St Augustine

St Augustine

Reaction One: There is a fascinating fellow in Carthage* named Aurelius Augustinus* (354- 430) (later to be St. Augustine*). He leads a riotous youth, carousing and enjoying the theatre.

A practicing Manichaean* (see above), he has a spiritual crisis and turns Christian in 387. He goes back to the rich city of Carthage and rapidly rises to become bishop in 395. What makes this particular fellow so fascinating is the influence he has on the next thousand years or so. He is apparently a terrific speaker and an indefatigable writer. His influence throughout the Christian world is second only to St. Paul*'s. In his major works, The City of God* and Confessions*, he champions orthodoxy against his former belief and other heresies.

Augustine's* reaction to impending doom is rather like that of the turtle. Pull in your head and tough it out. In this case the turtle shell in question is a current craze in Christian thinking derived from that old pagan, Plato*. The new Platonists (Neoplatonists) find Plato's* ideas really soothing for people persecuted by the state and liable to suffering.

Plato was very picky about distinguishing appearance from reality and opinion from knowledge. For him the real world around him was only a shadow of reality and only the product of opinion. Real knowledge could only be found in the pure, unadulterated ideas you had in your mind of all the things you observed. The real world was only a series of shadows on the screen of your mind.

This really appeals to the Christians. They figure that all the mess of daily life is only a shadow of the truth. Suffering will pass and only the soul is real. The soul will one day return to the ideal world from which it came. St. Jerome* has translated the Scriptures into Latin in 405 and his version becomes the accepted one in the West. Under Augustine* and Jerome* ecclesiastical Latin takes shape. So Augustine* takes these Neoplatonist* ideas, mixes them up with the Scriptures, and comes up with a complete set of rules for living and a systematic structure for Christian society. He writes it all out in The City of God*.

His story claims that ever since that unfortunate incident in the Garden of Eden, there have been two 'cities' in human society, one is God's, the other is Satan's. God's city (Jerusalem*) is the church. That means that the state is Satan's city (Babylon*, definitely including that Satanic practice called theatre). The current disaster of the fall of Rome can be blamed on the Church's being the servant of a pagan secular authority. That can easily be fixed by having the His story claims that ever since that unfortunate incident in the Garden of Eden, there have been two 'cities' in human society, one is God's, the other is Satan's. God's city (Jerusalem*) is the church. That means that the state is Satan's city (Babylon*, definitely including that Satanic practice called theatre). The current disaster of the fall of Rome can be blamed on the Church's being the servant of a pagan secular authority. That can easily be fixed by having the

Augustine's* ideas would have had less effect if there hadn't already been a system in place with which to implement them. Which brings us to the monastic orders and monasticism*.