was moving steadily away from his youthful optimism in the power of human reason and will, embracing instead a darker vision, of man’s abject dependence on the grace of God, Pelagius was confidently laying out “rules for behavior and the conduct of a holy life,” arguing that the most exacting imitation of Christ was well within “the power and functioning of human nature” and hence an obligation for the true Christian.
The disagreement between Augustine and Pelagius erupted into a protracted dispute. The disagreement revolved around, among other things, how to read one sentence in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all, because all have sinned.”
Pelagius argued that Paul’s passage could not be cited as proof that Holy Scripture barred the Christian pursuit of moral perfection, because baptism remitted the sin of Adam. With strenuous effort, a good Christian could aspire to live a life of perfect virtue, not unlike the pagan Stoics and Platonists. Augustine (implicitly renouncing his similar arguments in early works like The Blessed Life) vehemently disagreed.
The baptized Christian, no matter how serenely contemplative and ascetic his way of life, remained an invalid. To live in harmony with the divine order was a matter not only of self-renunciation and reasoning rightly but also of having faith, of submitting to authority, of subordinating oneself to consecrated scriptures and rituals embraced by a community of the righteous. “That is why the Scripture says, ‘The just man lives on the basis of faith.’ For we do not yet see our good, and hence we have to seek it by believing; and it is not in our power to live rightly, unless while we believe and pray we receive help from him who has given us the faith to believe that we must be helped by him.”
In a way, this was good news. After all, the life of philosophical contemplation and conversation that Socrates and Plato and Plotinus and the young Christian Augustine had all enjoined was not an option for most people. Few had the free time. And each differed greatly in his ability to reason rightly. But to search for wisdom through prayer and ritual professions of faith was a path open to everyone.
This was an egalitarian view—but it came with a disquieting proviso.
The intractability of original sin meant that the thirst for Christian wisdom could never be quenched in the lifetime of any mortal soul. Even the self-examination of the most sincere of Christian philosophers might reveal something about the truth and beauty of God—but only through a glass darkly: “For no one is known to another so intimately as he is known to himself, and yet no one can be sure as to his own conduct on the morrow ;… the minds of men are so unknown and so unstable that there is the highest wisdom in the exhortation of the apostle: ‘Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.’ ”
In 410, Goths sacked Rome. “If Rome can perish,” wrote the Catholic doctor Jerome, “what can be safe?” In the atmosphere of gathering panic that followed, Augustine increasingly came to believe that Christian doctrine, firmly inculcated, alone could rightly regulate the welfare of individual souls and the political communities they belonged to. “With God, the crimes in which many are banded together do not pass un-avenged, as is often the case with a king, or any other magistrate who is only a man.”
Augustine did not shrink from the coercive spiritual discipline that such views implied. Even fear was a feeling he marshaled fearlessly, preaching that the Lord’s “wrath shall come when you know not.”
As Peter Brown, his greatest modern biographer, comments, “Fallen men had come to need restraint. Even man’s greatest achievements had been made possible only by a ‘strait-jacket’ of unremitting harshness.”
Although Augustine’s career in the church went on for another two decades, and although he exercised growing influence within the councils of the Eastern Church, as many of his works were translated from Latin into Greek, it is not obvious that he can, or should, be regarded as a philosopher in the final years of his life. As bishop, he tried to curb and control the search for wisdom. And the very idea of “philosophy” now left him ambivalent.
On the one hand, in The