{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/101/1010010.htm","path":"chr/ecf/101/1010010.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/101/1010010.htm","text":"CHAPTER IV.\u2014The Writings of St. Augustin.\nThe numerous writings of Augustin, the composition of which extended through four and forty years, are a mine of Christian knowledge, and experience. They abound in lofty ideas, noble sentiments, devout effusions, clear statements of truth, strong arguments against error, and passages of fervid eloquence and undying beauty, but also in innumerable repetitions, fanciful opinions, and playful conjectures of his uncommonly fertile brain. 24\np. 11\nHis style is full of life and vigour and ingenious plays on words, but deficient in simplicity, purity and elegance, and by no means free from the vices of a degenerate rhetoric, wearisome prolixity, and from that vagabunda loquacitas, with which his adroit opponent, Julian of Eclanum, charged him. He would rather, as he said, be blamed by grammarians, than not understood by the people; and he bestowed little care upon his style, though he many a time rises in lofty poetic flight. He made no point of literary renown, but, impelled by love to God and to the church, he wrote from the fulness of his mind and heart. 25 The writings before his conversion, a treatise on the Beautiful (De Pulchro et Apto), the orations and eulogies which he delivered as rhetorician at Carthage, Rome, and Milan, are lost. The professor of eloquence, the heathen philosopher, the Manich\u00e6an heretic, the sceptic and free thinker, are known to us only from his regrets and recantations in the Confessions and other works. His literary career for us commences in his pious retreat at Cassiciacum where he prepared himself for a public profession of his faith. He appears first, in the works composed at Cassiciacum, Rome, and near Tagaste, as a Christian philosopher, after his ordination to the priesthood as a theologian. Yet even in his theological works he everywhere manifests the metaphysical and speculative bent of his mind. He never abandoned or depreciated reason, he only subordinated it to faith and made it subservient to the defence of revealed truth. Faith is the pioneer of reason, and discovers the territory which reason explores.\nThe following is a classified view of his most important works. 26\nI. Autobiographical works. To these belong the Confessions and the Retractations; the former acknowledging his sins, the latter retracting his theoretical errors. In the one he subjects his life, in the other his writings, to close criticism; and these productions therefore furnish the best standard for judging of his entire labours. 27\nThe Confessions are the most profitable, at least the most edifying, product of his pen; indeed, we may say, the most edifying book in all the patristic literature. They were accordingly the most read even during his lifetime, 28 and they have been the most frequently published since. 29 A more sincere and more earnest book was never written. The historical part, to the tenth book, is one of the devotional classics of all creeds, and second in popularity only to the \u201cImitation of Christ,\u201d by Thomas a Kempis, and Bunyan\u2019s \u201cPilgrim\u2019s Progress.\u201d Certainly no autobiography is superior to it in true humility, spiritual depth, and universal interest. Augustin records his own experience, as a heathen sensualist, a Manich\u00e6an heretic, an anxious inquirer, a sincere penitent, and a grateful convert. He finds a response in every human soul that struggles through the temptations of nature and the labyrinth of error to the knowledge of p. 12 truth and the beauty of holiness, and after many sighs and tears finds rest and peace in the arms of a merciful Saviour. The style is not free from the faults of an artificial rhetoric, involved periods and far-fetched paronomasias; but these defects are more than atoned for by passages of unfading beauty, the devout spirit and psalm-like tone of the book. It is the incense of a sacred mysticism of the heart which rises to the throne on high. The wisdom of some parts of the Confessions may be doubted. 30 The world would never have known Augustin\u2019s sins, if he had not told them; nor were they of such a nature as to destroy his respectability in the best heathen society of his age; but we must all the more admire his honesty and humility.\nRousseau\u2019s \u201cConfessions,\u201d and Goethe\u2019s \u201cTruth and Fiction,\u201d may be compared with Augustin\u2019s Confessions as works of rare genius and of absorbing psychological interest, but they are written in a radically different spirit, and by attempting to exalt human nature in its unsanctified state, they tend as much to expose its vanity and weakness, as the work of the bishop of Hippo, being written with a single eye to the glory of God, raises man from the dust of repentance to a new and imperishable life of the Spirit. 31\nAugustin composed the Confessions about the year 397, ten years after his conversion. The first nine books contain, in the form of a continuos prayer and confession before God, a general sketch of his earlier life, of his conversion, and of his return to Africa in the thirty-fourth year of his age. The salient points in these books are the engaging history of his conversion in Milan, and the story of the last days of his noble mother in Ostia, spent as it were at the very gate of heaven and in full assurance of a blessed reunion at the throne of glory. The last three books and a part of the tenth are devoted to speculative philosophy; they treat, partly in tacit opposition to Manich\u00e6ism, of the metaphysical questions of the possibility of knowing God, and the nature of time and space; and they give an interpretation of the Mosaic cosmogony in the style of the typical allegorical exegesis usual with the fathers, but foreign to our age; they are therefore of little value to the general reader, except as showing that even abstract metaphysical subjects may be devotionally treated.\nThe Retractations were produced in the evening of his life (427 and 428), when, mindful of the proverb: \u201cIn the multitude of words there wanteth not transgression,\u201d 32 and remembering that we must give account for every idle word, he judged himself, 33 that he might not be judged. 34 He revised in chronological order the numerous works he had written before and during his episcopate, and retracted or corrected whatever in them seemed to his riper knowledge false or obscure, or not fully agreed with the orthodox catholic faith. Some of his changes were reactionary and no improvements, especially those on the freedom of the will, and on religious toleration. In all essential points, nevertheless, his theological system remained the same from his conversion to this time. The Retractations give beautiful evidence of his love of truth, his conscientiousness, and his humility. 35\nTo this same class should be added the Letters of Augustin, of which the Benedictine editors, in their second volume, give two hundred and seventy (including letters to Augustin) in chronological order from A.D. 386 to A.D. 429. These letters treat, sometimes very minutely, p. 13 of all the important questions of his time, and give us an insight of his cares, his official fidelity, his large heart, and his effort to become, like Paul, all things to all men.\nWhen the questions of friends and pupils accumulated, he answered them in special works; and in this way he produced various collections of Qu\u00e6stiones and Responsiones, dogmatical, exegetical, and miscellaneous (A.D. 390, 397, &c.).\nII. Philosophical treatises, in dialogue; almost all composed in his earlier life; either during his residence on the country-seat Cassiciacum in the vicinity of Milan, where he spent half a year before his baptism in instructive and stimulating conversation, in a sort of academy or Christian Platonic banquet with Monnica, his son Adeodatus, his brother Navigius, his friend Alypius, and some cousins and pupils; or during his second residence in Rome; or soon after his return to Africa. 36\nTo this class belong the works; Contra Academicos libri tr\u00e8s (386), in which he combats the skepticism and probabilism of the New Academy,\u2014the doctrine that man can never reach the truth, but can at best attain only probability; De vita beata (386), in which he makes true blessedness to consist in the perfect knowledge of God; De ordine,\u2014on the relation of evil to the divine order of the world 37 (386); Soliloquia (387), communings with his own soul concerning God, the highest good, the knowledge of truth, and immortality; De immortalitate anim\u00e6 (387), a continuation of the Soliloquies; De quantitate anim\u00e6 (387), discussing sundry questions of the size, the origin, the incorporeity of the soul; De musica libri vi (387-389); De magistro (389), in which, in a dialogue with his son Adeodatus, a pious and promising, but precocious youth, who died soon after his return to Africa (389), he treats on the importance and virtue of the word of God, and on Christ as the infallible Master. 38 To these may be added the later work, De anima et ejus origine (419). Other philosophical works on grammar, dialectics (or ars bene disputandi), rhetoric, geometry, and arithmetic, are lost. 39\nThese works exhibit as yet little that is specifically Christian and churchly; but they show a Platonism seized and consecrated by the spirit of Christianity, full of high thoughts, ideal views, and discriminating argument. They were designed to present the different stages of human thought by which he himself had reached the knowledge of the truth, and to serve others as steps to the sanctuary. They form an elementary introduction to his theology. He afterwards, in his Retractations, withdrew many things contained in them, like the Platonic view of the pre-p. 14 existence of the soul, and the Platonic idea that the acquisition of knowledge is a recollection or excavation of the knowledge hidden in the mind. 40 The philosopher in him afterwards yielded more and more to the theologian, and his views became more positive and empirical, though in some cases narrower also and more exclusive. Yet he could never cease to philosophise, and even his later works, especially De Trinitate, and De Civitate Dei, are full of profound speculations. Before his conversion he followed a particular system of philosophy, first the Manich\u00e6an, then the Platonic; after his conversion he embraced the Christian philosophy, which is based on the divine revelation of the Scriptures, and is the handmaid of theology and religion; but at the same time he prepared the way for the catholic ecclesiastical philosophy, which rests on the authority of the church, and became complete in the scholasticism of the middle age.\nIn the history of philosophy he deserves a place in the highest rank, and has done greater service to the science of sciences than any other father, Clement of Alexandria and Origen not excepted. He attacked and refuted the pagan philosophy as pantheistic or dualistic at heart; he shook the superstitions of astrology and magic; he expelled from philosophy the doctrine of emanation, and the idea that God is the soul of the world; he substantially advanced psychology; he solved the question of the origin and the nature of evil more nearly than any of his predecessors, and as nearly as most of his successors; he was the first to investigate thoroughly the relation of divine omnipotence and omniscience to human freedom, and to construct a theodicy; in short, he is properly the founder of a Christian philosophy, and not only divided with Aristotle the empire of the medi\u00e6val scholasticism, but furnished also living germs for new systems of philosophy, and will always be consulted in the speculative discussions of Christian doctrines.\nThe philosophical opinions of Augustin are ably and clearly summed up by Ueberweg as follows: 41\n\u201cAgainst the skepticism of the Academics Augustin urges that man needs the knowledge of truth for his happiness, that it is not enough merely to inquire and to doubt, and he finds a foundation for all our knowledge, a foundation invulnerable against every doubt, in the consciousness we have of our sensations, feelings, our willing, and thinking, in short, of all our psychical processes. From the undeniable existence and possession by man of some truth, he concludes to the existence of God as the truth per se; but our conviction of the existence of the material world he regards as only an irresistible belief. Combating heathen religion and philosophy, Augustin defends the doctrines and institutions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against the Neo-Platoniste, whom he rates most highly among all the ancient philosophers, the Christian theses that salvation is to be found in Christ alone, that divine worship is due to no other being beside the triune God, since he created all things himself, and did not commission inferior beings, gods, demons, or angels to create the material world; that the soul with its body will rise again to eternal salvation or damnation, but will not return periodically to renewed life upon the earth; that the soul begins to exist at the same time with the body; that the world both had a beginning and is perishable, and that only God and the souls of angels and men are eternal.\u2014Against the dualism of the Manich\u00e6ans, who regarded good and evil as equally primitive, and represented a portion of the divine substance as having entered into the region of evil, in order to war against and conquer it, Augustin defends the monism of the good principle, or of the purely spiritual God, explaining evil as a mere negation or privation, and seeking to show from the finiteness of the things in the world, and from the differing degrees of perfection, that the evils in the world are necessary, and not in contradiction with the idea of creation; he also defends in opposition to Manich\u00e6ism, and Gnosticism in general, the Catholic doctrine of the essential harmony between the Old and New Testaments. Against the Donatists, Augustin maintains the unity of the church. In opposition to Pelagius and the Pelagians, he asserts that divine grace is not conditioned on human worthiness, and maintains the doctrine of absolute predestination, or, that from the mass of men who, through the disobedience of Adam (in whom all mankind were present potentially), have sunk into corruption and sin, some are chosen by the free election of God to be monuments of his grace, and are brought to believe and be saved, while the greater number, as monuments of his justice, are left to eternal damnation.\u201d\np. 15\nIII. Apologetic works against Pagans and Jews. Among these the twenty-two books, De Civitate Dei, are still well worth reading. They form the deepest and richest apologetic work of antiquity; begun in 413, after the occupation of Rome by the Gothic king Alaric, finished in 426, and often separately published. They condense his entire theory of the world and of man, and are the first attempt at a comprehensive philosophy of universal history under the dualistic view of two antagonistic currents or organized forces, a kingdom of this world which is doomed to final destruction, and a kingdom of God which will last forever. 42\nThis work has controlled catholic historiography ever since, and received the official approval of Pope Leo XIII., who, in his famous Encyclical Immortale Dei (Nov. 1, 1885), incidentally alludes to it in these worlds: \u201cAugustin, in his work, De Civitate Dei, set forth so clearly the efficacy of Christian wisdom and the way in which it is bound up with the well-being of civil society, that he seems not only to have pleaded the cause of the Christians at his own time, but to have triumphantly refuted the calumnies against Christianity for all time.\u201d\nFrom the Protestant point of view Augustin erred in identifying the kingdom of God with the visible Catholic Church, which is only a part of it.\nIV. Religious-Theological works of a general nature (in part anti-Manich\u00e6an): De utilitate credendi, against the Gnostic exaltation of knowledge (392); De fide et symbolo, a discourse which, though only presbyter, he delivered on the Apostles\u2019 Creed before the council at Hippo at the request of the bishops in 393; De doctrina Christiana iv libri (397; the fourth book added in 426), a compend of exegetical theology for instruction in the interpretation of the Scriptures according to the analogy of the faith; De catchizandis rudibus likewise for catechetical purposes (400); Enchiridon, or De fide, spe et caritate, a brief compend of the doctrine of faith and morals, which he wrote in 421, or later, at the request of Laurentius; hence also called Manuale ad Laurentium. 43\nV. Polemic-Theological works. These are the most copious sources of the history of Christian doctrine in the patristic age. The heresies collectively are reviewed in the book De h\u00e6resibus ad Quodvultdeum, written between 428 and 430 to a friend and deacon in Carthage, and give a survey of eighty-eight heresies, from the Simonians to the Pelagians. 44 In the work De vera religione (390), Augustin proposed to show that the true religion is to be found not with the heretics and schismatics, but only in the catholic church of that time.\nThe other controversial works are directed against the particular heresies of Manich\u00e6ism, Donatism, Arianism, Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism. Augustin, with all the firmness of his convictions, was free from personal antipathy, and used the pen of controversy in the genuine Christian spirit, fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. He understood Paul\u2019s \u1f00\u03bb\u03b7\u03b8\u03b5\u03cd\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd \u1f10\u03bd \u1f00\u03b3\u03ac\u03c0\u1fc3, and forms in this respect a pleasing contrast to Jerome, who had by nature no more fiery temperament than he, but was less able to control it. \u201cLet those,\u201d he very beautifully says to the Manich\u00e6ans, \u201cburn with hatred against you, who do not know how much pains it costs to find the truth, how hard it is to guard against error;\u2014but I, who after so great and long wavering came to know the truth, must bear myself towards you with the same patience which my fellow-believers showed towards me while I was wandering in blind madness in your opinions.\u201d 45\np. 16\n1. The anti-Manich\u00e6an works date mostly from his earlier life, and in time and matter follow immediately upon his philosophical writings. 46 In them he afterwards found most to retract, because he advocated the freedom of the will against the Manich\u00e6an fatalism. The most important are: De moribus ecclesi\u00e6 catholic\u00e6, et de moribus Manich\u00e6orum, two books (written during his second residence in Rome, 388); De vera religione (390); Unde malum, et de libero arbitrio, usually simply De libero arbitrio, in three books, against the Manich\u00e6an doctrine of evil as a substance, and as having its seat in matter instead of free will (begun in 388, finished in 395); De Genesi contra Manich\u00e6os, a defence of the biblical doctrine of creation (389); De duabus animabus, against the psychological dualism of the Manich\u00e6ans (392); Disputatio contra Fortunatum (a triumphant refutation of this Manich\u00e6an priest of Hippo in August, 392); Contra Epistolam Manich\u00e6i quam vocant fundamenti (397); Contra Faustum Manich\u00e6um, in thirty-three books (400-404); De natura boni (404), &c.\nThese works treat of the origin of evil; of free will; of the harmony of the Old and New Testaments, and of revelation and nature; of creation out of nothing, in opposition to dualism and hylozoism; of the supremacy of faith over knowledge; of the authority of the Scriptures and the Church; of the true and the false asceticism, and other disputed points; and they are the chief source of our knowledge of the Manich\u00e6an Gnosticism and of the arguments against it.\nHaving himself belonged for nine years to this sect, Augustin was the better fitted for the task of refuting it, as Paul was peculiarly prepared for the confutation of the Pharisaic Judaism. His doctrine of the nature of evil is particularly valuable. He has triumphantly demonstrated for all time, that evil is not a corporeal thing, nor in any way substantial, but a product of the free will of the creature, a perversion of substance in itself good, a corruption of the nature created by God.\n2. Against the Priscillianists, a sect in Spain built on Manich\u00e6an principles, are directed the book Ad Paulum Orosium contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas (411); 47 the book Contra mendacium, addressed to Consentius (420); and in part the 190th Epistle (alias Ep. 157), to the Bishop Optatus, on the origin of the soul (418), and two other letters, in which he refutes erroneous views on the nature of the soul, the limitation of future punishment, and the lawfulness of fraud for supposed good purposes.\n3. The anti-Donatistic works, composed between the years 393 and 420, argue against separatism, and contain Augustin\u2019s doctrine of the church and church-discipline, and of the sacraments. To these belong: Psalmus contra partem Donati (A.D. 393), a polemic popular song without regular metre, intended to offset the songs of the Donatists; Contra epistolam Parmeniani, written in 400 against the Carthaginian bishop of the Donatists, the successor of Donatus; De baptismo contra Donastistas, in favor of the validity of heretical baptism (400); Contra literas Petiliani (about 400), against the view of Cyprian and the Donatists, that the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the personal worthiness and the ecclesiastical status of the officiating priest; Ad Catholicos Epistola contra Donatistas, or De unitate ecclesi\u00e6 (402); Contra Cresconium grammaticum Donastistam (406); Breviculus Collationis cum Donatistis, a short account of the three days\u2019 religious conference with the Donatists (411); De correctione Donatistarum (417); Contra Gaudentium, Donat. Episcopum, the last anti-Donatistic work (420). 48\nThese works are the chief patristic authority of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church and against the sects. They are thoroughly Romanizing in spirit and aim, and least satisfactory to Protestant readers. Augustin defended in his later years even the principle of forcible p. 17 co\u00ebrcion and persecution against heretics and schismatics by a false exegesis of the words in the parable \u201cCompel them to come in\u201d (Luke xiv. 23). The result of persecution was that both Catholics and Donatists in North Africa were overwhelmed in ruin first by the barbarous Vandals, who were Arian heretics, and afterwards by the Mohammedan conquerors.\n4. The anti-Arian works have to do with the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, and with the Holy Trinity. By far the most important of these are the fifteen books De Trinitate (400-416);\u2014the most profound and discriminating production of the ancient church on the Trinity, in no respect inferior to the kindred works of Athanasius and the two Gregories, and for centuries final to the dogma. 49 This may also be counted among the positive didactic works, for it is not directly controversial. The Collatio cum Maximino Ariano, an obscure babbler, belongs to the year 428.\n5. The numerous anti-Pelagian works of Augustin are his most influential and most valuable, at least for Protestants. They were written between the years 412 and 429. In them Augustin, in his intellectual and spiritual prime, develops his system of anthropology and soteriology, and most nearly approaches the position of Evangelical Protestantism: On the Guilt and the Remission of Sins, and Infant Baptism (412); On the Spirit and the Letter (413); On Nature and Grace (415); On the Acts of Pelagius (417); On the Grace of Christ, and Original Sin (418); On Marriage and Concupiscence (419); On Grace and Free Will (426); On Discipline and Grace (427); Against Julian of Eclanum (two large works, written between 421 and 429, the second unfinished, and hence called Opus imperfectum); On the Predestination of the Saints (428); On the Gift of Perseverance (429); &c. 50\nThese anti-Pelagian writings contain what is technically called the Augustinian system of theology, which was substantially adopted by the Lutheran Church, yet without the decree of reprobation, and in a more rigorous logical form by the Calvinistic Confessions. The system gives all glory to God, does full justice to the sovereignty of divine grace, effectually humbles and yet elevates and fortifies man, and furnishes the strongest stimulus to gratitude and the firmest foundation of comfort. It makes all bright and lovely in the circle of the elect. But it is gloomy and repulsive in its negative aspect towards the non-elect. It teaches a universal damnation and only a partial redemption, and confines the offer of salvation to the minority of the elect; it ignores the general benevolence of God to all his creatures; it weakens or perverts the passages which clearly teach that \u201cGod would have all men to be saved\u201d; it suspends their eternal fate upon one single act of disobedience; it assumes an unconscious, and yet responsible pre-existence of Adam\u2019s posterity and their participation in his sin and guilt; it reflects upon the wisdom of God in creating countless millions of beings with the eternal foreknowledge of their everlasting misery; and it does violence to the sense of individual responsibility for accepting or rejecting the gospel-offer of salvation. And yet this Augustinian system, especially in its severest Calvinistic form, has promoted civil and religious liberty, and trained the most virtuous, independent, and heroic types of Christians, as the Huguenots, the Puritans, the Covenanters, and the Pilgrim Fathers. It is still a mighty moral power, and will not lose its hold upon earnest characters until some great theological genius produces from the inexhaustible mine of the Scriptures a more satisfactory solution of the awful problem which the universal reign of sin and death presents to the thinking mind.\nIn Augustin the anti-Pelagian system was checked and moderated by his churchly and sacramental views, and we cannot understand him without keeping both in view. The same apparent contradiction we find in Luther, but he broke entirely with the sacerdotal system p. 18 of Rome, and made the doctrine of justification by faith the chief article of his creed, which Augustin never could have done. Calvin was more logical than either, and went back beyond justification and Adam\u2019s fall, yea, beyond time itself, to the eternal counsel of God which pre-ordains, directs and controls the whole history of mankind to a certain end, the triumph of his mercy and justice.\nVI. Exegetical works. The best of these are: De Genesi ad literam (The Genesis word for word), in twelve books, an extended exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis, particularly the history of the creation literally interpreted, though with many mystical and allegorical interpretations also (written between 401 and 415); 51 Enarrationes in Psalmos (mostly sermons); 52 hundred and twenty-four Homilies on the Gospel of John (416 and 417); 53 ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John (417); the Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (393); the Harmony of the Gospels (De consensu evangelistarum, 400); the Epistle to the Galatians (394); and an unfinished commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. 54\nAugustin deals more in lively, profound, and edifying thoughts on the Scriptures than in proper grammatical and historical exposition, for which neither he nor his readers had the necessary linguistic knowledge, disposition, or taste. He grounded his theology less upon exegesis than upon his Christian and churchly mind saturated with Scriptural truths. He excels in spiritual insight, and is suggestive even when he misses the natural meaning.\nVII. Ethical and Ascetic works. Among these belong three hundred and ninety-six Sermones (mostly very short) de Scripturis (on texts of Scripture), de tempore (festival sermons), de sanctis (in memory of apostles, martyrs, and saints), and de diversis (on various occasions), some of them dictated by Augustin, some taken down by hearers. 55 Also various moral treatises: De continentia (395); De mendaico (395), against deception (not to be confounded with the similar work already mentioned Contra mendacium, against the fraud-theory of the Priscillianists, written in 420); De agone Christiano (396); De opere monachorum, against monastic idleness (400); De bono conjugali adv. Jovinianum (400); De virginitate (401); De fide et operibus (413); De adulterinis conjugiis, on 1 Cor. vii. 10 sqq. (419); De bono viduitatis (418); De patientia (418); De cura pro mortuis gerenda, to Paulinus of Nola (421); De utilitate jejunii; De diligendo Deo; Meditationes; 56 &c.\nAs we survey this enormous literary labor, augmented by many other treatises and letters now lost, and as we consider his episcopal labors, his many journeys, and his adjudications of controversies among the faithful, which often robbed him of whole days, we must be really astounded at the fidelity, exuberance, energy, and perseverance of this father of the church. Surely, such a life was worth the living.\nEllies Dupin (Biblioth\u00e9gue eccl\u00e9siastique, tom. iii. 1 partie, p. 818) and Nourrisson (l. c. tom. ii. p. 449) apply to Augustin the term magnus opinator, which Cicero used of himself. There is, however, this important difference that Augustin, along with his many opinions on speculative questions in philosophy and theology, had very positive convictions in all essential doctrines, while Cicero was a mere eclectic in philosophy.\n11:25\nHe was not \u201cintoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,\u201d as a modern English statesman (Lord Beaconsfield) charged his equally distinguished rival (Mr. Gladstone) in Parliament.\n11:26\nIn his Retractations, he himself reviews ninety-three of his works (embracing two hundred and thirty-two books, see ii. 67), in chronological order: in the first book those which he wrote while a layman and presbyter, in the second those which he wrote when a bishop. See also the extended chronological index in Sch\u00f6nemann\u2019s Biblioth. historico-literaria Patrum Latinorum, vol. ii (Lips, 1794), p. 340 sqq. (reprinted in the supplemental volume, xii., of Migne\u2019s ed. of the Opera, p. 24 sqq.); and other systematic and alphabetical lists in the eleventh volume of the Bened. ed (p. 494 sqq., ed. Venet.), and in Migne, tom. xi.\n11:27\nFor this reason the Benedictine editors have placed the Retractations and the Confessions at the head of his works.\n11:28\nHe himself says of them, Retract. 1. ii. c. 6: \u201cMaltis fratribus eos [Confessionum libros tredecim] multum placuisse et, placere scio.\u201d Comp. De donon perseveranti\u00e6, c. 20: \u201cQuid autem meorum opusculorum freguentius et deleciabilius innotescere potuit qam libri Confessionum mearum?\u201d Comp. Ep.. 231 Dario comiti.\n11:29\nSch\u00f6nnemann (in the supplemental volume of Migne\u2019s ed. of Augustin, p. 134 sqq.) cites a multitude of separate editions of the Confessions in Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and German, from A.D. 1475 to 1776. Since that time several new editions have been added. One of the best Latin editions is that of Karl von Raumer (Stuttgart, 1856), who used to read the Confessions with his students at Erlangen once a week for many years. In his preface he draws a comparison between them and Rousseau\u2019s Confessions and Hamann\u2019s Gedanken \u00fcber meinen Lebenslauf. English and German translations are noticed above in the Lit. Dr. Shedd (in his ed., Pref. p. xxvii) calls the Confessions the best commentary yet written upon the seventh and eighth chapters of Romans. \u201cThat quickening of the human spirit, which puts it again into vital and sensitive relations to the holy and eternal; that illumination of the mind, whereby it is enabled to perceive with clearness the real nature of truth and righteousness; that empowering of the will, to the conflict of victory\u2014the entire process of restoring the Divine image in the soul of man\u2014is delineated in this book, with a vividness and reality never exceeded by the uninspired mind.\u201d\u2026\u201cIt is the life of God in the soul of a strong man, rushing and rippling with the freedom of the life of nature. He who watches can almost see the growth; he who listens can hear the perpetual motion; and he who is in sympathy will be swept along.\u201d\n12:30\nWe mean his sexual sins. He kept a concubine for sixteen years, the mother of his only child, Adeodatus, and after her separation he formed for a short time a similar connection in Milan; but in both cases he was faithful. Conf. IV. 2 (unam habebam\u2026servans tori fidem); VI. 15. Erasmus thought very leniently of this sin as contrasted with the conduct of the priests and abbots of his time. Augustin himself deeply repented of it, and devoted his life to celibacy.\n12:31\nNourrisson (1. c. tom. i. p. 19) calls the Confessions \u201ccet ouvrage unique, souvent imit\u00e9, toujours parodi\u00e9, o\u00f9 il s\u2019accuse, se condamne et s\u2019humilie, pri\u00e9re ardente, r\u00e9cit entrainant, metaphysique incomparable, histoire de tout un monde qui se refl\u00e9te dans l\u2019histoire d\u2019 une ame.\u201d Comp. also an article on the Confessions in \u201cThe Contemporary Review\u201d for June, 1867, pp 133\u2013160.\n12:32\nProv. 10.19. This verse (ex multiloquio non effugies peccatum) the Semi-Pelagian Gennadius (De viris illustr. sub Aug.) applies against Augustin in excuse for his erroneous doctrines of freedom and predestination.\n12:33 12:34\n1 Cor. 11.31. Comp. his Prologus to the two books of Retractationes.\n12:35\nJ. Morell Mackenzie (in W Smith\u2019s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. i. p. 422) happily calls the Retractations of Augustin \u201cone of the noblest sacrifices ever laid upon the altar of truth by a majestic intellect acting in obedience to the purest conscientiousness.\u201d\n13:36\nIn tom. i. of the ed. Bened., immediately after the Retractationes and Confessiones, and at the close of the volume. On these philosophical writings, see Brucker: Historia critica philosophi\u00e6, Lips. 1766, tom. iii. pp. 485\u2013507: H Ritter: Geschichte der Philosphie, vol. vi. p. 153 sqq.; Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, I. 333\u2013346 (Am. ed.): Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, I. 231\u2013240; Bindemann, l. c. I. 282 sqq. Huber, l. c. I. 242 sqq.; Gangauf, l. c. p. 25 sqq., and Nouerisson, l. c. ch. i. and ii. Nourrisson makes the just remark (i. p. 53): \u201cSi la philosophie est la recherch\u00e9 de la verit\u00e9, jamais sans douse il ne s\u2019est rencontre une ame plus philosophe que celle de saint Augustin. Car jamais ame n\u2019a support\u00e9 avec plus d\u2019 impatience les anxi\u00e9t\u00e9s du doute et n\u2019a fait plus d\u2019 efforts pour dissiper les fantomes de l\u2019erreur.\u201d\n13:37\nOr on the question: \u201cUtrum omnia bona et mala divin\u00e6 providentie ordo contineat?\u201d Comp. Retract. i. 3.\n13:38\nAugustin, in his Confessions (l. ix. c. 6), expresses himself in this touching way about this son of his illicit love: \u201cWe took with us [on returning from the country to Milan to receive the sacrament of baptism] also the boy Adeodatus, the son of my carnal sin. Thou hadst formed him well. He was but just fifteen years old, and he was superior in mind to many grave and learned men. I acknowledge Thy gifts, O Lord, my God, who createst all, and who canst reform our deformities: for I had no part in that boy but sin. And when we brought him up in Thy nurture, Thou, only Thou, didst prompt us to it; I acknowledge Thy gifts. There is my book entitled, De magistro: he speaks with me there. Thou knowest that all things there put into his mouth were in his mind when he was sixteen years of age. That maturity of mind was a terror to me; and who but Thou is the artificer of such wonders? Soon Thou didst take his life from the earth; and I think more quietly of him now, fearing no more for his boyhood, nor his youth, nor his whole life. We took him to ourselves as one of the same age in Thy grace, to be trained in Thy nurture; and we were baptised together; and all trouble about the past fled from us.\u201d He refers to him also in De vita beata, \u00a7 6: \u201cThere was also with us, in age the youngest of all, but whose talents, if affection deceives me not, promise something great, my son Adeodatus.\u201d In the same book (\u00a7 18), he mentions an answer of his: \u201cHe is truly chaste who waits on God, and keeps himself to Him only.\u201d\n13:39\nThe books on grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, and the ten Categories of Aristotle, in the Appendix to the first volume of the Bened. ed., are spurious. For the genuine works of Augustin on these subjects were written in a different form (the dialogue) and for a higher purpose, and were lost in his own day. Comp. Retract. i. c. 6. In spite of this, Prantl (Geschichte der Logik in Abendlande, pp. 665\u2013674, cited by Huber, l. c. p. 240) has advocated the genuineness of the Principia dialectic\u00e6, and Huber inclines to agree. Gangauf, l. c. p. 5, and Nourrisson, i. p. 37, consider them spurious.\n14:40\n\u1f29 \u03bc\u03ac\u03b8\u03b7\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2 \u03bf\u1f50\u03ba \u1f04\u03bb\u03bb\u03bf \u03c4\u03b9 \u1f22 \u1f00\u03bd\u20ac\u03bc\u03bd\u03b7\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2. On this Plato, in the Ph\u00e6do, as is well known, rests his doctrine of pre-existence. Augustin was at first in favor of the idea, Solit. ii. 20, n. 35; afterwards he rejected it, Retract. i. 4, \u00a7 4; but after all he assumes in his anthropology a sort of unconscious, yet responsible, pre-existence of the whole human race in Adam as its organic head, and hence taught a universal fall in Adam\u2019s fall.\n14:41\nHistory of Philosophy, vol. i. 333 sq., translated by Pro. Geo. S. Morris.\n15:42\nIn the Bened. ed. tom. vii. Comp. Retract. ii. 43, and Ch. Hist. III. \u00a7 12. The City of God and the Confessions are the only writings of Augustin which Gibbon thought worth while to read (chap. xxxiii.). Huber (l. c. p. 315) says: \u201cAugustin\u2019s philosophy of history, as he presents it in his Civitas Dei, has remained to this hour the standard philosophy of history for the church orthodoxy, the bounds of which this orthodoxy, unable to perceive in the motions of the modern spirit the fresh morning air of a higher day of history, is scarcely able to transcend.\u201d Nourrisson devotes a special\nChapter to the consideration of the two cities of Augustin, the City of the World and the City of God (tom. ii. 43\u201388). Compare also the Introduction to Saisset\u2019s Traduction de la Cit\u00e9 de Dieu, Par. 1855, and Reinken\u2019s (old Cath. Bishop), Geschichtsphilosophie des heil. Aug. 1866. Engl. translation of the City of God by Dr. Marcus Dods, Edinburgh, 1872, 2 vols., and in the second vol. of this Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.\n15:43\nSeparately edited by Krabinger, Tubingen, 1861.\n15:44\nThis work is also incorporated in the Corpus h\u00e6reseoloicum of Fr. Oehler, tom. i. pp. 192\u2013225.\n15:45\nContra Epist. Manich\u00e6i quam vocant fundamenti, 1. i. 2.\n16:46\nThe earliest anti-Manich\u00e6an writings (De libero arbitrio; De moribus eccl. cath. et de Moribus Manich.) are in tom. i. ed. Bened.; the latter in tom viii.\n16:47 16:48\nAll these in tom. ix. Comp. Church Hist. III. \u00a7\u00a769 and 70.\n17:49\nTom. viii. ed Bened. p. 749 sqq. Comp. Ch. Hist. III \u00a7131. The work was stolen from him by some impatient friends before revision, and before the completion of the twelfth book, so that he became much discouraged, and could only be moved to finish it by urgent entreaties.\n17:50\nOpera, tom. x., in two parts, with an Appendix. The same in Migne. W. Bright, of Oxford, has published Select Anti-Pelagian Treatises of St. Aug., in Latin, 1880. On the Pelagian controversy comp. Ch. Hist. III. \u00a7\u00a7146-160.\n18:51\nTom. iii. 117-324. Not to be confounded with the two other books on Genesis, in which he defends the biblical doctrine of creation against the Manich\u00e6ans. In this exegetical work he aimed, as he says, Retract. ii. c. 24, to interpret Genesis \u201cnon secundum allegoricas significationes, sed secundum rerum gestarum proprietatem.\u201d The work is more original and spirited than the Hexa\u00ebmeron of Basil or of Ambrose.\n18:52\nTom. iv., the whole volume. The English translation of the Com. on the Psalms occupies six volumes of the Oxford Library of the Fathers.\n18:53\nTom. iii. 289-824. Translated in Clark\u2019s ed. of Augustin\u2019s works.\n18:54\nAll in tom. iii. Translated in part.\n18:55\nTom. v. contains beside these a multitude (317) of doubtful and spurious sermons, likewise divided into four classes. To these must be added recently discovered sermons, edited from manuscripts in Florence, Monte Cassino, etc., by M. Denis (1792), O. F. Frangipane (1820), A. L. Caillau (Paris, 1836), and Angelo Mai (in the Nova Bibliotheca Patrum).\n18:56\nMost of them in tom. vi. ed. Bened. On the scripta deperdita, dubia et spuria of Augustin, see the index by Sch\u00f6nemann, l. c. p. 50 sqq., and in the supplemental volume of Migne\u2019s edition, pp. 34-40. The so-called Meditations of Augustin (German translation by August Krohne, Stuttgart, 1854) are a later compilation by the abbot of Fescamp in France, at the close of the twelfth century, from the writings of Augustin, Gregory the Great, Anselm, and others.","title":"Nicene and Post Nicene-Fathers, Vol. I: Prolegomena: St. ...","type":"page"}