§ 178. AUGUSTINE. 997
L*ades later the whole West-E-oman empire fell in ruins. Tli« culmination of the African church was the beginning of it? decline. But the work of Augustine could not perish. Hia ideas fell like living seed into the soil of Europe, and produced abundant fruits in nations and countries of which he had never heard.* ^
Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the fii'st order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly /ertile and deep, bold and soaring ; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosbphers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile prmcejys, at least surpassed by no church father, scholastic, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full. It was his need and his delight to wrestle again and again with the hardest problems of thought, and to comprehend to the utmost the divinely re-
' Even in Africa Augustine's spirit reappeared from time to time, notwithstatidmg the barbarian confusion, as a light in darkness, first in Vigilius, bishop of Tap- BUS, who, at the close of the fifth century, ably defended the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and the person of Christ, and to whom the authorship of the so-cjJIed Athanasiau Creed has sometimes been ascribed ; in Fulgentids, bishop of Ruspe, one of the chief opponents of Semi-Pelagianisni, and the later Ariauism, who with sixty catholic bishops of Africa was banished for several years by the Arian Vandals o the island of Sardinia, and who was called the Augustine of the sixth century (died 533); and in Facondus of Hkrmiake (died 570), and Folgentius Ferrandiis and LiBERATUS, two deacons of Carthage, who took a prominent part in the Threi Chapter controversy.
998 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
vealod matter of the faith.' He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith, according to his maxim : Fides prceccdit intellectmn I appealing, witli theologians before him, to the well known passage of Isaiah vii. 9 (in the LXX.) : " Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis." But to him faith itself was an acting of reason, and I'rom faith to knowledge, therefore, there was a necessary transition." He constantly looked below the surface to the hidden motives of actions and to the universal laws of diverse events. The metaphysician and the Christian believer coalesced in him. His meditatio passes with the utmost ease into oratio^ and his oratio into meditatio. With profundity he combined an equal clearness and sliar[)ness of thought. He was an extremely skilful and a successful dialectician, inexhaustible in arguments and in answers to the objections of his adversaries.
He has cni-iched Latin literature with a greater store of beautiful, original, and pregnant proverbial sayings, than any classic author, or any other teacher of the church.'
He had a creative and decisive hand in almost every dognui of the church, completing some, and advancing others. The centre of his system is the free redeeming grace of God in Christ, operating through the actual, historical ciiukcii.
* Or, as he wrote to a friend about the year 410, Epist. 120, c. J, § 2 (torn. ii. p. 347, ed. Bened. Venet. ; in older ed., Ep. 122): "Ut quod credis intelligaa . . . non ut fidem respuas, sed ea quae fidei firmitate jam tenes, etiam rationis hice conspicias." lie continues, ibid. c. 3: " Absit namque, ut lioc in nobis Deus odcrit, in quo nos relitiuls animalibus excellciitiores creavit. Absit, inquani, ut idco credamus, ne rationeni accipiamus vel quaeraraus ; cum etiam credere non possennis, nisi rationales aiiimas haberemus." In one of his earliest works, Contra Acadera. 1. iii, c. 20, § 43, he says of himself: " Ita sum aff'ectus, ut quid sit vorum non credendo solum, sed etiam iutelligeudo apprehcndere impatienter desiderem."
' Comp. De praed. sanct. cap. 2, g 5 (torn. x. p. 7fl2): " Ipsuni credere nihil ftliud est quam cum assensione cogitare. Non enim oranis qui cogitat, credit, cum ideo cogitant, plurique ne credant ; sed cogitat omnis qui credit, et credendo cogitat et cogitaudo credit. Fides si non cogitetur, nulla est." Ep. 120, cap. 1, § 3 (torn, ii. 347), and Ep. 137, c. 4, §15 (tom. ii. 408): " lutcllectui fides adituni aperit, iiifiiielitas claudit." Augustine's view of faith and knowledge is discussed at ?arge by Ganoauk, Metapliysische Psychologie des heil. Auguatinus, i. pp. 31-7G, an I hi N'ouuRissoN, La philosophic de saint Augustin, tom. ii. 282-290.
' Prosper Aquitanus collected from the works of Augustine a long li.st of sentences (see tlie Appcudi.x to the tenth vol. of the Bened. ed. p. 223 sqq.), witl lef