§ 179. THE WORKS OF AUGUSTINE. lOOt
§ 179, The Wor'ks of Augustine.
The numerous writings of Augustine, tlie compceition ot which extended througli 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.' His style is full of life and vigor and
He therefore also marks the cuhnhiation of the patristic age, and has been elevated by the acknowledgment of succeeding times as the first and the niiiversal church father, — His whole character reminds us in many respects of Paul, with whom he has also in common the experience of being called from manifold errors to the service of the gospel, and like whom he could boast that he had labored in it more abimdantly than all the others. And as Paul among the Apostles pre-eminently determined the development of Christianity, and became, more than all others, the expression of the Christian mind, to which men ever afterwards return, as often as in the life of the church that mind becomes turbid, to draw from him, as the purest fountain, a fresh understanding of the gospel doctrine, — so has Augustine turned the Christian nations since his time for the most part into his paths, and become pre-eminently their trainer and teacher, in the study of whom they always gain a renewal and deepening of their Christian consciousness. Not the middle age alone, but the Reformation also, was ruled by him, and whatever to this day boasts of the Christian spirit, is connected at least in part with Augustine." Nourkisson, the latest French writer on Augustine, whose work is clothed with the authority of the Institute of France, assigns to the bishop of Hippo the first rank among the masters of human thought, alongside of Plato and Leibnitz, Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet. "Si une critique toujours respectueuse, mais d'une inviolable sLncerite, est une dea formes les plus hautes de I'admiratiou, j'estime, au contraire, n'avoir fait qu'exalter ce grand coeur, ce psychologue consolant et emu, ce mctaphysicien subtil et sublime, en un mot, cet attachant et poetique genie, dont la place reste marquee, au premier rang, parmi le maitres de la pensee humaine, i cote de Platon et de Descartes, d'Aristote et de saint Thomas, de Leibniz et de Bossuet." (La philosophie de saint Augustin, Par. 1866, tom. i. p. vii.) Among English and American writers, Dr. Shedd, in the Introduction to his edition of an old translation of the Confessions (1860), has furnished a truthful and forcible description of the mind and heart of St. Augustine, as portrayed in this remarkable book,
' Ellies Dupin (BibUoth^que ecclesiastique, tom. iii. x- partie, p, 818) and NouRRissoN (1. c tom. ii. p. 449) apply to Augustme the term maxjuus opinator, which Cicero used of himself. There is, however, this important diflerence that Augustine, along with his many opinions on speculative questions in philosophy and theology, had very positive convictions in all essentia] doctrines, while Cicero wa< a mere ecclectic in philosophy.
1004 THEKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
ingeniouE plays on words, but deficient in purity and elegance, and by no means free from wearisome prolixity and from that vagabiirida loquacitas^ with which his adroit opponent, Julian of Eclanum, charged him. He would rather, as he said, be blamed by grammarians, tlian 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 chui'ch, he wrote from the fulness of his mind and heart. 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 philoso])her, the Manichsean heretic, the sceptic and freethinker, are known to us only from his regrets and recantations in the Confessions and other works. His literary career fur 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 com- ])0sed at Cassiciacum, Rome, and near Tagaste, us a Christian philosopher, after his consecration 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 exjilores.
The following is a classifled view of his most important works, the contents of the most of wliich we have already noticed in former sections.'
' PossiDius counts in all, including sermons and letters, one thousand and thirty writings of Augustine. On these see, above all, his Retractations, where he himselt reviews ninety-three of his works (embracing two huiulrcd and thirty-two books, see ii. 07), 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. Also the extended chronological index in ScuiiNKMANN's Biblioth. historico-literaria Patrum Latinorum, vol. ii. (Lips. 1794), p. 340 spq. (rcprmted in the supplemental volume, xii., of Migne's 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 Mign^ lorn. si.