1018 THIRD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590.
Cliristology, on the contrary, he added nothing, and he diec shortly before tlie great Cliristological conflicts opened, which readied their ecnnienical settlement at the council of Chalcedon, twenty years after his death. Yet he anticipated Leo in giving currency in the West to the important formula : " Two natures in one person.'' '
2, Augustine is also the principal theological creator of the Latin-Catholic system as distinct from the Greek Catholicism on the one hand, and from evangelical Protestantism on the other. He ruled the entire theology of the middle age, and became the father of scholasticism in virtue of his dialectic mind, and the father of mysticism in virtue of his devout heart, without being responsible for the excesses of either system. For scholasticism thought to comprehend the divine with the understanding, and lost itself at last in empty dialectics; and mysticism endeavored to grasp the divine with feeling, and easily strayed into misty sentimentalism ; Augustine sought to apprehend the divine with the united power of mind and heart, of bold thought and humble faith." Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonavcntura, are his nearest of kin in this respect. Even now, since the Catholic church has become a Roman church, he enjoys greater consideration in it than Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, or Gregory the Great. All this camiot possibly be explained without an interior aflfinity.*
' He was summoned to the council of Ephcsus, whicli condemned Nestorianism in 431, but died a year before it met. He prevailed upon the Gallic monk, Leporiu8, to retract Nestoriauism. His Christology is in many points defective and obficure. Comp. Dokner's History of Christology, ii. pp. 90-98. Jerome did still less for this department of doctrine.
^ WiGCiKRS (Pragmat. Darstellung des Augustinisinns und Pelagianismus, i. p. 27) finds the most peculiar and remarkable point of Augustine's character in his eingular union of intellect and imagination, scholasticism and mysticism, in which neither can be said to predominate. So also Uubkr, 1. c. p. 313.
' No0RRissoN, the able expounder of the philosophy of Augustine, says (I. c lom. i. p. iv): " Je ne crois pas, qu'exccpt6 saint Paul, aucun hommc ait contribu6 davantage, par sa parole comme par ses Merits, a organiser, k interpreter, & r<''i)andre le christianisme ; et, apres saint Paul, nul apparemment, non pas meme le glorieui, I'invincible Athanasc, n'a travaill6 d'uue manifcre aussi pi-issante A fonder I'miiti citholique."
§ 180. Augustine's relation to Catholicism, etc. lOlS
His very conversion, in which, besides the Scriptures, the personal intercourse of the hierarchical Ambrose and the lite of the ascetic Anthony had great influence, was a transition not from heathenism to Christianity (for he was already a Manichsean Christian), but from heresy to the historical, episcopally organized church, as, for the time, the sole authorized vehicle of the apostolic Christianity in conflict with those sects and parties which more or less assailed the foundations of the gospel.' It was, indeed, a full and unconditional surrender of his mind and heart to God, but it was at the same time a submission of his private judgment to the authority of the church which led him to the faith of the gospel.'' In the same spirit he embraced the ascetic life, without which, according to the Catholic principle, no high religion is possible. He did not indeed enter a cloister, like Luther, whose conversion in Erfurt was likewise essentially catholic, but he lived in his house in the simplicity of a monk, and made and kept the vow of voluntary poverty and celibacy.^
He adopted Cyprian's doctrine of the church, and completed it in the conflict with Donatism by transferring the predicates of unity, holiness, universality, exclnsiveness, and maternity, directly to the actual church of the time, which,
■ On the catholic and ascetic character of his conversion and his religion, see the observations in my worli on Augustine, ch. viii., in the German edition.
^ We recall his famous anti-Manichaean dictum : '* Ego evangeho non crederem, nisi me catholics eccIesijE commoveret auctoritas." The Protestant would reverse this maxim, and ground his faith in the church on his faith in Christ and in the gospel. So with the well-known maxim of Irenaeus : " Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritua Dei, et ubi Spiritus Dei, ibi ecclesia." According to the spirit of Protestantism it would be said conversely: "Where the Spirit of God is, there is the church, and where the church is, there is the Spirit of God."
^ According to genuine Christian principles it would have been far more noble, '■f he had married the African woman with whom he had lived in illicit intercourse for thirteen years, v^ho was always faithful to him, as he was to her, and had borne him his beloved and highly gifted Adeodatus ; instead of casting her off, and, as he for a while intended, choosing another for the partner of his hfe, whose excellences were more numerous. The superiority of the evaugehcal Protestant morality over thy Catholic asceticism is here palpable. But with the prevailing spirit of his age ha would hardly have enjoyed so great regard, nor accompUshed so much good, if he had been married. Celibacy was the bridge from the heathen degradation of mar riage to the evangelical Christian exaltation and sanctification of the family life.