II AUGUSTINE continued bishop of that second-rate diocese until his death, August 28, 430.
In this simple framework was lived out the life of one who has been strikingly called incomparably the greatest man whom, “between Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian Church has possessed.” 2 We cannot date from him, it is true, an epoch in the external fortunes of the Church in the same sense in which we may from, say, Gregory the Great or Hildebrand. He was not, indeed, without ecclesiasticopolitical significance. He did much to heal the schisms which tore the African Church. He regenerated the clergy of Africa by his monastic training school. And it must not be forgotten that the two great Gregorys stood upon his shoulders. But his direct work as a reformer of Church life was done in a corner, and its results were immediately swept away by the flood of the Vandal invasion.
principles of his Biblical exposition are expounded; the “Enchiridion ad Laurentium ” on Faith, Hope, and Charity (421), which contains his most serious attempt to systematize his thought; the “De Trinitate (395—420), in which its final formulation was given to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity; and the ” De Civitate Dei” (413-426), in which are laid the foundations of a rational philosophy of history.
He seems to have been himself aware of the significance of the writings into which he had so unstintedly poured himself, and he devoted some of his last years to a careful survey and revision of them in his unique ” Retractationes ” (426-428), in which he seeks to compact them into an ultimate whole. The influence which they exerted from the beginning is attested no less by the spiteful comments on their volume which escaped from those less well affected to them (e.g., the interpolators of Gennadius), than by the wondering admiration of the better disposed (already, Possidius, “Vita,” chap. vii.). In point of fact they entered the Church as a leaven which has ever since wrought powerfully towards leavening the whole mass.
tiochenes in Western Christological thought, as illustrated, for instance, in the ” Eranistes ” and the correspondence of Theodoret, is only one example of a much wider fact; and in any event, the great doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ, which form almost the entirety of ” dogma ” in the East, so far from being a gift from the East to the West, as often represented, had their origin in the West, and were thence communicated to the East - the former through the intermediation of “the great Hosius,” and the latter through that of Leo the Great. Augustine, through whom - working, no doubt, in full knowledge of what had been done by the Greeks, but in entire independence of them - the doctrine of the Trinity received its completed statement, came too late to affect the Greek construction of this doctrine, and accordingly gave form on this great topic only to the thought of the West. But his Christological conceptions underlay the formulations of Leo, as those of Ambrose underlay his, and through Leo determined the Christological definitions of the East as well as of the West. Accordingly, while the doctrines of the East and the West on the Person of Christ have remained identical, in their doctrines of the Trinity the two sections draw somewhat apart, not only with respect to that perennial bone of contention, the filioque clause in the definition of the procession of the Spirit, but in what underlies this difference - their general conception of the relations of the Trinitarian Persons. This in the East is ruled by subtle subordinational inheritances (embedded in the Nicene formulary in the phrase 0Eos EK 0Eov and its equivalents), while in the West it is dominated by that principle of equalization which found its sharpest assertion in the ascription of avro0E6T’l’JS to Christ by Calvin, whose construction marks the only new (subordinate) epoch in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity after Augustine. This complete determination of Westem thought on the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Trinity fairly illustrates at·once the place of Augustine in Western Christian thought, and the effect of his supreme influence there in creating a specifically Western type of Christianity. It is worth while, no doubt, to distinguish between the actual influence exerted by Augustine in the West, and what may perhaps, in a more external sense, be called the authority enjoyed by his name in the Latin Church. To no other doctor of the Church has anything like the same authority been accorded, and it seemed for long as if his doctrine of grace at least was to be treated as a definitely defined dogma, de fide in the Church. Already in 431 Celestine sharply reproved the bishops of Gaul for permitting Augustine’s authority to be questioned in their dioceses; and soon afterwards, Gelasius (493) addressed to the bishop of Picenum a similar letter of rebuke for the like carelessness. Subsequent deliverances of Hormisdas (520), and Boniface II (530-531), and John II (534) confirmed the authority thus assigned him; and their encomiums were repeated by many later Roman bishops. It very naturally became, therefore, the custom of the ” Augustinians” in the Church of Rome - like Diego Alvarez, Jansen, Noris - to ascribe ” irrefragable authority ” to his teaching; and the question was gravely debated among the theologians whether a truly plenary authority were really to be attributed to him, or whether he were only to rank as the first of the Church’s authorized teachers. The result was very naturally that every tendency of thought in the Church was eager to claim for itself the support of his name; and the extraordinary richness of his mind, and the remarkable variety of, so to say, the facets of his teaching, lent him more than ordinarily to the appeal of numerous and even divergent points of view. The possibility of this was increased by the long period of time covered by his literary activity, and the only gradual crystallization of his thought around his really formative ideas. The Augustine of Cassiciacum or even of the presbyterate was a somewhat different Augustine from the Augustine of the episcopate; and not even at his death had perfect consistency been attained in his teaching. Accordingly the most amazing variety of doctrine, on almost every conceivable subject, throughout the Middle Ages, and later in the Church of Rome, has sought support for itself in some saying or other of his; and both sides of almost every controversy have appealed with confidence to his teaching. Schools of thought which had drifted entirely away from his most fundamental postulates still regarded and represented themselves as “Augustinian”; and the Church of Rome itself, whose whole history since the second Council of Orange (529) has been marked by the progressive elimination of Augustinianism from its teaching, is still able to look upon him as the chief doctor of the Church, upon whom its fabric is especially built. Confusion became so confounded that the Confession of Faith which Pelagius presented to Innocent was inserted quite innocently into the “Libri Carolini,” and was even produced by the Sorbonne in 1521 against Luther as Augustine’s own.