Augustine and the shaping of the Western church (c. 354-800)

What you'll learn

• Tell the story of Augustine's life and conversion, and explain his teaching on grace against Pelagius and its legacy for the Reformation.
• Describe how Jerome's Vulgate, Benedict's monasteries and Gregory the Great shaped the church after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, assessing each fairly from a Reformed perspective.
• Trace the mission of the church into the British Isles and northern Europe and summarise the impact of the rise of Islam, answering common myths about the 'Dark Ages'.

A restless heart: Augustine's life and Confessions

No theologian after the apostles has shaped Western Christianity more than Augustine of Hippo. Catholics and Protestants both claim him, and the Reformers quoted him constantly. To understand the Reformation, you need to understand Augustine.

He was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste in North Africa (modern Algeria), to a pagan father, Patricius, and a devout Christian mother, Monica, who prayed for him for years. A brilliant student, he went to Carthage, took a mistress, and had a son, Adeodatus. Reading Cicero awakened in him a love of wisdom, but for about nine years he followed the Manichaeans, a sect that taught two eternal powers of light and darkness. He taught rhetoric in Carthage and Rome and then became the official professor of rhetoric in Milan, where the preaching of Bishop Ambrose began to break down his objections to the Bible.

In August 386, in a garden in Milan, torn between his desires and his conscience, he heard a child's voice chanting, 'Take up and read; take up and read.' He opened Paul's letters at Romans 13:13-14: 'Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.' He writes that 'a light, as it were, of security' entered his heart and 'all the gloom of doubt vanished away' (Confessions 8.12.29). Ambrose baptised him, with Adeodatus, at Easter 387. Monica died soon afterwards at Ostia, content that her prayers had been answered.

Augustine returned to Africa, was ordained a presbyter at Hippo in 391, almost against his will, and became its bishop around 395. There he preached, wrote and pastored for thirty-five years, until he died on 28 August 430 while the Vandals besieged the city.

His Confessions (written around 397-400) is a prayer addressed to God, telling the story of his life as the story of grace. Its opening is famous: 'You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You' (1.1.1). It is the first great Christian autobiography and still one of the best books an apologist can read on the human heart.

Grace against Pelagius

In Confessions Augustine prayed, 'Give what You command, and command what You will' (10.29.40). He meant that God must give the very obedience he requires. Pelagius, a learned ascetic probably from Britain who was teaching in Rome, was disturbed by this; Augustine later recalled, in his treatise On the Gift of Perseverance, that Pelagius objected when he heard the words quoted in Rome.

Pelagius and his follower Caelestius taught that Adam's sin harmed only Adam and set a bad example; that babies are born innocent; that God would not command what we cannot do, so we are able to keep his law; and that grace mainly means God's law, Christ's example and forgiveness for past sins. To Augustine this emptied the cross of its power. If we can save ourselves, why did Christ die (Gal 2:21)?

Augustine answered from Scripture. All humanity sinned in Adam (Rom 5:12-19); we are born spiritually dead (Eph 2:1-5) with wills bound to sin; no one can come to Christ unless the Father draws him (John 6:44); faith itself is God's gift (Eph 2:8-9; Phil 1:29); and 'What do you have that you did not receive?' (1 Cor 4:7). God's grace does not merely help a willing person; it makes the unwilling willing. Behind that grace stands God's free election, and God gives his chosen the gift of perseverance. (You studied original sin and the bondage of the will in Know Your Faith, Lesson 5, and the doctrines of grace in Lesson 7.)

The church agreed. A council at Carthage in 418 condemned Pelagian teaching, and the Council of Ephesus (431) condemned Caelestius. A softer view, later labelled 'semi-Pelagianism' (the name is much later), held that we can make the first move towards God and grace then helps us; John Cassian was associated with it. The Second Council of Orange (529), led by Caesarius of Arles, answered that even the beginning of faith is a gift of grace, while also rejecting any teaching that God predestines people to evil. Its canons were little known in the later Middle Ages and were rediscovered and printed again in the sixteenth century.

A caution: do not confuse later Arminians with Pelagians or semi-Pelagians. Arminius taught that free will cannot begin or complete any true spiritual good without grace, and Wesley taught a 'prevenient' grace that goes before every human response (Lessons 6 and 7). The Calvinist-Arminian debate is about how God's grace works, not about whether we need it.

This is why the Reformation can be described as an Augustinian revival. Luther had been an Augustinian friar. Calvin quotes Augustine more than any other church father. B. B. Warfield famously summed it up by saying that the Reformation, inwardly considered, was the triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church. Be fair: Augustine also held baptismal regeneration, a high view of the visible Catholic Church and the sacraments, and other views Reformed Christians do not share. Catholics rightly point out that he once wrote, 'I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church' (Against the Letter of Mani Called Fundamental 5.6). Yet he also wrote to Jerome in 405 that only the canonical Scriptures receive his full trust as free from error (Letter 82.3).

The City of God and the fall of Rome

In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome, the first time in about eight centuries the city had fallen to a foreign enemy. Pagans said that Rome had fallen because it had abandoned its gods for Christ. Augustine replied with The City of God (22 books, completed in 426).

His answer is a Christian philosophy of history. There are two cities, made by two loves: the earthly city, built on love of self to the point of contempt for God, and the heavenly city, built on love of God to the point of contempt for self (14.28). They are mixed together in this age, even in the visible church, and will be separated only at the judgement. Rome was never the kingdom of God. Empires rise and fall; the city of God is a pilgrim people looking for 'the city that is to come' (Heb 13:14).

In the West, the last emperor in Italy, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic general Odoacer in 476. Historians use the date as a convenient marker, but life did not stop overnight; many scholars speak of a transformation rather than a sudden fall. Augustine's book helped Christians understand that the church does not stand or fall with any empire, a lesson worth remembering in every age.

Jerome and the Vulgate

Jerome (c. 347-420) was the greatest biblical scholar of the early Latin church. In 382 Pope Damasus asked him to revise the old Latin Gospels, which existed in many inconsistent versions. Jerome then settled in Bethlehem and, unusually for a Latin Christian of his time, put to work the Hebrew he had begun learning years before in the Syrian desert. Between about 390 and 405 he translated most of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, appealing to the 'Hebrew truth' rather than to the Greek Septuagint. His work became the core of the Latin Bible later called the Vulgate ('common' version), the Bible of the Western church for a thousand years. His famous saying, 'Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ' (Commentary on Isaiah, prologue), is quoted by Catholics and Protestants alike.

Jerome's translation was not welcomed by everyone. Augustine told him of an African congregation that nearly rioted when the new version changed the familiar name of the plant in Jonah 4:6.

Jerome also matters for the debate about the Apocrypha. In his prologues, especially the 'Helmeted Preface', he distinguished the books of the Hebrew canon from books such as Wisdom, Sirach, Judith and Tobit, which he said were not in the canon, though they could be read for edification. The Council of Trent (1546) later declared these books canonical and the Vulgate 'authentic'. The Reformers followed Jerome's distinction (see WCF 1.3; the Thirty-Nine Articles, Article 6, cites him by name). When a Catholic friend says Protestants 'removed books from the Bible', Jerome is the best historical answer: the greatest biblical scholar of the early church held the same Old Testament canon that Protestants hold.

Monks and popes: Benedict and Gregory the Great

Monasticism began in the deserts of Egypt with men like Antony (whose life Athanasius wrote) and spread West. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-c. 547) founded monasteries at Subiaco and then at Monte Cassino around 529-530. His Rule, 73 short chapters, ordered a community's day around common prayer (chiefly the Psalms), manual work and the reading of Scripture, with moderation and stability. Our main source for his life is the second book of Gregory the Great's Dialogues. The motto ora et labora ('pray and work') is a later summary, not a quotation from the Rule.

Reformed Christians should assess monasticism fairly. Monasteries copied and preserved Scripture and ancient learning, cared for the poor and sent out missionaries. But the system also encouraged a two-tier idea of holiness, lifelong vows Scripture does not require, and the idea that leaving ordinary callings is more pleasing to God. The Reformers, several of them former monks, rejected those ideas while honouring godly monks of the past.

Gregory the Great (pope 590-604) was a former prefect of Rome turned monk, who became bishop of Rome in a time of plague, flood and Lombard invasion. He fed the city, organised its defence, wrote the Pastoral Rule (591), a classic on pastoral care, and popularised the papal title 'servant of the servants of God'. When the bishop of Constantinople used the title 'ecumenical' (universal) patriarch, Gregory protested: 'Now I confidently say that whosoever calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Priest, is in his elation the precursor of Antichrist' (Letter 7.33, to the emperor Maurice). Protestants point to this as a striking contrast with later papal claims; Catholic writers reply that Gregory was rejecting a title that seemed to deny other bishops their office, while still upholding Rome's primacy. Gregory also helped spread later medieval practices: his Dialogues taught a purifying fire after death for small sins, which fed the later doctrine of purgatory.

The gospel goes north

Patrick (fifth century) was a Romano-British Christian, the son of a deacon. According to his own Confession, Irish raiders captured him at sixteen; after six years as a herdsman he escaped, and later returned to Ireland as a missionary. His Confession and Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus are the only reliable sources. The traditional arrival date of 432 comes from later annals; the shamrock and the snakes are much later legends. What is certain is a man who loved the people who had enslaved him and preached Christ to them.

Irish monasteries became centres of learning and mission. Columba founded the monastery on Iona around 563, from which Aidan later took the gospel to Northumbria. Meanwhile Gregory the Great sent a monk named Augustine (not Augustine of Hippo) to the Anglo-Saxons. He landed in Kent in 597, where King Æthelberht, whose Frankish wife Bertha was already a Christian, received him and was soon baptised. Augustine became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Celtic and Roman Christians differed on customs such as the date of Easter, and at the Synod of Whitby (664) Northumbria chose the Roman practice.

Then Anglo-Saxon Christians took the gospel back to the continent. Boniface (originally Wynfreth, c. 675-754) evangelised the Germanic peoples. According to his early biographer Willibald, he felled a sacred oak of the god Donar (Thor) near Fritzlar in Hesse, and when no thunderbolt struck him, many turned to Christ. He was killed by robbers near Dokkum in Frisia on 5 June 754, with about fifty companions, still preaching in his old age.

The rise of Islam

In 622 Muhammad and his followers emigrated from Mecca to Medina (the Hijra, from which the Islamic calendar is dated). By his death in 632 most of Arabia had submitted to Islam. Within a century Arab armies took Syria, Jerusalem (637), Egypt, North Africa (the homeland of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine) and, from 711, most of Spain. In 732 Charles Martel stopped a Muslim army near Tours and Poitiers.

Christians in the conquered lands were generally allowed to keep their faith as dhimmis (protected non-Muslims), but they paid a special tax (jizya), faced legal restrictions and, over centuries, became minorities. Christianity in North Africa eventually almost disappeared. The ancient churches of Egypt, Syria and Iraq survive to this day.

For the apologist, two points stand out. First, Islam arose six centuries after Christ, so its claim that the Bible was corrupted must reckon with the many biblical manuscripts that already existed long before Muhammad (see The Reliable Word, Lesson 1). Second, the Christian answer to Islam has never rightly been the sword but the gospel (2 Cor 10:4). The Islam module (m06) treats its claims in detail.

Why this matters for the apologist

Three popular claims meet their answer here. 'The Dark Ages were a time when the church suppressed learning.' In fact, monasteries copied the Bible and the classics, Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks taught and evangelised, and writers like Bede (whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People was finished in 731) carried on careful scholarship. Be honest about real wrongs too: in 415 the philosopher Hypatia was murdered in Alexandria by a Christian mob, a crime to condemn without excuse. But one atrocity does not make a 'Dark Age'. Much of the great Library of Alexandria had already been lost to fire, civil war and decline over the previous centuries, though the destruction of the Serapeum temple in 391, which may have held some remaining scrolls, was also the work of Christians. 'The Reformation was a sixteenth-century novelty.' The Reformers' doctrine of grace was Augustine's, defended at Carthage and Orange, and their Old Testament canon was Jerome's. 'The church was always Roman Catholic.' Gregory the Great himself condemned the title of universal bishop. That does not make him a Protestant. It does show that the later papal system grew over time.

Above all, this period teaches that God preserves his church through the fall of empires. Rome fell; the city of God did not.

Key texts

• Romans 13:13-14: The text Augustine read in the garden in 386: put on the Lord Jesus Christ. A reminder that God converts through his Word.
• Romans 5:12-19: Sin and death came through one man, life through one man: the heart of Augustine's case for original sin against Pelagius.
• Ephesians 2:1-9: Dead in sins, made alive by grace, saved through faith which is God's gift: the Augustinian and Reformed doctrine of grace in one passage.
• John 6:44: No one can come to Christ unless the Father draws him: Augustine's answer to the claim that we can take the first step on our own.
• 1 Corinthians 4:7: 'What do you have that you did not receive?' A favourite text of Augustine, showing that even faith is a gift.
• Hebrews 13:14: Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come: the theme of The City of God.
• Matthew 28:19-20: The Great Commission that drove Patrick, Columba, Augustine of Canterbury and Boniface into pagan lands.
• 2 Corinthians 10:4-5: The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh: the gospel, not the sword, is the Christian answer to rival faiths.

Objections and answers

Try answering each one yourself before you open the response.

Written task

Write a 300-400 word article for your church newsletter titled 'Why Protestants love Augustine'. Tell the story of his conversion briefly, explain his teaching on grace against Pelagius with at least three Scripture references, and show how it shaped the Reformation. Be honest that Augustine also held views Reformed Christians do not share, and explain how the Reformers handled that.

Hand this in to Mr Scott. He will look for:

• Accurate summary of Augustine's conversion with correct dates and text (Romans 13:13-14)
• Clear explanation of the Pelagian controversy and Augustine's answer, with at least three Scripture references
• Shows the link to the Reformation (e.g. Luther as Augustinian friar, Calvin's use of Augustine)
• Fairly acknowledges where Augustine differs from Reformed theology
• Warm, accessible style for a church audience

Further reading

• Confessions by Augustine (tr. Henry Chadwick, Oxford World's Classics): Read the primary source. Chadwick's translation is accurate and readable, with helpful notes.
• Augustine of Hippo: A Biography by Peter Brown: The classic modern biography, setting Augustine in his world of late Roman Africa.
• 2,000 Years of Christ's Power, Part 1: The Age of the Early Church Fathers by Nick Needham: A readable church history by a Reformed Baptist historian, covering Augustine, Jerome and the church of the early centuries in detail.