Augustine's "City of God" and medieval Western spirituality

City of God Augustine

Though the context of the "church father" Augustus is historically associated with his life and times, 354-430, his influence was not significant until later. This observation is true of all his works, as one by one they were adopted as secondary doctrine to scripture but mores specifically the City of God, where Augustine, among other things, demonstrates further proofs of his many discourses on sin and having a personal relationship with God. The ideas that are developed through the City of God are continuations of ideas that had challenged Augustine as a very human member of the world, having taken many false paths and lived a life altogether unholy. The work applies his own experiences and those of others as sinners and members of "wrong" faiths in a corpulent world of available free will to build a city of god in opposition to a city of earth, which offered free men the opportunity only for sin.

Augustine's contemplative ideal and his devotion to Christ help to explain both the influence which he subsequently exercised over Western medieval spirituality, and the character of De Trinitate, universally admitted to be among his supreme achievements; for the De Trinitate is not simply, or even primarily, a work of dogmatic, or even of contemplative, theology. It is, in the last resort, a work of devotion, which expounds and seeks to understand the faith for practical, not academic, reasons. It is a product of Augustine's personal religious life, just as his writings on baptism and the need for grace are products of his pastoral encounters with Donatism and Pelagianism.

Bonner 5)

Augustine was above all sincerely interested in the personal aspects of faith, and in how such aspects influenced man to do either good or bad within the eyes of God. This is clearly his draw as a foundational member of the recognized group of men known as the "church fathers" who so significantly influenced the middle ages that the period cannot be discussed without them and vice versa. It is for this reason that the manifest idea of the City of God be the most essential guiding principle of the reformation period, we call the middle ages. In an earlier work, Augustine discusses a transgression as a young man, that will likely remain that which he is most famous for as long as his memory exists, within a work that predates the City of God, called simply Confessions. The work is a highly personal account of Augustine's resistance to personal acceptance of faith and many years of strayed standards and options. The transgression, considered by many to be his pinnacle analogy is that of the pear tree, where he and a group of young hooligans decimate a pear tree and then feed its fruit to the pigs, having sought or gained nothing to commit such sin Augustine, above all his much more heinous sins of youth considers this to be his worst, which he plainly attests to simply because his sin had no self-motivation.

Augustine was not hungry and, had he been so, he had better fruit of his own at home. 4 the motive then was not material; it was malice pure and simple -- a pleasure in doing evil. 5 in this schoolboy escapade, we find proof of the spiritual nature of sin, and hence its importance in the mind of Augustine. 6 the motive of the apparently motiveless action is a perverse desire to emulate the divine omnipotence, 7 which springs from what Augustine was afterwards to regard in the City of God as the architect of the Earthly City -- love of self to the contempt of God. 8 in this sense the theft of the pears, even more than unchastity, is the great sin of Augustine's adolescence, and for this reason it forms a fitting climax to the sins of his childhood.

Bonner 110)

Theology in the Middle Ages was the only valid form of education. For that reason the church had a monopolizing control on the ideas that were furthered, and many were dedicated almost exclusively to higher order thought, regarding the role god played in the world and the role the world played with god. All professors where obligated to the church, taught in theological universities, and if they were to keep their jobs long they did not step outside the boundaries of faith teachings, in their life or their verbalized thoughts. Though the greatest teachers of the faith were reformers, the contentions they made were ripe from the perspective of the church. Their actions may have been challenging to the lesser order of the church but they were in due time. Anselm, created a personal connection to faith, as did Augustine and another famous teacher actually living in the period Abelard, for example built his fame, and some would say infamy on the personal relationship with God, which he believed must be strengthened. While Bernard of Clairvaux (the famous monastic reformer) built his teachings on realistic dedication to faith, especially on the part of the clergy and the monastic calling, the common denominator of faith then being the personal relationship with God and the ability of that relationship to guide or deter from appropriate early deeds and demands. While in Augustine's time such questions were of state building, in later Medieval times they were of rebuilding, and affixing the church and man to a doctrine that included only those aspects of historical works that built upon that which the church deemed appropriate for reformation.

A the foundation of the Christian religion and its acknowledgement by the authorities of the Roman Empire as the religion of the State, the overthrow of the Roman Empire in the West by the barbarian invaders and the gradual education of these invaders by the Roman Church in the intellectual tradition of the Christianized Empire. In this tradition, of which the Roman Church was in the West the main surviving depository, were found in a somewhat unstable synthesis the heterogeneous traditions of the classical culture and of the Christian religion.

The movement known by some as Natural Theology, built from the works of early Roman and Greek philosophers and the church fathers as they became known and of which Augustine was, transmitted it into the practice and ideas of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of the most influential theologians and therefore teachers of the church and laity were reformers who strove to meet the standards set for them by the Church fathers, such as Augustine in particular and Anselm as well.

The method of exploring a text of the Scriptures or an incident in the lives of the saints and using this as a basis for personal prayer was not invented by Anselm, but he began the pattern of writing down such meditations, with all the exclamations and sighs of one praying, using the resources of language to enable another person to enter into prayer by using those words. Anselm also added the passion of repentance and the exhilaration of praise to the bare texts, involving the supplicant in an intensity of feeling and a deepening of understanding. In the intensity of sorrow for sin, he is the heir of Augustine of Hippo, and the language of the Confessions is very close to Anselm's self-revelation and repentance.

(McGinn, Meyendorff, and Ledercq 202)

So, in City of God the textual concepts from his earlier works became the stuff of reformative language that would apply itself not only to the personal but to how the person was meant to build upon the institutions that surrounded him, influenced him and in turn was influenced by him. Bernard of Clairvaux was a direct descendant of Augustine in his ideas. He strove to recreate the church not as a calling of finery and social stratification but of one that encompassed a monastic tradition of subsistence means, as to set and example for good living to monasteries, as well as the laity, who looked to the church for answers in all things. Clairvaux then carried these ideas to real reformation of the monastic as well as the lay life. Furthering Augustine's observations in City of God. Though it is clear that this transformation of faith, persona and institution was not met with rapid embrace or that Augustine's works were not questioned, they were significantly influential in the ability of the church and its teachers and reformers to build a case for the kind of finery and opulence that was literally burgeoning at the seams of the church institutions previously to be eliminated through reform, as these characteristics demonstrated the ability to sway even the most ardent believer to sin, Augustine's personal challenge as proof.

The great successor to Anselm in this kind of prayer was Bernard of Clairvaux. Augustine presented a spirituality of knowledge which is love; Bernard, a spirituality of love which is knowledge. Bernard was the heir to Anselm's distinction between love and knowledge, and he gave a new and minor place to knowledge in prayer. It is no longer the sapientia of Augustine that is diminished, but the scientia of the schools. The emotional use of language reached new heights in Bernard. In many specific ways he popularized and expanded the piety presented by Anselm. For instance, the devotion to the name of Jesus so strongly associated with Bernard is expressed by Anselm in his First Meditation.

(McGinn, Meyendorff, and Ledercq 202-203)

Bernard sought to bring back the traditions of the early church, by holding even those in high office of the church to a standard that was not representative of wealth and privilege but was a representation of the life of Jesus, who became during this period the central figure in monastic and educational traditions.

But these are minor abuses. I shall go on to major ones which seem minor because they are so common. I say nothing of the enormous height, extravagant length and unnecessary width of the churches, of their costly polishings and curious paintings which catch the worshipper's eye and dry up his devotion, things which seem to me in some sense a revival of ancient Jewish rites. Let these things pass, let us say they are all to the honor of God. Nevertheless, just as the pagan poet Persius inquired of his fellow pagans, so I as a monk ask my fellow monks: "Tell me, oh pontiffs," he said, "what is gold doing in the sanctuary?" I say (following his meaning rather than his metre): "Tell me, poor men, if you really are poor what is gold doing in the sanctuary?" There is no comparison here between bishops and monks. We know that the bishops, debtors to both the wise and unwise, use material beauty to arouse the devotion of a carnal people because they cannot do so by spiritual means. But we who have now come out of that people, we who have left the precious and lovely things of the world for Christ, we who, in order to win Christ, have reckoned all beautiful, sweet-smelling, fine-sounding, smooth-feeling, good-tasting things-- in short, all bodily delights -- as so much dung, what do we expect to get out of them? Admiration from the foolish? Offerings from the ignorant? or, scattered as we are among the gentiles, are we learning their tricks and serving their idols? (Bernarc of Clairvaux trans. Burr NP)

Abelard on the other hand stresses the importance of repentance, partly as a result of his not so appropriate involvement with a young woman who he later made his wife and then separated from to pursue education and teaching and the monastic life, she also followed this path, as an educated upper class woman, this was the most logical alternative to marriage.

OFTEN the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows more by example than by words. And therefore, because I too I have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily. (Abelard trans. Bellows NP)

The period brought clarity to the laity and reformation to the church and the people. Much the same way the church fathers of the past had done. Education was demonstrative of theology, and theology alone as the driving desire was to understand the relationship between God and man and God. Which was done through the writings and teaching of the short list who became known as the church fathers, of whom Augustine was a recognized cornerstone of membership.

What is, however, beyond dispute is that throughout Augustine's life as a Christian minister, the ideal of contemplation -- the desire to behold the Vision of God in His kingdom-was an ever-present inspiration. 'There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be, in the end, without end! For what is our end but to reach that kingdom which has no end?' (City of God XXII, 30).

Bonner 5)

Augustine's simple utterances of faith, and how God's ability to forgive and demonstrate mercy were paramount to the message of the church and the reformative period, in short his works fulfilled the role of accepting past sin, as that which need be punished but not as a source of complete condemnation and therefore separation from God. "I will visit their iniquities with a rod, and their sins with scourges: but I will not disperse my mercy from them..." (Augustine trans. Betterson 13) Augustine surmised that through free will all is possible and yet he also stressed that it was through good deeds or repentance for bad deeds that would be the ultimate salvation of man, and to create an environment, however figurative that would be conducive to the development of good deeds and the acceptance of repentance for bad would be the greatest need and the greatest deed of man.

A the knowledge that God, the one true God, is to be worshipped for the sake of eternal life and everlasting gifts and for participation in that City on high, and not for earthly and temporal blessings, which divine providence bestows on good and evil without discrimination..." (Augustine trans. Betterson 211)

Augustine, in his rambling sense of self reprobation, though works like Confessions are considered highly valuable, are preliminary developments of greater ideals of development, i.e. that of an environment that would build the ability of the lay and called to create within themselves and around them the good deeds, worthy of the blessings of God. Augustine's work therefore became a launching pad for medieval thought, medieval reformations and new doctrines of truth that can even be traced to the modern.