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* Ibid., p. 212.
€ Ibid., p. 30.
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«rude and repellent.» At last, during a fever, he dreamed that, at the Last Judgement, Christ asked him who he was, and he replied that he was a Christian. The answer came: «Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ.» Thereupon he was ordered to be scourged. At length Jerome, in his dream, cried out: «Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever
again I read such, I have denied Thee.» This, he adds, «was no sleep or idle dream.» *
After this, for some years, his letters contain few classical quotations. But after a certain time he lapses again into verses from Virgil, Horace, and even Ovid. They seem, however, to be from memory, particularly as some of them are repeated over and over again.
Jerome’s letters express the feelings produced by the fall of the Roman Empire more vividly
than any others known to me. In 396 he writes: â€
«I shudder when I think of the catastrophes of our time. For twenty years and more the blood of Romans has been shed daily between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, the Pannonias—each and all of these have been sacked and pillaged and plundered by Goths and Sarmatians, Quadi and Alans, Huns and Vandals and Marchmen. . . . The Roman world is falling: yet we hold up our heads instead of bowing them. What courage, think you, have the Corinthians now, or the Athenians or the Lacedaemonians or the Arcadians, or any of the Greeks over whom the barbarians bear sway? I have mentioned only a few cities, but these once the capitals of no mean States.»
He goes on to relate the ravages of the Huns in the East, and ends with the reflection: «To treat such themes as they deserve, Thucydides and Sallust would be as good as dumb.»
Seventeen years later, three years after the sack of Rome, he writes: ‡
«The world sinks into ruin: yes! but shameful to say our sins still live and flourish. The renowned city, the capital of the Roman Em-
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* This hostility to pagan literature persisted in the Church until the eleventh century, except in Ireland, where the Olympian gods had never been worshipped, and were therefore not feared by the Church.
€ Letter LX.
â
€ Letter CXXVIII. ¡
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pire, is swallowed up in one tremendous fire; and there is no part of the earth where Romans are not in exile. Churches once held sacred are now but heaps of dust and ashes; and yet we have our minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we were going to die tomorrow; yet we build as though we were going to live always in this world. Our walls shine with gold, our ceilings also and the capitals of our pillars; yet Christ dies before our doors naked and hungry in the person of His poor.»
This passage occurs incidentally in a letter to a friend who has decided to devote his daughter to perpetual virginity, and most of it is concerned with the rules to be observed in the education of girls so dedicated. It is strange that, with all Jerome’s deep feeling about the fall of the ancient world, he thinks the preservation of virginity more important than victory over the Huns and Vandals and Goths. Never once do his thoughts turn to any possible measure of practical statesmanship; never once does he point out the evils of the fiscal system, or of reliance on an army composed of barbarians. The same is true of Ambrose and of Augustine; Ambrose, it is true, was a statesman, but only on behalf of the Church. It is no wonder that the Empire fell into ruin when all the best and most vigorous minds of the age were so completely remote from secular concerns. On the other hand, if ruin was inevitable, the Christian outlook was admirably fitted to give men fortitude, and to enable them to preserve their religious hopes when earthly hopes seemed vain. The expression of this point of view, in The City of God, was the supreme merit of Saint Augustine.
Of Saint Augustine I shall speak, in this chapter, only as a man; as a theologian and philosopher, I shall consider him in the next chapter.
He was born in 354, nine years after Jerome, and fourteen years after Ambrose; he was a native of Africa, where he passed much the greater part of his life. His mother was a Christian, but his father was not. After a period as a Manichæan, he became a Catholic, and was baptized by Ambrose in Milan. He became bishop of Hippo, not far from Carthage, about the year 396. There he remained until his death in 430.
Of his early life we know much more than in the case of most ecclesiastics, because he has told of it in his Confessions. This book has had famous imitators, particularly Rousseau and Tolstoy, but I
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do not think it has any comparable predecessors. Saint Augustine is in some ways similar to Tolstoy, to whom, however, he is superior in intellect. He was a passionate man, in youth very far from a pattern of virtue, but driven by an inner impulse to search for truth and righteousness. Like Tolstoy, he was obsessed, in his later years, by a sense of sin, which made his life stern and his philosophy inhuman. He combated heresies vigorously, but some of his own views, when repeated by Jansenius in the seventeenth century, were pronounced heretical. Until the Protestants took up his opinions, however, the Catholic Church had never impugned their orthodoxy.
One of the first incidents of his life related in the Confessions occurred in his boyhood, and did not, in itself, greatly distinguish him from other boys. It appears that, with some companions of his own age, he despoiled a neighbour’s pear tree, although he was not hungry, and his parents had better pears at home. He continued throughout his life to consider this an act of almost incredible wickedness. It would not have been so bad if he had been hungry, or had had no other means of getting pears; but, as it was, the act was one of pure mischief, inspired by the love of wickedness for its own sake. It is this that makes it so unspeakably black. He beseeches God to forgive him:
«Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the abyss. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee, what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously wicked, having no temptation to that evil deed, but the evil deed itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for the sake of which I committed the fault, but my fault itself I loved. Foul soul, falling from the firmament to expulsion from Thy
presence; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!» *
He goes on like this for seven chapters, and all about some pears plucked from a tree in a boyish prank. To a modern mind, this seems morbid; †but in his own age it seemed right and a mark of holiness. The sense of sin, which was very strong in his day, came to the Jews as a way of reconciling self-importance with outward defeat. Yahweh was omnipotent, and Yahweh was specially interested in the Jews; why, then, did they not prosper? Because they were wicked: they
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* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. IV.
â I must except Mahatma Gandhi, whose autobiography contains passages closely similar to € the above.
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were idolators, they married gentiles, they failed to observe the Law. God’s purposes were centred on the Jews, but, since righteousness is the greatest of goods, and is achieved through tribulation, they must first be chastised, and must recognize their chastisement as a mark of God’s paternal love.
Christians put the Church in place of the Chosen People, but except in one respect this made little difference to the psychology of sin. The Church, like the Jews, suffered tribulation; the Church was troubled by heresies; individual Christians fell into apostasy under the stress of persecution. There was, however, one important development, already made, to a great extent, by the Jews, and that was the substitution of individual for communal sin. Originally, it was the Jewish nation that sinned, and that was collectively punished; but later sin became more personal, thus losing its political character. When the Church was substituted for the Jewish nation, this change became essential, since the Church, as a spiritual entity, could not sin, but the individual sinner could cease to be in communion with the Church. Sin, as we said just now, is connected with self-importance. Originally the importance was that of the Jewish nation, but subsequently it was that of the individual—not of the Church, because the Church never sinned. It thus came about that Christian theology had two parts, one concerned with the Church, and one with the individual soul. In later times, the first of these was most emphasized by Catholics, and the second by Protestants, but in Saint Augustine both exist equally, without his having any sense of disharmony. Those who are saved are those whom God has predestined to salvation; this is a direct relation of the soul to God. But no one will be saved unless he has been baptized, and thereby become a member of the Church; this makes the Church
