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Professor Ferguson teaches at Whitworth College, Spokane, and hold a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. In this essay he is concerned to ask whether Augustine has a message which is relevant to our situation and, in so doing, he provides a helpful introduction to a great thinker of the Christian church (Roman Catholic Church).

By the close of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. Some blamed the new superstition, Christianity, because it had abandoned the cults of the Roman gods. Augustine, stung by this charge, responds not only to the accusation that Christians were responsible for the Empire's decay, but also to the larger issue, placing the tumultuous events of his time within a comprehensive theology of history. His perspective gives guidance to those who reflect on the equally tumultuous events of our age.

How are we to understand the events of our time? We can understand them numbly, lost in our affluence, only vaguely aware of the 'other half' who suffer from malnutrition and hunger; or selfishly, grasping for more in an economic system that is often deaf to the cries of injustice that come from the third world; or fearfully, cringing at the thought that we may have to alter our present way of life; or cynically, incredulous of human goodness, grimly accepting the absence of God, unable to find meaning, pessimistic about the destiny of the race; or hopefully, believing that hidden in the mystery of the swish of time through space, in spite of human suffering, there is a sovereign God who is moving history toward its just and rightful end.

Augustine's World

Augustine opted for hope, though the world into which he was born in Tagaste in the province of Numidia in North Africa in AD 354 offered little to sustain a hopeful attitude. It was, as one author has stated, " A world the perplexities of which have probably never been exceeded by any period, before or since. Behind Augustine was more than a millennium of sustained effort to realize a stable society based on the classical idea of the common wealth. But for over a century prior to his birth, the Roman Empire had been in decline.

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No political or military effort seemed capable of restoring its original strength. Military disasters and internal decay pointed to the fact that Rome was collapsing. In this atmosphere, the intellectually curious Augustine reflected on the nature of history. ¹These reflections were in a large measure a remarkable synthesis of the varied influences in Augustine's environment.

The life of Augustine is well known by it might be helpful to reconstruct these several in influences. Most important was his exposure to the Bible. Augustine was firmly committed to biblical religion and consciously adopted what he believed to be the biblical view of history. He accepted the Biblical affirmation that there is a sovereign God who is the moving force in human history, and it is this biblical theme that became the basic ideological framework out of which he worked. But the assumption that God is sovereignly at work in history does not function independently of other ideological assumptions. There is also history through exposure to classical culture with its presuppositions regarding human nature and history. While the classical world view does not escape Augustine's scrutiny, its presence is still very much in evidence throughout his work.² It is most evident in his early writings, but can also be observed in his apologetic thrusts in the City of God which were designed for the sophisticated pagan reader of his time.

Not to be treated lightly either are his many years as a "Hearer" among the Manicheans. It is of particular importance to note the influence exercised on him by the dualism of the Manichean system,especially how it provided a way to approach the problem of evil. Peter Brown remarks: " Yet just this Manicheanism had been Augustine's religion as a growing man. It had provided him with an extreme and distinctive mould for his feelings."³ Moreover his serious reading of the neo-Platonic literature, especially at such a crucial point in his life, left its mark. After his conversion, in an effort to obtain a better understanding of the Christian religion, he used 'concepts and themes still incomplete and tinctured, more that it was to be later by neo=Platonism.'⁴

Also central to the shaping of Augustine's point of view was his varied exposure to Catholic Christianity through his mother.

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Ambrose and the Christian Church of his time with its unique problems in a crumbling empire. The foundational tenet in Augustine's theological framework is most obviously faith - faith in the God who is sovereignly in control of history and human destiny. Almost in defiance of the chaos in the Empire, Augustine confidently believed in the One who stands behind history and who promises eternal felicity to all who put their faith in Jesus Christ.

Augustine's Theology of History

Augustine's view of history, which 'weighed with an almost physical pressure on the mind of Europe for a thousand years.....,⁵ is not based on inductions from allegedly observable trend in history nor on some philosophical discovery of an inner logic to the course of human affairs. It is more accurately described as a theology of history based on the biblical revelation which attempts to place the whole universe in a coherent pattern.⁶

The insights gained from the Bible caused Augustine to be critical of the classical view of history. Augustine jettisoned the central historical concepts of the Greco-Roman view.⁷ In the first place, because of his understanding of the biblical doctrine of sin, Augustine rejected the optimistic idea of the perfection of human nature and the possibility of establishing a reign of peace and happiness by human efforts. Secondly, on the basis of his understanding of the biblical teaching on creation and redemption, he would not accept the Greek idea of history as being an eternally recurrent cycle.⁸ His idea of time having a beginning at the point of creation, of a divine purpose in history being worked out through the Hebrew nation in successive stages and the Christian experience of redemption through the unique events of Christ's death and resurrection all made it impossible for him to assent to the notion of cyclical patterns that characterized classical Greek-Roman historiography.

Augustine replaced the tenets of classical understanding of history with certain biblical themes in his own development of a doctrine of history.⁹

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He viewed the historical process as the working out not of human purposes but of God's purposes. God was the moving force behind history. Hence the actions of historical agents, indeed, even their very nature and existence, are a product of the unfolding of a providential plan and are, therefore, historically important. In addition, Augustine's theology of history, because of his understanding of the equality of all people before God, w as universal in scope. It overcame the particularism of the classical view.

Collingwood's summary of Christian historiography into four categories provides a good summary of the central presuppositions guiding Augustine's view:¹⁰ (1). it will be universal history, or a history of the world going back to the origin of the human race; (2). it will understand events not as the working of human agents, but as the working of providence; (3). it will attempt to detect an intelligible pattern in the general flow of events, and in particular it will assign primary significance in this pattern to Christ whose life, death and resurrection gives it all meaning; (4). it will subdivide history into periods, seeing the progressive development of the divine plan in the course of human affairs. Augustine's analysis of history shares all of these characteristics.

It would not be accurate to imply that Augustine's rejection of the classical view of history was total. It is true that he rejected its basic features in light of his formulation of the biblical doctrines of creation, sin and redemption, but he continued to maintain in some measure the substantialistic idea of eternal entities underlying the process of historical change. However, the presupposition of historical understanding was retained with an important difference, namely that a personal God was the source of the eternal entities. Nevertheless, the purpose of plan of God for history as revealed in the Bible is shown to fulfill itself with a Platonic universe. It would not be accurate to over stress this influence, yet it is still fair to say that for Augustine, 'biblical history is Platonic Idealism in time.'¹¹

Still another basic assumption of Augustine's understanding of history is a dualism of two ages or as he express it, of two cities. This dualism in Augustine's thought can be traced to a number of sources, including the Bible and certainly his exposure to Manicheanism.

How do these various presuppositions, rooted in biblical, classical, and dualistic thought express themselves in his theology of history? The best answer

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to this question is contained in his work, The City of God, in which Augustine sets forth his views on the nature of history.

Two years after the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in AD 410, Augustine began to write The City of God, and he would not complete it until 426. The initial occasion for its writing was to reply to the accusation that the Eternal City had fallen because the worship of the Roman gods had been abandoned in favor of an oriental superstition. Christianity had been blamed for Rome's destruction by those who still too the pagan gods seriously. They argued that after the sack by Alaric, the pagan gods had deserted Rome due to the intrusion of those 'atheist' called Christians who lad suppressed and abolished the cults of the Romans gods.¹² Augustine's reply was that long before the rise of Christianity Rome had suffered similar disasters, and that polytheistic worship does not assure prosperity. For Augustine, the real significance of Rome was its preservation of earthly peace as the condition for spreading the gospel.¹³ The empires and states have been constituted because of human sin, and their value consist in the preservation of peace and justice.

But the scope of Augustine's work went far beyond the apologetic impulse to defend the Christian faith against is critics. He simply used their criticism as an occasion for developing a vast synthesis which embraces the history of the whole human race and its destinies in time and eternity.¹⁴ The real issue was the way in which God intervened in human history to accomplish his purpose. It is God who has made all things and who administers the course of historical events. To know His will is to understand history, and that will is revealed in the divine acts, judgments and promises recorded in scripture.¹⁵ Hence, The City of God is a definitive rejection of the paganism of an aristocracy that claimed to dominate the intellectual life of Augustine's age and a projection of a totally new world view based on the Bible. As a result:

The City of God is the most self-conscious book that he ever wrote. It was planned ahead on a massive scale: five books dealt with those who worshiped other gods for felicity on earth: five, with those who worship them for eternal felicity: the remaining twelve would elaborate on Augustine's great theme; four would deal wit the origin of the "two cities, " one of God, the other of the world; four with their 'unfolding course' in the past; four with their ultimate

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destinies. ¹⁶

Augustine builds his theology of history on a rejection of the classical view of the world, a reliance on the biblical record, and a confidence in God who was displaying his purposes in history of Augustine's own time and who would ultimately move history to its consummation.¹⁷ The grand theme that holds these motifs together is a dualistic relationship between two cities as expressed in their origins, causes, and ends. Augustine writes: "two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God."¹⁸ In the earthly city, there has been conflict and hate through all history from the fall of Adam and will be to the end of time. The heavenly city is planned by God to repair the damage of sin, and the whole history since the ascension of Jesus into heaven is concerned with one work only: the building and perfecting of the city of God.¹⁹

The first two sections of the City of God contains Augustine's refutation of the classical view of the world with its belief in and reliance on the pagan gods. These ten book constitute a detailed argument against all those who would maintain that the pagan gods can bring human beings temporal or eternal felicity. The unhappiness caused by the calamities of Rome's recent past are not the result of the departure of the pagan gods due to the presence of the Christian religion. Rather, the calamities are directly related to the behavior of the Roman citizens who have brought disaster upon themselves in the corruptions of their souls before the dawn of the Christian religion, which means that no blame can be placed on Christianity's introduction into the Empire. If the Empire is lost, it is the judgment of God who rules the course of history, implementing his purposes. Nor can one blame blind fate. What the pagans call fortune, chance or luck, is only what is hidden from us but not from God. There is no such thing as an accident or uncaused occurrence in the universe. All history is controlled by the rational purpose of God.²⁰ True happiness can only come from the sovereign God who out of his infinite love has redeemed the human race by sending a mediator, "the man Christ Jesus.²¹ Because Augustine views history as standing under the authority of God, he is able to offer a critique of the prevailing political institutions.

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Rome has prospered in the past because she has been just, but now in her failure to fulfill her divinely appointed function, faces the judgment of God who has the power to create and dispense the kingdoms of earth. Augustine writes:

God, the author and giver of felicity, because He alone is the true God, Himself gives earthly kingdoms both to good and bad. Neither does He do this rashly, and, as it were fortuitously - because He is God, not fortune - but according to the order of things and times which is hidden from us, but thoroughly known to Himself; which same order of times however, He does not serve as subject to it, but Himself rules as Lord and appoints as governor. Felicity He gives only to the good²²

In the next section, Books, XI- XIV, he deals with the origin of the two cities. The story is well known, and we only repeat it here in outline form. Originally the City of God was designed as a angelic community to which innocent people like Adam before the fall would be admitted. These angels were created by God, and he and his cohorts were cast into hell, Lucifer becoming Satan in the process. Human beings, too were created with free will ('able not to sin'), but after Adam's sin, the human race became corrupt and were subject to death and the influence of the wicked angels - now rebellious ones in the city of Satan, both cities transcending the boundaries of this world, yet using human history as their battleground. On earth, the inhabitants of the two cities live intermingled in body, though separated in will because of their different natures. Thus, Augustine says, ...two cities, one of sinners and one of saints are to be found throughout history from the creation of mankind until the end of the world: at the present day they are mingled together in body, but separate and distinct in will: in the day of judgment they will be separated bodily.²³

Woven into this cosmology are the basic presuppositions that hold Augustine's theology of history together. In a harmonious combination of Platonic thought ( via Neoplatonism) and biblical categories, Augustine sees God as omniscient, the knower of all that was, is and will be. He knew from all eternity the events that would occur in the created world, good as well as evil. Nevertheless, God created the world and time (simultaneously) and the human race and saw that his creation was good. It is good because all is in the eternal now for God; there is no beginning and end, and he sees in the present his final triumph. Of God, Augustine says:

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For He does not pass from tis to that by transition of thought but beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness: so that of those things that emerge in time, the future are indeed not yet, the present are now, and the past no longer are: but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal presence²⁴

But it might be asked, does this kind of omniscience in God make Him the only one responsible in history? Augustine replies in the negative as he gives what he considers to be a Christian answer of the problem of evil which he first understood using the categories of Manichean dualism. Each person has free will to love God and so be saved or to love self and so be lost. God has foreseen that the archetypal first person, Adam.

The people of the City of God on the other hand are already possessed by the divine spirit of peace as they look beyond this world to everlasting life in heaven. This age-long struggle between the children of flesh and the children of promise serves the overall purpose of vindicating God in history.

In closing, we owe Augustine for the latter doctrines most of us tend to associate with the Reformation. Total Depravity,Infant baptism, Predestination all have their genesis in Augustine.

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