The Epoch and Its Influence on People
The Culture and Religion
Since the Visigoths seized power over the Roman tribe, the great troubles brewed over the wrecks of the once great country. The people were oppressed so hard that they could not breathe their last to find their rest in peace. But despite the fact that the changes came very soon and caught people unawares, the bravest summoned up their courage and found the spirits to struggle against the invasion of the barbarians, their hope nestling in the distant and longed for City of God.
The state of people changed because St. Augustine appeared with his doctrine about the City of God. He suggested the idea that could change people’s lives and improve the state they were living in.
It was his good descend that made him get a good education. He was a man of high culture and brilliant knowledge. Because of the church san of bishop, he was a man of great influence, too. One can say that it was the great power of his mind that made him so famous in his wisdom and it was the church san that made the clergy circles listen to his ideas with more or less respectable attention.
He was a genius for his epoch, with his concepts of original sin and just war that later on were taken as the stepping stone of Western Christianity.
The Visigoths Coming
Because of his wonderful ideas, he attracted a lot of attention and became one of the greatest men of the epoch. Even with the raving and savage Visigoths appearing in the scene and changing the environment that the people lived to an unrecognizable place. The culture that has been valued for hundreds of years was suddenly abandoned and cultivated only by the few that were the most reckless and had absolutely nothing to lose. Unfortunately, they were not numerous.
Thus, if it had been not for the bishop, the Roman culture would have vanished without a trace. The decent man contributed a part of his into the further life of the culture.
However, his idea was not the one that had something to do with an open mutiny or with a revolt that might cause numerous deaths and take a lot of victims. He was a religious and a pious man; we have to remember that. And his way out was a most Biblical one.
As you might remember, the Bible speaks a lot of the great Promised Land, where the poor oppressed Egyptian people could find their own home and peace. This was the place where outcasts were the hosts, and where they could create their society to live in, with its peculiar customs, laws, and traditions, with their own rules to follow and no one to interfere. St, Augustine described it as the kingdom of justice and peace, the realm of their hopes arisen from the ashes.
Since bishop restored the idea, the so-called City of God was marked as the point where people’s sufferings end.
It was no wonder that Augustine was the man to start the search for better luck first. Because of his virtues, he was the one and only man who could lead the people out of the mess they were bound to live in.
However, the way he started out did not presume that he would become the leader of so many men and gain the importance of a state scale. Brown (22) describes him as a promising young man who was developing the concepts opposing the ideas that made people live in sin and misery.
St. Augustine at the Beginning of His Journey
The Early Years
He was educated in a rather peculiar way. Since he was inclined to reading a lot of books of historical importance, he did not consider the classical authors an interesting read. The way he picked the material to think on was rather selective than a random one. There were a few Roman authors that he adored to read and whose works he knew by heart, but these were not numerous. Namely, he liked Vergil and Cicero. Although his way of choosing the literature was rather unusual and free-willing, he grew up into an educated man.
The content of his education was barren. It was frankly pagan. It was surprisingly meagre: he would have read far fewer classical authors than a modern schoolboy. Vergil, Cicero, Sallust and Terence were the only authors he studied in detail. It was exclusively literary: philosophy, science and history were, alike, ignored. (Brown 24)
In spite of the fact that the epoch was harsh, and the environment in which Augustine grew up did not encourage him to become a goods-hearted man, he managed to live through the stern of the era and even not to lose the essence of the good nature that made him so great and philosophic.
The Adult Life
Finally, he reached seventeen – it was a ripe age from the point of view of the ancient Romans. It was time to choose his own path, and there was the only possible way for him. The school of rhetoric at Carthage! The small school of Thagaste was forgotten once and for all, together with the fears of being beaten or laughed at. This was his chance to become a man of great honor and influence in the spheres he appreciated most.
Such are the twists of fate that the books that Augustine hated most, philosophy and politics, were the grounds for his further life and work, as well as his guidance and the ideas that he would devote the rest of his further life to.
Augustine believes that Christian rulers can achieve a better or less approximate version of justice than pagan ones can.
But the function of both pagan and Christian states is to govern the life of a multitude that is not a moral community, not as populus, because many – probably the great majority – of its members are not true lovers of God. (Dyson)
And in the least degree did he ever suspect that he would convert people to his beliefs and religion several years later. Still this was what he was doing in his adult life.
The successful student and a great rhetoric, he would go on trying to make his creed sound as loud as a song of triumph.
He was exploring the nature of people’s virtues and sins, flagellating the latter and praising the former, and there was none who would say that his judgment was unfair, although he was considered a very harsh judge even for his epoch.
The Doctrine That He Proclaimed
The Roots of the New Ideas
St. Augustine saw human’s sufferings as the way to the relief that is going to happen in the future. Thus, the role of the martyr is to make the world better, taking away the evil together with the torments and the ordeal that the saint martyr is taking. He considered the sin as the first element that made the evil existing, and tried to make the sin vanish for good. Scourging the sin, he tried to make the society more virtuous.
The explanation of the presence of evil in the world as attributable to the sinning of our first parents, and to our own propensity to turn away from God, is complemented in the Fathers by a positive vision of God’s benevolent dispensation to men. In spite of our sinning God does not disregard our true value. All that befalls each individual in this world is foreseen and lovingly observed by Him. (Walsh 46)
The Interpretation of Bible
Owing to his doctrine, St. Augustine finally discovered the magnificent City of God, the image of the Eden that has been transformed into the shelter for those humiliated and offended in this world.
The City of God was the island of freedom that made people believe that there could be a better life waiting for them ahead.
Because of the desire to make people’s lives better, St. Augustine was developing this concept during all his life. The idea of the place where people could unite despite all the contradictions that split them apart was the one he had been going to for several years until he finally fully realized what the concept that could unite all people was.
In fact, all he was trying to do was to drive people’s attention form the political issues, which were rather dirty then, to the spiritual ones, which encouraged people’s spiritual development and made them not so desperate that their lament would not be heard, for most if the time it is easier to talk to God than to the representatives of the government.
It also must be added that in spite of the humane ideas he was promoting, his methods of controlling the congregation was very harsh and based on the politics of fear mostly.
The telltales of the Judgment Day and the fears of hell fire worked right in the times when people’s imagination could be inflamed with a single spark. It is clear that Augustine must also have possessed what today would be called a call for psychology: his speeches made people see everything he was depicting with the supernatural clarity and believe his every single word at once.
Brown drives an example of his utter sensitivity
When faced with an insoluble quarrel between two members of his clergy, on which the whole community was divided, he would send both to a shrine in Italy, where perjuries were detected by Divine judgement: we are entering the medieval world of the ordeal. This real terror of the Last Judgement was the backbone of Augustine’s authority in the Christian community. (191)
However, we must admit that he did not use this method cruelly, to “terrorize the flock” (191). Being a wise man, after all, and with the power that he possessed and which implemented a certain degree of responsibility, he could not cross the line.
The essence of the City of God was the idea that there was in fact no such a place like heaven on earth, and that is why people had to search within their own souls to discover the great Eden. The concept was such that a man could find his way in the dark with the help of loving God, but there could be temptations on his way, and these are the ordeals that have to be taken and suffered. But as a man passes then, he will surely reside in the heaven that he will discover in his soul, as the truth will no longer be locked from him.
To put it in St. Augustine’s very own words, the City of God of which we are treating is vouched by those scriptures whose supremacy over every product of human genius does not depend on the chance impulses of the minds of men but is manifestly due to the guiding power of God’s supreme Providence, and exercisers sovereign authority over the literature of all mankind. (Augustine 429)
However, the hard work was far from being done yet. Meaning that the City of God is a church, any church that a person can find and where he or she can feel safe like at their own home, St. Augustine also expressed the idea that this church should unify the rest of the confessions, making them stick together in a single knowledge possessed.
However, that was where the reality ended, and the dreams came to force. Taking into consideration that even the Christians could not come to terms with each other, splitting into confessions, the mixture of such religions as, say, the Muslim one and the Christian one, would result in a battle. That was something that even the saint could not put into practice.
The Results of the Great Master’s Work
The Martyr Is Venerated
Thus, the City of Man that would signify a New Jerusalem was farther than it might seem, but the bishop did not lose hope, and neither did the people who followed his footprints. They were striving to create the City whatever it might take them, and they did not fear the threats of the barbarians that took power and the multiple difficulties that stood in their way.
It is no wonder that he took this journey as the central aim of his life, as something that he could devote himself completely. In fact, the way he started learning the Holy Script was a bit unusual, too. The point was that at first, he did not like the idea that it conveyed, and, consequently, he could not speak to the Creator with the help of the Bible. As Pope Benedict XVI told,
It disappointed him. This was not only because the Latin style of the translation of the Sacred Scriptures was inadequate, but also because to him their content itself did not seem satisfying. In the scriptural narratives of wars and other human vicissitudes, he discovered neither the loftiness of philosophy nor the splendor of the search for the truth which is part of it. (138)
The Ideas That Don’t Die
Thus, there was no other way than to create the doctrine that would explain the essence of God’s words and provide people the place that they could call heaven on the earth. And St. Augustine did everything that he could to create such a place.
For his great deeds that will be forever taken into the pattern of history, he was venerated after he died the death of a martyr.
His dedication to the idea that could unify all people and dismiss the conflicts of all confessions ever existed was huge. It was unbelievable that a single man could do so much for the entire mankind – or, at least, for its believing part.
Basically, St. Augustine was not trying to restore the paradise, for he considered that those exiled from there had made this place unreachable for the rest of the mankind who was a part of the first sin as well; St. Augustine tried to make the City of happiness and piety, the place where people could stop forget about fears and sins.
In paradise, before sin, although they had no certainty how long their bliss would last, or whenever it could continue for ever – as it would have continued if they had not sinned. Even today we need not be ashamed to call those people happy whom we see living a life of righteousness and piety, with the hope of future immorality, without guilt to work havoc in their conscience, as they receive the ready forgiveness of God from the offences that arise from human frailty. (Saint Augustine 444)
Conclusion
As the saint passed away, the people nearly thought that they would lose the rest of their hope. But because of the ideas that St. Augustine was speaking, the beliefs that he carried in the depth of his heart, the notion of the New Jerusalem found their way to the rest of the people so that they could go on in their search of the City of God.
Works Cited
Brown, Peter R. L. Augustine of Hippo: a Biography. California: University of California Press. 2000.
Dyson R. W. St. Augustine of Hippo: the Christian Transformation of Political Philosophy. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2005. Print.
Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph T. Lienhard. The Fathers of the Church: from Clement Rome to Augustine of Hippo. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2009. Print.
Saint Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York, NY: Penguin Books. 2003. Print.
Walsh P.G., James Walsh. Divine Providence and Human Suffering. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994. Print.