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First Principles - Augustine Goes Postmodern

The Hom e of Am erican Intellectual Conservatism First Principles

October 15, 2013

Augustine Goes Postmodern

Curtis L. Hancock - 01/01/08 Many biographies of St. Augustine exist. James O'Donnell adds another that is interesting, distinctive, and lively. Time devoted to reading it is well spent, if for no other reason than to enjoy O'Donnell's vivid depiction of the late antique era in which Augustine lived. It is not a biographical novel, but it is a novel biography, attempting to break free of the obligatory veneration of Augustine. To make this break, one has to recognize that there are two Augustines, "the one who lived and died a long time ago and the one who lives to be remade by us and is known from his works. It's impossible to tell the story of the one without the other." (ANB, 5) As biography, this book volunteers a bold revisionism on grounds that "the study of Augustinian chronology, and thus of all of Augustine's life, is built on shaky ground." (ANB, 34) After all these centuries of research and biography, there is still a need to "concentrate first on the Augustine who lived long ago. He is less well known than his undying alter ego" (the Augustine "known from his works"). (ANB, 5) O'Donnell concentrates anew on Augustine's life partly under the inspiration of Pierre-Marie Hombert's contribution (published in 2000), Nouvelles recherches de chronologie augustinienne ("New Investigations in Augustinian Chronology").1 This study takes into account the recent discoveries of Johannes Divjak, who found in Marseilles, France, dozens of heretofore unknown letters by St. Augustine, and of Francois Dolbeau, who discovered in a library in Mainz, Germany, dozens of sermons also unnoticed in history. Combined, these discoveries "give us new light into his world." (ANB, 89) These discoveries make revisionism obligatory.2 On account of this dissent and revisionism, O'Donnell's book warrants detailed examination. He aims to break the mold into which the tradition has poured the sainted Augustine. Once broken, fragments of his life, times, and writings remain. In O'Donnell's worldview fragments are surer signs of truth. If one determines to read the auguries of these fragments, one makes authentic biography possible. This sounds like deconstruction, a charge O'Donnell would not disavow. There is a palpable postmodernist sensibility in his work. (ANB, 83, 144) "Breaking up that framework in order to see pieces of the man himself is a central task for the book." (ANB, 84) I will assess how successfully O'Donnell accomplishes this task. I will test the soundness of his interpretations of key elements (dare we say "pieces") of Augustine's life. Fun with Biography I praise O'Donnell for his willingness to amuse us while he informs. You've got to indulge a fellow who makes you laugh. The good humor in this biography is one of its attractive features. The ancient Greeks observed that a researcher can bring one of two states of mind to a subject, a spirit of seriousness (spoudaios) or an attitude of playfulness (paideia). Johann Huizinga argues that this distinction is a hallmark of Western civilization. As one of the architects of Christendom, perhaps Augustine deserves both kinds of treatment. (Of course, O'Donnell can be somber when he wants, as we shall see later.) Augustine has been under the specimen glass of serious examination for centuries. What is the harm in balancing serious biography with light-heartedness? Some may accuse O'Donnell of irreverence. True, humor cannot excuse everything, but one person's whimsy might be another's irreverence. Christian genius involves the mystery of the human person, which includes the risible and the regard for the comic in life, even when it touches on religion. As G. K. Chesterton said, "It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it." At any rate, O'Donnell's presentation bounces occasionally with humor and even frivolity. He gambols through his text, sometimes "saying the darnedest things." Let me set the context for a few droll examples: (1) speaking of the saint's struggle to convert: "Augustine falls back on his old pastimessex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, so to speak" (ANB, 68); (2) making a curious comparison: "As an orthodox Christian, Augustine differed from many of his contemporaries precisely because he had been a Manichee and couldn't let go. Ex-Stalinist neoconservatives are just as exciting among their new coreligionists, and just as out of place" (ANB, 50); (3) likening Augustine's Confessions to Huckleb erry Finn, and speaking of the latter: "Perhaps, like me, you purchased a copy in a high school bookshop long ago because you had heard it had some salacious things in it. (If they're there, I haven't found them yet)" (ANB, 35); (4) observing that the converted Augustine was conscious of the lifestyle he gave up: "As bishop and Christian, he was always a man who
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First Principles - Augustine Goes Postmodern

used to have a very different future, and made sure that you remembered it" (ANB, 36; well, it struck me as funny); (5) musing on the relationship between Augustine and his mother, Monica: "as she weeps on the shore at Carthage while her son sails off . . . Augustine suddenly becoming Aeneas abandoning Dido. We can all connect the dots of that story" (ANB, 55); (6) alluding to Donatism: it was "light on credibility and heavy on mumbo-jumbo" (ANB, 56); (7) speaking of Augustine's standard for his own baptism: "Most baptismal candidates were satisfied to present themselves when they had acquired the good intention at moral reform that marks New Year's resolutions or a decision to quit smoking or go on a diet. As long as there was no dramatic relapse, a relatively normal future life was quite in order. But Augustine was more competitive than most" (ANB, 60); (8) daring to bring up the Trinity: the "word 'person' was applied to the 'three-ishness' of god . . . The word originally meant 'mask,' the thing you wore in a drama . . . but few now would try to represent Christian theology as being about the three masks of god or the three stage roles he plays, although it might be a fresh approach to a difficult subject" (ANB, 65; I like to think even Augustine would chuckle at that one.); (9) speaking of Augustine's Platonism: he prefers "a perfect un-world over this imperfect one" (ANB, 82); (10) thinking of that blustery day when the barbarians walked into Rome: "in 410 he would have been ready to respond to the news from Rome with an Eeyorish 'I thought as much'" (ANB, 228); (11) doubting whether Augustine is "a purveyor of mystic crystal revelations and the mind's true liberation (though on some days that language would not have been foreign to him)." (ANB, 288) I could go on. (Note his reference to "overweight middle-aged hippies playing bluegrass music," that is, "the Grateful Dead.") (ANB, 275) But I'll stop at the eleventh example. Anyway, I can appreciate O'Donnell's occasional excursion into "hip" rhetoric. Still, there can be too much of a good thing. As one reviewer put it, "the insouciance and irreverence begin to sound hollow after a while."3 The Augustine who Confesses On to spoudaios. At some point, we seriously have to ask, "Does O'Donnell's postmodernist biography of St. Augustine succeed?" To respond, it is natural to begin with the Confessions. How does O'Donnell help us, if at all, better capture the mind and heart that Augustine suffers to disclose in his own autobiography? Before I engage that question and volunteer some criticisms, I want to commend O'Donnell for one conspicuous success. He spotlights something that is sometimes not given its due in treatments of the life and thought of Augustine: the fact that he was a rhetorician. Rhetoric was no idle curiosity, nor merely a job that he happened to fall into at Carthage. He aspired and trained to be a rhetorician from his youth and he remained one throughout his adult life. Rhetoric was central to Augustine's identity. Even before his chapters on the Confessions, O'Donnell brings this out effectively in his book's opening pages by asking us to imagine what it was like to be part of an audience hearing and witnessing one of Augustine's "performances." True, these performances had a spiritual purpose. They were teaching lessons of a pastor and bishop. But we must not overlook that they were rhetoric. Rhetoric was a profession and a gift Augustine brought to his Christian vocation which gave him opportunity to develop that gift further. It helped him navigate and ascend the intellectual culture of his day. The Confessions itself is the work of rhetoric. The centrality of rhetoric enables O'Donnell to explain cleverly the relationship of Augustine to St. Ambrose. Ambrose counseled Augustine in his desire for Christian conversion. But Augustine surely was attracted to Ambrose also because he was one of the great rhetoricians of the age. He was Augustine's mentor in faith and rhetoric. Here was a model for rhetorical power in service of Christian faith. He also modeled for Augustine that rhetoric could be a means of exchange to mobilize and advance a person's interests and standing in the Mediterranean- Christian society of the fourth century. Because Ambrose and Augustine are saints, biographers may be unwilling to emphasize how well the gift and achievement of rhetoric served as a "worldly" tool for them. But men like Ambrose and Augustine were politically involved in ecclesiastical and social events during their day. Such men, even if saints, have to be, at least, in the world, if not of it. It is a positive Christian service to take God's gift and use it to persuade others of the Good News. Is it unChristian that some personal benefit come from that? Perhaps in Ambrose, Augustine saw the embodiment of a Christianized Cicero, whose influence in Augustine's pilgrimage the Confessions stresses. Through the work of Ambrose and Augustine, the tradition of ancient oratory assimilates into Christian wisdom: Christian preachers had always known and enacted this Role [as accomplished rhetoricians]. What was different about Augustine, Ambrose, and their contemporary in Constantinople, John, called Chrysostom ("golden mouth"), and other polished per formers of the age is that they saw themselves in the tradition of the ancient orators as well. (ANB, 31) Rhetoric was a way in which Roman Catholics were truly Roman, retrieving and applying a traditional
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Roman value, forensics, to their Christian calling. With this salute to O'Donnell now discharged, I return to our general question: does his postmodernist biography of Augustine succeed? To repeat the obvious, in order to pursue this question we must address Augustine's Confessions. No biography should ignore a subject's autobiography. A self-reflective, ipse dixit record of a life is indispensable for biography. Aware of this, O'Donnell devotes two early chapters of his biography, chapter two, "Augustine Confesses" and chapter three, "A Modern Classic," to Augustine's autobiography. When an autobiography comes down to us as one of the eminent achievements of Western literature, it requires the biographer to ask: (1) why does the autobiography still connect with people many generations after its author has died? (2) does the autobiography indeed reveal the life of the author? To answer the first question, O'Donnell writes the third chapter. Autobiography, especially one as private and intense as Augustine's, is unique in ancient literature. It is a way of writing that presages postmedieval concerns with the self. "Privacy is a modern invention and depends on conditions of life and understanding of selfhood that were inaccessible to ancient people." (ANB, 1067) Hence, it resonates with modern audiences, with their interests in psychology, subjectivity, and emotions. In short, the Confessions is ahead of its time. Presently, I would like to focus on the second question: does the autobiography (in this case, Augustine's Confessions) successfully reveal the life of the author? To answer this question, one must determine whether the author of the autobiography is really aware of his or her own personality, character, and motivations. One of the tasks of O'Donnell's biography is to show that, as an exercise in personal psychoanalysis (ANB, 55); Augustine's autobiography does not succeed, or at best, only partly succeeds. He fails the "Oracle-of-Delphi Test," so to speak. He does not know himself. In other words, O'Donnell's verdict is that Augustine thinks he is someone he is not. His self-disclosure in the Confessions is largely an exercise in rationalization, obfuscation, and self-aggrandizement. Unconscious motivations explain our saint. Augustine's struggle for sincerity does not conceal what O'Donnell knows that Augustine does not. His sexual appetites may have been sublimated, but the Augustine of the Confessions is still self serving and obsessed with worldly interests. It is not just a matter of unconscious drives; character flaws also abound. "The intellectual arrogance that marked his youth had, he believed, also left him. (That argument is perhaps the most self-serving . . . and some of his contemporaries would have found it hard to take)." (ANB, 36) "The light and obvious thread is the description of a life's career meant to impress its readers." (ANB, 36) This is to be expected, since "Augustine never practiced the humility of the man who would escape attention. In prostrating himself before the divine in the Confessions, Augustine performs an astonishing act of self-presentation and self-justification and, paradoxically, self-aggrandizement." (ANB, 36) According to O'Donnell, people tried to tell Augustine this at the time, but he did not listen. (ANB, 4546) The Confessions is a product of self-creation, not selfdisclosure. The premise for this verdict is a view of enlightened, objective, or "scientific" history that O'Donnell assumes but never actually justifies. Perhaps he thinks that the Dolbeau and Divjak discoveries justify it. "Hombert digs deeper and finds that the foundations of Augustinian chronology are rotten, badly rotten. The most abundant texts, the sermons, were assigned a timeline generations ago by devout but relatively amateurish scholars." (ANB, 33). Once we supply a more convincing chronology of Augustine's stages on life's way, we can decipher better who Augustine is. There is some substance to this, but not nearly so much as O'Donnell thinks. O'Donnell thinks radical reinterpretation of Augustine, the man and saint, follows as soon as scholarship (the recent discovery of the letters and sermons) demands that we reject the traditionally accepted view that Augustine began to acquire notoriety in North Africa as early as 395 and that we replace it with the judgment that only after 410 "the great man" began to emerge. (ANB, 34) Prior to that time, he remained a selfserving social climber. These vices remained after 410, but they were not as evident. Once he arrived at his privileged station in life, he didn't have to act on his character flaws so much. What can I say to this? True, the scholarship of Dolbeau, Divjak, and Hombert justifies opening up new investigations into Augustine. But it does not justify revisionism of the kind O'Donnell envisions. At some point, it is the content, what Augustine actually says in those sermons and letters, that dictates whether we accept O'Donnell's conclusions. It turns out, unless one reads them with O'Donnell's suppositions already in mind, his conclusions do not follow. There are revisions and then there is "revisionist history," which, for O'Donnell, means that when one is examining a subject whose life is complex and ambiguous, responsible history must prefer dark psychological motivations and social compromises as the real causes of this subject's beliefs and behaviors. Augustine is eventually diced and sliced with this philosophical, or perhaps, more accurately,
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ideological conception of biography and history. Such an assumption is not excused by the discovery of letters and sermons. For it to stand, O'Donnell must give it independent demonstration. It is an ideology of debunking and deconstruction. Of course, it has its ideological pay-off. For if one deconstructs Augustine, one debunks the Catholic Church as traditionally understood. This agenda should not be lost on O'Donnell's readers. O'Donnell detracts and discredits throughout the entire biography. It is evident in his interpretation of the Confessions. In his effort to write a biography that humanizes the saint, a description that includes "warts and all" (a description any genuine saint would endorse), O'Donnell has forgotten the "all" and has pretty much left us with the "warts." O'Donnell's dismissive attitude says "never mind" to the thousand-plus years of biography that recounts Augustine's life as virtuous and, indeed, saintly. Those must be the biographies coming from "the devout and amateurish." In our postmodern age, we have sat too long at the knee of historical criticism to perpetuate naivet. We know that saints are too good to be true. If we study our subject through the lens of historical science, we will catalogue a different kind of specimen: a self-aggrandizer, bordering on narcissism, whose motivations are largely worldly; a figure whose own self-concept is so tortured by a sense of sin that he dare not face the reality of who he is. The Confessions provides Augustine the opportunity to fabricate an image of himself that he can present as respectable to the world, the image of the pilgrim progressing, while simultaneously convincing himself that he is someone he is not. Accordingly, the Confessions is an exercise in "bad faith." All of this adds up to a presumptive cynicism in O'Donnell's presentation of Augustine's Confessions. He turns innuendo and arbitrary accusation into art forms. Augustine's "one-man show," his "virtuouso performance" is a rationalization for his "own future authoritarianism." (ANB, 3637) If we avoid "the snares he has laid for his biographers" (ANB, 37), we can cynically unmask this social climber and power-seeker. Motivations and Machinations O'Donnell details specific ways in which Augustine manipulates his social circumstances, fabricates his identity for his times and posterity, and arbitrarily demands his interpretation of Christian religion over all others. Beyond what I've said above, which is specific to the Confessions, I will point out another way in which O'Donnell accuses Augustine of less than admirable motives for his life, work, and influence. It is fascinating to watch O'Donnell's studied efforts at innuendo and accusation, as well as his eccentric use of evidence, which sometimes is not evidence at all, to make his case. A case in point is his treatment of the relationship that Augustine develops with St. Jerome. In chapter four, with the provocative title "Augustine Unvarnished," O'Donnell alleges that in 394 the self-seeking Augustine conspired to write Jerome, who resided in Bethlehem (having been asked to leave several earlier locations), "to attract attention." (ANB, 92) In his letter, Augustine criticizes some of Jerome's views, a risky enterprise for one wanting to ingratiate himself, since Jerome was known for his volatility. By accident, Augustine's letter did not reach Jerome until years later. In the meantime, the letter went to Rome and circulated as a pamphlet titled "Against Jerome." Augustine protested that he never intended the letter to circulate in that fashion. He never wanted a public attack on Jerome. But suspicion and cynicism are axiomatic in O'Donnell's account. Feigning reluctance, he concedes that "we should probably accept his protestations," and yet he quickly adds "while perhaps pausing to wonder why scholars have been so ready to accept them." (ANB, 93; O'Donnell's italics) A fair and guarded interpretation would grant that Augustine surely knew he might benefit from Jerome's recognition but would also allow, lack of evidence to the contrary, that it is at best an accompanying motive and not the primary one for Augustine's sending the letter. Surely it is reasonable to think that Augustine's powerful mind is champing at the bit to dialogue with the greatest theologian of the age. That motive is plausible enough as to count against reducing Augustine to a "self-seeker" in his correspondence. But O'Donnell's skepticism about Augustine's motives automatically trumps such cautions: "Augustine may have been distressed that his letter did not make it directly to Jerome, but he was surely delighted that it had gone into circulation otherwise." (ANB, 93) Isn't this unfair speculation? This pattern of interpretation persists throughout O'Donnell's biography. It seems to offend the norms of careful, objective biography, suggesting that O'Donnell has an agenda: to make insinuation and defamation the presumptive judgment of St. Augustine. In the spirit of this agenda, O'Donnell seems to ignore how reason ought to judge the facts. He becomes prone to the fallacy ad ignorantiam (argument from ignorance) in his assessment of evidence. As a reminder: this fallacy is committed when one argues that something must be true because it has not been proven false, or that something must be false because it has not been proven true. O'Donnell commits this fallacy in the case at hand when he concludes: "Nothing Augustine says rules out the possibility that the rogue copy in circulation in Italy was not the original gone
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astray but rather a separate copy somehow put into play by Augustine himself." (ANB, 93) How does O'Donnell's inference differ from Joe McCarthy's argument on the Senate floor in 1950 that he had at last "penetrated Truman's iron curtain of secrecy"? Pointing to eighty-one "case histories" of persons whom he suspected were communists employed in the State Department, he singled out Case 40 and said, "I do not have much information on this except the general statement of the agency that there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections."4 O'Donnell's way of inference is the stuff of conspiracy theories. Of course, O'Donnell would reply to what I've said above by resorting to a postmodernist account of letter writing. Musing about a letter Augustine received from his friend Paulinus, O'Donnell remarks: Letter-writing is a complex social business, a way of making texts that pretend to be like speech. People may naively think they write letters to tell each other things, just as Augustine wrote (in his book The Teacher) that people use language to convey information. What we learn in the world of email ought to be alerting us that the whole business of letter-writing and letterreading is far more interesting and complicated than most people assume. Letters like these made Augustine's name where his voice could not reach. (ANB, 98) In this passage, O'Donnell recognizes that, independent of whether it is convincing or not as a theory of language, knowledge, and correspondence, this postmodernist view is surely not Augustine's. But what O'Donnell fails to see is that, since Augustine is one of those nave people (whose nave ranks would number people like Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas) who think language conveys information, it is likely that nobler motives than self-advancement are behind his correspondence. If Augustine believes words convey truth, why wouldn't he write letters to engage with others the pursuit of truth? The quoted passage then undermines rather than supports O'Donnell's own thesis about Augustine as schemer and self-promoter. Saint Augustine: Christian Philosopher One interesting feature of O'Donnell's biography is his handling of Augustine the philosopher. O'Donnell recognizes the profundity of Augustine's philosophical views. Yet he does not give them the attention that one might expect. In fairness, it is too much to ask a biographer to provide a satisfactory, let alone exhaustive, commentary of his subject's philosophical views. However, were Augustine's principles explored somewhat further, O'Donnell might better appreciate that ideas and philosophical debate are arguably more powerful motives in Augustine's life and work than self-interest and public visibility. Still, what commentary exists indicates that O'Donnell does understand Augustine's basic philosophical principles and also recognizes some of their problematic consequences. Augustine is philosophically a Platonist. Through reading the Neoplatonist Plotinus, he realized that spiritual realities exist. He credits this reading as a singular moment toward his conversion. He put away materialism and eventually Manichaeism. An unequivocal Platonism endures throughout all of Augustine's writings. While Platonism certainly gives Augustine a philosophical identity, it also creates problems for his philosophical development. Platonism holds that to be real is to be immutable. Augustine accepts this metaphysics and adapts it to his philosophy of God. God is perfect immutable being whose divine mind knows the perfect immutable intelligibles, the divine ideas, the universal exemplars of all created things. Hence, along with Plato's metaphysical principles, that to be real is to be immutable, Augustine also absorbs Plato's essentialism: immutable reality consists of Platonic Form, except now mutated into a Divine Mind and its contents. Under the influence of Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Porphyry, it is understandable that Augustine would come to this metaphysics. But it is nonetheless a source of difficulty for Augustine. If to be real is to be an immutable form, that which is not a form, matter, is unreal. This causes problems for Augustine's account of creation, matter, change, and the human condition. God's creation becomes something akin to Plato's sensible world. Things are poor imitations of forms. Their reality lies elsewhere. Needless to say, this diminishes the significance of God's creation. God created real creatures. Their reality has to be more than just the forms in God's mind that they represent. The problem is compounded when one considers that physical things change. Change is part of the nature of physical things. But change is a sign of unreality and unintelligibility in Platonic metaphysics. So, changing physical things demonstrate that God's creation is unreal. Nor can changing things be the objects of knowledge. Genuine knowledge requires permanence. Hence Augustine must resort to divine
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illumination to explain and secure knowledge. All of this combines to make Augustine's physical cosmos radically contingent, unstable, and uncertain. At least, Plato's matter has the benefit of being eternal. In Augustine's metaphysics, matter is a created but changing thing. It is insufficient in its own existence, existing only by God's grace, and unreal by virtue of being changing matter. Material creation is in flux and constituted by that which is not form. On both accounts, the reality of creation is compromised. And yet, matter must be good. Augustine is self-conscious about not repeating the error of Manichaeism, an issue O'Donnell discusses in depth. (ANB, 47 54) It appears Augustine doesn't realize how Platonism and essentialism have made problematic his Christian metaphysics. This of course is why Augustine does not have a doctrine of natural law. How can the instability of nature furnish evidences of universal scientific and moral principles? The natural order is a cosmos instead of a chaos only by the continual effort of God's grace to conserve things in existence. Each thing exists and behaves by the unceasing work of divine will. Necessity and law are not constitutive of it. This is a fact not lost on G. K. Chesterton, who conveyed effectively the fluid nature of Augustine's universe in these terms: It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never tired of making them. . . . The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. . . . Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, And at any instant it may stop.5 Of course, the unreality of changing matter leads to difficulties for Augustine's view of the human person. The human person, according to the incarnate theology of Christianity, is an embodied spirit. So important is the body in human nature that our afterlife requires the resurrection of our bodies. St. Paul made that clear in II Corinthians. But if our bodies are unreal, why would this be necessary? This metaphysics of matter is behind Augustine's tendency to describe the body as undesirable. Accordingly, O'Donnell observes: Augustine is reluctant to go as far as the Platonists in thinking any contact with a body was itself polluting, but he often uses (particularly in his earlier career) language that points in that direction, and he never fully rejects the style. He certainly shares with them throughout a preference for a perfect un-world over this imperfect one, for the unseen over the seen. (ANB, 82) Yes, he often uses language suggestive of Plato's description of the body in the Phaedo as a source of spiritual corruption. O'Donnell notes this fact: The body rather will be for him a source of distraction and defilement: food, drink, sleep (and dreams), sex (even in dreams), and, most seductive of all, the wandering of the eyes. All these things are for him not part of himself, not his core inner self, the real Augustine, but are rather instruments of the bodily Augustine, the imperfectly spiritual Augustine, and vehicles by which temptationand worsepenetrate the person (ANB, 108109). The debasement of the human body complements the metaphysical unreality of matter. Could this be the reason that Augustine principally speaks of immortality in spiritual terms, while making perfunctory observance to resurrection in Scripture? These are significant and compromising problems in Augustine's philosophy. Augustine himself may never have realized that his own first principles generated these complications. To O'Donnell's credit, he grasps these difficulties. Moreover, he appreciates that Augustine wrote for a lifetime trying to overcome perplexities that his philosophical assumptions spawn. Another aspect of Augustine's philosophy that O'Donnell understands is its association with rhetoric. By Augustine's time, philosophy had become a subset of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric). In particular, it had become subordinate to the liberal art of rhetoric. Cicero looked upon philosophy in this way. Since Augustine was inspired to be a philosopher under Cicero's influence, it is not surprising that he would regard philosophy as a kind of rhetoric.6 In Augustine's thought, philosophy plays out as a kind of rhetoric in connection with divine illumination. Because of the Fall, human nature is weakened in the exercise of its powers. The only
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rescue from this impotence is divine grace. (ANB, 301) Through the soul's soliloquy, through its discourse with itself, it can recognize that it suffers multiple conflicts. These conflicts cause confusions that impair the soul's ability under its own powers to obtain wisdom. The soul cannot acquire knowledge and wisdom until it turns to God to resolve its conflicts. This turning to God has epistemological and axiological significance. Truth and goodness do not come about as our sense powers contact sensible things in the external world, from which our intellects abstract information. Such a realist view of knowledge would be Aristotle's. For Augustine, knowledge cannot take place with natural powers that are undermined by sin. Sense experience, imagination, and intellectual abstraction, judgment, and reasoning are bankrupted in Augustine's philosophy of the human person. Knowledge takes place as a kind of redemption, as God empowers our intellects to gain truth by glimpsing the contents, the divine ideas, of his own mind. This is a kind of rhetoric, as the soul must persuade itself to encourage its conversation with God, as the soul pleads to God its sincere need for Him, without which it is nothing. The soul converses with itself and with God. This account of knowledge is modeled in the Confessions, a running dialogue between self and God. I applaud O'Donnell's book for seeing these fine points. However, he overlooks that the inevitable frustrations out of the application of Augustine's philosophical principles also impel Augustine to seek friendship, support, and counsel from his comrades in faith and wisdom. Accordingly, Augustine's search for social connection and communication has surely a more wholesome inspiration, at least to a significant degree, than the cynical motives O'Donnell habitually attributes to him. I cannot leave this section of my review without commenting on O'Donnell's perception of Augustine's Just War doctrine. This doctrine is one of Augustine's most conspicuous and enduring philosophical contributions. O'Donnell's dismissive attitude about Augustine's handling of the issue is telling. He seems to think Augustine really does not take the doctrine seriously. (ANB, 4) Has O'Donnell prejudged that enlightened Christians know that pacifism is necessary? Should we presume that Augustine would never sincerely argue that war could be just? (ANB, 154, 259) Should we presume that no genuine Christian would ever sincerely so argue? Without getting into the full debate, I would like to reinforce the conviction that Just War is unequivocally a serious and justifiable concern for Augustine. One way of showing this is to reminisce briefly on why Just War is Christian. First, in my own research on how various Catholic thinkers have treated the question of the Just War, I have discovered that there is nobody who is both a saint and a doctor of the Church who holds the pacifist position. doctors of the Church, including Augustine, follow St. Ambrose, who, in his book, De Officiis Ministrorum ("On the Duties of Public Officials"), argued that it is one thing for an individual, in the pursuit of sanctity and self-sacrifice, not to resist violence and willingly become the victim of it; it is quite another for an individual to invoke Christian love of peace as an excuse to stand by and let innocent people be harmed by aggressors. In other words, for the sake of testifying to higher spiritual perfection, I may be called to offer myself as a victim of violence, but it would be unjust and cowardly for me to offer up the welfare of others for whom I am responsible (as is a parent or a civic leader) to those who would harm them. To do so is to pervert the Christian principle of peace-making into something dishonorable. 7 Just War is a subject on which Augustine was mentored by Ambrose. In turn, Augustine has mentored generations of conscientious Christians on the issue.8 Accordingly, it is unfair for O'Donnell to remark that Augustine's account of history leaves "the human participants indistinctly swarming together in a confusing world and left to bicker until the end of time." (ANB, 307) Augustine's ethics of Just War is precisely his attempt to mitigate that state of affairs. Secondly, there are reasons against the view that Scripture prescribes pacifism. Jesus seemed to allow the possibility that force, but not violence, could be used in a moral way. (On this distinction, violence, the unjust use of force, is wrong; however, the use of force, under certain circumstances, may be morally permissible.) His words to the Centurion (Luke 7:110, which give him a perfect opportunity to condemn all war on principle) indicate the moral permissibility of being a soldier, not to mention Jesus' threat of force to run the money-changers out of the temple. Peter's meal at the home of the centurion, Cornelius (Acts 10), shows a willingness to break bread with his host, not a desire to condemn him. To the soldiers who sought his advice, John the Baptist told them to restrain from certain activities within their military service, especially that they do not use violence to plunder
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or steal and that they be content with their wages. He did not tell them that being a soldier in the first place is among the things they ought not to choose. While our contemporaries often regard pacifism as obligatory for Christian life, only a handful of Christians espoused it until the late Middle Ages.9 Love of peace ought not to nullify common sense. Gandhi himself wrote: Even manslaughter may be necessary in certain cases. Suppose a man runs amuck and goes furiously about sword in hand, and killing anyone that comes in his way, and no one dares to capture him alive. Anyone who dispatches this lunatic will earn the gratitude of the community and be regarded as a benevolent man.10 These kinds of comments O'Donnell's biography should also take into account. To O'Donnell's credit, he does attempt to nuance the discussion with reference to some of Augustine's remarks on peace. (ANB, 259) Still, the subject of just war in Augustine cries out for more treatment than O'Donnell's biography gives it. Saint Augustine: Polemicist and Artificer of Catholicism Fascinating passages occur in this biography dealing with Augustine's polemics, especially his ambivalence over Manichaeism and his debate with Donatism. On these subjects Augustine wrote extensively. O'Donnell's reaction to Augustine on these themes makes it clear that he does not share Augustine's view of Christianity. Alternatively, O'Donnell prefers a view of Christianity that I would label "gnostic." This is a fashionable preference. Knowing this, O'Donnell seems more willing to presuppose this worldview than to actually argue for it. He assumes, probably with good reason, that many of his readers would prefer a gnostic conception of Christianity, a conception which is not Augustine's. "Gnosticism" can mean many things. In the past, it commonly signified that, if one could but discover his or her true self, one would realize he or she is divine. In a compelling article, "A New Gnosticism: An Old Threat to the Church," Timothy Luke Johnson argues that today gnosticism shows up as a combination of this belief about the self with a kind of religious universalism.11 An enlightened mind knows (recall the Greek, gnosis) that salvation can be sought and attained in any religion. In keeping with this attitude, today's genuine Christian ought to regard his or her religion as just one interpretation of the divine and just one of many ways to salvation. Exclusivists (those who believe salvation exists only through Christianity) like Augustine are partypoopers who have soured Christianity, turning it from open pluralism to narrow particularism. Augustine's authority worked this ill effect by reducing Christianity (1) to the only way of salvation, (2) to a body of doctrine, called "orthodoxy," that rejects a priori alternative interpretations of Christian belief and experience (principally, interpretations that disagree with Augustine's), and (3) to a chronic state of doubt and anxiety about our spiritual destinies, so that we fail to find divinity within ourselves. All these failures O'Donnell lays on Augustine's doorstep. In his chapter "Augustine and the Invention of Christianity," O'Donnell argues that Augustine took a fledgling faith, one that was the model of diversity and that had the potential to liberate us from our fears and anxieties, and turned it into an onerous worldview. Augustine worked "obsessively, and dangerously . . . to advance the cause of his sect against that of the majority." (ANB, 14) Augustine's so-called "theological maturation" toward "true," particular religion could be interpreted as a kind of regression. To protest this so-called "maturation" and to show solidarity with diverse creeds, O'Donnell refuses to use "God" in the uppercase. Augustine's world still knew lots of different kinds of gods, and ardent devotees of any one of them knew perfectly well what the competition was like and perhaps even sampled other religious products from time to time. Only the highest-minded had any idea of the identity of a single divine principle crossing all religions. Augustine was not so high-minded . . . . (By leaving the word "god" in lowercase, I hope to remind readers of this danger throughout this book). (ANB, 7) If one escapes this implicit gnosticism, one can speak on Augustine's behalf, defending the requirements of Christianity against an uncritical universalism. I say "uncritical" because Augustine certainly was a universalist in the sense that he was Catholic, a word taken from the Greek (katholon), meaning universal. St. Augustine enthusiastically supported and advanced St. Ignatius of Antioch's vision of the Christian Church as "catholic." This fact O'Donnell himself recognizes:
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To be "catholic" for Augustine meant to be in communion with people he had never seen, people who lived across seas one would never dare to cross. The idea was not original with Augustine . . . . But what an idea it was. The Christianities of Augustine's time had an intuition of universality, an idea that they could claim to be true for all places and all times. "Catholicism" in the Latin west made that intuition concrete, and by 600 that notion of "catholicism" had undoubtedly prevailed. (ANB, 313) "Catholic" means desire for a universal, but distinctly Christian, communion. Where Augustine was not universalist (and on this matter, the Catholic Church has agreed with him) is in the belief that salvation can be achieved outside Christian faith. That is to say, Augustine is not a pluralist on salvation: salvation is achieved through Jesus Christ alone. "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Salvation through diverse faithsa view I have called "gnostic," following Timothy Luke Johnsonwas certainly not acceptable to Augustine. To the gnostics Christianity is . . . part of a more universal scheme of revelation and salvation. What is true within it is universally available, with or without Jesus, for it is spirit. What is particular about Jesus is false, for the particular is always material. In a very real sense, Gnosticism was an argument for spirituality over religion.12 On issues not related to salvation, there could be truth and goodness in other faiths, Augustine surely would admit. But the truths of non-Christian faiths could not include teachings about salvation. Nor could a Christian consistently accept non- Christian beliefs that contradicted Christian teachings, what Johnson refers to above as "revelation." Hence, logic would force Augustine to reject gnostic universalism (or pluralism) because it believes (1) that salvation can come through any faith or interpretation of faith without Jesus, and (2) that doctrinal disagreements are not significant. One may not like that this is Augustine's view. One may, like O'Donnell, prefer pluralism. But it is wrong to suggest that Augustine arbitrarily particularized and discriminated against versions of Christianity he did not like. Augustine had reasons for separating "orthodox" Christianity from alternative creeds and interpretations, interpretations he would regard as troubling. One may or may not accept his reasons, but he sincerely advanced them, and wrote and wrote about them. O'Donnell sometimes engages Augustine's arguments with some thoroughness, as in the case of his interesting treatment of traducianism and original sin. (ANB, 299) But even here O'Donnell doesn't consider how later scholastics will follow Augustine's lead, amend his position, and provide a more convincing solution. Too often O'Donnell asserts what he thinks Augustine ought to believe without recognizing why Augustine may be reluctant to believe it. Consider his treatment of Manichaeism, the sect (founded by the third century Persian, Mani) to which Augustine belonged in youth, which holds a dualism of spirit and matter, teaching the release of the spirit from matter by heroic and ascetic efforts. Augustine would have grounds to disagree when O'Donnell says: "They [the Manichees] were outlaws to Christians, but Christians in some sense they certainly were. They shared ideas that have been attributed variously to the Gnostics of Egypt, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and to Mani's native Mesopotamia itself." (ANB, 39) Augustine would object, arguing that to expand Christianity to accommodate such views turns the Christian faith into something incoherent and doctrinally anarchical. In other words, the pluralist interpretation of Christianity requires justification. Augustine argues that Christianity consists in a non-negotiable core of doctrines. One cannot abolish or ignore these doctrines just to satisfy the climate of opinion that religion ought to be universalist. Augustine spent his life's work as a theologian arguing that Christianity is not so indefinite as to embrace anything. He didn't "invent" Christianity, he argued for it. He convinced others by his arguments. One may not like his conclusions; one may disagree with his arguments. But when those arguments are assessed, one sees why Augustine makes his case, a case one has to take seriously. Consider again O'Donnell's remark above, referring to "the Gnostics of Egypt, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and to Mani." (ANB, 39) To these creeds, Augustine would reply concisely: (1) gnosticism does not account for the infinite gulf between Creator and creature, a gulf only bridged by divine grace. The gnostic bridges the gulf by making the creature divine, which the gnostic votary discovers in gnosis. (2) Zoroastrianism errs by making the diabolical a co-eternal principle with God. There can
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be only one infinite being; hence there is only one deity. Zoroastrian dualism, making the evil-deity equivalent in power to God, is unconvincing. (3) Manichaeism fails to grasp that evil can be real without being a substantial thing. Evil is a privation, not a thing, but a disorder or deficiency within a thing. Things, substantial entities, are created by God. Hence, they are good. This distinction preserves the significance of evil in the human condition (allowing us to make sense of Old and New Testament) but avoids the dire theological consequences of Manichaeism. Moreover, Manichaeism is thrice problematic, since, as O'Donnell himself admits in the above quotation, it shares the claims of the gnostics and the Zoroastrians as well. At any rate, this kind of argumentation reflects Augustine's approach to alternative interpretations of Christianity. It's not whether one wants to be pluralistic, but whether pluralism can conform to Christian truth. It may be that to some people Christianity would be a sweeter, gentler, and less demanding religion if Augustine "hadn't messed things up." But Augustine is a philosopher; he's taking the argument to whatever conclusion it leads. O'Donnell faults him because he "insists that his way and his way alone shall prevail." (ANB, 4) But Augustine's "insistence" is a philosophical one, which removes arbitrariness from his polemical work. This is one of the most serious oversights in O'Donnell's book. The word "insists" may mean an emotional demand that another accept one's views, regardless of the rational basis for one's views. This seems to be the way O'Donnell understands the verb. But this use of "insists" is not Augustine's. In spite of the fact that Augustine's philosophy is very rhetorical, he is still too good a philosopher to be tarred with that brush. It is fairer and more in keeping with Augustine's writings that he "insists" on his viewpoints over others because he believes he can vindicate them by reason and evidence. This is a judicious and moral insistence. Moreover, it is logically compulsory. If someone's views are justified, it follows that his views are more reasonable than the views of those who contradict him. It is a matter of logic, of consistency. If someone has attained the truth, it follows that he must hold that it is not just true for him but for another rational mind. If reason and evidence ob jectively persuade, they persuade all rational minds. Furthermore, for Augustine, truth is ultimately anchored in divine illumination; it exists eternally in the mind of God. In light of this, a rational mind must insist on the truth of his views for others, if he believes they are really defensible. Others may disagree, but he cannot say their disagreement consists of a truth that is equivalent to his understanding of the truth. To think of such equivalence is contradictory. They may disagree, fair enough, but they must bear the burden to prove him wrong. They cannot hide behind pluralistic slogans to absolve themselves of that debate. Accordingly, adherence to one's position, combined with polemics and justification, are not signs of a flawed character aiming to "impose one's views" on others. Such a person is just expressing the logical requirements of justification. Once a person has justified a judgment of truth, logic requires that those who disagree with him or her have mistaken views. This is not a matter of being narrowminded or of being a bully. This is the nature of philosophical-theological debate, classically understood. It is a matter of the logic of truth as it applies to the consequences of making and justifying truth-claims. One might wish that Augustine had a different, say, postmodern, relativist, subjective view of truth, a view of truth that O'Donnell seems to prefer. But Augustine did not subscribe to such a view of truth. He wrote a book, Contra Academicos ("Against the Academic Skeptics"), to overturn such skepticism. By "truth" he meant what most ancient thinkers meant. Indeed, he meant by "truth" what most people always mean: the agreement of our intellectual judgments with the facts, with what is the case, even if for Augustine, in this fallen world, such truth in the end is secured only by God's grace. To be saddened that this is Augustine's view, and to judge him morally because it is ancient and objective, not postmodern and relativist, is anachronistic and unfair. It is anachronistic in that it obscures Augustine's objective conception of truth anchored in reason and divine illumination, unfair in that it takes what are natural logical outcomes of his argument and transforms them into dishonorable motives in debate. Similarly, Augustine takes up his polemic with the Donatists and Pelagius. With the former, Augustine disputed whether sanctity was necessary for the administration of sacraments and for church membership. With the latter, he disputed whether our free will saves us. O'Donnell thinks that
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Christendom would have been a happier place (1) if Augustine had followed his mother's original religious affiliation with the Donatists, and (2) if he had listened to Pelagius. Instead, he returned from Europe a "belligerent Caecilianist," (the North African sect that took him as its bishop), and battled Pelagius for a less comfortable, more worrisome kind of Christianity. Whether Christendom would be "happier" is an interesting question of "what if" history. But Augustine would remind us that it's not about what we want. It's about what God wants and what doctrine requires. Perhaps Christendom would be happier but at what price? Besides, one has to be careful when the word "happiness" (b eatitudo, in Augustine's lexicon) is being tossed about. Many church fathers, doctors of the church, and saints have argued that Christianity is not about happiness in the commonly accepted sense of the term. Our ordinary conception of happiness is too shallow to adapt to the supernatural depths of Christian happiness. Yet it is this baser sense of the word, to be "comfortable" or "worry-free," that O'Donnell presupposes. This coarser sense of the word lends easily to the therapeutic view of happiness, freedom from fear and anxiety, that O'Donnell anachronistically uses as his standard to criticize, if not condemn, Augustine. Augustine, on the other hand, would disabuse us of such a casual definition, reminding us that the ultimate standard of happiness is the beatific vision. Happiness in this life is always qualified by sin, challenge, and doubt. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, who had a more optimistic view of happiness in this life than Augustine, recognized that our earthly happiness is imperfect because it consists of goods that can be lost at any moment. This realism about happiness may be disagreeable, but it is nevertheless entailed, Augustine believes, by Christian truth. Additionally, how we feel about happiness, even which definition of happiness we prefer, is beside the point where doctrinal disputes are concerned. Having said this, I should add that some of Augustine's own admirers, such as the abovementioned Thomas Aquinas, might disagree with him about the extent to which the Fall has sabotaged our natural inclination to happiness. But this is a debate about human ends that must be taken up in full before one dismisses Augustine's account of the human condition, which account is crucial to his treatment of Donatism and Pelagianism. It is not enough to do what O'Donnell does: dismiss Augustine's view of happiness because it is unpalatable to contemporary tastes for therapeutic happiness. Once these observations are in place, then one can better appreciate, even if one in the end disagrees with him, why Augustine argues against Donatism and Pelagianism. One can better understand why Augustine is so concerned with original sin, infant baptism, and problems of free will, salvation, and Predestination. If we have better solutions than Augustine to these problems, we're obligated to show why. We cannot toss his theology aside because we have an agenda. The Perennial Augustine Among the many achievements of O'Donnell's biography is the message that, whether we like Augustine or not, we live in a world of his making. Augustine speaks to modern peoples because their civilization continues to work out, or perhaps work away at, his assumptions, first principles, and beliefs. O'Donnell addresses this fact in two interesting closing chapters: chapter 11, "Augustine The Theologians," and chapter 12, "Who Was Augustine?" Augustine fashioned an Augustinian world. We live in that world, or at least, the vestiges of that world. That is why he still has the power to move us across the centuries. In a compelling study, Peter A. Redpath argues that modern culture is "secularized Augustinianism."13 Two hallmarks of modern thought are (1) that the universe is contingent and (2) that the knower must transcend the interior limits of consciousness, if he or she is to achieve real knowledge. These are foundational to Augustine's worldview as well. God is the sine qua non in Augustine's ontology and epistemology. God provides stability in a created or contingent, mutable world. God supplies knowledge since our own cognitive powers are too impaired by sin to assure knowledge. Sense perception and intellectual abstraction cannot function reliably so as to acquaint us with extramental things. Modern thought likewise struggles with instability and skepticism. Many prominent modern philosophers tend to be Augustinian in the way they inherit, set up, and articulate the problems of being and knowledge. But they cannot enjoy Augustine's solutions. As God has become increasingly marginalized, ignored, or even eliminated from modern worldviews, modernists have had to seek solutions suitable for an atheistic worldview. As Redpath puts it, their obligatory solutions are
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"secularized." Even when atheism has been avoided (for there are indeed theistic currents in modern and postmodern thought; O'Donnell himself still rides such a current), the result is a fideistic view of religion, according to which reason has little, if any, role to play in defending religious beliefs. Religious discourse becomes noncognitive: emotive, private, and non-rational. Modern philosophies of knowledge tend toward anti-realism, the belief that the mind does not directly know real, extramental things. On account of this tendency, skepticism beleaguers modernists. There is no rescue from their skepticism because (1) they have ruled out divine illumination and (2) they have discounted cognitive contact with actual extramental things as the contentdetermining cause of information in the human mind. Augustine himself arguably ruled out the second solution: reliance on extramental things. But he could resort to the former: divine illumination. For modern epistemologies, neither is regarded as a live option. Postmodernism is the malaise (or despair) that results from the recognition of the inescapability of the modernist's plight. The postmodernist is an Augustinian whose epistemic heart cannot rest. He is left with atheism, agnosticism, or fideism. Materialist science was the modernist's great hope. But such science is compromised by skepticism, hence all the noise about constructivism today (even science is a "cultural" construction to the postmodernists). The contents of the mind irreducibly shape knowledge by virtue of their being shaped by psychology or language or economics or culture. Even if postmodern minds weren't so compromised, the postmodern world would never give up knowledge. The epistemological compromises are compounded by ontology. The postmodernist's epistemic heart cannot rest; nor can its ontological yearning find satisfaction. The universe is radically contingent, where all that exists is matter in motion. In such a world, there are not abiding objects to give us genuine knowledge. It is a world that Sartre described as "gelatinous slither." Ironically, postmodernists come full circle back to Plato's time. They, as did he, have to confront Heraclitus's worldview. O'Donnell is operating in this worldview (although he has pursued the fideist's option), trying to assay Augustine in its light. It is an interesting thought experiment, if nothing else. In the last chapter of his book, O'Donnell reflects on Augustine's influence and speculates in a fashion reminiscent of Sigmund Freud. In Future of an Illusion and in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wonders about the future of the West once atheism is the consensus. Once people become sufficiently enlightened to recognize what Freud recognizes, that there is no God, civilization as we have known it will change. Freud puzzles and even worries over these inevitable consequences. O'Donnell has a similar reverie in his closing chapters, although it concern the human person, not God (as I stated, O'Donnell applies the fideist's option). Since Augustinian anthropology has underpinned Western civilization, does the future of civilization as we know it hinge on the fate of Augustine's philosophy of the human person? Will it be that as Augustine's Christian anthropology goes, so goes his civilization? Of course, his philosophy of the human person is his philosophy of soul. "Augustine writes and worries at length about the nature of the human soul because that soul is central to his understanding of himself, of humankind, and indeed of his god. If 'heart' was always metaphor, 'soul' was regularly insisted on as standing for something quite real." (ANB, 326) O'Donnell sees that it is on Augustine's view of the soul that those who envision a new philosophy of the human person and a new society and politics that follow upon it engage in a great debate. "If his view of the human person and his narrative account of the inner life is supplanted by better science, then all that he has been to centuries of devout and not so devout heirs could crumble very quickly into irrelevance." (ANB, 327) In practice, this "better science" goes by the name "cognitive science." In short, it is the attempt to reduce the human person to an organic machine. This is an anthropology that conforms to the physicalist monism of the scientific materialist's worldview. O'Donnell is correct to draw our attention to it and to indicate that Augustine's philosophy is still influential and at issue. His philosophy of soul is on trial in the scientific laboratory and in the philosopher's lecture hall. But if there is no soul? If there is no soul substitute called "mind" or "personality"? Contemporary cognitive science challenges our deepest western assumptions about human beings and what they are. Attempt after attempt to locate a mental or spiritual unity in some convincing relation with the brain and body of a mortal human fails, fails increasingly often in our times, to be replaced by a series of competing hypotheses about the loosely coupled
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functioning of multiple systems distributed throughout the body. (ANB, 32627) Yet it must be said that the death of Augustine's philosophy of soul is greatly exaggerated. Cognitive science is not the threat O'Donnell thinks it is. Once one engages the arguments, cognitive science is more a body of assertions and hypotheses than evidences and proofs. We are too prone to be intimidated by schools of thought that employ the nomenclature of "pioneering science." As John Searle says, an idea is likely to become a social movement if it excites the young and has funding. Cognitive science fits the bill. That does not mean that Augustine's philosophy of soul has lost or will lose the argument. We need Christian philosophers still brave enough to engage that demanding debate.14 Summary and Conclusions One time more I should say what I said. O'Donnell has written a clever, readable, enjoyable biography, replete with many keen insights into the place and times of Augustine. He also has a grasp of the central principles of Augustine's theology and philosophy. However, his insufficient exploration of these principles causes him to misunderstand a drive force both in Augustine's personality and his character: the thirst for truth. Because of this oversight, he exaggerates other motives in Augustine's life and work. In the end, the fun of his biography is at the expense of the character of St. Augustine. After I finished and put down the book, I believed that Augustine had been the victim of a mugging. I resented the assault, because I had been mugged too. When O'Donnell attacks Augustine and condemns his version of Christian faith, he is attacking me. When he attacks Augustinian Catholicism, he is attacking actual and would-be devout Catholics. Speaking of Augustine's God (that is, "god"), O'Donnell remarks with a hint of sarcasm: His god is with us still. Listen attentively to people talking about "god" (or God or G-d or Allah) and observe how remarkably predictable the divine has become across religious traditions. The late-antique Christian mlange of biblical and Platonic qualities is perhaps the most powerful and lasting cultural creation in history. He may have died a hundred or more years ago, but he is with us still, the undead deity for whom the zealots of many cultures compete. The jury is still out on the profit/loss assessment of this god's impact on history. (ANB, 329) In this respect, O'Donnell's biography reminds me of the work of Garry Wills, although Wills has a more congenial interpretation of Augustine. However, with regard to the church that came after Augustine, Wills and O'Donnell seem to agree: it is not authentic Christianity. Their difference lies in the fact that O'Donnell blames Augustine more for the failure of the Church than does Wills. But my point is that they ought not be disingenuous about whom they criticize when they condemn the Church. Since the Church has members, when they imply that the Church is benighted, aren't they saying that its members are backward too? Wills seems to think he is toppling over only hierarchical elites when he condemns the Catholic Church. But he is also attacking the work of saints who labored their lifetimes to deepen and explicate Catholic truth and wisdom. He forgets, as does O'Donnell, that indirectly he is attacking flesh-and-blood Catholics who believe orthodox traditions about the Church and its history (many of which Augustine encouraged and validated), living souls who take seriously a conception of the faith he regards as a counterfeit. By this comparison, O'Donnell's biography appears mean-spirited. In his book The New Anti-Catholicism , Philip Jenkins has addressed critics of this kind. While O'Donnell's attack is not as explicit, his judgments about Augustine imply corresponding doubts about the church he advanced. Accordingly, I would associate him with critics of such a kind. Along with Wills, Jenkins includes James Carroll and John Cornwell among that ilk. Another problem with Wills's recent books is the Question of whom he is actually attacking. Throughout their assaults on Church teaching, Wills, Carroll, and Cornwell all speak in terms of the "the Popes" or "the Vatican" and the wrongs that these elevated authorities have committed. This is rhetorically necessary if they are to avoid an overt attack against the beliefs and practice of ordinary Catholics, an assault that would certainly appear as simple bigotry. Instead, they claim to be attacking papalism, Rome, or the Vatican, but not Catholicism as such. The impression given is that through the centuries, Catholicism has been shaped by orders from above, in which ordinary believers exercised only a passive role. In the modern context, it is almost as if mainstream Catholicism is a bizarre, cult-like heresy
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invented personally by John Paul II, and which nobody really believes in outside a narrow circle of sycophants. For Wills, Carroll, and the rest, authentic Catholicism is the skeptical liberal variety of Faith Lite favored by American elites.15 O'Donnell's Augustine is not congenial to these elites. His portrait of Augustine's character often contains great insight but it is sometimes unfair and lacks objectivity. He mounts incrimination on top of speculation. His biography is partly driven by agenda and reproach. His agenda consists in several postmodern assumptions about historical criticism and the nature of enlightened religion and culture. This vision of religion and culture I have labeled "gnostic." These assumptions are more controversial than O'Donnell imagines. It is true that they are fashionable. But, as O'Donnell himself admits, Augustine will be read after these fashions are forgotten. If I may redirect Gilson's famous quip from Aquinas to the Bishop of Hippo: Augustine will survive to bury undertakers. Curtis L. Hancock Rockhurst University NOTES 1. Pierre-Marie Hombert, Nouvelles recherches de chronolgie augustinienne, Collection des tudes Augustiniennes. Srie Antiquite 168, Institut d' etudes Augustiniennes, 2000. 2. Divjak Letters: Discovered 1975 by Johannes Divjak in the Bibliothque Municipale of Marseille. Oeuvres de Saint Augustine 46B: Lettres 1*29*, Bibliothque Augustinienne (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1987). Dolbeau Sermons: discovered 1990 by Francois Dolbeau ion the Stadtbibliothek of Mainz. Augustin d' Hippone: Vingt-six Sermons au Peuple d'Afrique, ed. Francois Dolbeau (Paris: Institut d'tudes augustiniennes, 1996). 3. G. W. Bowersock, The New York Times, July 31, 2005. 4. Irving Copi, Introduction to Logic, fourth edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1972), 88. 5. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 6061. 6. The relationship of philosophy to rhetoric in Hellenistic and early Christian times has been expressed clearly by Peter Redpath, Wisdom's Odyssey: From Philosophy to Transcendental Sophistry (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997), 3162. 7. Ambrose, De officiis ministrorum , I, 36, 179. 8. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Hugo Grotius (just to name a few) are all heavily influenced by Augustine on Just War. For a helpful overview of this influence, see Wilfred LaCroix, S.J., Just War and International Ethics (Washington, D.C.: University of America Press, 1990). Also consult Darrell Cole, When God Says War Is Right (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook Press, 2002. 9. Wilfred LaCroix, S.J., Just War and International Ethics, 20. 10. Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, November 1926; quoted in Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 207. 11. Timothy Luke Johnson, "A New Gnosticism: An Old Threat to the Church," Commonweal, November 5, 2004, 2831. 12. Timothy Luke Johnson, "A New Gnosticism," 29. 13. Peter Redpath, The Masquerade of the Dream Walkers (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998), 1 32. 14. Examples of Christian thinkers who criticize cognitive science are: Robert Geis, Personal Existence After Death: Reductionist Circularities and the Evidence (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1995); David Brane, The Human Person: Animal and Sprit (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); Curtis Hancock and Brendan Sweetman, Truth and Religious Belief (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998). 15. Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptab le Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20304. See also Edward T. Oakes, S.J., "A Jesus Just for Me," (a review of Wills's What Jesus Meant) First Things, March 2006, 4548.
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