AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
By Henry Chadwick
Oxford University Press. 168 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-0-19-958806-0
This book is not just a delight, it is a treasure. What one gets is really a ‘buy one get one free’ sort of deal.
First, you have the life and ideas of one of the greatest writers the church has ever known whose thinking moulded giants like Luther and Calvin and changed the course of history. Second, you sit at the feet of a consummate teacher, Henry Chadwick, whom Peter Brown (no less) describes as ‘the unsurpassed expositor in our times of the thought of the Early Christians and of their pagan contemporaries’.
Double value
The double value is that big ideas and profound Christian thinking (not forgetting deep feeling and passionate engagement as in Augustine’s case) don’t age. Though he lived and worked 1,600 years ago, he is as relevant as if he wrote yesterday. And Chadwick is worth reading because his handling of so vast a canvas is magisterial — yet effortless. Augustine really does come to life in front of you. ‘No figure of the ancient world’, he says, ‘is more accessible to us’ (p.1). Also the author’s unlimited supply of detail carries the reader along with its brilliance and immediacy. At the same time — and quite by magic, it seems — a vast panorama of cultural thought and practice, covering the entire empire and era, opens before one.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Brown in his foreword finds himself using the analogy of ‘an adventure playground… a book full of thrills’.
Remarkable writer
Augustine’s corpus was vast: ‘Merely as a literary figure he must rank as one of the most remarkable writers of his age’ (p.1). And Chadwick lays out his material not only to follow the chronology of Augustine’s life, but also to explain the major texts, showing the development of his ideas and experience — as a young student in Africa, as a lecturer in Milan, becoming a Christian through Ambrose, immediately adopting a celibate lifestyle and intending to live in community with a small group of friends, moving back to North Africa, unexpectedly being dragooned into ordination as a presbyter in Hippo, then becoming Bishop and, willy nilly, having to deal with the maelstrom of conflicts and controversies in the church. Donatists outnumbered orthodox clergy in his region. He had to write about that. His beloved son, Adeodatus, died aged 18. So he wrote on education as a type of memorial. He also had to deal with miracle-workers and wrote On True Religion. ‘The daily miracles of creation are greater than those of the incarnate Lord’ (p.77). And so on and on — On the Trinity, Of the City of God, The Freedom of the Will.
Modern-day Pelagians?
In relation to the last, and with particular relevance to the current teaching among some evangelicals that physical death for human beings doesn’t come from the Fall, Augustine takes issue with one of Pelagius’s followers, Caelestius, whom ‘he reproached for teaching that Adam would have died whether or not he had sinned…’ (p.147).
Finally, a concluding section highlights where Augustine’s influence has not been helpful, most notably in his teaching about sex. He also discusses Augustine on Predestination and in the process sadly reveals an Arminian bias.
All in all, though, this is a book you can’t miss. It’s ‘buy one get one free’, as I said.
Ranald Macaulay,
connected with L’Abri Fellowship in Hampshire (http://www.labri.org), but living in Cambridge and founder of Christian Heritage, based at the Round Church (1130 AD) — http://www.christianheritage.org.uk
