Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/97

Rh seemed like a giving way of the solid earth beneath men's feet. Lesser men were moved to write: Orosius, mentioned above, in 417, and Salvian, whose lurid indictment of the sins of the Christian world (de Gubernatione Dei) was penned in 451, four years before the sack of Rome by Gaiseric. But it was Augustine who brought the problem under a single master-idea. This idea (which occurs already in de Catech. Rud., written as early as A.D. 400) is that of the two civitates, which, after a refutation of paganism as useless alike in this world (I.‒V.) and in the next (VI.‒X.), are treated of constructively in the remainder of the work, in respect of their origin (XI.‒XIV.), history (XV.‒XVIII.), and destiny (XIX.‒XXII.). The work would have gained by condensation, but as it stands, with all the marks of discontinuous production, it is a priceless legacy of Augustine's most characteristic thoughts (on Ep. 102, which illustrates the de Civ., and was written about 409, see below, § 16a). By the word civitas, commonly rendered "city," Augustine means rather a bond of union, or citizenship (cf. Philipp. iii. 20 Gk., "duo quaedam genera humanae societatatis" XIV. i., the "civitas" takes visible form in the shape of a government, but its essential character is in the spirit that animates it). There are then two, and only two, civitates, the one heavenly, the other earthly. The civitas terrena began with the fall of the angels, was continued by that of man, in the history of the Cainites, of Babel, and of the great world-empires. The civitas Dei began with Creation; its earthly realization is traceable in the history of the Sethites, of Noah, Abraham, Israel, of Christ, and of His people. The one is rooted in love of God, usque ad contemptum sui; the other in love of self, usque ad contemptum Dei. The chief good of the one is the pax coelestis (XIX. 13), that of the other, the pax terrena. The great empires are, in their genesis, the State is per se (remota justitia), "latrocinium magnum" (IV. 4). So that, looked upon in the abstract, since there are but two civitates, the state is the civitas diaboli, the church the civitas Dei.

But this conclusion is not, thus baldly stated, that of Augustine. To begin with, his conception of the church (see §§ 8, 16, b, c) is not consistent. Does he mean the visible church, the communio externa, or the communio sanctorum, the number of those predestined to life, to which not all belong who are members of the visible church, and to which some belong who are not? Augustine's language on this point is not always uniform. But at the time when he wrote the de Civitate, the predestinarian idea was growing upon him, and the two civitates tend to coincide with the predestined on the one hand, and, on the other, the rest of mankind. Again, the visible church, even apart from its merely nominal members, is but part of a larger whole, but the empirical shadow of a transcendent reality, the civitas superna, which includes angels as well as redeemed humanity (XI. 7). And in its earthly visible existence the church borrows the form of the earthly state (XV. 2). Again, historically, the two civitates are mingled together and interpenetrate. Moreover, the church needs the pax terrena, and

is dependent for it on the civitas terrena (XIX. 17, cf. "per jura regum possidentur possessiones," in Joh. Tr. VI. 15); practically for all civil purposes the churchman must obey the law. But, on the other hand, the civitas terrena cannot attain its chief good, the pax terrena, unless heavenly motives are brought to bear; for the social bond of caritas, for the elementary requisite of justitia, it is dependent upon the civitas Dei.

The destiny of the civitas terrena, therefore, when at the judgment the two are finally separated, is the destruction of its social bond; it will cease to be a civitas at all. There is, then, if we look at things in their eternal aspect, only one civitas, and, applying the ideal to the empirical, the state (qua good, i.e. if Christian) is in the church. Optatus had said (de Schism. III. 3) "Ecclesia in Imperio." Augustine reverses this relation: "Dominus jugo suo in gremio ecclesiae toto orbe diffuso omnia terrena regna subjecit." The state is in the church, and is bound to carry out the church's aims. The subject of "Church and State" was not the theme of the book, and it is not easy to extract from it a strictly consistent theory of their relations (see Reuter, pp. 125‒150, 380‒392). But these relations were the question of the future, and in the de Civitate Augustine laid the theoretical foundation for the medieval system (see also below, § 16 ad fin.). The modifying ideas alluded to above were not forgotten, but their assertion was the work of the opponents of the medieval hierocracy; and Dante, de Monarchia, is practically a reversal of the characteristic doctrine of the de Civitate Dei, after that doctrine, tested by being put into practice, has been found to lead to unchristian results. One unchristian corollary of Augustine's doctrine was the persecution of heretics as a duty of the Christian state. In his earlier days Augustine disapproved of this (contr. Ep. Man. 1‒3; Ep. 23, 7; 93, 2, 5, etc.); but the stress of the Donatist controversy changed his mind; in the interest of the doubtful, the weak, the generations to come, he found a sanction for persecution in St. Luke xiv. 23: Cogite intrare.

§ 10. The Pelagian Controversy (412‒430).—Augustine, in his first days as a Christian, held the common view that, while the grace of God is necessary to the salvation of man, the first step, the act of faith, by which man gains access to grace, is the act of man, and not itself the gift of God (de Praed. III. 7). This view is manifest in the ''Expos. Propos. in Rom. 13‒18, 55, etc., and traceable in de Quaest. LXXXIII.'', qu. 68 and 83). He came to see that faith itself is the gift of God, and that the very first step to Godward must be of God's doing, not of our own. This conviction was not due to reaction against Pelagianism; on the contrary, Pelagius himself was roused to contradiction by Augustine's language in his Confessions: "Domine da quod jubes" (see ''de Don. Persev. 53). Augustine's change of mind was directly and wholly due to his study of St. Paul (see above, § 7 b''); partly his wrestling with the difficulties of the Ep. to the Romans; but especially his reflection on St. Paul's question (I. Cor. iv. 7), "What hast thou that thou hast not received?&#8202;" 