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Augustine, Martyrs, and Misery

Peter Iver Kaufman

Church History / Volume 63 / Issue 01 / March 1994, pp 1 - 14

DOI: 10.2307/3167829, Published online: 28 July 2009

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Peter Iver Kaufman (1994). Augustine, Martyrs, and Misery. Church History, 63,
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 Augustine, Martyrs, and Misery
PETER IVER KAUFMAN

Augustine said that Rome fell frequently, all too often into "utter moral
depravity," occasionally into the hands of the city's enemies. Maybe Aeneas
was to blame. He had shown poor judgment, hauling to Italy the gods that
failed to save Troy. Subsequently, when the Gauls came to Rome's gates,
those divine and purportedly vigilant protectors did remarkably little protect-
ing. They later offered no resistance when Nero reduced Rome to rubble.
Augustine held Aeneas's eulogist responsible for the terribly inflated expecta-
tions that made the city's humiliations all the more demoralizing; Virgil
misled citizens, suggesting that Rome would stand forever. Christians should
have known better. They had it on higher authority that heaven and earth
would pass away.1
Yet Christians expected Rome to prosper with their God. News of Rome's
"passing" in 410 reached Jerome in Palestine as he was preparing his
commentary on Ezechiel. He paused, momentarily waxed inconsolable ("the
whole world is lost"), and returned to his project. When Augustine heard
about Rome's fate, he started something new. More than fifteen years later,
he completed his monumental and comprehensive City of God. To this day, it
defies simplifiers, the most successful of whom ponder its political theology
and generally conclude that the City was Augustine's effort to replace the
infectious enthusiasm and triumphalism of the likes of Eusebius and Lactan-
tius with a more modest and balanced assessment of the empire's place in
God's plans for redemption. I want to discuss a related matter in this paper,
to interrogate the pastoral effectiveness of the City's political theology.

1. Sermones 105.7.10, citing Luke 21:33; Sermones 81.9; and De civitate Dei 1.3 and 2.22
(hereafter DCD). For the sermons, I have used J. P. Migne's Patrologiae cursus completus,
Series Latina (Paris, 1844-); for DCD and other works cited, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasti-
corum Latinorum (Vienna, 1866—). All translations are mine. I have consulted Jean
Doignon's careful commentary on the sermons in "Oracles, propheties, 'on-dit' sur la
chute de Rome (395-410): Les reactions de Jerome et d'Augustine," Revue des etudes
augustiniennes 36 (1990): 135—145; but see also Rudolph Arbesmann, "The Idea of
Rome in the Sermons of St. Augustine," Augustiniana 4 (1954): 308-324; and Otto
Zwierlein, "Der Fall Roms im Spiegel der Kirchenvater," Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und
Epigraphik 32 (1978): 58—76. For "Vergilianism," consult diaries Norris Cochrane,
Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1957), pp. 27-30, 61-73; and, for Augustine's
remarks on fifth-century nostalgia for protective deities, see Gaetano Lettieri, // senso
della storia in Agostino d'Ippona: II 'saeculum' e la gloria nel 'De civitate Dei' (Rome, 1988),
pp. 248-253.

Mr. Kaufman is professor of religious studies in the University of North Carolina,

Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1
2 CHURCH HISTORY

Averil Cameron, borrowing from Bellah, recently proposed to measure

effectiveness in terms of Christianity's success in "implantfing] habits of the
heart." Hearts being hard for historians to monitor and probe, we will have
to settle, as Cameron did, for inferring effectiveness from discursive strate-
gies and for appraising Christianity's "capacity to create its own intellectual
and imaginative universe." We begin by considering Augustine's attempts to
encourage Christians to exchange one set of "habits" for another, to rid
themselves, that is, of expectations likely to limit the victory of faith over fact.
They expected that their virtues and martyrs would save them from misery
and keep Rome from passing. Augustine was determined to sweep the shards
of those expectations into the rest of the debris left by Rome's humiliation
and to rebuild their optimism on a firmer foundation, on God's promises
relayed in the church's instruction. But my paper stretches beyond the City
and the sermons and correspondence easily incorporated into its imaginative
universe. I want to suggest that if we concentrate on how effectively August-
ine broke the "fall" of Rome and review his remarks on martyrs, misery, and
Christian ministry, we will want to qualify Robert Markus's conclusions about
his "vindication of Christian mediocrity" and place his early fifth-century
controversies with Donatists and Pelagians in a different context.2

1.
In happier times, Rome was full of tombs. "[H]ow full Rome is with buried
saints and how rich the city's soil with sacred graves!" Visitorsflockedto the
old capital to see the latest construction undertaken to honor Peter, Paul, and
other martyrs interred in or around the city. Prudentius was all awe, envy,
and admiration: "thrice, four times, even seven times blessed [are] the
inhabitants" of Rome who routinely worshipped at those "sacred graves."3
Their reverence was misinterpreted. Manicheans, for example, thought
Christians were trying to appease ghosts hovering over the gravesites.
Augustine could hardly prevent willful misunderstanding, but he did explain
to Manichean critics that offerings were not left for Peter or Paul but for God,
as countenanced in the psalms. Christians "pay religious honor" to martyrs,
he said, by worshipping the God that martyrs had worshipped and by
offering thanks where they had offered up their lives. Much later, probably
after 410, he made the same point to the worshippers themselves. "Value
your martyrs. Praise them; love, honor, and tell others about them. But

2. Compare Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, U.K., 1992), pp. 50-53.
Also consult Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley, Calif.,
1991), pp. 4-6, 26-27, 42; and, for relevant remarks on Augustine's "pastoral
spirituality" and the Donatist controversy, Felix Genn, Trinitdt und Ami nach Augustinus
(Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1986), pp. 32-42.
3. Prudentius, Peristephanon 2.465^168, 2.529-584, 12.1-66.
AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS 3

worship [only] the martyrs' God." In the same sermon, he declared that
martyrs and apostles "hate" extravagant celebrations, feasting, and drinking
at their tombs, a declaration which signals Augustine's growing apprehen-
sion. He had assured critics of something he could no longer count on:
observances similar to those chronicled by Prudentius apparently were
intended and attended to appease martyrs and keep trouble at bay. August-
ine increasingly took it upon himself to underscore what was wrong with that
purpose and what had gone wrong with the observances. God, he insisted,
could not be persuaded to safeguard cities or regions or empires. God
promised solace in heaven, not security on earth. Christians preoccupied
with worldly hopes, fears, and monuments, Christians, that is, who "build"
on earth, were likely to be disappointed. "[T]he Lord disciplines whom he
loves" (Hebrews 12:6). Augustine disputed the very premises on which the
hopeful built ever more impressive basilicas and baptisteries to honor their
martyrs. Builders, admiring bystanders, and streams of dazzled sightseers
expected safety or prosperity in return for their homage. And what most
disturbed Augustine was that such credulous Christians cursed God when
their premise proved groundless, their homage ineffectual, their monu-
ments defenseless, their cities pregnable.4
Bishop Paulinus of Nola was a regular visitor to the tombs and shrines of
Rome. He well understood, then, why a widow in his diocese, desiring
protection for her deceased son, asked permission to have him buried in the
basilica of Felix the Confessor. Paulinus acquiesced but wrote Augustine for
a second opinion. Augustine may have meant to sound stern. He echoed
Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (5:10): "we must all appear before the
judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according
to what he has done in the body." It mattered what was done in the body not
to the body, post mortem. Yet the piety of Paulinus and that of his bereaved
petitioner were precious commodities, so Augustine found a way to draw the
exacting implications from the apostle's statement without directly condemn-
ing cherished practice. "When one thinks of where a dear friend is buried
and when the place of burial is associated with the name of an esteemed

4. Sermones 296.5, 8-9; and compare Sermones 273.7-9 with Contra Faustum 20.21. August-
ine marvelled that so much was expected in Rome from Saint Peter's tomb. Alive, Peter
lacked courage; he disobeyed Christ, repeatedly denied him, and was caught dissimu-
lating by Paul. Scripture yielded ample evidence against the granite character of Peter's
commitments, so much so that Augustine could not finally decide whether Peter was
the rock on which Christ pledged to build his church (Retractationes 1.21.1, discussing
Matthew 16:18). Augustine conceded that Peter was strong as well as weak, and the
church contained both the firm in faith and the infirm. But one conclusion was
inescapable after 410: neither Peter nor his tomb protected the stones and citizens of
Rome. Consult Victor Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chretienne aux premiers
siecles (Paris, 1980), pp. 128-129; and Robert Eno, "Forma Petri—Petrus, Figura
Ecclesiae," in Collectanea Augustiniana, 2 vols., eds. B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, and J.
Van Houtem (Louvain, 1990) 2:675-676.
4 CHURCH HISTORY

martyr one affectionately commends the soul of the departed to that martyr
in one's thoughts and prayers. And when the piety of their dear and faithful
friends is shown them, the deceased doubtlessly benefit, to be precise, the
deceased who, while they lived, merited that such should benefit them after
this life.5
The condition was crucial. Proximity to the tombs of martyrs and the
solemn prayers of friends could not comfort the soul of the reprobate. Only
the regenerate benefit. But because no one alive could tell with certainty
whether the deceased was reprobate or regenerate, Augustine allowed that
well-wishers ought to make arrangements that might console the departed.
Better to do what could be unavailing than to omit what would have
comforted the righteous. The bishop was also aware that proximity and
elaborate funerary rites comforted mourners' faith and hope in the resurrec-
tion.6
But Augustine asserted openly and often that the righteous were not
disadvantaged by having been interred without fanfare or far from the
graves of martyrs. Saints and angels find and assist the souls of the righteous
wherever they left their bodies. The corpses of the martyrs of Lyon were
devoured by animals. The pious and innocent victims of the Goths' savagery
were left to rot where they fell. No one should imagine that such blessed dead
would be overlooked. There was no room in Christianity for pagan supersti-
tions about the unburied. Too much paganism, Augustine charged, had
already warped Christians' expectations and had transformed Christians'
funerals into raucous celebrations.7
Pagans looked for rewards—prosperity, security—for their enthusiastic, if
disorderly, expressions of reverence; should Christians ask for less? Chris-
tians and pagan critics alike wanted to know why God had let Rome "fall"
during Christian times. Augustine answered that the first decade of the fifth
century could scarcely qualify as a Christian time, what with revels and
riotous conduct at Christians' gravesites.8
In 392, 397, and 401, Augustine prevailed on church councils to prohibit
indecent displays during funerals and funerary anniversaries. He boasted
some success, yet his persistent complaints after 410 suggest that the goal of
sobriety receded farther and farther as he pressed ahead. To shame local
revelers, he claimed that North Africa lagged behind the rest of Christendom
which had suppressed such disorder. But Augustine had to voice his dissatis-
faction dexterously. He did not want to imply that neighboring executives
had been remiss. He wrote to his friend Alypius that circumstances some-

5. De curapro mortuis 4.6 (hereafter Cura).

6. Cura 18.22.
7. Cura 2.4-3.5, 9.11; and Z)C/> 1.13.
8. Sermones 296.6.
AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS 5

times dictated tolerance. Prompt censure and suppression of boisterous,

even boozy behavior at gravesites could cost the North African church many
Christians. It was wise for a while to accommodate recent converts. They had
come to think that "sociability and effective supplication" went together.
Shrewd officials realized that pagans, upon adopting Christianity, could not
as easily abandon their pleasures as their illusions. The concession was
provisional; all Christians, Augustine said, must eventually conform to "the
saving principles of sobriety." After exonerating officials, therefore, he turned
to, and on, incorrigible converts and their descendants who continued their
feasting and drinking, scoured the Old Testament for precedents, and
defended themselves by referring to Rome, where pilgrims and city residents
were reputed to drink excessively after offering toasts to Peter and Paul at the
sites of their martrydoms. Augustine as good as admitted that his proclama-
tion about widespread suppression had been premature but went on to
explain that Rome was a special case, an administrator's nightmare. The city
was too big to police effectively. Waves of immigrants and pilgrims made the
population unmanageably diverse. The bishop of Rome, then, had some
excuse; drunkards (ebriosi) who disgraced their religion had none. Peter had
explicitly forbidden what Roman ebriosi were doing and what their North
African counterparts were defending (1 Peter 4:3).9
Rome was punished in 410. Divine retribution might have been far more
devastating, for five years before Alaric and the Goths stormed into Italy, the
pagan Radagaisus threatened to take the city. With God's aide, adjuvante
Domino, according to Augustine, the more barbarous barbarian was defeated.
Whatever else could be said of Alaric, he was, after all, a Christian; he spared
the basilicas of saints Peter and Paul. Rome suffered, to be sure, but not the
fate of Sodom. Roman Christians suffered, yet they endured nothing that
Christ had not suffered for them: capture, hardship, humiliation, anguish,
and death. God's "ineffable clemency" broke bodies, those of the martyrs and
that of the city of martyrs. But the pilgrim city of souls was undamaged and
undiminished.10
Augustine's City of God is concerned with two cities. It exposes the fiction
that the pagans' gods had been trustworthy protectors of Troy, Rome, and
the like. It discredits related hopes that the Christians' martyrs would alertly
guard earthly cities. Martyrs were not gods. They ought to be honored
temperately, soberly. They invited emulation, not adoration. And to emulate
them, Christians must offer the single "sacrifice" still "acceptable to God."

9. For ebriosi, see inter alia, Enarrationes in Psalmum LIX 15, although here, as elsewhere,
Augustine blames Donatist fanaticism as well as paganism. For "sociability and
supplication," Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (New Haven, Conn.,
1984), pp. 75-76, 84-85. The letter to Alypius is particularly informative, Epistolae
29.3-6, 9-10, but also consult Epistolae 17.4 and 22.4.
10. De excidio urbis Romae 8.9. For Radagaisus, DCD 5.23 and Sermones 105.10, 13.
6 CHURCH HISTORY

God, of course, needed no sacrifice, Augustine hastened to add, idealizing

divine plenitude, yet the City suggests that "a broken spirit" was a welcome
and acceptable sacrifice. For contrition and humility enabled Christians to
abjure expectations which exhibited lesser loves and attachments to cities of
earth and stone, then to love God unconditionally, to submit to God's will,
and to take hold of the sacred fellowship of the pilgrim city.11
Talk of sacrifice in the City is usually subdued but occasionally overpower-
ing. The tenth book emphatically matches "the sacrifice of humility" against
the arrogance of those who "build" on earth. Humility is the mortar for the
pilgrim city, which in the remaining books of Augustine's text, becomes the
foil to the terrestrial city with its monuments and mounting expectations, its
unrestrained confidence that enterprise, skill, virtue, and faith would earn
earthly rewards. On earth, the pilgrim city was austere, alien; its journey
through time, troubled and wretched (aerumnosa). However settled they mt/
seem, genuine Christians were citizens of this other, transcendent realm.
They must expect only hardship here but may expect reward hereafter.
Noah's ark perfectly symbolized the pilgrim city. To Augustine, its propor-
tions called to mind those of the human body that Christ assumed; its timber,
the cross from which Christ left this world. Its ordeals in rough seas
prefigured the pilgrim city's passage through time. No better reminder that
the genuine Christian was not at home here, that Christ's kingdom was not of
this world, could have been set before the faithful, save perhaps the Christian
martyr.12

2.
Too much and not enough were expected of Christian martyrs. Too much,
Augustine maintained, because many Christians presumed martyrs would
protect them, their properties, and their cities; not enough, because most
Christians failed to appreciate that martyrs were reliable guides on the
exacting journey from res to spes, from trust in the things of this world to
confidence in the blessings of the next. Moreover, the martyrs were irrefut-
able proof that God's compassion was not incompatible with hardship and
human misery. Miracles at their tombs attested the power of humility and
underscored their exemplary heroism as well as God's abiding love. No
wonder, then, that Augustine warmly welcomed the relics of Saint Stephen
when they came to rest near Hippo.

11. DCD 8.26-27, 10.1-7, 19.

12. DCD 12.9, 15.26, 17.3, 13, and 19.27. I agree with Basil Studer who urges, against
received opinion, that the tenth book, belongs with "confirmation[s]" such as these
rather than with the refutation of philosophers in the City's previous four books. See
Studer's "Zum Aufbau von Augustins De Civitate Dei," in Collectanea Augustiniana (see
note 4), 2:941-943.
AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS 7

The welcome spilled into the last book of the City where it mixes easily with
Augustine's arraignment of Christians who hesitated to circulate stories of
miraculous cures at martyrs' gravesites.13 Peter Brown suspects that August-
ine cheered the arrival of Saint Stephen and urged greater publicity because
he meant to overcome "the privatization of religious practice." Christians
had been too tight-lipped; their confidential, off-the-record stories about
miracles and cures and other "centripetal" elements such as intimate gather-
ings and meals at martyrs' tombs may have pulled families together but they
definitely pulled churches apart. Brown proposes that Augustine self-
consciously waged a campaign against "reticence." He pressed for public
disclosures and labored, on this reading, to replace centripetal with congre-
gational commemorations. In the process, Augustine and other officials
(Brown's "impresarios" of martyr cults) "rewired" piety to place their execu-
tive authority in the foreground. Each martyr became "the invisible, heav-
enly concomitant of the patronage exercised palpably on earth by the
bishop. . . . [T]he bishop entered with greater certainty into his role as the
visible patronus beneath the invisible patronus." But if Brown's account is an
anthem to the prowess of ecclesiastical administrators, it is also a tribute to
the persistent influence of patron-client relationships that characterized late
Roman social and religious practice. And, I fear, it is also something of afistin
the face of my interpretation, for Brown pairs patronage with intimacy and
amnesty, inferring that Augustine believed that "men who had shown them-
selves, as martyrs, to be true servants of God could bind their fellow men
closer to God than could the angels." But some nuggets simply cannot be
mined from the City's nearly inexhaustible treasure. The passage to which
Brown refers in this instance is emphatically theocentric. It declares only that
God made martyrs and angels companionable, and it criticizes practices that
honored martyrs as mediators. Christians commemorate martyrs' sacrifices,
Augustine explained, to thank God for martyrs' "victories" and to appeal for
God's unflagging support so that they might imitate whom they admire. The
passage in question conspicuously values imitation over intimacy.14
In De cum pro mortuis, where Augustine did write about martyrs' patronage
and meditation, he gingerly and skeptically considered common assump-
tions about intimacy. Maybe martyrs did remain close by, foraging for souls
and assisting the afflicted at their tombs. Augustine could not disprove it, but
tales of phantom figures, extraordinary visions, and sudden cures could not
tempt him into the camp of the credulous. He preferred the idea that martyrs
were with God, removed from commerce with their admirers yet assisting
them with prayers, much as Christians on the other side of the grave prayed

13. DCD 22.8.

14. Compare DCD 8.27 and Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin
Christianity (Chicago, 1981), pp. 32-39, 61.
8 CHURCH HISTORY

for the welfare of deceased coreligionists.15 Possibly Augustine favored this

second idea because it was less likely to confound the impression left by his
Confessions, the impression that Christians could search for and be found by
God's vast mercy without the patronage of "invisible friends" and intermedi-
aries. The City certainly supposes that Christians will search in time rather
than in particular places, in history rather than exclusively at gravesites and
shrines. True, God's traces {vestigia) could be discovered alibi magis, alibi minus,
in some places more than in others. But history and the narratives it inspired
told the faithful what to expect from their faith, once they learned to see
God's presence or providence in chronicles of the pilgrim city's ordeals, in
Cain's fratricide and all that followed, including, of course, the events of 410
and their aftermath.16

3.
At least one reason for Augustine's attention to martyrs and miracles had
nothing to do with patronage and intimacy. The martyrs' most important
legacy was the insight that life on earth was miserrima, most miserable,
compared with life everlasting. Were Christians never confronted with truths
about the martyrs' misery and about their own, they might never come to
terms with their estrangement from God. Misery drove them inward, up-
ward, and forward. The task that misfortune and grief set for introspection,
according to Augustine, was a sublime self-rediscovery tantamount to the
prodigal's return in Jesus's parable. The faithful returned to themselves and
to their heavenly father, acknowledged their former alienation from God and
their actual alienation (as citizens of the pilgrim city) from this world, showed
contempt for their old hopes for security and worldly prosperity, and
devoted themselves to new expectations compellingly articulated in stories of
the martyrs' courage and faith. The great danger was that calamity some-
times sent individuals scampering for imaginary consolations. That may be
why Augustine so resolutely associated grief with transcendence and why, as
Gaetano Lettieri pointed out, he stressed expectations {la dimensione dell'attesa)
in all his explanations.17
If his Confessions can be trusted, Augustine knew from personal experience
how consciousness responds to long pulls from grief, how the aggrieved
come to indict the times {mala tempora) and to doubt divine sovereignty. The
death of a dear friend, he confided, left him preoccupied with misery and
meaninglessness. He realized that he had been miserable for some time;
morbid reflections on temporality and mortality had merely chased misery

15. Cum 20.

16. DCD 10.3, 11.28, 16.2.
17. Lettieri, Senso della storia, pp. 169-171, citing Enarrationes in Psalmum LXVII31, and pp.
313-314. Also see DCD 11.28, 19.20; and Sermones 96.2, 169.9, 11.
AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS 9

from the lair from which it had secretly and deftly ruled his life. Augustine
regretted that his hopes had been shackled for years to perishable things
(and persons). But it took several years more to undermine those hopes
altogether and to put new ones in their place.18
Grief was not a false start. It led nowhere, if the aggrieved held tenaciously
to prospects for some worldly recovery or compensation, but it worked well,
if they could be induced to jettison their old expectations and take hold of
God's promises. For Augustine, much depended on the church's instruction,
and instruction amounted to the elaboration of Romans 8:24, "in this hope
["for adoption as sons"] we are saved." Augustine was persuaded that the
apostle addressed persons who had already confronted the persistence of
villainy in this world and had admitted the unreality of ever completely
overcoming evil. They were not hopeless. They neither cursed the times nor
quarreled with God. They were hopeful; from tragedy and misery, they
learned humility, without which every setback would seem an offense.
Unwilling to blame themselves, however, the arrogant blamed others, even
God. By contrast, humble and hopeful citizens of the pilgrim city, caught in
the coils of disappointment and grief, offered their contrition, their "broken
spirits," as sacrifices, much as the martyrs had offered their lives.19
Grief and misery, then, were not impediments. What encumbered humil-
ity and hope was "the flesh," broadly conceived. The flesh kept expectations
earthbound and prevented Christians from capitalizing on their misery.
Where the psalmist wrote of being stuck "in mire" (69:2), Augustine,
annotating, proposed that the faithful were stuck in the flesh. The spirit
"sighed" upward and forward; the flesh tethered Christians to worldly
ambitions. If calamity failed to cut them loose, that very predicament—the
tension betweenfleshand spirit—should have occasioned the kind of despera-
tion which in Augustine's estimation, the apostle most memorably described,
"I can will what is right but I cannot do it" (Romans 7:15-24).20
Some Christians, continentes, seemed to have overcome theflesh.Augustine
applauded their chastity, yet he could not abide their sense of superiority.
They bragged that they were better than their parents whose intimacies
produced them. Augustine's repeated preference for continence might sug-
gest that he would have overlooked some degree of impertinence, but he
took continentes as examples of the influence of the flesh on those who
appeared to have conquered it. For arrogance and uncharitable gestures
eclipsed chastity. Augustine preached that humility was paramount. If upon

18. Confessiones 4.4-6.

19. DCD 19.4 and Sermones 80.8. Also see Basil Studer, "Augustine and the Pauline Theme
of Hope," in Paul and the Legacies of Paul, ed. William S. Babcock (Dallas, Tex., 1990),
pp. 212-214; and Norbert Fischer, "Augustins Weg der Gottessuche," Tnerer theolo-
gische Zeitschrift 2 (1991): 96-98.
20. Ennarationes in Psalmum LXVIII18; LXXXIII9.
10 CHURCH HISTORY

searching one's soul, one found any boast or exaggerated self-esteem (inflatio),
one could be certain that too little love for God lodged there. And the place
where such love should have been was as good as an invitation to the devil to
cultivate insolence and bring forth a crop of wickedness.21
Pride tripped up the continentes, but Augustine thought the Pelagians far
more culpable, because they programmatically underestimated the extent to
which every Christian was stuck in or covered with "mire." They trusted their
virtues and had forgotten that salvation was earned only by Christ for the
Christian. Augustine flailed at Pelagian arrogance in 412 in his defense of
infant baptism.
The good that one does comes to light when one knows that justification is due
to God's grace and is not a reward for virtue [non ad sua merita.] The apostle said
that "God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure"
[Phillipians 2:13]. All who come from carnal generation to spiritual regeneration
come therefore through Christ. Christ made it clear, when he was asked, that the
question of remission could not be resolved by reason. But infants are surely not
exempt from the grace of remission, and there is no other way to cross to Christ.
And no one can be reconciled to God or come to God except through Christ.22
Virtues counted for little or nothing. One came "to spiritual regeneration"
only "through Christ." Neither the priest nor the child's parent or presenter
brought the baptized to (and "through") Christ. Responsibility for that and
for regeneration rested ultimately with God and, more proximately, with the
entire church, with those living and dead who took pleasure in the child's or
catechumen's presentation.23 Hence it was important to get the faithful into
the right church. To that end, after 410, Augustine continued to exchange
insults with Donatist secessionists who, for nearly a hundred years, had
trumpeted the virtues of the wrong church, the collection of their churches.
Donatists placed great stock in baptism. Their contention was that salva-
tion in the church Augustine defended was nearly impossible because no one
could be certain that the priest who baptized, or the bishop who ordained
that priest, or the bishops who consecrated that bishop had not been
indelibly stained by the sins of long-dead clerics. It seemed senseless to
Donatists to turn the quest for God into a game of chance, absurdly so
inasmuch as it was altogether avoidable. For early in the fourth century, only
some officials capitulated to authorities; others, Donatists' ancestors, seceded.
Their heirs' sacraments—baptisms, ordinations, consecrations—were still
valid, inasmuch as Donatists and their ancestors chose to suffer, as had the
martyrs, rather than to succumb to the wickedness of this world.24

21. Sermones 354.8-9; DCD 10.29 and 19.25.

22. De peccatorum meritis et remissione 1.33.62.
23. Epistolae 98.5.
24. Actes de la conference de Carthage en 411, 3 vols., ed. Serge Lancel (Paris, 1972)
3:1198-1202; Contra litteras PetUiam 2.17.14 and 3.38.44; and Contra epistolam Parmeni-
AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS 11

Augustine was struck by the irony that Donatists, who were so quick to
compare themselves and their puritanical predecessors to martyrs, had
completely misconstrued the meaning and message of martyrdom. He
agreed that martyrs had been "genuine lovers of righteousness," but he
charged that Donatists had forgotten that martyrs were preeminently para-
gons of humility. Measured by any standard, martyrs possessed a surplus of
virtue. That alone made their humility all the more admirable. But Donatists,
at the start of the schism—the moment of secession—boasted of their
righteousness. They then said they suffered as the martyrs had suffered, but
in the saying they showed how little they understood the martyrs' legacy and
their own experience. Had they been more perceptive, Augustine held, they
would have been more humble, charitable, and forgiving of their less
steadfast brethren. Moreover, had the Donatists of his time learned from the
martyrs to forego temptations of the flesh (calca carnem), they would not have
been found drinking, dancing, and carousing at sacred gravesites while he
preached about the martyrs' sobriety and humility.25
"How will you dissolve the glacier of [Donatist] iniquity unless you burn
with charity?" At first, Augustine hoped to melt resistance by publicly
disclosing and debating Donatist error and pretension. After 400, he gradu-
ally reconciled himself to the use of force, suspecting and then suggesting
that charity could require coercion, that "burn[ing] with charity" might,
under some circumstances, require scalding one's critics. The tactics would
take some explaining, for Augustine simultaneously maintained that Chris-
tians who suffered persecution symbolized the pilgrim city of God. So, to
keep Donatists from claiming close affinity with those emblems and first
citizens of the pilgrim city, Augustine distinguished between persons perse-
cuted for the sake of righteousness (Matthew 5:10) and others hounded
because of their obstinacy and fanaticism. As for Christians duped by Dona-
tism yet less fanatically committed to Donatist causes, he argued that would-be
rescuers must pinch (vellicat) and occasionally strike (pulsat) those ignorant of
the dangers and treachery that surround them, regardless of the criticism
that coercion would attract.26

ani 3.22.12. For general assessments of Donatism, W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church,
3d ed. (Oxford, 1985); and Bernhard Kriegbaum, Kirche der Traditoren oder Kirche der
Mdrtyrer: Die Vorgeschichte des Donatismus (Innsbruck, Austria, 1986). For Donatists'
fascination with martyrdom, Jean-Paul Brisson, Autonomisme et christianisme dans I'Afnque
romaine (Paris, 1958), pp. 292-294, 307, 311; and Ernst Ludwig Grasmiick, Coercitio:
Staat und Kirche im Donatistenstreit (Berlin, 1964), pp. 120-130.
25. Epistolae 29.11 and 159.8 Emin Tengstrom's discussion of the Circumcellions is rel-
evant, for, as the name suggests (circum cellos), they were Donatist partisans particularly
attatched to the shrines and cults of martyrs yet prone to anarchy. See Tengstrom's
Donatisten und Katholiken: Soziale, wirtchaftliche und politische Aspekte einer nordafri-
kanischen Kirchenspaltung (Goteborg, Sweden, 1964), pp. 65—78.
26. De utilitatejejunii 9.11-10.12; Epistolae 88 and 185.13-14.
12 CHURCH HISTORY

Among Donatists and Pelagians, spirituality was mistakenly equated with

moral superiority. Legislation, confiscation, incarceration could go only part
way to break the equation. If "habits of the heart" were to change, Augustine
would have to add compelling argument to coercive policy. While writing
about the compatibility of compassion and coercion, he came again to explain
the compatibility of divine mercy and human misery.

4.
Robert Markus writes about Augustine's "vindication of Christian
mediocrity," speculating that "the passionate intensity" of his assault on
Pelagian and Donatist perfectionism was one of the many examples in
religious history of converts' implacable and ferocious opposition to positions
they had deserted. "For some years Augustine's neo-Platonically inspired
philosophical views and his ascetically colored Christianity blended harmoni-
ously in his mind . . . [producing] confidence in man's rational and moral
capabilities." Although Markus admits that it would take a first-class piece of
sleuthing to find traces of confidence in Augustine's work after 400, he
maintains that the memory propelled and intensified the polemic against
perfectionism when "pastoral responsibility brought [Augustine] a deepened
sense of community with the half-educated, the superstitious, and the sensual
Christians of Hippo." 27
I submit that an equally, if not more, plausible connection between
"pastoral responsibility" and "passionate intensity" presents itself if we start
with the wistful, what-if passage Augustine composed for his City of God.
Let the Romans read our sacred books and discover what is abundantly written
in the prophets, gospels, acts of the apostles, and epistles against greed and
extravagance. It was written for people everywhere who assemble to hear it
written, to be read compellingly, not as the report of a philosophers' colloquy but
as an oracle from the clouds . . . Instead, Romans defame Christianity. They
blame it for their distress. Yet if the rulers of this world and those they ruled,
young men, maidens, and the elderly with the young . . . had listened to the
principles of Christianity concerning justice and morality, the state would have
arrayed all the earth with its happiness and then climbed to the summit ofeternal
life and reigned blissfully.28
Rome's chance had passed by the time Augustine had written this. Inas-
much as God's sovereignty was incontestable, one could only conclude
political failures were divinely predestined. The church's challenge was to
make sense of the failure and misery—to teach Christians to abandon false
hopes and unrealistic expectations and to trust God not to cheat them,
whatever disappointments they experienced. Augustine said nearly as much

27. Markus, The End ofAncient Christianity, pp. 50-53.

28. DCD 2.19.
AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS 13

before 410. Perhaps as early as 400, in his treatise on catechesis, he acknowl-

edged that the church prospered in times of relative peace. That empires or
emperors could secure lasting peace, however, was the longest of long shots,
despite the swagger of political rhetoric. A far better bet, he confided, was
that public officials would rank with scoundrels seeking domination rather
than with the pious who humbly seek God. Augustine made no single official
his target. He divided the world into two camps: in one, persons trusted their
own virtues and powers; in the other, they trusted God's promises.29
After 410, Augustine reintroduced the distinction. Perhaps it would have
been unobjectionable and inspiriting to have identified the second camp with
the church, but Augustine sensed that churches would always encompass
capricious and wayward Christians. On earth, they would forever be mixed
congregations of the reprobate, the rogues, and the righteous. The repro-
bate were lost. The bishops' pastoral responsibility was to make rogues (adhuc
carnales) righteous and the righteous more so.30
Righteousness, in this context, required straight and sobering talk about
virtue, talk that emphasized the persistence of misery rather than emancipa-
tion from it. In the City, Augustine advised that prudence did not eliminate
evil. The best that one could claim was that prudence put prudent people on
guard against evil. Earthly justice could never extinguish inordinate desire.
It could only try to contain the effects of misrule. And no one could become
perfectly virtuous, although Christians resolved to endure what God wanted
the faithful to endure (feramus quod deus nosferre voluerit) might be resource-
fully virtuous, if they shunned fraudulent consolations, steeled themselves to
Hebridean hardships, and were warmed and saved "in hope." The expecta-
tion that martyrs would intervene on earth and spare or save worshippers
was one specious consolation. The expectation that the city of martyrs, a
monument to Romans' self-reliance, would never be compromised was
another. Both had to be cleared before saving expectations could take root.31

29. De catechizandis rudibus 31.

30. De baptismo 1.23—25. Also see Cornelius Mayer, "Augustins Lehre von homo spiritales," in
Homo Spiritales, ed. Cornelius Mayer and Karl Heinz Chelius (Wiirzburg, Germany
1987), pp. 45-50; and Johannes Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon (Leiden, Netherlands,
1991), pp. 123-229.
31. DCD 19.4; and De excidio 8.9. Others celebrated "Roman peace," but Augustine saw
ceaseless war on the empire's frontiers (and in Christians' souls) and gathered that the
very conditions of earthly existence precluded lasting peace, which came only to the
regenerate and only after death, DCD 19.10-11. He denied that he ever went out of his
way to insult Rome, either the city or the empire. He understood that the imperial
expansion improved Christianity's prospects, yet he could not forget what underlay the
eradication of old frontiers, the relative reduction of tribal hostilities, and the remark-
able network of roads, over which Christianity's itinerant preachers as well as Rome's
soldiers had marched. Behind it all was the Romans' lust for domination (libido
dominandi). See DCD 3.10,3.14,4.5-7,8.24,15.7;and Sermones 105.9,12. For Augustine's
"patriotism," see Franois Paschoud, Roma Aeterna: Etudes sur le patriotisme romain dans
I'Occident latin a iepoques des grandes invasions (Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1967), pp.
14 CHURCH HISTORY
Augustine lumped perfectionisms with false expectations, for they all made
it difficult on earth to people the pilgrim city, the destiny of which could only
be represented by "a rhetoric of paradox." Augustine probably thought the
apostle had some premonition of this when he calculated that God deliber-
ately made the wisdom of the world look foolish (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). For
his part, Augustine, breaking and, one might say brokering the "fall" of
Rome, read all history through the cross, the resurrection, and the expecta-
tion of salvation. The City makes Rome's fate paradigmatic. It turns the tables
on those who appealed nostalgically to Rome's former glory and on those
who cited the Roman church's permissiveness which allegedly licensed
riotous behavior at the tombs of Rome's martyrs. Augustine turned to Rome
to extract a very different lesson. Any earthly triumph or happiness, if it
obscures the expectation for the pilgrim city's celestial victory and beatitude,
promptly occasions fresh misery and the increase of misery which was always
there (quae inerat augeatur). Each "fall" or failure deflates the wrong kind of
hope and gives the Christian ministry a chance to retrain perfectionists,
reaffirm paradox, reorient expectations, and people the pilgrim city of God.

234-236, 249, 256-258; and, for securitas or lasting peace in the City, see Wilhelm
Kamlah's still useful Christentum und Geschichtlichkeit: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des
Christentums und zu Augustins 'Biirgerschaft Gottes', 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, Germany, 1951), p.
266. I discuss other literature on the topic in Redeeming Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1990),
pp. 130-148, 196-200.
32. DCD 15.4; Cameron, Christianity, pp. 158—160 (on "the rhetoric of paradox"); and Luigi
Alici, "Interiorita e speranza," in Interioritd e intenzionalitd nel 'De civitate Dei' di
Sant'Agostino, ed. Remo Piccolimini (Rome, 1990), pp. 60-67.