Now we come to my hero among the Patristics: Augustine. He was the greatest constructive thinker and most influential teacher of the early Christian church, and a dominant force in theology and philosophy even today. His was a formative influence on Descartes and the whole development of modern philosophy. And the Protestant reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, were guided in their theological views to a great extent by his published works. Other than that, his life didn't accomplish much.

Augustine (AD 354-430) was born at Thagaste in North Africa, to a Christian mother named Monica and a pagan father named Patricius. He became a brilliant and successful rhetorician (think lawyer), practicing at Rome and Milan. In Milan he was converted to Christ in 386, and soon ordained. He became Bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 396 and remained there to his death.

The writings of this man fill 16 volumes of Migne's Patrologia Latina, in very small print--I had to translate some of them in my doctoral work and remember the experience painfully. The main bulk were very detailed explanations of the Scriptures, either as sermons he preached at Hippo or commentaries on various books of the Bible. His homilies on John's Gospel, Explanations of the Psalms, and commentaries on Genesis are of special importance. And his two most widely read works, Confessions and City of God, are the most significant and influential Christian books of all time outside of Scripture.

Let's take a brief tour of his thought. At every turn you'll say, "But that's what everyone believes." That's the point. Let's use Augustine's Latin phrases to make it.

For Augustine, God is absolute and majestic. He is eternal, transcendent, and absolutely free, holy and totally separate from evil. What he wills, he does without intermediaries of any kind (vs. Gnosticism and Plotinus).

All ideas and forms of things are grounded in God's intelligence (agreeing with Plato). He proceeded rationally in creating the world, and everything owes its existence to him (vs. Plato). He created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing). All that is, is good, since it was created by God.

All true theological thinking begins and ends with the Trinity. Augustine's work De Trinitate is the single most important writing ever produced on this crucial subject. God created mankind as Trinity, and we can approach him only as Trinity.

Augustine believed that the only knowledge worth having is knowledge of God and ourselves. All other knowledge, such as logic, metaphysics, and ethics, has value only insofar as it contributes to our knowledge of God.

It is our duty to understand what we firmly believe, to see the rational basis of our faith. And so we have a famous credo from Augustine: "Understand in order that you may believe; believe in order that you may understand." The highest function of wisdom and reason is to know God.

Truth is objective and absolute. I know that I exist, and so I know the reality of existence (Descartes would get credit for this idea 1,200 years later). The center of all thought is God. Concentration on inner spiritual reality leads to all truth.

Against Plato and with the Hebrew anthropology, Augustine believed that the body is not inherently evil. We are body and soul, but each works with the other to bring us to life's purpose.

Now things get interesting. Before the Fall we were holy and wholly innocent. After the Fall our entire being was corrupted. We were plunged into ignorance and sin, and are now utterly incapable of knowing what we should do apart from God's revelation and redemption. We were free to sin or not to sin before the Fall, but after the Fall it is impossible for us not to sin (non posse non peccare, for you intellectuals).

And so Adam's sin created hereditary sin, from which only God can reform us. The ramifications of this idea for infant baptism, sexuality, and human identity are still with us today.

As a logical result of this belief in inherited sin, Augustine argued strongly for predestination regarding salvation. He believed that every person is born with a sin nature, so that God is just in condemning us all. If anyone turns to God by faith, this is only possible by God's help, since our sinful nature makes such conversion impossible. And so God must decide who is to be saved and who is to be lost. A Calvinist before Calvin, so to speak.

Now we go from preaching to meddling. For Augustine, everything that is, is created by God and is therefore good (omnia natura bonum est--all nature is the best). How, then, did evil come to be?

By logical progression, if everything that exists is good, evil cannot "exist." Evil must be a privation or lack of the good: "nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature. Nature therefore which has been corrupted, is called evil" (Nature of the Good, 4).

God has given us freedom of will, so that we would choose the good (his worship). But we choose wrongly. And evil results from our wrong choices. It already existed in potential (evil as non-being, from Plotinus). And we make it a reality when we misuse our freedom.

The result is simple: evil is not God's fault but ours. This "free-will" theodicy (an explanation for evil in the light of God's goodness) is the most popular such approach in Christian history.

Augustine's theodicy drives his philosophy of history. There are two kinds of people ("cities" in his analogy): those who desire God and those who do not. The "City of God" is spiritual and eternal; the "City of the Devil" is material and temporal. They are in perpetual conflict throughout history (the "dialectical" philosophy of history, found in Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Nietzsche, Marx, and Spengler). Only when Jesus returns will the City of God defeat finally and forever the City of the Devil, and heal the results of the Fall eternally.

No one except Paul has exerted as much philosophical and theological influence on the Church as St. Augustine. We still think his thoughts in so many ways. But as is true with all human minds, his was finite and fallen. We'll see how in the studies to come.