But the fame of Augustine does not rest on his controversies with heretics and schismatics alone. He wrote treatises on almost all subjects of vital interest to the Church. His essay on the Trinity was worthy of Athanasius, and has never been surpassed in lucidity and power. His soliloquies on a blissful life, and the order of the universe, and the immortality of the soul are pregnant with the richest thought, equal to the best treatises of Cicero or Boethius. His commentary on the Psalms is sparkling with tender effusions, in which every thought is a sentiment and every sentiment is a blazing flame of piety and love. Perhaps his greatest work was the amusement of his leisure hours for thirteen years,--a philosophical treatise called "The City of God," in which he raises and replies to all the great questions of his day; a sort of Christian poem upon our origin and end, and a final answer to Pagan theogonies,--a final sentence on all the gods of antiquity. In that marvellous book he soars above his ordinary excellence, and develops the designs of God in the history of States and empires, furnishing for Bossuet the groundwork of his universal history. Its great excellence, however, is its triumphant defence of Christianity over all other religions,--the last of the great apologies which, while settling the faith of the Christian world, demolished forever the last stronghold of a defeated Paganism. As "ancient Egypt pronounced judgments on her departed kings before proceeding to their burial, so Augustine interrogates the gods of antiquity, shows their impotence to sustain the people who worshipped them, triumphantly sings their departed greatness, and seals with his powerful hand the sepulchre into which they were consigned forever."
Besides all the treatises of Augustine,--exegetical, apologetical, dogmatical, polemical, ascetic, and autobiographical,--three hundred and sixty-three of his sermons have come down to us, and numerous letters to the great men and women of his time. Perhaps he wrote too much and too loosely, without sufficient regard to art,--like Varro, the most voluminous writer of antiquity, and to whose writings Augustine was much indebted. If Saint Augustine had written less, and with more care, his writings would now be more read and more valued. Thucydides compressed the labors of his literary life into a single volume; but that volume is immortal, is a classic, is a text-book. Yet no work of man is probably more lasting than the "Confessions" of Augustine, from the extraordinary affluence and subtilty of his thoughts, and his burning, fervid, passionate style. When books were scarce and dear, his various works were the food of the Middle Ages: and what better books ever nourished the European mind in a long period of ignorance and ignominy? So that we cannot overrate his influence in giving a direction to Christian thought. He lived in the writings of the sainted doctors of the Scholastic schools. And he was a very favored man in living to a good old age, wearing the harness of a Christian laborer and the armor of a Christian warrior until he was seventy-six. He was a bishop nearly forty years. For forty years he was the oracle of the Church, the light of doctors. His social and private life had also great charms: he lived the doctrines that he preached; he completely triumphed over the temptations which once assailed him. Everybody loved as well as revered him, so genial was his humanity, so broad his charity. He was affable, courteous, accessible, full of sympathy and kindness. He was tolerant of human infirmities in an age of angry controversy and ascetic rigors. He lived simply, but was exceedingly hospitable. He cared nothing for money, and gave away what he had. He knew the luxury of charity, having no superfluities. He was forgiving as well as tolerant; saying, It is necessary to pardon offences, not seven times, but seventy times seven. No one could remember an idle word from his lips after his conversion. His humility was as marked as his charity, ascribing all his triumphs to divine assistance. He was not a monk, but gave rules to monastic orders. He might have been a metropolitan patriarch or pope; but he was contented with being bishop of a little Numidian town. His only visits beyond the sanctuary were to the poor and miserable. As he won every heart by love, so he subdued every mind by eloquence. He died leaving no testament, because he had no property to bequeath but his immortal writings,--some ten hundred and thirty distinct productions. He died in the year 430, when his city was besieged by the Vandals, and in the arms of his faithful Alypius, then a neighboring bishop, full of visions of the ineffable beauty of that blissful state to which his renovated spirit had been for forty years constantly soaring.
"Thus ceased to flow," said a contemporary, "that river of eloquence which had watered the thirsty fields of the Church; thus passed away the glory of preachers, the master of doctors, and the light of scholars; thus fell the courageous combatant who with the sword of truth had given heresy a mortal blow; thus set this glorious sun of Christian doctrine, leaving a world in darkness and in tears."
His vacant see had no successor. "The African province, the cherished jewel of the Roman Empire, sparkled for a while in the Vandal diadem. The Greek supplanted the Vandal, and the Saracen supplanted the Greek, and the home of Augustine was blotted out from the map of Christendom." The light of the gospel was totally extinguished in Northern Africa. The acts of Rome and the doctrines of Cyprian were equally forgotten by the Mahommedan conquerors. Only in Bona, as Hippo is now called, has the memory of the great bishop been cherished,--the one solitary flower which escaped the successive desolations of Vandals and Saracens. And when Algiers was conquered by the French in 1830, the sacred relics of the saint were transferred from Pavia (where they had been deposited by the order of Charlemagne), in a coffin of lead, enclosed in a coffin of silver, and the whole secured in a sarcophagus of marble, and finally committed to the earth near the scenes which had witnessed his transcendent labors. I do not know whether any monument of marble and granite was erected to his memory; but he needs no chiselled stone, no storied urn, no marble bust, to perpetuate his fame. For nearly fifteen hundred years he has reigned as the great oracle of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, in matters of doctrine,--the precursor of Bernard, of Leibnitz, of Calvin, of Bossuet, all of whom reproduced his ideas, and acknowledged him as the fountain of their own greatness. "Whether," said one of the late martyred archbishops of Paris, "he reveals to us the foundations of an impure polytheism, so varied in its developments, yet so uniform in its elemental principles; or whether he sports with the most difficult problems of philosophy, and throws out thoughts which in after times are sufficient to give an immortality to Descartes,--we always find in this great doctor all that human genius, enlightened by the Spirit of God, can explain, and also to what a sublime height reason herself may soar when allied with faith."
AUTHORITIES.
The voluminous Works of Saint Augustine, especially his "Confessions." Mabillon, Tillemont, and Baronius have written very fully of this great Father. See also Vaughan's Life of Thomas Aquinas. Neander, Geisler, Mosheim, and Milman indorse, in the main, the eulogium of Catholic writers. There are numerous popular biographies, of which those of Baillie and Schaff are among the best; but the most satisfactory book I have read is the History of M. Poujoulat, in three volumes, issued at Paris in 1846. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, has an extended biography. Even Gibbon pays a high tribute to his genius and character.
THEODOSIUS THE GREAT.
A.D. 346-395.