Church History — Unit 4: Augustine, Monasticism, and the Fall of Rome

Unit 3 ended with the bishops at Chalcedon in 451. By that year the Western Roman Empire was already half-collapsed. Visigoths had sacked Rome itself in 410, Vandals would do it again in 455, and the last Western emperor would be deposed by a Germanic chieftain in 476. The political order that had carried the gospel from Pentecost to Chalcedon was dying. Most observers thought the church would die with it.

The church did not die. She survived, in the West, largely because of three things that came out of the fifth century. The first was a North African bishop named Augustine of Hippo, whose theological work would shape the Western church for the next thousand years and still shapes evangelical preaching today. The second was a Latin scholar named Jerome, whose translation of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate) became overwhelmingly the dominant Bible of the Latin West for the next millennium. The third was a movement out of the Egyptian desert called monasticism, which would preserve Christian learning, copy Christian books, and evangelize barbarian Europe long after the Roman state had ceased to function.

Unit 4 is the story of those three gifts and the empire that fell around them. We will spend most of our time with Augustine because he is, after the apostle Paul, the most important theologian in the history of the church — and the man whose grace doctrine connects the early church to the Reformation we will reach in Unit 7.

"You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You." — Augustine, Confessions I.1

Augustine was born in 354 in the small North African town of Thagaste. His father Patricius was a pagan Roman official; his mother Monica was a devout Christian whose prayers and tears for her wandering son became one of the great mother-stories of church history. Monica wanted Augustine baptized as a baby, but in the custom of the day baptism was often delayed; she planted gospel seeds in him for the next thirty-three years and waited.

Augustine was sent to Carthage at seventeen for higher education. He fell at once into the city's pleasures, took a concubine he would keep for fifteen years, and fathered a son he named Adeodatus — "given by God." He read Cicero's now-lost dialogue Hortensius, which set him searching for wisdom, but the Bible struck him as crude and the Christian God as too obviously the local religion of his mother. He joined instead the Manicheans, a dualistic sect (we met dualism with the Gnostics in Unit 2) that taught matter is evil, spirit is good, and an eternal cosmic struggle is going on between two nearly equal powers. Manichean teaching let Augustine off the hook morally: his sin came from the evil principle in his flesh, not from a corrupt will he had to repent of. He stayed in the sect for nine years.

The dam began to crack when he was thirty. He had moved from Carthage to Rome and then to Milan, where he had been appointed professor of rhetoric in the imperial capital. In Milan he went to hear the great preacher Ambrose — not for the message, but to study the bishop's technique. He stayed because the words began to find him. Ambrose's allegorical handling of the Old Testament showed him that the Bible was not the crude book his teenage self had judged it. The Manichean answers began to look thin under serious examination. Monica, who had followed her son to Milan, watched and waited and prayed.

The break came in the late summer of 386. Augustine, weeping in a garden at the breaking point of his soul, heard a child's voice from a neighboring house chanting "tolle, lege, tolle, lege" — "take, read, take, read." He picked up a copy of Paul's letters lying on a bench, opened at random, and read: "Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts" (Romans 13:13–14). The words that struck him were the words Monica had been waiting thirty-three years to see strike him. He converted on the spot. Ambrose baptized him at the Easter Vigil of 387. Monica died at Ostia a few months later, ready to go.

Augustine returned to North Africa, sold his patrimony, and tried to live a life of philosophical retirement with a few friends. The church would not let him. In 391 he was passed through a crowd in Hippo and forcibly ordained a priest. In 396 he became bishop of Hippo. He held the see for thirty-four years, until his death in 430 with Vandal armies besieging the city walls. From that small North African seat he wrote more than five million words and shaped the theology of the Western church for the next thousand years.

Around the year 400, when he had been bishop for four years, Augustine sat down to write a book unlike any that had ever been written before. The Confessions is an autobiography in the form of a long prayer addressed to God. Augustine tells the story of his life from infancy through his conversion and beyond, holding nothing back, taking responsibility for everything. There had been confessions of sin in the Bible. There had been autobiographies in the ancient world. There had never been a book that combined the two with the searching honesty of The Confessions.

The book opens with a sentence that has been quoted ten thousand times: "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You." The thirteen books that follow trace one restless heart through every false rest it tried — sex, ambition, philosophy, sect membership, professional success — before it finally found its true rest in Christ.

The most famous scenes are themselves spiritual classics. In Book II, the boyhood Augustine and his friends steal pears from a neighbor's tree — not from hunger, since they had better fruit at home, but for the sheer pleasure of doing wrong. Augustine spends pages on this small act because it taught him what sin is at its core: not the love of bad things, but the perverted love of doing wrong as wrong. In Book VIII the tolle lege garden conversion is told. In Book X Augustine breaks into one of the most famous prayers ever written: "Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You! And behold, You were within me and I was outside, and there I sought You." In Book IX Monica's death at Ostia is described with a tenderness no other ancient writer matches.

The Confessions taught Christians a kind of self-examination none had practiced quite this way before. The pastor who has read Augustine's account of his own heart will counsel his people with a sharper diagnostic eye. The believer who has prayed Augustine's prayers will know himself better, and Christ better, for the rest of his life.

Augustine is called the Doctor of Grace, and he earned the title in a long fight with a British monk named Pelagius. Around 400 Pelagius came to Rome from Britain. He was a serious, ascetic man — not the sort the church usually has to fight. But his teaching, when examined, was a denial of grace at the bone.

Pelagius taught that human beings are born morally neutral. Adam's sin damaged Adam alone; it did not corrupt human nature itself. Each child is born as innocent as Adam was created. Each person has full free will to choose good or evil at every moment. Sin is not an inherited condition; it is an accumulation of bad choices. Salvation, accordingly, is something we achieve by following Christ's example, helped by the moral instruction of the gospel and the example of His sinless life. In principle, Pelagius taught, a man could be sinless if he tried hard enough.

Augustine recoiled. The whole shape of the gospel, as he had experienced it in his own conversion and as he read it in Paul, was that human beings are born already corrupt, that the will is bound by sin until grace frees it, and that even our turning to God is a gift of God before it is a choice we make. Augustine countered Pelagius across more than a decade of writing in books like On Nature and Grace, On the Spirit and the Letter, and On the Predestination of the Saints. Five points of his anti-Pelagian theology have shaped Western soteriology ever since.

First, original sin. When Adam fell, all his descendants fell in him. We are born already alienated from God, with hearts inclined to evil. Augustine pointed to Romans 5 and to the universal human experience that no one has ever had to teach a child to lie. Second, the bondage of the will. The will is not neutral. The unredeemed will is enslaved to its disordered loves. We can choose what we want, but our wants are corrupted, so left to ourselves we cannot want God truly. Third, prevenient grace. The grace that turns a sinner toward God comes before any decision the sinner makes for God. Even faith is a gift, not a contribution. Fourth, the necessity of grace at every step. We are saved by grace, kept by grace, sanctified by grace, and brought home by grace. There is never a moment when grace can step back and let us finish ourselves. Fifth, predestination. God's choice of His elect is not a response to foreseen merit; it is the foundation of any merit they will ever have.

The Council of Carthage in 418 condemned Pelagianism, and the Council of Ephesus in 431 reaffirmed the condemnation. The Western church received Augustine's grace doctrine as the rule of orthodoxy. A thousand years later, when a German monk named Martin Luther rediscovered Romans, he discovered Augustine again. The line from Augustine to the Reformation runs through Romans 5 and the doctrine of original sin and the bondage of the will. Unit 7 will pick up that line. Unit 4 lays it down.

On August 24, 410, Visigothic armies under King Alaric entered the city of Rome and sacked it. They were Christians of an Arian variety and they spared the city's churches, but the political shock was incalculable. Rome had not been sacked by a foreign enemy in eight hundred years. "My voice is choked with sobs," Jerome wrote from Bethlehem when he heard. "The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken."

Pagans across the empire blamed Christianity. The old gods had protected Rome for a thousand years, they said. Then Rome had abandoned the old gods for Christ, and the old gods had let her fall. Augustine sat down to answer them. The book that resulted, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), occupied him for fourteen years (412–426) and is one of the most influential books ever written by a Christian.

Augustine's central argument is the doctrine of the two cities. From the beginning of human history there have been two communities running through the world side by side. The City of Man is built on the love of self to the contempt of God; it includes Babylon and Egypt and Rome and every empire that has ever risen by the sword and fallen by it. The City of God is built on the love of God to the contempt of self; it includes Abel and Abraham and Israel and the church, and it is the only city that endures forever. The two cities are mingled in this present age. They will be separated only at the final judgment.

The implications shaped Western Christian thinking for the next thousand years. Earthly empires are mortal. Rome was always going to fall, because Rome was a city of man. The church is not the empire. The church may live for a season under imperial favor, but she does not depend on it; she existed before Constantine and she will exist after the last Christian emperor. The Christian's true citizenship is in the City of God (Philippians 3:20). Wherever a believer is on the political map, he is a pilgrim with his real homeland elsewhere. Augustine wrote those words while Vandals were preparing to lay siege to his own city. He died in 430 with the siege underway. Hippo fell shortly after. The City of God remained.

Augustine's contemporary Jerome (c. 347–420) was, alongside Augustine, the second great Latin Father of the West, and the church's first great biblical scholar. Jerome was an irascible monk and Latin stylist who learned Hebrew (a rare skill among Western Christians) and devoted his life to the text of Scripture.

Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome around 382 to revise the multiple competing Latin translations of the Bible that were circulating in the Western church. The Old Testament had been translated piecemeal from the Greek Septuagint; the New Testament existed in several rough Latin versions. Jerome did far more than revise. He retranslated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew (the first major Western Christian to go behind the Septuagint to the Hebrew text), translated the New Testament from Greek, and produced a single unified Latin Bible. The result became known as the Vulgate (from versio vulgata, the "common version") because it was meant to be the Bible the common Latin-speaking church could share.

The Vulgate became the single most important book in Western Christianity for the next thousand years. Every preacher in the medieval West preached from it. Every theologian quoted from it. Every monk copied it. The vocabulary of Western Christian theology — justification, regeneration, sacrament, predestination — is largely Jerome's Latin choices for the underlying Greek and Hebrew terms. When Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in the fourteenth century, he translated from the Vulgate. When Luther translated into German in the sixteenth century, he went back to the original languages, but he was reacting against centuries of Vulgate dominance. Jerome shaped the West's relationship with Scripture more than any other single translator until Tyndale.

Jerome's most quoted line is short and sharp: "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." The man who said it spent forty years in a Bethlehem cave with the text in front of him. He knew what he was talking about.

While Augustine and Jerome were writing in their cities, another Christian movement was forming in the Egyptian desert that would prove just as durable and arguably just as consequential. Monasticism was the deliberate withdrawal of Christians from ordinary urban society to pursue God in radical simplicity, prayer, and discipline. It began as a protest movement against the increasingly comfortable, increasingly worldly post-Constantinian church. If everyone in the empire was now nominally Christian, some Christians reasoned, then the only way to take the gospel seriously was to leave the empire's cities and go where its compromises could not reach.

Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356) and the desert

The first famous Christian hermit was Anthony of Egypt. Around 270, as a young man, Anthony heard the Sunday reading of Matthew 19:21 — "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor… and come, follow Me." He took it as a personal command. He sold his inheritance, gave the proceeds to the poor, and walked into the Egyptian desert, where he lived for the next eighty-five years in increasingly remote solitude. Athanasius (whom we met in Unit 3) wrote his biography — the Life of Anthony — which became one of the most-read books in the early church and inspired thousands to follow Anthony's example. Augustine himself reports in the Confessions that the Life of Anthony was one of the books God used to push him toward his own conversion.

Pachomius (c. 292–348) and communal monasticism

Anthony was a hermit; the next step was community. Pachomius, a former Roman soldier, founded the first cenobitic (communal) monasteries around 320 along the Nile. His monasteries had walls, gates, schedules, common meals, common prayers, and a written rule. Hundreds of monks could live together under a single abbot. Pachomian monasticism became the dominant model in the East and was carried west by men like Cassian.

Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547) and the Western rule

The figure who would shape Western monasticism for the next fifteen centuries was Benedict of Nursia. Disgusted with the worldliness of Rome, the young Benedict went into the hills, lived as a hermit, gathered disciples, and around 529 founded a monastery on the mountain of Monte Cassino south of Rome. There he wrote the Rule of Saint Benedict, a short, balanced, humane document that would become the foundation of nearly every Western monastery for the next thousand years.

The Benedictine rule organized the day around the famous double command ora et labora — pray and work. The monk would pray the Psalms together with his brothers eight times a day (the Divine Offices), work with his hands at manual labor for several hours, study Scripture and the Fathers in his cell, and live under obedience to the abbot in stable community for life. Benedict called the monastery "a school for the Lord's service." The rule's genius was its moderation. It was not the punishing asceticism of the Egyptian desert. It was a balanced, sustainable life designed for ordinary believers who wanted to give their whole lives to God.

Benedictine monasteries became the cultural backbone of the Christian West during the centuries when the Roman state had collapsed. Monks copied the books of antiquity that would otherwise have been lost. They drained swamps, cleared forests, and rebuilt ruined Roman estates as agricultural centers. They evangelized barbarian Europe; missionary monks like Augustine of Canterbury (Britain), Boniface (Germany), and the Irish Columbanus (Continental Europe) carried the gospel into territories the Roman legions had never held. For five hundred years after Rome fell, the largest single thing keeping Western civilization alive was Benedictine monks doing exactly what Benedict's Rule told them to do.

The Western Roman Empire died in stages across the fifth century. 410: Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome. 430: Vandals besiege and capture Hippo as Augustine lies dying. 451: Attila the Hun is turned back at the Battle of Châlons. 455: Vandals under Genseric sack Rome a second time. 476: The last Western Roman emperor, a teenager bearing the joke-name Romulus Augustulus ("little Augustus"), is deposed by the Germanic chieftain Odoacer. The Western Empire ends. The Eastern Empire, centered on Constantinople, will continue for another thousand years as Byzantium.

The new political map of the West was drawn by barbarian kingdoms. Visigoths in Spain. Ostrogoths in Italy. Franks in Gaul (modern France). Vandals in North Africa. Anglo-Saxons in Britain. Most of these peoples had already been evangelized in the fourth century by Arian missionaries (the most famous was Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, who translated the Bible into Gothic). They were therefore Arian Christians ruling over Nicene populations — an awkward situation that produced two centuries of friction before most of the kingdoms eventually converted to Nicene Christianity. The decisive turning point came in 496 when the Frankish king Clovis was baptized as a Nicene Christian, providing the West with its first major Catholic barbarian king and beginning the long alliance between the Roman papacy and the Frankish monarchy that would shape medieval Europe.

The church survived the fall of the empire because she was never built on the empire. Augustine's City of God had been right. The political structures collapsed; the bishops kept preaching; the monasteries kept copying; the catechumens kept being baptized; the Vulgate kept being read. By the year 500 a recognizable medieval Christian Europe was beginning to take shape on the rubble of the Western Empire. Unit 5 will pick up that story.

First, conversion is God's work, not the convert's achievement. Augustine spent thirty-three years running from God before God ran him down. Monica spent thirty-three years praying for a son she had every reason to consider lost. Pastor, the conversion you most despair of may be one Bible verse and one open page from happening. Pray. Plant. Wait. Trust. The grace that found Augustine in a Milan garden is not in short supply.

Second, the gospel is grace from first to last. Pelagius is not a fifth-century museum piece. Every generation produces a Pelagian moment when the church drifts from grace toward effort, when sermons subtly shift from "Christ has saved sinners" to "good people try harder." Augustine's five points — original sin, bondage of the will, prevenient grace, grace at every step, predestination — are not Reformation novelties. They are the gospel as it has been preached since Paul, and they will be the gospel until Christ returns.

Third, the church is not the empire. Augustine wrote The City of God while watching his civilization end. He warned the Christians of his day not to confuse the Roman political order with the kingdom of God. That confusion would have killed the church when Rome fell. Pastor, do not bind your church's confidence to any political party, any electoral cycle, or any cultural moment. The City of God is not on this year's ballot.

Fourth, hidden faithfulness is not wasted faithfulness. The monk in his cell copying a manuscript was not on television. The Bethlehem cave where Jerome translated was not visited by celebrities. The mother praying nightly for a wandering son was not honored by anyone but God. And yet five hundred years after the empire fell, those hidden hands had built a Christian Europe. Be faithful in the small thing. The five-million-word legacy of Augustine started with a North African mother who would not stop praying.

Augustine died on August 28, 430, in his bishop's residence in Hippo. Vandal armies were besieging the city. The walls would fall a few months later and the city would burn. Augustine's library and his unfinished manuscripts were saved by the librarian Possidius, who carried them to safety; that is why we still have most of what Augustine wrote. The bishop himself was buried before the city fell. His final days had been spent praying the seven penitential psalms, written out in large letters and pinned to the walls of his sickroom.

Three years before he died, Augustine had written a small autobiographical work called the Retractations, in which he reviewed his entire literary career and corrected himself on dozens of small points. Even at the end of his life he was a man under the authority of Scripture, willing to be corrected by it, willing to walk back his own earlier sentences when the text demanded. The largest theological mind of the early church kept growing until the day he died.

The empire that had given Augustine his Latin language, his rhetorical training, his episcopal office, and his cultural framework died around him. The grace Augustine had received in a Milan garden, the doctrine of grace he had defended against Pelagius, the City of God he had described in fourteen books — these did not die. They went into the bloodstream of Western Christianity and have been there ever since. Pass this examination, and we will meet medieval Christianity in Unit 5 — the world Augustine helped build but never lived to see.