In the space of three centuries following the death of Christ, two very different threats arose to bedevil the life of the Church. The first was persecution, which took fierce and resolute form right from the start. Wave upon wave of hatred was directed at those who persisted in the practice of the Christian Faith—not only from the Jews, who bitterly resented the fact that the followers of Jesus left the worship of the temple for the sake of a “blasphemer” whose execution they had welcomed, but from Imperial Rome as well, whose fury unleashed itself upon all who refused to honor the household gods. And because the gods were seen as immortal, and the Roman state no less so, any impiety shown to the presiding deities was seen as an attack upon the sacred office of the emperor himself, thus punishable by death.
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But all that came to a surprising end with the conversion of Constantine, whose Edict of Milan, in 313, conferred legitimacy upon the Church, thus allowing Christianity to become for the first time in history what God had intended for His Bride from the beginning: a people united, as St. Augustine would later say, by the things for which they had a shared love.
Yet, notwithstanding the end of the official campaign by pagan Rome to exterminate its enemies, there was yet another threat, far more insidious and systemic, which has never really gone away. Like an old penny that keeps turning up to debase the currency of true belief, it never goes completely out of circulation. And that would be the menace posed by heresy, which may be defined as the attempt to destroy the Faith from within—not by external force of arms, which aims to kill the body, but by false and deceitful ideas, which seek to rob the soul of its integrity and thus replace the rule of faith with something altogether alien.
By the end of the fourth century, the Age of Persecution was over, the Church not only having survived the hostility of Imperial Rome but, astonishingly enough, having quite succeeded in baptizing the whole Mediterranean world. That particular fear, for the time being at least, had been mercifully removed. Not the far deadlier contagion of heresy, however, which had, in the meantime, metastasized into movements like Manicheanism and Pelagianism. Were these to have succeeded, it seems fair to say, nothing distinctively Christian would have remained.
To be sure, not everyone would succumb to temptation. Or, as in the case of Augustine—who fell out with the one following a decade-long membership, even as he flirted for a brief time with the other—some would need to repent of both. The lure of heresy, however seductive it proved to be, did not in the end consume whole populations among the baptized. Not without a struggle, it didn’t. And the Church had heavy guns with which to engage and repel the enemy’s advance, including those deployed by Augustine.
Which brings us to the age which bears his name, a time no longer marked by lethal attempts to destroy Christianity from without. A time when the public life of the empire had become so hospitable to the outward forms of faith that Christians no longer felt in the least constrained in the exercise of their piety. Why even the life of sanctity became an attractive option for serious-minded souls!
“By the time of Augustine,” writes Peter Brown in his landmark biography of the Bishop of Hippo,
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the Church had settled down in Roman Society. The Christian’s worst enemies could no longer be placed outside him: they were inside, his sins and his doubts; and the climax of a man’s life would not be martyrdom, but conversion from the perils of his own past. Wandering, temptations, sad thoughts of mortality and the search for truth: these had always been the stuff of autobiography for fine souls, who refused to accept superficial security. Pagan philosophers had already created a tradition of “religious autobiography” in this vein: it will be continued by Christians in the fourth century, and will reach its climax in the Confessions of St. Augustine.
And he would not have needed to cast his net very far in search of readers. An existing audience was already there, Brown tells us, waiting to be fed. “It had been created for him quite recently, by the amazing spread of asceticism in the Latin world.” It was the search for God, for transformation of the self, that defined these men, known as the Servi Dei, or the Servants of God. It was, reports Brown, “that quest for perfection which characterized the amazing generation of the end of the fourth century.”
Of that generation marked by the longing for God—for a life of growing perfection in the sight of God, amid the inward struggles of the soul—few would rise as high as Augustine in the annals of sanctity and wisdom. And none would achieve greater excellence in giving expression to the journey along the way than Augustine in the pages of the Confessions, his literary and spiritual masterpiece.
