Blessed Augustine

also see Book Review posted January 2017

The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church

  by Fr. Seraphim Rose

The originally essay was published in Orthodox Word magazine 1978.  Then in 1980 Fr. Seraphim published it in booklet form with the preface pastrd below.  The first copyrighted edition was published 1983.  Fr. Seraphim's preface is included in the 2007 edition currently available for purchase from various book-sellers for a reasonable price.  If that changes, please, let me know.  joannahigginbotham@runbox.com

Preface

This little study of Blessed Augustine is presented here in book form at the request of a number of Orthodox Christians who read it in its original form in The Orthodox Word (nos. 79 and 80, 1978) and found it to have a message for the Orthodox Christians of today.  It can make no claim to completeness as a study of the theology of Blessed Augustine; only one theological issue (grace and free will) is threat here in detail, while the rest of the study is chiefly historical.  If it has any value, it is in revealing the attitude of the Orthodox Church to Blesed Augustine over the centuries; and in trying to define his place in the Orthodox Church, we have perhaps thrown some light on the problem of being Orthodox in our contemporary world, where the feeling and savor of true Orthodox Christianity are so rarely encountered among Orthodox theologians.  While setting forth the Orthodox attitude towards Blessed Augustine, the author has also had in mind to remove him as a "scapegoat" for today's academic theologians and thus to help free us all to see his and our own weakneses in a little clearer light—for his weaknesses, to a surprising degree, are indeed close to our own.

These weakneses of ours were vividly brought out for the author not long after the publication of the original study, when he met a Russian, a recent emigrant from the Soviet Union, who had become converted to Orthdooxy in Russia but still understood much of it in terms of the Eastern religious views which he had long help.  For him Blessed Augustine also was a kind of scapegoat; he was accused of mistranslating and misunderstanding Hebrew terms, of teaching wrongly about "original sin," etc.  Well, yes, one cannot deny that Blessed Augustine applied his over-logicalness to this doctrine also and taught a distorted view of the Orthodox doctrine of ancestral sin— a view, once more, not so much "un-Orthodox" as narrow and incomplete.  Augustine virtually denied that man has any goodness or freedom in himslef, and he thought that each man is responsible for the guilt of Adam's sin in addition to sharing its consequences; Orthodox theology sees these views as one-sided exaggerations of the true Christian teaching.

However, the deficiences of Augustine's doctrine were made b this Russian emigrant into an excuse for setting forth a most un-Orthdoox teaching of man's total freedom from ancestral sin.  Some one-sided criticisms of Augustine's teaching on original sin even among more Orthodox thinkers have led to similar exaggerations, resulting in unnecessary confusions among Orthdoox believers: some writers are so much "against Augustine that they leave the impression that Pelagius was perhaps, after all, an Orthdoox teacher (despite the Church's condemnation of him; others delight in shocking readers by declaring that the doctrine of original sin is a "heresy."

Such over-reactions to the exaggerations of Augustine are worse than the errors they think to correct.  In such cases Blesed Augustine becomes, not merely a "scapegoat" on which one loads all possible theological errors, justly or unjustly, but something even more dangerous: an excuse to an elitest philosophy of the superiority of "Eastern wisdom" over everything "Western."  According to this philosophy, not only Augustine himself, but also everyone under any kind of "Western influence," including many of the eminent Orthdoox theologians of recent centuries, does not "really understand" Orthodox doctrine and must be taught by the present-day exponents of the "patristic revival."  Bishop Theophan the Recluse, the great 19th-century Russian Father, is often especially singled out for abuse in this regard: because he used some expressions borrowed from the West, and even translated some WEstern books (even while changing them to remove all un-Orthodox ideas) since he saw that the spiritually impoverished Orthodox Orthodox people could benefit from such books(in this he was only following the earlier example of St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain)—our present-day "elitists" try to discredit him by smearing him with the name of "scholastic."  The further implication of these criticisms is clear: if such great Orthdoox teachers and Blessed Augustine and Bishop Theophan cannot be trusted, then how much less can the rest of us ordinary Orthdoox Christians understand the complexities of Orthdoox doctrine?  The "true doctrine" of the Church must be so subtle that it can "really" be understood only by the few who have theological degrees from the modernist Orthdoox academies where the "patristic revival" is in full bloom, or are otherwise certifiec as "genuinely patristic" thinkers.

Yet, a strange self-contraadiction besets this "patristic elite": their language, their tone, their whole approach to such questions— are so very Western (sometimes even jesuitical"!) that one is astonished at their blindness in trying to criticize what is obviously so much a part of themselves.  The "Western" approach to theology, the over-logicalness from which, yes, Blessed Augustine )but not Bishop Theophan) did suffer, the over-reliance on the deductions of our fallible mind—is so much a part of every man living today that it is simply foolishness to pretend that it is a problem of someone else and not of ourselves first and foremost.  If only we all had even a part of that deep and true Orthodoxy of the heart (to borrow an expression of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk) which Blessed Augustine and Bishop Theophan both possessed to a superlative degree, we would be much less inclined to exaggerate their errors and faults, real or imagined.

Let the correctors of Augustine's teaching continue their work if they will; but let them do it with more charity, more compassion, more Orthodoxy, more understanding of the fact that Blessed Augustine is in the same heaven towards which we all are striving, unless we wish to deny the Orthodoxy of all those Fathers who regarded him as an Orthodox Saint, from the early Fathers of Gaul through Sts. Photios of Constantinople, Mark of Ephesus, Demetrius of Rostov, to our recent and present teachers of Orthodoxy, headed by Archbishop John Maximovitch.  At the least, it is impolite and presumptuous to speak disrespectfully of a Father whom the Church and her Fathers ave loved and glorified.  Our "correctness"—even if it is really as "correct" as we may think it is—can be no excuse for such disrespect.  Those Orthdoox Christians who even now continue to express their understanding of grace and ancestral sin in a language influenced by Blessed Augustine are not deprived of the Church's grace; let those who are more "correct than they in their understanding fear to lose this grace through pride.

Since the original publication of this study there has been a Roman Catholic response to it: we have been accused of trying to "steal" Blessed Augustine from the Latins!  No:  Blessed Augustine has always belonged to the Orthodox Church, which alone has properly evaluated both his errors and his greatness.  Let Roman Catholics think what they will of him, but we have only tried to point out the place he has always held in the Orthodox Church and in the hearts of Orthodox beleivers.

By the prayers of the holy Hierarch Augustine and of all Thy Saints, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us!  Amen.

               Hieromonk Seraphim

               Pascha, 1980