A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

sack of the city of Rome itself by a Visigoth army led by Alaric in 410.

The Western Latin Church now added to Damasus’s assertion of its tradition and Ambrose’s demonstration of how it could outface worldly power by finding a theologian who would give it its own voice and shape its thinking down to modern times:

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.

Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes.

He is one of the few writers from the early Church era some of whose work can still be read for pleasure,

Manichaeism,

he pursued academic success in Rome and Milan

in Milan he also became fascinated by Bishop Ambrose.

in 385 he broke with his mistress in order to make a good marriage.

In his own account, the crucial prompting was the voice of a child overheard in a garden – children seem to have had a good sense of timing in Milan.

his plans for marriage were abandoned for a life of celibacy.

transmits sin from one generation to another.

the impact of meeting a fellow North African

Metaphor? Or is he talking sour meeting Ambrose?

leaving his teaching career to follow Antony’s example

Haha

the Donatists,

From 387

In 391

the Donatists,

Aurelius, the statesmanlike Bishop of Carthage;

parable in which a host had filled up places at his banquet with an order, ‘Compel them to come in’.

that a Christian government had the duty to support the Church by punishing heresy and schism,

How could God’s providence allow the collapse of the manifestly Christian Roman Empire, especially the sack of Rome by barbarian armies in 410?

Any reflection of the Deuteronomistic history? Haha

traditionalists in religion were inclined to say that Rome’s flirtation with the Christian Church was at the root of the problem,

Christians could not understand how a heretical Arian like the Goth Alaric had been allowe...

Part of the Christian response was to argu...

Any reflection of the Deuteronomistic history? Haha

Paulus Or...

a Spanish protégé of ...

The City of God (De Civitate Dei).

the problem at the centre of Augustine’s thought: what is the nature and cause of evil, and how does it relate to God’s majesty and all-powerful goodness?

For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, ‘the loss of good’, since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness,

‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’.

a struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history.

as biblical history itself demonstrated

the City is on pilgrimage

Pelagius.

Upper-class circles in Rome, newly Christianized at the end of the fourth century, were anxious for spiritual direction and a number of ‘holy men’ hastened to supply the demand.

were the affluent people among whom Pelagius ministered simply joining the Church as an easy option, without any real sense that they must transform their lives in the process?

Augustine’s preoccupation with God’s majesty seemed to leave humankind helpless puppets who could easily abandon all responsibility for their conduct.

followed thoughts of Tertullian

The only Latin theologian from the second and third centuries.

talked of humankind being wholly soiled by a guilt in...

which they termed ‘orig...

‘That we are able to see with our eyes is no power of ours; but it is in our power that we make a good or a bad use of our eyes …

Error is created. Truth is eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. "What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any more than I would Question a window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it. ~ Wm. Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment, p. 95.

Pelagius believed that the nature of a ‘Holy Church’ was based on the holiness of its members: exactly what the Donatists said about the Church,

Pelagius’s followers pushed the implications of this further, to insist that although Adam sinned, this sin did not transmit itself through every generation as original sin, but was merely a bad example, which we can ignore if we choose.

This misses the point that Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the highest standards demanded by God.

the mixed human society of vice and virtue which Augustine presents in the ‘City of God’, where no Christian has the right to avoid everyday civic responsibilities in this fallen world,

It is worth noticing that his first denunciations of Pelagius’s theology came not in tracts

written for fellow intellectuals, but in sermons for his own congregation.

The sack of Rome in 410 produced a scatter of refugees throughout the Mediterranean and this began spreading the dispu...