Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Brown
Read between
January 10 - January 11, 2019
Roman North Africa was one of the last provinces of the western empire to have maintained a high standard of civic life.
The duty of the Christian preacher was to urge the rich no longer to spend their money on their beloved, well-known city, but to lose it, almost heedlessly, in the faceless mass of the poor. Only that utterly counterfactual gesture—a gesture that owed nothing to the claims of one’s hometown or of one’s fellow citizens—would earn the rich “treasure in heaven.”
We cannot understand the prodigious output of Christian sermons from all over the empire, advocating almsgiving to the poor, unless we bear in mind that we are dealing with a church and with a society for whom the horizons of the possible had, relatively suddenly, been blown open.
Christians no longer limited their activities to the somewhat cozy care only of impoverished fellow believers. The new obligation of outreach to the poor as a whole placed a totally novel burden on the bishops and clergy, for which many churches were ill prepared.
they were being urged to direct some, at least, of their wealth in a markedly different direction from that to which they were accustomed—toward the faceless and unglamorous poor.
An entire society found itself wrestling with its self-image.
He took the task of preaching on the relations between the rich and the poor very seriously. His audience may not always have included large numbers of the poor, but his preaching left those who heard him in no doubt as to their duties toward the poor.
In these sermons, Augustine did not urge the clergy to appeal only to the compassion of their Christian hearers, far from it. The clergy were to go straight for the jugular and attack the rival system of giving—the ideology of civic euergetism.
euergetism,
doing good deeds
Augustine implied that only by setting the church on an imaginative collision course with the circus could the rich ever be persuaded to notice the poor.
Augustine’s sermons at that time amounted to a direct challenge to the ideology that had rendered the poor invisible to the non-Christian and even to the Christian rich: “Driven crazy by this and puffed up with pride … they even wish to lose their fortunes by giving—giving to actresses, giving to cabaret artists, giving to wild beast hunters, giving to charioteers. They pour forth not only their inherited fortunes, but their very souls. Yet they draw back with disgust from the poor, because the People [the populus—the citizens gathered in the hippodromes and amphitheaters] do not shout for the
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to make reality look different.
his novel stories were about the paradoxical joining of wealth, heaven, and the poor.
the notion of “alms” came to embrace three pious causes—care of the poor, support for the clergy, and the building and maintenance of churches.
Pelagius had addressed circles of men and women who suffered from a plethora of riches.
Augustine instantly understood the implied threat that such radicalism posed to traditional habits of religious giving.
Because of their radical nature, Augustine was determined to take a stand against Pelagian ideas on wealth.
almsgiving was an obligatory pious practice because it had an expiatory function.
Alms atoned for sins.
the notion of the redemption of sins through the giving of alms was calculated to startle the average person.
Sin came to be spoken of in financial terms. Sin was no longer seen as a load that could be lifted only by the heavy rituals of sacrifice associated with an archaic, agrarian society. Sin was a debt.
It was Satan who was the Scrooge-like accountant.
what seems at first sight to modern persons to be a crass commercialization of the religious imagination became one of the great “metaphors to live by” of the Jewish and Christian worlds.
To Augustine, from 412 onward, these words of the Lord’s Prayer—“Forgive us our sins”—provided the answer to Pelagius’s doctrine of the freedom of the will. Pelagius had offered a freedom to be perfect.
the Lord’s Prayer itself denied the possibility of perfection in this life.
The Lord’s Prayer was a daily reminder of a state of sinfulness that cried out for daily forgiveness.
Almsgiving provided the “wings” that brought the Dimitte nobis of the Lord’s Prayer up to heaven. Without such wings no prayer could fly.
perpetual giving was the counterpart of perpetual sin.
The “daily sins” that could be expiated by alms alone were not the big, cold crimes of violence, fraud, avarice, and adultery. They were the humdrum sins of everyday life. They also grew like hair—or like the prickles of the humble hedgehog.
though relieved from the burden of original sin through baptism, all members of the church were still spiritual convalescents.
He regarded them as precisely the sort of sins that could be dealt with by almsgiving.
He did not expect heroic renunciations of wealth. Rather, “small change” sins were met by “small change” outlays to the poor.
Augustine never discouraged heavy giving by the rich, but his insistence on the expiatory nature of giving ensured that the rich did not see themselves as special.
A citizen gave to the city, quite frankly, so as to show his own glory and that of his family. Citizens were not supposed to give in that way to the church. Rather, one gave “for the remission of sins.”
This language brought to the gifts of even the wealthy a note of human fragility, a sense of risk and of a need for safety for the soul, such as could be shared by all Christians, rich and poor alike.
room in such a view for relatively humble donors.
In this way, Augustine gave his Christian contemporaries a doctrine for the long haul. Driven as it was by the perpetual motion of the need to expiate sin, religious giving endured. Sin was permanent, and for that reason, religious giving also had to be permanent, regular, and devoted, above all, to the expiation of sin.
By the 420s, the twilight zone had widened to embrace the majority of the population of an officially Christian Roman Empire.
He did not admit (or he did not realize) that he had raised a problem for all later ages: How long would it take for souls to pass through that purging fire?
It was in this twilight zone, between human time and eternity, that Augustine suggested that the prayers and offerings of the faithful might be most effective.
The Neoplatonic solution was that souls still weighed down with past sins must descend again, through metempsychosis, to have these sins purged by a new existence in the body.
Platonic philosophers thought that these blemishes caused them to descend again to earth.
An emperor showed his power at its most stunning by exercising the prerogative of mercy.
He knew that images based on the almost whimsical exercise of the imperial prerogative of mercy would encourage Christians to put too much trust in that mercy.
The image of Christ as the ever-generous, good emperor and of the saints as supportive patrons would encourage sinners to lie low and wait until Christ declared a general amnesty at the Last Judgment.
regular almsgiving, along with regular prayer, was a constant reminder of a fallen human condition that demanded constant expiation.
penance, expiation, and reform. This concern led them to bring the other world into this world, so as to rebuke the sins and to redress the injustices of their own times, and to secure the souls of believers in the world to come.
He died in the 470s, having witnessed the end of the Western Roman Empire. His works are suffused by a new sense of urgency, driven by the fear of God’s judgment in this world and in the next.
Only by generous donations to the church could the rich entertain “one tiny flicker of hope” that they might be saved from this grim tribunal.
Never before had wealth and the afterlife been brought together in so menacing a manner.
