Blessed Augustine of Hippo: Rose’s Defense of a Western Father

Fr. Seraphim Rose mounted a sustained defense of Blessed Augustine of Hippo (354–430) as a genuinely Orthodox Church Father, arguing that Augustine is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar, was accepted by the Eastern Fathers, and that his theology – while differing in emphasis from the Greek patristic tradition – is not incompatible with Orthodox dogma when read carefully and in context. Rose’s defense is part of his broader conviction that the patristic tradition is a unified whole, encompassing both Eastern and Western Fathers, and that the modern tendency to exclude Augustine from the Orthodox consensus represents an overcorrection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Question: Is Augustine Orthodox?

The status of Blessed Augustine of Hippo within Orthodox theology is one of the most debated questions in modern Orthodox discourse. Augustine is the most influential Latin Father, and his theological legacy dominates Western Christianity – Roman Catholic and Protestant alike. In the Orthodox East, his reception has been more complex:

On the one hand, Augustine is commemorated as a saint in the Orthodox Church on June 15 — the date observed both in the Russian tradition and on the Greek calendar, where St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain placed him in his Synaxaristes (OrthodoxWiki, “Augustine of Hippo”; OCA, “Blessed Augustine, Bishop of Hippo,” June 15). He was cited approvingly by some Eastern Fathers and is included in patristic florilegia used at Ecumenical Councils. His Confessions and other devotional writings have been read by Orthodox Christians throughout the centuries.

On the other hand, several of Augustine’s distinctive theological positions – his teaching on original sin, his formulations regarding the procession of the Holy Spirit, his emphasis on predestination, and his understanding of grace and free will – have been identified by modern Orthodox theologians as departures from the Eastern patristic consensus. Figures such as Fr. John Romanides (whose 1957 Athens dissertation, published as The Ancestral Sin, traced the Western doctrine of original sin to Augustine) and Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos of Nafpaktos (who develops Romanides’ critique) have argued that Augustine’s theology represents a Western deviation that laid the groundwork for later Roman Catholic and Protestant errors.

Rose entered this debate as a defender of Augustine’s essential Orthodoxy, arguing that the modern Orthodox critique of Augustine goes too far and distorts the historical record. The sharpest expression of that critique in Rose’s own milieu came from Fr. Michael Azkoul, whose study The Influence of Augustine of Hippo on the Orthodox Church (Texts and Studies in Religion 56; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990) argued that Augustine stands outside the patristic tradition altogether. Rose’s letters of 1975–1981 explicitly criticize this kind of “heresy-hunting” against Augustine as excessive zeal and a failure of trust in the Church’s reception (the letters are collected in Patrick Barnes, ed., The Blessed Augustine of Hippo: His Place in the Orthodox Church — A Corrective).

Rose’s Argument for Augustine’s Orthodoxy

Rose’s defense of Blessed Augustine was articulated primarily in The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, written for The Orthodox Word in 1978 and issued as a book by St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (St. Herman Press) in 1983; later editions append Rose’s letters on Augustine (1975–1981), passages from the Confessions he found especially moving, and the liturgical service to Blessed Augustine commissioned by St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco (sainthermanmonastery.com book listing; Barnes, ed., The Blessed Augustine of Hippo: His Place in the Orthodox Church — A Corrective). His argument rests on several pillars:

1. Liturgical Commemoration

Rose noted that Augustine is commemorated as a saint in the Orthodox Church. This liturgical fact has theological weight: the Church does not commemorate heretics. If Augustine were genuinely heterodox in his essential theology, the Church would not have included him in the calendar. While liturgical commemoration does not imply endorsement of every sentence a Father wrote (the Church commemorates Fathers who erred on particular points while remaining fundamentally orthodox), it does establish a baseline of Orthodox acceptability (Rose, The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, St. Herman Press, 1983).

2. Eastern Patristic Reception

Rose pointed to the fact that Eastern Fathers and councils cited Augustine with approval. While Augustine’s works were less widely read in the Greek-speaking East than in the Latin West (partly due to the language barrier – Augustine wrote exclusively in Latin), those of his works that were known in the East were received without condemnation. Specifically:

  • The Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) ranged Augustine among the recognized orthodox teachers: the Emperor Justinian’s epistle to the council fathers lists him alongside Athanasius, Basil, the two Gregories, Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria, and the synodal record describes him as “shining forth most resplendently among the African Bishops” (Barnes, ed., The Blessed Augustine of Hippo: A Corrective, citing the acts of Constantinople II).
  • St. Photius the Great, in his Bibliotheca, noticed a Greek version of one of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works without condemning him (codex 54 witnesses a Greek translation of the De gestis Pelagii; De Gruyter, “The Greek Version(s) of Augustine’s De gestis Pelagii”). In his Mystagogy Photius went further, defending Augustine personally and urging that the Fathers’ imprecise expressions on the Spirit’s procession be passed over in charitable silence rather than weaponized.
  • St. Mark of Ephesus, at the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–1439), repeatedly called Augustine “the blessed” (ho makarios Augoustinos) and cited him approvingly — including in the thirty-fourth of his syllogistic chapters in defense of the Orthodox faith against the Latins — even while disagreeing with certain of his formulations; Mark is recorded as having spent money at Florence to acquire manuscripts of Augustine (Wikipedia, “Mark of Ephesus,” and the Florence acts; cf. Constas’s studies of Mark’s syllogistic chapters).

Rose argued that this pattern of reception demonstrates that the Eastern Church accepted Augustine as an orthodox teacher in his fundamental theology, even if his specific formulations on certain points differed from the Greek consensus.

3. Augustine on Grace and Free Will

One of the most contested areas of Augustine’s theology is his teaching on grace, predestination, and free will, developed especially in his anti-Pelagian writings (On the Spirit and the Letter, On Grace and Free Will, On the Predestination of the Saints, and others).

Rose argued that Augustine’s position is more nuanced than his critics (whether Calvinist or Orthodox) typically allow:

  • Against Pelagianism: Augustine rightly insisted, in agreement with the entire Church, that salvation is impossible without divine grace. Pelagius’s assertion that human beings can achieve righteousness by their own natural powers was correctly condemned at multiple councils (Carthage 418, Ephesus 431).
  • Grace and cooperation: While Augustine emphasized the priority and necessity of grace more strongly than some Eastern Fathers, he did not deny human cooperation (synergeia) with grace in the way that later Calvinism would. Augustine wrote: “God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us” (Sermo 169.11.13 [PL 38:923]; the phrasing “He who made you without yourself will not justify you without yourself” is a common paraphrase of the same passage, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1847 likewise cites). This principle of divine-human cooperation, while not as systematically developed in Augustine as in the Eastern tradition, is nevertheless present in his thought.
  • Predestination: Augustine’s teaching on predestination is his most problematic point from an Orthodox perspective. He taught that God, from all eternity, predestines some to salvation and permits others to fall into damnation (massa damnata). Rose acknowledged that this formulation is difficult but argued that Augustine’s predestination should be read in the context of his pastoral concern to safeguard the absolute primacy of grace, not as a systematic denial of human freedom. Rose noted that the Eastern Fathers also affirm divine foreknowledge and providence without thereby denying free will (Rose, The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, St. Herman Press, 1983).

Some Orthodox theologians hold a different view, arguing that Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings represent a genuine departure from the Eastern patristic balance between grace and free will. The fifth-century monks of southern Gaul — St. John Cassian above all, and later St. Vincent of Lérins and St. Faustus of Riez — resisted the strongest Augustinian formulations on predestination while affirming the necessity of grace. Cassian’s thirteenth Conference (“On the Protection of God”) holds that grace and the free movement of the will work together, sometimes grace preceding and sometimes the will’s first stirring being met and strengthened by grace (St. John Cassian, Conferences XIII, trans. Ramsey, ACW 57). The label “Semi-Pelagianism,” coined in later Western historiography for this Gallic current, is widely regarded as a misnomer; Orthodox writers (e.g., Sanidopoulos) argue that Cassian, Vincent, and Faustus articulated a synergism more consonant with the Eastern patristic consensus than with Pelagius.

4. Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology

Augustine’s De Trinitate is one of the great theological works of Christian antiquity. His approach to the Trinity differs in method and emphasis from the Cappadocian Fathers:

  • Starting point: The Cappadocians begin with the three Persons and work toward the unity of the divine essence. Augustine tends to begin with the unity of the divine essence and work toward the distinction of the Persons.
  • Psychological analogies: Augustine developed a series of “psychological” analogies for the Trinity (memory-understanding-will; lover-beloved-love) that are largely absent from the Greek tradition.
  • Relations: Augustine understood the Persons of the Trinity as constituted by their mutual relations, an approach that Thomas Aquinas would later systematize.

Rose argued that these methodological differences, while real, do not amount to heresy. Augustine does not deny the distinct personhood of Father, Son, and Spirit; he confesses the Nicene faith fully. His different starting point and his use of psychological analogies represent a legitimate theological exploration within the bounds of orthodoxy, not a departure from the faith of the councils (Rose, The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, St. Herman Press, 1983).

Modern Orthodox theologians who take a more critical view of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology – notably Vladimir Lossky (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch. 3) – argue that Augustine’s emphasis on the divine unity at the expense of the personal distinctions creates a structural imbalance that leads, among other things, to the Filioque. Rose was aware of this critique but did not accept it in its strongest form.

5. The Filioque

The most sensitive issue in any Orthodox assessment of Augustine is the Filioque – the teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son” (Filioque). Augustine is the primary patristic source for this doctrine, having written that “the Holy Spirit proceeds principally (principaliter) from the Father, and, without any interval of time, from both [Father and Son] in common” (De Trinitate XV.26.47 [PL 42:1095]; trans. NPNF I/3).

Rose made a careful distinction between Augustine’s formulation and the later Western dogmatization of the Filioque:

  • Augustine’s formulation: Augustine spoke of the Spirit proceeding from both Father and Son, but he maintained a “principally” (principaliter) from the Father, preserving an asymmetry that later Western theology often lost.
  • The later addition to the Creed: The unilateral insertion of the Filioque into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (beginning in Visigothic Spain in the sixth century and adopted at Rome in 1014) was a canonical and theological act that Augustine himself did not initiate and could not have foreseen.
  • St. Maximus the Confessor’s defense: Rose invoked the testimony of St. Maximus the Confessor, who in his Letter to Marinus (Opusculum 10 [PG 91:136]) defended the Western usage, insisting that the Romans “do not make the Son the cause of the Spirit, for they know that the Father is the one cause of the Son and the Spirit” — describing the Spirit’s progression through the Son and the unity of the essence, not a second eternal principle of the Spirit’s hypostatic existence (cf. Siecienski, The Filioque, Oxford, 2010).

Rose concluded that Augustine’s pneumatological formulations, while imprecise by later Eastern standards, do not amount to the heresy that the Filioque controversy would later expose. Augustine was attempting to express the Spirit’s intimate relationship to the Son within the life of the Trinity, not to establish a second arche (principle) for the Spirit’s procession.

The status of Augustine’s pneumatology remains a matter of ongoing discussion among Orthodox theologians. Those who take a more critical view argue that even Augustine’s nuanced formulation planted the seed from which the later heretical development grew.

6. Original Sin

Augustine’s teaching on original sin (peccatum originale) is another point of contention. In the Eastern patristic tradition, the consequences of Adam’s fall – mortality, corruption, and a tendency toward sin – are inherited by all humanity, but the guilt of Adam’s sin is not transmitted to his descendants. Augustine, influenced in part by a faulty Latin translation of Romans 5:12 (“in whom” rather than “because”), developed a doctrine of inherited guilt that became the foundation of Western hamartiology.

Rose acknowledged the real difference between Augustine’s position and the Eastern consensus but argued that:

  • Augustine’s emphasis on the universality and depth of the Fall is not wrong in itself; the Eastern Fathers also teach that the consequences of the Fall are catastrophic and universal.
  • Augustine’s language of inherited guilt must be read in the context of his pastoral concern to refute Pelagianism, which minimized the Fall and denied the necessity of grace for salvation.
  • The sharpest formulations of Augustinian hamartiology (such as the condemnation of unbaptized infants) represent the outer edge of Augustine’s thought, not its center. Augustine himself assigned the mildest punishment to unbaptized infants, indicating a certain pastoral hesitance.

Rose did not claim that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is identical to the Eastern teaching. He acknowledged the difference but argued that it falls within the range of legitimate patristic diversity rather than constituting outright heresy.

Note: The status of Blessed Augustine’s hamartiology remains discussed among Orthodox theologians. Some regard his formulation of inherited guilt as incompatible with the Eastern patristic consensus; others, following Rose, defend his essential Orthodoxy while acknowledging points of divergence. For the Eastern understanding, see the Orthodox guide’s treatment of ancestral sin.

The Broader Question: Western Fathers in Orthodox Theology

Rose’s defense of Augustine is part of a larger argument about the place of the Western (Latin) Fathers in Orthodox theology. Before the Great Schism (traditionally dated to 1054, though the separation was gradual), the Church was undivided, and the Latin Fathers – Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great (Gregory the Dialogist), and others – were part of the common patristic inheritance.

Rose argued that the modern tendency among some Orthodox theologians to retroactively exclude the Western Fathers from the Orthodox consensus is historically unjustified and theologically impoverishing. The pre-schism Western Fathers were members of the Orthodox Church, participated in the Ecumenical Councils (directly or through legates), and are commemorated as saints. To reject their theology wholesale is to amputate a significant portion of the patristic tradition.

At the same time, Rose acknowledged that the Latin Fathers’ theology developed within a different intellectual and linguistic environment than the Greek Fathers’, and that certain formulations – especially those that later became the foundation for distinctively Roman Catholic or Protestant developments – need to be read critically and in dialogue with the Eastern tradition.

The “Latin Captivity” Question

Rose’s position on Augustine stood in tension with a strong current in modern Orthodox theology – the critique of the “Latin captivity” of Russian theology articulated by Florovsky (Ways of Russian Theology) and extended by others. This critique argues that Russian Orthodox theology from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries was distorted by the uncritical adoption of Latin scholastic categories, including Augustinian hamartiology and sacramental theology.

Rose did not deny that such borrowing occurred or that it sometimes distorted Orthodox theology. But he distinguished between:

  • The legitimate reception of Augustine as an Orthodox Father of the undivided Church, and
  • The later, post-schism importation of specifically Western systematic developments built on Augustine’s foundations.

For Rose, the solution was not to reject Augustine but to read him within the context of the full patristic tradition, distinguishing what is genuinely catholic in his thought from what was later developed in a specifically Western direction.

Patristic Citations in Rose’s Defense

Rose drew on several patristic and ecclesiastical authorities to support his defense of Augustine:

  1. St. Maximus the Confessor: Defended the Western Fathers’ pneumatological language (the Spirit’s relation to the Son) as compatible with Eastern theology (Letter to Marinus = Opusculum 10 [PG 91:136]).
  2. St. Photius the Great: Despite his vigorous opposition to the Filioque, Photius did not condemn Augustine personally; in the Mystagogy he defended Augustine and Jerome, treating their imperfect expressions on the Spirit’s procession as the lapses of orthodox Fathers to be covered in charitable silence rather than as heresy (Photius, Mystagogy; as discussed in Barnes, ed., A Corrective).
  3. St. Mark of Ephesus: Referred to Augustine as “the blessed” (ho makarios) and cited him approvingly at the Council of Ferrara–Florence, 1438–1439 (Mark’s syllogistic chapters against the Latins).
  4. Liturgical witness: The inclusion of Augustine in the Orthodox calendar.

How This Fits Rose’s Emphasis on Patristic Unity

Rose’s defense of Augustine is consistent with his broader theological vision, which insisted on the unity and coherence of the patristic tradition across time and cultures. For Rose, the Fathers are not a collection of independent thinkers who happen to agree on some points; they are witnesses to a single, living Tradition, guided by the Holy Spirit. To dismiss Augustine is to introduce a rupture in this tradition that Rose found theologically unjustifiable.

This commitment to patristic unity also informed Rose’s approach to other theological questions: his defense of the toll-house teaching (which draws on both Eastern and Western patristic sources), his understanding of Genesis (which cites both Greek and Latin Fathers), and his general theological method of building arguments from a broad patristic consensus rather than from a single national or linguistic tradition.

See Also

References

  • Rose, Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. Written for The Orthodox Word, 1978; book ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press, 1983.
  • Barnes, Patrick, ed. The Blessed Augustine of Hippo: His Place in the Orthodox Church — A Corrective (compilation of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s letters of 1975–1981 with supporting documentation). [Web text at orthodoxinfo.com; Georgetown mirror, faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/bless_aug.htm.]
  • Azkoul, Michael. The Influence of Augustine of Hippo on the Orthodox Church. Texts and Studies in Religion 56. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990 (the anti-Augustine polemic Rose responded to).
  • Augustine of Hippo, St. De Trinitate (On the Trinity) XV.26.47 [PL 42:1095]; trans. NPNF I/3.
  • Augustine of Hippo, St. Sermo 169.11.13 [PL 38:923].
  • Augustine of Hippo, St. De Spiritu et Littera (On the Spirit and the Letter). Various editions.
  • Augustine of Hippo, St. De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio (On Grace and Free Will). Various editions.
  • Augustine of Hippo, St. De Praedestinatione Sanctorum (On the Predestination of the Saints). Various editions.
  • Augustine of Hippo, St. Confessions. Various editions.
  • Romanides, John S. The Ancestral Sin (1957 Athens diss., To propatorikon hamartema). English trans. Ridgewood: Zephyr, 2002.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957.
  • Maximus the Confessor, St. Letter to Marinus (Opusculum 10) [PG 91:136].
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Collected Works, vol. 5. Vaduz: Buchervertriebsanstalt, 1979.
  • Cassian, St. John. Conferences. Translated by Boniface Ramsey. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
  • Christensen, Damascene. Not of This World: The Life and Teaching of Fr. Seraphim Rose. Forestville, CA: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1993.
  • Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984.