Augustine East and West

The deepest fact about Augustine’s legacy is its asymmetry. In the Latin West he became, without rival, the formative theologian of a millennium and a half — the master of the medieval schools, the authority claimed by both sides of the Reformation, the architect of Western views on grace, sin, the Church, the Trinity, time, and history. In the Greek East he was, for most of the same millennium, almost unknown — a Father whose poor Greek, whose untranslated works, and whose distance from Byzantine concerns left him scarcely a presence until the late Byzantine and modern translations. This file weighs that asymmetry and what it means for Augustine’s place in the whole Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

The Master of the Latin West

In the Western Church Augustine’s influence is almost impossible to overstate. He is the most cited and most determinative of the four traditional Latin Doctors of the Church (with Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), and through the early medieval centuries his works — above all through the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which are largely a tissue of Augustinian citations — became the bedrock of scholastic theology (Brown 2000, ch. 27; Chadwick 1986, ch. 11). Thomas Aquinas built on Augustine even where he tempered him with Aristotle; the Augustinian doctrines of grace, original sin, the sacraments, and the relations within the Trinity became the framework of Latin theology. The Reformation was in large part a quarrel conducted in Augustinian terms: Luther was an Augustinian friar, and both Luther and Calvin appealed to Augustine’s doctrine of grace and predestination against what they saw as the semi-Pelagianism of late-medieval theology — while their Catholic opponents appealed to a different Augustine on the Church and the sacraments (Chadwick 1986, ch. 11). The seventeenth-century Jansenist controversy in the Roman Church was, explicitly, a fight over the correct reading of Augustine on grace. Whatever the West has thought about grace, sin, the will, the Church, and the inner life, it has thought in conversation — agreeing or disagreeing — with Augustine. He is, in a real sense, the common father of Western Christianity in all its branches.

The Near-Absence from the Greek East

In the Greek East the picture is utterly different, and the difference is itself instructive. For most of the first millennium Augustine was, to the Byzantine theological world, all but invisible. The reasons are several and concrete (Louth 2007; Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou 2008, introduction):

The language barrier. Augustine wrote in Latin and, by his own admission, read Greek poorly (Confessions 1.13–14; see The Restless Heart). His works were not translated into Greek in his lifetime or for many centuries after, and the Byzantine East, increasingly ignorant of Latin, simply could not read him. The first substantial Greek translations of any Augustine came late — the Solilóquia and On the Trinity were translated by Maximus Planudes only at the end of the thirteenth century, in the context of the union debates (Louth 2007).
A different set of questions. The great Eastern theological controversies — Arian, Trinitarian, Christological, iconoclast — were fought in Greek terms with Greek Fathers, and the specifically Augustinian preoccupations (the precise mechanics of grace and predestination, the psychology of the will, original guilt) were not the East’s central questions in the same form. The East had its own answers, in Cappadocian and later in Maximian and Palamite terms.
No occasion to need him. Where the West, in the wreck of Roman Africa and the Latin world, clung to Augustine as the surviving giant, the East had an unbroken chain of its own Fathers and felt no want of him.

The consequence is that Augustine played almost no role in the formation of Byzantine theology. When he did appear in the East, it was usually in the context of controversy — most pointedly in the Filioque debates, where Latin theologians cited Augustine for the procession of the Spirit and Eastern theologians (Photios, and later Mark of Ephesus at Florence) had to reckon with him as an authority claimed by the other side (see Augustine and the Filioque). This is part of why his Eastern reception became so contested: the East largely met Augustine not as a beloved Father read for his own sake but as a name wielded by Latin controversialists — a poor introduction, and one that colored the encounter from the start.

What the Asymmetry Means

This asymmetry has a double significance for the Orthodox assessment of Augustine, and both sides of it should be held.

On one hand, the asymmetry relativizes Augustine. The Eastern Church built a complete and self-sufficient theology — Trinitarian, Christological, ascetical, mystical — without him, which is itself proof that he is not, for the universal Church, the indispensable Father the West took him to be. The doctrines most distinctive of Augustine (inherited guilt, unconditional predestination, the psychological Trinity, the Filioque) are precisely those the East did not need and did not adopt; and a Church that produced the Cappadocians, Maximus, the Philokalia, and Palamas without reference to Augustine has every right to weigh his particular opinions critically rather than receive them as the rule of faith. The asymmetry is, in this sense, a standing argument against treating Augustine as the measure of all theology (a point pressed by the critical Orthodox tradition; see The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion).

On the other hand, the asymmetry should not be turned into a verdict of alienation. That the East did not read Augustine is largely a matter of language and circumstance, not of an ancient Eastern judgment against him; the Greek East did not reject Augustine, it simply did not encounter him. He remained, throughout, a Father of the undivided pre-Schism Church, venerated as Blessed Augustine, never condemned, and his greatest spiritual work (the Confessions) speaks to the Eastern heart as readily as to the Western (see The Confessions as a Work). The modern recovery of Augustine in the Orthodox world — the translations, the scholarship of the Orthodox Readings of Augustine school, the careful reassessments of Ayres and Barnes that show him closer to the Greek Fathers than the polemics allowed — is in part the East finally meeting Augustine for himself, outside the controversial frame in which it first encountered him (Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou 2008).

The Few Eastern Points of Contact

The near-absence of Augustine from the Greek East was not quite total, and the exceptions are illuminating. A handful of Greek writers knew something of him at second hand or in fragments. Photios, in the ninth century, knew enough of the Augustinian Filioque theology to argue against it, though he did not engage Augustine’s works directly at length (see Augustine and the Filioque). At the Council of Florence (1439) — the council whose union the Orthodox Church rejected — Augustine was at the center of the Filioque debate, the Latins pressing his authority and the Orthodox delegation — above all St. Mark of Ephesus — having to weigh how a Father of the undivided Church could be cited against the East; Mark’s careful response, neither denying Augustine’s sanctity nor accepting the Latin reading of him, is a model of the discerning Eastern reception (Siecienski 2010). And the late-Byzantine translations of Maximus Planudes (late thirteenth century) — the Soliloquies, On the Trinity, and parts of the City of God — gave a small circle of Greek readers their first direct access to Augustine’s own words, again largely in the charged context of the union debates (Louth 2007). The pattern holds across all these contacts: when the East met Augustine, it met him as a contested authority in a controversy, rarely as a Father read for his own spiritual nourishment — a circumstance that shaped, and arguably distorted, the whole Eastern encounter with him from the beginning.

The Modern Recovery

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have begun, for the first time, to change this. Augustine’s works have been translated into modern Greek, Russian, and other Orthodox languages; his Confessions circulates widely in Orthodox households; and a serious scholarly engagement with him has grown up in the Orthodox academy, both in the critical mode (Romanides, Lossky) and in the appreciative and revisionist mode (the Orthodox Readings of Augustine school, drawing on the wider reassessment of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology by Ayres and Barnes; see The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion) (Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou 2008). This modern recovery is, in a sense, the East doing belatedly what the language barrier and the controversial frame long prevented: meeting Augustine for himself, reading his own words rather than the Latin polemicists’ selections, and weighing him directly against the Greek patristic tradition. The result has been, on the whole, a more nuanced and more charitable Eastern picture than the older polemics allowed — though, as the next sections show, the genuine divergences on grace and the Spirit remain.

The Balanced Assessment

The fair assessment, then, is this. Augustine is the formative theologian of the Latin West and one of the most powerful Christian minds of any age — and he is at the same time a Father whom the Greek East built its theology without, and whose distinctive doctrines it did not and does not receive. Both halves are true, and neither cancels the other. He is a giant who is also, for the East, in part a stranger; a saint who is also, on particular points, a teacher held at arm’s length; the common father of the Western traditions who, in the East, is the Blessed Augustine — venerated, read with profit, and weighed against the consensus of the Fathers the East never set aside for him. The asymmetry of his influence is not a scandal to be explained away but a genuine feature of the shape of Christian history, and one of the keys to understanding why his reception is so contested and his title, in the East, “Blessed.”

References

Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007. (The late Greek translations of Augustine; the Filioque encounter.)
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008. (Introduction on the history of Augustine’s Eastern reception.)
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (Augustine at the Council of Florence; Mark of Ephesus.)
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Ch. 27 on the Western legacy.)
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Ch. 11 on the influence.)