Legacy and Assessment

A closing assessment of Blessed Augustine, weighing the whole that this collection has set out: his stature as one of the most powerful minds in Christian history and one of its profoundest spiritual writers; his genuine and consequential errors on grace, predestination, the Fall, and the Spirit, and the Eastern reserve about them; and the way the Orthodox tradition holds the two together — venerating the saint, weighing the doctrine, neither canonizing his system nor casting out the man. This file offers a balanced final verdict, faithful to the discipline that has governed the collection: the Church’s teaching stated as the Church’s own (METHODOLOGY §4.1), and the intra-Orthodox spectrum on Augustine’s reception reported both-sides (§4.2).

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

The Greatness

It is right to begin with the greatness, because it is real and because no honest assessment can pretend otherwise. Augustine was one of the most powerful and original minds the Christian Church has produced. He gave the West its theology of grace, its doctrine of the Church as a mixed body and of the sacraments as the acts of Christ, its analysis of the will and of evil as privation, its theology of history in the two cities, its philosophy of time and memory. He wrote the Confessions, perhaps the most influential work of Christian spirituality ever composed, and On the Trinity and the City of God, each a landmark of Christian thought. And beneath the systematic theologian was a man of extraordinary spiritual depth — a penitent who knew the heart’s restlessness and its homecoming, a pastor who wept at his ordination and died with the Psalms of repentance before his eyes, a soul whose cry “late have I loved you” the whole divided Church still owns as its own (Brown 2000, ch. 27; Confessions 10.27). The Orthodox tradition does not deny, but affirms, this greatness; it venerates him as Blessed Augustine, a saint and Father of the undivided Church.

The Errors

It is equally right to be candid about the errors, because the collection has been candid throughout and because honesty is owed both to the East’s reservations and to Augustine himself, who in the Retractationes was the first to weigh his own faults. The Orthodox reserve falls on a cluster of linked doctrines, set out across Sections 05 and 06:

• his doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt (the massa damnata), against the Eastern reading of the Fall as inherited mortality and corruption — the “ancestral sin” of the Greek Fathers (see Predestination and the Eastern Objection; Ancestral vs Original Sin);
• his late doctrine of unconditional predestination and efficacious, irresistible grace, against the Eastern doctrine of synergy and the universal saving will of God;
• and his Trinitarian formulations on the procession of the Spirit, which the later Latin tradition built into the Filioque the East rejects (see Augustine and the Filioque).

To these many Orthodox would add the most ethically troubling act of his career — his defense of imperial coercion against the Donatists, the compelle intrare whose long shadow fell across the later Western history of religious persecution (see Against the Donatists). These are not trivial points, and the collection has not minimized them; they are the substance of the Eastern reservation and the reason his title is “Blessed.”

Holding the Two Together

The whole burden of this collection — and of METHODOLOGY.md §4 — is that these two truths must be held together, not played against each other. Augustine is neither the flawless Doctor of the Western imagination nor the arch-corrupter of the sharpest Eastern polemic. He is a great and holy Father who erred on real and consequential points: exactly the kind of figure the Church has always known how to receive. The tradition’s instrument for this is the Vincentian principle — that no single Father, however eminent, is the rule of faith, but the consensus of the Fathers is the rule, against which each Father’s particular opinions are weighed (see Predestination and the Eastern Objection). Gregory of Nyssa held opinions on the apokatastasis the Church did not follow, and is a great saint; Augustine held opinions on grace and the Spirit the East does not follow, and is Blessed Augustine. The Church venerates the man and weighs the doctrine — and the weighing is not a slight to the veneration but its necessary companion.

The Spectrum, Once More

How sharply the weighing should fall is, as Section 07 showed, a genuinely open question among faithful Orthodox theologians, and this assessment will not close it. At the critical pole, Romanides and those with him read Augustine’s errors as a coherent and grave deviation that shaped a defective Western theology of God; at the appreciative pole, Seraphim Rose, the Orthodox Readings of Augustine scholars (Demacopoulos, Papanikolaou), and Andrew Louth read them as real but bounded faults within an essentially orthodox and holy Father far closer to the Greek tradition than the polemics allowed. The Orthodox reader is heir to this whole debate. The honest assessment is not to pick a winner but to know the spectrum, to venerate the saint, to receive what accords with the consensus of the Fathers, and to hold back from what does not — under the guidance of the Church and one’s spiritual father.

Why the Case of Augustine Matters Beyond Augustine

The contested reception of Augustine is, finally, a case study in something larger than one Father: how the Orthodox Church relates to the patristic inheritance as a whole. The temptation in either direction is real. One temptation is a flattening maximalism that treats every word of every Father as equally the Church’s teaching, so that the saints’ disagreements (and they did disagree) become an embarrassment to be explained away — a posture that cannot survive contact with the actual texts, in which Fathers correct one another and the Church follows some and not others. The opposite temptation is a rejectionism that, having found real error in a Father, casts out the man — a posture that would empty the calendar, for there is scarcely a Father without some opinion the Church declined to follow. The Orthodox handling of Blessed Augustine threads between these: it neither canonizes his system nor unsaints the man, but venerates the saint and weighs the doctrine against the consensus. In this the case of Augustine teaches the Church how to read all its teachers — by the rule of the consensus of the Fathers, under which no single doctor, however great, is himself the rule of faith (the Vincentian canon; see St. Vincent of Lérins).

There is also a pastoral lesson, especially for the Orthodox of the West and for converts from the Western traditions, for whom Augustine is often the first and most familiar Father. To such readers the proper counsel is the one Seraphim Rose gave: do not despise him for his errors, and do not swallow his errors for love of him; receive the Confessions and the spiritual writings with gratitude, learn from his defense of grace, and learn also, from the Greek Fathers, the synergy and the ancestral-sin reading of the Fall that correct his harder doctrines (Rose 1983/2007). The Augustine who can be loved without reservation — the penitent of the Confessions, the pastor who died with the Psalms before his eyes — is the door through which the Western Christian enters the patristic world; the contested Augustine is the occasion to learn how that world weighs its own.

A Final Word

The closing image is the one the relics give (see Feast and Relics): the bones carried from the African Church that bred him, across the sea, to rest at last in the Latin West that made him its master — while the Greek East that scarcely read him kept his name, nonetheless, in its calendar of the blessed. That is the shape of Augustine’s place in the whole Church. He is the common father of the Western traditions and, in the East, the Blessed Augustine: venerated, read with love in the Confessions, honored for his defense of grace, and weighed — carefully, charitably, and without polemic — on the points where the East did not follow him. To hold him so is not to diminish him. It is to receive him as the Church receives all her great teachers: as a saint whose holiness is honored and whose every word is not the Gospel, a giant who is also a brother, Blessed Augustine of Hippo.

See Also

• Feast and Relics — the relics and the feast
• Blessed Augustine — the title and the veneration
• The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion — the debate this assessment holds open
• Predestination and the Eastern Objection — the central doctrinal reserve
• Augustine and the Filioque — the Trinitarian reserve
• St. Vincent of Lérins — the canon of catholicity by which a Father’s opinions are weighed
• The Church Fathers — how the Church receives its Fathers

References

• Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 10.27 (“late have I loved you”); Retractationes (his own weighing of his errors). Trans. Chadwick 1991; FOTC 60.
• Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Ch. 27 and epilogue on the legacy.)
• Rose, Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983; rev. 2007.
• Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
• Romanides, John S. The Ancestral Sin. Trans. George S. Gabriel. Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002.
• Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007.