Biichern," vol. i. 341-351, exposes many of these, and justly refuses to believe A ugusti's claim that his sources were rare manuscripts which, after he had used them, were partly burned and partly stolen, and of which no duplicates remained. The best proof of his negligence or ignorance of the subject is
that he wholly ignores the
,
3TlD T1 (Dod Mor-
and Karaism which was written by the Karaite Mm-decai ben Nissim, at the end of the seventeenth century for Prof. Jacob Trigland of Leyden, and published with a Latin translation with Trigland's "De Karoeis " by Johann Christian Wolf in 1714. Augusti also confuses Judah ben Tabbai, who lived at least a century before the common era, with Judah haNasi. who flourished about three hundred j'ears later. The "Life of Augusti, "by an anonymous author, published in 1751 by Weber, is also reviewed and severely criticized by Baumgarten in the volume cited above (pp. 337-340). The Christian critic displays sufficient familiarity with Jewish affairs and customs to disprove the biographer's claim that Audecai), the full description of the Karaites
gusti, before his conversion, was a rabbi at Sondershausen, and proves that in reality he was a schoolmaster and possibly a slaughterer of animals or "shohet." Several other biographies of Augusti were written, mostly for missionary purposes, one translated into English by Macintosh, London, 1867. Bibliography: Delitzsch, in Snat auf Hoffnung, 1866; McClintock and Strong, Cj/c. Supplement.
P. Wl. most important of the Latin church fathers born Nov. 13, 354, at Tagaste, a town of Numidia died at Hippo Aug. After a riotous youth as a heathen, he be28, 430. came first a devotee of the Manichean confession, and then after nine years was converted to ChristianHe beity by Ambrosius, in 386. His came presbyter in 393 and bishop in Complex 395, and eventually the greatest pilCharacter. lar of the Catholic Church. This remarkable round of religious experience indicates very well the complexity of Augustine's were combined qualities the most character for in opposite, such as overexuberance of fancy and sharpest critical acumen; vehement prejudice and delicate consideration; romanticism and scholasticism; glowing sentimentalism and hair-splitting G.
ATJG-TJSTINE
The
greatest and
it,
As a
result,
Augustine's writings are
sometimes introspective
in the extreme, frequently
casuistry.
312
THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA
Augustine
soaring into the heights of religious adoration of the Divine Being; at other times he concentrates attention upon the Christian dogma, and attacks with pitiless logic, sometimes indeed with subtle casuistry, all deviations from the strict and rigid faith of Of introspective writings are his " Conthe Church. fessions," a work translated into nearly all the languages of civilization of quite another kind are his letters and sermons, his dogmatic and exegetical These curious psychotreatises, and his polemics. logical contrasts in Augustine who was too sensuous for a philosopher and too precise for a poet make it impossible to discern any definite system in his writings, his doctrines having no common foundation, being, indeed, for the greater part mutually On the one side he may be said to contradictory.
—
have been a forerunner of Descartes and of the modern theory of perception and psychology, and yet, on the other side, he leaned toward mysticism. One might just as easily find connecting-links between Augustine and Luther as between the former and the fathers of the Inquisition. This conflict in Augustine's principles is perhaps nowhere more strikingly revealed than in his attitude toward those two constituents of Christianity, Hellenism and Judaism. His conception of the Deity reveals throughout a strongly marked trace of Hellenism, derived by way of Neoplatonism; and yet, on the other hand, one can not help noticing his stringently legalistic Jewish views, which, curiously enough, are most apparent when he is endeavoring to combat Judaism.
The foundation of his doctrine concerning man was that he is a "massa peccati," incapable of raising himself to virtue, and can find the means of approaching God through the mediation
His Theory of
Man.
of Jesus alone. This doctrine is so foreign to the essential spirit of Judaism that it may serve to indicate the ex-
treme point in the divergence of Christianity from Yet grace, according to Auorigin in Judaism.
its
gustine, is the result of faith and love; and these, inconsistently enough, he interprets in true Jewish fashion faith as involving adherence to the law and " Qua3 caritas tunc perlove as combined with fear.
—
cum pcenalis timor omnis abscesserit, " is his expression ("Perf. Just." x. 22), which recalls the terse saying of the Talmud. " Where joy [the feeling fects,
" there also must be fear Another specifically JewOf the ish conception, dominating Augustine Church. as none other of the church-fathers, is his doctrine concerning the Church a conception which indeed has exerted signal and decisive influence upon the whole development of The system of Jewish theocChristian theology. racy, by which the welfare of the individual was conditioned by his reception into the community through
of
communion with God]
is,
(Ber. 304).
the sacrament of circumcision, was turned into a Christian form by Augustine in the conception of the holy institution of the Church, upon incorporation with which the salvation of the individual is made dependent. Connected with his doctrine of the Church is also his well-known theory of predestination. Since the Church is the only means of salvation, it results that all
not belonging to
it ("
civitas
as Augustine calls it, in contradistinction to the "civitas dei")are excluded from salvation. The old particularism of Judaism, without which the Christian Church would never have spread among the heathen, thus survives in somewhat modified form in the teachings of the greatest Christian genius of all time. The fact that Augustine, in the presentation of his tenets, very frequently arrives at diaboli,"
conclusions opposed to his principles, is partly owing to his very sweeping Scripture, theory of inspiration. Scripture, including the Greek translation that legacy from the Alexandrian Jews to the Church has, for Augustine, divine dignity as well as authority. As a consequence he considers a thing true because it is stated in the Bible, and it is stated in the Bible because it is true. In this tenet, moreover, he
Of
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