A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

to become the theological treatises into which they were turned by later
commentators.
The writings of a man who believed that all are helpless before the wrath of
God were now discovered in an age that could well believe itself to be suffering
this wrath. A work that had been neglected in the west for 300 years suddenly
found a new audience. This might have proved a temporary phenomenon, with
interest in Paul waning as life became more settled in later centuries, if Paul had
not been taken up by Augustine and turned into a cornerstone of western
theology so that, as one scholar, Paula Fredriksen, has written, ‘much of Western
Christian thought can be seen as one long response to Augustine’s Paul’. 9
Born at Thagaste in northern Africa in 354, Augustine had studied at the
university at Carthage. For some time in his twenties, when he was teaching in
Carthage, he was attached to the Manicheans, and it must have been then that he
first came across Paul. Like Paul, the Manicheans were preoccupied with good
and evil, light and darkness, and had a morbid fear of the physical world. When
he moved to Italy in 383, first to Rome, and then to Milan, where he became the
city orator, Augustine rejected the Manicheans and progressed through an
extensive study of Plato and his followers, towards Christianity. It was, however,
a tortuous process for him to reach a resolution of his inner uncertainties, a
process brilliantly described some years later in his Confessions, in which he
tells the reader how his conversion was eventually effected by reading a verse of
Paul from the Letter to the Romans (13:13-14): ‘Not in revelling and
drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather
arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ: spend no more thought on nature and
nature’s appetites.’ Augustine now adopted Paul as a Christian rather than a
Manichean mentor.
After he had moved back to North Africa in 388, Augustine first became a
priest and then, in 395, bishop of the coastal city of Hippo. It was in the 390s
that he developed what can only be described as an obsession with Paul,
although, unable to read Greek, he was dependent on Latin translations of the
linguistically complex originals. Between 391 and 395, he wrote two
commentaries on Romans, three substantial treatises on questions arising from
Chapters Seven to Nine, and a response to queries on the letter from an old
friend from Milan, Simplicianus. It was in this last letter that he set out his belief
that, in line with Paul’s thinking, all human beings are doomed to be mired in sin
and it is only through the grace of God, which no one merits, that one can be