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

saved. Why God picks out anyone from the humanity that has fallen away from
him as a result of the sin of Adam is, to Augustine, occultissima, ‘totally
unclear’. (It is similarly unclear what Augustine means when he describes God
as ‘loving’, although he once made an analogy with a schoolmaster who beats
his pupils because he ‘loves’ them.) It is in his letter to Simplicianus that he uses
the term peccatum originale, ‘original sin’, for the first time, and in future years
he developed this to argue that even at birth no one is free of the sin of Adam,
which has been passed through the act of sexual intercourse from generation to
generation. By now the belief in hell had become firmly embedded in Christian
thought, and it was to hell that all, even unbaptised infants, would go for eternity
unless God reached down to save them. It was the integration of Augustine’s
pessimism with the emerging doctrine of eternal hell fire that made the
implications of his theology so unsettling. It is hardly surprising that he faced
opposition, even outrage, from his contemporaries, but in the important debate
with Pelagius, who did believe in the free will of the individual to do good, he
prevailed, and the concept of ‘original sin’ became part of Christian doctrine. 10
Yet even if there is little one can do to save oneself, the believer should still
aim to lead a Christian life by following the teachings of the Church. By the
390s, Nicene orthodoxy was as much part of the Church in the west as it was in
the east, even if it was difficult to enforce in an empire that was being invaded
by Germanic tribes who were ‘Arians’. In North Africa, the imperial Church
instituted by Constantine (see p. 50 above) was in a minority as the Donatists
still dominated the region. There remained sophisticated subordinationists
among the Latin-speaking believers, and one of these, Maximinus, had a famous
public debate with the elderly Augustine in 427 that many observers felt ended
in Maximinus’ favour. 11 Whatever the later dominance of Augustine’s position
within the medieval Church, in his own time he was an embattled figure, even in
his own diocese.
Augustine had absorbed from his readings of Plato the idea of an unchanging
truth that exists ‘above’ in an immaterial world but is intelligible to humans, and
he adopted this concept in an early work after his conversion, Contra
Academicos, ‘Against the Sceptics’ (386-387). But while for Plato this truth
could only be found through a long process of reasoning - he did not expect his
‘Guardians’, an intellectual elite in themselves, to fully understand the
immaterial world before the age of fifty - Augustine bypassed this long journey
(and with it the process of reasoning itself) and argued that one could find truth