Fr. Seraphim Rose has written a very good book on the Orthodox view of St. Augustine of Hippo that I highly recommend. The following is a book review of Fr. Seraphim’s book The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church by Archimandrite [now Archbishop] Chrysostomos.
“In certain ultra-conservative Orthodox circles in the United States, there has developed an unfortunate bitter and harsh attitude toward one of the great Fathers of the Church, the blessed (Saint) Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.). These circles, while clearly outside the mainstream of Orthodox thought and careful scholarship, have often been so vociferous and forceful in their statements that their views have touched and even affected more moderate and stable Orthodox believers and thinkers. Not a few writers and spiritual aspirants have been disturbed by this trend. So it is that I am absolutely delighted to have a copy of Father Seraphim’s small, but powerful, tome on the significance and status of Saint Augustine in the Orthodox Church. His book is particularly significant since it comes from the pen of a spiritual writer, who, before his untimely death in 1982, was a chief advocate of moderation and careful, charitable thinking about the Church and her Fathers among some of the most conservative Orthodox elements in this country—an advocacy that earned him, more often than not, the flat condemnation of the ultra-conservative factionalists mentioned above.
It is certainly true that, in terms of classical Orthodox thought on the subject, Saint Augustine placed grace and human free will at odds, if only because his view of grace was too overstated and not balanced against the Patristic witness as regards the efficacy of human choice and spiritual labor. Likewise, as an outgrowth of his understanding of grace, Augustine developed a theory of predestination that further distorted the Orthodox understanding of free will. And finally, Augustine’s theology proper, his understanding of God, in its mechanical, overly logical, and rationalistic tone, leads one, to some extent, away from the mystery of God-which is lost, indeed, in Saint Augustine’s failure to capture fully the very mystery of man. About these general shortcomings in Augustinian thought there can be no doubt. And it is with these precise weaknesses in mind that Father Seraphim formulates his understanding of Augustine’s place in Orthodoxy.
Father Seraphim convincingly argues, with a multitude of primary references, that, while Augustine’s ideas may have been used and distorted in the West to produce more modern theories (such as Calvinistic predestination, sola gratia, or even deism), the Saint himself was not guilty of the kind of innovative theologizing that his more extreme detractors would claim he championed. Indeed, Father Seraphim shows that Augustine never denied the free will of the individual; that his view of grace was one which, in later years, largely through the influence of his Western contemporaries, he felt compelled to revise; and that his understanding of God, despite his overly logical approach to theology, was derived from a deeply Orthodox encounter with the Trinity—something which a passing interest in his Confessions would aver. Attached to his argument for a moderate understanding of Saint Augustine are gleanings from Father Seraphim’s study of the Patristic reaction to Augustine. To a number, the great Fathers of the Church whom he cites count Augustine among the great Fathers, qualifying their praise with precisely, the words of the author of this little book: that Saint Augustine wrote from an Orthodox heart and with an Orthodox mind, but erred in expressing himself with too much dependence on human logic and philosophical rigor, thus exposing his teaching to later gross distortions, making his small errors great ones.
What is most impressive about this book is that one can see clearly that Father Seraphim has read. This may startle some of my readers, but it is an important point. I have been reading the Fathers for almost twenty years, and every extreme statement that I read on this or that Patristic figure or witness rings a certain bell in me. Almost without exception, this polemical literature begins with an exposition of what is ‘wrong’ with a person or issue, never weighing against this the positive elements. I have come to understand that this is simply because these polemicists do not, in fact, have a reading knowledge of the Fathers; they have gleaned from indices and secondary sources, controversial material, which they then proceed to attack, never having read this material in context. Moreover, their polemical tone and ugly treatment of often sincere figures belie the spirit of charity and gentleness which is so much more present in the Fathers than the occasional (though necessary) outbursts of righteous indignation.
I recently read a ‘first draft’ of a work by one of the ultra-conservative theologians whom Father Seraphim tries to answer in his little book. Though this theologian is hailed as “the foremost Orthodox thinker of this time,” he is unknown outside his own circles. His grasp of basic English is abominably poor, and his writings have the telltale signs of the kind of selective reading I mention above. I am sure that this man is wholly sincere, but as I compared his work to that of Father Seraphim, I began to see that he had depersonalized his subjects, making great Fathers of the Church nothing but cold, stone figures. What Seraphim has done in this small book is to personalize Saint Augustine—to bring a man, a human being, before us, demonstrating to us how the greatness of God, nonetheless, worked through the littleness of the man (if, indeed, we can but rhetorically call so great a man as Augustine ‘little’). It is this personal element which commends Father Seraphim’s book to the Orthodox believer and the Orthodox scholar alike.
I might lastly add that the Introduction to this book, by Father Alexey Young, is a useful piece of writing in itself. With an almost ‘pastoral’ tone, it sets the stage for Father Seraphim’s scholarly drama—and that is just what the book is: a drama. It brings to life a character and, in so doing, throws a shadow of grave doubt over the writings of those who would make the ‘divine Augustine,’ as Saint Mark of Ephesus calls him, the Father of heresies and the source of all Western error. In fact, the shadow throws not only doubts but unbelief.
I highly recommend this excellent book to anyone interested in a fair and profound view of the great Father Augustine of Hippo.”
—Archimandrite [now Archbishop] Chrysostomos
You can purchase this book at St. Herman Press
