Augustine's Attack on Apocalypticism

Abstract

Augustine's Attack on Apocalypticism Bernard McGinn The Roman city of Salona, the birthplace of the Emperor Diocletian, is on the Dalmatian coast not far from Split in modern Croatia. The city boasts the remains of no less than three early Christian basilicas. The ruins of the fifth-century church of St. Domnius, the local martyr and patron, still contains the remains of the original lintel stone, which has the inscription "Deus noster propitious esto rei publicae romanae" ("May our God be favorable to the Roman State"), a phrase that is an apt summation of the providential theology of history linking the destinies of Rome and Christianity. This lucky survival is a striking coincidence because it was to Hesychius, the early fifth-century bishop of Salona, that Augustine of Hippo addressed one of his two most extensive treatments of the end of history, the treatise De fine mundi, or Letter 199.1 The other major treatment, of course, is in the De civitate Dei, especially books 18–20, which deal with temporal eschatology.2 [End Page 775] Augustine's theology of history, more than two decades in the making, was crafted to respond to two popular fourth-century views that attempted to deal with one of the most remarkable changes in Western society of the previous two millennia: Constantine's conversion and the subsequent growing alliance between the Roman Empire and the Christian Church.3 Thus, in slightly more than a century (303–427 CE), three major Christian theologies of history were created. The first was due primarily to Constantine's court theologian, Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–340), while the second was the work of the Christian rhetor Lactantius (ca. 250–325), who educated Constantine's son, Crispus. The Eusebian imperial theology of history was providentialist and optimistic, even messianic, in its view of Constantinian Rome as the fulfillment of prophetic texts of both the Old and the New Testaments. In his Divinae institutiones, Lactantius, on the other hand, took a pessimistic view of the future of the Roman Empire by combining elements of early Christian apologetics and apocalyptic expectations into a new synthetic format. Augustine was familiar with the writings of these two theologians4 and, at least up to about 400, shared some of their views. But the bishop's maturing thought on the nature of temporality,5 his explorations of the proper exegesis of scriptural prophecy, and his meditations on the shock of the sack of Rome in 410 led him away from what he came to think of as facile solutions to the meaning of history,6 hence the long composition of the De civitate Dei (ca. 413–427) and his epistolary exchange with Hesychius around 418–419. I will [End Page 776] look at Augustine's responses to Eusebian providentialism and to the apocalypticism of Lactantius and those who believed that the Bible provided a clear and predictable account of the course of history and its imminent end, especially his response to the latter.7 To see how Augustine positioned himself in the great fourth-century debate over sacred history, we can start with a brief account of his reaction to the imperial theology of history pioneered by Eusebius.8 From the late second century on, Christian thinkers had begun trying to fit the sacred history of the Bible into the secular chronology of classical historians in order to demonstrate the greater antiquity of God's people and to show the superiority of the Christian view of universal history based on the centrality of the Incarnation.9 The creation of a Christian theology of history involved first of all establishing a framework for universal history, something that Eusebius worked out in his Chronica, a book that became the basic source for world history for centuries to come.10 In the second place, such a theology required a theological vindication of God's providential plan for salvation, especially in the last age initiated by Jesus Christ. This was something Eusebius explored in several works, but especially his Historia ecclesiastica. Throughout his writings, notably in his Vita Constantini and De laudibus Constantini (the Tricennial orations of 335/336), Eusebius lauds the manifest destiny...