King Alfred's Old English Version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies/Introduction/Part 3
III. Relation of Alfred to St. Augustine.
Why should the practical warrior-king of Wessex have become the translator of the Latin Father? The answer to this question need not take us far afield. We have but to recall the exact historic position of St. Augustine in relation to the Latin Catholic system, and then to consider what were the circumstances of the English king, and the motives prompting him.
1. St. Augustine. — It is the accepted view of those competent to judge, that St. Augustine was the greatest of the Latin Fathers. Some class him with Jerome alone. Others admit Gregory the Great and Ambrose to be of equal rank with Augustine. At any rate his influence in formulating and expressing the Catholic dogmas that made the church such a power in the Middle Ages was enormous. 'Thou hast made us for Thee, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee' is the one expression of St. Augustine that epitomizes his life and character. Bindemann[1] calls him 'one of the greatest personages in the Church, ...and it can well be said that among the Church Fathers the first place is due to him'. Nourrisson[2] places him in the first rank of the masters of human thought, alongside of Plato and Leibnitz, Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet.
In his intensity of character and in his miraculous conversion to the Christianity which he had persecuted, there is, in him, a striking resemblence to St. Paul.
Aurelius Augustinus was born on the 13th of November in the year 354, and died August 28th, 430, as Bishop of Hippo Regius. His father was a heathen, but his mother was a Christian, who brought up her son in her own faith. He subsequently espoused the belief of the Manichaeans, and prepared himself by classical studies for the office of a teacher of rhetoric. After a skeptical transition period, when Platonic and Neo-Platonic speculations had prepare him for the change, he was won over by Ambrose to Catholic Christianity, in the service of which he thenceforth labored as a defender and constructor of doctrines, and also practically as a priest and bishop.[3]
In his consecrated learning and passionate devotion to God, Augustine again reminds one of St. Paul. Truly could he say: ‘The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’; and so was often pictured with upturned eye, with a pen in his left hand, and a burning heart in his right. He was a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, scholastic, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full. It was his need and his delight to wrestle again and again with the hardest problems of thought, and to comprehend to the utmost the divinely revealed matter of the faith. He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith, according to his maxim: Fides praecedit intellectum.... But to him faith itself was an acting of reason, and from faith to knowledge, therefore, there was a necessary transition. He constantly looked below the surface to the hidden motives of actions and to the universal laws of diverse events. The metaphysician and the Christian believer coalesced in him. This may be seen in the ease with which he blends philosophy and theology in his writings: his oratio and his meditatio unconsciously melt into each other.
It is Augustine who first clearly -and completely expresses the principle of the immediate certainty of inner experience. His love for introspection even constitutes his peculiar literary quality. He 'is a virtuoso in self-observation and self-analysis; he has a mastery in the portrayal of psychical states which is as admirable as is his ability to analyze these in reflection, and lay bare the deepest elements of feeling and impulse. Just for this reason, it is from this source almost exclusively that he draws the views with which his metaphysics seeks to comprehend the universe'. And so he finds the way to certainty through doubt, and makes this one truth the starting-point of his philosophy, strikingly reminding us of Descartes' use of cogito, ergo sum. 'In that I doubt, or since I doubt' says Augustine, 'I know that I, the doubter, am: and thus just this doubt contains within itself the valuable truth of the reality of the conscious being. Even if I should err in all else, I cannot err in this; for in order to err I must exist'. This is a dominant argument, not only in the Soliloquies, but in his other writings. From the certainty of the possession by man of some truth, he proceeds to establish the fact" of the existence of God as the truth per se; 'but our conviction of the existence of the material world he regards as only an irresistible belief. Combating heathen religion and philosophy, Augustine defends the doctrines and institutions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against the Neo-Platonists, whom he rates most highly among all ancient philosophers, the Christian theses that salvation is to be found in Christ alone; that divine worship is due to no other being beside the triune God, since he created all things himself, and did not commission inferior beings, gods, demons, or angels to create the material world; that the soul with its body will rise again to eternal salvation or damnation, but will not return periodically to renewed life upon the earth; that the soul does not exist before the body, and that the latter is not the prison of the former, but that the soul begins to exist at the same time with the body; that the world both had a beginning and is perishable, and that only God and the souls of angels and men are eternal.' He believes, further, in the theory that divine grace is not conditioned on man's worthiness, and holds to the doctrine of absolute predestination.
The writings of Augustine are unusually extensive and varied. In his Retractiones, written near the close of his life, he enumerates as many as ninety-three works composed by himself, not counting numerous epistles. But his City of God and Confessions are the two works that have gained the widest popularity, and have run through the largest number of editions. The former is called by Schaff 'the deepest and richest apologetic work of antiquity'. It is a comprehensive philosophy of universal history, in which he undertakes to show that the powers of this world are to be overthrown by that Kingdom of God which will last forever. In his Confessions he gives us an intensely inter-esting and frank autobiography, which recalls Rousseau's Confessions, but which excels all works of its kind.
Thus we can scarcely overestimate the influence of this master mind on the Middle Ages. Since it was so, his writings might easily have reached any one who had access to the language of the Latin Fathers, more especially if this one was a Christian, and had a devout and inquiring soul. Just such a character was that of Alfred, as can be easily shown.
2. King Alfred. - Having become king in 871 at the age of twenty-two, he found most of his time occupied in warlike pursuits, leaving little opportunity for education. Even before his accession, he had, by his bravery and tact, won the famous battle of Ashdown against the Danes. But the success was only temporary, for the West-Saxons, with Alfred as leader, had to fight nine dreadful battles against the Danes during the first year of his reign. In 878 the same stubborn enemy made such a heavy descent on Wessex that Alfred, weak as was his army, was forced to take temporary refuge in the island of Athelney; but in the same year he gathered new forces, and by a bold attack overcame the Danes under Guthrum, and wrenched from them the treaty of Wedmore. For some years he was busy rebuilding his cities, constructing a navy, and giving laws to his people; but in 893 the Danes under Hasting made a final attempt to overthrow Wessex, which attempt, however, resulted in Alfred's complete victory.
Now he had some leisure to carry on his studies and make his translations. He studied with the same zeal and avidity that he manifested in war. He made his vows to God, and solemnly paid them. 'Moreover, he promised, as far as his infirmity and his means would allow, to give up to God the half of his services, bodily and mental, by night and by day, voluntarily, and with all his might.' He was thus the first English king to become a truly great defender of the Faith.
From his various prefaces and other undisputedly original writings we learn that he was fond of the contemplative life, and could easily have become an ascetic; that he yearned for the education and salvation of his people; that he felt himself a leader in the acquisition of salvation for himself and for his people. With such surroundings and such a character, the logical thing for him to do was to read and study the Latin writings of St. Augustine. It followed easily that he translated and adapted some of these to the needs of his people.
Alfred found in St. Augustine the embodiment of many of his ideals. Had he been blessed with the advantages of early study and leisure, he doubtless would have become a spirit of the same kind - we dare not say of the same degree, for his practical Anglo-Saxon mind could hardly have compassed that lofty and subtle thought which characterized the great Latin Father. As a matter of fact, Alfred was in character and circumstances more nearly similar to Charlemagne, with whom he has often been compared. This similarity is seen in the fact that they both became students, started a revival of learning, established court schools, fostered literature, and collected scholars from other parts of the world. Charlemagne drew Alcuin from England, and in turn Alfred, a century later, drew Grimbold from France.
Had he not given this new impulse to learning and literature, to the founding of schools and churches, the mighty tide of Danish invasion would soon have swept all barriers away, the activity of Ælfric would not have been possible, and Old English literature might have been such a weakling, when in 1066 William the Conqueror forced his own laws and language on the English people, as entirely to lose its identity. Thus we see that Alfred, in several senses, was the mighty Defender of England, and well might he be called England's Darling. It was the blending of these two great streams - Latin Christianity as seen in Augustine of the fifth century, and the stalwart Saxon character as seen in Alfred of the ninth century - that caused a tide of influence to set in which reaches us over the tract of a thousand years, and is now, we believe, gathering strength for a new and mightier period of activity.