St Augustine: The Dark Angel of Agony

In his book, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, historian Perez Zagorin "takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy."

With the intellectual efforts of people like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, combined with the power and authority of the Roman Empire, Christianity eventually sanctified the use of torture as a means of saving souls and society by coercing people into conformity.  In doing so, Augustine became the Charles Manson of Catholicism, using his manipulative powers of persuasion to convince his more fanatical followers of the need to commit acts of torture and murder to defend the "truth" of Jesus Christ.

By the elixir of its transubstantiation, then, where the Church claims to magically turn wine into the actual blood of Christ,  the Catholic Church as an institution was thus transformed from a Dr. Jekyll working for a gentle Jesus in defense of the powerless, into a Mr. Hyde possessed by a war like Holy Ghost, hell bent on defending and expanding its own power.  And as one preached "suffer the little children to come unto me," the other treated its wayward flock like children who could best be taught to respect God and his church, by being made to suffer like Christ whenever necessary.

In this way, much like King David and the Sanhedrin had done before it, the Catholic Church would succumb to the fruit of earthly power, and its desire to "be like God, knowing good from evil." And in the process, the suffering for sins begun in the garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha, were theologically transformed from a shield into a sword; and a Christianity that had been founded as the Lamb of God that suffered for the sake of "sinners," became the Lion that defended its power and righteousness by devouring them instead.

We see how this butterfly became a hurricane of bloodletting through the pen of St. Augustine, and how his justifications for defending the power and prestige of the Catholic Church, helped pave the way for the likes of everyone from Torquemada to the would-be Catholic priest, Joseph Stalin.  Augustine contributed to this by not only legitimizing the use of torture as a necessary means of defending the faith as well as the "state," yoked together as they were by the emperor Constantine and the monarchies of Europe who defended their power as a "divine right," but by using the suffering of Christ to legitimize the persecution of heresy and treason alike.    

This justification of torture and death, indeed even as it was applied to Christ himself, began with the accepted yet unproven, and altogether unfalsifiable claim, that such things as a God and a devil were real, and that all of life was simply a contest of ideas between these two powers, fought out in our minds in a war of "beliefs;" the proper understanding of which determined the salvation or damnation of our everlasting hearts and souls. Such “beliefs” were built on the conviction that souls needed to be safeguarded against spiritual error and 'wrong thinking,' just as much as the crown or the state needed to be protected agaisnt traitors, so that ideas and "beliefs" needed to be necessarily segregated by moral authorities (who were always comprised of properly educated Christian men, of course) into camps of "good" and "bad." 

Failure to do so, so such 'moral authorities' from the Sanhedrin to Augustine to Torquemada would have us believe, posed more of a threat to the world of "beliefs" than even the environmental destruction being wrought in the actual world by capitalism today. And while capitalism's "love of money" appears to only be burning the planet with all of the moral rectitude of Puritans burning a 17th century witch - driving into extinction more species per day than an asteroid hitting the planet in the age of the dinosaurs - both are done with the understanding that it is really only the next life people should be worried about, since the next life is eternal and this life is only temporary. 

        

This is why Augustine, who initially claimed to deplore the idea that torture should be used to force confessions, ended up reluctantly justifying the use of torture "as a seemingly unavoidable evil in a fallen world where crime somehow has to be detected and punished." Like civilians killed during a “just war,” Augustine simply followed the moral compass of his "true faith" into accepting that torture was a necessary evil (see City of God, 19:6), much like religion itself. (So much for the claim that "religion" necessarily helps fallible men be better or even better discern moral truth.)

For Augustine, in other words, “error has no rights,” and because it does not, he cited biblical texts like Luke 14:16-23, to justify the use of coercion and compulsion for spiritual sanctity. (The Christian naturally denies that this is simply a way of hiding moral relativism behind a curtain of claims about theological absolutes, miraculously enough).  For him, coercion through the use of "great violence" could be justified, not when it was applied by unbelievers who persecuted because of cruelty, of course, but when it was applied "by Christians who persecuted because of love.”

In fact, “from Augustine onward, and for well over a thousand years, virtually all Christian theologians agreed that heretics should be persecuted, and most agreed that they should be killed.”

As Zagorin points out:

After his "conversion to coercion", Augustine became a leading proponent and even a theoretician of persecution,”  even insisting that “emperors and political authorities had the God-given right to crush the sacrilege and schism of the Donatists, since they were as obligated to repress false and evil religion as to prevent the crime of pagan idolatry." [p.28]

Zagorin also states that "Augustine elaborated his position in favor of coercion in religion in a number of letters. In a lengthy epistle to the Donatist Vincent, he argued for the utility of coercion in inducing fear that can bring those who are subject to it to the right way of thinking." [p.29]

As far as Augustine was concerned, “[M]any must first be recalled to their Lord by the stripes of temporal scourging, like evil slaves, and in some degree like good-for-nothing fugitives.”  

In 408 CE, in a letter to Vincentius, Bishop of Cartenna and a Donatist, Augustine explained further:

“I have therefore yielded to the evidence afforded by these instances which my colleagues have laid before me. … . [For example,] there was set over against my opinion my own town, which, although it was once wholly on the side of Donatus, was brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of imperial edicts, but which we now see filled with such detestation of your ruinous perversity, that it would scarcely be believed that it had ever been involved in your error.”

“Let us learn, my brother, in actions which are similar to distinguish the intentions of the agents …. In some cases both he that suffers persecution is in the wrong, and he that inflicts it is in the right. In all these cases, what is important to attend to but this: who were on the side of truth, and who on the side of iniquity; who acted from a desire to injure, and who from a desire to correct what was amiss?”

And nearly a decade later, in a letter to Boniface (Epistle #185), c. 417: De Correctione Donatistarum, Augustine went on to argue for the use of torture by saying:

"Thou shall beat him with the rod, and shall deliver his soul from hell;" and elsewhere he says, "He that spareth the rod hateth his son." For, give us a man who with right faith and true understanding can say with all the energy of his heart, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?" and for such a one there is no need of the terror of hell, to say nothing of temporal punishments or imperial laws, seeing that with him it is so indispensable a blessing to cleave unto the Lord, that he not only dreads being parted from that happiness as a heavy punishment, but can scarcely even bear delay in its attainment.

Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction? Although even men who have not been compelled, but only led astray, are received by their loving mother with more affection if they are recalled to her bosom through the enforcement of terrible but salutary laws, and are the objects of far more deep congratulation than those whom she had never lost. Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show symptoms of resistance;

The necessity for harshness is greater in the investigation, than in the infliction, of punishment’: and again: ‘…it is generally necessary to use more rigour in making inquisition, so that when the crime has been brought to light, there may be scope for displaying clemency…’

Basically, Augustine looked at it this way:  If a man “sees that it is unrighteousness for which he suffers, he may be induced, from the consideration that he is suffering and being tormented most fruitlessly, to change his purpose for the better, and may at the same time escape both the fruitless annoyance and the unrighteousness itself … .”

He went on to argue that since “our motive is Christian love, torture is simply the means by which we therefore “love the sinner and are concerned for his salvation. Hence, he continued, "we must not ignore any methods, however distasteful, when seeking with a mother’s anxiety the salvation of them all.”

After all, Augustine continued, “What then is the function of brotherly love? Does it, because it fears the short-lived fires of the furnace for a few, therefore abandon all to the eternal fires of hell?” Hence, coercion was not seen by Augustine as being intrinsically right or wrong; but as depending upon “the nature of that to which he is coerced, whether it be good or bad.”

Hence, for Augustine, the quintessential nature of the "Christian theory of persecution," summed up in that letter to Boniface, the Roman governor in Africa, was that "There is the unjust persecution which the wicked inflict on the Church of Christ, and the just persecution which the Church of Christ inflicts on the wicked."

And he summed this up in a pithy rhyme that clothed such evils with all the eloquence of a Shakespearean sonnet, when he wrote, "Unless by pain and suffering thou art taught, Thou canst not guide thyself aright in aught."