I have been reading Peter Brown’s acclaimed biography of Augustine, while also following the intense polemics surrounding Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality. The pope’s initiative, which focuses on decentralizing decision-making in the Church and the need for fellow Catholics to listen prayerfully to those they might disagree with, has come in for predictably scathing criticism from writers at First Things, the Catholic Thing, and other conservative publications. Often the tone is condescending as well as exasperated, driven by a deep suspicion that the pope has a secret agenda. Francis, they believe, is disingenuous. His real ambition is to undo what was accomplished by his two immediate predecessors.
Writing regularly at the Catholic World Report and the National Catholic Register, the theologian Larry Chapp usually brings a more measured tone to his criticism of the synod proceedings and Pope Francis, although he, too, can sometimes fulminate. Chapp remembers all too well what he characterizes as the theological and liturgical chaos of the decade after the Second Vatican Council. He believes that period of defections from the clergy, theological malpractice, and lay disobedience was a disaster from which Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI rescued the Church, but which Francis threatens to bring back. Like other critics of Francis, Chapp seems to have a great deal of tolerance for John Paul and Benedict’s shortcomings but little for Francis’s.
I find much to agree with in Chapp’s critique of post–Vatican II Catholicism and in his warnings against efforts to graft secular liberal values—especially with regard to sexual morality and egalitarian institutional structures—directly onto the Church. “The great misery of the twentieth century,” Chapp has written in summarizing theologian Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheist Humanism, “had been caused by atheistic thinkers who had promoted a false humanism grounded in a false anthropology—erroneous philosophical constructions of what it means to be a human being.” According to Chapp, our modern materialistic assumptions about the nature of reality are radically at odds with what Christian revelation teaches about human nature and destiny. The Church cannot simply rewrite Scripture and tradition to accommodate secular modernity’s individualistic and liberationist values. Catholic theology’s urgent task, Chapp writes, is to propose “a deeper humanism, a better anthropology, and a more compelling narrative of the meaning of our existence that gets us beyond the ‘monism of meaninglessness’ that characterizes modernity.”
Chapp puts the problem baldly, but it is hard to disagree with his basic assessment. It is easier to question his peevish dismissal of Church reformers as childish and his blithe insistence that sanctity is the only real solution to the current Church crisis. But he does acknowledge that the constant criticism of the pope can ring hollow. “After all,” he writes at First Things, “there is only so much criticism with which one can freight the synodal train before the critics, myself included, start to look like cranks, out to torpedo the process before it has actually done anything of note.” Amen to that.
Which brings me to Brown’s biography of Augustine. I have not read a lot of Augustine, although I did teach his Confessions to a class of bright high-school seniors some forty years ago. If memory serves, I was as perplexed by his Platonism then as I am now. The past is a different country. In most of Augustine’s work, his litigious rhetoric is an “obstacle race” for us, Brown concedes. But Brown has a unique ability to bring the very distant intellectual and social world of late antiquity, as well as Augustine’s complex personality, alive for the modern reader. He makes Augustine’s struggles and triumphs accessible, the dangerous world of the late Roman Empire vivid, and the contentious debates of fourth- and fifth-century Catholicism intelligible.
Given Catholicism’s current divisions, it was somewhat reassuring to be reminded of how divided and discordant the early Church was, and how deeply implicated it was in what Brown describes as a “hard” world populated by hard and violent men. As a bishop, Augustine was often faced with opponents out to torpedo his ministry and theological writings, and he did not hesitate to return the favor. Brown describes Augustine’s disagreement with Jerome as “singularly rancorous,” a phrase that could also be applied to the current combat over synodality. The Catholic world that Augustine played such an instrumental role in forging was just beginning to coalesce; its future was hardly certain. The competing claims of Manicheans, Arians, Donatists, Pelagians, and others were all being contested, often violently. Roman paganism remained a powerful social and political reality. Catholic practice was uneven, to say the least. Baptism was often postponed until one’s deathbed, as it was for Augustine’s father, and so the congregations Augustine addressed were made up of both the baptized and unbaptized. Concubinage was widely practiced. Clerics abused their authority. Augustine spent much of his time and energy as bishop adjudicating legal suits. Finally, as he was dying, the Vandals descended on what remained of Roman society in North Africa, threatening to destroy everything he had accomplished and possibly everything he had written.
As a bishop, Augustine had a lot of evangelizing to do. Far from commanding the obedience and loyalty of his congregation, he could be defiantly shouted down. “When Augustine preached, his statements were by no means the ex cathedra statements of the representative of a securely established Catholic hierarchy,” Brown writes.
Brilliant, urgent and, at times, intransigent, his sermons are better described as “dialogues with the crowd.” They are often inconclusive dialogues. One senses in them the constant presence of the unpersuaded, the indifferent and the downright disobedient…. Indeed, the very urgency and trenchancy of their tone betrays how little authority Augustine actually wielded over his hearers.
Perhaps there is something of Augustine’s belief in the weakness of human nature and the mysterious movements of grace in Pope Francis’s all-too-easily ridiculed conviction that dialogue, prayerful listening, and accompaniment are necessary. Persuading his audience of the Christian truths that Chapp is so eager to defend will not succeed by appeals to authority or moral browbeating. As Brown notes, Augustine rarely stood “outside his flock”: “He was well aware, that as the Catholic bishop, he had gathered a whole new group around himself, the ‘Christians’ of Hippo; and that consciously or unconsciously, the preacher had to keep his audience united by meeting them half-way on many issues.”
One can meet one’s fellow believers halfway without compromising on essentials. Augustine insisted that in order to understand one first had to believe. In his dispute with Jerome over how to read Scripture, he wrote,
We write while we make progress. We learn something new every day. We dictate at the same time we explore. We speak as we still knock for understanding…. If anyone criticizes me when I have said what is right, he does not do right. But I would be more angry with the one who praises me and takes what I have written for Gospel truth (canonicum) than the one who criticizes me unfairly.
On the vexed questions that concern both critics and proponents of Church reform, it would be helpful if all sides would move beyond the grievances they’ve nurtured for decades. Any “progress” the Church makes will be incremental, as it should be. Now no less than in Augustine’s time, we still knock for understanding.
