Augustine’s Latin Christian Synthesis

Alexander H. Pierce, Augustine’s Theology of the Sacramental Economy (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2022).

The modern academy often privileges specialization and discourages interdisciplinary engagement. The fragmentation of knowledge is not confined to the present. In antiquity, the disparity between human experience and the world of the mind led to a common division of reality into the “intelligible” and the “sensible.” Insofar as sense perception and intellectual cognition were thought to give us access to different domains of reality, ancient thinkers who espoused “Gnosticism,” Manichaeism, or certains inflections of Platonism were inclined to maintain a dualistic view of the world in which it is divided into two very different realms. Religions and philosophies adopting such a dualistic perspective sought to escape embodied experiences such as grief, pain, hunger, and death. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) is often viewed as perpetuating such a dualism. My dissertation argues precisely the opposite: Augustine drew on the central Christian idea of sacramentum—a technical but expansive concept indicating the mysterious conjoining of the sensible to the intelligible, the human to the divine—to produce a unified theory of existence that stands in contrast to the dualisms of his time. In short, it builds upon the work of interpreters who see in Augustine a unified vision of reality and counteracts readings which take the apparent dualisms or antitheses to be the final word.

There are at least two major reasons it is difficult to give a synthetic account of Augustine’s sacramentum. First, Augustine’s writings have given rise to a vast tradition of “sacramental theology” that colors later interpretations. But upon closer examination, Augustine’s use of sacramentum is more capacious and fluid than the sacraments known even to medieval doctors of the Church.[1] Second, the concept of sacramentum stands on a fault line in Augustinian studies. While scholars agree that Augustine’s sacramentum suggests some kind of relationship between visible signs and the interior realities they signify, this accepted view elicits two rather different responses. Readers convinced Augustine never escapes the softer and more radical dualisms of Platonism or Manichaeism, respectively, doubt his ability to maintain this union.[2] In contrast, many argue that Augustine moved past his dualistic influences and see in the centrality of signs and signification to his theology a fundamental “sacramentality,”[3] “sacramental principle,”[4] or “sacramental worldview.”[5] The first response ascribes to Augustine a contradiction of which I argue he is not guilty; the second I follow in spirit, but seek to qualify with a more concrete analysis of sacramentum that overcomes the tendency towards abstraction among scholars of this persuasion.[6]

My account of sacramentum moves beyond philological analysis to ascertain its significance to the structure and development of Augustine’s theology. It is less an intervention on a field gone awry or the filling of a lacuna. It is more an attempt to organize the insights of longstanding and polyvalent discussions of sacramentum and the sacramental. Its principal aim is to show that “sacraments” are foundational to the account of God’s economy of salvation at the heart of Augustine’s presentation of Christian belief . In short, I lay out the formative components of his “sacramental economy of salvation.”[7] By “sacramental economy” I mean God’s purposeful arrangement of visible sacraments in creation, Scripture, and the Church for the sake of human salvation. Although the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are, of course, crucial, the sacramental economy includes the full range of what Augustine means by sacramentum (and its synonyms). As his own theology developed over the course of his life, there is a gradual increase in the power Augustine finds in the concept of sacramentum for articulating claims about God’s temporal disclosure and fulfillment of his eternal plan of salvation.

The first part analyzes the historical, philological, and theological background of Augustine’s formulation of the divine economy of sacraments. Chapter one explores sources— classical, biblical, and Christian—of the notions of sacramentum and “economy” (dispensatio, dispositio) Augustine would have encountered in the late fourth century. It establishes the Apostle Paul and Irenaeus of Lyons as the primary sources of the early Christian notion of the economy of salvation and examines the two distinct sources behind the Latin Christian sacramentum: classical Roman usage and the Greek Christian “mystery” (μυστήριον) which Latin-speakers (esp. in Roman Africa) translated with sacramentum. The second chapter explains the role of the Latin apologetic tradition (Tertullian, Lactantius, and Ambrose, in particular) in mediating for Augustine earlier Greek Christians’ insights into mystery (μυστήριον) and economy (οἰκονομία).

Chapters three and four consider the next stage on the pathway to Augustine’s synthesis of earlier authors. Here I turn to Augustine’s intellectual formation up to his renunciation of Manichaeism to provide a context for his reception of modes of thought already authoritative among Latin-speaking Christians. Chapter four shows how from the Cassiciacum Dialogues (ca. 386/7) onwards, Augustine affirmed the mystery of Christ’s incarnation and held certain “sacramental sensibilities,” forms of thought that supported his eventual assertion of a thoroughly sacramental account of God’s plan of salvation enacted and revealed in history.

The second part traces the establishment, expansion, and stabilization of the sacramental economy in Augustine’s writings from 387 to 411/2. Biblical literature, the Latin Christian tradition, and its vocabulary led to Augustine’s assertion of sacramentum as a definitive, distinguishing feature of the Christian religion and its belief in creation as a gift. That creation is a gift of God rather than the result of some necessary emanation or accidental malevolent act means that its constituent parts are not obstacles to overcome but goods in which God expresses his intentions. In chapter five, I contend that Augustine’s sacramental sensibilities germinate during the years 387–394 into a more explicit account of sacrament in God’s arrangement of creation, Scripture, and the Christian religion for human salvation. These developments can be attributed to Augustine reacting against Manichaeism, refining and supplementing Neoplatonism, and embracing the scriptural and traditional teaching of the Catholic Church as he immersed himself more fully in ministerial life. Chapter six argues that a few years into his priesthood (394/5) Augustine arrives at two theological insights that reorient his formulation of the sacramental economy: (1) the saving power of the sacrament of the cross, and (2) the elaboration of Paul’s “great mystery” (magnum sacramentum) in terms of the “whole Christ” (totus Christus). The final chapter examines the anatomy of Augustine’s arrangement of the sacraments in and through which he identifies God’s work to redeem humanity. This same period witnesses a shift in Augustine’s writings toward more unified accounts of divine grace and human willing on the one hand and the relationship between divinely given signs (i.e., sacraments) and the things they signify on the other.

Implicit in my argument is the contention that the development of Augustine’s thought is largely the story of his reckoning with how best to describe the mystery or sacrament of the Incarnation. Augustine identifies the sacrament par excellence with the biblical account of the creative Word of God becoming flesh (Jn. 1:14) and humbling himself to the point of death on the cross (Phil. 2:8). By the time he becomes the Bishop of Hippo (395/6), Augustine interprets the Christ event to be the paradigm for how God has arranged the sacraments of creation, Scripture, and the Church into an economy constructed for the sake of human salvation. The culmination of his earlier experiences, Augustine as Bishop proclaims this sacramental economy as central to how one conceives all created reality being given and made known by God. Augustine’s conception of the sacramental economy reaches stability around the time of his appointment as Bishop of Hippo and remains steady at least until his encounter with the Pelagians (411/2), the terminus ad quem of my study. Augustine’s elaboration of Paul’s “great mystery” (magnum sacramentum) in Eph. 5:32 in terms of the “whole Christ” (totus Christus) made up of Christ and the Church clarifies the normative significance of Christ’s mediation in the sacrament of cross, but it also explains the pattern of sacraments as unifying what can appear to be related by suggestion or signification alone. In the end, I argue, Augustine’s mature writings on the sacramental economy evince an order of sacraments that descends from (1) the crucified Christ through (2) the great mystery or sacrament of Christ’s union with the Church to (3) the sacraments of worship that incorporate believers into Christ and his death, and ends with (4) the sacraments of the word in Scripture and in creation as understood by the light of Scripture.

In response to scholars who see Augustine’s thought as polarized in various ways, my project presents the sacramental economy as a hermeneutical lens that holds apparent dualisms within Augustine’s thought together. I contend that the central Christian claim—that God revealed and gave himself for all of humanity in the human nature and story of Jesus Christ—led Augustine to affirm that while there is difference between the intelligible and the sensible, the divine and the human, the soul and the body, the relationship between such pairs is not one of opposition, but of harmony. Seemingly divergent aspects of reality are distinct, yet bound together as a function of God’s plan for drawing human persons into everlasting relationship with himself. The concept of sacramentum, which evokes this unified vision of reality, is not a minor, countervailing intuition, but a fundamental insight that pervades Augustine’s thought and preserves unity and continuity across his literary corpus. In this work of intellectual history, I seek to illuminate how Augustine’s understanding of reality and the Christian religion fit within the broader landscape of other late antique philosophies and religions. By tracing the evolution of his thought, this project highlights its distinctive character within his philosophical and religious context and counters dualistic readings of his work. Understanding the pervasiveness of the sacramental will enable modern readers of Augustine to see through surface-level dichotomies—inner and outer, body and soul, sign and reality—to appreciate his vision of the harmonious unity of the world and everything in it that participates in the God by whom it was created.

[1] Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117 n.6, writes, “[S]acramentum may well be the most semantically dense term in Augustine’s theological vocabulary. Its basic definition is ‘sacred sign’ (signum sacrum)… Yet the term’s range of meanings, theological and exegetical, extends far beyond its vastly more limited usage within modern Christian theology.”

[2] This doubt is most forcefully evident in Phillip Cary’s trilogy: Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 

[3] Basil Studer, “‘Sacramentum et Exemplum’ chez Saint Augustin,” RechAug 10 (1975): 87–141.

[4] John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 76; Michael Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis, OSHT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 39. Cf. Douglas Finn, “Holy Spirit and Church in the Early Augustine,” AugAHI 64.1–4 (2014): 153–185, who speaks similarly of an “incarnational framework.”

[5] Veronica Roberts Ogle, Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine’s City of God (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 4–6. Ogle also uses the language of “sacramentality” and “sacramental grammar.” 

[6] I analyze Augustine’s sacramentum as a native intellectual commitment that expands in significance over the course of his lifetime to avoid conceptualizing it in a manner that reduces it by abstraction, limits it to the horizon of medieval sacramental theology, or modernizes it in some way. I am concerned with how it comes to be a defining feature of Augustine’s understanding of reality and the Christian religion.

[7] Although like David Vincent Meconi, The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 216, I use the phrase “sacramental economy,” my use stems more from the confluence of the early Christian concepts of sacramentum and οἰκονομία than the modern theological trope.

Alexander Pierce completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame in 2022 and is currently Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at the North American Lutheran Seminary.