Attila by Ross Laidlaw Page A

an easy or a quick decision. It came to him that, in a sense, it was a decision for the making of which his whole life had been a preparation.
    The world into which he had been born, the golden afterglow of the reign of the great Constantine, was, Augustine reflected, very different from the one he now inhabited. Then Christians, their faith established by Constantine as the official religion of the Roman state after years of savage persecution, had been willing partners in a compact with the empire, and Christianity had become a unifying force in a realm once riven by divisions and disharmony.
    But the empire, apparently so strong and stable, had within a generation descended into crisis. Disaster had succeeded disaster: Adrianopolis, the Gothic invasions, the crossing of the Rhenus by German hordes, the sack of Rome. In place of stability and confidence – chaos and insecurity. Yet, even as the empire weakened, its child the Church grew in power and authority. Had not Ambrose, Bishop of Mediolanum, forced the mighty Theodosius to kneel before him and do penance for his sins? The recentconsensus between Church and state broke down as Christian leaders increasingly stressed the irrelevance of earthly matters, and began to contemplate what had previously been unthinkable: a Church surviving in a world without the Roman Empire.
    All this, happening within Augustine’s lifetime, had strangely mirrored the events of his own career. His hedonistic student days when, not yet a Christian, he had lived for the sweet embrace of women and the addictive thrill of the arena, had been matched in the world by an easy-going co-existence between Christianity and other faiths. Then had come that blinding moment of epiphany, when he had seemed to hear a child’s voice exhorting him to seek inspiration in the Christians’ Bible: ‘
Tolle, lege
– Take up and read.’ From that moment, even while storm-clouds gathered round the empire, and the Church – abandoning its relaxed attitude to pagan gods – declared virtual war on heresy, he had tried to give himself completely to the service of Christ, eschewing worldly affairs and pleasures. It had not been easy. ‘Give me chastity and continence – but not yet’ had epitomized the sharpness of his struggle, as he had recorded in
Confessions
. Others too, like his friend Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, in rejecting the world for God, had had to make agonizing personal choices. In Paulinus’ case, this had meant ending relations with his dearest friend, the cultured and worldly poet Ausonius.
    It was the terrible trauma engendered by the sack of Rome that had crystallized these aspirations, and prompted Augustine to begin writing his
magnum opus
, the
City of God
. No more should men concern themselves with the Earthly City, he had argued; instead they should strive towards the New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, with its promise of union with God. With this vision had grown a conviction that men could not gain entrance to the City of God by their own striving. Sin barred the way. All men were sinners, but could not of their own free will purge themselves of sin. For this they needed Grace, a dispensation God alone could grant. But those who were vouchsafed this gift – the Elect – were already predestined to receive it. In the matter of salvation, God’s will was everything, man’s nothing. The bishop intoned to himself the rubric that formed the bedrock of his theology: ‘Grace, predestination, divine will.’
    The moment of truth was now at hand. If the beliefs expressed with such passionate conviction in his sermons and writings werenot to appear so much hypocrisy, he could not allow the Feast of the Kalends – given over to drunkenness, gluttony, debauchery, exchange of gifts, and competitive displays of wealth – to pass while he remained silent. The feast was a flagrant celebration of everything the old pagan Rome had