How Augustine Guided the Victorians

The uprootedness and impermanence that caused such anxiety in nineteenth-century life led to a revival of interest in the works of St. Augustine, particularly in Victorian Britain. An increasingly industrial and commercial world, defined by constant social and technological change and filled with an avalanche of mass-produced commodities, created a sense of profound uncertainty. This uncertainty resulted in the embrace of classic works of the past, among them the Church Fathers and particularly Augustine.

This interest in Augustine extended to both religious and secular audiences. Secular critics like Matthew Arnold saw in Augustine an embodiment of the eloquent, open-minded search for truth that characterized the humanistic, liberal-arts tradition he deeply valued. Religious thinkers like John Henry Newman and others in the Oxford Movement saw a return to Augustine as restoring a lost connection with the fervor and devotion of the early Church. Both camps saw Augustine as offering an antithesis to a modern world they viewed as plagued with indifference, myopia, and atomization.

Arnold desired to restore a sense of social cohesion and community lost in a mechanistic age devoted to hollow consumerism and “doing as one likes,” following base desires without a concern for the pursuit of either individual wisdom or the common good. While he did not idealize the past in a superficial or sentimental way, he did view modernity as particularly lacking in continuity and cohesion. Poems of his like “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” and the more famous “Dover Beach” lament this state of disquiet. In “Dover Beach,” Arnold wrote that “the Sea of Faith” was once full and “round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” In the tenuous modern world, conversely, the speaker can only hear its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” Arnold was a Christian, and by the standards of today, he was quite religious; yet he was not only discussing the loss of religious faith but the loss of faith in history and tradition, the continuity of society from one generation to the next.

Importantly, Arnold was not a fatalist. He believed humanity could overcome this uncertainty through learning and commitment, but he found the Victorian society he inhabited lacking in desire for this kind of improvement and perfection. The phrase most commonly associated with Arnold, then and now, is “the best of what has been said and thought.” This ideal is easily misinterpreted. As deeply as Arnold loved and admired ancient Greek drama, he did not believe that alone would save a broken world. Rather, this ideal is an appeal against insularity, against the belief that the mores and conventions of one’s own upbringing are enough to provide complete enlightenment. Literature of the past has the value of broadening the individual perspective and awakening it to forgotten but useful ideas and viewpoints.

In Culture and Anarchy, he comprehensively discussed the need for cultural knowledge to provide a foundation against the caprices of an unstable age, writing that this broader understanding provides “an elevation of our best self.” Thus subordinating “all the multitudinous, turbulent, and blind impulses of our ordinary self.” This expansiveness of understanding creates closeness and unity among ostensibly very different groups of people. As such, Arnold viewed Augustine and others who refuse self-interested complacency and spread this depth of understanding as “true apostles of equality.”

The bold and unsparingly revealing nature of the Confessions made it a particularly seminal text for Romanticists starting from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Share on XConstantly, Arnold opined against the idea of the “one thing needful.” Nothing was more dangerous for Arnold than the belief that following one person and one particular worldview is enough to understand and explain a complicated world. This belief he viewed as simply “Jacobinism,” by which he means an ideology with a “fierce hatred of the past and those whom it makes liable for the sins of the past.” This mix of hyper-individualism and ideological narrowness created for Arnold what he viewed as alienating divisiveness. For Arnold, the dilemmas of humanity remain constant, and so the genuine insights of the past remain not only beautiful but useful and revitalizing. Augustine particularly had value for Arnold as a thinker who dealt with the problem of finding clarity in an anxious and egotistical world. He venerated Augustine as one of those who “worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail.” The Confessions of Augustine was a particularly insightful text for Arnold, as it discussed with uncommon vividness and clarity “the animating labors and afflictions of early Christianity.” Arnold saw Augustine not only as a brilliant figure of theology and literature but a relevant thinker for broadening the minds of the nineteenth century and transcending the alienation of a divided age.

The bold and unsparingly revealing nature of the Confessions made it a particularly seminal text for Romanticists starting from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late eighteenth century, even among those who were not particularly religious. For the thinkers of the Oxford Movement, however, the text was especially meaningful. Beginning in the 1830s as a reformist crusade against the lukewarm carelessness and lifelessness of the Church of England at that period, the Oxford Movement combined a fervor for devotion and ritual with the Romanticist impulse toward individual passion and against an uncertain, mechanistic modern world. It produced some of the great thinkers of nineteenth-century Britain, such as Henry Edward Manning and Newman, whose Tracts for the Times gave the movement its other common name, the Tractarian Movement. The commitment of Newman and Manning to reviving the old forms of early Christianity led them to eventually join the Catholic Church, but it also led them to the insights of Augustine.

Newman’s most popular work, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, takes much of its structure and form from Augustine’s Confessions. Just as Augustine describes in vivid detail his journey from Roman paganism to doubt to guilty vacillation and finally to Christianity, Newman describes a similar journey from mainstream Anglicanism to questioning to self-contradiction and finally to his decision to convert to Catholicism. Both books depict arduous and difficult journeys, requiring both faith and reason, where every slight movement necessitates deep questioning and contemplation. As importantly, both are books characterized by their bracing honesty, presenting personal faults and failings without either downplaying them or wallowing in self-pity. Newman quotes Augustine repeatedly throughout the Apologia and credits a particular phrase in Augustine with helping push him toward Catholicism: “Securus judicat orbis terrarum.” This phrase, which can be translated to “The judgment of the whole world is final,” led Newman to believe that the Catholic Church is fundamentally indivisible, and thus any attempt to separate from the Church is necessarily in error.

Newman’s most popular work, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, takes much of its structure and form from Augustine’s Confessions. Share on XIn both thought and form, thus, Newman borrowed much from Augustine. Whether Newman would have converted to Catholicism without the influence of Augustine is questionable. That his Apologia owes significantly to Augustine and particularly the Confessions is undeniable. Arnold and Newman maintained a cordial closeness, and Arnold admired Newman since his undergraduate days at Oxford. The scholar J. Russell Perkins is largely correct in writing that “Newman was clearly more aware of the depth of the differences between them than was Arnold” and that these “two great Victorian sages, politely exchanging letters and publications, were at cross purposes.” Augustine was important for many thinkers of the nineteenth century, though what they did with his thought differs, as the discrepancy between Arnold and Newman demonstrates. The pluralistic liberal-arts vision of Arnold, with its focus on uniting society through broadening the minds of individuals beyond the platitudes of their milieus and social backgrounds, differed from the Tractarian vision that viewed Augustine as offering particular, specific religious truths. Still, both visions saw the wisdom of Augustine as an important wellspring capable of creating guidance and harmony in an adrift, commercialistic modern world.

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