Cor. 4:7-15 Paul's description of his "constant bearing about in the body the putting to death of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in his mortal flesh " (II Cor. 4: 10; cf. Rom. 8: 11) fits on to his reference in the preceding paragraph (II Cor. 3: 18-4: 6) to the inward "illumination" and "transfiguration" into the "likeness of the Son of God," whose glory was mirrored" in the eye of his soul. Especially must we note the allusion at its close to the new creation" for the world as well as for his own soul, which had "dawned" in his mystical vision of "the face of Jesus Christ." For this conception of the eternal life of "things invisible" triumphing through a "voluntary death" is continued in verses 16-18. Moreover in the opening paragraph of the next chapter (5: 1-10) it develops. into a discussion of the "heavenly house," an indestructible building of God" with which we are to be "clothed upon " when our "earthly tabernacles" decay. Finally this immortality, guaranteed by the gift of the Spirit, an "immortality in the image of God's own being," is declared to be the divine purpose in the creation. For a predecessor of Paul in the adaptation of the Hellenistic doctrine of immortality through vision of the divine image had also declared that

God created man for incorruption

And made him an image (eiкwv) of his own proper being.30 In all this defense of the "ministry," therefore, Paul is simply interpreting his vision of the glorified Lord and its retroactive effect in terms of Hellenistic religion.

It is the task of the psychological rather than the historical and literary critic to draw the boundary line between subjective and objective in this mystical experience of Paul. For our present undertaking let it suffice to have made clearer (if our effort has not been in vain), how Paul applied these 30 Sap. 2:23; cf. II Cor. 3:18; 5:5.

current conceptions to a spiritual experience which he was one of many to share with Peter and the other companions of Jesus; and that he and they together secured the triumph of Jesus' cause, the transfer to humanity of that ideal of the Kingdom of God for which Jesus suffered his martyrdom, because they endowed their vision of the exalted and glorified "Lord" with the moral qualities of the Servant of Jehovah who had "humbled himself and become obedient unto death, yea, even the death of the cross."

THE MYSTICISM OF AUGUSTINE

WILLISTON WALKER

So preeminent were Augustine's services in the development of Christian doctrine that our first thought of him is as a theologian. His controversies with Donatists and Pelagians, his explications of the Trinity, of grace, of predestination and of the sacraments were so formative for later Christian thought that they naturally stand in the forefront in our recollection of him. To those who immediately succeeded him Augustine appeared no less distinguished as a propagator of monasticism. But with all his other claims to distinction Augustine must remain always one of the greatest of Christian mystics, and no small part of his permanent influence has been the fruit of the mystical spirit which inspired and animated his writings generally, but was nowhere more evident than in his Confessions.

Augustine's Confessions are the most remarkable spiritual autobiography that the ancient world produced, and have never been surpassed in any period of Christian history. They are far from a complete story of his life. They end with the death of his mother, in this thirty-third year. He was to live till nearly seventy-six. They omit many details of employment and relationships in the years that they cover that the reader would gladly have had preserved. The main facts of spiritual and intellectual development stand forth, however, in transparent clearness. The Confessions exhibit with utmost fidelity his moral defeats, his philosophical and religious wanderings, his intellectual and spiritual struggles, and his transforming experience. No leader of the ancient

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Church is known to us, in the deeper recesses of his soul, with anything of comparable completeness.

Augustine's convictions were determined in large measure by his experience. In him two natures were conjoined, of diverse tendencies. He was marked, from earliest manhood, by a hot-blooded impetuosity, inherited perhaps from his easygoing, long heathen father, which manifested itself in sensuality. When little more than sixteen he contracted a concubinous relation to which he was to hold for years. At the same time his deeply spiritual and intellectual nature could find no abiding satisfaction in the gratifications of the flesh, and Cicero's Hortensius, which came into his hands in his nineteenth year, convinced him that in the search for truth the only permanent satisfactions are to be found. It was, it may well have been, an inheritance from his spiritual-minded mother. Thenceforth the two natures were in constant struggles within him, and victory came long to neither. His better self loathed his lower appetites, but he was unable to shake off their control. He was wretched in heart. “I, miserable young man, supremely miserable even in the very outset of my youth, had entreated chastity of Thee, and said: 'Grant me chasity and continency, but not yet.'

"1

In these torments he turned to the Scriptures for help, but the barbarous Latinity of the old versions then current repelled him. 'They appeared to me unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Cicero ; " 2 and his pride of will was not as yet to be bent to their characteristic virtue of humility. "I scorned to be a little one, and, swollen with pride, I looked upon myself as a great one." 3

No wonder that in this divided and wretched state he was attracted by the then widely prevalent Manichæism. The system of Mani, though always frowned upon by the Roman

1 Confessions, 8:7. 2 Confessions, 3:5. 3 Confessions, 3:5.

authorities, had the force that always inheres, for earnest minds, impressed with the depth of actual or potential human depravity, in a dualistic explanation of the universe. To Manichæan thought, good and evil are eternal realities, both positive existences, and in unending conflict, with man a creature in both camps, and his everlasting control a prize of victory. While evil is spiritual, its chief domain is that of matter. "I believed evil to be a sort of substance, and to be possessed of its own foul and misshapen mass, whether dense, which they denominated earth, or thin and subtle, as is the body of the air, which they fancy some malignant spirit crawling through the earth. And because a piety, such as it was, compelled me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, the one opposed to the other, both infinite, but the evil the more contracted, the good the more expansive." 4 Such a view tends to place evil not in a responsible wrongfulness of disposition, but to regard it as something inevitably bound up in the dual constitution of men, body and spirit, to be fought indeed, but rather hopelessly as long as man is in the bondage of the flesh. While man must struggle against evil, he is hardly responsible for its existence in his own nature. For some nine years Augustine remained satisfied with this explanation of his moral perplexities. Yet Manichæanism did not hold him. He came to question its adequacy, and fell into a state of skepticism, "doubting of everything and fluctuating between all." 5

Meanwhile Augustine was succeeding in his profession of teacher of rhetoric, and had secured an excellent post in Milan. Here two new forces came into his life. It is difficult to say which was the more influential. One was the preaching of Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, a man about fifteen years older than Augustine, and now in the full

4 Confessions, 5:10. 5 Confessions, 5:14.