Doctor Gratiae

Today, the Church celebrates Saint Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church. “There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future,” so long as we mean that as Saint Augustine did, and not as reworked by Lord Illingworth. In February, the Holy Father was visibly moved when visiting Annaba, the ancient Hippo. Like the page on U and non-U English, Saint Augustine’s Wikipedia pages in Portuguese and Slovene, neither of which I read, have long been significant sources of traffic to this site. His Rule has always been part of the Constitutions of the Order of Preachers, so that far from being the rupture with Augustinianism that is often asserted, the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas is wholly within it, and indeed utterly incomprehensible apart from it. Other attempts to affirm the Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination are not necessarily in opposition to Thomism; rather, under the Magisterium, which is its own point of reference and correction, it provides their point of reference and correction. This applies to the entire rational and empirical systems, since, at least in the context of those who devised those systems in Early Modern Europe, the very belief in the possibility of true knowledge by rational or empirical means (indeed, of true knowledge at all) is Augustinian, and indeed Thomist.

Martin Luther belonged to an Augustinian monastic institution. Yet, tragically, he had never been exposed to that intellectual tradition, but only to the real rupture with it, Nominalism. Thus he knew little of Saint Augustine and his successors on grace and salvation, so that he was unable to identify the Nominalist character of the concept of sola scriptura, at which he arrived – and it is vitally important to understand that his thought developed in this order – because of his pre-existing views on saving grace. Those views were in any case contrary to Scripture. As he would have known, if the proper integration of prayer, study and labour had been observed in his religious house, as it was in that of Saint Thomas, and originally in that of and under Saint Augustine. The Protestant Schism was not the answer, but the Late Medieval Church was in serious trouble. A heavy dose of Augustinianism was very much required. As it is today, when the grace of God has given us an Augustinian Pope.

Pope Leo XIV has inscribed Saint John Henry Newman in the General Roman Calendar and proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church. Saint John Henry was brought into full communion with the Petrine See by Saint Augustine’s dictum against Donatism, securus judicat orbis terrarum. The Donatists did not call themselves Donatists. They called themselves Catholics. But they were not. They lasted the better part of 400 years, and at their height they had more than 400 bishops. But they no longer exist. No one self-identifies as a schismatic. They can always tell you at great length why they are not. But they are. Other than the Maronites, who have never been out of communion with Rome, none of the Eastern Catholic Churches dates from earlier than the sixteenth century, and several are a lot newer than that. There was no provision for Personal Ordinariates until as recently as 2009. Having proceeded to consecrate more bishops, the Society of Saint Pius X may very well have no collective way back for several hundred years.

Excommunicated all the way down to the pews, and with the faculties to witness marriages and to hear Confessions revoked, the SSPX and its adherents have become the Lefebvrian or Lefebvrist denomination. That is far smaller than it habitually claims to be, unless the True Church really were Invisible after all. At least one of its new bishops was born into it and entered its seminary when he was all of 18. Preaching on the day after his consecration, he made himself far from the first to have revived the ancient heresy of Donatism. The answers to that are in Saint Augustine, whose spiritual son now sits in the Chair of Saint Peter.