Introduction
So come back a step or two with me, and let us consider why we love the apostle [Paul]. Footnote 1
In 1963 Krister Stendahl published his article, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,”Footnote 2 in which he argues that, ever since Augustine and his psychological-autobiographical explorations in the Confessions, Western Christian exegesis of Paul has found in the apostle’s letters the paradigmatic account of the universal human experience of the plagued conscience. According to Stendahl, this Augustinian interpretation misconstrues Paul. Paul’s concern was historical and communal: how, considering the experience of Jesus, were the gentiles to be incorporated into God’s covenantal people?
Pauline theology undoubtedly holds prominence in the thought of Augustine.Footnote 3 But, as Paula Fredriksen, Margaret Mitchell, Thomas Martin, and Brian Daley have shown, the story is more complicated: Pauline theology, for Augustine, is inextricably bound up with reflection on and identification with Paul’s person and biography.Footnote 4 In this regard, Fredriksen has developed Stendahl’s analysis. In her influential 1986 article, she argues that Augustine’s account of his conversion in Confessions (hereafter conf.) is a retrospective mimesis of what Augustine understood to be Paul’s own conversion: an amazing transformation from persecutor of the church to apostle of Christ that eludes explanation apart from God’s grace. In demonstrating this narrative imitation, Fredriksen undertakes parallel acts of disentanglement: the authentic letters of Paul from Luke’s account in Acts; the letters of Paul from Augustine’s reading of them via Acts; and the early Augustine’s account of his conversion from the account presented in conf. 8. Augustine’s famous conversion scene, according to Fredriksen, was influenced by his discovery of “Paul’s” doctrine of grace, a discovery made possible by a synthetic reading of Paul’s self-presentation in Galatians, deutero-Pauline accounts of Paul the sinner and persecutor (1 Tim 1:13; Titus 3:3), and the dramatic transformation on the road to Damascus from Acts 9. The Augustinian doctrine of grace that emerges in Ad Simplicianum and is presented narratively in conf. thus springs more from reflection on Paul’s biography than from Paul’s theology. In articulating this distinction, Fredriksen echoes Stendahl: Augustine’s focus is psychological and individual, how God’s salvation is wrought in the human soul, whereas for Paul redemption is a communal and historical reality coming to imminent fulfillment through God’s action in Christ. Augustine wonders at the mystery of God’s election of some over others, while Paul is awestruck at God’s mysterious plan to include the gentiles alongside the Jews in his covenant people.Footnote 5
In her article published two years later, however, Fredriksen extends her thesis slightly. In her view, Augustine’s discovery of grace entailed the abandonment of the ideals of classical paideia, with its identification of human nature primarily with the soul and its insistence on human freedom in pursuit of virtue. From Ad Simplicianum onward, Fredriksen traces continuity across Augustine’s anti-Manichaean and anti-Pelagian works: in relinquishing human freedom, Augustine achieves a unity of human nature and human history, Julian of Eclanum’s accusation of residual Manichaean dualism notwithstanding. For Augustine, the tension between spirit and flesh highlighted by Paul serves not as the impetus for flight from the body and time, but rather as proof of body and soul’s unity, comprehensible only in light of the history of human nature’s disintegration through sin and its gradual and hitherto incomplete reintegration through God’s promise and bestowal of grace.Footnote 6
While building on Fredriksen’s work, Margaret Mitchell has argued that the former’s thesis needs more thorough testing across Augustine’s corpus.Footnote 7 In this article, I would like to heed Mitchell’s call. Across a range of his homilies, we find that Augustine does deploy Paul’s conversion theologically and exemplarily, but that he does not treat the event in isolation. In Augustine’s mind, Paul’s encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus is fully comprehensible only when one considers Paul’s earlier participation in the martyrdom of Stephen. Augustine’s reflection on Paul’s exemplarity is a reflection on a historical chain of mimesis that extends from the crucifixion of Jesus through the stoning of Stephen to Paul’s own conversion. Our analysis of Augustine’s preaching on Stephen and Paul thus follows the narrative moments of their historical mimesis as Augustine comments on them in various homilies. At each moment—Stephen’s imitation of Christ and Paul’s imitation of Stephen—we find that Augustine elucidates a two-part vision: first an earthly vision of the exemplar, followed by a transfigured, heavenly vision of Christ. Between and through those two visions, Augustine intends his preaching to engage his congregants and set them on a dynamic, transformational journey across time and into eternity.
In demonstrating this, we will seek to modify Fredriksen’s account of Augustine’s use of Paul in three ways. (1) To be sure, Augustine’s theology emphasizes introspection and, in that respect, differs from the thought of Paul. But, more in line with Fredriksen’s later thesis, Augustine’s exegesis of Stephen and Paul pertains to God’s work not only in the individual soul, but also in the community and its history. Insofar as Christ’s words to Saul in Acts 9:4 form one of the important scriptural warrants for Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus—the glorified Christ as head of his body, the church, for whom and as whom he speaks in the PsalmsFootnote 8—we see that Augustine has a robust understanding of the communal character of Christian mimesis. (2) Although Augustine’s historical and communal reading of Stephen and Paul does not share the apostle’s Jewish apocalyptic context, it does express wonder at the power of God’s grace to unite Jews and Gentiles in the church. (3) Finally, Augustine’s doctrine of grace does not mean the complete abandonment of the classical ideals of moral exemplarity. His preaching on Stephen and Paul should be understood within the tradition of Greco-Roman medico-philosophical care of the soul. Augustine’s framing of his examples, however, takes on a Christian character, inasmuch as those examples undermine the notion of human perfectibility. Always struggling amid God’s grace, they embody a training regimen of mercy and forgiveness. Precisely in that way, Augustine envisions and understands himself, through his preaching, to be facilitating God’s work of establishing and enlarging the church across time and space. Augustine activates his own scriptural imagination and that of his congregants, enabling them to find themselves inside the church’s historical memory, where Augustine imitates Christ, Stephen, and Paul, and where he and his congregants find themselves the objects—and ideally the subjects—of the affective mechanisms of church growth: love of God and neighbor up to the point of forgiving one’s enemies.
Augustinian Mimesis
Philosophical and Rhetorical Background
Augustine argues that all Christian life is the following of an example.Footnote 9 Scholars have shown how Augustine’s use of exempla represents a combination of the classical rhetorical tradition of deploying examples for moral-pedagogical purposes and the Platonic metaphysics in which all of mutable visible reality imitates unchanging intelligible forms.Footnote 10 In the rhetorical tradition, exempla were generally narrative accounts of events from the ancient past that helped a speaker to persuade an audience. In moral education, the exemplum could serve as a mirror in which one might glimpse their strengths or failings of character.Footnote 11
Augustine also drew upon the classical philosophical notion of paradeigma as cause. According to Plato, nature derives from and imitates the intelligible forms. Philosophical education sought a return to that transcendent, ultimate reality by moving in the mind from mutable material representations through intellectual images to knowledge of the forms.Footnote 12 Augustine’s theology follows roughly the same pattern.Footnote 13 The Word of God contains the forms of all things.Footnote 14 Via a process of summoning and conversion, each creature strives to reflect the Word, who in eternally clinging to the Father, perfectly images God.Footnote 15 The human being, from among all other creatures, is created in the image of God, thus sharing in features of their archetypeFootnote 16 and having an innate urge to become like their source.Footnote 17 Unlike nonrational creation, however, humans do so through reason and choice. By turning away from God in sin, humans deform themselves,Footnote 18 yet paradoxically such deformation still represents a distorted effort to be like God,Footnote 19 inasmuch as humans seek to claim, unjustly, a dominance to which they are not entitled. Pride motivates the human to try to control the material things of this world. Such mastery is at best relative, and the delusion of absolute power can feed a disordered love of the self and material things. Such distorted love can cloud judgment, and the soul risks confusing its spiritual nature for a material one.Footnote 20
Vision and Cultural Critique
Augustine explores such disordered attachment especially in a visual register.Footnote 21 He distinguishes three hierarchically ordered modes of vision: physical, imaginative, and purely conceptual.Footnote 22 He espouses a Platonic ray theory in which the soul dispatches a ray that makes contact with its objectsFootnote 23 and then imprints their form on the imagination and memory.Footnote 24 Vision is thus active rather than passive. It engages and habituates the will and emotions,Footnote 25 insofar as one chooses where to focus one’s attention; it binds the soul to its objects in love,Footnote 26 sees in the soul the objects of sight,Footnote 27 and, most precariously, assimilates the soul to those objects.Footnote 28
Augustine therefore deplores his culture’s spectacles, the theater and the games,Footnote 29 because the Greco-Roman heroes and glamorized violence depicted there were, in his assessment, underwritten by distorted cultural values:Footnote 30 pride and lust for domination.Footnote 31 The memories of such spectacles disfigure the soul and occlude spiritual vision.Footnote 32 Against that backdrop, Augustine articulates his understanding of Christ’s reformative work. Christ, though in the form of God, deigned to assume the form of a servant in the incarnation, becoming, we could say, a rhetorical or theatrical spectacle of humility. Through faith in Christ in forma servi, pride is healed, and one is prepared for the eschatological vision of Christ in his divinity.Footnote 33 The sacramental presence of the immortal, invisible Son of God in a mortal, visible human being effectuates Christ’s exemplarity and a new regime of Christian material signs—from Christ’s cross to the words of Scripture to the stories of the martyrs and the church’s sacramental rites and liturgical celebrations—such that those signs might function as fitting conduits of God’s healing grace and aids to renewed spiritual insight.Footnote 34
Augustine frames the Christian liturgy as a counter-spectacle to the Roman theater and games,Footnote 35as a transformed cultural environment, in which believers are conformed to Christ’s sacrifice.Footnote 36 The liturgy and Augustine’s accessible preaching style contextualize and enable the imitation of Christian moral exemplars.Footnote 37 Augustine’s preaching on martyrs such as Stephen and Paul often occurs in the presence of their relics, material remains whose spiritual power inspires deeper imaginative reflection on not only the martyrs’ earthly suffering, but also their life in heaven.Footnote 38 Concerning Stephen’s relics, Augustine proclaims, “Such a small quantity of dust has assembled such a big congregation here; the ashes can’t be seen; the favors received are visibly evident. Imagine, dearly beloved, what God must be keeping for us in the land of the living, if he grants us such favors from the dust of the dead.”Footnote 39 Although Augustine acknowledges that Stephen and Paul are dead, his imaginative rhetoric shows that spiritually they are alive and active in the church. Elsewhere he addresses Paul: “You are reigning with the one you stoned [Stephen], reigning with Christ. There you can both see each other, can both now hear my sermon; both of you please pray for us.”Footnote 40 Augustine thereby counteracts the impression that the soul is material and mortal, which the violence of the Roman games might suggest.Footnote 41 Such a false understanding impedes one’s ability to recognize true moral exemplars. If death really is the end, one cannot see the preaching and deaths of Stephen and Paul as communally constructive examples of love and hope.Footnote 42
Augustine’s preaching exemplifies what Margaret Mitchell labels a “reading of resuscitation.”Footnote 43 “Let’s go and see, beloved,” Augustine invites his congregation, “let’s watch this great spectacle.… Let’s go and see. Here’s Stephen being stoned. Suppose him to be set there in front of our very eyes.”Footnote 44 Yet Augustine and his congregants are not mere spectators. Rather, they find themselves a part of the drama. Stephen’s and Paul’s experiences become theirs, the means of training and reordering the mind and heart: “You heard [the story], and you saw the spectacles of your heart. The sound was in your ears, the vision in your minds. You watched the great contest of Saint Stephen, in which he was being stoned.”Footnote 45 Because the spectacles Augustine stages during the liturgy occur in the imagination, they facilitate communal ascent from the material to the spiritual.Footnote 46 Indeed, the power of the imagination allows him to lead his congregants even further, toward glimpses of spiritual realities. According to Augustine, imagination is active in physical sight; likewise, conceptual vision is required for imagination, if one is to exercise judgment over it.Footnote 47 The goal, then, of imaginatively reflecting on exempla is to move beyond imitation to knowledge and love of spiritual truths.Footnote 48 So, in the case of Paul, what one loves is his just mind, which requires at least an implicit grasp of the form of justice. In striving to imitate Paul’s justice, one gradually learns that, for the Christian, justice demands that they love their neighbor in God and love God as love itself.Footnote 49 And with his reflection on the love of love itself in The Trinity (hereafter trin.) 8, Augustine commences his more inward investigation into God the Trinity. But we have gotten ahead of ourselves. How does Augustine cultivate a love of Stephen and Paul through his preaching?
Seeing and Loving Stephen and Paul
Scripture as Spectacle and Mirror
In Exposition of Psalm (hereafter en. Ps.) 147,Footnote 50 a sermon where Paul features prominently, Augustine describes how those who have just attended the theater “retain the fantasies of their empty pleasure in their minds and continue to feed on the memory of things … positively harmful.”Footnote 51 The theatergoers might even pity Christians who, they think, are missing out. Yet Augustine deems this a “perverse, futile benevolence”Footnote 52 born of worldly attachment. He instructs his Christian congregants: “direct your prayers to God on their behalf. Make [those who watch those spectacles] see and feel that they are playing the fool. However intent they may be on watching the spectacles that please them, let them spare a glance for the spectacle they make of themselves (se spectent), and find it displeasing.”Footnote 53 In other words, Augustine seeks to draw the theatergoers’ attention away from worldly spectacles and toward his Christian congregants, who offer prayers of mercy for them. The sight of Christian mercy ought, in turn, to cause those who had relished the theater to view themselves the way God sees them and to feel differently, to adopt a new moral and affective regime.
However, Augustine does not exempt his congregants from the demand for such continuous conversion; they too ought to look at themselves and feel differently. In en. Ps. 147 and in sermon (hereafter serm.) 49,Footnote 54 a homily in which Stephen looms large, Augustine stresses the need, above all, to judge oneself.Footnote 55 Consistent with the Latin rhetorical function of exempla, Augustine tells his congregants in serm. 49 to use Scripture as a mirror (speculum) that will give them an objective picture of themselves.Footnote 56 Of course, Scripture recounts God’s judgment and God’s mercy. In en. Ps. 147, Augustine stresses that Christians have their own spectacles—ultimately, that spectacle is the heavenly Jerusalem sharing in the vision of God,Footnote 57 but before that it is the scriptural narrative of salvation history, of Israel, Christ, and the spreading of his church to all nations. Some of Scripture’s prophetic account of God’s city is obscure, but this, too, is a divine spectacleFootnote 58 whose unveiling ought to transform its readers. In en. Ps. 147, the content that unlocks the obscurity of Scripture includes Paul’s biography—his astonishing conversion from persecutor to apostle through Christ’s grace.Footnote 59 Scripture as mirror and spectacle shows Augustine’s hearers who they are and who they should become. Careful reading of Scripture helps elicit a new set of desires and feelings:Footnote 60 awe and gratitude at God’s gift of mercy and the desire to become more fully integrated into Christ’s body. God’s outwardly oriented and radically transformative love gradually disposes Christians toward mercy over judgment. They learn to see others in the same light of mercy,Footnote 61 for they know not which enemy of Christ might, like Paul or Augustine himself, one day become a disciple in that same body.Footnote 62
Lewis Ayres has shown how, for Augustine, exempla contribute to the beauty of God’s providential plan,Footnote 63 which is like a cosmic poem or painting.Footnote 64 In a similar vein, Morrison has analyzed Augustine’s mimetic understanding of history, in which the point is not simply to recount a sequence of events as they happened, but to interpret history’s meaning, a task that can involve discovering parallels between temporally discontinuous or seemingly unrelated historical events.Footnote 65 Such a parallel allows Augustine, in en. Ps. 147, to find Paul’s biography anticipated in an obscure psalm verse and to connect it, via the correspondence of Paul’s conversion to Christ’s death and resurrection, to the rest of salvation history. At the same time, Augustine is interested in tracing the temporally continuous and direct chain of mimesis that runs from Christ through Stephen to Paul. How does that sequence proceed, and why is it important?
Augustine Seeing Stephen Seeing Christ
Stephen hearing Christ’s prayer of forgiveness
How, according to Augustine, did Stephen first see Christ as an exemplar?Footnote 66 In the anti-Donatist homily en. Ps. 132,Footnote 67 Augustine suggests a direct influence. He claims that Stephen “had heard the head [Christ] saying, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you (Mt 5:44). From that same head he had heard something else; from Christ hanging on the cross he had heard the prayer, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing (Lk 23:34).”Footnote 68 In the later serm. 316,Footnote 69 Augustine speculates whether Stephen had been among those for whom Christ pleaded forgiveness while hanging on the cross: “Perhaps Stephen was one of those [who persecuted Christ]. If he was, then that prayer also availed for him, Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.”Footnote 70 In this latter example, Stephen is not a neutral observer, but one implicated and transformed by Christ’s prayer, which functions sacramentally.
Stephen preaching the medicine of Christ
This dynamic of grace, the inward divine love that renders Christ’s outward deeds and words efficacious, serves as the theological basis for significant moves Augustine makes during his anti-Donatist phase: evacuating Donatist martyrs of theological power because they are not motivated by loveFootnote 71 or affirming the outward validity of Donatist baptism while denying its sacramental efficacy.Footnote 72 The key to both is an embodied, historical, and communal contiguity and continuity of love. We see this in Augustine’s interpretation of Stephen in the anti-Donatist homily en. Ps. 57.Footnote 73 Notably, Augustine invokes Stephen’s example in a way resistant to any stark division between individual conscience and communal history.
In en. Ps. 57.8, Augustine reflects on the mimetic character of Stephen’s own language. He likens Stephen’s obstinate Jewish audience to the Donatists of his own day. In that way, Augustine turns Donatist self-identity on its head.Footnote 74 The Donatists imagined themselves to be the eschatological Israel, distinct from the rest of the world, practicing proper liturgy, and obedient to the law found throughout Scriptures. They viewed the Catholics, by contrast, as unclean gentiles opposed to God’s elect.Footnote 75 The Donatists attributed their justice to their suffering persecution and Catholic injustice to the use of coercion.Footnote 76
Augustine first attempts to show the Donatist inability to follow the law. Employing medical imagery to illustrate the outward historical mediation of Christ’s inner grace, Augustine notes that the Jews had received divine medicine in the prophets and the law, but those medicines gained healing power only upon Christ’s advent. Stephen communicates this healing power to the Jews when he preaches the gospel: “Stephen’s incantations offered them this fortified medicine, but they refused to listen; they blocked their ears against him who had given the medicine its new power.”Footnote 77 In refusing to listen to Stephen, his audience refused to listen to Christ, medicamentum quod habet uocem.Footnote 78 Christ renders the Old Testament medicines efficacious, Augustine adds, by fulfilling the law; his twofold commandment to love sums up the law and the prophets.Footnote 79
We should note here that Augustine makes extensive use throughout his oeuvre of the image of Christ as medicus. Rudolph Arbesmann has shown how classical philosophers used medical imagery to describe their work of spiritual therapy and how common the notion of Christus medicus had become among early Christians, particularly in North Africa, by Augustine’s time. What is unique, in Arbesmann’s view, is Augustine’s pairing of Christus medicus with the medicine of humility, which heals the sin of human pride.Footnote 80 Thomas Martin has further explored the theme of Christus medicus in relation to Augustine’s treatment of Paul, especially Paul’s struggle with the stimulus carnis mentioned at 2 Cor 12:7. In texts spanning the Manichean, Donatist, and Pelagian disputes, Martin shows how, for Augustine, Christ the doctor heals Paul not all at once, but gradually: the stimulus carnis is Christ’s ongoing means of rooting out pride and instilling humility.Footnote 81 What we are starting to observe in en. Ps. 57, then, is how embodied, communal, and historical that healing was. The medicine that will only gradually heal the great apostle Paul is, as we will see, mediated to him through a chain of self-sacrifice and preaching on humility and mercy that, in fact, stretches back to the Old Testament law and prophets and extends forward from Christ through Stephen to Paul.
It therefore makes sense that Augustine would use medicinal imagery to combat what he views as proud Donatist self-justification. In en. Ps. 57, Augustine undermines the Donatist claim to justice by identifying the Donatists with Jesus’s persecutors. Augustine’s focus in this sermon is on speaking truth and judging rightly in one’s own case, by which he means that one’s heart and actions align with one’s words.Footnote 82 He takes his hearers into their own consciences, where only God is judge.Footnote 83 Augustine describes several moral scenarios to prove that everyone has an innate sense of justice: if a potential case of injustice were turned around such that Augustine’s hearers could imagine themselves the victim, they would find themselves upset.Footnote 84 They thus know that they ought to treat others as they themselves want to be treated, but their disordered self-love and attachment to worldly things causes them to value their private interests over the common good. Humans’ preoccupation with external things had led God to give them the written law.Footnote 85 But the love of justice and the fulfillment of justice in love came only through Christ. Augustine rhetorically includes all his hearers in the group of those who called for Christ’s death, even after deeming him just (Matt 22.16): “Did you not crucify him whom you had called just?… What were you doing, when you vented your cruelty against God who was man, and killed your king?”Footnote 86 Because Christ is their king, they ought to be fearful of his return, turn inward, and confess their guilt.Footnote 87 For that to happen, they need to hear the truth spoken in love, the medicine with a voice.
By imitating Stephen and rhetorically setting his hearers before the crucified Christ, Augustine demonstrates where one hears the truth. But he makes clear the historical tradition in which he imagines this predicatory mimesis to take place. The Donatists claim that they protected the Scriptures from destruction during the persecutions—that their ecclesial tradition has adhered to the truth—but in practice, Augustine thinks, they deny the truth spoken in Scriptures and exalt their own words above God’s. Christ says in Luke 24:46 that he must suffer, die, and rise again. This much the Donatists would apparently accept.Footnote 88 Yet their ecclesial separatism leads them to neglect what Christ predicts next, that the gospel is to be preached throughout the world, starting from Jerusalem. For Augustine, that prediction has been fulfilled in the Catholic Church.Footnote 89 If the Donatists wish to speak with integrity, if they wish to align their words and hearts, they must bind themselves to truth with love. For that they must join the Catholic Church, the locus of Christ’s grace. Against an imagined Donatist objection that one should not join a church full of hypocrites, Augustine defends the mixed church by noting that at least Catholic sinners leave open the possibility of hearing, of receiving God’s healing grace spoken across salvation history, whereas the Donatists, by insisting on their community’s perfection, deafen themselves to the medicine of Christ’s voice.Footnote 90
Stephen applying Christ’s medicine: healing the emotions
For Augustine, Stephen’s preaching is comprehensible only within the context of salvation history, which is not a mere recounting of past events, but is, in its telling, the very vehicle of God’s mercy. Augustine identifies in Stephen’s words a therapeutic purpose, and by conjuring the spectacle of Stephen’s struggle, he, Augustine, likewise seeks to heal his hearers’ affections. In this respect, we see Augustine not simply abandoning the classical rhetorical and philosophical goals of virtue and happiness but revising them in light of the Christian gospel.Footnote 91 For example, Augustine frequently observes that Stephen’s initial words to his Jewish audience are extremely harsh. In serm. 315,Footnote 92 Augustine asks, “Who wouldn’t suppose that he was angry, who wouldn’t suppose he was ablaze with the burning brands of hatred, when he said, Stiff-necked and uncircumcised of heart and ears?”Footnote 93 Augustine, it seems, wants to elicit an acknowledgment that his hearers do, indeed, think that Stephen hates his enemies. This question gains significance because of the human being’s inability to peer into another’s heart:
Now observe [Stephen] being savage and scathing; recall his hard words.… It was as though he was their enemy; as though, if it could possibly happen, he would love to kill them all. Let the person say this who cannot see [Stephen’s] heart. Well, his heart was hidden; but his last words were heard, and his hidden thoughts were laid bare when he was being stoned. Lord Jesus, he said, receive my spirit.… That’s what Saint Stephen said, still standing. And after that, he knelt down and said, Lord, do not hold this against them.Footnote 94
An uncharitable and presumptuous—given no one can see Stephen’s heart—interpretation of the martyr’s story would view him as hateful toward his enemies. Yet Augustine demonstrates the error in such premature judgment and inculcates a patient willingness to listen, so that Stephen might reveal his heart’s true intentions. Augustine simultaneously discourages premature judgment of others and makes his congregants look honestly at their own hearts. The imagined spectacle of Stephen’s outward struggle enables Augustine’s audience to see the agonic spectacle that God watches inwardly:
Exert yourselves as much as you can to show gentleness, even toward your enemies. Rein in the anger which is prodding you to avenge yourselves.… If you want to avenge yourself on your enemy, turn your attention to that very anger of yours; because that is your enemy, which can kill your soul.… Recognize your real enemy, recognize whom you are fighting with on the stage of your heart. It’s a very narrow stage; but God is watching; that’s where you must tame your enemy.Footnote 95
We should not overlook that imitation of Stephen, even if it does not require physical death, nevertheless entails more than just inward transformation of the heart. Anger’s defeat goes hand in hand with the external prayer of forgiveness, for oneself and others. Indeed, if we think about Stephen’s exemplarity, we note that, while Augustine never diminishes the very real death Stephen undergoes, it is the martyr’s prayer for his enemies that demonstrates that his death is one motivated by love rather than by pride. Hence, it is the utterance of that prayer—necessarily historical and communal—that ensures that Stephen’s example can function sacramentally too, by pointing to and mediating Christ’s grace. In serm. 49, for example, witness how Augustine makes Stephen, as a member of the church, a window onto Christ’s saving action:
Let’s go and see, beloved, let’s go and see, let’s watch the great spectacle.… Let’s go and see. Here’s Stephen being stoned. Suppose him to be set there in front of our very eyes. Ho there, member of Christ, ho there, athlete of Christ; look upon him who for your sake hung upon the cross. He was being crucified, you are being stoned. He said, Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing (Lk 23:34). What do you say? Let me hear. Let me see whether I may at least be able to imitate you.Footnote 96
Augustine then vividly recounts how Stephen prays for his persecutors.
Stephen seeing Christ in heaven
Augustine frequently comments on another detail of Stephen’s story: Stephen sees the Lord, this time glorified and standing at the Father’s right hand. In Augustine’s interpretation, Stephen’s second vision of Christ is similar to and different from the first vision of Christ on the cross. Both visions are of Christ in his humanity, in forma servi. But in the second vision, Stephen sees Christ in his glorified humanity, bearing features suggestive of his role as eschatological judge. The vision does not, however, arouse fright in Stephen; rather, it inspires confidence. Serm. 314Footnote 97 is illuminating in this regard: “[Stephen] was bearing in mind the instruction of the one whose presence he could observe in heaven; and reaching out to him with the most ardent love, he longed to leave the flesh behind as soon as possible, and to fly off to him. Nor was he now afraid to die, because he could see that Christ was alive, though he knew he had been slain for his sake.”Footnote 98 Stephen is granted a vision of the resurrected and glorified Christ; based on the transformative sacramental power of the cross, Stephen believes and hopes that if he follows Christ’s example in death, he shall follow Christ’s example in new life.
Concerning Stephen’s vision of the heavenly Christ, Augustine also observes, in serm. 314, that “what [Stephen] saw in faith, he indicated in faith, and took violently by storm.”Footnote 99 In serm. 316, Augustine points out that only Stephen, and not his persecutors, was able to see Christ standing at the right hand of God. It is the persecutors’ envy that precludes vision.Footnote 100 Stephen thus illustrates the sacramental power of faith, which heals disordered loves and thereby enables deeper spiritual insight. Faith, for Augustine, always has as its object Christ in the form of a servant.Footnote 101 According to Augustine, both Stephen and his persecutors are afforded sight of Christ dying and dead on the cross. But only Stephen, who has been granted faith, receives the vision of Christ risen and glorified, with the result that he, Stephen, is granted this vision of hope in the resurrection and is, in the process, trained in love. For Augustine, the life of faith is one in which the believer must look to both Christ on the cross and Christ glorified. As much as Stephen sought to live with the Lord in heaven, he was compelled to imitate the Lord’s words and deeds on the cross. Accordingly, note Augustine’s observation from serm. 49:
When he had [asked the Lord to receive his spirit] he knelt down, and on his knees he said, Lord, do not hold this crime against them. Saying this, he fell asleep (Acts 7:59-60). Oh what blissful sleep, what true and perfect rest! There you are, that’s what resting really is—praying for enemies.Footnote 102
In conjuring the spectacle of Stephen, Augustine hopes to train his congregants to feel and act rightly and to see sacramentally, with the eyes of faith. He gives his hearers a foretaste of heaven, a sense of heavenly rest. Yet this is not an exercise in otherworldly escapism. Rather, it is an exercise in building up the communal body of Christ. It is the hard work of faith, active forgiveness of sins, that paradoxically affords Christians the experience of heavenly rest.
Augustine Seeing Paul Seeing Christ through Stephen
Corrupted community: Paul stoning Stephen through the hands of others
Augustine dramatizes Stephen’s mediation of Christ’s grace most concretely in the case of Paul. Across numerous homilies, Augustine uses a particular narrative detail—Saul (Paul) keeping the coats of those stoning Stephen (Acts 7:58)—to indicate Paul’s status as an enemy of Christ.Footnote 103 Similar to his construal of Stephen, Augustine understands Paul’s words and deeds within a historical and communal context. Well-versed in the law and the prophets, Paul should have expected and recognized the advent of Christ.Footnote 104 But Paul’s role as aid to the stoning is perhaps most fascinating. An observation Augustine makes in serm. 279Footnote 105 is instructive:
When Stephen was stoned, the first martyr for the name of Christ, Saul too was very evidently present. And he was present among those doing the stoning, in such a way that it wouldn’t be enough for him to throw stones with his own hands. In order, you see, to be himself active in the hands of all those who were doing the stoning, he kept guard over the coats of them all, showing more savage rage by helping them all, than by throwing stones with his own hands.Footnote 106
This might appear to be a rather unconvincing effort on Augustine’s part to make an accessory to murder more culpable than those who actively do the killing.Footnote 107 But the frequency with which Augustine returns to this point and the theological importance he ascribes to another text from this story—Acts 9:4—suggest that more is at work. Acts 9:4 forms a scriptural foundation of Augustine’s theology of the whole Christ, for there Christ makes clear that Paul, in persecuting Christians, is harming members of Christ’s ecclesial body. Against that backdrop, we can see that Augustine does not intend just to show how sinful Paul is as an individual. Rather, Paul’s sinfulness is compounded by his membership in a community. Just as members of Christ’s body are bound together by the bond of love, such that Christ, in his humanity, suffers with them, so too is Paul joined to his violent fellows by a disordered love, by “showing more savage rage (magis saeuiens).” That disordered love allows Augustine to see Paul actively—and more effectively—working through the hands of others. In the figures of Stephen and Paul, then, we have examples not just of individual, but also communal mimesis. Stephen stands for Christ’s body as it imitates the Head’s example of humble self-sacrifice; Paul, contrariwise, represents a community violently separating itself from the whole.Footnote 108
Healing of emotions and expansion of Christological vision
With the mention of savage rage, moreover, Augustine situates his concern for Paul’s disordered affections into a communal context. In serm. 168,Footnote 109 he uses vivid language to bring Paul’s emotions before his congregants’ mental eyes:
Let us look at Saul raging, observe him raving, observe him breathing out hatred and thirsting for blood. Let us take a good look at him, brothers and sisters, a great spectacle!… So off he went to rage against the members of Christ, off he went to shed blood… he’s walking along like that, thinking, breathing out slaughter… wrath is guiding his feet, hatred moving his limbs.…Footnote 110
Note how, in raging against Christ’s members, Paul’s emotions are expressed through his own members. In en. Ps. 147, Augustine links the details of Paul’s biography to vivid and memorable images from the psalm:
Let us all concentrate on this example [of Paul] that is set before us, so that the verse, He sends his ice like breadcrumbs [Psalms 147:6(147:17)] may disclose its meaning.… Remember that block of ice who arose after the murderous stoning of Stephen, the block called Saul.… If ever there was a man hardened and icy against the fire of God, it was he. But although Saul was hard and frozen, the Lord, who will send forth his word, and melt them [Psalms 147:7(147:18)], uttered a burning cry from heaven, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4) At that one question, all the hard ice in Saul dissolved.… We have no need to despair even of ice, so how much less of snow or mist?… God is shouting to the gentiles, “I have melted the ice; come to me, all you who are snow.”Footnote 111
The intertextual exegesis serves multiple functions. Paul’s story becomes more memorable when conceived in terms of ice. That narrative is, in turn, more easily appropriated when associated with words from the Psalms, through which Augustine’s congregants are connected to the martyrs. For, as he instructs his congregation in en. Ps. 69,Footnote 112 “In this psalm … we hear the voice … of martyrs exposed to danger amid their sufferings.… Let us … from sympathetic hearts join our voice to theirs, even if we do not compare with them in pain.”Footnote 113 In this way, too, Augustine’s hearers can share in the healing of Paul’s heart. The bishop, in the aforementioned quotation from en. Ps. 147, uses prosopopoeia to make an argument from the stronger: if I, God, can melt the ice of Paul’s heart, how much more easily can I melt the softer snow of your soul? Finally, in en. Ps. 147, Augustine speaks explicitly of the obscurity of the psalm as a medicine used by God the doctor.Footnote 114 Consistent with the observations made by Martin regarding the patient Paul, who in Augustine’s reading needed ongoing healing to avoid temptation to pride, Augustine here links the psalm and Paul to show the human’s perpetual need for God’s grace:
Whose cold does the psalm mean when it asks, Who shall withstand his cold? God’s, obviously. But in what sense is it his cold? Well, think. He abandons a sinner and no longer calls him; suppose he ceases to open the sinner’s mind and no longer infuses grace. Now let this person release himself, if he can, from his frozen foolishness. He cannot do it. Why not? Who shall withstand his cold? Look at this helpless, hopelessly frozen person, who laments, I am aware of a different law in my members that opposes the law of my mind, and imprisons me under the law of sin inherent in my members. Who will deliver me from this death-ridden body? (Rom 7:23-24)Footnote 115
As he does with Stephen, Augustine connects the healing of Paul’s heart to vision and voice. We recall how those who stoned Stephen could not share his vision of the exalted Christ because of their envy.Footnote 116 Augustine says that Paul, too, was motivated by the most bitter zeal.Footnote 117 Like Stephen’s other persecutors, Paul still needed sacramental vision. In that regard, Augustine’s account in serm. 279 is illuminating:
[Paul] was laid low by the voice of Christ from heaven, and as he received the injunction forbidding him to rage, he fell on his face.… So what did he hear when he was laid low? Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? [Acts 9:4] … The head in heaven was crying out for his members still located on earth, and he didn’t say, “Why are you persecuting my servants?” but Why are you persecuting me? And [Paul] answered What do you wish me to do? (Acts 22:10).… Already the preacher is being fashioned out of the persecutor.… He heard what he must do. Yes, certainly he was struck blind. For his heart to shine with an inner light, the outer light was for a time snatched away from him.… And yet during the period when he couldn’t see anything else, he was seeing Jesus. Thus even in his very blindness the mystery of what it is to be a believer was taking shape; since those who believe in Christ ought to fix their gaze on him, ought to reckon everything else as scarcely even real; so that the creature becomes cheap in their eyes, while the creator grows all the dearer in their hearts.Footnote 118
If Paul’s rage and envy blinded him spiritually while he was helping murder Stephen, it takes physical blindness, according to Augustine, to awaken in Paul the eyes of a believer, to enable him, like Stephen earlier, to see Christ in heaven and, in the process, to learn to love the creator more in his heart than he loves the created world with his eyes. In serm. 279, Augustine interprets Christ to carry out the same kind of affective therapy that he identifies elsewhere in Stephen’s preaching. When Christ calls to Paul from heaven and knocks him to the ground, he is raging against Paul’s rage. Yet Christ’s rage is directed at an error, not at the person committing it. In other words, we see that, as in the case of Stephen, anger has its place in the Christian life, so long as it aims at sin, rather than the sinner, and so long as it is motivated ultimately by love, by the desire to heal the other person. Augustine deploys paradox to underscore Christ’s medical power: “What gentle savagery, what merciful rage! You can see him [Christ] getting the knife ready; he is going to operate, not destroy; going to cure, not kill.”Footnote 119 Thus, after knocking Paul down and blinding him, Christ offers him loving aid: he teaches Paul that, although this life entails suffering, that pain can be endured if one hopes for the rest of the next life.Footnote 120
But, finally and importantly, we must observe that this inward turn toward the heart and heavenly realities remains, simultaneously, a summons to really see the material, created world. Earlier we noted Stephen’s two-part Christological vision, first the lowly Christ on the cross and then the glorified Christ in heaven. In Augustine’s account, Paul also has a two-part vision. Unlike Stephen, though, Paul was not present at Christ’s passion. Instead, Paul first sees Stephen stoned and hears him preach harsh words and lovingly pray for his enemies. But Paul does not really see Stephen until the second part of his vision, when, blinded, he is formed into a believer and finally sees Jesus. And what does Jesus call him to see? None other than the members of Christ’s body whom Paul is persecuting—that is, he is called to see them as members of Christ. Without in any way denying the reality of Paul’s vision of Christ, Augustine suggests that the only way Christians see and hear Christ is through the members of his body.Footnote 121 But it takes the gift of faith to see the whole, the whole Christ, in and through a mere part.
Vision of the whole Christ throughout the nations
For Augustine, Paul’s transformation enables another glimpse of wholeness, a fulfillment of God’s promise that the gospel would spread to all the nations.Footnote 122 Augustine sees this occur partly through Paul’s persecution of Christians in Jerusalem, which causes members of the church to scatter across the earth.Footnote 123 In serm. 116,Footnote 124 which has an anti-Manichaean polemic, that detail is something of a hinge between two partial visions: the disciples’ sight of the risen Christ—an argument against Manichaean docetic Christology—and later Christians’ sight of Christ’s body the church, which helps anchor their faith in Christ’s and in their own future resurrection.Footnote 125 The reality of Christ’s body, in its suffering and glory, unites Christians in a single whole across history, a history still in the making. Thus, in serm. 116, Augustine uses the subjunctive to represent the suffering of Stephen and the early church at the hands of persecutors like Saul/Paul and thereby to ignite the faith of the Christians of his own day and incorporate them into the ongoing history of that communal body:
The whole Christ was known both to [the disciples] and to us; but the whole Christ was not seen by them, nor is the whole Christ seen by us. By them the head was seen, the body believed; by us the body is seen, the head believed. And yet none of us lacks Christ. He is complete in all of us, and still there is more of his body waiting for him. Those disciples believed, through them many inhabitants of Jerusalem came to believe, Judea came to believe, Samaria came to believe. Let the members join the body…. Let the Jews rage, filled with jealousy. Let Stephen be stoned, let the coats of those who stoned him be kept by Saul, Saul, the future apostle Paul. Let Stephen be slain, the Church of Jerusalem be thrown into confusion. Let burning firewood be scattered from there, let them go elsewhere setting other places on fire.Footnote 126
Similarly, in the anti-Donatist homily en. Ps. 147, Augustine situates the church’s spread from Jerusalem into a broader analysis of God’s promises and their fulfillment in salvation history: if the Donatists can view the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, then they should accept, as well, the promise that the church would spread to all the nations. But the deeper logic at work is a dialectic between whole and partial vision. There is the wholeness of Christ the head and his ecclesial body. In that regard, the Donatists believe only partially, in the head but not in the members as part of that whole, thereby missing the point and locus of Christ’s mercy.Footnote 127 This unity is confirmed, to Augustine’s mind, by Christ’s identification with the persecuted members of his church (Acts 9:4), who are represented by Stephen. Augustine pins Stephen’s martyrdom on Paul, yet he also recognizes in that death the sacramental seeds of Paul’s conversion.Footnote 128
The whole Christ is ultimately an eschatological reality, unknown to human beings, who exist in time and cannot perceive the motivations in other people’s hearts. Humanity’s partial vision becomes an important means whereby Augustine establishes the continuity between the church as a mixed body starting from Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem. Yet again, Augustine’s analysis studies salvation history and the individual conscience. Augustine deploys the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia to compel his hearers into an honest and humble acknowledgment of their imperfect souls.Footnote 129 At the same time, because of the obscurity of other people’s hearts, they are to practice mercy by assuming the best about others.Footnote 130 In an imperfect world, Augustine calls and equips his congregants to be and to become the heavenly Jerusalem, to share, to a small degree, in the perfect peace of heaven by entrusting to God alone the work of salvation.Footnote 131
God’s grace brings growth not only out of Paul’s persecution, but also through Paul’s preaching and epistles.Footnote 132 This, too, is an unfinished, ongoing process. Thus, in serm. 116, Augustine speaks directly to Paul in the present because the apostle remains alive and working on behalf of a church still taking form:
Speak, preach, preach Christ, scatter the seed, you fine ram, so recently a wolf. Look at him, observe him, this man who used to be so savage: But far be it from me to boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world was crucified to me, and I to the world (Gal 6:14). Pour forth the gospel; with your mouth scatter the seeds you have conceived in your heart. Let the nations hear, let the nations believe, let the nations burgeon with luxuriant growth, let a bride be born in the purple to the Lord from the blood of the martyrs.Footnote 133
Augustine maintains the imperative in the first two sentences of the foregoing quotation, but the addressee switches from Paul to his congregants. The addressee of the sentence immediately following the quotation from Galatians is thus ambiguous, and that ambiguity facilitates the Christian’s identification with Paul. Augustine effectively calls every Christian to look at Paul and, in the process, to be converted like him and “Pour forth the gospel.”
Grace as the overflowing gift of self
Just as the church spreads to all nations yet remains a mixed body,Footnote 134 so too Paul, the individual, exemplifies for Augustine the Christian’s ongoing struggle with sin and constant need of divine grace.Footnote 135 In ancient epistolary theory, a letter rendered its author present and offered the reader a glimpse of the letter writer’s soul.Footnote 136 For Augustine, Paul’s epistles offer an outward testimony of the inward movement of his heart, and they facilitate Augustine’s predicatory revivification and representation of Paul to his congregation.Footnote 137 In several homilies, Augustine stages conversations with the apostle, the rhetorical device of sermocinatio. These conversations are a mixture of quotations from Paul’s epistles and prosopopoeia.Footnote 138Augustine invokes Paul’s own words to prove that the apostle’s conversion and subsequent achievements for the church were all the result of grace. In common with all sinful humanity, Paul was, according to his own will, deserving only of condemnation and punishment. How could someone that zealous in his persecution of Christians have any merits of his own? So serm. 298:Footnote 139
Because if, my dear Paul, to begin with Saul, when you were persecuting the saints of Christ, when you were holding the garments of those who were stoning Stephen, if the Lord had delivered a just judgment upon you, where would you be now? For a crime of such enormity as yours, what place would be found for you at the very bottom of gehenna? But he didn’t make a just award then, so that he might make one now. You see, we read your own words about your previous doings in your letter, and it’s from you that we know about it. You said yourself, For I am the last of the apostles, not worthy to be called an apostle (1 Cor 15:9). You’re not worthy, and he did it. So he didn’t award you what was your due, because he bestowed an honor upon an unworthy man, whose due was punishment. I am not, he said, worthy to be called an apostle. Why not? Because I persecuted the Church of Christ. So if you persecuted the Church of Christ, how is it that you are an apostle? But by the grace of God I am what I am.… I myself am nothing. Whatever I am, I am by the grace of God.Footnote 140
Paul is who he is because of God’s grace alone. No one, then, should despair that they are too sinful for God’s forgiveness.
Yet Augustine does not simply set the sinner against God’s grace. The sermocinatio also allows Augustine to show that the relationship between human agency and divine grace is not a zero-sum game. Consider serm. 299B:Footnote 141
And how is it you [Paul] are an apostle? But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace in me has not been idle, but I worked harder than them all. Pardon me, Saint Paul, but people who don’t understand will think it’s still Saul speaking. I worked harder than all of them, has the appearance of being said out of pride. Still, it was said with truth; but what comes next? Yes, when he sees he has said something which could set him on a kind of pedestal, I worked harder, he says, than all of them; and straightaway, not I, though, but the grace of God with me (1 Cor 15:9-10). Humility recognized itself, infirmity trembled, perfect charity acknowledged the gift of God.… The one who bestows the merits will reward the merits. [Paul] became an apostle, though he was not worthy, and will he be unworthy to be crowned? There, you see, when he received a grace, quite gratuitous, in no way his due, I am not worthy, he said, to be called an apostle, but by the grace of God I am what I am. Now, on the contrary, he is demanding his due: I have fought the good fight, I have completed the course, I have kept the faith; but for the rest there remains for me a crown of justice, a crown of justice is my due. And to show you it’s something due, which the Lord will award me. I didn’t say, “gives me,” or “bestows on me,” but will award me on that day, the just judge. The Merciful one bestowed something on me, the Just one will make me an award. I can see, blessed Paul, what the crown is due to; your merits. But looking back to what you were, I recognize that these very merits of yours are God’s gifts.Footnote 142
God’s grace helps lead, gradually, toward the fullness of human flourishing and freedom.Footnote 143 Augustine uses the conversational format and the words of Paul’s letters to demonstrate how the human being is transformed through the help of Christ’s grace. Augustine lets Paul speak in such a way that he can alternatingly claim sinfulness and unworthiness and can point to his, Paul’s, merits. All the while, however, Paul attributes those merits to God’s gift. Thus, the conversational style shows how God’s grace does not erase Paul’s identity but, rather, gives it to him. And because Paul has this identity, he can be an example to other Christians, who can, with Augustine, share in Paul’s voice—note Augustine’s use of the first person toward the end of the quotation—and make it their own as members of the same body.
Faith and love: making and trusting the outward expression of the heart
For all Augustine’s mature reticence regarding exempla,Footnote 144 his incarnational theology and strong emphasis on grace leave a notable space for them in the church as a part of salvation history. Here we turn to another feature of Augustine’s preaching on Paul that is generally continuous with what we saw in the case of Stephen. In serm. 279, Augustine adduces Rom 10:10, where Paul describes believing in the heart while confessing Christ with the mouth, to highlight Paul’s humility, on the one hand, and the proud shame of contemporary pagans, on the other. According to Augustine, those pagans might recognize God’s eternal Word, but they will not outwardly profess the Word made flesh out of fear of social censure. For such individuals, Augustine underscores the need to humbly incarnate their faith, to bring inward faith and love to outward expression:
What’s the use of having believed with the heart unto justice, if the mouth hesitates to bring to birth what has been conceived in the heart? God sees faith inside; but that’s too little. What stops you confessing the humble one is your fear of the proud; and you put the proud before the one who for your sake incurred the displeasure of the proud. You’re afraid to confess the humble Son of God. The great Word of God, the power of God, the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), you’re not ashamed to confess that. You’re ashamed to confess him as born, crucified, dead.Footnote 145
Yet the need for external confession works the other way, too. In the same homily,Footnote 146 Augustine describes Faustinus, a convert to Christianity whose sincerity is doubted by some of his congregants. Augustine highlights the example of Paul to help his congregants see the power of God’s grace at work in Faustinus’s life.Footnote 147 Such seeing is of course hard. Augustine reminds his congregants that they cannot see Faustinus’s heart.Footnote 148 Consequently—and here we see the communally upbuilding and affectively therapeutic effect of faith—they ought to charitably and humbly trust his outward confession. God has already used their example as members of the church: whether they have inspired love or fear in Faustinus, they have been the occasion for his conversion. But should they presumptuously exclude him from the community, they close the door to hope.Footnote 149 Augustine exhorts his congregants to see and to believe at once so that pride can become love: “Let us not claim to judge the thoughts of others … look at [Faustinus’s] face, about which you should be rejoicing; commit his heart, for which you should be praying, to God.”Footnote 150 It is the outward sight of Faustinus’s face, coupled with the faith in what God is doing in Faustinus’s heart, that opens one to seeing Faustinus’s humanity, what he is and can be. That is also the way that Augustine’s congregants, in the context of the community, become more human, more the image of God.
These exhortations remind Augustine’s hearers of their partial vision. Humans cannot see the whole, cannot see everywhere God’s grace is operating. There can be no gradual healing inwardly, however, without the body, the law, the incarnation, examples, the church, and history. And wherever one finds oneself, whether in the church or without, God has designed matters for suitable healing, to combat pride and cultivate humility and love. Yet this attentiveness to place, time, and perspective in the Christian life does not result in the flattening of the distinctiveness of the church for Augustine. To the contrary, our analysis has shown how the church, in Augustine’s preaching, is the utterly necessary locus of grace, while at the same time remaining open to the movement of God’s grace both within and beyond the church’s visible boundaries.Footnote 151
Conclusion
In this article, I have sought, by means of an analysis of a range of Augustine’s sermons, to confirm Paula Fredriksen’s thesis that Paul’s Lucan biography of conversion from persecutor of the church to preacher proves theologically and anthropologically paradigmatic for the late antique bishop. But we noted that Augustine often treats Paul in tandem with the protomartyr Stephen. This led us to modify some further claims Fredriksen and her scholarly forebear Krister Stendahl had made about the Augustinian interpretation of Paul. Augustine might not share the historical Paul’s Jewish apocalyptic worldview, but his treatment of the individual Christian’s conscience cannot be comprehended apart from a consideration of the broader communal history of divine promise and fulfillment. Particularly against the Donatists, Augustine stresses, in line with Paul, how the eschatological Jerusalem includes Jews and Gentiles. And while Fredriksen is right that Augustine’s post-396 theology of grace turns toward the body and history, the bishop does not appear to make that shift by abandoning a philosophical concern with the soul, virtue, and eternity. To the contrary, Augustine’s preaching on Stephen and Paul continues, with notable Christian modification, a longer Greco-Roman philosophical and rhetorical tradition of “medical” care of the soul. Such care, which for Augustine is embodied and historical, aims to transcend the limits of materiality, temporality, and death, not by escaping from such strictures so much as by transforming them from the inside out. Christ’s real death renders Stephen’s and Paul’s historical examples transformative and theologically paradigmatic and thus serves as the basis for Augustine’s belief in Stephen’s and Paul’s continued life in heaven. Precisely as one toils horizontally through time in the church community, by following the examples of Stephen and Paul, one begins, Augustine believes, to ascend vertically, to gain a foretaste of eternal rest.
Because our study has taken us across so many different homilies, it is perhaps useful to conclude with a brief look at a single, later homily, serm. 316 (preached after 416),Footnote 152 where Augustine brings Stephen and Paul together in a dynamic predicatory act of sacramental imagination. As one may recall, this is the sermon where Augustine wonders whether Stephen was one of those who did not know what he was doing in killing Christ, one for whom Christ entreated his Father for forgiveness. Christ’s prayer was successful, and Christ’s real death becomes the focal point of Stephen’s own physical self-sacrifice and the means whereby the martyr, while in the body in time, makes an ascent toward heaven in and through Christ: “Those of you who know how to love Stephen, love him in Christ.… Notice whom he was confessing while he was being stoned; whom he was confessing on earth, whom he could see in heaven; for whom he was handing over his flesh, to whom he was entrusting his soul.”Footnote 153 Because of Christ’s death and Christ’s prayer, Stephen’s death and Stephen’s prayer could then be the seeds of change in Paul’s life: “Do you suppose Saul heard these words? He heard all right, but he jeered; and yet he was included in Stephen’s prayer.”Footnote 154
Augustine invokes an image of Stephen’s death and Paul’s sin:
Such a lovely picture this is, where you can see Saint Stephen being stoned, can see Saul keeping the coats of those doing the stoning. This man is Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus (1 Cor 1:1), this man is Paul, the servant of Christ Jesus (Rom 1:1).… We can see your [Paul’s] fruits that came by the will of God: you are read everywhere, chanted everywhere, everywhere you are converting to Christ the hearts that oppose him.Footnote 155
Via meditation on a violent death, beautiful not in itself but because it has been transformed by God’s grace, Augustine takes his congregants from the church’s beginnings to its universal geographic spread, achieved with the help of Paul’s letters. Those horizontal movements are, at the same time, movements inward and upward. Augustine’s rhetoric draws his congregants into their own minds. But there Augustine does not paint a picture or quote the letters of those dead and gone. Rather, his memory of the church’s past is engagement in its present and a foretaste of its future, as he and his congregants interact with Stephen and Paul, very much alive in heaven:
You [Paul] are reigning with the one you stoned [Stephen], reigning with Christ. There you can both see each other, can both now hear my sermon; both of you please pray for us. He [Christ] will listen to you both, the one who crowned you, one first, the other later on, one who suffered persecution, the other who did the persecuting. The first was a lamb then, the other was a wolf; now, though, both are lambs. May the lambs [Stephen and Paul] acknowledge us, and see us in the flock of Christ. May they commend us to him in their prayers, so as to obtain a quiet and tranquil life for the Church of their Lord.”Footnote 156
Augustine and his congregants remember Christ’s prayer for Stephen and Stephen’s prayer for Paul. They see how love and mercy build the church throughout the world. Through that memory, moreover, they become a part of that living historic and eternal community because Stephen and Paul now pray for them. In those prayers—prayers of mercy that, as we have seen, they are to imitate as well—they share in a tranquility that Augustine, I think, intends to be ambiguous, referring both to the imperfect peace of this life and the perfect rest of the next.
So who are Stephen and Paul for Augustine? They are spectacles of an all-encompassing Catholic Christian culture intended to counteract the violent spectacles of late antique Roman culture. Where, for Augustine, the latter might have suggested the finality of death and an ideology of pride and dominance, the former manifested the truth of God and the soul’s immortality and inculcated a habit of merciful love. Where the latter divided, to Augustine’s mind, the former drew the self outward into a greater unity with God and other. Augustine could thus deploy these examples as a way of defending and achieving catholicity against pagans, Donatists, and Pelagians. The stories of Stephen and Paul illustrate the transcendent mystery of God, in whom justice and mercy unite: in judgment God corrects error and in mercy God gradually reintegrates the individual and the community by healing bad habits. In that process, Augustine showed an understanding of divine grace that was compatible with a medical-philosophical training in virtue, that could lead people to the fullness of being human, by transforming, not denying, humans’ embodied, historical character. The examples of Stephen and Paul similarly enabled Augustine to show how God reintegrated the human community in its wholeness, as a body with many parts and a history. So, through the witness of Stephen, Augustine could underscore the conversion of Jews and the origin of the church at Jerusalem. Through Paul, Augustine could showcase the inclusion of the Gentiles into Christ’s body. Augustine could deploy such figures to articulate his vision of Christianization, not through exclusion and external conquest over the church’s enemies, but through inclusion and gradual transformation of the whole,Footnote 157 his vision of a church spread throughout the nations that yet remains a mixed body healed in time.
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