Christians have long wrestled with how best to think about the relationship between Christianity and culture. Many of us first thought seriously through this issue when we read H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic, Christ and Culture (first published in 1951). In doing some writing on Augustine, I discovered in my notes a comment by Serge Lancel on the influence of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine in the history of western culture. Before his death Lancel was Professor of Latin Literature and Roman Civilization at the University of Grenoble. The comment is found in Lancel’s 1999 (English translation in 2002) work, St Augustine. Lancel writes the following:
“[W]ithin the strongly constructed ‘teleological’ and theological framework, Augustine had placed an ‘educational’ content whose success would sound the knell of the most questionable practices of ordinary paganism, and whose spread would eventually either render traditional classical culture commonplace, or at least ‘secularize’ it, or sometimes give it a Christian interpretation, and ultimately feed the western Middle Ages for centuries” (p. 201).
Christians today, as Christians have always done, will continue to ponder how to live faithfully amidst a culture which is many ways hostile to Christian belief. But what should Christians do in the present? If, Lancel’s reading of Augustine is correct, then Augustine is quite intriguing indeed. Lancel correctly notes Augustine’s “teleological” framework (there is an “end” to which all things point, and to which history–under God–points) and a theological framework found in On Christian Doctrine. Among other key teachings, Augustine can affirm that there are “signs” (signa) and “things” (res). Various “signs” point to other “things”. All signs are things and many things are signs. Augustine will go on to argue that God is the ultimate “thing”–the key and greatest “thing” which grounds and provides coherence and meaning for all other signs.
But Augustine also speaks of “using” (uti) and “enjoying” (frui) things. All things can be “used” but only certain things should be “enjoyed” (at least in the ultimate sense of “enjoy”). And of course, for Augustine the “thing” which is to be enjoyed is God. And, it is the enjoyment of God which should order, shape, and govern all of our various uses of other things.
All this is to say, Augustine thought theologically, and his educational “program” set out in On Christian Doctrine was an attempt to to think theologically about central things: about (1) all the “signs” and “things” which we encounter, and about (2) all the various things which we are to “use” and/or “enjoy”.
As Christians practiced something like this Augustinian vision there would be–in effect–a Christian victory over, or transformation of, classical pagan culture. For as Christians began to think about all “signs” and “things” in explicitly Christian categories, as Christians began to “use” and/or “enjoy” various things in explicitly Christian categories, things change. Everything begins to appear different as we see and think in more and more explicitly Christian categories. The early medieval Christian who picked up Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and began to read through it may not have realized he was being inducted into a whole new way of thinking about all of reality, but he was. And this explicitly Christian way of seeing and understanding and speaking about the world would take root in the Christian west over time, and would result in the Christian transformation of paganism–albeit imperfectly and on most counts not completely.
