. Nevertheless, after I finished reading (in English translation) one of Augustine's most famous works--the Confessions--a few weeks ago, and having started to read his celebrated The City of God, I've come to realize that even as early as the time of Augustine himself, a few centuries after the time of the Apostles, the Church showed signs was in need of the sort of reformation Luther helped launch. This is because in these writings of Augustine we can see how certain ideas inconsistent with the Scriptures had already taken hold in the Church.
For example, in his Confessions, Augustine writes this about his mother Monica, whom he portrays as a devout Christian: "It had been my mother's custom in Africa to take meal-cakes and bread and wine to the shrines of the saints on their memorial days." (Book VI, Chapter 2, as translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin). Here we see the practice of venerating dead "saints" (believers of supposedly superior faith to that of ordinary believers) that became a distinctive characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. Interestingly, though, when his mother joined Augustine in Milan (in Italy), she ceased performing such ceremonies, he informs us. This was due to the fact that the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, "had forbidden such ceremonies...both for fear that for some they might become occasions for drunkenness and also because they bore so close a resemblance to the superstitious rites which the pagans held in honor of their dead." In other words, Ambrose was concerned that such ceremonies could be seen as being little different from paganism.
However, it wasn't just Augustine's mother who held to some questionable ideas, for all his devotion to the Scriptures, in his writings Augustine himself expresses some beliefs that are inconsistent with Biblical teaching. For example, in The City of God, he speaks of "people of less lofty virtue, who live in the married state, having (or seeking to have) children" (Book I, Chapter 9, as translated by Gerald G. Walsh, et al.). He contrasts them with "those who profess a more perfect life and are free from conjugal bonds." In other words, for Augustine celibacy is morally superior to monogamy, However, this is not actually the teaching of the New Testament. For instance, while the Apostle Paul does talk about the benefits of singleness in I Corinthians 7, both he and other authors of the New Testament also exhibit a high view of marriage (after all, in Ephesians 5 Paul speaks of how the relationship between husband and wife should reflect the relationship between Christ and the Church, and the author of the Book of Hebrews tells us that "marriage should be honored by all"). Nevertheless, this notion that celibacy is a spiritually superior state to marriage was widely accepted within the medieval Church.
In addition, in The City of God, in the course of developing an argument against the morality of suicide, Augustine writes:
There remains one argument for suicide, which I have touched on already. It is to the effect that taking one's life is expedient in order to ward off falling into sin, either through the allurements of pleasure or the violence of pain. If we admit this argument, it will logically lead us to the fantastical conclusion that men should prefer to end their lives as soon as they have been cleansed by the 'laver of regeneration' [i.e., baptism, quoting Titus 3:5] and have received pardon for all their sins. That is the proper moment for averting all future sins, when all past sins are blotted out. (Book I, Chapter 27, as translated by Gerald G. Walsh et al,)
In this quotation, we can see that Augustine believes that the ceremony of baptism itself cleanses us from sin, rather than being merely a symbol of that cleansing that occurs when an individual puts his or her faith in Christ. Once again, here we see an unbiblical belief that characterized the Church in the Middle Ages.
In short, through Augustine's writings, we can see how the Church had already began to wander away from Scriptural truth just a few centuries after its foundati0n and thus was already ripe for reform. Consequently, it is rather ironic that although Luther and many others among the Reformers were inspired by Augustine, they ended up rejecting a number of the beliefs that Augustine had held to and which had been retained by the medieval Church.
Image of Martin Luther from Wikimedia Commons