Enter the Beast  The Heretics   A Do It Yourself Guide to the Antichrist

As Richard Price (Head of the Dept. of Church History at Heythrop College, University of London, and priest of the Diocese of Westminster) points out in his book, Augustine as part of the series on Great Christian Thinkers, Augustine did not suppose that the arrival of Christian emperors meant the advent of the kingdom of God. But he did recognize that it helped the Church. Not only were the centuries of persecution at an end (at least temporarily), but state law was now available for the promotion of true religion. By the end of the fourth century the emperors had destroyed the power of pagans to molest the Church. Why not complete the good work by crushing enemies who were still more dangerous -- schismatics and heretics, who used the name of Christ to draw Christians away from the true fold? This leads us on to a notorious topic where St. Augustine was criticized in his own day and has been widely condemned ever since -- his defense of state coercion of heretics.

Here again he was responding to events and did not choose his ground. In a series of edicts, dating principally to 405 and 412, the Roman State, at the request of the e African bishops, tried to force the Donatists to give up their schism and submit to the established Church: their churches were confiscated, their services were banned, their clergy were threatened with exile, and their laity with heavy financial penalties, if they did not return to the Catholic fold.

When coercive measures were first proposed, Augustine had opposed their introduction; he did not think that error had any rights, but he was afraid that the Church would be unable to absorb a flood of reluctant converts. But he now changed his tune, partly because, as an official apologist for the Church, he had no option and partly because the converts turned out better than he had expected.

My original opinion was that no one should be forced into the unity of Christ: there should be attack in word, battle in argument and victory through reason, let those we had known as open heretics should be landed on us as insincere Catholics. But this opinion of mine was overcome, not by the arguments of opponents but by factual proofs. What proved me wrong above all was the example of my own city, which, though formerly entirely in the Donatist party, was converted through fear of the imperial laws to Catholic unity ...People were so helped by the terror of these laws that some now say, ‘We already knew this to be the truth, but we were held back by someone habit or other; thanks be to God, who has broken our chains and transferred us to the band of peace.’ Others say, ‘We did not know this to be the truth and were not ready to learn it, but we have become keen to learn it out of the fear of losing temporal goods without gaining eternal ones; thanks be to God, who used terror to dispel our negligence and to make us seek out anxiously what in time of security we never wanted to know.’ Others say, ‘We were deterred from entering by reports whose falsity we only learnt on entering, and we needed coercion to make us enter; thanks be to God who used this whip to teach us how false and empty were the lies people told about his Church.’ Others say, ‘We thought it did not matter where we practiced Christianity, but thanks be to God who rescued us from schism and showed u that the one God is to be worshipped in unity.’ (L 93.4.17-18)

Augustine found support for the use of coercion in Scripture itself. God had constantly driven the Israelites to repentance by punishing them. The conversion of St. Paul, overwhelmed by a heavenly vision on the road to Damascus, was a still better example of how God acts: not waiting humbly on the sidelines, asking of humans whether or not they must be left to find their own way to the truth: they may in their present circumstance lack other he opportunity to encounter the truth and the ability to recognize it when they do. Of course it would be better for them to discover such on their own initiative, but often this is not possible. Their freedom is adequately respected if, after being forced to assent to the truth, they come to believe in it genuinely; their belated consent makes up for the initial use of coercion.

In the parable of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:16-24) God is compared to a host who sends out his servant to the highways and hedges to compel people to come in. As Augustine commented, "They tick in the hedges, they don’t want to be compelled. ‘Let us enter,’ they say, ‘of our own will.’ This was not what the Lord ordered: ‘Compel them,’ he said, ‘to come in.’ Let necessity be experienced from without, and consent is born within. (S 112.7.8)

These passages represent Augustine at his best and at his worst. His defense of a policy of state oppression which drove many Donatists to suicide borders on the obscene. Moreover, his argument has thoroughly unpleasant implications: once you begin persecuting erroneous views, where do you draw the line? In the later Middle Ages and the time of the Reformation, his arguments were eagerly exploited by pious fanatics who wished to impose their own version of Christianity by means of state law. At the same time, however, his defense of the coercion of heretics shows real psychological insight: In our permissive society we are all too well aware that untrammeled ‘freedom of choice’ can enslave people to social or psychological pressures where no choice worthy of the name is actually exercised.

It is painful to read that his arguments were later used to defend such horrors as the Inquisition. But this should not blind us to the sheer logicality of a policy of coercion, once it is assumed, as most Christians did assume as late as the eighteenth century, that everyone who dies in heresy or schism goes straight to hell. We do not respect freedom of choice when it leads to drug-taking or drunken driving, yet schism in Christian eyes is far more destructive than either. If salvation is through faith in Christ and if Christ founded the one true Church as the ark of salvation, what ground do Christians have for tolerating other religions or for allowing a plurality of denominations? The arguments for religious coercion can appear perfectly, indeed horribly, logical.

It was not till the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that the Roman Catholic Church attempted the difficult task of reconciling modern ideas of religious freedom with its traditional claim to be the one true Church. The Declaration on Religious Liberty, one of the most  impressive of the council documents, argues that the service of God is only possible where there is freedom from coercion, since ‘the practice of religion of its very nature consists primarily of those voluntary and fee acts which a human being directs himself to God’ (1.3) Augustine would have said that this teaching is far too abstract and ignores the concrete situation - the lack of human freedom as a result of original sin and social pressures. It is to his teaching on original sin, and on the work of divine grace to restore freedom of the will, that I shall now turn.