38 
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
pagan as Rntilius Namatianus took even a rosier view: and, in¬ 
deed, the sack by Alaric, in itself considered, appears to have 
been, in reality, a rather tame aJffiair.^^ Surrounded by angry 
fugitives from the capital,^^ Augustine kept his head, appraised 
the situation as best he might,^^ avoided undue minimizing of the 
evil, and equally shunned its exaggeration.^® That his estimate of 
conditions was too conservative is due, not to unpatriotic aloof¬ 
ness, but to the lack of perspective inherent in a contemporary 
position. 
Neo-Flatonic Christianity lent moderation to Augustine’s grief and 
to its expression. 
The reaction of the bishop of Hippo to the history of his time 
was doubtless largely, perhaps chiefly, the manifestation of his 
religious philosophy, a philosophy based, in its turn, as much on 
the harrowing experimentations of his soul as on a detached and 
placid Neo-Platonic metaphysic. His poise and self-possession are 
less apathy and insensibility than the behaviour of a prophet who 
sees God in the affairs of men and the affairs of men subsidiary 
to the eternal and loving purposes of God. Augustine is at once 
a pessimist and an optimist, and the firmness of his glance upon 
“the portentous events around him,’’ to employ the phrase of 
Ozonam,^^ is due less to a balancing of the two tendencies than 
to a system which preserves each entire and manages harmoniously 
to blend the two apparent antitheses. 
It is quite correct to describe St. Augustine as a thorough pessi¬ 
mist. The human will is, for him, since the Fall, congenitally dis¬ 
eased; the phenomenal world possesses but secondary existence; 
nature may better be discerned in the mind of God than by direct 
observation, and investigation of nature, in and for itself, is but 
soul-damning curiosity; our lives are dreary and arduous pil¬ 
grimages to a better land; imperfection is the necessary concomitant 
of all existence short of that of Deity itself. To be gripped in this 
view of the world is in advance to possess an antidote to the worst 
Dill, op. cit., 309—311. H. F. Stewart, in Cambridge Medieval History, I (1911), 
575-576. 
2* Dill, op cit., 62-63. 
Gf. Orosius’s blind partizanship. Dill, op. cit. 
2“ For emphasis on the darker aspects of contemporary life, vid .: Sermo CCXCVI in 
Pat. Lat., XXXVIII; Sermo XI, ibid.’, Ep. XCIX and CXXVII, in Goldbacher, op. cit., 
XXXIV; and Sermo LXXXI, in Pat. Lat., XXXVIII. 
^ A. Frederic Ozanam, History of Civilization in the Fifth Century (tr. A. C. Glyn), 
I, 23. 
