Augustine Is With Us Still!

By David Wesley Soper

Union College, Barbourville, Kentucky.

IT IS easy to forget neither Pelagius nor Augustine, particularly in our era, for from whom does our betraying exalted view of human moral capacity derive if not from Pelagius, and of whose counsel, voicing an estimation of man as creature under God, do we stand in greater need than that of Augustine? In the one is given a real man and a verbal God; in the other a real God and, to a degree, a verbal man. It is at once evident that Pelagius and not Augustine is the prevailing prophet of the present, that Augustine has today but a minority following. It is also evident, is it not, that civilization built upon an overestimation of the moral power of man has come to chaos? Perhaps almighty man is less almighty than he has been led to assume. Perhaps it is necessary for him to recover a sense of his creaturehood under God. For what is the base of the present frontal attack upon humane government but an excessive view of man, which is to say, man viewed as though he were not in relation to transcendent Deity? Indeed, what philosophy fathered this exalted notion of superman, now laying siege against humanity, but the identical estimate, of man as without need of humility, prevailing in the democracies under attack?

It may well be that the attack on democracy — that is, democracy as Christianly understood — is itself the anti-toxin designed to immunize our man-centered culture against its own virus of self-sufficient pride, a counter-irritant to offset our own over-leaping view of man, a fire to check wildfire.

Augustine, I affirm, is with us still — perhaps as a minor prophet only to our distorted vision — and it may not be amiss to consider once again, and with care, himself and his leading ideas.

Our global wars, if man be a reality, are but loud echoes of the greater war within every human. Certainly Augustine was, in this sense, a man of battle. All the historic wars of the mind and the map were, literally, brought to sharp focus within him.

His father was a pagan and his mother a Christian. The pagan freeman, Patricius, regarded Christianity, much as the later Pietro Bernardone was to do, with cool contempt. The Christian mother, Monica, endured with silence her rough-willed husband and did not always come off the loser in their struggles. In the case of their son, she was at last the victor. Augustine was thus born into a home where the pagan-Christian world battleline was already clearly drawn, November 13th, 354 A. D., in Numidian North Africa, at Tagaste. Shortly before his death, about the time his son left for school at Carthage, Patricius became a Christian. The stout pagan learned to kneel with the subtly stronger Monica.

Augustine’s youth was a catalogue of excesses. Two centuries earlier Clement of Alexandria had described youth as an unbridled steed whom only the Lord could tame. Augustine, in this sense at least, was abundantly a child of the race. The battleline between play and study, flesh and spirit, was beginning to be drawn within him — though for some time to come it continued purely a one-sided contest. In early years Aurelius Augustine hated school work, much preferring ball-playing, and frequently received in full measure the school-master’s rod.

The Confessions anticipates Rousseau’s Émile, in better balance with the full cluster of virtues, for Augustine noted that his joy in Latin had arisen through natural home associations, as his hatred of Greek and the three R’s issued from their relation to severe school discipline. “No doubt then”, he observed, “that a free curiosity has more force in our learning these things, than a frightful enforcement” (Confessions, I, 23, Everyman Edition, p. 15.).

Petty thieving engaged some of the turbulent youth’s unabsorbed energies. His natural tendency to excessive sensuality was further strengthened by the Latin authors he studied, with their detailed delineation of the pagan gods’ flagrant bestialities.

Grammar and rhetoric, which were to play so vivid a rôle as Augustine’s early master interests, and later as good servants of his faith, became his study at the nearby city of Madaura. While his parents arranged to finance his further education, he was home for a time in his sixteenth year, occupying his idleness with mischief. His father, it seems, was more interested in his intellectual than his moral development, and ignored his problem of chastity. At this time he formed an illicit relation, maintained for fifteen years until his conversion. It is apparent that more than sensual love characterized the relation, and at his conversion his separation from the young woman rather than their public marriage is scarcely pleasantly memorable, particularly in view of their son, Adeodatus. A sense of guilt to be expiated, Monica’s desire that her son form a socially approved marriage, and the standards of the times serve to explain, if not to justify, the decision.

At eighteen years of age, Augustine continued his studies at the opulent and gay Carthage, where, for a time, his fancy was led captive by the exotic magnificence of temples, theaters, public baths and palaces. He was quite carried away by the overtone of easy immorality. For two years his studies made but an indifferent showing alongside his continual attendance at the stage-plays and his carousing. The obscenities of pagan religious pageantry, in praise to Cybele, goddess of fertility, attracted him. At length his latent intellectual abilities began to assert themselves, and he became “chief in the rhetoric school”, master of the arts of casuistry if but little engaged by the claims of truth.

St. Paul, I think, is finally to be credited with Augustine’s, conversion, with the help of Monica and Ambrose, yet the contribution of Cicero ought not to be overlooked. It was moral philosophy, and the love of wisdom, as mediated by Cicero’s Hortensius, which added to Augustine’s mind its first spiritual dimension. From the love of the flesh, and the love of clever phraseology, to the love of truth is itself no small step. What Virgil was to be to Dante, Cicero certainly was to Augustine. A famous remark from Goethe is anticipated in Augustine’s words in the Soliloquies: “I know nothing but this, that things fleeting and transitory should be spurned, that things certain and eternal should be sought” (in Paul Elmer More: Shelburne Essays, Sixth Series, p. 68). Though the simplicity and directness of St. Paul, even the elevation of St. John, seemed to Augustine at this time greatly inferior to the Latin classical authors, Cicero had opened the young man’s eyes to the alluring loveliness of wisdom. Philosophy herself was to be Augustine’s Beatrice to guide his steps to catholic Christianity.

The simple material dualism of those straitened rationalists, the Manichees, next served as the context of Augustine’s inward war. Salvation was an ascent from the vulgarity of matter to the lesser vulgarity of mind. The belief that truth might be exhaustively captured by the unaided reason appealed to Augustine at this stage in his progress, as to so many seekers after the Good Master, for it flattered his egotism and his intelligence, and removed the scene of battle from moral and religious responsibility to disinterested speculation. One merely had to climb out of oneself by much contemplation. Life was to be brought to suspended animation in the mind. A distorted dualism was Manicheism’s strength, and, though Augustine never went on from among the auditores to the perfecti, he was deeply in the toils of its apparently closed and complete system of philosophy. Not for long, however, particularly in view of Monica’s tears and, later, Ambrose’s sermons, could Augustine remain in this pleasant state of arrested intellectual development.

The very intensity of his physical passions served to dislodge him from Manichean absolute asceticism. His familiar prayer tells the story, presenting his inner war against the background not of the Christian self-government but of the Manichean self-mutilation.

“‘O Lord, make me pure and chaste, but not quite yet.’ For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished” (Confessions, VIII, 17, ed. cit., p. 163).

Before Augustine’s nineteenth year the son, Adeodatus, was born. That Augustine loved the boy is manifest in the fact that he kept him with him, allowed him to be baptized at his side, shared with him his fortunes until the boy’s death at the age of sixteen.

Not only during the two years at Carthage, but later, as well, a friend of his deceased father, one Romanianus, supplied the money for tuition and bills.

After a year as teacher back in Tagaste, Augustine returned to Carthage, for ten years occupying his energies by teaching rhetoric in his own school and contending for the public prizes. At length the Proconsul himself crowned him victor in a poetry competition at the Carthage theater. Throughout this period Augustine’s immoralities, considered in retrospect after many years, seemed great indeed, and, in fact, Monica’s tears were much in evidence. She must have felt often that there was little hope for her son’s conversion, and perhaps bemoaned the day of his birth. Yet she continued to pray for him, and to beg the prayers of Christian priests in his behalf. One bishop told her that he himself had outgrown Manicheism and that her tears were the guarantee of her son’s eventual redemption. On Augustine’s visits to Tagaste, Monica, heartily despising his arrogance and sensuality, yet gave him her finest hospitality.

Plotinian pantheism next grappled for Augustine’s final loyalty, along with a temporary appeal from astrology, and, indeed, Plotinus did not altogether lose his man. The Augustinian emphasis upon “union” rather than “fellowship” with God preserved, at least verbally, a central neo-Platonic tenet throughout even the later years. It is but fair to say of Plotinus, however, that he performed a lasting service to Augustine and to the ages by drawing the youth’s mind to the philosophical contemplation of God. The Platonic One above the Many, however distorted by Plotinus into a closed emanational system essentially pantheistic, reached Augustine, and it was not a long step for the youth, aware of an inner need not to be met by speculation, from the philosophical idea of a God who was all to a direct personal commitment to the God by whom all was created, sustained, and governed. Plotinus prepared Augustine for Ambrose.

Late in his twenties, Augustine was attracted to the Jerusalem of orators, Rome. The brilliant Syrian rhetor, Hierius, newly arrived from Antioch, had gained instant fame in the Latin capital. Fires of ambition stirred themselves to flame in Augustine. Why should he not, indeed, measure his skills against the great? Without a teacher he mastered the Ten Categories of Aristotle, and wrote his own first book on Aesthetics, De Pulchro et Apto, On the Fair and the Fit, dedicating it to his idol, Hierius, to whom promptly he forwarded a copy.

Against his mother’s opposition, and urged to his decision by his unruly students at Carthage, Augustine gathered his little family, his friend, Alypius, and his books, and sailed for Rome. The great capital, however, was a disappointment to him, for few students came to hear him, and the few who came left before the end of his lectures without paying the fees. Likewise there is no record that Hierius so much as acknowledged that his young North African admirer was resident in the city. He had come to conquer, but had been granted no battle. With joy therefore Augustine accepted the opportunity, offered him through Manichean influence, to become municipal rhetor at Milan. He was thirty years old when he made the oration of gratitude to the consul for the appointment, on New Year’s Day, 385 A. D. Speaking Latin fluently, though with a slight Punic accent, Augustine took up his duties in Milan, where Ambrose, greater orator than himself, thundered forth from the cathedral pulpit the classic Christian message.

Augustine’s sophistries and rhetorical arguments, as well as the speculative mists of Manicheism and Plotinianism, were but a poor defense against mature philosophy brought to the full teleology of personal faith in the glowing words of Ambrose. Perhaps Ambrose was the only great Christian thinker Augustine had met, but only one was needed. Sunlight began to play into the shadows of Augustine’s mind, and, more significantly still, into his heart. He had reached a transitional torment of indecision. Monica, who had followed him, rejoiced that the long years of praying and waiting were near the day of fulfillment.

Conversion, however, is not without reason called a crisis, for the battleline was clearly drawn within the professional rhetor. On the one hand his pilgrimage from Mani through Plotinus to Paul’s Epistles and Ambrose’s sermons and his direct confrontation with the decision for or against personal acceptance of the yoke of Christ, on the other gratitude to the Manicheans who had secured for him his present position, a real affection for the mother of his son whom he believed he must give up, and, perhaps most powerful of all, his own resisting pride of intellect and will. Public confessions of faith by newly baptised Christians, particularly of one who had formerly been a proud foe, plunged Augustine deeper into his problem. His profession of selling clever loquacity began, understandably, to seem to him like feeding husks to swine. He could not long remain in the shadowed vale of torment, and it was not possible that he retrace his steps toward his earlier half-views and his sensual excesses. He was under compulsion without and within to go forward.

He was further thrust against the dilemma and the necessity of decision by his introduction to Faustus, the acknowledged leader of the Manichees, whom, to his disillusionment, he found a comparatively ignorant man.

The most that the teaching of rhetoric could offer him was a temporary pleasure, meager enough, in money and fame. One day as he observed a joyous beggar on a street in Milan, it occurred to him that if temporary pleasure were a sufficient end, the merry mendicant had found a shorter and a wiser way than his own to its achievement.

Augustine was accepted as a catechumen, or candidate for baptism, but could not receive the sacrament till he had broken his relation with the mother of Adeodatus. Monica, anxious that her son marry a woman of his own station in life, made such arrangements as were required. Augustine’s companion of fifteen years, like Hagar of old, yet without her son, was sent away. After a proper wooing, Augustine was pledged to an approved marriage, though self-government again gave way to imperious passion, for he established another illicit relation while waiting the two years required by the bride. The Confessions pictures Augustine’s heart as “torn and wounded and bleeding” at his separation from her who was assuredly his wife, and describes her as pledging never to know another man. Apparently, in the standards of the day, her rank made impossible the public acknowledgment of their union. It is probable also that the young woman, certainly wronged, could not have been in maturer years Augustine’s cultural or intellectual confidante. His sins of passion were obviously not the least among those for which he sought baptismal forgiveness. It is evident, as well, that, forgiven or not, some of his sins went until the end without the repentance of restitution.

The thirteenth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, dealing as it does with the Christian’s civic obligations, has seldom been regarded as a document for personal evangelism. Yet its thirteenth and fourteenth verses proved the secret path of Augustine’s exodus from the vale of indecision. With his friend, Alypius, one summer afternoon in a garden, Augustine burst into tears of shame for his life of darkness, his wasted years of sinful self-service. He fell to the ground under a fig-tree in utter self-abandonment. From a nearby house a child’s voice sang, as though in a game, “Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege”. “Take up and read”. Receiving the words as the voice of God, he opened the Bible to this ringing command: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”.

“No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away” (Confessions, VIII, 29, ed. cit., p. 171).

The great release from the weight of sin and despair was not Manichean self-annihilation, not Plotinian pantheistic speculation, but the Person, Jesus Christ, the decisive acceptance of His glorious yoke and the permanent pursuit of His cleansing will.

At once, while awaiting his baptism, Augustine began his long series of compositions concerning the faith, turning his art of words to the service of his Lord. These compositions, indeed, are the multiform spearheads of his lifelong grand strategy against the prevailing pagan night and on behalf of the classic Christian heritage. There was little that was passive about Augustine. He was as imperious in noble faith as he had been in vulgar passion, and in the earth’s one great battle an undaunted, perhaps an unequalled, warrior. He accomplished theologically for Roman, and indeed for Protestant, Christianity, in almost perpetual battle, what few great generals have accomplished politically for their nations. In an age of little peace, he was first in the war of the spirit.

In Milan’s public square, as Monica looked on, Augustine was baptized by Ambrose. Each of the three was to be lifted to sainthood. Alypius and the young Adeodatus were also baptised on that Easter Day in 387 A. D. Ambrose himself wrote the hymns, a novelty in that era, sung by the assembly as accompaniment of praise to the holy sacrament.

But a little while later, serene in her son’s long-awaited admission as a member to catholic Christianity, Monica came to the end of her days. Mother and son spent precious hours together at Ostia on the Tiber before her death, as they were preparing their return to Africa. There is an unequalled beauty in the account of this final fellowship, a companionship of souls, in the Confessions (IX, 17–37, ed. cit., pp. 189-203).

Before the next year was out, Augustine, having divided his goods among the poor, and with a few friends, was back at his father’s old farm in Tagaste, in retirement from public life, in a period of soul-settling, marked by the delights of long discussions in philosophy and Christian theology.

Before his return to Africa he had written his treatises, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae et De Moribus Manichaeorum, De Quantitate Animae, and De Libero Arbitrio. Now, at Tagaste, he produced also De Genesi Contra Manichaeos, De Musica, De Magistro, and De Vera Religione, gaining at once a wide reputation for penetrating grasp of essential Christianity and of the basic weaknesses of its opponents.

In 391 he was ordained a priest by Valerius, Bishop of Hippo. In 395 by popular demand he was made a colleague of Valerius. He continued in his office as Bishop of Hippo until his death in 430. As a bishopric Hippo was not of first importance; as Augustine’s place of labor through pulpit and pen, it became the intellectual capital of the Roman Christian world. His writings, small and large, numbering over a thousand treatises, are sermons, essays on doctrine, exegetical works, and controversial pamphlets against heresies.

Best known, of course, are the Confessions, issued in 397 in 13 Books, and De Civitate Dei, The City of God, completed in 22 Books in 426. The earlier work is the autobiography of an authentic Christian, the later the autobiography of the distinct cities of man and God.

The Donatist and Pelagian controversies, among numerous lesser conflicts, occupied Augustine’s majestic intellect, and what he lacked in patient historical scholarship he made up twice over in direct perception of the nature of man and in dialectical skill.

The question at issue in the Donatist polemic was the validity of the sacraments when administered by unholy men. With usual penetration Augustine saw, and made his hearers and readers see, that it was unholiness in the participant rather than in the administrator which invalidated the ritual as a channel of grace. To one damnation, to another salvation, by the same valid sacrament.

Defended later by Julian, Bishop of Eclanum, and by Celestius, no doubt, in part at least, as an extreme reaction against the Manichean view of man as of evil origin, Pelagius asserted the natural goodness of man. The human will was actually not enslaved by the corruption of sin, but was free. Hence, the teaching of the law was sufficient; divine grace in forgiveness and help was not essential to salvation, but rather the gift of God to the man of merit. The general graces of God were sufficient, such as preaching, the scriptures, and good example. If any special internal grace was given, it was solely an enlightenment of the intellect, not a strengthening of the will. Each man started his life as innocent of evil as Adam in Eden. The reality of human freedom, maintained in the context of human moral sufficiency, is the leading Pelagian idea.

Augustine held certain ground in common with Pelagius — namely, the belief in the reality of human freedom. Cicero, as Augustine acknowledges in De Civitate Dei (V, 9, Eng. Tr. by Marcus Dods, 1878, pp. 192, 196), had taught him the necessity of freedom to the moral nature of man. A still greater area, however, Augustine held against Pelagius. Man was free, to be sure, but he was also the victim of evil, held captive by his own inward slavery of nature. Man was therefore in desperate and utter need of rescue by a power not his own. The parallel freedom of the redeeming will of God was a fact of infinitely greater moment than the free will of man, the slave of evil. The battleline was clearly drawn between the notions of self-sufficient pride, on the one hand, and, on the other, of man as a creature under God, held fast in the grip of evil desire, in need of a Saviour. God or not God was the question underlying even the issue of man’s impotence. Augustine, who looked back upon his own years of pride and lust, who knew — as who could better know — that God had lifted him from a vulgar bondage, against all of his own imperious tendencies, saw, and saw rightly, in the Pelagian assertions the dismissal of God from relevance to the human problem. As Calvin, the Augustine after Augustine, was to drive Servetus from the garden of Geneva, so Augustine drove Pelagianism from the city of God. He was, after all, but clear-sighted and honest in his recognition that both God and not God could not live in harmony in catholic Christianity.

Pelagianism had to wait for more than a thousand years to come into its own, in the man-centered casuistry of the Jesuits, and, still later, in the man-centered optimism of the last fifty years with its firm belief in the irrelevant Deity, a Deity, at second glance, possibly neither irrelevant nor a passive Onlooker, but, in the clear wall-writing of a global war, both ultimate Judge and Supreme Doer.

Shortly before his death, Augustine wrote his Retractationes, admitting his superficial errors of erudition, and his limitations of scholarship, while at the same time re-asserting the basic elements of the historic Christian faith — the salvation centered in God, the need centered in man.

In 429 the Vandals, under the barbarian Genseric, landed in Africa. The next year they besieged Hippo. Augustine in his seventy sixth year committed both himself and catholic Christianity, the City of God, to the mercy and grace of the Lord Christ. In the third month of the siege he died, the 28th of August, 430 A. D.

Rome had fallen in 410 A. D. Not even its nominal Christianity had saved it from barbarian invasion. The pagan world had declared, anticipating Gibbon, that Christianity had caused the fall of the great city. Actually Rome had rendered neither unto God the things that were God’s, nor unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. The claims of holiness and of justice, as well as of the military establishment, had alike been popularly ignored. Augustine saw that the fortunes of the political state and the church of Christ were not, and could not be, identical, for their motives, their convictions, and their goals were distinct, though not unrelated. The city which gave due attention to military vigilance for the sake of the preservation of justice could be a servant of God; Rome indeed had fallen because the blight of irreverence and of moral irresponsibility, of decay in arts and letters, of clever self-seeking, had fallen upon all her ways. Only the church of Christ could be the city of God; and only God’s city could endure. Kingdoms of men would rise in might and fall in unrighteousness and decadence; the Kingdom of the triune, familial God alone was imperishable. De Civitate Dei is in all its 22 books a stirring and just homily on the text, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”.

It is true that Augustine’s imperious nature — a Moses after Moses — gave authority to the doctrine that religious errors might be punished by civil penalties. Certainly the long history of religious persecutions has not been justified by the mingled blood of saints and Saviour. And by the same token we are scarcely justified in considering that the state is without its own direct accountability to preserve the pure practice of religion. Obviously, the state is not both but is either faithful or faithless servant of God — either friend or enemy of the church of Christ.

The desire to attribute harshness to the Augustinian doctrines of absolute predestination, reprobation, and irresistible salvation issues from the popular contemporary failure to understand Augustine’s concept of God as Underived Authority, Holy, Just, and Good. The decisions of Deity do not issue from the counsels of men, nor from their wills or wisdom, but from the wisdom and nature of God. Behind the apparent stringency of these terms is, in fact, the passion of redemptive moral love operating from the will of the Father who is also the Sovereign. He saves those appointed to salvation, and the salvation, like His authority, is His own, underived from men. Rome, noted for her pride and levity, had fallen; it was time to view the human problem with high seriousness, in its relationship of direct dependence upon the Sovereign will.

What, then, were the root Augustinian ideas? To what extent are they the saving ideas, though of the minority, in our time?

Cicero, faced with the dilemma of God as active Redeemer and man as morally free and responsible, surrendered to the superficial unity of the unreality of God and the reality of man. Pelagius made the same surrender, though with a less realistic view of man’s moral struggle, within the context of theology rather than of moral philosophy. The same ready solution of the problem by the denial of the larger of its two parts has proven a common intellectual snare through history. It is, however, more a convenience than a solution. Our own era is more verbal than actual in its recognition of the larger of the two parts of the problem. Augustine recognized, as the less lethargic thinkers have done in all ages, that all philosophical problems merge into a theological problem — God and a man and the means of their reconciliation.

All the identifying terms, which by the caricature of misunderstanding have become only quaint labels — namely, the corruption of human nature, the enslaved will, absolute predestination, election and reprobation, final perseverance — all these labels, I say, are reduceable to this central issue, the primary reality of God, the secondary reality of man, the problem of reconciliation, or recovery of fellowship, in view of God’s holiness and man’s moral imperfection. Abandon the greater part of the problem, God, and these terms are meaningless — as, for precisely this reason, they have largely become in our day. Accept! — the decision either way is a responsible one of faith without final knowledge; accept the reality of God, and both the problem and its terms become meaningful.

The deists have always accepted God in name, and denied Him in fact. Their testimony also is the easy surrender of superficial unity. For God, to Augustine, is never a Bystander in the universe, never in any sense a passive Onlooker in man’s struggle to achieve personal salvation or social justice. It is rather He who is active while man is passive.

“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. .. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6, 8).

God is the greater reality, man the lesser reality, and they are divided metaphysically by the relation of Creator and creature, morally by the creature’s sin. The metaphysical separateness is never lost — God is always God and not man; man is always man and not God. It is the moral chasm between human and Divine personalities across which the Divine bridge is thrown, even the Crucified. There is, then, but one hope of reconciliation, the realization of Christ as Divine Mediator — in whose single personality God and man cohered, who, as the Lamb of God, bore man’s sin upon the Cross. Since in Christ God became man without losing His divinity, there is hope that man may be lifted up with Him to fellowship, without losing his humanity. Pelagius sought to comfort mankind by slurring over the moral gulf between the human and the Divine. Augustine was the greater realist, for he knew the God from whom sin had separated him; he knew the Christ whose yoke had disciplined and redeemed him. In the Holy Spirit, as the life of the vine, his soul breathed the air of heaven. In the holy sacraments he was one with the pilgrim church across earth and heaven, the City of God. Every nation, as every individual, might choose to serve or attack God’s City. In those whom God had chosen in Christ had been and would be set up the Kingdom not of this earth.

Augustine is with us still — for neither the nature of man nor the nature of God has changed. Salvation is still the Divine gift in Christ crucified, and risen. The church is still the company of pilgrims; the Christian man is still under the forgiveness and the redeeming yoke of Christ, united by the Spirit to the vine.

Our democratic civilization, too, is perennially confronted with the threat of barbarian invasion. Our Rome also must serve God or be ground under the Vandal’s heel. Our age must recognize that man is not his own Creator but a creature under God.