Three Doctors of the Church

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell

Chapter III: Three Doctors of the Church

There are four Doctors of the Western Church: St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine and Pope Gregory the Great. The first three were contemporaries while Pope Gregory belonged to a later date.

Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome flourished during the brief interval between the Catholic domination of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasion of the West. These three men shaped the mold into which the Church was built for the Middle Ages more than anybody. "Speaking broadly, Saint
Ambrose determined the ecclesiastical conception of the relation of Church and State; Saint
Jerome gave the Western Church its Latin Bible and a great part of the impetus to monasticism;
while Saint Augustine fixed the theology of the Church until the Reformation, and, later, a great
part of the doctrines of Luther and Calvin" (Russell, 335).

Ambrose rose to power inside the Church by becoming somewhat of a surprise victor in the election to bishop at Milan, then the capital of the West. He acted as equal, sometimes superior to the Emperor, setting a precedent.

Ambrose wrote a letter to the young Emperor Valentinian II in A.D. 384 denouncing the idea of returning a pagan statue to the Roman Senate building. In the letter he showed that the religious considerations supersede the temporal ones.

Again Ambrose battled with the State this time refusing to give one of the churches of Milan to the Arians for use. Backed by the people, Ambrose emerged victorious. "Ambrose had demonstrated that there were matters in which the State must yield to the Church, and had thereby established a new principle which retains its importance to the present day" (Russell, 339).

Ambrose famously battled with Theodosius and won out. Again showing the power of the Emperor to be subservient to the power of the Church.

Jerome is most famous for producing the Latin Vulgate which though eventually accepted as authoritative had to initially fight against reluctance because of the work of Rabbis on the text.

Jerome was born in Stridon, near Aquileia and lived in Rome, lived as a hermit in the Syrian wilderness, traveled to Constantinople and returned to Rome where he began to work on his translation of the Bible.

Jerome found himself in quarrels often and left Rome in 386 to live in Bethlehem until his death in 420. Despite his exile away from Rome, he mourned the dying of the Roman world at the hands of the barbarians.

Augustine was born in 354 to a Christian mother and pagan father in Africa.

We know more about Augustine's early life than most others because of his Confessions. The book has had famous imitators, especially Rousseau and Tolstoy.

"Saint Augustine is in some ways similar to Tolstoy, to whom, however, he is superior in intellect. He was a passionate man, in youth very far from a pattern of virtue, but driven by an inner impulse to search for truth and righteousness. Like Tolstoy, he was obsessed, in his later years, by a sense of sin, which made his life stern and his philosophy inhuman. He combated heresies vigorously, but some of his own views, when repeated by Jansenius in the seventeenth century, were pronounced heretical. Until the Protestants took up his opinions, however, the Catholic Church had never impugned their
orthodoxy" (Russell, 345).

Augustine's obsession with sin seems morbid in modern readings, but was in line with what was seen as holiness in his age. Besides that he held that righteousness, the greatest of goods, was achieved through tribulation now that sin was in the world.

"It thus came about that Christian theology had two parts, one concerned with the Church, and one with the individual soul. In later times, the first of these was most emphasized by Catholics, and the second by Protestants, but in Saint Augustine both exist equally, without his having any sense of
disharmony. Those who are saved are those whom God has predestined to salvation; this is a
direct relation of the soul to God. But no one will be saved unless he has been baptized, and
thereby become a member of the Church; this makes the Church an intermediary between the soul
and God" (Russell, 346).

Augustine became a teacher of Rhetoric in Carthage then moved to Rome. With his move he became less convinced of the Manichean faith he had been originally attracted to. He became somewhat infatuated with the Skepticism of the Academy before meeting Ambrose in his move to Milan. It was at Milan with the confluence of his mother, a devout Catholic, Ambrose, the discovery of St. Paul and seeing the not-quite-there totality in Platonism that Augustine finally converts.