S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 7 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 1 5 1 Miloš Lichner sit in a meeting of vanity”, to which he quoted the second part of the verse, “[a]nd I did not meet with unjust people”. Thus, if the Donatists had already met with Catholics, they should have no problem sitting with them (Augustinus 1862, 599). 5 Augustine Against the Pelagians Augustine most often devoted himself to the topic of vanity in the debate with the Pelagians. In the collection of texts from the period of this dispute, which stressed the self-salvation of man without God’s help, that is, man’s autonomy, we find several texts in which the author also quotes other biblical texts that address the topic of vanity. In 412, in an interpretation of Psalm 127 (we again recall that Augustine used a different numbering of the psalms), he reiterates the futility of human endeavor, in which man seeks “vainly and in vain” to act outside of Jesus Christ. To act outside the Savior Christ thus means to set off on the path of darkness (Augustinus 1956, 1857). The interpretation of Psalm 39 (between the years 411–413) offers several new ideas in relation to the subject of vanity, and the author quotes a verse from Romans 8:20 (for the creation was subjected to vanity), along with Psalm 39:6. In the interpretation, the author describes the spiritual output of the soul, which is gradually freed from temporal things and ascends to God. During this spiritual ascent, man gradually becomes aware of the finiteness of his human existence and the vanity of all that is found on Earth. And so, transcending all created things, he disdains what is after him and rises spiritually to the sweetness of God’s law. Augustine recalls, however, and quotes a verse from the biblical book of Job 7:1, according to which life on Earth is only a temptation, if one suffers in this world full of scandals and insecurities of life, as well as a repeated return to excessive love for created things, so it is all mere vanity, and every man is mere vanity in the midst of the vanity of vain people; where, as we can see, he cites an even older version of the verse from Ecclesiastes 1:2 supplemented by the third verse: “What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?” This third verse becomes the key to understanding this interpretation. Everything that is under the sun is only vanity, and it is necessary to spiritually rise to the mountain. In his view, a man trying to accumulate wealth is a manifestation of “stupid vanity” (Augustinus 1956, 411–413). Augustine himself only perceives with difficulty his life under the sun, that is, in the created world, and the fact that he must proclaim this truth to people who are hungry for vanity. The entire created world is so in vain that it is as fragile as the spider mentioned in verse 12 of Psalm 39. Simply pressing a little finger on the spider will cause it to die. The created man is equally fragile and finite due to his sinfulness. His life is full of unrest, because he marries in vain, as the author of verse 13 of Psalm 39 reminds the author (Augustinus 1956, 416–419). It seems that the image of a fragile spider grabbed Augustine’s attention, because he returned to it in the interpretation of verse 4 (“man is like a breath”) of Psalm 144 (414) and interprets it through a verse from James 4:14, in which life is likened to “[a] vapour that appears for a little while and then disappears” (Augustinus 1956, 2081). In his commentary on the longest psalm, Psalm 119, which Augustine interpreted after long hesitation as the last of the Psalms after year 422, he returns to the subject of vanity. Unlike Ambrose of Milan, who interpreted this long psalm through the biblical book the Song of Songs, Augustine read it through the lens of the letters of the apostle Paul, mainly through the Letter to the Romans (Lichner 2009, 81). In his interpretation, he links several biblical texts about the deceptive vanity of the whole of creation, which he contrasts with the figure of Christ, who is the real Truth as well as the Way. Thus, man should walk towards him and gradually free himself from the vanity of both material and immaterial facts (Augustinus 1956, 1700). In the last years of his life, Augustine devoted himself to a dispute with Bishop Julian of Eclan on the understanding of grace and its necessity in human life. However, the topic shifted more towards anthropology in the sense that man is born into a world with inherited sin marked by the inner struggle of the spirit with the body, the body’s lusts, quoting the already well-known biblical verses from Ecclesiastes 1:2, Romans 8:20, and Psalm 144:4, which confirm his view of the vanity not only of creation, but in particular of man marked by an internal ambivalence as a consequence of inherited sin (Augustinus 2004, 27). As we mentioned in the introduction to our study, several views from this period were then adopted by Reformation theology. In this controversy, Augustine often emphasized the nature of vanity and the finiteness of created human existence, so that the salvation role of Christ, in the person of whom liberation from vanity is possible, can excel even more (Augustinus 1862, 843). He also develops this view in the fourteens book of his work on the City of God, where he stresses that man was created in truth and was subjected to vanity by transgressing God’s command, quoting his favorite verses from Ecclesiastes 1:2 and Psalm 144:4 (Augustinus 1955, 437).
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