From The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book II: Sin a Counterfeit of God

 "For so doth pride imitate exaltedness; whereas Thou alone art God exalted over all. Ambition, what seeks it, but honours and glory? whereas Thou alone art to be honoured above all, and glorious for evermore. The cruelty of the great would fain be feared; but who is to be feared but God alone, out of whose power what can be wrested or withdrawn? when, or where, or whither, or by whom? The tendernesses of the wanton would fain be counted love: yet is nothing more tender than Thy charity; nor is aught loved more healthfully than that Thy truth, bright and beautiful above all. Curiosity makes semblance of a desire of knowledge; whereas Thou supremely knowest all. Yea, ignorance and foolishness itself is cloaked under the name of simplicity and uninjuriousness; because nothing is found more single than Thee: and what less injurious, since they are his own works which injure the sinner? Yea, sloth would fain be at rest; but what stable rest besides the Lord? Luxury affects to be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fulness and never-failing plenteousness of incorruptible pleasures. Prodigality presents a shadow of liberality: but Thou art the most overflowing Giver of all good. Covetousness would possess many things; and Thou possessest all things. Envy disputes for excellency: what more excellent than Thou? Anger seeks revenge: who revenges more justly than Thou? Fear startles at things unwonted and sudden, which endangers things beloved, and takes forethought for their safety; but to Thee what unwonted or sudden, or who separateth from Thee what Thou lovest? Or where but with Thee is unshaken safety? Grief pines away for things lost, the delight of its desires; because it would have nothing taken from it, as nothing can from Thee.

"Thus doth the soul commit fornication, when she turns from Thee, seeking without Thee, what she findeth not pure and untainted, till she returns to Thee. Thus all pervertedly imitate Thee, who remove far from Thee, and lift themselves up against Thee. But even by thus imitating Thee, they imply Thee to be the Creator of all nature; whence there is no place whither altogether to retire from Thee. What then did I love in that theft? and wherein did I even corruptly and pervertedly imitate my Lord? Did I wish even by stealth to do contrary to Thy law, because by power I could not, so that being a prisoner, I might mimic a maimed liberty by doing with impunity things unpermitted me, a darkened likeness of Thy Omnipotency? Behold, Thy servant, fleeing from his Lord, and obtaining a shadow. O rottenness, O monstrousness of life, and depth of death! could I like what I might not, only because I might not? For so doth pride imitate exaltedness; whereas Thou alone art God exalted over all. Ambition, what seeks it, but honours and glory? whereas Thou alone art to be honoured above all, and glorious for evermore. The cruelty of the great would fain be feared; but who is to be feared but God alone, out of whose power what can be wrested or withdrawn? when, or where, or whither, or by whom? The tendernesses of the wanton would fain be counted love: yet is nothing more tender than Thy charity; nor is aught loved more healthfully than that Thy truth, bright and beautiful above all. Curiosity makes semblance of a desire of knowledge; whereas Thou supremely knowest all. Yea, ignorance and foolishness itself is cloaked under the name of simplicity and uninjuriousness; because nothing is found more single than Thee: and what less injurious, since they are his own works which injure the sinner? Yea, sloth would fain be at rest; but what stable rest besides the Lord? Luxury affects to be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fulness and never-failing plenteousness of incorruptible pleasures. Prodigality presents a shadow of liberality: but Thou art the most overflowing Giver of all good. Covetousness would possess many things; and Thou possessest all things. Envy disputes for excellency: what more excellent than Thou? Anger seeks revenge: who revenges more justly than Thou? Fear startles at things unwonted and sudden, which endangers things beloved, and takes forethought for their safety; but to Thee what unwonted or sudden, or who separateth from Thee what Thou lovest? Or where but with Thee is unshaken safety? Grief pines away for things lost, the delight of its desires; because it would have nothing taken from it, as nothing can from Thee."   

The Early Church and Abortion

Several years ago, I distinctly remember when I first learned that abortion was practiced in the ancient world. This came as no small surprise to me, having always associated the murder of the unborn with either advanced surgery or coat-hangers, neither of which was known a couple of millenia ago. The historian's classic conflict between vilifying or romanticizing the past had me in its grasp; I had forgotten that, in the words of King Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.” It takes a peculiar -and usually unintentional- form of arrogance to presume to have problems today that our ancestors didn't share.

As it turns out, abortion stretches back to the beginning of human history. Not only were there primitive attempts at surgical abortion, but people as varied as the civilized Greeks, the Romans, and the itinerant shepherds of Illyria, had access to the Iron Age equivelant of the birth control pill: herbal abortifacients, such as pennyroyal, saffron and rue. The pagan world was divided over the issue. Some men, like Hippocrates, defended the unborn and refused to administer abortive mixtures. Other men, like Aristotle, found themselves defending abortion. This philosophical position was based on the belief in “ensoulment,” the notion found in Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals that human beings don't have souls until between 40 and 90 days after they're conceived.

When the Gospel surged across the vast openness of the Pax Romana, Christians encountered a world whose peace and order were deceptive. Although the watchmen along the sweeping frontiers were idle, this lull had been bought by decades of incessant warfare and violence. Inside the Empire, Christians encountered daily bloodshed not only in the arena, but in the streets. Abortion and infanticide were widespread from one end of the Roman world to the other. It was such a problem, in fact, that the Didache (an early Christian catechism) saw fit to include a line specifically condemning abortion and infanticide as murder. Faced with a world where life was held so cheaply, Christians immediately began to defend the Bible's definition of life. God had said to the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart...." This belief in the eternal nature of the soul was in direct opposition to the philosophy of the day. Almost every one of the early Church Fathers -Tertullian, Clement, Jerome, Basil, Felix, Hippolytus- unanimously declared abortion's absolute moral wrong. Athenagoras only echoed the rest of Christendom when he petitioned Emperor Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 177: “We say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God.... The fetus in the womb is a living being and therefore the object of God's care.”

For hundreds of years, the Church's position on abortion was consistent and uncompromising. In the 13th century, however, a challenge came from a surprising source. Thomas Aquinas, leader of the Scholastic movement, reintroduced the mixed legacy of Aristotelian thought to Europe. Renewed reading of Aristotle's theories of the political world were unfortunately accompanied by the reemergence of his metaphysical musings. Among these was the old doctrine of ensoulment, which some spiritual and secular scholars of the day embraced, including Aquinas. The consequence was a temporary weakening of the Church's stance against abortion by a group of churchmen who proclaimed that fetuses that had not yet received a soul (as the theory went) could be aborted. This temptation to defer to philosophy and science in place of faith has been with Christians since the days of the apostles and will be until the end. Hundreds of years later, in the 20th century, a similar acceptance of the “prevailing wisdom” of the day over and above of biblical revelation would lead to some Protestant denominations condoning abortion.

But for the time, the influence of this idea was short lived. By the 15th century, Pope Sixtus V had renewed the classification of abortion as murder and prescribed severe punishments for its practice. Although in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIV briefly returned the Church to Aquinas' position, it was soon once again widely accepted throughout all of Christendom that abortion at any stage was immoral. Despite the many differences between the burgeoning denominations of the Church in that era, any Christian of the 17th century would have agreed with John Calvin when he made this simple argument: “The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being and it is a most monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.”