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Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page i

Salvation and Sin

Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page ii
Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page iii

S A L VA T I O N
and

SIN
Augustine, Langland,
and Fourteenth-Century Theology

D AV I D A E R S

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana
Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page iv

Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aers, David.
Salvation and sin : Augustine, Langland, and fourteenth-century
theology / David Aers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-268-02033-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-268-02033-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Salvation— Christianity—History of doctrines. 2. Sin—
Christianity—History of doctrines. 3. Augustine, Saint, Bishop
of Hippo. 4. Langland, William, 1330? ‒1400? Piers Plowman.
5. Theology—England—History— Middle Ages, 600 ‒1500.
I. Title.
bt751.3.a38 2009
230'.24209023— dc22
2009008134
Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page v

To my parents, Pam and Ian, with love.

V. Panem de caelo praestitisti eis.

R. Omne delectamentum in se habentem.

—Thomas Aquinas, “O Sacrum Convivium”

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Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page vii

contents

Preface ix

chapter 1
Augustinian Prelude: Conversion and Agency 1

chapter 2
Illustrating “Modern Theology”: Sin and Salvation in Ockham 25

chapter 3
Thomas Bradwardine:
Reflections on De Causa Dei contra Pelagium et de Virtute Causarum 55

chapter 4
Remembering the Samaritan, Remembering Semyuief:
Salvation and Sin in Piers Plowman (the C Version) 83

chapter 5
Sin, Reconciliation, and Redemption:
Augustine and Julian of Norwich 133

Notes 173
Bibliography 231
Index 253
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Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page ix

preface

“That is soth,” y saide, “and so y beknowe

That y haue ytynt tyme and tyme myspened;
Ac ¥ut y hope, as he πat ofte hath ychaffared
And ay loste and loste and at πe laste hym happed
A boute such a bargayn he was πe bet euere
And sette his los as a leef at the laste ende,
Such a wynnyng hym warth thorw wyrdes of grace:
Simile est regnum celorum thesauro abscondito in agro;
Mulier que inuenit dragmam.
So hope y to haue of hym πat is almyghty
A gobet of his grace and bigynne a tyme
That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne.”
“Y rede the,” quod resoun tho, “rape the to bigynne
The lyf πat is louable and leele to thy soule.”
“ Áe! and continue,” quod Conscience, “and to πe kyrke ywende.”
William Langland, Piers Plowman, V.92‒104

The epigraph to this preface is a gripping moment in a work

that is central to this book, a moment of conversion and summons
into the Church. But Piers Plowman unfolds a more complicated account of
the processes of conversion than the penitent Wille anticipates. He prays
for the divine grace that alone can redeem time laid waste and lost. Con-
science tells him that the place of beginnings to which his reason urges
him is the Church in which he had already been born in baptism. In the

ix
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x Preface

lines following the epigraph Wille obeys. But gradually Langland discloses
the opacity of the converted will to the introspective powers of the soul
and its unacknowledged resistance to the gifts of redemption. He also
discloses how the gift of God in which Wille is called to redeem the time,
“πe kyrke” founded by the sublime acts of Christ and the Holy Spirit, is
also historically constituted by the acts and habits of sinners (chapter 4).
So here the interactions of agency become extremely complex and des-
perately opaque to Wille as he searches for what he finds and loses, what
is present and absent, revealed and hidden. Perhaps drawn on by Lang-
land, Salvation and Sin explores different models of the mysterious rela-
tions between divine and human agency together with models of sin and
its consequences. Theologies of grace, versions of Christian identity, and
versions of community, especially the Church, are its pervasive concerns.
I am especially interested in figurations of how God found out a remedy
that would bring the long-wandering prodigal from a distant, insatiably
hungry and warring land “to the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem” (Heb. 12.22).1 As Shakespeare’s Isabella (in Measure for Mea-
sure) tries to remind the godly and revolutionary judge of Vienna who
has just insisted that her brother “is a forfeit of the law”:

Alas, alas!
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy.2

About to enter the cloister, Isabella evokes an extraordinarily powerful

image of salvation and the consequences of sin. In a poetry of radiant
beauty she grasps how human salvation is inextricably bound up with
divine patience. The divine judge, he who “is the top of judgement”
(2.2.76), the lord of time, patiently took time to find a way that would be
“the remedy” to sin and its catastrophic consequences. The remedy she
invokes is the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ (Phil.
2.6 ‒11). In the face of the magistrate’s reintroduction of the death pen-
alty for sexual unions outside marriage, she recalls the transformation
of the relations between law, justice, justification, and mercy in Christ:
“all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justi-
fied by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”
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Preface xi

(Rom. 3.23‒24). Her recollection invites the human judge, Angelo, to

consider the entailments of worshiping the God who enacts this humility,
patience, and self-abandoning service. Angelo rejects her invitation to
take the time he has been given to find out these entailments for himself
and the polity he governs. In doing so he rejects an invitation to conver-
sion. This charged scene identifies some central preoccupations in Salva-
tion and Sin. How do the writers it studies envisage the consequences of
sin, the conversion of sinners, and the resistances to conversion?
Four chapters of Salvation and Sin are on fourteenth-century writ-
ers, two of whom wrote in Latin, two in English (although one of these,
as the epigraph illustrates, makes use of Latin). But the book sets out with
Augustine, who died on August 28, 430. His presence, however, is not con-
fined to the first chapter, for he becomes a major interlocutor through-
out Salvation and Sin. The first chapter shows the reading of Augustine
relevant to this book while it introduces a vocabulary and grammar that
will help me to explore representations of divine and human agency, grace,
and sin in all the other writers explored here. Augustine’s role in shap-
ing my inquiries should not set up expectations that I have any interest
in contributing to a history of putative “Augustinianism.”3 Augustine was
certainly a major authority in medieval Christianity, but investigating the
extremely complex mediations of his work, and others’ work thought
to be by him, is not my task. I do hope, however, that the first chapter,
together with the later readings of Augustine (especially in chapters 4
and 5), may recollect fascinating strands of Augustine’s work that have
largely been occluded from literary studies.4 Indeed, I hope that literary
scholars, both medievalists and early modernists, may be encouraged to
expand their engagement with Augustine’s perpetually searching, monu-
mentally intelligent, and endlessly generative range of writings (includ-
ing his abundant homilies) and to do so before deciding what is or isn’t
“Augustinian” (chapter 4).
The second chapter begins the book’s engagement with fourteenth-
century theological writing. This chapter was the outcome of research
provoked by the current scholarly consensus that Langland’s theology is
“semi-Pelagian” or “Pelagian” and that his most important affiliations
are with “modern” theologians (“moderni”) and especially with William
of Ockham. My own previous engagements with Ockham, Langland,
and Augustine had not given me confidence in this thesis, but it clearly
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xii Preface

dealt with matters central to the present project. So I decided to explore

an especially relevant cluster of issues in Ockham’s theology. These are
his understanding of grace (including sacramental grace), human agency,
sin, divine forgiveness, and salvation together with his versions of free-
dom. Both Augustine and Aquinas help me to bring out the consequences
of Ockham’s model of grace, in which salvation is cut off from both the
network of mediations displayed by Augustine (chapter 1) and any sub-
stantive Christology. This, it will emerge in chapter 4, is a very different
theology from Langland’s.
From Ockham I turn in chapter 3 to a theologian generally consid-
ered to be “Augustinian” and engaged in a battle with fourteenth-century
“modern” theology and what he took to be its incorrigible Pelagianism.
Recent scholarship on Thomas Bradwardine has been particularly con-
cerned with scientific interests (physics, natural philosophy, astrology,
astronomy), together with his work in mathematics, logic, and metaphys-
ics. But my own engagement is restricted to aspects of his treatment of
sin and salvation, conversion, and the Church’s sacraments. Once more
my questions are facilitated by my reading of Langland, Augustine, and
St. Thomas. Given the customary classification of Bradwardine as “Au-
gustinian,” a judgment doubtless encouraged by his copious quotations
from Augustine, I was particularly surprised to find a thoroughly un-
Augustinian sidelining of Christology in the massive work undertaken
on behalf of the God worshiped by Christians, De Causa Dei. This, so
it seems to me, is accompanied by an equally un-Augustinian approach
to the mysterious relations between divine and human agency in the
processes of conversion and lives of Christian discipleship.
Having considered a “modern” theologian and a renowned anti-
“modern” one, I move to Langland’s theology of sin, grace, and recon-
ciliation in Piers Plowman, a long multigeneric poem written and rewrit-
ten in the later fourteenth century. I concentrate both on the distinctive
dialectical strategies of Langland’s poem and on some minute particu-
lars that illuminate his understanding of sin’s consequences, individual
sin, and collective sin. Such attention is essential because the poem’s
modes of writing are intrinsic to its theology. Christian doctrine is never
simply independent of the forms of writing and practice in which it is
manifested, but Langland’s work compels theologians to remember a
fact that their habitual procedures have often occluded, a fact to which
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Preface xiii

Aquinas drew attention in his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer:5 Lang-

land is profoundly and pervasively attentive to the person and work of
Christ in whom God is revealed. Here I show some of the ways in which
his theological understanding, to which his ethics belongs, is shaped by
his Christology. In doing so, I hope to suggest how arguments about
“Pelagianism” are inextricably bound up with Christology, although this
seems to have been largely forgotten. But it is not forgotten by Langland
or Augustine.
Anyone trying to write a historical survey of Langland’s relations
with fourteenth-century theology would doubtless follow up these con-
siderations with accounts of other theologians.6 But I have no such am-
bitions, a fact further manifested by the subject and modes of discussion
in the book’s final chapter. This brings Julian of Norwich’s profound,
compassionate, and much-admired theology into conversation with Lang-
land and Augustine. I confess that I found the processes and outcome
of this really gripping. The conversation unfolds important difficulties in
Julian’s account of agency and sin as these relate to salvation and Chris-
tology in the Showings. I hope this critical engagement with Julian’s great
work encourages further exploration of her thinking about human agency
together with her theology of sin and the reconciliation between God
and humanity effected in Christ (2 Cor. 5.16 ‒21).
Salvation and Sin has been written from both an English department
and a divinity school. It is indebted to discussions in courses taught across
a customarily sharp divide, courses that included both students in the-
ology and ones in English medieval studies, courses such as one explor-
ing theologies of grace from Augustine to Luther through Langland. The
book’s choices of texts, preoccupations, and modes of inquiry reflect
this site of production. So it is unsurprising that Salvation and Sin is more
theological in its arguments than work habitually done in English depart-
ments, even when this work addresses Christian writing in the Middle
Ages or the Reformation.7 But Piers Plowman is not known in divinity
schools, yet it plays a central role in Salvation and Sin. Moreover, the book
often attends to the minute particulars of the text in a manner that
suggests an apprenticeship in literary studies. I appreciate that this may
cause problems for some theologians who have never encountered Piers
Plowman. Such problems are an inevitable part of any attempt to work
across disciplinary divides that are alien to the medieval and early modern
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xiv Preface

writings and practices we study. My hope is that what is shown of Piers

Plowman in chapter 4 will encourage those who have not read the poem
to do so and to ruminate on it. But perhaps some who come from a di-
vinity school or department of theology without having met Piers Plow-
man may find it helpful to go from the chapter on Augustine (chapter 1)
to the chapter on Langland (chapter 4). This will at least give some sub-
stance to the passing allusions to Langland in the chapters on Ockham
and Bradwardine.
I have written and ordered Salvation and Sin as an inquiry into differ-
ent models of salvation and sin, setting out from Augustine, whose pres-
ence pervades the book. But it is neither a historical narrative nor, as I
have already indicated, a historical survey. Because the book is an explo-
ration of different writers, of peculiar force, addressing common and
central topics in Christian teaching and forms of life, it is possible to read
its interlocking chapters, after the Augustinian prelude, in an order other
than the one I prefer. It does seem to me, however, that were Piers Plow-
man to be studied in divinity schools or theology departments it might
elicit a fruitful exploration of the fate of Christian teaching and practice
in the modes of theological reasoning propagated by Ockham, Bradwar-
dine, and their successors. Be that as it may, I hope that my attempts to
engage with the works I explore will convey something of the joy I have
received from them and will encourage others to develop congruent criti-
cal practices.8

In the notes to this book I have tried to acknowledge those

to whom I know I am indebted, past and present. I want to thank with
especial gratitude the two people who have been most closely involved
and most sustaining in the making of this book, Stanley Hauerwas and
Sarah Beckwith. Stanley Hauerwas commented on everything here. He
brought his capacious learning and intense theological concentration
to the task of helping me understand what I want to do. My debts to
him, his friendship, and his generosity are immense. Sarah Beckwith also
read everything. I have benefited hugely from her creative and critical
intelligence at all stages of composing this book. I am fortunate indeed
that she remains at Duke University. I thank Derek Pearsall and Denise
Baker for reading early versions of material on Langland, Kate Crassons
Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page xv

Preface xv

for conversations about Piers Plowman, and Brian Cummings for com-
menting on the Bradwardine chapter. I am grateful to Lynn Staley for
reading the work on Langland and for a particularly detailed and help-
fully resistant engagement with the chapter on Julian of Norwich. I thank
James Simpson for inviting me to lecture on Augustine at the Harvard
Conference on Conversion in 2005 and for his comments on a lecture
that grew into the book’s first chapter. Many aspects of this study bene-
fited from discussions in graduate courses involving students from the
Divinity School and the English Department at Duke University; thanks
go to those students for the pleasure and privilege of working with them.
Among these, I thank Cara Hersh and Rachael Deagman, who were my
research assistants during the making of this book, and especially Rachael
Deagman, who provided me with inestimable help and support during
the major part of its completion. I thank Greg Jones, dean of the Di-
vinity School, and the provost and deans at Duke University, who have
given the leaves to help me complete this book. I also give warm thanks
to Catherine Beaver for making the English Department at Duke such a
benevolent environment. I am grateful to Barbara Hanrahan at the Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press for her invaluable support of this project
and her generous, patient advice. I have been greatly helped by Elisabeth
Magnus, who skillfully edited the manuscript for the University of Notre
Dame Press, and by Michael Cornett of Duke University Press, who,
with equal skill and care, worked on the edited text. Finally I thank Chris-
tine Derham, who continues to be my closest friend and my wife. For
her, still criss-crossing the Atlantic, some words from Bob Dylan’s re-
cent song, “Beyond the Horizon”: “Beyond the horizon / Across the
divide / Round about midnight / We’ll be on the same side.”9
Aers 000.FM 3/6/09 1:37 PM Page xvi
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 1

chapter 1

Augustinian Prelude
Conversion and Agency

That bread which you can see on the altar, sanctified by

the word of God, is the body of Christ. That cup, or
rather what the cup contains, sanctified by the word of
God, is the blood of Christ. It was by means of these
things that the Lord Christ wished to present us with
his body and blood, which he shed for our sake for the
forgiveness of sins. If you receive them well, you are
yourselves what you receive. You see, the apostle says,
We, being many are one loaf, one body (1 Corinthians 10.17).
—Augustine, Sermon 227

In this chapter I will consider some aspects of Augustine’s

writing about conversion as a way of approaching his theology of agency,
grace, sin, and salvation. This account will be developed in some later
chapters (chapters 4 and 5), but it offers a framework for my explorations
of fourteenth-century writing on forms of agency, sin, and salvation.1
Here I set out from The City of God (413‒26/27), where Augustine envis-
ages history through the figure of two cities, the earthly city and the city

1
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2 Salvation and Sin

of God.2 Augustine’s understanding of conversion and the agency in-

volved in conversion has to meditate on these differences: From what
forms of life are Christians converted? And to what forms of life, to
what practices will they be drawn?3
In the earthly city people live according to “the rule of self ” [secun-
dum se ipsum]: that is, by a rule that imagines humans as autonomous
subjects independent of God (CG XIV.3). Its peace is correspondingly
defined in terms of the distribution and possession of material goods
mediated by contingent cultural values, such as a cult of honor or a cult
of glory derived from military triumphs or civic works ( XIV.1). In the
earthly city, exemplified at its providentially shaped best by Rome, people’s
wills, their loves, are fixed on glorification of the self (“amor sui,” XIV.28).
In seeking to secure themselves they seek dominion over others, and their
lust for dominion comes to dominate their lives (“dominandi libido domi-
natur,” XIV.28).4 The rulers of the earthly city are “interested not in the
morality but the docility of their subjects,” and laws are organized around
the protection of property and its accumulation. This is called freedom
(II.20). Those who challenge this version of the virtues will be attacked
as a public enemy (“publicus inimicus”), and the licentious multitude
(“libera multitudo”) will exile or kill them ( II.20).5 In fact the earthly
city normalizes and institutionalizes the roots of sin.6 Adam’s will to
autonomy from God and Cain’s city founded on fratricide are its origins
( XIII.13‒15; XV.1, 5‒8).
Not that the earthly city necessarily rejects religion. On the contrary,
it fosters the worship of gods and the generation of many kinds of medi-
ator. Augustine exhibits this in a sustained account of religion and ritual
in Rome. The city’s gods and their cult are shown to function as ideologi-
cal and social cement in the compromise of conflicting wills and com-
peting lust for dominion. Even Platonic philosophers participate in their
polity’s religion.7 For through the shared worship of demonic mediators
and pagan gods competing citizens are bound together. It thus becomes
virtually impossible for “a weak and ignorant individual” nurtured in such
a culture to escape from its social and demonic ties (IV.32). The cultural
norms are internalized and secured in collective worship ( VI.4). Further-
more, worship itself is directed to sustain “the enjoyments of vices and
an earthly peace,” to prolong the dominion over others ( XV.7). All this
description and critical analysis is elaborated with a theological herme-
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 3

Augustinian Prelude 3

neutic centered on the one true mediator between the triune God and
humanity.8
What then is the city to which Christians are converted, those forms
of life that Augustine calls the city of God? Whereas the earthly city em-
bodies love of self becoming contempt of God, the city of God is made
by the love of God becoming the contempt of self, a love whose ful-
fillment and glory are not in a putatively autonomous self but in God
( XIV.28). This city fashions well-directed wills that make emotions
(“motus”), the acts of will, praiseworthy ( XIV.6).9 Such duly directed
wills love God, their truly felicitous end, and they love their neighbors
not according to human determinations (“non secundum hominem”)
but according to God (“secundum Deum”). In Scripture this is usually
called charity (“caritas”), though it is also known as love (“amor,” XIV.7).
But the power and detail of Augustine’s vision of the earthly city, instan-
tiated by Rome, pose the question of how anybody formed in this city
could find, let alone pursue, those very different and strange forms of life
called the city of God, the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Christ.10
To put the question in terms shared by Langland and Augustine (as we
shall see in chapter 4), how can the half-alive/half-dead man of Jesus’s
parable, the man attacked by thieves, stripped naked, bound up, and left
lying in a wilderness, how can such a person become a free member of
the city of God (Luke 10.29 ‒37)? Is the requisite conversion perhaps to-
tally inward? Could it be a totally inward act taking the Christian into an
invisible city, a Wycliffite version of the true Church?11
There are certainly powerful accounts of Augustine that go along
such lines. Adapting his Neoplatonic heritage, Augustine calls people
to a turn away from the temporal and material world in which they have
been fragmented and entrapped, a turn inward on a contemplative jour-
ney that will return them to God. Perhaps, like Milton’s Archangel Mi-
chael, Augustine calls Adam to find “A paradise within thee, happier far”
(Paradise Lost, XII.587).12 One of the most widely diffused readings of Au-
gustine in this direction appears in Charles Taylor’s monumental Sources
of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.13 According to Taylor, Augus-
tine invents a core component of “modern identity,” the one Taylor calls
“inwardness.” Indeed, Augustine’s invention of “inwardness” anticipates
Descartes.14 He quotes from Augustine’s early work On True Religion (De
Vera Religione): “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 4

4 Salvation and Sin

man dwells the truth.” Not without reason, Taylor comments: “Augus-
tine is always calling us within. What we need lies ‘intus,’ he tells us again
and again.”15 For Augustine, “inward lies the road to God” (129). In fact,
Augustine’s turn to the self was a turn to “radical reflexivity” (131).16
In an important review of Sources of the Self, Stanley Hauerwas and
David Matzko offer criticisms of Taylor’s version of Augustine. They
argue that this version entirely displaces the story of the city of God as “a
counter-commonwealth of forgiveness and peace.” Taylor, they maintain,
fails to grasp the role of the city of God in Augustine’s understanding of
the “inward” route to God.17 If this criticism is warranted, as I believe it
to be, it still leaves us with the question I put two paragraphs above: How
can those of us who are habituated dwellers in the earthly city even per-
ceive the city of God, let alone become its citizens? Augustine has shown
that we are preoccupied by temporal goods, power, and honor, that we
generate multiple strategies for shoring up our anxious selves against oth-
ers, against death, and against God. In these preoccupations are we not
likely to support our city’s means of self-defense, its military power on
which our own security against assorted barbarians depends? Do not ties
of patriotic solidarity, sacrifice, and collective glory bind us together into
our earthly city? Yes, of course they do. So could not “radical reflexivity,”
that famous inward turn, merely contribute to these given desires, anxi-
eties, and bonds? Could it not actually shore up the very self produced by,
in, and for the earthly city? And when I make the inward turn is there any
good reason to think I will not find a god made in the image of the earthly
city that has taught me how to honor the gods together with myself ?
Might not the earthly city even have taught me how to meditate? Taylor’s
inquiry does not ask these questions. Yet they are among the very ques-
tions Augustine’s City of God has taught us to ask and has actually taught
us to make central in any study of the self and its loves. In book VII of
the Confessions, considering the converted Christian, Augustine says that
while such a person may delight in God’s law according to the inward
person (“secundum interiorem hominem”), and so show himself to be
a rebel within the earthly city, “what will he do with ‘the other law in
his members fighting against the law of his mind and bringing him into
captivity under the law of sin, which is in his members?’ ” (Confessions,
VII.21.27, quoting from Rom. 7.22‒23).18 Unlike some of his readers,
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 5

Augustinian Prelude 5

Augustine does not give us good reason to trust that the “radical reflex-
ivity” of the “inward” turn will take us to God. It is salutary to remem-
ber that one of the features of the kingdom of God, the heavenly city, is
the supersession of privatized, deep, secret interiorities: “The thoughts
of our minds will lie open to each other” (CG XXII.29). In fact the fall of
humanity is inextricably bound up with forms of privatization, with a re-
jection of common goods, the bonds of community, and transparency.19
So we may suspect that far from being “the principal route to God,” “radi-
cal reflexivity” could become bound up with the forms of privatization
and inwardness cultivated in the earthly city as a means of accommoda-
tion with its life.20 Far from inciting conversion, such inwardness could in-
tegrate us more comfortably and resourcefully in the earthly city.
Conversion from this city, the “kingdom of death” (CG XVI.1),
to the city of God will involve not so much a privatized inward journey
as the conversion of the whole person from one home (“domus”) to an-
other.21 It will mean converting from a city seeking an earthly peace struc-
tured on the will for dominion and dismissal of the triune God to a city
whose members understand themselves as pilgrims in a foreign land wor-
shiping this God. And the triune God has given the promise of redemp-
tion in the divine judge who was crucified by the judges of the earthly city
(“under Pontius Pilate,” as the Nicene Creed states), the risen Son of God
reconciling God and humanity in the Church, itself a divine gift. This
city, Augustine says, calls out citizens from all nations to join a society
of aliens (“peregrinam colligit societatem”) that has its own religious
laws (“religionis leges”) and remains indifferent to the customs, laws,
and institutions of the earthly city with which it lives. This indifference,
however, will necessarily involve not inward emigration but dissent. And
dissent will encounter anger, hatred, assaults, and persecution ( XIX.17).
So conversion is not to a city that is only invisible, a home in a privatized
interiority.
Conversion is to the city of charity (CG XIV.7). This is the Christian
religion itself (“ipsam religionem Christianam, ipsam civitatem Dei”),
whose king and founder is Christ (“cuius rex est et conditor Christus,”
XVII.4).22 Here all sacrifice is directed to the triune God revealed in
Christ. It is offered “in every act which is designed to unite us to God
in a holy fellowship,” present and future. These sacrificial acts are acts of
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 6

6 Salvation and Sin

“compassion” involving neighbors and self, inseparably collective and in-

dividual, offered to Christ, the community’s “great Priest” ( X.6). They
constitute and build up the city that is the Church, the body of Christ. Au-
gustine quotes Paul: “We are many, but we make up one body in Christ”
( X.6; Rom. 12.3‒ 6). And here, characteristically, he turns to the Eucha-
rist: “This is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the
sacrament of the altar, a sacrament well-known to the faithful where it
is shown to the Church that she herself is offered in the offering which
she presents to God” ( X.6).23 This brings us toward the heart of con-
version in Augustine’s theology. Conversion is into the embodied life
and story of the Catholic Church in which Augustine held the office of
bishop. As he says, pagan philosophers were right in thinking that the
wise man’s life is social. But Augustine insists on affirming this “much
more strongly than they do.”24 As Oliver O’Donovan notes, Augustine
wishes to stress the “distinctive” capacity of Christian thought “to break
free of an individualist vision of the good” and develop “a social one.”25
For the city of God from “its first start” through its pilgrimage in this his-
torical world could not “attain its appointed end [debitos fines] if the life
of the saints were not social [socialis]” ( XIX.5). And so, living a life in his-
tory, “as a civitas, the Church is for Augustine itself a ‘political’ reality.”26
Here it is necessary to acknowledge a contested area in readings of
the City of God: the relations between the Catholic Church and the city of
God. My own view will already have emerged implicitly, but I think it
should be articulated, however briefly. The Church is both visible and in-
visible, a city and a mystical body, the body and bride of Christ. Augustine
explains his understanding of the relation between the Catholic Church
and the kingdom of heaven, the New Jerusalem, in a sermon preached
around 414.27 He tells his congregation that “the Church which now is,”
“this Church, which gathers in good and bad together,” is also “called
the kingdom of heaven.” It is the net of Christ’s parable, given to collect
all kinds of fish into a truly mixed body until the Last Judgment (Matt.
13.47‒50). Augustine stresses that Christians teaching good things but
“doing bad things” are certainly, for now, “in the kingdom of heaven, that
is, in the Church as it is in this time.”28 Similarly in book VIII of the City
of God he writes that the city of God, which is the holy Church, “is now
being built in the whole world,” built of those who once converted be-
come like living stones ( VIII.24; 1 Pet. 2.5). The Church includes both
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Augustinian Prelude 7

“tares” and “wheat,” which the Lord allows to grow together until the
final harvest. God’s “kingdom” thus includes “stumbling-blocks,” yet it
is “the Church in this world” ( XX.9; Matt. 13.39 ‒43). Such locutions re-
sist any dichotomization of visible and invisible Church. Augustine ob-
serves that his book is a defense of “the City of God, that is to say, God’s
Church” [defendimus civitatem Dei, hoc est eius ecclesiam] ( XIII.16).
So Catholic Christians are “the citizens of the Holy City of God” who
are “in the pilgrimage of this present life” ( XIV.9). Our allegorical read-
ing of the Old Testament must always be practiced “with reference to
Christ and the Church, which is the City of God,” both within and be-
yond history ( XVI.2).29 The Church is certainly the heavenly city on pil-
grimage, a determinate community of historical beings. But as we have
noted, it is equally certainly a mixed body. Against the Donatists’ fanta-
sies of a pure Church, Augustine insisted that the Church in its pilgrim-
age has wrinkles and spots, unlike the bride of Christ in her final form
(Eph. 5.25‒27).30 Just as Augustine’s language resists dichotomization of
visible and invisible Church, so it resists any simple, unqualified identifi-
cation of the city of God and the Catholic Church. The Church both al-
ready is the city of God and is not yet the city of God. This is a structure
of theological reflection pervading Christian understanding of the re-
lations between the kingdom of God already revealed in Christ and
the kingdom of God prayed for and awaited, an eschatological event.31 In
history, with its wrinkles, spots, tares, and wickedness, “the Church even
now is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven,” albeit a king-
dom “at war” ( XX.9).32
With this reading of Augustine’s language concerning the Church
and the city of God in mind, I return to the issue of conversion from the
earthly city, that kingdom of death (CG XIV.1), to the city of God. This
undoubtedly includes some kind of return to oneself from being assimi-
lated to “externals” [foris].33 But this moment must not be isolated from
the movement into the community that constitutes the city of God in its
historical pilgrimage. It must involve the whole, embodied person in a
process that is never completed in this life.34 Conversion is from a home
in a city organized around fragile compromises over wills competing
for dominion and wealth to one centered on the promises of redemp-
tion, the precepts and gift of God, namely the Church ( XIX.17). And it
entails the public act of baptism. In a sermon preached around 419 ‒20
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 8

8 Salvation and Sin

Augustine tells his congregation that in the Church sins are forgiven that
“are not forgiven apart from the Church.”35 Indeed, sins “must be for-
given in that Spirit by which the Church is gathered together in a unit”
(71.28). Why? “Because the Church has received this gift, of sins being
forgiven in her in the Holy Spirit.” Indeed, “You can tell you have received
the Holy Spirit if you are held in the bond of peace of the Church, which
is spread out among all nations. That’s why the apostle says, Eager to pre-
serve the unity of the Spirit in this bond of peace (Ephesians 4.3)” (71.28). As for
training in what Taylor called “radical reflexivity,”36 Augustine emphasizes
that baptism into the Church, with the gift of divine forgiveness con-
stituting this act, is conversion even if the Christians do not yet perceive
that they have actually received the Holy Spirit (71.30 ‒31). He reflects,
characteristically, on the limits of our self-awareness: “Nor should it strike
you as odd that someone should have something and be ignorant of what
it is they have. To say nothing of the power of the Almighty and the unity
of the unchangeable Trinity, who can easily grasp by knowledge what
the soul is?” (71.31).
Time and again, in different genres of writing, Augustine affirms
that “the words of God,” represented in Scripture, “make it perfectly
clear that, apart from community with Christ, no one can attain eternal
life and salvation.” And that, he writes in The Punishment and Forgiveness
of Sins and the Baptism of Little Ones (411‒12), is why we baptize people,
however young.37 Through this sacrament “they are joined to the body
and members of Christ” (III.4.7). Christ himself “willed that this rebirth
be brought about by baptism” and instituted this sacrament of conver-
sion (I.18.23). So while God “is the light of the interior human being,”
he “helps us to turn to him” (II.5.5) in the ways he has given people in
the Church, which is his body. Conversion “begins with the forgiveness of
sins,” but this “interior” renewal continues from day to day (2 Cor. 4.16)
in the Catholic Church, where the fruits of the Holy Spirit are bestowed
(II.7.9). Preaching to his congregations in the Church at once very visible
and invisible, he often stresses that if the forgiveness of sins in Christ
“were not to be had in the Church, there would be no hope of a future
life and eternal liberation. We thank God, who gave his Church such a
gift,” the gift of the baptismal sacrament.38 And, of course, thanks are
given for the sacrament of unity where Christians are daily incorporated
in the body of Christ.39
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Augustinian Prelude 9

In just this thoroughly social way the city of God on pilgrimage seeks
to remedy the privatizing individualism of the Fall. Conversion cannot be
an inward emigration. Nor can it be like the salvific journey of the awak-
ening Plotinian soul returning alone to its always unfallen self in union
with the One it has never truly left, an inward journey of the alone to the
alone. On the contrary, as John Kenney has recently shown, Augustinian
contemplation is Christocentric, scriptural, and thoroughly ecclesial. The
Church, he argues, offers “an ecclesial locus for contemplation, nesting
it within an institutional structure.”40 Christian conversion is to a city
that calls (“evocat”) and collects (“colligit”) a community (CG XIX.17).
It makes a determinate society developing a form of life faithful to God
revealed in his Word. Augustine’s arguments and iconography here are
congruent with Karl Barth’s insistence that the disciple of Christ cannot
attempt “ ‘inner emigration’ in which he will not be offensive, or at least
suspicious, or at the very least conspicuous, to those who still worship
their gods. It is not merely a matter of saving his own soul in the attain-
ment of a private beatitude. He loses his soul, and hazards his eternal sal-
vation, if he will not accept the public responsibility which he assumes
when he becomes a disciple of Jesus.”41 But conversion is not only from
one city and its present form of life to another. It is also from a history,
from a past that has constituted a person’s identity: one’s senses, emo-
tions, thoughts, fears, loves, dreams— indeed, memory upon memory.42
This past truly binds us. In the seventh book of the Confessions, Augustine
addresses the how of conversion: “What will wretched man do?” With
St. Paul’s help he reformulates the question and gives an answer that
is strikingly different from Taylor’s account of the “principal route” to
God through an “inward road”: “‘Who will deliver him from the body of
death’ except your grace through Jesus Christ our Lord,” the “coeternal
Son,” the innocent Lord who was killed by the prince of the earthly city
and freed humankind from the decree that was against us ( VII.21.21;
Rom. 7.24; Col. 2.14; see too VII.9.113‒14).
Turning back to the City of God we receive the same answer: “The
hostile power . . . is conquered in the name of him who assumed human
nature and whose life was without sin, so that in him, who was both priest
and sacrifice, remission of sins might be effected, that is through the me-
diator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, through whom
we are . . . reconciled to God” ( X.22). Christ is the “one road,” Augustine
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10 Salvation and Sin

writes, the goal and “the way” ( XI.2). Here is the source of the grace that
awakens and calls the Babylonian subject to begin the movement into that
other city. But this answer still leaves open questions about agency, about
the weight of the past, the temporalities of human identity. A person
drawn by grace into the community that Bishop Augustine now inhab-
ited would, however uncertainly and diffidently, become estranged from
her past. Yet the memory of that past, its presence, is not expunged.43 Nor
must it be, despite its formation in the earthly city. For in our memory,
that abyss with its fields, vast palaces, and treasures, is a massive power
(“vis”), a sublime (“horrendum”) mystery where we find God. For if
I find you outside my memory (“praeter memoriam meam”), Augus-
tine confesses to God, I forget you; and how shall I find you if I am not
remembering you (Confessions, X.17.26)? But this encounter with one’s
memory bears little, if any, relation to Taylorian accounts of the Augus-
tinian “inward” journey and the “road” to God. For the tenth book of
Confessions displays how the converted and baptized person, living in the
new household, has become extremely opaque to herself. Augustine ob-
serves how he has become a “quaestio” to himself ( X.33.50), has been
made to himself a difficult land, hard to labor ( X.16.25). Indeed, joyful
conversion shows how his self-reflexivity yields neither clarity nor cer-
tainty but lamentable darkness in which his obscure potentials are hidden
( X.32.48). The different and abandoned past still returns and, at least in
dreams, can elicit consent to old, rejected habits and pleasures ( X.30.41).
So the converting agency of divine grace does not repress the past. Rather,
it enables that past, its power and consequences, to be grasped, at last,
with clarity but, crucially, without panic. In his homily on Psalm 136, Au-
gustine notes that if we truly become citizens of Jerusalem, the memory
of Jerusalem will gradually supersede our memories of Babylon, our for-
mer home and, as we can only now see, our prison. But the danger re-
mains that as we are still pilgrims, encompassed by the earthly city, we can
aestheticize this city of confusion, turning it into songs, and gradually for-
get Jerusalem in the reinvigorated memories of Babylon.44 Once again we
are led to see how conversion is an exhilarating, restless, and dangerous
process. Nothing could be more misleading than to assimilate such de-
scriptions of the grace of conversion to some irresistible force that con-
cludes the struggles of conflicting memories, ends the need for searching,
and provides transparent self-knowledge in the light of divine clarity.45
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Augustinian Prelude 11

Some words from Barth’s treatment of the doctrine of reconciliation are

congruent here:

There can be no question of an act of compulsion on the part of

the Lord. . . . He certainly exercises power, putting down the mighty
from their seat and exalting them of low degree (Luke 1.52). Nor is
there any power in heaven or earth compatible with or superior to
His. But it is not a blind, brute power. . . . His is not a rampaging nu-
minous which strikes man unconditionally so that he can only be
petrified and silent before it, yielding without really wanting to do
so. He does not humiliate or insult man. He does not make him a
mere spectator, let alone a puppet.46

Views that take the account of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9 as paradig-

matic of Christian conversion will be addressed as I now pursue the issue
of conversion and agency.
In his preface to On Christian Teaching Augustine insists that Chris-
tians, however replete with divine gifts, must accept that the Holy Spirit
teaches through human mediations. Learning from others within the com-
munity is not only a learning about Christian practice and doctrine but
also a training in humility. It is the demonic pride learned in the earthly
city that seeks to persuade people that as vessels of the Holy Spirit Chris-
tians do not need human mediations of the Word. The outcome of such
perversity is likely to be refusal “to go to church in order to hear and
learn from the gospel, or to read the Bible, or to listen to anybody read-
ing it out and preaching it; and into expecting to be snatched up to the
third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body, as the apostle says, and there
hear unutterable words which it is not lawful for man to speak (2 Cor. 12: 2‒4), or
there see the Lord Jesus Christ and listen to the gospel directly from his
mouth rather than just from other people.”47 Once again, we learn that
ideologies and spiritualities that isolate us from the community of believ-
ers, the actually existing Catholic Church, are the product of pride, the
will to autonomy and privatization enacted in the Fall. Augustine would
doubtless have encountered Christians whose model of conversion was
taken from Luke’s story of Paul’s conversion (Acts 9 and 22). Perhaps
he would also encounter some who interpreted his own conversion as
an echo of this story. So he warns his readers: “Let us be on our guard
Aers 01 3/6/09 1:36 PM Page 12

12 Salvation and Sin

against all such dangerous temptations to pride, and let us rather reflect
on how the same apostle Paul, although he had been struck down and
instructed by the divine voice from heaven, was still sent to a man to re-
ceive the sacraments and be joined to the Church [ad hominem tamen
missum esse ut sacramenta perciperet atque copularetur ecclesiae]” (Pref-
ace, 6).48 Similar arguments are relevant to Cornelius in Acts 10. An angel
tells him that his worship is accepted by God and then hands him over
to Peter both to receive the sacraments and to learn what should be be-
lieved, hoped, and loved (Preface, 6). The human condition would be
truly abject (“abiecta”) if God seemed unwilling to minister his word to
human beings through humans (“per homines hominibus,” Preface, 6).
God, however, certainly wills such ministry. For without human medi-
ations in the Church “there would be no way for love, which ties people
together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were in-
termingle with each other” (Preface, 6.13).49
In a work written against the Donatists, On Baptism, Augustine also
reflects on Cornelius’s conversion. There too the emphasis is on the need
for Cornelius to be “incorporated in the Church by the bond of Christian
brotherhood and peace.” He learns about Christ through Peter. Baptized
by Peter, “he was joined by the tie of communion to the fellowship of
Christians, to which he was bound by the likeness of good works.” Au-
gustine observes that it would have been disastrous for Cornelius had
he despised what he had not yet received, communion with the Church,
“vaunting himself in what he had.”50 Augustine’s teaching is as incom-
patible with Wycliffite ideology, identifying the only true Church as an in-
visible one of currently unknown, unknowable predestinates, as it is with
Plotinian understanding of the “inward” way to salvation. For Augus-
tine, in Christian conversion the divine will is that such conversions be
made and sustained by human mediations that constitute the body of
Christ, the kingdom of Christ in its earthly pilgrimage, the city of God in
its historical form.51
This systematic emphasis on human mediation and the actual Catho-
lic Church in conversion does not sideline divine agency, grace.52 Char-
acteristically, Augustine confesses to God, “You converted me to you”
[convertisti enim me ad te] (Confessions, VIII.12.30). Indeed, a common
perception I have already alluded to has been that Augustine’s theology
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Augustinian Prelude 13

of grace overwhelms and dissolves human agency.53 Yet in the Confes-

sions God is shown patiently drawing people to active acknowledgment
of conversion in the Church. Victorinus exemplifies this ( VIII.2.3‒4.9).
A famous, erudite pagan, he has been a worshipper of idols, a proponent
of “sacrilegious rites,” and a defender of these cults for many years. But
reading holy Scripture and Christian writings he is drawn to Christianity.
He comes to see himself as a Christian and informs his Christian friend
and priest Simplicianus. The latter, however, replies, “ ‘I shall not believe
that or count you among the Christians unless I see you in the Church of
Christ.’ ” Victorinus rejects what he takes to be a superfluous externalism
of belief and laughingly asks, “Do walls make Christians?” This “joke”
is used to avoid any public identification of a move between communi-
ties, one that would certainly be offensive to his pagan friends. He wishes
to keep conversion an inward and private matter. But as he continues
to ruminate on the demands of discipleship outlined in Scripture (such
as Luke 12.9) he comes to see that conversion entails catechism and bap-
tism in the Church. So he decides to make “profession of his salvation
before the holy congregation” ( VIII.2.5). For Augustine this is a model of
God’s grace creating both joy for the converted person and communal
joy in the Christian community where the conversion incorporates the
convert ( VIII.2.5‒3.6). And it prefigures Augustine’s own conversion, to
which the story of Victorinus belongs. For in Augustine’s conversion
God acts through a dense network of mediations, a veritable cornucopia
of interlocutors. We encounter the roles, sometimes direct, sometimes
oblique, of many: Faustus the Manichee, Neoplatonists’ writings, Monica,
Ambrose, Anthony, Ponticianus, Victorinus, a child’s voice, Paul, divine
admonitions. Describing this network, Ann Matter concludes that “the
example [of Augustine’s conversion] given is not Paul, either as described
in Luke or in his own writings, but a Chinese box of stories of conver-
sion.”54 In converting Augustine through such interlocutors, God was
converting Augustine into the Church, that network of mediations where
he would be a bishop. The words he quotes from Simplicianus to Victori-
nus speak to his own deferral of baptism: “I shall not count you among
the Christians unless I see you in the Church of Christ” ( VIII.2.4).
Attention to the complex relations between divine and human
agency pervades Augustine’s work from his response to seven questions
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 690 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Milliners.— Mrs.
Becky McClelland, Millie and Rebecca Faucett, Mrs. John L. Means,
Catharine McCleary, Miss Mary Jane Shaw, Mrs. P. M. Hochheimer.
Millers. — Henry Beeson, Jr., Nathan Jefiferis, John Denny, Jacob
Landers, Henry Hawes, Billy McGuinn, Jesse Beeson, Adam
Sembower, Isaac Skiles, William Swearingen, Joseph B. Moser, Jacob
Mack, Daniel Swearingen, John McCoy, Jesse B. Ramsey, William S.
Barnes, Jesse Reed, L. O. Reynolds, Roberts Barton, William Barton.
Physicians. — Robert McCall, Samuel Sackett, Henry Chapese, Adam
Simonson, Solomon Drown, Daniel Marchand, Lewis Marchand,
Benjamin Stevens, J. B. Phythian, Daniel Sturgeon, Hugh Campbell,
Alfred Meason, David Porter, H. F. Roberts, Andrew Patrick, R. M.
Walker, Smith Fuller, F. C. Robinson. Painters. — John Knight, Joshua
Speers, William Rutter, Thomas Brownfield, John G. Stevens, William
A. Donaldson. Plasterers. — Edward Hyde, Lewis Vandiver, Aaron
McClure. Restaurateurs. — Macon W. Rine, Henry Offitt, John
Manaway, John Teed, John Durbin, George Ingles, Ezekiel Shelcutt,
James Winterbottom, James Ebert, Robert Knight, Oliver Wells, J. W.
Brown, John Holly, John Ryland. Stone Cutters. — Harry Jack, Philp
Crichbaum, John Bradbury, Joseph White, Kent Combs, James
Hagan, John Hagan, Joseph R. Marshall, Joseph H. Marshall, Robert
Baird. School Teachers. — Betsy Hedges, John Donne, Noble
McCormick, John Colestock, Sophia Stevens, William B. McCormick,
James H. Springer, George H. Leithead, W. Whitton Redick, George
L. Osborn, William Patton, Sarah Ann Sampsel, Polly Canon, Mary
Redick, Sarah Swisher, Ruth Dorsey, James Darby, Alf. Sembower, E.
P. Oliphant, Levi S. Lewis. Tavern Keepers. — Harry Gilbert, Hanna
Sands, Lydia Huffman, John Collins, Samuel Salter, Jonathan
Rowland, Margaret (Granny) Allen, Robert McClure, Thomas Collins,
John Slack, William Downerd, James Gregg, Nacca Gregg, William
Medkirk, Simeon Houser, Amos Howell, Matthew Allen, Seth Howell,
Philip Stentz, Thomas Moxley, Pierson Sayers, Jacob Harbaugh,
James Piper, William Merryman, George Manypenny, Harry Gilbert,
Zadoc Walker, Ewing McCleary, Wjlliam McClelland, Alfred
McClelland, Joshua Marsh,
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 691 Aaron Stone, P. U.
Hook, Aaron Wyatt, Thomas Brownfield, Nathaniel Brownfield, J. W.
Kissinger, Calvin Springer, Zadoc Cracraft, James Seaton, Kim Frey,
Thomas Renshaw, Benjamin Miller, William Medkirk, Andrew Byers,
Samuel Elder. Tailors. — John McCuen, D. M. Springer, Moses
Shehan, John L. Means, Daniel Huston, Asher Baily, John Carpenter,
Absalom Guiler, Peter Heck, James Heck, Elijah Gadd, Samuel Lewis,
Henry Lape. Veterinary Surgeons. — Drs. Kemp, George Magee,
Thomas M. Waldron, C. W. Springer. Weavers. — Noble McCormick,
Peter Crawford, William Stroud, Jane Lenom, James Winterbottom,
William Kerr. Industries and Utilities. — The first automobile
introduced into the town was owned by Thomas T. Coffin who
bought it from the Locomobile Company of America, of New York,
for which Mr. Coffin paid $600 or $700. He drove it from Brownsville
on April 8, 1901, through sixteen inches of snow. He kept it six or
eight months and sold it to Charles W. Johnson for $250, who ran it
backwards into the side of a building. He then opened a shop for the
manufacture of cars on East Penn street where he made some six in
number, when his factory burned. Percy D. Hagan introduced the
first taxicab service in the town Thursday, October, 19, 1911. J.
Harry Johnston & Son, funeral directors, introduced the first motor
hearse to be used in the town, August 26, 1913. Builders' Supplies.
— After several years in business, William C. McCormick located on
Center street and there established himself as a contractor and
dealer in builders' supplies in which he did a thriving business until
the time of his death, August 30, 1911. The Uniontown Builders'
supply company located their plant at Hadden Place in 1909, Edward
C. Cornish, president; Benton Boyd, secretary-treasurer. The
Uniontown Construction company, composed of Charles J. Coates,
Orlando Colley and McClelland Leonard, was incorporated March 3,
1905, and conducted an extensive business as contractors in
grading, excavating, street paving, hauling and cement work. Electric
Light and Power Introduced. — An electric light and power plant was
established in 1889 when the town council
 693 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. granted to W. G.
Hay and his associates a franchise for the construction and operation
of such a system. This plant soon passed into the hands of Samuel
E. Ewing and his associates, known as the United Light company
who received a franchise August 14, 1890, and furnished electric
light and power to the town. Enameled-ware Plant. See chapter VII.
Foundries. — Richard Miller erected a foundry on Pittsburgh street
which he put in blast July 4, 1846, and which he operated until
compelled by advanced age to retire from active business, since
which it has been operated by foundrymen and is still known as
Miller's foundry. Eleazer Robinson erected a foundry on Morgantown
street which he put in operation in 1840, and which he continued to
operate for many years when he sold to Jaquette and Keffer who
continued the business for some years until KefFer withdrew and
Jaquette continued until compelled by age to retire in favor of his
sons, Nathaniel and Andrew J. Jaquette. Nathaniel soon withdrew
and Andrew J. continued the business for some time. The Keystone
foundry was established in 1901 by Robert McDowell and C. W.
Howell, who erected an office building and a foundry building on the
site of the old nut and bolt works. This company employed a force of
about ninety men and manufactured car castings and other foundry
articles. It remained in operation two or three years. The American
Brake-shoe foundry, located on the site of the old nut and bolt
works, employed over one hundred men in its various departments,
and melted forty tons of metal per day. After a shutdown of nearly
five years, it resumed operations September 18, 1913, under the
superintendence of J. H. Brown. Glass Works. — The Thompson
glass works were established on South Mount Vernon avenue and
put into operation in May, 1889, and operated until 1895, when after
laying idle for five years, it was sold to George W. Frey & Co., who
operated it a short time. The Frey Decorative Glass Plant was
operated about one year. The Warren glass works were moved here
from Cumberland where they had been in operation for the past
eight years. The plant was located near the foot of Grant street and
put in operation in September, 1888. It was a forty pot plant and
furnished employment to about one hundred and fifty hands.
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 693 After having
suspended operation for some time, the plant was overhauled and
put in operation as the Flint Glass Works, August 35, 1898, and
conducted as such for a few years, and then abandoned. The
Uniontown Flint Glass company was located on East Penn street, and
started in business in 1903, and employed about twenty-five hands,
and was owned by William R. Gray. This plant was utterly destroyed
by fire Monday evening, December 31, 1908, and Peter Phillips, one
of the employes of the plant, who was sleeping before the furnace at
the time the fire occurred, was burned to a crisp. The Keystone
Bottle Manufacturing company, composed of William H. and George
W. Smart, began business on the site of the old Uniontown Flint
Glass works in 1907, and the company was incorporated in 1908,
and furnished employment to about one hundred hands. The Lily
Paper-Weight company, with Charles Zimmerman and others as
proprietors, erected a factory on the site of the old Nut and Bolt
works and made paper-weights for about two years. The Uniontown
Gas Works were established on North Beeson avenue in 1869 by
John H. Miller of Grafton, West Virginia, who conducted them for a
few years when the plant passed into other hands and conducted
until superseded by the introduction of natural gas. Natural gas was
introduced into the town in July, 1888, and was used for heating
purposes only, in the houses, until the invention of the gas mantle,
from which time it took the place of manufactured gas as an
illuminant. The Redstone Garbage company erected a furnace at a
cost of about $9,000 near Cycle Park out Connellsville street, which
was put in operation in March, 1907, by which the rubbish and
offensive matter of the town was disposed of. Other parties were
previously, and still are engaged in removing the garbage from the
town. A hub and spoke factory was operated at the foot of
Pittsburgh street for a short time by Seneca McCord, Ellis Baily and
others. It was started in 1871. Manufactured Ice Plants. — Hygeia
Ice Plant, see Chapter VIII.
 694 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The Crystal Ice
plant, with the capacity of forty tons of ice per day, was established
by Armor S. Craig & Sons on Wood avenue, and put in operation
June 1, 1909. Isaac N. Hagan erected an ice cream factory, with
complete machinery for the manufacturing of ice cream to the
amount of 2,000 gallons per twenty-four hours, in the fall of 1906.
Asa Rogers and his associates organized what was known as the
Fayette Ice Cream factory May 11, 1911. The plant was located at
the east end of Church street, where a superior quality of the
delicacy is manufactured. Leopold Kuth, William Brownfield and
others have been extensive manufacturers of ice cream. William
Carter was a caterer in ice cream for many years, and his place was
a favorite resort for this delicacy in the summer and for cooked
dinners in the winter months. He knew how to satisfy the cravings of
the inner man. The Sanitary Paper Bottle and Box company
commenced operations on Arch street March 18, 1912. O. W.
Kennedy, president; R. M. Fry, secretary-treasurer; James S. Amond,
business manager. The plant had a capacity of 18,000 bottles in ten
hours, and employed twelve to fourteen hands. This factory was
entirely destroyed by fire at 3 :30, Thursday morning, March 27,
1913. M. W. Miller established the first dyeing and scouring
establishment in the town, and which he conducted until his death,
July 13, 1908, a period of thirty-five years. John Kuth established a
plant for the manufacture of mineral water and pop in 1884, which
he operated for several years. He was succeeded in the business by
John Stockdale about 1899, who is still in the business with the
capacity of manufacturing 500 cases in twenty-four hours. Ewing B.
Marshall established himself in the business and sold out to Thomas
Lowry, who built a new factory in 1908, on South street with a
capacity of 500 cases in twenty-four hours. Daniel Sweeney is also a
large manufacturer of mineral waters. The Armour & Co. meat
market was established in Uniontown in January, 1891, at the foot of
Beeson avenue, and here they conducted business until they
purchased a lot on North Gallatin avenue, January 13, 1900, and
erected thereon a threestory brick building suitable for their
business. This building cost about $30,000, and was opened for
inspection by the public
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 695 on January 16,
1901, on which occasion a free lunch was served. The Schwarzchild
and Sulzberger, known as the S. & S. meat market was established
in Uniontown in 1896, when they occupied buildings near the
Baltimore and Ohio freight station. Here they conducted business
until they erected commodious offices and warehouse adapted to
their business in 1898 on North Mt. Vernon avenue, where they have
continued to conduct a thriving business, with the capacity of
handling I'S.OOO to 80,000 pounds of meat. The Uniontown
Provision company was established at the foot of CoiTee street in
1912, and butchered the first beef on November 14th of that year.
The company has a capacity of butchering one car load of cattle or
hogs per day. John Sansone established a wholesale produce market
January 1, 1897. Marion McClean soon followed. Armor S. Craig &
Sons established a wholesale produce market on South street and
later erected a large warehouse on Church street, where they
continued the business. Others have also engaged in the business.
William H. Farwell was the pioneer job printer of the town;
establishing its first exclusive job printing establishment July 1,
1888, which is still in successful operation. Other job offices have
been established. Uniontown has been able to boast of several good
brass bands. The Whig Brass Band was organized at an early day,
and among its members were George W. Rutter, the long established
merchant of the town, and Wesley Phillips. Mr. Rutter played a
double keyed flageolet upon which he played two parts of the music
at a time. This flageolet was burned in the fire that destroyed the
exposition buildings in Allegheny. A rival band at this time was the "
Democratic Band ; " among its members were: C. B. Snyder, Israel
Hogue and James Snyder. These bands were in great demands at
political demonstrations. A brass band was in existence in 1847,
under the tutorship of Captain William H. Stowey of Waynesburg.
Some of the members of this band were : James T. Gorley, trombone
; Hugh Gorley, cornet; George Hubbs, sax-tuba; Orton Frisbie,
ophicleide. By the request of this band the town council took action
on September 24, 1849, by which the " Union Brass Band " was
 696 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. granted the use of
the town hall " provided they conducted themselves in an orderly
manner." The most noted brass band of the town, and of which her
citizens were always justly proud, was the famous Rutter Band which
was organized in the summer of 1856. The original roster of this
band was as follows : Henry Brown, keyed bugle ; George W. Rutter,
the tailor, B flat sax horn; John (Curly) Inghram, alto ; Thomas
Brownfield and William Rutter, tenors ; James J. White, baritone; J.
Wesley Means, bass; Stephen Beckett, bass drum. This band was
suspended during the civil war, and several of its members
participated in that struggle. After the war the band was reorganized
and procured new instruments and new uniforms, and in conjunction
with the Connellsville band, attended the Centennial exhibition at
Philadelphia in 1876. In 1893 this band procured new uniforms and
accompanied the Randall Club of Pittsburgh to Chicago when Grover
Cleveland was nominated for the third time for the presidency, and
participated with the Randall Club to Washington, D. C, at
Cleveland's second inauguration. No other band in this section would
compete with the Rutter Band for a premium; consequently when
premiums were contested for. Putter's Band was excluded from the
contest. This famous band disbanded in 1909, and Charley Price
organized what was known as Price's Band which contained some of
the younger blood of the Rutter band. This band held its
organization until 1911, when engagements elsewhere called Mr.
Price away from the town. Lumber Companies and Planing Mills. —
The Carroll Lumber and Planing Mill company was organized in 1903,
with a capital of $30,000. They located on North Mt. Vernon avenue.
The Ohiopyle Lumber and Planing Mill company located on Penn
street in 1902, where they conducted business for a few years.
Charles F. Eggers and Samuel M. Graham established a planing mill
and lumber yards on East Fayette street in 1901, and did an
immense business as contractors and dealers in lumber and builders'
supplies. Mr. Graham withdrew from the firm, since which time Mr.
Eggers has continued the business. This mill has furnished
employment to many mechanics and laborers, and has been a
blessing to the town.
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 697 - A. A. Taggert &
Co. ran a Planing mill on Pfenn street for a few years. The South
Penn Building company established a planing mill and lumber yard
on the lot formerly occupied by the Ohiopyle Lumber company, on
Penn street, May 13, 1907, and carried on extensively as dealers and
contractors in building. The Union Planing Mill was located on East
Fayette street by the McFarland brothers in 1887 or 1888 and ran
until 1893, when it was sold to Carson, Teggart and Davis and others
by whom it was run until 1898, when it went into bankruptcy.
Laundries. — Hill Harold operated a laundry at the eastern bridge in
1891, and sold it to W. A. Gilliland who sold it to F. M. Morss who
moved it to Jefferson street, added modern machinery and
conducted it successfully. The Fayette Laundry began operations in
July, 1894, in a large brick building erected for the purpose and
fitted, with modern machinery, on Wood avenue, in July, 1894. Alex
J. Mead, manager. Eli Gaddis and William Frederick, Jr., erected a
flouring mill near Redstone creek on North Beeson avenue about
1887, which they operated about one year when they sold to Albert
Gaddis and Ami G. Thomas January 1, 1886, who operated it until in
'July of that year when it was entirely destroyed by fire. Mr. Gaddis
and others rebuilt on Mill street where they operated successfully
until March, 1906, when they sold to John Hogsett & Co. who have
since conducted the business. Potteries. — Potteries have been
conducted in the town by Christian Tarr, Abner Greenland and Norval
Greenland as mentioned elsewhere. Sprinkling of the streets to allay
the dust was introduced by Richard A. McClean in 1871. He used a
one-horse wagon and obtained the water at the gas works at $4.50
per month and charged from fifteen to fifty cents per week for
sprinkling in front of subscribers' property. He enlarged his facilities
and continued the business until the introduction of city water. The
sale of the Pittsburgh daily papers was introduced into the town by
James Hadden as the first " newsie." He started with ten or a dozen
subscribers for the Evening Chronicle at ten cents per week, to
which was subsequently added the Dispatch at six cents per week,
and a few copies of the Post. The streets not being lighted in those
days, he was compelled, on
 698 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. dark nights, to
carry his own light, which consisted of a glass paneled lantern in
which was a tallow candle. The business now has grown to quite an
enterprise, and the daily paper has become a necessity. Efforts were
made in 1887 to effect the organization of a Young Men's Christian
Association. Several men applied themselves earnestly to the task,
and meetings were held at various places for the purpose of
arousing a general interest in the cause, with varied success. A
considerable amount was subscribed toward the purchase of a
suitable property for a home for the association. The old Beeson
store room property on West Main street was purchased and part of
it devoted to the purpose and occupied as such for some time, but
the general interest in the meetings soon abated. A meeting was
held at the residence of Frank M. Semans, Jr. on April 5, 1906, for
the purpose of instilling new life into the organization, at which the
statement was made that property vested in the association was
valued at $50,000. On March 19, 1907, at a meeting of the board of
directors, J. V. Thompson and J. D. Ruby proposed to exchange the
old Thorndell property on the corner of East Main street and North
Gallatin avenue, and other valuable considerations, for the old
Beeson store room property, which proposition was accepted. At the
same meeting plans were consummated for the purchase of the old
Dr. J. B. Ewing property adjoining on the east, then belonging to J.
Q. Van Swearingen, A. F. Cooper and T. S. Lackey, at the
consideration of $45,000, minus a donation of $5,000. Since which
there has been some discussion as to tearing away the old buildings
and the erection of a modern Y. M. C. A. building, with business
rooms and offices from which a revenue can be derived sufficient for
the maintenance of the Y. M. C. A. A large building was constructed
south of East Fayette street by a stock company for the purpose of a
nut and bolt works which was started in operation about 1886, but
after running but two years it passed into the hands of the sheriff,
and C. H. Smith, A. L. Moser and Dr. A. P. Bowie became the owners
in 1888. The Uniontown Machine company, consisting of A. L. Moser,
C. L. Smith, Dr. A. P. Bowie, Samuel, Alfred and John L. Johnson
conducted a business here until June 3,
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 699 1889, when the
property was entirely destroyed by fire, the loss sustained was
estimated at near $30,000. The Old Steam Mill. — One Joseph
Huston, a native of Maryland, erected a building near the east end of
Penn street in 1838, for the purpose of a distillery and used it as
such for some time, and he was also engaged in other business in
the town. It is alleged that the whisky he manufactured would freeze
in cold weather even when in barrels in the house. He became
involved and his property was sold by the sheriff to James Huston of
Franklin township. This property subsequently came into the
possession of Israel Painter who converted it into a flouring mill and
constructed a mill race from the Henry Beeson saw mill on the banks
of Redstone creek, crossing the pike above the eastern bridge,
thence to the mill where it supplied the motor power for the
operation of the mill, and while in the ownership of Col. Painter the
building was destroyed by fire and a new one was erected. Samuel
S. Austin and Andrew Byers advertise that they had purchased the
new grist mill and distillery and offered it for rent in 1841. This mill
was again burned in March, 1851, while in the occupancy of William
Kerr and the fire was supposed to have been the work of an
incendiary, but it could never be proven. Mr. Kerr, it was said, could
walk holding a barrel of flour on each hip. The weather was so
severe at the time of this fire that the water froze in the fire engines,
and while the outside of the building was a sheet of ice, the interior
was a seething mass of flame. This was the first mill in the
community to use steam power and was always alluded to as " the
steam mill." Jacob Murphy, with William S. Barnes as miller,
purchased the site and erected a new mill which they operated for
several years. William K. Cooper became connected with Mr. Barnes
in the operation of the mill, and later, Clinton Cooper, a brother to W.
K., became connected. Jesse B. Ramsey and Jesse B. Gardner
operated this mill for some time, then it lay idle for several years,
when Messrs. Baldwin and Cheney, who had graded the Fayette
County railroad, traded $5,000 of railroad stock and $1,000 in cash
for the mill property, and Mr. Murphy lost much of this stock in the
sale of the road.
 700 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Baldwin afld
Cheney soon offered this property for sale and Fred Wilmarth
became the purchaser and Mr. L. O. Reynolds became his agent and
operated the mill for several years, and he was succeeded in the
business by his two sons, Burke and Lyman Reynolds and W. C.
McCormick, for several years. These were followed by Ellis Baily who
purchased the mill and his son, George M. Baily, took the
management. William H. Playford purchased the property, and after
laying idle for several years, he sold it to Daniel J. Johnson who
converted it into a distillery and conducted it as such until it was
again destroyed by fire, on Wednesday afternoon, January 29, 1902.
This immense fire occurring amidst a heavy fall of snow, was
spectacular in the extreme. Johnson then erected a large brick
distillery and warehouse on the site of the old mill which he
transferred to George W. Gans. The Laughead, Modisette & Co.
planing mill on North Beeson avenue, was erected by James A.
Laughead, William H. Baily and Dr. Smith Fuller and put into
operation in February, 1868, and during the almost thirty years of its
existence it built nearly all the expensive buildings erected in the
town during that time. Although some changes were made in the
membership of the firm, it always sustained its high reputation as to
responsibility and capable workmanship. This plant was located just
north of Redstone creek and occupied several acres of ground with
its mills, offices, sheds and lumber yards. This mill was destroyed by
an incendiary fire May 12, 1897, the loss was estimated at $50,000,
being owned at the time by E. P. Laughead, A. H. Laughead, Hugh
A. Burchinal, I. W. Miller, Charles E. Kremer, D. H. Thompson, S. M.
Dannells, Levi Crawford, Springer Crawford, H. C. Huhn, J. G. Fields,
C. T. Hall, T. O. Williams, B. F. Humbert and J. P. Conn ; many of
these were workmen in the mill. The burning of this mill was the
worst blow of the kind that ever befell the town; not only was it a
severe loss to the stockholders but to the many employes who here
found steady employment and the town lost one of its best business
enterprises. The Laughead, Modisette & Co. built a double brick
tenement north of the mill in 1879, which was occupied by various
tenants. Mr. Mcllvane built a frame dwelling next south of the brick
and occupied it. It became the property of George W. Litman.
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 701 The Columbia
Rolling mill or Iron and Steel Works procured grounds at the north
end of North Beeson avenue and began operations in September,
1887. These works did an immense business and furnished
employment to many skilled mechanics and common laborers while
in operation, but on May 16, 1891, Col. J. M. Schoonmaker arrived in
town and took charge of the property of the company as receiver.
The buildings were torn away in April, 1900, and the machinery and
all that was left of the stock was shipped to the Carnegie Steel
company at Homestead. The last pieces of the old mill were shipped
away in 1901, by Jody McLaughlin, who had been in the employ of
the company for fourteen years and seven months, and by Harvey
Herrington who had been in their employ twelve years. The land was
sold to the Carnegie Steel company June 9, 1911. Pennsylvania
Construction Company. — In 1886, the Pennsylvania Construction
Company, under the supervision of Harry P. Butz, erected shops at
the north end of North Beeson avenue on land owned by the
Columbia Iron and Steel Company, the right of way of the Baltimore
and Ohio railroad company dividing the two. This construction
company did much of the structural work from the product of the
Columbia rolling mill, with which it was connected, and was well
equipped for turning out much and excellent work, and furnished
employment for many skilled workmen and common laborers while
in operation. Uniontown Radiator Works and Enameling Plant. — In
1897, a Board of Trade was organized in Uniontown with John D.
Carr as president. As the outgrowth of this Board of Trade the
Uniontown Radiator company was organized with Max Baum as
president; Evans Linn, vice-president; Jacob Linn, secretary; O. P.
Markle, treasurer and John D. Carr, manager. The old buildings of
the Uniontown Steel and Construction company were secured, and
business started auspiciously, but from the lack of sufficient capital
the company was compelled to make an assignment, and the
assignee sold the property to Evans Linn. In 1899, Lloyd G. McCrum
and others organized a company which brought the plant from
Evans Linn and formed what was known as the Acme Radiator
company and commenced business May 20, 1899. This company
was chartered July 17, 1899, with a capital of $28,000, with the
following di 
 703 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. rectors: Fuller
Hogsett, A. L. Moser, J. M. Hustead, L. G. McCrum and I. W. Semans,
with L. G. McCrum as business manager. The officers were: Fuller
Hogsett, president; I. W. Semans, treasurer; L. G. McCrum,
secretary. This plant, under judicious management, soon became a
profitable industry. The patterns and equipments were overhauled
and the buildings enlarged and the output greatly increased. In
1903, the plant was sold, and in 1903, the firm became McCrum,
Howell, Kellogg and Pierce, who bought the enameling plant of the
Champion Manufacturing company at Blairsville. This new company
erected a large brick foundry and machine shop, and greatly
increased the capacity of the plant. In May, 1904, McCrum, Howell
and Kellogg bought the Uniontown plant from the Kellogg-Mackay-
Cameron company, and in June of the same year organized the
Kellogg-McCrumHowell company, having three plants, viz. : the
Radiator plant at Uniontown, an enamel ware plant at Blairsville and
a boiler and furnace plant at Norwich, Connecticut; the Blairsville
plant having been purchased by McCrum, Howell and Kellogg in
1903, and the Norwich plant in March, 1904. This firm did a
prosperous business, and in April, 1906, Mr. Kellogg retired, and the
firm became McCrum, Howell and Company. In September, 1905,
the Blairsville plant was destroyed by fire and it was decided to
rebuild at Uniontown, which work was begun that same year and the
new plant was put in operation in September, 1906. The radiator
plant had a capacity of 13,000 square feet a day, or more than
3,500,000 square feet a year. The enameling plant had a capacity of
300 bath tubs and 300 sinks and lavatories a day. Both plants were
modern in every respect, thoroughly equipped, and turned out
products of the highest quality. Each plant was complete within
itself; taking the raw material and turning out the finished product.
The radiator plant furnished employment to 300 hands and the
enameling plant furnished employment to 350 hands. This McCrum-
Howell Company went into involuntary bankruptcy March 14, 1913,
and receivers were appointed by the federal court, and near the
close of that year a reorganization was affected and the plants were
continued in operation under the name of the Richmond Radiator
Company. The Coke Industry. — From the fact that Uniontown owes
her phenominal prosperity principally to the coke industry of
 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 703 the county of
which she is the shire-town, and being a great nerve center from
which radiates much of the vital energy that inspires and controls
much of this great industry, it is eminently proper that due mention
thereof should be made in this work. It is conceded that James
Cochran of Dawson, Pa., was the pioneer coke manufacturer for
commercial purposes in the Connellsville coke region; as in 1843,
from the product of two ovens, he manufactured two boat loads of
coke, of 6,000 bushels each, which he floated to the Cincinnati
market. The early foundrymen of this region manufactured their own
coke as needed, by what was known as the open hearth method. It
is scarcely believable that within the span of one lifetime the coke
industry could have developed from comparative insignificance to its
present gigantic proportions. In 1849 there was not a coke furnace
in blast in Pennsylvania. In 1855 there were but twenty-six coke
ovens above Pittsburgh, and the United States census report for
1850 shows that there were but four establishments making coke in
the United States up to that time. The coke industry now ranks
among the first in point of magnitude and importance in the country,
and its wonderful growth is unequaled by any other industry. The
coke region surrounding Uniontown, on account of the superiority of
its product for blast furnaces and foundry use, is now supplying
seventy-five per cent, of the coke manufactured in the United States.
Late statistics show that there are now upwards of 40,000 ovens in
blast in this region, with a weekly output of 410,000 tons per week ;
and that the weekly payroll amounts to $800,000, of which $500,000
is paid to the laboring man. The Fayette Fuel Gas and Oil company
was formed by L. L. Minor, president; William Hunt, vice-president;
John K. Ewing, Jr., secretary; J. J. Allebaugh, treasurer; A. M. Jolliffe,
superintendent. Other members of the company were : William A.
Keener, Clark Breckenridge, Eli C. Gaddis, Noble McCormick, J. K.
Ritenour, all of Uniontown, and L. N. Singley and Greer & Smith of
Washington county. The company struck gas on the farm of John G.
Rider, in German township September 38, 1887.
 704 History of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The 10th of July
1888, found the lines of the company within the borough of
Uniontown, and in August of that year the company was supplying
gas to the consumers. The rates at that time were fixed at $10 per
year for cooking stoves, and $4 per year each grate. The Uniontown
Water Company was incorporated in 1883, with a capital of
$300,000. The first reservoir was built on Shute's run in Cool Spring
hollow and had a capacity of 3,000,000 gallons, and the water was
piped to the town. Since which time several and much larger
reservoirs have been constructed to meet the rapidly increasing
demands for water. No town can boast of a purer supply of water
than that furnished the inhabitants of Uniontown, as it is furnished
direct from the laboratory of nature. Lighting the town. — It is
difficult at the present day to realize that within the lifetime of some
of our older residents our forefathers were content to use nothing
but the glow of the backlog, the blaze of the pine knot or the dim
flicker of the grease cup with its projtruding rag wick for lighting
their homes, and as for lighting the streets of the town, they never
harbored the thought. The candle dip, which came later, was quite
an innovation over the grease cup, and was more suitable and
elegant for lighting the dwellings and stores, when inserted in
respectable candlesticks or chandeliers, and convenient for carrying
when enclosed in lanterns having glass panels. When it is
remembered that the common carbon oil of today was sold in the
stores at one dollar and ten cents per gallon as late as 1860, it will
not be wondered at that the tallow candle was not discarded sooner,
but lingered so long as an illuminant. It appears that the first
movement towards lighting the streets of the town was made
September 34, 1849, as on that date the town council appointed a
committee to erect six lamps on Main street, and Robinson and
Wylie were paid $35.63% for the lamps, and John Pumroy was
allowed two dollars per month for attending, lighting and
extinguishing the same. What illuminant was used in these lamps is
not mentioned ; and on November 37, 1855, a committee was
appointed by the town council to inquire into the cost of introducing
manufactured
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