Paying Attention To The Sky

“Augustine of Hippo” was first published in 1967 and then recently revised in 2000, with a new epilogue that dealt with a whole  new breed of archeological evidence that emerged between the two dates. Augustine lived from 354-430 AD. While this may seem distant from the modern consciousness, Brown has a special gift for immersing us in Augustine’s writing style (which is timeless) and relating it to the history and culture of the period. Another wonderful technique of Brown’s biography is to let Augustine, for the most part, speak for himself — what one reader described as an “almost like a mediated autobiography, an expanded “Confessions,” if you will.”

It makes for a great summer read because the chapters are short and to the point allowing the reader to forge his way through it. It is however that great book (500+ pages) that makes for a wonderful vacation read. One of the things I think you will find in it is a correlation between Augustine’s times and our own: note the “three fold Christian task” below and tell me if that has not changed at all.

One anecdote I recently read about its creation is even more fascinating and should be told to every masters thesis research scholar: “Turns out that Brown had not developed any special interest in Augustine until the end of his undergraduate studies. Being pressed for a thesis topic, with a deadline approaching, he picked Augustine almost at random. He then set about to master Augustine, and in just two years ended up writing the definitive bio that changed the field forever.” Is that a hoot or what? Another vote for “Follow your passion.”

The bibliography takes up eighteen pages and in a triumph of scholarship Brown uses primary sources in Latin, as well as, scholarly works in English, German and French. He is also a master of the anecdote and of the memorable “obscure” fact which makes him a favorite of mine. For instance, he tells us that in the Fourth century the image of Christ was that of a teacher, and a philosopher. There were no crucifixes in the Fourth century, and the concept of the suffering Savior did not exist.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed but my way of reviewing a book is to share the reading selections I made from it. So here is a few of what I considered the best of Peter Brown’s “Augustine of Hippo:”

The Importance of Confession
“It will not be held against you, that you are ignorant against your will, but that you neglected to seek out what it is that makes you ignorant not that you cannot bring together your wounded limbs, that you reject Him that would heal them. No man that has been deprived of his ability to know that it is essential to find out what it is that it is damaging not to be aware of; and to know that he should confess his weakness so that He can help him who seeks hard and confesses.”

Delight, The Mainspring of Human Action
Augustine came to view “delight” as the mainspring of human action; but this delight escaped his self-control. Delight is discontinuous, startlingly erratic:  Augustine now moves in a world of ‘love at first sight’, of chance encounters, and , just as important, of sudden, equally inexplicable patches of deadness: ’Who can embrace wholeheartedly what gives him no delight? But who can determine for himself that what will delight him should come his way, and, when it comes, that it should, in fact, delight him’

Influence of Neo-Platonism in the Confessions
…these incidents are always placed in relation to the most profound philosophic concepts available to a Late Antique Man… the great themes of the Neo-Platonic tradition in its Christian form; they are suffused with  a sense of the omnipresence of God, and they illustrate the fatal play of forces in a wandering soul, the tragedy of a man ‘disintegrated’ by the passing of time. Augustine allows his past self to grow in the dimensions of a ‘classic’ hero:  for these experiences summed up for him, the condition of ‘my race, the human race’. Every incident in the book, therefore, is charged with the poignancy of a Chinese landscape — a vivid detail perched against infinite distances.

The Will and ‘Delight’
..the will is now seen as dependent on a capacity for ‘delight’, and conscious actions as the result of a mysterious alliance of intellect and feeling: they are merely the final outgrowth of hidden processes, the processes by which the ‘heart’ is ‘stirred’, is ‘massaged and set’ by the hand of God.

Delight in the Truth…Progress in Wisdom
For Augustine, progress in wisdom, measured now by the yardstick of his understanding of the Holy Scriptures , could only depend upon progress in self-awareness…Like a planet in opposition, he has come as near to us, in Book Ten of the Confessions, as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the culture and religion of the Later Empire can allow:  Ecce enim delexisti veritatem, quondam qui facit eam venit ad lucem  ‘For behold you have taken delight in the truth; and he that does truth comes to the light. I desire to do truth in my heart, before Thee, by confession: with my pen, before many witnesses…

A Revelation of Limitations
The experience had come to him as a galling revelation of his own limitations: I found it far, far more than I had thought…I just had not known my powers: I still thought they counted for something. ‘But the lord laughed me to scorn and, by real experience, wished to show me to myself.’

Avoiding Contempt of Your Fellow Man
‘The man you cannot put right is still yours: he is part of you; either as a fellow human being, or very often as a member of your church, he is inside with you; what are you going to do?…do not think ill of your brother. Strive humbly to be what you would have him be; and you will not think that he is what you are not.’

A World Of Becoming
Augustine however was a man steeped in Neo-Platonic thought. The whole world appeared to him as a world of ‘becoming’, as a hierarchy of imperfectly-realized forms, which depended for their quality, on ‘participating’ in an Intelligible World of Ideal Forms. This universe was in a state of constant, dynamic tension in which the imperfect forms of matter strove to ‘realize their fixed, ideal structure, grasped by the mind alone…The rites of the church were undeniable ‘holy’, because of the objective holiness of a Church which ‘participated’ in Christ. The ‘true Church’ of Augustine … is not only the ‘body of Christ’, the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, it is also deeply tinged with the metaphysical ideals of Plotinus: it is the ‘reality’ of which the concrete church on earth is only an imperfect shadow. Thus, the men who received and administered these rites merely strove imperfectly to realize this holiness ‘according to a certain shadow of the reality’.

A Three-Fold Christian Task
For as Augustine saw it, the Donatists (an early ‘purist’ Christian sect) had solved the problem of evil in the men around them, merely by refusing to establish any relationship with it….For Augustine, innocence was not enough. It was only ‘one-third’ of the full range of human relationships to which the good Christian had to expose himself. He must perform a three-fold task: he must himself become holy; he must coexist with sinners in the same community as himself, a task involving humility and integrity; but he must also be prepared, actively, to rebuke and correct them.

The Augustinian Community
We should never forget that Augustine, in founding his monastery, wished to recreate around him exactly the same community, as the Apostles had created when they received this gift of the Holy Spirit.

The Fallen Human Mind
Augustine’s view of the fall of mankind determined his attitude to society. Fallen men had come to need restraint. Even man’s greatest achievement had been made possible only by a ‘strait-jacket’ of unremitting harshness. Augustine was a great intellect, with a healthy respect for the achievements of human reason. Yet he was obsessed by the difficulties of thought, and by the long, coercive processes, reaching back into the horrors of his schooldays, that had made the intellectual activity possible; so ‘ready to lie down’ was the fallen human mind; for they were part of the awesome discipline of God ‘from the schoolmasters’ canes to the agonies of the martyrs’ by which human being were recalled, by suffering, from their own disastrous inclinations.

An Inner Struggle
The idea of a world cut off from perfection and shared by human beings with hostile ‘powers’, was ‘part of the religious topography’ of all Late Antique men. Augustine merely turned the Christian struggle inward; its amphitheatre was the ‘heart’; it was an inner struggle against forces in the soul. The ‘Lord of the World’ becomes the ‘Lord of desires’ — of the desires of those who love the world, and so come to resemble demons committed to the same emotions as themselves. ‘The Devil is not to be blamed for everything; there are times when a man is his own devil.’

The Yearning of the Transient
…the world is by definition, for the Neo-Platonic philosophers, incomplete, transient, overshadowed by Eternity. All of the sadness of he ancient philosophers will flood into Augustine’s language as he talks of this transience. Human existence is a speck of rain compared with Eternity…The Christian must come with the yearning of the uncomplete to be filled….a sense of the loss of a loved one…there is only one thing a lover fears…”I shall never look at you again.”

Fear of the Lord
Do not be slow to turn to the Lord, nor delay from day today, for His wrath shall come when you know not…Filled with fear myself, I fill you with fear.

The Bible
For Augustine and his hearers, the Bible was literally the ‘word’ of God. It was regarded as a single communication, as single message in an intricate code, and not as an exceedingly heterogeneous collection of separate books. Above all it was a communication that was intrinsically so far above the pitch of human minds, that to be made available to our senses at all, this ‘Word’ had to be communicated by means of an intricate game of ‘signs’ (very much as a modern therapist makes contact with the inner world of a child in terms of significant patterns emerging in play with sand, water, and bricks. Wisdom’s way of teaching chooses to hint at how divine things should be thought of by certain images and analogies available to the senses.

The Mystical Body of Christ
Augustine lived through the emotions to which he appealed. In his middle age he became increasingly preoccupied with the idea of a ‘Mystical body’ of Christ: a body of which Christ was the Head and all true believers the members. For a Platonist, the unity of a body was, above all, a unity of sensations: the soul was the core of the body, for it alone was the center in which all the emotions of the body were experienced…For seen in this light the Psalms were the record of the emotions of Christ and his members. Just as he had taken on human flesh, so had Christ of his own free will, opened himself to Human Feeling. These feelings are only hinted at in the Gospels. Often the Christ of Augustine’s sermons is the pale impassive figure of a Late Roman mosaic; His crucifixion is a solemn, measured act of power — ‘the sleep of a lion’. But when he turns to the Psalms, Augustine will draw from them an immensely rich deposit of human emotions; for here was Christ, speaking directly in the person of the passionate King David. The song of the desperate fugitive from the wrath of Saul, is the inner story of the Passion: Heaviness fell upon me; and I slept.’ ‘His voice in he Psalms — a voice singing happily, a voice groaning, a voice rejoicing in hope, sighing in its present state — we should know this voice thoroughly and make it our own.

The Necessity of Allegory: Freud and Augustine
Augustine produced a singularly comprehensive explanation of why allegory should have been necessary in the first place. The need for such a language of ‘signs’ was the result of a specific dislocation of the human consciousness…Augustine takes up a position analogous to that of Freud. In dreams also, a powerful and direct message is said to be deliberately diffracted by some psychic mechanism, into a multiplicity of ‘signs’ quite as intricate and absurd, yet just as capable of interpretation, as the ‘absurd’ or ‘obscure’ passages in the Bible. Both (Freud and Augustine) assume that the proliferation of images is due to some precise event, to the development of some geographical fault across a hitherto undivided consciousness: for Freud, it is the creation of an unconsciousness by repression; for Augustine, it is the outcome of the Fall.

Understanding Scripture
No one can truly understand a book, Proust has said, unless he has already been able to ‘allow the equivalents to ripen slowly in his own heart.’ This profoundly human truth is what Augustine will always tell his readers: they must look into the Scriptures, ‘the eyes of their heart on its heart’. …let the scriptures be ‘the countenance of God’…a mind that once hoped to train itself for the vision of God by means of the Liberal Arts, would now come to rest on the solid intractable mass of the Christian Bible…Complete your work in me O Lord and open those pages to me‘… Seek His Face Evermore …Therefore let everyone who reads these pages proceed further with me, when he is equally certain as I am; let him make enquiries with me when he is as hesitant as I…Thus let us enter together, in the path of charity, in search of Him of Whom it is said: seek his face evermore.

Renewal In Old Age
You are surprised the world is losing its grip? That the world is grown old? Think of a man: he is born, he grows up, he becomes old. Old age has its many complaints: coughing, shaking, failing eyesight, anxious, terribly tired. A man grows old; he is full of complaints, The world is old; it is full of tribulations…Do not hold on to the old man, the world; do not refuse to regain your youth in Christ, who says to you: “The world is passing away, the world is losing its grip, the world is short of breath. Do not fear, Thy youth shall be renewed as an eagle.”

Demons
Augustine believed in demons; .‘a species of beings, superior to men, living forever, their bodies as active and as subtle as the air, endowed with supernatural powers of perception; and ,as fallen angels, the sworn enemies of the true happiness of the human race. Their powers of influence were enormous; they could so interfere with the physical basis of the mind as to produce illusions…they could take on human shape to start a plague or a riot…the nexus between men and demons was purely psychological. Men got the demons they deserved…

The Two Cities
Augustine used a theme that had already  become a commonplace among African Christians; he had met it first, perhaps, in the work of a Donatist, Tyconius. Since the Fall of Adam, the human race had always been divided into two great ‘cities’, civitates; that is into two great pyramids of loyalty. The one ‘city’ served God along with His loyal angels; the other served the rebel angels, the Devil and his demons. Although the two cities seemed inextricably mixed, within the church as in the world they would be separated at the Last Judgment. Christ would speak the words of judgment; the two cities — Babylon and Jerusalem — would then appear plainly, the one on the left, the other on the right.

Babylon And Jerusalem
Now it is the poignant longing of the psalms that Augustine fastens on. Babylon had meant ‘confusion’ a merging of the identity in the things of the world. The citizens of Jerusalem also depended on this world, but they became distinct from Babylon by their capacity to yearn for something else: Let us pine brothers for the City where we are citizens…By pining we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here: for I sing with my heart, not my flesh. The citizens of Babylon hear the sound of the flesh, the Founder of Jerusalem hears the tune of our heart’

The Process of Human History
Augustine’s great commentary on Genesis adapts a traditional  solution to the problem [of reconciling change and permanence in the world of nature]: God had implanted in each organism a constant, organizing principle, a ratio seminalis, that would ensure that change happened, not arbitrarily, but in accordance with a latent pattern laid down, once and for all, at the Creation….In this process the human race could be conceived of as a vast organism, like a single man, that changed according to a pattern of growth that was inaccessible to the human mind, yet clear to God…Seen as a whole human history was ‘that stretch of time in which the new born oust the dying‘, a great river slipping towards death. What had fascinated Augustine, was the language of God, distant and opaque as a liturgy. It is the significance of this language, suddenly uncovered in the appearance of Christ among men, that poured meaning into a small part at least of this disquieting inanity: The centuries of past history would have rolled by like empty jars, if Christ had not been foretold by means of them.…Prophetic history was exclusively religious history and showed the hints of division between an ‘earthly’ and ‘heavenly’ city.

Progress: The Capacity To Know and Feel
Augustine often uses the world ‘progress’ during his old age…it implies a consciousness of having left behind the superfluous, and of having become increasingly certain of the essential…The Christian life, as seen by Augustine, could only be a long process of healing…the nature and source of a fully good, creative action…marked the culmination of an inner [Christian] evolution…an act of choice is not just a matter of knowing what to choose: it is a matter in which loving and feeling are involved. And in men, this capacity to know and to feel in a single, involved whole, has been extremely dislocated: The understanding flies ahead, and there follows, oh, so slowly, and sometimes not at all, our weakened human capacity for feeling. Men choose because they love; but Augustine had been certain for some twenty years, that they could not, of themselves, choose to love. The vital capacity to unite feeling and knowledge comes from an area outside man’s powers of self-determination: From a depth that we do not see, comes everything that you can see. I know O Lord, that the way of a man is not in his power; nor is it for him to walk and direct his own steps… the relation of grace and freedom: that it is the healthy man is one in whom knowledge and feeling have become united; and that only such a man is capable of allowing himself to be ‘drawn’ to an act by the sheer irresistible pleasure of the object of his love: The soul of men shall hope under the shadow of thy wings; they shall be made drunk with the fullness of Thy house; and of the torrents of Thy pleasures Thou wilt give them to drink; for in Thee is the Fountain of Life and in thy Light shall we see the light?…Give me a man in love: he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns, give me one who is hungry; give me one who is far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal country. Give me that sort of man: he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about.

Peter Brown’s monumental work will put you in touch with that yearning again: a gift to all Catholics.