Paying Attention To The Sky

The Triumph of Saint Augustine by Claudio Coello

Sometimes you come across references to St. Augustine in other readings – sort of “asides” that illuminate a lot of what Augustine was or meant to the writer. These are some instances that I encountered the past several years and probably resulted in my reading even more deeply into the man and his thought. When you survey the depth of these observations, it makes you stand in awe of the man that Augustine was.

 

Chesterton told her the story of Augustine strolling along the beach meditating on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Suddenly the saint saw a small boy scooping water from the sea and putting it into a hole. Upon asking the child to explain what he was doing, St Augustine received the reply that he was putting the sea into the hole in the sand. The Saint smiled at the sight of the vast sea and the small hole and the child said to him: ‘As easy to put the sea into a hole as the mystery of the infinite God into a human mind.’
Wisdom and Innocence – Joseph Pearse

Heart Faith
Faith begins in that obscure mysterious center of our being that Scripture calls the “heart.” Heart in Scripture (and in Augustine) does not mean feeling or sentiment or emotion, but the absolute center of the soul, as the physical heart is at the center of the body. The heart is where God the Holy Spirit works in us. This is not specifiable as a kind of interior object, as emotions, intellect and will are, because it is the very self, the I, the subject, the one whose emotions and mind and will they are. “Keep your heart with all vigilance for from it will flow the springs of life.”(Proverbs4:23) With the heart we choose our “fundamental option” of yes or not to God, and thereby determine our eternal identity and destiny…The faith works controversy that sparked the Protestant Reformation was due largely to equivocation on the word “faith”…If we use it to mean intellectual faith – as Paul did in 1 Corinthians 13 [If I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing] – then faith alone is not enough for salvation for “Even the demons believe and shudder James(2:19). But if we use faith as Luther did and as Paul did in Romans and Galatians, that is as heart-faith, then this is saving faith. It is sufficient for salvation for it necessarily produces the good works of love just as a good tree necessarily produces good fruit. Protestants and Catholics agree on this.
Handbook of Christian Apologetics – Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli

A Christian Paradox: Being In The World And Not Of It
Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him, For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life; which is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God abideth forever.
1 John 2:15-17

How is it possible to be in the world without being of it? That is the problem that has haunted the Christian conscience since the foundation of the Church and which looms particularly large with regard to our intelligence….There will always be among us souls desirous of fleeing from the world, but it is by no means certain that the world will always permit them to flee from it; for not only does the world affirm itself, it does not even want to admit that some renounce it….

Christianity is a radical condemnation of the world, but it is at the same time an unreserved approbation of nature; for the world is not nature, it is nature shaping its course without God….

What is true of nature is eminently true of the intelligence, the crown of nature. In the evening of the creation, God looked at His work and He judged, says the Scripture, that all that was very good,. But what was best in His work was man, created to His image and likeness; and if we seek the basis of this divine likeness, we find it, says St. Augustine, in mente: in thought. …

To seize truth here below by the intelligence, be it in an obscure and partial manner, while waiting to see it in its complete splendor – such is man’s destiny according to Christianity. Indeed, far from scorning knowledge, it cherishes it: intellectum valde ama ["love intelligence greatly"]. …

There is a love of the intelligence which consists in turning it toward visible and transient things; but there is another which consists in turning it toward the invisible and eternal: that belongs to Christians. It is therefore, ours; and if we prefer it to the first, it is because it does not deny us anything the first would give us, and yet it overwhelms us with everything while the other is incapable of giving us
A Gilson Reader – Etienne Gilson

The Active Life And The Church
There is a fundamental error about the Church’s attitude to the Active Life — a persistent assumption that Catholic Christianity, like any Oriental Gnosticism, despises the flesh and enjoins a complete detachment for all secular activities. Such a view is altogether heretical. No religion that centers about a Divine Incarnation can take up such an attitude as that. What the Church enjoins is quite different: namely, that all the good things of this world are to be loved because God loves them, as God loves them, for the love of God, and for no other reason. That is the right ordering of love, about which so much is said in the Purgatorio. A full Active Life, rightly ordered, is therefore in no way incompatible with holiness or even with a rich Contemplative Life. Indeed many of the greatest Contemplatives have been masterly men and women of business – one need only instance St. Augustine of Hippo, St Theresa of Avila, or St Gregory the Great.
Introductory Papers On Dante – Dorothy Sayers

This series of selections comes from A Third Testament by Malcolm Muggeridge:

A Kind Of Fraudulent Ecstasy
We also know that to a temperament as sensual and imaginative as Augustine’s, sexual indulgence makes the greatest appeal precisely because it offers a kind of fraudulent ecstasy – joys that expire when the neon lights go out. “There is nothing so powerful,” he said when he was a Bishop, “in drawing the spirit of man downwards as the caresses of a woman.”

Augustine: The Process Leading Up To His Conversion
The climax of Augustine’s conversion occurred in a garden in Milan and its fulfillment in another garden in the country. I think he must have loved gardens, where for him the truth stood out most clearly. First, however, there was one episode in the process leading up to his conversion which received special mention in his Confessions:
My misery was complete and I remember how one day You made me realize how utterly wretched I was. I was preparing a speech in praise of the Emperor, intending that it should include a great many lies which would certainly be applauded by an audience who know well enough how far from the truth they were. I was greatly preoccupied by this task, my mind was feverishly busy with its harassing problems, As I walked along one of the streets of Milan, I noticed a poor beggar who must, I supposed, have had his fill of food and drink, since he was laughing and joking.
Contrasting their two conditions, his own so troubled, the beggar’s so cheerful, he cried out in desperation,
Will I never cease setting my heart on shadows and following a lie?

Augustine: Spend No More Thought On  Nature And Nature’s Appetites
In this mood he “suddenly heard the sing-song voice of  a child in a nearby house, Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl, I can’t say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, ‘Take it and read it, take it and read it.’” So he rushed to where he had left a copy of the Gospels open at Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and read: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries, rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. Spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.”
Augustine continued: “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so, for in an instant as I came to the end of the sentence it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness and doubt was dispelled.”
No one must suppose that this great conversion which had befallen Augustine, this light which had shone into his life and would never again leave it, had turned him away from this world. On the contrary, it made him more conscious than ever before of its joys and beauties, more aware than ever before of the terrific privilege it was to be allowed to exist in time. There is a passage that I love in the Confessions, in which he asks, “the earth itself, the winds that blow, and the whole air, and all that lives in it… ‘What is my God?’ Likewise he asks  the sky, the moon and the stars: ‘What is my God’ None of these was God, he was told. He went on to speak to ‘all of things that are about me, all that can be admitted by the door of the senses.’ They, too, he was told, were not God. Then at last he understood: their beauty was all the answer they could give, and the only answer he needed to hear.”

Augustine: The Eternal Wisdom
It was while they were waiting in Ostia that Augustine and Monica had an extraordinary, mystical experience which is described in the Confessions with incomparable artistry and skill. They were looking out of the window of the house in which they were staying into the courtyard below, talking together serenely and joyfully about the eternal life of the saints, which, they agreed, “no bodily pleasure, however great it might be and whatever earthly light might shed luster upon it, was worthy of comparison or even mention.” As they talked, ranging over the whole compass of material things in the various degrees, up to the very heavens themselves,” they came to survey “the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it,” Augustine said, “with all the strength of our hearts.”

Then they reached out and touched this eternal Wisdom, which like eternity itself is neither in the past nor the future, but just is. Touched it only to return, leaving, Augustine writes “our spiritual harvest bound to it, to the sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an end; far different from Your Word, our Lord, Who abides in Himself forever, yet never grows old and gives new life to all things.” Whoever has tried to give expression in words with a beginning and an end, the perspectives and shape of this creation in which we live, cannot fail to feel awed that so great a writer as Augustine would suffer a like predicament.

Augustine: The World Is Losing Its Grip
“This is the door of the Lord, the righteous shall enter in,” was written on the lintel of a church in Numidia. However, “The man who enters,” Augustine wrote,

is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators, people wearing amulets, assiduous clients of sorcerers, astrologers. He must be warned that the same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals also fill the theaters on pagan holidays…
Wherever the towering mass of the theatre is erected, there the foundations of Christian virtue are undermined, and while this insane expenditure gives to the sponsors a glorious result, men mock at the works  of mercy….

It is only charity that distinguishes the children of God from the children of the Devil. They all make the sign of the Cross and answer “Amen” and sing alleluia, they all go to church and build up the walls of the basilicas…

Take away the barriers afforded by the laws! Men’s brazen capacity to do harm, their urge to self-indulgence would rage to the full. No king in his kingdom, no general with his troops…no husband with his wife, no father with his son, could hope to stop, by any threat or punishment, the license that would follow the sheer sweet taste of sinning….

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 far away in this desert, who is thirty 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 doesn’t know what I’m talking about…

You are surprised that the world is losing its grip? That the world is grown old? Don’t hold onto the old man, the world; don’t 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. Don’t fear, they youth shall be renewed as san eagle.”

Augustine: You Neglect To Seek Out What It Is That Makes You Ignorant
It will not be held against you that you are ignorant against your will, but that you neglect to seek out what it is that makes you ignorant; not that you cannot bring together your wounded limbs, but that you reject Him that would heal them.

Augustine: I No Longer Wished For A Better World
I no longer wished for a better world because I was thinking of the whole of creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I have come to see that, though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone. See how Augustine effects a soul transformation by changing his perception of the world. More on this thought here.

Augustine: His Profoundest Conclusion
We live perforce, and always must, in earthly cities. They are our location, our set, with history for our script. At the same time, in all creation we are unique in being capable of envisaging a Heavenly City not susceptible to the ravages of time, existing beyond the dark jungle of the human will. As Saint Paul had said and Augustine had echoed: “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.

Pursuing his theme, Augustine ranged over the whole of human history as then understood, His conclusions have lost none of their force in the light of whatever has been invented, concluded and speculated upon in the subsequent fifteen centuries:

The centuries of past history would have rolled by like empty jars if Christ had not been foretold by them…
These were the two motives which drove the Romans to their wonderful achievements: liberty, and passion for the praise of men….
What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them…
The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity…
Take Aristotle, put him near to the Rock of Christ and he fades away into nothingness. Who is Aristotle? When he hears the words, “Christ said,” then he shakes in hell. “Pythagoras said this.” “Plato said that.” Put them near the Rock and compare these arrogant people with Him who was crucified.
In our fallen state, our imperfection, we can conceive perfection. Through the Incarnation, the presence of God among us in the lineaments of Man, we have a window in the walls of time which looks out on to this Heavenly City.

This was Augustine’s profoundest conclusion, and in his greatest work he enshrined it imperishably, to be a comfort and a light in the dark days that lay ahead, when in the year 430, the triumphant Vandals would cross into Africa, reaching the walls of Hippo itself, as  he lay dying there.

Augustine: The Heavenly City
Today our earthly city looks even larger, the point where it may be said to have taken over the heavenly one. Turning away from God, blown up with the arrogance generated by their fabulous success in exploring and harnessing the mechanism of life, men believe themselves to be at last in charge of their own destiny. As we survey the disastrous consequences of such an attitude, the chaos and destruction it has brought, as Augustine did the fall of Rome and its aftermath, his words on that other occasion still stand applicable , as he says to all circumstances and conditions of men:

In its sojourn here, the Heavenly City makes use of the peace provided by the earthly city. In all that relates to the mortal nature of man it preserves and indeed seeks the concordance of human wills. It refers the earthly peace to the heavenly peace, which is truly such peace that it alone can be described as peace, for it is the highest degree of ordered and harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God and of another in God. When this stage is reached then there will be life, not life subject death but life that is clearly … and assuredly life-giving. There will be a body, not a body which is animal weighing down the soul as it decays, but a spiritual body experiencing no need and subordinated in every part to the will. This is the peace that the Heavenly City has while it sojourns here in faith and in this faith it lives a life of righteousness. To the establishing of that peace it refers all its good actions, whether they be towards God or toward one’s neighbor, for the life of the City is utterly and entirely a life of fellowship.