Paying Attention To The Sky

It is difficult to venture forth upon the sea of Augustine’s thought, and even more difficult to summarize it — this indeed is almost impossible. I may however be permitted to recall some illuminating insights of this mighty thinker, for the edification of all.
Pope John Paul II

Augustine On Reason And Faith
First of all, there is the problem that occupied him most in his youth and to which he returned with all the force of genius and the passion of his spirit: the problem of the relationship between reason and faith. This is a perennial problem, no less acute today than yesterday, and the direction taken by human thought depends on its solution. It is a difficult problem, however, because one must pass safely between two extremes, between the fideism that despises reason and the rationalism that excludes faith. Augustine’s intellectual and pastoral endeavor aimed to show, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “since we are impelled by a twin pull of gravity to learn,” both forces, reason and faith, must work together.

He always listened to what faith had to say, but he exalted reason no less, giving each its own primacy in time of importance. He told all, “Believe that you may understand,” but he repeated also, “Understand that you may believe.” He wrote a work, perennially relevant, on the usefulness of faith, and explained that faith is the medicine designed to heal the eye of the spirit, the unconquerable fortress for the defense of all, especially of the weak, against error, the nest in which we receive the wings for the lofty flights of the spirit, the short path that permits one to know, quickly, surely and without errors, the truths which lead the human person to wisdom. He also emphasizes that faith is never without reason, because it is reason that shows “in what one should believe.” “For faith has its own eyes, by means of which it sees in a certain manner that what it does not yet see is true.” Therefore “no one believes anything, unless he has first thought that it is to be believed,” because “to believe is itself nothing other than to think with assent…if faith is not’ thought through, it is no faith.”

The outcome of the discourse on the eyes of faith is the discourse on credibility, of which Augustine often speaks, adducing the reasons for credibility as if to confirm the consciousness with which he himself had returned to the Catholic faith. It is good to listen to one of these texts: “There are many things that most properly keep me in the bosom of the Catholic Church; to say nothing of the most genuine wisdom…let me therefore omit mention of this wisdom” (for this argument, which for Augustine was extremely strong, was not accepted by his opponents). “The consensus of peoples and races keeps me in the Church, as does the authority based on miracles, nourished by hope, increased by charity, strengthened by its ancient character; likewise the succession of the priests, from the very see of the apostle Peter, to whom the Lord entrusted the care of His sheep after the resurrection, down to the episcopate of today; finally, the very name of the Catholic Church keeps me in her, because it is not without reason that this Church alone has obtained such a name amid so many heresies.”

In the great work on the City of God, which is at once apologetic and dogmatic, the problem of reason and faith becomes that of faith and culture. Augustine, who did so much to establish and promote Christian culture, solves this problem by developing three main arguments: the faithful exposition of Christian doctrine; the careful salvaging of pagan culture, to the extent that it had elements capable of being salvaged (in the area of philosophy, this was no small amount); and the insistent demonstration of the presence in Christian teaching of whatever was true and perennially valid in pagan culture, with the advantage of finding it perfected and exalted there. It was not for nothing that the City of God was widely read in the middle ages; and it greatly deserves to be read today as well, as an example and stimulus to deepen the encounter of Christianity with the cultures of the peoples. An important text of Augustine may be usefully quoted here: “The heavenly city…draws citizens from all peoples…taking no account of what is different in customs laws and institutions;…she neither suppresses nor destroys anything of these, but rather preserves and fosters it. The diversities that may exist in the diverse nations work together for the single goal of earthly peace, unless they obstruct the practice of the religion that teaches the worship of the one, true and most high God.”

Augustine On God And Man
The other great word-pair which Augustine continuously studied is God and man. As I have said above, when he freed himself from the materialism which prevented him from having an exact concept of God- and hence the true concept of man- he made this word-pair the center of the great themes of his study, and always studied the two together: man thinking of God, God thinking of man, who is His image.

In the Confessions, he asks himself these two questions: “What are You for me…. What am I myself for You?” He brings all the resources of His thought and all the unwearying labor of his apostolate to bear on the search for an answer to these questions. He is fully convinced of the ineffability of God, so that he cries out: “Why wonder that you do not understand? For if you understand, it is not God.” It follows that “it is no…small beginning of the knowledge of God, if before we are able to know what He is, we already begin to know what He is not.” It is necessary therefore to strive “that we should thus know God, if we are able and as far as we are able, the one who is good without quality, great without quantity, the creator not bound by necessity,” and thus going through all the categories of reality that Aristotle has described.

Although God is transcendent and ineffable, Augustine is nevertheless able, starting from the self-awareness of the human person who knows that he exists and knows and loves, and encouraged by Sacred Scripture, which reveals God as the supreme Being (Exodus 3:14), highest Wisdom (Wisdom, passim) and first Love (1 John 4:8), is able to illustrate this threefold notion of God: the Being from whom every being proceeds through creation from nothing, the Truth which enlightens the human mind so that it can know the truth with certainty, the Love that is the source and the goal of all true love. For God, as he so often repeats, is “the cause of what exists, the reason of thought and the ordering of living, or, to use an equally famous formula, “the cause of the universe that has been created, and the light of the truth that is to be perceived, and the fountain from which happiness is to be drunk.”

But it was above all in studying the presence of God in the human person that Augustine used his genius. This presence is both profound and mysterious. He finds God as “the eternal internal,” most secret and most present—man seeks Him because he is absent, but knows Him and finds Him because He is present. God is present as “the creative substance of the world,” as the truth that gives light, as the love that attracts, more intimate than what is most intimate in man, and higher than what is highest in him. Referring to the period before his conversion, Augustine says to God: “Where were You then for me, and how far away? And I was a wanderer far away from You…. But You were more internal than what was intimate in me, and higher than what was highest in me”; “You were with me, and I was not with You.” Indeed. he insists:

“You were in front of me; but I had gone away from myself and did not find myself, much less find You.” Whoever does not find himself does not find God, because God is in the depths of each one of us.

The human person, accordingly, cannot understand himself except in relationship to God. Augustine found ever new expressions of this great truth, as he studied the relationship of man to God and stated this in the most varied and effective way. He sees the human person as a tension directed toward God; his words, “You have made us for yourself and our heart has no rest until it rests in You,” are very well known. He sees the human person as a capacity of existence elevated to the immediate vision of God, the finite who reaches the Infinite. He writes in the De Trinitate that man “is the image of the one whom he is capable of enjoying, and whose partner he can become.” This faculty “is in the soul of man, which is rational or intellectual…immortally located in his immortality,” and therefore the sign of his greatness: “he is a great nature, because he is capable of enjoying the highest nature and of becoming its partner.” He sees the human person also as a being in need of God, because he is in need of the happiness that he can find only in God. Human nature “has been created in such an excellent state that even although it is itself mutable, it reaches happiness by cleaving to the unchangeable good, that is, to God. Nor can it satisfy its need unless it is totally happy; and only God suffices to satisfy it.”

It is because of this basic relationship between man and God that Augustine continually exhorts men to the life of the spirit. “Go back into yourself; the truth dwells in the inner man; and if you discover that your nature is mutable, transcend yourself also,” in order to find God, the source of the light that illuminates the mind. Together with the truth there is in the inner man the mysterious capacity to love, which is like a weight (in Augustine’s celebrated metaphor) that draws him out of himself, toward the others and especially toward the Other, i.e. God. The force of attraction exercised by love makes him social by his very nature, so that. as Augustine writes “there is nothing so social by nature…as the human race.”

Man’s interiority, where the inexhaustible riches of truth and love are stored, is “a great abyss,” which St. Augustine never ceases to investigate with unfailing wonder. Here we must add that, for one who reflects on himself and on history, the human person appears as a great problem- as Augustine says, a “great question.” Too many enigmas surround him: the enigma of death, of the profound division that he suffers in himself, of the incurable imbalance between what he is and what he desires. These enigmas can be synthesized in the fundamental enigma of the greatness of the human person and his incomparable wretchedness. The Second Vatican Council spoke at length of these enigmas when it wished to cast light on the “mystery of the human person.” Augustine tackled these problems with passion and employed all the genius of his interest, not only to discover the reality, which is often very sad — if it is true that no one is more social by nature than the human person, it is no less true, adds the author of the City of God, taught by history, that “no one is more prone to discord by vice than the human race”-but also and above all to seek and propose their solution. He finds only one solution, which had already appeared on the eve of his conversion: Christ, the Redeemer of man. I too have felt it necessary in my first Encyclical, called precisely Redemptor Hominis, to draw the attention of the Church’s children and all of men and women of good will to this solution; I was happy to take up with my own voice the voice of all the Christian tradition.

Augustine On Christ And The Church
As Augustine’s thought penetrates these problems John Paul II has summarized above, it becomes more theological, while remaining fundamentally philosophical; and the word-pair Christ and Church, which he had at first denied and later recognized in his younger years, began to illuminate the more general word-pair of God and man.

One may rightly say that the summit of the theological thinking of the Bishop of Hippo is Christ and the Church; indeed, one could add that this is the summit of his philosophy too, in that he rebukes the philosophers for having done philosophy “without the man Christ.” The Church is inseparable from Christ. From the time of his conversion onwards, he recognized and accepted with joy and gratitude the law of providence which has established in Christ and in the Church “the entire summit of authority and the light of reason in that one saving name and in His one Church, recreating and reforming the human race.”

Without doubt, he spoke profusely and sublimely of the Trinitarian mystery in his work on the Trinity and in his discourses, tracing the path that was to be taken by later theology. He insisted both on the equality and on the distinction of the divine Persons, illustrating these through his teaching on their relations: God “is what He has, with the exceptions that are predicated of each Person in respect of the other.” He developed the theology of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and from the Son, but “principally” from the Father, because “the Father is the principle of all the divinity, or, to put it better, of the Godhead,” and He has granted to the Son the spiration of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds as Love and therefore is not begotten. To reply better to the “garrulous rationalists,” he proposed the “psychological” explanation of the Trinity, seeking its image in the memory, in the intellect and in the love of the human person, and studying thus the most august mystery of faith together with the highest nature of creation, the human spirit.

Yet when he speaks of the Trinity, he never removes his gaze from Christ, who reveals the Father, nor from the work of salvation. Having come to understand the reason for the mystery of the incarnate Word, shortly before his conversion, he did not cease to investigate this more deeply, summarizing his thought in formulae that are so full and effective that they are like an anticipation of the teaching of Chalcedon. In an importance passage of one of his last works, he writes: “the believer…believes that .in him there is the true human nature, that is our nature, although it is taken up in a unique way into the one Son of God when God the Word receives it, such that the One who received it and what He received formed one Person in the Trinity. The assumption of man did not make a quarternity, but the Trinity remained: this assumption wrought in an ineffable manner the truth of one person in God and man. Therefore we do not say that Christ is only God…nor only man…nor man in such a way that He would lack something that certainly belongs to human nature…but we say that Christ is true God, born of God the Father…and the same is true man, born of a human mother…nor does His humanity, in which He is less than the Father, take away anything from His divinity, in which He is equal to the Father…The one Christ is both of these.” He puts it somewhat more briefly: “The same one who is man, is God; and the same one who is God, is man-not by the confusion of the nature but in the unity of the person,” “one…person in both natures.”

With this solid vision of unity of the person in Christ, who is called “wholly God and wholly man,” Augustine covers an immense ground in theology and history. If his eagle’s eye gazes on Christ the Word of the Father, he insists no less on Christ the man; indeed, he asserts vigorously that without Christ the man there is neither mediation, nor justification, nor resurrection, nor membership of the Church whose head is Christ. He returns often to this theme and develops it broadly, both to explain the faith which he had obtained again at the age of twenty-two and because of the needs of the Pelagian controversy.

Christ, the man-God, is the sole mediator between the righteous and immortal God and mortal and sinful human beings, because He is at once mortal and righteous. It follows that He is the universal way, “which has never been lacking for the human race, no one has been set free no one is set free, no one will be set free.”

The mediation of Christ is accomplished in the work of redemption, which consists not only in the example of righteousness, but above all in the sacrifice of reconciliation, which was supremely true, supremely free, and completely perfect. The essential characteristic of the redemption by Christ is its universality, which shows the universality of sin. This is how Augustine repeats and interprets the words of St. Paul, “If one has died for all, then all have died” (2 Corinthians 5:14), i.e., dead because of sin: “The Christian faith, accordingly, exists precisely because of these two men”; “One and one: one for death, one for life.” Therefore “every man is Adam; likewise, for those who have believed, every man is Christ.”

In Augustine’s view, to deny this doctrine is the same as “emptying the cross of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:17). To prevent this, he wrote and spoke much about the universality of sin, including the doctrine of original sin, “which the Catholic faith has believed from ancient times.” He teaches that “Jesus Christ came in the flesh for no other reason…than to give life and salvation to all, to free, redeem, and enlighten those who beforehand were in the death of sins, in sickness, slavery, captivity, and darkness…. It follows that those who are not in need of life, salvation, liberation and redemption cannot have anything to do with this dispensation of salvation by Christ.”

Because Christ, the only mediator and redeemer of men, is head of the Church, Christ and the Church are one single mystical person, the total Christ. He writes with force: “We have become Christ. Just as He is the head, we are the members; the whole man is He and ourselves.” This doctrine of the total Christ is one of the teachings that mattered most to the Bishop of Hippo, and one of the most fruitful themes of his ecclesiology.

Another fundamental theme is that of the Holy Spirit as the soul of the mystical body: “what the soul is to the body of a man, the Holy Spirit is for the body of Christ, which is the Church.” The Holy Spirit is also the principle of community, by which the faithful are united to one another and to the Trinity itself. “By means of what is common to the Father and the Son, They willed that we should have communion both among ourselves and with Them. They willed to gather us together, through that gift, into that one thing which both have in common; that is, by means of God the Holy Spirit and the gift of God.” He therefore says in the same text: “the fellowship of unity of the Church of God, outside of which there is no remission of sins, is properly the work of the Holy Spirit, of course with the cooperation of the Father and the Son, because the Holy Spirit himself is in a certain manner the fellowship of the Father and the Son.”

The Church As Body Of Christ
Contemplating the Church as body of Christ, given life by the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of Christ, Augustine gave varied development to a concept which was also emphasized in a special way by the recent Council: that of the Church as communion. He speaks in three different but converging ways: first, the communion of the sacraments, or the institutional reality founded by Christ on the foundation of the apostles. He discusses this at length in the Donatist controversy, defending the unity, universality, apostolicity and sanctity of the Church, and showing that she has as her center the See of Peter, “in which the primacy of the apostolic see has always been in force.” Second, he speaks of the communion of the saints, or the spiritual reality that unites all the righteous from Abel until the end of the ages. Third, he speaks of the communion of the blessed, or the eschatological reality that gathers in all those who have attained salvation, that is, the Church “without spot and wrinkle” (Ephesians 5:27).

Another theme dear to Augustine’s ecclesiology was that of the Church as mother and teacher, a theme on which he wrote profound and moving pages, because it had a close connection to his experience as convert and to his teaching as theologian. While he was on the path back to faith, he met the Church, no longer opposed to Christ as he had been made to believe, but rather as the manifestation of Christ, “most true mother of Christians” and authority for the revealed truth.

The Church is the mother who gives birth to the Christians: “Two parents have given us the birth that leads to death, two parents have given us the birth that leads to life. The parents who gave us birth for death are Adam and Eve: the parents who gave us birth for life are Christ and the Church.” The Church is a mother who suffers on account of those who have departed from righteousness, especially those who destroy her unity; she is the dove who moans and calls all to return or draw near to her wings; she is the manifestation of God’s universal fatherhood, by means of the charity which “is mild for some, severe for others; an enemy to none, but mother for all.”

She is a mother, but also, like Mary, a virgin: mother by the ardor of charity, virgin by the integrity of the faith that she guards, defends and teaches. This virginal motherhood is linked to her task of teacher, a task which the Church carries out in obedience to Christ. For this reason, Augustine looks to the Church as guarantor of the Scriptures, and attests that he will remain secure in her whatever difficulties arise for him, urgently exhorting others to do the same: “Thus, as I have often said and impress upon you with vehemence, whatever we are, you are secure if you have God as your Father and His Church as your mother.” From this firm conviction then is born his passionate exhortation that one should love God and the Church -God as Father and the Church as Mother. Perhaps no one else has spoken of the Church with such great affection and passion as Augustine. I have pointed out a few of his statements, in the hope that these are sufficient to show the depth and the beauty of a teaching that will never be studied sufficiently, especially from the point of view of the love that animates the Church as the effect of the Holy Spirit’s presence within her. He writes, “We have the Holy Spirit if we love the Church: we love the Church if we remain in her unity and charity.”