Paying Attention To The Sky

Freedom And Grace
Even to indicate briefly the various aspects of St. Augustine’s theology would be an infinite task. Another important, indeed fundamental aspect, linked also to his conversion, is that of freedom and grace. As I have already mentioned, it was on the eve of his conversion that he grasped the responsibility of the human person in his actions, and the necessity of the grace of the sole Mediator, whose power he felt in the moment of the final decision, as the eighth Book of his Confessions eloquently testifies. His personal reflections and the controversies he later experienced, particularly with the followers of the Manichaeans and the Pelagians, offered him the opportunity to study more deeply the individual facets of this problem and to propose a synthesis, although this was done with great modesty because of the highly mysterious nature of the problem.

He always defended freedom as one of the bases of a Christian anthropology, against his former coreligionists, against the determinism of the astrologers whose victim he himself had once been, and against every form of fatalism; he explained that liberty and foreknowledge are not incompatible, nor liberty and the aid of divine grace. “The fact that free will is aided, does not destroy it; but because it is not taken away, it is aided.” And the Augustinian principle is well known: “He who made you without your participation, does not justify you without your participation. He has made you without your knowledge; He justifies you if you will it.”

With a long series of biblical texts, he demonstrates to those who doubted this compatibility, or upheld the contrary view, that freedom and grace belong to divine revelation and that one must hold firmly to both of these truths. Few are capable of grasping this compatibility in its profundity, for this is an exceedingly difficult question which can cause many people anxiety, because while defending liberty one can give the impression of denying grace, and vice versa. One must therefore believe in their compatibility just as one must believe in the compatibility of the two entirely necessary offices of Christ, who is at once savior aid judge, for it is on these two offices that freedom and grace depend: “If then God’s grace does not exist, how does He save the world? And if free will does not exist, how does He judge the world?”

The Necessity Of Grace And Prayer
On the other hand, Augustine insists on the necessity of grace, which is the same thing as the necessity of prayer. To those who said that God does not command what is impossible, and that therefore grace is not necessary, he replied that “God does not command what is impossible; but when He commands, He exhorts you to do what you can and to ask for what you cannot do,” and God gives help so that the command becomes possible, since “He does not abandon us unless we abandon Him first.”

The doctrine of the necessity of divine grace becomes the doctrine of the necessity of prayer, on which Augustine insists so much, because, as he writes, “it is certain that God has prepared some gifts even for those who do not pray, such as the beginning of faith; but other gifts only for those who pray, such as final perseverance.”

Grace is therefore necessary to remove the obstacles that prevent the will from fleeing evil and accomplishing what is good. These obstacles are two in number, “ignorance and weakness,” but especially the latter because “although it begins to be clear what is to be done and what goal is to be striven for…one does not act, one does not carry it out, one does not live well.” Augustine calls this helping grace “the inspiration of love so that we may carry out in holy love what we have recognized…must be done.

The two obstacles of ignorance and weakness must be overcome if we are to breathe the air of freedom. It will not be superfluous to recall that the defense of the necessity of grace is, for Augustine, the defense of Christian freedom. Starting from Christ’s words, “If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free” (John 8:36), he defends and proclaims this freedom which is inseparable from truth and love. Truth, love and freedom are the three great good things that fired the spirit of Augustine and exercised his genius; he shed much light on the understanding of these.

Christian Freedom
To pause briefly in consideration of this last good, that of freedom, we must observe that he describes and celebrates Christian freedom in all its forms, from the freedom from error- for the liberty of error is “the worst death of the soul”-through the gift of faith which subjects the soul to the truth, to the final and inalienable freedom, the greatest of all, which consists in the inability to die and in the inability to sin, i.e. in immortality and the fullness of righteousness. All other freedoms which Augustine illustrates and proclaims find their place among these two, which mark the beginning and the end of salvation: the freedom from the dominion of the disordered passions, as the work of the grace that enlightens the intellect and gives the will so much strength that it becomes victorious in the combat with evil (as he himself experienced in his conversion when he was freed from the harsh slavery);  the freedom from time that we devour and that devours us, in that love permits us to live anchored to eternity.

He sets forth the unutterable riches of justification-the divine life of grace, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and “deification”- and makes an important distinction between the remission of sins which is total, full and perfect on the one hand, and on the other hand the interior renewal which is progressive and will be full and total only after the resurrection, when the human person as a whole shares in the divine immutability….

Christian freedom, as I have briefly mentioned, is seen and meditated on in the Church, the city of God, which manifests the fruits of this freedom and, as far as is in her power, makes all people sharers in them, upheld by divine grace. For she is founded on the “social love that embraces all people and wishes to unite them in one justice and peace, unlike the city of the wicked, which divides and sets people against one another because it is founded on “private” love.

Grace That Strengthens The Will
In the case of the grace that strengthens the will, he insists that it operates by means of love and therefore makes the will invincible against evil, without removing from the will the possibility of refusal. Commenting on the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, “No one comes to me unless the Father draws him” (John 6:44), he writes, “Do not think that you are drawn against your will: the spirit is drawn also by love.” But love, as he also observes, works “with liberal sweetness,” so that “the one who observes the precept with love, observes it in freedom. “The law of freedom is the law of love.”

Augustine teaches no less insistently freedom from time, a freedom that Christ, the eternal Word, has come to bring us by his entry into the world in the incarnation: “O Word that exists before time, through whom time was made,” he exclaims, “born in time although You are eternal life, calling those who exist in time and making them eternal!” It is well known that St. Augustine studied deeply the mystery of time and both felt and stated the need to transcend time in order to exist truly. “That you may be truly yourself, transcend time. But who shall transcend it by his own power? Let Christ lift him up, as He said to the Father: ‘I wish that they too may be with me where I am.’”

Definitions Of Peace
It is good to mention here some of the definitions of peace which Augustine made according to the various contexts in which he was speaking. Starting from the idea that “the peace of mankind is ordered harmony,” he defines other kinds of peace, such as “the peace of the home, the ordered harmony of those who live together, in giving orders and in obeying them,” likewise the peace of the earthly city and “the peace of the heavenly city, the wholly ordered and harmonious fellowship in enjoying God and enjoying one another in God,” then “the universal peace that is the tranquillity of good order,” and finally the order itself that is “the disposition that gives its place to each of the various equal and unequal things.”

“The pilgrimage of Your people sighs” for this peace “from its departure until its return,” and for this peace it works.

Charity And The Ascent Of The Spirit
This brief synthesis of Augustine’s teaching would remain seriously incomplete, if we did not mention his spiritual teaching, which, united closely to his philosophical and theological teaching, is no less rich than these. We must return once more to conversion, with which we began. It was then that he decided to dedicate himself totally to the ideal of Christian perfection. He remained always faithful to this ideal; even more than this, he committed himself with all his power to showing others the path of perfection, drawing both on his own experience and on the Bible, which is for all the first nourishment of piety.

He was a man of prayer; one might indeed say, a man made of prayer — it suffices to recall the famous Confessions which he wrote in the form of a letter to God-and he repeated to all, with incredible persistence, the necessity of prayer: “God has willed that our struggle should be with prayers rather than with our own strength”, he describes the nature of prayer, which is so simple and yet so complex, the interiority which permits him to identify prayer with desire: “Your desire is itself your prayer; and if your desire is continuous, then your prayer too is continuous.” He brings out its social usefulness also: “Let us pray for those who have not been called, that they may be called. For perhaps God has predestined them in such a way that they will be granted and receive the same grace in answer to our prayers”; and he speaks of its wholly necessary link to Christ “who prays for us, and prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest; He prays in us, as our head; He is prayed to by us, as our God. Let us therefore recognize our voices in him, and his voice in us.”

He climbed with steady diligence the steps of the interior ascents, and described their program for all, an ample and well-defined program that comprises the movement of the spirit toward contemplation — purification, constancy and serenity, orientation toward the light, dwelling in the light, the stages of charity  –  incipient, progressing, intense, perfect — the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are linked to the beatitudes, the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, the examples given by Christ himself.

If the Gospel beatitudes constitute the supernatural environment in which the Christian must live, the gifts of the Holy Spirit bring the supernatural touch of grace which makes this climate possible; the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, or in general, prayer which can be narrowed down to these petitions, gives the necessary nourishment; the example of Christ provides the model that is to be imitated; and charity is the soul of all, the source of radiation outwards and the secret power of the spiritual life. It is no small merit of Augustine to have narrowed all of Christian doctrine and life down to the question of charity. “This is true love: that we cling to the truth and live righteously.”

We are led to this by Sacred Scripture, which in its entirety “tells the story of Christ and admonishes us to charity,” and also by theology, which finds its own goal in charity, by philosophy, by pedagogy, and finally by the study of politics.

The Essence Of Christian Perfection: Charity
Augustine located the essence and the norm of Christian perfection in charity, because it is the first gift of the Holy Spirit and the reality which prevents one from being wicked. It is the good with which one possesses all goods, and without which the other goods are of no avail. “Have charity, and you will have them all; because without charity, whatever you have will be of no benefit.”

He indicated all the inexhaustible riches of charity; it makes easy whatever is difficult, gives newness to what has become a habit; it gives irresistible force to the movement toward the supreme Good, because charity is always imperfect here on earth; it frees from every interest that is not God; it is inseparable from humility — “where there is humility, there is charity” — and is the essence of every virtue, since virtue is nothing else but well-ordered love; it is the gift of God. This final point is crucial, because it separates and distinguishes the naturalistic and the Christian concepts of life. “Whence comes the love of God and of neighbor that exists in men, if not from God himself? Because if it is not from God, but from men, the Pelagians have won: but if it is from God, then we have defeated the Pelagians.”

Charity gave birth in Augustine to the anxious desire to contemplate divine things, a desire that belongs to wisdom. He frequently experienced the highest forms of contemplation, not only in his famous experience at Ostia, but in other forms too. He says of himself, “I often do this,” referring to his recourse to the meditation of Scripture so that his pressing cares may not oppress him: “This is my delight, and I take refuge in this pleasure as much as the things I must do permit me to relax…. Sometimes You lead me into an interior sentiment that is utterly unusual, to a sweetness I cannot describe: if this were to reach its perfection in me, I cannot say what that would be, but it would not be this life.” When these experiences are united to the theological and psychological acuteness of Augustine, and to his uncommon talent as a writer, we understand how he was able to describe the mystical ascents with such precision, so that he has been called by many people the prince of mystics.

Reconciling Prayer And Action
Despite his predominating love for contemplation, Augustine accepted the burden of the episcopate and taught others to do likewise, responding thus with humility to the call of our mother the Church. But he also taught through his example and his writings how to preserve the taste for prayer and contemplation among the tasks of pastoral activity. It is worth while to recall the synthesis that he offers us in the City of God, which has become classical. “The love of the truth seeks the holy repose of leisure, but the necessity of love takes on the just duty. If no one imposes this burden, one should spend one’s time in perceiving and grasping the truth: but in this case, the delight in the truth must not be altogether abandoned, lest the sweetness be lost, and necessity become oppressive.” The profound teaching set out here merits a long and careful reflection, which becomes more easy and fruitful if we look to Augustine himself, who gave a shining example of the way to reconcile both aspects of the Christian life, prayer and action, which are apparently contradictory.