St. Augustine « Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘St. Augustine’ Category

Reading Selections from The Rise of Western Christendom by Peter Brown

March 24, 2010

Peter Robert Lamont Brown is one of America’s major historians and certainly the dean of Late Antique studies in the American academe. Elsewhere I have reviewed and provided reading selections from his magisterial Augustine of Hippo. This is another great read.

Monks
In 270, the year Constantine was born, Anthony (250-356) a comfortable farmer on the Egyptian Fayum, made his way out into the desert, to emerge around 310 as a famous ermites, a “man of the desert” the “model” Christian hermit of all future ages. In Syria, also, the roads had long been traveled by bands of charismatic preachers who owed nothing to the “world.” Pointedly celibate, and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, their traveling bands were a sight to be seen. They had to be advised not to burst into chanted psalms when passing through non-Christian villages — lest they be mistaken for traveling musicians! They were the “unique ones,” the “lonely ones.” In Egypt, the Greek word monochos, “lonely one,” from which our word “monk” derives, soon became attached to such eccentric persons. Unmarried, detached from society either by living in the desert or by their restless movement, the “wanderers” of Syria and the “men of the desert” of Egypt represented a new form of radical Christianity, henceforth associated with a new term, “monasticism” — the life of monks.

Augustine And The Pelagian Controversy
For Augustine the convert emerged as a person sheathed in the will of God “For He hath made me and not we ourselves…” indeed we had destroyed ourselves but He who made us, made us anew. Augustine never doubted this about himself or others. The grace of God worked on the heart, “as it were as speck of gold in the hands of a master craftsman, “hammering the fragile, discontinuous will into an ever firmer, finally victorious resolve. This was no abstract doctrine for Augustine. The life of the Catholic Church, as he saw it, was made up of countless small victories of grace. To those who had learned to pray with a humble heart, God would always give the grace which fired the will to follow His commands….

Not every ascetic Christian in this age of great converts was comfortable with such a view. When the Confessions were read out, in the company of Paulinus, Pelagius, a devout layman from Britain, walked out of the room. For Pelagius and his many supporters, the “grace” of God did not work in this manner. God’s “grace” consisted rather in God’s decision to create human nature in such a way that human beings could follow his commands through the exercise of their own free will.

This was grace enough. Human beings had never lost their original, good nature. Everyone was free to choose the good. Once the accretion of evil habits, contracted through contact with the “world”, had been washed away through the transformative rite of baptism, every Christian believer was both able and obliged to reach out for perfection. For Pelagius, the Christian was the master craftsman of his or her own soul.

Augustine’s Theology Of Grace
Augustine’s theology of grace embraced more believers. It had room both for acknowledged heroes and for the average Christina. Pelagius, by contrast, had little to say to the average Christian. He insisted that all Christians were capable of being perfect and that they should become perfect. He wished to blur the distinction between lay person and monk by making every Christian equally a convert and a devout ascetic. He seemed to leave no place for the slow and hesitant progress of the rank and file, whose “conversions” were far from dramatic and far from complete….Augustine, by contrast , accepted that the Christian Church had come to contain a large number of distinctly mediocre persons. He did not expect ever Christian to be perfect. Yet each Christian was equal to every other, because all Christians were equally dependent on the grace of God …. Augustine’s doctrine was a source of comfort to the humble and a warning to the proud. There was no room in his view of the Church for self-created distinctions, based on the belief that some Christians could make themselves more “perfect” than others…Augustine saw the Catholic Church as a united community precisely because it was community of sinners as well as a community of heroes and of heroines.

Augustine’s City of God
Augustine’s City of God, was a book he began in 413, as an answer to pagan criticisms and to Christian disillusionment, provoked by Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. The disaster of the sack o f Rome provided Augustine with an excuse to expatiate on a theme dear to his heart. It was summed up in the title of the book, On the City of God. For as in Psalm 86 (87), Jerusalem was the “City of our God, of which “glorious things are spoken” Like the Jerusalem of the Psalms (as Augustine read them) the Heavenly Jerusalem claimed those born in all other nations as potential citizens. A common sin had made all men and all women quite irrespective of race, of class, and of level of culture, equally aliens from that Heavenly Jerusalem. All were summoned with stark impartiality, to become Christians and so to begin the long, slow return to heaven, their true homeland…Augustine deliberately created common ground with his readers , precisely so that, all obstacles removed and all arguments vanquished, they might have no excuse not to slip across that shared ground in order to become potential citizens of heaven by joining the Catholic Church.

Gregory The Great: Discernment In The Commentary on Job
Gregory entitle his commentary the “Mortalia of Job.” By this he meant a guide for the moral life derived from contemplation of the Book of Job…..It was the stuff of the soul that concerned him, in every situation and every turn and twist of its daily struggle with itself. Gregory was a throwback. He brought into the late sixth century an ancient strand in Roman thought — the austere tradition of ethical guidance earlier associated with the Stoic sages.. Gregory’s emphasis on the examination of ones’ motives, on the need for consideration of one’s response to every situation, the perpetual awareness of the inner self laid out before the quiet eyes of God are themes which hark back to the letters of Seneca and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelieus.

Gregory The Great: Praedicatio
“Once the world held us in its delights. Now it is so full of disasters that the world itself seems to be summoning us to God.” What mattered now was praedicatio, the gathering into the Christian Church of what remained of the human race, so as to face the dread Judgment Seat of Christ…It as a thought to greatly concentrate the mind. For Gregory the age of praedicatio was not an age of panic. It was, rather, an age of unexpected excitements. Like soft dawn creeping beneath a door, Gregory saw in his own age, a subdued recrudescent of the miraculous powers which had once accompanied the first advance of the Apostles. In 594 his Dialogues…announced to the Christian world that …his native Italy had been filled with vibrant holy men and women. They had been sent by God, in the last days of he world to warn mankind.

How The Irish Did Not Save Civilization But Did Something Greater
It is important not to exaggerate the cultural riches of sixth century Ireland. An enthusiastic nationalist tradition has claimed that an entire range of classical Latin books were transported to the island at the time of “Barbarian Invasions.” They were saved by the Irish form the barbarism into which , so these enthusiasts assert, continental Europe had irrevocably sunk. Books are still written entitled “How the Irish Saved Civilization”. This is a myth that has no scholarly support. It is also a myth that overlooks the true originality and creativity of Irish Christian culture at that time. For what Irish and West Britons lacked in books , they more than made up for though the intensity and originality with which they read what books they had, and the zest with which they applied their reading to substantially new situations, The Irish did a lot more than “save” the relics of classical civilization. They created something new.

Penance: Augustinian and Gregory the Great
Penance, for Augustine, was not a spectacular remedy for occasional great sins. It was, rather, a frame of mind. It was a lifelong process, because sin also, was the lifelong companion of the Christian. It was Gregory the Great who added a final, distinctive tone to the Augustinian tradition of perpetual penance. His contribution derived, in many ways, from a very ancient Roman past. The aristocratic tradition of moral guidance, represented by Seneca and others, had always urged its practitioners to subject themselves to relentless inner cross-examination, so as to lay bare their failings and to correct them. To this venerable, almost instinctive tradition, maintained among the Roman elites, Gregory added the entire world of the Desert Fathers, with their unflinching emphasis on the constant inner struggle of the monk and on the need for candor in revealing all sins to a spiritual guide…all sins mattered; and all must be examined with medical precision if they were to be “healed.” …The more Christians strove for perfection, he believed, the more clearly they would see heir own imperfection…Gregory used he word “horror”…not the fear of hell, rather, he referred to a nightmare sense of vertigo experienced by pious persons at the sight of the sheer tenacity, the insidiousness, and the minute particularity of their sins…They must look at themselves as God saw them, that is, with the divine impatience of an utterly just being, for whom a shoddy, unfinished soul was not enough.

Islam
In 610 at the age of 40, Muhammad began to see visions. They came from Allah, “The Lord of the World.” For the next 20 years, the messages came irregularly, in sudden, shattering moments, up to his death in 632. In them Muhammad believed, the same God who had spoken to Moses and to Jesus, and to many thousands of humbler prophets, now spoke again, once and for all, to himself. Vivid sequences of these words from God were carefully memorized by Muhammad’s followers. They were passed on by skilled reciters throughout the Arabic speaking world. For these were nothing less than snatches of the voice of God himself speaking to the Arabs through Muhammad. They were not written down until 660, in very different circumstances from the time of their first delivery. When written out…they came to be known as the Qur’an. What Muhammad recited was a direct rendering of the eloquence of God as he spoke to the human race…His messages declared that neglect and partisan strife had caused Jews and Christians to slip away from, even to distort the messages which they had once received from their prophets Moses and Jesus. Christians were told in, in no uncertain terms, that they had erred. They were warned by God that the Christological controversies which had absorbed their energies for so many centuries were based on a gigantic misunderstanding. Jesus had not been God and had never claimed to be treated as if he was God: “And behold God will say: “ Jesus, son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men: worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God?” He will say:” Glory to Thee. Never could I have said what I had no right to say [Qur’an v:119]

The Dome Of The Rock
Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik had made an even more aggressive statement of the superiority of Muslims to all other religions. In 692, he began to build the Dome of the Rock on top of the deserted site of the former Jewish Temple at Jerusalem. The new dome towered above the dome of Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Inside the mosaics around the base of the dome bore inscriptions from the Qur’an. …They showed that the Caliph wished to make plain to visiting Muslim pilgrims that, in God’s definitive judgment, the entire past of Christianity had been weighed and found wanting. The inscriptions were taken from verses of the Qur’an in which Christians were rebuked: Oh People of the Book (i.e. Christians), do not go beyond the bounds of your religion….Jesus , the son of Mary, was only God’s messenger…It is not for God to take a son…The true religion with God is Islam.{ Qur’an iv:171 and iii:19]

Subordination of Christians and Jews in the Islamic Empire
Christians paid a special poll tax – the jizya – in return for the “benefaction” of being allowed to continue to practice their religion undisturbed. The jizya tax was intended to make plain their subordination. It was paid by individuals and not by communities. Its administration required an elaborate and vexatious system of registration, such as only a strong empire, backed by a professional bureaucracy, could have imposed. Event he moment of payment was supposed to emphasize the subordinate position of the “people of he book” over against Muslims. Lawyers insisted hat those who offered the jizya must be careful to present the money on their upraised palms, in such a way that their hands should never e seen to rise above those of the Muslim recipient. In return for this mark of inferiority, Christians and Jews were left free to carry on their lives under the protection of an Islamic empire.

Bands of Human Wolves: 7^th Century Ireland
The monks knew that in 7^th Century Ireland a further, concentric band of persons lurked in the moral equivalent of the wild. The worst examples of these were bands of landless, unmarried young men…who lived a wild existence in the woods and bog lands. Eating horseflesh marked by sinister tokens of their vows of vengeance, frequently employed as the powerful as “enforcers”, these groups shadowed Irish society like the grey shapes of he wolves the cu glas, the grey dogs, packs of savage creatures who had broken loose from human control. Human wolves, untamed warrior sand brigands, occupied the unchurched edges of society.

Pascha And Easter
Pascha, the Latin version of the Jewish feast of Passover, the Pasah, was still the word used in all the romance languages…but in England, Pascha became Easter. “The name was derived from Eostre, the pagan goddess form whom the month was named – the joy of a pagan spring festival became the joy of Easter

The Wisdom Of An Anglo-Saxon In 628
This is how the present life of man on earth appears to me, King, in comparison with the time that is unknown to us. You are sitting, feasting with your earldormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth …and all inside is warm; while outside the wintry storm of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow files swiftly though the hall ….it flits from your sight, out of the winter storm and back into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment: what follows, or, indeed, what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine [Christianity] brings us more certain information, it seems right we should accept it.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Church History, St. Augustine | Tagged 7th Century Ireland, Augustine’s City of God, Augustine’s Theology Of Grace, Gregory The Great, Islam, Monks, Pascha And Easter, Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The Dome Of The Rock, The Irish, The Pelagian Controversy | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections (3) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

October 23, 2009

Twenty three years ago Pope John Paul II noted the importance of St Augustine of Hippo by issuing an Apostolic Letter on the 16th Centenary of the Conversion of St Augustine. The scope of the Letter is long, comprehensive and exhaustive dealing with many aspects of a great, towering and complex individual. I’ve been taking up various sections of the letter here and in earlier posts.

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.

Posted in St. Augustine | Tagged Augustine on Charity, Augustine on Christian Freedom, Augustine on Freedom And Grace, Augustine on Grace And Prayer, Augustine on Peace, Augustine on Prayer And Action, Pope John Paul II | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections (2) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

October 16, 2009

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.”

Posted in St. Augustine | Tagged Augustine On Christ And The Church, Augustine On God And Man, Augustine On Reason And Faith, AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM reading selections, City of God, Confessions, faith has its own eyes, Pope John Paul II, The Church As Body Of Christ, The Heavenly City, the threefold notion of God: | 1 Comment »

Reading Selections (1) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

October 13, 2009

Indeed, this holy man…was always in the habit of telling us, when we talked as intimates, that even praise worthy Christians and bishops, though baptized, should still not leave this life without having performed due and exacting penance. This is what he did in his own last illness: for he had ordered the four psalms of David that deal with penance to be copied out. From his sick-bed he could see these sheets of paper everyday, hanging on his walls, and would read them, crying constantly and deeply. And, lest his attention be distracted from this in any way, almost ten days before his death, he asked us that none should come in to see him, except at those hours when the doctors would come to examine him or his meals were brought. This was duly observed: and so he had all that stretch of time to pray…” (Possidus’ Vita XXXI:1-3)

Augustine’s Influence in the Church
Augustine of Hippo, who, scarcely one year after his death, was called “one of the best teachers” of the Church by my distant predecessor, St. Celestine I, has been present ever since in the life of the Church and in the mind and culture of the whole western world. In a similar fashion, other Roman Pontiffs have proposed the example of his way of life and the writings that embody his teachings as an object of contemplation and imitation, and very many Councils have often drawn copiously from his writings. Pope Leo XIII praised his philosophical teachings in the Encyclical Aeterni Patris; later, Pius XI made a brief synthesis of his virtues and teachings in the Encyclical Ad salutem humani generis, declaring that, of those who have flourished from the beginnings of the human race down to our own days, none—or, at most, very few—could rank with Augustine, for the very great acuteness of his genius, for the richness and sublimity of his teachings, and finally for his holiness of life and defense of Catholic truth. Paul VI later affirmed: “Indeed, over and above the shining example he gives of the qualities common to all the Fathers, it may be said that all the thought-currents of the past meet in his works and form the source which provides the whole doctrinal tradition of succeeding ages.”…He was likewise the genius who constructed a philosophy that can truly be called Christian because of its harmony with the faith, and a tireless promoter of spiritual and religious perfection.

The Confessions
We know the progress of his conversion from his own works written in the solitude of Cassiciacum before his baptism, and above all from the famous Confessions, a work that is simultaneously autobiography, philosophy, theology, mysticism and poetry, a work in which those who thirst for truth and know their own limitations have always discovered their own selves. Toward the end of his life, he wrote: “Which of my works succeeded more often in being known and loved than the books of my Confessions?” History has never contradicted this judgment, but has amply confirmed it. Even today, the Confessions of St. Augustine are widely read, since the richness of their interior insight and religious emotion have a profound effect on the minds of men and women, stimulating them and disturbing them. This is true not only of believers; even one without faith, but in search at least of a certainty that will allow him to understand himself, his deep aspirations and his torments, reads this work with advantage. The conversion of St. Augustine, an event totally dominated by the need to find the truth, has much to teach the men and women of today, who are so often mistaken about the greatest question of all life.

Not Arriving At But Rediscovering
It is well known that this conversion took a wholly individual path, because it was not a case of arriving for the first time at the Catholic faith, but of rediscovering it. He had lost it, convinced that in so doing, he was abandoning only the Church, not Christ.

He had been brought up in a Christian manner by his mother, the pious and holy Monica. In virtue of this education, Augustine always remained not only a believer in God, in providence and in the future life, but also a believer in Christ, whose name he “had drunk in,” as he says, “with my mother’s milk.” After he had returned to the faith of the Catholic Church, he said that he had returned “to the faith which was instilled in me as a child and which had entered into my very marrow.” If one wishes to understand his interior evolution, and what is perhaps the most profound aspect of his personality and his thought, one must take this fact as one’s starting-point.

He awoke at the age of nineteen to the love of wisdom, when he read the Hortensius of Cicero—”That book altered my way of thinking…and I desired wisdom’s immortality with an incredible ardor in my heart.” He loved the truth deeply, and sought it always with all the strength of his soul: “O Truth, Truth, how deep even then was the yearning for you in the inmost depths of my mind!

The Errors Of Augustine
Despite this love for truth, Augustine fell into serious errors. Scholars who look for the reasons for this indicate three directions:
1. first, a mistaken account of the relationship between reason and faith, so that he would have to choose between them;
2. second, in the supposed contrast between Christ and the Church, with the consequent conviction that it was necessary to abandon the Church in order to belong more fully to Christ; and
3. third, the desire to free himself from the consciousness of sin, not by means of the remission of sin through the working of grace, but by means of the denial of the involvement of human responsibility in the sin itself. [ dj: I was amazed when I read these, realizing I had made the exact same errors over the course of my life as well.]

The first error consisted, therefore, in a certain spirit of rationalism which led Augustine to believe that “one should believe those who teach, rather than those who issue commands.” With this spirit, he read the Sacred Scriptures and felt himself repelled by the mysteries that they contain, mysteries that need to be accepted with humble faith. When he spoke later to his people about this period of his life, he said: “I who speak to you was once deceived, when I first came to the divine Scriptures as a youth, preferring to discuss intellectual points rather than to seek piety…. In my wretchedness, I thought that I could fly, and left the nest; and before I could fly, I fell.”

Augustine And The Manichaeans
It was at this time that Augustine met the Manichaeans, heard them and followed them. The chief reason for this was that “they said that, having set aside the terrible authority, they would lead to God by pure and simple reason those willing to listen to them, freed from all errors” Augustine then presented himself as “one wishing to grasp and imbibe the open and authentic truth” with the force of reason alone.

After long years of study, especially of philosophical study, he realized that he had been deceived, but the effect of the Manichaean propaganda was to keep him convinced that the truth was not to be found in the Catholic Church. He fell into a profound depression and indeed despaired of ever coming to know the truth: “the Academicians kept my rudder for long in the middle of the streams, resisting all winds.”

It was the same love for truth which he always had within him, that rescued him from this interior crisis. He realized that it was impossible that the path to truth should be closed to the human mind; if it is not found, it is because men neglect and despise the means that will lead to the discovery of truth. Strengthened by this conviction, he replies to himself: “Rather, let us seek more diligently, and not despair.” He therefore continued to search, and reached the harbor under the guidance of the divine grace which his mother implored for him in her supplications and abundant tears.

He understood that reason and faith are two forces that are to cooperate to bring the human person to know the truth, and that each of these has its own primacy: faith comes first in the sequence of time, reason has the absolute primacy: “the authority is first in the order of time, but in reality the primacy belongs to the reason.” He understood that if faith is to be sure, it needs a divine authority, and that this is none other than the authority of Christ, the supreme teacher—Augustine had never doubted this-and that the authority of Christ is found in the Sacred Scriptures that are guaranteed by the authority of the Catholic Church.

With the help of the Platonist philosophers, he freed himself from the materialistic concept of being that he had taken in from Manichaeism: “Admonished by them to return to myself, I entered within myself, under Your guidance…. I entered, and I saw as with the eye of my soul…the inalterable light above my mind.” It was this inalterable light that opened to him the immense horizons of the spirit of God.

He understood that the first question to be asked about the serious question of evil, which was his great torment, was not its origin, but what it was; and he saw that evil is not a substance, but the lack of good: “All that exists is good. The evil about the origin of which I asked questions is not a substance.” He concluded that God is the creator of everything, and that no substance exists that was not created by Him.

Taught by his own experience of life, he made the decisive discovery that sin has its origin in the will of the human person, a will that is free and weak: “It was I who willed and refused; it was I, I.”

Although he could assert at this time that he had reached the point of arrival, this was not yet the case, because he was caught in the tentacles of a new error, the presumption that he could attain the beatifying possession of the truth by natural powers alone. An unhappy personal experience changed his opinion on this point. He understood then that it is one thing to know the goal, another to reach it. In order to find the necessary powers and the path itself, he took up “most eagerly,” as he says, “the venerable Scripture of Your Spirit, and above all the apostle Paul.” He found Christ the teacher in the letters of Paul, as he had always venerated Him, but also Christ the Redeemer, the incarnate Word, the only mediator between God and men. He saw then in all its splendor “the face of philosophy”- the philosophy of Paul that has as its center Christ, “the power and wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and has other centers in faith, humility and grace; the “philosophy” that is at once wisdom and grace, so that it becomes possible not only to know one’s homeland, but also to reach it.

Having rediscovered Christ the Redeemer and embraced Him, Augustine had returned to the harbor of the Catholic faith, to the faith in which he had been brought up by his mother: “For I had heard while still a boy about the eternal life promised to us by the God who in His humility came down to our pride.” The love for the truth, nourished by divine grace, overcame all errors.

Consecrate Himself Totally To Wisdom
But the path was not yet at its end. A former plan was reborn in Augustine’s mind: to consecrate himself totally to wisdom once he had found it, abandoning every earthly hope in order to possess wisdom. Now he could no longer make excuses: the truth so long desired was now certain. Nevertheless, he hesitated, seeking reasons to put off the decision to do this. The bonds that tied him to the earthly hopes were strong: honors, money, marriage, especially the last, in view of the way of life that that had become customary for him.

Augustine knew well that he was not forbidden to marry; but he did not want to be a Catholic Christian in any other way except by renouncing the excellent ideal of the family in order to dedicate himself with “all” his soul to the love and possession of wisdom. In taking this decision which corresponded to his deepest aspirations but was in contrast to his most deeply-rooted habits, Augustine was prompted by the example of Anthony and of the monks who were beginning to spread in the West also and whom he came to know by chance. He accused himself with great shame, “You could not do what these men and women do.” A deep and painful struggle ensued, which was brought to its close by divine grace once again.

Augustine related to his mother his serene and strong decision: “Then we went to my mother and related the matter to her: she rejoiced. We related how it had come about: she exulted in triumph and she blessed You, who are able to do more than we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20), because she saw that You had given her so much more, as regarded me, than she had been accustomed to ask with her unhappy and tearful groanings. For You converted me to yourself, so that I might seek neither wife nor any hope of this world.”

Tagaste and Hippo
From this moment, Augustine began a new life. He finished the academic year-the harvest holidays were near-and withdrew to the solitude of Cassiciacum; at the end of the vacation, he gave up teaching, and returned to Milan at the beginning of 387. He enrolled among the catechumens and was baptized on the night of Holy Saturday-April 23-24—by Ambrose, the bishop from whose preaching he had learned so much. “We were baptized, and the care of the past life fled from us. I could not have enough in those days of the wonderful sweetness of contemplating the sublimity of Your plan of salvation for the human race.” He adds, bearing witness to the profound emotion of his mind, “How much I wept at the hymns and canticles, keenly moved by the sweet voices of Your Church!”

After baptism, Augustine’s one desire was to find a suitable place to live with his friends according to his “holy resolution” to serve the Lord. He found it in Africa, at Tagaste, his native town, where he went after the death of his mother at Ostia Tiberina and after spending a few months at Rome to study the monastic movement. When he arrived at Tagaste, “having now cast off from himself the cares of the world; he lived for God with those who accompanied him, in fasting, prayers, and good works, meditating on the law of the Lord by day and by night.” The passionate lover of the truth wanted to dedicate his life to asceticism, to contemplation, and to the intellectual apostolate. His first biographer indeed goes on to say: “In his discourse and his books, he taught about what God had revealed to his intellect as he pondered and prayed.” He wrote very many books at Tagaste, as he had done at Rome and Milan and at Cassiciacum.

After three years he went to Hippo, intending to look for a site to found a monastery, and to meet a friend whom he hoped to win for the monastic life. He found instead, in spite of himself, the priesthood. But he did not give up his ideal: he asked and obtained permission to found a monastery, the monastery of the laymen, in which he lived, and from which many priests and many bishops came for all of Africa. When he became bishop, five years later, he transformed the bishop’s house into a monastery, the monastery of the clerics. Not even as priest and bishop did he abandoned the ideal conceived at the moment of his conversion. He wrote also a rule for the servants of God, which has had so much influence in the history of western religious life, and continues to play its part today.

His Conversion Helps Us Understand His Life
I have dealt at some length with the essential points of the conversion of Augustine, because they offer so much useful teachings, not only for believers, but for all men and women of good will: they teach how easy it is to go astray on the path of life, and how difficult it is to rediscover the way of truth. But this wonderful conversion also helps us to understand better his life afterwards as monk, priest and bishop who always remained the great man who had been struck by the lightning-flash of grace: “You had shot at our heart with the arrow of Your love, and we bore Your words transfixed in our breast.” Above all, the conversion helps us to penetrate more easily into his thought, which was so universal and profound that it rendered incomparable and imperishable service to Christian thought, so that we have good reason to call him the common father of Christian Europe.

The hidden force of his tireless search was assuredly the same force that had guided him on the path of his conversion: love for the truth. He himself indeed says: What does the soul desire more strongly than the truth?” In a work of lofty theological and mystical speculation, written more out of personal need than for external requirements, he recalls this love and writes: “We are caught up by the love of seeking out the truth.” This time, the object of the search is the august mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of Christ, the Father’s revelation, “knowledge and wisdom” of the human person: thus was born the great work On the Trinity.

Two coordinates guided the research, which was unceasingly nourished by love: the deepening of the Catholic faith and its defense against those who denied it, such as the Manichaeans and the pagans, or who interpreted it erroneously, such as the Donatists, the Pelagians and the Arians.

St. Augustine has been a topic of many posts. Some of the others are:

1. A review of Peter Brown’s wonderful book, Augustine of Hippo, here.

2. A collection of references by other writers that illuminate the many gifts that Augustine has for the student, here.

3. A short biography of Augustine, here.

Posted in St. Augustine | Tagged Augustine -- Consecrated To Wisdom, Augustine And The Manichaeans, Augustine's Conversion, Augustine’s Influence in the Church, AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM, Pope John Paul II, the Confessions of St. Augustine, The Errors Of Augustine | Leave a Comment »

The Majesty of St. Augustine

August 14, 2009

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.

Posted in St. Augustine | Tagged 1 John 2:15-17, Dorothy Sayers, Etienne Gilson, G. K. Chesterton, intellectum valde ama, Joseph Pearse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Kreeft, St. Augustine, The Heavenly City, The World Is Losing Its Grip | 2 Comments »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘St. Augustine’ Category

Reading Selections from The Rise of Western Christendom by Peter Brown

Reading Selections (3) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

Reading Selections (2) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

Reading Selections (1) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

The Majesty of St. Augustine

Pages

Recent Posts

Categories

Blog Stats

Top Posts

Subscribe

Archives