From Sinner to Saint

Editor’s Note: This is the tenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

Around the turn of the last century, a prominent London newspaper called The World put the following question to its readers, offering a prize for the best possible answer: “What’s wrong with the world?” Not the newspaper, of course, whose good health the owners took for granted. But the planet, about which there was a good deal of anxious concern. Why else would they have taken the trouble to solicit the views of their readers?

However, they could not have foreseen the following reply—which, while it may not have won the prize, was surely the wittiest on record. If brevity be the soul of wit, then this was the real deal. 

Dear Sirs: 
I am. 
Yours Truly, 
G.K. Chesterton

The author of the Confessions would certainly have approved. Like Mr. Chesterton, it would never have occurred to St. Augustine to assign blame for the world’s problems to anyone other than himself. Ownership of the world’s ills begins not with the neighbor next door or across the sea, but with ourselves. Before casting aspersions upon others, therefore, it would be wise to inventory one’s own wickedness. A hard look in the mirror will reveal enough raw material on which to justify a lifetime’s work of moral reconstruction.

Augustine is the perfect go-to guy. That is because, unlike most of us, Augustine possessed an acute and vivid sense of his own wrongdoing, including the cost exacted from others when he did. He wrote an entire book on the subject, after all, which proved as startling when it first appeared (owing to Augustine’s reputation for holiness, readers were understandably disconcerted to see it belied at great length throughout) as it continues to startle readers today, many of whom know little or nothing about his life, yet are astonished to learn that so much of it was steeped in sin. Lord Byron, for example, who was no slouch when it came to messing up his own life, not to mention the train wreck he made of others’ lives, drew eagerly upon Augustine’s copious account, boasting that he’d taught him “many new transgressions.” 

Hardly are we out of the gate, therefore, and already we find Augustine sinning up a storm. Even as an infant, he tells us, the only impediment standing in the way was lack of opportunity and strength. Nor was the infection peculiar to his own time spent as an infant. “I myself have seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means,” he tells us early on. “He was not old enough to talk, but whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy.” How can we attribute innocence to such a child, he asks, “when the milk flows in such abundance from its source, to object to a rival desperately in need and depending for his life on this one form of nourishment?” 

The period of his boyhood was no better, he adds, as it placed him in a world where a mere fault in grammar, for instance, was considered far more culpable than the envy felt for those who hadn’t committed it. “I won praise from the people whose favor I sought,” he tells us. 

For I thought that the right way to live was to do as they wished…blind to the whirlpool of debasement in which I had been plunged away from the sight of Your eyes. For in Your eyes nothing could be more debased than I was then…

How did such debasement display itself during this early stage of Augustine’s life? He does not shrink from telling us. Nor does he shrink from sharing even the least of his youthful sins from the unseen One to whom every word is being sent. It is not to us that he speaks but to God. We are here as eavesdroppers, as it were, looking over Augustine’s shoulder while he pens his letter to Another. And so he tells God about this or that lie told either to deceive others or merely to ingratiate himself with them. Or acts of theft performed, he says, “to get something to give to other boys in exchange for their favorite toys… And in the games I played with them I often cheated to come off the better.”

All the same, of course, he could not endure others cheating him. It’s an old story, isn’t it? We hardly mind lying to others, cheating or stealing from them; but that another should do the same to us is quite intolerable. 

This is not evidence of innocence, mind you, whether of the infant or the boy. “Far from it, O Lord!” he exclaims. “Let me tell you, my God,” he cries out on practically the first page of the Confessions, only to spend hundreds more embroidering upon the charge, “how I squandered the brains you gave me on foolish delusions.” Thus does he entreat God to spare him condign and obvious punishment for his sins, even as the pile of duplicity swells alarmingly in size. Pray God, forbear, he implores, knowing that even as a boy he stood in peril of losing his soul.   

In other words, no end of gifts freely given by a good and generous God; yet, no sooner given, then at once abused and dissipated. Such is the refrain throughout the First Book of the Confessions. “Should I not be grateful,” he asks, “that so small a creature possessed such wonderful gifts?” None of which had he given himself, by the way, but all received, poured out with a prodigality unmatched by any human measure. As the Fathers of the Church would say, “God does not reckon his gifts by the measure.” Every gesture of divine generosity remains, therefore, recklessly, wantonly even, over-the-top.     

Thus will Augustine need to remind himself that God’s gifts are good, “and the sum of them all is my own self.” In speaking my name, He gives me life. If each of us is the gift God gives, ought we not therefore to be grateful in getting something we could never ourselves give? It is the first and most obvious obligation we owe to God. “I should not even exist if it were not by your gift,” he admits, sounding the very depths of our nothingness before a God whose name bespeaks being, indeed, whose very essence as God, is simply to be. I AM WHO AM, to quote the voice from out of the fire of the Burning Bush when Moses dared to ask his name.  

And so, concludes Augustine, “I must thank him and praise him for all the good in my life, even my life as a boy.”

So where is the sin? How does it squirrel itself away into the soul of a young boy? He tells us on the very last page of Book I:

My sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.    

He will, praise God, come out from so wretched a state as being lost. But, alas for Augustine, not for a while yet…