Rooted in Christ

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

From the first moment of his conversion, rivetingly recounted in the pages of his Confessions, Augustine rooted himself in Christ, determined to cleave to his person and the redemption wrought by the sacrifice of his life. Not as mere idea, distant and remote, toward which he would now and again direct his attention.

Such rarefied realms, so beloved by men with minds like Plotinus, who would never dream of actually talking to God, were not for him. “Concepts create idols,” to quote Gregory of Nyssa, his counterpart from the East, “only wonder understands anything.” And so, leaving the world of speculation with its fleshless formulations behind, he sought a new center, a someone on whom to anchor everything.

Above all, Augustine wished to remain faithful to the grace of an encounter that had upended his life. An encounter not with an idea but a person—the human being Jesus in whom the whole meaning of personhood stands revealed. “You are in me deeper than I am in me,” he will admit with astonishment. And here is God now speaking his name! “I heard your voice calling from on high,” Augustine exclaims, who thereupon tells him: 

I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead you shall be changed into me.

For I am the God who is!

It is this God with whom Augustine now wishes to walk, to feed upon in the Eucharist (than which there can be no greater scandal of particularity), in order to anneal himself in the hope of everlasting life. Concerning the truth of that horizon-shattering claim, Augustine will never waver. In his own mind, at least, there can be no doubt but that in the face of the Incarnate Word the whole meaning of being has revealed itself. There can be no other mediator, no other way but the Way of the Word. 

It is simply not possible to draw near to God, to come before the Father, without first going through the Son. Which is no roundabout way, either, but the quickest and most direct way possible. “The God-Christ is the home where we are going,” Augustine tells the people of Hippo. “The man-Christ is the way by which we are going. We go to him, we go by him; why then do we fear that we should go astray?” 

And, yet, Augustine did fear precisely that. Both for himself and certainly for all those others for whom he was expected to make spiritual provision. Not only in charity did they have a claim on Augustine but, as their bishop and pastor, they could stake that claim on the absolute ground of justice. To look after them, therefore, was the only right and proper thing to do. Especially after the Fall of Rome, news of which struck North Africa with the force of a freight train (never mind the fact that they hadn’t yet been invented).

The point is, the unprecedented scale of the collapse took everyone by surprise. But about the souls entrusted to him, Augustine entertained no illusions. “The congregation of Hippo, whom the Lord has ordained me to serve,” he writes with customary realism,

is in great mass, and almost wholly of a constitution so weak, that the pressure of even a comparatively light affliction might seriously endanger their well-being; at the present, however, it is smitten with tribulation so overwhelming, that even if it were strong, it could hardly survive the imposition of this burden.

Here is the source of the Augustinian model of the Church, which is that of a great net cast into the sea, aimed at catching as many fish as possible. It is not for us to judge the quality of the catch. Let us leave that to the angels who, on the other side of death, will sort them all out according to their merit before God. “‘For with righteousness shall he judge the world,’” declares Augustine, quoting Psalm 195. “Not a part of it only, for it was not merely a part that he redeemed; the whole of the world is his to judge, since for the whole did he pay the price.”  And inasmuch as Adam is the representative man, scattered in his sin about the globe, it is fitting, says Augustine, that God, 

the Divine Mercy should gather up all the fragments from every side, forging them in the fire of love and welded thus into one what had been broken. …He who remade was himself the Maker; he who refashioned was himself the Fashioner. “He shall judge the world in righteousness and the nations in his truth.”

Thus will Augustine—in the exercise of his ministry, the office of chief shepherd in Hippo—remind his flock, over and over, as Peter Brown puts it so expressively, 

that even the baptized Christian must remain an invalid: like the wounded man, found near death by the wayside in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, his life had been saved by the rite of baptism; but he must be content to endure, for the rest of his life, a prolonged and precarious convalescence in the Inn of the Church. 

It is such a wonderful image, by the way, as lovely as it is luminous. And so completely at variance to the unreal reductionism of Pelagius, for whom the moral life is nothing more than making the right choice. Doing the good becomes the result of knowing the good. We’ve backed ourselves back into Platonism. So, you want to reverse the engine of vice that’s been driving your life? Then just throw the switch marked virtue. It’s as if the highest reaches of Beatitude were no more than a recipe away.  

Alas, matters are far more complicated, intractable even. Beatitude is not at all like baking a cake, especially when so much of the baking depends on God. And, besides, it leaves out grace altogether. “Why else,” asks Augustine, “is the Law given but that grace may be sought? And why is grace given but that the Law may be fulfilled?” The need for grace is perhaps the greatest hunger we have, without which we are less than zero; indeed, we verge upon a nothingness that is positively demonic.  

“For Augustine,” writes Brown, closing in on the precise distinction we need in order to appreciate where he is taking us, “the nature of the imperfection of man was sensed as a profound and permanent dislocation: as a discordia, a ‘tension,’ that strove, however perversely, to seek resolution in some balanced whole, in some concordia.” In other words, the remedy for sin, the overcoming of those habits acquired in committing sin—in short, the required conquest of the self—must reach very deep down, penetrating far below the surface in order to see at least a glimmer of the happy outcome God’s free gift of grace may bring.  

What Augustine envisions here is nothing less than a work of total, transmutative surgery. And the fact that the mind knows all this, can clearly see what needs to be done, means nothing in the absence of a will determined on putting into practice all that the mind knows. Something from outside has got to jumpstart the will, something as marvelous and fortifying as the grace of God, whose mysteries we can neither plumb nor predict.

Mere self-mastery may never be enough, not in a fallen world, a world fractured by sin—a subject to which we shall need to return speedily…