Setting St. Augustine on Fire

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

A deist, it may fairly be said, is someone who hasn’t yet found the time to become an atheist. But he will, make no mistake, and along the way he will almost certainly fall into agnosticism. It is the easiest and most obvious default position for the intellectually indolent. I mean, if nobody really knows what God is, maybe we shouldn’t even say that there is a God.  

Sound reasonable? Not if you consider the cumulative wisdom of countless ancestors, Augustine included, who could not even imagine a world without God. Only the God hypothesis makes sense, he and numberless others would unhesitatingly say, in the absence of which we are no better than poor Macbeth, for whom life has become “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

In an elegant little book called The Problem of God, Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J., strips away the pretensions of such people, exposing what he calls a species of “stupidity” so singular that not until the modern age would anyone the least bit intelligent have dared to defend it. Not only is agnosticism “an implicit refusal of God,” insists Murray, 

it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. This is a truth, the Sage of Israel would say, that any man ought to know. It is the first among the truths that no man is allowed not to know, for not to know it is to nullify oneself as a man, a creature of intelligence.

What the agnostic does is nothing less than dismantle the ramparts of reason, refusing even the possibility of beginning a quest in search of truth. To disdain an exercise that, left unimpeded, will carry the mind to the very threshold of Mystery, is perhaps the most serious breach of the intellect one could imagine because God is not finally beyond the reach of any man willing—even with half a brain—to find evidence of Him. If we are to believe St. Paul, that is, who travelled all the way to the Areopagus to give the Greeks—who claimed to have invented reason, for heaven’s sake—the good news that “he is not far from each of us” (Acts 17:27). And—O, sweetest of ironies!—it is only to the degree that we first live and move and have our being in God that we find ourselves free to reject Him. “If there were no God,” says Chesterton, “there would be no atheists.”  

And, finally, as Murray will argue, agnosticism amounts to a kind of despair. 

The search for God, says the agnostic, is too perilous for me; it is beyond my powers. In this willful diminution of intelligence, God disappears. Surely this is a miserably flat denouement to the great intellectual drama in whose opening scene Plato appeared with the astonishing announcement that launched the high action of philosophy—his insight that there is an order of transcendent reality, higher than the order of human intelligence and the measure of it, to which access is available to the mind of man.

Augustine would certainly have agreed with Plato. Indeed, on discovering his works in translation, along with the writings of Plotinus, his most profound interpreter—uncommonly skilled in “drawing out the hidden meaning of Plato,” says Augustine—he rejoices to find a kindred spirit, a philosopher as determined to know the truth as himself. “To a Christian Platonist,” writes Peter Brown, which is what Augustine appears to have become in the period following his taking leave of the Manicheans and making his way back to a place of sanity, 

the history of Platonism seemed to converge quite naturally on Christianity. Both pointed in the same direction. Both were radically other-worldly: Christ had said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; Plato had said the same of his realm of ideas. For Ambrose, the followers of Plato were the “aristocrats of thought.” 

But it was never mere proof of God’s existence that set Augustine on fire; it was, rather, the grace to remain steadfast in following the Lord, indeed, in falling in love with the Lord. On that score neither Plato nor Plotinus were at all helpful because, while their writings gave ample witness to an idea of truth, eternal and unchanging—a meaning beyond matter, a logos transcendent to all the mutations of time and space—there was not the least intimation of Incarnation, of this Word of wisdom and intelligibility becoming flesh and dwelling among us.  

Yes, there were depths sounded throughout, and among the many chords played upon the Platonist instruments one could hear distant echoes resonating with the music of the Fourth Gospel. But Plato’s Word never enters the flesh and blood and bone of a human and finite world. God may be Logos for the Greek mind at its most sublime pitch, but that this very Logos, the ground and source of the world’s being, should Himself enter into being, that was simply unthinkable. Logos, yes, but never sarx.

And not just unthinkable—as if it were a concept too complicated for the Greek mind to conceive, to try and adjust itself to—but utterly insupportable to the sensibilities of men for whom mind and matter could never come together. To look upon the face of Jesus and there to espy the eternal countenance of God? Not only was it a bridge too far to cross in the order of mind, but even wanting to do so, as though the deepest longings of the heart were to urge one in that direction, such a prospect remained wholly and utterly repellent. For the wisest men of the pagan world, it was the fact of Incarnation, not just the idea, that would constitute the real, the supreme, scandal.  

One thinks here of Porphyry, famous disciple and biographer of Plotinus, who had himself ever so briefly been a Christian; but, recoiling in horror from the experience, he turned his fury upon the faith he had rejected. “How can one admit,” he asks in Against the Christians, “that the divine should become an embryo, that after his birth he is put in swaddling clothes, that he is soiled with blood and bile, and worse things yet?” What possible torment could be greater, what ignominy more complete, than the fall of a soul into a material body (soma), which has now become no more than a tomb (sema)? Individuation was a curse to the Platonist mind, and nothing short of grace will rid him of it.

And Augustine? He is most eager to embrace it. “What a great act of your mercy it was,” he will exclaim, pouring out his soul before God, “to show mankind the way of humility when the Word was made flesh and came to dwell among the men of this world.” And while he finds many good things among the Platonist authors, there is nothing there that can ultimately satisfy, nothing to assuage the longings of his heart. Of the God who came among us, divesting Himself of His divine dignity in order to assume the nature of a slave, there is not a word among the Platonist authors. 

Thus, in his avid search for a truth not merely to know but to love—indeed, to be known and loved by—Augustine reaches for a wisdom greater than Plato. Which is why, at the very end of Book VII, we see Augustine, “seizing upon most eagerly the venerable writings inspired by your Holy Spirit,” to wit, the writings of the apostle Paul, “who teaches that he who sees ought not to boast as though what he sees, and even the power by which he sees, had not come to him by gift.” It is the gift of grace that Augustine most longs for. Not only that he might be shown how to see God but that he be given the strength to cleave to the God whom he sees.  

In the following book, Book VIII, the climax of Augustine’s search will take place, which we’ll see in our next installment.