Editor’s Note: This is the seventh in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.
In the immediate aftermath of his conversion, following a life not infrequently strewn with sin, Augustine finally decides in what world he wishes to live. But it could not have been an easy choice to make.
Born into the late classical world of a pagan empire, a world where he spent his childhood and early manhood, he could hardly have escaped an educational system originating in ancient Athens and Alexandria, whose benefits enabled him—and whole generations of other bright young men—to get on in the only world they knew. It was a reassuring world, one which instilled for both he and countless others similarly situated, an ethos of belief and practice not easily outgrown. “A classical education,” writes Peter Brown in his fascinating life of Augustine, “was one of the only passports to success for such men; and he narrowly avoided losing even this. His early life will be overshadowed by the sacrifices his father made to give him this vital education.”
Which evidently bore considerable fruit, too, owing to Augustine’s subsequent choice of a life of letters, becoming, as he put it, “a vendor of words,” a profession that would often lead to high office in the imperial state. But it was not to be. God stepped in, redirecting his life in a most dramatic way. And so, if the first half of Augustine’s life was spent amid the remnants of a Greek and Roman world, the latter half was destined to be spent in the company of provincial Africans, to whom he would unravel the mysteries of a shared faith, while launching crusades against heretics and schismatics bent on undermining that common faith.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Thus, catapulted into a wholly new world—that of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Roman Church—where he would spend the balance of his life as a bishop and theologian, Augustine found himself no longer a member of a pagan empire, whose frontier ran from the North of England to Persia and the Sahara, but a citizen of Eternity, whose frontier is bound by neither space nor time. “For here we have no lasting city,” the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, “but we seek the city which is to come” (13:14).
Now, the chasm Augustine faced between Christ and a culture pervasively pagan was not wholly unfamiliar to him who, in his own family, felt much the same conflict and tension. The Church may have been everywhere, but the life of the elites, of the actual governing classes, remained stubbornly resistant to its solicitations. And while, in the end, his pagan father consented to be baptized, it wasn’t until he lay dying that he actually made up his mind to do so, no doubt moved by the ardent prayers of his wife, Monica—who was no less assiduous in persuading her errant son to come home to Rome, weeping a great many tears along the way. She was utterly convinced that, as Augustine himself tells us in The Confessions, “the son of such tears could not be lost.”
Once Augustine had resolved to embrace the True Faith, both mind and heart were given over entirely to God, and to whatever tasks Holy Church had in mind for him to do. But first he and a few kindred souls needed to retire for a time, sequestering themselves in the country for a life of prayer and study. Awaiting the baptismal waters, he needed time, he felt, to habituate oneself to a new life. Christianity, after all, is not a set of propositions we simply give inward assent to, but a Way.
The decisive factor, therefore, was not the idea only but the journey, the life in which both the I and the we are joined at the hip. We go together to God or we do not go at all. That is because, for us, the profoundest possible point of contact, of communion with the Uncreated God, is not the solitary self, alone with the alone, but the self freely moving in communion and solidarity with other selves. If it is not well for God to be alone, as Chesterton would say, why should it be any different for us who are made in His image, which is that of a family, a community of persons?
This was the great discovery to which Augustine was led by the promptings of God’s grace, nowhere more tellingly set down than in Book VIII of his Confessions. There he recounts the example of his near contemporary, the philosopher Marius Victorinus, who despite long insistence on having already intuited the essentials of Christianity, thus refusing membership on the grounds that it was a mere fifth wheel, nevertheless came round at last, shaking Augustine to the core.
“Like many educated people both then and now,” comments Joseph Ratzinger in an acute analysis of the episode from his book Introduction to Christianity, “he saw the Church as Platonism for the people, something of which he as a full-blown Platonist had no need.” That such an intellectual superstar should actually bend the knee in order to profess the faith of ordinary men and women, submitting to the rite and discipline of baptism, helped move Augustine along the same path.
The great Platonist had come to understand that Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a way. The believers’ “We” is not a secondary addition for small minds; in a certain sense it is the matter itself…If Platonism provides an idea of the truth, Christian belief offers truth as a way, and only by becoming a way has it become man’s truth. Truth as mere perception, as mere idea, remains bereft of force; it only becomes man’s truth as a way which makes a claim upon him, which he can and must tread. [emphasis added]
It is not enough, in other words, merely to keep still, knowing that God alone matters. It was never God’s will that our connection with Him be an exercise in solipsism, shunning the company of others, as if solitude alone were the magic potion needed to stoke the mystic juices. Again, Ratzinger has nailed it: “Christian belief is not an idea but life; it is not mind existing for itself, but incarnation, mind in the body of history and its “we.”
It is not the mysticism of the self-identification of the mind with God, but obedience and service: the outstripping of oneself, liberation of the self precisely through its being taken into service by something not made or thought out by myself, the liberation of being taken into service for the whole.
It all comes down to the difference, as sharp and sundering as a blow to the head, between philosophy, which is what I think, and faith, which is what I receive. And it is only the mediation provided by that larger body—that is, the Church (totus Christus was the phrase Augustine loved)—that gives me the confidence of knowing that what I think is true. But then it is God Himself whom she gives me, whose very name is Truth, Logos. Indeed, it is she as both Bride and Mother—“younger than sin,” is how Bernanos puts it—who communicates the grace of God to us, becoming a river of such plenitude and richness as to overflow the banks every time.
“It is she who gave milk to our Bread,” exclaimed Augustine.
When I talk about her, I cannot stop.
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