The Impact of St. Augustine

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

Perhaps the first and most obvious thing to be said about St. Augustine, the span of whose life was close to eighty years—from A.D. 354 to 430—is that he was one of only a handful of truly foundational figures of the Christian West. Not only does he stand in the company of men like Benedict, who ignited a great monastic fire in the West, or Gregory the Great, who kept it blazing while caring for plague victims in a city overrun with barbarian tribes, but that, on the strength of his own accomplishments, which are too numerous to cite at the moment, he easily surpasses even these giants. The sheer impact of Augustine upon the life of the Church, of the emerging medieval world he had a hand in shaping, has never been equaled. 

So much of his thought, like that of St. Paul or St. John, has sunk so deeply into the consciousness of Christian thought and sensibility, the insights on which so much of our understanding of God and the world depend, that one is sometimes surprised to find that the source of all this overflowing wealth actually derives from him. After the writers of the New Testament, for instance, there is no other author cited as often as Augustine in the pages of the Second Vatican Council.  

Beginning in the late fourth and early fifth century when he lived and first became active as a bishop and theologian, creating a body of work that survives to this day, his presence was felt like a great leavening agent across Africa and Europe, elevating the life of man on so many fronts. Disputed fronts, too, which is why amid the convulsions of the 16th century, when Europe was tearing itself apart over disagreements of faith and works, both the heretics and the orthodox equally appealed to the authority of Augustine. 

And no sooner had that particular dust-up been settled, from the Catholic side at least, by the decrees issued at Trent, the Church in France found herself ravaged by the Jansenist scourge, whose adherents likewise seized upon Augustine to justify their excesses. Why this man should be at the center of so many storms, becoming a lightning rod among so many disputatious Christians, is a fascinating question. It is certainly one to which we will need to return in due course. 

At all events, merely to list his most salient achievements, to try and flesh out a few of the many implications of his thought, leaves one almost breathless from exhaustion. Beginning, of course, with the well-deserved honorific as the Church’s official Doctor of Grace, a title no higher than which may be conferred given the centrality of grace in the Christian life. Then, of course, there is the fact of his becoming patron and mentor to a number of religious orders, most prominent of which are the Dominicans, who trace their charism to the inspiration provided by his writings and the example of his life. 

And let us not forget the influence of his philosophy, which has given birth to an entire school of speculation bearing his name, to wit, Augustinianism. The chief characteristic of which is that it will not allow reason to corner the market on wisdom, but that the mind must, as Fr. Martin D’Arcy reminds us in a wonderful essay on Augustine, “be abetted, if not led, by love.” It is the chief gravitational force, as Augustine would never tire of telling us, whose attractions move the soul ever closer to God. Who, anticipating our ascent, launches the most daring descent in the event of Christ’s coming among us. 

Augustine, he adds, “does not admit the division of labor, the forced neutrality between philosophy and faith, desire and reason.” In other words, he does not place his faith inside a set of brackets, a veritable straightjacket, when taking up the tools of philosophy. “His own wisdom,” concludes Fr. D’Arcy, “if it is to be worth anything, must be a scintilla of the Wisdom of God.

This explains why he begins philosophy with a somewhat surprising postulate. The object of philosophy being truth, it is usually assumed by students that one must begin with reason and reason unaided. No, says St. Augustine, with a glance at his past, one should begin with faith. “If you cannot understand, believe in order that you may understand.”

In short, one must first stand upon the secure ground of God’s saving Word, revealed in the unmistakable flesh of Jesus Christ, before one can understand. And only owing to that “glance at his past,” the deliberate peeling away of memories to tell the story of his life, does Augustine jumpstart the need for faith, for God. The finding of God cannot really commence until the inward search has begun, the exploration of his own divided self. “And being thus admonished,” he tells us in the Confessions, “to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, you being my guide: And able I was,” he continues, “for you had become my helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul, such as it was, above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the Light Unchangeable.”  

It is the only way to read Augustine, to reach into the heart of his life. Once the reader recognizes that both the philosophy and the life are of a piece, that the most intimate details of the one, under the aspect of grace, move seamlessly into the other, the meaning of everything becomes clear. It is the endpoint. 

And for Augustine, of course, to know the truth of himself, that he was made for God and that without him all is naught, that became the driving force of his life. Not just to know the truth, mind you, but to feast upon it; only that will bring lasting happiness to the soul. “Think you that wisdom is other than truth, in which the supreme good is beheld and possessed?” he asks in his treatise “On the Freedom of the Will.”  “Here then is truth; embrace it if you can, and enjoy it and rejoice in God and he will give you the desires of your heart…”

On what then does a man’s happiness finally depend? For Augustine, the answer is simple. Life is made happy, fulfillment found, when there is “joy in truth itself: for this is a joying in thee, who art the truth, O God, health of my countenance, my God.” In this lyric burst of praise, we see how philosophy, Augustine’s unflagging pursuit of wisdom, passes almost imperceptibly into God, to the Word who is God:

Truth is immortal; truth is unchanging; truth is that Word of whom it is said: “In the beginning was the Word.”