Transcending the World

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

Part of the continuing fascination of Augustine for people who know almost nothing of the period in which he lived, whose own time and place seem so completely removed from the corruptions of late antiquity that for them Augustine might as well have come from another planet, is the fact that here was a man whose conversion seemed to carry him quite beyond every time and place. Almost as if, in the words of T.S. Eliot: 

Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion…                                

But, of course, it does matter, which is why the effort to enter into the world of Augustine is worth making despite the imaginative stretch required to do so. But, then, is it really so far from our own time and place? Glenn Olsen, who has long been an authority on the subject, writes: 

The world of late ancient and early medieval Christianity seems so obviously remote from ours, so obviously lost to us, that it hardly occurs to us that we might sit at its feet and learn. “What has a world overrun by barbarians in which illiteracy seems to increase daily have to do with us?” we ask, only to have the question freeze in our throats.

The barbarism of the past is not behind us, buried away in long forgotten cisterns, which we’ve proven ourselves clever enough to climb out of; it is beneath and within us, threatening to break out at any time. We live amid the complete absence of standards, concerning which no higher appeal can be made. That’s because there is no “higher”; everything’s gone flat as a map. How did Herr Nietzsche put it? “Something came along with a sponge and wiped away the horizon.” 

Barbarism is what happens when the horizon falls away and suddenly whole peoples have lost the plot, their directional compass no longer pointing due north; when the pilot light goes out and nobody notices how dark it’s become. They’re too busy preening themselves on how virtuous they’ve grown. And so they rush to enshrine things like the right to kill babies before birth, while congratulating themselves on being so much more civilized than, say, the Canaanites, whose worship of Moloch required only that they sacrifice their firstborn.  

So, maybe we’re a lot closer to the Age of Augustine than we thought. Of course, the moment we get there, poking our way through the shards of a pagan world imploding before our very eyes, we will see that Augustine, for all that he’s immersed in that disintegrating world, has at the same time quite succeeded in transcending it—thanks to the grace of a conversion that will literally lift him above circumstance. 

“He was a man withdrawn from the commotion around him,” writes Malcolm Muggeridge.  “Despite his great fame and involvement in his troubled times, he was somehow isolated, as though in his own inner sanctity he had achieved the monastic life he so longed for.”

Saints are like that, one must suppose. They experience a kind of serene detachment, “a cloistral seclusion,” to borrow a phrase applied to another saint, Thomas Aquinas, by the philosopher Josef Pieper, who likewise needed “to construct a cell for contemplation within the self to be carried about through the hurly-burly of the vita activa of teaching and of intellectual disputation.” A high level of detachment, as it were, to free the soul for that intensity of attention which only the truly recollected possess.

Alas, not a virtue much thought of these days, much less practiced owing to the numberless distractions by which we’ve allowed ourselves to be surrounded. Co-opted, actually. Leaving, for most of us, in the language of T.S. Eliot, 

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces 
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning…

That was not a problem Augustine faced, having managed, with not a few extra dollops of grace, to rise sublimely above it all. As we must all strive to do if we’re to conquer the self-centered self, besieged by constant importunities to feed and gratify itself. These are people who lack all sense of recollection, having no living center from which to look out upon a world vying for their attention. It is a condition Pascal famously described in the Pensees, consisting of an incapacity to stay silent in one’s own room. “All human evil,” he tells us, “comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.” One must always remain in motion, always doing something.

The point is—and while Christians were not alone in making it, many high-minded pagans having first embarked upon that high road—it was uniquely due to the quickening effects of the Christian Gospel that the point was given supernatural validation, elevated onto the plane of grace and glory. And the point is this, that there can be no truly noble or generous or splendid achievement in this world unless there be men who dare to believe that there is something beyond this world, who thereby refuse to submit merely to the vicissitudes of the workaday world but train themselves to hear the call of God beckoning them to a life of sheer limitless grandeur and joy.

Augustine heard that call. So, too, did Aristotle before him, and Aquinas after, each calling it “the jewel of all the virtues.” It is called magnanimity, which is the virtue we assign to that persisting desire of the heart to achieve greatness, to aspire after the highest thing of all and never to settle for less than its perfect and unending possession. Against which stand all the small-minded mediocrities, people who are always at their best, never tempted in the least to answer the call to greatness. “There are certain things,” writes Le Bruyere, “in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence.” And, one would insist on adding, the human adventure itself. 

“A person is magnanimous,” writes Pieper in his little book On Hope, “if he has the courage to seek what is great and becomes worthy of it.” Indeed, who resolves always and everywhere to set out with unvanquishable heart to realize the greatest possible good of all, namely, God. 

It was the defining theme of Augustine’s life, the very linchpin of his identity as pilgrim, priest, and bishop. We will enlarge upon these matters in the next article.