st. augustine--10/1/24

01 Oct 2024

st. augustine--10/1/24

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection--from The First Thousand Years by Robert Louis Wilken. Some consider Augustine of Hippo the preeminent intellect of the first millennium:

“It is a conspicuous, if seldom noted, historical detail that during the first millennium of Christian history the Church attracted many of the most gifted thinkers in the ancient world. The parade of luminaries is impressive: Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, and of course the four Latin doctores ecclesiae (teachers of the Church), Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great. Yet Augustine towers above all. It is not hyperbolic to say that during his lifetime he was the most intelligent man in the Mediterranean world. From the time of Plato and Aristotle, the great philosophers of ancient Greece, across more than fifteen centuries until Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages, he has no equal.

“Augustine surpasses measurement. More than any other Christian author in the early centuries, he is a world. He lived very long, seventy-six years, and wrote more profusely and thought more profoundly than any other early Christian, and his vigorous intelligence and fertile imagination moved across a much larger canvas. The steady flow of his thought passed through all the great questions pondered by thoughtful men and women in antiquity: freedom and determinism, how does one know, what is the highest good (summum bonum), what makes human beings unique, what kind of a being is God, how did the world come to be, how does one account for evil, what is the place of the affections in the virtuous life. He pondered two of the most mysterious and elusive aspects of human experience, memory and time.

“Augustine also dealt with new questions prompted by the coming of Christ and the emergence of a new kind of community, the Church: the reliability of the biblical writings, the nature of biblical language, allegory and the interpretation of the Scriptures, history and faith, revelation and reason, sin and grace, predestination, God as triune, love, the sacraments, the Church and political power.

“He penned one of the most quoted lines of all times: Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiesca in te. ‘You have made us for yourself, Oh Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’ He wrote expositions of the Bible and sermons (on all 150 psalms), a massive work in defense of Christianity (The City of God), philosophical essays (on free will, the immortality of the soul), catechetical and educational treatises (Christian Teaching), doctrinal expositions and polemical tracts, an introspective account of his own conversion written as a prayer to God (the Confessions) , hundreds of letters ( plus some found only two decades ago).

“In his last years Augustine even wrote a book called Retractationes, or second thoughts, a reassessment of his writings, book by book. Unlike conventional philosophers, artists, and politicians today who write self-serving autobiographies, Augustine knew that he was a great man, a towering figure whose many writings would be quarried to support all sorts of opinion. In writing the Reconsiderations he wanted future readers to know why he had written each book and to ward off the inevitable misunderstandings that would follow.

Saint Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645

“His writings reveal a person with deep empathy for the suffering of his fellow human beings. ‘The attitudes and movements of the body, when they are graceful and harmonious, are reckoned among the primary gifts of nature. But what if some illness makes the limbs shake and tremble? What if a man's spine is so curved as to bring his hands to the ground, turning the man into a virtual quadruped? Will not this destroy all beauty and grace of body whether in repose or in motion?’

“Although he is revered as a saint of the Church, Augustine was a man made of flesh, not of marble. His letters and books, many of which speak vividly of his feelings, give us a sharper picture of Augustine as a human being than anyone from antiquity. Chastened by experience, his thinking has a hard-won clarity. He wrote knowingly of the unpredictable and ungovernable desires that break through the order and conventions of human life.

“He was a practiced, seductive Latin stylist. Every word fits flush, and even in English his sentences captivate and beguile the reader, as in this passage from the Confessions.

“'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me and I was not with you ... You called and cried out and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.'

“In reading Augustine it is hard to keep one's distance. His words soar off the page to sink into the soul of the reader, moving the affections as well as stirring the intellect.

“Augustine was born in 354 in the small city of Thagaste, sixty miles from the Mediterranean in the Roman province of Numidia (Algeria), in North Africa. His mother, Monica, was a devout Christian, but his father Patricius had interest only in his son's education and advancement. Though his parents were not wealthy, thanks to the generosity of a local dignitary, a friend of his father, Augustine received a solid grounding in Latin grammar and rhetoric, one of the few paths that led to a better life for a young man from a small provincial town.

“When he was seventeen he continued his education in the bustling city of Carthage (near present-day Tunis in Tunisia) on the Mediterranean coast. During his years there he took a common-law wife and had a son by her, Adeodarus (given by God). At nineteen he became a ‘hearer’ of the Manichaeans, a dualistic sect that attracted clever, intelligent young men. Over time he grew weary of their intellectualism and disillusioned with the kind of disciples they attracted. Still, during his twenties he remained a hearer for nine years.

“From Carthage Augustine moved to Rome, where he taught rhetoric. But then in 384, when he was thirty years old, he was offered a position in Milan, at the time a more important city than Rome and the residence of the emperor in the West. At Milan he came to know the bishop, Ambrose, whose dazzling command of Latin rhetoric made a deep impression on him. He also learned from Ambrose how to read the Bible. Through Ambrose and the examples of others, notably the philosopher Victorinus, and the prayers and entreaties of his mother, Augustine became a catechumen and was baptized by Ambrose at Easter, 387.

“While preparing to sail back to North Africa, his mother Monica died in Ostia, the seaport of Rome. One of the most affecting passages in his Confessions is the account of her death. At first Augustine held back his tears, because he did not think it right to pour out ‘tearful dirges and lamentations’ for a devout Christian woman whose faith was ‘unfeigned’ (1 Timothy I:5) . But after a restful night he wrote that he was ‘glad to weep before you [God] about her and for her, about myself and for myself. Now I let flow the tears which I had held back so that they ran as freely as they wished. My heart rested upon them, and it reclined upon them because it was your ears that were there, not those of some human critic .... And now, Lord, I make my confession to you in writing. Let anyone who wishes read and interpret as he pleased. If he finds fault that I wept for my mother for a fraction of an hour, the mother who had died before my eyes who had wept for me that I might live before your eyes, let him not mock me but rather, if a person of much charity, let him weep himself before you for my sins.'"