The Conversion of St. Augustine of Hippo
The Conversion of St. Augustine of Hippo
Apostolic Letter of John Paul II
The Conversion of St. Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo (Augustinum Hipponesm) by Pope John Paul II
II
I have dealt at some length with the essential points of the conversion of Augustine, because they offer so much useful teachings, not only for believers, but for all men and women of good will: they teach how easy it is to go astray on the path of life, and how difficult it is to rediscover the way of truth. But this wonderful conversion also helps us to understand better his life afterwards as monk, priest and bishop who always remained the great man who had been struck by the lightning-flash of grace: "You had shot at our heart with the arrow of Your love, and we bore Your words transfixed in our breast."[66] Above all, the conversion helps us to penetrate more easily into his thought, which was so universal and profound that it rendered incomparable and imperishable service to Christian thought, so that we have good reason to call him the common father of Christian Europe.
The hidden force of his tireless search was assuredly the same force that had guided him on the path of his conversion: love for the truth. He himself indeed says: What does the soul desire more strongly than the truth?"[67] In a work of lofty theological and mystical speculation, written more out of personal need than for external requirements, he recalls this love and writes: "We are caught up by the love of seeking out the truth."[68] This time, the object of the search is the august mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of Christ, the Father's revelation, "knowledge and wisdom" of the human person: thus was born the great work On the Trinity.
Two coordinates guided the research, which was unceasingly nourished by love: the deepening of the Catholic faith and its defense against those who denied it, such as the Manichaeans and the pagans, or who interpreted it erroneously, such as the Donatists, the Pelagians and the Arians. It is difficult to venture forth upon the sea of Augustine's thought, and even more difficult to summarize it—this indeed is almost impossible. I may however be permitted to recall some illuminating insights of this mighty thinker, for the edification of all.
1. Reason and faith
First of all, there is the problem that occupied him most in his youth and to which he returned with all the force of genius and the passion of his spirit: the problem of the relationship between reason and faith. This is a perennial problem, no less acute today than yesterday, and the direction taken by human thought depends on its solution. It is a difficult problem, however, because one must pass safely between two extremes, between the fideism that despises reason and the rationalism that excludes faith.
Augustine's intellectual and pastoral endeavor aimed to show, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "since we are impelled by a twin pull of gravity to learn,"[69] both forces, reason and faith, must work together.
He always listened to what faith had to say, but he exalted reason no less, giving each its own primacy in time of importance.[70] He told all, "Believe that you may understand," but he repeated also, "Understand that you may believe."[71] He wrote a work, perennially relevant, on the usefulness of faith,[72] and explained that faith is the medicine designed to heal the eye of the spirit,[73] the unconquerable fortress for the defense of all, especially of the weak, against error,[74] the nest in which we receive the wings for the lofty flights of the spirit,[75] the short path that permits one to know, quickly, surely and without errors, the truths which lead the human person to wisdom.[76] He also emphasizes that faith is never without reason, because it is reason that shows "in what one should believe."[77] "For faith has its own eyes, by means of which it sees in a certain manner that what it does not yet see is true."[78] Therefore "no one believes anything, unless he has first thought that it is to be believed," because "to believe is itself nothing other than to think with assent . . . if faith is not' thought through, it is no faith."[79]
The outcome of the discourse on the eyes of faith is the discourse on credibility, of which Augustine often speaks, adducing the reasons for credibility as if to confirm the consciousness with which he himself had returned to the Catholic faith. It is good to listen to one of these texts: "There are many things that most properly keep me in the bosom of the Catholic Church; to say nothing of the most genuine wisdom . . . let me therefore omit mention of this wisdom" (for this argument, which for Augustine was extremely strong, was not accepted by his opponents). "The consensus of peoples and races keeps me in the Church, as does the authority based on miracles, nourished by hope, increased by charity, strengthened by its ancient character; likewise the succession of the priests, from the very see of the apostle Peter, to whom the Lord entrusted the care of His sheep after the resurrection, down to the episcopate of today; finally, the very name of the Catholic Church keeps me in her, because it is not without reason that this Church alone has obtained such a name amid so many heresies."[80]
In the great work on the City of God, which is at once apologetic and dogmatic, the problem of reason and faith becomes that of faith and culture. Augustine, who did so much to establish and promote Christian culture, solves this problem by developing three main arguments: the faithful exposition of Christian doctrine; the careful salvaging of pagan culture, to the extent that it had elements capable of being salvaged (in the area of philosophy, this was no small amount); and the insistent demonstration of the presence in Christian teaching of whatever was true and perennially valid in pagan culture, with the advantage of finding it perfected and exalted there.[81] It was not for nothing that the City of God was widely read in the middle ages; and it greatly deserves to be read today as well, as an example and stimulus to deepen the encounter of Christianity with the cultures of the peoples. An important text of Augustine may be usefully quoted here: "The heavenly city ... draws citizens from all peoples ... taking no account of what is different in customs laws and institutions; ...she neither suppresses nor destroys anything of these, but rather preserves and fosters it. The diversities that may exist in the diverse nations work together for the single goal of earthly peace, unless they obstruct the practice of the religion that teaches the worship of the one, true and most high God."[82]
2. God and man
The other great word-pair which Augustine continuously studied is God and man. As I have said above, when he freed himself from the materialism which prevented him from having an exact concept of God—and hence the true concept of man—he made this word-pair the center of the great themes of his study,[83] and always studied the two together: man thinking of God, God thinking of man, who is His image.
In the Confessions, he asks himself these two questions: "What are You for me....What am I myself for You?"[84] He brings all the resources of His thought and all the unwearying labor of his apostolate to bear on the search for an answer to these questions. He is fully convinced of the ineffability of God, so that he cries out: "Why wonder that you do not understand? For if you understand, it is not God."[85] It follows that "it is no .... small beginning of the knowledge of God, if before we are able to know what He is, we already begin to know what He is not."[86] It is necessary therefore to strive "that we should thus know God, if we are able and as far as we are able, the one who is good without quality, great without quantity, the creator not bound by necessity," and thus going through all the categories of reality that Aristotle has described.[87]
Although God is transcendent and ineffable, Augustine is nevertheless able, starting from the self-awareness of the human person who knows that he exists and knows and loves, and encouraged by Sacred Scripture, which reveals God as the supreme Being (Ex 3:14), highest Wisdom (Wis, passim) and first Love (1 Jn 4:8), is able to illustrate this threefold notion of God: the Being from whom every being proceeds through creation from nothing, the Truth which enlightens the human mind so that it can know the truth with certainty, the Love that is the source and the goal of all true love. For God, as he so often repeats, is "the cause of what exists, the reason of thought and the ordering of living,[88] or, to use an equally famous formula, "the cause of the universe that has been created, and the light of the truth that is to be perceived, and the fountain from which happiness is to be drunk."[89]
But it was above all in studying the presence of God in the human person that Augustine used his genius. This presence is both profound and mysterious. He finds God as "the eternal internal,"[90] most secret and most present[91]—man seeks Him because he is absent, but knows Him and finds Him because He is present. God is present as "the creative substance of the world,"[92] as the truth that gives light,[93] as the love that attracts, [94] more intimate than what is most intimate in man, and higher than what is highest in him. Referring to the period before his conversion, Augustine says to God: "Where were You then for me, and how far away? And I was a wanderer far away from You.... But You were more internal than what was intimate in me, and higher than what was highest in me";[95] "You were with me, and I was not with You."[96] Indeed. he insists: "You were in front of me; but I had gone away from myself and did not find myself, much less find You."[97] Whoever does not find himself does not find God, because God is in the depths of each one of us.
The human person, accordingly, cannot understand himself except in relationship to God. Augustine found ever new expressions of this great truth, as he studied the relationship of man to God and stated this in the most varied and effective way. He sees the human person as a tension directed toward God; his words, "You have made us for yourself and our heart has no rest until it rests in You,"[98] are very well known.
He sees the human person as a capacity of existence elevated to the immediate vision of God, the finite who reaches the Infinite. He writes in the De Trinitate that man "is the image of the one whom he is capable of enjoying, and whose partner he can become."[99] This faculty "is in the soul of man, which is rational or intellectual ... immortally located in his immortality," and therefore the sign of his greatness: "he is a great nature, because he is capable of enjoying the highest nature and of becoming its partner."[100] He sees the human person also as a being in need of God, because he is in need of the happiness that he can find only in God. Human nature "has been created in such an excellent state that even although it is itself mutable, it reaches happiness by cleaving to the unchangeable good, that is, to God. Nor can it satisfy its need unless it is totally happy; and only God suffices to satisfy it."[101]
It is because of this basic relationship between man and God that Augustine continually exhorts men to the life of the spirit. "Go back into yourself; the truth dwells in the inner man; and if you discover that your nature is mutable, transcend yourself also,"[102] in order to find God, the source of the light that illuminates the mind. Together with the truth there is in the inner man the mysterious capacity to love, which is like a weight (in Augustine's celebrated metaphor)[103] that draws him out of himself, toward the others and especially toward the Other, i.e. God. The force of attraction exercised by love makes him social by his very nature,[104] so that. as Augustine writes "there is nothing so social by nature .... as the human race."[105] Man's interiority, where the inexhaustible riches of truth and love are stored, is "a great abyss,"[106] which St. Augustine never ceases to investigate with unfailing wonder.
Here we must add that, for one who reflects on himself and on history, the human person appears as a great problem—as Augustine says, a "great question."[107] Too many enigmas surround him: the enigma of death, of the profound division that he suffers in himself, of the incurable imbalance between what he is and what he desires. These enigmas can be synthesized in the fundamental enigma of the greatness of the human person and his incomparable wretchedness The Second Vatican Council spoke at length of these enigmas when it wished to cast light on the "mystery of the human person."[108] Augustine tackled these problems with passion and employed all the genius of his interest, not only to discover the reality, which is often very sad—if it is true that no one is more social by nature than the human person, it is no less true, adds the author of the City of God, taught by history, that "no one is more prone to discord by vice than the human race"[109]—but also and above all to seek and propose their solution. He finds only one solution, which had already appeared on the eve of his conversion: Christ, the Redeemer of man. I too have felt it necessary in my first Encyclical, called precisely Redemptor Hominis, to draw the attention of the Church's children and all of men and women of good will to this solution; I was happy to take up with my own voice the voice of all the Christian tradition.
As Augustine's thought penetrates these problems, it becomes more theological, while remaining fundamentally philosophical; and the word-pair Christ and Church, which he had at first denied and later recognized in his younger years, began to illuminate the more general word-pair of God and man.
Endnotes
67 Tractatus in Io 26, 5: PL 35, 1609.
68 De Trin. 1, 5, 8: PL 42, 825.
69 Contra Acad. 3, 20, 43: PL 32, 957.
70 Cf. De ordine 2, 9, 26: PL 32, 1007.
71 Cf. Serm. 43, 9: PL 38, 258.
72 Cf. De ultitate credendi PL 42, 65 -92.
73 Cf. Confess. 6, 4, 6: PL 32, 722: De serm Domini in monte 2, 3, 14: PL 34, 1275.
74 Cf. Ep. 118, 5, 32: PL 33, 447.
75 Cf. Serm. 51, 5, 6: PL 387, 337.
76 Cf. De quantitate animae 7, 12: PL 32, 1041 -1042.
77 De uera relig. 24, 45: PL 34, 1041 -1042.
78 Ep. 120, 2, 8: PL 33, 456.
79 De praed. sanctorum 2, 5: PL 44, 962 -963.
80 Contra ep. Man. 4, 5: PL 42, 175.
81 Cf. Eg. De civ. Dei 2, 29, 1 -2: PL 41, 77 -78.
82 De civ. Dei 19, 17: PL 41, 645
83 Cf. Solil. 1, 2, 7: PL 32, 872.
84 Confess. 1, 5, 5: PL 32, 663.
85 Serm. 117, 5: PL 38, 673.
86 Ep. 120.3.15: PL 33, 459.
87 De Trin. 5, 1, 2: PL 42. 912; cf. Confess. 4, 16, 28: PL 32; 704.
88 De civ. Dei 8, 4: PL 41, 228.
89 De civ. Dei 8, 10, 2: PL 41, 235.
90 Confess. 9, 4, 10: PL 32, 768.
91 Cf. Confess. 1, 4, 4: PL 32, 662.
92 Ep. 187, 4, 14: PL 33, 837.
93 Cf. De magistro 11, 38 -14, 46: PL 32, 1215 -1220.
94 Cf. Confess. 13, 9, 10 PL 32, 848 -849.
95 Confess. 3, 6, 11: PL 32, 687 -688.
96 Confess. 10, 27, 38: PL 32, 795.
97 Confess. 5, 2, 2: PL 32, 707.
98 Confess 1, 1, 1: PL 32, 661.
99 De Trin. 14, 8, 11: PL 12, 1044.
100 De Trin. 14, 4, 6: PL 42, 1040.
101 De civ. Dei 12, 1, 3: PL 41, 349. 18
102 De uera relig. 39, 72: PL 34, 154.
103 Cf. Confess 13, 9, 10: PL 32, 848-849.
104 Cf. De bono coniugali 1, 1: PL 40, 373.
105 De civ. Dei 12, 27: PL 41, 376.
106 Confess. 4, 14, 22: PL 32, 702,
107 Confess. 4. 4. 9: PL 32, 697.
108 Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes. n. 10, cf. nn. 12-18.
109 De civ. Dei 12, 27: PL 41, 376.
