Augustine of Hippo, the Saint

From my January 2013 Hall of Men toast

“You are great, Lord, and greatly to be praised. Your power is great, and your wisdom can’t be numbered. Humans wish to praise you—humans, a portion of your creation, who carry around their mortality, who carry around the testimony of their sin and that “God opposes the proud.” Even so, humans, a portion of your creation, wish to praise you. You excite us to pleasure in praising you, because you made us for yourself! Our hearts are restless till they find rest in you.” – Confessions, 1.1

William Jurgens said in his three-volume conglomeration on the writings of the Church Fathers that “if we were faced with the unlikely proposition of having to destroy completely either the works of Augustine or the works of all the other Fathers and Writers, I have little doubt that all the others would have to be sacrificed. Augustine must remain.” Name another man since the Apostles who has had more influence than St. Augustine. Men like Boethius, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Newman, Tolkien, Lewis, Balthasar, Wojtyla and Ratzinger were all deeply influenced by him. He wrote the first known autobiography, the first history of the world and set the tone for medieval Christian thought and all of Western thought. His explanation of time is still compelling. His ideas of Just War are used as the standard today. He is known as the Doctor of Grace for his myriad of treatise on the subject. At least two of his works are consistently listed among the greatest books of all time. No great thinker can ignore this African bishop from antiquity and come away having any idea what it means to be a man of the West. We all see world through the lens of Augustine.

There was definitely a problem, for me, with the idea of toasting such a man. We could easily spend a couple hours talking about all of St. Augustine’s deeds. His works are like the abundance of fruit on a healthy tree. And we could, since we have both Catholics and Protestants present, delve into a lengthy polemical discussion about whose tradition should be used to interpret Augustine. Also, there might not be anything about this man that I will say tonight that you did not already know. It was a little vexing at first knowing that some of you might know more about him than myself. I am no Augustine expert, even though he is my patron saint and my Sacramental Name is Daniel David Augustine McNight.

I think I have a solution for myself. We’re not here to necessarily learn something new about these men–if we do, that’s gravy. Chiefly, we’re here to honor these men. I am here to be a herald for a man who wholly deserves to mentioned among these other great men. But if we are here to celebrate the man Augustine, the man, I think we must dig deeper. What makes Augustine great is not his immense intelligence or his beautiful rhetoric. Sure he’s a genius, but so was Niccolo Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche and John-Paul Sartre. Those men will never be on this wall. We must find the essence of St. Augustine or the truth about him, his being, rather than just his deeds, or maybe more accurately, what informs his deeds.

I want to focus on three expressions which I think, at least in my mind, encapsulate him fairly well. There are this: he is a seeker, a fighter and a lover. This is how I see him. We know of him being a seeker first of all because of his long search for Truth, first as a Gnostic and then once becoming a Christian, seeking understanding and wisdom in the bosom of Truth. As a fighter we see him first opposing the chief Manichee and then, as a bishop, practically every single heretic, demagogue and liar in his diocese. He could not resist to give an account to the Truth of Jesus Christ. He never backed down. His body of work is a testament to this. As a lover, we know this side of him first imperfectly, or more properly, pervertedly, as a playboy, and then completely as a celibate priest in a fulfilling relationship with the Triune God. You see the opposite ends of the spectrum–embracing a lie and then embracing truth, but he never stopped being a seeker, fighter and a lover throughout. These expressions of him were made perfect, in a sense, by something else. Something even more central.

Many men are seekers, fighters and lovers. What makes Augustine who he is, a man of near mythic proportions, is much simpler than just being a seeker, a fighter and a lover, but at the same time, it goes way beyond. I will say that we could have very easily never heard of him had he stayed a Gnostic Manichee. He could have been a phantom in the night–destined for eternal obscurity as he gallivanted around the empire seeking to quench his restlessness in the embrace of lust. No one would plunge the depths of the mind of this last ancient and first medievalist if he died saying “Lord grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” His life would have been a shadow and a dream had he not met the one lover he was trying to avoid his whole life. We would have never known of his tenacity if he had not allowed himself to be defeated. He was close to being a waste, not because of the loss of talent, but because of loss of being truly human. What makes Augustine truly great, is the same that can make us great. And at the deepest level, it is not a what, but a who. No, the who is not us, but we are required nonetheless. Catholic writer Leon Bloy said that “There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.”

What does it mean to be a saint? Let’s tease this out. A saint starts with this: “God exists. I am not God.” If you are to become saint you must, as the Temple at Dephi says, “Know Thyself”. The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that the saint knows he is a sinner. As Peter Kreeft says: “A saint's heart is broken by every little sorrow and sin. A saint's heart is also so strong that not even death can break it. It is indestructible because it's so breakable.” Reality is transparent. To fully know oneself is to know God, not to know about God, but to be lost in him–to turn all attention and praise to him. As a spouse praises his lover, so too does the saint to God. A saint is the bride of Christ, totally and perfectly dependent on him for everything and yet at the same time, totally independent: detached from all the cares of this world. That allows the saint to participate in the sufferings of Christ. “If you lose your life for my sake, you will find it.” Augustine says “God has only one Son on earth who never sinned, but never one without suffering.”  Suffering with purpose–sacrifice. With sacrifice, we move beyond the “individual”, for we exist for another. The fullness of personhood lies in love for others. As Christ lay dying on the Cross the totality of his existence for others was made manifest. He opened himself up to us as the way to salvation and in partaking of the divine nature of God. Augustine says, echoing the Fathers, "'For He hath given them power to become the sons of God.' If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods." But how can this happen other than being one with Christ? The Apostle says, “I am crucified with Christ, yet not I, but Christ who lives in me.” So to answer the question to be a saint and the answer to what can make us truly great is to be another. It is to be Jesus. Augustine writes:

Let us rejoice then and give thanks that we have become not only Christians, but Christ himself. Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God's grace toward us? Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man... The fullness of Christ then is the head and the members.

But in the end a saint is most wholly himself, for Jesus was the most human of humans. Participation in Christ is to be fully human. For the saint, there is no higher purpose than total surrender to Christ in Christ. Augustine knew the cost of surrender to God. In his Confessions in Book 8, being cut to the heart by the by a messenger from God on this very issue of total surrender, he rushes out to his little garden to breathe. He leaves his friend Alypius to weep in solitude and his physical strength gives way:

I cast myself down I know not how, under a certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the floods of mine eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to Thee. And, not indeed in these words, yet to this purpose, spake I much unto Thee: and Thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord, wilt Thou be angry for ever? Remember not our former iniquities, for I felt that I was held by them. I sent up these sorrowful words: How long, how long, "tomorrow, and tomorrow?" Why not now? why not is there this hour an end to my uncleanness?

So was I speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, "Take up and read; Take up and read." Instantly, my countenance altered, I began to think most intently whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find... Eagerly then I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence. No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.

So who is Augustine? Look at the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Who is Jesus Christ? Look at all his Saints among whom is Augustine. He reveals himself in the lives of those who know him. Our honored man was made St. Augustine by being made Christ. I have heard it explained that Augustine is like a child and God is a lake. The child is so much in love with the water, that he runs full steam and jumps off the pier, plunging straight into the heart of the lake–enjoying it for what it is and giving little thought as to ever getting out. Remember the opening paragraph of his Confessions. He has found himself by having totally lost himself in God.