Augustine Our Contemporary.

Augustine still sheds light in all directions.

I was asked recently to review a report on the decennial Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference, which met in the summer of 1998. This particular conference was especially important for Christians in the Episcopal Church for two reasons: first, Lambeth, while not canonically authoritative anywhere, is looked to by the entire religious world as an expression of Anglican ethos, spirituality, and faith; second, Lambeth 98 was one of the few such conferences which expressed divisive, controversial views. The controversial subject involved sexuality, specifically the question of gay marriages (and gay ordination). Most Western bishops favored the latter, but a majority of conference members, from "Two-thirds World" regions of the Anglican communion, looked to the book of Leviticus and condemned any such thought.

My task was not simply to review the report, but to respond, and that involved providing some sort of theological, ethical, and spiritual context. I found myself referring to Richard Hooker, to Kant and Hume, to St. Paul -- and to St. Augustine. On the issue of morality and ordination, Augustine seemed to sum up, to settle the matter, and to say things perfectly.

Augustine often exhibits this quality of indispensability. He seems to shed light in any direction: ethical, theological, devotional and spiritual, philosophical, practical. He appears throughout the Roman Breviary and the Anglican Prayer Book. Protestants claim him as the key to theological liberation, while Roman Catholics claim him as the source and substance for everything Thomas Aquinas reasoned through seven centuries later. I could not avoid him when pursuing doctoral studies in Old English literature, so enormously had he influenced early Medieval Western thought and art (and as I was writing my dissertation, the novelist Anthony Burgess published a novel based on Augustine's adventures against the Pelagians). I have done two close studies of Augustine -- one, of his conferences written shortly after his baptism; the other, of his late and extraordinary theological study, On the Trinity. I cannot avoid him now, as a parish priest, since his simple injunction to "become what you are" so powerfully and paradoxically expresses our relationship to our baptismal vows.

This has been my personal experience with the thought of Augustine. I could guess that this is simply a matter of my finding him especially resonant or useful, but two recent books suggest otherwise. Past Masters, a series of small introductions to the great minds sponsored by Oxford University Press, includes him, in a solid little book by Henry Chadwick, as one of the very, very few theologians thought worthy of inclusion (you will not find Anselm there, nor Irenaeus, though they are arguably more original and influential than Augustine, nor will you find any modern theologian). More recently, Penguin Books, inaugurating a similar project, Penguin Lives, produced, as its first offering, an incisive and balanced study of Augustine by Garry Wills, which was reviewed in Time magazine. I doubt that even Wills, one of the few serious intellectuals in the world who has anything like a popular following, could have commanded a review in such a public journal had he written on, say, John of Damascus or even Aquina s.

What is it, then, about Augustine that makes him so useful, so relevant? What gives this orthodox, catholic theologian, so firmly embraced by Christian tradition, relevance in an era which seems to be witnessing the dissolution of that tradition? How does a fourth-century bishop, in a relatively obscure cure (as Wills points out, he was merely one among many North African bishops at the time, and his see, Hippo, was by no means especially eminent), speak to the twenty-first century? What makes Augustine our contemporary?

My first suggestion is simple but not obvious: Augustine's era mirrors our own -- more than any subsequent era -- and that alone gives his thought a particular usefulness for us. I realize this claim has been made for various historic periods, but I am convinced that the age of anxiety which the fourth and fifth centuries of the common era witnessed offers our most complete, valid, and instructive historical precedent. The world of the late Roman Empire knew the tremendous advantages of a colossal network of transportation and communication, of advanced technological achievement, of internationalism, and of cultural, intellectual, and theological pluralism. It also experienced the concomitant disadvantages of a dislocation of values, internecine warfare and random violence, political corruption and revolution, ethnic and racial tensions, new disease, and existential despair. This is Augustine's context, and it is also ours; we understand that world in a way our more immediate forbears could not possibly.

Thus we find Augustine speaking to us with a relevance that can seem almost startling. The City of God, his most famous and influential work, is replete with this quality. Augustine does not write theoretically and hypothetically here; he responds to the moral and theological concerns of a world racked by pillage and destruction, random and chaotic violence, mutilation and murder. His parenthetical advice to victims of rape, indeed, runs like a leitmotiv throughout the initial chapters. Its basic theme is theodicy: justification of the ways of God to humankind, attempts to answer the question of innocent suffering. Augustine knew that serious inquirers in the early fifth century would demand this of a philosophical theologian, and we who have closed the twentieth century make the same demand. He writes, Augustine says, "first, because many are disturbed in mind when they observe how, in the daily round of life, God's gifts and man's brutalities oftentimes fall indifferently and indiscriminately to the lot of both the good and the bad," [1] and the entire work, with its very careful and detailed vision of history theologically interpreted, is his response to that disturbance. We may not accept every argument he marshals -- "by the same fire gold gleams and straw smokes" -- but the overarching thesis, that happiness is the product of meaningful existence, not of pleasant happenstance, and its corollary, that suffering can be accepted with dignity when necessary rather than resented and feared, must remain compelling.

Compelling for all serious thinkers, not just for fellow theists. Augustine wrote for agnostics and nihilists, for thoughtful classical conservatives demanding a return to pagan values and pagan gods, for disciples of any of the bewildering variety of philosophical schools and sects that flourished in the late empire, for rival religionists, as well as for practicing Christians. This gives his work a philosophical integrity lacking in many subsequent theologians, who wrote within a strictly Christian context for a specifically Christian readership. Consider for example his reflections on time and creation. In contrast to many Christian thinkers, who sought to establish a history of creation and offer a time scale, Augustine offers a relativistic argument:

[ldots]what is made in time is made after one period of time and before another, namely, after a past and before a future time. But, there could have been no past time, since there was nothing created by whose movements and change time could be measured. The fact is that the world was made simultaneously with time, if, with creation, motion and change began.[ldots](XI.6, 202)

We, who have been taught to understand time in quite similar philosophical language, read this not only with understanding but with sympathy -- it resonates with us. We respond similarly to his almost offhand treatment of the biblical "days" of creation: "it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to think--let alone explain in words--what they mean."

Second, Augustine exhibits an interiority, an emphasis on the reality of the inner life, the adventures of the mind, which is on the one hand the culmination of both his platonic heritage and his biblical tradition, yet on the other hand very familiar for us, heirs of modern psychology and modern literature. The most obvious example of course is the Confessions, an unprecedented account of the inner life, which traces the subtlest motions of thought, will, and feeling. Consider the famous episode of the theft of the pears:

If the crime of theft which I committed that night as a boy of sixteen were a living thing, I could speak to it and ask what it was that.[ldots]I loved in it. It had no beauty because it was a robbery. It is true that the pears we stole had beauty[ldots], but it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. If any part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavour. [2]

This sort of introspection is unprecedented. Augustine subjects not only his reasoning, his processes of thought, but, as we see in even this short passage, his feelings and the movements of his will to a microscopic recollection and analysis (the work is also rich with many classic passages of simple tenderness and authenticity of feeling). It was to prove enormously helpful for countless Christians making an examen of conscience over the centuries, but we are especially familiar with this sort of thing. In this, Augustine's modern intellectual descendants were Freud on the one hand and Joyce and Proust on the other.

The Confessions is, moreover, merely the best-known example of Augustine's work in this mode. Many of his hundreds of surviving works exhibit the same reflexive interiority. Most striking perhaps is the De Trinitate, which he began at the turn of the fifth century. This fifteen-volume work is his most theologically innovative, for in it he uses the same sort of introspection he had used in the Confessions to prove, not the existence of God, but the existence of the trinitarian, Christian God. Augustine leads the reader through a slow, inward spiraling tour of his own consciousness, or of the human mind, and claims that, along the way, we find a triune dynamic of mind which suggests the imprint of the trinity as surely as the design of the heavens suggests a divine designer. Here Augustine certainly stands out from the tradition, which almost always regards the trinitarian aspect of God as the exclusive province of revealed theology. Historically, moreover, I sense that there has always been a certain uneasin ess associated with this particular work. Yet its very theological inwardness makes it particularly attractive in our theologically ecumenical age.

The third aspect of Augustine's work which commends him to us is actually one he shared with many Christian writers who preceded him -- but few who followed. It can be approached through this question: what was Augustine? Was he a philosopher or theologian or teacher within the spiritual tradition? Are his books intellectual exercises, or doctrinal, or devotional? Is his primary concern the existence or nature of God, or ethics, or ontology, or epistemology, or morals, or history? The answer, of course, is all of these. Augustine is the only figure who appears substantially in Louis Bouyer's comprehensive history of Christian spirituality, in Frederick Copleston's comprehensive history of philosophy, in Jaroslav Pelikan's history of theology, and even in Eric Auerbach's classic literary essay, Mimesis.

This is not merely a matter of a single person's interest in a number of areas. Augustine combines these disciplines in each of his books. In his On Free Choice of the Will, for example, Augustine presents a closely reasoned, dialectical argument on the subjects of volition and predestination, derived ultimately from Plato's Euthyphro; at the same time, he appeals consistently to scriptures, offers ascetical advice, and concludes with a beatific vision:

so great is the beauty of justice, so great the joy of eternal light, of the unchangeable Truth and Wisdom, that even though a man were not allowed to remain in its light for longer than a day, yet in comparison with this he would rightly and properly despise a life of innumerable years spent in the delight of temporal goods. Indeed, the following is neither false nor trivial: "Far better is one day in thy courts than thousands." Yet it is also possible to understand this in another sense, namely that the "thousands of days" may be interpreted to represent the transience of time, while the term "one day" represents the immutability of eternity. [3]

This sort of thing is in itself no ordinary achievement: very few Christian writers, making reference to the Bible on every page, are at the same time quite intelligible to anyone outside the tradition through their sheer logical power (Aquinas, for example, is not). The vast apologetic of the City of Cod similarly makes constant reference to scriptures without once losing the thread of the logic; it simultaneously offers observations on philosophy, history, ethics, even mathematics, all of which contribute to the argument. Many of Augustine's works are, like the Confessions (and like the later works of the next great philosopher-theologian, Anseim), cast in the form of a vast prayer, addressed to God.

Augustine makes genuine contributions to several fields not because he is multifaceted so much as because his thought is seamless. That, too, appeals to us; that attracts us. From the impulse in physics to find a general field theory to the popular use of the word holistic, we have evidence of a yearning for the comprehensive, catholic vision, a frustration with the compartmentalization and departmentalization which have so characterized modern thought. Not only mathematics and the natural sciences, but philosophy, literature, and theology have become intelligible to specialists only, closed disciplines; by contrast, for all his erudition and comprehensiveness, Augustine represents a fundamental openness and simplicity we find immensely attractive. Whether postmodern philosophy or theology will achieve a comprehensive vision remains to be seen; Augustine certainly did.

In any era engaged in large-scale revaluation, the colossal figures of the tradition become vulnerable. Augustine has, moreover, been subject to various criticisms in recent decades: his concept of the City of God actually did contribute to the hubris of the Medieval commonwealth (though the Medieval understanding of his work is, to us, transparently flawed); Augustine's interiority equally contributed to the excessive stress on the individual conscience experienced by some churches in the reformed tradition, among others. But Augustine is, genuinely, vast. My purpose here has been simply to suggest those very basic aspects of Augustine which seem to make him peculiarly intelligible and sympathetic now. Aulen and Nygren, Gilson and Maritain, and any number of Orthodox theologians taught us, in the twentieth century, to expect relevance and newness from the early church. My suggestion here is that Augustine represents not so much the closing of that creative age as its culmination.

C. W. MCPHERSON is Rector of Trinity-St. Paul Episcopal Church in New Rochelle, New York, and author of Grace at this Time: Praying the Daily Office and Understanding Faith: An Exploration of Christian Theology.

Notes

(1.) Augustine, The City of God, trans. G. Walsh, D. Zema, G. Monahan, and D. Honan (New York: Image, 1958), 11.2, p. 67.

(2.) Augustine, Confessions (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1980), 11.6, p. 49.

(3.) Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna Benjamin (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), Ill.25, p. 148.