You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. –Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1
Divine Friendships, a new monthly series exploring Christian contemplative and devotional classics, begins on Monday, June 14 with The Confessions of St. Augustine. The Confessions have deeply influenced western Christianity for the last 1600 years. They tell of Augustine’s restless search for happiness and truth in the form of an extended personal prayer to God. Augustine’s style melds beautiful words of praise and thanksgiving, deep theological reflections and Biblical citations with his memories. There are several digressions from the biographical narrative, which some readers might find distracting. Nevertheless, many of these passages are worth reading and savoring for their own sake. Here’s just one example:
Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved thee. For see, thou was within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made. Thou wast with me, but I was not with thee. These things kept me far from thee, even though they were not at all unless they were in thee. Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open my deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine and didst chase away my blindness. Thou didst breathe fragrant odors and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for thee. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace. (Book X, Chapter 27)
Augustine’s restless self-examination, his philosophical and religious explorations, and the working of divine grace combined to bring about his conversion and inflamed his heart with love for God. The painting above by the French artist Philippe de Champaigne provides a beautiful pictogram of Augustine’s personal story of friendship with God. Veritas, the Latin word for Truth, shines with an aura of bright light at the top left hand corner of the painting. The Light of Truth hovers over an open book of Scripture and shines directly on Augustine’s face, illuminating his darkened mind. From there it sets aflame Augustine’s heart, which he holds in his left hand over a book of his own writings, while his right hand holds a pen.
Augustine’s restlessness questioning began in his youth. When he was sixteen years old, he remembers stealing some pears from a neighbor’s tree with some friends. The pleasure I got was not from the pears, it was in the crime itself, enhanced by the companionship of my fellow sinners. (Book II, Chapter 8). Out of youthful pride and a desire to impress the crowd he was running with, Augustine did something wrong because it was wrong. However, this left Augustine divided within himself. And I became to myself a wasteland. (Book II, Chapter 10). However, it also prompted an enduring philosophical question for Augustine: where does evil come from?
Augustine was a promising student, and he was drawn first to the study of Latin literature and then to rhetoric. At the age of 19, In the normal course of his studies, he came across a book by Cicero, arguably the greatest of Roman orators. At first, he loved the work for its style, but as he continued to read he found himself attracted to the substance of the work as well: an exhortation to seek wisdom for its own sake.
Reading Cicero ushered in him a religious quest in search of truth. At first under the influence of his Christian mother, Augustine turned to Holy Scripture. However, he found that he did not like its literary style compared to Latin literature. He also found that he simply did not believe its stories, which he took literally at the time, were true.
He turned instead to Manichaeism, a dualistic religion from Persia, which posited a universal struggle between matter, which was evil, and spirit, which was good. Three things seem to have drawn Augustine to Manichaeism: it had an answer to the problem of evil, it made universal truth claims, and it integrated Christ into its system as a prophet. At about the same time, Augustine had acquired a mistress, with whom he would have a son.
For the next 9 years, from age 19 to 28, Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage. During this time, he became more and more disenchanted with Manichaeism, less convinced of its truth. At age 29, he went first to Rome, then to a prestigious position in Milan. He greatly admired the preaching of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, both for its style and substance. From Ambrose, Augustine learned that Scripture could be read allegorically, not just literally, and he became a catechumen in the church.
At this time, he also began reading books by the Platonists. These had the effect of softening his materialist prejudice in religion. Up until that time, Augustine had believed that if God existed, he had to exist as a material body, bounded by space. The Platonists led him to begin to think of God in terms of spiritual and immaterial reality, which allowed him to think beyond the dualistic categories of Manichaeism.
It was at this stage that Augustine has a mystical vision that moves him forward:
And being admonished by these books to return into myself, I entered into my inward soul, guided by thee. This I could do because thou wast my helper. And I entered, and with the eye of my soul . . .saw above the same eye of my soul and above my mind the Immutable Light. . . . He who knows the Truth knows that Light, and he who knows it knows eternity. . . . And thou didst beat back the weakness of my sight, shining forth upon me thy dazzling beams of light, and I trembled with love and fear. I realized that I was far away from thee in the land of unlikeness, as if I heard thy voice from on high: “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness.” . . . . And I said, “Is Truth, therefore, nothing, because it is not diffused through space–neither finite nor infinite?” And thou didst cry to me from afar, “I am that I am.” And I heard this in the heart, and there was no room for doubt. I should have more readily doubted that I am alive than that the Truth exists . . . . (Book VII, Chapter 10)
From this mystical encounter, Augustine goes on to a spiritual and intellectual breakthrough. He sees that evil has no substance of itself, but is merely a privation of the Good. All of Creation is good. Evil is a turning of the will, away from the Creator towards created things. Evil is not substance, but rather a disharmony.
God became real to Augustine through this vision, not just a figure of his imagination. Yet although he was intellectually converted, he was still held back by his preoccupation with worldly things: ambition, love of money and lust.
But I was not able to sustain my gaze. My weakness was dashed back, and I lapsed again into my accustomed ways, carrying along with me nothing but a loving memory of my vision, and an appetite for what I had . . . smelled the odor of, but was not yet able to eat. (Book VII, Chapter 17).
While Augustine continued to struggle within himself, he hears from a visitor a story about two government agents that left the secret service to follow a monastic life. One of the agents says to the other:
“Tell me, I beg you, what goal are we seeking in all these toils of ours? What is that we desire? What is our motive in public service? Can our hopes in the court rise higher than to be ‘friends of the emperor’? But how frail, how beset with peril, is that pride! Through what dangers must we climb to a greater danger? And when shall we succeed? But if I chose to be a friend of God, see, I can become one now.” (Book VIII, Chapter 6)
The story of the two secret agents only intensifies Augustine’s turmoil. After hearing it he retreats to a garden. There, after weeping with contrition for his past sins and struggling to give himself completely to God, he hears a young child singing in the street. “Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege!” Pick up and read. In his agitation, Augustine took this as a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage he came upon. This is what he came upon:
Not in rioting or drunkenness, not in chambering or wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh. . . Romans 13:13-14
This was the decisive moment for Augustine. As he writes:
I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (Book VIII, Chapter12)
After this, Augustine quit his job as a professor of rhetoric and was baptized by Ambrose. He made his return to Africa along with his mother Monica who died in Ostia along the way, after sharing a mystical vision with Augustine. (Book IX)
The remainder of the Confessions takes a more philosophical turn. Book X deals with Memory and its relation to the self. Book XI reflects on God’s relationship to time. Book XII concerns biblical interpretation. Book XIII undertakes a mystical allegorical reading of first story of creation in Genesis. Augustine ends the Confessions, by returning to the theme of rest in God and urges his readers to seek it in God’s grace.
We must ask it of thee; we must seek it in thee; we must knock for it at thy door. Only thus shall we receive; only thus shall we find; only thus shall thy door be opened. (Book XIII, Chapter 38.)
What can reading Augustine’s Confessions tell us about divine friendships? Join me online Monday, June 14 from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm to discuss this question. Click here to register for the event.