Yesterday was the feast of St. Monica, and today is St. Augustine, of course.
In these two, it seems, there is practically ever step of the Christian's journey. Consider: there is parenting, with all of its pain and joy, the impassioned love of mother for child, the tension about what to do with that love, particularly when you see your child heading off in the wrong direction, a tension which can only be resolved, because we are not God and not in control, in prayer.
You don't even have to be a parent to get that part of it, for despite our delusions, life is never really in our control, and lifting it all up to God is sometimes all we can do, and usually the best thing we can do.
And in the life of Augustine, we see ourselves, too - if you've not read the Confessions - at least the first 8 books - what's your excuse? There are many translations, some better than others, and several online. What is most astonishing, every time I read it, is the shock, in this book that is sixteen centuries old, of encountering life as it was and as it is. We are so absurdly cocky and sure of ourselves, that we have progressed so far and that we know so much and that we understand the human heart so much better than the ignorant ancients, but of course we do not. Read the first three chapters of Genesis, even older than the Confessions, to see that so clearly. This is why we still read the philosophers, this is why young people, centuries after Augustine lived and died, crack open his Confessions and are surprised to find themselves:
Torn by their consciences, wondering at their own motivations for doing wrong, pressured by parents, facing a world in which adults play games, but games which they call "business," toying with temptations of popular culture, experimenting with popular spiritual fads, achieving success and finding it unfulfilling and, of course, coping with their own conflicting desires in a culture that is, like ancient Carthage, a "steaming cauldron of lust."
What pulls us moderns to Augustine as well is the honesty of his spiritual questions and the progress of his soul, as he makes his way to the truth, a way which is not only in his head, but involves his entire self, pulling and pushing, coming together and breaking apart, then coming together once more.
There is more than the Confessions of course, and as we keeping exploring we find even more of ourselves: our struggle to understand what it means to be a Christian in the world, and how to live in both this City of God and this City of Man, what it means to be sinful members of the Body of Christ, and so much more.
It is useful, too, to remember, than when Augustine died, it might have seemed to him that the whole world was coming apart, once again, and perhaps for good. Or perhaps it might not have surprised him at all that sixteen hundred years after the Vandals swarmed Hippo that men and women might be reading him, searching him still, looking for clues on how to understand their embattled and tormented inner selves and their inchoate yearnings for something...someone..in whom they can find rest for restless hearts.
Some links:
Pope Benedict at yesterday's Angelus
As Augustine himself would say later, his mother gave him birth twice; the second time required a long spiritual labor, made up of prayer and tears, but crowned in the end by the joy of seeing him not only embrace the faith and receive baptism, but also dedicate himself entirely to the service of Christ.
How many difficulties there are also today in family relationships and how many mothers are anguished because their children choose mistaken ways!
Monica, a wise and solid woman in the faith, invites them not to be discouraged, but to persevere in their mission of wives and mothers, maintaining firm their confidence in God and clinging with perseverance to prayer.
As to Augustine, his whole life was an impassioned search for truth. In the end, not without a long interior storm, he discovered in Christ the ultimate and full meaning of his life and of the whole of human history. In adolescence, attracted by earthly beauty, he "fell upon" it -- as he says honestly (Confessions 10, 27-38) -- selfishly and possessively with behavior that caused some sorrow in his pious mother.
But through a toilsome journey, thanks also to her prayers, Augustine opened himself ever more to the fullness of truth and love, to the point of conversion, which occurred in Milan, under the guidance of the bishop, St. Ambrose.
Thus he remains as model of the way to God, supreme truth and good. "Late have I loved you," he wrote in his famous book of the Confessions, "O beauty so ancient and so new .... For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside .... You were with me and I was not with you ... You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness: And you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness" (ibid.).
May St. Augustine obtain for us also the gift of a sincere and profound encounter with Christ, an encounter above all also for all those young people who, thirsty for happiness, seek it in mistaken ways and get lost in dead ends.
Fr. Z has several posts, including an interesting one on how St. Monica's remains found their way from Ostia to Rome - and a fascinating discovery in Ostia not long after World War II.
Nevertheless, no one gets to be such a giant without having detractors; and Augustine has had his share in every age. To modern secularists, he seems a fideist, a simp who would stop an argument in its tracks just because Rome said so. On the other hand, some Eastern Christians (a vocal minority) have accused him of rationalism. Augustine revered both faith and reason as gifts from God, each having its place in Christian life, each complementing and strengthening the other. To intellectuals who were struggling with faith, Augustine would say: Believe, that you may know. To fideists who denigrated philosophy he would say: Know, that you may believe.
Here's a great page with links to plenty of St. Augustine's works online.
Fr. Groeschel on St. Augustine:
When I try to analyze why this great man appeals so much to me, I realize it is because in many respects he thinks like a modern person. He is the holy psychologist. Without knowing what the word psychologist meant, I started to read him when I was fourteen years old and recognized that he was talking about things that I had experienced. His great line, “You have made us for yourself, Oh God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” is still today tremendously meaningful to me in life.
Most laypeople are unaware of it, but the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI is very much rooted in Saint Augustine and his great disciple, Saint Bonaventure. If you want to understand Pope Benedict XVI, you need to be familiar with the ideas of Saint Augustine and particularly his conviction of the importance of religious experience in order for us to believe and grow in the Christian life. That’s putting it in a nutshell.
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