Learning from St Augustine

Learning from St Augustine of Hippo St Ursula’s, Bern: 1 October 2023 A few years ago a Church of England newspaper carried out a survey of the 100 best Christian books ever written. The book which came in number one, written in Latin over 1600 years ago by a bishop in North Africa called Augustine, is entitled The Confessions. That sounds like a list of crimes or sins. Certainly, Augustine does mention various sins, including an early example when he and a group of friends raided a neighbour’s garden to steal pears. With typical honesty and insight, he recalls that the pears tasted terrible; he stole them not to eat them but just to get a kick out of doing something forbidden. But ‘confessions’ here means more than acknowledging sins; it means confessing the Christian faith and praising God. Augustine addresses the whole of the Confessions to God as a kind of long prayer, taking in autobiographical reflection on the way to a deepened understanding of the meaning of his life in the light of God and the Christian faith. If you haven’t read Augustine’s Confessions, why not try it? As with any book written 1600 years ago, there are bits that are hard to relate to, so judicious skipping may be called for. But there is also much that is very fresh, speaking powerfully across the centuries, and it has had a tremendous influence on Christian thought. But why mention Augustine and his Confessions today? Two reasons. First, a few days ago I was in Milan and visited its cathedral, which reminded me of the decisive importance of this city in Augustine’s story. His conversion in his early 30s came after years of wandering through various faiths and philosophies, and a major influence on him, encouraging him towards faith in Jesus Christ, was the preaching of the bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Augustine describes how, as he felt more and more drawn to the light of Christ, at the same time his heart was in turmoil, pulled this way and that. He was particularly aware of the changes that faith in Christ would mean for him in terms of sexual morality – a significant challenge for this young man. One day, in a garden in Milan, it all comes to a head. At a moment of despair, Augustine mysteriously hears a child singing ‘Pick it up and read’; so he picks up what he was reading and his eyes fall on words from Paul’s letter to the Romans (13:13-14) telling us to leave behind our old life and to ‘put on’ or clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘I neither wished nor needed to read further. . . . it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.’ (Conf. 8.xii.29, Chadwick p. 153). Augustine’s conversion in Milan, vividly described in his Confessions. The second reason I’m speaking of Augustine today is that the collect (or special prayer) for this Sunday (17th after Trinity) is pure Augustine: a collage of words and themes from his writings. The prayer runs: ‘Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you: pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself, and so bring us at last to your heavenly city where we shall see you face to face . . .’ Let me mention three themes drawn from this prayer, all very relevant to what it means to be a Christian today. First, the problem: the restlessness of the human heart. Second, the solution: the pouring of God’s love into our hearts. Third, the destination: the heavenly city where we shall see God face to face. First, Augustine is the patron saint, the spiritual doctor, of the restless heart. Today’s collect includes perhaps his most famous words. In the first paragraph of the Confessions Augustine prays to God: ‘you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you’. This restlessness affected Augustine at different levels. His mind was restless as he looked for the truth, the meaning of life, searching for it everywhere, in different religions and philosophies; but the truth seemed always to elude him. But his restlessness was not just intellectual; his heart also was restless as he looked for satisfaction in all the usual places: sex, friendships, a brilliant career. As he looks back on his earlier life, Augustine sees he was making a huge mistake. We all have within us a God-shaped vacuum which only God can fill, but we diagnose ourselves wrongly and mistakenly try to fill that vacuum, to satisfy that fundamental need, with things other than God. We are surrounded by good things, the gifts of God our Creator; and other people are the greatest of all those good gifts. But we take our eyes off God and grab after these things, thinking they will give us the wholeness, the contentment that in the end only God can give. But they cannot do that. Nobody, nothing, can satisfy the yearning within us that only God can satisfy. And despite our best attempts we cannot find the truth that makes ultimate sense of our lives and the realities around us. Augustine writes of these things with a freshness and an honesty that still speaks powerfully to us today, laying bare our restlessness, our incompleteness, our confusion. But he does not leave us there in despair. In fact, the way Augustine formulates the problem already speaks of the solution. He says to God: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.’ So, turning to the second theme, the solution to the human problem, the healing of the restless human heart, gets underway as we realize that we were made by God and for relationship with God. That is a very important truth for us to recognize, but thankfully the God of whom Augustine speaks does not leave it to us to find our way to him. The God made known to us in Jesus Christ reaches out to us, comes to us, takes the initiative in stilling and healing our restless and wounded hearts. In another famous passage in the Confessions, Augustine addresses God, saying: ‘You called and shouted: and broke through my deafness. You flamed and shone: and banished my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me: and I drew in my breath and I pant for you. . . . I have tasted you: and now I hunger and thirst for more. You have touched me: and I have burned for your peace.’ (Hammond translation, 2014 Loeb edition of Confessions 10, xxvii) Hear all those words Augustine uses for how God takes the initiative towards us: God calls and shouts, breaks through our deafness; God flames and shines; God breathes on us, touches us. That was Augustine’s experience; it can be our experience, too. Earlier I mentioned how words from Paul’s letter to the Romans played a key point in turning Augustine to Christ. This letter continued to be very important for Augustine for the rest of his life. Another text from Romans that he quotes very often says that ‘The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit’ (5:5). Today’s collect nods towards how dear this verse was for Augustine by turning it into a prayer: ‘pour your love into our hearts’. This is what will bring peace to our restless hearts, the pouring of God’s love into our hearts. Only God can do this, but we can pray for it, desire it, turning our hearts and minds to God and asking regularly to be filled with God’s love. We have been created both to receive God’s love, to know that we are loved by God, but also to love the God who loves us. Augustine knew well, both in his own experience and from the words of the Bible, that we love God because God first loved us (1 John 4:10, 19; see Augustine’s Homilies on 1 John in Augustine: Later Works, pp. 316, 335). He knew that God’s love for us comes first; our love for God follows. But, interestingly, Augustine tends in his writing to refer much more to our call to love God than to God’s love for us. So here’s something we might find strange: when Augustine refers to Paul’s words ‘the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit’, Augustine takes those words ‘love of God’ as meaning not God’s love for us, but rather our love for God, our love towards God. Augustine’s experience and conviction led him to emphasize that the work of God’s Spirit in us turns our hearts outwards in love towards God. This is so important for Augustine because what he sees as being fundamentally wrong with us is the disordered way we love. The problem with us is not that we do not love, but that our loves are disordered, chaotic; that’s what screws us up, makes our hearts so confused and restless. And Augustine’s prayer for himself, a prayer we can echo for ourselves, is that God will bring order to our love. That means loving God, who is the source of all things, above all things, as Jesus commanded us to do, and loving everyone and everything else in the light of God and in proper relationship to God. If we love God above all things, we will learn to love everyone and everything else as we should. Let me come back to today’s collect. First, we acknowledge to God our problem: ‘Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.’ Second, we take up words of St Paul dear to Augustine, turning to God for what will heal our restlessness, praying ‘Pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself’, remembering, with Augustine, that the Holy Spirit will both make us aware of God’s love for us, and also awake in us the love for God that will be the key to ordering our love for everyone and everything else. Thirdly, today’s collect continues: ‘so bring us at last to your heavenly city where we shall see you face to face . . .’ This final theme in the collect again echoes Augustine unmistakeably. For Augustine, we can in this life have true knowledge, true experience of God. But our present knowledge and experience of God are incomplete, only a foretaste of what is to come. And yes, we should as Christians seek the peace and the welfare of this world, because it is God’s good world; but we know (just as Augustine did in his day, with the Roman Empire collapsing around him) that the perfect peace and blessedness for which we long will never be attained in this life, in this world. But God has promised us through the life, death and resurrection of Christ that the city of God will come. Christians are called to live purposefully, as good citizens of this world, but with their hearts, their hopes set on the world to come, the city of eternal peace and joy. In this world, the Christian is homesick for heaven. To put it mildly, this is a hard perspective for us to maintain. Modern western society has more or less excluded from its reckoning any reality beyond what it believes we can observe and verify in this life; so the best that it can commend to us often seems to be the maximizing of comfort and of exciting experiences in this life before we die. Time is short, we are told, so don’t miss out: here are 501 films you must watch before you die, 501 places you must visit before you die, maybe even 501 relationships you must enjoy before you die. Christians can cheerfully resist this kind of propaganda for an approach to life that we know will only create in us more and more restlessness and grief, not to mention all the carbon emissions produced as we visit those 501 places. So as we have prayed today in words inspired by St Augustine, we look to God, who alone can give peace to our restless hearts. We thank God for the outpouring in our hearts, through the Holy Spirit, of the gift of love: God’s love for us prompting in us love for God above all things. And while we live in this world with gratitude for all the good gifts that we enjoy, praying and working for its peace and welfare, we keep in our hearts and minds the hope opened up to us by our crucified and risen Lord, looking ahead to the city of God that is to come, where our hearts will finally be at rest, and we shall see God face to face.