Identity - Lesson 10

I. Background and Context of Augustine

Our fifth address is now on Augustine, who lived between 354 and 430 AD. His challenge of being a Christian in Christendom—that that is, in the new society that had now taken shape at a much more extensive universal level than what we were talking about yesterday of the second century. The subject suggests either rash audacity or utter foolishness to ever attempt to depict this amazing figure, for Augustine stands above all the other giants of the church. No one has ever more influenced the whole discourse and the range of the church in the years that followed than this remarkable man.

II. Augustine's Prayer Life

At the same time, this will be a brief lecture because the companion lecture that I have in another series does explore him far more exhaustively than I’m doing this morning on the prayer life of Augustine. It’s appropriate that most attention should be paid to his prayer life in the other course because he is often considered to be the father of our interior consciousness. Charles Taylor, in his significant book that he wrote some years ago on the Sources of the Self, in the history of Western consciousness, predominantly is speaking very largely throughout his text on Augustine. That is a strong recommendation for you to read his work. Of course, the classic biography is Brown. He spent a lifetime not only in this epoch-breaking book on the life of Augustine but has in the latter part of his life revised all his previous learning, which is great, with a second edition. It’s the new edition that you should concentrate on in Peter Brown.

III. The Beginning of Christendom

The beginning of Christendom is associated with the event on 28th October 312, when the Roman Emperor Flavius Valerius Constantius was confronted by a heavenly vision of the sign of the cross replacing the Roman eagle bearing the words, “In this you will conquer.” What he is seeing in this mystical vision is that it’s the cross that has conquered the eagle. Inspired by this event, he defeated his rival Maxentius at Milvian Bridge and officially the Roman Empire had come to an end. Now it was to be called ‘Christian.’ Seventy-two years later, Aurelius Augustinus in the summer of 386 personally became a convert.

As we were saying in our previous address, all this had been profoundly affected by the demographics in a remarkable rise of the Christians themselves during the 2nd century. It’s an example, as we emphasise, then, that prophecy may be uncertain; demographics never are. When we understand the trends that are taking place with population then we know that consequences are inevitable. The inevitability of the rise of the Christian Church was because of the love of the Christian Church, how they cared for each other and how, in caring for each other and also in not practising baby-girl infanticide, they did what the politburo of China should more rationally have understood in the 21st century: that nothing brings a nation on its knees more than female infanticide.

IV. Tension Between Christendom and Personal Christian Identity

Well, it’s in this context that we have inherited since that period a tension between Christendom and personal Christian identity. In the middle of all of this, Augustine is a renewed voice for helping us to distinguish how easy it is for us to be nominal in our Christian identity as distinct from being personal in our Christian identity. 

Not only Christian scholars, but many, many philosophers of our time have all been challenged by his thinking. We might say that in all the mountain range of the Christian saints, the Mount Everest is Augustine—Everest in every sense of the word. His scholarships and books that he wrote is itself an Everest. He had a massive intellect, and he wrote no less than 117 volumes for later commentators to study. There’s one thing you could be assured of, if a scholar tells you that he has all read Augustine’s works then you know he’s a liar.

V. Augustine's Intellectual Brilliance and Humanity

The massive intellect that went with this was also within an indomitable explorer of the recesses of the human spirit and the human mind, saturated as he is in classical humanism, challenging as no other had done before or since the Greek and Roman civilisation. We will find that as we look back on the history of previous Christians and their struggle for their identity, they very often are very relevant for us as we struggle with our identity today. Augustine is no exception for us as we’re living in a transitional society and even in a transitional society within Christianity itself. His transparency of inner life was what inspired great thinkers like Pascal, or even Jean Jacques Rousseau, or Goethe, or Charles Dickens, or Tolstoy, Andre Gide. There were so many other diverse literary figures up to our time that all have been inspired, not necessarily spiritually, but simply by his profound insights of the human condition as a humanist. Certainly, his intellectual brilliance outwits the minds of Freud or Einstein, Heidegger, or any other great mind of our time. Likewise, he had the versatility to think globally, as we’re being invited to explore likewise in this kind of course. Regardless of the discipline that you come from, Augustine will always inspire you. 

VI. Augustine's Influence on Postmodernism

One of the interesting books that has been written recently, edited by John Caputo and Michael Scanlon, is called Augustine and Postmodernism. It’s an attempt to show how Augustine challenges the minds of people like Derrida or Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil. These are all brilliant men and women of our generation who all were inspired in their thinking by him. Yet his humanity draws and challenges them all. It’s only their professional hubris that repels and distances him from some of them. Because of all these thinkers, no one expresses humility more like our Lord than we find in Augustine’s writings. He rebukes us all for our lack of humility, as we shall see.

So as Peter Brown, in his wonderful biography said of Augustine, “He has come as near to us as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the culture and religion of the later empire can ever allow. It’s because of his vast ruminations on the nature of selfhood, a theme that is so close to our own preoccupations, that inspire us. In fact, he anticipates the postmodern strategies in dethroning the isolated Cartesian self, alone with one’s own thinking. No one is more anti-Cartesian than Augustine.” If one was to compare the two men, you would say that for Descartes, his identity was, “I doubt, therefore I exist,” when we would long to be free to have the experience I trust, therefore I can love God, which is the direction that Augustine is moving us towards.

Today, French existentialism in its utter rationalism is quite exhausted. Luc Ferry, on a new manifesto for being post-existential in France, has written a treatise On Love: A Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century. He wants to affirm that for philosophy to replace religion, love must replace thought. It’s ironic. He’s come to the end of his tether, and he realises he’s got to start being human all over again. 

Now, what does love mean? Well, it doesn’t mean Augustinian love at all, of course. It’s simply that the end of the road of rationalism and existentialism is erotica. It’s seeking full sexual freedom. So, Luc Ferry no longer wants Parisian society to hide their amours behind the closed hours of 5:00–6:30 pm, as the French speak of this as the hours you don’t talk about, you don’t intrude upon. He wants now to be wholly embracing an erotic lifestyle where family and everyone else is allowed to see what’s going on. There’s no church father, no later Christian thinker, that can more brilliantly expose all these radical, postmodern, illusionary lifestyles like Augustine does in his Confessions. We are living in extraordinary times, and no one can be more our companion than our beloved friend Augustine.

I had the privilege of walking with Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a Christian lampoonist. Before that, he married Kitty who was the niece of the founder of the Fabian movement—the founder of socialism, in other words, in Britain and with her husband, who had founded the London School of Economics. All of this conversion took place for Muggeridge after his own mid-life conversion. I used to ask him, “Now that you’re a Christian, who’s your favourite saint?” Well of course, it was Augustine. He himself had been a spy in World War II in MI5 and MI6 and he saw Augustine as God’s spy. “He was,” he says, “like him, a word spinner, installed professionally in his chair of lies. He too licked the earth in the fraudulence of eroticism and confessing as a bishop there’s nothing so powerful in drawing a man downwards as the caresses of a woman.” In other words, Augustine himself had gone through the dregs, and he had gone from the dregs of scarcely being human to being like the angels, all in the transformation of his one life.

Certainly, he had fame in his own day, like Muggeridge also had. Yet, how empty it all was. Augustine cites in his Confessions, his misery was complete, “I remember one day you made me realise how utterly wretched a human being can be, as I was. I was preparing a speech in praise of the emperor, intending that it should include a great many lies which would certainly be applauded by an audience who knew well enough how far from the truth they were. I was greatly preoccupied by my task. My mind was feverishly busy with these harassing problems. And as I walked the streets of Milan, I noticed a poor beggar who must, I suppose, have had his fill with food and drink, since he was laughing and joking.” 

Contrasting their two conditions, his own so troubled, the beggar so cheerful, he cried out in desperation, “Will I never cease setting my heart on shadows and following a lie?” Muggeridge was to cry out likewise. All this was too familiar for him, following the same profession for 40 years.

Augustine was now planning to marry a rich widow for more fame and success, having callously sent away his mistress back to North Africa, who had lived with him really as a devoted wife, keeping their son, Adeodatus, on whom he doted. One day in the house, matters came to a head when he went into the garden and, as he described it, “I now found myself driven by the tumult inside my breast to take refuge in this garden where no one could interrupt that fierce struggle, in which I was my own contestant, until it came to its conclusion.” Innocently, nearby children were playing. Not sure whether it was a girl or a boy, he heard the refrain repeatedly, “Take up and read. Take up and read.” He rushed indoors where he had left open the epistle to the Romans and read, “Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries, rather arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ. Spend no more thought upon nature and nature’s appetites.”

Now with a wholly new perception after his conversion, he writes, “The earth itself, the winds that blow, the whole air and all that lives in it is crying out, ‘What is my God?’” Likewise, he asks the sky, the moon, and the stars, “What is my God?” None of these was God, he was told. All the things that are about me, all that can be administered, admitted by the door of the senses, they too, they’re not God. Then at last he understood. Their beauty was all the answer they could give and the only answer he needed to hear. 

After this profound mystical experience, he is later joined by his mother, Monica, in Rome, who’s been praying for him so long in her life. He’s joined to her just before she’s going to go back to Africa. They’re in the port of Ostia, outside of Rome, waiting for the boat to take her away, and they were looking out of the window. Again, in a mystical trance, holding their hands, they saw the whole compass of material things in their various degrees up to the very heavens themselves. All were waiting and longing for the eternal wisdom, as humans too are straining for it with all the strength of our hearts. Our words have a beginning, and they have an end, but they were experiencing that the word of God has no beginning, no end. He who abides in himself forever never grows old, always giving life to all things. It was a great joy then for Monica, before she left, now to see exemplified in her son that her own simple faith had actually outmatched his intellectual but long and tortuous pilgrimage with her simple faith in Christ.

You know, we all have an experience that sometimes our intellect is our greatest obstacle to becoming Christians. Like the shepherds in their simplicity, they only need to cross a few fields to witness the nativity, but for the three wise men, it’s a very long journey to go from Persia to Bethlehem. The simplicity of Monica and the complexity of her son illustrate this profoundly. Our parents are usually well-meaning when they want us to have a successful career, and Augustine’s parents were, likewise, wanting their son to be successful in his career. Often, we put forward the material motive of success way ahead of the spiritual life that we should have. He was trained to be a rhetorician because that was the best way of getting to the attention of the court of the Caesars and it was like being trained to be a politician.

Augustine was highly trained as a rhetorician. He had developed remarkable skills with his arguments, diction, examples to address his immediate audience. He had a remarkable memory. Later, of course, he did use this to good purpose, as we’re reminded that one day when he was preaching in church in Carthage, the church reader had mistaken the Psalm that he was going to preach on that Sunday and read a different sermon. Well, this didn’t faze Augustine. He stood up and was able, just off the cuff, to preach on the new text, assuming that the Holy Spirit had guided them all to the right Psalm to select for that day. Yes, God does use our natural abilities for his glory, but not in the motive that we had originally in developing such skills. 

VII. Loneliness and Controversies of Augustine

After his conversion, like any radical conversion, you want to do something radical. Leonard Muggeridge, who was the oldest son of Muggeridge, was on the cold front and Vienna in the Cold War, and he came to one of our summer schools at Oxford that we had as a precursor to Regent. He wasn’t a Christian and through the summer school he became a Christian. Being a kind of radical like Augustine, what did he do? He tells his commanding officer he’s become a conscientious objector. He’s getting ready to get court-martialled and only his father’s public influence allows him to do some charity work in compensation at home. Well, this is the same kind of guy, you see. You have to be radical when you’re a radical person and you’re a brilliant mind.

So, what does Augustine do? Well, of course, the first thing is to get out of Milan as fast as possible. You’ve given up your whole career. Now his idea is simply to gather a few similarly minded friends and share together a monastic life on his estate in the countryside of his birth. He wants to go back to North Africa, in other words. But it’s not to be. His gifts were too famous, too precious. The church badly needed a leader like him. Others were later to follow in his community the Rule, but he wasn’t there. He had founded it, but he wasn’t allowed to remain there. And because Hippo had a bishop, he thought to slip into the congregation unnoticed to dwell in his own privacy. But he was recognised. He was grabbed, made a priest, and shortly afterwards a bishop. I don’t think anybody in the history of the church has ever been almost kidnapped to be, first of all, a priest and then within a matter of about seven years to become a bishop. He wept. He saw this as an imprisonment for his life.

I understand his weeping. In a very different context, but I too remember in our first graduation ceremony when I was installed for this new vision at Regent, I was weeping inwardly as we were going up to the platform. I was weeping because I knew it was going to be a long haul ahead. This is how Augustine can touch us all so personally in different ways. 

What are our tears? Well, they’re always mixed. Perhaps some of Augustine’s tears were over the lost dreams of having wasted so much life. Perhaps some of his tears were because he still wanted to be in the midst of the troubled life of bitter controversies and to stand for his faith. But I’m sure that most of his tears were just his feeling of total inadequacy to take on the responsibilities of his new office. 

One of the things that we discover about the rich and the famous is that they’re usually the most lonely people on Earth. They’re deeply enveloped in fame and esteem, but that doesn’t know you at all. Augustine was an example of a very lonely man.

Gatherings of the North African hierarchy often brought Augustine into the great metropolitan church of Carthage, where he delivered some of his greatest polemics. Again, he was unwillingly dragged into controversies with heretics for his whole lifetime. They were the result of his own journey with the Montanists and the Donatists and then the Pelasgians. Peter Brown weaves his biography of Augustine around one after another of these stages of his life. On the lintel of a church in New Medea was the inscription: “This is the door of the Lord; the righteous shall enter in.” Echoing the words of the Psalmist, “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to dwell in the tents of wickedness” (Psalms 84:10). But Augustine laments about the nature of his congregation. The man who enters is bound to see drunkards and misers and tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators, people wearing armlets of superstition, assiduous clients of sorcerers and astrologers. He must be warned that the same crowds that pressed into the churches in North Africa on Christmas festivals were also indulging to their fill in the theatres of pagan holidays. Is that any different from Christmas today? Just the same.

Augustine was aware so profoundly that the universalism of sin was at the same time outflanked by the length and breadth, the depth and height of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Because of the universality of God’s love and presence, Augustine was able easily to communicate with all the ethnic groups that there were in North Africa, Roman or Carthaginian, in their own diversities and with all their varying ranks of society. He once told the fishermen in Hippo, “It will not be held against you that you’re ignorant against your will, but that you neglect to avoid you being further ignorant. You cannot bring together your wounded limbs and yet you reject him that would heal you. When you know your condition of woundedness, don’t enter into the presence of God defying the one who can heal you.” 

One of the things that we must recognise is so important for all of us is that when we become Christians, it’s so easy for us to enter a ghetto and we leave behind the relevance of our own education and become almost naive about what it is to be a Christian. Intelligent Christians need an intelligent faith, they don’t leave it to the pastor. Certainly, Augustine exemplifies this basic principle. Augustine’s comprehensive grasp and the application of classical humanism was something that he applied to the whole Christian’s lifespan.

VIII. Augustine's Use of Classical Education

In the Confessions Book IV, 16, he comments that he had spent time and energy on the liberal arts. Often, he quotes a classical author who had helped him enter the Christian life. In his student days at Carthage, he had read Cicero’s Hortensius, which prompted a longing for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour of “my soul,” he says. But he didn’t despise that education. He used it for Christ. Later he used classical astronomy and the ability to predict dates and places and scopes of eclipses of the sun and the moon to challenge the cosmic myths of the Manichees. In passages in Confessions VII, 9–16, he pays tribute to the Platonising tradition that he had encountered in Milan. This positive role of classical education was reinforced in the advice given to Monica by an unknown cleric. She says, “Let your boy continue his reading. Don’t take him away from the classical literature.” What Augustine is saying, it’s not every Christian that needs to do so. It’s simply those who have been educated so far. You don’t break that continuum of the [inaudible] of growing intellectually. His mother had certainly not needed any classical education. She had a simple faith. But Augustine didn’t have a simple faith. He did, but it was a faith that was much more enriched from having faced all the challenge of the classics.

I’m reminded of this in an incident last year that happened with a friend of mine, who is decorated in the hall of fame at Detroit as having been the inventor of the transformation of the diesel engine to use gas. Last summer in our prayer group I was saying to our different friends, “I want to ask you three questions. The first question is what was the earliest relational wound you received as a child?”

“Oh, he said I can tell you vividly. At the age of ten, my relational wound was, ‘God, why did you ever create me if you’re going to send me to hell?’” Now, what this unpackaged was, what Ross Douthat, a New York correspondent, has written a book called Bad Religion. Every Christian today in North America needs to read it because bad religion is destroying the Bible Belt as it never has before. 

Phil said his parents were both from dysfunctional families. My father had never been fathered, abandoned by his father. His mother had never been a mother. She was abandoned by her mother. As hippies, they said they’d do the best they can and be honest with you. Our simple faith is that if you believe in God, you’re going to Heaven, and if you don’t believe in God, you’re going to Hell.

But the second question that I raised to our group and which Phil answered was, “And what was your compensatory emotion to not being allowed to raise questions?” He said, “I was always raising questions. The fact that I never got an adequate answer is why I pursued science. A scientist never stops asking questions, so that made me the scientist I became. But in my troubled mind of ten years old, my logic was if I ask God too many questions, I was obviously showing that I didn’t believe him.” He said, “I assumed that my distrust meant I was going to hell.” 

His younger brother, who was smarter, said in his reaction, “When my parents told me I was going to Hell if I didn’t believe in God, then what I should do is just not believe in God.” My friend, Phil, for four years before his brother died, these last years, pleaded with him, “Oh, trust God. Turn your back on your troubled childhood and believe in God.” And bitterly, he turned his back to the wall and ended saying, “I never believed in God; I never will believe in God.” Now, this seems strange to bring into Augustine, but it’s this principle that if we don’t allow our own educational heritage to give us the skills of pursuing then we can have such a primitive childhood superstition about God that it can destroy us at the end of our life.

IX. Augustine's Legacy and Relevance

At the end of his first book on Augustine’s own infancy and childhood, Augustine provides us with an impressive catalogue of the human gifts he’d discovered within himself. He said, “I discovered I existed, I discovered I was alive, and I discovered I thought. And an inward instinct told me to take care of the integrity of my senses that I could take delight in the truth, that I could develop a good memory, that I acquired an armoury of being skilled with words and I discovered that I had charm, so that I had lots of friends who helped to soften me. I learned to avoid pain and to have a sense of dependency.” He said, “I began to despise ignorance. These are all good qualities.” They formed in his early childhood the totality of who Augustine was. “This is me.” It was only later, as he was growing up, that he increasingly found that these very abilities “were now inner tensions, as a house divided against itself,” he says in Confessions VIII, 8.

We tend to think of the identity of Augustine as being fully shaped by the Confessions. We were talking yesterday about how Origen discovers that the Christian identity changes through our life. I think we have to apply the same thing to Augustine. Augustine has three phases of his identity. The first phase is that of a youth in the Confessions. The second phase is that he becomes much more mature as a bishop of the church and has to see much more the complexity of living with Christendom. Now he’s prepared to write his work on the two cities: the city of man and the city of God. It’s really right at the end of his life, the last 18 years of his life, that now he’s passionately reading and absorbing the Psalms because the Psalms are expressing all the heritage of all his emotions throughout all his life. Now he’s no longer thinking of public office. Now he’s preparing once more as a child before God to enter into the heavenly portals. We will discuss all of this much more when we reflect on his prayer life.

In The City of God, Augustine is now looking much more comprehensively at the whole nature of Roman culture. He’s refuting the Roman claim that the city suffered at the hands of the Barbarian attack in 410 because its citizens had stopped the traditional festivals and sacrifices as a consequence of the legislation of Theodosius in the East in 389, extended to the West in 493–95. Augustine continues to embrace a pastoral concern not only for the Christians, but he has a pastoral concern for all human beings. This is something we don’t think about. All God’s creatures, all humanity, are made in the image and likeness of God. We should have a pastoral ministry for all mankind. He’s concerned about the burial of those who are slain in the attack of the Visigoths. He seeks for sanctuary for those who are attacked. He attacks the practise of suicide by the Stoics. He describes two in particular that really deeply wounded him: the suicide of Lucretius, which he describes in The City of God in 1.19, and of Cato in 1.23. He goes on to speak of the plight of the captives and invokes the powerful example of the Roman hero Regulus. He critiques the decline of the Roman values of being a Roman citizen, citing the definition that idealistically Cicero had made in De Republica 2.21, and which he returns to at the end of his book in 19.21.

He employs Cicero’s ideal requirements of justice in a Roman city. He argues that this ideal cannot be accomplished without the power of Christ to transform the fallen human condition. So he appeals to Romans to join the Christian faith to become true Roman citizens. He argues, let these answers be made to their enemies by the redeemed family of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the pilgrim church or the pilgrim city of Christ the king. Remember however, that among these very enemies are hidden some who will become citizens. In The City of God 2.29, he appeals to those who embody the qualities of Roman heroes: “Desire these things, then, O, admirable Roman character, offspring of the Reguli, the Scaevolae, the Scipios and the Fabricii. Desire these things instead.” He makes use of Marcus Terentius Varro to identify three types of Roman religion: the scurrilous activities of the Roman gods in Roman literature, the contrived social festivals in the annual cycle of the Roman calendar, and the divinity defined by philosophical thought towards a sense of a single divine principle, which Varro had preferred.

When I reread that last year and I was in Hong Kong earlier this year, I gave a talk to the governors of Hong Kong to say you need to understand the political theology of Augustine. You need to apply the principles that he saw that were good in the Roman Empire to the wellbeing of all the citizens of Hong Kong today. And to realise he can mentor you both in being personally a Christian, but also being a politician—a good politician.

But when we look, finally, at what are the great emphases that shape the identity of Augustine, all his consciousness is filled with three elements: his consciousness of being a sinner, he’s conscious of needing humility, he’s conscious of needing prayer. He’s conscious of sin. As you know, we have the famous story of his memory as a teenager when he was in an orchard that adjoined the family house in Thageste, in what is probably now the western border of Algeria with Tunisia. There he joined mischievously his school friends to strip the pear tree, or more than one pear tree. He stripped the whole orchard. Did they do it because they were hungry? No. He says it was sheer devilry. What is sheer devilry? Well, he takes it theologically very deeply: it is devilish. What is devilish is anti-creational. It’s destroying what God has created. 

This is not a peccadillo that we would discuss today, but he sees that in the heart of man is that temptation to destroy creation. The environmental movement can use that today in their application, but it’s far more serious than they understand in the context of what Augustine was seeing.

What he also sees is that sin is seeking solidarity so that you’re not alone in your sin. He sees this in the sin of Adam and Eve. He sees this in the solidarity with which Eve seduced Adam. He elaborates on this extensively in the Confessions XIV [sic], 11. It’s not a question of blaming Eve. It’s a question of the solidarity of one not guarding the other against temptation. But he sees this as a cosmic event. 

The third source of sin that Augustine recognises is the sin of envy. He sees this as the sin of Cain against Abel. In other words, when we were discussing in our first address how we have a framework that’s aetiological, we’re realising that it’s the aetiological that gives us awareness of the cosmic significance that’s affected the whole human race in defiance of God as our redeemer creator.

You could say that the depth to which we understand the seriousness of sin in our lives is the depth to which we will appreciate the need of humility. Yes, Augustine is saying God is humility. He’s the humble God. He describes God’s dwelling place. Where do we find God’s presence? We will find it in humility. Entering into the palace of the King of Kings, what is the protocol for his servants? Humility. What is the entry into prayer in our daily life? Humility. 

There’s no way to get near to God than through humility. But Augustine takes this even deeper still. He calls humility as the apophatic. What does that mean, the apophatic? It means you cannot penetrate the mystery of God other than describing it as humility. It is what the Apostle Paul is to reflect on in Philippians 2:5–6: “Let this mind be anew which was also in Christ Jesus, that though he was God, he thought it not robbery to be equal with God as the Son of God.” But Christ made himself of no reputation. God took upon himself the form of mankind. Such is the amazing, amazing humility of God.

In these last few years when I’ve been seeing things more globally and speaking more boldly, I’ve had to realise that when we communicate to others that Jesus is claiming, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14;6), there’s no other voice with which one can express it but in utter humility. God does not make us cocky because he gives us amazing things to claim. But the amazing things we proclaim can only be given in the softest of voices of our humility because he is truly the humble one.

One of the elements that, later, the medieval church realised was the lifestyle of having a humble identity that Augustine has been teaching us to have is there’s no place for curiosity. This vice of curiosity is trying to explore what you can’t explore. This is where heresies start. Heresies begin with curiosity about, “But what if it was different?” Well, it isn’t different. We Christians today need to recover this extraordinary culture of the vice of curiosity that they recognise was not ours. In other words, it’s anti-esoteric. It’s anti-expressive of a knowledge that we think is for a privileged few. One of the marks of being professionally educated is that we boast of knowing things others don’t know, or to explore things that others don’t know, but this too is the vice of curiosity. What we discover that Augustine is entering into is that all his learning, all his skill as a rhetorician, was wholly inadequate. Just as Paul is saying about his education and his career, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).

What people find very difficult with Augustine is that his identity lies in memory. Memory is the treasure house for the Christian’s identity. It’s the memory of God that’s given to mankind. It’s the memory that Paul is saying in Philippians 2 [sic]: “Let this memory be anew, this mind be anew.” It’s the memory of the eucharistic meal: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Remember who I am. It’s almost as if what Augustine is giving up is to say far more important than my speech is my silence. 

We Western Christians have to learn that there’s a lot more sophistication of communication in Japanese and Chinese cultures about silence than vocal expression. In Japanese, it’s recognised that possibly 60% of communication socially is silent. Well, that kind of culture can be richly blessed by Augustine’s understanding of memory.

But we close on a theme that we will be elaborating much more in the other course, and that is that the Psalms become the life-long key of Augustine’s inner life of prayer, his inner sense of identity. He uses the Psalms polemically because the Donatists in North Africa were speaking about two Christs. They were speaking about the Christian faith of the Montanists that were so ascetic and distinguishing it from the much more liberal, open-minded, less ascetic culture of those in cities like Carthage that were much more tolerant. “No,” he said, “you can’t divide Christ. The Psalms are expressing the whole body of Christ. Whatever our condition may be, it’s expressed there.” He also sees that the Psalms express a double meaning of confession of sin as well as confession of faith and that the two are inseparable. But what gives such wonderful unity to the Psalms is that we sing them with musical qualities that penetrate emotions that otherwise are indescribable, inexpressible. It’s the music that heals the heart, where words lose in their inadequacy. Music and silence are both expressive of the Christian’s identity.

As we would discuss this in groups, let me give you a few group discussion questions. First of all, as you read through all three of these texts of the Confessions, The City of God and the Homilies on the Psalms appropriating all of this for yourself, where and how do Augustine’s disclosures resonate within your own inner life?

Secondly, as we now live in our millennial culture having had 2,000 years of Western humanism shaped and reshaped and shaped again by Christian cultural values, how does Augustine help us accept our cultural inheritance that we all share? This is a very strong polemical question because our secularism today is wanting us to totally forget the last 2,000 years as if it never existed. How crazy can we be?

Thirdly, just as Augustine so absorbs the Psalms, how does he guide us to absorb the Psalms in our devotional life? As we’ll see again and again, one of the greatest defects of Christian worship today and Christian inner devotional life today is we’ve displaced the Psalms with hymnody. There is a place for hymnody, but the central place must be for Psalmody. Are we going to see a musical renaissance that once more is singing in the Psalms all the time? We lost that in the 18th century.

And finally, fourthly, in our public witness how does Augustine help us or inspire us to discern and to refute what we can discern as contemporary heresies? A strong element of Augustine’s identity was—he’s a polemicist. Many of us can say “Well, I’m a Pietist,” and that’s fine. But we have to do our homework to be polemical against all kinds of contemporary heresies.