Prayer - Lesson 16

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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Augustine's Reflections on Prayer

Lesson Transcript

And now as a climax to our whole survey about prayer, nothing can be more of a climax than to reflect on Augustine's reflections on his teachings on prayer and especially on his reflections on the prayer of the Psalms.

And as I was thinking of what is a hymn that’s appropriate for this honouring of Augustine, this is the hymn that I've come up with. It's like a prayer that we can start with at the beginning of this session.

Renew your Church, her ministries restore:

Both to serve and to adore.

Make us again as salt throughout the land,

And as light from a stand.

'Mid sombre shadows of the night,

Where greed and hatreds spread their blight,

O send us forth with power enduded,

Help us, O Lord, to be renewed.

Teach us your Word, reveal its truth divine,

On our path, let it shine;

Tell of your works, your mighty acts of grace,

From each page show your face.

As you have loved us, sent your Son,

And our salvation now is won,

O let our hearts with love be stirred,

Help us, Lord, know your Word.

Teach us to pray, for you are ever near,

Your still voice let us hear.

Our souls are restless till they rest in you,

This the goal we pursue.

Before your presence keep us still

That we may find for us your will,

And seek your guidance every day,

Teach us, Lord, how to pray.

Teach us to love, with strength of heart and mind,

Each and all, humankind;

Break down old walls of prejudice and hate,

Leave us not to our own fate.

As you have loved and given your life

To end hostility and strife,

O share your grace from heaven above,

teach us, Lord, how to love.

As we think of this sentiment that should be at the heart of all our prayer life, it was certainly at the heart of this remarkable figure of the early Church, Augustine. It's actually ludicrous for me to try and summarise in one lecture anything of significance about him. He's such a colossal giant. I remember once being with a little girl and we were standing at a very tall cliff and I told her you know, you can't embrace the cliff; you can only touch it. And so we're like that: we can only touch upon him. We can't embrace him. He's too big, too vast to comprehend.

But there are fortunately for us today a lovely little library that Oxford University Press has started to produce and you get a small pamphlet, that size all about quantum physics, all about astrophysics, all about whoever. And Henry Chadwick, who has been a long time scholar in Cambridge of Augustine and did a translation of Augustine's works, has got a little summary that you could all very conveniently read in a meditation of just a few hours all about Augustine. I would recommend that as probably the best thing to ever get into; otherwise, you get into deep waters and you drown. It's been said that if anybody claims that they’ve read all the works of Augustine then he truly is a liar. It's too vast.

And so it's really a remarkable gift that God has given the Church to give us his life and his works. Again, if you're wanting to do a retreat on the prayer life of Augustine, there's a very useful little summary by Jaime Garcia. The book is called 15 Days of Prayer with St Augustine. And that too is a very useful little popular book that you can have as you can pray with other of the saints in that same series. Well, as I say, I'm not going to go into all the technical bibliography of which it's vast, other than to suggest that, as we were hearing the other day, now on Google you can actually get freely the translation of Augustine's Sermons on the Psalms by Maria Boulding's wonderful translation, it's so lucid, of the homilies, the sermons, of Augustine on the Psalter, on the Psalms.

I want to skip over therefore much about his life and much about the time in which he lived because that’s a huge subject in itself, but we do know that the importance of him is that he lived a long period of time. He was born in 354 in a small community, possibly originally it was a Romanised Berber colony in what is now Algeria and he died in 430. So he lived to see the Fall of the Roman Empire and lived to a remarkable age when the mortality for people in those days was for a man about 29. And so you see he lived a full life. His father was a lower class bureaucrat and he lived as a man who didn't have much faith - it was perhaps Christianised to some extent. But of course it was his mother, Monica, who really reared him in the faith as a child. And so it was actually the middle age of his life that he became a Christian. And again, all of that you can read in the stories about his autobiography. The book by Brown on the biography of Augustine is still a classic. That too is a book that is recommended for your general reading.

What, of course, marked all his life was controversy. And he was well-equipped for it because he was trained to be a professional rhetorician, so both in North Africa, where he's tutored in rhetoric and then later became the [orator 00:08:33] in the City of Milan, which was the capital of the empire at that time. He rose to the highest prestige with this brilliant mind that he had. And then, with his remarkable conversion in 391, all of that was turned and he very quickly became a priest and within four years he'd become a bishop. So he was extraordinarily precocious for someone so young and yet so immature in his faith to become a leader of the Church.

As we've said, as a man of dialogue he was a man of controversy. And so the first series of controversies that he faced were that there was a form of ethnic Christianity in North Africa. It was very much associated with the Berbers, who were resisting the Romanisation of North Africa and the Donatists and so he had to stand up against their exclusivism of other people of God and that was one of the big issues of his first struggle. And then later he had to fight against the Pelagians, who were a group of people that started with a lawyer that came from Britain, who sought to reform the Church again, but the reformation that he was seeking was in one's own self effort and was not appreciative of really the grace of God in his life. And so all through his life, he was such a public figure and it's therefore all the more remarkable that he was such a public figure and such a rhetorician that God transformed his life with a remarkable metanoia that grew from his youth through his maturity to his old age. So as we were saying about the significance of the early Paul that changed from being a young man to a mature man to a wise man in his age, Augustine was privileged to go through these different identities of what it is to be a Christian.

But for our purpose as we close on the subject of prayer, he again is an inheritor of the Desert Fathers. It was Anthony and his life that also had arrested Augustine so he realised that you have to live, as it were, in the desert of one's own private, inner space before God in order that you can therefore have a much fuller consciousness of God. Augustine's inner space that he explored was never empty space. It wasn’t Zen Buddhist space. It was a space filled with the love of God. So inner reflectiveness is what Augustine teaches us is the only way in which we have a large interior space and that space is for God.

Many secular interpreters of Augustine have seen him as the pioneer of self-consciousness. Nonsense! He was the pioneer, like so many of the Early Fathers, of God consciousness. It was that preoccupation that our whole freedom in Christ is to enlarge our consciousness. Well, he's now considered the father of Western consciousness, but he's also the father of Christian grace because he sees that this inner consciousness is all the consequence of the grace of God.

At the sane time, he lives in the world. He lives in the Classical World. He's been trained as a Classical rhetorician and so he doesn’t turn his back on the world. He faces it confrontally, but he does so like Jacques Ellul that sees that there are two worlds or two cities that are in confrontation with each other. There's a city of man and there's a city of God. The city of man was Classical culture, was the Roman Empire, but the city of God is the city where God is at work within our hearts and within our souls. But he sees that the dialogue between them is essential for us to grow in our consciousness of what the Christian life is all about. One of the other things that is distinctive about Augustine is that he has a new source of memory: memoria. For the rhetorician, memory was very important, to be able to memorise your speech, to be able to look at all the columns of the debating hall or indeed the halls where the senators would give their political speeches was that you were able to look at one pillar and have one paragraph in your mind with that pillar and then your memory would be aided by looking at the next pillar for the next part of your speech. And so really the array of the pillars was, for the rhetorician, really an aide de memoire for being able to give your speech.

Now he's using memory in a very, very different way. What he's speaking about is that deep within us is the memory of God. It's that memory that we have to recover. It was certainly a Neo-Platonic theme that the closer you go inside yourself, the closer you get to God. No, says Augustine. The closer you go inside yourself, the more you find the relevance of God for your need, so your new understanding of memoria is realising all your needs. And in realising all your needs, you realise all the more the need for the presence of God within you. And so instead of the doctrine of reminiscence, which is Plato's doctrine, Augustine's Christian doctrine is you need your inner mind illuminated by His presence, illuminated by His word, illuminated by grace. We need revelation. We need that God's word is on the outside that we read about has to enter into the depth of our being; otherwise, there's darkness. Whereas, His word gives light.

And this is why the Psalms became so profoundly significant for Augustine, because their inner illumination is guided by the interiority of the Psalms themselves. And so he sees that the central importance of what we might call 'Psalmist revelation' is how it illuminates our interior world. Again, a Platonist would never, never accept the Resurrection because it's the resurrection of the body and for a Platonist it's the escape from the body that is all important. And we see how even the Early Fathers made too much focus on the asceticism of the body in punishing it and depriving it and staving it and even making it sleepless. All these things were certainly a polemical intent that the Fathers had for appropriate use, but they also had got abused. They became excessively abused. And so this is where Augustine has a very central place for the body within our lives. What is the use of the significance of the body? The body is the instrument of presence of the other in our life. We have a body not to make us a ghost, but to be available for the service of God, to be available for the worship of God, that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. So Augustine has a healthy view of the body compared with some of those ascetics who had gone to extremity.

And a final thing that we find that Augustine is contradicting Neo-Platonism is on the subject of happiness as the absolute good, the summum bonum. This absolute good that the Platonic philosophers were yearning for is certainly that God has placed desire within our hearts. And so we have this wonderful statement at the beginning of the Confessions, God made us for Himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God. As we've seen about Hesychia and its interpretation of apatheia, yes, God has set infinite desire within a limited framework and we go on restlessly living until those desires become God-directed.

So Augustine is not Neo-Platonic, as so many people, even Christians, still condemn him to be. He's just the opposite. People don’t understand Neo-Platonism if they judge Augustine in this way. The very nature, he sees, of the Neo-Platonic is a contradiction of what he's affirming as a Christian.