Prayer - Lesson 17

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-17

Augustine, Consciousness, and the Inner Life

Lesson Transcript

We therefore realise that for Augustine the inner life is not about introspection. It's not naval gazing. It's a journey towards God. The more inwardly we’re focused, the more we are homo viater, the traveller, and we’re moving inwardly. And one of the ways in which you and I can understand that we’re a traveller is that every day we’re getting new insights because we have a new landscape to look at. If we never change from day to day, we’re really looking at life or Christianity from the balcony as a view of the road. And many, many Christians have got stuck in their pews with a view of the road. There's no change. But the mark of ceaseless change is the mark that we're travelling and that we have new vistas for us day by day. We’re moving on, but we’re moving inwardly, but we're moving upwardly. So it's like a piston: the dynamism of the Christian inner reflection is both in and up at the same time. Inwardly, we’re looking at our own abilities to ruminate, to meditate, to reflect, to understand, to remember. All of these are abilities of memory and of the mind and the intellect and the will that we exercise. But we always have to keep looking up to have the gift of grace to do these things.

When I started as a graduate student after the war, I lived with Donald Wiseman, who became professor of Assyriology later in his life. And every time he greeted me, he said 'Jim, keep looking up.' And I've never forgotten that phrase that was his kind of well, you knew Wiseman was talking when he said, 'Keep looking up.' Augustine was always doing this and so he makes a huge distinction between turning inwardly and looking upwardly. If he's the father of Western consciousness, people have drawn a continuum between Augustine and René Descartes when he said, 'I think, therefore I am.' What, of course, Augustine was doing was the very opposite of Cartesian thinking because thinking is thinking from your own perspective. It's always looking inwardly. He had no idea of what it was to look upwardly. And when we look upwardly, we don’t take the initiative. It's God who takes the initiative. So you might say the antithesis of the Cartesian self is not I think, therefore I am, but I respond, therefore I am. It's as a responsive vehicle of grace that we’re responding to His love; we're responding to His mercy. We're responding to His love. And so that interiority that is expanding within us in this sense of consciousness is that we are experiencing love. And love is threefold. It's love for the other. It's loving for the thing in itself, which is God, but it's love that enables us to love as well.

And so this exteriority was very, very different from that of the Stoics, who were self-contained about their virtues. Self-containment was all they required to control their passions. 00:04:23] But no, the Christian life is not a Pelagian life or a Stoic life. It's a life that is always being filled like an empty vessel from the spring that He gives to us. It's what Jesus promised the woman at the well, that out of you will flow rivers of living water. God doesn’t give us simply an aqueduct that supplies the water. He drenches us with this abundance of water that springs from within our lives by His spirit so it so totally transforms us that we can speak that the experience of the love of God is a mutual indwelling, that there's a place for God to dwell - that’s the summa bonum. That’s the desire above all desires that’s fulfilled, that Christ in me is the hope of glory, not me, but the Christ indwells within us. And so I live yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.

And the faith by which I live is not my faith, but it's faith in the Son of God. God gives me the faith by which to trust Him. God gives me the love by which to love Him. God gives me the joy that’s His gift to me. All of this comes from this indwelling, this interiority that is so profoundly what He recognises. And so it's in this context that he sees that the city of man is the expression of self-love. The city of God is the manifestation of the rule of love that’s over the heavenly city and in the heavenly city. It's a city of selflessness because we’re filled with His self, with His love. And so John Burnaby, who is a Scottish theologian of a previous generation, could see that if you [encapsulate 00:06:52] what Augustine is experiencing and expressing, it's Amor Dei. It's all about the love of God. It's a wonderful classic and I hope that some time you may have the time in your life to read Burnaby's Amor Dei of a previous generation. It's still so full.

And so when memory is so deepened within the new life of Augustine, not as a rhetorician to remember his lines, but now memoria becomes a vast treasure house of all the experience of God, of all the awareness that God gives to us of Himself. And therefore we think of the memory of the Church. We think of the memory of the scriptures. All of this is expressing all the experiences that we have of God. The Christian has a good memory, not because it's cognitive, but because God is so capaciously active within our interiority. That’s what he meant by it.

Well, there were many aspects of this that again we have to skip over because you could write a whole treatise on, as other people have done, on his consciousness of memory as well as of other aspects that we reflected earlier of immanence and transcendence and his understanding of time. But our time is limited.