What Does Saint Augustine Say to Us Today?

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), though a citizen of the ancient Roman world, has much to say to us today. Augustine also had much to say in his own lifetime, with a body of work totaling around six million words, so it is not easy to know all of what Augustine had to say, let alone to summarize that here. And Augustine, though having the ability to astonish and draw in readers, is also not particularly easy to read. But it is worth the effort, as he presents a truly remarkable Christian anthropology, or understanding of the human person in the world. 

Augustine offers a view of “faith seeking understanding” and the truth of love as a fundamental way of being, seeing, and living in the world, that informs and orders all aspects of life. He also offers a sacramental worldview, characterized by the confident search for God in all things, teaching us to see and know a most supreme Beauty that is ever ancient and ever new, astonishingly intimate to us, and yet truly infinite and mysterious beyond all comprehension. 

One way to enter into what Augustine has to say for us today is to gain some sense of traditional charisms of Augustine: veritas, unitas, caritas—or truth, unity, and love. 

Veritas (Truth)

One of Augustine’s most important insights is that knowing and loving are always tied together. This is indicated in the recurrence of “unity of mind and heart.” Knowing is, most properly understood, always a way of loving. There is a lot that can be unpacked in this insight—indeed, it anticipates a solution to a lot of problems that arise in the story philosophers tell about how humans know things in the late-medieval, modern, and postmodern periods. However, without going into those issues, it is also important to note that what is sought is not mere knowledge, but true understanding, and wisdom. 

This wisdom, which sheds light on truth, is not only personal, but a person—the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ. Augustine refers to Christ as the “inner teacher” who provides the medicine to heal our intellect, an incarnate exemplar showing us the way to truth, which is always a way of loving. So, much of this will be linked to what is said about caritas, or love. 

Truth must always be lived in love, for one’s neighbor and for God. It is also a restless quest, or pilgrimage, into the mystery of God, that requires deep and enduring commitment, that is not merely solitary. So it’s also a communal search, involving unitas, or unity. Augustine’s thinking on truth offers not only key theoretical insights on how to think of and pursue the truth, but Augustine makes himself a guide and inspiration, beckoning others to join him in the pursuit of truth, in the way that God beckoned him to do so. 

In a way that many today might resonate with, Augustine lived in a time when philosophical skepticism was prevalent, and he recognized in himself, as well as his friends, that this could lead to despair at being able to find any sense of truth. Some of the most respected minds, such as Cicero, were thought of as inveighing against the affirmation of any truth. Augustine notes his own despair at this, for a time: “As a result I became lazy and slothful, nor did I dare seek for what the most astute and learned men weren’t allowed to find” (Contra Academicos, II.9.23). But he pushes back against this and becomes convinced not only that truth can be found, but that he can bring his friends to this realization as well, which we see him doing in his early Cassiciacum dialogues after his conversion and just before his baptism. He does so under the conviction that the truth of wisdom he seeks is not just some thing out there, but a person, Christ, who’s mystery he was about to enter into in the sacraments. 

This is an early demonstration of what Augustine will continue to develop throughout his works, that faith and the intellect are integrally related in all things. Thus, his famous statement: Intellege ut credes; crede ut intellegas (“understanding in order to believe; believe in order to understand”). But note, he also warns against thought being mere curiositas, where people pursue cleverness, or simply want to “win” debates with rhetorical pyrotechnics without coming closer to the truth. This is an important message for our own time. His restless search for truth is a philosophical spirituality, and an intellectual piety, where humility and the acknowledgement of grace are essential. 

The centrality of Christ can often be overshadowed by what seems a very God-centered body of work, however looking at the whole of Augustine’s thought, it is clear that Christ is the enabling source of his thinking, as inner teacher, and as a fellow traveler on the pilgrim journey (peregrinatio). One enters into the mystery of truth by “putting on Christ,” as Paul says, and it is through Christ’s incarnation that one is able to follow on the way. Christ the Word, pierces our hearts (Confessions, X.6.8) and sets them ablaze, helping us to orient our desires toward their proper end in love of God and neighbor. Christ the healer provides the saving medicine. 

The poor Christ demonstrates that we love God by loving our neighbor, and by being conduits of divine love for others we enter more deeply into the mystery of the God who is love. The whole Christ is verified when we treat one another as the Body of Christ, and come to a deeper realization of the true community of God’s community. Thus, the importance of unitas, unity. 

Unitas (Unity)

Augustine has in mind a spirit of unity that fosters community and the common good that anticipates the restoration of creation to unity in the Logos, fulfilling our destiny of participation in the life of the Triune God. Unity, strengthened by grace and love, holds us together in communal pilgrimage toward God. A key idea in the monastic Rule of St. Augustine is: one in mind and heart intent upon God. This adapts the ideal of the community in Acts 4:32, by adding the dynamic journey into the mystery of God. It becomes clear that for all the emphasis placed on interiority for Augustine, this is not intended as something solitary or stagnant, but a dynamic journey of communal discernment that tries to make divine love concrete. Truly being in communion with one another requires love, and when we participate in that love, we come to know God. 

Augustine does not intend this rule to be only for monastic communities, but for them to be a radical witness to committed Christian community in a way that impacts the local church, families, and the Church as a whole. Augustine’s communities were situated in urban locations where members were meant to associate with the larger community and the local church. A spirit of the Body of Christ would mean sharing goods rather than pursuing individualism and acquisitiveness, as well as seeing to the broadly varying needs of diverse members. Augustine’s spirit of community does not try to make everyone the same but attends to the development of people in their unique gifts. It also includes a sense of “fraternal correction,” which means that deep relationships and ties have to be fostered and nurtured, so that difficult conversations can happen. This form of authentic love does not merely tolerate the other or turn a blind eye, but in a spirit of mercy seeks mutual care for the development of one another’s best personhood, to strengthen the community. 

This also stems from Augustine’s rich Eucharistic theology. As a Church we are called to be one Eucharistic Body of Christ in the spirit of his famous Sermo 272. In the Eucharistic Rite it is not just the bread and wine transformed into the body of Christ, but all of us, transformed into Christ, into one body. All these members then bear the very great responsibility to live as a sacrifice of praise, as conduits of God’s love for all people, treating all as we would Christ. This community is a unity in worship, participating in love, to enter more deeply into the mystery of the God who is Love. 

Caritas (Love)

Love is then the essential core of not only what it means to be human, but of all existence. God loves everything into existence for no other reason than to love and be loved. This is what makes up the basis of the Augustinian anthropology—that we are fundamentally desiring or loving beings, and so we have to realize the proper ordering of our loves (ordo caritatis) toward what is most ultimate. 

Augustine characterizes original sin as being curvatus in se, or curved in on oneself. To oversimplify: being selfish, trying to be autonomous gods unto ourselves. The result is a state of disorientation where one desires fulfilment but seeks it in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. As desiring and loving beings, humans cannot not love. Attempting to stifle desire will cause it to build up as in a pressure-cooker. Our desire is infinite, and the attempt to fulfill it with finite things is futile and can be quite destructive. However, it is this same infinite desire that ultimately leads Augustine to the infinite God. In Confessions, Augustine recounts having the things people and convention had told him would make him happy—a secure, successful, lucrative occupation; being eloquent and impressively intelligent; having an attractive partner, and a son, etc.—and yet he was still beset by a fundamental unhappiness. He even hyperbolically recalls thinking that a drunkard in the street who he saw laughing and carrying on was happier than he. This eventually triggers the crucial interior turn and search for what will ultimately fulfill him, and his fundamental insight that it is only the God who is “more intimate to me than I am even to my own self, and greater” (Confessions, III.6.11). He realizes that the only thing that will make him happy or fulfilled is no thing at all, but is God, who happened to be there all along, so close, and yet not noticed due to distraction and disorientation.

This is not to say that finite things are bad, but when ordered toward a deeper realization of love of God and neighbor, a sacramental worldview ushers in where one learns to see God’s Beauty in all things. This is also integral to Augustine’s understanding of true freedom. He prays: “order in me my love.” And when our loves are recalibrated toward this ordering, gravitational force, Augustine can say: “love and do what you will.” Interiority and the intellect are important, but knowing what one ought to do is not enough, as St. Paul indicates (Rom. 7:15), because we are not merely thinking beings, but more fundamentally loving beings. Our hearts can only come to rest when they enter most fully into God’s love; and the proper response to the realization of this is to say thank you, and praise God in all we do.

We seek truth, together, in a spirit of love. We make God’s truth and love incarnate in our communities by embodying Christ’s love. We return together to God the praise of which God is truly worthy, and return to God together, who most truly is Love and our truest identity, to partake in that Love that is our beginning and end, in that eternal living city, toward which we continue together on our pilgrim journey.