Augustine, Part Three

No one is redeemed except through unmerited mercy, and no one is condemned except through merited judgment.

A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today, edited by James R. Payton, Jr

A third and final post regarding Augustine.

God

Your today is eternity. And this is how the Son, to whom You said, “Today I have begotten You” [Ps 2:7], was begotten coeternal with Yourself. You made all time; You are before all time, and the “time,” if such we may call it, when there was no time was not time at all.

In the realm of time, there can be no such thing as a “beginning,” or a time before time. For whatever time, however long ago, one can imagine, there is always a moment before…in time. It is in that beginning before time that the Son was begotten, meaning inherently as eternal as the Father. Both were there at the beginning.

His present knowledge does not differ from what it ever was or shall be, for those variations of time – past, present, and future – although they alter our knowledge, do not affect His.

Because God is outside of time.

In a wondrous, indescribable way, even what is done against His will is not done without His will.

As a matter of fact, God brings about some of His purposes, which are of course good, through the evil designs of bad people; for example, it was by the good will of the Father working through the malevolence of the Jews that Christ was slain for us.

Give grace to do what You command, and command what You will!

The topic of God’s will and the problem of evil is a stumbling block for many. Not for me. Man is fallen, man has free choice to act, fallen man will at times choose evil. What of the unchosen evil – say cancer or some other ailment? Same starting point: man is fallen, our physical body is corrupt, subject to various physical ailments. What of accidents? Our world is corrupted, just as man is.

God can choose to act or not act; He can choose to use or not use one means or another to achieve His purposes. It is not my place to judge God.

You created, not because You had need, but out of the abundance of Your own goodness.

Being unchanging, inherently He can have no such thing as “need.”

The Son

A mediator between God and humankind must have something in common with God and something in common with humanity.

Like men, He [Jesus Christ] was mortal; like God, He was just.

The God-man.

In order that He might heal the whole human being from the plague of sin, He took without sin the whole human nature.

He took on all that we are, to heal all that we are.

By being Your Son, yet serving You, He freed us from servitude and made us Your children.

He is both the Priest who offers and the sacrifice offered.

Creation

What kind of days [of Creation] these were it is extremely difficult, probably impossible, for us to conceive, and how much more to say!

But the truths which those words contain appear to different enquirers in a different light, and of all the meanings that they can bear, which of us can lay his finger upon one and say that it is what Moses had in mind and what he meant us to understand by his words?

The arbitrary assurance with which they insist upon it [their interpretation] springs from presumption, not from knowledge. It is the child of arrogance, not of true vision.

I have read similar words from Augustine on this topic, and reproduce these here:

In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics…

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” (1 Tm 1, 7)

Returning to quotes from Payton:

When so many meanings, all of them acceptable as true, can be extracted from the words that Moses wrote, do you not see how foolish it is to make a bold assertion that one in particular is the one he had in mind?

Different understandings for many passages are possible without corrupting the faith. We cannot know with certainty the intent of each author for each sentence in Scripture. Even if we could, the human author might not have known the intent himself, let alone the intent of God.

I have heard many authors and lyricists, upon hearing an interpretation of their work, say something to the effect: I never thought of it that way, but, yes, it could be so.

Man / Confessions

Augustine is well known for his “Confessions.”

My life is full of faults, and my only hope is in Your boundless mercy.

The rule of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held fast even against its will, yet deservedly, because it fell into the habit of its own accord.

People love the truth when it bathes them in its light; they hate it when it proves them wrong.

I felt no need for the food that does not perish, not because I had my fill of it, but because the more I was starved of it the less palatable it seemed.

Without You I am my own guide to the brink of perdition.

Here we see a recognition of the depth of sin, and the utter lack of what was necessary to combat sin.

The path that leads us away from You and brings us back again is not measured by footsteps or milestones.

Wherever one’s soul may turn, unless it turns to You, it clasps sorrow to itself.

The one who serves You best us the one who is less intent on hearing from You what he wants to hear than on shaping his will according to what he hears from You.

When Your commands are obeyed, it is from You that we receive the power to obey them.

If the things of this world delight you, praise God for them but turn your love away from them and give it to their Maker, so that in the things that please you, you may not displease Him.

Trust God and obey His commands.

Let me not tire, O Lord, of thanking You for Your mercy in rescuing me from all my wicked ways, so that You may be sweeter to me than all the joys which used to tempt me….

True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in You, O God, who are the Truth…

In this, then, consists one’s righteousness, that he submit himself to God….

God is truth and mercy; we are to submit.

Salvation

It is not incongruous to believe that even in other nations there may have been people to whom this mystery [of salvation by divine mercy] was revealed, and who were also compelled to proclaim it.

Job is offered as one example.

An objection is often raised: what of all of the people who have never heard of Jesus, of His salvation, etc.? On the one hand, those who raise this objection have heard of Jesus, so they have no excuse.

Yet, what of this example of Job? Can any of us speak to all of the ways in which God can touch man? Further, is there not anything that we might decide to just leave in God’s hands, content that we don’t have to have every answer?

The Afterlife

In the afterlife we will be so constituted as not to be able to desire evil. But this does not mean that we will lack free will. In fact, our sill shall be much more free because it will be utterly impossible for us to serve sin.

We will have the freedom to live as we were intended to live. Can there be freedom more or better than this?

Other

While the hot restlessness of heretics stirs questions about many articles of the catholic faith, the necessity of defending them forces us to investigate them more accurately, to understand them more clearly, and to proclaim them more earnestly; thus, the question mooted by an adversary become the occasion of instruction.

I return to this idea where, on the one hand, many doctrinal conclusions have been reached that go beyond what appears necessary for salvation and faith (and, yet, have caused division); on the other hand, heresies have…well… forced the hand of these early Church fathers. Perhaps inevitable.

Then again, I don’t have to know what happened on September eleven to know what didn’t happen….

And now we have three incredibles, all of which have nevertheless come to pass. It is incredible that Jesus Christ should have risen in the flesh and ascended with flesh into heaven; it is incredible that the world should have believed so incredible a thing; it is incredible that a very few men, of insignificant birth, the lowest rank, and no education, should have been able so effectually to persuade the world, and even the learned, of so incredible a thing.

The leading truth they [the martyrs] professed is that Christ rose from the dead.

Biographies / Sources

Augustine (354 – 430) is the most profound of all Latin Church Fathers. His influence in Western Christianity is more significant than that of any other theologian.