‘Late Have I Loved You’: An Introduction to St Augustine’s Confessions

/in , , /by

 

Structure of talk

  1. Introduction
  2. Augustine’s life (up to conversion)
  3. Augustine and our post-Christian contemporaries
  4. The Confessions: style, structure, content
  5. Augustine’s conversion (Confessions V-IX)
  6. Questions for discussion
  7. Conclusion

Quotations

  1. You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (Ps 47:2), great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable (Ps 146:5). Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being bearing his mortality with him (2 Cor 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you resist the proud (1 Pet 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you (Confessions I.i.1).
  2. People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars But they are uninterested in themselves (Confessions X.viii.15).
  3. Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours (Confessions X.xxvii.38).
  4. I was led to Ambrose by you, unaware that through him I might be led to you. That man of God received me like a father and expressed pleasure at my coming with a kindness most fitting in a bishop. I began to like him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in your Church, but as a human being who was kind to me (Confessions V.xiii.23).
  5. It is one thing to catch a glimpse from a wooded summit of the homeland of peace and not to find the way to it, but vainly to attempt the journey along an impracticable route surrounded by the ambushes and assaults of fugitive deserters with their chief, the lion and the dragon (Ps 90:13). It is another thing to hold on to the way that leads there, defended by the protection of the heavenly emperor (Confessions VII.xxi.27).
  6. Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires (Romans 13:13-14).
  7. I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled (Confessions VIII.xii.29).

Further study

Augustine, Confessions, tr. H. Chadwick, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991

Prof Paul Freedman, ‘The Confessions of Augustine’, YaleCourses YouTube channel

Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ (In Our Time), BBC Podcasts YouTube channel

Brown, P., Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (2nd edition), Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000

Lane Fox, R., Augustine: Conversions and Confessions, London, Penguin, 2015

Augnet (very useable online resource on St Augustine): augnet.org/en/life-of-augustine/

Aquinas and Prayer

/in /by

“The starting point of prayer is desire for eternal life, and this persists in all the other works we do in due order, because all of them should be ordered towards obtaining eternal life, and so the desire for eternal life persists virtually in all the good deeds we do,” and again Thomas teaches, “we pray in order to make ourselves realise that we need to have recourse to his help…. By praying we offer God reverence, inasmuch as we subject ourselves too him and profess, by praying that we need him as the author of all that is good for us.” St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P.

As Christians we believe that we stand in the presence of God continually, and whether we are praying or not, we believe that the Divine presence is everywhere and that the eyes of God look on us always. The Lord in the gospel reminds us to pray always (Lk 18:1) and to never loose heart and this is best answered by us when live with an attitude of faith, hope and love and with a joy that comes from the Holy Spirit.(1 Th. 1:6). Thomas teaches (IaIIae.30 ad.1) us that every creature that exists in the world wants what is good for itself, it is natural to want, but within man there are grace given virtues that dispose us to a goal of perfect happiness beyond our natural human desires and God is the only possible source. Every human therefore desires happiness. This desire which comes from God is a desire that we will live eternally in God, eternally for he is heaven itself, our eternal joy. The goals we set in life move us in different ways depending according to whether our goal is present or absent. If our goal is present Thomas teaches that we will simply rest in it, if our goal is absent we must move on for the attraction keeps us in momentum. For Thomas, God by his ineffable will attracts us to himself, for we simply are made to love, we are attracted by what seems an absent self, and so we desire, this desire will lead to our rest but that is only in the presence of God.

This teaching on the desire of man, explains to me how Thomas comes to his conclusions on continual prayer. The desire for God or beatitude which is Eternal life will always remain as a thirst within the human heart; man will according to his desire live his life in relation to this desire. Unlike many things we desire we forget them after some time, or we lose the momentum to keep searching or we find substitutes that quench that thirst, but we discover that what we unnaturally desire only leads to unfullfillment. Like the prayer of Augustine in the first book of his confession we can pray, Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.

We therefore live our lives with this grace given love to desire something which seems absent and unattainable in this life, but God is present and as I stated at the beginning, we are always in God’s presence and his eyes look lovingly upon us. If our deepest desire is God, we will live our lives in accordance to God will, all our works will be ordered towards obtaining eternal life, everything we do comes from this love, this one desire to be united. So we can take from St Thomas that our life becomes a prayer, a continuous prayer if we live the moral life, for every action and decision we take comes from an inert desire to be with and in God. There are times however that the initial movement to come close to God weakens, and we begin to rest in the desires that have an ultimate end, or rightly as Thomas teaches we can start to desire pleasures as they are in themselves and not as steps to union with God, the reason be, according to Thomas, the simple cares of life.

In his commentary on the letter to the Thessalonians, Thomas states that; “Pray constantly” means to pray continuously. But then prayer is considered under the aspect of the effect of the prayer. For prayer is the unfolding or expression of desire; for when I desire something, then I ask for it by praying. So prayer is the petition of suitable things from God; and so desire has the power of prayer. “O Lord, thou wilt hear the desire of the meek” (Ps. 10: 17). Therefore, whatever we do is the result of a desire; so prayer always remains in force in the good things we do; for the good things we do flow forth from the desire of the good.

The desire for God will always be in man for it is a natural desire. Origen understood like Thomas that prayer in a broad sense as a life of love for God and for our neighbour, as long as a person loved virtuously and obeyed the commandments of God in his daily occupations, man was living a life of love and could be said to be praying without ceasing. In general speaking too we can describe prayer as true love, a mother and father have a natural love for their children, it is always there, regardless of what the child does, the parent will always love as demonstrated in the Gospels so many times but especially in the story of the Prodigal Son. The love will sometimes be stronger than at other times but there is never a time when it is not present and what is prayer if it is not love, even the shortest thought about God, even the smallest deed, even faithfully living one’s life according to God’s commandments in the smallest and uneventful ways is but awakening the heart to a life of continual love.

Is it possible therefore to stop praying, to stop desiring God and eternal happiness? I do not think it is, for even when man falls through sin, his desire while against man’s nature was a desire for good, a desire for happiness, though the good desired was not according to God’s commandments. The desire for mercy and forgiveness comes as a grace from God, the child aware of its faults is moved through grace to repent unto the parent, therefore the Spirit within cries out; “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” (Rm 8.26) The Spirit intercedes from within and we are as sinners humbled and in need of mercy rely on that participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

We are moved to repentance and conversion of life and through God’s mercy we are permitted to walk freely again, re-directed in many words along the path of life. When man has fallen in sin, he looks up to God and understands his need. When we fall we are humbled and see our need for that which is greater, if we never fell, we would grow in pride, and become in our own minds self-sufficient and independent. God therefore can see in the permitting of us to fall, a greater good, a deepening of prayer, and the begging of mercy which makes us dependent children on a loving and caring father. Through prayer we discover our need, and we as Thomas teaches, subject ourselves to God again and profess by our humble prayer that we need him as the author of all that is good for us.

Praying therefore without ceasing is simply Love, a love which is the grace of God attracting us to himself, through a life lived according to the commandments and the teaching of Jesus Christ who is the source and summit of the Fathers love, itself made manifest on the Cross.