Fr Brian Lowery, Prior of Convento S.Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy, was invited to Clare Priory, England to talk on "The Confessions of St Augustine".

Over the weekend, (3rd - 5th April 2009), Fr Brian gave four talks on the "Confessions" titled "The Confessions of St Augustine. his journey out and back, to finding God in himself". They are available here, in full, by kind permission of Fr Brian Lowery.

Each talk is available in Audio Format: 

Audio control >> Talk 1

| Talk 1 | Talk 2 | Talk 3 | Talk 4 |

FIRST TALK

INTRODUCTION

I would like to start out our weekend retreat on the Confessions of St. Augustine listening to what someone else said about the book. That comes from the great mystic, St. Teresa of Avila who had a tremendous feeling for St. Augustine and as a young girl was a student at a school of Augustinian nuns in Spain. She says in her Autobiography:

At this time they gave me the Confessions of Saint Augustine. It seems the Lord ordained this, because I had not tried to procure a copy, nor had I ever seen one. I am very fond of Saint Augustine, because the convent where I stayed as a lay person belonged to his Order, and also because he had been a sinner. For I found great consolation in sinners whom, after having been sinners, the Lord brought back to himself. It seemed to me I could find help in them, and that since the Lord had pardoned them, He could pardon me. But there was one thing that left me inconsolable, and that was that the Lord called them only once, and they did not turn back and fall again; whereas in my case I had turned back so often that I was worn out from it. But by considering the love He bore me, I regained my courage, for I had never lost confidence in his mercy; in myself I lost it many times. (Autobiography 9,7)

The Confessions have been a personal inspiration to many other readers and listeners as well, for over 1600 years. The book  traces the route of the famous conversion of St. Augustine as he himself wrote about it. Augustine saw his conversion as a kind of a road, a road of the heart. He said as much in one of the several times that he compared himself to the prodigal son: "It is not on our feet or by movement in space that we go from you or return to you" (I,18,28). That is, to turn your back on God and go off to a far place, like the prodigal son did, you don’t need chariots, ships or even feet, You just need to do it in your heart. To turn back to God, however, you don’t need chariots, ships or even feet, you just need to do it in your heart. That’s what the Confessions are all about.

Our plan is to stop at some of the key passages along the route of the Confessions in the short time we have and to read some of Augustine’s most pertinent thoughts about his conversion; and perhaps about our own conversions, too, that are going on at this very moment. Amid those pages we will read about what he would call his sinful past and how his freedom grew ever more diminished as his habits became stronger. We will also discover a mysterious and subtle presence of God, which Augustine recognized only years later after he had become a Christian, with which God little by little worked on his heart and led him back to him.

This mysterious presence, this active closeness of God in one’s life  despite all appearances, is one of the main reasons for his writing the Confessions. He wanted us to know that God never leaves us, no matter how far we go from him. He is the Hound of Heaven. God is all the time working in all sorts of ways to bring us to himself. Augustine wanted to encourage his readers and listeners on their own roads, not by preaching a sermon to us or handing us a treatise on theology but by showing the effect of divine grace in the story of another human being like ourselves. Today the power of stories to help understand the Christian life is more recognized than ever before. Stories teach us “the heart of the matter”. For they effectively dramatize the fact that God is for us and  his grace can transform us. The Confessions are the "story of a soul", to use the words of another Teresa, Therese of Lisieux. They are also a story of God and how he is constantly at work seeking us.

    I ask you to bring your book with you to our sessions. Underline it if you want. Write in it if something strikes you. For that is how the Confessions will become a friend, and you will be able to return to it easily and often in the future. By the way, it is good to read them slowly. For every word of Augustine is a foot deep and should not be glided over.

MEDITATION

So let’s now begin the book. Go to the very beginning, that is, to BOOK ONE, CHAPTER ONE, PARAGRAPH ONE. I'll start with a little tip. The first five chapters of BOOK ONE make up a kind of introductory meditation by the author as he prepares himself to write such a challenging work. It’s a marvellous meditation but a bit difficult. So, many people get discouraged at this point. There's no story yet. It is my experience that the number of those curious persons who have picked it up and then put it down again, unfinished, is greater than those who have persevered to the end. Perhaps they were fooled by the word, "Confessions." This book is not like the "Confessions of a Housewife," the "Confessions of a Spy," or the "Confessions of a Courtesan." But we’re not going to put it down. Let’s read:

Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is your power, and of your wisdom there is no number. And man desires to praise you. He is but a tiny part of all that you have created. He bears about him his mortality, the evidence of his sinfulness, and the evidence that you resist the proud. Yet this tiny part of all that you have created desires to praise you. You so excite him that to praise you is his joy. For you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. (I,1,1)

    "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." This is the most famous line in all of Augustine's works. If one knows anything Augustine ever wrote, it is this. I’m sure you have heard it before. Notice how much it tells us about ourselves. Augustine says that we are made for God. Actually he says that we are in motion and going towards God from birth. Therefore, we are fundamentally restless and will continue to be so. Restlessness is not a bad thing, he says. That’s what makes us searchers in life. Restlessness keeps us unsatisfied and yearning for more. That “more” is God, because we are made for him. Our real rest will come only when we are finally united with him. Someone once said that, after the Bible, nothing has ever better described the human condition than this passage in the Confessions.

    Did you notice how often Augustine uses the word, “you”? That is because he is speaking to God and not to us directly. The book is actually a long prayer. "You" means God. The Confessions is his song of praise and thanksgiving for the mercy of God that he concretely discovered in his own personal story. Augustine "confesses", or better “professes”, God's goodness and love. That’s what the title, Confessions, means. That’s enough now for this introductory meditation. Maybe some day you can return to it and read it all.

BOYHOOD

It’s time now to go the story line that begins with Chapter 6. We find him when he was an infant. Augustine starts off telling us how as a baby he made his needs and wants known to his parents by crying and frantically gesticulating, and then goes on to show how he later learned to talk by imitating the sounds his parents made. Naturally, he said, he didn’t remember all this. Others told him about it and he himself had observed the behaviour of babies. In one passage he tells about how he used to be breast-fed and the role that God played in that:

Thus for my sustenance and my delight I had a woman's milk. Yet it was not my mother or my nurses who stored their breasts for me. It was yourself, using them to give me the food of my infancy according to your ordinance and the riches set by you at every level of creation. It was by your gift that I desired what you gave and no more, and by your gift that those who suckled me willed to give me what you had given them. (I,6,7)

    It may seem exaggerated to ascribe to God such an ordinary human activity as breast feeding. But for Augustine it was not. For him it amounted to divine providence. Providence, according to him, is something all pervasive. It penetrates the spaces of a person's life just as God himself penetrates the spaces of the whole universe. It works night and day right from the beginning of life, because God is the creator.    

Here we can detect a deep and abiding conviction of Augustine's, namely that God is always and everywhere present to us, providing for us in all our needs. God’s providence is especially active along the road of our personal history. He said it many times in the Confessions about his own road: "You were with me", he would say (X,27,38; X,40,65) "You were always there"(II,2,4)

Let’s now continue on with the story.

(I, 9) He tells that he didn’t really like going to school;

O God, my God, what emptiness and mockeries did I now experience. For it was impressed on me as right and proper in a boy to obey those who taught me, that I might get on in the world and excel in the handling of words to gain honor among men and deceitful riches. I, poor wretch, could not see the use of the things I was sent to school to learn. But if I proved idle in learning, I was soundly beaten. For this procedure seemed wise to our ancestors; and many, passing the same way in days past, had built a sorrowful road by which we too must go, with multiplication of grief and toil upon the sons of Adam.

    Greco-Roman education was noted for its severity: memorization and strict discipline. Spare the rod and spoil the child. And there were beatings  too! Augustine never spoke well of his teachers. He said he would tremble at the thought of them. Do you remember the fresco at San Gimignano that shows the schoolmaster taking a stick to a little boy who hadn’t done his lessons? Augustine said in the Confessions that the first prayer he ever uttered was when he asked God to keep the hand of the schoolmaster off of him:

Yet, Lord, I observed men praying to you; and I learned to do likewise, thinking of you (to the best of my understanding) as some great being who, though unseen, could hear and help me. As a boy I fell into the way of calling upon you, my help and my refuge; and in those prayers I broke the strings of my tongue - praying to you, small as I was but with no small energy, that I might not be beaten at school.

    He felt some resentment about this. His parents seemed to approve the beatings. He knew they were ambitious and wanted him to succeed so that he could pull their family ahead. His family, too, had its conflicts:

Yet my parents seemed to be amused at these torments inflicted upon me as a boy by my masters, though I was no less afraid of my punishments or zealous in my prayers to you for deliverance. But in spite of my terrors I still did wrong by writing or reading or studying less than my set tasks.
You can see that Augustine was a very normal boy, and his family had its normal share of dysfunctions. That’s one of the things I like about Augustine. He wasn’t born a saint and he didn’t come from a pious and exemplary family. There’s hope for us yet!

(I, 11) He goes on to tell us that he was never baptised as a child:

Even as a boy, of course, I had heard of an eternal life promised because the Lord our God had come down in his humility upon our pride. And I was signed with the sign of his cross and seasoned with his salt as I came new from the womb of my mother who had great trust in you.

    The "sign of his cross" and the "salt" were two of the stages of the catecumenate.

He continues:

When I was still a child, I fell gravely ill with some abdominal trouble and was close to death. You saw, Lord - for you were even then guarding me - with what earnest faith I besought the piety of my own mother, and of the Church which is the mother of us all, that I might receive the baptism of your Christ, my Lord and my God. The mother of my flesh was in heavy anxiety, since with a heart chaste in your faith she was ever in deep travail for my eternal salvation, and would have proceeded without delay to have me consecrated and washed clean by the sacrament of salvation, while I confessed you, Lord Jesus, unto the remission of sins. But I made a sudden recovery. This caused my baptismal cleansing to be postponed.

    In those times baptism was put off until after adolescence. The sacrament of reconciliation had not undergone much development yet and it could be received only once. So they left space for the storms of youth to pass before the commitment of baptism. Augustine almost was baptised when a sickness made it urgent, but he got better and it was never administered.

(I, 13) Note how he hated grammar and maths. Rather he loved to read stories:

To this day I do not quite see why I so hated the Greek tongue that I was made to learn as a small boy. For I really liked Latin - not the rudiments that we got from our first teachers, but the literature that we came to be taught later. For the rudiments - reading and writing and figuring - I found as hard and hateful as Greek.

(I, 19) He says he was a bit of a rascal; he always wanted to win in games and come out first, and was not above lying to achieve these aims:

I stole from my parents' cellar and table, sometimes because I was gluttonous myself, sometimes to have something to give to other boys in exchange for implements of play which they were prepared to sell although they loved them as much as I. Even in games, when I was clearly outplayed I tried to win by cheating, from the vain desire for first place. At the same time I was indignant and argued furiously when I caught anyone doing the very things I had done to others. When I was caught myself, I would fly into a rage rather than give way.

(I, 20) Now let’s go to the conclusion of BOOK ONE and his narration of his childhood. After dwelling on his early life, telling us of his hurts and struggles as a boy, the games he played, and the dreaming he did, Augustine offers this reflection:

Yet, Lord, I should have owed thanks to you, my God and the most excellent Creator and Ruler of the universe, even if it had been your will that I should not live beyond boyhood. For even then I was. I felt. Even so early I had an instinct for the care of my own being; in my interior sense I kept guard over the integrity of my outward sense perception, and in my small thoughts upon small matters I had come to delight in the truth. I hated to be wrong, had a vigorous memory, was well trained in speech, delighted in friendship, shunned pain, meanness and ignorance. In so small a creature was not all this admirable and reason for praise? Yet all these were the gifts of my God. For I did not give them to myself. All these were good and all these were I. Therefore, he who made me is good and he is my Good: and in him I shall exult for all the good qualities that even as a boy I had. (I, 20)

    In this passage Augustine expresses his thanks to God for everything he was as a young boy despite the struggles and the pain. He gives us many reasons for being grateful: “For even then I was. I felt. Even so early I had an instinct for the care of my own being. … I had come to delight in the truth. I hated to be wrong, had a vigorous memory, was well trained in speech, delighted in friendship, shunned pain, meanness and ignorance. All these were good and all these were I."

This healthy affirmation of life becomes a beautiful canticle to the creator at the end of Book One in the Confessions. It reminds me of the famous canticle of St. Francis (“Praise be my Lord God for our brother, the sun … praise be my Lord for our sister the moon”.), only it is more psychological, more Augustinian. In this declaration about his early life we can see the person of Augustine as he himself knew it: his exceptional intelligence, his vigor and love of life, his great capacity for friendship, his passion for truth. And all these he considered to be gifts of God. “For I did not give them to myself. All these were good and all these were I”.

These interior gifts of God to Augustine were part of the plan that God had for him. They would help him along the road of his own conversion because from within they would enliven him and lead him ahead with their own original force. I like to call these inborn qualities "INNER PROVIDENCE".  We have already used the word, “providence” before, when we spoke of the baby at the breast. Now we use it more concretely when we affirm God to be present to Augustine in his natural gifts.

    Perhaps we can better understand what I am talking about if we take a look at one of those personal qualities that Augustine lists, namely the love of truth. "I had come to delight in the truth”, he said. “I hated to be wrong." This is one of his most evident gifts. It was part of that famous restlessness. This love of truth was like a burning passion leading him beyond all the easy answers and further on to ask the real questions. He had to know the essential of things, what doesn’t  change, what doesn’t disappoint, what doesn’t deceive. It was not just a question of intelligence. By nature Augustine could not be satisfied with anything this side of the whole truth. In fact, he could not be satisfied with anything less than God.

    Sometimes he went down wrong paths on this pursuit of truth and stayed there for a while. He had an ongoing fascination with astrology and horoscopes. He got trapped by a sect for over 14 years. He was even tempted by skepticism and said that a person who has experienced a bad doctor is afraid of trying even a good one. But all along God kept moving him ahead from within stoking that burning passion for truth and would not permit him to give up.

    Romano Guardini in his book, The Conversion of Augustine says that Augustine had an deep "predisposition to religion," an innate quality in certain people by which:

a person of Augustine's make-up cannot flourish in what is known as "the world," neither in what concerns the senses, nor in the achievements of the mind or culture. Everywhere he is bound to knock against their limitations, to sense what lies beyond them. Beneath the world's greatest profundity, he is aware of the plumbless depths of the divine, of peaks towering mysteriously higher than any heights the human mind can scale. Even when he doesn't want to, he senses how in all "these" things, "the others" push their way to the fore, capturing above all the heart; behind the known he senses the unknown, which appears to be the truly real - so much so that it threatens to leave all else far behind, often at the cost of great sacrifice. (pp.39-40)

    This inner attraction would give Augustine no rest. It continually drew him on to ask and search. The same can be said of the other qualities on his list: his memory, his love of life, and his capacity for friendship.

    Now a question to all of us: What gifts did God put into your personality? What it is it that helps you to seek and maybe find God? Is it a passion for truth as it was for Augustine? Or maybe a compassion for others? Perhaps a practical nature that rejects nonsense? A special understanding of the human heart? A desire to improve humanity? A love of spiritual beauty? Extraordinary courage? A delight in friendship? Or many other possibilities of God's inner Providence for you?

It's very important to fight the temptation of saying "There's nothing. I'm not special." We are all special. God did not make a mistake when he created us. Providence operates mysteriously in each of us in a unique and personal way. The trick is to find out just how it is working in you. It is a serious task to know ourselves. The discovery of it is immensely energizing.

    Naturally this personality of ours presents lots of obstacles too. That was true for Augustine. We see the obstacles throughout the Confessions. But for now let's finish on this positive point of divine providence within each one of us.