The past is not dead; it is not even past: a sermon on Augustine and the Donatists

Have you read True History of the Kelly Gang, the Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey? It’s about the eponymous Ned Kelly, a sort of Robin Hood figure in the turn of the 19th century Australian outback. It’s a dazzling read. Not only because of perennial themes wonderfully, comically, tragically woven into a riveting narrative – social exclusion and desperation, personal loyalty and honour, judicial cruelty and corruption – the stuff of legend; but especially due to the voice that Carey gives Kelly – it speaks to us passionately and personally, fusing the horizons of yesteryear and today. The epigraph on the title page is so apt, from William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

Reflecting on the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13 is what brought Faulkner’s statement to mind. It also triggered a memory that confirms it. I recalled one of those defining moments in church history, defining not only in the sense of setting the course that the church would take, but also in the sense of encapsulating a controversy that would re-emerge again and again along the way. No, indeed, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

Come with me to North Africa in the early 4th century during and after what will come to be called “The Great Persecution”. The emperor Diocletian has issued an edict declaring that all churches are to be destroyed, all worship forbidden, all sacred vessels confiscated, and all Bibles and sacred texts surrendered to the Roman authorities. Some of the church’s leaders give in to the demands, others resist and suffer for their faithfulness. Not surprisingly, the rigorists in the church consider those who buckled under imperial pressure to be traitors and apostates. Things come to a head with the disputed election of one Donatus as bishop of Carthage, an able, eloquent, and charismatic personality who, despite sustained opposition from church and state, will remain at the helm for the next 40 years.
What was at stake? According to Donatus and his followers, the church itself. The presence in it of those clergy who had bowed to pagan demands, they argued, compromised the integrity, tainted the purity, disrespected the martyrs of the church. Indeed they contaminated their congregations with their unforgivable crimes and must be removed from office.

Things got very nasty. The issue of the nature and constitution of the church aroused such passions. Subtract the violence and you could almost cry “Amen!” for such theological seriousness. The basic question was this: What is the connection between the unity of the church and the holiness of the church? The Donatists were adamant that the unity of the church is based on its holiness, and that the holiness of the church is constituted by the holiness of its members, particularly its ministers. The church, that is, is a community of saints, not a school for sinners. So the Donatists circled the wagons around the vineyards they planted, to protect the “true” church from the pollution of the world, and drastically to prune its own vines.

Opposing the Donatists was Augustine, bishop of Hippo (200 miles west of Carthage). Augustine and his followers were confident that the church could interface with a hostile world without fear of losing its identity. They insisted that the church is not a bolthole from the world, rather the church exists for the sake of the world, a world in pain and need. The church should not fear defilement either from pagan corruption or from Christian sinfulness, because its purity does not depend on its members and ministers but solely on its God. The church is not a community of the perfect, it is the community of the broken, those who live by God’s grace alone. It is therefore, inevitably, a “mixed” community, comprising quite bad people as well as pretty good people. Above all, said Augustine, the church is a fellowship of love – it is the love of Christ that constitutes its unity – a love that is patient and does not rush to judgement. And Augustine’s text? As the famous harvest hymn based on our parable has it: “Wheat and tares together sown, / unto joy or sorrow grown”.

I wish that this were a story of good guys and bad guys: Donatus – “Hiss! Boo!”; Augustine – “Hooray! Look out, he’s behind you!” – but it’s not as simple as a Christmas pantomime. Both sides in the conflict, in fact, did terrible, shameful things. A militant wing of the Donatists, the Circumcellions, plundered the homes of peasant farmers, robbed their granaries, kidnapped opponents, blinded them, murdered them. Augustine, in turn, if reluctantly, endorsed counter-measures including, eventually, state coercion and violence. When it comes to deeds, there were no winners in this schism. But in terms of ideas and principles? “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Donatus and Augustine continue to argue and battle for the soul of the church. Where should our sympathies lie?

Absolutely with Augustine, for one profound if rather obvious reason: if Donatus were right, we wouldn’t be here to discuss the issue, because if Donatus were consistent, there would be no church, just a sect. For where will you ever find a community of morally blameless people? Augustine himself was quite up front on this issue, even lurid. One who enters a church, he said, “is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators ... The same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals also fill the theatres on pagan holidays.” And yet some Christians today would get their knickers in a twist about, well, me saying “get their knickers in a twist”. How we love a good moral panic! We’re a long way here from Augustine, or – better – Martin Luther, Augustine’s heir, who once advised his earnest young lieutenant Philip Melanchton to “Sin boldly – but believe even more boldly!” Augustine and Luther, you see, recognised that the gospel actually redefines the very meaning of “holiness”, translating it from the realm of moral purity to the sphere of grace and mercy.

Nor does one have to be a moral relativist to recognise how fluid and changeable is our understanding of what is right, seemly, proper. Calvin saw dancing as “a preamble to fornication”, while the English Puritan Richard Baxter considered it “a sinful sport”. In the time of my own ministry, what used to be called “living in sin” has become for most people – I dare say most Christian people – an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, prelude to marriage, or even a tolerable arrangement in itself. And if – heaven forbid! – I were a betting man, I’d wager that in a generation the vast majority of Christians will look back on gay partnerships as we look back on inter-racial marriage. In any case, the essential point that Augustine made is this: that “in the final analysis the difference between Christians and others lies in one thing only: the former are members of the church, the latter not” (David Bosch). What binds us together is not an agreed code of ethics or practices but the love of Christ working through the mutual acceptance and forbearance of his members, members who are called to welcome diversity, exercise tolerance, and practice what has been called “interpretive charity” (Stephen Fowl) in our judgement of others.

And this goes not only for personal behaviour – the issue at stake between Donatus and Augustine – but also, I would suggest, for personal belief. Or are we to weed the tares on the basis of TC – “theological correctness” – and shun the “unsound”? All I can say is God help me if I am ultimately judged by my theological convictions and consistency. The rule of “interpretive charity” should govern not only our behaviour but also our beliefs. The crucial thing in theological disputes is to recognise the intention of faith of those with whom we disagree, keep the conversation going, never be the first to walk away from the Table. Against contemporary Donatists, we must resist, says Rowan Williams, “the temptation to seek the purity … of a community speaking with only one voice and embrace the reality of living in a communion that is fallible and divided.”

Augustine, with penetrating spiritual insight, saw that nothing is harder to avoid than self-deception, particularly when, assuming that the church needs protection, we don the mantle of “defenders of the faith”. Augustine also saw that defining yourself by what you are against is the symptom of an obsessive personality that clings to legalism and dogmatism. And he saw too the ultimate tragedy of this “absolutist attitude” (Reinhold Bernhardt): that in desiring to legislate and exclude, and in rushing to premature closure, we become angry, bitter, loveless. As we learn from the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, we are simply not capable of carrying out judicious separations; they must be left to the Judge in the fullness of time. “Till then, all false zeal must be checked, the field must be left to ripen in patience, the net must be cast widely, and everything else left to God in faith” (Joachim Jeremias).

“The past is not dead. It is not even past.” And the future belongs to God.

Singing in the first person: on “I” and “we” in worship

Recently I went along with a friend to a Hillsong worship service. I was reminded again that one of the distinctive marks of Pentecostal worship isn’t just the style of music but also the prominence of the first person singular. In mainline Protestant worship, the prevailing trend has been to replace the worshipping “I” with the communal “we.” The “I believe” of the creed is changed to “we believe.” The newer hymns are all about “our” needs, “our” lives, “our” relationship to God and one another. When older choruses are sung, the pronouns are often updated to reflect the plural preference. I have been in a service where the deeply personal Geoff Bullock song, “The Power of Your Love,” was amended, from:

Lord, I come to You
Let my heart be changed, renewed
Flowing from the grace that I’ve found in You
And Lord I’ve come to know
The weaknesses I see in me
Will be stripped away
By the power of Your love.

To:

Lord, we come to You
Let our hearts be changed, renewed
Flowing from the grace that we found in You
And Lord we’ve come to know
The weaknesses we see in us
Will be stripped away
By the power of Your love.

Now in principle there’s nothing wrong with either “I” or “we” as far as singing to God is concerned. And the good Lord is probably long-suffering enough to figure out what we mean when we sing a line as daft as “the weaknesses we see in us.” Let’s face it, where hymnody is concerned, the Christian church will only be saved (if it is saved at all) as though through fire.

But I’m sceptical of the assumption that “we” is somehow the more Liturgically Correct word to use – as if the believers who turn up to church on Sunday morning cannot be trusted to remember that they are worshipping in a community. The whole thing smacks (if you’ll pardon the dirty language) of socialism. Are the clergy anxious to make us ever-mindful of our communal loyalties, as if they knew deep down that we would all rather be worshipping on our own at home?

Interestingly, St Augustine’s view of the worshipping “I” was exactly the opposite. In his exposition of Psalm 121, Augustine argued that the “I” is the proper symbol of corporate worship, while the “we” is too individualistic:

Let [the psalmist] sing from the heart of each one of you like a single person. Indeed, let each of you be this one person. Each one prays the psalm individually, but because you are all one in Christ, it is the voice of a single person that is heard in the psalm [Cum enim dicitis illud singuli, quia omnes unum estis in Christo, unus homo illud dicit]. That is why you do not say, ‘To you, Lord, have we lifted up our eyes,’ but ‘To you, Lord, I have lifted up my eyes.’ Certainly you must think of this as a prayer offered by each of you on his or her own account, but even more you should think of it as the prayer of the one person present throughout the whole world. (Expositions of the Psalms, 122.2).

Augustine’s point is that the language of “we” can easily give the impression that the congregation is a collection of atomistic individuals. But when believers sing to God in the first-person singular, it is as if the whole body of Christ were crying to God with one voice. The “I” is intensely personal: I sing as if the song applied to me alone. But it is also mystical and communal: beneath and above and around my own individual “I,” I hear the surge of a greater voice, a corporate “I” of which my own voice is a part. In Augustine’s view, this corporate voice is the voice of Christ. It is Christ himself who sings the psalms and who cries out to God in one voice from one body through the Spirit.

I implore you, my liberal Protestant comrades, don’t be too proud to admit that the Pentecostals might actually have got something right! And don’t be afraid to confront the question whether the experience of community in those ostensibly oh-so-individualistic Pentecostal churches is less intense and meaningful, or more, than what is found in our mainline churches with our theological propriety, our liturgical spit and polish, and all our earnest bluster and blather about we, us, and our.

Review of Robert Clark, Mr White's Confession

The next in my spate of Amazon reviews is a short review of Robert Clark's Augustinian-noir detective novel, Mr White's Confession.

The strangest theology essay of all time?

In my doctrine of the Trinity class this semester, I received a paper titled "Augustinian Dreaming." It started out conventionally enough – explanations of Augustine's analogies of the Trinity, quotes from Rowan Williams, observations about "the spiritual transformation of this fallen earthly creature, which at best represents a foggy image of God," and so on. 

Then I got to the the last page. When I read it, I called the student aside and said: "As your teacher, I have to tell you that this is completely unacceptable, and you must never do this again in an academic essay. As a human being, I loved it – can I post it on my blog?" The student, who shall remain anonymous, granted permission: so it is with pleasure that I reproduce for you here the final section of his paper on the analogies of the Trinity in books 9-10 of Augustine's Trinity. (Disclaimer to any students who may be reading: this is not the way to get high marks...)

At any rate, I'm sure this will clear up any questions you might have had about Augustine's trinitarian theology:

Meanwhile Back In Creatureville

Anyway, on with the show, said the mute dwarf with the stunted knee caps to the blind ice cream attendant who’d already vacated what he didn’t know to the occupied tenants who didn’t live there anymore due to the fact that Rowan Williams was standing backwards in his vestry complaining that his bells no longer rang since vacating the local nun who’d never been occupied before except through Papal eyes that had fogged his glasses on a hot steamy winter’s night after forgetting that he’d been vaccinated against amnesia, meanwhile faraway from within the backwoods of Umbria in the Donovan Hills there was Francis and his friend Mellow Yellow trying to wear their love like heaven while counting all the tulips which didn’t grow there until the day came when they decided to venture beyond their dream and visit God who lived in Rome and wore a funny hat, he was none too pleased when all the beggars arrived at the marble palace interrupting his hand feeding of the penguins in his harem which ended up in a heated discussion about Martini Lucifer and the Druids of Seclusion until the mute dwarf stumbled in claiming you had a lot of shots at Martini and now you want to cosmic the beggars who are secretly just Augustinian infants who also confessed but you just have the Augustinian blues because you had nothing to confess to which the penguins sighed and departed with the beggars after which Pope Perfect sank back into another shot of bourbon, but upon their arrival in the Donovan Hills some of the penguins discarded their dilemma and began playing tambourines with smoked out eyes and chanting Hare Krishna while others bared their chastity screaming juice me, so Augustine with a passion for writing words of passion got a job as a juice-maker which he used as inspiration for his next book while the local Druids began planting rocks in preparation for the solstice when suddenly Sunshine Superman appeared on the horizon (which is why the Stonehenge was never finished) and just when the story was about to end all the Wilbury children arrived after spending many years travelling from Greenwich Village following a Purple Haze via Voodoo Chile and collecting multiples along the way, including a Mexican Sultan who solicited a Black Magic Woman claiming you have to change your evil ways while all her sultry voice could moan was, touch me with your Samba Pa Ti

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Origen and the problem of writing

Origen was the church's first professional writer; but in his day Christianity was not yet a literary religion. Jerome lists 800 books by Origen, but a more accurate list by Eusebius details 2,000 books (most of them now lost). Origen's patron Ambrose of Alexandria commissioned most of these books and put a huge staff of scribes and copyists at Origen's disposal.

When Origen was asked to respond to Celsus, a pagan writer who had attacked Christianity in a book called True Doctrine, Origen observed that a written response was not really appropriate for the Christian faith. "Now Jesus is always being falsely accused," Origen says in the preface to Contra Celsum. "He is still silent in face of this and does not answer with his voice; but he makes his defence in the lives of his genuine disciples, for their lives cry out the real facts and defeat all false charges." The only real apologetics is the life of Christ's followers, not written arguments. Indeed Origen suggests that producing a written defence of the faith might actually diminish the vitality of the Christian community: "I would therefore go so far as to say that the defence which you ask me to compose will weaken the force of the defence that is in the mere facts, and detract from the power of Jesus."

He goes on to write the book anyway, a big doorstopper of a book, 500 pages in the English translation. But his bad conscience – his need to apologise for the act of writing – is revealing.

When he got to the fifth book of his massive Commentary on the Gospel of John – he had completed four books so far, and had only got through a few verses – Origen paused to reflect on the words of Ecclesiastes: "My son, beware of making many books" (Ecclesiastes 12.12). He admits that he seems to have transgressed this command, and he explores this problem at length before resuming the commentary.

In the first place, Origen notes that "none of the saints has produced numerous compositions and set out his understanding in many books." Even Moses left only five books, and Paul was content to dash off a few lines when the occasion demanded. As for John, Origen poignantly observes that he "has left one Gospel while confessing that he could compose so many that the world could not contain them."

Origen is distressed by the sheer quantity of all that he has written compared to the prophets, apostles, and saints. "I get dizzy as though I were suffering vertigo, lest perhaps by obeying you [Ambrose] I have disobeyed God and have not imitated the saints." And he quotes another seemingly damning Wisdom saying: "In a multitude of words you will not escape sin" (Proverbs 10.19).

Yet Origen ventures a defence of his prodigious literary output. He notes that the perfect Word of God is not "a multitude of words" but one single Word. A person who contradicts this Word is being loquacious; he says too much, and sins in what he says. But a person who speaks truthfully always speaks the one simple Word, "even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing." You could talk forever and still be saying just one Word; and you could speak a pithy falsehood and be condemned for multiplying words. Truth is simple, falsehoods are multiple. As an example of the simplicity of truth, Origen notes that there are not four Gospels in scripture; rather "there is truly one gospel through the four."

The conclusion is that it's quality that counts, not quantity. If Origen can set forth the truth in his many writings then he will be speaking only one word. But if he speaks contrary to the truth in even one place, he will have written "many books."

The whole procedure is a striking example of Origen's spiritual exegesis, an attempt to press beneath the literal sense of the prohibition against "making many books" and to yield up its theological meaning. Only after securing this exegetical conclusion does Origen also mention the obvious practical exigency: the heretics are busy writing "many books" (literally, and in a spiritual sense!), and somebody has to answer them "on behalf of the teaching of the church." Otherwise the inquisitive and the vulnerable will be led astray.

Origen says that he has offered this defence "for myself" as well as "for those who are able to speak and write." He is assuaging his own troubled conscience, but he is also spelling out an exegetical rationale for a literary Christian culture, a culture in which writers can "make many books" while cleaving to the one simple Word.

By the late fourth century such a literary Christian culture could be taken for granted. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the changes Christianity had undergone than a remark from Athanasius, an Egyptian theologian writing around the middle of the fourth century. In a letter written during one of his many exiles (if only Athanasius had a dollar for every time he was exiled!) he apologises for the brevity of his previous 50-page letter. "I thought what I wrote was ever so brief, and I accused myself of great lethargy for not being able to write as much as is humanly possible against those who are impious toward the Holy Spirit" (Letters to Serapion, 2.1.1).

"I accused myself of great lethargy": Athanasius has a guilty conscience too. He feels bad for not having written enough.

By the fifth century Christianity has produced a writer like Augustine. One finds him in a provincial town in North Africa, an ageing bishop carefully overseeing the maintenance of the vast library of his own works. Augustine devotes the end of his life to itemising each book chronologically; he makes revisions and corrections; he collaborates with his librarian Possidius, taking every pain to ensure the preservation of his works for posterity. If some earlier Christians had happened to be writers, Augustine is an author. He writes not simply to refute heresy or to respond to this or that local problem; he writes because he is an author. He writes for his contemporaries, and for those not yet born. He thinks of himself essentially as a man of letters. His identity is bound up with the production of literature. In a letter of 412, Augustine had remarked: "I try to be one of those who write by making progress and make progress by writing" (Epistle 143.2). And in his De Trinitate Augustine describes writing as a path of discovery, a way of seeking the face of God.

In the same period, one finds an author like the Roman poet Prudentius, for whom writing is not a tactical necessity but a spiritual vocation in its own right. In the preface to his collection of poems, Prudentius writes:

When I write or speak of these things,
how I wish to break free from the chains of my body
to the place where my nimble tongue's last sound carries me!

[Haec dum scribo vel eloquor
vinclis o utinam corporis emicem
liber quo tulerit lingua sono mobilia ultimo!]

Augustine writes to make progress; he writes to seek God. Prudentius writes to transcend the world of the flesh; he writes to be saved. Writing has become something quite different here, something Origen could never have imagined. It has become part of the apparatus of spiritual life, a means of purgation and transformation. Writing has become a vocation and a spiritual discipline. Writers have become authors. With Prudentius and Augustine, the transformation of Christianity into a literary culture is complete.

Come into my heart, Lord Jesus: Origen and Augustine on the roomy heart

As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing. I learned it from my mother. She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind.

Into my heart, into my heart,
Come into my heart, Lord Jesus;
Come in today, come in to stay,
Come into my heart, Lord Jesus.

It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again. A Sinner's Prayer. At Sunday School they were always warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts. In another song I remember from those days, the human heart was compared to a castle where Jesus lives:

Joy is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart,
For the King is in residence there.

It seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart. And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned. Our most fervent wish was that they too might one day invite Jesus into their hearts, that they too might one day be able to run the royal insignia up the flagpole.

I suppose it's good to learn that sort of thing when you're still a child, before you get too disillusioned about the capacities of your own (or anybody else's) heart. It never occurred to me to doubt that my heart was spacious enough to accommodate a person like Jesus, or that it was the kind of place a person like that would want to live. When I invited Jesus, rather generously, to come into the house of my heart, it never occurred to me that he might take one look inside and say, "Sorry, this isn't quite what I had in mind. Do you have anything with an extra bedroom? And a view?" Nor did it occur to me that he might want to buy the house (like so many people in my neighbourhood in Sydney) only in order to demolish or renovate – that he might show up on the first day with trucks, sledgehammers, men in hardhats; that he might be the kind of homeowner who tears out the kitchen sink and knocks down walls.

That's the way some of the great patristic writers spoke about Jesus. They described the heart as a house for Jesus – but a house in dire need of rebuilding and repair. To start with, it's far too small. If Jesus is going to live here, there will have to be extensions. And it's all looking pretty rundown. The roof leaks. Mold is growing on the walls. The front door is hanging off its hinges. There are strange smells in the hallway. Weeds are growing up through the floorboards. Jesus is moving into your heart not because these surroundings are fit for him, but because he enjoys the challenge of fixing up old places like this – a broken-down dump of a house.

In the opening pages of his Confessions, Augustine poses the riddle of how an infinite God could be contained in any place. If God is the one who contains all things – if God is the environment in which all creatures live – then how could God be located within any of those creatures? What part of creation could possibly contain God? The very thought of it is absurd, like trying to grasp the horizon in your hand, like trying to pour the ocean into a teacup. "To what place can I invite you, then, since I am in you? Or where could you come from, in order to come into me?" (Confessions, 1.2.2). Yet God loves the human heart and wants to dwell there. Augustine is deeply moved by this thought, that God would choose to take up lodgings in such a humble dwelling.

But there's a problem. God arrives, suitcase in hand, and knocks on the door of our heart. And he can hardly fit inside. The place is too small. And it's a mess, a ruin, a veritable pigsty. Yet God isn't deterred. God wants to live here: the place has a lot of promise; and besides, God likes the neighbourhood. So there's only one for it: God rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. 

As Augustine puts it: "The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it" (Confessions, 1.5.6).

What Augustine is describing here is not what we would call a conversion experience. He's describing a process that will continue for the rest of his life. God renovates slowly, persistently, with boundless patience, and with loving attention to even the smallest details. My whole life will be nothing but the story of God's renovation. My whole life is one of God's repair projects. It's not the once-off experiences that matter – not any single episode of inviting Jesus into my heart. What matters is the process; what matters is that my heart gradually becomes bigger, wider, cleaner, more orderly. What matters is that it slowly becomes, over a whole lifetime, an inhabitable place for God.

Two centuries before Augustine, Origen had also spoken of the gradual process by which our hearts become dwelling places for God. But if Augustine's language evokes scenes of a dilapidated Roman villa, Origen's language has about it a certain characteristic oriental, Jewish, Old Testament flavour: his themes are learning and feasting.

For Origen, the heart is repaired and expanded by learning. As we learn more about God, gradually increasing our knowledge by daily increments, our hearts grow wider. At first the heart is too small, like (he says) the heart of a little child. But when it has grown big enough, Jesus is able to move in and take up residence there. And the goal of life, Origen thinks, is to become roomy for Jesus – to give Jesus room to move about easily and freely. As we grow, we are able to "offer such roomy hearts to the Word of God that he may even be said to walk about in them, that is, in the open spaces of a fuller understanding and a wider knowledge" (Commentary on the Song of Songs, 2.8).

To you and me, this vision – of God inhabiting the domain of our understanding – might seem rather dry, too cold and intellectual. But for Origen it is the highest mysticism. To be sure, the whole process involves thought, reflection, study of scripture: all this is the necessary work of renovating our shabby home. But once Jesus moves in, he is festive and full of cheer. He lays a feast, and the Father and the Spirit celebrate together at the table: "Blessed is that roomy soul [latitudo animae, in Rufinus' Latin translation], blessed the couches of her mind, where both the Father and the Son, surely together with the Holy Spirit, recline and sup and have their dwelling-place!"

Moreover, when Jesus takes up residence in the house of the heart, he brings with him every good thing. "With what precious stores, think you, with what abundance are such Guests regaled?" The purpose of life, in Origen's view, is to grow through learning – not because learning is an end in itself, but because through learning the heart grows wider, and such a spacious life can be a home where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit recline together and share a feast.

In Rublev's icon of the Trinity, it is usually said that we are invited to take up a seat, that the fourth place at the table is for us. But here is how Origen might see the icon: Jesus has laid a feast; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are reclining together at table; and the human heart is that table, the humble venue of eternal feasting, eternal joy.

Radio programme: God, good, and evil

Radio National's Encounter has just released the first in a two-part series on God, good, and evil. It was produced by Scott Stephens, and features interviews with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Susan Neiman, Marilyn McCord Adams, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney – and I'm in there too, talking about Augustine's solution to the problem of evil. I also argue for the continuing political importance of Augustine's understanding of evil.

I've been thinking a lot about this, since Augustine has been my main theological diet for the past year or two. Among other things, immersing myself in Augustine has led me to repudiate my decade-long fascination with Marxist political philosophy. I understand the appeal of Marxism, and of revolutionary rhetoric, but I think it's a mistake. And I think the roots of the mistake lie in a heterodox understanding of creation and fall. Anyway, I enjoyed having the chance to talk about some of this here.

You can hear the programme online – and stay tuned for the second instalment next week.

Audio lecture: lessons from Augustine's De Trinitate

Over the past several weeks, my class on the trinity has been working through Augustine's De Trinitate – an immense challenge! Today we reached the great finale of Book 15. So I tried to sum up Augustine's theology of the trinity in a final lecture, outlining a series of brief "lessons from Augustine". I had to record the lecture for some of the students, so I thought I'd also post it here. If you're interested, you can listen below – there are six short parts, each about 10 minutes:

Augustine part 1
Augustine part 2
Augustine part 3
Augustine part 4
Augustine part 5
Augustine part 6

This week with Rowan Williams

Lots of good stuff from Rowan Williams over the past week or two. He gave a very fine public lecture on the Philokalia at St Vladimir's Seminary (well worth listening to the whole thing). He has a video message to mark the beginning of Lent. He writes in The Guardian about the abyss of individualism. And in the new issue of Reviews in Religion and Theology 17:2 (2010), he has a rip-roaring good review of Luigi Gioia's important new book, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine's De Trinitate (Oxford UP 2009). The review begins:

"Too many theologians writing about Augustine in recent decades have fallen under the malign spell of Olivier Du Roy's substantial monograph of 1966 on faith and intelligence in Augustine's Trinitarian thought – an essay which argued in detail for an almost unqualified Platonism and individualism in Augustine generally, and an isolation of his Trinitarian theology from the economy of salvation. Du Roy's book, along with a somewhat misread passage in de Régnon's studies in the history of Trinitarian theology, produced a curious 'received wisdom' about Augustine as the source of all the theological ills of Western Christendom or even Western society; he appears to have been responsible for everything but the common cold."

Incidentally, the same issue of RRT includes Thomas Cattoi's incisive review of Giorgio Agamben's latest, Il Regno e la Gloria:

"Yet, it is true that, in this volume at least, Agamben offers few, if any, suggestions as to how the subject could break out of the spell of glory. Angels and bureaucrats conspire to make oppression ordinary, and even aesthetically pleasing; any capacity of resistance to the kingdom is shattered, as glory reasserts its transcendent and immutable character. Those readers who persevere to the end of the volume must wait for the next installment to receive their reward."

For more on Agamben's book, you can't go past Adam's invaluable synopses.

On desire and beauty: an Augustinian anecdote

Some years ago, I remember taking an afternoon walk down the quiet suburban street where my wife and I were living at the time. It was early summer, a warm breeze stirred the languid jacarandas that bloomed beneath the cloudless Queensland sky.

After rambling around for half an hour or so, I noticed a woman walking towards me from the far end of the street. I had left my glasses at home, as I often do when I am out for a stroll – but even at this distance I could make out her slender waist, the curve of her hips, the dark tresses falling about her shoulders. A long skirt swayed as she walked, and I saw that she was carrying a baby at her side. I had never seen her before – I'm sure I would have remembered her. I knew most of the people around here, she must be new to the neighbourhood. I am by nature a shy person, but on this occasion I decided I would pause to chat with this lovely apparition as she passed me on the street. I would catch her eye and smile, welcome her to the neighbourhood, ask where she was from, perhaps make some innocent flirtatious remark. I continued to observe her figure as she drew closer, my thoughts lulled by the jacaranda breeze and the easy rhythm of her hips. And then, with a disorienting shock of pleasure and recognition, I saw – what I would have seen at once had I been wearing my glasses – that it was my wife, strolling in the sun with our baby daughter perched on her hip.

Augustine’s Confessions is in large measure a record of misplaced desire. Our hearts well up with idolatrous desire for created things. We turn to the world of beautiful things instead of turning to the one who is Beauty itself. “In my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you had made.” But even in our corruption and confusion, God remains the hidden object of our desire. God uses our misplaced desires to draw us, in spite of ourselves, to God. “You were with me, and I was not with you.” In our desire for beautiful things, we are suddenly ambushed by God’s beauty, deep and secret and seductive – just as, that summer afternoon, my wandering desire for the lovely form of a woman was ambushed by the woman I love. “You were radiant and resplendent, and you put to flight my blindness” (Confessions 10.27.38).

On real estate

For a moment I thought Augustine was referring to life in Sydney, when he wrote: “It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man’s greatest good to have everything good but himself” (City of God, 3.1).

We do not interpret scripture; scripture interprets us

“Brothers and sisters, we are not now discussing possible ways of understanding this text, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. It can be grasped in an ineffable way; human words cannot grasp it [ineffabiliter potest intelligi: non verbis hominis fit ut intelligatur]. We are discussing the Word of God, and why it is not understood. I am not speaking in order to make it understood, but to tell you what hinders it from being understood.... [This text] wasn’t read in order to be comprehended, but to make us humans grieve because we don’t comprehend it, and to make us discover what hinders our comprehension, so that we remove the hindrance, and hunger to perceive the immutable Word, ourselves thereby being changed from worse to better.”

—Augustine, Sermon 117.3, in Patrologia Latina 38 (a sermon on John 1:1-3).

Iron & Wine and Augustine: on grace and mothers

One of Augustine’s favourite biblical texts was Paul’s question to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:7): “What do you have that you did not receive?” – Quid enim habebat quod non acceperat? Against Pelagian conceptions of grace, Augustine insists on the absolute priority of God’s action towards us in Christ. Even when God rewards us for good works, God is merely “crowning his own gifts.” There is, in other words, a sheer incommensurability between God’s gift to us and the gifts that we return to God. Even the best of our gifts are always derivative and dependent on the grace that we have already received.

I think there’s a nice illustration of this concept in the Iron & Wine song, “Upward over the Mountain” (from the 2002 album, The Creek Drank the Cradle – you can hear the song in this clip).

The song is an achingly beautiful depiction of the relationship between a son and his mother. The son is united to his mother through the gift of life and through the history they have shared. He recalls that fragile, fleeting moment after birth, “the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body.” But while acknowledging this connection, he also reminds his mother of the painful distance which adulthood opens up between them. He has outgrown the faith she once gave him: “Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given.” He asks her – impossibly – to “forget me, now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to.”

And yet he remains haunted by their bond, by the fact that his entire life – with all its griefs and freedoms – remains an unfathomable gift. In one of the song’s most poignant lines, he pleads: “Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you.” This line could serve as an exquisite parable of the whole relationship between child and mother: even when he gives her a gift, there is a tragic incommensurability between what he gives her and all that he has already received from her. Any gift to the mother is at best a mere trinket, at worst a kind of theft in which the very possibility of giving is painfully wrested from her.

To sell the mother’s car in order to buy her a pair of shoes – that is the kind of half-comical scenario which Augustine describes when he speaks of the incommensurability between grace and gratitude. “What do you have that you did not receive?” It makes you wonder about the way Augustine’s own relationship with his mother might have shaped his theology of grace: perhaps the best cure for Pelagianism is the experience of the mother’s unmerited, presuppositionless giving. So that the proper way to respond to a Pelagian is still the same as it always was: “You’re a very naughty boy – your mother would be so disappointed!”

Augustine – “the son of so many tears,” as he called himself – was deeply aware that he had always already received, that behind all his actions lay a gift that could never be earned or repaid. Indeed, when Augustine mourns the death of his mother, he can only confess: “I will speak not of her gifts, but of Yours in her.”

Anyway, here are the full lyrics of that beautiful Iron & Wine song, “Upward over the Mountain”:

Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me?
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body?

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying upwards over the mountain

Mother I made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison
Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given
Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to
Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons can be birds taken broken up to the mountain

Mother don’t worry, I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner
Mother don’t worry, she’s got a garden, we’re planting it together
Mother remember the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry?
Blood on the floor and fleas on their paws, and you cried till the morning

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying always over the mountain

Tolle lege

Thanks to Cynthia, the Augustine blog conference is now underway.

Augustine blog conference

In August, Cynthia will be hosting a blog conference entitled Conversations with Augustine, Past and Present. Posts will explore Augustine’s enduring influence on various theologians and philosophers from the Middle Ages to the present – so Cynthia is looking for posts on thinkers like Scotus, Luther, Heidegger, Barth, de Lubac, Marion and Lacan. If you’d like to participate, just head on over to Per Caritatem.

Human agency according to Augustine, Paul, and Lou Martyn

In his extraordinary book on the history of Christian spirituality, The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams describes Augustine’s understanding of human agency:

“Augustine is less concerned than almost any of the Greek Fathers with freedom…. The human subject is indeed a mystery; no one could be more painfully and eloquently aware of this than Augustine. But the mysteriousness and unpredictability have more to do with the forces that act on the subject…. Augustine’s undiminished appeal to a post-Freudian generation has much to do with this aspect of his thought. He confronts and accepts the unpalatable truth that rationality is not the most important factor in human experience, that the human subject is a point in a vast structure of forces whose operation is tantalisingly obscure to the reason. Human reality is acted upon at least as much as acting” (pp. 82-83).

This reminds me of a provocative SBL paper in November by the great Paul scholar, J. Louis Martyn (he was in a session with Douglas Campbell and Susan Eastman, with responses from Darrell Guder and Telford Work). Martyn presented Paul’s understanding of human agency along these lines: the human agent has no subjective autonomy and no moral competence to choose her own path. She is under the sway of inscrutable cosmic powers – and will remain so except for the militant, apocalyptic interruption of a divine agent who vanquishes the enslaving powers and creates a new moral subject.

Further, according to Martyn (much to the displeasure of his respondent, Telford Work!), Paul’s apocalyptic conception of human agency is a deliberate critique of the “classic moral drama” which underlies much of the Old Testament, e.g. in Deuteronomy, where “morally competent” agents are said to stand at a crossroad between two possible choices.

For Paul, there is no crossroad, no moral competence, no “choose this day.” To be sure, there is a real alternative: slavery or freedom! But this alternative doesn’t lie in our power or depend on our agency. This means that God’s action cannot be said to “help” us or “enable” us – the divine action is a unilateral liberation which constitutes us as new agents.

After his paper, Martyn was asked: “Why are you so uncomfortable with the word ‘enable’?” He replied: “I’m not uncomfortable with it. It’s just wrong.”

The ethicist's prayer

“Teach me so that I may act, not just know how I ought to act.”

—Augustine, Discourses on the Psalms, Psa. 118, X.3.

Schleiermacher

“Retrospectively, the dogmatics of the 19th century can be understood essentially as the direct, indirect, or negatively received influence of the theology of Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, one of the most powerful personalities in all of church history, in some ways comparable with Augustine.”

—Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981-83), 1:135-36.

Quote of the day

I dreamed I saw St Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried.

—Bob Dylan, “I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine” (1967)