ST. AUGUSTINE

New Zealand Tablet, 19 August 1915, Page 11

ST. AUGUSTINE

(For the J. 7. Tablet by the Rev. J. Kelly, Ph.D.) Christ is known in His saints. The saint is a saint because he is a friend of Christ’s. And no man or woman ever became a saint in any other way. Friendship is more than charity, as charity is more than love. Love of itself may be either good or bad but charity is never bad. As its name implies, charity makes those we love dear to us; and friendship is nothing else than this higher love specialised and become a habit. It is mutual, benevolent love.s It is not a virtue; but it is built on all the virtues. It grows through exercise like the virtues, and is nourished in the mind. All -love tends to union, and through friendship the highest union is possible. It not only makes the friend like the friend, but it lifts the lowly to the plane of the highest ; it makes man like God. Thus it made the friends of Christ like Christ. And through them, who seem to be, but really are hot, more kin to us, except in their infirmities, men sometimes find it easier to come to Christ and to approach that friendship with Him which the lives of the saints show us to be within our reach. Who abides in charity, abides in God, and God in him. A friend is an after ego another self. One Roman poet called another the half of his soul. Now the Eternal Truth tells us that this, too, may be said of man and God, when once man has come into the friendship' with Christ, for which on His part He hungers and thirsts. The Divine Friendship is for us all. It is ours to make it ours. And when we have done so, and when by our acts of friendship it is growing, when our mind and will and imagination feed it, we will come to understand at last why He put one positive law of love in the place of all the stern prohibitions of the Decalogue. ‘ Thou shaft not ’ need no longer be a warning beacon for which we have to look at every step. We can steer by the stars without danger of losing our way. In this month of August the Church asks us to honor a friend of Christ’s whose life is at once an example and a consolation for all men. On the 28th of August we keep the Feast of St. Augustine. He was a sinner and he became a saint. Midway in the walk of life he came out of the dark wood into the light and warmth of Christ’s love, through which he won his crown as any of us sinners may. Nothing in human affairs is constant but the law of change. In the fulness of its beauty the flower begins to wither; the ripeness of the fruit is followed by rotenxxess. When the great Roman republic became an Empire it was at the zenith of its greatness; and with the Empire decay set in. If you would learn what rottenness attended its decay read the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Romans. That in the awful

symbolism of St. John and in the plain language of St. Paul there is no over painting of the dreadful picture is plain from the testimony of the Romans themselves. The foundations of the Empire were giving way. The height of pagan civilisation was also the depth of pagan corruption. Justice and honor and virtue became shadows; cruelty and impurity reigned in the human heart. Through what unspeakable orgies Rome tottered to its fall Tacitus and Juvenal and Lucullus still tell us. The rot continued until the fourth century, when the barbarians of the north succeeded the effete Caesars. Let us remember that it was in the midst of this sea of iniquity the early Church grew, the leaven and the salt, active and salutary in the heart of the mass of unmentionable wickedness. Against such a background the figure of .Augustine ‘.rises out of the years. lie was born at Tagaste, a little African town, in 354. II father, Patricius, did not become a Christian until just before death, about the year 371. Rut Monica, his mother, was not only a Christian but a saint. Under her care his early years were spent. And in these three cardinal ideas were fixed in his mind : the Divine Providence of God, the life to come with its rewards and punishments, and Christ the Saviour of mankind. In after life no tempest that ever broke on the barque of his soul shifted these anchors, which, hidden deep, held through all storm and stress, — 1 From my tenderest infancy I had with my mother’s milk sucked that name of my Saviour, Thy Son ; I kept it in the recesses of my heart ; and all that presented itself to me without that Divine Name . . . did not altogether carry me away.' In 370, he went to Carthage to study law. The vortex of licentiousness caught the gifted, imaginative boy in that half pagan city. The seductions of vice, the example of his fellow-students, his own pride, dragged him down. Still a boy, he formed an attachment then which fettered his soul for fifteen years. In 373, through the eloquence of Cicero he became enamored of philosophy. This phase of development unfortunately led him to seek in the doctrines of the Manichseans a solution of the problems of nature and of the origin of evil. lie was won over to this sect and threw himself into it with all his energy, much to the grief of his mother. For nine years he followed the false light. But, as his powers developed, he saw how vain it was. Its depravity, its inability to answer the problems it attempted to deal with, its want of science, at last disillusioned him. In his twenty-ninth year he went to Rome, and thence to Milan, where he obtained a professorship. He soon fell under the spell of the great Bishop of that See, St. Ambrose, and became a regular attendant whenever the saint preached. The seeds were now germinating in his soul, but it was long yet ere they bore fruit. Me began to read Plato, and that most beautiful of pagan philosophers filled him with dreams and aspirations after a higher life spent in quest of truth. But the fabric of his dreams did not withstand the rude onslaught of his passions, and as yet he neither renounced pleasure nor embraced celibacy. All these years Monica was praying for the homecoming of the wanderer. Ambrose had told her that it was impossible that ‘ the son of so many tears could perish.' And through the tears and prayers of her mother’s love he found himself at last. The way, of grace as a rule is as gentle as the breath of a vernal breeze, and as soft as the mild rains of spring. Softly it knocks at the door of the heart, softly, too, it calls on the sleeping sinner. But history records, as does the experience of every confessor, instances in which it comes like an irresistibletorrent, breaking down all barriers and taking the heart by storm. So it came to St. Paul; so to Mary Magdalene, and so also to Augustine. In the garden at Milan, in 386, it came to him. The marvellous pages of The Confessions tell the story vividly in his own words. First the impression made by the reading of the life of Anthony ; then the great conflict between

the flesh and the spirit, and borne in on the"turmoil of his soul, a voice chanting, Take up and read, take up and read.' Then, ‘returning to the place where Alypius was sitting, for there I had laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence, I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first foil: “Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and emulation; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ , and make not provision for the flesh and its desires.” No further would I read, nor needed I : for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light, as it were, of serenity infused .into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.’ Now the shackles fell from his spirit; now the gloom of the wood was behind him for ever. The stars were shining, and the tremulous waves of grace broke in music over his soul:—‘ Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, so old and yet so new. Too late have I loved Thee. And behold Thou wast within and I without; and without I sought Thee, and rushed in my deformity on these fair forms which Thou hast created. Thou wast with me, and I was not with Thee. Thou calledst; Then utteredst Thy voice; Thou brokest through my deafness. Thy lightning flashed; Thy splendor shone; my darkness was scattered. Thy scent came forth, I drew my breath, and I pant for Thee. I tasted, I hunger, and I thirst. Thy touch reached me, and I burnt after Thy peace.’ In the following year, with his mother, he went down to Ostia, thence to embark for Africa. And at Ostia Monica died. In all literature there are no pages to rival his description of those last days with his mother in that old town between the Tiber and the sea. I know no writing more beautiful than the description of their discourse as they looked down from the window over the garden of that house in Ostia; nor, do I believe, has the language of man ever soared to l?hch exalted flights of eloquence. And for vibrating words of pathos what can compare with his account of her death ! She died full of hope, joyful now t her work was done and the wanderer brought home again. She made but one request; ‘Lay this body anywhere: let not the care for that in any way disquiet you ; this only I ask, that you would remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.’ ‘ And I believe,’ he says, ‘ Thou hast already done what I ask. For she, the day of her dissolution now at hand, took no thought to have her body sumptuously wound up, nor desired she a choice monument, nor to be buried in her own land. These things she desired not, but desired only to have her name remembered at Thy altar, which she had served -without the intermission of one day, whence she knew that holy Victim to be dispensed by which the handwriting that was against us is blotted out.’ For forty-four years after his conversion Augustine stood as a priest and a bishop amid the ruins of the pagan world, a builder of the city of God in the hearts of men. They were years of marvellous labors and of extraordinary mental activity. In his most important work, De Civifate Dei, he groups round the Catholic religion the destinies of the world, and draws clearly the hues between the City of God, living and always enduring in the hope of God, and the city of the devil, having its end fixed in the things of time, in vain glory, in ambition, and in lust. The Confessions lay bare to us the heart and mind of the writer with an insight so clear and an analysis so exact that they are unequalled as an autobiography. And besides these he left to posterity a treasury of theological and scriptural learning, controversial works, sermons and pastoral writings which place him in the foremost rank of the Doctors and Fathers of the Church, if any excelled him in some respects, none had such power over the human heart, nor knew so well how to sound its depths, or so skilfully to subjugate it. The secret lay in his own tenderness, so poignantly revealed in all ho wrote about his mother. The influence of his works no man can estimate. His words have not lost their freshness after all the

centuries since his death in the year 430. But the example of his life still reaches many whom his words never reach. And as many a mother finds hope against hope in the memory of Monica, many a wayward son finds in the life of Augustine a strength which enables him to liberate his soul from the bonds that keep it from union with its Saviour, and from friendship with Him Whose love is life and sweetness in time and in eternity.