Formative Practices in Augustine's Confessions

ANDRÉS G. NIÑO

FORMATIVE PRACTICES IN AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS

SUMMARY — In a previous article1 I discussed a cluster of spiritual exercises that emerge from a reading of Augustine’s Confessions as a meditative ascent towards God through a radical change of thought and behavior. In this paper I show that the transformative power of those exercises expands through engagement with select formative practices to consolidate the choice of a Christian way of life. Among them are attentive silence, assiduous lectio Divina, construction of a personal narrative, participation in ritual, ministry to the community, spiritual counseling, and observance of the Rule. Each has both a private and a social dimension; together they constitute Augus- tine’s distinctive and fundamental discipline of spiritual development.

In the introduction to her recent work Vannier wonders if the day will come when we will finish our commentaries on Augustine’s writings, particularly the Confes- sions. She answers convincingly, ‘certainly, not’.2 The reason she gives, based on a reflection by the theologian David Tracy, is that the Confessions is a ‘classic’ in the most precise sense of the word. That notion derives its strength from the presence of two primary criteria: its capacity to present the truth and its capacity to transform the reader or spectator. Those criteria apply most properly to the Confessions where we find Augustine engaged on ‘making the truth’ in his life (X, 1, 1). At the same time he envisions his many readers, past and present, and states his desire to ‘stir their minds and affects towards God’ and a new way of life (X, 3, 4) through a lengthy process of inner transformation. History tells us that indeed, many of those readers experienced a transformation of their inner selves. In retrospect we can see how the power of personal and universal factors has given the work its permanency in time and explains its profound influence on Christian spirituality for 1600 years.3

1 Andrés G. Niño, ‘Spiritual exercises in Augustine’s Confessions’, in: Journal of Religion and Health: Psychology, Spirituality, Medicine 47 (2008), 88-102 (OnlineFirst,2007-9143-0). In this paper I use, with a few variants, Maria Boulding’s translation, Augustine: Confessions, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997. All citations from this source are given in the text in the form (X, 4, 6) to indicate book, chapter, and paragraph. 2 Marie-Anne Vannier, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin, Paris: Cerf, 2007, 16. 3 Historian Jaroslav Pelikan considers Augustine to be a major intellectual, spiritual, and cultural force throughout that span of time. Pelikan, The mystery of continuity, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1986.

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The narrative describes ‘a detailed and progressive pattern of ascent’4 main- tained by the inner restlessness that human beings experience in their search for truth and happiness. On that matter the work is a point of encounter for readers of all times. Even among the disturbing and contradictory messages of modernity they can learn something about themselves. They can also learn about God and his ‘hidden providence’, Augustine’s term for his primal realization about God calling him even when he was not seeking God (XIII, 1, 1).

READING THE CONFESSIONS Scholars concur that the Confessions were already popular and sought after even before Augustine completed them. However, the experience was not all that smooth for some. Carol Quillen recalls the case of Consentius, a contemporary of Augustine, who acquired a copy of the book with the intention of learning how to engage in dialog with God. He read a few pages, but did not persevere long at the task. He was set aback by the ‘irritating brilliance’ of its language and threw the book away. He also admitted that, for eight years, other personal factors like his unstable thinking, sinful behavior, and aversion to reading itself, prevented him from returning to the Confessions. However, a second reading changed his attitude. He then emphasized that he was seeing himself there and resonating with Augustine’s own thoughts. And he wrote: ‘The words of the blessed Augustine have steadied the tossing raft of my faith (…) the teacher is not lacking to me but rather I was deficient to the teacher’.5 The Confessions is a rather difficult book, shaped by traditions and events of a world long past and unfamiliar to contemporary readers. However, there is a large dimension of human experience where we can identify with Augustine; that is the inner pilgrimage and inward journey that he and many others have made through God’s redemptive time. It is a zone of existence without boundaries in which we may gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and learn to engage in dialog with God as we respond to his call. The intrinsic power embedded in such experience becomes a bridge between Augustine’s time and ours. He knew that would be the case when he envisioned readers of his Confes- sions: ‘my fellow citizens still on pilgrimage with me, those who have gone before and those who will follow’ (X, 4, 6). Within the Christian tradition the classic works by revered authors are an irre- placeable source of inspiration and practical orientation for living. Regarding

4 James O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions (3 vols.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, I, I, xIix. Robert McMahon expands on the relevance of this ascent in Understanding the medieval meditative ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, Dante, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America, 2006, particularly 1-34. 5 Carol Quillen, ‘Consentius as a reader of Augustine’s Confessions’, in: Revue des Études Augus- tiniennes 37 (1991), 87-109.

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great ancient works, Hadot observes that ‘there are some truths whose meaning will never be exhausted by the generations of man (…) yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived and constantly re-experienced. Each generation must take up, from scratch, the task of learning to read and to re-read those old truths (…) This, too, is a spiritual exercise’.6 The problem is that we have neglected the reading of those works. In the context of modern life, they impose upon our schedules a slow rhythm that runs counter to our addiction to a fast pace in everything. We do not have much patience to create pauses, liberate ourselves from our preoccupations, and give full attention to a discourse that may stir self-examination and raise challenging questions. Accustomed as we are to moving in the whirl of constant images, it has become difficult to enter into a zone of interior silence and let the text alone unfold its meaning. The principal objective of this paper is to rescue the vitality of some of the truths embedded in the Confessions. In the process it will become clear that it is possible to be fully engaged with Augustine’s search and experience in our time.

A Constructive and Interpretive Task Vaught points out to a challenge facing us: ‘we cannot plunge into the Confessions without calling ourselves into question (…) If we are unwilling to probe the depths of our souls, we will never understand Augustine, for he makes insisting demands that we trace out the path he has traveled in our own spiritual and intellectual development’ 7. The reader is pressed hard in that direction even on reading the first page: Augustine, with a bow to God, addresses his audience saying ‘we humans who carry our mortality about us (…)’ (I, 1, 1). No one can disre- gard what follows and simply close the book. Confessions is a ‘pilgrimage of the soul’ (XI, 15, 22) and Augustine expects his readers to recognize their common predicament and join him in the ascent; as Hadot remarks, though the story is about Augustine, ‘it must not be understood as the incommunicable singularity of the man Augustine, but, on the contrary, as universal humanity of which the events of the life of Augustine are only the symbols’.8 Readers who persevere will have to move along a winding road, one that moves up and down through many vicissitudes, as Augustine progresses in his narrative; readers who do so will find that the story becomes their own in one way or another, as they follow Augustine’s progress. This is a meditative ascent, walked by many others since Augustine, that may stir some perplexities and fatigue, but is well worth the effort. To that end, from the perspective of this paper, we should approach it with a constructive and interpretive disposition.

6 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life: Spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, introd. Arnold I. Davidson, transl. Michael Chase, London: Blackwell, 1995, 108-109. 7 Carl G. Vaught, The journey toward God in Augustine’s Confessions, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003, ix. 8 Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 17, and note 89.

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Constructive in the sense of reading to appropriate the truths in the work that will allow us to live the human and spiritual experience it narrates within the contours of our individual circumstances. The transcendent meaning and communicative power of the Confessions, like other masterworks of human genius, were not really complete or fully discernible at the time of their creation. They become richer through the responses they elicit from those who contemplate them and assimilate their message, integrating it within the realm of their aspirations and ideals. The Confessions is a text meant by the author to serve as testimony to the validity of a Christian tradition. In that regard it contributes to the wholeness of what W. C. Roof considers a living tradition, ‘open to human agency and, therefore, to continuing narration of symbol, belief, practice, and image (…) [it] remains alive, vital and meaningful only as its members engage it in a given time and circumstance’.9 The reader is thereby challenged to become involved. Interpretive in the sense of taking responsibility for the creative presentation and utilization, in the context of the world we live in, of the metaphors, ideas, and practices that we have discovered in the Confessions. On this point we all know that the literature on Augustine and his writings is simply vast. It takes only a short while navigating through modern search engines and databases to realize the extent of it. It is a river flowing through the core of all disciplines. A large proportion of it, however, is scholarly discussions rendered in specialized academic language; this is particularly true of the Confessions, as was made obvi- ous in the proceedings of one major conference in Rome.10 Clearly, this is necessary to keep a major area of research and publication current and vigorous. However, it is also important to expand the relevance of that intellectual effort through efforts at dissemination that make it accessible to those who take seriously their Christian way of life today beyond academic circles. Augustine himself shared his personal experience in Confessions and the power of his intellect and eloquence in many other works, with a motley crowd of people. In that regard, John Paul II delivered a poignant letter to all who take Augustine’s thought as a guide in their life style and work; he asked them ‘to draw from the inexhaustible treasure of your great teacher Augustine, suggestions and propos- als for a renewed apostolic action (…) you must be pedagogues of interiority at the service of the humanity in search of Jesus Christ in the third millennium’.11

9 Wade Roof Clark, Spiritual marketplace: Baby boomers and the remaking of American religion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, 166. 10 Le Confessioni di Agostino (402-2002): Bilancio e prospettive (XXXI Icontro di studiosi dell’antichitá Cristiana, Roma, 2-4 May, 2002), Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2003. (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 85) 11 John Paul II, ‘Acta Ordinis’, in: Publicazioni Agostiniane 10 (2001), 34-38.

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From that perspective, reading Augustine and sharing our understanding with others is a challenge that demands ‘the solidity of the experience of God and life to be effective, something that is central in the Confessions’.12

Augustine – Spiritual Master An exploration of practices in the spiritual dimension of human experience inevitably raises this question: Who can be, or in fact is, a reliable guide in such matters? Considering the many seekers and objects of search in that realm, it is hardly surprising to see the appearance everywhere of gurus and experts who offer their advice to the multitudes hungry for peace of mind, self-knowledge, happiness, and other basic aspirations. The promise is always a highly priced goal: a breakthrough, a new level of health or total transformation. A recent account of this phenomenon and the practices imposed on the seekers by self-proclaimed masters appeared recently in a lengthy essay in Time magazine.13 The author describes the growth of a vast spiritual marketplace where throngs of people are searching frantically through its goods. One cannot but remember Augustine’s insight into the ‘restlessness of the human heart’ and the things that people will do to find ‘the secrets of personal growth’ hidden in the new age. People have always engaged in a quest for a better way of life and genuine seekers have listened to and followed reliable guides. In the Christian tradition of wisdom, the accumulated experience from the life and works of many of those guides offers both possibility and challenge. Amongst them, Augustine stands out as a towering figure mainly because of his Confessions.14 There he reveals a profound knowledge of the human heart’s motivations, internal defenses, passions and dreams, the power of will and its bondage, the depths of being wounded and lost. It is difficult for his readers to move through some of the passages where he describes himself as ‘carrying within a bleeding soul (…)’ (IV, 7, 12) without feeling the impact on their own minds. Through many pages of intense self- examination he astonishes us, even in these times of unveiled secrets, with his courage to pursue the truth at this level of honesty in writing.

12 Vannier, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin, 9. Also on this point, cf. David Tracy, ‘Traditions of spiritual practice and the practice of theology’, in: Theology Today 55 (1998), 225-241. 13 Nathan Thornburgh, ‘Change we can (almost) believe in’, in: Time (March 7. 2011), 58-61. 14 Spiritual master is the title unanimously given to Augustine by the late Fathers of the Church and consolidated through the influence he exercised on Christian spirituality throughout the centuries. The 1954 International Congress celebrating his 16th centenary emphasized this aspect through collaborations from scholars representing major schools of spirituality. Cf. Sanctus Augustinus vitae spiritualis magister (settimana Internazionale di Spiritualita’ Agostini- ana, Roma 22-27 Ottobre 1956). Vol. 1, Roma: Analecta Augustiniana, 1958.

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He is most persuasive speaking about the need to return to ourselves, to cultivate the path of interiority in order to overcome the effects of dispersion and to impose order in the disparate ways that we love. Augustine insists that we must surrender to God’s will, expecting everything from his graceful mercies, and simultaneously stand up with hope believing that we can always become better human beings. His humble attitude in the presence of God and the richness of his prayerful dialog is a compelling example for his readers. And above all, his teachings are sound, convincing, and challenging because they reflect an attentive listening to and contemplation of the word of God. As a spiritual master, he speaks to us not as someone elaborating a doctrine but as someone who draws on personal experience and wants to be heard and understood. One with the courage to give testimony of his unbreakable conviction that happiness and the true peace for human restlessness are ultimately found only in God (X, 20, 29; 22, 32; XIII, 16, 19).15 These are all ‘issues that matter’, related to the fundamental task of choosing and adhering to a rule of life. In that regard, Augustine compels the reader to reflect, to elevate his aspirations, and perhaps to change.

Formative Practices Hadot’s authoritative analysis of texts from ancient schools of philosophy and also of Augustine’s work illuminates our reading of the Confessions. He explains that those texts contain many spiritual exercises that emphasize a great variety of tech- niques and objectives according to the different schools. What they have in common, however, is the fact that they are written ‘not so much to inform the reader of a doctrinal content, but to form him, to make him traverse a certain itinerary in the course of which he will make spiritual progress’. This procedure, he says, ‘is clear in the works of Plotinus and Augustine, in which all the detours, starts and stops, and digressions of the work are formative elements’.16 Based on a commentary by Philo of Alexandria, Hadot also notes a difference between ‘more intellectual and more active exercises’ in the Stoic-Platonic inspired philosophical ther- apeutics. The first related closely to ‘activities of the thought and will’, while the latter were intended to create stable, solid habits and practical forms of behavior.17 Both are inseparable for anyone who strives to maintain authenticity in life. They are all oriented towards a personal conversion and the affirmation of a way of life. Moreover, Hadot points out that ‘Christian spirituality has been the heir of ancient philosophy and its spiritual practices’. Christianity, he says, has presented

15 Gilbert Meilaender, The way that leads there: Augustinian reflections on the Christian life, Grand Rapids, MI-Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans: 2006, 5-13. 16 Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 84-86. 17 Ibid., 64. Hadot’s concept is assumed in the main sections of our project, ‘spiritual exercises’ and ‘formative practices’ in the Confessions.

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itself as a philosophia (a way of being and a style of life) insofar as it assimilated into itself the traditional practices of spiritual exercises, albeit with the unique characteristic of being rooted in the Bible and the Gospel. We see this occurring in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine, and monasticism.18 From the perspective of this paper, the reading of the Confessions as exercitatio animae uncovers not only a detailed analysis of the process of conversion; it also reveals the processes of formation and the cultivation of the spiritual life. The book is about a total experience; that is, it shows how Augustine lived by what he believed, and gave testimony about the commitment he made to the Christian faith. In that regard spiritual exercises and formative practices are ‘distinct but not separate’19 as they reconstruct Augustine’s understanding and response to God’s call to conversion. The process engages his intellectum et affectum with God’s grace (X, 29, 40) in a number of tasks: remembering himself and God, resolving the dispersion in the realm of interiority, ordering love and unifying the will through conversion, accept- ing Christ as the way of inner restoration, participating in a community of faith, following the demands of life as a pilgrimage returning to God. Augustine’s meditative ascent in the Confessions shows how, through those exercises, he arrives to the knowledge and acceptance of Christ that situates him in a definite new way of life. The formative practices derived from the Confessions assume that certain conceptual dynamics underlie the exercises that guide Augustine’s choice of the Christian way of life. These practices nurture the process of conversion through methodical behaviors that reflect coherence of mind and body, and of thought and action, in the service of increased spiritual awareness. They are learned and performed in the social context of a community that teaches, guides, and gathers the believers in a unity of hearts and minds. They also express inner experience through words, gestures, songs, and movements in private and public per- formance. Through repetition, which is not mere routine but loyalty to a personal choice, these practices generate meaningful habits and a sense of stability and continuity. As a result they become part of a person’s deeper context of life, reinforcing the motivation and inner resources that lead to virtues consistent with beliefs. Beyond the effort that is implied in the practices, Augustine places particular emphasis on human dependency on God’s grace. Stalnaker20 comments that Augustine recommends various practices, at various times to various audiences; among them are sexual restraint or renunciation,

18 Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 127-130. 19 David Tracy emphasizes the significance of unity of thought and way of life, essential to education and formation. Tracy, ‘Traditions of spiritual practice and the practice of theology’, in: Theology Today 55 (1998), 235-241. 20 Aaron Stalnaker, ‘Spiritual exercises and the grace of God: Paradoxes of personal formation in Augustine’, in: Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 24 (2004) no.2, 137-170: here 138.

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voluntary poverty, almsgiving, hospitality, communal ownership of property, fasting, self-examination, private and public confession of sins, various kinds of prayer, Bible study and other sorts of learning (including the traditional liberal arts), philosophical dialogue, brotherly rebuke, and various forms of penance. And in his capacities as a priest and bishop, Augustine led many through cat- echesis, baptism, and shared worship, which included scripture recitation, preaching, music, and celebration of the Eucharist; this appears already in Con- fessions, particularly in book XIII. Moreover, he did not think the practices of personal formation were reserved only for a few, but that they pertained to the Christian life in its lay, clerical, and monastic forms. In this paper I single out a few of those many practices for their inherent capacity to reinforce Augustine’s fundamental striving towards unity with God and genuine testimony in the community of faith that animate the whole narrative of Confessions. They all are tied together firmly upon the scriptural ground that is the main resource for effecting change and growing adherence to the Christian way of life, viam vitae (VI, 2, 2). In that sense they constitute ‘practices of stability’ that facilitate Augustine’s progress in his ascent: ‘I shall find stability and solidity in you, in your Truth which imparts form to me’ (XI, 30, 40). In doing so they may also inspire his readers to deepen their own faith commitments.

SILENCE

Writing a narrative about the providential events that brought him to a transforming encounter with God was, for Augustine, a very personal and challenging task. At the center is a radical purpose, one so ambitious and risky that it is overwhelming and so urgent that it cannot be delayed. J. O’Donnell comments: ‘The truth that Augustine made in the Confessions had eluded him for years. It appears before us as a trophy torn from the grip of the unsayable after a prolonged struggle on the frontier between speech and silence’. Augustine now intends a ‘radical turn away’ from common sense towards the Other, the ground of being and the truth, and thus doing ‘towards the true self’.21 The objective here is not merely to explore one’s intimate thoughts but to listen to the Truth in order to ‘make the truth’ in one’s own life.

The ‘Multitude of Things’ In Confessions, Augustine embraces solitude and quiets his surroundings in antic- ipation of a genuine encounter and dialog with God. As Caranfa puts it, ‘This presence of God is the silence we hear in Confessions, calling Augustine beyond

21 O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, I, xvii.

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himself, beyond human words, and beyond time’.22 He adopts a purposeful attitude, in consonance with the decision to ‘seek God’, that will grant him to know and understand, to find and to praise (I, 1, 1). From the beginning he places a particular emphasis on the need for liberation from the externals associated with a ‘distracted’ style of living. He explains his predicament, stressing that he was ‘pur- suing a multitude of things’ (II, 2, 2) and could not hear the voice of God calling him in many ways: ‘Do I dare to say that you were silent, my God, when I was straying from you? (…) none of your words sank into my heart’ (II, 3, 7). He then reflects: ‘My soul (…) take care of the ear of your heart is not deafened by the tumult of your vanity. You too must listen to the Word himself who calls you to return (…) to the place of undisturbed quiet’ (IV, 11, 16). Eventually, Augustine moves from the level of action in his daily life, crowded with voices, images and constant stimulation, to a zone of intimacy (VII, 7, 11) where the self is formed. Silence allows his thoughts “to be collected from their wanderings” (X, 11, 18) in the service of internal coherence and depth of experience. The written word begins in silence and the writing itself imposes a crucial disengagement from the immediate external world, a transitional solitude that facilitates self-discovery, balance of emotion and reason and understanding of one’s predicament. More importantly, silence and solitude constitute a favorable environment that allows “the words of the soul and the clamor of thought famil- iar to God’s ear” (X, 2, 2; 6-9) to emerge from within. Yet this move is not a mere rejection of speech but a transcending of its limitations. Augustine recalls the painful memory of years ‘selling talkative skills apt to sway others’ (IV, 2, 2); it has developed in him an urgency to anchor himself in a purposeful search for meaning in what he says and writes. The world thunders with speaking that creates the illusion of permanency but it is eventually lost in a vanishing point of sheer transience. He is now posed to focus on the things that matter: ‘For me, good things were no longer outside (…) Those who want to find their joy in externals all too easily grow empty themselves (…) they pour themselves out on things which are transient (…) and lick even the images of these things with their famished imagination’ (X, 4, 10). Only at the end of speaking can we see, know, and understand.

A Voice in the Heart The narrative of Confessions is framed by a practice of silence and speech in expectation of the voice of the Other that can be heard ‘as one hears a word in

22 Angelo Caranfa, ‘Silence and spiritual exercises in Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, and Claudel’, in: Literature and Theology 18 (2004) no.2, 187-210: here 191. For an analysis on Augustine’s ‘bounded solitude in Confessions’, cf. John D. Barbour, The value of solitude: The ethics and spirituality of aloneness in autobiography, Charlottesville-London: University of Virginia Press, 2004, 34-42.

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the heart’ (VII, 10, 16). Augustine will learn to interact with that voice, ‘not with words of tongue and voice, but with the words of my soul and the clamor of my thought to which your ear is attuned’ (X, 2, 2). To that end he strives even further toward liberation of the inner self. He expresses this in the first pages of Confessions: ‘Heal and open my ears (of the heart) that I may hear your words; heal and open my eyes that I may see what you will’ (I, 1, 1). The practice becomes a locus of inner strength as Augustine struggles to maintain his inner freedom: ‘let not my own darkness speak to me! (…) Away I wandered, yet I remembered you. I heard your voice behind me, calling me back, yet I scarcely heard it for the tumult of the unquiet (…)’ (XII, 10, 10). The voice that ‘speaks clearly to the inner ear’ (XII, 11, 11; XIII, 29, 44) manifests itself through a wide range of internal stimuli, from a voice that is subtle and caressing to the tone of thunder and banging. Augustine utilizes images and verbs from the Psalms to describe his experience: ‘You called, shouted, broke my deafness, you flared, blazed, banished my blindness (…) you touched me, and I burned for your peace’ (X, 27, 38). One cannot listen to that voice without being changed, ‘tu mutaberis in me’, (VII, 10, 16), as Augustine came to realize. At the end of Book IX he describes his experience, for ‘a passing moment’, of the transformative power of true silence. It moves the desire upward towards things that do not pass: ‘we lifted ourselves in longing yet more ardently towards “That Which Is”’ (IX, 10, 24).23 This interior silence allows a profound self-understanding and opens up infinite possibilities for abiding in God. Human limitations, however, tied to the weight of earthly things and ‘the noise of articulate speech’, will drag him down from the heights of the experience, but the awareness of its meaning will remain ‘as a loving memory’ (IX, 10, 25).

Focused Attention Augustine observes that a recurrent experience of fragmentation and dispersion is the result of humans being conditioned by their temporality, in contrast with God’s eternity. He attempts to see the depths of that condition, reflecting on the way that time expands through past, present, and future; he observes that all things evolve in different intervals, passing, and ‘falling silent’. Then he realizes that ‘the vital energy of what I am doing is in tension between past and future’, through ‘anxious distractions’ and ‘thoughts fragmented by tempestuous changes’ (XI, 28, 37-38). The human temporality, however, may be transcended through

23 Augustine’s mystical experience at IX, 10, 24 has been the subject of numerous analyses. Ber- nard McGinn observes in this text ‘a retreat from the externals, a movement of interiority and an ascent to God’. McGinn, The foundations of mysticism, New York: Crossroad, 1991, 233. Also cf. John P. Kenney, The mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions, New York-London: Routledge, 2005, 129-145.

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focused attention that ‘does endure’ and is ‘always present’ (XI, 26, 37). It awakens the soul to the present moment which can only be fully experienced with a mind that is free of pre-conceptions and arouses our spiritual receptivity. In Confessions, attentive listening is a movement of return, of conversion, that involves the paradox of liberating the interior self while affirming the human being’s radical dependence on God. Augustine assumes a hopeful and confident tone by the end of Book XI through the recognition of Christ’s healing power: He stands as mediator between you, the one God, and us, the many, who are pulled around by multifarious distractions. In him your right hand holds me fast (…) so that I may be gathered in from dispersion in my stale days to pursue the One, forgetting the past and stretched undistracted not to the future things doomed to pass away, but to my eternal goal (…) with focused attention (…) to contemplate your delight, which neither comes, nor slips away. (XI, 29, 39) Augustine’s primal disposition in his ascent to God deepened its roots into a discipline of recollection that allowed him to listen and to create a space for an intimate and dialogical relationship. Dobbins notes: ‘the call to silence cannot and does not banish speech, but prepares the way for (and subordinates to) the act of listening to God’s speech’.24 In the opening lines of Confessions, Augustine addresses God, saying ‘Let me speak to you Lord’ (I, 1, 1). The story that follows reveals that the one who was once ‘hidden, dwelling on high, in the absolute silence’ (I, 18, 29), became close and spoke to Augustine with words that could be heard with the ‘interior ear’ (XIII, 15, 18). It is in the depth of this dialogical relation between God’s voice and Augus- tine’s response that spiritual ‘knowing and understanding’ (I, 1, 1) become possible. Silence, through the liberation of outer and inner barriers allows the emer- gence of a contemplative self, cleaving to God (IX, 10, 23-25). In Augustine’s experience this generates a transformative process from being receptive to being responsive and from listening attentively to acting upon the word (XIII, 21, 30).25

The Mirror of the Invisible A Christian pilgrim has always recognized along the way the evidence of God’s glory in the created world. Augustine, who had read St. Paul attentively, remembers his words: ‘the visible world with all its beauty mirrors the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and divinity’ (Rom 1:20). He incorporated that teaching into his Confessions: ‘Your whole creation never falls silent, never wearies of praising you who have made them so wonderfully’ (V, 1, 1). His cosmic view, inspired by Psalm

24 Richard Dobbins, ‘Silence and speech in the Ostia experience: The case of fons vita’, in: Stu- dia Patristica 38 (2001), 64-69. 25 The discipline of recollection maintains a balance between the apparent opposites of contemplative silence and the practice of ministry. Jean L. Chrétien discusses the dynamics of listening and action in Saint Augustin et les actes de parole, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 2002, 32-35.

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148, ‘the totality of creatures above and below’ (VII, 13, 19), harmonizes all beings in praise of God.26 Consequently, the visible creation, though transitory like all earthly things (IV, 10, 15), is a sign from which one can ascend to the spiritual realm. Creation is both a veil in its materiality and a revelation in the form and beauty of the one who is ‘Beauty so ancient and so new’ (X, 27, 38). Yet Augustine also clarifies that ‘they will speak only to those who learn how to question them rather than letting themselves be lost in their mesmerizing visible reality’ (X, 6, 10). He considers the things of beauty to be meaningful referents that emerge from a contemplative attitude set in the right direction. On that, Chrètièn comments that ‘If beauty is the very voice of things, the face-to-face encounter through which beauty grips us is not in its essence a speechless contemplation but a dialogue’.27 Augustine, exploring and questioning the created beings who silently praise their Creator and becoming engaged himself in the experience as part of nature, brings an exercise of ancient philosophy to a level of Christian contemplative practice.28 His silence leads to the ground not only of human beings, but of all created being. It apprehends the essential unity and purpose of the whole of creation. He writes, ‘the sky and the earth and everything in them – all these things around me – are telling me to love you (…) Your creation sings praise to you so that we may love you, and we love you so that praise may be offered to you by your creation’ (XIII, 33, 48). A meditative ascent is in progress here as well: the pilgrim turns away from external things to those within his interior self and then to those beyond the self. After Book IX, Augustine pauses to raise his most delicate question in a poem that begins, ‘What do I love when I love my God?’ Searching for words to articulate an answer he resorts to the imagery offered by elements of corpo- real experience. Thus when Augustine says ‘I do love a kind of light, a kind of voice, a certain fragrance, a food and an embrace, when I love my God’, he is mirroring another interior reality, where something limited to no place shines into my mind, where something not snatched away by passing time sings for me, where something no breath blows away yields to me its scent, where there is savor undiminished by famished eat- ing, and where I am clasped in a union from which no satiety can tear me away. This is what I love when I love my God. (X, 6, 8)

26 Carol Harrison expands on the topic of praise and creation in Beauty and revelation in the thought of Saint Augustine, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 (Oxford Theological Monographs), 130-136. 27 Jean L. Chrétien, The call and the response (transl. Anne A. Davenport), New York: Fordham University Press, 2004, 35. 28 Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 211. He identifies, in the ancient tradition, a movement from interiorization to exteriorization, in which one becomes aware of being part of nature with a transformed, cosmic perspective. It is ‘a new way of being-in-the-world’, and ‘one is practicing physics as spiritual exercise’.

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The love of God is not determined by the properties of those sensory adjuncts and yet, through them, the human being is able to perceive the mark of the Creator. He summons the powers of the mind and the senses in a unified experience of ‘the inmost self’, where God is grasped with certainty and delight. Thus, the discipline of silence that transcends human speech nourishes Augustine’s entire being.

LECTIO DIVINA

Learning to read, as the ancient philosophy prescribed, was a long and arduous practice for Augustine.29 It was like a pilgrimage of the mind and heart, an exhausting experience of going against the winds as he sailed into the turbulent sea of human wisdom. Yet it was also through his readings that he would eventually come to realize his errors and the limits of his knowledge (III, 12, 21). Confes- sions, as Bowery puts it, is ‘a book about books’, that shows the potential transforming impact that reading can have on the individual.30 From the perspective of this formative experience the Confessions present an itinerary of intellectual restlessness that may resonate with many contemporary seekers of wisdom. Augustine describes his early efforts in school, reading fables and memoriz- ing required texts, as useless and devoid of meaning. Even the reading of Virgil, which he loved in his adolescence, did not give direction or higher aspirations to his life. Later on, reading caused him even more trouble; while involved with the sect of the Manicheans he became ensnared with ‘glittering myths’ (III, 6, 10) and ‘harmful persuasions’ (III, 12, 21). The basic skills he acquired then, however, were later put to better use in the service of God (I, 15, 24). As Augustine ventured into the unfamiliar and rugged territory of the Chris- tian sacred scriptures, ‘to find out what they were like’, he acknowledges that he was not yet ready to enter its ways: ‘My swelling pride turned away from its humble style and my intelligence failed to penetrate to its inner meaning’ (III, 5, 9). What impacted him more was the fact that the scriptures presented ‘something humble as one enters but lofty as one advances further, something veiled in mystery (…) neither accessible to the scrutiny of the arrogant nor exposed to the gaze of the immature’ (III, 5, 9; VI, 5, 8). It would require that he allows God’s inspiring initiative to affect him with humility and genuine desire for truth. Later he would reflect: ‘As I first began to know you God, you lifted me up and showed me that while that which I might see exists indeed, I

29 For an extensive and detailed analysis of Augustine’s reading experience in Confessions Books I-IX, cf. Brian Stock, Augustine the reader: Meditation, self-knowledge, and the ethics of interpretation, Cambridge, MA-London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996, 24-121. 30 Anne Marie Bowery, ‘You are what you read: Reading the books of Augustine’s Confessions’, in: Augustinian Studies 39 (2008) no.1, 101-112.

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was not yet capable of seeing it (…) I seemed to hear your voice (…) I am the food of the mature, grow then, and you will eat me’ (VII, 10, 16). Fortunately, reading Cicero’s Hortensius, with its dignified prose and encouragement to pursue the love of wisdom and a change of life (III, 4, 8), set him on the path of inspiring and transformative reading. It was a crucial event that provided the right motivation to move forward: ‘I began to rise up to return to you’ (III, 4, 7). Paradoxically, it also made it difficult for him to accept the more rudimentary level of narrative and discourse he found in the Bible that seemed to him ‘unworthy’ in comparison (III, 5, 9). Reading the books of Pla- tonists raised his thinking to another level and brought him closer to the way leading to the Truth, although Augustine regretted that the name of Jesus was not mentioned there (III, 4, 8). It was like ‘seeing the destination without seeing the way to it’, yet he acknowledged the positive influence that those books exercised on his mind and, on reading them, recognized a providential design. Eventually, Augustine comes to an encounter with Ambrose who meditates on the scriptures and preaches them convincingly (VI, 3, 3), and his attitude towards the Word begins to change: ‘the sacred writings seemed to me all the more deserving of reverence and divine faith in that scripture was easily accessible to every reader yet guarding a mysterious dignity in its deeper sense’. It has also the effect of ‘stretching his understanding’ and offering ‘a hospitable embrace’ (VI, 5, 8). This initiation became a practice that Augustine would take up with admirable devotion and dedication.31

Lectio The tradition that we know as lectio Divina has evolved through a long process in the history of Christian spirituality. Reading as spiritual exercise was predominant in the Hellenistic tradition, and became Christianized by the Desert Fathers through their intense dedication to reading the Word of God in the scriptures. Through elaborated allegorical exegesis, they gave shape to the fundamental notions of Chris- tianity and interpreted the Hebrew Bible in such a way that its major characters and events were figurations of Christ and the Church in the New Testament.32 Along that line, Stock affirms more precisely that ‘It was Origin and Augustine who were chiefly responsible for expanding the biblical and early patristic notions of lectio divina into a more systematic style of asceticism’. He continues, ‘This tradition was passed onto the Middle Ages as a part of the divine office. From the eleventh cen-

31 Gaëlle Jeanmart, ‘Le miroir des Écritures’, in: Idem, Hermeneutique et subjectivité dans les Confessions d’Augustin, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006, 118-134. 32 Raymond Studzinski, OSB, offers a detailed account of this development and an insightful discussion of the influence of Augustine’s Confessions. Studzinski, Reading to live: The evolving practice of lectio divina, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009, especially 74-92.

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tury, it became customary for monastic authors to speak of three interconnected ascetic activities: lectio, meditatio, and oratio’.33 We can reconstruct this practice in Confessions and actively participate in the process, noting that Augustine allows us to learn how to make his journey living from the sacred word. Three aspects of Augustine’s experience in the practice of lectio are worth describing here. 1. Silent reading. At a critical moment of his intellectual and spiritual journey, Augustine observed Ambrose always ‘reading silently’, in contrast with the ancient tradition of reading aloud, ‘his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent’ (VI, 3, 3).The astounding scene and commentaries described in Confessions reveal the value of a practice carried on in the midst of a busy environment. There Augustine is part of a group of people drawn in the same situation: a man immersed in his interior life, uninterrupted and unobstructed by the presence of others. His outlook imposes admiration and respect. Augustine in his recollection wonders about ‘what exquisite delights he savored in his secret mouth, the mouth of his heart, as he chewed the bread of your word’ (VI, 3, 3). Ambrose is an example of a liber- ated contemplative self that is affirmed and nourished through silent reading. Stock, in his commentary on this event writes: ‘silent reading was the tech- nique: the silent reader, into whose interior world the outsider could not penetrate, was the sign that the desired state had been attained. A psychological mechanism and a philosophical ideal became one’.34 2. Reading ‘as if’. Augustine says that at one point he began reading ‘with intense eagerness’ the writings of the apostle Paul and learned to ‘rejoice with reverence’ (VII, 21, 27). This would slowly work through his mind towards a critical moment of his narrative when, in ‘silent solitude’, he would ‘take, open and read’ St. Paul’s letter, which he felt ‘as if addressed to him’. It caused an inner revolt that led him to recognize the depths of his condition. As a result of this powerful commotion in his mind and heart he was able to enter the road toward internal freedom and a different kind of knowledge (VIII, 12, 29). Later, Augustine will show how profound was his identification with the Apostle’s experience and writings: ‘I love Paul for saying what he did in response to the breath of your Spirit (…) strengthen me too, that I may be capable’ (X, 31,45). Confessions reveal the importance that his letters will have in his thinking throughout his life.35 The gradual immersion in the scriptures will also uncover for him the richness of the Psalms. Bonnardière says that, during Augustine’s retreat at Cassiciacum,

33 Brian Stock, After Augustine: Meditative reader and the text, Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania Press, 2001, 105. 34 Stock, Augustine the reader, 62. 35 Isabelle Bochet offers a dense commentary on Paul’s influence on Augustine, in: ‘Augustine disciple de Paul’, in: Recherches de Science Religieuse 94 (2006), 357-380.

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these constituted ‘the grand biblical revelation’ that played a central role in the structure of the Confessions.36 The reading of Psalm 4 is, perhaps, one the most forceful experiences narrated by Augustine. He was so profoundly impacted and personally engaged with its meaning that he wished others had heard ‘what the words of the psalm did to me’ (…) ‘I was uttering words of my own interspersed with yours’ (…) which were nothing else but ‘the intimate expression of my mind, as I conversed with myself and addressed myself in your presence’ (IX, 4, 8). As he goes further to verses 3-4 and reads: ‘why do you love emptiness and chase falsehoods?’ Augustine replies: ‘I trembled as I heard these words…for they are addressed to the kind of person I remembered myself to have been’ (IX, 4, 9). The extensive and detailed reading of the Psalm as described in Confessions, Stock notes, ‘effectively transformed the later ancient “spiritual exercise” into a public literary experience while retaining its personal private, and interior character’.37 Augustine’s selective memories of these events encourage his readers to think that even a brief reading of the scriptures in this manner might revive elements of personal experience and cause a catharsis conducive to a profound and critical change. He emphasizes, however, that such transforming impact comes not from the particular intellectual or emotional endowment of the human being, but from God: ‘So totally is it a matter of grace that the searcher is not only invited to see you (…) but is healed as well, so that he can possess you’ (VII, 21, 27). 3. Relational reading. Reading the Confessions establishes a particularly intimate relationship between Augustine’s voice and the reader of the text.38 Augustine’s pervasive use of the ‘I’, the first person singular, throughout the narrative cannot but reverberate within the one who is reading. The interaction takes place in the present, at a relational level that can be described in terms of ‘I am you’. More- over, the reader becomes an active participant in the dialogue between Augus- tine and God. In that regard, we not only come to know Augustine but, as Martin points out, ‘we have been learning the Scriptures, especially since the Scriptures themselves provide the very lens through which Augustine comes to know himself, and through which we are coming to know Augustine. He is showing “in practice” what it takes to interpret the Scriptures’.39

36 Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, ‘L’initiation biblique d’Augustin’, in: Idem (Ed.), Saint Augustin et la Bible, Paris: Beauchesne, 1986, 27-47. Augustine practiced reading and internalizing the Psalms starting with his conversion in 386. In 392 he began writing the Expositions of the Psalms, and in 397 the Confessions. 37 Stock, Augustine the reader, 113. 38 The retreats using the spiritual exercises with Augustine’s Confessions (SEAC) facilitate, through a selection of texts from Confessions, both the reading aloud experience that revives an ancient tradition in which the book originated and the meditative reading of lectio divina. 39 Thomas F. Martin, ‘Book Twelve: Exegesis and Confessio’, in: Kim Paffenroth & Robert P. Kennedy (Eds.), A reader’s companion to Augustine’s Confessions, Louisville-London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, 185-206: here 197.

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The text of the Confessions is the milieu in which the reader gradually enters into a deeper practice of lectio divina, ‘challenging us to listen not only to what God says to Augustine, but also to what God says to us’.40

Meditatio The reader, who takes the words of the Scriptures ‘as if’ addressed to oneself, then responds, through reflection and questioning, and thus originates an internal dialog. It is a trying practice because many pages may be ‘deep in shadow’: their meaning may not be manifest at the first reading of the text causing frustration and disillusion. That was Augustine’s early experience reading Isaiah which he had ‘to put it aside to be resumed when I had had more practice in the Lord’s style’ (IX, 5, 13). An attitude that blends patience with motivation, praying to be granted insight that builds into true knowledge, will be most effective (XI, 2, 3; XII, 23, 43). Augustine had that in mind when he began and ended his Confessions by quot- ing from the Gospel the invitation to ‘seek, ask, and knock’ (Mt 7:7). In that sense, meditatio builds through a paused, reflective re-reading of the word of God, a door he begs to be opened: ‘Let your scriptures be my chaste delight (…) grant us space for our meditations on the secret recesses of your law, and do not close the gate to us as we knock (…) reveal to me the meaning of these pages’ (XI, 2, 3).41 Here the reader can search for deeper meanings. In Confessions, there is room for legitimate confidence that effort spent pondering ‘the hidden wonders of the word’, poetically described through the figure of ‘the hart venturing in the woods deep in shadow, to hide, roam, browse, lie down and ruminate’ (XI, 2, 3) will not be in vain. Such activity brings long-term benefits for Augustine; it facilitates recording the words in memory and internal assimilation for a timely evocation. Also, the words of the Psalms helped him to look at his old self with a renewed mind, effectively transforming his ways of knowing and being; the story about the old dispersed, fragmented self was changed into one that pre- sents a unified and coherent self. Augustine asks his readers to think not so much about ‘what he was’ but about what ‘he is now’ (X, 3, 4). In doing so, they will realize the work of ‘his intimate healer’ (X, 3, 4). Finally, that gives him reason to exult with confidence and hope, mingled with recognition of his own weaknesses, and the desire that others might realize the richness of God’s grace.42

40 Carl G. Vaught, Encounters with God in Augustine’s Confessions, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004, 2. 41 Robert McMahon discusses in depth this process of reflective reading. Cf. Understanding the medieval meditative ascent, particularly 1-158. 42 Pamela Bright, ‘Singing the Psalms: Augustine and Athanasius on the integration of the self’, in: David E. Aune & John McCarthy (Eds.), The whole and divided self, New York: Cross- road, 1997, 115-129. A well-known passage in Confessions (IX, 4, 8-11) shows how Psalm 4 affected Augustine while he was ‘speaking with myself and to myself in front of you out of the intimate feelings of my soul’.

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In this manner he defines the essence of meditatio as a simultaneous act of ‘reading the words outwardly and experiencing their truth inwardly’ (IX, 4, 10). In the practice of meditatio one can progress through writing. The relationship between meditation and writing goes back to the Hellenistic philosophical tradition. Hadot, citing the Stoics, describes this process: ‘whoever wishes to make progress strives, by means of dialog with himself or with others, as well as by writing, to carry on his reflections in due order and finally to arrive at a complete transformation of his representation of the world, his inner climate, and his outer behavior’. Through this process, ‘what was confused and subjective becomes thereby objective’.43 The combined activity of inner dialog and writing was a prominent practice in the work of Cicero and Seneca; Augustine, most specifically in the Confessions, transmitted that tradition to Western spirituality.44 Augustine expanded the scope of this deep reading of the scriptures by methodically including personal notes that preserve the multiple benefits of meditation. Poque analyzes the strategy and shows that he frequently selects one or two words from a Psalm, sometimes a sentence. He then rephrases it or comments on it to create a thought of his own. He appropriates the word of the sacred text and inserts it in his stream of thinking and writing in a distinctively personal manner. Examples abound on every page of the Confessions, woven into the texture of the narrative. He links a series of questions in an intense dialog with God, ‘who will grant me peace in you’? (I, 5, 5-6) or weaves in many verses from the Psalms and words from St. Paul to compose a powerful ‘clamor of a pilgrim’ that speaks of perseverance, memories of past darkness, and vibrant hope for the light of salvation (XIII, 14, 15). All these integrative modalities represent, Poque notes, ‘not additional embellishment, or mere literary reference to a known work, or taking refuge under sacred authority. This is a corner stone upon which he builds reading, meditation and prayer’.45 Oratio In Augustine’s narrative there is a double motion, first towards one’s interiority and then toward what is more intimate than the human self: the Other. This is a contemplative movement that carries along a flux of internal activity where, spon- taneously, the reading becomes a deeper meditation and then, unexpectedly, becomes a fervent prayer. Here, a constant remembrance of God rises from the depths of human consciousness and expands through a prayerful dialog. The ‘desire for the Other’ is the inner pulse of Augustine’s silent prayer of the heart;

43 Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 85, 195. 44 Stock, After Augustine, 108-110. Albert Menguel comments on how Augustine’s meditative writing was assimilated during the medieval and Renaissance eras, as reflected in Petrarch’s Secretum. Menguel, A history of reading, New York: Penguin Books, 1999, 55-65. 45 Suzanne Poque, ‘Les Psaumes dans les Confessions’, in: La Bonnardière, Saint Augustin et la Bible, 155-166: here 160.

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it balances the internal activity of ‘the voice of my soul’ (X, 2, 2) and the ‘listening to the voice of God’ (IX, 10, 25). The powers of the soul are unified in a process that goes from attention and meaning-making towards ultimate trust and immersion in ‘the source of life’ (XIII, 4, 5). In Book XIII, about the Trinity and the Creation, Augustine pauses to suggest: ‘I wish people would turn their attention to the triad they have within themselves (…) I propose it as a topic on which they may exercise their minds (…) The triad I mean is being, knowledge and will. I am, and I know, and I will. Let anyone observe how in these three there is one inseparable life’ (XIII, 11, 12). Hadot comments on this: ‘by making the soul turn inward upon itself, Augustine wants to make it experience the fact that it is an image of the Trinity (…) Ulti- mately, it is in the triple act of remembering God, knowing God, and loving God that the soul discovers itself to be the image of the Trinity’.46 The practice derived from Augustine’s triad of ‘inseparable, but distinct’ (XIII, 11, 12) activities stirs up inner awareness, intellect, and affects towards God. He gives us the structure of the dialogical relationship between the human being and God which is the essence of an act of prayer.47 The three movements, which are esse, nosse, and velle, can be described as follows. Esse means being in the presence of God, who is one’s Creator, raising the whole being in that primal awareness: ‘O Lord you have made us and drawn us to yourself (…)’ (I, 1, 1), ‘You are the life of my own soul’ (III, 6, 11) and allowing ‘the intimate expression of my mind, to burst silently, as I conversed with myself and addressed myself in your presence’ (IX, 4, 8). Augustine’s prayerful attention awakens the ‘interior sense’ of his being: ‘I call upon you, O God, my mercy who made me and did not forget me when I forgot you. Into my soul I call you, for you prepare it to be your dwelling by the desire you inspire in it. I do exist thanks to your good- ness’ (XIII, 1, 1). This movement is the essence of seeking God who inhabits in silence (I, 18, 29-30) to delight in his presence, as the mind is drawn by ‘That Which Is’ (IX, 20, 24) Here, Augustine completely adopts the disposition of being-in-God. Nosse is desiring to know God and to know oneself. In the favorable zone of absolute trust, Augustine raises the deepest desire of his soul oriented towards God: ‘Grant me to know and understand, Lord (…) What are you to me (…) what indeed am I to you’? (I, 1, 1; 4, 7). He aims not at an abstract knowing but at

46 Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 107. Also from convergent perspectives, O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, II, 9. Olney explains Augustine’s texts on time and on the mind (XI, 20, 26; XIII, 11, 12) through the Trilogy Principle, ‘a single process that analysis would render in three stages that bear an inherently necessary relationship to one another such that anyone would be incomplete without the other two’. See James Olney, Memory and narrative: The weave of life-writing, Chi- cago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, especially 1-83, citation on 103. 47 This prayer of the heart is introduced and practiced during the SEAC retreats. The objective is to create a zone of being where one learns to be in contact with the ultimate reality, God, the locus quietis imperturbabilis (IV, 11, 16).

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knowing oneself in God’s plan of healing and redemption. At the same time he expresses the need to know God: ‘Let me know you, O you who know me; then shall I know even as I am known (…) Lord, I lie exposed exactly as I am’ (X, 1, 1; 2, 2). This is the intimate encounter that allows one to express the thoughts and affects rising from one’s experience (IV, 14, 22) and hope for the healing of that ‘mode of being that always swings between decay and growth, pain and reconcilia- tion’ (VIII, 3, 8), and the purging of the ‘residual darkness that will linger until my weakness is swallowed up by your strength’ (XI, 2, 2). Augustine aims at a radical openness before God that leads to lasting inner freedom. Velle is abiding with the intimate God. Human beings are called not only to seek God but to cleave to him, to center in him, to remain in him, in order to gain stability in their inmost self: ‘My good is to hold fast to God, for if I do not abide in him I shall not be able to in myself’ (VII, 11, 17). And meditating on Psalm 4, he writes, ‘You are Being itself, unchangeable, and in you is found the rest that is mindful no more of its labors (…) nor striving for a host of other things that are not what you are (…) it is you Lord, who through hope establish me in unity’ (IX, 4, 11). In Augustine’s experience, ‘abiding in God’ stands for the rest found in attentive listening with the inner ear immersing oneself in his presence, as the mind is drawn by ‘That Which Is’ (IX, 20, 24). It grows by degrees of practice and may lead to unexpected, albeit transient, depths of awareness. Here, time – past, present, and future – coalesces into an extended present, in which a person’s inner sense reaches a high point of concentration: ‘as if the tumult of the flesh fell silent for someone (…) and the very soul silent to itself that it might pass beyond itself by not thinking of its own being’ (IX, 10, 25). Silence gives way to contemplation. Gradually, being in God and knowing God and self converge in loving God: ‘O Love, ever burning, never extinguished, O Charity, my God, set me on fire!’ (X, 29, 40). This is the experience of unity that derives from internal order in the love that has its point of gravity set in God, in which the human heart finds rest. Overall, then, Oratio embraces the experience of ‘restlessness’ and transforms it into ‘stability’ in God, which is Augustine’s inner pulse in Confessions. This is the encounter of the human being with God ‘returning’ from the dispersion that re- occurs through our daily living. It creates the inner space where the memory of self and the memory of God merge into a silent prayer of the heart. As pilgrims often lift up their minds with images of their arrival at the end of the journey (XII, 15, 21; 16, 23), so Augustine verbalizes his desire for ‘a touch of the divine wisdom in a flash of thought (…) in a moment of knowledge’ (IX, 10, 25-26), to ‘fly out to merge with God’ (XI, 29, 39) and to ‘rest in God’s immense holiness’ (XIII, 38, 53).

Many scholars have remarked that Augustine’s large body of writings constitutes a massive commentary on the Bible. In Confessions, particularly, it is an engagement that ‘responds sensitively to figurative expressions in God’s books’ (XIII, 24, 36). From the perspective of formative practices, the Confessions offers the most compelling example of lectio divina, as Augustine reads, assimilates, and prays with the

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Scriptures. Moreover, the interrelated activities of lectio, meditatio, and oratio offer a possibility for a transformation of the self and a deepening of the Christian way of being. Here, Studzinsky notes, ‘the reader moves inward and upward to a higher understanding and then to an ethically informed life. Augustine’s own experience of personal reform through reading as presented in the Confessions grounded his vision of what the practice of reading the Scriptures could do’.48

NARRATIVE

Augustine begins his Confessions with a request to God, expressing a deeply felt need: ‘Allow me to speak before your mercy’ (I, 6, 7). Then he unleashes the forces hidden in his inner life, as he remembers and narrates. The text that emerges is enriched with the complexities of a profound revision of his thought and actions. His objective is not merely reconstructing his autobiography, but making a purposeful effort to disclose his inner self through a rational activity that creates order in a tangible form.

Who Am I, What Am I?’ The narrator who enters into action on the first page, the ubiquitous ‘I’, is willing to confront unavoidable and fundamental questions with regard not only to his nature as a created being but also to the moral depths of his experiences: ‘Who am I to you?’ (I, 1, 1) and ‘what is my nature?’ (IX, I, I). These are the questions that situate his self on the ultimate ground of life. To give an answer, he will remember – recordari volo (II, 1,1)- his past experience because ‘time is not inert. It does not go through our senses without an impact, for it works wonders in our minds’(IV, 8,13). Remembering will take him to the ‘bare depths’ of his being, a zone of radical openness beyond the barriers of self deception. The task will not be easy: ‘I am laboring over it, laboring over myself, and I have become for myself a land hard to till’ (X, 16, 24).49 Nor is he going to uncover things that are already known to God. However, he will discover things about himself in the process of narration in search of the meaning of his life. The writing will allow him not only to re-construct but also to re-orient his story with astonishing integrity. Following the ‘imperative to narrate’, Augustine reconstructs his life story at different periods: early memories of childhood (books I-II), adolescence (IV-VI) and early adulthood (VII-VIII).50 These bring up images and events from proximal contexts, including family, sources of support, and multiple cultural factors. In the

48 Studzinski, Reading to live, 76. 49 For an excursus on salient events in the various developmental periods in Confessions, see Mark Free- man, Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative, New York: Routledge, 1993, especially 25-49. 50 Olney observes that Augustine’s story displays a ‘narrative logic of development-within-continuity, of complexity spiraling out of singleness’ that will be the common ground for a tradition of life-writing down the centuries (Memory and narrative, 38).

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course of his remembering, Augustine focuses his attention more closely on con- crete situations and relationships that enable him to disclose his intimate way of thinking and express a wide range of affects 51. The writing becomes a formative practice that allows Augustine to achieve a deeper understanding and expression of his renewed self, living through different phases of his past experience. The underlying reflective activity uncovers important links between those phases and critical changes that have since taken place. Writing gives him an opportunity to bring up what is subjective and elusive, making it objective and creating a sense of ordered reality and continuity that heals and strengthens his internal resources. That carries the potential for a genuine transformation and spiritual progress.

Exploring ‘Vast Fields’ Augustine contemplates the vast, infinite treasures of his memory and wonders: ‘Who can plumb its depth? (…) I cannot myself comprehend all that I am’ (X, 8, 15). Yet, he sits down to write in order to confess, to give testimony, ‘not only before you God (…) but to all who are my companions in this life’(X, 4, 6). Later, in book X, he explains and summarizes the ‘method’ he has already been using to describe the events recalled from the past. He underlines a series of interrelated activities. He collects his thoughts to explore ‘the vast fields and mansions of memory (…) where I meet myself’. Then he recalls ‘what I did, when and where I acted in a certain way and how I felt about acting (…) the things I have experienced or believed (…)’, and he meditates ‘on all these as though they were present to me’ (X, 8, 12-14). Augustine exercises the power of his mind to pull them from ‘the distant caverns’ where they have been relegated in so he can gather them and make them knowable again (X, 17, 18), ‘selecting some and displacing others’ (…). All this activity is oriented to discern, evaluate, and scrutinize these experiences. Most importantly, he carries on this process in dialog with God, the thread that keeps the pieces together: ‘I consulted and listened to you teaching me (…)’. Concluding, he notes that he frequently practices this self- examination, which provides a sense of liberation and relief: ‘It is still my constant delight to reflect like this; in such meditation I take refuge from the demands of necessary business insofar as I can free myself’ (X, 40, 65). The manner in which Augustine negotiates his narrative constitutes a source of spiritual and psychological coherence that allows him to say, with honesty, in the presence of God and his readers, ‘This is what I am’ (X, 2, 2). Despite the significance of the remembered past, it is the interpretation made in the

51 Stock, analyzing this process in Confessions, notes that ‘it is through this linear dimension of internal speech that he is able to propose the soliloquy as a solution to the ancient problem of relating “forms of discourse” to “forms of life”. In his view, the link between them is the narrative shape of events’. Cf. Brian Stock, Augustine’s inner dialogue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, specially 181-228, here 185.

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present that determines the meaning of the narrative. The inherent connection between the images from the relived experience and the words that the narrator arranges through the writing is the text of a new experience. It carries along the impact of all significant intervening events and changes that have taken place in his life. Thus the narrative becomes a testimony of ‘making the truth’ (X, 1, 1) that reveals a new self. On that basis, Augustine insists that his readers should consider understanding him not as he was ‘then’ but as he is ‘now’ (X, 4, 6).

Life Structuring An attentive reading of Augustine’s narrative reveals a ‘life structure’ that frames the overall process of his experience. In Levinson’s terms this is ‘the underlying pattern or design of a person’s life at a given time’. It embraces several components whose centrality and importance depend on the emphasis and attention that the individual gives them. They are all characterized by ‘external aspects – events, social contexts, roles, a range of influences – as well as internal aspects – subjective meanings, motives, conflicts, personal qualities’. Thus, Levinson concludes, ‘The life structure is the framework within which these aspects are interwoven’.52 Figure 1 integrates some basic elements that are distinctively important to Augus- tine and serve as a tool for an overview of the design of his life. The figure broad- ens Levinson’s concept of life structure by integrating some specific components related to the fundamental strivings of a search for transcendence.53

Figure 1 – Life structure in the Confessions

LIFE STRUCTURE IN THE CONFESSIONS

Past experience Friendships Lifestyle Groups Work

Meditative ascent Fundamental striving toward meaning and transcendence in life. God’s call and human response

Family Social causes Marriage Faith community

52 Daniel J. Levinson, ‘A conception of adult development’, in: American Psychologist 41 (1986) no.1, 3-14. Here 5,7. 53 Andrés G. Niño, ‘Assessment of spiritual quests in clinical practice’, in: International Journal of Psychotherapy 2 (1997), 193-212.

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From this perspective, the focus is on the self in relation to the world supported by the dynamics of the principal components. Central to the structure is a person’s fundamental striving towards meaning and transcendence. This dimension of ‘spirituality’, unfortunately, is often set apart, disconnected from other engagements of the adult self, treated as a private issue on its own or disregarded altogether. How- ever, in Confessions where the human predicament is vividly reflected, we see that the search for truth and the order of love in relation to God determines the internal coherence and enduring happiness of a person.54 Its implications are profound and cannot be ignored without jeopardizing the stability in one’s life.55 The fundamental striving, in Augustine’s narrative, aims at an understanding of ‘God’s call and human response’, a gradually unfolding process of awareness and engagement that happens within the complex interaction of the main components of his life structure. His in-depth exploration, ‘making the truth’, allows a view of the whole person and shows how issues of disruption, change, and integration move through the spiral of his adult development. From that vantage point, Augustine’s ‘then and now’ (X, 3, 4) assessment provides him with a sense of continuity and sound hope for a transforming experience. Moreover, the analysis of the life structure opens the possibility, in the present, of a timely re-appraisal or closures of issues and events that have made a profound impact and linger in his memory. Readers of Confessions are able to see this happening throughout the story, as Augustine deals with the remorse of stealing pears (II, 4, 9), the death of a friend (IV, 8, 13-9,14), the effect of distorted ideologies (V,14,24-25), the dismissal of his mistress (VI, 15, 25) or the loss of his mother (IX, 11, 27-13, 37). In this project, such analysis, molded on Augustine’s experience, is considered a practice conducive to inner healing and affirmation of the self against internal and external forces that delay or disrupt spiritual progress. The results will be apparent in a renewed personal narrative showing greater internal coherence and purpose in life.

‘Why do I Do This?’ Following the imperative to confess and praise (I, 1, 1), Augustine raised a critical question: Why I do write this story? (X, 3, 3). Scholars have given very plausible motives for such risky determination to confess and narrate his life ‘with tongue

54 Ellen T. Charry develops this propositon in Augustine’s work in: God and the art of happiness, Grand Rapids, MI-Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2010, 25-62. 55 This realization has fostered the integration of spiritual concerns and experience in the research and practice of major health disciplines. However, it is critical to clarify at the onset ‘which self and what kind of restoration we have in mind?’. In an early paper I proposed Augustine’s experience as an answer to that question within the broad perspective of Christian anthropology. Cf. Andrés G. Niño, ‘The restoration of the self: A therapeutic paradigm from Augustine’s Confessions’, in: Psychotherapy 27 (1990), 8-18.

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and pen’ (I, 14, 23; XII, 6, 6). However, he provided the most important ones himself. In 397 he was not only a convert but a public person as well, one who needed to resolve the tension between ‘how he was then and how he is now’. He feels compelled to present a congruent image to his people. Along with that goes the need to express his gratitude for finally being free of his inner fragmentation and unhappiness. He now sees himself as a renewed being capable of ‘forgetting the past’, one who can ‘move forward towards the future’ (XI, 29, 30). Above all, he will use the disclosure of his experience that embraces ‘de bonis et de malis’ (X, 4, 5), to ‘stir the mind and affects toward God’ of those who read or listen, so that they may also resolve to change and join in praise (X, 3, 4). Perhaps now readers of Confessions who have been involved in assuming the ‘I’ of the text as their own may feel prompted to construct their own narrative as well. Augustine’s question, ‘Who was I and how was I’ (XI, 1, 1), invites an assessment of oneself as a man or a woman before God. The challenge is always to set aside time and space to become engaged with the practice. Despite the recognized importance of recreating and narrating one’s lived experience in the processes of identity formation and spiritual and psychological restoration, many people never find adequate opportunities to engage in this task. A retreat based on the spiritual exercises with Augustine’s Confessions is a favorable context where participants can take the Life Structure shown in Figure 1 as a reference and a point of departure. First, we suggest that they focus on a particular period of life and work through it, examining the relevance and impact of its components, events and personal actions56. Second, we offer a few questions to guide the reflective effort required in this practice. Among them are these:

– How do you see yourself at this point in life? – What are the most important components of your life at the present (major sources of meaning and satisfaction) and how are you engaged with them? – What particular events or situations have been most influential in the critical decisions you have made, changes, gains and losses in this particular period? – What sort of modifications should be made for you to have a deeper sense of internal coherence, meaning and purpose?

The questions and observations that we learn from Augustine’s narrative can be brought to bear in the process of elaborating answers from our own experience. Here, there is no point in imitating Augustine’s confessional style. Our narratives may have a different form and content, reflecting our unique individuality and occurrence. But the aims ought to be the same: to place ourselves, in

56 Augustine admits that his narrative is selective: ‘I am, of course omitting many things, eager to get to those which more porwerfully impel me to praise you; and in any case there are many that I do not remember’ (III, 12, 21).

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dialog, to articulate a response to God’s call. In that regard one’s personal task can be expanded through sharing in group reflections and discoveries made during the retreat.57 This option is consonant with Augustine’s own frank and wise approach to his readers. He has reservations, however, about disclosing his story to people who are a ‘curious lot eager to pry into the lives of others, but tardy when it comes to correcting their own’. He trusted more those who would listen ‘with ears open to me by love (…)’. Indeed, Augustine asks, what is the benefit of disclosing one’s thoughts and deeds to ‘strangers’, ‘to people who know me without really knowing me?’ ‘What do they hope to gain, those who want this?’ (X, 3, 3). His answer is a lucid instruction to remember in practice: ‘it is no small gain, O Lord my God, if thanks are offered to you on our account and many pray to you for us (…) let a fraternal mind do this (…) to such people I will disclose myself: let them sigh with relief over my good actions, but with grief over my evil deeds’ Readers will feel compelled to pray with Augustine: ‘Lord, do not abandon your unfinished work, but bring to perfection all that is wanting in me’ (X, 4, 5).

RITUAL The Confessions have been considered to be an expression of Augustine’s ritual and liturgical journey, which brought him into the very heart of the Christian faith lived in the community of the Church. The central event reflects the theme of ‘formation and reformation’ of the self that was characteristic of reli- gions in antiquity, as well as Christianity; that theme offered the individual and the community the ideal of a radical transformation of life.58 In that regard, Augustine’s experience expands, in its first phase, from the Christian ritual of the inscription of the catechumens (I, 11, 1) to the solemn rites of the Pascal Vigil in 387 (Book VIII) and his ministerial ordination reflected in Books X through XIII. Between those events was a large segment of living marked by intellectual and spiritual discontinuities, a radical conversion and, finally, sustained service to the people of God in the Church. Ritual is a thread that runs through the narrative structure of the Confessions showing Augustine’s progress in determination and single mindedness with regard to his choice of life. Conversion, the key event in Confessions, signals a return to God, not covering physical distances but through a change of heart and affects (I, 18, 28). Augustine reconstructed the rituals surrounding conversion to emphasize that it happens in

57 Traditional SEAC retreats take place in rigorous silence. However, in other formats, a time in the schedule may include this ‘open dialogue’. 58 Thomas Finn, ‘Ritual and conversion: The case of Augustine’, in: John Petruccione (Ed.), Nova & vetera: Patristic studies in honor of Thomas Patrick Halton, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998, 148-161.

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the context of people and circumstances closely related to the Church. It is no coincidence that he devoted so much attention to the example Victorino gives in the assembly of the faithful (VIII, 3, 2-5). That event had a profound impact on the crowd of believers, which reacted ‘with shouts of joy seeing him’ and stood in ‘attentive silence to hear him’ when he rose to proclaim his faith (VIII, 2, 4-5). Through many details, Augustine instructs the reader about the ritual that becomes in that case not only personal experience but also testimony. It embraces fundamental notions of self-identity, belonging and congruency between private and public image. Here, the person courageously ignites in others a desire to imitate and adhere to the rule of faith, as Augustine admits. The power of the ritual that can touch the depths of a human being in that way also reverberates in his own story, through confession and praise.

‘Our Today’ in God’s Time Augustine reflects on the human condition as a creature marked by the signs of mortality and the inescapable reality that life is fleeting, in contrast with the unchangeable eternity of God (I, 1, 1). He writes, inspired by Psalm 101, ‘You are supreme and you do not change, and in you there is no “today” that passes. Yet in you, our “today” does pass, in as much as all things exist in you (…) You are the self-same: all our tomorrows and beyond; all our yesterdays and further back, you will make in your Today, you have made in your Today’ (I, 6, 10). Time is the dimension that defines both God the creator and the human being and its implications loom large in all aspects of experience. Awareness of that radical tenet raises a question about how one is expected to live in our ‘today’ and continue on course. In that regard conversion takes its intrinsic relevance from the fact that it situates the individual on the right path. But it is not an event that happens once and remains circumscribed by a specific moment. Rather, it is only the beginning of a lengthy process of formation and consolidation that is realized through time: ‘it is in two different times that we were darkness and then became light’ (XIII, 10, 11). In between lies the challenge of learning how to live, as the psalm implores, ‘teach us to count our days so that we can gain wisdom of heart’ (Ps. 90:12), by transforming the distension of a ‘distracted mind’ into ‘focused attention’ of alertness and perseverance. Following the practices of ancient philosophers, which emphasized the critical importance of attention, Augustine places ‘the present of the present’ (XI, 20, 26), his ‘today’, against the background of God’s presence in human life. After his conversion, he comes to understand that life is framed by God’s creative plan, which will reform all our deformities. ‘Then’, he says, ‘shall I find stability and solidity in you, in your Truth that gives form to me’ (XI, 29, 39; 30, 40).59

59 For a broader perspective on the interface of time and eternity, movement of the soul, and attention, cf. Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Augustine and the “problem” of time’, in: Gareth B. Matthews (Ed.), The Augustinian tradition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, 39-60.

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It is this engagement of transcendence from the boundaries of human temporality that provides a deeper meaning to the ordinary things of life and allows Augustine to become more attuned to the sacred. The countless events that make his personal story become precious (XI, 2, 2) because they are a gift from God, creator of all times (I, 20, 31; X, 6. 8; XI, 30, 40; XIII, 35, 50). That is the task in the grand design of beginnings and ends in which human beings are called to participate. The return to their origin is the event that gathers all the rituals into a meaningful end, when the transitory experience of transcendence becomes definitive (XIII, 38, 53). Confessions are a testimony of Augustine’s life marked by this urgency and seriousness of purpose. Psalmody Augustine’s private meditation on the Psalms, as in lectio divina, expands with particular intensity through the communal recitation and singing of Psalms. Paul Burns comments on the evidence for this practice from fourth-century historical context that had a profound impact on Augustine who integrated it into his own life.60 He left moving remarks in his narrative about the healing process that was taking place after his conversion: ‘How copiously I wept at your hymns and canticles, how intensely I was moved by the lovely harmonies of your singing Church! Those voices flooded my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart until it overflowed in loving devotion’ (IX, 6, 14; 4, 8). This was the practice of the faithful of the church of Milan who gathered to sing in unison, ‘with voice and heart’, hymns and Psalms in which they found mutual ‘comfort and encouragement’ (IX, 7, 15). Augustine’s experience binds the senses and the mind, integrated in a movement towards God: ‘I find peaceful contentment in sounds to which your words impart life and meaning, provided the words are sung sensitively by a tuneful voice’ (X, 33, 49-50). Moreover, for Augustine, the recognition of Christ as the way of return and the participation in the life of the Church became the true measure of conversion and spiritual progress. And the Psalms are the link between those terms, that he will appropriate with distinctive passion. Boulding says For Augustine Christ is central to the psalms, whatever the particular era of salvation in which they are used. Because of faith in Christ, the Church of every generation is in communion with all the others (…) the prayer of the psalms must be understood as the prayer of the whole Christ, head and members, the totus Christus’.61 In Confessions, Augustine has broadened the scope of his intimate dialog with God into this communal ritual led by the Spirit: ‘Your Gift sets us afire and we

60 Paul Burns, ‘Augustine’s distinctive use of the psalms in the Confessions: The role of music and recitation’, in: Augustinian Studies 24 (1993), 133-146. 61 Maria Boulding, ‘St. Augustine’s view of the Psalms as a communion of faith between generations’, in: The Downside Review 126 (1998), 125-134: here 126-127.

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are borne upward; we catch his flame and up we go. In our hearts we climb those upwards paths, singing the songs of ascent’ (XIII, 9, 10). The practice of singing or reciting the Psalms, using The Book of Hours62 carved from the bedrock of Confessions, is central to the retreat experience of the spiritual exercises. The individual and the group, walking as pilgrims along with Augustine (X, 4, 6), unfold the ritual of the days – morning, midday, evening – in their meditative ascent (Ps 55:18), like a stream running along the pilgrim’s road (XIII, 11, 13). In this manner they fulfill his aspiration ‘to arouse my own loving devotion toward you, and that of my readers, so that together we may declare, ‘Great is the Lord and exceedingly worthy of praise’ (XI, I, I). This verse (Ps 47:2) that opens the book of Confessions is the closing acclamation in every hour, the ‘amen’ of the Augustinian psalmody.

Liturgy At the time he was writing the Confessions Augustine had already grasped the theological and experiential depths of the Eucharistic celebration (X, 43, 70) in the Catholic Church. That liturgy aptly expresses, with words and gestures, the primordial fact of the human heart made and oriented towards God, which results in confession and praise (I, 1, 1). Augustine invites the reader to reflect on the principal elements at work in ‘the solemnity of the house of God’ (VIII, 3, 6), particularly, the power of the word and the sacrament that nourish the faith of the pilgrim’s soul (I, 1, 1; XIII 11, 29-30).63 1. The power of the word of God. Augustine‘s experience grows through a slow process from his early attendance to Ambrose’s ‘energetic preaching’ in church at a time when he was plagued with uncertainty. He was an observer that became captivated first by ‘how he said it’ and later by ‘its substance’ which gradually ‘penetrated my mind (…) for I could not separate the two’. It was effective because the scriptural texts were explained not ‘literally’ but in a ‘spiritual sense’ (V, 13, 23-14, 24). In the course of the narrative Augustine shows his predilection for the parable of the prodigal son (Lk 15:24-32) who represents ‘all humans bent on the same quest for earthly, temporal happiness’ (XIII, 17, 20) who strayed in a region of ‘dissimilitude’ like him (I, 16, 28), but found the way to return. He

62 Andrés G. Niño, The Book of Hours for the spiritual exercises with Augustine’s Confessions (forthcoming, privately published 2009). 63 Michael P. Foley, ‘The liturgical structure of St Augustine’s Confessions’, in: F.M. Young, M.J. Edwards & P.M. Parvis (Eds.), Augustine: Other Latin writers, Leuven: Peeters, 2006 (Studia Patristica 43), 95-99. The entire cycle of great mysteries of the Christian faith – Incar- nation, Easter, Pentecost – turns around this ritual which Augustine refers to in his narrative, particularly in one vibrant passage at IV, 12, 19.

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takes the gospel text as a radical metaphor for the human condition in the process of being formed by God’s grace. Augustine emphasizes the profound impact that the reading of the parable has on people during the celebration of the Liturgy (I, 18, 28) saying that ‘there is joy and tears’; this note signals the inseparable affective component of ritual and underlines the power that ema- nates from the Word and stirs the human heart. Here, there is also a subtle invitation to the listeners to recognize themselves in the prodigal who repents and then hears words of forgiveness and love. In his reflection, Augustine art- fully connects the gospel story with his own story and hopefully the story of all his readers across time; at the end, he suggests a search for deeper meanings in the text and a personal response: ‘what is going on in our minds, then, that we should be more highly delighted at finding cherished objects, or having them restored to us, than if we had always kept them safe’? (VIII, 3, 6).64 Augustine experienced the power of the Word in himself with such efficacy that, as he put it, it ‘persuaded me to confession, to gentle my neck beneath your kindly yoke and invite me to worship you without thought of reward’ (XIII, 15, 17). Indeed, his main purpose in writing his story, built on a multitude of scriptural references, is to give a testimony that the Word of God is the instrument of conversion, and incarnated in Christ is the fullness of life, knowledge and love, capable of transforming the human being. At the end of his narrative he evokes the liturgical image of a gathering of attentive listeners: ‘Preachers of your word pass from this life into another, but your scripture remains stretched above your people everywhere until the end of the world’. The arid soul of the believer finds there the ‘fountain of life’ (XIII, 15, 18). 2 The power of the sacrament. It is the memorial of Christ that unites all those who walk through the Way in a bond of fraternity. For Augustine the Eucharistic liturgy is the sacred ritual that expresses repentance and forgiveness, confession and grace, through Christ, the mediator. He can see himself there, both as participant and main actor: ‘Lord, your only Son, in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, has redeemed me with his blood (…) I am mindful of my ransom. I eat it, I drink it, I dispense it to others and as a poor man I long to be filled with it, among those who are fed and feasted’ (X, 43, 70).65 The sacrament is also the real nourishment for the pilgrims’ journey and the medicine that heals their experience of dispersion. In the retreat of spiritual exercises, the ‘Liturgy of Pilgrims’ is an encounter in the evening that allows for mutual recognition and restful intimacy with God. It gives the participants an

64 Robert J. O’Connell, S.J. explores further Augustine’s interpretation of the parable of the prodigal in Soundings in St. Augustine’s imagination, New York: Fordham University Press, 1994, 143-173. 65 For a detailed commentary on this section, cf. John C. Cavadini, ‘Eucharistic exegesis in Augustine’s Confessions’, in: Augustinian Studies 41 (2008) no.1, 87-108.

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opportunity, in space and time, to celebrate their experience with chants of praise and prayers of gratitude: ‘even in our pilgrim way, we have been saved in hope (…) and made children of the light’ (XIII, 14, 15). This practice of ritual also helps the individual to develop that ‘interior sense’ that perceives the sacred, rely- ing not on the signs derived from external senses, but on the reality that inhabits the interiority of the human being. Together, the power of word and sacrament revives the memory of a common faith that gives meaning to the gathering and makes the notion of cor unum a lived and shared experience. The proclamation that opens the Confessions expressing a profoundly personal need to confess and praise is realized here: ‘that all your worshipers that hear my tale may exclaim: Blessed be the Lord for great and wonderful is his name’ (VIII, 1, 1).

MINISTRY

Augustine’s concept of ministry grows out of his understanding of God’s work creating and re-forming a new spiritual being whose ‘total will’ (VIII, 8, 19) must be oriented towards him. Its deepest meaning is encapsulated in that stance: ‘Your best servant is the one who looks not so much to hear from you what he wants to hear, but rather to want what he hears from you’ (X, 26, 37).66 He loved solitude himself as an attractive life style option but obeyed the voice that called him to serve others following Christ’s example (X, 43, 70). The narrative of Confessions allows us to follow a ‘pilgrimage of the soul’ in which Augustine reconciles the objectives of a personal journey towards God (Books I through IX) with the obligation to the neighbor in the human community (Book XIII). In that respect, he emphasizes the relevance of practices of ministry that proclaim the inseparable bond between the ‘hovering of the good Spirit’ and the life of the pilgrim church and its members. This social dimension is characteristic of Augustine’s spirituality in general and his practice of ‘service’ in particular. The practices described below, especially relevant in Confessions, lend cred- ibility to any action that we may carry on in the form of service and caring.

Solidarity The title of Confessions evokes the image of a very personal matter but from the start of the story Augustine opens up a vast perspective in which ‘all those who share our common mortality’ are invited to be witnesses. His critical return to the

66 The concept of ministry is central to Augustine’s experience in Confessions and later developed extensively in other works. Cf. Joseph T. Lienhard, Augustine through the ages: An encyclopedia (Ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald), Grand Rapids, MI-Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1999, 567-569.

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self, and the practice of interiority, do not aim at a mastery of introspection; rather, it transcends the self and expands through a nuanced awareness of the others. The event of his conversion is not only a profoundly personal experience that results from his intimate relation with God but it is nourished in many ways by the proximity and involvement of other people. His preparation for the major decision of his life, is nurtured by the company of friends in an auspicious retreat at Cassiciacum were they experienced God’s generous favors to all (IX, 4,7). After his baptism while he feels relieved that ‘the dread of our earlier lives dropped away from us’ his thoughts transcend far beyond: ‘I meditated upon your design for the salvation of the human race’ (IX, 6,14). Augustine leaves a detailed testimony of this reality that creates strong bonds of unity and underlies the reciprocal dependency between human beings in their search for God. The essence of the practice of ministry lies in the radical orientation of oneself towards the Other refined in a dialog sustained throughout the Confessions. This is a lifelong process nourished by the dynamics of ordo amoris through which Augustine learns how to love. It moves from a ground dominated by the blind forces of cupiditas into another in which caritas represents a new way of being and others are seen as reflecting the image of God in them. In his vision of solidarity ‘the many’ (XI, 29, 39) who share with him the pilgrimage of this life are his ‘companions, fellow citizens and brothers’ (X, 4, 6). He is eager to reach out to them by being transparent and caring. The word ‘confession’, Hyde comments, has various meanings, including ‘acknowledging’; they signify opening to the otherness of people and situations so that we can accept and integrate their complex reality in our minds and hearts.67 Thus we are able to reflect the understanding we gained from that event and share it back with them.

‘Opera misericordiae’ In Confessions, the readers learn how Augustine becomes involved in the realities of life through a ministry of works of mercy, particularly those under the notion of compassionate hospitality. Augustine interprets the figurative meanings in Genesis: [A]t the command of the Lord the soil of our souls grows fertile in works of mercy according to its kind (…) we fructify in love of our neighbors by assisting them in their bodily needs (…) we learn compassion from our own weakness (…) Let us break our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor under our roof (…) then may swift dawn break for us, so that rising from this lowly crop of active works to the delights of contemplation, we may lay hold on the Word of Life above (XIII, 17, 20-18, 23).

67 Michael J. Hyde, Perfection: Coming to terms with being human, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010, 42-45.

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These practices constitute the solid ground of an embodied spirituality among ‘living souls’. They are inspired by the example of the incarnated Christ and offered by ‘the upright will of the giver’ in response to ‘the needs of the present life’ experienced by neighbors (XIII, 21, 29; 25, 38-27, 42). Along this line, a person develops the capacity to de-center oneself from the reductive locus of self interests and move beyond to the encounter with the other. Augustine, at different points of his narrative, emphasizes the relevance of a genuine personal involvement with works of mercy, reflected in three grand gospel parables: the Shepherd who carries the lost sheep, the Woman who searches for the lost drachma, and the Father who embraces the prodigal son (VIII, 3, 6; XII, 15, 21). They resonate with his own experience, as one who has been the recipient of the ‘many mercies’ from a compassionate God ‘who sought us when we were not seeking him and were lost in the land of necessity and unlikeness’ (XIII, 1, 1).

Sharing of Gifts In the same vein, Augustine underlines the importance of sharing those gifts that constitute a person’s best talents. The urgency comes from Paul, who qual- ifies them as gifts ‘given to each of us as resources for the work of ministry’ (Eph 4: 7-16). The exercise of mutuality and sharing of talents become a unique source of enrichment and growth, in both human and spiritual dimensions. In Confessions, Augustine offers points for reflecting on the impact that this practice can have through the normal course of human interaction. Among the most relevant examples that capture its dynamics are the exchanges that take place among friends (IV, 8, 13). Throughout the narrative we are introduced to many people who come to play various roles in Augustine’s life, amongst them: Monica, Alipius, Nebridius, his unnamed mistress, Adeodatus, Ambrose, Sim- plicianus, Verecundus, Romanianus, Pontitianus. Their names represent the living expression and richness of different and unique gifts – wisdom, piety, loyalty, honesty, counseling, courage, generosity, detachment, human love in its many forms – as talents given by the same Spirit for the benefit of all (XIII, 18, 23). They have shared their best with Augustine and their interactions are brief narratives within his longer narrative that is also God’s story of grace and providence. Like stanzas in a poem, ‘they are parts of the totality of a human’s life and part of the life of humanity itself’ (XI, 28, 37).

COUNSELING

Augustine reminds his readers that the aim of God’s work has always been ‘to give form to our unformed state (…) to the believing soul, the soul truly alive,

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made new after your own image and in your own likeness’ (XIII, 34, 49).68 The process engages human effort and God’s grace in a forward movement and is embedded in these practices. They have the potential to reverse the conse- quences of a recurrent dispersion that, as Augustine put it, ‘is the work of my hands, by which I defected from you to my own unmaking’ (XIII, 1, 1). Now, it is possible ‘to live more and more fully on the fount of life’ (XIII, 4, 5). In that respect, Confessions makes a strong case for the reality that a human being alone will not be able to accomplish the formidable task of unifying the will in the search of the ‘supreme good’ in life. Augustine asked God to come to him and raise him up so that he could see and understand (I, 1, 1). God did not fail him, and did come to him, as ‘more intimate than his inmost being’ (III, 6, 11). But there is another source, discovered through the vicissitudes of his life: other humans who may, in Augustine’s view, be reliable instruments of God’s hidden providence who will help him set his bearings aright and make progress. In Confessions, Ambrose and Simplicianus play that role in a way that is both instructive and effective at a critical time in Augustine’s life.

‘Discussing Perplexities’ Augustine portrays himself as making a difficult, but intensely active, journey in his search for the truth. In his early years, he is notoriously open to the influence of people he encounters. He raises questions but receives no satisfactory answers. He experiences honors, pleasures, and friendships but finds no real happiness. Eventually, he acknowledges that his life is unstable and weakened by internal contradictions. How did he get out of that situation? The answer lies in a remark- able process, one that, paradoxically, was set in motion by Augustine’s restlessness. As he observed in Confessions, it was part of a fundamental striving to realize his best ideals and ambitions. From the perspective of this paper it constitutes a formative experience of counseling in the best tradition of ancient spiritual practices.69 Augustine gives a detailed account that may well serve present-day readers attending to their spiritual progress. Here I single out a few key factors.

1. The recognition of one’s predicament. It is the radical point of departure of the process that took long years for Augustine to reach. His predicament, well documented in Books I through V, is one of anticipatory despair about the crushing of the self and the ultimate defeat of his aspirations. He wrote: ‘I was eager for fame and wealth and marriage, but you only derided these ambitions.

68 Vannier, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin, 145-161, offers a splendid commentary on this point. 69 The concept of ‘counseling’ in Confessions integrates the depth and complexity of various interrelated activities associated with the gifts of the Spirit (XIII, 18, 23) and brought to bear in the relation between a person of ‘maturity and wisdom’ able to lead another who is seeking and discerning the path towards ‘stability in God’ (VIII, 1, 1; X, 26, 37).

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They had placed a load of misery on my shoulders and the further I carried it the heavier it became’ (VI, 6, 9). For some, this situation becomes the dead end beyond which there is only defeat and surrender to internal or external chaos. But in the Confessions, we see Augustine making that critical effort to search for what seemed to be missing in his life. He surmounts the point of stagnation, moving from ‘wavering uncertainty’ toward ‘greater certainty’ that ‘it was possible to unravel the tangle’ (VI, 1, 1-3, 4). 2. An approach to trusted guides. At first, Augustine was not personally involved, but his mother referred him to a certain bishop, who in fact refused to see him. In his ‘wise’ judgment, at that point Augustine was ‘not ready to learn’ and predicted that, through his own reading, he would come to recognize that he was at a dead end (III, 12, 21). That situation began to unravel in his encounter with Ambrose of Milan, to whom he would listen, out of curi- osity, captivated by his intellectual brilliance. Later, Augustine ‘tried’ to grasp the content of his message that gradually ‘found its way into my mind’ (V, 14, 24). Then in Book VIII, he shows a greater motivation to become engaged in counseling under the guidance of a man of solid reputation: ‘You [God] inspired me with the idea that I ought to go to Simplicianus (…) rich in experience and deeply learned (…). I could discuss my perplexities with him (…) he would bring out adequate advise as to how a man in my condition might walk in your way – ad ambulandum in via tua’ (VIII, 1, 1). 3. The role of narrative. Augustine takes a step towards establishing a favorable rapport: ‘Accordingly I made my way to Simplicianus. To him I described the winding paths of my wayward life (…). I mentioned that I had read certain Platonist books (…) Simplicianus told me how fortunate I was not to have stumbled with other philosophers (…) He went on to reminisce about Victori- nus (…) and he told me a story that I will not pass in silence (…)’ (VIII, 2, 3). The particular way in which Simplicianus conducts his intervention is ‘questioning as if he would need to learn while teaching the one who needs to learn’. In that context, Augustine mentions certain skills found among spiritual persons that promote progress and growth: sustained empathy, discernment, and good judgment (XIII, 23, 33-34). The encounter with Simplicianus, at a critical juncture, has a major impact on Augustine and the use of appealing stories reinforces his motivation to stay engaged in the process of inner healing (VIII, 3, 4-5). 4. Striving to imitation. The role models presented to Augustine constitute a convincing exhortation to courageous decisions and consequent behavior. They speak of things that are missing in Augustine’s life while forcefully pointing out what might lead him to change. In the process, he reflects and negotiates a response in his mind (VIII, 7-8). The actual time that mediates between the mentor’s intervention and the healing outcome cannot be predicted, although Confessions give the reader a condensed and ordered re-construction of the details. However, this counseling strategy proved to be very effective. Augustine became ‘strongly moved

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to imitation’, a reaction which he characterizes as a shared experience by others who are ‘affected by the common enthusiasm and catch the flame from one another’ (VIII, 4, 9-10 passim).70 This will extend its power further throughout his life, becoming his main reason for writing his own narrative, which will in turn exert the same impact on many of his readers down the centuries. 5. Empathic working through. The practice of narrative, as presented earlier, unfolds its complexity in this important phase of spiritual counseling. Cen- tral to it is the methodical inquiry that characterizes Augustine’s meditative ascent. The human counseling intervention though limited and transitory, is most influential in this area if wisely conducted. An experienced mentor works through a person’s story using questions, suggestions, reflections, and other nuances of language and gesture that are associated with the human face-to-face encounter. However, in Confessions it is God’s empathic func- tions that are the principal agent of change and progress, as the ‘inner healer’ (X, 3, 4) provides corrective experiences, guidance, enlightenment, and inner freedom: ‘You are there to free us from the misery of error which leads us astray, to set us on your own path and to comfort us’ (IV, 15, 24-27). This empathic activity that takes place in many events and through Augustine’s ongoing lectio divina is a distinctive quality of his dialogical narrative. Gradu- ally, it gives form to the ‘new spiritual creature’ that receives its inner life from God (III, 6, 10): ‘In you we are remade and find true strength’ (V, 1, 1). 6. A response in continuity. Augustine closed his life narrative in Book X saying, ‘This is what I am’ (X, 2, 2). The process of re-formation, though not completed, had allowed him to reach a milestone by persevering in the choice he made; that process provides continuity to his life. It is a dynamic, limitless process in which old questions and conflicts appear and reappear in various forms, following the unevenness of real life. Augustine was fully aware of the limitations as he looked within and beyond himself: ‘How far the first gleaming of your light has illumined me and how dense my darkness still remains and must remain, until my weakness is swallowed in your strength’ (XI, 2, 2). In fact, acknowledgment of the limitations and vulnerability of self may well be the highest expression of wisdom: not the result of mere intellectual work but the outcome of intimate reflections and experience guided by one’s convictions.

Augustine’s conversion represents a courageous striving toward a new way of being, a change in the inner world of the individual, sustained through time. He was able

70 The relevance of this dynamic has been emphasized in contemporary therapeutic work as it directly influences ‘ongoing learning of behaviors and skills as well as beliefs and attitudes, and sometimes transformative experiences’. Cf. Doug Oman & Carl E. Thoresen, ‘Spiritual modeling: A key to spiritual and religious growth?’, in: The International Journal for the Psy- chology of Religion 13 (2003) no.3, 149-165: here 160.

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to work through a coherent ordering of his world and place a priority on a value system and the relation to others in God. In Books VIII through XIII he shares with the reader a new direction and vision of what he wants to be. From this perspective the task of spiritual counseling is carried on through human encounters and in a more intimate and transcendent way through the dialog with God. It is a long way to an enduring transformation, one that takes Augustine far beyond the events narrated in Confessions, into the winding itinerary of his entire life.

Teaching and Learning The narrative of Confessions emphasizes early the significance of this engagement of reciprocal ‘teaching and learning’ within a friendly environment (IV, 8, 13). Later, as Augustine’s search for truth discovers the depths of the scriptures, teaching and learning acquire a new dimension (IX, 4,7). He holds firmly the notion, at the heart of his conversion, that Christ is the only Teacher and God’s wisdom who had been teaching him ‘in wondrous, hidden ways’ (V, 6, 10). At the same time, teaching is part of the Christian character, in the wider sense of facilitating knowledge, and communicating to others, ‘from the penetration of the divine mysteries’ (XIII, 25, 38) our interior vision of the truth of the Word and the truth of one’s self. It is a gift of the spirit to be shared and valued by all involved. Augustine, through his own Confessions, has placed his talents at the service of others. His style is informed by an insightful understanding of the human being, its potential and limitations. He teaches without pretensions, in a way that does not impose but persuades and invites to constant discernment and self examination. Most importantly, he establishes the primacy of truth over human pride or narrow views: ‘for your truth, O Lord, is not mine, nor his, nor hers, but belongs to all of us whom you call to share it in communion with him’ (XII, 25, 34). Here, all the readers are called to listen to the interior Teacher and at the same time to search for the truth together since we are all disciples under the same ‘only Teacher’(XI, 8,10). Those who listen enrich those who speak with their comprehension, interpretation and consensus. Augustine’s fundamental instruction is, as Chrétien puts it, ‘by listening together, we listen better, and by learning together we learn more; by being con-disciples we become better disciples’.71 Augustine had his attention focused on placing his experience at the service of the transmission of faith: ‘let whatever I speak, write, read or count, serve you’ (I, 15, 24; IX, 13, 37).72 This was a demanding task that brought together engagements of teaching and learning utilizing the resources acquired through the lengthy process of

71 Chrétien, Saint Augustin et les actes de parole, 105-112: here 109. 72 Annemaré Kotzé offers an extensive study on the various aspects of the communicative func- tion and purpose of the Confessions ‘to convert its reader’ in Augustine’s Confessions: Commu- nicative purpose and audience, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2004, 32-43.

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self re-formation. His passionate dedication to writing, talking, and caring for a large community of people was not the product of restlessness but the result of his commitment to the Christian way of life. In that manner, he was able to build a reservoir of wisdom through the Confessions and the many works that followed. His opus stands as testimony to his active participation in God’s gracious plan of ‘giving form to our unformed state’, and a wealth of inspiration from one ‘entrusted with the word of life (…) to bring the faithful to spiritual maturity’ (XIII, 34, 49).

THE RULE The formative dynamics of the preceding practices converge powerfully in the spiritual wisdom of Augustine’s Rule, one of the first to be written in the Western tradition and a treasured legacy for many who have followed his spiritual path through the centuries.73 Augustine had in mind a group of like-minded individuals who were intent on establishing the love of God as the primary aspiration guiding their lives beyond conversion.74 The project of a community was the practical answer to a poignant question he put to himself at a critical juncture in his life: ‘Why are we so slow to abandon worldly ambitions and apply ourselves single-mindedly to the search for God and a life of happiness’? (VI, 14, 24).75 The Rule, in that regard, shows an essential conceptual link with the Confessions, which declare the radical orientation of the human heart towards God (I, 1, 1) and Augustine’s aspiration to stir people’s minds and affects towards that engagement (X, 3, 4). The opening words and exhortation of the Rule ‘to gather in harmony, intent upon God, in unity of mind and heart’ echoes the compelling message of the Acts of the Apostles about the way of life of ‘the multitude of believers’ (4:32-35). Orig- inally intended for lay ‘servants of God’, it became widely practiced in the monastic tradition of the Church. Augustine’s Rule, brief and well structured in form and

73 Luc Verheijen, OSA, an internationally recognized authority on this matter, has established the text he calls ‘Praeceptum’ as the authentic Rule written by Augustine ca. 397, the time he also began writing the Confessions. George Lawless, OSA, gives a succinct account for non-specialists of Verheijen’s work, including the original Latin and English translation of both male and female versions of the Rule, in Augustine of Hippo and his monastic rule, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Here, citations of the Rule are from that source, in parentheses (RA), with numbers for chapter and paragraph. The language in this translation is adapted to be inclusive. 74 Conversion, interiority, and community are the robust pillars of Augustine’s way of life reflected in the Rule. Cf. Goulven Madec, ‘La Conversion d’Augustin: Intériorité et commu- nauté’, in: Lumen Vitae 42 (1987) no.2, 184-194. 75 Augustine and his friends’ first project of community life failed due to the barriers raised by marriage commitments (VI, 14, 24). The idea survived and was somehow realized later at Cas- siciacum, where Augustine and his company of ten ‘gathered in God’s service but still with a whiff of scholastic pride about it’ (IX, 4, 7). Years later, unexpected events in Augustine’s spiritual journey, becoming bishop of Hippo, would make the dream a solid reality for which the Rule was the guiding instruction.

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flexible in content, can be integrated into various designs of active or contemplative community life, as historical records have shown.76 In that respect, Leyser comments on Augustine’s broader vision as concerned with the question: How could the apostolic charity of those who dwelt together ‘as one’ descend to the rest? He goes on to observe that Augustine confronted the marginality of previous forms of monasticism which threatened to divide the body of the faithful through elitism, and wisely ‘transformed it into its means by which that body is made complete’.77 In that respect, the reality of more fluid situations and complex ideological trends in modern society makes Augustine’s Rule, in its main principles, an opti- mal resource for the ‘needs of the journey’ experienced by all members of the pilgrimage Church (IX, 13, 37). Individuals in our time from all walks of life may reflect upon it and sense the breath of the Spirit that blows unexpectedly around us and through all times. Those who may feel motivated towards a way of life engaged in that fundamental search ought to heed Augustine’s exhortation: ‘follow the Lord in the company of those to whom he speaks wisdom’ (XIII, 19, 24). One of the great strengths of the Rule, beyond its biblical inspiration, is the clar- ity, depth and relevance of its principles that should guide the life of the amici Dei. Here, for the sake of brevity, I point out just three of those principles that are crucial to the cohesiveness of its formative purpose: community, friendship, and service.

Community The Rule echoes the gospel’s call for detachment, addressed to all who see themselves as people being in the world but ‘not belonging to the world’ (Jn 15:19). The injunction to ‘take care that you have everything in common’ (RA 1, 3) is a basic requirement that Augustine had already considered in his earliest initiative of community life (VI, 14, 24). It stands in open contrast with the human tendency to acquire, accumulate, and hold on to one’s own property. ‘Personal property’ – proprium – is money, material goods, all those things that bring ‘wants destined soon to pass away’ (RA 1, 4). Based on this and other matters, Augustine builds a relational perspective that should help the community to grow on solid ground: ‘those who owned pos- sessions in the world should readily agree that those things become the property

76 For detailed and insightful commentaries on the spirituality of the Rule, see Tarsicius J. van Bavel, The Rule of Saint Augustine (transl. Raymond Canning), Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984/1996. Cf. also Gerald Bonner, OSA, The monastic rules (transl. Sr. Agatha Mary, foreword by George Lawless), Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 3rd.ed. 2004. For a study of Augustine’s Rule in the context of ancient tradition, Cf. Terrence G. Kardong, OSB, Pillars of community: Four rules of pre-Benedictine monastic life, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010, 167-190. 77 For a lucid commentary on Augustine’s concept of community, authority, and the role of the monastic life and the church, see Conrad Leyser, Authority and asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, 3-32: here, 12.

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of the community’; those who did not have property ‘ought not to strive in the community for what they could not obtain outside’ (RA 1, 5). Moreover, ‘those who come from some standing in the world should not look down upon their brothers who come from a condition of poverty (…) but ought to value more living together with them’ (RA 1, 7). He also writes of other elements such as time, projects, and personal talents that are often ‘fenced off with pride’. On all those areas, the Rule establishes the principle that everyone ought to consider the value and joy of sharing what one has, mindful of the fact that vain aspirations and pride ‘lurk even in good works in order to destroy them’ (RA 1, 8). Taking detachment from the proprium as a point of departure, the members of the community may gradually apply themselves towards a deeper practice of simplicity in their life. The Rule sets a principle that is relevant to many situations: ‘Those who have the strength to lead simple lives should consider themselves to be the richest of people. For it is better to be able to make to with a little than to have plenty’ (RA 3, 5). An attitude that takes time to consolidate and responds to Augustine’s concept of ‘life as pilgrimage’ (X, 5, 7).78 As the weight of things is lifted, the pace of the pilgrims is steadier and livelier and they can focus their attention clearly on the destination. Consistent with that perspective, they value events and relationships based on an undistracted love of God. Simplicity is not deprivation but fulfillment, since it transcends self-love towards a real bond between those gathered in Deum.

Friendship The objective of the Rule to gather people together in the love of God requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of human love. In that regard, an ordo amoris is necessary to elevate our relational modes to a level of ‘true friendship’ in God that is the foundation of caritas (IV, 4, 7). Augustine, as a mature man, observed that the human being is an immense abyss and that ‘even his hairs are easier to number than the affections and movements of his heart’ (IV, 14, 22). His own experience learning how to relate to others ‘with proper restraint as in the union of mind to mind’ and ‘to distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust’ (II, 2, 2) has a bearing on various aspects of his instructions in the Rule. Here I point out just three of them. First, after years of practicing ‘undistracted’ love of God (XI, 29, 39) Augus- tine was able to instruct others on how to give meaning to the cor unum in Deum through a discipline of human affects. He made observations on some very common behaviors such as looks, desires, and exchanges that may betray

78 The main themes of the Rule are already present in the ascent described in Confessions. Cf. Niño, ‘Spiritual exercises’.

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subtle forms of inner disorder. His instructions establish the standard of the gospel’s ‘purity of heart’ as the principle to guide outward and inward behavior. He points specifically, at the ‘gaze’ and ‘staring’ that convey inflamed desire, and emphasizes: ‘do not claim to have a chaste mind when you have unchaste eyes’ (RA 4, 4). In the depths of the human heart only the eyes of God can see (X, 8, 15), but Augustine wants his friends to avoid self-deception and be mindful that ‘God looks with patience that is as great as his wisdom’ (RA 4, 5). Second, the fact that people gather together to live in harmony with the common purpose of ‘seeking God’ does not guarantee good results unless the ideal is brought to bear in the practice of daily living. Augustine mentions some unavoidable events of human interaction, such as frictions, confrontations and disputes. Then, he brings attention to the principle that should be held above all others: mutual love in God. He stresses that all should learn how to resolve difficult situations in a timely way and with a genuine disposition: Anyone who has injured another by taunting, abusive language, or false accusation must remember to remedy the wrong with an apology as quickly as possible; and the injured party is to grant forgiveness without further disputation (…) do not shrink from offering healing from the same lips that inflicted the wounds (…) for it must not be earthly, but rather spiritual affection you bear one another. (RA 6, 1-3) Third, Augustine’s instruction dwells on the imperative of correction, which is a fine art in the practice of caritas. It applies to actions oriented to confront the wrong but in a way that protects a person’s sense of self-esteem and allows room for growing awareness and change. He asks us to act on ‘budding evil to progress, to keep the person from suffering a more deadly wound of the heart’, and continues, ‘you are not innocent if by keeping silence you allow brothers to perish’ (RA 4, 8). But, at the same time, he suggests pondering the steps to be taken in that regard, such as warnings, consultations, tempered corrections, ‘as if one deals with a wounded person in need of healing (…) with love for the person and hatred for sin’ (RA 4, 10). Even if the situation calls for a firm and painful intervention, one must not invade the inner zone of being and cause destructive shame. Augustine’s sensitivity recommends, before anything else, that the correction be made privately, so that ‘the fault committed may not be made known to all the others’ (RA 5, 9). It is this kind of approach that reveals Augustine’s deep knowledge of the human condition and equanimity when his judgment impinges on the welfare of others.

Service

The notion of gathering ‘in a house’, the external living context, takes its meaning from the purpose of seeking God in a common experience of mutual support and service. The Rule places little emphasis on ascetic practices such as

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‘fasting and abstinence to subdue the flesh’ (RA 3, 1) and much more on other aspects that engage the individual in the complex demands of relational dynamics and reciprocal service in the community. This can be observed reflecting on two main issues. The first is achieving good rapport between those endowed with authority and those bound to obedience. Augustine draws from scripture to set his bearings right on this: ‘Your superior must not think of him/herself [as] fortunate in having power to lord it over you (Lk 22:25-26), but in the love with which they shall serve you (Gal 5:13) (…) let him/her strive to be loved by you rather than feared, although both love and respect are necessary’ (RA 7, 3). It is a difficult balancing act not because he is expected ‘to see that everything said here be put into practice’ (RA 7, 1) but rather because of the demanding task of exercising judgment on others. Augustine notes in his Confessions that the one invested with authority, as a spiritual person, is empowered ‘to approve what he finds proper and rebuke anything that he finds amiss in the activities and con- duct of the faithful’ (XIII, 23, 34). However, that burden must be shared by all the members of the community: ‘Judgment is exercised not only by the holders of spiritual authority but by those also who are subject to them in the Spirit’ (XIII, 23, 33). In the Rule, the relationship between authority and obedience binds the entire community to the fundamental purpose of living as anima una. Thus, those on one side are responsible to render an account before God (RA 7, 3) and those on the other are responsible to carry a respectful attitude. Augustine closes his instruction with the reminder: ‘by your ready and loving obedience, therefore, you not only show compassion to yourselves but also to your superior’ (RA 7, 4). The second issue is dealing with expected differences amongst the members of the community, such as background, needs, capacities, and health. The Rule calls attention to matters of principle that transcend, in the love of God, all subtle forms of arrogance or interests hidden within the peculiarities of the human condition. Augustine points to some of the most likely sources of internal struggle or overt frictions: ‘if some are treated differently in regard to diet, this should not bother or seem unjust to others whom a different way of life has made stronger (…) it is given not out of honor but from toleration’ (RA 3, 3-4). ‘Rather’, he says, everyone should consider ‘that happier way of life which is more appropriate for those who are servants of God and whose needs are fewer (…) For it is better to need less than to want more’ (RA 3, 5). From that ground of daily issues and interactions, the Rule, gently but firmly, raises the aspirations of the community to the heights of spiritual freedom: ‘may the brothers’ works be done for the common good of all, with greater zeal and more cheerful perseverance than if you were each working for your individual interest’ (RA 5, 2).

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The Augustinian ars vivendi, thus briefly noted, cannot be sustained without the strength that comes from prayer. The Rule gives priority to this endeavor that fulfills the fundamental aspiration of the human being (I, 1, 1). Its emphasis on being ‘regular in prayers (Col 4:2) at the appointed hours and times’ (RA 2, 1) and his allusion to the singing or recitation of Psalms and hymns to pray to God (RA 2, 3) indicates the central role that psalmody played in the structure of the community life. It also highlights the intimate relationship between the Rule and the Confessions where Augustine reports the beneficial impact that the custom had on him. There he also noted how it led him to progress from the delight of hearing to understanding the meaning of what was being said (X, 33, 50). The interior sense, actively involved in the process of ‘experiencing the truth inwardly’ (IX, 4, 10), became the principle established in the Rule: ‘When you pray to God in Psalms and hymns, ponder within the heart what is uttered by the voice’ (RA 2, 3). The practice must not decay into a routine in which the sound of words is lost in the void without consequence. As Verheijen points out, ‘the meaningful chant emerges from the thoughts it expresses and even more from the life that confirms its authenticity’.79 In the final paragraph of the Rule, Augustine asks God to grant that those who have gathered together ‘to observe all these lovingly, as lovers of spiritual beauty’ (RA 8, 1)80 will be ‘diffusing the sweet aroma of Christ through the good- ness of your way of life, not like slaves under the law, but as persons constituted in freedom under grace’ (RA 8, 2). In this earnest prayer Augustine exhorts his brothers to a life in which the intimate and graceful presence of God gives meaning to the deepest aspirations of the human soul and reforms it as a new creature ‘gathered from dispersion in Christ’ (XI, 29, 39). There grows the ‘weight’ of the ordered love, the knowledge of self and God, the unified will, the attentive listening to the voice that speaks to the ‘inward ear’ (XII, 9, 9), the gifts that enrich those united by true friendship. The ultimate reality of life is God, the eternal Beauty – pulchritudo pulchrorum omnium – (III, 6, 10) that draws the heart of the human being ‘to your very self’ (VII, 17, 23). Augustine, who lamented ‘late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new!’ (X, 27, 38), wants that Beauty to be the yearning and fulfillment of those who follow his Rule of life. The Rule aims at stability in the ascent to God through all these practices of active and contemplative engagement that the pilgrims can embrace during their journey. The initial aspiration of anima una in Deum will take form in

79 Luc Verheijen, ‘La prière dans la Règle de Augustin’, in: La Bonnardière, Saint Augustin et la Bible, 167-179: here 171. 80 For an extensive theological reflection on Augustine’s experience of divine beauty as source of inspiration and reformation of the human being, Cf. Harrison, Beauty and revelation in the thought of Saint Augustine.

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their lives as they work through its principles with undivided will and attention. The pursuit of ‘true wisdom’ goes a long way through the unknown, “hungering and thirsting’ (III, 6,10) but the effort will not be in vain. As Augustine states at the end of his Confessions, concluding his dialog with God: ‘We had made a fresh start and began to act, thanks to your Gift (…) our good works will not last forever, but when they are done we hope that we shall rest in your immense holiness’ (XIII, 38, 53).

CONCLUSION

In this paper I have proposed a core of formative practices derived from a reading of Confessions as exercitatio animae in a journey of return to God. They are anchored, together with the spiritual exercises, in Augustine’s experience and wisdom that has inspired Christian spirituality for sixteen centuries. They offer a solid ground for building a personal commitment of thought and action to the Christian way of life. This work is also intended as a contribution to the task of methodically exploring Augustine’s teachings and experience and apply- ing them through retreats, study groups, and other initiatives that may respond to the spiritual needs of our contemporaries.

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