Late Have I Loved You: Augustinian Spirituality in Book 10 of the Confessions

By Laurence C. Sibley, Jr.

[Laurence C. Sibley, Jr., is a lecturer in Practical Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.]

See, I have been eager to love you with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my mind, and my neighbor as myself, but “O quicken me,” give me life, not in myself, but in your righteousness, that is, fill me with that love which I have longed for. 

—On the Psalms 119:41[1]

I. Overview

“... in my heart before you in confession ...”[2]

Book 10 of the Confessions begins with “May I know you, who know me. May I ‘know as I also am known’ (cognoscam te, cognitor meus, cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum).” Augustine’s search for knowledge has finally come home to knowing God. We have traversed his life from birth to baptism under his guidance, as he has reflected[3] from the bishop’s chair in Hippo.

The word he uses here at the beginning of Book 10 for knowledge, cognoscam, is different from those used in 1.1.1: da mihi, domine, scire et intellegere (“Grant me, Lord to know and understand”). Without trying to read too much into the different terms, which may simply have come from the several pre-Jerome Latin translations of the Bible that Augustine often quoted from memory, there does seem to be a shift in meaning for Augustine. Scio/scire (Ps 119:34 is cited by the editor, where the Hebrew is בין) has the sense of understanding as skill/expertise in knowing a text, the Torah, whereas cognosco/cognoscere (1 Cor 13:12, where the Greek is ἐπιγινώσκω) speaks of being thoroughly acquainted with a truth or a person, knowing through and through. By the time we arrive at 10.1.1, Augustine has finished “the story of his heart”[4] and is focusing on his present desire for growth in knowing God. The knowing he desires is mutual, “know as I am known,” and eschatological, beyond dim mirrors, face-to-face.

In the second paragraph, however, the Lord becomes the object of Augustine’s love and longing (amaris et desideraris). In the early twenty-first century it is probably necessary to clarify what love means for Augustine. Although no stranger to erotic love (he writes of it explicitly in telling his story), when he writes of loving God, he has something else in mind. The erotic tones that some find in his loving God are at most a muted, minor voice. In fact, such finding may say more about our own culture and scholarship than about Augustine.

Love/amor can be defined as “an inclination, a movement, or a striving” or “the will to become one with the object which it loves,” the latter drawn from Augustine’s de ordine 2.18.48.[5] In summarizing Augustine’s idea of love, Tarsicius van Bavel quotes, “Our heart is restless” (Confessions 1.1.1) and goes on to comment, “By love we are drawn out of ourselves, beyond the boundaries of our little world that is called ‘I.’”[6]

Most of the several references to love in the next few paragraphs concern the reactions of other human readers of his book, friendship love taught by God (10.4.5). One reference, however, is ambiguous: “The heart is aroused in the love of your mercy” (10.3.4). It could be human love (longing) for God’s mercy. Or is love here a quality of God’s mercy, which would be suggested by the parallel phrase, “the sweetness of your grace”? If the latter, then we find divine love active early in this extended reflection that culminates in 10.43.69: “how have you loved us?”

These two expressions, knowledge and love, run back and forth among the seventy paragraphs of Book 10 sometimes in parallel and sometimes intertwined, almost interchangeable. “The more you study Augustine’s thought the more it appears all of a piece, and the more hopeless appears the task of isolating and disentangling a single idea, so tightly woven is it into the whole tapestry of his thought.”[7] So it would be hard, perhaps impossible, to separate the threads. The two concepts coalesce and interpenetrate; flavor each other. Love dominates this perichoresis, hence this essay will focus on it. But it is always a knowing love.

One senses in this book of the Confessions that the restless heart of 1.1.1 is finally coming to rest. The terms for knowledge have shifted and love has become dominant. Augustine is dealing personally with God. No longer the legal certainties of Manichaeism and the cooler abstractions of Platonic idealism (Brown speaks of “sparkling little chains of argument”);[8] now he wants to be known and to know, to love and be loved.

II. A House with Three Pillars

Before looking at the details, we should survey the whole book, and as we step back to take it in, we find a structure like this:

1.1-5.7 May I know/love you?

This section begins with the plea, “May I know you (cognoscam te), who know me. May I ‘know as I also am known.’” and ends with at least ten uses of know (scit/scio) in 5.7. Love appears at least eleven times in paragraphs 2–5. All through this section love and knowledge alternate, sometimes in the same paragraph, setting us up for the way Book 10 will unfold.

6.8-23.34 Searching for God through the five senses and in the memory

“My love for you, Lord, is not an uncertain feeling but a matter of conscious certainty. With your word you pierced my heart and I loved you” (10.6.8). The opening paragraph (in some very eloquent phrases) explores loving God through the five senses. For all his sense-derived certainty, by 8.12 he is ready to “rise above that natural capacity in a step-by-step ascent to him who made me. I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory.” The next twenty-four paragraphs describe a long, wide-ranging search for God in his memory (see 10.24.35).

24.35-27.38 “Late have I loved you”

This brief section begins with a comment on how far he has ranged, searching for God in his memory. He muses for a bit, asking, “where are you in my memory, in what part?” The climax of this section, indeed of the book so far, is the oft quoted “late have I loved you,” because you called me and touched me and I am set on fire for peace.

28.39-41.66 The ordeal of temptations

At this point the Confessions takes a turn that has intrigued readers, for the story is not over at Augustine’s conversion and baptism. James O’Donnell states, “If conf. were merely the story of A.’s ascent to God, the work could well end with 10.27.38; that it does not is a sign that the work is more ambiguously constructed, reflecting the continuing search for God and the continuing failure of that search to achieve perfect fruition.”[9] Augustine revisits the five senses, this time as arenas for temptation. He struggles with the world, the flesh, and the devil; after finding God the battle goes on. And even the best moments are fleeting (“an extraordinary depth of feeling,” 10.40.65).

And sometimes Thou admittest me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul; rising to a strange sweetness [et aliquando intromittis me in affectum multum inusitatum introrsus, ad nescio quam dulcedinem], which if it were perfected in me, I know not what in it would not belong to the life to come. But through my miserable encumbrances I sink down again into these lower things, and am swept back by former custom, and am held, and greatly weep, but am greatly held. So much doth the burden of a bad custom weigh us down. Here I can stay, but would not; there I would, but cannot; both ways, miserable. (10.40.65)[10]

O’Donnell notes that “This paragraph thus stands in close relation to 10.27.38, in which that fleeting vision was palpable to the reader.”[11] Augustine is left with glimpses of splendor and a wounded heart.

42.67-43.70 “How have you loved us?”

This section begins with questions derived from his reflection on temptation: “Who will reconcile? Who is the Mediator?” God’s persistent love is found in his gift of his Son, sealed in food and drink.

The two large sections on senses and memory (10.8-34) and on temptation (10.39-66) are set off by briefer passages, like structural pillars, that place us in the house of knowledge and love between God and the human. What begins as a plea to know and be known traverses to the confession that human love has come late and finally to the realization that all has been driven by God’s love for Augustine, for the human seeker. It is these pillar sections on which we will concentrate in analyzing Augustine’s concept of knowledge as love.

We might compare this structure with O’Donnell’s suggestion[12] that the book divides into two parts: 1.1-27.38, the search for God in the senses and the memory, climaxing with an eloquent, however late, profession of love; and 27.39-43.70, the continuing and often failing search for God in the vale of temptation with only moments of “extraordinary depths of feeling” (40.65), arriving at the realization that it is God’s love that sustains the search (43.69, 70).

There is also the three-fold structure some see: the outer world of sense, the inner world of the mind, and the transcendent world of eternal things. Augustine’s summary in 10.40.65 gives some credence to this analysis:

Where hast Thou not walked with me, O Truth, teaching me what to beware, and what to desire; when I referred to Thee what I could discover here below, and consulted Thee? With my outward senses, as I might, I surveyed the world, and observed the life, which my body hath from me, and these my senses. Thence entered I the recesses of my memory, those manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with innumerable stores; and I considered, and stood aghast; being able to discern nothing of these things without Thee, and finding none of them to be Thee.[13]

Yet even here, where there is a flow from the senses to the memory, the third phase (upward) is cast more in terms of God’s walking with Augustine, his light drawing Augustine into the safe place. Muted traces of Platonism are there, but another dynamic, divine grace, is intruding. Even as he searches and ascends, God guides, descends. Cornelius Van Til observes that “... in Augustine’s internal struggle it is his basic devotion to Christ which finally emerges victor over his ever-lingering but ever-weakening devotion to Neo-Platonism.”[14] It is the trajectory that matters.

Whatever value these alternate readings of structure have (and they are not without merit), it was the discovery of these three brief passages (10.1.1, 10.27.38, and 10.43.69) and their structural impact that opened Book 10 up to me. Hence my understanding and the exposition that follows.

III. Knowing and Being Known

“... my confession ... in love cries aloud ...” (10.2.2)

Now we turn to the three smaller sections, which we have found to be framing timbers of the tenth book, to unpack them. In the first paragraph of Book 10, Augustine writes:

Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me: let me know Thee, as I am known. Power of my soul, enter into it, and fit it for Thee, that Thou mayest have and hold it without spot or wrinkle. This is my hope, therefore do I speak; and in this hope do I rejoice, when I rejoice healthfully. Other things of this life are the less to be sorrowed for, the more they are sorrowed for; and the more to be sorrowed for, the less men sorrow for them. For behold, Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light. This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession: and in my writing, before many witnesses. (10.1.1)[15]

It seems that all his life Augustine wanted to know. The search drove him to the Manichees, with their promise of certainty, only to have his hopes dashed when their dualistic explanations of reality failed to meet his test. The Platonists were the next hope, an improvement in many ways, especially in helping him to understand how God could be immaterial. But for all that they had no place for the incarnation of Christ:

There [in the books of the Platonists] I read, not of course in these words, but with entirely the same sense ... ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God....’ But that ‘he came to his own and his own did not receive him; but as many as received him, to them he gave the power to become sons of God by believing in his name,’ I did not read there. (7.9.13)

But at last, under the preaching and catechizing of Ambrose, he came to the place where knowing God in the deeper sense of cognoscere became his desire. In this opening paragraph of Book 10 he states his desire to come deeper into the light. In the course of Book 10 he will recapitulate his coming through the senses and through traversing his memory, and will open up the struggles he still has with temptations, but here he begins by pleading for mutual, deep, through and through knowledge with God.

And there is a kind of certainty even in the ambivalence of desire and conflict:

Not with doubting, but with assured consciousness, do I love Thee, Lord. Thou hast stricken my heart with Thy word [ percussisti cor meum verbo tuo], and I loved Thee. Yea also heaven, and earth, and all that therein is, behold, on every side they bid me love Thee; nor cease to say so unto all, that they may be without excuse. But more deeply wilt Thou have mercy on whom Thou wilt have mercy, and wilt have compassion on whom Thou hast had compassion: else in deaf ears do the heaven and the earth speak Thy praises. (10.6.8)[16]

When we ask what the source of certainty is, Augustine points to two. One, “more deeply,” the action of God in having mercy. All are bidden by the voice of heaven and earth, but only some hear. Indeed, Augustine himself did not hear for a long time. Now, when he is called to love, he is able to hear and respond.

The second factor is God’s word, striking Augustine’s heart. Again, this word had fallen on deaf ears for so long. All the time of growing up when Monica, his mother, spoke to him of God. Also, the word read in the liturgy during his early youth, which lingered in his mind all through the years of wandering and searching, only penetrated later, at the moment of God’s mercy. Later that word was preached by Ambrose towards the end of Augustine’s search.

It is interesting that in the very first paragraph of the Confessions he refers to Ambrose’s preaching in this way:

You have been preached to us. My faith, Lord, calls upon you. It is your gift to me. You breathed it into me by the humanity of your Son, by the ministry of your preacher. [praedicatus enim es nobis. invocat te, domine, fides mea, quam dedisti mihi, quam inspirasti mihi per humanitatem filii tui, per ministerium praedicatoris tui.] (10.1.1)

Chadwick’s translation (preached/preacher) here signals that we are dealing with the word in liturgy. James Earl fails to pick this up and moves to other readings of praedicatus (especially “predicated”) in order to make the point that even the search for Truth requires predication, “Augustine’s famous Credo ut intelligam.” Earl mentions that Christ is the praedicatoris, par excellence, but does not clarify how this relates to predication.[17]

How do we bring all this together? If praedicatoris is left ambiguous (is it Ambrose or Christ?), but is a reference to liturgical preaching, then we can second Earl’s comment that it also carries the sense of predication, which launches and guides the search for God. But without that liturgical source, such predication is weaker, bordering on mere hypothesis. It was because Augustine heard preaching, in the liturgical assembly where Christ was present in the Word, read and preached, and the human preacher was Christ’s servant, that he writes that his faith was breathed into him by God. The long search, in the end, was as simple as breathing.

Returning to 10.6.8, Augustine concludes that paragraph by describing his experience with his senses and their contribution to his love for God:

But what do I love, when I love Thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement when I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love when I love my God. (10.6.8)[18]

In the words “shine, sound, bear,” etc., the delights of God’s creation are somehow the medium for knowing God. Note how explicitly Augustine ticks off the five senses: touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. These are not metaphors or only spiritual senses. They are first earthy, tactile, visible, noisy, fragrant, and savory; and then they convey spiritual pleasures. This would not have been possible in the Manichaean system, where the material world is evil; and it would have been difficult even in Platonism where the material world only shadows the world of ideas. Augustine is thoroughly biblical and Christian in this passage, echoing Rom 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (NRSV).

Christopher Kirwan[19] highlights the place love had in Augustine’s coming back to God. The fear of losing or not regaining sexual comfort held him back in misery. The wound left by the departure of his unnamed concubine, the mother of Adeodatus, would not heal (Conf. 6.15.25); and the girl to whom he was engaged was too young (6.13.23). Moreover, during his year of teaching in Tagaste the death of a friend had bereaved him sorely:

Everything on which I set my gaze was death. My home town became a torture to me: my father’s house a strange world of unhappiness; all that I had shared with him was without him transformed into a cruel torment. My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there. I hated everything because they did not have him, nor could they now tell me ‘look, he is on the way’.... Only tears were sweet to me, and in my ‘soul’s delights’ (Ps 138:11) weeping had replaced my friend. (4.4.9)

These losses and the loves that preceded them may have been part of the restlessness that Augustine recognized in 1.1.1, a restlessness and hunger that is first of all for God. Just as the five senses see God in the things he has made and thus lead us to love him, so also human loves teach us much about God’s love, either by their presence or absence. In a world created and ordered by God, even in its fallen state, this is not surprising. His presence or absence is mediated by the presence or absence of beauty and love in our surroundings.

IV. Coming Late to Love

“Since the day I learnt of you ...” (10.24.35)

After describing how he came to love God in/through his senses, Augustine shifts his attention to exploring his memory (“... in a step-by-step ascent to him who made me, I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory,” 8.12). This occupies him until paragraph 35, where he exclaims, “See how widely I have ranged, searching for you in my memory.” A bit more pondering of the memory brings him finally to this burst of eloquence:

Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I have loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstestmy deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace. (10.27.38)[20]

What strikes me immediately in this passage, once the impression of eloquence has subsided, is his sense that God was with him all through those years of wandering and abuse of “those fair forms.” The world of things, in which he delighted and which now are the medium for loving God (10.6.8), at one time held him far from God. And here again is the testimony that it was God who broke through: bursting deafness, scattering blindness, breathing fragrance and pouring flavors that gave panting, hunger and thirst, and at last touching unto burning for peace.

This one paragraph is like an oasis, a place to rest from the explorations of the five senses and the memory. In the following section, the five senses will again be called forth, this time as the arena of temptation. Augustine will take us into his new struggles, his new desert. But here there is water for the journey. Here God’s presence during the earlier desert wanderings is affirmed as encouragement for the present realities.

Yet there is that eloquence. Augustine goes all out, it seems, to express not only the lateness of his love, but also his sense of the inbreaking of God. First the Latin (tight and compact, rhythmic—the repeated -asti/-isti of the verbs), then Chadwick’s 1991 translation (more fulsome, but still vigorous):

vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam; coruscasti, splenduisti et fugasti caecitatem meam; fragrasti, et duxi spiritum et anhelo tibi; gustavi et esurio et sitio; tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam. 

You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

As I read these lines, I recall the excitement I had in reading the crisis scene in Book 8 (8.12.28–30). The “profound self-examination,” “bitter agony,” and the “face now at peace” reverberate in the multiple impacts of these verbs. The words in Book 10 are different from those in Book 8 and bear the marks of reflection after fifteen years, but the fresh urgency of the garden storm and calm is remembered. “With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you” (10.6.8). Indeed.

Karl F. Morrison points out the function and character of such reflection as compared to the experience itself:

... Augustine himself distinguished between understanding, as the instantaneous flash of perception, and interpretation, as the process of recollection and decipherment that followed and that could be expressed in words. 

The recollection and whatever literary or pictorial representations it may inspire are works of art. Through them, experience has been translated into expression.... Augustine’s Confessions are mnemonic testimonies to the depths of love and terror penetrated in the event.... [W]e are in the position of looking over the shoulders of the people to whom the events happened as they put together what had happened to them.[21]

And, of course, this high art is designed both for God and to inspire the reader:

When I am confessing not what I was but what I am now, the benefit lies in this: I am making this confession not only before you with a secret exaltation and fear and with a secret grief touched by hope, but also in the ears of believing sons of men, sharers in my joy, conjoined with me in mortality my fellow citizens and pilgrims.... (10.4.6)

Even as Augustine praises God for having arrived this far, he is gathering strength to take us into the weaknesses and fears he still faces, his temptations.

V. The Thorough Love of God

“... you did not spare your own Son ...” (10.43.69)

Peter Brown pictures Augustine as chastened, humbled by the temptations he faced, and in despair because he could not predict which ones he could resist and which would overcome him. The life he might first have expected upon conversion, and when Platonism was a stronger influence in his thinking, was gone. After his baptism, during the months at Cassiciacum, “surrounded by his eager friends, he had enjoyed the most pleasant illusion a gregarious man could enjoy; ... he moved in a circle of ... superior souls ... within a single, widely-accepted, ideal of the perfect man.”[22] Now, “He is a man who has realized that he was doomed to remain incomplete in his present existence, that what he wished for most ardently would never be more than a hope, postponed to a final resolution from all tensions, far beyond this life.”[23] Human inability and vulnerability to sin did not vanish with baptism, as daily battles with the world, the flesh, and the devil revealed to Augustine.

So when we emerge from the long account of Augustine’s temptations, he asks, “Who could be found to reconcile me to you?” (10.42.67). This question leads him to define the requirements for a mediator: “something in common with God and something in common with humanity,” and at last to his climactic ode to God’s love:

How hast Thou loved us, good Father, who sparedst not Thine only Son, but deliveredst Him up for us ungodly! How hast Thou loved us, for whom He that thought it no robbery to be equal with Thee, was made subject even to the death of the cross, He alone, free among the dead, having power to lay down His life, and power to take it again: for us to Thee both Victor and Victim, and therefore Victor, because the Victim; for us to Thee Priest and Sacrifice, and therefore Priest because the Sacrifice; making us to Thee, of servants, sons by being born of Thee, and serving us. (10.43.69)[24]

Although this section is brief, just two paragraphs, it brings to resolution the tensions, not only of the struggle with temptation, but also the love and longing of 10.2.2 and the search for happiness in memory that came out of his question, “What then do I love when I love my God?” (10.7.11). The tenth book is filled with longing, striving, questioning. It reveals an ambivalent bishop, still on the way and feeling about for a firm place to stand. Like the Apostle Paul in Rom 7:24, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” he finds the love of God, the Mediator provided by that love, to be enough (see Rom 8:1, “no condemnation”).

But how is this comfort, this love of God conveyed? At the very end of 10.43.70 he writes, “... for I think upon the price of my redemption, and I eat and drink it, and distribute it.” When we fasten on this, we see our terrified, miserable, ambivalent bishop (43.70, first line) at the Eucharist, eating and drinking the symbols of his redemption. We also see him distributing to other faithful gathered around the table. In that simple feast it all comes together.

The preaching of 1.1.1 is at this table; the preaching of many priests during his youth, but especially Ambrose’s and now Augustine’s own preaching. But in that preaching is the preaching of Christ, breathing faith into Augustine once more.

And connected to that meal is the book of Paul’s writings, which he had with him in the garden and took up and read (8.12.29). “With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you” (10.6.8).We should not forget that this private copy was rather rare in his day. Most of the word of God he had heard all his life was read in the Sunday assembly. So the book, the words read, also has a liturgical setting. In that assembly it is the foundation and source for the preaching. This one crisis reading is but the final arrow in a life-long shower of arrows.

Also with the meal and word is the bath. In 10.3.4 Augustine tells of God’s “transforming my soul by faith and your sacrament” (mutans animam meam fide et sacramento tuo), reminiscent of the description of his baptism in 9.6.14: “When the time came for me to give in my name for baptism ... Alypius also decided to join me in being reborn in you.” Structurally, the reference to sacrament in 10.3.4 forms an inclusio with the mention of the Eucharist in paragraph 70, embracing the whole reflective exercise of Book 10 with signs and seals.

So, to answer our question, the love of God is conveyed by word and sacrament, by book, bath, and meal. Augustine at last has a place to stand where the grace of God is confirmed to him. The certainty of God’s love to him can be known, even more than his own love for God (10.6.8). The implications for epistemology and apologetics are profound.

As for epistemology the opening plea, “may I know you,” posits the basic problem of knowledge. How do we know? Especially, what makes any knowledge possible, from 2 + 2 = ? to ultimate knowledge?

This question has bothered Western philosophy since before Socrates became Plato’s foil. The answer of the enlightenment is Descartes’s dictum, cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), but that has led finally to the isolation of the individual and radical subjectivity, to loneliness and confusion.

Augustine’s desire to know God, coupled with the truth that God already knew him, became his place to stand, his Archimedian point. It is in that divine knowledge—God knowing us and our reciprocal knowledge of him—that truth not only becomes possible, but actual. Augustine’s biblical insight (he alludes to 1 Cor 13:12 in that opening statement) transcends the approach of Greek philosophy and in that insight humans could begin to emerge from Plato’s cave and know the sun.

This mutual knowledge, far from being the fruit of astute thinking, was communicated and affirmed to Augustine in the liturgy of word and sacrament. “You have been preached to us” (1.1.1). “With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you” (10.6.8). “... I think upon the price of my redemption, and I eat and drink it, and distribute it. In my poverty I desire to be satisfied from it together with those who ‘eat and are satisfied’ “ (Ps 61:5) (10.43.70). It is a liturgically driven epistemology.

When applied to apologetics, Augustine’s view yields a strategy that assumes God’s prior knowledge (and existence) as the foundation for human knowledge (cognoscam, through and through) of God, the self, and the world. If one assumes, with Plato or with Descartes, an autonomous human starting point, the human searching for God or seeking to verify God’s existence, one has no satisfying answer to Augustine’s question, “How may I know you?” One cannot lead a person to know God this way, nor can one prove God’s existence this way. So the strategy has two sides: negatively, one brings the other person to see what happens ultimately, if one begins with Descartes; and positively, one introduces the other person to Augustine’s assumptions about the God who knows and loves people.

VI. Augustinian Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century

“... no safe place for my soul except in you.” (10.40.65)

To sum up, Augustinian spirituality, as found in Book 10 of the Confessions, is centered on three points: a balance of knowledge and love; restlessness and humility in the face of temptation; being embraced and struck by God.

1. Knowledge and Love

Among several senses of knowledge, two stand out. The knowledge of an expert (scio / scire) in the books that was nurtured in Augustine during his education, and that continued to serve him well, but that ultimately left him still restless. And the knowledge of another person (cognosco / cognoscere), a knowledge infused with and dominated by love, and which, even in its preliminary, earthly expression gave him satisfaction while he awaited the eschatological, face-to-face meeting with God. This knowing love might bring, occasionally, “an extraordinary depth of feeling marked by a strange sweetness” (10.40.65), but it was constantly sustained by eating and drinking the price of redemption (10.43.70).

2. Restless Humility

All is not ecstasy and sweetness, however. Therefore the long section on temptation. This is the “not yet,” discovered as Augustine matured in his faith. The spiritual life is a struggle with temptation and uncertainty. It is qualified by the realization that redeemed humans continue to sin. Which temptation will defeat one next, even if it was once bested? Augustine’s spirituality is realistic, but not hopeless. Failure can be confessed (a major reason for the book) and redeemed, time and again. Peter Brown calls the Confessions “... the self-portrait of a convalescent,”[25] which does not lead to complacency, for restlessness continues until one’s rest is final, complete.

3. Embraced, Struck by God

Right from the beginning of Book 10, we noted God’s intrusion, his loving mercy. It was he who pierced Augustine’s heart with his word, who shattered his deafness, who touched him so that he burned to attain God’s peace. This is, ultimately, the only explanation Augustine offers for the possibility of a spiritual life: God’s grace. “Grant what you command and command what you will” (10.37.60).

All this has great relevance for the early twenty-first century. People still search for God, after modernity has exhausted itself. Scientism, especially scientific positivism, has infected both liberal and fundamentalist Christian approaches to truth. The questions and methods that sought positivistic proof were pursued not only by liberal theologians. It is uncanny how much the fundamentalists have also accommodated to the same questions and methods in their defense of the faith. To take two examples, one reads comments to the effect that better science will prove that the Bible’s doctrine of creation is true (or that evolution is false); or to the effect that a few more archaeological discoveries will prove that the Old Testament’s account of a certain battle is true. These sentiments fall into the trap set by modernity, assuming an objective standard by which to measure the Bible and the Christian faith. If only they were more Augustinian!

Augustine’s balance of knowledge and love, and especially the kind of knowing detailed in Book 10 of the Confessions, is a healthy antidote to modernity / positivism and postmodernity/subjectivism, both of which continue to ask the same questions, and to make the same assumptions, while despairing of finding objective truth. God can be known, not by the scientific method, but rather by one’s response to God’s love. Augustine’s insistence that one experience both humility and hunger answers both the triumphalism of Western dreams (conquering space/the environment) and materialism. It is God who triumphs and our hungers cannot be satisfied merely in the senses. God must be loved in the senses and trusted to grant what he commands. Augustine reminds us that it is really God who makes a spiritual life, in contrast to the claims of humanism (man is the measure) and individualism (this man is the measure). We answer Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum with Augustine’s cognoscam te, cognitor meus.

Notes

1. Barry Ulanov, ed., Prayers of St. Augustine (New York: Seabury, 1983), 79.
2. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10.1.1. Subsequent citations from Augustine’s Confessions are from this translation unless otherwise noted.
3. Karl Frederick Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 1–2.
4. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 169.
5. Allen D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 509.
6. Ibid.
7. James W. Earl, “The Typology of Spiritual Growth in Augustine’s Confessions,” Notre Dame English Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 13.
8. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 155.
9. James J.O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions: Introduction, Text and Commentary (3 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3:150.
10. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (trans. Edward B. Pusey; New York: John B. Alden, 1889).
11. O’Donnell, Augustine, 3:238.
12. Ibid., 3:150.
13. Augustine, Confessions (trans. Pusey), 10.40.65 (italics mine). See also the step-by-step ascent in 10.8.12.
14. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity in Conflict (Glenside: Westminster Campus Bookstore, 1996), 80.
15. Augustine, Confessions (trans. Pusey).
16. Ibid.
17. Earl, “Typology,” 17.
18. Augustine, Confessions (trans. Pusey).
19. Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London: Routledge, 1989), 187.
20. Augustine, Confessions (trans. Pusey).
21. Morrison, Conversion and Text, 2.
22. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 155.
23. Ibid., 156.
24. Augustine, Confessions (trans. Pusey).
25. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 177.