As the most quoted theologian in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo continues to serve as a central and authoritative voice for Catholicism today. Yet what, we might ask, is his primary theological message? In a word, grace. He has come down to us as the doctor gratiae, the “doctor of grace.” For the fifth-century North African bishop, the Gospel of Jesus Christ turns on the unmerited gift of divine love that Christian theology calls grace. Without grace, there is no gift of salvation and, therefore, no good news. It is by way of confession – both confession of sin and confession of praise – that we are granted access to this wildly merciful grace. And it is a gift received to the measure that it is given away in turn, beginning with the look of love that reads eternal rest into temporal ferment and fragmentation.
As a premier witness to grace, Saint Augustine was one of the few theologians who wore his heart on his sleeve. Let us recall one of his most well-known passages from Book X of his Confessions:
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you…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.”
Saint Augustine admits that his belated conversion to Christianity at the age of 31 was long in coming. In this short ode to divinity, Saint Augustine calls God beautiful, radiant, resplendent, and fragrant. He shares his ardent desire to arrive at a peaceful existence that God alone can give. Saint Augustine narrates how God called and cried out to him, put to flight his blindness, touched him and set him on fire with a love that knows neither limit nor fatigue. The doctor of grace weaves the theme of love in and out of his Confessions as the crimson thread that binds the rest together.
Even the opening words of his autobiography appear as an emblem that we find emblazoned on all of his writings in one form or another: Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Human beings are awakened to the degree that we take delight in praising the reason for our being, the One by whom and for whom we have been made. Naturally, our hearts are disquieted until they are quieted within the intrepid silence that envelops every sound. Saint Augustine silences the concupiscent agitation of his heart by sounding the words of confession through palate and pen. His confession is at once that of sin and that of praise.
Saint Augustine found it necessary to face his demons by confessing his sinful prodigality in Book II of the Confessions – the Book that has come to be known as his “Book of Shadows.” His paradigmatic tale of stealing pears from a local farmer’s tree and randomly feeding them to the swine reminds all of us of our delinquent adolescent wanderings that linger on as a trace among our rationalized and innocuously justified adult peccadillos. He goes on to recount augmentations of lust that result in a fractured heart and a disoriented conscience. However, Saint Augustine confesses his sins as a prelude – and Act I – to a much more interesting Act II of the Theo-drama that will follow, namely, the praise of divinity.
In Saint Augustine’s Confessions, “the praise is extended from the ego to the community of readers, or at least of those who accept the call to praise. It is carried out in a church.” Moreover, “that praise can constitute a place should not be surprising. It is a city, of which one becomes a citizen only by carrying out, in truly believing it, this very praise, which consists only in saying this – that God certainly is worthy of praise.” Church and city. This is the place of praise, where Church and city are united in a complementary symphony of praise. The praise of the people of God overflows out of the Church and spills into the city – the “earthly city” (civitas terrena) become the “city of God” (civitas Dei), the “love of self” (amor sui) become the “love of God” (amor Dei) – reminding all urban inhabitants from whom and to whom they wander and go. God, as otherwise than everything, goes before and behind every utterance of praise, and at the same time, graciously inhabits the praises of his people (see Psalm 22:3).
Pope Francis likewise observes how “it is curious that God’s revelation tells us that the fullness of humanity and of history is realized in a city. We need to look at our cities with a contemplative gaze, a gaze of faith which sees God dwelling in their homes, in their streets and squares.” We may immediately think about the city of Detroit. How many songs of praise have gone up from here over decades past, and how many more are soon to come? We arrive at praise by beginning with an honest and contrite confession of sin. Then praise gives rise to a movement from the heart to the hand that serves the other in love and thereby enters into the Sabbath of the Lord’s delight and peaceful satisfaction.
This third phase of the Augustinian Theo-drama – Act III – is the paradox of serving and resting simultaneously. In writing to encourage the disenchanted and wearied deacon, Deogratias, toward a rejuvenated catechetical ministry, Saint Augustine urges him on by exhorting, “If our understanding finds its delight within, in the brightest of secret places, let it also delight in the following insight into the ways of love: the more love goes down in a spirit of service into the ranks of the lowliest people, the more surely it rediscovers the quiet that is within when its good conscience testifies that it seeks nothing of those to whom it goes down but their eternal salvation.” What the Bishop of Hippo brings to light is the innocent freedom of love – a sincere and disinterested love without guilty conscience or regret. A love that serves without self-interest is faithful to its ordained mission until the end.
Sealing the unbreakable bond between servium and requiem, Saint Augustine prayerfully concludes his Confessions by contemplating the eternal Sabbath rest of the blessed known as heaven: “As for ourselves, we see the things you have made because they are. But they are because you see them…Of your gift we have some good works, though not everlasting. After them we hope to rest in your great sanctification…the peace of quietness, the peace of the sabbath, a peace with no evening.”
When we look out at the world with a contemplative gaze, God is seeing the world through us and recreating it. When I look upon the abandoned run-down building with a contemplative gaze, I lend a visual sacramental conduit for the Holy Spirit to be channeled in that place. When I look upon the other person facing me with the merciful gaze of Christ because I myself continue to be “mercified” by his grace, both self and other are animated within the ever-expanding City of God.
The contemplative gaze itself is redemptive because it is oriented around the Orient (Subsolanus) that is the kingdom of God and not around any nation of this world. The contemplative gaze is always a personal life-giving gaze. It bears within itself transcendence, all the while approaching the world with concentrated immanence.
In Deus caritas est, the Augustinian Pope Benedict XVI puts it this way: “Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.” This, again, is the divine potency of the contemplative gaze: Christ looks out at the world through my own eyes. Through my eyes – through my entire body – the uncreated love of Jesus Christ gives birth to a world redeemed, just as blood and water gushed forth from his pierced side to give birth to the sacrament of salvation that is the Catholic Church. “But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us…as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:7, 18).