Augustine, the not-yet saint
Advent is the already-not yet in microcosm: Jesus has already come; he has not yet come in glory. During this season I like to visit my old friend Augustine because I am indebted to his unflinching realism, which might have saved my sanity. The Christian subculture he traveled in was not too different from my own. It was hair-sprayed with lacquered rhetoric about "your best life now," as if Jesus offers us a life free from the struggles of this present age. If they had video screens in his church, they would have projected close-up images of over-smiley worship leaders. Augustine's biographer Peter Brown explains:
"Augustine was still firmly rooted in the old world. The ideal on which he based his life still belonged to the Platonic tradition of the ancient world. He would be a sapiens, a wise man, living a life of contemplation, determined, as were his pagan contemporaries in the same tradition, 'to grow god-like in their retirement.' We meet such philosophers in some sarcophagi of the time: austere, tranquil figures, sitting among a small circle of admiring disciples, a book open on their knees - the highest human type that the classical culture of Late Antiquity thought it could produce. Educated Christians thought of their saints as having achieved much the same ideals as contemporary pagans had ascribed to the philosophers." This same attitude today looks with admiration at the gated homes of its spiritual superheroes. But after a decade of enduring the weight of assumed-perfection, the Bishop of Hippo snuck up behind Christendom and pulled down their gym shorts when he published his earthy Confessions. It was an outright rejection of hair-sprayed perfectionism. Slow down and enjoy this poetic synopsis from Brown:
"A new tone has come to suffuse Augustine's life. 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 of all tensions, far beyond this life. Anyone who thought otherwise, he felt was either morally obtuse or a doctrinaire. All a man could do was to yearn for this absent perfection, to feel its loss intensely, to pine for it. 'Desiderium sinus cordis': It is yearning that make the heart deep. This marks the end of a long-established classical ideal of perfection: Augustine would never achieve the concentrated tranquility of the supermen that still gaze out at us from some mosaics in Christian churches and from the statues of pagan sages. If to be a 'Romantic,' means to be a man acutely aware of being caught in an existence that denies him the fullness for which he craves, to feel that he is defined by his tension towards something else, by his capacity for faith, for hope, for longing, to think of himself as a wanderer seeking a country that is always distant, but made ever-present to him by the quality of a love that 'groans' for it, then Augustine has imperceptibly become a 'Romantic,' and the Confessions which he wrote soon after, when he was the Catholic bishop of Hippo, will be a monumental statement of that most rare mood:"
"'Let me leave them outside, breathing into the dust, and filling their eyes with earth, and let me enter into my chamber and sing my songs of love to Thee, groaning with inexpressible groaning in my distant wandering, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart stretching upwards in longing for it: Jerusalem, my Fatherland, Jerusalem who is my mother...'" (Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 150).
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