In Lecture 15, that's what's hard, the confessions of St. Augustine. Last time we studied three great figures in the history of the church. We looked at Ambrose and Jerome and Chrysostom. Jerome was a very important scholar. He's depicted here in this reprimation era painting by Dira in his Jerome in his study with the skull there. That's often painted into pictures like this to emphasize that we don't have forever. We must do what we're going to do with the idea that someday we will die. The skull is a reminder that life is very fleeting. Jerome is often painted with a lion, too, for some reason. Not absolutely sure why a lion seems to be sitting at his feet in most of the paintings, but a little dull there, too, and they're both happily asleep, perhaps depicting the time when the lion and the lion shall lie down together. We're going to study a great scholar today, Augustine. And Augustine is depicted in this painting by Botticelli. This particular painting Augustine appears as a kind of Renaissance scholar, with globes and books and all sorts of instruments there in the background to emphasize his interest in all kinds of things. Botticelli probably misses the heart of the matter here because Augustine is really primarily a biblical scholar, and his interest is vast and broad but mainly focused on his study of the word of God. And as a scholar, Augustine is a scholar, and a preacher, and a pastor, and a churchman. So we come to this lecture which is really going to be about the life of Augustine, focusing particularly on his great writing, the confessions in which he gives us the story of his early life and his own words. He might seem a little unusual for me to take a whole lecture just to talk about the life of a person. But I think it's important for us to do that with Augustine because there are so many great themes that come out in his confessions. And I would like to discuss those with you so that we can better understand Augustine particularly as we come to the next two lectures. And then really the rest of this course because Augustine is undoubtedly the most important figure that will study in this course. Probably the most important figure in the history of the church after the time of the apostle Paul. Augustine wrote many letters and in one of his letters written to a widow, a long letter, in answer to the questions that a widow asked him and a letter that she wrote to him about prayer. Augustine carefully and with great wisdom responds to her questions. I would like to read just a few sentences from his long answer to her before we begin with a prayer taken from Augustine. He says this to the widow. Why the one who knows what we need before we ask him should urge us to ask and seek and knock, may puzzle us. We realize that our Lord and God does not want us to let him know what we want since he can't be ignorant of that. What he wants for us is to exercise our desire in our prayers so that we are capable of receiving what he is preparing to give us. His is a great gift and we are little and limited in our ability to receive. He tells us to widen our hearts. Our ability to receive his great gift which I has not seen since it has no color, nor ear heard since it has no sound, and which has not arisen in a human heart since the human heart has to rise up to it, will grow in proportion as we believe more trustfully, hope more firmly, and desire more artably. So we are to pray not because God doesn't know what we are going to ask, but so that our hearts will be prepared to receive the gift that he will give to us. It is very hard to choose prayers from Augustine because there are so many. The whole confessions is cast in the form of a prayer and it is wonderful resource for us as we pray. Let's come to the Lord now and I will use some words from St. Augustine as we begin our class today. Let us pray. O Lord our Savior, you have warned us that you will require much of those to whom much is given. Grant that we whose lot is cast in so godly a heritage may strive together the more abundantly to extend to others what we so richly enjoy. And as we have entered into the labors of others, so to labor that others may enter into hours to the full filmet of your holy will through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. I have already said something that Alistair McGrath says in one of his books that Augustine is probably the greatest and most influential mind of the Christian church throughout its long history. And we know a great deal about him. We know a lot about the way he thinks and the way he speaks because he has told us. First of all in his famous confessions which gives his ununderstanding of his intellectual and spiritual development. The whole book is, as you know, addressed to God in the form of a prayer but it is intended to be overheard in the confessions. Augustine is praying to God but he wants other people to listen in here what he is saying to God. The first nine books in the confessions, we would say chapters I think, the first nine chapters are all about graphical. He tells us about his story from his birth up through his conversion and even beyond. And the great theme there is sin and grace, Augustine's sin and God's grace. And then books ten through thirteen are quite different and students have often tried to figure out how those latter books connect with the first books because by the time we come to book ten, Augustine is dealing with some very difficult issues, philosophical and theological issues like memory and time and eternity. He says he knows what time is until he tries to explain it and he doesn't know anymore but he keeps trying to explain it and we keep trying to follow him in his reasoning in those chapters. And then he goes to creation and talks about creation and then begins what apparently is an exposition of Genesis chapter one in his symbolic allegorical style of biblical exposition. Some place Augustine says the new converts are to be taught the scriptures beginning with Genesis chapter one and taught right through the whole Bible. Some scholars have speculated that that is what Augustine was beginning to do now that he had described his own conversion to the Lord. He begins to set forth an exposition of the scriptures but if that is what he was going to do, he didn't get very far with it because he stopped after Genesis chapter one. You can imagine how big the confessions would be if he had gone all the way through all of scripture with an exposition of scripture. Perhaps a more reasonable suggestion as to what Augustine is doing in those last chapters of the confession comes from Chadwick in his introduction to his own translation of the confessions. He says the last four books make explicit what is only headed at in the autobiographical parts. Namely that the story of the soul wandering away from God and it entorn at in tears, finding its way home through conversion, that's the story of chapters one through nine. That story is also the story of the entire created order chapter 10 through 13 so the story of Augustine wandering away from God brought back to God and restored is somehow to be reflected in the greater picture of all of creation being restored to God in God's own time. Well perhaps we don't know completely what is in his mind in those latter books. I do read the confessions from time to time because I love this book but I must admit that I generally read the first nine chapters with a great deal of enthusiasm. Let's get bogged down in chapter 10 and never finish the last few chapters but you have a go at it and see what you think. The theme in all of this is certainly our need for God's grace which is going to be one of the dominant themes in the life and work of St. Augustine as we'll see next time as he is the champion of God's grace. Today I want to talk more about his own life as he sets it forth for us and point out some things that I think are significant and important for us to think about first of all his family. Gustin was born in Tagasta. Today that would be Algeria, modern country of Algeria in North Africa. He was born in the year 354. His father was named Patrick and his mother was named Monica. Monica by the way is a Berber name. It's not a Latin name but being a Berber word probably indicates that Augustine's mother was of the indigenous North African stock. In fact, we know that she spoke Latin with a strong accent which would indicate that she had learned Latin as a second language, not her native language. She was probably a woman of dark skin as Augustine may have been. But very little is said about that because color was so irrelevant in the Roman world that people don't often mention it. Monica was a very strong influence in the life of her son. She had a kind of stormy relationship, very close but sometimes with mothers and sons when they were very close also there was the possibility of strong disagreements and strong feelings. Monica certainly was a wonderful Christian. She was a woman of prayer. In fact, Augustine says in the confessions, my mother, your faithful servant, wept for me before you, more than mother's weep when lamenting their dead children. She was weeping before God for her son not because he was dead but because he was not a Christian. Augustine rejected her faith and lived a very worldly life in the early years, his teenage years and even beyond. One occasion when Monica was talking to her pastor about Augustine and how her heart was broken that he was not following the Lord. She began to cry and the bishop said to her, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish. In other words, God is going to save him because you have so wept for him and prayed for him. I don't know how the bishop could really say that because we don't know that kind of thing. But in this case, he was right because through the prayers and earnest endeavors of Monica and some other factors too that God brought into his life, Augustine was finally converted. She lived fortunately to see Augustine converted and died just the next year after his conversion. We know that Monica was a very faithful woman not only in praying but in witness to her family. Her husband, Patricia, was not a Christian. His mother, her mother-in-law, came to live with him. She was not a Christian and even though it seems that Monica and Patricia's did respect and love each other, Patricia's did not always make it easy for Monica and the mother-in-law certainly did not. The Christian woman found herself in a house where it was very difficult for her to live consistently as a Christian but eventually she won both her husband and her mother-in-law to Christ. How did she do it? Well, Augustine tells us in the confessions. She won her husband Augustine's father to Christ. Augustine says, the virtues with which you had adorned her and for which he respected, loved and admired her were like so many voices constantly speaking to him of you. Just her wonderful life, not her preaching or her words but she was able to witness by being a very loving, faithful wife to this man and all her good deeds in that situation which was a very difficult situation spoke like voices from God to Patricia's. And she won her mother-in-law and Augustine said, her beautiful attentions and her constant patience and gentleness finally broke through the defenses of the older woman and she became a Christian too. I always think of Monica as a supreme example of how to witness within a family. It's the right way to do it. Love, gentleness, courtesy and concern for others. Augustine pays tribute to his mother when he calls her a servant of the servants of God. That title has come to be used of the Pope today but it was used first not of a Pope but of this Christian woman Monica, a servant of the servants of God. I'm always glad when I drive down Olive Street in Creve Corps and pass St. Monica Church, Catholic Church there because so many things are named for St. Augustine but some things should be named for St. Monica and that church is there as a testimony to the faithfulness of this Christian woman. Well, Augustine rejected early on the faith of his mother and plunged into a life of sin. In fact, she read the confessions. He tells us that he was sitting as soon as he was born. Some people think he has kind of vivid imagination and perhaps is exaggerating things there. But he had both a theological conviction that this was true. He was born in sin and somehow was able to remember way back at the very beginning some sins in his life, selfishness, jealousy and things like that. He said, so tiny, a child, so great a center, just a little tiny baby, but a great big center and he knew that from the very beginning. She read through the confessions. He tells us about other episodes of sin in his life. The famous one is when he was a little boy and he would steal apples from a neighbor, not because he was hungry and wanted the apples but just because he wanted to steal the apples and he enjoyed doing that and he sat that forth as an example of his sinfulness. Then as he moved away from home and goes to the big city of Carthage, he falls into a life of immorality. I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves, master with words. You can see him there. He's a young man in Carthage and all these illicit loves hissing as he walks through the streets of that town. He was trapped. He began to feel that this was not the way to live. He wanted somehow to escape from it but he really did not want to escape from it and he prayed the famous prayer, O Lord, give me castity but not yet. So he continued to wallow in the sins of the flesh in Carthage but later he recognized that all along God was with him, keeping him from more sins. He said, I attribute to your grace whatever evil acts I have not done. God's grace was at work in Gustin's life before he was converted, keeping him from plunging even deeper into sins and perhaps destroying himself in the process. And also he said that God touched with a bitter taste all my illicit pleasures so that everything that he did had a kind of bitter after taste to it. Well he's there in Carthage, a man, a young man who was just given over to a worldly lifestyle of pleasure but God begins to awaken in him a hope and he begins to search. He was seeking pleasure and truth. He said not in God but in himself and in God's other created beings but what he found was that he plunged into miseries, confusions and eras and the further he plunged into the problems of life and the confusions of life and the disappointments of life. The more he began to wonder is there really something else? Now you might think by this time he would just say, well my mother has taught me the Bible and I will believe the Bible but I guess it had a hard time believing the Bible. Partly because he didn't like the style in which it was written. It was too crude and he was too sophisticated for that. He liked the classical writings with their smooth Greek and their beautiful words and the Bible just seemed inferior to him as a piece of literature and so he did not yet turn to it but he begins to wake up, talks about his vagabond mind. His mind is just sort of following everything that he can find and he begins to think about philosophy and perhaps the fact that he can find answer to his problems in philosophy. When he was 19 years old he read Cicero's Hortensius and we don't have that book because it has been lost so we don't know exactly what was in it. But it was a book that awoke a gust into the life of the mind. It awakened in him a desire for truth. He said that book changed my feelings. So now there was something beyond the flesh. There was the mind and truth out there he thought somewhere if he can only find it. Well philosophy did not help him much it led him to astrology in those days considered a rather respectable way of searching for truth. He said I openly consulted those imposter's called astrologers and from there he moved into a relationship with a cult called mannequiasm. It was a third-century gnostic movement that came from Persia and for a time was popular. It was popular in the Roman world. What was mannequiasm? Well it was like a California cult, a little Christian symbolism, a large dose of Zoroastrian dualism and some of the quiet refinements of Buddhism. The main problem that mannequiasm tried to address was the problem of evil. Where does evil come from? That is a big problem for everybody. We will be for a gust in two but he will solve it in quite a different way from the way the mannequian solved it. The mannequian said that evil is somehow related to the physical, to the material, to this world but not to God. They cannot see God as the God of this world because of all its sin and suffering and problems and disasters and it's not worthy of God. You have a view of God who is separate from it all but as Augustine finally came to realize that was no answer at all. God is protected from association with evil but he becomes a very weak God. It is hard to think of it as God anymore if he has nothing to do or nothing to say about this evil world. So like the Mormons and like Jova's witnesses, the mannequians were full of assertions but they could yield no doctrinal system that could satisfy a great mind like that of Augustine or they could bring forth no truth that could calm a miserable part. After he was in the mannequian movement for a while, he began to ask some very searching questions and the local mannequians could not answer those questions. They would put him all up and said, well, the main teacher is coming soon, just wait until he gets here. And when he arrived he could not do much better than the local people with the questions that Augustine was asking and so he left the movement and plunged into a time of skepticism. Perhaps there is no truth. He had tried philosophy, he had tried the religion of the mannequys and he ends in a time of disillusionment which drove him into skepticism. He lost hope that truth indeed could be found. But then there's another stage. His vagabond mind takes him from pillar to post. He begins to read the Neo-Platonic philosophers and he begins to see some glimmers of light in this particular teaching. The Neo-Platonic philosophers saw a far off land of peace. There was some kind of vision there that Augustine was able to relate to as something that he began to long for. But he said they could not show me the way to it to that land of peace. As he read their writings, many of the things that he read reminded him of some of the statements in the prologue of St. John's Gospel. But what was missing in the Neo-Platonic philosophers was the way to get to the peace and the hope and the life because they had no place for the incarnation. It was the incarnation of Jesus Christ that was missing that the word was made flesh. I did not read there in the books of the Platonist. Well, God is bringing him, though, just to where he wants him. The hound of heaven is after him. And it's not going to be long before we'll see God triumph in his grace in the life of St. Augustine. Let me come to Augustine the Christian. But let me go back and talk a little bit about God's providence in his life as the Lord leads him to the place where God wants him to be where God can bring to him his truth. We followed the search of Augustine now some comments on his career and the places that he lived. Augustine had decided that he would make a career out of rhetoric, very promising career in those days for someone who had the ability that Augustine had to use words the way that he did. In fact, he describes his profession as a vendor of words. He's in the word business. And he realized later that teaching rhetoric was also a kind of chair of lies, he said, because he wasn't concerned about the truth of the words, just the effect of the words. But to see how God used that in his providence, to give Augustine that gift and to train him that way, because he is going to use words, not to tell lies, but to tell the truth of God in some marvelous ways as we'll see. After a while in North Africa, Augustine began to get restless and he felt that if he was ever going to reach the pinnacle of his career, he had to get out of the backwater to the big city, even Carthage did not satisfy him, he had to go to Rome. And he decided to move to Rome, he was 29 years old, his mother did not want him to go to Rome, and she argued with him and pled with him for him not to go, because she believed that as long as he was close to her, she could keep an eye on him and try to convert him. And it was bad enough for him to be in Carthage, but if he got over to Rome way away, that big city, who knows what would happen to him. Actually, Augustine had to slip away, he told her he was going and then he wasn't going, then he told her he was going, then he said he wasn't going, and then he got on the boat and left before she knew it, and she was dismayed. But listen to what he says later, by her flood of tears, what she was begging of you, my God, was that you would not allow me to sail to Rome, yet in your deep counsel, you heard the central point of her longing, they'll not granting her what she then asked, namely, that you should make me what she continually prayed for. See what he's saying there? He's saying, God did not answer my mother's words, oh God, don't let him go to Rome, in order that he might answer my mother's prayer. Oh Lord, save him, because going to Rome was a very essential step in the conversion of St. Augustine, sometimes God doesn't answer our words in order that he might answer what is really even deeper than those words that he might answer our prayer. Well, he got to Rome and then he realized that that was not the place to be ought to be in Milan, because by this time Rome was not so important to the center of things was up in Milan, and he went on to Milan in the year 384, and there he met a man who was a great, great influence in his life, the man that we met last time, Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Augustine wrote in the confessions, all unknowing, I was brought by you to him that knowing I should be brought by him to you, God was getting him closer and closer to Ambrose, because that Ambrose was the person that God had chosen to be a significant instrument in the conversion of Augustine. Well, the reason he became interested in Ambrose was that Ambrose could speak. He was a great areter and Augustine would attend the services in the church in Milan to hear the sermon. Augustine said my pleasure was in the charm of his language. He reveled in the flow of the elegance and eloquence of this preacher, but he also became interested in Ambrose himself, and this has always impressed me because you have a great church leader and a great man. And then you have this man who's just come to town and really is not all that important in the overall scheme of things, plenty of things that Ambrose could have done with his time, besides getting to know Augustine. But Augustine said this, I began to like him. At first indeed, not as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in your church, but I began to like him as a human being who was kind to me. So there he is in Milan, not interested in the content of the sermons, but in the language of the preacher, and not really having any confidence in the church, but somehow he liked this preacher because he was kind to him. Well, that can be and should be a great example for all of us. As Augustine lived in Milan, he was hearing the sermons going to the church, hearing the singing, as we said last time, that so deeply moved him, the singing of your sweet speaking or sweet singing church. And other people too, God used the testimony and example of others that were friends around him, some of whom were Christians, and then he read the famous book by Athanasius on the life of Antony, that Egyptian desert monk that we talked about earlier, and the dedication of this man and leaving everything and going out into the desert so moved Augustine. And that by that inch by inch, God was pushing him toward the place where he would find his new life, and finally, and mainly, he was reading the Bible. And it was beginning to be a book that looked different to him than it did back home in North Africa. The climax of all of this is the famous story when he's in the garden, and he hears the voice of the little child saying, toly lege, toly lege, which means take and read. He tried to think, is that a children's game in which child would say that? That could think of any context for that expression to be uttered by a child, but somewhere outside the garden wall that little voice continued to say, take and read. And he had with him, he just so happened to have with him a book from the Bible, the Book of Romans, and he opened it, the way we were told not to read the Bible. He just opened it, put his finger on a verse, and the verse was this, let us walk honestly as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering, and wantoness, not in strife, and in being. His words just came with great power into his mind and heart, and the text went on to say, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof, and that did it. This is a long process, and this is just the climax of many influences in the life of a gust in, but in the year 386, a gust in now, 32 years old, clearly had become a new creature in Christ Jesus. He said in the confessions, I have learned to love you late, 32 years wasted, well not really, because God's providence was in all of that, but a gust in regretted the fact that it had taken so long. He spent the months between his conversion, which was in July 386, and his baptism at Milan by Ambrose, the next Easter, at a retreat country estate of a friend, not far from Milan, your Como in the beautiful lake district of Italy. He talks about the loveliness of your evergreen paradise. He's there now as a Christian with friends. In fact, some friends who were there were not Christian friends, so he's one friend that, gust in is very close to, he says my conversion did not put an end to our friendship, brings him into. Monica is there, she has come up now from Africa, a gust in son, the D. D. Dottis, son by his concubine, that he had in North Africa and some friends were there. And he said, we rested in you from the heat of the world. Sounds like a delightful time in a beautiful place. The gustin enjoys that period in his life, and he began to write some books based on conversations within the circle of friends. He later said in his retractions, late in his life, he wrote a book called Retractions or Revisions in which he tried to kind of put everything together that he had said or written, take back some things and explain some things. He said, the books that I wrote there were indeed now written in your service, but they still breathe the spirit of the school of pride. The old man looks back over those early efforts as Christian, he says, I did it for you, but there's too much of me still in those books. In the summer of 387, a gustin left Milan for Africa, he couldn't go back directly because of war. He stopped for a while at Austria, the town near Rome, very, very close to the Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome today. So you land there, you'll be close to Austria. You can't get there, it's really worth a visit because it has been restored somewhat to what it looked like back in the days of a gustin. Monica died there, and as you read the confession, she'll find a lovely passage describing the conversations that a gustin and his mother had at Austria, talking about heaven, and she became killed and died. A gustin stayed in Rome until the next summer and then went back to Africa. And soon was ordain, he was ordain in the year 391 and became a bishop in the year 395. When a gustin was ordain, he went, not for joy, but because he had a feeling he was getting into something that was going to be difficult. Preaching on the anniversary of his ordination, he said this once, to preach, to review, to correct, to edify, to care for individual souls is a great work, great labor. Who would not avoid that labor, but the gospel frightens me, he had to do it, even though he could see that he was bringing a put himself, many tears, and much labor. Well, actually the first thing he did when he was ordain was to ask for a sabbatical so that he could spend some time getting ready for the task ahead, he wanted to study the Bible and to pray, and to weep over his sins. But ordination was a great thing for a gustin. It focused him, it sort of screwed him down, kept him committed to something because he was such a great man in a way that he could have done so many different things and could have dissipated his energies going from this to that. But now as an ordain minister, and then as a bishop, he had his task before him, he was now a man under authority, a servant of God, and like his mother, a servant of the servants of God. He spent the rest of his life after he was ordained bishop of hippo in that rather out of the way town, it's not an important place, it became important because a gustin lived there. 35 years, he lived there, carried on his ministry of preaching, great sermons, spin, remarked to the gustin's preaching that he never held back because some of his ideas might go over the heads of some of his hearers, probably true. His sermons feed the soul, but also there are great ideas that he preaches even though many of the people in his congregation would not have been able to grasp those ideas. He spent a lot of time counseling, and I've included in the syllabus some excerpts from his letters, which are letters of counsel. He was a bishop, and so he governed the church. He spent much time in writing. He said, if the Lord will, I will labor in doing that which I think I may to be of some service even to future generations. So he wrote many books. The works of Saint Augustine are now coming out in a new English translation, about the third English translation that we've had of the works of Saint Augustine, but in this new translation, some works which have never been published before in English are becoming available to us. Well, the story of a very significant man, he died in the year 430, just before the city fell into the hands of the vandals who had come across from Spain into North Africa. Saint Augustine was dying. He had the penitential Psalms of David written out and fixed to the wall around his bed where he could read them over and over as he would be able to confess his sins and praise God for God's mercy to him in the words of the Psalms. Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance, the race that is set before us.