Abstract
One of the great unspecified facts about Augustine’s life is his priestly vocation—the question why he became a priest? Anyone who knows something about him probably already knows the how. He went to Hippo Regius to visit a friend whom he thought he might gain for God. Word soon spread that the great man was in the city, and he was mobbed and roughhoused into ordination against his will and better judgement.
It is still the case today that no one quite knows what to do with this testimony. That is why it is an ‘unspecified fact’. And Augustine himself took great care to ensure that it would remain that way. He would always insist that his plan following his conversion was to mimic the example of St. Anthony the desert father, and to found on his family estates at Thagaste an ascetic and exclusive community of Christian seekers. This is supported by what we know of his psychology and personality. Augustine remains influential today because he is one of the West’s standout tortured souls. He is read and admired so widely not as the priest but as the lone genius who stood out against his Age. He is read and admired as one of the ancient world’s most accessible minds. That is to say, there is enough timeless truth in his writings that one can ignore the dogma and the unfathomable moments, and pass straight to his disarming honesty about what it is to be a human being. In Rowan Williams’s words: It will be obvious that I believe Augustine a thinker supremely worth engaging with—not only as a specifically Christian mind but as someone whose understanding of subjectivity itself, of what it is to be a speaking and thinking person, is of abiding interest (p. ix).
You could, and should, say the same thing about Rowan Williams’s career. In that respect, he and Augustine are examples of each other. And to me at least, that makes this book On Augustine very interesting indeed. Why did Augustine become a Churchman? Why didn’t he instead write more books like the Soliloquies and the Confessions? I might wish that he had, for example; and I might wish that he hadn’t thundered away against his doctrinal opponents, telling everyone to go to (his) Church, or that he hadn’t burnt himself out on his parishioners’ needs.
Or maybe that is the point. And maybe that, then, is also the point of this book by Rowan Williams. It is a classic book. Other reviews in other places will go into that for you. It is a set of eleven masterclass readings of Augustine on themes like Time, the Soul, Language, Reality, Politics, Love, and Evil. But it ends with a short sermon, by Rowan the priest, on Augustine the priest.
I believe that Augustine left his priestly vocation to be an unspecified fact because he believed that it was a spectacular intervention by Grace; and because he hoped that as that, it would be able to surprise us now as much as it surprised him then. Or I should say, to interrogate us now. For that is perhaps the greatest active gift that Augustine has left to the Church. He had a brain and an ingenuity that clearly might have taken him anywhere else—and everyone sees that—yet he chose Christ, and Life. And in many ways, and from the world’s point of view, it is still unspecified, unexplained, and puzzling that he did.
However, when once you begin to get a feel for this unspecified place that Grace occupies, you begin to see a beautiful new consistency to Augustine’s thought. This consistency is like a narrative, except it is unlike any other narrative because it is made up of the unknown next of God’s plan. As Augustine became the Bishop of Hippo and went further and deeper into the Church and her Scriptures, and this Grace, he became more and more adept at giving this narrative its voice. It became the radical new epistemology of his Trinitarian theology as much as it became the tale of his Two Cities. On this narrative, Rowan Williams is supreme. Perhaps, I want to suggest again, because it appears to come so naturally to him to identify with this decisive practicality of Augustine’s project. For while this narrative is every inch contra mundum, it is also a bold manifesto for how to live with joy and hope in the Pilgrim City. In this book On Augustine, Rowan Williams is everywhere at pains to mark out the difference between the kind of knowledge that your fallen mind can contrive in order to possess, and what happens when you entrust everything to the fact that God came for you first. The one is cramped superbia—and superbia’s style of life: The trouble with putting the human search for God at the heart of things is that it can lead to a self-important, individualistic religiosity that talks glibly about ‘my spiritual journey’ as a thing in itself, a fascinating exercise in a specialist activity, a very elevating hobby… (p. 208).
The other is something that in this world at least, must look and feel like an endless sojourn. A step in time into the ‘unknown next’: The leaving behind of our limited material condition is a temporal and not a spatial matter, in that it involves the journey of growth and learning in time. The peregrination, which is the basic form of discipleship, is the willingness to see every present moment as the place which a desire for God obliges me to leave, yet also as the necessary prompt or stimulus to the journey of desire, not as something simply to be negated (p. 144).
Rowan Williams is not an uncritical reader of Augustine. He winces when we wince: ‘Controversy, stress, haste and bitterness could lead Augustine into strange paths…’ (p. 211), and he is far more willing to open orthodoxy up to inspection. But what really stands out from this book, for me—I repeat—is how he insists on performing rather than arguing, the saving truth. As with Augustine, he leaves you with the spectacle of a formidably clever and creative man who, notwithstanding all of that, chooses the Church. The sheer plain steel of that choice you will encounter all over On Augustine; and whenever you do I encourage you to set it against the brilliance already on display and be inspirited by it. Because it is never an argument; it is oh so much more powerful than that. It is Rowan the priest. And when once you can see it like that you will come to realise, with Rowan and Augustine, that it is God who chooses you: Left to ourselves, we can fantasize about gaining wisdom by effort, but in fact we shall only be locking ourselves up still further in our illusions, admiring not the eternal wisdom but our own spiritual skills.… We have to grow, says Augustine, if we are to feed on truth. And the heart of that growth is humility, facing our essential incompleteness at every level, metaphysical, spiritual, cognitive, moral. Where does God actually meet us? In the free action by which he accepts the limits of mortal life so that he can speak directly to us using our own language. When you see God in Jesus, it is as if you see him at your own feet, the suffering or dead body laid out before you; throw yourself down on that level, ‘and when He rises, you will rise’ (p. 132).