St. Augustine's Confessions - Mystical Vision at Ostia (Book IX)

Book IX of the Confessions reveals a side of Augustine that makes many Reformed Protestants like myself feel somewhat uncomfortable.  If anything, this book will help correct any misconceptions that we might have that Augustine is simply a carbon copy of John Calvin living at the turn of the fifth-century.  We must not forget that Augustine was a Roman Catholic Bishop and theologian, and in many ways both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are indebted to St. Augustine's theological legacy in different ways.  Protestants tend to gravitate toward his soteriology which emphasized human depravity and our desperate need for divine grace.  Roman Catholics, by contrast tend to gravitate toward Augustine's ecclesiology and piety.  There are three aspects to this particular chapter that will raise some Protestant eyebrows (although certain brands of Charismatics might be pleasantly surprised).  First, Augustine reveals his very definite impulse toward monasticism (he was in fact the founder of a monastic order).  Second, he reveals his Neo-Platonic mysticism which remained an integral part of his experience as a Christian.  Third, Augustine reveals his approval of the cult of the martyrs (veneration of relics) which became a major aspect of medieval Roman Catholic piety.

Following his conversion in Milan narrated in Book VIII, Augustine quit his job as a professor of Rhetoric and retired with a group of friends to a country estate in Cassiciacum, where they remained from July 386 AD to his baptism the following Easter.  During this time, Augustine wrote a number of philosophical works which were based on dialogues he had with his friends.  Here we see the beginning of Augustine's attraction to the monastic life which was only interrupted by his call to become a Presbyter (much to his own dismay!) 

We glean some additional insight in this chapter into Augustine's personal life as he shares about Adeodatus, "my natural son begotten in sin." (IX.vi)  Adeodatus, who was born to Augustine out of wedlock by his concubine of fifteen years, was apparently an extremely intelligent boy:  "He was about fifteen years old, and his intelligence surpassed that of many serious and well-educated men...His intelligence left me awestruck." (IX.vi)  The apple didn't fall far from the tree!  Unfortunately Adeodatus did not survive adolescence, but died as a baptized believer.  The narration about Adeodatus here is very interesting - Augustine speaks of him almost as though he were a peer rather than his son.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that they were baptized together by Bishop Ambrose in Milan.

Shortly after his baptism, Augustine recounts a story in which Ambrose receives a divine vision telling him where two martyrs were buried.  The bodies were located, and transported to Ambrose's basillica where a number of miracles occurred when people came in contact with the bier in which the bones were being stored.  According to Augustine's testimony, a blind man was healed and several demon possesed people were exorcised.  Augustine's strong belief in the power of relics becomes even more apparent in the last book of the City of God, where he tells a number of miracles which supposedly occurred in Hippo at the shrine of St. Stephen. 

Much of the rest of this Book is taken up with events leading up to the death of Augustine's mother Monica which includes a powerful tribute in which Augustine praises his mother's virtue as the Christian wife of a non-believer who won both her pagan husband and her wayward son to Christ through persistent prayer and witness.  Shortly before her death, Augustine and Monica shared a mystical experience at Ostia which is recounted in detail in this book using language that is distictly influenced by the Enneads of Plotinus:  "Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself.  Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon, and stars shed light on the earth.  We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds.  We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food." (IX.x)  What Augustine is describing here is direct, unmediated  communication with God.  Neo-Platonists held that such extatic union with ultimate Being could be attained by certain enlightened philosophers who were able to transcend the physical bodies and the constraints of the material world which was held to be evil.  Augustine himself claimed to have had one such experience as a Neo-Platonist prior to his conversion to Chrsitianity, which he describes in Book VII.  Prior to his conversion, Augustine held that his mystical experience with absolute Being left him morally unchanged in spite of its power.  He compared this earlier mystical experience to Moses looking to the promised land from a distance without actually getting to enter in:  "It is one thing from a wooded summit to catch a glimpse of the homeland of peace and not to find the way to it, but vainly to attempt the journey along an impracticable route surrounded by the ambushes and assaults of fugitive deserters with their chief." (VII.xxi)  By contrast, the mystical experience he shared with his mother at Ostia was powerful enough to free Monica from the remaining constraints she had to the corporeal world.  No longer was she concerned about where she would be buried or with whom.  Soon after this experience, Monica died and Augustine mourned her death.

St. Augustine's Confessions - A Neoplatonic Quest (Book VII)

After a few months away from blogging, I finally have some extra time to devote to finishing up my thoughts on the Confessions.  This past year, I've been digging deeply into Augustine's theology and am currently finishing up a grad seminar on his 1200 page magnum opus, the City of God.   Reading Augustine first-hand over the past year has been extremely rewarding and edifying on a number of levels.  It's enabled me to see Calvin, the Reformers and the Evangelical tradition in a whole new light - we are far more indebted to Augustine than we think.  It's also forced me to go further back and read Plato and Aristotle which in turn has given me more insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the NT and the historical backdrop of the Patristic era.  Like Augustine, many of the Church Fathers were disciples of Plato before they were disciples of Christ (and many of them remained steadfast admirers of Plato and Socrates post-conversion!)  In certain ways, the Christian worldview which captured Rome by the 4th century, provided fresh answers to very ancient and vexing philosophical problems.  For most Patristic theologians, Platonism and Christianity seemed to be two very complimentary systems of thought.  So respected was Plato well into the Reformation era that Ulrich Zwingli, the father of the Reformed tradition and forerunner to Calvin, contended in a letter to King Francis that Plato and Socrates (both pagans) were in heaven alongside the Saints!! (A statement that only served to increase Luther's dislike of his Swiss counterpart).

Book VII of the Confessions reveals the fact that Augustine's conversion to Christianity in the Milan Garden (Book VIII) may best be understood as several mini-conversions, the first of which was a 'philosophical'  conversion.  This initial conversion was from Gnostic Manichaeism with its dualistic ontology  to Greek Platonism with its sharp distinction between body and soul.  Manichaeism, with its emphasis on the material world had blinded Augustine to the existence of immaterial spiritual substance, and so he laments the fact that he was for a time "unable to think of any substance possible other than that which the eyes normally perceive." (VII.i.1)  Because of this, Augustine, the Manichean gnostic, could only conceive of God in strictly materialist terms:  "Although you were not in the shape of the human body, I nevertheless felt forced to imagine something physical occupying space diffused either in the world or even through infinite space outside the world...I thought that anything from which space was abstracted was non-existence, indeed absolutely nothing." (VII.i.1)

Augustine's gnostic worldview which reduced everything to the level of physical matter, created a major philosophical dilemma when it came to explaining the origin and existence of evil:  "Certainly the greatest and supreme Good made lesser goods; yet the Creator and all that he created are good.  What then is the origin of evil?  Is it that the matter from which he made things was somehow evil?... Was he powerless to turn and transform all matter so that no evil remained, even though God is omnipotent?" (VII.v.7)  For Augustine, the undeniable presence of evil in the world called into question either the omnipotence of God on the one hand, or the aseity of God on the other (ie. that He was assisted in creation by matter which He himself did not create).  Neither alternative was particularly attractive to the young philosopher who was seeking for truth.

In his attempt to discover an answer to the problem of evil, Augustine for a brief time entertained astrology as a possible solution.  In the end, however, he concluded that the astrology of the pagans, with its fatalistic determinism did not solve the problem of evil either since it could not adequately explain the very different fate of twins who were born under the same sign:  "You my helper, delivered me in this way from those chains.  I was seeking the origin of evil and here was no solution." (VII.vii.11)   For Augustine, astrologers were little more than opportunistic charlatans who preyed on sheer ignorance.  (He would probably be amazed that people are still reading horoscopes in the 21st century!!!)

The problem, Augustine finally concluded, was that "I was fixing my attention on things contained in space". He goes on to add that "the very images of physical objects formed an obstacle to my return." (VII.vii.11)  Augustine was only able to reach this conclusion with the help of the Platonist philosophers (Plotinus and Porphyry), whose books had been translated from Greek into Latin.  These books Augustine viewed as an integral part of his return to Christ: "By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself.  With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper." (VII.x.16)  In spite of the progress he made through secular philosophy, Augustine found himself still very far away from God in what he described as "the region  of dissimilarity." (VII.x.16)  Although the Platonists expressed many truths that were fully congruent with Christianity, they omitted the key elements of Christian faith, specifically the incarnation and atoning work of Christ on the cross:  "Again I read [in the Platonists] that the Word, God, is 'born not of the flesh, nor of blood, nor of tthe will of man nor of the will of the flesh but of God'.  But that 'the word was made flesh and dwelt among us' (John 1:13-14), I did not read there." (VII ix.14)

Although the Platonists didn't offer solutions to Augustine's deepest spiritual need, they did offer him a new ontology with which to view and interpret the world.  First, he was enabled to see that God is immaterial - a Spirit without a physical body of any kind.  With this breakthrough, Augustine concluded that God made everything, and that everything He made was indeed very good.  Evil is not a principle which exists apart from God, neither was it created by God.  Evil, Augustine eventually concluded, is the privation of good and the corruption of a good nature created by a good God:  "Accordingly, whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good." (VII.xii.18)  "For you evil does not exist at all, and not only for you, but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it." (VII.xiii.19)  The notion of evil as privation, has been an enduring aspect of the Augustinian legacy and enables Christian theologians to the present day to give a rational account of evil without implicating God as its author.  The ultimate origin of evil, Augustine would eventually conclude, is in the human will, which chooses lesser goods instead of the greatest Good.

The philosophy of the Neo-Platonists ultimately enabled Augustine to move beyond his shortsighted gnostic view of God.  Finally, he was able to see God in immaterial terms but he was still not yet a Christian:  "I was certain that you are infinite without being infinitely diffused through finite space... Of these conceptions I was certain:  but to enjoy you I was too weak." (VII.xx.26)  Augustine was later to express his thankfulness to God for exposing him to Platonist philosophy at this point in his spiritual journey, which he viewed as an essential step in his conversion: "I believe that you wanted me to encounter [the Platonists] before I came to study your scriptures...For if I had first been formed in mind by your holy books, and if you had made me know your sweetness by familiarity with them, and then I had thereafter met those volumes [of the Platonists], perhaps they would have snatched me away from the solid foundation of piety."  (VII.xx.26)  Augustine's initial conversion from gnosticism to Neo-Platonism propelled him forward in his quest for truth and gave him a new motivation to pick up and read the Scripture which he had long despised:  "With avid intensity I seized the sacred writings of your Spirit and especially the apostle Paul...I began reading and found that all the truth I had read in the Platonists was stated here together with the commendation of your grace."(VII. xxi.27)

Augustine's experience as outlined above raises the issue of Natural Theology and General Revelation.  Although Scripture is absolutely indispensable for our salvation because we cannot experience a relationship with God apart from knowledge about the perfect life, atoning death and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus, we should not deny that God has revealed many aspects of  truth outside of the Bible.  Indeed there are many incredible truths about God that we can learn from secular philosophy and from the natural sciences.  Another way to say this that I think Augustine would readily have affirmed in his own day is that 'all truth is God's truth.'  Although we dare not construct a full-blown Natural Theology that postulates salvation outside of personal faith in Christ, we ought not to automatically discount the many wonderful insights that we can get into God's good creation through modern science and philosophy.  True - the Fall has distorted our ability to reason accurately and to perceive truth in creation - but it has not completely destroyed it!  This was the position of both Augustine and the Reformers, and most importantly, was the position of Paul himself in Romans who held that General Revelation in both nature and the human conscience will render humanity without excuse before the Creator on the day of judgment.