Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
joy and be amazed by the deeper design and underlying purpose of the Artist himself and, from there, to soar up in admiration and in praise of the Allcreating God, where the richest fruitfulness of love finds its endpoint. How much more then ought we to rejoice when people now approach to learn of God Himself, for whatever things we learn, we learn to learn of God; and how much more ought we to be renewed in their newness, so that if our preaching, now a routine, has cooled off, it may again catch fire because of our hearers.47
A Password Called Creed
Augustine brought great enthusiasm to teaching beginners. That enthusiasm is evident in the way that he taught, year after year, the most basic matters to catechumens. From here to the end of the chapter, we will explore several examples. First, a sermon on the Creed. Each year, catechumens who wished to be baptized at Easter turned in their names and, if approved, were officially enrolled as competentes ("co-petitioners"). These advanced catechumens spent the forty days prior to Easter—what we now call Lent—practicing an ascetic regimen and passing through a series of special initiation rituals.48 One was the "handing over of the Creed" (traditio symboli). In this ceremony, the bishop recited the Creed and then explained it phrase-by-phrase. Competentes memorized it and, a week later, recited it publicly at a second ritual known as the "handing back of the Creed" (redditio symboli).49 The wording of the creeds that can be reconstructed from these sermons is similar to, but ever so slightly different from, the later "Apostle's Creed."50 Note the way Augustine repeats the Creed's phrases again and again, as though a refrain, as though he wanted to pound them into his hearer's memory. The Latin word for "creed" was symbolum, and, as he notes, it meant "password." Like any password, it was kept secret and used to distinguish allies from enemies. Note also the imagery he uses at one point, in portraying God's justice as topsy-turvy: that Christ is like a lawyer whom we have hired to work on our case and then who strangely gets assigned to act as our judge, implying that our court-case before God has been rigged in our favor. From Sermon 213:
(1) The Apostle says, "Everyone who invokes the name of the Lord will be saved" (Rom 10:13). You who have given in your names for baptism, you are running to this salvation, a salvation not for the short-term but for eternity. . . . The Apostle himself then added, "But how can they invoke Him in
47. De catechizandis rudibus 12.17 (CCL 46:141); my trans. 48. For an overview of the ritual, ascetical, and catechetical path followed by catechumens, see Harmless, "Catechumens, Catechumenate," AugEncy, 145–49; "Baptism," AugEncy, 84–87.
49. Augustine described this ceremony in his account of Victorinus's conversion: conf. 8.2.5 (quoted in Chapter 1).
50. On this issue, see Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 274–86, 299; Joseph T. Lienhard, "Creed, Symbolum," AugEncy, 254–55; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1972).