Augustine in His Own Words
When, therefore, the Apostle had exhorted us to present our bodies as a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God—our spiritual service—and not to be conformed to this world but be transformed in the "newness of our minds, that we might discern what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God," he went on to remind us that it is we ourselves who constitute the whole sacrifice: "For I say, by the grace of God given to me, to everyone among you: not to think of oneself more highly than one ought to think, but to deal soberly, each according to the measure of faith that God has apportioned. For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same office, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and all are members of one another, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us" (Rom 12:3–6). Such is the sacrifice of Christians: "We, the many, are one body in Christ." This is the sacrifice, as the faithful know well, which the Church continues to celebrate in the sacrament of the altar, in which it is clear to the Church that she herself is offered in the very offering she makes to God.48
The Incarnation in Gold Letters
Through the course of his debate with the Platonists in Book 10, Augustine marks out where Christians and Platonists converge and diverge. At one point, he tells a famous anecdote about what separates the two, namely, the Incarnation. From On the City of God, Book 10:
(29) It is, I suppose, humiliating for learned people to leave the school of Plato to enter that of Christ, who inspired a fisherman with wisdom enough to say: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was made nothing that has been made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not" (Jn 1:1–5). This is that beginning of the holy Gospel according to John which, according to a Platonist philosopher, as I often heard from that holy old man Simplicianus,49 afterwards bishop of the Church at Milan, ought to be written in letters of gold and posted high in a prominent place in all the churches. But the reason why
48. Civ. Dei 10.3–6 (CCL 47:274–79); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:120–27. On Augustine's defining of religion, see Madec, "Le De civitate Dei comme De vera religione," in Petites Études Augustiniennes, 189–213. On the issue of sacramentality, see especially Cutrone, "Sacraments," AugEncy, 741–47; Basil Studer, "Sacramentum et Exemplum chez saint Augustin," Recherches Augustiniennes 10 (1975): 87–141.
49. "Holy old man Simplicianus": Simplicianus was bishop of Milan from 397–400. On his role in Augustine's conversion, see Chapter 1; on his inquiries to Augustine about Paul, see Chapter 10.