2 Cian Cor: (continued)
he purpose of this volume is to make the spirituality of St. Augustine of Hippo available to people of the twentieth century, some of whom have forgotten that Augustine's Confessions was once the classic of the spiritual life in the Western world. That is why there will be no direct attempt to trace the genesis and the evolution of Augustinian spirituality. Instead, the Augustinian tradition in spirituality, which was the common heritage of the Christian laity and of many religious orders in medieval and modern times, can be found represented in the necessarily selective number of writings reproduced in this volume.
In this: Introduction I focus on Augustine's religious consciousness in its living relationship with the objects of his Christian faith. This presupposes dogmatic theology, on which this spirituality is based, and of which he is one of the earliest architects. Many excellent books, however, have already treated Augustine the theologian; here we encounter Augustine as guide to the spiritual life. Spirituality is also very closely allied to moral theology, because spirituality is concerned with human acts, very specifically with those human acts that refer explicitly and immediately to God, above all, prayer and everything connected with prayer in the ascetical and mystical life, that is, religious exercises as well as religious experiences. AN As Louis Bouyer has so well shown in his monumental studies of the spiritual life, the variety of spiritualities is traceable to the uniqueness of individual vocations and of individual personalities, this very uniqueness causing "'variations in the concrete application of the Gospel to a human life."! That is why Augus-
1. Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers (New York: The Seabury Press, 1963), p. xi.