Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings (continued)
INTRODUCTION
was in agreement when he affirmed that whereas the City of God and On the Trinity are the works of a mystic, the Confessions is a properly mystical work.
In any attempt to formulate an adequate definition of the mystical experience, a contact with God that is deep and satisfying, transforming and fruitful in charity, takes precedence over other factors. The mystic describes an experience that he frequently calls ineffable, so he is describing only that part of it that he can know and he is not describing how it is accomplished; but if it really is accomplished, whether or not there is human preparation and purification for it, it is still only God who can give Himself. One ought not to stand on the sidelines and say that God may give Himself only to Christians. This means that the discussion of whether Augustine's ascents to God were Plotinian or Christian is beside the point if Plotinus himself by God's power enjoyed the ecstasy he described.
In his later life, after meditating on the Gospels and Epistles, Augustine recognized explicitly Christian forms of union with God, sharing with St. Paul his Christ-Mysticism and his Community-Mysticism, the intimacy of Christ with his mystical members. P. Rondet spoke of it in these words:
Augustinian mysticism, like Pauline mysticism, gives to Christ a large place, greater than the Savior occupies in his theology, which is not Christocentric. The mysticism of Augustine is that of a man of action, of a man engaged by vocation in the apostolic tasks of pastor, preacher, controversialist. No ecstasy, no ravishment, but a perpetual presence of God which could indeed be the form of the highest union with Christ and the other persons of the Irinity.®?
Then there is the mystical aspect of his Image doctrine: As an image man is related to God the Trinity so that self-knowledge can engage him in that contact with God through the Trinitarian acts of remembering, understanding, and loving God when the capacity for God is realized through God's gift of Himself.
Some theologians have maintained that the mystical experi-
83. Recherches de Sciences Religieuses XLI (1953): 290-291.
INTRODUCTION
ence is the normal culmination of Christian life. It is the full development of the theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit insofar as charity establishes the connaturality or likeness of the soul to God by which union is achieved. Since wisdom is the actuality of Trinitarian life, the wisdom of the mystics is a participation in divine wisdom.
Essentially, mystical experience is an intuitive and responsive act of the mind caused by charity, an act of the will, aroused by the experience of being loved and resulting in the experience of wisdom, an experimental affective awareness of God's touch. Contemplation or mystical experience is therefore both intellectual and affective, with love having a certain priority. As intellectual, it is a graced intuition of God as Being, Truth, Goodness. As affective, it is a tasting of God (sapientia), a knowledge through love. In Psalm 109 Augustine links mystical experience to the forgiving love of God. Charity is the soul's beauty bestowed by transcendent Beauty and manifested most fully in the life of Christ. If Christ's love of the Father manifested itself in a constant love of neighbor, so must the mystic's love, which has as its first fruit the transformation into Christ, the re-formation of the Image of God in the soul, and as its second fruit the realization of the community of faith and love.
Was the experience of Augustine at Ostia with his mother, Monica, leaning in a window looking onto a garden, a mystical one? They were speaking of the joys of eternal life.
Then, with our affections burning still more strongly, toward the Selfsame, we raised ourselves higher and step by step passed over all material things, even the heaven itself from which sun and moon and stars shine down upon the earth. And still we went upward, meditating and speaking and looking with wonder at your works, and we came to our own souls, and we went beyond our souls to reach that region of never-failing plenty where Thou feedest Israel forever with the food of truth and where life is that Wisdom by whom all these things are made, both what is past and what is to come. But Wisdom herself is not made; she is as she has been and will be forever; or rather, there is no place in her for "to have been" or "to be going to be"; one can only say "to be"