1. What is prayer? . ........ ........ ........ ..... 7
Who is this man who has influenced the Western world more than any other writer?
Augustine Aurelius (354-430) was born in North Africa, a part of the Roman Empire, at a time when the empire had been Christian for only a few decades. His mother, Monica, was pious but somewhat passive in her Christian conviction during Augustine's childhood, and he was raised with little or no faith.
He sought the truth and an income in its pursuit, which brought him to Italy, where the real action lay for a young scholar. His teaching career gave way to that of rhetorician (a sort of speech writer at the Imperial Court), since, it turned out, he could command language more easily than mischievous students. He wandered in and out of the shadows until he discovered the fullness of truth and asked to be baptized into the Church.
He was ordained priest and immediately thereafter ordained bishop, a task he undertook with misgivings but much selfless zeal. He was shepherd to the Northern African diocese of Hippo for forty years, and died to the echoes of Vandal hordes ravaging the city he had served with paternal love.
So much for the man. Now the mind.
The world has not seen another like his. We Westerners are all under his influence in some way. Perhaps we have not considered the genesis of many of the concepts that make up our worldview, but in many cases, they are Augustine's progeny. Indeed, thinking like a Westerner means thinking like Augustine. Nonetheless, his intellectual reach is not confined to Christian philosophy and theology. Even the twentieth-century existentialists were under his spell when they appropriated his notion of "alienation" and called it their own.
Amongst other Augustinian concepts that pervade our culture are:
• Understanding God as a deep inner presence.
• Grace as an interior help.
Free will as a faculty uninhibited by external coercion as an integral feature of our souls.
The claim that words and gestures are signs that express our souls and personalities.
The notion of sin as a wandering far from happiness into a dark region where we lose what we love most. Rather than seeing sin superficially as a matter of rule-breaking, he thinks of it as relationship-breaking. For him, sin's wages are paid in loneliness, grief, and misery.
The view that each one of us is an "I" in search of a relationship with God, the only "You" who can satiate the soul.
That last notion, the soul as an infinite void with unlimited capacity because made for union with God, is perhaps Augustine's most renowned. Its characteristic quality is a yearning for satisfaction that nothing finite can gratify. Having insufficient resources of its own on which to draw and left to itself, the soul is condemned to its own native nothingness. It is compelled to search for a compatible "Other," lest it be absorbed by this hollow restlessness. God lets himself be found. And when he is found, what was once a vacuum of loneliness is transformed into a place of refuge, a veritable "hermitage within," where our heart can rest and enjoy converse with the Lord.
At this point it should be clear that God is the key to understanding the majority of Augustine's thought. In that light, we make it to port only if we succeed in loving God. Our happiness would never cease if we could just love God more than ourselves.
In great part, Augustine's influence had time and place on its side. As his dates suggest, he lived in what is known as Late Antiquity, on the threshold of the Middle Ages; an age which would construct its intellectual traditions largely on the foundation of his ideas. He carried out his ecclesiastical mission in the Roman Empire as a Roman citizen, in spite of being raised in North Africa. For intellectual sustenance, his youth was filled with the classics of Roman literature, Virgil and Cicero primarily. And his sojourn in Italy provided him with important contacts in the world of literature, ideas, and the life of the Church, all of which helped to shape his work as well as give it a broader scope and audience. Thus equipped with the best of nature and grace, Augustine stands on the shoulders of those two Latin giants from his younger days.
More than just a prolific writer, Augustine is also a founder of a school of normative Christian thought. This places him amongst those privileged men who are known as the Church Fathers - gifted and influential writers who helped to interpret Sacred Scripture, unfolding its doctrines and founding the discipline of theological reflection. And from amongst them, he is undoubtedly one of the greatest.
This is the man who wants to answer our questions about prayer. Few are as up to the task as Augustine: Doctor and Father of the Church, bishop and founder of a monastic order, saint and mystic.