42. "... I'amour. C'est un principe chcr a saint Augustin," Hardy, 90. See
12 ST. AUGUSTINE rest of Scripture, the literal and historical realities of Christ's life represent spiritual reality. Each specific historical act is significant of an interior, hidden, more real action; each specific historical act reveals a universalization pertinent to the inner spiritual life of the human soul. Factum audivimus, mysterium requiramus: "we have heard what happened, let us search out the hidden meaning. "^^ (12) It is not by the exercise of reason alone that we understand divine revelation. For it is faith that is the essential and unavoidable first step in the process of salvation, a gift of grace by which God presents man with an obscure vision of himself. The effort of trying to understand the vision of faith in order to see God clearly is a preparation in this transitory life of exile for the eternal contemplation of the divine reality in the true life.^* Love is also an absolute necessity for the divine revelation to achieve God's plan for human salvation. Augustine preached to his people out of his love for them and he preached love.^^ Now love is an act of will, as faith is an act of reason. Man cannot know God on his own by the exercise of his natural powers because his will is disordered, his love is disordered. He loves the wrong things and so makes the wrong choices. He sins. And sin plunges him into intellectual darkness. But man's will is free; he freely loves, and freely chooses and freely sins. Out of love God gives man his revelation, a free gift of grace. The revealed knowledge of God redirects our love; we love what we know.^^ Faith draws the will^^ to love what is the proper object of love. Out of faith man freely chooses to love God and seeks to know him whom he
40. Tractate 50.6. 41. See Hardy, 66-73, and Marrou, Saint Augustin el la fin, 485—488. 42. "... I'amour. C'est un principe chcr a saint Augustin," Hardy, 90. See also Tractates 3.21, 6.1, 7.1, 9.8, 17.6 and 9, 27.5, 32.8-9, 76.2, 83.2-3, 96.4, and 123.5; 'lod Berrouard, Homelies I-XVI, 13-14, 16-17, 23-24, and 52—53. The most common forms of address in the Tractates are caritas vestra and carissimi, e.g.. Tractate 1.1 and 2.
43. "'Reveiatio' signifie une action dynamique de Dieu en I'homme pour lui faire voir dans un amour engageant les realities divines," Hardy, 58.
44. Cf. Tractate 26.25: Ista reveiatio, ipsa est adtractio, "This revelation is itself the drawing (of the Father)."