Finds

For those not quite that ambitious, New City Press also has provided a unique way of getting to know the great doctor of theology more personally as a preacher and correspondent with the Augustine Essentials Collection. Essential Sermons condenses 11 volumes into one, while the Essential Expositions of the Psalms draws together excerpts of his great six-volume commentary on the Psalms. Likewise, Essential Letters collects his correspondence from four volumes. These essential volumes open up an important access point into such a vast body of writing.

Any potential power dynamic is quashed by the fact that my friend and I both stand under the good, now revealed to be God. We are, in Augustine’s Latin, socios, “joint participants,” “associates” in a goodness external to us both. And if we believe, Augustine concludes, that God is the source of all goodness, where my friend’s good lies as well as mine, it follows that authentically other-regarding friendship will involve “referring” her to God, but not coercively—pointing not prodding, suggesting not cajoling, sharing not imposing.

Thus the evidence marshaled here suggests that Confessions is not merely an extended reply claiming that his baptism and membership in the Church is genuine; rather, it is (among other things) also a subtle explanation as to how and why salvation must be worked out in this way. For it shows that whatever intellectual, moral, and even doctrinal progress or missteps Augustine made on his journey toward incorporation into Christ, it was the efficacy of baptism that overcame his past deficiencies in a definitive way, while also opening up for him the sacramental and ecclesial body of Christ, which would provide the ongoing remedy for his lifelong struggle with sin.

The world of learning is simply the world of humanity. It is common property, a shared home. Readers of all locations, backgrounds, and walks of life are free agents, capable of creative engagement and repurposing such culture as they find for the needs they see for themselves. “Humanity” is not a piece of essentialism, as some of its critics claim. It is an aspiration, a dream shaped by all who share it, toward which we advance piecemeal and with difficulty.

While Augustine is adamant that we remain stalwart in rejecting construals of earthly peace that do not harmonize with heavenly peace, this stance does not justify hostility towards the members of the earthly city, but instead encourages us to understand the passion behind their noblest impulses and to look for and their admire proto-virtues, which may well exist where we have none. It reminds us to learn from those willing to work with us, and even those who are not. This is guaranteed to be a humbling exercise, as it is bound to reveal our own Babylonian proclivities—the earthly things to which we cling without knowing—but that is for the good, as it divests us of the illusion that we have already become the people into which we pray we will be made, all of us together.