Recently I had an experience available to few except Jesuits: I made the month-long Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola for a second time. The retreat, which involves four to five hours of daily meditation on Scripture and scripturally-adjacent considerations, moves through a progression of themes: repentance, Christ’s childhood and public ministry, His death, and His resurrection. All Jesuit novices make the silent retreat at the beginning of their formation with a view to preparing for their first vows. And then they remake it at the end of their formation to prepare for their final vows. In my case, nearly twenty-four years separated the first unabridged retreat from the second. 

Despite the long intervening interval, my first long retreat was present enough in my mind to make comparison inevitable. One difference I noticed was the way Scripture had become richer for me. When I made the same retreat twenty-four years ago, I sometimes struggled to enter into Jesus’s own experience as portrayed in the Gospels and to find points of connection to my life. But after twenty-four years of living the Jesuit life, many of which have been dedicated to study and priestly ministry, the same passages now carried a surfeit of meaning. When I meditate on the Last Supper, I see more than Christ committing to his arduous mission, as I once did. I hear the fulfilment of Old Testament types—the “covenant of blood” of Exodus 24, the “new covenant” of Jeremiah 31, the suffering servant who justifies “the many” in Isaiah 53—and I am moved by God’s faithfulness. After 13 years of ordained ministry, more than enough time for the Mass to become routine, I find that the solemn intimacy of the Last Supper challenges me on new fronts: to be more reverent before the Father as I celebrate, more docile to the Spirit, more disposed to serve at cost to myself, more desirous of bringing all into living contact with his Eucharist. Scripture has grown much deeper.

To judge by Book 12 of the Confessions, Augustine had this experience too—only more so. By the time of its writing, Augustine had served as a priest for six years and bishop for four. He had studied, prayed, and engaged in theological controversy. I find it unsurprising, then, that Book 12 should abound in two convictions regarding the Bible. 

The first is that Scripture has both a surface and a deeper level of meaning. In the context of interpreting the creation account of Genesis, Augustine, with his characteristic mixture of assertion and praise, writes, “Marvellous is the profundity of Thy Scriptures. Their surface lies before us, flattering us as we flatter children. But marvellous is their profundity, O my God” (conf. 12.14.17; tr. Sheed). Augustine is arguably only carrying forward the Bible’s own self-understanding. In the Book of Revelation, for instance, John the Seer glimpses a vision of a sealed scroll, which only the Lamb can open, “written both inside and on the back (γεγραμμένον ἔσωθεν καὶ ὄπισθεν)” (Rev 5:1). Both suggest that Scripture speaks on many levels, some more immediately accessible than others. 

The second conviction is that Scripture discloses its depths according to the dispositions—especially the reverence—of its readers. After likening Scripture to a “nest” for the simple (conf. 12.27.37), for instance, Augustine describes the impression it makes on the wise with a horticultural image: 

“There are others to whom these words are not so much a nest as a thick-leaved orchard, in which they see fruit hidden, and they flutter about it with joy, and gaze upon it chattering, and eat of the fruit. For when they read or hear these words, they see that all the past and all the future are over-towered in Your eternal and changeless abiding” (12.28.38). 

Analogous passages on Scripture as a “seed” that produces a luxuriant growth can be found in Augustine’s On True Religion (uera rel. 42.79).  

Dangling Augustine’s own experience as bait, in other words, Book 12 entices the reader toward deeper study and meditation of the Word. It reminds us that we will be truly fortunate if, by the end of our life’s end, we can say with Augustine, “I have trusted Thy books and their words are deep mysteries” (conf. 12.10.10). 

Aaron Pidel has written two monographs to date: Church of the Ever Greater God: The Ecclesiology of Erich Przywara (UNDP 2020) and The Inspiration and Truth of Scripture: Testing the Ratzinger Paradigm (CUAP 2023).