Augustine, antidote to the Enlightenment
Peter Mullen discovers why Benedict XVI reveres the Bishop of Hippo
29 August 2008

I have just been reading some marvellous reflections on St Augustine by Benedict XVI. The minds of Pope and saint are so intertwined that I am surprised, given Benedict's intense and lifelong admiration of Augustine, he did not choose that name for his adopted title when he was elected to the See of Rome. So close is the Pope's thought to Augustine's that I often had to look and look again to be sure as to which man's words I was reading.

Pope Benedict has called St Augustine "the greatest Father of the Latin Church". In his reflections he explains just why: "He left a very deep mark on the cultural life of the West. It could be said that all the roads of Latin Christian literature led to Hippo, the place in North Africa where he was Bishop from AD 395 until his death in 430."

The Pope reminded us of Augustine's prolific output; he is the Church Father who left the greatest number of works, each one a philosophical, theological and literary masterpiece. Pope Benedict is himself a gifted psychologist, though not in the secular sense but as a man with profound insight into people's interiority, their inner spiritual workings, their souls. This he derives to a large extent from Augustine.

The Pope says: "His Confessions are his extraordinary spiritual autobiography written in praise of God. This is his most famous work and rightly so, since their focus on interiority and psychology constitutes a unique model in western culture, even for non-religious, modern times. His attention to the spiritual life, to the mystery of the 'I' and to the mystery of God who is concealed in the 'I' is something quite extraordinary, without precedent and which remains forever a spiritual peak."

A N Whitehead famously said that all western philosophy is "footnotes to Plato". In the same way, as the Pope says, the history of Western psychological understanding and insight comes directly from Augustine. If Descartes had properly understood the relationship between the "I" and the God who created it and who is eternally present within it, he would not have made the mistake of starting where he did: with his Cogito ergo sum which makes individual consciousness the centre of philosophical reference. Pope Benedict, like John Paul before him, is fascinated by Augustine not least because he recognises in him the antidote to the Enlightenment which made man the measure of all things.

Pope Benedict feels very close to Augustine as an old man. He tells how Augustine addressed his disciples when he was not long for this world: "In old age ailments proliferate: coughs, catarrh, bleary eyes, anxiety and exhaustion. Yet, if the world grows old, Christ is perpetually young, so do not refuse to be rejuvenated by being united with Christ."

The Pope, like Augustine, has all his life followed the intellectual calling and he believes that God is accessible to human reason because, as he said in his Regensberg lecture, God is himself the origin of the rational principle in the Logos, the Word who is revealed in the first 14 verses of St John's Gospel. But Augustine was not a cold-blooded academic, construing abstractly the existence of God. As the Confessions show on every page, he was passionate and it is Augustine who is truly the origin of that sense expressed by Pascal when he said: "The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of."

The Pope says: "These two dimensions, faith and reason, should not be separated or placed in opposition. They must always go hand in hand, for they are, as Augustine says, 'the two forces that lead us to knowledge'."

Augustine said that we both believe the better to understand and understand in order to believe more firmly. This is exactly the balance that the Pope constantly maintains in his own spiritual journey: his intellectual grasp of the faith, second to none, goes hand in hand with his passionate devotion to Christ. This combination is quintessentially Augustinian.

Pope Benedict comments: "God's presence in man is profound and at the same time mysterious, but he can recognise and discover it deep down inside himself. 'Do not go outside,' St Augustine says, 'but return to within yourself; truth dwells in the inner man. And if you find that your nature is changeable, transcend yourself. But remember, when you transcend yourself, you are transcending a soul that reasons'."

This is an insight which has led to methods and schemes of thought as diverse and as modern as existentialism and psychoanalysis - though it would be a mistake to blame Augustine for all the versions and perversions of those intellectual fashions. But the fact that even such modern outlooks as these trace their beginning to the thought of St Augustine is yet another example of what the Pope means when he says that Augustine's influence has penetrated into every nook and corner of western thought - and into realms which are not specifically Christian.

The Pope claims Augustine as a saint particularly pertinent to modern times when he says: "It seems to me that the hope of finding the truth must be restored to humankind." For in Augustine's day, as in ours, there were plenty of people saying that the only truth is that there is no truth and that one opinion is as good as the next. Throughout his sermons and his writings, Pope Benedict proclaims that, by the grace of God and the power of our God-given rationality, ultimate truth is available to us. This is the Gospel which our postmodern, pessimistic and even nihilistic age needs most to hear.

At the end of one of his lectures on St Augustine, after telling us how the aged, enfeebled saint lay on his deathbed and asked for prayers and psalms to be pasted up on the walls where he could read them even as he lay dying, the Pope quotes this beautiful passage from his hero which brilliantly reveals the "I and Thou" bond between Creator and creature: "You were with me, yet I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you - though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried aloud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent. You put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours alone."

In these reflections Benedict has triumphed quite astonishingly. He has succeeded in presenting - not to scholars, but to audiences of pilgrims - both the mind and passion of St Augustine. Miraculously, there is no dumbing down. Augustine's penetrating intelligence and his exquisite tenderness are offered all apiece - as if the Holy Father were holding out his hands and giving them to us.

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is the Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London