Mountain Brook Baptist Church
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Wednesday Night ResourcesTO LISTEN TO THE WEDNESDAY EVENING BIBLE STUDY Prior to 5:45 p.m. Dial **************************************** AUGUSTINE September 8th we will begin the reading of Augustine's Confessions, one of the truly great Christian books. You can purchase a copy at the church or you can access the book on the internet if you are comfortable using the computer. The book may be found at the following address: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8894756/Outler%20Transl ation%20of%20Confessions.pdf
September 8, 2010
Augustine’s Confessions
The Man
Sixteen hundred years ago (sixteen hundred and nine years to be exact, 401 A.D.) Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, finished a little book that has been read continuously ever since. It surely qualifies as a book that needs no introduction--and yet most of us know almost nothing about it, though we may well have heard the famous quote from page one:
"You have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless
until they find their peace in you."
But there is more than this first page! Hopefully in these next few Wednesday nights I will be able to whet your appetite for experiencing first hand this treasure. Few of us will agree with Augustine on every point, and some of the things he did may shock you. But unless I am mistaken, this is a little book you will want to return to time and again as your think about your own relationship with God. Two food analogies come to my mind as I think about Augustine’s Confessions. The first is the analogy of the little boy in the candy store who is so overwhelmed by the multitude of delights that he can’t choose any one. My copy of the Confessions bleeds from all the underlined passages, but choosing just a few to share with you is very difficult. The second analogy is of the difference between the hotdog meal and the fine dining experience. Hot dogs are meant to be stuffed in, quickly—hence the hot dog eating contests on the Fourth of July. But fine meals beautifully presented are meant to be savored slowly, capturing each nuance of flavor in every dish. The Confessions need to be taken in slowly. Every page if not every paragraph has a beautifully turned phrase or a way of looking at something that is arresting. Let me encourage you to get a copy and read the first nine chapters just as you would your daily Bible readings, slowly and carefully. It is one long prayer that covers the life of a man and his mother in about 200 pages.
Who was this man whose name was Aurelius Augustinus? As is the case with most people, we know him because of what he was at the end of his life, the Bishop of Hippo (modern Annaba), a town on the coast of the Mediterranean in what is today Algeria, North Africa. His life began some sixty miles inland in the town of Thagaste now known as Souk-Ahras in Algeria where he was born to his mother Monica, a devout Christian woman, and her husband, Patricius, a non-Christian, in the year 354 A.D. He was sent some twelve miles away at the age of ten for schooling, a time when Augustine said he learned to pray—that he would not be beaten by his school master. After his early education he was sent to Carthage as a teenager to learn the art of rhetoric--public speaking and argumentation—skills that would serve him well the rest of his life. After his graduation he himself became a teacher of rhetoric first in his home area and subsequently in Rome where he went in search of better students. What he found were students smart enough to cheat him out of his fee for teaching them.
Then something happened that can only be seen as providential. While Augustine was searching for a teaching position, one came available in Milan, and he got the position. It was providential because in the city of Milan there was a great bishop and pastor, Ambrose, whose preaching was of such quality that it impressed the brilliant young scholar who had been turned off by the stories of the Bible, thinking of them as too simple. On Easter Sunday of 387, Ambrose baptized Augustine in answer to the lifelong prayer of his mother, Monica, and thus began the Christian pilgrimage which has been chronicled so magnificently in the Confessions. Augustine gave up his teaching career and returned to North Africa. On the way back, he lost his Mother who died while waiting for a ship to take them home. This was a profound loss for Augustine, a loss that is partly responsible for the Confessions. He ends the ninth chapter of the book with these words:
By means of these confessions of mine I pray that my mother may have her last request of me still more richly answered in the prayers of many others besides myself.
He devoted himself to a monastic style of life, turning his home into a kind of monastery.
While visiting the church in Hippo in 391, the congregation begged him to accept ordination as a priest which he reluctantly did. In 395 he was made assistant Bishop and in 396 upon the death of the Bishop of Hippo, Augustine assumed the Bishop’s role which he held for the rest of his life. He never returned to Thagaste, his home town for more than a visit. Partly because of his rapid transition from a lay person to a bishop and partly to set the record straight about his theology, Augustine began writing his Confessions the year after he became Bishop and finished the book in 401. By the time he finished this book, Augustine had already written some thirty others, a third of the one hundred he wrote in his lifetime along with hundreds of letters and more than four hundred sermons. Today his collected writings fill a set of volumes almost the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He died on August 28, 430 just as the Vandals began the siege of his city, Hippo, having witnessed the fall of Rome and the collapse of the Roman Empire. The city was burned, but Augustine’s library was spared and, thus, today we have all his works still available to us. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls Augustine “one of the towering figures of medieval philosophy,” a rare tribute for a Christian author from a secular publication. Others point out that he was, perhaps, the first psychologist based on his insights into why we human beings do some of the things we do. But though he was a great philosopher and began the discipline we know as psychology, he is remembered as a Christian. And not only as a Christian, but a Christian whose faith has shaped the church. And with that much introduction, let’s look at Augustine’s Confessions.
The Book
Is There Room In Your Heart For God?
At Christmas time we sometimes sing Emily Elliott’s Christmas carol that goes:
Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown,
When Thou camest to earth for me;
But in Bethlehem’s home was there found no room
For Thy holy nativity.
O come to my heart, Lord Jesus,
There is room in my heart for Thee.
As teen agers we may have sung the old chorus:
Come into my heart,
Come into my heart,
Come into my heart today
Come in today
Come in to stay
Come into my heart Lord Jesus
And right there is where Augustine began his praise of God. He wonders if there is room in his heart for God, but we know immediately that his way of wondering is different from ours. Listen to his musings:
And what place is there in me into which my God can come?
How could God, the God who made both heaven and earth, come into me? Is there anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain thee?[1]
Augustine was awed by the greatness of God. How could it be that the creator of the universe could enter a finite human being? The greater our understanding of the vastness of creation, the better our telescopes, the greater this question haunts human hearts. But he knew it even then in 397 A.D.
Thou dost fill the heaven and earth, [but] do they contain thee?
Or, dost thou fill and overflow them, because they cannot contain thee?
And where dost thou pour out what remains of thee after heaven and earth are full? (I,3)
In our own times the Georgia poet, Sidney Lanier, caught something of the same awe when he wrote his famous poem, The Marsh Hen:
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
Listen again to Augustine as he lovingly lingers over every aspect of God’s infinite greatness:
But when thou dost fill all things, dost thou fill them with thy whole being? Or, since not even all things together could contain thee altogether,
does any one thing contain a single part,
and do all things contain that same part at the same time?
Do singulars contain thee singly?
Do greater things contain more of thee, and smaller things less?
Or, is it not rather that thou art wholly present everywhere,
yet in such a way that nothing contains thee wholly? (I,3)
Augustine began this chapter with his famous saying:
Thou hast made us for thyself and
restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee. (I,1)
At the end of the chapter he returns to that theme:
Who shall bring me to rest in thee? (I,5)
The house of my soul is too narrow for thee to come in to me; let it be enlarged by thee. (I,6)
So Small A Boy, So Great A Sinner!
When Augustine turns to deal with his own life, it is sin that dominates his thoughts. “Where, O Lord, or when was I, thy servant, ever innocent?” (I,7) He notes that he did not know whether he was anywhere before he came from his mother’s womb and then reprimands himself for asking whether he existed before he was born:
“Dost thou laugh at me for asking such things? Or dost thou command me to praise and confess unto thee only what I know?” (I.6)
What he did know was that even children sin and that he had never been without sin himself. Augustine was the theologian who more than any other gave us the doctrine of original sin—sin that was passed on by procreation. And while some of the debates about original sin may seem akin to those foolish debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, for Augustine the consciousness of sin was not theoretical. It was real for him. Some of his most vivid memories of childhood obviously were of being beaten by schoolmasters who tried to force him to learn the mechanics of languages. He says he learned to pray when he went to school—he learned to pray that he would not be beaten—and his prayers were not answered because “even so, we were sinning by writing or reading or studying less than our assigned lessons.” (I,9) Augustine could not understand why he hated Greek and loved Latin, but he hated the mechanics—grammar—in both languages and notes that he would never have learned these things which served him so well later “unless under compulsion.” Left to himself, he would never have mastered the languages he used so effectively later.
As he leaves his childhood and remembers his teenage years Augustine said to God:
I wish now to review in memory my past wickedness and the carnal corruptions of my soul--not because I still love them, but that I may love thee, O my God. For love of thy love I do this, recalling in the bitterness of self-examination my wicked ways, that thou mayest grow sweet to me . (II,1)
Augustine’s sixteenth year proved to be the beginning of sexual indulgence that, as for many a teenager, was too enticing to abandon but also too corrupting to allow him to come close to God.
During that sixteenth year of my age, I lived with my parents, having a holiday from school for a time--this idleness imposed upon me by my parents' straitened finances. The thornbushes of lust grew rank about my head, and there was no hand to root them out. (II, 3)
The only harsh criticism he has in the book for his saintly mother involves this year when family finances dictated that he leave school and spend a year at home with nothing to occupy his time.
…the madness of lust held full sway in me---and I gave myself entirely to it? Meanwhile, my family took no care to save me from ruin by marriage, for their sole care was that I should learn how to make a powerful speech and become a persuasive orator.
He notes that his mother admonished him about sex because “she was alarmed for me,” but that he took her admonitions as “what one might expect” from a mother “which it would be a shame for me to follow.” But in spite of her concern
and although she knew that my passions were destructive even then and dangerous for the future, she did not think they should be restrained by the bonds of conjugal affection…, for she was afraid lest a wife should prove a hindrance and a burden to my hopes.
And so looking back, Augustine confessed:
Thou wast always by me, mercifully angry and flavoring all my unlawful pleasures with bitter discontent, …Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust held full sway in me.
In retrospect he realized that his mother’s warnings were God’s own intervention.
I thought that thou wast silent and that it was only she who spoke. Yet it was through her that thou didst not keep silence toward me; and in rejecting her counsel I was rejecting thee… But I did not realize this, and rushed on headlong with such blindness that, among my friends, I was ashamed to be less shameless than they…(II,3)
And thus Augustine like many another teenager, lived a life that kept him from listening to God’s call. But that would change when he stole some pears.
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For a brief explanation of each chapter of Augustines’s Confessions as well as other materials about Augustine, see : http://www.molloy.edu/sophia/augustine/conf_main.htm
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