A homily for what would otherwise be St Augustine's Day

Feast of Saint Augustine

28 August 2013

St Paul’s, K Street

✠ I speak to you in the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

As always when there is a saint, we have a biographical sketch. But today is the feast of my favorite theologian, my first philosophical love, and I hope you won’t mind if instead I say a few words from my own experience of Saint Augustine.

It would be hard to overstate his influence. This largely self-taught thinker, imbued with a smattering of ancient wisdom, some second-hand Platonism, and an ever-deepening knowledge of Scripture, produced a body of work that remains vital and powerful. To a surprising extent, Christians still think his thoughts, still understand with his mind, still draw up battle lines around his controversies. Even in reaction, he wields influence: would anyone be invested in the misguided contemporary project of rehabilitating Pelagius were it not a way to take a stand against Augustine, like a rebellious teenager clumsily trying to assert his independence from a strong and imposing father?

There are many themes that run throughout Augustine’s work, which he repeats in ever new ways – like a jazz improvisationalist, as a recent biographer put it. I want to speak very briefly of just one, and then close with a short passage from the Confessions that illustrates it.

God is beautiful, and the beautiful things that preoccupy us, distract us, delight us, entice us, are genuinely beautiful, because in their various ways they reflect God and point to God, who made them, and indeed made them to be beautiful, for his own sake and for ours. But the very beauty of these things can also be a snare and a danger, pulling us away from their Maker, tempting us to love for their sake, or for our own sake, the beautiful things that are worthy of love only in God, and for God’s sake. In our sin, the things of this world blind us to God; but through God’s grace, they can also remind us of God. Will we be blinded, or will we be reminded? The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance we owe only to the giver of all good things, and yet he wants to give us those things – in himself, and for his sake – so God himself, timeless, invisible, unchangeable, entered the world of time and change, the world of what is seen, to call us back to himself, and to feed us with himself, so that we may become what we eat.

Now hear these words from the Confessions, and notice how even in calling us to reflect on the beauty that is beyond all sensation, he uses the language of the senses, appealing to each of the senses in turn:

Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new! Late have I loved you! And behold, you were within, but I was outside and looked for you there, and in my ugliness I seized upon these beautiful things that you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you. Those things held me far away from you – things that would not even exist if they were not in you. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness; you flashed, you shone, and you dispersed my blindness; you breathed perfume, and I drew in my breath and pant for you; I tasted, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I was set on fire for your peace.

May the example and teaching of Saint Augustine set us on fire for the peace of God, which passes all understanding. Amen.