“To the very last every problem is a problem of free will.”
—G.K. Chesterton
Among my first memories of Saint Augustine– prompting an immediate deep dive into its Confessionsone of the greatest memoirs ever written, was a tantalizing passage from Joseph Ratzinger’s book Introduction to Christianity, recounting the defining moment in Augustine’s life when, after discovering that “the famous philosopher Marius Victorinus had become a Christian,” his whole world suddenly fell apart. Because he too had been there and done that. It’s just that, unlike the repentant philosopher who freed himself from his pagan past, Augustine continues to cling to it.
“Victorinus had long refused to enter the Church,” the future pope recalled, “because he believed he already possessed in his philosophy all the essential elements of Christianity.” What is the point of becoming a member of an organization whose essence you have already absorbed? Wouldn’t it be a sort of fifth wheel to connect with a Church all the salient features of life and thought that you have already managed to understand? “Like many educated people of yesterday and today,” writes Ratzinger,
he saw the Church as a Platonism for the people, which he, as a full-fledged Platonist, had no need of. The decisive factor seemed to him to be the idea alone; only those who could not grasp it themselves, as the philosopher could, in his original form, It was necessary to be put in contact there through the ecclesiastical organization.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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But of course it’s all going to fall apart at the very moment when Victorinus, the clairvoyant sage of the Roman world, chose to be baptized and thus submit to a rule and discipline of faith whose contours he had not foreseen in advance. Only a movement of God’s grace could explain such a dramatic and unexpected change.
Ratzinger explains:
The great Platonist had come to understand that a Church is something more and other than an external institutionalization and organization of ideas. He understood that Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a way. The “We” of believers is not a secondary addition for little minds; in a certain sense, this is the question itself: community with one’s fellows is a reality which is located on a plane different from that of the simple “idea”.
In other words, all that Platonism can offer is an idea of truth, not truth as a path, not as a habit of life to which others are invited to submit, or even accept. with joy the yoke of obedience which he imposes. them. “Thus, belief encompasses,” says Ratzinger, “the entry into the worship of God by the community and therefore ultimately the fellowship that we call Church.
Christian belief is not an idea but life; it is not the spirit existing for itself, but the incarnation, the spirit in the body of history and its “We”. It is not the mysticism of the self-identification of the spirit with God, but obedience and service: the surpassing of oneself, the liberation of oneself precisely by placing oneself in service through something that I do not have not done or thought about, the release of being put into service for the whole.
After all, if Christ comes to us not as an idea but as the incarnate Word of the Father, who sent him into the world to suffer and die, then we must approach him in the same way. We are not tied to an abstraction, are we? And if we were to cling simply to an idea of faith, a faith separate from the very flesh in which God himself first came among us, how would we be different from the Platonists who sought to escape the flesh , convinced that she yielded to the flesh? neither insight nor salvation? A Church of Christ without Christ, how does it work?
Well, how does Augustine know all this about Victorinus? Who tells him? The story is told by a bishop named Simplicianus, who knew Victorinus well. And why does he tell Augustine? Because, as we learn from Augustine’s own words recorded in Book VIII of the Confessionshe himself had suspended the fire for a long time, not knowing whether or not he should throw himself into this same fountain in which Victorin had found new life.
Thus, Augustine writes, “to encourage me to follow the example of humility of Christ, who is “hidden to the wise and revealed to little children,” he speaks to me about Victorinus. Allow the example of this worthy man to consolidate, as it were, his own lack of courage and resolution. Also, as Augustine himself often reminds the reader, Confessions“because it shows the great glory of your grace and for your glory I must say it. »
Of course, in telling it, Augustine reveals his own shamefully indecisive heart. But isn’t this precisely what pleases us in his eyes, this desire to lay bare the baseness of his own heart? “When your servant Simplicianus told me the story of Victorinus,” he tells us (and God for whom Confessions are truly destined), “I began to radiate with fervor to imitate him. This is obviously why Simplicianus told me about it. Augustin wants to leave and do the same.
So what’s holding him back? Knowing the scenario, he surely knows the role he must now play. Yes, he does, and yet, finding himself prey to a sort of moral paralysis, he does nothing.
I was held fast, not by the chains imposed by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. For my will was perverse and lust came from it, and when I gave in to lust, the habit arose, and when I did not resist the habit, it became a necessity.
Meanwhile, the desire to surrender all things to God, to flee the chains that bind him, does not disappear; he persists, but he is not strong enough to prevail. And yet, he tells us,
it was by my own action that habit had become such a powerful enemy, because it was by my own will that I had arrived at the state in which I no longer wished to remain. Instead of fearing, as I should, of being held back by everything that weighed me down, I was afraid of freeing myself from it. In fact, I bore the burden of the world with as much contentment as one sometimes bears the heavy burden of sleep. My thoughts, as I meditated on You, were like the efforts of a man who tries to wake up but fails and falls back into the depths of sleep.
Augustine is quite certain, you see, that this is a much better thing, as he says:
abandon myself to your love rather than abandon myself to my own lust. But even though I wanted to follow the first path and was convinced that it was the right solution, I was still a slave to the pleasures of the second.
Thus, like the apostle Paul, who speaks for us all in his Letter to the Romans (7:24-25), Augustine will also exclaim:
Pitiful creature that I was, who was to deliver me from a nature thus doomed to death? Nothing but the grace of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Grace will certainly come to him, falling like dew on the parched and gutted ground, but in God’s time, which only He can measure. But few people will have written as fascinating an account of his descendants as Augustine, who tells this unforgettable story in the Confessions— written toward the end of the fourth century — whose application to our own confused and confusing century could hardly have been more prescient.
(Image: The Conversion of Saint Augustine by Fra Angelico)
