St. Augustine, Dad, and Me

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

St. Augustine, Dad, and Me David Paul Deavel, Editor One thing that converts to Catholicism are often asked is how their families took the change. My own parents were not happy, and my late father especially engaged me in many long conversations about my decision that were difficult and painful. One thing that perhaps bothered him a great deal was that I claimed to be following the path of Augustine, whom my father had always admired, if from a certain theological distance, as a lifelong Protestant. What made our distance greater was the territory we shared.1 In the history of theology it is fair to say that, next to Thomas Aquinas, there is probably no other figure in the history of theology who has played such an outsized role in exploring the faith once for all delivered unto the saints than Augustine of Hippo. The twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that the history of Western thought was merely a series of footnotes to the thought of Plato. The great historian of dogma Jaroslav Pelikan applied this equally to Augustine and noted that, like Aristotle, Dante, or Goethe, Augustine is one of those figures who is a kind of encyclopedia of thought in and of himself. His bibliography includes more than one hundred separate titles, and we have hundreds [End Page 5] of sermons from him recorded by stenographers. An old saying is Mentitur qui se totum legisse fatetur: He lies who says he’s read all his works. But even to read a few is to enter into the mind and heart of a genius. In the Confessions, probably his most beloved work, we meet a man who is not one of those plaster-of-paris saints that we sometimes find in our children’s books. John Henry Newman once said that if anybody wrote his biography, he wanted a real downright account. In Confessions we encounter a man who has written such a tale of himself. But while popular and brilliant and relatable, it is probably not even his greatest work. Augustine’s oeuvre is littered with masterpieces. Pelikan noted that if Augustine had only written one book of half a dozen or more, he would be remembered. Confessions, City of God, On the Trinity, On Free Choice of the Will, On Christian Doctrine, any one of his commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, on John—these are sheer brilliance in the service of faith that created echoes and arguments down through the centuries and will do so until time is no more. From Benedict of Nursia, Boethius, and Gregory the Great to Abelard, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Aquinas; from the Council of Trent, Calvin, and Luther to Pascal, Descartes, and Rousseau, Pelikan observes, we see that almost all of the interesting and powerful ideas, whether right or wrong, can be traced back to the North African bishop.2 I think we could easily add to the list in modern times, particularly Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. My own academic specialty, the thought of soon-to-be St. John Henry Newman was certainly of an Augustinian cast in many ways. While Newman was very much formed by the Eastern Fathers, my colleague Mark McInroy showed that in discussing theosis, or deification, the process by which we become not just good but gods—a doctrine many attribute solely to the East—Newman’s single most quoted Father was St. Augustine.3 One of the most famous episodes in his history of his religious opinions, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is when Newman has been given an article on the Donatists—and reads it with little [End Page 6] interest except for some words of St. Augustine: Securus iudicat orbis terrarum; The whole earth judges surely. Judges surely, that is, what is the true Catholic Church. The phrase echoed in his own mind as he thought about his own claim that the Anglican Church was truly the Catholic Church in England. This topic is where the history of Augustine’s influence on the whole Church meets his influence on me. Of the Protestant Reformation, B. B. Warfield, the nineteenth-century Princeton Presbyterian theologian declared it, “inwardly considered . . . just the...