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Happy Augustine’s Birthday!
November 13 is the birthday of Augustine, and now you know. Something else you know is that the near future looks like a terrible mess. Let’s know the past while we work on fixing that. Augustine ain’t as important as or insightful as the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospels, but he sure does top your average Greek philosopher. The purpose of life is not money, power, fame, or physical pleasures; it’s the love of G-d and neighbor.
That’s all I got for the moment. I have a new book on Augustine coming out, and I’ll try to do a few posts on that later. For now, I’ll just give you this link to my first (and cheap) Augustine book, and this nifty tip on the subject of its third chapter:
Augustine’s second surviving book features a conversation held on his birthday in Cassiciacum, near Milan. They use his birthday meal as an opportunity to talk about the meaning of life. There’s some Stoicism stuff, some Plato stuff, and most importantly some Bible stuff that’s not exactly 100% compatible with the Stoicism and Plato stuff. It’s a short and delightful little philosophy/theology book. The book is called De Beata Vita, On the Happy Life.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
One of my favorite saints and doctors of the church. “Our heart is restless. . .”
Yes, a wonderful line, that.
Thank you for the book recommendation. I ordered it from Amazon, and it should arrive before I leave for a week to visit my mother.
“The good earthly kingdom is just a benevolent band of robbers.”
Returning to Catholicism 3 or so years ago I was hungry for reading and have wandered through many delightful reads. Wanting to listen and learn from those in the church who came before me I decorated my bookshelf with some Aquinas, Assisi, Augustine, Barron, Ratzinger and others. Just recently started St. Augustine’s Confessions. It was a delight to see his memorial show up on my calendar. Thanks for this post!
Cool. Thanks!
Someday, I really need to do a post on the question whether Augustine really is a Catholic, and why or why not.
Lol.
Why?
Years ago I studied patristics, including some writings of Augustine, and realized at some point that many of the church fathers simply did not read the biblical text the way we do today. It was as if they read each sentence independently from the others, and filtered it through some form of Greek philosophy. They imposed foreign problematics on the text. They read letters of the apostles as if they were oracles of mystical knowledge and not letters. Anyone who reads any of the letters of Paul today and who is informed by modern scholarship of any denomination or persuasion whatsoever would be left mystified by the ancient commentaries of the church fathers. For example…and I’m going out on a limb here… but my recollection of Augustine’s discussion of Romans and other Pauline texts seems to show no understanding whatsoever of justification by faith, either the old pre-Protestant Catholic understanding or the Protestant one.
I never really knew what to make of this. It was intriguing, though, to realize that even very early church commentators viewed the texts of the New Testament as divinely inspired oracles.
Augustine: sometimes.
Still sometimes.
Fair enough, although contemporary scholars do that too.
Why not both?
Lately I’ve been reading his commentaries on the Psalms. Justification by faith does turn up there.
I’m not sure I follow. How are you using the word “oracle”?
Something that is divinely inspired in some way. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word oracle. The point is that they seemed to view the text as almost magical, each word or sentence conveying its own inspired meaning without regard to the overall meaning of the letter or gospel or whatever.
I wish I could find some of my old papers. In one of them I mentioned that Augustine seemed to be imposing “foreign problematics” on the text. My professor, who was a well known patristics scholar, wrote in the margin “To be sure.” In other words, “No duh, dumbass.” But if that’s what he thought, I wondered what value did he find in Augustine’s interpretation?
Ok, then it is an oracle.
Yes, that does happen. I wrote a whole paper on the topic. (I’ll get the dang thing published somewhere, someday.)
That’s not because they believe it’s divinely inspired. In Augustine’s case, it’s because he has a particular theory about how words work.
What is a “problematic”?
And aren’t modern scholars imposing foreign problematics on the text?
How did you know it was his birthday? My first reaction was, how did I miss it? I would have come across his feast day in a number of ways: liturgy of the hours, Mass readings. I should have seen it. But then I realized you said birthday, not feast day. Feast day is typically the anniversary of their death. I would never have come across a saint’s birthday. My next reaction, where did they record St. Augustine’s birthday?
However you knew, thank you for posting. He’s one of my favorite saints too.
He was Catholic. Should I pull up his devotion to the Virgin Mary? Should I pull his writing on the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist? Should I pull up his writings on all the sacraments? Remember he celebrated Mass every day. He had established a monastic order.
See the prologue to De Beata Vita. “My birthday was the ides of November,” he says.
By that reasoning, I can argue he’s Protestant by talking about all the things we agree with that he thinks–which, sometimes, Protestants actually got from him.
Or maybe I could find some bit of Platonism in his thinking that is not consistent with Catholic theology.
But what actually is the criterion for saying some Church Father is Catholic? It ought to be more than agreeing on this or that point of theology or doing this or that thing that Anglicans or Eastern Orthodox believers might also do.
Well he was a bishop in the Catholic Church. I would imagine that would be a start.
That’s a terrible start. That argument assumes that the Catholic church is the correct church. If we’re just going to assume that, then we can skip past Augustine and have me convert.
It’s an issue that presents a problem which can be discussed and contemplated.
Modern scholars impose foreign problematics…meaning issues that would never have occurred to the writers or original readers of the text…but I think they also understand the texts in a way much closer to the way the original writers and readers understood them. The recipients of the letter to the Romans didn’t know they were reading scripture when they read it. Augustine thought he was. From what I recall, his understanding of what he was reading was probably nothing like the understanding of the original recipients.
Sometimes. Sometimes no, not at all.
Yes, they did know. They knew it was the infallible testimony of an apostle. The first generation knew they were reading and writing Scripture. I can cite some primary sources (i.e., Bible verses) myself, but it’s better to read just one book that explains this marvelously. It’s by Michael Kruger, and it’s called The Question of Canon.
That’s fine if you appreciate him as a Protestant. I’m sure there is an overwhelming overlap. I think Lutherans and Anglicans (denominations that recognize sainthood) consider him a saint. This is what you actually said:
I’m happy if Protestants revere and find commonality with St. Augustine but you said he’s not Catholic. Or suggested as such. That’s ridiculous. As I said, he was a bishop in the Catholic Church and it dawned on me that he is also a Doctor of the Church. Perhaps you are not aware of what that actually requires. As bishop he is required to uphold the Magisterial teachings of the Church. That means he’s supposed to accept and promote Catholic doctrine established to his lifetime. As Doctor of the Church, he is a recognized contributor to theology and doctrine. That means that future writers of the Church used and built upon his writing as a development to theology or doctrine. So between those two titles, he is a lynchpin of Catholic doctrine from before his lifetime (as bishop) and a lynchpin of development after his lifetime (as Doctor). He is thoroughly integrated to Catholic theology.
Now it’s possible that some of his writing was off the reservation, so to speak. Not everything a Doctor of the Church is necessarily accepted by the Church as Magisterial teaching. But I’m not aware of any. I am actually aware of a point or two of Thomas Aquinas that is not accepted as Church teaching but nothing from St. Augustine. But both wrote so much (thousands of pages each!) that it’s quite surprising that more isn’t found to be unacceptable. You would think they would have stumbled along the way.
What particularly of Augustine do you find distinctly “Protestant” but not Catholic?
I don’t know. On the one hand I don’t see why Augustine would read it any different than us. On the other hand modern scholars introduce all sorts of heresies and biases that I don’t find acceptable and alter understanding. I think your point presupposes a snobbishness of time, supposedly linked to “progress.”
No. I only said it was a real question.
It’s not as I explained.
I don’t think he was.
You are assuming that the Catholic church is the correct church. That’s the only way the church he was a bishop in is the same thing as the Catholic church.
Give me an argument that does not assume that the Catholic church is the correct church.
I have never seen him affirm magisterial infallibility, of course. What else?
With a bad argument, yes. Why don’t you try a better one?
Belatedly Happy Birthday, friend of mine.
I hope your coming year offers you a lot of opportunities for adventure and great fun with your family and your fave pursuits.
(With many more birthdays to com.)
You couldn’t just let him enjoy his birthday, could you!
Now he won’t properly digest the birthday cake due to having to figure out the proper logical response. (I’m kidding. I don’t even think the kids would leave him much b-day cake.)
Anyway the thing I always enjoyed about the good saint was that he was someone who had sowed a lot of wild oats before settling down. Yet still the Vatican deemed him a saint.
This suggests there is hope for us all.
First of all, the Catholic Church is the correct Church from St. Peter onward. You can look up the succession of Popes. Second of all, I have never heard Protestants deny that the Catholic Church was not the Catholic Church after the Emperor Constantine. Augustine lived a 100 years after Constantine, well after what some Protestants claim – very incorrectly – the Catholic Church was formed. You need to read the early Church Fathers. Jimmy Aikin explains how early the Church was already called the Catholic Church.