The Modernity Of Saint Augustine

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Guit-ton

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Tne modjerni-by of Saint;
Angus-bine

THE
MODERNITY OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

THE MODERNITY

OF
SAINT AUGUSTINE

JEAN GUITTON
Translated by A. V. LITTLEDALE

HELICON PRESS
Baltimore Maryland

NIHIL OBSTAT: Hubertus Richards, S.T.L., L.S.S.
IMPRIMATUR: E. Morrogh Bernard,

Vic. Gen.
Westmonasterii) die 140 Aprilis, 1959

The Modernity of Saint Augustine was first published in French,
under the title Actualite de Saint Augustin, by Editions Grasset.

I translation Geoffrey Chapman Ltd and Helicon Press, Inc., 1959

All Rights Reserved

Made and printed in Great Britain by The pitchling Press, for the

publisher, Helicon Press, Inc., 5305 East Drive, Baltimore, 27,

Maryland, in June 1959

- "';. : :.--,J CONTENTS

PREFACE *

INTRODUCTION 6

I THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 9

Freud 19

Proust 2 4

Gide 26

Sartre 2 9

Conclusion 34

II SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 3^

Hegel 55

III THE UNION OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL HISTORY 63

Newman ^5

IV ST AUGUSTINE'S PLAGE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 7 1
NOTES 8 7

To

my friends in Geneva

PREFACE

ST AUGUSTINE is one of my masters in the interior
life. He was the chief influence in the formative
years of my youth. For more than seven years, he
was the subject of my daily meditations for a thesis
I was preparing on his thought. I took care not
to let my attention become fixed on a particular
section of his work or on any one phase of his life
(not even the antipelagian phase, the last, and
highly important, one), but to keep the whole
constantly in view, comparing himself with
himself.

In studying a thinker who has had such endur-
ing influence in the course of history, it is quite
amazing to follow the variations in standpoint
from which he has been regarded. If we had had
to consider St Augustine in the seventeenth
century, and to summarise the essence of his
thought, our subject would inevitably have been
that of grace. Now, however, we are mainly con-
cerned with other questions : existence and creation
in time, the stages of the spiritual life, history
viewed in its totality, the definition of the Church,

2 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

the relation between the history of the Church and
that of mankind, the relation of Christ with the
temporal order. At any rate, these were the
matters that engaged me when, thirty years ago,
I started on the study of St Augustine. sjgt * s
difficult to conceive how these studies woulil be
looked on by an Augustine returned to the present
world, having discarded the accoutrements of his
own epoch, and oblivious of the events of JShis
personal history, the stimulus of controversy, the
inevitable exaggerations of his expressions; an
Augustine, in fact, who strove to see his essential
self, as he sees himself now in eternity. Would he,
I wonder, look upon himself as a Christian
philosopher of the school of Plato, or as the
Doctor of Grace, or, as I try to see him, as the
thinker who long in advance of all others gained
some understanding of the nature of time in its
relation to the life of the soul and of mankind in
general ?

Whatever answer, conjectural in any case, may
be given to this question, my choice is made. My
aim is to gain some idea of the kind of solution
given by St Augustine to the various types of
problem thinkers have set themselves on the sub-
ject of temporal existence. I agree with Sainte-
Beuve that our ideas run along a few specified

PREFACE 3

lines, that the problems confronting the human
mind and the solutions proposed to them are
not so very numerous. That being so, it seems to
me that it is feasible to draw up a chart of these
problems and of their possible solutions, and that
this 'enumeration 3 will assist us in our choice.
I have preferred to deal with those problems that
here and now occupy Western thinkers, be they
religious or not.

These problems are not by any means new, but
they have been restated in forcible fashion: and,
making use of St Augustine as a master, not dead
but living and present, I have conjectured what
he would have said and thought in the present
time, this second end of the world. He had his
wily opponents, Donatus, Manes, Pelagius; his
somewhat doubtful allies, Plato and Plotinus; his
friends, highly esteemed indeed, but so different
from himself, Ambrose, Jerome, Paulinus of Nola;
and I have looked for their replicas in our own
time. I have always looked on doctrines as the
roles in a drama, and on writers of past ages as
the actors performing and transfiguring these
eternal roles, each in accord with his vocation and
his particular nature. Yet despite their originality,
these actors cannot hide the fact that the text
remains always the same.

4 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

It is on this account that St Augustine has
helped me to gain a clearer insight into this
harassed world, from the year 1924, when I first
became acquainted with him, to 1954, when I
wrote this small work. Through all these thirty
years I have remained convinced that St Augus-
tine's thought provides a commanding position
from which to judge my own time, and is becom-
ing constantly more relevant.

I could see the relevance of his thought after the
upheavals of the first war, and at the time when
the first stirrings of the oecumenical movement
directed men's thoughts to the Church, when my
own master at the Sorbonne, Leon Brunschvicg,
taught the doctrine of salvation by pure reason in
the universe of Spinoza and Fichte. It appeared
more clearly still as 1938 approached, when we
could foresee and dread a new Tall of Rome' and
an interval of barbarism in Europe. And anyone
who reads these pages can see how the problems
of existence, destiny, civilisation, the Church and
hope that confront us in 1955, seem to me
already present to the mind of St Augustine.

Consequently, when, on the occasion of the six-
teenth centenary of his birth, those engaged in
organising meetings of commemoration asked me
to speak of his actualite, his relevance at the

PREFACE

present time, at Paris and, more especially, at
Geneva before the faculty of Protestant theology,
I agreed to do so. This work contains my
thoughts on the subject.*

1 1 February 1 955

* This book was first published two months before the
new edition of my thesis. Existence et Destinee, le temps et
I 9 eternit^ chez Plotin et saint Augustin (Aubier), with a
new preface, which forms the final chapter of this present
edition.

INTRODUCTION

TODAY it is sixteen centuries since St Augustine
was born, the i3th of November, 354. Quindecim
annos, wrote Tacitus, grande humani aevi spatium:
a long period in a human life. In the life of the
human race, sixteen centuries is also a long period ;
but in that period there has been a constant revival
of St Augustine. A Roman legend has it that three
fountains sprang up from the ground where
St Paul's head touched it three times. Likewise,
we may say that St Augustine's thought touched
Western history three times, and, on each occa-
sion there sprang up a new stream: first, in the
Middle Ages, when he became the inspiration of
political and scholastic thought; then in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, when the
Reformers and innovators drew from him their
sustenance; and lastly, in modern times the
time of Kierkegaard and Hegel, Bergson and
Blondel, Mauriac and Claudel wherein his
presence, though veiled, is yet so palpable.
Perhaps, we might even say that the workings of
time have brought to light his real depths; that

6

INTRODUCTION 7

the medieval Augustinism, which mainly brought
out his latent Platonisrn, fell short of the Augus-
tinism of the controversies on grace ; that, though
these disputes were seen to be inspired by him,
it was reserved to the present epoch to share his
most profound intuition, his conception of exist-
ence in time. However this may be, Newman was
right when he said that St Augustine gave, as it
were, c a new edition of Christianity 3 , and that lie,
'though no infallible teacher, formed the mind of
Christian Europe'. We are to look on him, as on
St Paul before him, as a chance appearance of
extreme improbability, coming just at the moment
when the tree of Christianity in order to develop
needed a new graft, redirecting, heightening,
colouring, perhaps even altering with the addition
of its dark substance the Catholic sap. Take away
Augustine from the patristic age, Paul from the
early Church, and the course of Western history
would have been quite different.

When we commemorate the day of someone's
death, we look at things from a human standpoint ;
we recall what he did in his short passage through
history. But if we concern ourselves with his date
of birth we adopt a divine standpoint; we set
ourselves, unawares, the question of predestina-
tion; why, before this person came to be, had the

8 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

author of all history chosen him out, what mission
did he give him, just a fragile being newly come
to this earth?

This is the question I hope to answer in some
way at the end of this work in the course of
which I shall constantly note St Augustine's
modernity and the similarity between his time
and our own.

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY

WHEN he was forty-three, twelve years after his
conversion and Baptism, St Augustine wrote the
twelve books of his Confessions, to give an account
of himself, before God, to man: Apud te, haec
narro, generi meo, generi humano. Of all his works
none spread more widely. This incommunicable
experience of his was of value for all; ten centuries
later, minds so different as those of Petrarch and
St Teresa of Avila were to find in it the story of
their own spiritual course. Modern man, too,
comes more and more to recognise himself in it.

So powerful was the Greek tradition, which
ignored the historical factor in human knowledge,
that this work, which echoed so strongly down the
ages, remained neglected by philosophers. Psy-
chology of the Aristotelian type studies the soul as
one thing among others, and is concerned with
detecting its way of functioning. The soul is made
to reflect external reality as a mirror does. For
this reason, classical psychology excels in analys-
ing those two contrasting states in which the soul
coincides with nature and is absorbed in it,

9

I O THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

namely sensation and intellection. All that inter-
mediate activity in which the intellect gradually
develops and the will comes to life has significance
only in its relation to the pure activities of sense-
perception, understanding and decision. Now,
what we first discern in ourselves are individual
recollections, personal happenings, and it is
through these that man advances in self-know-
ledge. History is the very stuff of human conscious-
ness.

It is then understandable that the idea of the
inner history of an individual never suggested
itself to the Greek mind. This was not because the
Greek, as is so often said, had no conception of the
'person', but rather because in the pure Greek
view there was no real connection between the
event and the person. The occurrences of life
were but the accidents, even the defects, of life.
Hence, for Aristotle, the magnanimous man is as
devoid of memory as of zeal. He does not speak of
himself any more than of anyone else. He is
exempt from passion, and is likewise without
history. It is the same with the wise man of the
Stoics, who neither remembers nor sins. If he is
converted to wisdom, it is a radical transformation
which fixes him immutably in that stage. He does
not advance, he is borne away beyond time. If his

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY I I

life comes to be written we will be given a
portrait of this superlative state. This is what
Diogenes Laertius does for Pythagoras, Damascius
for Proclus, Porphyry for Plotinus, Philostratus
for Apollonius of Thyana. Marcus Aurelius, the
mild emperor, does not describe himself nor
write his confessions; but, in the context of events
whose details he does not trouble to furnish, he
compares himself to an ideal of impassivity,
which he laments that he has not reached. When
one of the ancient philosophers contemplates
existence, he leaves out of account the most
striking features of the human condition; and, if
all the same he knows himself, he does so not by
viewing the whole course of his life and drawing
on a full memory, but by intuition of his essence,
by recollection of those fleeting instants when he
realised his type in the light of a moment of
perfection and 'as he is at the end when changed
by eternity 5 .

We moderns however, avid readers of novels
and autobiographies, have become familiar with
the idea that man lives in time, that he travels in a
direction which cannot be reversed, that every
moment of time has its value, its special savour,
its eternal significance. This was not the case
with the ancients, nor is it with the Indian

12 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

philosophers; and Nietzsche himself, in his
ecstasy of Sils-Maria, believed himself to have
grasped the law of the eternal cycle : c Let every-
thing return in ceaseless repetition this is the
ultimate rejoining of a world of becoming with a
world of being, the highest point of meditation 3 .

Why is it, though, that the idea of personal and
interior history has been so little entertained by the
mind of man? No doubt because, for most men,
such a history is so uneventful. And perhaps, on
the other hand, because in such a history some-
thing irrevocable has happened, and they want to
blot it out altogether. This something we call sin.

The tendency of the Greeks was to look on sin
as something that happened inevitably, like mis-
chances in the world of nature; for them, the
"faulty 5 was never far removed from the 'fatal*.
If we accepted the view implied by the great
tragedians, we would have to reduce moral error
to an aberration wrought by destiny, equate evil
with insolence, and ascribe punishment to the
operation of a natural and necessary law. Plato
invariably looked on the wicked as sick men, and
regarded sin as error. Certainly, Aristotle did not
follow him in this confusion, for he specified the
share of the will in human action; but with
Plotinus we see revived, in a form scarcely differ-

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 13

ent, and with a few elements taken over from
Stoicism, the old popular notion that sin is a blot
not affecting the inner being of the soul. It is
held to be, as it were, the addition to the soul of an
element which irks and sullies it, and which it
ought to get rid of. The perverse man is abnormal,
a monster. Sin is a kind of consent wrung from
the soul by those evil passions that spring from
its embodiments; rather than error, it would
seem to be accident. Whatever the case may be,
the wise man never sins, and could not. So, then,
there is a mysterious link between the sense of
(personal) evil and the sense of (historical) time:
at every period when the sense of evil is alive, the
sense of time is seen to be present. When the sense
of evil grows weak, the sense of historical time, of
the irreversible course of time marked out by
particular events lessens correspondingly.

The history of the Jewish people provides an
example of this profound relationship; for it is
not too much to say that it was in Israel that the
mind of man discovered the nature of evil. In
this history we see man becoming conscious of
history through sin, repentance, vocation and
return. This happened at first in a collective
fashion, the individual feeling himself guilty or
called merely in so far as he was a part of the

14 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

whole people; but the work of the prophets
individualised this communal feeling. Ultimately
there came a time when certain privileged souls
among the Jews became convinced that in their
own particular lives, obscure though these were,
they re-enacted the whole history of the people.
The duration of the whole was condensed into
that of an individual, as in a mirror reflecting it.
Each individual sinned on his own account, and
each was converted. Each one was called by
name. The mystery of Abraham was reproduced
in each individual conscience.

Yet before St Augustine the history of personal
sin, which is now the theme of modern tragedy,
the gradual invasion of the self by the flesh
usurping in us the role of the spirit and attempting
to justify itself, the adjustment effected between
the various parts of the self, the coincidence of the
moment of liberation with that of the most
strenuous resistance, the fluctuations of the
deepest self which refuses, at the last, to identify
itself with the flesh, and which, at the very time
when it effects its detachment from the depths of
evil ? feels itself caught up in the depths of the
good this history had, as yet, found no literary
expression. We may say that St Augustine is the
first man in the West to have attained, in personal

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 15

fashion, the experience the Jewish people had
reached, in a collective way. 1

There would, however, be little point in history
if it consisted of nothing more than an account of
what happened, or even of an explanation of
events by their antecedents. History of that sort
is only a section of real history, just as a map gives
only an indication of distance and height.
Integral history would be both linear 9 like human
history, and vertical, like history as seen by God in
his eternity, as made by him out of the material
of our own history. It would be one in which the
working of secondary causes would be seen related
to that of the first cause. Nor are we to hold it to
be impossible, for it is such a history that, using
artistic symbols, the Jewish prophets (Isaias for
instance) attempted to write.

St Augustine may be said to have tried to
apply the rules of this kind of prophetical writing
to his own personal history; he tried to watch
his own history unfold itself within the eternity which
knows no change.

What St Augustine calls predestination is
precisely that vertical activity by which the
moments of our historical duration are harmoni-
ously adjusted one to another. In the Confessions
he brings out> in the midst of the incidents and

1 6 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

chance happenings of his life, the persuasive,
insinuating, insistent, even secret, action which
enlightens without dazzling, which draws out
without compelling. It is an action which is the
outcome of art, but of a divine art which disposes
the will while leaving freedom intact. It can do so
because the Eternal is more present to a being than
that being is to itself; He is able gently to mould
the heart. He can, too, make use of the most
ordinary contingencies to endow the words and
acts of our associates, without their knowledge,
with a spiritual significance exclusive to our-
selves. Sometimes by secret stirrings, 2 sometimes
by the prompting of circumstances, God recalls
the soul to itself. In the most unexpected ways 3 he
makes it aware of its wretchedness, 4 consoles it
and makes it run in his paths. 5 His hand is ever
present to re-create and restore what he has made. 6
Furthermore, he knows how to make use of the
evil that man does, for he does not cease to bring
into order what he condemns: though he does not
create it, yet he orders it to the good; the bitter-
ness which permeates illicit pleasure is fore-
ordained by his mercy, and the soul's conscious-
ness of its disorder is itself a part of order, being
the effect of a law. 7

There is in consequence always a harmony

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY I J

between the interior state of the soul and the
unlooked-for helps It finds, whether these come
from within or from outside itself. The most
perfect type of this harmony which is at one and
the same time the end to which all the others
tend and the outcome they jointly prepare is the
death of the righteous man; for his death is but
the coincidence of the end of his life with the state
of grace. Final perseverance, therefore, is nothing
else than the fulfilment of predestination. 8

From this vantage point we may say that time
can get the better of evil i for the evil we have given
up is no longer evil. The actual occurrence
remains: it is written in God himself, whose
omnipotence cannot efface it, and cannot, for
instance, bring it about that Judas did not
commit his act of treason. But the act underlying
the occurrence changes its significance with the
repentance and becomes matter for homage, in
which consists 'confession 5 . Duration and liberty
are thus related. The substance of time lies
beyond the present; it is the final moment by
which the whole sequence is judged. The very
core of time is its tension towards eternity.

The account of the Confessions seems to give the
impression of afore-ordained destiny. If God hears
our prayers, it is because he has already formed

1 8 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

them. 9 He governs us in a hidden fashion even in
our disorders. 10 Even a man's self-persuasion is his
doing. 11 Like other thinkers in their analysis of
freedom St Augustine restricted the sphere of free
will. But freedom is no more destroyed through
being upheld by a power of another order than is
time absorbed by eternity. These are two aspects
of one and the same problem. St Augustine
believed that our being overflows beyond itself:
there is more in our action than our own part in
it, more in the event than what we are aware of,
more even in freedom than the independence we
feel, more in prayer than the temporal petition. 12

Consciousness gives out at the point where God's
action begins. When we pursue immanence to its
ultimate reach, we come upon transcendence.
When we have fully analysed the free act, we
discover the place where freedom is grounded.
When we penetrate the depths of time, we come
to savour eternity. 13

That is why St Augustine could speak in the
same breath in terms of human freedom and in
terms of predestination, that is, of divine freedom.
If he was ever tempted to abandon the first,
lie would be recalled to it by the memory of his
sins. If he forgot the second, he had only to reflect
on the gift of God, to be reminded of it. No one

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 1 9

was more convinced than he of the primacy of
grace, and yet no one has ever described with
greater precision the vacillations of freedom, the
hesitancy of the will in its decisions. No one
believes more fully in the transcendence of God
and of his justice (to some his conception of God
seems fearsome) ; yet no one has striven so much
to grasp God's immanence, so respectful of human
freedom.

The reality of succession is due to him who
created time, for how could times succeed one
another, unless he contained them all? 14 It is he,
too, who gives value to history, for the events of
history would be without significance, if God, by
consenting to will himself in them, did not bring
us thereby to will ourselves in him.. 15
* * #

Here, by way of parenthesis, I will pass over
the intervening ages, and attempt a comparison
of St Augustine's intuition with that of some
modern writers, apparently at the furthest re-
move from Mm.

FREUD

The most remarkable case is that of Freud, for
while he certainly seems to have felt no direct
influence of St Augustine, to have had no

2O THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

acquaintance with his writings, Freud seems to
have derived from Augustine at times his own
opinions, at times his terminology. The libido is
there in the Confessions^ as also the idea of the
pervertibility, the actual perversion, of infancy.
Let us look beyond the differences: the modern
techniques, the powerful, and often fruitful,
myth of scientific precision and of determinism;
and compare their general outlook.

We find both in St Augustine and in Freud the
idea that the psychic life goes deeper than the
conscious level; that our conscious arises out of a
special sphere, the unconscious (which St Augus-
tine calk memoria^ the "memory 5 ) ; that the child
is already a responsible person, although he does
not know it; that his most natural acts, such as
those directed to the breast which feeds him, are
not pure but already tainted with perversity
(which St Augustine, using St John's expression,
calls 'concupiscence 3 }. There the similarities
cease, for St Augustine had not the least concep-
tion of the idea of neurosis ; at any rate, those
suffering from neuroses and mental disorders he
looked on as among the 'possessed', about whom
he drew his information from Scripture, paying
due regard to individual cases when he came
across them. The idea of finding a place for them

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 21

in the natural order and considering them as sick
persons could find no place in his mind; still less
could that of healing these diseases by any sort
of method other than that of St Mark's Gospel,
fasting and prayer.

We may, however, conjecture what an Augus-
tinian Freud or a Freudian Augustine would have
been like.

Freud's whole system assumes that the spiritual
world (not only the order of grace, but that of the
mind in its highest activities) has no real, inde-
pendent existence of its own as if, consequently,
all causality, all life, could be explained by
biological factors, whether simple or complex:
instinct and combinations of instincts.

No doubt, the idea could also be found in St
Augustine that combinations of instincts bound
up in the original warping of our nature from the
time of Adam, have a sovereign power, since
'concupiscence' in the child is active in its pure
impurity. He was, too, alive to the fact that self-
knowledge could counter the force of concupis-
cence since his Confessions, taken as a whole, were
an exercise in self-awareness written in order to
purify and free himself. Finally, in St Augustine as
in St Paul before him, can be discerned the idea
that the defences erected by society, instead of

22 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

assisting the struggle against libido, are liable
rather to intensify concupiscence by exasperating
it. From this point of view, we may see in St
Augustine the first germs of the idea of 'repres-
sion*.

The difference is that, for St Augustine, the life
of the unconscious from which emerges the ego is
not a life of dubious value in which instinct,
brought too soon to the level of thought, too soon
conscious even in the unconscious, becomes
perverted. Although his thought on original sin
includes the idea of a sin committed uncon-
sciously in Adam before the existence of the
individual, it is yet true that this sin is but an
accident of history, bound up with the racial fact
of our belonging to the line of Adam. In the
depths of his being, man remains bound to God ;
the source of our psychic life is above, not beneath,
us. Memoria is at the same time memory of God
and memory of ourselves.

Compare Freud on this question; indeed the
comparison arises naturally since, as I have said,
he himself made use of the Augustinian word
libido to designate the carnal instinct become
conscious, For both thinkers the tiny infant is
already possessed by evil powers; the defences
erected by society and rejected by him increase

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 23

his feeling of resentment. But from his perception
that the origins of our destiny are to be traced
ultimately to the twilight of pre-infancy, Freud
derives a materialistic theory of existence which
tends to explain the higher elements of our
nature love, art, religion as metamorphoses,
sublimations, of the lower, making the spirit,
in fact, but a hypocritical cloak for the flesh.

Suppose, now, we try to imagine what an
Augustinian Freud or a psycho-analytical St
Augustine would have been. All that is of value,
all the wisdom and the healing qualities in the
method of psycho-analysis would remain intact;
yet what a change in significance it would under-
go. No longer would the absolute from below (the
flesh become consciousness) be called upon to
explain the higher absolute, but it would be the
likeness of the soul to God which would make
itself felt, and which would be projected by
becoming degraded, even into our carnal states
and our unconsciousness. We would have a
psycho-analysis in reverse. And so the idea that
man is twofold, and not simple, as Freud's
optimism supposed in spite of what is so obviously
apparent, would explain our dissociations and
interior divisions, not only by social inhibitions,
but by the cleavage in man himself, caught

24 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

between the temptations of the flesh and the call
of love. Instead of the bio-social being set up by
Marxism following Freud, we would have one
which is both bio-social and spiritual, a 'mind-
body 5 giving its allegiance to value.

It is not too much to say that a depth psy-
chology of this kind, taking due account of the
different levels of the psychic life, giving to the
body what pertains to it, to the spirit its proper
place, and to a higher light its rightful scope, has
as yet never been put forward. We ought, too, to
add that its time has not yet come, for the
explanation in purely material terms (whether of
the Freudian or Marxist type) must certainly be
tried out first. Only the failure of this kind of
'explanation 5 will open the way to spirit. In all
probability, modern man has to take this round-
about way; he will not apprehend the spiritual
directly, but only through the impossibility of an
explanation which excludes it.

PROUST

A similar comparison could be made between
St Augustine and some modern novelists.

What after all is the modern novel in so many
cases but a remembrance indefinitely prolonged
and orchestrated? No one, perhaps, has brought

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 2

this kind of writing to such perfection as Proust.
No one at any rate has held so strongly to the idea
that, in recalling to memory time seemingly
vanished we have, according to the mysterious
expression of St Paul, a method of 'redeeming the
time', of regaining a kind of eternity. From this
point of view, Proust may be compared with
St Augustine, and moreover it may be estimated
how much this thought would have gained, had
he been an Augustinian.

Proust's memory is wholly taken up with the
human, it merely resuscitates the past with its
finely-wrought detail, its gaps, its successive
periods; but, now and then, in the instant of
aesthetic perception, it touches a point of
eternity, as did Augustine with Monica that
evening at Ostia; for instance, in the studio of the
painter, Elstir, or listening to Berma, or contem-
plating with Bergotte on the point of death, that
little yellow wall of Vermeer's. But Proust never
looks at his life as within God's eternity; the
sublimity of his perceptions never touches the
depths of the divine.

Likewise that sin of the flesh whose repugnance
he conveys to us shuts himself up within himself.
He cannot tear himself away from it by the act of
remembrance; for though he suffers from it,

26 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

even deplores it, he does not look on it as calling
for an act of mercy, whence he could survey it
with some kind of tranquillity. He is compelled
to stay bound to it, and his art itself is impaired
because of it.

GIDE

In Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Gide makes this ob-
servation: c The novel is concerned with the vicis-
situdes of life, good fortune and the reverse, social
relations, the war of the passions, with human
characters, but not with the very essence of man 3 .

It is certainly the case that Gide's earlier novels
are a meditation on the action of the Eternal
Being in time and, in this aspect, may be com-
pared with the experience recounted in the
Confessions.

Our temporal state is an abnormal one; we are
inwardly divided, ever escaping from ourselves
and pouring ourselves out, uncertain, restless and
incapable of possessing and even of being; this is
admitted. Everyone's desire is to become present
to himself, that is to live in a temporal state in
which the past is no longer finished and ended, the
future no longer uncertain, the present no longer
fluid. The instant wherein aU would be compre-
hended would be eternal life.

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 2J

Many however consider that the eternal present
cannot be given in the human form of time, that
it must be consigned by hope to a new time which
we call eternity and which will be met with after
death. This eternity, like the moral life itself, has
two poles. Just as there is an absolute distinction
between good and evil, so there is a corresponding
one between an eternity of life and an eternity of
death.

Others hold that the eternal present is to be
looked for in time itself. It is a question of
preparing certain moments which will have
eternal value and solidity; no waiting, then, nor
hope. What matters is to find a third dimension
of time; whether we call it presence, possession,
act, nourishment, it is nothing else than eternity.

That is Gide's position, and his ecstasies of
sense call for comparison with St Augustine's
ecstasy at Ostia. He may be called the anti-
Augustinian par excellence.

On the one hand, Gide rejects the absolute
distinction of the high and the low, of good and
evil. For him man has no essential quality., but an
accidental duplicity, and consequently it is only
necessary to throw off the mask of convention and
morality to find anew simplicity, nakedness and
innocence. But is Gidian man really simple?
B

28 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

In my opinion, he is not even just a double man
but a dissociated one, with so to speak two lives,
one supra-sensible of a mystical type, but of an
empty mysticism, the other infra-sensible of a
sensual type, but of a perverse sensuality. Gidian
man possesses a soul (ammo) and senses (sensus),
but not what could be called a heart (cor}.

On the other hand, in opposition to St Augus-
tine, Gide always assumes there is no difference
between time and eternity, or at any rate that
their difference can always be transcended by
realising absolute instants. Let us look into these
instants. Are they instants of possession ? Not at
all; they are instants of indigence, appetency and
desire. Of desire that hopes? No, but of desire
which aspires, and whose aspiration will never be
realised, so that for Gide the true fashion of
having is not to have. Gidian man knows
the ecstasy that lifts him up above time; he
knows, too, the voluptuousness that abases him
below time but he is unaware of that human
duration which is time itself and the sacrament
of eternity. In these aspects he enables us to
understand the Augustinian man whom he rejects.

The ultimate ground of the difference between
the two is this. Like Plotinus, Spinoza, and Gide,
St Augustine distinguishes two aspects in human

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 29

time: one, so to speak, horizontal, which is
tension towards the future, expectatio futurorum;
the other, so to speak, vertical, which is attention
to the eternal, extensio ad superiora. Spinoza called
horizontal time, duration; vertical time, the intel-
lectual love of God. Gide calls the first, desire ; the
second, fervour. Both Spinoza and Gide held
that, having distinguished these two currents
logically, we could separate them analogically by
a process of leaving aside all the temporal and
keeping only what is, already in this life, the
substance of the eternal. Plotinus, Spinoza and
Gide thought that this sifting and evading were
possible and in their eyes in this lies salvation.
Like them St Augustine knew the states of
deliverance the soul sometimes experiences
through the contemplation of truth; but he saw
in them not salvation, but only a foretaste of it.
For him, in short, there was but one way of
attaining the supreme ecstasy: by separating,
once and for all, these two axes of time, so as to
leave only the totally pure; and that was by
death. 16

SARTRE

Coming now to Sartre, I will first observe that
there is a profound resemblance between him

30 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

and St Augustine. Sartre's philosophy has always
made me think of the Manichaean period of
St Augustine.

The essence of Augustine's Manichaeism was
his inability to conceive existence except under
the form of matter, or, as he said, as massa. He
held that the spirit itself existed as a kind of
'mass 5 , sprung from matter, a prisoner in its
ponderous cage, reduced to a nonentity. This
massa exists in us, beneath us, as the evil part of
ourselves which lives on the biological plane, the
part to which we are indebted for the two forms
of indulgence: the spasm of pleasure and the
swelling of pride the part, in fact, which sins.
But above the zone taken over by sin there exists
a zone in which the spirit is disengaged, un-
fettered that of the being which depends on
itself alone, which is always conformed to its
ideal, since this ideal and its freedom are inter-
mingled.

All this amounts to the affirmation of two
theses. One, that the existence of matter, a mass
closed in on itself, is primary. The spirit exists at
first in a mode analogous to that of matter, shut
up in itself and at the same time outside itself
which is concupiscence. Two, that above this
existence which is truly ^-istent, there is a

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 31

possibility of absolute freedom unrelated to it.
Consequently when, at this time, St Augustine
sinned, he did not condemn himself; for it was
not his pure freedom which sinned, but there
worked in him the evil and 'massive' spirit, the
natura peccatrix unrelated to himself.

If we turn to the main points of the doctrine
set out in Being and Nothingness, we will find some-
thing analogous. Sartre holds being to be divided
into the In-itself (En-soi), which is without
awareness and material, and the For-itself (Pour-
soi), which is endowed with awareness and is
spiritual. But since the existence of the In-itself
is prior by right, like the Augustinian massa, it
follows that, seen from the In-itself, the For-itself
seems a useless excrescence since it adds to the fact
of being the absurd extra which is the awareness
of being and of suffering. The being which is
given to itself becomes suffering, captivity, ab-
surdity, as a spirit imprisoned in matter would
be; literally and truly, it is passion and useless
passion. Conversely, seen from the For-itself, that
is conceived, felt, perceived by an awareness, the
In-itself, that is the thing (an object, this tree
before me) is like an unknown entity projected
outside its essence, which is therefore de trap.
Consequently, both from the side of the being-

32 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

spirit and from that of the being-body (which,
fundamentally are not so very different, since the
spirit is, as it were, a massa cogitans), I find matter
to have the character of an existence which is an
excrescence, a projection and an absurdity.

But though existence is thus indicated and
condemned, it is not so with freedom, provided
this word be taken to mean that which makes the
very ground of our being, that is to say the power
to take up and use for one's own ends what
exists in nature and history, and to give to this
essence, this character, this behaviour which one
chooses, though void of value themselves, the
same sort of love one necessarily has for oneself.
In that case there is a sense in which it matters
little that the existence given to us is 'massive',
material, or to be condemned, or that, since we
are more clear-sighted as regards others than as
regards ourselves, we apprehend with horror this
condemnation of being in the existence of others,
for in oneself there is pure freedom. It is of
small account to have assigned to existence a
place lower even than that given ordinarily by
philosophers (even the philosophers of Becoming) ,
for freedom is exalted even above the place given
it by moralists (even the moralists of the Ideal
and of Duty) ; it is, indeed, an extremely high

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 33

value to be able to create value. It is, too, an
extremely heavy burden to be able to take on
oneself the inevitable.

We are here in the presence of a dualism carried
to extremes; and, no doubt, Sartrism is the
strongest expression of that eternal Catharism
which is the necessary consequence of the denial
of a single creative principle. Atheism, in fact,
cannot long remain monistic, not long explain
the totality of being by a single, identical prin-
ciple. At least, it can be such only in periods of
calm, with persons of optimistic temperament,
not subject to interior crises. But, once we
experience the rooted evil within us and outside
us, we can no longer admit absolute unity. Then
it is that, unless we affirm a transcendent principle
and a free creature faced with a good it did not
make itself, we are obliged to divide being into
two parts: one pura y the other impura, and to
assign to our freedom no relation with the impure
part.

That is why, in atheistic existentialism, we find
of necessity the same type of thought as in the
dualistic doctrine of Manes, which St Augustine
held for nine years. It is by no means to minimise
the doctrine of Being and Becoming, set out by
Sartre during the last war, to say that St Augus-

34 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

tine started from the point at which modern
thought seems tempted to end its journey.

We might draw other comparisons besides
these; some, in fact, suggest themselves forcibly,
as, for example, that of the spirit prompting St
Augustine with the general tone of the novels of
Mauriac or of Bernanos. These however I omit
and pass on to more difficult questions.

A single word could be used to express the
difference between St Augustine's inner experi-
ence and that of the moderns, however great
(with the exception of Claudel): the word
integrity. There occurs in one of St Augustine's
earliest works a wonderful sentence, extremely
compacted and impossible to translate: 'Ego in
discernendo et in connectendo unum volo et
unum amo. Sed cum discerno purgatum, cum
connecto integrum volo.' It may, perhaps, be
paraphrased as follows: 'Whether I divide things
up or join them together, I have the same end in
view, the same object of love. But, when I divide
(analyse) them, I aim at their purification; when
I rejoin (synthesise) them, it is with a view to
their integration/

St Augustine did indeed aim at achieving, with

THE INTERIOR MAN IN HISTORY 35

the help of the one Mediator, wholeness, the
gathering up of all the powers into a single har-
mony, the restoration of original integrity im-
paired by sin. Each degree of being was to be
respected and allotted its due place, but taken up
into a higher order. Here we have Plato redis-
covered, Pascal proclaimed and prefigured. Inte-
grum volo.

Ultimately, what we call experience is only too
often a diminution of experience. The sensual
imagine themselves to have experience of the
flesh. St Augustine, with all the memories of his
past, knew that the flesh could be known truly
only from the standpoint of purity recovered. As
Simone Weil said, purity alone has the power to
look on what is sullied. What the analysts and
novelists of to-day call experience is not integral
experience, but experience of disintegration.

II

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY

WE will now leave the side of the mountain that
is man in his inner being; and, before settling
ourselves on the crest, examine the other slope
which is mankind as a whole in time, man in
society, the City of God. Here, too, what a differ-
ence is apparent between St Augustine's ideas and
those of the philosophers.

The thinkers of antiquity may be said to have
looked on the social order as hierarchical. The
distinctions they admitted in society were based
on differences of function, those of magistrates,
guardians, and workers, as in Plato's Republic,
who were free men with acknowledged rights and
round whom was gathered a body of slaves on
whom the economy depended. The ancient city-
state could be likened to a pyramid, a mass
independent of time, made up of separate stones
each with its special function in the whole
structure but all subordinated to the highest of
them, for whom all the others exist the ruler,
the man of contemplation.

36

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 37

St Augustine's view was quite different. He
likened man's history to a musical work. The idea
was suggested by the writers of antiquity, who
saw time as a numbered sequence, a rhythm
perceived in the revolutions of the stars and their
spheres. In any rhythm, we can consider either
its repetitiveness which enables us to assign to it a
number; or else we can fix our attention on its
transitoriness and evanescence. It was this second
aspect with which St Augustine was mainly con-
cerned. For him, time was that which it was
impossible to take hold of. The nature of the
world is to be shifting and transient; and, as we
are fixed to a single part of it, we can never be in
enjoyment of the whole.

Let us recall how St Augustine analysed the
nature of time by scrutinising the simplest of
experiences.

Supposing, he says, I am about to sing some-
thing I know; before I begin the whole of it is
present to my attention. Once I have started, all
that part which is over and past rests present in
my memory; and so the life of my action is
divided into a part in the memory as regards
what I have said already, and another part in
expectation as regards what I am about to say.
Meanwhile, my attention remains in the present

38 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

and by Its means what was to be becomes a thing
of the past. According as this movement continues,
the area of memory is widened as that of expecta-
tion is narrowed, until the moment comes when
the latter is itself brought to nothing. Then it is
that the action is accomplished and has passed
over into the memory.

The analysis can be pushed further and further
in each direction, since what applies to the piece
as a whole is true, too, of each of its parts, every
syllable in fact. The same may be said of a more
extensive action of which this act of singing may
be but a part; of a whole life, in fact, of which a
man's separate actions are so many parts; and
also of the history of all the generations of men of
which the individual human lives are parts.

We have here a new conception of time or,
rather, a different way of being aware of time.

St Augustine did not aim at holding up the flow
of time at a particular chosen instant. On one
occasion he tried to do so and believed himself to
have been raised up by grace above the passage
of time. But the "ecstasy at Ostia* left him with a
sense of having failed. So then, time never stops
and it is no use wanting to halt it; all we can do is
to long for its cessation. The best thing for us is to
surrender to the passage of time and try to make

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 39

ourselves harmonise with its course. That is what
faith, more than any other activity of the mind,
enables us to do, since by it we come to be aware
of the gradual working-out of salvation, and this
makes of human history a poem.

From this it could easily be anticipated that, as
soon as a suitable occasion arose, a new view of
history as a whole, based on the similarity be-
tween the exterior and interior man, would take
shape of its own accord in St Augustine's mind.

Such an occasion was the sack of Rome. On the
24th of August, 410, the Salarian Gate was
forced by Alaric's hordes and they encamped
below the walls. These barbarians then began the
sack of the eternal City, and after six days of
pillage withdrew. From far away in Hippo, St
Augustine saw the significance of the event. It
meant the rupture of the ancient contract binding
the soul to earthly cities. It was an illustration of
the new alliance between the soul and the true
city.

There exists alongside the individual the city of
which he is a member and apart from which he
would be of no account. But there is an enormous
difference between the two. The individual has a
destiny of his own; he has scarcely come into
existence when he escapes the bonds both of the

40 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

body and of society. The word 'eternity 3 has a
distinct meaning for him, but it cannot possibly
mean anything for the city, which exists solely for
temporal convenience and provisionally. There
must of necessity arise a conflict between two such
opposed ends.

It is a conflict with a long history. It took its
rise in the city of antiquity with the pursuit of that
unrestricted thought called philosophy. This it
was which severed the relation set up of old
between the salvation of the soul and exterior
worship. Till then the need for salvation, so far
from turning man away from the city, had bound
him closely to its local gods and rites. At the
death of Socrates it would already have been
possible to divine that as the idea of salvation
became more and more purified, it would shake
the ancient cities to their foundations. The
master's great disciples, being equally concerned
to uphold the political order and to emancipate
the spirit, applied themselves to resolving the
opposition. Ultimately, even with Plato, this was
done to the advantage of the city. The Stoics in
their heyday, the heirs of the Aristotelian tradi-
tion on this point, looked on the Roman Empire
as being the image of a perfect city, universal and
Impervious to any sort of decay.

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 4!

St Augustine proceeded to show that the city
of the soldiers and politicians was incapable of
finding a way to save the State in time. He
presented a criticism of the politics and moral
teaching of the ancient world, and of popular
paganism. Neither the city of the philosophers
had discovered a method of saving the soul for
eternity, nor the Roman positivists, nor the
Platonic philosophy, nor Alexandrine mysticism,
nor the African wonderworkers. Porphyry and
Apuleius may have spoken about mediation, but
it was not a mediation that could bring salvation.
The catastrophe of 410 was the sign of a double
failure, that of the statesmen and soldiers and
their fine social order which could not even make
certain of temporal goods, and that of the philos-
ophers and mystics who were unable to assure to
men the goods of eternity.

There would have been no choice but to despair,
had not the mediation of Christ Incarnate been
offered to men. This takes us up into a new order,
which is temporal in its course, eternal in its fulfil-
ment. It opens up to man the passage hitherto
impossible.

We have a description of this movement. It
began with the creation of the angels, for Lucifer's
revolt preceded that of Adam; but through the

42 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

sin of the angel the moral order was split up into
two communions, into c two cities' , as St Augustine
says, of which one has love for its principle and
the other self-love, the counterfeit of love. Evil
was brought into the world through the warping
of the will. The dichotomy will never come to an
end.

Now the human order comes into being. The
fall of its first representatives is unfolded before us ;
we see the beginning of the period in which life is
invariably followed by death, the bitter fruit of
this fall. The two cities move apart; Cain builds
the earthly city, while Abel is a pilgrim on earth.
With Moses, however, the city, formerly in pil-
grimage, becomes settled; it receives a code of
laws, it becomes a people which prepares the
coming of the Church. The earthly city has a
history of its own, which is that of the Empires,
their establishment and their fortunes, particu-
larly of the Roman Empire which comes to replace
all the others. The two cities are not always
opposed, for the Empire gains from the order
coining from religion, and the Church from the
establishment of peace. Besides, their real frontiers
cannot be distinguished, since the Church has
reprobates among its members and some of its
children in the ranks of its enemies. This very

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 43

admixture requires, in justice, a state beyond
time wherein the good and the bad will be
separated and each go to his own place.

Time will come to an end, and with it the
whole political order. The saints, assembled in a
perfect society, will reign with Christ. Seen from
the vantage-point of the heavenly Jerusalem, in
which are found, sublimated, the characteristics of
ancient Rome, the horizon stands out clearly;
nature is simply a theatre, history but one aspect
of the whole context of things, and politics is
taken up only with ends of small importance. The
earthly Church itself, the sole normal means of
salvation, is only a provisional resting-place, an
outline structure.

Remember what was said above, in connection
with the Confessions, about that turning back of
the mind on itself, when, after looking at its own
life as it was, it seeks to view it in God. It is then
that narratio is followed by laudatio, and they both
are conjoined in confessio.

The same happens on the collective plane of
human history, and it is perfectly natural that St
Augustine's mind should pass through the same
phases.

So then, after considering human history in
itself and according to its apparent dimension of

44 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

pure successiveness, he goes on to view it in God
and in the context of predestination from eternity.

From the first, the purely temporal, standpoint
Christ was just a Nazarene who made his
appearance at a particular time and place, in this
hie et nunci and of similar hies et nuncs there is an
infinite number.

From the new standpoint 3 however, the whole
of history flows in relation to the God-Man.
Previously Christ was a golden rivet on the wheel;
now he is the nave, itself motionless, on which the
wheel revolves.

If it is hard to acknowledge that God enters
into history, that is because we fail to grasp the
complementary truth that history, through the
Incarnation, enters into God.

We must, then, first see the Incarnation as a
part of history, and Christ's coming in its tem-
poral setting, that is to say in its place in the
annals of political and religious events. Otherwise,
the Incarnation would never be anything more
than a mythical and insubstantial occurrence.
Consequently St Augustine shows with all the
learning possible in his day, the place occupied in
the whole of history by the Jewish people. He
takes care to underline the instances in which the
Biblical chronology corresponds with that of

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 45

other peoples. There were in fact many different
civilisations in existence at the same time; along
with the history of the Jews, there was the history
of Assyria, Greece, Egypt, and Rome. Abraham
came on the stage at the time when the Assyrians
had their fourth king, the Sicyonians their fifth.
The exodus from Egypt took place at the time of
Gecrops, Ascatades, Marathus and Triopas.
Christ was born in the reign of Herod, when
Augustus was emperor. Christianity, then, is not
a myth.

But if the Incarnation is no mythical event, it is
still not an historical event like any other, one
limited to a particular place and time. We have
just seen that it is a point in the visible history of
the world; we now go on to say that, of the in-
visible history it is the true centre and focus, for
that part of history unfolds within the Incarna-
tion. And it is through the presence of the Word
pervading all epochs of time that we are able to
transcend time.

No doubt, Christ came hie et nunc and his life
ceased in the course of time as an arrow is spent at
the end of its flight. But yet his teaching is given
to men at all times, and his sacrifice (whether
known or unknown to men) is at the centre of the
moral history of mankind. All good actions are in

46 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

relation with Ms one, perfect offering and all the
sacraments derive from him their efficacy. It
therefore matters little that the Incarnation took
place here and not there, so soon or so late, since
its effects extend to all centuries. It is quite
certain that Christ chose the times of his birth and
death; and this one case enables us to understand
how the dates of things and their allotted place in
the course of time can have a reason known to
God alone. Altogether the Incarnation owes to
chronology no more than a kind of support. In the
spiritual world it is at the centre, and it presides
over the course of history. It is the sole mediation,
the one efficacious theurgy; through it the eternal
comes to the rescue of the temporal and the tem-
poral in turn takes its place in the eternal.

We are now in a position to understand the
relation that obtains between the Jewish past and
the Christian present, between the Church and
the Churches, between the Church and the cities.

Christ is the immutable, eternal word, who
governs every creature both spiritual and cor-
poreal according to its situation in time and place.
This word is always the same, but it is expressed
differently in the different ages of human history.
The mystery of eternal life was proclaimed, from
the very beginning of the human race, by signs

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 47

and sacraments appropriate to the time. Then
God chose out a people to express in figure his
future coming and manifestation of himself, and
at the same time he prepared them for it; this was
the Jewish people. It had a very special destiny.
Its function was to symbolise, to proclaim, to pre-
figure. Its entire history is explained by its pro-
phetic mission.

Everything, so we read in the City of GW, not
only the prophecies made by word of mouth, not
only the moral and devotional precepts contained
in the sacred writings, but also the sacred rites,
the priests, the tabernacle, the temple, the altars,
the sacrifices, the feasts, the ceremonies, and, in
general, whatever belongs to the worship of latria
owing to God all these are so many figures of
what happened in the past, of what is taking place
in the present, and of what it is hoped will be ful-
filled in the future. And these figures all relate,
finally, to eternal life in Christ.

There was no necessity for all the Jews to have
grasped the significance of these symbols that they
possessed or embodied. A plan was being unfolded
and they could be simply its passive instruments.
But, if there were those who acted without under-
standing, there were others who saw the whole
significance of what they were doing. These we

48 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

call, precisely for that reason, prophets. In the
midst of a carnal people, they stood out by the
light of the interior man. They helped the human
race in its turn to rise higher, both by teaching
what was demanded by circumstances, and by
giving some inkling of what it was premature to
explain fully.

So it is that the whole of history is present in
each of its parts.

We will take the Paschal feast as an example. In
outward appearance and on the level of succes-
sion and change, there are two Paschs the
ancient Pasch of the Jews and the new Pasch of
the Christian sacrifice, which is emancipated from
the Jewish rite and commemorates daily the past
event it re-enacts. But in another sense there is
only one Pasch, that in which Christ was sacri-
ficed, and this Pasch proclaims the eternal Pasch
it inaugurates. Thus the horizontal order of past
and future, comprising two Paschs, the Jewish
one before Christ which looked to the future, and
the Christian one after Christ which turns back to
the past, is in some way a figure of a more pro-
found order, a vertical one, comprising both
Christ's one sacrifice in time and his eternal sacri-
fice. The order of past and future intertwines with
that of the single and eternal, which absorbs it.

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 49

This profound insight of his enabled St
Augustine to meet a number of objections raised
in his own time, and always recurring, on the
relations of Christ and Time, a subject on which
M. Oscar Gulmann has written an excellent book.

If God desires all men to be saved and wished to
found on earth a universal religion, why did he
choose such an insignificant race, and why did he
wait so long? If Christ is the sole way, what about
those who lived so many centuries before him?
What has become of all those thousands of souls
who cannot be blamed in the slightest degree,
since he in whom it is claimed belief is necessary
had not yet appeared ? In other words, how is it
possible to reconcile with God's universal provi-
dence the particularism of the Mosaic religion and
the lateness of the Incarnation?

The objection would have force if there had ever
been a time when the religion of the Incarnation
was not available to man. In fact, the Christian
religion was present among mankind even before
the coming of Christ in the flesh. In those days,
however, it was only universal virtually, being
practised first by a single person, then by a single
family, then by a single tribe, and then by a single
people.

Must we say that, apart from these privileged

50 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

persons, no one at all received the benefit of the
gifts of God? This perplexing question St Augus-
tine answered in his letter to Deogratias.

He drew a distinction there between two ways
in which God acts for the salvation of men. One is
official and collective, the other invisible and in-
dividual. Admittedly, he says little about this
second way; the controversy with Pelagius made
him take up an extreme attitude on the salvation
of unbelievers, but he never denied the fact of this
way. Granted there was a chosen people, are we
to conclude that the elect were confined to this
people ? St Augustine affirmed that the elect were
to be found in all peoples. No doubt, we can
never be in a position to judge individual cases,
but what we can say is that the salvation this
religion offers, just as it was available to all
epochs, so it was available, invisibly, to all who
were worthy to receive it. So, from the very
beginning of the human race, all who believed in
the Son of God, or who had any sort of knowledge
of him, or who lived according to his laws in holi-
ness and justice, in whatever time or place they
lived, were saved through him.

At times, St Augustine was brought to some sort
of intimation that the frontiers of the city of the
saints do not necessarily coincide with those of the

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 51

Church. There belong to the invisible Jerusalem
those excommunicated persons who, for the sake
of the Church's peace, bear patiently an affront
they have not deserved. Within it, as well, should
be placed Job the Idumaean, the centurion
Cornelius, the Sybil of Cumae who prophesied
truly about the last judgment and aU who live
according to the dictates of conscience. In this
way, the gulf separating revelation, which is
always particularised, from redemption, which
must of necessity be held universal, is mysteriously
filled.

c St Augustine 5 , Mgr Batiffol wrote, "may be
said to have glimpsed the doctrine of the soul of
the Church 5 (though he never used the expression) ,
c the soul to which all those saints belong who have
been sanctified by God without belonging to the
visible body. The range of action of divine grace
does not, in fact, coincide with the area of the
Catholica, but overflows it on every side to reach
the whole of humanity. . . . But this doctrine of
the soul of the Church was not one on which he
might be tempted to dweU, since, in his battle
against the Donatist schism, he was so dependent
on the doctrine of the necessity of the visible
Church. 5

But if the history of the Jews was a prophetic

52 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

one and wholly orientated to the future, why does
time still go on after Christ has come ? And, if it
continues, what new thing can it bring, since
Christian history is simply the unfolding of what
was prefigured of old ? After the great coining,
how should there be anything else to come ?

The doctrine of the Messias explains easily
enough the time preceding the day of glory; it is
all expectation, preparation, and everything has
its significance. But how are we to explain that
time continues after the Messias has gone? It is
not surprising that the messianic age seemed, to
the Jewish prophets and the writers of apocalypses,
to coincide with the day of judgment, and that
the first Christians could not resist believing in
the imminence of the end of the world. What new
thing could possibly come into being after that
which was newness itself? What is there which
could be comparable with the first coming of
Christ and his second coming for the judgment ?
The interval between these two events is, surely,
negligible; it could easily be regarded as a single
generation, for however immense it might be and
whatever should happen in it, nothing essential
could take place. Can we not say, with St Paul,
that the Christian age is c the beginning of the end
of the world 5 ?

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 53

St Augustine partly escapes the danger of
thinking in these terms by a theory of sacrifice
derived from the teaching of the prophets, a
theory which prevented him splitting up history
into two parts, as if there were an absolute before
and after.

Like the word sacramentum, sacriftcum takes on,
with him, a wealth of meaning which is yet very
exact. Sacrifice is any work we perform to unite us
to God in a sacred bond, any act done in reference
to the sovereign good who alone can make us
happy. St Augustine held that the offerings of the
Mosaic law were not themselves sacrifices but
only figures, professions, sacrammta, reminding
men of the necessity of the sacrifice of themselves
or announcing the coming of the sacrifice of the
God-man. Even fraternal charity, under the new
law, is sacrifice only if ordered to God and
practised out of love for him. A body wholly con-
secrated to God by temperance, a soul which
renews itself by submission to the Unchangeable,
every work of mercy done either to one's neigh-
bour or to oneself, contrition and the humiliation
of repentance, this is what makes up a true sacri-
fice; in this way we give back to God not only his
gifts but our very being. 16

But all these sacrifices of men are, ultimately,

54 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

related to that of Christ; this is what finishes and
perfects them. These offerings together from the
City, the universal sacrifice offered to God by the
great high priest who in his passion immolated
himself for mankind. The sacrifice of Christians
therefore consists in their forming together a single
body in Christ, and this is the mystery the Church
celebrates without ceasing in the sacrament of the
altar, in which, by the offering she makes, she
offers herself completely.

History does not come to an end with Christ,
and the coming of the Messias does not set a
bound to time. It is in a sense true that Christ
fulfilled the time of preparation. He consigned the
Judaism of the letter to a past which was in a way
absolute. But the same kind of plan continues, a
similar city is in preparation. Only from now on
history has another centre. Time is visibly linked
up with eternity; and through the mediation of
Christ Incarnate the spiritual fruit of the temporal
sacrifice is eternal.

Once again, having reached this point, let us
pause and see wherein lies the modernity of St
Augustine.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century all
was ready for the human mind to gain a more
exact awareness of time: infinitesimal calculus

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 55

which enabled increase to be expressed quanti-
tatively, greater knowledge of historical origins,
budding geology, the political revolutions, the
myth of progress, all these helped the formation
of a philosophy which took human time as its
object, its second nature. Time as it had been
regarded by the philosophers of antiquity was a
'disturbing element 3 , the source of the continual
agitation of things or the constant dissatisfaction
of the soul. It was quite a new thing to see in time
a principle of solidity, growth and consistancy.
The Jews, while they lamented the fact of tran-
science, had the sense of an invisible growth and
increase, as if time was fulfilling creation by cany-
ing it in successive waves towards its triumphant
end, when, as St Paul said, c God will be all in all'.
But when in the nineteenth century, after dis-
regarding it for so long, philosophy came to con-
cern itself openly with historical time, an ambig-
uity appeared. Its nature will be seen if we com-
pare Hegel with St Augustine.

HEGEL

The nineteenth century thinkers possessed,
under different forms, a sense of the meaning of
time which links them together and distinguishes
them from their predecessors in spite of what they

56 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

share with them. Hegel is the one we are to con-
sider as being the antitype of St Augustine, since
he worked out both the idea of History and that of
Mediation. M. Brunschvicg was quite right in
saying that 'Hegel's religious experience is,
extended throughout all the speculative and
practical domains, experience of the Word, of the
unity which, thanks to reason's role of mediator,
is established between the eternal ground of being
and the reality of nature or of history 3 .

Hegel saw clearly that to synthesise the in-
dividual moments of time and to link its move-
ment with its eternal source there was needed a
being, or a thought, which should subsist simul-
taneously, both in time and in eternity, and so be
capable of uniting the two. It may be, too, that
he saw that this work of mediation could not take
place equally on the two levels that were to be
united, but that it should belong, by its origin, to
the higher of the two and take up to itself the
lower. Something of the sort is suggested by the
philosophy of the Incarnation, since Christ, the
God-Man, is not equally man and God, but God-
made-man. But with Hegel mediation could not
be a real, and, as it were, vertical, one between
an eternal nature and a temporal nature subordi-
nated to the eternal in an indivisible structure. It

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 57

is, rather, a logical and horizontal mediation,
which follows the course of history and where each
term, once attained, becomes in turn a means to
go beyond itself. We might say that with Hegel,
the moment a Mediator is dispensed with, there is
no longer any mediation, but only middle terms
posited in Becoming, or rather, which are them-
selves Becoming. In fact they hardly seem to
deserve to be called either middle or terms,, since
they are means without leading to an end,
terms which are necessarily transcended.

With Marx we can catch sight of an attempt to
take away from Hegel's 'mediation' its property
of being only logical and not real Marx, it would
seem, aimed at introducing into the very root of
the interconnection of historical periods a media-
tion that was perceptible and concrete, working,
too, and suffering, one co-extensive with the whole
of humanity, ever growing in self-consciousness,
and the equivalent of what, in Christianity, St
Paul calls unus mediator homo Christus Jesus, Just as
the Christian enjoys by his participation in
Christ an advance possession of the kingdom, and
as he contemplates in Christ the End become
Means, the Truth become Way, so, too, the
Marxist has that which corresponds in his sphere ;
for between the objective historical situation of

58 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

the present moment and the revolution to come
there exists a concrete mediation which is that of
the organised proletariat. This myth is that which
corresponds to the 'nature' of the carpenter of
Nazareth which is possessed by the Form of God,
the proletariat being as it were the matter, the
political organisation the form.

Humanity then will be reconstructed with the
Proles-rex as its centre, as in Christianity it is
centred on Christ. In this proletariat become a
single community, as in the Christ-Church, the
soul of each individual, incarnated in his work as
if in a second body, is already in possession of the
essence of the Eternal being of the future whose
coming he helps to prepare. The comparison
might be pushed further still; and, in each case,
there would be seen a separation of the 'good*
from the c wicked% the treacherous presence of the
wicked among the good, the concealed presence of
the good among the wicked. They are the same
archetypes in both. All this goes to show in Marx
(as, no doubt unconsciously, in Spinoza and
Jewish thought after Christ) an attempt to find an
equivalent of the Incarnation, but without God or
Christ; without personal immortality, but strongly
endowed with the power of actualising itself.
Furthermore, with Marx more than with anyone

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 59

else, this attempt stoops down to the most Indigent
and Insignificant part of the human race. Marx
annihilates Hegel's logical myth; he gives it the
form of a slave, making it palpable, bleeding,
crucified in expectation of a marvellous future.

Yet the more he approximates to Christianity,
the more remote he becomes. Even with Marx, it is
ultimately no more than a question of a logical
mediation, excogitated by the philosopher in his
study, enforced by the politician or the soldier,
but without any of the reality of the man Jesus,
who really lived and suffered. The only reality
attaching to this proletariat which finally comes
to organise human history is that of a reality in
becoming, ever destroying and recreating itself
without end since time Is a kind of indefinite
spiral. Besides, since the persons who serve as in-
struments of this mediation have no eternity of
their own to look for, and universal history is with-
out consciousness of its own process, there Is no
possible foundation for its continuance In the
same course.

That is, no doubt, how a follower of St Augus-
tine would answer Hegel or Marx. He and they
would understand one another, through what they
had In common : a sense of totality, of mankind
seen in all Its dimensions, a sense of becoming, a

60 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

sense of the dramatic and logical nature of history,
a sense of action, hardship, suffering, a sense of
ever-present mediation. But for a logical and
indefinite mediation the Augustinian would sub-
stitute the concrete, single mediation of an
Eternal being within history, who alone could
bring about the sublimation and divinisation of
all men, taking each individually.

It may be that the reason why Hegelianism was
unable to safeguard the singularity of being lies in
the absence, with these philosophers of change, of
any interior experience of historical succession. I
have pointed out that, to St Augustine, the his-
tories of mankind, of a period, of a life, of a day,
an hour, a song, a syllable, a single vowel . . . are
all analogous, and perhaps, ultimately, identical.
In every case the moments perceived by analysis
form a continuous series; they complete one an-
other and are interconnected; in the Augustinian
saying so beloved of Claudel, the universe is the
melody of a sublime artist and the parts of the song
pass quickly, speeding along at the behest of the
artist, himself motionless, who sees them forming
a single unity like objects joined together in one
space. Thus to someone who could see the whole
course of history in a single view, time would
contract to a vibration* (It was in this sense that

SOCIAL MAN IN HISTORY 6 1

Bergson, in seeking to understand the relation of
eternity to time in motion, used to point to the
millions of successive vibrations that the eye con-
tracts into a single, motionless colour.) As for us,
we are limited by being within time, and we can
only grasp all times at once by making use of
imagination. Faith alone, by the idea it gives of
universal history, enables us to understand the
passage of time, and to see that it is negligible
in comparison with eternity.

Moreover, this time of history and the eternal
being are not brought into communication by an
act of the intelligence, as Hegel thought by
ratio alone, as we would say but by a more
complex act which, indeed, has ratio for its basis,
its matter, but gives it a special structure by add-
ing to it another dimension (as the third dimen-
sion of space makes the circle into a sphere) . This
act is prayer, oratio.

Ratio , if we follow it exclusively, leads to purely
linear and temporal dialetic, as is the case with
the modern dialecticians. Ratio believes itself to
have grasped and possessed the curve traced by
time, but fails to perceive the immovable and
higher source of this curve. It is like the thought of
some being placed at the point of a compass
describing a circle and unable either to see or

62 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

understand that there is a hand, in another
dimension, guiding its course. It is by oratio, at
every instant of life, that ratio is completed. It
reaches out darkly to the future for which it prays ;
it seeks to blot out all in the past that is not
eternal. It submits to the plan it cannot see and
adheres to it by faith. St Augustine has left to us in
outline a metaphysics of prayer.

Ill

THE UNION OF INTERNAL AND
EXTERNAL HISTORY

Now that we have examined the two facts of St
Augustine's thought, that concerned with the
interior man and that dealing with mankind as a
whole, both in the historical aspect, there is one
observation to be made.

What is characteristic of St Augustine is not that
he investigated either one of these subjects, nor
that he investigated both of them, but that he
divined that they were related to one another*
We will now try to take up our position on the
high ground that unites the two slopes. It is by
no means easy, for it is hard to see things together
in one view, As Pascal says, all is one, and one
thing is in another.

What we can at least do from this elevated
position is to gain an idea of where lie the short-
comings of our own age. There are some who are
preoccupied solely with the interior man; these
are the novelists, the spiritual writers, the exis-
tentialists of today. Others consider only the
exterior man; they are the sociologists, the statis-

64 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

ticians and cyberneticians, the dialecticians.
Truly, there are many modern writers with a
genius for introspection who have explored the
spiritual sphere, as, for instance, Maine de Biran
and Bergson. But life is short and it is now almost
impossible to devote oneself to history without
excluding all other pursuits. Bergson, towards the
end of his life, had a great desire to study the
history of God's dealings with man.

There have been writers in modern times who
studied and worked out the process of man's
historical development. Hegel and Gomte applied
themselves to understanding mankind as a whole ;
but their experience and dialectic were imperfect,
being unsupported by experience of a spiritual
nature. What strikes us in the lives of each is its
interior spiritual void. Auguste Gomte, and
particularly Renouvier and Gournot, who might
have achieved this difficult harmony, lacked an
experience of the spiritual on a level with their
wealth of knowledge. Perhaps we ought to admit
that in the present time when knowledge takes up
all our energies, when we are no longer content
with approximations, this harmony is unattain-
able by a single person; that it can only be realised
in a community, where each member has his
distinct sphere of activity. But where is there to be

UNION OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL HISTORY 65

found a community living and united by a rooted
faith outside the Church ? St Augustine was able
to achieve this harmony, because in his day
history was still in its first stages.

Among the thinkers belonging to the Catholic
family, I know only one whose experiences of the
spiritual and the historical order illuminated and
strengthened one another, and so deserves the
name given to him by Father Przywara of
Augustinus redivivus, Augustine come back to earth.
That man is Newman.

NEWMAN

It is enough to point to the two pairs of books,
the Confessions and the City of God on the one hand,
the Apologia and the Development of Christian
Doctrine on the other. They might be given the
titles, De duratione interna and De durations unwersi.
We could say that the treatises De Gratia and De
Ecclesia were written by St Augustine and New-
man in turn, in an inimitably personal way.

Newman experienced conversion, but in a
different way to St Augustine. He was preserved
from all that suffering that the resistance of the
flesh adds to the other trials of conversion, where-
as St Augustine never enjoyed the deep calm
which goes with the gradual passing from partial

66 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

to perfect light, which gave Newman such an
acute sense of the Church's own development. In
other words, Newman had not to accomplish a
complete revolution, a 'metastrophe 5 in the
Platonic sense. If he travelled ex umbris et imagini-
bus ad veritatem, he did so not by an uprooting of
the will, but through his mind working on the
data of history. St Augustine had the greater
agony to go through, he was more akin to the rest
of men in his experience of the flesh. Newman's
experience, being wholly intellectual, can be
understood only by the few who have studied the
history of the Church or whose wonder has been
aroused by the changes of religion.

For this reason, Newman the just is surpassed by
Augustine the sinner in the matter of interior
experience. What Newman owed to Augustine
was the example of dialogue in solitude of the
Creator with the creature, and the idea of thinking
and acting as if there were none but God and me in
the world. Newman did not build up a system on
this idea (like Descartes and Leibniz), nor a
mystical doctrine (like St Teresa of Avila), but it
led him by way of soliloquy to autobiography. The
continuous conversation of the solitary soul with
God took place, with both Newman and Augus-
tine, not in a wilderness with occasional ecstasies,

UNION OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL HISTORY 6j

but by reflection on life, its contingencies, temp-
tations, projects, failures, sins. Consequently, with
both, the intellectual approach took on quite a
new form thanks to the contribution brought by
prophetic or apostolic experience, which gave
considerable scope to historical contingency, to
the divine 'happening'.

A fourth century thinker, brought up on
Platonism or Aristotelianism, might have been
tempted to underrate the historical side of
Christianity through looking on world history as
just a logical dream.

Still more is the twentieth century thinker
brought up on positivism or post-kantian idealism,
liable to underrate Christian history through
seeing it as a mere dialectical becoming, without
any real drama.

So we have Plato on the one side with Hegel on
the other over against Christ and his first inter-
preters, less intent, however, on destroying his
message than in emptying it of meaning through
taking away that part which concerns existence
in time.

From this point of view, Augustine's work Is
like Newman's in that their experience of a
creative force at work within things, an experience
derived from what happened to them personaEy,

68 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

led them both to reflect on history and to discover
there the presence of this same inner force the
Catholic Church discharging in the history of
mankind the role that self-consciousness plays in
the life of the individual.*

They were, too, both opposed to a philosophy
that joined together the temporal and eternal in a
single Empire. The imperial organisation gather-
ing all men into one city, and the logical or dia-
lectical organism uniting all concepts and all
moments round a single focal point are both of
them means, one political, the other philosophical,

* In both cases the experiences and doctrines extended
beyond the sphere In which they were first applied.
Newman, as Przywara saw, introduced elements which,
applied to the philosophies of Hegel and Kierkegaard,
could provide them with a quite original solution. Like
Kierkegaard, he had experienced interior Christian
time 3 not in the form of the separating instant capable of
possessing the Infinite, but In the form of a duration
capable of receiving the Eternal according to its mode; and in
this he renews contact with an Augustinian tradition
that the Reformers had either not known or broken with.
More especially, he provided an answer to Hegel (like a
Plato who had read Aristotle) by showing that the real
becoming of history (which he did not deny, which had, in
facty occasioned his conversion to the Church of Rome, so
remote from Anglican immobility) was not a God-
making-himself, an immanent dialectic, but that this
becoming, on a certain privileged <my, was directed by a
divine Idea; that History, at least on this axis, had a
meaning.

UNION OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL HISTORY 69

of eliminating the difference between eternity and
time by endowing temporal activity with the
necessary and beatifying character which belongs
to eternity. That is why, as may be seen in
Stoicism, Hegelianism and Marxism, the philo-
sophies of the eternal-temporal form a justification
of the Empires of their time.

Over against these philosophies and these
polities stands the Jewish and Christian tradition.
At a time when Christianity was barely implanted,
when Greek and Roman thought might have set
up an imperial pantheism, St Augustine laid the
metaphysical, psychical, political foundations of a
Christian view of the world ; and it was his work
that influenced the period of transition.

Newman foresaw the spread of general dis-
belief, dominant over the minds of men who
would be assailed by the principles of atheism
before they had time to discover Christianity. A
new deluge, he said, will cover the world and
only a very few heights will be left untouched, for
men c wiH believe in atheism before discovering
revelation'. Then a new evangelisation will be
needed, but it will be more difficult than the first,
since what it has to proclaim will not be a New
Thing. The majority will think that Christianity
has been finally refuted. As to those who persist in

70 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

believing, no one will condescend to listen to them
or to enter on a discussion. Whatever reply be
made, it will amount to saying : it has been refuted
once, it is not for us to refute it over again. New-
man's work may be said to consist in adapting
the Church in advance to this work. It may be
that, after a new deluge, the future will see a
gradual reconquest of the regions of the spirit,
one by one. It will be harder than the original con-
quest was, for ignorance, however primitive, is a
less formidable obstacle than a learned and self-
satisfied negation.

IV

ST AUGUSTINE'S PLACE IN THE
HISTORY OF EUROPE

WE can now approach with rather more con-
fidence the tremendous question stated at the
beginning of this essay, the mystery of predestina-
tion. St Augustine, following St Paul, viewed it
from the standpoint of mankind as a whole, for
it would be unduly rash to try to see its application
in a particular case.

After the fall of Rome it was possible to en-
visage the approaching end of a world. All that
had value, the unity of the human race, culture,
the security in order which the Romans called
peace, tradition, the assurance even the Church
drew from the support of the civil power, all this
was on the decline. Was this decline to continue
indefinitely ? The history of the spiritual element
in mankind shows, as in a vibrating string, points
of expansion and contraction. In one privileged
sector a purer element of humanity advances,
develops, and seerns likely to fecundate the whole
earth; but corruption supervenes, accompanied by
what seem disasters and the triumph of grosser

71

72 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

elements, and the 'chosen people 5 is broken up and
dispersed. Everything leads to the belief that the
spirit is on the point of departure; but what looks
like the end becomes a new beginning and history
starts off again to sow a new seed. The Jewish
prophets were strongly conscious of this rhythm
in the affairs of men as shown in Abraham's
descendants. It was symbolised in the story of the
Ark. Isaias spoke of the small remnant that con-
tinued to be; and the whole ground of the Jewish
hope lay in the affirmation that a remnant would
persist, that the earth would always bud forth a
saviour.

We may say that in the fifth century of the
Christian era in the West one of these difficult
transition periods had come. But we might have
expected that the remnant (as regards thought)
would be a School of theologians, perhaps some
diaspora of prophets widely separated in place but
acting to a common end, as were the Fathers of
the Church in the East, who wrote in Greek and
upheld the Byzantine culture. These c Greek
Fathers' were hardly known in the West. The
Western Church was comprised in the Latin
culture and that in turn was summed up in St
Augustine.

Periods of decline favour the appearance of

ST AUGUSTINE'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 73

genius, that chance product, so improbable yet
substantial and enduring. It is, said Hegel, "at the
decline of day that Minerva's bird takes flight' .
When the old syntheses break up, their bonds
loosened, their matter scattered, the elements now
free but unable to remain in a state of anarchy,
seek some principle of fresh unity; and this
principle or germ is in itself a unity. Then the
course of events which seeks to continue, centres
on a man apart, whether an originator or a re-
former, who takes up what of the past is still living
to make it the foundation of the future. But the
work of founders and reformers subsists mainly by
its consequences, and their names are easily for-
gotten. The only ones who are really reborn are
those whose command of language makes their
writings last, such as Plato, Virgil, Dante,
Shakespeare. Men like these could well console us
for the disappearance of a civilisation, if their
writings remained, for they are each of them a
world, and anyone who had assimilated their work
alone would have a world of thought at his dis-
position. M. de Saci once said to Pascal that he
could find in St Augustine alone all the original
utterances of Pascal himself.

We may recall St Augustine's analysis of time.
A song, which passes in time, is never given in it-

74 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

self, since the sounds which make it up are con-
stantly flowing. But the memory, he says, pre-
serves it and gives it stability. Likewise, in the fifth
century when everything rushed headlong, van-
ished and seemed to be lost for ever, there
appeared the art and thought of St Augustine,
which gave this flight a fixed and stable form.

There are several types of posthumous exist-
ence. Some cease altogether, for they derive
merely from the fashion of a time. Others are
retained because they are bound up with a politi-
cal or religious tradition; others, as in Stendhal's
case, turn out to be contemporary with a succeed-
ing age. With St Augustine, it is quite otherwise;
he is not born anew as a result of chance, but he
forms a part of the essence of a human group with
its descendants, of a civilisation which recovers
self-consciousness in him. This continued life of his
has no parallel except in that of Plato whom he
resembles and whose thought he hands on.

In Plato there were present in the fullest degree
the conditions necessary for survival, though he
was not preceded, sustained and continued by a
Church. But he founded a School, perhaps the
first to have done so, one which resembled a
monastic order, provided with rules governing the
succession. His works, too, were often obscure

ST AUGUSTINE'S PLAGE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 75

enough to be deemed sacred and to demand Inter-
pretation. They have their light and their more
weighty passages, but always pulsate with life;
and, through the dialogue form, so lifelike, they
seem to create themselves anew with every fresh
reading. In them are found intermingled elements
from so many different sources, so many kinds of
inspiration, that any reader, no matter what his
taste, may find food for the mind. Above all they
contain all that was most solid in the preceding
tradition. The errors which ever recur are there
rejected, but they are depicted as possessing a
dignity and, sometimes, an elegance of their own.
Heraclitus, Parmenides, Gorgias, and even Calli-
cles are by no means diminished by their presenta-
tion in the Dialogues; and if they are made use of
to be refuted, it is with far less severity than St
Augustine uses against his opponents, Faustus,
Pelagius or Julian of Eclanus. Plato sets forth
myths derived from common recollection and
easy to retain, the equivalent of a Genesis and an
Apocalypse, bordering uncertainly on ecstasy and
mystery. He gives us a philosophy of politics, of
education, of poetry, and a mystique of love. We
find in Ms work politicians, women, young men in
great number, gods, and there is always present
the almost too real personality of Socrates who

76 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

had the advantage of being able to bring the pure
Idea down to earth.

St Augustine, though lacking Plato's suppleness
and versatility of talent, and devoid of humour,
had the same sort of advantages. Christ was, so to
speak, his Socrates, though on an incomparably
higher level; for Christ, being divine, was not an
object of contemplation but the very source of it.

It is true that St Augustine, who had never
heard Christ, could not present him in vivid
fashion. But his own personal history, with all the
various episodes in his journey towards God, the
continual reverberance of it in his memory, the
repentance ever accompanying the memory all
this gives his writing a quality of personal witness,
the lack of which makes any work even though
otherwise excellent seem defective to us, familiar
as we are with the Gospel. But what Plato
borrowed from the story of Socrates and the hem-
lock, St Augustine possessed on his own account;
he lived it in virtue of his conversion constantly
renewed.

St Augustine felt no need to found a School. He
had the equivalent of a School in the Church, to
which he committed his thought to unite to its
own. At the most, what he did was to give a rule
of life to a few disciples. As he grew older, he gave

ST AUGUSTINE S PLAGE IN THE HISTORY GF EUROPE 77

up the Idea of a monastery of thought and dis-
cussion which had attracted him so much at the
beginning of his conversion. It must be remem-
bered, also, that round about 420 any foundation
of a School was out of the question. As with us in
1940, it was a time of chaos in other respects, a
time very favourable to a work of creation, for a
written work can be constructed in the very abyss,
when it is helped on by the dissolution of the
elements of the world, and when surrounded by an
atmosphere of indifference like the mist upon
which Virgil looked as the garment of the gods.

Both Plato and Augustine had, as well as pre-
eminent genius, an accidental greatness, owing to
the catastrophes of the age. A man is always
nobler and greater when he is alone,* and^still
more so if those who should have accompanied
him have disappeared.

The centuries which followed Plato, and those
following Augustine, saw a period of emptiness in
which it might well have been asked if culture

* It is true that Plato's complement and balance followed
him at once, in the person of Aristotle, while St
Augustine's Aristotle (St Thomas) did not appear for a
long time. Plato was less solitary than St Augustine; for
he and Aristotle were twin summits of one mountain, the
comparison of one with the other was richly rewarding,
and that contributed to the fame of each.

78 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

were going to vanish altogether, and then an
attempt by the survivors to rebuild the tradition.
By then this could be done only by a Letter, for,
continuity being broken, memory was insufficient.
So it was that the Platonic Scripture came to be
held in especial veneration.

In this connection it may be noticed that what
makes a work of original thought survive is its
style. That alone lasts long which pleases, as
Pascal must have felt when he examined what
made up the art of pleasing. All Scripture is like
the wreckage of a ship after a storm, and a
wreckage has beauty on account of its gaps, its
strange shapes, the treasures vaguely anticipated,
and all the gifts left by the dead.

At this point we may ask if the recapitulation of
tradition round a single survivor does not mean an
alteration of it, since it is then depicted in the
exclusive colours of an individual mind and
career. The qualities, then, of an individual
destiny are liable to be taken by many generations
as rules of thinking, as governing man's aims and
feelings.

We may wonder if it is not the case that the
very defects of Plato, the rarefied geometrician,
the so abstract lover, the remorseless political
planner, have been canonised as part of Platon-

ST AUGUSTINE S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 79

ism; if, after twenty-five centuries, we are not still
suffering from having inherited Plato's tempera-
ment along with his teaching, in spite of Aristotle's
mitigations. (Some day the question may be asked
about Pascal.)

Likewise, we may wonder to what degree
Christianity still suffers from St Augustine's
pessimism, which is explicable by his tempera-
ment, the circumstances of his passionate and
brooding youth, and his nine years' association
with the Manichaeans. Why should a people
necessarily bear permanently the image of what,
for better or worse, a single individual once under-
went?

Still, we have to remember that this is a con-
dition belonging to any human work. Any work
must have an originator, and be rooted in the
circumstances in which it rose. No doubt, as it
grows, it seeks to rid itself of its first colouring but
it cannot always do so. Nor can it ever do so
completely.

Christ's work itself knew these limitations, the
price to be paid for any effective presence of the
Spirit within history, for any incarnation.

The spirit of Christianity could have been
expressed in the most diverse languages; it could
have coalesced with a number of different

8O THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

mentalities. It is, however, a matter of history
that it was developed and handed on to the
Western mind by Judaeo-Greeks. This initial con-
tingency continues to have effect. It is a fact that
the first apologists attempted to join the new
preaching with the ancient culture and that their
work was made easier by the writings of Plato and
his disciples of Alexandria. It is a fact that St
Augustine rid himself of his obsession with pan-
theism and dualism by reading Plotinus, and that
a mind so steeped in the Gospel first came to a
knowledge of itself through the Enneads. It is a fact
that St Augustine, when a slave to the flesh, was
freed only by a favour which he regarded as
wholly gratuitous and that he based on this his
doctrine of grace. Lastly, it is a fact that, with the
separation of the East and the eclipse of Greek
culture, Latin theology, derived from St Augus-
tine, dominated the Middle Ages, and inspired
the Reformers. So from St Thomas to Male-
branche, from St Bernard to Jansenius, the history
of theology and philosophy was bound up with the
fortunes of Augustinism, just as if this were a
second tradition mingled with the first, as if it had
given, on the threshold of the new age, a new
version of the Christian message.

This being so, no wonder there is a temptation

ST AUGUSTINE'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 8 1

to equate the Christian spirit with the Augustinian
mentality. My own view is that, from the fifth
century onwards, the Church has been attempt-
ing, by degrees, to keep in St Augustine's teaching
what in him belonged to her spirit and to drop
what derived solely from his own cast of mind.

But when all is said and done it must be
admitted that we owe to him far more light than
shade. Suppose he had never been in the Western
and Latin part of the Church. What would have
happened ?

No doubt we would still have had the essence
of the Christian religion, a revelation expressed in
dogmatic formularies and in Scripture. Doctrines
and duties, that is the simple, positive religion of
the Latins, of St Cyprian for example. But, left to
these practical people, we should never have had
a c Christian philosophy 3 , by which I mean a
union of faith and intelligence, apart from mystical
elevations of the mind or purely moral reflections.
We may question whether a Christian philosophy
is desirable, or even possible. At one time, too, it
was questioned whether philosophy 5 was possible;
Socrates showed that movement was possible by
walking. Likewise St Augustine showed the reality
of a philosopher who was always Christian or of a
Christian who was, nevertheless, a philosopher;

82 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

and the paradox seems as if it will last as long as
the civilisation of the West. We may even say that
all that is new in Western philosophy since his
time, even the anti-Christian philosophies, so
numerous from the sixteenth century onwards,
was fostered in Augustinian soil by methods
borrowed from him and that they are all trans-
positions or inversions of Augustinism, like those
of Spinoza, Kierkegaard or Hegel, not to mention
others more recent.

That being so, it may well be asked what would
have happened to the West if there had been
nothing corresponding to Augustinism to adapt it
in advance to the struggles and contributions to
come, so as to prevent it being shattered by the
struggles or submerged by the new arrivals. Thus,
as regards the contribution of Aristotle, which St
Thomas turned to such advantage, how could it
have been taken up without ill effect, had there
not been already present a germ of Augustinism
to guard scholasticism against the pressure of that
pre-hegeHanism which was the system of Aris-
totle?

The danger was all the greater in that, as G.
de Plinval observed, in many points St Augustine
is more modern than St Thomas. Though living
in a non-scientific age, he had a scientific mind.

ST AUGUSTINE'S PLAGE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 83

He was remarkably Ignorant of mathematics, as
he was of Greek and Hebrew; but Ignorance Is no
misfortune, if it enables one to avoid false cer-
tainty and leaves intact the power of intuition. The
De Musica and the De Ordine treat in quite modem
fashion of number, relativity, and discontinuity;
and it may be noted that St Augustine, more of a
Platonist than Plato himself, never admitted
astrology, nor the eternal cycle of things, nor
messages from the dead to the living. If we read
the myths of Plato and Plotinus, we are struck with
Augustine's sobriety in the matter of images con-
cerning the condition of the spirits in heaven or
hell; likewise, if we read St Gregory's Moralia,
with its stories of persons who have come back to
life, we can appreciate his caution.

This is, no doubt, all to be ascribed to his
philosophical turn of mind, or else to the purity
of his idea of God, and perhaps also to an un-
conscious independence of his own period. 'Three
centuries of profound changes and revolutions in
every sphere of life, together with the myriad
events and ideas they have seen, perforce make It
seem to posterity absurdly naive and odd, and at
times quite incomprehensible, that we are essen-
tially the outcome of what took place in times so
different from ours/ What Valery said on the

84 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

subject of Bossuet ought to apply still more
strongly here, but, In fact, to St Augustine it does
not apply at all.

From the standpoint of faith we would be
naturally inclined to say that God, in raising up
persons of singular endowments, founders or
rather recapitulators, always applies c his law of
economy'. What he did with Plato for philosophy
and was to do with St Benedict for the monastic
life, with St Teresa of Avila for mystical experi-
ence, he did, correspondingly, for Christian
thought in the West with St Augustine. It is in-
deed curious to see how those very general dis-
ciplines we call philosophy, monastic life, mystical life
are stamped by the mentality and even the idio-
syncrasies of the person who gave them impetus.
Wherever there are people who think in a
Christian way, they bear some resemblance with
St Augustine, that 'Father' of the Church. It is
not merely that they continue or comment on one
or other of his ideas, but, for better or worse, some-
thing much more far-reaching. They bear within
their own being some hormone derived from that
so individual destiny and from such extraordinary
circumstances. St Augustine's own history, his
carnal and zoroastrian phase, his controversy
with the monk of Brittany have, in this way,

ST AUGUSTINE'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPE 85
become part and parcel of our intellectual climate.

Now, once again, it seems as if the historical
universe is to undergo a radical change. As in the
fifth century of our era, civilisation is both con-
centrated and divided. It seems to be getting
ready to be transformed in a fashion impossible to
foresee. We belong to an age in which the old
structures are collapsing, when the worst seems
possible (even the end of our race) when, none the
less, there are many signs which give hope of a
new synthesis round a rejuvenated Catholic
centre.

Here it is that we can profit from the example
of the solitary bishop of Hippo, St Augustine lived
at a time when it was not easy to hope in a future
for humanity. He prepared for death while
dictating the last pages of the City of God in his
episcopal see, which was being besieged by
'barbarians 5 and defended by Arians an image
of the isolation of those who, while they seek
absolute and pure truth, have to compound with
the necessarily impure forces of the temporal
power. St Augustine could well think himself one
of the last generation of men and a witness of the
end of time. But the idea of the end of the world is

86 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

a deceptive one; the things of time die to be born
again. And, when fate has placed one in a period
when the established order seems about to break
up, since the face of the future is impossible to
discern, it is best to turn the mind towards the
eternum internum. In that way, without being aware
of it, as did St Augustine, we prepare the manifold
future.

NOTES

1 'When I was deliberating about whether I would
now start to serve God, as I had long desired, it was
/who willed, and /who willed not; I, I it was. I did
not wholly wish, nor was I wholly unwilling. So I
contended with myself, and I was divided by my-
self % Conf., VIII, 22.

2 'And you stirred me up by internal goads, making
me impatient until I could obtain certainty by
interior vision', Conf^ VII, 12.

3 c For thy hands, O my God, in thy hidden provi-
dence did not abandon my soul, and sacrifice was
offered for me from the blood of my mother's heart
through the tears she shed day and night, and thou
dealt wonderfully with me% Conf. V, 13.

4 *So then how wretched I was, and how thou acted
on me to make me feel my wretchedness*, Conf-
VI, 9.

5 "And behold thou art at hand, setting us free from
our miserable errors, and establishing us in thy
way, consoling us with the words, "Run on, I will
bear you and lead you, and bring you there**/
Conf. VI, 26.

6 'For the steps of man are guided by the Lord, and
he wills the Lord's way. Else how could there be
salvation, unless thy hand remade what thou made ?*
Conf. V, 13.

7 *And yet I sinned, O Lord my God, orderer and

87

88 THE MODERNITY OF ST AUGUSTINE

creator of all things in nature, but of sins orderer
only*, Conf. I, 16.

8 De dono persev., 21-23.

9 "Thou mayst not abandon him who now calls on
thee, for, before I called on thee, thou went before
urging me repeatedly to hear thee from afar, to be
converted and to call on thee who wast calling me.'
Conf XIII, i.

10 'And I erred in my pride, and I was carried about
by every wind, and, in deep secrecy, I was being
governed by thee 3 , Conf, IV, 23.

1 1 'Therefore thou didst work with me so that I was
persuaded*, V, 14.

12 'But thou, in thy profound designs granting the
essence of what she wished (Monica), didst not heed
what she then sought, in order to do in me what she
always sought*, Conf. V, 15; cf. In Job, CII, 13.

13 'But thou, most high and most near, most hidden
and most present', VI, 4. 'Thy mercy ever faithful
from afar continued to encompass me', III, 5.
'But thou, more inward to me than my inmost
being and higher than my highest*, III, n. 'Thou
alone art present even to those who have become
far from thee*, V, 2. 'O that they might see the
eternity within', IX, 10.

14 'For thou art supreme and unchanging, nor does
today run its course in thee, and yet it does flow in
thee because all things are in thee; for they would
have no course to run if thou didst not contain
them*, I, 10. 'And thou remainest in thyself, but
we are turned about in what we experience', IV, 10.

NOTES 89

15 'And therefore he is the source, because, unless he
remained while we wandered from the way, there
would be no place for us to return to% XI, 10.

1 6 'What all men call sacrifice is the sign of the true
sacrifice' 5 De Civ. Dei, X, 5. 'So then true sacrifice
is every work of ours done in order that we may be
joined in a holy union with God, every work, that
is, directed to that final good, which can make us
truly blessed. . . . Hence man himself consecrated
to the name of God and vowed to him, inasmuch as
he dies to the world to live to God, is a sacrifice*,
Ibid., X, 6.

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