In his biography of the life of his saintly teacher, Possidius, the Bishop of Calama, describes St. Augustine of Hippo as a man who exemplified the things he taught. Possidius writes,
not only was he a ‘scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old,’ and one of the those merchants who ‘when he had found the pearl of great price, sold all that he had and bought it,’ but he was also one of those of whom it is written: ‘So speak ye and so do,’ and of whom the Savior said: ‘Whosoever shall so do and teach men, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven’” (The Life of St. Augustine, 31.1).
In the roughly five million words we have of his corpus, the Doctor of Grace taught on nearly everything that touches the Christian faith. His great works on the Trinity (The Trinity), the Church (The City of God), and the drama of human life (The Confessions) are well known. As an account of the drama of human life, The Confessions have much to tell us about the place Augustine gives to prayer in the Christian life. In short, the entirety of The Confessions is a prayer to God, which is seen clearly in the opening and closing of the work. Drawing from various portions of the Bible’s book of prayer, the Psalms, Augustine famously begins his work by proclaiming God’s glory and the human creature’s desire for unity with its Creator:
Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom is beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you—we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until is rests in you (Confessions, 1.1.1).
Restlessly desirous of rest in the eternal embrace of its Creator, the human creature moves towards and is enveloped by that embrace through a life of prayer, or better, a life that is prayer. Thus, in closing the work, Augustine once again addresses his Creator,
But, the supreme Good, need no other good and are eternally at rest, because you yourself are your rest. What human can empower another human to understand these things? What angel can grace understanding to another angel? What angel to a human? Let us rather ask of you, seek in you, knock at your door. Only so will we receive, only so find, and only so will the door be opened to us. Amen (Confessions, 13.38.53).
With this understanding of human life it is not surprising, therefore, that Augustine places prayer at the center of the Christian life in his writings and that his first biographer and student, Possidius of Calama, describes him as a man of prayer who asked for the prayers of others, especially those entrusted to his care (The Life of St. Augustine, preface & 3.1).
One work where Augustine has a great deal to teach us about prayer in the Christian life is his early work, The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. Augustine structures his commentary according to the Beatitudes, and the bulk of what Augustine has to say about prayer falls within the domain of the sixth beatitude, “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God;” serving as the heading for the span of the sermon running from Matthew 6:1-7:12, and within Augustine’s commentary running from 2.1.1-2.22.77. The position of Augustine’s teaching on prayer within the commentary, then, corresponds to the place of prayer in the Christian life, at the very center, its heart. The reason is that it is the state, or orientation of the heart, which denotes for Augustine the orientation of the will (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.2.9), determines both what one loves and how one lives. As Augustine says, “we shall know all our works are clean and pleasing in the sight of God if they are done with a single heart, that is, with that supernatural intention whose end is love; for love is the fulfilling of the law” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.13.45). For Augustine, that prayer properly orients the will toward God is seen in three main effects of prayer he names: it “calms the heart, makes it clean, and renders it more capable of receiving the divine gifts which are poured upon us in a spiritual manner” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.3.14). By taking a brief look at each of these effects in turn we will come to better understand both the dynamics of prayer and how they relate to the moral life in Augustine’s thought.
Before considering each of the three effects of prayer Augustine names, it is important to note that these effects are understood to act simultaneously, and not sequentially. Of the three named by Augustine, it is the second effect of cleansing the heart that has the most far-reaching implications for the Christian life, and so it is best to begin with it. It is this effect of prayer that most clearly demonstrates why it is that prayer properly aligns the will to God. Augustine puts it this way, “there takes place in prayer a turning of the heart towards Him who is ever ready to give if we will but accept what he gives” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.3.14). We can put this differently and say that every act of prayer takes place by a movement of conversion, of turning the mind and heart towards God in a very discrete manner. For Augustine, if such a movement is authentic it implies, and we might even go so far as to say contains within itself, a threefold decision. A decision to live to please God out of love rather than to please the world (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.1.3), to serve God and not mammon (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.14.47), and finally and most importantly, a decision to receive rather than seize. Though never explicit about it in this work, by making all these connections, Augustine has effectively set up the two cities dynamic at the center of his famous work the City of God. The city of the world characterized by a desire to please the self and others and those of the city of God, who seek first the kingdom of God and his justice in all things (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.17.56). Within his discussion on the Sermon on the Mount, Augustine describes the former as those who through not having heeded and acted upon the words of Christ have built their house upon sand, and the latter as those who have built their house upon a rock that is Christ by acting upon his words (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.25.87).
With this imagery we gain two further insights. The first is that, in a certain way, those who have refused conversion lack the insight and thus the ability to operate according to absolute reality. For, by choosing to live as a self-pleaser they play the pretender, living in a false reality which ultimately gives way (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.2.5). In contrast, those who have undergone and continually undergo conversion in prayer come to understand the reality of all things and are able to operate accordingly by God’s grace. This process of coming to see things as they really are is described throughout the work by Augustine as the cleansing of the inner eye. The cleansing of the inner eye through prayer, therefore, directly impacts the way we live. For example, after discussing Jesus’ articulation of the Golden Rule in light of the twofold command to love God and neighbor, Augustine draws in the concept of the cleansing of the inner eye writing,
Therefore, once the eye has been cleansed and made single, it will be fit and capable of beholding and contemplating its own interior light. For that eye is the eye of the heart. And an eye such as this is the possession of him who, in order that his works may be truly good, does not seek the pleasure of his fellow men as the purpose of his good works; and even if it turns out that he pleases them, he relates this to their welfare and God’s glory instead of turning it to empty boasting (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.22.76).
The one whose eye is being cleansed so as to see things as they really are, thus lives the whole of life out of love for God and loves all things in and for the sake of God. Such an individual is capable of passing through the narrow gate for Augustine, because “now the straight road and the narrow gate are visible” to them (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.23.77).
The question, then, becomes how it is that one’s eye is cleansed by prayer. Before answering this question, it is important to ask and answer another. Why is the eye not already clean? Asked differently, what has distorted our vision? The answer, in short, is that sin has distorted both our vision of reality and our ability to live rightly. Augustine describes ignorance and weakness as the two primary consequences of the Fall. For example, in Against Faustus the Manichaean, he writes, “the ignorance or weakness, because of which someone either does not know what he ought to will or cannot do everything that he wills, comes from the hidden order of punishments and the inscrutable judgments of God, in whom there is no injustice” (Against Faustus the Manichaean, 22.78). This twofold consequence of the Fall, for Augustine, stems from his participatory metaphysics wherein all creatures exist precisely by way of participation in the Divine Life, Which alone simply Is. Accordingly, when the human creature is separated from God Who is Wisdom and Virtue, the human creature becomes ignorant and weak. Consequently, it is only by having its communion with God restored, then, that the human creature begins grows in wisdom and spiritual strength, or virtue, and thereby is once again able to see reality correctly and live accordingly.
In the second part of this article we will explore how the Christian life of prayer is formed by God’s salvific action in Christ together with the second two effects of prayer as taught by St. Augustine.
Your servant in Christ,
Tony Crescio is the founder of FRESHImage Ministries. He holds an MTS from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Christian Theology at Saint Louis University. His research focuses on the intersection between moral and sacramental theology. His dissertation is entitled, Presencing the Divine: Augustine, the Eucharist and the Ethics of Exemplarity.
Tony’s academic publications can be found here.