In part one of this article on St. Augustine’s understanding of the Christian life of prayer we saw that for Augustine, prayer forms the Christian life to such an extent that it can itself be thought of as a prayer. We then began to explore the first effect of prayer described by St. Augustine, which is that prayer makes the heart clean. The cleansing of the heart we saw is the result of the proper orientation of the human creature’s life towards God, a conversion which takes place repeatedly in prayer. Moreover, we also saw that having the heart cleansed, for Augustine, entails the overcoming of the twofold consequence of the Fall, ignorance and weakness, both of which are symptomatic of the rupture in the creature’s participatory relationship with the Creator. This brings us to a brief discussion of Augustine’s understanding of salvation.
The only way to have our participatory relationship with God restored, Augustine teaches, is for God to do so. And this He does through the Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, Who is the Incarnate Virtue and Wisdom of God, as St. Paul writes in his Letter to the Corinthians (see 1 Cor. 1:24). The answer to the question has already been implied when discussing how prayer entails a conversion of the will toward God. For Augustine, the act of conversion is not a simple matter of turning toward God. Rather, conversion finds its true meaning for Augustine in the metaphysics constructed by his theology of creation. For Augustine, all creatures are created by God the Father through the Son, the eternal Word, by the power of the Holy Spirit (see e.g., The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.6.12). Thereafter creatures are upheld in existence in the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. Creaturely existence on Augustine’s account, therefore, is imitative in a participatory fashion. Just as the Son is eternally begotten by the Father and turns back to the Father in the eternal embrace of Divine Love that is the Holy Spirit, so too each creature is meant to participate in this “eternal turn” of the Son to the Father in the Love of the Holy Spirit. It is only by doing so that creatures make their way from immaturity to perfection. Augustine puts it this way in The Literal Meaning of Genesis,
By so turning back and being formed creation imitates, every element in its own way, God the Word, that is the Son of God who always adheres to the Father in complete likeness and equality of being, by which he and the Father are one; but it does not imitate this form of the Word if it turns away from the creator and remains formless and imperfect, incomplete. That is why allusion is made to the Son, not because he is the Word but only because he is the beginning, when it says In the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1); here he is being suggested as the source of creation still in its formless imperfection. But the Son is being alluded to as being also the Word where the text runs God said, Let it be made. Thus his being the beginning implies his being the source of creation as it comes into being from him while still imperfect, while his being the Word implies his conferring perfection on creation by calling it back to himself, so that it may be given form by adhering to the creator, and by imitating in its own measure the form which adheres eternally and unchangeably to the Father, and which instantly gets from him to be the same thing as he is (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.4.9).
It is the eternal Word through Whom the Father calls creation into being, and after the separation caused by the Fall, the Father calls human creatures back to His eternal embrace of Divine Love through the voice of the Word of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. In the Incarnate Son the Wisdom and Virtue of God is made visible and exemplified, as St. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:24). If the Fall separates us from God it is by graced participatory imitation of the life of Christ that we are reconciled to Him. And it is in living in such a manner that the human creature grows in the wisdom whereby to see rightly, and the virtue or spiritual strength to live rightly. Consequently, in his commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Augustine writes of the need to seek out and live according to the Wisdom of God: “what need, therefore is there that the eye be clear and single-visioned for the finding of the way of wisdom, whose voice so great a host of errors and deceptions of wicked and perverse men tries to drown out…” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.25.86).
Of course, this process begins through the sacraments, most basically through Baptism and the Eucharist, which reunite us with God and strengthen our relationship with Him. The sacraments are not magic, however, and the grace we receive therein must be cooperated with in order to for our relationship with God to deepen and grow. This is why, for Augustine, prayer must be at the center of and pervade the Christian life. Each time we turn our heart to God in prayer, we imitate the Son of God’s eternal turn to the Father’s embrace in the Love of the Holy Spirit, and thereby encounter the possibility of deepening our relationship with Him. This is best exemplified by the Prayer Jesus taught us. In the Lord’s Prayer the Son teaches us to call God, Father, which St. Paul teaches us we can only do by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Who cries out, Abba, Father from within us (see Galatians 4:6).
The previous quote from Augustine’s commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount leads to a consideration of the second effect of prayer. For Augustine, in addition to leaving it ignorant and weak, the Fall also leaves the human heart restless, ceaselessly desiring in the core of its being to achieve its created purpose in the embrace of its Creator whether it knows it or not (see Confessions, 1.1.1). This purpose, however, is all the more difficult to discern in a fallen world, where voices are continually trying to point us in different directions. For Augustine, prayer enables us to remain focused on our relationship with God by calming the restless and distracted heart. We might say that prayer brings a calming and stabilizing effect to life in two interrelated ways. The first is seen by taking note of, as Augustine does, the manner in which Christ asks us to pray: “But when you pray, enter into your chambers” (Matt. 6:6). Interpreting this, Augustine writes, “what are these ‘chambers’ but the hearts themselves,” adding that “it is not enough to merely go into the chamber…the door must be closed—we must resist our carnal senses so that the prayer of our spirit may be directed to the Father, and this arises from the depths of our heart when we pray to the Father in secret” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.3.11). Prayer thus calms the individual as it focuses solely on the heart-to-heart conversation with God at hand.
The calming influence of prayer flows from the stabilizing influence prayer has on the human creature. The creature’s heart-to-heart is at bottom a participatory imitation of the Son. For, as we come into the presence of and speak intimately with our Heavenly Father, we participate in and imitate the life of the Son, Who eternally immerses Himself in the life of the Father in the embrace of the Holy Spirit. Thus, Augustine writes that as we undergo this cleansing of the heart which makes us evermore single hearted in intention, we are increasingly conformed to the image of the Divine Son (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.12.40), and thereby the unique image of God we have each been created to be is simultaneously further perfected (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 1.4.12; cf. 2.12.42). Through its formative influence, then, prayer comes to give shape to the whole of the Christian life, the its continual turning to the Father in love spilling over into every word and deed as we strive to imitate Christ who humbly deigned to become the exemplar par excellence of the human creature’s life (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 1.19.61).
This then leads us to consider the final effect of prayer. Prayer expands our capacity to receive divine gifts. Here two questions arise. First, why does prayer expand our capacity to receive divine gifts, and second, what are the divine gifts we potentially receive by prayer? The answer to the first question has already been given. Prayer expands our capacity to receive divine gifts because as we turn and reach out to God in imitation of the Son, the Holy Spirit stretches us out, if you will, so as to bring us just a bit closer to Him. It is this Divine stretching that expands our capacity to receive divine gifts. What exactly Augustine has in mind by way of “divine gifts” becomes clear when we consider his pairing of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, with the seven beatitudes, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The last of these are the “divine gifts” Augustine tells us prayer expands our capacity to receive. The final pairing of the three sets is the example best suited to our purposes here. There, drawing several strands of our discussion together, Augustine writes that “if it is through wisdom that the peacemakers are blessed, because they shall be called the children of God, let us pray that we be delivered from evil, for that deliverance will make us children, that is, sons of God, so that in the spirit of adoption we may cry Abba, Father” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.11.38). Prayer, therefore, stretches our capacity to receive God so that our communion with God might be deepened by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Consequently, prayer enables us to live in imitation of Christ, as the firstborn of the Father and our adoptive brother in the Family of God (see Romans 8:29). For Augustine, the Spirit of adoption within us is not only to cry out to God the Father in prayer, but in every action of a Christian life which testifies to God as Creator and Savior (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.3.12; cf. 2.25.84).
By way of summation three points might be made. First, our examination of Augustine’s theology of prayer reveals that the Christian life contains both trinitarian and incarnational dynamics. In prayer, we assume the posture of the Son in seeking the will of the Father and are enabled by the Holy Spirit to incarnate this will in participatory imitation of the Incarnate Son. Second, the locus of prayer is the heart, the very core of the human creature where it converses with God. Finally, the result of a heart-to-heart encounter with God in prayer properly orients the will by conforming it to the will of God (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.6.21), which thereby progressively yields a more perfect vision of reality and the ability to live accordingly. For in prayer we participate in and imitate the life of the Divine Son Who Is the Wisdom and Virtue of God by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Day by day, then, the Christian life increasingly becomes a prayer, a continual response of “unspeakable joy whereby truly and unequivocally a blessed life is perfected” (The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 2.3.14).
The great Bishop of Hippo’s life ended in the very same manner that he closed his Confessions. Possidius tells us that the Doctor of Grace
commanded that the shortest penitential Psalms of David should be copied for him, and during the days of his sickness as he lay in bed he would look at these sheets as they hung upon the wall and read them; and he wept freely and constantly. And that his attention might not be interrupted by anyone, about ten days before he departed from the body he asked of us who were present that no one should come in to him, except only at the hours in which the physicians came to examine him or when nourishment was brought to him. This, accordingly, was observed and done, and he had all that time free for prayer (The Life of St. Augustine, 31.1).
True to what his student Possidius wrote of him, Augustine was a man who practiced what he preached. Possidius describes him as a living sermon, as one who “lived uprightly and soberly in the faith, hope and love of the Catholic Church in so far as he was permitted to see it by the light of truth, and those who read his works on divine subjects profit thereby” (The Life of St. Augustine, 31.1). With his last sermon, if you will, Augustine reminded us that the Christian life is a life of prayer, a lover’s prayer that hopes for nothing except the eternal loving embrace of one’s Creator. Therefore, in remembering his life we do well to make ours the prayer of his student Possidius, that God give us the grace “to emulate and imitate him in this world” so as to “enjoy with him the promises of God Almighty in the world to come. Amen” (The Life of Augustine, 31.1).
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.