Conclusion

For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. ROMANS 11:36

Twenty chapters may give the impression that Augustine taught many things. In one sense he did; he wrote more than any other writer of the ancient church, on more subjects. But at the centre of it all is one simple, searching claim, and it is the claim of his first paragraph. We were made for God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. Everything else in his teaching is that sentence followed out.

Follow the thread and the whole shape appears. We are lovers, carried by our loves as a stone is carried by its weight. Sin is love turned the wrong way — the pear-thief loving his own fault, the creature loving itself in place of its Creator. Evil is not a rival power but the absence of good, a falling away from the God who made all things well. Left to ourselves, we cannot turn back; the will that turned away destroyed its own freedom. So grace must go before, making the unwilling willing, giving what it commands. It comes to us in Christ, the humble Mediator, who cured our pride by His humility and won the victory by becoming the victim. It meets us in the Scriptures, whose whole aim is love, and in the church, a mixed field that Christ is making holy, which stands by the daily forgiveness of sins. It reorders our loves, until we love God first and everything else in Him. It builds a city out of that love, running through all of history beside the city of self-love, and it will raise that city, body and soul, and bring it at last to the Sabbath which has no evening. Faith begins; hope prays; love is the end; and sight is the home.

What he got wrong

This book has not hidden Augustine’s errors, and it would be a poor tribute to pretend he had none. He approved the use of force against the Donatists, and his arguments outlived his gentleness. He tied the inheritance of sin too closely to sexual desire, and left a long shadow on the church’s view of the body. He consigned unbaptised infants to punishment, however mild, and pressed his doctrine of predestination further than many of his most loving readers can follow. Protestant readers will also hesitate over his prayers for the dead and his tentative purgatorial fire.

None of this is raised to diminish him. It is raised because he himself taught us to expect it. No one wrote more powerfully about the deceitfulness of the heart, the blindness of pride, the way we fail to see our own sins. And no great writer did more to correct himself. At the end of his life he sat down and reviewed every book he had written, noting what he now thought mistaken. His Retractations are a model of intellectual honesty. He would want us to read him the same way: gratefully, critically, with the Bible open.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. PSALM 139:23

What to carry away

If you carry nothing else from this book, carry two things.

First, take your restlessness to God. Do not numb it, and do not despise it. It is the memory of home. Every time you find that something you wanted has not satisfied you, hear it as Augustine heard the voices of the earth and sea and sky: not here — higher. And go to the One who said, Come unto me, and I will give you rest.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. MATTHEW 11:28

Second, pray his prayer. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. It is the prayer of a man who had discovered that he could not make himself holy, and that God could. It is not a counsel of passivity; Augustine was one of the busiest men who ever lived. It is the recognition that every good thing in us is a gift, and the confidence that the Giver is generous. If you are fighting a battle you keep losing, stop fighting alone. Ask.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:13

A last word about the man

Augustine died in August 430, in a city surrounded by an invading army, with the civilisation he had known collapsing around him. He was seventy-five. He had spent the last days of his life reading the penitential Psalms fixed to the wall beside his bed, weeping over them. He died, as he had lived since the garden, a confessing man: a sinner who knew himself forgiven, a bishop who knew himself a beggar before God.

He left no will, because he had nothing to leave but his books. Those books have outlasted the Vandals, the empire, and every one of the controversies in which they were written. They have been read by monks and Reformers, by philosophers and children, in Latin and English and in languages Augustine never heard. And the sentence that begins them has lost none of its force. The heart is still restless. God is still its rest.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Go back to the chapter of this book that unsettled you most, not the one you enjoyed most, and work through its application points again.

2. Begin reading the Confessions for yourself this month, a few pages a day, with a pencil and a prayerful heart.

3. Write down one error of your own thinking that you have come to see. Thank God for correcting you, and be humble about the errors you have not yet seen.

4. Make Augustine’s prayer, give what You command, part of your daily prayer for the next month.

5. Tell one other person what you have learned from Augustine, and invite them to read him with you.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.

Thank You for Your servant Augustine: for his honesty, his hunger for You, his witness to Your grace. Forgive us where we have followed him into error, and keep us where he followed You.

Give what You command, and command what You will. Reorder our loves, humble our pride, and bring us home.

Let us rest and see, see and love, love and praise, in the Sabbath that has no evening. Amen.