WISDOM OF THE
AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION
Find yourself in the words of Augustine
T
he year before he died, the elderly bishop Augustine now seventy-five years of age, asked what must have been a purely rhetorical question: ‘Which of my works has enjoyed greater circulation and popularity than the books of my Confessions?’ For more than fifteen hundred years now their circulation and popularity have continued to expand. Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that as far as western Christianity is concerned, all thinking on prayer, asceticism, and the spiritual life in general has been influenced one way or another by these books. They constitute one of the pillars on which the western spiritual tradition is built. In the sixth century we find Gregory the Great reading and re-reading these pages, and a thousand years later in Avila, St. Teresa, that great mystic of the practical mind, is still drawing inspiration and light from this same source – and St. Teresa was discriminating about her sources! Even today, the great number of English translations of the Confessions available is ample evidence of their continuing popularity. What is it that makes them appeal to so many different people of such diverse historical, cultural, and educational backgrounds? Perhaps it is the fact that people can find something of themselves in these books, expressed so clearly and sympathetically, that people find their own experience of life somehow mirrored here. In an age like ours which prizes experience so highly, it is not surprising that such skillful and honest presentation of one man’s experience of life, love, doubt, fear, frustration, pride and sorrow makes such an appeal. But there is more than that. In the Confessions we come face to face with a man so passionate in his experience of life that we are drawn into and caught up in his enthusiasm. “Human beings, as he tells us, ‘warm themselves at each other’s flame.’ ”
Gervase Corcoran, O.S.A., A Guide to the Confessions of Saint Augustine 20
