A PERSONAL AND TRADITIONAL FAITH

I recently read a not-so-great book on St. Augustine’s idea of education based on an examination of the Confessions. For those who haven’t recently read it, Confessions is the saint’s great spiritual memoir. The story is set within an extensive prayer as Augustine meditates on how grace was drawing him into communion with God over the course of years. But even though Confessions is ultimately addressed to God, it makes no effort to hide how influential were the people God moved to shape his conversion. But the education book sadly missed what Augustine took great pains to include. For all of its soaring language about how divine grace can inform the process and purpose of learning, there was something important missing from the author’s vision: teachers. In the whole book, there was not more than a passing mention of Augustine’s two great teachers, figures who give shape to nearly every chapter of Confessions: Ss. Ambrose and Monica. 

It’s difficult to overstate the formative impact of Monica and Ambrose, Augustine’s mother and bishop, respectively. Listen to how he describes Monica’s deep confidence in God’s graciousness for her son: “she was fully confident that you who had promised the whole would give her the rest, and thus most calmly, and with a fully confident heart, she replied to me that she believed, in Christ, that before she died she would see me a faithful Catholic” (Conf. VI). At the end of her life, she reveals that praying and patiently awaiting her son’s conversion was, in fact, the one thing that bound her to this world before departing to be with Christ: “There was indeed one thing for which I wished to tarry a little in this life, and that was that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has answered this more than abundantly” (Conf. IX). Monica’s faith is the backdrop to all of Augustine’s wanderings, and over time puts tension on his tendency to act dismissively toward his mother’s religion. 

Similarly, St. Ambrose of Milan stood as an unrelenting check to Augustine’s intellectual aimlessness and hubris. Augustine was in Milan to teach rhetoric and oratory, and while there became wrapped up in what turned out to be a pseudo-Christian cult. It was then he met the famous Bishop who, “received me as a father, and showed me an Episcopal kindness on my coming. Thenceforth I began to love him…. And I listened diligently to him preaching to the people, not with that intent I ought, but, as it were, trying his eloquence, whether it answered the fame thereof…” (Conf. V). To the young scholar, Ambrose proved a Christian whose intelligence and piety of life constantly challenged his own self-aggrandizing. To Monica’s resilience of faith was added Ambrose’s quiet sophistication and pastoral care. Together, the two overcame Augustine’s resistance and were the vessels of grace for his conversation.

I’ve noticed a tendency to view Augustine’s conversion as a matter of unmediated divine intervention. The famous passage when Augustine receives the command to “take up and read” the Scriptures is seen outside of the relationships that participated in it. This was not an isolated moment of a convert taking up their Bible and experiencing redemption. Instead, it took shape and meaning from the personal relationships by which the foundation of divine grace had already been laid. Earlier in the story, Augustine had observed Ambrose: “when [Ambrose] was not taken up (which was but a little time), he was either refreshing his body with the sustenance absolutely necessary, or his mind with reading. But when he was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest” (Conf. VI). It is no surprise, then, that the moment of Augustine’s conversion was shaped by the person who had shaped his path to conversion; “take up and read” is to say “follow Ambrose, do what he does.” Augustine obeys and is turned to Christ after the  manner of his spiritual father.

I find it important to highlight this way of seeing Augustine’s conversion not only because today is his feast day but also because it helpfully challenges our tendency to see the saving knowledge of God apart from relationships. The temptation to do so can be understandable. People are very messy, and there are many reasons why it would be a lot tidier if God were directly causing every particular thing without involving complicated and sometimes painfully-unworthy people. But this is not the case. As I have often taught in our children’s classes at the parish, God seems to really enjoy working with a team, even though that team falls down quite a lot. If He really found this problematic, the Bible and history would look very different. God is not threatened by the involvement of people in carrying out his plan and, in fact, he solicits our involvement. But as soon as we begin to speak of involvement by people and peoples in places, we are then talking about mediated grace, ways that grace takes shape among real persons--in short, we’re talking about tradition.

If we were to take up and read, the Scriptures prove to be a great place to see the importance of tradition, of how real relationships between real people establish trends for living the Christian life. St. Paul highlights this to the Corinthians: “Follow me as I follow Christ. Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you” (11:1-2). We see the same in his letter to the Thessalonians: “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2:15). The Christian life is learned, and that way of learning is authoritative and powerful, as St. Paul reminds the Philippians: ​​”What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (4:9). The pattern of evangelism and conversion in the New Testament bears witness that the faith is received from those who received it before them. 

We sometimes hear a lot made of the phrase “a personal relationship with Jesus.” Often, this seems to mean having a one-on-one relationship with Jesus. This tells us something true. Each person is known and loved by Christ. It is also a phrase that cuts against an exaggerated grouping impulse, to see my affiliation with the Church as sufficient for being saved, which is a grave error. But we miss something essential if we come to believe that the grace of our salvation does not come to us in place among a people and the ways of that people by which it has learned to pray. We cannot  come to think of grace as a detached energy or isolated idea that is not at every point configured to the Divine Persons of the Trinity communicated to the personal humanity that God created. Despite the popular phrase, I cannot ever really make the faith my own. It cannot belong to me, but I can and must participate in it. Salvation is provided to and practiced by a discerning, praying people and is passed generation to generation in that people’s liturgical, homiletical, and ascetical traditions. Salvation is always personal, but salvation is not merely individual. We come to a personal relationship with Jesus alongside and even because of those before us in personal relationships with Jesus. 

This is also true of our practice of the faith. Like Augustine, receiving saving grace means that we need real people to teach us how to live as Christians. We need literal and spiritual parents like Monica and Ambrose, and we should not be surprised if our way to faith shares a resemblance to theirs. Augustine took up and read and became the spiritual son of Ambrose, the bishop who taught him to take up and read. God and His grace are no less great because they involve people and the ways of practicing the faith that follow from them in their generations. And so we have to resist the iconoclastic temptation to eradicate all but God from the world of salvation. The Reformers were right to say that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ, but we must also keep in mind that to be “in Christ” is to be in the Church among the saints who comprise her. 

To be a traditional church means to treat as precious what Christ through his apostles and the saints to who came after them have given us. In the spirit of Chesterton, we do not disenfranchise the ‘democracy of the dead.’ We have to take seriously the many personal relationships with Jesus as they have followed one to the next for centuries. Augustine was saved by a symphony of loving relations. We all are. So we cannot speak of education without teachers. We cannot speak of salvation without the Church. If we are being saved, it is by faith, but always a personal, relational, and traditional faith. As we pray on All Saints’ Day at Holy Communion:

It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting God, Who, in the multitude of thy saints, hast compassed us about with so great a cloud of witnesses that we, rejoicing in their fellowship, may run with patience the race that is set before us, and together with them may receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away.