Despite being distanced in the history of
time for more than 15 centuries, Augustine is one of the most modern luminaries
of Christianity; one of the most “human” saints, for the great affinity of
Augustine's spirit has with thousands of men of the present century, so
great that it gives him perennial modernity.
Ambrose, one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures of the fourth century perhaps took the spirit of genius Augustine with the radiance of his eloquence, but it did not reach the soul of the sensual pagan of Carthage.
Thomas Aquinas, an affectionate intellectual who if were a contemporary of Augustine would have been for the rebellious flesh and the revolutionary psyche of Mónica's son a great sphinx, a phenomenon that is admired, but which is not comprehended and from which no solution is expected for the intimate and painful problems of life.
Augustine has this peculiarity: he is a man endowed with extraordinary sharpness of spirit and intense psychic vibration... intelligent and sensual, he is eminently spiritual, metaphysical, mystical, that is, so many paradoxes in one personality!
The vast majority of men are unable to break free from the demons of lust, but they are not always vulgar, joyful profanes, unbelievers of the spiritual and divine world. On the contrary, in the virtue of a strange principle of psychic polarization, since the more they feel the tyranny of the flesh and wallow in the mud of these pleasures, the more awake in their souls, the nostalgia for a world of purity and spirituality and the longing in returning to the paternal home. It seems that this phenomenon is repeated every time the ardour of the flesh goes hand in hand with the glow of intelligence.
It is possible that a man who acts only by instinct, a man-body, is dragged by the source of lust into the dark regions of atheistic materialism; who doesn’t feel any more in his brutish consciousness the delicate attraction of the divine light, the longing for the spirit, for he lacks the necessary intellectual clarity to illuminate the vast underground of his animality.
With the intelligent man, however, in general, another phenomenon occurs; the more he enjoys, the more unhappy he feels.
He is a prodigal son who, surrounded by herds of human beings indulging in their sexual appetites, cannot be part of these fools; he does not throw himself among the brutes; do not get excited about this banquet to satisfy his appetites.
This unfortunate shepherd of human herds could well equalize with the irrational, indulge their desires in the same way as they and live in peace, in the peaceful narcosis of total stupidity.
But... there is a strange mystery that obstructs this unhappy happiness.
His intelligence raised an invincible barrier to this sinking in the mud, defending himself from extinction in the world of sinful flesh, refusing to satisfy his sensual hunger...
This is the glorious tragedy of man: that he cannot be an integral brute.
Not being able to kill the hunger of the spirit with the feast of the irrational.
Having to feel the hunger for desire and the sickness of enjoyment.
To endure within the Self the painful drama of the ego's personality... Not being able to narcotize the nostalgia of the soul with the numbing of lust...
What perhaps the stupid man can achieve, the intelligent-spirited man cannot.
The flesh roars in a rage, with despotic vehemence the imperative of his instincts: Enjoy! enjoy! enjoy!...
The spirit raises the torch of intelligence and illuminates the unknown regions of truth, where the legend shines: Think! think! think!...
Ah! if the man were a simple animal, he would find peace and tranquillity in the enjoyment of sensory pleasures.
If man were pure spirit, he would find definite stillness in the enjoyment of the pure delights of truth.
But, as he is a mixed being, a bridge between two worlds, suspended between heaven and earth, angel and animal - this poor being, always attracted and always repelled, always dragged to earth by the flesh and always snatched to heaven by the spirit...
Hence his state of eternal dissatisfaction, his nostalgic restlessness of soul... hence the possibility of a man being a Satan of the illusory lust today, and tomorrow a seraph of exalted spirituality... hence this paradox of paradoxes, of being able, in some way, to be an angel and a demon at the same time.
Men of peaceful natures, without violent passions or extreme aspirations, these eunuchs of body or spirit, do not comprehend revolutionaries like Augustine and detest them as men without religion or morals - when many of these “satanic seraphim”, these human disharmonies can have more religion than certain "godly souls" who never felt the storms of the flesh nor the lightning of the spirit in themselves...
When Jesus visited Simon's house, where two souls met, one, calm as the monotony of a plain, and the other, restless as a world struck by earthquakes and black precipices - the spirit of Jesus sympathized with the sinner's dynamic restlessness of Magdala, and disliked the static stillness of the doctor of law.
From this clash of flesh and spirit, of this eternal struggle of Satan's abyss and God's excelsitude, a sadness, a psychic state of indefinable character is born in the thinking man, a state that poets and philosophers have uselessly tried to divulge in concrete formulas.
The man feels...
The man thinks...
And from this feeling and thinking, a kind of wanting, of loving, springs up, which everywhere comes up against the narrow walls of his insufficiency.
The man feels invited by the sun of freedom to the serene heights of purity - and with each attempt, he injures his wings in the iron bars of his material prison... And, with the soul's wings in a living wound, he falls back to the sadness of his impotent will...
And then he feels as if he were exiled from a homeland that he never saw, abandoned by a love who he never lived, drawn to a centre and at the same time repelled to a periphery, torn by two antagonistic forces that in the arena of his soul are fighting in a bloody struggle of life and death.
No thinking spirit is happy in the mud - even if a crowd of mermaids live in it.
And then this inconceivable absurdity arises: a deeply sensual man can at the same time be a highly mystical one. The light of intelligence converted physics into metaphysics... The ardour of the heart culminated in his libido in erotic transcendence...
Augustine is the typical representative of the man-flesh and the man-spirit, and perhaps there never was a sinner as longing for God as this African; no slave of lust felt the longing for the things of the spirit as intensely as this pagan.
Among so-called “worldly men” there are far greater numbers of sincere spirits who seek God and are attracted to Christ than can be imagined.
What later turned Augustine into a Christian, in the immortal pages of “Confessions” and “City of God”, already pre-existed as a germ in his soul.
No man is at the end of his evolution what he was not, virtually, at the beginning of the process of his metamorphosis. The greater the destiny of man, the more faithful he must be to himself and the more firmly he maintains reason in his personality, regardless of all the aggressions and possible transformations of the environment that may alter the end of his pilgrimage, which first passes through the process of self-knowledge and the ultimate self-realization.
The Self of the mediocre man is like clay - the Self of the superior man is like crystal. The clay has no defined shape, assuming all the forms of the environment in which it is found, and all the modalities of the container. The crystal, however, even before appearing in its geometric form, is already what it will be: with strictly circumscribed faces, edges, colour. That is, the future body of the crystal is already pre-determined by the soul present in its atoms. Each atom of clay is clay, and, for that reason, an amorphous, indefinite being, without character, without a soul, without “personality” - whereas each atom of the future crystal already pre-existent virtually has character, form, soul, “personality”. The clay substance is susceptible to any and all adulterations, whereas the crystal substance is of absolute fidelity to itself.
Every mediocre man is like clay - every refined man is like crystal.
The first is a simple individual – the second, a powerful personality.
The greatest service that the refined man can render to humanity is to have the courage to be explicitly what he is implicit - even though this allegiance to the Self is almost always a “nuisance” for the world in which he lives for this man is inevitably a revolutionary, an exception to the rule, an anomaly - and the world of dominant mediocrities do not tolerate such injury to its traditional routine. The refined man does not adapt to these clichés, does not break his crystalline edges for the sake of moldable clay; he does not round his faces; he does not tamper his Self in the face of so many crimes committed by a society of clay-men ...
The crystal-man can hardly be a legitimate ornament of society because he cannot entertain - for a long time - a group of clay-men in a hall of distinguished ladies and elegant gentlemen. His edges differ from conventional banalities. His rectilinear character does not conform to the curvaceous hypocrisies and flattery without which the society of these mediocre men does not subsist.
However, this man-crystal, appalling “nuisance” for society, is the great foundation with the ability to support and build, from the world of chaos, a world of harmony.
The greatest crystal-man who ever appeared on earth was by the clay-men declared a heretic, revolutionary, dangerous and unsuitable. “Out with him! crucify him!” And all of this was very real, very true. There has never been a greater “heretic”, nor a more revolutionary spirit, nor a man more unsuitable to lying social conventions than this man.
And since that day, the path of the crystal-men is always full of obstacles, of gallows and burned at the stake, of prisons and crosses...
As unlikely as it may seem, Augustine, after those mysterious voices in Milan, was still what he was and what he always was: a man excited by a great ideal. And, if this were not the case, the present century would not know the name of Monica's son; for every man without an ideal is a man destined for oblivion and obscurity, a null man. The ideal is energy, potential. How can a machine run without fuel? It is much more necessary and interesting to witness the turbulent and dramatic evolution of a great man than to watch the calm placidity at the end of his journey.
Gone are the days when the biographies of the saints were ascetic pieces made to give examples to the naive reader and elaborated to show to the public a saint fell from heaven, in all its fullness and perfection. These books are still in publication for this class of readers, but the real-life man does not open these fictional works, or else he closes the volume at the end of the first chapter, never to open it again. Nowadays, there are already descriptions of the saints' lives that present the hero with all the lights and shadows, with all the virtues and vices, a true human individual on the ascension path of his authentic personality.
It is better to know how a profane joker became a determined spiritualist than to hear that he was born a saint and performed so many hundreds of miracles.
It is better for the spiritual ascension, to witness the dynamic fermentation of a character in the process of crystallization than to contemplate the tranquil statics of a crystal already perfectly formed and with defined faces.
* * *
Augustine's heart beats in every man - a pagan and a Christian, a sinner and a saint, a sensual and a mystic. He's not just an extraordinary man. He is the symbol of humanity - of this humanity without Christ, and at the feet of Christ.
He summarized the nature and grace of the history of mankind - and the intimate history of almost all human beings.
His life is the most amazing apotheosis of the power of grace. This same grace that made Paul, a fierce persecutor of Jesus who fell at the gates of Damascus and later became the greatest apostle of the Gospel also made the libertine joker of Carthage the enlightened mystic of Hippo.
For both, the same motto is valid: “I will show you how much it is worth to suffer for the name of Christ”.
It is in the school of suffering that the great messengers of Divinity are formed.
The heroes of the spirit.
Secular men.
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