Prof. Edward Bradley
April 26, 2007
Rollins Chapel
For the past six weeks I have been absent from Hanover and hence unable to
learn from the weekly chapel services how the discussion of the topic of faith
and reason has evolved. My ignorance means that while I may enjoy a
certain measure of freedom in my remarks today, I must also be concerned that
what I say not turn out to be a stale rehearsal of what has already been
compellingly explored by others. As I begin, then, I must beg your indulgence,
for I am, moreover, neither theologian nor philosopher, and I hold no holy
orders. But like you, I am a pilgrim, one whose understanding of the
relationship between faith and reason has been profoundly shaped by my
encounter with another pilgrim, a figure of towering intellect and inspiring
faith, St. Augustine of Hippo. Allow me, therefore, to offer a few observations
about St. Augustine that illustrate the course of his own pilgrim's path in the
hope that his example may help to illuminate more clearly the nature of our own
experience.
Although born in North Africa in 354 AD to a family of modest means, he was
bright and energetic and enjoyed the equivalent of a full scholarship to high
school and college through the patronage of a wealthy friend of his family. His
discovery of the world of books led him as a school boy to fall in love with,
and mourn the death of, Dido, the tragic heroine of Virgil's Aeneid
(Conf. 1. 20-22), and later, his encounter with certain works of
Cicero opened up to him the world of philosophy and inspired in him "an
incredible ardor" for "undying wisdom" (Conf. 3. 7). The force of this
discovery persuaded him that Scripture was, as he states, "unworthy of
comparison with the nobility of Cicero's writings" (Conf. 3.9). Before
long, Augustine's brilliant academic achievements brought him from Carthage to
Rome where he established a small private academy for the sons of the
wealthiest and most distinguished families of the ancient city. And, finally,
while the exact dates are not known, he appears to have left Rome in the early
380's to take up an imperial appointment as professor of rhetoric in Milan, the
new capital of the western half of the Roman empire. His professional success
as a man of letters, trained in the traditional disciplines of grammar,
rhetoric, literature, and philosophy, as well of mathematics, music, and
natural science, made him the perfect embodiment of a classical education
founded upon the teachings of Plato and Aristotle among the Greeks and Seneca
and other Stoic thinkers among the Romans. He was also immensely influenced by
the work of Plotinus (ca. 205-270 AD) and other Neoplatonists.
Yet he was also a deeply troubled man -- inquietus in Latin.
Perhaps "tormented" would be a more apt description. Although not baptized,
Augustine had been raised as a Catholic Christian by his mother, Monica, and
during his early manhood he had not been deaf or insensitive to the great
moral, religious, and, by extension, political debates that were raging about
him in Carthage and Rome and later in Milan, where, in fact, Ambrose, the
authoritative bishop of the imperial city, was often in open, public conflict
with the emperor, Valentinian II (375-392). On the contrary, Augustine had been
deeply drawn into the circle of the Manicheans in Carthage and Rome, and as a
devotee of that sect had even resided while in Rome in a Manichean
household. Perhaps most pertinent of all, his sexual needs had bedeviled
him incessantly from the time of his mid adolescence right up to the eve of his
conversion at the age of 33. In today's language, I think that we might
fairly describe them as a kind of addiction from which all his efforts to
liberate himself were enfeebled by his own inadequate will. All around him,
moreover, he saw and read about highly intelligent, well-educated men with
successful professional careers like his own coming to a determination to
abandon the saeculum, which is to say, the pursuits and values of
secular society, and make a leap of faith into the Christian way. It was in
such circumstances, then, that after lengthy meetings with some of these
prominent individuals, including Ambrose, Augustine uttered a great cri du
coeur, the first stage, as it were, of a kind of dramatic anagnorisis:
What shall an unhappy man do? "Who shall deliver me from the body of
this death," unless it is by your grace, " through Jesus Christ our Lord," whom
you have begotten coeternal with yourself, and created in the beginning of your
ways, in whom the prince of this world found nothing worthy of death, and yet
killed him? And the handwriting of the decree that was against us was blotted
out.
All this those writings of the Platonists do not have. Their
pages do not have this face of piety, the tears of confession, your sacrifice,
a troubled spirit, a contrite and humbled heart (cor contritum et humiliatum),
the salvation of your people, the city that is like a bride, the pledge of the
spirit, the cup of our redemption. In those books no one sings: "Shall not my
soul be subject to God? For he is my God, my protector. I shall be
moved no more" (Conf. 7.27).
This acute recognition of profound needs unmet found its
final, most succinct, and perhaps most eloquent expression in the famous scene
in the garden where the long agony of his conversion in Book 8 of the
Confessions has its dramatic denouement:
....I turn upon Alypius and cry out to him: "What is the
trouble with us ? What is this? What did you hear? The unlearned rise up and
take heaven by storm, and we, with all our erudition but empty of heart, see
how we wallow in flesh and blood! " (Conf. 8.19)
I began my remarks by describing us all, including St.
Augustine, as pilgrims. I like the word because its original meaning is
that of a traveler in a foreign land, a wayfarer. In Augustine's case, the leap
of faith that occurred in a small garden attached to a suburban villa near
Milan literally led him to wend his way back to North Africa after having
resigned from his professorial appointment. The spiritual crisis that
precipitated his abandonment of one way of life (saeculum) for
commitment to the Way (via, as in John 14:6) was explosively expressed
by his insight in the garden that he was, to paraphrase, despite all his
erudition, "empty of heart." Surely, no such painfully intense or
prolonged turmoil in our own lives is likely to account for our presence here
today. Indeed, in many, if not in most cases, our pilgrim's path probably
follows a course traced by our family when we were still young, even if later
subject to the testing and corrective reorientation that take place normally as
we move into a larger world of vastly expanded personal experience and formal
learning, as here at Dartmouth. But, whatever its origins and however
circuitous and even laborious our progress may have been or even still be, our
following the Way with and through Jesus Christ to the truth and to fullness of
life is predicated upon the acknowledgement by reason of the absolutely equal,
determinative claims of faith in defining our identity. For Augustine, the
decisive battle centered on the insufficient resources furnished by reason to
feed his hungry heart. At the very beginning of the Confessions
he had stated, "...our heart is restless until it rests in you" (1.1), the
central drama of the epic journey that unfolds over the course of 13 books.
With allowance made for the virtually incommensurable differences between St.
Augustine and myself, I wish to acknowledge that he has been in my life a great
teacher and spiritual guide, an inspiring companion on the Way (comes in
via). From his path to conversion and beyond I submit, moreover, that he
offers a clear and compelling lesson to all of us: our rational faculties, no
matter how powerfully developed, can avail us just so far in life; it is only
when we learn with experience to hear and to heed the voice of our hearts
calling us to the loving embrace of the Lord that we can, at last, achieve
fullness of being in perfect, abiding peace.
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