XIII. St. Augustine and the Church

Augustine’s mode of thought told him that with the coming of Christ conditions had set in for souls seeking the spirit other than those which had previously existed. For him it was firmly established that in Christ Jesus had been revealed in outer historical fact that which the mystic had sought through preparation in the Mysteries. One of his significant utterances is the following: “What is now called the Christian religion already existed among the ancients and was not lacking at the every beginnings of the human race. When Christ appeared in the flesh, the true religion already in existence received the name of Christian.” There were two ways possible for such a method of thought. One way maintains that if the human soul develops within her the forces which lead her to the knowledge of her true self, she will, if she only goes far enough, also learn to know the Christ and everything connected with Him. This would have been a Mystery-wisdom enriched by the Christ-event. The other way is that taken by Augustine, by which he became the great model for his successors. It consists in ceasing to develop one’s own soul-forces at a certain point, and in borrowing the conceptions connected with the coming of Christ from written accounts and oral traditions. Augustine rejected the first way as springing from pride of soul; he thought the second way the way of true humility. Thus he says to those who wished to follow the first way: “You could find peace in the truth, but for that humility is needed, which does not suit your proud neck.” On the other hand, he was filled with boundless inward happiness by the fact that since “the coming of Christ in the flesh” it was possible to say that every human soul can come to spiritual experience if she goes as far as she can in seeking within herself, and then, in order to attain to the highest, has confidence in what the written and oral traditions of the Christian Church tell us about the Christ and His revelation. He says on this point: “What bliss, what abiding enjoyment of supreme and true good is offered us, what serenity, what a breath of eternity! How shall I describe it? It has been expressed, as far as it could be, by those great incomparable souls who we admit have beheld and still behold... We reach a point at which we acknowledge how true is what we have been commanded to believe, and how well and beneficently we have been brought up by our mother, the Church, and of what benefit was the milk given by the Apostle Paul to the little ones...”[^1]