Tomorrow morning I need to give an introduction to mystical theology, since next week the students will read through Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum. The most fundamental point that will need to be made is this: mystical theology is not a separate stream or tradition or even genre of theology, but just another way of designating the character of the entire theological enterprise. The relentless concern of the fathers and the medievals is to maintain the absolute identity of the intellectual and experiential quest for God. Thus the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity was but an exploration on the part of the entire church of how to worship the God revealed in Christ. Likewise, Augustine’s own spiritual search for himself and for God necessarily included an intellectual search for what is meant by “the self” and how to comprehend the nature of the incomprehensible God. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium is the most concise demonstration of the point. At stake is precisely the journey of the mind into God. The journey cannot be made without the intellect—even though, in the end, the intellect is left behind in the ecstasy of desire and love—nor can the mind itself be properly understood without undertaking the journey into God.

Saying that all theology should be mystical means two things above all. First, it’s a pursuit that involves the whole existential orientation of a person, not only her intellect. The structure of theological inquiry involves both understanding and love, intellect and will, knowledge and desire. Second, it means that theology’s object is always self-consciously out of reach—both intellectually and experientially. The goal of theology is nothing less than to lose ourselves in God.

That human beings are prone to erect our own admirable towers and shut out God is a fact worth taking seriously in the work of theology; systems of thought as often as towers or empires are built on the basis of self-protection and self-glorification. It is extremely important that theology be done in a way that opens up our lives to the disruptive and transforming movement of the Spirit, rather than close us off. But I think Halden’s wrong to say that’s what’s going on in “holistic” theologies like those of Hart or Balthasar (or presumably Thomas or Gregory or Augustine). I would grant that it may be more of a danger for theologians writing in a systematic mode, but not that theology aimed at painting whole pictures of things is intrinsically lacking in “self-dispossessive openness” and closed off to the irruption of difference.

What “holistic theology” aims at expressing—though only ever provisionally expressing—is the unity and perfect beauty of all things in God, where difference becomes harmony and pilgrims finally and eternally lay eyes on their destination. And it aims to express how in Christ all things hold together even now, if we have the eyes to see. I think it would be hard to accuse Augustine of seeking out premature intellectual closure; his is a theology intimately aware of the incompleteness of human knowledge and the impossibility of completeness, and a theology which is tormented (in a way that most contemporary proponents of the precariousness of truth are not) by human helplessness in the face of our own lives. Yet it is because he takes that helplessness seriously, because he takes seriously the fact that there are unanswered questions and unattended pleas intruding from every side of human existence, that he is also driven to take seriously the hope that God hears and God answers. The incoherence and embattledness of human life is not something to be disdained or swept aside for Augustine, to be sure, but it is to be battled through in the hope of a genuine rest and a genuine understanding in a God whose unity is the sole solvent for human fragmentariness. That’s precisely the work of the Confessions: to find in the madness of his past life a coherence that could only be understood by referring it all to God. And that’s also the ground of Augustine’s grander, more systematic theological elaborations.

Aquinas also well knew, and not just toward the end of his life, that all his work was like straw, a feeble guess after the inner coherence and beauty of things. Balthasar wrote what he wrote under the conviction that theology was the enormously hard and humbling work of opening oneself up to the God who dwells at once in inaccessible light and in the visible forms of all things. Hart understands theology not as a closure of truth but as a kind of gift offered in love, whose truthfulness is proved or disproved precisely by its hospitality. The Christian tradition witnesses over and over again to “holistic” theologies that are offered precisely in the spirit of kenosis. Next to these, the recent reaction against systematic theology can seem to insist on making permanent the fragmentation and fracturing of human knowledge and experience that belongs (because of sin) to our earthly life. At least, these other examples make it difficult for me to see why theology would refuse to look within and beyond the tumult in hopes of glimpsing, as through a glass darkly, the rock and rest of God.

God belongs to the mind, he is to be understood; material bodies belong to the eyes, they are to be seen. But do you imagine you can completely grasp, or comprehend, a body with your eyes? You most certainly can’t. I mean, whatever you look at, you are not looking at the whole of it. When you see someone’s face, you don’t see their back while you see their face; and when you see their back, you don’t at that moment see their face. So then you don’t see things in such a way as to grasp or comprehend them whole…. So then, brothers and sisters, what can be said about that Word? Look, here we are, saying about material things staring us in the face, that we cannot take them all in, grasp them totally, by a look. So what mind’s eye will be able to grasp God, take all of him in? It is enough to touch his fringes, if the mind’s eye is pure. But if it does touch upon him, it does so with a kind of immaterial and spiritual touch, but still does not embrace or comprehend him all; and that too, if the mind is pure.

And we human beings are made blessed by our hearts just brushing against that which abides always blessed; and that is itself eternal blessedness; and that by which we are made alive is eternal life; that by which we are made wise is perfect wisdom; that by which we are enlightened is eternal light. And notice how by brushing against it you are made into what you were not, while that which you brush against is not made into what it was not. What I am saying is: God does not increase thanks to those who know him, but those who know him do, thanks to their knowledge of God.

—St. Augustine, Sermon 117, 4–5

—St. Augustine, Sermon 272

(Note: this is one of the sermons where Augustine utters his famous phrase: “Become what you see; receive what you are.—Estote quod videtis, et accipite quod estis.”)

—St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, tr. 26, 13.

Now the knowledge of the creature is a kind of twilight, compared with the knowledge of the Creator; and then comes the daylight and the morning, when that knowledge is linked with the praise and love of the Creator; and it never declines into night, so long as the Creator is not deprived of his creature’s love. And in fact Scripture never interposes the word ‘night’, in the enumeration of those days one after another. Scripture never says, ‘Night came’; but, ‘Evening came and morning came, one day’. Similarly on the second day and on all the rest. The creature’s knowledge, left to itself, is, we might say, in faded colours, compared with the knowledge that comes when it is known in the Wisdom of God, in that art, as it were, by which it was created. For that reason it can more appropriately be described as evening than as night. And yet that evening turns again to morning, as I have said, when it is turned to praise and love of the Creator.

—St. Augustine, City of God XI, 7

Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, by R. A. Markus.
New York: Cambridge University Press, c1970, 1988. 254pp.

The resourcefulness of this book is breathtaking, as is its scope, and it deserves to be read (if I can be forgiven so frank a display of academic awe) purely for the joy of watching Markus unfold his masterful collation of a great range of Augustinian themes. He admits in the preface that the exploration of St. Augustine’s vision of history sometimes led him to consider “even more distant topics, such as, for instance, Augustine’s views on prophetic inspiration, or on youth and age” (xxi), but never do these “more distant topics” seem at all out of place or overly labored; Markus simply has an eye for the subtle interconnections of the bishop’s immense corpus. The chiefly aerial image of Augustine’s development that he provides, however, is not without its drawbacks. So quickly does the argument move between texts that it is some-times difficult to keep confidence that the author is really speaking in Augustine’s voice, as one might doubt a real estate agent who moves too quickly through a house. But Augustine’s spirit, at least, is easily discernible, if not always his letter—though an appendix containing a close reading of an especially important section from City of God XIX does mitigate this concern somewhat.

The strong thesis Markus forwards in this book has become famous in the nearly four decades since its original publication: against both the ‘Constantinian settlement’ (represented by Eusebius) and the Donatists’ attempt to make a clean social break with the whole ‘world,’ including and especially the Empire, Augustine secularizes the world and the church alike, divesting them of the absolute or final significance which either has only eschatologically. The Roman Empire is not identical with the earthly city, and the Church, though it can be identified with the heavenly city in a special way, remains a corpus permixtum while on pilgrimage here on earth, the tares growing up alongside the wheat until they are sorted out at the final judgment. Indeed, according to Markus, Augustine broke ranks with many of his contemporaries by secularizing history itself: outside the total interpretation given to salvation history in the biblical canon, no his-tory can possess ultimate significance; since the Incarnation and until Christ returns, history is homogeneous, always ambiguous as to the final end of what comes to pass and always a mystery as to where and how God may be working. This, in short, is Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. The saeculum is the age where the two cities always interpenetrate, since neither can exist sociologically in the purity it is ascribed eschatologically.

The implications are many and profound. Before Augustine achieved this understanding—and according to Markus, it was indeed a heroic achievement, though one often misunderstood—it would have been necessary to instruct catechumens not only in the history of Israel but in the history of Christian Rome, since the conversion of the Empire was understood to be bringing about the fulfillment of certain prophecies. His refusal to grant saving significance to the work of the Empire, besides freeing the heavenly city from any debilitating dependence on a fleeting and self-serving historical institution, made it paradoxically possible to see in the ‘state’ more rather than less potential: not burdened by the need to fulfill all prophecy, the state might bolster the Church in its opposition as much as its support (requiring a fortitude that shakes Christians from complacency) and, in either case, exists as one place where members of the either city might work together for temporal peace. (It should be said, as Markus is careful to do, that the idea of the ‘state’ as such was an alien to Augustine, insofar as that idea suggests a clearly discernible social body separate from and over against the general populace. Markus even believes, though rather more arguably, that in the mind of Augustine the ‘state’ crumbles into a collection of individuals engaged in all different sorts of civic work.) And to name just one more consequence of Augustine’s secularization of history: re-quiring less of our current stage in human history and allowing it more ambiguity with respect to its providential purpose is, according to Markus, the move that distanced Augustine from both Eusebius and Donatus. Under Augustine’s mature evaluation, both fell to the temptation prematurely to name and circumscribe the heavenly city, exalting themselves as already the community of eschatological glory.

Markus’s procedure in the book is perfectly straightforward, which is part of what makes his argument so intelligible. In sequence, he discusses Augustine’s secularization of history (chs. 1–2), his secularization of the Roman Empire (chs. 2–3), and his secularization of the church (ch. 5)—which ideas together, he says, constitute Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. The sixth chapter deals with the most obvious possible objection: if Augustine ‘secularized’ the Roman Empire, denying its intrinsic eschatological significance, how could he also have justified Rome’s coercion of Donatists back into the Catholic fold? Markus thinks that in his repudiation of any theology of Christian empire (which did not happen until relatively late in life), Augustine lost an important part of his rationale for religious coercion—so important, in fact, that he would have had to repudiate it if he had fully thought through his theology of the saeculum. Nonetheless, Markus artfully elucidates the supports for the justification that remained in play for Augustine, showing that the issue for him was, in the end, a pastoral one and not a question of the role of the ‘state.’ Indeed, “the fact that he did not think of this problem in terms of the state, but in terms of individual members of the Church who held secular office, disguised from Augustine the acute tension between his consent to coer-cion and the implications of his theology of history and society” (p. 152). In his last chapter (ch. 7), finally, Markus takes leave of the company of historians. He turns instead to a kind of theological exposition of Augustine’s thought on the relation of church to society, abstracted (in a way possible only for theology, not history) from the broader context of his life and work as a bishop. In theology, he says, continuity is found not by repetition but by loyalty to someone’s true doctrinal aims.

This last chapter provides the easiest access to everything wonderful and everything questionable about this book—though I will not do Markus the profound injustice of an overly brief critique, which, even if true, would be inadequate to the creative depth of his proposal. This entire exposition of Augustine’s social thought is justly famous and much discussed, and no short review could hope to say what needs to be said in response. It will suffice merely to indicate, instead, that I think such a response would need to pursue more earnestly than Markus does the outline of Augustine’s ecclesiology. It would need to be said that the church in history is in a special way already identical with the eschatological city of God because it is already organized around that love, the love of God, which will animate and illuminate that city forever. And it would need to be said, conversely, that every other earthly community is much more closely allied to the eschatological earthly city than Markus seems willing to admit, precisely because it is organized around some other love than the love of God—whose only real alternative, for Augustine, is the love of self. But again: whether such concerns be right or not, the debt we owe much to this magnificent work is one not quickly or easily to be repaid. Perhaps in another forty years.

—St. Augustine, Sermon 29A

It may be, however, that I’m being too generous to Milbank. For reasons that Halden has so rightly and forcefully spelled out, it is possible that Milbank would say, rather than being an imitation of God, that every human construction is a parody of Christianity.

It is no new insight that the pastoral character of so much early theological reflection offers a serious challenge to modern theology by its very form. With Augustine, though—so embroiled in the intricacies of a small African town and an even smaller parish—one is especially impressed by the extent to which his grand theological treatments seem mere extensions of his work as a bishop. The man himself, perhaps, longed for more solitude, less petty interruption; who of his kind wouldn’t? Yet his driving love was always for the church, and for his church at Hippo most of all.