Seek His Face Evermore: St. Augustine and the Quest for God

To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement. ~ St Augustine

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STL, STD, Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville

Who among us is erudite enough to set about measuring the immensity of the achievement wrought by Augustine, whose depths clearly defy one’s best efforts to plumb?

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

It was during the pontificate of Paul VI, who has since been raised to the altar, that a gathering of scholars arrived in Rome for a conference on St. Augustine. Drawn by the timeless attractions of the Doctor of Grace, they came, as was fitting, to the center of Catholic Christendom, the Eternal City, for learned and spirited exchanges concerning the greatest of the Church Fathers from the first millennium.  

In the course of their meetings, they were received in a private audience with the Holy Father, who possessed more than a passing acquaintance with the mind and heart of the sainted North African bishop. In fact, around that same time, he’d been in conversations with the writer and philosopher Jean Guitton (The Pope Speaks: Dialogues of Paul VI with Jean Guitton, 1968), with whom he shared his admiration for Augustine, noting, among other things, the fusion of style and substance in his writings. “It is the Latin genius at its most perfect,” he said, intimating that here was the very essence of what it means to be a poet. “And with St. Augustine,” he added, “the poetry is that of truth, of the doctrine. It gives the doctrine its savor, its depth.”

So, when the Holy Father turned to the group, having learned why they’d come to Rome, he asked, “How does one study the ocean?”

Indeed. How, exactly, does one go about doing that? Where to begin? Faced with so vast and voluminous a legacy, is it even advisable to try? Who among us is erudite enough to set about measuring the immensity of the achievement wrought by Augustine, whose depths clearly defy one’s best efforts to plumb? An endless cave, as it were, which few have the capacity to go spelunking along in order to chart its source and course.

On the other hand, why not simply take the plunge into all that oceanic swell, diving headlong to the very bottom of the deep blue sea? You will see recurrent themes and ideas popping up almost anywhere, certain words even becoming flash points to illumine whole realms of undiscovered country. Words like desire, destiny, grace, gravitation, glory, joy, rest, union, beatitude. Discrete pieces fitted together to form a rich mosaic; or raise a scaffold to surround the life and thought of one of the most singularly endowed human beings that ever existed.

And from that vantage point, there may perhaps be seen one great big thing that serves to unify all else, an organizing idea around which the words themselves coalesce into a single, overarching whole. Not the little foxes, mind you, but the elusive hedgehog itself. And what is that crystallizing point but the recognition that, for Augustine, not only are we creatures both incomplete and unfulfilled without God but that we remain entirely unreal to ourselves as well. 

Because, so Augustine tells us, not to know that horizon-shattering presence—that Supreme Someone of whom all the saints and mystics speak—is to collapse everything, including the self, into a state of sheer blithering unintelligibility. “You were more inward than my most inward part,” he tells God, “and higher than the highest element within me.” And recalling the sad unsettled time before his conversion, he declares: “You were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you.”  

If the Socratic dictum on which wisdom’s pursuit depends—that I am to know myself and that a life left unexamined is really not worth living—then for Augustine the immediate and most relevant application of the lesson is when, knowing that it is God whom I must seek to know, I will then come to the most saving knowledge of myself as well. Self-scrutiny, in short, depends on first riveting the attention upon God, who is not to be confused with the self but remains instead the Still Point of all that is, thus the centerpiece of both the self and the cosmos.

“Love is my gravitation,” Augustine teaches us, “and where it goes I too must go.” We become the very thing that we love. Indeed, the soul is made more present to itself by what it loves than by where it lives. Anima plus est ubi amat, quam ubi animat. The Latin is quite beautiful, yet very nearly untranslatable. (“How colorless that is,” commented Pope Paul, recalling the text, “in every language, even when something of the alliteration is kept! In the Latin of St. Augustine it resounds, is registered not only in the audiomemory but in mind and in truth.”) 

Thus, when it is God Himself whom we are to love, we become ever more like Him. The word for this, of course, which Augustine seizes upon most eagerly, is deification, a term crucial to his presentation of the Christian life. A life not only centered on Christ, as though it were enough that He be the operative principle, but suffused—steeped through and through—with Christ.  

He is not an ideal toward which we are to move, even as we remain frustrated by our repeated failures to reach it; but He is the very center out of which our lives have already been formed, been given a Christocentric shape. It is to the person of Christ Himself that we are to cleave, so that in doing so we may be transformed into the very likeness of God. “Let us thus rejoice and give thanks,” he exclaims, “for we have been made not Christians, but we have been made Christ.”

Who else will show us the face of God? If we are, as the Psalmist reminds us in a text often cited by Augustine, “to seek his face evermore,” it is because the human being Jesus, in whom dwells the very fullness of God, reveals it to us. Jesus is no mere exegete, in other words, plopped down among us in order to unpack a text or two about God. He is no less than the enfleshment of God Himself, arrayed among us in human form, in order that we, too, may see the Father even as He looks upon Him amid the precincts of an eternal felicity. “Let us enter together in the path of charity,” he urges, “in search of him of whom it is said, ‘Seek his face evermore.’”

Again, it is God whom we are to love, the God who dwells deep within the heart. Yet, as Augustine will often lament, “the heart has wandered away from him. Return, transgressor, to your heart. Hold fast to him who made you. Stand with him and you shall stand fast. Rest in him and you will be at rest.”

It is in passages such as these that we locate the birth of what may be called “the method immanence,” a way unafraid of beginning from within, starting from the fact of human hunger and thirst, of sheer boundless desire for God. Each of us, to sound the distinctive Augustinian chord, is “a hollowed-out space” only God can fill. On the very first page of the Confessions, a masterpiece of autobiography, in which a whole life is laid bare before God, Augustine provides the most memorable example of the method, easily the most quoted passage in the book:  

You have made us for yourself, O God, and so our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.

There are many such passages, all equally arresting, but to find them we must first pick up Augustine and, as he himself was once famously urged to do, “Take and read!” We shall not be disappointed.