4 Sep Mon

When you read Saint Augustine, it’s almost impossible not to see parallels with your own life.

The very first page of “Confessions”, contains his much-quoted line: fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te (“You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”)

Social commentators sometimes talk about how “the world has lost its story,” meaning we no longer know why we exist as persons or societies. And the stories we try to substitute for it – enlightenment, national greatness, economic progress, even science –which depended on having a sense and direction to life, no longer have any real substance.

And it shows. Desperate attempts at establishing “identity” by latching on to race, and gender “communities,” or engaging in environmental or political crusades, are in the end, modern manifestations of restless hearts.

In a way, even his other book, “City of God”, reflects Augustine’s belief that our confidence in our own powers, independent of God, to establish perfect justice on earth, is just another delusion which, we hope, will quiet our restlessness.

Still, what’s to be learned from a man who died 1600 years ago, in a time and place so different from our own?

Well, perhaps the first thing is that despite all those differences there’s much that speaks, with sharp immediacy, to us because –skip this the proud progressives of all ages– many human things don’t change.

Augustine tells us of a tale of “two trees.” The first, the pear tree that Augustine and his teenage friends stole fruit from, not because they were hungry, or the pears were good (they weren’t), but out of casual perversity. Here he shows that what we now call being “woke” is the Christian belief that human hearts, all human hearts including the most “woke,” waver between good and –to use the tight term– evil.

The pear tree tells a deep story. Ultimately, it isn’t society, or economic conditions, or your family that explain your bad behavior, it stems from the same human source: restless hearts attracted to good and evil.

But there’s another tree in his story. At the moment of his conversion, “I flung myself down, how, I know not, under a certain fig-tree,” says Augustine. (Bk. VIII) The second tree is a fig tree, and it was from fig leaves that Adam and Eve fashioned themselves coverings when, after they sinned and felt naked, they repented. Thus, it means understanding reality and beginning a new direction.

Augustine no doubt had this in mind. And so, the fig tree is a reversal of the course we took that fatal day in Eden. Every time someone is converted, he turns in the right direction, he recovers the meaning of his life, his own personal story, and finds peace of heart.

Fr. Charles Belmonte