Seeking the Open Place with St. Augustine
Photo by Anh Nguyen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/monumental-walls-in-temple-17651321/
Many of us have experienced what the Irish call thin places, where we sense that the shroud between the material world and eternity has gone threadbare. A pilgrim might find a thin place in a shadowy stone chapel wherein a saint is buried. A hiker might find one on a misty mountainside. A mother might sense one in the glider where she nurses her infant after midnight. In such numinous places, God feels especially close.
Saints aren't satisfied with merely sensing the divine. They yearn for ecstatic joy in union with the Beloved. They seek not just thin places but the open place. In Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo expresses his desire to touch God “at the point where that contact is possible and to cleave to [God] at the point where it is possible to cleave.” Confessions details Augustine’s pilgrimage toward this point of contact, the place where eternity enfolds the earthbound traveler. Friends of God burn to know and embrace God—and we are all called to sainthood.
A reader can easily get entangled in thorny Books 10 and 11 of Confessions. Yet in these chapters Augustine works most vigorously to conceptualize the point of contact. In the first nine books, Augustine narrates his youth and conversion. Once he opens himself up to grace, the tough spiritual climb begins. Augustine acknowledges that God has been with him always, but that he has not been with God; his sin has been a barrier. The last section of Book 11 offers a rigorous meditation on the point of contact that Augustine has been seeking. We might view this section as a primer for discerning the open place, where union with God is possible.
Augustine opens this final section of Book 11 with a suppliant’s cry: “O Lord, my God...” With this phrase he speaks directly to the Mystery. What follows, then, isn’t mere intellectual work; it is engagement in relationship with a Person. To speak with Eternity is a matter of the heart—evinced by the primordial interjection O that begins the prayer.Augustine asks the Beloved, “How deep is the abyss of Thy secret, and how far from it have the consequence of my sins held me?” Whereas the reference to depth suggests profundity and incites reverence, the word abyss tinges the sentence with terror. An abyss is unfathomable, empty, even frightening. It is a dangerous deep. The word secret, too, carries both bright and shadowy connotations, for a secret can be either ruinous or propitious. In one stroke, Augustine has conveyed fear and reiterated his desire to venture deeper into the abyss, closer to the secret. Boundless, ever-new, God is the unknown territory where the courageous venture in search of treasure. There is no easy path; the Way is adventure, calling the bold.
To discern the rocky path to God, Augustine prays, “Cleanse my eyes and let me rejoice in Thy light.” The language of cleansing suggests Purgatorial redemption, a realm of rigor but also of hope. In his search for the open place, Augustine has found that God’s glory permeates us and our world but that human error prevents us from discerning it.
Following Augustine’s request for cleansing is a thicket of dense reasoning whose thorny syntax models the strain of trying to find the open place through intellect alone. “Assuredly,” Augustine posits, “if there were a mind of such vast knowledge and foreknowledge that all the parts and all the future were as clearly known to it as some familiar canticle is known to me, such a mind would be marvellous beyond measure, would strike us silent with awe.” Note the dependent clauses inlaid within dependent clauses, syntactically conveying layers, vastness, complexity, and unfathomability, building up to the resounding conclusion, “nimium mirabilis est animus iste atque ad horrorem stupendus”—the word horrorem meaning awe in this case but also capable of connoting dread and horror. The magnificence of God stupifies and strikes with awe. The language—arresting, forceful, terrifying—tells us that attempting to peer directly into the open place through our intellectual power alone is futile. We will be left trembling in terror, paralyzed in fear of the Lord.
Yet, the soul yearns to draw close, and to rest in God is to rest in full joy and peace. We are told over and over in the Gospel, “Be not afraid.” Perhaps we must feel God’s majesty and elevation if we hope to meet the Mediator, Jesus, who lowered himself from the greatest heights, who did so out of love, who calls us friends.
To illustrate the magnitude of God’s gift of self, Augustine uses an disarmingly familiar analogy: he compares God’s omniscience to our knowledge of a favorite song. When singing a canticle, Augustine says, he knows what has come before and what comes next. But “Far be it from me,” he continues, “to think that You, O creator of the Universe, creator of souls and bodies, had only such knowledge as that of the future and past. Far more marvellously, far more mysteriously, do You hold your Knowledge.” With the reference to music, a familiar, warm tone emerges. Augustine celebrates creation in its spiritual and physical forms: souls and bodies. And whereas the words marvellous and mysterious at the beginning of the passage carry a note of dread, now these same words ring with lyric harmony. Augustine is introducing us to a God who knows the universe as we know our favorite song. The God who sings is a God with whom we can sing.
Whereas our impressions vary as we sing a song, and our knowledge is divided between expectation and memory, Augustine says in praise, “No such thing happens to You, the immutable and eternal, the eternal Creator of minds.” In addition to the lilting rhythm, the repetition of eternal functions as a beacon, telling us we are drawing close to the open place we’ve been seeking. There is no trembling in fear here, only hymnic joy.
In this celebratory tone, Augustine draws Book 11 to its conclusion with a vision of eternity. “In the beginning” he praises God, “You knew heaven and earth without any element of change in Your knowledge; and similarly in the beginning, You created heaven and earth without any element of change in Your action.” Parallel syntax reinforces the sense of balance: thought and action, heaven and earth, change and changelessness, the divine and the mundane. In both the form and content of this sentence, we experience harmony and completeness
Augustine closes Book 11 with a tone of trust and comfort. Though we still cannot fully understand God’s mystery, and our response to God’s magnificence is still one of awe, the repetition of the phrase “without any element of change” suggests stability, assurance, and completeness. Where before we felt the depth of our unknowing and wrongdoing, here we can rest safely in God’s right knowing and right action.
What are we to do, having opened ourselves to the point of contact with the divine? “Let him who understands praise You,” Augustine prays, “and let him who does not understand you praise you likewise.” Once again, he has employed parallel structure to create a sense of balance and lyric repetition. We are called to sing songs of praise when we have opened ourselves up to communion with God; no intellectual prerequisite bars the lowly faithful from meeting the creator on high. Instead, “the humble of heart” are God’s dwelling place.
The open place, then, exists wherever Christ dwells: in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, The Way of the Cross, Golgotha, and on every altar, in the form of the Eucharist. Pope Saint John Paul II tells us, “To borrow a phrase from the Jewish Sabbath liturgy, the Eucharist is a ‘taste of eternity in time’ (A. J. Heschel). [...] the Eucharist is a divine and transcendent presence, a communion with the eternal, a sign that ‘the earthly city and the heavenly city penetrate one another’ (Gaudium et spes, n. 40). The Eucharist, memorial of Christ's Passover, is by its nature the bearer of the eternal and the infinite in human history.”
So, through the grace of God, the pilgrim in the ancient stone chapel may carry the open place within, as may the hiker on the misty mountain top and the nursing mother. As did most certainly, in his cell at Auschwitz, St. Maximilian Kolbe. As did, bending over a festering beggar’s open wound, St. Mother Theresa of Calcutta. And as did, in the surrender of his Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross. Jesus enfolds the created world in Himself and fills the created world with Himself. To rest in the open place, to stand ensconced in eternity and cleave to God at the point of contact, we must first humble the heart, believe without seeing, and consume the eternity offered by Christ the Mediator, becoming the open place we are each called to be.
