Augustine and Jerome
I just finished reading The Fathers, by Pope Benedict, a collection of his first series of Wednesday audiences covering the Church Fathers up through St. Augustine.
Augustine’s dedication to finding the truth through reason actually led him to reject the Catholic Faith as a young man! From Pope Benedict’s Wednesday audience on January 30, 2008:
Today’s Catechesis, however, is dedicated to the subject of faith and reason, a crucial, or better, the crucial theme for St Augustine’s biography. As a child he learned the Catholic faith from Monica, his mother. But he abandoned this faith as an adolescent because he could no longer discern its reasonableness and rejected a religion that was not, to his mind, also an expression of reason, that is, of the truth.
His thirst for truth was radical and therefore led him to drift away from the Catholic faith. Yet his radicalism was such that he could not be satisfied with philosophies that did not go to the truth itself, that did not go to God and to a God who was not only the ultimate cosmological hypothesis but the true God, the God who gives life and enters into our lives.
He ended up following the Manichean heresy for many years (a dualistic theology of balanced good and evil powers) before returning to the Catholic Church and becoming the greatest Latin Father and Doctor of the Church.
Here is an interesting application of Augustine’s pilgrimage of faith to my own: I have been asked before if my goal is “to convert everyone to the Catholic Church.”
St. Augustine answers this question for me: my goal is for everyone to find the fullness of the truth. It so happens that I believe with all my heart that the fullness of truth is found in Jesus Christ and that the Catholic Church is the one He founded and has protected from error in her teachings. So yes, I do want all people to enter full communion with the Church.
However, if the Church is not what she claims to be, then I do not want people to become Catholic, and I remain open to the possibility that she is not the true Church. If someone can show me through reason that there is a more plausible alternative, I am open to considering those arguments. So far that has not happened.
More brilliance from Benedict on Augustine:
Thus, Augustine’s entire intellectual and spiritual development is also a valid model today in the relationship between faith and reason, a subject not only for believers but for every person who seeks the truth, a central theme for the balance and destiny of every human being. These two dimensions, faith and reason, should not be separated or placed in opposition; rather, they must always go hand in hand.
As Augustine himself wrote after his conversion, faith and reason are “the two forces that lead us to knowledge” (Contra Academicos, III, 20, 43). In this regard, through the two rightly famous Augustinian formulas (cf. Sermones, 43, 9) that express this coherent synthesis of faith and reason: crede ut intelligas (“I believe in order to understand”) – believing paves the way to crossing the threshold of the truth – but also, and inseparably, intellige ut credas (“I understand, the better to believe”), the believer scrutinizes the truth to be able to find God and to believe.
I believe in order to understand.
I understand, the better to believe.
“However, if the Church is not what she claims to be, then I do not want people to become Catholic, and I remain open to the possibility that she is not the true Church. If someone can show me through reason that there is a more plausible alternative, I am open to considering those arguments. So far that has no[t] happened.”
I remember the day that I realized that the Church was “The Church” founded by Christ; it was a great moment – I actually did a fist-pump in the air while mowing the lawn – and a great grace.
Once that gift of faith was given to me I haven’t doubted; I have gotten angry at the Church for the sinfulness of its members, but I have never doubted.
Please ask for the gift of Faith, in prayer, it is a grace and not something that you will be able to grasp intellectually by your own power.
In other words, if you are not convinced, you will not be able to convince anyone that the Catholic Church is “The Church” and most of your efforts will be a waste.
Welcome to our blog, Lucien, and thank you for your thoughtful comment. It’s great to hear how excited you were. I, too, was overcome by joy when I realized that the Catholic Church was the true Church founded by Christ.
Was there a particular argument or set of arguments that helped convince you?
I considered several arguments prior to receiving the Sacraments of Initiation; the most plausible one to my mind being one you have mentioned elsewhere: that if I believe the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, gave us His body and blood to eat and drink, and started a Church that that Church must still be in existence and continue to be one (unified in beliefs).
Examining the three branches of Christianity, that we have today (Catholic, Orthodox & Protestantism), it was pretty clear that both the Orthodox Churches and Protestant “churches” were not unified in beliefs in any real way, shape, or form, thus the whole aspect of oneness (unity in belief) was lost; it also seemed apparent to me that those major schisms and heresies were sustainable, thanks in large part, due to the monetary support received at the national level (i.e. the royal ruling classes). That is why Evangelical Protestantism has turned out to be such a powerfully destructive heresy; because American Evangelicals, great in wealth, have spread the error of sola scriptura on their missionary activities to Catholic countries leaving in their wake disunity even within their own particular sects.
But the moment that I knew in my heart (and bones) that the Catholic Church was “The Church” did come several weeks after my baptism and confirmation; I don’t recall running through any particular argument, at the time, I was just reflecting upon the first council of Jerusalem and then considered all the councils called by the Catholic Church and how the Apostles, in their written declaration, wrote a letter claiming to have the Holy Spirit speak through them on these issues. Only the Catholic Church still does this; no other church (with any historical Christian credibility) claims that the Holy Spirit speaks through them definitively in this manner, so a light went off – I did a fist-pump and later realized that God had just given me the gift of Faith in His Church.
Although I thought the Catholic Church had held unto the majority of the truth of what Jesus had taught, prior to that moment of faith and fist-pumping, I also held onto a naïve and erroneous notion that His Church might have been split into the three distinct branches to aid the spread of the Gospel, instead of seeing the truth of the matter – that God works through fallible humans and thus division will always be a problem.
Without this aspect of certainty in His Church I think faith is not fully-developed; and really probably isn’t faith, as understood as an act of God’s grace, thus nothing I can acquire myself but have to ask for in prayer. After all, if I don’t think the Church speaks authoritatively today with Christ’s authority on matters of faith and morals; why would I think it spoke authoritatively when it compiled the bible and proclaimed all the other major teachings that have roared through history challenging and changing our world for the better?