The Memory of Christ

Alex Fogleman

doi:10.1017/9781009377430.010

8 - The Memory of Christ

Augustine of Hippo and the Knowledge of Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2023

Alex Fogleman

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Alex Fogleman: Affiliation:
Baylor University, Texas

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Summary

Augustine’s corpus allows the observation of several interesting aspects of the interrelation between pedagogy and knowledge. In particular, he demonstrates the way in which a Platonic-informed illuminationist epistemology can be transformed by a christologically shaped view of love. Looking primarily at De catechizandis rudibus and credal sermons, this chapter examines how Augustine understood love to be the central issue for knowing God in catechesis. It also explores how debates with Manichaeism and Donatism shaped Augustine’s view of the role of catechesis.

Keywords

Augustine illumination love De catechizandis rudibus creed

Type: Chapter
Information: Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation , pp. 175 - 197

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009377430.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023
Creative Commons: This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

Of all the writings surveyed in this book, Augustine’s corpus provides an especially rich body of literature to explore the relationship between knowledge and pedagogy. Several scholars of late have explored Augustine’s theological writings, such as De trinitate, in epistemological categories.Footnote ¹ Augustine, we can now better appreciate, did not conceive of the doctrine of the Trinity merely as a body of propositional content but a mode of knowing God that engaged readers through scriptural meditation and exercises of purification and ascent. A similar goal drove Augustine’s preaching: The sermon itself, in Augustine’s practice, becomes a site for exercising the mind in the quest for knowledge of God.Footnote ²

While many aspects of Augustine’s catechesis merit attention, I have elected to focus on the role of love in Augustine’s catechetical epistemology. The theme of love – the weight (pondus) that propels us toward beatitude – is, of course, central to Augustine’s theology.Footnote ³ Here, I want to explore how love appears in Augustine’s approach to knowledge of God in catechesis. More broadly, we can situate Augustine’s understanding of knowledge within broadly Platonic categories, but which take on a specifically Christian focus. For Augustine, knowledge occurs by the divine illumination in the memory. Yet it is not the reminiscence of a prelapsarian world of eternal ideas but an encounter of Christ the inner teacher who administers the healing medicine of grace in the church that reorders our loves. Augustine’s view of knowing God in catechesis thus gathers a moral discourse about love, a theological account of Christ’s mediation of God and human nature, and an anthropological discourse about the pivotal role of memory. All of these elements are put into service of instructing catechumens on the rudiments of faith as the foundation of their ascent to God.

After first outlining the key features of the catechumenate in Hippo Regius and the polemical contexts that shaped it, I explore Augustine’s understanding of knowledge and pedagogy more generally before turning to the appearance of these themes in De catechizandis rudibus and in sermons to catechumens on the creed. It must be admitted rather quickly that this chapter is not at all a comprehensive study of Augustine’s catechumenate.Footnote ⁴ The narrower objective is to consider the role of love in Augustine’s understanding of knowledge in catechesis.

The Catechumenate in the Contested Spaces of North Africa

The outlines of Augustine’s catechumenate are fairly well known and can be briefly rehearsed.Footnote ⁵ We have little demographic evidence for how long people normally remained catechumens before baptism. Infant baptism was still the exception rather than the rule.Footnote ⁶ Augustine’s own experience – signed with salt as an infant to join the rank of catechumens but not baptized until an adult – was probably unexceptional. The older view that the legalization of Christianity resulted in an influx of nominal catechumens is much less tenable than it once was.Footnote ⁷ Scholars have called attention to the particular settings in which Augustine made appeals to baptism – the need to teach the proper meaning of the sacraments and the difference between catechumens and the faithful – rather than grand claims about Constantine and the decline of the catechumenate.Footnote ⁸

Augustine’s sermons do provide ample evidence of the rites of initiation.Footnote ⁹ The first stage began with the candidate being signed with salt and the sign of the cross.Footnote ¹⁰ For adult inquirers, this rite entailed an initial screening and instruction in which a cleric would discern the newcomer’s background and motives for becoming a Christian. The instructor also provided a narrative overview of salvation history and an exhortation to moral living. After this rite, catechumens joined the faithful in hearing Scripture and sermons in the Sunday liturgy but were excused before the service of the eucharist. During Lent, catechumens received not only a new title – competentes, given at the nomen dare sermons – but also more specific instruction on the baptismal creed and the Lord’s Prayer, delivered two weeks and one week before Easter respectively.Footnote ¹¹ During this time, they were exhorted to fast from meat and wine, to abstain from sexual intercourse, and to avoid the baths and public entertainment.Footnote ¹² During Holy Week competentes were scrutinized, led in a rite of renunciation, and they attended several homilies on paschal themes. In the rite of scrutiny, the candidates renounced Satan and the demonic as a sign of their transition to a new world.Footnote ¹³ The Easter Vigil included more fasting, the lighting of the lamps (lucernarium), special prayers, and the reading of Old Testament passages along with brief commentary and exhortation.

Having received the creed two weeks or so before Easter, they “returned” the creed (redditio symbolorum) to the bishop a week beforehand and also learned the Lord’s Prayer, which they would recite during their first participation in the eucharistic service after their baptism.Footnote ¹⁴ After a long night of vigil prayers and preaching, Easter morning saw the baptismal waters consecrated, the competentes processed to the font amid Psalm chanting (for instance, Psalm 41),Footnote ¹⁵ stripped naked, interrogated about the creed, and immersed three times in the font. After baptism, they were anointed by the bishop with chrism and dressed in white linen.Footnote ¹⁶ They celebrated their first eucharist, with a cup mixed with milk and honey, and prayed the Lord’s Prayer for the first time with the congregation.Footnote ¹⁷ Afterward, they received yet another new name – infantes or neophytes – and underwent mystagogical instruction, especially on the significance of the eucharist. In these settings, Augustine focused especially on the transformation of the catechumens signified in the transformation of the physical elements.Footnote ¹⁸

The formation of Christians in the catechumenate was a subject of special concern for bishops like Augustine, as it provided an important pathway for assimilating non-Christians into the church.Footnote ¹⁹ It was also a heavily contested subject in Augustine’s period. While Christian leaders had debated the appropriate standards for receiving baptism since at least Tertullian’s period, Augustine’s polemical context – and here I will look only at Manichaeism and Donatism – shows new encounters that shaped his approach to catechesis.

Manichaeism’s impact on Augustine’s catechesis, while largely understudied, was far from negligible.Footnote ²⁰ The classification of hearer and elect was critical to the Manichaean community, and Augustine himself was a Manichaean hearer for nearly a decade before returning to the Christian catechumenate.Footnote ²¹ A major difference, however, between the Manichaean elect-hearer relation and Augustine’s catechumen–faithful distinction was that the former was largely understood to be a permanent state in life while the latter was a transitional stage. In Augustine’s telling, Manichaeism’s division into two permanent states, which was undergirded, he thought, by a theology of reincarnation, induced a moral laxism that allowed hearers to neglect the full implications of the gospel.Footnote ²² In Contra Faustum 5, Augustine writes:

If it is true that one cannot receive the gospel without giving up everything, why do you [Faustus] delude your hearers by allowing them to keep in your service their wives, children, households, houses, and fields? Indeed, you may well allow them to disregard the precepts of the gospel: for all you promise them is not a resurrection but a change (reuolutionem) to another mortal existence in which they shall live the silly, childish, impious life of those you call the elect, the life you live yourself, and are so much praised for.Footnote ²³

Augustine here claims that while Manichaeans taught that one must give up everything to receive the gospel, they prevent hearers from actually doing so by permitting them to avoid the more comprehensive asceticism enjoined upon the elect. For Augustine, this moral laxity was linked to a doctrine of reincarnation, which contrasted the Christian doctrine of resurrection. We can only speculate whether Augustine’s polemic accurately represents Faustus’s views. More interesting is how this critique of Manichaeism may have informed Augustine’s own approach to catechesis. At the very least, it suggests that Augustine was concerned to articulate theological reasons that catechumens should lead a morally upright life. Catechumens ought not be divided from the faithful based on discipline but should uphold the same standards.

A similar concern about moral laxism, though in a quite different setting, undergirds De fide et operibus, written around 412.Footnote ²⁴ Here, Augustine’s target is a group of anti-Donatists who were concerned, out of what Augustine sarcastically calls a “commendable charity,” to allow those living in immorality (in particular, those who were divorced and remarried) to be admitted to baptism.Footnote ²⁵ This group contended that the faith learned in the creed was sufficient for baptism and that a reformation of morals could be deferred until afterward. In response, Augustine articulated an approach to moral instruction in catechesis that balanced rigorism and laxism. In passing, he notes how eager catechumens are to learn during this time. Notice, he writes, “how alert they are in their meetings, how keenly they listen, how carefully they consider everything.”Footnote ²⁶ What better time to instruct them in the moral as well as doctrinal precepts than the catechumenate?

What is all that time for, when they hold the status and title of catechumen, if it is not for them to hear what a Christian should believe and what kind of life a Christian should lead, so that, when they have proved themselves, they may then eat from the Lord’s table and drink from his cup? … This has been the practice for as long as the Church has had the sound rule that those coming to receive Christ’s name are given the status of catechumen, and it is carried out even more strictly and carefully in these times, when those who have submitted their names to receive baptism are called competentes.Footnote ²⁷

For Augustine, the time of the catechumenate was a lengthy time in which one learned the moral habits of life that would allow the heart to be cleansed for a pure reception of the Word, especially found in the eucharistic sacrament. Augustine here develops an argument that upholds the close connection between a moral reformation of life and the attainment of true wisdom and virtue.

Augustine’s polemical engagements with Manichaeism and Donatism (or, in the case of De fide et operibus, anti-Donatism) demonstrate the variety of ways that Augustine’s social contexts shaped his approach to catechesis. These examples highlight, from different angles, the importance of moral reformation in baptismal education. In the former, Augustine worried that the Manichaean permanent hearer-elect structure engendered laxer moral standards for hearers than for the elect. In the latter, Augustine discerned the implications of an anti-Donatist view of catechesis that would reduce the catechumenate to an instruction in faith but not morals. In both, we glimpse how shaping knowledge in catechesis was governed by the specific contexts in which Augustine operated .

Augustine on Knowledge, Learning, and Love

Augustine’s adaptation of late ancient Platonism is a much-contested subject, one that cannot detain us here. As it concerns epistemology, however, there is a fairly general agreement of Augustine’s debt to a broadly Platonist epistemology of illumination.Footnote ²⁸ This doctrine helped Augustine confront Academic Skepticism early in his career, and it played a key role in early and late writings where Augustine discusses knowledge. In De magistro (389/391), he prioritizes knowledge acquired through the unmediated perception of truth – Christ, the inner teacher – over the kind of second-hand knowledge that is acquired through signs, testimony, and other forms of sensory-based knowledge.Footnote ²⁹ In De trinitate, he develops from this doctrine his famous distinction between scientia and sapientia as the difference between sensory and intelligible cognition, which also pertains to reflection on the human and divine natures of Christ.Footnote ³⁰ Christ is, in his human and divine nature, respectively, both scientia and sapientia, and thereby the means by which the soul acquires intelligible vision of God through the sensory perception of Christ’s flesh.

Especially important in Augustine’s transformation of Platonic illumination is the role of memory.Footnote ³¹ While the theory of reminiscence (anamnesis) was key to Plato’s understanding of knowledge, and Augustine seems to have imbibed much of it in his early years, he later rejected any association this doctrine had with the corollary notion of the soul’s transmigration.Footnote ³² In so doing, perhaps, he shares certain similarities with Plotinus’s qualification of Platonic views of memory and recollection, in which Plotinus rejects the linkage of memory with sense perception.Footnote ³³ For Augustine, true knowledge is not the memory of a prelapsarian state, since the memory of paradisal beatitude has been completely lost to oblivion; it is rather, the encounter with Christ the inner teacher in memory.Footnote ³⁴ In that locus classicus of Augustinian reflection on memory, Confessiones 10, Augustine likens memory to a large storehouse – “the fields and vast palaces of memory.”Footnote ³⁵ The first half of this chapter is an inquisitive exercitatio mentis, a movement from the exterior to the interior from the inferior to the superior, which asks how one can encounter God through memory if God is not experienced as a sensory image like other memories. The memory of happiness is not like remembering a city one has visited, or numbers, or the liberal arts. The blessed life is nothing less than “joy based on the truth,” a reality universally desired yet little experienced.Footnote ³⁶ God is, for Augustine, coterminous with this joy-filled possession of truth but is not locatable in the memory as such. Augustine thus confesses: “You remain immutable above all things, and yet you have deigned to dwell in my memory since the time I learned about you.”Footnote ³⁷ God was not, it seems, in Augustine’s memory before he “learned God,” yet there is no “place” (locus) to find and learn God since God is only really learned in his transcendence.Footnote ³⁸

At this point, with the search for God in memoria frustrated, his tactic changes as he recounts the dramatic in-breaking of divine love that shatters his senses and inflames his heart.Footnote ³⁹ He explores how the Johannine trifecta of lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life (1 John 2:16) disperse and disorder the senses from their proper orientation and unification in rest in God. The conclusion to this exercise finds Augustine reverting to Christ as the one mediator between God and humanity – the eternal Word and true God, who, taking on human flesh, serves as the midpoint between humanity and God.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, Augustine’s reflections on the senses and Christ are not like the earlier reflections on memory; they are, rather, the christological inversion of how the pursuit of God in the memory occurs.Footnote ⁴¹ While Augustine could not ascend to God through memory, Christ became known through memory by healing the disordered affections acquired through sensory knowledge.

This approach to knowledge also implicated Augustine’s pedagogy. While the young Augustine of the Cassiciacum days gravitated, like Plato, to the dialogue, the main form of instruction he deployed throughout his career was the sermon. Yet even here, dialogical modes are pervasive.Footnote ⁴² The church and its Scriptures constitute a “school” of the Lord, which provides healing remedies as well as content for study.Footnote ⁴³ Augustine often relativizes his authority as bishop and positions himself as a fellow hearer and “co-disciple” in the quest from faith to understanding.Footnote ⁴⁴ “Do not listen to me,” he counsels, “but together with me,”Footnote ⁴⁵ for in the church, Christians are those who listen while Christ is the one who teaches.Footnote ⁴⁶ In some sermons, his illuminationist epistemology is explicit. In his tractates on First John, for example, we find Augustine explaining the relationship between external instruction and the internal teacher as a “great sacramentum”:

Now see a great sacrament here, brothers: The sound of our words strikes the ears; the teacher is within. Do not think that a person learns anything from a human being. We can admonish you through the sound of our voice. But if there is not someone within you to teach you, the sound of our voice will be in vain … As far as I am concerned, I have spoken to all of you. But those of you who are not instructed by this inner anointment, who are not internally instructed by the Holy Spirit, will leave here without knowledge. Instruction from the outside gives a kind of assistance and encouragement. But the pulpit (cathedra) of the One who teaches hearts is in heaven.Footnote ⁴⁷

The preacher’s words, which can only touch the physical ears of the listener, offer instruction, assistance, and encouragement, but true knowledge always comes from Christ the inner teacher who reveals truth by the Holy Spirit. The preacher announces the same words to all present. Yet only some receive knowledge. It is also important to notice Augustine’s reference to the totus Christus doctrine. In the church, Christ the head teaches from his cathedra in heaven, while Christians learn together in the school – his body – extended throughout the world.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this way, Christ is understood as the inner teacher not only in an individual sense but also in a corporate sense, as the inner teacher of the ecclesial body.Footnote ⁴⁹

Augustine’s illuminationist epistemology shaped the way he understood learning at different stages of the Christian life. In three tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine reflects on the scriptural paradox that while, on the one hand, Christ taught the apostles everything he received from the Father (John 15:15), on the other hand, there is more they cannot yet bear (John 16:12).Footnote ⁵⁰ Augustine rejects a certain kind of this-worldly esotericism in which it would be absurd to say that the unbaptized catechumens listening to these Scriptures can “bear” more of Jesus’s teaching than the apostles could. For Augustine, the catechumens are not restricted from the sacred mysteries because they cannot bear certain teachings but so they might “more ardently desire” the sacred mysteries.Footnote ⁵¹ The distinction between simpliciores and spirituales appears, then, not as a matter of different teachings for the baptized and the non-baptized. Rather, every Christian encounters a singular truth – Christ and Christ crucified – but this truth is understood differently by the simple and the mature according to the light of spiritual illumination they possess. For the simple, the crucified Christ is milk, while for the spirituals it is solid food (1 Cor. 3:1–3).Footnote ⁵² But, importantly, it is the same Christ upon whom they feed. The spirituals do not hear anything different from what the simple hear, but they do have a greater capacity to understand it.

This greater capacity for understanding is afforded primarily by the love infused in the Christian’s heart by the Holy Spirit. For those beginning the journey, Augustine explains, love is the key:

Advance in charity that is diffused in your hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given you, so that “fervent in spirit” (Rom. 12:11) and loving spiritual things, you may be able to know – not by any sign apparent to bodily eyes or by any sound audible to bodily ears but by an inner sight and hearing – the spiritual light and the spiritual voice that carnal persons cannot bear. For what is utterly unknown is not loved, but when something that is known to a small degree is loved, it happens through that love that it is known better and more fully.Footnote ⁵³

Augustine’s epistemology of illumination is here guided by an understanding of Christ’s crucifixion and the Spirit’s diffusion of love in the heart. Growth in knowledge occurs not primarily by intellectual achievement but by the inner illumination of the teacher encountered in love.Footnote ⁵⁴ Augustine goes on to show that Jesus’s statement that the disciples cannot bear certain knowledge and that he will lead them into all truth is not referring to knowledge in this life but about the fullness of knowledge in the hereafter.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the present, the Spirit teaches believers as much as they can grasp, “inflaming their hearts with greater desire” to the extent they grow in charity. By directing his hearers to charity, Augustine is able to distinguish between the suspicious esotericism of false teachers and the concern to enable simple believers to grow in spiritual illumination.

For Augustine, theological and biblical engagements with the Platonic doctrine of illumination provide formative guides for preaching and teaching. In the remainder of the chapter, we will find more opportunities to discover how Augustine’s understanding of knowledge related to his approach to catechesis – first in Augustine’s writing about how to teach catechumens Scripture in De catechizandis rudibus and then in his sermons to catechumens on the creed.

Knowing Christ as the Heart of Scripture: De Catechizandis Rudibus

Augustine’s theoretical treatment of catechesis is best seen in De catechizandis rudibus, written sometime around 400–403.Footnote ⁵⁶ Writing to Deogratias, a deacon in Carthage who was finding his own efforts at catechesis disappointingly tedious, Augustine reflects on many aspects of catechetical pedagogy, such as how to structure the narrative of Scripture and how to offer the concluding exhortation to join the catechumenate.Footnote ⁵⁷ Central to this treatise, though, as Michael Cameron has noted, is its emphasis on love.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this section, I want to draw attention to how Augustine articulates the role of love in shaping knowledge of God, specifically as it relates to Augustine’s illuminationist epistemology and the discernment of Christ’s love for humanity as the heart of Scripture’s narrative.

One of Augustine’s solutions to Deogratias’s lackluster catechesis involved an appeal to the doctrine of illumination. Frustration occurs, Augustine explains, when the teacher cannot convey in human speech the scintillating insight he experiences in the mind. There is a sharp discrepancy between the instant flash of insight and the laborious plodding of words. Although our facial gestures may convey something of internal thoughts, the ideas themselves cannot be directly transmitted to the student; the student receives truth only by some form of inner illumination.Footnote ⁵⁹ In our world of signs and “enigmas” (see 1 Cor. 13:12), “not even love itself can break through the murkiness of the flesh and penetrate into that eternally clear sky from which even the things that pass away receive whatever brightness they have.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The disjuncture between words and thoughts is thus a potential source of discouragement.

Later in the treatise, Augustine returns to this issue. But this time, his reflection is more christological in focus. If the teacher is frustrated by the gap between his own insight and his vocal instruction, he can look to Christ who, although by nature equal to God, descended into the depths of humanity for our sake (Phil. 2:6–8). He can also imitate St. Paul who, although experiencing ecstasy in spirit, nonetheless spoke in a “level-headed” manner for the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:13–14).Footnote ⁶¹ Augustine concludes:

If our understanding finds its delight within, in the brightest of secret places, let it also delight in the following insight into the ways of love: The more love goes down in a spirit of service into the ranks of the lowliest people, the more surely it rediscovers the quiet that is within (recurrit in intima) when its good conscience testifies that it seeks nothing of those to whom it goes down but their eternal salvation.Footnote ⁶²

In this passage, the doctrine of illumination retains its basic shape, presuming that illumination is the best source of attaining knowledge. Yet it also shows how the pattern of incarnation establishes a principle by which the Christian catechist imitates Christ’s descent in humility and, precisely there, rediscovers an inner quietude. These reflections echo Augustine’s comments on the powers and failures of memory in Confessiones 10, noted in the previous section. While no amount of love on the Christian’s part can break through the “murkiness of flesh” to ascend to God, the humble love of Christ in the incarnation enables the soul to find healing through its response to grace and its imitation of Christ’s descent to the lowliest of places.

The focus on Christ’s love for humanity appears again in Augustine’s explanation of teaching the narrative (narratio) of Scripture. Augustine’s use of the term narratio belongs to the multifaceted range of uses for this term in antique rhetoric. However, as Michael Glowasky has recently demonstrated, the importance of narratio in De catechizandis rudibus is found especially in the way it helped Augustine show the ordered dispensation of God in history and its reprisal in Scripture and preaching – the goal of which was to draw hearers from reflection on God in time and history to the contemplation of divine ideas in eternity.Footnote ⁶³

Augustine advises Deogratias to teach the entire history of salvation, from the beginning of the world to the present time of the church. However, the catechist should arrange the events of Scripture in a way that not only highlights the centrality of Christ and the church but also, in particular, illuminates God’s love for humanity in Christ: “Thus, before all else, Christ came so that people might learn how much God loves them, and might learn this so that they would catch fire with love for him who first loved them and so that they would also love their neighbor as he commanded.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The ability to reciprocate the love of God is central to Augustine’s approach to knowledge. The discovery of the incarnate love hidden in the Old Testament and revealed in the New belongs to a training program in spiritual knowledge. The unveiling of God’s love for humanity in Christ entails that “spiritual people with their spiritual ways of understanding are made free, thanks to the gift of love.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The narratio should thus be comprehensive but should also “focus on explaining the deeper meaning of each of the matters and events that we describe: a meaning that is brought out when we relate them to the goal constituted by love.”Footnote ⁶⁶

For Augustine, love is central to helping new Christians know God in Scripture. While the catechist’s task, at one level, is to present catechumens with a concise account of the history of salvation, the most important objective is to draw their focus from the order of historical events to the underlying unity of Scripture located in Christ’s love for humanity. For Augustine, knowing God begins with discerning in the order of history the unifying principle of Christ-shaped love.

Written in the Heart: Memory and Love in Credal Instruction

Several weeks before baptism, Augustine “handed over” the creed to the competentes (the traditio symboli) in anticipation that they would “return” it to the bishop before baptism (the redditio symboli).Footnote ⁶⁷ In a handful of sermons from these settings (sermones 212–215 and De symbolo ad catechumenos [= sermo 398]), we see another example of Augustine’s illuminationist epistemology transformed by Christ-shaped love, especially in his focus on memory. Augustine employed a variety of idioms for teaching the creed (symbolum) – such as an oath or financial agreementFootnote ⁶⁸ – but an especially important image was that of inscribing the creed on the memory of the heart. For Augustine, memorizing the creed is not simply a practical strategy for learning the faith. It is the means by which catechumens are enabled to love God. The creed written on the heart, for Augustine, is nothing less than God inscribing the new covenant into the Christian by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5).

Throughout the credal sermons, Augustine emphasizes learning the creed by memory. The introduction to De symbolo ad catechumenos provides perhaps the clearest description of this process and the images associated with it:

Receive, sons and daughters, the rule of faith, which is called the symbol. And when you have received it, write it on your hearts (in corde scribite), and say it to yourselves every day; before you go to sleep, before you go out in the morning, fortify yourselves with your symbol. Nobody writes a symbol for it to be read, but for purposes of recall (ad recensendum). So to prevent forgetfulness from deleting what diligence has handed over to you, let your memory be your codex (sit uobis codex uestra memoria).Footnote ⁶⁹

The image of inscription was not unique to Augustine, as we have seen; it was a mainstay in ancient memory arts traditions. For Augustine, as for Cyprian before him and Chrysologus after him, the creed collects and collates what is found more diffusely in the Scriptures, its brevity serving as an aid to memory. The words of the symbol, as Augustine explains in another sermon, “have been compressed into a brief summary, and reduced to a definite, tightly knit order,” so that the competentes can receive and return the creed without it “burdening their memories.”Footnote ⁷⁰

At one level, this advice is practical. Augustine stresses constant repetition and reflection on the creed so that catechumens may fasten the rule of faith securely in memory and begin to reflect on it in daily life. The competentes are to repeat the words to themselves daily – before going to sleep at night and upon waking in the morning. They are advised to learn the creed by hearing and then to work diligently to retain it in memory.Footnote ⁷¹ It is something they are “to always retain in mind and heart … to recite in bed, think about in the streets, and not forget over meals”; even asleep, “your hearts should be vigilant.”Footnote ⁷² They should not be lulled into complacency once they have first memorized it but should continue to dwell upon it.Footnote ⁷³ As to memorizing the precise order of the words, Augustine offers different perspectives – perhaps reflecting strands within the rhetorical tradition about whether it was more important to learn the precise wording of a speech (memoria ad uerbum) or whether it was better to memorize the realities signified by the words (memoria ad res).Footnote ⁷⁴ In sermo 214, he emphasizes memorizing the precise words.Footnote ⁷⁵ In sermo 213, he counsels them not to worry if they get words wrong as long as they do not get the faith wrong.Footnote ⁷⁶

Augustine’s reflections about memorizing the creed, however, were not merely practical. In these sermons, we also see the imprint of Augustine’s reflection on the relationship between knowledge and memory. In particular, Augustine’s description of the creed as providing a summary of Scripture recalls the comments he makes about memory and knowledge in Confessiones 10. In a passage adjacent to the one cited above, Augustine writes of the process of learning as a mnemonic activity of collection (colligere) and cognition (cogito):

The process of learning is simply this: By thinking (cogitando) we, as it were, gather together (colligere) ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected. Now they easily come forward under the direction of the mind familiar with them.Footnote ⁷⁷

There are two key ideas in the background here. One is an allusion to Plato’s famous description of philosophy as training for death and a “gathering” of the soul. In the Phaedo, Socrates explains that if life in the body is marked by dispersion and dissipation, the philosophical life involves the purification of separating soul from body by its being “gathered” (συναγείρεσθαί) and “collected” (ἁθροίζεσθαι) unto itself.Footnote ⁷⁸ Augustine will draw upon similar language in his articulation of the distentio animi in Confessiones 11, where he writes about the soul’s recollective intention from fragmentation in time. Second is the way the convergence of colligere and cogitanto functioned within the rhetorical tradition. Colligere, for Augustine, combines both memory and reading, and it entails the gathering of memories of what has been read as well as one’s own sensory experiences. However, memory, as we have noted, is not simply about recall but inuentio – the discovery of new ideas.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Mary Carruthers’s describes Augustine’s passage here, “knowledge extends understanding not by adding on more and more pieces, but because as we compose our design dilates to greater capacity and spaciousness.”Footnote ⁸⁰

For Augustine, we could say, the collation of the creed in the memory is twofold. On the one hand, it serves as the basis of generative thought – the basis of greater “capacity and spaciousness” of memory. In gathering the creed in the memory, the mind becomes attentive to the central features of Scripture’s diffuse range of stories, teachings, and narratives. Yet this focusing of attention is anything but restrictive. It opens rather than closes access to the mind’s ability to know God. On the other hand, the colligere of the creed is part of the soul’s “gathering.” The soul is scattered in the diffuse distention of misdirected knowledge and affections. But when the Christian “records” the creed in memory – the Latin recordari connoting writing, memory, and heart (cor) – not only are the Scriptures collated in the mind; the soul also finds an orientation that gathers its diffuse parts and draws it into attention on God. The soul is gathered from fragmentation and drawn into the state of focus that allows it to cleave to God in Christ. The symbol inscribed in the memory is the first step by which the Christian encounters the illuminating truth of Christ the inner teacher.

Augustine also describes the process of credal instruction with recourse to select biblical passages. At the end of his exposition of the baptismal creed in sermo 213, for example, Augustine offers a synthesis of catechetical knowledge in the paradigm of Isaiah 7:9: “Let this faith impress itself on your hearts and guide your confession. On hearing this, believe so that you may understand; so that making progress you may be able to understand what you believe.”Footnote ⁸¹ Romans 10, additionally, seems to have been especially useful for Augustine’s framing of catechetical instruction. Romans 10:10 outlined the process of traditio and redditio – the hearing of the creed understood as believing in the heart and returning it to the bishop in the confession of the mouth.Footnote ⁸² Romans 10:13 clarified the distinction between salvation in this life (in spe) and the next (in re).Footnote ⁸³ And the sequence of Romans 10:13–15 helped Augustine explain the ordo of teaching the creed followed by the Lord’s Prayer, which respectively align with the virtues of faith and hope.Footnote ⁸⁴ The church first gives the creed and then the Lord’s Prayer, Augustine explains, because the order of salvation according to this Pauline text entails “calling” (inuocat) upon God in prayer only after one believes in God according to the parameters set forth in the creed.Footnote ⁸⁵

An especially insightful example of Augustine’s engagement with Scripture for articulating credal instruction occurs at the end of sermo 212. After having explained the tenets of the symbol, Augustine describes the catechumens’ memorization of the creed – and the warning against writing it down – in terms of God’s inscription of the new covenant upon the Christian’s heart (Jer. 31:33):

The fact that the Symbol, put together and reduced to a certain form in this way, may not be written down, is a reminder of God’s promise, where he foretold the new covenant through the prophet, and said, “This is the covenant which I will draw up for them after those days, says the Lord; putting my laws into their minds, I will write them also on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33). It is to illustrate this truth that by the simple hearing of the symbol it is not written on tablets, or on any other material, but on people’s hearts.Footnote ⁸⁶

The writing on the heart through teaching and through memory is a sign of the inner reality of the new covenant. Augustine immediately adds, however, that this inscription is only “written on your hearts by the Holy Spirit, once you have been born again by his grace.”Footnote ⁸⁷ It is, in other words, not simply memorizing the creed but the combination of credal memory and the Spirit’s indwelling that provides illumination in baptism. Moreover, Augustine goes on to explain, this inscription is aimed toward love: “that you may love what you believe, and faith may work in you through love.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The result of this Spirit-enacted inscription is that Christians serve God not out of fear but out of love. By memorizing the creed in catechesis and through receiving the spiritual anointing of baptism, Christians are drawn into the life of love.

Augustine’s sermons to catechumens on the creed are not laden with the kind of theoretical reflection on knowledge that we find in De catechizandis rudibus or other writings. They demonstrate more than articulate the contours of Augustine’s pedagogy of knowledge. And yet they reveal important dimensions of how Augustine taught catechumens to know God. Augustine had a responsibility to teach catechumens the creed and to encourage them to memorize it. He did so, though, with an awareness that by having the creed written in their hearts, they begin the journey of faith with a new memory – a memory that would allow them to encounter Christ the inner teacher whose Spirit would write the covenant of love upon their hearts.

Conclusion

Augustine’s approach to catechetical knowledge finds its center in a christologically shaped vision of love. This focus stemmed in part from Augustine’s broader reflections on the relationship between epistemology and pedagogy – informed by Platonist traditions of knowledge. It also owed to polemical encounters with Manichaeism and Donatism, both of which, in different ways, alerted Augustine to the kinds of laxism to which catechumens could be prone. But it was above all in theological and biblical reflection that Augustine’s pedagogy of love took full shape. In De catechizandis rudibus, Augustine showed Deogratias how to teach the love of Christ as the center of Scripture’s narratio – the central feature of Scripture hidden in the Old Testament and revealed in the New. In sermons on the creed, Augustine stressed memory as the place wherein the soul is gathered and brought into union with Christ by the inscription of the creed on the heart and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Here we see all the lines of Augustine’s Christianized doctrine of illumination converging: The catechist proclaims the words of the creed, which come into the ears of his hearers and are imprinted on the memory; meanwhile the Holy Spirit writes the new covenant into their hearts, which empowers them to know and love God. This movement inaugurates the soul’s journey into God, moving from the rudiments of faith to the heights of divine wisdom, all the way guided by the love of Christ made known in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ and received by sharing in Christ’s body, the church.

Footnotes

¹ See, for example, Khaled Anatolios, “Oppositional Pairs and Christological Synthesis: Rereading Augustine’s De Trinitate,” Theological Studies 68, no. 2 (2007): 231–53; Luigi Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s ‘De Trinitate’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 6 (“A Christological Epistemology”).

² John Cavadini, “Simplifying Augustine,” in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John van Engen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 63–84.

³ Many texts could be cited here, but unsurpassed is John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine, repr. (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1991 [orig. 1938]).

⁴ For more fulsome treatments, see especially William Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014); Martin Brons, Augustins Trinitätslehre praktisch: Katechese, Liturgie, Predigt, Ritual und Unterweisung auf dem Weg zur Taufe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017); Matthieu Pignot, The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa (4th–6th Centuries): Augustine of Hippo, His Contemporaries and Early Reception (Leiden: Brill, 2020). I have written on Augustine’s approach to lifelong credal catechesis in Alex Fogleman, “Confitendum et Proficiendum: Augustine on the Rule of Faith and the Christian Life,” Pro Ecclesia 34, no. 1 (2022): 457–77, and on the instruction of the Lord’s Prayer in catechesis as focused on instilling the virtue of patience in Fogleman, “Anger, Prayer, and the Transformation of Desire: Augustine’s Catechumenate as an Emotion-Shaping Institution,” Church History 91, no. 2 (2022): 227–44.

⁵ Paul Bradshaw has especially vied for more agnosticism in our knowledge of liturgical development in the first three centuries, and with a greater appreciation of the regional differences. See Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), x.

⁶ On the role of Augustine’s controversies with the Pelagians and its impact on and dependence upon the practice infant baptism, see Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 803–15; Alexander Pierce, “From Emergency Practice to Christian Polemics? Augustine’s Invocation of Infant baptism in the Pelagian Controversy,” AugStud 52, no. 1 (2021): 19–41.

⁷ For the older view, see Frederick Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: Church and Society at the Dawn of the Middle Ages, trans. Brian Battershaw and G. R. Lamb (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 357; Victor Saxer, Les rites del’initiation chrétienne du IIe au VIe siècle: Esquisse historique et signification d’après leurs principaux témoins (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di stui sull’alto Medioevo, 1988), 424. It is often rehearsed in standard histories: see, e.g., Edward Yarnold, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the RCIA (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 6.

⁸ See especially Éric Rebillard, “La figure du catéchumenate et le problème du délai du baptême dans la pastorale d’Augustin: à propos du post-tractum Dolbeau 7: De sepultura catechenorum,” in Augustin prédicateur (395–411): Actes du Colloque international de Chantilly (5–7 septembre 1996), ed. Goulven Madec (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1998), 285–92; William Harmless, “The Voice and the Word: Augustine’s Catechumenate in Light of the Dolbeau Sermons,” AugStud 35, no. 1 (2004): 17–42 (at 23–24); Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 66–70, 225–29; Matthieu Pignot, “Questioning Christian Baptism: Insights from Augustine’s Correspondence,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 111, no. 3–4 (2016): 452–82. For representative examples from Augustine’s writings, see Augustine, s. 132; 335H (=Lambot 26); Io eu. tr. 10.10, 11.1, 12.3; ep. 2*.

⁹ My account here mostly follows Thomas Finn, “It Happened One Saturday Night: Ritual and Conversion in Augustine’s North Africa,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58, no. 4 (1990): 589–616. For other treatments, see Robert De Latte, “Saint Augustin et le baptême: Étude liturgico-historique du rituel baptismal des adultes chez saint Augustin.” Questions Liturgiques 56 (1975): 177–223; De Latte, “Saint Augustin et le baptême: Étude liturgico-historique du rituel baptismal des enfants chez saint Augustin,” Questions Liturgiques 57 (1976): 51–55; Suzanne Poque, “Introduction,” in Augustin d’Hippone: Sermons pour la Pâque, SC 116 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2003), 33–39; Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 352–402.

¹⁰ Augustine, cat. rud. 26.50; conf. 1.11.17. On the significance of signing the forehead, see Matthieu Pignot, “Ritual Performance and Christian Belonging: Signing Foreheads with the Cross in the Writings of Augustine of Hippo,” Sacris Erudiri 58 (2019): 111–43.

¹¹ See Augustine, s. 216.1 on the etymology of competentes. On the nomen dare sermons, see Sarah Muldowney, ed. and trans., Saint Augustine: Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, FC 38 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 83–115; Finn, “It Happened One Saturday Night,” 591.

¹² On the Lenten discipline in Augustine’s period, see Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 291–322.

¹³ Augustine’s s. 216 is the only extant rite of scrutiny from Augustine. Ambrose mentions it at expl. 1.1. Quodvultdeus, discussed in the next chapter, provides more detail. See Albert Dondeyne, “La discipline des scrutins dans l’Église latine avant Charlemagne,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 28 (1932): 5–33 and 751–87.

¹⁴ Augustine, s. 59.1; s. 228.3; s. 229A.1. For an alternative view of this timing, see Pierre-Patrick Verbraken, “Les sermons CCXV et LVI de saint Augustin: De symbolo et de oratione dominica,” RBén 68 (1958): 5–40 (at 5–6).

¹⁵ For the reference to chanting Psalm 41, see Augustine, en. Ps. 41.1.

¹⁶ Augustine, s. 120.3; s. 223.

¹⁷ On the precise location of the Lord’s Prayer in the service, see William Harmless, “‘Receive today how you are to call upon God’ (s. 58.1): The Lord’s Prayer and Augustine’s Mystagogy,” in Seeing with the Eyes of Faith: The Mystagogy of the Church Fathers, ed. Paul van Geest (Louvain: Peeters, 2014), 349–74.

¹⁸ Augustine, s. 227, 228, 229A, and 272. On the eucharistic liturgy, see J. Patout Burns Jr. and Robin M. Jensen, “The Eucharistic Liturgy in Hippo’s Basilica Maior at the Time of Augustine,” in Augustine through the Ages, ed. Allan Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 335–38. On Augustine’s approach to instructing the neophytes, see Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine’s Homiletic Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 89–123.

¹⁹ On the function of the catechumenate as social assimilation, see Pignot, Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa.

²⁰ Harmless (Augustine and the Catechumenate, 93–95, 126–28) mentions three themes – faith and reason, origin of evil, and reality of incarnation – as issues occupying Augustine as a Manichaean hearer and then as a catholic catechumen, but not as informing his practice of catechesis.

²¹ In some Manichaean writings, such as the Cologne Mani Codex, hearers are even referred to as catechumens (katechoumenoi). On the ascetic character of Manichaeism, see Jason BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 26. There is a great deal of debate about Augustine’s knowledge of Manichaeism before and after his return to Catholic Christianity. While Kevin Coyle has claimed that Augustine had only minimal textual knowledge of Manichaeism until after 393, when he first directly quotes from a Manichaean text – and thus as hearer was only exposed to Manichaean teaching through hearing – Johannes van Oort has postulated ways in which Augustine’s knowledge of Manichaeism as a hearer was better informed and based on literary texts available for hearers or potential converts. Johannes van Oort, “The Young Augustine’s Knowledge of Manichaeism: An Analysis of the Confessiones and Some Other Relevant Texts,” VC 62, no. 5 (2008): 441–66 (at 449), against J. Kevin Coyle, “What Did Augustine Know about Manichaeism when He Wrote His Two Treatises De moribus,” in Augustine and Manichaeism in the Latin West, ed. J. van Oort, Otto Wermelinger and G. Wurst (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 43–56; and Coyle, “Saint Augustine’s Manichaean Legacy,” AugStud 34 (2003): 1–22.

²² Even granting Augustine’s polemical rhetoric, we can concur with BeDuhn that “duality was as inherent to Manichaean community as it was to Manichaean metaphysics.” BeDuhn, Manichaean Body, 29.

²³ Augustine, c. Faust. 5.10 (CSEL 25:282–83; NPNF 4:166, alt.): Quid autem fallitis auditores uestros, qui cum suis uxoribus et filiis et familiis et domibus et agris uobis seruiunt, si quisquis ista omnia non dimiserit, non accipiet euangelium? Sed quia eis non resurrectionem, sed reuolutionem ad istam mortalitatem promittitis, ut rursus nascantur et uita electorum uestrorum uiuant, tam uana et inepta et sacrilega, quam uos uiuitis, quando ualde laudamini.

²⁴ On the importance of this treatise in Augustine’s catechumenate, see Matthieu Pignot, “Setting Rules for Becoming Christian: Augustine’s Polemical Treatise De fide et operibus in Context,” Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 64 (2018): 73–114. On Donatist catechesis, see now Alden Bass, “Fifth-Century Donatist Catechesis: An Introduction to the Vienna Sermon Collection ONB M. Lat. 4147,” (PhD diss., St. Louis University, 2014); Jane E. Merdinger, “In League with the Devil? Donatist and Catholic Perspectives on Pre-Baptismal Exsufflation,” in The Uniquely African Controversy: Studies on Donatist Christianity, ed. Anthony Dupont, Matthew Alan Gaumer, and Mathijs Lamberigts (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 153–77.

²⁵ Augustine, f. et op. 1.1. The comment about their “commendable charity” comes from f. et. op. 15.25. That this group comprised a group of lay people is derived from the description in retr. 2.64.

²⁶ Augustine, f. et op. 6.9 (CSEL 41:45; WSA I/8:231): Quanta uigilantia conueniant, quo studio ferueant, qua cura pendeant?

²⁷ Augustine, f. et op. 6.9 (CSEL 41:45; WSA I/8:232, alt.): Quid autem aliud agit totum tempus, quo catechumenorum locum et nomen tenent, nisi ut audiant, quae fides et qualis uita debeat esse christiani, ut, cum se ipsos probauerint, tunc de mensa domini manducent et de calice bibant? … quod autem fit per omne tempus, quo in ecclesia salubriter constitutum est, ut ad nomen christi accedentes catechumenorum gradus excipiat, hoc fit multo diligentius et instantius his diebus, quibus conpetentes uocantur, cum ad percipiendum baptismum sua nomina iam dederunt.

²⁸ For accounts of Augustine’s epistemology of illumination, see especially Ronald Nash, The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969); Lydia Schumacher, Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Peter King, “Augustine on Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. David Vincent Meconi and Eleanor Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 142–65; Therese Fuhrer, “Ille intus magister: On Augustine’s Didactic Concept of Interiority,” in Teachers in Late Antique Christianity, ed. Peter Gemeinhardt, Olda Lorgeoux, and Maria Munkholt Christensen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 129–46.

²⁹ Augustine, mag. 11.37–38.

³⁰ Augustine, trin. 12.4.22–25; 13.6.24.

³¹ Studies of Augustine on memory are vast, but see esp. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Paige Hochschild, Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kevin C. Grove, Augustine on Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

³² For earlier views, see sol. 2.20.24; quant. 20.34; lib. 1.12.24. For the rejection of Platonic theories of transmigration, see trin. 12.15.24; ciu. 12.14; retr. 1.1.4.

³³ Plotinus viewed memory as twofold – one aspect that received, passively, sensory impressions; the other an active power that could produce memories and through discursive reasoning encounter the One. Plotinus discusses memory through engagement with Aristotle’s work on memory in Enneads 4.3–4 and 4.6. For good discussions, see Luc Brisson, “La place de la mémoire dans la psychologie plotinienne,” Études Platoniciennes 3 (2006): 13–27; R. A. H. King, Aristotle and Plotinus on Memory (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009); Stephen R. L. Clark, “Plotinus: Remembering and Forgetting,” in Greek Memories: Theories and Practices, ed. Luca Castagnoli and Paola Ceccarelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 325–40. On Augustine’s understanding of memory and recollection vis-à-vis Plato and Plotinus, see Lenka Karfíková, “Augustine on Recollection between Plato and Plotinus,” SP 75 (2017): 81–102.

³⁴ On the oblivion of paradisal beatitude, see Augustine, trin. 14.15.21.

³⁵ Augustine, conf. 10.8.12 (James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 1:123; trans. Henry Chadwick, Augustine: Confessions [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 185).

³⁶ Augustine, conf. 10.23.33 (O’Donnell 1:132; Chadwick, Confessions, 199).

³⁷ Augustine, conf. 10.25.36 (O’Donnell 1:134; Chadwick, Confessions, 201): Tu autem incommutabilis manes super omnia et dignatus es habitare in memoria mea, ex quo te didici.

³⁸ Augustine, conf. 10.26.37 (O’Donnell 1:134; Chadwick, Confessions, 201): Vbi ergo te inueni, ut discerem te? Neque enim iam eras in memoria mea, priusquam te discerem. Vbi ergo te inueni, ut discerem te, nisi in te supra me? Et nusquam locus, et recedimus et accedimus, et nusquam locus.

³⁹ Augustine, conf. 10.27.38.

⁴⁰ Augustine, conf. 10.42.67–43.68.

⁴¹ This view of the structure of conf. 10 owes to Grove, Augustine on Memory, 44.

⁴² For what follows, I have been greatly helped by Cavadini, “Simplifying Augustine,” 72–80.

⁴³ Augustine, s. 16A.1.

⁴⁴ Augustine, s. 23.1–2; s. 134.1.

⁴⁵ Augustine, s. 108.6.

⁴⁶ Augustine, disc. chr. 1 (= s. 399.1).

⁴⁷ Augustine, ep. Io. tr. 3.13 (PL 35:2004; WSA III/14:63, alt.): Iam hic uidete magnum sacramentum, fratres. Sonus uerborum, nostrorum aures percutit; magister intus est. Nolite putare quemquam hominem aliquid discere ab homine. Admonere possumus per strepitum uocis nostrae; si non sit intus qui doceat, inanis fit strepitus noster. Adeo, fratres, uultis nosse? Numquid non sermonem istum omnes audistis? Quam multi hinc indocti exituri sunt? Quantum ad me pertinet omnibus locutus sum; sed quibus unctio illa intus non loquitur, quos spiritus sanctus intus non docet, indocti redeunt. Magisteria forinsecus adiutoria quaedam sunt et admonitiones; cathedram in caelo habet qui corda docet.

⁴⁸ See also Augustine, disc. chr. 15 (= s. 399.15).

⁴⁹ For further on the ecclesial character of memory, see Grove, Augustine on Memory, chap. 2.

⁵⁰ Augustine, Io. eu. tr. 96–98. On these sermons, see Guy Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), chap. 8.

⁵¹ Augustine, Io eu. tr. 96.3 (CCSL 36:570; WSA III/13:355): Non enim diligitur quod penitus ignoratur. Sed cum diligitur quod ex quantulacumque parte cognoscitur, ipsa efficitur dilectione ut melius et plenius cognoscatur.

⁵² Augustine, Io. eu. tr. 98.1–3.

⁵³ Augustine, Io. eu. tr. 96.4 (CCSL 36:571; WSA III/13:356): In caritate proficite, quae diffunditur in cordibus uestris per spiritum sanctum qui datus est uobis, ut spiritu feruentes et spiritalia diligentes, spiritalem lucem spiritalem que uocem, quam carnales homines ferre non possunt, non aliquo signo corporalibus oculis apparente, nec aliquo sono corporalibus auribus instrepente, sed interiore conspectu et auditu nosse possitis. Non enim diligitur quod penitus ignoratur.

⁵⁴ A corollary is Augustine’s critique of the vice of curiosity. Augustine warns the simple against the vice of curiosity: “Wicked teachers somehow season their poisons for the curious, so that they may think they are learning something great, because it deserved to be kept a secret, and they imbibe all the more agreeably the foolishness that they consider knowledge.” Augustine, Io. eu. tr. 97.2 (CCSL 36:573; WSA III/13:361): Ipsa quippe occultatione condiunt quodammodo nefarii doctores sua uenena curiosis; ut ideo se existiment aliquid discere magnum, quia meruit habere secretum, et suauius hauriant insipientiam, quam putant scientiam, cuius prohibitam quodammodo furantur audientiam.

⁵⁵ Augustine, Io. eu. tr. 96.4; 97.1.

⁵⁶ For 399/400, see L. J. van der Lof, “The Date of the De Catechizandis rudibus,” VC 16 (1962): 198–204. For 403, see P.-M. Hombert, Nouvelle recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris: Institute d’Éstudes Augustiniennes, 2000), 41–44.

⁵⁷ On the rhetoric of boredom, see Catherine Chin, “Telling Boring Stories: Time, Narrative, and Pedagogy in De Catechizandis Rudibus,” AugStud 37, no. 1 (2006): 43–62.

⁵⁸ Michael Cameron, “Love Actually: Modeling Amor in Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus,” Journal of Religion & Society, Supplement Series 15: Augustine on Heart and Life: Essays in Honor of William Harmless, S. J. ed., John O’Keefe and Michael Cameron (2008): 48–69. Cameron sees his article as an extension of a comment from Carol Harrison describing De catechizandis as “a treatise on the nature of love.” Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 67.

⁵⁹ Augustine, cat. rud. 2.3.

⁶⁰ Augustine, cat. rud. 2.4 (CCSL 46:123; trans. Raymond Canning, Augustine of Hippo: Instructing Beginners in the Faith [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2005], 58): Nec ipse amor tantus est, ut carnis disrupta caligine penetret in aeternum serenum, unde utcumque fulgent etiam ista quae transeunt.

⁶¹ Augustine, cat. rud. 10.15.

⁶² Augustine, cat. rud. 10.15 (CCSL 46:138; Canning, Instructing Beginners, 93): Si enim intellectus delectat in penetralibus sincerissimis, hoc etiam intelligere delectet, quomodo caritas, quanto officiosius descendit in infima, tanto robustius recurrit in intima per bonam conscientiam nihil quaerendi ab eis ad quos descendit, praeter eorum sempiternam salutem.

⁶³ Glowasky, Scripture and Rhetoric, 30–31. Glowasky’s more focused argument about the role of narratio in different stages of the catechumenate requires more detailed attention, not all of which I would agree with, but his general point about the role of narrative in Augustine’s preaching is salutary.

⁶⁴ Augustine, cat. rud. 4.8 (CCSL 46:128; Canning, Instructing Beginners, 70): Si ergo maxime propterea Christus aduenit, ut cognosceret homo quantum eum diligat deus, et ideo cognosceret, ut in eius dilectionem a quo prior dilectus est inardesceret, proximumque illo iubente.

⁶⁵ Augustine, cat. rud. 4.8 (CCSL 46:128; Canning, Instructing Beginners, 71): Secundum illam occultationem carnaliter intelligentes carnales, et tunc et nunc, poenali timori subiugati sunt. Secundum hanc autem manifestationem spirituales, et tunc quibus pie pulsantibus etiam occulta patuerunt, et nunc qui non superbe quaerunt, ne etiam aperta claudantur, spiritualiter intelligentes donata caritate liberate sunt.

⁶⁶ Augustine, cat rud. 6.10 (CCSL 46:131; Canning, Instructing Beginners, 76): ut singularum rerumatque gestorum que narramus causae rationesque reddantur, quibus ea referamus ad illum finem dilectionis, unde neque agentis aliquid neque loquentis oculis auertendus est.

⁶⁷ Augustine sometimes taught the Milanese creed of his own baptism (s. 212–214), sometimes the creed of Hippo (s. 215), and still again what may be a Roman or Milanese form of the creed (symb. cat.). For discussion of the text of the creed, see Liuwe Westra, The Apostles’ Creed: Origin, History and Some Early Commentaries (Leuven: Brepols, 2002), 163–68 (on the African creed of s. 215) and 189–96 (on the Milanese creed of s. 213 and s. 398); Joseph Lienhard, “Creed, Symbolum,” in Augustine through the Ages, ed. Allan Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 254–55.

⁶⁸ Augustine, s. 212.1, 213.2, 214.12.

⁶⁹ Augustine, symb. cat. 1 (CCSL 46:185; WSA III/10:45, alt.). Accipite regulam fidei, quod symbolum dicitur. Et cum acceperitis, in corde scribite, et cotidie dicite apud uos: antequam dormiatis, antequam procedatis, uestro symbolo uos munite. Symbolum nemo scribit ut legi possit, sed ad recensendum, ne forte deleat obliuio quod tradidit diligentia, sit uobis codex uestra memoria.

⁷⁰ Augustine, s. 214.1 (RBén 17:14; WSA III/6:150): Sed collecta breuiter et in ordinem certum redacta atque constricta tradenda sunt uobis; ut fides uestra aedificetur, et confessio praeparetur, et memoria non grauetur.

⁷¹ Augustine, s. 212.2 (SC 116:184; WSA III/6:138): Hoc est ergo symbolum, quod uobis per scripturas et sermones ecclesiasticos iam catechuminis insinuatum est: sed sub hac breui forma fidelibus confitendum et proficiendum est.

⁷² Augustine, s. 215.1 (RBén 68:18; WSA III/6:160, alt.): Accepistis ergo, et reddidistis, quod animo et corde semper retinere debetis, quod in stratis uestris dicatis, quod in plateis cogitetis, et quod inter cibos non obliuiscamini; in quo etiam dormientes corpore, corde uigiletis.

⁷³ Augustine, s. 58.13.

⁷⁴ For these two traditions, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, 73–74.

⁷⁵ Augustine, s. 214.2.

⁷⁶ Augustine, s. 213.

⁷⁷ Augustine, conf. 10.11.18 (O’Donnell 1:125–26; Chadwick, Confessions, 189): Quocirca inuenimus nihil esse aliud discere ista, quorum non per sensus haurimus imagines, sed sine imaginibus, sicuti sunt, per se ipsa intus cernimus, nisi ea, quae passim atque indisposite memoria continebat, cogitando quasi conligere atque animaduertendo curare, ut tamquam ad manum posita in ipsa memoria, ubi sparsa prius et neglecta latitabant, iam familiari intentioni facile occurrant.

⁷⁸ Plato, Phaedo 67c–d (LCL 36:330–31). This idea owes to Michael Chase, “Attention in Neoplatonism: From Plato to Porphyry and Some Christian Church Fathers” (unpublished paper).

⁷⁹ See above Chapter 2.

⁸⁰ Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 246.

⁸¹ Augustine, s. 214.10 (PL 38:1071; WSA III/6:156). See also s. 212.1; symb. cat. 2.4.

⁸² Augustine, s. 213.1; symb. cat. 1. Augustine’s correlation of creed and prayer shows, as Harmless puts it, the bishop’s discernment of the “subtle inner logic” latent in liturgical reflection on scripture. Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 338.

⁸³ Augustine, s. 213.1.

⁸⁴ Augustine, s. 212.1; 213.1; 398.1. See also s. 57.1; 58.1; 59.1. More generally on this Scripture, see Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 338.

⁸⁵ Augustine, s. 213.1 (MA 1:442; WSA III/6:141): Quia ergo iste ordo est, ut prius credatis, postea inuocetis, hodie accipitis symbolum fidei, in quo credatis; post octo autem dies orationem, in qua inuocetis.

⁸⁶ Augustine, s. 212.2 (SC 116:184; WSA III/6:138). Quicquid enim in symbolo audituri estis, iam diuinis sanctarum scripturarum litteris continetur et omnia carptim ubi opus erat soletis audire sed quod ita collectum et in formam quamdam redactum non licet scribi, commemoratio fit promissionis dei, ubi per prophetam praenuntians testamentum nouum dixit: hoc est testamentum quod ordinabo eis post dies illos, dicit dominus, dans leges meas in mentem eorum, et in cordibus eorum scribam eas. Huius rei significandae causa, audiendo symbolum non in tabulis, uel in ulla alia materia, sed in cordibus scribitur.

⁸⁷ Augustine, s. 212.2 (SC 116:184; WSA III/6:138): Praestabit ille qui uos uocauit ad suum regnum et gloriam, ut eius gratia regeneratis uobis, etiam spiritu sancto scribatur in cordibus uestris.

⁸⁸ Augustine, s. 212.2 (SC 116:184; WSA III/6:138): ut quod creditis diligatis, et fides in uobis per dilectionem operetur ac sic domino deo largitori bonorum omnium placeatis, non seruiliter timendo poenam, sed liberaliter amando iustitiam.