Throughout the history of the Church, it is common for some of the phrases uttered or written by the saints to constitute a high when it comes to approaching his work, and in this case, St. Augustine is no exception. Nevertheless, the same phrase is a synopsis of his whole life, of the incessant search for a "Something" that surpassed him and that he did not understand; of the very particular race of his life to find the Truth, of a turn in the activity that had impassioned him throughout his existence to stop, to let himself be taken over by the One from whom he had wanted to escape, to recognize Him, to contemplate Him, to love Him and to rest in Him.
A vital career that discovers an encounter of the one who loves with the one who allows himself to be loved and summarizes this experience by quoting: "You made us, Lord, for you, and our heart is restless until it rests in you". This phrase condenses the core of Augustinian anthropology: the human being is a seeker of God, and in a world marked by interior fragmentation, existential uncertainty and haste, the thought of the Bishop of Hippo offers keys to understand the human condition and its openness to mystery.
It is interesting that we recognize how important it is in the work of St. Augustine the deep desire of the human heart and its particular vocation to truth and love; in Christian terms, we speak of nothing other than the vocation to the life of Grace, to the life of and with God, with his only Son Jesus Christ who has presented himself as Truth (cf. Jn 14:6) and St. John has recognized in him Love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8).
The personal experience of the Bishop of Hippo is the starting point; he does not limit himself to analyzing the search for meaning, but to assuming it in his testimony of life; we could almost say that the work is dramatized in the fleshIn this way, like him, many people today continue, sometimes without knowing it, to search for meaning in their own lives. To reread St. Augustine is then, a way to enter in contact with someone who has known how to dialogue with classical philosophy, Christian revelation and existential experience, someone who has searched with sincerity. Let us not see his thought as a kind of "Christian archaeology".but as a spiritual pedagogy for today.
The Restless Heart: Augustinian Anthropology
Based on the revelation, the human being has been created by God. in his image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26), an image that has been wounded by sin and has caused man to enter into a kind of permanent tension in which, although he is called to communion with God, at the same time he experiences his fragility and his trend to seek himself, leaving God aside, and sets out on a path in which it seems that the only objective is to walk alone, without the one who has called him into existence.
– Supernatural concern of the human heart is not simply anxiety or emptiness, but the expression of a radical openness since it is structurally oriented towards a "beyond" itself. For Augustine, the heart symbolizes the center of the person: his intelligence, his will, his memory and his affectivity. This inner unity, however, is disordered if it is not centered on God (cf. Confessions X, 29, 40).
This inner tension is described by St. Augustine as a struggle between two loves: on the one hand, he identifies the self-esteem closed to the Creator or "amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei".and at the other extreme, he discovers the love of God that orders and elevates all things, or "amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui". (cf. St. Augustine, De civitate DeiXIV, 28).
This dialectic is what makes personal life take shape, but also, with it, history and culture. Augustinian anthropology is expanded and a note is discovered that is not eminently philosophical, but existential. To link man's attitude to the Creator by wanting to move away from or to draw near to Him, whether he closes himself to His action or identifies Him as the foundation of everything through love, is to offer an anthropology in a theological key. Man is a pilgrim, not a nomad; he has an origin and a destination; and the restlessness that inhabits him is not resolved by possessions or knowledge, but by the presence of the living God.
For Augustine, desire (desiderium), is not a defect to be suppressed, but a force to be ordered and purified; for him, desire is an imprint of the Creator in the creature, and therefore, what God has sown in man is the yearning for the infinite. Thus, every search for beauty, truth and goodness is, at bottom, a search for God, even if it is not always recognized as such. St. Augustine affirms that "everyone wants to be happy" (De beata vita, I, 4), but in this search for happiness, not a few get lost looking for it where it is not. The true drama of the human being consists in absolutizing temporal goods, which in reality replace the Supreme Good. In this sense, conversion is the redirection of desire: to stop loving oneself disorderly (love sui) and learning to love God for Himself (amor Dei).
The yearning of the heart and desire as a deep longing within man are not detached from the anthropological identity itself, they go hand in hand, they are united because desire well understood is a way to reach the truth, that force that impels the search for what fills life, the person and existence. This process, which is not limited only to the intellectual aspect, involves a transformation of the heart, a form of pedagogy of desire transversal to the gracethe prayer and the opening to the truth.
In Augustinian logic, to educate desire is to direct it to its source, not to repress it, but to broaden it since, as Pope Benedict XVI affirmed: "in the heart of every man is inscribed the desire for God" (Spe salvi27); in fact, we can affirm that today's man is no different from yesterday's man in his deepest thirst. Languages and technologies change, but not the cry of the heart: 'I want to live for something greater than myself', and that 'greater' is always God".
Interiority as a path to God
Pope Benedict XVI seems to paraphrase what St. Augustine said centuries ago when he reflected on man, insisting on a return within, to oneself, and there, in the interior of our life, we can find the essence of all reality, Truth itself. St. Augustine said: "Do not go outside, go back to yourself; within man dwells the truth" (De vera religione, 39,72). This call to interiority remains current in a culture saturated with noise, images and superficiality, where there is a risk of losing contact with oneself and, therefore, with God; a reality where selfishness, vainglory, consumerism, well-being, immorality, appearances lacking in sincerity and truth seem to be the order of the day, is, in the final analysis, a world in which there is room for everything and everyone, except for the Divinity.
Augustinian interiority is openness to a presence: God is more within me than I am myself (meo intimate interiorcf. ConfessionsIII,6,11). To find him, man needs silence, listening and truth. The Augustinian itinerary towards God invites us to assume our limits, to remember our wounds and to contemplate mercy. This vision is complemented by his teaching on memory (memory sui), which St. Augustine considers a kind of "inner chamber" where the past resides, as well as the imprint of God. Memory becomes a theological place, a space where the Creator, who has never ceased to accompany his creature, is rediscovered. From this perspective, prayer is not an empty and meaningless petition; on the contrary, prayer enters into the dynamics of relationship, since it is an existential dialogue. It is the space where the desire is purified, the will is ordered and the person is unified. As St. Thomas Aquinas would later say, following St. Augustine: oratio est interpretatio desiderii (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 83, a. 1, ad 2).
The challenges of modern man
Augustine's thought is still profoundly current because it does not start from abstract theories, but from the experience The experience of the human heart is constant, continuous and always new, open to the realities of each time and ready to lead those who desire it to a dynamic of encounter. In a world where many live dispersed, without a stable center or worse, a world where we do not know what is the center or the vital referent that drives our actions, without a clear horizon of meaning, in the midst of all this, the Augustinian vision offers a luminous word.
Today, as in the fourth century, man runs the risk of absolutizing the immediate, of seeking himself without transcendence. Augustinianism invites us to rediscover that the human being can only find himself by going out of himself and opening himself to God. Its message is also profoundly pastoral: it is not only a matter of "thinking of God", but of "loving Him", and letting ourselves be loved by Him and for Him, loving our neighbor, those who surround us, those who are present in our daily lives.
The pedagogy of desire proposed by St. Augustine is a way of evangelization: it does not start from the imposition of ideas, but from accompanying the desires of the human heart, helping to discover that, deep down, these desires point to God. In this sense, Christian anthropology, far from repressing freedom, frees it from its false absolutes and is thus capable of reorienting life no longer to having or possessing that which is passing away, but to strive to receive that which lasts until eternity. Consumerism is a passing act, a store of commerce that induces to spend resources -not only economic- on that which does not tend towards eternity.
Augustinian thought can dialogue fruitfully with psychology, literature and contemporary philosophy. The search for meaning, the experience of suffering, the longing for interior unity and the thirst for truth continue to be, as in the past, places where the Gospel can be incarnated. With the above, the Augustinian proposal is not a theory of the past -I insist-, but a light for the present. Modern man, like the man of any era, is a being who desires, seeks and longs for fullness; and in the midst of so many paths, St. Augustine reminds us that only in God does that restless heart find rest.
To return to Augustine is to rediscover that the Christian faith is not a burden, but a response; a response to the truest desire of the human being and that the search for God is not at odds with freedom, but rather fulfills it, makes the heart burn in a constant search for Love, opening the experience of encounter and with it, that of holiness because it is not the absence of desire that makes us holy, but the purified desire of the Spirit; God wants us with a heart that burns, not with an extinguished heart. Augustine's passion for truth, his intellectual honesty and existential humility continue to inspire those who, in the midst of noise and confusion, listen to the restlessness of their heart and receive the strength not to flee from the world, learning from St. Augustine that the heart, in order to be at peace, must learn to beating to the rhythm of GodIn the end, this is what the search for God consists in, to be with Him, to surrender ourselves to Him, to allow ourselves to be assumed by Him, to live eternally with Him.
