I just now caught wind of your most recent comments…so forgive me for not responding sooner. I may try to pull something of a response together, but I am slammed trying to finish a paper for a conference and I’m not sure it’s time for me to come up for air yet. Thanks again for the engagement. Peace.

dave b

There have been many debates about whether Augustine taught a doctrine of Real Presence. In his sermons (especially those to the newly-baptized on Easter) he uses very realistic language, e.g., when he says, “The bread which you see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ” (sermon 227).

What’s odd (and causes a great deal of the confusion in the debates) is how little Augustine says about the salvific power of this body. He quickly moves to direct his hearers’ attention back to themselves as the ecclesial Body of Christ, which is always for Augustine the fundamental res sacramenti, the thing signified in the sacrament. We are to BE what we have received, the body of Christ–and that, rather than the literal flesh of Christ, is the body that he would have us focus on in the eucharist.

This ties in with the theme of the inner unity of the Church as the true means of grace and channel of sacramental efficacy, which I mentioned in my reply to Dave Belcher, above. Hence in the same sermon Augustine proceeds to say: “The sacrament of the Lord’s table is set forth: we who are many are one bread, one Body. Commended to you in this bread is how you are to love unity.”

In Outwards Signs, toward the end of chapter 8, here is how I proposed to interpret this odd situation. (1) Augustine speaks as a sacramental realist (pointing to the bread and calling it Christ’s body) because this is how the church speaks, and he will always speak in accordance with the church, even when he does not quite know what to make of how she speaks (this is the principle that faith comes before understanding, and authority before reason). (2) What Augustine lacks, in order to understand why the church speaks thus, is a way of attributing salvific power to the literal flesh of Christ. He is missing the concept of Christ’s life-giving flesh, which was to become an official teaching of the magisterium through Cyril of Alexandria in the 3rd ecumenical council, held at Ephesus in 321, the year after Augustine’s death. (3) The underlying problem is that Augustine’s Platonist ontology does not have room for any external things, even Christ’s flesh, to have spiritual power. (4) Hence his eucharistic piety is not a form of devotion to the Real Presence of Christ’s flesh, even though he is willing to say that Christ’s flesh is present right there on the altar. It seems likely that he believes in the Real Presence but doesn’t know what to do with it. So his eucharistic piety instead focuses on the inner unity in love of the ecclesial body of Christ.

Sorry to be so long replying. The conference came in the middle of my vacation.

In my book, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self (chapter 3), I focused attention on the movement “in then up” that you get in key passages in Confessions, such as 7:10.16 and 7:17.23. God certainly transcends the self, but not by being found outside it. God is there among external things, of course, since he is omnipresent, but he is found by turning away from them and finding him both within the soul (because he is not external and corporeal) and above the soul (because he is its Creator). The soul’s inner space is not like a private dark room (as in modern thinkers like Locke) but like the interior courtyard of a palace with no roof, open to the sun shining above (imagery suggested by the treatment of memory as inner space in Conf. 10). It’s as if to say: outside, it’s always cloudy. If you want to get a clear view of the sun, you have to enter within inside and look up. This language of turning inward and looking upward can all be traced back to Augustine’s Neoplatonist heritage, but which he uses in new ways.

I deal with Augustine’s anti-Donatist sacramental theology in my new book, Outward Signs, where I point out that for Augustine the power of the sacrament is found in the inner unity and peace of the church, especially its prayers, “the groans of the one dove” (De Bapt. c. Donat. 3:22). There is certainly sacramental efficacy here, but it is not external, as if outward signs could have power to confer an inner grace. Rather, the efficacy is that of a community, which for Augustine is an unity of souls bound together by common love.

This takes some getting used to, for us moderns: for Augustine, true community is found in the inner dimension, not externally. The inner is not necessarily or inherently private, as in modernity. This is because in true community it is souls, not bodies, that are joined–by the souls’ power of love (as we can see in the social theory he develops in the City of God). For Augustine this does not make the life of the community “subjective” (a modern term which has no equivalent in ancient thought) because the inner realm of the soul is closer to intelligible Truth than bodies are. (In Platonist terms, bodies belong to the sensible realm of “opinion”–the closest ancient thought gets to the modern notion of “subjective”). The Church is that true community which is bound together by love of eternal Truth, and precisely in the power of that love becomes an efficacious INNER means of grace.

So even in the sacraments, Augustine does not want us clinging to external things. That’s the key sense in which he is closer to Calvin than to Luther. Calvin can agree with other Swiss Reformers that we “must not cling too tightly to mere external signs” (Inst. 4:14.16), whereas for Luther, both Gospel and sacraments are external signs to which we cling for our salvation, the same way we cling to Christ in the flesh.

I wonder about this statement with respect to Augustine’s semiotics: “So the best an external word can do for us is admonish us to go looking for grace within.” Is this really the case, though? Does not Augustine’s interiority direct the self outward? The point of the beginning of The Confessions, that God is nearer to me than I am to myself, is not that grace is already found inwardly, but that there is already an exteriority to the interiority of the self, opening the self outwards. Even a disordered amor sui is the result of the homo incurvatus in se…true self-love is instead a result of an exterior direction of the interior — the intentioning aim of the self outside of itself (so that the self is restless until finds rest in God) precisely to Christ the Mediator.

I am simply uncertain that any such duality between exterior and interior can hold with respect to Augustine’s concept of the way in which grace operates in and on the self. Furthermore, even if such a duality is found in places earlier in his writings, the later development of his thought — especially his social thought in the later controversies — seems to me to necessitate a complete overhaul of any strict divide between interior and exterior with respect to grace (and here perhaps a development in Luther’s thought needs to properly correspond to a development in Augustine’s own). For instance, in the Donatist controversy — both in Contra ep. Parm. and in De Bapt. — the “efficacy of the sacrament,” or conferral of grace, is not dependent on the moral performance of the minister, but instead — truly — on the complex of relations with respect to the “intentionality” of the baptizand….such that the “interior” witness of the Spirit, the love of God shed abroad in the heart of the self moves the self outside of itself by the gift of an intentionality towards communion with Christ, who is the true minister of the sacrament. There is thus both an objective element (or “exterior,” in the work of Christ as minister) as well as subjective element (or “interior,” in the work of the Spirit as bond of love)…and it is the interrelation between an interiority that points outward and the exteriority where the true gift of grace — in Christ! — is received that the recipient of the sacrament is truly united with Christ and thus also the catholic church, the head and the body of Christ.

Just some thoughts on semiotics and grace in Augustine…I really appreciated the rest of the article. thanks.