2 of 4

Today I can share only a few words of "St. Mugg's" from this book, on the first of his favorite prophets, Augustine of Hippo. But I hope to return to the rest of his extraordinary gallery soon.

In his introduction, the journalist sets up the great North African bishop like this:

It is possible to see [Augustine's] role as that of a stay-behind agent posted by a celestial spymaster in a collapsing Roman Empire with a brief to promote the Church's survival as custodian of the Christian revelation. … His worldly credentials were impeccable—a highly successful professorship of rhetoric at Milan University, which in his regenerate days he called his Chair of Lies, friends and acquaintances in the highest circles and occasional speech-writing jobs for the Emperor himself.

I can not resist adding Muggeridge's elaboration, later, on Augustine's position as a teacher of rhetoric. This, says Mugg, was "a rather empty and pretentious discipline which in those days was very highly regarded, rather as sociology is today." Ouch! But the journalist hurries to spread the sarcasm to his own discipline: "Looking back on his profession, [Augustine] contemptuously called it being a vendor of words. Alas, my own trade!"

And alas, my own, too. But more from Mugg on Augustine:

At the age of thirty, he had reached the summit of a career with a dazzling prospect before him. But somehow, he remained totally unsatisfied … knowing in his heart that God had some other purpose for him and that, try as he might, he would never be able to escape his true calling.

(Even in his most profligate years, Muggeridge had experienced a similar, restless sense of a divine vocation frustrated.)

Why is Augustine a prophet not only for his own day, but for today? Mugg offers this acute observation:

It is easier for us to get inside Augustine's unregenerate skin than perhaps it would be for any of the intervening generations. The similarity between his circumstances and ours is striking if not to say alarming. There is the same moral vacuity, leading to the same insensate passion for new sensations and experiences; the same fatuous credulity opening the way to every kind of charlatanry and quackery from fortune telling to psychoanalysis; the same sinister combination of great wealth and pointless ostentation with appalling poverty and unheeded affliction. As Augustine wrote, "O greedy men, what will satisfy you if God Himself will not?"

What, indeed.

But after his conversion, Muggeridge makes clear, Augustine was no killjoy who abandoned the good pleasures of the earth just because these pleasures are so easily perverted by sin:

No one must suppose that this great conversion which had befallen Augustine, this light which had shone into his life and would never again leave it, had turned him away from this world. On the contrary, it made him more conscious than ever before of its joys and beauties, more aware than ever before of the terrific privilege it was to be allowed to exist in time.

Or again,

No one has ever been less of a Puritan in the pejorative sense. Everything in creation delighted Augustine. He spoke to his congregation of the gloriously changing colors of the Mediterranean, which he had so often observed. All created things should be loved, he insisted, because God made them. The sea, the creatures, everything that is, speaks of God.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48