St. Augustine: Books and comments on a painting

Some years ago I posted a round up of books about St. Augustine.   Rater than reproduce it here, I’ll link to it HERE

However, I want to update with a couple of additional volumes.   Books and articles on Augustine pour forth.

Here is a recent offering from Emmauus Road Press

US HERE

Return to the Heart: The Biblical Spirituality of St. Augustine’s Confessions  by Shane Owens

Christ and the Altar Fire: Sacrifice as Deification in Matthias Scheeben by David Augustine

US HERE

One of my favorite images of St. Augustine is a painting by Philippe de Champaigne. Right click for much larger.

Firstly, you will note the flaming heart and the light on the left with the word “veritas… truth”. There is a quill, for Augustine was a writer. There are texts under foot with the names of heretics like Pelagius , Celestinus, and Julian of Eclanum. On a stand is the Bible with its pages in motion, perhaps to indicate that Scripture is in-breathed by the Holy Spirit.

Augustine peers towards divine truth. His burning heart’s flames are stretching towards the truth through Augustine’s head. The affective affects the intellective in accordance with the Augustinian phrase, “Nisi credideritis non intelligetis… unless you will have first believed you will not understand”.

What’s going on with that heart? Augustine, who authored the unforgettable “our hearts are inquiet/restless until they rest in Thee”, described us and our love as working like gravity, which in the thought of the ancients was a force within a thing that sought to go to its proper place of balance in relation to all other things.

“Amor meus pondus meum” (conf 13, 9, 10) said Augustine, “My love is my weight”, drawing the restless soul to God, the only source of lasting peace.

We are all made in God’s image and likeness, made to act as God acts. He reveals something of His will to us. When we obey Him we act in accordance with the way He made us and what He intended for us. All things that live and move and have their being must come to rest in God or forever be in conflict with themselves and the cosmos.

In the painting the burning heart is by it’s internal need striving to go to the divine light.  In turn it enflames the intellect which can then find its way to the divine light of Truth.

In the dynamic of this tension, Augustine is writing under the illumination of Truth and the insights of the inquiet heart.

One might be tempted to subtitle this work “continuous conversion” or “work in progress”.