A reflection for Friday within the Thirteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Augustini Episcopi, Confessoris et Ecclesiæ Doctoris, III classis (28 August)
Commemoratio ad Laudes tantum: S. Hermetis Martyris
The Introit of a Doctor’s Mass is always the same, and it is never worn out: In medio Ecclesiæ aperuit os eius: et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiæ et intellectus — “In the midst of the church the Lord opened his mouth: and filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding” (Eccli. 15:5). Note where the mouth is opened: in medio Ecclesiæ, in the midst of the Church. The Doctor does not speak from a private summit of genius; he speaks from inside the assembly of the faithful, and what fills his mouth is not his own. On this day the Church applies the antiphon to the man to whom, of all her sons, it belongs with the least strain. Augustine of Hippo talked and wrote for forty-four years in the midst of the Church — sermons, letters, treatises, retractations — and sixteen centuries later she has not finished listening. Today’s Mass asks what such a man is for, and it answers with two texts: a dying Apostle’s charge to preach, and the Lord’s declaration that His disciples are salt, light, and a city on a mountain.
I. Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season
The Epistle (2 Tim. 4:1-8) is the last will and testament of St. Paul, written from his Roman chains to the bishop he had left at Ephesus. It opens not with advice but with an adjuration, and the witnesses summoned are terrible: “I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming, and his kingdom: preach the word.” Prædica verbum: insta opportune, importune — be instant in season, out of season. Reprove, entreat, rebuke, in all patience and doctrine.
St. John Chrysostom, expounding this passage in his homilies on the Second Epistle to Timothy, dwells on that pairing of opportune, importune: the preacher, he says, is not to keep to fixed seasons as if the word of God had office hours; his season is affliction and prosperity alike, prison and freedom alike, for the word must be sown whether the ground looks ready or not. And Chrysostom notes the order of the verbs — patience and doctrine stand at the end because rebuke without patience hardens, and zeal without doctrine wounds.
Then Paul gives the reason, and it reads like a page from our own newspapers: “For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.” The remedy for the age of itching ears is not a softer message but a steadier preacher: “But be thou vigilant, labour in all things, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil thy ministry.”
And then the trumpet: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day: and not only to me, but to them also that love his coming.” St. Gregory the Great, whose Regula Pastoralis is the Church’s classic on this whole Epistle, insists that the preacher’s authority to say such things is purchased only by a life that matches the sermon; the shepherd’s voice, he teaches, penetrates the hearts of his hearers when his conduct commends what his speech commands. Paul can speak of his crown because he speaks from the scaffold’s shadow.
II. You are the salt of the earth
The Gospel (Matt. 5:13-19) takes the same office and states it in images. “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid.”
The Fathers press each image for its exactness. St. Hilary of Poitiers, commenting on St. Matthew, observes that salt works invisibly and by contact: it does not change the appearance of what it seasons but its corruption; so the doctrine of the Apostles, sprinkled through the mass of mankind, preserves the world for eternity, and if the salt itself go flat there is no second salt to season it. Chrysostom, in his fifteenth homily on St. Matthew, draws the sterner conclusion: the Lord’s words if the salt lose its savour are addressed to teachers before anyone else, and they mean that the corruption of the best is the most useless thing on earth — good for nothing “but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men.” The world may fall into folly through ignorance; but when the appointed remedy itself decays, there is no remedy for the remedy.
The light and the city say the other half. Salt works hiddenly; light cannot work hiddenly at all. St. Augustine himself, treating this passage in his commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, warns against the false humility that hides the lamp under the bushel-measure of temporal convenience — the man who dims his witness because candor would cost him comfort or advancement has preferred the bushel to the lampstand. And the city on the mountain, in the constant reading of the Fathers, is the Church herself: founded on the height that is Christ, visible to friend and enemy alike, incapable of the anonymity that timid ages wish upon her.
Then the Lord adds the sentence that fixes the standard for every doctor and every catechist to the end of time: “He that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Qui fecerit et docuerit. Doing stands before teaching, exactly as in yesterday’s Collect for St. Joseph Calasanctius — ita agamus et doceamus. St. Thomas, asking in the Summa about the excellence of the teaching life, answers that to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation — contemplata aliis tradere — is greater than either contemplation or action alone, as it is greater to illuminate than merely to shine (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 188). But the lamp must burn before it can give light. A doctrine merely spoken is a lamp painted on the wall.
III. The restless heart in the midst of the Church
Set the two readings side by side and St. Augustine (354-430) steps out of them as if they had been written for his canonization.
He was born at Tagaste in Roman Africa, the son of St. Monica’s tears. For thirty-three years he was himself a man of itching ears — a professor of rhetoric who heaped to himself teachers according to his own desires, nine years a hearer among the Manichees, then a fashionable skeptic, all the while held fast by ambition and by the flesh. The story of his deliverance he told once for all in the Confessions: the voice in the garden at Milan, the passage of St. Paul taken up and read, the baptism at the hands of St. Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387. Wisdom went down into that pit too, and the sentence in which he confessed it has become the possession of the whole Church: late had he loved the Beauty ever ancient and ever new; and our heart is restless until it rests in God (Confessiones I,1; X,27).
What the Church celebrates today, however, is not only the convert but the Doctor — the man the converted man became. Ordained a priest at Hippo almost by force of the people’s acclamation, made its bishop in 395, he spent thirty-five years doing precisely what the Epistle commands: preaching in season and out of season, reproving, entreating, rebuking, in all patience and doctrine. Against the Manichees he defended the goodness of creation; against the Donatists, the unity and catholicity of the Church; against the Pelagians, the absolute primacy of grace — whence the Church calls him the Doctor of Grace. Nearly the whole doctrinal vocabulary in which the West has ever since spoken of sin, grace, the Trinity, and the sacraments passed through his mouth, opened in medio Ecclesiæ.
And the city on the mountain: no man ever took that image more literally. When Rome fell to Alaric in 410 and the pagans blamed the Christians for the ruin of the empire, Augustine answered with the De Civitate Dei — the City of God, seated on the mountain that is Christ, which cannot be hid and cannot be sacked, journeying through the earthly city’s rise and collapse toward a peace no Vandal can besiege. He finished his own course in the middle of the demonstration: he died on the twenty-eighth of August, 430, in the third month of the Vandal siege of Hippo, the penitential psalms fastened to the wall beside his bed. The earthly city was burning outside his window; he departed to the other one. Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consummavi, fidem servavi.
The Church commemorates today at Lauds St. Hermes, a Roman martyr of the early persecutions whose tomb on the Via Salaria was venerated from antiquity — a quiet reminder, beside the towering Doctor, that the Church’s greatness is measured by fidelity, whether it fills thirty volumes or a single grave.
IV. A word for practice
The Mass of a Doctor is not a museum tour. Salt, light, and the charge to teach belong, in due proportion, to every confirmed Christian, and the age of itching ears is not less ours than Timothy’s.
First, examine yourself on the bushel. Where, this week, did you dim the lamp — leave a falsehood uncorrected, a mockery of the faith unanswered, a grace unmentioned — because candor had a price? Augustine’s warning is that this is not humility but a transaction.
Second, feed your mind before you open your mouth. The Doctor of Grace read Scripture daily to the end of his life and died with the psalms before his eyes. Choose one work of his and begin it: the Confessions for the heart, the Enchiridion for doctrine in small compass. Fifteen minutes a day, tolle, lege.
Third, pray for preachers. The Epistle is addressed to a bishop, and the plainest lay application of it is intercession: that the men charged to preach the word may be instant in season and out of season, and may finish their course.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day — Adesto supplicationibus nostris, omnipotens Deus: et quibus fiduciam sperandæ pietatis indulges, intercedente beato Augustino Confessore tuo atque Pontifice, consuetæ misericordiæ tribue benignus effectum. “Attend to our supplications, O almighty God: and to those to whom Thou grantest confidence to hope in Thy loving-kindness, mercifully grant, by the intercession of blessed Augustine Thy Confessor and Bishop, the accustomed effect of Thy mercy.” Or, more simply, Augustine’s own sentence made a petition: Fecisti nos ad te, Domine — da cordi meo in te requiescere. “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord — grant my heart to rest in Thee.”
Suggested devotion: the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, attending especially to the Ascension — the Head gone up into the city on the mountain, drawing the restless hearts of the members after Him. Those who keep the older custom may add the Te Deum, which tradition long loved to associate with Ambrose and Augustine at the font.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto three of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the theology of grace — what Augustine won against Pelagius, and how St. Thomas received and ordered it. The Church History path treats the fall of Rome and the two cities, the frame in which all Christian philosophy of history has been done since. And the Lives of the Saints path pairs him with his mother: the traditional calendar keeps St. Monica on the fourth of May, in Paschaltide, while the reformed calendar moves her to the vigil of her son’s feast, and no study of Augustine is complete that forgets whose tears purchased him.
Sancte Augustine, Doctor gratiæ, ora pro nobis. Sancte Hermes, ora pro nobis.