Constant Prayer of St. Augustine – Completion
Fr. Jan of St. Bruno, OCD
Word Prayer
From what has been said in the previous parts of the article, a question may arise: Is verbal prayer, according to St. Augustine, really necessary, that is, prayer in the sense that people most often understand it? Alternatively: is such prayer merely the prayer of those who have not sufficiently progressed in their spiritual life?
For Augustine, verbal prayer is significant to the extent that it is necessary in the state of (earthly) journeying to ignite desire: “We pray without ceasing with our desire (...), but at the appointed hours and times, we also pray to God with words, so that through these signs of things we can encourage ourselves to realize how far we have advanced in this desire and to spur ourselves to further kindle it. (...) Behold, then, at the appointed hours we withdraw our minds from other concerns that can partly extinguish our desire, and we call it back with the words of prayer that bring us to what we long for. (We try) to prevent the desire from completely cooling, (...) we strive instead to rekindle it. Therefore, the Apostle says: 'Your requests are made known to God'” (Phil 4:6).1 These words should not be understood to mean that it is necessary to make them known to God, who surely knew them before they were spoken, but in the sense that they are known to us before God, to give us courage.”2 This leads to an important lesson for one of the most common forms of prayer, intercessory prayer. It is not – contrary to widespread understanding – an effort to change God's will, but rather to align ourselves as fully as possible with that will. What we ask for would happen even without our prayer. However, if we join the intentions of the Lord's prayer, we take God's plan as our own and our lives move in the direction God wants, and His intentions can be realized through us: “When we say: Hallowed be your name (Mt 6:9; Lk 11:2), we encourage ourselves to desire that God's name, which is always holy, would also be hallowed among people and not be rejected, which does not help God, but rather people. When we say: Your kingdom come (Mt 6:10; Lk 11:2), which will come anyway, whether we want it or not, we focus our desire on this kingdom to come for us and that we may deserve to reign in it. (...)”3
A person in a state of journeying needs to understand and formulate what they desire. Their desire and direction must be aimed at some goal. The better this goal is known and perceived, the stronger the desire for it, and the more likely it is that a person will use appropriate means to achieve it. However, the necessity of words is relative. There are also moments when verbal expression is not needed and perhaps not even possible: “Often, prayer consists more of sighs than words, tears than speech. Our tears are before God's face, and our sighing is not hidden from Him who created everything by His word and does not need human words.”4
Ways of Prayer
Intercessory prayer, which we briefly mentioned in the previous section, is not the only form of verbal prayer that can be integrated into the concept of constant prayer. In Augustine's writings, we can distinguish at least four other ways or forms. All of them stem from the life of a person who stands before God's face. It is thus a kind of prayer of life that is in no way inaccessible even to those called to active life. Agostino Trapè identifies different forms of prayer with different postures of a person before God: “The posture of one who is created and stands before the Creator's face is expressed in adoration (bowing); the posture of the lover before the face of Eternal Beauty is expressed in praise; the posture of the recipient before the face of their benefactor is expressed in thanksgiving; the posture of one who feels like a sinner before the face of the holy one they have offended with their actions is expressed in a prayer for reconciliation; the posture of the poor, needy, and wretched before the one who owns all the treasures that can satisfy all our needs is expressed in a petition.”5 Since we have already briefly mentioned the last of the aforementioned forms, intercessory prayer, we will also attempt a brief commentary on the others.
Prayer of Adoration
The fundamental starting point for the prayer of adoration is the awareness that we are created, and at the same time a true insight into who we are before the Creator. Augustine, even as a Manichaean, believed that a person could help God in the struggle against evil and that God needs this help.6 Later, he came to know God, who is completely independent of His creation, to whom He gives being out of His love, and who is for man simultaneously a giver of light, knowledge, and a source of love.7 Adoration, however, does not just mean an intellectual insight into these truths, but their acceptance. That is to let them shape one's life, one's posture before God.8 A person who thus accepts God as Creator and themselves as creation stands in truth, and thus bows before God. The foundation for moments when we engage directly in the prayer of adoration, such as Eucharistic adoration,9 is therefore a sincere posture of adoration, recognizing God and accepting His will, which is a matter of one's entire life. A visible expression of adoration then is sacrifice. For Augustine, however, the external expression is inseparably linked with the internal posture, the external sacrifice with the internal sacrifice. Therefore, for him, every “good deed, by which we strive to unite ourselves in holy communion with God, and which is directed toward the ultimate good, whose attainment brings us true happiness.”10 Thus, the most perfect sacrifice becomes the sacrifice of a person who fully accepts God and His will: “Most of all, the sacrifice becomes that of the soul, which enters into dialogue with God, so that ignited by the fire of His love it loses the form of worldly desire, becomes clothed in the imperishable and becomes worthy of God, because it has accepted from His beauty. This thought is also expressed by the Apostle, when he says: 'Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what God's will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will'” (Rom 12:2).”11
Praise Prayer
In order to praise God, according to Augustine, two things are needed: suitable words that can dignifiedly express God's praise. These were prepared for us by God Himself: “So that man might be properly praised, God Himself sang His own praise, and thus man found a way to praise Him.”12 In the psalms, we find more of the voice of the Holy Spirit than our own. We could not sing these words if they were not inspired by Him.13 If God prepared these words, He did not do so for Himself, but for us. Our praise ultimately benefits us and not God: “God's dignity does not increase when you praise Him, nor does it lose anything of His greatness when you offend Him. You become better by praising the one who is good, whereas if you offend Him, you become worse. But the one who is good remains good always.”14 And elsewhere: “If you praise a thief for being a thief, do you not become his accomplice? On the contrary, if you praise the just for his justice, do you not become a participant in his justice through your praise?”15
The second prerequisite for dignified praise is the harmony of our life with Christ's life and the subjection of our will to God's will. The whole life then becomes praise. “Let us never cease to praise the Lord! We have spoken a word, and it is gone; we have accomplished something, and then we have finished; we have praised the Lord, and then we have been silent; we have sung, and then we have rested. We move on to the fact that we engage in other things that need to be done. Does this mean that God's praise ceases in us? No, because your tongue praises only for a moment, but your life must be a constant praise.”16
But can we praise God even in times when it seems that life brings us only bitterness and suffering? And for what can we praise God in such times? Often not for the immediately experienced reality, as such praise might not be sincere, although this is not excluded. However, it is possible to praise God for preserving us in faith, hope, and love. Augustine comments on the words of the psalm: “Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will praise you forever and ever” (Ps 84:5).17 “But where does this happen? In my life. But what kind of life is this life of the age? It could be answered: My death! Why your death? Because I am in exile, far from the Lord. And if being united with Him means life, being distant means death. But is there something that gives you comfort? Yes, hope. If you live in hope, praise also for hope and sing for hope. Do not sing for what is the cause of your death; sing for what gives you life. This world and its troubles are the cause of your death, but the hope of achieving a renewed world gives you life. I will praise the Lord in my life.”18
Just as difficult times come, there can also already come moments in this life when the praise that one would like to offer to God exceeds the possibility of verbal expression, which is undoubtedly in tension with the first condition of dignified praise, namely the use of suitable words. However, it is not about despising these words, but rather surpassing them: “Sing to God with joy! (...) Joy is a certain sound that indicates that the heart wants to give birth to something that cannot be expressed in words. And to whom belongs this joy, if not to the unutterable God? The unutterable is that which cannot be spoken: when you cannot express what you want and you must not be silent, what else remains for you but to rejoice and open your heart in an unutterable joy that exceeds the bounds of words? Sing beautifully to Him, with joy.”19
Thanksgiving Prayer
Thanksgiving prayer is closely related to the prayer of adoration and the prayer of praise. Like them, it is an expression of the attitude of a person who perceives that they are gifted by God. Adoration, which is an expression of accepting God, is the condition that opens the doors of our lives to this gifting. The relationship between praise and thanksgiving is also very close; however, we can consider thanks as an expression of gratitude for specific manifestations of God's goodwill that we experience in our lives.
Certainly, it is possible to thank for any gift of God, but for Augustine, the richest sources of joy and thanks mainly derive from the knowledge of God's plan of salvation and its realization in a specific life, that is, the gift of forgiveness and reconciliation with God. He himself experienced this forgiveness when he accepted baptism, and in the Confessions, he describes the joy that contemplating the plan of salvation brought him, as he devoted himself to it in the following days: “We were baptized, and all the restlessness that our past life caused in us vanished. In those days, I could not get enough of contemplating the greatness and depth of the plans of salvation that You have for humanity. I shed (also) many tears when I listened to the hymns and songs that sounded in your house!”20 From this perspective, we can also perceive his theological struggle against Pelagianism as a struggle for the possibility of a true attitude of a person before God, allowing for genuinely praying and receiving any good with gratitude as God's gift: “I confess that you have forgiven me everything I have voluntarily committed, but also everything I have not committed because you have protected me.”21 The same thought, contained in the last quote, was also expressed positively by the saint in the well-known sentence: “Your merits (O man) are nothing more than a gift from God. When God crowns your merits, He crowns His gifts.”22 Thus, the prayer of thanksgiving is also fully related to God, but its significance once again mainly applies to the person who, even through it, becomes aware of the multitude of God's gifts that they have received from God in their lives.
Reconciliation Prayer
Reconciliation prayer could certainly be included simply in intercessory prayer, as it is also in the Lord's prayer, where the request “forgive us our trespasses” represents one of the total of seven requests. Nevertheless, as mentioned, the posture before God that leads to it can be distinguished from the posture typical for intercessory prayer for other needs. The reconciliation prayer presupposes a person who is aware that they have hurt God’s love.
Agostino Trapè formulates the fundamental principle of Augustine's teaching on reconciliation prayer: “Sin, once committed, cannot remain unpunished: either it will be punished by God, or it will be punished by us.”23 A whole series of passages from the saint's works attests to this understanding: “Sin must be punished, for the scepter of justice is the scepter of His kingdom. Could sin remain unpunished? It cannot; sin must be punished; if it were not to be punished, it would not be sin. Prevent God; if you do not want Him to punish you, punish yourself.”24 “It is necessary that for every injustice, great or small, there should be a punishment, either from the person who repents or from God who punishes. However, the one who repents is already punishing themselves. (...) Before He looks upon you to punish you, prevent Him with confession and punish yourself, so that He might then not find anything to punish. When you punish your wickedness, you perform a work of justice. God will have mercy on you, for He will find that you act justly.”25
From the context of all of Augustine's theology, it follows that this sort of justification, which a person can obtain through their prayer and penance, relates to those who have already been redeemed by Jesus Christ and who have received freely and without their merits the gift of salvation. To assert the opposite would mean attributing to Augustine the ideas he struggled against for a long time and which, according to him, “interfered with Christianity at its very heart: they emptied and robbed of significance Christ's cross and our salvation.”26 “The cross of Christ appears to be in vain if it is claimed that justice and eternal life can be attained without the mystery of Christ. But this is precisely what is defended in that book,27 “I do not say this knowingly; I would have to say that its author is not a Christian, but, as I rather believe, unknowingly.”28
However, I find the above-mentioned terminology, emphasizing the necessity of punishment, somewhat unsuitable. It seems as if it denies God the possibility to refrain from punishment without required compensation, as in his soteriological reflection emphasized by C. V. Pospíšil: “No victim has the obligation to demand absolutely full compensation for their dishonored dignity. It is an undeniable right of everyone to forgive what the wrongdoer is not able to return, and the legal order will not suffer any harm. The essence of restoring order is not the restitution of the dishonored dignity, but the internal conversion, the inner reform of the wrongdoer.”29 For a truly Christian spirituality, it seems most important for us to perceive the necessity of repentance as a necessity for the person who needs to stand before God in truth, that is, also in the awareness of their own sin, and not as a necessity for God. This ultimately resonates entirely with the entirety of Augustine's teaching on prayer, as we have shown in its other forms, which have always aimed not only at glorifying God but also at elevating the person.
Conclusion
We have tried to show at several points why St. Augustine can be considered a great teacher of prayer, even though no specific school of spirituality or interior prayer, as we know from the following centuries, is usually associated with his name. It can be said that this saint lays down common foundations on which it is possible to further build and refine the spirituality of various schools and life states. Augustine himself surely knows “privileged” groups of individuals, specially devoted to prayer. In letter 130, addressed to the Roman widow Proba,30 which is his only work dedicated exclusively to the theme of prayer, he indicates on the basis of biblical citation (cf. 1Tim 5:5) that widows are one of these groups.31 However, ultimately all Christians are called not to place their hope in anything but God, thus becoming “Christ's widows” in this world, that is, unsecured people who in prayer expect salvation and fulfillment of their lives from God.32 Every Christian who lives in the place where God calls them can already express this desire for communion with God, which is the foundation of prayer, through this response. In accepting their own vocation, they express obedience to God's plan, which is the foundation of what we have called the prayer of life. Through it, we learn how to experience those moments dedicated exclusively to communion with God, that is, prayer in the narrower sense.
The highest model of Christian prayer is of course Jesus Christ Himself, who spoke to us in human words and prayed using them Himself. Our prayer is a participation in His prayer, our relationship with God is a participation in His relationship with the Father. Jesus' life culminated in the sacrifice on Golgotha, which is an expression of perfect adoration, praise, thanksgiving, and atoning sacrifice offered to God. The various forms of prayer mentioned are therefore all present in this sacrifice. Because we participate most fully in this sacrifice in the sacrifice of the Holy Mass, the Mass is the place of the highest expression and connection of all our stances before God – forms of prayer.
(This study was prepared based on my master's thesis:
Prayer of St. Augustine, KTF UK, Prague 2009.)
