“By your gift we are on fire”: Augustine and Virgil
Who we imagine God to be transforms how we live, how we love, and how we write. And while we can never see God perfectly in this life, honing our focus, making it bit by bit clearer, is a work worth a lifetime.
A revolution for the better, which is all that conversion really is, takes place in the soul when it arrives at a clear enough working understanding of God. In the Confessions, St. Augustine models one way this revolution might look, as an invitation to us to seek it too. His narrative breaks through any hesitation, any fear we may have that previous errors or preoccupations might shut us out from that understanding. If Augustine could reach it in the past, through all the debilitating pride, presumption, and privilege of an elite educated Roman citizen of late antiquity, then, Augustine seems to be saying, we can be confident that his God — who loves humility of heart and who works in every kind of circumstance — will not deny it to us in the present.
In the early books of the Confessions, Augustine scorns the strain in his education that encouraged him to focus his attention on the adventures of one Aeneas, “whoever he was,” and whether or not his battles fought in fire and water founded the same city that would change Augustine’s own life. It was not even Aeneas’ fight scenes that the young Augustine found most interesting in the story, as a reader might expect a young boy to do. Though it came naturally at first, later Augustine finds it petty to have wept for the death of Queen Dido while his eyes remained dry to his own faults. His scorn registers disdain for fictional empathy, which fits in with Augustine’s disavowal of his youthful receptivity toward theatrical fictions.
Yet as both the deep textual structure and the keen narrative self-awareness of the Confessions performatively show, this empathetic exercise strengthened and humanized Augustine’s young soul. Literature and drama gave him a sense of the inner life of the mind and a sense that others’ inner lives were as real as his own. In time, with maturity, these understandings beneficially ablated Augustine’s natural tendencies to act in callow and self-serving ways. Importantly, though, the arts did not slow his selfishness at first, when they were arguably the strongest emotional element in his formation. Only later, after sustained engagement with Scripture and the liturgy, did Augustine become able to see himself and others with greater clarity through a literary lens, and to act fruitfully on that vision.
The literary later entered into and enriched even Augustine’s prayer life, through the marks left on his mind by its themes and its terrible beauties. These marks arise again in a key passage of the Confessions’ Book XIII, the culmination of his spiritual memoir, where Augustine practices exegesis on Scriptural texts about the identity of God as Holy Spirit.
This is the famous passage in which Augustine contrasts the weight of concupiscence, which drags us down into the obscurity and monotony of sin, with the weight of love, a kind of inverse gravity that raises its possessor ever higher along paths of purification, peace, and hope. The much-quoted aphorism found in this passage, pondus meum amor meus — “my love is my weight” — means essentially that where our treasure is, there our hearts are too. Like a rock that falls from a shaken mountainside, or like water vapor rising from a river in the heat, Augustine cannot help going where the gravity of his being pulls him. In the same way, love goes to Love; in the same way, a heart filled with God goes to God.
In this famous passage, too, the fire and water imagery that marks the final books of the Aeneid — scorned, remember, by Augustine’s younger self — resurfaces. Where this imagery appears in the Aeneid, it speaks of rage and hatred, violence and upheaval. In those final battle scenes, Aeneas’ and Turnus’ warring personalities are dissolved into the elements, as they become more and more identified with the wills of ancient divinities. This identification eradicates both men as individual characters. It strips them of choice, of agency, even of personality.
Rather than persons, the warriors become clashing weather fronts. Their very outlines appear cloudy. They undergo a kind of erasure of the self which is the violent opposite of sanctification. Their agon strips away the matter on which grace might operate: the natural capacity for conscious human cooperation and consent. Turnus’ departure as an angry ghost, and Aeneas’ rise into worldly glory as a bronze-stamped image on a shield, a literal shell of himself, are equally reductive of the complex humanity of each man.
Yet in the Confessions, for Augustine, this same fire-and-water imagery functions not to express violent agonistic conflict or to result in the destruction of the person but rather to deepen the individual soul, to intensify the power and passion of the heart’s outgoing impulse to dissolve and recover itself in God. The dissolution precedes the recovery as the crucifixion of Christ precedes His Resurrection. Yet the resurrected self is transformed in a profoundly different way from the erased self of the naturalistic ancient concept of divinization.
Though in some ways mimetic of figures who have inspired him — Antony, Ambrose, and even in some sense Aeneas — the converted Augustine becomes (to borrow Lewis’ phrase on sainthood) “gloriously different” both from his former self and from those whose paths he has studied. In the Confessions, the reader is privileged to watch this transformation occur in the intensely compressed arc of narrative time. The saint, united to God, is not negated but fulfilled. Everything lost is found again.
Wrestling not with flesh and blood but with powers of inner confusion and dispersion, Augustine repurposes the imagery of fire and water, moving it from the material realm of Latium’s battleground to the spiritual battleground of the interior life: “Shall I say that we sink, and we rise again? But it is not in any space-occupying abyss that we sink and we rise again.” Like Aeneas battling Turnus, Augustine’s soul battles its own lack of understanding, arriving finally at the conclusion that “we come to supreme peace when ‘our soul has passed through a water insupportable.’” Following the thought of the Psalmist, this “water insupportable” is not the water of grace, but the water of natural change, in which the passion-driven soul sinks until the Spirit of God lifts it up. Such water “sinks below the oil” — the symbol of sacramental anointing.
And yet water too can be a symbol of the Holy Spirit, as in Baptism — as translator Frank Sheed observes in his note on this passage. Fire, too, speaks of the Spirit in the way it “tends upwards,” toward the heavens: “By Your gift we are on fire … we flame and we ascend.” Vitally, for Augustine, what fire ascends toward and what water descends toward are the same as that to which the oil, stone, and invisible soul-filling love of the passage all also tend: not to the victory and woe of the classical passage, the very investment in which involves a kind of moral defeat, but the rest and peace of salvation.
To the extent that Augustine’s intellectual pursuit here constitutes a kind of spiritual warfare, it is a war fought not mainly for the sake of vanquishing an enemy but instead for the sake of securing a good otherwise unattainable. And the conflict is a just war, because it is fought not in the spirit of libido dominandi — the will to power set up against a physical equal in the order of the world — but, instead, in the spirit of fortitude and justice. The enemy is not another human of equal dignity but, instead, Augustine’s own temptations to complacency and ignorance, which stifle and suppress the good of his own humanity.
Through the Scriptural identification and literary adoption of the Aeneid’s tumultuous, stormy classical imagery, Augustine baptizes it — though he also chastens it — until the only violence left in it is that of the “violent” who “bear away” the kingdom of God by the intensity of a love that seeks the most direct route to the beloved, however harsh a road this may be. Having found the willingness to fight his way upward, all Augustine wants now is to see his love more clearly, with the kind of vision that is the immersion of the whole being: “Give Thyself to me, O my God, give Thyself once more to me. I love thee: and if my love is too small a thing, grant me to love more intensely… This only do I know: that it is ill with me when Thou art not with me — I do not mean by me, but in me; and that all abundance which is not my God to me is neediness.” (Confessions XIII:8)
Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and the author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood Books, 2021), Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord (Catholic Truth Society, 2021), and Fragile Objects, stories (Wiseblood, 2023, forthcoming). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society located at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.