B (3:41)

And what's really interesting about De d' Artrina is that Augustine wrote that primarily with priests in mind. And so we might not think that the sort of priestly formation or preparing for homilies, the first thing you should do is learn how to read Scripture. But that's what Augustine thought. He said the first thing you need to do is know what Scripture is, how to read it and then how to communicate it. And I think that really aligns with the mission of the Augustine Institute, where we really strive to do that in everything. To read the Bible really well, but then also to communicate it really, really well. And that's sort of the last part of the De Doctrina. And one piece of advice he gives that I love is if you're not really good at speaking and you don't know how to do it, just copy someone who is just steal a homily from a classical author, steal something from one of these great preachers. And so he just has very practical advice of how to know the faith, but then how to communicate it to any kind of person. And that really was his day in, day out job. We think of Augustine as someone who sat in sort of a dusty old room Writing the City of God. But he, in fact, complained bitterly that he was never given time to write City and that he was never going to finish it because he spent all his time really preaching and pastoring the people in his local area.

A (4:52)

I have great empathy for that, for his complaining about busyness and not being able to write, because I'm having that problem right now.

B (5:00)

You could try what he did, which was apparently a local council decreed that he should not be disturbed on, like, Thursday afternoon or something so that he could finish writing City of God. And he complained bitterly that this was being disregarded by everybody. But you could try making a decree.

A (5:13)

I would need a decree of a high order to get people at the Augustus to give me freedom for an afternoon. But I don't have any false hopes or expectations that it's going to happen. But, yeah. So Data. And you're right, Liz, to talk about. Augustine loved Scripture. And he taught so eloquently on it. He preached on it so well. But that was one of the things that drew us early on. There were several of us discerning, what do we name this institute? We want to found this institute dedicated to the new evangelization, but what do we name it? And there was the idea of very practical names, Catholic leadership, something kind of institute. And we're like, no, that's not gonna. That's not gonna work. But when the name Augustine came up, two of us in particular, Sean Ennurst and myself, one a good friend of ours, Jay Reyes, said, what about Augustine? Sean and I looked at each other right away, and we had been very involved in the new evangelization, working for Archbishop Chappew in the Diocese of Rapid City, S.D. and Shawn was in charge of parish catechesis and evangelization. I was in charge of the schools. And we both loved Augustine. And there's another work of Augustine that was very formative for us and our project, and that was Catechism Rudibus, which is on hand in the Christian faith, as sometimes the English translations as. But literally, it's On Teaching the Ignorant. So it's not a very politically correct title. So who wants to. Here, I think you should read this on Teaching the Ignorant. But Augustine writes this book in response to a deacon who writes a letter to Augustine and says, look, I'm supposed to be teaching basically what we would call rcia, teaching the Faith. And I don't know where to start, I don't know where to stop, I don't know what to cover. So what should the syllabus be and people are falling asleep and getting bored. How do I make this interesting? It's like all the classic problems of how do you teach the faith? And here's this early deacon who does it. And of course he writes Augustine. And it's dangerous to write a letter to Augustine because you might get a book response. And that's what he gets. He gets this whole book. And I love how Augustine begins with, well, here's how you start in the beginning, God created. That's where you begin. You begin with creation. And then you go all the way to church history, to this present moment of salvation history. And you show this story of salvation is an ongoing story from Scripture to church history. And you tell it as a Narazio, as we like to say here, as a story. And so Augustine, who's a master rhetor, he was a professional, you know, as a doctor of rhetoric, that would be marketing, you know, for us. And he understands that story is very important for stickiness, for marketing, for teaching, for eloquence. And that's what he teaches. And so that was one of the things that really influenced Sean Interest and myself is Augustine's on how to teach the faith. And we tried to use those principles for teaching out in Rapid City, South Dakota.

B (8:12)

And I think something that Augustine shows by the advice he gives to others and then how he actually executes that is that he's just a master who's able to act at all these levels where we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homilies that survive from St. Augustine, where you can see him dealing with these very big theological topics in extremely accessible, even exciting and fun ways. But then this idea that if you want to really be able to speak authentically, you have to tell the story of salvation history, then if you ratchet it all the way up to the City of God, one of his most famous works, that's still exactly what he's doing in City of God when he's arguing against the Romans, that Christianity isn't some sort of, you know, backwater religion, that it has this coherent and persuasive narrative. He tells the entire story of salvation history, starting from Genesis in the City of God as well. So he just has this sort of authentic biblical spirit where he's read it and embodied it so that he can communicate it to the ignorant, and he can also communicate it to those who are, you know, kind of giving him these very upper level intellectual challenges in the City of God.

A (9:21)

I just want to underscore this idea of storytelling and how we use it here. At the Augustin's with the inratio. And then I want to move to the City of God where you did, because that's the other big book. That was one of the big reasons why we chose Augustine. But the idea, Augustine taught about this idea of a nerazio and he even uses it in his, the title of his work on the Psalms. And in the beginning of the Psalms he talks about the importance of story and this idea of narrative that God has a narrative story that he wants to include us into. And we try to teach the students here this idea of the power of story. And so, you know, not just having disparate pieces of information, but connecting those different pieces of information within a narrative web and within a narrative thread that there's a narrative thread that ties these things together. And so yes, there's Abraham and there's David and there's Isaac and there's Jacob and there's all these different. And there's the Fall and sin and Adam. But if you take the narrative thread, all of a sudden you can teach a lot of the doctrines through the story. And rather than just simply having a dogmatic book and here's all these dogmas or doctrines or propositions, you teach the propositions within a narrative story. And all of a sudden it's much more human and it's much easier to digest these propositions and truths within a narrative thread.

B (10:45)

And it's also the way that God chose to teach. I mean, that's what Augustine comes to see because Augustine is, he's like, you know, he's sort of a highbrow, liberal, educated Roman. And throughout his youth he basically thought the Bible was low class material and that Virgil was really a lot better and the language was a lot better, it was a lot more persuasive. And at the height of his career, Augustine was sort of the court rhetor, you know, giving speeches in honor of the emperor when he's 30. So he's really, you know, world class in terms of his education. And when he has his conversion, he really is converted to the idea that God is the most persuasive speaker and that the Bible is the most persuasive rhetoric. And he really commits himself to that in a way that I wonder if we even do, you know, sometimes we want to have the silver bullet talking point for this or that thing. But, but Augustine says, you know, if you want to be persuasive, you have to know the Bible and you have to be able to tell God's story in the way that God tells it. And his commitment to that, I think, really pays off in his pedagogy, what we see, the way he teaches and the way he's able to present things.

A (11:50)

It goes back to what you said, too, about Augustine saying at the end of Deductrina, find a good rhetor and imitate them. And of course, Augustine imitates the best. He imitates the divine pedagogy. You know, Jesus is the storyteller. He's telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, the story of the Prodigal Son. And all of Scripture really unfolds from Genesis to Revelation as a story, as a narrative. And of course, then when he sits down to do the City of God, he's going to use a narrative thread to tell that story.

B (12:21)

And what's interesting about the City of God is that the first. Well, I guess what's not interesting, the first half of the City of God is pretty boring. So, I mean, I love Augustine and I still find it boring, because what Augustine does in the first half is he really looks at the narrative framework of the society around him. So he takes Virgil, you know, the Aeneid, tells the story of the Roman Empire and that sort of their narrative, and he dissects that narrative and says, okay, here's what you think is important, here's what you think is good. And it's really tedious in a lot of ways because it deals with very specific things about Roman culture that we don't really care about anymore. But what it shows you is that he. He's not only committed to sort of the Christian vision, but to really understanding his opponent's objection to it. And he's able to lay that out. And then the second half, then he says, no, I have a completely different vision of the world, a completely different vision of society and the story God's telling. And that's when he begins at Genesis and goes forward.

A (13:16)

Yeah, you know, exactly why we. I mean, one of the ultimate reasons why we chose Augustine as a patron is, you know, De Doctrina was going to be very important for Scripture and Augustine's love of Scripture and then Catechismus Rudibus, the teaching of the faith. How do you hand on the faith? Effectively, that's really important because we're a teaching institute. We want to equip teachers to be effective teachers. But then the third thing was the City of God, and it was because Augustine uses the narrative story of Rome and then the narrative story of Israel and Christianity to tell a worldview in other words, he uses these narratives to engage the worldview of the culture. And one of the things we really wanted to do is equip our students at the Augustine Institute to engage the worldview of today. Because just like in Augustine's day, the world is changing radically right now. And we're at the time, in Augustine's day, civilization was in great decline, and he had to tell a story that built up a biblical worldview to give people a vision and a way of living in the midst of the decay of the late Roman Empire, because that way of living was dying. And what we want to do is we want to give students a worldview that they could articulate, but also to be able to deconstruct the worldview that they've received in the world. Right? And so for Augustine, of course, that worldview is late Roman worldview. And he's going through the stories that are the canonical stories for the Roman worldview, like Virgil's Aeneid. So he's got to deconstruct that. The stories today are post modernity and relativism. And so what we want to do is equip our students to understand what unifies and what undergirds the thinking of relativism, why it's consistent in its own worldview and how we can engage that worldview with the good news, with the gospel, and to be able to understand their faith as a worldview. And one of the analogies I always like to use with the students is that, you know, you can be orthodox Catholic and you can believe in the angels and the saints and the truth about Jesus and his divinity and the sacraments, but if you have them as different pieces, separated and isolated, it's like having, you know, if I have every orthodox part of my Honda Odyssey, you know, our family van, if I have every orthodox Honda part, but it's dissembled, I can't drive that van anywhere, and I'm not capable of putting it together. And I think a lot of people are just giving a parts list approach to the faith. The way they received the faith and were taught the faith was this piece, this piece and this piece, but never interconnected, never as an organic unity that they could drive into the world and into their life in any way.

B (16:05)

I really love that you've turned to this, because I think what kind of the homilies of Augustine and the other texts you mentioned on Christian doctrine show us? He's sort of a teacher, which is at the heart of everything we do here. But then what City of God shows us is sort of why he's the patron of the new evangelization for us, which is that Augustine was really dealing with an audience that had sort of one foot in the Roman world and one foot in the Christian world. And even though, in a sense, Augustine's world was stepping into the Christian world and we're stepping out of it, it's this idea of one foot in, one foot out, and helping people encounter the gospel who maybe have heard of Jesus or who are practicing, but only a little. And that's very much who Augustine was dealing with. Augustine talks about his very lukewarm congregation, who, you know, Maybe they had 90% of the right Honda Odyssey pieces, but there's a couple spare parts in there, too. And so he talks about, you know, I know that you guys are visiting astrologers because they come and tell me who's coming, and I know that you're using magical charms. Okay, we don't have those same problems. But he knows the people in his own congregation are sort of not really 100% clear on, you know, what it means to be a Catholic. And so that's why he's sort of the patron of the new evangelization in my mind, is that actually he shares a lot of cultural similarities to us even being so divided in time.

A (17:25)

And I think just, you know, we've been talking about the key works of Augustine and how they shaped and different elements are so important to our curriculum and to the way we approach things here at the Augustine. But then there's the person of Augustine. And, you know, he just. He looms large in the Catholic tradition. And of course, he's infamous for some people. Some people just don't like him and they vilify Augustine. But Augustine is such a great saint. And I think of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you know, the most quoted person in the Catechism of the Catholic Church outside of scripture is St. John Paul II. So like you said, he would be the natural reflex. If you're thinking about an institute dedicated to the new evangelization, it would be John Paul II. But the second most quoted person after St. John Paul II is actually St.

B (18:09)

Augustine, and he's the first father quoted in the catechism.

A (18:12)

There you go. Yeah.

B (18:13)

When I was. Before I became Catholic, I was somehow persuaded to help ta a course on the Catechism. And I was like, I'm not Catholic. I don't think about it. And, you know, opening it up and reading it for the first time and seeing the confessions quoted basically on the first page, that, that passage, that's actually part of our motto. Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, for you have made us for yourself. I was like, oh, well, I got me at page one. But I do think that there is something about Augustine's story in the Confessions that especially appeals actually to modern people. And of Augustine's works, the City of God was really the very famous one in the Middle Ages, the this is the one that's quoted the most. And it's not that people didn't like the Confessions, but as a modern classic, it's really, really we who have taken the Confessions as sort of this foundational text and really appeals to us in the modern era. And that's sort of fascinating given it's one of the first, if not the first autobiography ever written and written so long ago that you can read the Confessions and really see yourself in it. And I think that does speak to the cultural overlap too. I mean, a lot of Augustine's early life, sort of rejecting the faith of his mother, who's overly pious and overbearing, sort of having a lot of, you know, dalliances, living with his girlfriend, seeking after a really high level career and being very ambitious. These features of the story are very familiar to modern people in a way that maybe they weren't even familiar to medieval people.

A (19:35)

Yeah, I think you're exactly right that there's something unique about the Confessions and it's amazing. And I think even modern readers of the Confessions, even people who aren't terribly Christian or Catholic, are astounded at here's this ancient autobiography that feels like it's so self conscious and it just feels like a modern autobiography. I mean, it's just so remarkable and you know, there's nothing written like that at that time or almost until the last hundred years.

B (20:07)

Yeah. He also manages to have very good sort of work life balance. No, not really, but I mean, the number of hats that Augustus had to wear in terms of being someone who was a. He was a magistrate who had to oversee court cases of just sort of people. He, you know, is this great writer, famous theologian, that's what he's most known for. But then the day in, day out work of just preaching. Like I said, we have hundreds of his homilies, taking care of his parishioners, answering letters. We have hundreds and hundreds of letters that Augustine answered anywhere from some young Roman boy asking for help with his Cicero homework, essentially to, you know, some priest way out in the middle of nowhere saying, well, if I'm lost in the desert, and I stumble upon a dilapidated pagan temple, and I'm dying of hunger, and I see some food there. Can I eat it? You know, because he's dealing with, you know, everything. And I can't imagine what his inbox would have been like if he lived in the modern world.

A (21:04)

He would not like email?

B (21:06)

No, I don't think so.

A (21:07)

He'd be overwhelmed by it. But he got a lot of. In his day, he got a lot of inquiries. I mean, it's amazing. He became quite famous for his intellect. But, you know, one of the striking things about Augustine, and going back to that earlier image of the books that are always associated with him, with the mind and the heart on fire, here is a unique person because oftentimes in the tradition, we have people who are really brainy and really smart, and we have other people who are really passionate, loved people. But Augustine is the bridge. He really is both. And he's unique. I mean, we're going to have great saints who are really personal, taking care of people, other saints who are great intellects. But Augustine's unique. He is passionate, he is emotional, he is vibrant. He has a huge heart. But he also has a towering intellect. And he's an incredible thinker and a rigorous thinker, and I think that he brings both those together. It's really striking.

B (22:03)

And. And I think that also speaks to something that's very sort of prevalent in new evangelization, is that Augustine puts a big emphasis on friendship and on spiritual friendship and on intellectual friendships. I think this is something we're realizing more and more when the culture around us maybe isn't receptive to tomes of theological knowledge, that the first step often has to be cultivating a relationship with somebody else where you're sort of an authentic witness. And then, you know, eventually you have the sort of intellectual credibility to be able to explain things. And that's really Augustine's story in the Confessions. Everything happens in the context of friendship, sort of his failures and his successes. You know, he really credits his conversion to the prayers of his mother that he ignored for many years. And at the. What's so beautiful about the Confessions is that book nine, when Augustine is baptized. He records the baptism and conversions of many of his friends who've been following him throughout the story. And one of the reasons why that can happen is because Augustine has this loving heart, this beautiful relationship, and this towering intellect. He's able to sort of win over, you know, his whole community when he comes into the church.

A (23:16)

You put your finger on the pulse of Augustine, I think with friendship. I really think that that's the heart of who Augustine. It says so much about the person of Augustine. And I know early on at the August Institute, there's a few faculty members who started it, and we were all friends. I had worked. I mentioned with Sean interest. We worked for Archbishop Champion. We had studied together in our master's program. And so Sean and I went back a number of years. We had studied together, but we had been on the front lines of evangelization and catechesis together. And then to come back together here in Denver, where we launched the Augusta Institute. And we were teaching at the seminary together at St. John Vianney Seminary. And so that kind of friendship. And then with another great friend, Jonathan Reyes. And so early on, one of the distinctive things about the Augusta Institute is faculty at a lot of universities, at least in my experience, oftentimes tended to be isolated, you know, working on their own projects, having to get their own tenure. And we wanted to be a faculty that was a community of friends. And maybe it was because we were younger and it was a fresh new institute, and we were just all young faculty at that time who had. Who knew each other. But really there was a fabric of friendship, and that was really special. And we really invited and encouraged the students who are here to have a network of friendships and to create friendships. And I know one of the things we have the students do is we have them read the Confessions and we challenge them. And one of the things we try to invite them to do is to foster and create friendships. The first thing we do for the on campus students is bring them up into the mountains for retreats. They can get to know each other, and we challenge them to really create a social network of friendship as they study together.

B (24:55)

That's really important, and it really does make a difference. I can attest that we are all still friends.

A (24:59)

Yeah. As the faculty is growing along really well.

B (25:01)

It's actually something that stood out to me enormously coming here, that everyone just gets along so well. But it does make a big difference to the life of the mind. And Augustine really shows how the highest form of friendships are those which are spiritual and intellectually formed. So, you know, if you want to take a cue from Augustine for his 30th birthday party, they all went on a retreat to a friend's villa and sat around, you know, writing. They hired a scribe to record their philosophical conversations. And they had, like, reading time in the morning and scripture discussion and, okay, maybe you won't go that far, but that really was what Augustine considered what he calls ultimate leisure. And I don't know if we think about leisure in that way, but for Augustine, ultimate leisure really is reading the Word of God in the company of friends. And when he eventually is bishop, he creates a community, a sort of quasi monastic community, basically, of friends who are able to read Scripture together. You know, you have these stories in Pisidius, life of Augustine, who was a friend, he wrote a life of Augustine, these images of them having basically lunch after Mass and discussing Augustine's homilies and really reading the Word together. And that's. That's really what he sets up as the model and his ideal Christian society, his ideal Christian life. And I don't know, we often think of study as really hard work, which it is, but it's also a sense of ultimate leisure because it's resting in God and resting in each other.

A (26:27)

It is such a beautiful thing. And I think, you know, I think of our faculty here and so many of them. When you wrote your book on God, you know, for what every Catholic should know, when Dr. Michael Barber wrote his book on, with Dr. Brian Petrie, one of our faculty, on St. Paul, a new Covenant Jew, what I Love, or if it's Dr. Gieshak writing an essay or presenting a paper for the Society of Biblical Literature, the faculty share their papers with each other to help prove freedom, correct them, get feedback. But it's a real community of sharing, and it's just really unique. And it's a very special thing. And it really. I think it's our patron Augustine, who has interceded for us because we have a great relic of St. Augustine in the chapel. And whenever I'm down there for Mass, I always end after Mass praying to Augustine to pray for the institute. And I think he has his charism. I believe he's prayed for us, and his charism is here and present in this great community, this friendship, because I think the faculty are friends and they care about each other's work. Sometimes faculty can be in a sense of competition, and here it's really a confraternity.

B (27:39)

Yeah. And I think that's a big shift that Augustine experiences in his own career, too. You know, he experiences this great sort of rising star where he's, you know, climbing the ranks of rhetoric, and he's calling in favors to get a better appointment and then to have that conversion to realize, no, it's the baptismal calling of all believers as the true foundation of friendship. He makes a big deal of that Confessions and his Son Idodotus was baptized at the same time as him. And he has this beautiful line where he says that his son is equal to him in the age of grace. And so that this creation of a new friendship through baptism is something that's so important to him. And I would love to think that that charism is here. I hope it is.

A (28:21)

Yeah. And hopefully it grows. God willing. And I think, you know, all the. A lot of you have watched a lot of our formed Live events with our faculty, and so you get a little taste of the. The wonderful faculty we have here. And just the desire to have conversations about God, about things that matter. And sharing that conversation with you is really a big part of what the Forum Live events are all about for us here at the GUS Institute and Formed is to share these great conversations about God. You know, I think back to the great prayer of the Jews, the Shema, hear of Israel in Deuteronomy 6, verse 4, and following, and you get this great creed, this great creedal prayer of here, hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And of course, Jesus will add mind to that which I think is breaking out what the heart means in Hebrew. But that great prayer. But then he goes on and says, and you shall talk about this as you go in and as you go out and when you sit at table. And so really, the most beautiful thing is God invites us to not only acknowledge and love him as the God and to love him with all of our hearts and soul and strength, but then in our community, that comes from that love to talk about the things of God. And so that's what we should be doing. And one of the things I'm most edified when I hear you write in with letters is when I hear people say, this is what our family talks about. We listen to or watch something on Formed or watch one of the forum shows, and we discuss it as a family. Nothing pleases me more because that is what the beautiful truths are. You can share the truth and you don't lose any of the truth yourself. And Augustine talks about that. That's the beautiful thing about spiritual goods, is that they can be shared and you don't lose, you actually gain. And so I hope that you share these truths with your family, with your friends and with others so that you can create a deeper network of friendship, because that's what evangelization and the love of God is all about, is creating friendship with God and a loving friendship with a network of friends who we can all share God with. Well, I hope you've been blessed by this conversation and get a window into why Augustine is our patron here at the August Institute. And may the Lord bless and keep you. You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting formed.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press with award winning studies and parish program, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustine institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.