Be Perfect
Article 2: Contemplative Character of the Augustinian Charism
“Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”
All life needs to be perfected. Perfection is the attainment of an objects end. God has not only given us natural life, but supernatural life - a life of grace. This supernatural life is the sharing of God’s very life. Only in heaven will we possess our absolute and complete end, which is the Beatific Vision and pure love, the possession of God Himself. Here in this life, perfection is relative, and we attain it by striving for the Beatific Vision.
The nature of holiness is essentially the same for all Christians. Christ is the same Master and Model for all. The Holy Ghost, the sanctifier; Charity, the fullness, manifest in the total surrender to the glory of God and to the love of neighbor; the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, its principal source; the way of the Cross, and for some even martyrdom, its manifestation par excellence.
Holiness Received
Holiness is essentially a gift from God, the gift of Sanctifying Grace infused in the soul at baptism and restored in the soul after Mortal Sin in the Sacrament of Confession. By Sanctifying Grace, we are elevated to a supernatural order, becoming participants in God’s Divine Life.
Effects of Sanctifying Grace
Sanctifying Grace makes us participants in the divine nature. St. Peter wrote, “Through these, he has bestowed on us the precious and very great promises, so that through them you may come to share in the divine nature, after escaping from the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire” (2 Pet. 1:4). Sanctifying Grace is the foundation for all other effects that come from other graces. By making us participants of the divine nature, Sanctifying Grace has made us true adopted sons of God, heirs of God, brothers of Our Lord and coheirs with Him. This grace gives us a mysterious, but real, participation in the divine nature in such a way that, as St. John the Evangelist says, gives us the right to call ourselves sons of God. “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are” (1 Jn 3:1). Another effect of Sanctifying Grace is that we have been made temples of the Holy Trinity. Our Lord Himself revealed this fact to us: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (Jn 14:23).
Saint Augustine
St. Augustine wrote much on the topic of grace thanks to the Pelagian controversy. For these writings, he is known as the “Doctor of Grace”. Due to the Pelagian heresy, he focused much of his writings on grace on the liberating and healing aspects of grace. Nevertheless, he also wrote about the positive and elevating aspects of grace, by which we are made participants in the divine nature, made adoptive sons of God, temples of the Holy Trinity, and by which the image and likeness of God was not only restored from the wounds from ignorance and concupiscence, but embellished by wisdom and charity.
Divinizing Grace
St. Augustine explains the interior transformation that takes place in the soul by the infusion of Sanctifying Grace, and the link between justification, filial adoption, and deification: “It’s clear that he called gods the men who were divinized by his grace, not born of his substance. Because he justifies him who is just by himself, not by another; and he divinizes he who by himself is God and not by participation of another. He how justifies is the same who deifies, because justifying makes children of God; we were made children of God and we were made gods; but this is by the grace of adoption, not in virtue of generation. Because one one is the Son of God and with the Father one God. The others who are divinized are so by grace, not born of his substance; so that they are not what he is, except by favor they are made like him and are coheirs with Christ” (En. in ps. 49, 2.).
St. Augustine exhorts us to rejoice that we were made children of God. And if we are children of God, then we are brothers of Christ. But even more still, in the Mystical Body, we were made, by grace, not only Christians, but Christ Himself. “He has allowed us to become not only Christians, but Christ Himself. Are you aware, brothers, do you understand what God has made us? It is so that you are full of admiration and joy. He has allowed us to become Christ Himself. Because if He is the head and we are the members, the whole man is Him and us” (In Io. ev. tr. 21, 8).
Embellishment of the Image of God
“Make me understand you, My Lord God, and love you. Increase in me these gifts until I am completely reformed” (De Trin. 15, 28, 51). This short prayer of St. Augustine synthesizes his thought regarding the aim of holiness to which we must aspire, and refers to the means by which we are to obtain this goal. The aim of holiness is the embellishment of the image of God, in which we were created. The means we must use are knowledge and love.
Using as a foundation that man was made in the image and likeness of God, St. Augustine tells us that the man’s steps on the way of perfection must be driven to the attainment of this specific object: the restoration and embellishment of the image, that was erased in man by sin. “By sin, man lost true justice and holiness; consequently, the image was deformed and discolored; it recuperates its beauty when it is renewed and reformed” (De Trin. 14, 15, 22).
Knowledge and Love
What are the steps that lead us to embellish the image that was destroyed by sin? “Make me understand you, My Lord God, and love you. Increase in me these gifts until I am completely reformed”. The means of perfection are knowledge and love of God.
St. Augustine isn’t referring to a knowledge that is simply speculative or theoretic, without any relation to the Christian life or change in behavior. The intellectual search for and penetration of divine mysteries cannot be separate from the desire for moral perfection and of love from the will. “One does not penetrate the truth except through love” (De civ. Dei 19, 1. 3). One must search for knowledge of God with love. St. Augustine doesn’t want to know for the sake of knowing; he wants to know in order to love. This is why he says that no good is perfectly known without also being perfectly loved (De div. quaest. 83, 35). He even adds that, however much is the knowledge, greater must be the love (De sp. et lit. 36, 64).
Way of Love
The reformation of the image of God which was deformed by sin happens with daily effort, by observing the Evangelical Counsels, contemplative meditation, and the purification of the soul from all that which is not of the love of God. But, above all, by Charity by which the soul transfers its affections from temporal things to God. “Our steps are our affections” (En. in ps. 94, 2). We walk towards God, loving (Ep. 155, 4, 13). This is St. Augustine’s via caritatis - the Way of Love.