 Welcome to The Spiritual Masters, a podcast from Tan Books and Tan Direction in which we look at the greatest and holiest writers from Catholic history. Join us as we explore the life and times in which they lived, an overview and study of their greatest works and how we as Catholics can look to these masters as models for our own holiness on our journey to heaven. Welcome back everybody. We are continuing our series on The Spiritual Masters featuring the great Saint Augustine and we're here with my good friend, Dr. Paul Thickpen. Thanks again for being here, Paul. Thank you for the invitation. We've covered a lot. We've been covering kind of skimming the surface of some of his most important works, the Confessions, City of God, on Christian doctrine, on the Trinity. And now we're just going to talk, we're going to bundle his sermons, his homilies together. And let me start us off by saying just a couple points and then I'd like you to talk about your experience with his sermons because I know you have a love and affection for them. He started preaching as a young priest, which was uncommon. Mostly it was reserved for bishops, but he was such a great speaker and so renowned already. He got a lot of preaching in early on. He followed the liturgical calendar. That's one thing I read. That's kind of significant. But he, and oh, this is an interesting thing. So like he would have a scripture passage, a gospel reading, most likely that he, that was kind of like the passage for that Sunday or that week, but he would actually preach on that maybe four times in the same week, which is different than we have, you know? And so that enabled, I can imagine it was like just droves of people coming in to hear the same message throughout the week. That's kind of an interesting thing for me. People took shorthand. He had scribes sitting in there and so that's one way that we have all of this. Many of those survive. We have four to 500 sermons and that equals up to about 1.5 million words. And you mentioned there's about five and a half million words of Augustin total, but 1.5 are sermons. And somebody estimated that he preached about 8,000 times in his life, which is an unbelievable number. Some homilies were very long. One homily was 1,500 lines long, which translates into a two and a half hour preaching. Augustin was Pentecostal? Yes, he was. I could say that as a word, Pentecostal. He was. Yes, he was. We would preach on for hours and times. Oh my goodness. That's awesome. That's awesome. So yeah, that's just kind of an overview of the quantity that this guy did. I didn't say anything about the quality. I just said the quantity. So why do you love the sermons? What do they say to you? Why do you appreciate them so much? Because as soon as we started talking about this podcast on him, you jumped all over the sermons. Yeah. Well, it's easy if you read his theological and philosophical essays to just picture him as this very abstract thinking kind of high-level thinking person. And he was. But it was when I got to his sermons when I said, oh my goodness. These are all the same truths. But he's putting in a way that everyday people can understand. And he's doing it in a very delightful way. That Northern African culture, they loved wit and they loved colorful stuff and imagery and analogies and anecdotes and stories. And he was drawing on his native culture when he did that. And it's interesting. I'll just as a side note, have a dear friend, a father, Valerie Aqua, who's from Cameroon. He's from Africa, you know, further down the continent. But one of the things I noticed about when I first met him was that his everyday sermons, especially the children, were just excellent, really theologically formed. And I'm thinking, boy, Augustine could have said that kind of stuff. Then I had my first theological discussion with him back. What have you been reading, father? And he'd been reading Augustine and all these other great things. And what he had the same gift of being able to take these very deep, profound insights and put them in such a way, not dumbing him down, but making him concrete, making them vivid, giving them a narrative, bringing personal experience to Barron and other people's experience. And that's what you see in Augustine. And that's what's so lovely about it. It's the kind of thing that every writer, I'm a writer, would love to be able to do it as well as he does. And a lot of his imagery was homespun. So I've got one I want to read at some point where he's talking about the fear of God and the love of God. And the analogy is a needle with thread sewing through a piece of cloth. Every person that had ever had to do that would recognize what he's talking about. So it's beautiful. The fear of God prepares a place for love. But once love has begun to dwell in our hearts, the fear that prepared the place for it is driven out as the one increases, the other decreases. And the more love fills us, the less place there is for fear, greater love, less fear, greater fear, less love. But if there is no fear at all, there is no way for love to come in. As we can see in sewing, the needle introduces the thread into the cloth. The needle goes in, but the thread cannot follow unless the needle comes out first. In the same way, the fear of God first occupies our minds, but it does not remain there because it enters only in order to introduce love. Wow. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. So you've got- And fear of God hurts a little bit. It hurts, it hurts, but it has to prepare a place in our minds. And it carries in its train the love. And once you've made the place you needed, and the love is in place, you take the needle away. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's just brilliant. And think how many women, especially in that day, would probably done most of the sewing. They're just thinking, oh yeah, I know all about that. And the needle hurts sometimes. I get just here thinking about it and drawing all kinds of lessons from it. And he did it every day. I mean, just all the time, all the time. One of the things, Paul, that I've latched on to in my research is that he gave sermons on all 150 Psalms. Yes, he loved the Psalms. The biography I read on him told me that Augustine referred to the Psalms as the emotions of Christ. What do you think he meant by that? That's powerful language. That's an imagery that I need to meditate on. And we know David was so much a pre-Christ figure in metaphor or whatever you want to call it, but the Psalms are the emotions of Christ. Help me understand that. Well, first of all, I want to say that St. Athanasius had written an essay on the Psalms, and he called the Psalms the mirror of the soul. So in general, of the human soul, he'd say, if you're feeling sad, here's a Psalm. Read that, and it'll reflect and help you understand what you're going through. Here's, are you afraid? Here's one. Are you angry? Here's one. And so I see Augustine kind of taking that. I don't know if you've read that probably. Taking it a step further and saying, okay, Christ was kind of the perfect human, not kind of, he was the perfect human. And not that he would have necessarily wanted to bash babies against the rock like one of the Psalms says, but if this really is like a mirror of the soul, that's probably a mirror of Christ's soul, or he illustrates it in such a beautiful way. And I think we have to keep in mind, too, that Augustine taught specifically at one point, when people have the question of why would Jesus say on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because had the Father really abandoned him? And some people said, yes, but what he said was that Christ is the head of the body, and the head speaks for the body, and we're the body. And we ourselves have that place where we feel like God has abandoned us. And so we cry out that when he is crying out on the cross, my God, my God, why have you abandoned forsaken me? He's doing it on our behalf. He has taken up our voice because he's taking on our sin. And I think that's a great example of what he's talking about, that that's a Psalm that comes from a Psalm, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's from one of the Psalms, David had said it, but it isn't a human cry. And now Christ has taken that human cry and made it his own on our behalf. He knows he's not abandoned by the Father, but he's speaking on our behalf as our representative, the book of Hebrews tells us he is our representative. And then you can take that in so many ways then. And the rest of it too is that if you read the rest of the Psalm, it doesn't end with why have you abandoned me. It ends up in words of praise. And there's a good chance that he actually said the rest of the Psalm. While he was there, we only got the first words. They sometimes would do that when reporting what he had said. So I think that's a good example of what we're talking about. Christ is the head speaking for the body in many ways. And in the Psalms, we see that in a beautiful way. So Augustine had a, I'm sure he delivered a lot of what he gave, at least 150 sermons on the Psalms and probably more. I think he saw that, again, the body of Christ, the Psalms spoke to the emotions of the everyday man, all the normal things that men and women were going through, all the emotions, all the life experience, it's embedded in the Psalms. So he believed that he could bring language, his own language, his own imagery and allegory that these African population could understand his parishioners, I guess you call them. And he wanted to connect his eloquence, his metaphor with the emotions of Christ that are found in the Psalms. And so I can just imagine sitting there and listening to him speak the Psalms. I think in his sermons, more than his theological treatises, his treatises, you can find a playful language, more brilliant imagery, because he is speaking to the average person like you're saying. So this was, I guess, the ultimate use of his rhetorical skills. I read that he used Latin puns to help things stick in the memory. So he just seems the complete opposite of a stuck up academic. He just seems to me to be such a down to earth pastoral father to his flock, especially in times of difficulties. When the vandals are besieging hippo, he gives homilies on perseverance, preparing yourself to, Christ will give you the grace to survive persecution. So he's just a loving father preaching to his people. And I suspect you can see that throughout his sermons pretty clearly. You can't. I think about, let me see if I can find this one quickly. He would speak to the people about their, the adversity in their lives. And if they were to question why God isn't answering a prayer the way they want, or questioning why God is allowing this adversity, then he would give them these beautiful analogies. So here's one where he compares, he compares the Lord to a physician, right? Which is the Lord's own, yeah, it's a biblical image. We must understand then that even though God does not always give us what we want, he gives us what we need for our salvation. Suppose you ask a physician for something that would be harmful, and he knows it would be harmful. What should he do? Let's say you ask for a drink of cold water. If it would do you good, and he gives it to you right away, then surely you cannot say that he has not heard you. On the other hand, if it would do you harm, and so he does not give it to you, you still cannot say that he has not heard you just because he contradicted your will. Instead, he has heard you for the sake of your health. The divine physician, yeah, that's beautiful. And he talks too about how when God comes after us for the scalpel, or even he talks sometimes about the cauterization of a wound, which is, you know, a horrible thing. They would take a piece of metal and get it glowing red. They didn't know about germs, but they knew if you left it, it would go to gangrene, so press it against the wound. He uses that strong imagery. Anybody who's been through it would know exactly what he's talking about. And he says, you just got to trust the doctor that he knows what's going to be best for you. You can't really tell the doctor how to treat you because you don't. But again and again, when the adversity comes, you just have to say that I trust the doctor. He knows what he's doing. The divine physician analogy is incredible, and I'm glad he uses it because a lot of people after him use this analogy. And our little book, Trust Will Surrender to Divine Providence, a great little tan book, you know, it talks a lot about this, and it quotes Augustine, I think, on, I know it quotes him a ton on divine providence, because he's got so much to say about it, but I think he quotes him in regards to this divine physician. But think about this, Paul. I mean, we pay doctors to hurt us in order to bring a healing, you know? I mean, we want them, we pay that, they cut into us with a knife to fix something, and we pay them money and say thank you. That's exactly what he says. What do we do with God? He's the divine physician, and he sends pain and suffering our way for our own salvation, and we get angry at him. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a beautiful analogy that the divine physician works really well. That's, I mean, this, this, he probably got the words that you were reading. They also come from, from the sermons here. He, he'll even talk about how the, when the doctor has to do things that hurts you, you know, you, you don't say, oh, the doctor hates me. No, because he doesn't hate you. He hates the disease because he loves you. Such a beautiful thing to remember that if he's giving you the adversity, it's something, he's allowing it, something you need, and it's because he hates the disease in your soul, so to speak. The brokenness there, and he loves you, so he wants you to be healed. He doesn't hate you. That's awesome. Well, I, I need to spend more time with the sermons, you know? And I think that I, you know, I think the one place that I did experience them a good bit is in the Liturgy of the Hours. I think there's a lot of excerpts, you know, in the daily readings. There's, there's quite a lot of references. What's, it's not Liturgy of the Hours. What's the part in the back when they, you know, the, the daily, the extra readings that go along with the Liturgy of the Hours? Why am I forgetting? Anyway, and so it's, you know, there's quite a lot of passages from, from Augustine, from his sermons, because they're just fitting for every day of the year, you can find something. So maybe Tan needs to publish more on the sermons of Saint Augustine, you know, maybe we'll consider that. But in our next episode, Paul, we're going to wrap it up. It'll be our conclusory episode. And we're going to talk about how Saint Augustine, after everything we've said, everything we've discussed and everything he did, how he's a model for us becoming a saint. But it's probably best seen in, in his sermons, because that's when he's really trying to help his parishioners, his flock be saintly. But thank you for this episode and any last, any last thoughts on the, on the sermons, any advice you give to our listeners before we conclude? Read them. Yeah, you can get them online. The translations are often old, but even if you just take one at a time, the small, most of them, not the one you talked about. Yeah, right. That was the outlier. But most of them, you take them and just let the, let the image he uses, the analogy, whatever, just sink in. Sink in. All right. God bless you, Paul. Thanks for being here. God bless you, Carter. Thank you. This has been an episode of The Spiritual Masters, a podcast brought to you by Tan. To follow the show, learn about more inspiring holy men and women, and to support The Spiritual Masters and other great free content from Tan. 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