Saint Augustine and small things: “Do you aspire to great things? Start with the most little”

By Enrique Eguiarte, Augustinian Recollect.

Although Saint Augustine had experienced very important moments in his life and had got to know the most influential people of his time, such as the emperor, or Saint Ambrose, among others, he knew the importance of little things. And this in different dimensions. Both in human relationships and in nature, in the spiritual life, as well as in the daily life of the Christians and monks. I will present below the small details in these areas that I have mentioned above.

Saint Ambrose, school of welcome and humanity

First of all, let us stop to see the importance of the small things in the human relations. Saint Augustine will always be a man of detail and care in his relationships. He had learned from Saint Ambrose how to be welcoming and how to manifest charity through hospitality, kind words and show affection and interest. In this way, when Saint Augustine arrived in Milan around the year 385-386 to fill the position of official speaker of the emperor’s court Valentininao II, made a formal visit to Saint Ambrose.

The Bishop of Milan, for his part, knew well who Saint Augustine was, and he also knew that he had been chosen by Symmachus, who, though distantly related to him, was pagan and had become a bitter enemy of him over the case of the removal of the altar of the Victoria goddess of the Roman Senate. Despite all this, Saint Ambrose welcomed paternally to Saint Augustine and took an interest in him and in the affairs of his life. Hipponenses recounts in the fifth book of the Confessions:

“I arrived in Milan and visited the bishop, Ambrose, famous among the best in the land, your pious servant, […] That man of God received me paternally and with bishop’s affability, he took great interest in my trip. I began to estimate him; to the principle, certainly not as a doctor of the truth, the one who despaired of find in your Church, but as an affable man with me” (Confessions 5, 23).

Saint Augustine would never forget that interview and the details that Saint Ambrose had with him. And although later his relationship with the Bishop of Milan was not as cordial as could have been, the detail of his reception made Saint Augustine learn the importance of small things. When he himself becomes bishop of Hippo, he will keep it in mind and he will be a welcoming, human and hospitable bishop, like Saint Possidius himself reminds us in the Vita Augustini:

He was also always very hospitable. And at the table he wss attracted more to reading and conversation than the appetite to eat and drink (Vita 22, 6).

A small detail: do not say the name to convince him of friendship

Another element that we could mention about the importance of little things in human relations it happens around the year 411-412, when the controversy began with the Pelagians. In fact, the year 411 marks the end, at least on paper, of the controversy with the Donatists and, curiously, also marks the beginning of the struggle against the Pelagians. That year Saint Augustine wrote the work called De peccatorum meritis that is usually considered the first Augustinian anti-Pelagian document.

Both in this book and in those that follow up to the year 415, although Saint Augustine knows that the main representative of the new heresy is the British monk Pelagius, avoids to mention his name in these works. In fact, he thought that if he kept his name quiet and kept his identity a secret, he might later find himself relaxed with him and have a friendly dialogue, and that the detail of having silenced his name would be important, since Pelagio himself would take it into account as a manifestation of deference and fraternal charity, and that this would move him to realize his mistakes and change his mind.

Indeed, Saint Augustine himself, in a letter to Saint Jerome, that he was not precisely a friend of small details, he comments this explicitly, to show him the strategy he intended to follow with Pelagio and at the same time invite him to curb his anger against the new heretics:

“I also sent the book with which I replied, since they had asked me with interest and I had seen that it could be useful and healthy for them. In fact, I had written thinking of them, not of Pelagio, in response to his writing and words, still leaving I concealed his name, because he wanted him to correct himself as a friend. Which I confess that I still desire and I do not doubt that I also yearn for your holiness”. (Letter 19*,3).

However, as it happened to Saint Augustine on several occasions throughout his life, in which his goodness and bonhomie were disappointed by other people, Saint Augustine, finally, will have to change tactics when he sees that Pelagio himself hardened in his position and became not only a heretic, in the strictest sense of speech, but also a skilled sophist, capable of disguising his heresy as orthodoxy. From then on, in his works and before the people in his homilies, he will mention his name, so that everyone would know what the intentions of Pelagius and knew his ideas against Catholic doctrine. Saint Augustine had given much importance to that small detail, but his adversary, moved by his ungrateful pride, towards God and towards men, had despised him.

The Book of creatures is full of details

But Saint Augustine was not only a man who took care of the details in his interpersonal relationships. He was also very attentive to the details of God in creation. For him everything created was a book that tells us about the greatness and goodness of God (Sermon 68, 6), and the observation of all the details of the world should lead him to be man to praise God and to discover his love for all men.

Thus, the Augustinian work is full of small details related to animals by through which Saint Augustine deduces not only the greatness of the Creator, but also draws consequences and spiritual reflections. For example, he looks at ants. Of them Saint Augustine draws the conclusion that their industriousness in the spring and in the summer are an example for the believer, who must treasure in his heart the affective experience of God, so that when the spiritual winter arrives, so that when the moments of spiritual dryness, do not falter and lose faith, but live on the affective treasure that he had accumulated in his heart like formica Dei, like an ant of God:

“Yes, winter has come: the ant returns to what it collected in the summer; and there, in the privacy of her hiding place, where no one sees her, she recreates herself in the work done in summer. When in summer she was collecting all this, everyone saw her; now,when she feeds on it in the winter, no one sees her. What does this mean? Notice this in the ant of God: she gets up every day, rushes to the temple of the Lord, pray, listen to the reading, sing the hymn, meditate on what she heard, reflect on her interior, and hides in her heart the grains that she gathered in the threshing floor” (Commentary from Psalm 66, 3).

He also notices that the deer lean on each other to cross the rivers, that is to say, that they all form a long line, where the deer rests its head on the back of the one in front, and together they swim to the other shore. A community must do the same, unite to overcome difficulties and support each other, learning to take over in positions of greater burden or responsibility:

“(…) It is said, I say, that the deer when they go in a herd, or when they go swimming to other lands, they rest their heads by laying them on each other, so that one goes in front and those who go behind follow, placing one on the other his head, until the end of the pack. When the first has tired, he passes to the end, for another to replace him and continue with the same weight that he carried; this form he rests laying his head down like the others” (Commentary on the Psalm 41, 4).

And the examples could be multiplied abundantly, so let us see in Saint Augustine to a man who gave great importance to the small details in the nature, since creation is the other book written by God, together with the Sacred Writing.

Warning for sailors: The small details in the spiritual life

And in the spiritual life Saint Augustine is very attentive to small details. Thus he emphasizes that it is very good to reach the heights of holiness and that it is necessary to avoid at all costs the most serious sins.

In the time of Saint Augustine there were three sins that required the public penance: adultery, apostasy and murder. But he not only exhorted the faithful of him to avoid these sins, but also to be attentive to small sins of everyday.

In his sermons ad populum he warns of the danger to those who neglect small details, pointing out that the sum of many small things makes something great that it can be a real danger. Saint Augustine uses the example of drops of water that they can enter a boat. At first they may seem like things insignificant, but if those drops continue to enter, very soon the boat will begin to fill with water and, if this water is not drained, it can make the ship shipwrecked. The same happens with small sins, when care is not taken about them, or indulges in them simply because they are small: they can do shipwreck the spiritual life of a believer:

“Small are the drops that fill the rivers; small are the grains of sand; but, if a lot of sand is piled up, it oppresses and crushes. The bilge (the drain of the ship), if neglected, does what rushing waves do: gradually enters through the bilge; but if he goes in for a long time and doesn’t take it out, sink the ship” (Treatises on the Gospel of Saint John 12, 14).

Small things, small sins are a real danger, because they can shipwreck the spiritual life of a believer. It is necessary to be attentive to small details.

Small details in monastic life

But it is necessary to pay attention to the small things; not only in the spiritual life of the believer, but also in community life there are details that are worth taking care of. The Rule is full of small details that become an indication of charity (giving blankets special mattresses for the weakest or more comfortable mattresses for the sick), but also there are small things that become an indicator that something is not right in the religious heart. Saint Augustine invites the consecrated or the nun to review those items. Indeed, he speaks of something as simple as the gaze and invites the religious to wonder what his gazes are like, particularly the ones he directs towards the people of the other sex. And he expresses with a short phrase the meaning of this little detail, because the eyes become the messengers or are the sign that there is an impure heart:

“And do not say that your soul is pure if you have dishonest eyes, because dishonest eyes denounce an impure heart (literally: they are the messengers of an impure heart: impudici cordis est nuntius)” (Rule 3, 4, 4).

The gaze is a small detail, but it can denote many more elements. Deep and need to be addressed. The religious needs to purify his heart to be able to serve God, and to be able to see God present in his life (Matthew 5, 8). For this reason, for through a small detail, the same consecrated person can realize that he/she has a deep need for conversion.

Small details: a letter, a gift…

The saint also pays attention to the small details that appear in chapter IV of the Rule, where he talks about letters and small gifts. But if someone has come to such great malice that he secretly receives from some woman letters or any kind of gifts (munuscula), if he admits it spontaneously, forgive him and pray for him. But if he is surprised and it turns out convicted, he is to be rebuked more severely, according to the judgment of the priest or superior (Rule 3, 4, 11).

They may seem like superficial and almost unimportant elements, but Saint Augustine invites to be attentive to seemingly superficial things in order to see what the elements that denote or what are their consequences.

For us people of the 21st century it seems too superficial that a religious can receive a letter from a woman. Today it would be better to say, receive loving messages or Whatsapps from a woman. But when we refer to saint Augustine, we forgot one detail: that in the fifth century only fifteen percent of the people knew how to read and write. Unfortunately most of the women were illiterate. Apart from the women who belonged to the highest social classes, the aristocrats, like Proba, Melania, Paula, the rest were illiterate. That’s why it’s lack of the religious has a greater gravity, since the woman to be able to send the message to the religious that she finds herself infatuated with, or with whom she has started an affective relationship, she needs to ask another person to write the message for her.

The clerk did not have to keep the secret, and this would soon become the talk of the town or place. Say the same so the woman could read the monk’s response. She would have to turn again to someone to read the letter to her.

That is why Saint Augustine in this small detail invites us to be vigilant in order to avoid the scandals or that, when word got around the town, it came to be thought that all the inhabitants of the monastery are equal and that they all live affective incorrect relationships, so your experience of chastity would leave much to be desired.

The same goes for small gifts. Saint Augustine in the Rule speaks explicitly of “small gifts” (munuscula), that is to say little details by means of which the woman would try to show her disordered affection for the religious.

Once again it is about something simple and superficial, but it reveals an profound element, which is the affective emptiness of the religious and the questionable experience of his own consecration of him. And although we do not know what kind of gifts Saint Augustine was referring to, (possibly fruit or small objects of little value, since the world of Saint Augustine is that of a pre-industrial and pre-consumer society), again they are indicators that there is something big that is wrong in the heart of the religious. That is why Saint Augustine asks in the Rule that those who do these things, either openly or in a hidden way, be punished.

At first sight it seems to us that he forgives those who are more shameless, and that he publicly proclaim; but the adjective used later, when saying that those who receive them secretly must be punished with greater severity (severius) makes us see that this greater severity has to do with the severity with which they are punished the former, otherwise the point of comparison for this adjective would be missing. This is not the only text of the Rule where we can notice textual inconsistencies, as it happens with the steps to follow in fraternal correction in this same chapter IV.

Details of humanity that are of charity

Finally, Saint Augustine would invite us to always have details of humanity that are become samples of the charity of Christ. In this way we know that Augustine in the last years of his life received in Hippo two brothers, Pablo and Palladia. Both came from Asia Minor and were part of a group of brothers who had been cursed by their mother, and that, because of that curse, they had afflicted with an illness that made them tremble from head to foot. Both had arrived at Hippo hoping to be able to achieve the cure of his ills in the chapel of the Basilica of Peace in which the relics of Saint Stephen were kept (Sermon 317,1).

In this way we know that both of them were praying in the chapel of Saint Stephen for several days and that suddenly one day Pablo was cured. This healing happened in Easter Sunday. Saint Augustine not only thanked God, but also invited the community to pray for Palladia so that he would soon be healed.

That day Saint Augustine had the detail of inviting both of them to his house for lunch. He wanted humanly celebrate with them the healing of Paul and ask God for the healing of Palladia.

“Easter arrived, and in the morning, with a large number of faithful already present, the boy was in prayer clinging to the gate of the holy place where the relics of the martyr were. Suddenly he fell prostrate and lay as dead, but without any trembling, even the one he used to have during his sleep. They remained present astonished, some fearing and others lamenting. some wanted to lift him up, but others prevented him, saying that it was better to wait for the result. He suddenly gets up and no longer trembles (…) Finally silence was made, he proceeded to the solemn reading of the divine Scriptures. When it was the turn of my exposition, I spoke briefly in tune with the pleasant circumstance of such joy; rather than listen to what I said to them, it seemed better that they consider the eloquence of God in that divine work. The man ate with us and told us in detail the whole history of his calamity, of his mother’s and his brothers’”. (City of God 22, 8, 22).

In fact, the latter would be cured a few days later, and Saint Augustine would present her to the town already cured so that the town would realize the power that prayer has. Although the healing had taken place during the Augustinian preaching, the bishop of Hippo had the detail of interrupting his sermon and inviting the people to give thanks for what happened:

And while Augustine recounted this, from the memory of Saint Stephen the people He started screaming and saying, “Thank God! Praises to Christ!” Between that incessant screaming, the girl who was healed was taken to the apse. To see her, the people, in the midst of joy and tears, in total silence of words, but not without shouting that lasted for a moment. Restored silence, the bishop Augustine said:

“It is written in the psalm: I said: ‘I will confess my crime against myself before the Lord my God’, and you forgave the wickedness of my heart. I said: ‘I will confess’; I haven’t confessed yet. I said, ‘I will confess’, and you forgave. I entrusted to your prayers to this wretch; better, to this former wretch. We prepared to pray, and we have been heard. Let our joy be an action to thank you. The Church, holy mother, has been heard before that mother, cursed to his ruin” (Sermon 323, 4).

Saint Augustine is for us an example of taking care of small details, since many of they are a sign or indicator of great things, since there is no detail, no matter how small whatever it is, that it does not become something big, if it is done with a lot of love. That’s why Saint Augustine’s prayer in the Confessions makes sense:

“Grant, oh, God!, to men to see in the small the common notions of small and big things” (Confessions 11, 29).

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