St. Augustine: Let us be pilgrims who spread hope by walking joyfully with our eyes upwards

Historical vicissitudes

St. Augustine lived in a time full of changes and events that foreshadowed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In the year 410, Rome, the head of the world, had been sacked by the Goths of Alaric, and the news had shaken the world as a whole and had reached every corner of the Roman Empire as the darkest of omens. Some thought this event was the beginning of the end, the prelude to the final catastrophe leading to the world’s end.

Meditating on these events, St. Augustine invited us to look beyond human elements and place our hope only in God. And in the face of the accusations of the pagans, who blamed the Christians for the sacking of Rome, since the cult of the ancient gods of the Latin religion had been abandoned, St. Augustine brilliantly responded to their calumnies with his monumental work, The City of God, which, in addition to being a profound theology of history, is a song of hope. In this work, he recounts in the first part the history of Rome and pagan cults, and in the second part, from book XI, he narrates the history of the City of God with its birth, development, and culmination in the kingdom of heaven. All of this is an invitation not to be surprised by despair and fear and to raise one’s heart with hope towards God.

The hope of St. Augustine was not just theoretical or laboratory hope, as might be that of a thinker who wrote in his study in times of peace and surrounded by pastoral tranquility and calm. It was factual and existential hope since misfortune and calamities very soon knocked on the doors of North Africa.

Faced with the decline of the Empire, the Vandals had taken advantage, and in the year 429, guided by Genseric, they had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, beginning an unstoppable advance of conquest, destruction, and death throughout North Africa.

In the year of St. Augustine’s death, 430, they reached the gates of the walls of the city of Hippo. St. Augustine, old, tired, and sick, could see and hear them from his monastery, where, as his first biographer, St. Possidius reminds us, he would soon have to retire to end his days at 76.

Augustine’s hopeful response

Despite all these events—which led many to despair and fatalism—Augustine died with the hope that something new was being born despite the death of civilization and the world he had known.

In this new world, his work, his thoughts, and his words would have a crucial place, above all, to remind human beings that man’s life on many misfortunes and calamities always threaten the earth, but that none of them should rob him of hope since the hope of the Christian has a name, and this is Jesus Christ and his promise of eternal life.

St. Augustine invites us not to let any circumstance steal the hope of the believer, who lives from it, and the same hope must always keep him joyful in the Lord (Rom 12:12) amid tribulation and calamities because he knows that God is always faithful and will not fail to fulfill his promises.

St. Augustine died on August 28, 430, not with the anguish of one who contemplates that everything has been useless or that his work had been in vain, but with the hope of knowing that Christianity is the religion of resurrection, which, throughout its history, has faced many deaths, which seemed to have annihilated it, but, like the Phoenix of classical mythology, Christianity, after failure and apparent death, resurges. In contrast, its enemies irremediably face death and end up in ashes.

Christian hope

In The City of God, St. Augustine invites us to hope, reminding us that those who belong to the City of God must advance each day, singing and walking (Sermon 256,3), between “the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God” (City of God 18,51,2). He also reminds us that history has a meaning and an end, and it is none other than to reach the city of God, the kingdom of Heaven, where the Church will finally be purified and will be forever the pure wheat of God, once the trash that accompanied it in this world has been left behind. In the city of God, “we will rest and contemplate, we will contemplate and love, and we will love and praise” (City of God 22,30,5).

And hope, as Augustine reminds us, is a virtue that does not remain looking backwards, with the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia, but looks forward and “stretches” forward, fixing its gaze on God. Thus says the Bishop of Hippo: “The opposite of hope is looking back; when we speak of hope, we speak of things to come, not of things past” (Concordance of the Evangelists 2,22).

In Book XI of his Confessions, the saint recalls the Christian meaning of time, which is none other than walking as pilgrims with hope toward the city of God. In this way, he is inspired by Saint Paul’s phrase to the Philippians (Phil 3,13): “Leaving what is behind, I stretch toward what is ahead.”

St. Augustine highlights how hope is the virtue that should lead the Christian to “reach out,” that is, to launch himself toward the things ahead, to reach toward the kingdom of Heaven, leaving behind what is earthly and running toward what is celestial. In fact, in parentheses, this exact phrase of St. Paul as a catalyst of hope could synthesize the whole thought of St. Gregory of Nyssa, expressed with the Greek word epéktasis, which St. Augustine translates in the Confessions by extension.

Hope, the virtue of the walker

Therefore, for the Hipponense, the idea of pilgrimage is fundamental. We walk, but we do not do so without direction or joy. We walk with the joy of the pilgrim who knows where he is going and that God, Christ, walks at his side and gives him the strength to advance each day.

This pilgrimage of hope is made with the affections of the heart; We walk and advance not with our feet, but with the affections of our heart (Sermon 306B,1). And, as he points out in Book XIII of the Confessions, we walk upwards, towards the Jerusalem of heaven, where hope will have its complete fulfillment in God, and the rest of the eternal Sabbath, without sunset (City of God 22,30,4).

Augustine masterfully points this out when he recalls that we sing the songs of the steps or of the ascents, as did the pious Jews who made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and who, when they were already approaching the Holy City and had to climb the last slopes, sang the gradual songs (Psalms 119 to 133 in the liturgical numbering).

St. Augustine points out that these gradual canticles in Greek are called anabatic, which indicates that these steps only go up. Any other staircase serves to go up and down, but this one only goes up; it is ascending, as in shopping malls, where there are escalators that only go up and others that only go down:

“Your Gift ignites us, and by it, we are carried upward: we are inflamed and walk; we climb the ascents arranged in our hearts, and we sing the Canticle of the steps or ascents. With your fire, yes; with your holy fire we are inflamed and walk because we walk upward, towards the peace of Jerusalem” (Confessions 13,10).

In his first works before being ordained a priest in True Religion, the young Augustine recalls that one of the essential points of Christianity is hope, specifically hope in the resurrection and eternal life. Thus, he gives voice to the ancient philosophers, who would be amazed at the flowering of Christianity and the tremendous hope of eternal life:

“For if the teachers whose name they boast of were to return to life and find the churches full and the temples of idols deserted, and that the human race has received the vocation and, leaving the greed of temporal and passing goods, ran to the hope of eternal life and spiritual and higher goods, they would perhaps exclaim like this (if they were as worthy as is said): ‘These are the things that we did not dare to persuade the people, yielding rather to their customs than attracting them to our faith and desire’” (True Religion 7).

In The Confessions, he speaks of the present life as a “mortal life or a vital death” (1,7), since existence is marked by death, and with birth, a limited time begins to pass, that of earthly existence. Nevertheless, St. Augustine invites us to hope and not to be victims of the anguish into which those who do not have faith can fall. For the believer, hope opens beyond space and time in the eternity of God, and this should mark his whole life.

Hope, strength in the present life

Hope gives the believer a new strength with which to face the calamities of the present life, always with a smile in the heart, knowing that nothing can take away hope because of the firm conviction that everything that is lived in the present life is nothing more than a simple anecdote, because true life, Life with a capital L, is one that we will live in the kingdom of heaven:

“(…) “In these calamitous days, when the Church achieves its future exaltation through present humility and is taught with the sting of fear, the torment of pain, the discomfort of work, and the dangers of temptations having in the hope its only consolation” (City of God 18, 49)

Augustine never tired of inviting his faithful —nor does he tire of inviting us, men and women of the 21st century— to raise the heart (Sursum Cor: Sermon 86,1), not to put it in the things of the earth, but to leave it in hope in heaven with God, where our life is, and where we aspire to reach with the help of God’s grace.

But hope does not make us forget the present world or our mission on earth, which is none other than to spread hope and invite all men to salvation in Christ. In a world sick with wars, struggles, hostility, and despair, Christians must spread the hope of the future world and help with this virtue to go transform the world in which we live to direct all things towards Christ.

In this way, we could accomplish what the Apostle himself recalls in the song of the Letter to the Ephesians, making Christ the head of everything again (Ephesians 1,10), anakephalaiosis; that is, putting things back in their proper order.

Today, we are experiencing a significant crisis because things do not have Christ as their head; instead, their essential principle is material elements (money, pleasure, power). It is necessary, from hope, to orient everything again towards Christ so that he may once again be the head of everything, and everything may be directed towards Him as the point where the universe acquires its plenitude.

Saint Augustine knew the strength of hope and that a man without hope is a shadow who no longer lives but only survives, feeding on the crumbs of earthly pleasures and silencing his anxiety with all kinds of palliatives.

Hope is what gives human beings strength in all the circumstances of their life and what, while suffering, death, or pain, makes them glimpse that there is always a better future: “Let your hope be in the Lord God. Do not expect anything else from Him; May the Lord himself be your hope” (Commentary on Psalm 39:7).

This is what the elderly Saint Augustine thought on the eve of his death. From his bed, he heard the cries of the vandals, the neighing of horses, and the clanging of weapons, but he did not lose his peace: he knew that hope projects us beyond the present moment and makes us place all our trust in God, the merciful and ever-faithful Father, who will keep his promises. Hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5).

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