ABSTRACT
In a lecture given at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in 1983, Gerald Bonner cited a passage from Book 7 of Augustine’s Confessions that provides a powerful synopsis of Augustinian anthropology. The passage, in the 1944 translation of F.J.Sheed, says:
So I set about finding a way to gain the strength that was necessary for enjoying You. And I could not find it until I embraced the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is over all things, God blessed for ever, who was calling unto me and saying: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and who brought into the union with our nature that Food which I lacked the strength to take; for the Word was made flesh that Your Wisdom, by which You created all things, might give suck to our soul’s infancy. For I was not yet lowly enough to hold the lowly Jesus as my God, nor did I know what lesson His embracing of our weakness was to teach. For Your Word, the eternal Truth, towering above the highest parts of Your creation, lifts up to Himself those who were cast down. He built for Himself here below a lowly house of our clay, that by it he might bring down from themselves and bring up to Himself those who were to be made subject, healing the swolleness of their pride and fostering their love; so that the deity at their feet, humbled by the assumption of our cost of human nature; to the end that weary at last they might cast themselves down upon His humanity and rise again in its rising.
