Begoglio: From his preface to the book of Giacomo Tantardini, Il tempo della Chiesa secondo Agostino. Seguire e rimanere in
attesa. La felicità in speranza,
Città Nuova, Rome 2009, 388 pp.
“There is the
point: some believe that faith and salvation come with our
effort to look for, to seek the
Lord. Whereas it’s the opposite: you are saved
when the Lord looks for you, when
He looks at you and you let yourself be
looked at and sought for. The Lord
will look for you first. And when you find
Him, you understand that He was
waiting there looking at you, He was
expecting you from beforehand.
That is salvation: He loves
you beforehand. And you let yourself be
loved. Salvation is precisely this
meeting where He works first. If this
meeting does not take place, we
are not saved. We can talk about salvation.
Invent reassuring theological
systems that turn God into a notary and His
gratuitous love into a due deed to
which He is supposed to be forced by His
nature. But we never enter into
the People of God. Whereas, when you look
at the Lord and you realize with
gratitude that you are looking at Him
because He is looking at you, all
intellectual prejudices go away, that elitism
of the spirit that is
characteristic of intellectuals without talent and is
ethicism without goodness.
If the beginning of faith is the
work of the Lord, Saint Augustine also
describes how you remain in this
beginning. Here the keywords are those
contained in the subtitle: following and awaiting. And the figure that
represents them is John, the
beloved disciple. John represents those awaiting
to be loved, and remains by grace
and not effort in this expectation. In him it
is obvious that “if one is not
loved first (cf. 1 Jn 4, 19) one can neither love nor
follow” (p. 171). The awaiting of
the acts of the Lord is renewed in him in
every instant, the expectation of
those new beginnings in which freedom
adheres to grace “through the
pleasure by which it is drawn” (p. 372).
According to Augustine, there are
distinctive features – Don Giacomo
points out – indications of when
one is seen and embraced by the Lord.
The first sign is gratitude, the
spontaneous motion of the heart that
gives thanks. Augustine shows that
even the clear understanding of what it
takes to obtain salvation can
become a source of pride, of the sort that he
registered among the Platonic
philosophers of his time, who “have seen
where one must reach to be happy,
but decided to attribute to themselves
what they saw, and become proud,
have lost what they saw” (p. 27). One can
arrive at discovering that only in
God is there happiness, but this knowledge
does not by itself move the heart.
The heart remains sad and full of itself. It
does not dissolve in tears of
gratitude (pp. 19-25). Instead, when one is
picked up in His arms by the Lord
and “humbly embraces my humble God
Jesus” (p. 40), without even
thinking about it, he becomes full of gratitude
and gives thanks. And in this
gratitude also becomes good [my underline]. Don Giacomo
writes that “one is good not
because one knows what goodness is, one is glad
not because one knows what
happiness is. One is good and is happy because
one is embraced by goodness and by
happiness” [my underline] (p. 330).
The other distinguishing feature
is precisely the surfacing in the heart
of that happiness in hope that the subtitle of the book also mentions. For
Augustine, the joy promised by the
Lord to his followers is given and lives in
spe, in hope.
What does that mean? The expression in spe in the
writings of
Augustine indicates that this
happiness is always a grace. In our earthly
condition, this is immediately
obvious to everybody: happiness on earth,
promised as pledge of heavenly
happiness, does not come from us, we
cannot build it nor maintain and
master it. It is not in our hands, and hence
is precarious, according to the
schemes of those who believe they can build
their life as their own project.
It is the happiness of the poor, who enjoy it as
a gratuitous gift. The happiness
of those who live forever suspended in the
hope of the Lord, and for that very
reason are untroubled. Because it is a
beautiful thing to live confident
that the Lord loves us beforehand, seeks us
beforehand. The Lord of patience
that comes to us hoping that we, like
Zacchaeus, climb the tree of humilitas. Saint Augustine addressed to Him
the beautiful prayer also recently
revivified by Pope Benedict XVI, which can
also summarize this book: “Grant
what You command, and command what
You will”. Grant us the gift of
becoming as children, and then ask to be as
children, to enter the kingdom of
heaven.”
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