The Humility of Augustine

I was especially struck by Augustine's humility today in a passage of his de Trinitate (The Trinity). Translation care of Edmund Hill (1991).

"But take a man who has been roused by the warmth of the Holy Spirit and has already woken up to God; and in loving him he has become cheap in his own estimation; and being eager yet unable to go in to him, he has taken a look at himself in God's light, and discovered himself, and realized that his own sickness cannot be compounded with God's cleanness. So he finds it a relief to weep and implore him over and over again to take pity and pull him altogether out of his pitiful condition, and he prays with all confidence once he has received the free gratuitous pledge of health through the one and only savior and enlightener granted us by God. Well, such a man, poor and grieving in this way, is not puffed up by knowledge because he is built up by charity (1 Cor. 8:1), since he as valued knowledge above knowledge; he has put knowledge of his own weakness above knowledge of the walls of the world, the foundations of the earth and the pinnacles of the sky; and by bringing in this knowledge he has brought in sorrow (Eccl. 1:18), the sorrow of the exile stirred by longing for his true country and its founder, his blissful God.

As one of this sort of men, O Lord my God, I sigh among your poor ones in the family of your Christ; and I beg from you a morsel of your bread with which to reply to people who do not hunger and thirst for justice (Mt. 5:6), but are well fed and have more than enough. What has satisfied them is their own imaginings, not your truth. This they thrust away from them, and so bounce back and fall into their own emptiness." De Trinitate, IV. 1.

While apparently beginning a polemic against pagan philosophers (or at least introducing the subject in this section), Augustine contrasts their proud search for knowledge with his desperate search for God. What a great example of a gifted man who understood that his gifts truly came only from the grace and mercy of God.