Addressing his congregation in Hippo, Augustine urged, ‘Our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.’Footnote 1 Indeed, one may well claim (without much exaggeration) that ‘seeing God’ forms the ‘whole business’ of Augustine's theology as well. ‘Seeing God’ is the theological cipher through which Augustine develops his theology of the incarnation and his valuation of the sacraments. In the Confessions and De Trinitate Augustine invites his readers to consider the relation between ‘sight’, ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge’. This language (‘sight’, ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge’) suggests a degree of both continuity and discontinuity between the finite vision of God received in faith – ecclesially mediated through scripture and the sacraments – and the eschatological beatific vision. The vision of God is the consummation of Augustine's great work, the City of God; indeed, the entire argument of this book leads up to the conclusion of the saints’ beatific vision of God. In this essay I explore how Augustine understands the character of the seeing that constitutes the beatific vision in the final coda of the City of God. What does it mean to see the divine presence?
A constant in Augustine's long literary career is his understanding of God's presence as ubique totus, or ‘whole and everywhere’. I want to tease out the dynamic of what Augustine means by seeing God as ubique totus. I will first consider how Augustine came to perceive of the divine presence in this life (here I will look especially at the Confessions); second, how he theologically articulates the nature of the divine presence (here I will draw on Ep. 187); and, finally, how he understands the divine presence in the life to come (and here I will focus on the conclusion of the City of God). I suggest that a fundamental continuity obtains between how Augustine understands seeing God in this life and the next and that this continuity is predicated on his conception of the divine presence as ubique totus.
A striking element in Augustine's handling of the beatific vision is his strong insistence that the resurrected body will be markedly different from our current body. Contemporary theology about the eschaton – the new heavens and the new earth – tends to emphasise the continuity of our current state of embodiment with that of the resurrected body. In part, this emphasis stems from a desire to affirm the goodness of creation, of materiality, of human flesh, emotions and sexuality, all of which will be redeemed and restored to their full integrity.Footnote 2 In contrast, Augustine tends to emphasise the discontinuity between our current material constitution and the resurrected body. His sustained emphasis at the conclusion to the City of God is ‘to express the difference between this life and the life to come’.Footnote 3 This sentiment is amplified in two letters (Ep. 147 and 148) devoted to the topic of the beatific vision.Footnote 4 In letter 148 Augustine underscores that there will be ‘so great a change of this body when it is made a spiritual body’.Footnote 5 He continues to explain that nearly all continuity is eviscerated: ‘These bodies will be something far different and will not be themselves. They will be something else.’Footnote 6 Why this emphasis on the difference and discontinuity between the earthly body and the resurrected body? The short answer is that the discontinuity is predicated on the fact that the saints will see God ‘face to face’ and that such a vision requires a decidedly new way of being. What kind of eyes can see God? Augustine writes, ‘For they will either be the eyes of this body, and they will not see him, or they will not be the eyes of this body if they do see him, because by such a great transformation they will be the eyes of a far different body’.Footnote 7 The eyes of the resurrected body will ‘see’ in way analogous to (but far beyond) how our minds ‘see’ in this life, explains Augustine.Footnote 8
Much of contemporary theology wants to highlight the continuity between our current existence and the new heaven and the new earth so as to affirm the created goodness of the material order as well as all that accompanies human embodiment. In contrast, Augustine's eschatology begins not with the restored creation, the resurrected body or even the heavenly vision of God; instead, Augustine's point of departure is the object of the eschatological vision, namely God himself. In the short letter, Ep. 148, Augustine repeats seven times that the divine presence is ubique totus – wholly everywhere.Footnote 9 The divine presence, he insists, is not a partitive presence.Footnote 10 At the outset of the letter he writes that God ought ‘not to be thought to be bodily and visible in a stretch or area of space’.Footnote 11 Of course, he adds, this is the only way in which our eyes can now see anything. God is ‘whole everywhere’ (ubique totum) and not ‘divisibly in areas of space (per localia spatia divisibilem)’.Footnote 12 So, why does Augustine emphasise the discontinuity between our current vision and the vision of God to come? He says, ‘[I find it] far more tolerable to add something to a body than to take something away from God’.Footnote 13 This is a telling line. If the resurrected eyes will see the immortal and invisible God (cf. 1 Tim 6: 16) they would require dramatic transformation, for otherwise they ‘will by no means see an incorporeal substance that is whole everywhere (ubique totam)’.Footnote 14
Divine presence as ubique totus in the Confessions
Readers of the Confessions know the long and arduous route Augustine traversed searching to understand and articulate the nature of divine presence.Footnote 15 Indeed, it is possible to read this autobiography as the confession of a long and painful, but prayerful, purification of this search. The Confessions are bookended by a discussion of the nature of divine presence. Calling upon the Lord at the outset of the Confessions Augustine inquires,
How shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord? Surely when I call on him, I am calling on him to come into me. But what place (quis locus) is there in me where my God can enter into me? ‘God made heaven and earth’ (Gen 1:1). Where may he come to me? Lord my God, is there any room in me which can contain you? . . . Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? Or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you? Where do you put the overflow of yourself after heaven and earth are filled? . . . In filling all things, you fill them all with the whole of yourself. Is it that because all things cannot contain the whole of you (omnia), they contain part of you, and that all things contain the same part of you simultaneously (eandem partem simul omnia capiunt)? Or does each part contain a different part of you, the larger containing the greater part the lesser part the smaller? Does that imply that there is some part of you which is greater, another part smaller?Footnote 16
The profusion of sputtering questions regarding divine presence situated within a catena of Psalm quotes finds a degree of resolution in the formula ubique totus. Augustine writes, ‘Or is the whole of you everywhere (ubique totus), yet without anything that contains you entire?’Footnote 17 Augustine suggests that, yes, as obscure and mysterious as the formula ubique totus sounds, it contains the answer to the question of divine presence.Footnote 18 The rest of the Confessions tracks the circuitous route Augustine took to arrive at this conclusion.
Initially, Augustine was a materialist; in Confessions 3 he describes his inability to imagine anything not made up of atoms: ‘I was seeing only with the eye of the flesh . . . I was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is’.Footnote 19 Eventually, Platonist writings presented Augustine with a profound breakthrough. Platonism proposes that immaterial reality is more ‘real’, ‘substantial’ and ‘enduring’ than material objects we see with our physical eyes. In his early years, of which we read in the first books of the Confessions, this was not yet on Augustine's horizon. He was still intractably stuck in the intellectually shallow waters of Democritus’ materialism: ‘I had not realised that God is Spirit (John 4:24), not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass.’Footnote 20 In book 3 Augustine recounts his inability to comprehend God as ‘everywhere and whole’ (tota ubique).Footnote 21 Augustine's problem, he recalls, was the inability to conceive of vision beyond physical sight: ‘How could I see this when for me “to see” meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and forming an image in the mind?’Footnote 22 As a result, ‘when I thought of you, my mental image was not of anything solid and firm; it was not you but a vain phantom. My error was my god.’Footnote 23
At the age of 20, Augustine read Aristotle's Categories, which he describes as ‘an extremely clear statement about substances’.Footnote 24 He learned the nine ‘accidental’ categories of a substance: quality, quantity, relation, etc. The problem, explains Augustine, is that he also attempted to grasp the divine substance under such ‘categories’: ‘I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable (mirabiliter simplicem atque incommutabilem) as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes.’Footnote 25 Much later, in De Trinitate, Augustine writes,
Thus we should understand God, if we can and so far as we can, to be good without quality, great without quantity, creative without need or necessity, presiding without position, holding all things together without possessions, wholly everywhere (ubique totum) without place, everlasting without time, without any change in himself making changeable things, and undergoing nothing. Whoever thinks of God like that may not yet be able to discover altogether what he is (quid sit), but is at least piously on his guard against thinking about him anything that he is not.Footnote 26
Here we sense the strong apophatic strain that comes to the fore in Augustine's mature theology. The divine substance is not something known or knowable to humans, and certainly not under the auspices of ‘categories’.Footnote 27
As he entered his thirties Augustine had come to realise that that which is incorruptible is to be preferred to that which is corruptible;Footnote 28 but he was, by his own admission, ripe picking for the Manichaeans with their suave materialist metaphysic: ‘I thought it shameful to believe you to have the shape of the human figure, and to be limited by the bodily lines of our limbs. When I wanted to think of my God, I knew of no way of doing so except as a physical mass. Nor did I think anything existed which is not material. That was the principal and almost sole cause of my inevitable error.’Footnote 29 Augustine was enticed by the supposed sophistication of the Manichaeans. They mercilessly mocked what they saw as the hopeless anthropomorphisms of the scriptures.Footnote 30 What on earth did it mean to be created in the ‘image of God’? Does God have a pretty face? Hands, arms, fingernails and hair? Their loud mockery simply expressed out loud the profound discomfort Augustine had with his Manichaean, material conceptions of God: ‘Although you were not in the shape of the human body, I nevertheless felt forced to imagine something physical occupying space diffused . . . in the world.’Footnote 31 The chief error of the Manichaeans, Augustine contends, was the inability to understand the divine presence as ubique totus: ‘They evidently do not know that you are everywhere (ubique). No space circumscribes you. You alone are always present (praesens) even to those who have taken themselves far from you.’Footnote 32 Augustine describes the idolatrous, immanent character of his theology at this time, which was insufficiently attentive to divine transcendence: ‘I visualised you, Lord surrounding it on all sides and permeating it, but infinite in all directions, as if there were a sea everywhere (ubique) and stretching through immense distances, a single sea which had within it a large but finite sponge; and the sponge was in every part filled from the immense sea.’Footnote 33 The analogy limps precisely in its materialism (i.e. the idea that God's presence is like water suffusing a sponge), and it is this materialism that Augustine later came to see as problematic, both in the Manichaeans and in his own youthful understanding of God.
At the cathedral in Milan, Augustine heard Bishop Ambrose preach, and he came to realise that the mockery of the Manichaeans missed its mark: the imago dei does not mean God has a body: ‘I had been barking for years not against the Catholic faith but against mental figments of physical images.’Footnote 34 Ambrose taught that God's presence is both wholly immanent and wholly transcendent: ‘You who are most high and most near, most secret and most present (praesentissime), have no bodily members, some larger, other smaller, but are everywhere a whole (ubique totus) and never limited in space.’Footnote 35 Ambrose gave Augustine a theological grammar with which to articulate the divine presence as ubique totus. At the same time, his reading of the so-called ‘books of the Platonists’ (the famous libri platonicorum) gave him a metaphysic to articulate the ‘real distinction’ between participated Being and contingent participating being as well as the ‘presence’ of eternal Being pervading all things.Footnote 36
Divine presence as ubique totus in Ep. 187
The locus classicus for Augustine's mature exposition of the nature of divine presence is found in Ep. 187; this letter was intended as a book, which Augustine titled The Presence of God.Footnote 37 Augustine writes in response to a request from the Roman prefect, Claudius Postumus Dardanus, to explain how one can best understand Christ's words spoken from the cross to the believing thief, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43). The challenge latent in the question is that Christ was not to go to paradise that day; rather, his soul was to go to the underworld and his body to lie in the tomb. Augustine suggests that rightly distinguishing Christ's divinity from his humanity solves this exegetical puzzle: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ is best understood as spoken by Christ's divine nature, which as God is ‘always everywhere’ (ubique semper est).Footnote 38
While one must affirm that God is everywhere, explains Augustine, one must resist ‘carnal thinking’: ‘We do not suppose that God is spread out through all things (ubique diffuses) as if by special magnitude in the same way that the earth, or a liquid, or air, or this light is spread out. For every magnitude of this sort is smaller in part than in its whole.’Footnote 39 A recurrent theme in Ep. 187, which maps neatly onto the same concern presented narratively in the Confessions, is Augustine's adamant rejection of material picture-thinking when conceiving of the nature of the divine presence. This is crystallised in the definition of divine presence that he advances:
Yet he is not spread out in space like a mass such that in half of the body of the world there is half of him and half of him in the other half, being in that way whole in the whole. Rather, he is whole in the heavens alone and whole on the earth alone and whole in the heavens and in the earth, contained in no place, but whole everywhere in himself (in seipso ubique totus).Footnote 40
Any material analogies regarding divine presence – such as a liquid or as light – are radically deficient in that they are by definition partitive. Augustine wants to draw his reader to a perception of spiritual substances. As such, he uses analogies of human wisdom, immortality and health, which to varying degrees exist in the whole of the body. These examples are successful precisely in that they are not partitive. After all, there is not greater wisdom, immortality or health in a large man than in a small man. Likewise, these qualities pervade the whole person and are as complete in one part as they are in the whole.Footnote 41
Nevertheless, even these analogies still limp when trying to conceive of the nature of the divine presence. Human wisdom, immortality and health are qualities. But when God says, ‘I fill heaven and earth’ (Jer 23:24), he does not fill them as a quality: ‘God is spread out through all things not such that he is a quality of the world but such that he is the substance that creates the world.’Footnote 42 This statement expresses the heartbeat of Augustine's understanding of God's presence, which is simply another way of speaking of divine providence: the Creator not only fashions his creatures, but is at every moment holding them in being, continually communicating his own presence to them. As such, a recognition of divine immanence forms the substructure to Augustine's theology of divine presence. At the same time, Augustine's doctrine of creation also entails an affirmation of divine transcendence. God is not a part of his creation. Grabowski writes, ‘Though He is immanent in all creatures, the simplicity, spirituality, and immutability of His nature require that He be transcendent to them.’Footnote 43 Augustine's doctrine of divine presence, then, affirms at once God's profound immanence and his radical transcendence. (In the cadence of the Confessions, God's presence is interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.Footnote 44 )
In Ep. 187 Augustine advances a further distinction regarding divine presence. While God's presence is in seipso ubique totus, he does not dwell in every creature to the same degree: ‘Hence we must say that God is everywhere by the presence of his divinity (per divinitatis praesentiam) but not everywhere through the indwelling (habitationis) of his grace.’Footnote 45 Even among those in whom he dwells by grace, he does so to varying degrees. As such, Elisha asked for a double portion of the Spirit that was in Elijah. Sanctity comes in varying degrees because God dwells more and less abundantly in different people. Inasmuch as God communicates his presence to his creatures he is everywhere (or, put negatively, he is absent from nothing), and he never communicates only a part of himself. Nevertheless, the divine presence is not always received by creatures, just as light cannot be received by a blind man.Footnote 46
Augustine explains that for this reason the divine presence is not only whole and everywhere, but is so ‘in himself (in seipso)’.Footnote 47 While his creatures receive him in limited and varying degrees, God remains whole in himself.Footnote 48 Augustine writes, ‘But just as he is not absent from one in whom he does not dwell, and he is present as a whole although that person does not have him, so he is present as a whole to one in whom he dwells though that person does not receive him wholly.’Footnote 49 The distinction Augustine develops between God's presence, which is ‘whole everywhere in himself’, and the manner in which he dwells within his creatures is subtle but deeply significant. As a variation on the example of the inability of the blind to receive light, Augustine explains how sound is received only poorly by those hard of hearing and not received at all by the deaf, while nevertheless the same sound is emitted. He continues,
How much more excellently is God, an incorporeal and immutably living nature, who cannot be extended and divided like a sound over stretches of time and who does not need an airy space in which to make himself present to others but, remaining in himself in his eternal stability, able to be present to all things in his totality and to individual things in his totality. And yet those in whom he dwells possess him in accordance with their different capacities.Footnote 50
Ep. 187 fills out what is entailed by Augustine's understanding of the divine presence as ubique totus as first developed at length in the Confessions. As in his early autobiography, Augustine is at pains to insist that the divine presence is not material or partitive; nor is it a quality. Rather, God's presence is the source and sustenance of life for his creatures to whom he is at once profoundly immanent and radically transcendent. Ep. 187 adds a further distinction between God's ubiquitous presence (praesentiam) and the mode in which he ‘dwells’ (habitationis) by grace. While God's presence is always ‘whole everywhere’, it can be received in its fullness only by God himself (in seipso); by contrast, in creatures God ‘dwells’ in varying degrees according to the grace they have to receive his presence.
The beatific vision as ubique totus (De civitate Dei 22.29)
Augustine's arduous personal purgation of material conceptions of divine presence, recounted in the Confessions, sets him up for his speculative and doctrinal writings on what it means to see God in the hereafter: the seeing that will constitute the beatific vision. I turn now to the last book of what Augustine calls his magnum opus et arduum, the City of God. In chapter 29 of book 22 Augustine inquires with what kind of vision the saints will behold God in the life to come.Footnote 51 As in Ep. 147 and 148, he emphasises the ‘otherness’ of the vision of God. How different and discontinuous will that vision be compared to the vision we now have. Vision in this life is, by definition, partitive and divisible. By contrast, the Apostle Paul describes the future vision as ‘beyond all understanding’ (Phil 4:7), because, of course, ‘eye has not seen’. Augustine provides very little positive content to the nature of the beatific vision; what he can affirm is that this vision will be completely other than our vision now. While scripture affirms that the saints will see God in the resurrected body, it is not clear that they will see through the eyes of the body, explains Augustine.Footnote 52 Will the eyes of the resurrected body see God in the same way we now see the world around us – the sun, moon, stars and sea? This is ‘no easy question’, responds Augustine.Footnote 53
Perhaps, suggests Augustine, instead of a physical vision seen through the eyes of the body, this sight will be similar to the sight of the Old Testament prophet Elisha, who could see the duplicitous action of his servant Gehazi, who illegitimately received payment for a miracle wrought through the prophet Elisha. While the servant's wicked action was not carried out directly before the eyes of the prophet, the Septuagint translation of this narrative reads that the prophet Elisha told his servant, ‘Did not my heart go with you?’ And Jerome's translation from the Hebrew text reads, ‘Was not my heart there present (in praesenti erat)?’Footnote 54 Augustine explains, ‘It was therefore in his heart that the prophet saw’.Footnote 55 Thus, there is a perpetual seeing with ‘the heart’, ‘mind’ or ‘spirit,’ which is proper to beatitude.Footnote 56 Augustine grounds this conviction in Matthew 5:8 (‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’), a text that holds a central place in his theology of the vision of God. Thus, even if the saints were to close their eyes, they would still behold God with the eyes of the heart.
Nevertheless, writes Augustine, the question still stands ‘whether [the saints] will also see by means of the bodily eyes when they have them open’.Footnote 57 This would seem to be the case if ‘those physical eyes also will have their own function’.Footnote 58 But if this is so, Augustine speculates, they would have to be ‘possessed of a very different power’ so as to see ‘that immaterial nature’. They are, after all, able to see the divine nature that is ‘not confined to any space but is everywhere in its wholeness (ubique tota)’.Footnote 59 Although God says, ‘I fill heaven and earth’ (Jer 23:24), explains Augustine (echoing the opening of the Confessions), this does not mean ‘he has part of himself in heaven and part on earth. He is wholly heaven, wholly in earth and that not at different times but simultaneously; and this cannot be true of a material substance.’Footnote 60 Affirmations of the divine presence as ubique totus should immediately be apophatically recalibrated: the divine presence is not partitive, temporal or material. We must remember that Augustine is holding this proposition regarding the resurrected bodily eyes seeing God as a speculative hypothesis. Certainly, the saints will see God with the eyes of the heart or the eyes of the mind, but whether they will also see with the physical eyes of the resurrected body is less clear to Augustine at this point. Augustine is simply weighing the merits of both positions.
On the one hand, the proposition of a physical vision of God seems implausible. When Paul speaks of seeing God ‘face to face’ (1 Cor 13:12), this does not ‘compel us to believe that we shall see God by means of this corporeal face, with its corporeal eyes’.Footnote 61 Rather, this text refers to the face of the ‘inner man’, of which Paul elsewhere writes, ‘But we, gazing at the glory of the Lord with face unveiled, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory’ (2 Cor 3:18). If now we perceive God in faith, which is a matter of the heart and of the mind and not of the physical body, it follows, suggests Augustine, that resurrected vision will be intensification or sharpening of that inner vision.Footnote 62
On the other hand, God could certainly fashion the resurrected body so that it will be able physically to see spiritual reality. It is human reasoning that strictly partitions the intelligible from the material so that the realm of the spirit is only perceived by the mind and the realm of matter seen only by the physical eyes. But this dichotomy does not account for the fact that God, who is spirit, sees and knows his material creatures.Footnote 63 How might the saints’ resurrected physical eyes see the immaterial God ubique totus? We must completely reimagine this sight: ‘The power of those eyes will be extraordinary in its potency’.Footnote 64 Not a keener eyesight (like an eagle), suggests Augustine, but a thoroughly different vision – the ability to see the immaterial. And so, whether physical eyes will be able to see spiritual realities is unclear to Augustine: ‘And yet we do not know what new qualities the spiritual body will have, for we are speaking of something beyond our experience.’Footnote 65 Scripture offers little help here, explains Augustine, and so such questions remain ‘beyond our understanding’ (Phil 4:7).Footnote 66 We are left with more questions than answers about the character of the seeing that constitutes the beatific vision.Footnote 67
However, one thing is clear, namely, that God will be seen ubique totus. Augustine concludes,
It is possible, it is indeed most probable, that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a fashion as to observe God in utter clarity and distinctness, seeing him present everywhere (ubique praesentem) and governing the whole material scheme of things by means of the bodies we shall then inhabit and the bodies we shall see wherever we turn our eyes. It will not be as it is now, when the invisible realities of God are apprehended and observed through the material things of his creation, and are partially apprehended by means of a puzzling reflection in a mirror. Rather in that new age the faith, by which we believe, will have a greater reality for us than the appearance of material things which we see with our bodily eyes . . . In the future life, wherever we turn the spiritual eyes of our bodies we shall discern, by means of our bodies, the incorporeal God directing the whole universe . . . Perhaps God will be known to us and visible to us in the sense that he will be spiritually perceived by each of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself; he will be seen in the new heaven and earth, in the whole creation as it then will be; he will be seen in every body by means of bodies, wherever the eyes of the spiritual body are directed with their penetrating gaze.Footnote 68
Here we have Augustine's richly suggestive speculative theology. We do not know how the saints shall see, but the object of their vision will be God ubique praesens. Just as we now ‘see’ life in other people, we then will ‘see’ God in all things as He will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28).Footnote 69 The whole world will be translucent to the divine presence, bursting and brimming with God Himself. The material world, which we now perceive as concrete and ‘real’, will then seem like effervescent shadows projected on a cave wall when compared to that richly dense substantial existence glistening with the divine life – ‘life piled upon life’.Footnote 70
Augustine posits a great deal of discontinuity between our current, embodied existence and the life of the resurrected body. Augustine often repeats that our current ‘seeing’ will be quite unlike the seeing of the life to come. But this discontinuity is predicted on a much great continuity – the continuity of the object seen. God does not change. God always remains in seipso ubique totus. In this life and in the life to come, creatures do not exist unless they are called into being and held in being by the divine presence. God is always communicating his being and life to his creatures; he is always present to them with his life and love. In this life, as in the next, God is present ubique totus. The major intellectual quest of Augustine's life, as recounted in the Confessions, was to discern the nature of divine presence. He came to articulate the character of divine presence as ubique totus: God is everywhere present, simultaneously. But this description remains, in this life, apophatic; principally it articulates what the divine presence is not: it is not partitive, temporal, material, or a quality. This inchoate vision of God awaits its eschatological fullness when the reconstituted body and resurrected eyes will clearly perceive what is now seen dimly, namely, the divine presence ubique totus.
