A hen makes herself weak among her chicks, so that even if the chicks are not following her and you do not see them, you still recognize her as a mother. Wings drooping, feathers ruffled, her hoarse clucking, as she droops and brings her limbs down to them, you recognize her as a mother, even if, as I said, you do not see her chicks. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, 15.7
If you’ve never been to a farm and seen what Augustine is talking about in this quotation, then you might have trouble imagining it. When a mother hen feels threatened, she will puff her feathers up, hug the ground with her body, and make a hoarse clucking sound. Her chicks, no matter how old, will see or hear her, come running, and duck for cover inside the feathery mass. (It’s ridiculously cute when the chicks get curious in there and can’t keep from poking their heads out to see what’s going on. Here’s a Youtube video.) Sometimes a chick won’t be able to locate their mother, so they’ll hunker in place and remain quiet until they think it’s safe to come out. The hen will usually stay in her squat, fluffed up state until she senses danger has passed–or until she sees or hears a lost chick.
Years ago, when we first let our hens hatch chicks, I couldn’t believe that an animal would do something like this. It’s basically suicidal. What biological or evolutionary sense could it make? Most birds, when provoked, will fight back or abandon their young and make new nests. This is part of Augustine’s point: the chicken, he says, is the only species of fowl he knows of that hunkers down in place and refuses to leave. Storks, swallows, doves, and the rest have different mothering habits. So, for Augustine, it’s all the more mysterious that Jesus would liken himself to a mother hen gathering up her brood (Matthew 23:37). In his Homilies on the Gospel of John, where this quotation comes from, Augustine says that this is how we are to understand Jesus’s humanity. In taking on flesh, the Word of God brought himself to the weakest, most vulnerable place, taking on “the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7), so that he might find all of his chicks. “The strength of Christ created you [John 1:1-3],” he preaches, but “the weakness of Christ recreated you. The strength of Christ caused that which was not to be; the weakness of Christ caused that which already was not to perish. He fashioned us in his strength, [and he] came looking for us in his weakness.”
During Lent, I’ve set aside my usual habits of Benedictine prayer to revisit this collection of homilies. I haven’t looked at them since graduate school, and I confess that I’m slightly embarrassed that I’m not reading them in Latin. I don’t like reading things on screens, getting to the university library isn’t as easy as it used to be, and my book budget has shrunk. Excuses abound. Still, it’s been a delight (in the midst of my own weakness) to rediscover Augustine’s exegesis of his most favorite book of the Bible. And what’s struck me in this liturgical season, perhaps more so than in previous years, is how closely Augustine’s preaching interweaves a doctrine of creation with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Let me show you what I mean.
In his homilies on John, Augustine is at pains to show his listeners that creation is full of marvels that are continuously unfolding in front of them. They have trouble recognizing them as marvels because their minds are distended, or stretched across, the warp of time. (In case you’re interested in the philosophy of time, Book XI of the Confessions for Augustine’s most thoroughgoing treatment time as distensio.) Except in freak weather or geological events, the created order presents itself as a continuous flow of natural causation. It encompasses our lives as biological agents. For most of us, though, it’s background. Augustine thinks that if we could shake off our habitual numbness and attend to the beauty of the natural world, we would see wonders [mirum, singular here, which I’ve made plural] “enough to set you trembling as you think about [them]” (Hom. 8.1).
Exhortations of this sort usually accompany Augustine’s treatment of miracles. When he is writing about the wedding at Cana in Galilee (preached the week of Palm Sunday, no less, in Hippo Regius, North Africa, 407 AD), Augustine tells his congregation that he knows that they are expecting a theological explanation of why Jesus turned water into wine (8.1). But a miracle like this shouldn’t really astonish them, Augustine says, because “the one who made wine on that day at the wedding in those six jars, which he had ordered to be filled with water, does the same thing every year in the vines” (ibid.). Jesus’s miracle amazed his followers and they perhaps amaze us. But what happens every season, when winemakers turn grape juice into wine, does not. “Its familiarity has let the wonder of it slip away” (ibid.). Augustine then dares his listeners to reflect on “the force in a single grain of any seed you like” (ibid.) See if you don’t come away shaken by the beauty and the mystery of it.
Across these sermons, Augustine will pull ordinary examples from creation and ask his congregation to reflect on them. If our hearts were rightly ordered, he argues, we would find the ordinary goings-on of nature as beautiful and mysterious as the miraculous. It seems to me that this rhetorical strategy has two goals. (1) The first is to insist that God makes and governs all of creation through his Son, the Word. He never acts in creation apart from the coeternal agency of Jesus. (2) The second is that creation is also a word (but not the Word) that God speaks to us, his human creatures, whom he is relentlessly pursuing until the day that he (like the mother hen) has finished gathering up his people. (The question of whether God could speak directly to non-human creatures or have a relationship with them does not present itself.)
For Augustine, creation is a school of spiritual formation. If the church learns to receive and interpret creation with the eyes of faith, it will be transformed into patterns of love, delight, and worship. “We see [the world] and, if his Spirit is within us, they so delight us that the craftsman is praised, not turning our attention to the works and away from the craftsman, nor turning our faces to the things he made and our backs to the one who made them” (ibid.). In a different work, On the Trinity, Augustine will put it this way: “Who but God annually clothes the bushes with leaves and flowers? But when the rod of Aaron the priest budded [Numbers 17], divinity was in a certain fashion conversing with a hesitant and doubtful humanity” (III.11). If I can push his metaphor a bit further, the “certain fashion” of God speaking through miracles is just a different dialect of the same language of creation. God, who seeks and pursues “a hesitant and doubtful humanity,” uses the “words” of creation to woo us. The only difference is the manner, or the dialect, of divine speech.
For Augustine, the epitome of divine speech to humankind is the Verbum infans, the Word-made-infant, or the Word-made-unword (14.4). (Infans, from which we get our word infant, literally means “not speaking,” or “incapable of speech.” The man loves a good paradox.) Augustine says that this is what Jesus, the Word of God, became when he took on human flesh and lay as an infant in the manger. “Abiding as God with the Father, he became a man among us, so that through him you, for whose sake he became a man, might become such a one as can grasp God” (14.12). Crucially, the Word-made-infans does not destroy creation but exalts it.
There’s lots more I could say about this, and many directions we could go in, but for now, I’ll leave things as they lie. A very happy Palm Sunday to all.