Who Was St. Augustine?

Having lived here for over seven years now, I often find myself falling prey to the delusion that nothing more can surprise me, at which time something always does. One such occurrence happened at my own breakfast table when suddenly my wife asked, “Who was Augustine?”

Let me explain something. My wife is a distinguished writer who has written an award-winning novel about Christ and the Apostles, reads everything she can get her hands on, has edited literally hundreds of books, and, in short, is among the most educated representatives of her generation in this country. How could this woman I not only love but deeply respect not know the most important of the Latin Fathers whose impact on Christianity was probably greater than anybody since St. Paul? In any case, I explained as best I could, then as an experiment asked my stepdaughter, “Who was Augustine?”

“Some Roman,” was the best she could do, but then what can one expect from a young lady of twenty?

Then I recalled that once, when we were visiting a Lviv writer, my wife first laid eyes on a translation of Helv П tius, started to leaf through it, and suddenly exclaimed with tears in her eyes, “How is it possible that I didn’t even know that such a philosopher existed?”

Earlier she told me that she had never even seen a Bible until the 1970s. “You just couldn’t get it,” explained this woman who had been able to obtain and read all kind of illegal dissident works and managed not to be expelled from Lviv University during the General Pogrom of 1972 only by the skin of her teeth. It seems that all her male fellow students had assembled in front of the KGB building when she was called in for questioning, and the interrogator was afraid of what they might do if she were expelled.

Imagine what kind of world it was where you could read Milton or Dante, but you could not read the Bible, without which such monuments of world literature make little sense. And then I began to understand what a skewed culture was inculcated in this country, where central parts of the world cultural heritage were simply crossed out and forbidden.

When one talks about the crimes of totalitarianism here, one often thinks only in terms of how many people were killed, repressed, or otherwise made to suffer. Here, however, we are confronting a very different kind of wound, a spiritual one. The issue is not religion as a product of the knowledge that we are all going to die sooner or later and would like to believe a better fate awaits us than simply rotting in some grave. The issue is that the spiritual values of religion and thinking deeply about it is one of the things that make us what we are, an essential element of what distinguishes us from God’s other creatures. And isolating a whole society, whole generations from this huge part of its cultural heritage is a kind of damage that I cannot imagine how to adequately measure or describe. It is a crime of the spirit, which has wounded the soul of this people, and only God knows how long it will take to heal this wound.