Augustinian Spirituality and Mysticism

Summary

• Introduction
• Ten Augustinian Values and the Augustinian Imperative "Be Church"
• Love and Its Purification
• Freedom and its Investment in Love
  • Service and the Common Good
  • Community and Communion
  • Friendship
  • Spiritual Direction: A Note on Freedom, Love and Interiority
• Prayer
• Notes On Core Values
  • Virtus et Scientia
  • Caritas, unitas, veritas
  • Interiority, Community Life, Service

Related Articles

• Ten Augustinian Values
• Ten Augustinian Values: A Diagram
• Caritas, Virtus et Scientia: A Contribution to the Discussion on Core-Values
• Being Church: Lay Augustinian Spirituality I
• Being Church: Lay Augustinian Spirituality II

Before we proceed with our review of the Ten Augustinian Values, I would like to present a diagram first. Pictures say a lot of things and I think that it would be appropriate to show the ten Augustinian Values not disjointedly as if were simply enumerating a list of groceries, but as a whole and within a dynamic process that I describe as "the verification of Love", or "making Love authentic."

In the previous article we have given an outline of an idea: Augustinian Spirituality. In that article we tried to show how Augustinian Spirituality flows from the sacrament of baptism and therefore can also be lived by the laity. We have also shown that the historical development of Augustinian Spirituality, in Augustine's life and even in the founding of the Order of St. Augustine that "Augustinian Spirituality" as a spirituality for the laity was intended by Augustine and lived by him and his friends before his call to serve the Church transformed his lay monastery into a kind of seminary. Finally, the hermit spirituality that blossomed in the Tuscan regions of Italy from the 11th century onwards led to a movement of groups that were lay in origin (e.g. the group of St. Francis). Of these, some were incorporated into the Order of St. Augustine in 1244 and perhaps even later in 1256.

Its been more than four years since I posted "Ten Augustinian Values" for the teachers and students of the University of San Agustin. In this article and in those that will follow, I will try to explore the possibility of re-explaining the Ten Augustinian Values as a dynamic program for human formation based on Augustine's understanding of the two-fold commandment of love. I will be writing this straight from the heart, so to speak, and will be "purifying" it with supporting documentation later on. I will greatly appreciate all the help that the reader can give by way of comments and criticism to this ongoing work.

For those who have read the article Ten Augustinian Values the first part of this essay should be familiar. It is just the slight modification of the introductory article for the main "Ten Augustinian Values." The discussion on the Ten Augustinian Values will be totally different from the original article because it will be departing from a different perspective: human formation.

The present article is a rewriting of "Being Church in an Academic Setting II" originally published in Communitas and partly published on the web at [http://www.geocities.com/agilawan/mission/layspir.html]. It was written as a commentary on a talk given by the Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine, the Very Reverend Fr. Miguel Orcasitas, OSA, to the members of the University of San Agustin academic community in February of 1996.