Wisdoms Journey by Saint Augustine

Lost people need to find their way home: "Of this we would be quite incapable, unless Wisdom herself had seen fit to adapt herself to such infirmity as ours."²²
Augustine knew from his Platonic background that love of goods other than God could distract one from the love of God. After his conversion he realised, "The incarnation was necessary to empower the Christian to return."²³
Augustine presents Jesus as the figure of Wisdom. He is both the goal of our journey and the means of reaching our destination: "She herself is our home, she has also made herself for us into the way home."²⁴
In a bold theological move Augustine conceives both the experience of sin and salvation as a journey. Since we could not find our way home, Wisdom made a journey to us. The reason for the journey of the incarnation was to heal blindness. The map of frui-uti shows that people are blind internally; preferring the means of creation to the end of God. Augustine reasons that this explains why it was necessary for Wisdom to present herself to our external eyes in a physical human incarnation: "She is present everywhere, indeed, to inner eyes that are healthy and pure; but to those whose inner eyes are weak and unclean, she was prepared to be seen by their eyes of flesh as well."²⁵
The external incarnation is necessary because inner eyes are blind—the possibility of external sight appears as a concession or accommodation to the lost. This raises the question of how one's internal eyes benefit from an externally seen incarnation. A clue to Augustine's answer is found in his focus on love of God and neighbour as the fruit of good interpretation;²⁶ the external incarnation heals the internal sight as it teaches us to reorder our loves. We learn from Wisdom how to frui and uti the right objects in the right proportion. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we see the journey that we could not make for ourselves. Wisdom made the journey on our behalf and invites us to follow and learn how to love God afresh.
A merely intellectual grasp of this journey is however not enough to acquire the Augustinian mindset. It is not sufficient merely to understand the Christian story of sin and salvation. Augustine takes considerable pains in De Doctrina Christiana I to foster a sense of the beauty of Wisdom's healing journey: "Just as when doctors bind up wounds, they do not do it untidily, but neatly, so that the bandage, as well as being useful, can also to some extent have its proper beauty, in the same sort of way Wisdom adapted her healing art to our wounds by taking on a human being."²⁷
Augustine invites us to explore the nature of Wisdom's beauty. He focuses on two aspects of what to him constituted beauty: likeness and dissimilarity. He sees a beauty in the likenesses and continuities of Wisdom's healing: as humans were led astray by a woman, so they are healed by one born of a woman and the dead are healed by a death. In the area of dissimilarity, Augustine includes the issue of Wisdom appearing foolish and our bad use of immortality contrasted with Christ's good use of mortality.²⁸ Augustine meditated on the shape of Biblical salvation and his reflections amounted to far more than merely intellectual observations; the beauty of the shape of Wisdom's gracious journey stirred up excitement, passion, and joy in God. Thus the work of theology becomes a re-embracing of our first love. In order to read Scripture fruitfully, we need the mindset of conscious existential appreciation of the beauty of God's gracious journey to us in Jesus. To lose sight of Wisdom's journey (and our journey as it is caught up in Wisdom's) is to lose the hope of participating in worthwhile theology. Augustine hopes that those who read on to his hermeneutical principles will have the mindset to observe many more praiseworthy and useful aspects of God's journey: "Those who are not held back by the necessity of completing a work just begun, from reflecting on many other instances of the sort, will appreciate how well furnished the Christian medicine cupboard is with both contrary and homeopathic remedies."²⁹ This approach to beauty is consistent with Augustine's earlier exploration of the topic of beauty in De Musica, in which he portrayed a universe where "Every creature has a specific rhythm and seeks to ever more occupy itself as it truly is. Music is part of our temporal striving towards ever greater exactitude."³⁰ Augustine saw a beauty in music as it formed part of our striving and journeying. The beauty of music is surpassed by the journey of Wisdom to give us sight and bring lost people home. Augustine's vision of Wisdom's healing journey as a beautiful, well composed medicine cabinet forms his invitation to modern theologians. The question is, Will we approach the medicine cabinet with the appropriate mindset?