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The first verses of Genesis tell us that due to the hand of God creation gained a shape. A form. The recognition of this truth is central to existence. It tells us that there is an order of things. And it tells us that God is real.
This recognition, this seeing of things as they are, comes for some later in life, for some earlier, and for some it doesn’t come at all. For St. Augustine of Hippo, the great Church Father, it came after a lengthy period of searching for Truth.
In his Confessions, which details his profound conversion to the faith, St. Augustine offers an exegesis of Genesis, particularly on the text’s presentation of the birth of time and creation. This sort of expansive, almost cosmic vision, comes only after he has shown us his formation in the faith—his aforementioned search.
In Book XII, the penultimate book of Confessions, he says the earth was once “invisible and without form, a profound abyss, upon which there was no light, for it was altogether formless.” For Augustine, this means “there was a certain formlessness without anything to specify it.” Genesis, as Augustine reminds us, demonstrates how God shaped and formed the earth and then brought about both light and darkness, or night and day.
But then he shows us that this idea of formation—of form itself—and of light and darkness, not merely night and day, didn’t stop after the primordial creation event. It is something that constantly occurs, in the sense that God desires us, the creatures made in His image and likeness, to be properly formed. Augustine says, for instance, that the “human mind can but aim at a sort of lightless knowledge—or, if you prefer, enlightened ignorance,” which is what happens to us when we do not seek proper formation, content as we are to remain comfortable and safe. But just as there is stasis, there is also backsliding.
Which leads to an important, if deeply troubling, question: What happens when we as a people initiate a project meant to dismantle created forms?
The late Pope Benedict XVI—who, it must be said, considered himself to be somewhat of an Augustinian—identified an emerging “dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” Form educates and points us to God. Without form, we are left with nothing but ourselves.
Augustine seemed to recognize this. He tells us that “where there is no form and no order, nothing comes and nothing passes away, and as a consequence there are no days nor any changes to mark the duration of time.” In a sense, it would be the reversal of the created order. Though such a negation is impossible, we can see how this project to dismantle forms can cause significant and severe confusion, blinding us to the truth of things.
Augustine notes this in his Confessions. During his attempt to understand total formlessness, which was when he had not yet grasped Genesis, he says:
My mind was in a whirl of hideous and horrible forms which utterly denied the order of nature, yet they were forms all the same; and I conceived the formless not as totally lacking form but as possessing such a form that, if it were seen my senses would recoil from it strangeness and grotesqueness and my human weakness be utterly confounded.
If he were to conceive of the formless, he reasons, he “should strip away every smallest vestige of every sort of form.” This, he says, he “could not do.” He needed Revelation—as the Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., liked to say—to complete his reason, so he could understand scripture as best as he could.
But his description of his attempt to understand nothingness—“hideous and horrible forms which utterly denied the order of nature” and the “strangeness and grotesqueness” of something without form—is apt, because it shows us the challenge of trying to find the Truth in a post-truth modern age.
It’s no secret that secularization is gaining speed. The Public Religion Research Institute learned that, as of 2022, some twenty-seven percent of Americans do not have any sort of religious affiliation. It’s worse in Europe—a 2018 story in The Guardian featured this for a headline: “‘Christianity as a default is gone:’ the rise of a non-Christian Europe.”
It might seem strange to cite him, but Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, provides us with a good way to think about what our retreat from form has done to us: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
Ours is an age that has decided to trivialize the liturgy, filling it with showtune-like hymns; has decided to render the male and female forms as meaningless; has decided to turn toward ugliness in art and literature and architecture, as Roger Scruton so often demonstrated; has decided to remove any sense of telos, or end, from education or career, emphasizing money and prestige as the things that matter.
All that is solid has melted into the air, and so, as a consequence, all that is holy has been profaned. Such is life in a time of semi-formlessness.
But nothing is new under the sun, as Ecclesiates reminds us, and we can note that Augustine’s time was oddly similar to ours. Some differences, too, to be sure. But his was also an age obsessed with prestige, just as he was, for a time; it was also an age awash with strange beliefs—consider, for instance, the various Gnostic sects, including the Manicheans, of which Augustine was a part. It was an age distracted by spectacle—for him, it was the theater, with its “unreal sufferings” that did not move people to “aid the sufferer but merely to be sorry for him”—and one where arbitrary rule-following in schools seemed to have supplanted genuine formation.
What this might mean, then, is that, to help us see the truth of things—that God is real, that all things have forms because God gave them forms—we would need an Augustine, having been awakened by another Ambrose, to show us that our pursuits are wanting, if we do not give ourselves fully and completely to God. As Augustine pointed out, and as was mentioned previously, the light-dark dichotomy does not only refer to the initial creation event. It also refers to us human beings, who are constantly being formed.
So, to prevent our inner lives from becoming “a profound abyss, upon which there was no light,” we need a guide. We need someone to show us that the ideologies and beliefs we cling to as substitutes for God are not enough. In short, we need another Augustine to help us to move our gaze upward.
But we can also turn to the original. We can sit with Augustine’s Confessions, and pray that grace, as it did with him, works on our souls.
Image from MeisterDrucke
