Catholic Migrant Identity After Augustine, Bonaventure, and Ratzinger

A decade ago, I made a move from Australia to the United States and served for a year as a visiting research Professor at DePaul University. This brief period of migration—one overlaid on my experience of already being a migrant to Australia—provided an experiential backdrop to what would later become my major research project that year, focusing on a theological account of migrant identity.

In this context I found that the fifth-century North African bishop Augustine of Hippo—arguably the Church’s foremost migrant thinker—provided the key theological backdrop to the research that would unfold. That link between Augustinian theology and migrant identity would continue to occupy me long after I finished up in the United States and took on new twists and turns, when I had occasion to delve more deeply into the works of a second Augustinian theologian, the late Joseph Ratzinger, whose links to Augustine are apparent in his works on love and in his interest in a third Augustinian theologian, the Franciscan Doctor of the Church St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio.

In what follows, I will lay out some broad brushstrokes of the research on a theological engagement with Catholic migrant identity, and arrange this presentation around the three thinkers mentioned above: Augustine, Bonaventure, and Ratzinger. In elaborating the thought of each I also hope to weave three points through the argumentation. First, I highlight how an Augustinian theology of love forms one important golden thread connecting all three thinkers, a golden thread that helps us make sense of migrant identity, in particular Catholic migrant identity. Second, I identify the search for a home outside one’s place of origin as the connecting Augustinian theme that also helps us understand Catholic migrant identity. Finally, I argue that the experiences of the Catholic migrant forms a mirror that reflects back upon the experiences of every Catholic.

Augustine

When talking about migrant identity and Augustine, what is often brought up is the idea in his City of God, in which the City of God sojourns as a pilgrim through the City of Man. What often follows is the shorthand of “pilgrim equals migrant” which, because it is shorthand, overlooks something more theologically foundational.

To this, we need to consider Augustine’s Confessions. In particular, we should consider his most oft-quoted line found in the opening chapter of the Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee” (I.1.1). This one line encapsulates the most foundational claim of Christian anthropology, and frames the puzzle of the Catholic migrant: before we are thinkers, we are restless lovers. For Augustine, as well as Bonaventure and Ratzinger, all theological thinking begins with the heart that loves, for love underwrites our conception of self and gives direction to our thoughts, words, and deeds.

A very deliberate tie can be made between this directive power of love and migrant identity. This tie is apparent to migrants who made their transitus to their country of domicile after their formative years in their country of origin. More to the point, it is most viscerally felt when migrants settle into the adventure of their new home country, whilst simultaneously yearning for the familiarity and security of the old home country, giving rise to an odd sense of homesickness whilst at home.

How to make sense of this homesickness? I suggest that it boils down to sin, which has an impact on our love, the fallout of which the migrant experiences in a particular way. The relevant question here concerns what sin does to our love, and how this is inflected in the experience of the migrant.

For Augustine, our love for God as the highest love spills over to a proper ordering and cohesion to our secondary loves and therefore cohesion to our sense of identity. In explaining what sin does to our love, Augustine follows Origen of Alexandria’s maxim: where there is sin, there is multiplicity. Put another way, sin diverts our love away from God as the highest love, leading to a disordering of our loves. Sin splinters love and ultimately, self. In short, sinners develop the theological equivalent of split personalities, and our divided loves lead to a whole host of often conflicting versions of ourselves. This is why Augustine, when speaking of his life of sin in Book II of the Confessions, says, “I have been fruitlessly divided. I turned from unity in You, to be lost in multiplicity” (II.2.1).

We now must ask how the splintering of love applies to the theme of migrant identity. To answer this, we need to be aware of the twofold challenge that migrants generally face in their country of residence. The first challenge is that they are not born in the country of residence, and in varying ways this will, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, permanently mark the migrant as an outsider. The second, more pointed challenge flows from the first. Because they are not born in the country of residence, the migrant’s allegiances will in various ways remain a live question, especially in times of societal stress. The constant question to the migrant is whether, as an outsider living in the midst of the native-born, their loyalty rests on the country of residence or elsewhere. What complicates matters is that many migrants often make no attempt to prove their patriotism in such binary terms. Indeed, many migrants celebrate their previous belonging whilst in the country of residence. It can be at very quotidian levels, such as through food or language, or in terms of allegiances to the symbols or institutions of the country of origin, be they flags, festivals, political and social organizations.

In response to migrants’ celebrations of multiple belonging, political commentators in the country of residence often assert that a migrant’s splintered love for both country of origin and country of residence foments disunity within the latter. Seen in an Augustinian light, we can see that the criticism by such political pundits of a migrant’s love for multiple polities is a kind of civic attempt at critiquing the multiplicity of loves brought about by sin. Furthermore, the cure to such divided love also seems to be a civic parallel to Origen’s point that the antidote to multiplicity is singularity through the help of virtue, for implicit in the criticism of the vice of migrant’s divided love is that the only cure is the virtue of a singular and exclusive love of the country of residence. Insofar as migrants are patriots of multiple countries, they are regarded as secular sinners.

Having problematized the impasse with Augustine, the question now becomes one of whether he can help us resolve this impasse. A side note is required here. If multiplicity is an inescapable human condition, then theologically speaking, the kind of multiplicity the Catholic migrant manifests is not something confined to migrants. We can put this more constructively and say that the kind of multiplicity manifested in the migrant is not problematic but is indeed iconic of every person. Indeed, in their embodied experience of multiplicity, migrants can be regarded as an image of the Church. Framing the migrant as a secular sinner because of their outward multiplicity, articulates an internal reality that affects both the migrant and the native-born. Set against the backdrop of Augustine, the multiplicity of the migrant is a symptom, one of the many outworkings of our division of loves, which is in turn brought about as a result of sin. If everyone is marked by multiplicity, as Augustine claims we are, it means that the migrant’s externalized multiplicity should bring to our attention subtler multiplicities within each and every one of us.

We can push the envelope further. The temptation here would be to apply the rubric of “multiplicity bad,” therefore “unity good,” and to try to expunge multiplicity as a prerequisite to unity. This would not be in keeping with a careful reading of Augustine’s theological critique of our divided love. Remember that Augustine did not say that he was simply divided, but that he was “fruitlessly divided.” I suggest that Augustinian theology engages the problem of multiplicity not by expunging multiplicity but by transforming it, from the fruitless multiplicity to a fruitful, redemptive multiplicity. To this, let us now go to St. Bonaventure.

Bonaventure

Though the extent of Bonaventure’s continuation of Augustine’s legacy cannot be exhaustively explored here, the link between both doctors is most apparent in the centrality of love both give in their respective accounts of the economy of salvation. More specifically, the link between both doctors becomes evident in the way both paint a picture in which love is essential in either dispersing a union or drawing the many into a unity.

The key Bonaventuran theme for our purposes is his take on the ancient theme of the coincidence of opposites, in which everything has an opposite with which it is united through a mediator. Bonaventure grounds his take on the coincidence of opposites on the patristic positing of Christ as the Divine Logos, the Word of God and also the divine underwriting of all creation. For Bonaventure, the Logos was not something extrinsic to creaturely existence. Since it is through the Logos that all creatures were made (as the Gospel of John’s prologue indicates), the Word is in fact the very ground of every creature’s existence and an integral part of each creature’s structure.

From the cosmos’ inception, the Logos stands as the point of unity for all creatures. If it is through the Word that all things were made, then for Bonaventure, every creature that exists and every creature that ever will exist is, in the face of the array of differences between each one, nonetheless an articulation of that same Word. Even more relevant is Bonaventure’s apprehension of the Logos encompassing not just everything, but everything and its opposite. This is because the Word itself is everything and its opposite, something Bonaventure expresses best in his Itinerarium. In Christ, Bonaventure says, one sees at once “the first and last, the highest and the lowest, the circumference and the center, the Alpha and the Omega, the caused and the cause, the Creator and the creature, that is the book within and without.”[1]

For Bonaventure, Christ is the mediator for all things and their opposites, because Christ is also the crucial mediator that holds the Trinity together. The Logos is not one isolated monad within the Trinity, but a person who, because he is a person, intimately inheres to another person.[2] More specifically, the Logos is a person who brings into himself and shares the characteristics of two other apparent opposites, the Father, who is all generator, and the Spirit, who is all generated.[3] Like the Spirit, the Logos is the generation of the Father (“born of the Father before all ages,” as we confess in the Creed), yet like the Father, the Son is also one from whom the Spirit proceeds (since the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, as the Creed also professes). The Logos mirroring both the Father and the Spirit is the reason why the Son reveals the fullness of the Triune God to all who encounter him. Moreover, the Logos does not reduce or eliminate the particularities of either generator (Father) and generated (Spirit) to fit into a homogenized unity. For Bonaventure, unity in the Logos presumes the integrity of both Father as Father and Spirit as Spirit, since the Logos is but the inhering of both Father and Spirit in their fullness.[4]

Let us circle back to our consideration of a Catholic migrant’s celebration of multiple belongings. If we follow Bonaventure, and if Christ holds together what seem like opposites by bearing the features of both, then our multiplicitous loves cohere with each other so long as they remain anchored in the unifying love of the Logos. In the Logos, our manifold loves no longer oppose each other, because the Logos returns to unity what sin had split into the multiple. Each constituent identity is now united with other constituent identities for, in the Logos, each constituent presumes the other rather than opposes the other. Furthermore, each constituent identity will be transformed in the Logos, though that transformation does not require that constituent to surrender its integrity to be harmonized in the Logos or to one another. Instead, the transformation in the Word of God results in each constituent arriving at a greater integrity. In other words, the closer one’s love is integrated into the Word of God, the more the one that loves becomes itself. What is more, the more everything is ordered towards the Logos and become truly themselves, the more they cohere with everything else, including their opposites.

At first, the image of the final reconciliation of all loves in the Word might sound abstract, even pollyannaish. However, another dimension that the coincidence of opposites can speak into is a reconciliation of opposite experiences by the same person. The migrant would experience the coincidence of opposites most viscerally in the experience of losses from the country of origin the more one integrates into the country of domicile (I have written more about how Bonaventure might help us face the experience of loss more generally elsewhere). This can be the loss of a cultural marker, historic home, or even constituent identity, points of familiarity, security, and even identity that once grounded the migrant before their transitus. These losses are often met with a poignancy and even regret, and such poignancy and regret over these losses are powerful tokens of a love of that which was lost. The love of what was lost might be coupled with a desire for its opposite, namely the restoration of that which was lost. As the coincidence of opposites, Christ could also be the locus of bringing together the experience of loss and its hoped-for restoration. This experiential question opens up a pastoral one, which is answered with reference to Ratzinger.

Ratzinger

While Bonaventure lays out the metaphysical basis for the cohering of loves that are splintered, a pastoral question for the migrant remains: what does the cohering of opposites in Christ mean for Catholic migrant identity, in particular with respect to the migrant’s desire for a home when one’s original home is lost? We can frame the puzzle another way: how might this cohering of loves in Christ produce a locus of stability that underwrites the identity of the Catholic migrant? It is this question that Ratzinger helped me answer.

When reflecting on my own migrant journey, I presumed at first that my locus of stability was geographically based; by this I mean that my identity was first grounded in one territory, and now it is grounded in another territory. Thus, when I started the research on Augustine and migrant identity, I focused on how migrants negotiate the multiplication of geographical affiliations when stricken from one’s original homeland.[5] Upon reflection, I now realize that the migrant faces a much subtler challenge, for the migrant’s most immediate point of interface in the country of residence is not geography, but the persons living within that geography. It is not simply that where I find my stability has to shift. Rather, the whole axis for that locus of stability must undergo a shift. It is right at this point that Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity becomes particularly relevant, or more specifically, a segment that explored the implications of the clause in the creed that says “I believe in God.”

Ratzinger begins his exploration by focusing on Israel’s option to refer to God with the Hebrew prefix “El” (e.g. Elohim, El-Shaddai, etc). This seems like a simple move at first glance, but Ratzinger regards this as an important religious turning point for Israel. This is because the so-called El-religions, Ratzinger says, are “characterized chiefly by the social and personal character of the divinity.”[6] In referring to God with the prefix “El,” Israel’s God was no longer a geographical god tied to a place, no longer a numen locale. Instead, Ratzinger says, Israel shifted the axis in its reference to God away from geography, making the God of Israel a personal god or a numen personale. This shift from a geographical to a personal god was highly significant, not only because it distinguished God from the geographically based deities of the surrounding nations. For Ratzinger, a numen personale overcomes a distinct geographical limitation within the numen locale. Ratzinger lays out the problem in this way:

We should recall that the religious experience of the human race has continually been kindled at holy places, where for some reason or other the “quite other,” the divine, becomes particularly palpable to man . . . but the danger immediately arises that in man’s eyes the spot where he experienced the divine and the divine itself merge into each other, so that he believes in a special presence of the divine at that particular spot and thinks he cannot find it in equal measure elsewhere.[7]

In other words, a geographical god is only potent in particular places and not in others. By contrast, if Israel’s God was a personal god, the link to the divine is anchored on a personal plane as opposed to a geographical one, what Ratzinger calls “the plane of the I and you, not on the plane of the spatial.”[8] In other words, the biblical God is not the God of the lands of Canaan, Egypt, or Babylon, but of the persons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

What are the implications of Israel’s switch to a personal God? First, Ratzinger says that a numen personale is a God whose presence is experienced so long as the personal relationship between God and believer endures, regardless of where the believer is. In Ratzinger’s words, God “is no longer bound to one spot, but present and powerful wherever man is.”[9] Furthermore, when divine presence and potency is decoupled from geography, a numen personale becomes a God who is more intimate with a person, regardless of where that person is. This innovation in apprehending a personal God survives the transition from the Old Testament to the New. The numen personale, Ratzinger writes, becomes “the one sustaining element not only of the religion of Israel, but also of the New Testament faith: the emanation of God’s personality, the understanding of God on the plane defined by the I-and-You relationship.”[10]

At the same time that a numen personale makes God more intimate, Ratzinger also observes that it makes God transcendent. In Ratzinger’s words, the numen personale “moves [God] away into the transcendence of the illimitable.”[11] A personal God is a transcendent God both not anywhere in particular and also always to be found. It is God’s transcendence, Ratzinger says, that makes it more credible to believe in a God who is always near his people. Furthermore, Ratzinger observes that if God is transcendent, he is also omnipotent. Whereas a geographical god is only potent in certain places, a personal god’s potency remains operative because of God’s faithfulness to a relationship with a person. It is faithfulness to a person, not geography, that charts either the exercise or withholding of God’s power.

It is this shift from a geographical to a personal God that underwrites the shift in the locus of stability the Catholic migrant must undergo. It is not only sociologically acceptable to want community as a locus of stability; it may even be theologically imperative for the Catholic migrant to shift that locus of stability, not in terms of shifting from one territory to another, but in terms of shifting from a geographical plane to Ratzinger’s “plane of I and you.” Indeed, Ratzinger notes the necessity of precisely this shift in axis for the Christian life when, as Pope Benedict, he wrote his encyclical Spe Salvi. Benedict highlights a crucial link between God’s kingdom, God’s personal love and our locus of stability. In Benedict’s own words:

His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. . . . His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is “truly” life (§31).

Here, Benedict crystallizes what the Catholic migrant aspires to, a shift in the locus of stability grounded in the gift and reception of love between persons. This shift in axis takes place on three levels. On a theological level, this means a shift from an affiliation to a land towards an affiliation to the person of Jesus Christ. On a pastoral level, it could mean a fine-tuning of the migrant’s locus of stability to the persons in the community of believers in the country of domicile. At a spiritual level, if the God of Israel retains a boundless potency, as Ratzinger puts it, it also has implications for the spiritual life of the migrant who can, in times of vulnerability, be tempted to nostalgically long for lands past, presuming that God was only faithful in that past geographical context. If God is personal rather than geographical, the spiritual challenge for the migrant would be to hold fast to their relationship with the person of God and, wherever the migrant is planted, trust in God’s personal and loving providence, especially as it is mediated through the Church, which is mediated in turn by the love of persons within the Church.

The reader gets a sense of this Ratzingerian completion of this Augustinian movement even in the life of Augustine himself, especially when he recounts the role of St. Ambrose of Milan in his biography. Most of us might be familiar with the role St. Ambrose plays in Augustine’s conversion, and attribute it to Ambrose’s combination of intellectual prowess and personal faith. The Confessions, however, highlights a subtle but highly relevant detail. In Book V, Augustine mentions the paternal relationship with Ambrose. Its impact is nothing short of striking. Ambrose, Augustine says, “took me up as a father takes a newborn baby in his arms, and in the best tradition of bishops, he prized me as a foreign sojourner” (V.13.23).

Mediated by Ambrose, the Church welcomed Augustine not only because he is an intellectual, but precisely because he was a foreigner, far from his North African home. In his commentary on this passage of the Confessions, James K. A. Smith says that this relationship was an important antecedent to the proofs of the Christian faith, precisely because, Smith says:

More than arguments or proofs, Ambrose offered the seeker Augustine something he’d been hungering for: a home, sanctuary, rest. For this refugee in a new city, arriving with questions and so much unsettled in his life, the cathedral in Milan became an outpost of the home this spiritual emigre had been seeking.[12]

Conclusion

We have seen how Augustinian theology, from Augustine himself through to Ratzinger, provides an invaluable lens to diagnose the migrant’s search—and ultimately all our searches—for a home, all while afflicted with the splintering of loves and selves. Stricken by sin, these loves and selves are multiple, and that division is not healed by pretending that multiplicity does not exist. Instead, Augustine alerts us to the importance of undergoing a shift from a fruitless multiplicity to a redemptive multiplicity, in which our splintered loves find a real and lasting point of convergence.

Migrant or otherwise, our splintered loves not only converge on the person of Jesus as the coincidence of opposites. It is the person of the Lord that is also where the hearts of both migrant and native-born find the home that will outlast every geographical home. More to the point, it is the body of the person of Christ, which we call the Church, sacramentally mediated through the persons that make up the Church, that constitutes the site of this sure refuge for hearts looking for that final place of harmonization.

In Book XIX of his City of God, Augustine was well aware that our natural endowments, such as our geographical homes, integrated as they are with the City of Man, will go the way of all temporal things, while the heavenly peace given by God, is unshakable and everlasting. But the comforting endnote that Augustinian theology provides is that because of that peace that comes with abiding in a personal God, we can hope that when the scroll of history is rolled up even these fleeting earthly things—the migrant’s historical identity and home—also stay with us in this time and in the time to come. In the words of Augustine himself: “All our natural endowments will be both good and everlasting. . . . This is what is meant by that consummate beatitude, that limitless perfection, that end that never ends” (XIX:10).

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