This research will examine the emergence of spirituality of the apostolic period. The research will set forth the context in which Christian spirituality unfolded in the first century A.D., discussing in particular evidence of how the apostles made connections from spiritual experience to the shared experience of faith in the Christian community.
When the concluding prayer of St. Augustine's Confessions declares that God intimated his Word in heaven and earth through the figure of Jesus, it is the Church that is said to have been predestined "before all times, without morning and evening." Augustine continues:
Then you began to work out in time what you had predestined, so that you might reveal what was hidden and bring order into our disorder; for our sins were over us and we had gone away from you, into the dark deep, and your good Spirit was borne above us to help us in due season. And you . . . established the authority of your Book between those above who were to be docile to you, and those under, who were to be subject to them. And you gathered together the society of the unbelievers into one membership, so that the zeal of the faithful might appear, and they might bring forth for you works of mercy, distributing even to the poor their earthly riches so that they might obtain heavenly riches . . . All these things we see and they are very good, because you see them in us--you who have given us the Spirit by which to see them and in them to love you (Augustine, 1963, p. 348; emphasis in original).
The nexus that Augustine declares of the Church with spirituality, as an outgrowth of spirituality, and as the dynamic resolution of paradox that spirituality may entail is difficult to overstate. One need not get into details of the vexed doctrine of predestination to see that, by the time Augustine articulated this view of spirituality in A.D. 401, the tightly rationalized structures of Christian thought on the subject could b...