The Sea in a Seashell

Nearly everyone who has sat through a sermon on Trinity Sunday has heard it. Saint Augustine is walking on the beach, worn down by the mystery of the Trinity, and he comes upon a child pouring the sea into a hole in the sand with a shell. He tells the child it cannot be done. The child tells him the same, and vanishes. The story takes a minute to tell, it has been told for five hundred years, and most of us could not say where we first heard it.

Three things are worth knowing about it. The first is that it is a legend, and a late one, and that Augustine never told it of himself. The second is that it is nonetheless one of the truest things ever said about him, because he said it himself, in other words, more than once. The third is that the story is usually aimed at the wrong people. It is remembered as a warning to the clever, and it is that. But it was painted, for the most part, on the walls of churches that belonged to friars who read Augustine for a living, and they did not put it there to tell anyone to stop thinking.

Let this be said plainly at the outset, then. What follows is the story as the Church has loved it, an honest account of where it came from, and a look at what Augustine actually wrote on the shore of that sea. The last of these is the part worth keeping.

Part One — The Story as the Church Has Told It

It is told this way. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, had been at work for years on a book about the Trinity. He had gone over the ground until the ground gave way under him. One God; three Persons; the Father not the Son, the Son not the Spirit, the Spirit neither of them; each wholly God; not three gods but one. He believed every word of it. He wanted to understand it, and understanding would not come.

So he went down to the sea. Hippo sat on the African coast, and the water was a short walk from his church. He went along the shore turning the mystery over, as a man turns a stone in his hand, and there on the sand he came upon a small boy.

The boy had dug a hole. He was running down to the surf with a shell, filling it, running back, and emptying it into the hole, and then down to the surf again. Augustine watched him for a while, as a man watches a child when he would rather not think, and at last he asked him what he was doing.

“I am going to put the whole sea into this hole.”

Augustine smiled, as anyone would. The sea is very great, he said, and the hole is very small, and the shell is smaller still. It cannot be done.

The boy looked up at him. Sooner, he said, will I empty the sea into this hole with this shell than you will fit the mystery of the Trinity into your head. And then he was gone. Augustine looked at the hole, and at the empty beach, and understood that he had been answered. In some tellings the child was an angel. In others, and the painters generally preferred this, the child was our Lord himself, come in the shape of a little one to a man who had written so much about becoming one.

That is the whole story. It has no second act. In the oldest English telling the boy has a spoon rather than a shell, and the hole is a pit, and the moral attached is a stern one: that simple and unlearned men should not presume to muse on the high things of the Godhead further than the faith informs them. The shell won out over the spoon, and in time it became one of the saint’s emblems in art, beside the book and the burning heart. What the legend leaves unsaid is whether Augustine went home and finished the book. That silence is one of the places where the legend and the man part company, and we will come back to it.

Part Two — Where the Story Came From

Augustine never told this story, and no one who knew him told it either.

The Confessions, which hide nothing of his youth, have no beach in them. Possidius, the bishop of Calama who lived under his roof and wrote his life within a few years of his death in 430, does not have it. The sermons do not have it. Nothing in the eight centuries that followed has it, so far as anyone has found. When the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine assembled the Golden Legend around 1260, the fullest storehouse of saints’ lore the Middle Ages produced, he gave Augustine a long entry drawn carefully from the Confessions, and the child is not in it.

The earliest witnesses scholars can point to are late medieval, and they are pictures before they are words. Benozzo Gozzoli, a pupil of Fra Angelico, painted the life of Augustine on the walls of the apse of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano in 1464 and 1465, and the twelfth scene shows the bishop bent toward a child at the water’s edge, with three shells on the sand around the boy for the three Persons. Then in 1483 William Caxton, printing the Golden Legend in English at Westminster, added the story to Augustine’s life on his own authority and said why. He had seen it painted on an altar of Saint Augustine in the church of the Dominicans at Antwerp, and he could not find it in any copy of the Legend he possessed, in Latin, French, or English. He put it in anyway. The printer’s honesty is worth a moment. He tells us the story came to him from a picture, and he tells us it was not in his sources, and he was right on both counts.

From there it spread as such stories do. The Augustinian friars, who claimed the saint as their father, took it up; it entered the sermon books; by the sixteenth century it was being engraved in Germany and painted across Italy and the Low Countries. Botticelli set it on the predella of an altarpiece for the church of San Barnaba in Florence. Garofalo painted the boy with his spoon at the saint’s feet. Rubens painted it for the Augustinians of Prague in the 1630s, the bishop on the shore in full pontificals and the child beside him with the sea behind. A story that no one had written down before 1483 was, within two centuries, one of the two or three things everyone knew about the greatest of the Latin Fathers.

What a Legend Is For

None of this makes the story false in the sense that matters. A legend of this kind does not report; it portrays. The Church has never asked anyone to believe that an angel stood on the sand at Hippo, and she loses nothing if no one did. What she has done is let the faithful remember a true thing about a true man through a story that did not happen, which is a very old way of teaching and the way our Lord himself taught when he spoke of a sower and a prodigal.

The question to put to such a story is not whether it occurred but whether it is faithful, and the test of that is whether the man it is told about would have recognized himself in it. He would have. He wrote it first.

Part Three — What Augustine Actually Wrote

The book the legend puts in Augustine’s hands is real, and it very nearly defeated him.

He began De Trinitate about the year 400, a few years after he was made a bishop, and did not finish it for the better part of twenty years. He said so himself. In a letter to Aurelius, the bishop of Carthage, written when at last the fifteen books were done, he tells him that he began them as a young man and published them as an old one, and he explains the delay. Some of the books had been taken from him before they were finished and corrected, and had gone about in a form he had not approved, and the discouragement of it had nearly made him abandon the work altogether. He finished it, he says, because the brethren would not let him stop.

So the picture of a man worn thin by the Trinity is not a painter’s invention. Neither is the lesson. The first book opens by warning against those who try to reason their way to God from the things of the body, or from the nature of the soul, or from their own ingenuity, before they have believed. The fifteenth closes with a prayer, not a proof. He asks God to let him remember him, understand him, and love him; and then he asks that whatever in those fifteen books came from God might be acknowledged by God’s people, and whatever came from himself might be pardoned by God and by them. That is a man setting down a shell at the edge of the water.

He had the sea in his mind long before any painter gave him a beach. The Confessions open with it. He asks how he can call upon God to come into him when there is nothing in him that could hold God; whether heaven and earth contain their Maker because he fills them, or whether he fills them and overflows; and where, when heaven and earth are full, the rest of him goes. The man asking that question did not need an angel to tell him the hole was too small. He already knew that he was the hole.

And in a sermon on the first verses of Saint John, preached to ordinary people in his own church, he put the whole of the child’s rebuke into four words. Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus. We are speaking of God, he told them; what wonder if you do not understand? For if you understand, it is not God. That is the shell and the sea without the shell and the sea. The legend only gave the sentence a beach to stand on.

But he never let that humility become an excuse for laziness, and this is the part of him the beach leaves out. The same man who said if you comprehend it, it is not God told his people, in another sermon, to believe in order that they might understand: crede ut intelligas. The verse of Isaias he quoted more often than any other — unless you believe, you shall not understand, as the Old Latin he used rendered it — was for him a programme, not a prohibition. Faith comes first. Understanding follows faith and never catches it. The gap between them is not a failure of the mind; it is the shape of a creature.

Part Four — What the Church Means by a Mystery

Here the layman is owed a definition, because the word has been worn smooth.

A mystery, in the Church’s sense, is not a puzzle. A puzzle is a thing we do not know yet. A mystery is a thing we could not have known on our own and cannot use up once we have been told it. The Baltimore Catechism, in its lesson on the Unity and Trinity of God, asks whether we can fully understand how three Divine Persons are one and the same God, answers that we cannot, because it is a mystery, and then gives the definition every Catholic child once learned by heart: a mystery is a truth which we cannot fully understand. Not a truth we cannot understand at all. A truth we cannot fully understand. The whole of the beach is in that adverb.

The First Vatican Council said the same thing with the care of a council. In its constitution on the Catholic faith, in 1870, it taught that the mysteries of faith by their very nature so exceed the created intellect that even after they have been revealed and received by faith they remain veiled, so long as we are pilgrims in this life. And in the same chapter it taught that reason, enlightened by faith, when it seeks earnestly, devoutly, and soberly, does attain some understanding of the mysteries, and a most fruitful one, from the likeness of things it knows naturally and from the connection of the mysteries with one another and with man’s last end. Then it added that reason never becomes able to grasp them the way it grasps its own proper objects. Some understanding, and a most fruitful one; never comprehension. That is a council describing a child with a shell.

The Athanasian Creed is older and blunter. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible; and yet not three incomprehensibles, but one. The Latin word is immensus, unmeasured, without measure, which is a word one uses of the sea. And the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, laid down the rule that governs every likeness we draw for God, the shamrock and the sun and the three states of water included: however great a likeness is noted between the Creator and the creature, a greater unlikeness must be noted between them. Every picture of the Trinity is a shell. It holds real water. It does not hold the sea.

Part Five — The Hole Was Dug in Eden

The hole in the sand is older than Hippo. It was dug in a garden.

It is often said that Adam had the tree of knowledge, and it is worth being exact, because the text says the opposite. Of every tree of paradise he might eat; of the tree of knowledge of good and evil he was told not to eat, under pain of death. That was the one tree he did not have. What he had was better, and Genesis mentions it almost in passing, as a thing too ordinary to explain. They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in paradise at the afternoon air. God came down in the cool of the day and walked with the man. Whatever Adam knew of God he knew the way a child knows a father, by conversation, in the measure a creature can carry. The shell was being filled by the sea itself.

The serpent’s proposal was that the shell could hold the sea. Eat, he said, and your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Adam reached for comprehension without the Giver, on his own terms, all at once. Augustine saw the irony fifteen centuries before anyone painted him a beach: man would have become far more like God by clinging to God than by presuming to be a god on his own account. And what Adam got was what the child promised the bishop, a dry hole. The eyes of them both were opened, the text says, and they perceived themselves to be naked. That is the whole harvest of the tree of knowledge taken without God: a man’s knowledge of his own exposure.

Notice what was lost first. Not knowledge. The walk. They heard the voice and hid themselves, and the conversation that had been the source of everything they knew was broken from their side before God had said a word. Then came the sentence. The garden was shut, the cherubim and the flaming sword were set at its gate, and the tree of life was barred, lest the man put forth his hand and take of it and live for ever. So the Fall took both: the walk with God, and the tree Adam had been free to eat from. The one tree he had grasped at he was left holding, and it gave him nothing.

The Church’s theologians have named what remained. Saint Thomas lists four wounds that original sin left in our nature, and the first of them, the wound in the intellect, is ignorance; after it come malice in the will and weakness and disorder in the appetites. The Council of Trent taught that Adam lost the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted, and the Catechism says that human nature, deprived of that original holiness, is wounded in its own powers and subject to ignorance, suffering, and death. Fallen man is a man trying to carry the sea in his two hands, in the dark, and insisting that he can. Every heresy about the Trinity, every tower at Babel, and every prophecy chart with a date on it comes out of that garden by the same gate.

Our Lord has a phrase for the place outside. He speaks of the exterior darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and he uses it of those who are shut out of the kingdom at the end. Eden’s gate is the first of those shuttings-out, and every other one in Scripture is a repetition of it.

The Walk Resumed

But the walk was never withdrawn for good. Enoch walked with God, and was seen no more, because God took him. Noah walked with God. Abraham was told to walk before him. And then the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and the walk became literal again, on dusty roads, with men who did not understand him. On the way to Emmaus two of them could not make sense of the Scriptures until he walked beside them and opened them, and only afterward did they say that their hearts had been burning within them while he spoke in the way. The pattern never varies. God comes down to walk; understanding follows the walk and never precedes it. That is crede ut intelligas with a road under it.

Which means the legend is the garden reversed, in miniature. A man is walking by the sea alone, working at the knowledge of God by his own strength and failing at it. God comes down in the shape of a child, at the afternoon air, and resumes the conversation that was broken at the beginning. And the child is Adam’s opposite in every particular. He knows the sea will not fit. He is not ashamed of his shell. He does not hide. Adam reached for the fruit; the child reaches for the shell; and the whole difference between the two trees is in that reach. That is what our Lord meant when he said that unless we become as little children we shall not enter the kingdom. The way back into the garden does not run through the tree of knowledge. It runs through a tree of another kind, which the Church keeps on her altars, and which this journal has written of elsewhere: by a tree we were lost, and by a tree we are saved.

Part Six — The Water in the Shell

The part of the story no one preaches is the water.

The child’s shell was not empty. Every trip he made to the surf he came back with real seawater, the same water that ran out to the horizon, and he poured it into the hole, and the hole held it. He did not have the sea. He had a shellful of the sea, and nothing he had was false. That is the layman’s portion, and it is not a small one.

What the Church gives us of God is not a model or a guess. The Creed we say on Sunday, the sign we make with our hand, the Name into which we were baptized: these are the sea itself, in the measure a creature can carry. When a mother teaches a child to say In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, the child is holding a shellful of the Trinity, and it is really the Trinity. He will not understand it at seven. He will not understand it at seventy. Neither did Augustine. But what he has is true, and he can drink from it. Our Lord thanked his Father for hiding these things from the wise and prudent and revealing them to little ones, and the legend is, among other things, a picture of that verse.

That is why the story was painted in the houses of men who studied. The friars at San Gimignano and Antwerp were not warning themselves off theology. They were being reminded, in their own churches, why they did it and where it ended. Augustine’s twenty years were not wasted; the fifteen books are still read. Saint Thomas Aquinas, having written more about God than any man before or since, laid down his pen after Mass one morning in December 1273 and told his companion that everything he had written seemed to him like straw beside what he had seen. He did not say it was false. He said it was straw. Straw is real. It is what a man carries home from a field he cannot carry.

Two Ways to Lose the Sea

There is a discipline in this, and it cuts two ways.

The first edge is the one the legend is usually used for, and it is a good one. Ecclesiasticus has it: seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy ability; but the things that God hath commanded thee, think on them always, and in many of his works be not curious. The man who believes the hole can hold the sea is the man who, finding that it will not, decides there is no sea. Most of the great errors about the Trinity began as attempts to make it fit. Arius made the Son a creature because a begotten God would not go into his head. Sabellius made the three Persons three masks of one actor for the same reason. Each of them emptied the shell to make the mystery manageable, and each was left with a dry hole. The orthodox doctrine is the one that keeps the water and admits the sea.

The other edge is for those who, hearing the story, decide the beach is not worth walking. The child did not tell Augustine to go home. He told him what he could and could not do, and left him on the shore with a shell in his hand. The faithful are not forbidden to think about God. They are forbidden to think they have finished.

Part Seven — The Child in the Library

The beach is not Catholic property, and the most famous mind of the last century stood on it too.

In 1929 the journalist George Sylvester Viereck asked Albert Einstein, for the Saturday Evening Post, whether he believed in God. Einstein did not answer with a creed. He answered with a child. We are, he said, like a little child who walks into an enormous library whose walls are lined to the ceiling with books in many languages. The child knows that someone must have written them. It does not know who, or how. It cannot read the languages. It notices that the books are arranged according to some plan, a mysterious order it cannot comprehend and only dimly suspects. That, he said, is the position of even the most intelligent human being toward God. He had just finished reshaping the physics of space and time, and when asked the largest question he could think of, he reached for the same figure the painters of San Gimignano had reached for: a small child before something far too big for it.

The internet has since put the Socratic line in his mouth, I know that I know nothing, along with a dozen other sayings he never said. It is Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, and Einstein did not need to borrow it. What he actually said was recorded by people who knew him, and it is better suited to the beach. His collaborator Banesh Hoffmann and his secretary Helen Dukas set one of his remarks at the front of the life they wrote of him in 1972, and it reads like a late confession: in a long life he had learned that all our science, measured against reality, is “primitive and childlike,” and that it is nonetheless the most precious thing we have. In 1936 a schoolgirl named Phyllis Wright wrote to ask him whether scientists pray, and he wrote back that anyone seriously engaged in science comes to see a spirit at work in the laws of the universe, one vastly superior to man’s, before which “we with our modest powers must feel humble.” In the same year, in a paper on the foundations of physics, he wrote that the eternal mystery of the world is that it can be understood at all.

Honesty requires the next paragraph. Einstein was not a Christian, and he said so without embarrassment. When a New York rabbi cabled him in 1929 to ask the same question Viereck had, he cabled back that he believed in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, and not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of men. The Church cannot call him as a witness to the Trinity, and this essay does not try. He saw the sea and would not name the hand that holds it.

But notice what he refused to do. He refused to say the hole was the whole. He kept the water in his shell, and called it the most precious thing we have, while saying in the same breath that it was childlike against the reality it measured. The man who had measured more of the sea than anyone then alive called himself a child in a library, and he meant it. The posture is Augustine’s exactly, less the faith that would have told him whose library it was. Our Lord said that these things are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed to little ones. The physicist, at least, had the sense to stand among the little ones. What he lacked was the One who does the revealing.

Conclusion — The Hollow of His Hand

The prophet asks who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and the question answers itself. The sea the child could not carry sits in the hollow of a hand, and the hand is God’s. That is the first thing the beach teaches. The thing we cannot contain is not, on that account, contained by no one.

The second is stranger. If the painters were right, and the child was Christ, then the sea that would not go into a hole in the sand had already, once, gone into something smaller. Solomon at the dedication of the temple asked whether God would indeed dwell upon earth, since the heaven of heavens could not contain him, and how much less a house. The Church has sung the answer in her Office for fourteen hundred years: he whom earth and sea and sky adore, who rules the threefold frame of things, was borne for nine months in the womb of a girl. The Infinite did not fit into a man’s understanding. He fit into a manger. He did it so that we might understand as far as we are able, and love him further than that.

So the layman walking the shore of his own small learning may take the story the way Augustine, who lived it in his own words, would have had him take it. Believe, so that you may understand. Understand what you are given. Expect it to run out, and be neither surprised nor ashamed when it does, because the sea is not ashamed of the shell. Carry what you can carry, and pour it into what you have been given to fill: a child’s catechism, a rosary, the sign of the cross made over a sleeping child. Then go back down to the water.

We see now through a glass in a dark manner, Saint Paul says, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known. Augustine’s own last word on the subject will do for ours. Let me remember thee. Let me understand thee. Let me love thee.