## Confessions: invocation and desire
– *Confessions* I.1–2: “Grant me, O Lord, to know and understand whether first to invoke you or to praise you; whether knowing you precedes calling upon you.” He immediately ties this to Rom 10:14 (“How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?”), then prays: “I will seek you, O Lord, and call upon you… I call upon you, O Lord, in my faith which you have given me, breathed into me by the humanity of your Son and the ministry of your preacher.”[3][4]
– In the same opening, Augustine reflects: “When I call on him I ask him to come into me… Where do I call you to, when I am already in you?” intertwining invocation with his doctrine of God’s omnipresence and of the soul existing *in* God. This passage is foundational for Augustine’s understanding that calling upon God is an interior turning to the One in whom we already live and have our being.[3]
## Letter 130 to Proba: what and how to pray
– In Ep. 130, Augustine gives his most systematic teaching on prayer, insisting that to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) is to “desire without intermission from Him who alone can give” the blessed life, which is eternal life in God. He distinguishes “many words” from “long-continued warmth of desire,” arguing that true prayer is the sustained desire of the heart directed to God, even if formulated in few words.[5][1]
– He teaches that “whatever other words we may say… if we pray rightly… we say nothing but what is already contained in the Lord’s Prayer,” so that all authentic invocation is, in substance, a participation in the *Pater noster*. For Augustine, to invoke God rightly is to let our requests be shaped by Christ’s own prayer rather than by merely carnal desires.[6][1]
## Prayer as desire and the “cry of the heart”
– Summarizing Augustine’s scattered statements, one modern synthesis captures his view: “Prayer is the loving reaching out of the mind to God… the cry of the heart is a solemn earnestness of thought… only the heart’s cry, only the longing of the heart makes prayer genuine.” Augustine is quoted as saying that those who pray with desire “sing in [their] heart even though [their] tongue be silent; but if [they] pray without desire, [they are] dumb before God even though [their] voice sounds in the ears of men.”[2]
– On this view, “prayer is not the reverberation of sound; it is the articulation of love,” so that whether one invokes the Lord aloud or silently, “we must cry from the heart.” This interiorization of invocation is crucial: calling upon the Lord is fundamentally affective and volitional, not merely verbal.[2]
## Prayer times, brevity, and continual invocation
– In the same Letter 130, Augustine notes that the Egyptian brethren “have very frequent prayers, but these very brief, and, as it were, sudden and ejaculatory, lest the wakeful and aroused attention which is indispensable in prayer should by protracted exercises vanish or lose its keenness.” He approves this pattern as a way of preserving interior attention while keeping prayer frequent, aligning with his theology of constant desire punctuated by explicit acts of invocation.[1]
– On “Let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:6), Augustine explains that this does not inform God of what he does not know but “makes them known to ourselves in the presence of God by patient waiting upon Him,” resisting ostentatious display before others. Prayer times thus serve as moments where desire becomes conscious invocation before God, clarifying the heart’s orientation.[1]
## Prayer, Lord’s Prayer, and purification of desire
– A later summary of Ep. 130 notes that Augustine sees the content of Christian prayer as the desire for a blessed life, which is nothing other than the possession of God himself as the true blessed life. This does not exclude other petitions, but the Lord’s Prayer becomes the criterion for purifying what believers ask, so that their invocation increasingly expresses love for God for what God is in himself.[7][8][5][6]
– Pastoral appropriations of Augustine stress his use of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane (“not my will but yours be done”) as the pattern for aligning desire and invocation with God’s will, and they link this with his confidence that the Spirit intercedes within believers when they do not know how to pray. In this way, Augustine frames invocation as Trinitarian: the Father addressed, the Son as pattern and mediator, and the Spirit as the One who interiorly shapes the heart’s cry.[8][9][3][1]
Sources
[1] CHURCH FATHERS: Letter 130 (St. Augustine) – New Advent https://www.newadvent.org/
[2] Saint Augustine believed that prayer should … – The Augustinians https://theaugustinians.org/
[3] St. Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, newly translated and … https://www.ccel.org/ccel/
[4] [PDF] Augustine’s Confessions. Selections for God Everyday and … https://cdn.dal.ca/content/
[5] This Is the Best Work on Prayer I Have Ever Read https://www.ncregister.com/
[6] St. Augustine on Prayer https://www.
[7] St. Augustine on How to Pray – SpiritualDirection.com https://spiritualdirection.
[8] 4 Principles on Prayer from Saint Augustine – The Gospel Coalition https://www.
[9] Saint Augustine on Prayer – Timothy Keller https://timothykeller.com/
[10] Augustine On Prayer – Catholic Book Publishing https://
[11] Augustine on prayer : Hand, Thomas A – Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/
[12] [PDF] Why Pray? Augustine of Hippo’s Multifaceted Doctrine of Prayer https://lirias.kuleuven.be/
[13] The Confessions of St. Augustine – Classical Liberal Arts Academy https://classicalliberalarts.
[14] St. Augustine Answers 101 Questions On Prayer https://www.catholiccompany.
[15] Augustine’s Reflections on Prayer – James Houston | Free Online https://www.biblicaltraining.
