Return to the Heart: The Biblical Spirituality of St. Augustine's Confessions

Reviewed by Dr. Matthew T. Vander Vennet, Donnelly College

Shane Owens, Return to the Heart: The Biblical Spirituality of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Emmaus Road, 2025. Pp. 176. ISBN: 9781645854487.

As St. Thomas Aquinas often referred to St. Augustine in his works and commentaries, it seems fitting to review a work which unveils a little more of the depth and thoroughly biblical richness of Augustine’s thought, especially as it relates to his Confessions. Owens himself states, “…St. Thomas Aquinas frequently advance[s] an argument with the words, ‘dicit Augustinus [as Augustine said].’” It is even more of a unique pleasure because I have known Dr. Owens, also a member of the Sacra Doctrina Project, for over a decade now and know of his deep love and passion for St. Augustine. Add to the fact that our current pope, Leo XIV, is the first Augustinian on the throne of St. Peter, this work could not have been published at a better time.

Return to the Heart is not necessarily meant to be a deeply academic work or scholarly commentary. Rather, as Owens himself states, it should serve as a “meditative and thematic mining of the spiritual classic” (xiv). In this approach, Dr. Owens succeeds. Indeed, the more that I read the more I was drawn into meditating on my own journey with the Lord.

For both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, scripture was the foundation and font from which to draw spiritual insight, strength, and sustenance. Indeed, like Aquinas, Augustine superbly weaved scriptural verses and insights throughout his works. Scripture provides an encounter point with the Lord. Owens understands this aspect of St. Augustine and deftly guides the reader through the Confessions with that idea in mind. Knowing the depth of St. Augustine’s own immersion in Scripture truly allows one to appreciate and understand the Confessions on a whole new level, especially as it relates to the human heart.

The Bible speaks in many passages of the heart as the place where God meets man and man meets God. This idea is crucial to understanding the Confessions and provides the main idea of Owens’s work. He identifies three spiritual movements of the heart when discussing the Confessions. There is a movement “inward through recollection (to return), downward in humility (to repent), and upward through contemplation (to remain)” (9) [emphasis in the original]. It is this roadmap that St. Augustine himself provides that the rest of Owens’s work follows and discusses.

Nine chapters fill the work with each examining some aspect of the movements of the heart in its interaction with God. Owens shows that the conversion of St. Augustine follows the standard biblical narrative of repentance and conversion and provides an example for our own. The titles of the chapters follow the threefold movement that Owens identified above: The Human Person and a Heart Unquiet; Memory and a Heart Recollected; Sin and a Heart Disintegrated; Belief and a Heart Illuminated; Friendship and a Heart United; Death and a Heart Quieted; The Church and a Heart Re-Created; and Jesus and a Heart Passionate.

I would like to highlight the very last pages of chapter four in which Owens teases out a major aspect of St. Augustine’s conversion and bring it back to the overall scope of the work: Scripture. Owens says St. Augustine’s relationship with Scripture was “the initiation of a communion between mind and text, heart, and God that would last a lifetime” (69). Indeed, “the Scripture shaped Augustine’s actions, hopes, and prayers” (70). The same could be said for Aquinas as well. Once he allowed the Scriptures to penetrate his heart and mind and allowed it to direct his actions in its application in his life, St. Augustine’s heart was healed by Christ himself.

Return to the Heart is a good reminder that even though all the education and intellectual formation that we possess is good and necessary, it is but part of the picture. These things certainly aid us in the process. Yet, all the speculation we engage in, and wisdom we may acquire, may be, in the end, as straw if we do not allow God to touch our hearts and convert them as St. Augustine did and as St. Thomas Aquinas himself experienced.

Dr. Owens quite ably succeeds in his effort to draw us deeper into the heart of St. Augustine’s Confessions and in a deeper consideration of the influence of Scripture in the life and works of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.