Reflecting and Responding
Augustine of Hippo
Loving God with Our Body, Mind and Heart
What is God but he who made us. What is man but that being which has both a body and a soul. We are not God and we recognize that it is God who gives to each of our senses its own place and function. As we rise in stages towards the God who made us we go beyond all the natural faculties of our senses and perceptions.
CONFESSIONS
NO SINGLE FIGURE IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH has influenced Christianity more profoundly than Augustine (354-430). The themes and trajectories that occur throughout his writing are pivotal for our thinking and our living. Augustine’s understanding of our life with God is complex, and we must review several works if we are to understand him adequately.
Like Origen’s before him, Augustine’s work centers on three levels of reality—body, mind and heart—and how these levels affect the ordering of our love for God. If we read, for example, his Confessions, we know of the disordering power of misplaced desire. If we read only his later theological treatises, we do not understand the human condition from which so much of his interest originally developed. Augustine’s three levels depict the different orientations we take depending on our perception of what is most important. Augustine thoroughly examines these three levels and helps us see how they contribute to or distract us from our life with God.
For Augustine, the individual consists of a body and a soul (including memory, intelligence and will). God, who is above and outside creation, orders everything in the world properly. When we live in right relationship with him, he orders the levels of our body and soul so that we satisfy both types of needs properly. Augustine does not reject the needs of the body. He diminishes them, but he does not deny them. However, the needs of the body must be ordered by reason if we are to experience God’s grace and redemption fully.
Likewise, the soul, which includes reason, is part of our innate nature. History is filled with civilizations and individuals who disrupted the proper order by advocating our ability to ascend to God on our own. This is a result of distorted reason. The right use of reason allows us to recognize our need for God. But reason alone cannot lead us to union with God. It can only show us that God is not present and help us recognize the depth of our need for God.
How We Know God
According to Augustine, God exists above all levels of human reality. He is known through Scripture, creation and the inward Teacher, Jesus Christ. But because we do not know God initially, our efforts to make sense of life are haphazard and ineffective. Although we long for God, we do not realize it at first. All we can do is prepare for him by properly orienting one element of our earthly life: our will. Committing to knowing God and how he works means we must create habits that incline us to look for him. When we are taught how to look for God through reason and are protected through morality from distraction in our search, we can anticipate a visit from God.
Our capacity to reason sets us apart from the rest of creation. Because of it we can reflect on Christian truth and allow this reflection to influence our desires and activities. The objective of the right use of reason is to comprehend reality.
Augustine’s interpretation of reality is that humans are estranged from God. On our own we cannot return to him. God, who sees our need and recognizes that we will never meet it on our own, sends Christ. But it is extremely difficult for us to recognize our own need because of three temptations: the love of power, the pervasiveness of lust and our inability to find contentment. These temptations keep us in turmoil, constantly churning, preoccupied with all of life yet unable to find lasting satisfaction. This condition allows our appetites to gain the upper hand. It disrupts normal human living. Ultimately, it places us in direct conflict with our true foundation, the love of God flowing outward in love of neighbor.
When our will is oriented to God, our judgments and motivations are based on love. Our concern is to gain wisdom, perfect holiness and realize happiness through loving God and our neighbor. When we live with a spirit of love, we naturally curb our desires. They just don’t come to mind in the same way or with the same power. As the guiding motive of our life, love works with reason to allow us to comprehend reality accurately. According to Augustine, this opens the window of our understanding so that we see our need for God, how God provides for that need through Christ and how this divine drama plays out in history. Essentially, Augustine asserts, all of history reflects one of two things: either we love ourselves or we love God. Either we align our will with his or we are self-willed.
Augustine’s identification of reason as the mediating link between God and our senses illustrates the importance he places on the power of the intellect. Reason reminds us that we are made in God’s image. But reason can lead us astray. It has the power to produce comprehension, but it cannot produce any lasting happiness. When our reason is oriented by self-interest, we spend all our time satisfying the appetites and desires of the body. Yet it is also our reason that orients us to love God. And it is our love for God that properly aligns all of our human capacities.
The Nature of Faith
Augustine spends hundreds of pages showing us God’s providential action in history. But he also helps us appreciate God’s interest and involvement in our individual lives. Specifically, he wants us to realize that it is God who initiates contact with us and not our own activity that leads us to God. That being the case, how do we understand our longing for God and its place in our experience of God’s grace and redemption? Ultimately, Augustine concludes that we cannot manufacture God’s initiative, but we can prepare for it by orienting our will to him.
Augustine also emphasizes that correct doctrine matters. This is not an emphasis we often encounter today, but for most of its history the church has recognized doctrine as the intellectual framework we need to understand our life with God. Augustine teaches that we must move beyond a simple experience of God to a structured understanding of him.
A quick scan of the contemporary theological landscape reminds us why. Most teaching today seeks to recover a vitality in the Christian life by emphasizing the love of God without equally stressing the need for knowledge of God. These trends bear a striking similarity to earlier movements that resulted in widespread ignorance and neglect of core Christian beliefs. In each previous case, the lack of knowledge of God eventually led to a lack of love for God.
Augustine teaches that proper doctrine brings faith to life. When we gain knowledge, our faith deepens and we understand life at a more fundamental level. The Bible invites us to come to the full wealth of our conviction (Col 2:2 NEB). This means that over time and through study we become convinced of the truth of the Christian life. In The Enchiridion and The First Catechism, Augustine identifies these principles through some of the most poignant and provocative teachings in Christian history.
Augustine believes that by living the Christian faith, we will finally come to recognize it as true. In The True Religion, he identifies three reasons why he considers Christianity to be the one true faith: it offers the best understanding of human nature, it offers the best description of our plight in being alienated and cut off from God, and it offers the most realistic remedy for our plight as provided by God in Jesus Christ.
Ultimately, in order to recognize God’s provision in Christ, we must also learn that we can do nothing to redeem ourselves. When we are unable to rise above our own self-love, we manufacture all kinds of diversions in an attempt to find a happiness that endures. But eventually we realize that nothing in this life provides the happiness and joy that come from God alone. The difficulty is that we reach this level of knowledge only if we persist in our love for God.
This leads us to our final discovery: that our only hope for enduring happiness is to discover the eternal peace of God, which harnesses and redirects the enduring restlessness of our spirit. Those of us who align our love and will with God’s love and will realize the impact this has on our own life, as well as the cumulative impact on human history. The table “Augustine’s Ordering” summarizes Augustine’s understanding of the right ordering of our love for God.
Table 1.2. Augustine’s Ordering
Level
I
II
III
Order
Body
Mind
Heart
Faculty
Senses
Natural knowing, memory, intelligence, will
Soul, supernatural knowledge
Use of Scripture
Literal reading of Scripture
Scripture in context
Scripture in conversation with itself
Type of Knowledge of God
Created order manifests God
Reason aids in comprehension
Jesus as inward Teacher
Disciplines/Preparation
Engage in correct Christian practices
Reflect on Christian witness and doctrine
Gain wisdom, seek holiness
Goal
Love of neighbor
Love of God through love of neighbor
Happiness in love of God
Distractions
Love of power, pervasive lust, inability to be content
Disordered thoughts
Disordered loves
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
If anyone could understand the destructive nature of disordered love it was Augustine. Early in his life he had experienced enough of the “hissing cauldron of lust” to fill a good-sized book. Indeed, he did just that in his famous Confessions—the pioneer of the memoir genre. Descending into the “lower beauties” of sexual promiscuity, he wrote, “The enemy held my will and made a chain out of it and bound me with it. From a perverse will came lust, and slavery to lust became a habit, and the habit, being constantly yielded to, became a necessity.” Desperately longing for genuine love, Augustine had to confess, “I polluted . . . the stream of friendship with the foulness of lust, and clouded its purity with the dark hell of illicit desire.”
Augustine’s famous conversion in that Milan garden came about because he realized that only Christ had the power to free him from the “whirlpools of vice” that so imprisoned him. And Christ did free him—perhaps a little too much! Wanting to make a clean break with the sexual promiscuity and professional arrogance that had dominated his life in Italy, Augustine left his mistress who had borne him a son, resigned his teaching post in Milan and returned to Thagaste, Africa, the city of his birth. From there he went on to establish the Augustinian monastic order and become the famous Bishop of Hippo.
Frankly, I wish Augustine had taken a different path. If he had married his mistress instead of leaving her, perhaps he could have given the world a whole new model of the holiness of human love. For me he diminished human love too much. I suppose I am projecting my modern sensibilities onto an ancient writer. Perhaps emotionally and psychologically he could not have done that. And historically it is nearly impossible to imagine it, since holiness in that day was so tied to monastic life. Still, I wish he and his mistress had married and been able to show us a more excellent way for the right ordering of love, at least on the human level.
Still, many valuable lessons emerge from the life and teachings of Augustine. I will mention three. The first is his keen understanding of both the importance of reason as well as its limitations. How important a teaching for our day. Mostly we see today only the extremes: either we embrace reason utterly or we reject it utterly. Not Augustine. He knew that reason rightly used can bring us to understand our need for God and lead us to right beliefs that provide the intellectual framework for structuring our life with God. At the same time he knew that reason can be severely distorted if not oriented around divine love. It is a wonderful balance we could learn from today.
Then, second, I am taken by Augustine’s keen understanding of the role of the will in the spiritual life. He recognized the importance of the orientation of our will toward God as a way of preparing ourselves for a visitation by him. At the same time he rejected the idea of “free will,” knowing instead that it is God who initiates and inclines us toward godliness. He understood better than perhaps anyone else before or since both the importance and the complexity of the human will.
And, finally, Augustine’s understanding of Christ as the inward Teacher is so very intriguing. I wonder if his conversion experience in that Milan garden didn’t play a part here. At a crucial moment he had heard the singsong words of a child repeating, “Take it and read it. Take it and read it.” He could not think of any child’s game that would use those words and finally became “quite certain that I must interpret this as a divine command to me to open the book [the Bible] and read the first passage which I should come upon.” In dramatic fashion, Christ had become for Augustine the Prophet who would teach his people himself. This idea of Christ as the ever-living, inward Teacher is full of implications for our daily living, and Augustine was the first to give this idea real substance.
And, so, what does all this mean for our living? An answer is not hard to come by. We begin simply by asking Christ, our living Teacher, to guide us through our activities today. The same for tomorrow, and all the days that follow. We seek to orient our will toward his will, knowing that he is always there first, directing and guiding. We enlist the aid of reason’s common sense toward our daily tasks, knowing that God guides us in this way.
And then what we hear and know to do, we do. Christ will never ask us to undertake anything he does not also give us the power to obey. And often the guidance is so simple . . . yet so profound: “Pay close attention to José today, he needs your affirmation.” “Be still, rest, shalom.” “Do not fear today’s meeting, I will guide you.” “Challenge the injustice at work and I will be beside you.” Jesus, your inward Teacher, will be your strength and guide. Daily. Here. Now.
Dear Lord, we would like to learn from Augustine about the right ordering of love. It is a little hard because frankly Augustine overwhelms us—his towering intellect, his massive influence. . . . It is hard to know how to bring all that down to where we live. But we would like to try. We would so appreciate it if you would show us the way.
Augustine does describe his early life as “a whole frying-pan of wicked loves.” That speaks to our condition. We’re tempted often to distort love, if not outwardly then inwardly. We really do not know how to love rightly. One moment we are longing for “the good, the true, the beautiful,” and the next moment we are “sinking down to the depths of the lower beauties,” just like Augustine.
Perhaps we need a Milan garden kind of experience. It would probably scare us to death if that kind of thing happened to us! Besides, you seldom come by means of the fireworks of Sinai. More often it’s the still small voice. Whichever way it is that you choose to come, “Come, Lord Jesus.” In your time and in your way. Amen.