The Heart’s Desire: Finding Fulfilment
In August 2005, a few months after his election to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI (b. 1927) spoke to a World Youth Day celebration in Cologne. He highlighted what he considered to be three of the great questions of the day: ‘On whom can I rely? To whom shall I entrust myself? Where is the One who can offer me the response capable of satisfying my heart’s deepest desires?’ These were matters that everyone could relate to, whether religious or secular.
For Benedict, it was important to convey that Christianity engages with and answers such deep human questions, and that it answers them by pointing to someone who can be trusted and is able to satisfy both the desires of the human heart and the questions of the human mind. ‘The happiness you are seeking, the happiness you have a right to enjoy has a name and a face: it is Jesus of Nazareth.’ For Benedict, Christianity is not merely a map that points us to where salvation and fulfilment may be found; it is about being pointed to the one who makes this fulfilled life possible and shows us what it is like.
Benedict’s approach stands in a long tradition of seeing Christianity as both framing and answering ‘ultimate concerns’ (a phrase popularized by the American theologian Paul Tillich). Christian faith can be understood relationally and existentially. Christ is someone who can be trusted, who will help me face life and live meaningfully. Christ came to bring life – life of new quality and significance: ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ (John 10.10).
Yet, in a provocative but carefully argued recent discussion, the Yale theologians Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun argued that theology seemed to have ‘forgotten its purpose: to critically discern, articulate, and commend visions of the true life in light of the person, life, and teachings of Jesus Christ.’ A similar point was made by the Princeton theologian Ellen Charry (b. 1947). Charry has shown how many Christian doctrines actually have pastoral goals, in that they seek to shape believers’ thinking in ‘socially salutary ways’. For Charry, ‘to discount the importance of human flourishing is to misunderstand theology and its purpose.’
Some academic theologians would resist any such suggestion, seeing this as the pointless reduction of academic analysis to therapeutic intervention. I don’t agree. Anyone who has studied the links between Christianity and healthcare will know that human wellbeing lies at the heart of the ministry of Christ and at the heart of early Christian intellectual and pastoral reflection. From the beginning, Christian theology has set out its own distinct vision of human flourishing, shown how this is grounded in Christ and implemented it in the life of the Church.
For many people in Western culture today, ‘wellbeing’ is understood mainly in terms of promoting good health and social conditions. Unsurprisingly, many Christian activists are involved in movements working for the elimination of disease and poverty, which, rightly, are seen as major threats to human wellbeing. More recently, increased emphasis has been placed on the importance of mental health, leading to expansions of traditional understandings of wellbeing to include having good mental health, high levels of satisfaction with life, a sense of meaning or purpose and an ability to manage stress. In this chapter, we shall reflect on how theology engages with these important questions.
What is the connection between theology and wellbeing? It’s a significant question, given that human beings want more than simply to be able to exist from day to day (though that’s an important starting point). They want to know what things mean, to see how they fit together or to discern a big picture that makes sense of the seemingly random events of life. Yet without some informing story, some controlling world view, it proves difficult, if not impossible, to avoid surviving for surviving’s sake. Without a transcendent framework, there is no bigger picture, no greater goal.
Theology helps us to decide what is good and meaningful from a Christian point of view. It offers us a framework for leading a ‘good’ life. However, there is no cultural or philosophical agreement about what it means to be ‘good’ or to live an ‘authentic’ life, in that these ideas are shaped by a world view: an understanding of the nature and goals of human beings. As Charles Taylor points out, without an informing big picture, this amounts to little more than ‘doing your own thing’.
Back in the eighteenth century, many writers sympathetic to the Age of Reason thought that a universal rationality and understanding of goodness could be achieved. Today, this idea is no longer taken seriously due to the realization that concepts of rationality and goodness are shaped by historical factors. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is one of many to point out that what people ‘consider reasonable or unreasonable alters’. What people find rational at one point in history is seen as irrational at another.
Yet some would suggest that engaging with the question of meaning in life is really a philosophical question. After all, classical Greek philosophy was clearly concerned with the big questions of life. Why should anyone look to theology to answer such questions? It’s a fair point. To answer it, we’ll look at the light shed by two significant American voices.
In an autobiographical reflection, the Yale theologian Kathryn Tanner (b. 1957) explains why, as an undergraduate at that university, she shifted her focus from philosophy to theology:
Theology held for me the prospect of addressing questions of meaning in a comprehensive fashion eschewed by most philosophers at the time. Theology as an academic discipline was clearly about something (not just talk about talk about talk), and its pursuit of the true and the right had significance for a community of inquiry outside itself – the church. Theology, in short, seemed to matter – to someone.
Tanner observes that the ‘question of the legitimacy of theology’ now seems to have shifted from theology’s academic credentials to the question of ‘whether theology has anything important to say about the world and our place in it’. We’ll come back to Tanner shortly as we look at her helpful views on the identity and significance of Christ.
However, her perception that recent philosophy has not taken seriously the question of meaning is borne out by our second voice, the philosopher Susan Wolf (b. 1952). Wolf observed that this question is rarely raised in professional philosophical circles nowadays, tending to be of interest to young students, whose lack of sophistication causes professional philosophers to cringe with embarrassment. As Wolf notes, talk about life having any meaning now seems to have been ‘banished from philosophy’. Happily, however, it is welcomed and remains firmly rooted in Christian theology.
One element of the Christian view of life is that it can be seen as coherent and meaningful – an insight that is highly significant for human wellbeing. The Oxford philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99) points out the ‘calming’ and ‘healing’ effect of ways of looking at the world that allow it to be viewed as ultimately rational and meaningful. Yet observation, experience and events need to be interpreted if they are to help us understand what, if anything, they mean.
The novelist Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) highlighted the importance of finding meaning for human wellbeing and dignity in her autobiographical memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011):
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with our religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Winterson’s point is well taken and resonates strongly with much recent research on the importance of big pictures in relation to human wellbeing, and especially the well-established link between meaning and God.
A number of years ago, I was reading the early notebooks of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which mainly dealt with some rather dull questions of logic. Yet Wittgenstein’s entries for June 1916 show a sudden interest in the meaning of life, a question he saw as linked with the question of God: ‘What do I know about God and the purpose of life?’ His reflections on this point are rather inconclusive. However, they are important for our purposes as they point to the clear link he intuitively forged between God and finding meaning in life.
So why is finding meaning and purpose in life so important for human wellbeing? This is not a specifically religious or theological question, even though Christian theology answers it in its own distinct way. It is helpful to turn at this point to Michael Steger, the director of the Center for Meaning and Purpose and professor of psychology at Colorado State University. Steger is one of many researchers who has noted that human beings cope more successfully with life’s challenges if they feel that they are doing something worthwhile and meaningful.
For Steger, ‘meaning’ concerns the way in which ‘people comprehend, make sense of, or see significance in their lives’, along with the manner in which ‘they perceive themselves to have a purpose, mission, or overarching aim in life.’ Steger points to Viktor Frankl’s experience in concentration camps during the Second World War to illustrate how people find ways of coping with suffering and hardship in even the most adverse of circumstances.
Theology contributes significantly to our wellbeing by allowing us to see our world and ourselves in ways that generate meaning and purpose. This is an excellent example of Karl Popper’s three worlds being held together within a theological big picture. To speak of meaning in life is to refuse to be restricted to what C. S. Lewis termed a ‘glib and shallow rationalism’, which limits reality to the realm of empirical facts. It is to reach behind and beyond our experience of this world, to grasp and explore an intellectual framework that positions human beings within a greater scheme of things, and to allow us to see ourselves and our inhabitation of this world in a new way.
A core article of faith for me as a teenage atheist was that I inhabited an incoherent meaningless universe devoid of any purpose or significance. It was just there; I was just there. I had stumbled into a pointless, though often beautiful, world. I loved science, which seemed able to explain how our universe functioned, though not why it existed or, indeed, why there was anything rather than nothing. I was influenced in this respect by the novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), who suggested that the starry brilliance of the night sky spoke ‘of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.’ The words were elegant yet the message was sombre: there was no point to anything. The universe was a riddle without an answer, an enigma without a solution.
That’s not how I see things now. Theology plays a major role in helping us to discern meaning and value in life and, as we’ve been exploring, one of the ways it does this is by creating a way of looking at the world that is able to bring together what might otherwise seem to be chaotic and disconnected.
This Christian big picture discloses a glorious, loving and righteous God, who creates a world that goes wrong and then acts graciously and wondrously in order to renew and redirect it before finally bringing it to its fulfilment. And we ourselves are an integral part of this story, which discloses our true purpose, meaning and value – who we are, what has gone wrong, what God proposes to do about it and how we are involved in this process of transformation.
The Harvard psychologist William James (1842–1910) made the point that religious faith is basically ‘faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.’ Christian theologians have long recognized the importance of making sense of the world and finding its deeper patterns, holding that, in some way, these reflect the wisdom of God as its creator.
However, such reflections lead on to another question. What benefits result from knowing that there is such a ‘pattern’ or big picture? Let’s now reflect on how Christian theology understands the idea of faith and the difference that this makes to us.
The New Testament’s account of the nature of faith is complex, bringing together a range of insights and inviting us to weave them together into a coherent whole. It is theologically tempting to offer a neat definition of faith, but that would necessarily limit our comprehension of it. The Genevan theologian John Calvin suggests that faith is best understood as ‘a steady and certain knowledge of the divine benevolence towards us, which is founded upon the truth of the gracious promise of God in Christ, and is both revealed to our minds and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.’
Calvin’s definition is theologically rich, setting his understanding within a Trinitarian context and making a critically important distinction between the objective and subjective aspects of faith. The gospel is both ‘revealed to our minds’ and ‘sealed in our hearts’. Faith is our response to a God who makes promises to us – promises that can be trusted and relied upon.
Thus, faith is about entrustment. William Temple (1881–1944), one of Britain’s leading theological writers of the early twentieth century, made this point clearly: ‘Faith is not only the assent of our minds to doctrinal propositions: it is the commitment of our whole selves into the hands of a faithful Creator and merciful Redeemer.’ We see this important theme acted out in Mark’s account of the calling of the first disciples, Simon and Andrew, by the shores of Lake Galilee. Mark focuses on the theme of calling and following: Christ calls; the disciples respond by following (Mark 1.16–18). Christ didn’t offer them proof of his identity or importance, or any sort of argument about why they ought to follow him. They clearly do not fully understand who this person is or what he wanted them to do or to become. That emerges as they journey with him. As they hear Jesus teach and see him heal and restore, they gradually realize how they fit into his ministry.
To return to our big picture idea, we could say faith is about recognizing that a grander vision of reality exists, that it may be trusted and, finally, it may be inhabited. Like the disciples, we need to step into the world it discloses and make it our own.
This leads us to ask how theology can help us to engage with questions of meaning and the way that we feel about ourselves and our world. To explore this, we’ll focus on the central theological notion of Incarnation.
In the past few centuries, probably reflecting the influence of the bygone Age of Reason, theology was thought of primarily as making sense of things. Yet early Christian writers saw theology as both enabling understanding and fostering human wellbeing. This can be seen from the works of Augustine of Hippo, who offered a theologically informed account of human flourishing and the pursuit of ‘the good life’. In 388, Augustine wrote a treatise comparing the ideas of Christianity with those of the Manichaean sect, to which he had once belonged. One sentence in Augustine’s treatise has always stood out for me:
For if God is humanity’s chief good (Latin: summum bonum), which cannot be denied, it clearly follows that, since to seek the chief good is to live well, that to live well is nothing other than to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind.
Augustine was well aware of the importance of happiness and saw this as inseparably connected with finding and embracing God as both its source and its ultimate goal.
Christianity is an extended imaginative and rational reflection on the significance of its central figure, Jesus Christ, who both tells us and shows us what God is like: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (John 1.14). The doctrine of the Incarnation speaks of a direct transformative personal encounter between God and humanity that is made possible by the Son of God coming among us, as one of us, in a visible and tangible manner:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.
(1 John 1.1–2)
As God incarnate, Christ embodies a life of meaning and value, which Christians are called on to imitate to the extent that they can. Christ shows us what the redeemed life looks like as it’s lived out in the real world. As the philosopher Ian Kidd remarks, a ‘tradition of wisdom’ is about more than the ‘theoretical articulation of a good life’, in that it points to someone who definitively manifests or embodies its ‘concrete practical exemplification’.
The Christian understanding of Incarnation also illuminates the search for coherence in our world. The New Testament speaks of Christ as a principle of coherence: Christ ‘is before all things, and in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.17). Our fear of meaninglessness is often linked to the perception that there is no ‘big picture’ in life but, for Christianity, meaning is embodied in Christ as God incarnate. Let’s now reflect on the significance of the Incarnation in more detail.
Earlier, in exploring how we might map the Christian understanding of salvation, we discussed the importance of grasping how theology can hold together a rich yet diverse vision of salvation, which has important implications for our wellbeing. Let’s now do the same thing for the doctrine of the Incarnation, focusing on the ways in which this doctrine changes the way that we think – and feel – about ourselves and our place in the universe.
We know that we need to do more than look at doctrines; we need to look through them, asking how they help us to see ourselves, God and the world. What difference does the doctrine of the Incarnation make to the way that we understand and feel about ourselves as occupants of a complicated world? Let’s consider two of the ways in which theologians have articulated these themes.
1 Coping with suffering
Some philosophies see the fulfilled life either as successfully avoiding suffering or denying its real existence or significance. Christianity views suffering as a reality with which we need to engage, and Christian devotional practice often takes the form of contemplation of images of the crucified Christ. Such images offer reassurance to those undergoing suffering, that their Saviour and God was no stranger to affliction and can be a source of consolation in a time of need. Early Christian spirituality, particularly during the extended period when Christianity was marginalized and sporadically persecuted within the Roman empire, stressed the way in which individual believers’ personal stories connected up with the story of Christ, especially in relation to hardship. The wall paintings of Roman catacombs expressed this visually – for example, by depicting Christ as the good shepherd who carried his weary and fearful sheep through a dangerous world.
Many books have been written on how we can make sense of suffering in the world, often treating this primarily as an intellectual riddle that needs to be solved. The rise of rationalism at the time of the Age of Reason (mentioned earlier in this chapter), has led many modern writers to focus on explaining why suffering happens – an undertaking generally known as ‘theodicy’. Yet most Christian theologians take the existence of suffering as a given and believe that the question to ask is how faith in a suffering Christ might enable us to cope with pain and learn from it.
The American theologian Dorothee Sölle (1929–2003) was sceptical about theological explanations of suffering. In her influential book Suffering (1975), she argued that these rationalizations of pain often seemed to do little more than justify the status quo and dull us to the situation of those in anguish. Yet, despite this concern, Sölle believed that it is essential to discern or to create some kind of meaning within what seems to be meaningless suffering if we are to learn from and live well with it. For many Christian theologians, the suffering Christ embodies a real hope that such meaning can be found.
2 Incarnation and attachment
A central theme of classical Christian thinking about the nature of the life of faith is the notion of ‘taking hold of Christ’ or ‘being united with Christ’ – two New Testament themes that have found wide theological and spiritual application. Many spiritual writers of the Middle Ages recognized the importance of the theme of ‘attachment to Christ’, sometimes depicting this as the union of two lovers. In the late twentieth century, however, the theme came to be expressed particularly in terms of ‘attachment theory’, with its stress on the significance of a ‘secure base’ (resulting from parental attachment) for the development of a young child. The work of the social psychologist John Bowlby (1907–90) was key here, particularly his 1988 book A Secure Base, which highlights the importance of attachment to positive personal development.
This helps us to explore the emotional and relational aspects of the parental care of God embodied in Christ. The American theologian Kathryn Tanner, who, we noted earlier, makes particularly effective use of this image of ‘attachment’ in Christ the Key (2009):
The Spirit does not merely join us to Christ but, once we are so joined, enters within us as the power for new life according to the shape of Christ’s own life as the Son incarnate. We are not just joined to Christ but are to be made over into him by the power of the Spirit we have from him.
All of us hope that we really matter, that we are, in some sense, special to someone. Yet this hope seems to be subverted continually. Sigmund Freud, for one, famously argued that scientific advance has led to a radical re-evaluation of the place and significance of humanity in the universe, deflating our pretensions to grandeur and uniqueness. We seem so small against this vast cosmic backdrop, which appears indifferent to our presence and wellbeing, that it’s easy to be overwhelmed by a sense of our own insignificance.
How might we develop a theological response to this concern? Marilynne Robinson weaves together two theological themes to set these anxieties in a fresh context and allow them to be seen in a new way. One of her most interesting discussions is found in an essay entitled ‘Psalm Eight’, where she explores existential concerns using some of the opening verses of that psalm:
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
(Ps. 8.3–4)
Robinson’s answer to this question has two interconnected elements: we matter because God has created us and we matter because God enters the created order to visit and redeem us.
In the first place, Robinson insists that being created and loved by God confers a status on humanity that, once it is recognized and internalized, reassures us that we are, at least in some sense, special:
The strategy of the Psalmist is to close the infinite distance between God and humankind by confounding all notions of scale. If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him, splendor of a higher order, like that of angels.
Robinson then supplements this with a second insight – that this ‘infinite distance between God and humankind’ is bridged by God in the act of Incarnation in which God ‘visits’ humanity, entering within our domain and thus gracing it – and us – with glory. That God should consider us worthy of such an act of humility and compassion ought to cause us to reflect on our sense of worth.
A somewhat different approach was taken by the poet-theologian George Herbert in the seventeenth century. We have considered part of Herbert’s remarkable poem ‘The Elixir’ already. In that same piece, he explores the idea of the transvaluation of human life through being ‘touched’ by God. Here, Herbert picks up on the Gospel narratives of Christ healing individuals by touch, thus restoring them. Herbert likens the graceful ‘touch’ of God to the famous philosopher’s stone of medieval alchemy, which transmutes base metals such as lead into gold:
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.
For Herbert, Christ is the incarnate Saviour who ‘touches and owns’ believers, thus transforming them. What some consider to be commonplace therefore become precious and significant: they are transvalued by God’s grace. This is how God sees us, even if we see ourselves more negatively. It’s a theme expressed well by Marilynne Robinson in Jack (2021), the fourth of her Gilead novels, which calls into question whether anyone can really be said to be ordinary: ‘You look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world.’ Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ calls into question cultural assumptions about what is good and valuable and suggests alternatives grounded in a Christian framework.
This theme is developed further by the American Orthodox theologian and novelist David Bentley Hart (b. 1965), noted for his dense writing style and widely admired for the brilliance of his ideas and analyses. Hart argues that ‘the Christian vision of reality’ amounts to nothing less than a ‘transvaluation of all values’, in that this vision leads to ‘a complete revision of the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and one another and their place within the world.’
When Christianity first appeared, some might have seen it as a revolutionary political movement that aimed to overthrow the social structures of its day. Yet, as Hart points out, this was a revolution of the mind. It opened up new ways of thinking about God and human beings, which led to many traditional Roman social norms being challenged:
It is practically impossible for us today to appreciate the magnitude of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition.
Early Christians recognized that their patterns of evaluation and action were to be conformed to the new reality of the kingdom of God and that everyone was to be treated well. Why? Because they saw people in a new way, through a new lens. They inhabited a new ‘vision of reality’:
The new world being brought into being in the gospels is a world in which the grand cosmic architecture of prerogative and power has been superseded by a new and positively ‘anarchic’ order: one in which the glory of God can reveal itself in a crucified slave, and in which, therefore, we are forced to see the face of God in the forsaken of the world. In this shocking and ludicrously disordered order, everything is cast in a radically transforming light, and comes to mean something entirely new and perhaps unsettling.
In their very different ways, Herbert and Hart invite us to envisage and put into practice the Christian ‘vision of reality’, living out a life that reflects the new values it creates and affirms – values embodied in Christ.
What, then, is the point of theology in the light of these reflections? The answer is, it helps us to understand the strange new world that faith both allows us to see and trains us to inhabit, so we can be responsible citizens of this new creation (Phil. 3.20). It enables us to perceive a new moral order, and invites us to align ourselves with its values and live them out in the world in anticipation of the fulfilment of these values in the New Jerusalem. After Christ, we see – and value – things in a new way. As the Italian Franciscan spiritual writer Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) remarked, ‘as we see, so we love. The more perfectly and purely we see, the more perfectly and purely we love.’
The Church is the community that sustains this vision of reality and coaches people in the art of living it out. The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas (b. 1940) makes this point well, focusing on the ethical aspects of Christian life.
The primary task of Christian ethics involves an attempt to help us see. For we can only act within the world we can see, and we can only see the world rightly by being trained to see. We do not come to see just by looking, but by disciplined skills developed through initiation into a narrative.
Hauerwas’s point is that a distinctively Christian approach to ethics results from stepping inside the Christian story and reflecting seriously and extensively on how this affects our behaviour. He emphasizes the importance of practicing ‘disciplined skills’ in order to perceive the world in this new way. What difference does it make to see the natural world and human beings through a Christian theological lens rather than from an atheist standpoint? And who is going to help us to develop these skills and initiate us into this new habit of viewing things?
Inevitably, these reflections feed into thinking about theological education, which is increasingly being seen in technocratic terms – for example, acquiring pastoral and homiletic skills, being inducted into the corporate culture of denominations and being taught pre-packaged theological conclusions. However, we also need mentoring in the art of seeing things from a theological perspective and help in developing this skill. Theological education should be about discovering the landscape of faith, learning from those who have been there before us and personally assimilating their wisdom into our own vision.
Christians naturally come to understand experience in different ways, with important consequences for the age-old human quest to find our heart’s desire. This is what we’ll explore next.
Although many theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – such as Martin Luther – considered experience to be theologically significant, when I began to study theology the dominant view of the period was that engaging with experience involved an unacceptable lapse into subjectivism. Happily, some writers of that period were challenging this consensus – most notably the German theologian Gerhard Ebeling (1912–2001). In 1974, Ebeling delivered an influential lecture complaining about the ‘experiential deficit in theology’, in which he proposed a reconnection between theology and experience, thus linking some core elements of Karl Popper’s ‘three worlds’ that all human beings inhabit (p. 57).
So what happens when theology engages with human experience, such as our sense of deep longing for what seems to lie far beyond our reach? For writers such as Augustine and C. S. Lewis, to rightly understand such an experience is the first step towards encountering what it points to. In the final section of this chapter, we’ll delve into this theme by looking at the idea of the fulfilment of our heart’s desire.
Early Christian writers explored the idea that Christianity satisfied human longings and aspirations at three levels. First, it brought to fulfilment the hopes and longings of Judaism, from which Christianity originally emerged. Christ’s declaration in the Sermon on the Mount was widely seen as a manifesto of this position: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them’ (Matt. 5.17).
Christianity’s relationship with Judaism gradually came to be seen as of diminishing relevance as Christianity rapidly established itself in Roman and Greek culture in the late first century. Many regarded Christianity as the fulfilment of the classic human quest for wisdom, highlighting the way that it seemed to fulfil some important themes in the writings of philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus.
Other early Christian writers, however, located the significance of Christianity at a more existential level. The Oxford philosopher Iris Murdoch reflected on the human experience of longing in an imagined dialogue between the Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates. How are we to make sense of a deep sense of yearning that nothing seems able to quench? She notes two answers:
PLATO: Our home is elsewhere, and it draws us like a magnet.
SOCRATES: Our home may be elsewhere, but we are condemned to exile, to live here with our fellow exiles.
Some found this Platonic framework helpful in exploring the notion that there is a created homing instinct within us. This instinct may not be able to get us home on its own, but it reassures us that there is one to be found and points us in the right direction.
For Augustine of Hippo, Christianity offered a vision of a God who was able to fulfil the deepest longings of the human heart. This is expressed in his famous prayer: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’ The human experience of longing needs to be interpreted theologically to understand what it really means and what it points towards. For Augustine, human beings have some inbuilt longing to relate to God (an idea often expressed in terms of bearing the ‘image of God’), so that finding and embracing God is about becoming what we are meant to be and attaining joy and peace in doing so. Augustine sets the idea of the ‘restless human heart’ in search of God alongside that of a God who comes in search of us, entering into history to encounter and transform us.
Yet Augustine warns us that we often seem to be drawn to things that fall short of our true goals, causing us to be disappointed, if not disillusioned. Rowan Williams, one of the most perceptive of the contemporary interpreters of Augustine, suggests that attempts to find peace, authenticity and happiness on our own terms and in our own strength will simply end in tears:
We are frustrated and disappointed in what we try to satisfy ourselves with and we create idols and fantasies to save ourselves from emptiness, and so deepen our bondage and anger and misery (it is like drinking sea water to quench our thirst).
For Augustine, only God is able to satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart, for the simple reason that this is the end for which we were created.
In this chapter, I’ve tried to show how Christian theology gives us a viewpoint, a way of seeing reality, that allows us to discern – not invent! – meaning and value. These are not qualities that we can read off the world, like the colour of the leaves in our garden or the temperature of the air around us. They are created by a world view, a larger picture of our world that enables us to interpret, and not merely observe, our world.
As we saw when reflecting on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor (pp. 18–21), some people try to adopt a neutral view of the world that doesn’t rest on any larger vision of reality. Yet, as Taylor notes perceptively, this means that questions about ‘what is good, or worthwhile, or admirable, or of value’ simply cannot be answered. Why not? Because both meaning and value are interpretations of reality. They result from looking at life through a philosophical or theological lens.
As I’ve stressed throughout, Christianity locates us within a big picture so that we can position ourselves within our complex world. Or, to put it another way, Christianity tells us who we are by inviting us to work out how we fit into this larger scheme of things. We have to learn to see ourselves as standing within this big picture, and to discern how this helps to make sense of our world and our place, significance and value within it.