Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te
Our heart is restless, until it rests in you
Peeling Onions
Entrenched in our present view of our world and ourselves today is a kind of formula for personal success, that is, we are required to “find” ourselves in order to experience happiness and fulfilment. The personal journey and the personal journal have become related metaphors to describe this coming to oneself. Finding the “joy” of being, uniquely, oneself, is just about the greatest thing a person could do, and the best legacy a person could leave.
Such a view of life’s best work and preoccupation is a far cry from what Augustine and his contemporaries would have thought; in fact, what most of us, till perhaps the mid-twentieth century, would have thought too. The obsessive personal journey, if undertaken to a mere destination called “me”, is hardly the most elevated of occupations … Such a self-centred proposal is not new, and yet this false and flickering light, arrogantly promising self-empowerment and enablement, has a stubborn hold on us.
Coming to personhood requires a larger context than the confining limitations of just “me”. Contemplating my own navel till I get to “me” is essentially futile; the shocking discovery I will make is that I am simply, in and of myself, nothing more than an onion whose layers are peeled away upon examination after examination: there is no deep core to behold.
No, the time has come to retrace our steps to a better, if older, proposal. Self-knowledge and core personhood come from an apprehension of an infinitely greater Other that stands apart and beyond just our mere selves, and challenges us to purposes and thoughts higher and greater than we are.
“Our heart is restless, until it rests in you”
Augustine began the Confessions when he was about forty-two. They are confessions for several reasons: as confession of his early waywardness, and misplaced faith in the beauty and knowledge of the world rather than God; confession or statement of belief in God; and confession as praise to God, the One who frames his apprehension of himself, and to whom he offers his Confessions in prayer. In fact, his entire “autobiography” is presented within the framework of an extended prayer.
Augustine’s starting point is a reflective consideration of himself as man, filled with irrepressible longings and unspeakable yearnings for something beyond himself. He makes no apology for this, because he realises, in the common sense that was perhaps more typical of his day, that his contemplation of reality or fulfilment could hardly begin and end with himself, a human being. The physical world points beyond itself to the presence of the One who made it and knows it intimately and well. Even in his sinful state, Augustine understood the quest for the greater Reality that stood outside of himself, beckoning to him through the elusive lusts and human loves that he gave himself to.
Personhood at its core consists of the will. As creatures of desire, we reach towards what we desire and long for. Augustine’s famous line, oft-quoted, “Our heart is restless, until it rests in you,” (Book 1) pithily summarises our human predicament: we long to “rest” in “something” greater than, other than, outside of, ourselves. But the impossibility of attaining that is nowhere as poignantly expressed as in Ecclesiastes 3: 11: “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (NIV). The human condition is such that we are blind to our own dependency on God: we long for an intimate knowledge of the “something” that stands outside ourselves, but are unable to grasp it, and yearn ceaselessly for the restfulness that would surely follow.
Augustine’s youthful adolescence and adulthood were spent in this way. Searching for the inexpressible that he apprehended distantly, without the means to find it, he wasted his youthful energies on what he later deemed restless dissipation and sexual lust. He was a directionless and uncontrolled creature of impulse, longing to give himself to a great purpose and love: “the single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and be loved” (Book 2). His true regret was that he sought for the numinous beauty and truth of the eternal God within the limited context of the transient created order. His unbridled lust for women and sex, he said, showed it, and his equal love for the passing knowledge of the world confirmed it.
“Late have I loved you, O beauty both ancient and new …”
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being,
were they not in you. (Book 10)
In love with the beauty of the world, whether physical or intellectual, Augustine only learned to love the beauty of God late in life, when he was in his thirties. Moving as he did from his ten-year entanglement with Manichaeism to an admission of Christianity, Augustine relates how the intellectual hunger and desire for the truth brought him to his knees. In effect, the Confessions are a story of conversion: Augustine’s conversion from Manichaeism, to pursuing truth and philosophy (love of wisdom) via the “righteous pagan” Cicero’s Hortensius, to an intellectual assent of Christianity, and finally, to an emotional conversion to the Christian faith. In his search, Augustine admits that he looked “outside” at the “shapely things [God] had made” and “rushed headlong” at them, thinking to find the satisfaction that only God, the One who created him, could possibly give. In the process of his folly, Augustine admits that he was “misshapen” in his wrongful search, held back and far from God by the very things, whether love or beauty, “which would have no being, were they not in [God].”
Foolishly content in his own knowledge, Augustine’s error is the error we make today, of substituting the small and limited happiness or pleasure that the physical and material realm provide in place of the ultimate happiness that can only be found in God. During his Manichee years, it is when his close friend from Tagaste dies that Augustine is plunged into deep and inconsolable grief. His unreasonable grief is due to his misplaced love of friends. He is pushed a step further to the conclusion that human loves, however good, are temporal and limited, but the ultimate unchangeable rest that Augustine longed to find still lay beyond him.
God the Summum Bonum of Life
The place of the mind in Augustine’s search for the Perfect is crucial, because the knowledge or Truth that he sought was really the knowledge of God (Christ). Far from being detached, Augustine’s idea of human knowing involved a passionate engagement with the Reality he sought to know. God then was the satisfaction of the infinite yearning of the soul to know as it was known, and to name as it had already been named. Arriving at this was to finally reach the rest of the restless soul, and the happiness that was not just temporal.
The revelation of one’s nature and being is thus possible only when seen in relation to the revelation of the One from whom one came. Only in relation to God, the source of all existence, could Augustine make any sense of who he himself was, and for what he had been made. Our moral sluggishness keeps us from understanding true personhood. The human quandary is that we view the starry heaven imperfectly from below, but are simply too weighted down by our sinfulness to be able to move upwards towards the vision we may have glimpsed. Yet our human memory is such that it is a repository that holds faint memories of that ideal happiness or recognition of truth that continually eludes us. Our present sinfulness does not prevent dimly-recalled “images” or memories of God imprinted in our human souls from drawing us irresistibly back to the ideal source and constant form of all Reality.
Being shattered images of God, man is given to change and changefulness. Heatedness, dissipation, and multiplicity describe as much as plague him. As creation turns away from the unchanging and harmonious oneness of God, it becomes scattered in peaceless multiplicity, unable to gather together its dissipated energies to return to its true source. It is this wilfully perverted life that Augustine calls “evil”, if we follow his famous definition of evil being the absence or deprivation of good. The further a soul hurtles away from God’s perfection, the greater the perversion of its free human will.
If humans are creatures of the will, rather than merely of intellect or emotion, as Augustine holds, then it is the will empowered by Christ that enables it to seek God or to know him. Without Christ, we are morally impotent, unable to even move towards God, our summum bonum (highest good) and ultimate happiness. He is the means and mechanism by which our return to God, the true Source of all, is effected. Without the gift of the Spirit, the empowering “will” of God, there is no real freedom in us to do the good we desire because of the woeful inertia of sin that binds our wills. Human volition is transformed and enabled by the Holy Spirit who gives it a single will and focus—towards God alone—and sustains its life-journey back to the ground of all being (Book 13). The human soul discovers, in its repentance, the cure for its perverted multiplicity, effected in the healing of its broken parts, and the re-joining and restoration of its various pieces into the wholeness it had always longed for: humbled, it finds personhood.
To Augustine, post-fall, to become a person that is truly imago dei is to accept Christ, and through spiritual rebirth via the Spirit, become a new person, leaving the old, dissipated Adam behind. In God’s summons to spiritual rebirth, Augustine sees that God’s love is the “weight” that draws him, not downward in the spiral of sin and the perverted will, but upwards now in the ascent of his freed soul towards God, the lode of existence. The flaming love of the Holy Spirit becomes the purifying motivator and mover of the will, once given over to inertia: “My weight is my love. By it I am carried wherever I am carried. By your gift, we are enkindled and are carried upward … We ascend your ladder which is in our heart … we glow inwardly with your fire—with your good fire—and we go forward because we go up to the peace of Jerusalem” (Book 13).
The God who knows the heart and kidneys
All life is a returning to the point of origin. Augustine’s personhood centred on the soul’s repentant return to the true source of life. His quest for self-knowledge brought him to a place beyond himself. Augustine, as his biographer James O’Donnell says, was not the final authority on Augustine. Rather it is the God who knows the “heart and kidneys”—that innermost intimate space of man’s mind—who defines the man.
God is the authoritative source of self-knowledge, the weaver of the metanarrative that gives human life meaning and substance: “What happens when we hear about ourselves from you? We come to know ourselves” (Book 10). Book 13 is the last chapter of the Confessions, explaining the days of creation. If Book 1 began with the restless heart searching for rest, then Book 13 appropriately ends with rest too. The Sabbath rest Augustine speaks of is not only God’s rest from the work of creation (Genesis 2: 1), but figuratively stands for the rest of the soul returning to its own proper equilibrium and place in the rest of God. Augustine’s Confessions began with a quest for self-knowledge: it ended where all things properly end, with a contemplation of God.
This was published in a Kairos monograph entitled, Restoring the Broken Image, pp. 19-22, April 2009
