8. Dodson, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, 13.
9. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.1.1. (Beveridge, 4).
10. For a further study of the tremendous mystery at the heart of religious experience, see Otto, Idea of the Holy, 12–41.
11. Oberman, Luther, 184.
12. The role of the Reformation in the rise of literacy should not be missed. Martin Luther sought to offer public-school education to all German youth. The printing press was also important in the rise of literacy and the emphasis on schooling that resulted from the Reformation.
13. Before Paul tells Timothy about the Scriptures and tells him to preach the Word, he reminds Timothy that he has followed Paul and that Paul has endured great suffering (1 Tim. 3:10–4:3). The foundation of preaching is an exemplary life. The chief shepherd should also be the chief sufferer.
14. Pink, Spiritual Growth, 124. I’d recommend Pink’s Profiting from the Word of God for more information on how to read Scripture in a way that feeds the soul as well as informs the mind.
15. Lancashire, “Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture” (edited for clarity).
3
Saint Augustine
FAITH SEEKING UNDERSTANDING
My sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and in his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.
—Saint Augustine, Confessions
My introduction to Saint Augustine came through his Confessions. Equal parts memoir, prayer, and theological reflection, Confessions defies easy categorization. Augustine reflects his life story in a prayer back to God and invites readers into his story. He opens the book with these famous words, which function as a sort of thesis statement: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”1 The first long section of Augustine’s story is one attempt after another of trying to quench this restlessness. For much of his life he attempts to find meaning, purpose, and rest outside of himself. Will academic accomplishments make him happy? Will fitting in satisfy him? Will sexual encounters provide the thing that causes his soul to rest? He goes on a search for satisfaction and comes up short with every attempt.
It isn’t until he comes to himself (to use words of the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15:17) that he comes to God. In all these external pursuits, God was within him, as God was the one who gave him life. Later in the Confessions, Augustine poetically writes, “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there. . . . You were with me, and I was not with you.”2 Elsewhere he suggests, “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.”3 As such, Augustine is known as one of the first philosophers of interiority.4 Whereas philosophers previously discussed the outside world, Augustine discusses the world of his soul. He unearths his deep and hidden thought life. He reflects on his reflection. He provides a first-person standpoint in the pursuit of truth. This seems common today, but in his time Augustine changed the standpoint of truth-seeking in unique ways.
AUGUSTINE’S STORY
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, which is in modern-day Algeria. He’s a church father who emerges from North Africa. His father, Patrick, was a Roman, pagan town counselor and tax collector. Patrick desired to have his son pursue the career that Patrick had always dreamed of for himself. So, Augustine was sent to the best schools to study with the best teachers so he could be the smartest and most successful person. Let’s call it an ancient plan for upward mobility meant to fulfill his parents’ wishes.
His mother, Monica, was of African descent and was a devout Christian. Whereas Patrick may have been a demanding though distant father, Monica comes across at times as an overbearing mother. She wanted the best for her son and clung a bit tightly. Yet Augustine credits her prayer and nurture as the conduit and catalyst of his eventual faith. She was a wise and saintly woman.
In reflecting on his youth, Augustine describes an early episode in his life where he was with his friends near a pear orchard. Not yet ripe, the pears had no value. But Augustine and his friends schemed to steal them. He shamefully remembers, “My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. . . . I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it.”5 Groupthink and peer pressure had powerful sway for young Augustine. As he reflects on this incident, he says he would never have done it by himself, but the power of friendship, the power of belonging and being approved, drove him to do the illicit action. He was a conundrum to himself, free yet bound in ways he could not understand.
Though he had some youthful distractions from school, he ended up being somewhat of a golden boy and star student. His hunger for recognition and approval—from father and friends—drove him to success. He was sent to Carthage to learn with the best, but here he had another hunger that emerged in his young adulthood: lust. In his own words, “All around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. As yet I had never been in love and I longed to love. . . . I was in love with love.”6 We can feel the teenage angst of lust in Augustine. He was in love with love. Perhaps we could say he was a hopeless romantic, but the romance he wanted was sexual experience. He wanted to be accepted, and if that meant feeling “love” in the arms of a woman after a one-night stand, that would do for the time being.
In spite of his distractions, Augustine excelled in his studies in Carthage because, as he describes it, he had a “delight in human vanity.”7 He didn’t necessarily care to be smart, but he sure wanted to be seen as smart. To use YouTube rhetoric, he wanted to “own them with logic” and “destroy his opponent.” Whether his argument was true didn’t matter as long as he won.
PRECONVERSIONS
Throughout Augustine’s early life he underwent several “preconversions” that reoriented him to the world, and books were often the catalyst for these changes. The first book was Cicero’s Hortensius. Augustine claimed that “the book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart.”8 In all of his schooling, Augustine had thought the goal was to know more than others, or at least to win arguments against others. Who cared about philosophy (i.e., loving the truth)? Education had been a status symbol for Augustine. But Cicero changed Augustine’s thoughts on education. Augustine didn’t want merely to seem smart anymore; he wanted to be wise. In the end, truth would indeed lead to happiness—but not in the way Augustine planned.9
Another preconversion for Augustine came through reading the writings of Mani. Mani was the founder of a heretical sect called the Manicheans. In essence, Manicheanism was a philosophical system that taught a division of the world into two realms: good and evil. The body, as material, was evil, but the spirit was good. This belief system could account for the problem of evil. Good and evil were eternal, so they resided within humanity. Christians had a harder time explaining evil because they said God was eternal and good. Then how did evil come about? For Augustine, this strict logical system explained the universe. Explanation was the goal of the Manicheans: to explain away all mysteries, to know everything. Because Manicheans believed in this strict, logical system, truth was available only to the superrational, a limited few. These interests—explaining things and being elite—fueled Augustine’s desire to be right.
Manicheanism drove Augustine’s self-confidence. He could master and improve himself by conquest. If he worked hard enough, studied long enough, exhibited enough self-control, he could control his destiny. He still had some lingering questions about Manicheanism, but he was told to wait until Faustus, a leading teacher of the day, came to town. Augustine did just that, but Faustus left him feeling underwhelmed. This is the guy I’ve been waiting for? He wondered. He seems pretty average. This interaction sent Augustine into an intellectual crisis. Maybe he had made a wrong choice.
Commenting on Augustine’s predicament, David Brooks writes,
Reason is not powerful enough to build intellectual systems or models to allow you to accurately understand the world around you or anticipate what is to come. Your willpower is not strong enough to successfully police your desires. . . . The problem, Augustine came to believe, is that if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride.10
Augustine thought he could conquer his life, but he found his life conquered. In biblical language, rather than merely knowing God, he became known by God (Gal. 4:8–9).
CONVERSION
After his schooling in Carthage and brief teaching stints in Thagaste, Carthage, and Rome, Augustine’s move to Milan sparked a brief interest in Christianity. He heard good things about the bishop there, a man named Ambrose. Augustine had always thought Scripture was a bit foolish, not as refined as the philosophical Cicero. He started going to church to hear Ambrose preach, not for the content but in the hopes of picking up some rhetorical tricks so he could be more convincing. But in spite of his intentions, Augustine realized that “while I opened my heart in noting the eloquence with which he [Ambrose] spoke, there also entered no less the truth which he affirmed, though only gradually.”11 Augustine’s conversion was a slow burn.
In Ambrose, Augustine found someone he could trust. Truth depends on trust. The Quaker educator Parker Palmer explains the etymology of “truth.” “The English word ‘truth’ comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word ‘troth,’ as in the ancient vow ‘I pledge thee my troth.’ With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in a mutually accountable and transforming relationship, a relationship forged of trust and faith in the face of unknowable risks.”12 Palmer points out that relationality connects to belief. We are not as intellectual and reasonable as we think we are. On Ambrose, philosopher James K. A. Smith notes, “From Ambrose, Augustine would realize that the Christianity he’d rejected was not Christianity. But it was Ambrose’s love and welcome that created the intellectual space for him to even consider that.”13 Sometimes a good and faithful friend can give plausibility structures for belief—that is, the habits or ethos that makes something believable. Ambrose appears to have been not merely knowledgeable but also a wise theological physician.
One day, Augustine’s life took a turn that changed him forever. By “coincidence” (as often is the case in transformative moments), he met a fellow African transplant in Milan named Pontianus. This man began telling Augustine about Christian saints, particularly Egyptian monks like Saint Anthony, who abandoned everything and lived in the desert to follow God. They weren’t ashamed of the gospel. These stories convicted Augustine, as he was fearful of what commitment to Christ would mean for his social standing.
He rushed to his friend Alypius and wondered aloud about how the unlearned could teach masters of rhetoric anything. These simple people seemed to have conquered their passions while Augustine was “deeply disturbed in spirit, angry with indignation and distress.”14 Augustine seems to have been intellectually convinced of Christianity at this time. He didn’t need more answers. Yet he had a greater problem. His affections for God lagged behind his mind. He didn’t know whether he loved God even if he believed in him. Would belief be strong enough to conquer passions?
He then went outside Alypius’s house to a garden. He describes his mental state as being like that of a madman with phantom limbs. He couldn’t control himself. It looked as if Augustine was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Yet it wasn’t mental. What was holding him back was not an existential crisis but sin. Those old lusts came and spoke. “Vain trifles and the triviality of the empty-headed, my old loves, held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered, ‘Are you getting rid of us? . . . From this moment we shall never be with you again, not for ever and ever.’ . . . Meanwhile the overwhelming force of habit was saying to me: ‘Do you think you can live without them?’”15 Isn’t that how sin talks? “You think you can give me up? Forever? Never again?”
Underneath a fig tree,16 he pondered, “‘How long, how long is it going to be?’ ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow.’ ‘Why not now? Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?’” Augustine was confronted with a decision. He then began to hear what sounded like a chant or kids’ song: Tolle lege, tolle lege, or “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” Books are a prevalent part of Augustine’s story.
Supposing this chant to be a divine call to open the book in Alypius’s house (which “happened” to be the Epistle to the Romans), he rushed back. He picked up the book, flipped it open, and read wherever his eyes “happened” to land: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:13–14). Augustine writes, “I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.”17 The truth of the Bible gave Augustine the rest he had been longing for.
Augustine had thought he was the master of his own destiny and shaper of his own thought. He had thought his intellectual system could bring him to God. But he kept finding himself unreliable. So, he made the leap toward truth. “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.”18 The truth set Augustine free. The truth caught and healed him.
His conversion led to a posture of receptiveness. When God offers us a gift, we try to buy it. All of Augustine’s life, he had wanted to earn his prestige. Yet he found that prestige was a gift and not a wage. The reality of grace is central to the Christian mindset, and as you may remember from chapter 2, all great religious revivals start with the centrality of grace. Grace seems too simple, too accessible for someone as talented and smart as Augustine. Grace would mean Augustine wasn’t special or more capable than others in regard to salvation. For most of his early life, he couldn’t accept that. However, Augustine came to the end of himself, and there he found God.
TRUTH AS A TOOL, NOT A WEAPON
