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
Augustine’s conversion set him on a path of Christian contemplation, careful study, and religious dialogue. He wanted to be left alone for a life of leisurely learning, but once the gospel took root, it moved outward. As Justo González writes, “It was not only now a matter of studying for the love of truth, or as an act of devotion, but also of studying as preparation to teach others.”19 Augustine saw the needs around him and was compelled (and somewhat forced) into the priesthood and, eventually, to being a bishop.
After the garden scene, Augustine got to writing and didn’t stop. Today, Augustine’s collected writings take up forty-four volumes. He wrote more than many of us will ever read, and he did it in a day without computers, typewriters, or a printing press. It’s astonishing to think about. The impressiveness does not come merely from the amount he wrote, either. Those within and outside the Christian faith consider him one of the greatest philosophical minds. While his writing is quantitatively impressive, it is because of the quality of his work that he is still shaping conversation today.
Like many church fathers, Augustine was an apologist: he defended the faith from false doctrine, guarding the deposit entrusted to him (see 1 Tim. 6:20). He gave himself away to the truth that found him. His first writings refuted his former sect, the Manicheans, rebutting key tenets and arguing with key leaders. He then moved from the Manicheans to the Donatists, who had emerged after persecution in the early church. The church had to figure out what to do with those who had reneged on their faith during a time of persecution and then wanted to come back to the church once the persecution was over. Having denied Christ, would they be allowed back when it was easier to be a Christian? The Donatists were against that. Those who avoided persecution or martyrdom should not be considered Christians. Donatists were seeking a pure church, one uncorrupted by sin and error.
Augustine’s tone changed significantly when he addressed the Donatists. Earlier in his life he had wanted to win arguments, but here he dealt respectfully with this group, “for his purpose was not to defeat his readers but to convince them.”20 Augustine realized that people argue from their heart more than their mind. “Their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken,” writes Augustine. “And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object they love instead of the truth. They love the truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong.”21 He came to these insights because he had studied his own heart. He had also wanted to be seen as being “in the know.” There’s a certain type of academic I call the “Well, Actuallys,” who are always out to correct people because they know everything. When someone says, “We got there around 3:00,” the “Well, Actually” chimes in, “Well, actually, it was more like 3:15.” I don’t know Augustine’s personality, but I imagine him being one of those people in his preconversion days.
But in his postconversion days Augustine tried to convince by caring. He was concerned less with being right and more with caring for people with the truth. He ceased to weaponize truth. Philippe de Champaigne painted a fitting portrait of Augustine in 1650. Veritas (truth) is symbolized by a sun in the top-left corner. The rays of truth proceed from the sun, through Augustine’s head, to his heart, which he holds in his hand on the right side of the painting. This image is an apt illustration of Augustine’s thought. Truth doesn’t end in the head but makes its way to the control center, which is the heart. He understood the heart as being central to our living. What someone loves is more important than what they can consciously know or express. Truth is foundational but insufficient. As David Brooks writes, “Knowledge is not enough for tranquillity and goodness, because it doesn’t contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action. We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation.”22 Augustine was conquered by love, and he sought to convince others with love and truth. Knowledge needed to turn to wisdom.
The last major doctrinal controversy Augustine faced started with Pelagius, perhaps Augustine’s most well-known debate partner. Pelagians said that accountability required choice. God couldn’t hold people accountable if they were sinful by nature. If sin wasn’t a choice but was how humans were born, then God would be unjust to hold them accountable. For this reason Pelagians denied original sin, the doctrine that people are born in a state of sin. But Augustine knew the depth of sin in his heart. Pelagius was attacking the gospel itself as well as the glory of God in salvation. Augustine understood that we humans are unable to choose Christ in our sinful state. The will is bound to sin, and without God’s intervention, sin is all we choose. Humans need God to act to save us. He’s the one who gives the gift. All we can do is receive.
Augustine was asked why so much of his writing dealt with Pelagianism. Here’s how he responded: “First and foremost because no subject gives me greater pleasure. For what ought to be more attractive to us sick men, than grace, grace by which we are healed; for us lazy men, than grace, grace by which we are stirred up; for us men longing to act, than grace, by which we are helped?”23 In the Roman Catholic Church, Augustine has come to be known as the doctor of grace. I can’t think of a better theme to mark a life.
At the end of his life, he went back through his work and made some retractions. He was humble enough to detail how his mind had changed throughout the years, what he had overstated or underemphasized, and what he had been just plain wrong about. For Augustine, truth was not something that he held; truth held him. Truth affected him deeply, and it caused a loving overflow to others. He dedicated his life to the truth that gave his soul rest.24
BIBLE STUDY
Perhaps the most popular form of spiritual formation in the evangelical world, Bible study allows us to know, interpret, and apply Scripture. When studying the Bible, we don’t merely study; we allow the Word to study us. As we saw in chapter 1, the foundation of all spiritual formation is biblical truth. We ought to be devoted to studying the Bible.
SCRIPTURE MEMORIZATION
The Psalms instruct us to meditate on the law day and night. How is that possible if we don’t know it? Memorizing Scripture is a way to meditate on the text when we don’t have the Bible in hand. Jesus quotes the Bible when tempted by the devil, so memorizing the Bible is also a help in fighting sin.
LISTENING TO SERMONS
“Faith comes from hearing” (Rom. 10:17). The Word addresses us, but we need help in understanding it. Listening to the Bible being explained has been a formative habit for me, and it is a means of grace by which God changes us.
SINGING SCRIPTURAL SONGS
One further way to meditate on Scripture or biblical themes is to sing songs. One of the most beautiful things I’ve seen is older Christians with dementia still recalling the songs of their youth even when they have forgotten much else. Music is a great means of remembrance.
RESOURCES
Augustine. On Christian Teaching. Translated by R. P. H. Green. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Charry, Ellen. By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Lovelace, Richard. Renewal as a Way of Life: A Guidebook for Spiritual Growth. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2006.
1. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1 (Chadwick, 3).
2. Augustine, Confessions 10.27.38 (Chadwick, 201). Elsewhere in the Confessions, Augustine writes, “But you were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me” (3.6.11; Chadwick, 43).
3. Augustine, On Christian Belief 39.72 (quoted in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129).
4. In proto-Descartes fashion, Augustine wonders how he knows anything.
Reason: You who wish to know yourself, do you know that you exist?
Augustine: I do.
Reason: How so?
Augustine: I do not know.
Reason: Do you know that you think?
Augustine: I do.
Reason: Therefore that it is true that you think.
Augustine: Certainly.
Augustine, Soliloquies 2.1.1 (quoted in González, Mestizo Augustine, 53).
5. Augustine, Confessions 2.4.9 (Chadwick, 29).
6. Augustine, Confessions 3.1.1 (Chadwick, 35).
7. Augustine, Confessions 3.4.7 (Chadwick, 38).
8. Augustine, Confessions 3.4.7 (Chadwick, 39).
9. As Étienne Gilson contends, “In [Augustine’s] doctrine wisdom, the object of philosophy, is always identified with happiness” (Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, 3).
10. Brooks, Road to Character, 199.
11. Augustine, Confessions 5.14.24 (Chadwick, 88).
12. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known, 31.
13. J. K. A. Smith, On the Road with St. Augustine, 152.
14. Augustine, Confessions 8.8.19 (Chadwick, 146).
15. Augustine, Confession, 8.11.26 (Chadwick, 151).
16. The garden imagery in this story and his earlier account of taking from the pear tree should not be lost on us.
17. Augustine, Confessions 8.12.29 (Chadwick, 153).
18. Augustine, Confessions 8.11.27 (Chadwick, 151).
19. González, Mestizo Augustine, 75.
20. González, Mestizo Augustine, 111.
21. Augustine, Confessions 10.23.24 (Chadwick, 199–200).
22. Brooks, Road to Character, 211.
23. Augustine, Epistle 186, 12.39 (quoted in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 356).
24. For a fuller account of Augustine’s philosophical foundations, see Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine.