Love Seeking Understanding, Understanding Seeking Love: The Trinity and How Doxology Drives Theology

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly working through Stephen R. Holmes’ bookThe Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity. Though the book surveys the full history of Christian theology, Holmes begins with what has been called the 20th century revival of the doctrine of the Trinity. In rehearsing the resurgence of interest in the Trinity, Holmes asks whether the so-called revival was in fact much more revisionary than is typically thought. With that question in mind, he carefully works through the Trinitarian debates of the first few centuries in order to articulate the key figures, moments, exegetical moves, and doctrinal insights which together gave the Church her creeds and her understanding of the Trinity.

I hope to have more to say about the overall argument in a later post, but for now I wanted to share a striking observation that bears on the task of theology itself.

Holmes notes that the doctrine of the Trinity, and the attending understanding of the person of Christ, emerges as a theological articulation of the already existing fact of Christian worship. That Christ was worshipped as God from the very beginning of the faith is historically undeniable, and yet the attending theology of the divinity of Christ and the relation of the Son to the Father within in the life of God took a few centuries to work out. In other words, one way to look at the emergence of the doctrinal expression of the Trinitarian life of God is that the Church’s theology had to catch up with the already existing reality of the Church’s worship. Theology gave expression to doxology. Or to put it more boldly, doxology can and often does drive theology.

As a vivid example of this, at the end of his own extensive reflections on the Trinity, Augustine prays, and as part of his elaborate and beautiful prayer, he asks God this, “May I remember You, understand You, love You. Increase these things in me, until You renew me wholly” (On the Trinity Book XV.28.51) He links understanding and love, and the full prayer makes clear that understanding is never meant as an end in itself but is meant to serve and increase love. Theology that serves the church is sourced from love, from a determination to know the one whom we worship, to come to know more and more the one we are commanded to love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and then to love him.

All of this put in my mind of this lovely passage from Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology , vol. 1. , where with the evocative language of the Song of Songs, she reminds us all what theology is really for: “To speak of God, to name the Divine Perfections, should be honey in the comb, the river of delight, the freshness and strong elixir of love. Love is the Truth of God, but also the Beauty. God is sublime, a zealous Good. Love alone is as strong as death, its passion fierce as the grave. To know this God, the Living Lord, is to hunger and to delight and to hunger once more. Theology should pant after its God, the Love that is better than wine, for God is beautiful, truly lovely, the One whose Eyes are like doves. Eat, friends — all theology should ring out with this invitation — drink and be drunk with Love.” (Brad East has a lovely review of this volume here.)

I have Sonderegger’s words pinned on the bulletin board above my desk to remind myself of the true end of all my study—to know God and to love him. Balthasar sums all this up quite succinctly when he exhorts, “Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them” (Love Alone is Credible) Yes, but the theologian must not listen only, but as Balthasar’s larger work demonstrates again and again, the great task of the theologian is to become a lover of God oneself.

What does Jerusalem have to do with Vienna?

Paweł Czerwiński

What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? Since Tertullian posed this question, it has become a short hand way to frame the relationship between philosophy and theology. But as this extended quote from the novel Mystical Paths illustrates, the better question for our age might be, what does Jerusalem have to do with Vienna? In other words, what is the relationship between theology and psychology?

“My father had long ago since grasped that the language of Christianity and psychology could form two ways of expressing one truth, but I longed for a detailed synthesis which would make Christianity blaze across the minds of unchurched mid-twentieth century masses and render its message meaningful. It’s no good performing the classic academic exercise of expressing Christianity in term of the latest fashionable philosophy. That appeals to no one outside the universities. For the mid-twentieth century you’ve got to express Christianity psychologically because even the average moron at a cocktail party has heard of the Oedipus complex. Or in other words, psychology’s the grass-roots intellectual language of our time, and if you can translate Christianity into that, everyone will finally understand what the preachers are whittering on about in the pulpit—and then with understanding will come spiritual enlightenment…”

Though the novel is set in the mid-1960’s, Nick’s insistence that “psychology’s the grass-roots intellectual language of our time” could be said for our day as well. In the context of pastoral ministry, I have seen that people have not only absorbed a lot of pop psychology and readily speak its language. They are also hungry to understand things in psychology terms. As an example, the explosion of interest in the Enneagram within Christian circles shows the deep hunger for both self-understanding and the ease with which people begin to speak a new language.

So on one level, I resonate with the quote and see the value in learning to speak in these terms and to look to psychology for resources in translating the faith within given context. I see this as related to the question of mission and contextualize, a topic I hope to pick up in earnest in the new year as I continue to work through David Kettle’s Western Culture in Gospel Context.

However, just as expressing Christianity in terms of a fashionable philosophy can have have a distorting effect, so that the theology comes to serve the philosophy rather than the other way around, so too can expressing Christianity in terms of psychology go awry. On the most basic level, psychological models change and certain models are uneasy bed fellows with classically Christian understandings of the human person. More fundamentally though, the great temptation in translating the faith into the language of psychology is that such translation becomes a reduction, so that the faith is reduced to nothing more than a kind of therapy. If faith is therapeutic then the driving question becomes how does this make me feel rather than is this true. If faith is merely therapeutic it is all the more easily abandoned for something else that “just works better.”

The deep irony, as Darrow himself comes to learn in the novel, is that the Christian tradition itself has deep reservoirs for psychological self-understanding. Augustine and The Confessions famously comes to mind, and one only needs to spend time reading John Cassian or almost any passage chosen at random from the Philokalia to see that Christianity has long had an interest in plumbing the depths of human motivation.

No Golden Age? No problem.

There is no golden age, and that is a good thing.

“We are living in a time when the images of the gods and idols are crashing all about us. The spiritual and cultural traditions of vast regions of the West are increasingly being called into question; indeed, we can go even further and say they are being liquidated, quickly and relatively painlessly. Just as a tree in autumn drops its leaves without pain or regret in order to gather once more new strength from within, to renew its powers in hibernal peace, so too the tree of culture is now being stripped of its leaves.”

So begins Hans Urs von Balthasar’s essay, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”, an essay where Balthasar examines those specifically Christian streams of thinking, writing, reflection, and prayer that have nourished the tree of culture in the past.

But this opening points to something that is especially worth taking to heart: Look at the tree, he says. Stop looking at the dead leaves on the ground. Stop lamenting that you live in autumn. Look up. Though the season speaks of coming death, the tree isn’t going anywhere.

The point is worth taking because looking at the tree and rightly discerning the season in which we live helps us guard against a temptation Balthasar readily describes, namely the temptation to return to some golden era, some previous age that is imagined to be better and purer simply because it was prior. First is best, we might say. Earlier is purer. And because of this temptation we might lament living through autumn rather than spring. He argues that we are especially prone to look back to the Patristic period with “Romantic longing”. Why? Because the Fathers were first and are therefore purer. But to return to the image of the tree, the argument of first is best, first is purer, is like saying “I would rather have a sapling than a redwood.”

To be clear Balthasar notes the ways in which there is a purity to Patristic thinking, a spring time newness to things. And there is a sense in which what they faithfully did, what they thought and what they died for, set the parameters and the terms of the conversation that continued in their wake. But they have not said everything. We must keep this in mind because of this temptation to look back on a particular historical moment or a particular thinker and believe that their way is the way, that their way is the only way to approach things.

This does not mean that we don’t have anything to learn from earlier ages and earlier thinkers. Quite the contrary. Take the example of Paul, though we must begin with understanding him in his context in order to faithfully preach what he preached, it is not enough to simply say,this is what Paul said, and then imagine that we have said everything there is to say. We must move to the next step, which is coming to terms with what Paul is saying to us in our time and in our place. Now what Paul is saying will not wholly contradict what Paul said. Remember the primary metaphors Balthasar employs are organic—the tree, the stream—so this is not about radical discontinuity and rupture. But being faithful to the word is something more than being able to say, this is what it meant. We have to be able to say also this is what it meant then, and this is what it means now, because the word of revelation is a living word.

I find Balthasar’s point about avoiding a naive nostalgia about the past especially interesting because I grew up in a context where the church of the book of Acts was held up as the golden age of the church. It was a variation on the argument that first is best, that first is purest. And Balthasar will have none of that thinking. I know people, and I myself have been guilty of this, who have traded the church of Acts as the ideal for the theology of the Fathers as the ideal, but Balthasar challenges both ways of thinking and says, yes, looking back is part of being faithful, and s we should look back, and we should read and learn and understand, but not so that we can perfectly replicate what they did in their time and place, but so that it might source our own faithful expression in our own time and place.

An historical example, he says, is only ever an analogy, and for him the inner paradox of analogy is that for all the similarity, there is always the ever greater difference, which means that we can glean things, yes, but we cannot perfectly replicate them, nor should we try. Take for example an argument that I hear a lot, namely that the time in which we are living in is like the fall of Rome. There is something to this argument that resonates with people, and we can readily find touch points, and it is a reason that some many are finding great nourishment in returning to Augustine and The City of God. Though we should read Augustine and learn what he is saying to us now, the analogy is never perfect. As Balthasar puts it, theology at its best in a given era is the the light of Truth breaking through “a vast number of mosaic shards of broken and smokey glass: in the thousands of many forms in which it is announced, systematized, humanized” (369). Which means that even in autumn, and even in a coming winter, the light comes and is coming into the world, and though we might only be a shard of broken glass, we are still able to let the light shine through. So the question becomes what might it mean to faithfully speak the living word in the midst of an autumn?

Does theology have anything to do with holiness?

In this post and in the next few posts, I want to explore some of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflections on the relationship between theology and spirituality, or what he tends to call the relationship between theology and sanctity, what we might now call the relationship between theology and holiness.

Now these two words, theology and holiness, might seem a curious pairing to us, and this is precisely the issue Balthasar hopes to address. Theology/holiness, contemplation/action, believing/living—we tend to see these more as dichotomies and dilemmas rather than as dynamically related and mutually informing realties. But the two absolutely belong together, and the fact that they aren’t seen as belonging together is for Balthasar a story of decline and a story of divorce. Their separation is therefore grievous and unnatural. To illustrate Balthasar offers this striking image in the essay “Theology and Sanctity”, saying that theology without sanctity is “bones without flesh” and that sanctity (spirituality) without theology is “flesh without bones”.

Taking this image of the body, we might say that what results from the separation of theology and sanctity is a kind of formlessness, something incomplete and not wholly itself. As he concludes, “Only the two together (corresponding to the prototype of revelation in scripture) constitute the unique ‘form’ capable of being ‘seen’ in the light of faith by the believer, a unique testimony, invisible to the world, and a ‘scandal’ to it.”

Thinking of scripture as offering the prototype, I was put in mind first of Paul, and the way the opening prayers in his epistles are so often road maps to his theological reflections, and the ways, like in Romans 8, that his theological reflections are transposed into prayer and doxology.

I was also put in mind of Augustine and how so much of his work is either actually prayer or is suffused, surrounded by, steeped in, prayer. The Confessions are of course a famous example of this, but you can see it throughout his work. Here is a portion of a prayer from the end of The Trinity that nicely captures Augustine’s deep desire not simply to understand something, or to explain something, but rather to see and be transformed by what he has sought to understand:

“Do Thou give strength to seek, who has made me find You, and has given the hope of finding You more and more. My strength and my infirmity are in Your sight: preserve the one, and heal the other. My knowledge and my ignorance are in Your sight; where You have opened to me, receive me as I enter; where You have closed, open to me as I knock. May I remember You, understand You, love You. Increase these things in me, until You renew me wholly. “

The Trinity, XV.28, taken from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130115.htm

As another example, I think of Anselm who calls his work the Monologium “an example of meditation on the grounds of faith.” In other words, to use a more famous phrase of his, he is engaged in “faith seeking understanding”, and this prayer from the Prosologium illustrates how central prayer is to that larger quest of knowing God:

“I pray, 0 God, to know you, to love you, that I may rejoice in you. And if I cannot attain to full joy in this life may I at least advance from day to day, until that joy shall come to the full. Let the knowledge of you advance in me here, and there be made full. Let the love of you increase, and there let it be full, that here my joy may be great in hope, and there full in truth. Lord, through your Son you do command, nay, you do counsel us to ask; and you do promise that we shall receive, that our joy may be full. I ask, O Lord, as you do counsel through our wonderful Counsellor. I will receive what you do promise by virtue of your truth, that my joy may be full. Faithful God, I ask. I will receive, that my joy may be full. Meanwhile, let my mind meditate upon it; let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it; let my mouth talk of it. Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole being desire it, until I enter into your joy, O Lord, who are the Three and the One God, blessed for ever and ever. Amen.”

Prologium, CHAPTER XXVI. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-proslogium.asp

In these prayers both Augustine and Anselm assume not only a relationship between theology and holiness, meaning that what they believe ought to have some effect on how they live, but also the relationship between love and knowledge, that what they know of God moves them to deeper love of God, and deeper love moves them to deeper knowledge. The divorce between love and knowledge is the deeper issue faced by theologians today, and in my mind it is only in restoring that relationship that we can then heal the divide between theology and holiness. This is why Sertillanges and Griffiths are both such important voices in their respective descriptions of the intellectual life. They both understand the vocation in terms of love and desire. I pray that the same would be true for me and for a whole generation of theologians who hope to serve the church with theology.

The City of God and the Citadel of Pride: Why Humility Matters

“The grace of God could not be commended in a way more likely to evoke a grateful response, than the way by which the only Son of God, while remaining unchangeably in his own proper being, clothed himself in humanity and gave to man the spirit of his love by the mediation of a man, so that by this love men might come to him who formerly was so far away from them, far from mortals in his immortality, from the changeable in his changelessnes, from the wicked in his righteousness, from the wretched in his blessedness. And because he has implanted in our nature the desire for blessedness and immortality he has now taken on himself mortality, while continuing in his blessedness, so that he might confer on us what our hearts desire; and by his sufferings he has taught us to make light of what we dread.” City of God, Book X.29

What is ultimately offensive and irreconcilable about the Incarnation may not be the metaphysics, the sheer improbability and seeming impossibility that God would become man, but the even more stunning implications about the kind of God who would become man. Who is this God who would subject himself to the vicissitudes of history? What is this uncontrollable mystery marked not primarily by power and might but by humility?

In Book X of City of God Augustine spars with the Neoplatonists, represented primarily by Porphyry. I have to admit that this section was pretty tough going for me. I’m not entirely familiar with Neoplatonism, and though Platonism will always cast a shadow on Western thought for good or for ill, I wasn’t entirely sure where Augustine was going. But a real payoff came in chapter 29 of Book X, where Augustine comes to a truth that is instructive for anyone engaged in evangelism and apologetics.

In this chapter, Augustine asserts that at bottom it is not for philosophical or intellectual reasons that the Neoplatonists reject Christ. Rather it is because Christ’s humility in the Incarnation and Crucifixion are affronts to their pride. Of course the whole of Christ’s life and ministry raises intellectual questions, but for Augustine, the hurdle is not primarily an intellectual one of unanswerable questions, but a spiritual one of utter humility.

This is not to say the Incarnation is not an unfathomable mystery. Of course it is bottomless and beautiful and worthy of our contemplation. Nor is this to say that intellectual objections are empty and therefore should not be addressed, but it is to say that there is often a deeper objection behind the presenting objection, and if that deeper objection is not addressed, intellectual answers, no matter how subtle or seemingly satisfying, cannot win the day. For pride is the final stronghold, the last fortress that must fall in the battle for our affection. To be sure, even when we have turned to Christ, skirmishes will be fought, offensives will be launched from this fortress, for pride resides in our most inward citadel, in the Helm’s Deep of very selves.

Here Augustine is addressing that special form of pride, intellectual pride. Augustine’s target may be the neoplatonist, but it could just as easily be the New Atheist or the materialist or any other such movement that will inevitably come down the pike. But to take the example of the New Atheist, for Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris to acknowledge the hint of the possibility that there is some reality outside of science as they have defined it would be an act of enormous humility. What they have to lose is credibility, platforms, and power, the very things that Christ laid aside in the Incarnation.

In The Lord of the Rings Frodo’s greatest advantage is his seeming inconsequence. As Gandalf says of the quest to destroy the Ring, “Let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.” Humility has its own power because it never occurs to the powerful that anyone would willingly sacrificing power. This willingness, this sacrifice is its own kind of power.

Yet anyone looking at the quest of the ring bearer from the outside would have their doubts.  Surely this hobbit cannot matter? Surely the fate of Middle-Earth does not hinge on a halfling? And many looking on the life of Christ have had their doubts. Surely the Christ cannot come from Galilee? Surely the Christ is not a carpenter, born and raised in obscurity? And we pile on our own objections. He never penned a book, never traveled beyond the borders of his occupied country, never directly affronted the occupying powers, never commanded the allegiance of the powerful. But if we would experience the humility of Christ and see its power to overcome darkness, and in seeing acknowledge the latent power of humility to destroy the one thing that seems unassailable, human pride, then we might come to a place of worship and awe, a place of understanding, not where all our questions are answered to our complete satisfaction, but where as Augustine puts it, “he might confer on us what our hearts desire.” 

Desire, Satisfaction, and the Supreme Good, Reflections on City of God, pt. 6

“All those schools must be ranked below those philosophers who have found man’s true Good not in the enjoyment of the body or the mind, but in the enjoyment of God. This is not like the mind’s enjoyment of the body, or of itself; nor is it like of friend by friend; it is like the eye’s enjoyment of light–or rather that is the closet analogy…Therefore Plato has no hesitation in asserting that to be a philosopher is to love God, whose nature is immaterial…To be sure, it does not automatically follow that a man is happy, just because he enjoys what he has set his heart on; many are miserable because they are in love with things that should not be loved, and they become even more miserable when they enjoy them. But it remains true that no one is happy without the enjoyment of what he loves. Even those who set their heart on the wrong things do not suppose their happiness to consist in the loving, but in the enjoyment. If anyone then enjoys what he loves, and loves the true Supreme Good, only the most miserable would deny his happiness. Now this Sovereign Good, according to Plato, is God. And that is why he will have it that the true philosopher is the lover of God, since the aim of philosophy is happiness, and he who has set his heart on God will be happy in the enjoyment of him.” City of God Book VIII.10

Here Augustine grapples with one of the central questions: what is the supreme good, the Summum Bonum? That is to ask, what is supremely worthy of pursuit? Or to put it another way, what is the aim of life? When the weeds are cleared, what is left? When the dross is burned away, what remains?

As important as that question is, behind that question is another more fundamental question, namely, what are human beings. In this passage, Augustine is arguing that human beings are primarily creatures of desire, driven by enjoyment and pleasure, and that therefore happiness (and by extension the supreme good) comes from enjoying what is loved. That may seem simple enough, but for some, it may seem strange to see Augustine affirming these things in his discussion of the supreme good because he has something of a not entirely undeserved reputation when it comes to things like sex. But as much as the problem may lie with Augustine’s own sexual baggage, a lot of the problem lies with our culture’s tendency to hear words like pleasure, desire, and enjoyment in purely sexual ways.

Which actually speaks to one of his central points in this passage–not all desire is good or beneficial or rightly orientated, not all love leads to happiness. Moreover, perhaps we hear these words in a sexualized way because our sexual desires are disordered. But that seems impossible to many because of the tendency to think of desire and the indulgence of that desire in a purely circular and simplistic way with no thought of what desire itself tells us about the nature of the world and what our desires might be aiming us toward. Even it the thought of disordered desire may not occur to us, it is something to grapple with, especially if  Augustine is right that “many are miserable because they are in love with things that should not be loved, and they become even more miserable when they enjoy them.”

While the thought may be simple–that human beings are creatures of desire made to enjoy that which is desired–the application is enormously complex. There are so many things to desire and so many ways that desire can become disordered. This is not to mention where the lines between true enjoyment and overindulgence are. It is hard to argue that we are creatures of desire, creatures of appetite. Love, passion, romance, labors of love are the bright face of desire while greed, gluttony, overindulgence, addiction are its dark twin. When we think of our gut level orientation to the world it’s hard to argue that so much of day to day life is grappling with desire. The push and pull of the everyday is often found in the counterbalance of seeking to satisfy certain desires, while simultaneously suppressing others. But that angst is precisely why the question of the supreme good is so important. If we are creatures of desire, then we must at least attempt to figure out what it is that it is best to desire. Or to put it another way, what is the thing that when it is desired and then enjoyed is most satisfying? For Augustine that is God. As he puts it in Confessions,”God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

Even if you answer the question differently than Augustine, it is worth asking why and pondering what it might mean, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, that there seem to be desires that nothing in this world fully satisfy.

 

What have your gods required of you? Reflections on City of God, Pt. 5

Up to this point in City of God, Augustine has been showing the impotence of the Roman gods in the affairs of this world. They do not offer the protection or benefits claimed for them, and their sheer number indicates that whatever power they might have is limited to inconsequential spheres of influence that in the end have no benefit. In Book VI he turns to the question of eternal life, asking if these gods have anything to offer their worshippers on the other side of death. His answer, of course, is no, but along the way he interacts with Varro, author of Divine Antiquities, a book now lost to history which offered detailed descriptions of Roman religion.

Varro’s book sounds fascinating, like a encyclopedia of the sociology of religion of the day. And as Augustine describes it, Varro’s book is long (which is saying something considering what a brick City of God is). Within the book, Varro distinguishes between mythical, physical, and civil theology, respectively, the gods of the theater, the gods of the philosophers, and the gods of the state. One reason for these distinctions is that Varro wants to distance himself from the gods of the theatre, what he calls the mythic gods, and wants to uphold the gods of the state, what he calls the civil gods. Both Varro and Augustine find the theater disgraceful and its presentation of the gods unseemly. But Augustine finds Varro’s distinction between the mythic and the civil gods to be meaningless because the horrors and savagery depicted in plays is the same type of savagery enacted in the temple of the gods. Fascinatingly, Augustine quotes Seneca on this point, who says of Roman worship, “One man cuts off his male organs, another gashes his arms. If this is the way they earn the favor of the gods, what happens when they fear their anger?”

One of Seneca’s implied points, and certainly one of Augustine’s explicit points, is that the worship required by a given god tells you a lot about the character of that god, which then begs the deeper question, are gods who require such things worthy of worship? Augustine’s overall point in this book is that people should not contort themselves and pour themselves out for gods who have nothing to offer in this life or in the next. For Augustine, the gods of the Roman pantheon are the epitome of gods who are unworthy of worship because they cannot save in this life or the next.

Another important point from this section is that worship is always demanding because by definition you are offering yourself to another, and to truly offer yourself is never easy. But to pour yourself out to things, ideas, ambitions that in the end deplete and bleed you and offer nothing in return is a tragedy. That is not overstating it, because from a Christian point of view misdirected worship, the pouring out of the self for those things that act like gods but are not gods, is the deepest human tragedy. It is the tragedy of idolatry. Or as David Foster Wallace so beautifully and strikingly puts it,

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” David Foster Wallace, This is Water

What have your gods required of you? This is a great question for any season, but especially for Lent, when we offer before the Lord our deepest motivations and desires, asking him to cleanse and forgive us.

 

Fate vs. Providence, Reflections on City of God, Part 4

In Book IV of City of God, Augustine argues that Rome’s greatness is not due to the pantheon of gods they worshipped. At the beginning of Book V Augustine turns to fate, destiny, and astrology to show that Rome’s greatness was not written in the stars either. As you can imagine such discussions lead very quickly into the deep waters of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

As others have noted, City of God 5.9 is worth reading and rereading, but I want to discuss a different aspect of this section of the book, namely the difference between a pagan notion of fate or destiny and a Christian notion of providence. This distinction, it seems to me, lies at the very heart of Augustine’s own thinking, and at the heart of how Christians perceive reality and the vicissitudes of history. Fate and destiny are faceless, and they are nameless too, to the extent that there is no one to thank for blessing and no one to rail against for cursing. To be sure, as Augustine discusses at length, Rome deified their conception of Felicity and Fortune in order to put a face to the nameless force, but for Augustine that is exactly the problem. In naming these goddesses, Fortune and Felicity, the Romans rightly intuit the need for a face on the other side of reality, but they don’t go far enough in identifying the one true God of history and the universe.

Providence, on the other hand, is the will of the benevolent God playing out in time and space. Providence, in its fullest sense accounts for both free will and foreknowledge, and places ultimate causes in the hands of the God of Christian revelation. There are two very practical things to note about a Christian view of providence. 1) Though the ultimate purpose of seemingly random events remains inscrutable, the character of the one governing them is not. The God of Christian revelation is loving, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast mercy. For all his power and might, the face behind reality is ultimately kind. 2) There is no area of life or reality left merely to chance. Again, we might not understand events and our experiences fully, but the promise of Christian revelation is that the expanse of Providence spans from the movement of the celestial bodies to the intricacies of a bird’s wing. As Augustine puts it,

“Thus God is the supreme reality, with his Word and the Holy Spirit–three who are one. He is the God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and every body; participation in him brings happiness to all who are happy in truth and not in illusion; he has made man a rational animal, consisting of soul and body; and when man sins he does not let him go unpunished, nor does he abandon him without pity…From him derives every mode of every being, every species, every order, all measure, number, and weight. He is the source of all that exists in nature, whatever its kind, whatsoever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms. He has given to flesh its origin, beauty, health, fertility in propagation, the arrangement of the bodily organs, and the health that comes from their harmony. He has endowed even the soul or irrational creatures with memory, sense, and appetite, but above all this, he has given to the rational soul thought, intelligence, and will. He has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s death (to say nothing of the heavens and the earth, the angels and mankind)–he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace. It is beyond anything incredible that he should have willed the kingdoms of mean, their dominations and their servitudes, to be outside the range of the laws of his providence.” City of God, V.11

As I read this beautiful passage, I imagine what Augustine would have made of quantum mechanics in this regard and the awe and worship he would have felt to know that providence extends to the infinitesimal just as much as to the infinite. And a passage like this reminds me at base what is so immensely practical and life giving about theology. Discussions of Providence, free will, and sovereignty can certainly be anything but life giving, but to affirm and believe in, and ultimately be comforted by God’s providential care of all things is to know freedom and peace and to be filled with worship and awe.

Worship, Empire, and the Fickle Human Heart, Reflections on City of God

“But the worshippers and lovers of those gods, whom they delighted to imitate in their criminal wickedness, are unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country. ‘So long as it lasts,’ they say, ‘so long as it enjoys material prosperity, and the glory of victorious war, or, better, the security of peace, why should we worry? What concerns us is that we should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day, enough to keep our inferiors in their place…Anyone who disapproves of this kind of happiness should rank as a public enemy: anyone who attempts to change it or get rid of it should be hustled out of hearing by the freedom-loving majority: he should be kicked out, and removed from the land of the living. We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” City of God, Book II, Chapter 20

In this passage, as a master of rhetoric, Augustine uses hyperbole to great effect. By adopting the voice of a typical Roman citizen, he skewers both the Roman deities and those who worship them. He also tellingly reveals one dark aspect of imperialism–the calloused disdain of the privileged for those beneath them. More broadly, here and throughout Book II, Augustine is examining the ways in which false worship distorts the worshipper. In Augustine’s logic worshippers become corrupt because the gods they worship are corrupt. Worship is formative and shapes the worshipper into the image of the thing worshipped.

As this passage shows, for Augustine what was ultimately disordered about Roman worship was that it was a means to an end. In other words, the worship was false not just because the gods themselves were false, but more importantly because the worship was offered as a way to secure some other thing, such as wealth, happiness, security, prosperity. The last line sums up this theology: “We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” In other words, we will offer worship only to the extent that it benefits us. It is interesting on this count to see the ways in which Roman gods are in one sense simply personified versions of the thing desired–a god of war or reason, a goddess of love or wisdom. It is also interesting to note how many of the Greek and Roman myths narrate gods acting on their behalf to secure some thing desired.

This passage also reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a book where the gods of the old world, the gods of mythology, roam the American landscape mostly as grifters and vagrants because they are no longer worshipped and are only vaguely remembered. They have been replaced by new gods, like television, media, celebrity, technology. And one of Gaiman’s points in writing, besides providing a vastly entertaining story and interesting world, is to show in which human worship is doled out in order to receive benefits. Old gods are traded for new gods when their are new benefits to be had.

Even if you aren’t religious in any way, I think it is instructive to take Augustine’s words and Gaiman’s story and think of how mercenary and fickle the human heart really is. Our affection is so fleeting. Our devotion so often given for selfish reasons. Why is that? Why do we have such a hard time remaining steadfast? It is also instructive to consider the inscrutable God of providence and Lord of history that Augustine commends and to wonder how it would shape and form us to worship Him.

How do we suffer well? Reflections on City of God

“When the good and the wicked suffer alike, the identity of their sufferings does not mean that there is no difference between them. Though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different. Virtue and vice are not the same, even they undergo the same torment. The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke; the same flail breaks up the straw, and clears the grain; and oil is not mistaken for lees because both are forced out of the same press. In the same way, the violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation. Thus the wicked, under pressure of affliction, execrate God and blaspheme; the good, in the same affliction, offer up prayers and praises. This shows that what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.” City of God, I.8

Throughout City of God Augustine describes the providential ways of God as inscrutable. For him, God certainly acts in and through history, but his exact motivations and purposes are unknown. To be sure, Augustine, as a Christian, has a sense of the overall trajectory of history (everything is moving towards the City of God) but the particulars of history and vicissitudes of the everyday often remain mysterious. This is another way of saying that Augustine doesn’t have a complete answer to the question of why do we suffer, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to say about suffering itself.

Again this is where Augustine becomes relevant for us. Though we are not living through the particular circumstances of the fall of Rome, we are none the less caught in the messiness of history, trying to make sense not only of our own lives but also of the circumstances all around us. Augustine’s reminder that the same experience of suffering produces different results can help us in the midst of our lives because it reminds us that we don’t have to spend all our time thinking about the spinning wheel of history, but instead can concentrate on the quality of our own character rooted by faith in the one who moves the wheel of history. While concentrating on suffering in general helps us cultivate a theology of suffering, concentrating on the particular of our suffering and how we respond to it helps us cultivate character.

This point has been driven home to me lately, as I have witnessed in the last few weeks different people suffering in similar ways (grappling with cancer), and yet their responses have been profoundly different. For me Augustine’s contrast of the stinking cesspit versus the pleasant perfume draws the contrast between what I have seen both vividly and accurately, and has driven home a simple point, but a point philosophically minded people like me need reminding of–witnessing particular suffering is so different from thinking about suffering in the abstract. I so often think about the problem of suffering from a detached, rarified viewpoint and only ask the question why. Why would God let these things happen? But if I only ask that question, I fail to confront the particularity of suffering in individuals, to meet them and empathize with them in the midst of their suffering, and in so doing ask a total different question–how is it that two people can suffer in extremely similar ways and yet react in such opposite ways? Why is it that suffering produces such different results?

Don’t get me wrong. Both the general and particular viewpoints on suffering are necessary. The question of suffering in the abstract helps us grapple with the nature of God, humanity, and the world, and Augustine himself is an able guide through these issues, showing us ways to think deeply about the nature of suffering in general. But the question of suffering in the particular helps us grapple with the quality of life and character, and helps us confront what can sometimes be a terrifying question–what kind of people are we becoming–a question that is often only answerable in the crucible of suffering.