What Do I Love When I Love My God?

Augustine:

But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 212.

Joy Held in Common

"When large numbers of people share their joy in common the happiness of each is greater, because each adds fuel to the other's flame."

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 163.

Let Us Love, Let Us Run

"Come, O Lord, and stir our hearts. Call us back to yourself. Kindle your fire in us and carry us away. Let us scent your fragrance and taste your sweetness. Let us love you and hasten to your side."

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 163.

Grace Is All Gift

Augustin on grace:

Saint Paul teaches that he who sees ought not to boast as though what he sees, and even the power by which he sees, had not come to him by gift [1 Cor. 4:7]. For, whatever powers he has, did they not come to him by gift? [Rom. 7:22]. By the gift of grace he is not only shown how to see you, who are always the same, but is also given the strength to hold you. By your grace, too, if he is far from you and cannot see you, he is enabled to walk upon the path that leads him closer to you, so that he may see you and hold you.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 155.

Hearing the Voice with the Hearing of the Heart

"Far off, I heard your voice saying I am the God who IS. I heard your voice, as we hear voices that speak to our hearts, and at once I had no cause to doubt. I might more easily have doubted that I was alive than that Truth had being."

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 147.

Loving People in God

St. Augustin's God-besotted God-centeredness in the Confessions is well known. Reading through the Confessions, I'm struck also by how God-centered is Augustin's thinking about love for people. The following quotations from book 4 will give you a good feel for this (italics mine).

In a section discussing friendship, Augustin confesses to God:

Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God, our God who made heaven and earth and fills them with his presence, because by filling them he made them (79–80).

Then in a portion discussing delighting in things of this world, Augustin addresses those who would delight, among other things, in souls:

If your delight is in souls, love them in God, because they too are frail and stand firm only when they cling to him. If they don't, they go their own way and are lost. Love them, then, in him and draw as many with you to him as you can. Tell them "He is the one we should love. He made the world and he stays close to it" (82).

Oh for more Augustinian God-besotted God-centered love for people!

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961).

Augustin's Conversion Critiqued and Defended

Some have offered critique of how stylized or superstitious or otherwise faulty is the "conversion" of Augustin (e.g., Adolf von Harnack) as he tells his conversion story in book VIII of his justly famous Confessions.

Dealing with this criticism, B. B. Warfield sympathetically considers what Augustin was doing in writing the Confessions:

The person we meet in [the Confessions] is a person, we perceive, who towers in greatness of mind and heart, in the loftiness of his thought and in his soaring aspirations, far above ordinary mortals: and yet he is felt to be compacted of the same clay from which we have ourselves been molded. . . . It is the very purpose of this book to give the impression that Augustine himself was a weak and erring sinner, and that all of good that came into his life was of God. 

It is especially important for us precisely at this point to recall our minds to the fact that to give such an impression is the supreme purpose of the Confessions. This whole account of his life-history which we have tried to follow up to its crisis in his conversion is written, let us remind ourselves, not that we may know Augustine, but that we may know God: and it shows us Augustine only that we may see God. The seeking and saving grace of God is the fundamental theme throughout. The events of Augustine's life are not, then, set forth in it simpliciter. 

Speaking then of the aim of Augustin in recounting the sins of his infancy and childhood, Warfield says:

In these traits of the narrative, however, Augustine is not passing judgment on himself alone, but in himself on humanity at large in its state of sin and misery. By an analysis of his own life-history he realizes for himself, and wishes to make us realize with him, what man is in his sinful development on the earth, that our eyes may be raised from man to see what God is in his loving dealing with the children of men. We err, if from the strong, dark lines in which he paints his picture we should infer that he would have us believe that in his infancy, youth, or manhood he was a sinner far beyond the sinfulness of other men. . . .

He knew his own sinfulness as he knew the sinfulness of no other man, and it was his one burning desire that he should in his recovery to God recognize and celebrate the ineffableness of the grace of God. The pure grace of God is thus his theme throughout, and nowhere is it more completely so than in this culminating scene of his conversion. 

—"Augustine and his 'Confessions,'" in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield: Studies in Tertullian and Augustine (vol. 4; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 267–268.

Affection Among Friends

Augustine on the charms of friendship:

We could talk and laugh together and exchange small acts of kindness. We could join in the pleasure that books can give. We could be grave or gay together. If we sometimes disagreed, it was without spite, as a man might differ with himself, and the rare occasions of dispute were the very spice to season our usual accord. Each of us had something to learn from the others and something to teach in return. If any were away, we missed them with regret and gladly welcomed them when they came home. Such things as these are heartfelt tokens of affection between friends. They are signs to be read on the face and in the eyes, spoken by the tongue and displayed in countless acts of kindness. They can kindle a blaze to melt our hearts and weld them into one.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 79.

True Friendship: A Holy Spirit Bought Bond

"For though they cling together, no friends are true friends unless you, my God, bind them fast to one another through that love which is sown in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us."

—Saint Augustin, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 75.

The Actual Subject of Augustin's "Autobiography"

B. B. Warfield:

His actual subject is not himself, but the goodness of God; and he [Augustin] introduces his own experiences only as the most lively of illustrations of the dealings of God with the human soul as he makes it restless until it finds its rest in him. 

A little further on, after discussing how the Confessions of Augustin are in a different class from Rousseau's Confessions, Warfield makes a nearer generic comparison to bring out what sort of book the Confessions is:

 The closest analogy to Augustine's Confessions, among books, at least, which have attained anything like the same popular influence, is furnished by John Bunan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Bunyan's purpose is precisely the same as Augustine's—to glorify the grace of God.

Furthermore, he says:

The interval that divides Augustine's Confessions from the Pilgrim's Progress is less than that which separates them from any simple autobiography—veracious and searching autobiography though a great portion of it is. For the whole concernment of the book is with the grace of God to a lost sinner. It is this, and not himself, that is its theme. 

—"Augustine and his 'Confessions,'" in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield: Studies in Tertullian and Augustine (vol. 4; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 240–241.

Sermons that Stoop

C. H. Spurgeon on the preacher humbling himself in the pulpit for the sake of coming clear to his listeners:

It is said that many of the sermons of Augustine are full of shockingly bad Latin, not because Augustine was a poor Latin scholar, but because the dog-Latin of the day was better suited to the popular ear than more classically correct language would have been; and we shall have to speak in similar style if we want to get hold of men.

There is a certain prudery about ministers which disqualifies them for some kinds of work; they cannot bring their mouth to utter the truth in such plain speech as fisher-women would understand, but happy is that man whose mouth is able to declare the truth in such a way that the person to whom he is speaking will receive it.

So Spurgeon concludes, "Learn to stoop."

—C. H. Spurgeon, Pictures from Pilgrim's Progress (Pasadena: Pilgrim Publications, 1992), 58-59.

O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation

After being laid low with some illness of late and feeling sluggish in my walk with God for some time, I recall a few favorite paragraphs outside the Bible. It's from Augustin's Confessions.

Lord, I am your servant, born of your own handmaid. You have broken the chains that bound me; I will sacrifice in your honor. Let me praise you in my heart, let me praise you with my tongue. Let this be the cry of my whole being: Lord, there is none like you. Let them say this and, in answer, I beg you to whisper in my heart, I am here to save you.

Who am I? What kind of man am I? What evil have I not done? Or if there is evil that I have not done, what evil is there that I have not spoken? If there is any that I have not spoken, what evil is there that I have not willed to do? But you, O Lord, are good. You are merciful. You saw how deep I was sunk in death, and it was your power that drained dry the well of corruption in the depths of my heart. And all that you asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours.

But, during all those years, where was my free will? What was the hidden, secret place from which it was summoned in a moment, so that I might bend my neck to your easy yoke and take your light burden on my shoulders, Christ Jesus, my Helper and my Redeemer? How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose and was now glad to reject! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honour though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves. At last my mind was free from the gnawing anxieties of ambition and gain, from wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust. I begain to talk to you freely, O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation (Book IX, Section 1).

Augustinian Fellowship

Consider Augustine's notion of fellowship and compare it with what we often mean by fellowship.  And ask yourself, whose is richer, whose poorer?  Whose more biblical, whose more natural?

Fellowship according to Augustine is "the enjoyment of God and of each other in God" (City of God, Book XIX, Ch. 17). 

How's our fellowship?

Defining Virtue

St. Augustine's definition of virtue can scarcely be improved upon: "rightly ordered love" (Book XV, City of God).

Here is C. S. Lewis's expansion of Augustine's definition: "St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it" (Ch. 1, The Abolition of Man).