The Surprising Saint of Hippo
The Surprising Saint of Hippo
Act One: The Restless Heart
Journey stories interest us, and the finest among them truly captivate us. As we observe the character’s struggles, missteps, setbacks, growth, and transformation, we discover fragments of our own stories and experiences. We can’t help but watch as the stories unfold.
One of the finest journey stories of all time is The Confessions of St. Augustine. It has found its way onto the bucket list of books to read for many people. Last week I wrote a brief introduction to The Confessions. You can find it HERE.
To help unpack his journey, I’m borrowing his famous words found in The Confessions:
“Our heart is restless until it rests in you, O God.”
These eleven words provide an outline for his dramatic journey into his heart. There is the opening act: — The Restless Heart — followed by the concluding act — The Heart at Rest with God.
Today: Augustine’s Restless Heart
Augustine possessed an inherent talent for storytelling. His academic background and professional journey refined his capacity to use a story for the purpose of persuasion. As his expertise and reputation expanded, prominent Roman political, military, and economic figures sought him to tell their stories of success and influence public opinion.
At a pivotal moment in the evolution of Christian theology, Augustine recognized that his personal journey through moral darkness and spiritual restlessness furnished the necessary components to counteract an emerging heresy within the Christian church. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, a concept known as Pelagianism emerged, posing a challenge to the doctrine of grace alone. A British monk by the name of Pelagius, who was born in the same year as Augustine (354 A.D.), rejected the notion that the sin of Adam resulted in moral and spiritual corruption for all subsequent humanity. Pelagius accepted that Adam indeed committed sin, but he began to teach that the ramifications of Adam's transgression were confined solely to Adam himself, rather than extending to subsequent generations. According to Pelagius, every human being descending from Adam enters the world with a soul that remains unblemished by sin. As a result, we can attain complete and perfect righteousness independently of divine grace.
Augustine knew better, not merely through theoretical study, but through the experiences of his own life. Pelagius and his ideas would eventually be rejected by the church in 415 A.D. However, when Augustine began writing his Confessions in 397, the church's decision about the moral condition of humans and our need for divine grace was still up in the air. The first act of The Confessions provides experiential evidence that the human heart is tainted and depraved by Adam’s sin and unable to achieve moral righteousness apart from God’s Grace.
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Evidence of Depravity
A Theft of Pears
Augustine wanted nothing to do with church and Christianity by the time he became a teen-ager. After his father was unable to pay for his education, he returned home to Tagaste and fell in with a bad company of adolescents. One day, this gang of friends decided to steal the pears from a neighbor’s orchard. After eating what they wanted, they threw the rest to pigs. As Augustine reflected on the story, he saw the theft was not because of hunger or lack. It was simply because of the thrill of doing evil and hurting someone else. This story culminates a section of reflections on his early life in which he asks the haunting question, “I ask you, my God, I ask, Lord, where and when was your servant innocent?” The implied answer, of course, was “Never.”
A Battle with Lust
Augustine left his hometown gang to study the art of persuasion at the University of Carthage. While at the university, he discovered the power of lust and then lost the battle against sexual sin almost entirely.
I refused to satisfy my internal hunger with your spiritual food, my God, and I was unaware of any need…My soul was sick and covered in sores, and it rubbed up against material things in a desperate attempt to relieve the itching…To love and be loved in return was what excited me, especially if I could enjoy my lover’s body. So, I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of lust and obscured its brightness with foul passion.
It would not be wrong to think that his headlong rush into sexual sin put him at risk of sexual addiction. The compulsions he had given into had become a form of slavery. To find some relief, he turned to an ascetic philosophy called Manicheism.
A Turn Toward Asceticism
Augustine knew he needed rescue. He was succeeding in school and had a promising future, but he was engulfed in corruption. To extricate himself from lust, he turned to a philosophical idea gaining prominence in the region. It was called Manicheism and offered salvation through ascetic practices. He found in Manicheism what would seem to us today to be a bizarre explanation of his battle with sexual addiction: the first humans (Adam and Eve) were created by evil by mating with demons. Therefore, all subsequent humans are naturally wicked, created by evil forces.
Manicheism also offered him rescue from the power of lust by ascetic practices. Within every human person, Manicheism said, were particles of light and goodness trapped by the darkness and evil of the human body. To find freedom, Augustine was taught that he had to engage in ascetic practices to release those particles of light and goodness. He accepted the teaching and began to fight a battle against sexual sin. It was no doubt during this time that he wrote his infamous prayer, “Lord, give me chastity…but not yet” after struggling hard, but repeatedly losing the battle against lust. Eventually, he would become convinced that Manicheism offered nothing to help free the human soul from moral darkness and spiritual restlessness.
The Pursuit of Prominence
Augustine had painfully discovered that lust and asceticism could not satisfy his restless heart; but, maybe upward mobility and success could. So, in the same way he had rushed into sexual sin and then into asceticism, he began to rush toward prominence. His reputation as a brilliant public speaker and orator was growing. He gained prominent positions first in Carthage, then in Rome, and finally in Milan. Each move was a move up the ladder of success. A political appointment to a governorship was likely just around the corner.
But, his heart was horribly unhappy. He wrote that as his successes multiplied, so his “sins multiplied.” Sex had created relational pain. Manicheism had been hollow and a waste of time. Career success had failed to deliver what he hoped. His heart was desperately restless, seeking peace.
For Augustine, the spiritual rest he sought was just around the corner. Come back next week for Act Two: The Heart at Rest with God.