ARCANE AND GERMANE BOOK REVIEWS
“After reading a new book, never allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”
(C.S. Lewis)
Weeping in the bitter contrition of my heart … suddenly the voice of a child reaches me from a nearby house … “Take it and read it, take it and read it.” At once I went eagerly to the table where I had left Paul’s letter to the Romans open … “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:13–14). For immediately I had reached the end of this sentence it was as though my heart was filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away. (VIII.12)
Written in AD 397–401, the 13 books which comprise the Confessions of the North African born Augustine (354–430 AD), are the first example of autobiography in Western literature. In them Augustine chronicles his early life and childhood, and his growth into a gifted intellectual, rhetorician and teacher. He also candidly describes his life of self-centred living, fornication, proud and selfish ambition, and his involvement with the heretical Manichean sect. The event described in the quotation above was the climax to a long period of personal struggle. Augustine was finally wonderfully and miraculously converted, as God brought his word to bear on his life, and he was confronted by both the holiness and the forgiving love of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Reordered Loves
On the very first page of his work Augustine famously declares:
You stimulate [man] to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you. (I.1)
By his own admission, Augustine’s heart was once restless, captured by sex, comfort and intellectual pride. But God had pursued Augustine from the beginning, using the words of teachers such as Ambrose of Milan (338–397), and the teaching and prayers of his mother Monica.
before I could call upon you at all, you were ahead of me; by all sorts of voices and in all kinds of ways over and over again you pressed yourself on my attention, so that I might hear you from far away and be converted and might call upon you who were calling me.’ (XIII.1)
Faith Seeking Understanding
One inherent danger in the task of theology is to treat God as an idea to be mastered, rather than the Person who masters us. Perhaps the most striking feature of Augustine’s work is that, while it is properly a work of theology, it is at the same time literally a confession. That is, a hymn of praise and fervent prayer offered up to God. Each section is inextricably woven through with Scripture. We get to ‘overhear’ his prayers in response to God’s Bible words, as Augustine works out his understanding of God’s loving action in his life from a position of faith in Christ. Augustine terms his stance one of ‘faith seeking understanding’:
My faith prays to you, Lord, this faith which you gave me and with which you inspired me through the Incarnation of your Son and through the ministry of the Preacher … And see, you are close to us, and you rescue us from our unhappy errors, and you set our feet in your way, and speak kindly to us and say: “Run and I will hold you and I will bring you through and there also I will hold you.” (I.1, VI.16)
God Only Knows
Perhaps more than any other that has gone before, our culture is obsessed with the project of finding and making self, by looking into ourselves. Older theologians provide us with a way out of this spiritual solipsism. They point us away from ourselves to God, to find true liberation, and receive true knowledge of ourselves.[1] Here Confessions is solidly theocentric. Augustine was utterly convinced of the scriptural truth that God knows us better than we know ourselves (e.g. Ps 103:13–19, 139:1–18). This is a profoundly confronting and humbling perspective, and one we may shy away from. As Augustine observes:
[We] love truth when truth is giving evidence; but hate it when the evidence is given against ourselves. (X. 23)
But there is no true joy apart from truth, including the truth of our own sin, and God in Christ is final truth (e.g. Jn 6:63, 14:6). God revealed Augustine’s sin and his grace in Christ to him, and so the true purpose of his existence.
A Big God
The God encountered by Augustine is a big God:
And now my infancy has been long dead, while I still live. But you, O Lord, who are always alive and in whom nothing dies—since before the beginning of the worlds, before anything that can be called “before,’ you are and are God and Lord of all that you have created and in you stand the cause of all things that are unstable; in you remain the unchanging sources of all that changes; in you live the eternal reasons of all that is temporal and will not submit to reason… (I.6)
This is the God who relentlessly pursued Augustine when he was far away, prepared his heart to receive him, and bound him to his Saviour with cords of love.
I call upon you, my God, my mercy, who made me and did not forget me when I had forgotten you. I call you into my soul which you are making ready to receive you by the longing which you yourself inspire. (XIII. 1)
Augustine paints a portrait of the Creator God who is sovereign, ‘the unchanging source of all that changes’ (I.6). His grand theocentric standpoint inspired the Reformer John Calvin, who frequently quoted Augustine throughout his Institutes, as well as reformed theologians including B. B. Warfield.[2] God-shaped problems demand God-shaped solutions. We were made by God for his glory. No one less than the God of the Bible can meet our needs or is worthy of our praise.
Concluding Reflections: Augustine & Mental Health
Augustine is celebrated, amongst many other things, for his strong view of God’s sovereignty in both creation and redemption. God’s will is irresistible; his power ineluctable. But this is not something that Augustine deduced from first principles. Nor is it merely a point of doctrine to be adhered to in order to be ‘theologically correct.’ It is a truth from the mouth of God. It is a doctrine full of comfort, because it expresses God’s own love for us. Scripture teaches us that God in Christ seeks us out, that he pursues us, and when he finds us, he never lets us go (e.g. Lk 15:1–32; Jn 10:14–30; Rom 8:28–30). As Augustine reaches back into his memories, he can see that God was always at work. And he can look into the future guided by God’s word, trusting God will keep all his promises for the new creation.
This is what struck me as I read the Confessions for the first time at the onset of a long and difficult period of mental illness. When I looked into myself, all I could see was confusion and contradictions. There was no way I could find to move forward, no clear way out. The Confessions reassured me, as I heard Augustine meditate on and rejoice in God’s promises, that God is not confused by what confuses me. He is not overwhelmed by what overwhelms me. He never wearies in his love for us, and he is never stuck, but works out all his good purpose for us. God did not take my struggles away. In God’s wisdom I still had to go through them, but I had been reassured: I could entrust, and I must entrust myself to him. ‘We are weak, but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me.’ Like Augustine, God also provided faithful people who prayed regularly for me, and who reassured me of our big God’s love. I needed to know, and still need to know, that God’s grace—from womb to tomb—really is sufficient for me.
But I have been spilled and scattered among times whose order I do not know; my thoughts, the innermost bowels of my soul, are torn apart with the crowding tumults of variety, and so it will be until all together I can flow into you, purified and molten by the fire of your love. (XI. 29)
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor 4:17–18)
[1] For a helpful critique of seeking our identity apart from God, see Brian Rosner, How to Find Yourself: Why Looking Inward is Not the Answer, Crossway, 2022.
[2] B. B. Warfield. Calvin and Augustine, Presbyterian and Reformed, Westminster, 1971.
