Confessions

Augustine prayed: give what you command, and command what you will. An example shows the way, but it cannot give a broken will the power to walk it. Only grace can.

Augustine had this argument with Pelagius fourteen hundred years before Finney. God may command what we cannot do by ourselves, because he gives what he commands. The command is real and so is the gift!

And this is the very sentence he could not sit still for.

Augustine had this argument with Pelagius fourteen hundred years before Finney. God may command what we cannot do by ourselves, because he gives what he commands. The command is real and so is the gift!

Augustine prayed, give what you command. If nothing from Adam reached us, we would not need God to give us the power to obey. Every Christian who prays that prayer admits that we do.

Augustine’s prayer against a system of permissions: give what you command, and command what you will.

Augustine’s prayer, give what you command, is not a Manichee prayer. It asks the good Creator to heal what he made. A wounded nature is not an evil one.

Luther says in the Bondage that Augustine agrees with him: free will can do nothing but fall. He names Augustine’s Spirit and the Letter.

Augustine’s line is that the heart is restless until it rests in God. It is the collision Camus describes, said fifteen centuries earlier by the man he studied for his degree, and with an answer.

The cheerful, occupied man is restless and does not know it. The heart is restless until it rests in God.

Every people he names as older than Adam is a people with the same ache in it. One fall reaches all of them.

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

The Romantic looks in and expects to find home. Augustine looked in and found the ache — and said nothing finite, the self included, has ever stilled it.

Freud traces the restlessness to a child wanting its father. Augustine agreed it starts there, and said it does not stop there, because nothing finite has ever quieted it.

A good thing, made restless — which is the distinction he says cannot be drawn.

Everything but the one sentence. Augustine read these books and found the Word in them, and did not find him made flesh.

Teresa writes that when she read how Augustine heard the voice in the garden, it felt as if the Lord had spoken to her (Life 9.9).

Camus grants the hunger and the silence, and calls their collision the absurd. Augustine and Lewis take the same hunger the other way. A hunger for something the world cannot supply is one of the ordinary signs that something else supplies it. Camus wrote his university thesis on Augustine.

Freud explains where the longing came from. He never asks the other question — whether a longing this specific, appearing in every culture, is evidence that it has an object.

Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium climbs from one beautiful body to all of them to beauty itself, because no particular thing ever finishes the wanting. Augustine makes that argument nearly eight centuries later and grants Plato every rung of it. What a Form cannot do is come looking for you.

Augustine found that nothing he chose could satisfy him until God changed what he loved. Grace did not only teach him. It changed his heart.

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

A duty to believe only on proof is itself believed without proof — the rule cannot pass its own test!

Augustine went inward before any of them, and further. Book X is the report: not a true self at the bottom of the search — a God who had been in there the whole time, while the seeker was out among the fair forms He had made.

He sings a requiem in the empty churches and asks what they are now. Augustine answers from inside one: not a tomb — the place the living God was found to have been all along.

A man who says there is no fact of the matter has just told you a fact about the matter.

Augustine met the same man in the fourth century. A person who doubts everything is still there, doubting, and cannot doubt that. The complete sceptic needs one solid thing to stand on, and he has just admitted it.

The exact answer, and he cannot dodge it: he has never once managed to live inside the doubt he is selling.

Augustine: if I am mistaken, I exist. A mind that trusts only itself has already trusted something it did not make.

He cannot live the indifference he boasts of. Nature keeps handing him back the certainties he says he has thrown off.

Freud’s account is itself a claim about how every mind works — and it has to be exempt from its own suspicion to be worth stating.

Even a proof that lands gives the wrong God. A first cause is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

James collects religion as inner experience, varieties of a feeling. Augustine’s question went the other way — out to the earth, the sea and the stars — and what answered him was not a feeling he had but the look of things that are not him.