Our Restless Hearts

Written for Principles of Dogmatic Theology with Dr. Gerald P. Boersman; November 23, 2019

Augustine opens Confessions by quoting scripture:

“You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (Ps. 47:2): great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable’ (Ps. 146:5). Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being ‘bearing his mortality with him’ (2 Cor. 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you ‘resist the proud’ (1 Pet. 5:5).  Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation.  You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourselves, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (Confessions, 1.i)

Boersma points out that, here, Augustine has established “the character of all theology.” (Week 3, Discussion 1) We know; we are certain; “our heart is restless until it rests in [God].” In his infancy narrative, Augustine parallels our human infancy and development with our heart’s search for God, before we have even learnt about God.

For all that Augustine’s Confessions speak of his own transgressions, the true theme of the book is not confession as we commonly use the term today, but confession of who we are, as humans; who God is in his divinity; and, most of all, how we search for God, before we are even aware that it is he who we seek, or know how to enter into relationship with him. Augustine asks “Lord my God, is there any room in me which can contain you?” (Confessions, I.ii.2) He states “I would have no being, I would not have existence, unless you were in me.” (Confessions, I.ii.2) Although he knows God is within him, and he is within God, Augustine struggles with how to reach God: “How can I call on you to come if I am already in you?” (Confessions, I.ii.2)

Augustine reaches back, beyond his own memory, to infancy to show how our development as humans mirrors the development of our relationship with God. As an infant, we simply exist; we don’t know our past. “I do not know where I came from.” (Confessions 1.vi.7) We are given nourishment which we partake of, through the goodness of God. “So I was welcomed by the consolations of human milk; but it was not my mother or my nurses who made any decision to fill their breasts, but you who through them gave me infant food…” (Confessions 1.vi.7) Even when we are infants, before we can voice any thought, God is already providing for us. Our mothers and our nurses are given food for us which their bodies must let out. Mother (or nurse) and baby live life in harmony, one giving for the good of the other, who takes and is nourished. In ways we do not see, God is entering our lives, providing the means for parent and child to bond, as we must bond with him. “For the good which came to me from them was a good for them; yet it was not from them but through them.” (Confessions 1.vi.7) We know everything good comes from God. Augustine states “I became aware of this only later when you cried aloud to me through the gifts which you bestow both inwardly in mind and outwardly in body.” Confessions 1.vi.7) We know God because he reveals himself to us; once he reveals himself to us, we (hopefully) recognize that it is he who our heart seeks.

Augustine makes it clear that infants have no knowledge of this natural order. “For at that time I knew nothing more than how to suck and to be quieted by bodily delights, ant to weep when I was physically uncomfortable.” (Confessions 1.vi.7) Babies benefit from the natural order, but they participate in it by the grace of God and the actions of their parents. Similarly, in the infancy of our relationship with God, we benefit from all his good gifts, even though we do not yet recognize that they come from him, or even that we seek him.

            Augustine continues to describe his infancy, although he admits he describes not from first-hand knowledge, but from what he has been told: “Afterwards, I began to smile, first in my sleep, then when awake. That at least is what I was told, and I believed it since that is what we see other infants doing. I do not actually remember what I then did.” (Confessions, 1.8) This can be seen as a parallel to our earliest days of prayer as children. We are taught a string of words, without knowing the meaning of them either individually or together, and then pray using them. The repetition of the words allows us to praise God, although we don’t understand yet. This is true even if one does not meet God until they are older; simply understanding the words used in prayer does not equate to knowing God. We need not be actual infants to first meet God with as little self-awareness as infants experience those first months of life.

Speaking of himself in infancy, Augustine states “When I did not get my way, either because I was not understood or lest it be harmful to me, I used to be indignant with my seniors for their disobedience, and with free people who were not slaves to my interests; and I would revenge myself upon them by weeping.” (Confessions, 1.8) Is that any different than our reaction when we demand that God do things according to our will, and not his? For all our hearts long for him, we still fall into the sin of thinking ourselves the masters of our lives. “The human heart is a bundle of desires and wants constantly jostling, itching to be itched.” (Boersma, Week 3, Discussion 1) We want what we want, and we want it immediately. This impatience may not rise to the level of sin by itself, but it may easily lead to sin, as our desires become our focus; we fail to live content in God’s love.

“We cannot seem to be find peace, that deep-seated contentment.  Because of a lack of serenity, our restless hearts thrust themselves outward, grabbing and grasping at whatever fixes our fancy: a house, a spouse or a mouse.  But we cannot settle down.  Finite goods fail to satiate the wants of the soul.  No sooner do we get the object of desire and a new want fills the void.” (Boersma, Week 3, Discussion 1)

We don’t live a life of following the Beatitudes; rather, we live a life of following the crowd, of having the biggest, the best, the newest; all things that we race after, but leave us emptier than we were before.

Augustine points out “My infancy is long dead and I am alive. But you, Lord, love and in you nothing dies.” (Confessions, 1.9) Augustine begs for an answer of what “before” may mean: “Tell me, God, tell your supplicant, in mercy to your poor wretch, tell me whether there was some period of my life, now dead and gone, which preceded my infancy?” He wants to know “What was going on before that [his time in his mother’s womb], my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere, or any sort of person?” (Confessions, 1.9) Of course, Augustine has no answer. Yet, he continues, “But you may smile at me for putting these questions. Your command that I praise you and confess you may be limited to that which I know.” (Confessions, 1.9) We praise God when we know him, as we know him, each of us to our own abilities. Augustine says “At the time of my infancy, I must have acted reprehensively; but since I could not understand the person who admonished me, neither custom nor reason allowed me to be reprehended.” (Confessions, 1.11) Augustine tells of seeing a baby jealous of his own brother’s feeding at their mother’s breast, and says “people smilingly tolerate this behaviour, not because it is nothing or only a trivial matter, but because with coming of age it will pass away.” (Confessions, 1.11) As infants, we sin in our selfishness, or would, if one could sin unknowingly. We are born sinners; we need to be taught what is good and proper and pleasing to God.

Yet what Augustine is asking when he asks if or where he was before conception goes deeper still. He is exploring the human condition. His question here is essentially the opposite of the question of death. What does it mean to be human? What is life before conception? “To be human is to be a creature, indeed, only a small part (portio) of creation. Each creature gives praise and glory to the Creator in whatever its created mode. The sun by shining brightly, the turnip by growing hazy purple, the inexorable donkey by refusing to budge.” (Boersma, Week 3, Discussion 1) Every bit, every piece of creation, has its own place and own role in creation. We, in our humanity, can think of what our life is; we can contemplate the reason for life. The sun shines day in and day out. The turnip grows, is picked and eaten. The donkey, if it thinks at all, cares only for its own desires. To be human is to understand that we have a beginning and an end. “Augustine writes, homo circumferens mortalitatem suam.  To be human is to bear about mortality; it is to carry the existential weight of knowing you are being given unto death.  That each day is a day in which I am closer to decomposition and the evisceration of all memory that I ever existed.” (Boersma, Week 3, Discussion 1) We are aware that we are not immortal; we are aware that we had a beginning and we will have an end. We ask if we exist before conception, for if we could know that we did, we could also see that the afterlife as fact rather than promise.

We die. That’s the crux of the problem. “And, unlike the contingency of all creatures – the sun that burns out, the turnip that rots away, and the donkey whose life comes to an end – the mortality of man seems wholly unnatural.  It is not comfortable.  We sense this is not how it should be.” (Boersma, Week 3 Discussion 1) We are no more than infants in our understanding of creation, and life, and death.

“Paul Tillich famously remarked, ‘Finitude in awareness is anxiety.’  Other creature do not share this angst; they do not “carry around” their mortality – they simply are mortal.  A turnip’s end does not transcend finite existence.  It is completely intelligible within the natural order within which it comes in and out of existence.  Unlike the sun, the turnip, or the donkey, we have an immortal soul.  We were made for eternity.  The death we ‘carry around’ is unnatural.” (Boersma, Week 3, Discussion 1)

We “carry around” this unnatural death, and we seek to find God.

Augustine says of his own infancy, “I do not wish to reckon this as part of the life that I live in this world; for it is lost in the darkness of my forgetfulness, and is on the same level as the life I lived in my mother’s womb….I feel no sense of responsibility now for a time of which I recall not a single trace.” (Confessions, 1.12) I’m not sure I agree with him on this. If we count our lives only by the days we remember, we would surely end up causing ourselves to forget the bad days and recall only the good. Has anyone who has ever lived has had total recall of every moment of life? If not, do those other days not count? If you commit a sin but forget it, it is still a sin committed. To claim “no sense of responsibility” for the times you do not recall seems to me to be a lessening of the human condition; to separate one’s humanity based on the days, weeks, months, years that one recalls and to discount the rest. We may not have full responsibility before we reach the age of reason, but that does not mean any behavior before that age ought be perfectly allowable.

We grow, from infancy to old age, always searching for God, a search that never ends within this lifetime.

 “The restless heart is the symptomatic expression of the penultimate character of finite existence.  The more that we want, but fail to get in each good thing that we grasp, bears witness to the transcendent Good refracted and reflected, in shimmering, shining goods the world over.  We experience, with intensity, nostalgia, fervor that we are made for an eternal Good, and that it alone will satisfy: ‘Our heart is restless until rest in you.’” (Boersma, Week 3, Discussion 1)

Our hearts will not truly rest in God while we are still in exile on earth, and none of us, of course, can state with certainty what actually happens at death.

But a postscript, of sorts: I saw my husband’s body, tense and still in the days leading up to his death, his face lined with pain. And I saw his body in death, suddenly relaxed, his face empty of pain, a look of peace on his face. Unbelievers will give me medical reasons, physical reasons, for that change. For me, this is the true fulfillment of Augustine’s theological point when we finally come to rest in God, our hearts are no longer restless. The rest we find in God in life is but a mere shadow of the rest we will find when our soul reaches the place of resting in God.”