To Enjoy Him Forever

Augustine’s Confessions opens with perhaps his most famous quote: “for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (Confessions 1.1). This quote on its own speaks to the profound longing in our natures for God. Yet, many are probably unaware of the line that comes just before it. He says, “You move us to delight in praising You.” According to Augustine, the sovereign God designs our hearts and directs our steps so that we would not only praise God but delight in the praising. In other words, our hearts are restless because, in our sin, we are not participating in what was designed to be our greatest delight: God and his praise. We were not made to delight in material goods, but in the eternal Good who is the source of all other goods, the unchanging Triune God.According to Augustine, the sovereign God designs our hearts and directs our steps so that we would not only praise God but delight in the praising. Share on X

This is the point of both his Confessions and book one of Christian Doctrine. It might seem strange to us to spend the first book of a work on doctrine towards enjoyment in God, as opposed to a treatise on the Trinity or prolegomena, but this is what makes Augustine and many of the Church Fathers so wonderful. They don’t see doctrine as a dry work of academic literature or mere intellectual pursuit. Theology, for Augustine, is a means of delighting in God. It is how we can learn to view God as our ultimate source of enjoyment. It is not less than an intellectual pursuit but so much more. Doctrine is a way to settle our restless hearts. Therefore, in this column, I want to reflect on what Augustine means by enjoying God and how that should affect how we study doctrine today.

Enjoyment Versus Use

The first thing to address is Augustine’s distinction between “enjoyment” and “use.” In Christian Doctrine, Augustine defines the difference between use and enjoyment this way: “For to enjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake. To use, on the other hand, is to employ what means are at one’s disposal to obtain what one desires, if it is a proper object of desire” (1.4, emphasis mine). What is the significance of this distinction? It lies in this: God alone is to be enjoyed because He alone is worthy, in Himself, of our resting with satisfaction. Enjoyment for Augustine is more than sensory pleasure, such as the way we would enjoy a good book, our favorite meal, or even friendship between brothers in Christ. Such things, while they may be good on their own merits, are temporary and were not designed to satisfy the deepest desires of our souls. They may direct the mind towards higher things when we thank God for them, but that is just the point of difference between enjoyment and use. You cannot, or should not, enjoy God to achieve some higher source of enjoyment. When we enjoy God, we need not seek anything other than God Himself. We have reached the end toward which all things aim. “The true objects of enjoyment, then,” Augustine says, “are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are at the same time the Trinity, one Being, supreme above all, and common to all who enjoy him” (1.5).

Enjoying Others

This leaves open the question of how we are to view other people. Augustine anticipates this question in our command to love one another as we love ourselves. Does the command to love one another mean that we enjoy people in the way Augustine has defined enjoyment? In other words, “it is a question whether man is to be loved by man for his own sake or for the sake of something else” (1.22). Augustine’s answer is no. We love each other, but we do not enjoy other people the same way we enjoy God. At first blush, this answer might sound harsh, implying that we merely use others to achieve some higher end, but to view it that way misses Augustine’s point. All of our relationships, which come from the hand of God, are given for the sake of loving God and loving others. As we grow in our love for God, our capacity to love our neighbors increases both in quantity and means. Our capacity to love others increases, and we come upon a myriad of new ways to show the love of God to the people in our lives. In an ineffable way, when our hearts are fixed on the unchangeable God, when we make God the sole source of enjoyment, we learn to love God through loving our neighbors, and loving our neighbors, in turn, increases our love for God. The two greatest commandments are a mutually informing and beneficial pair. They sanctify us together. It may sound strange to modern ears, but we do not truly love our neighbors if our hearts are not ultimately directed to God. Augustine has put his finger on the pulse of ultimate satisfaction for the wandering heart: “We ought to desire, however, that they should all join with us in loving God, and all the assistance that we either give them or accept from them should tend to that one end” (1.29).

Enjoying God through Theology

So where does this leave the task of theology? How can the theologian use theology to rest in the enjoyment of God and lead others to do the same? Augustine, in book 4, gives us direction through how we teach the doctrines of Scripture. “For teaching, of course, true eloquence consists, not in making people like what they disliked, nor in making them do what they shrank from, but in making clear what was obscure” (4.11). People love listening to an eloquent sermon or lecture, but true eloquence is not merely stringing together lengthy prose. Complexity can be eloquent, but in teaching, complexity often has the appearance of being inarticulate. And it is not always clear that the pursuit of theology is the enjoyment of God for that very reason. Enjoying God can often be obscured by how difficult the intellectual task of reading theology can be, in part, because we as writers have not put an emphasis on clarity. The beautiful truths contained in Scripture are often obscured behind the confusing words seeking to explain them.

This does not mean that simple words cannot be beautiful or poetic. They often are. To say something simply and to say it poetically is not an “either/or” proposition. The best example of this that I know of is the Heidelberg Catechism. Question 1 asks the simple yet profound question “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer is no less profound, and I would challenge anyone to find an answer that is as equally simple as it is beautiful. “That I am not my own,” it instructs us to answer, “but belong—body and soul, in life and in death— to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” In a world obsessed with autonomy, we are taught through this catechism to give ourselves up to the comforting fact that we are not our own. In the bigger picture we are not autonomous. We are the Lords in both body and soul, that is, our whole nature is the precious possession, not of a tyrant, but a faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. That is the eloquence about which Augustine speaks. Therefore, I find myself enjoying God, not simply because of how beautiful the words are, but because of the truth in those well-spoken words: that God is my comfort both in life and in death.As Augstine says, when we enjoy God for his own sake, we are “enjoying Him… not as the mind does the body or itself, or as one friend enjoys another, but as the eye enjoys light” (Confessions, 8.8). Share on X

Conclusion

Reading and writing theology can be a wonderfully enjoyable experience. It can leave us with a sense of satisfaction that is hard to put into words. I would hazard a guess that if you reflected on your favorite theological work, you would admit that what truly made it enjoyable was not the reading or writing itself, but how in the reading and writing your mind was constantly directed to God. After all, what makes a painting enjoyable is not seeing the colors on the canvas but the sense of longing one has to stand where the painter stood and to experience the landscape firsthand in its immediate beauty. Theology should lead the mind to enjoy God for his own sake, not because the words themselves are beautiful, but because we long to see the One whom they signify face to face, robed in splendor (1 Cor. 13:12; Ps. 104:1). As Augstine says, when we enjoy God for his own sake, we are “enjoying Him… not as the mind does the body or itself, or as one friend enjoys another, but as the eye enjoys light” (Confessions, 8.8). To enjoy God through theology is as natural as an eye enjoying seeing through the sun. After all, is an eye not restless, straining to see in the dark, until someone comes and turns on the light?

Image credit: Neon from another age | Simon Hucko | Flickr.