
Gerald P. Boersma is Associate Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University where he also serves as the Director of the MA Program in Theology. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is the author of “Augustine’s Early Theology of Image” (Oxford, 2016).
Gerald P. Boersma is Associate Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University where he also serves as the Director of the MA Program in Theology. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is the author of “Augustine’s Early Theology of Image” (Oxford, 2016).
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“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.”
—St. Augustine, Confessions
At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire…. Desire intrigues us, stirs the soul. We love stories about desire—tales of love, sex, wanderlust, haunting nostalgia, boundless ambition, and tragic loss…. Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing—an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions.[1]The restless heart—the central motif of Augustine’s autobiography—fires the will of political empire builders and corporate titans, but equally inspires saints to heroic acts of virtue and self-sacrifice. A restless heart moved Francis of Assisi, Therese of Avilla, and Mother Theresa. The restless heart is the symptomatic response to the penultimate character of finite existence. The more that we want, but fail to grasp in each good thing that we clasp in our hands and hearts, bears witness to a transcendent Good that alone can satisfy. The refracted, reflected, shimmering goods shining the world over are but partial instantiations—incarnations—of the primordial Good for which we long. We experience with intensity (but also nostalgia) that we are made for an eternal Good that alone gives peace: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine’s own life, detailed in the Confessions, is a personal and poignant expression of the universal cor inquietum. It is the story of a soul and the desperate, futile ways that this soul seeks peace and belonging. His intention in writing the Confessions, recalls Augustine in the Retractions, written at the end of his life, was to lift up the affections of the heart—his own and those of others—to the love of God. It is only in God’s love that the soul finds belonging, satisfaction, and rest. The Confessions is the story of one soul’s long, purgative journey to find rest in God. Noverim te, noverim me (“May I know you and may I know myself”), prays Augustine in his early dialogue, the Soliloquies (written even before his baptism). This quest to know God and the soul is the golden thread running through Augustine’s corpus. In the Confessions this theme finds a heightened intensity. Augustine confesses who God reveals himself to be and who man is. As in Augustine’s other works, here too, it is clear that knowledge of God and knowledge of the soul are inextricable. Self-knowledge entails coming to know myself in God. The process of self-discovery, of prayerful interiority, entails becoming increasingly attuned to the fact that my ontological and spiritual ground is the Transcendent Good. As such, Augustine’s spirituality of ascent is not like conquering a distant mountain—perilously inching up a ladder to seize upon a remote and unknown place. No: Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (“You were more inward than my most inward parts and higher than the highest element within me”) prays Augustine, as he comes to realize the intimacy of God’s personal presence. To ascend to God is to plunge ever more deeply into the self and there to discover my truest self in God.
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Gerald P. Boersma is Associate Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University where he also serves as the Director of the MA Program in Theology. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is the author of “Augustine’s Early Theology of Image” (Oxford, 2016).