My Weight is My Love

"Spiritual Formation", writes M. Robert Mulholland, "is the process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others" (15). It occurs "primarily at the points of our unlikeness to Christ’s image” (37). Individuals will not get far in a spiritual formation or discipleship program without topics like sin, obedience, temptations, and conflicting desires being discussed.

Saint Augustine was no stranger to the struggle. Perhaps no one else has written so extensively on this topic, and in the case of his Confessions, with such candor! The contemporary reader will find many of the same issues and temptations at work despite the intervening centuries. As Malcolm Muggeridge noted, "The similarity between his circumstances and ours is striking, not to say alarming. There is the same moral vacuity, leading to the same insensate passion for new sensations and experiences; the same fatuous credulity opening the way to every kind of charlatanry and quackery from fortune telling to psychoanalysis; the same sinister combination of great wealth and pointless ostentation with appalling poverty and unheeded affliction" (28).

Centuries of Greek philosophy set wisdom, knowledge, and reason as the pinnacles of human experience. This worldview led to the belief that "no one would purposely choose evil because it is bad for us. All evil is chosen under the guise of the good through ignorance. However, Augustine, following St. Paul makes the will, rather than reason, our dominant feature" (Pojman 75). Augustine writes of himself in the Confessions, "…when I willed to do or not do anything, I was quite certain that it was myself and no other who willed, and I came to see that the cause of my sin lay there" (Augustine 109).

Owning up to our own actions is a critical aspect of spiritual growth. We often attribute our actions to circumstance, moods, misunderstanding, coercion, and any number of other creative excuses to avoid our own complicity. A domestic abuser will say he lost control of his temper, when in truth he lost control of his wife and willed violence upon her to reassert his control.

Not everyone performs the same action when confronted by the same circumstance. That indicates free will. We can fan any number of smokescreens to avoid our responsibilities, but the reality is that human beings choose the particular course of action that they believe will attain the results they most desire. So the will is not directed by logic, but by love:

"A body finds its own place by entrusting itself to its own which carries it not to the place which is lowest but to the place that is its own. A flame rises and a stone falls…My weight is my love. By love I am drawn to wherever I am drawn" (Augustine, as quoted in Meagher 100-1).

If people could have made themselves pleasing to God through the law, there would have been no need for a savior in Jesus Christ. Louis Pojman points out in his introduction to Augustinian thought: "Morality does not consist in following rigid rules against one's nature but having a transformed character whereby one does the right thing out of a moral motive" (78). This idea—minus the transformed character, of course—is similar to the logic of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: "...someone who does not enjoy fine actions is not good; for no one would call a person just, for instance, if he did not enjoy doing just actions" (11)... and "an end pursued in its own right is more complete than an end performed because of something else" (7)...

Human nature, in Augustine's estimation is "…a fictitious fabric of will, a web of self-made, self-imposed loves" (Meagher 131). In other words, "One's love determines one's person, and one's person determines one's love. What I love is both constitutive and expressive of who I am, of what kind of person I am" (Meagher 100).

Just as those schooled in Greek philosophy thought it impossible for people to choose a wrong course of action if they knew it was harmful, we may find it hard to comprehend how love can direct an individual to sinful acts. Alas, that is the paradox—and tragedy—of addiction: the behavior that throws a life into chaos is the very same behavior that an individual most cherishes and is compelled to do.

Augustine observed this at work in his African congregation in regards to making oaths: "'In our present state, we do have the free power to do or not do anything, before we are caught up in any habit. When we have used this freedom to do something, the sweetness and pleasure of the act holds our soul, and it is caught in the sort of habit that it cannot break—a habit that is created for itself by its own act of sin. We see around us many men who do not want to swear, but, because their tongue has picked up the habit, words escape from their lips which they are just unable to control…If you want to know what I mean, start trying not to swear: then you will see how the force of habit goes its own way'" (quoted in Brown 150).

There is an old saying that goes, "Watch your habits—they become your character." That is what Augustine is getting at here. Robert Meagher explains, "One's own loves, whether appropriate or not to what one is, fashion and fit who one is. One's own life or word, whether finally a lie or not, acquires a certain personal truth. Although nature places no necessity upon person, person generates a necessity of its own. Although the fact that I am a human being does not force me to be this or that kind of person, the fact that I have become a particular sort of person somehow necessitates that I live a corresponding kind of life. This personal necessity, the momentum of one's loves, is what Augustine calls habit or custom (consuetudo). Habit, though originating in the will, a creature of the will, becomes virtually natural. In fact, 'there are as many contrary natures [in human being] as there are wills which resist one another'" (105).

People will sometimes risk anything to satisfy a sinful craving. Reputations are ruined. Ministries fold. Families deteriorate. Self-respect is lost. Sin retains just enough allure to keep a soul coming back for more. We mistake a mirage for the Promised Land in more ways than one.

God reigns gloriously supreme in Augustine's reckoning. Running away in denial is futile, as the saint writes: "…where does he go or where does he flee save from Thee to Thee—from God well-pleased to God angered" (Augustine 58)? Greek thought characterized people as searching for perfection. Augustine indicates that what we are all really searching for fulfillment. We seek to fill our appetites with the pleasures of sin, but the appetite is misdirected. It is in reality a hunger for God: "Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it. You seek happiness in the land of death, and it is not there. For how shall there be happiness of life where there is no life" (Augustine 60)?

In Book Two, Chapter IV, Augustine describes a long list of sins and explains how each of them are a shallow reflection of an attribute of God. He states: “…the soul is guilty of fornication when she turns from You and seeks from any other source what she will find pure and without taint unless she returns to You. Thus even those who go from You and stand up against You are still perversely imitating You” (Augustine 29). The great tragedy of our sin is that we are trying to fulfill a genuine desire with a counterfeit that can never satisfy.

What can we do to conquer habit and redirect the will? Nothing in and of ourselves, but God can set us free. Augustine relays his futile experience with self-reliance: "[I] did not think of [God's] mercy as a healing medicine for that weakness, because I had not tried it. I thought that continency was a matter of my own strength" (Augustine 101). A lesson for Christians who think they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps!

The Confessions of Saint Augustine demonstrates a number of activities and attitudes that are related to spiritual formation. The first, and most important, is that Augustine recognizes his need for transformation and that it is God who does the transforming. "It was pleasing in Your sight to reshape what was deformed in me" (115). Confession is a process that must be entered into because "I should only be hiding You from myself, not myself from You" (173). Book Ten is mostly about (and the result of) meditation and study. He describes the importance of holy leisure and meditation on God's word, specifically the Psalms (152-5).

Sin is the result of a desire for blessedness horribly misdirected. A program of spiritual formation must keep individuals directed to God as the object of their love and fulfillment.

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999.

Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Trans. F.J. Sheed. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1970.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.

Meagher, Robert E. An Introduction to Augustine. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Muggeridge, Malcolm. A Third Testament. New York: Ballentine, 1976.

Mulholland Jr., M. Robert. Invitation to a Journey. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993.

Pojman, Louis P. Who Are We?: Theories of Human Nature. New York: Oxford, 2006.