By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
I Burned for Your Peace: “Augustine’s Confessions Unpacked,” by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2016), 234 pages; $17.95. Available at www.ignatius.com or call 1-800-651-1531.
Citing as the predominant theme in both Augustine’s The City of God and the Confessions the drama of “God’s providential design and man’s free choices” in human history and in individual lives, Dr. Kreeft revisits this spiritual classic by quoting important selections and offering commentary and exegesis on those passages.
Because of its riches as a great book, the Confessions always invites more study and further exploration in plumbing its depths. As a classic renowned for its universality in depicting the human condition, fallen human nature, and the mysterious hand of God’s Providence, “ever ancient, ever new,” the Confessions proves inexhaustible as a fountain of wisdom that illuminates God’s love for each person: “You who care for each one of us as though he was the your only care,” in Augustine’s words. Kreeft’s book provides an even greater appreciation for the riches of this masterpiece.
Reminding readers that the Confessions begins and ends with praise (“Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised”), Kreeft reflects on the nature of praise, identifying its natural motive as an act of love. Because praise comes from the heart, “praise is a kind of love, a part of love, a deed of love, an effect of love, or a revelation of love; we never praise anyone or anything we do not love.” Augustine’s book is more about God’s love than about Augustine’s life.
Focusing on Augustine’s quest for God and passion for wisdom, Kreeft also touches on the mystery of God’s seeking for Augustine. Augustine writes, “I sought the Lord and afterward I knew He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me.” This restlessness that drives Augustine, Kreeft explains, compares to a child’s movements in the womb: “If the baby were not restless in the womb, it would never be born.”
The restless heart of Augustine that depicts the human condition and identifies man’s restive nature serves as God’s means of leading wandering man to seek the peace and rest that only God gives. Without the restless heart inciting movement – “Our homelessness, our alienation, our misery, our confusion, our lover’s quarrel with the world” — man does not reach his destination of Heaven.
When Augustine wonders why he matters to God, pondering why the Creator of the universe takes personal interest in a mere creature, a single atom of humanity (“What rather am I to Thee, that Thou shouldst demand my love and if I do not love Thee be angry and threaten such great woes?”), Kreeft unfolds the answer by alluding to the crucifix: Love transcends reason, and love’s mysteries surpass all logical categories:
“Love is absurd, thank God. On the Cross God suffers our Hell so that we rebels and sinners might enjoy His Heaven.”
Why is God in His majesty moved to anger by the behavior of one single mortal? Kreeft’s development of Augustine’s answer captures another dimension of God’s nature besides the still, small voice. God screams like an irate parent because He sees His children making immoral choices. He is not an imperturbable Stoic philosopher upholding his dignity: “He shouts — because most of us are nearly deaf. He is utterly undignified. He lowers Himself….”
As Augustine ponders the brevity of man’s mortality and suffers the tragic loss of a beloved friend in the prime of life, he meditates on man’s experience of time and God’s unchanging timelessness — the Eternal Now that comprehends past, present, and future in one glance. Augustine reflects that God’s eternal nature undergoes no sense of the passage of time. Whereas man’s days pass and his fathers’ ages have been, “Your years do not pass, Your years are today.”\
Despite the progression of time that brings loss and separation to mortal man, Kreeft’s commentary on this passage adds, “Nothing is lost forever. Nothing.”
Comparing time and eternity to a wave and the ocean, Kreeft offers this striking analogy: Although waves break and events end, waves remain in the sea and events continue in history as parts of a greater whole that embraces them: “A wave dies, but the sea that contains all waves does not. All dying happens, as everything happens, ‘inside’ Eternal Life, for Eternal Life has no outside, except eternal death (Hell).” What appears lost to man’s senses is forever present and preserved in God’s omniscience.
As Augustine recalls his fierce passion to win in the games of his childhood, even cheating to boast victory yet unleashing furious anger when the victim of others’ violation of the rules, he confesses, “At the same time I was indignant and argued furiously when I caught anyone doing the very things that I had done to others.”
From this episode Kreeft sees proof of the Golden Rule, the natural law, the knowledge of right and wrong that, in Aquinas’ words, “cannot be eradicated from the heart of man.” Though fallen man can ignore the natural moral law, he cannot extinguish it.
While Augustine hated the person who cheated him and retaliated with an outburst of rage, he discovered that “no enemy could be more dangerous to us than the hatred with which we hate him, and that by our efforts against him we do less damage to our enemy than is wrought to our own heart.”
Kreeft adds to this observation the moral truth that both just and unjust acts have two effects, one on the subject and one on the object as witnessed on the two victims of abortion, the death of the child and the harm to the woman’s conscience and soul.
In his restless search for wisdom, Augustine finds temporary relief in the doctrines of astrology that absolve man of all moral culpability. All sin, he learns, “is the doing of Venus or Saturn or Mars,” and man is innocent because sin belongs to “the Creator and Ruler of heaven, and the stars of heaven.” Of course, such a doctrine of determinism allows man to rationalize and excuse all vice as beyond man’s rational or moral control.
Kreeft relates the ancient heresy of astrology to modern ideologies that propose the same solution to evil. Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism all propose some version of updated, pseudo-scientific determinism:
“Darwinians tell us that we ape the apes. . . . Marxists tell us there is no personal sin, only economic sin…Freudians tell us we are an id, not an ego…a river of libido, not a person who has the reason and free will to control his boat on the river.”
Once Augustine’s search for truth culminates in his knowledge of God and the Catholic faith and he recognizes his ignorance, his intellectual errors, and the fallacies of the Skeptics, the Astrologists, and the Manicheans, he rests in a state of mental slumber and inertia. He confesses that while no one wants to be asleep all day, “yet a man often postpones the effort of shaking himself awake when he feels a sluggish heaviness in the limbs.”
Augustine’s procrastination protested “Give me just a little while,” a ploy that means a long time. Kreeft identifies this human sloth as the failure to distinguish between indefinite time (chronos) and the urgency of the present moment (kairos): The word now is “always a definite, concrete, specific, real time” whereas the word soon “is an indefinite, abstract, generic, unreal time.” God, however, always announces that “Now” is the time for salvation. The Hound of Heaven demands that a person act on the knowledge with the conviction of a “yes,” not “soon.”
Mother And Son
When Augustine announces his conversion and his mother Monica, who has prayed daily and ceaselessly for this deepest desire of her heart, rejoices, son and mother marvel at the hand of God’s Providence in both their lives. As they converse, they are in awe and wonder at God’s intimate love for each soul:
“And higher still we soared . . . and came to our own souls, and went beyond them.” They experience a glimpse of the beatitude of Heaven on Earth, a peace that passes all understanding, a dream come true, an answer to a prayer.
Kreeft captures the heart of the mystery, the paradox of God’s hiddenness and presence, transcendence and immanence. Augustine and Monica conduct their holy conversation as they behold a miracle in their lives:
“This timeless moment lacks nothing good, true, beautiful, or joyful that was in time. It is not so much timeless as full of time, or, rather, full of the being that we found in time in a dispersed and broken fashion, but now together.”
I Burned for Your Peace, then, leads the mind into the soul of a great saint who plumbs the heart of reality. As Augustine discovers God within and around him both in his heart and in his mind and in all the ordinary events of his life — God correcting, speaking, leading, moving, pursuing, and loving him — he is touched by the Lord and burns for Him: “Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.”
As Kreeft fittingly ends his book, “If you are not on fire for Him, it is not He who has touched you.”
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