Per Caritatem

“Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you-we who carry our mortality about us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”

This opening paragraph of Augustine’s Confessions is well-known, particularly the last sentence regarding the restless or unquiet heart.  In the few but carefully crafted opening lines, we have a kind of introduction to the entire book, as well as a hint to one of the major themes, viz., the relationship between philosophy and revelation, reason and faith.  In other words, one might argue that two traditions, Christian and pagan, are brought together in this passage, though perhaps the latter only as a faint echo.   (However, in other parts of the Confessions, Augustine’s pillaging of the pagan tradition is made explicit (e.g., book VII). 

The Christian tradition is readily sensed in the opening passage, as we find paraphrases from the OT and NT running together as Augustine prays and praises his God.   So where do we hear the pagan echoes?  These can be heard in the famous line about the restless heart that runs in multiple directions and is fragmented and dis-ordered until it finds its rest in God.  In other words, in the background we have the (Platonic) idea of moving from plurality to unity-from the soul being tossed in many directions and restless, to being at rest.  Though what I suggest is merely implicit or barely audible in this opening passage, it becomes more explicit as the narrative unfolds.  For example, at the end of book I.31, Augustine writes, “[i]n this lay my sin, that not in him was I seeking pleasures, distinctions and truth, but in myself and the rest of his creatures, and so I fell headlong into pains, confusions and errors” (Boulding trans., p. 61).  Then in the opening paragraph of book II, we read, “I will try to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces” (p. 62).  A dis-integrated self, movement away from the Truth (the Triune God) and a passionate pursuit of the things of the sense world are all packed into what Augustine wants to communicate with his image of a restless heart.  Those who are familiar with Plato’s Republic know that in that work, Plato defines justice as the harmony of the various parts of the soul (rational, spirited, appetitive), and here Augustine, though Christianizing this Platonic idea, seems to say something quite similar. Just as Plato suggests that inner dis-harmony is detrimental to the soul, so in a similar (but Christianized) vein Augustine says that when our loves are dis-ordered we are restless and our attempts at finding true rest in created things rather than the Creator proves futile-we fall to pieces.  So we see that from the very opening paragraph of the Confessions, Augustine is weaving together various melodies from various traditions, yet the harmony created is decisively Christian.