Thought and Being

As I read St. Augustine's Enchiridion recently, I noticed a parallel with Descartes' famous dictum, cogito ergo sum. Augustine writes:

It is a question whether we ought to argue with those who profess themselves ignorant not only about the eternity yet to come but also about their present existence, for they [the Academics] even argue that they do not know what they cannot help knowing. For no one can "not know" that he himself is alive. If he is not alive, he cannot "not know" about it or anything else at all, because either to know or to "not know" implies a living subject.
-Enchiridion, VII, 20

Now, obviously I'm not the first to notice this. Today, having returned to Thomas Martin's book on Augustinian spirituality, Our Restless Hearts, I read Martin's account of the parallel, which was commented upon by Descartes' contemporaries, particularly his supporters. There are also parallels, I'm told, in Augustine's On Free Will and City of God. Apparently Descartes himself denied any direct dependency on Augustine. But Martin observes, "An irreparable breach would have been created in his argument by suggesting that he discovered the principle elsewhere than in the 'thinking self,' Descartes' thinking self, of course."

This is a really fascinating idea. I've always been pursuaded by Descartes' argument, but if the thought that "I am" comes from outside the self, then perhaps I am not, or at least the "I" that is may be much bigger than "I" think.

I'm quite curious about the concept of collective intelligence, and I may write more about this soon. The evidence seems quite strong that our thoughts are heavily conditioned by our experience and even our seemingly original thoughts are constructed from prior materials. All of which leads me to ponder what is truly fundamental to reality.

Augustine, addressing God, answers in the Confessions:

We, therefore, see these things which You made, because they are, but they are because You see them.

Augustine, Man and Creation

There's a patristic wind flowing through the blogosphere these days. Derek at Haligweorc posted a plan for reading the Fathers and it inspired Lee to inaugurate his new blog with a series on St. Augustine's Enchiridion. I meanwhile, had already been reading Thomas Martin's book on Augustinian spirituality, Our Restless Heart, and feeling prodded by Lee's work and a comment that Annie made on Derek's blog about "digested history", I decided to also pull my copy of the Enchiridion off the shelf and go ad fontes as they say.

St. Augustine gets a really bad rap in certain circles, and I think that many times it's because of what people think he says more so than because of what he actually says. A popular position is to be against traditional Christianity because its doctrine of Original Sin devalues human dignity. Semi-informed people know enough to pin the blame for this one on Augustine.

In this light, I was very pleased with the section of the Enchiridion I read today. In approaching the problem of evil in humans, Augustine formulates a position that looks a lot like the traditional Lutheran simul iustus et peccator, except the saint ascribes goodness to the human as human before their meeting Christ.

We find this to be true in many, indeed in almost all contraries, that they cannot coexist in one thing simultaneously. But while nobody doubts that good and evil are contraries, not only can they exist simultaneously, but evils cannot exist at all without goods, and they can only exist in goods, although goods can exist without evils.

This is all Augustine's doctrine of creation and of evil as corruption of good. What is created is good simply because it was created by the supremely good God. But listen to how he deals with the question of human evil.

But what is an evil man if not an evil being, since man is a being? Moreover, if man is something good because he is a being, what is an evil man but an evil good? But when we make a distinction we find that he is not an evil because he is a man, nor is he a good because he is wicked, but he is a good because he is a man and an evil because he is wicked.

List to that again, a wicked man "is a good because he is a man and an evil because he is wicked."

The humanists who grumble about the doctrine of Original Sin tend to have a sort of romantic notion of the inherent goodness of humans. We are good because of the great and noble things of which we are capable. There's a "spark" of goodness at the core of our being. Augustine, though he might recognize a partial truth in the "spark," locates our goodness in God. We are good, essentially good, because we are God's creation. As long as we exist, this goodness remains. And yet Augustine's view allows full responsibility for our actions. Though remaining always good, we are also evil when we behave wickedly.

Union with God

In my previous post I mentioned some ideas on union with God that I found a while ago in Lawrence Kushner's book God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know. I went back and re-read this section in Kushner's book. It's very good stuff.

The rabbi he references is Kabbalah expert Moshe Idel and the Hebrew term Idel uses to describe the mystical union is devekut. He gives three types of union: cognitive devekut, devekut of behavior and devekut of prayer. Kushner summarizes this way:

We don't want just to read about what God wants. We don't want someone else telling us what God wants either. We don't even want God telling us what God wants. We want our eyes to be God's eyes so we can see the world the way God sees it. We want our teaching to be God's Torah. We want our hands to do God's work. We want our prayers to be God's prayers. We want what God wants. Devekut: being one with God. At last the "little i, Anochi," and the "Great I, Anochi, of All creation" are one.

That's not too much to ask, is it?

It reminded me of what St. Augustine said of his conversion experience: "This was the sum of it: not to will what I willed and to will what you willed." (Confessions, Book 9, Chapter 1)

Ramblings on Free Will

Martin Luther is said to have looked back at his body of work late in his life and decided that his Bondage of the Will was one of the few things (along with the catechisms) he wrote that was worth preserving. Calvinists like to point this out. Lutherans have to live with it.

It's true that lack of free will is a cornerstone of Lutheran theology. How many times is Luther's explanation of the third article of the Creed quoted? "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him..." This is a cornerstone of our theology. It's also a bit of an embarassment.

When I was in college a friend and I used to get together in various bars and talk about philosophy. It became a joke between us that no matter what topic we talked about it always came down to the question of free will. At the time, I was an unapologetic defender of free will -- completely free will to the point of making every human decision practically arbitrary. My friend, a dyed-in-the-wool post-modernist, found my position absurd (which of course it was).

Later I became a dogmatic Lutheran (really...I was). I took it as a given in theological matters that the human will is absolutely bound in matters related to salvation. This is where I now think it's a bit weird. The official Lutheran position has always been that our wills are free with regard to "things below" but that they are bound with regard to "things above" -- that I can make whatever choices I like with regard to civil righteousness, but that I cannot, apart from the Holy Spirit, come to God.

American culture will not tolerate any impingement on free will. We are, says the culture, masters of our destiny. And in the realm of religion this translates into theologies that Lutherans cannot tolerate because they are synergistic and semi-Pelagian. And most of these theologies are, in fact, objectively bad -- but not necessarily because they are synergistic.

Apart from being at odds with American cultural religion because of its position on free will, Lutheran theology is also at odds with the ancient faiths of Catholicism and Orthodoxy on these matters. Orthodoxy especially stresses cooperation with God in salvation. But Lutherans hear "cooperation with God," label it as "synergistic" and treat it as heresy.

I think this is a weakness in Lutheran culture.

I was leading a study of the Augsburg Confession once and one of the participants mentioned an idea he had heard once that the Sacrament of Communion is for Lutherans something like what altar calls are for Baptists. I liked that. A retired pastor who was in the class said that Luther wouldn't have liked that. "Why not?" I asked. He responded, "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him...."

But that elipsis has content, right? It says, "but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith." We confess that we don't have the freedom to come to God on our own power, but when would we ever have to do it by our own power?

Typical Lutheran presentations make the believer (or believer-to-be) into a marionette. God pulls the strings, and we dance. We take the saying, "Apart from me you can do nothing" and make it into "You can do nothing."

The Orthodox believe that they have found the middle way between Augustine and Pelagius. Pointing to the writings of St. John Cassian, for example, the Orthodox teach that God works in and through our will to accomplish our salvation. This was judged in the West to be semi-Pelagianism.

But it's only semi-Pelagianism if you make a sharp division between the human will and the work of God and set them against one another. It seems to me that this involves a false view of the nature of God's presence in the world. If the work of God is seen as super-natural in the modernist sense of some outside action acting on nature, then you have this problem. But if you see God's work as the manifestation of God's immanent presence within the world ("in me deeper than I am in myself" as Augustine says), then the problem goes away.

It's common to here Arminians say something to the effect that God is a perfect gentleman and would never impose salvation on us against our will. That idea has always struck me as deeply flawed -- God is God and so on. But the real issue is that God doesn't need to do anything against our will, because our will is capable of being a vehicle for God's presence in our lives. And I think this is the essence of the Orthodox doctrine of synergism.

Born Again and Again

St. Paul, St. Augustine, Martin Luther and C.S. Lewis are among the many Christians whose spiritual journey includes a dramatic momentary turning. Modern evangelicals frequently point to these experiences as the moment when these men were born again, the moment of their salvation. Luther even says he felt like he was born again, though it should be disputed whether he meant by that what modern evangelicals mean.

But I think there is something that Lutherans should learn from these evangelicals, and from Paul, Augustine, Luther and Lewis. We should learn something about commitment. Paul, Augustine and C.S. Lewis all specifically relate their experiences to obedience to God. St. Augustine says, "This was the sum of it: not to will what I willed, O Lord, but to will what you willed."

Ever since I read those words in St. Augustine's Confessions I've had a longing for just that feeling. More on that in a moment.

While I fimrly believe that the Lutheran teaching that we are saved throughout our lives and that this salvation is assured in our baptism, I think that Lutherans should learn from evangelicals that at some point you need to actually commit yourself to following Christ. Lutherans, with our penchant for theological precision, would quickly say that we must commit ourselves anew each day. Very well, but we must, nevertheless, commit.

What I've related to this point has been my thinking on the Damascus Road experience for some time now. But now I must come to a confession and with it something that I learned today, though it was something I already knew.

As I mentioned above, I have had a longing to experience Augustine's feeling of "not to will what I willed, O Lord, but to will what you willed" since I first read his account of it. The power of its effect on his life captivated me, and I wished and hoped that God would do something like that in my own life.

And this wish, as wishes do, took on a life of its own within me. I started to look for it in my prayers. With every new feeling of contact with God I began to wonder, "Will this be what changes me?"

I should make clear what it was I was looking for. I am, and have been for some time, a commited Christian. My faith makes a great deal of difference in the way I live my life. In fact, I don't think it would be too immodest to say that faith pervades my life. Some people might even say I am obsessed with God. But I wanted, and want still to be honest, just what Augustine says: not to will what I willed, but to will what God willed. Stepping back it's easy to see that what I was looking for was what Wesleyans call a second work of grace. It's very un-Lutheran of me, I know.

Eventually, I started to try to manufacture something like the experience I was looking for. I'd convinced myself that it wasn't really a particular work of grace that was need but rather my response. I was moved by William Law's statement, "And if you will here stop, and ask yourselves, why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance, nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it."

So I would decide to become serious about living in the will of God. For a few days it would go well, and I would begin to hope I had finally reached that longed for place. And then I would do something base, something that I couldn't deny came from within me. So I would consider that attempt a failure and conclude that I must try again.

What I saw today is that this is exactly the experience of the Baptist who isn't sure that he "really meant it" when he was baptized before and so goes forward for another altar call and is baptized again.

I needed no doctrinal instruction. I can kick the simul iustus et peccator rhetoric with the best of 'em. Why I didn't apply that to my own life, only my fellow owners of human hearts can know.

Having made this realization, it occured to me that perhaps I already have what I've been longing for. The commitment to Christ that I've been looking for can't possibly be a long, unbroken streak of successful discipleship. It can only be a commitment to keep picking myself up and continue following when I fail.

As Luther says of baptism, "It signifies that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts, and, again, a new man daily come forth and arise; who shall live before God in righteousness and purity forever."

All this I already knew, but now I know it in a new way. I've connected with it. God help me, I've become more Lutheran.

And what of my longing for Augustine's experience? I'm not certain of this, but I think that perhaps the longing itself is the experience. Is there really a difference between longing to will what God wills and actually willing what God wills? Maybe. But for now I will resolve myself to be content with longing for the will of God to be made manifest in my life.