Psalm 8 in Augustine’s Confessions
But what is it that I love in loving thee?
This article was originally written to fulfill the requirements of an assignment in a course entitled Philosophy for Understanding Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary
Modern Christians often confess their love of God in animated ways. I used to work at an inner-city Gospel mission where I had the pleasure of serving God alongside Christians of all sorts of traditions and expressions. The unity we shared was grounded in our love of God. Reading Augustine’s Confessions brings me back to those long shifts with passionate believers serving the kingdom. Young zealous Christ-followers carried out many theological conversations, all trying to articulate why they loved God and what they loved about God.
In this blog post, I want to accomplish two things. First, I hope to identify the struggle of what it means to articulate a love of God in a secular age. Words that seem strong, bold, and wonderful yet fall flat in a disenchanted world. Secondly, I will look to Augustine for direction in answering this question.
Loving God in a Secular Age
Augustine says, “It is not with a doubtful consciousness, but one fully certain that I love thee, O Lord. Thou hast smitten my heart with thy Word, and I have loved thee.” Augustine understands that his love for God comes from God through the Word. Augustine has come to confidently know that he loves God because of the clear revelation of God through the Holy Scriptures. However, that is not sufficient for Augustine. He loves God, but what does he love? He continues, “But what is it that I love in loving thee?”
It is this question that sticks in my mind. I confess my love of the Lord. I have for years, decades even. I have wrestled with some of the hard passages of the Scriptures and have, by the grace of God, remained confident and grown in my love of and faith in God. However, I confess that I ask the same question as Augustine, what exactly is it that I love when I say I love God?
Luke Ferry’s A Brief History of Thought, reads like it could be the prologue to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Ferry tracks the slow burning titanic battle between Greco-Roman thought, and the victorious Christian thought. According to Taylor, we have entered into a secular age where Christian thought is no longer the norm, and it seems modern contemporary philosophy and worldviews are the ones victorious. We live in a secular age, and our Christian convictions and sayings (like ‘I love God’) do not seem to have the same meaning as they once did.
A simple way to understand Taylor’s cultural exegesis of the current secular age is through his ideas of a buffered and porous self. In the world which Ferry walks his readers through, people lived in a world of transcendence and when Christianity became the regulative system of thought. The transcendence of the Hellenistic age evolved from paganism to Christianity. A porous versus buffered self means that we perceive our ability to participate in the Transcendent as non-negotiable versus negotiable. To be porous is to let the transcendent world flow through you, whereas to be buffered means the transcendent, if it exists at all, is always at an arms reach. This difference between porous and buffered makes these claims of love for God fall flat in our modern world. A truly buffered person can barely imagine what it would be like to love something intangible.
Augustine’s line of questioning in the sixth chapter of Book 10 about how we might know what we love when we say we love God is so essential to our personal faith and public faith (Christian witness). As mentioned in the introduction, modern Christians love to (correctly) express their love and affection for God, yet their words sound hollow to modern, buffered non-believers’ ears.
According to Augustine, What Do We Love When We Say We Love God?
Here we turn to Augustine, looking for guidance in this secular age we find ourselves in. Augustine does not resort to simple answers about why he loves God. He encompasses God’s revealing and creative character in articulating this question. He ultimately concludes that his love for God is due to God’s sovereign decree that we can understand the world and come to an understanding of Him through general and special revelation.
Chapters 6 and 7 of Book Ten in Confessions articulate this love. Augustine clarifies that love is not simply because there are things in God’s creation that are pleasant to us,” Not physical beauty, nor the splendor of time, nor the radiance of the light--so pleasing to our eyes--nor the sweet melodies of the various kinds of songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and spices; not manna and honey, not the limbs embraced in physical love--it is not these I love when I love my God.” Although, as he continues, those are part of why he loves God, just not the only reason he loves God. Augustine is giving the first piece of the puzzle.
He continues questing through this thought: what is that we say when we say we love God? It is not the created order around us that we love when we say we love God. Loving God is not loving the animals and mountains. Loving God, when considering the creation, is recognizing who made the animals and mountains. Augustine started this quest of understanding by recognizing that his love for God has come because the Lord has “smitten him with His Word” but then spends the following paragraphs discussing creation or general revelation. It is because of the knowledge given to him through the special revelation of the Word that Augustine is drawn to understanding that he can love God by loving creation, even though that is not the same as loving God himself.
Augustine’s love for God encompasses the gift of faith that came to him through the Word and the beautiful creation God has given him to reside in. To say that Augustine loves God is to say that he loves the works of God, which point to the character of God. And Augustine only knows what is of God because of the revelation through the Word.
In this secular age of buffered and porous selves, Augustine offers guidance about articulating our love for God in ways that do not sound hollow to an atheist’s ear. Augustine teaches us, in his Confessions, that God gives us our faith and love through His Word. We can be confident that we love God because the work of the Holy Spirit animates our love for God. The Psalmist articulates the pathway to our love for God for the buffered person in our midst. Praise be to God for his revelation to us in his Son and in the beauty of creation all around us. Love-filled hearts draw close to God in worship when they consider the wondrous works of God, as David so clearly articulates in Psalm 8:
Psalm 8
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
2 Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? u
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels v
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
7 all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
8 the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
9 Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!