Confessions #12: Magneto

One of Augustine's stumbling blocks to Christianity and the Bible in particular initially was his aversion to the stories of the Old Testament where he often found those reputed to be "righteous" to do some seemingly very "unrighteous" things. He, like the Manichees with whom he spent many years in fellowship, was disgusted by the polygamy of the patriarchs, the character of those like Moses and David who committed murder, and the Old Testament sacrifices.

But along the way of his education, Augustine came upon Cicero's Hortensius, in which he was drawn irresistibly to the search for wisdom and truth in the study of philosophy. Augustine comments, "The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart. I began to rise up and return to you."

Augustine also recalled about Hortensius that he was "impressed not by the book's refining effect on my style and literary expression but by the content." In the footnote, Chadwick remarks that "among Augustine's sharp criticisms of contemporary culture of his time is the proposition that it valued for far higher than content." How true that seems to be today! How many more albums have been sold by the packaged pop bands than by those that sing about meaningful issues? Or how many times has the latest blockbuster been more of a glorified fireworks show with some witty lines and a vague moral platitude than a film of substance and reflective analysis of life and culture? It is not much different in the Church where if the music doesn't sound a certain way or the design isn't quite cool enough, we pass it by regardless of the content of the message. We live in a very similar age.

So it was Augustine's reading of philosophy, particularly Hortensius, that lead him back to the Scriptures. Cicero had exhorted him "not to study one particular sect but to love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found." One thing that held Augustine back in his enthusiasm for Cicero's call to philosophy was this--"that the name of Christ was not contained in the book." Because of his mother's influence, the memory of Christ was implanted in him deeply, and "any book which lacked this name, however well written or polished or true, could not entirely grip [him]."

In Augustine's return the the Scriptures he found "something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries." He was not ready at that time to begin the ascent into the mysteries of the Scriptures. Augustine was still thought too highly of his own taste and preferred the large tomes of philosophy current at that time. He was not yet able to start from the beginning, as it were, as a child. But the seed had been planted in him; the seed of hunger for wisdom, for truth, over against the love of vanity and physical pleasures. Not only did Augustine direct his search upward through the thoughts and words of the philosophers, but also through his reflection on the created order. Still, in all these things, Augustine still was hungry, hungry for truth, for nourishment. As he said, "I derived no nourishment from them, but was left more exhausted than before." So it was this memory of Christ and the hunger that his absence affected that would eventually lead Augustine back to the Scriptures and to the God whom Scriptures reveal.

The last line of one of John Donne's holy sonnets (which are holy not because they're sonnets, though many a high school teacher might disagree, but because their content is about that which is holy) goes like this: "And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart." Adamant is a magnetic loadstone, so you can imagine what would the nature of its relationship with iron be like. So it is with our hearts, hard and heavy as iron before the Lord. We do not, indeed we cannot, rise to meet him in the air, as the rapture imagery so goes. His Word hangs in the air like a thick cloud, unreachable, but even if we did reach it, we have not the capability of capturing it's shape or form. So we need him, to come on those clouds, like Magneto, to draw us up into is his atmosphere, His Word, His life. Come Lord Jesus, come quickly.