I read a variety of books for my own spiritual nourishment. In addition to the Christian Scriptures, writers that feed my soul include the likes of Brennan Manning, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Thomas Kelly, and C.S. Lewis. And then there are historical voices like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Augustine, Brother Lawrence, and many others. One of my doctoral qualifying exam questions was in the area of Medieval philosophy and theology. So I became familiar with Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux, et. al. I learned a long time ago that, when it comes to spiritual depth, "newer" is not necessarily better than "older." In fact, for by far the most part, "newer" doesn't come close to "older." While a lot of books are written in the area of spirituality, I think there's a lot more book-writing than actual soaking and saturating and dwelling in the earth-shattering presence of God. People are just too busy writing books for that today. And it shows.
Thanks to people like Richard Foster, our rich Christian spiritual heritage is not only being preserved but re-presented to all who want to go deeper in Christ. I am now slow-reading through Foster's Longing for God: Seven Paths of Christian Devotion (along with Gayle Beebe). It contains twenty-six short chapters on important figures in the history of Christian spirituality. Want some spiritual depth outside of the Scriptures? Begin here.
Tonight I read the chapter on Augustine (354-450). Back in the 1970s I read Augustine's Confessions. Foster says if we read this we know, among other things, "the disordering power of misplaced desire." (26) Augustine understood the depth of human condition. He wrote of our estrangement from God due to our succumbing to three temptations: "the love of power, the pervasiveness of lust and our inability to find contentment." (27) These three temptations keep our hearts in a turbulent mess. We are reminded it was Augustine who wrote that, because God made us for himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in him. Centuries later Nouwen prayed, Augustine-like, asking God if the restless seas in his heart would ever settle down.
Augustine's answer was this: "When we are unable to rise above our own self-love, we manufacture all kinds of diversions in an attempt to find a happiness that endures. But eventually we realize that nothing in this life provides the happiness and joy that come from God alone.... Our only hope for enduring happiness is to discover the enduring restlessness of our spirit." (29)
Did Augustine know self-love? Oh, yes he did. Read Confessions. "Desperately longing for genuine love, Augustine had to confess, "I polluted... the stream of friendship with the foulness of lust, and clouded its purity with the dark hell of illicit desire." That's the kind of Davidic Psalm 51 heart that forms the foundation of genuine repentance that leads to real, lasting change. Without this kind of thing, nothing changes. David provides the earlier model; Augustine comes along in the fourth century and reduplicates it. This kind of thing is needed big-time today. Largely, it has been lost.
I love Augustine's spiritual valuing of the human intellect. Reason has been given us by God. Made in God's image, we are rational beings. this is not to be devalued. We need not choose between the false dichotomy of experience vs. reason, as if reasoning is not also experiential, as if the heart does not also have its rationale. "Augustine teaches that we must move beyond a simple experience of God to a structured understanding of him.... Most teaching today seeks to recover a vitality in the Christian life by emphasizing the love of God without equally stressing the need for knowledge of God." (29) This lack of knowledge of God eventually leads to a lack of love for God.
Foster and Beebe do an excellent job capturing the heart of these spiritual masters, many of whom were quite ordinary people who found extraordinary life and experience as they dwelt deep in the presence of God.
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