The Choice Between Love of God and Love of Self

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

There are two forces at work in the world—gravity and grace—and each of us must choose to follow one or the other. There is no third way. Are we to be moved by the downward pull of the one, leading to dissolution and death? Or do we allow ourselves to be drawn upward by the other, which leads to everlasting life and the joys of Paradise? “Once a poor creature,” the poet George Herbert announces, “now a wonder,/ A wonder tortur’d in the space/ Betwixt this world and that of grace.”

So, it’s really a no-brainer, right? Yes, but what about those who choose not to choose? Who refuse to acknowledge even the least bit of tension “betwixt this world and that of grace,” having collapsed all the distinctions along the way? What becomes of them? 

Dante calls them “the trimmers,” those whose fate is to fill the Vestibule of Eternity because, lacking “the good of the intellect,” they have no desire for the joys of Heaven, while Hell has no real appetite for them. “So many,” laments T.S. Eliot in a famous line from The Waste Land, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Let the numberless throng continue to move its metaled way across London Bridge.

In short, it is the human predicament, from which there is no escape so long as we remain in the body. Consisting of two opposing forces that aim to capture the heart of man, broken since the time Adam and Eve lost their innocence, leaving our first parents to face, in the words of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “A long day’s dying, to augment our pain.” 

And the point of all this in an essay about a saint who lived in the late fourth century? Where exactly does Augustine fit? Why does he matter? Because, simply put, on practically every page Augustine ever wrote, and most especially in the Confessions, there is copious and eloquent testimony to one or the other option. Having freely sampled the one at great and painful length during the first half of his life, only to break decisively with its false glamour in order to give himself over to the other in the second half, his witness provides as moving and instructive an account of the human drama as anything this side of Holy Scripture.  

Putting it in precise Augustinian terms, it is the choice between the love of God and the love of self that will determine the outcome of a man’s life. Each of us must decide whether to place cupiditas, which is the pursuit of self-love and the pleasures that men pile high in the service of that self, square in the center of all that we do; or that we aspire to the pure love of God and the goods He has wisely ordained for our eternal happiness, thus placing caritas at the center of the self. And, once again, there is no turning back, no room to maneuver between the two. Putting it in precise Augustinian terms, it is the choice between the love of God and the love of self that will determine the outcome of a man’s life. Tweet This

Thus did God fashion the world of men, endowing them with the capacity of turning upward to Himself in the practice of virtue (conversion to God), or downward toward the self in the practice of vice (aversion from God). Will we resolve, in other words, to love God with such ardor and conviction that even at the expense of ourselves we will not desist, disdaining the temptations of the self-centered self? Or, alternatively, do we allow ourselves to be so consumed by self-love that we are prepared at every turn to exclude God from the equation?  

In a riveting passage from The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis’ re-creation of the exchange between God and the Self on the other side of death, there is but a single sentence spoken, and all of a man’s destiny will depend on who speaks it. Either the Self will say to God, “Thy will be done,” thus ushering the Self into Paradise; or God will say to the Self, “Thy will be done,” and into the everlasting darkness the Self will descend, taking himself freely and forever to Hell. 

For Augustine, therefore, there are but two characters that matter above all in the human story: God and the Self. And in telling the tale, neither one will be treated as finally detachable from the other. It is what makes the Confessions so compelling a read, that throughout the tale he succeeds in remaining so completely and intimately wedded to each.  

This is why we do not confine Augustine to the first five centuries of the Church’s life. He is not reducible to the times in which he lived. Besides, nothing makes an author more boring than when he belongs to the spirit of his own age. When a writer becomes so bewitched by the currents of his own period, he will soon be swallowed whole by the currents of the following period. Marry the spirit of one age, as they say, and become a widower in the next. “Only those,” writes Fulton Sheen in his Introduction to a much earlier edition of the Confessions (E.B. Pusey, 1838), “who vault their times by revealing the abiding passions and longings of the human soul ever enjoy literary immortality.”

And to what do such “passions and longings” finally point but the two primordial movements of the human heart, the competing attractions of which will last for so long as men live on this earth. The two starkly contrasting forces on which everything turns in the life of man, namely, God and the Self. How often one hears their recurrent echo, too, down the many centuries since Augustine first felt the gravitational pull of the one, later countered by the sheer vertical surge of the other. 

The example of St. John Henry Newman comes to mind, an extraordinary soul whose earliest recollections are recorded in his Apologia. How wonderfully it replicates the same drama faced by Augustine. And why not? They were kindred spirits, each illustrating the struggles of the other.

“When I was fifteen,” he tells us (this would be in the autumn of 1816), “a great change of thought took place in me.  

I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured…making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolutely and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator…

A perfect bullseye, I’d say.