I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine's Confessions Unpacked by Peter Kreeft

Author:Peter Kreeft [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497129
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-07-07T22:00:00+00:00

We can distinguish

(1) Desires and deeds that are sinful,

(2) Desires and deeds that are perfect,

(3) Desires and deeds that are not sinful but yet not perfect in faith, hope, and charity.

Monica’s tears came from category (3), not from category (2). But God used them, even so. God even used category (1), Augustine’s own sinful desires and deeds, to save him eventually from sinful desires and deeds, as he says in his last line; so how much more would He not use Monica’s category (3) tears? He uses imperfect things to get perfect things in the end. In His perfect economy, nothing is wasted.

What is really a straight line, the shortest distance between two points, may appear as a curved and twisted line to us, because we are living in curved space-time, not in the timeless abstract concepts of Euclidean geometry. In our world, in which physical relativity reigns, a sufficient amount of matter can curve space, so that what we expect to be the straightest line or the shortest time is really not. It is not unreasonable to expect something analogous in divine Providence.

God was in fact not ignoring Monica’s tears or treating them more lightly than Monica was. He was making the same “psychoanalytic” distinction, within those tears, that was explained in the previous passage: the distinction between (1) the essence, or the depth, of them and of the heart’s desires from which they flowed and (2) the surface feelings and thoughts of which Monica was aware. Those tears were precious and powerful prayers because they flowed not just from the surface but from deep faith and love in the depth of her heart that God alone knew. But her moanings and complaints flowed partly from a lack of faith, a lack of perfect trust, in her surface consciousness. (Even saints are far from perfect and are the first to admit it.) God rejected the surface but accepted the depth. He rejected the surface precisely because He accepted the depths. He did not ignore either of those two dimensions of her tears. He is not a Stoic. He does not ignore hurt feelings just because they are not perfect. He weeps with us (actively, not passively) and waits with us, because He is with us, even in our foolish Monican moanings.

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