Loving A Hidden God
FRIENDLY LOVE
In this world two things are essential: a healthy life and friendship. God created us humans and as living beings. This was his gift of life to us. But if we are not to live a solitary life, we need to have friends.
Sermon 299D, 1
It is not enough to "love" God to be united to him; we must love him as a friend. To love God because of the benefit he brings us (although it may move us in his direction) is not enough. Eventually we must come to love him because of the good that he is. So too with our human loves. We may begin loving them because of the pleasure they give us, but if our love is to be lasting and true we must come to love them with the love of friendship. With God as with our human friends, our love must be trusting, and be honest. It must be based on the truth of what we are. The difficulty we have understanding our human friends is not unlike the difficulty we will have understanding the mystery that is God. Indeed, having faith in an unknown God is often not as difficult as having faith in a wayward friend. With God as with our human friends we must be frank about how we feel and what we think. With God as with our human friends we must be humble enough to reach out for help when we need it. A reflection on human friendship thus becomes a reflection on the friendly love that God already has for us, the type of love that we strive to have for him in this life.
It is in our nature to need human lovers, human friends, but to find them is a difficult task. Friendship is not a matter of bodily proximity. Augustine describes it as a concordia, a "union of hearts".(Against the Academics, 3.6.13; Letter 258, 1.) He says:
When you have many individuals, you indeed have many souls. But if they love one another, they become one soul.
Commentary on the Gospel of John, 14.9.3
Living with another does not make them a friend. Indeed, the love of friendship can and does exist over vast expanses of space and time. This is so because human love does not depend on a union of bodies. Because it is a union of spirits, a "oneness in heart", it is possible to be connected with a loved one over great distances. When a love is the last thing you think of at night and the first thing you think of in the morning, they are never far away. You can kiss them with your spirit when you hold them in your heart.
The need for such unity of hearts points to the first requirement for the love of friendship: it must be requited. (83 Diverse Questions, 31.3) We can love in the sense of "desiring" many things without any return of love, but to be a friend to someone demands that they also be friends to us. When love ceases to be mutual, friendship ceases. As Augustine observes:
It can happen that a friend begins to hate a friend and thereby ceases to be a friend while the other does not know this and still loves him.
The Trinity, 9.4.6
Augustine's point is clear. Friendly love cannot exist with someone who does not know us or does not care about us.
A truly mutual love demands that there be some sort of equality between the lovers. We love our friends as ourselves and neither more nor less than ourselves. The eyes of friendship neither look down nor look up to a friend; they look at the friend. Like a delicate rake caressing soft sand, the love of friendship has a leveling power, smoothing out the differences which come from our being unique individuals. We must love both ourselves and our friends in the same way, not as ends in themselves but as means whereby we can together each achieve our one eternal good: God himself. (On Christian Doctrine, 1.22.20-1)
Friendship can only exist when it is the highest form of love, a love of benevolence, literally a "wishing well" to the other. This does not mean that friends will always agree but they must always care for each other, desiring that only good things will come to the one they love. If I have a true love of friendship for another, it must be altruistic, valuing the good that IS my loved one rather than the good or the pleasure that they bring to me. Such love of the good that is my loved one cannot be a jealous love. Valuing them for what they are in themselves, it does not stand in the way of their loving others. Indeed, perhaps the greatest sign of my friendly love of another is to be happy when they are happy with someone else.
On the practical level, to be friend to another means that we must be willing to bear their burdens and to allow them to bear ours. In a perfect world friendship would only need to express itself in the enjoyment of the other in unending good times. In such a world we would embrace them not because they needed us but because we rejoiced in them. It would truly be delightful because, as Augustine remarks:
Love is more precious when it issues from the richness of beneficence rather than from the burning arid desert of need.
Catechizing the Uninstructed, 1.4.7
The highest form of love is the love that "wants" another, not "needs" another. A love offered to our friends in their good times is not tempted to subordinate them because of their need for us. It simply rejoices in being with them because of the good that they are. In this life, however, such an ideal state where friends never "need" each other does not last very long, if it exists at all. Bad things happen and it is then the love of friends is tested. As we trudge through the river valleys of this life we are like deer struggling against the current of our times, and sometimes we are called upon to take the lead. As Augustine says:
Nothing so proves friendship as bearing the burden of a friend. Take the example of deer. When deer swim across a river to an island in search of pasture, they line themselves up in such a way that the weight of their heads carried in the antlers is borne by another. The one behind, by extending its neck, places its head on the one in front. By bearing each other's burdens in succession, all of them are able to successfully navigate the raging river.
83 Diverse Questions, 71.1
There comes a time in life when each of us needs a place to rest our weary head and there is no better place than in the arms of one who truly loves us. Friends may be delightfully sunny and breezy in good times but if they go away at the first threat of a storm, they are not true friends at all. Augustine learned this truth when he was a young man. A dear friend died and he literally was immobilized by grief. Eventually he was able to get on with his life only because of the support he received from other friends. He describes how they helped him as follows:
The consolation of other friends did the most to repair the damage and give me strength after the death of my friend. The interchange between us captured my mind: conversations and joking, doing favors for each other, reading together good books, being foolish and being serious together, disagreeing without hatred, sometimes falling into disagreement but thereby remembering in how many things we agreed, teaching and learning from each other, waiting impatiently for the absent to return and rejoicing when they did. These and so many other like signs coming from the hearts of friends are shown through their eyes and mouths and speech and a thousand little gestures. All of these expressions of friendship brought our hearts together like bundled kindling, making one out of many.
Confessions, 4.8.13
The problem with trying to develop a love of friendship with others (or, indeed, with God) is that we do not know them very well. We are a mystery to ourselves but others are even a greater mystery. If my heart is an abyss hidden even from myself, how can I get to know that abyss that is the other? Friendship needs to be based on truth. It must begin with some understanding of the "reality" that is the "other". If I do not know the real "them" and they do not know the real "me", our friendship will be a fragile fantasy based on a fiction. As Augustine comments:
A person must be a friend of truth before they can be a friend to another human being.
Letter 155, 1.1
It is for this reason that maintaining a real friendship with another human being will always be a difficult and demanding task. Our knowledge of them will always be imperfect. That "inner self" which is the core of their character is constantly in flux. Even if we know who they are today, their desires and their fears, their passions and their convictions, tomorrow all these may be different. And even today, that inner spiritual core that is their true person is only partially revealed to us. Every individual is a like a dark chamber surrounded by thick walls and these walls cannot be either pierced completely by love nor scaled successfully by words. As Augustine observes:
Within our consciousness there is a great solitude which can neither be experienced nor seen by anyone else.
Sermon 47, 23
Augustine returns again and again in his writings to the difficulty involved in knowing the truth about ourselves and about others. He writes:
In this journey of earthly life, each one carries his own heart and each heart is closed to every other heart.
Commentary on Psalm 59, 9
If by abyss we understand a great depth, is not a person's heart an abyss? For what is there more profound than that abyss? People may speak to you. Their external actions may be seen. They may be heard speaking, but who can penetrate their thoughts, who can see into their hearts? Who can know what the other is inwardly engaged in, what they are inwardly capable of, what is going on inside them, what they intend, what they are inwardly wishing to happen or not happen. Who can know these things about someone else?
Commentary on Psalm 41, 13
The good heart is hidden and so too is the evil heart. There is an abyss in every heart whether it is good or bad.
Commentary on Psalm 134, 16
All of us are strangers to each other in this life because all of us are clothed with a flesh that hides our heart. We pass by each other day after day carrying our heart deep within and each of our hearts is hidden from all the others.
Commentary on Psalm 55, 9
Since we cannot know now what is going on inside others, friendship must be based on trust. Our trust must be so strong that we dare to be frank with each other, free to say what we like and dislike about each other, free to share passions, fears, hopes, and dreams. (83 Diverse Questions, 31.3) It is indeed taking a chance to be so open, to trust so much, but it is worse still never to trust anyone. In Augustine's view such caution, far from being prudent, is deadly. (Faith in Things That Are Not Seen, 2.4) The difficulty in knowing another must not make us overly cautious, refusing to give our love to anyone until they prove themselves friendly to us beyond a shadow of a doubt. The paradox is that we can never be completely sure of the heart of another, but the only way to truly know another is by opening our heart to them as a friend. (83 Diverse Questions, 71.5)
It is no surprise, then, that when Augustine comes to reflect on the gift of the Holy Ghost called "Counsel", he interprets its first instruction as a command "to forgive". Since human friendship will always be a relationship between "cracked" individuals, we must expect that those we love will never live up to our expectations perfectly. Sometimes they will do the wrong thing; sometimes they will wrong us. In such situations the sign of our friendly love will be our willingness to forgive them for the past and hope for a better future.
Only in heaven will we have perfect knowledge of others. Only there will ...
... we see the thoughts of others which now only God can see. Only there will no one seek to conceal their thoughts because only there will there be no evil thoughts.
Sermon 243, 5
As Augustine wrote to the widow Italica:
In this life, however intimately you knew your husband through whose loss you are called a widow, he was better known to himself than to you. You saw his face (which he certainly could not see directly) but his knowledge of his interior self was more accurate than anything you could know. As St. Paul writes: "No one knows the things of man but the spirit of man that is in him." (1 Corinthians, 2.11) But when "the Lord shall come bringing to light the hidden things of darkness and revealing the counsels of the heart", (1 Corinthians, 4.5) then nothing will be hidden between us and those we love. Then there will be nothing for anyone to reveal to their human loves nor anything to hide from strangers. Indeed, in heaven there will be no strangers.
Letter 92, 2
In heaven the perfection of our love will "glue us to God" just as even now in our imperfect state the objects of our love become glued to us, leaving "footprints" in our memory even when they themselves are absent. (Commentary on Psalm 62, 17; The Trinity, 10.8) But our ultimate union with God and our human loves will be much more than a cold intellectual examination of "footprints" of past experiences. We will not simply recall what our human loves were; we shall embrace what they have become. Finally and forever we shall be at home with our flesh and blood: those human friends who have made our life here bearable and that loving and lovely God who is our friend now and wants to be our friend for all eternity.