Fugitive Love and the Runaway Heart

The exceptional brilliance of his works, his contradictory nature, his desire to bring together faith and intelligence, classical and Christian civilization, the old wine and the new — these deliberate efforts made him in some ways a rationalist. – Fernand Braudel

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.” These are arguably the most famous words in Saint Augustine’s Confessions. We have heard these lines repeated, in some form or translation, in some reference or allusion, many times. We are also familiar with the apologetic explanation for Augustine’s writing: To be made in the image of God is to be made in love for love; as Augustine later said, in his moment of despair, crying as his heart burned with illicit loves in the cauldron of iniquity that was Carthage, “I was in love with love.” Even though Augustine would later state that in his pursuit of love his soul was in putrid and rotting health, decaying from within as magots and vermin gnawed away at him, his famous outburst that only God could satiate his restlessness—our restlessness—was the result of his incessant love to be loved.

Later, in a haunting and famous section of The Confessions, Augustine reflects on why criminals break the law. Reflecting on his theft of pears with friends, in a moment of clarity and honesty Augustine simply says the unadulterated truth of the matter, “It was foul, and I loved it.” Criminals break the law because they love to be criminals, to test the divine law, to exert domination over things—thereby stripping all free will and subjective value from a being. He desired “shame for its own sake.” Augustine wanted to be pursued by the justice of God because of the thrill of being a fugitive of Love itself; he sought the exhilaration of the race to his own destruction rather than the serene contemplative peace of love with another.

It is true that throughout The Confessions, The City of God, De Trinitate, and other writings—especially his homilies—that Augustine’s scattered and decidedly unsystematic understanding of the imago Dei can be pieced together by scholars. In De Trinitate, Augustine says that human rationality is our primary likeness unto God, for the soul is rational by its nature as Augustine plainly describes it, “The rational soul.” Thus, we have the capacity to know so that we can know what love is, “lover or knower is substance, knowledge is substance and love is substance.” Rationality and desire are united. Love has a reason for existence and reason exists to know love.

This returns us to that most famous statement in The Confessions that now gets recontextualized in light of a systematized anthropology. Sprinkle in some City of God to reinforce the point—like when Augustine proclaims that peace is the desire of the soul (Book 19)—and we can pretend that Augustine was a systematic thinker by tying so many disparate threads and musings together. In short, Augustine’s famous declaration is a summary of his understanding of human nature: we are creatures of love, made for love, whose desire for love finds fulfillment in God.

I do not think the attempt to systemize Augustine’s psychology and understanding of human nature is an unworthy endeavor. I myself have been engaged in doing just that—from my thesis at Yale to various writings on the bishop of Hippo since graduation—but I want to revisit the more immediate reality to Augustine’s famous declaration, the reality that gets lost in the theologizing of The Confessions instead of listening to it as it was: the lamentation of a broken heart, a wounded soul, a man aggrieved and suffering, a runaway who fled his mother, a man who abandoned his concubine never to see her again, a father who witnessed the death of his son, an exile who left his home country then returned to his homeland and became a priest and bishop among the community he initially despised and was indoctrinated to hate as a Manichean. It is well-known that Augustine actually wept at his own ordination. He wept not because he was filled with joy, but because he didn’t want to live a life in service to God—he did not desire that contemplative peace offered in a life of prayer and service to the poor and the faithful of God; though that is what ultimately changed him for the better.

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Love is the great theme in Augustine’s writings. Love saturates the entirety of The Confessions. The battle between love and lust, which is an internal war over the nature of love itself, is the governing principle of The City of God. Among all the patristic fathers, Augustine is the most daring in his interpretation of 1 John where the Johannine author declares “God is love” (Deus dilectio est). Augustine immediately inverts the sentence so that it also means “Love is God” (dilectio Deus est), implying that love itself is the Divine nature manifesting itself in our world and in our life. Yet love often seems to be fugitive, running away from us, slipping through our fingertips, dissipating with time. The love that moves our being never seems permanent.

The young Augustine, the Augustine who was stealing pears, having sex with a woman after finishing teaching rhetoric to students at school, and who sought to remove himself from the overweening presence of his drunken mother, is hardly the material for a rockstar saint, let alone one of the four doctors of the Church. He is, frankly, a bad role model. And Augustine knows this. The young Augustine is clearly an embarrassment to the now older and maturing Augustine, the Augustine who writes The Confessions and becomes the thinker that made him the most important theologian of Christianity.

We have the classicist and essayist Gary Wills to thank for giving a name to Augustine’s concubine, “the only one” Augustine ever loved and was faithful to: Una, “the One”—because she was the only one he ever loved. Augustine and Una never married. But in the fourth and fifth century, their status was regarded as a sort of common law marriage and it did not bar either of them from entering the Church. Even though Una accompanied Augustine and their son, Adeodatus, to Rome, Saint Monica’s scheming to push her out of the picture and continue to advance Augustine’s social and political prospects sent Una packing. Another woman was selected for Augustine to marry, but then Augustine converted. He never married. There is evidence that Una was a Christian and joined a monastery, possibly becoming a saint like her lover. Nevertheless, it is clear by carefully reading The Confessions the ghost of Una looms over the text. She is everywhere even though never named or even physically described or given a single spoken line.

However, we know she was “the one.” She was “the only woman for me, and I was faithful to her.” Even so far removed from their last bedroom dalliance together, Augustine still can’t forget her. He can’t stop thinking about her even as he tries to suppress their memory together by leaving her nameless in The Confessions. Augustine was struck by cupid’s arrow and the wound from that arrow of love never healed. We should, though, be thankful that it never healed. For out of the wound grew the mature Augustine’s theology of love and memory that preoccupied much of his best writing and thinking.

The question of needing healed for various loves that were improper also looms over The Confessions. He acknowledges he loved the rhetoric of Cicero over the vulgar and sometimes clumsy language of the Bible. He also states he wept over Dido’s love for Aeneas and her suicide instead of tending to the ruination of his own soul when he was a schoolboy. He loved winning the praise and adoration of others, so he cheated to ensure he would receive that praise and adoration. As he said about his theft of the pears, he loved the foulness of lawbreaking for the sake of foulness—he loved being a fugitive of the one love that makes all love possible and good. In a word, he loved himself, his own idea of love, and his own will for it. The bubbling and burning cauldron he bathed in was pleasant.

When Augustine turns away from these supposed illicit loves, it is not because God is the only subject to be loved. As he says in De Trinitate, “This word is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of the changeable nature or unchangeable truth; which means either in covetousness or in charity. Not that the creature is not to be loved, but if that love is related to the creator it will no longer be covetousness but charity…the lower creature should be used to bring us to God, the creature on a par should be in enjoyed, but in God.” This, of course, has echoes of the restless heart finding rest in God. Love, the mature Augustine realizes, is Divine. What the young Augustine missed was not recognizing God in the loves that moved him, “My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” As he also says in City of God, “we are nothing but wills of love.” The older Augustine can now recognize what that weight of love was and what the will of love moving humans is: God, Love itself.

Once we realize the fugitive love we pursue is an image of Divine Love because it was created by Love itself, we can turn our runaway heart away from just ourselves and toward others, recognizing the inherent worth in their love and beauty, because God is there. This is Augustine’s haunting revelation in Book X, “Too late did I love You! For behold, You were within me.” Since God is Love and Love is God, all Love, properly speaking, is Divine—and once we recognize this, we can bring sanctification and beautification to all the good things that God has made: the pear, other people, ourselves. The love within us is Divinity itself!

This, in a way, permitted Augustine to calm himself over the state of Una’s soul (and his own). Implicitly, as is becoming clear in this careful reading of The Confessions, he still cares for Una. He realizes that he was the cause of her misdirected love, her sin—for sin is misdirected love in Augustine’s imaginative theology. He hasn’t seen her since he sent her away. He will never see her again. By writing about her, even without naming her, he did so to protect her identity. She did nothing wrong. Augustine did everything wrong, and Una suffered become of him. Now, in being able to see God in her, and in being able to see God in their love they shared, Augustine is able to cease his running away and rest at peace that the love he shared with Una can be forgiven and sanctified. How? Because he was seeking God all along. And so was she. It was his own stupidity, his own ignorance, his own self-conceited heart that prevented that reality from being known when they were together. But now he recognizes it as they are separated and he grew older and wiser as a pastor tending to the care of hundreds of parishioners. Augustine hopes that Una recognizes the same, wherever she may be.

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Let us not downplay the remarkable statement that Augustine confesses to God, and the world, that she was “the only woman for me, and I was faithful to her.” It is safe to assume that Una was literate. Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric. Adeodatus was a child prodigy by Augustine’s depiction of him. So if Una could read, which is almost certainly the case as she would have been the one educating the young Adeodatus while Augustine was busy teaching, then Una could have picked up The Confessions and read the proclamation of the man who loved her that she still held captive his heart even after his ordination and ascension to the episcopal office of Hippo.

The restless heart that Augustine speaks of in The Confessions is definitely his. It is uniquely his. The stories of heart he tells in The Confessions are solely his and no one else’s. The runaway heart is his. The anxiety, the grief, the brokenness of Augustine is his. Augustine doesn’t want to be lonely even though he is extremely lonely. But Augustine also knows that all his loves are also the loves of others: others love Cicero, others love Virgil, others love thievery, others love women whom they do not marry, others love the burning desire that consumes them every second of their existence, day and night, week by week, year by year.

Augustine, at first glance, seems to suggest that all his various loves were the problem. But when we read him carefully, he does not conclude that at all. Bad readers and bad interpreters of Augustine conclude what Augustine nowhere ever states. Augustine plainly states, by contrast, that he didn’t know God and therefore couldn’t know the beauty and goodness that existed all around him, the beauty of the pear he stole and the goodness of the woman with whom he bore a child. The problem wasn’t what Augustine loved. The problem was Augustine didn’t know love and therefore didn’t love enough: he didn’t love all the beautiful and good things of the world in relationship with the Beauty and Goodness of the Love that makes all things good and beautiful. By not loving God, he couldn’t love all the good and beautiful things that God had created for the blissful happiness offered to humanity. That happiness, Augustine finally realizes, is found “in our knowledge.” As he says, “For the happy life is not seen by the eyes because it is no physical entity. It is surely not the way in which we remember numbers. A person who has a grasp of numbers does not still seek to acquire this knowledge. But the happy life we already have in our knowledge, and so we love it.”

When Augustine breaks down, he remarks that he had thought God was far from him. Now he knows how wrongheaded he was. God was always with him, within him. And while so many good and beautiful things had been taken away from him—or, more properly, he pushed those good and beautiful things away because of his own stupidity, he can now foster a renewed love with those good and beautiful things through the oasis of memory. He doesn’t need the limited physical thing to recover the love that was there, the love that was hidden to him in his lack of knowledge.

Memory is the great philosophical achievement in Augustine’s theology. Memory is a major theme of The Confessions. Memory is a major theme throughout De Trinitate. Memory is a great theme even in The City of God. Although Augustine routinely focuses on his shortcomings, it is through this new memorial knowledge that Augustine implicitly sanctifies these shortcomings by recognizing the Love that governs the whole cosmos. This is what his younger self couldn’t realize. Even as we lose so much, and Augustine lost so much, the knowledge of Love that he finally achieved allowed him to recover those losses in a richer and more meaningful way than if he merely clasped onto those things unto his dying breath and they decayed with him.

Although Una is gone forever from Augustine’s physical side, she exists forever in his memory. As a famous movie would say, “We’ll always have Paris.” Augustine always has Una because Augustine found God and he could finally rest without fear that he ruined the souls of others, especially hers. The Confessions is a warning against ignorance: the ignorance of God and the Love that creates and sustains all things (this is the real danger and deficiency of Manichaeism). It is also a work of encouragement. The encouragement that even if you are broken, lonely, and afraid—running away from the Love that you so desperately seek—the Christus Medicus is always by your side waiting to apply the remedy for your runaway soul: love, a love that is not fugitive and fleeting but steady and eternal.

Now, Augustine recognizes, he was right to love Dido’s love—for she did not really seek just Aeneas but wanted to love God with and through Aeneas because “love is God”; he was right to love the beauty and eloquence of Cicero whose lovely speech directed Augustine to the pursuit of friendship and philosophical truth which finds ultimate fulfillment in God, the beauty and truth of Cicero’s rhetoric is not of man but of God; and he was just in his love for Una who was made in the image of God and also desired to love and be loved just as God wills for all. Augustine’s runaway heart is no longer running. The love he was pursuing is no longer fugitive to the fading effervescence of time. The love he had and still has is healed and made eternal in his memory as his mind is sanctified by the knowledge of Divine Love. The Love that is Divine has the power to heal and sanctify all things. Luckily for Augustine, he had enough time to realize this. And luckily for us, we also have time to realize that powerful reality too.

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