Use and Enjoyment

            In the beginning of his book De Doctrina Christiana St. Augustine relates a principle which is foundational for his entire system of theology: the distinction between use and enjoyment. First, Augustine says that there are signs of things and things in themselves; that is, there are some things (e.g. words) which are only used to signify something else. These things are signifiers which point beyond themselves to something that is greater than them and is represented by them. Secondly, he distinguishes between things which are to be used and those which are to be enjoyed. The things that we use are simply signs which point towards something which is to be used. It is this which ought to be the object of our ultimate love and desire. Hence the usable signs are meant to assist us and support us in our pursuit of that which we ought to truly enjoy, so it is wrong to take ultimate enjoyment in such things. When we do so we divert our attention away from the object which ought to be the proper focus of our enjoyment and settle for a lesser and finite joy. Augustine identifies the proper object of enjoyment as the Holy Trinity. For this reason he concludes that, 

. . .this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made – that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.¹

            Now Augustine does not mean that we should never enjoy or take pleasure in the things of this world. Augustine found great in joy of human love, especially as it was embodied in his mother, Monica, and in his circle of close friends. However, he also understood that while this love is good and should give us a degree of happiness it cannot be treated as ultimate. If we treat human love as ultimate we make it into an idol that competes with God. Love is only an analogy of the One who is Love. Human love is an image of or participant in the divine love, through which the divine love is mirrored. All of creation is an ectype of the divine Archetype and gives Him glory by displaying his perfections in created and finite form. Hence, loving our neighbor is the second greatest commandment and it is subordinated to the greatest commandment which is to love God. We are called to love our neighbor because our neighbor is made after the image of God and therefore by loving our neighbor we love God indirectly. 

            Hence, all things that God has created are goods, but they are not the ultimate Good. So to Augustine it is no sin to love a friend or take a measure of happiness in the beauty of creation insofar as our love of a friend draws us into contemplation of God’s love and our admiration of created beauty points us towards the majesty of the God who is the Creator. For Augustine the problem comes when our loves are disordered and we enjoy ectypal good instead of the archetypal Good. What Augustine means by enjoyment of something “is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake.”² It is to treat it as the telos of human existence. Neither human love nor any other finite good is the telos of human existence and we are not to rest in them. God alone is to be our chief love and supreme object of desire: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it finds its rest in you.”³ All other loves must be properly ordered beneath Him and directed towards our ultimate end of enjoying Him. Sin – and restlessness – results when we exalt a lesser good to the status of ultimate enjoyment. 

The Old Testament prophets use the imagery of adultery to describe what happens when we make some finite thing the primary object of our affections. Indeed, in idolatry we turn away from our true bride, Christ, and commit spiritual fornication in our fleeting romance with our temporal lovers. Like an adulterer who loses interested in their good and loving spouse and pursues a destructive and mutually hurtful affair with someone else, so we are wont to lose interest in the ultimate good and settle for lesser goods. We settle for these lesser goods because, unlike the infinite God, they are finite and we think that we can exercise power over them and bend them to our will. By doing so we hope to gain ultimate joy without submitting to God and therefore retain our autonomy. We cannot control God so we turn to idols that we can control. Ultimately, we all have a god complex; we want to have all joy in ourselves without recourse to a higher a good, just as it is with God. When he analyzed his own sin, Augustine recognized this defining characteristic of sin:

Thus the soul is unfaithful to you when it turns away from you and seeks outside of you the things it cannot find in pure and unmixed form until it returns to you. All who forsake you and set themselves up against you are acting in perverse imitation of you.⁴

Augustine placed this discussion of use and enjoyment at the beginning of his manual for Christian teaching in order to ensure that those who would do theology would remember that the enjoyment of God is always the proper end of theology. Whenever our hearts and our energies are directed towards the ultimate enjoyment of something other than God we find ourselves in idolatry. God is the highest good; he alone is worthy to be enjoyed in and of Himself. Everything else is to be enjoyed only to the degree that it reflects Him. To settle for less than God is to settle for less than the best and to put our hope in something finite and unworthy of the weight we place on it. And like anything which has excessive weight placed on it the finite things we substitute for God will fail. Human love is imperfect and will often disappoint us. Our relationships with others will always be marked with difficulties. Our material possession will be corrupted by rust and moth, beauty will fade, progress will negated by regress, riches will relapse into poverty, and all earthly glory is fleeting. God alone is infinitely beautiful, infinitely good, and infinitely loving and he alone is unchanging and incorruptible. 

            The contemporary Church has forgotten the Augustinian distinction between use and enjoyment. It has charged headlong into adultery with lesser goods, enjoying them instead of using them for the enjoyment of the One who is Good. We Christians are guilty of enjoying many things which ought to be used and putting many loves before God. There are idols on the “Left” and on the “Right,” so to speak. We are wont to make social justice, a better self, high self-esteem, national greatness, a moral society, and immaculate systematic theologies the chief end of man instead of the enjoyment of God. In all cases we settle for a loves which are less than the glory of God because we deem them safer. We think that we have greater control over them since they do not have the same piercing and unbearable glory that God has. Before the majesty of God we are horribly exposed and the extent of our filthiness and unrighteousness is laid bare. So instead of placing ourselves in the presence of God we worship things that we can better measure up to and which we fancy we can manipulate. Ultimately, we are seeking righteousness apart from God so that our autonomy can be preserved. We want a religion of therapeutic theism or civil religion because being true to oneself or being a good conservative American is easier for broken creatures like ourselves to swallow than to have our nakedness exposed before God. 

C. S. Lewis aptly summarized our situation: 

Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.⁵

Lewis could just as easily have said we are creatures fooling about with authenticity, social justice, patriotism, the Law, doctrine for doctrine’s sake, and human love. All of these things are good, but they are good only insofar as they are directed towards God and made subservient to His glory. When we make these things the ends of our religion, rather than the means by which we glorify and enjoy God, we are far too easily pleased with lesser goods.

            Often our unfaithfulness is easy to miss because we invoke God in our pseudo-Christianities, by we try make God the means rather than the end. We pretend that God is a pagan god who can be bought and manipulation with praise and sacrifices so that He can be bribed into giving us the object that we really want to enjoy. How we try to use God rather than enjoy Him is powerfully displayed in the movie Amadeus, a film adaption of Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name. The plot revolves around the highly fictionalized lives of composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. From an early age Salieri dreams of becoming a great composer and prays to God that he will give his life to God and remain celibate if only God would bless him with musical genius, ostensibly so he glorify God with beautiful music. Salieri becomes the court composer for the emperor of Austria and comes to believe that God has accepted his offer, until he meets Mozart. He is absolutely repulsed by Mozart since Mozart is obscene, crude, and licentious. Salieri simply cannot believe that God would choose to give such great gifts to such an impious little man. After Mozart proves to possess vastly superior musical genius to him, Salieri renounces God and commits himself to a life of vengeance against Mozart. He chooses to believe that God has viciously decided to mock him rather than allow him to glorify Him through music. Thus, it quickly becomes apparent in the movie that the glory Salieri really had in mind all along rather was his own. The fictionalized composer believed that he could bribe God into doing Salieri’s will. He was using God for the purpose of enjoying something else, namely the glory of Salieri. As a result, he is eventually driven to madness. 

            Like Salieri we often try to sound pious by adorning our practices and our theology with righteous-sounding words. Phrases such as “transforming the cultural for Christ” and “spreading the gospel” can often be euphemisms for thinly sanctified versions of the political Left or Right. “Personal renewal” can be used in lieu of “therapeutic deism.” As Christians, we must remember to always keep God at the center of our faith. Only when we recognize Him as the One who is eminently worth being enjoyed above all other gods and Him alone will we become a mature Church.

1.     Augustine, De Doct. Christ. I. 4.

2.    Ibid.

3.    Augustine, Conf. I. 1. 1.

4.    Ibid., II. 6. 14.

5.     C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” Theology, Nov. 1941, 1.

What is Love?

If you were to ask ten people of my generation what the highest good is, my guess nine of them would say love. My generation, raised on a steady diet of Disney, has grown up with the belief that love is the highest good. But do we really comprehend what love is? I am of the opinion that we don't. Most people around my age confuse love with tolerance. But tolerance is largely a passive disposition – especially since my generation tends to confuse tolerance with apathy – whereas love is active. By and large my generation thinks that love means that we should “live and let live.” We don’t care who you sleep with, what your religion is, or what kind of background you come from because we are apathetic about these things. We simply don’t have any capital invested in them. It is hypocritical when, in the name of love, we self-righteously demand those who do have capital invested in these things to change. Our notion of "love" doesn't require anything on our part, other than labeling anyone who disagrees with us as “intolerant” (an ironically moralistic phenomenon).

The problem is that our love tends to be therapeutic. We don't want to give up anything out of love, but we like to feel like we are people who practice love towards others. Kindly apathy or half-baked  slacktivism are cheap ways to make us all come away feeling good about ourselves and morally righteous. Our notion of love is not self-giving and for that reason it is not love at all. It doesn't give up anything, except for the pittance of our parents' money we spent on the "Free Tibet" or the "Save Darfur" t-shirts we bought. In reality, we have no right to demand that homophobes bigots, or religious dogmatists learn to self-sacrificially love when we don't do the same. If we did, we would learn what love really is. It isn't apathy, thinly disguised as tolerance. It is something far richer. Real love is unconditional and self-sacrificial. It means counting others more significant than ourselves.

My understanding of love is unapologetically religious. Though non-religious people, and people who do not share my specific religion (Christianity) should be able to appreciate and practice this conception of love, I believe that it is ultimately only justified by the Christian religion. This is because God is at the center of the Christian religion and God is love (1 John 4:8). And God can be love because of the uniquely Trinitarian character of the Christian God. The being of God eternally unfolds into threefold personality of three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God, therefore, is essentially tri-personal. His being overflows with life and personality. The Father is the fountain of the Godhead. He eternally generates the Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from both of them. However, each of these persons are consubstantial with each other, meaning that the three persons are one divine being. As a result, there is something like a community within God because each of the persons have eternally related to each other and eternally inhered within each other in what is called perichoresis - or the divine dance. The three persons within God have eternally loved another in self-giving love.  Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, expressed this when he said, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:10).Therefore it is possible to say that God from all eternity is love. The Trinity is inherently mysterious, but it is also inherently wonderful since only a Triune God can eternally be love. Any other god could not be loving until he created someone to love.

God did not simply exist as self-enclosed love for all eternity, but decided to create other beings whom he could love and who in return could also love (him as well as each other). This is partially what Christians mean when they say that God created man after his image; we are meant to love and be loved in return just as, internally, God loves and is loved. Specifically, God has created a covenant - a mutually and permanently binding relationship - with man, where if man loves God with all his heart as his chief end, God will not withhold himself from man. And this highlights the defining characteristic of love; it is giving yourself up to another. God has given himself to man by condescending to us. God did not have to make us; he was perfectly happy with the eternal love of his Trinitarian nature. Yet he decided to create us and bind himself in a covenantal relationship with us. In return we are to give ourselves up to God by desiring him with all our heart, soul, and strength. Hence, all love is covenantal in nature; it involves a mutual self-surrender to another. Of course, God's covenant with man differs from Trinitarian love in several ways. Primarily, it is unequal. This unequal love is very difficult for us to understand because we are so egalitarian. Yet if one thing it is certain, God is a entirely different species from us; he is divine, we are not. God does not need us, but we need him. Our relationship with God is always one of a king with his subject; God stoops down to us, whereas we lift our arms up to him. Yet there are analogies of inequality in human relationships. For example, the love of a parent and a child is quite unequal. The parent, though truly giving herself up in the love of a child, is in a position of authority over the child. Thus in covenantal relationships unconditional self-giving does not conflict with inequality. And, contrary to what our culture thinks, it is the former rather than the latter which is the true hallmark of love.

Perhaps a covenantal relationship - which is simply saying true love - can be better understood when it is contrasted with another kind of relationship: a consumer relationship.1 A consumer relationship is not binding or unconditional. It exists so long as both sides are getting what they want out of it. The two parties do not irrevocably give themselves up to each other. Yet, this is precisely what happens in a covenantal relationship. We no do not remain in our friendships and familial relationships only until they inconvenience us. Rather, we are permanently bound to our friends and brothers and sisters. When we enter into a consumer relationship with someone the end is not that person but whatever we get from them. We use them rather than love them. But in a covenantal relationship, the person is the end in itself.

The nature of love is further displayed through God's grace towards us. God entered into a covenant with us, which we broke by loving ourselves rather than him. Our relationships are now tend to be directed solely toward our own gratification and glorification.  Yet God is faithful to the covenant he made with those whom he called to himself from all eternity. Taking on the form of a servant he humbled himself by becoming a man. In the Incarnation God shows his love for us by making the ultimate self-sacrifice in an act of unconditional love. He suffered death so that our debt to God might be paid and our sins cancelled. God, in the Person of the Son, made himself the sacrifice that restored us to a relationship with him.  As Paul put it, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:2).  And Jesus himself said that "greater love has no one that this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (Jn. 15:13). He said this with regard to himself who had just said, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you." Thus we see that God loves us with the same love that abides within the Trinity. It is a love that "does not insist on its own way" and which "bears all things" (1 Corinth. 13: 5, 7). It is a love that does not insist on its rights but gives them up for the benefit of another, for the Son of God did not retain his rightful place at the glorious right hand of the Father but came down to our broken world and partook in our sufferings for our sake. Love fundamentally must involve grace.

Therefore, Christ is to be the model of love that we look to. God is Love and Christ, as Incarnate God, is Love made flesh. If we are to truly know what it means to love, we are to be imitators of Christ. We are to account one another more significant than ourselves, just as Christ accounted his own life nothing and gave it up for our own sake. If we are to truly love, we must give up our rights and bind ourselves in a covenant with our beloved. We must give up a part of ourselves to another. Any love worthy of the name must be unconditional. Hence, we see that real love is the furthest thing from apathy. Love is not content to live and let live, but strives to enter into the complicated and often messy tangled web of human relationships. We pay people an intolerable compliment when we love them, since love squashes all pretense to autonomy when it binds two souls together. Love argues, chides, and even disapproves because love is not satisfied with politeness but pushes on to speak the truth even when it is hard. Real love is not "romantic" either. Love does not always involve feeling loving or loving someone who is lovable. In fact, it may rarely involve these things. Love is an action undertaken by the heart in spite of how we feel about other people. When we love, disagreements and differences are not dissolved, but rather love proceeds despite of these things. "Love endures all things" (1 Corinth. 13:7). When we love, we do not forget our zeal for our religious creeds, our realization that others are imperfect sinners, or our partisan politics. Instead, we imitate Christ's love by retaining our zeal all the while having compassion and loving our very enemies. When we do so we pass beyond the shallow realm of tolerance and arrive at nothing less than pure agape.

1. What follows is an adaption of a part of a sermon I heard Tim Keller preach on May 6, 2012 entitled "Love and Lust."