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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

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.

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