Augustine’s Hymn of Longing

I was reminded today of this quote from St. Augustine’s “Confessions”.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless
until they rest in You
…
You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Thomas Cahill, among others, counts “Confessions” as the first real autobiography. He thinks Augustine was the first person to write the word “I”, and mean what we mean today. If you read his confessions, you can’t help but be swept up into the emotional turbulence of his world. He was the first author to so complete divulge himself to the reader, and even 2,000 years later, it’s a thrilling book to read – especially in those places where Augustine recounts his final capitulation to Christ’s call.

Augustine wrote during a period when much of what we would call Christian Orthodoxy was being worked out. His own contributions included meditations on the nature of Sin, and God’s eternality, and the Kingdom of God. His work would later become a foundational influence in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and C.S. Lewis (if you read Lewis’ autobiographical works in one hand, with Confessions in the other, it’s hard to ignore the presence of the latter in the former).

Too often, we read the dry rhetoric of the theologians and forget, perhaps, that they were people drawn into God’s presence with compelling grace, and slain by the wonder of his holiness, just as we are. The works of High Orthodoxy were written by the hands of those deeply in love with God.