Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

As a nineteen-year-old, Augustine read Cicero’s dialogue Hortensius. This work considered the paradox that every person “sets out to be happy [but] the majority are thoroughly wretched.”27 Cicero concluded that the extreme scarcity of human contentment might be a judgment of divine providence for our sins. He counseled his readers not to seek happiness in the pursuit of material comfort, sex, or prosperity but rather to find it in philosophical contemplation. The book was electrifying to the young Augustine.28 One of his lifelong projects became to discover why most people are so discontent and bereft of joy. He concluded that our discontent has both a functional cause and an ultimate source. The functional cause of our discontent is that our loves are “out of order.” Augustine taught that we are most fundamentally shaped not as much by what we believe, or think, or even do, but by what we love. “For when we ask whether somebody is a good person, we are not asking what he believes or hopes for, but what he loves.”29