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The desire for grace is the first grace. Coming to the end of your self-sufficiency is the first revelation.
What used to look like walls hemming you in start to look like scaffolding holding you together.
“Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good.”
Augustine’s account honors the complexity of our experience. He recognizes that knowing what to do isn’t enough. He names that experience of feeling divided, like there are two (or more!) of me.
“The self which willed to serve was identical with the self which was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself.”
“How does anyone suffer an unhappy life by his will, since absolutely no one wills to live unhappily?”
They’re unhappy, not because they choose to be but because their will is in such a condition that it can’t choose what would ultimately make them happy.
Grace isn’t just forgiveness, a covering, an acquittal; it is an infusion, a transplant, a resurrection, a revolution of the will and wants.
Grace is freedom.
The fateful moment is hermeneutic: “I interpreted it solely as a divine command.”31 The tortured soul will be called into new life by obeying a command.
it’s an invitation to a life that is secure enough to risk, centered enough to be courageous, like the rails of a roller coaster that let you do loop after loop.
“The human will does not attain grace through its freedom, but rather attains its freedom through grace.”
If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns.
“The first freedom of the will was therefore to be able not to sin; the final freedom will be much greater: not to be able to sin.”
this is the sursum corda, the opening invocation of the Eucharist: “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord!” Where do we learn to live into this freedom on the way? Where do we learn the graced dependence that sets us free? It’s not magic, Augustine counsels: look no further than “the sacraments of the faithful.”
First we’ll say this invocation. Then we’ll read from this book. Then we’ll raise hands. It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch. You lived in the caves and hollows of what had worked before.
On the road, you’re always already following somebody.
This deconstructs the myth of authenticity bound up with negative freedom. In that story, I’m authentic if I’m “sincere,” and I’m only sincere if I act as if I’m making things up from scratch, expressing something “inside” me that’s all my own.
You do ...
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Action could coax belief rather than testifying to it.
Doing something without knowing if you believed it—that was proof of sincerity, rather than its absence.
Maybe being named without your choosing is a sign that you’re loved.
Turns out, the “confines” of Sacramento were the scaffolding that gave her an identity;
But then it turns out that being free isn’t about leaving; it’s about being found.
Freedom isn’t digging a tunnel to escape, he counseled; it’s digging down into yourself.
God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance.
if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.
There is a shadow side of such aspiration. “On reflection,” confesses Eugene Peterson, “I realized that I had become busy, a bastard form of ambition.”
If you keep walking around the phenomenon of ambition, you’ll start to note a couple of features. First, the opposite of ambition is not humility; it is sloth, passivity, timidity, and complacency.
Second, it is the telos of ambition that distinguishes good from bad, separating faithful aspiration from self-serving aggrandizement. Augustine never stopped being ambitious. What changed was the target, the goal, the how of his striving.
Like Andre Agassi, who hated tennis because it was his father’s dream, Augustine hated learning in no small part because his parents treated it so instrumentally, as a means to fulfill their own ladder-climbing hopes, living vicariously through the son who had no choice but to endure it.
“But this same father did not care what character before you I was developing, or how chaste I was so long as I possessed a cultured tongue—though my culture really meant a desert uncultivated by you, God.”
The saddest thing about imposed ambition is that it nonetheless forms us. Our resentment doesn’t inoculate us. Just because others set the path for our hearts doesn’t mean we don’t run there.
“We pursued the empty glory of popularity, ambitious for the applause of the audience at the theatre when entering for verse competitions to win a garland of mere grass.”
There is a bundle of hopes and hungers bound up with our ambitions, but so often they boil down to the twin desires to win and to be noticed, domination and attention—to win the crown and be seen doing it.
When Augustine reflects on ambition, he’s really delving into the dynamics of fame.
But naming the symptoms is easy. The challenge is diagnosing the disease. The question is: What do we want when we want attention?
The point of discussing ambition in terms of idolatry isn’t denunciation; it’s diagnostic.
Our idolatries are not intellectual; they are affective—instances of disordered love and devotion.
For Augustine, we are made for joy.
Existentially, the problem with idolatry is that it is an exercise in futility, a penchant that ends in profound dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
We are treating as ultimate what is only penultimate; we are heaping infinite, immortal expectations on created things that will pass away; we are settling on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through it to its Creator.
“His trip reports betray a theme, in photo after photo entirely devoid of human companionship: empty lounges, first-class menus, embroidered satin pillows—inanimate totems of a five-star existence.” But he’s winning.
IT WAS AMBITION that brought Augustine to Milan, but it was attainment that unsettled him.
There’s the beggar, a “failure,” laughing in the morning while Augustine, a “success,” is racked with anxiety. “He had no worries; I was frenetic.” It’s funny, he remarks in retrospect, how we choose anxiety and fear over simplicity and merriment. It’s as if we imagine our frantic ambition will bring joy.
Suddenly he was filled with holy love and sobering shame. Angry with himself, he turned his eyes on his friend and said to him: “Tell me, I beg of you, what do we hope to achieve with all our labours? What is our aim in life? What is the motive of our service to the state? Can we hope for any higher office in the palace than to be Friends of the Emperor? And in that position what is not fragile and full of dangers? How many hazards must one risk to attain a position of even greater danger? And when will we arrive there? Whereas, if I wish to become God’s friend, in an instant I may become that
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What is our aim in life? What are we aiming for when we aim our lives at some aspiration?
The alternative to disordered ambition that ultimately disappoints is not some holy lethargy or pious passivity. It’s recalibrated ambition that aspires for a different end and does so for different reasons.
Attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder.
Our culture of ambition has only two speeds: either win or quit.
