Tag: Worship

Posted on

What have your gods required of you? Reflections on City of God, Pt. 5

Up to this point in City of God, Augustine has been showing the impotence of the Roman gods in the affairs of this world. They do not offer the protection or benefits claimed for them, and their sheer number indicates that whatever power they might have is limited to inconsequential spheres of influence that in the end have no benefit. In Book VI he turns to the question of eternal life, asking if these gods have anything to offer their worshippers on the other side of death. His answer, of course, is no, but along the way he interacts with Varro, author of Divine Antiquities, a book now lost to history which offered detailed descriptions of Roman religion.

Varro’s book sounds fascinating, like a encyclopedia of the sociology of religion of the day. And as Augustine describes it, Varro’s book is long (which is saying something considering what a brick City of God is). Within the book, Varro distinguishes between mythical, physical, and civil theology, respectively, the gods of the theater, the gods of the philosophers, and the gods of the state. One reason for these distinctions is that Varro wants to distance himself from the gods of the theatre, what he calls the mythic gods, and wants to uphold the gods of the state, what he calls the civil gods. Both Varro and Augustine find the theater disgraceful and its presentation of the gods unseemly. But Augustine finds Varro’s distinction between the mythic and the civil gods to be meaningless because the horrors and savagery depicted in plays is the same type of savagery enacted in the temple of the gods. Fascinatingly, Augustine quotes Seneca on this point, who says of Roman worship, “One man cuts off his male organs, another gashes his arms. If this is the way they earn the favor of the gods, what happens when they fear their anger?”

One of Seneca’s implied points, and certainly one of Augustine’s explicit points, is that the worship required by a given god tells you a lot about the character of that god, which then begs the deeper question, are gods who require such things worthy of worship? Augustine’s overall point in this book is that people should not contort themselves and pour themselves out for gods who have nothing to offer in this life or in the next. For Augustine, the gods of the Roman pantheon are the epitome of gods who are unworthy of worship because they cannot save in this life or the next.

Another important point from this section is that worship is always demanding because by definition you are offering yourself to another, and to truly offer yourself is never easy. But to pour yourself out to things, ideas, ambitions that in the end deplete and bleed you and offer nothing in return is a tragedy. That is not overstating it, because from a Christian point of view misdirected worship, the pouring out of the self for those things that act like gods but are not gods, is the deepest human tragedy. It is the tragedy of idolatry. Or as David Foster Wallace so beautifully and strikingly puts it,

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” David Foster Wallace, This is Water

What have your gods required of you? This is a great question for any season, but especially for Lent, when we offer before the Lord our deepest motivations and desires, asking him to cleanse and forgive us.

 

Posted on

Fate vs. Providence, Reflections on City of God, Part 4

In Book IV of City of God, Augustine argues that Rome’s greatness is not due to the pantheon of gods they worshipped. At the beginning of Book V Augustine turns to fate, destiny, and astrology to show that Rome’s greatness was not written in the stars either. As you can imagine such discussions lead very quickly into the deep waters of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

As others have noted, City of God 5.9 is worth reading and rereading, but I want to discuss a different aspect of this section of the book, namely the difference between a pagan notion of fate or destiny and a Christian notion of providence. This distinction, it seems to me, lies at the very heart of Augustine’s own thinking, and at the heart of how Christians perceive reality and the vicissitudes of history. Fate and destiny are faceless, and they are nameless too, to the extent that there is no one to thank for blessing and no one to rail against for cursing. To be sure, as Augustine discusses at length, Rome deified their conception of Felicity and Fortune in order to put a face to the nameless force, but for Augustine that is exactly the problem. In naming these goddesses, Fortune and Felicity, the Romans rightly intuit the need for a face on the other side of reality, but they don’t go far enough in identifying the one true God of history and the universe.

Providence, on the other hand, is the will of the benevolent God playing out in time and space. Providence, in its fullest sense accounts for both free will and foreknowledge, and places ultimate causes in the hands of the God of Christian revelation. There are two very practical things to note about a Christian view of providence. 1) Though the ultimate purpose of seemingly random events remains inscrutable, the character of the one governing them is not. The God of Christian revelation is loving, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast mercy. For all his power and might, the face behind reality is ultimately kind. 2) There is no area of life or reality left merely to chance. Again, we might not understand events and our experiences fully, but the promise of Christian revelation is that the expanse of Providence spans from the movement of the celestial bodies to the intricacies of a bird’s wing. As Augustine puts it,

“Thus God is the supreme reality, with his Word and the Holy Spirit–three who are one. He is the God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and every body; participation in him brings happiness to all who are happy in truth and not in illusion; he has made man a rational animal, consisting of soul and body; and when man sins he does not let him go unpunished, nor does he abandon him without pity…From him derives every mode of every being, every species, every order, all measure, number, and weight. He is the source of all that exists in nature, whatever its kind, whatsoever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms. He has given to flesh its origin, beauty, health, fertility in propagation, the arrangement of the bodily organs, and the health that comes from their harmony. He has endowed even the soul or irrational creatures with memory, sense, and appetite, but above all this, he has given to the rational soul thought, intelligence, and will. He has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s death (to say nothing of the heavens and the earth, the angels and mankind)–he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace. It is beyond anything incredible that he should have willed the kingdoms of mean, their dominations and their servitudes, to be outside the range of the laws of his providence.” City of God, V.11

As I read this beautiful passage, I imagine what Augustine would have made of quantum mechanics in this regard and the awe and worship he would have felt to know that providence extends to the infinitesimal just as much as to the infinite. And a passage like this reminds me at base what is so immensely practical and life giving about theology. Discussions of Providence, free will, and sovereignty can certainly be anything but life giving, but to affirm and believe in, and ultimately be comforted by God’s providential care of all things is to know freedom and peace and to be filled with worship and awe.

Posted on

Worship, Empire, and the Fickle Human Heart, Reflections on City of God

“But the worshippers and lovers of those gods, whom they delighted to imitate in their criminal wickedness, are unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country. ‘So long as it lasts,’ they say, ‘so long as it enjoys material prosperity, and the glory of victorious war, or, better, the security of peace, why should we worry? What concerns us is that we should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day, enough to keep our inferiors in their place…Anyone who disapproves of this kind of happiness should rank as a public enemy: anyone who attempts to change it or get rid of it should be hustled out of hearing by the freedom-loving majority: he should be kicked out, and removed from the land of the living. We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” City of God, Book II, Chapter 20

In this passage, as a master of rhetoric, Augustine uses hyperbole to great effect. By adopting the voice of a typical Roman citizen, he skewers both the Roman deities and those who worship them. He also tellingly reveals one dark aspect of imperialism–the calloused disdain of the privileged for those beneath them. More broadly, here and throughout Book II, Augustine is examining the ways in which false worship distorts the worshipper. In Augustine’s logic worshippers become corrupt because the gods they worship are corrupt. Worship is formative and shapes the worshipper into the image of the thing worshipped.

As this passage shows, for Augustine what was ultimately disordered about Roman worship was that it was a means to an end. In other words, the worship was false not just because the gods themselves were false, but more importantly because the worship was offered as a way to secure some other thing, such as wealth, happiness, security, prosperity. The last line sums up this theology: “We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” In other words, we will offer worship only to the extent that it benefits us. It is interesting on this count to see the ways in which Roman gods are in one sense simply personified versions of the thing desired–a god of war or reason, a goddess of love or wisdom. It is also interesting to note how many of the Greek and Roman myths narrate gods acting on their behalf to secure some thing desired.

This passage also reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a book where the gods of the old world, the gods of mythology, roam the American landscape mostly as grifters and vagrants because they are no longer worshipped and are only vaguely remembered. They have been replaced by new gods, like television, media, celebrity, technology. And one of Gaiman’s points in writing, besides providing a vastly entertaining story and interesting world, is to show in which human worship is doled out in order to receive benefits. Old gods are traded for new gods when their are new benefits to be had.

Even if you aren’t religious in any way, I think it is instructive to take Augustine’s words and Gaiman’s story and think of how mercenary and fickle the human heart really is. Our affection is so fleeting. Our devotion so often given for selfish reasons. Why is that? Why do we have such a hard time remaining steadfast? It is also instructive to consider the inscrutable God of providence and Lord of history that Augustine commends and to wonder how it would shape and form us to worship Him.

Posted on

Observation vs. Participation

“I freely confess, accordingly, that I endeavor to be one of those who write because they have made some progress, and who, by means of writing, make further progress.”  – Augustine

I just started reading Desiring the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith, where he argues that true Christian education should be primarily formative rather than primarily informative. That is true education should be aimed first at the affections and then at the mind.  Having just completed my first year of seminary, I am convinced he is right.  Simply teaching the Bible and its theology with no grounding in their affective dimension will never truly form character.

If this is so, how then does knowledge become more than knowledge?  Smith argues it is through liturgy, through worship, that we are primarily formed. I want to make the most of my time in seminary, and for me that must mean growing in my affection for God and becoming more like Christ.  To that end, I want to use writing as a means to “make further progress,” as a kind of liturgy.  For me, writing about Scripture is a kind of worshipful reading.  As Smith argues “we love in order to know” because we are lovers, we are worshippers before we are anything else.  Writing becomes a means of participation, where I come to the text not simply as an observer, but as a worshipper.

When thinking about theological education, I have to ask my self, am I an observer or am I a participator? The accumulation of information demands only observation, whereas the formation of character demands participation.  God calls his people to participation, and our participation with and in him is worship. We are formed by what we worship.  We become what we behold.  And as Christians if we would be formed by Christ, we must behold him, because by beholding him we, as Edwards wrote, “lay ourselves in the way of allurement.”

Writing this blog will hopefully serve as a way to lay myself in the way of allurement. Writing is a participation with the text, allowing the text to shape and form not only my thought, but my affections.  In that way, I hope my thoughts to serve as reflections, a kind of shimmering surface that mirror back the truth of Scripture to myself and those that read.  I want to write through the things I read and learn, so that I might be mastered by truth, instead of trying to become the master of truth.