I have a new book on Augustine. (Ricochet members: Check for a cheaper price here!) Its title is Augustine’s Preaching and the Healing of Desire in the Enarrationes in Psalmos.  First, a word on what my three Augustine books are about.

Augustine, bishop of a place called Hippo in North Africa in the early 400s, is a super-influential theologian-philosopher guy–super-duper-influential.  If you don’t know his name, chances are still pretty good you’ve heard something about some guy who stole pears when he was young, or who prayed for chastity-but-not-yet!

And desire is what he talks about all the time.  He doesn’t talk about sin, the Gospel, the Trinity, the Incarnation, Plato, history, time, his mother, faith and reason, or biblical hermeneutics on every page, although he is famous for talking about all of these things.  But he talks about desire on every page because he, like the Buddhists and the Stoics and many others, thinks it’s very important for us to get our desires in order.  We can’t be happy if all we long for is fleeting things outside of our control.

Despite being the one thing Augustine just won’t shut up about, desire is a rare focus in books about Augustine.  It’s almost like scholars are professionally obligated to think Augustine is important, but only because there might be some secret fact about his life or some hardly noticed fact about his books that clever modern scholars haven’t figured out yet.  Never mind his plain teachings in tens of thousands of pages–apparently he’s important (for some reason), but his plain teachings aren’t very important.

Yes, it’s almost like that.

Not quite.

But almost.  (To be fair, the hardly noticed facts scholars do figure out are interesting and important sometimes.  Two words: David Meconi!)

Anyway, enough background prose from me.  Let’s get this post organized!  It’s time to summarize Augustine’s views on desire and happiness, introduce that oddly named book Enarrationes in Psalmos, and introduce his idea of the Whole Christ who speaks in the Psalms.  Stuff he says about desire in Enarrationes: coming up in future posts!

Augustine’s Theology of Desire

Love G-d and love people!  This is the biblical rule for doing what’s right, which Augustine explains is also how to be happy.

And note well: Being happy and doing what’s right are the same thing! There’s ultimately no conflict between my moral obligations and what makes me happy. Of course, we think there can be: Sometimes, the unjust win and the just suffer.  Augustine’s pastoral response in the Expositions on the Psalms is something like this: We only worry about that because we have not yet learned to love the right things; there is much greater joy for the just and for those who love God, although some of that joy is deferred until after death.

You can also look for a more philosophical response in Augustine, and you won’t have a hard time finding it: Vice is its own punishment.

Anyway, what Augustine says about desire in general is things like this:

Don’t stake your happiness on money, power, fame, or physical pleasure. Not all reality is physical, and non-physical things matter more than physical.  That means G-d and the soul–which is what we should really value.

Love greater goods more than lesser goods.  That means people.  (Or souls, or spirits–but the body matters too, as a part of the human being.)

And love the greatest good the most.  That means G-d.

The Expositions on the Psalms

Let’s do the title first. It’s not his own. Enarrationes is a title given by Erasmus some time later, although the word is Augustinish enough. You can look it up here; an enarratio is an exposition or commentary or explanation or interpretation.

Not a bad word for a sermon, which is what most of the Enarrationes are–his sermons on the Psalms.  (The ones that aren’t sermons are shorter written commentaries.  Most of the sermons were preached, although some are probably more like unpreached sermon notes.)

In different sermons you can find Augustine interacting with the audience a bit, observing that a lot of people have shown up for a Good Friday sermon, lamenting Christians who skipped church and went to the circus, apologizing for preaching too long, blaming everyone else for letting him preach too long, or remarking on how much he is sweating during the warm weather.

The Totus Christus

I’ll do some posts later on what Augustine actually says about desire in the Enarrationes.  For now, let’s introduce the animating idea of these books: the idea of the Totus Christus, the Whole Christ.

This means Jesus Christ united eternally with the church–their identities permanently intermingled.

This means Augustine gets to interpret the Bible in interesting ways, for example finding the voice of Jesus the Messiah in the words of a Psalm, asking questions about why he’s talking about his sin, and then finding answers about how he’s actually speaking in the voice of the church when he does that.

I’m not doing justice to this interesting concept, and I’m not sure I even know how to in a short Ricochet post.  I do better in the book–but still not well enough–and I cite a bunch of people who explained this idea long before I ever got there.  (Michael Fiedrowicz and Michael Cameron, for example.)   Here are a couple of lines from there that might help get across some of the weird awesomeness:

It teaches Augustine to preach not primarily to get facts into the heads of his flock, but to train them to read Scripture in such a way as to reflect on their union with Christ and to learn better to love him and one another.

The idea of the totus Christus provides Augustine with an interesting bit of advice for a believer: You are a part of the church, which is the body of Jesus Christ, and it is your responsibility as such to have your heart and life aligned to his priorities!

And just what does he think are the priorities of Jesus, and how are we supposed to align our hearts to them?  More on that stuff in later posts!