Ordering our Loves and Feasts
In our discussion of celebration and feasting, a question of morality arises: "How do we celebrate in a way that makes us more holy?" Perhaps, asked differently, how do we celebrate in a way that makes us more aware of the Christian reality in the celebration, rather than getting lost in it and stumbling into sin? Last week, I mentioned Gnosticism and Manicheanism as heresies that are countered in our feasting; however, there is a danger in going so far in the opposite direction that we end up in gluttony, drunkenness, and sloth. How, then, do we live in fasting and feasting, whereby we neither fall into sin on the one side nor heresy on the other?
In Augustine’s Morals of the Catholic Church, he talks about when he was influenced by Manicheanism, characterized by a dualism of good and bad, which, of course, impacted how he understood the incarnation and God himself. However, this also impacted how Augustine saw the plight of humankind; the Manicheans sought to answer evil in the world by rejecting the physical and trying to ascend to the spiritual. Augustine, turning from his old Manichean influences, comes to realize that there is a moral answer that is rooted in the incarnation. Christ became incarnate that he might heal the physical and show humanity what it means to be truly human.
Part of the effects of the fall and Christ’s redemption of humankind is the topic of freedom of the will. Augustine acknowledges both the freedom of man to choose between two choices, while also confessing that God foreknows all things. While humans retain the ability to choose, they are still bound by sin and do not always do the right thing. People sin because of the fall, not because God created the physical world that way. However, through the work of God, “by whose help we are or shall be free,” people are being redeemed to pursue God and live rightly. Therefore, when people live according to their own desires, not the desires of God, they live “like the devil.”[1] Only when people “live not according to [themselves]” can they “live according to the truth…God.”[2]
Pride stands as the antithesis of living according to God because it places the person as the guiding factor of their life; it is the sin that controls their will. Yet, in a world surrounded by actions rooted in pride, placing one person over another, the Christian is called to “faithfully love until all unrighteousness passes away, and every human power be brought to nothing, and God be all in all.”[3] Augustine writes in Against the Manicheans that it is only when a life of love in service to God is pursued can true happiness be obtained. He places the commandment of “love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, and soul” as the basis for this happy life because it is only when people rest in God that they can find fullness of life. Love is the key to happiness and joy, not passing worldly love but love rooted in God, which seeks to serve God and others. Love is the “virtue leading us to a happy life”. [4]
In Augustine’s writings on virtue, love is put forward as the Christian ethic in which all other virtues are rooted. The answer to the question of “what is it to live well and in a holy manner?” is answered with “to love virtue, to love wisdom, to love truth.”[5] What is virtue but “the perfect love of God”[6]? What is truth but Jesus Christ himself, who says, “I am the Truth.”[7] And who is wisdom other than the God who knows all things? [8] However, within Augustine, there is a clear distinction between what type of love he is talking about; there is a worldly love “fashioned by love of self,” and there is a godly love, which is the “love of God.”[9] However, people are curved in on themselves and are unable to love rightly all the time; humanity is focused on pride, on “me” over “you.” It is only through the grace and mercy of God that we are “sanctified [and] burn with full and perfect love, which is the only security for our not turning away from God…where [we are] conformed to the image of his Son”[10] and rightly oriented to love him and others. Expounding, Augustine says,
"But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love; and on this account, in the Song of Songs, the bride of Christ, the city of God, sings, 'Order love within me.'"[11]
Let us, therefore, feast and fast with a heart of rightly ordered love. By living into the love of Christ, we rightly order our celebrations to the work of Christ. Ponder the divine work of salvation and let your love and life be driven by that. For our love of God is always rooted in God's love for us: "We love him, because he first loved us.” So, if we feast out of the love for Christ, then we will rightly use his created order for its purpose, to glorify him. And if we allow our actions to be ordered by our love for Christ, then we too shall glorify God, neither falling into heresy nor sin.
Ut diligatis invicem,
Fr. Aaron
[1]Augustine, Morals of the Catholic Church, Chapter 15, paragraph 25, in Reading in Christian Ethics: A Historical Sourcebook, eds. J. Philip Wogaman and Douglas Strong, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 54.
[2]Ibid., 55.
[3]Ibid., 61.
[4]Augustine, Against the Manicheans, Chapter 15, paragraph 25, in Reading in Christian Ethics: A Historical Sourcebook, eds. J. Philip Wogaman and Douglas Strong, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 62.
[5]Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1984), XV.22.62.
[6]Ibid.
[7]Ibid., 55
[8] Ibid., 54.
[9]Ibid., 56.
[10]Ibid., 62.
[11]Ibid.. 637.