Augustines View of the Relationship between Human Love and Gods Love - Essay Example

Augustine’s view of the relationship between human love and God’s love   St. Augustine’s concept of love is God-oriented, directed vertically, and complemented by the horizontal love between humans. He asserted that loving others was equal to loving God as humans were created by the same supreme authority. The act of loving fellow human beings was more demanding as it was more definite and never provided much chance of self-deception, he maintained. “In loving others one finds God, who abides in the love of one person for another.” (Cavadini and Fitzgerald, 29). Augustine affirmed that by loving one’s neighbor presuming God’s presence in that person would lead humans closer to the grace of the Almighty. He emphasized loving the earthling and the immortal was same. God resided in the very heart of humans which stirred love. “Self love and love of others coincide with love of God when inserted into the ordered hierarchy of loves” (Cavadini and Fitzgerald, 29) Augustine opposed self love and termed it as evil, which misguides humans taking them in the opposite direction of the eternal power. For him human existence was a struggle where one copes with sin and salvation. The triumph over salvation could be achieved only through divine grace. For Augustine the concept of proper love was always directed to God as he believed that the very thought of love was incited by God himself. “All we can do is to love God, who is love, for God’s sake.”(Boeve, Schrijvers, Stoker and Vroom, 279) Loving fellow human beings in the right spirit was equal to loving God with full dedication of soul, heart and mind. Augustine implied the desire to find one’s inner self was synonym to the desire of attaining proximity with the Almighty. Yearning to love one’s fellow being was equal to the desire to love God. Augustine’s theory of love was inspired by Neo-Platonist tradition which encouraged the thought that love was a creation of God in which human participation was very essential for the welfare of humanity. God was the ultimate finishing point and love provided the path to reach that goal. “The ultimate vocation of the Christian then is grow in his or her relationship to God. The self must learn how to abandon itself for the sake of participating more and more in God’s love.” (Boeve, Schrijvers, Stoker and Vroom, 279) This understanding of love is called kenotic view. Augustine perceived love as the rescue boat which transports the fallen human beings to God’s grace. The underline of this thought was the relation shared between a human and God was a central relation, unlike the relation shared between fellow human beings. By relating to God could only help a human to secure an identity for his individual self. The human soul would be restless until it merges with the supreme authority and if this union was not achieved, every other thing was meaningless. Augustine argued that God was ultimate as he was the creator of all good things in this world and as a creator of all fine things he hold the position of supreme goodness. So, no other earthly creation should be loved more than God. He stressed that other human beings should be taken as reflection of God’s grace and thus, be loved in the same manner as one would love the eternal power. ”The image of all creation engaged in loving response to its maker and to the other created things is a beautiful one.” (Groenhout, 65) In Confessions, Book IV Augustine discusses his youth time which was full of confusion. As he was pursuing the career of a teacher, he was busy making friends and turning his attention towards so called methods of reaching the truth of God. He said he was torn between the sinful desires of life and the world of the supreme authority. Augustine starts with giving a short description of his quest in Thagaste, disclosing that he was running after hollow ambitions in his public life and pursuing a secret religion in his private hours thinking that would take him to the ultimate truth. He claimed that this hypocritical life guided him towards self destruction. He said he was deceiving himself with material gains and false religious beliefs of Manichaeism. He regretted his stint as a rhetoric teacher and called himself a salesman selling his knowledge. Augustine mentioned the lady of his life with whom he had a relationship out of marriage and disclosed that during this relationship he attained the knowledge of the difference between marriage and a relationship without any agreement. During these years he made a friend named Nebridius with whom he bonded really well. Augustine believed that God made the spirit of love active in both of them and he recalled it as a pleasant experience. But among all the happiness Augustine got the shock of his life when his good soul friend died prematurely. He got the taste of losing the sweetest thing in his life. He found the truth that death was the ultimate reality prevailing everywhere. He started hating his surroundings as he tried looking for his dearest friend everywhere but failed to find him. His bitterness rose. Augustine’s bitterness came from the fact that all earthly things are prone to an end one day and it is of no use to maintain an attachment to them. As the hatred towards death rose inside him, he conceptualized that the whole humanity would become the victim of death. He felt surprised at his own survival as his dead friend was the other half of himself. He came to accept that faith in God and maintaining a relation with the supreme authority could relieve him from his grief. Augustine understood that the religious beliefs such as Manichaeism were all false and deceptive paths, not capable of providing real happiness or satisfaction. Attachment to mortal things is of no use as they can vanish anytime and bring sorrow in one’s life. He felt pity for himself for his stupidity as he loved a human being without understanding the basic truth of human existence. His heart failed to get respite anywhere; he felt disillusioned where to take his miserable soul, how he can escape from his own emotions, his own self. Time proved to be a good soother. But the remedy that made Augustine better was the company of other friends. With the arrival of other friends, his love diverted to them; he was more engaged in long hours of pleasant discussions, learning from mutual experiences, waiting with desperation for the absent friends, sharing each other’s moments of happiness among others. A realization came over Augustine that loving other human beings can only bring happiness and one should love other fellows as if loving the God himself. Thus, the death of the dear friend enlightened Augustine on true divinity and made him realize that God’s love is the only love that will survive with human beings than any other mortal creation. Augustine realized that weeping was the best way to lessen one’s grief. He left Thagaste to forgot his pain with a lesson learnt that all material things were transient, they were born to die one day, and one should love these things with the belief that God was present in them .These objects could be enjoyed as long as this belief was installed inside one’s heart. Human beings were born to die one day. So the love should not stop at one, the attachment should be extended to other beings as all were creation of God reflecting his goodness. Believing in the goodness of others was showing confidence in the goodness of God. Human beings fade away with time, but God was immortal, Augustine maintained. Loving a person perceiving God’s presence inside him would help one to overcome the loss of that particular individual, as God could be perceived in any other person as well and could be loved in the same way. Augustine explained the fact that “how human language works through the voicing of words that must pass away to make room for the next words in order for meaning to be complete. He then reminded his soul that -- The Word himself cries you to return. There is the place of undisturbed quietness where love is not deserted if it does not itself depart.” (Kennedy, Paffenroth and Doody, 49) The above example very much supports the realization that loving  God never ends as he is omnipresent, in all created things. Augustine in his confession affirmed that if the creations of God were taken as a whole because they were formed by the power who was himself the other term of wholeness and timeless entity, the fear losing transient things would not be a big concern as they could be perceived through God. Augustine viewed language as a petty tool to reach the truths of the supreme power. The example also reflects that God will be present eternally but the creation will come and move making space for others to complete the totality. Augustine signified that loving humans was the best thing, and there was a purpose why God created this feeling of love in the human heart. The human beings were created in such a way that if someone’s love was not reciprocated, the individual’s conscience would not rest in peace. The nature of this love should be undemanding and selfless. As he said with the love of his other friends his grief for the dead friend gradually mellowed down and the pain and bitterness faded away. If humans turn their face from this love of God, there was hardly any chance of resting in peace. Then the most gorgeous and sweet things in the world would fail to provide solace. The law of existence was things grow to perfection, the faster their growth was, more was the chance of them turning into non-existent. If humans understood this truth, it would be much easy for them to survive, Augustine emphasized. Loving God was the ultimate way out and to reach him it was appropriate to love his creations and try to find him in fellow beings. If all the creations on this world were to lose their entity then what is the purpose of creating them? Augustine solved this puzzle saying that all these mortal things present in this world were mediums through which humans could praise the Almighty and admire his goodness and power. The creations would always remind of the supreme entity and make the human beings note that there is only one wholeness and all have to submit themselves in that wholeness one day. Nothing is permanent. They also perform as a reminder that pleasures attained through physical senses are short lived. Augustine finally stressed that one should praise God for the material things and should return this love of God by loving others visioning his presence and goodness everywhere. References 1. Augustine, Saint Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Book IV. Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1838 2. Boeve, Lieven. Schrijvers, Joeri. Stoker, Wessel and Hendrik M. Vroom. Faith in the Enlightenment. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 3. Cavadini, John, and Allan Fitzgerald. Augustine Through the Ages. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005 4. Groenhout, Ruth. Connected Lives: Human Nature and An Ethics of Care. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004 5. Kennedy, Robert. Paffenroth, Kim and John Doody. Augustine and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006 Read More