Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Christians (3)

We could say that human beings are fundamentally erotic creatures. Unfortunately—and for understandable reasons—the word “erotic” carries a lot of negative connotations in our pornographied culture. Thus Christians tend to be allergic to eros (and often set up stark contrasts between eros and agape, the latter of which we hallow as “Christian” love). But that cedes the goodness of desire to its disordered hijacking by contemporary culture. In its truest sense, eros signals a desire and attraction that is a good feature of our creaturehood. Instead of setting up a false dichotomy between agape and eros, we could think of agape as rightly ordered eros: the love of Christ that is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5) is a redeemed, rightly ordered desire for God. You are what you desire.
 
This teleological aspect of the human person, coupled with the fundamental centrality of love, generates Augustine’s third insight: because we are made to love the One who made and loves us—“we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19)—we will find “rest” when our loves are rightly ordered to this ultimate end. But Augustine also notes the alternative: since our hearts are made to find their end in God, we will experience a besetting anxiety and restlessness when we try to love substitutes. To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate. And you are what you love.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Christians (2)

A second theme worth noting is Augustine’s locating of the center or “organ” of this teleological orientation in the heart, the seat of our longings and desires. Unfortunately, the language of the “heart” (kardia in Greek) has been co-opted in our culture and enlisted in the soppy sentimentalism of Hallmark and thus equated with a kind of emotivism. This is not what the biblical language of kardia suggests, nor is it what Augustine means. Instead, think of the heart as the fulcrum of your most fundamental longings—a visceral, subconscious orientation to the world. So Augustine doesn’t frame this as merely an intellectual quest. He doesn’t say, “You have made us to know you, and our minds are ignorant until they understand you.”
 
The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance (see Ps. 42:1–2). So in this picture, the center of gravity of the human person is located not in the intellect but in the heart. Why? Because the heart is the existential chamber of our love, and it is our loves that orient us toward some ultimate end or telos. It’s not just that I “know” some end or “believe” in some telos. More than that, I long for some end. I want something, and want it ultimately. It is my desires that define me. In short, you are what you love.
 
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Christians (1)

The work of St. Augustine, a fifth-century philosopher, theologian, and bishop from North Africa who captured this holistic picture of the human person early in the life of the church. In the opening paragraph of his Confessions—his spiritual autobiography penned in a mode of prayer—Augustine pinpoints the epicenter of human identity: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
 
Packed into this one line is wisdom that should radically change how we approach worship, discipleship, and Christian formation. Several themes can be discerned in this compact insight. Augustine opens with a design claim, a conviction about what human beings are made for. This is significant for a couple of reasons.
 
First, it recognizes that human beings are made by and for the Creator who is known in Jesus Christ. In other words, to be truly and fully human, we need to “find” ourselves in relationship to the One who made us and for whom we are made. The gospel is the way we learn to be human. As Irenaeus once put it, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
 
Second, the implicit picture of being human is dynamic. To be human is to be for something, directed toward something, oriented toward something. To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live. We are not just static containers for ideas; we are dynamic creatures directed toward some end. In philosophy we have a shorthand term for this: something that is oriented toward an end or telos (a “goal”) is described as “teleological.” Augustine rightly recognizes that human beings are teleological creatures.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.