Christmas in July
Augustine's City of God Reveals True Freedom is Choosing the Love of God
Our family headed north for the Fourth of July, to our house in Maine, nestled in a mountain on the side of a lake.
We started the week off with Mass at a tiny church called Our Lady of the Snows with Father Aaron, the priest who travels long distances between his churches. He came to our camp last summer, for coffee and cookies, and gave our house a blessing. He is humble and holy, and his childlike peace disguises his brilliant mind.
So when he stepped up to give his homily, which was about freedom, and started talking about the parallels of the USA to the Roman Empire, I leaned forward. I had been reading Augustine’s City of God, which was written during the fall of Rome. The parallels are easy to see, and have been discussed by many: in a free democracy, when the pursuit of pleasure and power overtakes the responsibility of citizenship and ordering ourselves to the good, the enterprise becomes unsustainable. It is only dedication to God, to the good, to selflessness, in our lives and our families that can sustain a great civilization.
The next day, rain poured from gray skies, the heavy sound of it on the roof mingling with the rushing stream coming down the mountain behind us. When it rains on the fourth of July week, and plans to swim and hike and explore get squashed, shopping becomes entertainment. We ended up at a discount box store with surprises for adults (organic chili tahini!) and for kids (knock-off Nerf guns for days!) in the toy isle. We said they could pick out one $10 toy, and as my son reached for a ginormous box that held what looked to be an expensive train set that goes around the Christmas tree, my husband shook his head no. Ten dollars, he reminded him, and then he peered at the price tag.
Surprise! $9.99. Ok, buddy, it’s yours.
The birth of Jesus Immanuel, God with us, is a funny thing to think about at the 4th of July. But we couldn’t think of anything else when the sounds of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ rose up from an electric toy train running on black plastic track played on repeat. Our five- year-old twins lay, belly on the ground, necks craned in wonder, watching the train run in a circle for over an hour.
We wish you a Merry Christmas. Good tidings we bring to you and your kin.
The music, and priest’s sermon at Mass, reminded me of Pope John Paul II writings on human freedom, where he quoted the City of God:
“At the level of the entire spiritual cosmos - a fundamental fracture and opposition has occurred: on one hand, the love Dei usque ad contemptum sui [love of God to the point of indifference to self ] and on the other, the love sui usque ad contemptum Dei [love of self to the point of indifference to God] as the great Augustine of Hippo says. So deep is the drama of freedom in the history of the visible and invisible world. However, God creates the human being both rational and free, wanting above all to express his image and likeness in the human person. Even at the cost of abusing the great gift of freedom.” - Teachings for an Unbelieving World, IV (English translations added)
The good tidings the Christmas music reminded us about is that Jesus came into the world to heal this fundamental fracture. Through his grace, it is restored, and we share in his life and in his freedom. The Gospel at Mass echoed this paradox: whoever loses his life will save it, and whoever saves it will lose it. Pick up your cross and follow me (Mt 16:24-26).
Augustine’s maxim that we either have love of God to the point of indifference to self, or love of self to the point of indifference to God, plays out constantly. For Christ and the early church, this was martyrdom. For most of us, it is the daily dying to self, and letting the love of God flow out to our love for others. Getting up in the night with little ones, listening to teens late at night when they want to talk but you want to go to bed, the sacrifices the special needs of our children may require. Life is messy and we are all allergic to indifference to self in some areas of our life. But I have seen where grace has entered to make these things easier – to make us indifferent to the difficulty - the more we grow in love of God.
For Augustine, the love of God impacts our culture. For any society, what they value the most highly - what they worship - will be reflected in that society’s order. A society that worships God yields peace, compassion, forgiveness and solidarity. This is the City of God, the Civitas Deis. When a city mirrors the Heavenly realm, where angels surround the throne of God, worshiping Him, peace will naturally come, because they are ordered rightly to the truth. There we find true freedom, because losing ourself in the love of God yields joy, peace and happiness.
This is a key point - being rightly ordered to the truth. The relationship between rationality and the freedom of the will - between knowing the good and the freedom to choose it - has been divorced in our age, just as it was in the Roman age, because of what Augustine declared corrupt worship.
For Rome, its worship of the Olympian gods, who were violent and vengeful, produced a civilization that was corrupt, based on a phony concept of justice, and marked by the lust to dominate. When the earthly city mirrors the advancement of the self - the lust for power, domination - this is what Augustine calls the Civitas Terraina, the City of Man.
This should sound familiar to us. It’s Nietchese’s will to power. To the degree that our civic world worships the unconstrained self-will over any constraints God would impose - reality, morality, obligations - our world will start to mirror the irrationality, confusion and dominance of the passions found in the unconstrained will. Our conscience becomes not the freedom of the will guided by rationality, but a counterfeit notion of freedom. The absolute freedom of the will sans reason causes us to turn inwards towards, and ultimately becomes a slavery to passions and to sin.
Augustine cared a great deal about those lost in sin, because he remembered the misery of being there himself. He wanted to set people free. He points out that God doesn’t dominate, doesn’t try to wrestle into submission. He is gave us our freedom so that we could be like Him, self-gift. Augustine knew that when we orient ourselves outward, towards loving God, worshiping God, ordering all of our desires to him, we find true happiness and freedom.
This contest between these two cities plays out endlessly throughout history. The battle between good and evil are like the parable of the weeds and the wheat - God allows them to flourish together because it will result in a greater good. He also writes that ‘the Church’ isn’t necessarily the City of God. There are people who are in the church whose ends aim at man and not God. Conversely, there are people in society outside the church who are part of the City of God, whose ends aim at God’s justice and love.
In the City of God, he holds that true followers of Christ are always a contradiction to the dominant culture. Our value of God over self doesn’t fit with their believe that the self, and its unfettered attempts at power and pleasure, are what constitute freedom. To them, the rational side of our nature constrains us.
As we look around and see these two versions of freedom play out in our country and reflect on what it means to be free, Augustine is a most helpful guide. Amercia’s grounding in the principle of the freedom of the human person that we get from our Judeo-Christian worship is what has allowed us to flourish. Viewing the human person with this freedom of conscience has granted us more freedom than any other nation in history. But within this harvest of wheat, the weeds of materialist post-modern atheists are growing. The errors of a counterfeit freedom, based on a counterfeit conscience that is stripped of any constraints of a Judge or God, are spreading at a breath-taking speed.
The City of God and the City of Man spring up together. In order to tell who is who, we can use Augustine’s rule: is the love of God their end, or love of self?
Augustine's writings highlight this freedom of conscience our nation has championed, that we are always free to choose to be in either the City of God or the City of Man. By reminding us that rationality and freedom of the will must work together, we can choose to order our values to the good, and to worship that which is more like God. This is how we become part of the City of God. Not through force, not through dominating and demanding, but in loving God, in worshiping him, and then loving others more freely.
The two cities have always been mixed together, and as Christians we are just pilgrims on our way home to the ultimate city of Heaven. Spoiler alert: Augustine reminds us that in the end, The City of God wins. As we celebrate freedom in our country, and how it is grounded in our love for God, we make the City of God a reality. And like Christmas in July, the more we bring His goodness into our society, the more his love makes every season filled with joy.
