Chapter 4 of Mark Clavier’s book is on Augustine’s Rhetoric of Delight
Clavier explores Augustine’s eloquent God – by that he means it is God’s power alone which has the power to transform and liberate. We need liberation because knowledge of the good is not enough – there is an (humanly) unbridgeable gap between what we know we should do and what we do.
That gap is caused by the fact that we are not merely rational beings – which is why, Clavier says, Paul in Romans 7 talks about failure to do the good in terms of desire.
Clavier takes Romans 7 to be autobiographical – Paul talking of his struggle with sin. This is debateable but the point is that Romans 7 spoke powerfully to Augustine. Not only did it describe his own inner moral conflict captured in the Confessions, it
… gave him a way of explaining theologically how sinners escape bondage to sin and achieve salvation. The answer is delight: the heart must delight in righteousness before it can choose it. However, this isn’t just any delight. It is a divine delight that originates in God, is woven into creation, and enters the human heart through the reception of the Holy Spirit … to be saved is to be drawn to God not by tyrannical force but by the persuasive force of God’s eloquence: the Holy Spirit. Augustine famously claimed “Love God and do as you want” (HEJ 7.8 ) For Augustine to be free we must be swept up into God’s love, experienced as a ‘victorious delight’ that frees our wills not only to know righteousness but to desire it as well. (64)
Again, Augustine’s own experience is significant here – he talked of his former life as a rhetician and master of logic as being ‘puffed up with knowledge.’ The trap – or irony – that Augustine came to see was how pursuing higher wisdom leads to pride.
The revolution in his thinking was to see that it is only God’s eloquence, God’s delight, God’s love that can set people free. Clavier puts it this way
God doesn’t require people to ascend to him because in his humble love he came down to them in order to raise them up. Human weakness is no longer the barrier to salvation, but the means for it. Christians gain wisdom through the humility of Christ – indeed Christ the Word is the wisdom of God. (66)
But how is this divine wisdom received? How do people have their hearts transformed so that they desire true delight – which is God himself?
The answer for Augustine is the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit through whom God’s love is poured into believers’ hearts (Rom. 5:5 – an important verse for Augustine, appearing over 200 times in his writings). Clavier quotes Augustine’s Morals of the Catholic Church (1.17.32),
Inspired by the Holy Spirit, this love leads us to the Son, that is, to the wisdom of God through him the Father himself is known. If wisdom or truth is not desired with all the powers of the soul, it shall not be found at all, but if it is sought after as it deserves to be, it cannot withhold itself nor hide from those who love it … It is love that asks, love that seeks, love that knocks, love that discloses, and love, too, which abides in that which has been disclosed (74)
So the Christian life is NOT a matter of choice – of the head – the arena of Christian discipleship, ethics and virtue is the heart – it is what we delight in, what we love, that will dictate how we live. Clavier summarises it this way
Augustine give experiential depth to the Pauline theology of bondage to sin and death. By locating the key moment with delight rather than choice, he shifted the emphasis from the mind to the heart, thereby explaining why embracing virtue and shunning sin is so hard. In order to be saved, people must be inflamed with a desire to love God, and that only happens if they are first overwhelmed with by the presence of God experienced as delight, which is none other than the Holy Spirit. (81)
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