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Vouchsafed to be Hungry in His Poor

Augustine similarly argued that such acts of kindness fit into a network of need. Both giver and recipient were in need before God and although God needed none of a person’s goods, God had ‘vouchsafed to be hungry in His poor. “I was hungry,” saith He, “and ye gave Me meat.”‘

-Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, p. 20

It has been said that God symbolically wept through the eyes of the prophet Jeremiah. Surely he literally wept in the flesh in the person of Christ. Likewise God literally experienced hunger and thirst in the incarnation; yet his grace is so abounding that beyond his own temporary need during his short time as a not-yet-glorified man, he has ‘vouchsafed,’ or condescended, to call the hunger of the hungry his own hunger. Even the risen and glorified King of kings is hungry in his poor. It boggles the mind, and demands a response.

He is never hungry: “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine” (Ps. 50:12), but he condescends to call the hunger of the hungry his own.

Faith Seeking Understanding

As the right order requires us to believe the deep things of Christian faith before we undertake to discuss them by reason.

– St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo

This is built upon Augustine’s famous “Believe, so that you may understand.” That is, faith seeking understanding, or reason within the bounds of religion.

  • If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority (John 7:17).

I Do Not Know What I Do Not Know (Augustine)

How, then, shall I respond to him who asks, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” I do not answer, as a certain one is reported to have done facetiously (shrugging off the force of the question). “He was preparing hell,” he said, “for those who pry too deep.” It is one thing to see the answer; it is another to laugh at the questioner–and for myself I do not answer these things thus. More willingly would I have answered, “I do not know what I do not know,” than cause one who asked a deep question to be ridiculed–and by such tactics gain praise for a worthless answer.

Rather, I say that thou, our God, art the Creator of every creature. And if in the term “heaven and earth” every creature is included, I make bold to say further: “Before God made heaven and earth, he did not make anything at all. For if he did, what did he make unless it were a creature?” I do indeed wish that I knew all that I desire to know to my profit as surely as I know that no creature was made before any creature was made.

-Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 11.12

I was having a casual conversation with a ‘secular’ teacher today and I made a passing reference to Augustine. He told me that he often uses a quote by him in one of his classes. ‘What quote?’ I asked. His response: ‘I do not know what I do not know.’

I had never heard that one before, so I asked him where it came from. When he said that it was from the Confessions, I was taken aback. I’ve read Confessions, and made all sorts of notes on it, so how could I have missed such a gem? He gave me the exact reference (book 11, section 12) so I checked it as soon as I got home this evening. I found that the translation I own, the Penguin Classics edition, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin, does not contain the phrase. I then did a quick Google search and found that the exact phrase is found in Outler’s translation (which is the version available at CCEL; see above).

The Penguin edition puts the phrase in question like this:

For in matters of which I am ignorant I would rather admit the fact than gain credit by giving the wrong answer and making a laughing-stock of a man who asks a serious question (p. 262).

In other words, Augustine was not afraid to admit that he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Those are wise words, and, though I cannot read the Latin, the English is particularly loaded. I see at least a double meaning in the phrase (as it is in English). On the one hand, it can simply mean admitting your ignorance. On the other hand, it can mean admitting your ignorance to your ignorance. Not only are you ignorant (there are things you do not know), but you are also ignorant of your ignorance (you don’t know the depth of your ignorance, and how that ignorance affects your knowledge. In fact there are times that, since you don’t know what you don’t know, you actually don’t know that you don’t know). That’s quite profound, and it is a true expression of, and call for, intellectual humility.

Write it Down

R. Is thy memory powerful enough to hold all things that thou thinkest out and bidst it to hold? A. Nay, nay; neither mine nor any man’s is so strong that it can hold everything that is committed to it. R. Then commit it to words and write it down.

-From Soliloquies by St. Augustine

Isaac Watts recommends a similar practice in his great book, Logic (this was the quote that inspired me to start this blog):

In order to preserve your treasure of ideas and the knowledge you have gained, pursue these advices, especially in your younger years: – 1. Recollect every day the things you have seen, or heard, or read…2. Talk over the things which you have seen, heard or learned, with some proper acquaintance…3. Commit to writing some of the most considerable improvements [i.e. applications] which you daily make, at least such hints as may well recall them again to your mind, when perhaps they are vanished and lost (1847 edition, pp. 72-73).

If you’re not writing down your thoughts, and the thoughts of others that you are studying, you are overestimating the power of your memory.

A Religion for Adult Minds

In her essay entitled Strong Meat, Dorothy Sayers quotes Augustine speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ (Confessions, 7.10):

I am the food of the full-grown; become a man, and thou shalt feed on me.

She comments,

Here is a robust assertion of the claim of Christianity to be a religion for adult minds (Creed or Chaos?, p. 14).

It has often been said that the basics of the gospel – Christ living the life that we couldn’t live and dying the death that we deserve – are simple enough for a small child to understand, while the complexities of Scripture are profound enough that the aged genius can’t even begin to plumb the depths. I think that statement is true. And one end of it shouldn’t take away from the other. We should not let the simplicity of the basic message fool us into thinking that this isn’t hearty food, that this isn’t a religion for adult minds.

This past week I spent a good deal of time re-studying the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God. The church fathers took great effort, essentially exhausting their resources formulating this doctrine, and still they leave us with only a hint of what this doctrine is, and might entail. This is ‘strong meat.’ One of the great things about Christianity is that it never stops challenging the mind.

John Piper once commented on the brilliance of John Owen, and the application of his life and work to us, that the Christian life is like cliff-climbing. You spend time, perhaps years, climbing one intellectual cliff. You look at a doctrine from every angle possible, and ultimately you come to place where you think you have understanding. You get to the top of the cliff and you think you’ve made it. Then you look up – and there’s another cliff to climb. Maybe this one is a smaller cliff, so you climb it more quickly, only to find another, and another. You never stop climbing.

This is why the authors of Scripture speak of the attributes of God in such broad, grand ways:

  • Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Rom. 11:33).

Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
your judgments are like the great deep (Ps. 35:6-7).

The Apostle Paul realized that this was no easy matter, plumbing the depths of Jesus Christ, and so he recorded his own prayer for Christians:

  • …that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:17-19).

This is knowledge so great, and so demanding, that it takes the very presence of the food, already in you, to help you digest the food to come. You might say that Jesus, in Paul’s picture, is like the mother bird who must chew the babies’ food before them, and for them. If we were to eat it on our power we could never digest it. And it is only through this process that we grow intellectually. In other words, it is only through approaching the truth like a child, knowing that it is not something we can fully comprehend,  that we attain adult minds.

I will ‘bottom line’ this post in this way: Don’t be deceived into thinking that Christianity is a shallow religion. Our God is not shallow. We come as children to a Father, but we do not check our minds at the door. We come as children longing to eat grown-up food. And there is food in abundance to be found.