God knows us better than we know ourselves - Part 2 (A reflection on the life of St. Augustine)

God knows us better than we know ourselves – Part 2
(A reflection on the life of St. Augustine)

Cl. Mario D’Couto SDB

            Augustine was ravished by God’s beauty; nonetheless, he was torn from it by carnality. Because of his need for a woman, he found that he was at the end of an elastic leash which pulled him back to a self in strife. Two wills, one spiritual, one carnal, were in conflict and their conflict wasted his soul.

            Ralph Harper in his book, “The Seventh Solitude” makes some interesting observations regarding the contemporary use of psychoanalysis in man’s search for self – knowledge. Had Augustine tried to find himself, as many do today, by undergoing a course in psychoanalysis, it is doubtful whether he would have been converted. Harper says that however much a person comes to know himself through psychoanalysis, it often seems that the more he knows about himself, the less he becomes capable of knowing God.

            The agnostic who undergoes psychoanalysis can become acquainted with the origin of his emotional difficulties and may at least come to know what he has repressed and ought to face openly. But if he has never known or felt that holy longing which is the Augustinian disquietude, it is unlikely that psychoanalysis will give him the drive for God. If psychoanalysis could expose in each patient a universal disquietude for the Whole, which could be interpreted to be holy longing, then the role of the priest could begin smoothly form where the psychotherapist let off. Too many who have be psychoanalyzed assume, however, that they know all there is to know about themselves. It is natural that after the expense of so much money and so many confidences, they should want to think this. Until a person has become acquainted, however, with his ‘God – relationship’, such knowledge is incomplete. 

            To learn the truth about ourselves and not to learn that God is that truth, that we will always be frustrated until we learn to adore the mystery of love, is to become inadequately acquainted with the dynamics of human nature. When Augustine exhorts us to return to our own hearts that we may find God, he is assuming form his own experience that our heart and the God of that heart are inextricably and mysteriously intertwined.


            All this is possible because of the gift of freedom that God Almighty has blessed each of us. Yes, we are indeed free beings. It is for the same reason that the approaches of ‘religious psychoanalysis’ and ‘medical analysis’ are way too different. For where ‘medical analysis’ begins with a deterministic assumption, that is to say, each of us is determined or governed by our circumstances, ‘religious psychoanalysis’ begins with the assumption of sinfulness. Sinfulness is a consequent of a wrong choice made (in the moral sense) and hence, one of the chief signs of freedom is the ability of a person to accept his or her responsibility for real. Thus, in this sense, sinfulness cannot be an ‘Imagined Sinfulness.’ Thus, we cannot say that we are ‘determined.’  

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