All sin is a false imitation of God. As Augustine wrote in book III, our various faults seek to imitate the goodness of God in some respect. In book IV of the Confession, Augustine highlights some details of his life after he took up with the Manichaeans:
- he began to teach rhetoric, and was taken up with its power to "overcome others" (IV.ii)
- he kept a mistress, "not joined to me in lawful marriage", but nevertheless he "truly kept the promise of the bed" (IV.ii)
- he recalls the incident of "seeking the prize" in a theatrical poetry competition (IV.ii)
So what is happening? Augustine is seeking after power, love and glory: it is a trinitarian way of looking at sin. As all sin is an imitation of God, so we can also come to understand sin in terms of a false imitation of God the Trinity. Power, love and glory are for Augustine, ways in which we begin to understand the Father, Son and Spirit. And so we also come to falsely imitate God in these ways.
Augustine came to see in rhetoric that one could have power over others: an imitation of the power of the Father, from whom are all things, and from whom is all power ("you would have no power over me, were it not granted you from above"). He continues to seek after love, seeking in his "faithful" yet non-married relationship a kind of love and mutuality which is a pale imitation of the incarnate love shown by Jesus. And Augustine begins to seek for that public attention, that self-centered affirmation, that glory which is an imitation of the Spirit. But of course, the Spirit bears witness to Christ, and does not draw our gaze toward himself.
Seeking for these things (power, love and glory) is in one sense an expected occurrence. We are made in the image of a God who is Trinity, and both the virtues we have and the faults we have will reflect something of the nature of God the Trinity. On the negative side, it is easy to see how the temptations to a wrong use of power, love and glory work in our own lives and the lives of those around us. Yet we desire those things because we are meant to experience them in the context of our relationship with God. It is perhaps more difficult for us to see how power and glory can be "good", because the major examples we see come from the world of politics or celebrity lifestyle. Yet Jesus gives his followers authority (power) over the presence and effects of evil (cast them out in my name), and we look forward to being changed from glory into glory.
As we contemplate power, love and glory in God, and as He grants grace for us to imitate Him, we come to experience the fullness of what it is to be made in the image of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Comments