ST AUGUSTINE AND OUR RESTLESS HEARTS

Fr Billy Swan

In his first address to the Church and the world on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica after his election in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV identified himself as ‘the son of St Augustine’. With these words, the new Pope was not just drawing our attention to him being the first Augustinian Pope in history, but to the influence of Augustine on his spirituality and life as a priest and religious. In all that he has written and taught since that time, the influence of Augustine is clear. Here in Rome, in the months after Leo’s election, the surge in fresh interest in St Augustine was noticeable, with new books, articles and journals appearing in bookstores across the city.

On 28^th August, the Church celebrates the feast of St Augustine which presents an opportunity to focus on Augustine’s core teaching that comes at the very beginning of his autobiographical Confessions: “You have made us for Yourself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee”.

The context of these famous words is important for they were born from his own experience. Although gifted and bright, the young Augustine was wild, restless and unsettled, causing his mother Monica to constantly worry about him. He flirted with many religious movements and struggled greatly with lust. Yet the honesty of Augustine eventually led him to faith in God and is the reason why his Confessions remain a classic of Western spirituality. There, Augustine admits that his restless heart sought satisfaction, not in God, but in the things and people that God had made. It was the classic mistake of substituting God for the things of God. It was only late in his life that he discovered his mistake and concluded that our hearts are indeed restless until they rest in God.

For Augustine, the path towards this discovery had a twin track. In coming to know God, he began to know himself too. He came to know that it wasn’t possible to satisfy his restless heart with anything finite but only with the infinite love of God for which his heart was made. Only an infinite love could satisfy his infinite longings and deepest needs. For a passionate man with a passionate heart, only a passionate God was believable.

We all can recognise ourselves in Augustine’s insights. For when we place divine expectations on human shoulders, disappointment is the inevitable outcome. We repeat Augustine’s classic mistake of confusing God for the things of God and inevitably, we fall into addictions and sadness.

The first step we make towards faith in God is to recognise our passionate desires. For Augustine, his heart “gasped, panted and burned” for something more. Eventually, Augustine realised that this something more was the God who “called, shouted, flared, blazed and lavished his fragrance” (Confessions).  Here was the God whose passionate love could alone satisfy Augustine’s longing and leave him at peace. On this discovery, Augustine rejoiced with his famous words “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and new”. For Augustine, God was anything but dull and boring but beautiful. He said: “the more love grows in you, the more beauty grows in you and the more beautiful you will become”. And in Christ Augustine found “the beauty of all things beautiful”.

These profound ideas animate our efforts to evangelise today. Augustine teaches us that our religion is a love affair of the heart that is the symbol of the deepest centre of who we are. He reminds us that the passionate desires we experience have been placed there by God Himself, leading us to his own passionate love. In a world of distractions, he invites us to make that journey inside ourselves where we are not alone, but where we meet the God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It is there that God’s thirst for us meets our thirst for Him. It is from that starting point where the soul is united with God in loving communion, that we live our faith publicly.

The key to effectively preaching the Gospel today is to address the heart. It is the centre of our integrity and the core of our being. God’s Word speaks to the deepest desires of every human heart. It speaks to the totality of every life – our hopes, fears, desires and dreams. But it also speaks of the gift of love in its proper order; that we don’t confuse God with things of God but rather love God first and all things and people in his name. When this happens, the more loving and beautiful we become and the more we make this world a beautiful place.