“I” is not the Answer

I met David Opderbeck online through the now defunct ASA listserve and found him to be an interesting thinker who often has interesting things to say, and says them in interesting ways (yes, that is a tautology). He blogs at “Through a Glass Darkly” and has just published a post entitled “God and Creation: Transcendence.”

He writes;

The first common popular idea is that “God is in everything and everyone.” In popular culture, what we hear often sounds more like “pantheism” — the notion that God and the world around us really are essentially the same thing. In fact, in American popular culture, this usually boils down to God becoming the same thing as our own individual selves. How often have you hear a line like this in a song or TV show or movie: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are.”

The truth of God’s transcendence is that the real basis for a meaningful and good life lies outside of ourselves. We are part of creation, and therefore we are not God.

… in our created humanity we are made for an intimate connection with God. It is right to look into ourselves as we seek God. An honest search of the self should reveal a nature that is not self-sufficient, that is not meant to be alone, that longs for relationship with a beauty and harmony and love that the individual self cannot sustain. The great Christian thinker Augustine called this a “God-shaped void” at the heart of every person.

There’s probably something rather “old hat” about this given that true novelty is a rare thing in theology (not to mention that David cites Augustine in support!) but there is something here which strikes me in a new way. In teasing this out I actually discovered (or think I did) that what David is saying is, in fact, “old hat” but also very, very important.

What I’d not considered before is that Augustine’s notion of a “God-shaped void” can be conceptualized in either subjective or objective terms. The meaning of this will be clearer if we speak of Augustine’s “void” as a form of desire and ask: what is it that the human person is desiring? And what sort of stimulus will satisfy that desire?

These are complex questions, I must say, but David’s comments above suggest to me one way we ought not to answer them, namely by pursuing the sort of maxims which David ascribes to contemporary American culture: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are.”

The problem with such answers is simple to plot out if we begin with the idea that Augustine’s “void” is essentially a notion of a sense of lack and ask “what evolutionary explanation might we offer for such a sense of lack?”

[Excursus: “What’s evolution go to do with it?” I hear you cry. Well, basically, if you’re starting with the assumption that “God” is not the obvious answer, then evolution is all you’ve got! If you’re not convinced, then I’ll just say “presume evolution, for arguments sake.” If you’re still not convinced here is a picture of some cute puppies. End of Excursus]

Here it seems to me that the one answer which is palpably deficient is precisely the one given by contemporary society. That is, I can’t see that evolution would have equipped us with a sense which attaches to nothing in our environment for it would then have no influence on human behavior and, therefore, no adaptive advantage.

To put this another way, it seems that Augustine’s void must relate to something in the external world—it must drive us to seek something outside ourselves. It doesn’t seem, however, that we are being driven by such a sense to pursue basic physical needs, these already having quite strong motivating drives of their own. So food, sex, clothing, material possessions, and etc., don’t scratch where the void itches.

So if we have a sense of lack that is directed outward, and which isn’t tied to our physical needs, then we’re obviously looking for an external need which is non-physical in nature, and that leads us directly to relationship with other persons.

What strikes me as interesting about relationships with other persons, however, is precisely that they demand a loss of focus on self—precisely the opposite of what contemporary society suggests as the answer to Augustine’s void.

The answer to human “lostness” is not, contrary to the wisdom of the contemporary self-help movement, a move inward, but rather a move outward. Which suggestion can be loosely confirmed if you ask why should a person who does nothing for others, who is absorbed with their own self-importance, actually have a sense of worth? They are, after all, useless to anybody but themselves and it would seem to me that a sense of lack is precisely what such a person should feel.

None of this speaks directly to Augustine’s suggestion that the sense of lack, the “void,” is God-shaped and can therefore only be filled by God. My only point is that in seeking an answer to the question of what fills the “void” there are some answers we can with some confidence set aside. If I am convinced of anything after reflecting upon David’s remarks it is that inside ourselves is the one place we should not look for an answer.