Our heart is restless

Augustine is forty-three years old when he begins writing the Confessions, and by that point he is already one of the most famous Christian thinkers in the Western world. He is the bishop of Hippo, a coastal city in North Africa. He has converted, been baptized, buried his mother, returned to Africa, been ordained against his will, and spent the better part of a decade preaching and writing with extraordinary productivity.

He sits down to write something no one has ever written before: not a theology, not an apology, not a sermon, but the interior history of a soul. He writes directly to God, in second person, as if the entire document is a prayer — because it is. He is not explaining himself to posterity. He is trying to understand, in the act of writing, what God was doing in the years he was running away.

The opening sentence of the Confessions is the most famous sentence in Christian literature after the Bible itself:

You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

He arrives at this sentence after a lifetime of chasing rest in every wrong place — in pleasure, in philosophy, in rhetoric, in ambition, in the approval of powerful men. Each thing promised rest and delivered more hunger.

The sentence is not a platitude. It is a diagnosis. It is the conclusion of a man who tried everything else first and is now in a position to report that nothing else worked.

The Confessions will be read for sixteen hundred years. It will be the book that more people cite as the one that changed their lives than almost any other. And it begins with the admission that the writer was wrong about almost everything for the first thirty years of his life.

Restless. It is the exact word.

Not lost. Not evil. Not hopeless. Restless — which implies movement, searching, a capacity for something that hasn't been found yet.

Augustine's diagnosis of the human condition is more precise and more compassionate than almost any other in Christian history. He does not say the heart is wicked and deserves to suffer. He says the heart was made for something specific, and that it will keep moving until it finds it.

Every addiction, every ambition, every desperate relationship, every compulsive achievement — Augustine would say these are misdirected searches. The restlessness is not the disease. The restlessness is evidence of the design.

Where is your restlessness pointing?