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While self-help Christian living literature can help us, both Paul's assessment of human nature and our own experience suggest that we need to think more deeply about these issues. Few have thought more deeply than Augustine about how the human person may relate rightly to the objects of human love—temporal goods, oneself, one's neighbor, and God. While Augustine is often thought of as a philosopher and theologian, he was a pastor for most of his life. Matters that dealt with sustaining faith, practicing Christian virtues, and teaching the truth were especially important to him, just as they are for believers today.

In the course of his religious journey to Christianity, Augustine recognized that no object or physical thing can be good or bad in itself. Rather, he acknowledged two things: (1) that it is our will that takes good things and makes them bad by our absorption with them and thus our perversion of them, and (2) the relation of our affections to the sensible world can only be determined by having a proper relation to all physical things in light of their Creator.

Augustine taught that if anything exists, it exists because it was given existence (and is sustained) by God. He wrote a book completely devoted to the issue, On the Nature of the Good. In it, he says: "Every nature is good, and every good thing is from God. Therefore, all nature is from God."

He elaborates: "All life, potency, health, memory, virtue, intelligence, tranquility, abundance, light, sweetness, measure, beauty, peace—all these things whether great or small … come from the Lord." What makes things good is their right use in the scheme in which God has placed them. Whoever makes a bad use of good things does not make them bad, but merely abuses good things. Augustine would say that we sin when we place anything or anyone in the wrong order of goods—that is, if the cleanliness of our home is more important than housing needy children, or if we follow the dictates of our career over the covenant of marriage. Regarding things as more important than they are is what leads to obsessiveness, possessivenesss, or oppressiveness.

Augustine builds on this perspective in his book On Christian Teaching. He makes a distinction between things that are to be enjoyed and things that are to be used. To enjoy something is to love it and gain happiness from it simply for what it is. To use something means to employ it to obtain the thing you love or gain happiness from. The chief distinction between the two is that "to enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake"; everything else is a means to what we should hold fast to or love. In poetic form, Augustine expresses this distinction in his Confessions:

What is the object of my love? I asked the earth, and it said, "It is not I." … I asked the sea, the deeps, the living creatures that move about, and they responded, "We are not your God; look beyond us." … I asked heaven, sun, moon, and stars, and they said, "Nor are we the God whom you seek." Then tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him. And with a great voice they cried out, "He made us."

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September 2007, Vol. 51, No. 9