Your coffers, or your hearts?
“They have not in-voked God” (Ps 52[53]:6). Don’t such people entreat God every day? They’re not entreating God. Pay attention and with God’s help I may be able to explain this. God wishes to be worshipped gratis; he wants to be loved gratis, that is, to be loved chastely, not to be loved because he gives something other than himself but because he gives himself. One who in-vokes God so that he may become rich, is not in-voking God. One in-vokes something that one wants to come to oneself. What does in-voke mean if not to call into oneself? … If you say, “God, give me riches,” you don’t want God himself to come to you; you want riches to come to you. You in-voke something that you want to come to you. If you were to in-voke God, he would come to you; he would himself be your wealth. But as it is you want to have a full coffer but an empty conscience. God fills hearts, not coffers. What good does external wealth do you if an inner poverty weighs you down? Those who in-voke God for worldly comforts, for earthly goods, for the present life and earthly happiness are not in-voking God. (Augustine, EnPs 52[53], 8; PL 36, 617-618)
Thank you… I had to rad this twice before I read “coffers” rather than “coffee” but thinkning of my reliance on coffee, maybe I’m not far off…
Would love to see the text and meditation of Augustine on the two daughters of of hope….
David, me too! I sat down for breakfast with a fresh cup of coffee, open the dotcommonweal web page, and thought I saw the title: “Your coffee, or your hearts?”
Then got hung up on “to be loved gratis, that is, to be loved chastely, not to be loved because he gives something other than himself but because he gives himself”, that sent me on a quest to check the meanings of “chastely” in online dictionaries, was reminded by them that “chaste” occasionally simply means “pure”, and was satisfied that it made sense.
With those distractions, of course, the meditative aspect was largely lost, but at least I improved my English a little bit.
The Latin word is “arca,” and refers to a place where money is kept. I had first thought of using “safe” as a translation, but I thought that sounded too modern. Perhaps “coffer” is too old…. Suggestions welcome.
Casket. (See, e.g., The Merchant of Venice.)
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“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”
–Janis Joplin
I find Augustine’s comments very odd. I understand that different metaphors appeal to different listeners, but his don’t work for me.
His certainty about what God wants, likes, etc. is not convincing. E.g., his notion about why God made cows kosher was particularly odd. “By calling animals clean that chew their cud God wished to suggest that everyone ought to place what he hears into his heart so that he will not be slow to think about it later.”
I don’t think so.
I don’t think of myself as a ruminant or a snake. And what’s wrong with asking a loving Abba for money? We do it every time we say the Our Father: Give us this day the do-re-mi to buy our daily bread. Jesus had no problem with money. He said the kingdom of heaven is like a woman searching for a lost coin. And he played a joke on Peter, telling him to open the fish to find a coin. Etc.
We have no problem asking our parents for money or giving money to our children. We pray to sell a house, Etc., etc.
The only potential confusion is in the title, not in the text proper, so changing the title would do it.
Or one could simply say that it’s our own fault if our morning brain is focused on coffee to the point that our internal auto-correct spelling checker transforms “coffer” into “coffee”.
And what’s wrong with asking a loving Abba for money? … We pray to sell a house…
Not me. I wouldn’t ask for my problems to be solved in a specific way. I would never pray to sell my house even though it’s on the market right now, but I might pray to make the right decisions and to adjust gracefully if I end up losing a lot of money. I don’t believe at all that my prayer will cause God to make a buyer appear out of thin air, but I tend to trust that things will somehow turn out well in the end, and whenever something helpful happens, I can still be grateful — I knew He’d be there for me. “Thy will be done”!
On the other hand at times of crisis such prayer is impossible. Once my 9-year-old son disappeared, and I could not pray anything resembling “Thy will be done”. I most definitely did not want God’s will to be done whatever it might be: I wanted my son to be found safe and sound, God’s will be damned (that was my “prayer” that day: “Beware! If my son is not safe, I’m done with you.”). I love my children more than I love God. (In the end it turned out that instead of biking home directly after school, he had been convinced by friends to go to a catechism class, and the police simply found him tranquilly coming out of the rectory at the end of class, unaware that the whole town was looking for him.)
So, no, I don’t pray for money. Either I pray to understand and accept God’s will, if I’m open to it, or else, when I already know what I want regardless of God, I just go my own way.
I don’t think Augustine always expected to be taken seriously; surely sometimes he was playing with his congregation, and one can imagine smiles among them as he goes on.
In 1 Cor 9:9ff, St. Paul uses the injunction not to muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain to justify his asking for material support for his preaching of the Gospel. So the allegorizing of the Fathers has some good biblical precedents. Of course, some metaphors speak to some people and not to others. There are people today who have never seen a ruminant and will be puzzled by our English expression “chewing the cud” as meaning “reflecting on,” as in an illustration given by the OED: “Let vs ruminate, and (as it were) chewe the cudde that wee maye haue the sweete iewse [juice?]‥& consolation of them”–this said, I believe, about reflecting on the Scriptures. I think this was part of the medieval prayer-tradition of the lectio divina.
Augustine did not say one can never pray for good things for others or for oneself; but to make the desire for such things or the enjoyment of them the main thing in one’s relationship with God would indicate an unchaste relationship to him, like that of a man marries a woman chiefly, or even solely, for her money. An example Augustine uses elsewhere.
Hi, Claire:
Jesus’ first miracle, that we know of, was pretty specific: turning water into wine at a wedding, after his mother pointed out the potential embarrassing situation to him.
(Funny cartoon a couple of issues ago in the New Yorker. God saying he can’t be worrying about famine, war, etc., because he’s focused on a guy making a free throw.)
I think it’s superstitious to bury a St. Joseph statue in the yard to sell a house, but people do that. (Even in first grade, I was a little scandalized when Sister turned the statue of the Infant of Prague to face the wall, because she didn’t get what she had asked for.)