Reflections on the End of Summer
What Is It We Really Enjoy in Life?
I have loved peaches for as long as I can remember. For me, a perfectly ripe and juicy peach is the gold standard of fruit. I anticipate the arrival of peach season every year with the eagerness of a little child on Christmas morning. Then, all summer long, I earnestly strive to enjoy as many peaches as I possibly can. For a little while, it seems as though the supply will never end. But then September comes, and with it the realization that peach season is coming to a close. The end of summer has always seemed bittersweet. I’m thankful for all the good times I had and looking forward to the start of a new school year and the bright colors of autumn, but still sad to see it go as the falling temperatures foreshadow the darkness and cold of winter. Like the delight of eating a summer peach, any happiness in this life is fleeting. Everything in this life is impermanent. But does being transitory make it all insignificant? And is the best that any of us can hope for to eat, drink, and be merry for as long as we are able? As a Christian, I believe there is more to this life—that Jesus’ example shows the love we experience in the present is a sign pointing us toward what is eternal.
One of the ironies of our existence is that the passing nature of pleasure is what makes it enjoyable, but we want it to last forever. I doubt I would treasure peach season if it lasted all year; and even I would get tired of peaches if I ate them all the time—yet when I’m eating a particularly sweet and juicy one, a part of me wishes it would never end. Although we are finite beings, our desire is infinite. Augustine argues that our infinite desire is evidence of our desire for the Infinite. As he says at the start of his Confessions, “You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Only that which is infinite and eternal—God—can satisfy our longing for a happiness that never ends. Jesus told the woman at the well, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty; but the water that I will give them will become in them a spring of water welling up into eternal life” (John 4:13-14).
In his book On Christian Teaching (De doctrina Christiana), Augustine differentiates between use (uti) and enjoyment (frui). This distinction determines the way we relate to things. The things which are to be enjoyed make us happy; and the things that we use help us on our way to happiness, enabling us to reach the things that make us happy and hold on to them. For example, we can use a car in order to go visit and enjoy the company of our family or friends. Augustine defines enjoyment as, “to cling to something with love for its own sake,” and use is “to refer what has come into use in order to obtain what you love.” He contends that we can only truly enjoy that which is eternal and unchanging, that is, God, which is a name for what we put above all other things. Enjoying God thus means loving the origin and ultimate good of all things. And so, when Augustine says we should use other things for God’s sake, what he means is that we should relate to them according to the light of goodness itself. We should not love temporal things as if they are eternal. Rather, we should love the things in this life in such a way as to point us toward what is always good and true.
Augustine argues that when we enjoy a person in God, we are really enjoying God rather than the person. That is, what we ultimately enjoy is the love which has brought us both into being and joined us together. Such a relationship exemplifies what the Doctor of Grace calls “to use with love” (uti cum dilectione). In this case, “when what is loved is present, it must necessarily also carry with it delight.” We know from his Confessions just how important friendship was for Augustine. But, living in a world where mortality was a constant danger, he learned the hard way that we should not love anyone in this life as if they will never die. Augustine wants us to love one another in such a way that our relationships point to the ultimate good of all things. What he does not mean is that we should use others in the sense of manipulating them in the name of God. In this sense, what is true of the love of friendship also holds true for my love of peaches. I shouldn’t enjoy them in the sense that I make my happiness depend on eating their ripe, juicy flesh. What I should do is use them with love, giving thanks for the fruitfulness of the earth and the labor of everyone who works to produce peaches, and using their nourishment to fuel my body to do good things and their deliciousness to remind me of the providential goodness of our Creator.
The Doctor of Grace concludes that the purpose of the scriptures, and of life itself, is so that we can learn how to love rightly. We should the make use of the good things in this life, not with a permanent love and delight but in a transitory way, as a means of transport, “so that we may love those things by which we are carried for the sake of that for which we are carried.” All things in this life emerge from and return to that which is eternal. On our odyssey through time, we should be thankful for the things that are passing along with us and appreciate them all the more because they are temporary. But not everyone chooses to do this. Some cling to impermanent things believing that they can make them happy. Augustine refers to this kind of disordered desire as concupiscence. As was true in his own time, our society is rife with concupiscence. And so, as this summer comes to a close, each one of us faces a choice. Do we try to live for the moment, seeking to place our happiness in passing things? There are, after all, many good things in this life, and they can bring a kind of happiness that lasts at least for a while. Or do we choose to follow Jesus in the belief that to live for what is eternal is the path to eternal life?