What We Ask Our Loves to Carry: Augustine and the Restless College Student
What are you doing this summer? How did the midterm go? Did you go out last night? At Penn, these questions come almost naturally, and beneath them lies an assumption: that we should always be striving after something—better grades, better jobs, better social standing. Yet even when we get what we want, and achievements accumulate, satisfaction doesn’t follow.
So what’s the problem?
It’s not that we’re pursuing the wrong things, but that we’re asking them to be ultimate.
We long for fulfillment in our lives. As the prophet Jeremiah puts it, in our thirst we carve out “broken cisterns” for ourselves—sources of satisfaction that ultimately “can hold no water.”(1) We look to our careers, our grades, and our social lives as if they will finally secure a lasting sense of meaning.
Augustine of Hippo offers a way of understanding this pattern through his idea of ordo amoris, the order of love. For Augustine, the problem isn’t simply external, with the objects of our desires, but internal, with our disposition toward them. The issue, then, is not that we love bad things, but that we love good things in the wrong order.
These things—GPA, jobs, social status—aren’t bad. As Augustine reminds us, they are good because they are created by a good God. The problem arises when we elevate them beyond their place, turning them into the foundation of our identity and self-worth. Seen in this light, the patterns of university life begin to make more sense. For instance, pre-professional ambition, academics, and social life all follow a similar pattern. The desire to work, to learn, and to belong is good, but when career becomes identity, grades become intelligence, and relationships become status, what were once simply goods become the measure of our worth.
These are not false goods—they are true goods that we have asked to bear too much. In doing so, we begin to treat them as ultimate. Augustine would call this a form of idolatry: expecting created things to meet our deepest, most enduring needs. It’s not surprising, then, that when we build our lives around unstable goods, we should expect instability in return.
Augustine does not tell us to love less, but to love rightly. The solution to disordered love is not indifference, but reordering. When we get our love in order, the goods of university life don’t disappear, but they are no longer asked to do what they cannot do. No longer the ultimate source of identity, they become part of a larger whole, freed from the need to justify our existence. Finally, these pursuits can be received as goods rather than burdens.
Augustine describes this transformation as a movement from cupiditas, a self-centered love, to caritas, a rightly ordered love directed toward God and, through him, toward others.
The question, then, is not whether we’ll love, but what we’ll ask our loves to carry.
If Augustine is right, the restlessness many of us feel is not simply a problem to be solved, but a sign. It reveals the limits of the things we try to make ultimate by showing that they cannot satisfy us.
“You have made us for yourself,” Augustine writes, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”(2)
References:
Jeremiah 2:13
Confessions I.1