Made to Worship
Agnus Dei, Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664)
“Tell me what you worship, and I’ll tell you who you are…” - Alexander Schmemann
This year, the Octet Collaborative continues its exploration of what it means to be human. In this essay, we consider humanity as homo adorans: we are made to worship.
Let’s begin with a few cultural contradictions:
Materialism v. spirituality: How is it possible that we are increasingly convinced that we and the rest of the universe are nothing but matter and energy, even as interest in spirituality, even mysticism, is on the rise?
Foodies and fasting: why do we see growing interest in so many forms of indulgence and so many forms of asceticism at the same time?
Minds and machines: why are we so eager to reduce the workings of our minds to firing neurons and brain chemistry, which we barely understand, but equally eager to ascribe consciousness to large language models, which we built?
At the center of each of these contradictions lies some sort of deformity of desire. We struggle to evaluate and adjudicate between our desires, rather than merely accommodating or suppressing them. We are made to seek something ultimate and transcendent, and will desperately seek it even within the immanent frame, convinced that nothing lies beyond it. We worship the work of our hands, made in our image, rather than devoting ourselves to the One who made us in His.
The Christian scriptures are replete with worship of the triune God, so much so that in at least one tradition, our chief end - the very reason for our existence - is to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever. Worship is of architectonic importance for the Old Testament people of God, for whom tabernacle or temple was always located in the very center of life. Sin, on the other hand, is often understood precisely as misdirected worship, or disordered desire (see Jeremiah 2:12-13, or Romans 1:22-23, for instance). But this leads to a question. If we are made to worship God, what do we do with our other desires? If sin is disordered desire, worshiping creatures as though they were the creator, is there a way to rightly order our desires for created things without denying them altogether?
For help, we’ll turn to the thought of two different early Christian thinkers: in the west, Augustine, and in the east, Gregory of Nyssa.
For Augustine, humans are desiring, imaginative animals. It is Augustine that gives us one of our most beautiful expressions of the idea that we are made to worship God above all else, writing in his Confessions that “You [God] move us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You.” For Augustine, love of God is central, and the virtues that are meant to move us toward one another and toward other created things - wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance - are all manifestations of that love which serve to unite us, rather than divide us.
When properly ordered under the love of God, desire constitutes community:
“A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love. There can be as many different kinds of people as there are different things for them to love. … The better the things, the better the people; the worse the things, the worse their agreement to share them.” - City of God 19.24
“We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self.” - City of God 14.28
In other words, for Augustine, what we love makes us who we are, not only as individuals but as a society: what we agree is most worthy of love orders our common lives. It is worth asking about our nation, or our churches, or our universities: what do we hold as our common objects of love?
From Gregory we get a different but complementary angle on love; he similarly held that the love which moves us toward that which we find most beautiful holds society together. He argued that the joy of satisfied desire properly overflows to acts of service to the poor, attention to the weak, and gratitude for the world in all its fulness and limitations. But in order to function this way, our desires have to be properly directed and then strengthened, not tamped down: refined and trained, not negated. As CS Lewis put it, our desires are not too strong, but too weak - we are too easily satisfied by money, sex, and power, when we are made for nothing short of union with our creator!
The apostle Paul says something similar in his letter to the Ephesians, though it’s easily missed. In chapter 4, he writes:
“Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” - Ephesians 4:17-24
There’s an interesting conjunction in that paragraph. Paul says that the Gentiles (the unbelieving nations) have given themselves up to sensuality, and so have become callous. Usually, we associate sensuality with an excess of feeling, with uncontrolled desires, but here Paul says the opposite: in giving themselves up to sensuality, the Gentiles have deadened their desires. This sounds like the dynamic of addiction: over time, the dopamine hit from the stimulus lessens, so that the addict needs more and more of the substance to sustain the same sensation. In giving themselves over to sensuality, the Gentiles have killed their sensitivity to what is meant to bring them pleasure: love for God and neighbor, rather than merely feeding their own greed.
Between Augustine and Gregory, we receive wisdom for training our desires: neither mere accommodation nor ruthless suppression, but right ordering of desires for created things which are meant to point beyond themselves, to their creator. Augustine is clear that desire for creatures as ends in themselves is always misplaced, simultaneously elevating created things above their worth and divesting them of their real value (cf. Isaiah 44). As Oliver O’Donovan writes, “Materialism, for Augustine, is the paradigm of the lying love, attached to real goods and yet untrue, since it misconceives the significance of those goods within reality as a whole.” In one of the most beautiful passages in his Confessions, he writes:
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.”
We are made to worship God, but God is the creator and giver of all things. We can receive them, and love them, precisely as gifts, pointing us to their Creator.
