Playtime for the Atheist
by Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:
When the young Augustine was in his long years of struggle, he was not searching for surges of good feeling. He got that from the mistress he kept, to whom he was faithful, and who bore for him his dearly loved son, Adeodatus. He was not searching for eminence in the world. His brilliance as a writer and teacher could win him that. He did not want the comfort of being told that God would respect his Manichean notions of a deity spread out through the universe like an all-penetrating ectoplasm, corporeal but too slender to see with the naked eye.
He wanted to find the truth, and to rest in it, as in an assured dwelling place. When he found it, he found Christ, whom he sometimes called by the simple and powerful name Truth. He was not the only ancient father to do so.
Our minds are made to hunger for the Truth and to be satisfied by it and it alone. Who would take a spouse on the condition that he or she only seemed to love, no matter how persuasive the acting was? Or who would say, “I accept this faith because it pleases me, and it helps me through the sufferings of this life, but I do not care whether it is true”? We do not want to be deceived, even when we are the ones doing the deceiving.
When Augustine found the Truth, he rejoiced in it. Such a joy is natural, in harmony with our nature as rational and intellectual beings. Jesus did not say that Satan was, at the center of his evil, the father of hurt feelings and bruised egos. He said that Satan was a murderer from the beginning, and a liar, and the father of lies. Satan does not rejoice in the truth because the truth is not in him.
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