Desire, Memory, and the Mirror: Wrestling with Augustine, Lewis, and the Imago Dei

 

There’s a haunting question Augustine asks in Confessions, Book X:

"How can I seek God unless I already know something of Him?"

It lingers not as an academic puzzle, but as a spiritual ache. How can we long for something we've never seen? How does the soul ache for a presence it has never embraced?

Augustine proposes that the answer lies deep within the memory—a mysterious, recondite storehouse where truth might be hiding, waiting to be unearthed. We are drawn toward God, he says, because something of Him is already imprinted in us. Not in a pantheistic sense, but as an echo of the One in whose image we were made.

C.S. Lewis would echo this centuries later:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

The longing is the evidence.

But I wrestle with this: Is God truly buried somewhere within me, waiting to be uncovered like a coin in a dusty drawer? Or is it that the desire for Him, the yearning, is the sign that He stands outside of me, calling me home?

This is where my understanding of the Imago Dei comes in.

The Mirror, Not the Spark

I've long been drawn to the interpretation of Imago Dei taught by N.T. Wright and John Walton: not that we carry a divine spark, but that we are angled mirrors. Our vocation is to reflect God’s justice, love, and beauty into the world—and to reflect the praises of creation back to Him.

In this sense, the image of God is functional and relational, not ontological. It’s not that God is in us like a divine shard, but that we are designed to be creatures-in-communion, capable of mirroring heaven to earth and earth back to heaven.

Augustine, with his Neo-Platonic leanings, might push closer to the soul as containing divine traces—reason, memory, and will being the inner trinity that images the Divine Trinity. But even he stops short of saying the divine is inherent. Instead, he emphasizes that our souls are restless until they rest in God. That rest, for him, comes from outside, even if its hunger stirs within.

So perhaps both are true:

• Desire is born from the memory of what we were made for.

• And we remember—not clearly, but like a dream we can’t quite name—that we were made to mirror Love Himself.

Restless, but Anchored

Reading Augustine in a heavy season of my own, I feel his ache. I, too, am searching—sometimes through study, sometimes through silence. Some memories rise easily. Others hide in those "recondite receptacles"—the dark, unreachable rooms of the soul. But even there, God can dwell.

And maybe that’s the good news: even when we forget, God remembers. Even when the mirror is cracked, it can still catch the light.

"You were more inward than my innermost self." — St. Augustine

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This journal entry is a humble wrestling—not a conclusion. A glimpse, not a system. A whisper of that other world our hearts keep aching for.