Turn Inward: Augustine on the Natural Sciences

In the past two decades or so, debates about science vs. religion have become all the rage.

Frankly – I have found such discussions to be absolutely useless, if only because the participants who engage in such matters usually end up creating caricatures of ideas and viewpoints.

As time has passed though, the whole “Creationism/Evolution” controversy has essentially hit a dead-end.   Lots of people I know who were jumping up and down like mad jack-rabbits for one side or another went on to other things to argue about – limits of free speech versus Political Correctness, the migrant crisis in Europe and the UK, Islamism – Islamophobia?   etc. etc.

In the midst of my Augustinian studies for this blog, I did run across a rather intriguing paragraph from Augustine of Hippo’s De Genesi ad Litteram, one that I wish I had known about a very very long time ago.

As Augustine is remarkably modern in his tone and sentiments, I’ll just quote without commentary.

There is knowledge to be had, after all, about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world, about the movements and revolutions or even the magnitude and distances of the constellations, about the predictable eclipses of moon and sun, about the cycles of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and everything else of this kind. And it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments. Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one’s guard against at all costs, that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics, and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter when they see them to be toto caelo, as the saying goes, wide of the mark. And what is so vexing is not that misguided people should be laughed at, as that our authors should be assumed by outsiders to have held such views and, to the great detriment of those about whose salvation we are so concerned, should be written off and consigned to the waste paper basket as so many ignoramuses.

Whenever, you see, they catch some members of the Christian community making mistakes on a subject which they know inside out, and defending their hollow opinions on the authority of our books, on what grounds are they going to trust those books on the resurrection of the dead and the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, when they suppose they include any number of mistakes and fallacies on matters which they themselves have been able to master either by experiment or by the surest of calculations? It is impossible to say what trouble and grief such rash, self-assured know-alls cause the more cautious and experienced brothers and sisters. Whenever they find themselves challenged and taken to task for some shaky and false theory of theirs by people who do not recognize the authority of our books, they try to defend what they have aired with the most frivolous temerity and patent falsehood by bringing forward these same sacred books to justify it. Or they even quote from memory many things said in them which they imagine will provide them with valid evidence, not understanding either what they are saying, or the matters on which they are asserting themselves (1 Tm 1:7).

 

Turn Inward: Augustine on Teenage Love and The Theater

I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves.  As yet I had never been in love and I longed to love; and from a subconscious poverty of mind I hated the thought of being less inwardly destitute.   I sought an object for my love; I was in love with love, and I hated safety and a path free of snares.

-Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book III

A friend of mine once told me that reading Augustine was kind of a breathe of fresh air for those interested in classic literature.   I asked him why and he pointed to this passage above saying, “Well – unlike all those philosophers or historians talking about the deeds of great men or hubristic folly, this seems a lot more normal.  Augustine seems pretty human.  I can relate to this.”

So this blog post is going to zero in on that portion of Augustine’s life right before the events spoken of in Turn Inward: Augustine On Grief.   This is Augustine essentially “going to college.”   Remember, he’s the smart aleck kid from the backwater hinterland boondock of Roman Algeria who just got a free ride to study in Carthage.

What’s Carthage?    To us that’s the equivalent of going to study in New York, Paris, London, or Rome.   In Augustine’s day, Carthage was already a place of important history – the Romans fought their greatest general Hannibal during the Punic Wars for control the Mediterranean.   It was also a city of great antiquity, having been mentioned in Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, specifically where the hero Aeneas has a hot torrid romance with Queen Dido of Carthage.   Incidentally, The Aeneid was one of young Augustine’s favorite works of literature.

..the poetry I was forced to learn about the wanderings of some legendary fellow named Aeneas (forgetful of my own wanderings) and weep over the death of a Dido who took her own life from love.

…….

I wept over a Dido who ‘died in pursuing her ultimate end with a sword.’

-Augustine, Confessions, Book I

It is a familiar story isn’t it?   Adolescent youth a little too smart for his own good enters the big city with all the sights, sounds, and delights of the world.   And from the bits of pop culture, literature, and the beating of his heart our little scholar thinks he knows what love is about.

Romantic Movement by Karl Louis Preusser

So he seeks….he pursues…

To me it was sweet to love and to be loved, and more so if I could enjoy the body of the beloved.  I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence.  I muddied its clear stream by the hell of lust, and yet, though foul and immoral, in my excessive vanity, I used to carry on in the manner of an elegant man about town.  I rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured.  “My God, my mercy,” in your goodness you mixed vinegar with that sweetness.  My love was returned and in secret I attained the joy that enchains.  I was glad to be in bondage, tied with troublesome chains, with the result that I was flogged with the red hot irons of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and contention.

-Augustine, Confessions, Book III

And in the quote above, we can see our older Bishop Augustine’s analysis.   Ultimately, like all teenagers, he really didn’t know what Love was actually about.   But it just felt good to be in an adolescent romance.   And undoubtedly, it was a bit of a learning experience as he went through all the other emotions that such a romance would entail.It probably didn’t help too much that, like teenagers, he took part of his orientation for life from movi-, I mean from theatrical shows.

I was captivated by theatrical shows.  They were full of representations of my own miseries and fulled my fire.  Why is it that a person should wish to experience suffering by watching grievous and tragic events which he himself would not wish to endure?  Nevertheless he wants to suffer the pain given by being a spectator of these sufferings, and the pain itself is his pleasure.  What is this but amazing folly?   For the more anyone is moved by these scenes, the less free he is from similar passions.   Only when he himself suffers, is it truly called misery; when he feels compassion for others, it is called mercy.-Augustine, Confessions, Book III

Does Art imitate Life?   Or does Life imitate Art?Augustine and many other Western writers might point to the fact that at minimum, certain people do take their orientation of how to live their lives from fictional works.   I submit two examples gentle reader for your approval:

1.)The great German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote the bestselling novel of the late 1700s called The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a melancholy soulful youth in love with a married woman.     It is a tale of friendship, unrequited love, and suicide.    The net effect? Copycat suicides.  Lots and lots and lots of copycat suicidesby teenagers and young adults so moved by The Sorrows of Young Werther that they even copy his suicide letters, dress up like the character, and take a pistol to their heads in the same manner.   At the time, this was dubbed Werther Fever.

2.) A more modern example – has anyone reading this ever watched a Spanish telenovela?  For the Americans reading this, NPR did an excellent story about how former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez affected the telenovela industry.  I’m going to link the story but I wanted to quote a relevant part of the report first.

He says he thinks Venezuelans take cues about how to act in everyday life from soap operas. They’ve watched so many, that they’re practically actors themselves. Like many Latin Americans who grew up on a telenovela diet, my own nostalgia for the genre is offset by a deep discomfort about the fantasy world that is portrayed.

The shows are followed by mostly dark-skinned, working-class audiences, but they tend to feature a European-looking heroine, who always ends up marrying the wealthy leading man. That’s simply not the way things work on a continent with the greatest economic inequality in the world.

Jasmine Garsd, Morning Edition, How Chavez Changed Venezuela’s Telenovelas, April 12, 2013

How Chavez Changed Venezuela’s Telenovelas

So… what does Bishop Augustine, our much older and more sober mind, think of all that transpired in his youth as he reflects on these matters?

My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is you yourself my God.  But that was not the kind of hunger I felt.  I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became.   So my soul was rotten in health.  In an ulcerous condition, it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by the contact with the world of the senses.  Yet physical things had no soul.  Love lay outside their range.

-Augustine, Confessions, Book III

Ultimately, Augustine believes that he was looking for love in all the wrong places.  That he didn’t really understand what Love, in its most fullest since, meant.   As I stated in my previous post, Turn Inward: Augustine On Grief, the only way he thought it possible to Love other people and things is to understand the source of Love.

Hence our dear Algerian scholar would eventually walk down a path of faith, finding his heart’s rest in the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob.

 

 

 

 

Ethikos: Aristotle on Virtue

The last couple of blog posts from the Turn Inward series highlighted an important concept for Augustine of Hippo’s journey toward religious faith and psychological knowledge – namely that of friendship.

We know from his Confessions that much of his ideas regarding friendship and what constituted the good life was derived from his readings of the Roman philosopher, orator, and politician – Marcus Tullius Cicero.    However, Cicero himself was elucidating and refining this concept of friendship transmitted to him through his own studies in Greek philosophy.I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on this Mediterranean tradition of the Graeco-Roman world and explore the foundations of ethics and morality.If we recall from previous discussions – friendships can be defined by three characteristics

1. Pleasure
2. Utility
3. Virtue

Pleasure and Utility seems quite comprehensible to our modern sensibilities.   But Virtue?   Well, as has been made apparent by all the questions I end up getting – Just What Do You Mean By Virtue?

Even the word seems somewhat…..off-kilter to the average person.   It seems to conjure images of priests at pulpits, nuns with rulers, school teachers haranguing students, and members of the older generation wagging their fingers at their grandchildren.

One insightful young fellow told me that speaking of Virtue set off the “bullshit alarm” in his head…..that or the “speaker must be judging me somehow.”

I find it rather interesting that a word like that could carry so many associations and uncover many anxieties – especially since no one seems to bother to ask what the word meant in its original form.  In other words:  What did being virtuous mean to the Graeco-Roman thinker?

Aristotle Contemplates a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

There is one Greek philosopher whose examination of virtue and ἠθικός (trans: ethikos or ethics) stands above the rest – Aristotle.     This isn’t because Aristotle somehow “invented” a moral or ethical code.    Rather, he stands in a tradition stretching back to Socrates who investigated the common sense notions of the Greek people about what is Good and Virtuous.

Aristotle’s brilliance comes from the overall account he gives about what it means to be virtuous in the context of one’s individual needs, one’s duties to society, and one’s place in the cosmos.

So let’s get started – What is Virtue?

Latin: Virtus =  Greek: ἀρετή (Arete) = English: Excellence

So Virtue is a type of Excellence.

Well, what the hell does that mean?

An example:   Take a piano player.  A piano player refines his or her piano-playing skill through habit and practice.   His or her skill would be referred to by the Greeks as a  τέχνἠ or Techne – an art or craft.  Once the piano player achieves a certain level of ability, others will come to acknowledge that person as having developed an ἀρετή or excellence.

You can probably take any type of social role – Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, Accountant, Police Officer, Baker, etc. and apply that same type of logic.

So what Aristotle does is ask a question:  Is there a type of Excellence that all Human beings  can achieve in order to live a full, happy, and successful life?

For Aristotle and the Ancient Greek World – the possession of the cardinal virtues is a type of moral excellence that allows an individual to express his or her full potential as a human being.

Virtue then is a disposition, an inclination, a… habit toward seeking to do what is worthy, honorable, and good.

And a friendship built on Virtue is a type of relationship where individuals seeks what is Best and Good for one another.