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.

 

 

 

 

Turn Inward: Augustine on Peer Pressure and Transgression

Alone I would not have committed that theft, where what pleased me was not what I was stealing but the  fact that I was stealing.  Doing this alone would not have pleased me so well, nor would I have done it.   O friendship so clearly unfriendly, untraceable seducer of the mind!  It was a craving to do harm as a sport and a joke, an appetite to wrong another person, apart from any desire for revenge or for my own gain.  It was just that someone said “Come on, let’s do it” – and one is ashamed not to be shameless.”

-Augustine of Hippo, Confessions book II

A person’s teenage years tends to be regarded as a time of great confusion and soul-searching.   We all deal with it in some form or fashion, embracing some archetypal social role in order to fit the greater whole of our environment.

Myself?  I was a Nerd.  A Geek.  A Boffin.  A Swot.   My days were mostly consumed with unanswerable philosophical questions, learning foreign languages, biology lab, awkward music lessons, and fencing with sabers.   Or what I like to call “Guaranteed Boredom for 95% of the Planet unless Wes Anderson decides to direct the movie.”

In this respect, our dear Augustine of Hippo had an adolescence much closer to the modern norm.   He was in the throes of lust for the fair maidens of his hometown, looking for things to brag about to his friends, and not above committing a bit of unnecessary petty larceny – the theft of some pears.

And that’s where the focus of today’s blo gpost will be on – as the communal theft of a neighbor’s pears resulted in Augustine meditating on the nature of friendship, crime, and sin.

Many historians often seem baffled by the amount of space Augustine devotes to examining this particular incident regarding the theft of pears.   After all, Augustine and his accomplices were never caught nor punished.  However, Augustine seems interested in dissecting this whole incident to illustrate the psychological nature of his crime and the social context of his sin.

For those who have been following this Turn Inward blog post series, one may recall that a general theme of the last few posts has been the nature of friendship.   Augustine the Bishop reflected on his adolescent attempts to “fit in” with his social group in the following manner:

..that among my peer group I was ashamed not to be equally guilty of shameful behaviour when I heard them boasting of their sexual exploits.  Their pride was the more aggressive, the more debauched their acts were; they derived pleasure not merely from the lust of the act but also from the admiration it evoked.  What is more worthy of censure than vice?  Yet I went deeper into vice to avoid being despised, and when there was no act by admitting to which I could rival my depraved companions, I used to pretend I had done things I had not done at all, so that my innocence should not lead my companions to scorn my lack of courage, and lest my chastity be taken as a mark of inferiority.

-Augustine, The Confessions, Book II 

I think that every adolescent has experienced these feelings at one point or another.   Augustine was attempting to “be one of the boys” so to speak.    And this attempt would eventually lead into the theft of the pears, as indicated by the quote at the top of this blog post.   It is interesting to note that Augustine the Bishop regarded these early relationships as parodies of true friendship.     Why parody?    Referring back to our examination of Cicero’s On Friendship, true friendship was comprised of the following criteria:

1. True Friendships occur between good people, as sound and enduring friendships are built on virtue.
2. Friends do not ask each other to do anything “dishonorable.”
3. Friendship is about the movement of Plurality to Unity.

And in all three criteria, Augustine the Youth’s so-called “friends” are found lacking.  What we have instead is simply a peer pressure group.

The theft was a nothing, and for this reason I was the more miserable.  Yet had I been alone I would not have done it – i remember my state of mind to be thus at the time – alone I would have never done it.   Therefore, my love in the act was to be associated with the gang in whose company I did it.

However, while Augustine the Bishop acknowledges that this peer pressure group is part of the context for his transgression of morals and laws, it isn’t the driving force.

I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality.  My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and doing what was wrong.  There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though it was attractive neither in color nor taste.  To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after we had continued our game in the streets.  We carried off a huge load of pears.  But they were not four feasts but merely to throw to the pigs.  Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.

-Augustine of Hippo, Confessions book II

Our Older Bishop Augustine takes a moment to reflect on this point.   More often than not, crimes and transgressions are committed toward some sort of purpose.   A thief could steal food to feed himself.   A murderer may slay a rival in a desire for wealth, property, or love.  In many ways, these transgressions are distortions of proper activity to achieve these ends.

But this theft of the pears – it had not greater purpose.  It wasn’t even a distortion of an activity for a purpose.   In his own words “I was not seeking to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.”

But the question is – Why?  Why did it feel so good at the end of the day?

Augustine answer may sound surprising to us – for he says “Pride imitates what is lofty, but you alone are God most high above all things.”  He then proceeds to enumerate characteristics and things that humans seek and how…ultimately… we are trying to emulate God.  Some examples might suffice:

1. Curiosity appears to be zeal for knowledge – but God already knows all.
2. Luxury seeks abundance/satiety – but God is the giver of incorruptible pleasure.
3. Prodigality is the shadow of generosity – but God is the bestower of good things.

Etc. etc etc.

For those of a non-religious bent, I might offer up a reasonably close interpretation:  This is about Feeling Free.

Specifically, feeling free from Rules.   As in, human beings tend to like it when Rules exist – except when those Rules apply to them.

In this respect, Augustine hits the nail on the head.  Transgression of Law (Moral, Civil, or otherwise) speaks to a kind of illusion of Freedom.   In a certain sense, one is essentially parodying the power of divinity, which to the ancient mindset is the only Thing/Being/Whatever that is Truly Free.

 

 

 

 

 

Turn Inward: Augustine On Grief

“Grief darkened my heart.”  Everything on which I set my gaze was death.  My home town became a torture to me; my father’s house a strange world of unhappiness; all that I had shared with him was without him transformed into cruel torment.  My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there.  I hated everything because they did not have him, nor could they now tell me ‘look, he is on his way,’ as used to be the case when he was alive and absent from me.    I had become to myself a vast problem, and I questioned my soul, “Why are you sad, and why are you very distressed?”  But my soul did not know what reply to give.

-Augustine of Hippo, Book VI, The Confessions

Thagaste, North Africa: 374-376 AD

For a brief moment in his life, Augustine of Hippo must have thought his star was rising.   He had spent his teens studying rhetoric and the great classical writers such as Cicero and Virgil in the city of Carthage.   Although he long ago swore that the search for ultimate wisdom would be his primary motivation in life, the lure of temporal success was just too hard to resist.

And now he was back in his hometown of Thagaste, a bona fide teacher of rhetoric.   In a world where the art of verbal persuasion was the primary means to gather the favor of both the mighty and the masses, one could see why a highly skilled rhetorician would be in great demand.   In his own words:

Overcome with greed myself, I used to sell the eloquence that would overcome an opponent.

He had also made friends in Carthage, intellectuals whose thoughts must have inflamed and inspired his ever curious mind in ways that the inhabitants of sleepy backwater Thagaste never could.  They had introduced him to the doctrines of the Manichees, a religion that emanated from ancient Persia which stated that the world was the creation of a god of good and a god of evil.   Their philosophizing nature and grand cosmological speculations made his mother’s simple Christian faith seem rather…..dull.    Besides, he had read the Bible in its Latin translation and it couldn’t compare at all with the verse and language of Cicero’s writings.   What possible wisdom could they hold?

Upon his return to Thagaste, Augustine became reacquainted with a friend of his youth.

During those years when first I began to teach in the town where I was born, I had come to have a friend who because of our shared interests was very close.  He was my age, and we shared the flowering of youth.  As a boy he had grown up with me, and we had gone to school together and played with one another.

…..

It was a very sweet experience, welded by the fervour of our identical interests.

Bearing with him all the wisdom and knowledge he had acquired from Carthage, Augustine a fide deflexeram, or wrenched his friend from his faith in Christianity as a kind of service.   However, one day his friend became very ill – so much so that his parents had opted to baptize him in order to receive a remission of his sins if he were to die.   Augustine didn’t take this situation seriously and joked about it upon his friend’s recovery.   Much to his surprise, his friend took his baptism quite seriously and asked Augustine to be respectful of his decision.

But our sharp little rhetorician thought all he had to do was bid his time.  Augustine would set his friend straight and everything would be right in the world….

…..and then his friend died….

The First Mourning by William Adolphe Bouguereau

—————————————————————————–

The opening quotation at the top of this blog was Augustine’s immediate reaction to the death of his close but unnamed friend.  Suffice it to say – he took the loss quite hard.   However we must remember that the Confessions are written in two voices: that of the young man experiencing these emotions at the time, and the much older adult who has started to reflect on these experiences.

Augustine the Twenty-something Rhetoritician describes his thoughts as:

I was surprised that any other mortals were alive, since he who I had loved as if he would never die was dead.   I was even more surprised that when he was dead, I was still alive, for he was my “other self.”  Someone has well said of his friend, “He was half my soul.”  I had felt that my soul and his were ‘one soul in two bodies.”  So my life was to me a horror.  I did not wish to live with one half of myself, and perhaps the reason why I so feared death was that then the whole of my much loved friend would have died.

It was, as the youth of today would call it, a “bromance.”

Had we been alive at the time, to have seen the whiz-kid genius and his ever present wingman laughing in the marketplaces,  debating in the streets, and chasing after the virtue of young maidens – I have no doubt that many of us would have been moved by young Augustine’s great sorrow.

And yet, Older Augustine has a different perspective:

At that time I wept very bitterly and took my rest in bitterness.  I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend.  Although I wanted it to be otherwise, I was more unwilling to lose my misery than him, and I do not know if I would have given up my life for him as the story reports of Orestes and Pylades, who were willing to die for each other together, because it was worse than death to them not to be living together.  But in me emerged a very strange feeling that was the opposite of theirs.   I found myself heavily weighed down by a sense of being tired of living and scared of dying.  I suppose that the more I loved him, the more hatred and fear I felt for the death which had taken him from me, as if it were my most ferocious enemy.   I thought that since death had consumed him, it was suddenly going to engulf all humanity.

And so Augustine the Bishop raises an important question with his revelation.

Was he really grieving for his friend?

Or was he grieving for himself?   Was he actually grieving about the loss that Death had inflicted on his life?

One modern commentator couldn’t help but remark that perhaps Young Augustine was probably entertaining thoughts such as “How dare this guy die and leave -me- in a state like this?”

Our Older Augustine uses this personal episode of sorrow as a starting point to examine the nature of grief and the grieving process.  And behind this dissection of grief is a theory about the nature of friendship.

Augustine follows in the footsteps of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero who defined friendship as a form of love.   For Augustine, all forms of Love seeks or attempts to Unite You with Something Else.  The enjoyment of Love is when you have been united with the thing you were seeking.

In terms of friendship, it would be appropriate to say then that this is the state when one person’s inner being (soul, psyche, etc.) is united with another.   Two souls may become one.   Or multiple for that matter.

While undoubtedly there is a penchant to interpret this in a Romantic sense, I’d ask you gentle reader to consider the following example: sports teams.  One of my own friends, who likes to reminiscence about his glory days on a high school American football team, would often describe a kind of feeling when “our team was staring with one gaze at our opponents down field.”   Even an observer can usually tell when a particular group of people might share a certain sort of chemistry in their interactions.

Friendship then is that sense of shared unity.   But what happens when that unity is disrupted?  Or destroyed?

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost.  Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.

For Augustine, Grief then is that agony when those souls are torn in two.   When that beautiful unity is ripped asunder and you are left broken by it.   This might be the appropriate time to recall the idea of a Romantic relationship, or rather the End of a Romantic relationship.

But notice how Augustine defines misery – “a state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things.”  The soul or psyche just doesn’t realize it is in such a state of misery until the loss of the mortal thing.  As he states later on in Book IV of the Confessions:

The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.

In other words, the feeling of grief is the natural outcome of expecting some sort of endless happiness from a mortal and finite thing.  For those who might be familiar with the teachings of the Siddartha Gautama, Augustine’s insight mirrors the Buddhist idea of the First Noble Truth – that all conditional phenomena and experiences are not ultimately satisfying and will bring about suffering.

One could say that Augustine’s grief at the loss of his friend was due to the fact that Augustine had loved inappropriately.  Or to utilize some Platonic logic, how can something that is impermanent bring about a form of permanent happiness?  It can only result in a misery at the end.

The lost life of those who die becomes the death of those still living.

Friendship is the most valuable thing to have on this Earth, or so the ancient philosophers said.   Is there some way to honor and acknowledge it without going through a period of excessive loss?

So what is our dear Bishop of Hippo’s solution?  He offers a simultaneous religious and Platonic answer: To love our friends in God.

Happy is the person who loves you [God], and his friend in you, and his enemy because of you.  Thought left alone, he loses none dear to him; for all are dear in the One who cannot be lost.

From a Platonic perspective, there is only One thing that is Truly Permanent.   The Beauty that makes us love things, places, and individuals is merely a small reflection of that One Thing which is the source of all that Beauty.

A Christian believer would phrase this in the way Augustine did:

O God of hosts, turn us and show us your face, and we shall be safe.  For wherever the human soul turns itself other than you, it is fixed in sorrows, even if its fixed upon beautiful things external to you and external to itself, which would neverthless be nothing if they did not have their being from you.

As was stated before, friendship is an act of unity.  So for Augustine, to “love our friends-in-God,” is to essentially share an eternal happiness with our friends, who if departed from us are kept safe by that One Permanent Thing.

 

 

 

 

Turn Inward: The Psychological Insights of Augustine of Hippo

When people contemplate the origins of the academic study of psychology, our attention is usually drawn to the great figures of the 19th and early 20th centuries:  William James, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Wundt, etc.   These were men of the early heady days of experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism.    But they were not the first days when mankind decided to reflect on his or her interior life.   Philosophers, mystics, poets, saints, and writers of previous eras and cultures long gone have often attempted to plumb the depths of the human mind.  Their methods were quite varied – abstract reasoning, ancient physiology, and even meditation.  And some merely wrote what was on their mind.

Turn Inward is my humble attempt to bring to light some of these rare individuals who dared to look beneath the surface of our superficial thoughts in search of the secrets of the mind.

I can think of no better person to start this series than the famous 4th century philosopher and saint of the early Christian Church, Augustine of Hippo.

Now I know what some of you might be thinking – what in the hell does some stodgy ancient headmaster type have to teach a sophisticated urbane person of the 21st century?

A lot actually.  Because before he was the great thinker and saint, Aurelius Augustinus was a wild, promiscuous, and devastatingly intelligent youth who was born in a North African backwater of the Roman Empire.   Cocky and Curious, Augustine wanted to take the ancient world by storm and make a name for himself.

In other words, I would argue that Augustine of Hippo had a lot of what we might call today as “life experience.”  On top of that, he had an expansive understanding of his own psychology.

It is for this reason when readers pick up a copy of his Confessions, many can’t help but remark how….modern…he sounds.   In fact, his Confessions may very well be the first time in Western literature when a writer decided to expose his actual thoughts to his readers.  Let me emphasize that point – not an argument, not an abstraction, not a treatise – but his thoughts and reflections on his life.   Furthermore, he’s able to extrapolate certain experiences to some rather universal emotions and feelings we all undergo at some point in our lives.

So that is my “sales pitch” to those who were unsure of sticking around for this series.

It is my intention in the next couple of blog posts to examine some of the psychological insights buried in Augustine’s Confessions – which serves as a kind of spiritual autobiography of the man.

We may also lightly touch on diverse topics such as Platonic philosophy, early Christian theology, and the state of the late Roman empire to fill out the backdrop of his life.

However, I believe that to us Augustine of Hippo’s major relevance comes from his status as an astute commentator of the human condition.