Augustine

Augustine and Confessions

By Nathaniel Binzen, November 1, 1999

One cannot delve much into the character of Augustine in just a few pages. I can only reach in and toss out a few of his confessions which strike home for me.
Augustine may disparage his earlier days as a tradesman in rhetoric, but in truth his fertile tongue is never rescued from its labor. He only redirects his word-dealing to what he sees as a greater purpose. His innovation is that he turns his gaze inward and then projects the inner man outward for the benefit of the ages. The immediacy of his personal tale of waywardness and transformation loses nothing with the passage of time. The power of the Confessions comes in part from his employing the same vivid emotions which affected him so much while attending the theater in his youth. Though he claims to have come to reject such delightful pangs, nonetheless I cannot fail to see the signs of his feared self-indulgence reemerging in the very manner of his self-recording (Book III, Chap. 2).
Augustine is on an urgent life-long quest for knowledge. He looks high and he looks low. I really identify with that. In my own youth, I conjured up two time-honored bits of practical philosophy which together can justify almost any conduct - (1) you can't judge something unless you've tried it yourself; and (2) history has observed that sometimes those who sink the lowest later rise the highest (for that second axiom, I can thank Augustine directly). With these insights in hand, I, like Augustine, did manage to learn a great deal in a worldly way, while, naturally, piling up many regrets along the way. Augustine, though, runs far ahead of me in, among other things, the weight of his pious regrets.
So much for the looking low. (Un)fortunately, I don't have the space here that Augustine had for confessions. I also share with Augustine the upward gaze. "Truth! Truth! How the very marrow of my soul within me yearned for it…!" (Book III, Chap. 6). His wide-ranging eye scans the pleasuring flesh, the scholarly and mythic fare of Greece and Rome, the inventive world of the Manichees, the cosmos of the natural scientists, and the teachings of the Platonists. Everywhere Augustine encounters empty ideas; and he comes to see that "The danger lies in thinking that…knowledge [of scientific matters] is part of what [a person] must believe to save his soul" (Book V, Chap. 5). Finally, in the Christian teachings, he becomes reconciled to the reality of mystery, and he gains insight into the nature of true knowledge: he sees that anything that can rightly be called truth is so because it is touched with the love of God. He comes to prefer the wisdom of a church that "demanded that certain things should be believed even though they could not be proved" (Book VI, Chap. 5).
How this change comes about in him fascinates me. All this relentless searching, and the compounding disillusionments - the preposterous, immoral myths propounded in schoolbooks; the cluelessness of the revered Manichee bishop Faustus; the whorishness of his own employment, teaching the next generation to be spinners of hollow sophistries - lead Augustine by age thirty-one into an anguish of doubts and remorse. For some time he had been hanging on every word of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and he is obviously ready to hear when Ponticianus, a high servant of the emperor, describes to him his own moment of conversion. Ponticianus tells Augustine how he and a friend happened to visit the house of some Christians and, reading there a book on the pious life of the Egyptian monk Antony, "All at once he was filled with the love of holiness. Angry with himself…he looked at his friend and said, "What do we hope to gain by all these efforts we make? What are we looking for? What is our purpose in serving the State?" (Book VIII, Chap. 6).
With this outburst, too, I identify. I had a similar moment myself during the Bush administration, in Utah, at a place called Dead Horse Point. I asked my companions, "What is the point of all this? Where are we going? Why does any of this matter?" I can't say, though, that the answer has ever come to me with clarity that it did shortly thereafter for Ponticianus, and similarly for Augustine. For soon after hearing this story, Augustine, his "inner self…a house divided against itself" (Book VIII, Chap. 8), heard the voice and saw the light in dramatic fashion.
I also identify with the fact that, even though strengthened by the certainty of his love for God, Augustine, in the latter part of his Confessions, and indeed during the remainder of his life as a committed Christian believer, continues to confront huge speculative difficulties. The quest for knowledge does not end; paradoxically, the firmness of its foundation, which he feels so strongly, is itself shrouded in the mystery of faith. Augustine has merely opened up paths of investigation - into the nature of God, of memory, of time, of the creation of heaven and earth - which others must follow, and push farther, down to the present day.
Augustine and I part company, though, in consideration of some of what this revelation tells us about the nature of ourselves: I cannot entirely follow him in his harsh judgement concerning his own worldliness and sin. Yet, as elsewhere, the over-the-top poetry of his language captivates me:

my love went beyond the affection of one mind for another, beyond the arc of the bright beam of friendship. Bodily desire, like a morass, and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart….In my tender youth [love and lust] swept me away over the precipice of my body's appetites and plunged me into the whirlpool of sin. (Book II, Chap. 2)

He nails the double edge of desire - if I may re-state, one's eros reaching out for the world may be a good thing; but it's the grasping, the holding and consuming which inevitably follows that is bad. Again, he says, "my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in [God] but in myself and his other creatures…" (Book 1, Chapter 20). But I think he pushes the lesson to be derived from this insight too far. To Augustine, I would reply that, embodied creatures that we are, we cannot fail to love and enjoy this world, its creatures and our own creations; nor, for my part, can I fail to see God in and through these marvelous things of creation all around us.

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