Augustine, Confessions/On Christian Doctrine

“Grant me chastity and continence… but please, not yet.”

A few months back, I wrote a post about the difficulty of meaningful change. The aim of storytelling is often the depiction of character change: after this or that circumstance, a character sees something differently than he did at the outset. James Joyce's Dubliners is an entire short story collection dedicated to excavating the exact moment of epiphany and its variegated manifestations.

Augustine's Confessions is usually considered to be the earliest extant work of autobiography (autohagiography?), and it has at its core a theme of reconciliation. Augustine struggles to reconcile on the one hand the ineffable nature of God with the material world, and on the other his innate human sinfulness with the demands of a righteous life. It is a compelling work, not only because it is the testimony of a man from the early days of the church struggling with faith, but because he comes to reconciliation through two topics with which we are familiar through our reading (Plotinus and the idea of random chance, which I haven't finished writing yet). 

This reconciliation -- change from one mode of thinking to another -- is important also to our understanding of Augustine's theology. Coming to the faith by way of pagan philosophy allows Augustine to see the value of utilizing outside, seemingly blasphemous sources in understanding scripture. Additionally, as we can see from what has become Augustine's most well-known quote above, the process of becoming a Christian and separating oneself from the pleasures of this world, was not easy. Augustine was a dirty, dirty man.


You’re So Vain

But Augustine looks with contempt upon his old life, when he privileged the body and materialism over spiritual essence, preventing him from understanding the nature of God. Early on in the Confessions, he wonders how God managed to enter into the world, how his form became imbued in that of other forms: “As nothing can contain your whole being, does each thing contain a part of you?” It’s a natural question, even a necessary one. The material world is important in Christianity. It is God’s creation and a benchmark for His power; Augustine points to Matthew 10:30, which reads, “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” God is clearly at work within the world, and it, being His creation, is necessarily good (contrast this with the Puritans), though it can also be corrupt and an impediment to knowing God. Alexander Pope said, “Whatever is, is right,” but Augustine amends this to say that “for [God] there is no evil at all… In parts of creation, however, there are some parts that are not appropriate to those parts, and for that reason are thought evil.” The world lacks the order that heaven possesses, an order which was dimly visible to Augustine: 

“I looked around and saw that within physical objects there is one sort of beauty that comes, so to speak, from the totality, and another which gives a sense of harmony through the congruence with which it fits in with another object, as part of a body fits in with the whole.”

The world has reflections of supernal beauty, but he did not yet possess the vocabulary to make sense of it.

Of course, being familiar with Plato, we all see where this is going. Upon discovering Plato’s doctrine of Forms, through the lens of Plotinus’ Neo-Platonism, everything coalesced. Book VII of the Confessions is incredible to read for this reason. It is the document of a man who has come to a new and deeper understanding of the world through the study of another’s philosophy. Though Augustine is usually considered a philosopher in his own right, he is also an interpreter of Plotinus, imbuing early Christian thought with ancient Greek philosophy; this meeting of worlds is spectacular.

Augustine the Greek

There is an abundance of similarities between Plotinian philosophy and Christian theology, not the least of which is the idea of a trinity – One, Intellect, and Soul in the former; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the latter. We can draw further, although perhaps more tenuous, comparisons. The Son is the Intellect, an emanation of the One, but also the same as the One, eternally with the One. Pursuing a life of contemplating the One, as the Intellect (the Son) does (by living as God) is the only true life. However, the world is not to be forgotten, because only through the world can we understand God. Romans 1:20 reads, “I apprehended and perceived your invisible nature through the things you have made,” which is strikingly similar to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. (Okay, maybe not strikingly, but the connections are deeper than one might expect.) Following Augustine's example, we can better understand the eternal world by understanding the material one.

Augustine also has a Plotinian understanding of time. “Most of all, I thought his miraculous virgin birth to be an example of how things temporal are to be despised for the sake of gaining immortality.” Recall that Plotinus considers eternity to be the realm in which cause and effect are of no consequence (no pun intended).

Given his use of Greek (i.e. pagan) philosophy to reach an understanding of the Christian God, it is no surprise that Augustine does not fear ideas outside of the Bible. In fact, in On Christian Doctrine, he famously describes the Egyptian gold taken by the Jews when they left Egypt. Though the Egyptians used gold to fashion idols, there was no reason that the Jews could not appropriate it and use it to worship God; so it is with the wisdom of pagan philosophy, which God placed in the hands of Christians to be used for its true purpose: "Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad."


Put Your Whole Heart In It

The other major reconciliation documented in the Confessions is Augustine’s conversion to an active religion rather than a passive one. Before he became a Christian, Augustine was a Manichean, which meant, without getting into a detailed discussion of a topic I know nothing about, that he placed evil squarely within the material world and believed that righteousness could be achieved by knowledge instead than action. Christianity, however, declares that people are inherently sinful and that action, in the form of behaving in a way commensurate with Christ’s behavior, is the only way to be a Christian. Manichaeism was passive whereas Christianity was performative.

If, however, we must perform, we cannot perform only with our body (as Jesus says the hypocrites do) but with our soul; and therein lay the problem for Augustine. No longer was religion about faith, which is at its core a sort of knowledge, something “learned”; it was about a state of being.

When he sought to change his disposition, he found to his dismay that his will struggled with him:

“The mind orders the body, and the body obeys; the mind orders itself, and it resists… I repeat: the mind that gives the order to will could not give the order if it did not will to do so; but it does not do what it orders. It does not will with its whole being, therefore it does not order with its whole being… If the will were a full will, it would not give the order that the will should exist, since it would already exist.”

Augustine reasons that if he wanted something in his heart of hearts, he would not have to struggle the way that he does. There must be a part of his will that is not as committed as the rest. “It is not, therefore, such a strange situation, that one should will and not will; it is a sickness of the mind, which, even when uplifted by the truth, does not fully arise, being weighed down by its habit.” We are sinful from birth, and by habit only become more so. Consider the wet dreams which plague Augustine and which he sees as proof of original sin: even if he keeps himself pure when he is awake, his body betrays him.

Casting Lots

The climax of his conversion experience takes place, quite literally, by chance. Finding himself constantly subverted by his will, he turns to the Bible for advice. Instead of reading through it or turning to a specific passage that he knew and cherished, he opens it to a random page, putting his future in the hands of – he believes – God. The passage that he opens to proves fruitful: 

“I had left my copy of the Apostle Paul there when I had risen to go aside. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the first heading I cast my eyes upon: Not in riotousness and drunkenness, not in lewdness and wantonness, not in strife and rivalry; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts.” 

Taking the passage to be a sign from God, he resolves to change his life. But as we’ve seen from previous blog posts, true change cannot happen right away. Later, when his mentor, Ambrose, tells him to read Isaiah, he tries but does not understand: “But I, not understanding my first reading from him, and thinking that the whole book was similar, put it off, to be resumed when I was better versed in the language of the Lord.” Though he gives a semi-valid reason for putting it off, he is still shirking his responsibility. Ambrose believed him to be ready, so why put it off unless he was still not completely committed in his soul?

The use of chance as a way of determining divine will is very interesting to me (and will be the subject of its own entry). For now, it will suffice to say that cleromancy, the casting of lots as divination occurs with some frequency in the Bible, among pagans as well as Christians, which is strange given the warnings against divination (e.g. Leviticus 19:26).

Truth: Origins

Keeping all this in mind, especially his understanding of Platonic forms, let us hear about Augustine's theology.

Truth, to Augustine, is similar to memory. Both have the ability to stir intense feelings within us, yet neither can be apprehended physically. Memory, though it is of something that occurred, is in itself incorporeal. So it is with Truth, which seems to Augustine something that has always been present within us.

“My eyes say, ‘If they had colours, then we must have reported them.’ The ears say, ‘If they made a noise, then we informed you of them.’…Whence and by what route did they enter my memory? I do not know how; or when I learnt them, I did not take on trust somebody else’s heart; I recognized them in my own and affirmed that they were true, and put them away so to speak, into safe-keeping, to bring them out when I wished. They were there, therefore, even before I learnt them.”

He points to an instance in the Bible to emphasize the nature of Truth. When Isaac blessed Jacob over Esau even though Esau was the firstborn and therefore the one who should have been blessed, he did so because he was influenced by an abiding Truth that he could not have apprehended in any way except through the influence of God. Isaac "was counted worthy not to recognize his children and thereby to bless them, but to bless them and thereby to recognize them!”

Since Truth comes from God, who is unchanging, there can be no relativism for Augustine. In fact, it is relativism that engenders hatred. 

“Why, then, is ‘truth the mother of hatred’ [a quote from playwright Terence], and why does the man of God become an enemy to those to whom he preached the truth, seeing as men love the blessed life, which is none other than rejoicing in the truth? Why indeed, if not because they love the truth in such a way that whatever else they love, they define what they love as the truth.”

We call Truth that which fits in with our own beliefs, but beliefs are ever-changing and therefore cannot contain abiding Truth. Truth, if it is as inherent as Augustine believes, must come from an outside source, namely, God.


Truth: Understanding

One of the most spectacular things about Augustine’s understanding of Christianity is that this Truth that he ascribes to God is, though fixed, still open to interpretation. Translator Robin Lane Fox writes that Augustine views conflicting interpretations of biblical passages to be beneficial. “It may be more beneficial to entertain a variety of exegetical possibilities [provided none of them is per se wrong] than to commit one’s self to a single interpretation [however correct] at the expense of others.” Augustine assents, saying, “These words may be understood in such diverse senses, seeing as they are none the less true for it.” Moreover, obscurity and metaphor in the Bible is not there by coincidence or carelessness: “And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect.” Interpretation is key to Augustine’s Christianity, no doubt because he took so long to come to an understanding of God. We should be warned against blithely rejecting interpretations that differ from our own: “Rather they [those who reject conflicting interpretations] are proud and know not Moses’s meaning, but love their own, not because it is true but because it is theirs.”

Though any interpretation that is not per se wrong may be acceptable, Augustine still gives us guidelines for determining the authority of any particular interpretation.

Foremost for Augustine is Jesus’ command that we love one another. The Golden Rule is the ultimate measure by which to judge what is right and what is not. Augustine asks, “Is there any time or place in which it is unrighteous to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and to love your neighbour as yourself?"

Times change, he notes, and what is acceptable in one culture may not be acceptable in another. That is not to say that cultural relativism should be embraced by default, but rather it is important to understand that what can be done without “lust” – that is, for the glory of God – by one culture in one time may not be by another culture in another time, and vice versa: what was not acceptable in another time may be acceptable in ours.

This clears up two pieces of advice that seem conflicting. First: “Men are prone to estimate sins, not by reference to their inherent sinfulness, but rather by reference to their customs.” This is not a strange idea. Modern science has shown over and again that people are bad at estimating everything, and sin, according to Augustine, is not exception. But Augustine, like Christ, emphasizes that we should be part of society. “No one, citizen or foreigner, should by their lust violate the social contract that exists within a state or people, whether it is ratified by law or by convention; for loathsome is every part that does not fit into its whole.” The customs of our time are to be respected, just as Jesus commanded to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

Augustine therefore stresses that we above all obey the Golden Rule and use it was a metric for all else. Below that, we should follow the customs of our time, so long as they do not conflict with the Golden Rule. By no means, he seems to say, are we to estimate right and wrong by our own faculties. Truth, therefore, is not objective in the sense that X is always right and Y always wrong, but flexible and subject to hierarchy. In this way, Scripture can remain relevant throughout the ages. 

Stray Observations

• I got kind of bored writing this about halfway through, but hopefully that wasn't too evident (until now, I guess). Also, I was trying to keep it scholarly and minimize the proselytizing, so sorry if it was too preachy.
• Also, I used the Everyman edition of Confessions because it was a gift from my dad several years ago. I thought it was an excellent translation with insightful notes and introduction, although I've heard the Oxford World Classics edition is also highly regarded. I used the Dover Thrift Edition of On Christian Doctrine because it was cheap and used the Shaw translation.
• Augustine is probably the first semiotician. Throughout the entirety of On Christian Doctrine, he stresses the benefit of studying literary techniques like metaphor and being familiar with signs of various kinds. He dedicates several chapters to analyzing the different uses of signs and symbols, not just in the Bible, but in the world. 
• I didn't find a good way to return to the idea of vanity, but there's one other point I wanted to make about it. Augustine places a great deal of focus on counting. Above, he references the Bible verse about God having numbered hairs, and later on, he says, "The arrogant cannot find you, even if in their zeal for their art they number the stars and the sand and measure out the regions of the heavens and trace the paths of the stars.” Numbering the stars and sand, of course, would be an exercise in futility, just like counting hairs; but the latter is possible with God. Hence the idea of trying to count or number that which is essentially infinite -- or perhaps not active "counting" but simple "knowing" -- becomes associated with both the domain of God and the arrogance of men.
• Sin, for Augustine, is imitation of God: “Pride imitates exalted status…Idleness, too, aims for a kind of repose…Envy vies for supremacy…”
• “It is the dead who have lost their life, but the living experience death.”
• “The letter slays, but the spirit gives life.” (2 Cor. 3:6) He views this verse as providing an understanding of passages that seemed “perverse” when he read them literally.
• “You [God] use all things, knowing or unknowing according to the order which you know.” 
• “And I said, ‘Is truth a nothing, seeing as it is diffused neither through finite nor through infinite space?’ And you shouted out from afar, ‘No indeed! I am who I am.’”
• “Pleasure pursues things that are beautiful…whereas curiosity seeks both these things and their opposite, wishing only to try them out… It is for this reason also in religious matters that God is put to the test, when men demand signs and wonders not in order to gain salvation, but for the mere experience of them.” Also: “Men mostly lack understanding when they speak; they speak more of seeking than of finding.”
• “Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you… Since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.”