Reading Augustine. Jason Byassee
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sin (Genesis 3), but also Augustine’s first exploration in this work of the theme of evil as a mere counterfeit good. His young “unfriendly friends” formed a society that encouraged one another in evil, in a sort of demonic parody of the church, which is meant to be a holy society of friends, encouraging each other to virtue (47).
This book is often pointed to as an example of Augustine’s neuroticism, and proneness to exaggeration, over his past sin. James O’Donnell says in his recent popular biography of Augustine that if there are any titillating parts of Confessions, he has yet to find them!3 And sure enough, Augustine’s inner tumult over his past sin seems remarkably disproportionate to the gravity of the deeds actually committed. He says of his confusion between lust and love that the “two things boiled within me. [Confusion] seized hold of my youthful weakness sweeping me through the precipitous rocks of desire to submerge me in a whirlpool of vice” (24)—would that we wrote like that!). Of his theft of the pears he remembers his exultation then with pity: “I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it” (29). Historian John Cavadini calls our attention to the relentless rhetorical excesses in this chapter, often involving swirling, violent motion, as in the first quote above.4 He suggests this book is marked by an almost palpable sense of sadness, epitomized in its final sentence: “I became to myself a region of destitution” (34). Cavadini offers his own, more piquant translation: “I had made of myself a land of empty lack,” a desolate landscape. As Augustine explores the depths of his sin, his rhetoric is appropriate, even in its very excess. For sin with no purpose, no function, no explanation, is a perfect analogy to the theft of the forbidden fruit in the garden, by which Adam and Eve gained nothing, except the very wasteland of independence from God Augustine describes here: “It was foul, and I loved it.” The point is best made with a pedantic example, for sin is itself an abyss, a puzzle, an act without motive, a senseless rebellion against a God who cannot finally be escaped, a wandering into a trackless waste, farther and farther from one’s genuine self as one in communion with God. All the pears gained Augustine was “a few more satisfied pigs,” says Cavadini—it gains us nothing more glamorous or explicable either.5
For Reflection
. Are you surprised at Augustine’s level of horror at his past sin of stealing pears?
. Does his memory of his own pre-conversion behavior help you to reframe memory of past behavior you once thought trivial, but now may be seen with similar horror? Or is Augustine simply neurotic?!
. What do you suppose Augustine means by “curiosity”? Why would he consider this something to be avoided?
. What do you think of the description of sin and evil as a sort of lack or waste? Does it do justice to the palpable presence of evil we see in the world and in our own lives?
. Augustine looked to 1 John 2:16 as an especially important verse to reflect on his life. Is there a particular biblical passage that expresses how you have reflected on your own life?
1 I use the Latin here because the English cognate, “curiosity,” is a false one and would be somewhat misleading to use. Paul Griffiths, a great Augustinian theologian of our day, is presently at work on a book about curiositas in Augustine.
2 For more on this see the masterful work by Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). This book helps explain what early Christians thought they were trying to accomplish through ascetic practice. The book’s value is not only in Brown’s sympathetic ear to ancient voices, and his unmatched prose style, but also in his ability to help us see past the polemical attack on ancient Christian sexual renunciation bequeathed to us by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Modernity.
3 This from the author of the definitive modern three-volume commentator on Confessions! (see n. 3 above). The biography is James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). The biography has serious flaws unfortunately, which I describe in a review in Books and Culture (Sept/Oct 2005).
4 In “Book Two: Augustine’s Book of Shadows,” in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, ed. Paffenroth and Kennedy, 25–34.
5 Ibid., 34.
Chapter Three:
Book III
In book iii the pace of the Confessions begins to
quicken. As part of Augustine’s education in Carthage, he seeks to grow in eloquence by reading the great orator Cicero’s book Hortensius (now unfortunately lost to us) (39). We can catch a glimpse of Augustine’s view of his education by thinking of how today’s cynics view lawyers or politicians: as people who will speak whatever is necessary, regardless of the truth, to get their way and become wealthy. Rhetoric was of enormous political import in the ancient world, for those who could speak well could get their way with crowds, senators, emperors. Augustine remembers that he had been merely searching for more such lucrative tricks while reading Cicero, but instead found that the book “changed my feelings.” His prayers, desires, even his very loves, were all altered through the reading of a single book. His former hopes seemed vain now, and “how I burned, how I burned with longing to leave earthly things and fly back to you” (39). We might see this as the first of several “conversions” in the Confessions: the conversion from uncritical worldly ambition to philosophy.
Augustine’s ardor for Cicero’s work is cooled only by the noticeable absence there of the name of Jesus, which he had loved from his infancy as he drank it in with his mother’s milk (40). Turning back to the scriptures of the Catholic Church of his youth, he found them crude compared to the “dignified prose” of Cicero. So he fell in with the Manichaeans, a group that never tired of speaking of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit—they believed the latter had become incarnate in their founder Mani, as the Son had become incarnate in the man Jesus. The Manichaeans explained the brute reality of evil in the world as the result of a cosmic clash between two opposed principles: light (exemplified in the sun and moon) and darkness (seen above all in the evil of material existence). In this mythic battle some of the light has been captured, imprisoned in darkness, and can only be restored to the realm of light by proper action of the “elect” within the Manichaean community—actions such as eating cucumbers and sexual renunciation (before we Christians laugh too hard, we should remember the oddness of much of what we believe about good, evil, eating, and sex!). Much more could be said here,1 but suffice it to say that for the retrospective-looking Augustine, the Manichaeans were principally appealing because they had an explanation for the evil in the world, for which the Catholics left him wanting. Further, the Catholics were unable to account for the anthropomorphic depiction of God in their own scriptures (describing God in human terms, as having a “face” for example), and for the obvious immoralities of their own greatest biblical figures—the patriarchs.
That the Manichaeans’ erudition so appealed to Augustine shows that the learning of Catholics in Roman north Africa left much to be desired (and that the appeal of esoteric eastern religions began long before the hippies of the 1960’s!). Just think of Monica, whose fidelity to the church no one could doubt, but whose intellectual training in the faith is shown to be wanting several places in Confessions. In Augustine’s life’s work after his conversion he almost single-handedly redressed this wrong.
A final note on this book is the lovely depiction in it of Augustine’s mother Monica, especially in her prayers for her son. She drew some comfort from a dream that her wayward son would return to God (49). Yet she continued