felix hominum

there is a difference between nostalgia and memory

I''ll have to confess that we had ocassion to rent the latest incarnation of Brideshead Revisited.  The movie lacked a great deal;  it missed many of the central themes of Waugh's work.  Most notable, it mistook mere nostalgia for memory.  In a brilliant little piece of writing, Thomas HIbbs pointed out some of the shortcomings of the film's treatment of Waugh's text:

The desire to arrest time, to hold onto the present as if it could be preserved from age, is a powerful human motive—one at the root of art itself. (In both the book and the film one cannot help but think of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”) While the film’s focus is on guilt and lost innocence, Waugh’s focus is on the way faith overcomes the limits of romanticism regarding innocence and the past. It is not simply, as Lady Marchmain severely puts it, that time and eternity are at odds with one another. Instead, the task of faithful memory, or desire recollected through grace, is to discern the workings of providence in and through the moments of time. Thus, time itself, ordinarily an instrument of decay, can be redeemed, as the moments of time are gathered, rather than dispersed.

What the film makers did was to reduce memory to mere nostagia.  It is the sort of mistake I see again and again in the life of the Christian church.  And I see it operating in at least two ways.  In its most obvious and plain form, nostalgia supplants memory by a sort of romantic longing, with the past as a reference.  It is a form of reference to Golden Age theory (we might call it).  All starts out well and goes downhill from there.  In its fundamental Anglican form, one can see it in the 1549 preface:  "There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted."  On the other side we have a form of philosophical Darwinism:  remnants in the Church (which is always "behind" the culture) of ideas of progress, evolution, and a necessary moving beyond all that has come before. 

Nostalgia is a convenient tool for both camps:  in the first case it allows for mere longing, and in the second case it is used to reinforce a notion that what has gone before must be treated in a merely nostalgic way.  The notion of memory, however, is quite different.  Memory (and Augustine gives us insight into this) is really a power of the soul - the ability to be free (to some degree) of the contstraints of time.  Memory helps us to be part of the communion of saints, and not merely to be nostalgic about a golden age.

St Augustine, Confessions, for Trinity Sunday

Book XIII

Chapter XI

12. Who can understand the omnipotent Trinity? And yet who does not speak about it, if indeed it is of it that he speaks? Rare is the soul who, when he speaks of it, also knows of what he speaks. And men contend and strive, but no man sees the vision of it without peace.

I could wish that men would consider three things which are within themselves. These three things are quite different from the Trinity, but I mention them in order that men may exercise their minds and test themselves and come to realize how different from it they are.

The three things I speak of are: to be, to know, and to will. For I am, and I know, and I will. I am a knowing and a willing being; I know that I am and that I will; and I will to be and to know. In these three functions, therefore, let him who can see how integral a life is; for there is one life, one mind, one essence. Finally, the distinction does not separate the things, and yet it is a distinction. Surely a man has this distinction before his mind; let him look into himself and see, and tell me. But when he discovers and can say anything about any one of these, let him not think that he has thereby discovered what is immutable above them all, which is immutably and knows immutably and wills immutably. But whether there is a Trinity there because these three functions exist in the one God, or whether all three are in each Person so that they are each threefold, or whether both these notions are true and, in some mysterious manner, the Infinite is in itself its own Selfsame object--at once one and many, so that by itself it is and knows itself and suffices to itself without change, so that the Selfsame is the abundant magnitude of its Unity--who can readily conceive? Who can in any fashion express it plainly? Who can in any way rashly make a pronouncement about it?

Chapter XII

13. Go forward in your confession, O my faith; say to the Lord your God, "Holy, holy, holy, O Lord my God, in thy name we have been baptized, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." In thy name we baptize, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

St Augustine, on Good Friday

for us he was unto thee both the Victor and the Victim,
and therefore Victor, because he was the Victim
for us he was unto thee both the Priest and the Sacrifice,
and therefore the Priest, because he was the Sacrifice
...I meditate upon the price of my redemption

Confessions X, xliii

St. Augustine gets his own MySpace page

By Kaitlynn Riely
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- St. Augustine of Hippo just got a whole lot hipper.

The fifth-century doctor of the church, perhaps known best for "Confessions," an autobiographical account of his conversion to Christianity, now has a MySpace page.

Michael Dolan, the director of communications for the Augustinians of the Province of St. Thomas of Villanova, said he started the page on St. Augustine's behalf as an engaging way to introduce visitors to St. Augustine and the Augustinians.

"The focus of the page is to give people a deeper sense of who Augustine was, but also to get them engaged in Augustinian spirituality," Dolan told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview.

The popular social networking Web site myspace.com allows users to post pictures and information about themselves on their personal pages. All users -- and now St. Augustine -- can add other users to their list of friends.

As of the afternoon of June 12, St. Augustine had 87 MySpace friends, including two named Pope Benedict XVI; two fellow saints, Sts. George and Brigid; some guy named Josh; and Canadian singer Celine Dion.

From CNS, via the Sheepcat

You can see St Augustine's MySpace profile here.

His interests include:  "praying, writing, reading, rhetoric, preaching, hanging out with friends."

augustine on biblical interpretation...

intus utique mihi, intus in domicilio cogitationis nec hebraea nec graeca nec latina nec barbara veritas sine oris et linguae organis, sine strepitu syllabarum diceret:  'verum dicit'...

Confessions XI.iii

Unless you read a bit of Latin you probably will depend upon a translation in order to understand what Auggie saying here.  He has been writing about Moses, to whom Augustine attributes authorship of Genesis.  Augustine engages a basic question:  how does one hear and understand (audiam et intellegam...), how God in the beginning made the heavens and the earth?   Hmmm, well, a pretty straightforward and simple project of interpretation if there ever was one.

Augustine's first impulse is to address the issue of reaching the author of a text:  what if he were able to converse with Moses, to speak with him?  Would that answer the fundamental question about the origin of creation?  The first problem is language.  If Moses spoke to Augustine in Hebrew, it would be useless, while if Moses were to converse in Latin, then it might be more profitable. (XI.iii)  But then Augustine comes to a foundational question:  how would he know whether or not Moses spoke the truth (...an verum diceret)?

And here at once is the most dangerous and most comforting of realities.  In reading the Scriptures and seeking for meaning, he has to look

intus utique mihi, intinus in domicilio cogitationis nec hebraea nec graeca nec latina nec barbara veritas sine oris et linguae organis, sine strepitu syllabarum diceret:  'verum dicit'...

External forms of assistance in reading the Scriptures are helpful (author, language and context), but the kind of knowing which Augustine searches for will be found 'within' him, in the inward house of his thoughts, where truth ['Truth' - as in the second person of the trinity, in whom 'are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge' X.xliii ] speaks to him without the form [= limitations?] of human language.  Augustine ends this introduction to the question of understanding creation with a rather non-academic sort of plea:  parce peccatis mea - "pardon my sins". 

Mercy comes before knowledge, and understanding the meaning of scripture is dependent upon the presence of the Word.

[Side note:  do you ever just mindlessly close the door to the bathroom, even when you know that no one else is home?  Just wondering...]

I'm going to try to have a further look at Confessions X-XII while over in the middle east, so there might be sporadic bits of this in amongst pictures of bedouin campfires and such...whenever I find an internet connection...

augustine, briefly, on good friday

for us he was unto thee both the Victor and the Victim,
and therefore Victor, because he was the Victim
for us he was unto thee both the Priest and the Sacrifice,
and therefore the Priest, because he was the Sacrifice
...I meditate upon the price of my redemption

Confessions X, xliii

What Augustine read in the books of the Platonists; or, why metaphors don’t raise the dead.

In Book VII of the Confessions, Augustine tells us how he read “certain books of the Platonists, translated out of Greek into Latin.” (VII.ix)  “Therein I read”, he tells us, “that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  He discovered the truth of what we might call the immutable nature of God.  As well, his reading of philosophy lead him to see that these “Platonists” has grasped an important principle:  that God made the world, indeed there is something within God’s own self (Word) which makes creation possible.

“But that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, did I not read there.” (VII.ix)  Drawing from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, Augustine tells his readers other things he “did not read” in the books of the Platonists:  “that he made himself of no reputation, and was made in the likeness of men, and humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross, whereby God has highly exalted him…” (VII.ix)

This is the scandal for the Platonists, the Gnostics, and all the sects from then ‘til now who would have us believe that the Word was with God, but that he was not made flesh and dwelt among us.  There are those who think the former, without believing the latter.  To know Christ as the Word, without knowing Christ as the Incarnate Word, is an exercise in missing the point. 

They offer little comfort at the graveside:  metaphors don't raise the dead.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

Augustine sees Scripture anew

Well, there you have it.  By the end of Book V Augustine has mostly despaired of finding the big T truth from the Manichaeans.  He has run across some sceptics who would argue that we can't really know these sorts of things for sure.  Yet he wants a kind of certainty about these questions.

In Book VI of the Confessions, Augustine tells us that he little by little is becoming acquainted with Ambrose, Bishop of Milan.  It is about this time that Augustine again takes up some reading of the Scriptures.  While the whole book speaks of Scripture, there is a little line in VI.v which has again caught my attention:

I ever believed, both that thou wert God, and hadst a care for us, though I was utterly ignorant, either what was to be thought of thy substance, or what way led or brought back again towards thee.  Seeing therefore mankind would prove too weak to find out the truth by the way of evident reason...for this cause was there need of the authority of Holy Writ.
(VI.v)

Let's take this one step at a time. 

• Augustine believes that there is a "God", but is still thinking somewhat in materialist categories ('what was to be thought of thy substance').  His old sect was materialist:  God is, or has, a 'body', sort of the way we have pictures of a kindly grandpa sitting on a large white throne;
• He believes that this God is not detached ('hadst a care for us').  This God, whomever he may be, must have a relationship to the created world and to humanity.  This God must be different from the absent gods.
• He is unsure of how to be "led or brought back" to this God.  He is at wit's end (the limits of reason) as to how he can know the divine.
• There are limits to natural reason.  This can take two forms:  either one might say that reason is clouded by the Fall, or one might say that unaided human reason is insufficient to grasp the Divine.

Humanity cannot ascend to God solely via reason and intellect. As Donne puts it in the Holy Sonnet, reason proves to be either weak or untrue.  And so we come to the question of "the authority of Holy Writ".  There must be speech from the other side.  As Augustine hears Ambrose expound and preach, he slowly realizes that his own view of God has limited his ability to understand the 'sense' of the Scriptures.  And it is a mutual relationship:  as he grows in understanding the Scriptures, he will come to have a better, truer view of God.

aside #1:  while Plotinus & others would claim to have reached up to the Divine via the Platonic ascent (pure or modified), they always "fall out" of the vision of God.  The relationship cannot be sustained by unaided reason.

aside #2:  many in Anglican circles speak about the relationship between scripture, reason & tradition.  While the three work together, I submit that there is a linear relationship.  It is not a ruling triumvirate.  It is interesting to note that while Augustine addresses scripture and reason in this section, he also draws in what we might see as tradition:  the living teaching of the bishop (Ambrose) faithfully carrying out his calling in the community of the faithful - the Church.  Thus we can see a relationship between all three at work in bk V.

aside #3:  the problem of "authority" is a problem of pride.  Throughout the Confessions the question of Scripture is related to the question of human pride.  I suspect little has changed.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

Confessions V: three sorts of journey

In Book V of the Confessions, a remarkable number of events transpire which move Augustine both geographically and spiritually.  In V.i he gives us a hint of what is to come in philosophical terms:  “the whole creation is never slack in thy praises”, which leads the human soul to contemplate nature, and so to raise itself up toward contemplation of God.  The soul leans “itself on those things which Thou hast created” and so also passes over to “Thyself, who hast made them”. (V.i)  This is the basic form of the Platonic ascent, as outlined in the Republic:  we move from shadows to caused things to the cause.  Augustine will find that as he learns more about nature, he will become disentangled from the Manichaeans and so will “rise” up toward God, the source and creator.  There are of course echoes of natural theology and Romans 1 in here.  In V.iii Augustine compares piety with the ‘natural philosophy’ of the day, liberally sprinkling his text with quotes and references from Romans 1.  The philosophers examine nature, and they “discourse truly concerning the creature, but the truth, the Architect of the creature, do they not religiously seek after.”  This is a theme he will repeat later in VII – the “Platonists” understand the Word as Creator, but stumble when they dismiss the Word made flesh. (VII.xx,xxi)

In V.ii Augustine begins to write of what we might call providence.  The God who created has a concern for his creation, and even if the creature is morally or spiritually estranged from Him, He has not “given over” the creature.  Throughout book V he repeatedly writes of incidents which cause him to slowly but surely fall off from the Manichaean heresy.  [I’ll say more about these later.]  In hindsight he attributes these to the principle of Providence.  “Thou dealtest with me therefore, that I should be persuaded to go to Rome.” (V.viii)  The geographic move to Rome was indeed providential:  Augustine left behind the Manichean Bishop, Faustus, he left behind Carthage (to Carthage I came, burning, burning), and he also leaves behind his confidence in the sect to which he belonged.  In his new geographical setting he meets another Bishop – Ambrose, and begins a new stage in his journey.  “To him was I led by thee, unknowing, that by him I might be brought to the, knowing it.” (V.xiii)  Here again Augustine writes as though it was God who was directing these “movements” in his life:  from Carthage to Rome and Milan;  from a bishop of the Manichees to a Bishop of the Church;  from confidence in his sect to skepticism.

He begins a further questioning of things related to Scripture (V.xi) and discovers certain weaknesses in the approach to Scripture which the Manichaeans hold.  He began to listen to the “speech of one Elpidius”, who argued for the Catholic interpretation and position.

And the Manichees’ answer seemed but very weak to me:  they would not give their answer in public for an open hearing, but only in private, among their own followers.  Namely, they said, that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been corrupted by some unknown persons…but they themselves (the Manichees) failed to produce any uncorrupted version.
V.xi

[note to self:  I wonder what Augustine would have made of the Jesus Seminar?]

He has moved in place;  he has moved philosophically, and now he begins to move spiritually.  In all 3 of these the older Augustine, writing this text, sees the hand of God.  It is a reason for hope.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

power, love & glory: Augustine, Confessions IV

All sin is a false imitation of God.  As Augustine wrote in book III, our various faults seek to imitate the goodness of God in some respect.  In book IV of the Confession, Augustine highlights some details of his life after he took up with the Manichaeans:

• he began to teach rhetoric, and was taken up with its power to "overcome others" (IV.ii)
• he kept a mistress, "not joined to me in lawful marriage", but nevertheless he "truly kept the promise of the bed" (IV.ii)
• he recalls the incident of "seeking the prize" in a theatrical poetry competition (IV.ii)

So what is happening?  Augustine is seeking after power, love and glory:  it is a trinitarian way of looking at sin.  As all sin is an imitation of God, so we can also come to understand sin in terms of a false imitation of God the Trinity.  Power, love and glory are for Augustine, ways in which we begin to understand the Father, Son and Spirit.  And so we also come to falsely imitate God in these ways. 

Augustine came to see in rhetoric that one could have power over others:  an imitation of the power of the Father, from whom are all things, and from whom is all power ("you would have no power over me, were it not granted you from above").  He continues to seek after love, seeking in his "faithful" yet non-married relationship a kind of love and mutuality which is a pale imitation of the incarnate love shown by Jesus.  And Augustine begins to seek for that public attention, that self-centered affirmation, that glory which is an imitation of the Spirit.  But of course, the Spirit bears witness to Christ, and does not draw our gaze toward himself.

Seeking for these things (power, love and glory) is in one sense an expected occurrence.  We are made in the image of a God who is Trinity, and both the virtues we have and the faults we have will reflect something of the nature of God the Trinity.  On the negative side, it is easy to see how the temptations to a wrong use of power, love and glory work in our own lives and the lives of those around us.  Yet we desire those things because we are meant to experience them in the context of our relationship with God.  It is perhaps more difficult for us to see how power and glory can be "good", because the major examples we see come from the world of politics or celebrity lifestyle.  Yet Jesus gives his followers authority (power) over the presence and effects of evil (cast them out in my name), and we look forward to being changed from glory into glory.

As we contemplate power, love and glory in God, and as He grants grace for us to imitate Him, we come to experience the fullness of what it is to be made in the image of God:  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

Why did Augustine fall for the Manichaeans?

Or, how six inches of muddy water can pretend to be as deep as the ocean.

Out of all the religious options on the buffet of beliefs, cults and practices available in the Roman Empire, why did Augustine fall in with the Manicheans?  They were dualists, seeing the basic principle of things as the opposition of good and evil.  But this kind of opposition of good and evil has a particular form, which we will look at later.

For now, in Confessions III.vi Augustine writes that he fell in with these "proud" men, who were carnales nimis et loquaces.  They were "carnal", that is, they were materialists.  The principles of good and evil appeared to him as material principles, and the Manicheaens' explanation of the world was essentially a materialist explanation.  Previously, Augustine noted that he was consumed with his attraction to the physical body - looking at a human being as physical only, without the spiritual.

This type of religion is, I think, at least partly the logical extension of his lust.  It is the religious form of lust.  It is craving a material, physical explanation for good and evil,  thinking that the physical world will provide everything that can satisfy a human being.  Augustine writes in III.vi:  "...sed secundum sensum carnis quaererum" - he was seeking after God only in a physical, material sense, only using the faculties of the body, not the mind.

[note to self: in a sense, this allows one to posit that moral choices are equal to physical conditions, that moral choice has only a material cause, and that what we are is reduced to our physical, material reality]

The Manicheans were also loquaces - they were eloquent, they could speak well.  Augustine already had compared the simple style of Scripture with the eloquence of Cicero, and Cicero won that battle.  Here again, it the the outward beauty of the words, not their content, which appeals to him.  The Manichean's also had this:  they had a "mixture of the syllables of thy holy Name, and of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter". (III.vi)  That is, they combined the names of the familiar Christian faith with teaching contrary to the Christian faith.  They made the 'Trinity' (or rather a pale generic god dressing up in Jesus' name) a bit more palatable to Augustine.  And palatable is the correct word.  Something can taste good (appealing to the physical senses) without providing any nourishment for the soul.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

 

Augustine's "love" of wisdom

What pleased me in Cicero's book was his advice not to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it and embrace it.  (Confessions III.iv)

At the age of 19, Augustine read Cicero's Hortensius, a work now lost to us.  As you might gather from the title, the work was an exhortation to philosophy.  Which sounds good so far.  What Augustine got from the book, however, was the idea that he should love wisdom itself, "whatever it might be".  A rather adventuresome 'voyage of discovery', so to speak.

What was this general love of wisdom?  It seems akin to the popular claim to be "spiritual" in a generic sense.  That is, the appeal of this course is that one doesn't have to be actually committed to one thing or another, but just love the idea of wisdom.  The verbs Augustine uses to describe this initial excitement about wisdom will be used again later in the Confessions, when he sees that Wisdom is not a "whatever", but has a definite shape, form and name.

Augustine's mother, Monica, had been a faithful Christian.  With the sound of the name of Christ in his ears and memory, he decides to give the Scriptures a go, thinking that he might find this "wisdom" somewhere in them.  His reading of Scripture is less than successful at this point (III.v).  Compared to the eloquence of Cicero's style, these books of the Christians are a bit rustic in flavour.  Like many before him and since, his pride kept him from understanding what the Scriptures had to say.

There is something essential about the attitude with which one approaches Scripture.  Augustine has it right:  one needs to stoop the neck in humility in order to gain the heights of Scripture.  The young Augustine is unwilling, and so unready, to gain from reading revelation.  Like his desire for the outward beauty of the body in lust, so also he is attracted to the more beautiful language of Cicero.  He is judging people and books by their "outward appearance", rather than by their inward content.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

love and lust: augustine & eden

But what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind--the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire.

Confessions II.ii

If you have to ask someone if he'll still love you tomorrow, then he doesn't love you tonight...  I know I have never intentionally set out to use anyone.  But we are judged by our fruit.  The fruit of casual sex is the persistent habit of objectifying sexual partners, to the point of being unable to perceive people except in terms of how they relate to one's own wants and desires.

The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On
Dawn Eden

Here the young Augustine begins to tell of his struggle with sexual sins, a struggle which will plague him for many years to come.  In her book, Eden tells us of her own journey, and I suspect she and Augustine might have had a fruitful conversation or two.

What Augustine found himself doing is quite aptly described by Eden:  the objectification of the person,  seeing him/her only as a means, reducing personhood to body as it serves my desires.  In this way, the sexual sins of Augustine are somewhat like the sins of a glutton.  The food is there only to be consumed.  Yet there is never a point of being satisfied, of saying "I am content".

wandering footnotes:

A]  There is so much even in our church culture that points to the sexual experience as the greatest, "highest" and most fulfilling form of relationship - the stuff of which the "Jesus is my girlfriend" sort of contemporary worship music is made.

B]  I think a group of young guys were a bit surprised once when I said that they should expect that they will most likely have to practice sexual self control in marriage, most noticeably when and if they decide to have kids...  :^)  which seems ironic.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

book review:  The Thrill of the Chaste

lost the books...

I was going to do a bit of follow up on the whole Carthage burning burning thing, but that will have to wait.  When it comes, it will also include some thoughts on Dawn Eden's book "The Thrill of the Chaste", which I finished a day or two ago.  The two dovetail nicely, perhaps intentionally so on Eden's part.

But in the midst of all this there was an event at the kindergarden last evening.  It was a sort of Dads (or special friend) & kids evening, which involved getting together with other dads and our kindergarden aged children & sitting around making crafts, singing songs, and building some sort of bird feeder thingies.  You can tell the novice dads because they brought hammers, and no needle nosed pliers.  We experienced dads brought needle nosed pliers, in order to hold the nails at a safe distance while a kindergardener wails away at the nail with all her might.  The experienced dads can use their fingers today.  The inexperienced dads have no bone structure left in their digits.

In anticipation of the evening, as SJ & I loaded our backpack for the stuff we would need, we emptied mine of things we would not need for the evening.  Things like books. 

"I put your books away, daddy."

"Thanks, SJ.  Do you remember where you put them?"

"No.  Don't you remember where I put them?"

To Carthage then I came, burning burning

To Carthage then I came    

Burning burning burning burning    
O Lord Thou pluckest me out    
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

TS Eliot:  The Wasteland

Veni Karthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum.

Augustine Confession III.i

"Alberta jails are banning nicotine patches because some inmates are smoking them, releasing toxic fumes."

CBC Edmonton news story

connect the dots...

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

Pears, power and pretense: augustine & the second temptation

In book II Augustine recounts the episode of the “theft of pears”.  He will return to this episode again (as will I).  He stole some pears.  He thought that he “got away with it”, and thus showed how “free” he was.  But as he recounts, it was a “counterfeit liberty” (II.vi) like the pretended freedom of a runaway slave.  At its heart, sin contains a counterfeit of goodness, and the temptation to it contains a lie.  For now I want to look at this episode in light of the second temptation of Christ, according to Luke’s account:

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.   If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Luke 5: 4-7

What is this temptation about?  Yes, it is about the desire for power and glory, and the incorrect means of obtaining and using those things.  But underneath, in the subtle (remember the garden of Eden) layers of this temptation, is a well disguised lie.

“I give it to anyone I please”.  Now on the surface the reader is tempted to take these words at face value, as a true claim by Satan.  Yet the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; and as Jesus stands before Pilate, he tells Pilate that he would have no authority over him, had it not been granted from above.  Is not the devil lying in this temptation?

Which brings us back to Augustine’s theft.  The temptation to sin always contains a lie – a promise of something which it does not really have the power to deliver.  And so it was in the Garden of Eden – the first temptation began with a lie (you will not die, you will be like God!).  Temptation and sin always contain a falsehood and a counterfeit.  Just as sloth makes a pretense of peace and quiet, and vain ambition hides behind the name of ‘honour’ (II.vi), so all sin pretends to give us good things, but it is a lie.

The young Augustine believed that to commit a sin and escape unpunished would mean that he was free from God’s authority.  After all, why obey a God who doesn’t have the power or will to stop a crime?  And in this pretense to liberty and freedom we find many of our own sins.  God does not see.  God does not act.  If I do this, then I will be free, I will be like God.  The same lie found in the Garden is still with us.

ps  For those who think St Augustine had no sense of humour, I refer you to II.viii, where he asks himself what he gained from this episode of the theft of pears:

Quem fructum habui miser aliquando in his, quae nunc recolens erubesco...

Get it?  What did I, wretched man, have as the fruit of these things...  Augustine is not above the occasional  groaning pun.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

Those wretched, wretched babies

Of all things for which Augustine is remembered, perhaps the most notorious is his description of what we have come to call a theory of "original sin".  Leaving aside the history of that idea, we see Augustine writing about the "sin of my infancy" (I.vii).  "For in thy sight can no man be clean from his sin, not an infant of a day old upon the earth." 

I have written elsewhere of the proof of "original sin" which I have seen exemplified in my very own household.  But what is this all about in the Confessions?  Augustine sets out a few principles in the first few chapters of Book I.  In chapter vi he gives us a description of how our present nature reflects God's intention in Creation:  the harmony seen in the nursing mother and the hungry child reflects something of the original goodness of Creation.  The mother provides (and even needs to provide) for the infant who needs the milk.  In this relationship their is a kind of harmony.  Yet, Augustine writes, the infant goes beyond wanting what is necessary (vii), and there is a universal desire to "have more" than what we need.  He writes that "I myself have seen and observed a little baby to be already jealous;  and before it could speak (literally the meaning of in-fans) what an angry and bitter look it would cast at another child that sucked away its milk from it." (vii)  The infant, he says, is capable of a jealousy of others, even though that particular infant is fully fed and has all it needs.  It is this reaction of jealousy, this self centredness, which leads Augustine to write:

...it is not the mind of infants that is harmless, but the weakness of their childish members

If the will of infants could be fully expressed, it would be mayhem beyond belief (side note:  we see remnants of this in the toddler's sandbox).  We "grow" out of childishness - on many levels.  Yet the root of sin is there:  the desire to have more, the desire to have it all, even though we have what we need, and a covetousness of others.

He is fascinated by infancy - the age at which one does not speak - and how it is that we come into speech.  His theory of speech in I. viii seems to leave no doubt that speech, for Augustine, is 'natural' to the rational mind made in the image of God.  Speech gives us access to a whole new 'world';  not just in the next stage of human growth (puertia), but in our ability to grasp rationally universal ideas, and to realize that there exist beings besides ourselves.

Augustine - the Lenten blog project series

Augustine's Confessions - the Lenten blog project

William Watts, Rector of St Alban's, London, took it upon himself to translate Augustine's Confessions as a Lenten discipline in the year 1641:

This translation I began for the exercise of my Lenten Devotions;  but I quickly found it to exercise more than my Devotions:  it exercised my skill, (all I had); it exercised my Patience, it exercised my Friends too (for it is incomparably the hardest task that ever I yet undertook.

I was taken by the words of Wm Watts (found in the preface to the Loeb edition) - I found his Lenten project to be intriguing, and have thought to myself that one day I would also walk with the Confessions through Lent.  Since first reading the Confessions almost 25 years ago, I must say (I dare not write 'confess') that Augustine has been a rather faithful companion to me.  For the next 40 days I intend to blog my way through Augustine's Confessions.

There will be a mix of posts.  This will sometimes be commentary, sometimes reflection on how the Saint's writing has made its way into my own discipleship, sometimes mere query as I peer into things of which I haven't the foggiest notion.  Once in a while I may descend into the Latin, at which point I might refer to the critical editions, if for no other reason than to give some people an excuse to put Latin on their blogs (...fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te).  For the most part I'll follow then the Loeb edition and Watts' translation (though I will depart from some of his translation for my own).  I've had several excellent teachers over the years, and so in advance I will claim no great originality in the posts I write (except in cases of abject stupidity - that alone is mine).

Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde:  magna virtus tua, et sapientiae tuae non est numerus
Thou art great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised:  great is thy power, and thy wisdom cannot be numbered.  (I.i)

It is perhaps a radical departure from contemporary practice to start with God, rather than ourselves.