The Bible and Western Culture - Part 1 - Augustine and the Christian Self

[Music] in many respects saint augustine is a pivotal figure in the history of western culture he's certainly the most important theologian in the his in the christian tradition in addition he serves as a sort of bridge between the age of classical antiquity and medieval europe with its christian emphasis he was a professor of rhetoric and a scholar a highly educated and intelligent individual who wrestled with formidable spiritual problems throughout the entirety of his life and he eventually ended up as a bishop in the catholic church but in addition as one of the doctors of the catholic church he is recognized as being one of the leading religious thinkers in the history of the west now he's particularly intriguing because his story is both very human and very moving he started out as a sinner who was remarkable for his transgressions or at least remarkable in his own mind for his transgressions and in addition to that after a period of spiritual searching and intellectual work in the direction of religious illumination and religious insight augustine did in fact convert he had a conversion experience and his conversion experience the story of his life which led up to the process of his conversion to christianity is the body of his book the confessions one of the most important texts in the western tradition now in the process of thinking about his own life working out the implications of what it means to be a christian the in this world working out a conception of god a conception of the deity conception of the soul and a free will he managed to create a sort of matrix into which other christian other christians will pour their experience and they will find that what augustine has formulated for them is not merely the narrative account of his own life but rather a sort of algebraic formula for all christian lives if you stop and think about the idea of original sin as it's presented in christianity you will find that all people are born sinners those who eventually get god's grace have a conversion experience and adhere to god's law have the chance of being saved thereafter but everyone starts out as a sinner so saint augustine begins as a sinner but then again so does everyone else that will be part of the point of his book when we examine it in detail in addition to the idea of beginning with sin there's also the idea of a conversion experience a turning of the corner a 180 degree turn around in the conduct of one's life we will find that this is also a characteristic feature of christian autobiography the christian sense of the self begins with an understanding of our own depravity and then moves with the grace of god towards some turning point some conversion experience in which the christian decides to forsake this world in which the christian decides to take seriously the injunction that my kingdom is not of this world and to pursue the kingdom of god outside of worldly concerns and worldly affairs after conversion experience characteristically a christian will devote themselves to spiritual concerns rather than worldly concerns this is certainly the case of saint augustine what he did then in writing the confessions is create a sort of form into which later christian thinkers both saints and would-be saints anyone who wishes to be saved he establishes certain mileposts along the journey of life and these mileposts will become the stock features of christian autobiography so he's important as a doctor of the church as someone who thought through contemporary intellectual problems on the other hand he is also timeless in the sense that he offers us insight into what it means to be a christian either at the time that he was living or in the time that we're living now now he became a saint by forsaking his sinful worldly ways by reading the bible by applying himself but his actions did not cause his conversion his conversions in his own words are the product of god's free and unbought grace so the grace of god influences augustine's orientation towards the world changes his understanding of philosophy and makes him a reborn man a new man it changes him so his movement from the sinful secular world of classical antiquity through various kinds of halfway houses in this case what are described as heresies in the tradition of catholicism in this case manichaeanism from these heretical postures to the true understanding of christian faith and christian uh belief is the story of augustine but it is also the story of every christian so there's a sense in which augustine is writing an autobiography that is impersonal which is a very odd idea a very peculiar thought we think of autobiography often as being the specific details of one individual life and we often think that it's the uniqueness of a specific life that makes it attractive or interesting or important augustine offers us an opposite view he says that what's important about his life is not the particular details of the sins he committed or the circumstances under which he had his conversion what is important is that he shows us the path that the pilgrim must take if the pilgrim intends to move from this world to the next if the pilgrim the christian pilgrimage tends to go to heaven now augustine uh lived between 354 and 430 in the declining roman empire he was a cosmopolitan individual born in north africa spent most of his time there but also was a professor of rhetoric in milan and also taught rhetoric in rome he had access to some of the most important texts and the most important thinkers of his day and what he was trying to do is find a spiritual path initially the spiritual path would be his own later on the spiritual path that he blazes will turn out to be the spiritual path for the majority of western christians and what he wants to do is negotiate between two extremes these extremes are represented in characteristic heresies of his day uh these are parts of christoph of the christian tradition which did not go which did not continue on throughout the centuries of christian history rather these are things that these are beliefs that grew for a small period of time were the source of both doctrinal and political fighting and then eventually they disappeared and collapsed augustine was instrumental in causing the collapse of certain heresies and in that way what he did was shore up the catholic church at a time of great political and moral upheaval now the two tendencies that augustine was trying to avoid or was trying to to steer a path between were called manichaeanism and pelagianism now manichaeanism had the greatest attraction for augustine and manichaeanism is a rather in some ways it's a rather intuitive treatment of the christian tradition it lends itself manichaeanism to a good account of the problem of evil and if you stop to think about this the scriptures and if you stop to think about the history of christianity i believe you'll find that one of the most difficult and perplexing and vexing problems in the history of the christian religion is the problem of evil the book of job is directed towards the problem of evil but also the idea of god's final judgment of eschatology and the last day when god will separate the sheep and the goats is another way around the problem that in this world we often don't see a correspondence between people's moral virtue and the results of their actions sometimes bad things happen to good people sometimes good things happen to bad people if we have a just and omnipotent and almighty god the question emerges how shall we account for the fact that there's this incomplete correspondence between people's merits and what they actually get one of the ways in which this was attempted or what this problem was uh people attempted to solve this problem was through manichaeanism now the originator of manichaeanismani was a heretical bishop and he he died by crucifixion he was eventually martyred for his heretical faith but before he did he managed to spread his doctrines quite considerably and they had a large currency throughout the mediterranean basin at the time that augustine is doing his work at the end of the 400s now manichaeanism states that the way in which we solve the problem of good and evil is by assuming that there are not one that there's not one god but in fact two gods an evil god and a good god and the entire history of this world of this world of space and time is in fact a conflict between the good god and the evil god thus we can account for the fact that in this world sometimes bad things happen to good people or good things happen to bad people on account of the influence of this negative force of this evil god of darkness in other words if you can imagine satan move from the status of a fallen angel up to the status of god and put in a roughly equal position then you have some idea of what the manichaean heresy was like now the advantage of this view is that it does seem to solve in a very neat way the problem of evil if something bad happens to someone who deserves good we know that this is the action of the evil god the downside of it is well there are at least two downsides of it from the perspective of a believing christian in first case it is not monotheistic it's polytheistic and we have then a very difficult time accounting for the origin of this second evil god if the good god did not create him well then he must be at least as powerful and at least as ultimate or absolute as god the father yahweh on the other hand if he's created by god the father if he's somehow the creature of yahweh well then we're back to the old problem of why did yahweh create such an evil god and then we fail to solve the problem of evil so the difficulty is is that either manichaeanism turns out to be a sort of polytheism or it turns out not to do the job that it was designed to do which to solve the problem of evil for this reason augustine struggles with manichaeanism and tries to find his way through this greatest of theological problems and what he decides to do is to move away from mannequins it takes him a period of years actually there's some 11 years between the age of 19 when he becomes philosophically active and whereas my reaches its adult status and the time and the age of 32 when he actually has his conversion experience he's struggling with these manichaean ideas and what's important about this is that he provided what is now the canonical rejection of manichaeanism in other words when manichaeanism was eventually described as a heresy by the catholic church some period of time after augustine what they did was was pick up augustine's criticisms of manichaeanism and bring it into the body of church doctrine so in some respects foundational beliefs within the catholic church were constructed by saint augustine and if for just that reason there are other reasons of course but if for just that reason that makes augustine one of the pivotal figures in the history of western religion and western thought now here's the problem that we find with manichaeanism or that augustine found with manichaeanism what he said was if it's true that there is a god who is as important as the good god an evil god that's just as powerful and significant as the as the good god who causes the evil in this world what it does is mean that we are a not responsible for the evil that we do for example if i decide to pick your pocket or to murder you it's not that i'm choosing to do this rather than i'm a puppet in the hands of this evil god the problem with that is that it removes all moral responsibility from us if that is the case then the moral skeleton of christianity will collapse in other words this makes christianity impossible if it is not polytheistic so the argument that augustine makes is that manichaeanism necessarily leads to moral fatalism and moral fatalism is the inverse of the christian stance towards being and that is a great contribution that augustine makes to the history of philosophy one of the reasons why manichaeanism declines as an intellectual movement in late imperial in in late rome is because of the fact that augustine provides these very powerful arguments against it in addition manichaeanism has as part of its religion a belief in astrology and augustine produced some very powerful arguments against astrology now that this may cause us to smile just slightly now because it seems that what could be more obvious and easier than producing arguments against astrology but back at the time that augustine was living around the year 400 astrology is intellectually serious and it is the kind of thing that has to be grappled with by cutting edge intellectuals quaint as that may seem now and the argument that he produces he and his friends he engages in a sort of socratic dialectic with a number of like-minded friends throughout the course of most of his life and the argument that he comes up with is a very persuasive and fine one one of his friends said the day i was born there was a slave in my household and she was pregnant just like my mother and the slave was born at exactly the same time that i was and yet the slaves fate was far different from my own thus it would seem that the stars have a most imp most dubious influence on the course of our lives augustine took that argument to be conclusive he wrote it up and it was one of the nails in the coffin of astrology as a serious intellectual movement and that of course helped to undermine manichaeanism still further now there's another tendency besides manichaeanism now of course augustine was more attracted to manukinism than to any other philosophy prior to moving to christianity proper because it solved the it appeared to solve the problem of evil when it turns out not to do that he starts to hunt further and look for other ways of getting out of this maze one of the ways which he inquired into and found insufficient was called pelagianism now pelagianism is the opposite kind of a moral doctrine the opposite kind of a heresy from manichaeanism pelagianism states that it's a very optimistic reading of christianity it was put together by a bishop named pelagius and what his idea was this that if people practice asceticism if they devote themselves to scripture and to doing proper moral behavior that any christian can be saved in other words it's not merely the arbitrary and amazing and un and incomprehensible grace of god rather it's a doctrine of works pelagianism the idea is that if you read scripture and you try and focus your soul on spiritual matters if you long enough if you long for god's inside enough and you hope for conversion it is possible and not only is conversion possible but sainthood is possible within the pelagian doctrine for any believer the difficulty is is that this is a perfectionistic doctrine this sounds like something that was borrowed from athens and then grafted on to the tradition coming out of jerusalem because of the perfectionistic tendencies within it and the advantage of it the thing that made it attractive to people is that it is perfectionistic it offers people a fairly sure path if they apply themselves diligently towards sanctification the difficulty here is that augustine himself attempted to try this attempted a doctrine of works attempted to force himself into a christian mold and found that all his works came to naught while it increased his anxiety about a lack of a conversion experience while working at conversion increased his despair about his sinful state he could not by any work of his own either intellectual or moral generate grace on his own grace according to augustine comes directly from god's intervention in the soul of the believer so the problem with pelagianism is that essentially it makes it impossible for us to have any room in our theology for grace it makes grace superfluous because we can manufacture our own apparently he overcomes pelagianism with the idea of original sin he says look the reason why the pelagian doctrine is not going to work why an optimistic reading of christianity is impossible is because peace people are intrinsically sinful since they are born sinful they are born concupiscent they are part of this world they need some conversion experience that does not come from them it is far too greek far too promethean to say that yes i can get connection to the godhead simply through my own efforts and through my own activities there is something terribly terribly arrogant and hubristic about the idea that we can save ourselves so augustine says he uh he that he wants to negotiate between these two alternatives which he finds unacceptable he can't accept manichaeanism because of its moral fatalism he can't accept pelagianism because of the fact that it is morally perfectionistic and the optimism that runs through it is essentially unscriptural it's unbiblical it leaves out the idea of original sin so with the idea of grace and the idea of original sin augustine has forged the weapons the characteristic constructs of western theology and he has undermined the leading pretenders to the throne of true christianity in other words he has found that middle ground which allows him to keep moral freedom and moral responsibility and yet hold on to the idea of god's necessary and amazing grace and by doing that he has established the domain of what is generally thought of as the mainstream of western christianity its theological domain but in some ways at least as importantly he has created the characteristic boundaries of the christian self which is a most remarkable achievement he has told us what the domain properly is of our own psyche of our own ego of our own soul he says there is a whole range of things that you are responsible for your behavior and insofar as it is possible your temptations your thoughts uh saint augustine emphasizes the importance of the internal life of the christian particularly his intentions and attitudes independent of actions so the key thing will be that we will be responsible for our behavior we will also be responsible for our evil intentions independent of our evil actions and this is the domain of our conscience in other words the conscience is something that is developed over a period of centuries it's not that it isn't there but its boundaries are demarcated with increasing degrees of precision over the centuries and saint augustine is one of the great figures in constructing the christian sense of the self telling you what you are responsible for and what you are not responsible for the conversion experience and god's grace it's out of your hands you are not responsible for it you cannot be held accountable for that on the other hand when you do evil it is not some evil god pushing you around you cannot slough off moral responsibility you are in control of the sins that you choose to commit so he is allowing us to demarcate the domain of the christian self now it is remarkable that he constructs this theory of the christian self and particularly the idea of conscience and the domain of our free will within the context of a deterministic theory of history augustine has worked out particularly in city of god or his the last of his great works augustine works out of theory of history which is providential god has had since god exists outside of time god is not temporal or spatial god has had the idea of all events within time within his mind from the beginning from the very from the very uh creation of the world for that reason everything that happens will happen in the mind of god is already known on the other hand from our perspective and this is very important in augustine's thinking distinguishing between god's perspective and the human perspective from god's perspective it's all done it's a done deal he knows where everyone's going from our perspective we still have to win the battle every day we must fight the battle every day and for that reason we are responsible and we are free within the domain of god's overall providence and god's overall determination of human history this may seem to be paradoxical it is one of the problems that augustine worked on at great length to reconcile philosophy and theology insofar as it's possible in the long run augustine makes the argument that theology cannot be perfectly made consistent with philosophy but insofar as it is possible we reconcile god's providence and determination of history with our own moral freedom by working on a two le by working on two levels one the perspective of human beings and other the inevitable and perfect and final perspective of god within each of these perspectives both freedom and determination apply god can work out the contradiction we just have a set of practical problems in our own life to take care of now augustine's confessions was written over a period of four years from 397 to 401 and what it is is an account of augustine's journey towards the word and it is a most remarkable book for a variety of reasons first reason augustine's confessions begins the tradition of western autobiography if you think about earlier works of literature earlier works of poetry they are not autobiographical in the same sense there were things like plutarch which told us about the lives of ancient greeks and romans but they weren't written by the individuals themselves involved augustine says i'm going to tell you the story of my life but it is not going to be so for some vain romantic reason you're supposed to be attracted by the particular incidents of augustine's life rather the reason he is going to narrate the events of his life is because it will give you a path from your initial state of original sin towards god's sanctification and towards god's grace you will not get there without god's help on the other hand he can save you from certain errors which may impede the prog the pilgrims progress that every christian must undertake so he's trying to give us a sort of push in the direction of grace but he cannot provide us with grace he can just say that that's something that god that's between you and god so augustine is pushing us in that direction and it is remarkable that he is always fascinated with words augustine was a professor of rhetoric and all professors of rhetoric are fascinated by words augustine as an infant starts out that's the first book of the confessions begins with his fascination with words and with his early childish ability to work with words he started to remember or to learn the connection between certain sounds and certain things in the world and he actually describes the process and one assumes that he doesn't remember it but rather describes it because he's seen his own children or his own child describes the process of come of being totally isolated from the rest of the human community to gradually learning words and learning that we could make the inside public we could make the inside outside by uttering certain sounds so it's this fascination with words that augustine emphasizes in the beginning of his confessions this will turn out to be very important because of his uh later job as a professor of rhetoric and most importantly these words will all be toddling baby steps towards the word with a capital w and that is the end of augustine's life that's the whole point the whole purpose the whole telos of augustine's existence so it is not accidental the emphasis and the the thematization of words and speech that runs entirely through the book rather we are seeing a man gradually accumulate enough words to the point where he can start to read the word where he hears the word and if you remember the first passage in the gospel of john in the beginning was the word well the word all little words small letter w words all those words gesture towards the big word and augustine's book is about his movement from little words to the big word that's what his book is all about and that's what his life means once we understand that we realize that we're not re reading a frivolous life of some rhetorician or some philosopher what he is trying to do is show us the necessary path for all spiritual seekers that ultimately find rest in god's word so we are now going to talk about the movement from words to the word it's worth emphasizing here also that in putting together the confessions and putting together this christian sense of the self augustine is laying the foundations for the middle ages for the conception of the world characteristic for the next thousand years or so that's one of the reasons why this has tremendous historical significance he's writing about 400. the battle of adrian opal which the goths win against the romans is has already been fought and the romans have lost it's very clear that the roman empire is falling in a mere 10 years alaric will sack rome at 4 10 and it's obvious that the roman empire is crumbling and remember that the fall of the roman empire was not an event it was a process and the process has already begun by the time that augustine is writing what he is doing then is altering the classical conception of the self the self as an image of virtue if you think about plato or aristotle the the great-minded man right the uh the the high-minded man that we see in aristotle's ethics what augustine is doing is forsaking and abandoning those classical conceptions of the self because it is clear that the classical age is ending and this of course fits in with the eschatological elements in christianity the old evil secular world the world of babylon is ending with any luck we will now move into a world dominated by jerusalem rather than babylon the holy city and that is what augustine is moving us towards he helps the believing christian because he lays the foundation for the christian sense of the self if the old archaic classical sense of the self is not satisfactory because it's aristocratic because it has a great many pagan elements secular elements augustine is going to say yes we can create a new conception of the self and this new conception of the self will help be the foundation of the western conscience so in addition to writing the first autobiography he is constructing the standards by which we would define an ego or a self or a cogito he has philosophical implications that continue down into the present day now there are 13 books to the confessions and that's an odd number it's not something we would expect perhaps it indicates you know perhaps it is numerological and indicates something about human imperfection and it's funny that just before saint augustine died towards the end of his life he reread his published works and particularly read the confessions and he quipped when he read them the first ten books are about me the last three books are about the bible and within certain parameters that's true it's a very oddly constructed book and particularly because the the form of it is so peculiar and unique we may be tempted to think that that this is just poorly organized and there have been two arguments two ways of thinking about the structure of the confessions one school of thought has it that the the key to the confessions is that first ten books he has he narrates his um his his life up until book eight where he has his big conversion experience by looking at the bible in book nine his mother dies his mother has prayed for mueller's life and once his mother is dead and he you know he is converted he becomes saint augustine well then the rest of the book is a long anti-climax it has been argued that the remainder of the book the last three chapters are essentially a kind of an appendix where he talks about the first parts of genesis in which he does some characteristic scriptural exegesis the other school of thought is the one i want to argue for i mean i can't be certain that which which is the best one to choose but the one that makes most sense to me is an alternative to that i see the last three books of saint augustine's confessions not as an appendix not as a post script that's tacked on later i see it as the culmination of his life in other words saint augustine has been longing for communion with the divine his whole life has been directed towards finding a path through the spiritual forest augustine knows he has seen the light he has seen religious illumination when he is able to read scripture and have scripture directly influence his life the implication here is as follows saint augustine's life leads up to a final point and the final point that his life leads to is the ability to read scripture if we understand that this book is all about words with a small w leading with the grace of god towards the word with a big w well then what's more appropriate that he should finish off the last part of his confessions with three books and of course we know the the symbolism of three from the lectures on the bible with three books about biblical exegesis what could be more appropriate what could make more sense so if you stop and think about it although it doesn't narrate the events of his life it does narrate the characteristic concerns of his soul and when you have met saint augustine when you have gotten your way through the first 10 books and you know what his life is like it leads right up to the present then you move into the timeless and spaceless and holy realm of scripture and once we move into that realm we have gotten to the point of our journey we have gotten to the holy city and that's what the concluding three books of augustine's confessions are like let me give you some of the details of his life because they're most intriguing and they form a sort of matrix for the other lives of the saints that you may encounter in the course of your studies book one is about words and also about providence talks about his early boyhood and talks about his fascination with words those of you who know the work of ludwig wittgenstein will find that ludwig wittgenstein was a great favorite a great admirer of saint augustine because of his emphasis on words and his emphasis on the ability to communicate he said here's someone that has obviously thought seriously about the human condition rather than bringing in a procrustean system like that of aristotle or plato or any of the the roman stoics what he does is go back and examine his life personally and directly from the inside and this is very congenial to wittgenstein's stance and it turns out later that wittgenstein will use many of the arguments from augustine's confessions in his own work on language so this although it is dated clearly because of the philosophical and theological stance that it takes there are philosophical ideas here which are of the greatest significance which will have a tremendous impact on the later course of western philosophy in book two we find out about sin now sin is one of saint augustine's favorite topics he is convinced of his own sinfulness and while reading the book i became convinced of his sinfulness as well but i was not quite as convinced of the degree of sinfulness that saint augustine was convinced of this perhaps is the is the necessary vanity of those who would write autobiographies they have to inflate their own importance and since augustine's early importance is as a sinner he gives you the idea that he's a magnificent sinner a tremendous sinner on the other hand i don't think he sees in the same league of say stalin or pole potty it's not quite the same league of sin but if you if you read augustine you would guess that he had done something at that level of evil now augustine's sins are his early sins are articulated in that second book the last half of the second book half a chapter of the book are about stolen pairs yes he's an adolescent and he likes pears and he's in with bad company so he steals them now of course for augustine for for us this may well be just adolescent foolishness we wouldn't approve of it but it's not the end of the world for augustine it is a sign of intrinsic human depravity he didn't really want the pairs he didn't have christian love towards his friends they were just out to do something devilish and they stole the pairs without any necessity of having them and the idea of transgressing is the is in some respects particularly for adolescence and attraction in and of itself well augustine takes this idea of the attractiveness of evil the idea that transgression has a certain a certain shine to it that is particularly uh alluring to adolescents he takes that to be a sign that all human beings are full of the blackest kind of wickedness and that this wickedness manifest itself in his life through the stealing of pears now again we may get the idea that he's over emphasizing this that he's hitting it a little bit too hard it's hard for us to see this is the greatest kind of depravity for augustine it's not so much the pairs as the inclination towards doing evil he says look everyone has that built into us that's why pelagianism is never going to work because everyone was born sinful and unless you get god's grace as a free gift from god there's nothing you can do but evil this will be very important later on in the history of western theology when luther borrows remember that luther is an augustinian friar when luther borrows this idea and says yes by faith and by grace is how you are saved you cannot do it yourself a doctrine of works will not work well what he's saying here is that yes i was sinful you are sinful if you don't have grace and the only way to get out from under that is a serious application towards a life of righteousness maybe you will get grace maybe you will not but the only way out of that morass is moving in this direction so we find out that he has stolen pairs and doubtless we have stolen other things or done some other transgression the point is not the pairs or the theft the point is if any of us look back on our lives if we are honest and serious with ourselves we will find that we transgressed not just because of some outside necessity we transgressed because we wanted to we transgressed because we found sin attractive and once we we bite onto that bait augustine has us hooked he says fine so i found wickedness attractive and so do you and what that means is that the only way out of this maze is through god's grace now books three to five of the of augustine's confession are about his battle with manichaeanism all right manichaeanism is a kind of gossip gnosticism which tries to solve the problem of evil but turns out to be unsatisfactory so he goes through a couple of books working his way through the ideas behind manichaeanism showing his gradual progress it's worth comparing augustine's confessions to pilgrim's progress if you know it because although augustine has proper names in his book there is a sense of a spiritual journey moving from this world to the next through the grace of god he punches our ticket all right well i don't know quite how we get there but the idea is that this is a sort of pilgrimage this is a movement a motion of the soul from this world to the next and the way in which it works at least for augustine is by intellectual struggle against manichaeanism now from at the age of at the end of book five augustine be moves to milan where he meets bishop ambrose now saint ambrose is again is also a very important figure in the history of catholicism because he is one of the leading theologians of the time and it is ambrose that introduced augustine to an important idea allegorical and symbolic interpretation of scripture and that is of great importance for augustine when he had been a spiritual seeker when he had been looking for a way to understand scripture because he'd been raised in the classical tradition new classical rhetoric a new you know the greek and roman writers when he read scripture it looked to him like straw it looked to him like dust like an inferior sort of a book because he was reading things like loaves and fishes as being about bread and fish right rather than being about symbolic questions he would read the parables as being literal and exclusively literal so he wasn't getting very much out of he said no this is just an ancient set of myths from the near east i can't take this seriously what ambrose does because ambrose is a scholar as well a leading intellectual and speaker what ambrose does is introduce augustine to the idea of allegorical interpretation and symbolic interpretation and a whole new domain opens up for augustine at that point he says this changed my life now i could finally see what was in front of me in scripture and his whole life turned around but the problem was this although ambrose was able to explain the nature of scriptural exercises to augustine and was able to explain difficult parts of scripture to augustine converting to religion is not an intellectual problem and augustine at the end of book seven when he's working when he's working with ambrose when he's trying to figure out his way from manichaeanism to catholicism by the end of book seven he's ready to convert he says yeah i see the point now i see the symbolic and allegorical interpretations now i see what's wrong with manichaeanism now i see how it is to get out of the labyrinth there's one problem i don't have the capacity in other words his intellect is convinced at the end of book seven but religion is not a question of intellect this is not platonism it is a question of the heart and the soul and there is more to the soul than the ability to reason so augustine finds himself in despair he describes his conversion experience most movingly in book eight when he says i was tearing my hair out i was like a man divided a particular i think he quotes from scripture and says uh the part of the gospel where it says a house divided against it itself shall not stand well he says i was a house divided against myself i was walking on and up and down shaking uncontrollably i was tearing my hair i was gesturing at the war at the walls i was he was acting crazy he was a man torn in two directions who intellectually is willing to buy into christianity but his faith the emotional the spiritual part of him has not made the jump yet and it must be it certainly seems to be a terrible circumstance for a human being gradually being torn apart internally it's a splitting of the soul what happens is this augustine is in this terrible state of affairs he's sweating and he's walking back and forth and he's tearing his hair out and he's weeping and he's having a very great difficulty and his friends don't know what to do with him no one knows how to solve a problem like that not then and not now and he hears and takes this to be a miracle he hears a child he couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl he later comes to believe that it's an angel but whatever it is it says the child's voice says take up and read take up and read take up and read well augustine is highly suggestible at this point and so augustine takes up and reads the handiest book available and of course for augustine at this point his life that will be the bible so what augustine does is open up the bible to a random passage and just read it and it turns out that this random passage is a miracle from god and this random passage allows him to break free of the snares of sin the snares of the flesh what he comes to is is a paul to the romans chapter 13 verses 13 and 14 and what it says there is quote not in drinking and drunkenness nor in lust and wantedness nor in quarrels and jealousies rather arm yourself in the lord jesus christ spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites for augustine this is the analog of paul's conversion on the road to damascus the scales fall from his eyes and he is finally able to give up his earlier life of sin he sends his mistress away because he liked sex a great deal he had often said the only thing that that prevents him from being a christian is the fact that he likes sex so much he said i would like someday not to not not to desire sex but i want that to happen some other time i think the prayer that he gives is oh lord this is before his conversion he says oh lord give me chastity incontinence but not yet well i'm afraid that quite a few people particularly those of us who like sex have often uttered that prayer we would like chastity incontinence but not quite yet it is a sign that augustine has made this spiritual renewal in the change from book seven to the to book eight where he is no longer willing to pray that he not be given continence yet he says i want all of moral virtue now i want god taken into my soul without any reservations once he decides that he will not spend his time in drinking in drunkenness nor in lust and wantedness nor in quarrels and rivalries when he decides to arm himself in the lord jesus christ he is willing to accept religion without any caveats without any restrictions and it is this unrestricted acceptance of biblical faith that marks augustine's conversion experience it demands not less than everything and that in many respects is again one of augustine's great contributions to the history of western thought those who would seek god must be willing to put up all of the chips on one bet you cannot bet a few chips part of your life part of your soul and say i'd like god on that basis god doesn't make deals you want grace you want to be saved well there's a wonderful passage from the scripture which is relevant to this the young man comes up to jesus and says lord what must i do to be saved and god says well jesus says obey the commandments and the young man says well all right i do all that tell me something really difficult and interesting to do because i want to be really good and he says okay go sell all you have and follow me and it turns out that the rich young man didn't want anything quite that spectacular he wanted something kind of in between the moral of that story as i understand it is that religious faith demands not less than everything it demands everything that we can possibly put up augustine when he had his conversion experience was willing to put up everything and it's not unwilling until he was willing to stake at all that he had the possibility of receiving god's grace he received god's grace under those circumstances and this is what turns his life around utterly this is the point where she decides to go and become baptized ambrose baptizes him in the easter of 387 thereafter he becomes a monk for several years and his great learning and his great intellectual abilities combined with his great piety caused him to become a bishop very quickly and becomes one of the leading doctors of the church now it is worth noticing that this conversion happens in book 8 of a of the confessions which has 13 books in it it's worth noting what happens in book nine when this all works out and he finds that he has been converted and he's gotten his his baptism his mother monica who is a saint in the catholic church dies and all through his life his mother monica who had been a believing christian has been trying to get saint augustine to convert she gets her own husband to convert she herself had always been devout and has spent all her life trying to bring her wayward and want and son back into the fold she dies happy because she has been informed that augustine has come to the church and as a result all her prayers have been answered a couple of things worth emphasizing here this is worth your consideration when you read the book in the first case she has a certain sort of telos or telos or purpose seems to be prayer and her prayers are answered it emphasizes the fact that god works in mysterious ways and in fact prayer is quite powerful more powerful than people might expect and certainly the prayers of the faithful ultimately are answered right it's not a doctrine of works but here we are seeing god's mercy and generosity being given to this woman before she dies rather than afterward a great kindness on the part of god but more important than that in some respects is that saint monica augustine's mother is in fact a personification of the church have you are you familiar with the term mother church well in fact when saint augustine's mother dies he gets a new mother a mother that doesn't die a mother that lasts forever he is accepted into the bosom of mother church so he actually exchanges us this worldly mother for an otherworldly mother or a a mother of space and time a secular mother for a divine mother the idea then is is that he never loses this connection with his mother and it turns out that if the prayers of his mother are answered consider how much more how much more powerful and how much more satisfactory the prayers of the entire church will be reconciling with this with the church is another is a way of reconciling with his mother before she dies in some ways it's the death of his mother and the transfer of his allegiance from her his family to the church that marks the end of his life story in some ways we could end the book there the last three books uh the last parts of the book where he engages in these scriptural exegesis are very important because they show that he has learned how to read the word and his whole life has been a journey towards that word and the process of reading the word is the source of his observations about time and eternity and particularly the choices of scripture that he includes in his confessions is important the last parts of the confessions are about the book of genesis and particularly god making the world and god saying let there be light the book of genesis can be read allegorically as a re-creation of the world in the soul of every believer who has a conversion experience the book of genesis god's creation of the world is performed over and over and over again in the soul of the believer and which augustine has done in this exegesis from genesis is show us how to leave this world for the next how to have the light of god's illumination brought in into our soul what sort of path the christian has to pursue genesis happens every day according to augustine and that's why it's it's proper for him to finish his book not with his own death not with his mother's death but with a rebirth into the eternal truth of scripture

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Bible, Augustine, Christian, Self

Id: iWcQM0YsKmQ

Length: 45min 39sec (2739 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020