"The City of God," by Saint Augustine of Hippo (Part 1/2) | Graham H. Walker and David J. Theroux

good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is David Thoreau and I'm the founder and president of the CS Lewis aside of California I'm delighted to welcome you this evening to our event actually the first of two events were holding to discuss the enormous ly influential classic Christian book Christopher book and Christian philosophy entitled the City of God by Augustine of Hippo the second of our two events on this book will be held two weeks from tonight for those of you new to the CS Lewis society we are a nonprofit Christian educational and cultural organization interested in advancing deeper understanding of the life works and ideas of CS Lewis and others who are addressing the enduring philosophical cultural historical literary theological social and economic issues of mankind we invite you to visit our website Lewis society org for further information in this regard you'll find information about the Lewis society book and film club which this is these are two of the meetings in this regard you will also find a schedule of upcoming events and we welcome your participation on a website you can also find information about Lewis about all of his books focus about him CDs DVDs and so forth and we invite you to become a member of the CS Lewis society with a tax-deductible contribution originally written in Latin and published first in 426 ad the full title of Augustine's book the City of God is after the on the City of God against the pagans and it was written in response to allegations that Christianity was responsible for the decline of Rome written by one of the most influential Church Fathers the City of God is one of actually five major books by Augustine for our next two events on the book we're delighted to have and clean tonight we're delighted to have dr. Graham Walker to lead our discussions Graham is the executive director of the independent Institute he received his PhD public law and government from the University of Notre Dame and its illustrious career has crossed many areas including administrative work in the college level he's been a professor at Catholic University of America in the University of Pennsylvania he's been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study a senior research scholar at the Witherspoon Institute he's been a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a legislative aide to former congressman David Stockman he's also the author of two books which I recommend one is entitled moral foundations of constitutional thought and the other is the ethics of FA Hyack so I'm very proud to introduce Graham Walker it's a pleasure to be here thank you all for coming and I'm putting my watch here you know because having taught for Oh almost 15 years in the college classroom I found that I was trained to speak in 55 minute increments without stopping and so I don't want to do that and I can go on and on so I'm going to be pausing as you will see to ask you interact with some of the material with me so you know be prepared for that and of course the other thing about putting the clock up here is because I really don't want to go too long when I was a professor I used to get these teacher course evaluations at the end of a term at the end you know that students they will write you know different numerical rankings and they'll put comments at the end and then after it gets digested by the bureaucracy at the university you get them back and you're not supposed to guess at whose handwriting is written at the bottom of the sheet what their name anyway one student wrote the bottom of the sheet if I had only 20 minutes left to live I'd want to spend it in dr. Walker's class because of dr. Walker 20 minutes feels like an hour that really happened so as David explained we are going to be discussing st. Agustin's work the City of God and the coming to directly to that text very shortly here let me give you some preliminaries some of this may be old hat to many of you may be new to others so bear with me if it's if it's familiar we read a guest and now for many important reasons not simply because he is recognized as a major figure in the Canon of Western thought which he is but the reason he's recognized for that is because of his accomplishments some have titles him the second founder of the Christian faith or some the third after you know Jesus and then Saint Paul he is considered to be in Western thought the originator of modern conceptions of the human will as you'll see perhaps in some of our discussions shortly many in many credit st. Augustine for introducing into Western thought the concept of history which has dominated us ever since the early centuries of Christianity namely the idea of history as having a beginning a middle and and and moving forward as opposed to the classical Greek idea of history is a cycle repeating itself he is credited with being the precursor of modern psychology because of his self-reflective writings a very interesting man there are his dates 354 to 430 a pivotal time he was born in Togashi in north africa some of you may know that his mother was Monica Saint Monica after which we've named Santa Monica in California um his father Patricia's Monica was a Christian although she had someone shall we say constrained theological views his father Patricius was a patrician pagan and the mother and father had their differences over how to raise the son not surprisingly the father prevailed which led to the pathway which he took for the major portion of his life which I'll come to in a moment what did he look like well there are different accounts so in the 6th century fresco was made currently hanging in the ladder in the silica in Rome probably as an older man why did Shelley painted him this way in 1494 obviously focusing on his scholarly output and 1639 Peter Paul Rubens portrayed in this way but as usual roben seems more interested in the wonderful flesh of the cherubs that he does in this his subject being an African of course somewhat speculative lady he was darker and more Moorish looking anyway well have been it's it's not you know absolutely clear in some ways romans of his era were less attentive to ethnic and racial differences and so that they seemed to matter less but perhaps he looked like this this was an icon from somewhere in the centuries after his life I don't know who created this one he's probably most famous for his book the confessions cover copy they're the confessions is fascinating because in the confessions he addresses the whole thing to God while he interrogate his own soul that's why it's called confessions it's not really admitting to sins it's kind of confessing who he is to God probably with the City of God his most famous work most influential work because it's so introspective people said this is the first really fully introspective psychological work of Western thought not surprisingly as John Jacques Rousseau later titled his own very introspective work confessions but of course if you read the two side by side you'll see that the one is addressing God all night and the other is addressing well I guess himself or something certainly at the very least you can say that a guest in stands at the start of headwaters of a stream of self-reflection that turned out to be quite important probably the most famous passage in the confessions comes at the close of the first paragraph of the book where he makes this famous statement thou hast made us for thyself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in the incredibly beautiful statement of the truth of our position biblically I think that this is supposed to be a rendition of his mother with him at the point when he's reflecting on his life neither of them looks too appealing right there I like the other pictures of him better but still this is incredibly beautiful quote in the confessions we learned a number of interesting autobiographical details about Agustin and by a boy parenthetically when I went to graduate school a question arose amongst the students is it Augustine art is it Agustin my professor who was trained in Europe said was German he said oh no no Augustine is the city in Florida Saint Agustin is how you pronounce it so you know to fit in nicely with my professor I went along with that and learned it I'm not sure whether he's correct or not however in any event it's an it's an anglicized version Holocaust Aeneas so you can take your pick I'm going to say my custom so we learned some biographical details about Agustin in the confessions that are interesting the thing that characterizes all of his work is an acute almost raggedly acute perception of human sinfulness including very much his own and he illustrates this with a story when he's still more or less a prepubescent boy which many famous works of art this is not famous this is a work of art taken from the story you may have heard the story of the pears okay so he and his mates are going along and decided to steal some pears off of someone's pear tree over a wall and he reflects on it in a way that he thinks reveals there's something very strange about human sinfulness human wrongdoing which is that the pears he wanted them not because he was hungry not even because they were beautiful but simply for the sheer malice of stealing them because they throw them on the ground the subject has been perpetually interesting to artists this is a modern like 19th century English rendition of the same kind of story with more or less English children instead of the North African ones they're looking up at a pear tree - this story has captured people's attention why do people do what's wrong oh we said well you know they need whatever they can't get sometimes true and oh well they have a bad upbringing sometimes true he had a good upbringing but they pull away the layers of unpleasant cultural formation and you still get what Agustin later calls original sin this propensity this unruly malicious propensity now of course as he got older Agustin began dealing with the whole next range of human temptations dealing with his burgeoning manhood and his perception of the attractiveness of women and so forth and he laments profoundly in the confessions how deeply astray he went in the misuse of his sexuality and so again one of the things that characterized his work as we'll see later is a very clear perception of the problems with human sexuality as well as its glory although he has trouble with that but but he he recognizes it he was so a fraud about his misuse of his adolescent and young adult sexuality that he wrote this beautiful line in the confessions this is book 11 chapter 2 was there no one to lull my distress to turn the fleeting beauty of these newfound attractions to good purpose and set up a goal for their charms so that the high tide of my youth might have rolled in upon the shore of marriage a beautiful question if only it had rolled in upon the shore of marriage he would have been much better off and so what his son I do notice and so would the woman by whom he bore the son and and so forth anyway clearly a lot of self-knowledge reflected in this beautiful quote eventually the young man goes through a series of intellectual and personal crises he was raised on kind of classical rhetorical Ciceronian thought influenced by the Stoics and then turns to a time when he flirted with man icky ism the idea that somehow human body is evil and only human spirit is good and that were just spirits trapped in bodies but he was so disgusted by going to see the proponent of manikyam Faustus was his name and that he turned away from manicures that couldn't be it and then he turned to neoplatonism and finally he began to listen to the sermons of st. Ambrose Bishop of Milan and in hearing Ambrose the proclamation of the gospel of Christ he eventually saw that the light he began had begun to see through the Neoplatonic philosophy was actually emanating from this wonderful historical risen man Jesus Christ but he still couldn't bring himself to commit to it and so the story is told by Agustin in his confessions how he struggled in a walled garden and this is for Angelico's depiction of the struggle that he went through he struggled and struggled and he finally just threw himself on the ground and began to be in tears he had a Bible with him he had been looking through it but hadn't been able to well what was it exactly not fine through the existential satisfaction that matched the intellectual wisdom that he was discovering he wanted the whole thing not just the rationality of it and so he was in torment and heard voices of children as it were outside the wall saying pull a leg yato a leg a take it up and read it and so well I don't recommend this as a Bible study method and even Agustin himself didn't recommend it as a Bible study method he grabbed the Bible flung it open at the first page it happened in Romans chapter 15 where the text in st. Paul says put on the Lord Jesus Christ therefore and take no thought for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof it is shocking why does God allow that it's bad PR for him I think perhaps it's a good reflection of how God understands that we are both rational as well as more than rational I won't say sub rational Thaman more than rational well certainly that was the case for Augusto and so he put on the Lord Jesus Christ and set aside the struggle and he he said it was like a light from the heaven was piercing his soul and his mind and he got up told his mother who was waiting I guess that's his mother off to the side there you know at that point fretting over him no why is that oh well yes you're right I don't know who it is then Frangelico may have had a good imagination anyway so Augustine came fully into a personal experience of the risen Christ which matched the intellectual clarity that he had been gaining thus his conversion and with his conversion came this incredible flow of reflection and energy the confessions came out of the City of God came out of it many other books David mentioned five great ones and they're even more than that it's quite an incredible corpus and in the course of his work he essentially synthesized what he received from the Bible so I mentioned history well obviously the Hebrew people before Christianity was even thought of had a beginning and a middle and they were looking for an end that wasn't new but a Gustin gives it a kind of a civilizational presence in the Roman world through the Christian faith that if that idea hadn't had before similarly human will the Old Testament doesn't necessarily speak of the will but it certainly speaks if the heart of man is setting your heart right and turning your heart and so forth very much in line with what modern people think it is the will this contingent turnable thing that we have the ability to come to to turn and control and he articulates this it's from the Bible but it's through classical philosophy it's the same with so much else of his work so he is known for a few key sort of slogans here's a few of them you may have reflected on these or heard these before trade they boot and tell aghast is probably his most famous aphorism believe in order that you may understand which is a very interesting way of connecting faith and reason it means in context something slightly different from what one might think that is to say believe and then you won't have to think about understanding kitchen will just accept it on faith that's actually not what he means what he means is that when you receive from the Bible clarity about the universe and its meaning then it enables you to answer the questions that your rationality have has already formulated it's like finding the key that fits the lock so it's not a matter of finding the key and throwing away the lock it's a matter of finding the key to get in the lock if you see what I mean believe in order that you may come to a full and complete understanding without which without belief you'll get a partial understanding like st. Paul before him Agustin is very far from saying that without divine revelation human beings know nothing of the truth no no indeed Saint Paul himself says that it's because they know the truth and set it aside Romans 1 same thing with Agustin unregenerate man without access to divine revelation indeed gets a good deal of the truth so much so that he's without excuse but still doesn't really fully understand the next one is related actually it's kind of odd you might not think of this but do be to ergo sum as a kind of rendition of something that he says in the eleventh book of the city of God this was a statement he formulated against the group of philosophers called the academics who were known to be sort of I'm an is skeptical like a lot of people today you know people that they say well it's not that I don't believe in God there's not that I do believe in God I just think that no one could ever know anything finally we're always in a continuous state of perpetual uncertainty because you know we could be misled and so you know we can never land anywhere because it could always be mistaken and so what appears to be humility of course ends up being a kind of finality that that posture of uncertainty concern about possibly being misled actually hardens into a dogmatic practical affirmation of knowing nothing against that he really thought and he said he was against the academicians who said what if you are deceived because he said we have to believe he and something in order to know anything he said if I am deceived then that means necessarily that I am and therefore I can't even have the experience of being concerned about being deceived without in escape ibly affirming that I exist and then of course if so you it's not only that you exist this you know you exist and it goes on from there some people think that this all originated with Descartes cogito ergo soon it's actually doobie - ergo Co Jeeto ergo soon but there's much more to it and Descartes was probably consciously simply drawing on the tradition first articulated by Agustin we can't actually be learners without realizing that we know something is basically what what do be - ergo sum means and credit in telecaster and then fides quite the quarians and to look to him another Latin scholar faith seeking understanding a similar formulation this is juxtaposed when we look at the history Christian thought with shitali and back in the late 2nd century who had said something like I created though quia absurdum I believe it because it's absurd like apparently that's not quite fair to till telling he may not have been quite that fidei istic he did say however this is totally who had said the son of God that the Son of God died is utterly credible because it is unfitting and the resurrection is certain because it is impossible that's what Tertullian had said well those are somewhat aesthetically appealing word games but Agustin would have none of it and he thought sertoli was wrong and some later philosophers simply said credo quia absurdum was Tertullian philosophy if it was it was certainly quite different from st. Agustin's so we're going to turn to the City of God and I have recommended that you get this edition or at least the translation that's contained this is the Modern Library Edition here and is translated by Marcus Dodds it has an interesting introduction by Thomas Merton which is actually worth worth reading even though Merton tends to veer off on the mystical a little bit I recommend reading Thomas Merton introduction nevertheless and so this is my copy of a 1962 edition of the modern library the trouble with it is that as you can see it's kind of falling apart cause this is my favorite book and and so I have to treat it very gingerly the trouble does have all the good places marked in the book so I can't get rid of it yet so I'm so I'm gonna cope with this so let's begin let's begin now I'm beginning I'm beginning that at the beginning David indicated the beginning at the beginning of this namely that the book was occasioned by the pagan irritation complained that it was sort of the weakening of Romani toss which had led to the fall of Rome against the German barbarians this was written I think after the second or third sack of Rome you know there was a sequence of them until a final kind of fall and when the barbarians took over they hadn't taken over yet but it was after one of those sacks that this was written augustins response to the question was interesting and complex his basic response you might say was know not so in fact contrary to what some of the high Empire Roman thinkers claimed which was that Christianity had feminized the men and weakened the Empire and therefore they couldn't fight effectively because they didn't have the you know the gumption they had lowered the testosterone level or something like that was the caustic complaint he said no to the contrary Rome had weakened itself by betraying its own principles the shift from the Republic to the Empire in particular being an illustration of the problem Marone betrayed her own principles and undermined herself by giving in to corruption and self-love self-absorption led to the weakening of Rome which led to the fraying of the Roman cultural fabric which led to the vulnerability to the barbarians and God's providence was behind this whole thing a very strong claim you know nowadays if people are Christian believers of some kind in this yeah well God did this or that or gods causing something in Jerusalem this week or something everyone's well probably those are exaggerated claims at the moment when I here than most the time but Agustin made a very strong claim that God's providence was behind the basically the rise and fall was wrong God honored the Romans because of their excellences comparatively God brought the Romans to retributive decline because of their sinfulness and he allowed and arranged for the barbarians to take over and this was all kind of a process of moral desert across history providential history is essentially what Agustin I was arguing so um much more could be said about you know the introduction to the book I'm skipping over because we can't possibly read the whole thing in two sessions or talk about him so if you got this email from David Thoreau you'll see that there's a reading guide and I think there are copies of it back there if I'm not mistaken if you don't have the reading guy so I chosen a few bits and the bits are essentially from book 5 where I'm going in a second then books twelve or fourteen today which is all about the order of creation and the fall of man and then two weeks for today we'll look at books 15 18 and 19 which is where the social and political stuff gets articulated it's it's all really really good I mean the whole book is fabulous but these parts are my favorite and many people find them more accessible than other parts but not very not very as you'll see it's it's heavy going I remember I first taught this in Philadelphia to undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania and they were squirming because you know if you're an undergraduate at an Ivy League university you know that smart people don't believe in God and that none of your parents friends at your cocktail parties in suburban Long Island or in Great Neck New York believe in God and then the kids you went to Paris with on your you know interim year between prep school and Ivy League believed in God and so you know smart people don't do what Agustin does which is constantly quote the Bible launch into pans of praise and prayer to God then immediately plunged into interaction interactive argument with Roman philosophers and the tradition in which he works if there supposed to be a separation of church and state well people think they're supposed to be a separation of like God in mind whatever you say about church estate certainly a Gustin doesn't believe in separation of God and mind and so my undergrads of 10 were offended indeed they were offended and so I it took me a lot of sort of you know pull them along with me because I said okay okay yeah I know that you know this is just lets get inside of his mind and see how he thinks before you decide that it's you know to be to be set aside as antiquated or whatever and it's so grudgingly um you know I learned how to teach the class to this group of interesting and smart kids at the University of Pennsylvania they were able to understand the Roman part a little bit because this is sort of moral psychology okay so well yeah I'm gonna get the Rome in a second I'm starting with this quote from book 14 chapter 28 which is sort of a summary of the whole book I'm coming back to Rome so I just lost my train but coming back to Rome in a second this a statement about the two cities is probably the most crystallized formulation Augustine says accordingly two cities have been formed by two loves the earthly by the love of self even to the contempt of God the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self the former in a word glories in itself the latter and the Lord as you'll see in a bit when he says two cities he means two citizenry's to people groups formed by two loves now some people say that Agustin says yeah there's the love of God and the love of self and you've got you the one or the other that's not quite accurate if someone said to you yes a guest and teaches that you either love God or love self having read this statement right now you would respond to that person by saying well let me clarify that and what would you say that person says well either you love God here's love self it's like binary what would you say by way of correction to that based on this yes sir you can love the list there is a natural hierarchy to respect precisely and that's signified by what words in the sentence even to exactly the words even - mm-hmm much better than my pen students even - so the point is not to have one instead of the other but rather to the trouble is when you love yourself even to the point when it's contempt of God because your regard for yourself is greater than any perception you may have of God or broaden it out to permanent truths to which you're accountable ultimately you may recognize though but decide yeah I need to do what's you know in my interest that's the love of love of self even to the contempt of God love of God even to the come to terms of self is more difficult it's a little more difficult for a classical Christian theologian because contempt of self is problematic and why would contempt a self be problematic yes namely right so if you have contempt for yourself that means you have to have contempt for your neighbor wait a minute that doesn't make sense so exactly that's why it's problematic and is he overstating it here perhaps ultimately but you see in so many ways his thinking comes out of the existential edge of his own awareness of fallenness and disorder so in fact if you're honest with yourself as he was trying to be you will see that there do come times when to do the right thing really feels like pulling your arm out of the socket it feels like killing yourself to do the right thing you know I mean not to put too fine a point on it but comes to mind someone who's pregnant doesn't want to be who says my life is over and then it's you know it's my life versus the other life and if it's a life versus a life then of course self-defense is more legitimate but that thought itself of course is somewhat rationalized because indeed there is another way there's another way and but that feels like the other way it feels like I'm giving up my whole life and it feels the same way with you know love relationships that we all may have and ones that aren't suitable there are unhealthy and for one reason or another what if what if it's a person that's not your spouse and you have a spouse but you're in love with this other person to pull away from that person it feels like a ripping your heart out does it not or can really can it's not easy you really have to look says what Jesus probably said you know if your eye offends you pluck it out and then we say well you know Jesus it's just exaggerating well yes and no I mean he's making a point because in fact there are times when to do the right thing it's excruciating ly painfully and you have to be willing to die die to yourself dietary future side of your hopes died your feelings anyway the way the world is so messed up as it is things get entangled knots and it does come to a point where you have to choose to love God even to the contempt of your very self but of course Jesus had provided the ultimate solution to the conundrum when he said you know if you lose yourself for my sake you gain it and so thus you gain your real self right your real self is not the self that's committed to your own satisfaction your real self is something deeper and you may not be totally in touch with your real self most of us are not much the time anyway you can see how complex the thought is here and there are two citizenry's are formed because people have this kind of orientation a gravitational pull of one love over the other ver and the vice-versa and they tend to aggregate birds of a feather in a way and so there's two cities one thing I would like to point out to is that the book is called the City of God and I have seen people write even and treatises and give speeches and so forth saying that well yeah Gustin says there's the city of man and the City of God and so you're either in the city of man of the city of God now the problem with that statement is that I have yet I mean maybe it's there in some occasional laughs but I have yet to find him use anywhere in the text the phrase city of man now why would that be do you think he doesn't say city of man versus city of God he says the heavenly City and the earthly City he says elsewhere the earthly and the heavenly right here in this passage so why doesn't you say heavenly City or City of God versus city of man why doesn't he use that formulation if not Marcus he's already on this point with me I suspect I can tell those eyes why wouldn't a gust and use that city of man or city of God excludes Devils for one thing exactly interestingly Devils immaterial evil spirits they are earthly in the sense that they are oriented toward the opposite locust from God so that's one reason there's another probably yes save us come to Saint Valentine and he's not supportive define the city of man as opposed to the City of God is unintelligible is humaneness at odds with the divine precisely so ultimately ultimately humanists and the divine are not at odds because Christ became incarnate and if they were ultimately at odds like the Manik you so it said then it would be impossible but in fact humaneness it was created so everything about agustín's thought in some ways can be summarized with these polls of biblical theology between creation and fall Agustin is acutely aware of fall like many others after him you might say that that side of Agustin resonates with Hobbes resonates with sought and others that acute awareness of the disorder and distraction and meaninglessness and pain and so forth and yet he can't bring himself to reject the human experience intrinsically because on the sixth day God created man the only female created he them and he said it's very good human nature is very good so consequently the problem is not image and so we don't want to say that's right Earth I would say it's not the lake or possibly possibly Romans 8 translation terrestrial related in that way but when st. Paul is saying that our humanity dinar in current this isn't bad there's the flesh that this thing is it yes and as you'll see as we get into book 13 essentially that's the resolution as a matter of vocabulary you might be right it would it might need to be a better word about what he means by earthly is that oriented to earth to the exclusion of heaven so you can hold on to that quibble though you may be entitled to it yes yeah earth oriented earthbound yeah by a division material world right he says elsewhere as I'll show you later this evening at one point he says that it came to pass that man who should have been spiritual even in his flesh became fleshly even in his spirit so this understanding of the fall and creation and how their fallen creation aren't two opposite things there is creation and there's the fall right this is bigger this is smaller you might say this is not zero a stream dualism by definition it's asymmetrical rather than symmetrical because creation is bigger and more powerful than fall and ultimately whose death will be swallowed up in victory right that's what it says in 15 yeah okay so this view of Christian fall of the heavenly and earthly animates his understanding and his valuation of the Romans which is he the first answer in the book why did they fall he says of the Romans in book 5 chapter 12 glory they most ardently loved forth they wished to live for it they did not hesitate to die every other desire was repressed by the strength of their passion for that one thing so this is a very interesting analysis of the Romans especially the early Romans the nobler Romans the better Cato being their great embodiment perhaps historically he says that they repressed other desires by the strength of their passion for glory he notes however in the same chapter as I have put here there is no true virtue except that which is directed toward that end which is the highest and ultimate good of man so if you're trying to organize your personality and you organize it with regard to an ultimate end which isn't really what its ultimate end is you're going to mess things up you'll disick walibi ate yourself and so he's not saying that the Romans and their glories and their excellent ability to repress their bad impulses and so forth the early Romans he's not saying that they were just right but he was saying that they did manage to repress it profess the bad stuff in chapter 13 he says nevertheless they who restrain baser lusts not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety or by the love of intelligible Beauty no Christianity or Platonism but by the desire of human praise or at all events restrain them better by the love of such praise are not indeed yet holy but only less base they're less base so the Romans loved praise and honor so much that they repressed a lot of bad impulses which made them effective as fighting forces made them culturally effective made their laws potent and powerful the Romans really did push aside a lot of distractions which they later absorbed but but which they could have been distracted by at the beginning but they weren't and he puts it this way he says wherefore through that Empire examples are set before us in order that we may be stung with shame we Christians may be stone was saying if we shall see that we have not held fast those virtues for the sake of the most glorious city of God which are in whatever way resembled by those virtues which they held fast for the sake of the glory of a terrestrial city and that too if we shall feel conscious that we have held and fast we may not be lifted up with pride okay now this is a complicated thought unpack it a bit the key pork part is what I put in bowl they resembled true verge the Roman virtues resemble to true virtue they resembled them and so what he's basically saying is that God is a moral relativist well not really but what I mean by that is that God and therefore agustin with God is trying to be with God reasons both from an absolute scale of judgment by which the Romans are holy found wanting and by a relative scale of judgment by which they found you know relatively good they resembled their virtues resemble to true virtues why do they resemble traitors because to illustrate it with a really homely example um you know before the night before the big game with the college or high school football team the coach tells the guys stay away from the booze and the women tonight because you've got the big game tomorrow we don't want you all confused or whatever you know pretty basic stuff and so so that you know there's I stayed tough all night and they play the big game whatever now that may be because they're gonna like let loose later but they do get the basic point that you know you've got to discipline yourself in order to achieve anything good similarly I used to speak to my students in Philadelphia about the strange pattern of life that they many of them admired and aspire to they wanted to all be hedge fund managers in Manhattan and they all want to have a place out in the Hamptons and the pattern of life that they seemed often to be aiming at was you know they're like a go go go Monday through Thursday like push really hard and be acute and disciplined and make hard choices and so forth get you know push themselves hard get enough sleep don't drink so that on late Thursday night or in a midday Friday they get they get in there you know BMW and head out to the Hamptons and you know let loose through their drugs or whatever on the weekend and then back together because they can't really they know they can't sustain their life unless they compromise with virtue they don't want to live virtuous life but they had to make a compromise they give in a little bit they yield to virtue just enough likes to sustain their lifestyle so they can do the crazy you know this vise full things on the weekends but but it's a it's a seesaw back and forth but still they see they have to repress their vices in order to succeed in life same thing with the ROM the same things with all of us the ROM is just we're quite remarkable according to Augusta because they took it further they loved glory success victory over other nations they loved to see that the preeminence of Rome and the majesty of her laws being extended over the known world and so they were relatively self restraint they had a pretty orderly society until they didn't he says of them the Romans were good according to a certain standard of an earthly state notice the kind of the relative judgment this is now he's not damning them he's he's affirming them and critiquing them simultaneously he says it is not true virtue it's just a slave of human praise how true that is how very true that is if if you want to be praised and you figure you're gonna say and do whatever you have to do to get praised you're the slave of the praise I mean politicians who basically say what's my position you know on this issue well let's see what do people want to hear oh that's what they want to hear according I'll say that they're slaves for their audience right if you're this if you want praise then you're the slave of your desire to pray you're the slave of those to whom who will confer upon you the from the praise so he says though nevertheless they who are not citizens of the eternal city which is called the City of God in the sacred scriptures are more useful to the earthly City when they possess even that virtue then if they had not even that and isn't that true people are we are all better off if our fellow citizens are comparatively restrained if the murder rate is down if the drug use rate is down if the domestic violence rate is lower you know we could say well until it goes to zero I'm going to be totally dissatisfied and it doesn't matter well we shouldn't be satisfied until it's at zero but at the same time we should be glad if domestic violence rate drops it's an improvement in the situation for a lot of people so there's this comparative moral judgment they which he finds the Romans wanting and he finds them also admirable simultaneously pretty intriguing way of looking at sort of secular virtues so the the ordinary believer and the pew might say well you know can non-christians have moral excellence but of course there's a stupid question the obvious answer is yes but agustín's the answer kind of gives her the underlying dynamics of that you can have higher and lower forms of comparative virtue he says that Cato deserved more praise than others for example because he really although he did love glory he loved his countrymen he loved his home and he was willing to sacrifice a great deal to walk away from power all good all admirable and yet maybe also rooted in this kind of fatal spiritual psychology some people summarized his teaching as saying that Agustin teaches that the virtues of the Romans are were resplendent vices resplendent advice as well moving on I'm going on to book eleven except I'll pause because you might have something to say about the Romans yes so there are these two citizenry's these two people groups constituted by this glue that holds themselves together personally and that exists amongst one another the glue of their respective love pattern and so he says I will endeavor to treat of the origin and progress and deserved destinies of the two cities the earthly and heavenly to it which as we said are in this present world commingled and as it were entangled together okay first great taste of his kind of social philosophy there are these two citizenry's but the goal is not to make sure that they get separated he's not saying that you know all the ones who really love God should go off and do you know the benedict option should hermetically seal themselves off make sure that they create a parallel social structure of politics social institutions museums churches schools so they never have to go outside their thingy not at all he says that we are in this present world commingled and entangled together and he sees God's providence behind that commingling that entangling and of course he would probably say even if it were seemingly possible as it has sometimes seemed to separate society into secular and religious or different religious pillars like in the Netherlands for a period of time in the nineteenth century they had this pillared society system where there were each creedal confessional group had its own kind of system of institutions and so forth problematic maybe admirable in any event Augusta would say even when you seem to separate them out you won't because the problem is that the commingling is running down inside every human heart and you know the fact is that you can't tell exactly who is who and it's a it's a pre-sub arrogance to be able to determine in external matters who's who certainly you can you can know whether you trust God or not at least you can get to the point of knowing whether you trust God or not but as to others you have to be careful and social separation is not what he's talking about if that commingling is something to be admired he talks about creation generally because this commingling is rooted to creation he talks about the variety and diversity of God's creation as he says the opposition's of contraries land beauty to the language so the beauty of the course of the world is achieved by the opposition of contraries arranged as it were by an eloquence of words not of words but of things that's when you look around you you see there's so many different kind of odd things why are all these why they're all these things why are there so many species why are why do they eat each other who knows in the mind of God somehow values this great variety God loves diversity that sounds like a politically correct slogan but it's probably true so there is in this complex creation man and we see in ourselves the image of God he says here the system book 11 chapter 26 that is of the supreme Trinity an image which though it be not equal to God or rather though it be very far removed from him being neither Co eternal or to say all in a word consubstantial with him is yet nearer to him in nature than any other of his works and is destined to be yet restored that it made there is still closer resemblance so human nature is this glorious thing of st. Paul quotes the psalms a little lower than the angels man was made and so agustin is echoing the same thought notice that he denies con substantiality why does he use the word con substantial no in that sentence it's a very particular word it's the same word that's using the trees to emphasize the substantiality exactly and so therefore he certainly doesn't want to get anyone thinking the human beings are consubstantial with God they're definitely not they're not kind of substantial that was that was that Catholic back when everybody was Catholic in fact we may we may all still be Catholic so um as you know it's here the deep theology behind this is that there is no unchangeable good but the one true plus of God and that the things which he made are indeed good because from him yet they are mutable because made not out of him but out of nothing you've heard the term creation ex nihilo that's literally what this latin is here what does mutable mean therefore yeah capable of changing right in a way that God is God is God can decide to punish people after he has been merciful for a while that's not the same kind of change ability in your essential nature it's not he's not changeable he's immutable but anything he makes is mutable of course that's why God the second person of the Trinity and God the third person Trinity are kind of substantial because they are they sharing his immutability the immutability of God but those things that are made are made out of nothing so this is interesting about about made out of nothing if they're mutable capable of changing and that capability of changing is what makes both good and bad things possible mmm he says here this nature was created so excellent that they would be mutable in itself it can yet secure its blessedness by adhering to the immutable good the Supreme God and since it is not satisfied unless it be perfectly blessed and cannot be thus blessed to save in God in this nature I say not to adhere to God is manifestly a fault or a fishing you've heard that word vitiated 'add that's the word he's using there so think of you can adhere to something that keeps you strong so you know you have one part of the velcro on the wall and the floppy part of the velcro in your hand this floppy thing can be made strong and secure by adhering to the you know the other part of the velcro on the wall you had here we were made to adhere we are by nature velcro and without the velcro we don't have a proper spine a proper shape we can adhere however to him who does without becoming him it's like the the great thing about the velcro is you stick it together and it pulls it pulls apart again because the thingies that go like this are different from the things that go like this you know in the velcro there'd actually differently shaped and so they're not the same but they they're made you know to go together so we can adhere and secure our blessedness our happiness our well-being but or not and if we don't then we're gonna mess ourselves up what's interesting therefore he says it's not nature but therefore vice which is contrary to God human nature is not at odds with God as we said before so he puts it this way vice cannot be in the highest good and cannot be but being some good no why is that vice has to be in some good but it can't be in the highest good it has to be in some good because if it's not in some good it doesn't exist and there's no sat there and advice that's kind of like what we said before if you doubt you actually know that you exist similarly here vice can't exist unless it exists and it can't exist and lets us in something good but it can't be in an immutable good which means it has to be in a mutable good you can see what I mean things solely good therefore can in some circumstances exist things solely evil never for even those nature's which are vitiated by an evil will so far indeed as they are vitiated Adar evil but insofar as they are nature's they are good and when initiated nature is punished besides the good it has in being in nature it has also this that it is not unpunished for this is just certainly everything just is good for no one is punished for natural but for voluntary vices for even the vice which by the force of habit and long continuance has become a second nature had its origin in the will fascinating statement second nature notice that for a second nature very interesting phrase I mean we use it all the time oh it's it's it's become second nature to me in effect what he's saying is that human being since Adam and Eve's turn have acquired a something that's like second nature it's it's a voluntary vice pattern well it's rooted in the voluntary just like a lot of our wrongdoing it starts out small you know you started out doing a little something and then you know after a while you become the captive oh I've seen it people I love my parents were both very fond of alcohol and they weren't born alcoholics you know their drinks people were voluntary at first and same with the cigarettes that they became addicted to there was probably years when was essentially voluntary but at a certain point it becomes like a second nature to them and they couldn't buy their own force extricate which is why we call it a disease because it's it's not voluntary but with everything like this unlike physical purely physical things it has it has its roots in something voluntary of course alcoholism may have some involuntary roots too and that you may be a propensity or a vulnerability so if someone has ever noticed that I don't drink at parties that's the reason because I fear I may have the propensity even though I don't participate in the thing so I just figured ok whatever it doesn't mean that much to me I'd rather not even build a second nature around the wrong thing like my mother and father did who are now with God in his presence and I love them very much but I'm sure they won't mind if I illustrate the point that way so why did angels first and then human beings turn away like what caused them to turn away this is a perpetual question right of theology so the 6th day you know male and female everything's good but then next thing you know there's this whole Adam and Eve thing and something has gone wrong so what would cause that and if God is good and what he makes is good so there must be some cause because everything has a cause right ok so this is what this is where it gets really interesting you don't have to agree but I have to explain how it gets interesting if the question be asked what was the efficient cause of their evil will there is none for what is it which makes the will bad when there's the will itself that makes the action bad and consequently the bad will is the cause of the bad action but nothing is the efficient cause of the bad will well why do you think he's using the term efficient cause what does that phrase seem to suggest to you efficient cause he knew a little Aristotle more than a little exactly but you better explain for everybody else what that means someone you got a better grade in philosophy class should help me out get it wrong fool causes four causes exactly material efficient formal and final yeah and what we usually mean by cause is the second of Aristotle's causes like what what pushes the thing to happen that's what you mean that's what the efficient causes for Aristotle and similarly he's using the same terminology that's the closest isn't it to what we call them fools today exactly when we say cause we mean this we mean efficient cause right because the other forms a cause are our only causes in a very formal sense for Aristotle II like the material cause the material cause of a chair is wood but I mean that that's because without the wood you can't shape it into so that that's not really what we mean by cause causality we mean the thing that pushes it to happen effective efficient the force that makes it happen but the problem is when you're talking about the turn of the will and if the will really is a will then you can't actually go behind the will because otherwise it isn't it will if there is a will then you can't excavate below it for causality I mean you can you can you can excavate below it an Aristotelian terms like human nature existed but that that wasn't the cause of the turning of atoms will or anyone's will it's not your it's not human nature and of course their influences that are around us but those influences usually come from either we give in to those influences voluntarily or not or else those influences themselves are rooted in somebody's voluntarily turning the wrong direction previous to us and influencing us secondarily but if there really is such a thing as a human will then you can't dig below it for it sufficient cause he's saying the will is the if it's a will it's it's the it's a cause of its own turning otherwise it's not a will so notice what's what's going on here he doesn't get into is there a free will or not a free will he's only asking a much simpler question is there a will is there a will because if it's not a free will actually the word free is superfluous anyways right not a will it's just something else in at the phenomenal chain of causality and you're calling it a will but it isn't really a will so if there's a well then there's no cause of the bad will when the will abandons what is above itself and turns to what is lower it becomes evil not because that is evil to which it turns but because the turning itself is wicked this is really so precise and beautiful if you can see it it's not because it's turning to an evil thing but because the turning is wicked therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil but it is it is itself I which the words of but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an inferior thing oh but then you say well the desire is must to be the cause of the turning of the will but the problem is with Adam and Eve there were no inappropriate desires right because we're dealing with like the first instance of pure pure choice of will not ours ours is highly qualified by all the influences that we experience but their's was not so why did they turn to something evil but I didn't Adam and Eve turned to something evil and then if you look at of course it's the story of the Garden of Eden well maybe this Satan tempted them yeah he did but then that just pushes the question back one level right why would Satan who had to have been created good because God made nothing that wasn't good why would that being turn to something evil well there was no evil to turn to actually and in fact in tempting Adam and Eve the serpent didn't tempt them to something evil he tempt them something good you'll be like God if you do this thing you'll be like God in other words they didn't have same didn't have to hold out some tawdry low thing like hey addicted to meth crack it's gonna be really no it had to be something very high and beautiful and good and only because there was nothing that they couldn't had no appetite for anything out of them goods right so it was turning to something good which was used as the leverage you might say or the temptation the distortion to which they then voluntarily submit they decided that they too wanted this good which was not theirs to possess and yet it was a good they weren't possessed they weren't desiring something evil they were desiring something good but it wasn't a good that was there to possess thus he explains the idea how I'm fallen people could turn away from God it's in and it's there's no final answer to causality because he says the will is that son cause it was in fact truly contingent okay you have a question or thought yeah there's there's no cause will but it doesn't make sense would return to an inferior you were turning to it if it you return to a superior thing there was nothing higher in their vicinity than God they turned from something they turned to a higher thing but they chose to desert to grasp at it possessively in a way that was inappropriate instead of enjoying it they grasped at him but it was a high not a low thing is the point a good not a bad thing and similarly when we are tempted most of the time not always but most the time when we are tempted we are tempted to something that's intrinsically good like what why for example is sexual experience such a perennial human temptation you know when you're not supposed to have someone you're supposed to have it with or whatever it's because it's so good and by good I don't only mean feel-good which I concede but intrinsically good because created by God because it has this incredibly high noble purpose so sexual temptation no wonder it's such a huge problem for people because it's so incredibly good it's so good because it's so close to the heart of human nature right male and female created he them so that they can image the image God and ultimately so that the man could somehow enact the role of Christ in relation to the to the church and the woman gets to enact the role the church in relation to Christ I mean what could be higher that's why sex is so appealing not only because of its neuro sensors involved but they're there because God wanted to signify the importance and beauty of this great thing and thus this great good thing is an occasion for sin because we turn to something good when it's not ours to grab same thing we just reenact the first sent over and over again in different ways there are two other aspects of which it one is we may be seeking it ourselves rather than trusting the model provided over certain time over trusting ourselves rather than them so for example CS Lewis and say the fruit of the tree and garden was nothing necessarily ours never to have but it was not appropriate for us - mm-hmm God might have said later I'm gonna share some knowledge with you that you don't yet have yeah that's a really good point uses the same temptation for Adam and Eve that we're told he experienced himself which resulted in his fallen from heaven that he won he wanted to that he place that he valued possessing God's status in in reality higher than fellowship which wasn't meant the highest thing which he as a being could aspire to rightly and therefore that was the orientation to an otherwise superior think this well schooled person is referring to a passage in Isaiah where we get this notion of the fall of Satan that suggests that he was grasping and of course there's a whole tradition developed out of that and the pastor in Isaiah is not as you know definitive as the Genesis passage but it still it suggests exactly what you're saying so let no one look for an efficient cause of the evil we'll just stop it for it is not efficient but deficient and as the will itself is not affecting of something but a defect for defection from that which supremely is to that which has less of B that is to begin to have an evil will he's doing a little wordplay there I'm not sure that's philosophically definitive but it's kind of fun the way he puts it then so the soul lives by God when it lives well but cannot live well unless by God working in it what is good and the body lives by the soul when the soul lives in the body whether itself be living by God or no so this is interesting parallel that he's making God makes man and man lives by reference to invite hearing to God man has a soul and a body the body does well when it lives by reference to the soul and the soul does well when it was does well by reference to God so there's this kind of nesting that we participate in unfortunately human nature was in Adams person his person vitiated 'add that is to say reduced qualified distorted initiated and altered to such an extent that he suffered in his members the warning of this median lust and became subject to the necessity of dying well he says we are then burdened with ruptal body but knowing that the cause of this burdensomeness is not the nature and substance of the body but its corruption we do not desire to do deprived of the body but to be clothed with its immortality I love I love that piece but when man lives according to man not according to God he is like the devil when therefore man lives according to himself that is according to man not according to God assuredly he lives according to a lie because you're living if you live by reference to let's say the meaning of your life is drawn from your own my reference to yourself then you're living a lie because your nature was created to live by reference to your maker so the constitution of your nature is that way and when you choose to live by reference to yourself rather than by reference to God you're violating the constitution of your own nature that's why he explains things the way he does so the right will is therefore well directed love and the wrong will is ill directed love I love this statement because it illustrates the ways in which I'm saying agustin so unlike other rationalist philosophers either of antiquity or of modernity doesn't pose a choice between passion and reason Aristotle was all about passion versus reason so if others been emotion versus reason his point is that every human being by virtue of his nature is a torrent of desire of love because we were made to love God and then to love one another it's like this wellspring of love desire passion within us and so the right will isn't a matter of choosing rationality and over this passion it's rather taking the passion it's like a fire hose no you can hardly control but you can you you can't turn it off that's one that's the one thing you can't do you cannot turn it off this wellspring of desires cannot be turned off but it can be directed to its proper source and so that's what the right will is it's properly directing your love it's not choosing reason over passion it's taking your passion and turning it properly then interesting and it's so different from typical rationalism but anyway since they turned it the wrong way a kind of a second nature was forming he says human nature was altered by the transgression of those first human beings so on account of it this nature subject to the great corruption we see and feel into death furious and contending emotions and far different from what it was before so now we come to this passage which basically we're talking about you know what happened here okay this is actually an inset from an Albrecht Durer woodcut fabulous piece the whole piece is actually a little too blatant so I give you they give you the inset because Durer like Rubens like Agustin loved the human body and so should we but nevertheless for tonight's purposes I gave you the essential inset there anyway so our first parents fell so what exactly happened there he messed things up fine we all get that you know what that means more or less but he talks about how an evil will preceded the act that's the first little paragraph I giving you there an evil will preceded it and so he says in that second piece the wicked deed then if the transgression of even forbidden fruit was committed by persons were already wicked now what he means by already wicked has made clear in context they're not because they've been created wicked heaven forbid but rather because already it turning had occurred in the in their will and in their spirit the turning may have occurred moments before before they grabbed mmm but it occurred it was prior to it it may have it did inseparable chronologically but still prior to it because the crucial thing was the turning of the will not the the movement of the hand that's the point okay so the evil fruit could be brought forth only by a corrupt tree quoting Matthew 718 but the tree was evil tree stands for what here tree was evil tree no human nature yeah yeah I mean it's the look at views because there is a tree in the story but what he means literal here in this case or figuratively his analogy is that the evil fruit was brought forth by a corrupt tree Adam and Eve with the corrupt tree they were corrupt cuz their will had already turned or just you know a fraction of a moment before had already turned maybe it had already turned so the tree was evil not the result of it was not the result of nature for certainly it could become so only by the device of the will and vices contrary to nature so don't look to human nature as the cause of their sin because they were good and that's evil is never the result of nature that's constant refrain and agustin now nature could not have been depraved by Vice had it not been made out of nothing in other words if God had begotten Adam rather than created at him then Adam wouldn't have been able to be corrupted by vice but of course there was one whom God did beget and he was kind of substantial with the father and that's the second Adam Christ but anyway nature could not have been depraved by Vice had it not been made out of nothing consequently that it is in nature this is because it is made by God but that it falls away from him this is because there's made out of nothing and this is the key sentence here I wanna linger on for a few minutes here man did not so fall away as to become absolutely nothing but being turned toward himself his being became more contracted than it was when he clave to him supremely is okay so what's the most important word in that bolded sentence exactly I knew the tent would see that immediately contracted get small yes some students would say to me oh yeah so let's like the social contract with Rousseau and Hobbes and stuff and Locke it's an agreement no actually it's a shrinkage it's a it's a shrinkage it became more contracted than it was and of course this is perfectly consistent with everything not like a given him before you can see it all leads up to this basic concept human nature is contracted it's shrunken and it's a sad shrinkage a very sad shrinkage because he's been turned toward himself it's like an inward turn it's like when you said someone's bad posture you know their turn for themselves it's the spiritual equivalent of that it's navel-gazing writ large all different ways you can it's it's salep system it's narcissism turned toward himself and the result is that the that the consequences are inflicted on himself when a man turns toward himself and then he suffers the consequences in himself for what he did often comes to my mind when we are at this picture here of contraction or shrinkage another natural object is the sea sponge shaped like this roughly some bigger some smaller you know sea sponges are great they grew naturally they harvest them and then you can use them to wipe up to sink and if you go to the gourmet storage and get those french sponges that are actually sea sponges that are collapsed really tight and then you bring the home stick it under the faucet it goes up now a sponge in the sea could say to itself or others if it were able it could say well I just want to be a sponge I am so sick of being permeated by h2o in all of the pores of my being here I just want to be a sponge you know enough of this water thing and so it's if it were able to climb up out of the water and get itself up onto the dock you know finally you know the water is running out of me I just want to be sponge I don't want to live with reference to water all the time but then of course what happens in the force you mean you know dries out it crisps up right and and if you pick it up on the dock you try and what it doesn't wipe because it's too crisp you have to like rehydrated a bit to even use it same thing by your sink right the nature of a sponge is that it cannot function as a sponge unless it's fully permeated by molecules a non sponge that's the way sponge is and so it is with human beings we are designed to be permeated throughout our entire being with the presence the personal presence of God enabled as we learn in the New Testament through the third person of the Holy Trinity the Holy Spirit who by his nature is able to do that permeation without fusing himself with us he can permeate us just like the h2o molecules don't become sponge molecules they're different but they're it's a permeation and so we shrink up like a sponge the sponge that loses its efficacy its functionality is impaired what a shame yeah it's two people it's a scar tissue on the back of the retina and the ophthalmologist point out what it does is it basically crinkles the retina by trunk making it try to contract oh dear the visual effect is a distortion and so it's the fact that contraction leads to a distortion yes it's a perfect yeah right it's perfect analogy I'm sorry to hear that you've experienced it recurring idea God is unchangeable things made from nothing are changeable and it's not apparent to me - nothing makes something unchangeable as that just makes it changeable could he have made something out of nothing which was unchangeable that's your question right I'm just trying to formulate your question yeah I don't know the answer to that possibly but you see the problem with that from Augustus lineage would probably be that unchanged ability is part of the divine nature and so that's why Christ is immutable because he's begotten not made but something that's made has to come out of nothing not out of something that predated it because the only something that predated anything is God's own being so something like that would be in the nature of an answer to your question eternal it's divine yeah so he thinks it's a it's like it written into the logic of either our words or of reality itself more likely which our words reflect somehow so okay I'm going on step a little bit more to go here that you know I think it's it's worth holding on because even though this is dense it's pretty satisfying so book 14 continues in that same chapter fourteen thirteen it's like one of the highlight chapters of the whole city of God I highly recommend looking at fourteen thirteen that's why it's on the little the list of chapter pieces here accordingly to exist in himself that is to be his own satisfaction after abandoning God is not quite to become a nonentity but to approximate to that and therefore the Holy Scriptures designate the proud by another named self pleasers for it is good to have the heart lifted up yet not to oneself for this is proud but to the Lord for this is obedient and can be the act only of the humble there is therefore something in humility which strangely enough exalts the heart and something in pride which debases it I think everyone can get that whether they believe in the Bible or not and you've seen it in people you've seen it this seems to be contradictory that loftiness should debate this exalt that pious humility enables us to submit to what is above us and nothing is more exalted above us than God and therefore humility by making a subject to God exalts us etc but pride is not the same there is therefore something in humility which exalts the heart something in pride which debase is it by craving to be more man becomes less by aspiring to be self-sufficient he fell away from him who truly suffices him and here's the here's the part I quoted for before it came about that like man who by keeping the commandments should have been spiritual even in his flesh became fleshly even in his spirit now clearly fleshly doesn't mean fleshly in the simple carnal of a literal skin sense similarly in the same passage he quotes st. Paul in Galatians chapter 5 where there's this interesting list of so-called works of the flesh that include carousing revelry debauchery but also anger enmity malice covetousness in other words Paul the Apostle lists sins of the mind and sins of the body and he calls both works of the flesh but just chose to she goes to show you that st. Paul neither st. Paul nursing agustin were Gnostic or manichaean because they don't see the physicality as the problem flesh leanness means orientation toward man as over against God that's the flesh leanness means taking the flesh as like a stand at synecdoche if you know the words in english grammar Synecdoche taking the part for the whole so fleshly this means man oriented --mess both in the vessels of the galatians by saint paul and in the city of god by st. Augusta that's what fleshly this mean so that man who should have been spiritual even in his flesh became fleshly either in his spirit in short to say all in a word what the disobedience was the punishment of disobedience in that sin what the disobedience was the punished for what else's man's misery but his own disobedience to himself man has been given over to himself because he abandoned God while he sought to be self satisfying and disobeying God he could not even obey himself Hansen is that he is involved in the obvious misery of being unable to live as he wishes so you can see that what's going on here is this the idea that there's this continual self battle that we all go don't want with years ago when I was at Penn and Philadelphia teaching I remember sitting at lunch with some faculty colleagues I was a junior and your track assistant professor political science and we were sitting there with some of my senior colleagues and we were talking about you know moral dilemmas and moral ambiguity and of course you know among academics ambiguity and nuance or everything so they were saying well you know what what's the biggest moral challenge of modern life and so well they said mostly they said well you know it's nothing I'm gonna figure out what the right thing to do is because it's so complicated and so I sort of I didn't raise my hand but I said well I ventured well I think maybe the biggest challenges is not doing what we know to be right when we do know it and they were scandalized and somewhat annoyed that I would give an answer like that because that implied that there were in fact some true and false some questions with had true and false answers not every question to be sure but some and in fact I argued that that was the biggest moral struggle for modern man is you know trying to get himself to do what he knows is right when he knows it not when he doesn't know it there is nuance don't get me wrong there is no us but they were oh there's ambiguity too but not comprehensive ambiguity yes what if what if there was 97% ambiguity in 3% clarity we'd be responsible for 3% clarity and be extenuating for the 97% heavy duty the trouble is the 3% probably runs through every vein of every human interaction that we had the 3% of clarity we know perfectly well that the other person deserves our respect even our love even if we don't know all the rest of it anyway so the righteous the righteous himself even the righteous himself in this age does not live as he wishes until he has arrived where he cannot die be deceived or injured until he is assured that this shall be his eternal condition so we end up kind of where we started accordingly to citizenry's have been formed by two loves the earthly by the love of self even to the contempt of God and the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self the former in the word glories in itself the latter in the Lord and thus we come to my conclusion with regard to this portion of the City of God but I'm gonna pause here not simply to stop but to see if there's more like I can tell that you have more to say well it probably is I mean I'm Lois was very well versed in agustin and of course you know parenthetically the thing about agustin is his influence is pervasive I mean I showed you it was in Descartes of all places right but I mean Augustine is the intellectual father of the Protestant Reformation and yet he is wholly embraced as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk right so he was so well versed in agustin that he then rediscovered certain things in st. Paul that he felt had been suppressed and it was a Gustin influence that lay behind Luther and so many other things in modern life you know Justin's everywhere so bent is probably coming out of Augusta somewhere but of course it's not really original with the Gustin either it goes back to the Bible I don't know the answer to that a translate please o curved in himself I think so but I don't know where it is in the text yes I think so it fits perfectly yeah yeah you may be the Latin behind some of the phrases I actually had written on the screen was precisely those phrases himself yes a couple pots around twenty six twenty days yes the discussions about self-awareness oh yeah oh it's it's 26 you know I love that piece so he's talking about we're not just a we're aware that were exactly mm-hmm then it gets into the I am therefore I think which i think is what you do Beto ergo sum is a way of summarizing it rather than the reverse switches and then in 28 this seems to building on that I wrote this amazing sentence down which is in my translation which is that we love it also is the very love with which we love whatever good so then I tried to paraphrase it myself I'll throw this up you see anything is right when we recognize that love which we love comes from God yeah happy endings will when we think it comes from ourselves miserable undo or yeah yeah that makes perfect sense okay moreover you know in this these two chapters that you just alluded to which are 26 and 28 of book 11 part of the argument here is that there are certain things that we this is not a gustin's phrase it's someone else's but it fits here there are things that we can't not know we can't not know that we exist we can't not know that we know we exist and what he goes further says we can't not recognize that we love our own existence and so that's what he says the image of the trinity and man being knowing and loving father son and spirit this is human nature and we can't we can deny these things and turn our eyes from them but we can't really not know them yeah I just found all of that really insightful reflecting a reflection on our psychology awareness and I would think couldn't you just beautifully not circulatin yeah sure in a way that's a few more than psychologists you need to so you know if you spend time in this very thick book among other things and then someone comes along and says well you know Christianity is just so simple minded like reduces everything to a simple black and white no complexity no ambiguity I'm thinking to myself I guess you never got me on third-grade Sunday school you just ignored ignored everything about theology after that point but some people did have this caricature in their mind you know and it said they they suffer from a kind of mis-education or a partial education that suffering cultural amnesia you know millions of people every day drive through Santa Monica have no idea that it's named after the mother of san agustin who went through all this ok so unless there's another thought I guess we're gonna stop if you want to come back next week these are the chapters I've laid out I've made a few copies of the reading list here I think there's some copies back there too and you are most welcome to grab one of those come back two weeks from tonight to keep on going then bring you get to the really hot and heavy stuff like the social and political stuff it's going to be interesting and it's not going to vindicate either a political party thank you all for coming [Applause]

Channel: C. S. Lewis Society of California

Views: 29,962

Rating: 4.9132152 out of 5

Keywords: Christian, Bible, Religion, Conservatism, C. S. Lewis, Truth, Moral Relativism, Virtue, Belief, God, Jesus, Roman Empire, Church Father, Trinity, Luther, Paul, Slavery, Africa, Monica, Confessions, hedonism, Rome, Marriage, Theology, Priest, Visigoth, Augustinian, Latin, Descartes, Reason, Aristotle, Creation, Grace, City of Man, Calvin, Original sin, Stoic, Good and Evil, Freedom, Christ, Salvation, Just war, Aquinas, Sexuality, Pagan, Catholic, Fall of Man, Plato, Manichean, Natural Law, Resurrection, Protestant

Id: G_mmvpsFAYs

Length: 92min 13sec (5533 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019