Great Books: Augustine's Confessions Books 1-8 (Part Two)

Denied his Baptism in Christ, Augustine began to cope with the polarity between his mother and father, caught between their personal systems of belief. This resulted in a tangle of juicy psychology as Augustine links his feelings about God to his feelings about his mother, Monica. She, as God’s instrument, agreed to deny him his baptism. Yet, as he writes, if it weren’t for:

she (who) did all that she could to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he. In this you helped her to turn the scales against her husband, whom she always obeyed because by obeying him she obeyed your law, thereby showing greater virtue than he did. (I, 2)

This dichotomous statement is intriguing and sheds light upon Augustine’s view of a virtuous sin committed by his mother, which seems to be in direct conflict with what we have already learned about his views of sin. How can it be that all sins are equal in the eyes of the Lord, even an infant’s cries, but it is somehow virtuous for a woman to “turn the scales against her husband”? He witnessed his mother walking a theologically fine line as she thwarted his paternal father’s influence while somehow still abiding in God’s Law. She never disobeyed her husband except through her enduring piety to the Christian God and her prayers for her son. Augustine credits his mother's piety as the one constant in his life which lead to his ultimate salvation and, in so doing, he estabilshes a repeating pattern in his early life which involved turning his back on his mother and God alike.

Augustine continued his studies, having been sent to Madaura, where he found that he disliked Greek and preferred Latin writers over his other studies. He found himself lost in the stories, another example that he gives of turning away from God and into a world of falsehood and fiction; “a ferment of wickedness.” (II, 2) Coming upon his adolescent years, Augustine began to yearn for the sin of lust which, he claims, would continue to haunt him until his conversion. His studies of literature and public speaking were interrupted when:

my father, a modest citizen of Thagaste whose determination was greater than his means, saved up the money to send me farther afield to Carthage…no one had anything but praise for my father who, despite his slender resources, was ready to provide his son with all that was needed to enable him to travel so far for the purpose of study..Yet this same father of mine took no trouble at all to see how I was growing in your sight or whether I was chaste or not..Both my parents were unduly eager for me to learn…my mother because she thought that the usual course of study certainly would not hinder me. (II,3)

This is how Augustine “construe[d] the character of his parents” and there is conflict in this belief. He describes himself as spoiled and self entitled, both bitter about his parent’s desire for his education and unequal in his forgiveness of one of them despite their equal roles. In a feat of impressive mental contortion, he recognizes his mother’s part in this stage of his development as God’s hand in his life and yet he offers no such accolades to his father because he is pagan and not a believer.

All of this is but a preamble to the parable about sin to come. While waiting for his journey to Carthage, at the age of 16, he had free time to spend with unruly friends. Augustine claimed that he fell prey to peer pressure and gave in to the grievous sin of theft. He and his buddies had a habit of engaging in games out of doors after dark and these games involved committing anything that might be forbidden, such as stealing pears from a tree near a local vineyard. Augustine took these pears not because of need and cannot recall if they ate more than a few. He stole them for the sake of committing a theft and fed most of the pears to the pigs. What some might consider a simple adolescent prank, Augustine elevates to such a degree that it might be better interpreted as a symbol for original sin. For “if any one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor.” (II,6) It can be assumed that there were other pranks committed by these “ruffians” but Augustine chooses specifically to tell us his story of stealing fruit from a forbidden tree.

Augustine’s inner reflections about the reasons he commits his version of original sin are quite innovative and compelling. He attempts to converse with his crime of theft as if it “were a living thing” (II,6) in order to gain a greater understanding of that which he considers to be the plight of all descendents of Adam and Eve. Augustine believes the source of all sin can be boiled down to three states of the human condition: anger, fear and grief and that sin translates or is “hatched” by a “lust for power, gratifications of the eye and gratifications of a corrupt nature.” (III,8) He goes on to converse with this disembodied sinful part of himself in an attempt to reason through the process of sin. This dialogue regarding the nature of sin suggests that he (and all of us who sin) continuously experience all the human corruptions that lead to the first sin in every act of sin committed since our removal from Eden; whether cruelty, lustfulness, inquisitiveness, ignorance and stupidity, sloth, extravagance, and envy, to name but a few.

And now, O Lord of my God, now that I ask what pleasure I had in that theft, I find that it had no beauty to attract me. I do not mean beauty of the sort that justice and prudence possess, nor the beauty that is in man’s mind and in his memory and in the life that animates him…It did not even have the shadowy, deceptive beauty which makes vice attractive-pride, for instance, which is a pretense of superiority, imitating yours, for you alone are God, supreme over all; or ambition, which is only a craving for honour or glory, when you alone are to be honoured before all and you alone are glorious for ever.(II, 6)

Ultimately, however, Augustine uses this mental exercise as a means of discovering that the reasons for sin are of no consequence, writing that if “it was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin.” (II,8) He, like Adam, was lured by others to commit his grave act of eating the forbidden fruit and thus “wandered away, too far from your sustaining hand, and created of myself a barren waste.” (II,10)

Great Books: Augustine's Confession Books 1-8 (Part One)

This essay uses the Great Books edition of Augustine's Confessions, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. As this translation is still under copyright, a translation by Albert C. Outler can be found here.

Augustine’s Confessions were written in the year 397 CE during his early 40’s and is somewhat inaccurately considered to be one of the West’s first autobiographical accounts despite the fact that there are many other classical writers who worked in the same medium previously. It is not a complete autobiography, obviously, since he would live to the ripe age of seventy-six. However, it does represent the most detailed account of any individual living in the 4th and 5th centuries. Augustine’s life stands upon the precipice between dramatically shifting times in human thought and in many ways both his life and his Confessions can be seen as products of this transition between historical ages. It has been suggested that Augustine is both the last Classical thinker as well as the first Medieval writer.

Undoubtedly, his autobiography was highly influential on writers during the Medieval period. Augustine’s Confessions take the reader on his spiritual journey from a state of sinfulness to his salvation in Jesus Christ. The intentional structure of his autobiography allows for Augustine to pick and chose personal events from his life that illustrate an archetypal spiritual journey.

Augustine utilizes an innovative structure within his Confessions that involves personal and sometimes brutal self-admonition interspersed with direct quotations from the Bible and lyrical passages in praise of God. The personal sins he discusses seem, on the surface, to be of little consequence, in comparison to, for example, murderers, and yet his descriptions of those sins are offered in caricature, as if he had literally sold his soul to the devil. At first reading, it can be interpreted simply that all sins are equal in the eyes of God; however, this juxtaposition also raises questions within the reader’s mind and encourages a deeper reading of the text where we ultimately see his life and his conversion as a teaching story or parable in itself. This metaphorical writing style is used repeatedly throughout the Confessions, revealing Augustine’s background in Platonic thought, the writings of Paul of Tarsus and his own deep studies of scripture.

This analysis will cover only the first eight books of the Confessions which takes us from his infancy to the moment of crisis that pushes Augustine to make a full conversion to the Christian faith. As mentioned in his Author Sketch, Augustine would be profoundly influenced by his mother Monica and his writings illustrate quite clearly his feelings of being torn between the pagan beliefs and morals of his father and the Christian beliefs and actions of his mother. This is, perhaps, the reason he begins his story with a very dualistic worldview that is not reconciled until the moment he finds his peace in Christ. Augustine touches upon many great ideas throughout the Confessions but we will be focusing on his discussions of Sin, Good and Evil, and Will.

Books I and II of the Confessions deal specifically with Augustine’s infancy and his early childhood. He offers an interesting perspective on infants and their capacity for sin as he attempts to recall this distant time in his life. “And if my wishes were not carried out," he writes, "I would get cross with elders, who were not at my beck and call, and with people who were not my servants, simply because they did not attend to my wishes; and I would take my revenge by bursting into tears. By watching babies I have learnt how they behave... and know that I behaved in just the same way myself.” (1:6) This passage illustrates Augustine’s belief that we are all, as descendants of Adam, born of sin and that “if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.” (1:6) It is striking that his opinions on the sinful nature of babies are so strong considering that he spends so little time defending his ideas about a period that he admits he cannot truly recall. He does take the time to lament as he contemplates his infancy, “I ask you, Lord, where or when was I, your servant, ever innocent?” (1:7)

His early childhood is dealt with briefly, in much the same way, but with intuitive observations about the hypocrisy of small boys being punished for playing games instead of attending to their studies by the same masters whose livelihood depended upon even more sinful games. He terms this period of his life as one of suffering and humiliation. Yet, he views this natural tendency of young boys to enjoy playing games quite straightforwardly as further indications of inherent sin.

And yet I sinned, O Lord of my God, creator and arbiter of all natural things, but arbiter only, not creator, of sin. I sinned, O Lord, by disobeying my parents and the masters of whom I have spoken…I was disobedient, not because I chose something better than they proposed to me, but simply from the love of games. (1:10)

During this period of Augustine’s life, it is important to note that he was attending Christian schools and was as close to the faith as he would be for many years to come. It was also during this time that he developed a grave stomach illness (the first of many) which left him close to death. There is much consternation in these next passages as he describes his conflicting feelings of being passed over for his baptism when, instead of dying, he quickly recovered.

You, my God, were my guardian even then, and you saw the fervor and strength of my faith as I appealed to the piety of my own mother and to the mother of us all, your Church, to give me the baptism of Christ your Son, who is my God and my Master…So my washing in the waters of baptism was postponed, in the surmise that, if I continued to live, I should defile myself again with sin and, after baptism, the guilt of pollution would be greater and more dangerous. (1:11)

Even when Augustine wrote the Confessions at the age of forty-three, he had yet to reconcile what contour his life might have followed if he had been baptized in his early boyhood. This incident seems to set Augustine upon his spiritual quest and his search for truth. As we will see, Augustine searches for this truth in many ways but, firstly, by engaging in sin for sin’s sake.

Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part Two)

The first part of this essay can be accessed in the archives under October 2009.

Having defined sin as turning away from God, Paul creates a causal relationship between sin and death by offering Adam’s mortality as precedent and every death since as proof of sin’s universality. The “wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity” [1:29] that one normally associates with sinful behavior is presented more as a symptom of death than sins in and of themselves. By the reasoning, Paul writes, that “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command” [5:14].

It is during this first period that Paul finds the inspiration for his own gospel of salvation for the Gentiles. Though no Law yet existed, Abraham was able to attain righteousness (or cleansing of sin) through his faith in the existence and omnipotence of God. This justification (literally, to be made just) through faith serves as Paul’s model for non-Jewish salvation as he notes that “Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness” [4:9] As Abraham exhibited that faith before he entered into the covenant with God, outwardly manifested through circumcision, “he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them” [4:11].

As for the Law, Paul argues that it serves only to make one aware of sin, while doing nothing to compensate for humanity’s inherently sinful nature. In fact, The Law made being human (or at least being Jewish) more intolerable as it defined precisely what actions were sinful so that those who broke it (ie everyone) could understand why they were being punished with death. For Paul, that is what law does. It defines negative behavior and then assigns the appropriate punishment for it. Deprived of the option of being truly cleansed of sin, humanity is/was lost to a spiral of unmet expectations.

We know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living with me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my spiritual nature. For I have the desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out. [7:14-18]

The only solution, by this arrangement is in becoming a slave to something other than sin; a new possibility created by God in the resurrection of Jesus. Just as Abraham’s righteousness was “credited to him” by virtue of his faith in God and exhibited outwardly through circumcision, so may the believer, then, have righteousness credited to them by virtue of their faith in Jesus the Christ, as exhibited through a baptism in his name. Now while we can easily understand while the ritual pruning of a man’s foreskin might impress the sincerity of his faith upon an otherwise skeptical God, what is it about baptism specifically that conveys righteousness upon its recipients?

The key, for Paul, is remarkably simple in its construction. Death is the sentence for sin which itself is universal to the human condition. In dying, Jesus paid the literal price for his own sins (death) but, in resurrection, is now free from humanity’s sinful nature. Baptism in his name, then, is a baptism “into his death” [6:3], creating a new state of righteousness wherein one’s “old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—as anyone who has died has been freed from sin” [6:6,7].

The first half of that argument is so easily answered by common sense that it is hardly an argument at all for no reasonable person, whatever their belief, could argue that the dead might be capable of continuing to sin past the end of their life. This argument only remains ironclad, however, if one does not suppose that a person might be raised from the dead because, as far as anyone could really tell, it had never happened. That is what makes the belief in Christ’s resurrection so critical to the foundation of Christian belief. If one can believe that God made a special exception in raising Jesus from the dead and allowed him to ascend into heaven with his now-sinless nature intact, then it is just as reasonable to assume that He did so in order that humanity might be baptized into that death that they might escape their hitherto inescapable sinful nature as well. In that belief, the believer dies to their old self and is reborn, with Jesus’s sinless nature indwelt within them, into a new condition by which they are no longer a slave to sin but a slave to righteousness.

In one sense, sin carries out its own form of Judgment in that it is the root cause of death. Salvation from sin, according to Paul, goes beyond merely freeing the believer from their naturally sinful state. If justice can be said to exist, then it must exist in its highest form within any God responsible for creating all things. This means that in addition to death, which is caused by sin, sinners must also undergo a separate judgment by God whereby they are again punished for their sins. Those with clearly formed pictures of fiery lakes and eternal damnation may be surprised to find how vague Paul is, at least in his Epistle to the Romans, about when that judgment will take place and what form it will take.

In the opening chapter, Paul underscores the urgency of his gospel by proclaiming that the “wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” [1:18]. Initially, it appears that this wrath is the catalyst for all the forms of evil and depravity that humans naturally embrace, with the final judgment being death itself, the “wages” of all sin. Later, though, Paul adds on a second component when he speaks of “the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” [2:5]. He reveals no details about when this day of judgment is due to occur, only saying that there “will be great trouble and distress for every human being who does evil” [2:9] on this day when “’God will give to each person according to what he has done’” [2:6].

The foundation of Paul’s theology is that everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, has committed sin and, because of that sin, is condemned to die. Paul believes that Jesus will return to usher in a new era of divine peace on Earth and that, in so doing, would reunite the living and the dead for judgment under God’s authority. While evidence outside of the Epistle to the Romans also suggests that Paul believed this would happen within his lifetime, he is vague about that aspect of Jesus’s return saying only that it would “take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ as my gospel declares” [2:16].

Thus when Paul declares the necessity of salvation, he is essentially arguing on two different fronts simultaneously. Humanity must be saved from its own sinful nature because the effect of sin is death and death, as we all know, is bad. Humanity must also be saved from God’s judgment by being justified into righteousness through baptism into Jesus’s death. As Jesus became sinless and righteous in transcending death, so must each believer embrace the atonement that his death represents in order to shield them from God’s holy judgment. Without the resurrection, none may hope to become righteous enough in God’s eyes to avoid punishment but, in seeking righteousness through Christ, all may hope to receive “glory, honor and peace” [2:10].

Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part One)

Epistle to the Romans by Paul of Tarsus
Time: Written in the middle of the first century of the Common Era.
Location: Most probably Corinth.
Great Ideas: Sin, Judgment, and Love

This essay will quote from the New International Version of Romans which can be found in its entirety online here.

Paul’s contributions to the New Testament are so tantalizing because he represents the first time that a shaper of the gospel of Christ is allowed to speak to us directly. This is not to say that no one had written on or about Christ before Paul fired up his amanuensis and became, in the literary sense, himself immortal. There is evidence that a variety of documents (a “Sayings” Gospel, a “Miracles” gospel, a “Cross” gospel) were produced by the early fold of believers who emerged on the other side of Jesus’s crucifixion and proclaimed his resurrection. Those writings, however, were eventually synthesized, redacted, and expanded upon by writers who were approaching the topic decades after the fact; each with their own brand of theology to promote and set of narratives to which they attended. The Gospels, in this sense, represent work by committee even if the final product was penned and shaped by one man or woman’s hand.

More treacherously, from a critical analysis standpoint, not every Epistle attributed to Paul is inarguably his own work. An examination of the merits of the various sides of that particular argument is in order if one seeks to fully appreciate who Paul was and what his message means. That discussion is only necessary, however, if one is writing on the whole of Paul’s work or writing about an Epistle whose authorship might be worthy of some scrutiny. Gratefully, no doubt for writer and reader alike, we are not.

Paul’s Epistle to the Romans must be appreciated as one of the cornerstones of Christian theology, if not the document that defines what Christianity is and how it differs from the Jewish and Hellenic traditions that Paul synthesizes even while repudiating them. It captures a tectonic moment in the development of human thought in a manner that is passionate and unimpeachably sincere; sometimes breathtaking in its concise but elegantly structured arguments. It bears the voice of a mind possessed by genius which, if Romans' historical bonafides weren’t already impeccable, might be the most compelling argument for its attribution to as an actual work of Paul’s.

It is a work that serves many functions. It is a declaration of Paul’s intention to assert his theological influence on the congregation of believers who lived in Rome. It is an introduction to the basic principles of his unique gospel (or “good news”) for those who would hear it. It includes pragmatic advice on how to deal with different tensions that might arise within the church. It deals directly with the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and Paul draws heavily from the Torah to legitimize his claim that Judaism should cede to The Way described in his gospel of baptism in the death of the resurrected Jesus Christ. While all of these goals shape and contribute to the Epistle to the Romans, three Great Ideas adequately house most of Paul’s themes and provide us with adequate structure to examine the work thematically rather than in a more limited linear fashion. To this end, we’ll examine Paul’s writings in Romans on the topics of Sin, Judgment, and Love.

The first task that a writer (whether physicist, theologian, or philosopher) must face in dealing in abstractions is to define, with as much precision as language might allow, the parameters of their interpretation of a given term. Paul’s gospel hinges its urgency upon the idea that every human being is sinful and is in need of redemption through Jesus in order to escape God’s judgment. To accept even the premise of the argument, the onus is on Paul to first explain what sin is and why salvation from might be necessary before we might consider the efficacy of the solution that he provides to its inexhaustible influence.

Though his descriptions of behaviors that arise from sin are more eye-popping on the page (and thus more likely to distract the reader from the simplicity of his message), Paul lays a definition on the line in the very first chapter, writing that:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men were without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…{1:20-25]

Those hoping for an Aristotelian clarity that might read like, “Sin is the product of X,Y, and Z” will, of course, be disappointed by the layers that must be parsed in order to get at Paul’s meaning. Recall, however, that he is a Hellenic Jew writing to an audience of Greek, Jewish and Roman Christians. Not all of them accept as fact, as Paul certainly did, the indisputable literality of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, yet all must be able to accept the salvation equation as applicable to their own worldview.

To a converted Jew, like Paul, the equation is most simple. Though Adam had “clearly seen” God’s “eternal power and divine nature,” he chose to exchange “the truth of God for a lie” by eating from “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” [Genesis 2:17] from which God had forbidden him. Paul reinforces this idea of sin entering the world through Adam’s disobedience later when he remarks that it “entered the world through one man” [5;12]. Interpreted more radically, Adam did not sin against God in his act of disobedience for sin did not yet exist and, by Paul’s reckoning, only God may create something from nothing. In committing an act from which he was forbidden, Adam placed his own interest above that of God’s, serving at the behest of “created things rather than the Creator” with the “created things” in question being himself. In so doing, he exchanged “the truth of God for a lie” and thus, sin was born in the fundament of human nature.

To a converted Greek, the task was more complex. For in the ascent and decline of classical Greek culture, a god’s position in the grand scheme of things was subject to constant revision. Though Zeus was acknowledged as the king of the gods, he was eclipsed in public acclaim by many others, including Athena, Apollo, and later Dionysus. Many philosophers questioned openly the existence of the gods and, while their worship remained an important part of Greek culture, reason became a god of its own, producing irrefutable knowledge that, in many cases, supplanted what could only before be believed. As Greek political influence waned, however, so went the assuredness that knowledge was a better ally than gods, imaginary or otherwise, whose power could not be resisted. Luke puts this very idea into Paul’s mouth in the Acts of the Apostles as he visits Athens and entreats its philosophers and believers alike to join him in worshiping the Unknown God who:

…made the world and everything in it [and who] is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. [Acts 17:24]

By the same logic, Paul suggests that since the creation of humanity, all nations have been able to see “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature” but have allowed that vision to become distorted into images derived from nature, from animals and from humanity itself. Without the Law, given solely to the Hebrews as part of their unique covenant with God, Greeks were left to do the best they could with the information they had and things didn’t turn out too well. Now, their gods had been subsumed into Roman ones along with the rest of their once-dominant culture. Turning away from a supposed innate human understanding of God’s eternal qualities in favor of the gods’ more mercurial ones would, by this interpretation, be the source of sin.

It bears mentioning that something fundamentally new had been emerging in the Mediterranean culture in the century surrounding the time in which Jesus and Paul both lived, taught, and died. While the Persian and Egyptian cultures, long before the time of Alexander, had embraced the idea of mortals actually achieving godhood while they yet lived, the Mediterranean culture (excluding Egypt) had shown great resilience to the idea. Greek and Roman culture alike preferred elevating only the rarest of mortals to the status of divinity and usually conferred upon their death, rather than as justification for the authority of their reign. Every would-be conqueror from Thrace to Rome might claim divine parentage but men were men and gods, for the most part, remained gods.

In the span of one long lifetime (or two average ones), the lure of divine authority as a tool of governance had proven too tempting to endure and the Romans began incrementally importing these ideas into the Roman culture and all the places that it touched. Moreover, even as their claim to living divinity became more strident, the Julio-Claudian Caesars became more depraved in their abuse of common decency in the governance of their people. How difficult an argument was it for Paul to make to Greek or Roman alike that if this was their people’s conception of a god, then it was tragically deviant from the “eternal power and divine nature” that were inherent in “God’s invisible qualities?”