Augustine
Confessions
Book II
Age: 16
Abandoning his studies, indulging in
lustful pleasures, and committing theft
Context
• Augustine’s adolescent years are regrettably viewed as:
– Decadent & useless
– Lurid & sinful
• Schooling at Carthage:
– Regrettable: because the study of rhetoric here goes
against the purity of one who is close to God because
to excel in law, praise comes with the crafty
manipulation of blind men.
– Learned rhetoric (art of eloquent speaking),
literature (Latin and Greek), and dialectic (logical
argumentation).
• Book II offers a few brief insights as to how and why he
committed the sins of fornication and theft.
Family Dynamic
II.1-3
•
What are Augustine’s parent’s reactions upon learning of their son’s sexual maturity?
– His father (Patricius) was happy at the prospect of grandchildren.
– His pious mother (Monica) was worried about his committing fornication and
adultery.
•
What does Augustine wish his parents had done in regards to providing him with a
sexual outlet?
– He wishes that they had arranged a legitimate marriage for him.
•
Why did they refuse to do this?
– Because at that time, marriage to a country girl would have held Augustine back
from a brilliant career (ideally in law) where he could make a more socially
advantageous marriage to an heiress.
•
Augustine speculates about his parents’ wishes for him. Worldly ambition seems to
drive both of their actions, but Augustine reserves his sternest disapproval for
Patricius, apparently because he shows no awareness that there is any success
beyond the shallow rewards that the world can give.
– Irony: everyone praised his father for making so many financial sacrifices for
Augustine’s education, even though his father cared nothing about the vicious
character such an education would develop. Augustine’s mother felt that a
literary education would at least do no harm to Augustine’s spiritual life and she
too was interested in seeing her son succeed socially.
Sexual Sin
II.1-3
• His account, which begins in Book II, is one of the most famous
features of the Confessions.
• Augustine’s problematic attitude towards his sexual urges—his
reluctance to give up sex—ends up being one of the last, painful
obstacles to his full conversion.
• Giving some credit toward love:
“the single desire that dominated my search for delight was
simply to love and be loved.” *
• Problem:
– His love had no restraint imposed on it.
– He is unable to distinguish between physical love, which
satisfies only lust, and the spiritual love of friendship and
companionship, which satisfies the heart and mind.
– Hence, pure love was perverted by its misdirection toward
worldly things (bodies). *
Christian View of Celibacy
II.1-3
• Was the highest goal while marriage was a less
admirable alternative, suitable only for those who
could not fully control their sexual impulses and,
therefore, required a legitimate outlet for them.
• Even with marriage, sexual activity was to be
reserved solely for the conception of children,
and not enjoyed for its own sake.
• Sex is used only for procreation
Robbing the Pear Tree
II.4-10
Motivations
Augustine claims that every crime has a motive. Even in the most
abstractly driven crimes committed, there is an external motivating
factor.
• Not motivated* by:
– Self-interest: to combat hunger or poverty
– Greed (want): to enjoy the taste of the fruit
– Revenge: to get back at any particular individual or party
• Was motivated by:
– a distaste for good behavior. *
– the presence of his companions—he makes quite clear that he is
certain he would not have committed the theft if he were alone.
• He also observes that part of his impulse toward promiscuity
involved bragging rights with his friends, who took just as
much pleasure in telling stories (exaggerating the exploits) as
in the acts themselves.
Clarifying the Motivation to Sin
• The mature Augustine was not so much concerned with the mere
act of stealing pears. His real concern was with what was happening
inwardly.
• Augustine’s actions simply represent a perversion of his God-given
goodness.
• Each thing he sought to gain from stealing the pears (and everything
humans desire in sinning) turns out to be a twisted version of one of
God’s attributes. *
• Rhetorical feat:
– Augustine matches each sinful desire with a desire to be like
God. *
– Trapped in misdirected love of earthly goods, the soul separates
itself from God and tries to demonstrate its power over God by
breaking God’s laws.
Specific Implications
• This sin is a kind of rebellion against God’s
omnipotence, a perverse attempt to demonstrate
the soul’s imagined self-sufficiency.
• Even by attempting to deny God’s omnipotence,
the sinner imitates it, thereby proving that
nothing is outside God’s fullness and dominion.
• Any motivation one may have to sin would be
more truly realized/actualized through the Lord.
Generic Implications
• Theft: analogous to The Fall
– Humankind’s fundamental disobedience and fall from
grace involved the improper taking of fruit from a tree
in the garden.
– Later, Augustine’s final conversion takes place under
a fruit tree in a garden, standing in contrast to the
present episode of sin as well as to Adam and Eve’s.
• Promiscuity: extension of sexual sin
– Some scholars have seen the episode as an
extended metaphor for the sin of promiscuity.
– This also links to the story of Adam and Eve in that
humanity’s Fall was believed to have included a fall
from sexual innocence. Augustine even describes the
sin of theft as the soul’s “fornication” against God.
Contemporary Application
• Augustine is painfully aware of the influence of peer
pressure, subtle and unspoken, on his own behavior.
• He attempts to determine what it is about human beings
in groups that makes them so susceptible to irrational
impulses, impulses they would never act upon if they
were alone.
• Unsolvable problem: people in groups can both support
each other in good and influence each other in evil.
“Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction
of the mind.”
Like love, friendship must be subjected to reason if it is
to be truly good.
• Interestingly enough, Augustine partly blames the theft
on peer pressure.*
Possible
Criticisms
A) Why does Augustine lavish such
anguished and intense selfscrutiny on what sounds like an
otherwise minor bit of juvenile
delinquency?
Responses
A) Augustine is using this episode
to stand both as a generic
example of all the other sins
committed in his youth and of
the common sins of humanity.
–
B) Augustine’s self-criticism has been
ridiculed as an example of a
neurotic soul that was burdened
by excessive and unnecessary
guilt.
This encourages readers to recognize
and understand their basic sinfulness—
the distance they have fallen from God;
the corrupt state of the Will.
B) Augustine’s aim: stealing is
something every child indulges
in at some point in their
development, hence the episode
has come to take on a kind of
universality.
Augustine’s horror at his past sins, which many Christians would
regard as minor, marked him as a Christian of the highest spiritual
standards.
Summary of Book II
• Augustine’s main concern in analyzing his theft of the pears:
– His motivation to sin
• Two types of sin:
– Lust: as an example of misdirected love, a confused attempt to
seek satisfaction in transitory things that can never truly satisfy.
– Evil for evil’s sake: the love of wrongdoing simply for the doing
of it. Like the misdirected love of others that is at the root of lust,
misdirected love of self is at the root of rebellion.
• Augustine often identifies all human sin with lust
– Concupiscence: a selfish and excessive desire for anything,
including the pleasures of the flesh.
– He constantly identifies misdirected desire as the root cause of
his wanderings from God.
– His attitude toward sex: it is a sinful impulse that reason cannot
control
• The role of reason:
– Reason will come to play a very important role in Augustine’s
spiritual journey as he learns that seeking truth might be more
important that worldly success.
Augustine’s
Confessions
Book III
Age: 17-19
The sin of tragedies, Cicero’s
Hortensius, a simple Bible, and the
errors of Manichaeism
The Sin of Fiction
III.1-3
• Augustine falls in love with a woman whom many
assume to be his unnamed concubine and continues to
be lost in carnal desires.
• Augustine recounts his enjoyment of theatrical shows
and considers the emotional appeal of fiction.
• Problem with theatrical tragedies: they constitute
immersion in fictional suffering without a recognition of
one’s own suffering in sin.
– Emotional titillation: they create empty emotional
reactions in their audience. Producing sensations with
no moral ends.
– Tragedy also encourages a love (enjoyment) of
suffering that Augustine now finds absurd and wrong.
Cicero’s Hortensius
Background
• Cicero:
– One of the most studied classical Latin
authors.
– Considered to have an almost perfect style of
rhetoric
• Hortensius:
– Has not survived, and much if what scholars
know about it comes from quotations in
Augustine’s works.
– Was a defense of the study of philosophy,
encouraging readers to devote themselves to
the pursuit of truth.
– Aimed to rebut the position that philosophy is
useless and does not lead to happiness.
Augustine, the Hortensius, & the Christian Bible
III.4-5
• Encounter with the Hortensius is often referred to as his “first
conversion.”
– Augustine was moved deeply by the content of the work—the
claim that to pursue true wisdom is the route to a happy life—as
opposed to the locution (quality of writing).
– For the first time, he “longed for the immortality of wisdom with
an incredible [passion] in [his] heart.”
• However, feeling that it lacked a reference to God (which it did since
Cicero was a pagan) Augustine felt he needed to look to Catholicism
(his religion) and the Christian Bible for answers.
• Problem:
– The early Latin Bible was crudely worded and somewhat
obscure.
– For a student of rhetoric like Augustine, its language was too
simple to be satisfying and drove him to a strong dislike toward
Christian scripture.
• Consequences:
– Disliking the plain-spoken Bible is a main reason for his
becoming attracted to the more refined and intellectual texts of
Manichaeism.
Manichaeism Background
• Founded by Mani, in the 3rd century CE, who,
inspired by a vision, believed himself to be a
Paraclete—the last in a line of prophets.
• Gnostic religion—from gnosis (knowledge)—
promises believers a secret knowledge, hidden
from non-believers, that will lead to salvation.
• Dualistic:
– View the universe as a battleground between
the opposing forces of good and evil.
– Darkness and the physical world are
manifestations of evil, while light is a
manifestation of good.
Manichaeism Background
• Elaborate cosmology:
– Complex mythologies of angels and demons used
to explain the workings of the universe.
– Light and darkness originally existed separately,
without knowledge of each other. Good and evil are
equal powers and both have always existed.
– Believed the physical world is of no value: it is the
temporary, illusory stage for a struggle of spiritual
powers, and all that matters is the release of the
divine spirit within us from the contamination of the
material body and its return to its true home.
• Was eventually banned for being seen as:
– Heretical by Christians
– A dangerous import from the rival power—Persia—
by the Roman state.
Manichaean Believers
Two Types:
• The Elect Saints
– Orthodox
– Have already reached
spiritual perfection
– Are committed to a
missionary life of extreme
asceticism:
• Poverty, celibacy,
extreme dietary
restrictions, and are
even forbidden from
harvesting/preparing
food.
• The Hearers
– Auditors
– Devoted to caring for the
Elect.
• Incurred the sin of
harvesting plants & were
released from sin by the
prayers of the Elect who
ate the food.
– Not celibate, but forbidden
to procreate.
– Hoped to be reborn as
Elect.
– Augustine was a Hearer
Augustine & the Manichees
III.6-10
• Comes across the sect in Carthage during his studies and
ends up believing strongly in the Manichee doctrine for ~10
years.
• Manichaeism offered Augustine a way to accommodate his
conflicts:
– He could pursue his career, and retain his partner, while purging his
sins through his service to the Elect.
– He could blame those sins on his lower, alien nature, which like the
material world had been made by the power of evil, but which his true
self, would eventually shed.
• This led Augustine to believe that Manichaean dualism
compromised his acceptance of responsibility for his sins.
– Manichaeism responded to his need for the name of Christ (instilled
in him by his mother) while allowing him to retain his distaste for the
Christian scriptures.
• He could regard the Bible as a crude and contaminated attempt at
truth, whereas the Manichaean scriptures offered both the name
of Christ and what seemed to be a profound understanding of the
universe and of human life.
Manichee Challenges to/Criticisms of Christianity
• Manichees:
– Viewed Christianity as a flawed and incomplete
religion.
– Were extremely critical of the moral failings of the
patriarchs of the Old Testament. Stories which
described episodes of lust, anger, violence, and
deceit led them to believe that the OT God was really
an evil demon, not a God of Light.
– Argued that the books of the New Testament had
been altered to corrupt Christ’s actual teachings.
– Refused to accept the Incarnation—the union of God
and human in a physical body—and rejected the idea
that Christ had been born from a human mother into a
material body, because they viewed the body as evil.
– Believed that this was actually only the appearance of
physicality and death. It was, therefore, also
impossible that Christ could have suffered a physical
death on the cross.
Augustine’s Break From Manichaeism
III. 6-10
• Error in “picturing” God:
– Manichee doctrines depended heavily on visualization of the
concepts of God and evil, and this dependence greatly delayed
Augustine from coming to know God without imagining Him.
– Manichees did not believe God to be omnipotent, claimed that
He struggled against the opposing substance of evil, and that the
human soul was of the same substance as God.
• Bad meeting with Faustus:
– Upon meeting a highly respected Manichee Elect, Augustine is
disappointed by his excessive talking and failure to answer
Augustine’s challenges to the Manichee cosmology. This
meeting pushes Augustine further away from Manichee beliefs.
• Perspective in the Confessions:
– Christian polemic—presenting the beliefs and doctrines as he
argues against them
• Rational philosophy and astronomy persuaded him that
the colorful Manichee cosmology is false and lead him to
Neoplatonism.
Summary of Book III
• Cicero’s Hortensius introduced Augustine to
philosophy—the love of wisdom.
• What drew Augustine to Manichaeism:
– Dissatisfaction with the simple language of the Bible.
– Manichaean texts:
• Rhetorically embellished
• Elaborate cosmology
• What led to his rejection of Manichaeism:
– Fantastical cosmology and cryptic laws became suspicious
– It began to conflict with the budding science of astronomy
– Augustine was ready to explore more truthful, less wordy forms
of beliefs after his meeting with Faustus.