Augustine (354-430) was not only a man of his time like the previous ones in this series. Of the five mentioned, this African author had the most significant influence on the civilisation of the white man (he was, for example, the most widely read author in Spain). I will not speak here of his magnum opus, The City of God. His infernal doctrine, which wreaked so much havoc in my young life, is already denounced in several parts of my autobiography. I will confine myself to his most popular book.
It will be remembered that in my article on Goethe I said that Zweig had written about Augustine, but I omitted what he wrote about this so-called Father of the Church. Here is the full passage:
Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.
Before he can throw light into his soul, a man must be aware of its existence, and this awareness does not begin until after the rise of Christianity. St Augustine’s Confessions breaks a trail for inward contemplation. Yet the gaze of the famous divine was directed, not so much inward, as towards the congregation he hoped to edify by the example of his own conversion. His treatise was a confession to the community, a model Confession; it was purposeful, teleological; it was not an end in itself, comprising its own answer and its own meaning. Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake.
But in previous pages Zweig had observed the obvious: Rousseau’s confessions were not honest either, since he never repented of his sin of having thrown all his children into the orphanage. Precisely because of this sort of thing Zweig said that autobiography is the most difficult of literary arts: one must betray oneself if one wants to tell the pure truth about one’s life, a truth that neither Augustine nor Rousseau really confessed for lack of insight, intellectual honesty and nobility of soul.
The biggest problem I see with the editions that have been made of the Confessions is that they have been prefaced by Christians, including Penguin Books. This bias makes the unsuspecting reader unaware that the accepted wisdom about the book is a myth. There was no such thing as his very famous conversion weeping in the garden of his house. He was always a Christian as I will demonstrate in this article divided into more than one blog posts.
By convention, the thirteen chapters of the Confessions are called books instead of chapters by the publishers:
BOOK I: Augustine’s childhood
In this first chapter Augustine mentions his wet nurses. It is pertinent to note that, in referring to his whining as an infant, he already sees it as sinful. The white man’s current seemingly terminal sense of guilt is due to having secularised the Christian notion of sin (now at ethnosuicidal levels throughout the West). Augustine speaks of ‘you’ to his god, which all editions capitalise, ‘God’; he doesn’t use the ‘thou’ when referring to this deity in the Confessions: a sort of epistle to the Christian providence by this Punic theologian.
‘Who shall make me understand the sin of my childhood, since before thee no man is without sin, even a child of a single day on earth?’ Three pages later he confesses: ‘I was still a boy when I began to invoke you as my help and refuge…, I was small, I begged you with no small affection that they wouldn’t whip me at school. Sometimes, for my own good, you didn’t listen to me, and I was laughed at not only by my elders but also by my parents’.
Augustine was unaware, as the vast majority of religious people still are, that the idea of ‘God’ is a sublimation of the parental image. In this anecdote we see that the child Augustine was the victim of beatings at school and of mockery of these beatings in his own home. Since the idea of the deity is a projection, it is not surprising that now, talking in written soliloquies to his parental introject, he tells this ‘deity’ that ‘for his own good’ he didn’t listen to his pleas. Alice Miller calls this poisonous pedagogy in one of her books, translated into English under the title For Your Own Good.
And why was he beaten? On the next page he tells us: ‘I was whipped because I played ball…’ Clearly, the teachers were childhood-breakers, but Augustine doesn’t identify with the wounded child inside him but with the perpetrator: ‘I sinned, Lord, by disobeying my parents and teachers’.[1] The religious introjects had begun in his early childhood:
I was still a child when I heard of the eternal life promised to us by our God, who humbled himself and came down to our pride. And from that time I was marked with the sign of the cross, and from my mother’s womb I was given a taste of his salt.
Then he writes: ‘With what fervour of spirit and with what faith I came to my mother and mother of us all, your Church’ (my emphasis: keep in mind that he is always writing to his god in this epistle-book called the Confessions). He continues:
In truth, I already believed, and my mother believed, and all the house believed, except my father, who, however, could never overcome in me the pious right my mother had over me that I shouldn’t cease to believe in Christ, in whom he didn’t yet believe. For my mother wanted you, my God, to be my father more than he did.
The next page already shows the enormous cognitive distortion that Christianity caused him from an early age: ‘Being such a small boy I was already a great sinner’, and shortly afterwards: ‘I still don´t fully understand today why I abhorred Greek literature’. As I read the following pages I couldn’t restrain myself from writing at the bottom of the page, ‘If what Augustine says is a sin, Tubby of Little Lulu is a sinner!’ Even common curiosity in the Greco-Roman world was sinful:
But my sin was to seek in myself and other creatures, not in him, pleasure, beauty, and truth, thus falling into pain, confusion.
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[1] What healed Alice Miller of her depressions, she confesses, was to identify with the wounded child inside her; not with the perp.
4 replies on “Augustine, 1”
My childhood was much like Augustine’s in this respect. I had impeccable standards set for myself at the same time as being unable to tolerate any personal error, no matter how small (or fictitious, as with the things I made up to take to Confession with me, so as to play the part if I was lacking in suitable ‘sins’ for the week). I think my mother’s steady religious pedagogy matched to my father’s critical hostility and impatience stimulated this, but at the time I put my failures (or imagined failures) down to something like sin, ever-present in me, as far as I could tell, and in need of perpetual self-chastisement.
It’s the reason behind my then self-harm also, feeling I had ‘let God down’, and then again more so as I started to lose my faith, either by letting my parents down, or later directly.
I realise now it was more likely to be my repressed anger at my father leading to these violent, gruesome acts, but at the time I was turned fully inwards, and constantly being informed by my mother when I asked, “pray to God; he’ll help you, just ask for forgiveness” (my mother was kindly in her words although unhelpful), and hearing – obviously – nothing in return, at the same time as expecting too much of myself, with a father who both expected great standards from me, and, simultaneously, presented no hope and faith in me whatsoever, and a very palpable lingering disappointment, often broadcast.
These days I’m still fiercely over-critical of myself, and often brood for too long over something I’ve said, done, or written, picking it apart, but in general I’m better than I was, as, like Miller, I’ve come to decouple myself from the parental introjects, and from their withering perspective(s).
I suppose you’ve read, perhaps more than once, what I said about the ‘Colin Ross class’:
Few things have illuminated my mind more than that class. And Ross is the only proponent of the trauma model I’ve ever met personally (although I spoke to Theodore Lidz on the phone in 1996).
Today, all Western atheists, following in the footsteps of Augustine, are self-harmers.
Yes, I was thinking of the lines in Day of Wrath when I wrote my comment. I must say, I wish I had more luck when it comes to writing to (and on) trauma model advocates. Robert Whitaker’s site ignored my emails recently, as did the US psychologist and Harvard researcher Kermit Cole – and that was after me reading an article of his that rooted schizophrenia in ‘childhood trauma’. They are, as you said recently with Patrick D. Hahn (and Jay Joseph?), quite willing to go that far, but I know of not one of the researchers these days who will go the extra mile and lay the blame at the feet of parents. The days of Lidz, Sullivan, Laing, Schatzman, and Arieti appear to be over. Alice Miller fans all seem to be particularly liberal-leftist. It frustrates me infinitely. I’d sent each of my email correspondents a free PDF copy of Consumption and was seemingly ignored on principle. I hate mental health sites and researchers that give a ‘contact us’ button, and yet ignore messages sent to them, presumably because it offends their squeamish orthodoxy.
Personally, I like that facet of Ross, but otherwise get annoyed at him for still hanging onto some ‘gene’-environment interaction, as well as for suggesting speculatively in Genetics of Schizophrenia, that the ‘illness’ could exist at the level of a body’s (presumably faulty) electrical fields. I pull my hair out with these people! Why can no one see the obvious plain in front of them?! Even the title of his recent book sets up a false conclusion.
I agree with you. Not practically all, but all new (or old) people I bump into in the street these days, 100%, predictably always come out with these self-defeating, masochistic neochristian ideals. It’s got to the point where I haven’t been able to have a sane, open conversation with anyone around me for about four years. Not a soul! I’m forced to keep it all to myself these days, as they invariably get offended/flustered/liable to call someone, if I just state more of the obvious to them, over miscegenation, or as a solution to immigration, or indeed any ‘race talk’ at all.
Usually, I’m just ignored anyway, at best. No one in this country has a spine, and I feel even more annoyed for that, knowing I too am thus forced into silence, unable even to rouse others. I can’t think of any vital speech over here that isn’t now illegal. It makes one wonder how a pushback can ever form, even given future collapses. Not for the liberal authoritarian laws… but for the detestable nature of the cowardly, sheepish, monochrome citizens.
What happened to you with Whitaker happened to me with Peter Breggin!
I’ve said these things to myself in soliloquy too! But there’s one exception. Apparently, you’re the only one interested in the trauma model who’s also interested in preserving the white man. What a shame that Whitaker, Ross, and those still alive don’t want to take the step that Lidz and others took decades ago!
This truly is the West’s darkest hour.