Augustine, 5

I read the Confessions almost a quarter of a century ago during a two-week voyage on a cargo ship bound for Europe. It was a time when I wanted to find an Englishwoman to marry. It is worth noting what I wrote then in the Atlantic Ocean:

2 October 1991

I’ve been dreading staying goof off: finishing the two books I have halfway through the trip.

I need to reconcile myself with Augustine and New Spain (Paz’s book). That would be, indirectly, a reconciliation with dad, since he is both.

 

BOOK VII: He begins to read the epistles of St Paul

Augustine begins this chapter by saying that he no longer conceived of the deity in the form of a human body, and then goes on to say something which again shows that all this talk of his later conversion is false, since he was already, in his youthful way, a good Christian:

My heart adhered firmly to the faith in your Christ… My soul was not willing to abandon it; rather every day it was more and more steeped in it.

And four pages ahead:

My faith believed also in Christ, our Son and Lord… These beliefs were already intact and firmly rooted in my soul.

It is not surprising that at this point Augustine’s extreme theological rationalisations had already begun. First he dispatches the problem of evil, and then he reconciles the irreconcilable: the Torah with Paul.

It was with great eagerness that I picked up the venerable Scriptures inspired by your Spirit, particularly those of your apostle Paul.

As I said in the first entry, Augustine was a man of his time. He followed, to its ultimate consequences, the misguided steps of the Caucasoid Christians of his time: something that speaks volumes about imperial Rome in the 4th century.

The next chapter is the most famous of his Confessions. The whole book shows how dead the Aryan soul was then, as it is dead now. If it hadn’t been dead it would have prevented the Judeo-Christian flourishing. Already in this chapter Augustine uses so many metaphors taken from the Bible that a reader unfamiliar with it would find himself without understanding much.

To understand the next chapter we have to imagine Augustine in a terrible struggle with himself à la Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: a titanic struggle in which the maternal introjects won out (remember Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He didn’t die but degenerated into a vice’).
 

BOOK VIII: ‘Conversion’ in the garden of his house

I will now tell how you freed me from the bonds of my carnal desires.

Augustine recounts how an African named Ponticianus saw Paul’s epistles on Augustine’s desk and began to speak about Antony, the Egyptian monk. Remember the passage in Deschner’s book about this monk:

Athanasius did not just adorn his Vita Antonii (St Anthony or Antony was a monk who played an important role in the conversion of Augustine; was the archetype of the lives of Greek and Latin saints, and for centuries inspired the monastic life of the East and the West) with increasingly crazy miracles, but he also falsified documents in the worst of styles.

When Ponticianus left, Augustine rationalised this visit of the African as follows: ‘You brought me once more face to face with myself, forcing me to look myself in the eye so that I might see my iniquity and abhor it’. He was already thirty-two years old and, comparing his erotic conduct with that of the Egyptian monk, he confessed:

In my inner house a great strife was being waged… I turned to Alypius saying loudly: ‘We, on the other hand, wallow in flesh and blood’.

He, stunned, stared at me in silence…

The house where we were staying had a small garden. So I withdrew to the garden and Alypius followed in my footsteps.

Augustine realised that ‘there are, therefore, two wills in us’. In psychoanalytic language, we could say that it was a struggle between the super-ego instilled by his mother (Thou shalt not fornicate, etc.) and his natural call to Eros, which in the pagan world wasn’t that sinful. ‘As I was deliberating whether to consecrate myself to the service of the Lord…’ That is, feeling the call to follow in the footsteps of a monk would mean no marriage, a life condemned to celibacy.

And from this moment it would no longer be licit for me to do this or that? What was it, my God, that I was suggesting with those words ‘this and that’? What sordid things! What indecencies!

But Augustine doesn’t get graphic. He fails to confess what exactly it was. Let us remember that he had already said: ‘To love and be loved was the sweetest thing for me, especially if I got to enjoy the beloved´s body…’ Gollum continues:

Do you intend to live without these things?… ‘Shut your ears to the filthy whisperings of your members, and you will be mortified. They speak to you of delights, but not according to the law of the Lord your God’.

This struggle within my heart was nothing other than the struggle of myself against myself. Alypius was still beside me, silently awaiting the outcome of this new agitation in me.

I got up and he stood stunned in the place where we were sitting. I threw myself, as best I could, under a fig tree and gave free rein to the tears, which flowed like two rivers from my eyes, an acceptable sacrifice to you, Lord.

I hurriedly retraced my steps to the place where Alypius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Epistles of St Paul when I got up from there. I picked it up, opened it, and silently read the first passage that fell before my eyes. It said: No gluttony and drunkenness; no lust and wantonness; no rivalry and envy. Rather put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not concern yourself with the flesh to gratify its lusts.

I didn’t want to read any more, nor was it necessary. In an instant—no sooner had I finished reading the sentence—all the darkness of my doubts vanished, as if a light of assurance had taken possession of my heart.

Then we went to see my mother.

We told her everything, with great joy on her part. And as we told her the story of what had happened, she, jubilant and leaping for joy, blessed and glorified you… For she saw that you had granted her much more than she used to ask of you with her tearful and pitiful moans. In such a way you converted me to you that I no longer desired a wife nor harboured any hope in this world. I was firm in that rule of faith which many years before you had shown her that I would embrace. It was thus that you turned her weeping into joy [Ps 30:11], far more fulfilled than she had wished. A sweeter and more chaste joy than she had expected to find in the grandchildren born of my flesh.

In Augustine’s mind, the inversion of Greco-Roman values was now complete.