Finally, I decided to title my essay ‘Augustine and other influential “giants” of the Christian Era’, which was published on this site from 30 March to 7 this month. Yesterday and today I edited it, and its PDF version can be read here. It is an important essay because it begins to give an idea of the literary genre I want to inaugurate with my trilogy.
My output as a writer is divided into two: books written in my mother tongue and what I post on The West’s Darkest Hour. The importance of essays like this is that, at last, it begins to become apparent why subjects as seemingly dissimilar as self-knowledge and white decline are connected.
To see the connection it is essential to put out of our minds the inane autobiographies that appear on the market for mass consumption—prolefeed for the proles—such as those written by film stars for example, and realise that we are talking about something astronomically different.
Knowing oneself, in the sense of the Delphic Oracle’s commandment (how different from the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parents!), is vital to save the Aryan from the process of self-destruction he is undergoing.
Recently, I have had to make intensive use of my mobile phone against my will because I need to use the said device for banking operations. Having prostituted my soul in such a way; having to use hours of my time to familiarise myself with the wretched ‘applications’ of the phone, leads me to say a few things.
One of my sponsors is correct, at least in part, to blame technology for Aryan decline. I became aware of this a few years ago when, far from the cities and their mundane noise, I had a moment of halcyonic rapport in the countryside, touching a tree.
The communion with nature made me realise what an incredible level of degradation it is to live in a metropolis, or even a modern town (recently I was complaining about the noise of the air conditioner in the village where I live). I even plan to unplug the refrigerator so as not to listen to the damn engine while meditating, and to get into the habit of buying my groceries daily so that I don’t need to refrigerate food.
BOOK IX: With his mother and friends he returns to his native Africa
‘…where I had offered you as a sacrifice, my old self’ Augustine writes in this chapter. He didn’t realise that his ‘new self’ was what psychologists today would call the false self: his relationship with his god, to whom he speaks in the second person singular, was a maternal introject—not his true self! But now imbued with his false self, the absorbing mother within him, he writes: ‘My heart was fire’ and ‘now I was disgusted by those who rebel against the Scriptures’: a preamble to the destruction of the works of Celsus and Porphyry ordered by Emperor Theodosius II.
After his ‘conversion’ Augustine wrote to Ambrose and signed up to be baptised, so he, his mother and Alypius, who would also convert to the cult of the Galileans (Emperor Julian’s term), returned to Milan.
We also brought Adeodatus, my natural son, born of sin. You had gifted him well. He was barely fifteen years old… His intelligence left me speechless.
A little later, Augustine devotes some interesting pages to how his grandparents had educated his mother, and how they had turned her into a puritan: through mistreatment. I was especially struck by these words, which are understandable if we imagine the African heat, where the family grew up: ‘Apart from the hours when they ate soberly with her parents, she wasn’t allowed to drink even water, even if she burned with thirst’. But I find it very strange that in his book Augustine didn’t tell anecdotes about his siblings. What did he want to hide from us? What we do know is that his mother had fulfilled her mission:
She said to me: ‘My son, as far as I am concerned, I no longer find pleasure in this life… There was only one reason why I wanted to stay a little longer in this life. I wanted to see you as a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has fulfilled this desire even more fully than I wished. I see you his servant, who despises the happiness of the earth. What am I doing here?’
I don’t remember my answer well. What I do remember is that, barely five days later—not many more—she fell into bed with fevers… At fifty-six years of age and thirty-three years of mine, that pious and holy woman was released from her body.
It is very significant for those of us who research mental disorders to read, a couple of pages later, a retrospective recollection when her mother was still alive:
And she also reminded me with emotional affection that she had never heard a harsh word or insult against her come out of my mouth.
But he would take out his pent-up rage with his theological pessimism, so opposite to that of Pelagius. The following year Adeodatus died (had the great doctor of the Church treated his son well?) and the narrative part of his Confessions ends. The rest of the next four chapters are mere homilies for new converts.
If we ignore them (books X to XIII of his Confessions), it seems very significant that Augustine ended his book with this great account of his mother. As my father told me, ‘Faith is suckled’. And as Monica told her son: ‘Where I was’, in her dream of the rule, ‘there you were’. The rest—the coming theology of Augustine—followed from there.
No wonder that the year Augustine died, 430 c.e., was the year in which the Dark Ages began. When I see the astronomical damage done to the white man by the Imperial Church, that Church of which Augustine was its great architect, I increasingly admire Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. Unlike Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare and Augustine himself, the German philosopher was a ‘man against his time’, a poet against the Christian Age. Now, thanks to new ways of refuting Christianity besides Nietzsche’s—Richard Carrier’s mythicism and the autobiographical genre I want to inaugurate (which precisely shows that faith is indeed a programme installed in us by our parents)—, the mental virus for the white man implanted by deranged theologians could, potentially, cease to infect us.
Giovanni di Balduccio, Tomb of St Augustine in Pavia, Italy.
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.
The Conversion of St Augustine by Fra Angelico.
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.
I want to speak now in the presence of my God of that twenty-ninth year of my life… Night and day my mother offered you for me the sacrifice of her heart, flooded with tears.
My mother, who wept bitterly at my departure and accompanied me to the seashore… wanted me to stay or to take her with me…
What a mother!… You made the rivers of tears that my mother shed for me dry up, watering the earth beneath her face every day. She was reluctant to return home without me, but that very night I hoisted the sails, leaving her alone crying and praying… You didn’t do what she asked of you then, so you could make of me what she always asked of you…
As soon as I arrived in Rome, a bodily illness brought me to the brink of the grave… Had it happened, where would I have gone but to the fire and torments that my deeds deserved according to the justice of your law… My mother would never have recovered from such a wound. I have no words to express the love she had for me.
But that wasn’t healthy love. For those who have read my Letter to mom Medusa, it is like believing that the love my mother felt for me as a teenager was healthy!
That chaste and sober widow, so given to almsgiving, servant of your saints, who never left a day without offering at your altar, went to church twice a day morning and evening, never missing a day.
Pages later Augustine confesses:
I believed that your only-begotten Son and our Saviour was something like the shining body of your substance for our salvation. I felt nothing else of him but what I could imagine in my vanity. I thought that with such a nature he couldn’t be born of the Virgin Mary without mingling with the flesh…
The Manichaeans said that the books of the New Testament had been falsified by persons unknown, who wished to impose the Jewish law on the Christian law…
I arrived in Milan and went to see Bishop Ambrose… I refused to entrust the cure of my soul’s illnesses to these philosophers, in whose books the saving name of Christ didn’t appear. I opted, therefore, to become a catechumen in the Catholic Church.
BOOK VI: His mother catches up with him in Milan
By this time my mother had already come to my side. Her piety had given her the strength to follow me over sea and land…
Her heart wasn’t startled or troubled with joy when she heard I had done much of what she tearfully asked me to do. I saw myself free from falsehood, though I hadn’t yet reached the truth. Sure as she was that you would grant her the rest—for you had promised her all—she answered me, full of serenity and with a heart full of confidence, ‘by my faith in Christ, I hope to see you a faithful Catholic before I leave this life’.
This is what she told me. I ran with more solicitude to the church, hanging on Ambrose’s lips. She loved that man as an angel of God… She loved him greatly because he could lead me to salvation. [Ambrose for his part] was full of praise for her when he saw me, congratulating me on having such a mother.
Then Augustine tells us of his new friendships:
I had met Alypius on my arrival in Rome and we became such good friends that he came with me to Milan. He didn’t want to be separated from me… Nebridius too… had come to Milan for the sole purpose of being with me and thus be able to search for truth and wisdom… I was now thirty years old…
I thought I would be very unhappy if I lacked the caresses of a woman… Alypius was not in favour of my marrying… He, for his part, was, in that city very chaste… As for me… I was wounded by the disease of the flesh…
Alypius couldn’t quite understand how I, whom he truly admired, could be so attached to those sexual pleasures… I wanted to marry at all costs… I had already asked for the hand of a girl who was almost two years younger so that she could get married.
A cute nymphet! (today it would be called paedophilia). But Augustine entered into a concubinage with a woman older than the precocious brat:
And she left me the natural son I had had with her… I couldn’t hold out for the two-year term.
An idealised painting of ‘Saint’ Monica and her grandson, Adeodatus: Augustine’s only son.
I feel very frustrated that comments on WDH have on the whole tailed off. Where did they all disappear to? Or were they timewasters in the first place? I didn’t think so. I dislike the quietness. It’s like they’ve all lost their spines. I don’t know if they’re demoralised, or simply ideologically opposed all of a sudden when National Socialism didn’t turn out what they wanted it to be/didn’t turn out to be ‘hardcore’ WN with swastikas. I imagine it’s the Christian question, but more so especially the trauma model and animal rights that gets them the most—most people are cruel; I’ve gathered that, and resent being forced to high moral standards.
I had an obvious thought as to the commenters, and commenters in general. I notice the most responses are always to the ‘what was done in the war/what could have been done instead in the war’ topic set. It’s because, I think, this topic is basically abstract, and doesn’t require personal change. One can mull over nerdy history perspectives all day long, massaging tiny new snippets of information in.
But to discuss ethics is more of a quality than a slew of mere information, and brings the person in question into the debate, not just the abstract at arms length, and thus is harder to massage into their already-rigid position, as, for once in their lives, coming from the dissident right in general as they are, they are encouraged to see ‘the mentally ill’ not as hate objects, but as victims of parental cruelty, and, more than that, are encouraged to realise that by eating meat they are causing unnecessary suffering, and are so evil in some sense.
That takes too much effort to change over compared with editing in a tiny new snippet of historical insight here and there, or piping up with more. I don’t personally know a huge deal about that point in history (though like to learn), and I don’t have an endless fascination with regurgitating facts one could find in a book if they wanted.
I think that’s the root of it, qualities versus facts-by-rote. It’s a hard situation to get around.
If I wanted endless Jew-bait, as I call it (a pun on click-bait), I’d just go to The Unz Review. Don’t get me wrong, I consider it a problem, but Jews don’t really play on my mind much these days, unlike Christianized whites. The more they look at Jews, the more excuse they have, and the less they see themselves. Only when they see themselves, and tackle themselves, can they mount any sensible attack on their enemies.
I hope you have some new blood soon. At one point there were over 40 people, right? I count loads of commenters, and I get frustrated when the ones I like drop away. They should understand, as you say, that yes, the Jewish Question is a given, and we’ve all done it to death (if not, the SS Pamphlets cover it pretty well) but the Christian Question encapsulates everything. If not for the latter, these ignorant mercantile commenters really are no different to Jews in my eyes. They worship and obey the principles of the same alien god.
Editor’s 2 ¢:
I think the Christian issue has really alienated the dissident right from this forum, and the fact that I barely mentions Jews.
The position of this site, following the four words, is: Be kind to abused animals and children, and tough on the exterminable Neanderthals who abuse them. Conversely, the WN position in general is based on Christian ethics: Love one another, and exterminationism is unthinkable anathema.
To the commenters:
I wonder, if Ben and I launched a podcast talking about all of this (a WDH transformed from written word to spoken word, inviting listeners to speak to the show), would you come back?
Roman sculptural group showing Castor and Pollux or, according to other authors, Orestes and Pylades.
BOOK IV: He becomes a teacher of rhetoric at Tagaste
For the space of nine years—from the age of nineteen to the age of twenty-eight—I deceived myself and deceived others… We were after the vanities of popular glory, the applause of the theatre, the public contests, the contests of hay wreaths, the games of spectacles, and the intemperance of concupiscence.
These were times when Augustine made a living by rhetoric, which he himself calls ‘the art of deception’, and lived with a woman; times when he took part in a recital of dramatic verse. Let us remember that the full title of his future magnum opus, unlike the way publishers abbreviate the copies we buy in bookshops, reads De civitate Dei contra pagans. In his Confessions he speaks of
…Venus, Saturn or Mars. We are led to believe that man—who is flesh and blood and proud rottenness—is guiltless.
But in his hometown a great misfortune befell him. His soulmate, a young lad of his age, fell ill and passed away. ‘My soul could not live without him’, Agustín confesses, ‘weeping flooded me’. See image above. Interestingly, Augustine uses Greco-Roman imagery when he writes: ‘Orestes and Payloads, who wanted to die for each other, or both of them together, because they considered it the worst death to live apart from each other’. He adds:
I was his second self. How well the poet expressed it when he said that his friend ‘was half his soul’ [Horace, Odes, I, 3,8]. I felt that my soul and his were but one in two bodies. I was horrified at having to live because I didn’t want to live half-heartedly. And perhaps this was also the reason for my fear of dying, so that the one whom I had loved so much would not die completely.
Was Augustine bisexual? Throughout the centuries Christian commentators don’t want to see it. That is one of the problems not only with biographies from Christian pens, but of history in general: those who write provide us with a Christian or neochristian slant. In my library there came to be three editions of the Confessions but in none of them did the translator, or whoever prefaced the book, suggested that these words of Augustine would evoke the homoeroticism of Orestes and Pylades, or Castor and Pollux.
I carried my soul torn to pieces and dripping with blood, a weight that neither I myself was able to carry, nor did I know where to put it. Neither the charm of the woods, nor the soft perfumes of a garden could soothe it. Nor did I find peace in song, or play, nor in splendid banquets, nor in the delights of bed and home, nor even in books and verses. Even light itself was a horror to me, and everything that wasn’t what he was, was unbearable and hateful. My only rest was moaning and tears, and when I stopped crying, I felt the heavy burden of my misery on my back.
As a defence mechanism a few pages later he confesses: ‘My greatest rest and consolation was to solace myself with the other friends… We all had something to teach the others and each learned from the others… Our souls melted together and into one’.
A pagan of the time might have read between the lines a homosexual relationship in what Augustine just said about his lachrymose agony, but as I wrote above the commentators on the Confessions never suggest it. Even my admired authors Eduardo Velasco and William Pierce did not understand the homoeroticism of ancient Greece and Rome.
Augustine and his mother Monica (1846) by Ary Scheffer.
BOOK II: Spends a year at home before going to Carthage
I want to remember now my past uglinesses and the carnal dullness of my soul… In my adolescence I burned with desire to be filled with the baser things… Your anger against me was increasing… burning in the flames of my concupiscence… At least, I should have paid more attention to the voice of your clouds warning those who marry that you will suffer the tribulations of the flesh, but I forgive you [1 Cor 7:28].
This poor devil, elevated to the greatest Father of the Church for all Christendom (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant), already believed that sex was sinful even within marriage! On the next page Augustine continues:
Made a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, I would have sighed happily for your embraces [Mt 19:12]… I was lost at sixteen.
And here it is clear what it means to be a slave to the parental introject (in his case, a mental slave to his mother’s engulfing mind), and why I say that the idea of the deity is but a sublimation of the maternal (or paternal) image:
She wanted me—and I remember how insistently she asked me in secret—not to fornicate… The words, however, were yours, though I didn’t know it. I thought you were silent and that it was she who spoke. Therefore, I despised you, her son, the son of your servant [his mother] and your servant [Augustine], who didn’t cease to talk to me through her.
With such an ogre of a super-ego it is no wonder that further down on the same page he added about his nascent libidinous impulse:
I wallowed in my slime as if it were balm and precious ointment, and to mire me…
BOOK III: Going to Carthage
To love and be loved was the sweetest thing for me, especially if I got to enjoy the beloved’s body…
He was already nineteen years old and his pagan father, the only one who could have saved him from his wife’s abrasive behaviour, had died.
But you know very well, O light of my heart, that I had no knowledge of the counsel of your Apostle at that time.
In a sense he did, as we saw in the previous section. Augustine was unaware that the self is a structure, and that it can be programmed at the whim of one’s parents, either for good or for evil.
What only delighted, excited and kindled me was to love, seek and embrace strongly not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it might be. These were the words that excited and burned me, and the only thing that dampened my ardour was not to find the name of Christ there. For this name, Lord, the name of my Saviour and your Son, I drank it piously with my mother’s milk, and by your mercy I kept it engraved in the depths of my heart.
By the way, I will never forget my father’s words: ‘Faith is suckled!’ in a tone of assertive gravity. And here is how the unconscious of Augustine’s mother had already perceived that her son, although he would flirt for a short time with Manichaeism and other pagan sects, was at heart a good Christian:
My mother, your faithful servant, wept for me, shedding tears… She dreamt, in fact, that she was standing on a wooden ruler all sad and afflicted and that there was coming towards her a young man with a bright, cheerful and smiling face. He asked her the reason for her sadness and her daily tears, not because he didn’t know it, but because he had something to tell her, as in such visions. When she had answered that her tears were for the loss of my soul, he told her to take courage and to look carefully and be attentive, for where she was, there I was also [my emphasis]. She looked and saw me standing beside her on the same ruler.
Monica’s unconscious captured her son perfectly, as he was: a good Christian.
When she told me the dream and I tried to interpret it as a message that she shouldn’t despair of one day being as I was at present, she promptly and without hesitation replied: ‘No, he didn’t say “where he is, there you are”, but “where you are, there he is”.
This sharp reply of my mother’s impressed me very much… I was more impressed by this reply than by the dream itself.
But as Augustine had not yet devoted himself body and soul to being a champion of Constantine’s still young faith, his mother ‘returned to the charge with greater entreaties and more abundant tears’ as he confesses in his Confessions.
Monica was a clinical case of what some YouTubers call a narcissistic mother: a phallic, possessive mother without ego boundaries between her and her son, whom she treats as a mere egoic object (cf. my Letter to mom Medusa).
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.
Finally, I decided to title my essay ‘Augustine and other influential “giants” of the Christian Era’, which was published on this site from 30 March to 7 this month. Yesterday and today I edited it, and its PDF version can be read here. It is an important essay because it begins to give an idea of the literary genre I want to inaugurate with my trilogy.
