Did Augustine and Aquinas Believe In A Literal Interpretation of Genesis

We got a new comment on a very old post, which I thought I'd respond to with a post in order to make it more likely that people more knowledgeable than I would weigh in. The question is:

Hello,

I see that this is an older post, but some of the comments are recent, so hopefully the OP will see this comment.

Can you provide any sources to document this claim:

"Aquinas and Augustine both seem to agree that it is not only possible but indeed likely that the history and cosmology of Genesis are not literally true."

Thank you and God bless.

On of the reasons that I'm a less interesting blogger these days is that I've gotten more cautious about making big statements without being really, really sure I know what I'm doing. However, pulling together what I think I had in mind, here are a couple notes.

A key phrase in what I said is "the history and cosmology of Genesis are not literally true." Augustine and Aquinas were learned in the natural philosophy of the ancient world, and according to this the cosmology in Genesis was far more obviously primitive than its history. Genesis seems to indicate a basically flat world with a domed sky overhead: God separates the waters and the waters above are called the sky. Ancient natural philosophy had determined that the earth was spherical and developed a detailed model of the orbits of the heavenly bodies around the earth which allowed them to make highly accurate calculations of eclipses, conjunctions, etc.

Augustine is probably the easier call here. In his Confessions, Augustine talks about how he was originally turned off from Christianity by what he saw as the Bible's bad cosmology and by scientific claims put forward by Christians:

In Confessions Book 5, Ch 3-5 he talks about his early flirtation with the Manichees. One of the things that he says consistently held him back was that the Manichees consistently made claims about astronomy which Augustine knew to be untrue. He struggled with how he could believe them in deeper things when they didn't even know this, and he hopes that when one of the famous Manichee teachers comes to town, this fellow will be able to explain it all, but the teacher turns out to be a clever speaker but as ignorant as the rest.

This leads Augustine to make the general observation:

Whenever I hear a brother Christian talk in such a way as to show that he is ignorant of these scientific matters and confuses one thing with another, I listen with patience to his theories and think it no harm to him that he does not know the true facts about material things, provided that he holds no beliefs unworthy of you, O Lord, who are the Creator of them all. The danger lies in thinking that such knowledge is part and parcel of what he must believe to save his soul and in presuming to make obstinate declarations about things of which he knows nothing.

Much of the interesting stuff the Augustine has to say on the topic of reconciling Genesis and science is in his Commentary on the Literal Meaning of Genesis, which is not entirely available online, though here's a good chunk of it. Galileo quoted extensively from this in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. From that we get:

It is likewise commonly asked what we may believe about the form and shape of the heavens according to the Scriptures, for many contend much about these matters. But with superior prudence our authors have forborne to speak of this, as in no way furthering the student with respect to a blessed life-and, more important still, as taking up much of that time which should be spent in holy exercises. What is it to me whether heaven, like a sphere surrounds the earth on all sides as a mass balanced in the center of the universe, or whether like a dish it merely covers and overcasts the earth? Belief in Scripture is urged rather for the reason we have often mentioned; that is, in order that no one, through ignorance of divine passages, finding anything in our Bibles or hearing anything cited from them of such a nature as may seem to oppose manifest conclusions, should be induced to suspect their truth when they teach, relate, and deliver more profitable matters. Hence let it be said briefly, touching the form of heaven, that our authors knew the truth but the Holy Spirit did not desire that men should learn things that are useful to no one for salvation.

This, I think, basically amounts to saying that the literal cosmology in Genesis is inaccurate, but that that's not the important message, which is what I'd say in regards to the chronology as well.

I haven't read all of Augustine's commentary on Genesis, but he does think through some interesting things that immediate proposed themselves to the ancient mind such as:

How can God create light before he creates a source of light?
How can he create something, yet have it be formless?

He also seems to take an overall approach of "if the description turns out to contradict science, then it was obviously never meant to be taken literally". For example:

38. Let us suppose that in explaining the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” one man thinks that it was material light that was made, and another that it was spiritual. As to the actual existence of “spiritual light”65 in a spiritual creature, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the existence of material light, celestial or supercelestial, even existing before the heavens, a light which could have been followed by night, there will be nothing in such a supposition contrary to the faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if that should happen, this teaching was never in Holy Scripture but was an opinion pro-posed by man in his ignorance. On the other hand, if reason should prove that this opinion is unquestionably true, it will still be uncertain whether this sense was intended by the sacred writer when he used the words quoted above, or whether he meant something else no less true. And if the general drift of the passage shows that the sacred writer did not intend this teaching, the other, which he did intend, will not thereby be false; indeed, it will be true and more worth knowing. On the other hand, if the tenor of the words of Scripture does not militate against our taking this teaching as the mind of the writer, we shall still have to enquire whether he could not have meant something else besides.

He also comes back to his point about ignorance of science creating scandal:

39. Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

(Needless to say, I'm kind of a fan of this line of thinking.)

Aquinas is a bit harder to pin down. Obviously, he sees the world as spherical, etc., that was simply a given at his time. But he seems to me less eager to step quickly away from traditional interpretations of scripture than Augustine. (I'd appreciate thought from more accomplished readers of Aquinas than myself.) So, for instance, in Summa I 74.2 he discusses the question of whether the seven days of creation were seven days or one (he describes Augustine as holding that the seven days were actually one day with seven aspects.) He seems to make the case that both of these positions are possible to hold, but perhaps to lean more towards the seven day idea than Augustine's.

In discussing creation in Summa I 65-74, it seems to me that Aquinas is at least open to some level in creativity in how he takes the Genesis creation account to be true. For instance, in Summa 1, Q97 he holds that it was in the nature of man's unfallen body to die (on the theory that mortality is a part of a creature nature and humanity's nature did not change) but that the effect of the unfallen soul upon the body was such that it kept it from dying. In Summa I, Q96, Art. 1 he argues that even before the fall predators still ate meat, killing other animals in order to do so, because the fall would not have changed the nature of predators.

The big philosophical issue which was in play as to the age of the universe in Aquinas's time was whether the material world was without beginning, which Aristotle had held. Obviously, Christianity teaches that the world was created by God, but some Christians argued that the world having always existed was not inconsistent with God having created it, since God is, after all, constantly holding the world in existence through the active exercise of His will. Aquinas did not accept that argument, so in that sense he sided with an account of world history more like that in Genesis, though I'm not clear whether he had a strong opinion as to the age of the world (or whether that mattered.)

I hope that helps and I would strongly encourage those more knowledgeable than me to weight in.

Augustine's Confessions, for children

Yesterday being the feast of St. Monica, and today being the feast of St. Augustine, it seemed like a good time to break out Confessions and read about the childhoods of the saints.  Augustine writes so simply and clearly that he is not onerous for school-age children to listen to, or to read for themselves, but he's also very prolific. I found myself editing on the fly, skipping passages, and flipping around a great deal to find the sections that would be of most interest to the youngsters here.

I've gone through Books 1 and 2, which draw from Augustine's infancy and youth, and highlighted passages that I think will be most compelling for children to listen to, or read themselves. (Teenagers ought to be able to read more extensively on their own -- Confessions is definitely not an inaccessible or difficult book, stylistically.) Each section is short and concise -- certainly children reading at a fourth-grade level or above should have no difficulty reading a passage a day by themselves.

All of Book 1 is appropriate for children. The sections that I have not bolded are ones that can be skipped in the interests of time or flagging interest on the part of the youngsters, but I recommend them all.

Book 2 moves into Augustine's adolescence, and starts examining issues of lust and sexual incontinence that parents might want to avoid with pre-teens. Parents might want to preview the sections here that are not bolded before reading them aloud or assigning them to younger children.

My translation is by R.S. Pine-Coffin, from Penguin Classics.

Book 1.1: Introduction, "you made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you."
1.2, 3, 4, 5: Continuation of Augustine's questions to God about His existence, His creative love, His attentions to Augustine himself. These are interesting, I think, to children who are themselves so full of questions, but can be skipped.
1.6: Augustine's babyhood.
1.7: faults of infancy
1.8: early boyhood, learning to speak
1.9: trials of going to school
1.10: sports
1.11: Augustine is gravely ill, but recovers before his family feels the need to baptize him.
1,12: the paradoxes of study
1.13: the trials learning Greek and Latin
1.14: Homer vs. Virgil
1.15: short digression on using study for God's glory
1.16: teaching children to admire the false example of false gods
1.17: Augustine recites the speech of Juno
1.18: intellectual vanity vs. eternal concerns
1.19: Augustine's bad habits of childhood
1.20: Augustine's good qualities of childhood

Book 2.1: Augustine recounts his adolescence and sins, particularly lust, to which he was prone.
2.2: continued.
2.3: onset of lust, and his father's unwillingess to check him.
2.4: theft of the pears
2.5: reason informs all behaviors, virtuous or vicious
2.6: meditation on the theft
2.7: acknowledgement of sin
2.8: Augustine explores why he stole the pears
2.9: incitements to the theft
2.10: wandering from God

Augustine also recounts some of the life of his mother, St. Monica. We enjoyed reading these sections yesterday on her feast.

Book 9.8: Monica's childhood and early addiction to drinking wine
9.9: Monica's humility and careful dealings with her husband and mother-in-law (be prepared to discuss how it used to be acceptable for husbands to beat their wives!)
9.11: the death of Monica

I really feel that there is a niche for a beautifully illustrated children's book about the boyhood of St. Augustine, with text taken from Confessions. I would buy it.

Augustine's Confessions: At a Distance from God

In Book 3 we saw Augustine's fall away from the Church, in Book 5 we will see the beginning of his return. Book 4, however, is focused primarily on his years as a Manichean.

This is where we get the fairly brief description which is nearly all we have on Augustine's longest romantic relationship:

In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wedded wife but a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her. But she was the only one and I was faithful to her. Living with her I found out by my own experience the difference between the restraint of the marriage alliance, contracted for the purpose of having children, and a bargain struck for lust, in which the birth of children is begrudged, though, if they come, we cannot help but love them.

We also hear a bit about Augustine's life as a hot shot young rhetorician. In addition to his Manichean beliefs, he falls into consulting astrologers frequently, in part to learn the auspices when he's entering major academic competitions. At one point, a magician of some sort offers to assure that he will win a competition, but although Augustine finds the idea that that stars and planets can influence worldly events appealing (and has no qualms about consulting astrologers and books of astrology) he recoils at the idea of the magician sacrificing animals to dark powers in an attempt to secure a victory for him.

After winning one of these competitions, he finds himself in conversation with a proconsul renowned for his learning. They became friends, and the proconsul tells Augustine that he really should abandon all this astrology nonsense. He provides several arguments as to why the stars and planets are not in fact able to control our fates, but Augustine is as yet unable to be persuaded, though he says these arguments remained with him and were instrumental in persuading him years later.

Augustine's major personal and religious crisis in this period stems from one of his close friendships, another young man who, like Augustine, was a Christian catechumen but had strayed into Manicheanism. They both now consider themselves much more philosophically and spiritually sophisticated than their Christian families. However, the friend falls sick and appears likely to die.

His senses were numbed as he lingered in the sweat of death, and when all hope of saving him was lost, he was baptized as he lay unconscious. I cared nothing for this, because I chose to believe that his soul would retain what it had learnt from me, no matter what was done to his body when it was deprived of sense. But no such thing happened. New life came into him and he recovered. And as soon as I could talk to him -- which was as soon as he could talk to me, for I never left his side since were were so dependent on each other -- I tried to chaff him about his baptism, thinking that he too would make fun of it, since he had received it when he was quite incapable of thought or feeling. But by this time he had been told of it. He looked at me in horror as though I were an enemy, and in a strange, new-found attitude of self-reliance he warned me that if I wished to be his friend, I must never speak to him like that again.

After that, Augustine leaves the topic alone, assuming that once his friend recovers and is past the worry of a major illness, he'll come around. But shortly after this the friend takes a turn for the worse again and dies.

The Augustine who is a character in the Confessions, Augustine in his mid twenties, takes his friend's death very hard indeed, nearly to the point of despair.

My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death. My own country became a torment and my own home a grotesque abode of misery. All that we had done together was not a grim ordeal without him. My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not there to be seen. I hated all the placed we had been together, because he was not in them and they could no longer whisper to me 'Here he comes!' as they would have done had he been alive but absent for a while.

Augustine's description of grief is so familiar and so human as to be instantly familiar -- and yet, the authorial Augustine also has a critique of his feelings a decade and more before. Looking back, Augustine sees himself as having expected something more than human of his friendship. He expected it to be unending and eternal. In a sense, he expected it to be god-like. Now, to the degree that love springs form God and all true loves are modeled on God, this is well and good, but Augustine now reflects on how his young self expected a beloved friend to be with him always, whereas it is God alone who can say truly, "I shall be with you always."

Had he loved his friend in God rather than as God, the older Augustine sees, he would have understood, if still suffered from, the separation. It was because he lacked the understanding (something which, perhaps, none of us in this mortal life can have to its fullness) that he and his friend were still united in God that his friend's absence seemed so unbearable and desolate.

---

The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Classics edition of Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.

You can also access a full, modern translation of Augustine's Confessions by Alberet C. Outler online, courtesy of Fordham University.

Augustine's Confessions: An Elusive Love

Book 3 finds Augustine studying in Carthage. On the personal front, the adult Augustine accuses his late-teen self of being consumed by lust, but he hasn't yet found a specific person to get into trouble with.

I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something.

Of course, from his authorial vantage point, Augustine sees that what he was searching for in the most final sense was God. Lacking God to love, he sought about for other things -- sex first among them -- which he thought would fill that lack.

Yet even acknowledging that God is our deepest and ultimate need, there's also something that's very familiarly human about Augustine's phrasing here. He talks about searching for an object for the love that he has. It's not simply that Augustine wants to be loved by someone else. He feels himself full of some good, brimming over with something which he desires to give to someone else, if only he can find someone willing to value it. For all that Augustine is talking about what he sees as his sinful past, it strikes me that this underlines the way in which human yearnings can teach us virtue.

But it's certainly not all high-mindedness.

To love and to have my love returned was my heart's desire, and it would be all the sweeter if I could also enjoy the body of the one who loved me.

Also, on a sort of side note, I was struck by this brief passage:

I defied you even so far as to relish the thought of lust, and gratify it too, within the walls of your church during the celebration of your mysteries.

Yes, Augustine, was indulging in girl watching at mass. The saints are but men as we are, it seems. Perhaps I'm engaging in too much creative interpretation here, but reading that line I recalled that the girlfriend Augustine eventually settled down with for over a decade (and who bore his son, Adeodatus) was a catechumen (as he is too at this point, never having been baptized.) I can't help wondering if the girlfriend (or mistress, to use the term that shows up in most translations -- the relationship itself, as we shall see, has something of the ancient and something of the modern in it) who stuck with him so long, and went into a convent after they separated, was a girl he met at church. She seems to have had something of the "nice girl" about her, despite the irregularity of their relationship. I wonder if she was always overawed by Augustine's mental gymnastics in regard to faith, or if she, like Monica, was always quietly praying for his return to Christianity during his theological wanderings.

At this time, Augustine is searching in more ways than one. He's doing well as a rhetorician, which as with being a high-end lawyer today involves being able to argue persuasively for either side, and he moves in a fast set (where he's ashamed to admit he's not actually all that wild in his personal life) but God's light begins to shine into Augustine's life again from an unexpected quarter. He reads Hortensius by Cicero and is deeply affected by Cicero's recommendation that the reader study philosophy. Cicero, who lived in the first century B.C. during the last days of the Republic and was killed at the orders of the Second Triumvirate after the death of Julius Caesar, was one of the greatest Roman rhetoricians and politicians. In this regard, he would have been a key model for Augustine in professional life, and Cicero's speeches would have been a major area of study for him. However, Hortensius was a dialog (now lost) dealing with issues of philosophy -- an area in which Cicero was not a great original thinker but certainly a devoted enthusiast.

After reading Hortensius Augustine is determined to devote his mental powers to The Truth, but where is he to find it? Since Augustine is a catechumen (on the indefinite delay plan, as far as baptism goes) it occurs to him that the Bible might be a good place to start:

So I made up my mind to examine the holy Scriptures and see what kind of books they were. I discovered something that was at once beyond the understanding of the proud and hidden from the eyes of children. Its gait was humbe, but the heights it reached were sublime. It was enfolded in mysteries, and I was not the kind of man to enter into it or bow my head to follow where it led. But these were not the feelings I had when I first read the Scriptures. To me they seemed quite unworthy of comparison with the stately prose of Cicero, because I had too much conceit to accept their simplicity and not enough insight to penetrate their depths. It is surely true that as the child grows these books grow with him. But I was too proud to call myself a child. I was inflated with self-esteem, which made me think myself a great man.

Having tried to read the Bible without guidance, and found it less than he expected, Augustine falls in with a set more to his liking -- a group of young men who can talk all about God with all the same names that Christians and Jews apply, but who believe that they have got at the real truth which most Christians don't understand. They also have glib answers to questions like "Where did evil come from?" and "How could God have endorsed or allowed actions in the Old Testament which we now know are evil?" These are the Manicheans -- a dualist sect who believed in both a good and an evil principle (the evil god created the physical world) and who had, it seems, fused together Hellenistic and Mesopotamian mysticism and elements of Christianity to produce a cult which claimed to see deeper into the Scriptures than Christians did. In the late Roman world, this filled much the same place as some sort of Buddhist-Christian-Pagan-Kabbalah fusion might among today's cultural elite.

St. Monica is, of course, incredibly upset at the thought that her son has wandered into heresy, and prays fervently for his return. She also finds a bishop who is a convert from Manicheeism and begs him to argue with Augustine and set him straight. He advises her to continue praying and assures her that under the veneer of sophistication their teachings are so nonsensical that Augustine will eventually read and study enough to see through them and return to the true faith. She's granted a consolation which many a parent of present day lapsed Catholics yearns for -- a dream in which she is assured that Augustine will return to her faith. This reassures her (despite Augustine's glib attempt to argue the dream actually meant she would become a Manichean) though she does not slacken her praying.

---

The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Classics edition of Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.

You can also access a full, modern translation of Augustine's Confessions by Alberet C. Outler online, courtesy of Fordham University.

Augustine's Confessions: Sin for the Sake of Sin

In Book 2, we find Augustine (the character) as a teenager, while Augustine (the author) takes the opportunity to think about what makes us sin. The connection will be familiar to us all. Augustine talked about Original Sin in Book 1, that tendency which we can see even in very young children towards selfishness in which we can see the rooted tendency towards self over others which is at the root of sin. But that selfishness of childhood is largely unthinking. It is as we enter late childhood and early adolescence we attain the ability to think about sin in a way much like that of adults, but with the drives almost unique to adolescence. Augustine sees this in his past self and doesn't like what he sees:

For as I grew to manhood I was inflamed with desire for a surfeit of hell's pleasures. Foolhardy as I was, I ran wild with lust that was manifold and rank. In your eyes my beauty vanished and I was foul to the core, yet I was pleased with my own condition and anxious to be pleasing in the eyes of men.

In this book, the story of what's going on in young Augustine's life (versus his examination of the human condition) struck me, with the ways that it seemed both familiar and alien.

This book primarily deals with Augustine's 16th year. He's done well at school, but he's taking a year off from his studies because his father wants to send him off to a more advanced school of rhetoric (Augustine has shown a great deal of promise in school) but can't afford to send him yet. In Late Antiquity, rhetoric was something that could take you far. Augustine's father is not among the richest men in the town -- in modern terms Augustine's family is solidly middle class, though that was a smaller segment of the population then than now. But Augustine's abilities seemed to promise the chance he could rise to the big leagues. Think of this along the lines of Augustine's father thinking his son could make it into Harvard Law and make it as a top lawyer -- but he doesn't have the money to send him yet, so they're taking a year to save up.

This is also the year that adolescence hits Augustine full force. As an adult, looking back on the history of his soul, as it were, what strikes Augustine is not so much that this was the pause before he took a shot at an ivy league education and high powered career but rather that this is there year when lust took control of his life. And looking back, it seems to the adult Augustine that others were surprisingly unconcerned about this:

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. Many of our townspeople, far richer than my father, went to no such trouble for their children's sake. 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....

One day in the public baths he saw the signs of active virility coming to life in me and this was enough to make him relish the thought of having grandchildren. He was happy to tell my mother about it, for his happiness was due to the intoxication which causes the world to forget you, its Creator, and to love the things you have created instead of loving you, because the world is drunk with the invisible wine of its own perverted, earthbound will. But in my mother's heart you had already begun to build your temple and laid the foundations of your holy dwelling, while my father was still a catechumen and a new one at that. So, in her piety, she became alarmed and apprehensive, and although I had not yet been baptized, she began to dread that I might follow in the crooked path of those who do not keep their eyes on you but turn their backs instead.... I remember well what her wishes were and how she most earnestly warned me not to commit fornication and above all not to seduce any man's wife.

However, Augustine sees a bit of worldliness even in Monica's concerns, for though she worries about her son's morals she does not encourage him to marry and thus give a lawful vent to his desires. She too is concerned that he focus on his studies and his career.

This was because she was afraid that the bonds of marriage might be a hindrance to my hopes for the future -- not of course the hope of the life to come, which she reposed in you, but my hopes of success at my studies. Both my parents were unduly eager for me to learn, my father because he gave next to not thoughts to you and only shallow thought to me, and my mother because she thought that the usual course of study would certainly not hinder me, but would even help me, in my approach to you.

Augustine the narrator seems to see some degree of fault with this -- though given what we as the reader 1600 years later know of Augustine's later career, one can't help seeing Monica's desire to see him complete his studies as being well-founded. And thought Augustine is justifiably regretful of some of his actions in the intervening years, his studies did, in the end, form him into the Father of the Church we know today. Encouraging a promising young man to get married at 16 would have been about as unusual in the 4th century as it would be today. From the sound of it, one gets the impression that Patricius took the approach that boys will be boys, while Monica prayed that her son would be a "good boy", yet considered it a normal and acceptable risk to put him on a good career path and expect him to find a way to put his hormones on hold for ten years. Questioning, as he does, the value of worldly success in general from his current vantage point, Augustine as the author gives these concerns less weight, but the actions of Patricius and Monica will sound familiar and sympathetic to any modern parent.

Of course, one can't write about Book 2 of Confessions without talking about pears, and the reflection on the attractions of sin which takes up more than half of the book.

One of the moral questions Augustine is trying to examine in this portion of the story of his life is what makes us want to sin. According to the Platonic tradition, one only ever desires something because it is good. Thus, if one wishes something bad, it is either because one imagines it to be good, or because it has some good in itself which we are wrong in loving only to the extent that we do so immoderately.

Yet often, we sin not out of desire for some concrete good thing, but rather out of the simple joy of transgression. To illustrate this, Augustine tells of an escapade during this year he spent at home:

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night--having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was--a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.

The pears were clearly not the object here because, as he restates several times in examining the act, the pears weren't even good pears -- the boys knew that tree produced pears that were hard and indigestible.

Thus, this is not, Augustine concludes, like those sins committed for some simple good, as when one steals something because one wants to have that thing. The joy he and the other boys experienced was the joy of breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules. This desire to be a law unto oneself and break rules for the sake of disobedience is an inversion of our desire for God. When we love God, we desire to follow His laws. However, when we want to break laws simply for the sake of breaking them, what we really want is to experience ourselves as the make of all laws -- as God. The excitement and enjoyment we feel in violating rules is the excitement promised by the serpent who said, "You will become like God."

---

The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Classics edition of Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.

You can also access a full, modern translation of Augustine's Confessions by Alberet C. Outler online, courtesy of Fordham University.

Augustine's Confessions: Growing Up Human

The second half of Book I (Chapters 7 to 20) deal with the earliest years of Augustine's life, starting with his infancy. One of the things I find kind of charming about this section is the approach Augustine brings to examining his earliest years:

I do not remember that early part of my life, O Lord, but I believe what other people have told me about it and from watching other babies I can conclude that I lived as they do. But, true though my conclusions may be, I do not like to think of that period as part of the same life I now lead, because it is dim and forgotten and, in this sense, it is no different from the time I spent in my mother's womb.

This is one of those fascinating things about Augustine. He's never just talking about himself and his memories, even if that is the theme which drives his narrative. He's perhaps more interested in the experience of being human, and of humanity in relation to God, than he is in telling us about his experiences in particular.

Of course, when Augustine thinks about the experience of being human, he immediately starts thinking about original sin, and some find him rather dour because of this. Augustine is one of the few people you'll find talking about infants sinning:

It can hardly be right for a child, even at that age, to cry for everything, including things which would harm him; to work himself into a tantrum against people older than himself and not required to obey him; and to try his best to strike and hurt others who know better than he does, including his own parents, when they do not give in to him and refuse to pander to whims which would only do him harm. This shows that, if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.

Read in isolation, this can sound rather cold and severe. Of course babies cry, they have no other way of making their needs known! But Augustine recognizes this, and indeed notes that people never blame or scold babies for being selfish, because of course they can be no other way. I think Augustine is trying to get at two things with his was of describing babies' actions here. First, he seeks to show us how naturally selfishness comes to us as human beings. When infants, we care for nothing but What We Want Right Now, and it is only gradually that we learn that other people may rightly not satisfy our every desire immediately. Second, Augustine is very deliberately drawing a comparison between how babies react to the world which to us seems so clearly understandable (and yet to them so cruel and unreasonable) and how we react to God. Just as a baby cries and strikes out at his parents when he doesn't get some toy or food that he thinks he desperately needs, so we strike out and cry out against God. And like the baby, our trials are very much rooted in the fact that we do not understand the world as God understands it, and so every trial seems strange and unaccountable.

Moving on into his boyhood, Augustine talks about his struggles with being made to learn Greek in school -- a section I remember with particular fondness and clarity because I spent a couple days in college working my way through chapters 13 and 14 in Latin. Augustine, who spoke Latin as a native, is talking about the difficulty he had in learning Greek, and specifically about how learning a foreign language from a grammar book is so completely different from the natural process of picking up a language from hearing it spoken around you. These days, of course, there's virtually no other way to learn how to read Augustine's language. Language changes, but being a schoolboy remains the same.

Augustine also speaks so movingly of the plight of the schoolboy, motivated primarily by the fear of being beaten, trying to conform himself to the seemingly arbitrary desires of the adult world that one almost pictures him sitting down with Rousseau for a chat -- except that for all his talk about infants sinning one gets the impression that Augustine actually likes children rather more than Rousseau did. Augustine's sympathy for his boyish rebellion against the wishes of his teachers comes not from some mistaken belief that children are naturally good, and that it is only society that corrupts them, but from the more balanced realization that while the process of civilizing children enough that they stop hitting others and taking their toys does impart a certain degree of real virtue, but that very much of what society considers virtue (which in Late Antiquity involved such skills as a thorough knowledge of the classics, the ability to argue persuasively in the law courts and in politics, knowing all the right people and respecting them for being "the right people", etc.) is in turn so much arbitrariness and self regard. Augustine's total focus on God and our final purpose causes him to see not only his won priorities as a boy as often being selfish but also those of society as often being mere vanity. If there's a bit of the rebel in Augustine, it is not because he wants to "do his own thing", but rather because he understands that conforming to God is of such infinitely greater value than conforming either to society's expectations or to his own will.

---

The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Classics edition of Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.

You can also access a full, modern translation of Augustine's Confessions by Alberet C. Outler online, courtesy of Fordham University.

Augustine's Confessions: Contemplating the Infinite

Book I of The Confessions seems to me to fall into two parts: Chapters 1-7 grapple with the very concept of an infinite and eternal God, while Chapters 8-20 discuss the human experience of growing up and attaining some degree of youthful self awareness. I'll cover this first half of the book today, and the second half tomorrow, so that each post can be relatively short.

Augustine sets out to tell the story of his own life in relation to and in relationship with God, and he opens the book by addressing God. Right here in Book I, Chapter 1 we run into one of the handful of quotes from Augustine that practically everyone has heard, whether or not they actually know it comes from him:

[T]hou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.

That restlessness will provide much of the matter for Augustine's story, but here he asks the more basic question of why an eternal and perfect God concerns himself with all too mortal and fallen humans:

How shall I call upon my God for aid, when the call I make is for my Lord and my God to come into myself? What place is there in me to which my God can come, what place that can receive the God who made heaven and earth?

This idea of God being in something while also being both infinite and the creator of all things is something which an inquiring mind must necessarily poke at, and Augustine pokes with a sense of imagination which seems, in some ways, oddly modern:

Do heaven and earth, then, contain the whole of you, since you fill them? Or, when once you have filled them, is some part of you left over because they are too small to hold you? If this is so, when you have filled heaven and earth, does that part of you which remains flow over into some other place? Or is it that you have no need to be contained in anything, because you contain all things in yourself and fill them by reason of the very fact that you contain them? For the things which you fill by containing them do not sustain and support you as a water-vessel supports the liquid that fills it. Even if they were broken into pieces, you would not flow out of them and away.

Clearly, this is not the sort of guy who'd have trouble with the mind games we have in modern physics -- ideas like the space of the universe expanding, or the universe itself (which is everything) having somewhere into which it is expanding. Yet Augustine isn't just playing games with the idea of space, and how God could be infinite yet in things, the creator yet in his creation. He's addressing a set of points which far too many modern thinkers (both Christian and skeptic) seem to have difficulty grasping.

If the universe appears to play out without any "gaps", does that mean that there's no evidence for God? That the physical laws explain everything? No, Augustine would tell you. Something occurring according to "natural laws" does not mean that hit happens without the need for God (as if God only touched creation once in a while when He stepped in to cause a miracle) but rather, what we call natural laws are the orderly playing out of God's plan for the function of the universe. The universe is not some separate thing, but rather is encompassed and contained by God.

Augustine is similarly fascinated by the concept of God's relationship with time as we experience it. As he considers that God knows and contains all of his past, and also his future, Augustine describes the "eternal now" in which God, as an eternal being, experiences all time as present rather than sequential:

For you are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you are simply 'today'. The countless days of our lives and of our forefathers' lives have passed by within your 'today'. From it they have received their due measure of duration and their very existence. And so it will be with all the other days which are still to come. But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.

How far God, seen through Augustine's eyes, is from the "old man up in the clouds" of whom people ask "how can he possibly know everything that is going on at once in the world, much less hear every prayer. Does he have secretaries?" Augustine sees God in a sort of mathematical grandeur. Infinite and eternal, God is in all things because all things are contained in Him, and God sees and knows all things at once, because as an eternal being He stretches infinitely before and infinitely after every temporal event. The entire temporal timeline, thus, contracts in on itself, with infinite stretches before and after it. All of cosmic history is a point of simultaneous existence, both created and perceived in the mind of God who is it's eternal Creator.

---

The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Classics edition of Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.

You can also access a full, modern translation of Augustine's Confessions by Alberet C. Outler online, courtesy of Fordham University.

Augustine's Confessions: Getting Started

For several years running, I did a series of Lenten reading posts focused on Dante's Divine Comedy. It's been a couple years, and I never did cover the last couple cantos of the Purgatorio, for which I am sorry. Perhaps some day the time will be right to go back to it. However, this year I had the itch to re-read Augustine's Confessions, which is a conveniently Lent-length work. And so as a form of discipline, and also in hopes it may be interesting or helpful to a few people, I'm going to write my way through Confessions this Lent in a way similar to the Commedia posts of past year.

Before plunging in, a few brief notes on what we're getting into. The Confessions was written by Augustine when he was in his mid-forties, in 397-398 AD, just a few years after he was made bishop of Hippo in North Africa. This was ten years after his adult conversion to Christianity which is the culminating even of Confessions.

Confessions is a very approachable work. It's about 300 pages long in a paperback edition and although it deals with a number of philosophical and theological issues, its basic format is that of a spiritual autobiography written in the first person and addressed to God. It is not only perhaps the first spiritual autobiography, but also the first book-length personal autobiography in Western Literature. Other classical writers had written about themselves to one extent or another (perhaps most famously Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars and Civil Wars and Xenophon in his March Up Country) but had always done so in the guise of a third person, objective history.

St. Augustine unabashedly writes about himself as himself, and does so in a manner so introspective that you come away feeling that you know him. Far from being a "just the facts" biography, Augustine takes the story of his life and conversion as a means to examine questions of what it means to think back to your past, understand your past motivations, to examine the human condition and the relationship of the human person to God.

As I said, Confessions is a highly readable book. If you're going to read one book by the Church Fathers, Confessions is arguably the most accessible and yet one of the deepest. This will be my third time through it in English (I also struggled through the first three books in Latin in one college course -- which mostly underlines that my Latin was always very schoolboyish, as it's not very difficult Latin at all) and I hope that if you enjoy these posts and you haven't read it you'll give it a try. My approach here will be to work through the book in order, writing about each of the thirteen books in one or two posts, quote or describe particularly interesting or famous parts, and talk about some of the major themes. I'm not an Augustine scholar by any stretch, this will be more like a book club discussion, and I hope anyone with an interest (whether you've read Confessions or not) will feel free to join in that spirit in the comment boxes as the mood strikes.

---

The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Classics edition of Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.

You can also access a full, modern translation of Augustine's Confessions by Alberet C. Outler online, courtesy of Fordham University.