St Augustine

PHILOSOPHY IN AN HOUR

Paul Strathern

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

St Augustine’s Life and Works

After St Augustine

Further Information

From St Augustine’s Writings

Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates

Chronology of St Augustine’s Life

Chronology of St Augustine’s Era

Recommended Reading

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The golden age of philosophy came to an end with the death of Aristotle in 322 B.C. What had been a matter of coherent argument now largely degenerated into attitude or commentary. Of the former, there were two main attitudes. Times being what they were, neither of these was optimistic.

The Stoic philosophy was developed by Zeno of Citium, who was born in the early third century B.C. in Cyprus. Zeno was a successful capitalist until he lost all his resources in a shipwreck. He was immediately attracted to the Cynics, who believed that material possessions were of no importance whatsoever. Zeno developed this attitude into his own Stoic philosophy, named after the stoa (or pillars) of the arcade in Athens where he taught. Zeno believed in adopting a Stoic attitude to life and claimed that all men are divided into two categories. The first group (Stoics to a man) consist of the wise, who are indifferent to everything except their own wisdom. The rest are fools.

For the Stoics, wisdom meant forswearing the passions and living a life of virtue. This involved self-control, fortitude in the face of adversity, and just behaviour.

Stoic philosophy developed over the centuries and eventually became a great hit in Rome, especially among those disillusioned portions of the upper classes who had to endure the whims of recalcitrant emperors. The tragedian Seneca even tried to teach Stoicism to Nero, but the emperor proved temperamentally unsuited to this philosophy.

In the second century A.D. Stoicism was finally adopted by the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote a series of rather pompous and banal meditations on the subject during his long campaign against the trans-Danubian barbarians.

Other similar philosophical attitudes gave rise to the aforementioned Cynics, and to the Skeptics, who believed they knew nothing but saw no contradiction in teaching this.

But the most important attitude other than Stoicism was that adopted by Epicurus, who was born during mid-fourth century B.C., probably in Samos. In later life Epicurus settled in Athens and founded a community that lived in his garden and followed his philosophy. This was known as Epicureanism and was in many ways the opposite of Stoicism. Where Stoics renounced all pleasure, Epicureans believed in living the good life. But Epicurus himself believed that the good life was an extremely simple life – living on bread and water, with perhaps a bit of cheese on holidays. His aim (and initially that of his philosophy) was to achieve a life devoid of all pain. Sex, drunkenness, ambition of any kind, and generally living the high life resulted in headaches, hangovers, and disappointments. These were all a pain, and their causes were thus best avoided. The Romans, who had no feel for such finer points of philosophy, avidly embraced Epicureanism but insisted on their own idea of the good life. This involved a lot more than bread and water. Epicureanism thus became corrupted, acquiring the self-indulgent associations that it retains to this day.

Almost all other philosophers of this period concentrated on the works of their great predecessors. Their activities consisted largely of commenting, analysing, elaborating, and quibbling. Foremost among these unoriginal critics were followers of Pythagoras and Plato. The greatest of the latter was Plotinus, who developed the religious bent in Platonism and incorporated various mystical features. In the end his philosophy was barely recognisable as Platonism, so it was called Neoplatonism.

The most important intellectual event of the early centuries A.D. was the spread of Christianity. This increasingly stymied any further serious philosophy until the arrival of Augustine.

St Augustine’s Life and Works

‘I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lasciviousness. I ran wild with lust, the abominable things I did: rank depravity, a surfeit of hell’s pleasures. Bodily desire like a bubbling swamp and virile sex welling up within me exuded mists…’ St Augustine was a sex maniac. Or so he would have us believe. His famous Confessions contain page after page in which he castigates himself for being ‘the vilest slave of evil passions’ and indulging in ‘the filth of lewdness, hell’s black river of lust’. But the expectant reader turns the pages with increasing disappointment as he searches for actual examples of ‘this crazed wantonness’. So we don’t know exactly what Augustine was up to in the fleshpots of Carthage. My guess is that it wasn’t much more than the usual student escapades.

But there’s no denying that Augustine had a problem with sex. He had a strong sexual urge and probably enjoyed sex when he was actually doing it. But he was also possessed of an extremely strong mental desire to stay chaste. A few sessions with an understanding analyst would probably have defused the problem – but this would have robbed philosophy of its greatest exponent in almost one and a half millennia. When Augustine arrived on the scene, six hundred years had passed since the death of Aristotle; after Augustine died, it was nearly eight hundred years before the appearance of Thomas Aquinas.

Augustine was born in 354 A.D. in the small town of Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia (now Souk Ahras in the northeastern hinterland of Algeria). His parents appear to have been a rather boozy middle-class couple. But his hard-drinking father Patricius developed alcoholic symptoms of emotional disintegration in the form of obsessive womanising and violent outbursts. Whereupon Augustine’s mother Monica turned to religion, forswore the demon drink, and transformed her frustrations and disappointments into ambitions for her son.

We know a fair amount about Augustine’s youth from the descriptions in his Confessions. From the outset Monica appears to have overwhelmed little Augustine, though at no point does Augustine venture a word against his mother, whose obsessive puritan Christianity pervades the book from page one. ‘Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby?’ Augustine asks, castigating himself for crying for his mother’s milk. ‘I was indeed a great sinner,’ he comments, without irony, on his early dislike of lessons at school.

Then, as a teenager, he really goes off the rails. Together with pals from school, he steals the fruit from a pear tree. As a result of this vile iniquity, Augustine indulges in an orgy of self-laceration which continues to the end of the chapter (‘foul soul falling from the firmament to expulsion… into the depths of the abyss,’ and so on). He then continues in the same fashion for another six chapters before ending: ‘Can anyone unravel this twisted tangle of knots? I shudder to look at it or think of such abomination.’ What on earth is this all about? Readers of a psychological bent may find symbolic overtones in the young lad ‘shaking down the fruit from the tree’, but this would be a shallow and uninformative explanation. The real villain of the piece here was definitely Mom.

There is no doubt that Monica ruled the family’s home life. She even managed to persuade the hapless Patricius to convert to Christianity, almost certainly in a fit of alcoholic remorse, the year before he died. And when it became apparent that young Augustine had inherited some of his father’s unspeakable habits, he was banished from the family home. But only briefly: Monica did not wish to let him out of her clutches.

Meanwhile Augustine continued to wrestle with his problem. In despair he would even occasionally turn to God, imploring him in touching fashion, ‘Lord, give me chastity – but not yet.’ He didn’t want God to ‘cure me too soon of the disease of lust, which I wanted satisfied, not quelled’.

Augustine was an extremely bright boy, and Monica had great ambitions for him. Before Patricius died he had scraped together enough money for the boy to continue his education at Carthage. Here, away from Mother, Augustine had a number of experiences in the bordellos and developed a taste for the theatre (later described in the Confessions as ‘a loathsome mange, which swells and festers with hideous pus. What miserable delirium!’). He then settled down to live with a woman, with whom he was to share a long and faithful loving relationship. She even had ‘an accidental son’ by Augustine. (Nothing is said against her personally in the Confessions; it’s what they repeatedly and enjoyably did together that upset him.)

But Augustine wasn’t just a prig with a problem. The turbulence that drove him to such (alleged) extremes of lewdness and such extremes of (purely literary) self-abasement also drove him with equal force to discover the truth about himself. Why did he behave in such a way? How could he be so utterly and despicably vile and polluted and at the same time yearn with equal longing for purity?

The psychology that might have reduced him to shallow normality was not available, and the Christianity offered by his mother appeared too simple to satisfy his demanding intellect. What he needed was a convincing explanation of his plight, sufficiently profound for him to believe. He began reading Cicero and was at once attracted to philosophy. It was Cicero, a graduate of Plato’s Academy, who taught him the difficult business of how to think properly. But Cicero offered no solution.

Augustine found what he was looking for in Manichaeism. This quasi-Christian sect had been founded a century earlier by a Persian named Mani, who had claimed to be the Holy Ghost and had ended by being crucified by fire worshipers. Manichaeism was essentially dualistic, its adherents believing that the world was a product of the conflict between Good and Evil (or Light and Darkness). Man’s soul consisted of light, entrapped by darkness from which it must seek to free itself. This was a belief tailor-made for Augustine in his present state, even if it had been proscribed as a heresy by the Christian church. Augustine embraced Manichaeism with open arms.

Mother was not pleased when Augustine arrived home after his four years of study in Carthage. The mistress and child she could accept (they could be dealt with later), but Manichaeism was another matter. This grieved her heart, and she saw no point in disguising the fact. Meanwhile Augustine began teaching rhetoric in his home town, and became interested in astronomy. But Augustine, now twenty, remained ambitious, and a year later he returned to Carthage, where he worked in the university as a visiting teacher. Unfortunately the times were changing and the students were out of control. Discipline problems became so great that teaching was virtually impossible. Augustine decided to set off with his mistress and young son to look for work in Rome.

By now Augustine was beginning to have intellectual doubts about Manichaeism. The latest findings of astronomy did not accord with the mythological explanations of the heavens offered by the Manichaeans. Augustine was visited by Bishop Faustus, the Manichaean scholar, and together they discussed these matters. But in the end the good-natured bishop was forced to confess that he had no answer to these problems, which set Augustine pondering.

Mother didn’t approve of the projected trip to Rome, and she came to Carthage to say so. Before the boat sailed there was a scene on the quayside, with Monica ‘clinging to me with all her strength in the hope that I would either come home or take her with me’. Augustine finally persuaded Monica that the boat would not sail until next morning, and she went off to visit a nearby shrine to St Cyprian. Augustine then secretly set sail under cover of darkness, ‘leaving her alone to her prayers and her tears’.

In Rome Augustine continued to mix with Manichaeans. Despite his doubts, he remained convinced by their doctrine that it was not us who sinned but some other darker nature that entrapped the soul. He continued teaching, and within a year his intellectual brilliance had been noticed. He was offered a post as professor of rhetoric at Milan.

Milan had recently replaced Rome as the administrative capital of the Roman Empire, which was in the process of splitting into its eastern and western halves. The empire was entering one of the more exotic periods of its long decline, with the crowning of teenage emperors and the like. (The army had recently excelled itself by proclaiming a four-year-old as emperor, but this example of military intelligence had been politely overlooked; a degenerate adult had briefly been put forward in his stead.) The present emperor now resided in Milan, but the most influential figure in the city was Bishop – later to become Saint – Ambrose. His power was so great that he had recently ordered the Emperor Theodosius to perform a penance after he had been responsible for a massacre in Thessalonica.

Ambrose was one of the ablest minds in Christendom, and his sermons attracted large audiences. Augustine went to hear one and was at once disabused of two prejudices he had held toward Christianity. He saw that this religion could be embraced by a man of great intellect. He also saw that the Bible was a more profound book than he had previously realised, and that it was not always to be understood literally.

A year after Augustine’s arrival in Milan, his mother finally caught up with him. By now Augustine was able to reassure Monica that he was no longer a Manichaean; but he was not yet a Christian either. He still had large ambitions ‘for fame and wealth and marriage’. Monica seems to have been all in favour, and soon persuaded him it was time he found himself a proper wife. A girl of suitable family was selected and they became engaged, despite the fact that she was so young he would have to wait for two years before they could legally marry. But there was a price to pay for all this. ‘The woman with whom I had been living [for over twelve years] was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage and this was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding, because I loved her dearly.’ Augustine’s mistress – who remains nameless throughout the Confessions – was forced to leave her son with Augustine and was sent back to Africa ‘vowing never to give herself to another man’. (This last remark is usually taken as a token of her undying love for Augustine, though women may interpret it differently.) Augustine soon found the prospect of a two-year wait before his marriage quite unendurable, and he took another mistress – yet despite this he remained ‘devastated’ by the loss of his first mistress.

More than ever, Augustine now found himself tormented by ‘the problem of evil’. He could no longer believe in the Manichaeans, largely because of their intellectual inferiority. They appeared unable to answer his questions on astronomy or explain the problem of his irrepressible sexual impulse. Yet there seemed to be no alternative to their dualistic interpretation of the world. The soul of Light within him remained helplessly in the grip of Darkness beyond his control. Yet the very notion of dualism seemed more and more unacceptable to him. Then he discovered the writings of Plotinus.

Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself. In this case Plotinus was convinced that he understood the philosophy of Plato much better than Plato himself had managed. In his attempt to explain what Plato had really meant to say, Plotinus transformed Plato’s original theories into what came to be called Neoplatonism. Into the container of Platonic theory Plotinus poured a cocktail of features from Pythagoras, Aristotle, and the Stoics, adding a mystical twist of his own.

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