[1]
After they've read his compelling spiritual autobiography, I ask
my students the obvious question: "What is Augustine
confessing?" To a person they reply: "His sins." To be
sure, Augustine recounts his sins in vivid detail. But Gilbert
Meilaender offers a second answer: "His love of
God." Moreover, Augustine confesses from a nature that is
hard-wired to praise.
[2]
Augustine is the theologian we love to hate. He is unfairly
blamed for leading Western Christianity into a body-denying,
pleasure-hating, world-berating funk, particularly by folks who
haven't read him. Meilaender has -- deeply and over
time. He has found in the North African saint a sturdy
conversation partner, someone whose theological compass was
sure. And though Augustine navigated different controversies
from our own, he charted terrain familiar to us all: the
restless waters of the human heart.
[3]
Meilaender knows what every good historian knows: history is
simultaneously a window and a mirror. On one hand, history
offers a window on the past. We read Augustine and find
ourselves with him on the dusty streets of Carthage, "a hissing
cauldron of lust" (Confessions 3.1). We learn the
contours of late antiquity, its superstitions, its resignation, and
the thin veneer Christianity painted over the old gods. No
crisis of conscience prevented Christians from consulting
astrologers to determine the auspices of the stars. Indeed,
Augustine spent a good deal of his early episcopacy trying to
explain the very different fates of two people born under the same
stars, the biblical twins Jacob and Esau (e.g., The Confessions
7.6; de diversis questionibus, ad simplicianum). The
foreignness of his world startles us, and we find ourselves
mesmerized by difference.
[4]
Yet, every window is simultaneously a mirror. As we look
down the centuries of time, we catch a glimpse of ourselves
looking. We learn a lot by attending to what catches our eye,
where we shrug or snigger. Those brief moments
when history functions as a mirror can be liberatory, if we let
them challenge our settled ways of framing the world.
As Meilaender "worries with" Augustine, he astutely cautions that:
"...it is often at those places where one is tempted to dismiss him
as misguided, or even comical, that listening to Augustine worry
over a subject can set us free from the limits that confine us"
(x). Augustine's world may seem exotic, but his anxiety
closet looks a lot like ours. Subjects like desire and duty, sex
and politics, and the anguish of loss still keep us awake at
nights. Meilaender demonstrates that worrying about these
topics with Augustine offers fresh insight.
[5]
Meilaender's signal insight is the centrality of praise to
Augustine's theology and to the life of discipleship as a
whole. Admittedly, praise is not something one immediately
associates with the North African saint. We spent more time
riveted on the remnant of Adam's sin. Yet, Meilaender so
powerfully argues its importance, I wonder how I'd missed
it. Praise proves the gracious antidote to anxieties over
desire and duty, sex and politics and grief.
[6] Desire:
"If the things of this world delight you, praise God for
them...." (4.12)
"...our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you....:"
the line is so familiar, we fail to check what precedes or
follows. When we do, however, we see that Augustine describes
a creature hard-wired for praise. Our "instinct" is to praise
God, who has made us for Himself. Other objects
distract desire, and Augustine chronicles these in The
Confessions with a thoroughness that borders on
obsession. Games and books, women and reputation, friends and
philosophy: he sought them all. Possessing them only
whet - but did not diminish - his appetite. The
striking illustration of such insatiable desire is the rage of an
infant already fed when it sees another infant at the nurse's
breast. There will always be other objects of desire,
but there is only one Subject. God draws the heart
toward its true home.
[7] Meilaender considers whether the human search for God is
nothing more than another selfish desire to possess God, as if the
divine were the one object that could make us happy. He
concludes: "It seems right that we should desire to be in the
presence of the God who made us...." (10). He could have made
the point even more strongly. While Augustine chronicles all
the false turns in his search for happiness, The Confessions
chronicles more powerfully God's search for him. Augustine
seeks - but he's already been found. He desires to possess - but he
finally discovers that he's been a man possessed from the
beginning. "But where was I when I looked for you? You
were there before my eyes, but I had deserted even my own self"
(5.2), Augustine exclaims, marveling over that what is almost
a genetic predisposition toward God. Once again, we are
hard-wired to praise. Desire gives way to delight as the
creature finds its true home.
[8]
Duty: "...entrust to the Truth all that
the Truth has given to you..." 4.11)
Because creatures find rest in their Creator, human nature is
teleological. Augustine's chief metaphor for the
Christian on this side of heaven is a "pilgrim," peregrinus, and
the word captures the sense that we are always underway. We
find ourselves trapped in a "second nature," tainted with sin, yet
whispers of our created first nature remain. All of nature
bears vestiges of the trinity (vestigiae trinitatis). In humans,
these lure us to our true home. Duty points us in the right
direction.
[9] Borrowing from British philosopher, Henry Sidgwick,
Meilaender schematizes human nature, showing how we move from who
we are in the throes of an ambiguous second nature (descriptive) to
who we were created to be (attractive) through the commands of duty
(imperative). Duty is shown to be more positive than simply a
stop-gap measure to keep the world from sliding into
chaos. Guided by responsibility we do whatever can be done to
preserve a semblance of divine order. Duty marks the way
toward our true home.
[10]
In his discussion of duty Meilaender takes up an issue near and
dear to Augustine's heart - and to the heart of anyone hard-wired
for praise. Lying and truth-telling are a particular focus of
the North African saint, and his fascination seems a compulsion
until we realize that both are ciphers for something that concerns
us all: the truthful life which truth-telling
presumes. The Confessions chronicles all the false gods
that waylaid Augustine on his journey, along with all the honeyed
lies they spoke. Duty certainly got Augustine back on track,
but Meilaender is not content to let duty be merely a prerequisite
for the strait and narrow. Rather duty describes the only kind
of person who would want to rest in God: the pilgrim who yearns to
live a truthful life. Meilaender takes his cue on this from
Paul Griffiths, whose insight is worth quoting in full: "....the
true antonym of mendacium, for Augustine, is adoratio, or its close
cousin; confessio; and the fundamental reason for banning the lie
without exception is that when we speak duplicitously, we exclude
the possibility of adoration" (Paul Griffiths Lying: An Augustinian
Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004, 85); Meilaender,
73). Lying disables the creaturely instinct to praise.
[11] Politics:
"....the fragile brilliance of glass...." (de civitate dei
4.3)
Meilaender points to the symmetry between the internal history of a
person in The Confessions and the external history of an empire in
Augustine's magisterial The City of God. Both histories,
macro- and micro-, founder on misplaced praise. Augustine
sought it from childhood, and he only refined the stratagems he
deployed for boyish games to win in argument. Similarly, the
Romans reveled in glory and human praise, and their empire finally
ran aground on overweening pride and unbridled
ambition. Meilaender cites James Madison in The Federalist
Papers in his support: "Ambition must be made to counteract
ambition....It may be a reflection on human nature that such
devices should be necessary to control the abuses of
government. But what is government itself but the greatest of
all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no
government would be necessary" (94). But the earthly city is
not populated by angels, and government will always defend against
pride, ambition, and the darker angels of our own
nature.
[12]
Augustine merits a place in the tradition of political realism,
but Meilaender emphasizes that it is a realism without
resignation. Augustine brokers an earthly kingdom
that is neutral in terms of ultimate beliefs and values. This
brand of political realism seems welcome relief in a world where
religious fundamentalisms play such fierce roles in global
politics. But though "chastened," politics is not "denuded,"
as Meilaender puts it: "The realm of politics lacks ultimacy;
it is neither redemptive nor salvific. But it is by no means a
realm in which religious beliefs, and vision of the moral life
shaped by such beliefs, have no proper place" (97). Indeed,
Augustine gives us a thick version of citizenship, and this could
be a hearty supplement to a thin gruel of a citizenship constituted
around choice and consent. Some versions of "the good life"
are better than others; indeed, some are richer. Christians
cut in the Augustinian mold recognize the importance of public life
precisely as a penultimate good. Theirs is an earthly city
where ambition does not rule, force is censured, and peace is the
chief political end.
[13]
Sex: "...I found myself in the
midst of a hissing cauldron of lust..." (3.1)
Augustine's reputation as a sex addict is vastly
undeserved. First, he was faithful to his concubine for over
fourteen years, and his failure to reveal her name in The
Confessions was probably due more to his discretion and desire to
protect her than to any lack of significance in his
affections. He writes that she "was torn from my side"
(6.15). Augustine raised their son Adeodatus, a highly unusual
gesture. Roman laws of concubinage remanded custody to the
mother of any children issuing from such a
relationship. Second, the central transgression of
Augustine's youth is not some mass rape of a woman, but a mass
theft of pears. Augustine and his friends stole pears from a
neighbor's orchard, and their misdeed damns them all the more
because they were not even hungry.
[14]
Much has been written on Augustine's sexual predilections, but
Meilaender provides fresh perspective. He catches the rhyme
between food and sex, and this chapter offers a delightful
discussion on the symmetry of desire in
them. Both offer such diversion that they
tempt one to muddy the crucial distinction between the good of
something and the pleasure it affords. While all
too aware of how pleasure delights, Meilaender insists on the goods
of each. Food nourishes the body, the health of which is
important for our earthly pilgrimage as well as being a good in
itself. In a similar fashion, sex nourishes the race with
progeny. Children are emphatically part of the good of
sex. But so is "fleshly communion," the other good in
marriage. These are penultimate goods, but Meilaender shows
how they serve the God who is our greatest good. Moreover, as God
blesses the body with health, God blesses the creatures with the
goods of children and human love. If we enjoy them in God,
they surely participate in that "instinct to praise,"
adoratio.
[15]
Grief: "...my heart grew sombre with
grief...."
Augustine wisely counsels pilgrims to "love the friend in God"
(4.9), advice that surely applies to spouses, and
children. Yet the context for Augustine's remark is likely
none of the above. The most poignant writing in The
Confessions attends the death of an unnamed male
friend. Augustine gives language to inexpressible
grief, and his ability to speak the unspeakable consoles those who
mourn. Even in translation, he's worth quoting in
full:
[16] "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 now a grim ordeal without him. My eyes searched
everywhere for him, but he was not there to be seen. I hated all
the places we had known 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. I had
become a puzzle to myself, asking my soul again and again 'Why are
you downcast? Why do you distress me?' But my soul had no
answer to give. If I said 'Wait for God's help,' she did not
obey And in this she was right because, to her, the well-loved man
whom she had lost was better and more real than the shadowy being
in whom I would have her trust. Tears alone were sweet to me,
for in my heart's desire they had taken the place of my friend"
(4.4).
[17] Few have tackled Augustine on grief. Scholars treat
this loss under the rubric of "friendship," and indeed, while
Augustine's rhetoric rings with classical cadence, its expression
is uniquely his own.
[18] So is Augustine's counsel. Even someone
untrained in the mores of late antiquity could conclude such
attachment was unwise. Better to be alone - and suffer
less! If Augustine were in fact the world-denying ascetic
people like to make him out to be, he might even warn the pilgrims
off excessive affection. But friends grace our lives, not as
gods but as blessings from the One God. There's appropriate
love and enjoyment of these dear people -- and appropriate grief
when they depart. Their loss causes suffering, but that
does not mean we should have loved them less. It means only
that we have loved them well - or at least, as well as we
could. "And somehow we must learn the humility that loves the
goods of this life 'in God,' knowing that apart from that relation
they cannot truly be themselves" (157). Indeed, apart from our
relationship to them, we cannot truly be ourselves. In
Meilaender's reading, grief is only another dimension of
praise. In its very incompleteness, human love points to the
promise of divine love, which is full and rich and
forever.
[19]
Conclusion:
Meilaender's path back to the fifth century is well-worn, and
his knowledge of the Augustine corpus is intimate and
vast. His conversation with Augustine includes
all his other favorite conversation partners: Martin Luther and
C.S. Lewis, Dante and Karl and Anders Nygren, along with living
authors like Martha Nussbaum and Kim Powers, George Lindbeck and
John Rawls. It's rich fare, and yet I want to take issue with
Meilaender on one point. Certainly, he "worries with"
Augustine on issues that vex us still. And yet the cantus
firmus is the steady beat of praise. In ways that he does not
even acknowledge, Meilaender shows this to the heartbeat of the
North African pilgrim's piety. That is the signal contribution
of his fine book.
Professor of Historical Theology and Ethics
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
(All quotations from R.S. Pine-Coffin's translation Saint
Augustine: Confessions (New York: Penguin Books, 1961).
© March 2008
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 8, Issue 3