From his hometown of Thagaste, Augustine, now 18 years of age, traveled to Carthage to continue his secular education. He describes Carthage as "a cauldron of illicit loves," i(1) Although the deep desire of his soul was to love and to be loved (indeed a good desire placed in his heart by God), he readily admits that "I was in love with love" and sought to fulfill his desires through unrestrained lust. Looking back on this experience as a mature believer, Augustine sees himself as a prisoner in bondage to sin: "I attained the joy that enchains. I was glad to be in bondage, tied with troublesome chains, with the result that I was flogged with the red-hot iron rods of jealousy suspicion, fear, anger, and contention." This chapter reminded me that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Sin always promises more than it can deliver to its unsuspecting victim. As the old gospel song says: "Sin will take you farther than you want to go, sin will leave you longer than you want to stay and sin will cost you far more than you want to pay!" Some key themes of this book include the following:
1. Divine Chastisement
Looking back on his experience in Carthage, Augustine traces the providence and loving care of the Heavenly Father in disciplining His wayward son: "Your mercy hovered over me from afar. In what iniquities was I wasting myself...And in all this I experienced your chastisement. During the celebration of your solemn rites within the walls of your Church, I even dared to lust after a girl and to start an affair that would procure the fruit of death. So you beat me with heavy punishments, but not the equivalent of my guilt." iii(5) (Note the Prodigal Son motif) He came to realize the hard way (as most of us do) that sin always carries temporal consequences which are really a form of divine discipline: "Your punishment is that which human beings do to their own injury because, even when they are sinning against you, their wicked actions are against their own souls." viii(16)
2. Natural Theology
Throughout the Confessions, Augustine expresses his conviction that 'all truth is God's truth', or that God can and does reveal truth about himself apart from Scripture. At age 18, Augustine read Horensius which was written by the Roman philosopher Cicero. This book had a profound spiritual impact on the young student. Although a pagan, Cicero advised his readers to "love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom wherever found". Augustine testifies that "the book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart. I began to rise up to return to you." iv(7) However helpful this book was in putting the prodigal son back on the road toward home, it did not satisfy Augustine's quest for ultimate truth. Because of this, he decided to dust off his Old Latin Bible: "I therefore decided to give attention to the holy scriptures and to find out what they were like." But the refined young scholar quickly put it back on the shelf since "it seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero. My inflated conceit shunned the Bible's restraint, and my gaze never penetrated its inwardness." v(9)
3. Gnostic Deception
Augustine's insatiable quest for Truth led him into nine years of error as he fell in with a heretical sect known as the Manicheans. Much of this chapter is devoted to explaining and refuting the erroneous teaching of their leader Mani, which I have already summarized in my initial post. In short the Manicheans were an ascetic sect of gnostic pantheists, who held a dualistic view of good and evil. Mani himself arrogantly claimed to be the Paraclete (Holy Spirit) in human form. Augustine testifies that "they uttered false statements not only about you [God] who really are the Truth, but also about the elements of the world, your creation." vi(10) For Augustine, his time with the Manicheans was nothing short of a decent into the "depths of hell, there to toil and sweat from lack of truth." He laments the terrible seduction he endured in the house of lady folly (Prov 9:17) so that "while travelling away from the truth I thought I was going towards it." vii(12)
4. The Nature of Evil
In his polemic against the Manichees, Augustine introduces a concept which will be developed as the book progresses, namely that evil has no being in and of itself, but is rather the privation (or absence) of good: "I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being." vii(12) The materialist worldview of Mani which conceived of two physical beings, one evil and the other good, in never-ending conflict had blinded Augustine to the reality about God's true nature and the nature of evil: "I had not realized God is a Spirit not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass." vii(12)
5. Platonism
The influence of Plato on the thought of the mature Augustine comes to the surface in this chapter. First there is evidence that Augustine embraced Plato's doctrine of 'recollection'. Unlike the contemporary view which holds that infants acquire knowledge through experience and teaching, Plato taught that people are born with complete knowledge and must bring this suppressed knowledge to the surface through a process of recollection. Here's what Augustine says that I think relates to this topic: "This name, by your mercy Lord, this name of my Saviour your Son, my infant heart had piously drunk in with my mother's milk, and at a deep level I retained the memory. Any book which lacked this name, however well written or polished or true, could not entirely grip me." iv(8)
There is another passage which strongly hints at Plato's theory of forms. Plato taught that there was a supra-temporal realm which contained perfect forms of everything we see here in the physical world. For example, we can identify "chairness" because there is a perfect form of a "chair" in this supra-temporal realm. In countering the mythology of the Manichees in this chapter, Augustine seems to enlist Plato as an ally in order to defend the intrinsic goodness of the physical creation (Manicheans, like all gnostics believed the physical realm was evil). In vi(10) Augustine argues that physical objects bear the marks of their creator, making the physical realm superior to the speculative mythology of the Manichean worldview: "And yet again the pictures of these realities which our imagination forms are more reliable than the mythological pictures of vast and unlimited entities whose being, by extension of our image-making of real objects, we may postulate, but which do not exist at all." For Augustine, Platonism as a worldview holds a distinct advantage over gnosticism, which is why on his journey to the Christian faith, he abandoned Mani's gnosticism and became a disciple of Plotinus.
Although Augustine's mature theology was certainly influenced by Plato's theory of forms, Augustine is also critical of certain aspects of Platonism as evidenced by the following quotation: "By you, my love, for whom I faint that I may receive strength, you are not the bodies which we see, though they be up in heaven, nor even any object up there lying beyond our sight. For you have made these bodies, and you do not even hold them to be among the greatest of your creatures." vi(10) Plato's theory of forms can lead to a kind of polytheism, but for Augustine all of these ideal forms have their origin in the mind of God, the one who created them. For Augustine, God and God alone is the embodiment of ultimate beauty and perfection.
No comments:
Post a Comment