Confessions
St Augustine
This is, apparently, the world’s first autobiography. The parts of the narrative that deal with the author’s personal and emotional life are both well told and historically interesting, not to say fascinating. Augustine was also one of the greatest ancient post-Classical philosophers, and I was impressed by his ability to communicate difficult ideas lucidly.
I’m not religious, so that aspect of the book was less important to me than it would be to most readers. I am interested in theodicy, but I found Augustine’s rather unsatisfactory – the usual Catholic position of blaming everything on human free will and error without tangling with the real questions about the power and goodness of God that are raised by the existence of evil. Augustine says evil isn’t a substance in its own right but simply the absence of good, or more accurately the absence of some good; in other words, evil as such doesn’t really exist. All things are good to God, he explains, but some things are less than perfectly good. All this is very neatly laid out but the logical contradictions are not addressed or even, it seemed to me, noticed.
What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer).
What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer). But in this regard, I was thoroughly disappointed by the Confessions; all the author has to say on the subject is that the Word of God supersedes all other knowledge and renders all intellectual questions irrelevant. I’ve heard that line before and I’m afraid it does not convince me.
As for the man himself, he always did believe in God, in one form or another, so this question never troubled him. His quest was not for God but for a religion that could meet his intellectual and psychological needs. As the narrative approached the moment of his conversion I grew quite excited, waiting for the big intellectual denouement, but the whole thing came and went in a welter of emotive description and heartfelt praise, like the climactic scene of a romance novel, without a single intelligent word said about what I really wanted to understand.
At this point I rather lost interest in the good father’s story. The investigation of time in Book XI is impressive, certainly for someone writing in an era lacking accurate timepieces; Augustine could probably have been persuaded agree with Einstein that ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ I skipped most of Book XII, in which the author seems to take to task those who interpret the Bible symbolically before doing, as far as I could see, exactly the same. I skipped the last book, XIII, completely.
I wish I knew of a critical analysis or review of the Confessions for non-religious readers, written from a secular, essentially philosophical and historical perspective. If anyone knows of such a thing, please tell me about it. I want to read it – so long as it’s not too long-winded.
I wish I knew of a critical analysis or review of the Confessions for non-religious readers, written from a secular, essentially philosophical and historical perspective. If anyone knows of such a thing, please tell me about it. I want to read it – so long as it’s not too long-winded.
