Arrears blogging: November 13 -- Portrait of a Puritan As A Young Man

In the opening of today's passage (which I first encountered in an Updike short story, coincidentally enough) St. Augustine is hard (heh, heh) on himself:

TO CARTHAGE I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares... For this cause my soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense. ... I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscense, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness...

He got all up in there, is what he's trying to say, and what an awful sin he found it to be, his rolling around in the hay with girls. (I particularly like, as an image, his sick soul "desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense" -- true enough, really -- why do bankers build big houses? To scrape the sores of their souls with them.) And then, even worse, he went to the theater:

But I, miserable, then loved to grieve, and sought out what to grieve at, when in another’s and that feigned and personated misery, that acting best pleased me, and attracted me the most vehemently, which drew tears from me. What marvel that an unhappy sheep straying from Thy flock, and impatient of Thy keeping, I became infected with a foul disease?

It's good that the Harvard Classics contains within it at least one rant against popular culture infecting a wayward youth? For that's what Augustine is, in this part of his autobio -- he's nineteen. Somehow I missed this fact when I was assigned this book in college, even though I was nineteen myself at the time. I suspect that, like the young saint, I had my mind on other things.

And when you go back and read the passages, they seem to be describing not so much an archsinner as a typical nineteen-year-old, let loose at college in a big city, weepy over his pop culture, feeling deeply, chasing the opposite sex, hot for love and perhaps confusing lust with it. He even wants to be a lawyer to please his mother. He could be anybody (which is his point, I guess). And that he presents himself here, in later life, condemning the wild ways which he has made sure to enjoy already -- well, that's small-c classic too.

December 17: Santa Monica

Amazingly, St. Monica is not the patron saint of sport fishing, or boating. Unless your kids cut school to take up these activities, because she is the patron of disappointing children.

St. Augustine's, in his Confessions, wants to make you think that it was all a big struggle, his progress to sainthood. But it turns out he was a legacy all along! His mother was a saint too-- St. Monica, who is memorialized by her son today.

And the first thing he talks about is how she never gave her dad any lip, which is what kept her from being beaten:

And she so endured the wronging of her bed as never to have any quarrel with her husband thereon....But besides this, he was fervid, as in his affections, so in anger: but she had learnt not to resist an angry husband, not in deed only, but not even in word. Only when he was smoothed and tranquil, and in a temper to receive it, she would give an account of her actions, if haply he had overhastily taken offence. In a word, while many matrons, who had milder husbands, yet bore even in their faces marks of shame, would in familiar talk blame their husbands’ lives, she would blame their tongues...

Augustine is literally saying that women who get smacked around deserve what's coming to them. This is the type of thing that reminds you that the Harvard Classics were assembled before women got the vote.

Eventually we come to the end of her life, which is prefigured in the following conversation:

Thou knowest that in that day when we were speaking of these things, and this world with all its delights became, as we spake, contemptible to us, my mother said, “Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life.... One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?”

In other words, now that you've become a nice priest, I can die! No pressure on Augustine, there. It reminds me of the joke about how Christmas celebrates the birth of the only Jewish son ever to live up to his mother's expectations. Anyway, Monica dies, and Augustine is devastated, despite the strong, saint-level strength of his faith. How bad is it? Even a bath doesn't help:

It seemed also good to me to go and bathe, having heard that the bath had its name (balneum) from the Greek [Greek], for that it drives sadness from the mind. And this also I confess unto Thy mercy, Father of the fatherless, 47 that I bathed, and was the same as before I bathed.

This is the kind of quasi-ludicrous detail that softens my heart. We who are regularly bathed -- or so I hope -- will never endow bathing with the same mystical power that the ancients did.

Of course, my mom's a saint too. But I was trained not to be a braggart about it.

Most importantly, and in keeping with the season, the invocation of St. Monica allows me to share Tom Lehrer's "I'm spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica," which I take it both she and her son would have hated:

August 21: One or Two Digressions on Augustine's Confessions.

Why isn't this post more insightful? Blame this guy.

Hey, Harvard Classics, what's with all the Jesus all of a sudden? Luther, Milton, and now this? August seems like the least Jesusy month. December would be number one, of course, then April or March, then November because of Thanksgiving -- basically I associate Jesus with cold weather, and the nice weather with pantheism. Why are you bothering me with redemption when I'm eating corn on the cob? This would explain California's religious culture, but would completely fail to explain Spanish Catholicism.

In our excerpt today, Augustine ("St. AugusTEEN is in Florida and St. AugusTIN is in heaven," one of my college professors once said) is about to pull the trigger and turn Christian, but can't quite. It is remarked to him how happy everyone will be because of his conversion. Augustine, like an observational comic, wonder what the deal is with that:

What then takes place in the soul, when it is more delighted at finding or recovering the things it loves, than if it had ever had them? ... A friend is sick, and his pulse threatens danger; all who long for his recovery are sick in mind with him. He is restored, though as yet he walks not with his former strength; yet there is such joy, as was not, when before he walked sound and strong. Yea, the very pleasures of human life men acquired by difficulties, not those only which fall upon us unlooked for, and against our wills, but even by self-chosen, and pleasure-seeking trouble.

I give Augustine credit for not answering the question. I'm sure somewhere else he says it's Original Sin or something. My own sense is that we're so ready to expect the worst -- the house always wins, you could say -- that any time the house loses we're pleasantly surprised. The question for Augustine (and Milton) is, why is the house against us?

Also noteworthy in this reading is Augustine's anticipation of the snooze alarm:

Thus with the baggage of this present world was I held down pleasantly, as in sleep; and the thoughts wherein I meditated on Thee were like the efforts of such as would awake, who yet overcome with a heavy drowsiness, are again drenched therein...And when Thou didst on all sides show me that what Thou saidst was true, I, convicted by the truth, had nothing at all to answer, but only those dull and drowsy words, “Anon, anon,” “presently,” “leave me but a little.”

I haven't complained about the translations in a long time but this is a work that would benefit from being modernized; it probably already has, only I've forgotten it, like everything else I read in college, apparently.

July 26: Jesus and the cool table

For the groupies?

Unfun fact about Thomas à Kempis: he was buried alive. When they dug up his corpse (Wikipedia doesn't say why they dug up his corpse), they found splinters under his fingernails. It was just like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," in that he was not quite dead yet. And it was for this reason that he was not canonized -- he couldn't take it like a saint.

Which is a good exercise in separating the teller from the tale, because that guy with the splinters under his nails opens his famous book with this:

It is vanity to desire a long life, and to have little care for a good life. It is vanity to take thought only for the life which now is, and not to look forward to the things which shall be hereafter. It is vanity to love that which quickly passeth away, and not to hasten where eternal joy abideth.

Of course, even faced with the inevitability of not being able to live up to your ideals, it's not a bad thing to have them, if you are so inclined (not everyone is -- I live in Hollywood, after all). Unless your ideals are crazy somehow. Are TàK's?

Well, he certainly warns against "knowledge" as such ("Therefore be not lifted up by any skill or knowledge that thou hast; but rather fear concerning the knowledge which is given to thee. If it seemeth to thee that thou knowest many things, and understandest them well, know also that there are many more things which thou knowest not."); and yet I have a feeling that he felt betrayed by the state of the medical art there at the end. On the other hand, how anti-knowledge is he, really? He wrote books, after all. It does seem like he's more worried that the smartest guys might think that they're sitting at the cool table in the monastery.

Telling you that people who think they're cool aren't really cool is a big theme in this excerpt:

The proud and the avaricious man are never at rest; while the poor and lowly of heart abide in the multitude of peace.

This I don't buy -- or, more precisely, I buy the first part, which is basically "Mo' money mo' problems," but not the part that it's peaceful to be poor. If peace and contentment were really to be found among the poor (or, in the variant version of this trope, the rural), how come everyone wants to move the other way? (We might call the rural version the "Green Acres" fallacy.) You can't get people to do even if you supply them with an ideology.

Come to think of it, that "people who think they're cool aren't really cool" is an important message, not just of teen movies, but of Christianity itself. "The worse, the better" is the paradox that supplies the energy of Christianity (and Buddhism, maybe, but I don't know enough to really say).

What makes this excerpt not like a teen movie is its emphasis on negative self-esteem:

That is the highest and most profitable lesson, when a man truly knoweth and judgeth lowly of himself. To account nothing of one’s self, and to think always kindly and highly of others, this is great and perfect wisdom.

I'm not so sure, but I guess it's just a measure of degree. To really hate oneself is a recipe for disaster (and, believe me, the comedy world is full of that); but, as TàK might have said, but did not, people with obviously high self-esteem tend to be assholes. This includes people who know they're saved. The second half of this paragraph, though, contains a good lesson for todayr:

Even shouldest thou see thy neighbour sin openly or grievously, yet thou oughtest not to reckon thyself better than he, for thou knowest not how long thou shalt keep thine integrity. All of us are weak and frail; hold thou no man more frail than thyself.

Bloggers take note!

Jan 28: Jesus-y

Today from the Imitation of Christ (Vol. 7, paired with Augustine’s “Confessions”.) We’ve been just Jesus-ing it up the past couple days; I don’t mind, so much, but what would the Greeks have said? Is this really the kind of company they want to be keeping?

I’m a fan of Jesus, however, his early work in particular, so I’m happy to dive in – or fly, “since by two wings is man lifted above earthly things.” The title of the chapter is “Of a pure mind and simple intention,” which is so unobjectionably spiritual that even a masseuse would agree with it.

Again with the “reacheth” stuff in the translation. The King James Bible has a lot to answer for – you can say what you want against modernity, but it least it freed us up from stuff like this.

“If there is any joy in the world surely the man of pure heart possesseth it, and if there is anywhere tribulation and anguish, the evil conscience knoweth it best.” – SO, if you feel bad, it’s your fault.

Now to Chapter V, of self-esteem (or “self-steam” as I like to think of it). As far as I can see it’s saying not to judge others because one’s own record is hardly a prize. Self-esteem has surely come a long way since the 16th century.

-- Apparently this Jesus person seems to be very important, as one should love him and not living creatures. And yet he also “canst quickly drive away Jesus and lose His favour if thou wilt turn away to the outer things.” So he’s touchy, too. No wonder they needed a chapter on self-steam.

-- “But a true lover of Christ, and a diligent seeker after virtue, falleth not back upon those comforts, nor seeketh such sweetnesses as may be tasted and handled, but desireth rather hard exercises, and to undertake severe labours for Christ.” I think they should have had this reading closer to Lent. As the possessor of a Catholic boyhood, it has a familiar tone (even if my own high Vatican II youth had much less of it than is stereotypical).

-- This seems wise: “I have never found any man so religious and godly, but that he felt sometimes a withdrawal of the divine favour, and lack of fervour.” I mean, it’s followed by exhortation which those of you with a church background will find (too) familiar, but it’s nice for the flaws to be acknowledged once in a while.

I’m kind of surprised this is even in the Harvard Classics. The Confessions are one thing, but this is really super-heavy Jesus. And, if the Harvard Classics are kind of a monument to self-improvement, it’s kind of funny that they include a manual to a completely different kind of self-improvement within it.