On Christian Doctrine - St Augustine

'On Christian Doctrine' is primarily a guide on how to read the Bible.  St Augustine sets out various rules to help people understand.  More passionately, he provides several rules to fight back against the critics of the Bible.  Those seem to me to be the core of this work.
There are two main prongs that he works with.  The first is that the reader work hard to understand what is written as a metaphor.  This may mean digging deeper into translation.  It may mean letting quick understanding slide past at first.  It absolutely might mean relying on more learned scholars for interpretation.
The other rule is to read passages with the idea of the larger context in mind.  Try to make each part work together with the overall message given.  Don't take a verse on its own, if it seems to disagree with everything else.  And above all, be open to giving the reading the benefit of the doubt.
There are other discussions about things like how important eloquence is to preachers of the Bible.  Augustine thinks it is good, but not crucial.  He advises that uncertain speakers should lean as heavily as they can on the written word.  That strikes me as good advice.


I struggle a bit with the rule that Augustine has about giving the Bible the benefit of the doubt.  Lord knows, it's frustrating to deal with arguments from people who want to pluck one verse out of context and stake a whole argument on that.  I see this done rather constantly on social media and it's almost always done in bad faith.  Any large doctrine can be picked apart if you strain at gnats.
On the other hand, is it fair to argue that a contrary reader must give the writer all benefit of the doubt?  I don't know that it is.  It's akin to saying that you can only understand the Bible if you have full faith in it.  Essentially it demands that the reader swallow the camel whole.
I suppose a careful reader can try to swing back and forth between the two points, but that isn't a common skill.  Though, if it were, the world would undoubtedly be a better place.

Upcoming (Updated)

I've finished up Epictetus.  Next up will be a largish section of St Augustine, books XV - XVIII of 'The City of God'.  I enjoyed Augustine's 'Confessions' (the first half at least) and I'm looking forward to this.  I believe this section is a detailed difference between a city of man and the city of God.


Update: I had the wrong piece by St Augustine.  The work I'll be doing is 'On Christian Doctrine'.  Please update your scorecards accordingly. 




The Shakespeare writing will continue, of course.  Now that I'm done with the 'Henriad' and the Hollow Crown, I'll catch up on writing about the various comedies that I've read but not written about yet.  I think I'm only three behind, but I'll have to check that out.  I've also finished 'King Lear' but I'm still digesting that.  (Poor Gloucester!)  The next tragedy will be 'Othello' and then I'll have finished all of the Shakespeare that is in the Great Books reading plan.
I'm also half way through my personal goal of reading all of Shakespeare's plays this year.  I've currently read 11 of the 13 comedies, 4 of the ten tragedies, 4 of the ten histories and exactly zero of the five romances.  At this pace, I should have them all completed by the end of the summer.

Confessions and Summa Theologica - Augustine, Aquinas

(Sorry, I thought I hit 'publish' on this earlier in the week.)

I don't really have a lot to say about the readings for April.  This is unfortunately becoming a theme for the year.  So much of the readings seem to be simply beside the point.

Augustine
Take book eleven of 'Confessions'.  Augustine tries to understand the nature of time and how such a thing as time would coexist with an omnipotent God.  This quickly looks like a game of verbal puzzle making.
I find pretty much all attempts to logically (or physically) prove the existence of God to be fruitless.  An omnipotent God can defy any such proof simply by the virtue of having the power to overcome any obstacle.  Meanwhile, the spiritual element, the most important, is necessarily reduced.
Which isn't to say that there isn't some value to Augustine.  His worshipful approach is often beautiful, though it tends to blend together with time.  The first half of Confessions is Augustine's personal story of conversion and I found it much more compelling than the second half.

Aquinas
The readings from Aquinas suffer from much the same fault.  When we talk about the soul, we're off into some pretty uncharted territory.  We don't really know what the soul is or how it interacts with the rest of the person.  This means that discussing the exact method that the soul uses to gain knowledge is simply impossible.  Much of this section was similar in terms of actual usefulness.
I remain in awe of the style that Aquinas uses.  For those that aren't familiar, he first poses a general question and then breaks that question down into six or so smaller questions.  Each of these is then given a statement and then arguments against that statement.  Aquinas then responds to those arguments with his full understanding.  Then he finishes up with rebuttals to the arguments. 
You can't say that he doesn't give each question a full hearing.  I would love to see some modern writers adopt the very same method.

Biographies

Biography of St Augustine. 

Biography of Thomas Aquinas.


These are two of the most important thinkers of the church.  St Augustine was around at the tail end of the western Roman empire.  Thomas Aquinas is on the other side of the 'great gap'.  He came in when at a time when Aristotle was reintroduced to the west and it shows.

Readings for April

Two meaty pieces:

April
St Augustine: Confessions (books 9-13) link
St Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica (part 1, QQ 16-17 and 84-88) link

Readings for April

Two pieces but big ones.  Sorry.  

April
St Augustine: Confessions (books 9-13) link
St Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica (part 1, QQ 16-17 and 84-88) link

The Dark Ages (Or at Least a Large Gap)

The Great Books are arranged mostly chronological.  The set I have (the first edition) starts with Homer who lived sometime around 850 BC and continues along the timeline up until Freud at the beginning of the 20th century.  There are a few occasions where authors are paired together by subject, rather than time.  For instance, Ptolemy who lived in the second century is in the same book as Copernicus and Kepler, even though they both lived some 1300 years later.  It works though, since all three studied astronomy.
If you lay out a timeline of all the authors though, you find a giant gap.  Our current subject, St Augustine, died in 430 AD.  The next author, Thomas Aquinas, wasn't born until 1225.  For nearly 800 years, there were no authors deemed worthy enough to be included in the Great Books of the Western World series.  When I was younger, this period was known as the Dark Ages, though that term has fallen out of fashion.  In comparison to such busy times as 450 - 370 BC, it is pretty obviously a down time.
Along with the Great Books, I've been dipping in and out of a book called 'A History of Knowledge' by Charles Van Doren.  (A very interesting book, btw, and from the same Ivy league tradition as Mortimer Adler.)  I found his description of Augustine's impact to be very interesting, (all excerpts from Chap 4):

He [Augustine] died believing that he had been right. Christianity, in order to survive, had to renounce earthly glory and be willing to live on in small isolated, lonely places where the glory of the Heavenly City would shine forth and be more easily seen. Christians, St. Augustine believed, were seeking another kind of triumph from the Roman triumph. The Defeat of Rome, of New Carthage, or even of Hippo, did not really seem important no matter how much misery they might produce. The goal of Christians was in another life, and their city was not of this world.

Van Doren talks about how people then began to think:

St Benedict, for example, went to Rome around 500 AD to study at one of the few remaining Roman schools. He was shocked by the wealth and luxury...and retired to live for the rest of his days in the somber monastery that he founded at Monte Cassino at the beginning of the sixth century. In doing so he laid down a pattern and a rule of life that was imitated everywhere in the West.
For centuries the Benedictines were devoted to poverty, prayer and good works, following the rule of the founder and spiritual father.
...
From our modern point of view those centuries that we still call dark were the nadir of Western civilization. Our ancestors did not feel that way about their time.
They did become frightened and nervous as the year 1000 AD approached, as we are nervous about the coming of the second millenium [written in 1992]. They were like children, afraid of the unkown. They feared the world might come to and end at the close of the year 999. When nothing terrible happened, they drew a collective sigh of relief and set about rebuilding their new version of the Roman empire. We live in it today.

A few caveats are in order here, the first and most prominent being that while I find this interesting, I don't want to put this down as my belief.  We'll cover more of this ground when we get to Gibbon in October and I'm sure other places as well.  Maybe I'll have a firm opinion in ten years when the list is done. 
The second caveat, is that there were some great minds in those 800 years.  In the next chapter, Van Doren lists a good half dozen men who were notable, and I think they'll deserve a post of their own. 
The third caveat is that I find it wildly unlikely that there wouldn't be significant rebellion from the ideal of poverty, especially from the merchant class.  Or, if not rebellion, at least they wouldn't hew so closely to the ideal as to completely close up shop.  Something else must have been going, probably many, many things.
Still, 800 years.  Just think of that.  Eight full centuries without a writer that could crack the lineup of the Great Books.  That seems preposterous.  Or calamitous.  But would Augustine have thought it a great display of piety?

More on Augustine, Confessions

There really is a large amount of interesting things that Augustine says. Don't misunderstand my irritation at his thoughts on infancy to to mean that he should be ignored. For instance:

• He must have been consumed by lust when he was a young man. He writes about the 'madness of lust'. Augustine wished that his friends had urged him to channel that lust into marriage but instead they concentrated on his speaking skills.


• Augustine was a fan of the theater, especially tragedies. He grieved along with the actors, and praised those that made him grieve the most. This, he contrasted with the universal desire for joy and thought that the seeming contradiction had to do with the passions that are released.


• He questioned the value of a liberal education if it wasn't accompanied by a higher faith. That includes this wonderful bit here: "For I had my back to the light, and my face to the things enlightened; whence my face, with which I discerned the things enlightened, itself was not enlightened." I don't know how true that is but it's a lovely metaphor.


• "It was, that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been corrupted by I know not whom, who wished to engraff the law of the Jews upon the Christian faith; yet themselves produced not any uncorrupted copies." I read this as a Jewish intrepretation of the New Testament ideals had made the church to bound by rules and tradition.


• Augustine was privy to an experiment to test astrology. Two children were born at the same time, one to a wealthy man and another to a slave. He argued that there was no possible reading of the stars that would account for how different their lives must necessarily be. Mind you, this was back in the fourth century. More than 1600 years later, this still isn't seen as proof.

A very interesting man.

Children

From Matthew, Chapter 18:

1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the
greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 He called a little child to him, and
placed the child among them. 3 And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change
and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4
Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

From Augustine, Confessions:

Hear, O God. Alas, for man's sin! So saith man, and Thou
pitiesthim; for Thou madest him, but sin in him Thou madest not.
Whoremindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none ispure from
sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon theearth. Who
remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I seewhat of myself I
remember not? What then was my sin? was it that Ihung upon the breast and
cried? for should I now so do for foodsuitable to my age, justly should I be
laughed at and reproved. What Ithen did was worthy reproof; but since I
could not understand reproof,custom and reason forbade me to be reproved.
For those habits, whengrown, we root out and cast away. Now no man, though
he prunes,wittingly casts away what is good. Or was it then good, even for
awhile, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent, thatpersons
free, and its own elders, yea, the very authors of itsbirth, served it not? that
many besides, wiser than it, obeyed not thenod of its good pleasure? to do its
best to strike and hurt, becausecommands were not obeyed, which had been obeyed
to its hurt? Theweakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its
innocence.

I was raised in a protestant church and really didn't learn much about the doctrine of Original Sin. My understanding of it is that man is stamped with sin that carries forth all the way back from Adam and Eve in the Garden. That's why newborns are baptised fairly quickly, to wash away that sin. We believed (and this still makes sense to me) that sin is only possible from someone who is mature enough to have an understanding of right and wrong. The passage from Matthew seems to back that up.

The Confessions - St Augustine (Books 1-8)

I started off not liking Augustine very much. Book One starts with an extended grovel, something that I've never been able to respect very much, even in a religious context. The books are in chronological order so Augustine starts his tale in infancy. This leads to a passage on Orignal Sin:

Who remindeth me of the sings of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure
from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth. Who
remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I
remember not? What then was my sin? was it that I hung upon the breast and
cried? for should I now so do for food suitable to my age, justly should I be
laughed at and reproved. What I then did was worthy reproof; but since I could
not understand reproof, custom and reason forbade me to be reproved.

Speaking as the father of a very young newborn, I can hardly disagree more with the idea that normal infant behavior is 'sin' in any way shape or form. I know that Augustine further explores Original Sin in his other works so it might be unfair to judge the snippets that appear here. But what I've read so far, didn't convince me in any way, shape or form.
My impression of the man did improve though. Each book deals with a segment of his life and, taken alone, each books is fairly interesting. Not only that, but his writing is compelling and has an unusual poetry to it. There is this near the beginning of Book Three:

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 in love, in love with
loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares.

Read that out loud to yourself, with a full pause at each comma. Some very lovely stuff. And I remember well being 'in love with loving'. Augustine was very much a sinner and his frank and open manner of recounting his past sins makes it easy to understand him as a man.
Also impressive is his intellect and his way of attacking problems with his mind. His knowledge of Christianity had been colored by Manichean criticism. When he investigated the scriptures on his own, he found those criticisms to be unfounded. He realized the huge respect that he had for the Christians near him (notably his mother and separately, a friend who died while young) and he let that speak well of Christians in general.
His studies led him to Rome and then to Milan. He found himself more and more led towards Christianity. Augustine opened a Bible at random and found a verse that spoke to him:

Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in
strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision
for the flesh, in concupiscence.

Since 'concupiscence' (strong sexual desire) was one of Augustine's main temptations, he thought this was aimed straight at him and finally converted.

Biography of Augustine

Augustine was born in 354AD, in the north African town of Hippo Regius (which my brain wants to read as 'King Hippo'). He was quickly recoginized as brilliant and his family gave him the best education they possibly could. He became one of the most important theorists of the Catholic church but, interestingly enough, did so only after a very public conversion. Augustine is perhaps the most famous conversion to Christianity in history.
He had three famous and important works, all of which we'll read from in this project: 'Confessions', 'City of God' and 'On Christian Doctrine'. Augustine was one of the leading theorists in subjects like Original Sin and Just War Doctrine. He was one of the earliest to have the honor of being a 'doctor of the church', a title given to those whose advanced learning.
He returned to Hippo in later life and was a Bishop there. He died while the city was under siege from Vandals (actual Vandals). Apparently he asked that all of the books in the city be gathered into the library for safe keeping. When the Vandals burned the city they spared only the library and Augustine's Cathedral.
We'll return to Augustine several more times in the next ten years.

April Reading

From the New Testament: Gospel of St Matthew and Acts of the Apostles Kindle/Nook/Google, Google
St Augustine: 'Confessions' books 1-8 Kindle/Nook/Google

On a personal note, this month might be a bit bare since we're expecting child number three right around Easter.