Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  It is impossible to consider Augustine, the second most important convert in the theological firmament of the early Christian era, without giving Paul his due. But let us leave Saul—he was still Saul then—as he awakes from a blow on his head to hear a voice from the heavens calling him to rebirth in Christ. Saul did not have any established new religion to convert to, but Augustine was converting to a faith with financial and political influence, as well as a spiritual message for the inhabitants of a decaying empire. Augustine’s journey from paganism to Christianity was a philosophical and spiritual struggle lasting many years, but it also exemplified the many worldly, secular influences on conversion in his and every subsequent era. These include mixed marriages; political instability that creates the perception and the reality of personal insecurity; and economic conditions that provide a space for new kinds of fortunes and the possibility of financial support for new religious institutions.

  Augustine told us all about his struggle, within its social context, in Confessions—which turned out to be a best-seller for the ages. This was a new sort of book, even if it was a highly selective recounting of experience (like all memoirs) rather than a “tell-all” autobiography in the modern sense. Its enduring appeal, after a long break during the Middle Ages, lies not in its literary polish, intellectuality, or prayerfulness—though the memoir is infused with these qualities—but in its preoccupation with the individual’s relationship to and responsibility for sin and evil. As much as Augustine’s explorations constitute an individual journey—and have been received as such by generations of readers—the journey unfolds in an upwardly mobile, religiously divided family that was representative of many other people finding and shaping new ways to make a living; new forms of secular education; and new institutions of worship in a crumbling Roman civilization.

  After a lengthy quest venturing into regions as wild as those of any modern religious cults, Augustine told the story of his spiritual odyssey when he was in his forties. His subsequent works, including The City of God, are among the theological pillars of Christianity, but Confessions is the only one of his books read widely by anyone but theologically minded intellectuals (or intellectual theologians). In the fourth and early fifth centuries, Christian intellectuals with both a pagan and a religious education, like the friends and mentors Augustine discusses in the book, provided the first audience for Confessions. That audience would probably not have existed a century earlier, because literacy—a secular prerequisite for a serious education in both paganism and Christianity—had expanded among members of the empire’s bourgeois class by the time Augustine was born. The Christian intellectuals who became Augustine’s first audience may have been more interested than modern readers in the theological framework of the autobiography (though they, too, must have been curious about the distinguished bishop’s sex life). But Confessions has also been read avidly, since the Renaissance, by successive generations of humanist scholars (religious and secular); Enlightenment skeptics; nineteenth-century Romantics; psychotherapists; and legions of the prurient, whether religious believers or nonbelievers. Everyone, it seems, loves the tale of a great sinner turned into a great saint.

  In my view, Augustine was neither a world-class sinner nor a saint, but his drama of sin and repentance remains a real page-turner.

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  The future church father was born in Thagaste, located in today’s Algeria, into the evolving middle class of a Roman town that had existed for three centuries. His father, Patricius, was a pagan, a small landowner, and a government official whose chief virtue (as far as his son was concerned) was his willingness to sacrifice financially so that Augustine could obtain the rudiments of a classical education. His mother, Monica, was a Christian focused almost entirely on her children (especially Augustine); the only thing she seems to have shared with her husband was a determination that their brilliant son be educated. But, then, nearly everything we know about Monica comes from Confessions, and Augustine’s relationship with his mother was so intense that it could hardly escape the scrutiny of twentieth-century psychiatrists.

  Monica was a piece of work, and her work blended the necessity of feminine compromise—given the inescapable fact of male social dominance—with a canny, relentless drive to prevail in matters, especially religion, of greatest importance to her. As Augustine recounts, his mother felt that women were obliged to tolerate their husbands’ infidelities, and her tolerance may have been one reason why Patricius, unlike many of his contemporaries, never beat her. She kept her eyes on the prize, which was instilling Christian belief in her son in spite of the pagan education he was receiving and, eventually, drawing Patricius into the Christian fold as well. She managed to obtain this conversion only at the end of Patricius’s life, and that was the story of many such mixed couples and families in the early Christian era (including the more politically consequential saga of Helena and her son Constantine). As a child, Augustine nearly died from an intestinal disorder, but Monica did not have him baptized, as her son later explained, because if he did recover she knew that he would continue to sin after being christened—and that would place him on the road to hell. What a risk taker Monica was! Faced with the choice of making sure that her gravely ill young son went to heaven in a state of grace after baptism or giving him the chance to go on sinning until he was ready to accept Christianity on his own, she rolled the dice. “Even at that age I already believed in you,” Augustine writes, “and so did…the whole household except for my father. But, in my heart, he did not gain the better of my mother’s piety and prevent me from believing in Christ because he still disbelieved himself. For she did all that she could to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he.”2 (Italics mine.)

  Many religious believers have criticized psychiatrists for anachronistically superimposing Freudianism on Confessions. But psychiatrists, whether Freudian or not, can hardly be blamed for being struck by an account of an upbringing in which an invisible, supernatural father was constantly pitted against the natural father who was feeding, clothing, and educating his son. Augustine’s dilemma, however anachronistic it may be to impose Freudian terminology on the story, is timeless. For a child, the perception of one parent as the representative of just, timeless moral values and the other as the emblem of worldly striving need have nothing to do with religion to create immense emotional turmoil. Religion, however—especially when one faith insists on an absolute truth claim—ups the ante. The soothing notion that religions may be equally good, albeit contradictory—the fallback position for many mixed couples today—was not available to Christian parents when the church was in its infancy (though it was certainly available to and accepted by pagans throughout the empire). The “one religion is as good as another” perspective was not really accepted by any Western religious denomination until well into the twentieth century, and now exists only in countries and within social and religious groups that fully accept religious pluralism and reject absolute truth claims.

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  By the late 390s, when Augustine completed Confessions, he had long been familiar with Jewish Scripture and immersed in early Christian writings, and his references to Paul permeate the autobiography. Saul/Paul was a much greater writer and propagandist than any of those who drew their inspiration from him—from the fathers of the church to Calvinists, as well as conservative Catholic and Protestant theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Augustine, the authority of the church and its sole claim to truth, despite his incorporation of classical philosophy into Christian theology, became the entire point of his turbulent search for a moral center of gravity. Had Augustine been writing even a century earlier, it seems doubtful that his conversion story would have exerted anything like the direct emotional power of Paul’s epistles, written (as far as the best scholarship can determine) in the first three decades after the conventional Christian dating of the crucifixion of Jesus (around the year 33).

  Peter Brown, the great scholar of late
antiquity and author of the definitive twentieth-century biography of Augustine, describes Confessions as “a masterpiece” in which Augustine “communicates such a sense of intense personal involvement in the ideas he is handling, that we are made to forget that it is an exceptionally difficult book.”3 Confessions certainly is a dense and difficult book, in style as well as substance; I find it impossible to forget the difficulty and the density except when Augustine steps out of the persona of God’s correspondent and reveals, intentionally or unintentionally, the complexities of his own mortal moral life. Who is to say that the prayer formula—for a kind of book that had never been written before—was anything other than a conscious or more likely subconscious disguise for the intense desire of a writer to talk about his own experience, to sing his own song? I see Augustine as a man who was as driven to talk about his personal secrets as any autobiographer who has ever lived, but his religious beliefs dictated that he frame his own story in the form of a letter to the immortal Supreme Being. What Brown judges as intense involvement with ideas might also be seen as intense tension between concealment and revelation—as well as between pride of authorship and a faith that dictated humility.

  What interests us about Augustine is the prism of guilt, self-loathing, vaulting ambition, grandiosity, and sheer strangeness through which he reaches an accommodation with his ruler of the universe. He may well have exaggerated his own sinfulness (how evil, really, is it to steal a bunch of pears to impress your peers, or to have one mistress and one son out of wedlock?), but what is compelling about Confessions is not how his sins might be judged sub specie aeternitatis but how Augustine himself viewed the offenses in particular and evil in general.

  Augustine’s preoccupation with the question of evil—the theodicy problem that poses so many more difficulties for a monotheist than for a polytheist who believes in gods with limited power—is what keeps us all reading. The paradox of the existence of evil in a world supposedly designed and presided over by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good deity, has always been the moral question for every person of faith. Atheists do not have this problem in its theological form, because the atheist rejects the idea that any supernatural being has the power to affect human moral decisions or their consequences. But the need to keep dark impulses from overwhelming the better angels of our nature is equally urgent for all sane human beings, regardless of religious or nonreligious beliefs. For all who possess a conscience—my definition of sanity—doing right when we are strongly tempted to do wrong is a moral challenge and a moral duty that never goes away. The ubiquity and sheer difficulty of this task is the reason why heresies attempting to separate good and evil into separate universes arise repeatedly throughout religious and Christian history, and it is Augustine of Hippo’s fundamental subject—regardless of whether he was really a great sinner by anyone’s standards but his own.

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  Augustine himself would probably have no quarrel with anyone who considers Paul a much greater writer. I know verse after verse from Paul’s epistles by heart, but I have to look up passages in Confessions. For an English-speaker today (at least for one old enough not to have encountered the Bible for the first time in dumbed-down recent translations), the indelible impression rendered by Paul’s prose is likely attributable to the proselytizer’s fabulous luck in having his words rendered into the language of Shakespeare by William Tyndale and the translators of the King James Bible. There is not a line in Confessions with the emotional power of the “through a glass darkly” passage in Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, nor could Augustine’s obsession with original sin lure potential converts in the manner of Paul’s promise that, although in our earthly lives we know only in part, in eternal life we will know fully, even as we are known. The author Christopher Hitchens, in a lagniappe to the King James translation written for Vanity Fair magazine several months before his death in 2011, felt the same way, in spite of his uncompromising atheism, about what has rightly been called the only great book ever written by a committee. For his father’s funeral in 1987, Hitchens had chosen a Jesus-free reading (4:8) from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” The “Contemporary English Version” published by the American Bible Society translates the passage Hitchens quoted at his father’s funeral as, “Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly, and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.” Hitchens correctly describes these verses as “pancake-flat,” consistent with self-help psychobabble and lacking the power to penetrate “the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me.” He adds, “There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of ‘my friends’ for ‘brethren,’ but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to rewrite the history as well as to rinse out the prose.”4

  I read the “through a glass darkly” passage at my father’s funeral for much the same reason as Hitchens selected his verses: as a daughter, I felt that the lines embodied the primary virtue—hope—that defined my dad’s character. Paul’s hold on Augustine can be attributed not only to theology but to the admiration of a very good writer for a great writer.

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  Confessions is a real autobiography as well as a real conversion story, and attempts to reduce it largely to a “prayer to God” minimize not only the degree of Augustine’s emotional conflicts, egotism, and existential guilt but the importance of his having been raised in a family and spent his adult life in a society that provided fertile soil for every kind of doubt and belief—religious and nonreligious.

  Periods of political change and uncertainty, such as the fourth and fifth centuries in the late Roman Empire, have nearly always been characterized by religious change. After the death of Constantine, the first Christian emperor (who was baptized not long before he died in 337), the empire was split into Eastern and Western sectors by his feuding sons—a division that would ultimately have a permanent impact on Christianity as well as politics. In the Western empire, the small Roman towns of North Africa, which had been prosperous from the first century B.C.E. until around the year 200, were literally crumbling. Public baths, aqueducts, and monuments—all of the material achievements of Roman civilization—would disintegrate steadily over the next millennium in the West—with the exception of the extraordinary feats of Moorish architecture and city planning at the height of the Convivencia (literally, the coexistence) of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in eighth-through-tenth-century Iberia. Repeated waves of attacks from the north stretched the material and military resources of the empire to the utmost. In 363, the last pagan emperor, Julian, was killed during an attempt to invade Persia, and in 376, Velens, emperor of the East, allowed Visigoths to settle within the borders of the empire. It took only another thirty-four years for Alaric and the Visigoths to invade and sack Rome—an event of incalculable economic and psychological importance that made the security of a church-state alliance even more appealing to those shaken by the once-invincible empire’s fragility. But the union between Catholicism and what was left of imperial rule threatened the religious freedom of all who did not accept the teachings of the Roman church, including non-Christian Manicheans and Jews. In the theology that emerged from that union, especially with regard to Jews, Augustine was destined to play a fateful role.

  The rise of a new, aggressive, proselytizing form of monotheism—and its attempts to form an alliance with imperial power—had even more negative consequences for Jews than for pagans, if only because most of the inhabitants of the empire were still pagans, and the Jewish minority had depended on a certain protected status to maintain its communal institutions within the imperium. A few his
torians, most notably Benzion Netanyahu (who died in 2012 and was the father of the current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu), have argued that the Western persecution of Jews originated in the classical world’s hatred of Jewish Scripture and culture and envy of the economic success attained by many Jews living outside Palestine (both before and after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70). Netanyahu argues that “the Jewish question in antiquity was produced by essentially the same factors that fashioned it in later times; that antisemitism in the Christian period was, fundamentally, a continuation of the anti-Jewishness that preceded it; and that the origins and manifestations of both phenomena were fundamentally the same.”5 But the Roman state, before the rise of Christianity, did not act to destroy Jewish institutions in the absence of open revolt, such as the uprising that led to the destruction of the Second Temple or the crushing, in 135, of the rebellion led by the “false Messiah” Simon bar Kochba. After the decisive battle in 70, it was said that Roman soldiers plowed the entire area around the temple under in an effort to destroy all of the original stones. According to the twelfth-century scholar Maimonides, what followed was the near-total destruction of the city of Jerusalem. Christians then used passages from the Gospels to praise the destruction of the temple and to argue that the catastrophe was foretold by Jesus. They were referring to a passage in the Gospel of Matthew (24:1–2), in which Jesus gathers his disciples in the temple in Jerusalem and says, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” The same incident appears in Luke (21:5–8, 12):