by Susan Jacoby
Like the Muslims whose faith would emerge several centuries later, the Manichees considered Jesus a great prophet and spiritual figure while viewing their own teachings as superior to Christianity. They were most closely connected to Christian teaching in their views on asceticism, although Manichees were more extreme in their ascetic leanings than Christian leaders in the fourth and fifth centuries—with the possible exception of the onetime hermit and church father Jerome. The chief importance of Manicheism was its relegation of good and evil to separate universes, literally consisting of the world of darkness and the world of light. Manicheans believed that particles of good were trapped in the evil matter that composed most of the human body. They believed not in original sin but in the possibility of human perfection, to be attained by rigorous self-discipline and eventual union with the pure, untainted light of goodness. Energy representing the light in man would rise toward perfection, in ways that contradicted contemporary observations of the movements of astral bodies. The phases of the moon, for example, were not seen by Manichees as objective phenomena, independent of man, but were thought to be caused by variations of pure light and impure darkness being released from earth as a result of human behavior. Even for that era, Manicheism was heavily dependent on pseudoscience; astrologers, building their business on the pseudoscientific premise that the stars affected the behavior of men, had nevertheless grasped the basic truth that the stars and planets were not controlled by human beings.
The pseudoscientific cast of Manichean dualism eventually drove Augustine away. Troubled by the contradictions between Manichean teaching and Greek scientific writings, Augustine turned to one Faustus, whom he tartly describes as a man with a reputation for learning “conveniently maintained by his frequent absences on missionary journeys.”13 When Faustus turned up in Carthage in 383, Augustine took his measure and was disappointed, discovering, to his disdain, that the Manichee’s reputation for being “exquisitely skilled in the liberal sciences” proved unjustified for anyone who knew the Greek classics. “And since I had read and well remembered much of the [Greek] philosophers,” Augustine recalled, “I compared some things of theirs with those long fables of the Manichees, and found the former more probable….”14 Ignorance of the classics would not do for Augustine as a pathway to religious faith. A year after meeting Faustus, Augustine was off to Rome and basically done with Manicheism.
Yet dualism, despite its weird cosmology, was certainly no more preposterous as an answer to the theodicy question than the “free will” used by the fathers of the church, including Augustine, to let God off the hook. No one describes the issue better than Augustine himself, in his musings in Confessions on the evil of babies:
Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy?…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 do so for food suitable to my age, justly should I be laughed at and reproved. What I did then was worthy of reproof; but since I could not understand reproof, custom and reason forbade me to be reproved. For those habits, when grown, 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 a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent, that persons free, and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure?…The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother. Who knows not this?15 [Italics mine.]
A baby might look innocent to doting parents, but to Augustine, infants were only biding their time until they grew strong enough (thanks to all of those feedings on demand) to wreak real mayhem. There is certainly nothing incredible, by the standards of religious logic, about either Manicheism or free will as the answer for a man bound by faith to absolve God of being responsible for the evil committed by infants. One explanation is as plausible, or implausible, as the other—if, that is, you accept the premise that babies are born bad. Monica, characteristically, threw her son out of the house when he became a Manichee follower, although she never lost hope that he would return to the true path of Roman Catholic Christianity.
If Confessions is not a “tell-all” memoir in the modern sense (as ecclesiastical and scholarly commentators constantly remind Augustine’s unwashed, prurient fans), it is a real autobiography, filled with stories about Augustine’s earthly friends as well as his immortal Friend. It is no less a memoir or an autobiography because Augustine leaves out important episodes in his life (as all autobiographers do) or because twentieth-century scholars with a psychoanalytic bent have imposed historical anachronisms on certain episodes. Consider a famous passage in which Augustine expresses contempt for a father who was respected by the community because, in spite of sparse financial resources, he devoted what he had to financing his son’s studies. “But yet this same father had no concern how I grew towards Thee, or how chaste I were; so that I were but copious in speech, however barren I were to Thy culture….”16
Augustine then regrets that “the briers of unclean desires grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to root them out.” When Augustine’s father saw his nude son at the public baths, “now growing toward manhood, and endued with a restless youthfulness, he, as already hence anticipating his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself….”17 In other words (this translation was completed in 1838), Augustine’s father saw his son’s manly penis, probably in an erect state, and told Monica that they might anticipate becoming grandparents.
In his analysis of Confessions, Garry Wills takes two German psychiatrists to task for concluding that Augustine’s father had seen him masturbating. It certainly does seem unlikely that public masturbation was a routine part of the experience of using Roman baths prized for their cleanliness.18 Nudity, however, was a given. The point of the passage is not that the teenager was masturbating but that Augustine was repelled by his father’s evident pleasure at the sight of his sixteen-year-old son’s mature genitals. And the passage reveals a deeper truth about the young Augustine’s formative emotional conflict, instilled by the contrast between his mother’s devout Christian teachings and his father’s paganism.
In spite of his father’s vulgar earthly desires, Augustine continues, “In my mother’s breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a catechumen, and that but recently. She then was startled with an holy fear and trembling; and though I was not as yet baptized, feared for me those crooked ways, in which they walk, who turn their back to Thee, and not their face.”19 As a Christian convert, Augustine would replay that conflict even after he became a bishop of the church. The role of mixed marriage is part of what makes Confessions seem modern and relevant in our society, which, like Augustine’s own, is characterized by religious, racial, and ethnic intermarriage of many kinds. Augustine’s harsh judgment of his father, and the clear line he draws between the moral values of his parents, is also entirely consistent with his attraction to Manicheism.
The book’s best-known episode is its “conversion scene,” when Augustine finally decides to be baptized. As Wills points out, the significance of this scene is not the conversion itself but Augustine’s renunciation of sex. Chastity was not a condition for becoming a Christian; it was not even a condition for becoming a priest in the fourth century (although it was far from certain that Augustine—a respected teacher of rhetoric and the classics, thanks to his father’s worldly ambitions and sacrifices—would become a priest). Exactly why Augustine was so focused on sexual sin, as opposed, say, to the sin of pride—which he demonstrated far more consistently and flagrantly throughout his life—is not entirely clear.
In his Soliloquies, written shortly after his conversion, Augustine, who had already fathered his son, Adeodatus (c. 372–88), produces this charming description of woman:
Portray woman as you will, endow her with every good thing, yet I have made up my mind that nothing is more to be shunned than union with woman. I know nothing that so topples a man from the defense of his own soul’s battlements than female attractions and the carnal couplings that are the condition of having a wife. If a philosopher is allowed to beget children—a point I am not sure of—then he who has sex only for that purpose gets my admiration but not my imitation….I have therefore laid this demand on myself (rightly and usefully, I believe)—to protect the freedom of my soul by giving up any concern or quest or contract with a wife.20
By this point, Augustine had already, at Monica’s insistence, packed off his mistress and the mother of his son, but had also decided not to yield to Monica’s wish that he take a wife of higher social status. For him, being a Christian and a philosopher had become antithetical to sex. In a long commentary, written in the mid-390s, on the Sermon on the Mount, Augustine added to the misogynist Christian template already provided by Paul. “Thus a good Christian [man] is found in one and the same woman to love the creature of God, whom he desires to be transformed and renewed; but to hate the corruptible and mortal conjugal connection and sexual intercourse; that is to love in her what is characteristic of a human being, to hate what belongs to her as a wife.”21 One can only imagine what a soul-nurturing experience it must have been to serve as Augustine’s mistress and the mother of his son.
Suspicion of the body was a high-toned intellectual fashion not confined to Christians or Manicheans but also shared by pagans, and had a long tradition among ascetics in Roman civilization. The second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius, for example, is said to have given up the act of intercourse as soon as he had fulfilled his imperial duty of producing an heir. He memorably described the sex act between a man and woman in his Meditations as “the friction of an entrail and the expulsion of mucus accompanied by a kind of spasm.”22 Julian (332–63), the last pagan emperor of Rome and a convert from Christianity, held the same suspicious, disdainful view of the body and sexuality as Augustine. Religious conversion (to or from Christianity) required concentration and devotion to the gods or to God, but it did not require devotion to the natural expressions, such as sexual love, of divine creation.
In describing the moment of his conversion, Augustine quotes Paul’s epistle to the Romans and says his eye was drawn to a passage advising the faithful to abjure any pleasure in “reveling and drunkenness…lust and wantonness…quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more on nature and nature’s appetites” (13:13). Augustine declares that he has no desire and no need to read more of the passage in order to confirm his rejection of carnal pleasures and his embrace of faith. “For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine then told Monica that he “no longer desired a wife or placed any hope in this world but stood firmly on the rule of faith….”23 As a new Christian, Augustine rejected even those pleasures permitted to Christians. For him, it was better to burn than to marry.
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This severe theology may explain the enduring fascination of Confessions for Christians, but it does nothing to illuminate the appeal of the book for some atheists, even though they regard the absolute truth cherished by Augustine as a fantasy and as the source of many of the world’s ills. I certainly do not find Augustine a particularly appealing character. In his portrait of the church father as a young man, I see him as the sort of familiar male intellectual who spends most of his time in verbal joustings with male friends—especially the sort of acolyte friends who might consider him first among equals. And I despise Augustine’s views on Judaism, although it is possible that some of my ancestors—especially in regions that are now part of Germany and Poland—survived because of his formula for conversion and harassment that stopped short of extermination. I cannot, as a person shaped by Enlightenment thought and twentieth-century science, even begin to share Augustine’s definitions of evil.
The real emotional power of Confessions lies in the spectacle of a man of high intellect struggling to reconcile his own reason with the acceptance of absolute truth required by his chosen faith. As he moves toward the conclusion of his personal story, Augustine presents a discussion of memory that belongs to the greatest Western literature of any era. These pages also demonstrate that Augustine was, for all the scientific ignorance of his time, an instinctive man of science: he was not the sort of person who trusted the evidence of his own eyes and ears as the measure of all things. And yet he was also a man who could call curiosity a disease, and the secrets of nature mysteries that should not be probed by human beings. It is not surprising that a man so deeply conflicted about the fundamental question of whether humans have the right to know and to understand nature—precisely because they are endowed with reason—should have taken many years to bow his head to a new faith and figure out a way to define it as reasonable. A world in which reason is seen as good and curiosity as evil cannot be a comfortable place for any thoughtful human being. The senses, Augustine points out in his discussion of memory, do not fully explain the storage of images in the mind. “All these things, each of which entered by its own avenue, are distinctly and under general heads there laid up: as, for example, light, and all colours and forms of bodies, by the eyes; sounds of all kinds by the ears; all smells by the passage of the nostrils; all flavours by that of the mouth; and by the sensation of the whole body is brought in what is hard or soft, hot or cold….All these doth that great receptacle of memory, with its many and indescribable departments, receive, to be recalled and brought forth when required….And yet the things themselves do not enter it, but only the images of the things perceived are there ready at hand for thought to recall. And who can tell how these images are formed, notwithstanding that it is evident by which of the senses each has been fetched in and treasured up?”24
Augustine did not, of course, understand either the sensory properties of memory or the ways in which the brain stores experience—in part because of the primitive state of medicine and biology, and in part because of the distinctions he made, as a Christian, between the physical and spiritual realms. But the question he asks—how does memory do what it does?—is the same question being posed in an age of biogenetic research. We know more, but by no means all, of the answers today—as evinced by the still-frustrating and frustrated search for any effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, that fatal degeneration called “dying from the top” by Enlightenment thinkers, who were aware that men as brilliant as Isaac Newton had lost all memory before they died.
In one of the most beautiful, evocative passages about memory in the Western canon, Augustine observes:
This same memory contains also the affections of my mind; not in the manner in which the mind itself contains them when it suffers them, but very differently according to a power peculiar to memory. For without being joyous, I remember myself to have had joy; and without being sad, I call to mind my past sadness; and that of which I was once afraid, I remember without fear; and without desire recall a former desire. Again, on the contrary, I at times remember when joyous my past sadness, and when sad my joy. Which is not to be wondered at as regards the body; for the mind is one thing, the body another. If I, therefore, when happy, recall some bodily pain, it is not so strange a thing. But now, as this very memory itself is mind (for when we give orders to have a thing kept in memory, we say, “See that you bear this in mind;” and when we forget a thing, we say, “It did not enter my mind,” and, “It slipped from my mind,”…)25
Augustine could not possibly have understood that the mind is inseparable from the body—nor would he believe that today if he held the same religious conviction, as many do, that man was cr
eated by God as an exception within nature. One need not be a religious believer to be disturbed by the fact that what we call the mind is entirely dependent on the proper operation of the physical human brain. There are even scientists who long for evidence that the human mind has a dimension independent of the body—a thoughtful, emotional, or spiritual dimension that cannot be quantified or measured in the laboratory. Such claims are necessary if one is to maintain that man is above the rest of the kingdom of nature—not only because of that undeniable fact, the superior human brain, but because of some other fundamental difference separating the human species from all other creatures. Augustine, though, was asking his questions about memory without being able to stand on the shoulders of giants. Both the limits of his scientific understanding and his conflicted sense that there might be more to understand are on display in the observation that the birds of the air and beasts of the field also possess memory—or they would not be able to return to their nests or earthly lairs.
Then, alas, Augustine the philosopher—curious in spite of his guilt about being curious—shifts from his general discussion of memory to what concerns him specifically as Augustine the Christian. How can it be that, before his conversion, he had no “memory” of God Himself? Again, he seeks to distinguish man from the birds and beasts. The knowledge of God, he argues, is nothing like either a bird’s “memory” of its nest or a man’s recollected emotion. “Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee?” he asks. “For in my memory Thou wert not, before I learned Thee….Place there is none; we go backward and forward, and there is no place.”26