(St) Augustine’s Confessions: I had started it years ago, thought it too slow, and put it down for another time. Finally, just this past week, I picked it up again. Again it started slow – but this time, surprise of surprises, as I plowed ahead it got decidedly more interesting. For one thing, I was surprised by how contemporary the very style of his writings and thoughts were. Since Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 AD in Roman North Africa (near the ancient city of Carthage), this makes such similarities startling, and yet it takes only a few pages to learn that the Romans of this era were as sophisticated and worldly, and their intellectuals as cynical and self-confident, as we are today. The intelligentsia often wrote with great sarcasm and complex logic, and in Augustine’s case, with the eye of a modern sociologist, detailing the motivations behind people’s actions with precision. Unlike the writers of the Bible, who seem primitive by our standards, we find that the Romans of the early Christian era were almost identical in their thinking to us, despite vast differences in technology and scientific knowledge.
Which leads us to the other thing, the content, which concerns Augustine and his many sins. Since I am still in the earlier pages, his greatest sins so far concern those of the flesh. As with his contemporaries in his middle-class social group, the unmarried boys were expected to get as much action with the ladies as possible, not just for pleasure, but to increase their social status among their peers. Unlike us, many of the women they dallied with were married, but since unwed pregnancy was still absolutely taboo and modern birth control was not yet invented, these were the only woman available outside of brothels or the hiring of expensive courtesans. His other sins included theft for fun and assorted mischief of the sow-your-wild-oats variety. His life, then, was much like it was with my crowd back in the day, which, I will admit now, was much like most other teen- boy crowds of my day. All was and is so common; and most, both then and now, was and is expected by society and largely tolerated as the silly antics of youth, antics that are often looked upon by older men with nostalgia.
It was with sex where Augustine found his greatest guilt, but that did not stop him from criticizing his parents, especially his father, for his attachment to the things of the world, and to status and prestige. Again, his life circumstances were no different than many of ours’ today. As with practicing Christians today, Augustine would lament much the same things they do here now. And just as then, most of his contemporaries today would not listen. Most would think, as they did then, “Live life, for God’s sack! Take off the ash and sack cloth and forgive yourself for a few common foibles! We are all just human after all!”
But with all this, why do some still read St Augustine? Why do some still go to guilt-inducing services and why do some – myself included – still go to church on Ash Wednesday and get the ashes of our finite lives set on our forehead to proclaim our pre-born guilt and to ask for holy forgiveness for even the most common foibles of adolescence? In the end, then, why do some still wallow in the lingering guilt expressed by St Augustine? What good could it possibly do?
Guilt: in contemporary anthropological thinking, it is the critical factor that allows for thinking beings to live together. We are, as this theory goes, essentially egoistic, but still need society at large for our individual survival. Guilt is that unpleasant feeling that over time makes us conform to rules, such as not having sex with the wives of others or with theft, rules made to make society possible. Since humans depend on the stability of their social situations, the ability to be socialized is something that can be selected for in a Darwinian fashion. From this perspective, guilt is a necessary element in the human mind. It does not need to be surrounded by spiritual mystery – at least by the intelligentsia, those self-contained rational people so cherished by late 19th century novelists.
Augustine, however, as modern as his thinking was in most ways, did not have Darwinian Theory. Guilt for him and his contemporaries had no explanation other than its formation by the gods or God to keep us in line though cosmic discipline. In Augustine’s time, many of the sins of youth were sloughed off with a wink towards those celestial entities, leaving adults to worry only about grave sins such as killing one’s brother. The lower order transgressions were considered as things of children, to be forgotten in responsible adulthood, much as with us today. But for Augustine then, and with many of our priests and religious now, that is not the case. Sin is sin, and while it can be forgiven by God or Christ, it will always be on our soul like a blemish before God. We must always, then, remain contrite.
Which seems like such a waste. Practically speaking, we might say that once the lesson is learned, a “sin” has served its purpose and should dissolve into the past. Why stay up at night thinking about that wrong move we made back in high school, for guilt has ensured that we will never do it again. To have it linger, then, seems counterproductive, as it consumes intellectual energy that could be used elsewhere. Apart from necessity, it also takes away much enjoyment of life. Why not forget about it and move on? Why not think like the cultural sophisticates of past and present and simply make hay while the sun shines?
However: it might just be that, practically speaking, lingering guilt may be necessary to continue to control our impulses. As for Augustine, by the time he wrote his memoires he was already thinking as a saint. This is to believe that ALL attention must be paid to how our thoughts and actions affect our relationship with God. For the saint, there is no winking at past sins. Rather, guilt is God’s way of bringing us out of this fallen world into his. No degree of suffering is too much for this goal, for the passing of a life in misery is nothing compared to the passing of a soul in hell – or the spending of eternity in paradise. Guilt, then, is a blessing, a gift from God to prod us along the holy path.
For many of us, the dichotomy of our thoughts on this could not be more different: to live life to the fullest, or to live it as a proving ground for God. For me, I strive most for the former. Even the Catholic Church is divided on this issue, giving us both images of blessed suffering and healthy happy families living the good, although basically moral, life. But in an odd way, it is here where socio- biology and Christian theology come together. For the Social Darwinist, the saint would give his society the ideal rules for living totally for the other in denial of one’s own desires, an ideal to be kept in the mind as an unreachable template that defines the “good” of the culture and ensures cooperation. For the Church, the saint is to be seen in much the same way, as an ideal template to be used to perfect ourselves, although its end is to bring us to live with God, even though for most such perfection is, or at least seems to be, an impossibility.
For the saint, his guilt is not only eternal and all devouring, but it is relished as the suffering that is necessary to purge oneself of all human attachment. It is the same pain as that of the flagellant, and for the same reason – to beat or cast the ego out of the soul. And just as the anthropologist might see this ultimate figure as the ideal receptacle for social rules and as an ultimate good to the community, so the religious see the saint as a connection to God who bridges the gap, at least a little bit, for us all.
How the two approaches come together is almost odd, as odd as the realization that we are so like the later ancient Romans. There is a greater truth in there somewhere, but I will only conclude with the realization that guilt, the hideous party-pooper of our modern era that psychiatrists have been trying to kill off for one hundred and thirty years, might be one of our greatest gifts, both from nature and from the supernatural.
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