Augustine's Confessions: Vice, sin or weakness?

For to love and to be loved was more sweet to me if I could enjoy the body of the person who loved me.

Thus I defiled the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and darkened its sparkling waters with clouds of lust, And yet, filthy and nasty as I was, with my excessive vanity I pretended to be elegant and well-bred. And I fell head-long into love, whose prisoner I desired to be.

The troublesome word in that excerpt from near the beginning of Book 3 is "friendship". We have no idea what Augustine is talking about here but whatever it is, it seems sexual in nature. For writers in antiquity, "friendship" usually meant something between two men. It might also refer to two women but women's friendship was not taken as seriously. Men and women, however, were not taken to be friends very often. If Augustine meant to write about a relationship between himself and woman, he would have written differently.

No, I am not saying Augustine was gay or that he had a same-sex love affair a la Charles Ryder.

The thing to notice here is that any kind of sin that comes up in Augustine tends to get described in sexual terms. "Lust", "flesh", "concupiscence", and lots of other such terms could end up meaning gossip or gambling as easily as sex. Actually, that is understating the case for Augustine has used the language of sexual desire a lot so far in the book, he has not used it even once in reference to any actual sex act. We don't get any mention of an actual sex relationship until Book 4, Chapter 2, which contains a passing mention of his living with a woman he is not married to and that is described in mostly positive terms.

Two chapters after that we get a reference to a friendship that Augustine claims he "perverted" but that perversion was astrology and not sex.

A big part of the problem is us. We have eroticized sin to such an incredible degree that the language of sin and seduction have become synonymous.

But another big part of the problem is the culture of antiquity that didn't have much place for love in marriage. Saint Paul's statement that it is better to marry than to burn with passion strikes us as an overly pragmatic, if not outright exploitative, attitude towards marriage. It says, get married and you'll have a sanctioned outlet for your sex drive. And yet Saint Paul was a screaming romantic compared to most in antiquity who saw marriage as a contractual arrangement driven by a concern over community and property interests. It never would have occurred to Augustine to see marriage as a special kind of loving relationship because it tended not to be. There must have been some marriages that were but it simply wasn't the expectation.

That means that love as we mean the word to describe a special kind of bond between people who are in a sexual relationship, had no place in his culture. To talk about sex as a special bonding force between husbands and wives would have made no sense to them.

I don't think a writer like Augustine could think of sex as anything but a vice or, at best, as a weakness.You could have sanctioned sex in marriage but sex was never going to be a positive thing for him.

We might distinguish between sin, vice and weakness as follows:

• A sin is to break a rule in a blameworthy way. It could be a conscious choice to break a rule or it could be a failure to try hard enough or any one of a myriad of possibilities but it would be blameworthy; it would be something you could be convicted of.
• A vice is a kind of character trait that will lead you to do bad or fail to do good but not necessarily to break rules. I might be the worst sort of coward but never face any situation where it makes any difference. (The vast majority of men alive today will never find out whether or not they are cowards.) But the flaw is blameworthy in that I should be making efforts to train myself not to be a coward.
  A weakness is a trait that I couldn't eliminate even if I wanted to.

Augustine describes sexual desire sometimes as if it were vice and sometimes as if it were a weakness.

In any case, he always seems to describe sin of any sort, even sins that have little or nothing to do with sex such as astrology—using language we would use to describe somebody who pursues illicit sexual pleasure.


A note to anyone kind enough to follow my blogging of Augustine: I have decided not to blog the book in any systematic way. I'm doing this mostly because I don't want to block my enjoyment of the book, and I am enjoying it immensely. That said, I also don't know the book nearly well enough to write about it in any thorough-going way. This series of posts  is just a bit of hits here and there based on things that strike me.

Augustine's Confessions book 2

Any time you read any book at all about ethics, you want to pay very close attention to the opening moves.

Most of us read the other way: we want to get to the end and see what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do. That temptation is very strong with a writer like Augustine who casts one very long shadow in ethics. Even if you're reading him only to reject him, you will care a whole lot about what he requires and prohibits.

But that is kind of dumb if you think about it. Any moral system has some flexibility built into it. It would be really exceptional if every single conclusion was rock solid. There is far more to learn from considering the premises. You can learn a lot from reading moral writers with interesting moral premises even if you don't want to accept their conclusions.

Anyway, here in Book 2, Augustine actually begins to outline what sin means to him. And, as is becoming a bit of a theme for this blogging of the book, it isn't what I thought I remembered.

Augustine begins with sex. You expected that. Right? But he doesn't end up there. He ends up with what seems like a rather trivial sin—an account of stealing pears off a tree—as his paradigmatic example of a sin. How does that work?

Well, for starters, Augustine doesn't talk about sex as way of describing sin but as a way of describing human weakness. Sex in itself is not a sin. The sin arises when we start thinking and caring about how others see us as sexual beings.

Augustine is not, as the modern term would have it, sex positive. He argues that it is better to be celibate than to have sex. This, as odd as it may seem to us, was not an uncommon attitude in the ancient world. Sex was what imprudent people, people with poor risk assessment skills, did and it was understood by not a few to be a danger to your virtue in the sense that it prevented you from being all you could be.

When Saint Paul, says, for example, that a married man is focused on pleasing his wife and a single man is focused on pleasing God (a line that Augustine approvingly quotes) he is not saying anything that would have shocked ancient readers. They could easily imagine a military leader saying the same of his troops; saying that their loyalty and devotion as soldiers would be greater if they weren't married.

But we should not imagine that Augustine imagines sex to be a sin. He sees it as a weakness. And one of the profound outcomes of this is that he he uses terms like concupiscence and lust to describe all human craving after base things. Sex is a base thing in his eyes to be sure but it isn't evil. The sin comes when our desire for sex trumps our desire for higher things.

Dangerous friendships

When it comes time to confess the sexual sins of his sixteenth year, a year he spent in idleness, Augustine shocks us by not mentioning any of the things you might expect. He doesn't mention Suzie whom he met in the back pantry way or Pauline on the beach. No, the thing that drives him to sin is not Suzie's bodacious ta tas or Pauline's awesome posterior but his desire to seem like a player in the eyes of his friends:

... I rushed ahead with so much blindness that in the presence of my companions I was ashamed of being less filthy than they were. And when I heard them bragging of their wicked actions and boasting how much more beastly they were, I was determined to emulate their life, not merely for the pleasure of it, but in order that I might be praised for it. (Book 2, chapter 3)

In fact, as he goes on to tell us, when he couldn't match his friends' exploits, he bragged as if he had.  Well, you don't need to be a psychologist to recognize that behaviour trait.

The really important thing, here, however, is that he does do what some who claim to be his disciples would do and focus on particular acts as sins. WHat matters to Augustine (so far anyway) is the thing we aim at. The good we think we'll get of it.

And that is why the stolen pears are such a perfect paradigm example of sin for Augustine. He didn't particularly want the pears. He had better pears already accessible to him. He would not have taken the pears if he had been alone. No, the good he sought in stealing the pears is the shared joy that came from doing evil with others.

The joy we should really want is union with God. That's the basis of Augustine's morality. Does that mean that I have to give up everything else? No.

Marriage and Augustine's concubine

Augustine lets show a few interesting things about marriage. Like Paul, he argues that marriage is a way not to burn with lust. That's not a very exalted view of the sacrament. That said, you wonder what's going on between the lines.

Augustine loved his mother and speaks highly of her in most places so it really jumps out at us when he is critical of Monica. And he is on the subject of marriage. His mother, seeing that he has reached puberty, worries about his sexual behaviour but she doesn't worry enough to suggest he get married so as to not to sin. In fact, she discourages marriage and the rare moment of criticism Augustine allows himself towards his mother is on this subject. He clearly thinks she was only concerned about his success in this world when she ... well what did she do? We don't really know. We only know that Augustine says she didn't want him to marry.

This is all between the lines but I wonder iof Augustine didn't later come to resent his mother's (and father's but the mother matters most here) attidtude towards marriage.

And the primary evidence for this, it seems to me, is his concubine. Augustine kept a concubine and did so for years ultimately giving her up with regret. He had a child with her and he seems to have cared for her and the boy she gave birth to. And what we have to wonder is whether there wasn't a serious regret here regarding the life he might have had. I think there was and that has to affect how we read what Augustine says about sex here and elsewhere. It implies a much softer take on what men and women do in intimate situations both inside and outside marriage than what someone like Alice von Hildebrand would have us take to be Augustine's attitude.

Now, softer doesn't necessarily mean that the rules change, it does not imply that he believed that adultery was just fine in some cases, for example. Adultery is always going to be wrong. But it should be more understandable, and less worthy of contempt that von Hildebrand would have it.

To loop around to the beginning, if the stealing of pears is the paradigmatic example of sin, then lust is the paradigmatic example of human weakness.

The Confessions: How much of a platonist is Augustine?

(Conclusion of Book One)

The more I read of this thing, the more dismayed I get with myself for having read so shallowly thirty years ago.

Rereading it now, I can see that again and again, I simply assumed I knew where Augustine was going instead of paying attention to what was really going on. Augustine, for example, says that plays that had him weeping for fictional characters led him astray. When I first read this, I read it as simply saying what Plato says in The Republic, that these texts are poor for teaching. I think now that Augustine's point is more subtle and more positive. It's easy to miss this because he goes on and on about his failings in being so enthralled in all this drama when he should have been studying more practical stuff.

At the end, however, there is a flip where Augustine suddenly talks about how, despite all his failings, God's grace was with him and helped him do things he never could have done of his own accord.

Where Plato sees a epistemological problem, Augustine always and everywhere sees sin first and epistemology second. It isn't just the texts he loved but also the teachers who taught him who were sinners. I think Augustine would say that no matter how far astray you go, God's grace is reaching out to you and is there to lead you home.

The second big thing that I missed all those years ago was idolatry. Under the influence of popular culture, I tended to assume the danger of idols and superstitions was the idols and superstitions themselves. I see now that to do that is to treat these things as if they had real powers. Even thought I knew that idols were empty, I thought that superstition itself could get a hold of you to such an extent that the idols you were superstitious about may as well have power.

I have come to see in the ensuing years that the real problem with idols is that they and our thoughts about them are nothing at all. The primary danger they pose is that you will simply waste your time worshiping or being fearful of what is just clay. Any real power or psychological effect is a distant second by comparison to this waste of time and opportunity.

It matters a whole lot to Augustine that the fictional character whose words he declaimed was Juno as opposed to mere a fictional character created for the purposes of entertaining. And it also matters to him that even when he declaimed the words he knew that Juno had never actually spoken them. The whole exercise was, thus, a waste of time and effort.

The biggest shift between my earlier and present readings is one of tone. I now see that this section of the Confessions is full of hope. When I first read it, I projected a vision of the "dark ages" wherein people saw this world as a vale of tears to be endured solely for the purpose of getting to a better life in the next world. I see now that Augustine saw this world as full of God's grace. Those years he spent weeping tears for Juno were years he might have spent better but, given human sinfulness, it is unlikely that he would have done. Wonderfully, however, he sees that even though he did not do better, God's grace was still with him. It's a wonderful life after all—let's wonder at it.

I started re-reading Augustine's Confessions last night ....

I could not honestly claim that my past readings of it were terribly profound. The first time I read it, I skimmed it so as to be prepared for a university lecture. The second time I read it was about fifteen years ago. I long had thought that I should re-read it and one day I saw a beautiful, leather-bound copy of it in a bookstore. I bought that copy and brought it home and read it in the bathroom. It's a good book for bathroom reading as most of the chapters are short enough to read during a visit to those facilities.

That second time I read it "looking for wisdom", which is to say that, much like a westerner who "goes Buddhist", I read it look for bits that would confirm the things I already wanted to believe. Not surprisingly, I found what I was looking for.

Reading the first ten chapters last night, I was struck by two things. The first is that Augustine is not an individualist. Well, duh! I know but "individualism" is usually just a word. We don't think of meaning when we say it so much as we think of any of a number of well-worn clichés.

Augustine's first remarks about his sins are about his sins as a baby. He admits that he doesn't remember any of these sins but concludes that they were there based on his observations of other babies. That's a rather staggering thing. Right from the get-go he assumes that sin is an aspect of our nature as human beings. This is clear if we ask a question that Augustine doesn't ask himself (probably because it didn't occur to him as a question worth asking): How do you know know that you sinned if you can't remember? Augustine's implied answer: Because that's what babies are like; they are sinners.

He does give us examples of what he means. He mentions that babies will resent another baby having access to the breast. Why, he asks, given that the breast is abundantly flowing, would a baby want to deny another baby access to what it needs.

For us, that is a bizarre way to see things. We tend to think that the baby couldn't know any better. It is unaware of the needs of others; it may even be unaware of the existence of others as separate beings. We would be inclined to argue that the baby couldn't sin because it was incapable of making a decision about how it responds to others.

Augustine would be more likely to respond by saying that in exempting the baby we are exempting sin. His view was that sin was a kind of disorder that inclines us to do bad things. It's not the decision that makes us sinful, it's our desire. That's the second thing that struck me. What follows from that, it seems to me, is that our modern understanding of morality is completely at odds with what Augustine would have imagined as the goal of being cleansed from sin. Our modern morality (whether deontological or consequentialist) is all about making better decisions. Augustine sees sin as part of our very make up. And I'll leave it there for now because I have only read the first ten chapters. Of course, I have an idea of what is coming but I'm am trying to reread the Confessions as if for the first time so I am going to try and forget what I think I know.

Oh yeah, before getting to the sins of his youth, Augustine goes through a series of meditations on the incomprehensibility of God. Nothing finite could understand what it cannot contain and the finite cannot contain the infinite. That must, of course, connect to sin but I don't know how yet, so I just note it.