a very human saint
Robin Lane Fox Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015)
Both Synesius and Augustine, as Fox makes clear throughout his work,
left us versions of the “confessional” genre (Synesius’ confessions far more
self-justifying and impenitent), a tradition that perhaps grew out of
Petronius’ bawdy Satyricon, while
Libanius composed in the form of complex philosophical hymns (which could not
match Augustine’s beloved more simple psalms). Yet how their contributions to
their chosen genres differed and how their oratorical and philosophical views
varied helps to reveal Augustine’s immense importance and explains his
continued influence—even if within his own lifetime the holy man did not see
that work widely read.
Fox also permits us to comprehend just
how important the North African Christian communities in Algeria, Tunisia,
Morocco and other such countries, before the later Arab conquering of the
region, were to the early development of Christianity.
And, most importantly, the author
brilliantly details Augustine’s slow transformative conversion expressed in the
Confessions as “what I once was” and
“what I am now.”
Augustine was born in the small town of
Thagaste in what is now modern Algeria—where he was baptized by his mother
Monnica as a Christian, which would ultimately determine his path of life—and
became attracted to the theories of Mani, the Iranian prophet, who argued for a
vision of the world as existing in a condition of equally powerful forces for
good and evil, symbolized by the light and the dark. Although many of its
values shared much with Christianity, even believing that Jesus was the
embodiment of the light—Mani, himself, declaring himself to be an apostle of
Christ—the Manicheans did not believe in the divine birth, and in their
dualities of dark and light gave much more emphasis to the evil in the human
soul than did Christianity. Moreover, in the East, in particular, the
Manicheans also adopted aspects of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Indian Hindu
and other traditions. And its believers rejected, as well, the biblical psalms
and the entire Acts of the Apostles (later to become some of the most important
texts for Augustine) because of the idea that the “Holy Spirit” had supposedly
been bestowed upon Christians at Pentecost.
The Manichean tradition of personal confession in the traditions of its
“hearers” (something, perhaps, more akin to today’s Scientologists auditors)
later influence Augustine’s own Confessions—an
idea, however, that Fox does not fully explore.
What Fox does show us is how not only Mani’s beliefs, but Cicero’s
writings, and Platonism influenced Augustine’s gradual movement toward
Christianity. Perhaps just as importantly was his mother, Monnica’s determination
to see her son’s conversion to Catholicism, as well, of course, Augustine’s own
struggles against his human lust. The man clearly loved sex and was committed
to marriage before, as Fox brilliantly reveals Augustine’s retreat “Into the
Garden,” where the former orator determined to “let it be done now,” fell back,
and fought with himself and God in giving up sexual acts, finally recognizing
that it was Adam’s sin that was behind all human failings: “Grant me chastity
and continence,” he prays to God, “but not yet.”
The words of the apostle Paul—“not in rioting and drunkenness, not in
chambering and shamelessness, not in contention and rivalry but, put on the
Lord Jesus Christ and no provision for the flesh in its lusts”—finally brought
on Augustine’s transformation, which led to his Christian conversion. And it
was his celibacy, Fox makes clear, that allowed the later Bishop of Hippo to
inform and deepen his thought.
The rest of the story reads almost like an exciting soap opera, as,
Augustine moves from oratory to philosophy and Christian thinking, is
influenced by Ambrose and other great churchmen, begins writing, and moves back
to North Africa where he is eventually raised into a position as a co-bishop.
Enemies claim sexual intrigues, based on his former Manichean beliefs—the
utterly flabbergasting tale of the supposedly Manichean activity of engaging in
sexual activity on a floor sprinkled over with flour, after which, disengaging
from sex at the very last moment, the male masturbates into the flour, later
baking it into a bread to be sent off to a would-be female lover, reads like
something out of a soft- porno thriller—all help to make the great saint a very
human figure who certainly did not live a sheltered or totally sacred life,
which is, obviously, why we still read Augustine today. As history Susanna Elm writes, in this book
“Augustine emerges fully as a man of his very own time, the later Roman empire….”
And finally, of course, Fox’s book excites one, all over again, to read
Augustine’s Confessions as one of the
great texts of the centuries. It is, after all, a genre that has never quite
been conceived the way he did. Yes, his is an autobiography, a memoir of sorts,
but it is, as Fox makes clear, also a testimony of the self in abnegation of a
sinful past and a kind of prayer for a more perfect future.
Given my own multi-volume commitment to a far less sacred kind of
testimony of the times, how could I not read this book with immense admiration
of this important Third-century thinker?
Los Angeles, October 14, 2016
Reprinted
from Reading
with My Lips (September
28, 2024).
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