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You don’t have to win, but you also don’t have to quit. You only have to quit performing, quit imagining his love is earned. You can rest, but you don’t have to quit. You just need to change why you play.
A later Augustinian, Blaise Pascal, named this with the same sort of self-knowledge: “Vanity is so anchored in the human heart,” he observed, “that a soldier, a cadet, a cook, a kitchen porter boasts, and wants to have admirers, and even philosophers want them, and those who write against them want the prestige of having written well, and those who read them want the prestige of having read them, and I, writing this, perhaps have this desire, and those who will read this . . .”
Augustine the bishop confesses he is still prone to fall for the third temptation: The “wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which [he now realizes] is no joy at all.
The trick, Augustine points out, is to aspire to one’s office, and aspire to excellence in that office, without letting praise for your excellence be the overriding goal of your ambition.
And, confirming Derrida’s hypothesis, Augustine concludes that what was going on in his sex life, even if disordered, really was about love: “The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved.”
But what could we possibly learn about sex from the so-called “inventor” of original sin, this celibate scold and ancient misogynist?4 What could we, liberated from repression, possibly learn from a monk?
Worlds were colliding: the celibate Augustinian scholar, the “fecund” young Protestant. It’s like I was proving Augustine right: sex and marriage and the “affairs of the world” would distract from higher goods.
“I was in love with love,” he recalls.9
He traded the cosmic for the orgasmic.
He could recognize what Leslie Jamison calls that “narrowing of repertoire” that nonetheless comes with widening expectations.
Promiscuity didn’t keep its promises.
In a podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, Brand offers his own introspective reading of what he was looking for in his promiscuity: “The great gift of promiscuity,” he told Rogan, “is that you get to experience all of the intimacy with all of these strangers and it seems exciting. And the kind of sexuality that I’ve always had is more about worship than any kind of domination. I adore, I adore, you know?”10 This recognition of an almost liturgical aspect to sexual desire would not surprise Augustine.
PAIN IS HOW the body tells us to stop, to slow down, to attend to a problem.
Those superpowers of self-deception are amplified when society tells us that pain is pleasure, that our disappointment is happiness, that we’re living the dream.
The rites of the bachelor party are sacrosanct; the ritual calf must be slaughtered to the god of pleasure.
Wanting more isn’t the problem; it’s where I keep looking for it.
Restraint looked like release from the frantic chase he’d been on. If the soul-hunger that had been trying to feast on the ephemeral could finally be fed by the eternal, then his expectations wouldn’t be constantly disappointed.
Continence is a general principle of being held together rather than dispersed, having a center rather than dissolving oneself in a million hungry pursuits.
Every saint has been born of lovemaking. It’s when we stop idolizing sex that we can finally sanctify it.
If ambition means leaving home, it often means spurning family.
Finding and forging an identity means asserting our independence, breaking the bonds of dependence we’re thrown into as children.
the mother must be overcome because her suffocating embrace is the means of her manipulation. Her presence swells and overwhelms and inhales all the oxygen an independent self needs to breathe. She denies our autonomy with kisses; she steals our self-reliance with hugs.
Augustine bristles at playing the role of a puppet in her schemes. Even if he comes to want the same things that she wants for him, he, like any emergent adult, wants to own the decisions as his own, to establish his agency in the face of the one who birthed him into being.
The mother gives birth to the child who becomes an adult by living as if he materialized ex nihilo.
Nothing is more distasteful to the rebel child than realizing mom was right.
The son has become a snob who prides himself on his “enlightenment,” an intellectual and spiritual snobbery that only intensified when he joined the Manicheans who took themselves to be the “Brights” of their day—the rational, enlightened ones who saw through the myths that everyone around them had been suckered into believing.11 It was the enlightened Manicheans who wove Augustine into the networks of power that got him his posts in Rome and Milan, not Monica’s backward “brothers and sisters” in the church.
He needed an Ambrose to make Christianity intellectually respectable enough to be plausible again, and once he stepped inside the faith he saw his mother’s piety—and hence his mother—in a new light.
She represents the yearning of mothers everywhere, weeping over their children, hoping, praying, tenacious in their fierce love that the children confuse with control.
Rituals are not solutions. They don’t “fix” things. They are how we live with what we can’t fix, channels for facing up to our finitude, the way we try to navigate this vale of tears in the meantime.
That kind of “power” is often despised in a world that can only imagine power as domination, in a patriarchal world—let’s be honest—where power is confused with testosterone-laden bravado.
“Nothing is far from God,” she told Augustine’s friends.
We hit the road to find ourselves but hardly ever do it alone. The paradox is that the voyage of discovery—the search for authenticity—is mine, and yet the search almost always seems to be shared.
This tension, even contradiction, is inscribed in our screenplays because it’s baked into existentialism from the start. Take, for example, Dasein, that strange pilgrim character we meet in Heidegger’s Being and Time—the character who is us, Heidegger claims.1 My world is always shared, he emphasizes: “The world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt].”
I am others; I live and move and have my being in the world they have made.
That’s why Heidegger suggests that “proximally and for the most part”—his favorite phrase for naming our cultural defaults—our “everyday” existence is an unreflective absorption and immersion in the defaults “they” have set for me.
Who am “I” when I live absorbed in this shared world? I am “they,” as Heidegger awkwardly puts it; I am das Man, the “they” we invoke when we defer to social defaults (as in “they say you shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day” or “they say our love won’t pay the rent”).3
in this everyday version of “Being-with,” Heidegger says, I live “in subjection to Others.” Indeed, in a sense, I am not: my “Being has been taken away by Others.”4 “They” have taken over my identity; I am them.
“When Dasein is absorbed in the world . . . it is not itself.”5 And this happens simply by the way I swim in my milieu, by going with the flow of an environment.
This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of “the Others,” in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more.
We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking.
“Every secret loses its force,” Heidegger concludes: instead, what we get is an inauthentic “averageness,” a “levelling down” of possibilities to what is shared. “In these modes,” he observes, “one’s way of Being is that of inauthenticity and failure to stand by one’s Self.”
For Heidegger, to be authentic is to answer a call that resounds above the din of “the they.”
The “call of conscience” is that appeal that snaps me out of my everyday absorption, my inauthentic they-self, and calls me to become Myself.
“When the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the ‘they’ is revealed.”
in his play No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre would put in the mouth of Joseph Garcin the jarring suggestion that “hell is other people”?
For Sartre, being is a zero-sum game: it’s you or me.
The Other is a scandal to my consciousness. Intersubjectivity, for Sartre, is an essential and ongoing contest of assimilation and objectification—of either devouring or being devoured.
At the heart of Sartre’s absolute freedom is an independence that has to refuse any and every gift. “For Sartre,” Marcel observes, “to receive is incompatible with being free; indeed, a being who is free is bound to deny to himself that he has received anything.”
Freedom is debt-free, which means living without attachments, connections, absolved of relation to others.
Indeed, Sartre’s entire dialectic “rests upon the complete denial of we as a subject, that is to say upon the denial of communion.”
