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Philosophies of ascent would confirm his worst vices: the pride and arrogance of the climber, the self-sufficiency of the intellectual who would think his way to salvation and congratulate himself upon arrival.
perhaps what was most scandalous about Christianity was its utter democratization of enlightenment—the way the gospel held out the grace of illumination to any and all.
Platonism offered a ladder to (re)connect God and humanity; in Christianity, God climbs down.
This, inevitably, is how many earnest seekers end up shipwrecked. They insist on paddling their own boat, and they refuse the raft that is a cross.
Gnosticism, on Camus’s reading, was “one of the first attempts at Greco-Christian collaboration,” but one in which the Greek trumped the Christian precisely because, in the end, Gnosticism refuses the scandal of grace: “The spiritual are saved only by gnosis or knowledge of God. . . . Salvation is learned.”
result is an epistemic Pelagianism akin to the hubris of the addict: I’ll figure this out, I’ll find a way, I’ve got this covered, to which those in recovery reply: “Your best thinking got you here.”
At its heart, Neoplatonism is another version of the same pretension, confident in its own ingenuity.
the Neoplatonist is revolted by Christianity’s “anarchy,” its refusal of an epistemic meritocracy and the spiritual aristocracy of the “wise.”
“One must choose between the world and God.”
Conviction is not synonymous with dogmatism.
is an ancient version of “how my mind has changed” in which he entreats his readers to cheer his progress rather than denounce the change as intellectual compromise.
“If you are not sure what I am saying and have doubts about whether it is true, at least be sure that you have no doubt about your having doubts about this.”44 Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.
But in Alcoholics Anonymous, she noticed that the “addiction stories” traded back and forth as the oxygen of the group all made you think, “I’ve heard this before” because “addiction is always a story that has already been told.”
“Look at me” is the secret desire of originality. But the stories that circulated in a recovery meeting served a different end: they were weaving a web of solidarity.
The point wasn’t to draw attention to the storyteller; the hope was to give a gift to the listeners, to create a world in which listeners could see themselves, orient themselves, and maybe even see a way forward, a way out.
Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite it.”2 What is meant to be damning in the review of a book (just another addiction memoir) “gets turned on its head by recovery—where a story’s sameness is precisely why it should be told. Your story is only useful because others have lived it and will live it again.”
witness authority.
Addiction stories work because of this solidarity of experience.
“I’ve found my people,” we say when we discover a community that shares with us what we thought was a solitary passion or alienating affliction.
Someone bears witness to what it means to be them, and we whisper, “That’s me.” Identity is our name for being found by a story someone else told.
And his only appeal—his only claim to authority—is witness authority.
I’m just confessing to God, why not keep a journal, work all of this out in private? Well, for the same reason that addicts share their story at a meeting: maybe someone will see themselves in my story, Augustine says. Maybe someone will hear this prodigal tale, with all its dead ends and heartbreak, and whisper, “That’s me.”
Augustine’s story is only of interest if it is unoriginal, a story that’s been told a million times, one that rehearses the prodigal adventures of the human condition.
I write for others, he says, as “partners in my joy and sharers in my mortality, my fellow citizens and sojourners abroad with me”—so they might find compatriots of a patria they didn’t know they were longing for.
If Augustine shares his story, it’s not to disclose something about himself. To the contrary, there’s a sense in which his own particularity is diminished, his biography eclipsed.
What the Confessions ask of a reader is not, “What do you think of Augustine?” but rather, “Who do you think you are?”
The Confessions, far from being an egocentric memoir or autobiography (like those penned by Montaigne and Rousseau),9 are “a hetero-biography,” as Marion puts it, “my life told by me and especially to me from the point of view of an other [hetero], from a privileged other, God.”
OUR LONGING FOR an identity is bound up with finding a story. That story might be covert and submerged. Its plot may never be diagrammed. But we nonetheless find ourselves adopting a role, playing out a script that has been given to us by some narrative.
Jonathan Franzen captures the anxiety that stems from being un-storied in a passage in Freedom, documenting an episode where the protagonist, Walter, feels like his world is melting because he keeps flitting from narrative to narrative.
There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake. . . . How to live?
Whether it’s Disney or HBO, HGTV or Instagram, they’re all myth-making, which is just to say they are offering scripts we can live into.
An actor, unlike a model, at least has the potential to show us a character we can adopt.
Augustine realized that identity was storied, and that meant finding your story in the story revealed by your Creator.
Why was it that this particular story became the governing narrative for the rest of his life? The very notion will scandalize us, we who’ve been encouraged to live “our” truth, to come up with our own story, for whom authenticity is the burden of writing our own de novo script.
The notion of a governing narrative that is not your own feels like signing over the rights to your life—which it is!
Scripture irrupted in Augustine’s life as revelation, the story about himself told by another, and as illumination, shining a light that helped him finally understand his hungers and faults and hopes.
For the rest of his life, Augustine, like a hip-hop bricoleur, “samples” Scripture in everything he says.
When Augustine explains why he would bother sharing his own story with others, “my fellow citizens and sojourners abroad with me,” he situates his words in relation to the Word, but more important, he situates his act in relation to God’s action.
To side with performance over proof was, in a sense, to stand with the imagination as prior to reason—to take sides in the longstanding battle between philosophy and poetry.
When Plato imagined the ideal republic, governed by philosopher-kings trained in logic and mathematics, he wanted the mushy poets exiled outside its walls. The republic would be governed by ratio, not rhetoric; the city would traffic in syllogisms, not stories.
And it is surely an irony that Christianity has been prone to a similar kind of rationalization and privileging of the didactic (especially in Protestantism).
We reduce the wonder and mystery of grace to teachable bullet points and statements of faith.
We prefer the didactic environs of the epistles to the action and metaphor of the Gospels. We reduce the dramatic narrative of Scripture to a doctrinal system. We say we love Jesus, but we prefer to learn from Paul, who gives...
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I had effectively re-created the kingdom of God as if it were Plato’s republic: Poetry prohibited. Imagination excluded.
And I remember Cardinal Ratzinger, long before he was Pope Benedict XVI—in fact, when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the doctrine police of the church—challenging this triumph of the didactic when he said: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story.”25
He doesn’t give us a philosophical dialogue or a collection of syllogisms: he invites us into a story.
But that means deploying the dynamics of drama. The Confessions are more art than science, more aesthetic than logic.
The point of the Confessions isn’t to parade himself or to write a treatise trying to argue people into the kingdom of God. Instead, Augustine is writing to move hearts.
Antony of Egypt, Victorinus, and others.30 Why does Augustine give us the drama of this narrative instead of the arguments of a treatise? Because his apologetic is aesthetic.
The problem is that we can’t think our way home. “The mind of man, the natural seat of his reason and understanding, is itself weakened by long-standing faults which darken it.” Our
