Book III

[Kerstin]

Augustine moves to Carthage to continue his studies. Carthage is the second largest city in Northern Africa at the time after Alexandria. The city is predominantly pagan with a few Christian communities. He is captured by the enticements of the city, the theaters, the loose living. He is only seventeen, after all. Then, in the course of his studies, he encounters Cicero’s Hortensius, a work that is only preserved in fragments into our time. He experiences an intellectual awakening. “(7) All my hollow hopes suddenly seemed worthless, and with unbelievable intensity my heart burned with longing for the immortality that wisdom seemed to promise.” Philosophy opens a new way for him to look at the world, but even then he realizes that “(8) Only one consideration checked me in my ardent enthusiasm: that the name of Christ did not occur there.” He must have had a very deep thirst for Christ.

It is at this juncture that he looks upon scripture and finds it lacking intellectually. He still has a desire for worship, and ends up falling victim to the Manichean heresy. “(10) They told me lies not only about you, who are truly the Truth, but also about the elements of this world that is your creation.” In the introduction of my edition there is a short overview of Manichaeism:

”Their founder was a Persian mystic, Mani (d. A.D. 276), whose cosmic dualism taught that all of reality was the unfortunate mixture of a good god and a malicious god eternally at war. Such a dualistic worldview not only provided an easy answer to Augustine’s nagging question why there was evil in the world, but it also excused his “real” self from sinning, as wrongdoing and destruction were simply inescapable realities.”

What follows are a series of paragraphs where Augustine deals with the spiritual and philosophical aspects of this decision. For brevity’s sake I’ll omit them here and leave them for our discussion. Though one sentence jumped out at me when he explores some of the absurdities of the Manichean belief system, “(18) I believed, poor wretch, that it was accordingly a higher duty to show mercy to fruits of the earth than to human beings,…”

At the end of the book we meet his mother Monica again who had been deeply concerned about Augustine’s spiritual welfare and shed many tears. Revealed to her in a dream, she knows he will be a priest someday. “(20) I confess to you, Lord, that, as my memory serves me – and I have often spoken of this episode – I was more deeply disturbed by this answer that came from you through my sharp-eyed mother than by the dream itself.” For now, Augustine remains with the Manicheans. A priest consoled Monica, “(21) He replied that I was yet unteachable; I was puffed up with novelty of my heresy…”Leave him alone,” he advised. “Simply pray for him to the Lord. He will find out for himself through his reading how wrong these beliefs are, and how profoundly irreverent.””

[Kenneth]

“He who sins is sad” is very true looking at the sad state of St. Augustine in the first pages of Book III.

“the more empty, the more I loathed it. For this cause, my soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense.”

[Manny]

Ah how I remember my college days. I too loved going to see Shakespeare and going to blues clubs in downtown Manhattan and going to cheap restaurants and playing pool in bars and discussing life and literature and the latest music with college friends. I wasn't dissolute like Augustine apparently was but I can see how one gets sucked into a life of selfishness. I completely identified with Augustine here.

[Kerstin]

We haven't gotten into the subject of Manichaeism yet, which is really a form of Gnosticism. There were many forms of Gnosticism, and the early Church Fathers wrote many apologetic texts refuting them, among them St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr - and many more. Gnosticism, in a nutshell, is really a re-paganizing of Christianity. They made up a whole pantheon of gods, up 30 or so, and how Jesus figures into this is really quite contrived. It boggles the mind that anyone with a rational mind could ever believe any such thing. But then the Christian monotheistic world view was a new concept, and configuring it back to into known ways of worshiping isn't all that surprising. Augustine himself said, he could excuse his bad behavior on the evil side of his nature without being fully responsible. And as many who reject the scriptures, then as now, he didn't see that the Christian God is a rational God, that within Creation is intelligibility, and that being made in the image of God means that our minds are uniquely made to perceive and understand these realities.