Christian hubris, superbia, temeritas: on having to teach Augustine again

It was just the other day that I vented my anger at having to put up with Platonic rigmarole masquerading as "proof" of anything in particular. So it is only fitting that having taken it out on grandfather Plato that I should now turn to someone infinitely pettier and less arresting.

So here it is: why on earth do we still read or teach Augustine? His pseudo-explanation of the sack of Rome in 410 and of the the disintegration of the world of antiquity has exactly the same value as the explanation of AIDS as God's punishment for the degeneracy of the homosexuals -that is, exactly nil. Whereas his pretended unpacking of the various metaphysical conundrums regarding theodicy and the the liberum arbitrium amounts to nothing more than "God knows" and we do not deserve nor are we able to fathom his will. His entire thought can be summed up in one sentence: Christ is savior (I do not believe he would quarrel with this). Everything else is an interminable repetition of the exact same idea in different guises, i.e. a tediously belabored tautology. His notion that this unlocks all riddles of human existence is a very tall order for any normal individual. But maybe Augustine was not normal (for how can you characterize as moderately sane a person who believes that newborn infants deserve to burn in hell?).

So whence the ferocity of his religious passion? It is simply that for reasons that concern him personally, and are not in the least obligatory for anybody else, all other sources of meaning in his life dried up so he threw himself entirely into the Christian promise. He could no longer be fulfilled through love, friendship, service to the community or the life of reason or the imagination. So feeling that all these outlets of self-justification had been disgraced he cut himself off from ordinary humanity (and humaneness) and in a monstrous act of self-aggrandizement hitched himself to the wagon of Christ for a pretended soaring to heaven barred to the rest of us mortals. Augustine smiles maliciously as he wheezes past us and as he sees us shrink into imperceptibility in his glorious ascent. Why he felt betrayed by all the means of self-fulfillment that nature (and hence God, if you believe that God is the author of nature) places at human disposal is an interesting question. It may have to do with his own psychological peculiarities, or with the difficulties of an age out of joint or both. But it is certainly not of earth-shattering significance, i.e. a crisis of metaphysical dimensions that is revelatory of the deepest ontological essence of Being. That he may believe so is perhaps understandable, if not excusable. The we too ought to concur with this assessment of his is just laughable.

In the Christian intellectual tradition, if it be dignified by that name, we do not in general come across the slightest trace of the humility and the love that its representatives so pretentiously trumpet. In fact the opposite is the case. All we get is a venomous rant dripping with hatred and plain incomprehension of the traditions (especially the Hellenic tradition) they are are keen to damn.

But in Augustine the whole thing takes a particularly annoying turn (there is nothing more reprehensible in a thinker than being annoying).

For what we have here is egomania to the superlative degree, the boast by one individual that his "conversion" to the single and exclusive truth is at the same time paradigmatic of all conversions and declarative of the only truth there is on offer.

He may be an excellent writer of Latin prose: I cannot be the assessor of that. But this is not the palm he was claiming. Hence, we can judge him solely on the basis of what he himself considered his "accomplishments". And on all these the verdict can only be damning.

His legacy is, as we will see, threefold and on all counts deleterious. If we continue to refer to him it ought to be as an example to be avoided, as a kind of thinker that contaminated the European philosophical tradition with odious epistemological and moral stances. From these there flowed all the excesses and abuses both in thought and action that have marred the said tradition, i.e. intolerance, dogmatism, self-conceit, denying to others the very right to exist.
From this perspective all his affectation about "caritas" is just an empty show, just as it was in his great model, Paul. For Augustine does not love God, he loves his own God. And he does not love his neighbor, he loves only the neighbor that loves the same God as he. I do not need to point out all the neat uses that these precepts can be put to, if one is eager to disgrace and eliminate all those that think differently in reference to a canonic set of beliefs (religious, ethical, political, national or what have you).

The first governing thought in Augustine is that of the "illuminated" self. This is no other than his own self as illuminated by a light which that same self axiomatically defined as the divine one, brooking no objection on the matter. This is a closed epistemological circle, amounting to the simple idea that a thought that emerges in my mind is the truth simply because it emerges in my mind in a special way (accompanied by psychological fervor). And it is as vicious as it can get. Augustine impresses us by the emotional tumult in his soul, and by nothing more, for emotional urgency does not lend truth to a belief. All beliefs, true and false, morally right or wrong, can be accompanied by psychological intensity and sincerity. This does not in any way affect their epistemological or moral status.

Of course Augustine also has a text before him: scripture. But this text is asserted to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, simply on account of Augustine's own conversion. The very same Augustine before the conversion declared that same scripture to be false.

So Just like Saul on the road to Damascus God entered the mind of Augustine, and from then on we are admonished to accept as truth what this particular illuminated individual declares to be such (including the Book). This continues to be no argument and no proof of whatever truth might or might not be found in the holy text. It is just an imposition, a threat, a cajolement, a flattery maybe to make yourself see something as true because Augustine so sees it and without subjecting it to any rational control. This is no wisdom, it is blindness. Faith is alright, and maybe unavoidable -even epistemologically speaking. But Paul's and Augustine's particular faith is alright and unavoidable for them and for them alone. It is not so for others who choose not to share it, who choose to pursue other faiths.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Augustine's newfound wisdom goes together with a rabid condemnation of reason (along with all other natural capacities and inclinations of the human person). His "teaching" amounts to a sustained shrillness, simply deafening you with the grandiloquence of his rhetoric and confounding you with the terror of his imaginings. And if you dare to raise your voice in inquiry concerning the meaning of scriptural pronouncements and the logical coherence of the whole system of "truths" therein, he will immediately cut you down with pitiless ferocity.

For the second guiding thought of his system is that Holy Writ is truth, but in numerous places this truth is "obscure". This means, mind you, not that it lacks meaning in itself, or that it is not well developed. It means that it is obscure to you, the reader, because your mind is weak and overwhelmed and deformed by sin, so that it cannot rise to the truth that is there in the holy word but humans cannot see it.

This is the purest of all pure sophisms. Under this maxim you can transform every nonsensical and/or criminal utterance or injunction into divine truth. If you do not understand the word of God (of the Church, of the Nation, of the Party) it is your fault because you are inherently deficient in spirit and intellectuality and morality for not having subjected yourself to the tutelage of those ontologically supreme entities. Worse still, if you proceed to claim that the obscurity of a given passage is due to the fact that it lacks sense, that it is a mere aggregation of sounds, then you are a convinced enemy of the truth and hence you do not deserve to exist. You are responsible for the obscurity just like you are responsible for all evil. God knows, even if no human does, and he is all-good even if his creation is replete with evil. Do not judge or question the hidden meanings and purposes of God.

What is understandable in scripture is so because God willed it, and what is incomprehensible is so also because God willed it. For He aimed to put human beings through the spiritual labor to eventually discover the hidden truth for themselves (here Augustine declares that he knows what are God's aims). And since ordinary humans will be incapable of so delving to the bottom of true insight, we will have permanent need of a body of illuminated saints and sages (such as Augustine) who will tutor us as to why the sundry stupidities of scripture, theology and ecclesiastical tradition are indeed utter wisdom and also chastise us if we resist this our moral and intellectual debasement. And if even after that there are still passages that cannot be penetrated, then that's that and nothing further can be said about it. God knows why he put them there. Probably to test our presumption to know all things. But if you say this, and Augustine is more than willing to say, you then again claim to know God's mind.

This entire doctrine of divine symbols and signs proceeding from a transcendent God to dumbfound mankind and empower an elite of authoritative and authoritarian guides is arguably the most detestable and the most destructive thought spun by the discombobulated brain of someone like Augustine (among many others) with a purpose of course to place himself in the seat of spiritual auctoritas. In this light the saint's conversion appears as what it truly is, namely as extreme and manic self-indulgence, as the madness of someone wishing to elevate his ego to the status of privileged receptacle of divinity.

Augustine's existential tribulations would be of interest if placed under a radically human sign, namely if presented as as paradigmatic of the haplessness of humanity in the midst of an inscrutable universe in which God is sorely missed and sought but it is doubtful whether he is ever found. For God is voiceless, and it is impossible to understand why he would privilege someone like Augustine to make privy to concerning the root mysteries of existence. But this is what Augustine assumes about himself. His torments are to be read not as human, but as paradigmatic of the way a human person was metamorphosed into a vessel of divinity. This is demanding too much of us poor sinners.

The claim might be somewhat credible if the said person's career subsequent to the supposed metamorphosis reeked of an aroma of meekness, understanding and humility, not least with regard to those resistant to his message: in this he would be truly imitating Jesus who sought the company of whores and tax collectors. But no.

All we get in Augustine is his fulminating denunciation of the lost world of pagan sinfulness, in other words of his own youth. There is not a scintilla of kindness in his utterings, just the imperiousness of someone convinced of having grabbed God by the beard (if not by the genitals) to turn him into his own private sponsor and protector.

Augustine hates himself, and who hates himself cannot love others. And it is this psychologically perverse relation of Augustine's to his pagan environment that brings us to the third governing assumption of his system. This one is also steeped in dishonesty for in it he is hell-bent in denying his own intellectual parents. In his egotistic theology Augustine remained a philosopher, i.e. someone determined to expound in quasi-rational terms the "true" solution to moral and intellectual problems deriving from his theological principles. He puts his mind to work in order to clarify some of the "obscurities" of Christian dogma (the presence of evil, the reality of freedom etc.), thus implicitly justifying the rationality that he has been despising all along. And in doing so he cannot but utilize the resources of Hellenic learning of his time. Augustine the philosopher (who denies being one) is a neo-Platonist as we all know, in that his solutions to the theological puzzles are purloined from that corpus: his illumination is the platonic methexis and/or emanation, his theory of evil is premised upon the principle of privation etc.

All that would be creditable, if he would acknowledge himself as a philosopher (with a theological bent to be sure). But he dissimulates: he abjures and calumniates philosophizing, denying in advance that it can achieve all those things that he himself obsessively employs it to achieve. This is not being straight and clear about what he is doing. What he has plagiarized from the stupendous intellectual labor of those he denounces he does not admit to but wants to claim as his own. In his advice in De doctrina christiana concerning the way the Christian needs to deal with pagan texts he concedes that there is a lot in Hellenic literature that is worth studying, especially moral precepts and a certain awareness of God (he means in the neoplatonic tradition primarily). But, he says, all the rest must be consigned to the fire. As to the above-mentioned premonitions of truth in pagan authors they are not the property of the pagans themselves: "they belong to us Christians". Somehow they must have stolen it from the antecedents of Christian wisdom ("Plato is Moses speaking Greek" was the preposterous canard of earlier Christian intellectuals) and so we are entitled to steal it back. This is deviousness, dishonesty, self-serving disingenuousness of the lowest kind.

This approach continues a long-practiced stratagem of the Alexandrian apologists and of the Cappadocians. But it is no less infuriating epistemologically and morally for having that illustrious pedigree. For whence Augustine's presumption to claim as his own by right the intellectual achievements of the Hellenes growing out of a glorious philosophical tradition having no truck with his "truths"? But, he retorts, they employed raw and unaided human reason, hence if they got something right they have no title to it. Christians on the contrary are led by the divinity and their works are the conduit of divine wisdom. Hellenic philosophy smacks of pride.

Well, it is is easy to decide who is full of intolerable and inexcusable pride here. There is no more shabby trick to declare a priori your own thoughts as connected to the divine source and hence true by definition. When Jesus was asked what is truth he remained silent. But our saint here goes one better on his Lord. One thing is striking about all these presumptuous and self-worshiping Christian theologians, namely that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus.

Hellenic reason may have failed in many things, but at least it never renounced its humanity. That is why it is still with us. Plato may have failed to scale the heights of divinity or the soul for all he claimed to have done, but he is one of us. We may chide him today, but we still revere him because he tried to take the human faculties as far as they could possibly go. There is a message there for today. Augustine's peregrinations are on the contrary futile and tedious for us. He had a problem with his carnality: so what? This sounds so petty now. Instead of dealing with it, instead of acknowledging that he is human, he thought that he could separate himself from his own substance and make the leap directly into the intelligible world. What self-infatuation, what pride!