Augustine’s Guilty Conscience

I have some more thoughts about Augustine.

Cicero's Hortensius was supposedly influential on Augustine. I get the sense that it was one of his earliest experiences of the power of rational argument. Like Cicero, Augustine was trained in Greek philosophy and oratory. I was reading that Hortensius somehow led to Augustine's eventual dissatisfaction with Manichaeism. Hortensius is now a lost text and so I don't understand the impact it had, but apparently it caused Augustine to doubt the worthiness of Manichaean dualism. Some people criticize Gnostic dualism because it presents too harsh of a view of reality. However, for Augustine, I guess it seemed too lenient and accepting. It didn't make sin personal enough for his taste. Augustine felt unable to separate his sense of identity from his sense of guilt. The Manichaeans believed there was purely good divine spark that was the true Self.

There is one aspect of Manichaeism that I didn't come across in my researching about Augustine. The Manichaean religion divided believers into two categories. There were the general adherents of the faith and there were the ascetic monastic class. The latter was the more desirable way of life, but Manichaeanism allowed that not everyone was capable of asceticism. The average believer lessened the sin by supporting the monks. This sounds like the Eastern tradition of monasticism which is quite probable as Mani had included Buddhism as an aspect of his religion. That is another element I haven't seen mentioned by any commentaries about Augustine. As a devout Manichaean for 9 years, Augustine would've become familiar with Buddhist ideas. That is interesting to consider how Buddhism combined with Gnosticism would've created the framework for Augustine's understanding of his strong mistrust of fleshly desires.

What is truly interesting is that I get a sense of an inner division within Augustine when he criticizes Manichaeism. I suspect he is actually criticizing his younger self and attempting to distance himself from the faith of his earliest spiritual longings. Nine years in a religion is no small potatoes, and this especially true considering that it was a religion falling out of favor. I read that it was even somewhat dangerous to be Manichaean at that time. It's possible fear for his life played a part in his conversion to the much safer faith of Catholicism. Let me get back to my point about his motivation to criticize his younger self. Even though he was a member for many years, he never became a monk. This must've been part of what made him feel guilty. He was a young guy with normal sexual desires and yet Manichaeism idealized abstinence. He felt unable to control his sexual desire and ended up blaming Manichaeism. Strangely, he criticized Manichaeism by projecting his own sense of weakness onto it.

"I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature within us. It flattered my pride to think that I incurred no guilt and, when I did wrong, not to confess it... I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unkown thing which was in me but was not part of me. The truth, of course, was that it was all my own self, and my own impiety had divided me against myself. My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner." - Confessions, Book V, Section 10.

I want to point out how Augustine's criticism of Manichaeism summarizes Pelagius' criticism of determinism. Pelagius actually used Augustine's writings to defend his position. However, Augustine later came to embrace determinism and claimed that Pelagius was misinterpreting his earlier writings. I personally suspect that this was the apologist in Augustine backtracking in order to defend orthodoxy. As he had to earlier distance himself from Manichaeism, he now had to distance himself from his own criticisms of Manichaeism.

He ended up creating a convoluted theology to make sense of all of this. Basically, freewill existed prior to the fall. And, as we all have our natures grounded in the soul of Adam, we to are guilty for Adam's fall. So, we are guilty the moment we're born because we somehow mystically partook of Adam's sin before we were born, but magically because of this sin once we're born we no longer have freewill. It's the logic of an apologist using sophistry to create a political justification for the persecution of their opponent. You have to give Augustine credit for his ability to pull the most absurd arguments out of his ass and present it in such a way that it almost sounds like it makes sense.

The other method that Augustine (and many heresiologists) used was to misrepresent his opponents. Pelagianism became exaggerated as meaning a denial of God's grace, but Pelagius never denied this. Pelagius merely said we're responsible for our actions which seems rather commonsense, but commonsense was an affront to orthodoxy and the latter won the battle. In the long run, though, the Catholic church agreed that Augustine went too far in his fatalism. It's significant to point out that fatalism was sometimes an accusation against Gnosticism and this attitude of Augustine may be a carryover from his own Gnostic background.

Let me return to Augustine's personal sense of guilt. He felt lustful even though he had a 16 year monogamous heterosexual relationsip. The guilt was because it wasn't respectabel as she was his mistress, but today we'd simply call their relationship a common law marriage. They even had a child together. The child died and as far as I know the child was unbaptised which puts an intriguing twist on Augustine's theology as he beleived unbaptised children were damned. I can't find much about this child, but it very well might've contributed to his dissatisfaction with Manichaeism and his life with his "mistress". Just imagine how different Christianity could've been if Augustine had lived a happy life as a father and husband.

Augustine's understanding of morality was a bit demented. In order to become Christian, he left his 16 year long monogamous relationship. He saw it as a sin to stay in a monogamous relationship. This is obviously his Manichaeism sense of guilt rearing its ugly head. Augustine apparently lived a rather tame existence and yet felt guilty. He wasn't a hedonist; he didn't eat gluttonously he wasn't a drunkard; and he wasn't promiscuous. I wonder if he felt that he somehow inherited the guilt of his promiscuous father. This would also explain his two-faced relationship to the intellectual ability he also inherited from his father. In today's world, Augustine probably would be put on anxiety medication. The guy had a near paranoid sense of guilty conscience.

Unfortunately, he never felt guilty about his later support of oppression and persecution. He obviously was very talented at projecting his immense guilty conscience onto his opponents and then made sure they were punished accordingly. It was war, and the guilty must convert, must submit... or die!

I'll now try to explain Augustine's theological understanding about Original Sin.
There is the intelligable and the sensible. The world of the senses is private and isolated. Hence, the individual is inevitably sinful and the divine wisdom can only be attained through the institutionally-substantiated public rituals. Our being trapped in the physical world isn't directly inevitable as in Manichaeism, but is indirectly inevitable because of Original Sin. Original Sin is the collective evil that can only be countered by the collective good (i.e., the Roman Catholic Church). The individual is merely a passive battlefield.

The practical implications ultimately don't appear all that different than Manichaeism except in the utter denunciation of freewill (after birth that is). Unlike Manichaeism, the individual soul is only tenuously connected to the divine and the only hope is the Church's demand of complete submission. In some ways, the Christian soul is even more trapped in the body than is the Manichaean soul. A difference is that Original Sin isn't a permanent evil. Someday, evil will be completely annihalated as evil is fundamentally nothing more than a denial of good and thus without substantiality (but I don't know how this fits into Augustine's belief that only an elect will be saved). Neither Mankind nor God is responsible for evil, and yet (in The City of God) Augustine defends against criticism that God does interfere in history in order to teach. God has absolute freewill and is absolutely innocent. There is an element of Neo-Platonism mixed in here that is reminiscent of some Gnostics.

Augustine's concept of soul is neither of the substance of the body nor of God. Manichaeism claimed the soul was a trapped divine spark, but Augustine believed the soul in some sense Neo-Platonically chooses its descent (freewill leading to Original Sin). The human soul alone is responsible for moral evil in the world because human will can lead only to sin. On the other hand, only God through His Grace is responsible for lifting the soul out of sin. It's the mutable nature of the soul that allows this transformation. The sould is mutable because it is a created temporal entiry.

Augustine's theology is mostly rhetorical in trying to persuade people towards orthodoxy. He leaves many aspects unresolved and doesn't create a coherent philosophy. Despite his idealizing of the rational mind over the passions, he doesn't believe that intellect can resolve theological issues. For the most part, the individual can't prove most things and so must trust the proper authorities. He affirms a vague Neo-Platonic intuition, but blind faith is more primary. God has foreknowledge and so our choices are predetermined from God's view, but we're still responsible for our moral choices even though our severely limited individual will inevitably leads to sin. Essentially, everyone is guilty and if you don't feel guilty then you're guilty of not feeling guilty. Humanity is collectively responsible for Adam's Fall. The significance of holding onto this tenuous concept of freewill is in order to keep God unsullied, but freewill as such serves no practical purpose. Freewill is just an abstract concept that exists in the past.

Augustine became grimly pessimistic in his latter life. He saw humanity as comprised of Massa Damnata where only a few elect were predestined to be saved. He comes to a view that is more confusing and unappealing than the Manichaeism he turned away from. Augustine the young Christian convert and Augustine the old bitter heresiologist quite likely wouldn't have agreed on a whole lot. This evolution from hope to pessimism reflected the times. Christianity had likewise evolved in Augustine's life from the optimism of being newly legalized to the Fall of Catholic-ruled Rome.

The bitterness of the aging Augustine would create the groundwork for Catholicism during the coming centuries of the Dark Ages. The Grace of God is inscrutable and unmerited, and this offered a rationalization to the unquestioned authority of the Catholic Church. The Church saw itself as a light in a dark world. Like Augustine, the Church doesn't passively accept its role. In opposition to the passive relation of Mankind to God, the Church politicians take a very aggressive relation to the general population. If most of the population is damned by God with no hope of being saved, then it doesn't lead to an attitude of respect and compassion.

Greek tradition emphasizes the circular and universal. Patterns repeat and patterns reflect the universal. Aristotle thought poetry was more philosophical than history because it is concerned with universals. Quite differently, the Judeo-Christian tradition emphasizes the linear and unique. Jesus is unique and singular, and thus this demonstrates a more limited view of salvation. The Jews hoped for a messiah that would save them alone, and Augustine believed only an elect would be saved. As such, there is no universal salvation, no repeating pattern of salvation playing out throughout all of history.

Augustine's development was largely from the Greek tradition to the Judeo-Christian. He read widely in Pagan literature, and after his conversion it took him many years to catch up in his reading of Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Neo-Platonic optimism faded and the only other main tradition within Christianity was Gnosticism. In Augustine's case, this meant he increasingly turned back to Manichaean ideas.