Category Archives: Augustine

Is evil privation?

Posted by on March 11, 2010 75 comments

It has become an almost undisputed datum in contemporary theology that evil is to be understood in the Augustinian manner as a privation of goodness. Evil has no reality or being as such. Rather it is simply a lack, a minus within the plenitude of goodness (See for example Confessions VII 13[19]).

This sounds absolutely lovely and certainly gives theologians a great way to posses answers.

However lately I’ve been thinking through some problems with Augustine’s account. Three things:

  1. Its unclear why a lack of goodness necessarily makes something evil. My biceps are probably not as strong as the could be. They lack strength, which is good for biceps to have. Doesn’t seem evil. Or to use a specifically moral example, it would be good if I gave $100 to every needy beggar I ever came across. But instead I’m more likely to give a couple bucks if I have it on me. Is there any evil going on here? I doubt it. At the very least there is no necessary evil going on here, but there is a certainly “lack” of goodness.
  2. There’s absolutely nothing in the Bible I can find that remotely describes evil this way. If it is in there, show it to me. I can’t find anything that gives even a hint that we should understand evil as a lack of goodness in Scripture.
  3. Not only does the Bible not describe evil in this way, it actually describes it in ways that seem to outrightly contradict it. All throughout the NT Paul and the other apostolic authors speak of evil as involving cosmic forces, powers, demonic agents, Satan, etc. Evil is not talked about as a lack of goodness, but an utterly real group of forces of darkness. Obviously we need to work hard at interpreting this language, but I don’t see a way to make it square up with the Augustinian notion without very intentionally bringing a pre-determined axe to bear on the Bible.

Now, of course this will bring about the oft-thrown down gauntlet that “you’re ontologizing evil!” (here’s looking at you, Horstkoetter). In response to that I find myself inclined to say “So?” Saying that evil exists or has some sort of being is not, prima facie problematic as far as I can see. Now, to be sure it would be problematic to claim that evil and God are both equally ontologically ultimate; that would be to end up Manichean. But that is decidedly something different than recognizing that evil has (contingent) being in some sense. Obviously that one needs to be unpacked more, but at the very least I’m hoping to forestall the facile accusations of Manicheanism that are so readily made these days.

Conundrums of Simplicity

Posted by on November 3, 2009 Comments Off

Peter Leithart has two great posts wrestling with some of Augustine’s questions about the nature of the relations within the Trinity and the question of simplicity, particularly his struggles with the biblical affirmation that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Augustine labors mightily to articulate how this can be true if the Father is supposed to have these qualities himself. Leithart throws out one provocative possible solution:

Does the Father have wisdom “in Himself”? Yes, because the Wisdom that is the Son dwells in Him  by the Spirit.  Does the Father possess His being “in Himself”?  Yes, because the Son is the fullness of His deity, and the Son indwells Him through the Spirit.  Vice versa: Does the Son have wisdom considered in Himself?  Yes, because what is “in Himself” is the fact that the Father dwells in Him in the Spirit, so that His existence “in Himself” is His existence as the Son indwelt by the Father.

And so on.

This allows us to speak of Father and Son distinctly; it also makes it clear that the Father is not Himself except as He has and is indwelt by His Son, nor is the Son Himself except as He has and is indwelt the Father.

To me this seems like a necessary critique of any sort of pyramidal trinitarianism like that articulated by John Zizioulas, for example.

Augustine the Crazy Feminist

Posted by on September 23, 2009 44 comments

Melissa posts a couple awesome quotes from Augustine on God as Mother. Here’s just one:

“My father and mother have abandoned me (Psalm 26:10). The psalmist has made himself a little child in relation to God. He has made God both his father and his mother. God is our father because he created us, because he calls us, gives orders and rules us; he is our mother because he cherishes us, nourishes us, feeds us with milk, and holds us in his arms” (Exposition 2 of Psalm 26, par. 18).

Didn’t Augustine know that only modern liberal feminazis call God “Mother”? I guess not.

Augustine Translations

Posted by on September 10, 2009 15 comments

Even though Augustine Week only produced a handful of posts, I’m still furiously reading all things Augustine. So far I’ve been quite impressed with the New City Press editions of Augustine’s works. Sadly they haven’t done The City of God yet, but the Cambridge University Press edition seems pretty good to me.

But, as a total dilettante at Augustine scholarship, I find myself wanting to ask the question: what translations of Augustine do people find to be the best? And why?

The Doxological Self

Posted by on September 2, 2009 12 comments

To move towards something of a synthesis of my last two reflections on Augustine’s Confessions let us consider:

  1. Augustine’s act of recounting his life and accounting for his past “selves” is an act of self-construction in some sense. Augustine is becoming a person through telling the story of his conversion.
  2. The act of confession, of telling the truth about God and ourselves is ultimately, and in Augustine’s case manifestly, an act of joyful doxology, of delight in God. To confess is to joyfully speak how we have been radically de-centered and dynamically caught up into God’s own life.

As such, for Augustine, his act of “self-construction” is not what we think of in the modern sense of determining ourselves, becoming a pastiche of preferences and judgments on the basis of our desires. Rather, what Augustine is doing in narrating himself in the Confessions is fundamentally doxological (and missionary—more on this later). Thus the “self” that Augustine renders through his personal narrative is a distinctly unselfed self. A person whose center lies not in himself but in God’s radical intrusion radically transformative presence into his life. In short, the self that Augustin construct in confessing is a distinctly doxological self.

Thus, whatever we may make of Augustine’s relation to the rise of the modern self, Augustine himself had very little in common with it. Augustine ultimately discovered his “self,” his personhood through doxology—that is through being caught up in God’s radical grace which elicits the excessive response of praise and thanks in all of one’s actions. That is why Augustine’s autobiography cannot be cast in any other linguistic mode but that of doxology.

What is Confession?

Posted by on September 1, 2009 18 comments

One of the interesting things about reading Augustine’s Confessions is the way it makes one reflect on what the practice of confession means in a full theological sense. Clearly Augustine’s act of confessing in his account includes what we normally think of, namely the public admission of sin. However it is clearly much, much more than that for Augustine. All throughout the Confessions the language is saturated with longing, prayer, inquiry, exultation, sorrow, joy, and hope. In short, the language of the Confessions is the language of the pslams, or more generally, of prayer.

Put even more succinctly, for Augustine, confession ultimately is centered in speaking the truth about God and creation in all its dramatic complexity and contingency. “Confession” means something like profession of the fullness of our faith, proclamation of the gospel in all its dimensions. Confession is the passionate commitment to speak the truth in all its beauty in the face of our own manifest slavery and contradiction. However for Augustine this task is not one of sheer moral resolve, let alone humiliation, rather it is an exercise of joy in God.

To boil it all down, confession must ultimately be seen as the articulation of our own doxological transformation. In confession we recount how we have been and continue to be caught up into God’s radical love which draws us away from sin and futility and towards the fullness of life and joy in sharing in the triune life. In short, confession is doxology. In confession we are drawn to speak (or sing) the truth of God’s intrusion into our lives of sin and slavery out of the excess of the joy that comes from knowing God and knowing ourselves and our neighbors in God.

Confession is not a difficult moral duty. Rather it is an exercise of doxological delight in the beauty of how God has seized in Christ and through the Spirit given us a share in the very life of the Trinity.

Augustine and Self-Constituting Narration

Posted by on September 1, 2009 9 comments

Brian Horne’s essay “Person as Confession” is an interesting look at what Augustine was perhaps “doing” in writing his Confessions. This has clearly been a source of debate among scholars of Augustine for some time, but Horne’s analysis certainly poses some interesting questions. Why, for example did Augustine assume that people would be interested in reading about his own spiritual development? Did he even have an audience in mind?

Horne suggests that Augustine’s unstated motivation in writing the confessions is actually quite different. Augustine was not primarily writing for others but rather for himself. What is going on in the Confessions is “the deliberate creation of a ‘persona’, the ‘I’ or subject of the narrative.” Horne goes on:

It is no accident that so many writers on ‘narrative theology’ go to Augustine’s Confessions as a primary text, the classical example (outside the biblical text) of the genre of ‘narrative theology.’ It does exactly what narrative theologians want a text to do: it presents a theology by telling a story, or, perhaps, to put it the other way around, it tells a story in such a way that the theological implications are unmistakable. We take this further: in the Confessions we have the attempt at discovering meaning in a life and imposing an order on chaos by means for relating and forming into a narrative (a human history) selected pieces of previous experience. It is, in a real sense, the re-creation of the person by the recollection of the past; and the process by which this is done is highly selective. (p. 68)

What Augustine in doing in the Confessions is an  act of constitutive self-narration. Augustine is constructing his persona, his very self in recounting his story. This is seen most clearly in the central role that memory plays in the Confessions. This trajectory reaches its apogee in Book X, chapter 17 when Augustine actually identifies personality with memory:

O my God, profound infinite complexity, what a great faculty memory is, how awesome a mystery! It is the mind, and this is nothing other than my very self.

Thus, for Augustine, personhood itself is found in memory. To be a person is to remember. As such, Augustine’s exercise in telling his story is, in a very real  sense, Augustine’s own exercise of becoming a person:

Memory and personhood are co-terminous, hence the necessity for the subject to tell his own story. The ostensible motive for Augustin’s writing of the Confessions was the ethical one: the encouragement of his readers in their struggle to live the Christian life; but might not the real, though unacknowledged, motive have been the ‘achievement’ of his own personality? Like Proust who has to relate the middle-aged Parisian Marcel to the Marcel who was a child in Combray, the Marcel who was an adolescent in Balbec, and the Marcel who was obsessed with Albertine; so Augustine has to integrate the various Augustines of the past (the Manichee, the neo-Platonist, the youth of powerful sexual energy and emotion) with the man who finds himself Bishop of Hippo. And it is only memory that can be used for this function: without memory the person cannot exist. (p. 71)

If this sort of reading is correct, perhaps we can say that Augustine is the first “pure” narrative theologian in the modern sense. And it also rasies questions about the nature of the Augustinian self and what relation it has to the modern self.

Augustine Our Contemporary

Posted by on August 31, 2009 1 comment

It seems a fair consensus that in Augustine’s journey to Christianity there were three major issues with which he had to deal. Certainly these could be expressed variously but they seem to come down to 1) a problem with the idea of humanity being created in God’s image (since God is absolute transcendent spirit, how could people with bodies bear God’s image?); 2) a major problem with the barbaric and violent depictions of God in the Old Testament; and 3) an intense desire to adequately explain the origin of evil.

In all this Augustine is not facing concerns far different from what most people face in considering the Christian faith today, with the exception of the first concern. The obsession with the immaterial One is certainly not in vogue today as it was in Augustine’s. However, the other two issues seem to be front and center among the questions that most modern people have if they seek to intellectually examine the merits of the Christian faith. In short, Augustine is far more of a theological familiar than a stranger when it comes to questions leading to faith. Does this show Augustine’s massive influence over the nature of Christian reflection, or is it merely a reflection of what questions of faith must normally involve? Perhaps both.

Augustine Week

Posted by on August 28, 2009 37 comments

Let me begin, appropriately, with a confession: I have never read Augustine in any thing approaching the depth that he merits. Obviously this is an unacceptable situation. To that end, I have decided to declare this coming week, beginning on Sunday, to be Augustine week. Barth and Yoder will be put aside, movies and my latest HBO series’ will not be viewed (by the way, Ben you may want to check out Carnivale at some point if you haven’t already).

For this week I will be doing a complete readthrough of the Confessions (which I’ve never done before) and I’ll attempt to read as many sections as possible from de Trinitate. So, to that end, I need some feedback from those who have read more of de Trinitate: What segements of the book are really the must-reads would you say?

Should be a good week of reading and posting. Stay tuned. And join in if you wish. Let the reading of Augustine spread!

Freedom: Augstinian-Style

Posted by on May 14, 2009 31 comments

James K.A. Smith’s article in Evangelicals and Empire is good overview of the contrast between the rhetoric of freedom in the West and the classical Christian and distinctly Augustinian notion of freedom as rightly ordered desire:

If we valorize freedom as mere freedom of choice, then we end up affirming the condition of a disorderd should as metaphysically normative, and we will end up describing as “free” what Christian theology describes as a state of sin. We will also end up describing the rightly ordered agent as some how unfree because he is not free to do otherwise.

I pretty much agree with this. The equation of freedom with the experience of choice is, frankly just stupid. Also, I am a firm believer that true freedom is freedom that can do no other. The one who cannot help but love his wife is free. The man who chooses to cheat on his wife with his secretary is enslaved.

But, of course this line of reasoning has an ideological danger to it (which does not militate against it—it just needs to be noted). Equating freedom to rightly ordered desire must not be allowed to turn into a sort of enforced moral totalitarianism if it is to be true freedom. In other words, while reducing freedom to choice is slavery, it is not any less slavery to say that since freedom is not ultimately about the experience of choice it doesn’t matter whether or not we coerce the choices of others.

If you had to…

Posted by on March 27, 2008 21 comments

A while back I asked folks who they would study if they had to be a scholar of just one modern theologian.  The key word there was ‘modern’.  Now I want to open it up more.  Out of all premodern theologians, (lets say up until the 19th century) who would you most want to study?  I suppose I’d have to go with Augustine, with Luther being a close second.  Other runners-up would be Aquinas, Irenaeus, and Jonathan Edwards.  What say you?

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