Confessions
St. Augustine was a Roman philosopher and theologian who influenced most of western Christianity after him, and thereby most of western thought and philosophy. His Confessions is an overarching, mostly autobiographical journal of his life and how he transformed from a worldly degenerate to a holy icon of Christianity. I read the book from a secular and philosophical point of view, and a feature of Augustine that distinguished him above many other theologians was how logical he was, partly because before Augustine had become a Christian, he studied and taught classical rhetoric and was exposed to many other systems of beliefs. What he called his “mistakes” in believing these other systems of beliefs, I think is actually his strength – he was able to reason about his faith not just from within Christianity but with respect to other conflicting belief systems. I did find the book to be a little too laced with religious language and would have liked more autobiographical details, but historically and in context with the development of western thought it’s still a worthwhile read.
Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was a resolution to a mid-life crisis; his crisis was philosophical, as he had tried to look for other systems of thoughts such as Manichaeism and even tried to explore astrology before being led by Neoplatonist thought towards the end goal of Christianity. Before he settled on faith, however, he described his spiritual malaise, of anxiety and a lack of sustainable joy, and this lack of commitment to any particular belief were effectively nihilism. During his uncertain, nihilist period, he found little joy nor meaning in his profession as a teacher, and satisfied his lust as merely perfunctory without passion. He resolved this crisis by converting and dedicating himself to Christianity in a garden in Milan, and thereafter his works were all devoted to his faith. The nihilism and uncertainty is one trigger that I believe pushes people toward religion, the other triggers being some extreme pain or loss (like Pierre Bezukhov’s religious stint in War and Peace), or simply sustained brainwashing during youth. Religion is emotional medicine, and although it can bring some happiness and meaning with its fictions, it’s prudent not to overdose. Just as worldly pleasures can make people lose their mind, the contrived emotional euphoria from religion is so great that it makes people, especially the dissatisfied, confused, weak, and hurt, lose their minds even quicker.
% grep -i "confessions" quotes.txt4 matches
on beauty
“Like the sun, things of beauty rise and set. At their rise they have their first beginning; they grow until they reach perfection; but once they have reached it, they grow old and die. The faster they climb towards the zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions
on faith
“I believed countless things which I had never seen or which had taken place when I was not there to see – so many events in the history of the world, so many facts about places and towns which I had never seen, and so much that I believed on the world of friends or doctors or various other people. Unless we took those things on trust, we should accomplish nothing in this life”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions
on art
“The youth looks at a picture painted on the wall, which ‘shows how Jupiter is said to have deceived the girl Danae by raining a golden shower into her lap’. These are the words with which he incites himself to lechery, as though he had heavenly authority for it. Filth is committed with greater confidence as a result of learning the words. They contain the wine of error which had already gone to the heads of the teachers who poured it out for us to drink. If we refused to drink, we were beaten for it, without the right to appeal to a sober judge”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions
on social hypocrisy
“The patrons who pay for the production of these shows are held in esteem such as most parents would wish for their children. Yet the same parents willingly allow their children to be flogged if they are distracted by these displays from the studies which are supposed to fit them to grow rich and give the same sort of shows themselves”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions