Tag Archives: augustine’s city of god

"Enough about me - what do YOU think of my figleaf?"

As we were saying, there’s a mind-bending insight at the heart of Augustine’s squib on Original Sin located dead center in his City of God. His biology is bad, but his psychology is time warps ahead of somewhere.

Augustine’s viewpoint is binary: it’s in his title. There’s what he calls both the “City of Man” and the “flesh,” which is where we all live — a universe of whims and desires and confusions very much like the Buddha’s “dukka.” And then there’s the “City of God” and the “soul.”

So Augustine’s point is that men are at war inside themselves just as states are at war; and of course, this ain’t no coincidence. The engine of all is the human will: “For the will is in them all; yea, none of them is anything else than will.”

Where we point our wills is all-important. Even emotions are caused by our wills, as we are sad because something we’ve decided to want is denied us. “And generally,” he says in Book XIV Ch. 6:

“… in respect of all that we seek or shun, as a man’s will is attracted or repelled, so it is changed and turned into these different affections.”

Look at that, girls! He’s saying where we point our wills is what we become. Again: we become what we love. So be careful what you love. (“The right will is … well-directed love, and the wrong will is ill-directed love.” XIV:7)

And what about Eve and Adam? Truckloads of theology and pastoral commentary have been forklifted onto the question: Why did they eat the freakin’ fruit? Genesis doesn’t really tell us. They were tempted, yes. But why did they — the Children of God — actually do it?

Their choice — the Original Sin — was an act of the will. But why oh why could they not follow some simple instructions?

We will what we love, says Augustine. So a better question is: What did Adam & Eve LOVE more than God? His answer is clear: THEMSELVES.

The Original Sin is self-centeredness. And humans are self-centered because of a perceptual bias caused by our senses: we are, quite literally, at the center of our world. Our mistake is in failing to know — or too often forgetting — this simple truth.

Bet you didn’t know that. I know I didn’t, before Augustine told me. Here’s how he works it out.

Life in Eden was sweet, endless, and lacked any pain. God’s one requirement was to listen up. Each human is created so that “submission is advantageous to it, while the fulfillment of its own will in preference to the Creator’s is destruction” (XIV:12).

We are like canines, not wolves, forced to live in a human world. Survival requires submission to one who knows more than we do (i.e., dog trainer/God). When we think we know better, we are wrong. Bam. Print that, people.

In Chapter 13, Augustine lays it on us:

“Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride?”

What is this horrible “pride,” anyway? It’s when the soul “becomes a kind of end to itself.” He quotes Proverbs 18:12: “Pride goes before destruction, and before honor is humility.” “That is to say,” he says in a typically lovely phrase, “secret ruin precedes open ruin.”

It’s the paradox of our lives: Wanting to be more than we are, we become less; and in humility, a simple acceptance of present reality, we are lifted up and “exalted.”

In this light, our punishment is actually kind of poetic:

“For what else is man’s misery but his own disobedience to himself, so that in consequence of his not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he cannot?”

We are condemned to see Paradise, and want it, and yet fail to get there again and again for the odd reason that we cannot obey our own wills. I’d be so much happier if I ate right, exercised, didn’t yell at my kids, didn’t expect too much, cared about my clients, felt good about life, helped those in pain. Right? And isn’t my life one loooong failure to do this?

I know mine is.

This post is already too long. I’ll point to where we’re going with this: Augustine knew there’s something baked into people that makes us self-centered. That thing is intrinsic to our perspective: we are literally the center of our worlds.

And we’re back to Religious Epistemology for Absolute Blithering Idiots! … and our favorite self-centered philosopher, the great Soren Kierkegaard

Before the Fall?

Augustine writes like an architect. His logic isn’t linear so much as structural, with ballrooms and storage rooms and corridors all rambled through at leisure, at times in darkness, until we think we’re lost or losing it and then . . . outside, at last, we see the house in daylight and it’s beautiful.

He was a very careful editor. Near the end of his life, he wrote a thing called Retractions that revisits all his major works and corrects parts, with reasons. He’s the only Ancient author whose individual works can be dated precisely because he did it for us.

In his two greatest hits — Confessions and City of God — Augustine puts his main point . . . where? Exactly where a modern writer would not: IN THE MIDDLE. Not just near the middle, or somewhat central . . . exactly in the middle, almost to the word. It’s an odd technique, no? Imagine Malcolm Gladwell putting the main thesis for Blink in the center of the book. He’d be working the toaster at Toronto’s Great Canadian Bagel.

What happens in the middle that’s so special? Thanks for asking:

• Confessions — Augustine spends the first half of this book-length prayer confessing to a “misspent” youth that isn’t as bad as he says and a certain, um, lustiness that strikes us today as entirely normal. Then — at the end of Book 8, word 63,000 of this 126,000-word hut — he describes a life-shattering moment. In a Garden (knock knock, Adam!) he hears a voice and reads a passage from Galatians to “make no provision for the flesh” . . . and his old life is over. Like that.
• City of God — The architect turns urban planner in this much bigger book, laid out like Confessions: first half describes the restlessness and torpor and (ouch) death that come from living in the world; second half, the completeness and peace and immortality that come from turning our eyes to the Big Banana in the African Sky. Both start refuting “errors” of non-Christians in meticulous detail and end explaining Genesis in meticulous detail. And in both books, these neat halves are separated by a conversion that is not a physical but a psychological event.

Put simply, both pivot on a moment when Augustine — and the reader — realize something. Something that’s been there all along but we just haven’t seen. It’s a moment of clear sight, a change in attitude, a step into the psychic light of truth.

Right in the middle of City of God is where Augustine talks about the nature of human beings and what we call Original Sin. As I said, it’s not what you may think. Hint: all of us are literally at the center of our worlds; it’s baked into being human. Right?