This essay is concerned with Book III of Saint Augustine’s ‘Confessions.’ It is specifically concerned with the way in which Augustine identifies a series of possible problems, as well as their causes, as he reflects on a specific period in his life in which he was studying rhetoric in Carthage and often found himself straying away from what he would later consider to be a good and true life, which is the same a life spent with a firm relationship to God. This essay will consider how Augustine identifies the problems in his writing, whether or not these problems can be seen to specific to his time and whether or not it is possible to see them as having a moral weight outside an explicitly religious context.
In the early sections of book III, Augustine presents himself as living completely in sin when he was a late teenager, which is the period which the book covers. This sin and the problems associated with it stem primarily from a lack of understanding of the true nature of the world, and, importantly, from a lack of understanding of what is truly to be desired for happiness. The most important of these early descriptions comes when Augustine describes that wished to love objects merely for the sake of ‘loving’ rather than for any other good or any other purpose. (Augustine, 2003. 30) This act of loving for the sake of loving is shown to be a flawed and hyper-energetic way of living. It does not contain a connection to God nor to anything with a purpose. In the same section Augustine describes himself as suffering from pride and ambition and from wishing earthly fame and success in the school of rhetoric, rather than seeking after a closeness to God which should be the goal of an enlightened life. Augustine frames this error and the problems which result from it with an example of the theatre and of the pleasures which he pursued when he used to frequently visit it. He writes that a love of the theatre is an example of something perverse in human nature which should be resisted if the person is to serve God and to lead a happy life:
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"Augustine’s Confessions: Book III".
‘The spectator [at the theatre] does want to feel sorrow and it is actually his feeling of sorrow that he enjoys. Surely this the most wretched lunacy?…Now when a man suffers himself, it is called misery; when he suffers in the suffering of another it is called pity…The spectator is not moved to aid the sufferer but merely to be sorry for him; and the more the author of these fictions makes the audience grieve, the more they please him.’ (Augustine, 2002. 31)
This description of the theatre comes to serve as a metaphor for a wrong way of thinking throughout Augustine’s descriptions of his life. As a student he sought gratification in loud and obvious displays of glory. In the same way as when is watching something at the theatre and one is fascinated by an image or a copy of real life, then it is also the case that when one seeks fulfilment in earthly things or achievement in things which are separate from God. It seems that for Augustine this is major cause of problems and it could certainly be argued that these problems continue to persist in modern society in which many people watch movies in order to feel pity and joy, but find it more and more difficult to experience those feelings in other ares of their life and in their personal relationships.
Later in Book III, Augustine introduces the idea of a thinking which is attempting to know God but is caught up too much in the wrong kinds of philosophical problems. At the heart of Augustine’s writing is a belief in the nature of Good and Evil. This belief takes a very specific form which Augustine inherits from Plato. He does not attribute any positive existence to evil, but rather he sees evil things as arising from a lack of Good. In Book III of the Confessions he makes this clear and sees the fact that he did not understand it previously in his life as a major reason for the problems which he identifies and encountered in his youth. In short, the problems which he sees around him stem from either an unwillingness to know God or a lack of understanding as to His true nature. Augustine makes this clear in section VII of book III:
‘By all this my ignorance was much troubled and it seemed to me that I was coming to the truth when I was in fact going away from it. I did not know that evil has no being of its own but it is only an absence of Good, so that it simply is not…I did not even know that God is a spirit, having no parts extended in length and breadth, to whose being bulk does not belong.’ (Augustine, 2002. 31)
It seems therefore, that it could be argued that Augustine sees three major causes for problems in both his own life and in the life society as a whole. The first of these is a desire to love things merely for the sake of loving, rather than for the things themselves or what they mean, the second is to become enraptured by images of things instead of reality and the third is to misunderstand that nature of God and to become to caught up with philosophical problems. While it seems that some of these diagnoses may be unduly punishing and harsh, it is nonetheless the case that in things like education, the media and hedonistic lifestyles they can be seen to continue and to still be present in the modern day.
- Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin, 2002.
