Augustine Is Really Smart

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading my yearly allotment of Augustine: books 6-10 in the African bishop’s treatise on the Trinity. He didn’t convince me with his main point, but he did convince me (if, indeed, I needed any convincing on this point) that his intelligence embraced broad fields of knowledge and dealt with them in great power and insight.

OK, Augustine’s main point. Books 1-5 (which I read three years ago) deal mostly with terms regarding relationships between the Persons of the Trinity and with the question of Who made the appearances to Abraham, Moses, and others in certain Old Testament stories. I divided the treatise arbitrarily into thirds for my ten-year reading plan, but my artificial division seems to have worked, since books 6-10 shift focus to our relationship with and understanding of the Trinity. Augustine’s primary question is this: How can we love the Trinity when we can’t understand or form an accurate mental picture of the Trinity?

His basic answer is that we sometimes love a thing without exact knowledge of it because we have loved something else like it and reason by analogy. I, for instance, will sit down eagerly later this year as I begin The Claverings, a book by Anthony Trollope that I have not read. Why do I relish the experience in anticipation when I don’t know the book? Because I have read and enjoyed several other Trollope books, so my love is founded on the likelihood that I will enjoy this one as much.

What then, Augustine asks, do we know that is like the Trinity so that we can love the Trinity as we begin and continue to know the ultimately incomprehensible God in three Persons? There is, Augustine tells us, a trinity in my mind: the mind itself, its knowledge, and its love. This answer works to some extent: the knowledge and the love, like the Word and the Holy Spirit being respectively begotten and breathed by the Father, come from and reflect the mind itself, and the mind is not what it is without its actions of knowing and willing. But do knowledge and love have a separate identity that bears an analogy to Christ saying that He doesn’t know everything the Father knows? And doesn’t the mind perform other functions, as well, like reasoning? Augustine suggests a second trinity of human mentality: memory, understanding, and will. In some ways, this analogy seems better, and in other ways it seems just as arbitrarily limited to three as did the first proposition. But Augustine’s question still seems important to me, and his approach still provides a door to my search for an answer. I am inclined to say that I love the Trinity because God in three Persons is like nothing else in existence (thing A cannot both be with thing B and be thing B except in the case of the Trinity: John tells us that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God), and I like other things that are unique. Yeah, there’s the problem of saying that all these things are alike in that they aren’t like anything else.

My dissatisfaction with his answers doesn’t negate the point that Augustine wrestles with a fascinating, important question. And the intelligence and knowledge he uses to put all the parts of the argument together are astonishing. Did anyone else before Augustine ever examine the human mind to the point of questioning why we love things we don’t know? Plato and Aristotle both have lots of helpful things to say about loving what we do know and even loving what we mistakenly think we know. But loving what we don’t know? Augustine also appears to me to have invented, some 1500 years ahead of time, the field of semiotics, with all of his analysis of words and mental thoughts as signs of both external things and of each other. In other books, he talks about music, mathematics, and history. In the Confessions, he takes on the mystery of consciousness of time.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine commended study of all these fields and more, thus, I thank God, granting approval for medieval Christians to study literature and grammar and astronomy and geometry and to create cathedral schools and universities. He is the most influential Christian writer between the writing of the New Testament and now. Had I never read a word of his prodigious output, he would still bear responsibility for much of the shape of my intellectual life, as he does for anyone geeky and odd enough to be reading this blog. Graduates wear robes at school commencements because monks delivered medieval education because Augustine sanctioned academic pursuit for Christendom.

So what can we call Augustine? An intellectual powerhouse? The founder of Christian academicism? A beacon atop the mountain of western education? It’s difficult to find the right words to describe him adequately and to capture the importance of his far-reaching achievement. He isn’t like anyone else.

Beauty in Ashes

Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I just finished reading Bleak House for the third time in my life, and before writing this blog post, I looked back to see what I blogged about in 2012, the last time I enjoyed the Great Man’s ninth novel. It appears I wrote six times about the book. How did I find so much time to write these posts while I was working?

I have just one thing to write about after this visit with the deep, mysterious, disturbingly comforting Bleak House. I see that I touched on it in one of my posts from nine years ago when I commented on this passage:

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

The dark storm makes creation new. After the deluge comes a new brilliantly colored sign in the heavens.

Throughout Bleak House, characters are immersed in atmospheres of influence. Influence, a common word in the book, originally referred to streams of celestial power in our atmosphere flowing (fluens in Latin) in from the planets. These influences, it was believed, both shaped character and caused temporary changes of temperament or health. Influenza came from the influences. At the beginning of Bleak House, the air is filled with “fog,” which sounds romantic to us now but actually consisted mostly of smoke from factories. As we progress through the pages, we get the pervading rain around Chesney Wold, the dust that blankets everything in Tulkinghorn’s chambers, the soot of the poor neighborhoods, the disease in the noisome air of a cramped urban cemetery, and, most importantly, the poisonous influence of the Court of Chancery, touching and harming everyone who has the misfortune to find his business taken up therein:

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right.

And yet beauty arises from the wreckage of this whirlwind. This isn’t Great Expectations, so Dickens awards his good characters happy endings in this novel with the sad name. And yet every happy ending summarized in the last chapter of Bleak House has a depth of beauty that comes from some tragic mark. One character ends happily married and has a baby girl – who is deaf and dumb. But doesn’t the mother only love her child the more for that deficiency? The narration tells us explicitly that one pretty widow is more beautiful with the shadow of loss on her face. Two neighbors who have argued over the ownership of a disputed strip of land try reconciling but find that they actually have more fun arguing. John Jarndyce still calls his study the Growlery. And the house, in commemoration of the storm that has made creation new, is still affectionately known as Bleak House. Because of its realism and familiarity, isn’t this the happiest of all Dickens’s happy endings?