Episode 121: Augustine on Being Good

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 121 is something like, what's the psychology behind behaviors typically referred to as sin? And we read St. Augustine's Confessions from around the year 400 AD. Books 1 through 9, you can join join the discussion, find a link to the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer facing toward my God at Madison, Wisconsin.

0:41 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Allan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:46 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Wes: Mark. Man, that could not be more creepy. That voice could not have been more dripping with something. I don't know.

0:56 Mark: It's the mood that Mr. Augustine put me in.

0:59 Dylan: I could see the candles around you, Mark.

1:02 Mark: Mr. Aurelius Augustinus. That's his real name, Aurelius Augustinus. I just found that out this evening reading the introduction to my text by, you know, this. So, Wes, you recommended this F.J. sheed translation, which is from 1940. It's not a very new translation. The version that they sell of it now. Introduction by Peter Brown, edited with notes by Michael P. Foley. Those are a lot of good notes. It gives footnotes for every time he uses a Bible passage, which is all the fucking time.

1:32 Wes: Yeah, but I kind of. I didn't find that very useful.

1:35 Dylan: I ended up buying this version that's clearly like bound as a public domain. It's a nice bound copy, but it's just literally the book from Sheed, I'm sure by some Christian press, Aeterna Press. But the book is pretty good quality. It has really great table of contents.

1:52 Wes: That's actually one of the things I liked about the Sheed.

1:55 Dylan: The table of contents is a little.

1:56 Wes: The cheat sheet. Yeah, Tables of contents at the beginning of each book.

2:00 Dylan: Yeah, Back in the day, table of contents really were informative.

2:05 Mark: But it doesn't have page numbers on it. Each chapter. Here's each book, I should say, says, here's what happens in each of the chapters, but doesn't give you any page numbers. You just.

2:14 Dylan: Mine has his page numbers for each subsection.

2:17 Mark: Okay.

2:18 Seth: I have a translation by somebody named Boulding, Maria Boulding.

2:22 Mark: Ah.

2:22 Wes: Is it new or.

2:24 Seth: Yeah, I'm trying to find the date.

2:26 Mark: It's a lady, so it can't be that old.

2:29 Seth: 1997. I looked it up and my local library had a couple of different translations. They had the one that Wes recommended and then they had a couple of others and I looked this one up on Amazon, they had this one and it got really good recommendations for readability.

2:43 Wes: I found the sheed pretty readable.

2:45 Dylan: Yeah, me too.

2:46 Wes: But Augustine himself, not always incredibly readable.

2:51 Dylan: In my wretchedness, I loved to be made sad and sought for things to be sad about. In my wretchedness, yeah.

2:58 Wes: There's only so much of that I can take before I just want to shoot myself. Basically have to take a break from the book.

3:06 Dylan: Well, there's a kind of rhetoric about this process of not just the many prayers that he has, but also the kind of constant invocations. And it's familiar when I've been to fundamentalist services or something like that. They were just like this.

3:23 Mark: You've been to a lot of those?

3:25 Dylan: I haven't been to a lot, but I've been to a couple.

3:27 Wes: Have you been searching?

3:29 Dylan: No.

3:29 Wes: After your Manichean phase?

3:31 Seth: No. No.

3:33 Dylan: But my son got invited to a summer camp last year at a local evangelical church by a couple of his friends.

3:43 Wes: So he went, there's got to be a girl involved in the.

3:45 Dylan: There was not a girl involved. And so he went. And I guess what I did, I volunteered to be a night chaperone for three of the nights. And so I would go there at like 10 o' clock at night and make sure everybody got to bed and all that stuff.

4:00 Mark: So you wouldn't get up to any pear picking.

4:02 Wes: Did you have to prevent them from praying too passionately together?

4:06 Dylan: They were all separated by gender and everybody was very, very nice. But there's definitely this rhetoric, you know, way of talking about your relationship with God and a way of displaying your dedication and to the cause. And there's just words that you say and phrases that you have, all of which remind me of Augustine.

4:26 Wes: It's the self hating thing we should say for listeners, by the way, who aren't familiar. So he's telling his life story as a prayer to God, a confession. Yes, he's giving confession to God himself. There's a lot of life history, but a lot of it is just. It's told for the purpose of telling a story of his coming to God. That's the basic arc of these first nine books. But what you were getting at, Dylan, was this. Well, I don't know if I'm, you know, if I'm giving the right characterization of this, but what I felt as his sort of abject masochism, which I think is an important question because it goes to this Whole question of sin.

So, for instance, he's frequently going to talk about the wretchedness of lust and yes, the wretchedness of a worldly life. But he doesn't really sell that his life doesn't look that wretched before he's got a woman. And from what I could tell, he had multiple women.

5:16 Dylan: He's fucking around the whole time. Right?

5:18 Wes: Yeah. Augustine got laid.

5:20 Dylan: Got laid many, many times.

5:23 Mark: Well, he had a common law wife and then he had another common law wife later. But apparently he was actually faithful to his first common law wife, which was unusual. Like it was not unusual to get hooked up with one of these common law wives, not somebody that you were going to marry because they weren't at your political station. So ultimately he ended up jilting her because of his ambition and was set up for a marriage that he didn't end up going through with.

5:46 Wes: Right. But he took a mistress during the two years he was waiting for her to come of age, you know, to reach 12 years old. But there was a hint in there that he actually had more partners than that before and after. So, yeah, apparently he was faithful to his common law wife. But I saw suggestions in there, but that before and after that he had gotten around.

6:06 Dylan: Maybe we should be good doobies and sort of really introduce the whole thing the way Mark would have us do usually.

6:15 Mark: All right. So he writes this when he's in his 40s, like 43 to 46 years old, I believe, says my intro, and it covers pretty much birth through when he's 30. He was raised in an area, a very religious area of North Africa. There wasn't really any temptation toward paganism, however, the education was all read Latin, read the famous texts in Latin, recite large portions of it. So one of the things he objects to earlier on, for instance, is just having to say these things about the Roman gods as part of the stories. But really nobody in his environment was a believer in that kind of thing.

However, there were many versions of Christianity and Manichaeanism that was mentioned. The belief that good and evil are fundamentally different substances, like that they're the two powers at war. And not that everything comes from God. It's a way of dealing with the problem of evil. So it's a story of his own conversion, but it's really a story of, in many ways, his intellectual development. So it ends up being about a lot of the ideas in question about the God's relation to the physical world and the remaining books 10 through 13, that we're not going to talk about today, but we are going to talk about next time actually just take on that metaphysical stuff straightforwardly.

So we're not really going to talk so much about that today. However, when he's analyzing his own past life, we do get a lot of theorizing about the psychology of sin, of why did it take him so long, even though he was raised Christian of some sort, but yet it took him a long time to sort of fully come around. So this conversion is not from atheism or something to Christianity. It's from just like not so declared to completely dedicating his life to Christ.

7:54 Dylan: Well, to becoming a Catholic.

7:57 Wes: But he wasn't a Christian. I mean, his mother was a Christian and his father wasn't. He had lots of doubts about Christianity and, you know, a lot of his time and his interest in rhetoric, he's actually interested in arguments against Christianity, which is a lot of what Manicheanism and some of the other things he was involved with entail. So questions, for instance, about the origin of evil and things like that. So, for instance, how there can be evil in the world if God is all good and omniscient and knows everything that's going to happen. Those sorts of questions. And the Manichaeans really do have an alternative answer. I think that Manichaeans also denied the divinity of Christ, although it's not like they denied him as a figure.

8:36 Dylan: Yeah, and Manichaeans aren't Christians. I guess Wes just said that.

8:39 Wes: Now I'm doubting myself.

8:41 Mark: I think it might be kind of complicated, but we didn't read about Manichaeanism other than what he says about it.

8:46 Wes: It has an origin in Persia. It's a mishmash. It's the New Agey kind of thing of the day.

8:53 Mark: Well, and a lot of the criticisms of Christianity are things like just don't some parts of the Bible sound like either they don't make any sense, like the creation stories, or that they're morally objectionable, like the Old Testament fire and brimstone stuff. But some of the same questions that people raise about the Bible today. He doesn't really sell us too hard on it more. But eventually I figured out the right answer, or eventually he was taught the appropriate doctrine that made him satisfied enough that left him feeling intellectually fulfilled.

He's a strong believer in the search for truth. I don't know if the word reason actually pops up here. It's not like Aquinas, where the word reason becomes really central, I think, but it's definitely being intellectually. Aware and open to things, that that's an important part of it. But he thinks fundamentally human infirmity is too great. Right. Human weakness, the weakness of our reasoning faculties is too great. We don't have the light within ourselves. We need the light of God to show us. So it's like an intellectually curious, good spirited person.

There are certain conclusions that they're going to come to that Augustine is going to agree with. But a lot of it I want to say you can't get without faith. But I don't even think he says it that way. He's sort of, you can't. Unless God comes to you and fills you.

10:07 Wes: Well, it's grace. But he doesn't. Yes, he doesn't really explicitly.

10:12 Dylan: He doesn't use that word.

10:13 Wes: Yeah, yeah, but in other words, it's grace.

10:16 Mark: Right. Unless you're on the God path, then you're going to be deceived by all sorts of things, then your sensibilities are not going to be. And by the right path, it's not even just wanting to be a Christian, it ends up being something very specific and going with these correct answers to all the problem of evil and all that other stuff.

10:33 Dylan: Well, and I think you're right, Mark the point. The problem of evil dominates the intellectual development laid out in the first nine books before his conversion, where that's sort of the main running theme as he's describing his education and what draws him and what he's convinced of. And then also along the way there's sort of the color commentary from after his conversion about what was wrong with him, what his state was there as he's going along telling his story and the problem of evil and how evil exists in the world and its relationship with God just looms large through the whole thing.

And it makes sense given that that would be the great separation between him and the Manichaeans. When he figures out how to account for evil in the world and God somehow being related to it and not being opposed to God, then the next big thing is the relationship of sin and where sin comes from. If we are created by God, how is it that we can sin then? The third part of it, I guess is will. Which brings us back to Eva's book.

11:37 Wes: Will is his way out. Will is his solution to the problem of evil.

11:41 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

11:42 Seth: So my question is, is the question of substance, his struggle with seeing God as a substance, a bodily substance, tied up with his struggle with trying to understand the problem of evil?

11:54 Dylan: I think it is tied up with it.

11:55 Seth: I Think so too. I'm wondering if it's worth our time to untangle it or not. I'm not sure it is.

11:59 Dylan: Well, maybe it's worth saying what his solution is. He mentions what the solution is even without getting into the detailed metaphysics that he gets into in book 10.

12:08 Mark: And after it's a spiritual substance. That's the solution.

12:12 Dylan: Yes.

12:13 Wes: Yeah. And he's helped out by the Neoplatonists there. So it's Platonic philosophy that helps him figure that out. It's unclear why he talks about how he couldn't imagine God except as a spatial being, which is kind of weird, right? At least to us.

12:27 Dylan: Is it? Why do you say that's?

12:29 Wes: Because I think we're so used to the idea of a spiritual, non spatial God. And maybe that's because Augustine is now part of the tradition. I don't know.

12:37 Dylan: It doesn't sound so weird to ask where God is. Right. And if you have aware that he is, it seems like pretty quickly it wouldn't be so crazy for it to be spatial. I mean, Augustine's solution does seem to loom large here where you just sidestep the whole problem by saying that God is a completely different substance than what makes up the rest of the universe.

12:57 Seth: So, Wes, it does sound strange to me that he was struggling with it, but I think there's times where he encapsulates the problem as saying he's thinking in terms of God infusing everything. God being a substance that infuses everything, he says, so if you take like a bigger piece of stone, is there more God in a bigger piece of stone than a smaller piece of stone? And he says, no, that's ridiculous. Of course you can't think of amounts of God. So I think when he says that he struggles with the idea of thinking of God as a bodily substance, he's trying to wrap his mind around how God could be in everything and be complete in everything without respect to its extension, so to speak.

You know, he talks about trying to conceive of the universe and its limits, and he still understood it as something finite, but trying to think of God as being outside of it. So his struggles don't sound so quite archaic. I do kind of get what he was struggling with, but you would suspect that there would be some alternative like he was. That he would be presented with an alternative theory by some Catholic that had a better solution, unless he's the one who's kind of inventing it through this whole process, which I don't know enough about. To say.

14:08 Wes: So let me just give a flavor of his problem regarding God. This is in book 3, section 7, and then subsection 12. Do all translations have these subsections?

14:19 Mark: They're not subsections. They run through the whole chapter. But yeah, they're standard.

14:24 Wes: So towards the middle of 12. So 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. For bulk is less in its part than its whole. And if it be infinite, it is less in the part circumscribed by a certain space than in its infinity. And so could not be wholly itself in every place as spirit is, as God is. So that's the setup to that. I don't know. Are there other places where he's musing about that? I know he sort of solves it at the end of the.

14:51 Mark: Yeah, just right at the beginning of the book. And this is what kind of made me like him a little bit. That even though the whole thing is just so drenched in prayer that it's hard to, you know, you kind of want to fast forward over the preface to every chapter where he has to suck up to God for a couple paragraphs before he says anything real. But right here at the beginning, Book one, part one is just a paragraph or two paragraphs. And you sort of invoked God. God come to me, you know. But number two is. But how can I call unto my God, my God and Lord, for in calling unto him, I'm calling him to me.

And what room is there in me for my God, the God that made heaven and earth? Is there anything in Me, O God, that can contain you All? Heaven and earth cannot contain you, for you made them, and in me them. Yet since nothing that could exist, could exist without you, you must in some way be in all that there is, etc. You know, it's almost like a greeting. The beginning. Oh, God, let's talk. But how could I talk to you when you're not here? How is that working? Why am I saying come to me? Where were you hiding? How could you have been over there and now you're coming over here?

He sort of is self reflect reflective enough that since he's giving this monologue that every sentence he says, he realized that there's something, there's a question in it, there's a puzzle in it. And that's what makes the whole book philosophically interesting.

16:07 Dylan: Yeah. And he demands that's where sort of the reason or what we would think of the reasonableness fits in Well, I guess we should eventually talk about where the faith fits in and believing in God and submitting yourself to. To God and what that would imply regarding things that disagreed with what was sort of in plain sight to you. But in this, what Mark just read in other sections, he has a kind of demand of what seems plainly to be the case to him and demands of consistency on, like the Manichaeans, that there's this section where he and others get very disgruntled with the Manichaeans because they simply do not have an answer to a particular philosophical problem.

And in fact, when the account is made by one of their teachers, they see him as having walked into a trap and completely undermined anything that the Manichaeans would be saying because this teacher displayed such flawed logic with respect to it. He is thoughtful in an interesting way. I mean, I guess it's sort of his being theological. And his being theological is to ask questions that seem perfectly sensible both of what has been said to him about the nature of God and how that can possibly be true. That is, he basically takes it as true, based on Scripture, that God is everywhere.

And then he's asking reasonable questions about, well, how can I be talking to you? How can I have you in me if you're everywhere? Stuff like that.

17:39 Mark: Right. Which is all in line with this hermeneutics that we mentioned him in our hermeneutics thing, that he was the first one to really systematically do that. And one of the reasons he was able to overcome these objections to stuff in Genesis sound kind of ridiculous is by reading it allegorically that this was like a big thing introduced for him to.

17:59 Dylan: It's not literal and he's adamant about it. That has to be interpreted.

18:03 Mark: You mentioned how this relates to reason again and how it seems like, you know, of course he's asking these questions. He's making use of his powers of reason. But at least the way that this Peter Brown introduction to my volume spun this was that part of confessing is not just, I did these sinful things before, but I am such a weak and faulty creature that these things puzzle me. So confessing an intellectual problem is actually part of the confession of how imperfect our reason is. Saying, I can't really understand. I know. You know, it certainly makes sense to say, God come to me. But then when I think about the words, it actually doesn't make any sense because God can't come to me because he doesn't move. And so isn't that reflect upon my own, the weakness of my Intellect is really what that means. The fact that he's asking these puzzles.

18:54 Wes: So prayer is integral to reflection because we rely on God. This isn't really part of the reading, but Augustine's version of the a priori is divine illumination. We rely heavily on God when we are reasoning. We can't do without his illumination.

19:09 Mark: Right. If we're sort of working on the wrong template of what God is, if we're using Manichean beliefs, then we're fucked. You can't. You can't reason properly on his model.

19:19 Wes: Relatedly. So the question for me is, what's inspiring all this searching? It's not simply intellectual curiosity. It's pain. It's suffering, which he talks about a lot, despite his mom getting. Getting laid a lot. So he's looking for a way out of pain and suffering. And in a way, he's looking for a foundation and also a way of dealing with loss. So there's a lot of talk about the fact that I was kind of trying to figure out why he's so down on worldly things. That's one of the things that interested me about this book. Why sex is so bad and lust is so bad and all of those things.

It's not like, for instance, Christians are prohibited from having wives. Although, you know, the way the arc of this whole story is that he's on this quest to basically get rid of women. And it's not clear to me that the Christianity at this time, that it's inherently anti lust, at least for the average person. And I think part of the answer comes to be it's about finding a foundation. That's not what he calls corruptible, but we could also say changeable. That's not something that changes in time or something that you can lose. And so it doesn't even have to be sex.

It could just be, you might think the foundation of a good life is friendship. But you can see he sort of argues against that. He has friends who die. He laments at one point treating this friend who died as if he were going to live forever. In a way, God is the sort of final, incorruptible, permanent foundation for things. It's a way of having something that you can't lose. And that's the sort of quest I see him on in this. And by the way, and this is intimately related to the way in which will can he uses this word, swerve away from God? Because part of the he thinks this being caught up in the world of appearances and pleasure, it's a way of Treating non permanent things as if they were permanent.

It's sort of a self deception. And it also is intimately tied to pride and to thinking of yourself as a God. And so that gets us to this pear stealing incident.

21:19 Dylan: Yeah, that's a good place to go.

21:20 Wes: So in book one, he starts out as his criminal career as a baby everywhere and crying and otherwise being an asshole. And then he's escalated in book two to theft. But I thought part of the point of that pear stealing incident is that, you know. So his question is, and we discussed this a little bit with Eva, the willing episode. But his question is, what is it that attracted to him? What did he get out of stealing those pears? Because it wasn't for the pleasure of eating them or anything like that. So I thought maybe we could discuss that in light of.

21:51 Dylan: This is one of the most famous sections of the whole book, Book two, section four.

21:55 Mark: Four. And then he analyzes it through the next several sections.

21:59 Dylan: Yeah, yes, exactly. The very first paragraph is sort of him just lamenting in some ways describing the problem. He says, yet I chose to steal and not because want drove me to it. Unless want of justice and contempt for it in an excess of inequity. For I stole things which I already had in plenty and of better quality. Nor had I any desire to enjoy the things I stole, but only the stealing of them. And the sin. He goes on, our only pleasure in doing it was that it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. Yet in the depth of the abyss you had pity on it. Let that heart know now tell you what it sought when I was thus evil for no object, having no cause for wrongdoing save my wrongness. I loved my own undoing. I loved the evil in me, not the thing for which I did the evil, simply the evil. My soul was depraved.

22:53 Mark: And then his analysis, he ends up saying, well, he wouldn't have done this by himself. It really was because he was with other boys. He's 16 years old here. He isolates this in book two because he was between schools. I guess his parents were sometimes they weren't particularly rich, but they were able to send him away to very career oriented schools for a lot of the point. But for whatever reason during this one year, he just was left to his own devices, running around.

23:17 Dylan: Yep.

23:18 Mark: And so he's with his friends. And so, yeah, this actually gets at Wes's question of what's wrong with beautiful things. And so the next chapter there, chapter five, book two, here there's an appeal to the eye in beautiful things, in gold and silver and all such. The sense of touch has its own powerful pleasures, and the other senses find qualities in things suited to them. Worldly success has its glory and the power to command and to overcome. And from this springs the thirst for revenge. But in our quest of all these things, we must not depart from you, Lord, or deviate from your law.

The life we live below, here below has its own attractiveness, grounded in the measure of beauty that it has in its harmony with the beauty of all lesser things. The bond of human friendship is admirable, holding many souls as one. Yet in the enjoyment of all such things we commit sin if through immoderate inclination to them. For though they are good, they are the lowest order of good things. Higher and better are forgotten. Even you, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law.

24:09 Wes: And he'll say later, when you enjoy such things, you should turn yourself towards God as the source of them.

24:16 Dylan: Yes.

24:17 Wes: So again, it's this idea of where the foundation is. It's not that these beautiful things are in and of themselves, it's that they derive their goodness, and you can sort of see the Platonic theme here from something otherworldly. And then that otherworldly entity is the proper object of our attention as opposed to the worldly things that derive their goodness from, in this case, God.

24:38 Mark: I was trying to imagine what it would be like to actually love your friends in this way. I was brought to mind the Martin Buber's I and Thou thing. I'm sure that is. That's anachronistic, bringing that, bring that kind of thing in. Because what he's talking about is. Buber's talking about is very existential. You know, I'm contemplating you and through you I'm contemplating the divine. But that would almost seem idolatrous. I think the way you described it, Wes, was more. Well, I don't really. I can enjoy you insofar as we are both turned toward God and so we can sort of be fellows in rejoicing about this higher thing.

It's not about, you know, just as having bad friends can make you more likely to sin, as in this case, and having good friends can make you more likely to be godly. But it's not just because of how awesome and humanly they are. In fact, his mother, who he puts as the paragon, seems like just a shell of a human being, frankly, seems the way he characterizes her is so one dimensional. And that's good that a richness of Personality would be deviating from your divine pattern.

25:47 Wes: Yeah, but before we leave the pear analysis, I thought sort of the height of his analysis of this was section 14, where he. So perhaps it was the thrill of acting against your law, at least in appearance, since I had no power to do so. In fact, the delight a prisoner might have in making some small gesture of liberty, getting a deceptive sense of omnipotence from doing something forbidden without immediate punishment. I was that slave who fled from his lord and pursued his lord's shadow, and so on and so forth. What interests me is again, this, you know, and this is a repeating theme, this idea of part of the terribleness of being cut off from God is this delusion of one's own omnipotence, which, of course, if you live like that, you'll be punished for it.

But that to me is a really perceptive analysis of what the real thrill of stealing the pear is, this sense of power. And I was reminded of sort of the Nietzsche's critique of utilitarianism, where it's not pleasure that's the primary motivator, it's will to power. It's the same thing. In this case, it's not pleasure of the pears that's motivating Augustine. In this case, it is the power that that act involves, that that transgression involves.

27:02 Mark: But what makes his image there of. It's like the slave or the prisoner who. With this illusion of power, I mean, really, that resonates with us because it's such a petty. You know, it's just boys doing this little thing. And that's sort of how we would think about it. You know, you think bullying somebody or whatever makes you powerful, but that's just obviously pathetic. That's because you. You can't exert any real power. But for Augustine, really, it would be thoroughgoing that anyone. If. Even if you're a tyrant over millions of people, then you are. It's. It's an illusion of power. Somehow you making all these people bow to your will is in the same way, like the prisoner who is just. Maybe just from the perspective of your eternity of existence, your time on Earth here is only a little tiny blip in the middle of it.

27:50 Wes: Well, also. Yeah, no, no, no. But also dictators are vulnerable to being deposed. I mean, that's the basic point. You know, part of his story is about his chasing of fame and worldly goods and all these things. And it's not that he didn't get them. It's not that he wasn't capable of getting them. It's just that they're always subject to the possibility of loss and impermanence and corruptability and all that stuff. And so they can't ever be a real foundation for power. So power in that sense is always. The power that they provide is always an illusion. They seem to promise more than they actually give. The act of lust never actually unfolds all of those implied meanings that it seems to have when we are in the state of fantasizing about it and pursuing it and so on and so forth. It's always disappointing in that sense. It doesn't deliver.

28:37 Dylan: Maybe, maybe not. Right. I mean, I don't really buy the direction he's going about how he's overcome by evil and his own evil that he's captured by and in love with. But it might be a correct understanding that he is enjoying or partaking of his own willfulness for willfulness sake. So that the breaking of the rules is its own thrill and its own pleasure. And that's what he's attracted to in some ways. That's the basic self understanding. And that sounds sort of right. And I wouldn't want to dismiss that inclination. And it's not clear to me that it's always bad. I can think of all kinds of examples where it seems kind of petty,

29:27 Mark: but that it's always bad from his perspective.

29:30 Dylan: No, that's always bad in general. Right.

29:32 Mark: Well, of course, it's just his perspective is so narrow and screwed up. But we're trying to. I thought we were trying to say what Augustine means in his language. So I'm not.

29:42 Wes: Dylan, are you saying Augustine doesn't necessarily think that willing simply for willing's sake is always bad? Or you're saying it's not always bad?

29:49 Dylan: I'm trying on the one hand to recognize his. He seems to be right to understand that it's an act of self assertion. And there's something right on about his diagnosis of that act of stealing the pears for the sake of stealing the pears and putting aside the moral judgment on it and how far he is going with saying that this is like the source of his deep evil. Yeah, it does seem a right observation that this is something in not just a 16 year old's soul is in people's souls to. I mean one version of it is you want to win.

30:25 Seth: Right.

30:25 Dylan: Every Tuesday night I'm out playing soccer with these over 40 guys and every other time there's somebody out there that he gets his spirit up so high that because you took the ball from him and bumped into him, he's going to come and take you out later.

30:42 Wes: So I see this as an actual differing case because it's not transgressive. And the part that Mark read, he was talking about beautiful things. His whole point of setting that up is that there are lots of reasons that we might be motivated to do things in life. Winning, sex, money, the beauty of things. But the pair thing doesn't fall into any of those categories, say.

31:02 Dylan: Why not? Because it seems to me that the stealing of the pears falls neatly into that category of transgressing and asserting your will against the rules, against other people.

31:13 Wes: I think you're onto something there. What you seem to be saying now is that pleasure of winning is at least in part reducible to this idea of the pleasure of willing for willing's sake. Something like that, yeah.

31:22 Dylan: And in his case, he diagnoses it as the pleasure of being part of a gang and winning. So they together transgressed and stole these pears for the sake of it, asserted their power as a group. And in fact, that seems to be also rightly an added part of the whole pleasure of being part of a gang and asserting your will as a part of a gang on the world, be it stealing.

31:47 Wes: That's a little complex there, though, because he says he wouldn't have done it without the companionship. But it wasn't because of the companionship that he did it. The companionship was a sort of catalyst. So he asked a question in section 16. Perhaps then what I really loved was the companionship of those with whom I did it.

32:04 Dylan: But that sounds just like being part of a group where by yourself you would never have done X, but together you do it, but not simply because you were goaded into it, but because you were part of this group that did it.

32:17 Wes: But he concludes that section by saying, but since the pleasure I got was not in the pears, it must have been in the crime itself and put there by the companionship of others sinning with me. So I take him, he's asking the question of whether, well, maybe my primary motivation wasn't simply transgression, but it was just trying to be in with these other kids. I take it to his conclusion is that, well, without the companionship this wouldn't have happened. But that actually is not the main motivator. The transgression is the main motivator and the companionship is the catalyst that it needed.

You know, so for me, stopping at willing for willing's sake isn't enough, because then I want to know Psychologically, why are people motivated in that way? Eva talked about toddlers and this idea of, and I think we touched on it a little bit of this idea of establishing boundaries and an identity at that stage in life, that willfulness that they exhibit. And that's why I liked his analysis at 14. I saw that as the high point because then he gets into this quote, unquote, deceptive sense of omnipotence. I thought that was the plausible psychological root of all that.

33:17 Dylan: It sounds right. That's one of the reasons why I was linking it up with the idea of winning in the sense of asserting your power. And if you make it psychological, you say that it's part of asserting your identity. Those victories become part of who you are.

33:33 Wes: Yeah, we go back to an Aristotelian notion of actualization. And again, I'm linking with Nietzsche here as well, which I know is odd to relate Augustine to Nietzsche, but this Aristotelian idea is that your being is enhanced. You are more what you are in those moments.

33:47 Dylan: Yes.

33:48 Wes: Assuming that winning is part of your

33:50 Dylan: function and all that, it becomes kind of fuzzy here because with Augustine, he seems to, on the one hand, articulate exactly what we're describing of the function of will and identity in some respect, but want to at least turn it differently, if not point to it as the source of evil. Actually, in fact, it is. It's the source of evil in the world.

34:11 Wes: Exactly. This is, I think, the real contrast with the eudaimonistic picture, where I think power actually fits into that potentiality is Aristotle.

34:23 Mark: I think we can hook this back to reason that I was saying, if you're using the wrong concepts, if you don't have the right doctrine, then even trying to reason out things honestly, you're not going to come to the right answer. But on the other hand, having the right doctrine ultimately comes down to unifying your will and making it in accord with God's will. So then you take his law and internalize it, just like he has internalized the Bible so that every other freaking thing that comes out of his mouth is something. A direct quote from Psalms.

And So in section 13 here, this is still book two, chapter six, he lists all these vices, and they're all a case of misdirectedness. And so misdirectedness you could see as either a conceptual mistake or you could see it as an act of will. So the way it starts, it says in brackets, for there is a certain show of beauty in sin. I don't know what the brackets mean. Thus Pride wears the mask of loftiness, of spirit. Though you alone, O God, are high over all, ambition seeks honor and glory, Although you alone are to be honored before all and glorious forever by cruelty.

The great seek to be feared, yet who is to be feared but God alone From his power what can be wrested away or when or where or how or by whom? So that in particular that last example is just like I was saying, that you know, anything that you do, it's kind of like the prisoner with this illusion of omnipotence or whatever, that all, all of our willful is really childish. Because the reality is that God's presence overwhelms anything that our puny little will could want to do. And so the most that we can do when we will, otherwise, when we put our ambitions into something else.

So we, instead of rejoicing in God, we rejoice in ourselves. That's pride. When we seek honor and glory, instead of just trying to accord with God's will, we're throwing a little childish tantrum which is equally misguided in terms of we're not seeing things clearly, we're making a conceptual mistake. But also it's willful. And I think those are one and the same.

36:26 Wes: I think there's an explanation for why he thinks willfulness is evil. And I don't see this as just an intellectual mistake. So, for instance, when he says ambition seeks honor and glory, although you alone are to be honored before all and glorious forever, that word forever is actually important. Because suppose if I had secured my glory as a teacher of rhetoric, that that were something permanent in the world and the solution to all my problems, and it provided me with peace, tenure, and it could never be taken away. Yeah. Except in Wisconsin.

It would be morally just as legitimate a solution. I think the problem with those solutions for Augustine is their corruptibility, their transience. The fact that you can lose them, they can be taken away. They're actually not the secure footings that I think he's looking for, this secure foundation and to treat them as such in our fantasies. And I think he's absolutely right about this. We treat them as such. We treat them as if they are sort of final solutions. Oh, if once I have this, then everything's going to be all right. No, no, it's more problems, more money, more problems.

37:32 Mark: I still think you can say that's an intellectual mistake, but it's also a moral mistake. And so you end up being blamed for having wrong views about things. Because like you said, the divine ends up being the a Priori. So if you're sort of rightly aligned with God, then things will be clearer to you. Maybe you didn't read the right books yet, maybe you need a little more instruction. Even if you read the right books, if you're not oriented toward God, you're not going to get it. You're going to scorn the correct doctrines.

38:04 Wes: My way of saying this is that you can't be happy for Augustine without God. And this is really about his quest for happiness and how he didn't find it until he found God and the rest of the stuff. He describes it as miserable, even though didn't sound all that bad to me. But teaching positions, the women, the this, that, and I wish he had explained that more, you know, other than this sort of abstract, oh, you can lose these things or it's of this world and it's becoming. I wanted to know what made Augustine so miserable that he was on this quest.

38:35 Dylan: Well, and in fact one particular question would be like. He rails against his position in rhetoric in a number of places and in fact in the next chapter talks about how he falls in love with plays and stuff like that. Did you get anything more out of it than him saying that? And it seeming that it should be plain and obvious why falling in love with plays was terrible. I didn't see him arguing that it was bad a la Plato and the Republic, that certain kinds of rhetoric or speaking or speechifying was bad and that poetry was bad because it wasn't pointed towards the good.

And same thing for rhetoric, that he seems to imply that it was bad, that he was a rhetorician because he was not pointed towards the truth and wasn't speaking well towards the right sorts of things. Yeah, he doesn't seem like he ever says it that way to me. It just seems to be implied that I was a terrible person because I was merely teaching rhetoric and I fell in love with these plays and that on the face of it was going to be obvious that those were yet signs of his depraved soul.

39:41 Wes: I think you're right, Dylan. Most of it's implied. It's sort of the Gorgias argument. He's teaching people how to use words to move up in the world, but he's not teaching them what's good or what's true. And then the only thing with the plays I saw, he does have a whole little discourse on pity. In section three of book three, he talks about plays, the sense in which we go to them and we take pleasure in other people's sorrows. And he contrasts the pleasure of pity with true compassion, which is not really pleasurable because we simply feel the sorrow for the other person. He seemed to be offering an argument there that plays are producing this kind of vicious pity as opposed to real compassion. So that's the only explanation I saw there. But I had the same reaction as you.

40:27 Mark: So is he against real pity for people? I thought his big point here was that these are fictitious situations. Let's read some of that diatribe against pity, then.

40:36 Wes: Book three, chapter two, section three.

40:39 Mark: So that tears and sorrow, it would seem, are things to be sought.

40:42 Wes: That is, when people take pleasure in pitying others.

40:44 Mark: But he's talking about this in the context of how the spectator of a play wants to go and suffer, wants to feel this pity.

40:52 Wes: But then he contrasts compassion. So is compassion feeling for others, even though he's talking about plays, I think he thinks pity in general is to be shunned because it's a way of taking pleasure in other people's sorrow. The sorrows of others must move our love. The distinction is that instead of just simply getting pleasure, that sorrow moves our love. Later on, in that paragraph, the sorrow I feel for him gives me no pleasure, and so on.

41:16 Mark: Still I'm seeing the context to this. Tears and sorrows would seem are things to be sought. Yet surely every man prefers to be joyful. May it be that whereas no one wants to be miserable, there is a real pleasure in pitying others. And we love their sorrows because without them we should have nothing to pity. All this takes its rise in that stream of friendship of which we have been speaking. But where does that stream go? What is the direction of its flow? Why it must run into and lose itself in the torrent of pitch which boils out in great waves of vile lust. For by some inclination in itself friendship is twisted and torn away from its heavenly cleanness.

41:49 Wes: That section I didn't understand. The context here seems to be broader than simply plays now. So he's talking about it arising in friendship and.

41:56 Mark: And then right after that is the part that you started to read. Is compassion feeling for others, therefore to be shunned? By no means the sorrows of others must move our love. But beware of uncleanness, O my soul, under the protection of my God, the God of our fathers, who is to be praised and exalted above all forever. Beware of uncleanness. I can still feel for others, but in those days when I went to theaters, I was glad with lovers when they sinfully enjoyed each other, Although the whole thing was merely fictitious and part of a stage play. And when they lost each other, I was sad for them. But either way, I enjoyed the play. But today I have more pity for the sinner getting enjoyment from his sin than when he suffers torment from the loss of pleasure, which is ultimately destructive, the loss of happiness, which is only misery.

42:34 Wes: So he's switching back and forth between plays and reality. It's not simply limited to plays.

42:39 Mark: It's not that pity is bad. I feel like he's using the terms pity and compassion synonymously.

42:44 Wes: No, he's not. But let me read the next sentence. This clearly is the truer compassion. But the sorrow I feel for him gives me no pleasure. It seems to me he's using compassion to mean when I move to love and sorrow from seeing someone's sorrow, and pity is when I move to pleasure from seeing someone else's sorrow. We know what we mean. Regardless of whether he's really making that semantic distinction, we know there's a distinction between those two things.

43:06 Mark: The question is, like, when we've had discussions about this in the past, part of it is in the context of Nietzsche or more recently in Emerson.

43:12 Wes: Yeah, I thought it was just quite similar to Nietzsche.

43:15 Mark: Well, but I think usually the contrast there is between pity and empathy, that if you simply pity someone, you're really not empathizing with them. You're actually kind of looking down on them. But if you really feel for them and are moved to action like you're talking about, then that sounds like compassion. But look at the way Augustine is using it. He immediately says, you're moved, but don't be unclean. So in other words, you should not sympathize with someone who is suffering because of their sin. In other words, sympathize with them is kind of.

You feel like they feel. So the example he gives is if you are pining for your lost love, well, love itself, romantic love, ends up being, to a greater or lesser extent, sinful. Certainly these people in these plays or in a lots of, you know, if you're thinking about young people who are not married, he would definitely call all these people sinful. And so to sympathize with them, to feel for them, would be pity in the bad sense. Even though we might think, oh, that's being compassionate. No, to him, being compassionate is to actually be judgmental about them is to be kind of a dick.

That you should love the sinner but hate the sin, which is not being sympathetic with them at all. I'm sympathetic with your better.

44:27 Wes: You it depends on your stance there. You're being sympathetic in the sense that you're worried about the damnation of their soul. You're not worried, oh, you know, he lost his wife. How tragic. It's. Oh, how tragic that he's so attached to the things of this world. That's not a great example. But that's in the general.

44:42 Mark: No, Right.

44:43 Wes: So it's still sort of an empathy or sympathy depending on your to distinguish those, but let's not do that. But it's still directed now differently. But you're right, it's more judgmental.

44:53 Mark: This is actually something. I'm a little surprised, but this is something we can directly apply to how people think today and what we think about that.

45:02 Wes: Don't get me started on that.

45:05 Mark: The kind of attitude that he's expressing here of love the sin or hate the sin. But what does that actually mean for how you relate to the actual person? It's that I actually am not going to sympathize with what you're feeling right now because what you're feeling right now is based on you being a fuck up. And the only way in which you can say I have compassion for you or I feel for you is if you were to get your act together and see things from the correct point of view and see how much of a fuck up you are, then you would sympathize with my feeling.

45:33 Wes: I think you're putting it too strongly. You worried about their soul. It's not that you're a total dick now, it's you're worried about their soul as opposed to their worldly concerns. Like I said, that shifting.

45:43 Mark: All right, I guess I'm thinking more of it in terms of how if your pet is suffering. So you worry about your pet, you love your pet and you don't want your pet to suffer. But that doesn't mean that you in any way feel for it in the way that if it's suffering because I want more food, I want more food. That's what my dog expresses. Both of my pets express all fucking day long.

46:05 Dylan: I'm suffering so much.

46:06 Wes: You have put me through this.

46:10 Mark: So the correct sort of compassion, the Augustinian sort of compassion toward them is not to sympathize with them in any way.

46:17 Wes: Well, you're reminding me of the story about his mother when she was young that he tells you about.

46:22 Mark: Oh, tell that. I love that.

46:24 Wes: So she had a. Basically a caretaker who. A servant who was really great. And part of why she was so great was she deprived the mother of Water during the day so that she wouldn't.

46:37 Mark: She wouldn't develop a thirst. She would control her appetites.

46:39 Wes: Yes, to control her appetites. It's like, wow, water.

46:45 Mark: Because if you end up being too thirsty for water, you're gonna end up being thirsty for wine.

46:50 Wes: And then she does. His mother does go through a little drunken period. Do you remember that?

46:55 Mark: Yes. Although it's strange that that comes. You know, it's like, oh, she was raised right by this lady.

47:00 Wes: I know it made no sense.

47:01 Mark: But then it didn't work.

47:03 Wes: It didn't take.

47:05 Mark: Cause she was. As a child, she was asked to go refill her parents cup or something and she would just taste a little of the wine and then eventually she would drink.

47:13 Wes: The opposite explanation is equally plausible, which is that she was deprived of water and developed an oral fixation and then became a drunk.

47:21 Dylan: This is why you should never talk to children about sex. Because if you talk to them about sex, then they're gonna go have sex. But obviously if you don't talk to them about sex and don't expose them, then they'll never have sex.

47:36 Wes: Yes, it always works. Also, make sure they've never heard of the Internet at this point.

47:43 Dylan: There's parts of it where he's applying his own thinking about it, but this bit about saying that his mother was prevented from becoming a drunk by being deprived water such that she learned to tolerate her thirst just seems so weird.

48:05 Unknown speaker: Yeah,

48:07 Mark: the whole thing about his mother is crazy.

48:10 Wes: Yes. His whole relationship to his mother.

48:12 Mark: Yeah, it explains the whole conversion thing, frankly. Very urbane, scholarly influences that are showing him the way of the world, introducing him to different philosophy. But ultimately he feels like he's incomplete until he can come back to where his mother wanted him to be, which is completely straight up Catholic. Giving his life to that.

48:34 Dylan: Well, in fact, at the beginning, he talks about how his mother was so upset with him starting to get it on.

48:42 Wes: Well, I love the part where his father notices he has an erection. It's book two, section six. It's only implied it's six. His father sees him at the baths and rejoices that he's, you know. But it's very obvious what's happened.

48:57 Mark: I thought he caught him spanking it or something.

48:59 Wes: Oh, you went that far? I mean, I don't know. No. So here's the. But during the 16th year, on the contrary, my father saw me one day at the public baths. Now obviously growing towards manhood and showing the turbulent signs of adolescence. The effect upon him was that he already began to look forward to grandchildren and went home in happy excitement to tell my mother. So whatever he saw, it's something sexual.

49:24 Dylan: He rejoiced. Indeed, through that intoxication in which the world forgets you, its Creator, and loves what you have created instead of you. The intoxication of the invisible line of a will perverted and turned toward baseness.

49:41 Wes: Yay. My son had an erection. No, God. All the erections are attributable to God, ultimately.

49:50 Mark: But in Augustine's case, as an immediate.

49:54 Wes: Well, the question of volition and erections now is a curse to me.

49:59 Dylan: Well, but in this section, his mother was upset about this, Right. And she was a Christian, even though he turned to Manicheanism.

50:06 Wes: Yeah.

50:07 Dylan: Ultimately, he goes and becomes the Christian Catholic that his mother wanted him to be and chased.

50:15 Wes: So towards the end of Section 7, she did not want me married because she feared that a wife might be a hindrance to my prospects.

50:22 Dylan: Ah, yes.

50:23 Wes: Not those hopes of the world to come which my mother had in you, O God, but my prospects as a student for. And both my parents are unduly set upon the success of my studies. Okay. My father, ambition, my mother, because she thought that the studies would lead him to God, basically. Okay. So she is sort of focused on the holy thing. She thinks his success will lead him towards becoming a Christian. And his father just wants him to be successful.

50:47 Mark: And right toward the end, in book nine, after he's converted, he talks about her dying. And this is where he goes into a digression and tells the story about the wine. Also tells about how there's a great passage about domestic violence here.

51:05 Wes: Yeah, I knew you were gonna bring that up.

51:07 Mark: The neighbors knew that her husband was a violent man, Patricius. And this might even be the first time they use his name, Augustine's father, Patricius. But there was never a mark to show that he had beat her. And they were surprised about that. When her friends asked her the reason, she taught them her rule. Many matrons with much milder husbands carried the marks of blows to disfigure their faces and would get all together to complain of the way their husbands behaved. My mother, talking lightly but meaning it seriously, advised them against their tongues, saying that from the day they heard the matrimonial contract read to them, they should regard it as an instrument by which they became servants.

And from that time they should be mindful of their condition and not set themselves up against their masters. So it's your fault. You need to be more meek and realize that you are a Servant to your husband. But we shouldn't be surprised that there's something a little archaic in here.

51:59 Dylan: It is, you know, 400 CE, right? Yes.

52:03 Unknown speaker: Yes.

52:03 Mark: And apparently at least one of the quotes that the person who wrote the intro pulled out. He analyzed this whole thing as a condemnation of a lot of the mores of society. Right. The mores of his society expected you to strive towards this literary ambition, that people learned Latin the way people now learn computer languages. That a requirement to professional success.

52:25 Wes: I think he grew up speaking Latin, though. But. Yeah, perfecting it and becoming a scholar of it.

52:29 Seth: Yeah.

52:30 Mark: And so these, like having a common law wife that is someone of your station, but then. Or below your station, but then ditching them when it comes time to have a marriage to somebody who's of a higher rank, that was just absolutely normal. So he was a social liberal because he ended up condemning that. What he had to do, what he did himself in rejecting this person that he'd been with for nine years or something and had a kid with and then ended up sending her away and she became a nun. He thinks that that is despicable. That's one of his confessions. So that's something.

53:04 Wes: Yeah, it was. Was pretty despicable. It's not in the realm of pear

53:07 Mark: stealing, but at least this thing about don't provoke your husband goes is. I think part of the context is that you should be spreading peace wherever you go, that you shouldn't be saying things that will provoke people. You should be a calming influence. That. That's just part of the ethic here. So he talks about how she ends up. She dies of cholera and she's only in her 40s. But once he's converted, he talks about having a conversation with her and how she says, really, this is all I needed to live for. There's really nothing else I want to do.

Like, there's really no point to life now. The whole thing was very depressing. The way he's trying to spin it, that because she died having fulfilled her purpose then. And he has a whole thing on how he grieved for her and how it was kind of shameful to grieve in this case because she died saintly. And so there's no reason to grieve for somebody like that. That person went straight to Jesus. Don't cry for somebody like that. Oh, but I did cry. He did cry when he was on his own. There's a scene before that where they're at the funeral and one of the younger members of their party is lamenting aloud and they shush him.

54:14 Wes: His son. That's his son.

54:16 Mark: Oh, okay.

54:18 Seth: Yeah.

54:18 Wes: His son is crying out for his grandmother and.

54:21 Mark: Yeah, yeah. Doesn't it seem a little depressing that, you know, the fulfillment we were just talking about, you can't be really happy except in God because all of these other things are transitory. Well, her happiness was in her son, Augustine, becoming a true Christian. And once he does that, she doesn't see any point to being alive anymore. She seems to get no pleasure out of the world. She's not like just all happy and saintly. She's like, I might as well die.

54:48 Wes: Well, this brings us to the larger question of what's the point of living at all if all of these corruptible and losable and things are sort of distractions? Right. Why not just cut the whole thing short and return to God? I'm getting at the, you know, sort of Nietzsche critique of this sort of hatred of life and this focus on another world because life is too, too painful.

55:11 Mark: I saw plenty in here to argue against talking about this in general as a hatred of life, that it is easy to get distracted into loving the creations and not just the Creator. But. But the creations are good and loving them is good as long as you sort of clearly have in mind that you're sort of loving the Creator through them.

55:32 Wes: See, I didn't get as much of a sense of that. And part of it is this sort of his quest to escape his sexuality. That's one of the big sticklers in this book that comes up over and over again. It's like, I'm ready to convert, but I couldn't give up women, I guess, unless he's going to become a priest of the church, that's not even necessary. So it's never clear to me why he thinks becoming a Christian.

55:55 Dylan: There's no celibacy at that point.

55:56 Wes: I don't think, oh, is it okay.

55:58 Dylan: I don't believe that celibacy was required. In fact, I wouldn't want to be quoted on it. But I think it is in part Augustine that brings about celibacy in the church.

56:09 Mark: It's more in an imitatio Christi thing. Why? You know, that's. It's one of the positive things you could do to be even more spiritual is to be celibate.

56:17 Unknown speaker: It.

56:18 Mark: It was on the table.

56:19 Wes: Yeah. It's like, okay, I'm going to be a super Christian. It was never clear to me why he thought he had to go all the way like that. If you're going to enjoy Wine and sunsets and remember that they come from God and never forget that and never get wrapped up in lust and all that stuff. But why must he escape sex? He's adamant about it through the whole thing to the point where it interferes with his conversion. So for instance, in book six, it's all about, well, I can't give up women. I mean, that's almost the whole book. It's just odd to me to be very 21st century and obtusely 21st century.

56:54 Mark: You're certainly pointing out a way that one could modernize this text and be a life affirming Christian in that. Yeah, the good kind of sex, the kind between married people that love each other.

57:07 Wes: Procreative.

57:09 Mark: You should enjoy that in the same way you should enjoy sunsets. You should keep God in mind. Maybe have a picture of Jesus next to your bed. Jesus shaped vibrator. I don't know.

57:21 Wes: I saw the hatred of life in this that Mark doesn't think is as strong.

57:24 Dylan: But I mean, what you just described, Mark, is a positive sort of view of the way one ought to have loving relationships or something. It seemed to me that it was a pretty short walk from the way he understands his sexuality is manifesting his willfulness, willfulness against God. That it's a very short walk to. Well, women are the source of my evil. My lust is the source of my evil. And women are the ones who bring out that lust in me and I can't do without them. They're the great temptresses that you very quickly get to. That whole very just despicable thread of women being equivalent to Satan. The path to evil.

58:08 Wes: Yeah, which I think predates this, but.

58:11 Dylan: No, I know, but it reinforces it clearly.

58:13 Mark: The presence of his mother as a character in here and how key she is, I think completely contradicts that whole as a theme. On the other hand, he does refer allegorically when talking about the non godly things he can't let go as his mistresses. I saw a footnote in this version that said, no, actually he's not talking about actual mistresses here. He's using this to refer to just all the stuff that he can't get rid of.

58:39 Wes: I might have misunderstood that.

58:40 Mark: So maybe it is comparable to. He gives another example of going to the gladiatorial games of something that his friend did. Even though his friend was like, that's sinful, that's terrible. Rejoicing in bloodshed like that. But his friends insisted on taking him. He's like, well, I'm Gonna sit here and I'm gonna. Just not even. I'm gonna hold my ears and close my eyes. But then once he opens his eyes, like, he's like, oh, man, this is awesome. And he can't stop going to them.

59:07 Wes: Now, this is a guy. So this is Augustine's friend, and he had been addicted to this?

59:11 Mark: Yes.

59:11 Wes: And then he gave it up. And then they dragged him along again and they got him back into it.

59:17 Mark: Oh, I thought they were just telling the origin story of his addiction. I guess I didn't realize he was re. Addicted.

59:22 Wes: No, no. That was like after he'd already given it up and then he got sucked back into it.

59:27 Dylan: They took him on a bender after he had gone to AA and had his chip for a long time.

59:32 Wes: Exactly.

59:32 Mark: So is his conversion by Augustine into not liking that after he had relapsed or before he relapsed?

59:38 Wes: After he relapsed. And I forget that part of the story, but let me give you just a little flavor of the hatred of life part. So. So. Book three, the first chapter, Section one. For within I was hungry all for the one of the spiritual food which is thyself, my God. Yet, though I was hungry for one of it, I did not hunger for it. I had no desire whatever for incorruptible food. Not because I had abundance, but the emptier I was, the more I hated the thought of it.

1:00:07 Mark: He didn't have any Twinkies. They were those they don't ever spoil.

1:00:11 Wes: Because all this my soul was sick and broke out in sores whose itch I agonized to scratch with the rub of carnal things. Carnal. Yet if there was no soul in them, they would not be objects of my love. My longing then was to love and to be loved. But most when I obtained the enjoyment of the body of the person who loved me. I mean, he's railing against the features of a regular sexual relationship to me. That's the way it seems to me.

1:00:42 Dylan: Thus I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of unclean desire and sullied its limpidity with the hell of lust.

1:00:49 Wes: Yes, that was actually what I was looking for. That was in my notes. The hell of lust thing.

1:00:53 Seth: It's just.

1:00:54 Mark: I don't know if that's all figurative. They did have red rubbing back there, which is because people had these pussy sores from all the illnesses and.

1:01:01 Wes: Okay, that's terrible. But, yeah, there's a lot of those types of passages. And that's why I. This whole hatred of Life thing and wanting to escape to another world and not. And basically because. And for what? Because it's painful when you're not getting desires met or because it's painful to lose what you love or those sorts of things. It seems to me that the proper course is to learn how to. You know, this is a huge theme in psychoanalysis where the fear of loss leads to pathology, the inability to mourn. It seems like the proper path is one of learning to mourn, one of learning to tolerate loss and deprivation, not of continuing to seek until you find this bedrock fantasy. And it's still kind of an omnipotent fantasy. You know, you're placing the omnipotence in God, but you've found someone that you can rest everything on and that you will never lose.

1:01:53 Dylan: Well, so there's a long section on grief and transience in book four. From his age 18 to 27, his friend dies. And he was a friend in the truest meaning of friendship. For there's no true friendship unless you weld it between souls that cleave together through the charity which is shed in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us. So eventually he goes on to understand what friendship is as being properly reflected in friends that are loved in God and therefore you can't lose them. So to Wes point, Augustine describes his deep, deep grief over the loss of his friend in that he begins to solve this by understanding that he can preserve that friendship if he understands it properly as being managed by God.

And then he has this meditation on transience and how to deal with the fact that some things are transient and must cease to be and the ways in which they get preserved. Yeah, so for him it becomes in section after saying that transience must be there, he goes on to explain that God itself does not pass, that things pass, that other things may come in their place and this material universe be established in all of its parts. But I do not part anywhere, but do I depart anywhere, says the word of God. And he goes on to explain that God himself does not pass.

Yeah, this has to do with the way in which things are parts and wholes and how you can have parts that exist as part of a whole, but the whole exists in time. God is eternal.

1:03:45 Wes: And it's another, you know, he mentions this in passing, but his whole idea that even the things that seem evil in life or the sufferings, that we have the whole of creation taken from the omniscient perspective is good. This is part of his explanation of how there's no substantial evil in the world.

1:04:03 Dylan: You're making the criticism in line with Nietzsche's criticism that this is a philosophy founded in the fear of death and the fear of transition.

1:04:14 Wes: Not even just the fear of death, but the fear of loss of any kind, whether the loss of love or the. It could be the death of the loved one, but it could just be the loss of a relationship or the way a relationship changes over time. It could be, you know, sometimes things that seem like very might be trivial disappointments in life actually can be tremendous disappointments and people want to defend against that.

1:04:38 Dylan: And is that the fear of loss or the quest for certainty or those go hand in hand, that the quest for certainty is a way of trying to eradicate loss?

1:04:51 Mark: He does not have a quest for certainty. I guess it depends what you mean by certainty. He's certainly very certain of the conclusions that he comes to, but he thinks again that the human intellect is very weak and fallible and we really ultimately know a lot of things. And so a lot of the problem with Manichaeism is that it promises so much that you will be able to figure this out and then sits down and tells this big story about the nature of everything and it ends up just all being just a fantasy. Bullshit.

1:05:23 Wes: Yeah, I think Dylan was talking more generally about certainty of. Involved in faith in God. Mark, you're talking about the like a Cartesian foundationalism, epistemological certainty, which he definitely. Yeah. He's content to not reach towards that.

1:05:38 Dylan: Well, I guess I would say yes and no. Right. They seem to me to be very, very similar, but drawing the line in a different place.

1:05:45 Wes: Yeah, I mean, ultimately it's a pretty robust bit of knowledge to say that there is a God. He talks about doubt through the whole thing and how he loses his doubt towards the end.

1:05:55 Dylan: So that's what it is, that certainty is really less certainty but lack of doubt, which is both Cartesianism and what Augustine is doing have the same feature of trying to eradicate doubt. And it's not quite the same thing as positive certainty, but both of them are different than trying to come to terms with transformation, transientness, or even mystery for that matter.

1:06:22 Wes: Yeah, for Descartes it's a grounding to the sciences. Augustine doesn't ground the sciences in the same way. For him it's no, it's strictly this theological doubt that's involved.

1:06:31 Mark: So what's so satisfying, even if you don't like Descartes actual arguments, is that at least looks like, you know, it's a very transparent attempt to move logically from one statement to another. Whereas, you know, I described that Augustine, as soon as he brings up a new topic, he starts sort of spilling out what the puzzles are in it. And some of these. So you were talking at book four. I was looking at later chapters in book four where one of the things he had a problem with why he didn't believe the Bible is because it looked like in the olden days the figures in the Bible would have multiple wives.

They would do a lot of stuff that by current, the standards of Augustine's day, was unseemly at best or positively sinful. And so he sort of throws this out as a puzzle, but then instead of kind of moving like Descartes would in a logical way to a resolution of the puzzle, he just says, well, later I found out what the right answer is, and here it is. Which in this case is just that. It's divine command theory. God makes the laws, God can change them as he wants. Really, there is only one consistent divine law, but it just applies differently in different times and places and to different people.

And so it's just like being bothered by evil or any of these things. It's a matter of our finite human perspective that we only see one piece of the tapestry. And if we could see the whole thing, if we could see the whole divine law. God's divine law is so complicated that it's not going to be obvious to us.

1:08:00 Wes: So, yeah, he's critical of looking at ancient times and judging them by our contemporary standards. It's odd because he sort of conveniently becomes an agnostic, or he's not a relativist. Exactly, although it looks a little bit like that. But he's conveniently agnostic when necessary. So such are those who are scandalized when they hear that something was permitted to righteous men in one age and not permitted in another.

1:08:23 Mark: Although we can know that being like sodomites would always be wrong in all times and places, even if everyone was doing it right. For this fellowship that should be between God and us is violated whenever that nature of which he is the author is polluted by perverted lust.

1:08:38 Wes: So where did you skip ahead?

1:08:41 Mark: Section eight of book three.

1:08:43 Wes: He says things like, just as one man in one day and in one house, different things are held fitting for different members, and a particular act is lawful now, but not lawful now or hence, and something is allowed or indeed commanded in one corner, which is forbidden and punished in another. Does this mean that justice is unstable and changeable? No, but the times over which justice presides are not alike, for they are times. And then he talks about men are unable of their own observation to compare the conditions of past ages and foreign nations which they have not experienced with those which they have experienced in the matter.

So you see what he's doing here. He's saying we ought not to be judgmental because we haven't lived in such times and the requirements of the times and context could be different. It's a little bit too convenient, frankly. But it's not the kind of attitude he's going to take anywhere else.

1:09:33 Mark: Well, and so that's why I'm thinking that this is not an argument in the traditional sense of here I've set up a puzzle and now we're driven to this conclusion like Descartes would like us to. It's more. Here's the view, that's the official church view that I subscribe to, that I found out, you know, a number of years after the events that I'm telling about here. And if you mouth these words, it'll satisfy you enough because part of it is admitting the fact that, that we humans are blind and limited. And so we really can't make a judgment about this. So you can't say, I'm going to argue this, I'm going to appeal to your reason. But then one of the essential pieces of appealing to your reason is say, well, your reason is kind of pathetic and you should really just take God's word for it.

1:10:18 Wes: Also, it's in tension with the idea of interpreting the Bible figuratively. Right. Which is his primary solution he describes early on and the confessions being positively turned off by Scripture because of these very types of issues. And the way that I think we're all familiar with that feeling, the idea that you can interpret the Bible figuratively non literally is sort of the key out for him.

1:10:42 Mark: Yeah, but if Abraham has multiple wives, how are you going to interpret that figuratively? He had many jack o' Lanterns wives.

1:10:50 Wes: Augustine doesn't take the idea that the world was created in seven days literally. Do we have to take every character in action as a historical fact? It's not clear to me that we would.

1:11:01 Mark: If you got to Leviticus that's filled with thou shalt not, thou shalt not and very detailed law. And you said we can take this figuratively. That doesn't seem to make any sense. Like you'd have to say like he does that it just doesn't apply in this time and place. But it did there for various reasons.

1:11:17 Wes: Yeah, you're right. You're Right. It's a little harder in those cases.

1:11:21 Mark: I think that's a great idea to read commandments figuratively.

1:11:26 Wes: Well, that's a whole other discussion of where the figurative begins and ends in your interpretation of a text like that.

1:11:31 Mark: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass. I'm gonna read that figuratively to mean pear garden. All right, so pear garden is a good euphemism itself.

1:11:45 Wes: One of the other concerns running through this is the worry about the kind of determinism or fatalism involved in astrology and Manichaeanism, the sense in which they deprive you of any moral responsibility for anything. So book four, Section four, I think that's the first place we get this. All the saving truth the astrologers strive to destroy when they teach that the inevitable cause of sin is in the heavens, that it is the doing of Venus, Saturn or Mars. In other words, that man, flesh and blood and proud corruption is guiltless, and that the guilt lies with the Creator and ruler of heaven and the stars of heaven.

So it's a kind of. I guess it's what Strawson called the objective point of view. And it's a kind of determinism. Well, it's not determinism exactly, but it's the same sort of thing where it gets you off the hook. There can be no such thing as moral responsibility in the case where evil is just, you know, for the Manicheans, or is just a substantial principle that does its work in the world and we're sort of subject to it. Or in the case of astrology, it's the workings of the planets or something like that. And then the next place we get the same sort of theme is in section 18 of book 5.

For I held the view that it was not that we sinned, but some other nature sinning in us. And it pleased my pride to be beyond fault. And when I did indeed evil, not to confess that I had done it, that you might heal my soul because it had sinned against you, I very much preferred to excuse myself and accuse some other thing that was in me. But not I. But in truth, it was wholly I. It was my impiety that had divided me against myself.

1:13:22 Mark: That's why I don't buy that women are evil or something is in here. Because it's always you, even if you're being tempted by things, even if there are things that you should probably avoid. The real emphasis is that it's you that's sinning and you can't get off the hook.

1:13:36 Wes: Yeah, so this gets us, you know, to his whole solution to the problem of evil. So those are the positive parts of it, that sort of. He liked being deprived of moral responsibility. But the negative part is just the puzzle of how God could be responsible for evil. And of course, I think the solution he comes up with is in book seven, section three. So it is the.

1:13:56 Mark: It's free will.

1:13:57 Wes: Yeah, free will.

1:13:59 Dylan: So I set myself to examine an idea I had heard, namely that our free will is the cause of our doing evil and your just judgment the cause of our suffering evil. Yeah, that's an interesting pair there. Right? That we do evil because of our own free will and we suffer evil because of God's judgment.

1:14:20 Mark: Well, we suffer evil. Just to connect this with things we've already said. Why would we call it the suffering evil? Well, it's because we are putting too much value on something that can be taken away. You know, I get hurt and I think I'm suffering evil. Well, if you weren't so goddamn attached to your body, then you wouldn't feel that's particularly evil.

1:14:40 Wes: Yeah.

1:14:40 Dylan: This is the rationale for why it's not bad to torture someone because their body is only part of the corrupt world.

1:14:51 Wes: Really. Was he used in that way?

1:14:53 Mark: Yeah, there's no pro torture section in here that I see, but I see where you're going.

1:14:58 Dylan: But the rationale that we're talking about is part of the rationale of torture during the Inquisition.

1:15:05 Wes: Okay.

1:15:06 Dylan: And it might be going too far to say Augustine's at fault for it. Right?

1:15:11 Wes: Well, I think he would accept the blame. It's his will.

1:15:17 Mark: You know, he's really harsh on himself. You know, this whole thing is just being harsh on himself. And why couldn't I have converted earlier? And I mean that's. But for other people, yes, you're judgmental. We already had the discussion about the difference between pity and compassion. But you still end up, I think if you take him at his word, not being a dick to other people because he remembers when he was like that. And so you wouldn't treat someone as if they should have already reached the conclusions that you reached as the enlightened Christian through hard wrung toil, that's not the way to get them to righteousness is to, oh, you shouldn't be so attached to your body, so I'm going to torture you. That would be not in the spirit of Augustine.

1:16:00 Dylan: I see what you're saying about it. And the words on the face of it are there. And I can understand reading it in that way and just be content with the tension regarding the role of sexuality and lust and depression of loss and dealing with grief, and also his intellectual development regarding the nature of evil. But I confess that I just find myself so skeptical of this kind of language, just from the history of it being used in the church for just horrible doublespeak about the treatment of human beings. When I read it, I feel like, what was he like when he was running the church, you know, or his little section of North Africa?

Was he the compassionate man who understood that this is the way he was when he was young? Or was he more like many church leaders that came after him? Or they justified all kinds of horrible atrocities to other human beings on the basis of this kind of faulty thinking.

1:17:03 Mark: So the way that Peter Brown, who wrote the introduction of my edition here, described it was at the fulfillment of the chapter nine of this book, which ends about 10 years before he's writing. He ends up quitting his job as a literature professor. He didn't then, you might say, oh, he became a monk or something. But they didn't really have monks back then. They didn't have all the church political apparatus quite then. And so he spent a good five years or something there being able to live the life of a philosopher, which was an option there. Like if you were rich enough, you could kind of live as a gentleman.

And yes, he had kind of be a shabby gentleman. He wasn't particularly rich. So it was only later that he was sucked into becoming a priest over an actual flock. Like that was not. It was not that people were anti clerical, but actually having to do the duties of a clergyman was seen as kind of a drag, at least that's the way he saw it. And that he was essentially put in charge of what amounted to small claims court. So he was not like issuing grand decrees to send heretics to the flames. He was like dealing with. With these people coming to him complaining about his sheep were on my land and crap like that.

That's what he was like as a church leader, as he's dealing with a bunch of crap like that and hippo. And then at this point he was sick and feeling like he might not live given how many people like his mother and you know, were dying of various ailments and, you know, so he was really writing this as a way, even though he ended up then living 30 years more after this. But he didn't really think that he was at that point. And he was kind of being wistful for the time where he didn't have to have a job as a clergyman where he could just be one with the Lord.

1:18:45 Wes: Yeah, he complains a lot about the

1:18:47 Mark: teaching job, and really this is all about him and his God. And the introduction also says that this was meant to be read aloud, that the way he wrote it, he was really influenced by Psalms, and that's what he quotes the most. And he saw the Psalms as David's personal prayers to God. And so he was really trying to do something just like that. He was trying to give his own personal prayers to God that could then be used to inspire people in the same way that he was inspired by the Psalms. So the way this is supposed to be used is to kind of read to each other as a sacred new kind of inspirational literature to get other people to accept Jesus in the way.

The same way, you know, he describes his own conversion as very much driven by books, some key teachers as well, but also just that he read a book at a certain time, you know, about some people who converted without any wrangling that he had gone through. You know, he reads a story about these guards that go to a hut and meet some peasants who are living a monastic kind of lifestyle. And they're so inspired by them, they immediately say, we're not going to go back and be Roman guards anymore. We're just going to take it. And Augustine takes that as like a personal life, like, well, crap, why can't I be that sure of myself?

He does have a few political comments, you know, just like he has comments about everything that sort of comes across his path in here. A few comments about, you know, of course we should obey kings and things like that. That's sort of what the social contract is, is obeying kings, but as a matter of course, spits that kind of stuff out. But to think that he's making any sort of social prescriptions or saying something about how the state should punish people or whether conversion should be forceful or anything is just so beyond his intention here, it's crazy.

1:20:33 Wes: You know, Mark, you were mentioning the books. So the thing that sort of starts him off is this Hortensius by Cicero, which is an exhortation to philosophy that sort of gets him to the point of thinking about these things.

1:20:46 Mark: Becoming a truth seeker.

1:20:48 Wes: Becoming a truth seeker. Yeah. And moving him away from the Manichaeanism.

1:20:52 Mark: That wasn't before he even discovered Manichaeism. I thought that was like, early on, that he just like philosophy in general. Cicero got him into that.

1:21:00 Wes: Maybe you're right.

1:21:01 Mark: And Manichaeanism is one of the things he explored, it seems. Actually it's kind of an intellectually permissive climate that people could just look into these different sects and heresies and stuff. And there wasn't any strong arming people over it.

1:21:14 Wes: Yeah, there was something, actually, when he was up in Milan, I think Justina was emperor for a while, and she tried to take over some of the churches there for the Arians. And I don't know. I think that's a Christian sect. Right. And they resisted it. This is his pal Ambrose, who was also a key figure in getting him ultimately converted, but resisted that. So there were some of those sorts of conflicts between these different sects. But eventually Justina actually backed down. And it didn't get violent. But. Yeah, so there was the Cicero. He was enamored of the academics, who are basically skeptics in the Pyrrhonian sense. You know, sort of agnostics suspending belief about things, though.

1:21:57 Mark: Not actually agnostics about God. No. Nobody on the table that he seriously considers. Like, he was just raised. Of course God exists. Like, that's not in question. The question is, like, is the Bible an accurate representation of God? And other stuff like that that he considers astrology. He has a flirtation with that astrology.

1:22:15 Wes: Yeah. In fact, that's one of the things he has a hard time kicking that because he talks about. You know, he has people around him who say, oh, that's bullshit. And he still can't give it up, even after it's been explained to him. Well, just because someone said it happened and then it happened. That's called chance. They say a lot of things happen. Most of them don't turn out. The one thing that turned out isn't evidence for the accuracy of astrology. I found those little accounts amusing. Yeah. And then his disappointment with Faustus. That's actually before the academic skepticism phase. Faustus was the Manichaean. You know, he'd been looking forward to meeting this guy and hearing the ways of the Manichaeans, sort of defended then the Neoplatonists. So it really is an intellectual development, but one that somehow pushes him in the direction of Christianity and faith.

1:22:59 Mark: I had a note here of a recurrent thing, humble bragging that he does a lot of. In describing his whole schooling, like, and the Faustus thing in particular is, you know, I found that I could understand all these books without anybody explaining them to me. And then when he finally meets this supposed expert in Manichaeism, he finds that, like, the guy doesn't know. He doesn't know shit. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

1:23:21 Wes: Yeah, he says something about reading Aristotle's categories unaided, how easy it was for

1:23:26 Mark: him, just what an awesome student he was. But then the reason it's humble is because it's always coupled by. But it was so misdirected since I didn't have God.

1:23:35 Wes: What does it matter that I was brilliant if I don't have God?

1:23:39 Mark: I didn't have the correct way. Yeah, I was that awesome. I'll take his word for it. If he's the guy that wrote one of the few books from this era that survived because it was so beloved, I'm sure he was one of the most brilliant guys around. Sure. I don't mind him pointing that out,

1:23:57 Wes: but the whole, you know, he's a rhetorician and there's a, there's a rhetorical strategy here with the prayers. Obviously, I think all of us find it off putting. Is that just our level of prejudice at this point in history or is it.

1:24:09 Mark: You mean the, the pervasive biblical quotes are just.

1:24:12 Wes: Yeah, the. Oh, God and this. Yeah, the ass kissing towards God.

1:24:17 Mark: So I found myself thinking about this because the way that the introduction that Brown described it is that memory was really prized in this era. And he just created his own internal Bible. Like he read especially psalms so much that they just became part of his lexicon that he could just pull these things out. And it's not just like these are like jazz riffs. Yes, yes. And so I started thinking about that, that that's how a lot of pop songs are to us. Like we know the lyrics so well that we could just, you know, if somebody says something, if we're trying to express same, we might say, you know, time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. But we would feel like complete goofuses doing that kind of stuff.

1:24:57 Wes: No, we'll be more like quoting literature, not pop songs.

1:25:02 Mark: But that's the social function that they played for him. Like if you sing these songs to yourself and they sort of become in a social thing, like that's what the Bible was. They didn't have much entertainment. This is what he got into. This is his jam.

1:25:17 Dylan: They went to plays.

1:25:19 Mark: Well, that's true. And he also uses things, you know, some of the quotes are from classical sources. They're not just from the Bible.

1:25:25 Dylan: Are you talking about the prayers in addition to the quotes from the Bible or are you distinguishing them?

1:25:33 Mark: There's no difference.

1:25:35 Wes: Well, often all these, according to these footnotes that Mark and I have when he's saying all these things. They're often references to the Bible. So his prayer is, you know, oh Lord, for in this way you form the offspring of this, our death, blah, blah, blah. You know, all of that stuff, most of it is actually referring back to the Bible.

1:25:53 Mark: Especially those places where I was saying that the solution that he says ends up seeming like a little bit of a non sequitur from the problem he set up. It's because, oh, you know, later I discovered that I am. I like, oh, because that's a quote from the Bible.

1:26:08 Wes: So he's.

1:26:08 Mark: The solution that he's coming is just. Just something verbatim that he's then not going to. In this context, explain. I'm sure he had many sermons where he explained this stuff at great length. It's just the shorthand he's using for this particular document.

1:26:21 Wes: It's I am that am.

1:26:23 Mark: Right, yes. That was merely an example, but it was one of many. Yeah, I am that I am. That's what I had here at the

1:26:31 Dylan: beginning of book six. He says, oh God, my hope from my mouth. Where were you all this time? Where had you gone? For was it not you who created me and distinguished me from the beasts of the field and made me wiser than the birds of the air? Yet I walked through dark and slippery places and I went out of myself and searched for you and did not find the God of my heart. I had come into the depths of the sea and I had lost faith in all hope of discovering the truth. So what you're saying is that I should understand these prayers, these call outs here as the soundtrack. Transitional soundtrack for the book where they're all little callbacks to specific sections of the Bible.

1:27:17 Wes: Yeah. There are seven different references there to Psalms and to Job.

1:27:21 Mark: They're samples.

1:27:22 Dylan: It makes sense to me that they would be explicit references to particular sections of the Bible. But I was reading them as also his consistent theology.

1:27:32 Mark: Yes, they are the content of his thought. He's so internalized these biblical passages that like, that's just the way he thinks. It's not just a stretch and throwing in a gratuitous quote.

1:27:41 Wes: Yeah. And this is not an unusual. If you read a speech by a literary person these days, you know, there's lots of references to literary texts and to, you know.

1:27:50 Dylan: Yeah, but that's why it's not the Bible. Right? I mean, just because they're referring to. And in sections of the Bible, it's not a straightforward just re rendition of that. It's actually an interpretation of it, it's him, right?

1:28:04 Mark: It's an authentic expression. I don't know if it's an interpretation it implies, but if just.

1:28:09 Dylan: Well, this is where I think we're disagreeing is that it doesn't seem to me that it's merely a expression, a kind of knee jerk quotation of the Bible, but rather him paraphrasing multiple sections all at once. And it seems to me that those were examples of things that were utterly and deeply consistent throughout the book, revealing his end state theological interpretation of things, both in his asking questions. Those questions are always presuming, you want to say implicit, but they're almost utterly explicit proper answers to those questions. And that it's his interpretation of the Bible because he in fact doesn't think that the Bible is a literal document anyway. I mean, it's the running solution throughout the book.

1:28:57 Wes: Yeah, I would agree with that. So I think that's where maybe, Dylan, you're reacting to Mark's riffs or whatever you were saying Mark about they don't seem throwaways.

1:29:05 Dylan: I mean, I didn't really like them, but they don't seem to be throwaways in terms of the way the book is working and in terms of what he's trying to say and the nature of his confession and all that stuff, both in terms of the content and in terms of the way he's saying it. I still haven't even really sorted out what it means for him to be speaking this particular way all the time,

1:29:25 Wes: except that it's annoying.

1:29:29 Mark: So he lives and breathes this stuff. He has to do it in his daily work. He also, we know, was a trained orator before this. And one of the conventions of oration was also bringing in quotes like this. So it is not at all surprising that he would be quite masterful at weaving these things together into an original tapestry.

1:29:50 Wes: Right?

1:29:51 Mark: In saying is it an interpretation or not? It's just that so many of them are just in the exhortations, in the ass kissing of God parts. Just like I don't think the question of is this to be taken literally or not applies to the commandments. I don't think taking this literally or not applies to the exhortations of love. In what sense would you not be taking. It's already imagistic. There's no hermeneutic problem with the Psalms in particular that needs to be addressed by saying we're not taking this literally. So I just think it's an irrelevant consideration. So it's hard for me to say all these many quotes, if 90% of them are in the here's how much I love God. It's hard for me to say that those are interpretive in some way, but maybe you're talking about the small amount, like the I am as I am that are supposed to be substantially saying something.

1:30:39 Dylan: Even if parts of them are quotations, it doesn't seem to me that they rise to mere quotations. I mean, I think they're concatenations of things, at the very least, which he's put together in a particular way on purpose.

1:30:54 Mark: This is a new way of using quotes. It's not the irritating way that Schopenhauer did in what we just read, where he would make his point and say, just like Cicero would say, and then give something to basically express the same thing that he already said. That was kind of gratuitous, just to show that he's all fancy. Even Schopenhauer did that in a way that showed he was really knowledgeable about all these texts. The fact that he could figure out an apt quote from one of these things, if not that knowing that quote may even shaped his view in the first place.

There's something else going on here. It's much more internalized. Okay, we haven't still gotten back to the phenomenology of will. So it's what we were talking about on the Eva episode, on our last episode, that he is asking himself, like, you know, I knew what the truth was, I knew what the correct doctrines were, but yet I still couldn't give myself fully to a Christian life. I couldn't give up women. Why is that? Well, it's not because there's the will that is reason. And my reason and my will were telling me to do this, but yet I had these foreign animal impulses in me that were pulling me the other way.

It's not like Plato's picture of the. At least is my interpretation of Plato here, of the gold soul, silver soul, brass soul, and that we all have these faculties within us, the brain, the heart and the balls that are pulling us in different directions. It's that my will was divided, the two wills thing.

1:32:17 Wes: That's book eight, section 24. He's talking about inner conflict. When we're conflicted between doing two things as having two wills. And he's objecting to the Manichaeans who might say that one is a willing towards evil and one is towards good, said Section24. Therefore, when they perceive that there are two wills in conflict in man, they must not say that there are Two opposing minds in conflict, one good, one bad. From two opposing substances and two opposing principles.

1:32:46 Mark: Yep. Which is what sounds like the wisdom of my balls is pulling one way and the wisdom of my brain is pulling the other way. Like that's not the way to talk about it.

1:32:55 Wes: Yeah. Because you could be deliberating between two evil things. So that's his example. Like whether to take a man's property or to spend money on lust or something like that. So it's not like your options are always one good option, one bad option. But I'm unclear on where does this get us with this two wills thing.

1:33:11 Mark: It's sort of too specific to the Manichaeans, this particular argument that he's giving. Because they have this view that we are dual souled. And who knows if this is even a good representation of their view. It sounds pretty damn uncharitable to me that whenever we're indecisive about something, it's because one of the wills is pulling one way. The good angel on your shoulder and the bad devil on your shoulder. And those are both part of your psyche. Because then as soon as there are other options, there would be more souls. It would proliferate.

1:33:37 Wes: Let's go to a better place for the phenomenology of the will. Maybe section 21 is better.

1:33:41 Dylan: There's this section that says, why does the will not obey the mind's orders?

1:33:44 Mark: Yeah, do that.

1:33:46 Wes: Why this monstrousness? That's the.

1:33:47 Dylan: Yes.

1:33:48 Wes: The beginning of chapter nine of book eight. The mind gives the body an order and is obeyed at once. The mind gives itself an order and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to move, and there is such readiness that you can hardly distinguish the command from its execution. Yet the mind is mind, whereas the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will. The mind is itself, but it does not do it. That's the monstrous thing he's talking about.

1:34:13 Dylan: Yeah.

1:34:14 Wes: And what is the root of it? This mind, I say, commands itself to will. It would not give the command unless it willed. Yet it does not do what it commands. The trouble is that it does not totally will. Therefore it does not totally command. It commands insofar as it wills, and it disobeys the command insofar as it does not will. So we get these partial willings. Now the will is commanding itself to be a will commanding itself, not some other. But it does not in its fullness give the command so that what it commands is not done. For if the will were so in its fullness, it would not command Itself to will, for it would already will.

So willing to will is already partial. It's already flaking out. Essentially, it's like saying, I'm gonna go on a diet as opposed to just not eating the pizza. It is therefore, no monstrousness partly to will, not to will, but a sickness of the soul to be so weighted down by custom that it cannot wholly rise even with the support of truth. This is the theme we've seen through the book. Where he's trying to figure out why he went on this long journey, right? Why he sort of knew all along where he had to go, but he couldn't do it. It why it took him so long to give up the worldly things.

And then the last sentence. Thus there are two wills in us because neither of them is entire. And what is lacking to the one is present in the other. So this now sounds like to have a whole willing. You have two partial wills coming together into unity. The two wills thing is related to the partial wills thing.

1:35:45 Mark: That doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound like that. Whenever we have a whole will, it's because these partial wills come together. It's that the natural way, the pure way, is to have a whole, single will. But that you can be fractured because of sin.

1:35:59 Wes: That last sentence. Thus there are two wills in us because neither of them is entire. And what is lacking to one is present in the other.

1:36:05 Mark: No, that's in the bad situation. That's in the infirmity. That's not the normal situation. There is an affirmative mind pressed down by habit. And so there are two. I'm just looking at my notes here, but that's how I read this.

1:36:16 Wes: I'm saying it applies to both situations. Because it could be that both wills are in harmony.

1:36:21 Mark: That's gotta be wrong. I see. This is in section 10.

1:36:25 Dylan: Section nine.

1:36:25 Mark: No, section nine.

1:36:27 Wes: So he is talking about failures of willing here. Okay. The sickness of the soul, weighted down by custom that it cannot wholly rise even to the support of truth. Thus there are two wills in us. Yes, you could take that one to refer to the weight of custom. But neither of them is entire. What is lacking to the one is present in the other. That's the part which makes me think they're complementary or could be complementary.

1:36:50 Mark: No, I think it just means that in this case, where we are divided against ourselves, you can't sketch out, like, what are the qualities that one has that are missing in the other. It's just that they should be part of a whole. But since they're divided Then the part of the whole that is lacking one is in the other. That's just what part whole means. That's all I'm.

1:37:09 Wes: Oh, I see, I see. But it's lacking the ones. Okay, I get it.

1:37:12 Mark: Yeah. No, I think it's really important that

1:37:14 Wes: we are not so the meta will. So I'm just trying to figure this out. So the meta will has the.

1:37:19 Mark: There is no meta will.

1:37:20 Wes: There's two wills. There's willing to will. He's talking about willing to will.

1:37:24 Dylan: But why is it meta will and not just the proper activity of the will? The will, it's reflexive.

1:37:29 Mark: Yes.

1:37:29 Dylan: So because the body, the hand is not a hand. The hand is body, but mind is mind. And so it's this reflexive nature of the mind.

1:37:40 Wes: But if I will myself to pick up a pen, there's no reflexive. I just will my body and it does it. There's no conflict there.

1:37:47 Mark: And that's the way it should work with all things.

1:37:50 Wes: But in cases of conflict, I will myself to will. Yes, that's why I'm calling it a meta will. So I have the meta will, and then the proper will. And the proper will is lacking.

1:38:00 Dylan: The disagreement is calling it a meta will and a proper will. What I'm reading Augustine to be saying is that the distinction of the will in contrast to the body is that it. It has this reflexive feature. But it's not that every act of will is always reflexive. Just like not every act of thinking is thinking about thinking, but you can think about mathematics. You can think about the computer in front of you, but you can also think about thinking. And that thinking about thinking is not meta thinking, it's thinking and the will. When you will your arm to move, that's willing. And when you will your will, it's willing.

1:38:37 Wes: Yeah, except that the willing yourself to will. That's the case in which the command is not executed.

1:38:43 Mark: It only happens when there's something wrong. Is that right?

1:38:46 Wes: The will is commanding itself to be a will. Commanding itself, not some other. But it does not, in its fullness, give the command so that what it commands is not done.

1:38:55 Mark: Yeah, so this is all still describing the infirmity, not the norm.

1:38:58 Wes: I'm taking this as that in these reflexive cases are cases of failure. And you guys are saying these reflexive cases could be successful.

1:39:07 Dylan: Yeah, and read the next sentence. I think you're right, Wes. For if the will were so in its fullness, it would not command itself to will, for it would already will at the very Least even if it's not a meta will, it's that willing your own will is a sign of your incontinence in some respect.

1:39:26 Wes: Okay, exactly.

1:39:28 Dylan: Your will would always be acting just in the same way as willing your arm to move up. Your will would be in complete alignment with what it would ought to do. Those moments when you're willing your own will to exerting that willpower to convince yourself of something that is a sign that you're sort of out of alignment, to use in anachronistic term.

1:39:47 Wes: Wasn't Eva associating Augustine with willpower?

1:39:50 Mark: Yes, that you're white knuckling it, but

1:39:53 Wes: no, this makes me think that he's not advocating willpower because it never works.

1:39:57 Dylan: Well, she says he's the origin of the notion of will, where that will, the Western notion of will. She has these two threads, one which runs through Aquinas and peters out and the one that runs through Augustine, where the will is the source of evil.

1:40:17 Mark: Yes. And we have to remember that the way that her historical dialectic thing worked is not so much that Augustine intended that the result of his system be that we all white knuckle it, that we all just push through with willpower. Because just like it was not Nietzsche's intention that everybody be a dick who's trying to take power over everybody else. But we had that exchange about. Well, that's one of the illogical but expected consequences. And so in the same way, except

1:40:43 Wes: it wasn't a consequence in the same way.

1:40:46 Mark: So said the argument, this is the same thing that Dylan was arguing earlier, that he's seeing things that are pretty natural outgrowths, you know, a hatred of women and stuff that come out of this. But they're not in this at all. They're not actually in the spirit of Augustine, if you read him carefully and really try to keep to his spirit. And I think the same thing here.

1:41:04 Dylan: And you're exactly right, Mark. That's exactly the move that I was making.

1:41:07 Wes: This is actually a very interesting account of incontinence. Akrasia, as Aristotle called it.

1:41:14 Dylan: Do you think that it's the same kind of account of incontinence that Aristotle makes? It depends on what kind of failure are we talking about. In both cases, incontinence is a failure for Aristotle and is clearly a failure in Augustine and is the source of evil.

1:41:31 Wes: So for Aristotle, it's a conflict between what you know you should do and habit.

1:41:37 Mark: That sounds very much like this.

1:41:39 Wes: And that's the akratic man, akrasia and to be virtuous, you really have to be habituated in the right way. And it does though. It does actually.

1:41:46 Dylan: Yeah.

1:41:47 Wes: Sound quite similar.

1:41:48 Dylan: And that if you were properly habituated, it wouldn't even be an act of will, so to speak.

1:41:54 Wes: Well, it would be an act of will, but not willpower.

1:41:56 Dylan: Yeah, yes. You wouldn't be trying to do it. You would be just doing it.

1:41:59 Mark: Yeah, I was gonna say. Oh, but to do it the right way, it's not a matter of habit. Because he usually talks about habit as a negative thing. But clearly in the example of her mother being conditioned by her guardian to not need to drink so much. There are good habits too, according to this. So, yes, part of the discipline would be to gain those good habits.

1:42:18 Wes: But really, in the end, habituation is not Augustine's solution. You have to rely on God.

1:42:23 Dylan: That's right. You have to turn to God.

1:42:25 Mark: Okay, so this is very much in line with. Is he merely quoting Scripture? No, he has so internalized Scripture. It is habitual for him.

1:42:34 Wes: No, no, no. But this is really is his solution, though. The idea is that we don't have the power in ourselves. We can't rely on ourselves.

1:42:42 Dylan: Yes, that's right.

1:42:43 Wes: We do need to prostrate ourselves before a divine being and rely on that being if we're going to accomplish. That's how he becomes saved in the end there.

1:42:52 Dylan: Eradicating doubt is a big part of that. With God at your side, you would have no doubt about the behavior of your will. You wouldn't fail, except insofar as you're a finite being and all that stuff. But it's the quest for eradicating doubt, eradicating sin.

1:43:09 Wes: Let's look at his conversion. That's actually a good question. I mean, because it seemed to me like he had gotten rid of a lot of doubt and he still couldn't pull it off. So what happens that allows him to pull it off in the end?

1:43:18 Dylan: Just to finish my own thought, I was just trying to see what the distinction for Aristotle and Augustine would be in essentially having something very similar to habit. In both cases, that is, the activity of the soul is. It just does what it ought to do without having to act upon itself to do it. So in the case of Aristotle, you develop habits and you exercise your excellence in the right way. You get to the point where you just do those things naturally as part of your own activity. And something similar is going on with these multiple wills in Augustine. But it seems like the end is different in Augustine. It has to do with an alignment with God and with Aristotle. It seems to have to do with being excellent, being the most who you are as a human being.

1:44:11 Mark: Yeah, but of course Augustine is just trying to take that Aristotelian picture and say, oh well, what you most fully are as a human being is obeying the law of God. Like that's what human excellence is. And so you could apply all the same.

1:44:25 Dylan: Well, but it seems to take an interesting turn there. Right. By pointing itself outward.

1:44:32 Mark: What do you mean pointing itself outward?

1:44:33 Dylan: Well, pointing itself towards God. Right. It's only by the grace of God,

1:44:37 Mark: you know, I understand that. It's not a self moved thing.

1:44:40 Dylan: Yes, okay.

1:44:41 Wes: No, I think that's a perfect point because I was asking what is it that got him in the end to finally convert? And it's kind of grace. Right. This is book 8, section 29, where he just opens a book randomly to read a passage of scripture and he gets the right thing. It's a lottery. He wins the lottery. It's chance.

1:45:01 Mark: It's exactly the opposite of white knuckling it. The opposite of will. Will is all bad in this story. It's not the goodwill versus the bad will. Yeah.

1:45:10 Wes: So he opens it up and he does this because he heard some children take and read, take and read. He heard some children saying this from afar or something. And so he goes and gets the Bible and he opens up to a random place and it says, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurity, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences. Which again goes to this whole theme of not relying on the material world for your sustenance, but for something more stable and permanent. And solves his problem of the possibility of loss and striving and all that.

1:45:46 Mark: It's grace and there's sin. So just to go Back to book 8, chapter 10, the alternative to there were two minds and they were arguing, it's that there's one mind, there's strife in me. The strife was against my will, but did not show the presence of another mind, but the punishment of my own mind. It was the sin that dwelt in me and the punishment for the sin freely committed by Adam and I was the son of Adam. These are what my notes say. So it's my own fault. Sin is the stain that is on me. It's still me doing it, but it's kind of the unintended consequence of my rebellion. And we're like that from. Yes, we didn't talk about this part, but his whole beginning is how sinful babies are. You might think that babies are so innocent, but no, we are primordially little monsters. Little sinful monsters.

1:46:38 Dylan: Little willful monsters.

1:46:40 Wes: Yes. He starts shitting on himself from the very beginning of the biography.

1:46:44 Mark: It's hard to say that that's your fault. But he points out here it's the punishment for the sin freely committed by Adam. And I'm the son of Adam. So that's the way of saying I'm responsible for the. The son is to be condemned for the sins of the Father. That kind of bullshit.

1:47:02 Dylan: Importantly, because every act is an act of will in this respect. So because you continue to follow the sins of the Father, you are doing that of your own will, your own free will, and therefore you are culpable because of that. Yeah, it's not your nurture, it's your nature. In fact, it's not even that, it's you in your act. Every act you do is an act of will. So it's like Schopenhauer in that respect.

1:47:30 Mark: Yep.

1:47:31 Wes: I mean, you could tell the same story of our biological predilection to egotism. They're all survival mechanisms. Right? The crying of the baby and its neediness and all those things which Augustine sees as inherently sinful or what Freud called the ego instincts. Basically the narcissistic stuff. Our self centered, give me, give me what I need, give me what I need world type of stuff.

1:47:52 Mark: But the solution is not, like Schopenhauer says, to give up your will is to become will less. The solution is in book nine, I no longer willed to do what I willed, but willed to do your will. So you still remain willful.

1:48:05 Wes: Yeah, interesting.

1:48:07 Mark: But you just are correctly aligned. You're whole, you're free in your servitude. Because your attempts to rebel were all illusory anyway in the face of the overwhelming power of God. So God is truth. Just get in line with that and then we'll operate correctly.

1:48:23 Wes: And if you just stay quiet and do what God wants, he doesn't hit you as much. Sorry to bring it back to demonstration.

1:48:32 Mark: No, that's if you're responsible for your own suffering. That's kind of. That's a good metaphor. A good terrible metaphor from Augustine's own malch.

1:48:43 Wes: That's true.

1:48:44 Mark: You should be angry with yourself, with good cause. I have another quote that he had here. Your ultimate disposition is not quietude, it's not willlessness, it's being quite vigilant. And a hearty follower of your God, internalizing him as the superego.

1:49:03 Wes: You know, I'm thinking now of all the self help books that have been written which are trying to help people solve the problem of incontinence. That's really what it's all about, right? Why can't I just do this? Why can't I, you know, how am I going to lose weight or start choosing better relationships or things like that? It's a very appealing idea to say in the end. And this is sort of part of aa, right? It's this whole idea of surrender. I don't have the power. It's almost like it's a giving up of the struggle part, you know, the giving up of the willpower part and that whole game that we always inevitably lose. I don't know how it works exactly because I've never experienced the surrender to the higher being part and how that helps, but it's definitely appealing.

1:49:44 Mark: All right, I think that's a good end for this discussion and we can take up some of the metaphysical issues

1:49:49 Dylan: and anything that's left over before we sign off. I just feel compelled to give a shout out to some people that I met when I was in Anaheim. I went to this coffee shop called Ink and Bean. It was a coffee saloon and word shop and it was one of the coolest places I'd ever been to with old typewriters and writing implements and just really awesome place. They were great. Good coffee, cool writing stuff. It was fun. So if you're in Anaheim, you should go there.

1:50:20 Wes: Awesome.

1:50:21 Dylan: That's my closing. If you're in Anaheim, go to the Ink and Bean because it was awesome. Will yourself there.

1:50:26 Mark: So that's your closing. So

1:50:30 Wes: do you have a.

1:50:31 Mark: Do you have any other closing thoughts, Wes? I feel like I expelled all my energy myself.

1:50:40 Wes: No, I think the self help book thing would suffice.

1:50:43 Mark: I was red rubbing it.

1:50:46 Wes: What do you say? What is the red rubbing it?

1:50:48 Mark: That's just a new term that I've made up for in a time where people have lots of open source. It's a new kind of sexual deviation that makes use of the open source. Oh God.

1:50:58 Dylan: You made that up. I was kind of hoping that you had read that that was true somewhere. But it really is just revealing the kind of mind you have that you just made that up.

1:51:09 Mark: No,

1:51:12 Dylan: that's a perfect way to end a book on a discussion of Augustine.

1:51:16 Wes: Yes. The mind of a pervert.

1:51:19 Dylan: There's nothing more to say, Mark.

1:51:21 Mark: Well,

1:51:24 Seth: you know.

1:51:25 Mark: No, I'm not Gonna respond to that. But it's related. Actually, it's quite related that. So my first attack on this was through the Librivox version. It's a different translation. It's the Albert C. Outler translation. And I listened to the whole thing at double speed. So I, you know, I was more or less skimming it. I was trying to figure out like what sections should we read. And I got through the whole book and I remember emailing you guys angrily, like, everything up before book eight is just a complete waste of time. There's like no ideas expressed at all.

Thinking that maybe we should just do one episode on it, just on the later stuff. But then after some time passed and we had the discussion with Eva and she was so in her book, enamored of Augustine. And then it really opened me up. So I feel like I surrendered myself, if not to God, then at least to Augustine, to enjoying this. And I did more or less enjoy it. So I still, on the second time through, I read the first few chapters and then I just ended up re listening to the Librivox for a bunch of it, stopping a lot and taking notes. So I didn't have a lot of your Wes, your verse numbers were not in my notes because that was not in the audio version.

I had book and chapter, but still those are small enough chunks that you can feel comfortable in them. And just as a narrative, you were saying if there wasn't so much ass kissing toward God, it would have been a page turner. And I kind of feel, yeah, it

1:52:46 Wes: could be edited, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Except for, I mean, I really did have to put it down at times just because I just. I don't know what it is. Like it almost infuriates me, the whole oh God stuff. And despite people know I'm not anti religion and maybe it's a product of my own lack of humility or something. And that level of humility is just irritating.

1:53:08 Mark: It's the style. So you might be completely like, I'm not homophobic at all. I'm completely cool. But then you see Brokeback Mountain and you're like, ah, maybe I don't want to actually watch that. I'm just saying that's a stage in becoming more comfortable.

1:53:23 Wes: I enjoyed Brokeback Mountain as uncomfortable as it was, but it's just something you

1:53:28 Mark: need to get accustomed to. Being okay with it in the abstract is not the same as being exposed to it.

1:53:32 Dylan: Amen.

1:53:33 Wes: It feels like padding and it's repetitive. It's just boring. Frankly. And it's. And also the masochism of it that makes me want to slap him. The whole arc of it, the internal arc to get over his worldly attachments and find God and all that. And the biography itself, it's quite interesting. And I just even became fascinated by, wow, what an amazing window it is into the Late Roman Empire and daily life and how contemporary, in a way, it seems. I mean, it had me looking up history of that era and even just finding all the archaeological images I could of people's houses and the way they lived and just how insanely contemporary it all seemed. It's really amazing. And that sort of went on for hundreds of years. People lived that way.

1:54:17 Mark: My favorite parts of the book were some of the parts that we kind of skimmed over in this discussion to, like book five, where he's talking about the life of an academic at the time, like that he went to Rome from wherever he was. Before that, from Milan, maybe. I don't know, because he heard the students were quiet, that they wouldn't just burst in on people's lectures in the way that they would in his current school. But then when he got to Rome,

1:54:39 Wes: they weren't constantly looking at their iPhones.

1:54:40 Mark: When he got to Rome, he was appalled that a lot of students wouldn't pay their fees. They'd come and show up to his lectures, and then they wouldn't pay him.

1:54:48 Wes: It was still 100 years out until they had invented student loans so that they could just preemptively impoverish students before they even arrived. You still had a choice about whether to pay.

1:55:01 Mark: Yeah. All right, so as we wrap up this discussion, let's also hear from Seth Paskin, who, you might notice, disappeared early on in the conversation, but is now, a couple weeks later, back and healthy again. So, Seth, just to give you an opportunity to vent a little about Augustine. Well, tell us what was going on there. What happened to you during the episode?

1:55:21 Seth: Well, it was certainly not by choice, so I apologize to the listeners. I had prepared for the episode, and I was particularly interested in the conversion story. That really had a strong effect on me. And I had gone to dinner with my wife, and we had been discussing it, and I was very excited to talk about this notion of the conversion experience. And during the early part of the conversation, when the guys were getting off and some of the finer points of metaphysics and various other things that Augustine was talking about, I started to develop kind of a headache and got a little disoriented.

I think I had some kind of a little food allergy reaction and ended up having to bow out because I just couldn't stay focused on the conversation and felt a little under the weather. So it was a disappointment. But I did want to comment about what was interesting about the arc of the narrative around the fact that Augustine distinguishes between two phases of his conversion. The first is saying that he didn't know what the right thing to do was. So in a sense, he kind of excused himself and said, it was when I was younger and I didn't know what was the right thing to do.

It was okay that I wasn't doing the right thing. But he makes an explicit change in his Once he knows that the Catholic Church is the true church, but he still doesn't convert, you know, and this is when I was reading this is when I tweeted out that thing about God grant me chastity, but not yet something like that. And so for me, what it did was two things. One, it's a really interesting personal narrative about the notion of self improvement. In this case, it's a religious conversion, but it's anybody who struggles with knowing what they should be doing and feeling like they can't for whatever reason.

And then the other part of it is that it made me very much understand what we had been talking about with respect to Eva's book and why she put such a focus on Augustine understanding truly what it's meant by. If knowledge is virtue, when you know something, then you do it. And Augustine very clearly is saying, no, I knew quite well what I was supposed to be doing and I wasn't doing it. In his case, he was talking about not being able to overcome his lustful desires. So it really brought it home for me and I felt like it was a very personal story.

It was something that I think very relatable. It's not often that we read older works of philosophy and you have to work sometimes to get the relatability. And in this one, I think talking about struggling to overcome your better instincts right or doing things that you know are wrong, I think it's personal and relatable, but it's also sort of the very first pointing towards kind of a psychological aspect to behavior in a philosophical context, that it was really interesting. So I'm sorry I did not participate in the conversation, but I wanted people to know that I heartily endorsed the selection.

And I really think as easy as it is to read and as important a work as it is, everybody should get out there and take a look at it. I've checked mine out from my local library, and I encourage you to make use of those resources in your area as well.

1:58:21 Mark: You sound like this episode was sponsored by St. Augustine.

1:58:25 Seth: This episode was sponsored by I thought

1:58:29 Mark: you told me at the time that it was a combination of the conversation that we were having and that it wasn't going the direction that you expected, but also just Augustine himself was just not relatable. And basically that was making you sick, that immersing yourself in that the previous couple of days just made you so nauseous that you couldn't get through the conversation. Whether or not that's true, I think it's a better story than what you just told.

1:58:50 Seth: Well, in that case, please disregard everything I said and believe what Mark is saying.

1:58:55 Mark: All right, thanks.

1:58:56 Seth: Thank you.

1:58:58 Mark: We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com Consider a contribution. Big donors since last time have included Fred Bowe, Irek Herna, Christopher Erickson, Steve Jurass, James Blick, Stephanie Jones, Jack Shepard, Robert Tabb, James berger, Peter Overs Jr. Daniel Lilly, and Jeannie Carey. And really, really thank you, thank you, thank you to the smaller donors, including those who are newly, on a continued basis signed up for a $5 a month citizen site. If you kind of want to support what we're doing here and $5 a month is too much for you, we actually have an account and@patreon.com specifically to include those of you who want to give small amounts.

You know, a dollar a month, surely you know, don't you, about our Citizen Only feed, whereby the ad free unbroken versions of these episodes can be beamed straight to your iOS or Android device. You just have to take a couple minutes to set it up. So if you're logged into your citizen account, look under the members menu where it says how do I? And that'll tell you how to do it. Now everybody, citizen or no, should go check out our YouTube channel. It's got all the after shows. It's got our live performance from last summer. And did you know we have another upcoming live performance?

Why? We are a featured guest at the second Annual Pittsburgh Continental Philosophy Conference, Uncommons Theory and Public Space, where we will be addressing approximately that topic by talking about Hannah Arendt. You should go. It's September 25th to 27th. Go look at pittsburghphilosophy.com for details and we'll tell more about exactly when we're going to go on, when we're clear on that. So folks should get involved with us. Not only do we have the whole not school thing for partially examined life citizens. You can follow us on Twitter. We have a Facebook group that has an enormous amount of discussion.

You can go to our blog, comment on the articles there. If you're a good writer, you take a chance submit something for consideration for our blog. And lastly, it would be a great help to us. If you use itunes, go to our itunes store page. Leave us a nice review or take your favorite partial exam in life episode. Send a link to it to some of your friends. So thanks everybody for listening. Good night everybody.

2:01:06 Dylan: Good night.

2:01:07 Wes: Good night.

2:01:27 Unknown speaker: I still want it can't drop it Time passes and feeling stone beneath me and that should be thousand my feelings where I stand I want you to be watching over me I want you to be every time I leave I want you to be right in there to me when I bleed no I just can't believe just you believe I'm the only to see you move out forgotten least you never let it show look different from where you sit guess you'll never know I want you to be watching over me I want you to see every time I breathe I want you to be right next to

2:02:42 Mark: me

2:02:46 Unknown speaker: when I bleed no I just can't believe just can't believe I'm the only to see. No I just can't believe I'm the only to see you moved on oh God least you never let it show you look different from where you sit get Guess you never know. I want you to be watching over me I want you to see every time I be I want you to be right in this place to be what I feel when I. When I leave

2:04:47 Mark: when I leave

2:04:52 Unknown speaker: when I leave.