PAUL FREEDMAN: Alright, so
you may be asking
yourself, "Why are we reading
the Confessions?" I think I
gave a preliminary answer
before, but since it seems to
be perhaps more appropriate
for religious studies or
philosophy, let me remind
you why we're
struggling through this.
First, the impact
of Christianity
on the Roman Empire--
that is to say, the social and
intellectual setting of the
rise of Christianity
in the late
fourth, early fifth centuries.
The second is to understand some
of the Christian moral
and doctrinal problems and
their implications.
Once again, we're not exactly
interested in these for
reasons of theology or morality,
but we need to get
into the minds of people
at the time in order to
understand what bothered them,
what controversies they were
involved in, and how those
controversies indeed divided
the Roman Empire and
the successors
to the Roman Empire.
Some of those problems--
well, under that second heading
of Christian moral and
doctrinal problems, let me just
mention three, which by
no means exhausts them, but are
three that we can sort of,
if not identify with, I think
see their importance.
One, the problem of evil.
Second, the relation between
body and soul.
And three, the Christian
understanding of sin and
redemption.
Now, it turns out these are
all aspects of the same
problem, and they are dealt with
in Augustine's works most
thoroughly, more thoroughly than
any other thinker of the
ancient world.
The third reason we're looking
at this is the interaction
between Christianity and
classical culture and religion.
Roman life and politics,
Augustine's career and his
giving up his career, what that
means, other ideas within
the Roman Empire, such as
Manicheaism, Platonism.
And then finally, this is a
document of philosophical and
psychological investigation.
And while that is not our
primary purpose here, you
should not get out of a liberal
arts college program
without reading this and
pondering it a little.
This can be summarized in terms
of the importance of the
humanities, even, or of
philosophical investigation,
as opposed to mere investigation
of natural
phenomena, in words that
Augustine uses in Book X,
which we have not read.
After Book IX, Book
X is a turning.
It discusses time and
the meaning of time.
Books XI, XII, and XIII are
a commentary on Genesis.
Worth reading, if you like, and
interesting to think about
how they do or do not mesh with
the more confessional
parts of the Confession.
But in Book X, he says, "Men
go out and gaze in
astonishment at high mountains,
the huge waves of
the sea, the broad reaches
of rivers, the ocean that
encircles the world, or the
stars in their courses, but
they pay no attention to
themselves." They are busy
looking at external
phenomena and not
examining their own heart.
And if the Confessions is
anything, it is certainly an
examination of the
author's heart.
But it's not an examination
of his heart in a purely
emotional sense, in the way
we're familiar with in
so-called confessional
literature.
I had a tough upbringing.
This happened to me.
That happened to me.
I struggled with addiction.
I beat my kids.
Now I'm a great person.
Whatever.
This is an intellectual
investigation as well as an
emotional investigation.
And indeed, Augustine doesn't
see these as separate, or to
the degree that he does, it's in
a more complicated way than
just saying intellectual versus
non-intellectual.
He is an intellectual,
obviously.
And he awakened to being an
intellectual, an experience
that many of you may have had.
Remember, he reads this dialogue
by Cicero, now lost,
called the Hortensius.
And this convinces him that the
life of the mind is the
most important thing
to pursue.
And I wouldn't say that we all
have had this experience, but
maybe you--
what was the point at which
you discovered that you
weren't like other people,
that they lived more for
immediate sensations, or
pleasure, or what Augustine
would call debauchery, and you
wanted to read or think about
stuff or do lab experiments?
I think the essence of Yale, if
I understand it correctly,
is I don't have to choose
between fun and the
intellectual life.
So it's not actually perhaps
relevant to your lives now,
but particularly if you went to
a public high school, grew
up in a non-intellectual
environment.
Those of you whose parents are
professors and went to some
school where everybody was
reading Latin at the age of
six, I'm not talking to you.
But I'm talking to the vast
majority who woke up one day
and realized, either with pride
or with dismay, "I'm
different from other people."
Ideas have meaning to me.
I'm going to suffer in life
for that, though there're
going to be some rewards.
And I leave you to discern what
the rewards are and to
mull over what the suffering
has been or maybe will
continue to be.
I hope not, and I suspect
you'll have an
easier time of it.
But this book is about a search
for truth and a search
that takes a number of wrong
turns, at least from
Augustine's opinion looking back
on the situation when he
wrote this in the 390s.
It's a confession of sin.
It's also, as I said before, a
confession of praise for the
God whose love directed him
back to the right path.
It is personal, but exemplary.
It is about spiritual yearning,
but it is also about
intellectual yearning
for truth.
It's a book about the education
of a young man and
the adventures of this
young man and what
he learns from them.
Now, in the first place, he is
both an intellectual and a
passionate person.
He is someone who is unusually
frank about his desires.
But notice that he's not
just opposed to desire.
He is not someone who believes
that desire, love are to be
simply repressed or ignored.
Love is a psychological need.
And he has a very discerning
and interesting passage in
describing his teenage years
and his lusts when he
frequented the brothels
of Carthage.
In Book III, at the beginning,
he says, "I was in love with
the idea of love." So he was not
only in love, but he was
in love with the idea of being
an emotional being, of love
that is both sexual and
spiritual, in which these two
things are not well marked
off from each other.
He is also a believer
in friendship.
And it's funny, because in
our own culture, I think
friendship has changed.
When I started teaching, people
had trouble dealing
with the affection that he has
for his friends, like Alypius
and Nebridius, or the mysterious
unnamed friend who
dies after being baptized.
Augustine is always surrounded
by friends.
Even in the most intimate
moments, when he's undergoing
this conversion, there're
all sorts of people
right around him.
And as I said before,
this seemed to be--
the explanation was, well, he
must've been homosexual, or he
must have these desires, or
maybe it's part of Roman
culture of friendship.
But in recent decades or years,
where we have a culture
of friendship, where your
friends are extremely
important--
admittedly, if you have 900 of
them, it's a little bit,
perhaps, weakened--
but I think we can understand
some of this better than might
have been the case a
little while ago.
This friend who dies after being
baptized, here is an
example of another form
of seriousness.
They go out and have
fun together.
The friend becomes ill.
The friend is suddenly
very serious.
The friend gets baptized,
because to be baptized, as
with Constantine, means that you
are committing yourself to
a much more stringent and
moral life than before.
And then he dies.
And this certainly disturbs
Augustine.
What is life all about?
Any of you who've had the
experience of contemporaries
of yours who have died will
understand this, I think.
Augustine's also ambitious.
He is a successful person.
Even though he's from
a modest family--
his father, a pagan or
non-Christian, middle class
official of North Africa, his
mother, a Christian--
He's clearly marked for success
because of his unusual
gifts, his unusual gifts being
intellectual, ability to
write, ability to argue.
He's marked out as
extremely smart.
And at that time, success for
such a person, the course of
success was through government
service--
this is the era of
post-Diocletian,
post-Constantine--
and related particularly
to a combination of
rhetoric and law.
This is not all that different
from societies familiar to us.
That is to say, the training in
law gives one access to a
number of different kinds
of political offices.
But rhetoric is perhaps a
little stranger to us.
Rhetoric in this context means
the art of persuasion.
So it's very closely related
to law and legal pleading.
It is the art of writing well,
of writing elegantly, and it
is very, very highly valued
in the Roman Empire.
His mother, Monica, is
extremely pious.
In fact, the first section,
class rather that I taught--
no, I guess I was a
section leader--
when I was a graduate student,
the first section I had, my
students were arguing with me
about Augustine's patronizing
attitude towards his mother.
And I said, well, no, he's
not patronizing.
He's smarter than his mother.
His mother's just an
ordinary person.
After all, Augustine becomes a
saint, and his mother doesn't.
Some guy from Santa Monica
Catholic School said, who do
you think Santa Monica is?
This is Augustine's mother.
So anyway, I've learned.
Augustine's mother is a saint.
She is a more steadfast kind
of person than Augustine.
She's not someone who stays up
all night wrestling with the
problem of evil.
Nevertheless, she does not
want him to be baptized.
She wants him to
be successful.
Like most mothers, she wants her
child to be a good person.
But even more than that,
she wants her
child to be a success.
And that means delaying baptism,
because if he's going
to be a success, he's going to
have to be involved in the
world of high government,
and that may mean--
well, that definitely means
involvement in sinfulness,
involvement in the shedding of
blood, involvement in legal
wrangling and stuff like that.
And so he is encouraged to lead
a normal life, "normal"
meaning, at least in his
own retrospective
view, sinful life.
This is what Augustine is giving
up in his conversion.
He is giving up a career.
He is giving up a social
expectation of success or
social definition of success.
He is giving up the pleasures
attendant on that career,
which range from parties to
honors to sexual conquests and
the whole life of a
well-established member of the
Roman elite.
What is bothering Augustine?
What bothers him is, in part,
the problem of evil, which
we've alluded to already.
Why does a good and omnipotent
god allow evil to flourish?
A related problem is that
compared to the works of the
Greek writers and philosophers,
the Bible seems
awfully crude to him,
rhetorically, in terms of
style, and conceptually,
in terms of its ideas.
The Old Testament god-- and
we're probably at various
levels of familiarity with
the Old Testament--
but the Old Testament god is
temperamental, I think it's
fair to say.
Here's a guy who decides
to destroy--
a guy--
a deity who decides to destroy
the world by flood, destroys
the cities of the plain, kills
one of the people bearing the
tabernacle back to Jerusalem
because he stumbles.
What kind of god is this?
This bothers Augustine.
And his anthropomorphism
bothers Augustine.
In the Old Testament, in the
Hebrew Bible, a god speaks
with people.
Adam hears him walking
in the garden.
How can that be?
How can this human-seeming
god be the real God?
So these two anxieties put
Augustine in the camp of the
Manicheans.
Remember, the Manicheans believe
that the solution to
the problem of evil is that
God is not omnipotent.
God is trying, but there's
another evil god who is
opposing Him.
And that evil god is the god
of the flesh and the god of
the Old Testament, Jehovah, the
creator god, the god of
matter and flesh.
We are souls imprisoned
in flesh.
Our true home is the spiritual,
and we have to
renounce everything that has to
do with the flesh in order
to go there.
So Manicheanism would seem
to be extremely ascetic.
You should have absolutely
nothing to do with the world.
But as is always the case with
the statement, "everything
that's material is evil, but we
are material," Manicheanism
also offers or affords you an
opportunity to be completely
involved in the world, totally
involved in the world, because
there's nothing you
can do about it.
All you can do is say, the
flesh is evil, I'm in the
flesh, I'm just going to have
to deal with it until I am
liberated into the spirit.
So Manicheanism is not
necessarily world-renouncing,
but they do identify the source
of evil with the body.
The body is wicked.
The immaterial soul is good.
This is not Christianity, as
Augustine discovers or
elaborates.
Even though we may think of
Christianity as exalting the
soul over the body,
nevertheless, it
also exalts the body.
Christian doctrine is that the
bodies of human beings will be
resurrected, not
just the souls.
There will be bodies after
the Last Judgment in
heaven and in hell.
God created the world,
and it was good.
What then explains the
presence of evil?
Augustine at this stage turns
to Platonism for an
understanding of the
nature of evil.
Evil is not a thing in itself.
It is rather the absence
of good.
Now, if anyone has ever said
that to you, you will have
found that unconvincing, at
least in its first iteration.
Because we're not just talking
about the absence of good, as
in, this bowl of chili
is not very good.
It's not very flavorful.
It's OK, but it's lacking
in something.
But that's not evil.
Evil is not like, not
particularly good.
Evil is much more vivid,
gratuitous, cruel,
all-encompassing.
The Platonists don't
deny that.
What they mean by saying it's
the privation of good is that
it is nothingness.
Evil is, in fact, the absence
of being and meaning.
The reason it produces such
spectacular effects as war,
oppression, crime, is that
people turn away from the
good, or they turn away from
what is truly good to prefer
lower goods.
They turn away from the things
of the spirit to the
things of the flesh.
They prefer their own lusts
and desires, their own
ambitions and greed, to the
common good or to the
immaterial and spiritual good.
And it's this turning away from
the Sun, this turning
away from good, that seems
to be a human problem.
Human beings, generally
speaking, don't understand
what they're on Earth for,
according to the Platonists.
Many of you are familiar with
the metaphor of the cave from
The Republic.
This is the classic depiction
of this wrong preference.
The people in the cave are
chained facing the back wall
of the cave, and they see images
of what's passing in
front of the cave reflected
on the wall.
As time goes on, they
come to believe that
those images are reality.
They forget that they're
chained.
They forget that they can't
see the real things.
They forget the Sun.
If you were to liberate them and
turn them around and show
them the light, first of all,
they couldn't bear it, because
they're used to the
world of shadow.
Secondly, they'd kill you,
because you are destroying
their assumptions
and their world.
They would at least
persecute you.
They're not interested
in the truth.
They're interested
in getting by.
So for the Platonists, evil is
the result of this error in
perception, assuming that it's
a great thing to get rich.
Or assuming that it's a great
thing to beat people up
because you're stronger
than they are.
Or it's a great thing to
conquer and subjugate.
Or all of these things, some
of which are evil but are
really the preference of things
that you should not be
pursuing or that you should be
pursuing for reasons inspired
by spiritual truth.
How do you get rid of this?
In the Platonists' imagination,
by education.
That's the whole point
of Plato's dialogues.
That's why they are dialogues,
many of them, with a question
and answer.
They're very didactic.
They're like being in a class.
Socrates quizzes people, and
then he shows the solution.
And they say, "Oh, wow,
Socrates, now I understand.
Now I'm going to be a Platonist,
and I'm going to
build a perfect society."
End of story.
The important thing to
understand about Platonism is
that it is not dualist in the
way that Manicheanism is or
the way that we instinctively
think about evil.
Evil is not opposed to good.
It's hierarchically
inferior to good.
The Platonists' universe is like
a ladder with many rungs
going up from mud, bugs, rocks
to the immaterial One, and
with many, many steps, as I
said, many rungs or steps or
levels in between.
Human beings are
in the middle.
And also, human beings-- unlike
animals, mud, slugs,
but also unlike angels and
demiurges and deities--
human beings can move up
and down the ladder.
That's what free will is.
That's what being human is.
You can read Hortensius, read
the Confessions, fall in love
with the liberal arts, and
ascend to some very high realm
of the spirit.
Or you can choose the
downward path to
debauchery and mere pleasure.
It's a question of how free you
are, but we do have the
opportunity to move up and down
this ladder, unlike the
animals and all other created
forces that are fixed.
Now, the question
is what makes us
move up and down this?
Or what'll motivate
us to move up?
And here we come to some key
differences between Platonism
and Christianity with
regard to evil.
Platonism tends to ascribe
evil to ignorance.
Christianity tends to
ascribe evil to sin.
The difference between sin and
ignorance is that sin is
deliberate.
You know you shouldn't do this,
and you do it anyway.
You're not overcome by desire.
So to anticipate one of
the paper topics--
but I don't think I'm going to
be giving away the answer--
what is it about the
pear-stealing incident that
makes it so important?
Anybody want to venture a
preliminary response to this?
STUDENT: Well, it's
the fact that he
doesn't need the pears.
He just does it because
he feels like sinning.
PROFESSOR:
So the pears-- he
doesn't need the pears.
It is just a desire.
I mean he doesn't say to
himself, I want to sin.
I haven't sinned in two days.
He doesn't need the pears.
What do they do with the pears
when they get them?
STUDENT: They chuck them.
PROFESSOR: Yeah,
they throw them out.
They throw them to the pigs.
So they're not hungry.
It's not like, I was overcome
by desire, and that led me
into some sinful behavior.
They weren't overcome
by desire at all.
How would you describe their
pre-pear-stealing state?
At least, what would you guess
was their pre-pear-stealing
frame of mind?
There's one word that'll
describe it, but if you want
to, use a few more.
Some guys go and they steal some
pears from an orchard.
They fool around with them.
They throw them to the pigs.
STUDENT: Bored?
PROFESSOR: Bored.
Bored.
Now, here's something we
can identify with.
They're bored.
They need to amuse themselves.
They cannot amuse themselves
by saying, "I'm a good
person," or, "I'm going to
contemplate the One," or, "I'm
going to do some homework."
It doesn't end.
Young people are thought to be
easily bored, but the boredom
of old people, it's a different
kind of bored.
But there it is.
It's persistent.
That's not the only reason
people sin, but it is a
gratuitous reason.
And that's what's interesting
about the pears.
It's gratuitous.
It's not from need.
The Platonists don't have a
good response to why this
happens, because it's not
a question of education.
Now, Augustine does not invent
Christian ideas of sin.
If you said to Augustine,
"Come on, why are you so
worried about the pears?"
He's not worried about
the pears as such.
It's just a little emblem or a
little example of a different
kind of problem--
that is to say, knowing how to
behave doesn't change us.
Feeling how to behave--
to put it in Freudian terms,
it's not the ego that decides.
It's the id.
It's the instinct, not
the intellect.
And that's what his
conversion means.
His conversion is not:
"Suddenly, I was convinced
that Christianity was true."
He already knows that
Christianity is true, but he
knows it intellectually.
The conversion is a conversion
to an emotional
apprehension of it.
So however intellectual he may
seem to you, however formed in
the tradition of Greco-Roman
classicism he was, however
much the Hortensius awakened him
to the life of the mind,
he is ultimately a theologian
and philosopher of the
irrational, of the
supra-rational.
And indeed, Christianity in its
history has an oscillation
between intellectualization and
the rediscovery of sin and
God's grace.
If you think of movements like
the Reformation of Martin
Luther, John Calvin, et cetera,
in the sixteenth
century, it takes issue with
the notion that we can do
works that give us merit in the
sight of God, and that the
Church tells us we have
accumulated merits, and
therefore we'll go to heaven.
The Reformation teaches that we
are face to face with God
and that our so-called
good deeds
don't amount to anything.
We are all sinful.
If God operated according
to justice, we
would all go to hell.
It's faith and grace that save
people, hence the Reformation.
But it's also the Great
Awakening of Britain and
America in the eighteenth
century, the development of
Methodism, the Fundamentalist
movement, all of these tend to
reject attempts to approach God
contractually, attempts to
approach God in terms
of a deal.
So if human beings are sinful
and if education is not going
to get them out of
sin, what will?
Now, the Augustine of the
Confessions is different than
the Augustine of 20 years
later when he
wrote The City of God.
And we're not studying The City
of God, but this book,
written in response to the sack
of Rome in 410, develops
some ideas that are found in
the Confessions about the
nature of sin and how
we get out of it.
The nature of sin
is the pears.
How we get out of it is at least
in part the conversion.
We got the pears sufficiently
for the time being?
The conversion is started--
well, it started long
before the event.
But what precipitates it as a
drama is this conversation
with Ponticianus in Book VIII,
Part VIII, who has traveled
and describes the
monks of Egypt.
Now, we'll be talking lots and
lots about monks, but the
monks of Egypt are the first
example of Christian monks,
men who flee the world into the
desert and there live on
weeds, saline water,
locusts, other
insects, basically nothing.
And they have visions, and
they are sought out by
ordinary people.
It's key to understand that to
be a hermit in this society
does not necessarily
mean that you have
nothing to do with people.
People start to want to find
you, because you must have
special power.
Back in Alexandria, their
baby is sick.
"Maybe you, oh hermit, living
on locusts and out in the
desert, have some spiritual
power to help my baby."
This is shamanism.
It happens in all sorts
of religions.
You can't just be a shaman, a
medicine man, a wise man, and
hold down a regular old job.
Or you can, but it helps.
And that's the conceit
of a lot of TV
ideas, secret heroes.
They're the real estate agents,
but they're battling
the forces of darkness.
But generally, most of the
time, you've got to be
special, and you've got
to look special.
And you've got to be a reject.
You can't have a spouse,
kids, a mortgage, a
garden, a swing set.
You've got to be a seer.
You've got to have your vision
focused on the other world.
Ponticianus tells Augustine
about these men, and his
response is not only to be
impressed by them, but to be
humiliated by them.
First of all, here are these
guys who are intoxicated with
God, while I'm still thinking
about my career.
But-- and this is the ancient
world speaking--
they are uneducated, these
monks of Egypt.
They didn't study The Republic,
the Hortensius, the
Timaeus, the rhetoric
of Quintilian,
the Satires of Juvenal.
They don't know anything
about this.
They're uneducated people.
Many of them are illiterate.
And yet they are
closer to God.
They have an apprehension of the
divine that causes them to
renounce the world,
whereas we--
Augustine says of him
and his circle--
we "lie here groveling in this
world of flesh and blood,
while they storm the gates of
heaven." And this is the
moment of his conversion.
Now, after his conversion,
Augustine's plan was to lead a
life of contemplation
with his friends.
They would retreat from the
world, meaning they would give
up their careers, but it would
be a little bit like one of
your friend's parents have a
lot of money and have this
wonderful cabin somewhere
in the Rockies or
the Sawtooth Mountains.
And you're going to figure
out some kind of way of--
you'll be on the Internet and
everything, but you're going
to have this kind of beautiful,
contemplative life.
But the beautiful part is that
it's not going to be
uncomfortable.
It's not the desert of Egypt.
It's remote--
you're not going to
be bothered--
but there are beautiful
mountains,
trouts in the stream.
It's idyllic.
And you and your friends are
going to talk about reality
and the spirit and
philosophy and--
I don't know how idyllic this
sounds to you, but it's
certainly an understandable
idea of a way of life.
It is the ancient idea of what's
called "leisure with
dignity." And indeed, that's
what being a professor was
supposed to be when I
signed up for it.
Otium cum dignitate, leisure
with dignity. "Leisure"
meaning not wasting time
leisure, but not responding to
clients, or not responding
to urgent scheduling
phone calls, deals.
You've got to show up
to your classes, but
that's not really onerous.
At least, that was the idea.
And I won't go into the
frustrations of being a
professor or the
dissatisfactions.
But the classical idea is otium
cum dignitate, "dignity"
meaning not being naked in the
desert, not having to eat
locusts and figure
out how to--
"OK, I had curried locusts
last night.
Tonight, I think I'll have
locust casserole." No, no, no.
Something nicer than that.
But in fact, he did not follow
through on this.
He did not lead a life of
cultivated classical dignity
with his friends.
He went back to North Africa.
He became a bishop.
His years were consumed by
disputes over doctrine or with
heretical--
as he deemed them--
tendencies, like Donatism,
most notably.
And he died defending his city
of Hippo, Hippo Regius, in
modern Tunisia, from the
Vandals, one of those
barbarian invaders who will
occupy us next week.
He then was very much involved
in the world.
To be a bishop in the Roman
Empire was by no means an
office of dignified leisure.
It was right in there in
the political trenches.
It's a position of honor, to be
sure, but his understanding
of the Christian's duty in the
world was that you cannot lead
a life of perfection.
You cannot lead a life of
sin-free contemplation.
We all are sinners.
He becomes more and more the
theologian, philosopher who
combats perfectionism.
Perfectionism is a doctrine that
human beings can be made
radically better--
perfect, even.
There are debates throughout
societies about the degree of
human perfectibility.
This is indeed supposedly and to
some extent I think really
at the heart of debates
between what is called
liberalism in the United States
and conservatism.
Liberals believe in human
perfectibility.
If you educate people, if you
help them, if you encourage
them, if you provide government
subsidies, you will
build a better society.
The response upon the part of
conservatives to that is,
people are the way they are
because that's the way they
want to be, or they made
wrong choices.
But all the help from some
public authority isn't going
to help, isn't going to really
make a difference.
Are people perfectible?
People who believe in
education tend to
believe that they are.
On the other hand, very
well-educated
people have been bad.
Hitler loved classical music.
So did Stalin.
Just because you are a
connoisseur of art doesn't
make you a good person.
Augustine is a radical
imperfectionist, more so in
The City of God than in the
Confessions, which is
teetering on the brink.
The pears is a kind of
imperfectionist moment.
He glimpses the power of sin.
By the time of The City of God,
by the time that the end
of the Roman Empire is at
least glimpsed as a
possibility and the rise of the
barbarians, Augustine has
become someone who does not
believe that human beings can,
in any way, earn salvation.
Human beings are irrevocably
sinful.
Once again, if God judged people
according to their
merits, they would
all be damned.
Since the Christian belief is
that some people are saved,
they are saved by a mysterious
process called "grace." Grace,
by its very meaning,
is undeserved.
You don't show up at the door
of Heaven with a ticket of
admission earned by your
deeds on Earth.
What opens the doors
to you is a
generous, arbitrary decision.
Well, "generous" may mean,
I had good intentions.
I didn't kill anybody.
But "arbitrary" may mean that
we can't figure out who's
going to Heaven and who's
going to Hell.
It may even mean that since God
knew before we were born,
God predestined us for
Heaven or Hell.
This is a harsh doctrine.
It gets periodically
rediscovered and then dropped.
It's at the heart of the belief
of the people who
settled Massachusetts
and Connecticut.
It is the heart of Calvinism and
of Puritanism, the belief
in the elect.
The question is, are these elect
visible or invisible?
The elect are people who are
going to go to heaven.
Are they visible?
Can we say, this guy is so good,
he's going to heaven?
This woman is so loving,
nurturing, self-effacing,
whatever, she's going
to go to heaven?
That's the notion of
a visible elect.
An invisible elect is, "We don't
know, we have no idea."
And this is a crucial
difference.
Because if you believe in the
visible elect, even if you say
they're not guaranteed, but
anybody outside of this circle
is for sure going to
hell, then you
have Puritan New England.
You have a small community of
people pursuing perfection.
Or you have the Amish.
Or you have any small pious
community that believes that
outside of it is more or less
given over to sin and more or
less doomed.
Inside of it, maybe it's not
guaranteed, but your chances
are much, much better.
But if you believe that we don't
have a visible elect,
that we have no idea,
then everybody ought
to be in the Church.
Everybody ought to have access
to the sacraments that provide
initiation into the Church.
You ought to start converting
pagans, even savage pagans.
You ought to be out there roping
in as many people into
the church, including people
who don't want to be.
Because you just never know.
Maybe their kids will be.
Augustine is behind ideas of
things like forced conversion.
As long as they're baptized,
there's a chance
of them being saved.
And baptized as infants,
preferably, because baptism
does not any longer mean, in
Augustine's world, perfection.
It means the beginning.
It means entering the process.
So the three things that he is
teaching that are implicit in
the Confessions and that he is
important for in terms of his
intellectual impact are his
opposition to perfectionism,
his exaltation of grace, and
the notion of sin as
indelible, not solvable.
Where this becomes of key
historical importance is in
the Church.
The Church is a body that can
either be sectarian and small,
as with the Amish or Puritan New
England, or it can be huge
and universal, as with the
medieval Catholic Church.
Augustine stands behind the
medieval Catholic Church,
which is a political body, a
body of doctrine, a structure
ruled by princes, and a
structure that has a
missionary impact on the
rest of the world.
Now, the papers.
You have the paper topics.
If you didn't get them, come
up and see me after.
You can choose any one of
them, or you can choose
something else.
But if you choose something
else, please talk to your
teaching fellow or to me.
And talk to us anyway
about these papers.
We'll give you plenty
of opportunity to
bounce ideas off us.
Now, next week, we talk about
the fall of the Roman Empire.
But this is implicit in what
we've talked about today,
because the bottom line is the
Roman Empire is going to fall
in the West, and the Church
is not going to.
And so we'll look at how
that works next week.
Thanks.
