Loves Labours Confused - Augustine and the Journey to Christianity
Posted on 2005-01-27 at 08:02
Abstract:
Concerning Augustine's transition from a Gnostic knowledge of God to a Christian relationship with God. Augustine's conversion and insight forms the basis of so much of Christianity that study of the subject is central to any study of modern theology.
Paper:
In many ways, the death of Augustine's mother became his moment of true gestalt. Though he had had an earlier moment of insight which led to his conversion experience in the garden in Milan, it was not until his mother's death when, confronted with the need to apply his new-found insight, he truly understood its importance. Until this point, even after his conversion, Augustine existed in a state of anxiety produced by what he might describe as a contest of conflicting wills. It was his mother's death that settled that anxiety.
Augustine seemed to see those two wills as a dialectic between man's covenant with God and his desire for attachment to worldly things---that is to say, between the spirit and the flesh. The tension born of this dynamic conflict within the soul of man, according to Augustine, caused much of man's suffering. At one point, he describes this state of anxiety:
The one necessary condition [of entering the covenant with God], which meant not only going but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go---provided that the will was strong and unqualified, not the turning and twisting first this way, then that, of a will half-wounded, struggling with one part rising up and the other part falling down. (Augustine 147)
Augustine originally saw this anxiety as an inescapable side-effect of his own humanity. His flawed nature could do nothing but produce the effect. His reasoning in this matter relied heavily on a Manichean---and ultimately Gnostic--- dualistic approach to understanding the human condition. He believed that the mind was of a higher order than the body. This hierarchy created in man the innate ability of free choice---the ability to choose the actions which one will perform in any given situation. "The mind commands the body," Augustine believed, "and is instantly obeyed" (Augustine 147). Yet this same hierarchy was cause for conflict when the mind tried to command the mind. Apparently the mind need not follow its own commands, therefore one cannot command oneself not to want something or not to think something. "The mind commands itself," Augustine added, "and meets resistance" (Augustine 147). Man, under this system of thought, becomes his own most difficult problem.
Added to this dire theory was Augustine's view that Man's will was confused at heart since his fall from grace and now, rather than loving God for His own sake and God's works for the uses they provide, he loved God's works for their own sake and God for the uses He can provide. Man's will is thusly confused and Augustine simply did not see a way to correct that since he could not will himself to change his own will. Prior to his episode in the garden of Milan, Augustine sought after worldly things just for the sake of having them. He chased after women, sought academic prizes, and desired money. Anything that satisfied his desire for the purely sensual was the recipient of his attention. As Augustine put it, "in an ulcerous condition [my soul] thrust itself to outward things, miserable avid to be scratched by contact with the world of the senses" (Augustine 35).
It was Lady Continence, a figure who appeared to him in the garden, who brought Augustine, intellectually, out of the quandary of fighting a losing battle against an evil will. She talked of God's grace as the answer:
Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you. (Augustine 151)
Through this experience Augustine became able to accept, logically, the precepts of Christian faith, thus the whole garden incident is often dubbed his conversion experience. However, examination of the text both during and after this experience may indicate that it was only a prequel to the actual moment of his entering into a relationship (or covenant) with God. That moment may have been later, at his mother's death.
It is true that Augustine described a difference of worldview after the garden conversion. He used typically Gnostic imagery when he talked of a "light of relief" which removed his anxiety (Augustine 153). He described a peaceful time when, with his mother, he learned to climb the scale of goodness to reach its near-peak, which he believed was the human mind. As he put it, "we ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds" (Augustine 171). Using the Gnostic, and therefore Manichean, doctrine of salvation through intellectual reflection and special insight, Augustine had taken the next step toward Christianity by being able to embrace its doctrines because of his rational for them. But he had not yet entered into a relationship with God. That was to come a bit later.
The reader gets the impression, through Augustine's writings, that anxiety had left him, as much as it ever would, at this point. As a testament to the falsity of that statement, however, the death of Monica, his mother, crumbles the framework of Augustine's logical-salvation experience. His first substantial test proves to be his true conversion experience. Augustine falls back into an anxiety once again--- this time unsure of his condition or its possible solution. He became, "tortured by a twofold sadness," (Augustine 175) and his mind and body warred again:
I closed her eyes and an overwhelming grief welled into my heart and was about to flow forth in a flood of tears. But at the same time under a powerful act of mental control my eyes held back the flood and dried it up. The inward struggle put me in great agony. (Augustine 174)
Augustine suddenly saw his attachment to his mother, formed of the habit of living with her for so long, as drawing him toward some inappropriate grief. He wrestled with the idea that he had fallen into the habit of loving her for her own sake rather than for her use to God and the world as a Christian. He retired to a bath in hopes that this thing would help resolve his conflict. Again he turned towards worldly things, just as he was wont to do earlier in life, for a salvation that he would never find there. After the bath he found that he was, "exactly the same as before" (Augustine 176). His Gnostic manner of understanding God had not produced in him any relationship with God and therefore he had not learned to truly let go of the world around him. Exhausted from his returned anxious state, he slept. It was this sleep which would herald his actual conversion. In chapter IX, paragraph 33---rather than chapter VII, paragraph 28--- Augustine truly converts to Christianity by accepting its doctrines of salvation and love not simply with his mind, but with his heart.
Suddenly, Augustine, "was glad to weep before [God] about and for her, about [him]self and for [him]self" (Augustine 176). He learned to cry not for his loss of a mother, but for a mother, "who had wept for [him] that [he] might live before [God's] eyes" (Augustine 176). He saw his mother, and the rest of creation no longer as ends, in and of themselves, but as means to know God. "If anyone lists his true merits to you, what is he enumerating before you but your gifts" (Augustine 177)? Augustine has that moment of Christian gestalt, which some call rebirth, here at his mother's death, not in a garden in Milan as has been suggested. "Thereby [Augustine] submitted [his] neck to [God's] easy yoke and [his] shoulders to [God's] light burden" (Augustine 155). Augustine had finally made the transition from a Gnostic knowledge of God to a Christian relationship with God. His conversion was complete.