Ama et quod vis fac

Having nearly completed Garry Wills' biography of Augustine which I blogged earlier, I agree with the reviewers who say it's not really an introduction. Short it is, but it seems to move at an unclear pace and assumes knowledge of philosophy and theology that a lay person might not have. Having said that, it's well enough written and has been reasonably diverting.

I particularly liked these words of Augustine

Because of various circumstances, we see one man looking harsh because he loves and another looking pleasant because of vice. The father gives a son blows, the whoremonger gives blandishments. Consider them in themselves, blows or blandishments – who wouldn't take the blandishmenst and duck the blows? But look at the motives – they are the blows of love, the blandishments of vice. You see my point, that human acts should be judged by their basis in love. Many things have a surface appearance of good, but are not based on love – like blossoms on a thorn plant. Other things look hard, look forbidding, but they instill a discipline informed by love. Once again, to put it simply: Act as you desire, so long as you act with love. If you are silent, be silent from love. If you accuse, accuse from love. If you correct, correct from love. If you spare, spare from love. Let love be rooted deep in you, and only good can grow from it.

(Interpreting John's Parthian Letter 7.8)


I'm conscious I'm writing on academic topics a lot these days; I must find something trivial to comment on next time. It's blinkin cold tonight ;)

listening to Glad I'm Not A Kennedy | Shona Laing

Sex, Angst, Repression and God

That's what the few people who know anything about him usually associate with the North African writer Augustine (354-430). A native of Algeria, he was a thinker who had an incredible impact on the Western world, but i suspect many today won't know much about him.

I've started reading Garry Wills' biography, Saint Augustine which I picked up in Wellington's Arty Bees secondhand bookstore.

One thing is certain, Augustine was an incredibly prolific writer. Wills writes that Augustine was an ever-developing thinker, unsatisfied with even his own formulations to the end of his life, so that those (like Calvin) who attempt to make a system from his writing at a particular period in his life do him an injustice.

Wills argues well that "The testimony" is a much better rendering of his well-known confessiones.

[In the fourth century] the penitential system of the church "confessional" did not exist... Augustine was not confessing like an Al Capone, or like a pious trafficker of later confessionals.

On Augustine's supposed sexual obssessions Wills writes

We must be on guard for such misreadings... [People] are convinced that Augustine was a libertine before his conversion, and was so obsessed with sex after his conversion that they place many unnamed sins to his account - though his actual sexual activity was not shocking by any standards but those of a saint. He lived with one woman for fifteen years "and with her alone, since I kept faith with her bed" (T 4.2). This kind of legal concubine was recognised in Roman law... Even the Church recognised the legitimacy of such a relationship (Council of Toledo 400, Canon 17).

Yet the expectation of sexual excess in Augustine's life leads people to add sexual scenes and themes to his story.

Nothing like a little truth to ruin our salaciousness, huh?

Peter Brown's bio seems to be the more critically acclaimed.

Nevertheless, the reviews of this short book acknowledge that it has good points, notably in Augustine's early life and his relationship with his concubine. I've just started it. We shall see what other interesting things come up.

cor inquietum "the unstable heart", drawing us ever onward. One of Augustine's themes. i like that.


listening to Argyle Park | Doomsayer