Oh When the Saint Goes Marching Out…

September 17th, 2016

Can’t Wait

I’m still working my way through the Columbia University Literature Humanities syllabus. The latest obstacle on the confidence course: Augustine’s Confessions.

The book is supposedly about Augustine’s conversion to Catholicism, but I’m only about 40% of the way through, so I can’t confirm that with confidence. A lot of it is random interjections in which he praises God, and a good deal of it is filled with musing about this and that. It’s not what I would call “a story,” in the conventional sense. It’s not like Charlotte’s Web, where Wilbur wakes up every day and has interactions with Charlotte and Templeton and inches perceptibly closer to his pivotal appearance at the fair.

Augustine was a very smart guy. That surprised me. Christian scholarship is not always the sort of thing that shines in juxtaposition with Descartes and Kant. It’s definitely better than the little bits of Muslim scholarship I’ve been exposed to, and by that I mean it’s not something an objective eight-year-old would find ridiculous, but the Christian arguments I’ve seen have not been all that sophisticated.

Augustine is sufficiently bright to drive a thinking person to underline quotations, in the vain hope of remembering and using them later. That’s about the highest praise I can offer.

I don’t actually remember any of the things I underlined. I didn’t like them enough to go back and prolong the experience of reading the book by memorizing them.

This is the problem with a reading list. You always think about the destination, not the journey.

Augustine was raised by a Catholic (his mother, Monica), but he became a Manichee. This is important, at least to me, because it explains why my Lit. Hum. professor kept ranting about Manicheism and eating cucumbers on the rare occasions when I visited the class. I thought he just had a weird obsession.

Manicheism is a cult, founded by a guy named Mani. Don’t ask me what they believed. I get bits and pieces of it here and there, but if it’s not on Wikipedia, I probably don’t know it. They believed something about the universe being composed of light and darkness, and people were supposed to eat foods that contained light. Cucumbers figured prominently on the list.

The Manichees were against animal sacrifice, and they thought the Christian scriptures were screwed up, because, of course, the Old Testament is full of sacrifices. Augustine made a pretty shrewd observation after he joined the Catholics. The Manichees held that the scriptures had been altered, but they were never able to produce a copy of the unaltered text.

I can relate to Augustine. He listened to silly people who believed silly things, and his natural intelligence didn’t prevent him from being fooled. I listened to televangelists and megachurch pimps.

Augustine was a player. He was obsessed with sex. He manages to make it boring, however.

Here’s something that surprised me: he had an illegitimate son. He began turning toward the church, and his mom tried to fix him up with a ten-year-old fiancee. In the meantime, Augustine was still getting busy–on a steady basis–with a woman to whom he was not married.

So far, I have not seen any indication that he was horrified by this. How can that be? He was getting ready to get very serious about a relationship with God, and here he was, running around with a chippie.

I could understand if he acted under compulsion. If he said, “I told the servants to lock me up, but at three in the morning, I gave in again, kicked the screen out of the window, and ran over to Lulu’s place.” That’s not how it reads. It seems more like he decided to give up his mistress as a practical matter, like a man who sells his golf clubs in order to make room for snow skis.

I don’t think anyone ever calls Augustine a pedophile. We call Mohammed a pedophile all the time; he married a girl who was 6 years old, and he had sex with her three years later. Augustine decided to become engaged to a girl who was 10, and he would have been allowed to consummate the marriage when she was 12. Not a huge difference.

Many of his experiences resonate with me. He complains constantly about his regret over having believed lies. Right there with you, pal. I believed Satan’s lies outside the church, and then I went to church, where I believed the lies he spread through preachers.

I’ve come to realize something: God loves it when you see the truth. He really hates being disbelieved, and he hates it when people believe Satan. He loves it when people say, “Satan is a liar.” It’s what he has been waiting to hear.

Even though I myself have lied, I hate liars. I love exposing them. I love showing people they’ve been lied to. God is the same way. Most of Satan’s damage has been done with lies. God tells people the truth, and they spit at him. Satan tells them ridiculous lies, and they believe him and give him their lives. I see why God loves faith so much. Don’t you hate it when you tell the truth and people don’t believe you?

I guess it seems like I pick on my sister a lot, but here I go again. She taught me what it was like to deal with liars. She lies about me all the time. She has done it since I was very small. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time defending myself to other people, refuting her lies. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to other people about the lies she has told me about them. It’s exasperating. I know exactly what God goes through.

A person who spreads lies is like a thief who runs away while knocking over furniture and leaving it in the path of his pursuers. The thief just runs and pulls things over. The pursuer has to stop, lift things up, and put them in order. Lying is very efficient, in that way. It forces truthful people to waste time and do a lot of work. They have to fix the mess the lies create. That’s why liars love lying. If you have to deal with liars all the time, you’re constantly untying knots they tied with their forked tongues.

I get it, God. I know what you deal with every day. I see how Satan managed to delay you so many times.

I understand why hell exists. Liars and murderers require a storage bin where they can be confined, so they can’t spread their vexation to heaven. As for the fire, well…it will keep them busy so they can’t plot. I would rather see them suffer than see them arm themselves, because righteousness has to be preserved.

I won’t criticize God’s plan.

I have two problems with Augustine. First, he’s boring. Surprise, surprise. If he’s on the Lit. Hum. syllabus, it should surprise no one that he can’t write a paragraph that scans cleanly. That’s almost a given. He is very windy; he never knows when to give it a rest. Editors are the lowest form of life, but he could use one.

Second, he tries to understand God with the unaided mind, which is the unfortunate tool that got him into Manicheism. It doesn’t work. He reasons and reasons, and he only gets so far. You can’t learn about God through reason. The Holy Spirit has to impart understanding to you. You have to pray in tongues. You have to get God’s help. I guess by Augustine’s time, the devil had already managed to convince Christians tongues were no longer needed.

Augustine didn’t know all that much about God. It’s frustrating to see people call him “saint,” as though he were an exalted being with knowledge the rest of us can never receive. Any ditchdigger who prays in tongues can learn more about God than Augustine knew.

Christianity is not for scholars; it’s for people of faith who are willing to pray and submit. Take a look at the bell curve. Do you really believe God only wanted to know the people on the far right? Of course not.

I don’t understand how Columbia University can give people one week to read Augustine. I can do about twenty pages per day without losing my mind. That makes it a two-week ordeal. No one with a realistic courseload could read all these boring books in time for exams. No wonder people cheat.

I guess before I wrap up, I’ll say one more positive thing about Augustine. He makes fools of the people who claim morality isn’t a Jewish/Christian invention.

Academics hate God, so they’re always looking for ways to pull him down. They love to tell us morality is universal. The things one major culture thinks are right are also esteemed by other cultures. Ten Commandments…Code of Hammurabi…it’s all the same. WRONG.

I’ve gone through the Greek and Roman syllabus offerings. They showed me that the ancients who were neither Christian nor Jewish were depraved and barbaric.

Homer’s protagonists were disgusting, and they were just like Virgil’s. They were murderers. They were rapists. They loved invading other people’s cities, raping everyone in sight, demolishing all the buildings, and take the citizens as slaves. They called men who did this “blameless.” They called them “pious”!

Come on. Wake up. Their mores were nothing like those of Christians and Jews. God’s people were much more civilized than they were. The Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians were coarse and cruel. They were inferior. Without the Jews and Christians, their perverted ethos would now be universal.

The Jewish God is the only God, and the culture that came from Judaism is superior. Not “different.” Not “better in some ways.” Superior. Admit it. Or stand up for rape, torture, pillage, and wars of conquest. Without the Jewish God, earth becomes like hell. The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

America’s culture is rotting because we don’t acknowledge that the values that saved us are Jewish. We denied the source of our blessings, so now the river runs black and fetid.

It’s funny how God-hating liberals fight God while proclaiming values that came from God. Love, patience, kindness, self-sacrifice…these concepts, when found in Greek and Roman culture, are stunted and perverted, at best. In Judaism and Christianity, they flower and dominate.

But the children of darkness will never admit it. A supernatural blindfold can’t be pierced by logic or common sense. Okay, fine. You’re right about everything. Bruce Jenner, a man who won the Olympic decathlon, is a woman. A four-year-old who thinks he’s a girl should receive sex hormones that prevent him from going through a normal puberty. Have it your way.

I look forward to Dante, and that’s only because I want to be done with Augustine.

One Response to “Oh When the Saint Goes Marching Out…”

  1. Aaron's cc: Says:

    [up-thumb] LIKE

    The falsehood at Columbia turned me into a seeker. Had a couple of initial detours with est and other nonsense, but once I found the “original text”, it’s been 30+ years of continuous growth.

    I’ve enjoyed your revisiting of the Core Curriculum. As bad as some of it was, it still beat marching for Oxfam and rallies to get out of Nicaragua… for the primary benefit of appearing compassionate enough to a young female to merit seeing her naked a few hours later.