My Time With Augustine Approaches its End

I have not finished Augustine’s Confessions. It’s around 300 pages, and I just stopped on page 252.

I thought things were starting to pick up a while back, but he has gotten more boring than ever. For some reason, Augustine was absolutely obsessed with time, and a huge portion of his book is devoted to his wild guesses.

There are several problems with this.

1. The subject is incredibly boring.

2. Augustine’s convoluted writing style makes reading a lot like driving in circles.

3. The whole time I’m reading this stuff, I am painfully aware that it is of no use to anyone, and that I will not be rewarded for the effort.

I think I’ll suffer through the process of transcribing some of this mess so you will understand what I’m going through.

That is why your Spirit, the teacher of your servant (Moses), in relating that in the beginning you made heaven and earth, says nothing about time and is silent about days. No doubt the ‘heaven of heaven’ which you made in the beginning is a kind of creation in the realm of the intellect. Without being coeternal with You, O Trinity, it nevertheless participates in your eternity. From the sweet happiness of contemplating you, it finds power to check its mutability.

Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turling dromes,
And hooptiously drangle me,
With crinkly bindlewurdles.

I may have edited that last bit a little.

Sorry. Last week I bought the TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s really good, in much the same way the movie version isn’t.

To get slightly more serious, Augustine is very disappointing. He seems to think God shares his fascination with philosophy, and that now that he has decided to serve God, the good Lord will reward him by giving him definite answers to his pointless, worthless questions.

It makes you wonder if he has any idea what God’s priorities are. Jesus didn’t run around answering questions that drove people crazy; he wasn’t Deep Thought. He healed the sick, and he told people they were going to hell if they didn’t watch it. He explained mysteries in parables and symbols, but they weren’t boring, useless mysteries. He explained important things, and his explanations would later guide the Spirit-led.

Jesus doesn’t care about Zeno’s Paradox. Take my word for it. Angels don’t dance on the heads of pins. God doesn’t make big rocks just to see if he can lift them. If these things are important to you, as far as God is concerned, you’re on your own.

It’s sad that the Catholics decided Augustine was a super-Christian and gave him the title “Saint.” He didn’t know the Holy Spirit very well. He is not a good teacher, because he didn’t know the subject. The apostles knew God, and their writing is scripture. Augustine was just a philosopher and rhetor who got baptized. His writing is self-indulgent, time-wasting speculation.

Read any book in the New Testament and then read ten pages of Augustine. You can feel the difference. It’s not subtle. Scripture is powerful and useful. Augustine…not.

This is a great example of what happens when people try to carry their own burdens. Augustine seemed to believe God was going to help him with the tedious, difficult intellectual task of understanding time. In reality, God wanted him to drop the subject and think about something productive. God never helped Augustine with the time thing. He would have helped him tremendously had he let God choose the subject of inquiry.

Believers progress in stages. Some people never get past salvation. Some people move on to the baptism with the Holy Spirit and then get stuck there. Some go on and move in the spiritual gifts. Every step is good, but each successive step is better than the last one. Augustine didn’t get very far. He was about like a devout Episcopalian in modern America. He had some faith, and he felt devoted to God, but that’s about it. He wasn’t able to prophesy or write scripture. He didn’t work miracles. He was nothing like the apostles.

Augustine spent his life making guesses about God and then disseminating them so other people could be deceived. That’s not good. That’s evil.

One telling difference between people who are and are not Spirit-led is that people who are Spirit-led do not waste their lives. Augustine wasted his. After he experienced salvation, he continued striving to understand difficult concepts in physics, and he failed utterly. He didn’t even come close to succeeding. If God is leading you, you will not spend your life walking in circles, and you will not end in failure.

With any luck I’ll be done with this book tomorrow. I had hoped it would be less dreadful than the Greeks and Romans, but my hopes have been dashed. Do I dare hope Dante is better? I don’t care. I just want to get it over with.