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Shannon : Welcome to episode 26 of the Catholic frequency podcast. On this episode, I continue my series of conversations with Sean Berube on Saint Augustine's Confessions . We're doing a thirteen week series analyzing each of the 13 books of confessions, and this is week two.
Sean : This discussion we're doing with Augustine, it's going to be a deep dive in his masterpiece confessions, but this is actually the second talk of what's going to be an ongoing, three month, thirteen week discussion of Augustine's Confessions. This work has been considered his masterpiece. It's one of the most influential works in all of Western civilization by the measure of theology, philosophy, and even the historical. So there's really this is one of those books that's far too rich and far too nuanced and far too beautiful to really discuss in one sitting. So this is part of what's a three month, read through where we're really going to not just read through the book, but really dive deep and ruminate and try to understand the the deep ideas and deep words that Augustine is trying to pull out of us here.
So I am really thrilled to not just be going on this journey and to have all of you here, but I am also thrilled to be joined by an amazing cohost, namely Shannon of Catholic Frequency.
Shannon : How's it going, Sean? It's great to be here. You know, this book, confessions by Saint Augustine, such an incredible journey. And, I know last week you told me how excited you were. And it's not that I wasn't excited, but, having been through one before because it really, like, hit me harder this time as we go deeper into it.
Sean : Yeah. I think that's even just what you said there, I found that's very much it was my experience reading Confessions, because the first time I read it I mean, of course, this book had been built up rightfully so as one of the the greatest, masterpieces in Western civilization, but, honestly, it might have been my entire read through the first time. I was a little I don't wanna say disappointed, but I felt a little for lack of better, we're underwhelmed. Like, I feel like there's something I'm missing here. Like, yes, I enjoyed this book, but for all the acclaim and all the praise it gets, like, there must be something that I'm missing here that what is going on in confessions?
And sort of what you've said, it seems that this is the experience a lot of people have is the more that you don't just read through the confessions but really meditate and ruminate on what Augustine is saying, the more it seems this text, in my experience, starts to age like fine wine. And you start to realize there's such a brilliant sense of genius here that it's poetical. It really does speak to your soul and heart first. And so maybe it even starts working on you before you can intellectually comprehend it. But then you look back on the the reading in hindsight and you're like, wow.
This work this has really changed me in a lot of ways. So and hence, I I feel like this every time we discuss it, I feel like I'm re encountering it again for the first time in a lot of ways.
Shannon : Something I found in a little more research this this week is, of course, we know that pope Benedict had a great love for Augustine. I read a quote when we started this series last week from Augusta from from Pope Benedict about how he considers Augustine almost a contemporary peer that the writings from sixteen seventeen hundred years ago speak to him with the voice of today's. And I actually found that in 02/2008 or so, which is what, three years after Pope Benedict was elected, he did a series of talks on Augustine. So in in in Rome, the people, they have a general audience for the pope on Wednesdays most of the time, and anybody can go to this. And, the pope gives some, you know, some short messages on a variety of things.
But in 02/2008, Pope Benedict did a series of talks over maybe five or six weeks about Augustine. So I've been trying to, like, read through those. Very fascinating. And through that, I discovered a, letter that John Paul the second wrote in 1986 about Augustine. So I haven't read that one yet, but there's it's like the deeper you sort of research this stuff.
You know how it is. It's like a rabbit hole.
Sean : 100%. And this is sort of, I think, part of how you understand the great conversation and the Western canon in general and part of why Confessions is such a masterpiece is, like you said, there's rabbit holes that once you start reading books from the the greatest minds of the West or even the the greatest, books, whether it's a philosophy or fiction, they never are just isolated to works of art. They're always in communion of that which came before them. And so, more often than not, the joys of the great conversation is when you read and then you discover that, oh, this book is referencing this or that, and it goes back and forth. And generally speaking, the more references a older book has, the the more foundational it is.
That is the case with, Confessions. I'm not sure if this is official, but my my personal estimation, Confessions is really right up there as far as significance to influencing the greatest minds. I know we said last week, Peter Kreeft says that, confessions and Augustine himself was the most influential man of the entire medieval period in the history of Western civilization with perhaps the exception of Socrates. So all this is to say that whether we know it or not, so much of the logical and intellectual bedrocks of our civilization up to this day rest on some of the simple writings and ruminations of this book that we're about to be discussing for the next hour or so.
Shannon : And so many of us have heard of these great books in history. Right? But we haven't read them. And so it's so interesting when you sort of take that step and take that journey because you you hear people mention it. You hear like, you hear talks or a speech by doctor Creighton.
He'll reference what what you just said. But when you take that journey and you dig into it, you're it just comes alive in a new way. It's like a a black and white photo becoming color. It's like I mean, I know doctor Kreeft knows what he's talking about, but it's like, wow. He really he really knows what he's talking about.
Sean : No. I think that's really the joy, and that's a very, I think, great use of words you said there as far as come to life because it's it's really the case that when you read the great books and you understand them and you understand how they're communicating, you see that the abstract truths you were talking about come alive in fiction that everything is connected, but then you also see how these patterns play out in reality too, how they they play out on your own mind psychologically speaking, how you can understand it as far as relations go. This is part of what Aristotle talks about when he he says pro nesis is part of a lived experience that you come from, wisdom that you get from real life experience where you can map and correlate patterns, from wisdom traditions. So all of this is to say that when you're reading the great books, even if it's a work of fiction or an antiquated autobiography, it very much has weight that corresponds to real life and transforms your soul and your interior being and, as such, therefore transforms your reality even if your material and external circumstance senses change.
It helps you find a joyous life in an otherwise, difficult world.
Shannon: And just marvel at, you know, no matter how long ago this was, it's a long time ago. You know, truth is truth, and truth endures. In fact, I wanted to read, if I could I know I I did this quote last week from, pope Benedict. I wanted to read it again because I wanna go on and read a little longer than I did last week, if that's okay. Sure.
So this is Pope Benedict. When I read Saint Augustine's writings, I do not get the impression that he is a man who died more or less sixteen hundred years ago. I feel he is like a man of today, a friend, a contemporary who speaks to me, who speaks to us with his fresh and timely faith. And that's where I stopped last week. I'm gonna go on.
In this is Pope Benedict. In Saint Augustine, who talks to us, talks to me in his writings, we see the everlasting timeliness in his faith, of the faith that comes from Christ, the eternal incarnate word, son of God, son of man. And we can see that this faith is not of the past, although it was preached yesterday. It is still timely today, for Christ is truly yesterday, today, and forever. I just thought it was a little more beautiful when we went a little further than what I read last week.
Sean: Absolutely. What you're touching on on the the back end of that quote too is the the timelessness that that in a way because, Christ is the truth, it is a truth that transcends time and space and therefore and this is the joys of reading the ancients is realize that what you're going through, they went through thousands of years ago and already have the the the answers to. It's like, wait. My problems have already been solved. So it again, it's it's truly an enriching and enlightening experience, really re reading the entire canon of the great books and especially for Confessions.
So I think it might be best to start this conversation with a quick little recap both over what is Confessions about for anyone who missed last week's space and what do we discuss in, week one, book one. So in layman's terms, Confessions is pretty much an autobiography. It's Saint Augustine. He's recapping the first thirty years of his life, which is by his own terms, a story of him making the transition from being a man of the world a great, great sinner, a man who committed every sin in the book to not only find faith, but event eventually find a faith that leads him to be an intellectual giant, a doctor of the church, and one of the the greatest and most influential saints of all time. So it's a really riveting and personal, story about a personal experience to coming to the faith.
But what's makes it so relevant to us is it's a deeply heartfelt particular story that points to the universalities of mankind, namely that Augustine is writing about this the sense of an aching and restless heart that is looking for home and that this is universal that all of us have this aching, this longing, this yearning for joy as CS Lewis writes, and all of us are searching for home. So, really, the open invitation when we're reading Augustine's story is, yes, looking at what he went through, but also having the idea to see, where do I find myself in his shoes in both the highs and the lows? And when you once you make this connection, you realize that you also have the same greatness and you have the same call to adventure and glory. So before we jump into book two itself, there's also a few things I thought I might share as far as understand standing the context and the the high level structure of, confessions. This was brought to me my attention by a dear friend of mine, Athenian stranger, the other day.
He he gave me permission to share it. He just said give credit, but this was one of those things that absolutely blew my mind as far as, like, if you know that GIF of, like, the mind blow. Like, I'm I'm super excited to share this. But, I guess, before I get too far ahead of myself, is there anything else you'd like to share as far as from last week or, just what you think people should know going into confessions, Shannon?
Shannon: I think we should know what Athenian stranger said because that's one smart guy. So that's what I'm waiting to hear. That he is.
Sean: That he is. Okay. So this was, again, all credit due to Athenian stranger. If you're not following him already, please go do. He's a genius man and he's give given some of the best spaces and talks on Greek philosophy and use of reason I've ever encountered.
So anyhoo, what did he he share? He he shared with me a whiteboard. It was this crazy diagram that's discussing the structure of confessions. So confessions is basically two main sections. It's part one is autobiography.
Augustine detailing the first thirty years of his life from center to saint. And then part two, the last four books, is a series of theological discussions and writings, which sounds a little weird at first. You might ask, well, why did he do an autobiography and then start pontificating about what theology and God in the universe? Wouldn't that make for a separate book? But what I realized or what I was showing you that there's a a deep, deep pattern here that that points to the narrative structure embedded in all of the great works of the West.
So, pardon me, I didn't get as much time to prepare for this as I would like and I might be a little over the place, but you can bear with me. So if we were to look at it, there's five main structures to what's going on in confessions. There's books one through nine, which is Augustine talking about his his life back to the faith. Book 10, he then writes theologically about memory. So not just his personal memory, but, like, what is memory in general, and how does this relate to understanding our place in reality?
Memory then goes on to book 11, which is time. So asking, okay. If we have memory, well, this is embedded in time and place in the past, present, and future. So what encapsulates time? Then time goes to book 12, which is heaven and earth and pontificating about creation itself, which goes to book 13, creation.
So the key idea here then is that these last four books, they all build on each other based off of Augustine's story. In other words, it's making an argument that's a universal argument found in all great writing and all great myths. And that argument is something like the ascent to knowing God is an inward movement. And it's an inward movement that starts with your personal story and then builds upwards to an ontological precondition of creation, meaning that the entire story of confessions is a cycle. If you read it from books one to 13, it starts with Augustine's personal story and pontificates all the way back to creation itself, to Genesis one.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And conversely, if you read it in reverse order from book 13 to book one, it's a story of creation to heaven and earth, to time, to memory, to a particular memory of a particular time in a particular place such as Augustine. So this is a a narrative structure that you see in all the great works. It's the same idea that you see in Dante's divine comedy. We start with a particular person in a particular time in a particular place, Dante in exile, and Dante is searching for God.
So he has to go down to go up. He has to go into the memories of his sins. He has to go down into the inferno and then ascend up to see the face of God himself. So this is I'll pause here for a second. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but what are your thoughts to this, first Shannon, as far as what I'm is this cohering first and foremost?
Shannon: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. As I read it and read some commentaries, you know, this first part of the of the work, you know, he's looking inward. He's remembering as we talk talking about his memories when he was a child and growing up and he didn't wanna learn Greek and and the things we we heard in book one and in book two as well, I guess, dig into it a little bit. He's really recounting, you know, is is probably the most lurid part of of, confessions when he was, you know, chasing his carnal desires.
And, you know, as he moves through through that, I can't remember which book it is, I think maybe 10 or nine or 10, you know, where he talks about his mother dying. It's like it was just sort of interesting. And then he then he sort of turns, you know, upward, I guess. He's looking inward a lot of the time, and now he's turning upward to focus on things eternal.
Sean: Yeah.
Shannon: The And Oh,
Sean: go ahead. Sorry.
Shannon: Good. No. Go ahead.
Sean: Oh, yes. So, and I thought you were were finished there. I didn't mean to cut you off, but this is exactly right. I so the key idea here is that if you want to find God, you must first go down to go up. When Augustine is writing confessions in the present, he's writing it with the intention of I want to grow closer to communion with God.
And so books one through nine is him going down. In writing his confessions, he's confessing all of his sins and all of his darkness and all of his depravity. This is, again, the same idea as Dante going down into the inferno. This is Odysseus and Aeneas, the the heroes of Greek antiquity who have to go into the underworld before they can rise up and make their way home. This the it's the basic structure of all narrative fact is if you really want heaven, you must first look at the great darkness, of your yourself or the darkness of reality.
You must first understand the dark night of the soul before you can truly comprehend the glories of the gospel and the good news. And, of course, this is Christ on the cross as well. He must have his passion. He must have his agony in the garden. He must suffer first, and he must go down into hell before he can go up to heaven.
And so what's significant then about this idea, he must go down to go up, well, all of the the myths the myths of antiquity, the writings and the lifespan how Augustine views his life and the writings of great post Christian works like Dante, all of these writings are true in the sense that all of them are pointing to the cross. All of them are saying, okay. This this idea of the meaning of life is true in the sense that we have to die so that we can come back to an everlasting life and an everlasting glory. But the the actual truth, the ultimate truth is the cross or the story of Christ. And what signifies the truth of Christ's story is this is the this happened in real historical life.
This was the word made flesh. This is it's what CS Lewis calls as just as the he he considers this myth becoming fact in the same way that God has become man. So all of this is a long winded way of saying that every time we're reading a good story or a good myth or hearing someone share deep wisdom and we say that's true, it's true that it's, found in relation to the cross itself. And then we can find ourselves in the same shoes as Augustine or the same shoes of Dante by realizing that we too are in in exile in the wild and searching for home and that home looks like picking up our cross and carrying it. Because as we pick up our cross and carrying it as Christ tells us to, we're now embodying the same narrative journey that Christ himself followed that led him first down into the inferno and then up into everlasting glory and paradise.
So this is the the underlying structure that Augustine is going through and Brooks went through. And as we're looking at his life, this is us journeying through the dark night of the soul to find the the the gem in the darkness that brings us the true salvation or true wisdom to live a life of glory that conquers pain.
Shannon: This idea of going down, you know, to go up. You know, we we do that in the modern sense. There's that book I always quote, you know, silence. Right? We have to be silent in our own mind so we can have that interior look, so we can do what Augustine does in confessions, which is sort of review the things that he's done right, but mostly mostly done wrong.
And, we do that in silence away from the distractions of the world, because if we just stay constantly overstimulated, we'll never never go down, which means we'll never go never go up.
Sean: Yeah. 100%. So and part of this you might ask, well, why? Like, why do you have to look at your darkness before you can truly comprehend the gospel and the good news? Like, why does Dante have to go into hell?
And maybe that's an easier one to understand is, like, when Dante is going through the nine circles of hell, the the inferno, he's he's getting terrified by all the evils and the horrors that he sees. What everyone suffers in Dante's Inferno was what's called a contrappasso, which means they're not just suffering torments, but they are suffering punishments that are directly a result of the crimes that they committed on Earth. So people who are in hell for lust have punishments that are indicative of the lust. The people in for betrayal have, punishments that are reflective of their betrayal. So what Dante is doing when he is seeing these horrible, horrible punishments is he's not just gawking in this sense of voyeurism of, like, wow.
This is terrible. I'm scared straight. I mean, yes. But he's recognizing not just the the torments of hell, but he's also recognizing the the horrors and evils of sin itself because he sees this sin laid bare and consuming the the souls of those who are suffering. But most importantly, he recognizes the same capacity for sin inside of himself.
This is the idea. This is that to truly ascend, you have to first have a genuine, genuine sense of confession. Confessions. Right? Pardon.
I'm sorry. You have to have a confession and a genuine repentance that says, I you know, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. I am so afraid of letting God down because I truly comprehend the horrors of sin that are inside of my soul. And so it's almost the this is psychologically true too that in Jungian terms, this is, integrating your shadow that once you voluntarily look at your darkness, you look at your evils, this is therapeutic and that it emboldens you and it makes you braver, but it also humbles you and gives you a genuine sense of understanding of self and who you are because as Lewis reminds us, it's no man realizes how hard it is to be a good person until you try to because when you try to be good, your your demons, the darkness side of you will sort of come out and you'll realize how hard it is to stay chased, to stay pure, to avoid gluttony. So this is really it is that you first must go down to go up because you need a genuine repentance that is expressed by the idea of realizing that I am sinful, I am fallen and I am completely dependent and contingent on the great and everlasting source of glory and goodness that is God above me.
And only once I wholeheartedly submit and surrender to him first do I have the capability of truly ascending to dare to seek the face of God himself.
Shannon: I'd like to invite everybody if you have not to please repost the space as we talk about confessions by Saint Augustine. Yeah. What you're saying there reminds me of of, like, AA, like people that I know that have had friends that are alcoholics and that there's this talk about we have to let them hit bottom. You know, they're never going to be free of that demon until they want to be, and they're never gonna want to be until they hit rock bottom or lose it all or realize they can't do it in and of themselves. They need they need to turn, look up, as they say.
Sean: And I love that you bring up AA. That's one of my great friends went through it and found God through AA, but what what he says as someone who still attends the meetings is that the biggest hiccup for a lot of people and who are going through AA and struggling is, if I if I remember right, it's steps two and three, which is acknowledging there's a god and a higher power above you and surrendering to it and submitting and acknowledging you are powerless to, conquer your alcoholism or your sin without the the the source and the gift of a higher power. And this is exactly what you live with when you leave out of the inferno as Dante or when you leave out of books one through nine of Augustine is recognizing this powerness powerlessness and having this wholehearted surrender first and foremost.
Shannon: This was such an interesting chapter to read. I wonder maybe we can do get a show of hands just how many people are kinda reading along with us, you know, because one thing, you can just come to the space to learn. But also week by week, you can be reading along with us and, have read book two this week and book three next week? Anybody? That's just you and me, Sean.
Sean: Just you and I. We're we have to carry the whole load on our shoulders. But no. I mean, since you're bringing it up, now might be an appropriate time to start to actually dive into book two itself unless there's anything else you wanted to, touch on here.
Shannon: Lead the way, sir. Perfect.
Sean: And, also, I did want to, give a heads up. I have had a few requests to speak in the past five or ten minutes. I do see everyone. Shannon and I are first going to get through a few key points that we want to discuss, and then we're going to love to have some guest speakers come up and share some comments and thoughts, probably around the hour or around 07:15 or so. But so we see we'll definitely get you up here, but we'll just try to get to some key ideas first.
So yeah. First, diving into book two. So book two deals with the sixteenth year of Augustine's life. So where we last left with Augustine, the first fifteen years of his life, he was discussing how he effectively grew up. He wasn't baptized, and he didn't have any strong role models to teach him to love virtue or love goodness or love the good.
Best he had was his mother, but he more or less discusses that we had a predisposition to sin as it was and his education taught him to not love God and virtue, but to love honor and glory, specifically defined as worldly glory. I need to get ahead in the world. I need to find my station. He would study the great books, but not to seek their their lessons and wisdom, but he would study them so that he could present them well on stage and become a great speaker and win the applause of man. And he discusses that by the end end of book one, around the ages of 14 and 15, he starts becoming a man of passion and vice and wrath.
He he leaves us with this idea that he started seeking pleasure and truth and nobility and worldly things and created things rather than God himself. And he fears that or he he fears with the realization of twenty twenty hindsight that this is about to set him on a path of great sin. So you can maybe say book one was original sin, but I think book two as far as where Augustine starts to flounder. But I think book two is where things really amplify, where we start to see this, like, snowball effect of sin compounding on sin. And Augustine starting to really show signs of what he would consider depravity and perhaps beginning to tangibly pay the price for it.
It's, really book two is divided into two sections. One is he's discussing his main sin that has haunted him most of his life or will haunt him most of his life life, which is lust. And then he has this very famous anecdote, which is the infamous pear tree anecdote, which I I I think he basically considers the pear tree incident that we'll get into as, like, the incident that seems to have sealed his fate more than anything else to lead him to a life of sin and evil before he finally repents later into his thirties.
Shannon: You're mentioning there, I and one of the things I remember making note on is is this he said his father gave next to no thought to God. Therefore, he's not gonna be passing on virtue. Right? And very little to me. That's Augustine talking.
We just we know how important fathers are, good role models are to teach the family and guide the family, and, this is perhaps one of the reasons why he finds his himself in all those situations, including at the pear tree.
Sean: Most definitely. I think because his mother is a very virtuous woman. We said last week that it's it's even be said, joking that his mother should be considered a a saint as well because without his mother, we have no Saint Augustine Because his mother is a fairly constant and consistent in her life as far as she is praying for him and praying for him and for him to come back to the faith and practice the faith genuinely. His father is, to my understanding, I think he does practice Christianity, but it's very much a a cultural thing at best if that's even the case. His father is far more of a he takes a lot of pride and excitement in seeing Augustine flourish in the worldly sense again.
Like, very careerist, very, like, oh, my son's gonna be a great speaker and a great aristocrat. So if you wanted to outside of the accountability of Augustine's own sinful nature, if you wanted to point any one finger, sure there's the education system, but it there's definitely a felt absence in a lock lack of a fatherly and paternal guidance to guide Augustine to a love of virtue. And it really shows the idea that if the father doesn't do his role to lead his flock, the flock will get lost and fall astray.
Shannon: Virtue is so important. I was thinking about, you know, the crazy state of the world. We're seeing all these scandals about how all this, you know, the government, the USAID scandals, and how how they've stolen all this money from from the people of The United States. And it's like, you know, if if the world were full of virtuous men and women, almost all these bad things would never have happened. If there were people that were honest, there were people that said, you know what?
It's it's wrong to steal. It's wrong to seek ambition and fame at such a such a scale. So, you know, we hear that word virtue, which is a word that, you know, if you go down to the street corner and start talking about virtue, people probably aren't that interested in. Right? But we've got to make it it's it's why I love what you do, Sean, and what so many of our friends do, posting the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Because the true, the good, and the beautiful are attractive. So we will get it and we're getting into this, you know, Augustine's fornication and all this kind of stuff is sexual escapades. But this longing, I was looking for the quote. I wrote it down, but maybe I can't find it. But, yeah, our longing that leads us into really many vices, whether it's sexual immorality or maybe you you're a shopaholic and you just spend too much money.
Maybe you're a glutton and you just eat all the time. It's we're trying to fill this hole inside. We're we're made for God, and when we don't have him, we're gonna try to fill it up. And that'll bring a lot of temporary highs, but they're very transitory, and then the lows are are pretty low. And, the lows are the permanent the permanent destination if we don't if we don't embrace virtue and and as we keep this theme of looking up and look up out of ourselves.
Sean: This feels like a great opportunity to plug your space tomorrow because if I remember right, you said you're doing a space with great books, Deacon Garlic on Plato and Eros. Is that right?
Shannon: Yes. Space tomorrow night. I hope you're coming. It's, the Christian defense of Eros. And, you know, we think about we've heard this talk about, like, faith and reason.
You know, Augustine loves this idea and and Aquinas this in John Paul the second. The faith and reason are complementary, and eros and agape, these two Greek words among other words for love, it's when we eros gets sort of separated. So in faith and reason, if it's too much faith and no reason, you have fundamentalism, which leads you to terrible places, you know, like suicide bombings and stuff like that. If you have no faith in all reason, you're in denialism and, you know, the world's a terrible place. You're this radical secular humanist.
And it's the same way when we when you have eros and you divorce that from agape, where it just becomes about lust, there's no care or concern for the other person, you go down very dark paths. And so, yeah, the space tomorrow night is about, you know, because because people think about that, you know, We think about that word eros, and we just sort of think, oh, Christians can't be into that, you know. But, that's God's design. We look at Genesis on the second chapter of Genesis, it's not good for man to be alone in the scripture in Song of Solomons. Song of Solomon.
I did a Bible reading one time, and, you know, when I do these readings, I read for an hour sometimes, so I don't have time to also preread it. And so I was reading, I think it was Song of Solomon, and the language is very vivid. And I was looking at the net word that I had to say, like, half a second from now, and it's like, oh, I had to get him. So we see this imagery in the Bible, and and it's very, very good. And so, again, it's just about when it's you know, Satan wants to take what God has given us because Satan can't create anything on his own.
He can twist things and and disorder them, disorder our desires. One of the things tomorrow night, and then I'll stop talking about the space tomorrow, is I'm gonna bring up the there's a famous statue in Rome, sculpted by Bernini. It's in one of the churches. I can't remember which one, but it's called the ecstasy of Saint Teresa and Saint Teresa of Avila. And it's kind of a in the past, it's been a controversial statue because of it's kind of like almost erotic or or getting close to being this sort of her position, and she got this look of ecstasy.
And it's about something that she wrote in her diary, how this vision of an angel piercing her brought her so much pain and so much ecstatic joy of God. And the church has put this in one of the great churches of Rome, so the church has, you know, sort of approved this and says this is a good thing to to contemplate. But the eros is the passion, and God has this passion for us. That's why he went to the cross. And passion is a good thing.
It just gets disordered. When it gets disordered, that's when trouble abounds.
Sean: But that's exactly why I brought this up is I mean, if Augustine were to attend your talk tomorrow night and listen to it, it would save him all that we're gonna read for the next two months. Is Augustine's story is more or less not to oversimplify the story of a suffering man with a perverted or distorted eros that he's, again, he's looking for he's putting all of his energy and all of his passion to be happy into worldly things. Namely, it will be sexual lust. The the the Christian argument and it's it's brought by Plato and funny enough, Augustine was he synthesized Plato more than anyone else. He'd loved Plato.
So what Plato writes in the symposium that you'll be discussing tomorrow was that your sexual energy, your your desires is a love for the beautiful. And this love for the beautiful points you to the transcendental form of beauty itself. So your your job for Plato was to take the the these desires of yours of what you think will make you happy and seek them to the logical and highest end that you can conceptualize. For Plato, that's the form of the beautiful. For the the Christian and, this will be Augustine's answer is that's God himself.
Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee. So so much of flourishing is learning how to get your aim right, to aim upward at the highest good that you can conceive or conceptualize and put not just your mind, but your your heart into this. You must learn to love it. Right? That Christ is not an idea to be studied but a being to be loved.
So look at the highest good. Look at God itself and and get your hearts to love it. And if you do this, this eros into agape, into God, this helps you flourish. But if your eros misses the mark, right, because sin is an archery term, meaning you are missing the mark, you are missing the target, you're missing the aim, then this eros which can fuel your capacity for greatness can lead you to destruction. And this is precisely what it does.
Augustine's life is a life of misguided eros. I'll start I'll I'll I'll show this by reading just the first paragraph or two of, of this book, book two, where he discusses so poetically how his his lust is perverted, his eros is perverted into lust and how it ruins him. So I'll read it, right here. He writes, I arrived now at adolescence and I burned for all the satisfactions of hell and I sank to the animal in a succession of dark lusts. My beauty soon away, and I stank in thine eyes, yet was pleasing in my own and anxious to please the eyes of men.
My one delight was to love and to be loved. But in this, I did not keep the measure of mind to mind, which is the luminous line of friendship, but from the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, And the hot imagination of puberty mists steamed up to becloud and darken my heart so that I could not distinguish the white light of love inside the fog of lust. Both love and lust boiled within me and swept my youthful immaturity over the precipice of evil desires to leave me half drowned in a whirlpool of abominable sins. Your wrath had grown mighty against me, and I knew it not. I had grown deaf from the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment for the pride of my soul, and I departed further from you.
And you left me to myself, and I was tossed about in a waste then poured out in boiling over in fornications, and you were silent. You were silent and I, arrogant and depressed, weary and restless, wandered further and further from you into more and more sins, which could bear no fruit to save my sorrows. That's just the opening paragraph of book two, which again, please, for all that we discuss it, read Augustine himself because it's a poetry and an agonizing of the heart and soul above all else. I can think of few better literary expressions of the the horrors of lust than that right there. This image of a boiling, like, a burning heart and, like, a burning fire that's not just a a a life affirming passion, but a destructive fire that's eating you alive.
And he has all this imagery of it darkening his mind. And he's suffering and he's abject, but he can't even realize that he's abject because he's in love with lust and in love with himself effectively. This this idea of lust and disordered eros turns you in on yourself so that you're blind to God. And like we said last week, there's nothing more pitiful than a pitiable creature who doesn't pity himself. What Augustine doesn't realize right now is he's eating himself alive.
He's falling away into sin and he's completely blind to it because he's so enamored with his his pleasure. So it's beautiful. Well, beautifully horrifying.
Shannon: Might be a good time for you to mention, don't you recommend a specific translation for people who do wanna start reading Confessions? You have a sort of a preferred one, don't you, Sean?
Sean: Most definitely. The the preferred translation comes from both doctor Peter Kreeft and from Deacon Garlic of the Great Books podcast, so you're in great company here. But they recommend the FJ Sheed translations. It's considered one that is most, accurate to capturing the the meaning of Augustine's words. But more importantly, it also captures the poetry and the rhythm which with which Augustine writes because you you really this is poetry above all else that this isn't so much an intellectual exercise as as it really is a a burning heart, a a fiery soul, a transformation of heart because what faith does above all else is transforms your heart and your soul before your mind.
Right? As Augustine himself will write later writes, that I believe so that I can understand. It has to transform your heart before you can fully come into union and comprehend the god and the goodness of faith and grace.
Shannon: I loved it when you were reading there. It's like, you should record an audiobook. It was really, really good. I mean, just the the vivid language and imagery that and again, especially when you're hearing someone else read, it's different than when you're, like, reading it on the page yourself. But, yeah, just powerful, powerful stuff.
Like like I was saying, you hear about these great books, but when you really dig into them, you understand why all these people you've heard, whether on television or YouTube or read about a hundred years ago, were talking about one of the landmark, like you said, Sean, perhaps one of the greatest, certainly one of the greatest works ever in Western civilization, maybe the top two or three. It's, his most famous work. And, Augustine put out a lot of stuff. He wrote, I think, more than any of the other church fathers. So it's just, it's just so interesting to to dig in.
And this this is as you were reading those opening words, this is, really getting into it here in chapter in book two.
Sean: Yeah. Well, again, it's faith is above all else an exercise of the heart before it is an intellectual exercise. We absolutely love to punt pontificate and synthesize Greek reason, you know, Aristotle with Aquinas and Plato with Augustine, but it really begins by first understanding faith and and realizing again that Augustinian, induction that our hearts are restless till they rest in thee. That above all else, we are are searching for home first and foremost and to recognize that we're in exile and it's like, well, where is home? I mean, so, like, you you said yourself that this you felt that this had impacted and moved you a bit more differently than, book one did last week.
I was curious. Could you tell me a bit more about, like, what it was that stuck out to you, or what kind of moved you, or what started to resonate or churn inside of your your spirit?
Shannon: I think it's just kinda getting into it. I I would, sort of compare it to when you sit down and start watching a movie or something. Right? You know, the first two minutes, you know, ten minutes in, you're more into it than two minutes in. You know, you kinda have to kinda get quiet.
And and and, of course, we're reading this over weeks. We're not reading it in one sitting. And so you just kinda have to sort of get yourself your mind quiet and get back into it. So, you know, having done it last week for the first time, it was just easier to sort of return to this place, this time period. And, you know, you're familiar with the writing style from from book one, and we talked about it a lot.
And so it was just more more familiar, I think, is is the right way to say it and just easier to kinda just fall right back into the story.
Sean: Most definitely. Most definitely. Because, again, it really is a a poetry. So I think once you get a bit more used to the rhythm, you understand what he's trying to to do here. It's not so much of a, you know, medieval classical work of intellectual, pontificating like you might find in an Aquinas.
Like, I say that or or to the contrary. It's it's much more of a bearing my heart and soul open for all of you to see, for all of my darkness to lay forth, like, leave no stone unturned as far as this is who I am, this is what I've done. Because, again, it's only through these confessions that you're able to ultimately, I think the idea, funny enough, is it's to become a vehicle of grace. In in many ways, it points to this this idea of Mary who's very much venerated and Augustine will become a huge fan of, the Virgin Mary later. Right?
Part of what he and I guess, by extension tradition, so on and so forth, grew to love about Mary and her fiat was that she perfectly as a disciple of Christ as the example for what we're called to as far as her fiat was she was full of grace and she completely surrendered when the angel Gabriel appears to her. Right? So it's Mary's act of humility is simply thy will be done, which is the the the most simplest thing you can think of. Like, she says, yes, who would say no to God. Right?
But it really is truly glorious because this is it's it it almost goes back to, like, that same clip that we were discussing in AA as far as far as people get tripped up at the acknowledgment of the the higher power, the existence of God, and the surrender to it that it's nice to say, oh, I'd say yes to God. But when you actually look at the the sheer amount of faith and courage that it takes to fully surrender, to fully say, you know, I I give my myself over to you completely. Like, in practice, that can be quite terrifying. I know in my own life, many times I felt called to do things that I'm like, are you sure, God? Like, I mean, yes, that I will be done, but do I have to do this?
Like, do I have to quit my job right now? Or so on and so forth. It's it's it's funny enough if you read, Saint Faustina's diary, you know, she was the twentieth century mystic who reportedly had a lot of conversations with Christ personally. One of the the big jumps for her that really brought her towards, I think, sanctification came when Christ had her do an exercise. If if you're to believe her diary, it was he he told her to grab a piece of paper and then write two words on it, my will.
And then he said put an x on that and then get a second pay paper and say thy will be done and circle it. Again, very simple exercise, but it really seems that, like, this is what's celebrated in the Virgin Mary and that what all of us are called to do and that all of the saints truly embody by meditating on it after maybe a lifetime in many cases that thy will be done. Let me completely open myself up to you in every every capacity that I can with a full hearted baptism, a full hearted confession, a full hearted surrender, and then complete subservience that this is what true humility looks like and then this is what will perceive true glory, but it comes on the other side of the darkness.
Shannon: I was at, mass this week and actually went to sometimes I go to a Maronite mass, and the readings this week were about the the person who's in torment and wants to send someone to their warn their brothers and their father and stuff about, you know, if they if they knew about this place, they they wouldn't sin. They would they would believe. And, he basically says, they have the prophets. And, it was interesting because, you know, I don't I can't quote the the verse specifically now, of course, when I'm trying to do it on the spot. But he said, you know, if they won't believe what they already have, they're not gonna believe they're not gonna believe anything.
So we have to, I I I it's interesting because you you we're talking about this, getting back into this this second week. It was just more it was just more emotional. Like, you can really see him searching and and regretting what he's done and almost recounting this in, you know, such, you know, such sorrow. You could just I don't know. It just it really was alive this this week, to me in a way it wasn't last time.
Sean: Again, that really it points back to both Mary and Mary and devotion because Mary and devotion is interpersonal above all else. It's it's far more emphatic and about, you know, praying for Mary's intercession and praying for the Holy Spirit to come alive in you. So it's really far less intellectual. It it's their strange paradox of Augustine that though he's an intellectual giant, perhaps only rivaled or surpassed by Aquinas, at the same time, he's most known above all else for that burning heart. I mean, we'll we'll get to his his, his actual full hearted what's the word I'm looking for?
Conversion later, which is the the the burning heart completely manifest, but this is what faith looks like above all else. It's I believe so that I may understand. I will probably be harking on this point throughout all thirteen weeks, but you can't meditate on this enough that true belief precedes understanding. And that tends to be the the big hang up when you're evangelizing and having discussions with modern man today who's far more skeptical about the metaphysical and skeptical about God and the divine and like, okay. Maybe I can follow the laws, but, like, I don't know if I can believe God.
Like, I just I I can't rationally comprehend. And it's like, well, in many ways, if you're always looking with just the brain, you will never fully comprehend faith. This will later be Augustine's problem. He's eventually going to if we get a bit ahead of ourselves here, he's eventually going to get sick of his sinful ways and look for happiness, and he's going to look for it through reason. So he'll study philosophy and philosophy and philosophy and Plato and Neo Platonism and, the the Manichae Manichaeism, which is heresy, but he's looking for God through the brain alone.
And you can see this with so many brilliant minds, especially today, that there are so many brilliant people who can intellectually comprehend everything, but they're like, I just I can't believe in God. It's like, I I I just can't make that jump. And it's like, well, you're looking with the brain. It's the heart that you need above all else. You you need that leap of faith first, which, again, ties back to Mary.
I'm sorry to be redundant, but it starts with that surrender first that say, yes. It's like that's usually one of the questions I've asked that will reap, reap fruits if I'm having a discussion with someone who's skeptical and a bit more intellectually and inclined. I'm like, okay. I know you say that you believe or this makes sense, but do you actually want God to be real? And I'm like, what?
Like, well, what do you want? Do you want God to be real or not? And they're like, I I just wanna know what's true. And I'm like, well, do you? Like, you you say that you do like, you you you want him to show yourself, but you're you told me you're afraid to pray.
You're afraid to go to mass and actually do the things, like, if you genuinely if if God's not shown to you and you're you're doing all the right steps, it's like, well, are you really doing that? Because, like, God doesn't want is your mind. He wants your love. So are you treating him like someone that you genuinely love? It's he's a relationship first, and only once you seek that relationship and seek his face will he start to show himself to you.
But this is why he figuratively remains hidden, and he'll be hidden from Augustine for quite a while.
Shannon: Last time, or when we were in that space last week with, with Deacon Garlic, he gave that quote from the John Paul the second, encyclical Fidei Eratio. The opening line is faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth. And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word to know himself, so that knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of the truth about themselves. Such a beautiful opening to this incredible encyclical, this convenience thing we could do a space online.
Sean: Can you repeat that one more time?
Shannon: The whole quote? Yeah.
Sean: Yes.
Shannon: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth, and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word, to know himself so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
Sean: It's funny because, again, that reeks of the Augustinian burning heart. And, again, that also even reeks of CS Lewis. And I'll even I'll tie this back to to Augustine in a second. But this is this was because CS Lewis, of course, was famously, like, an atheist for about thirty years as well, not similar to an unsimilar to Augustine. And what was really nagging him his entire life was this sense of being well, surprised by Joyce's autobiography.
Right? That he had the sense that there was a longing inside him and he had this reason of, well, if there's a desire in my heart, there's clearly something that I was designed for that, otherwise, I wouldn't yearn for this happiness. And like Augusta, he spent a lot of his life looking for happiness and worldly things and especially the intellect. And he really, couldn't find it until he, came came back to this idea of the true myth, which which ties back full circle to what, Athenian had taught me earlier. And I see you in the audience now, Athenian.
I had started up with the, with the the blueprint you had shared with me yesterday in the group chat that was truly phenomenal. So, again, everyone, Athenians here, follow him if you don't because he his, his genius inspired much of this talk. But so what what, CS Lewis found out as far as, okay, if I have this longing inside of me, if I have this burning heart, this, this joy, well, I love the myths. And what are the truths of the myths pointing to? Well, it's it's pointing to the one myth that actually happened in real life, Christ.
Christ is the word made flesh. He He he was the one truth that was predicated in reality and he is the truth that all truth points to. So then clearly, if my heart loves truth and I'm looking for home, then home comes with picking up my cross and following Christ that this is where home is and hence my heart is restless till I rest in thee. So, again, this is really the beauty of what's not just going on in confessions, but all the great myths and all the great narratives. Whenever we say it's, oh, this is true or this is deep without realizing it, the the standard of truth that we're referring to is the standard of the cost itself as the cross is the myth made into historical fact that is predicated of all of the the great narrative journeys, and at least insofar as the narrative journeys throughout time are true.
Shannon: I was glancing over that, letter that well, it makes perfect sense when you said that that opening line of the encyclical faith and reason sort of has the spirit of Augustine because John Paul the second admired him so greatly. And in I was sort of scanning, the letter that John Paul the second wrote about Augustine from 1986, and he references something that Leo the thirteenth, which is a pope, you know, around the in the late, eighteen hundreds, you know, for, like, the last maybe fifteen years or so of the eighteen hundreds. But he wrote an encyclical. This is something we're gonna have to read up on. It's, the restoration of Christian philosophy, and he's referencing Augustine here.
So I know that's gonna be something we wanna pull some nuggets out of as we continue this journey.
Sean: Most definitely. Most definitely. At this point, it might be appropriate to get to the the latter half of book two now, which is the the infamous, pear tree thievery scene, which is funny because on the one hand, it's a very, very innocuous story, and yet it seems that this story is what may have ashamed Saint Augustine more than anything else in his entire life. So as Augustine recounts it with this infamous, pear tree, story, he discusses how, again, he's 16 years old now, and much of his life has been informed by a love of not just worldly things and pleasure, but also wanting to win the approval in the eyes of others. And one of the ways that he won approval was by being rebellious.
This was, of course, a sexual lust. You know, there there's an implication that part of why he wanted lust aside from the obvious of wanting to sleep with a woman is that it also made him cool in the eyes of his peers. Right? Like, he's a womanizer and, like, oh, he doesn't play by the rules. And and this idea of being rebellious sort of takes, takes shape in all form of his life.
He's always looking to win the sense of vainglory in the world and in the eyes of others. So he writes how he and his friends, they're hanging out, by a farm one night and the problem they have right now is boredom that they're just they're looking for a thrill and they they spot this pear tree. And Augustine, he leads the charge. He and his friends, they completely ransacked this pear tree. They just leave with their shirts stuffed with as many pears as they can possibly carry and go running away down the road.
And it's like, well, why did they do this? We'll find out that they don't even need the pears nor want the pears. They're not even hungry. They just discard them, throw them to the wild, and they have no use of them. And Augustine writes he writes of how much this act horrified him in hindsight because what he was doing was he was looking for the thrill and the excitement of stealing pears simply because it was forbidden.
That there was just because it was wrong was the only his only motivation here, that he was taking joy and evil for its own sake. And he's really seems to consider this a formative moment of evil because this will be the standard that sets him on the wrong path for at least the next three to five years, if not more, of really reveling and being wise in his own eyes of, I want rushes, like, I don't I don't conform by the rules. I'm cool in the eyes of others because I am great in my my own way. I, you know, I don't settle. It's like the the very fact that he's now training himself to take joy and explicitly and expressly evil, Not even just this vainglory that's a corrupted sense of good, but simply and specifically desiring evil for its own sake.
As innocuous as this pear tree scene could be seen as boyhood mischief, this very act of love was training his heart to love something that would effectively destroy him. And he he writes about the fact that this was the moment of my soul seeking to love its own self destruction.
Shannon: I don't wanna divert too much, but there's something that I'm working on. I'm working on a post. There's this book that that, that's written by a Catholic priest in the in the nineteenth century called liberalism is a sin, and it talks about how once the Protestant revolution sort of introduced this idea that we can sort of decide that we're not bound by what the church teaches, it starts us on this very slow but very obvious progression through history where more and more things, more and more evils are accepted until we get to where we are, today. But, I'm just gonna read this quote because I was working on this earlier, something I haven't posted yet, but it was reminding me of this stuff we read about, about Augustine, about this sort of the pull to the darkness. The quote is men become liberal on the count of a natural desire for independence and for an easy life.
Liberalism is necessarily sympathetic with the depraved nature of man, just as catholicity is opposed to it. Liberalism is emancipation from restraint, catholicity the curb of the passions. Fallen man, by a very natural tendency, loves a system which legitimizes and sanctifies his pride of intellect and the license of his passion. Hence, Tertullian says the soul and its noble aspirations is naturally Christian. Likewise, it may be said that man by the taint of his origin is born naturally liberal.
Logically then, he declares himself liberal in due form when he discovers that it offers protection for his an an excuse for his indulgences. I was just sort of thinking about all these indulgences that that that Augustine recounts in booktube. And it was kind of funny when that he sort of, like you say, like you infer, this pear tree to me seems like, well, wouldn't, you know, sleeping with all these people be a worse sin than, you know, taking a couple of pairs? It seems like it would be, but it it seems to have, that that incident seems to have had the sort of the opposite effect on him. It really, really affected him, which, you know, as you become closer to God, the smaller and smaller sins do to weigh on you more.
And as you're recounting the the thing about he wanted to be cool with his friends, I think we might be reading different translations. I had to get on the sheet translation, but but the note that I wrote down was, you know, he was doing this for the applause of his friends. He heard his friends bragging of their depravity. And while do we see that in our culture today?
Sean: No. I mean, that's exactly what what it refers to. And, I mean, I can say more or less that was me growing up in adolescence too that much of how we distinguished ourselves as young rebellious lads was just doing things for the sake of it. I remember one of my friends, we were this is my parachute incident. We were, literally walking by my elementary school or 11 or 12 years old, a little bit older, but, and just kind of getting into trouble and being idle.
And I literally remember, like, my and I felt terrible about this. I don't know why. I bet my my friend was like, hey, guys. Watch this. And he took, like, this giant rock and just, just, like, rammed it through a window, like, just completely shattered a window, and we all went running.
And, again, it was that same sort of idea of, like, what what was that? Because, like, clearly, there was nothing good going on there. To this day, that's something I still don't feel good about, but it's that same idea of if men aren't into love the good, well, and they're left to their own devices. They say idleness is a devil's playground. Right?
And it's like, well, if you have a bunch of young men who are bored and they have total disregard for good and evil, you know, they're lukewarm, well, look at what they'll do. They'll naturally drift to something that is destructive. Right? That's almost a little, that almost points to something bigger that if you don't teach men to be great, they will naturally become forces of destruction to destroy society. But, conversely, if you properly train someone in a good education to love the true, good, beautiful God and virtue, well, they can become forces of virtue who build up society much like Augustine becomes.
I also love how you had had brought up that there really is a celebration of individual autonomy and, the doctrines of modernity. It ring brings back to Milton in Paradise Lost because, Satan in Paradise Lost, the antagonist, is seen as an intellectual. And his famous slogan in Paradise Lost is, it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. And so this is the they say that the the idea of the Luciferian origins of the root of evil in mankind too is this pride of saying, I don't want to submit to virtue or to submit to that which is good and just. I'm wise in my own eyes.
I know better. I I know good for me. I redefine good and evil by my own rights. I live by my own rules. I live by my own freedom.
Hence, that that idea of celebration of freedom is defined by the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want isn't the true freedom in the sense of the freedom that is aligning the truth and con conforming you with reality or aligning your soul with goodness, but it's the freedom of abandoning good and evil and and disregarding it and thereby attaching yourself to the weight of pride and attaching yourself to the the restrictive blinding effect of sin. And that's what is happening. Augustine is writing of how sin is burning him but blinding him so that he's unaware of his own depravity as lust is beginning to boil in his soul.
Shannon: I love that you slipped in there, the the classic definition of truth. Do you wanna say it again? What is truth?
Sean: Truth is conformity of the mind with reality.
Shannon: You know, we think about the cardinal virtues . Prudence is the one of the first ones. You can't be prudent if you don't acknowledge reality. Right? You can't make a decision, a wise decision, and weigh the facts if you're in some kind of fantasy land like we have today.
Like, we have so many people who say that, you know, men can have babies and, you know, it's all kind of stuff and there's 15 genders and all that. But it makes you know, this whole one of one of the things he conveys in this book is that, this idea, he says nothing deserves to be despised more than vice. And when you're mentioning, Paradise Lost, you know, Satan is the greatest marketer in history. You know, the first marketing campaign is in, you know, where the Garden of Eden when he comes to to Eve and and give some partial truths. Right?
We see on all these commercials on television, they're gonna tell us some of the things that the whatever they're selling us, gonna do, the drug, for example. But, you know, they're leading off all the you you read the warning label of, like, prescription drugs, and and there's, like, a gazillion things that they don't tell you about. And that's that's kinda what the devil does. He he puts the shines a big Hollywood spotlight on the good parts and keeps the bad parts in the shadows. The is the old idea.
You can't necessarily just give a dog a poison pill. You but you can hide it in a steak, and he'll eat it.
Sean: And I do love that line. Nothing is to be be despised more than vice. Reminds me of another great CS Lewis book, and this is what we're talking about with the canon in general. Right? It's a great conversation and everything's connected.
But this was it helped me understand hatred thanks to Lewis himself. What what I'm specifically referring to is it's in is book two of his space trilogy series. This is Paralandras. And, real quick, it's an allegory of Garden of Eden where the the protagonist finds himself on this island and there's this innocent woman who's basically a pre fall Eve. She's completely innocent and then the devil is there in the form of a man and he's trying to tempt this Eve like woman to eat from the the garden as well, like, you know, commit sin in this world.
And what the protagonist's role is to do is he has to try to outwit the devil. He has to sit here and talk to the innocent woman and say, no. Don't eat from the tree. You were told not to. And so it's a a constant back and forth back and forth throughout the novel.
And, the the woman being like, oh, that's a good point. Maybe I won't. And then the devil's like, no. No. Do this.
Eat it. Eat it. And she said, oh, maybe I will. Back and forth. And you feel this like, as this conversation is going, you feel a, like, very slow sense of dread and despair overcoming the protagonist because it's a one step forward, two steps back thing.
He feels himself losing ground. He's like, man, like, this is true. I I can't that's true what they say. You can't outwit the devil. He'll he's always smarter than you.
He's got a slick tongue. And he he feels this despair, but What's also coming out of him in this despair as he's watching, the the devil completely manipulate this beautiful and innocent woman. This line made me laugh out loud the first time I read it. He he's talking in the heat of the moment and he's watching the devil just whisper more and more into her ear in real time. And he goes, like, my blood started to boil and something came over me.
And for the very first time in my life, I understood the nature of evil and what it was made for in the first place. And then it ends there and then it it just cuts to, like, a third person view when he just, like, balls his hand into a fist and punches the devil in the jaw, and they start just having a fight. But, I mean, I I absolutely love it is that he realized that hatred is even hatred, which is a part of God's design, had is given a purpose, and our purpose is to hate evil and hate sin. It's not just, again, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and a true properly oriented fear is a a love of God and a fear or a proper hatred of doing evil and doing vice because you recognize the destructive consequences that takes place in yourself or the world at large. So the virtuous man is not just a man who loves the good.
He also has this equally necessary hatred for evil, not hating people per se, but, you know, what's the classic saying? Hate the sin but not the sinner. Like, hating lust. This is what Augustine will need to try to aspire towards, not just avoiding lust, but truly improperly hating it and properly running away from it.
Shannon: We see, you know, when there's a big crime there was a big school shooting here in Florida a few years ago, in Parkland, and there's a lot of people, a lot of Catholics, you know, Catholic church, of course, the the idea of life protecting life from conception until natural death, you know, lends to not killing people even in, you know, capital punishment. And, you know, it's not part of their desire is not wrong. It's not wrong to want justice. We're supposed to love justice, one of the cardinal virtues, but we don't always get to determine what justice is. You know, vengeance is mine, says the Lord.
And sometimes that's hard because, you know, someone's murdered someone. We know that's wrong, and we don't ever want them to do it again. But as the church understands it today, we have the resources to protect the general populace from somebody if we lock them up. Whereas in the past, they didn't. They couldn't.
They didn't have prisons, you know, a thousand years ago like we do today where they could have somebody for decades. So, you know, because the church is kinda tilted a little little bit more towards it being no versus what they've said in the past, and that's that's one of the reasons. But it's not wrong to love justice.
Sean: Yeah. Well, and say that much like the idea that Augustine points out that great saints and great sinners are very much alike. I think you see this very much in accordance with justice that some of the most insane people you might see in in in history, politically speaking, at least might have might have been motivated by a genuinely warped sense of justice, like, a a genuine sense of believing that they're fighting for justice, but it's almost like because it's warped and perverted much like Eros that's perverted away from Agape becomes a self destructive force. Same is true with justice. You can genuinely love justice, but if you miss the mark and lack that humility to think that you may be wrong, like, there's I I think there's a saying that there's nothing that brings out the evil in man like convincing him of the righteousness of his cause without error.
Because if someone is convinced that their cause is undeniably righteous in just in every single way, this begins to open up a dark path psych psychologically speaking where you you can begin to believe, well, the ends will justify the means because my cause is true and just I think this is especially what you see laid out in a lot of sort of Marxist, resentment, throughout the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century is that it's there's a sense of a a a lot of the people who were were committing these injustices had this perverted and warped sense of justice, and they were, effectively, it seems, ideologically possessed by the spirit of resentment above all else. And and more often than not, it seemed that what would happen is the populace would get whipped up by demagogues who would whisper these lies about the, oppressive bourgeoisie and proletariat. And so these people would get whipped up into a false sense of oppress or unoppressed and have this, false sense of, oh, my cause is truly just in every single sense of the way, and therefore, everything that I do is just. And it it seems that that this is my point then, that it's almost that a perverted sense of a love of justice that isn't just leads to the worst, evils imaginable.
Shannon: Yeah. Again, it's where man is is becoming the moral arbiter. Right? Divorce from the church, which we see in the, you know, Protestant Revolution, where the church isn't telling us what's right and wrong. We're deciding.
You know, Hitler decided what to do because he had a a very different and very warped sense of right and wrong and, you know, all the all the ghoulish regimes throughout history. I'm sure Stalin thought he was doing the right thing based on his world twisted world view.
Sean: 100%. One hundred %. So I think what we'll we'll do, there's one or two last points in in in book two that I want to discuss here. And I know I have been getting a lot of our requests for speaking throughout. Now, please, anyone who would like to add a comment, on anything, feel free to request, and we're happy to get you up here.
We'll we'll take up some speakers. But so thus far to recap, we've been dis discussing the lust of Augustine, and we discussed the pear tree incident as far as how he really began to love evil for its own sake. And this began to, in his eyes, start to seal his fate in a terrible way. I think in the I have it here the second to last, maybe the last two paragraphs. He has this interesting meditation on friendship, this idea of iron sharpen iron, man sharpen man, or maybe lack thereof.
But, again, he's reflecting on the the incident of the pear tree still and how he took joys and evil itself. But he writes here about his friends. He goes, my pleasure in it was not what I stole, but that I stole the pears. Moreover, I would not have enjoyed doing it, stealing the pears. I would not have enjoyed doing it if I was alone.
Oh, friendship, unfriendly, unanalyzable attraction for the mind, greediness to do damage for the mere sport in just a bit, desire for another's loss with no gain to oneself or vengeance to be satisfied. Someone cries, come on. Let's do it. And we would be ashamed to be ashamed. So, I I love that line and that idea of being ashamed to be ashamed as well that part of what maybe leads you leads one to evil is doing evil acts through peer pressure.
Right? But it's it's not just peer pressure. It's, well, I don't want to be a coward. I don't wanna be someone who just plays by the rules. Let me go along with everyone in their depravity.
And then this begins to open up a figurative Pandora's box of even if you're just going along with the crowd at first, eventually, this this still has a lasting impact on your interior being and your spirit. And this does begin to blind your conscience so that if you keep hanging around the wrong crowd and you keep making these wrong decisions, they compound externally but also internally such that you reach a state that Augustine has now reached of beginning to desire evil for its own sake because you've perversely learned to enjoy the desires of your own self destruction. Hence, iron sharpen iron, man sharpen man that goes both ways. It's, you know, but be careful who you hang out with. I mean, this is why in the book of Proverbs in the Bible which Augustine doesn't love it like the Psalms, but it's still up there.
It's they they talk so much about don't keep the counsel of the wicked and the sinners because you'll become like them. You're not going to change them, and that's true of both the the promiscuous woman and of the the wicked man. So it it really it it touches home on this idea. True virtue is, if nothing else, at least beginning by having a divorce from evil, both in yourself and with the crowd that you hang around with.
Shannon: One of the notes I made is that he would pretend to have committed greater sins than he actually did so that his friends because he didn't wanna he wanted the acceptance of his friends. That that peer pressure is so powerful so powerful that people wanna be accepted, and that's that's not an inherently bad thing. People want to be loved and accepted. But again, it's when it becomes disordered. And, again, you're looking to man instead of God first and getting everything else in your life in the proper order.
Sean: I mean, 100%. I mean, this is this is specifically what virtue ethics I mean, it comes down to is and I was discussing this on the Odyssey space yesterday, which Athenian was a part of. It's a big part of why we read the great books per se is that by the same time, if you're keeping company with great and noble sold people, they'll call out something inside of you too. They won't call out your depravity. They won't call it a love for sin.
They'll call out a love for the good, a love for courage, a love of virtue. And this goes back to I mean, why we're here doing what we're doing now is we're reading and learning from the great men of history, but I I guess that's the the idea of why dialectic is useful in the first place. When you sit together and you discuss what is true, especially in the community where two or more are gathered in his name, then fruits of the spirit tend to ripple forward and you begin to transform for the better because you have a better understanding of what what is true, what is good, what is virtuous, what is just, and how can I align myself with the true, the good, and the just, and the beautiful in my daily life? And once you take that sort of allegorical truth that you can discern from literature and apply it to your own being, you can see yourself in the shoes of the heroes of your life story. We can see ourselves in Augustine searching for truth, ideally have a less unhappy exile searching for a happy home.
When you're reading The Odyssey, you can see yourself in the shoes of Odysseus and realize you're wrestling with the waves looking for your way home. You can find a sense of place in the storms of life. It's you can find the particularity of your story in the grand narrative of reality and figure out, well, what is the true and the virtuous act can do right now so that I can find home, which is specifically what Augustine is doing. Only he's doing it very poorly right now as he's instead pouring his heart and his soul and his love into, lust, sexual lust, and the the loves of appealing to the depravity of his fellow man.
Shannon: Sometimes some of the great conversions of history when you've gone so far into the darkness and and been rescued from it and come back, you really have a such a sense of how amazing God is and what you've been been delivered from more than the person who never sort of went into that. You know what I'm saying? It's, the person that didn't never have that far fall. They were kinda basically good, and that's the way we should be. Right?
We shouldn't fall into depravity. But the people that have gone so far in the darkness and then been rescued by God have a have a fervor and a zeal, an eros for God, unlike, sometimes people who never who never wandered into the darkness.
Sean: It definitely it it reeks of the prodigal son. That's the idea we discussed last week as far as sins that you properly confess and repent to become virtues because you now have a greater real life understanding of the evils of the evilness that is sin and you have a more proper hatred for sin, which only amplifies your love of virtue. And I'm just going off the cuff here, but this also might be part of the idea of why suffer there's a glory in suffering if your aim is still oriented as being a servant of God who is serving to what love your fellow man and the good is that even if you're suffering in an innocent sense, but you're offering it up and you're still praying to live a life of grace and give grace unto others, well, in in this case, you're you're learning the evils of pain and suffering, but it's not necessarily a byproduct of your your own sin. So it's it only will be edifying and, sanctifying to your being because it it leans into this greater awareness of you need a total submission unto the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness which is God.
And through this increased sense of surrender and an increased realizing of your own powerlessness, you can draw into that which gives you the power to conquer all the evils of the world. So in many ways then if you suffering that is not a result of your own depravity or your own sin that you handle gracefully by offering up to God and the goodness becomes a boon that sanctifies you to live a life that is more akin to grace and live a life that is truly transformative such that you'd not only can handle the horrors of the world, but you can also be a boon to let the light of God shine through you for others to see, to to be a conduit of grace that ties back that idea of Mary and her humility and submission again. Right?
Shannon: It reminds me of the c s look c s Lewis book, The Problem of Pain, which I haven't read in a million years, but it's another one to put on the list. All the books that, you've given me to read, you and you and Deacon Garlic. I'm gonna be
Sean: busy. Yes. And this is a little I mean, probably, this might be my favorite space I've ever done of all time was A Grief Observed as well, which is a sequel to the problem of pain in many ways. So that my little recommendation to the audience is please read CS Lewis's problem of pain and then read a grief observed in order because a problem of pain is very much an intellectual apologetics of CS Lewis answering, well, why does God allow evil and suffering and pain? And how is he still good?
How does this work to our benefit? And the grief observed is him actually having to live out this theory he wrote about twenty years earlier because his what happens, of course, his wife dies, and it draws him into agony. It draws him to a dark night of the soul. Like, this is the man who had been the I I I think his title was something like the priest of England because he was always giving these sermons on the radio during World War two. Like, a a giant an intellectual giant in the face of Christianity.
And after twenty or thirty years, he has an his entire faith shattered and brought into question by this unbearable grief of his wife's passing. And when you read through it, there's just like it's it's a a man who's completely broken and humbled in so many ways. I'm not going to spoil the ending, but it really gives you both theoretical, the intellectual, and the emotional understanding of what happens when the storms of life come and take you out, which they most likely will in all likelihood. Like, what happens when you are completely destroyed while you have a faith in God? And how do you orient yourself when these storms of life come and take everything away from you such that you can barely find a will to live in the waking day and moment of each life or each each day?
Excuse me.
Shannon: Yeah. I've I've never read I mean, I've heard a little bit about his story towards the end of his life, but I've never, read that second book you mentioned. So that's another one to, to put on the list. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that peep keep people from God is this, you know, that thing you've mentioned.
Why does a good God let evil exist? If God is good, he wouldn't do it because we are looking at it from our standpoint because we're like an ant, but we're judging God, And this is how it would be if I was God, but we're so limited. We can't we can't comprehend the great mysteries.
Sean: Yeah. I think that that's really it. And, Rafael, I know you've been up for a second, so I think I'll go over to you after this if you have a question or a comment, anything you'd like to add. But I I I do think for the simple touch on the from a beagle, like, we're about to answer it in ten seconds here. But I know logically that does tend to be the idea that logically it can make sense, why God allows for evil because it's it could logically cohere that a world in which God grants you the freedom to choose between good and evil is a world that is better than a world in which he deprives your freedom altogether and forces you to be confined to goodness itself without any option to choose, which is the logical answer.
But, even if that coheres, that doesn't necessarily help with the evidential or the emotional problems. And, like, you you got to, I I tend to lean towards the, the answer of cosmic skepticism that you see come up in the book of Job, which is we have to realize our humility that the divine sense of justice and goodness transcends our limited human capacities and faculties. And therefore, the the ultimate act of faith is to specifically, when you're trusting and hurting like Job or like CS Lewis in grief observed to still cling to him and still surrender to him and still say, though I do not understand, I trust in your goodness because I love you, which ties back to the beginning of this. Right? That God is not an idea to be studied, but a being to be loved.
And love is above all else offering him your heart and your trust first and foremost and then understanding will follow. We appreciate all of you for listening for the full full scope of it. We've got, this is the second book down. We still got 11 more to go. So eleven more great glorious weeks of Augustine.
To think that we've only just touched the tip of the iceberg and are just getting started. But on that note, I think we will, sign off. God bless you all. Hope you all have a blessed and fantastic night and rest of your week, and I will catch you next Wednesday for book three. Take care, everyone.

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