Augustine of Hippo

David Bentley Hart on Heidegger: Modernity-as-Nihilism

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(Some scraps while I read and write away at several other, more substantial, pieces.)

Earlier I posted an excerpt from the later Heidegger; I have also posted thoughts from David Bentley Hart (on Marilynne Robinson, of Gilead fame). Wishing to combine the two, we might discover that Hart published an article on Heidegger in February of 2011 (ignore the venue of that link, if it bothers you: the article is worth reading). This is the last time I’ll be posting about Hart for the foreseeable future, though there is much about Heidegger I shall eventually get to here (barring death). Continue reading →

On Abandoning What is Public, Part I

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I

Ruin lust has become a fetish and a buzzword in some circles in recent years, producing a trickle of books, and the attraction seems to be a love of decay, or a love of ruins as a kind of ἀποκάλυψις, or un-veiling of the fate of our loved, ordinary haunts. Many of us are haunted and captivated by ruins; some are filled with dread at the sight of them. I am among the former, though I don’t wish ruin on any familiar place.

I have seen the look on a friend’s face as he stared at the abandoned shell of the hospital he was born in, and after, as we wandered its dead halls. The home in which I grew up will be sold to a business soon; a large tree that I have known my whole life, which sheltered my childhood play and the zipline of my childhood dog, will likely be destroyed with the transition. The glade where I learned how to pray has become a dump. The field in which I first made love under the stars has been bulldozed. I have already seen other places of my childhood –my grade school, middle school, high school, boy scout camp, forests where I once would play with friends, hills we would sled on, &c.— wiped away either by accident, for development, or for convenience. When these places die or are abandoned, something of the joy and vivacity of our memories, something about their anchor, so often dies with them.

“Ah, but nothing lasts forever”, so goes the true-ist retort. –and it is true. We should expect this, to some degree. (In the early fifth century did not Augustine of Hippo, in book 19 of the City of God, warn that all things long for peace, even if the peace of dissolution into the elements?) A healthy form of this expectation is good. The true-ist retort, however, dodges the question as to whether we should be resigned to the ruination of every imperiled and decaying place, especially those places that real estate agents don’t deal in.

Buildings and topography are not the only kind of place, and these other kinds can become ruins, too. (I write this with some embarrassment, as it seems so obvious.) There is the architecture of our shared public life; there is the shape of our relationships with one another; there are the clusters of habits we collectively engage in and by which we can recognize the significance of so much of what passes between us. We should not resign ourselves to the ruination of these places, and we must know how to repair and maintain them. What are the ingredients of these places, what is the building material of our public life?  Continue reading →

The Origins of Political Authority — Augustine of Hippo, City of God 19.14-15

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I will be posting several pieces on Augustine in the future, one on Augustine and disenchantment, another on Augustine largely secularizing the origins of political authority. The latter I shall get to first.

In the next month I shall also begin looking closely at another phenomenon that one sees slivers of here already in these chapters — the logic, character and scope of religious intolerance in the (third,) fourth and early fifth centuries. The issue of slavery is one I’ll likely need to defer.

Here, however, are parallel translations of chapters 14 and 15 from book 19 of the City of God, which I’ll be referring to. (Apologies for the strange formatting on mobile devices — it looks fine on my desktop.)
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R. A. Markus on Augustine on Signs

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The third chapter in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. R. A. Markus (New York: Doubleday, 1972) is titled “St. Augustine on Signs”, written by Markus himself (whom we introduced earlier, and whose book Saeculum we previously summarized).  Originally appearing in Phronesis in 1957, it is a curious blend of historical and constructive work — beginning with the historical, then eventually threading in the constructive strands (highlighting roads Augustine suggested, but neglected to travel — I will largely ignore these in this post). The De Magistro (“The Teacher”), De Doctrina Christiana (“On Christian Teaching”), and De Trinitate (“On the Trinity”) are the three works of Augustine’s focused on by Markus here. Continue reading →

Plotinus, Augustine, and the Confessions

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The Neoplatonic understanding of reality is that the world and each thing in the world is an ontological procession or exit from the One-beyond-being –that is, the super-essential Good or Beauty– into difference and multiplicity (the One generating first Intellect, Intellect generating Soul, etc.), and that each thing returns or reverts to what it is an expression of, and participates in, by way of its own unity, its own nature. Proceeding is often likened to a fall, and reversion to an ascent. Insofar as anything exists, it remains within the generative cause from which it proceeds, no matter how far it exits into multiplicity.

In his Confessions, the parable of the prodigal son plays a central role – not only as a means of figuratively summarizing Augustine’s understanding of his own life, but as expressive of the procession or exit of the whole world; yet Augustine stresses the element of falling in the whole procedure: we fall, and are wasted in the fall; we exit, but do not return; like the prodigal, we exit and exit and exit: we go off in a far country, wasting our native dignity, and do not wake up to return to ourselves, our right minds, and remember the Good of our native homeland, God.

The way that Augustine reads his life within this mirror of this parable, and the way that he gathers up his memories in thanksgiving to God so as not to abandon them within the dissolution of the exit, are exemplary of the way that he seeks to unify his own life by gathering himself back to his essential unity and his native homeland, or rather, to seek the hidden unity being wrought by God in the wasteland of his fractured self.

We shall aim first to outline some elements of the procession and reversion in Plotinus, the reasons Plotinus gives for the soul’s fall, the means of its return, and a major disagreement within the tradition of pagan Athenian Neoplatonism that takes its cue from Plotinus. It will then look at the same themes in Augustine’s Confessions, to place the same themes of that work’s narrative in its philosophical context. Continue reading →