David Brooks — Interesting Vulnerability

David Brooks — Interesting Vulnerability May 5, 2015

David Brooks in an interview with Sarah Pulliam Bailey:

Your book has several stories of important Christian authors, including Augustine and Dorothy Day. Were they new to you?

I was familiar with Augustine, but I had never really read in depth or read about him. I now consider Augustine the smartest human being I’ve ever encountered in any form. His observations about human psychology and memory are astounding, especially given the time. What’s even more amazing is he combines it with emotional storms. He’s at once intellectually unparalleled and emotionally so rich a character. I portray him as sort of an Ivy League grad. He portrays himself in “The Confessions” as this sexual libertine, but he wasn’t really that. He was just an ambitious and successful rhetorician and teacher who found that being a successful rhetorician was too shallow for him. He felt famished inside. I think his confession is a very brave renunciation of ambition.

With him what I found so attractive, and this is more a Christian concept, is the concept of grace, the concept of undeserved love. It helps to feel religious to experience grace. Even if you’re secular person, you can always have the feeling that people love you more than you deserve and that you’re accepted.

Frankly, the thing I struggle with in Christian thought in general is the tension between surrender and agency. Raised as a Jew, I believe that we control our lives, we take action. The Jewish tradition is, God created the earth but human beings complete it. It’s about you doing things and exercising agency. In Christian thought, there’s less emphasis on that. It’s more unique redemptive assistance from God. There’s more surrender. The line between agency and surrender, what we can do on our own and what we can’t is something I just don’t understand. I don’t have an answer to that.


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