Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.
Some famous men become so influential that critics take to blaming them for any problem in the cultures they helped create while forgetting to give them credit for the good. So Augustine, perhaps the seminal thinker of Western Christendom after the Biblical age, is often blamed for whatever the critic does not like about the present Western church.
A common criticism is that Augustine follows Plato and denigrates the body and physical pleasures. This manages the trick of misreading a great pagan and a magnificent Christian philosopher. The haters of the body in the church today after all have no profound education in either high paganism or Augustinean theology!
Plato does not have have a “low” view of the body, though he does have his characters consistently commend intellectual or spiritual pleasures over those of the body. Care has to be taken in saying a view is one held by Plato, because he wrote in dialog form. He never states his views as his own in any of the dialogs. In one dialog Phaedo, a character in the discussion, Socrates, is to be executed. Socrates is comforting his mourning students and in doing so puts down the body and commends the soul. Most of the examples of Plato “hating” the body are pulled from this dialog. In one of his last works, however, (Timaeus) Plato notes that all humans will always have a body, some finer than others. We are embodied souls!
Plato certainly had students who misread or misused his works. He was such an influential thinker that he spawned followers that were cynics about knowing anything for sure, religious cults, and many other philosophical schools. Some of these sort-of-Platonists did view the body as evil and the soul as redeemable.
Was Augustine one of them?
I am an amateur when it comes to reading Augustine (no Latin here), but I have read him carefully for years, including in classes taught by real experts. Augustine may not have read much original Plato, there is controversy about the extent of Augustine’s Greek language skills and the availability of the texts to him. Augustine certainly was surrounded by a variety of neo-Platonist cults and philosophers. Despite all of this, Augustine, using whatever text he could get, is frequently a good commentator on Plato, especially his cosmology. He is also critical of Plato and never uses him (as Augustine does Scripture) as a final authority.
Plato is helpful to Augustine, but not decisive. Of course, Augustine received a classical education and so had deep Greek philosophical influences that he may not have noticed. However, since the Plato that appears to have influenced Augustine most deeply was the cosmological Plato, the Plato who proposed a solution to the problems of materialism, there is little reason to think that Augustine would have “caught” a low view of creation from Plato. Understood in the terms Plato uses, the cosmos is a good creation. While the cosmos is not the Good, it is as perfect an image of the Good as can be made.
Carefully reading Augustine (especially Confessions) shows a passionate man eager to put his passions in proper order. Reread the section on his love for God. The man fell in love with God and like any lover viewed any distraction from the Beloved as a waste. He assumed, I think, that we are given to overrate the loves of the physical world as he did and to be too easily distracted from what was best by what was good. Augustine was trained in Roman rhetoric and knew how to hammer his opponent. He speaks passionately about the love of God next to whom any other love, even smelling a flower, is nothing.
Augustine was a man of affairs, the active pastor of a church. He ate, drank, and lived with intense friendships all his life. He fathered a son he loved. If we wish in Confessions that he had included more warnings, some language to prevent disciples from abusing his rhetoric to commit the heresy of hating the body, this father of the church might have pointed out that if these “students” could not avoid heresy (sex is evil!) when it is plainly condemned by the Church, there was no helping them. They loved their error more than the truth.
Augustine was, after all, one church father and not the entire church. He was not infallible and over time some ideas he presented on doctrines like the Trinity would be refined. He was one vital voice in an intellectual community that spanned centuries.
Intellectual fashion in the ancient world struggled with the incarnation. How could God, pure spirit, lower Himself to become man? Plato had not even considered the possibility. Augustine held resolutely to the doctrine of a full incarnation.
Most of all, when tempted to wonder about his harshness regarding physical pleasures, I read the unbridled joy he feels in the pure love of God and I stop. Perhaps, he has found a great good and wishes to share it. No doubt if I turned from the table to my prayers more often, I might find that joy now, here, in the body.
Augustine experiences the love of God while alive and so loves God with his soul and his body. This divine love is not opposed to bodily pleasure, but is the greatest of all pleasures: soul and body. Perhaps, Augustine is experiencing such great joy that he finds it hard to relate to my satisfaction with less complete love. My heart may find a greater rest when it finds rest in God.
Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.
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Augustine Confessions (Oxford World Classics) translated by Henry Chadwick, Book X 8 (page 183)
To The Saint Constantine School college student Will Irwin. These thoughts are based on our tutorial today.
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