Thoughts on St. Augustine's "Confessions" and Intellectual Conceit

Lately I've been reading Augustine's "Confessions" and I'm astonished at their relevance for the modern reader. Augustine lived from 354 to 430 AD, and many of his writings (particularly "The City of God") deal with issues that would be of little practical concern to modern Christians. His "Confessions," however, simply and poignantly illustrate how even the most esoteric theological questions have very real implications in the lives of those who honestly seek truth.

As I read, I am most amused by Augustine's all-too-familiar journey from childish devotion to smug intellectual conceit, then to emotional devastation, and finally back to the foot of the cross. As Augustine moved from youth into adulthood, he began to crave the superficial approval of those around him, not in order to be righteous but in order to be thought accomplished. Erudite. Enlightened. "At this point I feared to speak a barbaric turn of speech more than I feared to commit a barbaric act."

He sought out the type of success that would bring notoriety. "How I loved mine own ways and not Yours. How I preferred my vagabond freedom...The more my work was praised, the better I became at it. Such is human blindness, that we glory in our sightless condition...I swelled with arrogance...Fame was the goal of my detestable vanity, for I rejoiced in human conceit."

Then, suddenly, Augustine's outlook changed. He began to realize that the enlightened members of society whose approval he craved had little interest in truth. Instead, they used philosophy "to seduce by disguising error with long words and subtle arguments and honorable sounding names." But after happening upon a book of Cicero, this was no longer enough for Augustine. "Cicero taught me that every vain hope is worthless. Suddenly I burned with an intense desire to find wisdom that had eternal value...And since at that time I did not understand the Scriptures...I was changed by Cicero's exhortation only to the point that my heart was strongly awakened, and ingnited."

He says, "I began to stir myself to return to You."

But Augustine's arrogance would not be easily overthrown. He says, "I resolved then to bend my mind to the holy Scriptures, that I might see what they contained....[But] these are words that take root more easily in the hearts of little ones. In my grand learning, I would not allow myself to become small. My swelled head sought greatness."

Can we not see in these words the very same conceit that prevents so many today from honestly and openly approaching God's word? Can anyone deny that the Bible is looked down on in the halls of Academia and in the wider popular culture as an object unworthy of serious study? And why? Because the Scriptures possess no wisdom for our times? Because biblical claims have been fully examined and exposed as morally, intellectually, and theologically hollow? Of course not. The reason is simple: The Bible has become unfashionable. Plebeian. Common. It is regarded as below the great minds of our age, just as it was 1700 years ago. And yet it endured the scorn of the "enlightened" then, just as it will again today.

Eventually, Augustine's desire for a truth that was lofty and thoeretical would be dashed against the rocks of very real human tragedy. His greatest friend, with whom he had played as a child and reasoned as an adult, suddenly fell gravely ill. Explaining the intensity of their connection, Augustine says, "Our friendship was made deeper because we had the same study interests. And I took him away from the true faith...We became of one mind in this untruth, and I became dependant on him for spiritual support."

Lying unconscious and close to death, Augustine's friend (whose name is not given) was baptized by his family, who feared for his soul. Augustine thought this a worthless exercise, confident of his friend's unwillingness to accept the Christian faith. He never left the bedside, and when his friend showed signs of recovery, Augustine "began to make a joke of the baptism he received when he was utterly absent in mind and feeling." To his amazement, his friend did not share Augustine's disdain for the family's efforts. Instead, Augustine recounts how "he pulled back from me as if I were his enemy. With a wonderful and sudden freedom, he told me to stop making such comments if I wished to remain his friend."

Augustine sees a transformation in his friend that confounds all his previous instincts - all his attraction to vain philosophies. Suddenly the question of eternal truth was not theoretical. I believe that Augustine's friend, standing at death's door, saw finally that man's attempt to reconcile with God is something more than mass delusion or wishful thinking. Though he was not even awake for the event of baptism, he viscerally understood that only by taking refuge in the love of the eternal God could he find solace from the pains and inevitabilities of this transient life.

Augustine however, having not been pushed to the edge of the abyss, does not yet see as clearly as his friend. And when the fever returned again and claimed his friend's life, Augustine was thrown into despair. He says, "Life was revolting and hateful...a huge load of misery weighed me down." "I carried around my shattered, bleeding self. I was sick of carrying it but didn't know how to put it down." He recalls, "Whatever I associated with my friend became a distracting torture. I sought him everywhere, but he was not to be seen. I hated all places because he was not in them...The depth of my grief was a great riddle even to me. I asked my soul for the reason for such sadness, but I heard no answer....Whatever the reason, I was wretched."

And in this moment when all his arrogance is exposed as hollow, Augustine catches a distant glimmer of God's mercy. He begins down a road that will ultimately lead him to the simple rationality of man's completion in God, and God alone, when he says, "Every soul is wretched that becomes bound...to perishable things. The soul is torn apart when the thing loved is lost."

And with that, Augustine reached a point described vividly by the greatest Christian minds and known to us all: the awareness of man's innate incompleteness. The awareness that there is some thirst in us that cannot be quenched by the things of this world, for they all pass away. The sudden knowledge that to be human is to want for a fulfillment that humanity cannot provide. And this realization will inevitably lead, despite all our resistance, to the foot of the cross and beyond.

We can take comfort that Augustine, a man who lived only 300 years after Christ, was afflicted with the same intellectual arrogance that is rampant in our own lives and in the world around us today; and yet God was able and willing to shake him to his foundations and strip him of all but the simple, rational truth of man's completion in God through the sacrifice of Christ. And He will do the same for us.