Saturday, July 4, 2009

Augustinian angst.

"For what can be more wretched than a wretch who has no pity upon himself, who sheds tears over Dido, dead for love of Aeneas, but who sheds no tears for his own death in not loving thee, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inner mouth of my soul, O power that links together my mind with my inmost thoughts? I did not love thee and thus committed fornication against thee..."
(Confessions, Book 1, St. Augustine, translated by Albert Outer)

If Montaigne is the person whose lonely thoughts constantly make me want to comfort him, than St. Augustine is the person whose constant struggle with ideas of love simultaneously attracts and repulses me-- only to keep me circling in his struggling orbit. Here Augustine is bemoaning the shallow emotion of empathy for it seems to have dulled and interrupted the greater emotion that later enters his soul-- love of God. If he cried for Dido upon learning of her bereavement than surely this was a kind of infidelity to his later and eternal master. But this is Augustine's reading of himself-- in this post I want to make yet another an attempt to reconcile his conflict: are his free-flowing tears for Dido one step towards loving God, or are they in fact, the expression of a fully-blossomed love of God already? In other words, can Augustine's immense pity for a weeping queen be read as a kind of human godliness?
If I went into theological definitions of Augustine's concept of God and other such scientific things, maybe this blog post would be more concise and perfect. But I want to explore the idea of God on a more basic level, as I always do, and try to make clear on this other level, the connection that DHR once made-- Augustine is very much like Aeneas, a wanderer with a cause. A simple description of Augustine's pre-conversion state of mind would be this: he loved God without knowing. I say this because I read Augustine's movable state, his ability to weep for an unloved one, as one that encapsulates all of the characteristics of God that we turn to-- modified for the human form, of course. If the form of God is able to show mercy that is powerful enough to change circumstance, than the most divine of human forms is able to weep in the face of another's misfortune.
A wretch who has no pity on himself may be wretched indeed, but isn't that perhaps the most godly of all human beings--God, as I see him, is a figure whose entire self is devoted to the care and love of a creation that is so much less than him. The human being can't really make that assumption but don't we all nevertheless, aspire to the image of God? In Islamic thought, there can be no real love of God, unless there is a love for his creation. The whole let's-leave-the-material-world-behind train of thought sometimes strikes me as people getting ahead of themselves--it's not original sin that brought us here but rather our own connection with each other and the things around us, God's creation. I'm not sure whether we've been sent to this world to make up for that one mistake in the Garden of Eden, but rather, I think we've been sent to learn how to love each other for aren't we all, in our various guises of religions, just God's creation?

No comments:

Post a Comment