IF THE ENCOUNTER with Cicero’s Hortensius woke up something in Augustine, it wasn’t true philosophia, love of wisdom, but rather a lust for knowledge that served other cravings—for advancement and access to an inner circle.10 He wasn’t really interested in wisdom; he simply wanted to be part of the enlightened crowd. This was still a craving to belong. Which perfectly explains why, not long after this wake-up call, Augustine fell in with the Manicheans.
This detour in Augustine’s journey—and his lifelong wrangling with them—will seem hopelessly irrelevant to twenty-first-century seekers if we merely consider what the Manicheans, these devotees of Mani, believed. The teachings of Mani are so foreign and fantastical that they don’t seem to have any contemporary analogue; it’s not like Manicheanism is a live option today. As Robin Lane Fox comments in his succinct but fulsome account, “Mani’s cosmology strikes what he would call ‘semi-Christians’ as a teeming myth, more like Star Wars than their own Christianity.”11 Indeed, its radical dualism, with eternal forces of Darkness and Light inscribed into the very fabric of the cosmos, feels like something we’d encounter only in Game of Thrones. (That its rites seemed to include a cabal of the elect consuming bread baked from flour “fertilized” by sex rituals is, sadly, not entirely outlandish today.)
We need to look past the content of the Manichean’s doctrine and see what actually drew Augustine in: the way they claimed to know. What’s instructive about Augustine’s attraction to Manicheanism is less what they taught and more how they held to that teaching. In this respect, we will notice something shockingly contemporary about the Manicheans’ epistemic posture: they were the “rationalists” of their day. While their worldview seems fantastical to us, the Manicheans prided themselves on having escaped superstition and the embarrassments of believing, instead arriving at the shore of enlightened knowledge. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say the Manicheans considered themselves the scientists of significance: instead of trusting the testimony of prophets, their knowledge was rooted in the course of the sun, moon, and stars. These purveyors of Light and of secret enlightenment were the “Brights” of their day; they prided themselves on refusing authority and instead knowing how things worked.12
The attraction, then, was less to explanatory power and more to association with people who confidently imagined they had an explanation for everything—and were well connected in high places, to boot. (It was Manichean connections that landed Augustine his appointments in both Rome and Milan.) The attractiveness of the Manicheans was an intertwined set of benefits that spoke directly to an aspiring provincial, running from his mother’s backwater faith, newly interested in being “in the know,” and still clambering for positions of power and influence.
In 392, not long after he was ordained to the priesthood, Augustine wrote to an old friend, Honoratus, who was still associated with the Manicheans. Augustine felt a special burden for Honoratus since he was to blame for Honoratus falling in with them. If he writes passionately and pastorally to a friend led astray, it’s because Augustine is also writing to his younger self, as if he owes this to Honoratus as an act of penance. But it also means Augustine knows something of the psychology of attraction here from the inside. “There is nothing easier, dear friend, than to say one has discovered the truth,” Augustine writes, “and even to think it, but from what I write here I am sure you will appreciate how difficult it really is.”13 Imagine Augustine, a newly ordained priest, writing to Honoratus, who’s busy reading the new atheists.
The attraction to Manicheanism was about association with people who confidently offered a posture as much as a doctrine. “We fell in with them,” Augustine reminds his friend, “because they declared with awesome authority, quite removed from pure and simple reasoning, that if any persons chose to listen to them they would lead them to God and free them from all error.” They promised a way to rise above those “held in fear by superstition.” “Who would not be enticed by promises like that?” Augustine asks. “What was it that attracted you, I wonder? Was it not, I beg you to remember, a certain grand assumption and promise of proofs?” The Manicheans found us at an opportune time, Augustine reminds him: “scornful of the ‘old wives tales’ [told by mothers?] and keen to have and to imbibe the open, uncontaminated truth that they promised.”14
This is a familiar recipe for recruitment, trotted out today by rationalist purveyors of scientism who promise to unlock all the mysteries of the universe by a “science” that shows there are none. From Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker, the priests of enlightenment are prophets of overreach, promising a status more than an adequate explanation. And we buy in, less because the “system” works intellectually (we often don’t even expend the energy to confirm the evidence, and we suppress lingering questions), and more because it comes with an allure of illumination and sophistication, with the added benefit of throwing off the naivete of our parents’ simplistic faith. What their “knowledge” offers is a shortcut to respectability.
Just don’t ask too many questions when you make it inside. That was Augustine’s problem: ultimately, he wasn’t satisfied with association; he actually wanted to understand. And when he kept pressing the Manicheans with questions, they kept telling him: Wait til Faustus gets here; he’ll explain everything.15 Except he didn’t. In such circles of enlightenment, there are always questions you’re not allowed to ask, as Augustine discovered.
In writing to Honoratus, Augustine doesn’t offer a counterpoint to the specific doctrines of the Manicheans (he does that abundantly elsewhere). Instead, his critique is more “radical,” we might say, getting to the “radix”—the root—of their epistemic posture, of what they claim to stand on. The Manichean rationalists “boast that they do not impose a yoke of belief but open up a fountain of doctrine”; they “attract numbers in the name of reason.”16 In other words, the Manicheans prided themselves on their refusal to submit to any authority outside of their own reason, which was not so different from the rallying cry of Immanuel Kant’s essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” fourteen centuries later: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! It’s the same watchword used today by those who like to imagine themselves “free thinkers.”
But Augustine pulls the rug out from under the feigned stance of rational self-sufficiency. Everyone believes. Everyone submits to some authority. And all these people priding themselves on enlightenment have decided to simply trade belief in one set of authorities for belief in another. “Credulity,” Augustine points out, is not a defect; it is inherent to being human. Tongue-in-cheek, Augustine points out the number of times Honoratus expects his interlocutor to trust him, to believe him, so that he can show him the path to enlightenment.17 Trust is the oxygen of human society, Augustine says, and believing the testimony of others is at the very heart of the scientific enterprise. Understanding doesn’t transcend belief; it relies on belief. If someone says believing is wrong, Augustine wryly notes, “I do not think he can have any friends. If it is wrong to believe anything, then either one does wrong by believing a friend, or one never believes a friend, and then I do not see how one can call either oneself or the friend a friend.”18 Augustine is striking at the very heart of what the Manicheans offered: not just enlightenment, but belonging, a circle of those “in the know,” a friendship of light. Indeed, why would we have ever been drawn to the Manicheans if we hadn’t believed what they promised? “I would not come to someone who forbids me to believe unless I did believe something. Could there be any greater insanity than this: they blame me only because I have belief that is not supported by knowledge, although it is only that which brought me to them?”19
Augustine is not promising a different version of self-sufficient enlightenment to counter what the Manicheans are offering. He’s calling into question the very myth of such a stance. The question isn’t whether you’re going to believe, but who; it’s not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself to. Do you really want to trust yours
elf? Do we really think humanity is our best bet? Do we really think we are the answer to our problems, we who’ve generated all of them? The problem with everything from Enlightenment scientism to mushy Eat-Pray-Love-ism is us. If anything looks irrational, it’s the notion that we are our own best hope. So Augustine invites Honoratus to consider what’s at the heart of Christianity, which is not a teaching per se, but an event, an unthinkable event from a Manichean perspective, and yet one that speaks to humanity’s deepest hungers and fears. “Since, therefore, we had to model ourselves on a human being but not set our hopes on a human being, could God have done anything kinder or more generous than for the real, eternal, unchanging wisdom of God itself, to which we must cling, to condescend to take on human form? . . . By his miraculous birth and his deeds he won our love, but by his death and resurrection he drove out fear.”20 Many years later, in 417, still confronting the challenge of the Manicheans’ rationalism, Augustine pleads with his congregation in a sermon: “You cannot be your own light; you can’t, you simply can’t. . . . We are in need of enlightenment, we are not the light.”21 You’re going to entrust yourself to somebody. Would you entrust yourself to the One who gave himself for you?
THERE’S NO RUSH. It took Augustine a long time before he’d consider this. His disenchantment with the false promises of the Manicheans did not translate into an immediate embrace of Christianity. In fact, the result was a long period of destabilizing skepticism, a sympathy for the “Academics,” skeptics who despaired of ever arriving at the truth.22 While he was still happy to leverage the Manicheans’ connections to land his post in Milan, by the time he arrived, he bordered on cynicism.
Our cerebral struggles are often intertwined with other anxieties. What we identify as intellectual barriers are sometimes manifestations of emotional blocks. We pride ourselves on being rational but then miss the biases and blind spots that constitute our rationality (a feature of the human condition confirmed by recent developments in behavioral economics). We decide that something “doesn’t make any sense” when we no longer want to be associated with the people who believe it, or a “light goes on” and we “see” something after we’ve spent time hanging around people who believe it. Rationality turns out to be more malleable than we’d guess.
Sometimes plausibility is pegged to a person. The turning point for Augustine was not an argument; it was Ambrose. What Ambrose said, what he taught and preached, was not insignificant. But what made a dent on Augustine’s imagination was Ambrose’s very being—what he represented in his way of life. Ambrose was a living icon of someone who integrated assiduous learning with ardent Christian faith. If to that point, based on his childhood experience, Augustine had concluded that Christians were simple, backward, and naive, the encounter with Ambrose was the destabilizing experience of meeting someone with intellectual firepower who was also following Jesus. Even more than that, it was Ambrose’s hospitality that prompted Augustine to reconsider the faith he’d rejected as unenlightened. What ultimately shifted Augustine’s plausibility structures? Love. His recollection is warm and speaks to a hunger even more fundamental than the intellectual: “That man of God took me up as a father takes a newborn baby in his arms, and in the best tradition of bishops, he prized me as a foreign sojourner.”23 More than arguments or proofs, Ambrose offered the seeker Augustine something he’d been hungering for: a home, sanctuary, rest. For this refugee in a new city, arriving with questions and with so much unsettled in his life, the cathedral in Milan became an outpost of the home this spiritual émigré had been seeking. And there was a father there waiting to welcome him.
This was the point he’d later make in The Advantage of Believing: there is a relationality to plausibility. Illumination depends on trust; enlightenment is communal. It’s not that Augustine immediately comes to affirm the catholic faith; rather, Ambrose’s kindness and hospitality to a precocious outsider was the affective condition for him to reconsider the faith he’d spurned. “I fell in love with him, as it were, not at first as a teacher of the truth—as I had no hope for that whatsoever in your church—but simply as a person who was kind to me.”24 You can feel in this encounter something of the gratitude of the African outsider not being marginalized by an intellectual at the center of power. It’s not that he immediately comes to believe but that Christianity becomes more and more believable (and Manicheanism less and less so). “Though now I hadn’t yet verified that the church was teaching the truth,” he admits, “it was plainly not teaching what I’d so obnoxiously accused it of teaching.”25 From Ambrose, Augustine would realize that the Christianity he’d rejected was not Christianity. But it was Ambrose’s love and welcome that created the intellectual space for him to even consider that.
This relationship between love and knowing, affection and intellection, would become a hallmark of Augustine’s thought for the rest of his life. By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.” He crystallized this in one of his earliest works after his conversion, Soliloquies. Adopting a visual metaphor for knowing—as in “the mind’s eye”—Augustine picks up the Platonic metaphor of knowing by means of illumination. But there’s an important difference: “it is God himself who illumines all.” Reason, Augustine’s interlocutor, then continues: “I, Reason, am in the minds as the power of looking is in the eyes. Having eyes is not the same thing as looking, and looking is not the same as seeing. The soul therefore needs three things; eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing.”26 But only healthy eyes can see, and faith restores the health of the eyes.
“If the mind does not believe that only thus will it attain vision, it will not seek healing.” In other words, if skepticism leaves us despairing of ever attaining the truth, we’ll never go looking. “So to faith must be added hope.” But reason will only be motivated to set out on the quest if it is also animated by a desire, if it longs for the promised light. “Therefore a third thing is necessary: love.”27 If this remains abstract in the Platonic dialogues of his early career, in the Confessions we see this point embodied. It’s not just that reason needs love in order to know; I need to be loved into such knowing, welcomed into such believing, embraced for such hoping. If the arguments are going to change your mind, it’s only because an Ambrose welcomes you home.
THE EMBRACE OF Ambrose didn’t smother the questions. There was no dichotomy, only a priority: not love instead of understanding, but loving in order to understand. If Ambrose engendered a shift in plausibility structures for Augustine, it meant that he could consider anew whether Christianity had resources to answer some of his oldest, most lingering questions—about evil, the nature of God, free will, and other intellectual questions that continued to dog him. The relationship to Ambrose nudged him to find an intellectual well in Christianity he didn’t know was there, as if tapping into an artesian aquifer that had been right under his feet all the way back home in Africa.
Augustine slowly started to realize how stunted his philosophical imagination was. While the Manicheans had promised him enlightenment, he was coming to see that they had furnished his imagination with a limited array of blunt instruments that were inadequate tools for the complex questions he was asking. His conceptual muscles had a limited range of motion. For example, he was unable to imagine a kind of substance that wasn’t somehow material—anything that existed had to be physical.28 This limited his ability to conceive of a God who transcended time and creation, as well as his ability to understand his own mental powers, the nature of the soul. Similarly, because of the habits of mind he’d acquired from the Manicheans, when he sought to understand the origin of evil, he says, “I searched in a flawed way and did not see the flaw in my very search.”29 It was slowly dawning on him: the cabal that had promised him enlightenment turned out to be remarkably parochial. The enlightened ones who prided themselves on being rational were working with a limited intellectual toolkit but had never told him (likely because
they didn’t realize).
The intellectual breakthrough Augustine needed came, once again, from philosophy. But not from Cicero this time. Instead, it would be “the books of the Platonists” that would refurnish Augustine’s theoretical imagination—or, to change the metaphor, that would serve as an intellectual gymnasium where he could work to increase the range of motion in his conceptual muscles. He could reach conclusions that weren’t available to him before, stretching his mind around ideas that had been conceptually out of reach, affording new possibilities to both settle some questions and live into a coherent way of life. He wouldn’t have to choose between faith and reason; philosophy would be the preamble to his embrace of Christianity.
But this gearing together of Platonism and Christianity would generate its own tensions and cause Augustine to have to make a choice. Much has been made of Augustine’s Platonism, and it’s beyond question that Platonism—or, more specifically, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus—provided a crucial intellectual scaffolding at the time of his conversion and through the rest of his life. In Of True Religion, one of his earliest works, Augustine paints Christianity as the completion of Platonism—that if Plato were alive in the Christian era, he too would be a follower of Jesus.30
Yet to overstate the continuity is to miss what Augustine sees as a fundamental distinction of Christianity that makes all the difference: humility. Platonism lifted his attention from the temporal and material to the eternal and invisible. Platonism helped him conceive of an ascent to higher things, to the purity and eternity of the Good. But what Platonism could never have imagined was that the Good would descend to us; that the eternal God would condescend to inhabit time and a body; that the divine would humble itself and swing low to carry humanity home.
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 16
