On the Road with Saint Augustine
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7. Confessions 2.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 24).
8. Confessions 2.4, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 37.
9. Confessions 3.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 35).
10. “Joe Rogan Experience #1021—Russell Brand,” YouTube, October 5, 2017, https://youtu.be/iZPH6r_ZDvM. Quotes in this section come from this podcast.
11. Emily Chang, “‘Oh My God, This Is So F——ed Up’: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side,” Vanity Fair, February 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum. This article is an adaptation from Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley (New York: Portfolio, 2018).
12. Recall Augustine’s silent scream: “If only someone could have imposed restraint on my disorder!” Confessions 2.2.3 (trans. Chadwick, 25).
13. Confessions 2.2.4 (trans. Chadwick, 25).
14. Brand’s own “confessions” repay reading, however. See Russell Brand, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions (New York: Henry Holt, 2017).
15. Confessions 8.11.27 (trans. Chadwick, 151).
16. Confessions 8.11.27 (trans. Chadwick, 151).
17. On the Reformation as an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic, see James K. A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 38–41. See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 62–66, on two-tiered Christianity.
18. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 137. See also Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
19. Augustine, City of God 14.22–23.
20. Augustine, Against Julian 14.28, cited in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 393.
21. Cf. Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011).
22. Cf. Confessions 6.11.20.
23. Cf. Kyle Harper’s discussion of “pastoral Christianity” as a gracious accommodation to the realities in which Christians found themselves (From Shame to Sin, 177–90).
24. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage 6, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 1st series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 14 vols. (1890–1900; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 3:401.
25. Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 67.
26. On the Good of Marriage 5.
27. Cf. Caitlin Flanagan’s tongue-in-check comment in one article: “Take it a step further. What if we asked for a lifetime commitment, a binding legal document and the presence of witnesses at the vow taking? Could work.” Flanagan, “Getting ‘Consent’ for Sex Is Too Low a Bar,” New York Times, July 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/well/getting-consent-for-sex-is-too-low-a-bar.html.
28. See Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 77.
29. For a creative, novelistic insight into this relationship, between Augustine and his concubine, but also between his concubine and Monica, see Suzanne Wolfe, The Confessions of X (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2016).
30. Confessions 4.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 53). A lot has been made of the fact that this woman is unnamed by Augustine. I follow Peter Brown (Augustine of Hippo: A Biography [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967]) in seeing this as actually a sign of respect, a way of guarding her from what would be the late ancient paparazzi who would be looking to find a bishop’s old flame. (There is some evidence that she lived in a convent not far from Hippo.) Interestingly, in On the Good of Marriage when Augustine disparages exactly what he himself had done—taking to himself someone for a time, “until he find another worthy either of his honors or his means”—he also embeds a kind of backhanded praise of the woman in such an arrangement: “there are many matrons to whom she is to be preferred” (5).
31. Confessions 6.15.25 (trans. Chadwick, 109). Augustine immediately takes another concubine, which might also explain why he was so tired of having to “take care of” his sexual desire by book 8.
32. True Religion 1.16.30, in On Christian Belief, trans. Edmund Hill, OP, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine I/8 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 48.
Mothers
1. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 75–76.
2. Recounted in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), 305–6, 359. Perhaps Camus’s point about a “Mediterranean” account of freedom, at the end of Rebel, hints at why freedom isn’t synonymous with independence, and why a mother’s love doesn’t rob a person of identity, but grants it.
3. Todd, Albert Camus, 378. A journalist later said that what Camus meant was, “If that [terrorism] is your ‘justice,’ I prefer my mother to justice” (379).
4. Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 19.
5. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 22.
6. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 23, 25.
7. An important plotline in Suzanne Wolfe’s fictionalization of the relationship in her novel The Confessions of X (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2016).
8. Augustine, Confessions 5.8.15, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82.
9. Confessions 6.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 90).
10. Justo L. González, The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 18.
11. The term “the Brights” comes from a famous op-ed by philosopher Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff,” New York Times, July 12, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/opinion/the-bright-stuff.html. We’ll return to this in the “Enlightenment” chapter.
12. Confessions 6.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 92).
13. González remarks about Augustine, “Throughout most of his life, it would seem that the Roman in him had become dominant; but when, after the Roman disaster of 410, he tried to read what had happened from a Christian perspective, he was quite critical of the entire Roman culture and civilization, and this criticism was partly grounded on principles learned long before from his Berber mother.” Mestizo Augustine, 18–19.
14. Augustine, Confessions 9.22, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 262.
15. Rob Doyle, This Is the Ritual (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 18.
16. Doyle, This Is the Ritual, 29, 30.
17. Doyle, This Is the Ritual, 31.
18. Karr, “The Burning Girl,” in Tropic of Squalor: Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 6–7. Copyright © 2018 by Mary Karr. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
19. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will 3.23.67, in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119.
20. Exposition of the Psalms 58(1):10, in Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, 6 vols., The Works of Saint Augustine III/15–20 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2000–2004), 3:156.
21. Confessions 9.26 (trans. Ruden, 266).
22. Confessions 9.27, 9.28 (trans. Ruden, 267, 268). She didn’t “care about a tomb in her homeland” (9.36, trans. Ruden, 274).
23. Confessions 9.30 (trans. Ruden, 269).
Friendship
1. Heidegger’s term “Dasein” is a technical term he uses instead of the usual philosophical notion of “the subject,” “the ego,” etc., trying to give a more existential, embedded picture of what it means to be “me.” Dasein means “being there,” being here and now, existing in a world. Heidegger’s English translators almost universally leave
the term untranslated, such that “Dasein” is now almost like a Germanic philosophical character.
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 154.
3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 163–64.
4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 164.
5. Heidegger, Being and Time, 163.
6. Heidegger, Being and Time, 164.
7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 165–66.
8. Heidegger, Being and Time, 317.
9. Heidegger, Being and Time, 372–73.
10. Heidegger, Being and Time, 354.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003), 463.
12. See discussion in Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 213–14. She cites Iris Murdoch’s droll remark that Sartre turns love into “a battle between two hypnotists in a closed room” (214).
13. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel, 1956), 82.
14. As we’ll see below, this will be an interesting point vis-à-vis Heidegger.
15. Marcel, Philosophy of Existentialism, 79.
16. Marcel, Philosophy of Existentialism, 76.
17. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 170.
18. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 171, 176.
19. Augustine, Confessions 2.4.9, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.
20. Confessions 2.8.16–2.9.17 (trans. Chadwick, 33–34).
21. “This Place Is a Prison,” track 8 on the Postal Service, Give Up, SubPop, 2003.
22. Confessions 2.8.16–2.9.17 (trans. Chadwick, 33–34). Augustine admits he himself played this role of frenemy to a friend who died (4.4.7–8).
23. Confessions 6.8.13 (trans. Chadwick, 100).
24. Confessions 6.8.13 (trans. Chadwick, 100–101).
25. Augustine, Confessions 6.13, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 152.
26. Kipling D. Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 41, ed. Mark P. Zanna (London: Academic Press, 2009), 279–314.
27. See Edward Davies, “Loneliness Is a Modern Scourge, but It Doesn’t Have to Be,” Centre for Social Justice, accessed December 18, 2018, http://thecentreforsocialjustice.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/y/7CB805AF716F58B3/FC687629C2073D80907C5D7C792C0FF8.
28. Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (New York: Knopf, 2003), 17.
29. Clay Routledge, “The Curse of Modern Loneliness,” National Review, January 16, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/digital-age-loneliness-public-health-political-problem.
30. Heidegger, Being and Time, 156–57.
31. Marina Keegan, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” Yale Daily News, May 27, 2012, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness.
32. Confessions 6.26 (trans. Ruden, 166).
33. Confessions 2.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 24).
34. Confessions 8.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 133).
35. Confessions 8.5.10 (trans. Chadwick, 139).
36. Confessions 8.6.15 (trans. Chadwick, 144).
37. Confessions 8.7.16 (trans. Chadwick, 144).
38. Heidegger, Being and Time, 158.
39. Heidegger, Being and Time, 158–59.
40. Confessions 8.8.19 (trans. Chadwick, 146).
41. Confessions 8.11.27 (trans. Chadwick, 152).
42. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 192.
43. Jamison, The Recovering, 193.
44. Lena Dunham, “The All-American Menstrual Hut,” Lenny, January 31, 2017, https://www.lennyletter.com/story/the-all-american-menstrual-hut.
45. Confessions 8.12.30 (trans. Chadwick, 153).
46. Augustine, Soliloquies 1.2.7, in Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 26.
47. Soliloquies 1.3.8 (Burleigh, 28).
48. Letter 10*.1, in Letters, trans. Roland Teske, SJ, ed. Boniface Ramsey, 4 vols., The Works of Saint Augustine II/1–4 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001–2005), 4:262.
49. The text of the Rule of Augustine can be found at https://www.midwestaugustinians.org/roots-of-augustinian-spirituality.
Enlightenment
1. Augustine, Confessions 3.3.6, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38.
2. Confessions 3.4.7 (trans. Chadwick, 39).
3. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 300–304. For discussion, see James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 62–65.
4. Hence he connects this with the “buzz of distraction” (Confessions 10.35.56).
5. Augustine, Confessions 6.9, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 147.
6. Confessions 10.23.34 (trans. Chadwick, 199–200).
7. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 147.
8. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 148.
9. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 147. See the Atlantic’s conversation with William Deresiewicz: Lauren Cassani Davis, “The Ivy League, Mental Health, and the Meaning of Life,” Atlantic, August 19, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/qa-the-miseducation-of-our-college-elite/377524.
10. Cf. Augustine, The Happy Life 1.4.
11. Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 105–11, quote on 105.
12. For an introduction to the cult of the Brights, see Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff,” New York Times, July 12, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/opinion/the-bright-stuff.html.
13. Augustine, The Advantage of Believing 1.1, in On Christian Belief, trans. Ray Kearney, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine I/8 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 116.
14. Advantage of Believing 1.2 (trans. Kearney, 117).
15. Confessions 5.6.10–5.7.13.
16. Advantage of Believing 9.21 (trans. Kearney, 133).
17. Advantage of Believing 10.24.
18. Advantage of Believing 10.23 (trans. Kearney, 134).
19. Advantage of Believing 14.30 (trans. Kearney, 141).
20. Advantage of Believing 15.33 (trans. Kearney, 144).
21. Sermon 182.4–5, cited in Justo L. González, The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 93.
22. See Augustine’s early dialogue, Contra academicos, in Against the Academicians and the Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).
23. Confessions 5.23 (trans. Ruden, 131).
24. Confessions 5.23 (trans. Ruden, 131).
25. Confessions 6.5 (trans. Ruden, 141).
26. Augustine, Soliloquies 1.6.12, in Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 30.
27. Soliloquies 1.6.12 (Burleigh, 31, emphasis added).
28. Confessions 7.1.1.
29. Confessions 7.5.7 (trans. Chadwick, 115).
30. Augustine, Of True Religion 3.3–4.7.
31. Confessions 7.9.13 (trans. Chadwick, 121).
32. Confessions 7.9.14 (trans. Chadwick, 121–22).
33. Confessions 8.9.19 (trans. Chadwick, 146).
34. Confessions 7.9.14 (trans. Chadwick, 122).
35. Confessions 7.14 (trans. Ruden, 186–87).
36. Albert Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, trans. Ronald D. Srigley (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 53.
37. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 67, 69 (emphasis added).
38. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 93.
&n
bsp; 39. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 108.
40. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 116, 117.
41. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 46.
42. On Reprimand and Grace 8.17, in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199.