St Augustine: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

The golden age of philosophy came to an end with the death of Aristotle in 322 B.C. What had been a matter of coherent argument now largely degenerated into attitude or commentary. Of the former, there were two main attitudes. Times being what they were, neither of these was optimistic.

The Stoic philosophy was developed by Zeno of Citium, who was born in the early third century B.C. in Cyprus. Zeno was a successful capitalist until he lost all his resources in a shipwreck. He was immediately attracted to the Cynics, who believed that material possessions were of no importance whatsoever. Zeno developed this attitude into his own Stoic philosophy, named after the stoa (or pillars) of the arcade in Athens where he taught. Zeno believed in adopting a Stoic attitude to life and claimed that all men are divided into two categories. The first group (Stoics to a man) consist of the wise, who are indifferent to everything except their own wisdom. The rest are fools.

For the Stoics, wisdom meant forswearing the passions and living a life of virtue. This involved self-control, fortitude in the face of adversity, and just behaviour.

Stoic philosophy developed over the centuries and eventually became a great hit in Rome, especially among those disillusioned portions of the upper classes who had to endure the whims of recalcitrant emperors. The tragedian Seneca even tried to teach Stoicism to Nero, but the emperor proved temperamentally unsuited to this philosophy.

In the second century A.D. Stoicism was finally adopted by the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote a series of rather pompous and banal meditations on the subject during his long campaign against the trans-Danubian barbarians.

Other similar philosophical attitudes gave rise to the aforementioned Cynics, and to the Skeptics, who believed they knew nothing but saw no contradiction in teaching this.

But the most important attitude other than Stoicism was that adopted by Epicurus, who was born during mid-fourth century B.C., probably in Samos. In later life Epicurus settled in Athens and founded a community that lived in his garden and followed his philosophy. This was known as Epicureanism and was in many ways the opposite of Stoicism. Where Stoics renounced all pleasure, Epicureans believed in living the good life. But Epicurus himself believed that the good life was an extremely simple life – living on bread and water, with perhaps a bit of cheese on holidays. His aim (and initially that of his philosophy) was to achieve a life devoid of all pain. Sex, drunkenness, ambition of any kind, and generally living the high life resulted in headaches, hangovers, and disappointments. These were all a pain, and their causes were thus best avoided. The Romans, who had no feel for such finer points of philosophy, avidly embraced Epicureanism but insisted on their own idea of the good life. This involved a lot more than bread and water. Epicureanism thus became corrupted, acquiring the self-indulgent associations that it retains to this day.

Almost all other philosophers of this period concentrated on the works of their great predecessors. Their activities consisted largely of commenting, analysing, elaborating, and quibbling. Foremost among these unoriginal critics were followers of Pythagoras and Plato. The greatest of the latter was Plotinus, who developed the religious bent in Platonism and incorporated various mystical features. In the end his philosophy was barely recognisable as Platonism, so it was called Neoplatonism.

The most important intellectual event of the early centuries A.D. was the spread of Christianity. This increasingly stymied any further serious philosophy until the arrival of Augustine.

St Augustine’s Life and Works

‘I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lasciviousness. I ran wild with lust, the abominable things I did: rank depravity, a surfeit of hell’s pleasures. Bodily desire like a bubbling swamp and virile sex welling up within me exuded mists…’ St Augustine was a sex maniac. Or so he would have us believe. His famous Confessions contain page after page in which he castigates himself for being ‘the vilest slave of evil passions’ and indulging in ‘the filth of lewdness, hell’s black river of lust’. But the expectant reader turns the pages with increasing disappointment as he searches for actual examples of ‘this crazed wantonness’. So we don’t know exactly what Augustine was up to in the fleshpots of Carthage. My guess is that it wasn’t much more than the usual student escapades.

But there’s no denying that Augustine had a problem with sex. He had a strong sexual urge and probably enjoyed sex when he was actually doing it. But he was also possessed of an extremely strong mental desire to stay chaste. A few sessions with an understanding analyst would probably have defused the problem – but this would have robbed philosophy of its greatest exponent in almost one and a half millennia. When Augustine arrived on the scene, six hundred years had passed since the death of Aristotle; after Augustine died, it was nearly eight hundred years before the appearance of Thomas Aquinas.

Augustine was born in 354 A.D. in the small town of Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia (now Souk Ahras in the northeastern hinterland of Algeria). His parents appear to have been a rather boozy middle-class couple. But his hard-drinking father Patricius developed alcoholic symptoms of emotional disintegration in the form of obsessive womanising and violent outbursts. Whereupon Augustine’s mother Monica turned to religion, forswore the demon drink, and transformed her frustrations and disappointments into ambitions for her son.

We know a fair amount about Augustine’s youth from the descriptions in his Confessions. From the outset Monica appears to have overwhelmed little Augustine, though at no point does Augustine venture a word against his mother, whose obsessive puritan Christianity pervades the book from page one. ‘Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby?’ Augustine asks, castigating himself for crying for his mother’s milk. ‘I was indeed a great sinner,’ he comments, without irony, on his early dislike of lessons at school.

Then, as a teenager, he really goes off the rails. Together with pals from school, he steals the fruit from a pear tree. As a result of this vile iniquity, Augustine indulges in an orgy of self-laceration which continues to the end of the chapter (‘foul soul falling from the firmament to expulsion… into the depths of the abyss,’ and so on). He then continues in the same fashion for another six chapters before ending: ‘Can anyone unravel this twisted tangle of knots? I shudder

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St Augustine: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

St Augustine: Philosophy in an Hour

Contents

Introduction

St Augustine’s Life and Works