Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom on the past between primary secondary worlds. I'm doctor Andrew Snyder, and I'm glad that you're here. Hey there, welcome back. Today. We're going to be getting back to our book club on Augustin's Confessions, as I'm joined by Chase and Kyle to talk about books five and six. But before we get there, I want to give you some quick updates.
First of all, as a reminder, I am resurrecting my sub stack on Tolkien's Letters, which provides a brief summary and more importantly, a reflection on each of Tolkien's letters. And now that I'm bringing that back, I'm doing so with the revised and the expanded edition of his Letters, and so I'm going to go back and take a look at some of the new letters that I had missed the first time around with the old edition, and so that is starting up right away. I'm gonna leave
a link in the show notes. I said that last time, but I don't think I did, so I'm actually gonna leave that link in the show notes this time. I go ahead and subscribe to that so you don't miss it. Every other edition in that subsac series is free and every other every other article is behind a small paywall of five dollars a month. However, if you become a Tier two patron over here at Mythic Mind, then every Tuesday you're going to get my reading of one of
those articles. And so I need you some catchup to get to where I am in the substack, but and so you might get some bonuses here and there as I catch up, but then you'll be getting on a weekly basis, my reading of the latest subsc article, even those that are behind the paywall. And so if you are somebody who just really prefers reading, then then you could subscribe my substack. Five dollars a month will get
you access to all the articles. Or if you're somebody who likes to listen and you just went all the Mythic Mind stuff delivered into one single podcast feed, become a Tier two patron or higher over at patriot dot com slash Mythic Mind. And by the way, I'm talking
about patronage. If you're listening to this when it comes out, know that I am currently running a special deal where the discount for annual patronage is bumped up to twenty five percent, and if you get a Tier three annual patronage, then you get all podcasts, substack stuff, all delivered early and add free into a single podcast feed. And you also get access to all of my courses that begin
within this annual term. And so if you subscribe right now at that level, that would include Plato Stoicism until we have Faces, which begins at the beginning of August. In the fall, we have the Elder Scrolls in Philosophy, and then in early twenty twenty six we're going to take a look at the Summarillion. And so you can get all that right now at a discount by becoming an annual Tier three patron and that really goes a long way in funding my efforts to keep doing things
like this. And one last thing before we get into our conversation with some of the various things that are happening right now, I've reworked the schedule a little bit. You may have noticed are that this episode was released on a Monday, as opposed to the regular Tuesday, and so moving forward, the main Mythic Mind podcast, this one
right here will be released publicly on Mondays. On Tuesday will be our Tier two Patron higher substack readings every other Wednesday, we have our Movies and Shows podcast, and then currently at least for a short time, every single Friday, where we have an episode from the Mythic Mind Games podcast. It just so happened with the way schedule worked out with recordings and guests and whatnot, that I end up with a small stockpile of episodes, and so I decided
to release those on a weekly basis for now. I would love to do all these podcasts on a weekly basis, maybe even more frequently than that, but I just I really would need the support to be able to turn away from other bill paying endeavors to do that. And so if you want to help me to increase frequency on an ongoing basis, head over to patreon dot com slash Mythic mind But for now you can and over on the Mythic Mind Games podcast you can expect an
episode every week at least for a little while. All right, with all of that said, let's go ahead and get into our conversation with Chase and Kyle on Augustine's Confessions books five and six. Welcome back after about a month of a break there. Welcome to Chase and Kyle, and I guess we lost some people along the way. I guess I don't know. They were two convicted. They just couldn't stand it anymore dealing with these deep studies. But we are returning to talk about books five and six
of Augustin's Confessions. I think we want to start off by just reading first. I don't know half of the first paragraph or so, to just set the tones that set the mood of what we're doing here. Augustin writes, receive the sacrifice of my confessions, offered by my tongue, which thou didst form, and hast moved to confess unto thy name. Heal thou all my be, and they shall say, Lord, who is like to thee, A man who makes confession to THEE does not thereby give THEE any information as
to what is happening within him. The closed heart does not close out thy eye, nor the heart's hardness resist thy hand, for thou dost open it at thy pleasure, whether for mercy or for justice. And there is nothing that can hide itself from thy heat. So he just starts off very similar to how he usually starts off these books, well, confessing himself before God, also raising some of these questions. He kind of asking the question of well, why am I making confessions to God who already knows
what's going on in my own heart. It's the kind of question that we've all probably thought about from time to time of what's the point of praying to a God who already knows what we have to say?
Right?
There's that kind of intellectual problem there. Even Boethius deals with that question, what's the point of praying if God already knows what I'm going to pray? He knows what I have to say? And of course the point is not to give God new information. The part is to humble yourself before God. And so he's really orienting himself appropriately there as he is going to go on to detail how he was humbled, as he's been doing in
various ways. Now he's going to really get into how he has been humbled intellectually as he is pulled by grace through this philosophical meandering. So I kinds that's the stage for what we're looking at in these in books five and six. But love to hear from you, guys, whatever you want to say. To kick us off with book five, Kyle, you wanna take it.
Yeah.
So, my my thoughts, I think sometimes don't relate to each other as well as they should. But I thought the first paragraph is really dense with a lot of different insights. And one of the things that sucks to me was, so the closed heart does not close out there eye know the heart's hardness, resist thy hand, for thou dost open it at thy pleasure, whether for mercy or for justice.
And so for men.
Yeah, I think all the time about all right, that my eyes have been enlightened such that I may see and delight in the glory of God.
And that's for mercy.
And you have to remember, and he's kind of hitting on this key. It's like he could have continued in his blindness, maybe unto death, but his eyes would be opened at that point for justice, such that he would receive the wrath of God for eternity. And he kind of reflects on that later on when he's speaking about his illness in Rome as soon as he arrived, and he's praying a thanks to God for saving him from his first death as well as the second death, where
he would have been under that wrath eternally. So that was the first thing that I really keep it on that that I thought was enlightening.
Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think later on it kind of goes with this about how I think it's the second paragraphed. So they stumbled against the in their cojustice and justly suffered since they had withdrawn from My mercy and stumbled against Thy justice and falling headlong on Thy wrath. And it's the same thing, like there's really no es, there's no escaping God, you know, whether like if you just think like you're not hey, I'm not
really about it. I don't want any of his love or anything like that, Well, you're still going to be confronted against him, you know.
Yeah.
I mean Augustine definitely throughout his writing, but we've already seen some confessions how he really demonstrates the fact that God is in charge here, that Augustine wasn't saved through any merits of his own. He was saved despite himself. Like he's very clear about that that, you know, he's thrown himself into all these different lusts within this reading.
I don't know if it's book five or six, but you know, he starts to I don't know if He's mentioned this before, but that he he has this concubine that he's had for years now that he finally lets go when he's engaged to get married, he let's go of this woman that he's been with, but then he couldn't wait any longer, so he got another woman while he's still waiting. And so this is someone who's just
been thrown into less of the flesh. He's been thrown into less of the mind, as he's been dragged along by these cult leaders, these heretics, these vain philosophers. Yet despite all of these things, God has graciously been leading him along toward his home in the church. And so we just really see this idea that God is in charge both in executing justice as well as in issuing out mercy, and that God will save those who he sets out to save.
Yeah, I think one of the things I saw here in the first couple of paragraphs was just how creation, you know, serves to qualify the Creator and he at the end of this first paragraph he talks about all the all the like man, animals, lifeless matter, everything praises the Creator, and God doesn't desert anything that he is made.
Yeah, when he says, the truth is that they've fled that they might not see THEE who saw us them. And so if eyes blinded, they stumbled against THEE. For thou dost not desert any of the thing that thou hast made. And so it's exactly what you're saying. And so that God, God is he is the foundation for all of existence, Like there's no where we can flee from God. You go to the highest heavens, he's there, go to shield, He's there. And so God is always present for those who turn to him and ask of
his mercy. But of course, as Augustine mentioned earlier, it's the problem is that in our blindness, we celebrate our blindness as if it's a strength. And at that point you're not going to ask to see. Therefore sight will not be granted to you. And so we very much see that sin, that misery, in its various forms, is
on us. Lewis talks about this, and I think it might be the great He has this great line where he talks about how basically eternal joy is forever right in front of us, you know, if only we would reach out for it, and we just we see that humbled spirit in august and someone who has been crushed down, his pride been crushed down, it's been able to receive the mercy that's always being extended out to us.
It's interesting because, like, as you read Augustine's confessions, you kind of see hints of some of the doctrines that he's coming up with. I remember, I think it was in book four he's like hinting at divine simplicity, and here like he what's the line God will not leave He's created. I can't quote it. I know it's in the first paragraph. I'm not gonna spend too much time
looking for it. But then later on he's like struggling with the incarnation, right that might be book five, book six, and he's saying, I can't I can't come to like I was foolish in that I imagined evil as a substance, and so I can't bow to a god that has created this evil substance, right, because then you can't be all good. And so he's he's saying that as like
such that he eventually recognizes that it's wrong. He's hinting to the fact that he's recognizing it's a foolish thing to think, but even here it's like God, God does not abandon his creation, and so far as like for something to be creation, it can't be abandoned, right, Like it's there, there's no there's no there, There isn't without him.
And so if you.
Are going like there, there's no real sense of abandoning God.
It's just blindness. Yeah, which seems to be what he talks about.
Yeah, that's just exactly right. It's exactly how he sees it. That I mean that that evil for justin that are our evil? Sin is it's a it's the problem isn't that we value things. The problem is that we value lesser things above the greater things, and in so doing we move in the direction of non being. And that's what sin is, that we're moving in the direction of non being. We're trying to go where God isn't But of course there is no such place where if we are.
If we go there, God is there too, because we are like, you don't have existence without God. And so that's exactly right. And this is something that he struggled with, and in fact, there's something that the Romans in general tended to struggle with because they didn't have this idea of a truly transcendent God. Their God's very much dwelt
on the same plane of existence as we do. They're just like superheroes essentially, Like it's not that different than what you get in you know, the Marble version, which is you know, dumb down version obviously, but metaphysically speaking, it's essentially the same thing. They just operate in a
different realm of this plane of existence. And so when the Christians start talking about like we don't have you know, we don't bow down to two idols, because well, our God can't be that identify that that well, our God is intrinsically that localized like that, they accuse a Christians of being atheists because they simply had no way of understanding the idea of a purely spiritual, truly transcendent God
that transcends this material realm. And Augustine seemed to kind of imbibe some of some of that difficulty, which is one of the reasons why he last on to the Manicheans, because they at least had some idea of good and evil that made sense to him with his Roman upbringing, and of course that their idea of being kind of this the yin and Yang idea of sorts that good and evil or constantly cons with each other, and that that the material is the what the world of sense
experience is like inherently flawed or you know, drawn down to evil, which obviously is not a Christian position, but it's it is something that philosophically he had to overcome on this journey.
Yeah.
And and keeping all that in mind, you see him speak redemptively of creation, even even though it is slashed on by sin, because he speaks of we are helped upward by the things thou hast made, and passing beyond them until the who has to wonderfully made them.
So you have.
Our passions are is a ladder to our love for God. Right And so things aren't bad in and of themselves, but they.
Are lesser than but.
Respect and rightfully they are way posts on the way to a love for God.
Yeah.
In fact, it is his appreciation of the natural world that in part started to cause some doubts towards the Manicheans, because the things that he was learning about, like the way that the world works on a very natural, what we would call scientific level, that it just didn't seem to mash up with the things that he was learning from the Manichean So there was this contradiction between what we would identify as the Book of Nature versus the
Book of Revelation that he was using. And so we start to see there's this disconnect here that the philosophers that I esteemed, the philosophers who seem to have a decent grasp on the way that the world works on a mechanical level, like this isn't matching up with what my Manichean teachers are telling me. And so that started to instill some doubts that maybe there's maybe there's non
substance here is as I once thought. And eventually this head Manichean guy, this Faustus, he comes and first, you know, Gustin's really excited about meeting this this great teacher who has inspired so many. But then he finally gets to talk with the guy and he recognizes he doesn't really know anything, and so they're just it's just empty, it's just empty substance. It's empty kind of theological jargon, but
there's no reality behind it. And so then he starts to become more inclined toward the classical philosophers at that point, which is kind of part of his movement. Ultimately in the direction of the church.
Augustine is the King of the humble brag or you have this world renowned teacher, and Augustina finally meets him, he's like, dude, you're actually just not that smart.
Well, I mean, augusta name. This is the guy who previously told us that he read Aristotle. You know he didn't understand that everyone else had to time with them.
Yeah, that's true.
Two weeks in a row, just the King of the humble brag.
Yeah, but even more so, I don't.
He just really hammers home on it, like it seems like there's a few things to know about Augustin that unlocks all the texts, because at the end of.
What is it book two? Of what's book five?
I don't know how the heading, how to read the headings, But he says, but where was I when I saw after thee that weren't there before me? But I had gone away from myself and I could not even find myself much lessly.
So there.
I'm afraid to butcher him when paraphrasing him, but he speaks of it as though he's wandering away from himself. Those are the terms he uses not that he's wandering away from God, but that he's wandering away from himself.
Right, because ultimately it's one of the same. I mean, if to you know a Turkey guard, he has this great line in one of his journals when he says, with God's help, I shall become myself. Said to you that I'm only truly myself, the ideal version of me, which is another way of saying, the true version of me when I am standing before God. Let what we are made in his image. We're made to reflect who
God is. And well, we're not doing that. We're living as shadow versions of ourselves, which is very platonic language. And also, I mean, that's what we get in the Great Divorce, the difference between the ghosts and the solid spirits. That the ghosts are shadow versions of what a human is supposed to be. And so to flee from God as an image bearer of God is to flee from yourself who you are, who you are designed to be.
And in so doing you in turn become well, you become darkened, you become shadowy, you become less substantial and more frivolous. And so he is obviously somebody who's been looking for what is substantial. He's starting to have some doubts in the Manicheans. He's starting to recognize that there's more value to be found in the classical philosophers, which you know Cicero, who really launched him on his philosophical quests.
That when he's studying Cicero for rhetoric, he recognized that Cisroo is actually saying some significant things, that there's some actual wisdom there beyond how he's saying it. And so there's always been the spark in him of like, I want to actually get to the root of things. I want substance. I don't just want the veneer, which is perhaps kind of ironic given that he's I mean, he's a master of rhetoric right like he is somebody who you would think would be consumed with how Thinter said.
But all along on his philosophical journey he wants to know that the substance behind things. He wants to know the capital W word behind words, and so he shifts towards the philosophers. But even then he he recognizes that they can only go but so far. He says that they can calculate and eclipse, but they don't recognize that they themselves are eclipsed. They can study the light, but they don't understand what actually produces the light. They can't get beneath the surface.
You know.
It reminds me of until we have faces, this idea that you know you we eventually you reach a level where Foxes can no longer dig right, where he's looking for something that now even the philosopher, the great philosophers, what they are incapable of approaching, and ultimately.
He's looking for God, whether he knows it or not. At this time in his.
Life, Augustine is an expert, putting down just like how everything serves God's purpose and seeing different things that happened through his life that pushed him on the way. When he says at the end of I Guess Chapter seven, book five, is is thus Faustus, who had been a snare that brought death to many, did without his knowledge or will, begin to unbind the stare that held me.
And then later he goes on about and the next paragraph, but you owe my hope and my portion in the land of the living, forced me to change countries for my soul's salvation. You pricked me with such goats at Carthage as drove me out of it, and you said before me certain attractions by which I might be drawn to work. It's like using just frustration at one's job to like push one towards salvation and in God's purpose. It's pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah, I love that that line of providence that even as he's detailing, you've got the wickedness of Faustus, this guy who he says has led so many people astray into death, but yet that served as part of his journey to get him to where he needs to go. Because Faustus is the one who actually dis changed Augustine.
I allowed him to kind of move away from the Manicheans, and then he moved away from Carthage basically because the students are really annoying, you know that they bus to show up whenever they want to, Like they're just not really focused, I mean. And so he wants to go somewhere where he feels like he's gonna get some measure of respect, that there's going to be an expectation of discipline.
You know. He wants to move into a better school district.
Essentially, which I well, maybe I shouldn't say, Maybe I shouldn't coment on that. So he wants to go somewhere where you know, he can just focus on teaching, and
so he goes to Rome. But even that only lasts but so long, and he does well enough there, but eventually he's inclined to move away from there as well because in part his students weren't paying him, so he still having a problem with his students, and so then he moves off to Milan, where he's going to meet Ambrose, which is going to be a fundamental step in his conversion story because Ambrose is is really gonna be the
one who's going to lead him into the faith. And so he really just details how between his own sinful impulses and frustrations, the fact that he lied to his mom when he ran off to Rome, he's he I mean, not a lot of commendable stuff going on here, but he recognizes that his own sin, as well as just the frustrations and sin around him, it's all bringing him exactly where it is that he needs to be.
I love the way he describes like his mom throughout these two folks, where he said, you did not do what she was at that moment asking that you might do the thing she was always asking just meaning like, didn't keep him from Rome because he was meant to go there. But the thing that she's always been asking for, praying for is his salvation.
Yeah exactly. I mean, same kind of idea there, but just from her perspective that, you know, God didn't give her what she was asking for. He didn't give her consolation then and there so that she could get the ultimate consolation. Just another emphasis on the sovereignty of God
over our temporal fleeting thoughts and feelings. I should mention that in the midst of all these changes in his life, for a little bit of time, he after starting to part ways with the Manicheans, he starts to team up with the academics, which this was a group of philosophers that actually descended from Plato's academy, although they have a very different orientation than Plato did. So things have well,
it's the long defeat. Things have fallen apart over time, and so now these academics are basically just the skeptics of the age when they say you really can't know anything, that there's no truth to be known.
So I didn't know that academics was a term for a school of philosophy. So but I read the line what I thought to be the manner of the academics, that is to say, doubting of all things and wavering between one and another, and I just I just thought it was funny.
I think, no, it works for the natural reading in today, you know, today's academic climate. I mean, you know, as somebody who teaches in the humanities, that this is basically it like there is no truth, like we can't really know it. Who's to say it's all subjective, that there's no reality that we can actually talk about meaningfully. And so even if we just treat that as a kind
of a normal term, it definitely works. But I should bring up that Augustine talks a lot more about the academics in the City of God in one section, and I mentioned this in the Brief History of Ideas of course recently. But when you get to Renee Cart who is trying to, you know, find some truth that he knows the absolute certainty, you know, he says, I'm going to doubt everything I could possibly doubt because I want to build up my philosophy on some truth I couldn't
be wrong about. And so he whittles down all the things he could be he could doubt, And you know, I could doubt whether or not I'm awake or I'm sleeping. I don't really know, you know, I could be asleep right now, dreaming my sense experience could be deceiving me, maybe getting fed some wrong information matrix style, like he wants to create the worst possible scenario so that way
he can find something he's certain about. And what he concludes is, I think therefore I am, you know, because I'm thinking I know I must ex in some capacity. And that's what he knows, a certainty.
And yeah, he.
Kind of treats this like it's this novel philosophical innovation he came up with, but in reality it comes straight from Augustine's argument against the academics and City of God. Augustine says that, you know, the academics say you can't really know any truth. Well, the problem is if I doubt I know that I exist in some capacity. And so in Augustine's argument against the academics, I mean, he basically lays out what the Kart just copies over and
doesn't give credit for. So just just another argument against modern philosophy and all this worthwhile you can find in the pre moderns. But that's kind of a side.
That sounds a little that sounds a little personal.
Telling, Yeah, a little bit.
Yeah. I definitely think from the modern period on, from from the cart on, things tend to go downhill.
I did.
I did, because we're talking about the way that God direct the steps of Augustine for his salvation. And so at the end of chapter seven of book five, I'll just I'll just read it because it's what we're doing.
It's the last line I really like.
For thy hand, oh my God, and the secret of thy providence, did not desert my soul from the blood of my mother's heart. Sacrifice from me was offered the day and night by her tears, And Thou didst act with me in marvelous ways. For it was thou, my God, who didst do it. For with the Lord shall the steps of a man be directed, and he shall like well his way. How shall we attain salvation unless by thy hand thou dost remake what thou didst make? And you have you we're talking about like the way to
know God is through humility. He speaks about that again and again. The philosophers can't know God because they won't they won't think little of themselves. They need to think of themselves highly.
And in this.
Autobiography of a gust And he's constantly talking about the way God has humbled him and and God is like God has God has created, God has made Augustine intellects for great things. Yeah, in order for God to remake august And he needs to tear it down and he needs to he needs to demonstrate like it like you are great, but you are only would I make you in order for that for that action to be completed.
Yeah.
In in Over in book six, he really emphasizes just how how weak we are with his incident with his his buddy Alypius, who who had turned away from the games that the the gladiatorial games, you know, recognizing that this is just violence as carnage, like there's nothing redemptive about this, and so he turns away from it. But then his friends say, no, you know, come on over, like you know, he says, yea, even if you drag me there, like I'm not gonna look. And they said, okay,
well let's put that to the test. And so, you know, his buddies drag him to the arena so that he can test his resolve to not participate.
But then the crowd started going. He kind of falls into the crowd.
He loses his individuality with the group think, which is so easy to do, right when everyone's getting right off about something, it's easy to just join with the crowd, and so he starts to fall into this bloodlust with the crowd. And so now he's just fallen right back
into these carnal passions. But then Augustine talks about how Olypius was falsely accused of theft, and he kind of goes through this redemptive art redemption arc about how this guy he falls, he has this false accusation levied against him, but kind of through all of this he's brought up and sort of restored, not only politically, but more importantly restored spiritually. And so in this side incident, looking at his buddy in Milan, that we we see just this again.
We see the weakness of our carnal nature, but the sovereign redemption of God that often takes what we might consider unlikely means to accomplish its purposes, much as we see in the life of Augusta and just now brought down to the microcosm level with this, this case of this guy he knew.
Yeah, Augustine is also intentional to point out that in the case of Alypius, the Reformation took time. Right, we have we have the gladiatorial incident, and then Alypius is inviting his friends there and he's all in, and now he's fallen into that lust, and now he's gripped by the lust. And Augustine says, he, out of all of this, you drew him with strong and mercyful hand, teaching him to have confidence in you, not in himself. Him having
confidence in himself being why he failed. And then Augustin says, but this was long after, so it's not it's not a quick fix. But with Alypius as well, as we see through Augustine's biography, like God, God is taking his time to humble the people that he draws to himself, because you can't go to God unless unless you are unless you have humility, and it can take time to cultivate that.
Yeah, and that I mean it should give us some hope, not only for ourselves and our unfailings, but I think even more fundamentally for those that we those that we care about, like those that we pray for, and it seems like nothing's happening. The reality is we just we don't know God's timing, We don't know God's sovereignty. Oh we know, hopefully, what we know is God's mercy, and that's that's all we can rely on. And I think
that is another good example of that. Yeah, it's jumping I mean kind of all over these sections here in his conversations with Ambrose. I think it's worth noting that he initially was drawn into this relationship with Ambrose, not because of Ambrose's theology or his philosophy, but because, well, Augustine's because he was kind. It was just his kindness that drew him in initially. And then as they form this relationship, he starts to go listen to Ambrose's sermons.
Now at that point he still isn't drawn into the actual theology or substance of the sermons. He's drawn at that point by Ambrose's rhetoric that as a teacher, rhetoric he recognizes Ambrose speaks very well, and so he's drawn into that. And so I mean it's it's like he's drawn into all these surface level things, but in so doing he ends up finding well, finding substance. I don't
really know what to make of that. It kind of sounds like it just made a case for secret sensitivity, which I don't really like that.
But my thought, my thought was that it's a case in point of what we were talking about earlier with the passions being a ladder to God, right, because like he is, I think you can say he has a passion for rhetoric clearly, and so he's constantly seeking out these teachers and whether it's Ambrose or whether it's Cicero, he encounters things which are true and thus bring him higher to teatures.
Yeah, I think that's that's a good point that you know he was in Ambrose speaking well like that is a it's a it's a good thing. Beauty is good, right, Beauty of words is a good thing. And that that is something, a good thing that Augustina was lashing onto. Even if it's not the highest thing, it is a good thing that, as you said, it's a ladder bringing him somewhere significant.
And so I think it.
Has more to say with the reality of beauty, the reality of goodness than it does with Ambrose.
So to speak.
In other words, Ambrose isn't trying to construct a scenario to make people feel comfortable. He's engaging in beautiful and good things that speak to the souls of those who are looking in the direction of something that is good and beautiful.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because what is good, is beautiful and is true, right, because all of these things are those transcendental attributes. And with Augustine, like you also always notice like he feels the tension with falsehood. Yeah, whether it's it's the falsity of it, whether it's the ugliness of it, whether it's the badness of it. He's always saying, like, these these things never left me content. He doesn't find contentment until he finds truth.
Right, And at least looking back, he recognizes that that's why all these things were empty, because he wasn't finding Christ. And in his conversation with Ambrose, he recognizes that the Christian faith that he had rejected for so long is actually not the Christian faith. He had this caricature of what Christianity actually teaches, but as he got into the substance of that and it kind of unraveled that a little bit. So the scriptures became far deeper than he recognized.
You know, it makes me think of you know, the the Yeah, I say, the expangelical types who say, well, you know, I grew up in church, therefore I know what they teach, right, I know what they say, I know what happens there, when most most of the time they have no idea what Christianity is. Right, the people who are most vocal in their descent from Christianity, typically speaking, they really don't know what Christianity is. They don't know
what it is that they've rejected. And I think Augustin is really coming out and recognizing just that that he spent so long with his prejudice toward toward you know, orthodox Catholic teaching, that that now he's recognizing he hasn't actually rejected Christianity, He's rejected his understanding of what Christianity is, which is a very different thing.
Yeah, I think I haven't.
So I'm gonna well, just I'll be honest.
I haven't read a lot of Augustin.
I've heard lots of things about Augustine, and from what I've heard about his belief in creation has always been really fascinating to me in terms of just like he sees the spider eating the fly, and he's like, there is an inherent goodness, there is an inherent beauty in this thing that's happening, Like the spider was clearly made to do this, it's fulfilling its natural purpose. And so to then presume that this only occurred later and what's his term, post lapsarian world is foolish maybe in.
A sense, yeah, I mean, Augustine. Augustine's understanding of creation is not in line with your typical twenty first century fundamentalist that you know, Augustine, And we'll get to this at the end of the Confessions. We kind of got we start to move away from autobiography to really getting into his understanding of the Genesis account of creation, and
so we'll get into this in more detail. But Augustine supposes that, well, maybe God didn't make everything finish, that maybe he basically created the seeds of creation that took time to develop, and so he definitely would be what we would call an Old Earth creationists by today's standards. The difference, of course, being that Augustin he's not relating.
Evangelicals don't like him.
Yes, that I mean, people will even use Augustin try to argue for like theistic evolution. I mean, not that he's going to speak in those terms, because he's not dealing with modern science. But when he talks about God creating seeds of creation, that that progress over time to the world that we have today. Like philosophically, that case can be made. I'm not saying it has to be made, but like the point is that he is not a literalist in the way that he approaches the creation account.
In fact, that's part of what he got from Ambrose learning how to interpret the Old Testament allegorically.
Yeah, I think I think it's a good example of how maybe my phraseology will be bad, but there there can be a good kind of deconstruction, right, Like we live in that expangelical world where deconstruction is a really dirty term, but it is good to think about, like, all right, what is the scripture actually staying? Like what points is it making? What points is it not making? And I'm reading into it.
Yeah, And I think that it's very important that we understand scripture in its original context and ask the question why was it written? That's gonna be a different question, that's going to lead to a different answer than simply looking at it from a twenty first century lens and asking what does it seem to be saying right now to our current context, because obviously all scripture does speak to our current context, but we have to filter it through,
you know, what was the original intention here? And when Augustine, kind of led by Ambrose, when he looks at the Genesis creation account, his first response is not that he's getting a literalistic, scientific, materialistic account of how things came to be. What he's recognizes or you know what he what he comes understand is that what we're getting is
a theological message. And so in the way that we are interpreting the genetic account, like we need to understand not just what's happening on a on a little level, but like what does this mean? What is this revealing about who God is? And when that takes a primary level reading, well, it may lead to some different conclusions and then you might get otherwise. I feel like I'm going to be pleasing and upsetting a number of people right now, It's.
All right, you're safe with me.
At the beginning of book six, I do like the the story about his mom traveling through the dangerous storm and reassuring the sailors kind of like maybe think of like Paul was just like it's called going to be all.
Right, right right when Paul's like, I have to go to room, so we're gonna make it.
Yeah, stay with the ship. That's the only way.
Yeah. His mom sounds like an extraordinary person.
Been a fascinating woman. Yeah, And the devotion that has to her son is incredible.
And she even got so much from Ambrose, you know, like just doing what she was like the custom that she was going to do, and then hearing Ambrose say like, hey, that's should be doing that, and then she just like flipped on a dime and was like, all right, you're right, you know, rather than oh, this is the way that I've always done it, it's like, you know, listen to somebody that may know better.
Right.
I can't imagine what her anxiety must have been like just having this son who is a genius and him being an unsaved person and she knows it, and she just is constantly waiting to find somebody that can speak on the same level as her son, and for thirty years she just never gets that until eventually she finds Ambrose and Augustina says like, yeah, she had a deep love for him, and I just I wonder what that must have felt like and.
For her, yeah, I mean even when he was with the Manicheans, right, she's like trying to get people to go talk to him, and now she finally found someone who's who's able to reach out to him.
I mean that was kind of I guess, like coming from like a public school mindset or like even non denominational very like shout out church to a more like structured church. It's like, oh, it's kind of the same thing, you know, Like I know that my parents had wanted
me to like meet these people. Know these people talk to different like more intellectually about stuff like this, and it took a long time, you know, and then you're always like you're like, maybe I'm just the one that's wrong, and I just need to like cool off a little bit, and then you finally find it.
Yeah, yeah, and so he does. He finally he finds it, He finds the substance that he's looking for, or well, kind of he's still keeping himself at arm's length, right, He's still he's still keeping himself away a little bit, you know, even at the point where he becomes a catechumen, and so he starts to recognize that that there's wisdom here, like there's something significant, this is something like what I'm
looking for. However, it's he doesn't really have like a moral conversion yet, it's very much an intellectual conversion to this point where he recognizes that there's some wisdom here. He likes what he's hearing, that there's more substance here than he guess even in the pagan philosophers that he's admired of to this point, and so he recognized there's something here, but it's still very cerebral, it's very philosophical. You know, he still has his you know, his his mistress.
He hasn't really changed his life at all. It's all just intellectual at this point. The heart conversion will come in the next reading.
Yeah, to jump around again, because we're talking about the
heart conversion getting there. In chapter six of book six, we have the story of him passing by the beggar, right, and so it's like he has to deliver a speech which is a bunch of lies, and he knows their lies, and everyone that's gonna listen to it knows that they're lies, but they're all going to do this speech anyway, And he's dreading the experience to the point where he sees the beggar on the side who's just I don't know, wine drunk, right, and is having a good time asking
people for pennies and panhandling, And so he's wondering, just like, what, like, what do I have that is greater than what he has? Right, this person is experiencing joy, whereas I'm.
Not right, he says, like this, this drunk beggar on the street, he has a greater measure of joy than I do, as this great teacher rhetoric who's about to give a speech to the Emperor of Rome, Like, he doesn't get much more prestigious than that. Yeah, he recognizes that he's walking around in despair, like he has all the things he's been looking for, but he recognizes he
doesn't have the things he's been looking for. And now, I mean, to be fair, he does state that, like, certainly this drunk beggar's joy is not true joy, but to at least closer I suppose than what Augustine is experiencing.
Yeah, kind of a wake up call in yours. The beggar with like the the beer in a paper bag. Heven better joy than you are, even if it's not real.
Yeah, but it is.
It's it is the depths of hedonism, right, because he starts out that chapter saying, I was hot for honors, money and marriage, and you made mock of my hotness. You prevented me from taking delight in anything not yourself. It's ultimately, like, if you're chasing those empty joys like you're, what does make you better than the beggar who's actually happy,
even if it is just from wine. Right, if you're if you're warm, but if you're warm and sad, but he's cold and happy, like you're, you're hedonists chasing after joy.
He has it.
You don't, right, You're you're just a bad hedonist. And and so I mean, ultimately, of course, his despair, the fact that he was unable to achieve the hedonistic pleasures that he was pursuing, is itself a gift. It is the grace of God giving him this despair, right of preventing him from achieving happiness in the things he was falsely seeking happiness. And and even somewhere in here he gives a old job that epicurist who is one of
the major heatonness of classical era. And you know, basically he's basically saying that he was being a bad heatonist, that he's pursuing pleasure but not finding it. But ultimately him not finding pleasure is because God was calling him to himself. His heart was restless until it rests in
God talks about about this a lot. There's there's a lot of connections thematically between Kirkegarden and Augustine, and Kirkgard talks about how despair is not something any of us want, but often it's exactly what we need, Like we need to recognize the emptiness of latching ourselves onto things that are here today and gone tomorrow, latching ourselves onto fading circumstance, which brings back to Boethius, and that what we need to do is to find the eternal good, that the
good that makes good things good, and so that that despair can't actually be a gift anything else. We didn't mention that, you feel like it is worth bringing up here. I still think it's just really lame how he gets set up to get married, but I mean the girl he's engaged to is not enough to get married yet, so he's got to wait a couple of years, and in the in the meantime, he sends away his concubine, who is also the mother of his child. Then he just can't wait to get married, and so he picks
up a new mistress. You know, I don't really know what's happening with a child at this point. It's it's like, I don't I don't have a lot of sympathy for him in all of this, and I don't think he would for himself either looking back, which I guess is the.
Point of redemption.
He was the ladies man he was, which.
Likely feeds into some of the things he says about you know, celibacy and sexual relations even within marriage later on. How I feel like a lot of what he ends up saying later on, and I'm sure my my Catholic French might disagree with me on this, but in you know, the things he has to say about celibacy, I think a lot of that probably is maybe an overreaction to some of his own experience, because that really was his his chief chief impatient.
I think I think it's I only have one last comment, but I think that Alypius acts in a way as a mirror to Augustine, because there there are two people that are really just going through the same struggle, but here Augustine is able to observe it externally rather than internally, and so far as Alypius is a talented young person that is struggling with these worldly desires, and they're they're keeping him away from the truth, even though there is a real zeal for the truth.
Yeah, I think that they're good. It's a it's a good companion story to the broader story that we're getting of Augustine himself. Well, I think I'm gonna we'll go ahead and wrap it out. I'm gonna end with the last bit of book six. Here, woe to my soul,
with its rash hope of finding something better. If it forsook the my soul turned and turned again on back, insides and belly, and the bed was always hard for thou alone art her rest, and behold thou art close at hand, to deliver us from the wretchedness of error, and establish us in thy way, and console us with thy word run. I shall bear you up and bring you and carry you to the end. Just a good
summary of the things that we've been discussing. That there is rest, you know, going back to his opening of book one, that there is rest only in God, and that our only hope of finding that rest is to run right, run from our temptation to sin, the lust of the flesh, the delights of the eyes, and run to the one place where we can find eternal rest. And that is where God will carry us unto the end. Well,
we will wrap there. Next time. We will cover books seven and eight as he deals with some more philosophical problems. We get a conclusion to his relationship with astrology, and we actually get to his heart conversion to the Christian faith.
But Hellen, godspeed, all right.
Thank you for listening. As a reminder, currently running a deal of our Patreon annual discounts are bumped up to twenty five percent for a short time. I originally said I was gonna go to the end of June, but since I'm just announcing this in the podcast, you know, I'll give it another week, and so through the end of the first week in July, I'll keep that deal going.
Become an annual patron today. And by the way, the good news is that when you become an annual patron at a discount, you actually get to keep that discount when you renew next year, and so it's a good deal beyond just this term. And again, become a patron gives you access to all the three podcasts delivered into
one patron feed early in ad free. But if you don't become a patron right now, then make sure that you are subscribed to all three of our podcasts right now, Mythic Mind, Mythic Mind movies and shows, and Mythic Mind games. This is an exciting time in Mythic Mind. And I want to thank all my patrons because it really means a lot to me that we've been able to go this far and then we have even more goals on
the horizon, and so many thanks to all patrons. And I want to think by name all Tier three patrons and higher and so that is Mark, Amanda, Chase, Chaz, Christopher Clinton, David Don, Aaron Evy, Adam Jack, Jamie, Justin, Justin, Kyle, Paul, Roger, Ross Tyler and William. So thank you so much to all Tier three patrons. Thank you to all patrons. This is a growing community overall. We have over sixty members now and so we continue to grow, and I hope
that you will consider becoming part of this community. But that's it for now. If you're listening to this on the public feed, the next thing to be released is see Return of the Jedi on Wednesday over on the Mythic Mind Movies and Jokes podcast, So check us out there until next time, godspeed. I have always, at least ever since I can remember, had a kind of longing for death. It was when I was happiest that I
longed most. It was on happy days when we were up in the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine, where you couldn't see Gloam or the palace. Do you remember the color and the smell, and looking across at the gray mountain in the distance, And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing somewhere else, there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche, come, but I couldn't come, and I didn't know where I was to come to.
It almost hurt me.
I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home. And now I will make answer to you. Oh, my judges, and show that he who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world. For I deem that the true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men. They do not perceive that
he is ever pursuing death and dying. And if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he regret the arrival of that which he has always been pursuing and desiring. The longing of Plato and the control of the Stoics pervades Lewis's retelling of the Cupid and psyche Myth until we have faces with this incredible novel, which he believed to be
his best. Lewis demonstrates the tensions and ancient thought, and even more significantly, the limits of rational philosophy, which can only go as deep as the foxes can dig. Beyond that, Under that and providing the life of that thought, we find the dark and holy places that blind our faculties of reason. What then shall we do? This is a topic that we will explore after first surveying some important philosophical contributions in the ancient world that have had some
significant bearing on Lewis's great novel. To this end, we will begin with Plato's Phato, which discusses the immortality of the soul and what those who love wisdom might expect in the life to come. And then we'll spend four weeks with some of the great stoics, including Epictetus, Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. Finally, we will turn our attention to till we have faces for the final two weeks with original content, and so this will not be the same as what you may have seen in the fiction
and philosophy of CS. Lewis course. Each week of this eight week study will include readings from primary sources that will be provided as PDFs, although these are all texts that belong in your personal library. You'll be provided with
recommendations for secondary readings. You'll have recorded presentations for you to watch at your leisure, ongoing discord chats, and weekly life meetings to discuss the readings enrolled today by going to patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind and checking out the job, or you can gain access to all courses, past, president and future this year by purchasing a Tier three annual subscription.
I hope to see you there