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An Undeceptions podcast. But Augustine found a way to show how Christianity is the fulfillment and extension of even Neoplatonism.

In Christ, he said, all of reality can be joined in fellowship to the one ultimate reality of God. And this comes not through ascetic rigor or intellectual sophistication, but through divine gift, grace. Augustine was quite something.

The fifth century genius, Saint Augustine, you knew we were going to slip him in here, writes about beauty in his classic De Veritate Religione of true religion. And he poses the question, are things beautiful because they give us delight?

Or do they give us delight because they are beautiful? He emphatically opts for the second. Beauty is an objective thing built into the creation and it calls out to us.

The 5th century theological giant Augustine wrote some very heavy tomes on music, six books on rhythm and meter, and an intended six books on harmony, though we don't know if he completed those. You might ask, why on earth is a theologian so interested in music? And the simple answer is, music was the audible embodiment of the numeric structure of reality.

In his book, Foundation of Modern Physics, the physics Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, wrote that, Book 11 of Augustine's Confessions contains a famous discussion of the nature of time, and it seems to have become a tradition to quote from this chapter in writing about quantum cosmology. Augustine is everywhere.

In the five years I've been doing this podcast, I mean, it feels like two, but producer Kayleigh assures me it's five. I don't think I've referenced anyone more than Aurelius Augustinus, Augustine of Hippo or Saint Augustine. There's hardly a subject this fifth century intellectual giant didn't write about or help shape in the history of thought.

His shadow looms not just over Western Christianity, but over the whole of Western thought. I mean, he even invented the genre of the intellectual autobiography.

In ways that are almost undetectable today, this Roman African's thinking has seeped into our thinking about freedom, sex, love, sin, humility, grace, and even science. The list goes on.

But not everyone loves him. His views have sparked intense opposition from theologians, humanists, feminists, and some of my close friends. But that's to be expected when you leave over 5 million of your words lying around waiting to be analyzed by countless academics over the last 1600 years.

But I love him and I am hugely influenced by him. And I think Augustine embodies the mission and posture of the Undeceptions project.

He was all about trying to make sense of God and the world in a society that was still highly skeptical of Christianity. And he did it with an attitude of curiosity. He once described himself as "a man who writes as he progresses, and who progresses as he writes."

Always learning, willing to question, even question himself. I mean, he wrote a whole book toward the end of his life called Retractions, critiquing his own views. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts his contribution like this.

Philosophers continue to be fascinated by Augustine's often innovative ideas on language, on skepticism and knowledge, on will and the emotions, on freedom and determinism, and on the structure of the human mind. And last but not least, by his way of doing philosophy, which is, though of course committed to the truth of biblical revelation, surprisingly undogmatic

and marked by a spirit of relentless inquiry. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by the way, is not normally this gushy about Christian things. So after 130 episodes, we're now exploring Augustine of Hippo, the patron saint of the show. I'm John Dixon, and this is Season 12 of Undeceptions. MUSIC

We are so grateful again that this season of Undeceptions is sponsored by our friends at Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special master lectures, video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the pod by going to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget the Undeceptions. It's a great way to get a better understanding of the world of the world.

Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, philosophy, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...

I would say if you were looking for a line about Augustine and his influence on Christianity, I think you could say he's the most influential Christian writer for the Latin-speaking West between St. Paul and Martin Luther. Yeah, okay. All right. He's literally... I'm listening. I'm listening now. Augustine, for Western Christianity, Augustine is one of the big three. Because the Eastern Christianity had their own brain in it.

That's one of our guests today, Kate Cooper. She's Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of Queens of a Fallen World, The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions. He's an early Christian bishop. He lived just after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, where Christianity becomes, as it were, an official religion, going from being a religion of outsiders to very much a religion of insiders.

And he's really the figure in Latin Western Christianity who figures out what do we do about the fact that Christians have power now? We're not living up to it. We don't know what we're doing clearly. Why did God put us in this position? And, you know, it's terrifying.

And I think one of the reasons Augustine has such staying power as a thinker is he's writing in the years between roughly 400 and 430, so end of the Roman Empire, early Middle Ages. He's writing as the Roman Empire is falling apart. The only thing left standing seems to be the church.

And he's trying to figure out, are we up to this? In the Latin West, the political situation is constantly churning. There's constant invasions, constant regime change. And the church is constantly being invited, essentially, to wash away its promises in order to please the new guy. So how does the church find a way to stand firm here?

in a sense, stand and deliver on its promises to a community that has survived all of this terrifying change. The Roman Empire had thought of itself as invincible. In the epic poem The Aeneid, Virgil describes Rome as imperium sine fine, an empire without end.

Augustine is living right at the time when this Roman belief was under serious threat. Everything was at stake. The empire was sort of crumbling around him. And then the unfathomable happened. In AD 410, in his lifetime, the city of Rome was sacked.

And part of his work wrestled with this fact. But first, Augustine had to wrestle himself, his own pursuits, ambition and passions. His book, The Confessions, is a deeply personal and self-reflective work. And it was the first of its kind. To praise thee is the wish of every person who is but a part of thy creation.

Thou dost bestir them, so that they take delight in praising thee. For thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. Augustine's Confessions, Book 1

It's certainly the first psychological autobiography. There are autobiographical writings previously, but there's not one where somebody tells the story of their own life from childhood and really tries to analyze themselves in that way. So The Confessions is

an absolute landmark for historians of the family. It's incredible in that it talks about the relationships between men and women, between slaves and free people, between teachers and their pupils, all of these daily life questions and all of these questions about how Christianity influenced people's ideas about how they should live. So it's just extraordinary. Do we know when he wrote that? No, we don't. Wow.

We know that he wrote it after he became a bishop. But before the City of God? Almost certainly, because the City of God, it's published in the 420s, but he's writing it in the teens and 20s. And people tend to assign a sort of vague date of around 400 to the Confessions, but we just really don't know. Do we know why he wrote it? Or have you got a hunch of why he wrote it? Why this...

incredibly introspective and yet theological and philosophical autobiography. Was he just aware that people wanted to know about him or was he trying to do something more profound? It's a great question. In a way, I think we have to ask ourselves what would inspire somebody to start talking about themselves in such an open and profound way?

We have to ask ourselves whether there's a little bit of a self-fashioning going on. You know, it's possible that he wants us to see himself in one way rather than another. He's almost certainly involved in church controversy by the time he writes it. And so it might partly be almost a kind of plea for understanding

that he wants his listeners to realize that he's in good faith, that he's really trying to expose himself and be honest, and he's trying to earn their trust. I think that's probably where I would fall, is that somewhere in there, either because he's trying to earn the trust of his colleagues or his congregation, or because he feels like it will be helpful to his readers

to understand that he as a Christian leader isn't better than them. I think that might be, you know... Because it's not a self-aggrandizing biography like there are other examples of throughout Roman history. Augustine's Confessions is just a story of tears. It's incredible how he's very funny,

But he's constantly talking about things that upset him, things where he was disappointed, things where he was disappointed with himself. So in that sense, it's almost like he's creating himself almost as a kind of anti-hero. And of course, the hero of the story is God. An anti-hero from the beginning. Here's Augustine reflecting on himself as a baby. For even at the very first, I knew how to suck, to lie quiet when I was full.

and to cry when in pain, nothing more. Then, little by little, I realized where I was, and wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I could not, for my wants were inside me, and they were outside, and they could not by any power of theirs come into my soul.

and so I would fling my arms and legs about and cry, making the few and feeble gestures that I could.

though indeed the signs were not much like what I inwardly desired. And when I was not satisfied, either from not being understood, or because what I got was not good for me, I grew indignant that my elders were not subject to me, and that those on whom I actually had no claim did not wait on me as slaves, and I avenged myself on them by crying.

Augustine's Confessions, Book One. And of course, the hero of the story is God. Yeah. You know, the second hero... I'm a jerk. God is gracious. No, exactly. That's what he's trying to say. You know, I mean, I would have said, I'm a mess. God is gracious. But, you know, but it is very much that story. Something a lot of people don't understand about Augustine, we think of him as a Latin writer. Therefore, we sort of imagine that he grew up in an ivory tower in the city of Rome.

Totally wrong. He grew up in North Africa, in what's now the eastern end of modern Algeria. He grew up in a village market town known for its lion market. They are caged and led on wagons down to the port to be shipped off to Rome or Carthage for the gladiatorial games.

So it's just, it's a weird and fascinating landscape. It's a very fertile area. Augustine is just on the edge between the Tell, which is the part of northern Algeria, which is sort of wheat fields, which is really important economically in the Roman Empire. He's on the edge between the wheat fields and one of the mountain chains. And so it's this...

edge between super Roman civilization in these towns and cities, and then just the vast expanse of the agricultural Roman Empire.

Crucially, he's from a family that seems to be a mix of Roman and Berber background. And so there's a sense that they're on the make, they're trying. And this is interestingly, this is true of a lot of families in these African towns in the fourth century. An imperial system where ambitious families are trying to get their kids into education so they can work their way up the food chain. And Augustine's a smart kid? Augustine...

We believe Augustine was the smartest guy recorded in the whole century. You know, he's just an incredibly bright boy. He's taught rhetoric and oratory at Medeiros, which was the famous university in the region. And it's a region that's known for producing some of the best rhetoric

professors of rhetoric out across the Roman Empire. Augustine's family, if you look at his profile, they clearly tap him very early as somebody who has the potential to go to Italy, which he does, and make it in the Italian system. Augustine's relationship with his mother, Monica, permeates the whole of his confessions. We would know nothing about her except for this record.

Augustine describes Monica as an intensely faithful Christian, quite unlike his dad. She is relentless in her love for her boy, often weeping in her prayers over his early escapades. Monica is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, and the city of Santa Monica in Los Angeles is also named after her. Shout out to any listeners in Santa Monica. Love that place.

And now thou didst stretch forth thy hand from above, and didst draw up my soul out of that profound darkness. Because my mother, the faithful one, wept to thee on my behalf more than mothers are accustomed to weep for the bodily deaths of their children. For by the light of faith and spirit which she received from thee, she saw that I was dead.

And thou didst hear her, O Lord, thou didst hear her, and despised not her tears, when, pouring down, they watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed. Thou didst truly hear her. Augustine's Confessions, Book 3 Augustine's father, Patricius, was a hot-tempered womanizer. Augustine seems to have inherited some of that.

"I came to Carthage where a cauldron of unholy loves was seething and bubbling all around me. I was not in love as yet, but I was in love with love. To love and to be loved was sweet to me, and all the more when I gained the enjoyment of the body of the person I loved."

Augustine's Confessions, Book Three

Very early on, he tells us in the confessions that he was sexually passionate and he wanted to get married. And his mother said, no, you can't marry yet. We're ambitious. If you wait, you'll get a better offer and you'll get a better dowry. So what happens is that the mother, again, reading between the lines in the confessions, seems to arrange for him to have sex

A concubine, which in the Roman system is essentially a paid lover who will often keep house for you and play the role of a wife, but it's specifically not a marriage contract. Augustine never names his concubine, perhaps out of his own shame, but perhaps to protect her name. But he describes her as the only woman he ever loved.

Scholars like Kate have actually given her a name, Una. It's Latin for someone. It's kind of sweet and yet kind of dark.

Augustine stays with her for 15 years. Together, they have a son, Adiodatus. Around this same time, as a young adult, Augustine started dabbling in a religious cult known as Manichaeism, much to the despair of his Christian mother. In those days, he thought his mother's faith was lowbrow, simplistic, and just untrue.

Manichaeism was much sexier, although that's not the right word to use because Manichaeism shunned the pleasure of the body and of creation itself.

It was a bizarre blend of elements of Christianity as well as classical philosophy and Eastern mysticism. Manichaeism's idea of a great battle between equal forces of good and evil, spirit and body, made more sense to Augustine than the too earthly Christian Bible, which he'd read but which seemed to him to lack the loftiness that he was looking for.

As his studies continued, though, his doubts with Manichaeism and classical philosophy began to mount. He also became disillusioned with the Manichean leaders who were, he thought, hypocritical and who disapproved of his constant questioning.

But all the while, Augustine is making a name for himself in academic circles, in the glorious city of Milan, which by this time, the late 300s, was actually the imperial city. The whole imperial court resided there. Fast forward 10 or 20 years, and all of a sudden Augustine is in his early 30s. He's in Milan.

and he's got a chair of rhetoric in the city that hosts the imperial court, and he's giving panegyric speeches before the emperor. At this point,

The families at court are looking at him and saying, "This guy's got a future. If this guy can get funding..." And Augustine actually says in the Confessions, "If I could marry well enough, I knew I could become a governor of a Roman province, which is a title that will get you into the Senate."

And he's still with Una when he comes to Milan. She's followed him from Carthage, first to Rome and then to Milan. He's at this great moment of ambition. And his mother arrives in the winter of 385 to 386. And all of a sudden there's the idea that now's the time. Augustine's, you know, he's ripe, let's get him married.

And so there he is in Milan and he has the opportunity to get married. And before he knows it, he has a specific offer from a family who have a 10-year-old daughter who's an heiress on a large scale. And Augustine says, yes, at this point, the portcullis comes down because one of the conditions that the family imposes is that he send Una back to Africa.

And so there he is. He and Una, they've got a teenage son. They've been living together for over a decade. And he says that they were living a life of what he calls domestic bliss.

And famously, he tells us in the Confessions that when she's sent away, she vows to never know another man, which means that she is really showing him the faith that is characteristic of what becomes his idea of Christian marriage. So off she goes. Augustine is left realizing that she is just a better person than he is.

So that, I think, was a big, big blow, not only to his ego, but to his self-worth, to his understanding of himself as a person. Because his fiancée, the heiress, is only 10, Augustine has to wait for two years before he can marry her. So that puts him in a situation that is terrible.

it turns out simply untenable psychologically. And again, he talks about this in the Confessions, that he has to wait. He's already made it very clear to us that he's a person who has a lot of control problems with his sexual urges. So what does he do? He takes a second concubine.

So the parents-in-law think, fine, he's a red-blooded male. At least he's taking a stable relationship so he's not going to be going to prostitutes and bringing the disease into the house. So that's their thinking. Somewhere in there, Augustine starts to notice that this is all not quite what he would like to think of himself.

Meanwhile, the number of my sins was growing. The woman I'd been accustomed to sleeping with was torn from my side, because she was supposed to be an obstacle to my marriage. My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood. She went back to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man,

and leaving me with the illegitimate son she'd given birth to. I was wretched, but I couldn't even manage to emulate a woman. Instead I itched at delay, as it was two years before I could have the girl I was arranging to marry. I was no lover of marriage, but instead a slave to my lust. So I secured another woman, but not a wife to be sure.

It was as if I wanted my soul's disease to be maintained unimpaired, or maybe even augmented and conveyed into the realm of lawful wedlock. And I needed a sustained relationship to serve as a sort of escort on this journey. But that wound of mine, made by hacking off the woman I'd had before, wasn't healing. On the contrary.

After excruciating inflammation and pain came putrefaction and a growing numbness and hopelessness. "You're the one to be praised. You're the one to be glorified, fountain of mercies. I was growing more wretched and you were growing nearer. Your right hand was almost, almost there to pluck me out of the slime and wash me clean. But I didn't know that.

While he's in Milan, Augustine hears about the incredible sermons given by the Bishop of Milan, a man named Ambrose. He's a figure that becomes extremely powerful in Augustine's life.

Ambrose deserves his own episode one day, so please take that down, producer Kayleigh. Because many scholars reckon that Ambrose, as a former Roman governor turned Christian bishop, had as big an impact on the church in the Roman world as Emperor Constantine had had at the beginning of the 300s.

Ambrose was an intellectual, trained in rhetoric just like Augustine, and came from a very influential Roman family. His reputation as a public speaker, beyond compare, was what first drew the very vain Augustine to him. For although I did not trouble to take what Ambrose said to heart, but only to listen to the manner in which he said it, nevertheless his meaning, which I tried to ignore,

And he is a spectacular preacher. The other thing he's doing though is he's come across an idea from the Greek East of Christian virginity.

and that Christian virgins are people who have a special relationship with God because they have a kind of purity in their connection to God that they're not accountable. He's thinking particularly of young women because everybody knows that once women are in family relationships, they have all sorts of obligations to the men around them.

So if you get a woman who's vowed to virginity, okay, she might be accountable to her mother, but pretty much it's going to be God and the church all the way. And she's not going to be going to the priest and saying, well, I'd love to, but my husband won't let me. So we love virgins. Ambrose loves virgins. And he starts to preach the idea that not only women, but also men

should pursue the path of virginity, ideally, or at least sexual asceticism. So at the time that Augustine is having this crisis about what a bad man he is and how his badness is fundamentally because he can't control his sexual impulses and not only has he betrayed Una with the young woman that he's going to marry, but he's even double betrayed her with this second concubine and it's just a train wreck. There are

There he is, listening to Ambrose of Milan preaching these incredible, terrifying sometimes, sermons about hellfire and virginity. And what is virginal chastity but purity free from stain? And whom can we judge to be its author but the Immaculate Son of God, whose flesh saw no corruption, whose Godhead experienced no infection?

So, Augustine basically starts to, in a sense, interpret

I just want to chime in here and note that it wasn't just Ambrose's teachings on sex that attracted Augustine. Though apparently Ambrose was so persuasive in his arguments about the virtues of abstinence against the Roman lust and licentiousness.

That noble families worried their daughters might choose a life of virginity over marriage after hearing him preach, so they hesitated to send their daughters to church. But Ambrose's preaching addressed many of the concerns Augustine had had with Manichaeism. He also showed Augustine that there were people within the Christian faith who had applied intellectual rigor to their beliefs.

Ambrose was known for his knowledge of the latest Latin and Greek writings, Christian and pagan. He even incorporated some of the more recent philosophical insights into his preaching, and Augustine was impressed. Now, this is all before he is a confessing Christian. Tell us...

the story, the famous story, of his coming to have this revelation and thinking of himself as a full Christian. So he's in Milan with his friend, Olypius,

and they meet a pair of young men who start talking to them about the ascetic movement and about the life of Antony, who was a desert father from Egypt, whose life had recently been translated into Latin. And they get very excited about this idea of the desert fathers. And Augustine talks about how he was

He was with Olypius and he was so upset about the fact that his own life was going in this direction that was just so upsetting to him. They're in a small house in a garden and over the garden wall he hears some children playing a game where the sort of sing-song of the game is "take it and read." So he has seen this book of Paul's letters in the house and he decides to go back in and pick up the book and read.

Suddenly, I heard the voice of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, pick it up, read it, pick it up, read it.

Immediately, I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damning the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon,

Augustine's Confessions, Book 8

And at that point, he picks... And just opens a page, doesn't he? He opens the book. And famously, there is in the ancient world practice called sortes biblicae, where you open a book and you point to a passage and you see what it says. And it's kind of almost a form of divination. So that's clearly what Augustine was doing in this case. And when he gets to the passage, it's Paul's passage from Romans about not in reveling and drunkenness,

And Augustine realizes, "Oh, this is what God wants for me. He wants me to follow this life of asceticism that I've heard about in the life of Antony." So he makes this marvelous connection between the letters of Paul, the life of Antony, and God's will. So I quickly returned to the bench where Olypius was sitting, for there I had put down the Apostle's book when I had left there.

I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof." Romans 13:13

I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was, infused in my heart, something like the light of full certainty, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. Confessions, Book Eight

There's a sense that he's trying to bring together the world of his childhood and his mother's Christianity with this sort of heady world of intellectual Christianity that he started to get access to through Ambrose's preaching. So there's a sort of the two things come together for him. He says that he's had this moment and the scales fell away, everything looked different, and the first thing he thinks is, "I know I can't get married to that girl."

Interestingly, he doesn't phrase it as being about sex. He phrases it as being about he knows there's something wrong with that marriage. And in fact, again, we have this question of ambition. But so he decides, initially he sees it as following the life of philosophy.

And he and Olypius organized themselves to go and live with a group of friends for a few months up in the mountains and read philosophy and really try to think about what it is to live a righteous life. After Augustine becomes a Christian, he's baptized by Ambrose and then turns from his purely academic life to establish a community of prayer and study in his hometown, Fagaste, in present-day Algeria.

But locals weren't going to have a bar of this. Someone so talented shouldn't be hidden away in prayer and study. So just four years after his conversion, Augustine was pressed by North Africans in 391 to become a priest. And five years after that, he was elevated to become a bishop of the most important port city of the region, Hippo.

From this post, he defended Christianity against paganism and heresies. He gave sage advice to Roman officials, overwhelmed by rampant slave trading and violent raids by Saharan warriors. And he laid down his five million written words like a master foundation, a bedrock of Western civilization. Sounds like an exaggeration, right? Stay with us.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. The second founder of the faith. Converted 1600 years ago, St. Augustine still shapes church thought.

That's the headline of a full-page article in Time magazine on 29 September 1986, celebrating the 1600th anniversary of the conversion of Augustine. Here's a bit more from the article. The sudden conversion was fateful not only for St Augustine, who forsook his ambitions and his women to undertake an early form of monastic life, but for the subsequent development of the West.

Pope John Paul II, in an anniversary pronouncement, terms Augustine "the common father of our Christian civilization." Only a handful of thinkers have had equivalent influence over such a span of years. During his 35 years as bishop, he not only supervised a turbulent diocese, but spent long hours judging disputes, preached daily , and managed to write 100 treatises and hundreds of letters on doctrine.

Five million of his words are indexed in computers at West Germany's Würzburg University. Those words affected almost every aspect of the faith. Long before Calvin, Augustine championed predestination,

Before Luther, he taught salvation by God's mysterious grace, not by works. Augustine, more than any other writer, defined Roman Catholic teaching... Mining Augustine's enormous corpus of writing is not something we can really do in a single episode. But I asked my next guest, theologian Han Luen Cancer Comline, to help us grasp the big picture of Augustinian thought.

So can you give us an idea of the main themes and whether you reckon there's an overarching theme to this big brain we call St. Augustine? Oh, I love that question. So for Augustine, I would say four key themes for him would be trinity, humility, grace, and love.

So I think if we have a sense of what those four themes mean to him and how they connect to each other, we can create a kind of quadrilateral or window into his larger thinking that gives us a perspective on the whole. By the way, Han Lewin is the Marvin and Joreen DeWitt Professor of Theology and Church History at Western Theological Seminary in Michigan. G'day to Michigan. We have loads of listeners there. We love ya.

She is particularly interested in Augustine and her book, Augustine on the Will, a theological account, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

We're going to have to do a whole episode on the first of those themes she mentions, the Trinity. Augustine once told a story about walking along the seaside while he was meditating on the Trinity. And he watched a boy filling a hole in the sand with seawater. And he asked the kid what on earth he was doing. And the boy said he wanted to empty the whole ocean into the hole.

Augustine pointed out that that was impossible. The quick-witted boy replied that understanding the Trinity that Augustine was always going on about was even less possible. I like it. Augustine accepted the challenge and wrote arguably the most important work on the Trinity for the next thousand years or more, in which he described the Trinity as pure love.

The Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the very love that binds them together. He said much more than that, of course, but for Augustine, this means everything is ultimately about love.

Beyond On the Trinity and The Confessions, which we've already mentioned, the other crucially important work of Augustine is called The City of God. I asked Kate Cooper to do the impossible and summarize the work. So The City of God is...

I'm really going to try to compress this. It's hard. He starts getting letters from highly literate laymen saying, what is this Christian thing? Explain it to me in terms that are philosophically valid. Some people think that the sack of Roman 410 is a sign that the Christian God really doesn't love the Roman Empire and we just need to go back to the old gods.

And so Augustine is having to take the question of why God would allow a group of people to have political power even though they're clearly not up to the job. And it's that failure of the imperial church to bring prosperity and peace that he's really struggling with in that text.

And his fundamental idea is that the city of God is not the city here on earth. The city of God is also not something hovering in heaven right now watching us. The city of God is the perfect reality that will happen at the completion of history at the end of time. And none of us knows what role we are playing in the city of God.

We don't know, as we live out our lives bound in time here on Earth, what it means to take the action that we're taking because we can't see the outcome. And even if we were a perfectly moral person, because we're bound by time and we don't know what the other sequence of things that are going to happen until the end of time, we don't know the significance of our actions.

You can get a little bit more on the city of God in our episode 80 with Christopher Watkin. It's titled Critical Theory. Head to the show notes for more. There were two big theological threats to Orthodox Christianity in Augustine's time, and Augustine stomped on both of them, intellectually speaking.

One was Donatism, a group of puritanical Christians led by Donatus, who said that anyone who denied Christ during the persecutions at the beginning of the century was not a valid Christian, no matter how much repenting they did. Therefore, any churches founded by any of those repentant traitors were false churches. The Donatus thought that there were a lot of false churches.

Some think of Augustine as dogmatic and puritanical, but in fact, he rescued the church from this spiritual elitism. He reminded everyone that divine love, not human faithfulness, is the central reality of Christianity. Then there was Pelagianism, another overly rigorous version of Christianity.

Can you give us the 30-second explainer on Pelagianism? Yes. And then tell us a little more about Augustine's view of the will. Now, I know you've written a book on this, but if you can do it in like 60 seconds, my audience would love you. Okay. In a nutshell, Pelagius had a very different theological sensibility than Augustine. He was someone who really emphasized the

human potential. This is like all the slogans I heard growing up in the 80s, like, you can do it, you can achieve it. Like, if you can dream it, you can accomplish it, reach for the stars, all of this stuff. That was Pelagius. He has written some things, for example, his letter to Demetrius, which could be read today at a graduation ceremony by a motivational speaker. I mean, he's basically all about

not underestimating our natural abilities as God created us. And then Augustine, in contrast to that, really emphasizes our neediness and our dependence on God's grace to do anything good. Whenever I give moral instruction, I first try to demonstrate the inherent power and quality of human nature.

I try to show the wonderful virtues which all human beings can acquire. Most people look at the virtues in others and imagine that such virtues are far beyond their reach. Yet God has implanted in every person the capacity to attain the very highest level of virtue.

The reason is that in moral capacities, God has created us all the same. We are each capable of achieving the same degree of moral goodness. Once people perceive this truth, they're filled with hope, knowing that in the fullness of time, they can share the moral virtue of Christ himself. A letter from Pelagius to Demetrius, 385 AD.

This was one of the most important debates in the history of Christianity. Pelagius reckoned we humans are innately good and have the power within us to fully obey God. I'm good through and through and only getting better. That was kind of their mantra.

But Augustine argued from the Bible and experience that we are fallen creatures. Our inherited nature is a strange mix of good and bad. We are free to act as we choose, but not wholly free to act for the good 100% of the time.

His fancy phrase for this was liberum arbitrium captivatum, free will in captivity. That is, our will might be free, but it's also weakened by our nature. Now you can test out Augustine's idea very easily. Try for the next 24 hours to do, say and think only good things. Starting now. Let me know how you get on.

In his confessions, Augustine tells a personal story about stealing pears, which is really a story about human nature. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden to

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart, which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now, that my heart confessed to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself.

It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing, I loved my error, not that for which I erred, but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed, but shame itself. Augustine's Confessions, Book Two

This sort of passage is often quoted to make the point that Augustine was a total downer, a grumpy pessimist about humanity. The great 20th century political philosopher John Rawls gave Augustine the dubious honour of one of the two dark minds in Western thought. Check out the show notes for the other dark mind. Does Augustine deserve this title? Spoiler, not if you actually read him.

We'll see what my expert guest has to say about it after this. 68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.

Undeceptions and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organization give people like Tarrat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions. I am lovable. Hi, lovable friend. I'm Mona Monkey. I live in the kingdom of self-esteem.

Along with my friends, we're the lovable team. Come right along, bring your huggable you. We'd all like to meet you and talk to you too. The gates of the kingdom are opening wide as you say these words three times with pride. I'm lovable, I'm lovable, I'm lovable. So come with me and you will see all of the lovable ways to be. I am courageous.

That's a reading from a librarian in the city of Rancho Cordova in California. She's reading a kid's book called The Lovables in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem by Diane Lumens. Any kid who reads this book hears this message. You are very special.

It came out during the self-esteem craze of the 1980s and 90s, that thinking was based on questionable research, see the show notes, that suggested a high self-esteem, that is thinking highly of yourself, holding a positive view of your actions and capacity, correlated to being a well-adjusted, clean, sober person with no criminal record and probably higher education.

If you have low self-esteem, you're more likely to be in jail. There were a bunch of scholarly papers around the same time making this point. And schools across America in particular, but also here in Australia, adopted self-esteem programs to instill greater confidence in our kids. You know, every child gets a prize. Pelagius would have loved it.

The only problem is it's mostly junk. Newer studies explore the problems inherent in self-esteem culture. Turns out Augustine was probably right. It's kind of a glass half empty, half full thing. Like you could hear Pelagius' view and think, oh, that's so encouraging. He thinks we have so much potential. This is wonderful.

But on the other side, I love Peter Brown's line about how Pelagius' message was simple but terrifying. Perfection is possible and therefore obligatory.

That is a lot of weight to put on human shoulders that you alone can do anything you want to do. He like practically says that in so many words. And I think deep down, we all know that's false, that we cannot do anything we want to do. And so it can be deeply discouraging to feel that that's an obligation we have. So I think there's another side that sees Augustine, another way of framing this, where Augustine's

alleged pessimism about the human condition is actually something really hopeful because it corresponds to a really broad view of God's grace and corresponds to an acknowledgement of our neediness as human beings and that that's okay. I mean, I've often felt that there'd be no more depressing idea to believe than that I am good through and through and only getting better.

Because I don't know how I'd cope with all the counter evidence. You know, like by 9am, I know I'm a jerk. All of this reminds me of something British intellectual Francis Buffard wrote about his conversion from atheism to Christianity. When he was a sceptic, he mocked the Christian notion of guilt. He grew to love it, though. He writes...

I've found that admitting there's some black in the colour chart of my psyche doesn't invite the blot of dark to swell or give a partial truth more gloomy power over me than it should have.

but the opposite. Admitting there's some black in the mixture makes it matter less. It makes it easier to pay attention to the mixedness of the rest. It helps you stop wasting your time on denial and therefore helps you stop ricocheting between unrealistic self-praise and unrealistic self-blame. It helps you be kind to yourself.

Here's Spufford himself giving a talk at St Paul's Cathedral in London. In my experience, although faith can begin in awe, it can begin in a sense of consolation that blows in like weather and startles you out of nowhere. But more common in some respects is just to reach one of the points in life where you are irresistibly reminded that you've messed up.

as I shall put it in church. And at those moments, which I think are universal unless your life is extraordinarily lucky or you are leading your life in an extraordinarily oblivious way, you discover yourself as a being who does not fit easily with your own wishes. A being who acts against yourself as often as you act for yourself.

who is resistant to your own best intentions, who, whatever the line is that your society and you yourself draw between the good and the bad, are some of the time voting haplessly on both sides of it. Francis Spufford, I don't know if you know that name, he's a British author, and he wrote a book called Unapologetic, and he was a complete atheistic British sceptic.

And he says one of the things that brought him to Christianity was the realization that we're all fallen. Because he thought, as soon as I believe I'm fallen, I can be gentle on myself. And that sort of ties in with what you were saying. Like there is a kind of gentleness about Augustine's view. You can see how it would be oppressive. But actually, in his framework...

Yeah, I think that's great. And I think one reason why people often don't see that side as much is because it tends to come through, especially in his sermons, where he's preaching to people, exhorting them, and just reiterating

really in touch with how hard it is out there on the ground to be a human being and to get better. And he doesn't throw in the towel. He doesn't say, well, you know, we're sinful, so just be complacent and do whatever you want to do and it's all fine. He urges people to really give it their best shot to keep growing, but also acknowledges that it's really slow.

and arduous, and there is going to be progress and there's going to be regress, and that this is normal, and that they can rely on God's grace to sustain them through that. To say that Augustine is depressing is to say that you haven't read Augustine. Because if you do read Augustine, you'll find that every time he says something that's just painful and devastating—

He's also saying something crazy, something fascinating, something funny, something wondrous. But is he more about human guilt than he is, you know, love and joy?

Oh, I think that's a terrible misunderstanding. I think he's very concerned about our failings as human beings and our limitations as human beings. He really thinks that it's dangerous to think that you can do more than you can do, that that's the point where people make bad and dangerous mistakes. If you think, oh, I'm the good guy and he's the bad guy or she doesn't deserve my help, that's when you make terrible mistakes. So he wants us to be humble.

He really does want us to be humble. In one of his many letters, he wrote, "This way is first humility, second humility, third humility. And no matter how often you keep asking me, I will say the same over and over again." This was a massive departure from the culture of Rome he grew up in, where pride was a virtue and humility was a weakness.

But Augustine reckoned we can only see true glory, the glory of God and our own glory, when we acknowledge our fallenness. You know, the one thing we haven't referenced here, and I almost feel like I'd like to reference it even very briefly, is that there's a very strong historical argument made by Peter Harrison that it's Augustinian theology, the revival of Augustinian theology in the 14th and 15th centuries, that gave us the scientific revolution. Because people...

began to realize you can't just intellectually, rationally decide why the planets move like that, why plants grow like that. You have to actually, because our minds are fallen.

Because we're deeply fallen creatures. So we have to create tests of our intuitions. We speculate this, test that speculation. And it grew entirely out of Augustinian revival. I feel like we've touched on that in a previous episode. Hey, producer Kayleigh here. Just popping in to say that John's riff to the team just there was inspired by Peter Harrison's book, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. We'll pop a link in the show notes.

Peter Harrison was a guest for our very recent live show in Brisbane, Australia. Look out for that episode dropping in your feed soon. It'll be called Intelligible Universe. Anyway, back to JD.

Another big criticism of Augustine is that he was a raging misogynist. So I put that to Kate Cooper, who's studied precisely this question. And her answers were fascinating. But you'll need to be a Plus subscriber to get that extended episode. Head to underceptions.com forward slash plus to sign up. I'm so sorry to be a tease. Producer Kayleigh made me do it. Sorry.

There is a skeptical reading of Augustine that just says he was a social climber and, you know, wanted to be one of the greats. And what do you know, he ended up one of the greats. Do you share that view or do you think there's a way of rescuing him? I mean, after all, humility was one of the things he liked. Yeah, right.

So I don't entirely reject that perspective because Augustine was a human being. So inevitably, as he himself taught and admitted in his confessions, which not only talked about his sins before he became a Christian, but talked about his ongoing struggle with temptation, I think he would be the first to admit, yes, I still struggle with pride.

So I think that in some ways that skepticism about valorizing or putting Augustine up on a pedestal is something that his own thought would theologically justify, actually. So I think that it is appropriate to acknowledge weaknesses in Augustine and acknowledge that he wasn't right about everything. He was a human being like all the rest of us.

That said, my approach to Augustine and to early thinkers generally is to keep my eyes open for weaker areas and to be open to critique. Also, to try to learn as much as possible from these thinkers of the past, realizing that we contemporary people also have a lot of blind spots in our own time. And that, I guess, following the biblical principle, we could spend all day thinking about the log in...

Augustine's eye, or we could say, how can we learn from him about some areas where we could improve? You sound like a true historian there. Our first thought really shouldn't be, how could they have thought that? It should be, oh my goodness, I wonder what my blind spot is. What will people say of Dixon 200 years from now? Shut up the thought. Have you got a favorite piece of

writing from St. Augustine? I would actually recommend this short little book called On Instructing Beginners in the Faith.

And I just love that. He sort of gives, it's like a crystallization of his understanding of what's most important in Christian belief. And also there are some really wonderful reflections on just how to engage with others in an encouraging way in a Christian context. So some real pastoral wisdom there as well. And it's very short, available in paperback. So that's a great one.

Brilliant. Finally, what do you think a skeptic might find enriching if they dipped into Augustine? Mm-hmm.

For the skeptic, I would recommend Confessions because it's interesting to trace the path that led Augustine to Christian theology and just to hear a lot of questions that he had about Christianity, skeptical questions that he himself had. I think it's important for skeptics to know that the kinds of questions they ask are important and good to explore and also valuable.

shared by, you know, many Christians have thought through these questions too, and they're good questions. So for Augustine, for example, when he first encountered the Bible and the Old Testament, he was really turned off. He thought, what is going on here? Lowbrow. Yeah, lowbrow. Like this text is not polished stylistically, and God seems to be endorsing violence. There's all kinds of...

things that seem unfitting for the object of worship that are attributed to God in this text. So this was an issue that he had and worked through. So I think that for skeptics, I would recommend that. And also, I do think Augustine, so Augustine is someone who's been there, who can connect with folks like that.

And then even in his thinking going forward as a Christian, he bears those kinds of questions in mind. So he'll say sometimes, you know, in a sermon or writing, well, maybe someone might ask this. He's always thinking not only about his own perspective, but what a critic might say. So I think that gives his thought a kind of rigor that's appealing to people who think it's important to ask hard questions.

Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. Jesus was somewhat pessimistic about human nature. To his own followers, he said stuff like, That's Matthew 7.

The word evil here is jarring to modern ears. We usually reserve it for the Hitlers of the world. But it's pretty common in Jesus' teaching, where it basically means immoral or wicked. If you then who are wicked, he's saying. And he uses it everywhere, of everyone, whether his opponents or his closest friends.

This quotation comes from the famous Sermon on the Mount, which opens with the words, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5. So we're evil and we're morally bankrupt. The loftiest ethic ever uttered begins with a call for us to recognize our fallenness, our lack of moral credit.

Now, Jesus didn't say that we're hopeless failures destined only to be immoral, but he did insist that recognizing our flawed humanity is the first step towards seeing the kingdom. This is because, as Augustine would emphasize again and again, this kingdom is all about God's love and grace toward us, not our capacity to be good.

I had a really interesting conversation about all of this stuff with a thoughtful journalist from the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster. He said he liked some of the ethical teachings of Jesus, all the bits about love and peace, but he was wary of any of that talk about human guilt and the need for divine mercy. He worried this would crush the human spirit and especially children. He and his wife were about to have their first child.

Kids would grow up, he feared, in a cloud of guilt that obscured their abilities and intrinsic value. He preferred the notion that we all have within us everything we need to live honourable lives. Now, he wasn't a Christian, but he was sounding like a good Pelagian. I explained that I reckoned things are the other way around.

Imagine growing up in a family where the expectation is that you are good through and through. You'll make the first 15. That's a rugby reference, by the way. Always stay out of trouble, get straight A's at school and quickly repair any personal failures. I suggested to him that this was the true recipe for crushing a child's spirit.

This performance-based mentality where worth is tied to achievement cannot prepare us for the inevitable failures of life. Much better, it seems to me, is to raise our children in the full knowledge of both their gifts and their flaws. All in the knowledge that they are loved regardless of performance. And that's what Jesus taught. And that's what Augustine championed a few centuries later.

The longer I live, the more attached I am to the biblical truth that I am fallen. I don't like my foibles and frailties. I'm not excusing them. But I love the way the Bible prepares me not to be shocked at my own inability to live up to my own standards, let alone God's standards. The Bible prepares me not to be shocked that other people, even seemingly good people, will let me down.

So my trust isn't in my flawed self or in any other human leader, but in the mercy of God who entered this corrupted and corrupting world of ours, lived the perfect life none of us could live, then gave up that perfect life on my behalf on the cross so I could know forgiveness and restoration and eventually share in his resurrection. There is rest in this knowledge.

knowledge of our fallenness, knowledge of God's graciousness. And I think that's what Augustine meant when he famously said in the opening lines of his confessions, Thou, Lord, hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. ♪

If you want to find out more about anything you heard in today's episode, Researcher Al has some great show notes for you. All the links to the books and shows and people we mentioned, some deep dives into the more complicated stuff, and there's a transcript of the full episode too. Head to underceptions.com to find them. They're way too long to put in the notes of your podcast app.

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especially American sense versus the Australian scent. If you have questions about this episode or any of our episodes, you can send it my way. Send us an audio or text message via the links in the show notes and I'll try and answer it in an upcoming Q&A episode. See ya. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Eunice Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is writer and researcher and drummer. Siobhan McInnes is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwey. Boom! Our voice actor today is Yannick Laurie. Thank you, mate. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible.

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Head to underceptions.com to find them. They're way too long to put in the notes of your podcast app. Between drumming sessions, it's pretty much all Research Al does each day. And if you're thinking about buying... It's basically correct. It's very accurate. What a job. Tough life.