CITY OF GOD PART III.

Unfortunately, there are many things in St. Augustine’s writings, where his philosophical curiosity yields to the authority of the Scriptures to such an extent that what must be a matter of faith, and, ergo, incontestable, becomes an article of his philosophy, and thus highly questionable and even repulsive. Such, for instance, is his theory which pushes the concept of damnation of the unbaptized babies beyond reasonable limits. There are many other objectionable features in his philosophy as well. But once we agree to dismiss such instances of merging theology with philosophy as a product of his time and harbinger of the Dark Ages of Christianity in general, St. Augustine’s value as a truly great philosopher cannot be denied.

But, unfortunately, nor can we deny the frighteningly cold inhumanity of his other-worldly philosophy, as perceptively noticed by our old friend W. T. Jones in his Conclusion to The Medieval Mind, which is Part II of his History of Western Philosophy:

“We may differ greatly from Plato and Aristotle on many philosophical issues, he points out, but we feel we understand them even when we differ. Most of us today, though, do not feel we understand Augustine, even when we agree with him. To most of us today his personality is hopelessly unsympathetic, and his theories far-fetched and inconsequential. What strikes as most foreign about his position, is its inhumanity. Where Augustine prized obedience and passive acceptance of God’s will, we would value initiative, self-reliance, and self-respect. It’s not merely that we do not feel as debased as Augustine held mankind to be; we do not want to feel debased. And if we did, we would not conceive ourselves to be on the road to salvation, but on the way to a mental hospital. To describe oneself as “crooked, sordid, bespotted, and ulcerous,” when one had been leading the quiet industrious life of a scholar, would strike us as outright comical, if it were not so pathological. The Confessions seem less an act of piety than a sign of morbidity, and Augustine’s sense of God’s guiding hand, on even the most trivial of his acts, less an insight into the nature of the real, than an indication of profound emotional instability and insecurity in Augustine’s own personality.”

I may be somewhat shocked, and even offended by W. T. Jones’s arrogant use of the generalized we, where a more modest I should have been called for, but I cannot fail to agree with most of what he says here. As a matter of fact, I would have been much more receptive to the Augustinian and all that proverbial Christian self-deprecation, had such other-worldliness of the outlook borne commendable fruit, in changing people’s personal and social behavior toward sanctity, righteousness, and a Christian communistic disposition. As nothing of the kind is in evidence, as corruption and sanctimonious hypocrisy seem to have triumphed in Christendom over genuine Christian morality, as represented by the best of what Christianity has to offer, it is now exceedingly obvious that the self-flagellations of the body and the mortifications of the spirit of the Christian saints who have been revered by the Church for these practices, have given the Christian world a wrong sense of direction, wrong models for emulation. The hypocrisy of this sort of direction is exposed in the sad fate of Fra Savonarola, namely, in the fact that, while bestowing sainthood on these Christian ascetics, the Church dignitaries never had any intention of following their way of life, or Christ’s way, for that matter… But to summarize my objection to the Augustinian model, I find it far more spiritually rewarding just to follow Christ, than any of his self-deprecating followers, such as Saint Augustine.