Please Feed Them!

     PHEW! I knew I made the right decision in not becoming a Nun. Now I am certain that I would never have been able to follow the rules of the monastery. 

     Right off the bat, I’d like to start with a statement that I hope does not offend any of my classmates, for it is merely an opinion/question that I would like some explanation to: 

     I have never understood the concept of fearing a god. 

     When it comes to religion, I have always been under the impression that a god is a figure who is worshiped for the love he/she generously gives to all human beings. Throughout this “Rule of St. Benedict” reading, I have been wondering whether things would work better, if members of the monastery were not afraid. There are so many great concepts within this text, starting with the prologue. When the narrator is speaking of making it to heaven, he states, “we must run to it by good deeds/ or we shall never reach it.” I agree whole-heartedly with this piece of advice. It is the writing that follows, which makes me second-guess what has already been said.

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      Beginning in chapter 23, we start to get a glimpse of the consequences that follow rule-breakers. I have never given the act of punishment a thought when it came to monasteries. Before this reading, I assumed that there would not be a punishment for those who chose not to follow rules, or those who chose to leave the monastery. I assumed that the members and “bosses” of the school would follow the same rules that are given to us in chapter 4. For instance, rule number three states that you should not commit murder, yet, in chapter 28, we are told that an Abbess must kill a sister who continues to go against the monastery’s orders.

    What happened to rule number 30?: “To do no wrong to anyone, and to bear patiently wrongs done to oneself.” 

    OR rule number 32: “Not to curse those who curse us, but rather to bless them.” 

    Pardon me for my criticism, but this doesn’t seem fair! Or just! 

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   You see, I started this reading completely happy with sentences that tell us:

To help in trouble (Rule #18)

To become a stranger to the world’s ways (#20)

Not to forsake charity (#26) 

 

     Then, I read about the killing of sisters who disagreed with the way the monastery was being run, I heard about the starvation the brethren (etc.) endured whenever the Abbess felt it necessary, and the rules against speaking, even when you have something good to say. 

    This reading made me angry—very, very angry. 

    But I need to get to more important things before this blog is up. So, I must turn your attention to my biggest concern within the reading. A concern which I have alluded to in previous paragraphs. A concern which hearts my soulless ginger soul to consider—the lack of eating. 

    I don’t think I will ever understand the concept of fasting. Our bodies were meant to be fueled by food, and will only be damaged by the deprivation of this important energy source. 

    Yes, I could be bias. I am proud to admit that my entire day revolves around food. But even given that fact, I would not describe myself as over-indulgent (because if so, I would surely burn in hell. But also because I wouldn’t consider my diet to be gluttonous). 

     I know, I know, it’s not like the monastery was starving the children and the old. BUT THEY WERE STILL STARVING EVERYONE ELSE! 

     I’m going to have to be sure to pack snacks for Tuesday’s class, because I think I’ll need to emotionally eat my way through this upcoming discussion.

I prefer the "Utterly Delusive" Philosophers, Tbh.

The question was put forward of to what extent do we have to have bad things in order to have the good? Maybe in order to recognize something at "good" a person has to experience what we deem as "bad," but I'm not so sure that you have to have bad for there to be good. If something is good, it is because it is so, not because something bad says it is. Things do exist by opposition, but that's only really for analytic purposes.  Augustine says we can have a good place without bad, but not a bad place without any good. Even though some of his arguments might come off as pessimistic, I think this is the basis for a lot of what he says.

There is a difference between happy and fulfilled. I think he would argue that in order for a person to have a fulfilled life on earth, he/she absolutely does have to have the bad with the good. To get a full human experience, we have to experience every emotion and go through struggles and experience the ups as well. Happiness however, cannot be achieved on earth completely because Augustine says if we don't have faith in a better world after our existence on earth is over, we're settling for less, even if what we settle for makes us completely happy because he believes there is eternal bliss in Heaven and if you're Christian, you will go there. But, if I genuinely do all I can with what power I have as a person, and I'm happy with that, I don't see how I'm settling for less. I think I would be losing happiness by waiting for it to find me after I die rather than discovering what it is to my fullest potential while I'm alive.

I disagree with a lot of his religious stances. Partly because I'm not religious, and partly because I spent my last semester writing a 20 page paper on humanism and its importance. So, I lean toward striving to achieve all we can while we have what we KNOW to be, rather than living for a life we HOPE will come later. Disregarding heaven as a post-life destination doesn't doom a person's happiness. In fact, I would argue that it enhances it. Believing in going to heaven after we die is a hope. Nobody knows. Can we really BE happy if we spend life HOPING for happiness and eternal bliss instead of finding what creates happiness? It's like relying on something else to fill a void that we don't try hard enough to fill ourselves on earth. Rather than saying, 'this is the way it is because that's the way God intended it to be, but I wish it were different," why not go and do something about it? What is so wrong with trying to achieve the happiest level of human existence as a human being?

Legitimacy in the City of God

I was intimidated before reading this based on what Dr. MB said in class. I have not taken an English class since senior year of high school, so I think you can imagine my fear. However, I trusted my Lutheran upbringing and tried to go into this with an open mind, like always. What I found was a text riddled with what one classicly sees when dealing with Christian theological texts. The phrases seem long and circular, but really everything just leads back to God. All answers for moral questions brought up in the Earthly City lead back to reasoning based solely in scripture and the Word of the Lord, and that we cannot hope to be happy or perfect in this earthly place when the perfect City of God is waiting for us.

I think what is interesting to me that popped out right from the beginning was how the City of God gains legitimacy. Many utopias or utopian stories are just that: stories. Plato's Republic describes Socrates and his friends coming about the perfect city and in turn the perfect citizen, but it never is seen as real. For St. Augustine and many, many people, the City of God is a very real place that we will one day be able to live. I think that makes this text rather interesting, though. Rather than philosophizing about an ideal city that is not real and inherently unattainable, St. Augustine discusses what he believes to be a real, and attainable, perfect place. For St. Augustine, and his readers, there is no debate about whether it is possible, because it already is in existence. We just have to get there.

The context is also everything for this writing. It occurs after the Fall of Rome where people were scrambling for meaning and a sense of community. The great empire of Rome has fallen and these people are no longer the most powerful. In the classic days of Rome, the Gods were to blame for good and bad happenings, so naturally people were turning to God to blame for the ruin. St. Augustine, being the saint he is, took this opportunity of despair from the people to evangelize like no other (except that the majority of the population could not actually read what he wrote so who really knows how good he was). He spreads the "good news" and tells the lost sheep that God is not to blame for Rome's destruction because how could things not go wrong in the Earthly City? He mentions how our Earthly city was founded in selfishness and speaks of a city founded on the greatest love of God (393). That seems pretty great to someone who suffered in the Fall of Rome. Is the idea not tempting of a place founded in love and not hate (unless you are an inherently wicked sinner. They are not invited to the party, of course), one where we are protected by God's Divine Grace? Throughout the rest of the passage, Augustine just continues to mention the impossibilities and wrong doings of the Earthly city and continues to make points about how much better this City of God is and will be when/if we get there. We will no longer be tempted, we will be free of our earthly tethers, and we will know true peace. He rejects the old way of thinking, the old philosophers, and dismantles the idea of a commonwealth of the people in the Earthly City later on.

This text overall I just find to really be harkening to our human nature of wanting community in some way. For the people of Rome who are undergoing turmoil, I am sure they were looking for a sense of community too. Is it too cynical to say that perhaps Augustine is taking advantage of that fear and using promise of a perfect community to spread Christianity? Perhaps, but is there no better setting to spread beliefs and doctrine than in times of trial?

Love thy neighbor, but don’t trust him

              When most people reflect upon their lives, family and friends comprise a large portion of what is reflected upon. Human beings are surrounded by other humans from the moment of birth. As a children, we are taken care of by our families. In the schools years, we are surrounded by our peers and form relationships to foster our growth. As adults, we start families of our own and repeat the cycle. Humans are constantly interacting with each other and our experiences both influence and are influenced by other people in our lives. When thinking back on good memories, most people’s memories will be of experiences with friends or family. However, because we are constantly in contact with others, bad experiences and memories are often derived from interactions with friends and family as well.

                Most people weight the positive outcomes of friendships more than the negative outcomes.  Otherwise, people in society would shy away from friendships to protect themselves from the negative outcomes. In The City of God, St. Augustine argues that the danger of worldly friendships outweigh the possible benefits that can be gained. He states that because family and friends have such a close emotional relationship, they can be easily harmed and deceived by each other. Due to the closeness of these relationships, one can be harmed before he even realizes and devoid of a means to protect oneself as a result. St. Augustine thus warns to be cautious in these relationships (Augustine, 858-859). By taking this stance on the issue, he is assuming that humans are inherently bad and sinful. Because he is promoting the utopian nature of the heavenly city in contrast to the imperfect nature of the earthly world, conceding the value of human relationships on earth would lessen the improvement from the earthly world to the heavenly city.

                Since St. Augustine is basing his ideas for the ideal world on the bible for what awaits in the heavenly city, it would be intuitive that he would align his arguments with the principles of the bible. However, one of the most widely known messages of the bible is ignored in this argument above. In his argument, St. Augustine somewhat deviates from the message from Jesus to love thy neighbor. While he is not conveying the exact opposite message, his ideas still stray from the general message. He encourages people on earth to be suspicious and guarded on actions with family and friends. If one was to truly love one’s neighbors, he would not be worrying about the wrongdoing that could be experienced as a result. This fact diminishes the support for his claims about how to approach relationships with family and friends in the earthly world.

                Even regardless of the quality of support for St. Augustine’s argument, he proposes an earthly life that lacks pure enjoyment. If every person has to constantly doubt the intentions of other people, then relying on others and working together seem impossible. A life consumed by paranoia does not seem like a life that could also be full of happiness and enjoyment. Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, I believe that everyone can experience a happy and fulfilling life and it seems dystopian to take away a means to achieve that. 

St. Augustine's negativity

The main idea was to prove that the decline of the Roman Empire was not caused by the conversion to Christianity, and point out the difference between the earthly city and the heavenly city. However, at times I lost the main points of St. Augustine’s The City of God within the smaller messages in the chapters. But, I liked how the chapter titles gave a brief description of what the chapters were about. It helped me decipher some of the more complex ideas that were trying to be conveyed. Overall, I was surprised that I understood as much as I did, because I was slightly intimidated when Dr. MB said it was one of the hardest books she has ever read.

The chapter that I found most odd was Book XIX, Chapter 5. St. Augustine has a fairly negative perspective on human beings and their nature as whole, but this chapter stood out to me. The title is, “Social Life; its value and its dangers;” but the case for the values of social life were hardly

stated. I interpreted this chapter as St. Augustine saying, “You can’t trust anyone.” He was calling everybody out on their trustworthiness—family, friends, spouses. He says, “The story of mankind is full of them at every point; for in that story we are aware of wrongs, suspicions, enmities and war – undoubted evils, these. And even peace is a doubtful good.” Personally, I do not agree with him. I know that you will meet people in your life time that will betray your trust, but I have friends that I would trust with my life. These friends have always been there for me during good and bad times.

I found Book XIX, Chapter 6 interesting as well. While reading this chapter, I could not help comparing it to the motto of our current judicial system, “Innocent until proven guilty.” For even the most severe of crimes, everyone is entitled to certain rights and is not harmed prior to their ruling. From what St. Augustine was describing, it seems like their justice system’s motto is “Punish until someone admits to being guilty.” This leads to injustice because innocent people admit to committing crimes that they did not commit to end their suffering. In addition, there were no rules, regulations or processes that must be completed for a sentence to be given. It was all based on the judgment of the judge, who could possibly be ignorant and misinformed.

As St. Augustine is making his argument he has an air of confidence and supremacy. He is very sure of his beliefs and has no problem condemning others’ behavior. It is one thing to support and promote your belief and lifestyle, but in my opinion, he comes off as slightly arrogant. Does anyone else feel that way?

*Addition: After attending class today and having Dr. MB clarify St. Augustine's stance. I have a better understanding of where St. Augustine was coming from. I understand that he wasn't really trying to be pessimistic. He was trying to make the point that in the earthly city there are many vices, but in the heavenly city there is only Supreme Good.

Is God the Answer?

It may be my catholic school background, or maybe I was just not reading closely enough, but I found St. Augustine to be fairly easy to understand.  I even found myself agreeing with many of his overarching ideas and drawing parallels between many things that he called attention to and what I see in our world today.

Of all that I read, I found his discussion of the two cities to be the most interesting.  For a while, I could not discover what the second city was.  Obviously, the first of the two cities is the City of God, in which there is all encompassing happiness and love because all is as it should be and God is the only one with power.  The second city, we find out in Book XI at the end of chapter 1, is the earthly city.  I found almost all of what St. Augustine to be saying throughout this book focusing on these two cities and the ways in which they differ.

If I am not mistaken, he does not like mankind and believes that they do not understand spirituality of the workings of God.  He feels very strongly that the City of God “does not depend on the chance impulses of the minds of men, but is manifestly due to the guiding power of God’s supreme province,” (Book XI, Ch.1). Throughout this reading, St. Augustine compares the earthly city to the heavenly city.  All of his commentaries about the two focus on the differences between the supreme, perfect nature of God and the fickle, imperfect nature of mankind.  The largest section of comparison comes in Book XIV, chapter 28 when he is discussing the origins of the two cities.  He states that the “earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God” and “the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt itself,” (Book XIV, Ch. 28).  He makes a clearer distinction saying, “the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly city glories in the Lord,” (Book XIV, Ch. 28).  According to St. Augustine, the major difference between these two cities is the power given to God and the complete submission to his word and deed.  He favors this over all other ways of thinking and states that those who favor the Heavenly city will be much happier than those that continue to reside in the earthly city.

When reading these comparisons, I cannot help but find similarities between some of the problems that St. Augustine highlights and those that I see in the world today.  Many of the points that he raises about humans and their focus on pride and power hold true today.  His comments about how in the earthly city, “the lust for domination lords over its princes as over the nations it subjugates,” (Book XIV, Ch. 28).  There is no difference between his assertion then and what we see in our world today.  As a nation, we still look to dominate other countries, and we always have.  Even among the people of our nation, competition for the best clothes, or the best car, or the best grades dictate our actions and our priorities.  While I do not agree fully with St. Augustine’s solution, I do believe that something needs to be done about the desire to be the best.  I think that his idea of a city where competition and domination are nonexistent is wonderful.  I think that this connects back to the first day of class and our first blog post.  Many of us had a plan to change the world that revolved around the idea that our world needs more understanding and acceptance of others.  I think that, while St. Augustine may have had a different solution to the problems that he was finding in the world (through God and spirituality) than we did in our class, I think that the desire for a solution to the problem shows that there has been very little change in the nature of humans and their priorities since this was written.  Maybe St. Augustine is on to something and there really is a city that could exist, where all of the issues we discussed on the first day of class are resolved, in a sphere beyond our imagination.

Ultimate Supreme Final St. Augustine!!!!

Well Dr. MB you were not kidding at all when you said St. Augustine was tough. Honestly, you don’t want to know the difficulty I had staying awake while reading this. And while Sparknotes helped with a summary as you said, The City of God really feels like a book that’s difficult to summarize. So, nice try Sparknotes. However, despite my inability to stay conscious while reading Augustine’s work, I was able to make it through a sizeable amount of the required reading and found some interesting points.

“Our Final Good is that for which other things are to be desired, while it is itself to be desired for its own sake” (Book XIX, Chapter 1). This is an example of one of St. Augustine’s lines that sounds important. That, as well as the definition of “Final Evil” that follows it, seems like a point worth deciphering, as Augustine’s diction is so dense and twisted that each sentence feels like a riddle. So what is Augustine talking about with all of these goods and evils? He refers to the philosophers that “engaged in a great deal of complicated debate” (Book XIX, Chapter 1) about this topic, and how it relates to happiness, and seems to believe that he has the correct answer in the form of these “supreme” goods and evils.

By chapter four, Augustine has come up with Ultimate Goods/Evils, Supreme Goods/Evils, and Final Goods/Evils and I feel like I’m in the Marvel Universe with all these adjectives. Is there any difference between these adjectives? I have yet to figure out if they’re all the same. Regardless, how does this equate to the idea of utopia? Surely the person who can “achieve true happiness” – if such a thing is even possible – would be able to fit well into a utopian society, right? That’s probably up for debate.

Lastly, I think it’s strange that St. Augustine just kind of starts attacking the Stoics in chapter four, calling them arrogant and insolent. I took a class last semester on the Stoics and their philosophies deal heavily with the idea of one’s sphere of influence and how we should understand what is up to us and what isn’t. Namely, we have no control over anything except the way we react to things. If I’m reading this correctly (and there is a large chance that I am not), Augustine seems to believe that all the Stoics really do is kill themselves. I mean he’s not wrong… but he’s kind of an asshole about it. Frankly, I think using the Stoic philosophy would be the most logical way to go about creating a utopian society. They focus more on controlling one’s emotions and recognizing what things are worth being upset about, if any. I think if a society of people could maintain the type of discipline required to live the Stoic lifestyle, things like greed and jealousy would be non-issues. However, they may have a motivation issue when the answer to everything is basically always, “It doesn’t matter, we’re gonna die anyway.” Oh well!

A Tale of Two Cities

As I read theses passages, I was constantly looking for where some sort of description of the City of God might be, so that I can properly compare it to the Republic. But unfortunately, Augustine does not go into every tune and pastry like Plato does, but instead sets out a fairly broad view of two cities. One city based on a love of pleasure, and the other based on a love of God.

Many people may get confused as Augustine doesn’t go into nearly as much detail with his utopia as Plato. But one reason for this is because Augustine doesn’t disagree with Plato on many of the minute aspects of society. For instance, on the subject of enforcing justice he says that the City “needs make use of this peace also” (877), and on the subject of socializing, “the philosophers hold the view that the life of the wise man should be social, and in this we support them much more heartily” (858).

Augustine’s primary focus is to criticize aspects of Platonic philosophy in light of Christian theology. In our class discussions, we concluded that Plato’s republic would fail because injustice comes from human nature (the fig-stealer). Apparently, Augustine felt similarly, for he states “the story of mankind is full of them at every point: for in that story we are aware of wrongs, suspicions, enmities, and war” (858). Whereas Plato gave reasons for the Republic to start wars, Augustine wars to “consider the scale of those wars, with all the slaughter of human beings, and all the human blood that was shed!” (861). Finally, and most importantly, we remember that Plato established his society on the grounds of certain immutable virtues, such as moderation and justice. Augustine, however, goes through these virtues one by one, and points out that they are impossible to fulfill because of human nature (854).

Instead, the single virtue that Augustine places at the head of his society is peace. But this peace is not of an earthly focus, which Augustine calls “a kind of compromise between human wills about the things relevant to mortal life” (877). But rather, he defines this peace as focus on eternal life in Heaven (865). In other words, Augustine is proposing a kind of theocracy where focus on God is the primary foundation for all aspects of society. Whereas Plato focused on education, and considered religion to be one aspect of it, Augustine instead believed that education without the proper religious backing is worthless.

That’s another reason why Augustine is so vague with his description of the City. He believed that the minute aspects of society don’t really matter so long as the right religion is established. In his own words, “She takes no account of any difference in customs, laws, or institutions, by which earthly peace is achieved and preserved – not that she annuls or abolishes any of those, rather, she maintains them and follows them, provided that no hindrance is presented thereby to the religion which teaches that the one supreme and true God is to be worshipped” (878).

I find it fascinating that even today, many religious people would agree with Augustine’s basic premise: the City of God, which focuses on heavenly things, will ultimately survive, whereas the City of Man, which focuses on earthly things, will ultimately perish. Many evangelicals today point out governments that abolished religion, places like Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the French Directorate, and conjecture that they all failed because they threw out the out the only indispensable piece of society. 

Thoughts on St. Augustine

            While reading St. Augustine’s text, I had a hard time immediately connecting his ideas to the concept of Utopia.  In Plato’s writing, Socrates and his two companions were directly discussing how to create and ideal society. Though, “utopia” is never actually stated, the connections between Plato’s ideas and our explorations of utopia were very clear. I wonder if I was supposed to read St. Augustine’s views about Christianity and think of it as though he is presenting that a utopia is founded on well-followed Christian principles.  I know Augustine is not directly taking about “utopia,” but this is the connection that I made between the two subjects.

            I liked that the introduction provided a third person overview of Augustine’s writing.  It helped set up the rest of the reading and helped me think critically about Augustine’s argument and how he set it up.  John O’Meara’s introduction gives a little background on Augustine himself; people haven’t been able to determine whether he was a pessimist or an optimist, which would in turn shed an interesting light on Augustine’s overall theological and theoretical discussion. On page x of John O’Meara’s introduction, he mentions, “It is unfortunate that Augustine, in placing the positive part of his argument in the final twelve books and the negative in the first ten, gives the impression that he is opposed to Rome and Greek philosophy.  If he had stated the basis of his positive doctrine first, it would be seen that…his general outlook is positive.”  On the one hand, I admire Augustine for addressing the conflicts that would negate his beliefs directly in order to strengthen his own theory.  However, I think O’Meara is trying to say that if Augustine addressed the problems he had with the pagan religion later on in his text, his argument would have become more accessible.  There would be less disagreement at the beginning of his writing so his readers would have stayed engaged longer. But this is the way that Augustine chose to write it and its not like he can edit it now.

            There is a lot of negativity in this text, but right away in Book I’s preface, I thought the idea that “God is our helper” (6) is a nice one.  I have always thought that God was traditionally considered a ruler or a commander, but Augustine’s statement seems like a friendlier one. It seems to allow for free will and the view that God is there to give advice rather than commands.  He later talks about how his two proposed cities are both founded on love.  I thought statements like this one provided evidence of Augustine being a positive person.  This view really aids his argument because it gives the reader a reason to like and to trust him.  However, I felt that a lot of his arguments were sometimes just statements.  They seemed to lack a “why” or evidence to make them persuasive. I’m interested in knowing more about how other people perceived him and the strength of his argument: people during his time, people during our time, and your own thoughts.