Augustine’s feeling of fragmentation has its modern corollary in the way many contemporary young people are plagued by a frantic fear of missing out. The world has provided them with a superabundance of neat things to do. Naturally, they hunger to seize every opportunity and taste every experience. They want to grab all the goodies in front of them. They want to say yes to every product in the grocery store. They are terrified of missing out on anything that looks exciting. But by not renouncing any of them they spread themselves thin. What’s worse, they turn themselves into goodie seekers, greedy for every experience and exclusively focused on self. If you live in this way, you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.
Augustine found himself feeling increasingly isolated. If you organize your life around your own wants, other people become objects for the satisfaction of your own desires. Everything is coldly instrumental. Just as a prostitute is rendered into an object for the satisfaction of orgasm, so a professional colleague is rendered into an object for the purpose of career networking, a stranger is rendered into an object for the sake of making a sale, a spouse is turned into an object for the purpose of providing you with love.
We use the word “lust” to refer to sexual desire, but a broader, better meaning is selfish desire. A true lover delights to serve his beloved. But lust is all incoming. The person in lust has a void he needs filled by others. Because he is unwilling to actually serve others and build a full reciprocal relationship, he never fills the emotional emptiness inside. Lust begins with a void and ends with a void.
At one point Augustine called his fifteen-year relationship with his lower-class common-law wife “a mere bargain of lustful love.” Still, their relationship could not have been entirely empty. It is hard to imagine a person who lived at Augustine’s intense emotional register taking a fifteen-year intimate relationship lightly. He loved the child they had together. He indirectly celebrated his wife’s steadfastness in a tract titled “What Is Good in Marriage.” When Monica intervened and got rid of the woman so Augustine could marry a rich girl of an appropriate social class, he seems to have suffered: “She was an obstacle to my marriage, the woman I lived with for so long was torn out of my side. My heart, to which she had been grafted, was lacerated, wounded, shedding blood.”
Augustine sacrificed this woman for his social standing. The unnamed woman was sent back to Africa without her son, where we are told she vowed to remain celibate the rest of her life. The person chosen to be Augustine’s official wife was just ten years old, two years below the legal age of marriage, so Augustine took another concubine to satisfy his cravings in the interim. This is what he was doing in all phases of his life at this point: shedding sacrificial commitments in favor of status and success.
One day, while walking in Milan, he observed a beggar who had clearly just finished a good meal and had a few drinks. The man was joking and joyful. Augustine realized that though he himself toiled and worked all day, fraught with anxieties, the beggar, who did none of these things, was happier than he was. Maybe he was suffering because he was shooting for higher goals, he considered. No, not really, he was seeking the same earthly pleasures as that beggar, but he was finding none of them.
By his late twenties Augustine had become thoroughly alienated. Here he was living an arduous life and it was providing him with none of the nourishment he needed. He had desires that didn’t lead to happiness and yet he still followed his desires. What on earth was going on?
Self-Knowledge
Augustine responded to this crisis by looking within himself. You’d think that somebody who has become appalled by his own self-centeredness would immediately head in the direction of self-forgetfulness. His advice would be simple: ignore yourself, pay attention to other people. But Augustine’s first step was to undertake an almost scientific expedition into his own mind. It is hard to think of another character in Western history up to that time who did such a thorough excavation of his own psyche.
Looking in, he saw a vast universe beyond his own control. He sees himself with a depth and complexity almost no one had observed before: “Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul, the different kinds of love…. Man is a great depth, O Lord; you number his hairs…but the hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feelings, the movements of his heart.” The vast internal world is dappled and ever-changing. He perceives the dance of small perceptions and senses great depths below the level of awareness.
Augustine was fascinated, for example, by memory. Sometimes painful memories pop into the mind unbidden. He was amazed by the mind’s ability to transcend time and space. “Even while I dwell in darkness and silence, in my memory I can produce colors if I will…. Yea, I discern the breath of the lilies from violets, though smelling nothing….”12 The very scope of a person’s memories amazed him:
Great is the force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber; whoever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine and belongs to my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too straight to contain itself. And where should that be, which containeth not itself? Is it without it and not within? And how then does it not comprehend itself? A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this.
At least two great conclusions arose from this internal expedition. First, Augustine came to realize that though people are born with magnificent qualities, original sin had perverted their desires. Up until this point in his life Augustine had fervently desired certain things, like fame and status. These things didn’t make him happy. And yet he kept on desiring them.
Left to ourselves, we often desire the wrong things. Whether it’s around the dessert tray or in the late-night bar, we know we should choose one thing but end up choosing another. As the Bible says in Romans, “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
What sort of mysterious creature is a human being, Augustine mused, who can’t carry out his own will, who knows his long-term interest but pursues short-term pleasure, who does so much to screw up his own life? This led to the conclusion that people are a problem to themselves. We should regard ourselves with distrust: “I greatly fear my hidden parts,”13 he wrote.
Small and Petty Corruptions
In the Confessions, Augustine used an idle teenage prank from his own past to illustrate this phenomenon. One boring evening when he was sixteen, Augustine was hanging out with his buddies and they decided to steal some pears from a nearby orchard. They didn’t need the pears. They weren’t hungry. They weren’t particularly nice pears. They just stole them wantonly and threw them to some pigs for sport.
Looking back, Augustine was astounded by the pointlessness and the tawdriness of the act. “I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and pamperedness of iniquity…. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself.”