In Our Time - Augustine's Confessions

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss St Augustine of Hippo's account of his conversion to Christianity and his life up to that point. Written c397AD, it has many elements of autobiography with his scrutiny of his earlier life, his long relationship with a concubine, his theft of pears as a child, his work as an orator and his embrace of other philosophies and Manichaeism. Significantly for the development of Christianity, he explores the idea of original sin in the context of his own experience. The work is often seen as an argument for his Roman Catholicism, a less powerful force where he was living in North Africa where another form of Christianity was dominant, Donatism. While Augustine retells many episodes from his own life, the greater strength of his Confessions has come to be seen as his examination of his own emotional development, and the growth of his soul.WithKate Cooper Professor of History at the University of London and Head of History at Royal HollowayMorwenna Ludlow Professor of Christian History and Theology at the University of Exeterand Martin Palmer Visiting Professor in Religion, History and Nature at the University of WinchesterProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 400 AD or thereabouts, when St Augustine was Bishop of Hippo in the Roman province of Africa, he wrote one of the most influential works in Western Christianity, his confessions. His reputation has flourished ever since.

These are confessions about his past life. His youth besotted by sex, his years of living with a woman unmarried and their son, his embrace of the Manichaean religion and other philosophies, and famously the time he stole pairs as a child, not because he wanted to eat them, but because he wanted to steal. These are also confessions of his faith in the God of the Catholic Church, just one of the competing Christian churches at that time. They were a demonstration of how his soul developed,

showing a way that others might follow, and it's argued that his experience of life influences his ideas on marriage and original sin. With me to discuss Augustine's confessions are Kate Cooper, Professor of History at the University of London and Head of History at Royal Holloway. Moena Ludlow, Professor of Christian History and Theology at the University of Exeter. And Martin Palmer, visiting professor in religion, history and nature at the University of Winchester. Kate Cooper. We place Augustine in Hippo, then part of the Roman Empire. What state was the empire in when he was a young man, when he was a born?

It's very much the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Empire. I mean, to take a benchmark, 410 is the year of the sack of Rome, which is one of the great moments of the fall of the empire. Augustine is writing about the period of his childhood in use from 354 to 387. So it's the years that are the run-up to the sort of cataclysm. And it's a period in North Africa of constant civil war. What other background did he have? He comes from what seems to be a Roman citizen family with a kind of mixed Roman Berber background. Sorry, Berber.

Berber, yeah. The mother was a Berber. Yeah, his mother's name, Monica. Because this is Algeria. He's part of the present-day Algeria. Yes, exactly. So in that sense, there's a tradition being carried through her name of the Berber background of her family.

And if you look at Augustine's own name, Aurelius Augustinos, that first part of the name Aurelius indicates that his family were granted Roman citizenship, probably as having been native colonials in the Roman Empire, although earlier in the third century. His father was Patricius. Now, what sort of level of societies were they in? What sort of money did they have? What did they do? What could they do? Well, it's a really interesting question, because Augustine says in one of his sermons that he's a homo-powper, you know, a poor man. But What he seems to mean by that is perhaps closer to what we would consider to be a kind of middling sort. The big trauma in the family in his youth is that his father gets to a year of a bad harvest and can't pay his school fees.

He has to come home from school for a year. Similarly, it's kind of a family where education is considered to be the opportunity, almost like going to grammar school. If he does good speeches at school, he'll have the opportunity to. to work his way up. It's also a time when people took up young men and patronized them in the sense of furnished them with money to go into the next stage. Exactly. And Augustine goes from patron to patron.

When he's in his sort of teenage years, there's a man called Romanianus, who's from Thigaste, the market town that his family lives in. And Rumanianus helps the family with the school fees. afterwards he makes friends when he's at university in Carthage and through the friends in Carthage he gains the patronage of a Roman senator, Simicus. What's your learning at school?

Mostly what we would call the classics. A lot of Virgil, memorizing Virgil, doing extemporae performances of Virgil's famous scenes. So it's Latin Latin and more Latin? Latin. No Greek? Very little comparatively. And would he be taught rhetoric?

Rhetoric really is one of the great arts that are taught in school at that time. They have the system of the liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric. How to make great speeches, basically. Exactly. And, you know, if you think about it, making speeches in the age before modern communications, it's about two things. It's about reaching people in the here and now, giving extemporary, where his speech is in the market square or in the agorah, but it's also about learning to write letters.

And Augustine's career fundamentally is centers on the letters that he writes and the people he persuades, you know, across the empire. But you get a letter from Augustine, you kind of stop and think. But he defended people and persecuted people as well, and he did say, I lied for profession, didn't he? We can't let that go.

Well, I mean, one of the really interesting things about Augustine as a figure, and one of the reasons that so many people across history have kind of fallen in love with him is because he's so, he has such a strong self-knowledge about his own failings. You know, you try to say something against him,

but he's already got there first. Martin, Martin Palmer, we have the Roman Empire coming towards, he didn't know it was coming towards, a big dipping point, ending point. We have Christianity not very long established as the imperial religion, and so just finding its feet, but it wasn't Christianity

in the sense of a block, it was Christianity in a sense of factions. Now, can you give us some idea... I know you can give us the deepest idea on the planet, Martin. But can you give us some idea of what's going on? Well, I think, to put it bluntly, it was a hell of a mess. Is that how they were described? Oh, absolutely. It's a straight quote from the Latin. Essentially, there had been this belief

that if they could convert the Roman Empire, if Christianity could convert the Roman Empire, if basically paganism could be got away with, and Theodosius at around about 380 actually bans paganism, temples are closed, the academies are closed and so forth. Then surely this would bring Christ back. And this is the great trauma of the early churches.

Jesus says in the Gospels, it's reported that he says, before some of you here die, I will return. When they died, that was a bit of a crisis. You know, what had happened? So there was this whole debate, well, is it because we're not good enough? Is it because we haven't converted enough?

Is it because we're still grappling with the powers of Satan in paganism and so forth? And then gradually you get this sense as it heads up towards Constantine's conversion and his legitimation of Christianity in 312 that maybe this is the turning point, maybe this sort of existential dimension of Christianity at last we're going to have control, last the kingdom of God can come on earth, at last Christ can return. And he doesn't because frankly he screws up.

Well, what happens is? the moment the church actually gets its hands on a great deal of money, a great deal of prestige, an awful lot of people suddenly decide they want to be Christians, who, to be absolutely honest, are a bit iffy. But that's not the point we're after. And the point we're after that there are different. But there are also huge differences. Huge differences.

So let's talk about two differences. One is what became the Catholic, the imperial Catholic Church, and the other are the Donatists, who were particularly effective in Africa, where, of course, Augustine came from. So let's talk about the clash between those two and where he figured in that. This comes in a sense to that whole question of,

are we pure enough for Christ to return? Because the last great persecution in the Roman Empire of Christians is under Diocletian, and that takes place around about 300 to 305. And in North Africa, which, and this is really quite important, North African Christianity was already slightly odd in comparison with sort of the other side of the Mediterranean. And in North Africa, those who,

handed over the scriptures to be burnt, or those who basically said, okay, you know, we'll worship the emperor, at the very least, we'll not carry on preaching. They were disowned by what became the Donatist church. The Donatis were the pure line. They were the pure line. There's always a pure line, isn't there?

It's a pure line versus the rest. Always. And the Donatus were the pure line. And they basically said, anybody, not only anybody who failed to stand up for Christ join the persecution. But anybody who subsequently was then ordained by someone who had failed to do that or ordained by somebody who had been ordained by somebody who failed to do that was no longer pure. Their sacraments were no longer valid. They could not take you into heaven.

So when he had this great education, much revered by it. And he came back to North Africa, thinking all was well, the Donatists, his native faction turned against him. And they were the majority church. The Catholics were a minority and had been persecuted, but so also be the Donatist. And then you have, of course, the Aryans as well, the whole Aryan controversy, where they basically said, look, Christ is important, but he's not God. And that's a whole other tradition which swarms in at the very end of Augustine's life, because when he is attacked in his own city,

it's the vandals who have become Aryan Christians who basically see persecuting the Catholics as being, again, how you get to heaven. So excellent. So they're jostling for who is going to be the main church. And we've got the Catholic and the Donatus and the area. The Catholics are a sort of neck and neck. Morena, the confessions, what form do they take? Do they have a form? Well, at first sight, they look like an autobiography. So Augustine, in his later career, says, reflecting back on confessions,

the first ten books are about me. So he tells the story of his life from his infancy until shortly after the period at which he makes a decisive commitment to a particular kind of Christianity. But then we have other books at the end, which involve reflection on memory and time and the doctrine of creation. So it's really a unique form, and a lot of ink has been spilt trying to wonder what exactly holds the whole book together.

But in the first ten books, we could call it autobiography. We could call it one of the very first, not the very first, some time, but one of the very first, certainly the most significant that there was. So it's a rather bold thing for him to do, isn't it? It is. And so the question is, why did he decide to do it at this particular point? Yes. Some people have suggested it might have been an exercise in self-justification.

Perhaps he came back to Africa. He was ordained first priest and then bishop. Perhaps people expressed doubt about his appropriateness for that particular role. They were worried about his youth or his commitment to the malachies. Yes. His concubine person, and he loved very much. much you were told. I don't mean to say person. I mean, I don't know what to say these days. Anyway, a concubine

with whom he lived for 15 years and had a son, and also the fact of his devotion to elicit, what you might, a cauldron of illicit sex, was what he described myself, bathing in quite happily. So there'll be that, that way we want to be, there's snips around here. But the way I see it is that that doesn't really explain how he writes the confessions.

No, no. I mean, I was just putting a bit of colour in, really. So, that's part and parcel of it. And we have to ask, you know, why does he spend so much time on, you know, giving us all that detail? But I think he was writing it as a text which was intended to have the same effect on his audience as the books that he was reading when he converted. So he wants to transform his reader's lives in the way in which his own life was converted. So which were these, Plotinus? It was the books of Plotinus, but it was also that he hears stories about people who'd been converted by readers. the life of Anthony. So there are a lot of books and a lot of stories that made up the story

of Augustine's own conversion. I think he wants to replicate this. I still haven't gone, in terms of this magnificent spread of time he spends on this book, chapter after chapter, a chapter of chapter about himself, does he know I give a more specific hint, reason why he's doing it in the first place? You've been around it very convincingly, but is there anything central? There's one point where he says a lot of the confessions is addressed to God and he says to God, why am I telling you all this about all my sins? Because you know it already. And then he answers himself back and he says,

well, I'm telling this in front of the whole of the human race, however few of them might actually read this stuff, so that they may know how deep the pit is from which we call to God and that they may commit their lives to God. And so I think in that particular place, he's saying this is the reason I'm confessing my sins before God so that other people can do the same thing as well. It isn't as you're saying indicated at the beginning of your contribution,

just sins though. It's his ideas of sins. Who did he expect to read this, Moena? I think young men like himself. And from the little evidence that we have of the readership, that does seem to be the people who were picking it up and reading it. So the kind of men that he talks about in the confessions, people in their 20s who'd done their education and were moving into careers

who were at a kind of crux in their formation. These are the kind of men he's, I think, aiming to address. Kate Cooper, can we come back to the concubine about which I was too, part of too lightweight about. He had a relationship with a woman for 15 years. They had a son when they were forced apart, as it were, which they were by his mother. He describes great love and affection for her and so on.

Can you tell us about that in itself and also that as typical or not of the period. Thanks. It's one of the things that is really important to understand is that in Augustine's world, the fact that he had this to us a licit relationship would not necessarily have been counted as a strike against him. He lived in a world where there was a to us shocking idea of entitlement that Roman citizen men of certain standing basically were expected to go around grazing across the population and exploiting whoever they could get their hands on. Often, people would consider it to be of benefit to them to get, you know, money or

favors or whatever it was. In other cases, and the likelihood is that this was the case with Augustine. In other cases, they were exploitation of slaves, for example, which to us seems extraordinarily unsavory. But in that world, it was considered to be the norm. literally not something to apologize for. So in that sense, one of the questions you're asking yourself is, why does he make such a story of this as being wrong? And also why does he do it when he's a 17? And he does it so profoundly is there?

It isn't it? It's a 15-year business, isn't it? He's very clear on the fact that he got into the relationship, not for any high-minded reasons, but for lust. but once he got into the relationship, he found that it stuck to him. And he says that my heart was hers. So in that sense, you know, and again, that doesn't mean that it wasn't an exploitative relationship. You know, men have been falling in love with people who they're exploiting sexually kind of since time immemorial.

But it seems to be a little bit Jefferson and Monticello kind of situation that, you know, he has really fallen for her. Nobody knows what she thought. Obviously, she's put in a position that's extraordinarily difficult, if you think about it. Whatever her attitude at the time to their relationship, she's in a position where she knows that she's gotten involved with somebody who's going to have to set her aside at the point when he marries. Now, why does he have to marry? Because he's a young man on the make, and he's going to have to get a dowry. And he has a mother who is very concerned. We've missed Monica out, who is the barber.

element and all. They're very concerned that she should be on the make as much as possible. She is a ferocious person. Well, she certainly is. And the thing about Monica, you know, she gets to Milan where Augustin, by this point, he sort of worked his way up. She's gone from Carthage to Rome. Finally, he's in Milan where the imperial capital is settled. Can we come back to Milan just a little later? Okay. But there they are. And he's in a situation where he's constantly having audiences with the emperor. So he's really in a good position. You know, small town boy on the make and his mother comes in, she follows him to Milan, and she's kind of on the prowl. She says, okay, where's the heiress? And he actually talks about in the confessions,

he says, you know, we had to talk about it. We figured out that if I got the right kind of dowry, I could get a provincial governorship out of it. I think we did a bit of Milan that, okay, right? I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, please, please. I'm going to Martin Palmer. There was this philosophy very tempting to him called manicism, which he was part of, a proper part of, for ten years. Can you explain what it was and why it attracted him? It attracted him because it addressed the key question that he's constantly grappling with. Why is there sin and why is there evil?

Why do we do the things we shouldn't do and don't do the things we should do, to quote Paul, one of his favourite characters? And manichism gave a very straightforward answer. It was a religion that had emerged out of what we would now think of as Iran, Iran, in the third century with a prophetic figure called Manny, who had grown up in a Jewish Christian sect, one of hundreds of sects that were around, which were sort of roughly Christian.

He absorbed also a great deal of insights and ideas from Zoroastrianism, particularly the idea that God is not omnipotent. That actually God has great powers, but there is another great power, which is the power of Satan, if you like to use Christian language. light and dark. And there's been this cosmic struggle

in the universe and there's a cosmic struggle and you and me, Melvin, that is going on where God is fighting for us but actually needs us to join him in that fight because otherwise he's not going to win.

And so there is that real sense that there is an evil force and a good force, a light force and a dark force, and also this belief that the light force had been invaded by the dark force, that this was, this was repelling an attack.

And manichyism has an extraordinary notion which also actually has echoes in Plotinus, the Greek philosopher, which is that the physical body is a trap within which the divine spark is caught and that procreation is in a sense perpetuating the power of evil. By having sex, by producing children, you are trapping into these physical structures,

the divine spark. And the divine spark is constantly struggling to try and reunite with the one, with the absolute, but is being constantly thwarted by the physical body,

by sex, by appetite, by disease, by the whole works. Excellent. Moena, we come to something which the listeners might think is trivial, but he made him this a profound part of his work. The story of stealing pairs,

right. He was a boy, in a gang, they're still some pairs. then what? Well, it doesn't seem in the story to have any immediate consequences, but Augustine, the author, takes this story as a stepping off point for a profound investigation about what was the cause of this event. And he seems to come down to two particular answers to that question. One of which, which you've already mentioned,

is that he's perplexed by the fact that he didn't want the pairs because they looked nice. He didn't want the pairs because they were hungry. In fact, they threw them to the pigs. He seemed to steal the pairs because he wanted to do something naughty. And the second reason is that he wanted to do that wicked thing with the gang. And so there's a delight in the complicity of naughtiness with these other boys. And the fact that it wasn't a really awful thing to do, I think is crucial, which is why I'm using the word naughty.

He's puzzled by how engaged he got in that. apparently trivial action. But for him, it epitomises sin because sin is not doing something which has a rational explanation. At the bottom of it, it's irrational for Augustine. But I like the use of the word naughty, it's like a thread, but the more you pull it,

a rope comes out and then a noose comes out of it. Once you're there, once you're doing things that we used to say, for badness, where are you? And that's where he's talking about a region of each of us. If we can steal pairs, we can steal countries, we can see, that is what he builds on it. fantastically. Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. And so the point of the triviality is very

carefully done, as is possibly the fact that it's stealing a fruit from a tree, which of course would have had biblical echoes for the Christians who were reading this book, which is, you know, Adam and Eve eating an apple in the Garden of Eden seems also to be quite a trivial incident. But if you see it as an instance of pride of deliberately doing what God told you not to do, it can explain in the Christian theology a great deal. What emphasis, I'm suggesting that he gave great emphasis to this. Am I right? I think he does, because he later on in the confessions,

comes back to deal with the question of sin. And although it has different colours at different times in the confessions, at the base of it lies this idea that it's a delight in doing the wrong thing because it's wrong. And sometimes that wrong thing might be sexuality. Sometimes it might be sins of the stomach or taste. But there's that absurdity at the bottom of it for him. But his philosophical answer as to why they're doing this is fascinating, isn't it?

And that is, can you tell us? The philosophical answer is that it's due to a will that falls away from God and has become corrupt. So it's not due, as in the manichy system, to some external evil force, which is battling against the good. Rather, it's to do with the human will that has, if you like, turned its back on God

and decided to do the wrong thing. And that's the root of evil for Augustine. A human pride, you can behave better than God. Yes, exactly. Right. Kate, Kate Cooper, his mother, we're arriving at his mother, Monica. Now, she was a formidable woman, and she put up with a terrible man,

but she pushed her son forward. Can you tell us something significant about her? I think Monica gets a bad press. She's... That's about to change. Augustine is obviously really troubled about her because he, you know, he thinks of himself as having let her down. But the story he tells about her own life is absolutely phenomenal. You know, he talks about her being married at a young age, which probably means 12, to an older man who's, who has a bad temper, who's,

who's violent, who she kind of learns to steer and corral into behaving in a way that she and her children can cope with. You know, so you get the sense of this indomitable spirit. And if you listen to the stories that he relates, her having told him about her childhood, they're incredible. She talks about her nursemaid as a helpful thing to do to the children in the heat in Africa, which in the summer gets to 40 degrees, centigrade, the nursemaid thought that to keep them from drinking water all day would help them in their character formation. Now, I have personally gone without water in Algeria,

and I will tell you, I did it for an hour and I was about to faint. You know, so this idea of this childhood where the two, that even the little girls are being taught to be fierce Romans. So did she, as the suggestion is in the notes that I've read, Did she take control of his life at a certain stage? And if so, how? The big question with the family of Augustine and Monica is who had the money. After Patricius dies, it looks like Monica was the one who had the purse strings.

She wasn't a kind of widows, weeds, impoverished, you know, beggar. She seems to have been the one who had the property. and the power. And she's very clear that what she wants from her younger son is for him to be the one who makes it and who brings the whole family up. Well, he didn't do too badly at one stage, yeah, very, and we'll move on to Martin now. He's doing tremendously well as a retortition. And that's been explained to us around the table.

he decides to become part of the Catholic Church why did he do that I think we're back in Milan with Ambrose we are back in Milan with Ambrose and this is now 386 and he's found teaching actually quite tough the students in Carthage were rude

the students in Rome were thieves, villains con men and he gets to Milan with a kind of sire relief and ends up in an imperial court where everybody is basically fake So there is a background of sort of not quite sure this is where I want to keep going for the rest of my life. But then he then enters into this whole exploration of philosophy, of Plotinus, Neoplatonism. He wants to find an intellectual reason for why sin and evil exists.

And very much he is trying to think his way through to an answer or to answers. What do you think did this great speaker preach? Andrews, what did he have? Ambrose helped him, first of all, to look at the Bible and to see within the Bible layers of meaning, not just a surface meaning. And one of the extraordinary things about the confessions is that, I don't know if any of if it's accounted it, but I would think on every page there's five or six quotes or references to sections in the Bible, particularly the Psalms and particularly the writings of Paul. So Ambrose gives him back the Bible as something. something that he can take seriously. He also challenges him to think about converting, to thinking about what's he going to do? Because Ambrose at that point in 386 has just fought a major struggle against the emperor's wife, who is an Aryan. She belongs to this particular sector of Christianity that does not see Christ as being, as it were, a full part of the Trinity, but as a kind of adopted son almost. And she's trying to take over Ambrose's church and give it to the

Aryan Visigoths, who are her security force, and he basically occupies, he does a sort of sit-in in the Basilica and downs her and she eventually gives up. So here's this ferocious man who defends what he thinks is absolutely true. And I think that appeals to Augustine, because it's saying this is worth possibly giving a life for rather than just writing another book about. Mouena

Martins mentioned the neoplatinus Can you develop that a little The influence of the neoplatonists on Yes so when he was in Milan He seems to have been moving in circles Where the books of the neoplatonist Or the books of the paternists As he calls them were being read

Frustratingly we don't know What these books precisely were But we suspect that they were Latin translations of people like platinus And possibly of Plotinus' people his pupil porphyry. And I think what Augustine got from these works was two important things. The first was an idea and the second was a method of how to do philosophy. So the idea was that the ultimate reality is good and beautiful and immaterial. So that God could be a real thing

but have no material substance. And this was an absolute turning point for Augustine because throughout the confessions, he's continually fretting away at this idea. How could God be everywhere? How could God be something to whom, someone to whom I can pray, if God is a material substance? If I love God, what is God? Absolutely. Who is the God I love? And he keeps on chewing away at this idea.

And it seems to be, in the Platonist philosophy, particularly that of Platinus, he can say there is something that is not just real, but the most real and good and beautiful thing, and that is God, but it's immaterial. And the method that he gains from the Neoplatonists is linked to this because they teach him that instead of trying to look at the outside world and make deductions from that, instead you should pursue a form of contemplation, which is both philosophical and has a kind of religious tinge to it.

And that teaches Augustine a process of questioning and self-questioning. And in the end, he, through this process, comes to see that human minds could also be real but without material substance and that might be an analogy by which he can understand God. I think what Moena said about this method is enormously important because in a sense what happens with Augustine in Milan is he switches from the external world to the inner world and this is something that was happening throughout Christianity

having failed to bring the kingdom of God on earth by converting the emperor by converting the Roman Empire having failed to even be able to agree on what Christ was and what the gospel is, people turned inwards. They stopped trying so much to come up with a philosophy that would mean you could manage all the aspects of the secular world to use that phrase. And so part of this journey for him,

and particularly the moment of his conversion, is when he goes inwards and begins to hear in his inner ear, as he puts it, the voice of God. Can I come to you, Kate, to ask, Martin mentioned this, but if you just give us one or two illustrations, that he is finding in the Bible, which is thought in the New Testament, in the sounds, let's take to the New Testament, these simple sentences, these simple parables in that,

which are dismissed as too simple. He's finding depths there. He's finding philosophies in a sentence, which were dismissed as just another piece of prose, as it were. Up until that time, people in the Latin-speaking world had tended to say the Bible as a kind of source of folk wisdom. That's what I was looking for. It's the wisdom of fishermen.

But what Ambrose does, and this gets back to what Martin was saying, Ambrose is a super literate, fluent in Greek, philosophically trained mind, whose leisure time seems to be spent reading third-century Greek philosophers. And among them critically is the philosopher, Christian philosopher, origin of Caesarea, who's the person who really developed the idea of all. allegory in the New Testament, taking an idea that's already there in the platonic tradition, but really bringing it over to Christianity, not only the New Testament, but also those lascivious stories of the Hebrew Bible as well. He finds that it's really an allegory. You know,

the Book of Kings, they're all having, you know, war back and forth. How can this be religious? Of course, the answer is it's an allegory for the war within the soul. Right, Marina. And one of the reasons for his conversion at that particular point may be that he learnt from Ambrose's preaching on the doctrine of creation because Ambrose famously preached on Genesis and this was the point to which Augustine was able to understand Genesis,

not as a folk tale, but as something that could have deep philosophical significance. How did he whittle his... How did he get into that? Was it because of the first line of Genesis? It was partly that, but actually with disarming frankness, he tells us that when he first went to hear Ambrose preach, it was because he just liked the sound of Ambrose's voice.

He liked, it sounded good. And this was one professional appreciating the ability of another. But he also says that gradually something was dripping into him. And that was Ambrose's learning that enabled him to get a grip on Genesis. And yes, that crucial first verse was one of the things, but also all sorts of things that he then tears apart or picks apart in the last few books. Martin, you mentioned near the beginning of the program but people thought that Christ was going to come back.

He said he would come back. Why didn't he come back? What sort of disruption did that cause? Huge disruption, because it raised a fundamental question. Why has he not returned? Is it because of us? Are we just not good enough? Are we so bad?

I mean, what is interesting is when you look at the moment when Augustine has his conversion experience, and this is very much based on hearing the story, as was mentioned earlier, of Anthony, the Egyptian hermit, and the fact that simple people, reading his biography, simple people in Egypt, but also court officials who were sort of rather flummoxy, they were reading his story and certainly going, oh my God, I'm going to give up everything, I'm going to go and live in a cave and have nothing and have no sex and only eat vegetables. Oh, my God, I've found salvation. And Augustine's going, but why can't I find this?

And in a sense what was happening was that because Christ wasn't coming back, then clearly something was not right in the Christian world. And the monastic movement that emerged in the 4th century is one response to that. Augustine is another response to that because he basically teaches that this world is irredeemably bad. The only thing that can save it is grace. And the only thing that grace knows is that God decided, was going to be saved beforehand.

So in a sense, it takes away the pain of, am I good enough, and replaces it with, has God chosen me? I have to say, I can't listen to you say that he thinks that the world is irredeemably bad. Oh, come on. What I do think. No, but I think you're imputing Manekeism to him. I mean, I would say that he sees the creation as good, and he goes back again and again to the creation.

The material world is good. what is tragic and what is wrong is the rupture of the will. It's that moment where Adam chooses to take the apple from Eve and Eve chooses to take the apple from the serpent of paradise, that moment of saying, I'm going to go on my own, I'm going to wrench myself away from a simplicity of following the will of God to be an autonomous human being. That moment is both our glory and our tragedy according to Augustine. That's the moment where we rip ourselves out of the unity of God's creation.

And the last books of the confessions are devoted to explaining that the world is good because God created it. And so actually Augustine... It's a fallen, isn't it? It's a world that has fallen. So, I mean, yes, I mean, if you go back to Romans to his most favourite book

in the whole Bible, you have, Paul, talking about the whole of creation groaning because of human sins. I'm not arguing that the creation wasn't initially good. What I am saying is that for Augustine, and particularly in the city of God, his great final volume, he's actually saying, no, if you're hoping for something better, look for the heavenly kingdom,

because it's not going to come here, folks. Okay, the thing there, though, you can't say that he's let the world be evil. It's that he sees the world as fallen and in need of grace and in need of redemption. and this world that we live in is only an echo of the world of completeness that will happen at the end of time. Can I ask you what impact Augustus' confessions had on views and acts of sexuality in the Catholic Church from then on? Absolutely. And it's a great segue because in the city of God, book 14, he talks about the sin of Adam and the way that he specifically goes back and he says,

you think that the sin of Adam was sex because they are fruitful and multiply after they eat the fruit of the apple. But, and he very specifically says that's not how it works. The sin of Adam is that moment of pride where he sets himself apart from God. And he actually says that the real sign of that is male impotence. it's not the fact that men are constantly lusting when they don't want to lust. It's the fact that their body won't always follow them when they do want a lust. That's the real sign of the human will being torn out of the divine unity. Can I come back to the question, though, what effect did it have on the behaviour and the edictus of the Catholic Church?

Well, I think there are two things here. So I think that in fact, Augustine's own theology of sex and sexuality, is not really found in the confessions. That's just the beginnings of it. But we always read it in terms of the confessions because he's so frank about himself in that book. So it's impossible to tear the two apart. And later on, Augustine does develop a theology of sexuality in marriage

where companionship is important, the procreation of children is important, social factors are important. He does say that the good of marriage also lies in the controlling of sexuality. But the other. Other things are there wrapped up in it too. And I think if you look back at the confessions, you can see that in a little bit in his relationship with the concubine,

which he says was a happy one. So it wasn't the meeting of two great intellectual minds, but it was a relationship of companionship, and they both got joy out of the birth of their son. So in the confessions, you can see the seeds of this quite complex doctrine of sexuality coming out, which was then developed in his later theology. Can I go around the three of you quite briskly because we're towards it? What do you think his legacy is today?

Where do we find it most prominent? Martin, start with you. Ironically, in the Protestant churches, because, to quote a theologian of the last century, Augustine took the worst of St. Paul, and Calvin took the worst of Augustine and produced the whole predestination tradition, but also that the rediscovery of Augustine,

and particularly the sense that only grace not work, was going to save you was fundamental to Luther, to all the major reformers of the 16th century. So ironically, I would argue that it's the Protestant churches and that the reaction

to the rediscovery of Augustine was the Enlightenment saying, oh no, we're actually much better than you think we are. I disagree. I think the greatest reader, modern reader of Augustine is Albert Camus,

another Algerian, whose idea of existentialism of the person who wants to do good and yet is never able to completely achieve what he wants to do, that shows. And Camus wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine. And Camus really shows himself to be somebody who gets it, who gets that sense of the human condition. Well, I think Augustine's influence on Protestantism

was very profound, as Martin suggested, but I think I'd place it somewhere slightly differently. And I want to go back to the text of Augustine. We've been talking as if we can see his life directly behind it. But the point is it's a text. And he's constructed the way in which we read his life. And I think because of Augustine, we read narratives of conversion in a very particular way.

And he's given us an idea of what it is to be converted, which is very much alive and well in Protestant ideas of being born again, which actually rule out other experiences of being Christian. Well, thank you all very much. That was terrific. Thank you, Kate Cooper, Morewenan Ludlow, Martin Palmer. Next week, the tyranny of the majority. We'll be discussing Alex at Tocqueville's Democracy in America, two volumes 1835 and 1840. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Did we miss anything important? I'd like to pick up on Marina's point about his conversion and setting a model, because when he has the conversion moment in the Garden of Milan, you get this whole sort of thing of him weeping and emotions and all the rest of it. And then he sort of looks back on, let's be frank. I mean, as you've said, his relationship with his mistress was, he was faithful to her. There wasn't anybody else, as he tells us, he was faithful to her. And he hadn't done terribly bad things, but he does that classic conversion story.

I was a hotbed of evil. I was dreadful. He compares himself with Cateline, the great, Roman figure of deceit and treachery. And so you get this whole thing of almost painting a blacker picture in order that the conversion makes you look whiter. And I think that's actually, I'm picking up on your point about that sense of a dramatic moment where everything changes

and this is how the path is set, does cut out, you know, what Pelagius would have been talking about, for example. But I think that's the point at which his text almost runs away with him. He didn't predict how that was going to be read because actually in the text, I agree he does paint his sins perhaps more blackly to make that drama. But he lays the path to that conversion quite carefully. And it took a long time. He tells us all the books he read and the process of it.

Even his conversion to manichaeism is in some ways on the path to his conversion. The reading of the Neoplatonic books certainly was. And so actually, as a historian, I'd say it was probably a gradual process. And he tells us that. So why do we read it? He does, but he also says that everything that happened to him God had foreseen and planned, therefore there was... I mean, the irony is that he says all the things he didn't do right

were actually what God allowed him to do or made him do in order that he would then be where he got to now. So he has a sort of atiological perspective on his own narrative, but that moment of kind of bam-wham, I'm suddenly I'm in God, again, he runs to his mum and tells her that it's all right now. that is that classic moment of, you know, I can tell you the day, the minute, the hour,

the place where that conversion happened. And I think that that's a terribly heavy burden for people for whom that does not happen. You're narrowing your eyes, Kate. I can see that. Which is going to just a disson. No, no, no, no. I think when, you know, Augustine has this story

of the sex and drugs and rock and roll of his use. And I think it is something that he's put there for a reason, but it gets back to the idea that he's trying to reach his reader. You know, this is a text that was read over and over and again for centuries by young men in monastic training. And it's incredibly consoling to hear that the person that you admire actually was worse than you were. You know, it's a very generous thing to do.

but it's also a very entertaining thing to do. And I think we can't underestimate that. One of the three, as I understand it, three purposes of rhetoric was to entertain. It was to teach to something else and to entertain. It must have been informed, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Teach light and move.

Right. Yeah. And he certainly does all these three things. And one of the most common pieces of feedback I get when I teach this book as I do to my students is I had no idea it. entertaining. And it's very interesting teaching it in particular to clever boys who are around 20, 21, 22, because it's not just that he struggled with his sexuality. I think he struggled with being clever. It wasn't cool to be clever. You have this amazingly clever young man who wants

to be in with the in crowd. He's interested in sex and that is the temptation but I think underlying it he doesn't know what to do with his cleverness or his ambition. And every time he mentions sex in the confessions, he mentions ambition. They're completely tied up one with the other. And this really still strikes home. I think the point about his cleverness is super important. He's constantly worrying about, on the one hand, his quest for understanding. And if you think about the problem he has with the Manichaeans, at the end, he's got all of these questions and people keep saying, look, you're finally going to get a chance

to talk to Faustus. He's the one who's going to be able to give the final answers that you need. Faustus finally arrives and within minutes, Augustine realizes oh my God, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. And of course, what Augustine doesn't know is that

he's probably the brightest kid to grow up in North Africa since the beginning of time. So, you know, this sense of disappointment when somebody else wasn't ahead of him. It's just heartbreaking. And the way in which he contrast Faustus and Ambrose is really important.

The producers coming in without a really good offer tonight. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Nick Robinson and I present a podcast called Political Thinking, which tries to do just that. Think about politics. Longer, more conversational interviews, which examines the thinking of the people who shape our world, whether they're political leaders like Ruth Davidson

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