Pints With Aquinas - 222: Understanding Augustine w/ Chad Engelland

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Today I’m joined around the bar table by Dr. Chad Engellend—professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, an expert in St. Augustine’s thought, and host of our new 7-part series on the Confessions of St. Augustine. SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints  Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform  

G'day, g'day, g'day. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and today I will be joined around the bar table by Dr. Chad Engeland from the University of Dallas to discuss St. Augustine and in particular St. Augustine's most classic work, The Confessions. Thomas Aquinas obviously held St. Augustine in high esteem. People are often surprised at just how many times Thomas Aquinas quotes Aristotle, and he does quote him a great deal. But even more than Aristotle, he quotes St. Augustine. So if you want to better understand Thomas Aquinas, understanding Augustine is also a very helpful thing. And Dr. Chad Englund is an expert on St. Augustine and Augustine's confessions. So I've been telling you about this for a while now. I'm super pumped to announce it. But starting next week, we are going to begin a seven-part video lecture series on Augustine's Confessions.

Dr. Chad Engeland says that Augustine's Confessions are the book you need to read outside of the Bible if you're a Christian. This is what you have to read and understand. And Dr. Chad helps us do that in a seven-part video series. It's recorded just for my patrons. You won't find this anywhere else. So if you've been considering becoming a patron for a while now to support all of the different things that we've been doing, like our Spanish translation videos, like this trip to Africa we're looking at doing next year to teach apologetics. I'm now doing these monthly debates in which I often pay people to come on and to debate. If you want to support this work, become a patron, patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. I'll send you a signed copy of my book,

Pints with Aquinas, Beerstein perhaps, and you'll also get access to this course, which is starting next week. This is something we are all going through together. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now, and it can be really tempting to just sort of lose ourself in the politics of the day or some celebrity scandal. Let's try to be a lot more interesting than that. One of those things that will help you be more interesting is, for the third time, this course on the confessions. All you got to do, go to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd, give $10 or more a month. That's

it. You can even quit at the end of the course if you want to, but hopefully you'll realize that what I'm putting out on Patreon is substantive enough that you want to stick around and you'll get access to this seven part video series of lectures by Dr. Chad Englund. And he is expected to be in the comment section discussing with you. So if you have questions as you read through it, because he gives reading assignments every week as well. If you have questions about it, he will help you with those questions. So this is going to be really great. All right. Here is the episode that I just, well, you know what's funny? I should point this out. I recorded this episode right before I went off the grid in August. So here I do not have a beard. In the interview, I do have a beard. So it's not like I grew a beard in a couple of seconds in case you were wondering. Let me know in the comments section what you prefer because I'm certainly open to regrowing the beard. All right, here's the interview.

G'day, Dr. Chad Englund. Great to have you on Pints with Aquinas. Thank you for agreeing to do this. My pleasure. And you are a university professor at the University of Dallas, is that right? That's right. Did you used to be at Catholic University of America? So that's where I did my graduate work, and then I spent nine years in Cleveland, so we have some mutual friends from there, including Father Damien Ferencz and Father Ryan Mann. Yeah, yeah, I love him. Well, tell our viewers just a little bit about yourself.

Okay, well, I'm married, four wonderful children, and I have as my profession and as my hobby the study of philosophy. Fantastic. And your dissertation, was that in phenomenology, or what was that? That's right. Yeah, it focused on phenomenology. There is someone at the Catholic University of America, Father Robert Sokolowski, who's a legendary phenomenologist, and I highly recommend reading anything you can get your hands on by him. And he was really instrumental for me and my own sort of intellectual conversions and intellectual journey. And so I really, I mean, I could step back if

you're interested. I mean, one of the reasons I went to graduate school, I shouldn't say one of the reasons, the main reason I went to grad school is because I was very much like Augustine, trying to figure out how all the pieces can fit together, especially, you know, given our own day and age, you hear you're raised in the faith, and you might have even come from a good Catholic family, and you might have attended even Catholic schools, but that doesn't mean that at any point along the way, your intellectual problems have actually been addressed right so the elephant in the room is that you can't actually easily fit together your Catholic upbringing and the sort of message or the count of what's real that you pick up simply by means of attending your science classes

through all of your different years. So how this fits together was a mystery to me. And so that's one of the reasons I went off to Catholic University to begin with, to study philosophy, is because I had this blessing. The blessing was I went to a Catholic university and they required the study of philosophy. And at that time at Xavier, they required three philosophy classes. And you need at least three because it's not to the third one that the pieces really start to sink in. It takes time to settle. And it was that third class where I didn't so much suddenly figure things out, but I became impressed that philosophy was the way to figure things out.

So that's why I went off to Catholic University. That's where I encountered Father Sokolowski. And what he gave me through phenomenology and through, you know, some other readings of contemporary philosophy was a way to peel back, you know, the layers of misunderstanding so that we could, I could get to a point where I could see how it would be the case that simultaneously we could affirm the truth of Christianity and the truth proposed to us and discovered so wonderfully by modern natural science. And so I Was therefore Let's see. I remain continually interested in the phenomenological movement and and I see it as a real prologue omen on to philosophy really a recovery or we're awakening

philosophy starting anew. And I actually have a little intro to phenomenology text coming out in August with MIT Press. And it's exciting there because it's not going to be a Catholic readership, right? These are folks that are part of the MIT world. of the MIT world, and yet I'm able to share some of these sort of discoveries about how you can work your way to at least a more humane view of the world in which religious questions can again be asked. Do us a favor. I want you to kind of help us understand phenomenology and why we ought not to be afraid of it.

My understanding is it was somewhat of a reaction to Hume and Kant to return back to the things, as it were. But it seems like sometimes people have this idea that if we just focus on our experience of things, that this could be to the detriment of, say, teleology. Does that make sense? It absolutely does make sense. And so there are challenges and there are pitfalls to be avoided. But one of the exciting things I think is to avoid the either or either you tend to experience or you tend to objective structures. And what what that ends up doing is if you just say, Oh, attend to objective structures, then there's a whole part of human existence that's left out

there that isn't, as it were, correlated with truth. And what's exciting about phenomenology is it reconnects experience to the objective structures and shows you how those objective structures are given in and through experience. So the barriers that a Hume or a Descartes or a Kant erect between us in reality are torn down by phenomenology when done well. So the really exciting thing, for example, on the issue of relativism, well, one way to answer relativism is to ignore experience and just attend to objective structures. Another way to attend to relativism is to say pay close attention to experience and what you find given in and through experience is access to the real, right? Not the superficial experiences, not the vague and confused experiences, but bring those experiences to clarity and distinctness and you have given truth, right? Truth does occur in and through experience. We can confirm how things are through our experience. So the phenomenologist doesn't say, well,

if your experience of reality is that sort of epistemological relativism or moral relativism is a thing, then, well, that's your experience and then therefore that's true for you. I just want to be clear for our viewers, that's not what we mean. That's exactly right. John Paul II was a practicing phenomenologist. He was also a practicing Thomist. Didn't see those things as mutually exclusive. He says he thanks God for allowing him to participate in the phenomenology movement. And he celebrates phenomenology as what he calls an attitude of intellectual charity. Attitude of intellectual charity. And

what is that? Well, it means that instead of erecting those barriers between us and things, instead of erecting a barrier between oneself and another, we instead focus on that breakthrough of phenomenology, which is this rediscovery of the mind exposure to the world, to the truths of the world. And that rediscovery is called intentionality, that our mind, our thought is world-directed. Now, oh, sorry, continue. Yeah, no, that's it. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you so much for sharing that. All right, I want to say thank you to our sponsor, Halo. Halo is the number one Catholic app in the U.S. It's got a five-star ratings on the App Store. And there really is something for everyone. If you're just getting started with contemplative prayer, for example, or if you pray every day, it's got something for you. rosary meditations, you can meditate on the Gospels, the Divine Mercy. It's a fantastic app,

really sophisticated, 100% Catholic. It has daily examines, night prayer, even minute meditation. So if you're kind of like waiting at the, I don't know, traffic light, or if you're waiting to go into a doctor's office or something, you can just put in your earbuds and be led through a full-on Catholic meditation. You can fall asleep to Bible sleep stories they have. a full-on Catholic meditation. You can fall asleep to Bible sleep stories they have. It's free to download and it has permanently free content, plus a premium subscription with extra content. There's a 30-day free trial, which you can get right now by signing up to hallo.com slash Matt Fradd, online only, okay? hallo.com slash Matt Fradd. I sort of feel like this is why people, I think, more naturally gravitate to Augustine than Aquinas. So I know, of course, Aquinas quotes Augustine even more than Aristotle in the Sumer, and so he was a big fan of Augustine. But I've heard somebody say something like, Augustine is beautiful like a garden, and Aquinas is beautiful like a tool.

Augustine is beautiful like a garden, and Aquinas is beautiful like a tool. I sometimes think Aquinas reads sometimes like a board game instruction manual. Because if you think what makes for a good board game instruction manual is that it's incredibly clear. There are no superfluous words. You know, it gets right to the point. It tells you only what you need to know and exactly what you need to know. And so sometimes when people read Aquinas, it kind of feels, it can feel, unless you're reading one of his sort of sermons to the laity or his beautiful hymns, that you're reading something that's kind of been printed out of a computer.

Whereas when people read Augustine, it kind of does sort of pull people into that experience that they have had, they're longing for, they know not what. that they have had, they're longing for, they know not what. Well, I think you're right that there is a different flavor in those two great philosopher-theologians. And also I think that they really are complementary in the sense that Augustine is the master of the field of experience. And Aquinas is very much the master of the structure of the real world. And so they really make up for deficiencies in each other. And there is a way in which if you read a lot of Aquinas, you get to a point where you appreciate that every word does count. So when you get to Summa Contra Gentile's book one, chapter 22, and he says this sublime truth, he uses an adjective.

You know that Aquinas is right there telling you that what he's talking about is really important because he wasted a word. He gave us an adjective. And of course, Etienne Gilson picks up on that. And then, you know him, the more you are attentive to the fact that he does sometimes give you clues, right, to what he feels and to the kinds of things that Augustine especially pays attention to.

Yeah, when Aquinas writes against the Latin Averroists, he is scathing, or even when he sort of tries to refute seeks to refute the kalam cosmological argument as william lane craig has uh you know after aquinas obviously coined it but okay passage on that by the way is uh the perpetual virginity of mary where he you can you can hear him pounding the table how dare you assert that joseph would uh you know violate the holy tabernacle of god yeah he's furious and i was reading just yesterday what aquinas had to say about muhammad and it's it's again blistering and there are just a few little real jabs like

it's something to the effect of he said it was very shrewdrewd of Muhammad not to allow his followers to read the divine books since they would have seen that he didn't know what he was talking about. It was something to that effect. I was like, ooh, burn. All right. For those who are kind of new to Augustine, maybe just kind of who is St. Augustine? Why is he important to Christianity? Big question, but try to boil that one down. Yeah, well, first,

an issue of perspective. I always remind my students, we're actually slightly closer in time to Aquinas than Aquinas was to Augustine. So it's important to keep that in mind. We think of them as two medieval philosopher theologians, but they're not in any way contemporary. but they're not in any way contemporary. It was just as much a challenge for Aquinas to get himself into Augustine's world as it is for us to get ourselves into either one of those worlds. Great point. But I do think that Augustine's world is in some ways, has some similarities to our own, in the sense that he was alive during the decline of a civilization and was the beneficiary of that civilization.

But he was also given something new, something that was just beginning. So outwardly, the world is ending. Inwardly, though, the world is just beginning. Medieval thought, Christian culture is in his very hands coming to be. It's pretty exciting, this just clash, juxtaposition between outward decay and inward renewal. For those who aren't aware, tell us what you mean by the outward world coming in on itself, because I think there's a lesson we could learn here as Americans as we look around and wonder how long this American project is going to last.

Sure. So, I mean, he was born in 354, died in 430. He died when the barbarians were at the gates. Of Hippo? Yeah, of Hippo. And the cataclysmic event of his whole life was when Rome itself was sacked. event of his whole life was when Rome itself was sacked. And that's why he wrote The City of God, because he had to defend from the critique of the pagans this conversion to Christianity. Because,

you know, one way of reading what had happened is we forsook the old gods, they're no longer defending Rome, and now the barbarians are here. And so this wonderful work that's the city of God is a whole political theory that Augustine lays out where he he talks about, you know, the two cities, one based upon the libido dominandi and the others, the city of God, how it's at work in history and will become to fruition only in heaven. heaven and so what was what was occurring is Rome was decaying Rome was falling the great city of Rome that for a thousand years had stood was shown that it's not invincible how far was Augustine living from Rome well like where is hippo in relation to Rome oh well it's Mediterranean so he was in North Africa. And when we're talking about Rome, we're talking about the Roman Empire, which covered how much land?

Okay, so that would have been, you know, it would have included Europe and into Asia. Okay, so we're not talking about like a city. We're not talking about like a city over there that had no impact on him. Oh, right. Yeah, so he was not talking about like a city. We're not talking about like a city over there that had no impact on him. Oh, right. Yeah, so he was part of the Roman Empire. And so the very center of that Roman Empire had fallen.

And that, of course, would have been absolutely cataclysmic. You know, like Washington, D.C. falls or something like that. You know, like Washington, D.C. falls or something like that. There's a sense in which your country, your homeland has been invaded, has proven to be not the invincible refuge that we thought it was going to be. But, you know, even apart from that actual political collapse, there was a kind of moral decay. And there was a way in which Augustine was groomed, even by his parents, for worldly success and for a career that was in the end going to be just, he came to discover, vainglory. It wasn't going to be ultimately satisfying, ultimately anything that was going to really satisfy his restless heart. So you have not only sort of the political collapse, but you also have a sense in which the very tablet of goods, even if the armies had it invaded, there was something empty about the whole project. There was something about about the whole project. There was something about

what Rome stood for that people were sniffing out, right, that was somehow hollow or empty, and didn't satisfy Augustine. So that's, I think, why Augustine turns eventually to Christianity, and I think that's also why Christianity made such inroads. Tell us about the Confessions. We're about to do a seven-part video course on Patreon. Thank you so much for leading it. But why should people be interested in the Confessions? Would you say that's the book, if people haven't read Augustine, that they should pick up first? they should pick up first? Absolutely. I mean, I think you could make the case, you know, that the city of God or his reflections on the Trinity are more important theologically. And I don't know that that's the case, but you could make it, right? My favorite text is the Confessions. I think just about all of his wonderful philosophizing and theologizing is at play there.

I mean, there's also actually another work that was really influential in the Middle Ages on Christian doctrine that would also rank near the top of any reading list of Augustine. But the Confessions is the most engaging of all of his works. And here you should keep in mind this about Augustine. Augustine is a master rhetorician. He was trained as a rhetorician. And that's not, I mean, it can be mere hollow words, right? Just BS. Like the sophists of Socrates. The sophists of Socrates the sophists of Socrates but it can also be in ideally is and this is what Augustine says we should do is should speak beautifully about the truth hmm but there's no reason we should

leave the truth unclothed and naked, but instead speak beautifully, make the truth alluring. That's sort of a responsibility. We should do better for Christianity than Christopher Hitchens did for atheism. It often felt like he spoke more beautifully than we could on Christianity. Exactly. Exactly. And so the text in which Augustine does that, the one in which he really just lets his rhetorical abilities fly, is the Confessions. The other texts are rhetorically muted in that respect. Augustine is endeavoring in the Confessions to speak beautifully about the truth. And so I think it's the best entry point for his thought. And I actually think it's the most important text that any Christian might read, of course, with the exception of the Bible. I want to get to that, but I want to just kind of pause a second and say, why, I mean, this might sound like an obvious question, but why should we speak beautifully

about the truth? Because it seems like sometimes when we argue, you know, we treat people like they are machines and we have to feed them a syllogism in order for them to spit out the correct belief. And someone might say, well, why speak beautifully? Isn't that somehow obfuscating the facts that we're just trying to communicate? What would you say to that? Good question. So I think Augustine's response might be to say that the alternative is perhaps based upon an anthropological error, where you think about our human faculties as merely consisting of an intellect and a will. And so what you want to do is feed the intellect by giving it bare truth.

And what Augustine wants to say is don't forget the heart. Don't forget the heart. Don't forget the heart. What the heart is responsive to is subtle movements, right? Affectivity. And I think one of the crucial things that, and this is my speaking my own voice here. One of the crucial things that you realize in any debates, if you've actually successfully worked out the debate, you come across first premises or first principles that can't themselves be deduced in terms of anything else. Well, how do you weigh competing first principles? Well, one of them is what's going to respond to you yourself are a measure in the sense that what is going to respond most deeply to your own aspirations,

not your mere subjective feelings, but you as a human being, you as one who hungers for the truth. What is it that feeds you? What is it that actually satisfies that hunger? And I think we can help people by clothing first principles in beautiful speech so that we can show that it resonates with, you know, the deepest stirrings of the human heart. And just what do we mean by heart? Because when you talked about how we have to appeal to the heart, that made me think of Pascal's line, something to the effect of, the heart has reasons, the reasons knows not, or something like that. What does Augustine mean when he talks about the heart? What do you mean by it? Good. And it

should be said, Pascal is very much in the Augustinian tradition. Yeah, he writes like him. I love him. So the heart, and there's a way in which Augustine doesn't quite synthesize the heart. It plays a central role, and I was just participating in a conference on this topic. And anyway, the short is that Augustine uses heart maybe in two senses. One, it names the deepest ground of the human person, you know, that place where you make a decision for or against the truth. And it could also, though, be a kind of faculty that's most associated with spiritual affectivity, the experience of joy, the experience of desolation.

It's so important for our prayer lives. So he's not talking about the class of things we usually mean by feeling. Right, right. But he's talking about spiritual affectivity. That's good. The kinds of things that are so, so utterly important to our spiritual lives. You can't have a vital prayer life if you're not attuned to spiritual affectivity. That's really good.

This is why the fathers in the Eastern Church and the Orthodox sort of fathers talk of how important it is to pray with the heart. And to pray with affection and with emotion and to unite your mind with your heart. And sometimes that could be misunderstood with who you just want us to have an emotional experience here. But no, that's not the point. It's the point you're making that, yeah, this desolation that we feel, we don't feel that in the intellect. We don't feel that in the will. I feel that. And I guess that's what we mean by heart, right? Like it's me, I. Correct me if I'm wrong. No, no, I think that, and I guess that's what we mean by heart, right? Like it's me, I. Correct me if I'm wrong.

No, no, I think that's absolutely right. And so it's important not to mute this dimension of the human being, because then I think you're right, we become something like machines, and it becomes easier to think of ourselves as being explainable according to the very same principles in which you explain a machine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful. Now, what's that classic line from Augustine where he says, you called, you shouted, can you remember that off by heart, broke through my deafness?

Oh, yes, that's from Book 10. And you're right, it has to do with spiritual affectivity. I could grab that passage. I can look it up while you're talking because it is so great. I can't read it without almost crying. It's so beautiful. Yeah, and it ends up being a real summary

of the confessions as a whole. So you're quite right to... Now, I'm not sure which translation this is, but do you mind if I read it? Go right ahead. Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new. Late have I loved you.

You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you. Yet if they had not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted and broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone and you dispelled Beautiful. Beautiful. Powerful. beautiful no powerful and what he's testifying there too is the fact that the christian message does not address itself in a void but is addressed to a soul that was created by the very God that Christianity proclaims. And the way in which

we experience inwardly being created in the image of God is that our life is suffused with restlessness apart from him. And so we are marked by a great desire. Now, that desire is enkindled, marked by a great desire. Now, that desire is enkindled, inflamed in the presence of beauty. But what Augustine wants us to see is the ambiguity of created beauty, or if you could say, not the ambiguity, but the true significance of created beauty. Beauty rightly resonates with our experience, but we have to rightly interpret the beautiful things around us, that they are signs. They point beyond themselves to the God who created them. So Augustine's telling us, respond to beautiful things in the way you respond, but respond for them in understanding them to be the very things they are. That is to say, they are creatures that are, you know, designed and created by God to lead us to him. Augustine gives this wonderful

image in one of his sermons, where he says, you know, our relationship to God is a little bit like a bride and a bridegroom. So the bridegroom gives the bride a beautiful engagement ring. Now think about that. It's a beautiful engagement ring. It has to be beautiful, right? Because if it was trashy, it would not have the symbolism behind it. So it is beautiful. But the bride herself, and this is all of us, can respond to that in one of two ways, right? We could look at the engagement ring as something that was wonderful on its own terms, just in its own right, and we're going to rest in it and say, wow, I got this great engagement ring, I'm so proud of it.

Or, and there you're kind of grasping it, or you can take it as a token, as a sign of a far greater gift, which is the gift of the love of the beloved. And so Agassiz wants to say similarly, when it comes to our response to creation, our response can be one of two ways. We can either grasp it as the good that it is, but when we do that, we misunderstand its deeper significance, and we close ourselves to the deeper gift. Or we can receive it with open hands, and when we receive it with open hands, then we are placed in a relationship with the God who communicates with us through that creation. That's really beautiful, yeah, because if you

saw somebody who thought the wedding ring was everything, you would think them an idiot. You'd pity them. Like, what are you doing here with no concept of what it signifies? And that's what he says about creation, huh? That's beautiful. And you could see an opposite. I mean, you could say, oh, I don't even need an engagement ring or who wants creation? Or you could dismiss its goodness. But it really is a gift, and it is a great gift. But there's a greater gift behind it, namely the giver, who wants to give us something even greater still, namely his own self. That's beautiful.

Okay, you mentioned a conversation. Maybe I'm getting this wrong. You say here something, the revelatory episode in Milan of the cheerful drunken beggar. What are you talking about there? Well, there are a lot of wonderful episodes in the Confessions. And in my many course, I have to leave a lot of them aside. One of the ones that I left aside is this wonderful moment of clarity for Augustine. So he's in Milan.

This is getting close to the end, getting close to his major conversion to Christianity. But he's not there yet. He's still clinging to worldly ambition. And it's actually the height of his career, you know, right in the area where he's, you know, giving speeches in the presence of the emperor. So this is you're at the top. He's at the top of his career here. And yet he's inside a festering wound, as he says, you know, he's unhappy. He's not quite arrived. Somehow you can, of course, with a career, you can never have enough. You can never. And so he's he's unhappy. And what happens is he sees this drunken beggar who's asking for some coins so that he can get drunk. And there's a moment where he sees this guy and he thinks to himself, even as his friends are making fun of him.

Wait a second. Wait, I'm not really hungering after. really hungering after i'm not aspiring to i'm not really making any concrete plans to achieve any more lasting happiness with my worldly ambition than this drunken beggar but note this difference he actually is able to achieve the kind of momentary happiness that is constantly eluding me. So it's like this mirror to Augustine where it's like, you know, Augustine, know thyself. Your grade of happiness, the one you're aspiring to, is no better than being drunk. Wow. In fact, it might even in some ways be less effective because at least you can you can get drunk but you never have enough worldly success the moral is of course don't turn from worldly success to a bottle instead realize what's

really going to satisfy you yeah go beyond the transitory so it's just this wonderful episode where you kind of a pedestrian encounter, right? We all have those encounters. You go through a big city. But Augustine was touched by it. And we see again and again in the confessions, Augustine showing us the way to be touched by our experiences, to be alert to the way in which God wants to talk to us, wants to reveal the truth about our own lives and about our own deepest calling in and through these small everyday encounters with other people. And I sometimes wonder, and I'm pretty sure this is the case, that we are so

distracted, and this here again, we turn to Blaise Pascal, who spoke so much about this, we intentionally plunge ourselves into distraction i think to and i think this is why i do it to distract myself from myself because i don't like myself i'm currently thinking about taking a seven-day silent retreat and in one way i'm happy and another way i'm terrified because i've got a feeling that after three hours i'm going to go crazy because i'm not sufficient to me. I need something to distract me from it. And just this idea that we are so distracted from the movements of our heart today with podcasts and iPhones and everything else that we often kind of walk around completely

unaware of our heart. So that injunction in Proverbs to guard your heart for it's the wellspring of life, it's like we're not even cognizant of what's going on, which is probably why most of us aren't cognizant of the spiritual warfare we're engaged in on a daily basis. What do you think about that? No, I think you're exactly right about that. And you mentioned Pascal before, and Pascal talks about how being unable to cure death, we distract ourselves by going to war and not being able to stay quietly in our own room. And that's, I think, one of the reasons that the pandemic shelter in place touched us so deeply or troubled us so greatly is that our usual distractions were muted, although maybe other distractions were heightened. Yeah. But I think you're right that this area of electronic communication that we're very much becoming, yeah, our life stream, we're becoming natives, or we already are natives, in it heightens

the opportunity for distraction, and that one of the witnesses of Augustine and the Augustinian tradition is to remind us of the importance of being mindful of what's really important and of the importance of quieting the distraction. Sister Maria Boulding, who did one of the more recent translations of the Confessions, translates that signature line that you hear from the Confessions, our hearts are restless until they rest in you. She does a literal translation, and she says, our hearts are unquiet. Now, unquiet, of course, has a sense of still, you know, the waves that are disturbed. But I think there's also an important resonance of noise. Our hearts are noisy. And there's a later places in the confessions where Augustine tells us we have to quiet the noise because otherwise we're not going

to hear the voice of God addressing us. And so the real message of the confessions for our time is if you are going to heed or hear, if you're going to hear the voice of God, which is addressing each of us, and it is, you have to manage the distraction. You have to manage the noise. You have to dim the noise out. You have to tampen it down and turn within to an interior space in which you can hear God addressing your soul. So I know that reading is a death for videos and things, but I just don't care. Here's one of my favorite little passages from the Brothers Karamazov. It's talking about Ivan favorite little passages from the brothers karamazov it's talking about ivan coming back home and he's he becomes cognizant of his mood and i read this because it's exactly right here what we're talking about it says the strangeness lay not in the anguish itself but in the fact

that ivan fjordovich simply could not define what the anguish anguish consisted of he had often felt anguish before and it would be no wonder if it came at such a moment when he was preparing the very next day, having suddenly broken with everything that had drawn him there to make another sharp turn, entering upon a new, completely unknown path, again quite as lonely as before, having much hope but not knowing of what, expecting much, too much from life, but unable himself to define anything, either in his expectations or even in his desires. And yet at that moment, though the anguish of the new and unknown

was indeed in his soul, he was tormented by something quite different. And then he goes on asking himself questions like, what is it? Like, what is this thing? And then he has this encounter where he immediately recognizes what it was almost like a splinter in his heart that he couldn't quite discern. But my fear is that I'm not walking around aware of that. I don't even wonder, I don't even, I'm not even aware that I'm in anguish to even ask myself, where is this anguish coming from? Because I'm turning from one screen to another, from one distraction to another,

and I have to think that many of us are like this and that this is not good for spiritual health, you know? No, I think you're right, and Kierkegaard belongs to that whole existential tradition that would include Augustine among one of the forerunners where these experiences, we want to sometimes just sort of put them in a box and call them psychological experiences of merely relative value, or they're somehow opposite, we'll say they trump everything else. What Kierkegaard and the existentialists, and going back to Augustine, want to suggest is that these experiences actually are revelatory of our, they're not really, they're revelatory of what we are and what we're sort of destined for in our nature, but they also can be modulated, right? We can, in the very way we live our lives,

we can run from the truth of ourselves. And we run into distraction. Or we can resolutely, you know, it is an existential language, turn to the truth of ourselves. And, you know, there we enter into places we don't want to go. There's some odd resistance that we have to overcome. Amen. It's facing our poverty.

That's what it is. Like if I do something, I'm in control. Even if I pray the rosary, in a sense, I'm doing something that I am completing and then have completed and I'm not putting down

the rosary, of course. But if you tell me to sit down and do mental prayer for 15 minutes, I'm terrified. And I think I refuse to be poor. That's what it is. Because as soon as I sit down, I'm bombarded by a hundred different things. And I'm just sitting in my own shit, in my own poverty. And to sit there in that, but to be seen by the loving father, I mean,

that's kind of the goal, I guess. But I think that's why a lot of us don't pray, at least in that way, in that sort of stillness, because we come, you know, smack into our own poverty. No, I think you're right about that. And I liked the way you put it about being gazed upon or looked upon by the Heavenly Father, because I think that's really crucial. And it's something Augustine would like us to see. It's not a matter of just quieting ourselves and turning to the void. Right, like the kind of centering prayer might sometimes be an example of. It's a de-centering. Prayer is essentially a de-centering because what you're doing is you're opening yourself to the interpersonal relationship.

That's really good. What does de-centering mean? uh to the interpersonal relationship uh that's really good what do you mean what does decentering mean it means that instead of our ordinary way of living our lives according to which uh our center of gravity uh is ourselves we're the still point right yes um instead we are bringing ourselves into orbit around god right that we are orbiting him there's a kind of copernican revolution that needs to take place in our own life thank you i'm gonna remember that prayer prayer is so it's not so much um a matter of of yeah just quiet everything but actually you're trying to listen right so the positive thing is you're trying to hear god speak to your soul and so therefore you quiet everything right you're trying to hear God speak to your soul. And so therefore you quiet everything,

right? You're hearkening. I just think about trying to hear a friend speak to you at a restaurant or a bar, right? You have to, there's a lot of noise you have to tune out in order to tune into the voice that's addressing you. So that's what's happening here. You're really a tune in prayer. And I agree. It's terrible. It's terrifying to do that kind of vulnerability, that kind of prayer. But there's also this odd way. And here's the odd thing about it, isn't it? The very thing we fear is the very thing that gives us inestimable joy when we surrender ourselves to it. And that's the message of Augustine. We're made for praise. We don't want to praise for some reason. But when we do, we find that that's exactly message of Augustine. We're made for praise. We don't want to praise for some reason.

But when we do, we find that that's exactly what we always wanted. So isn't that an enigma of the human heart? We turn from the very thing that once we do it will give us the fulfillment we so ardently desire. Gosh, you just said some really powerful things that I don't think I'm going to quickly forget. That idea of de-centering. And I love that analogy of when I'm with you in a bar and I want to listen to you, I have to tune everything out in order to hear you. Yeah, that's really, really good. Yeah.

Okay, so with all this in mind, with what we're talking about, the heart and the desires of our heart, and Augustine, you mentioned earlier that everybody needs to read the Confessions. You said it's the book outside of the Bible. Why do you say that? Well, I think it's in terms of the Christian tradition, it's the one that shows us how to think like a Christian, how to pray like a Christian, and even how to behave like a Christian, all while not telling us anything, but instead showing us these things. It's demonstrating. In that respect, it's a little bit like a YouTube video, right? I mean, you talked about reading Aquinas as like

an instruction manual. You could also watch a YouTube video, and I was able to do something really mundane, replace the belt on a dryer by watching a YouTube video. Couldn't do it with the instruction manual. The Confessions are like a one-stop YouTube video that shows you how to do all of the most important things, how to think about God, YouTube video that shows you how to do all of the most important things, how to think about God, how to relate to your friends, how to relate to the world, but also, and most importantly, how to pray, all without making you feel along the way that you're in a classroom or that you're reading a textbook. So there's a value to textbooks. There's a place to the classroom. And Aquinas was brilliant in the Summa in writing a textbook. But Augustine writes a text that's not for the classroom, that leaps off the page.

It's a page turner in its own right. It's fascinating in its own right. But all along the way, sort of almost in spite of yourself, you pick up all of these things that are really good for you to know. You pick out how to pray, how to make sense of the hand of providence in your life. And, you know, all of the crucial distinctions that are necessary for making sense of your life. So it's really a wonderful teaching experience, or learning experience, rather. Yeah, sorry, I didn't know if you were going to continue there. Well, I was playing with the idea, but yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, gee, that's a really great point. And I think something we're hearing about more and more, you know, even in modern psychology, is this idea of understanding our stories. Like where you came from and how you were influenced and why it is you do the things you do and what your deepest fears are and what they're rooted in and what the lies you've believed about yourself are and what the truth actually is. Like what God thinks about you as opposed to what you've learned about you from some, say, negative experience when you were a child. And kind of to your point about this being the one-stop shop which teaches you how to Christian, to kind of use it in that sense, it's sort of Augustine does that too, right? He talks about, I mean, even just that incident of the pear tree, which is so often, I think, misunderstood.

People say, oh, look at Augustine. He's got such a sensitive conscience saying that he was just going to steal a pear and he gets disappointed about that. But really, I mean, in a way, it's sort of like Raskolnikov, to reference Dostoevsky again, in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov wanted to do a crime just because it was evil. And in a sense, that is what Augustine was talking about doing when he was younger. But anyway, just this idea of knowing our story and where we came from is something we learned from augustine as well do you do you see that as uh an important thing and yeah no undoubtedly and um and this was one of the points that i make in the course is that there is a way in which Augustine shows us the inability of any attempt to write, to do an

autobiography on our own terms, that we're not going to be able to make sense of our own lives from our own vantage point. The way to tell our story, the way to make sense of our lives, is to avail ourselves of that decentering, of that divine encounter, of the divine point of view, that in order to write the story of our lives, it's not enough to look at things from our own point of view. It's necessary to look at things from the point of view of the author of our being and the author of our story. And we can do that. That's part of the great glory of being a Christian is that we are able to help ourselves to the divine point of view, and thus we're able to make sense of our life through God's eyes.

Yeah, that reminds me of St. Paul, where he says something to the effect of, you know, I don't know anything against my conscience, but I don't even judge myself. I don't have anything against my conscience, but I do not consider myself acquitted. But both could be true. Like, if I do not consider myself acquitted. But both could be true. Like if I'm not judging myself, I'm not saying I am with 100% infallible certainty that I am justified and will be saved, but nor am I saying I'm condemned. I see who I am through his eyes.

No, I think that's right. I mean, there is a way in which Augustine's Confessions is a testimony to the fact that we need a helper, that we are broken, that our stories are mangled. And in that respect, there can be a kind of darkness, but I think it's always important to recognize that any darkness in which the human heart can fall short of its proper love of God and thus its proper happiness. Do you have a particular translation that you would recommend people pick up of the Confessions? recommend people pick up of the confessions well um i recommend uh the maria bolding translation from um ignatius press as a critical edition that's um uh edited by david vincent mcconaughey who was uh my teacher of augustine when i was an undergrad so i have a place in my a warm place in my heart for him and for that text. But I like others for scholarly purposes. People like the Chadwick translation, but I find the footnotes infuriating.

And I actually first read the Confessions in the John K. Ryan translation, and I taught that same translation for many years. So when I think of Augustine, I think in that translation. Yeah, it is funny how you tend to want to read what you first experience. I don't know what the Barnes & Noble translation is. That's the one I read or have read. I don't even know what that is. I tried reading the Frank Sheed translation because everybody said it was the best,

and I didn't like it myself. I think it's because he changed up what I knew of Augustine that I had read before, and I'm like, this isn't what he said. This is very different. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, very good. Okay, well, look, this has been really helpful and awesome. Thank you so much for helping us understand a little bit about Augustine

and about the confessions. I guess one final question, which we touched upon at the top of the hour, is this idea that Hippo was burning as Augustine was dying, and yet his hope was not in sort of worldly power but in God. And I think today many Christians in the West look around at their society, and they're not terribly hopeful that America will remain America for very long or Australia or England or whatever.

And that can be really scary. But what can we learn from Augustine in this respect? Well, one thing to keep in mind is that Augustine is very much the thinker of divine providence. And we can help ourselves ourselves the divine point of view and get glimpses here and here and now little peaks and bits and pieces of how the way or the way in which the divine plan is at play within the world. But the full disclosure of divine providence is not for us here and now. And I think we'll only come later.

But I think there's also this this important reminder that at the end of the day, the most important thing is going to be the salvation of our souls and our loved ones in the church and those that we can bring into the church. And so the work for us to focus on, you know, as civilization, teeters, totters, the thing we should focus on is what's most important. is what's most important. We should focus on fostering a vibrant Catholic culture for our families, for our parishes, for our universities. And, you know, much like in the Middle Ages, culture was preserved in the monasteries. So we need to do everything we can in this time and place to preserve our families, to preserve our parishes, but also, very importantly, this point is sometimes lost, we need to preserve our Catholic universities. You know, those are the front line of cultural wars, and too often I think Catholic parents just sort of write these things

off and say, well, I'm just going to support local secular university. But when you do that, you're not supporting the Catholic intellectual life. And you're also not fostering those places of real encounter where the Christian intellectual tradition can be broken up, open to a new generation and renewed. And so I think what we really need to do as we become more and more powerless to affect real social change is to focus all of our energies or more of our energies and resources on sustaining our institutions and really looking to them as a sign of hope. Yeah, yeah, sustaining the ones that seem to deserve to be sustained, because there's a lot that I wish would burn. Yes, yes, quite right. Or that deserve to burn, you know, that claim to be Catholic, but are awful.

What's University of Dallas like? Just a softball for you, since you teach there, I'm not sure how objective you can be. Well, I mean, let me tell you, the reason I came here, my sister came here, did her undergraduate here, and I uprooted my family and brought them down here because I wanted my kids to go here. Wow. It's really a first-rate Catholic education. And one of the things that's most distinctive about it is the way in which it engages texts in a deep way. So you're not going to get a kind of textbook knowledge, but you dip into the great works here.

You learn to write. You learn to think deeply and to feel at home within the Western tradition. within the Western tradition. And that turns out to be one of the great gifts, I think, that you can give your children, give yourself, is to really feel at home in the living Christian intellectual tradition. And that's something that happens here at the University of Dallas. Yeah, it can be kind of overwhelming when you've had a subpar education like myself and like many others,

when you consider the great books that are on offer, and you think, gosh, I can barely bloody read this or that. How am I ever going to get started? But I guess we'd say it would be a better thing to just focus on the confessions for now and to do that intentionally than to anxiously try to read a bunch of classics just because they are that.

No, I think you're right. Always quality over quantity. than to anxiously try to read a bunch of classics just because they are that, you know? No, I think you're right. Yeah, always quality over quantity. Awesome. Well, Dr. Chad, thank you very much for being on Pines of the Kiwanis. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Okay, okay.

Thank you so much for watching that episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. As I've said in the beginning, we really want you to join this course on the Confessions of St. Augustine. And, you know, it's going to be a fantastic course. Go to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. When you get here, you can see all the free stuff you get in return from supporting the show and all the work that we're doing.

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