Podcast episode
November 29, 2023
Episode 180: Augustine of Hippo: Saint of the Exoteric
We discuss Augustine’s seminally-important Christian anti-esotericism. We start by reviewing some of the aspects of the Christian esoteric covered in the podcast so far, and then turn to how Augustine refutes, attacks, or otherwise manages these currents to create a position-statement whereby Christianity is a single, universal system of belief which has no secrets. Along the way we discuss the problem of esoteric scriptural hermeneutics in Orthodoxy (which Augustine just glides over without mentioning, for the most part), and the difference between an anti-esotericist position and an actual eschewing of esoteric methodologies. Augustine has the first, but he doesn’t really have the second, and in fact uses tries-and-true esoteric Christian methodologies in his framing of an allegedly non-esoteric Christianity.
Works Cited in this Episode:
Primary:
Augustine:
- De doct. Christ. I, 6. This passage perhaps echoes Plot. Enn. V.3[49]14.16-19: ἀλλά τι κρεῖττον τούτου, ὃ λέγομεν «ὄν», ἀλλὰ καὶ πλέον καὶ μεῖζον ἢ λεγόμενον, ὅτι καὶ αὐτὸς κρείττων λόγου καὶ νοῦ καὶ αἰσθήσεως, παρασχὼν ταῦτα, οὐκ αὐτὸς ὢν ταῦτα.
- Sermons on the Gospel of John: the Gibbs and Innes translation is available online. Evil magical arts: 97.3; the allure of secrecy: 97.2. Hiding certain doctrines from the catechumens isn’t really secrecy: 96.3 ad fin.
- ‘Physician-argument’ fior religious coercion: (summary by Christian Tornau in the Stanford Internet Encyclopædia of Philosophy: ‘Augustine’s intentionalism also provides him with arguments in favor of religious coercion. As the objective of right fraternal love is not the neighbor’s temporal well-being but his eternal happiness or salvation, we must not passively tolerate our fellow-humans’ sins but should actively correct them if we can; otherwise, our motivation would be inertia rather than love (In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 7.11; cf. Letter 151.11; Ad Simplicianum 1.2.18). Catholic bishops are therefore obliged to compel heretics and schismatics to re-enter the Catholic church even forcibly, just as a father beats his children when he sees them playing with snakes or as we bind a madman who otherwise would fling himself down a precipice (Letter 93.8; 185.7; and Letter 93.1–10 in general). Obviously, this is a paternalistic argument that presupposes superior insight in those who legitimately wield coercive power. While this may be acceptable in the case of the Church, which according to Augustine’s ecclesiology is the body of Christ and the embodiment of fraternal love, it turns out to be problematic when it is transferred to secular rulers (Augustine rarely does this, but cf. Letter 138.14–15). And as even the Church in this world is a mixed body of sinners and saints (see 8. History and Political Philosophy), it may be asked how individual bishops can be sure of their good intentions when they use religious force (Rist 1994: 242–245). Augustine does not address this problem, presumably because most of his relevant texts are propagandistic defenses of coercion against the Donatists.’
Secondary:
Henry Bettenson and David Knowles. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans. Penguin, 1977.
Bernard McGinn. The Foundations of Mysticism. Crossroads, New York, NY, 1991: ‘the most detailed and incisive investigation in Patristic writing of the dangers of esotericism’: p. 256. The legacy of Gnosticism an anti-esoteric-hermeneutics attitude among the Orthodox: p. 99.
Guy Stroumsa. Milk and Meat: Augustine and the End of Ancient Esotericism. In Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism, pages 132-46. Brill, Leiden, 1996; we quote p. 142.
Themes
Anti-esotericism, Augustine of Hippo, Basilides, Christianity, Esoteric Christianity, Esoteric Hermeneutics, Gnosticism, Manichæism, Orthodoxy, Qumran Scrolls
Kenneth Selens
November 29, 2023
Perhaps this is too speculative, but the earliest Christianity of the historical Jesus is too opaque to resist such ventures. Its antecedents of an opened heaven apocalypticism inevitably will run into problems when demoticization is equally strived for. I suspect that the original purpose of baptism as an ‘arcane discipline’ was designed to facilitate altering visionary experiences of deification for the oppressed masses. Inevitably many would fail to reach such an ideal vision. Jesus’ contingency plan was making himself a spiritual proxy. Later, some who could attain such visions would claim revelations that would create divisions amongst early Christianities instigating a fight for an ‘orthodoxy’. What became capital ‘O’ Orthodoxy seemed to largely exclusivize only one particular deified individual. Christianity would be plagued with the struggle between an esoteric and exoteric dichotomy forevermore. Without such wild speculations Guy Stroumsa shows the beginnings of medieval Christian mysticism out of this exoteric / esoteric quagmire through Augustine. I find this convincing, albeit, I certainly see other influences in what became Christian mysticism. After all is said, I ultimately see the roots of Christian mysticism, however historically altered, from apocalypticism.
Kenneth Selens
November 29, 2023
And middle Platonism.
Earl Fontainelle
November 30, 2023
I think you and Stroumsa definitely have your fingers on the pulse of what went on, even if, as you say, we can’t know all the details. It’s pretty amazing what the Cappadocians do with the problem of demotic deification: it’s all there, carefully hedged, but pretty ambitious: Christian, become (like) God! Augustine is more obsessed with what he experiences as a yawning ontological gulf between himself and his god. I feel like he should have either stuck with Manichæan Christianity or really abandoned it; his half-measures lead to a very lopsided and stunted spirituality, in my reading.
Kenneth Selens
November 30, 2023
I certainly could’ve done without total depravity and predestined eternal conscious torment injected into the entire western half of Christendom.
Earl Fontainelle
November 30, 2023
Yep. Me too. I don’t usually get involved in making judgements about the thinkers we cover, but I’m more than prepared to step up and say that those are ideas are the real depravity.
James Butler
November 30, 2023
Another excellent episode. I share your obvious dislike of Augustine’s long-term baleful effects on the worldview of, well, just about everyone for the subsequent millennium plus. And yet – isn’t this part of what makes him so compelling? – he’s obviously capable of great and very affecting sublimity, too. Famously:
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi!
Et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam;
Et in ista formosa quae fecisti deformis inruebam. mecum eras, et tecum non eram.
Ea me tenebant longe a te, quae si in te non essent, non essent.
Vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam;
Coruscasti, splenduisti et fugasti caecitatem meam;
Fragrasti, et duxi spiritum et anhelo tibi;
Gustavi et esurio et sitio;
Tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.
(But I wonder if this intensity springs from precisely the same disposition that makes him so self-scouring and brutal. Those piled-up verbs aren’t just a stylistic battering ram; I think they testify to the intensity of his yearning, his ‘burning for thy peace’.)
Earl Fontainelle
December 5, 2023
Yessir! Exactly. It’s almost a Latin version of sufi love-poetry, and yet something goes wrong somewhere ….
And where does this affecting piece of poetry come from?
Update: Confessions, Book X.
Thomas Kiefer
December 1, 2023
Augustine of Hippo, the Patron Saint of No-Fun.
Tomas Robert Seymour
December 5, 2023
What I found interesting when reading Confessions was that Augustine had significant difficulty in reading the Christian scriptures before meeting Ambrose. Ambrose who takes from Origenist scriptural hermeneutics, presumably taught Augustine how to read scripture in allegory.
His relationship also to Platonism is also fascinating. Somewhere Augustine writes that this philosophy is the closest to Christianity, but in Confessions he seems to levy pride or ‘superbia’ against them – an accusation I find to be entirely polemical and without foundation.
Earl Fontainelle
December 5, 2023
Tomas,
The interview in the following members’ two-parter has a lot to say on Augy’s Platonism and his ideas about superbia.