Mes Souvenirs

I just heard news about the old Victorian house of my childhood in Bath, New York. When I lived there, it was painted a traditional, pleasant beige with maroon trim and accents, and maybe green shutters. Now, according to my informant, it has become quite a spectacle. “Let’s just say it will never disappear during a blizzard,” she remarked. Luckily for everyone, there will invariably be a blizzard in western New York, within the next decade; so we can all put her observation to the test.

My first thought about the news was that I have no attachment to the house. I never did. I wasn’t sad to leave it, and I don’t care what becomes of it.

Indeed there are no emotions in my memory surrounding that house. To my surprise, this is not an instance of my otherwise very bad memory. I remember feeling nothing when I moved. I remember trying to feel nothing about it. I remember telling others that I felt nothing.

But all of this remembering comes as quite a shock. I do have an exceptionally poor memory. So the fact that I have memories surrounding the process of leaving this house makes me think that my first thought was missing the mark. I think my memory is accurate in telling me that I wasn’t sad to leave it, but it betrays something else by being able to recall that negative emotional fact so distinctly.

This is all just a big preface to what I intended to write about: my memory has been bad “for as long as I can remember,” but there’s a mystery here that is begging to be explored.

My father also has a troublesome memory. He is encyclopedic in some ways; ask him about modern music or botany, and then be prepared to sit down. He cannot, however, recall much of his childhood or teenage years, nor a lot of more recent events. My mind works on a pattern similar to his, I assume. I can remember things that I’ve heard or seen or read so long as they are filed into a kind of encyclopedic system. But “what happens” to me or to others around me often pass away quite quickly—if not falling into that larger filing system, with its apparently finite number of labels for significance. I cannot remember most of my childhood. I don’t have a good sense of important dates: for example, when I first moved, or at what age I started playing soccer, or when my parents were divorced, or when I became friends with so-and-so. After poking and prodding I can sometimes narrow them down, but it doesn’t come easily, and each time I try to think about them I have to go through the same process of narrowing down.

And then the mystery.  I now suspect that this old house has so many memories tied to it. I wonder: “How much of this poor memory of mine is only so because I attached my thought to things along the way, and then the things themselves were taken from me?” This attachment carries a different sense than the one in my first thought, mentioned above. It is not that I am attached to the house in a way that necessarily provokes an emotional reaction, but that I is attached to it.  With the things, such as that house, coming and going, there is an I that comes and goes.

What if all the “happenings” that I have forgotten are only gone because I filed the memory externally. They’re not gone simply because they are in the past, but because I let them fall upon something else that did not endure or stay with me. Maybe I could have tried to attach them to something else within me that I wouldn’t lose, and they would have remained. (Is that what we call “learning”?) Maybe I am too much in the habit of letting “what happens” stay outside, stay tied to the things that I won’t take with me, things whose likeness it is hard to imagine without an external likeness….

None of this is new for psychologists.  I’ve read about it plenty.  But I hadn’t experience the significance of the thoughts for myself until tonight.

My next mission is to get my hands on some old and new photographs of the house, to see what else emerges.

On Augustine’s Confessions: his wager among the books

Along Augustine’s long road toward submission to biblical authority, he comes to a place where he takes up the Academic philosophers’ recommendation to suspend belief about some matters until certainty arises. The astronomers are adequate to expose the dubious character of the Manichæan fables, but this does not give him enough reason to take up the Bible again. He also does not hold on to the Academics, for the same reason that he says he did not overly admire Cicero’s Hortensius, given in Book III, Chapter iv:

Perchance it was that book I was stirred up, and enkindled, and inflamed by: this thing only in such a heat of zeal took me off, that the Name of Christ was not in it. For this Name, according to thy mercy, O Lord, this Name of my Savior thy Son, had my tender heart even together with my mother’s milk devoutly drunken in, and charily treasured up: so that what book soever was without that Name, though never so learned, politely and truly penned, did not altogether take my approbation.

So now two elements have come into focus:—unwillingness both to rejoin the Manichæans and to submit wholeheartedly to the Academic philosophers. But the lack of will toward these two sects does not adequately account for his decision to join the Church in Milan as a catechumen. This seems to come out of nowhere. Augustine, at this point, has not submitted himself to catholic doctrine, nor accepted the claims of the Bible’s legitimacy or authority. To this point he writes the following in Book V, Chapter xiv:

For first of all the things began to appear unto me as possible to be defended: and the Catholic faith, in defense of which I thought nothing could be answered to the Manichæans’ arguments, I now concluded with myself, might well be maintained without absurdity: especially after I had heard one or two hard places of the Old Testament resolved now and then; which when I understood literally, I was slain. Many places therefore of those books having been spiritually expounded, I blamed mine own desperate conceit, whereby I had believed, that the Law and the Prophets could no way be upheld against those that hated and scorned them.

Ambrose’s preaching had at least exposed Augustine to alternate possibilities for biblical interpretation, though not supplied him with adequate counter-argument or refutation of the Manichæans. Augustine has only the possibility of a refutation. He doubts that the Manichæans accurately describe the natural world, that biblical doctrines necessarily lead to absurdity, and that the philosophers can offer him the wisdom that he craves. There are many possibilities, but no feelings of certainty, no signs of necessity.

Yet did I not resolve for all this, that the Catholic way might be held safely; seeing it might be able both copiously and not absurdly, to answer some objections made against it: nor yet did I conceive that my former way ought to be condemned, because that both sides of the defence were equal. For although the Catholic party seemed to me not to be overthrown, yet it appeared not to be altogether victorious.

Philosophically, Augustine has the negative. This might mean that he is an Academic philosopher par excellence.  But when considered psychologically, he might say of himself merely that he is unwilling. He has been unwilling toward the Manichæans and the Academic philosophers, and now it is clear that he is equally unwilling toward the Church.  Rather than a philosophical virtue, Augustine seems to think his unwillingness is a sign of intellectual failure.

And so there remains a little confusion about his decision to join the Church as a catechumen. Why would he make this move? Why would he submit himself to biblical doctrine without the positive, without the will, and without faith?

At first glance, there is no sense in it. A reader might be suspicious that Augustine is knowingly omitting from the narrative some reason for making this move. This suspicion should be rejected for two reasons:—first, because part of Augustine’s project is to show how God mercifully moved him throughout his life toward the catholic faith, and so to leave out a known reason for becoming a catechumen would only take away from that project, since all reasons so far have been redeemed and subsumed under God’s gracious plan;—second, because the move is not as unreasonable as the first glance might suggest. To the second point, Descartes in Part III of the Discours says that he will continue to go along with the laws and customs of his country and keep himself in the religion in which he was instructed from his youth, even while claiming to enter into a skeptical project. Maybe Augustine’s thinking matched this. But in case anyone calls the honesty of Descartes’ words into question,* another plausible answer might be found in Pascal’s wager argument. In Pensée 233† he writes,

You wish to go to the faith, and you do not know the way; you wish to be healed from unfaithfulness, and you ask about the cure for it: learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all their goods; these are people who know the way that you wish to follow, and who are cured of an evil of which you wish to be cured. Follow the form through which they began: that is, doing everything as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses spoken to them, etc.; that will make you believe, even naturally, and you will be rendered compliant.‡ – But this is what I fear. – And why? What do you have to lose?

What Pascal describes may in fact be based on his interpretation of instances like Augustine’s own story, but the anachronism does not take away from the thought behind what is written: What has Augustine got to lose by joining the Church while he waits for a sign giving further direction? Having determined that Manichæanism is a risk, and that the Academic philosophers do not promise what he craves, and knowing that the Church does at least promise such, while being unsure of the substance behind that promise, he is making the gamblers move to stay in the game and wait to see what cards turn up.

Before this point, he had been prevented from such a wager because of the high risks that he had associated with the Bible and biblical doctrine. Ambrose’s preaching, however, changed the stakes. Mirroring Pascal’s account of the relationship between miracles and demonstration in Pensée 842,° this is the pivotal point where Augustine obtains the first half of what is sufficient for his conversion, namely, the lack of conflict between the Bible and his own criteria for reasonableness. Ambrose’s words make it less repugnant to him, and he no longer dismisses it on the basis of the absurdity of its content, as he had done previously because of his Manichæan prejudices. So the thinking that goes into Pascal’s wager now applies, once there is any probability, however slight, given to the claim of the authority of the Bible, since it presents infinite gain to Augustine if true and no loss if false.

More needs to be said for the sermons of Ambrose that effect this wager, and also the large change in Augustine’s hermeneutics that comes from reflection on 2 Corinthians 3.6.

*And rightly, I think, should we suspect Descartes of being less than honest.

†My translation.

‡The verb in French is abêtir, which means to be rendered bête or beastlike. It has connotations to docility, tameness, acquiescence, submission, dullness, silliness, stupidity, and simplicity. Pascal’s use of it here has some shock-value, but I think that he also means what he writes.

°The following is my translation of one of the paragraphs in the middle:

The proofs that Jesus Christ and the apostles draw from the Scriptures are not demonstrative; for they say only that Moses said that a prophet would come; but they do not thereby prove that this is the one, and that was the entire question. These passages, therefore, are used to show that someone is not against the Scriptures, and that there appears to be no conflict, but not that there is agreement. Now, this is sufficient, exclusion of conflict, along with miracles.

The word translated conflict is répugnance in French, here taken in the logical sense of inconsistency, incoherency, incompatibility, impossibility, etc. In Augustine’s case, the last two sentences could be modified: Ambrose’s interpretations are used to show that the Bible is not in conflict with the criteria for reasonableness, and that there appears to be no conflict, but not that there is agreement. Now, this is sufficient, exclusion of conflict, along with submission of the will. So Augustine has the first part, and does not find the second until the garden scene in Milan.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the Hortensius dialogue provides the negative

Augustine, in the Confessions, recalls a few books from his studies in youth that he considers to have contributed to the overall confession of his life. Among those of which he gives favorable mention is Cicero’s Hortensius,* described in Book III Chapter iv.

When Augustine is around eighteen or nineteen, he is supposed to be acquiring the excellences of oratorical and written style in order to become a lawyer. He approaches the reading of Cicero—“whose tongue almost everyone admires, though not so his heart”—expecting to find beautiful language that he might adopt for his own uses in the rhetorical fields. But Augustine takes the Hortensius to heart in a strange way: he enjoys what is written more than how it is written! This aberration is celebrated by Augustine because that book happens to contain an exhortation to philosophia, which Cicero straightforwardly defines as “the love of wisdom,” as opposed to the common love of dispute that characterizes many activities under the same name. The change in his manner of reading coincided neatly with a message that would change his young views and values.

This was what delighted me in that exhortation, that it did not engage me to this or that sect, but left me free to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace Wisdom itself, whatever it was.

It was a turning point in his life in which he left behind “vain hopes” of becoming a wealthy or famous lawyer in order to pursue “the immortality of wisdom.” He even admits that at this time his prayers were turned toward God. And then he writes at the beginning of the next chapter, “I resolved thereupon to bend my studies toward the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were.”

Before examining his view of the Bible, it is worth looking at Augustine’s account of the Hortensius in light of the Phædrus dichotomy between books that are barren and those that are fecund. While Augustine speaks favorably of it, he does not bother sharing with the reader any of its content other than the exhortation to love wisdom and how that exhortation led him to reexamine the Bible. It cannot be considered among the fruit-yielding books, because it lacks a manner of endurance. He receives it, and he takes its words upon him, but they do not positively teach him. The Hortensius only provides the negative. In other words, it only leads him away from his current practices, but does not impregnate him with knowledge beyond its own words. It is efficacious, but not fecund. It tells him to pursue wisdom, but Augustine adds “quæcumque esset”—Wisdom itself, “whatever it was”—showing that he was entranced by the thought, but that its marrow escaped him at the time.

In Chapter v he admits that the Bible’s message eluded him in his youth, even though the exhortation to wisdom had encouraged him to read it. It seemed “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence. For my swelling pride soared above the temper of their style. . . .” Evidently the impression left by the Hortensius, while providing the negative, did not teach Augustine the humility that he considers prerequisite to an understanding of the Bible. It gave him the appearance of wisdom by means of the exhortation to pursue wisdom, but it did not give him the wisdom itself; and so he did not at that time pursue the catholic faith, in which he believes wisdom is found, but fell into the good words and strange Manichæan teachings.

Bringing the Hortensius under the scheme developed from the Phædrus is convenient for speculating about Augustine’s views on the matter, but it will become clear that his views on the Bible do not fit so conveniently into the scheme.  This is equally insightful, though, and so the scheme will continue to be used to bring out a principle that Socrates and Phædrus did not anticipate.

*Because the dialogue is no longer extant, Augustine’s account must suffice for a judgment in this inquiry.