I Don't Get Augustine: a Journal Entry

I hesitate to post in the blogworld these days. After blogging for a while, you forget that people actually read your stuff, even if they don't comment, and sometimes these are people you've never met, or may not want to know your business, and sometimes it feels ugly to put out things you're thinking and know that someone can judge you for it.

It's one of the reasons I moved more to the fictional perspective. I may or may not agree with the perspectives of the characters I use. They may or may not be me. I want what I write to be something more than constipated whining. I should leave that in journals.

But today I'm breaking that a little, moving back to the journal format.

Yesterday I shoveled for three hours and am feeling it some in my lower back. It's a good feeling. I didn't take pictures of our neighborhood, but really regret it now. The place was transformed. It was quiet, it was peaceful, it was really white, and the soft powdery snow dunes could have been a scene out of the Arctic, or a very washed out desert. I shoveled out four different houses in the process, and while everyone was well hidden on Tuesday when the storm was going through, yesterday it was like we all wanted to emerge again to begin the digging. It's things like this that I enjoy because it creates a kind of community that disappears once again after the crisis is over.

So I'm also reading through Augustine's Confessions, trying to put together a lecture in a couple weeks. I have to admit, I haven't liked him much. He seems narcissistic at times, overly obsessed with every thought and movement he makes. He reminds me too much of me. I especially didn't like the parts when he was writing about his early childhood, suggesting that everything physical was bad, everything spiritual was good. It reminded me too much of things I heard as a kid, and the hang-ups a lot of Christians have had over sex, the environment, physical beauty, and art and culture. I see a lot of good in those things, though I realize too that I see a lot of stuff that's twisted, or downright ugly, shallow, or evil.

As I've been reading on in Augustine, maybe what I think he's saying isn't what he's saying at all, or maybe he's coming to a maturing understanding. Last night in the section I read, he acknowledges that God created this good, and makes statements that evil is a twisting of that good rather than an equal and opposite opposing force.

That's what I don't get. Earlier he said he thought they WERE opposing forces, reflecting more a Manichean (?) or Zoroastrian idea. So which is it? What does he believe and what's he trying to say? Or is this a reflection of changing thinking, maturing, the willingness to change his views over time. If I want the benefit of the doubt for revising my thinking, I guess he deserves it too.

I'm no Augustine expert, and I'm still not sure I like him. In the midst of first year teaching at a new college with new material, I'm finding myself wrestling, a lot. I gave a lecture on the Celts the other day. I really LIKE the Celts, and I was excited about talking about them, but when the lecture was said and done, I felt like I really bombed. I was sick, and couldn't think clearly, but it was more than that. I wondered if I said what I'd wanted to, if it was communicated well, and realized it probably wasn't. I told a story, not a lecture, and was hard to follow. I was told, "Think more bullet points, not paragraphs." This was good advice, I just haven't seemed to be able to figure out consistently yet how to do that. I think the potential was there for a great lecture, but the presentation . . . that still needs work.

Enough obsessing.