The Bowels of Wisdom: Part 3/4

St Augustine

Continuing from our exploration of Lancelot Andrewes and T.S. Eliot (see below for links), even an orthodox Christian such as St Augustine, schooled in his Hortensius, never quite overcame the distaste he felt for the visceral crudeness he met on first reading his mother's bible. That was what propelled him towards Manichaeism:

non enim sicut modo loquor, ita sensi, cum attendi ad illam scripturam, sed visa est mihi indigna quam tullianae dignitati compararem.

I did not then feel as I now speak, when I looked into Holy Scripture, but it seemed to me unworthy to compare to Ciceronian dignity. 

Confessions III.5

I don’t think Augustine was talking only about the quality of Ciceronian prose, but the comparative crudeness of the God he found in Scripture, compared with the pure and simple One of the Platonici libri. Mani’s followers were able to dualise away all the negative corporalia, a dualism Augustine would reject when he found God not externally, but instead could say:

tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.
But you were deeper than my innermost depth and higher than my greatest height.

Confessions III.6  

It’s a famous line, but the context is often ignored: it is nestled within an extended metaphor on food, drawn from Proverbs 9:20, where Lady Wisdom’s nemesis, the Shameless Woman exhorts the undiscerning to “grasp with pleasure the secret bread and the sweet water of theft.” If there is a sexual euphemism at play here, as there is in the apple-scrumping yarn about forbidden fruit, that should be unsurprising: because food and sex are the two most basic animal desires, the strongest because the most necessary to life, and hence the most easily perverted. Nonetheless, the main point to make here is that Augustine deals with the incongruous images of Scripture by claiming that he had been reading them in too “carnal” a sense: the Shameless Woman seduced me, he says,

…quia invenit [me] foris habitantem in oculo carnis meae et talis ruminantem apud me qualia per illum vorassem.
…because she found [me] living outside (myself), in the eye of my flesh, and chewing only on such things within me as I could devour through it.

— an odd phrase, which I have translated as literally as I can, to give the full sense: that to gorge the eye on physical beauty ironically blinds us to the true vision of those things, and particularly those people, in their spiritual value. Hence the perhaps most famous passage of the Confessions:

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.

Late have I loved you, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! Late have I loved you. See, you were within me, and I was outside, and that was where I searched for you; and disfigured, I rushed in on the beautiful things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The beautiful things held me far from you; yet if they had not been in you, they would not have been at all.

Confessions X.27

The saint’s old lustful eye had put a barrier between his gaze and the reality of its object, keeping the beauty thereof perpetually external, where it could not nourish his soul, but instead trapped and disfigured it. It turned what should be lifegiving icons of God into dead idols. Instead of taking the beautiful things as rungs up the spiritual ladder, the eye got caught on them and could look no higher.

Now, Augustine realises this; but a semi-Manichaean suspicion of the world of flesh remained with him to the end. We needn’t get him on the analyst’s couch to talk about his mother and his concubine to establish this. It’s there for all to see in his thoughts on original sin, and particularly his ideas of prelapsarian sexuality in the City of God. Before the Fall, bodily epithumia could have no pull on the sober charioteer’s reins. Libido was “the punishment inflicted for the sin of disobedience,” peccato inoboedientiae retributa est (City of God XIV.23).

Before the consumption of the forbidden fruit, every part of the body was under complete control, oboedienter hominibus ad voluntatis nutum, an observation limited not only to the generative lower member, but also to the bowel – for even today:

Nonnulli ab imo sine paedore ullo ita numerosos pro arbitrio sonitus edunt ut ex illa etiam parte cantare videantur.
A few people emit at will so many sounds from their bottom, without any smell, that they seem to be singing out of it.

City of God XIV.24

This, you will be grateful, is not part of my own post-dinner repertoire. I hope that St Augustine meant it as a joke. He does, thereafter, return to his habitual gravitas, by talking about a priest, one Restitutus, who had such power of “mind over matter” that he could withstand all pain, even burning, at will. But even this serves only to drive the point home all the harder: the body remains, for Augustine, to some extent a regrettable embarrassment, something to be overcome.

The shame of sex is reasoned away, the shame of the bowel laughed away, and all this told through the symbol of eating forbidden food, as though the very stuff of life itself seemed to him at times an unfortunate necessity. And for all the greatness of the saintly doctor of Hippo, whom I love, I fear that this negativity, verging on dualism, has continued to afflict Western thought right to this day.

In the next, final and rather longer post of this series, we will see how Dionysius’ embrace of another kind of Platonism informs a response to this dualistic tendency.