On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
James K. A. Smithamazon.com
Saved by Jonathan Simcoe and
On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
Saved by Jonathan Simcoe and
Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.
By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.”
Augustine wryly notes, “I do not think he can have any friends. If it is wrong to believe anything, then either one does wrong by believing a friend, or one never believes a friend, and then I do not see how one can call either oneself or the friend a friend.”
the Manicheans prided themselves on their refusal to submit to any authority outside of their own reason, which was not so different from the rallying cry of Immanuel Kant’s essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” fourteen centuries later: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! It’s the same watchword used today by tho
... See moreHe wasn’t really interested in wisdom; he simply wanted to be part of the enlightened crowd. This was still a craving to belong.
“You cannot be your own light; you can’t, you simply can’t. . . . We are in need of enlightenment, we are not the light.”
What masquerades as the pursuit of truth becomes an agenda for confirming my biases and making me comfortable, for justifying my enjoyment of what I ought to be using. If the actual truth disrupts my enjoyment, I resent the truth all the more. What I love in this case is my truth, not the truth.
Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life.
The disordered love of learning makes you a mere technician of information for some end other than wisdom, and the irony is that philosophy could devolve into just another way of idolizing.
Augustine is striking at the very heart of what the Manicheans offered: not just enlightenment, but belonging, a circle of those “in the know,” a friendship of light.