Augustine's Confession Book 1: Chapter 13 - Reflections

I got a good chuckle out of this chapter. Augustine hated Greek. I took Greek. I didn't have to but I did it anyway. It is a difficult language, at least I found it far more difficult than Hebrew. He said that he preferred Latin because that is where he started and it was no less a pain to learn than Greek.

He confesses that he much prefers the basics or 'rudiments' and even 'what the grammarians teach' over the great Greek epochs. It was not always so. He confesses that at one time he shed tears over Dido and Aeneas (a classic Greek epoch) but did not shed any tears for the condition of his soul or his own spiritual death. I believe he cried as he wrote this chapter and confesses it freely. He speaks of the madness of his sinful mind that would have been grieved if he were forbidden from reading the poems that caused him grief and that this is considered honourable and fruitful learning. So he now prefers the basics that taught him how to read and write over the great poems and epochs and songs that stirred his heart in early years because the basics taught him something useful while the higher literature only grieved him and worked as a force to distract and even deafen his soul from God.

The basics and foundations are profitable. The poems and epochs are vain. If you had to forget one of these he would prefer to forget Aeneas than how to read and write, as any sane person should choose. Yet when he was a boy he hated "one and one are two, two and two are four," but "a wooden horse full of armed soldiers and the holocaust of Troy, and the spectral image of Creusa were all a must delightful --and vain-- show!"


If I didn't know I was reading Augustine I would think I might be reading one of the Puritans. They took this theological thread and ran with it, sorrow for inner sin, rejecting the arts as vain, especially valuing what was profitable and practical. It definitely reminds me of my long hours reading and writing about Thomas Watson and the English Puritans of the 1600's.

For myself I am reminded that one will not find God in the Liberal Arts or the Humanities or in any other academic endeavor in and if itself. I am often reminded that one can love Theology, or Biblical Studies, or Religion, or whatever spiritual discipline, and still not know or love The Lord. None of these things are bad in and of themselves but they are no substitute for knowing God and have faith.