Breaking and Entering

            Once again I overdressed before going out. This time it was for the ride to my second Early Medieval Philosophy class. I wore pants, a long-sleeved shirt and my leather jacket, when I could have been more comfortable with my arms and legs bare.

            I had expected the lecture hall to contain the algorithm class that precedes mine but I’d forgotten that was on Thursdays. The classroom was empty when I arrived except for one student.

            I had about half an hour before class started so I did a bit of writing and then read some of Balzac’s “The Atheist’s Mass”.

            Professor Black arrived at around 11:05. The lecture started at 11:10. She explained to us that she tends to run a little behind schedule and so though the plan was to cover Augustine this week, it might overlap a bit into next week.

            Augustine was born in 354 in Roman Africa, which is now Algeria and Tunisia. He was probably a Berber, but a Roman citizen. His mother, Monica, was a Christian (later made a saint) while his father was a pagan who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. Although Augustine was raised in Christianity his background did not infuse his thinking. He pursued various ideologies before he formally converted to Christianity in his adulthood.

            Augustine’s family were the Roman equivalent to lower middle class. They didn’t struggle for the basics but had to scrimp and save in order to send Augustine to good schools.

            Augustine studied Greek and Roman and though he flunked Greek he later became the main conduit for later scholars access to Greek philosophy.

            Augustine was sent away to study in Carthage, where he was influenced by Cicero, especially his dialogue Hortensius (which is now lost) and developed a high opinion of rhetoric, which was a stumbling block to his conversion to Christianity because Christian doctrine was not intellectually persuasive.

            He joined Manichaeanism, an anti-Christian religion that had been founded about a century before by the Persian prophet Mani. They taught a dualistic cosmology that was manifest in a struggle between two co-equal realities: a spiritual world of light ruled by god and a material world of darkness ruled by an evil supreme being. The universe then had two creators.

            Augustine was dissatisfied with Manicheanism and after travelling to speak with Faustus, one of the main Manichaean bishops, he was disappointed with the answers to his questions and left to become a Skeptic. Skepticism had been the main philosophical movement at Plato’s academy. Augustine decided this was not enough and left that as well.

            While in Carthage Augustine had taken a concubine who gave birth when he was 19 to his son Adeodatus. The boy was very important to him but he died at the age of 17 and so it was a major blow.

            Augustine was offered a job as a professor of rhetoric in Milan. There he met Ambrose, an even more skilled orator than Augustine, who happened to be a Christian. He showed him how to resolve the contradictions in Christian scripture by reading it allegorically. Augustine later developed his own non-literalist system for interpreting Christian scripture.

            Augustine encountered translations of Plato into Latin by Plotinus and Porphyry. These helped him to untie the knot in Manichaeanism. First he’d seen god as material but later as immaterial. He came to view Christianity as a form of Platonism. He grappled with the relation between metaphysical evil and human sin. He was interested in the cause of sin in relation to free will and developed a theory of evil.

            Augustine left his concubine for a more advantageous marriage but before the wedding could occur, he converted in 386.

            In book two of Augustine’s Confessions he tells the story of the gang to which he’d belonged and of their stealing of the pears just for the sake of the thrill of theft. Professor Black says that she used to have a pear tree and the raccoons behaved very similarly to her pears as did Augustine to the pears in his story. She says she has a ginkgo tree now.

            So he stole pears. Big deal. Not a major crime. He had done a lot worse than that but he picked the most innocuous of his sins because it drives home the problem of moral choice and evil. It is an example of sin for its own sake. Opposing divine law is a false imitation of god and a form of pride. Doing something for its own sake is an attempt at being god.

            He claimed that he wouldn’t have stolen the pears if he had not been part of a group with that goal. Maybe the human imitation of god requires an audience.

            She told us that the Rolling Stones, “Saint of Me”, on their Bridges to Babylon album, have a reference to Augustine: “Augustine knew temptation / He loved women, wine and song / and all the special pleasures / of doing something wrong …” I have that album on CD but it’s not one of their finest achievements from a musical standpoint so I never noticed that lyric.

            He more or less equated beauty and goodness and developed a hierarchy of goodness from lesser physical goodness that is susceptible to abuse to nobler godly goodness that cannot be abused. Physical things used at the lower level are ends in themselves but they should be used as a means to god.

            That night I watched an episode of Maverick that had an interesting plot. Bart and Beau stopped in a town on their way to Denver and won a lot of money in a poker game. The only way out of town was through a pass where there were bandits robbing everyone that tried to take money out. The local telegraph company offered the solution of wiring the money as credit and so the Mavericks wired their money to Denver. Meanwhile Beau lost all of the theoretical money because all the hotels were full and so there was no place to sleep and nothing to do but to play poker after the limits of exhaustion and the vanishing point of good judgement. To pay his debt he gave the receipt from the telegraph company. But when the winner tried to cash it there was no money at the other end. The Mavericks were arrested but the winner agreed to let one of them go to Denver to try to track the money while he other one stayed in jail. Before leaving though Bart was suspicious and so he sent a wire to his father to test his theory: “I’m getting married, getting a job and giving up gambling”. The response congratulated him and was glad to hear he’d given up his wicked ways. Bart knew right away it had not reached his father since Beau Maverick senior would never approve of marriage, work or not gambling. Bart then left town and followed the telegraph wires to a cave in the pass. Two guys in the cave were receiving and sending back the responses. The telegraph company was a scam for taking people’s money. So Bart went back to town and sent a fake wire to a relative saying that he and Beau had found the Diamond Back silver mine that had been lost in an avalanche years before but needed a certain sum for equipment (the sum was the amount of the debt they owed). The telegraph company decided to give the Mavericks the money so they could follow them to the mine. They instead went to the cave and tied up the guys that had been sending the wires. Beau knew how to run a telegraph from his days in the British army so they sent wires to trick the telegraph company into their own undoing.

            That night there was a knock on my door. My hallway neighbour Benji was standing at my door in his underwear telling me that he was in trouble. He’d locked himself out of his apartment. I worked with screwdrivers, a hammer and a chisel for the next twenty minutes until I finally got it open for him. I really chewed up his door though but he didn’t care. He was desperate. I don’t even know how it finally opened. I told him that I now knew how to break into his place. He said he was going to copy his key the next day but didn’t know where he would keep an extra. I told him that he could keep it at my place.