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Augustine's Confessions with Joey Sherrard · Christians Reading Classics

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• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Great is your power, and your wisdom is immeasurable.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: A human being bearing his mortality with him, carrying with him the witness of his sin, and the witness that you resist the proud.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You stir man to take pleasure in praising you because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So wrote Augustine in Opening The Confessions.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: In the 4th century AD, Augustine, a one-time maniche, converted to Christianity and became one of the most prolific writers of not only Christian Roman Empire, but in all of Roman literature as well.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: A bar graph I saw once of words written by multiple Roman authors shows how Augustine dwarfs all others from Roman literature.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And confessions in particular became the first spiritual memoir in the Western world.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mirror Orthodoxy.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, book's editor for Mirror Orthodoxy, and the author of the book, Christians Reading Classics.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Today, it is an absolute privilege to talk about Augustine's confessions with Joey Sherid, who has been thinking about Augustine quite a bit for the better part of a decade.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: He is the author of The Augustinian Pastor, Deep Wisdom for Modern Ministry, newly out.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: He has been pastoring for nearly 20 years and currently serves as Pastor of Discipleship at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church in Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: He is a senior fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians, and he's also served as a guest lecturer at RTS Orlando.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, Joey, thank you for joining me.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Nadia.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's a real pleasure and an honor to be on this with you.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's wonderful to talk with you.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And a while back, you have written an essay on Augustine, Form Your Orthodoxy, that kind of previewed ideas in this book.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So before we jump into Augustine himself and also talk about your ideas about Augustine in your new book, let's talk about definitions.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: What is a classic?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: That is a very difficult question to answer.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: But when I think about a classic, I think about a piece of literature, or it could actually be music, or it could be something like that, that it asks the enduring questions about humanity, about the divine, uh, and it does so in a way that is so well that it lasts beyond its own time, but is returned to by folks again and again because of how well it how well it poses those questions.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm realizing as you're talking that the classics, the concept of the classics also presupposes human nature, that there's something similar in us.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um we here we are in the 21st century having this conversation over the latest technology.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we are talking about questions and about a text that people have appreciated for millennia.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: I I do think that's about Augustine for sure, and about the confessions, uh, is it also is true about other uh you know works of literature, but I it is incredible how for for so many people when they read the confessions, uh, they feel themselves read by Augustine as well, and how he he narrates his inner life in a way that um is is not just Augustine, but is it's uh it's us as well.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is us as well, the idea of restless souls.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's start with some background.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think everyone has heard of Augustine, but not everybody knows for sure.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like who was he?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what is his general life story?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, so Augustine was born in the mid-fourth century in Roman Africa.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: So he was born in what is to us today, uh modern-day Algeria.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: He was born to uh a Roman father, uh Patricius, who sort of a low-level Roman official.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And his mother, we probably probably was a Berber, so native to to northern Africa at the time.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: He was a precocious student.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, he won awards in rhetoric, and uh his his father sort of took a bet on Augustine that uh if he kind of wrote Augustine, he could sort of his family name would sort of uh would get out of the obscurity that it found itself in at the time.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: He had a restless heart.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he was searching for truth uh and for satisfaction.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: He looked for that in uh in romance and in sex, he looked for that uh through um in sort of intellectual pursuits, uh, philosophy.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: He looked for that through professional uh advancement as well.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and he um at some point decided that he could not find that in Roman Africa, and so he he fled Carthage uh and went to Rome, uh, which in some ways is mirroring the story of another classic when Augustine did that, uh, and advanced really to the height of uh kind of his vocational path.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: He was master of rhetoric in Milan, and uh, which was the kind of the seat of the Roman Empire, briefly during that time, uh, and then incredibly gave all of that up.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: He had turned a he had turned, abandoned the faith of his uh of his mother, Christianity, had pursued uh sort of philosophical enlightenment through manichaeism, as you mentioned earlier today.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: But slowly but surely God had been showing Augustine that everything that he longed for had been found, was to be found in the God of the Christian faith and in the scriptures uh of the Bible.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so he converted to Christianity, was baptized on April 24th, uh, so almost exactly a year ago today, uh, in 387, and gave up his job and moved back to Africa and wanted to live a life of contemplative reflection.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and uh much to his surprise and initial dismay, he found himself conscripted uh against his will into life as a local church pastor.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: He became the bishop of Hippo, and he he lived the next 40 years of his life as uh as uh a pastor and shepherd to the people entrusted to him back in Roman Africa.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Wrote many books that uh are classics within themselves, along with the confessions uh on the Trinity, the city of God, uh, Christian teaching, um, and then eventually died uh in 430.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was in Hipporegis with his congregation as uh his city was being um sieged by the by the vandals, and he died not long before the city uh would eventually fall.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So he's very much a person living in a world in crisis, kind of everybody can tell something is going on.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Roman Empire of his day is changing.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and here he is struggling through it all with everybody else, but also experiencing his own crisis of faith.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Which yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, that's right.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean that that's one of the things that makes Augustine such a um fascinating person, uh, is that he does, he is, he lives at the intersection of so many things, both within his own heart and then within world history, um, the kind of decline of the Roman Empire.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so yes, he he's such a fascinating and fertile thinker for all those reasons that you just mentioned.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I highly recommend anyone who wants to dig deeper into the biography of Augustine.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Brown's um biography of Augustine remains, in my view, the absolute best.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's an intellectual biography of Augustine.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason, another reason it's worth reading is precisely because Peter Brown has uh been at the forefront of studying this period of transition in the Roman world.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: We used to talk more about the fall of Rome and, you know, the Dark Ages and all of that.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And there is some of that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, all of those cliches and simplified language have um some reason to them.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: But Peter Brown has shown that in the midst of this decline and fall of the Roman Empire that some have seen, there's also um something new and different, a flourishing Christian empire.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Augustine is an example of that.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Roman North Africa was at the forefront of that.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: All the brilliant thinking minds that come to mind, uh, fourth, fifth century, like Roman Africa was just the seat of theological conversations.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, before we jump further into Augustine's uh confessions proper, I want to ask you about your new book, The Augustinian Pastor.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, your main point is Augustine was first and foremost a pastor for uh, as you said, for about four decades.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: He is ministering a congregation in this age of crisis.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, would you give us an overview of your argument and for whom did you write this book?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I I mean the way that you frame that question is is so helpful because uh Augustine has been remembered rightly so in so many different ways uh by scholars and thinkers today.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: He's remembered certainly for his his theological mind.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh his works are studied in philosophy classes uh as a figure uh who is representative of the kind of the airy era of history that you just mentioned, late antiquity.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's a really he's a really interesting person to think through his own times for that end.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: As a political theorist, you know, his work on the city of God uh is uh is a really seminal work for thinking through politics in the Western tradition.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Augustine is helpfully studied in all of those ways.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And yet at the same time, Augustine lived four decades of his life as a local church pastor.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: And the confessions, as amazing as it is, uh, it has almost frozen him in time for us because he does not, he's been a pastor for probably about five or six years when he begins to write the confessions.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but um, he doesn't talk about his pastoral life that much at all.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's easy to forget uh the kind of setting for most of his works that we remember him by, De Trinitate and On the City of God uh and things like that.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: He he worked these out as a local church pastor.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so I just tried as a pastor myself to listen to Augustine and what he has to say to those of us involved in the work of ministry and how we can learn from him.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so the book is divided into two parts.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: I I'd take in the first part uh his thoughts on the person of the pastor.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: How does the pastor think about God's providential work in their life?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: How does the pastor help us to think about, I mean, how does how does Augustine help us to think about what it means to live by a rule?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because Augustine lived uh all of his adult life post-conversion in a monastic community.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: How does the Augustine help us to think about friendship in ministry?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, how does he help us to think about humility?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and then the second part of the book is just thinking about the practices that Augustine gave his, you know, his days and years to uh in pastoral ministry.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: So the cure of souls, how we the work of ministry is reordering our loves uh according to the design that God has given us, thinking about the work of preaching, the work of catechesis, instructing people in the faith, and then how a pastor should think about the church ecclesiology.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so the book is divided in those ways and is meant to help us to apply Augustine's own thinking to our own time and places and the work that God has entrusted to us.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I particularly appreciate it that you bring to the fore his significance as a pastor, because I think that's um often forgotten, not just for Augustine, but a lot of the uh late antique church fathers, that they were primarily pastors.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and obviously their theological contributions are well worth studying, but at the same time, what did these people do as their day job?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this makes a difference in what they wrote and how they wrote it.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I assume you went into this book with some assumptions, ideas.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, what surprised you in the process?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Did you learn anything about Augustine or yourself that you found surprising?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I mean, Augustine surprised me um in the depth of his thought.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, which is not to say that I didn't think Augustine was a deep thinker when I began to study him, but he, in a way that is really um, I think so helpful, he has a way of giving us simple concepts which are not simplistic, but have a depth.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so as we go deeper into the these kind of concepts that he gives us, we find that the categories he gives us are capacious enough for the questions that we might bring to them.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I think about, you know, how Augustine thinks about um the two cities in the city of God.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that is a that is a really um simple category for thinking about human life in the world and the relationship between the Christian and the world uh around him or her.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also a category that Augustine can explore fruitfully for you know pages and pages.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: Think about a concept like the ordering of love.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that this is what Jesus has to say to us about when summing up what the meaning of the scriptures are is to love God and to love neighbor.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And yet Augustine has a way of taking that concept and helping us think through how we apply this in all sorts of you know very specific uh situations that we might find ourselves in.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Think about how Augustine thinks about humility and pride.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: He thinks about humility and pride not just as uh sort of um postures that individuals might take, but he has a way of thinking about this, how humility affects institutions, how humil affects, in fact, entire civilizations can be characterized by pride or humility as well.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's he's such a there's just so much depth that I was surprised as I the more I got into Augustine, the more I just found there was more, there was more to explore.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, also just as we we said, I said earlier, he's such a fruitful thinker for thinking through so many things, the relationship between pagan culture and Christian revelation, the relationship between faith and understanding, the relationship between the church and the world, the relationship between uh spiritual formation or you know, uh, and intellectual work that we have.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then at the end of, but at the end of the work, I was just really surprised, in spite of all of all these things, how relatable he is.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he is he's an ordinary human being, uh, and he had a considerable intellect.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the more I ri got to know him through his writings, the less I was intimidated by him, and the more I was endeared to him.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a that was a real gift for me uh in this process.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: The greatest theologians of the past, they were just people too.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we place them sometimes on this pedestal, and like Augustine, yes.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's definitely an implied pedestal, and yet, yes, he was a person, he was a sinner, he was a convert, and he was a pastor.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dig into the confessions.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, what kind of a book is this?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And do you have any tips, especially for first-time readers?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know it can be a little intimidating.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard multiple people say it's like, well, I've thought about reading Augustine's confessions.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds a little scary.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what kind of a book is the confessions?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is is really the question for the confessions.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and the more that we can um set aside our expectation that the confessions is a single kind of book, the more I think we'll be prepared to to read the confessions and uh to start to enjoy all the things it has to offer us.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um confession confessions is, I mean, I think it's such a it's sort of a multivalent work.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just one thing.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that goes back even just to the word that the book is named, confessio, right?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: So what does that word mean?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, we associate that often with a confession of sin uh that might take place during corporate worship, or depending on our tradition, it could take place, you know, in a relationship with a spiritual authority to us.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: But for Augustine, it meant that it did mean admitting sins, but it also meant praise, and it also meant a kind of acknowledgement of what is true, what what someone has found to be true.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so reading the confessions as a book that is doing all of those things, it is not just Augustine telling the truth about his sin his sin and God's love for him in that.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: But it is also Augustine telling the truth about who God is and what work God has done in his life.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's and it's also Augustine telling the truth of you know his praise uh of God for the work that he has done in his life and trying to to move us, the reader, uh, to join him in praising God as well.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so if I was going to give advice on what uh like how to read the confessions for the first time, I think that um I would start by saying to kind of inviting the reader to kind of put his or her guard down when they read the book.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um because Augustine is speaking to us self-consciously.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there we're sort of the third, you know, uh angle of a triangle that Augustine is inviting us into in this reading.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: So there's Augustine, there's God, who he he is talking to.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the entire book is a prayer to God.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And yet he knows that we're listening in.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: And he's he's he's including us and speaking to us and inviting us um to enjoy the same kind of relationship that Augustine is enjoying and pursuing with the triune God as well.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh by being a charitable reader and letting Augustine uh kind of speak to our own experiences, even as he speaks very personally of his own, I think that um the what makes, as we were saying earlier, what makes the confession so A classic is that we find ourselves in Augustine's restlessness and the ways in which when he chases things that were never meant to satisfy us, he feels his life disintegrating and falling apart.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And yet when Augustine, you know, begins to turn back to God and finds in God the beauty and the satisfaction that he longs for, I think he he does so in a way that moves us to seek the same things as well.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: The thing I would say is just to the confessions is a book of questions, um, and to pay attention to those questions.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: And um, because I think Augustine is inviting us to to bring our own questions to God.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the book is really in some ways an extended meditation on Jesus' uh teaching to, you know, to ask, to seek, to knock.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that's how the book starts.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the final sentences of the book are inviting us to continue to ask and seek and knock alongside Augustine.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And probably a little bit uncomfortable at first for a modern reader, just reading a book that all of it is addressed to God.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: We don't really write like this, at least not for commercial publication.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's what makes it such a unique book, uh, in yeah, how how it in how it forms us uh and how it refuses to let us sit on the outside as kind of a disinterested observer.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he's he implicates us in his writing.
• 23:38
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• 23:52
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• 24:04
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• 24:12
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• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's walk through the book a little bit more in detail.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: The basic story.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: What is he telling us?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what would you recommend that we pay special attention to?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so uh Augustine comes to us in what um is called 13 books.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: We might think of them as 13 chapters.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: And in uh his at the end of his life, Augustine went through all of his works and wrote um kind of a preface or uh and oftentimes corrections to everything he did.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so in that book, the the Retracciones, uh, he tells us the structure of confessions.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: He says the first 10 books uh are about his life, and uh the last three books, books 11 through 13, are about um how to read holy scripture as well.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: So we think about the structure of those first 10 books.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it tells the story of a man's departure from God uh and then his eventual return to God as God pursues him.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: And what is so wonderful about the confessions is that each reading gives you something more as you follow that story that he gives us, like each reading, I think, has a way of giving you another layer to what Augustine uh is doing.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so he tells the story of his life um from his birth, and he reflects on what his birth, what his infancy would have been like, and then tells us much of the biography that um that we talked about earlier in the podcast up until his conversion uh in his mid-30s.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um so what should we pay attention to?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we should pay attention to this things that Augustine pays attention to, which are not things that you would normally find in someone's autobiography.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so in book two of the confessions, Augustine tells at length the story of a moment in his life which would be deemed insignificant.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a moment where he stole some pears as well.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so, as we pay attention to that story, it's worth asking like, why does Augustine spend so much time talking about his theft of some fruit?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and in one way, uh Augustine is telling the story about how his own life recapitulates the story of humanity in the theft of fruit in the garden as well.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think to pay attention to is just the structure of those first 10 books.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Augustine is self-consciously, although not obviously to the reader, kind of following the story of the declinion of his life into sin and a specific understanding of sin that um is found in our Bibles in 1 John chapter 2, verse 16, which talks about sin in three ways.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of a typology of sin.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Sin is the desires of the eyes, excuse me, desires of the flesh, desires of the eyes, and the pride of life.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: And as you follow from book two to book three to book four, he focuses on how he is embracing each of those forms of sin through his own like desire to satisfy his fleshly desires in book two, to his own kind of grasping after um sort of experiences that will superficially satisfy him.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of the desire of the eyes, which we could talk more about, but goes to a classical understanding of what is called curiosity, which in the classical world was was not a virtue, was actually a vice.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then in his own pursuit of sort of professional advancement and the um in the pride of life.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: And in his pursuit of this, uh in book five of the August of the Confessions, Augustine gets on a boat and he goes to Carth to from Carthage to Rome, fleeing his mom, who is praying for him.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and as he goes on that journey, he doesn't realize that God has a very different plan for that journey for him.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so in books six and seven and eight, we see God sort of unwinding Augustine's kind of sinful behavior.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so in book six, Augustine realizes just the fruitlessness of his um his uh pursuit of academic advancement, and he he begins to wonder if getting to the top of the org chart is really what he wants to do with his life.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then in book seven, he starts to realize that the answers he's looked for in uh in his desire for truth have been superficial, and uh God unwinds his the desire of the eyes.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then in book eight, his kind of the pivotal moment of conversion, Augustine gives up uh his fleshly desires uh and submits his life to God.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so that just that structure I think is helpful to just get a sense of like why is Augustine talking about this?
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why in book six does he spend so much time talking about an interaction with a beggar who seems more happy than he is?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I also just each reading gives some more.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's just interesting to think about all the details that Augustine gives us in this book that the more you read, you know, it's just so interesting that in the first, the first half of the of those chapters, Augustine almost never uses a proper noun to describe anyone.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's only until God begins to turn his life around that he begins to call people by their names, which in some ways I think Augustine acknowledging now, like now I'm able to live in community.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm able to have real relationships because God is God is calling me back to himself when he's calling me to others as well.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: So there's all sorts of little torical things that it's pretty incredible to think about how Augustine was able to pull all of this together.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: And um, he was a master rhetorician.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's what he was teaching.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: So here he is bringing all of those talents to the writing of this story.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I would love to hear more about um, so you've mentioned like the sins of the flesh, the sins of the eyes, the desires, the sinful desires of the flesh, and uh sinful desires of the eyes, because these are problems we're facing too.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: This this is very, very Roman Empire, but it's also very 21st century America.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think, yes, there's a lot to say about that.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think Augustine's description of the desires of the eyes is really, really helpful for us today.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because Augustine in book three of the confessions, the way that he talks about the desires of the eyes, one of the stories he tells is his relationship to the theater in his own time and how he would go to plays and he would go expecting to be moved to tears, um, and sort of longing for that experience of kind of having a sentimental moment uh and it and yet never being moved to action based on those emotions, which I think is is a is a way that entertainment just functions perennially.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, it that it in its in its most, I guess, vicious forms, it that's how it functions.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it it seek it leads us to seek certain emotional experiences while not moving us to become virtuous men or women as well.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that kind of sense of curiosity, at one point Augustine calls it like he calls it the experience of like scratching an itch, but but never, you know, never being able to like have that itch removed.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that that kind of restlessness, you know, I think for me is is is kind of what the experience of social media, you know, tries to tries to cultivate in me, you know.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so sometimes when he's talking about this, like, is Augustine talking about manichaeism or are you talking about uh Twitter on you know a week night?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking about the book, uh Scrolling Ourselves to Death.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah, that's that's us.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: And also I think, you know, I think the way Augustine talks about pride is just really helpful because he doesn't he doesn't kind of resign himself to really easy pat answers to that.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like when he talks about his own experience of pride, he really acknowledges that there are ways in which praise should be the right response to a life well lived.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: And often is, it's not always the case.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, and so when he thinks about his own life as a pastor, he thinks, you know, if if people were always uh people never said I was doing a good job, um, there might be something very wrong with that experience.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I could just be doing a very good job.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: But then, but he also asks, but why I want to ask the deeper question is why do I why do I want that?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Do I want the praise or do I want to be the kind of person who is worthy of praise?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a really that that's a that's a way of thinking about that, that gives us the ability to be much more discerning rather than to kind of be very sort of sort of black and white binary.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I don't want to be praised, you know, or you know, or anything like that.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I think those categories are just really helpful as he kind of unpacks what John is doing in 1 John 2, 16.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I'm reminded of that Roman context because humility was not a Roman virtue, but it was a Christian one.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Augustine um is living kind of at the beginning of humility being something worth pursuing and um and is able to name Roman pride for what it is, which is kind of a lot of bluster, but not a lot of substance underneath it.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that that comes out more in the City of God, but you can tell when he thinks about his own education, even in uh in the confessions, he's he realizes that he was praised for his ability in grammar, and yet the stories that he was talking about were uh pretty horrible stories with not a lot of virtue at the center of them.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh he kind of is able to say that was there's a pride in that that um was kind of was rotten at its center.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk a little bit more about the confessions as a book written by a pastor that presumably people in his congregation read, which is just awkward.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's right, yes.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: It is uh it is quite remarkable to think to compare the the kind of story Augustine tells about himself versus what I understand to be most uh kind of stories of the lives of saints in his own time, which was you know a some amount of narration of life before uh before Christ, uh, and then a fairly heroic tale uh about who the saint was.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Augustine tells a very different story, um one that is very um painstaking in its description of his sinful life.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: That that makes up quite a bit of the book.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's not a it's not a it's not a cursory examination of that by any stretch of the imagination.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: And yet Augustine is also very um, very intentional in describing his life as unfinished and still on the way as a pilgrim.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so even in book 10, when he finally gets to the end of telling the story of his own life and faith and Jesus' bringing him to himself and his conversion and baptism.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: In book 10, he kind of stops and sort of goes back again and says, Here's where I'm still just wrestling with this.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: And kind of book 10 ends it with one of the few times where Augustine really mentions his pastoral identity, and he talks about standing behind the Lord's table and you know dispensing to others the bread of life, but recognizing that he is he needs it as well.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: And what he gives to others uh is something that he takes for himself as well.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's um that's a vision of pastoral identity that I think is really refreshing and helpful for pastors today and needed.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I mean, pastoral failures I think are perennial from age to age, but um in our own times they're very public.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Augustine gives us, gives pastors some resources, how to, how to think about themselves, not as um, not as finished, uh, finished human persons, but as people still very much on the way.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think Augustine also just gives us a vision of the pastoral life in a in a as a life that is demanding and intellectually satisfying, and uh that is just really compelling.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think he he shows us past his own life as a pastor and what he talks about in confessions about his rejection of manichaeism, his, you know, the way that he uses uh philosophy to kind of help him solve intellectual problems, help him to read the scriptures more faithfully, his own, um, the way that Neoplatonism helped him to do that, and yet also the way that he modified Neoplaton, the Platonic thought in a way that needed it needed to be submitted to the truths of scripture.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, he gives us a a vision of what it means to be a pastor that I think calls us to more uh and calls us on a on a path that um will be on all our lives in in ministry, um, as well as giving us a vision for what it means to be human that invites us, whoever we are, whether we're pastors or not, to continue to see ourselves on the way, pilgrims uh on the way home.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I would like to think that people in his congregation or around North Africa and really the Roman Empire reading this, maybe felt more comfortable going to their pastors with sins and questions, because it seems like peeling the veil away from this and saying, like, pastors are people too.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and especially uh as we consider how many um how many converts to Christianity sometimes with the zeal of a convert end up going into ministry.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a story very much of someone who did that.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, that's well put.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I can imagine that his his flock who are familiar with the book would have would have seen in Augustine someone who is as like them, uh not just fundamentally different than them.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: So without obviously revealing uh secrets of people, um, I would love to hear a little bit more about how you've applied um your reading of Augustine to your own uh pastoral ministry.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think in an in a number of ways, I mean, I I do think one in the one of the ways in particular that um I have found Augustine helpful is in his vision of pastoral friendship.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um Augustine was a man who, in spite of our tendency to think of him as um a sort of solitary, introspective uh person, Augustine, uh to quote Peter Brown, who you mentioned earlier, uh, was never alone.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: Even at the moment of his conversion, Olypius is sitting next to him.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Augustine recognizes the dangers of friendship, his theft of the pairs was something he says he wouldn't have done it if it was just him.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: But he also recognizes the the joys and the pleasures of friendship.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: And Augustine lived at a time where friendship was understood to be a like a necessary component of the good life.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like you couldn't, you couldn't live the good life without friends.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: And as Augustine pursued that, as in life as a pastor, he his life was just marked by some remarkable friendships with his brothers in the monastery when he corresponded with people like Jerome.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and those friendships, while not uncomplicated and not sometimes without tension, because of that ideal of friendship, Augustine, um, Augustine was able to, I think, serve his local church, but also just to serve the church Catholic uh through that.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, Augustine has been really helpful as I think about my own pastoral friendships.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a part of a small group of pastors, and we have kind of made promises to stay in friendship with one another and try to think about our friendship as not just an association of like mutual admiration, but instead like uh a way in which we want to call one another to something good, um, to the to the happy life.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that's been very helpful.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: I do think Augustine's work on the loves is helpful to me.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's just as I spend time with people in my congregation.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it can be very easy as a pastor to focus primarily on behavior modification and to kind of look for superficial answers to the questions that uh our men and women bring to us.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: But he guess has a way of just looking to the heart and asking, like, what are the what are the deeper desires and attachments that are going on in in a person?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: And how do we shepherd people to um to love God and then to love neighbor and to use the things that God has given us uh so that we can enjoy God Himself?
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's been very helpful.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and Augustine's also been helpful just as I think about discipleship in my local congregation.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: He had a vision of catechesis, some of which he just inherited, you know, as he experienced it himself uh when he converted to Christianity and was baptized.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: But he also innovated on that tradition and really sought to form men and women for lifelong faithfulness to God.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I um I I've learned from that.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: And in in some ways, I'm still quite some far ways away from implementing some uh some of those things, but um, he's given me a framework to think from uh as I think about those things.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's really lovely.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, a reminder that as uh God's people, we are connected to friends across the centuries.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, yes, as uh yeah, one of the joys of the the communion of saints.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, final question, which um I know it's a little bit of a pressure, but what classic do you wish you had written and why?
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, as A tough question.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: I I was very tempted to deviate from uh the person I've spent much of the last few years with, Augustine.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I did think about Middle March, that would have been a great book to have written, or Crime and Punishment.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: But I I ended up reverting to another book by Augustine, The City of God.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I what I um admire about this book is its ability to be both um timely and timeless.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's timely in that Augustine is giving pastoral guidance to um a group of people who are bewildered um by the sack of Rome in 410 and afraid, unsure of the future.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: And yet it's timeless in that he is helping us to think through the broad scope of world history.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's helping us to think through what it looks like to live as pilgrims in the world and yet not to shun the world, but to continue to love the world around us.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, it's a it's a book of remarkable pastoral guidance and yet incredible intellectual depth and resources.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's um it's a fantastic, fantastic book.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: The City of God.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't, I know I am incapable of reading of writing that book, but uh it is, it's it's it's one of my favorites.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and that's the delight of thinking what incredible classics we wish we could have written.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: But but the good news is they exist already.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Joey, thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Nadia.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's a gift, a gift to be with you and uh yeah, enjoy the time.