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The Saint Who Couldn’t Stop Sinning · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr. Jordan Vale.
• 0:10
  In today's episode,
• 0:12
  we're going to look at the saint who couldn't stop sinning.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a pear tree in North Africa, sometime around the year 370.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: An underreared,
• 0:23
  a group of teenage boys are about to do something none of them
• 0:25
  will ever be able to
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: explain.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: The pears are not good.
• 0:29
  They belong to a neighbor,
• 0:30
  and the boys honestly have better food at home.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody's hungry.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: But late one night,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: they strip the tree anyway,
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: more pears than they could eat in a week,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: and they carry them off and throw most of them to the pigs.
• 0:42
  One of those boys will spend the next 40 years turning that
• 0:45
  night over in his mind.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: What kept him going back to it was just the senselessness of it.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: No one got hurt.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: The pairs were almost worthless.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: He had stolen something he didn't even want,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: for no reward,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: at real risk,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: for the pure pleasure of doing the thing he knew he should not do.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Why would anyone do that?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he couldn't let the question go.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: We understand a man who steals bread when he's starving.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: But he had not been starving.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: He had wanted nothing the theft could give him except the theft itself.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: The wrong was the whole point and he could not see the bottom of it.
• 1:18
  To understand why stolen pears would haunt a man for the rest
• 1:21
  of his life,
• 1:22
  you have to know what he became and what he spent that whole
• 1:24
  life running from.
• 1:26
  He was born in 354 in a small town in Roman North Africa in
• 1:30
  what is now Algeria.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: His mother prayed for him without stopping.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: His father honestly just wanted him to be impressive.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he was.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Words came to his mouth the way Mozart comes to a child prodigy's hands.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: By 17,
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  SPEAKER_01: he had been sent to the city of Carthage to study rhetoric,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: the art of persuasion,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: which in the Roman world was the fastest road to money and power.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And Carthage gave him a whole new world.
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  SPEAKER_01: He loved every second of it.
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  He described arriving there as walking straight into a place
• 1:58
  where unholy loves
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: boiled up around him on every side.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: He took a lover,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: they stayed together for years,
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  SPEAKER_01: and she gave him a son,
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: a boy he named Odietus,
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: which means given by God.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm,
• 2:13
  that's a strange name to give a child you fathered outside any
• 2:16
  marriage your world
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: would recognize.
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  But even then,
• 2:19
  part of him was reaching for God with hands that were busy
• 2:22
  doing something else.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: He spent the next decade and more living as two men at once.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: One of the men was climbing.
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  He chased the best teaching positions and posts across the
• 2:32
  empire and eventually
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  SPEAKER_01: won an imperial appointment in Milan,
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  a position that put the life his father had dreamed of within
• 2:38
  arm's reach.
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  He was brilliant,
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  admired,
• 2:41
  on his way up,
• 2:42
  with a partner,
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  a son,
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  and a future.
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  SPEAKER_01: The other man in him was looking for something and couldn't find it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: For nine years,
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  SPEAKER_01: he gave himself to a religion called Manicheism,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: which explained the existence of evil by cutting the universe in half,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: light on one side and darkness on the other.
• 3:01
  Part of its appeal was the silent permission it gave him to
• 3:04
  live a dualistic life.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: If the darkness was its own separate force,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: then the bad things he was doing,
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: they weren't fully his.
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  SPEAKER_01: And when the movement's famous teachers finally sat in front of him,
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  SPEAKER_01: And they couldn't answer his hardest questions,
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  SPEAKER_01: he walked away from it,
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: now more restless than before.
• 3:22
  In Milan,
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  he started slipping into the back of a well-known bishop's
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  church.
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  He went at first to study the man as a performer,
• 3:29
  to see how a master handled a crowd.
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  And he found himself caught up by what the man was actually
• 3:34
  saying,
• 3:35
  against his own will.
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  The scriptures,
• 3:37
  that he had dismissed as crude,
• 3:39
  were being read in a way he had never imagined.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the door he thought was closed, it turned out to have a handle.
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  SPEAKER_01: His mother had followed him to Milan by then.
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  Her name was Monica,
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  and she had been praying towards this exact moment for most of
• 3:52
  his life.
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  SPEAKER_01: But she did do the practical thing a mother of her time would do.
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  She arranged a respectable marriage,
• 3:58
  the kind that would finish his climb.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: But there was one obstacle.
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  SPEAKER_01: The girl was still too young to marry,
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  and the match required sending away the woman he had lived with
• 4:07
  for over a decade.
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  SPEAKER_01: He sent her away.
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  He wrote later that his heart,
• 4:11
  where it clung to her,
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  was torn open and left bleeding.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: with the wedding still two years off and his bed suddenly empty,
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  SPEAKER_01: he took another lover anyway,
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  SPEAKER_01: because he could not stand to be alone with himself.
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  And this is the part everyone leaves out when they turn him
• 4:26
  into a marble statue or
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: place City of God prominently on their bookshelf.
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  SPEAKER_01: He knew precisely what he wanted to become.
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  SPEAKER_01: He could see the better life with total clarity.
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  SPEAKER_01: He could describe it more beautifully than almost any person alive,
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  SPEAKER_01: argue for it,
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  SPEAKER_01: move audiences the tears about it.
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  SPEAKER_01: And he could not make himself walk through it.
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  He would resolve the change and then stand there watching
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  himself not change as
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  SPEAKER_01: though his own will were a stranger who would not take his orders.
• 4:53
  And there's a prayer from those years that gives away the
• 4:55
  entire game he was playing.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: He asked God to make him pure.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then under his breath, he attached a condition.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Not yet.
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  He was asking to be rescued from the one thing he was not
• 5:07
  finished enjoying He
• 5:08
  wanted the cure on the guarantee that it would not work out too
• 5:12
  soon And anyone who
• 5:14
  has ever set an alarm to begin a whole new life on Monday
• 5:16
  morning we know that
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: prayer
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, it finally came apart in a garden in Milan in the summer of 386.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: He was past 30.
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  SPEAKER_01: A visitor had been in his house that day,
• 5:28
  telling stories about ordinary people who had walked away from
• 5:30
  everything for God.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Men that were not smarter nor stronger than he was.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And these stories, they didn't inspire him, they humiliated him.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Here were average people doing the thing he could not do,
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: and he was supposed to be the gifted one in every room.
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  SPEAKER_01: He fled the house into the garden with something like a panic attack.
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  SPEAKER_01: He threw himself down under the bare covering of a fig tree and wept.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing he kept saying over and over was a question about time.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: How long?
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  SPEAKER_01: How long would he keep saying tomorrow, then tomorrow, then tomorrow?
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  SPEAKER_01: Why not put an end to it this very hour?
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  SPEAKER_01: And then,
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  SPEAKER_01: through the garden wall,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: from the house next door,
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  SPEAKER_01: he heard a child's voice,
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  SPEAKER_01: a boy or girl he could never afterwards say which,
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  SPEAKER_01: singing one short phrase again and again.
• 6:17
  The way children do when they've turned a handful of words into
• 6:20
  a song in their head.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Take up and read.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Take up and read.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: He had a book of Paul's letters lying nearby.
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  SPEAKER_01: He opened it wherever it fell and read the first words his eyes touched.
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  A line that told him to put down the appetites he kept losing
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  to and to clothe
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  SPEAKER_01: himself instead in Christ.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: He said that as he finished the sentence,
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  SPEAKER_01: light poured in and every last shadow of doubt was simply gone.
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  SPEAKER_01: The man's name was Augustine.
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  And the reason he still matters 16 centuries later is what he
• 6:49
  did with the discovery.
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  SPEAKER_01: That he had not been able to save himself.
• 6:54
  Most people who turn their lives around tell a story about
• 6:57
  willpower afterward.
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  SPEAKER_01: I was lost and then I pulled myself together.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: I found my way.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine told the opposite story.
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  And he would build a theology out of it that was going to shape
• 7:06
  the next 1500 years
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: of the western world.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: A while later,
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  SPEAKER_01: a calm,
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  respectable British monk named Pelagius began teaching
• 7:15
  something that at first
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: sounded completely sensible.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: God commands us to be good, so we must be capable of being good.
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  SPEAKER_01: The power to obey is already inside us, and we only have to use it.
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  SPEAKER_01: Stop making excuses.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Choose the right thing.
• 7:28
  Augustine had spent half his life trying to choose the right
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  thing by raw effort and losing.
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  SPEAKER_01: And he knew in his bones, Pelagius had it wrong.
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  He argued that the human will is not nearly as free as we like
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  to flatter ourselves.
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  SPEAKER_01: That a person can be dragged along by his own habits,
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  SPEAKER_01: like a man bound in a chain he forged himself one link at a time.
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  And no quantity of clever reasoning or sincere intention can
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  close the distance
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  SPEAKER_01: between the good we can see and the good we actually do.
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  Something has to reach in from outside and lift a will that
• 7:58
  cannot lift itself.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: He called back grace.
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  The man who could not stop sinning spent the rest of his life
• 8:04
  insisting no one can,
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  SPEAKER_01: at least not on their own power.
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  SPEAKER_01: And there was nothing gloomy in it for him.
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  SPEAKER_01: He was simply reporting what he'd experienced,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: after running the experiment on his own life for 30 years.
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  SPEAKER_01: He was baptized at Easter in 387, with his son standing beside him.
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  SPEAKER_01: Within a year,
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: his mother was dead,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: having lived just long enough to see the things she had prayed for.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Not long after that, his son died too, still a teenager.
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  SPEAKER_01: He returned to North Africa,
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  SPEAKER_01: became the bishop of a port town called Hippo,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: and stayed there until the end.
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  SPEAKER_01: He wrote an account of his own wreckage and addressed it straight to God,
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: and it became the first true autobiography in the Western world.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Sure,
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  SPEAKER_01: other men had written records of their public triumphs,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: but he wrote a record of his private collapse,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: out loud,
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  SPEAKER_01: on purpose,
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  SPEAKER_01: and he called it worship.
• 8:51
  He died in 430 with a barbarian army at the city walls and the
• 8:55
  Roman world he had
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: known coming down around him.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: We tend to assume the goal of a moral life is to finally get it together,
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: to want the right things and then do them,
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  SPEAKER_01: cleanly,
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  SPEAKER_01: the way a competent adult handles their affairs.
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  Augustine's entire life is an argument that this is not how
• 9:13
  human beings actually
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: work,
• 9:14
  that the gap between knowing the good and doing it is not some
• 9:18
  private defect you
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: happen to suffer from.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's the everyday, ordinary human condition.
• 9:24
  He opened his confessions with a single sentence that he spent
• 9:27
  the rest of the book proving.
• 9:29
  You have made us for yourself,
• 9:30
  he wrote,
• 9:31
  and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: He spent 30 years trying harder, and the restlessness never lifted.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: What he came to believe was stronger and stranger than willpower.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: The restlessness was pointing at something,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: and the long,
• 9:48
  humiliating inability to fix himself turned out to be the most
• 9:51
  honest thing about
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: him,
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: and the first thing worth listening to.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: The pairs, turns out,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to the Theology Made podcast.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.