Wisdom's Friendly Heart

Augustinian Hope for Skeptics and Conspiracy Theorists

Jennifer Hockenbery

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532690846, 9781532690853
• eBook ISBN: 9781532690860
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Sixteen-hundred years ago, Augustine begged his African congregants to think rationally, pay attention to evidence, and listen to their neighbors. He knew this would not be easy. He knew that human error is more common than human knowledge. He himself had been a member of an elitist cult for nearly ten years and then had spent several years as a skeptic resigned to seeking wealth and honors rather than hoping for truth or goodness. He would not be surprised by the rise of white supremacist cults or the nihilistic apathy that have arisen in the "post truth" era. He had seen nativism, elitism, fear, and doubt rise in response to a crisis of hope that truth could be found, a crisis that led to the use of physical force rather than educated disputation, a crisis that ended in the fall of both Rome and Carthage to Vandals and Visigoths.Augustine's response was to preach publically the hope that encouraged him in his own personal quest for a happy life. This book examines that hope in Augustine's context until the current moment.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Is There Really a Place for Augustine in the “Post-Truth Era”?

In 2005 on his satirical show “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert invented a new word, “truthiness,” to describe how a statement feels to a person who wishes the statement to be true even if there are no facts to support their feeling. Colbert joked that people should stop worrying about the truth of positions and instead rely on the “truthiness” of them. As always with satire, there was some truth—or at least truthiness—in his discussion of how contemporary people decide what to believe. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary named the adjective “post-truth” as the word of the year, a word that refers to the tendency of people in the twenty-first century to prefer opinion to fact or to be unable to differentiate between opinion and fact. By 2019, the expression “post-truth era” had become a mainstream term for the current age, an epoch in which people do not agree on any common criteria by which different people might judge the truthfulness of a statement. In the post-truth era, public opinion claims that the difference between ethics and aesthetics, between social good and social bias, and between science and conspiracy theory lies only in the heart, or the gut, of the person evaluating the claim.

This is in contrast to the era of the founding of the United States, an era commonly called “the Enlightenment,” when Thomas Paine announced that certain arguments are “common sense” and Thomas Jefferson claimed that certain truths are “self-evident.” And yet, if they were able to witness the present era, Enlightenment thinkers might be surprised to find so much skepticism about the possibility of objective knowledge even as the majority of American citizens have access to vaccines that have wiped out small pox, antibiotics that have radically reduced fears of scarlet fever and tuberculosis, and tiny computers that fit in their pockets that provide access to books, articles, and ideas from around the world. On one hand, contemporary thinkers are right to have a humility that Enlightenment thinkers all too often seemed to lack. Of course, human beings, even those who are intellectual giants, see the world through the lenses of their biases. On the other hand, contemporary thinkers seem to be blind to how much knowledge the human community has gained. Indeed, the very fact that contemporary thinkers can see the racist bias of an intellectual giant like Thomas Jefferson could be cause for hope in the progress of knowledge rather than despair that nothing can be known.

And yet, the despair that nothing can be known seems to be getting more press than the evidence for hope in acquiring new knowledge. Headlines that disparage other headlines as “fake news” are the norm as are those that decry the lack of civil conversation. In many cases, it seems that people simply do not trust anyone to be able to see correctly. In some cases, it seems that people do not even trust themselves to see correctly. Such a lack of trust leads to a lack of earnest engagement by the public in inquiry and dialogue just at that point in time when human beings have so many technological tools that allow inquiry into the smallest and farthest corners of the cosmos and that encourage dialogue with people all around the globe.

There are many hypotheses about the root of this lack of trust. Perhaps it began in university philosophy departments. Western philosophers have been arguing that people should be more careful about making assumptions since the era of the Enlightenment. Philosophers in the last century especially have been deconstructing the systems of belief that were once considered common knowledge and admonishing people to be aware of bias and hegemony. At the turn of the millennium, however, the philosophical academy realized that it might have a new battle to fight. Not naïve realism but radical skepticism seemed to have become the norm in society. Those who made their living advocating for the love of wisdom started to recognize the danger to their profession if people stopped believing in wisdom. Worse, for those philosophers who believe that Carl Linneaus aptly coined the term homo sapiens (literally “wisdom knowing hominoids”), the crisis of “truthiness” endangers not just academic departments but also the ability of people to live truly human lives.

Indeed, the crisis is not merely academic but critical to every day human life. People who do not believe that humans beings are capable of arriving at truth through sense experience, reason, and conversation are more likely to advocate for obedience rather than education, force rather than dialogue, and totalitarianism rather than democracy. In contrast, hope that human beings can find wisdom is a hope that inspires literacy rather than punishment, debate rather than violence, and freedom rather than dictatorship.

This book proposes that Augustine, the fourth-century African Doctor of Grace, might inspire such hope. In this post-truth era, it might seem naïve to expect that the advice of a fourth-century African bishop might be of any real use. Some readers might expect that such a book will be nostalgic at best and dangerously conservative at worst, advocating a view that readers ignore the last 1,500 years of scholarship in order to return to a simpler time. That is not the intention of this book. Rather, this book introduces—or re-introduces—Augustine to the contemporary reader as a figure who lived in an era when popular opinion was skeptical about the possibility of wisdom, when orators argued for verisimilitude (truthiness) rather than truth, when elitist cults gained members by advancing conspiracy theories, and when academics scoffed at the idea that knowledge could be advanced beyond bias. Augustine not only lived in such an era but he himself was tossed about on the waves of this culture. As a young man, he joined an elitist cult. When he escaped, he shrugged his shoulders at the possibility of truth and decided to use his rhetoric skills to serve the highest bidder. But then, at the peak of professional success but in the pit of personal despair, he discovered hope that he could know truth after all. This is a hope worth sharing.

This book presents Augustine as a sojourner towards truth who discovered that he alone could not become wise. Augustine came to advocate that the journey towards truth is always done in relationship—in relationship with nature, in relationship with community, and in relationship with the Truth who befriends the philosopher. As such, this book does not advocate a return to the study of Augustine’s specific views about the world as much as it advocates a future of study in which thinkers have hope that Truth is not beyond their grasp but is already in relationship with them. In short, Augustine believed that Truth has a friendly heart (misericordia) and that philosophy is the recognition of human friendship with wisdom. This belief was the foundation for his hope that human beings could inquire into nature, debate ethics and politics, and find ways to live happy, flourishing lives. This book evangelizes for Augustine’s hope in order that readers might be inspired to engage earnestly in inquiry, dialogue, and debate about the nature of themselves, their world, and the possibility of the happy life.

Who Was Augustine?

For the reader who is new to Augustine, the following section serves to present the African doctor in his historical time and place. Born in 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Northern Africa, Augustine was the child of a Christian mother and a polytheist father. While Western European Christians have been quick to consider him one of their own, Augustine was proud to be an African by birthright and by culture.1 This was well-noted by his Italian contemporaries who insulted him for using “Punic logic”2 and having “Numidian stubbornness,”3 although Augustine did not seem at all ashamed of his African origins or his African accent.4 Of course, Augustine also was cosmopolitan in orientation and scorned provincialism and nativism among both Africans and Italians. Perhaps this is why his Confessions has had such universal appeal to people in various cultural contexts throughout the last 1,600 years.

Augustine, often lauded as the first autobiographer, provided his readers with many details of his life in the Confessions. Writing for readers in his own time who might be Africans or Europeans, he assumed his audience would include catholic Christians as well as Donatists, gnostics, polytheists, Platonists, and academic skeptics. To all of these, Augustine, the master of rhetoric, gave an autobiography that is personal and intimate yet universal and inclusive.

Beginning with infancy, Augustine gave a portrait that was sympathetic to his childhood self and to children generally. He wrote about his mother, Monica, whom he adored, and his father, Patricius, who made life difficult for his mother. He barely mentioned his siblings, but it is known that he had a brother, Navigius, and a sister whom he does not name but whom tradition has called “Perpetua,” perhaps after the Carthaginian martyr. About himself, he explained that he liked to play ball more than he liked to do math and he liked to listen to Latin stories of Aeneas much more than do school work about the Greek epics of Odysseus, which his teachers demanded he read. He noted that he was often punished for fighting about who was best at ball on the playground, even though the same adults who punished him were rewarded for fighting amongst themselves in the academic arena. Generally, throughout the Confessions, he argued that there was very little difference between children and adults, and probably very little difference between himself and the reader.

His stories of adolescence were also in this vein, although he provided more particular details as his memories were sharper. He was an excellent student, and his parents decided to use their money to send him to Carthage to study for the law. In Carthage, he fell in love twice—with a young woman and with philosophy. He described his carnal love affair with shame, not so much because of its carnality as because of his ineptitude at loving well. Some scholars have decried Augustine for not naming his concubine in the text, but whatever her given name, she was clearly Augustine’s Dido, the African Queen whom Aeneas loved and left in Virgil’s great epic, The Aeneid. Augustine recalled and denounced the way he wept at the theater for the fictional Dido while failing to mourn for the real people he hurt with his own behavior. He claimed his own behavior was that of a foolish adolescent who loved the concept of love but did not know how to engage in loving his lover for her own sake. He claimed to have spoken about the pleasures of the marital bed with such eloquence that celibate friends forgot their vows. But his conjugal joys, he worried later, were selfish rather than self-giving. He blamed himself for engaging in lovemaking with his concubine without a desire to create children but only out of desire to find pleasure in the moment. Overall, Augustine’s account of his love affair with his concubine is confessional; he portrayed his role in the relationship as thoroughly corrupt. And yet, in the narrative of his failure to love purely, the reader must recognize an authentic love for this woman whom Augustine knew he had wounded. Perhaps the memory ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• A Note on Translation and Citations
• Abbreviations for Augustine’s Works
• Timeline of Augustine’s Life
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: On Fire for Truth
• Chapter 3: Everybody Loves a Secret
• Chapter 4: “Never Mind, It’s Only My Opinion”
• Chapter 5: Wisdom’s Friendship
• Chapter 6: The Influence of Hope
• Chapter 7: The Influence of Hope
• Chapter 8: Beyond Truthiness
• Bibliography