Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter

Margaret R. Miles

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608997596
  9781498212915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621894537
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Augustine and the Fundamentalist's Daughter, Margaret Miles weaves her memoirs together with reflections on Augustine's Confessions. Having read and reread Augustine's Confessions, in admiration as well as frustration, over the past thirty-five years, Miles brings her memories of childhood and youth in a fundamentalist home into conversation with Augustine's effort to understand his life. The result is a fascinating work of autobiographical and theological reflection. Moreover, this project brings together a rare combination of insights on fundamentalists' convictions and habits of mind, as well as on differences among fundamentalists. Such reflections are especially urgent in this time in which fundamentalism is prominent in political and social discourse.

1 Disorder and Early Sorrow1

I lived and I felt. . . . I looked for pleasure, exaltations, truths not in God, but in God’s creatures (myself and the rest), and so I fell straight into sorrows, confusions, and mistakes. (1.20)

We come to expect love in the forms we first knew it.

—george makari2

Our hearts are restless until they rest in you (1.1). Augustine’s memoirs begin with the evanescent self, guaranteed nothing but mortality. Created ex nihilo, nothingness remains with us as lack, void, restlessness, the “suspicion that ‘I’ am not real.”3 He proceeds quickly to prayer, to re-collection of the scattered self in which the self is placed, stabilized, and secured in God: I could not exist therefore, my God, were it not for your existence in me. Or would it be more accurate to say that I could not exist unless I existed in you? (1.2). The missing self, the lack, has been filled with the ultimate security, the God who fills all things and are wholly present in everything you fill (1.3). Having established his own existence, he begins to trace his life from the womb forward.

Handicapped by inability to observe his own infant behavior, Augustine was forced to rely on the report of others and on observation of another infant, perhaps his son. At first the infant is nothing but “life and a body” (1.7). Instinctively he sucks nourishment from a woman’s breast, nourishment that is generously provided, he specifies, not by the nurse herself, but by God. Augustine remarked that he must have smiled first when I was asleep, and later when I was awake (1.6). He implies that the infant’s waking smile is simply extrapolated from the biological sleeping grimace. Had he lingered to explore the infant’s first smile (at approximately three months of age, as later studies show) and its implications, he might have revised his teaching that the infant’s first intentional act—what is “original” to the infant—is sin. For, according to modern researchers, the smile is an affectively charged movement, “a sign of openness toward another, sign of friendliness and warmth, a social interaction.”4

Psychiatrist René Spitz, who studied the smiling response, analyzed the infant’s disposition to smile as a “manifestation of pleasure experienced when beholding the presence of a human partner.”5 From extensive experimental studies, Spitz concludes that the infant’s smile is intentional, “the first natural sign of recognition of another that, in its gesture of amiability, carries with it a natural moral tone: to be open and friendly toward others . . . . [It is] a spontaneous individual kinetic act, and precisely not legislated or taught.”6 Similarly, psychiatrist Melanie Klein, studying infant behavior at the breast, observed that within a few weeks after birth, an infant who has learned that she will be fed when she is hungry is then more interested in the mother’s face than in the nourishment she offers.7

Answering the objection that the infant’s smile merely imitates the smiling face it sees, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone argues that the infant’s smile is not only intentional, but it is also “an initiatory act,” not a response.8 Interpreting the smile as the infant’s original intentional and initiatory act is conclusively supported by research showing that blind babies smile.9

However, what Augustine noticed as he observed infant behavior was that the infant’s first intentional act is sinful.10 He asks, Who can recall to me the sin I did in my infancy? Observing a baby who was envious; it could not yet speak but it turned pale and looked bitterly at another baby sharing its milk, he declared that infants are harmless because of physical weakness, not because of any innocence of mind (1.7). For a fundamentalist, the essential statement of selfhood is: I am a sinner.11 Although this acknowledgement might appear to license sinning, fundamentalists strain every nerve not to appear sinful.

G. K. Chesterton once said that original sin is the only Christian doctrine that is fully documented; any newspaper, any day, will give ample testimony to the perversity of human nature. This is not the place for an exposition on the doctrine of original sin, but a clarification is necessary. The doctrine is not based on the claim that the infant’s first intentional act was/is sinful, but on St. Paul’s claim that Adam’s sin made all humans sinners. Augustine developed Tertullian’s idea of the existence of an original weakness (vitium originalis) into the doctrine of original sin (peccatum originalis). In his treatise, Ad Simplicianum, written shortly before his Confessions, “we meet the epoch-making phrase originale peccatum, meaning a sinful quality which is born with us and is inherent in our constitution.”12 Furthermore, originale peccatum includes not only the possibility of sin, but also “original guilt.”13 Augustine also volunteered the innovation that original sin is transmitted through sex at the moment of conception. His experience of helpless concupiscentia was confirmed for him by his observation that the infant’s first intentional act already shows the effects of original sin. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; individuals reiterate the experience of the species. Moreover, Augustine’s often repeated principle that any good in the individual is directly attributed to God makes it imperative and obvious that the infant’s first intentional act must be sinful. The only way to be a self is to be a sinner.

•

Augustine assumed that the subjects one studies are silent until one approaches them with the right question. He brought to his interpretation of the infant his predilection for noticing sin. The question he brought to observation of the infant was, What, then, was my sin? Was it that I cried for more as I hung upon the breast? The jealous infant suggests a possibility to Augustine; perhaps his sin was envy: Can one really describe as ‘innocence’ the conduct of one who, when there is a fountain of milk flowing richly and abundantly, will not allow another child to have his share of it? (1.7). Infant’s inarticulateness insures that they and their behavior become helpless victims of adult projections!

Augustine’s interpretation of the infant’s body language is reminiscent of a discussion I had with my mother some years ago. In defense of her anti-abortion position, Mother told me that she saw an anti-abortion advertisement that showed a fetus in the womb shrinking from a knife that came towards it. “But Mother,” I said, “my granddaughter (then six months old) would not know enough to shrink from a knife.” She had to acknowledge that the ad depended either on trick photography or on coincidence, and in either case, on projection.

The studies of modern psychiatrists and psychologists from an ontogenetic perspective indicate that pleasure and openness to another’s presence precedes the frustration and rage Augustine understood as fundamental to human nature. Infantile fear responses develop from the so-called startle reflex (at about two months, to sudden loud noise or loss of support), to “stranger anxiety.” Stranger anxiety is the infant’s first antisocial behavior. In other words, fear responses originate in reaction to environmental stimuli and are not extrapolated to social stimuli until the infant is approximately nine months old.14 From an ontogenetic perspective, Augustine was wrong, but influentially wrong.

Throughout the history of the West, sweeping conclusions about “human nature” have been drawn from Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. Theologians such as Martin Luther and Jean Calvin have based their theologies on the belief that humans are fundamentally sinful. My mother agreed. On days when I had a cold, was out of sorts or otherwise crabby, she said, “That’s your real self coming out!” Later I had a friend whose mother, in similar circumstances, said, “You’re not yourself today, dear.”

Even Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, who disagreed dramatically with Augustine on almost everything else, found the roots of repression and neurosis in infantile life.15 Freud and Augustine share a bleak and disrespectful view of children.16 “Freud’s child is a humiliated creature, driven by discomfort, dread, and shame.”17 He is anxious, grasping, ignorant, and insecure, cravenly seeking protection, reassurance, love. Augustine’s child is greedy, disobedient, lying, lazy, jealous, and unhappy.

And when people did not do what I wanted, either because I could not make myself understood or because what I wanted was bad for me, then I would become angry with my elders for not being subservient to me, and with responsible people for not acting as though they were my slaves, and I would avenge myself on them by bursting into tears. (1.6–7)

Moreover, Augustine saw in the infant’s behavior the source and paradigm of lifelong aggression and acquisitiveness: For it is just these same sins which, as the years pass by, become related no longer to tutors, schoolmasters, footballs, nuts, and pet sparrows, but magistrates and kings, gold, estates, and slaves (1.19).

Clearly, Augustine did not regard infancy with rose-colored glasses. It is important, and...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Disorder and Early Sorrow1
• Chapter 2 Learning How to Live
• Chapter 3 Laziness and Inertia
• Chapter 4 Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Chapter 5 Staying Is Nowhere
• Chapter 6 Mothers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters
• Chapter 7 Relaxing from Myself—a Little1
• Chapter 8 Conversion and Conversions
• Chapter 9 Parents or Fellow Pilgrims?
• Chapter 10 The Difficulty of Beautiful Things
• Chapter 11 The One Thing
• Chapter 12 A Sharp Quick Sense of Life
• Chapter 13 The Weight of Love
• Epilogue
• Bibliography