11 August 2004
The First Autobiography
'But what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind--the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy. Thy anger had come upon me, and I knew it not. I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my mortality, the punishment for my soul's pride, and I wandered farther from thee, and thou didst permit me to do so. I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications--and yet thou didst hold thy peace, O my tardy Joy! Thou didst still hold thy peace, and I wandered still farther from thee into more and yet more barren fields of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless lassitude.'
- St Augustine, Confessions, Book Two.
Augustine is considered to be the patron saint of sore eyes, which perhaps explains the Christian (and indeed secular) obsession with claiming that masturbation makes you blind.
Can we save Augustine from himself? So he believed in original sin ('intrinsic impairment'), dogmatism, interiority, guilt, and so forth. But what a good writer...
If anyone has access to the Roberto Rossellini film about him I would be eternally grateful if they could let me know, as it seems otherwise impossible to find.
