I’ve recently acquired the somewhat hare-brained habit of reading multiple books at once. While plugging away at Timothy Findlay’s "Les Robes Bleus" (traduit du "Spadework" en anglais), Robertson Davies’ “A Mixture of Frailties”, and listening to Milton Friedman’s “The World is Flat” on CD while working in the kitchen (!), I decided to pick up Saint Augustine’s “Confessions” and pace myself at several pages a day. My reasoning for this was that Augustine’s fare would provide more food for thought than the others, and thus would be best absorbed in small doses.
However, I was taken aback when—immediately after the preface and translator’s notes—as I had just barely begun to delve into the work, the author begins to confess for the sins of his infancy. He names his incessant crying and flailing of arms when hungry as an undue call for attention and a symbol of selfishness; no matter that he has no recollection of it at all. Indeed, he ascribes these sins to himself after watching the behaviour of other babies, and confirming with his mother that he was no exception.
While I personally find this notion absurd in the extreme, I also must acknowledge that it fits well with the theory that all human beings (and some would argue, all sentient beings) are born with the tendency to commit wrongdoing. If we cannot believe that people are innately good, we must assign such sins to babes. Since Augustine subscribes to the orthodox Christian view—now upheld by the Catholic Church as well as most Protestant denominations—that we are sinful creatures from the womb, it is fitting that he begins his Confessions from the very point of his entry into the world.
The argument of good and evil in nature is as old as humanity; in this, as throughout Augustine’s writing, it is not my aim to argue for or be attached to a particular side, but merely to point out the elements that I—as an ordinary layperson—may fail to understand. Perhaps I also have a perceptual bias in this: I was born premature, and came close to death several times within my first 48 hours on this earth. As a child, I often wondered what would have become of “me” if I had perished as an infant. Would God have given me a second chance? If I had had a soul, would He have “recycled” it for some future birth? Who would I have been? Who was “I” and would “I” even have existed? I didn’t like to think that He might have banished me to Purgatory, or to Hell, or to some zombie-world where doomed innocents went to pay for their unknown sins.
Does that seem consistent with a God who is fair, just, and good?
I suppose I will have to keep reading.
