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Was Saint Augustine an anti-feminist?

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No, argues this excellent talk from 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~nmcenter/women-cp/augustin.html. I agree. He was a man of his time and fallible,16Augustine and certainly couldn’t have conceived of women as the equals of men in the City of Man.  But he undoubtedly saw men and women as equal in the City of God.  And, being the son of the indomitable Saint Monica, it is inconceivable to me that he would not have respected women’s intellect and moral strength.  That’s why I had to give him a strong, smart, spiritually indomitable mate in The Saint’s Mistress.

Augustine and His World (Part One)

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I wrote in an earlier post about the similarities I saw between life 21st-century America and the late Roman Empire.  People living in cities in the late Empire enjoyed many modern-ish conveniences and were surprisingly cosmopolitan.

But, the world of Leona and Aurelius Augustine was also a unique culture, which inevitably formed the future saint.  In this post, I examine the state of Christianity in North Africa while Augustine was growing to maturity.

In general, the native North Africans had never adopted the Romans gods. The cult of Mithras had its adherents, but most North Africans of Augustine’s era were either Christian or still worshipped the old Berber high gods like Ammon or Dea Caelestis.

North African Christians were generally more legalistic and rigid than Christians elsewhere. They were warm, passionate argumentative people compared to the cool, self-controlled Romans.  This led to literal Biblical interpretation and to the bitterness of their schisms.

Augustine would later be instrumental in establishing Christian orthodoxy, but in his youth the rising church was anything but united.  In North Africa in particular, sects and heresies abounded.  As I portray in my book, Donatists and Caecelians clashed bitterly and often violently.  The schism between the two sects went back to the Diocletan persecution.  Certain priests compromised during the persecution; others went to their deaths defending the faith.  80 years later, North African Christians were still fighting about that.  And then there were the quasi-Christians.  Hoping to ride on the coattails of the rising Christian church, basically pagan sects like the Manicheans adopted some of the tenets and language of Christianity to gain adherents – including, for a short time, Augustine himself.

Faith-centered conflict infected even Augustine’s home.  His mother, the future Saint Monica, was a devout Christian.  Although his father, Patricius, accepted baptism on his deathbed, he was a casual pagan for most of his life.

I wonder if this over-heated atmosphere of conflict had a negative impact on Augustine’s opinion of Christianity.  Certainly, the literalism of the North African Church was a turnoff for him.  He could not accept Christianity until Ambrose and Simplicianus taught him to interpret the Old Testament allegorically.

People accepted Christianity for many complex reasons in the 4th century.  I tried to convey that my book.  Some joined the church as a path to power, or because all their friends had joined.  Augustine came under pressure from both his friends and his mother.  But, in my conception of him, he would never have accepted the faith unless he were truly convinced.  I think he had to escape the legalistic, bitterly conflicted atmosphere of North Africa to come to that conviction.

 

Modern Dialog in The Saint’s Mistress

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Even in some of the positive reviews of The Saint’s Mistress, reviewers question my use of modern-sounding dialog.  I did that deliberately, even though I knew it would be a controversial choice and might set a few readers’ teeth on edge.

I was working on the book during the financial meltdown of 2008-9, and the atmosphere of crisis and impending catastrophe felt to me eerily like what my characters must have experienced as the Roman Empire was slowly collapsing around them.  I began to notice many similarities between our 21st-century culture and the 4th-5th-century world I was writing about.

People living in cities in the wide-ranging Roman Empire in the 4th or 5th century had fast food and disposable containers.  They had theaters and restaurants, and followed their sports as avidly as we do ours:  chariot racing, gladiatorial contests.  The rich had indoor plumbing and central heating.  In a large city like Carthage, my characters would have heard dozens of languages and dialects, and seen people of many races, from all over the Empire and outside it.

Like 21st-century Americans, the people I wrote about were living under the government of the richest, most powerful state the world had ever known. Like us, they lived in a society that was already class-stratified and was becoming more so.  Like our army, theirs was stretched thin, constantly fighting little wars against people they saw as barbarous.  Christianity was riven by the arguments of multiple fanatical sects, each convinced that they had a monopoly on the truth.

Their world was crumbling, just as ours seemed to be in 2008.

In short, they were disconcertingly like us.  They were living lives very much like our modern lives, in the very last decades when that was possible, before the Dark Ages descended.  I wanted to convey that in my book.  I wanted my characters to feel like people you would see at a hockey game or in a restaurant in 21st-century America.

Anyway, even in Latin, my main character in particular would have spoken casually, not in the kind of formal language we often hear in books and movies about her era.  Casual Latin hasn’t survived in written literature to my knowledge, and none of my readers would understand it anyway.  So, it seemed to me that the most powerful way to convey the modern sort of life Leona would have lived and the casual language she would have used, was to have her speak in casual, modern English.  I knew it was a risky decision, and I’ve had one painfully negative review based on my choice of language alone, but I still think it was right.

 

Augustine and His World (Part One)

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I wrote in an earlier post about the similarities I saw between life 21st-century America and the late Roman Empire.  People living in cities in the late Empire enjoyed many modern-ish conveniences and were surprisingly cosmopolitan.

But, the world of Leona and Aurelius Augustine was also a unique culture, which inevitably formed the future saint.  In this post, I examine the state of Christianity in North Africa while Augustine was growing to maturity.

In general, the native North Africans had never adopted the Romans gods. The cult of Mithras had its adherents, but most North Africans of Augustine’s era were either Christian or still worshipped the old Berber high gods like Ammon or Dea Caelestis.

North African Christians were generally more legalistic and rigid than Christians elsewhere. They were warm, passionate argumentative people compared to the cool, self-controlled Romans.  This led to literal Biblical interpretation and to the bitterness of their schisms.

Augustine would later be instrumental in establishing Christian orthodoxy, but in his youth the rising church was anything but united.  In North Africa in particular, sects and heresies abounded.  As I portray in my book, Donatists and Caecelians clashed bitterly and often violently.  The schism between the two sects went back to the Diocletan persecution.  Certain priests compromised during the persecution; others went to their deaths defending the faith.  80 years later, North African Christians were still fighting about that.  And then there were the quasi-Christians.  Hoping to ride on the coattails of the rising Christian church, basically pagan sects like the Manicheans adopted some of the tenets and language of Christianity to gain adherents – including, for a short time, Augustine himself.

Faith-centered conflict infected even Augustine’s home.  His mother, the future Saint Monica, was a devout Christian.  Although his father, Patricius, accepted baptism on his deathbed, he was a casual pagan for most of his life.

I wonder if this over-heated atmosphere of conflict had a negative impact on Augustine’s opinion of Christianity.  Certainly, the literalism of the North African Church was a turnoff for him.  He could not accept Christianity until Ambrose and Simplicianus taught him to interpret the Old Testament allegorically.

People accepted Christianity for many complex reasons in the 4th century.  I tried to convey that my book.  Some joined the church as a path to power, or because all their friends had joined.  Augustine came under pressure from both his friends and his mother.  But, in my conception of him, he would never have accepted the faith unless he were truly convinced.  I think he had to escape the legalistic, bitterly conflicted atmosphere of North Africa to come to that conviction.

Young Augustine

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Young AugustineAugustine’s Confessions is sometimes referred to as the first autobiography.  But it’s not an autobiography in the 21st-century sense, a revelation of events and emotional reactions going all the way back to childhood.  The Confessions center on God more than on Saint Augustine himself.  It is an autobiography of what he considered his most important relationship, his relationship with the divine.

That relationship with God is ultimately what’s most important about Augustine, of course, but in creating him as a fictional character in The Saint’s Mistress, I had to be curious about what he was like as a teenager, when my main character, Leona, first met him.

The basic facts of his life were easy enough to find.  His parents, Monica and Patricius, married in 354, when Monica would have been only 21 and Patricius around 40.  Their first son, Aurelius Augustine, was born on November 13, 354.  Two siblings, Navigus and Perpetua, followed.  The marriage was not happy.  Monica was a devout Christian; Patricius was Pagan, hot-tempered and sexually unfaithful.

I thought that, above all, young Aurelius was probably an earnest, responsible young man who tried to be pleasing.  As the brilliant firstborn son of parents of modest means, he must have felt driven to prove himself.  As the child of parents who, by all accounts, were almost constantly at odds with each other, I imagined that he must have been a peacemaker who tried to play both sides in any conflict.

I portrayed him that way in my opening scene near the pear orchard.  In Book II of the Confessions, Augustine describes the minor crime that he and his friends committed in stealing pears from a neighbor’s orchard.  He admits that he participated to increase his standing among the gang of wild boys who were his friends at the time.  In my opening scene, right after the pear theft, two of his friends attempt to molest Leona and her sister.  Aurelius is uncomfortable with that but hesitates to speak up until another boy defends the girls.  He doesn’t want to hurt innocent girls, but he doesn’t want to look weak or timid to his bolder friends.  He wants the respect of his friends, but he wants the girls to like him, too.    He can’t have it both ways, and Leona forms an unfavorable first impression of her future lover.

As the love story of Aurelius and Leona unfolds, and they both mature, again and again Aurelius is forced to choose between what’s right and what’s popular, between pleasing others and following his own moral compass.  As he matures, he more often and more easily makes the right choice.  In imagining his growth from earnest, eager-to-please Aurelius to Saint Augustine, I came to love and respect him, both as a saint and as a flawed and complex human being.

I Hope You Dance

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This little piece I wrote was published on the front page of the employee news where I work, and I got tons of positive feedback on it, so I thought I’d blog it.  It was in response to the question “What is the playlist of your life?”

At the risk of sounding corny, I have to confess that the soundtrack for my life is “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack.  First, l love to dance. I would come to your wedding and bring a $200 gift just for the fun of doing the Electric Slide and boogying to the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” (Little known fact:  I have also danced WITH one of the Isley Brothers).  I took  Zumba classes for several years, and more recently my husband and I have been doing Irish set dancing.  I’m not even that good at dancing, and I don’t care; I just love it so much.

Less literally, though, “I Hope You Dance” is about living life full-on with your face to the wind.  As a person who can hardly believe she’s recently turned 60, I recommend this approach to any young person.  Take on a little more than you think you can handle. Reach out to people.  Reach out to them again. Try your best.  Fail.  Try again and fail better.  Find friends who make you laugh so hard your stomach hurts.   Eat the chocolate cake, try the raw Galway Bay oysters one time, enter the marathon, take the trip to Paris, ride the zipline.  Sit on your porch swing and take in the sunset.  Live so that you can whisper with your last exhale, “Wow.  So worth it.”

Augustine on understanding God

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I love this quote.  It says everything that I passionately feel about the arrogance of certainty.  What drives “religious” people to violence is not faith; it is arrogant certainty that they have a complete and exclusive understanding of what God wants.  True faith approaches God with humility, never arrogant, ego-serving certainty.

augustine on understanding god

Downton parody part 4

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Part Four:  You Though Cora Was a Good Woman, Too, Didn’t You?

Cora has well-hidden her bitterness over Robert’s foolish loss of her fortune in Canadian railroad stocks.  She has also well-hidden her long-standing affair with art historian Simon Bricker, which began in Season 5, and her disgust with her 3 slutty daughters, one of whom ran off with the chauffer, another who ended up with a Turkish diplomat’s son dead in her bed and the last – most shameful of all – ending up with an illegitimate child whose identity must be hidden from the world.  Cora is a bitter, bitter woman, who has played by the rules all her life and feels ill-rewarded for it.

She thought she was finally free when Robert’s ulcer burst in Season 6.  But, Robert stubbornly survives and Cora’s desperation becomes so overwhelming that she realizes she must find some means of achieving both revenge and the freedom to marry Bricker. Cora has never liked Bates, and sees a way of killing two birds with one stone.  Over a period of weeks, she confides to Baxter her “concerns” about Bates:  how she overheard him complaining to the other servants about what a hard master Robert is ad his disappointment that Robert survived the burst ulcer.  She points out a bruise on Anna’s cheek and asks Mrs. Hughes if Anna had ever shared with her any confession of being abused by Bates.  She confides privately to Bates that she’s worried about rats in her bedroom and insists that he must go and buy the rat poison; she’s too embarrassed to let any of the other servants know. 

Knowing that Bates has been bringing Robert a forbidden nightcap each evening, she adds some of the rat poison to the brandy.  The loyal, honorable Bates thus becomes the instrument of his beloved master’s demise and finds himself in prison a third time. 

Unintended consequence:  Unknown to Cora, Carson has been taking nips of the brandy, to calm his nerves over his wife’s terrible housekeeping.  With Carson also dead, Thomas Barrow is saved from unemployment and becomes the butler at Downton Abbey.

After a suitable period of mourning, Cora marries Bricker, and they depart for the French Riviera, planning to live out the rest of their lives there.  The rest of their lives are short, however.  Violet suspects that Cora is the real mastermind behind Robert’s poisoning.  When she confides this to her former Russian lover, Prince Kuragin, he becomes enraged on her behalf and travels to the Rivieria, where he shoots both Cora and Bricker in a Riviera casino, then turns the gun on himself.  It is later learned that Kuragin was dying of cancer anyway.    

Downton ending parody #3: But What of “Poor Edith”?

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Part Three: But What of “Poor Edith”?

In another tragic case of mistaken identity, Michael Gregson was not, in fact, murdered in Germany.  His remains were misidentified, as we learn when he, too, makes his way back to Downton in the penultimate episode.  Looking much the worse for the wear after four years in a German prison for inciting a riot, Gregson returns just in time to become a complication to Edith and Bertie’s wedding plans. 

In the final episode, Edith makes her choice – in favor of the father of her child, Gregson.  But we learn something that Edith does not yet know:  that Gregson’s time in prison has had an effect of his mental stability, that he is subject to bouts of madness that come and go.   

In the Downton Abbey spinoff, “Haxby” (see yesterday’s post, The Surprising Triumph of Molesley), we watch as the truth of Gregson’s condition slowly becomes apparent to the pregnant Edith (that woman is a veritable fertility machine, can’t have sex a single time without conceiving).   Gregson’s madness progresses and he must be confined to an asylum.  Bertie and Edith commence a passionate illicit affair, and Edith ironically finds herself in the situation that started the whole mess:  she is married to a lunatic whom she cannot, under British law, divorce.  So she heads for Germany…..