King Haddock’s Reviews > Confessions > Status Update

"My rashness and impiety lay in the fact that what I ought to have verified by investigation I had simply asserted as an accusation. . . . Deceived with promises of certainty, with childish error and rashness I had mindlessly repeated many uncertain things as if they were certain. . . . when I contended against your Catholic Church with blind accusations."

Augustine discusses how he confidently repeated arguments from the Manichees against Catholicism without realizing they were strawmen. It's a relevant section. Augustine throughout has been soaked in investigation, academia, debate, careful study, philosophy, a hunger for knowledge. This discussion about how he realized his assumptions against the people he thought he understood and decried... dang. We've all done it

"Fine style does not make something true, nor has a man a wise soul because he has a handsome face and well-chosen eloquence."

Of Mani: "So when he was found out, saying quite mistaken things about the heaven and stars and the movements of sun and moon, though these matters have nothing to do with religion, it was very clear that his bold speculations were sacrilegious." Augustine discrediting a religious authority based on bad science is something I wish was more consistent in the western religious world today.

"Moreover, I had not yet found the certain proof for which I was seeking, by which it would be clear beyond doubt that the true forecasts given by the astrologers when consulted were uttered by chance or by luck, not from the science of studying the stars."

Footnotes: "His position was not that a correct astrological prediction is the result of purely random chance, but that 'chance' is our name for a cause we do not know, and in this instance the correctness of prediction is the result of the internal sympathy of all parts of the cosmos."

Yet again, yet again, yet again, Augustine records everyday issues and interactions that are the same as go on today. He records conversations he had with a famous physician (Helvius Vindicianus, physician for Valentinian I) who said astrology is bogus; the reason things seem to be fulfilled is the nature of chance, or of humans picking out a phrase or two that so happens to be 'applicable' to their life.

My commentary doesn't suffice in such small chunks (I struggle with brevity). Nothing here is anti-intellectual: it's that presentation alone doesn't determine value of thought.

Augustine tackles how one draws to schools of thought based on how eloquently it's presented. It remains a draw today. We want to lie in with the educated and draw superiority out of it. And it's not that well-structured material is or isn't good. But behind flowery language can be poor values or bad ideas, as Augustine notes of his studies: "where one's reputation is high in proportion to one's success in deceiving"

Augustine continues, of his youth's impressions of the Bible: "It seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero. My inflated concept shunned the Bible's restraint . . . Yet the Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them. I disdained to be a little beginner. . . . That explains why I fell in with men proud of their slick talk . . . loquacious." 2/3