Augustine, Confessions (bks. 2-3)

Augustine is famous for his story (among many, many other things) of his youthful offense of stealing pears.  On the surface, they are just pears and Augustine is a punk kid.  But surely that's not why he tells the story.  After all, if that is it, then the pear story has no more significance than to say that Augustine had a discipline problem as a youngster and should've been in trouble with the authorities.  I think he's speaking to something deeper though.

In the story of stealing the pears, Augustine is pretty explicit in his detail in regards to the stealing of pears being simply for the sake of doing bad.  I think what Augustine was doing rather was speaking to the depth of his sin apart from God.  Why is it so important to him that he is not stealing the pears to eat?  After all, doesn't he say that he gave most of them to the swine or simply threw them away? It seems the most important part of the tale is not that he stole the pears, but that he stole for the sake of stealing.

Augustine, in my opinion, is clearly making the point that though we sin with or without God, without God we sin for the sake of sinning.  We indulge the deepest of the evil within us- that is, doing that which is bad for its own sake.  It is the clear and pointed manifestation of our rebellion against the will of God.  And why do we do this?  It is to gain that completion God created us to seek only in him. As the Augustinian quote is often said 'our soul can not find rest till it finds rest in thee', or something to that effect.  I believe the Wills translation says 'stability' but the effect is the same.  The thrill and fleeting joy of our sin, we believe, will satiate us.

Nothing could be further from the truth however,  Just as Augustine says in regards to our seeking sexual pleasure to fulfill our desire for intimate love,"...though nothing is more intimate than your love..." making the point that what we are really doing as human sinners is seeking God where he is not-- that is, in sinful things.  This, I think, is important in relation to where Augustine is going.  It is important that we realize our evil for it's own sake in rebellion against God and finding completion in him.  Until we see that, Augustine seems to say, we will not see our need for a Savior.

It is a striking thought.

Plato, Apology

As we read Plato's Apology, we see Socrates under trail for corrupting the youth and blaspheming the gods.  Upon his conviction, he makes a ridiculous request that makes some, people who didn't even vote him guilty, vote for him to get the death penalty. Socrates, it seems is not shocked by this.  So the question to me is clearly: "Did Socrates commit suicide?," in a manner of speaking.

The man is going to be banished.  Not a terrible penalty, and at least he would be alive. But instead he requests this: to be pampered by the government.  He wants a house, food, and protection as provided by the government.  Shortly, he wants to be treated as an Olympian victor. That's absurd.  By the standard of the court, he is a criminal.  Criminal's dont get treated like kings, and Socrates is not stupid enough to think that.  So what is he doing?

Socrate's seems to think that the gods have deemed his the wisest man alive.  As such, it has become his duty to spread his wisdom around the world.  So being exiled elsewhere and forced to pay a fine simply won't do.  So why not just ask to stay and get a harsher punishment, but not death? It seems Socrates is committing suicide.  I think that Socrates simply can not imagine living without philosophizing in Greece.
He says:

Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living

Life, to Socrates is not worth living if not for his philosophy.  He must have it, or he will be dead (regardless of his 'vital signs', so to speak).  So it certainly seems what Socrates has done is to commit suicide.

Augustine, Confessions (Bk. 1)

Augustine, in his Confessions, Book 1, uses his own childhood as a opportunity for worship.  By worship, I mean a recognition of the providence of God in his life and blessings thereof. He also uses the imagery of his childhood to show complete dependence on God. This is clear from the very first paragraph of the book.

Man, 'confined by a nature that must die,' confined by this evidence of his sin, the evidence that you rebuff the over-weening, yet man would still appraise you, since you made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you.

This quote, famous in it's own rite, is telling of Augustine's belief in the inborn dependence of humanity on God for fulfillment from the very beginning of their being. As he contemplates his very existence he first becomes familiar with the reality that there is a God, and he is not Him.  Not only is he not him, but he can not contain him or relate to him- quite the conundrum.

In his search to see who the true God, Augustine recognizes and points out the 'graces' in his life.  Such as a child draws to the breast of his mother is the relationship of man to God.  Augustine praises God for his creating him in a manner by which he will do that and find sustenance.  Augustine uses his infancy as a metaphor for relation to God in general.  He says,

Who is there to remind me of my sin before I spoke?--'no one being clean of sin, not a speechless child with but a day upon the earth'-- who will remind me....

A powerful, and controversial it seems, statement on the human condition.  I certainly agree with Augustine in drawing this analogy. Such as the infant must rely upon the breast of his mother, so we rely on God.  Yet, as he said in the aforementioned quote, man is 'confined by a nature that must die', making it rebel against the very 'breast' that sustains it.  So it seems, Augustine is right in drawing the analogy that it is the grace of God that draws us to himself, such as it is the care of the mother that draws the infant to feed.  Obviously, most skip their infancy in biographical writing, seeing as we don't remember it firsthand.  That said, I think Augustine's using it to foreshadow his coming spiritual revolution that was much the same is profound.

  

Plato, Euthyphro

In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates and Euthyphro get into a discussion about the very nature of holiness.  Euthyphro is on his way to put charges against his father for the death of another man and Socrates is appalled.  Euthyphro, however, thinks it quite virtuous.  Socrates then asks him roughly the following: what is virtue?  Euthyphro replies basically: 'What I'm about to do.'  Humble man, that Euthyphro.

Perhaps simply to mess with him, Socrates engages the question further.  He arrives at the following question, and the one to which I will examine.  "Are pious things pious because the gods say they are, or do the gods say pious things are pious because they are?"  So, to recap, in regards to holy things- are they holy because they have some sort of innate pious feature or because the gods (or God) has decreed they are holy?  Quite the question.

I wonder, however, is it the right question to ask? Are those the only options?  Is it possible that God, acting as creator, sees uncorrupted creation as good? Seemingly, a creator God would set the rules for existence. So, that being the case, if a Creation simply meets its purpose in "being", is it not good?  It seems that that purpose would be an extension of the very nature of God himself.  And what happens if we move back and forth between poly- and mono- theism.  Would the answer remain the same?  What if the question was formulated in Trinitarian terms?  All that to say this: I'm not so sure that the question is logically the best options for explaining the piety of things.

But I digress.
Socrates seems to think that God's love results in the piety of the thing. Euthyphro otherwise thinks that the love of God explains the piety (i.e. the piety is a feature of the thing itself). Neither can be right.  After all, one would exalt the good of the object to a point that it demands the gods love, and the other does not explain why the gods love something.  It is somewhat circular.
This is exactly what Socrates means when he says,

And are you not saying that what is loved of the gods is holy; and is not this the same as what is dear to them-do you see? 

We are left without an answer.  It seems to me that questions that have no answers are often simply bad questions.

Donagan, "Philosophy and the Possibility of Religious Orthodoxy"

In relation to Donagan's work, a phrase I am mulling over continuously in my mind is "the imperative or religious orthodoxy".  So where does this come from?  Donagan certainly did not say it explicitly.  However, he did say this:

[Mezger] presupposes that human beings of a given culture conceive the world and their place in it in a characteristic way, which they are utterly unable to escape-- and that if they live in a period of transition between cultures, or in circumstances in which they are open to many cultural influences, without having a coherent one that is theirs, they will be confused, and unable to classify their confusion except by finding a coherent culture and embracing it.

Donagan then goes on to say that if this is true, then the next logical step is to demythologize the scripture (such as the transpatiality of the ascension of Christ, etc.)  Then his next point,

So expressed, the philosophical legitimacy of liberal theology is unquestionable... What liberal theology lacks is neither religious seriousness nor moral character-- it is religious authority... [thus] in no case would they claim to teach doctrine authoritatively.  In their different ways then, demythologized orthodoxy and liberal religion wittingly or unwittingly abandon the claim in any significant sense to possess and expound revealed truth.

I find these points by Donagan incredibly compelling.  Does the lack of authoritative revelation dumb down the religious behavior? Certainly not.  But it does seem to kill any sense of certain religious belief. In no way can any theological liberal or demythologizer of revelation claim to have any certain truth in regards to God and certainly not to the supernatural or divine.  To me, it is almost comical; those who believe themselves to be freeing the Scriptures from its doctrinal chains end up binding their interpretation to their culture.  They are enslaved to the whims of the day making the scriptures, to steal from Mezger, passé.

Of course, there is no imperative to believe anything.  However, I think to be a Christian, which it is clear Donagan is writing of, one must have a tinge of religious orthodox, dare I say even a smidgen, or a sizable lump. To deny revelation and demythologize the faith itself is not to synthesize the faith to the reason, it is to denigrate the religion altogether by attempting to 'explain it away'.  Perhaps this is a stretch, but the distinction between religious orthodoxy and demythologized orthodoxy is such that one seems to not be orthodox together, that is- to not even be the same faith but to be something altogether different.

Then, it seems, there must be a standard.  An authoritative interpretation, as Donagan says, or at least a standard of believe, say- the Apostle's Creed or Nicene Creed.  Regardless, it seem clear to me that liberal theology is baseless and in clear denial of the imperative or religious orthodoxy that the Christian faith demands to truly be able to claim Christ as he is historically and revealed divinely to be.