Alan Jacobs

Iowa

I like Nick Carr’s description of the Vision Pro as a “face tiara for elite beings of a hypothetical nature.”

Very excited about this forthcoming book from Deb Chachra. All the hidden places in the built environment!

I’ve heard from a number of people, via email, about this series, and almost all of the responses have been negative. This has surprised me. 

Most of the criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the project. My critics seem to think that I am seeking to describe “the Augustinian view of X” or “the Augustinian position on Y,” and so they want me to talk about something that Augustine writes in one of his other books or in a sermon. But I’m just trying to read a book, you know? Just read one book, a big complicated book. 

There may be another misunderstanding at work in these critiques. The assumption seems to be that for any X there’s one “Augustinian view,” on any Y there’s one “Augustinian position.” But maybe he changed his mind about some things, or framed some complicated issue differently in one book than he had in another. Maybe also — I’m speaking from experience here — when you write millions of words over several decades you kinda forget some of what you’ve said. There’s a funny moment in CD XVIII.41 where Augustine contrasts the disagreements of the philosophers with the unity of the authors of Scripture, and when I came to that I made a little marginal note that this reminded me of his earlier statement that Babel/Babylon mean “confusion” (XVI.4). But then a couple of pages later he writes, “For ‘Babylon’ means ‘confusion’, as we remember having said already.” Oh right, I said that already. (It me.)  

Maybe people are always this way, but I think in our own moment — I wrote about this in How to Think — the stream of information and misinformation so overwhelms our sensorium that we crave fixity, we like being done with something. Encountering a writer as prolific and various as Augustine, we perhaps look to manage the torrent of words by finding “the Augustinian position on Y” and putting it in our pocket for later use. 

However valuable that might be, it’s not what I’m doing here. I’m just trying to read a book, and I think the reading of books — especially big complicated books — is pretty much a lost art. You read and you think, and then you read more and you decide that you thought wrong, you reflect and revise your interpretations — and you do so over a fairly lengthy period of time. (I may be adding second and third thoughts to this project a decade from now.) It’s a good intellectual exercise, I commend it to you. 

Also: that’s why I’m organizing these posts in a Zettelkasten style: Every time I introduce a new topic I use a new number, but when I go back to revisit an earlier topic I create an appendage. So I might have topic 3 and then follow-ups I designate as 3a and 3b. Later I might add 3a1 and 3a2. Eventually I’ll create a page that lists all the posts in the proper reading order. 

I’m traveling this week; posting will resume soon. 

This photo of Mykha (from the Chicago Sun-Times) really captures her spirit.

I’m back in my old stomping grounds of Wheaton, Illinois today, and I just learned that one of most memorable people I’ve ever met, Mykha Trinh, died six years ago. When our son Wes was a baby, we’d go to her little restaurant and after she cooked amazing meals for us she would hold Wes and walk him around the restaurant so we could eat in peace. Everything she had, including her time and energy, she gave to others.

To me, the Vision Pro doesn’t look like something to use, it looks like something to be sentenced to - by an especially cruel judge.

In a previous post I wrote, “The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the power of change.” But it’s it at least curious that Rome grew so powerful. What led to that power?

Here we have to invoke the idea of multiple causes. For Augustine, of course, God is the Final Cause of everything. In CD IV.33 he writes,

It is therefore this God, the author and giver of felicity, who, being the one true God, gives earthly dominion, both to good men and to evil. And he does this not at random or, as one may say, fortuitously, because he is God, not Fortune. Rather, he gives in accordance with the order of events in history, an order completely hidden from us, but perfectly known to God himself. Yet God is not bound in subjection to this order of events; he is himself in control, as the master of events, and arranges the order of things as a governor.

Though he says here that “the order of events in history” is “completely hidden from us,” a little later he wonders whether at least some of these divine purposes, and the order of events emerging therefrom, might be readable by humans. In the Preface to Book V he writes, “Let us therefore proceed to inquire why God was willing that the Roman Empire should extend so widely and so long.” And then he lays (at least some of) his cards on the table:

The cause of the greatness of the Roman Empire was neither chance nor destiny, in the sense in which those words are, somewhat arbitrarily, employed, when ‘chance’ is used of events which have no cause, or at least no cause which depends on any rational principle, and ‘destiny’ of events which happen in an inevitable sequence, independent of the will of God or man. Without the slightest doubt, the kingdoms of men are established by divine providence.

But then Augustine has to do things like discredit astrology — which is often used to show that human affairs are predestined — and it’s not until V.12 that he returns to the question: “Let us go on to examine for what moral qualities and for what reason the true God deigned to help the Romans in the extension of their empire; for in his control all the kingdoms of the earth.“ At this point we should remember that Augustine is replying to pagans who say that Rome flourished because of its devotion to its gods, and when Rome ceased to worship its gods, those gods withdrew their patronage. And Augustine has already demonstrated (to his satisfaction anyway) that those gods were either sheer fictions or weak and ineffectual demons, in either case unworthy of any devotion and incapable of assisting humans in their endeavors.

No, Augustine says, the real explanation for Rome’s success lies altogether elsewhere, and you can see where he’s headed if you note the phrase “moral qualities” (mores). Briefly, Augustine makes this remarkable argument: Rome flourished because, and insofar as, its citizens loved it. When Romans loved their city and sacrificed their personal interests to its needs, then it flourished. Yes, many Romans did this in order to gain the praise of their neighbors, which is not ideal — only the praise of God should really matter to us, and even pagan poets like Horace understood the dangers inherent in the love of praise (V.13) — but it is better to want to be praised for virtuous acts than to pursue vice.

Augustine has several points he wants to make about all this.

1. Those who sacrificed their own personal interests out of love for their city “received their reward” (V.15). They got the earthly happiness they wanted.
2. But they did not get, because they did not seek, eternal life and true happiness (beatus). This is a constant theme of Augustine’s writings: In the end, we pretty much get what we want.
3. And the Romans succumbed to the libido domanandi — you can see in the Aeneid, as I noted in an earlier post, this gradual shift from (a) wanting one’s city to flourish to (b) wanting one’s city to rule.
4. And this lust for political domination leads to a lust for personal domination. The infection spreads. In the days of the Republic, before the mania for imperial conquest set in, it wasn’t unusual to find virtuous Roman leaders, virtuous by the world’s standards anyway; now, at the fag-end of Empire, vice rules all. There could be no fifth-century Cato. 

At IV.28 Augustine writes of the Romans, “though they could not have exercised dominion without the consent of the true God, still, if they had ignored, or despised, that multitude of false gods, and had recognized the one God, and given him the worship of sincere faith and pure lives, they would have had a better dominion – whatever its size – here on earth, and would have received hereafter an eternal kingdom, whether they had enjoyed dominion in this world or no.“ But instead they got what they asked for; they have their reward. So it is always with the City of Man.

Kansas. I was listening to the Eno/Eno/Lanois Apollo music as I drove through this landscape and it was strangely fitting.

Sunrise over Waco this morning

Ken Myers on music and silence.

Eric Adler: “It seems a stereotypically American, and perhaps more broadly imperialist, conceit to believe that we can create cosmopolitan monoglots. When we undervalue the study of world languages, we shut the door to true cosmopolitanism and all the awe and wonder it inculcates. We deny students the opportunity to participate in and engage deeply with other cultures, to fathom how our language shapes our view of the world, and to do the hard work that fosters meaningful cross-cultural interactions and mutual respect.”

The poet Tennyson had many siblings. Once a visitor to the family home found a boy lying on a rug in front of the fireplace. The boy got up and introduced himself: “I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.“

Let me tell you something, friends: This is something special. You’ll have to wait a while to read it, but trust me, you’ll want to.

Not closely related to my main argument, but just a brief note: 

Longtermism is the version of effective altruism that wants us to think about our ethical imperatives on a much vaster historical scale; it warns us against discounting the value of the lives of future people. (In his retelling of the Good Samaritan story, Phil Christman could have added a longtermist who would have scorned the Effective Samaritan for thinking only of the local and immediate. A longtermist, seeing a wounded man by the side of the road, would surely have “passed by on the other side.”)

Augustine is a kind of longtermist, in the sense that he thinks we should focus not on our immediate desires and concerns but on our eternal destiny. Thus his indifference to politics as we usually conceive of it: “As for this mortal life, which ends after a few days' course, what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?” (CD V.17) 

C. S. Lewis is writing very much under the sign of Augustine when, in his great sermon “The Weight of Glory,” he says this: 

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. 

It is a view that, if does not consign politics to the realm of adiaphora, quite radically decenters it.

We often hear that evangelicalism — and, often, other forms of orthodox Christianity — has been “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good.” It has been so focused on “pie in the sky by and by” that it has neglected the prophets’ call to seek shalom — justice and peace in the City. And that critique is absolutely valid. But maybe we could use a little more longtermist decentering of politics these days. 

In an interview Andy Summers once said “If you’re using alternate tunings, you just don’t know enough chords.” Yeah, but Andy can do things like this with his chord-making hand. Not fair.