Episode #016 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

One of my favorite things to ask people, and to me one of the most fascinating things to hear people talk about, is the moment they knew they had found the infallible truth about life and the infinitely enormous universe that we live in. There’s usually a moment in their life. It’s a little bit like the JFK assassination or 9/11. Everybody knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news about it. Well, I think being one of the lucky few people that actually has the true nature of existence revealed to them—I mean, that has to rank at least as high as the JFK assassination on your hierarchy, right? It’s huge. It’s also interesting because people have all different ways that this sort of thing happens to them. For whatever reason, they’re chosen out of the 7 billion people on this planet for God to breach that strict protocol of never revealing himself so that he can have some kind of direct correspondence with them.

You know, he’ll directly speak with them sometimes. People talk about having conversations with God, right? Maybe sometimes he’s not really in a talking mood, so he does something like he’ll move the drapes in the corner. And the person infers that God moved the drapes. So that means I have to go outside, but not physically outside. He means outside of this box that I’m living in, this box of sin and deceit. When I was living in my first one-bedroom apartment, these Mormons came to my door. And they told me that the moment they knew was direct communication between them and God, but their direct communication was more in the form of God giving them certain feeling states when they think about big decisions in their life or by giving them goose bumps. The all-powerful creator of the universe to them was communicating with them by making their hair stand up on end.

Well, here’s another interesting example. One of my many step-grandmothers over the years once told me a story that apparently one day her cat, who was also severely overweight, by the way, somehow got those—I mean, you know the grate, if you have a multiple-story house, there’s a grate in the floor that leads down into the ventilation system sometimes? Well, she left that grate off of the floor, and her morbidly obese cat jumped down inside of the ventilation shaft and got stuck. Like, he got wedged in there. I mean, it was like some ridiculous parody of Mission: Impossible VII. Tom Cruise gains 50 pounds and has one last go at trying to save the world, and it’s not going too well for him.

So, my step-grandma hears the cat meowing, and she goes to the kitchen where she keeps her Bible. Because, after all, who doesn’t like to cook and study the word of the Lord simultaneously? And she begins praying. And all of a sudden—and when she tells this story, she’s incredibly emotional, so she obviously believes that it happened. Or it did happen—golden tubes of light rain down from the sky. There was a chorus of angels. She told me she actually saw heaven, and Jesus descended down from the ceiling right in front of her and, I guess, ironically, right through the ventilation shaft that the cat was trapped in. And he appears in front of her, and he says, “Use the step ladder.” Granted, when she tells the story, he doesn’t say it like he’s a genie like I just did. He says it in a comforting voice. “Use the step ladder.” Then he disappears, and she goes and gets her mom. They get on the step ladder, and they get the cat out of the ventilation shaft. It was a miracle.

And how awesome is that, you guys? Jesus has to be a busy guy, right? I mean, I read once that something like 100 people die every minute of the day, many of which from very preventable diseases or violent acts that you could ostensibly intervene in and change the course of them happening. I mean, I can’t fathom how special it must feel to be the cat that he saved instead of dealing with the rest of the 7 billion chess pieces he has playing all over the world. But to my ex-step-grandmother it was a miracle. And she said from that moment on there has never been any doubt in her mind: she and God have conversations all the time. And she knows that if anything bad ever happens to her, God is going to get her out of it.

Well, I love hearing these stories. And the guy we’re going to talk about today has a really great one, albeit not as sensational as my ex-step-grandma’s. And his is a great story because he spent so much of his life as a skeptic of Christianity. And then he has this transcendent experience, and he instantly is certain of everything. He instantly knows the infallible truth. It's fascinating. I mean, can you guys really blame me for being so interested in these stories, though?

I mean, if you start with the knowledge we’re born with, it’s pretty incredible that one experience, one experience alone, not only tells you that a supernatural God exists but that that God is a single God, a single God that’s interested in human affairs and offers people personal salvation if they follow his set of rules. But not only that, this supernatural God also manifested himself on planet earth and sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself, or however the popular saying goes if we’re talking about Christianity. I mean, these things are not just a given when you’re born into this world. And I’m incredibly jealous of these people. I find it endlessly fascinating to hear when others are given experiences like this. It’s honestly amazing.

Now, Saint Augustine was one of these lucky few people. And if you’re looking at figures in the history of philosophy, he kind of gets a bad rap. He’s sometimes portrayed as the momma’s boy of philosophy. But I think that’s kind of inaccurate, personally. And I really think it’s just trying to point out that his mom was a semi-famous figure in herself. You guys would know her better as Saint Monica. The town of Santa Monica in Southern California is named after her. I mean, even in modern times it’s easy to imagine being a child and feeling this enormous amount of pressure to conform to the same religious beliefs as your parents and fearing that if you don’t, they’re not going to accept you; they’re going to disown you.

Plus, if it’s a rule in your house that you are going to go to church every Sunday if you’re living under my roof, mister, which it is in many households—your choice as a child becomes either to believe and to become a Christian or to be completely antisocial and against all these people at all the various church functions throughout your youth—people who are usually incredibly nice and worthy of respect. My point is, this is a modern example of how someone might feel pressure from their parents and family to believe in something, and it might lead them to accept the first thing that’s presented to them and work out all the details later simply by virtue of this peer pressure.

Well, one amazing thing about Saint Augustine is that he didn’t do that. He remained unsure for many of his formative years, and he did it in the face of Saint Monica. I mean, just understand that much of the reason this woman is heralded by the Roman Catholic Church is because of how persistent and effective she was at leading her son to Christianity. For her son to remain skeptical for as long as he did tells us a great deal about Saint Augustine, and it makes the story he tells of the moment when he did convert finally especially interesting. But first let me tell you a little bit about his early life because it ends up shaping his philosophy for years to come.

Saint Augustine was born in a town called Thagaste. Thagaste is on the coast of North Africa. And instantly he found himself in an environment of religious differences and conflict. But I’m not talking about the world and society he was born into, which without a doubt was full of differences and conflicts. I’m talking about his home life. His father was a pagan. His mother was a devout Christian. Their two backgrounds made for two very different ideas for what the best path was for young Augustine. When you read Saint Augustine’s principal work called Confessions, all throughout the Confessions, through the dozens of books and volumes, a recurring theme is him lambasting himself for all the terrible sins he committed as a youth. The funny part is, it’s not like he was some sick, sadistic kid. The way he makes himself sound, he sounds like the kid that lived next door in Toy Story. But he actually seems pretty normal.

But this guilt consumes him. And to be fair, it would consume you too if you believe like he did that you are held accountable for every sin you commit from the moment you’re born, even ones you commit when you’re just an infant. I mean, he’s so hard on himself. He says this in his Confessions, “Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby? For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth.” Now, right here you can see this disconnect between what he thinks and what we in modern times typically think about the actions of babies and things we do in early childhood. I mean, generally speaking, as a society, the earlier in life you do something, the less accountable you are for your actions; or at least the more we expect you to make mistakes, so therefore the punishments are less severe. This is why if an 8 year old kills someone they get 2 years in juvey, and if a 28 year old kills someone it’s 25 to life.

But for Saint Augustine, from the time we set foot on terra firma for the first time, we’re getting tried as adults. And it’s important to note, he’s not just vilifying everyone else for the sins they committed as children and babies to make himself feel better. I mean, like I said before, he spends huge chunks of entire books just reading himself the riot act about all the bad things he used to do. It’s honestly comedy at times. He talks about his unquenchable desire for his mother’s milk as though he’s committing the sin of gluttony wanting to be fed. He talks about all the needless and ungrateful complaining he did all the time, just crying whenever he needed something, you know?

The deeper implication here—one that even adults can take something from—is that if we do something wrong and we didn’t know that it was wrong, that doesn’t necessarily save us from God’s wrath. Plus, this sets a very useful precedent that—regardless of how seemingly perfect your life has been from the moment when you were able to be mindful of your actions for the first time—you still are a sinner, a sinner that needs God to save you from the lake of fire eventually. So, in other words, no matter who you are or what age you are, you are flawed and in need of God’s grace to save you from your inevitable fate in hell. This is what his mother Monica was telling him all throughout his childhood. And yet, he still remained skeptical of everything she had to say.

Luckily for Augustine, his father saved up enough money to get him out of the house and be educated. But he was still a young man, a young man setting sail, making the philosophy scene. You know, he’s a blank slate just out there experiencing the world, soaking it all in. Well, years later in his Confessions he would write about one of these places he went early in his life. “I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust. Bodily desire, like a morass, and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust.” Then he goes on a little bit later, “This was the age at which the frenzy gripped me and I surrendered myself entirely to lust, which your law forbids but humans hearts are not ashamed to sanction.”

So, we can see several things here that are quintessential qualities of Saint Augustine. Most notably in my opinion is the not-so-distant relative of the idea that Plato and Plotinus and other philosophers laid out that there is a clear distinction between existence in the sense-able world and existence in a higher, more real world. This quote is drawing a distinct line in the sand between pleasures within our bodily existence and what Augustine sees as the truth—our soul’s eternal fate. His example in the quote is the difference between the clear light of true love from the murk of lust.

Now, at this point in the Confessions, Saint Augustine just starts yelling at himself again. It seems clear that he made some mistakes during his younger years when it came to lust, alright? He sure talks about it enough. I mean, to be honest, he attacks himself so relentlessly in the next few chapters of the book that the deeper philosophical implications underneath what he’s saying can kind of get lost in the paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of him telling himself that he didn’t follow the Christian rule book well enough. But earlier on in the Confessions, he makes a point that illustrates what I think he was trying to get at in the next several chapters. He said, “But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.”

So, while Saint Augustine is out on this quest in his early adulthood—getting educated, seeing the world—he finds what he thinks is the truth at the time. He became a believer in Manicheism. Manicheism was a Gnostic religion back then that was actually a pretty serious rival to Christianity during the times of Saint Augustine. Basically, the idea behind it was that, I mean, God wasn’t all-powerful, and that in actuality all the things in the world are controlled by a dualistic cosmos. I mean, in the case of Manicheism, there were two forces, good and evil, constantly battling against each other. And it should be known that these two forces in themselves are actually extremely complex, and they represent a lot of different things. Many times, the Good represented the higher spiritual existence, and Evil represented the material, flawed lower existence. Huge fans of philosophy might consider it similar to Empedocles’ view of the forces of Love and Strife.

The important part is this: Saint Augustine became a follower of Manicheism. Sometimes I like to think about how things would have played out if little Sputnik moments throughout history ended up happening differently. Just imagine if instead of Christianity becoming the dominant religion of the West, I mean, just imagine if Manicheism somehow tipped the scales in their favor. I mean, how would the world be different today? It’s fun to think about people walking around believing that there’s a powerful cosmic force of Good perpetually battling with a powerful cosmic force of Evil, and that we as humans are coexisting with this battle. I mean, it’s interesting to think about.

But really, one of the great things about Christianity is that it kind of has everything. I mean, there are Christians today who believe in something very similar to that. They believe that the devil exists and has the power to intervene and try to influence humans to do his bidding. You know, the devil tries to get us to do bad stuff, and God tries to give us strength so that we won’t succumb to his temptations. The similarities to Manicheism are obvious.

But anyway, after a while of following Manicheism, Saint Augustine grew kind of suspicious of the whole thing. He started having questions that people couldn’t answer. And ultimately, he just wasn’t satisfied. He started talking to Archbishop Ambrose that would later become Saint Ambrose. And he started leaning more in the direction of Christianity. But he wasn’t completely sold yet. He wanted to be, but I imagine he would have felt a little silly just hopping from one religion which he says is the absolute truth directly to another one. He needed some sort of experience to make him sure of it.

So, the story goes that Saint Augustine was having a conversation with someone, and he gets incredibly frustrated with himself. So, like someone who has attended therapy at some point in his life, he removes himself from the discussion and goes out to his garden to cool down and get some fresh air. But he doesn’t cool down. In fact, he kind of goes downhill. He just—he starts hitting himself. He’s so frustrated, he starts pulling his own hair out. He sits down on a bench and just starts bawling his eyeballs out. That’s how frustrated he was. Now, as he’s sitting there crying on a bench, he hears a child say from a nearby house in, like, a singsong manner, “Pick up and read. Pick up and read.”

Now, at first, he’s like, ah, it sounds like some kid’s playing next door. They need to quiet down. I mean, can’t a man cry in peace? But then he realizes it was actually a divine intervention. God had taken control of that child’s brain or at least orchestrated events in that child’s life so that God knew she would yell those words at the time that they would echo across the garden, and Augustine would be there crying on the bench. And he would hear those words and interpret them as a message from God to read his Bible. God is smart, you guys. He was ten steps ahead of both of them. I mean, it actually almost calls into question our ability to exercise free will if our actions are so predictable or God has the ability to seize control over your actions.

So, Augustine gets the message from God and decides that what he should pick up and read is the Bible. So, he gets his Bible, opens it up, and the first line that he reads is Romans 13 verse 13 and 14, “Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.” Well, to someone whose mom had told him all throughout his childhood how flawed he was and how wrong all these earthly desires that he has were—that kind of upbringing that would lead Saint Augustine to think so terribly of his time in Carthage as a young man, the type of upbringing that would cause him to ruthlessly lambaste himself for all of his sins in the Confessions—this was the best passage you could have possibly read. This was God speaking to him. Now he knew the truth, and Christianity became the last religion he converted to.

Saint Augustine would spend the rest of his life making a case for Christianity against all of its many competitors and hostile critics during his day. And in the process, he’d write by far the most brilliant philosophical works of his time period and would honestly foreshadow to concepts that changed the world over a thousand years later. He may be one of the main reasons why Christianity prevailed over all of its other competitors.

One key idea that was a central theme of last episode with Plotinus is the apparent dichotomy between evil in the physical world and the existence of a benevolent God. If you remember, Plotinus made the case that evil is better described just as an absence of good. And really to be fair to middle Platonists—wait, actually Plato himself says in his work Gorgias that evil is only manifested by an absence of something. The point I’m making is that, I mean, it wasn’t an idea that was unique to Plotinus to say that evil is only an absence of good. Plotinus is just the guy that organized everything and popularized this three-tiered fountain approach which explained if the physical world is so far removed from the source of good—the One—that it stands to reason that that absence of good can be in the lowest tier.

Well, there are obviously differences between Saint Augustine’s worldview and the worldview of Plotinus and his hierarchy of being. But it’s important to point out that the relationship between these two men is by far the biggest contribution that Saint Augustine made to philosophy. Make no mistake, Saint Augustine made huge strides when it came to Christian thought. I mean, he defended orthodox thinking like nobody else did around him. But philosophy owes him a massive debt of gratitude because of the fact that he managed to fuse together the philosophy of Plotinus with Christianity. That was his major contribution. Saint Augustine is commonly referred to as a Christian Platonist.

There’s no telling what would have happened to Platonism or a lot of other early philosophy if it weren’t for this merger that he pulled off. But if the fate of Plato’s thought was anything like all the other philosophy of the ancient Greek world and the Hellenistic age, then I think if it weren’t for Saint Augustine, we might only know Plato through a few obscure fragments that managed to survive. This is why Saint Augustine is a hero to philosophy. He kept it going during a time when it had no business going. That said, he was an incredibly brilliant man who made completely unique philosophical works as well as genius adaptations of older works.

But actually, I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to what I was talking about before—the question from the last episode. How can evil exist in a world created and maintained by a benevolent God? Well, Plotinus attributed it to the distance between this lower matter and the transcendent One, or the source of everything good. Saint Augustine didn’t think the same way. So, he had to find a way to answer this question on his own. His answer was the most comprehensive approach to date of a concept that still rocks philosophers to this day.

Evil exists because humans have free will. The idea was simple. Humans are rational creatures. That seems to be a given to all the other philosophers of his time. But the only way humans can truly be rational creatures is if they have the ability to make choices. They need to have the ability to make the choice whether to—I mean, to murder that guy or not murder that guy, you know? Should you steal your neighbor’s barbeque or not steal your neighbor’s barbeque?

He calls this ability to choose between good courses of action or bad courses of action “free will.” Saint Augustine points out that in the book of Genesis when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, God left them with the choice of whether to listen to the talking snake or not. He uses this example as an early glimpse at the relationship between God and all other humans. We have the ability to make choices either to our benefit or detriment. It naturally follows that these choices can be to the benefit or detriment of others. And when they’re to the detriment of others, we might call them evil. This is how evil can exist in a world with a benevolent God as its creator and overseer, to Saint Augustine. The concept of evil actually has nothing to do with God. It has to do with human action. These detrimental actions are just a necessary expense of having a bodily existence with the right to choose.

All this is really interesting, but the most important part here is that Saint Augustine was heavily influenced by Plotinus. And this wasn’t the only issue where he was influenced. It turns out, Plotinus and his hierarchy of being—the three-tiered fountain that all of creation stems from—it actually makes a pretty good companion philosophical doctrine to Christianity and their idea of the Trinity. Saint Augustine was able to merge the two. But one interesting part of his quest to merge Neo-Platonism with Christianity is a problem that he ran into when thinking about Plotinus’ concept of the One.

Saint Augustine would have been thinking about the One as God. For Plotinus, the One was independent of everything else. There was absolutely no way to describe it. So, it goes without saying that it has existed forever, eternally. Because if it existed in relation to time, it wouldn’t be a singularity. It wouldn’t be the One anymore; it would be the Two, you know? It would be whatever it is plus time. But this idea didn’t merge well with the Christian idea that God created the heavens and earth, because when something has a creation, people can always ask, well, what came before that?

Saint Augustine had to reconcile the problem. So, he did so by creating a philosophical look at time that was so ahead of its time and different from everything else that had come before it, it’s almost like he overheard a kid playing next door chanting it to him. I mean, that’s how profound it was. We can think of Saint Augustine’s theory of time as being broken down into two parts. What is time in reality, and how is it measured? Those are the two lenses that he viewed time through to try to understand it better.

Well, at first he takes a page out of Aristotle’s book when trying to classify what time is exactly, and he looks to the efficient cause of time as a starting point. Looking at it this way also clears up the questions everyone has about what the relationship is between the Christian God and time. He talks about it here in his Confessions when he’s talking to God about the questions these naïve people have about time in relation to God: “How could these countless ages have elapsed when you, the Creator, in whom all ages have their origin, have not yet created them? What time could there have been that was not created by you? How could time elapse if it never was? …Furthermore, although you are before time, it is not in time that you precede it. If this were so, then you would not be before all time.”

What he’s saying here is that God created time. And because he created time, he couldn’t have existed within the fabric of time ever. So, therefore, he exists external to it and isn’t affected by it. Now, this may seem a little disappointing to some people, but it gets better because he’s nowhere near done. All he needed to do was establish that God gets all the credit for time and its creation. Then he started to wonder about the interesting stuff. What is time exactly? And how do you measure it?

He sets the stage for a long time in his Confessions just mulling over how confused he is about it. “My soul speaks with truth when it confesses to you that I do measure time. Is it the case then, Lord my God, that I perform the act of measuring but do not know what I am measuring? I measure the motion of a body in time. Is it the case that I do not measure the time itself?” Most of us measure time in terms of past, present, or future—some variation of that. But Augustine makes the case that the way we think of the concepts of past, present, and future are completely wrong. In fact, nothing exists in reality except for the present. The past has already happened and doesn’t exist anymore. And the future hasn’t happened yet, so can it really be said to exist at all?

Saint Augustine thought that the concepts of past and future are really just human constructs to make sense of the world around us. He said, “It is inaccurate to say, ‘there are three tenses of time: past, present, and future,’ though it might properly be said, ‘there are three tenses of times: the present of past things, the present of present things, the present of future things.’ These are three realities in the mind, but nowhere else as far as I can see, for the present of past things is memory, the present of present things is attention, and the present of future things is expectation. If we are allowed to put it that way, then I do see three tenses or times, and I admit that they are three.”

Shortly after that he goes on and describes the way that the human brain measures time within itself. “It is in you, my mind, that I measure time. Do not interrupt me, or rather, do not allow yourself to be interrupted by the thronging of your impressions. It is in you, I say, that I measure time. As things pass by they leave an impression in you; this impression remains after the things have gone into the past, and it is this impression which I measure in the present, not the things which, in their passage, caused the impression. It is this impression which I measure when I measure time. Therefore, either this itself is time or else I do not measure time at all.”

What he’s saying is, time is nothing in reality. Time only exists in relation to the human brain’s way that it perceives reality. Time is an illusion created by our minds to make sense of the world around us. Now, this was incredibly ahead of its time. And he sums it up with a great quote here. “What is true of the poem as a whole is true equally of its individual stanzas and syllables. The same is true of the whole long performance, in which this poem may be a single item. The same thing happens in the entirety of a person’s life, of which all his actions are parts; and the same thing happens in the entire sweep of human history, the parts of which are individual human lives.”

So, now it’s time for the question of the week. And maybe it’s a little bit selfish of me to ask this particular question. But we talked earlier in the episode about these moments that we have, or the single moment in your life when you knew that this was the way that you were going to believe. Obviously, if you’re agnostic, you don’t have one of these moments. But if you’re devoutly religious or devoutly atheist, you probably have one of these. What was that one moment that you knew you knew the truth? And if any of you guys have any free time, please send them to me. I honestly love reading them. Steve@stephenwestshow.com if you get a second.

Thank you very much for all your support. I’ll talk to you next time.