“on whom nothing is lost.” - philosophia a fake chinese rubber plant In the fake plastic earth...

Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they

mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed,

animal energies or impulses with no connection to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep awareness

and understanding?

- Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought

“The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.” So Henry James on the task of the moral imagination. We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision are our besetting vices.

Responsible lucidity can be wrested from that darkness only by painful vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. Our highest and hardest task is to make ourselves people

“on whom nothing is lost.”

Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge

What to do with Muddlement?

What did you do with Muddlement?Textual Resources• Re-read sections over (and over) again• Took notes on your reading• Marked up the text or made outlines• Threw the book across the room

Personal Resources• Spoke with friends about the text• Spoke with your professor outside class• Spoke to God about helping you with Augustine• Complained to whoever would listen about this book

Outside Resources• Facebooked Augustine• Wikipedia’d or Googled Augustine• Used the NPU Library• Used the database CREDO• Clicked “Disliked” Augustine’s facebook page

Augustine on theORDO AMORIS

The Confessions andThe Journeys of Love

“Augustine’s own spiritual development is related in his Confessions. It is a journey from disordered affections to the order of love whereby God is reached not primarily by ascetical practices nor by intellectual ascent but by human love, voluntary and affective, unified by the Holy Spirit into caritas

(doc. Chr. 1.16.15). Mary T. Clark, R.S.C.J.

Part I:Composition

A FuneralComposing a Life

Language AS DefinitionCompose

• write or create (a work of art, esp. music or poetry) : he composed the First Violin Sonata four years earlier.

• write or phrase (a le8er or piece of wri9ng) with care and thought : the first sentence is so hard to compose.

• form (a whole) by ordering or arranging the parts, esp. in an ar9s9c way : compose and draw a s:ll life.

• order or arrange (parts) to form a whole, esp. in an ar9s9c way : make an a<empt to compose your images.

Language AS TheologyLogos

John 1

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it . . .

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Language AS HumanityConfession

Confessions I.i,v

Humanity, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you . . . [but] What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you?

Yet woe to those who are silent about you because, though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say.

The Confessions and self-examination

X.iii.5-6

I am making my confession in the ears of believing brothers and sisters, sharers in my joy, conjoined with me

in mortality, my fellow citizens and pilgrims, some who have gone before, some who follow after, and some

who my my companions in this life.

part I: Composition

1. To compose is to selectively order and arrange, with care and thought, into a whole.

2. To converse is to compose oneself in language, for the sake of gathering oneself with another seeking community.

3. To create is to compose through oneself an ordered creation out of chaos.

4. To confess is gather oneself in speech before the creator so as to bear witness to oneself as creature (the creator’s creation).

Part II:Augustine on

Disordered Loves

Name your loves

CLAIM #1Love is directed toward many kinds of objects.

CLAIM #2

What one loves is closely connected to one’s identity.

CLAIM #3The quality of loves can be evaluated to be good, poor, or somewhere in between.

CLAIM #4

How well one loves is closely connected to who one is.

I came to Carthage and all around hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. As yet I had never been in love and I longed to love; and from a subconscious poverty of mind I hated the

thought of being less inwardly destitute. I sought the object for my love; I was in love with love, and I hated

safety and a path free of snares. . . I polluted the spring waters of friendship with the filth of concupiscence.

- Confessions, Book III.i

DISORDERED LOVESPolluting the Waters

The Disordered SelfMisery is the state of the soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Grief darkened my heart. Everything on which I set my gaze was death. My home town became a torture to me; my father�s house a strange world of unhappiness; and that I had shared with [my friend] was without him transformed into a cruel torment. I had become to myself a vast problem, and I questioned my soul. �Why are you sad, and why are you very distressed?� But my soul did not know what reply to give. . . I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend. Look within my heart, my God . . . For you cleanse me from these flawed emotions. You direct my eyes toward you and rescue my feet from the trap. . . For whenever a human soul turns itself, other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows.

Emotion Passivity Receptivity Subjectivity Discernment

How does it come about that various kinds of love are felt in a single soul with different degrees of

weight? Humanity is a vast deep, whose hairs you, Lord, have numbered, and in you none can be lost.

Yet it is easier to count his hairs than the passions and emotions of his heart.

- Confessions, Book IV. xiv

DISORDERED LOVES CHAOS of EMOTIONS

The Disordered Self

What are the narratives and lessons of the various stages of Augustine’s development?

ChildhoodTheft of Pears

University Life in CarthageDeath of his Friend

A green plastic watering can For a fake chinese rubber plantIn the fake plastic earth

That she bought from a rubber manIn a town full of rubber plansTo get rid of itself

It wears her out, it wears her outIt wears her out, it wears her out

She lives with a broken man A cracked polystyrene manWho just crumbles and burns

He used to do surgery On girls in the eighties But gravity always wins

And it wears him out, it wears him outIt wears him out, it wears him out

She looks like the real thingShe tastes like the real thingMy fake plastic love

But I can't help the feeling I could blow through the ceilingIf I just turn and run

And it wears me out, it wears me outIt wears me out, it wears me out

And if I could be who you wantedIf I could be who you wanted All the time, all the time

Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees

Part III:Augustine onORDERED LOVES

EROSPHILOSOPHICAL Conversion

Love of the perfect, by the imperfect

The book of [Cicero’s] contains an exhortation to study philosophy. The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers. . . My God, how I burned, how I burned with longing to leave earthly things and fly

back to you . . For with you is wisdom. ‘Love of wisdom’ is the meaning of the Greek word

philosophia. This book kindled my love for it.

- Confessions, Book III.iv

Early StirringsLove at First READ

VII.xviiAnd so step by step I ascended from bodies to the soul which perceives the body, and from there to its inward

force, to which bodily sense report external sensations, this being as high as the beast go. From there again I

ascended to the power of reasoning to which is to be attributed the power of judging the deliverances of the

senses. It withdrew itself from its imaginative fantasies, to discover the light by which it was flooded. And at this

point I had no hesitation in declaring that the unchangeable was preferable to the changeable. So in a

flash of a trembling glance it attained to that which is.

AugustineThe Ascent of Eros

Martin Luther King Jr. himself

A Just Person

Goodness

A painted portrait of MLK

The idea of Justice

Rank according to which is most real?

God

The Good

Justice in and of itself

A Just Person

Martin Luther King Jr. himself

A portrait of MLK

How Augustine would Order them

ErosThe Ladder of Love

God

Truth

Reason Itself

Human Reason

Vitality

Perception

Bodies

Perfectly Good

Imperfectly Good

Enjoyment

Use


God

Truth

Reason Itself

Human Reason

Vitality

Perception

Bodies

Perfectly Good

Imperfectly Good

Enjoyment

Use


God

Truth

Reason Itself

Human Reason

Vitality

Perception

Bodies

Perfectly Good

Imperfectly Good

Enjoyment

Use

The person who knows the truth knows it,and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it.Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity:you are my God.

Book VII.x

LOVE and knowledgeLucidity

AgapeChristian Conversion

Love of the imperfect, by the perfect

You are so high among the highest, and I am low among the lowest, a mean thing. You never go away from us. Yet

we have difficulty in returning to you.

It is not in the power of the one who wills, nor of the one who runs, but in the power of God, who has pity.

The burden of the world weighed down on me. VIII.12.

From a hidden depth of profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all misery . . That precipitated a vast

storm bearing a massive downpour of tears. . . I threw myself down somehow under a fig tree.

AugustineThe Descent of Agape

Suddenly I heard a voice chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl, speaking over and over again,

“Pick up and read, pick up and read.”

Philia

Mutual love for each other’s sake

Book II Friendship and Stealing Pears

Book III Friendship with “The Wreckers”

Book IV Death of a Cherished Friend

Book VII Discernment of Truth with Friends

Book VIII Conversion Made Possible by Friends

Book X Confession Written to Friends

AugustineA Life Composed in Friendships

VI.xvii.26

Without friends even the happiness of the senses which I then possessed would have been impossible, no matter

how great the abundance of carnal pleasures.

I loved these friends for their sakes and I felt that I was loved in return by them for my own sake.

AugustineThe Equality of Friendship

IV.8

To make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to

share in trifling and in serious matters, to disagree though without animosity, to teach each other something or to

learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival.

These and other signs come from the heart of those who love and are loved and are expressed through the mouth, the tongue, through the eyes, and a thousand gestures of delight, acting as fuel to set our minds on fire and out of

many forge unity.

AugustineThe Delight of Friendship

He truly loves a friend who loves God in the friend.

Sermon 336, 2.2.

AugustineFriendship And God

Ordo AmorisThe Composition of Love

God

SelfSelf Others

Agape Eros

Philia

Conclusion:The Composed LIfe

AugustineThe Composed Life

II.i

It is from love of your love that I make the act of recollection.

You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had

been fruitlessly divided.

Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient, So newLate have I loved YouYou were within me, but I was outside YouIt was there that I searched for YouLate have I loved You, Beauty so ancient, so newYou were here with me, But I was not with YouIt was there that You found meYou called and You shouted, You broke through my deafnessYou flashed and you shone, Dispelled all my blindnessYou breathed Your fragrance on meLate have I loved YouI drew in Your breath, And I keep on breathingI’ve tasted I’ve seen, And now I want moreYou breathed Your fragrance on meLate have I loved You

Composing Your Life

1. To compose is to selectively order and arrange, with care and thought, into a whole.

2. To converse is to compose oneself in language, for the sake of gathering oneself with another seeking community.

3. To create is to compose through oneself an ordered creation.

4. To confess is gather oneself in speech before the creator so as to bear witness to oneself as creature.

“on whom nothing is lost.” - philosophia a fake chinese rubber plant In the fake plastic earth...

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