St. Augustine by Botticelli
Part One: Patrick’s Confession
Exciting event today – I can take Augustine’s Confessions off the Shelf of Pretension. The Shelf of Pretension, for the uninitiated, is the place where you prominently display impressive books you want people to think that you have read. It could also be the place where you put all your pretty books, regardless of whether you have read them or not. People who love books – you know what I’m talking about. You’ve got your own Dewey Decimal System for aesthetic bookshelves. You can admit it. We’re all friends here. Do you have all your nautical books grouped together? The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe, Captains Courageous, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? …..Perhaps I’ve said too much…
Inspired by Augustine’s Confessions, I here reveal the books which sit prominently on my living room bookshelf that I have not read, but would like people to think I have read:
Don Quixote – Cervantes
Les Miserables (unabridged) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – Francis Bacon (that’s a little joke for the literature/theater majors/minors)
And of course, War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
There, I feel a little better. You should also know that I do aspire to read those books, and many more besides. Once I finished school, I realized the joy that comes with reading what you want to read instead of what you have to read.
Once I have read those books, I’m sure they’ll still be on the shelf. They are the pretty books, after all. I’ll have to think of a new shelf name then. Perhaps the Shelf of Literary Snobbery.
What’s on your Shelf of Pretension? Confess!
Part Two: Augustine’s Confessions
I won’t do the three-fold review which I like to do, for a couple of reasons. One, I was the first person to read the copy I have, so there’s no archeological data to uncover there. Second, I don’t really have anything interesting to say about the aesthetic experience of the book – except that I hate end notes. If you (the author) have a comment, put it on the same page!
Instead, here’s some random quotes and thoughts that stuck out to me:
“It is not the infant’s will that is harmless, but the weakness of infant limbs.” – In other words, we think babies are innocent mostly because they can’t reach things or tell us what they think.
“Without You, what am I to myself but the leader of my own destruction? Let the strong and mighty laugh us to scorn, and let us, the weak and needy, confess ourselves to You.”
“Unless we could weep into Your ears, no trace of hope would remain for us.”
“Blessed is the man who loves You, and his friend in You, and his enemy for Your sake.”
“I had learned from You that nothing should be held true merely because it is eloquently expressed, nor false because its signs sound harsh upon the lips.”
“Manners that I did not want for myself as a student I was forced to endure in others when I became a teacher.”
“…They would assert that the New Testament writings were falsified by some unknown persons…however, they themselves did not produce any uncorrupted copies.”
“I was preparing to make an address…in it I would tell many a lie, and for my lies I would be applauded by men who knew that I was lying.”
“Caught fast in a disease of the flesh with its deadly sweetness, I dragged along my chains and was fearful of being loosed from them.”
“I held that the higher things are indeed better than the lower, but that all things together are better than the higher things alone.”
The famous – “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”
“Just as fawning friends pervert us, so also quarrelsome enemies often correct us.”
“Your best servant is he who looks not so much to hear from you what he wants to hear, but rather to want what he hears from You.”
There’s a chapter toward the end titled “Had I Been Moses.” I love it. I would read a book with that title.
“Too late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved You!”
“I can find no safe place for my soul except in You. In You may no part of me ever depart. Sometimes You admit me in my innermost being into a most extraordinary affection, mounting within me to an indescribable sweetness. If this is perfected in me, it will be something, I know not what, that will not belong to this life.”
And this one sums up the book nicely:
“What thing within me could be hidden from you, even if I would not confess it to You? I would be hiding You from myself, and not myself from You.”
Trivia:
Augustine’s father was named Patricius (the Latin form of my name!)
Augustine’s feast day is August 28 (my birthday!)
Augustine was bishop in a town that shares a name with my favorite animal!
Augustine is the patron saint of printers, theologians, and Tucson, Arizona.
