Re: The joys of wickedness
Posted by kit on 2025-May-15 18:28:00, ThursdayIn reply to The joys of wickedness posted by diogenes on 2025-May-15 08:57:26, Thursday
|
To be fair to Augustine, he doesn't say that unbaptised infants are "tortured for all eternity," but he does seem to think that they are deprived of Heavenly bliss. Dante, again, seems to get to the point here when he places unbaptised infants and virtuous pagans in Limbo - a kind of pagan paradise, a perfectly pleasant and bucolic place, but overshadowed by a kind of melancholic sadness. Augustine did indeed seem to think (at least in his later works) that unbaptised infants were damned in some sort of way, even if he denied that they were actually tormented like the souls of sinners. As for the famous fruit: I think Augustine's point is not that stealing fruit is especially evil, but that even the most minor sin participates in human fallenness. But there is a further point here that maybe brings us back closer to Buddhism. The Confessions is a book all about desire. Augustine sees human beings as principally driven by desires, but mostly the wrong ones. We are constantly longing for the wrong things, in the wrong ways. We long for pleasure or comfort or distraction - or, indeed, somebody else's property - when in reality all our desire should be fixed on the source of everything good. This is why Augustine talks about the theft of fruit: not because it was outrageously evil, but because it illustrates how he himself was tossed about by his own misguided desires. (It is also a nice literary allusion to Genesis 3, of course - the point at which human loves go drastically wrong.) But for Augustine - unlike Siddhartha Gautama - it is not desire itself that is the problem; merely that it seems we can never love as we should. |
Follow ups: