Enlightenment : How to Believe

What do I want when I want to be rational?

For the aspiring provincial, the university looks like a ladder. An education is a tool for climbing. Sadly, we live in an age in which the university has adopted this picture of itself. Colleges are credential factories, and the Ivy League is a ridiculously expensive employment agency connecting the new meritocracy with hedge funds and Supreme Court clerkships that function as escalators to wealth and power.

In other words, not much has changed since a young Augustine made his way to Carthage. Study was almost a distraction from the extracurricular activities of playing games and getting laid. And learning itself was instrumentalized as a means to achieve some other good: “My studies which were deemed respectable had the objective of leading me to distinction as an advocate in the lawcourts, where one’s reputation is high in proportion to one’s success in deceiving people.”1 The liberal arts, in Augustine’s experience, were something to be weaponized rather than a curriculum for cultivating the soul. The notion that his university education might touch on matters of wisdom was almost laughable.

But even broken clocks are right twice a day, and even a bastardized curriculum can be a portal to another world. In a university that revolves around the quest for profit and prestige, a lingering liberal arts curriculum is like a distant echo that keeps calling. You never know when the still, small voice of Plato can pierce through all the noise in a marauding frat boy’s life and resound as a wake-up call for a soul—that his taut, frantic, voracious body has a soul, that the soul is made for a quest and not just sexual conquests, and that there is a kind of learning that doesn’t just position you but transforms you.

This is what happened to Augustine. In the seething carnal cauldron of Carthage, where students took vandalism more seriously than they took learning, where everyone was on the make and only there to find a way up and out, Augustine was assigned to read Cicero, and in that reading we witness his first conversion. Cicero’s Hortensius, an exhortation to pursue wisdom, caught Augustine off guard and set him off-kilter. It plucked strings in his soul he didn’t even know he had. “The book changed my feelings,” he recalls. “It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart.”2 Philosophy had lodged an existential thorn in his heart and he couldn’t shake it.

For the next decade, Augustine would live what Charles Taylor might call a “cross-pressured” existence, tugged and pulled in various directions, a playboy who’s caught the philosophy bug.3 A new interest and curiosity has been kindled, but old habits and hungers remain alive and well. Philosophy became something he added to his life, not a way of life. And in fact, it’s remarkable how philosophy—the alleged love of wisdom—can be domesticated by those other lingering habits of the heart, such that philosophy actually becomes just one more lust, one more game of domination and conquest (something I’ve seen in a thousand sophomore philosophy majors and, sadly, much of “professional” philosophy). The encounter with Cicero’s Hortensius birthed something new in Augustine, but his infant interest in wisdom became the child that served other masters still ruling his heart.

Augustine would give a name to this kind of disordered relationship to wisdom and learning: curiositas. Curiosity for Augustine is not the spirit of inquiry we prize and encourage; rather, it is a kind of quest for knowledge that doesn’t know what it’s for—a knowing for knowing’s sake, we might say, or perhaps more to the point, knowing for the sake of being known as someone who knows.4 For Augustine, the reason I want to know is an indicator of the sort of love that motivates my learning. Am I learning in order to grow, learning in order to know who and how to love? Or am I learning in order to wield power, get noticed, be seen as smart, be “in the know”? The disordered love of learning makes you a mere technician of information for some end other than wisdom, and the irony is that philosophy could devolve into just another way of idolizing. Indeed, Augustine could still see this in himself by the time he was a teacher: “I was seeking to use my education to please other people—not to teach them, but just to please them.”5

Curiosity is characterized by a fetishization of something as “truth” in order to serve my own interests and ends. When learning is reduced to curiositas, actual truth and wisdom are disdained as an affront to my interests, my authority, my autonomy, and I become a so-called philosopher (lover of wisdom), Augustine says, for whom actual truth “engenders hatred.” Augustine’s diagnosis of what is going on here is timely:

Their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken. And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love the truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong.6

What masquerades as the pursuit of truth becomes an agenda for confirming my biases and making me comfortable, for justifying my enjoyment of what I ought to be using. If the actual truth disrupts my enjoyment, I resent the truth all the more. What I love in this case is my truth, not the truth. “What is loved at the moment,” Heidegger comments, “a loving into which one grows through tradition, fashion, convenience, the anxiety of disquiet, the anxiety of suddenly standing in vacuity; precisely this becomes the ‘truth’ itself.”7 This Augustinian diagnosis, taken up by Heidegger in the 1920s, seems ever more true in a culture of clicks and likes:

They love [the truth] when it encounters them as glitzy, in order to enjoy it aesthetically, in all convenience, just as they enjoy every glamour that, in captivating, relaxes them. But they hate it when it presses them forcefully. When it concerns them themselves, and when it shakes them up and questions their own facticity and existence, then it is better to close one’s eyes just in time, in order to be enthused by the choir’s litanies which one has staged before oneself.8

Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life. As Heidegger puts it, “The bustling activity in which they are absorbed, the cheap tricks to which they abandon themselves, rather makes them even more miserable.”9 To be among “the enlightened ones” comes with its own anxiety—of being found out, of not knowing, of being in the out-group of the ignorant rather than the inner sanctum of winks and nods and inside jokes. Curiositas is the anxious burden of having to always be clever.

IF THE ENCOUNTER with Cicero’s Hortensius woke up something in Augustine, it wasn’t true philosophia, love of wisdom, but rather a lust for knowledge that served other cravings—for advancement and access to an inner circle.10 He wasn’t really interested in wisdom; he simply wanted to be part of the enlightened crowd. This was still a craving to belong. Which perfectly explains why, not long after this wake-up call, Augustine fell in with the Manicheans.

This detour in Augustine’s journey—and his lifelong wrangling with them—will seem hopelessly irrelevant to twenty-first-century seekers if we merely consider what the Manicheans, these devotees of Mani, believed. The teachings of Mani are so foreign and fantastical that they don’t seem to have any contemporary analogue; it’s not like Manicheanism is a live option today. As Robin Lane Fox comments in his succinct but fulsome account, “Mani’s cosmology strikes what he would call ‘semi-Christians’ as a teeming myth, more like Star Wars than their own Christianity.”11 Indeed, its radical dualism, with eternal forces of Darkness and Light inscribed into the very fabric of the cosmos, feels like something we’d encounter only in Game of Thrones. (That its rites seemed to include a cabal of the elect consuming bread baked from flour “fertilized” by sex rituals is, sadly, not entirely outlandish today.)

We need to look past the content of the Manichean’s doctrine and see what actually drew Augustine in: the way they claimed to know. What’s instructive about Augustine’s attraction to Manicheanism is less what they taught and more how they held to that teaching. In this respect, we will notice something shockingly contemporary about the Manicheans’ epistemic posture: they were the “rationalists” of their day. While their worldview seems fantastical to us, the Manicheans prided themselves on having escaped superstition and the embarrassments of believing, instead arriving at the shore of enlightened knowledge. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say the Manicheans considered themselves the scientists of significance: instead of trusting the testimony of prophets, their knowledge was rooted in the course of the sun, moon, and stars. These purveyors of Light and of secret enlightenment were the “Brights” of their day; they prided themselves on refusing authority and instead knowing how things worked.12

The attraction, then, was less to explanatory power and more to association with people who confidently imagined they had an explanation for everything—and were well connected in high places, to boot. (It was Manichean connections that landed Augustine his appointments in both Rome and Milan.) The attractiveness of the Manicheans was an intertwined set of benefits that spoke directly to an aspiring provincial, running from his mother’s backwater faith, newly interested in being “in the know,” and still clambering for positions of power and influence.

In 392, not long after he was ordained to the priesthood, Augustine wrote to an old friend, Honoratus, who was still associated with the Manicheans. Augustine felt a special burden for Honoratus since he was to blame for Honoratus falling in with them. If he writes passionately and pastorally to a friend led astray, it’s because Augustine is also writing to his younger self, as if he owes this to Honoratus as an act of penance. But it also means Augustine knows something of the psychology of attraction here from the inside. “There is nothing easier, dear friend, than to say one has discovered the truth,” Augustine writes, “and even to think it, but from what I write here I am sure you will appreciate how difficult it really is.”13 Imagine Augustine, a newly ordained priest, writing to Honoratus, who’s busy reading the new atheists.

The attraction to Manicheanism was about association with people who confidently offered a posture as much as a doctrine. “We fell in with them,” Augustine reminds his friend, “because they declared with awesome authority, quite removed from pure and simple reasoning, that if any persons chose to listen to them they would lead them to God and free them from all error.” They promised a way to rise above those “held in fear by superstition.” “Who would not be enticed by promises like that?” Augustine asks. “What was it that attracted you, I wonder? Was it not, I beg you to remember, a certain grand assumption and promise of proofs?” The Manicheans found us at an opportune time, Augustine reminds him: “scornful of the ‘old wives tales’ [told by mothers?] and keen to have and to imbibe the open, uncontaminated truth that they promised.”14

This is a familiar recipe for recruitment, trotted out today by rationalist purveyors of scientism who promise to unlock all the mysteries of the universe by a “science” that shows there are none. From Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker, the priests of enlightenment are prophets of overreach, promising a status more than an adequate explanation. And we buy in, less because the “system” works intellectually (we often don’t even expend the energy to confirm the evidence, and we suppress lingering questions), and more because it comes with an allure of illumination and sophistication, with the added benefit of throwing off the naivete of our parents’ simplistic faith. What their “knowledge” offers is a shortcut to respectability.

Just don’t ask too many questions when you make it inside. That was Augustine’s problem: ultimately, he wasn’t satisfied with association; he actually wanted to understand. And when he kept pressing the Manicheans with questions, they kept telling him: Wait til Faustus gets here; he’ll explain everything.15 Except he didn’t. In such circles of enlightenment, there are always questions you’re not allowed to ask, as Augustine discovered.

In writing to Honoratus, Augustine doesn’t offer a counterpoint to the specific doctrines of the Manicheans (he does that abundantly elsewhere). Instead, his critique is more “radical,” we might say, getting to the “radix”—the root—of their epistemic posture, of what they claim to stand on. The Manichean rationalists “boast that they do not impose a yoke of belief but open up a fountain of doctrine”; they “attract numbers in the name of reason.”16 In other words, the Manicheans prided themselves on their refusal to submit to any authority outside of their own reason, which was not so different from the rallying cry of Immanuel Kant’s essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” fourteen centuries later: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! It’s the same watchword used today by those who like to imagine themselves “free thinkers.”

But Augustine pulls the rug out from under the feigned stance of rational self-sufficiency. Everyone believes. Everyone submits to some authority. And all these people priding themselves on enlightenment have decided to simply trade belief in one set of authorities for belief in another. “Credulity,” Augustine points out, is not a defect; it is inherent to being human. Tongue-in-cheek, Augustine points out the number of times Honoratus expects his interlocutor to trust him, to believe him, so that he can show him the path to enlightenment.17 Trust is the oxygen of human society, Augustine says, and believing the testimony of others is at the very heart of the scientific enterprise. Understanding doesn’t transcend belief; it relies on belief. If someone says believing is wrong, Augustine wryly notes, “I do not think he can have any friends. If it is wrong to believe anything, then either one does wrong by believing a friend, or one never believes a friend, and then I do not see how one can call either oneself or the friend a friend.”18 Augustine is striking at the very heart of what the Manicheans offered: not just enlightenment, but belonging, a circle of those “in the know,” a friendship of light. Indeed, why would we have ever been drawn to the Manicheans if we hadn’t believed what they promised? “I would not come to someone who forbids me to believe unless I did believe something. Could there be any greater insanity than this: they blame me only because I have belief that is not supported by knowledge, although it is only that which brought me to them?”19

Augustine is not promising a different version of self-sufficient enlightenment to counter what the Manicheans are offering. He’s calling into question the very myth of such a stance. The question isn’t whether you’re going to believe, but who; it’s not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself to. Do you really want to trust yourself? Do we really think humanity is our best bet? Do we really think we are the answer to our problems, we who’ve generated all of them? The problem with everything from Enlightenment scientism to mushy Eat-Pray-Love-ism is us. If anything looks irrational, it’s the notion that we are our own best hope. So Augustine invites Honoratus to consider what’s at the heart of Christianity, which is not a teaching per se, but an event, an unthinkable event from a Manichean perspective, and yet one that speaks to humanity’s deepest hungers and fears. “Since, therefore, we had to model ourselves on a human being but not set our hopes on a human being, could God have done anything kinder or more generous than for the real, eternal, unchanging wisdom of God itself, to which we must cling, to condescend to take on human form? . . . By his miraculous birth and his deeds he won our love, but by his death and resurrection he drove out fear.”20 Many years later, in 417, still confronting the challenge of the Manicheans’ rationalism, Augustine pleads with his congregation in a sermon: “You cannot be your own light; you can’t, you simply can’t. . . . We are in need of enlightenment, we are not the light.”21 You’re going to entrust yourself to somebody. Would you entrust yourself to the One who gave himself for you?

THERE’S NO RUSH. It took Augustine a long time before he’d consider this. His disenchantment with the false promises of the Manicheans did not translate into an immediate embrace of Christianity. In fact, the result was a long period of destabilizing skepticism, a sympathy for the “Academics,” skeptics who despaired of ever arriving at the truth.22 While he was still happy to leverage the Manicheans’ connections to land his post in Milan, by the time he arrived, he bordered on cynicism.

Our cerebral struggles are often intertwined with other anxieties. What we identify as intellectual barriers are sometimes manifestations of emotional blocks. We pride ourselves on being rational but then miss the biases and blind spots that constitute our rationality (a feature of the human condition confirmed by recent developments in behavioral economics). We decide that something “doesn’t make any sense” when we no longer want to be associated with the people who believe it, or a “light goes on” and we “see” something after we’ve spent time hanging around people who believe it. Rationality turns out to be more malleable than we’d guess.

Sometimes plausibility is pegged to a person. The turning point for Augustine was not an argument; it was Ambrose. What Ambrose said, what he taught and preached, was not insignificant. But what made a dent on Augustine’s imagination was Ambrose’s very being—what he represented in his way of life. Ambrose was a living icon of someone who integrated assiduous learning with ardent Christian faith. If to that point, based on his childhood experience, Augustine had concluded that Christians were simple, backward, and naive, the encounter with Ambrose was the destabilizing experience of meeting someone with intellectual firepower who was also following Jesus. Even more than that, it was Ambrose’s hospitality that prompted Augustine to reconsider the faith he’d rejected as unenlightened. What ultimately shifted Augustine’s plausibility structures? Love. His recollection is warm and speaks to a hunger even more fundamental than the intellectual: “That man of God took me up as a father takes a newborn baby in his arms, and in the best tradition of bishops, he prized me as a foreign sojourner.”23 More than arguments or proofs, Ambrose offered the seeker Augustine something he’d been hungering for: a home, sanctuary, rest. For this refugee in a new city, arriving with questions and with so much unsettled in his life, the cathedral in Milan became an outpost of the home this spiritual émigré had been seeking. And there was a father there waiting to welcome him.

This was the point he’d later make in The Advantage of Believing: there is a relationality to plausibility. Illumination depends on trust; enlightenment is communal. It’s not that Augustine immediately comes to affirm the catholic faith; rather, Ambrose’s kindness and hospitality to a precocious outsider was the affective condition for him to reconsider the faith he’d spurned. “I fell in love with him, as it were, not at first as a teacher of the truth—as I had no hope for that whatsoever in your church—but simply as a person who was kind to me.”24 You can feel in this encounter something of the gratitude of the African outsider not being marginalized by an intellectual at the center of power. It’s not that he immediately comes to believe but that Christianity becomes more and more believable (and Manicheanism less and less so). “Though now I hadn’t yet verified that the church was teaching the truth,” he admits, “it was plainly not teaching what I’d so obnoxiously accused it of teaching.”25 From Ambrose, Augustine would realize that the Christianity he’d rejected was not Christianity. But it was Ambrose’s love and welcome that created the intellectual space for him to even consider that.

This relationship between love and knowing, affection and intellection, would become a hallmark of Augustine’s thought for the rest of his life. By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.” He crystallized this in one of his earliest works after his conversion, Soliloquies. Adopting a visual metaphor for knowing—as in “the mind’s eye”—Augustine picks up the Platonic metaphor of knowing by means of illumination. But there’s an important difference: “it is God himself who illumines all.” Reason, Augustine’s interlocutor, then continues: “I, Reason, am in the minds as the power of looking is in the eyes. Having eyes is not the same thing as looking, and looking is not the same as seeing. The soul therefore needs three things; eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing.”26 But only healthy eyes can see, and faith restores the health of the eyes.

“If the mind does not believe that only thus will it attain vision, it will not seek healing.” In other words, if skepticism leaves us despairing of ever attaining the truth, we’ll never go looking. “So to faith must be added hope.” But reason will only be motivated to set out on the quest if it is also animated by a desire, if it longs for the promised light. “Therefore a third thing is necessary: love.”27 If this remains abstract in the Platonic dialogues of his early career, in the Confessions we see this point embodied. It’s not just that reason needs love in order to know; I need to be loved into such knowing, welcomed into such believing, embraced for such hoping. If the arguments are going to change your mind, it’s only because an Ambrose welcomes you home.

THE EMBRACE OF Ambrose didn’t smother the questions. There was no dichotomy, only a priority: not love instead of understanding, but loving in order to understand. If Ambrose engendered a shift in plausibility structures for Augustine, it meant that he could consider anew whether Christianity had resources to answer some of his oldest, most lingering questions—about evil, the nature of God, free will, and other intellectual questions that continued to dog him. The relationship to Ambrose nudged him to find an intellectual well in Christianity he didn’t know was there, as if tapping into an artesian aquifer that had been right under his feet all the way back home in Africa.

Augustine slowly started to realize how stunted his philosophical imagination was. While the Manicheans had promised him enlightenment, he was coming to see that they had furnished his imagination with a limited array of blunt instruments that were inadequate tools for the complex questions he was asking. His conceptual muscles had a limited range of motion. For example, he was unable to imagine a kind of substance that wasn’t somehow material—anything that existed had to be physical.28 This limited his ability to conceive of a God who transcended time and creation, as well as his ability to understand his own mental powers, the nature of the soul. Similarly, because of the habits of mind he’d acquired from the Manicheans, when he sought to understand the origin of evil, he says, “I searched in a flawed way and did not see the flaw in my very search.”29 It was slowly dawning on him: the cabal that had promised him enlightenment turned out to be remarkably parochial. The enlightened ones who prided themselves on being rational were working with a limited intellectual toolkit but had never told him (likely because they didn’t realize).

The intellectual breakthrough Augustine needed came, once again, from philosophy. But not from Cicero this time. Instead, it would be “the books of the Platonists” that would refurnish Augustine’s theoretical imagination—or, to change the metaphor, that would serve as an intellectual gymnasium where he could work to increase the range of motion in his conceptual muscles. He could reach conclusions that weren’t available to him before, stretching his mind around ideas that had been conceptually out of reach, affording new possibilities to both settle some questions and live into a coherent way of life. He wouldn’t have to choose between faith and reason; philosophy would be the preamble to his embrace of Christianity.

But this gearing together of Platonism and Christianity would generate its own tensions and cause Augustine to have to make a choice. Much has been made of Augustine’s Platonism, and it’s beyond question that Platonism—or, more specifically, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus—provided a crucial intellectual scaffolding at the time of his conversion and through the rest of his life. In Of True Religion, one of his earliest works, Augustine paints Christianity as the completion of Platonism—that if Plato were alive in the Christian era, he too would be a follower of Jesus.30

Yet to overstate the continuity is to miss what Augustine sees as a fundamental distinction of Christianity that makes all the difference: humility. Platonism lifted his attention from the temporal and material to the eternal and invisible. Platonism helped him conceive of an ascent to higher things, to the purity and eternity of the Good. But what Platonism could never have imagined was that the Good would descend to us; that the eternal God would condescend to inhabit time and a body; that the divine would humble itself and swing low to carry humanity home.

The books of the Platonists, Augustine says, helped him grasp half the gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” as the prologue to John’s Gospel puts it. “But that ‘he came to his own and his own did not receive him; but as many as received him, to them he gave the power to become sons of God by believing in his name,’ that I did not read there.”31 That the Son could be equal to God is something the books of the Platonists effectively helped him to understand. “But that ‘he took on himself the form of a servant and emptied himself’ [Phil. 2:7] . . . that these books do not have.”32 Philosophies of ascent would confirm his worst vices: the pride and arrogance of the climber, the self-sufficiency of the intellectual who would think his way to salvation and congratulate himself upon arrival. But here was the scandal of Christianity: You can’t get here from there, God says, so I’ll come get you.

For someone who had been drawn to the elitism of enlightenment, who had tried to make it into the exclusive Manichean club of the elect who had risen above the masses and made it to the top, perhaps what was most scandalous about Christianity was its utter democratization of enlightenment—the way the gospel held out the grace of illumination to any and all. You can feel this in a snobby remark Augustine made right before his conversion in the garden. After hearing story after story of people finding their way to the Way, he says, “I turned on Alypius and cried out: ‘What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard? Uneducated people are rising up and capturing heaven, and we with our high culture without any heart—see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood. Is it because they are ahead of us that we are ashamed to follow?’”33

Platonism made some crooked places straight in Augustine’s imagination, enabling him to find his way to the Way in Jesus—in God’s condescending to become human, and more so in humbling himself to the point of death, even death on a despised cross. Augustine saw a humility that was unparalleled in the ancient world and unthinkable to philosophers. That humility spilled over into an offer of grace and epistemic mercy that transgressed all boundaries of class and tribe. The affront to philosophy was that “you have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes, that toiling and burdened they should come to him to be restored.”34 Augustine kicks out the pretentious stilts of intellectual striving: “Those who are raised high in the air, as if by the stage boots of a loftier teaching, the platform boots of actors supposed to represent divinities, don’t hear Jesus saying, ‘Learn from me, since I am gentle and humble at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’”35 Platonism offered a ladder to (re)connect God and humanity; in Christianity, God climbs down.

Albert Camus, in fact, is someone who appreciated this crucial difference—that at stake in the confrontation between philosophy and Christianity, between Platonism and the gospel, was the reality of epistemic grace. “In Christianity, it is not reasoning that bridges this gap,” Camus rightly observes, “but a fact: Jesus is come.”36 This, inevitably, is how many earnest seekers end up shipwrecked. They insist on paddling their own boat, and they refuse the raft that is a cross.

Gnosticism, on Camus’s reading, was “one of the first attempts at Greco-Christian collaboration,” but one in which the Greek trumped the Christian precisely because, in the end, Gnosticism refuses the scandal of grace: “The spiritual are saved only by gnosis or knowledge of God. . . . Salvation is learned.”37 The result is an epistemic Pelagianism akin to the hubris of the addict: I’ll figure this out, I’ll find a way, I’ve got this covered, to which those in recovery reply: “Your best thinking got you here.”

At its heart, Neoplatonism is another version of the same pretension, confident in its own ingenuity. Salvation is contemplation, and only epistemic elites have the wherewithal (and luxury) of achieving such a state. “Here God allows only his admirers to live,” as Camus put it.38 Which is why the Neoplatonist is revolted by Christianity’s “anarchy,” its refusal of an epistemic meritocracy and the spiritual aristocracy of the “wise.” “The theory of unmerited and irrational Salvation is at bottom the object of all the attacks” in Plotinus’s Enneads, Camus points out.39 And what we get in Augustine, he concludes, is “opposing Incarnation to Contemplation.” It is Camus, haunted by but still refusing the Augustinian option, who provides one of the clearest insights into what was at stake:

Greek in his need for coherence, Christian in the anxieties of his sensitivity, for a long time he remained on the periphery of Christianity. It was both the allegorical method of Saint Ambrose and Neoplatonic thought that convinced Saint Augustine. But at the same time they did not persuade him. The conversion was delayed. From this it appeared to him that above all the solution was not in knowledge, that the way out of his doubts and his disgust for the flesh was not through intellectual escapism, but through a full awareness of his depravity and his misery. To love these possessions that carried him so low: grace would raise him high above them.40

If Camus himself ultimately opted for the Greek, he knew it was because he was refusing grace.

Sadly, this may have stemmed from his own misreading. At the opening of his dissertation, when he is summarizing what he calls “evangelical” Christianity—a fabled “primal” Christianity of the New Testament—he encapsulates it as a dichotomy. “One must choose between the world and God.”41 Camus himself accepted the dichotomy, then chose the world. What if he had read Augustine a little more closely and had seen that Christianity imploded the dichotomy—that in the incarnation, God chose the world?

AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSION, HIS intellectual stand on this mystery, did not preclude humility. Conviction is not synonymous with dogmatism. Augustine was more than willing to admit: “I do not know.”42 Indeed, one of his last acts as an author was a remarkable project: he became his own critic. Augustine’s (unfinished) Retractations—a personal, critical survey of the vast corpus of his writings (he made it through ninety-three of his works)—is a remarkable testament to intellectual humility. It is an ancient version of “how my mind has changed” in which he entreats his readers to cheer his progress rather than denounce the change as intellectual compromise. Augustine hopes for readers not to take glee in his mistakes but to appreciate the honesty of his admissions (“only an ignorant man will have the hardihood to criticize me for criticizing my own errors”).43 It is an intellectual virtue, for Augustine, to follow illumination where it leads, even if it means admitting one was wrong.

We see him make the same appeal to those who are so confident that Christianity is wrong or that it is intellectually feeble and thus something to be abandoned, outgrown. He encourages caution about hastily considering the matter settled: “If you are not sure what I am saying and have doubts about whether it is true, at least be sure that you have no doubt about your having doubts about this.”44 Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.