In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman has an excellent critique of the data-driven mindset of Enlightenment Modernism, which looks to quantitative research alone to solve all of society's problems. (As an educator, I see this problem in education, which is dominated by standardized testing.) Quantitative research is just one way to discover/regulate/define truth among many, but modern society sees it as virtually infallible. Postman calls out this bias:

We have [many prejudices today], as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers, who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists, and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living today by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

James K. A. Smith has recently written "Singing the Story into Our Bones," a thought-provoking article on music. Here's a few excerpts from this article that stood out to me.

"We tend to think of stories as childish things—the stuff of children’s sermons. We romanticize stories, to be sure, and wax nostalgic about them, but we also think of “story” as something to outgrow, like security blankets and Santa Claus. Story is part of the immature, benighted world of myth and fantasy and nursery rhymes—the childish things we put away in order to grow up and face the proverbial “real world” full of cold, hard facts."

"As Christians inhabiting this late-modern world (still so powerfully shaped by the Enlightenment), we have imbibed and absorbed functional stances toward both story and authority that can make us poor hearers of Scripture. Even more problematic, our implicit perceptions of both story and authority might explain why, despite our best intentions, we have a hard time receiving the Bible as authoritative. It’s pretty hard for us to reconcile the flannelgraph depictions of fantastical stories about fish and fiery furnaces when Monday to Friday we’re faced with the urgency and force of the stock reports in The Wall Street Journal. We are unconsciously conditioned in a million different ways to defer to the authority of the facts in Scientific American and be skeptical of the gospel “stories” precisely because they are stories."

"To be human is to be storied."

"If Christian worship is one of the ways that we are sanctified by the Spirit, then we might say worship is a kind of narrative therapy—a reordering of our narrative orientation. Sanctifying our perception requires restor(y)ing the imagination. This transformation requires aesthetic measures that resonate with the imagination and reach us on an affective level. Stories are not just nice little entertainments to jazz up the material; stories are not just some supplementary way of making content “interesting.” No, we learn through stories because we know by stories."

"The formative power of cultural narratives cannot be adequately countered with mere didactics. Counterformation requires countermeasures that capture our imagination, not just convince our intellect. So we need to be regularly immersed in God’s story—“the true story of the whole world,” as Michael Goheen calls it. Our imaginations need to be restored, recalibrated, and realigned by an affective immersion in the story of how God in Christ is reconciling the world to himself. Song seeps into our bones in ways that didactic information never will. To sing the story of God’s gracious acts is not just to recite them. In the embodied, affective rhythm of song, the Spirit plants the story in the epicenter of our being: in our desire, in our imagination. Singing the story is the way it gets into our bones and under our skin, shaping the very way we perceive our world."

Saint Augustine: A Penguin Life by Garry Wills
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the last few months, I noticed that several books I had been enjoying were influenced strongly by Augustine—in particular, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom.

Also, Augustine was influential on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and he has been influential as well on John Piper, a writer whose books have helped me grow spiritually.

One connection to Augustine that each of these writers holds is Augustine’s anthropology. Augustine sees the human being not primarily as a thinker, but as lover—not primarily a thinking being, but a desiring being. In today’s world, dominated by Enlightenment thinking, some Christians see the core of our being as the mind, our thoughts. But Augustine knew better. Augustine saw the core of our being not in the head, but in our desires, our affections. For Augustine, becoming a Christian involves God sovereignly transforming a person’s affections so that the person desires Him above all else. In other words, salvation involves the mind, but it equally involves the changing of a person’s desires so that God is loved for His own sake, and not for any other reason.

So anyway, when I saw Garry Wills’ bio of Augustine at the library last week, I picked it up, and I read the book in about three days. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It’s scholarly and yet readable, and at only 150 pages, it’s short enough that it’s not overwhelming.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I love the story of Augustine’s conversion. As an unconverted man, Augustine had struggled with sexual sins, and was unwilling to repent from them to follow Christ. As he was wrestling with his soul one afternoon in a garden in Milan, he overheard a voice, maybe of a little girl in a nearby house: “Take up and read!” Seeing this as providential, he got up, took a copy of the Scriptures, and opened it up. The verse he opened to was Romans 13:14: “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.” Augustine says, “The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and every shadow of doubt evanesced.” Again, it was Augustine’s desires that were changed. He had thought the right things, but that afternoon, his affections were directed to God.

2. I was fascinated by how Augustine’s thought developed over the course of his lifetime. For example, Augustine moved over the course of his ministry from a neo-Platonist disdain of the material realm to a Biblical acceptance and embracing of the material realm as good--because it was created by a good God. Originally, as a new believer, Augustine was an ascetic. But at the end of his life, he was defending the institution of marriage from attacks by Jerome, who had said that marriage caused defilement (because it involved the body). Augustine certainly wasn’t perfect as a man or as a thinker, but he had an amazing capacity to work through intellectual problems and the humility to change his positions as he felt led by God to do so.

3. It was interesting to me that Augustine was so involved in the work of his local ministry. He was a pastor, and he was constantly dealing with situations in his church. I had pictured him as someone sitting in a study all day, writing and thinking lofty thoughts detached from the world. But this isn’t what Augustine’s life was like at all. He was constantly pre-occupied with practical issues in his congregation and with issues in other churches nearby.

4. Wills also gave me a better idea of what the early church was like. He describes leaders like Jerome and Ambrose, as well as church councils, which could get surprisingly rowdy. Wills sees Jerome as a crotchety and argumentative man, highly unlikable, and unable to keep friends. Ambrose, who baptized Augustine, was someone who Augustine respected more and more over the course of his lifetime.

5. Finally, I was struck by the importance of writing in Augustine's life. Augustine wrote for himself, and writing helped him clarify his thoughts. Augustine also did much of his work as a pastor and as a church leader through letters, sermons, and other forms of writing.



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