I recently watched a video of a talk that David Brooks gave last month at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and, as best I can tell, a secular Jew. He’s also a very insightful guy. In this particular lecture he reflected on his recent experiences teaching a course at Yale. What he expected – and got – was a room full of this country’s best and brightest college seniors. What he didn’t expect – and was troubled by – was the realization that these students had no interior life. He reports that they were so focused on external success that they’d not only failed to cultivate their inner world, they didn’t even have a vocabulary to talk about it.
You can watch the lecture for yourself by clicking here. What I found interesting was not his observation about the students at Yale or his conviction that we need an inner world, rather it was his belief that we are broken.
As I noted above, I’m not sure exactly what Brooks believes about spiritual matters, but it’s not every day that New York Times reporters use the word “sin.”
In the lecture, Brooks describes his efforts to help students begin thinking about their inner world by assigning certain books. In particular, autobiographical works written by people who were not only very accomplished (in worldly terms) but who also had a rich inner life. His list included people like: Dorothy Day, Francis Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall and Samuel Johnson
It also included Augustine. In particular, it included Augustine’s Confessions.
Perhaps you’ve read it. If not, add it to the pile of must reads. Here’s what Brooks emphasized:
- Augustine, who was born in Algeria in 354, was exceptionally bright. Exceptionally, exceptionally bright.
- His mother, Monica, was a devout Christian. She was also ambitious for her son. Brooks called her a Tiger Mom. Perhaps she was.
- While he is still young, Augustine goes to Carthage, a university town, to try to impress the grad students. He is very vain. He leads a sort of wild life. (Not wild by today’s standards. But he is involved in the hook-up culture.) All of this throws him into turmoil. Augustine writes:
I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love. And from the depths of my need I hated myself for not more keenly feeling the need…. What I needed most was to love and to be loved. But most of all, when I obtained the enjoyment of the body of the person who loved me, I rushed headlong into love, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bounds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot iron rods of jealously, by suspicion and fear, by bursts of anger and quarrels.
- He marries a common law wife from a social class below him. Later his mother finds him a wife of his own class to marry. He is forced to leave his first wife (of 15 years, with whom he had had a son). He found this experience horrific. All of this caused him to reflect on his own sinfulness and cruelty.
- One of the famous stories in Confessions revolves around Augustine’s account of stealing some pears. He had fallen in with some rough kids and decided to go along with them. So, even though he had no desire or need for the pears, which were not particularly good, he took them. This leads him to reflect on his inability to be good – i.e., that he does bad things even though he wants to be a good person.
- In Book 8 of Confessions, Augustine describes himself in a state of moral paralysis – a lack of freedom brought on by the accumulation of his own choices. He offered the following analysis of his predicament in terms that approach a modern understanding of sexual addiction: “I was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain to hold me as a prisoner. The consequences of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed and habit to which there is no resistance – becomes a compulsion. By these links, as it were, connected one to the another (hence my term, a chain) a harsh bondage held me under restraint…”
- Brooks said that he explained to the Yale seniors that Augustine was “imprisoned by his passions. He wasn’t leading a debased life. He was selfish but not any different than you or me.”
- Brooks goes on to recount the famous story of Augustine’s conversion. I’m quoting here from his Aspen lecture: He is in the Garden and listens to someone talk about others who were sacrificing for religion. He starts crying. He wants to be alone. He hears a voice which sounds like child’s voice, “Take up and read. Take up and read.” He finds a Bible, opens it at random to Romans 13:13-14, which reads: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.’ He stops reading. He instantly feels a light infusing upon him. It’s one of the most famous conversion stories of all time. He tells his Mom, who is overjoyed.”
- Brooks ends his comments by noting that Augustine learned that: “many of us set out to conquer the world; we are raised to be ambitious. But if we want inner peace we need God, and we can’t conquer God the way you conquer a job opportunity. You have to be receptive and be passive and hold up the white flag. You need to be receptive and vulnerable.” Brooks goes on to add: “And that is an impulse that is very difficult for us – the idea that contentment will not come through advancing, progress and ambition but through vulnerability, acceptance, self-renunciation is hard to learn, but critical if we are to be whole people.”
As I said, not the usual fare for a NYT writer.