Augustinian truths
Kate Chisholm
Lord Reith must be turning in his grave. Not with shock and horror, but in amazement that there are still moments on his beloved airwaves when you can imagine yourself back to the beginnings of the BBC, to a world without gizmos and celebrity knockouts and a time when broadcasters were confident enough of their material (and respectful enough of their audience) not to feel that ‘entertainment’ must be added to everything to make their programmes palatable, like MSG or the emulsifier soya lecithin. True, the moments are often buried so deep in the schedules that you’re lucky to find them, or still be awake. But this week on The Essay at 11 o’clock Radio Three offered anyone just back from walking the dog and not addicted to Newsnight the chance to bone up on St Augustine.
Some might wish to argue that it’s a desecration to attempt to summarise the fourth-century Christian’s mammoth works, the City of God, say, or the Confessions, in short bursts of 15 minutes a session. But I find it harder and harder these days to concentrate for longer than that at a stretch, and these brief quarter-hours were wonderfully intense insights into the questing saint’s life and teaching. Not a second was wasted on unnecessary packaging; no music, no build-up, no gimmickry at all. Just four talking heads (a different scholar or writer each evening) explaining why we should still be heeding the thoughts and words of this ancient bishop from north Africa.
The point about Augustine is that he asks (and tries to answer) the big questions that we all find ourselves struggling with at some point in our lives. Why is there such evil in the world? How can a loving God allow good people to suffer so much? What do we mean by the just war? How can we reconcile our human desires with a faith in God? But, as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, emphasised, Augustine also questioned what it is to be human, both boring and bad. He trawled back through his early life, trying to recapture the experience of being a child, to discover how we grow (or not) from self-centred babydom into responsible, thinking persons.
At one point in his semi-autobiographical (and surprisingly modern-sounding) Confessions, Augustine describes, with pugnacious precision, the way that some babies terrorise their parents with their constant mewling: ‘It can hardly be right for a child, even at that age, to cry for everything ... to work himself into a tantrum against people older than himself and not required to obey him; and to try his best to strike and hurt others who know better than he does, including his own parents, when they do not give in to him and refuse to pander to whims which would only do him harm.’ Odd, but somehow reassuring, to hear a premonition of Lionel Shriver’s chilling book We Need to Talk About Kevin (which you may have heard this week on Radio Four) in something written in AD 397–8.
On his theory of war, so abused in recent times, Professor Gillian Clark reminded us that Augustine was not saying that ‘you know your war is just if God tells you to fight it’. On the contrary he argued, ‘Be very careful indeed.’ Even with the best of intentions, it’s possible to get things very wrong. ‘People must correct themselves while they live. Death comes suddenly and no one can then be corrected.’ Stirring stuff for a stormy night in January, with the wind howling through the eaves.
Friday’s Afternoon Play on Radio Four was also unflinching in its observation of human behaviour. The Minute When Your Life Stops (directed by Nadia Molinari) laid bare the impact of a suicide in the family. But it was not strictly speaking a play. Jude Hughes, the writer, instead chose to interweave a fictional situation — a woman and her three teenage children grapple with their feelings after the death of their husband/father who hanged himself in the garage — with reallife interviews with wives, husbands, sisters, children who have also been abandoned in this dreadful way. You’re left feeling as if your skin has been seared away and oddly more alive than you ever should be, says one of the characters.
On paper this play did not sound like ideal listening, and especially not in gloomy January when the number of suicides tends to increase, peaking in the grimmest month of all, February. The fusion of make-believe with such painful reality also sounded rather dubious; suicide creates far too deep a scar to make play with its consequences. But at no point did I feel as if my emotions were being manipulated by the writer, and the interviews were so affecting. Not a wasted tear or self-pitying groan. Augustine — and Lord Reith — would have been justly proud.
Previous page
