Antiquity and Renaissance

¶ … Confessions of Augustine, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, "On the Oration and Dignity of Man," Petrarch's poetry, and Shakespeare's drama "King Lear" are both products of societies in which the dominant religious ethos was Christian rather than pagan. However, although all texts share this similar historical feature, fundamentally opposing views of the self are articulated through the theological texts in contrast with the works of lyric and dramatic poetry.

This may seem counter-intuitive to a casual reader, as both Augustine's Confessions and "King Lear" makes use of pagan and Christian modalities of selfhood. A closer reading suggests that while the former does so to validate the Christian concept of the supreme value of the inner life of the self as illuminated by God, the latter does so in a way that ultimately expresses a view of human inner life that is nihilistic, confusing, and cannot necessarily be illuminated at all.

Augustine is a man writing on the cusp of the division in historical time between the old pagan era and an evolving Christian, soon to be predominantly Catholic world. He advances, in contrast to pagan antiquity, a view of the self that is interior in its focus. He contrasts this interior nature with his other, worldly self of his past pagan life, the life where he had a mistress, and was concerned mainly with accumulating material goods and gaining the trappings of outer, societal status.

In the course of the Confessions, he makes exterior this inner conflict by discussing his parents. His father was a pagan, and a man of the world. His mother was a Christian, and a long-suffering wife who eventually became St. Monica. Augustine must chose between these two portions of himself. He ultimately chooses Christianity, or rather Christianity chooses him, as he experiences a divine revelation in a garden while staring at a Biblical verse.

It is interesting to note that before this revelation took place, Augustine had become to live in a more Christian fashion. He became fascinated with a sect of Christianity later deemed to be heretical. He begged God to make him good, but not yet; not so good he could not enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Augustine's fundamental change, in other words, was in terms of his inner point-of-view.

To the world he might have appeared as a good man, only have committed some small offenses, such as stealing apples as a child, or not marrying the woman he was having intercourse with. However, Augustine states that in retrospect, he realizes that merely because much of the outer world deems a man to be good, this does not mean the man himself is good. After all, much of the world, in Augustine's time, was still non-Christian. Augustine states that individual must alone listen to the inner voice of God.

It is the inner life that is important, rather than the outer appearance or outer action. Augustine had seen the quote that inspired his revelation many times before, but because he looked at that quote with a different inner life than before, the Biblical quote changed his entire existence.

That Augustine is simply not an idiosyncratic Christian writer, but that his philosophies were taken up and developed by later authors reflected in the writings of Saint Teresa of Avlia, whose 'interior castle' model of the self also exemplifies a Christian stress upon interior life. The outer trappings of power, such as a kingly castle, is used as a metaphor to express a greater truth, namely of the accent of the soul to heaven within, a phenomenon that cannot be expressed or witnessed fully in an external fashion.

For Teresa, the divine 'rainfall' from God of revelation, although expressed in humble metaphors, such as watering a garden, is both unwilled by the soul and achieved not through specific actions, but through the mysterious gift of God, of grace. The reasons for Christian philosophy may have to do with its roots in Platonic philosophy, such as the writings of Pico della Mirandola suggest. Pico's writings, around the time of Teresa's build upon Plato's division between the transient nature of reality, which is.