Scenic Route — Post 2
“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” —Augustine, Confessions I.1 (trans. Pusey)
During my research, I happened across the privation theory and the man who wrote it. I became fascinated with what such a conflicted man, on his very human journey, could do for something as omnipotent as God. What I found was more of a landing point than a point of creation. Through my studies of the Stoics and finding many parallels with Christian teachings, it felt like Augustine was the end of one journey and the start of another. An inflection point. Stepping off a bridge and wandering into a new world that opens up.
I think Augustine is the point where Stoicism really ends and Christianity begins. A bridge that lands at his feet.
I found myself going the opposite direction somehow. That’s what this post explores.
Stoicism wasn’t intended to be a bridge. It was intended to be a solution. An explanation. The Greek and Roman pantheons were complete chaos. Jupiter feuding with Juno. Ares causing war for sport. Aphrodite picking favorites. The way the Roman and Greek gods intertwined, one culture absorbed by another, there was no unified logic under any of it.
The Epicureans landed on gods that exist but don’t care. Atoms and a void. The Skeptics decided you couldn’t find the answer and should stop trying.
The Stoics looked deeper. What they found was the logos. A rational ordering principle behind everything. Not a god with opinions. A framework. Impersonal, consistent, everywhere. You couldn’t pray to it but you could align yourself with it.
Their physics is what makes it stick for me. The logos isn’t a being watching from somewhere else. It is everything. It moves through us the way warmth runs through a rock. It’s pneuma, breath, woven into matter. You’re not aligning with a distant rule. You’re discovering what you’re already made of then feeding and fueling off that source. That’s a long way from Zeus throwing thunderbolts.
Cleanthes wrote the hymn to Zeus but Zeus was not his muse. He was writing about the logos.
“Thou canst Make the rough smooth, bring wondrous order forth From chaos; in Thy sight unloveliness Seems beautiful; for so Thou hast fitted things Together, good and evil, that there reigns One everlasting Reason in them all. The wicked heed not this, but suffer it To slip, to their undoing; these are they Who, yearning ever to secure the good, Mark not nor hear the law of God, by wise Obedience unto which they might attain A nobler life, with Reason harmonized.”
Stoicism was universal. It gave you nothing to love. It didn’t love you in return.
That appealed to me. A better life in tune with a harmonious reason. A reason in which good and evil were just a part.
I kept pushing in the opposite direction.
John’s Gospel opens with a line any educated Stoic in the first century would have recognized: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
Word. The Greek is logos. John puts it exactly where a Stoic would, at the origin, as the principle the whole cosmos runs on. A first-century Greek reads that verse and thinks he knows what’s coming.
Then, four verses later, John breaks the rule: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
The Greek under “dwelt” is eskēnōsen, from skēnē, tent. Literally, the Logos pitched its tent among us. It camped in a body.
Stoicism couldn’t go there. Marcus, in his tent on the frontier, aligned himself with the Logos the way you align with the tide: by understanding it and stopping your resistance. The ordering principle was something you could come into accordance with but never touch. It didn’t know his name. It couldn’t. A principle can’t love you. It can only be true.
Christians gave it a face. They made it a man. The principle that Marcus could only reach out toward now reached down.
It loved. It forgave. It died for your sins.
The Logos became something you could have a relationship with. Something you could love back.
The old religions were personal but tribal. Stoicism was universal but dry. Christianity offered both: a universal framework with someone inside it who knew your name.
That’s the thing I had first, before I had a name for any of it. The relationship showed up before the framework did.
I was an atheist for a long time. I couldn’t buy a God that let so much “evil” happen in the world. A God that sat by as floods and disease ripped through civilizations. A God that let his children die as murderers live among us.
It wasn’t the building or the book as much as the people who used them as cover. The ones who could quote scripture in the parking lot then judge someone for being different from them. The people who showed up on Sunday then lived the rest of the week as if the sermon never happened. I could see the gap. Nobody else seemed to. That made me crazy.
Then I drank for a long time. The list of people and institutions I disagreed with grew in correlation with the volume of alcohol I consumed until I couldn’t live that way anymore.
I went into recovery and found a version of God I couldn’t explain. The Higher Power of the Twelve Steps is deliberately undefined, in case an alcoholic with a chip on his shoulder who doesn’t want to sign up for anything comes in. An exit door was left conveniently open, without having to agree to terms first.
Alcoholics are interesting creatures. We are willing to unconditionally surrender ourselves over to something, anything, so long as we are able to quit drinking. Not one moment before we are ready and only if we can negotiate the terms.
I looked around those rooms and saw a lot of happy, sober people. Slowly over time, I began to trust the source of their happiness. I didn’t have a framework. I had a relationship I couldn’t name with something that many people call God. I was okay with that. Eventually, giving my life over to a God of my own understanding, having some faith in something bigger than myself, led to a better life for me.
Then I started reading the Stoics.
Somewhere in there, it clicked. The logos. The order I had been breaking against when I was drinking. The thing I was previously in relationship with, that I now had a name for. The Stoics didn’t give me the relationship. They gave me the structural account for something I’d been inside for years without knowing what to call it.
History walked the bridge forward: polytheism → Stoicism → logos → Christianity → logos with a face. I walked it backward through sobriety.
I started with something that was a lot like the Christian God. It gave me order. It gave structure to my chaos. Then I found Stoicism. I prefer the Stoic view. There is no negotiation. The natural order exists but it does not love you back. You are but a small part of a much larger whole.
What I found isn’t that one is better than the other. What I found is that one is better suited for me.
By the time he writes the Confessions, Christianity has found its way to the front. The God he’s converting to is the God of scripture. The God he’s describing is recognizable as the logos with a face.
But what kept pulling me to him wasn’t a balance of Stoicism and Christianity. It was the man writing toward a self he kept failing to be. What I found most interesting was the gap.
Confessions is a 400-page meditation on the gap between who he was, who he is and who he was trying to become. Written to the God he was reaching toward. The form is prayer. A man examining himself with no exit. That’s what Marcus was doing in his tent. That’s what Seneca was doing on his better nights. That’s what anyone in recovery is doing in the Fifth Step. The vocabulary changes. The work doesn’t.
I keep coming back to “grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Socrates said no one does wrong willingly. Wrongdoing is a failure of knowledge. Augustine’s “not yet” is a direct rebuttal. He understood. He could articulate the good more precisely than almost anyone alive. And that understanding still fell short.
His answer: the will itself is damaged. You can’t reason your way there. You need grace. You need something outside yourself. The “not yet” is the seed of his theology, grown out of his own specific failure to be who he knew he should be.
I can’t think of anyone with any kind of honest recovery that doesn’t know a version of that prayer. Augustine had a name, a structure for what he was trying to live up to. I was grasping for something I couldn’t define.
I’m not here to canonize Augustine or to condemn him. What I want to add here is why he keeps pulling me back.
He has two conflicting identities in the same person and he’s painfully aware of them. There’s the Confessions, the woman he sent away, the prayer, the garden, the years of “not yet.” And there’s the theology that modern Christianity is still built around.
Two bodies of work, entirely different in form. The same conflict runs through both. The articulated good on one side, the lived practice on the other and the gap between where he is and where he feels he is supposed to be.
That’s the parallel I see. What’s fascinating is the shape. Not him and me or us and them. The internal conflict. Anyone who has written and broken their own rules knows it. We all know it in some form or another. But we’ve never written a book in observation and prayer over it.
His biography, his own words, in his own book, is a sustained record of loving the wrong things in the wrong order, knowing better and then doing it anyway.
He didn’t stop being human when he wrote the theology. I think he just came to terms with being an imperfect human, let go of the idea that he would ever be perfect and began to fully love something bigger than himself.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
Closing Question
Have you ever hit a point where understanding wasn’t enough, and you needed something outside yourself to change?
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