In the second article in a lecture series on the Consolations of Theology, Moore College lecturer ANDREW CAMERON recovers Augustine's insights into obsession.
Tanorexics are people who can't stop sunbaking. According to a 2005 US study, they display addictive tendencies similar to alcoholics or compulsive gamblers. Dr Tony White, senior lecturer in the Department of Dermatology at Sydney University, has "seen patients who have had melanomas cut out but still can't quit". "They're out of control, and they're not just being naughty, they've got a problem and they need professional help."1
What makes us like this?
You might respond "but I'm not like this. I'm not a tanorexic, an alcoholic, or a compulsive gambler." But have you ever been so preoccupied, distracted or taken by something or someone that you can't think of anything else? Vintage cars, a friendship, some technical perfection, academic excellence, fitness, shoes, machinery, music, our team winning the final, a computer game" whenever we preface some interest with the phrase "I have a passion for', we may just be talking about an interest, but we are often talking about an obsession.
The English term "obsession' appeared about 500 years ago. "Those in the castle sent to advise the Earl of their obsession" " meaning that they were under siege by an enemy. For us, it describes a mind plagued by a fixed idea or an unwanted or unhelpful desire. It refers to those episodes in life where we were deeply convinced of some "passion', but when we look back, shake our heads and say, "I don't know what I was thinking of". We were "under siege'.
There is no direct equivalent for "obsession' in the biblical languages; yet a persistent theme in the Bible is that all of us, from time to time, become obsessed with something. Humanity has its perennial favourites, such as money, sex, food or power, and it has a bit to say about these. It was Augustine, the African Christian leader who spanned the 4th and 5th centuries "like a colossus', who first drew together these biblical threads. He has been described as "far and away the best"”if not the very first"”psychologist in the ancient world" (Albert C. Outler).2
Augustine was fascinated by the way we can all find the seeds of obsession down at the core of our very selves. In an extended reflection on the way he understood life in the flesh to work,3 Augustine marvelled at the way his senses could gather sights and sounds and store them in the "vast cave' of his memory. Even one so beautiful as God could make his home there, in our minds. Yet this "fleshly' system, although wonderfully good, is also plagued with many possibilities for subversion.
Firstly, our senses can become trapped in what they sense. Many of us will recognise this lifelong task of Augustine's: "I struggle daily against greed for food and drink. I must therefore hold back my appetite with neither too firm nor too slack a rein".4 Likewise fragrances, music and sensual sensations all have their place; yet he was not happy about the way these could all mesmerise him.
Secondly, he thinks scientific inquisitiveness can go too far. He becomes unduly engrossed in the sight of a dog chasing a hare, or of a lizard eating a fly. Modern readers think that Augustine is going much too far when he chides himself for such interests, and even he knows that they can result in proper praise to God for the creation.5 But he senses a weakness here: that such a distraction can become a fixation, then an obsession.
Because we are like this, "there is a third kind of temptation which, I fear, has not passed from me. Can it ever pass from me in all this life? It is the desire to be feared or loved by other men, simply for the pleasure that it gives me, though in such pleasure there is no true joy".6 Like many of us, he is easily ensnared into social obsessions, and his autobiography is loaded with examples. "I was preparing a speech in praise of the Emperor, including that it should include a great many lies which would certainly be applauded by an audience who knew well enough how far from the truth they were. My ambitions had placed a load of misery on my shoulders and the further I carried it the heavier it became" " and then, to his shock, he passes a drunken beggar who is freer and happier than he.7
Substances and experiences; knowledge and its acquisition; social acceptance and social power. The problem is not that these are bad; on the contrary, according to Genesis 1:31, God made everything "very good", in its own place. But everything is almost too good; and we are surrounded by it, and have all been, or are, obsessed by some aspect of it.
Moderns try to brush aside Augustine as being overly rigorous, as in the example with the lizard. But his point is a profound one: that if he is honest with himself, there is a seamlessness between the kind of momentary "obsessions' that lure him throughout the day, and the obsessions that end up enslaving him. His threefold analysis of obsession is attempting to take seriously John's threefold description of our human response to the world (1 John 2:16): "the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions" " or, as a more racy translation puts it, "a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions". These powerful cravings are what theology calls concupiscence: those strong and overwhelming mixtures of mental and emotional longing that waylay us. (Augustine thinks that our craving for money is explained by the way it enables us to buy into each of these first three cravings.)
Here, according to Augustine, is the root of obsession: that even though God abundantly gives us a good world to be received with thanks (cf. 1 Tim. 4:4-5), we bore voraciously into tiny sections of it as if there can never be enough of it for us. In our voracious craving for good things, we think and act as if abundance is scarce: "I need that drink. I need sex. I need this promotion." Our overwhelming conviction that our real problem is the scarcity of some good thing colours all of us, in all our relationships; and it is this extreme flaw in each of us that makes our world such a melancholy place. We can never be content.
Anne Manne writes with incredulity of a woman who moans, "I have to work'. But, writes Manne, "I looked about me. We were sitting in an air-conditioned 300-square-metre, multi-bedroom ranch house with several bathrooms. Among the vehicles in the multi-car garage was a 4WD worth $50,000'. The house was huge, like much of modern suburbia. "The Great Australian Dream had been transformed into an empty crypt of consumption.'8
We marvel at obsession like this in others " but it is much, much harder to notice in ourselves. Pointing to the way the Bible helped him to end his own self-deception, Augustine uses it to help us end ours.
Is there hope for us? Clearly, since these are our desires at work, the very machinery used for self-evaluation and then change is hopelessly compromised. Augustine can only find any consolation in God: "Can anything restore me to hope except your mercy?'9 And in one of theology's most magnificent passages ever, Augustine points to the advent of a Mediator, someone human enough to know our way of death, but godlike enough to walk it rightly. Yet by not grasping to be godlike, he shows arrogant humanity the way of contented humility; and by sharing in our death, he makes wicked people justified. "Rightly do I place in him my firm hope that you will cure all my ills, through him who sits at your right hand and pleads for us; otherwise I should despair. For my ills are many and great " but your medicine is greater indeed.'10
Like Augustine, despite our ongoing wrestle with longings, distractions, and budding obsessions, we can rest safe in the caring mercy of the God who offers to heal and "reorder' our desires, if we give ourselves over in repentance and trust to the Mediator.
"Tanorexics' may still need professional help, as might alcoholics, sex addicts, the eating disordered, and nearly all of us at some time in our lives. But there remains one who offers to uphold and supervise that help, to cure our disordered desire and lead us into the way of peace, to a place where we are finally freed of our obsessions. Except, of course, for a best and most proper obsession: to love and serve him, and those around us.
Andrew Cameron lectures in Ethics at Moore College.
Endnotes:
1. Cited by Amy Lawson, "Sun Addicts need AA-type program', The Sunday Age 2/10/2005 p. 5.
2. Augustine. Confessions and Enchiridion. Translated by Albert C. Outler. London: SCM Press, 1955. Online: [url=http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/confessions-bod.html]http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/confessions-bod.html[/url].
3. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin Classics edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, Book X.
4. Conf. X.31 (Penguin edn. p. 237).
5. Conf. X.35 (Penguin edn. p. 243).
6. Conf. X.36 (Penguin edn. p. 244).
7. Conf. VI.6 (Penguin edn. p. 118).
8. Anne Manne, "Sell your soul and spend, spend, spend: the cost of living in a material world,' Sydney Morning Herald, April 14 2003.
9. Conf. X.36 (Penguin edn. p. 244).
10. Conf. X.43 (Penguin edn. p. 251).
