So now that I have released the rockin’ early letters EP it’s time to begin work on an album based on Augustine’s next work On the Immortality of the Soul. You may wonder…how does Kyle know which work comes next? Well, the easy answer is I am relying on Augustine’s own recollection in a book he wrote near the end of his life called the Retractions, or in Latin, Retractationes. In this work, Augustine surveys many of his writings in the order he recalls writing them and provides comments about each. So it makes it easy: I just go to the Retractions and look at what is next. Augustine was 73 years old when he wrote his Retractationes, and he was in his early 30s when he wrote On the Immortality of the Soul. So he was looking back 40 years or so. Retractationes, then, is very useful as a guideline for constructing a timeline of Augustine’s writings and life. Augustine did have copies of his own works, so he was able to read them. Imagine reading something you wrote 40 years ago. For me, I guess it would be baby scribbles at my current age, but because I am a little bit of a digital pack rat, I was able to pull up a research paper from college that was about 16 years old. It was interesting to read parts of it.
Well, anyways, here is what Augustine writes regarding his work On the Immortality of the Soul. With my weird sense of humor, I chuckled a bit reading the end of the first paragraph. It was almost exactly the thought I had trying to read the work. Thank God for AI being able to summarize it! While reading the passage below, I kinda picture Old Man Augustine rolling his eyes a little at his younger self. Regardless, we will create a cool rock album on the work to bring out the best parts in an accessible way. It is a good reminder that Augustine’s thoughts did transform significantly over time and that we are presently dealing with the early Augustine, who, at this point in his life, was mostly untaught in the Christian faith. I have struggled a little while listening to the albums and reading portions of the works, as they are not exactly 100% theologically correct. That said, I didn’t really intend for every album by this band to express Christian ideas, but rather for the project to remain faithful to Augustine and help me learn about him. Sometimes that means learning about people’s shifts in thinking, how they learned and even their mistakes. This is good to remember if, like me, you find some of the songs too focused on glorifying reason and the mind or too philosophical. Trust me when I say we will see a shift. I think we see some of that shift, especially in his prayers in Soliloquies. All that said, though, God uses people to convey His truth even in youthful ignorance. Sometimes it’s the partial truths (which are truths, just less full) that hit us when we are far from God and that God uses to lead us to Christ.
Augustine, Retractions, Chapter 5
After I finished the Soliloquies and returned from the countryside near Milan, I wrote a short book called On the Immortality of the Soul. I meant it to be a kind of personal note to help me complete the Soliloquies, since that work was still unfinished. But somehow, even though I didn’t intend it, the book was copied and shared, and now it’s counted among my writings. The reasoning in it is very compact and difficult to follow—so much that even I find it tiring to read, and I can hardly understand it myself.
When I wrote that book, I was thinking only about the human mind. In one place I said that learning cannot exist in something that never learns. Elsewhere I said that knowledge only includes what belongs to a certain discipline. But I failed to remember that God doesn’t learn any disciplines, and yet He knows everything, including things that have not yet happened. I also wrote that no being has life joined with reason except the soul. But of course God’s life is not without reason, for in Him there is the highest life and the highest reason. And when I said that whatever is understood always stays the same, I forgot that the mind itself is something that can be understood, yet it changes constantly. I also wrote that the mind cannot be separated from eternal reason because it is not joined to it by place. I would not have said that if I had already learned from Scripture, which says that our sins separate us from God. That shows that even things not joined in place can still be separated in a spiritual way.
I also said that if the soul is without the body, it is not in this world. I can no longer remember what I meant by that. Surely the souls of the dead are without bodies, and yet they are still somewhere in this world, since even the realm of the dead belongs to creation. Perhaps when I said “without the body,” I meant being free from the body’s corruptions or sicknesses; if so, my wording was poor. I also wrote rashly that the highest Being gives form to the body through the soul, so that the body exists only as long as it is alive—whether this applies to the world as a whole or to each living creature within it. That whole idea was careless and mistaken.
This book begins with the words, “If there is anywhere such a thing as learning.”