So now that I have released the rockin’ early letters EP its time to next begin work towards 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 much 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 is 73 years old writing his Retractationes and when he wrote On the Immortality of the Soul he was in his early 30s. So he is remembering back 40 years or so. Retractationes then is very useful as a guideline for constructing a timeline of Augustines writings and life and 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. In 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! In reading the 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 early Augustine who was really at this point in his life mostly untaught in the Christian faith. It has been one of those things listening to the albums and reading portions of the works that I struggled a little with as they are not exactly 100% theologically correct. That said I didn’t really intend this band to be all albums expressing Christian ideas but rather to be faithfully Augustine and help learn about him. Sometimes that means learning about people’s shifts in thinking, how they learned and even their mistakes. It is a good thing for you to remember if like me you find some of the songs to be a bit too much glorifying reason and the mind or too philosophical. Trust me when I say we will see a shift. Some of that shift I think we see especially in Soliloquies with his prayers there. All that said though, God uses people to convey His truth even in youthful ignorance and also sometimes it’s the partial truths (which is a truth just less full) that hit us when we are far from God 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.”