GOSPEL DELTA

Confessions – Book 2

// February 19th, 2010 // Affection

Reading through the first chapter of Book 2 in Confessions, I couldn’t help but notice Augustine’s use of words when describing those dark times in his adolescence when his sin and distance from God was at its peak. The closing line “”I became to myself a wasteland” pretty much sums it up. Descriptions like ” mists of passion steaming up”, “puddly desires of the flesh”, “hot imagination”, “boiling over in my fornications”, “barren fields of sorrow”, “tides of my youth”, and “foaming in my wickedness” paint a picture of a wasteland. As I reflected on this, three things from my own life jumped to mind:

1)   TS Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”

I read this poem back in high school. Eliot’s descriptions of despair have a similar flavor to those of Augustine.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

In addition, there are even thoughts in “The Wasteland” that were directly inspired by Augustine’s “Confessions”.

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

This poem rang true to me when I read it 10 years ago. Even then, in some sense I had realized that we live in a wasted world. In “The Wasteland” we see Eliot as a tormented man, not unlike Augustine, who sees and experiences the spiritual emptiness, paralysis, and disease of this world. But Eliot’s despair turned to hope when he became a Christian in the middle of his life. Much like Augustine, God saved him “from fire by fire”. Post-conversion, Eliot became a profound Christian writer. From his pen came this stunning quote:

“The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

2)    ”The Dead Marshes” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Two Towers:

In The Lord of the Rings, the Dead Marshes were an ancient battlefield of the where many of the fallen were laid to rest. Over time, the battlefield became marshes, which swallowed up the dead, though their bodies could still be seen floating in the water. In Two Towers, Gollum leads Frodo and Samwise through a passage through the marshes, which was marked by lights that danced about, and Candles which Gollum called “candles of corpses”. The Marshes were also known as ‘The Mere of Dead Faces’; and are described in Two Towers as:

“dreary and wearisome. Cold, clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long forgotten summers.”

In The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien speculated that the description of the Dead Marshes may have been based on his personal experience in World War I, specifically, the Battle of the Somme, fought on the banks of the Somme River in France. One of the largest battles of the First World War, by the time fighting had petered out in late autumn 1916 more than 1.5 million casualties had been suffered by the forces involved. It is understood to have been one of the bloodiest military operations ever recorded.

I think both Augustine and Tolkien are alluding to an all too easily-forgotten truth: that life is truly a battlefield that has, in many places (especially our hearts), turned into a swamp of despair, and there are casualties all around us. We feel that. But on this side of the Cross we have the solid assurance that God has not left us alone.

3)   ”The Pond”

This is a video I recently saw at Ray Ortlund’s blog. It so aptly illustrates the deceptiveness of sin and temptation, and the rescue we experience from the sewage that Augustine is describing through this part of his life. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” – Romans 7:15.