Scott Beauchamp
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Contact
  • Blog
An Aggregate of Last Moments

augustine and the trials of fallen friendship

9/14/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
One’s view of God may be congenial when things are going well and yet largely inadequate when one is facing the fundamental challenges that suffering and death pose to our sense of meaning and well-being. The large, “cosmic” questions of meaning that can seem too “abstract” and “distant” in normal times will become very concrete and immediate when crisis threatens. Will the comfortable, distant, non-demanding God be adequate to shed light on the deep questions of meaning in such times of darkness? So unbearable was Augustine’s grief, so incapable was he of bearing this burden, that it caused him to flee his hometown and return to Carthage.

Like all created things, friends are good, but incomplete. They are finite, and we have been created for an infinite good, and only it can fulfill us. To expect that created things, even friends, can fulfill us in ways that only God can is to expect more than they can give and to miss the good they can be. Like all created things, friends are meant to point us toward the God who created, redeemed, and sustains us. Our perseverance in truth, goodness, and love depends upon this. Without these, we become useless, and perhaps worse than useless, to those we call “friends.”
​

Which brings us to another question. How good a friend was Augustine? He was using his friendship with others to seduce them away from the faith and into a life of illusion and arrogant worldliness. And not merely this one nameless young man. There are also his other, more famous friends whose names we know: Alypius, Nebridius, and Romanianus. Augustine was clearly the intellectual ring-leader of the group, and he led them all into the errors of Manicheanism, before later leading them back out.
Here.
1 Comment
Paul R Grenier
9/14/2020 08:53:46 am

Hard for me to imagine dealing with the periods of grief in my life without the friendships, including that of my wife, who helped by just being there.

Two other quick random thoughts. What I've found is that differences over fundamentals like those in your brief meditation here lead to the end of friendship.

Another thing is that I think there is a very large number of men, in particular, who have no close friends today.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Scott Beauchamp

    Writer - Critic - Poet - Editor

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly