The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Diary: In matters of what is too narrowly considered “belief”–meaning belief in god, a reductive definition I reject–I am non-binary: I neither believe nor disbelieve. I find both postures untenable as much for being postures (that is, for being projections more often intended for mass consumption than for one’s personal, unadvertised, humble search for meaning) as for being undemonstrable. I acknowledge that they’re undemonstrable only by the very narrow, infinitesimal standards of human knowledge. I don’t mean to debase human knowledge: I’m not Augustinian. But a journalist’s first responsibility is to perspective. On earth we think we are the center of the universe. Our innate arrogance, inseparable from our innate creativity and genius for beauty and destruction, imagines our store of knowledge immense, despite our own evidence that it isn’t so: after a planetary history of 5.5 billion years, the cave painters emerged only 15,000, 25,000 years ago at most, and spent ten millennia or more painting the same poor bison and horse over and over again, however sublimely (repetition helps to develop skills). My Phoenician ancestors devised our alphabet only 6,000 years ago or less, and that only for the dullest of CPA practices of the time. The Odyssey and its less mature predecessor are at best 2,800 years old. FlaglerLive, that third and final segment of the Homeric trilogy, is only 16 years old. For all our hothouse self-congratulations, I picture all that knowledge as Micromegas, had he traveled beyond Saturn, might picture our local group of galaxies (itself a grain of sand’s atom in the universe), detecting our earth somewhere in the mist: as a lonely, insignificant smudge of next to nothing. To go from smudge to Augustinian proof of god’s existence is, as stretches of dark matter from here to Galaxy GN-z11 (the farthest yet recorded, is why I’m enshrining it in my smudge), a stretch. All that said, our lives are eternal Odyssean searches for home, and on the approach of Thanksgiving what drunk uncle might we not honor but Augustine and his conception of the human soul as being part of god, a conception he manufactured, I think, as part of his pre-Cabalistic attempt at proving the existence of god. I have trouble respecting a thinker whose entire philosophy is based on self-loathing, particularly a very smart thinker who requires me to have no pleasure not only of the flesh but of the mind: what hypocrisy is that, Hippo? But of all Augustine’s wacky ideas, this matter of soul pleases me, at least to the extent that it is part of the search that should never end. What if my soul, all our souls, are part of an oversoul? And shit, if as I wrote that last line I did not suddenly realize I was myself retreading old ground. This is the Hegelian idea, which I also loathe for its predeterminism. Why then did it appeal to me this morning when I read it in an analysis of Augustine’s idea of the soul? I don’t think it’s the predeterminism of it that I was imagining, or the ridiculous Hegelian idea that all tends toward a greater ideal, but the plurality of it, the idea that all our souls are as if in a hyper-democratic way not the creation of the creator, but the creator itself, that we are all as much our own creation as “his,” if the creator is to be so stupidly reduced to a sex. We are creation, creation is us. Our soul as synapse. Obviously the idea is as silly and reductive as any attempt either to explain creation or, more absurdly, to ascribe it to a creator. But who said the road back to Ithaca had to be so dull and humorless?

—P.T.

Augustine (354–430) began by declaring that Rome was being punished, not for her new faith, but for her old, continuing sins: lascivious acts by the populace and corruption among politicians. The pagan deities, he wrote, had lewdly urged Romans to yield to sexual passion—“the god Virgineus to loose the virgin’s girdle, Subigus to put her beneath a man’s loins, Prema to hold her down… Priapus upon whose huge and beastly member the new bride was commanded by religious order to stir and receive!” Here Augustine, by his own account, spoke from personal experience. In his Confessions he had described how, before his conversion, he had devoted his youth to exploring the outer limits of carnal depravity. But, he wrote, the original sin, and he now declared that there was such a thing, had been committed by Adam when he yielded to Eve’s temptations. As children of Adam, he held, all mankind shared Adam’s guilt. Lust polluted every child in the very act of conception—sexual intercourse was a “mass of perdition [exitium].” However, although most people were thereby damned in the womb, some could be saved by the blessed intervention of the Virgin Mary, who possessed that power because she had conceived Christ sinlessly

–From William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (1992).

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