The Cane and The Cross

But, in my heart, he did not gain the better of my mother's piety and prevent me from believing in Christ just because he still disbelieved himself. For she did all that she could to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he. In this you helped turn the scales against her husband, whom she always obeyed because by obeying him she obeyed your law, thereby showing greater virtue than he did.

From Augustine's Confessions, a man's virtue is directly correlated to obedience to God and His laws. From his mom obeying God's law to submit to the non-believing husband, Augustine finds that she showed "greater virtue than he did."

Adherence to God's laws is the requirement to be a virtuous Christian. This is submission.

If this was so, why did I dislike Greek literature, which tells these tales, as much as the Greek language itself?

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There was of course the difficulty which is found in learning any foreign language, and this soured the sweetness of the Greek romances. For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn. As a baby, of course, I knew no Latin either, but I learned it without fear and fret, simply by keeping my ears open while my nurses fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me. I learned it without being forced by threats of punishment, because it was my own wish to be able to give expression to my thoughts.

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This clearly shows that we learn better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion.

Augustine's childhood was marked by the cane: humans in positions of power, like teachers, which struck him, both metaphorically and literally. The answer to the boy who did not want to learn Greek was harsh punishment, not firm guidance.

He was beat into submission.

But your law, O God, permits the free flow of curiosity to be stemmed by force. From the schoolmaster's cane to the ordeals of martyrdom, your law prescribes bitter medicine to retrieve us from the noxious pleasures which cause us to desert you.

Augustine finds that God's law of submission applies to him and his teachers indeed. Despite being a grown man, long gone from the teachers that struck him, he finds himself a boy once again, recounting the memory of a cane long in the past.

Despite this memory, despite the pained reflection, he believes one thing to be true: this is God's law, even if bitter, and I was virtuous for submitting.

To Augustine, if submission is virtue, and cruelty teaches submission, then cruelty is divine medicine.

But you, who take every hair of our heads into your reckoning, used for my benefit the mistaken ideas of all those who insisted on making me study; and you used the mistake I made myself, in not wishing to study, as a punishment which I deserved to pay, for I was a great sinner for so small a boy. In This way you turned their faults to my advantage and justly punished me for my own. For this is what you have ordained and so it is with us, that every soul that sins brings its own punishment upon itself.

This affliction, these strikes of the cane, is framed as a positive experience. Through God's intentional judgement, this small boy's great sins were itself his own divine and just punishment.

The man now reflecting on childhood, he finds that young Augustine is solely to blame for the strikings that marked his childhood education.

God's law is the cane.

Simone Weil, a Christian mystic from 20th century France, also explored the cane, which she called force in her The Iliad, or the Poem of Force:

The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force. The force that men wield, the force that subdues men, in the fact of which human flesh shrinks back.

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Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. Someone was there and, the next moment, no one.

Unlike the man who grew to understand the force of the cane as divine judgement, Weil sees it as "that which makes a thing" of the boy that submits to it. Weil finds the divine judgement, the path which returns a sinner to His divine love, of Augustine's God as dehumanizing force.

Weil reflected in Gravity and Grace that an action done is itself distinct from the energy fueling that action, where the energy can raise or lower the moral standing of the agent:

The object of an action and the level of the energy by which it is carried out are distinct from each other. A certain thing must be done. But where is the energy to be drawn for its accomplishment? A virtuous action can lower a man if there is not enough energy available on the same level.

What is base and what is superficial are on the same level. ‘His love is violent but base’: a possible sentence. ‘His love is deep but base’: an impossible one.

Even a single mother who toils to feed her son is herself reduced if she labors from mechanical, legal necessity rather than unfiltered care. She finds that her work is shallow, not deep. A legal means to an end, not an action of love.

Hence the use of cruelty in order to sustain or raise the morale of soldiers. Something not to be forgotten in connexion with moral weakness.

This is a particular example of the law which generally puts force on the side of baseness. Gravity is, as it were, a symbol of it.

Gravity, that which represents force against the a human being, is base.

In the realm of Augustine's God, "His love is violent but base". This God's love is shallow, not deep. An act of convenience or obligation, not of divine love.

There exists no God within Weil's realm whose love is shallow.

In the shadow of the cross, Augustine finds the cane. That which strikes him from divine love, from perfectly divine judgement. He submits to the adult who canes a child, nodding his head. "This is his medicine towards God", he would say.

Under darkness cast by that shadow, Weil finds not a sick boy but an abused child in the shackles of affliction, a young soul collapsed and contorted into a thing. She would lend her hand to that boy, recognize the brutality of his suffering, and say to herself:

This is not God's divine love.