And what sins have been chasing humankind for centuries?
A couple of great figures in the history of culture, including Augustine of Hippo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lev Tolstoy have written works named “Confession”. As I can understand, they did not intend on confessing their own sins, however, they wanted to give the reader insight on the most frequent and, as they saw it, the most dangerous vices.
When reading Augustine’s “Confessions”, you realize that, essentially, the vices have not changed as time goes by. While describing the 5-th century Carthago, he displays the theatre as the strongest temptation, which was the most significant form of “media” at that time, and had about the same properties as the media today. In both cases, the aim was to arouse the similar kind of passion.
When writing about the theatre, which Augustine himself was a regular visitor of, he asks –“ Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? Yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness?”. Isn’t the situation the same today, aren’t the best sold “products” of television and social media disasters, accidents, bloodshed? People want to see those images, but they have no desire to live through the hard times people from their screen did.
While proceeding to list the sins of his youth, Augustine recalls his dream of forums and heated arguments. “Those studies also, which were accounted commendable, had a view to excelling in the courts of litigation; the more bepraised, the craftier”. The equivalent of forums is the internet, which creates the current “postmodern” reality, where words are more important than the actuality. Is it a new phenomena, though, wasn’t it the same in Augustine’s times? The difference is that before the 2010s, there were forum debaters and listeners, actors and spectators, writers and readers, whereas today everyone is a writer, therefore, screaming nonsense and the praise it gets has increased drastically.
The only way out Augustine saw was leaving worldly life and becoming a clergyman. It is a solution a thinker could arrive at, but not everyone can take that path. What about us? I do think it is possible to live in a crowded city, use the internet and have a couple of significant qualities of a clergyman, regardless. And one of those qualities, I reckon, is the awareness of one’s own mission, which requires inner peace and renunciation of ambition.
…As a rule, people wrote confessions at a mature age, when on one hand they had gathered enough experience to make sense of life, and on the other hand, they did not actually care about others’ opinion and thoughts. Confessions can thus be said to be followed or perhaps accompanied by concentrated silence. But I think that we, regular people, need certain days or at least hours to bypass the “forums” and their specific bickeries as well. We won’t write confessions, I guess, but confessing some things to ourselves is not out of the question.
Aram Abrahamyan
