Most people are familiar with Augustine's famous line. "I had prayed to you for chastity and said "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet""
As RS Pine-Coffin points out in his introduction to the Penguin Edition, the life of Augustine is interesting because he was a great sinner who became a great saint. I have been reading the Confessions again with my behavioural economics hat on. Indeed Augustine seems very relevant to some of the last posts. He seems to have been a very risky youth though very amiable to his friends and likeable. As he developed self-control (no doubt as his brain was developing similar to the path in the article Ken posted) he becomes more austere.
Like a lot of the young guys in the studies we have been discussing, he also found formal education very boring - "Many and many a time i lied to my tutor, master and my parents and deceived them because I wanted to play games or watch some futile show or was impatient to imitate what i saw on stage". Book 1 in general reads like a compendium of modern behavioural problems.
he puts a lot of his behaviour down to a desire to impress his peers and bodily desire, "the clank of my chains, the fetters of death". his description of moving from essentially a career as a juvenline delinquent with very present-oriented viewpoints to a eternity-focussed theologan is very interesting and contains nearly every theme in the new literature written from a rich subjective perspective. The discussion of his rejection of Manicheaism really could have come straight from the AER (only less equations). His discussions of procrastination are rich:
"For i felt that i was still the captive of my sins, and in my misery, i kept crying 'how long shall i go on saying "tommorow, tommorow"? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?"
anyway, i cant do this justice in a five-minute rant. People who work on memory always cite Confessions as a classic and i think it is also one of the richest accounts of impulse control and personal development. Well worth a read.
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