This essay analyzes Augustine’s Confessions, arguing that his conversion and the privatio boni framework served as a psychological stabilization mechanism – a redemptive hinge-set that suppressed his shadow and externalized evil onto others. The analysis frames Augustine as the definitive case study for why most psyches require such containers, setting the stage for later figures who approached but failed to fully inhabit the non-redemptive Abraxian position.

Welcome back. This is a post about Saint Augustine’s Confessions (written between 397-400 AD), which I read against author intent. This is the first part of a greater series which will be released sporadically and will analyze resonant luminaries such as Kierkegaard, Weil, Berdyaev, von Foerster, and Philip K. Dick, among others, as those who approached the Abraxian framework but didn’t quite reach it (I’ve covered other resonant figures such as Cioran, Junger, Hoeller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shalamov previously, mostly from a pre-Abraxian perspective, and some may warrant a return).

Why did I read Augustine? A couple of reasons:

1. It is the earliest psychological autobiography in existence – as translator Henry Chadwick stated, “like Plotinus and Porphyry, Augustine understood the Delphic maxim ‘Know yourself’ as the path to knowing God; conversely, knowing God is the way to self-knowledge”, and it reads as modern in many ways (especially its baseline-to-descent-to-ascent structure and its heavy interior focus);
2. Augustine intensely grappled with the crucifixion of opposites, and his case study demonstrates the offloading function which is necessary for most psyches to stabilize;
3. He was placed in intense, early double binds from his fanatically religious mother and (to a much lesser extent) his status-driven Hellenist father, who he seems to perhaps to have hated1, and a significant aspect of his story to me revolved around trying to come up with a solution to the double bind, having parallels with my own case;
4. While the privatio boni (evil as deprivation of the good, as opposed to evil possessing a reality of its own) existed before Augustine in both Neoplatonic and Platonic forms, Augustine played a pivotal role in grafting it (especially Plotinus’s version) onto Christianity, an influence felt to this day; and
5. Augustine lived during Christianity’s total triumph over Hellenism, whose last gasp was Julian the Apostate (who I have covered previously), but even Julian was heavily influenced by the Christianity he fought.

I’ll first provide a brief biography of Augustine for those unfamiliar, discuss the intensity of the crucifixion of opposites he experienced, delve into how he grafted the privatio boni onto Christianity and finally review how his particular path provided psychological stabilization for his specific situation.

A Brief Biography

Augustine’s biography in brief: born in 354 AD (which overlapped Julian, who died in 363 AD) to a middle class family, his mother was a Catholic who prayed heavily while also drinking heavily (although she apparently stopped drinking later in life2). Augustine was brilliant and learning came easy to him; he engaged in minor anti-social acts as a teenager, rebelling, acts – such as stealing fruit from trees even though the fruit was inferior to what his family already owned – which later caused him tremendous anguish. He had a sexual relationship with a woman for a decade and had a son with her out of wedlock, a common occurrence in that era. The son died in his teenage years and is only briefly mentioned in the autobiography.

Augustine moved to Rome and became a master of and teacher of rhetoric, where he found success, and he was considering marrying into a wealthy family which was a prerequisite to a political career. At the same time he was religiously a Manichean, which believed in dualism (i.e. a battle between good and evil on the earthly plane) and non-procreation, but he experienced increasing doubts over its precepts over time, in significant part (to my understanding) because his mother Monica was following him (and his siblings3) around, praying, nagging, and wailing at him to become Catholic4, and this influenced him to such an extent that even philosophy didn’t quite appeal to him, p. 40: “This name of my Saviour your Son, my infant heart had piously drunk in with my mother’s milk, and at a deep level I retained the memory. Any book which lacked this name [of Christ], however well written or polished or true, could not entirely grip me.” In other words, his psychic architecture was heavily influenced by Christianity due to the intensity of his upbringing to such an extent that perhaps no other text, no matter how “true”, could grip him. I don’t mean this reductively; Augustine possessed extraordinary intellectual ambition, fear of death, grief over friendship, disgust with his own divided will, and existential anxiety about impermanence, but Monica’s presence was both overbearing and relentless.

One of the items that shook his Manichean faith involved issues with its interpretation of astronomy; Mani had made various pronouncements about the Heavens which were, in Augustine’s age, proven to be incorrect based on arguments of the philosophers, and this shook his faith in Mani more broadly. He was unable to secure adequate answers to these arguments from the most scholarly Manicheans of his day. Another issue was that Augustine thought that equating evil to a real force gave one an excuse to offload personal responsibility – it was just some evil possessing an innocent person and the person wasn’t at fault, therefore one could be passive and avoid taking responsibility, and he didn’t like this.

Heavily influenced by Neoplatonist philosophers about God being all good and emanating goodness into the empty nether – to such a degree that his main disagreement with Plato was that Plato had not accepted Christ5 – and shaken by a near death experience – a “fever” that almost killed him (such fevers were common and regularly killed the young and the old alike) – he eventually converted to Catholicism, abandoned his political ascent and became Bishop of Hippo Regius, where he was highly influential and wrote various books until dying during the Vandals besieging his city in 430.

Augustine wrote his Confessions in large part to stave off critics, both Catholic, Manichaean and Hellenic, to his approach, trying to demonstrate (successfully) that his winding path was not a calculated one for political or social gain but rather motivated by the calling of the spirit. The book heavily focuses on his upbringing, his various beliefs over the years which all proved to be insufficient to quiet the angst within his soul, an angst which was only solved (to an extent) by his ultimate conversion. The last part of the book deals with doctrinal disputes, wrestling with the meaning of memory, the ambiguities of the Bible and how such ambiguities should be understood and addressed, and I found this later part to be less compelling.

Augustine’s Crucifixion of Opposites

Augustine does a great job describing his own version of the crucifixion of opposites, which is an inherent part of living – p. 202,

There is a struggle between my regrets at my evil past and my memories of good joys, who desires troubles and difficulties? You command that they should be endured, not loved. No one loves what he endures, even if he loves to be able to endure it…in adversities I desire prosperity, in prosperous times I fear adversities. Between these two is there a middle ground where human life is not a trial? Cursed are the prosperities of the world, not once but twice over, because of the fear of adversity and the corruption of success. Cursed are the adversities of the world, not one or twice but thrice, because of the longing for prosperity, because adversity itself is hard, and because of the possibility that one’s endurance may crack. Is not human life on earth a trial in which there is no respite?

Some of the opposites he was torn between include (but are not limited to):

1. his desire for status and his desire for connection to God;
2. his desire for carnality, love of food, love of music and his desire for asceticism;
3. his love for and devotion to his mother and his appreciation for philosophy, especially Neoplatonism;
4. his love for an all good God and his constant inability to maintain that level of Goodness (requiring him to engage in endless God praise chanting, reflected within the Confessions6);
5. his desire for deep friendship and his inability to sustain it due to death, illness, inaccessibility, etc.

There are many more such energies he, and everyone else, is crucified between. To be alive means to be torn between competing energies without permanent resolution – only provisional resolution, if that – and the question becomes how does one find a container to deal with those energies? As explained before, the vast majority of people offload the crucifixion of opposites rationally onto an exterior structure – whether to an all-loving God (privatio boni) or a secular alternative (politics, race, etc.) – while a minority collapse into antinomian predation, but the baseline is that the crucifixion of opposites must be borne somewhere. For Augustine, hedonism (“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”), rhetoric, and Manicheanism were all unsuccessful containers for his angst, leading to what seemed to me to be a high degree of neuroticism (at least until his conversion); as Jung argued, neuroticism is caused by a failure to follow the path one is meant to follow in this life.

Augustine found a container for the agony he felt over the crucifixion of opposites in a conception of an all-loving God; this is why he writes, p. 61-62: “Not everything grows old, but everything dies. So when things rise and emerge into existence, the faster they grow to be, the quicker they rush toward non-being. This is the law limiting their being….’Surely I shall never go anywhere else’, says the word of God. Fix your dwelling there. Put in trust there whatever you have from him, my soul, at least now that you are wearied of deceptions. Entrust to the truth whatever has come to you from the truth. You will lose nothing.”7 But the conception of God as all good is the privatio boni, and such a conception is inherently unstable.

Grafting the Privatio Boni Onto Christianity

Augustine was reading Plotinus and Porphyry in Latin translation in Milan, and what he found there was a metaphysics that provided the intellectual armor against Manichaeanism’s dualism that he had come to detest. Plotinus had argued that evil has no positive ontological status, that it is simply the absence or diminishment of the Good, which emanates downward from the One into matter. Augustine’s move was to Christianize this framework: the One becomes the personal God of scripture, the emanation becomes creation, and the privatio boni becomes orthodox doctrine. This was the grafting of a philosophically sophisticated anti-dualist metaphysics onto a redemptive grammar – a personal God who cares with a promise of afterlife justice – that Plotinus had never provided. The privatio boni is therefore best understood as a transferable technology, one that migrated from pagan Neoplatonism into Christian orthodoxy through Augustine’s synthesis, and which has structured Western theodicy ever since.

Such a conception of the privatio boni for Augustine was unstable, though, for structural reasons. Jung had correctly attacked both Augustine and the entire Plotinian inheritance, arguing that by declaring evil a mere privation of good rather than a real force with its own energy, the privatio boni framework requires the suppression of the shadow into the unconscious, where it does not disappear but accumulates pressure and is eventually projected outward onto an Other designated as the carrier of evil. The result is not the elimination of darkness but its externalization – heretics, pagans, enemies of God become the containers for everything the privatio boni framework cannot acknowledge within the self. Jung appreciated Augustine’s psychological depth and interiority, which was genuinely revolutionary for the period, while insisting that the God-image Augustine arrived at was structurally inadequate to the reality it was meant to contain. Augustine’s container holds, but only by generating a permanent leak that must be continuously managed through vigilance, shame, and the designation of approved enemies.

This explains Augustine’s shift from a seeker of truth to a dogmatic enforcer (persecutor of Donatists, etc.). Once he stabilized his own psyche by declaring the internal world “saved,” he had to locate the “evil” outside himself in heretics, pagans, and sinners. The “leak” becomes the fuel for institutional intolerance. At the same time, the privatio boni beliefs massively incentivize group cohesion and collective action with a redemptive worldview – “be Good, deny the Evil, fight the Evil, and you’ll go to Heaven when you die.” Non-redemptive or lesser-redemptive frameworks lacked the group cohesion and incentivization toward action, which is why they lose out in the material realm – I think of gnosticism especially: if the world is fundamentally fallen, then what is the incentive to engage with and struggle to perfect the world? Boundary enforcement is required of any institution, where rejected ideas accumulate in the shadow – this is a structural reality of any collective and which is why, unfortunately, the individuation journey is fundamentally an individual path.

Augustine’s Stabilizers

A combination of upbringing, social conventions, and status-seeking all coalesced in Augustine unconsciously leading him to the path that he led. Based on the stabilizer model, I tend to think that Augustine was primarily status oriented, which explains his mastery of rhetoric – the ultimate status technology of the ancient world – with a secondary orientation around attachment and belonging (to his mother, to his friends, of which he had many close ones8). He did care to some extent for meaning and narrative, not much for control and agency (or rather, his agency was reactive (driven by angst, guilt, external pressure) rather than generative (driven by intrinsic orientation), and a bit of coherence (finding Manicheanism to be incoherent), but those were tertiary concerns for him, I think.9

What makes Augustine’s framework functional as a stabilizer is also what makes it structurally incompatible with an Abraxian position. Using Wittgenstein’s terminology, every worldview rests on hinge propositions, bedrock assumptions so fundamental they are not argued for but acted from. Augustine’s hinges are: suffering is temporary, the good God will vindicate, meaning is given rather than maintained. These are not conclusions he reaches; they are the conditions that make his entire intellectual and spiritual movement possible. Essentially, then, redemptive metaphysics are best seen as psychophysiological technologies that allow most humans to metabolize irresolvable contradiction, and Augustine is the first and an excellent case study in this argument.

The Abraxian hinges are the precise negation of each: suffering is permanent, justice is a human projection, meaning must be actively maintained against entropy. Abraxian consciousness asks the individual to carry contradictions permanently without final redemption. There is no argument that crosses this gap because arguments presuppose hinges, and the hinges are different. Augustine is not wrong given his hinge-set; the hinge-set itself is what is at issue. His Confessions is therefore readable as the most honest and psychologically precise account of what it costs to install and inhabit a particular hinge-set, and why, for the vast majority of people under the vast majority of conditions, that hinge-set remains the only metabolically survivable option. This explains why debate between a non-redemptive Abraxian type and a redemptive type is impossible, because we are standing on different ground. I cannot convince Augustine to adopt the Abraxian hinge because it would collapse his entire psychic structure (his relationship with his mother, his life’s work, his hope for redemption). He isn’t “stupid” or “blind”; he is structurally locked into a position he cannot leave without self-destruction.

Conclusion

None of this is to deny that Christianity – and Augustine specifically – advanced humanity’s understanding of the psyche. Before the Confessions, no one had documented the divided will, the experience of doing what one does not want to do, the way grief can attach to misery, or the phenomenon of self‑deception with such phenomenological precision. Augustine’s breakthrough was the idea that the self is opaque to itself, that reason cannot simply master desire. The problem is not his observations but his explanation: he channeled everything he discovered into a redemptive God‑image that required the suppression of the shadow.

Augustine, then, is not a villain or a fool. He is the most honest witness we have to the structural necessity of redemptive stabilization for most psyches under most conditions. His Confessions documents, without entirely meaning to, the cost of installing a hinge‑set that suppresses the shadow: perpetual vigilance, shame, and the externalization of evil onto others. He approached the crucifixion of opposites with unusual clarity, but he could not bear to hold it without a container. This is the human default. In future posts, I will discuss those who came closer to the Abraxian position – Kierkegaard, who held the tension longer before leaping; Weil, who glimpsed affliction without redemption; Berdyaev, who tried to salvage freedom without the old God; and Philip K. Dick, whose ruptured gnosis arrived too late and too chaotically to stabilize, among others. None of them fully crossed the hinge‑gap, but their proximity illuminates the terrain.

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1

Augustine’s father, Patricius, is barely present in the Confessions and when he appears it is often with contempt. The bath scene, where Patricius celebrates his son’s puberty as a worldly trophy, is framed by Augustine as moral blindness, and Patricius’s deathbed conversion is mentioned without emotion. One plausible reading is that Augustine’s turn toward an omnipotent, loving, and just heavenly Father was also a flight from an earthly father who represented everything he came to reject: status‑seeking, sexual indulgence, and pagan indifference to the soul.

2

Monica was the ultimate pious vessel, but she had a hidden, shameful compulsion of secretly drinking wine from the cellar. She was shocked into sobriety only when a slave girl insulted her by calling her a “drunkard.” Monica’s secret drinking is the mechanism of the privatio boni in action: the “badness” must be hidden in the unconscious (the cellar) to maintain the pious container, and it is only managed through the threat of shame. Augustine inherited this psychic architecture from her.

3

His sister – labeled “Perpetua” (a name which Ernst Junger interestingly referred to his wife as in his journals) – became head of a community of nuns.

4

p. 82: “As mothers do, she loved to have me with her, but much more than most mothers; and she did not understand that you were to use my absence as a means of bringing her joy. She did not know that. So she wept and lamented, and these agonies proved that there survived in her the remnants of Eve, seeking with groaning for the child she had brought forth in sorrow (Gen. 3: 16). And yet after accusing me of deception and cruelty, she turned again to pray for me and to go back to her usual home.”

5

The mediation between Plotinus and Augustine ran through Ambrose of Milan, but indirectly and almost accidentally. Augustine attended Ambrose’s sermons to study his rhetorical technique – Ambrose was the greatest preacher of the age and Augustine was still, at that point, a rhetoric professional evaluating a competitor. What he absorbed instead was Ambrose’s allegorical method of reading scripture, derived from Origen and ultimately from Philo’s Hellenistic-Jewish synthesis, which allowed the Old Testament’s more embarrassing literalisms to be read as spiritual symbols rather than historical claims. This resolved one of Augustine’s standing objections to Christianity. The Plotinus he encountered was through Marius Victorinus’s Latin translations – Victorinus himself a converted Neoplatonist rhetorician, making the transmission chain: Plotinus → Porphyry → Victorinus → Augustine, all running through the rhetoric profession. Augustine never read Plotinus in Greek. The privatio boni reached him already partially Christianized, through a chain of converted intellectuals who had each made a version of the same synthesis before him.

6

This endless praise is not psychological insecurity projected onto God, it is structural necessity. Within privatio boni logic, if God is pure good and the source of all being, any diminishment of praise risks conceding the reality of evil or lack, which the framework cannot tolerate. Evil as mere absence is an unstable concept; it requires constant rhetorical reinforcement to hold. The praise is load‑bearing, not decorative. This is why Augustine’s opening chapters feel almost compulsive; he is shoring up a metaphysical architecture that would otherwise collapse under the weight of its own internal contradiction.

7

This reminds me of the story of Roosh, a hedonist pickup artist who, after experiencing the early cancer-caused death of his sister, turned to Eastern Orthodoxy and is apparently becoming a monk now, leaning into it as an intense psychological stabilizer.

8

Augustine explicitly states he did not steal the pears because he was hungry or wanted the fruit (which he threw to the pigs). He stole them because “it was forbidden” and, crucially, he wanted to do it with his gang, wanting shared transgression and peer recognition. When his unnamed best friend dies, Augustine is so devastated by the loss of his relational anchor that he literally flees the city because every street corner reminds him of his friend. This is a classic Attachment-regulated destabilization. p. 58: “I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them. At that time that was my state: I wept very bitterly and took my rest in bitterness. I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend.”

9

It’s debatable, of course; his primary and secondary stabilizers might be switched. If he were primarily Status-regulated, perhaps he would have stayed in Milan, married the wealthy aristocratic girl, and kept Ambrose as a useful intellectual patron. He abandoned the ultimate status game of his day because his attachment to his mother (and her tears) and his narrative need for salvation outweighed it, although, as a counter, his ultimate status as a Christian bishop far outweighed what he would have achieved as a politico. It shows that his conversion was not just a spiritual awakening but a status realignment – he traded the status of a Roman rhetorician for the ultimate, eternal status of a Bishop and Saint.