Absent While Present

“Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.” — 1 Corinthians 15:33 (KJV)

In Milan, Augustine's career was going well. One day he was preparing a speech in praise of the emperor, a speech “wherein I was to utter many a lie, and lying, was to be applauded by those who knew I lied.” On the way, he passed a beggar in the street who had clearly had a few drinks, laughing and joking, completely carefree.

It hit him hard. “And certainly he was joyous, I anxious; he void of care, I full of fears.” With a few coins the beggar had got a cheap version of the happiness Augustine was chasing through all his scheming and ambition. And the beggar would sleep off his drunkenness that night. Augustine would wake up with his ambition the next day, and the next.

His closest friend in Milan was Alypius, a younger man from his home town who had once been his student. In Carthage, Alypius had been obsessed with the chariot races. One day Augustine, teaching, made a sarcastic comparison to people addicted to the races, not even thinking of Alypius. Alypius took it personally, not as an insult but as a wake-up call, and quit going.

But later, studying law in Rome, Alypius ran into something worse. Some friends coming back from dinner grabbed him and dragged him, protesting, into the amphitheatre to watch the gladiators fight and die. He told them:

“Though you hale my body to that place, and there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.”

He sat down and shut his eyes. Then a man fell in the arena, the whole crowd roared, and curiosity got him. He opened his eyes. “For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight.” In one afternoon he changed: “Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto.” He went back again and again, and dragged others along. His soul was “bold rather than resolute,” Augustine says, and “the weaker, in that it had presumed on itself, which ought to have relied on Thee.”

God did free Alypius from it in the end. By the time he was in Milan he had become a man of unusual integrity. As a legal adviser he turned down a bribe from a powerful senator and ignored his threats. But Augustine wants you to see the arena scene clearly, because it's about more than Rome.

You don't have gladiators. You do have a phone that can show you anything: violence, cruelty, porn, people being humiliated for laughs. And you may have friends who say, “Just watch this.” Alypius thought he was strong enough to sit there and stay untouched. He wasn't. Nobody is. What you keep looking at, you start to become. The strength Augustine recommends isn't bragging that you can handle it. It's knowing you can't, and leaning on God instead.

One thing to do this week: name one thing you watch or scroll that leaves you feeling like “one of the throng.” Skip it completely this week. If friends push, say what Alypius should have said: “I'm not watching that.”