“Was I nothing more than a woman’s body to you? You know that is not true. And how can you distinguish between body and soul? Isn’t that bungling God’s work of creation? …When you clawed me with your sharp caresses, you were also tearing at my soul”.
-Floria, in her letter to St. Augustine, denying his confession that what they shared was merely lust
Jostein Gaarder’s Vita Brevis was based on letters he found in a second-hand bookstore. The letters were written by Floria Aemilia to a certain Aurel as she called St. Augustine, by that time a prominent Bishop. In her pained writings, she attacked the Church’s dogma about celibacy for the religious as an affront to the gifts of God, the gift to love and be loved. She agonized over St. Augustine’s confessions that his life of fornication included his life with her. She cried that her love kept him faithful and that they were living in happiness until the theologians decided that he should marry “abstinence”. She laughed at his invitation to abandon life’s pleasures in order to live a holy life. This, she maintained, could both be accomplished without wasting the beautiful world that God has given humankind.
“On the other side of the bridge we passed some vendors, and I stopped to look at a beautiful cameo. Then you bought it for me, and now, now I sit with it in my hand. I clasp it, tightly. So God will have to forgive me for holding on to the ‘physical’….But life is short and I know so little. What if there is no heaven above us, Aurel, imagine that this life is what we were created for!”
Fascinated by the lives of saints, I liked this ‘other’ side of a story. St. Augustine’s life is one of those drilled into Catholic girls’ minds during my schooldays. If they weren’t dead already, I’d like to throw this book at one of the nuns at St. Paul and ask them first, if it was really humanly possible to renounce all sensual feelings (apparently St. Augustine was ready to renounce the sense of smell), as was propagated during St. Augustine’s time, and not be considered ‘retarded’ today. And second, if the letters were to be believed that Augustine did in fact love only one woman and stayed with her albeit unmarried, that the Church may have been responsible for ripping a family apart (they had one son); and that this may have been the cause of tremendous trauma St. Augustine suffered during his “formation” (described by religious books as terrible bouts with the devil).
Floria cleverly cited Augustine’s wish to have all Songs of David removed from the Church. She correctly pointed the contradiction because the Songs extol everyone to laugh, sing, and dance in praise of God. Living in those times she was brave to reject the Church based on her criticisms to St. Augustine’s confessions. She claimed she already has her God who created her and he comes with no theologians who judge her happiness.
In Floria’s description of their life together, I wondered whether St. Augustine’s experience had been exaggerated by the Church to once more stress the sinfulness of sensual pleasure. Some confessions of St. Augustine quoted (translated) in the book, about the many women he took to bed, was questioned by Floria as perhaps mere boasting like of a young man among his friends. Floria thinks this may have been done to emphasize a misplaced guilt in the man. After all, wouldn’t she know whether he’s really experienced with women or not?
Towards the end of the book Floria unwittingly predicted a reality that was to claim thousands of women’s lives by the hand of the Church, when, upon meeting her (and sinning) again, Augustus beat her up and sent her away without seeing her son.
“I shiver, for I fear the day will come when women like me will be done away with by the men of the universal church. And why will they be done with, your Grace? Because they remind you that you have denied your own soul and gifts. And for whom? For a God, you all say, for him who created a heaven above you and also an earth which actually holds women who bring you into the world”.
Centuries later, the Catholic Church began the Inquisition, which tortured and killed millions of women throughout the Christian world.
