Vita Brevis: A Letter to Saint Augustine

In one of his trips in 1995, Jostein Gaarder accidentally found an old manuscript in a secondhand bookshop in Buenos Aires. It was a letter in Latin from a woman signed herself as Floria Aemilia, addressed to Aurelius Augustinus, Bishop of Hippo. Gaarder bought it, and after examining it, became strongly believed (although no authority could yet confirm) that it was being originally written by St. Augustine’s mistress, whose identity he has concealed in The Confessions, but Augustine did mentioned the woman as his mistress quite a lot. I read this book right after finishing The Confessions, in order to judge it more contextually. My copy (translated to Bahasa Indonesia) contains only 150 pages, yet it was a thought-provoking reading.

Floria was an intellectual woman; she met Augustine for the first time when they were both pupils in rhetoric school. And through her letter, she quoted a lot from great philosophers like Cicero or Horace. The main purpose of the letter was to criticize Augustine for abandoning her for God, and to question his thoughts in The Confessions which she happened to read, perhaps not long after it was published. For some people, Vita Brevis—the Latin words of ‘Life is Short’—was perhaps a touching love story of an abandoned woman, but I regarded it as a mere ungrounded jealousy of a woman who could not accept being defeated by a “philosophy”. She bitterly and desperately wanted to tell the world that Augustine was all wrong.

I felt sorry for Floria because, though she was intellectual, she was so selfish and narrow-minded that she could not see beyond herself. She kept accusing Monica (Augustine’s mother, the Saint) for breaking their relationship to make way to Augustine’s marriage with a young girl. Well, dear Floria, think about this, by whatever standard you valued yourself, you were just a mistress, never Augustine’s legal wife. So how could you claim your rights to own him? Any mother who is intimate with God would react the same as Monica to any woman who seduces her son to live in sin. Then you criticized Augustine’s struggles to purify himself by staying away from earthly beauty as blasphemy to God. It only proved your ignorance and narrow-mindedness. Why couldn’t you be happy that your beloved man was reaching towards his real call, which is God? Why couldn’t you just support what he was fighting for? If you loved him as much as you kept boasting, you should! Instead of asking the same question over and over again: “Do you remember how sweet our love was, Aurel?”

And in the attempt to pour your anger to your Aurel, perhaps, you have done just the same thing as you criticized Augustine for. You accused him of cutting the whole context of bible text: 1Cor. But in the attempt, you yourself cut the whole context of Augustine’s Confessions. It was only proof that you could not really understand the deeper meanings of Confessions. Well, for that I could not scold you, because this whole thing is just about two persons who have loved each other in the past, then one of them completely changed, while the other stayed the same. Thus there lied a wide gap that separated them, as wide as the gap between earthly and spiritually lives.

See? This book is for me more tiring than touching. I just can’t sympathize with women who think life is just about love, lust, and romance. It’s rather surprising, in Floria’s case, because she was a learned woman, and she was then even a catechumen. I can understand how hurt for her to be abandoned by the man she’d loved, but doesn’t it happen to many women? She criticized that God or the Catholic Church has acted injustice by hindering a man from loving a woman. But it does not apply to every man, only whom He calls, and Augustine was among them. And it’s not because men shouldn’t love women, if so, why then God created us as man and woman? It’s because, in this case, Augustine’s sexual passion over Floria has barred him from seeing the Light of God.

In the end, I was disappointed by this book. I have expected Floria as somehow in the same level with Augustine in theology and philosophy, as she has dared to answer the Bishop’s Confessions. Or at least, I have expected a bit about feminism. But in the end, it’s just about the rage of a woman over romances problem.

I guess two and a half stars are even too good for Floria, but at least it made me understand and appreciate The Confessions more than my original reading of it.

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I read Indonesian translation by Jalasutra Publishing

This book is counted as:

2^nd book for Lucky No. 15 Reading Challenge: Bargain All the Way

A Letter of Mary: Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes Series # 3

What would you think if you have lived in London in the 1920s, and heard news that the famous retired detective Sherlock Holmes has just married? ‘Awkward’ would be the first word pop up in my head. But interestingly, in A Letter of Mary, King has written it such that it seems normal—interesting but normal.

A female archeologist, Russell’s friend, visited the Holmes’ residence, and placed a small box containing an old papyrus under Russell’s care. It is believed to be a letter from the first century written by Mary Magdalene. Yep, it’s THE Mary Magdalene, the Saint. Few days later the Holmes found out that Ms. Ruskin has died in a hit-and-run accident in London. It turned out, of course, to be a murder. King develops several leads of suspects, including a sexist colonel who was disappointed that the archeologist he was about to sponsor was a woman; a Palestinian man who have visited Ruskin; and her nephew who would have had benefit from her death. Then a group of men ransacked Holmes and Russell’s house, and most probably wanted to get to the old papyrus. So Russell translated it (originally written in Hebrew), and found in it that Mary Magdalene has called herself the apostle of Jesus, which, if the letter was published in today’s world, would have huge impact, both historically and theologically.

[spoiler] Actually, the papyrus would have been an interesting point to dig on, and I have imagined some journeys to the east, tracing over historical facts, etc; but apparently King had another plan. In the end, it was just a usual lust-of-money kind of crime. [spoiler end] Again, there is the feminist theme all over the book (Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ apostle, Dorothy Ruskin the female archeologist among her male colleagues, and the misogyny Colonel and his son). However, concerning our detectives, King made Holmes won over Russell in solving this mystery. Maybe it was meant to be a balancing aspect against the feminism topic? And what about Russell’s feeling over the Colonel, considering his misogyny ideas? I think here in this story, Russell has fully grown up as a woman—she sees feminism not only as ideology, but the way a woman sees her opposite sex.

Speaking about feminism, one of the most interesting parts of this third book of Mary Russell-Holmes series is Russell-Holmes relationship—now as husband and wife. Russell said to Holmes that she thought they are not a romantic couple. But I disagree; I think they are romantic…in their own way. I think romantic isn’t about flowers, candle-lit dinner, etc. Romantic is when you know details about your partners; their habits, their likes and dislikes, their feelings and reaction over something; things you only share with your partners. And above all, they respect each other. Russell and Holmes are like this. I think the marriage life of two genius detectives with acute pride and high ego would be just like Russell and Holmes’s.

And sometimes there are indeed several ‘romantic’ scenes throughout the story. My favorite is when Holmes must leave Russell to her undercover at the Colonel’s house; and at the door before he left, he stopped, looked at Russell with unread expression, and said: “I feels like Abraham…”. This he refers to Abraham, when he took his family to Egypt, and told Sarah—his beautiful wife—to lie to Pharaoh that she was his sister, lest Pharaoh will kill him to take her as his wife. Isn’t it sweet? Or when Holmes confessed to Russell that now his heart controlled his mind (he was worried about Russell); to me that’s romantic—romantic in Sherlock Holmes style! :)

In short, this book might be my other favorite so far from the series, besides The Beekeeper Apprentice. Now, I can’t wait to read the fourth book, The Moor, which was set in Dartmoor, the setting of Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Super interesting, eh? ;)

Four stars for A Letter of Mary, I liked and enjoyed the whole story. It’s been an oasis during the hectic month of December!