IIC 168: Restless Hearts: St. Augustine and Catholic Parts Work

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: “For you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” It’s a famous quote from St. Augustine, the Confessions, book one, chapter one. But what can St. Augustine teach us about restless hearts? What can St. Augustine teach us about restless parts of ourselves? St. Augustine had a tremendous interest in the inner workings of the mind, heart, and soul. He was focused on what we call now intrapsychic processes, particularly inner conflicts. His book, the Confessions, had this inward focus. And Catholic physician John Donley in 1937 wrote an article in the Linacre quarterly titled St. Augustine: The First Catholic Psychologist. And St. Augustine’s been referred to as a Catholic psychologist for decades. St. Augustine says, “Thus, my two wills, one old and one new, one carnal and the other spiritual, were at war with one another, and by their conflict they laid waste to my soul.” He’s got that focus, inner conflict, and he says, my impiety had divided me against myself. Join us as we go back to the fourth century as we engage with St. Augustine and what he can show us, what he can teach us about our hearts and our parts.

[00:01:59] Dr. Peter: I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, and I am so glad to be with you. I’m a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts. But most of all, most of all, I’m a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you taste and see the height and depth and breadth, and the warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God your father. Also, to experience the love of Mary your mother. These are your spiritual parents, your primary parents. I’m here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary.

[00:02:41] Dr. Peter: And to that end, throughout all of 2025, we are bringing the insights from Internal Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz and other parts and systems models. We’re bringing them in and we are harmonizing them with the truth of the Catholic faith. And why? Here’s why. To help you to live out the three great loves and the two great commandments: to love God, your neighbor and yourself. And I’m bringing you the best of Catholic professionals in the field as my co-host, as my expert guests, to share with you their insights, their understanding, their experience. Why, again? To help you not only overcome obstacles and deficits in your human formation, but to help you thrive, to flourish and fully embracing that identity as a beloved little son or daughter of God, not just with one or two parts of you, but with all your parts. All your parts in an integrated way, sharing in the bliss of a deep union with God. 

[00:03:42] Dr. Peter: So this is episode 168 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, which releases on June 16th, 2025. And it’s titled Restless Hearts: St. Augustine and Catholic Parts Work. And with me, I have back in the virtual studio, the two people, the two professionals I would most love to have a conversation with about St. Augustine and parts work, Dr. Christian Amalu and Dr. Gerry Crete. It is so good to have you both here. Both were here with us on the last two episodes. And Dr. Gerry Crete, dear friend, dear colleague. Some people might not know that you and I, Gerry, we go way back. We go back as friends. Before we started this whole Souls and Hearts thing, we were in the depth psychology group together. 

[00:04:33] Dr. Gerry: That’s right. 

[00:04:35] Dr. Peter: And I remember, I remember my most vivid earliest memory of you was you discussing the Night of the Living Dead at the Catholic Psychotherapy Association meeting. 

[00:04:44] Dr. Gerry: It was actually the Walking Dead.

[00:04:45] Dr. Peter: Oh, the Walking Dead. 

[00:04:48] Dr. Gerry: Different, very different. Well, I mean, there’s all zombies, but Walking Dead is a TV series that I believe really gets at trauma. The Night of Living Dead, well, you know, saw that as a teenager.

[00:05:02] Dr. Peter: So, obviously, we’re revealing my deficiencies in zombie-ology, but I’m glad that you’re here to correct me on that. Dr. Gerry is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s the founder and owner of Transfiguration Counseling. He’s the co-founder with me of Souls and Hearts in 2019. We’ve been going at this, we’re six years strong now. He’s the author of the book, Litanies of the Heart, published last year by Sophia Press. And if you haven’t read Litanies of the Heart yet, and you are an avid follower of this podcast, I can’t recommend any other book above and beyond Litanies of the Heart. So check that out. So good to have you with us here, Dr. Gerry. 

[00:05:40] Dr. Gerry: Thank you. Yeah, thrilled to be here and thrilled to be talking about St. Augustine today.

[00:05:46] Dr. Peter: Well, it was you and it was Dr. Christian that had to do very little convincing to break this out in a separate episode. And then Dr. Christian Amalu, he’s our guest expert. He’s the post-doctoral fellow at Immaculate Heart of Mary Counseling Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. And he focuses on Internal Family Systems and a Catholic anthropology, really a Catholic way of understanding the human person. And it is so good to have you with us, Dr. Christian. You and I got to know each other really well as we were kind of working on that dissertation. I was honored to be the third reader on your dissertation, which was all about grounding Internal Family Systems in a Catholic understanding of the human person through the Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person. And we’re going to be talking about that in a later episode. But, so good to have you with us. So good to have you here to discuss St. Augustine and his ideas about parts. 

[00:06:35] Dr. Christian: Yes, so glad to be here, Peter. So talk about St. Augustine and help out in any way I can.

[00:06:41] Dr. Peter: So St. Augustine, born November 13th, 354, well into the declining years of the Roman Empire, into Tagaste, a Roman city in a river valley, in Numidia, a city which is now known as Souk Ahras in the African country of Algeria. It’s about 40 miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, the very outermost fringe of the Roman Empire at the time, which was in a deep decline. And what does St. Augustine, from the 4th century, what does he have to say to us about our inner systems, our Internal Family System, what does he have to say to us? That’s what we’re going to be getting into. And I just feel like turning this over to you guys and just letting this roll. So I’m just so excited to be able to be with you as we do this. So, I don’t know, which one wants to kind of take it away first, to get us launched into this? 

[00:07:34] Dr. Gerry: Well, I’m happy to lead and do a little intro, if that’s okay. I’m prepared today to mostly focus on the Confessions of St. Augustine, although I know Christian will probably have more to say about the City of God and maybe other writings of Augustine. I mean, he wrote a lot. If I could just start by saying that when I was 16, I took a bus, like a Greyhound type bus, across Canada from Ottawa all the way to British Columbia. And I read the Confessions and my buddy probably thought I was really weird, of all things, you know, reading this biography, autobiography, of a saint who was writing in the fourth century.

[00:08:22] Dr. Gerry: And if I have to say anything about the Confessions, it’s accessible. And there’s different translations that are a little easier to read, modern English, than others. But even the harder to read versions are pretty accessible to understand what he’s saying. And I think that the Confessions were, might be, I’d have to go and look, but I think it might be the earliest kind of autobiography that’s written in such a personal way. I mean, usually, I think a lot of the writings, usually it was about someone else when you got a biography, and it was always to glorify them, right? And the Confessions, I mean, he does write it obviously after his conversion, but he really is talking about his inner world and his inner life and his conversion. And so it’s a very personal book in my opinion. And it spoke to me even at 16. And I really loved following the story. I felt like I was entering into the mind of this person from the 4th century. So I kind of want to just preface, to say just how much I love St. Augustine’s Confessions and how much of an impact it had on my life.

[00:09:31] Dr. Gerry: Now I hadn’t looked it over in quite a long time, so I glanced at a few things before this show so I could kind of be refreshed. But I would say that, like you were saying, he was like an early psychologist. I don’t know if I would say he was the first, but I would definitely say he was definitely really an early Christian psychologist in so many ways. And the one thing I would point out is that he highlights and prioritizes in some ways our affective states. So he, unlike some of the other guys, like even Evagrius, we were talking about last time, who is brilliant, prioritizes the intellect. And even like the highest form of contemplation is the knowledge of God, which is pretty incredible, one would think, but still it’s knowledge. Whereas Augustine, I’m sure, also prioritizes that too to some extent. But for Augustine, it really is about this deep longing and desire for God, and God’s desire for us as well. And so there’s this emphasis on our emotions, and not just an intellectual choice.

[00:10:47] Dr. Gerry: And we kind of see that in the contrast between Augustine in the 4th century and then much later in what, 13th century, is St. Thomas Aquinas. And you really see this difference in Augustine’s conversion story because in book 7 of the Confessions, we kind of see his first conversion, which is an intellectual ascent of the will. So he makes a kind of intellectual choice kind of thing toward God. But it is incomplete. And it’s in the eighth chapter where he becomes vulnerable and he surrenders to God and he gives his heart fully to God. And then we see this conversion going so much deeper. So I think that, for Augustine, the heart choice is given, if you will, a priority. Whereas Aquinas, to some extent, argues that you can know God, on some level, with our intellect. That might be an oversimplification, but there’s a contrast there between intellect and heart that I just want to point out. So that’s my lead in, Christian, you can riff off anything there.

[00:11:57] Dr. Christian: I mean, I’ll do my best. I don’t know what it is about the age of 16, but I think that was the first time I got exposed to the Confessions as well. And yeah, I mean, I have a few very like eye-opening moments that I remember and you’re talking about this accessibility. I know that Augustine’s Confessions, I mean, it became a classic. This is a classic of literature, probably one of the great books ever written. I also know that at some level, there have been different saints over the years who have written Confessions of their own, but nothing like this. This really has been like the paradigm for a spiritual autobiography. And I remember reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and just reading myself in many ways, and that was both unsettling and yet so absolutely comforting at the same time.

[00:12:51] Dr. Christian: I remember, I can’t remember which book this is in, but he’s talking about in his youth, he talked about the braggadocious speech between young men. It was essentially in the equivalent of a locker room. He described locker room talk. And I heard that. I was like, wow, there’s so much that I can relate to here. And feeling like you want to be accepted and kind of the nature of human beings and how we interact with one another, peer pressure, all of these different things that, at the time, I could relate to. And he also had this way, like you said, of speaking from the heart, this focus on the heart, this deep, what I can only speak about right now and think of in psychological terms as that deeper level of attachment, seeing things from an attachment perspective, that deep emotional perspective, that feeling like you belong somewhere.

[00:13:42] Dr. Christian: And there seems to be a trail of that throughout Augustine’s thought. He speaks at that deeper human level, not just merely at an academic level, even though he has plenty of academic firepower, so to speak. I think what then endeared Augustine, is that he was able to live in both of those worlds very comfortably. I felt like, because at the time, 16 years old, I felt like, okay, well I don’t know if I could have a high level theological conversation with Augustine, but I could definitely sit with him and just talk about life. So I think that would be my main lead in with Augustine.

[00:14:18] Dr. Peter: So I’m hearing you guys say that it’s not just about the intellect, it’s not just about the thought, the conceptual ideas and so forth. It’s also about the emotions, and then it’s even broader than that because he gets into the intensity of his desires. He talks about impulses, and that’s the thing that strikes me as a psychologist, especially one that was originally trained very intrapsychically, you know, psychodynamically, is that all of this internal psychological phenomena is being addressed. It’s not just even emotion. It’s desire, it’s impulse, it’s memory, it’s imagination. It’s internal conflicts, that he struggles with, laid out in full relief. It’s all of the contents of the psyche. And that was what was really striking to me. And then it’s all being written in the 4th century. It’s not being written, you know, in the nineties, which is a long time ago in sort of psychological time, like stuff in the nineties, sort of like, oh wow. You know?

[00:15:21] Dr. Peter: But being written, we’re talking 17th centuries ago. And there’s something that’s drawn both of you to St. Augustine. We saw this in the last episode with the enthusiasm that came up and the pride of place, almost, for St. Augustine, when we are starting to think about things in terms of parts and systems, we’re thinking about things in terms of this multiplicity of self, all the themes that go into what this podcast is about, kind of grounding IFS and parts work in a Catholic anthropology. So when you begin to think of that, I’m curious like what features of his work or of his being, come up for you?

[00:16:00] Dr. Gerry: Well, maybe I can lead with a little passage from the Confessions.

[00:16:03] Dr. Peter: Sure. Love it.

[00:16:04] Dr. Gerry: This is from chapter seven. And so he says, “And so admonished, no return to myself. I entered into my inmost parts with you leading me on.” And you, he’s referring to God. “I was able to do it because you had become my helper. I entered and saw with my soul’s eye, much as it was, an unchanging light above that same soul’s eye above my mind. He who knows truth, knows that light, and he who knows it, knows eternity. Love knows it.” So that passage alone to me is extraordinarily profound in terms of looking at interiority, on multiple levels. So we have inmost parts. So we already have this like recognition of the complexity and multiplicity within. We see this notion of the soul’s eye. So what does it mean to see with the soul’s eye? So we’re already here into spiritual senses, a deeper spiritual vision within.

[00:17:20] Dr. Gerry: We have this, I think so interesting, he says, above my mind. To me, he’s speaking of, in a positive sense, dissociation. Or, in a positive sense, being in a trance-like state or being in an otherworldly state, if you will. So he’s going to a deeper state of consciousness is pretty much what I read into that, however you want to exactly word it, which is kind of profound in terms of deep interiority, deep looking within. And he’s also seeing God as both his helper in that process, like that God is with him as he goes deeper, looking into himself, and ultimately he will say that God is the ultimate end of it as well, because he goes on to talk about God as, “O, eternal truth, true love, and beloved eternity.” So it’s this interesting notion that one goes inward to discover ourselves, the complexity of our own inner world, and we go inward to discover God himself. And he places a priority on that, which to me is extraordinarily profound.

[00:18:31] Dr. Peter: Not just looking heavenward like up into the sky, you know, or to the cosmos. Looking, turning inward to discover God within one’s own being. 

[00:18:43] Dr. Gerry: It really is an inward and outward motion. And we see that. We saw a little bit of that already with Evagrius last time we were talking. We’ll see it again with medieval mystics. It’s about going inward to go upward, and that is our access point to have a deep, intimate experience of God. So to me that’s kind of profound. I think, like you were saying, a lot of times we think on our externals, even a lot of the prayers we say or the things we do. And there’s nothing wrong with those things, of course. It’s just that we’re looking outwardly for God. Of course there’s lots to, we could speak about encountering God and, in some sense, God’s presence or whatnot in nature and in others and stuff like that. So there is value in exteriority, but this is really profound. This is a real deep, intimate access point, and it means we have to look inside.

[00:19:43] Dr. Christian: Yeah, that is such a beautiful quote. I mean, I’m just trying to soak it in right now because I remember reading that years ago, and especially considering Augustine’s life. We’ve spoken about how intense of a person he was. He felt things very, very deeply. He was a man of passion. He was fiery, if we could use that term. And I think in navigating his own inner world, realizing, wow, how complex this is, how deeply he feels things and realizing that he needs God to enter into those spaces in order to find that harmony, that that wasn’t something that he could just make happen on his own.

[00:20:25] Dr. Christian: I think that quote almost has its completion in the earlier quote that he says, which is the most famous quote that Augustine has, which is, ” Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” So seeing that going into your inmost parts to look for God in those spaces to welcome him into those spaces is how he’s going to find that rest, because he’s not finding that rest anywhere else. It’s absolutely profound. And I have no doubt that Augustine then kind of became this reference point for all of that medieval work that we see in like Theresa of Avila and others of doing that interior work of, no, God’s really within. So how do we cultivate and make that happen?

[00:21:11] Dr. Peter: Well, and St. Augustine was no stranger to looking for satisfaction outside of himself. I mean, he sampled the variety of different ways that men and women do to try to fill the void, to try to replace God with some other created thing. And so he speaks from experience of having been, in his own estimation, a great sinner, having been not one of these saints that seemed to possess holiness from the cradle, you know, but from living in the trenches of a decadent Roman society in collapse, in decline, in part because of the degree of departure from natural law. And I’m sure that, you know, he describes in detail, especially in the first five chapters of the Confessions of his own personal decline, his own slipping into a great degree of worldliness.

[00:22:11] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting the way he also conceives of the inner struggle. I think he has, there’s so many passages in the Confessions that really speak to, in IFS terms, polarizations, inner conflicts, right? I’ll just read this little passage. This, I don’t know how little it is, but like this passage here, from chapter seven, he says, “For if there be as many contrary natures as there are conflicting wills, there will not now be two natures only, but many. If anyone deliberate, whether he should go to their conventicle or to the theater, those men at once cry out, ‘Behold, here are two natures, one good, drawing this way, another bad, drawing back that way, for whence else is this indecision between conflicting wills?’ But I reply that both are bad, that which draws to them and that which draws back to the theater. But they believe not that will to be other than good, which draws to them. Supposing then, one of us should deliberate and through the conflict of his two wills should waver, whether he should go to the theater or to the church. Would not these also waver what to answer?” And then later he says, “… once converted to the truth and no longer deny that where anyone deliberates, there is one soul fluctuating between conflicting wills.” Right? So he’s arguing that it’s not like we’re two separate beings or something like that. So he isn’t arguing something like that, but he keeps the unity of the soul intact, the self system on some level is intact, yet recognizing conflicting wills. He’s really recognizing different parts that have a different agenda.

[00:23:56] Dr. Peter: Right, right. And it feels like different wills. It feels like each of these parts has its own will. But we wouldn’t say just for clarity’s sake, and for my Catholic standard bearer, my part that likes make sure, we wouldn’t say within Catholicism that we have more than one will.

[00:24:13] Dr. Peter: Right, we have one will. And that, that is a question that comes up a lot. I think a lot about this in terms of like how do parts influence the will, right? So I think there’s sort of like a lobbying effort that different parts have to try to co-opt or take over the will, blending and so forth.

[00:24:28] Dr. Gerry: And I think Augustine is actually, in that, if you read it carefully, he’s actually arguing against the idea have multiple wills. He’s actually arguing for one soul with one will, and language is a little bit tricky, but he is recognizing this inner conflict that is causing all this chaos and disruption for the will, if you will. 

[00:24:53] Dr. Christian: Yeah, no, I would agree with that. I do wonder if the way we use “will” right now is the way that he would’ve used “soul,” at least in terms of that central faculty, where the decision making is actually being made. And if what he’s calling wills, we would call kind of those rampant desires. We have different things that we want at different times, and it can be legitimate to want those different things, but wondering if he’s using “will” as “want” in some way. Yeah.

[00:25:24] Dr. Gerry: I think so. Okay. I have another passage. 

[00:25:28] Dr. Peter: And so those of you that are listening on the audio, we’re putting these up on slides for everybody to see over on YouTube. So we’ll have them just available there so that you can see them. Because it’s a bit much to unpack all of this. So definitely. 

[00:25:42] Dr. Gerry: Well, I want to show that St. Augustine discusses manager parts and firefighter parts. 

[00:25:49] Dr. Peter: All right. 

[00:25:52] Dr. Gerry: All right. He refers to blending as well. There’s so much here. I could just, oh my gosh, I get so excited. Okay, so he’s referring to, at one point, he’s talking about his past life, that you were referring to in first five chapters. And he’s remembering all the enticements and he says, “The very toy of toys and vanity of vanities, my old mistresses still enthralled me.” Right? So this is his parts that are still calling him back in temptation to his old ways. “They shook my fleshly garment.” So his carnal desires, I imagine. And whispered, he says, “They shook my fleshly garment and whispered softly.” And then he says, “Does thou part with us?” And there was those old mistresses or whatnot are saying, are you letting us go? Are you leaving us? So that really struck me like a firefighter part, right? Saying, hey, come on back over here. This will make you feel better. “And from that moment, shall we no more be with thee forever?” This is a firefighter part saying, I don’t want to let go of, I don’t know what, pornography, overeating, whatever it is that’s the issue. “And from that moment shall not this or that be lawful for thee forever?” It’s almost like a tempting part.

[00:27:23] Dr. Gerry: “And what did they suggest to me in the words of this or that? What is it that they suggested, O my God? Let thy mercy avert it from the soul of thy servant. What impurities did they suggest, what shame. And now I far less than half heard them, not openly showing themselves and contradicting me, but muttering, as it were, behind my back.” So it’s like these voices behind him. He’s trying to get away from it. But they’re muttering. They’re these voices that are coming, “and furtively plucking me as I was departing to make me look back upon them. Yet they did delay me so that I hesitated to burst and shake myself free from them, and to leap over whither I was called, — an unruly habit, saying to me, “Dost thou think thou canst live without them?” How many times do we have a part that’s like a firefighter part that is calling us back to our old ways? And that it’s some way of coping or some way of managing life, like Augustine had been doing in his early life, and even as he’s moving away from that life, he’s still hearing those voices within.

[00:28:36] Dr. Peter: Well, it kind of goes to this whole idea of conversion, right? You mentioned that he had first an intellectual conversion, and I can imagine some manager parts that are very into philosophy, theology, coming to see the light of truth and Christianity, abandoning Manichaeism and saying, okay, this is the way we are going to be. But those parts are not representative of all the parts. There are other parts that have other foci, other agendas. 

[00:29:06] Dr. Gerry: Wait, wait, wait. Now listen to this. This is the next part. He says, this comes right after. He says, “But now it said this very faintly.” Okay, that’s the other voice. Now, a new voice. “For on that side towards which I had set my face and whither I trembled to go, did the chaste dignity of Continence appear onto me, cheerful, but not dissolutely gay, honestly alluring me to come and doubt nothing and extending her holy hands, full of a multiplicity of good examples, to receive and embrace me.” So now I see this Continence showing up is like a self-led manager part, calling him to a life of chastity, to a different kind of life.

[00:29:58] Dr. Gerry: And then later on he says, “And she smiled on me with an encouraging mockery as if to say, ‘Canst not thou do what these youths and maidens can? Or can one or other do it of themselves, and not rather in the Lord their God?'” So calling them to conscience. “‘The Lord their God gave me unto them. Why standest thou in thine own strength, and standest not? Cast thyself upon him; fear not, he will not withdraw that thou shouldest fall; cast thyself upon him without fear, he will receive thee and heal thee.'” So I think that, I mean, you could read that as the inmost self possibly, but I actually read it as a self-led manager part, calling him toward God. And then, I’m not going to read all of it, but then he says, “This controversy in my heart was naught but self against self.” That’s what he says.

[00:30:56] Dr. Gerry: This old mistress kind of voice and then Continence’s voice were arguing. That’s why I didn’t think it was necessarily self. I saw it as these two, a manager, self-led manager part, and a firefighter part having a little battle, if you will. And so when I was reading this, I was going, oh my gosh, this is really very parts work, IFS oriented. I mean, definitely written in the fourth century, certainly the language is somewhat different, but wow, it’s speaking to this little battle going on inside.

[00:31:28] Dr. Christian: Yeah. No, that’s phenomenal. I have actually not heard that passage before. That’s new to me. And I’m with you on that. It sounds like manager versus firefighter, and really does, I think, Peter, you were just saying, it gets to that point of what is conversion really like, and how longstanding is that? It’s a conflictual thing. And you might start in one place, like in this case he maybe was convinced more intellectually at first, but then what happens when that means you have to give up things? What happens when that means that the parts of you that have delighted in certain behaviors, when they have to actually give something up, what does that look like?

[00:32:05] Dr. Christian: And they don’t just go away. And we would, again, argue that the parts don’t go away at all, but learning a new mode of being, that it’s really difficult. And I’m hearing the enticement back, but then, I don’t know, maybe these are some of Augustine’s own Catholic standard bearers that are jumping in, wait a minute, but we could be virtuous. We could be this. We could how we can do this. But it’s still feeling like he’s having to convince his world to change.

[00:32:31] Dr. Gerry: Right. And then just, I think this will close up this little part of mine here. This is all at chapter eight of the Confessions. He then says, after he has this little inner struggle, he says, “But when a profound reflection had” — and here this is so important, so cool — “from the secret depths of my soul” — his innermost self — “drawn together and heaped all of my misery before the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm accompanied by as mighty a shower tears.” And then he just breaks down in crying. It’s so powerful. So he brings that inner conflict before his, the secret depth of his soul. And something happens there. I mean, he doesn’t say a lot more, but he brings that misery there. It’s in the sight of his heart. And then there he talks about mighty storm so something is shaken, I think, is how I read that. And then it just produces tears. He just has a catharsis. He just has this powerful moment of change, and this is conversion of the heart, which is different than the chapter seven intellectual ascent. This is a deep, powerful moment. And then I think at that point his friend Alpius, who had been with him, comes and sits beside him and just holds him pretty much in that space. He doesn’t even say very much, but is there with him through that. So powerful. So there’s also that example of accompaniment of another person while he’s experiencing this.

[00:34:13] Dr. Christian: What a beautiful, ancient example of an unburdening. I mean, he took that within and that storm, but then afterwards, I’m not sure what description he gives afterwards, but it sounds like there’s finally this ability to release things and to feel that was so much that it reduced him to tears. I mean, I’m just kind of sitting in awe of it right now.

[00:34:40] Dr. Peter: Yeah. And one possibility is there may have been some grief in the relinquishing of maladaptive ways of trying to get attachment needs met or integrity needs met because Augustine was a man who loved deeply, who connected really deeply, relationally. He was to use a technical term, sociophilic, which means that he really desired the intensity of relationship. So I think he saw that parts of him were experiencing, okay, I’m going to give up these old maladaptive ways of coping, sinful ways of trying to get needs met, and I’m going to bet on this new thing. And that seems to be like a part by part process for him. You know, intellectual parts first, we got it, but they’re not carrying the same kinds of needs. They’re not carrying the same kinds of integrity needs and dependency needs and attachment needs and identity needs that other parts are carrying. And so there’s this rolling process of conversion, you know, that Dr. Peter Martin has called internal evangelization. We’ve mentioned that before on this podcast. He’s discussed it before. And to see that unfold in this like very coherent way throughout the Confessions is mind blowing to me.

[00:36:02] Dr. Christian: I think it once again points to the idea that what we’re discovering here isn’t as new as we would like to think that it is. This is ancient. There is something that is just almost fundamental about this approach and has been modeled for us before. So it’s kind of rediscovering it, but rediscovering it from a new vantage point.

[00:36:26] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And I think what’s also interesting is he has this powerful conversion and then he goes and meets with his mother, I think that’s in chapter nine. Of course, she’s thrilled, right? She’d praying for him for all this time. But it seems like in that encounter with his mother in Ostia, like they have a powerful vision experience in that chapter. And it’s like Augustine finally led by his inmost self, is meeting his mother, and she’s led from her inmost self. So there’s this self to self intimacy between the mother and her child, Augustine, in that chapter that’s just beautiful.

[00:37:10] Dr. Peter: Yeah, where previously there had been a lot of what looks like to me, reading this with clinical eyes, a lot of enmeshment, previously. A lot of problematic dynamics in the relationship between Monica and Augustine, to the point where, speaking of firefighter behavior, he felt like he had to flee, he had to deceive her and get away from her because, you know, I imagine that parts of him were feeling smothered, that they were struggling to maintain, you know, some kind of identity. And then of course feeling terrible about that, that it was difficult for him, with the intensity of his relating and the intensity of his mother’s relating. And one can imagine a lot of agendas here. You know, one can imagine Monica’s parts just so filled with anxiety for her son, good intentions, but that could lead her to interact with him in ways that made it difficult for him to tolerate being in relationship with her. And then in chapter nine, that being eased, right? Because now there’s more recollection, there’s more interior integration. There’s a capacity to relate more from the depths of the heart, the innermost self, rather than through these parts that navigate the difficulties of family relationships in that family.

[00:38:24] Dr. Christian: Yeah, I can’t help but hear that and think about, yeah, if there was enmeshment before, and it sounds like Monica felt very deeply and very intensely as well. So maybe the fact that Augustine had some of that modeled or learned, that he learned her own parts, that intensity and that deep passion. Because she had a very deep passion for him and for his conversion and wanting that. And I cannot help but think that in moving away from Monica, he had to learn how to find that peace and stillness in his heart, to find his inmost self. And if him moving away was then the way that she had to then reconcile with her own inner intensity, with her own inner storm, and that both of them finding their inmost self, then they were ready to come back together and have the healthier dynamic they were meant to have as mother and son.

[00:39:18] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. And just as a side note, I was in Rome not that long ago, over a month ago now, and I went to, there’s a church of Saint Augustine and there’s a side chapel where Monica, her remains are. And so I was able to pray, I prayed for my children, before St. Monica’s. And that was just so powerful and beautiful. So I felt a deep connection right there to this mother, this parent who weeped for years for her son, wanting so much for his conversion and getting to see him. Like he was definitely living a worldly life. And then he was like pursuing these Manichees or other of odd things.

[00:39:56] Dr. Gerry: And meanwhile she was married. She had been married to a Roman who was not Christian. And so, you know, I’m sure that was part of her conflict, wanting to raise her son, possibly, in the faith, but then maybe having obstacles, opposition to that. And so, just such a powerful witness of hope, that you can’t try to control, you want to keep your managers at bay and not control your kids when, especially as adults, there’s probably not a lot you can do to manage them. But you can pray and you can hope and trust and it’s hard to imagine a greater saint than Augustine, their son ended up being.

[00:40:35] Dr. Peter: And to do your own internal work too, to get ready for a re-encounter. I mean, sometimes those re-encounters don’t happen, I think because the parent isn’t ready yet. The parent hasn’t done the human formation work that would free that mother or father to enter into a relationship in a healthy way with a son or daughter, maybe that’s wayward or estranged or having difficulties. Because sometimes I think we believe that if we just will hard enough, if we just strive hard enough, we can have a good relationship with anybody. But it’s not just about the will, it’s about your capacity for interpersonal connection, your capacity for intimacy. And so, I agree, I think there was some distance that was needed here for both of them to be able to develop that capacity, to free them to be able to interact at the level that we see in chapter nine. And that wasn’t going to be able to happen in chapter four or chapter five or chapter six yet. So, yeah.

[00:41:42] Dr. Peter: It’s interesting, there’s this quote from the city of God that reminds me of exiles, perhaps firefighters a bit too, but it goes like this. It says, “For a prohibition always increases an illicit desire so long as the love and joy and holiness is too weak to conquer the inclination to sin.” You know, the prohibition always increases an illicit desire. I’m thinking about, you know, our managers attempting to suppress our exiles, right? Basically the sort of just say no, you know, the kind of eighties approach to drugs, right? Just say no to whatever that illicit desire is, not appreciating that beneath that is some positive intention. It’s a maladaptive attempt to try to get a legitimate need met.

[00:42:33] Dr. Peter: And bringing in this idea of the love and joy of holiness. Like actually meeting the need, right? So that the parts do not have to pursue sinful means or maladaptive means, right? So there’s this awareness he’s describing what in psychoanalytic thought we would call the defensive suppression. And it’s not about like killing off these parts. It’s not about destroying them. It’s about bringing the love and joy, and then experiencing that integration. He says, “Sin is looking for the right thing in the wrong place.” You know? And so it kind of acknowledges in a sense that even what motivates sin is a desire, a disordered desire for something good. And can we get to what that something good is? Or are we simply going to be like the church lady and wave our finger at that part and say, no, you can’t. And then we can expect that, you know, the prohibition will increase the illicit desire because we’re not bringing the love and joy.

[00:43:38] Dr. Gerry: You know what’s hitting me there is in the Confessions and in section 29, I’m not sure, I think that might still be chapter eight, but he talks about part of his conversion and he recalls like Saint Anthony, I think it is, who just opens up the Bible and sees the passage that says, leave everything, from Matthew, I think, right? Like, leave everything behind, give it all the poor. And that inspires Saint Anthony to do that. And he does that. So Saint Augustine says, well, I’m going to do the same thing. So he opens up the Bible and what does he get? He gets Romans 13:13, which says, stop your rioting and drunkenness and wantonness. And instead trust in Jesus. But Augustine does have a change of heart from that passage. It’s not just an recrimination. And then he’s like, oh, I better repress, or I better stop.

[00:44:32] Dr. Gerry: Because he says, this is a quote. He says, “By a light.” It’s like he received a light, like some kind of powerful grace. He said, “By a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” So the difference is that there was security. It wasn’t a fearful turning away, oh my goodness. It was a turning to God, to Jesus and feeling the security of being in that place, that safety. And then realizing all these other behaviors that were tempting to him or whatnot, actually created insecurity for him. 

[00:45:16] Dr. Christian: Yeah, no, hearing that, that’s such an important nuance. And I think, again, one of the things that makes Augustine’s approach so genius is it’s not just simply this intellectual kind of, well, this isn’t good for me. Okay, just throw it away. No, he’s actually going for that deeper integration, that deeper, no, my heart has yearned for this. He’s not just going to subject himself to pain and doing without, and okay, well now my life’s just not going to feel good anymore. It’s going deep inside and saying, wait, there is something here that is looking for a good. It’s looking for a good, these desires have an end, there’s a legitimate end. I haven’t found that yet. How do we establish that? And doing it from that place of security is absolutely paramount.

[00:46:05] Dr. Peter: Well, that’s that first primary condition of secure attachment is that felt sense of safety and protection. And if parts have that, that opens the door to the second one, which is to be able to be seen, heard, known, and understood. And it sounds like he’s being able to enter into that with God, that he is able to connect with God as a spiritual confidant, as a lover, one who loves him deeply.

[00:46:32] Dr. Gerry: Well, yeah, and that’s so powerful in what he writes because he, in another passage, I believe also in chapter eight, he says, “I see it not enough to be drawn by the will.” Interesting. “Thou art drawn even by delight. What it is to be drawn by delight?” He asks. And then he quotes Scripture, “Delight thyself in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thy heart.” That’s the end quote. There is a pleasure of the heart to which that bread of heaven is sweet. So it’s not about suppressing all feeling, it’s about reorienting that to where our true delight is, where we really do find love, where we really do find security, where we really do find the delights of our heart fully met, which is in God, and it’s like, whoa, okay. This is a transformation, not just a reformation.

[00:47:26] Dr. Christian: Yes. And this is actually what conversion and repentance is supposed to look like. It’s not simply just, okay, I’m throwing away something else in a reorientation of my mind, it’s, no, I’m actually turning to the source of all things. I’m actually going to have it fulfilled. It hasn’t been fulfilled up to this point. I’m actually turning toward the thing that is going to save me. I’m actually going to feel full. We look at Augustine’s life, I don’t think he ever felt full. He was never satisfied. He was always hungry for more. True repentance actually sates that hunger.

[00:48:10] Dr. Peter: Well, when I’m thinking about so many spiritual manager parts in devout Catholics that seem to follow a spirituality of cardiac amputation, I’m going to call it, where, in the heart, they find something unappealing, something sinful, something disordered. And the idea is we’re going to cut it out. We’re going to cut it out and discard it. We’re going to amputate it, right? So the scalpels, the long knives get out and there’s an attempt to hack away at these parts, not realizing that they’re indispensable. They are not disposable. And so this idea that Augustine is showing us, you know, 16, 17 centuries ago, how we can go through this process of integration, how we can go through this process of the parts coming together. And he’s bringing up that hierarchy, he doesn’t use the word kingdom within in the same kind of way as some of the other saints have, but there’s a sense of order to that and that is really, really striking to me.

[00:49:12] Dr. Gerry: So I’m quoting a lot today, but like in chapter 10 of, again, in Confessions, because I was revisiting it all. It’s so amazing. I can’t even believe it. I’m seeing it all with new eyes. But he says, “And at times you introduce me from within.” So he’s talking to God still. “Into a wholly unaccustomed state of feeling, kind of sweetness, which, were it made perfect in me, would be not of this world, not of this life. But my wretched weights cause me to fall back again and I am swallowed up in the usual run of things. I am held fast, weeping heavily, but heavily held.” It’s such a beautiful honesty in that, and that’s in chapter 10. And it’s like he’s recognizing on some level, like again, like the importance of feeling, of emotion. So affectivity. He’s also noticing like where it would be perfect, it would be kind of divine. And he’s admitting he’s not a hundred percent there because he’s still being weighed down by things, like he’s still presumably tempted or struggles with this or that. But he’s seeing this vision of what it would mean for it to be not of this world within him, but also just even saying at the beginning, you introduced me from within. So again, it’s this interior work that God is doing within him and there’s so many powerful things there. So even if you just read chapter 7, 8, 9, and 10 of the Confessions, you would get a whole education on parts work, amazingly enough.

[00:50:54] Dr. Christian: No doubt.

[00:50:55] Dr. Peter: It’s so interesting because — you’ll have to remind me of the name of the book. I’m missing it right now. It’s the one that Schwartz and Falconer wrote on the history of parts thinking. Do you remember the name of that book is? 

[00:51:07] Dr. Gerry: Many, many something, many minds or something. No, not that one.

[00:51:11] Dr. Peter: Yeah, it’s like many, yeah, I can’t remember.

[00:51:15] Dr. Gerry: Many Minds, One Self.

[00:51:16] Dr. Peter: Many Minds, One Self. That’s right. So there’s a chapter in there on Christianity. And so what Schwartz and Falconer do is they go through all of these different traditions, different ways of thinking, to kind of look for parts and systems thinking throughout all of human history. And in that chapter on Christianity, Saint Augustine is singled out, but he’s singled out for a lot of criticism actually. And it’s so striking about how critical and some attributions that are just not in alignment with what we know to be true, by faith and even by good scholarship. Like that, St. Augustine invented original sin, for example, it says that in there and so forth. So there’s kind of an irony that I’m noticing between how this is not being appreciated necessarily, and the fullness of it all, in the broader sort of IFS community — what Augustine has to offer in terms of understanding the multiplicity of self and systems thinking.

[00:52:16] Dr. Christian: Yeah, I’m not too surprised that there is such a different take on Augustine. The other thing that you can find is that when you read any figure like this, and especially Augustine, he has so many writings. I mean, if you just read the Confessions, you’d have a decent snapshot, but there’s still so much more that he has written about. And so if you were to just get to know a little sampling of his writings, could you really say that you hold the entirety of Augustine’s thought. And I don’t know if they were reading Confessions.

[00:52:46] Dr. Peter: 5 million words. 5 million. He’s written 5 million words. 

[00:52:53] Dr. Gerry: Okay, so I have it, this book that you mentioned, Many Minds, One Self: Evidence for a Radical Shift in Paradigm. On page 238, because I read it and I have all these comments on the side saying mischaracterization, it’s not true. Because this is literally what he says here. He says, “Returning to the fourth century, Augustine’s doctrine.” Right, so I guess original sin. “Was challenged by Pelagius.” Who’s considered a heretic in the church, by the way. Pelagius believed that we could effect our own salvation by own effort, which is so interestingly opposed to Christianity. But he calls Pelagius another Christian scholar, ” who believed that while Adam was a bad role model, people were not forever cursed by his actions. Like Origen, Pelagius believed that humans were born in the image and goodness of God, so as to bring that to the world.” 

[00:53:47] Dr. Gerry: As if Augustine did not teach that we are in the image of God. It goes on to say, “People could call upon their God-given will to steer them from sin without the need for divine guidance. Thus, for Pelagius, God’s image is buried by sin but not erased. And he advised a woman who was asking for spiritual guidance to listen to her inner teaching, that God had placed in her. After long and bitter struggles, Augustine’s doctrine prevailed and was installed in the Western Christian Church through a number of councils.” So it’s basically characterizing him as having contaminated Christianity when it’s so not what he was doing. He totally misses that Augustine is a doctor of grace. Yes, he had strong things to say from his fourth century mindset around sin and stuff like that, and he had a focus on sexual sin. Maybe that was out of balance. I don’t know, maybe because of his own life, who knows.

[00:54:45] Dr. Gerry: But he was all about grace. I mean, he was all about not relying on ourselves to effect our own salvation. And in fact, it’s such a beautiful freedom to realize that we’re not responsible for our own salvation, and that the self can be not responsible and have an agenda of salvation, per se, because Christ does that. And so therefore we need to almost like more rest in grace, rest in the good news, rest in what he has done for us. And it’s extremely freeing. You probably want me to write an article on that. I don’t know.

[00:55:26] Dr. Peter: I’m going to hold to that. I wrote you that in an email a while ago. 

[00:55:30] Dr. Gerry: I wrote these comments years ago. 

[00:55:34] Dr. Peter: I want you to review that chapter in a Kingdom Within. 

[00:55:36] Dr. Gerry: I’m going to become enemy number one, right? In the whole appendix, you know, countering No Bad Parts, so I can just take out his chapter on Christianity. 

[00:55:47] Dr. Peter: Well, I think it’s important just so the people have some of that context, because it’s important for us to be able to distill out what is good and true and beautiful and right, and what secular approaches or non-Catholic approaches to IFS are, but then also to be able to get to these anthropological underpinnings that are problematic in one way or another. I was just so struck by how much a friend of IFS, at least grounded in the Catholic anthropology, Saint Augustine is, versus how misinterpreted he can be by those that are advocating it outside of the Catholic church. 

[00:56:27] Dr. Gerry: To be fair to someone like Schwartz and probably some others, like Augustine’s writings can be taken a certain way, and were used by people like Calvin to really distort the gospel, and really distort our understanding of the goodness of humanity created by God in his image.

[00:56:47] Dr. Christian: I think that really calls to mind, to me, the importance of having a complete vision. And this is something that, I think the last presentation I saw on this was a presentation by Bishop Barron. But this has been a very, very old part of our tradition, that how do we interpret the tradition? How do we interpret the scriptures? How do we interpret all of spirituality? And it’s through the lens of Christ and the love that God has for humanity. If that is not the main interpretive lens, that’s not the main hermaneutic by which we are reading the Scriptures, we’re going to misinterpret constantly. And even our idea of what that love’s supposed to look like can be misinterpreted, which is why we have a magisterium. So this idea is that if you’re coming at it from this one angle and you read this one thing, okay, well, what is the backdrop of it? And we’re looking at Augustine, somebody who felt so deeply and was so immersed, he’s trying to rest in God. And if all of these things that he’s saying, even though they’re being said maybe using extreme verbiage or whatnot, but where that passion’s coming from, if it is through the proper lens of understanding the complete picture, then you can actually, you can see where the love is. You can see where, okay, that characterization right there is not quite landing. And Augustine himself wouldn’t say that. So holding a complete picture actually is really critical in all of this.

[00:58:17] Dr. Peter: Well, that’s why it’s so critical in Souls and Hearts broadly, but also specifically in this podcast that when we look at IFS, when we look at ego state therapies, theories, when we look at other parts and systems approaches, that we harmonize those approaches to what we know to be true by divine revelation. We are given that. We’re not starting out like Schwartz did. Schwartz made this sort of argument, it’s a phenomenological approach. I’m going into this with no assumptions. You know, I’m only going to sort of listen to what I’m given, you know, not come in with any a priori ideas. We come at this very differently. We come with the certainty of faith that what we’ve been given in divine revelation, in the doctrines of the church is true and we’re building on that. And that’s really important for so many, we talked about spiritual manager parts. You know, so many people have expressed appreciation that we’re not entering into doctrinal battles with Souls and Hearts. We’re not entering into uncharted theological waters where we’re advocating things that sound like they’re against what the church has perennially taught. So just want to make sure that we affirm that. But then at the same time that we don’t just stay within the early church fathers, that we don’t just form our ideas about parts and systems thinking from St. Augustine or from Evagrius or from any of the other saints from antiquity, that we can draw the benefits, the insights, that others had.

[00:59:50] Dr. Peter: And Saint Augustine, in De Doctrina Christiana, book 2, chapter 40, that’s a theological text on how to interpret and teach the Scriptures. He says, ” Moreover, if those who are called philosophers and especially the Platonists have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use.” He goes on to say, “All branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which we ought to abhor and avoid. But they contain also liberal instruction, which is better adapted to the use of the truth and some most excellent precepts of morality and some truths in regard even to the worship of the one God are found among them. Now, these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God’s providence, which are everywhere scattered abroad.” 

[01:00:51] Dr. Peter: Right, so here Augustine is telling us to be open to the entirety of knowledge, of insight, wherever God may have chosen to, to bury it and whoever might have dug it up. And so we’re not to leave this behind, we’re not to ignore something that had its roots originally outside of the Christian tradition, but to be able to draw that in and to mine it and to harmonize it with what we know to be true. And Augustine did that, having been well read in the secular sources, the non-Christian sources of the day. And I’m also reminded of St. Thomas Aquinas, who did that, again, eight centuries later, as he was synthesizing so much from Aristotle, of course, but from all kinds of sources back in the day.

[01:01:38] Dr. Christian: Truth is truth.

[01:01:40] Dr. Gerry: I really like that. I think that Christian makes a great point. I’m going to use the word hermeneutic there, kind of to refer, I think, to the overall Christian message, and I almost like think of it as a tune, like a musical tune. Like it’s the message, the song Christ, if you will, the song of God in history is a tune that you can hear in a way. And sometimes because of our instruments that we have that might be flawed, because not all of us can sing, you know, in key or whatever it is. Like we get it imperfectly. Even the Saints. Like, I don’t assume the saints in a blasphemous way or a horrible way, but like contextually, they’re all affected by the culture. They’re raised in the time period, they’re raised in the worldview that they would have. So it is tricky business studying these different fathers, even the earlier ones like we were talking about before, you know, you have to understand where they’re coming from and then you get, later on, to the medieval writers and you have to understand where they’re coming from, the worldview they have. And then you have to have an appreciation and critique of our own worldview. We’re in a modern and postmodern world that we are influenced by. 

[01:02:56] Dr. Peter: Absolutely. 

[01:02:56] Dr. Gerry: So we are all coming, all of us in 2000 years, whoever’s writing or just figuring it out or reflecting are all going to be influenced by our culture and by our time period we live in and all this. And so when we do go back and read some of these things, we do need to take time with it and understand context or we might miss the tune. We might miss the music that’s being played and how beautifully in its own way it’s being played at that time in history. Or we get it wrong, like Schwartz did with St. Augustine.

[01:03:27] Dr. Christian: I find when I read anything that was written before my time, I have to start with a little prayer of, “God, please help me to be humble while I read this.” Just because it’s written in English doesn’t mean they mean the same things that I mean when I say that. It’s helped me to take things at their own word and actually sit with them rather than jumping to my own, again, 21st century education assumptions. So I look at Augustine and it’s like this is cutting edge for his time. I mean, this was brilliant and I still read it right now and I still think it’s cutting edge, but it’s also, first of all, I’m pretty sure he wrote this in Latin, not in English. And so we’re reading a translation and as good or as badly as the translations might be, I know there’s a number of them out there, but even getting into his own mind, he thought in a different way. So can I connect with that?

[01:04:23] Dr. Gerry: It’s the same issue with Scripture though, right? Because, you know, Greek has so many layers to the use of different words. And so that’s why translations matter. And sometimes, no matter how good the English translation, we’re never going to get the full meaning of the text. So that’s why we often need commentaries to help us with that, hopefully reliable good commentaries, because we’re translating something. And not just the words themselves, but sometimes the context of why they would make that comment or why they would use that kind of metaphor or whatnot, that might be alien to us because we don’t live in that kind of society. You know, I don’t know what a mustard seed looks like, right? You know what I mean? Like, I might not have a sense, yeah, they’re tiny. They’re like kind of like weeds. They grow everywhere. Like I might not have known that, right? Because I never have to encounter a mustard seed, except maybe when I’m making Indian cuisine or whatever. But what I’m saying is we don’t always understand. And so we do need help with it. And there’s a lot of scholarship. There’s still a lot of scholarship to do, but there’s a lot of scholarship out there on the fathers, and people that have done this work.

[01:05:36] Dr. Peter: And you’re kind of getting to why you and I started Souls and Hearts. You know, it was to be able to take the best of psychological resources, you know, human formation resources and to ground them in a Catholic understanding of the human person, to do that conceptual work to be able to open this up in a way that people could embrace it with more confidence that it wasn’t going to lead them astray. That’s really what we’re all about. And to that end, if anybody ever discovers in any of our resources or any of the things that we offer, anything that’s getting off track, you know, anything that seems to be against what the teachings of the church are, I want to hear about it. Reach out to us, let me know. Because that’s the last thing we want, right? That’s the last thing we want.

[01:06:19] Dr. Peter: At the same time, we’re not just going to hide from the offerings that are out there that don’t originate in Catholic sources to begin with, right? So it’s a both-and. We want to be able to have the benefit of all of the goodness that God has bestowed on the world, whether that was to Catholics or non-Catholics. I have a great debt of appreciation to Richard Schwartz for beautiful things that he’s discovered, he’s written about, he’s popularized, that he’s synthesized. A lot of respect for him. But also, to be able to read these things and to understand these things with a critical eye, with an eye toward, okay, how do we draw the best from it so that we don’t get undermined by anthropological issues or spiritual issues or theological issues.

[01:07:01] Dr. Peter: Just want to make sure that we’re emphasizing that again. And I’m wondering is there anything else before we kind of go to an experiential exercise? I know that you, dear Dr. Christian, you are kind of volunteering today to do an experiential exercise for all of our listeners, all of our viewers and for us. So anything else? We’ll have an opportunity for a key takeaways at the end. So we’ll get those one-liners in again. But anything else before we move that direction that you would want to say? 

[01:07:30] Dr. Christian: I mean, there’s so much that has been said. I don’t know if there’s too much more to add. We could talk about the City of God. I think I could give a cursory idea from that, but I think we’ve already touched on some things from there. And there’s so much from the Confessions that I think covered it sufficiently. But I don’t know if that would really add too much more. All those quotes that Dr. Gerry made right there, I think, just really get at the heart of it already. And I mean, I feel very sufficient in our coverage of Augustine today. If you are, then I think we’re good to go.

[01:08:02] Dr. Peter: Well, let’s take it from the intellectual, conceptual, that we’ve been sharing, and let’s bring this into the experiential. Let’s do this. And I am excited that you’re going to take this with us and just give us a little frame, a little preparation for it, so that folks know.

[01:08:15] Dr. Christian: Yeah. Absolutely. So for today, thinking about going inside and kind of sitting with our own systems today and considering the impact of St. Augustine and how to start from that position, my mind really jumped to the idea of the restless heart and how much Augustine’s restless heart was seeking for the answers, seeking for that which would fulfill everything. And when considering that, I’m just wondering if we can take a little bit of time to just settle in wherever you are. If you feel like you’re busy about something and you need to attend to other things, feel free to come back to this later. For right now, wherever you are, just kind of settle in. Settle in to wherever you are. If you’re sitting, really feel yourself held by your seat, your feet on the ground. I invite you to take a couple of deep breaths and just really center yourself. Just kind of find that calm, peaceful point. And as you’ve settled in, want to kind of consider from a Augustine’s example, any kind of restlessness that you might be feeling right now. This could be physical restlessness, could be about a relationship in your life. Could be about some of the ideas we’ve talked about today, or just something that’s not really resolved. This doesn’t have to be a big thing, like a major crisis in your life. It can just be something that hasn’t found rest. It keeps coming up. Maybe consider that for a second. Note where that is. You may easily find something, you may not. If you find yourself having a hard time following along with this, that’s okay. Just settle in where it feels appropriate, where you feel like you can give it attention. And if you can follow along, consider this restless point. How is this showing up for you? What is this restlessness like? You might feel it physically, you somewhere in your body could be agitation or tension somewhere. You might feel it mentally, some thought or belief that’s coming up. You might have some emotions, you might have some anger, some anxiety, sadness, or fear. And as you notice what’s coming up, this restless part that’s showing up, maybe consider and ask what it’s trying to let you know. Is there a need that’s driving it? What is it that this part is trying to receive or trying to resolve? How has it been approaching this so far? And what does this restless part need from you right now? Can there be space, space to acknowledge the needs of this part? Can there be space to offer some calm, to offer some kindness, to accompany and be with this part, to let it know that you’re there with it. Notice how this part responds, and if there’s any kind of a shift in that restlessness. It may not completely go away right now. That’s fine. This can take time. If there’s any space within you, to offer some gratitude to this restless part for what it has shared with you. And for the time spent, feel free to extend that gratitude to this restless part. Take note of any insights that have come from this and of any follow up that you may need to do in whatever way feels right to wrap this up. If it’s helpful to welcome the Lord into this, there may be more stillness, offer that, then feel free to return and come back here.

[01:17:34] Dr. Peter: This is so interesting. I was able to reconnect with my collaborator part. This is a part that has a long history of being very driven to succeed. And I make the argument in a number of places on this podcast, and in some of my other writings, that each part that’s not in right relationship with your innermost self holds a material heresy about who God is, right? And the material heresy that this part of me holds is Pelagianism. This is the part of me that believes that if I work hard enough, if I strive hard enough, if I achieve enough, then God will love me. He protects against this real little exile that holds a lot of shame about inadequacy around not being enough. So I had this image of a road, and the fantasy that these parts have, these two parts of me have, is that if we just get to the end of the road, we will have done enough. But the road always goes on, right? Like there is no end of the road. You get to that point where it looked like it ended and now it goes down the hill or it goes around the bend. And so there’s this constant kind of drivenness around that.

[01:18:43] Dr. Peter: And the message is, I don’t love you for what you do. I love you for who you are. And so the idea of being, rather than doing, and that the doing should flow from the being, not that the doing is an attempt to get to a state of being accepted or loved by God. So that’s kind of in a nutshell what that was all about. But just so interesting that we had brought up Pelagius in the way that we did, and the idea that we can kind of, you know, merit our own salvation by pursuing perfection in the natural realm without the necessity of grace. And the idea that we’re talking about this in terms of the context of Saint Augustine, who is the doctor of grace, and the gratuitous gift of grace that God gives us. And my parts know that, like, that’s intellectually kind of all laid out but it’s so subtle how parts can move away from that, and fall back into those old ways of being, that old restlessness that St. Augustine addresses. So that’s what that brought up for me, Christian. Thank you. 

[01:19:43] Dr. Christian: I’m so glad. I’m so glad that was, sounds like a positive impact in return to some attention that part needed.

[01:19:53] Dr. Gerry: I think for me, it was more like, bringing up clarity. It’s one of the eight Cs, right? Or is it, maybe?

[01:20:01] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Oh yeah.

[01:20:03] Dr. Gerry: Because curiosity and compassion and connection, you know, creativity, those ones are somehow easier. Clarity is sort of interesting. And I know sometimes, like for me, if my environment starts to get too messy and disordered, then I feel restless, I don’t feel comfortable, and I’m never going to get to a point, well, probably not going to get to point, you know, where everything is in perfect order and everything’s been filed perfectly and everything’s like taken care of. Because that would take, it seems like that would take forever. But nevertheless, sometimes you need to clear something out a little bit in order to have the clarity to see what’s in front of you. 

[01:20:40] Dr. Gerry: And I have a tendency to work on projects and then get distracted and then forget about them. And then when I look at them again, I’m like, oh my gosh, I actually did most of this. I’m further along than I remembered, but I do need to finish it. You know, I’m sort of having that experience with a couple things lately where I’m starting to get clarity of here’s these projects that have a lot of value. At least I think they do. And I had the clarity that like, maybe the Lord wants me to finish them, that I need to like just go through it. And so to me that helped relieve that restless heart. Because I think my restlessness comes when I’m feeling overwhelmed, when I feel like there’s just too many different things all over the place and everything’s kind of a mess. And where do I begin? This kind of restlessness. And to get clarity is to see, oh, the path is starting to open up. This is where it’s supposed to go.

[01:21:42] Dr. Christian: Nice.

[01:21:43] Dr. Peter: Beautiful.

[01:21:44] Dr. Gerry: That’s what came up for me. See, everybody, that’s the beauty of these experiential exercises. We all have such radically different, you know, like whatever it is we need can up.

[01:21:53] Dr. Christian: Yep.

[01:21:54] Dr. Peter: Well, we want to hear from you about what came up for you in this experiential exercise as you took it in. So if it feels comfortable, if it feels right, it feels good, share that with us in the comment section of YouTube for this episode. And we’d love to hear what that was like for you. And so as we bring this to a close, as we draw this to an ending here, just curious if there’s one point that you would want our viewers, our listeners to remember about St. Augustine, Catholic parts work. What would you want them to take away? What would be the one thing that you would want them to hold onto from this whole episode?

[01:22:44] Dr. Christian: After you.

[01:22:46] Dr. Gerry: Okay. I would say that a true conversion of the heart is what Saint Augustine calls us to, not just an intellectual ascent. And that his goal was to have a chaste life ordered to God. And that involves our whole system, right? That involves our entire heart, surrendering to God and being open to being transformed. And that it’s good and that it leads to our good.

[01:23:16] Dr. Peter: Love it. Thank you, Dr. Gerry. Dr. Christian? 

[01:23:23] Dr. Christian: I think my takeaway is going to be a little reminiscent of the takeaway I had when I was 16 and I first read this, because I think there was something growing up where there were a number of saint stories, and I’m sure this has mostly to do with the way we present saint stories a lot of the time. They’re too manicured, they’re too clean. And my takeaway, walking away from those as a, I can’t say I was a rowdy teenager. My mom and dad would laugh if they heard me say that, but I think the takeaway was, okay. I don’t see where the mess is and I feel like a mess. And when I read Augustine, there is so much more confidence and peace that my messy system, that there’s room for that mess. There’s room for that conversion. There’s room for me to feel strongly, there’s room for me to feel intensely, and that that is an avenue for which God can enter in. It’s not a hindrance. As a matter of fact, that’s the key. And for him, he saw that as the way to God to go inside, to wrestle with those, to have that war within, and that through grace that gets illumined and we become more and more like Christ.

[01:24:43] Dr. Peter: Well, I am so grateful to you both for the time and for the engagement and for the sharing of your experience, your knowledge, but also the sharing of your hearts. You know, that this isn’t just about the exchange of ideas. doesn’t just happen in the realm of the mind. So, so grateful to you both for that. Okay, so if you enjoyed this episode, if you resonated with it, tell us about it, the comment section in YouTube for this episode. Let us know. We would love to hear from you. Also, like and subscribe. And you can also leave reviews and comments on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast platform you have available to you. Our upcoming episode will be on St. Maximus the Confessor, IFS, and parts work. Dr. Gerry, Dr. Christian will be back with us. I’m so excited for that.

[01:25:36] Dr. Peter: Calling all Catholic adults. The RCC is now open for new members for the rest of the month of June. The RCC opens every February, June, and October for new cohorts. This is our St. Jerome cohort. We do parts work in the RCC in its structured program in a community of like-minded Catholics. And why? To help you flourish and thrive. Every applicant to the RCC as part of the registration process takes the PartsFinder Pro. That’s a series of 18 measures. The Souls and Hearts team then writes a six to nine page report, and that report describes 10 to 15 hypothesized parts of you with their burdens, with their roles, and with the relationships among those parts. It can get to how your heart is divided. And we have a library and archive of more than a hundred parts descriptions. We tailor make those to fit what we’re seeing in the PartsFinder Pro about your internal system. And you can download PDF reports for a fictional man and a fictional woman as samples to see what those PFP reports are like. Those are in the description for the YouTube episode here in the YouTube description area for this episode. It can really launch your parts work.

[01:26:51] Dr. Peter: I did a whole analysis of St. Augustine and St. Monica and their attachment needs and their integrity needs for advanced RCC members in formation Fellowship earlier this year. I laid out the parts that I thought each of them had and how they interacted through those parts, and that was a difficult mother-son relationship in many ways. So, if you make it through that first year, that Foundations year, you have access to all of that advanced material as well. We explore these kinds of interesting questions in the RCC, all again in the service of your human formation, all in the service of your interior integration.

[01:27:24] Dr. Peter: All right. Formators, these are Catholic therapists, Catholic counselors, Catholic priests, spiritual directors, coaches, anyone who’s involved in the formation of others. We have a retreat for you from August 11th to the 14th, 2025 in Bloomington, Indiana at Mother of the Redeemer Retreat Center. We are very much open to folks joining us there. You don’t have to be a member of the FFF, of the Formation for Formators community. It’s a come and see type of retreat, but we’re going to be doing a lot of experiential work. So you can check that out and you can also think about new groups that were starting for Catholic formators. They start in late August and September. Get on the interest list at soulsandhearts.com/fff. Find out more about the retreat there as well.

[01:28:13] Dr. Peter: As you may already know, I host conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern time on my cell phone, (317) 567-9594. You can get in touch with me. I don’t do any clinical services. I can’t do any professional consultations for you there, but we can certainly discuss what’s coming up in these podcast episodes and what’s happening in the semi-monthly reflections. And as we draw this to a close, we will invoke our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.