Just as Every Cop Is a Criminal, and All the Sinners Saints

Augustine’s philosophy was about the nature of evil and the limits and responsibilities of free will. Who hasn’t mused on the origin of evil when reading a newspaper or watching the news? It was no different for The Stones in 1968, with Vietnam and the deaths of the Kennedy brothers on their minds. It was the same too for Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s, with the assassinations of the Russian Royal family still in living memory, as it was for Augustine way back in 387.
Augustine lived between 354 and 430 A.D. and for thirty years was Bishop of Hippo—now the coastal city of Annaba in Algeria. He started off as a pagan, like his father, believing that the world was the product of two Gods—one good, and one evil—a belief known at the time as the “Manichean heresy.” Later, he converted to the Catholicism of his mother and was fascinated by the miracles portrayed in the New Testament. He then discovered the writings of Plato and decided that evil was not a force in its own right but instead an ‘absence’ of what should be—a topic Mick Jagger would touch upon in his lyrics centuries later. But, Augustine had a problem:
because such little piety as I had, compelled me to believe that God, who is good, could not have created an evil nature. (Confessions 5.10)

For Augustine, the existence of evil challenged the notion of an all-powerful and good God: if such a God existed, why did-n’t He just rid the world of evil? If He had created everything, and “everything” includes evil, then logically, God had created evil. Why had He done this? Augustine put the puzzle this way:
How, then, do I come to possess a will that can choose to do wrong and refuse to do good, thereby providing a just reason why I should be punished? Who put this will into me? Who sowed this seed of bitterness in me, when all that I am was made by my God, who is Sweetness itself? If it was the devil who put it there, who made the devil? If he was a good angel who became a devil because of his own wicked will, how did he come to possess the wicked will which made him a devil, when the Creator, who is entirely good, made him a good angel and nothing else? (Confessions 7.3)

The Catholic Church taught that evil was an individual’s choice, and this led Augustine to revisit that moment of ‘original sin’ in the Book of Genesis. He believed that it was a factual account of original sin, one that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition: we all live under these conditions and are part of a wider ‘divine’ plan. The snake (or demon) in the Garden of Eden tempted Adam and Eve to prefer themselves over God. For Augustine, this was ‘original sin’—the sin of pride. God allowed the snake to tempt them, to correct their terrible mistake. Demons then, are fallen angels, whom God allows to punish us as part of their own eternal punishment.
Now if God created demons and humans (as part of His “omnipotence” or all-powerfulness), and God knows every individual outcome (as part of His “omniscience” or all-knowingness), then how is anyone free to do anything other than what God planned?
Augustine believed in a type of free will that gives us freedom that is fairly well prescribed and pre-destined. Predestination and free will may seem contradictory. But in order to explain the existence of evil that was not caused directly by God, Augustine had to suppose that humans had freedom to act in ways that brought about sin and evil. So, in something of an awkward compromise, he envisioned humans as free agents who nonetheless live under major constraints—all imposed ultimately by Adam and Eve’s ‘original sin’.
Augustine knew quite a bit about sin and lack of satisfaction. He admits in his Confessions, “I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness and clouded its waters with hell’s black river of lust” (3.1). Unlike The Stones, who seem to have reveled in the black river, Augustine struggled with his lust for other women for much of his life, keeping a mistress for several years while he was married: “In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wedded wife but a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her” (4.2). Because of this, Augustine was initially reluctant to be baptized into the faith. But once he had worked through his concept of evil, he decided that the sin he had been guilty of was pride: turning away from God.
Yet there was a bright side. As James Wetzel explains it, the more we ‘confess’ to God, the more we enter into a conversation with Him, and therefore become less likely to commit further sin. The act of confession itself is a good thing. But does that mean that if we didn’t sin, we would never talk to God? Quite a comfort for a sinner such as Augustine! It’s as if he figured that to reach God we must have enough free will to permit us to sin and, subsequently, to confess. For Augustine, therefore, evil is a necessary thing. It must exist.51 So you might want to have some courtesy and some respect.
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And I Was ’Round when Jesus Christ Had His Moment of Doubt and Pain

The Master and Margarita also has a ‘novel within a novel’, a device whereby a novelist, known only as ‘The Master’ writes an updating of the New Testament in which the mysterious Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Christ) battles with Pontius Pilate, while Christ’s own spin-doctor, Matthew the Levite, embellishes his “miracles.” The Master is eventually locked in a lunatic asylum after turning in his manuscript, in much the same way that a reluctant Pilate handed over Yeshua Ha-Nozri to be crucified. All the while Satan looks on. The reader gradually realizes that The Master’s novel is no fiction, but is meant to be an accurate account of historical events, similar to Augustine’s re-reading of the Book of Genesis and the events in the Garden of Eden.
Back in Moscow, a more sympathetic Woland turns The Master’s mourning lover, Margarita, into a witch. The most climatic scene of the novel comes as Margarita leads hundreds of ‘dead’ people—characters stretching right back throughout human history—out of Hell into a huge masked ball that she hosts for Woland in central Moscow. The decapitated head of the character Berlioz reappears to suggest that death is not in any sense a final ending. Margarita’s selflessness is rewarded and she is allowed to live in a kind of limbo with The Master, a limbo that they both assume to be death. This time, it is God himself who intervenes and orders Woland to grant The Master and Margarita peace. Even Pilate is forgiven, as he sits waiting to be reunited with Christ; he even wishes now that he had taken Christ’s place at the crucifixion.
Bulgakov, like Augustine before him, suggests that there is evil in the world, but that there is good in all of us, which can be united with the Divine if we turn away from the material world. Pilate, the Master, and Margarita all end up rejecting the material world and are joined with the Divine at the end of the novel.
Like Augustine’s Confessions, the novel begins by posing the question of God’s existence and ends by answering it firmly in the affirmative. Bulgakov’s Satan also operates within the divine constraints of Augustinian free will. He is more like an employee of a large organization than he is an autonomous destructive force. So we naturally have sympathy for this Devil. It was to these ideas that Mick Jagger turned his attention in 1968, indirectly questioning Augustine’s notions, asking searching questions about the nature of evil and free will.

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It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, But I Complicate It

Augustine begins with questions about what defines a person and how a person behaves—the psychology of personality. His Christian view of the person, and his abiding concern with psychological tension in the individual, suggest that he can be seen as something like the first Christian rock artist. Like most of them, until he converted to Christianity, he was all about rebellion and obsessed with sex, excess, and bad-boy behavior. Eventually Augustine came to blame his indiscretions on his material nature, as opposed to his immaterial soul. In fact much of our modern understanding of the split between body and soul can be traced to Augustine, who like Plato, placed the body on a lower plane of existence than the soul. The body will drag you down, away from the excellences of the higher realm.
Yet God created everything, Augustine believed, including our bodies. God is the ground of all being, for “if there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, the truth itself is God. So in either case you cannot deny that God exists.” As the ground of being, God is perfectly good—Goodness itself—and all things created are also good as a result, in varying degrees. But since evil was not created by God, it either must have had a different source or it doesn’t really exist. Augustine opts for the second alternative, writing that “evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”54
This is where Augustine’s interest in human personality meets his theory of evil. Evil is not a thing or a positive force, but instead “a swerving of the will which is turned toward lower things” (Confessions, p. 121). The free will is crucial: the best world must have moral freedom in it, because only moral freedom allows for moral goodness to come forth. God would want a world where evil exists, because moral virtues can only exist in a world where evil exists. Courage would not exist, if neither natural evils such as floods or hurricanes, nor moral evils such as the Holocaust or slavery, existed. So God is neither the creator of evil, nor its helpless victim. Rather, he co-exists with evil understood as a privation of goodness. On the other hand, Augustine believe that evil sometimes leads to good in ways that humans cannot see or understand. As Goodness itself, God can see the big-picture-benefits of having evil around, which may sometimes elude our human understanding.
For Augustine, all this moral freedom means that our lives face a constellation of simple yet powerful opposites that we must navigate: soul versus body, pride versus humility, God versus man, good versus evil, temporal versus eternal. We not only have to think about these issues, but live with them and through them in order to approach philosophical truths.

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A Rolling Stone Gathers … Happiness?

Cyrenaic hedonism thrived in Greece for about a hundred years. Even after it died out, core hedonistic principles remained in the air. After about fifty years, another Greek philosophical school, led by Epicurus, decided to give hedonism another shot. The Epicureans followed the Cyrenaics in understanding pleasure as basic, but they argued that pursuing pleasure on the basis of sensation alone was inadequate. Cicero (106–43 B.C.), a Roman Epicurean, and one of the movement’s most well-written spokesmen, explains that running headlong after pleasure in the manner of the Cyrenaics is flawed because, “great pains result for those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally.”27
Where the Cyranaic recommendation was to grab hold of as many pleasures as quickly as you can, Epicurus recommends a careful study of the pleasure that awaits you before you decide to indulge. This is because, Epicurus points out, sometimes pleasures, though good in the moment, carry with them negative consequences as well. If a pleasure will lead to a future pain that is worse than the original pleasure was good, it makes sense to avoid it. Since the goal is to net as much pleasure as possible, it’s foolish to reach for pleasures that bring along a negative balance of pain by the time all is said and done. What’s more, sometimes it makes sense, according to Epicurus, for a hedonist to choose to engage in a painful action.
While this point would have been inexplicable for the Cyranaic hedonist, it has a clear logic. Some pleasant activities have negative consequences later, such as the small fortune Keef has spent on his drug-related legal woes. Conversely, some painful activities have pleasant consequences later, such as the cold-turkey aches, pains and messes, of kicking a junk habit that later enable the pleasure of raising children. Epicurus says, “We sometimes pass over many pleasures in cases where their outcome for us is a greater quality of discomfort; and we regard many pains as better than pleasures in cases when our endurance of pains is followed by a greater and long-lasting pleasure.”28
The Epicureans differ from the Cyrenaics in other ways too. The Epicureans recommend learning to live very simply, as they believe that those who are unaccustomed to luxuries will derive the greatest pleasure when they do attain them. This is, of course, antithetical to the high-flying rock’n’roll lifestyle epitomized by the Stones, and exemplified in their songs.
Why would the Epicureans think that a life of quiet simplicity is to be preferred to the life of a rock star? Working from the belief that the intense pleasure of high luxury carries with it an unacceptable amount of pains as well, they advise us to find pleasure in simple, easy-to-attain goods, arguing that humbler joys actually end up amounting to more pleasure once you subtract all the pain that results in harder-to-get goods. The simple life is better, according to the Epicurean, because it removes the hassle and anxiety that always follows the thrill-seeker who has no time to rest before he is compelled to continue the hunt for his next pleasurable experience.
Again, Keef is a prime example. The pleasure obtained from heroin is followed by incessant search for more fixes. Once a hedonist becomes accustomed to the intensity of the hard-to-attain pleasures, his taste for simple pleasures will be dulled, and he will no longer be able to derive satisfaction from those things. This is the desperation of 1971’s “Sister Morphine” from Sticky Fingers: “Tell me, sister morphine /When are you coming round again? / Oh, I don’t think I can wait that long / Oh, you see I’m not that strong.” Keith Richards complained in a 2006 interview that he is no longer able to achieve a high off of drugs.29 Rather than worry about all that, Epicurus advises avoiding hard-to-attain pleasures altogether, thus sparing the pain that comes when those pleasures are not available.
While the Cyrenaics make it clear that they think one pleasurable activity is as good as any other, and that each should be judged merely in terms of the amount of pleasure it provides the person who engages in it, the Epicureans thought that pleasures exist in a hierarchy. Epicurus is very explicit about what he means in holding pleasure as the ultimate good, and he decidedly does not mean unbridled bodily indulgence. He says:
We do not mean … those that consist in having a good time … but freedom from pain in the body and disturbance in the soul. For what produces the pleasant life is not continuous drinking and parties or pederasty or womanizing or the enjoyment of … dishes of the expensive table, but sober reasoning which tracks down the causes of every choice and avoidance, and which banishes the options that beset souls with the greatest confusion.” (The Hellenistic Philosophers, p. 114)

For Epicureans, prudence is the greatest virtue, for it is the key that allows us to live happy lives. Although not a particularly common word today, the concept of prudence, or phronesis, in Greek, is an idea that is readily recognizable. Prudence is the ability to foresee the results of our actions, to recognize the implications for tomorrow of what we do today. Prudence was extremely important to the Epicureans because the ability to predict the consequences of our actions was integral to choos-ing those actions that would lead to the most pleasure, all things considered, rather than the most pleasure right now. So you see, their goal of pleasure, pleasure, and more pleasure really isn’t essentially different from the Cyrenaics, or the Stones. The difference is their reliance on prudence to help them achieve more lifetime pleasure over pain. Unlike the Cyrenaics, they would not be continually subtracting from their pleasure score to account for the pains that inevitably follow the unconsidered pursuit of pleasure.
This doesn’t mean the Epicureans had anything against physical pleasures, either. Cicero says, “I cannot conceive of anything as the good if I remove the pleasures perceived by means of taste and sex and listening to music…. Certainly it is impossible to say that mental delight is the only good.”30 What’s more, the Epicureans are not categorically opposed to any particular pleasures. Epicurus says, “No pleasure is something bad per se: but the causes of some pleasures produce stresses many times greater than the pleasures.”31
Rather than rule out certain kinds of pleasure altogether, then, the Epicureans merely rule out pleasures that result in greater pain than pleasure at the end of the day. This means that, though a particular pleasure, such as drug use, is still permissible, it must be indulged in a way that avoids the negative consequences that often follow it. A life free of addiction will have more pleasures than the life of an addict, so the Epicureans will advise responsible drug use that avoids the perils of addiction. Likewise, a life free of disease will have more pleasures open to it than a life cut short by AIDS, so sexual pleasures should be pursued in ways that minimize disease. In other words, if you ran into some Epicureans at a rock festival today, they’d be the ones passing out free condoms and running the needle exchange programs.

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Out of Control

Our oldest record of people choosing to live according to a hedonistic moral code dates to the fourth century B.C. The people were called the Cyrenaics because their leader, Aristippus (around 435–356 B.C.), was from a place called Cyrene, in Greece. Although historians believe that the Cyrenaics were the first to systematize the moral code of hedonism, they lived so long ago we no longer have any of their writings. So, we have to rely on a biographer named Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.), who was kind enough to write a book called Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in which he explains the belief systems of the many philosophers of his time, including Aristippus and the Cyrenaics.
Diogenes tells us that the Cyrenaics’ version of hedonism was the first and most basic form of hedonism. It is sometimes called simple hedonism. The Cyrenaics believed that all pleasures are equally good, differing only to the extent that more intense, frequent, and long-lasting pleasures are better than more subtle, rare, and short pleasures. Basically, for the Cyrenaics, it was the more pleasure the better, and get it any way you can. Does this sound like anyone we know? Let’s take a look at a few lyrical examples. “Shake Your Hips,” a song from Exile on Main St., urges us to focus on moving our bodies in pleasant ways. “Don’t move your head / Don’t move your hands / Don’t move your lips / Just shake your hips / Do the hip shake, babe.” The hips are the crux of many of life’s pleasures. Of course, rock’n’roll was always about more than just the pleasures of dance form, and the pleasure from one gyration often hopes to lead to another. The lives of the Stones seems to make that clear.
In addition to just pursuing pleasure, we see an example of a “no holds barred” attitude to pleasure conveyed in the song, “Brown Sugar,” from Sticky Fingers. Here, rough, bondage and discipline-type sex with sixteen-year-old black girls is endorsed. “Ah, brown sugar, how come you taste so good? / Ah, brown sugar, just like a young girl should.” “Out of Control” from the 1998 album, Bridges to Babylon, sends a dual message : not only is it okay to pursue pleasure with untamed abandon, it’s better to grab all the pleasure you can in the moment. There is an urgency, a sense that the best pleasures are fleeting and so must be seized before they are gone, that is clear example of Cyrenaic hedonism. “Now I’m out / Oh out of control / Now I’m out / Oh out of control /Oh help me now / In the hotel I’m excited / By the smile on her face.”
The Stones’ emphasis on bodily pleasures—sex and drugs—is in keeping with the Cyrenaic views on pleasure. What’s more, the Cyrenaics tell us that, “pleasure is a good, even if it arises from the most unbecoming causes … for even if an action be ever so absurd, still the pleasure which arises out of it is desirable, and a good.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers). This type of thinking serves to justify the sorts of limit-pushing behavior described in “Brown Sugar,” as well as “Rip This Joint,” from Exile. “Mama says yes, Papa says no /Make up you mind ’cause I gotta go / Gonna raise hell at the Union Hall / Drive myself right over the wall.”
Cyrenaic hedonism is about attaining particular instances of pleasure. Diogenes Laertius explains:
Happiness is a state consisting of a number of particular pleasures, among which, those which are past, and those which are future, are both enumerated. And they consider that particular pleasure is desirable for its own sake; but that happiness is desirable not for its own sake, but for that of the particular pleasure. (Lives of Eminent Philosophers)

Rather than believing that we seek pleasure in order to be happy, the Cyrenaics think that happiness simply is a life of successive pleasures. They also believe that pleasures of the flesh will always trump pleasures of the mind. Unlike most moral theories, and even other forms of hedonism, Cyrenaic hedonism insists that the road to happiness lies not in our rational natures, but in our most base animal instincts. The Stones’ 1969 song from Let It Bleed, “Monkey Man,” could serve as a theme song for the entire Cyrenaic movement. The song not only acknowledges our animal nature, but embraces it. “I’m a fleabit peanut monkey /All my friends are junkies…. Well, I am just a monkey man / I’m glad you’re a monkey woman too.”
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