Augustine and Disorder
[Trivia: Which 5 current NHL teams have English-language colors in their names?]
A while ago I wrote about curiositas (here and here), the bygone idea of chaotic and disordered interests as a mental vice. I recently came across a maxim in that same vein; as Black Lawrence Press notes,
In his own Confessions, St. Augustine wrote, “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
It’s not hard to find this quote repeated elsewhere online, e.g. at Goodreads (whose quote pages seem to be crowdsourced and unvetted), but pinning it down (beyond “The Confessions”) was harder.
I did trace it, though, to the end of the paragraph numbered as I.12.19. In the original, “iussisti enim et sic est, ut poena sua sibi sit omnis inordinatus animus.” This has been rendered as “For it is even as thou [God] hast ordained: that every inordinate affection brings on its own punishment.” Alternatively, “For Thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should be its own punishment.”
For everyone wondering, the original Latin “sit” is much more literally the latter (“should be”) than the former (“brings on”). But the bigger question: is “affection” or “mind” the better rendering? Because those feel far distant.
In context, the whole paragraph reads:
In boyhood itself, however (so much less dreaded for me than youth), I loved not study, and hated to be forced to it. Yet I was forced; and this was well done towards me, but I did not well; for, unless forced, I had not learnt. But no one doth well against his will, even though what he doth, be well. Yet neither did they well who forced me, but what was well came to me from Thee, my God. For they were regardless how I should employ what they forced me to learn, except to satiate the insatiate desires of a wealthy beggary, and a shameful glory. But Thou, by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered, didst use for my good the error of all who urged me to learn; and my own, who would not learn, Thou didst use for my punishment—a fit penalty for one, so small a boy and so great a sinner. So by those who did not well, Thou didst well for me; and by my own sin Thou didst justly punish me. For Thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should be its own punishment.
The context is important because the raw definition of the word (animus) is formidably complex. Frankly, the context seems to suggest mental activity and the mind rather than any generic “affection.”
Which leads us to the surprising conclusion that the vaguely sourced and irregularly translated Internet saying seems to be more faithful to the original Latin than the line as it appears in full-length translations. Animus seems better as “mind” here, and for that matter its adjective is also represented better: the Latin word “inordinatus” sure looks like our word “inordinate,” but that English word is used to mean “excessive, inappropriate in magnitude” whereas the Latin word, built from “not-ordinate”, means “not arranged, disordered, irregular.”
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Answer: The Detroit Red Wings, the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Chicago Blackhawks, the St. Louis Blues, the Vegas Golden Knights. (“Bruin”, meanwhile, is Dutch for “brown”, as in “brown bear.”)