The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [120]
The fact that the lyrics were inspired by The Master and Margarita, a novel by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, has always given the song a philosophical aura. But in fact there is no thinker more relevant to the meaning of “Sympathy for the Devil” than Saint Augustine. Augustine was obsessed with the meaning of good and evil, and his ideas had lasting impact on both Christian and secular thought.
Born in Thagaste, Northern Africa (modern Souk Ahras) in 354, Augustine jump-started the genre of autobiography with his Confessions, written in 394. He converted to the Catholic Church at age thirty-two, and eventually became a Bishop. But Augustine was no saint, in one sense at least. His Confessions describe a youth and young adulthood filled with enough passion and indiscretion to rival the tabloid exploits of Britney Spears, Eminem, or The Rolling Stones. Most notoriously, he confesses an obsession with sex. When he was sixteen, Augustine wrote, “both love and lust boiled within me, and swept my youthful immaturity over the precipice of evil desires to leave me half drowned in a whirlpool of abominable sins.” God didn’t seem to mind all this evil, Augustine pointed out: “You left me to myself: and I was tossed about and wasted and poured out and boiling over in my fornications: and You were silent, O my late-won joy.”53
If he was both a well-respected man about town and a fornicator who struggled with his sex drive, this man of “wealth and taste” was also prone to self-analysis that usually ended in self-loathing. Besides all of his lust, he was also in the habit of stealing things he did not need. Augustine and his gang, out carousing late at night, once stole a load of pears from a tree filled with fruit “that was not particularly tempting either to look at or to taste.” Augustine has other, similar stories that suggest why he acted this way: “Our only pleasure in doing it was that it was forbidden … I loved my own undoing, I loved the evil in me—not the thing for which I did the evil, simply the evil … For what might I not have done, seeing that I loved evil solely because it was evil?” Augustine is convinced that he loves evil and has no other reason for committing these acts. But there’s something else involved, he says, namely other people assisting him: without “the companionship of others sinning with me, … I would not have done this by myself: quite definitely I would not have done it by myself ” (pp. 26–31).
This connection between evil and social or group behavior shows up in “Sympathy,” as Jagger shrieks: “I shouted out—‘who killed the Kennedys?’ And answers “When after all, It was you and me.” We know it wasn’t “you and me” who literally pulled the trigger on the Kennedys, but perhaps partial blame can be assigned to others. Whether conspiracy theories were in the back of Jagger’s mind or not, there is a way to see that Augustine and Lee Harvey Oswald share a similar refrain: I could not, would not, and did not do this by myself. You all helped me.
Still, there’s an important difference between Augustine’s and Jagger’s take on the Devil. In “Sympathy” Jagger puts a human face on evil and makes us feel guilty for the violence and tragedies presented to us. Evil is real—and it is us. But Augustine does not think it’s real in the same way. For Augustine evil has no positive existence at all.
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,