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I watched with glee

While your kings and queens

Fought for ten decades

For the gods they made

(woo woo, woo woo)

Mick doesn’t seem to care much for Augustine’s view of evil as “privation”; in “Sympathy for the Devil” The Stones are presenting evil as an in-your-face reality that exists independent of the good. This is what Mick and the band saw, if not from the stage at Altamont, in the footage they are shown watching (with revulsion) in Gimme Shelter. Meredith Hunter did not die at the hands of a bunch of privations.

A Wild Murder Couldn’t Drag Me Away

Despite their different views of evil, there are reasons to see Sir Mick and Saint Augustine as taking similar paths in life. Augustine’s youth played a necessary role in his redemption. And The Stones’ early flirtation with an evil persona—at its apex in the swirl of Altamont and “Sympathy for the Devil”—no doubt taught them that the force of opposites colliding makes the world go ‘round—or brings it crashing down.

Drug use was a staple of The Stones in the Sixties, and the unbridled use of drugs is a certain kind of evil, a fact Jagger emphasized in telling Rolling Stone in 1995 that his avoidance of drugs in 1968 helped make Beggars Banquet the great success that it was.57 And it’s ironic that the sex-talk in this chapter has almost exclusively been related to Augustine, since The Stones were one of the most sexually-charged bands in rock history. Sexual obsession can also strangle creativity in many ways. But it is the visceral nature of their lifestyles that I have most emphasized in comparing and contrasting Sir Augustine with Saint Mick. They are like brothers, with deep connections, but also diverging in notions and lifestyles in the way only brothers can.

In calling Augustine a Christian rocker, I mean that he was concerned with the primordial forces underlying reality, such as sexuality and evil. He defines evil as the dark underside of good, and gives performative detail to it by describing his love of evil itself. For all his love of rationality, Augustine believed that some truths can only be performed or willed. Before his conversion, he had followed the Manichees (followers of the teachings of Mani), who believed that we have two minds, one good and one evil. Augustine came to believe that we can have many wills but only one mind. So if our will is pulled in many different directions, we can say that we have many wills, and the directions they are pulled in may all be good. But if all these good things “attract us at the same moment, … they are all in conflict until one is chosen” (Confessions, p. 143). One good will is our goal, and can only be achieved by actually choosing.

Gimme Shelter also seems to have two personalities, and critics argue that the movie must choose what it wants to be—a harrowing documentary, or joyous concert footage—just as Augustine says we must choose—between goods or, more dramatically, between good and evil. The Stones, both as explorers into the dark side of humanity and as passive observers of the evil of Altamont, had to rise again; they had to find a way to make their “Sympathy for the Devil” the performative force for understanding evil that it was meant to be, rather than the scapegoat for a multiplicity of forces that were often beyond their control. In doing so, they would learn some restraint, but thankfully also remained restive. If Augustine could fully rest in God, perhaps it was because of how far he had fallen early in his life. And he expresses just how much tension he felt between the flesh and spirit in his infamous line, “God, grant me chastity—just not yet.”

On December 6th, 1969, also early in their careers, the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world was in tatters. While Augustine turned from the flesh to the spirit to find rest, The Stones remained in the flesh, continuing to sing the blues and to confront the ecstasy, pain, and evil which define the body and the blues. They’ve continued rocking and rolling, telling