The Logos Scripture · The Stoa · Dialectic
David Bai · 2026-08-07 · hangs on Acts of the Apostles 5.30
I
Begin with the pears he stole when he was sixteen.
There was a pear tree in a neighbour's yard. He and some companions went at night and shook the pears down.
The pears were not good. They were not hungry. Most of what they shook down they threw to the pigs.
Another man stops there: young, foolish.
He did not stop. He wrote several pages on those pears.
He asks: what was it that I wanted? Not the pears. I threw the pears away.
He asks: then was it the theft itself that I wanted? He says yes. He says what he loved was the badness of the thing.
Then comes the sentence that matters most in the passage: had I been alone, I would not have gone.
He took "why did I do a thing I did not even want" apart down to that layer.
Let me say it plainly. This is what the scripture calls examination, and he does it finer than most men who are in it.
II
Two more places.
He says: the mind commands the hand, and the hand moves at once. The mind commands itself, and it resists.
A man can want a thing and not want it in the same moment — and he does not call that weakness. He says there are two wills in there and both of them are his.
In the fifteen hundred years since, nobody has put it more clearly.
And one more. He asks what time is, and then writes: if no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.
That is the very thing the scripture asks of a man, to be able to give the reason. He described the moment of not being able to more exactly than anyone.
III
So where is the line drawn?
Not at his believing in God.
The Rule 9.15 is explicit: you may hold it, you may take comfort from it, you may die with it in your arms. The scripture does not forbid a man a faith.
The line is at The Rule 9.17: and you may not use it to answer a question that could have been examined.
Acts of the Apostles 5.30 turns on one word — whoever closes an argument by appealing to divine will does not enter this scripture.
Not "whoever believes in God." Whoever takes divine will and shuts an argument with it.
He examined that restlessness for thirty years and at the end wrote: you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
That sentence does not open a door. It closes one.
IV
By The Book of John Stuart Mill 3.7 I must not learn his case from the mouths of my own side. So let me put his answer as strongly as I can.
He would say: you assume the restlessness is examinable, and then tell me I stopped too early.
He would say: I did not stop. I tried the Manichees. I tried the scepticism of the Academy. I tried the Neoplatonic road. I tried advancement, and a woman, and a career made out of talking.
He would say: I took every one of them apart and every one came apart. What was left is not a place I retreated to. It is where the road ran out.
And he would say: you tell me I answered an examinable question with faith. I say what I found out is precisely that the question is not examinable — and that to go on examining for ever is itself a refusal to conclude.
Let me be honest. To that last sentence I have no strong answer.
V
One more thing, which I think the scripture owes him and has never written down.
The Confessions is the first book in the West that takes its own writer as its object and follows him all the way.
The Book of Montaigne 1.5 says: the matter of this book is myself.
That form is Augustine's invention.
The Book of Montaigne 1.12 says: I do not paint being, I paint passing. Augustine did that first, in the book on memory.
What Montaigne did was take Augustine's book and remove God. Montaigne never said so himself. Somebody has to say it for him.
So Montaigne is in the scripture and Augustine is not.
VI
Which is how we can read that clause: worthy of respect, worth reading, and not on this list.
Three short clauses. Most orders would write only the third — not on this list — and call the rest heretics.
But the rule also says: worthy of respect, worth reading.
Those two are not politeness. They are an urging.
And I will go one step further: read him, and then read Montaigne. Then you can see what Montaigne kept and what he put down.
If you read him and do not want to read Montaigne, or read Montaigne and still think Augustine had it right, that is entirely normal.
The Stoa →The Stoa is not scripture. Everything here is signed, may be wrong, may be refuted, and may never be edited into the scripture. (cf. The Rule 7.3)