Quotquot haec legerint meminerint: All Who Read This Will Remember

I think that all of us who work on Augustine of Hippo feel after a while that we have a deeply personal relationship with him: such is the force of Augustine’s personality. But Gene Vance experienced that feeling with particular intensity. Gene thought and wrote and talked about Augustine throughout his scholarly life.¹ He aired Augustine’s ideas with an urgency that made them his own. Indeed, the resemblance was more than superficial; for reading Augustine, one has the sense of an intellectual tenacity and enthusiasm similar to Gene’s, and a similar boundless capacity to ask questions.²

I came late to this conversation, for I only knew Gene for the last dozen years of his life. At a conference, I gave a paper that caught his interest and suddenly, vividly, Gene was present, looming slightly, tousled, earnest, burning to discuss the late antique texts that I work on and that he loved.³

And now, suddenly, vividly, Gene is dead. Gene did everything vividly. Augustine would have appreciated the paradox.⁴

So when I was asked to contribute to this volume in memory of Gene, I knew that I would write something about Augustine. And it would have to be about the Confessions, the most explicitly personal of Augustine’s works, and the one to which Gene returned most frequently. In fact, I realized that Gene had himself proposed the topic the last time we met. It was, as it turned out, a week before his death. We were sitting in a garden in Princeton in the freshness of spring, and conloquebamur ergo soli valde dulciter (“we were speaking, just the two of us, very pleasurably”); and Gene was speaking of Monnica, the mother of Augustine. He said that he had long felt that the Confessions as a whole, not just the biographical passage in book 9, was intended as Monnica’s epitaph and memorial.⁵ I disagreed; he pressed his case; we bandied rival citations; the argument evaporated in laughter.

But I knew all along that Gene’s unconventional readings often contained precious insights. (Who but he would have dared to read into Augustine’s contrasting depictions of the relation of God the Son to God the Father in the Confessions and On the Trinity a portrayal of Augustine achieving some kind of resolution with the shade of his own father?)⁶ So in tribute to Gene Vance, praeterita obliviscens in ea quae ante sunt extenta (“forgetting former things and focused on those ahead”), I essay here a reading of the Confessions that puts Monnica’s death at its heart.⁷

Re-reading book 9 of the Confessions under these conditions was a very strange experience. Gene was a passionate reader; texts mattered intensely to him.⁸ Reading with Gene looking over my shoulder, as it were, I read differently from before.⁹

The first half of Confessions 9 is noisy and hectic and full of death. This is so striking partly because of its contrast with the end of book 8. There Augustine reaches the climax of the account of his long struggle to fit his will to that of God. He has spread the account over three books, which seem designed to mimic in the reader Augustine’s own frustration and irresolution and divagations.¹⁰ The signature tense of this account is the imperfect, repeated in an ongoing jingle of incompleteness: dicebam intus ecce ‘modo fiat, modo fiat’, et cum verbo iam ibam in placitum.¹¹iam paene faciebam et non faciebam . . . (“I was saying inwardly, look, ‘now let it happen—no, now’, and I was already going towards what agreed with the Word. Now I was almost doing it—and I wasn’t doing it...”; Conf. 8.11.25). Augustine is longing for punctum ipsum temporis quo aliud futurus eram (“that point of time at which I was going to be something else”), and sexual restraint, personified in all her chaste dignity, is laughing at him with inrisione hortatoria, “encouraging mockery”¹² (Conf. 8.11.25 and 27). He is in the famous...