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eleven Augustine’s Unconfessions James J. O’Donnell The reading practices of moderns when confronted with Augustine’s Confessions are extraordinarily consistent and extraordinarily idiosyncratic. To find a way to talk about Augustine and his self-representations that breaks the crust of that familiar set of practices even a little, I will choose to begin by reading a bit of Augustine’s presentation of a fragment of the life of his friend Alypius.1 One day when meditating on his school exercises in Carthage, Alypius was walking in the forum and came upon—Augustine will have us believe—a crime scene. Another student, perhaps one of those eversores (“wreckers”) of whom Augustine did not approve,2 had taken an axe to the lead grating over the tiny cells in which the silversmiths of the artisans’ quarter had to work. No one should envy those workers their difficult and probably toxic work in cramped quarters or the draconian discipline to which they were subjected, but they had their own solidarity and loyalty to their trade. So when they heard the would-be thief trying to break in, they set up an alarm. The thief dropped his axe and ran. At this moment, Alypius comes along (so the story goes), finds the axe, and picks it up with a wondering look on his face. The silversmiths and the authorities converge on the spot, and Alypius is more or less arrested. By any reasonable standard of ancient justice, this should have put paid to Alypius’s career right there. Found in flagrante delicto, his prospects for future health and safety, let alone career success, were dim. But Augustine assures us that Alypius was the right sort, and lucky besides. The civil servant who had the title of “architect” of the forum happened along (no doubt from habitual haunts nearby), recognized Alypius as someone he knew, and listened to his story. Because Alypius had this connection, investigation followed and the real culprit was tracked to his lair where a slave boy, no doubt fearing the Caputo/Scanlon, Augustine 12/2/04 10:09 AM Page 212 swift application of judicial torture, happily “dropped a dime”3 on the young master of his employer’s house—he recognized the axe, and Alypius was off the hook. I do not see that any reader of Augustine’s Confessions, ancient or modern, has ever paused to doubt the truth of this story for a moment. Let us pause. If this were not Augustine telling us the story, and if it were not Alypius of whom he spoke, would we be so certain? Is there anything we know of Alypius that makes it impossible to imagine that he was himself the culprit? Are we so confident in the veracity of ancient slaves and the integrity of the Roman judicial process that we can be sure that the sight of an angry judicial mob at the front door would not impel a frightened slave boy into perjury against a master he may have had no special reason to love? The question of Alypius’s guilt should remain open and the story an intriguing one. He would not be the first distinguished attorney with a complicated case of adolescent miscreancy to explain away. But Augustine’s narrative, artfully constructed of self-accusation and excuse, has proven impermeable to assault. The only piece of narrative that has ever undergone assault on grounds of truthfulness is the fragment of time in the garden in Milan when he hears the child’s (or the angel’s?) voice urging him to “take up and read.” For an autobiographical narrative with heavy theological overtone, written by a man with a suspect past and enemies of several sorts, that gullibility—the word is not too strong—is astonishing. Augustine may very well be making his own kind of truth out of his past,4 but his truth need not be our truth—and at the very least should not become our truth so unreflectively. But art and history are on Augustine’s side. He who writes a dense, vivid, and sophisticated narrative will very often be taken seriously. When the same writer acquires, over a thousand years, a reputation as a philosopher and theologian of the first rank, he assures himself a broad and friendly readership. His halting, frustrated , difficult autobiographical text will be taken as the ideal first-person correlate of the genre of hagiography and read as though it were...

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