Feminist Interpretations of Augustine

4 Confessing Monica

4 Confessing Monica Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller It is difficult to force Augustine to confess his mother fixation, partly because he is already so eager to do so. He is, after all, the man who virtually invented the closet, so that he could come out of its hollowed, hallowed interiority again and again, making a subject of his private perversions , flamboyantly exhibiting his stubbornly bent will. Monica is among the guilty pleasures enjoyed by the author of the Confessions. Moreover, unlike stolen pears, she is a love that the author cannot possibly renounce, a pleasure he cannot forgo. She emerges as the irrepressible subject of a holy life in a work that resists hagiography, as an irreducibly carnal figure in a tale that insists on love’s sublimation, as Wisdom seduc- 120 Feminist Interpretations of Augustine tively incarnate in a book that has little to say about Jesus. Finally, she erupts, she opens up, as an excitingly fertile, disturbingly overdetermined, matrix of meaning, at the very place in the Scriptures where Augustine— sitting in silent contemplation—expects to find nothing at all. This present meditation on the mother in Augustine’s Confessions is written with two hands, one historical and literary, the other theological and exegetical. The text may, like Confessions itself, seem to divide naturally into two parts. Yet thoughts overlap, words interweave: it is finally impossible to say precisely where one subject begins and another ends. Confessions is a woman’s life. Is that so strange a claim? More paradoxical still, the womb of the life—cradled in the center of the text—is the account of the woman’s death. It is in grieving his mother Monica that Augustine discovers his point of departure, just when we might have thought he was finished with his account. He departs, he begins again, then, in the middle—in medias res. (Every beginning is also a departure— from something). Grieving Monica, remembering his mother, delivering her eulogy to God in the pseudoprivacy of his ancient prayer closet, Augustine learns to read; he begins to write in earnest. In principio Deus creavit, runs the text. ‘‘In the beginning you made heaven and earth,’’ he addresses the author of both Scripture and cosmos wonderingly (11.3).1 Augustine creates too; he is also a writer: he makes his confession brashly ‘‘in this book before the many who will read it’’ (10.1). But perhaps we make too much of his sheer originality, his autogenerativity.2 We forget —or fail to notice—that it is his mother who provides him the narrative material out of which to conceive time and space, to frame the very cosmos. Monica’s life (centered on her death) gives him his opening, keeps his story of conversion open. Monica is Augustine’s eternally un- finished business; she is present in all his beginnings.3 A beginning that is in the middle of the thing, an irruptive potentiality that resists narrative closure, Monica plots and is emplotted, simultaneously generates and disrupts story lines. Less an item than a happening, she takes place in the argument of Augustine’s Confessions, and thus we must strive to understand what that place is. Present from the beginning (1.11), she meets her end (and in a sense also makes her formal debut) in book 9, where the narrative portion of the Confessions likewise concludes. There is a certain substitutionary logic to the mother’s dying the death impossible for the author of an autobiography. The existence of book 9 nonetheless presents a dilemma, for book 8 already contains all the mak- Confessing Monica 121 ings of another kind of ending, having staged the intense struggle of will that culminates in Augustine’s dramatic ‘‘conversion’’ (the liberating death of his formerly enslaved self).4 For the first-time reader, it must come as something of a surprise when Augustine extends his story into a ninth book that relates, first, his ascetic withdrawal and baptism and, second, his memories of the life of his mother. The centerpiece of these memories is a shared mystical experience occurring shortly before Monica ’s death and Augustine’s oddly unexplained and open-ended departure for Africa at the portentous age of thirty-three. Such a dizzying spiritual encounter, following the dramatic experience of divine intervention in book 8’s scene of conversion, seems excessive—more than the story demands , almost more than it can...