Access to God in Augustine's Confessions: Books X-XIII

Preface

Preface Augustine’s Confessions is a fascinating book. The author begins by praising the greatness of God, confesses his sins by writing an autobiography, and defends his faith by describing the conditions that make memory, temporal experience, and existential transformation possible. In each case, the dynamism of his discourse takes us beyond the surface of the text into the presence and absence of the one to whom he speaks. The richness of the language Augustine uses permits him to stand before God as a unique individual, and it enables him to make even the most theoretical issues accessible in the last four books of the text. The author comes to himself, not only by describing the story of his life in Books I–VI, and by giving an account of his encounter with God in Books VII–IX, but also by describing the conditions that make his transformation possible in Books X–XIII. How shall we respond to a book as rich and complex as this? What approach should we take? What questions should we ask? What answers should we expect? What purposes should undergird our inquiry? Without trying to answer these questions prematurely, at least this much should be clear from the outset: we cannot plunge into the Confessions without calling ourselves into question. Augustine speaks as a psychologist, a rhetorician , a philosopher, and a theologian; but even in the so-called “theoretical Books” of the text, he speaks most fundamentally from the heart. If we are unwilling to probe the depths of our souls, we will never understand Augustine; for he makes insistent demands that we trace out the path he has traveled in our own spiritual and intellectual development. No one undertakes a project of this kind alone, and I want to thank my students and colleagues who have participated in it and have helped make it possible. First, I express my gratitude to the students at Baylor who have attended my lectures and seminars about the Confessions, and two of whom have been my research assistants. Natalie Tapken prepared the notes for the book; and Christi Hemati assisted me with changes in ix x PREFACE the final version of the manuscript and with the copyedited manuscript. She also proofread the penultimate copy of the text and prepared the index for the book. I am also grateful to the thirteen philosophers who came to Penn State for a week in 1992 to study the Confessions with me. We thought and talked until we were exhausted; but in the process, the text opened up in ways that none of us could have anticipated. Some of the papers from this conference and from my graduate seminars appeared in a two-part issue of Contemporary Philosophy, published in 1993.1 In 2001, Baylor University sponsored a Pruitt Memorial Symposium devoted to the topic, “Celebrating Augustine’s Confessions: Reading the Confessions for the New Millennium”; and Professor Anne-Marie Bowery and I were the codirectors of this conference. Finally, I am grateful to President Robert Sloan, Provost David Lyle Jeffery, our former Provost Donald Schmeltekopf, and my colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Baylor for providing me with a supportive and exciting academic environment in which to bring this project to completion. However, I am grateful most of all to Robert Baird, the Department Chair, who read the penultimate version of the manuscript. He not only made valuable suggestions about what I have written, but also encouraged me to turn the project loose after more than a decade of work. I have presented parts of chapter 2 at a number of institutions and philosophical meetings: the Graduate Christian Forum at Cornell, the Convocation Lecture Series at Bethel College, the Distinguished Lecture Series at Baylor, the Philosophy Department Colloquium at the University of Essex, the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, the “D” Society at Cambridge, the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, the Philosophy Department Colloquium at Penn State, the Baptist Association of Philosophy Teachers at Furman University , the Interdisciplinary Program at Valparaiso University, and the Kenneth Konyndyk Memorial Lecture to the Society of Christian Philosophers in New Orleans. I want to thank those who attended these lectures for comments and criticisms that have helped me sharpen some of the issues in this final version of the book. I have also published parts of chapter 2 in an essay entitled, “Theft and Conversion: Two Augustinian Confessions ,” in The Recovery of Philosophy in America: Essays in Honor...