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

Introduction

Introduction This book is a detailed analysis of Books X–XIII of Augustine’s Confessions, and it comes to focus on the conditions that make his access to God possible. The first of these conditions is the structure of memory, the second is the nature of time, and the third is the meaning of creation ex nihilo. Looking back on the first thirty-three years of his life, and writing from the perspective of adulthood, Augustine develops the view that memory is a pathway to God; and having established the relation between God and the soul along this pathway, he turns to the confession of his present sins. Then he gives an account of the nature of time, bringing time into relation with eternity by claiming that God not only produces things in time, but also creates time itself as the context in which he remembers, encounters, and anticipates the stages of his quest for fulfillment. Finally, Augustine commits himself to a Christian community of interpretation, where literal and allegorical interpretations of the first chapter of Genesis issue in a new way of understanding the relation between God and the soul. Augustine’s attempt to deal with the problems of memory, time, and creation presupposes a metanarrative of creation, fall, conversion, and fulfillment in the light of which he believes that the lives of all his readers can be understood. However, this does not mean that each of us moves through every stage that Augustine traverses, that all of us do so in the same way, or that the particularity of our unique situations can simply be subsumed within a universal pattern. Augustine is convinced that the pattern is there, and one of his most important tasks is to call our attention to it. However, the author of the Confessions not only addresses us as tokens of a type, but also as unique individuals. In doing so, he stands in between the global human situation and the particular modifications it exhibits. The Confessions thrusts us into the hyphenated place between the universal and the particular, the past and the future, the community and 1 2 INTRODUCTION the individual, and God and the soul, challenging us to listen, not only to what God says to Augustine, but also to what God says to us. The problem of God and the soul and the language appropriate to it are intertwined in a variety of ways. First, the interaction between God and the soul unfolds within a temporal, spatial, and eternal framework , mobilizing the language of the restless heart as a way of bringing space, time, and eternity together into a metaphorical and analogical unity. The relation between time and eternity is expressed most adequately in metaphorical discourse, while the relation between eternity and space requires analogical uses of language for its appropriate articulation . In both cases, figurative discourse is the key for binding God and the soul together. Second, this pivotal relation involves both unity and separation and expresses itself in creation ex nihilo, in the fateful transition from finitude to fallenness, and in the quest for fulfillment that attempts to reestablish peace with God. All these stages of the cosmic drama require figurative discourse for their adequate expression, but they also involve a performative use of language that reflects the dynamism of God, the discord of our fragmented spirits, and the vibrant interaction that can develop between the soul and the ground of its existence. Performative discourse is the language of creation, the language of the restless heart, and the language that permits God and the soul to confront one another in the space that opens up between them. Finally, the two strands of our inquiry come together because the interaction between God and the soul has a linguistic dimension and involves speaking and hearing as its fundamental expression. However important seeing may be, speaking and hearing generate the context in which the ultimate issues of life can be addressed. If these issues are to be dealt with adequately, the language of God and the soul must not only be figurative and performative, but also sufficiently intelligible to bring stability to the human situation. Figurative language points to the mystery of God and to the separation between God and the soul; performative utterances point to the power of God and to the space between the creator and the creature in which they can disclose themselves; and intelligible discourse points to the Word of God, to...