Encounters with God in Augustine's Confessions: Books VII-IX

Introduction

Introduction This book is a detailed analysis of Books VII–IX of Augustine’s Confessions, and it comes to focus on three pivotal encounters between God and the Soul. The first is his philosophical conversion, the second is his conversion to Christianity, and the third is the mystical experience he shares with his mother a few days before her death in Ostia. At a time when philosophy and theology are moving in so many directions, I have chosen to deal with these experiences, not only because they are fundamental stages of Augustine’s existential and reflective transformation, but also because they are archetypical expressions of the human spirit. This is true when Augustine calls our attention to these experiences in the Confessions;1 and it is still the case today, however reluctant many of us may be to fasten our attention on these issues. My own version of Augustine’s enterprise is that God, the soul, and language are the most important problems a philosopher can consider, that religion is the region where all the enigmas of the world converge,2 and that solitude is the place where the ultimate issues of life intersect.3 Yet we must never assume that the problem of God and the soul and the subtle uses of language it requires are either resting places or private problems with which we must struggle alone. When we confront these issues, we face enigmas to be pondered rather than problems to be solved; but having struggled with them in private, we should also address the public context in which our life and thought are embedded. What draws me to Augustine’s Confessions is that I see myself on almost every page. As the Renaissance poet, Petrarch, is the first to notice, the Confessions is not only Augustine’s story, but also the story of Adam and Eve, and hence the story of us all.4 It is a microscopic expression of a macroscopic theme: in a single life the relation between God and the soul unfolds as sustained encounters between an individual and the ground of its existence,5 where the experiences that emerge from these encounters demand the richest linguistic responses of which we are capable. As 1 2 INTRODUCTION Augustine says himself, “What can anyone say when he speaks of thee? But woe to them that keep silent—since even those who say most are dumb” (1.4.4). Augustine’s account of his three encounters with God 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 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 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...