The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions: Books I-VI

Preface

Preface Augustine’s Confessions is a difficult book. For many readers, there are too many prayers, too much self-flagellation, and too much philosophy. What other book begins by praising the greatness of God and by calling our attention to the mortality that reflects our separation from him (1.1.1)?1 Where else can we find an autobiography about the sins of infancy and about an adolescent act of mischief that becomes an obsession (1.7.11), (2.4.9–2.10.18)? Who besides Augustine pictures sexuality as a boiling caldron that seethes and bubbles all around him (3.1.1)? In Book IV, he describes the death of his closest friend as an episode that almost leads him to despair (4.4.7–4.7.12). In Book V, he records his disappointment with Manichean dualism as a way of dealing with his deepest intellectual problems (5.7.12). And in Book VI, he expresses temporal, spatial, and eternal hysteria as he tries to bring the journey of his wandering soul to rest (6.11.18–19). In all these cases, the Confessions expresses a range of feelings that is difficult to describe, but it also displays a powerful capacity for reflective discourse. Unlike most philosophers , Augustine can feel deeply and speak profoundly in the same sentence. Indeed, his most famous book poses difficulties for interpretation because it weaves together what most professional philosophers try to separate. 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 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. In the past two decades, I have tried to respond to these demands; but I have only begun to find the place from which Augustine is speaking in the past few years. If one philosopher pays tribute to another by taking him ix x PREFACE seriously enough to criticize, it is even truer that the highest honor we can pay a great thinker is to try to rise to the level of his thinking. The time has come to develop a philosophical framework that is rich enough to express a distinctively Augustinian account of the journey toward God. Only if we do this is there room for us to stand beside Augustine, and only if we open ourselves to the fundamental questions he raises can we participate in a dialogue with him that transcends both hubris and humility. 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 Penn State and at Baylor who have attended my lectures and seminars about the Confessions, and some of whom have been my research assistants. Roger Ward at Penn State and Chris Calloway and Travis Foster at Baylor have been three of these students; and I am indebted to all of them for their assistance. In addition, I am grateful to my student, Kristi Culpepper, for helping with the page proofs and the index. However, the person who has helped me most is Natalie Tapken. In particular, she has read many primary and secondary sources and has helped to prepare the notes 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 one of my graduate seminars appear in a two-part issue of Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 15, published in 1993. Recently, Baylor University sponsored a Pruitt Memorial Symposium devoted to the topic, “Celebrating Augustine’s Confessions: Reading the Confessions for the New Millenium.” Professor Anne-Marie Bowery and I...