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

3 Manichaeism, Skepticism, and Christianity (Books V–VI)

115 3 Manichaeism, Skepticism, and Christianity (Books V–VI) As our account of the temporal, spatial, and eternal dimensions of Augustine’s development continues to unfold, the relation between God and the soul and the language that permits us to speak about it are once again our central themes. This chapter focuses on the first of these themes by beginning with the presence and absence of God and by concluding with Augustine’s conviction that God will lead him home and set him free. In between, the language of God and the soul allows us to place a spiritual and linguistic framework around our description of Augustine’s life in Carthage, Rome, and Milan. Within this framework, Augustine searches for a stable identity by moving through a series of personal, spiritual, and reflective stages that his encounter with Cicero’s Hortensius initiates. In reflecting on these stages, he calls our attention to the temporal and the spatial dimensions of his journey toward God; but he also emphasizes the eternal dimension of his life in the three cities in which his quest for wholeness unfolds. When he writes the Confessions , Augustine is keenly aware of the fact that his journeys from one city to another not only occur in space and time, but also point to vertical transitions within his soul that lead him toward God. In this chapter, the vertical axis of Augustine’s development comes to focus on the opposition between Manichaeism and Christianity; and the author of the text retraces the steps through which he moves from one way of living toward the other. His flight from Carthage to Rome is motivated by the young philosopher’s loss of confidence in the Manichaean picture of nature and its fanciful descriptions of the history and the structure of the cosmos. Somewhat later, a transition from Rome to Milan becomes the occasion for him 116 The Journey toward God in Augustine’s Confessions to repudiate dualism, to embrace Academic Skepticism, and to reexamine his rejection of the Catholic faith. The interpersonal dimension of Augustine’s life becomes increasingly important as he moves from one city to another, mobilizing the communal aspect of his experience and the interplay between the outer and the inner worlds between which he is suspended. Three dominant personalities have a decisive impact on him: Faustus, a celebrated Manichaean teacher; Monica, the mother who pursues him relentlessly from one stage of his life to another; and Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan who makes the Christian faith accessible to him. As Augustine moves from Faustus to Ambrose against the background of the constant influence of his mother, he makes progress in his journey toward God that expresses itself in the temporal and spatial aspects of his life. Two expressions of the temporal and spatial dimensions of Augustine’s experience point to the resting place in God that he longs to enter: first, he suffers from temporal, spatial, and eternal hysteria as he begins to move toward pivotal experiences that will transform his life; second, he discovers the crucial role of friendship in helping him carry the almost unbearable burden of the fear of dying that haunts him at almost every stage of his journey. Augustine could not live without his friends, and he gives a moving account of how he loves them as he tries to cope with an attack of anxiety that almost overwhelms him. The interplay between fragmentation and friendship is a theme that binds the reflective and the personal dimensions of Augustine’s life together; and though turmoil disorders his feelings and disturbs his intellect, the friends with whom he surrounds himself sustain him as he begins to catch a glimpse of the end of his journey. THE PRESENCE AND ABSENCE OF GOD (5.1.1–5.2.2) Augustine begins this stage of his narrative by asking God to accept the sacrifice of his confessions from the hand of his tongue and to heal his bones so he will be able to praise him (5.1.1). Both these requests are important: the first reminds us that speaking and hearing remain at the center of the Confessions , and both the first and the second suggest that the deliverance Augustine seeks involves not only his soul, but his body as well. In asking God to accept the sacrifice of his tongue, and in claiming that his bones cry out for redemption, Augustine uses figurative discourse to bind the...