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3. A Moving Viewpoint: Augustine’s Meditative Philosophy in the Confessions
- The Catholic University of America Press
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C H A P T E R 3 A M O V I N G V I E W P O I N T Augustine’s Meditative Philosophy in the Confessions T H E P R E V I O U S C H A P T E R explored the deep coherence of Augustine’s Confessions, its unity of texture and structure. This unity lies beyond the ken of Augustine the narrator, for he never remarks on it. According to the premise of the work’s self-presentation, its unity emerges through the dynamism of the narrator’s dialogue with God, according to God’s plan for the work as a whole. Because I view this premise critically, I attribute this plan to Augustine the author. Distinguishing between the narrator and the author allows us to appreciate both the explicit dynamism of the Confessions’s unfolding and its implicit plan, its deep coherence. It also enables us to understand that the work contains understandings beyond what Augustine the narrator asserts. In other words, Augustine the author designed the work to lead readers to insights beyond those achieved explicitly by his narrator. If we think there is only “one Augustine” in the Confessions, we will identify him with the narrator and thereby fall short of the further understandings designed by Augustine the author. In this chapter I want to explore some of these further understandings so as to describe the character of Augustine’s meditative philosophy in the Confessions. By “philosophy” I mean theology as well, all the concerns treated in Books 10–13, even the allegory on the Church. By “meditative,” I refer primarily to understandings implied by Augustine the author. By definition, these cannot be discovered by reading the narrator’s statements but only by meditating 109 upon relations between them. In one sense, of course, the Confessions ’s meditative character is explicit in its meditative texture: Augustine the narrator wonders, poses questions, hazards answers, searches for the truth, mulls things over, and so on. Because scholars have often commented on this aspect of the work, I say little about it. Characteristically, they attribute it to the historical Augustine as they search the work for his positions or doctrines. In other words, they recognize the work’s meditative style, but they assume that its philosophical substance is doctrinal. In my view, however, Augustine the author designed the Confessions to lead his readers into a meditative, rather than merely a doctrinal , philosophy. The narrator’s doctrinal positions remain important , but they do not constitute Augustine the author’s whole philosophy in the work. Because he designed the work as a Christian-Platonist ascent, it has a moving viewpoint that qualifies the truth character of its doctrinal positions. As stages in an ascent, they remain true on their own levels, true as far as they go. But, as I argued in Chapter 1, none of them is final. Each proves less a position than a station along the way. The only final position in the Confessions is the Church as God’s purpose for creation, and the Church, in this sense, is not “a true position” but a container for all truths. In other words, while Augustine the narrator’s philosophizing in the Confessions has an explicitly meditative style, Augustine the author’s philosophy has an implicit and meditative substance. The rest of this chapter attempts to sketch the character of that meditative substance . The chapter has four sections. The first returns to the Confessions ’s meditative texture in order to treat its moving viewpoint in the small. This is the most obvious aspect of its meditative character, and it is best to begin with what is already understood. The following sections explore the work’s moving viewpoint in the large. The second section turns on the relations between Books 2 and 8, perversion of the will through sin and conversion of the will through 110 A Moving Viewpoint [18.232.188.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:49 GMT) grace. As we saw in the previous chapter, these two books are linked with one another in the chiastic structure of thematic parallels in Books 1–9. This dialectical link, clearly designed by Augustine the author, invites our meditation on what these parallels imply. After sketching out some of the parallels between Books 2 and 8, in the second section I pursue the theme of “friendship.” Book 2 prefigures its fulfillment in Book 8, and Augustine the author thereby...