Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child

Introduction

I n t r o d u c t i o n xi In an astonishing passage about nativity and infancy located near the beginning of his Confessions, Augustine meditates on his origins in the impersonal and immemorial event of birth. He begins to confess, in other words, where no autobiography is possible, and may be taken to confess to the fault of not being able to produce one in the first place. Reflecting on his derivation from something so foreign and forgotten as being born introduces a sort of quietus at the center of his mortal being. “For all I want to tell you, Lord, is that I do not know where I came from when I was born into this life which leads to death—or should I say, this death which leads to life [vitam mortalem an mortem vitalem]? This much is hidden from me.”1 Others inform him about his infancy, and he gleans more by observing the typical interactions of parents and children. But as Augustine repeatedly declares, he cannot recall himself (“non enim ego memini”).2 It is a startling admission in a work that will go on to hymn the power of memory, the faculty of the soul which recollects “my mind” that is “my self,”3 and is the guarantor of personal identity. Nothing less than the ontology of the human is at stake in failing to articulate this original issue. Human gestation and maturation are passing stages that are as fundamental as they are fatal to self-sufficiency, and dwelling on them is liable to surprise anyone who assumes life is continuous, autonomous, and inalienable. What impresses Augustine is how being eventuates from such a derelict state of becoming . How does anyone survive the leap from insentient beginnings? “My infancy is long since dead, yet I am still alive.” The implicit reference to xii INTRODUCTION morphogenetic and metabolic process is figured rhetorically, as perhaps it always must be, by means of antimetabole: vitam mortalem, mortem vitalem. Augustine’s interest in the paradoxes of propagation leads him to wonder further about when and how he came to be, and he pursues the issue to the point that his having been anything at all is put radically in question. Personal identity recedes from view: Answer my prayer and tell me whether my infancy followed upon some other stage of life that died before it. Was it the stage of life that I spent in my mother’s womb? For I have learned a little about that too, and I have myself seen women who were pregnant. But what came before that, O God my Delight? Was I anywhere? Was I anybody? Augustine confronts a mystery that is also the mundane reality this book sets out to explore: a barely animate and emergent creatureliness that is nonetheless necessary for human flourishing. There is no originary subject here, since the individual starts out as an anonymous array of events among a constellation of others. There is no independent being, as identity is precariously suspended in time and space. For Augustine, as for many others since, the dilemma is that persons must really come to an end—to begin—somewhere. Augustine’s awareness of the problem of what amounts to a kind of vanishing origin is as acute and agonizing as it is generative, for he comes to see in the prehistory of himself a death more final (because an event more primordial and inexpressible) than any future passing that results in everlasting life. In reverse, that is, the human is not eternal. Becoming is therefore a logical and logistical issue with far-reaching metaphysical consequences: “Can it be that any man has skill to fabricate himself?”4 In his initial inquiry, he has hit upon a unique creaturely dependency and derivativeness, for it is just the case that coming alive is not like crafting other things. One must be factored out of the process of assembly. However much nativity and infancy ground existence, they are in excess of human presence. Yet there would be no future were it not for so many primordial, intestinal involvements and intimacies that are not personal experiences but that are essential material configurations of persons nevertheless. We can eventually come to see how many other things, inanimate objects and INTRODUCTION xiii not just organisms, emerge from milieux that are not appropriate to them either. The germinal phases of...