Learning to Read: Narrative and Temporality in the Confessions
“Anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study Chapters 14–28 of the Confessiones thoroughly. For in this matter our modern age, so proud of its knowledge, has failed to surpass or even to match the splendid achievement of this great thinker who grappled so earnestly with the problem of time.”[4]
-Edmund Husserl
In August of 430 CE, Augustine of Hippo came down with fever and it was clear that the end was near.[1] Possidius in his Vita Sancti Augustini paints a portrait of the Bishop on his deathbed:
This is what he did in his own last illness: for he had ordered the four psalms of David that deal with penance to be copied out. From his sick-bed he could see these sheets of paper every day, hanging on his walls, and would read them, crying constantly and deeply. And, lest his attention be distracted from this in any way, almost ten days before his death, he asked us that none should come in to see him, except at those hours when the doctors would come to examine him or his meals were brought. This was duly observed: and so he had all that stretch of time to pray…[2]
Augustine spent his life speaking and writing and teaching. His output and his impact were immense, and he knew it. He had recently worked through the whole of his whole oeuvre, writing a commentary on each work and noting errors in a project that bore the title Retractationes — not so much “retractions” as “reviews” or maybe “revisions.” This epic undertaking (in a letter: “I had no idea how many [books] there were and I find that they amount to 232”[3]) took a course oddly similar to the Confessions he wrote some 30 years earlier: he read himself chronologically, evaluating his thinking from the perspective of a wisdom only many years of study and reflection can attain. Augustine was thinking of how he would be seen and judged by a posterity who would never hear him preach, for he knew that, in a strange kind of transubstantiation, he would become his texts.
While certainly poetic, this way of passing from the material world should not be understood simply as a demonstration or performance of piety. Even if it is an invention of Possidius, it is entirely coherent with the person and the philosophy we find in the Confessions. For all three aspects of this death — reading, silence, and solitude — were deeply meaningful to Augustine, and deeply connected. Reading for Augustine was a kind of orthopraxy, a means for the divinely rational yet time-bound human soul to approach the eternity of the divine.
***
Augustine’s theory of reading is a corollary to his theory of time. “What then is time?” he asks in Book XI of the Confessions. “Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” (230).[5] Just as he must solve the problem of evil (addressed in On Free Choice of the will, among other texts), so must he account for the human experience of time as a meaningful sequence of events, when all of time exists at once in God. The problem of time is also the problem of language, for language, like history, is syntactic, making meaning by putting letters and syllables and words in order. And like language, narrative — the way events are ordered by an author and read by a reader — belongs equally to the realm of the human, finite and fallen. Following Paul in Second Corinthians, Augustine shows that reading is intimately related to belief; reading the right way leads to believing the right way. But even more, Augustine suggests that the act of silent reading is as close as a human can get to an experience of time that resembles God’s. As a literary project (at least in the narrative of the first nine books), Augustine tries not only to write his former life like an Old Testament, with early scenes prefiguring later ones, but also, in the juxtaposition of the writing self and the written-about self, to craft a narrative, each moment of which bridges past and present in such a way as to be independent and simulate God’s “one Today” (8). The Confessions shows Augustine learning to read like a good Christian, and in a way the book teaches us to do the same.
If Augustine was anything, he was a man of letters, and in the Confessions he depicts his progress from the worldly life of the rhetorician to the pious life of the Christian as a series of encounters with texts. As a student in Carthage, he was captivated by the theater — captivated by representation. “I wanted only to hear stories and imaginary legends of sufferings which, as it were, scratched me on the surface” (3.2.4). More important than the veracity of the events on stage was their effect, which Augustine describes as physical and superficial in nature. Similarly, his study of rhetoric was also a means to a superficial end: to “delight in human vanity” (3.4.7). He wanted to be something of an actor himself, moving and persuading in order to win adulation from his audience, and his education in the classical tradition put great emphasis on delivery and argumentation. Around this time, however, Augustine read Cicero’s Hortensius, deviating not only from his rhetorical curriculum but also from his way of reading, for he “did not read…for a sharpening of [his] style” but rather for the book’s content. “The book changed my feelings…It gave me different values and priorities,” namely kindling in him a love for philosophy (3.4.8). Encouraged by Cicero’s exhortation to seek wisdom in all quarters, Augustine sampled the Gospels. But the humble aesthetic of the text, so different from Cicero, repelled him.
Although Augustine was compelled to engage with Christianity, his elevation of form over content led him to associate with the Manichees, “men proud of their sick talk” (3.6.10). Faustus, a Manichee bishop, impressed Augustine with “his soft eloquence” (5.3.3); he was “gracious and pleasant with words. “He said the things [the Manichees] usually say, but put it much more agreeably” (5.6.10). But eloquence alone did not satisfy Augustine’s “thirst” since he was “already satiated with this kind of talk, which did not seem better to me because more elegantly expressed” (5.6.10). The rhetorician was not satisfied by rhetoric alone, and although he found Faustus a pleasant conversationalist, his spiritual wandering continued.
It was in Milan that Augustine finally reconciled his rhetorician’s insistence on elegance with his inclination toward Christianity. Ambrose, whose very named identifies him with the divine, demonstrated through his biblical interpretation as well as his own spiritual practice that what was necessary was a change in reading. When Augustine, although still a teacher of rhetoric, was drifting ever closer to the church, he heard Ambrose say in one of his sermons, “as if he were most carefully enunciating a principle of exegesis: ‘The letter kills, the spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3:6)” (94). Ambrose interprets Paul’s theological statement on the relation of the “inner” law of the New Testament with the “written” law of the Old Testament as instruction for reading. In consequence, “those texts which, taken literally, seemed to contain perverse teaching he would expound spiritually, removing the mystical veil” (94). Augustine learns from Ambrose to disregard his academic insistence on rational coherence and his aesthetic preference for the refined literature of the classical world, and instead to see “absurdity” as evidence of “mysteries” (96). The contrast between the right way of reading (exegetically, typologically) and the wrong way of reading (literally) is analogous to the “two ways” Christ describes in the Sermon on the Mount: the Bible “welcomes all people to its generous embrace,” but the virtuous readers are brought to God “through narrow openings” (96), just as Christ says that “the road that leads to destruction is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13–14).[6] If God chooses to make himself known to man through sacred texts, reading the right way is the key to knowing God and therefore the key to salvation. Enlightenment came when Augustine disengaged himself from thinking as a rhetorician and yielded to the logic and the spirit of scripture — a retreat from the human way of thinking which is analogous to his retreat from human society in the garden scene of Book VIII.
Ambrose models not only Pauline interpretation, but also, in his silence, a way of reading which is in itself a metaphysical practice. Although deeply engaged in the world, when not attending to his duties as a religious leader he “restored either his body with necessary food or his mind by reading” (92–93). Despite being a rhetorician as skillful as Augustine (who, in his less faithful days, listened to his sermons for their rhetorical ingenuity), Ambrose read in silence and in solitude; “his heart perceived the sense [cor intellectum rimabatur], but his voice and tongue were silent” (92). Silent reading was not only strikingly unusual, [7] but also, for an onlooker, strikingly alienating: Ambrose gives no outward signs of his purpose, utterly alone with his thoughts and with the text. And indeed, Augustine’s chief interactions with Ambrose occur from a remove, as an observer and a listener, emphasizing the importance of the independence, or maybe even the self-sufficiency, of the faithful.
Ambrose’s silent reading is a foreshadowing of Augustine’s own conversion scene in Book VIII, the book’s only other instance of silent, solitary reading, as well as the Confessions’s most powerful example of the recuperative and ultimately transformative power of interpretation. Trying to escape from a mental fever caused by the misalignment of his will with his desire to convert, he goes into his garden, accompanied by ever-faithful Alypius. From a neighboring house he overhears a child’s voice shouting tolle lege! tolle lege! but at first does not know what to make of it. Like a puzzling passage in scripture, he racks his brain for some literal interpretation of what he hears, wondering if it might come from a children’s game. But because this literal ‘reading’ is fruitless, he “interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find” (153). He remembered the story of St. Antony (perhaps related by Ponticianus) who connected a seemingly unrelated passage in the Gospel of Matthew to his own life, and so he did the same, aligning himself with a series of conversion narratives. He found his copy of Paul’s Epistles, “seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’ (Rom. 13:13–14)” (153). Reading silently with his heart rather than aloud with his rhetorician’s tongue, Augustine suddenly finds the power to depart from a life of the senses. The internal nature of this moment is emphasized when Alypius asks what he read, and then again when Alypius tells Augustine what followed it. Each man reads and is converted independently and in silence, free from the influence of an audience or an interlocutor.
These two episodes of silent reading are not only examples of withdrawal from the context of human life and turning toward God and his scripture; they are also moments of humans getting as close as possible to a divine perspective on their existence as finite creatures. Turning to the text is turning to God, ascending toward the unchanging Word, and reading at random is an alignment of the human will with God’s will, a step away from fallen willfulness and towards “reflecting the glory of the Lord.” It is also the defiance of the human, narrative way of reading, which relies on one sentence leading to another in logical succession; and indeed, Augustine, ignoring context, “neither wished nor needed to read further.” Finally, in refraining from reading aloud the passage from Romans, Augustine does not bring the word of God into the human realm of temporally-bound speech, which, like a narrative, takes time to be spoken and is therefore understood in time.
For God, everything is the present, including the human past and future (“your years are one Today” [8]) and Augustine states in the first few lines of the book that the human understanding of sequence, of how one thing is followed by another, is inconsistent with God’s super-temporal status. Augustine works on this problem more explicitly in Book XI, where he suggests that the best way to think about time is as aspect rather than tense, where “a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come” replaces our intuitive conception of past, present, and future as discrete (235). He draws an analogy between a human life and a psalm: although there is something that “occurs in the psalm as a whole,” a single idea or intention, we recite syllables and words and sentences; similarly, although our lives form but one moment in the eyes of God, we experience a sequence of moments and ‘todays.’ Even if there is some idea behind the psalm, language takes time, making it a narrative in the same way that our finite minds make our lives into narratives. Time even makes human experience a kind of bondage, so that “a person singing or listening to a song he knows well suffers a distension or stretching in feeling and in sense-perception from the expectation of future sounds and the memory of past sound” (245). But God is “unchangeably eternal,” and so not affected by the fallen distinction between beginning, middle, and end. God’s word is eternal, and that means that it is silent. When He spoke, “it is clear and evident that the utterance came through the movement of some created thing, serving your eternal will but itself temporal” (225). The created word, the willful word, the time-bound word — these are all the spoken word.
The roots of Augustine’s insistence on the relationship between reading and belief seem to lie in both biblical and Neoplatonic sources. On the one hand is Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians: Just as the “the reading of the Old Testament” is veiled to Jews, so, Paul writes, are “their hearts are covered with a veil” (2 Cor 3:14–18). Once Christians read in the right way, their “unveiled faces” will be “like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord.” “Reflecting the glory” means not only praising God and thereby amplifying his glory — the express purpose of the Confessions (“man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you” [3]) — but also, in this context, reflecting divine will in man’s actions and experience. That is to say, proper interpretation not only leads to orthodoxy, but also to orthopraxy. Silent reading therefore seems to be a way for fallen man to transcend the human knowledge of language and approach God’s. Alone in his study, isolated from the world, Ambrose’s “heart [cor] perceived the sense” (92). Guided by what he interpreted as God’s command, Augustine read in silence and “it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart [infusa cordi meo]” (153). This image of the heart as the proper seat of the understanding, and as the means through which right reading takes place, echoes Paul: the” hearts [of the Jews] are covered with a veil [κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τὴν καρδίαν αὐτῶν κεῖται], and this veil will not be taken away till they turn to the Lord” (2 Cor 13:15).
Neoplatonic sources allow Paul’s theory of reading to be translated into metaphysical terms. As Brian Stock describes in Augustine the Reader,[8] Augustine, like Plotinus and Porphyry, espoused a metaphysical ‘ladder’ of levels of being, with God at the top. Besides omniscience and omnipotence, God is defined as unchangeable and the stationary, while the human soul, lower on the ladder, strives to ascend. In this system, upward movement towards God, the summa essentia, is conversion (conversio) or return (reversio), while movement downwards toward the temporal world is deterioration (corruptio).[9] In Book VII, Augustine writes that “step by step I ascended from bodies to the soul which perceives through the body….From there again I ascended to the power of reasoning…This power, which in myself I found to be mutable, raised itself to the level of its own intelligence, and led my thinking out of the ruts of habit” (7.17.23). This gradual ascent to the proper love of God — one which echoes the erotic education outlined by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium — led Augustine right to the brink of conversion, yet he “did not possess the strength to keep my vision fixed.” He understood what he was working towards, but “to enjoy you I was too weak” (7.20.26). Reading the Gospels, namely Paul (7.21.27), was finally what allowed him to bridge the gap from understanding to truly believing. In retrospect,
“I believe that you wanted me to encounter [the Platonist books] before I came to study your scriptures. Your intention was that the manner in which I was affected by them should be imprinted in my memory, so that when later I had been made docile by your books and my wounds were healed by your gentle fingers, I would learn to discern and distinguish the difference between presumption and confession, between those who see that the goal is but not how to get there and those who see the way which leads to the home of bliss, not merely as an end to be perceived but as a realm to live in” (7.20.26)
When Augustine hears tolle lege, he picks up the Bible and, again, reads Paul. But now we see that “pick up and read!” is an exhortation not only to turn toward God by reading his word, but also to turn away from the time-bound practices of reading in sequence and reading aloud, both of which anchor the reader in the human realm.
Nonetheless, the Confessions remains a narrative. Yet it is one which strives toward the status of scripture. Though Augustine does tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, he almost always writes with the end in sight. Even as we read about Augustine’s infancy, we are grounded in the present as the writing Augustine analyzes from a position of knowledge. He makes clear that he is recollecting — “’What shall I render to the Lord?’ (Ps. 115:2) who recalls things to my memory” (32) — and interpreting, making sense of the “absurdities” of a life which, like those of the Old Testament, were not always consistent with the life of the Augustine who writes. The reader also notices that the book is dense with parallels and prefiguring: Augustine’s childhood fever, which almost resulted in baptism, prefigures the mental fever which leads to his conversion; his discovery of Cicero’s Hortensius and turn toward philosophy is a foreshadowing of his discovery of scripture and his turn toward Christianity, and so on, so that the present can be found in the past and vice versa.
Book VIII exemplifies this aspect of Augustine’s literary art with its dense chain of conversions. A chain of conversion stories is told: Simplicianus tells the story of Victorinus, a translator of Platonic works, who read ‘all the Christrian books’ and felt a longing to be converted; Ponticianus, seeing the Epistles of Paul, tells the story of Antony, who hears part of the Gospel of Matthew read aloud in a church and is converted; Augustine, thinking of Antony, reads Romans and is converted; Alypius reads the next verse and is converted. These stories are virtually identical to one another in all significant respects: each tells the story of a man who encounters Scripture by chance and independently undergoes a conversion. And, one suspects, Augustine hoped that after the reader hears his story, his conversion narrative, she too might pick up the Gospels. In some sense, though, she already has, for the very language of the Confessions filters each moment through a Christian lens. Constant citation of the scriptures, particularly the lyrical, deeply personal Psalms, compresses the distance between Augustine’s sinful past and his knowing present; as Erich Auerbach observed, Augustine’s prose, loaded with paratactic constructions, has much more in common with the style of the Old Latin bible than with Cicero.[10]
Like Ambrose to Augustine, the book not only teaches, it also shows. In the Retractiones, Augustine writes relatively little about the work for which he is now best known:
The thirteen books of my Confessions praise the just and good God for my evil and good acts, and lift up the understanding and affection of men to Him. At least, as far as I am concerned, they had this effect on me while I was writing them and they continue to have it when I am reading them. What others think about them is a matter for them to decide. Yet, I know that they have given and continue to give pleasure to many of my brethren.[11]
Both in the silent reading it describes and in the literary form Augustine employs, the Confessions attempts to solve the problem of temporality both in human experience and in narrative.
[1] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 436.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Augustine, Letter 224 in Letters: Volume III, trad. Sister Wilifred Parsons (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press: 1953), 118.
[4] Edmund Husserl, The Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from the Year 1905, tr. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 3.
[5] Citations refer to Chadwick’s translation. The Latin text consulted was the Loeb edition.
[6] Citations refer to the New Jerusalem Bible. The Greek text consulted was the Alford edition of 1873.
[7] Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 23, no. 2 (Apr.-Jun. 1962), 190. Mazzeo quotes a medieval scribe, Richard of Schöntal, who described the difficulty of learning to read without speaking: “Oftentimes when I am reading straight from the book and in thought only…they [devils] make me read aloud word by word, that they may deprive me so much the more of the inward understanding thereof, and that I may the less penetrate into the interior force of the reading, the more I pour myself out in exterior speech.”
[8] Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10.
[9] Loc. cit.
[10] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 66–74.
[11] Augustine, Retractions, tr. Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1999), 130.
