The Theology of Augustine’s Confessions

Book Preface

Augustine’s Confessions is my “magic book,” a friend of mine remarked many years ago. I have been immersed in Augustine’s Confessions for more than forty years. My interest in human time and the use of the confessional medium to regain time go back to 1969 and my reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and a complementary interest in Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness. On the opening page of his influential lectures, Husserl says that Book 11 of the Confessions is the only serious reflection on the topic. I turned aside and read Augustine and have been reading him ever since. At the time I did not intend to study Augustine, but what in the long run held my interest was not only his ability to raise in an original way questions of contemporary interest but the reverse – the surplus latent in his strangeness.

In the intervening years, I have written a master’s thesis and a doctoral thesis on the Confessions. I recall that at that time, on my way to the library, the theologian Bernard Lonergan announced to me in his apodictic and stentorian voice: “Remember, all a doctoral student must prove is that he can read one text.” I have been trying to read that one text ever since. My 1987 book Original Sin in Augustine’s Confessions1 is the culmination of this earlier work, and its finding on dualism and original sin still finds an important place in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the present work. Indeed, the present book can be read as a companion to and continuation of the earlier work. Note especially section 2 of chapter 1 of the 1987 book on “The Role of Theology in the Confessions.”

An important advance over the earlier work has been the philosophical scaffolding and site, even a witness stand, provided by Paul Ricoeur for reinterpreting, interrogating, and cross-examining Augustine’s “strange” testimony. My first attempt to deconstruct and recuperate Augustine’s witness – “Paul Ricoeur, Freudianism, and Augustine’s Confessions,”2 – took advantage of the many Freudian analyses of the Confessions to offer a non-reductionist reading – see Chapter 2 of the present book. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, I published an encyclopedia entry and two articles3 – see some sections of Chapters 4–9 of the present book. They are the result of my struggle to understand what I regard as the foundational theology of the Confessions – the incarnation, original sin, electing grace, and predestination – using Ricoeur’s theory of narrative universals.

Contents
Preface page ix
Abbreviations, Primary Sources and Translations xiii
Introduction 1
1 Confessio 6
2 Fatherhood: From Neurotic Phantasm to Compassionate Symbol 34
3 Narcissism and Narrative’s Vital Lie 56
4 Evil, Suffering, and Dualistic Wisdom 71
5 Original Sin: An Ineluctable Triple Hatred 94
6 Original Sin and the Human Tragic 115
7 “The Platitudes of Ethical Monotheism” 130
8 Inscrutable Wisdom 147
9 The Lyrical Voice 177
10 The Life of a Bishop: Reinventing Plato’s Celestial Clock,
Confessions 11–13 200
11 Resurrection and the Restless Heart 213
Notes 239
Bibliography of Works Cited 309
Index 321