Augustine Paper: Intro paragraph with footnotes

This paper explores Augustine’s hermeneutical approach to Genesis 1 in Confessions. It takes the more developed hermeneutic theory of On Christian Doctrine and seeks out parallel content (however seminal) in books XII and XIII of Confessions. Though the theoretical books of On Christian Doctrine (1-3 dated at 397) emerge at about the same time as Confessions (397-401), there is a measurable distance between the two hermeneutics.[1] Augustine tends toward inclusivism in Confessions. His method and theory intentionally license multiple ways of thinking and interpreting.[2] On Christian Doctrine¸ on the other hand, seeks to restrict which interpretations are permissible with the use of rules. Ultimately, this breaks down to the methodological difference between an autobiography and a philosophical treatise. Confessions is just that, a confession. In the first nine books, Augustine confesses his moral culpability: his lust, gluttony, pride, etc. In the latter four books, however, Augustine confesses his intellectual fallibility.[3] His licensing of and openness toward assorted interpretations in Confessions demonstrate his commitment to intellectual humility through contrition.

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[1] “Non solum sibi ssed aliis etiam”: Neoplatonism and Rhetoric in Saint Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, Martin Camargo, Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the history of Rhetoric, Vol. 16. No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 393-408

[2] For an example found earlier in Confessions one can turn to Augustine’s account of well ordered passions. Augustine combines Platonic, Stoic, and Peripatetic traditions in his account of weeping (among other passions), where weeping is permissible given certain provisos and sin given others. He borrows the Platonic conception of justice (or well-orderdness), and combines it to the putative Stoic doctrine of pathaiei, all the while operating from within Aristotelian virtue ethics. For more, see Sarah Byers, “Augustine and the Cognitive Cause of Stoic ‘Preliminary Passions (Propatheiai), (Journal of the History of Philosophy 2003).

[3] Book X focuses on a theory of memory, book XI on a theory of time, and books XII and XIII on a theory of interpretation. Another way of looking at the difference from books 1-9 to 10-13 is between the sins of Augustine’s past and the sins with which he struggles while writing Confessions, i.e. past and present sins (see Margaret Miles, Desire and Delight, (New York: Crossroads, 1991), 101).

I Missed the Train and Started Talking

It’s uncommonly quiet sitting in 30^th Street Station after 10:00, eerie not hearing the gallop of shoes in the foyer. I lost my train ticket, missing the 9:19 to Thorndale, and I find myself looking at the tracks, lost like Odysseus in that abstract idea we call journey, trying to pass the time till the next train. Who was I, what haunted me, what hopes did I have? There is a difference between the shrink-wrapped narrative I tell people and the story I tell myself of myself. We are all hidden creatures I guess, each harboring greater or lesser degrees of what we take ourselves to be. Tonight I find myself wanting to tell my story as i see it.

A year ago this time I worked two jobs 65 hours a week as a pizza delivery driver and grounds crewman. The year previous I worked at a factory tossing bread into a trash can. The three years prior to that I was in undergrad, studying, making friends, losing friends, going through that all too common early twenties identity crisis. Sometimes I wish I could tell that boy breaking up with his first love some five years ago that it was only the beginning. That as he closed the closet door to cry and curl up on the floor, to slither down uninterrupted by the gawking eyes of his roommates, he was closing the door on naivety.

During my first class at UPenn listening to Peter Struck lecture on the phenomenological character of 20^th century myth-theory, I realized that I was a long way from cutting deep-dish pizzas into just 6 slices instead of the normal 8. I realized the distance between me now and the factory, the watching of the same motion of one’s right hand gripping bread-dough off an assembly line hundreds of times a day. It’s impossible to describe the drop in emotion waking up at 4:30 every morning to a pinpointed soreness in the shoulder muscle, a soreness which both reminds you of yesterdays woes and predicts todays. I was even further away from that fumbling undergraduate, kicked around from one emotion or belief to the next like a hacky-sack. And I was ages away from that boy who had traveled the world, who had experienced more by the time he was 18 than perhaps most people ever will.

Because if it is not true of me then it is not true of anyone. I have seen “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” And I do not merely mean the sublimity of an Namibian sunrise, perched atop Monkey Mountain (a name perfectly descriptive of the animal population) like a bird at dawn singing a song with my eyes. I do not mean the air of the Swiss Alps, how for some reason it’s so crisp you feel like you’re molesting it just by breathing it in. I do not mean the skip of the heart and trip of the legs turning the corner to see the Dome (pronounced dwomo) for the first time. I do not mean the serenity of sipping white wine with my sister atop a hotel, Athens below our feet and the Parthenon lit up brighter than a star against the silver night. I do not mean the alien beauty of the Blue Mosque or Hagia Sophia, so transcendent to all I’d known. I do not mean the lights of Hong Kong city, their worldliness and their splendor. I do not merely mean Venice Square, or the Botticelli room, or the Grunewald, or the Uffizi, or Ephesus, or Patmos, or the Aegean, or the smile of Namibian children, or laughing with Nidipo, or prayer under the Southern Cross, or the thrill of smuggling, or, or, or…

I also mean the love of my mother, how she nurtured and coddled and pushed and prayed for me in ways specific to my own needs. How she still does. I mean the love of my father, how he taught me the quality of a good man through both words and actions, his work ethic, his wisdom, his unyielding courage. I mean how my parents love each other, holding nothing but God in higher regard. I mean a sister and a brother with whom I can trust any secret. I mean the charisma and value of my closest friends through the years. I mean the love I have known on this earth. I challenge any of you to find someone who can equal me in graces given, the talents, the wealth, the health, the love.

But I am a man of extremes. I have loved and lost. I have held dying children in my arms. I have seen the gaunt expression of teenagers unsure of whether they have HIV. I have sympathized with depression not as an outsider but an insider. I have seen drooping cheeks, mouth agape in labored breaths staring in my mirror. I have suffered bouts of insomnia. I have had chronic hives, gained weight, smoked, drank, and ate the pain away. I have felt loneliness, bent over, heaving, taking another hot shower that doesn’t make the silence any more bearable. I have been so angry that I have blacked out. I have spent months on end waking up in terror, not knowing why or if it would ever stop, wondering how the first thought of my day can be the discovery that I am horrified. I know what it is to look at beauty and hate it because it gives me hope, every smile a heralder and harbinger of heartache. I have both wished for death and feared it. It’s a violent juxtaposition owning the strength of youth while feeling the defeat of age. I have died many times, have clenched my teeth and pumped my fists toward the sky more than I have bent my knee in repentance and gratitude.

I have had what theorists call religious experience, where 4 hours seemed like 10 minutes, and I was so overwhelmed with God or Good or whatever you want to call it that I could scarcely withstand it. I have been in such states of angst that (and there is no other way of explaining it) the colors of the world grew richer, darker, thicker. I have been so in love that I would have gone to hell for someone. I. Have. Felt.

I may be rightly accused of not expressing myself, but I may never be accused of having nothing to express. There is a reason I have the poet’s instinct, the incessant need to revalorize every experience. Mine are myriad, variegated, and stifling. Being overtly self-aware, I have an especially acute sensitivity to suffering, and potent memory of my joys. My silence is not an indication of lack of something, it is the opposite. A taciturn poet is a man drowning in meanings, not the other way around. There is too much, not too little. Silence has been my answer, sometimes for better sometimes not. Part of the time I believe that the effusions of youth are self-centered—perhaps I am exercising that demon right now. Part of the time I am afraid to feel; I put my trust in the comfort and stability of meaninglessness. Part of the time I don’t feel because I’d rather listen or help. Some of it is sin, some habit, some a little of both, some of it is good.

There is a sense in which a person can be actively loving by actively seeking to be loved. Egoism of intent turns out to be altruism by the nature of things. Saying you want someone to hear you, love you, listen to you, is to say that they are valuable enough to risk letting them in on the story you tell yourself of yourself, even to help you define what you mean by ‘you’. And I think I can get away with this post as something more than simply therapeutic—more than some effusious rambling— because I don’t often ask others to hear my story as I see it (however jumbled and non-linear it may appear here). It is an invitation of a sort, an apology for my silence over the years, even a treatise of regret. But whatever else it is (and it is many things), it is certainly mine, my story, my way of seeing myself.

10 Lines from 10 Authors

The love of poetry is rare these days. It’s a lonely hobby, I’m afraid. Few are those who read it; fewer still are those who can read it properly, with enjoyment. I am willing to publicly disgrace myself (probably because it is 3 o’clock in the morning) by admitting that I have a mound of poetry books piled on my bathroom sink. Added together, you’d find a leaning tower of poetry stacked 3 feet high --no exaggeration--within arms length of the toilet. It has been like this for years, giving me plenty of time to rummage through thousands of poems. What follows are some nifty lines from poems I particularly enjoyed—though you will not find my favorite poems in this list. They come in no order and completely off the top of my head. As such the indentations, grammar, and all such details will be desperately off. My apologies. I wish only to convey those things I’ve enjoyed, without having to put in the effort normally demanded during daytime hours. I simply needed something interesting enough to keep me from being bored and boring enough to put me to sleep.

10. “Even now, I know that I have savored the hot taste of life/, Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast,/Just for a small and forgotten time/ I have had full in my eyes from off my girl/, The whitest pouring of eternal light,/ The heavy knife, as to a gala day.” – from the final stanza of Black Marigolds translated by E.P. Mathers

9. “lady I swear by all flowers” –e. e. cummings

8. “is it so Wind, is it so? All that you and I do know is that we saw fly and fix ‘mongst the flowers and reeds of Styx, yesterday, for a bed of tiger cubs, a great fly of Beelzebubs, the bee of hearts, which mortals name: Cupid, Fie, and Love for shame.”—From Song of the Stygian Naiads by Thomas (Lovelace?...Love something) Beddoes

7. “May she be granted beauty and yet not/ Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,/ Or hers before a looking glass, for such,/ Being made beautiful overmuch,/ Consider beauty a sufficient end,/ Lose natural kindness and maybe/The heart revealing intimacy/ That chooses right, and never find a friend.”—From A Prayer For My Daughter by the ineffable William Butler Yeats

6. “or do the Modern dance. To you that’s destiny, to us it’s chance”—from The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning by W.H. Auden

5. “so Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay” from Nothing Gold can stay by Robert Frost

4. “his effable, effin ineffable, singular inscrutable name”—from The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot

3. “for art is a form of catharsis, and love is a permanent flop, and work is the province of cattle, and rests for a clam in a shell, so I’m thinking of throwing the battle—would you kindly direct me to hell”—from Coda by Dorothy Parker

2. “And happy melodist, unwearied, Forever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! More happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting and forever young, All breathing human passion far above.” --From Ode on a Grecian Urn by the grandiloquent John Keats

1. “life is over there on the shelf”—by Emily Dickenson

4 Character Sketches without Characters or Sketches

This is what happens when you read too much Faulkner. You want the feeling that comes from the grit of the soliloquy without the work it takes to write a story.......blarg..........or...........blog?

1. “Do not tell a man who comes to you in need of aid that he must simply depend on grace, and think for one moment you have supplied him with countermeasures. You have not offered him advice; you have scarcely uttered a word. Grace only means we do not know the exact cause of our fortune. To tell a man he must depend on grace is to tell him he must affirm the consequent, or have Jesus Christ create a stone so heavy that all the powers incarnate cannot lift it. What you have done, what you have smuggled into this man’s mind is the idea that if he fixates on a turn of phrase concerning grace, it will grant him the power to abandon his fixation with cutting or pornography. You have taught him magic where machines are necessary for his deliverance. You have sent him sailing with Ulysses toward a home he does not have, saying words he does not mean, with an identity he cannot locate. You have, in effect, successfully diagnosed him the angel Lucifer only to immediately thereafter prescribe him the Devil.”

2. “Dreams and sophistication. Dreams and the color of the length of your favorite food. I remember once I dreamt about relations with my cousin; how I would quote ‘I have committed incest father’ where I spoke to no Father and it didn’t count as incest with my cousin. And I remember Freud how he would say that I had killed him. And then I thought how Jesus had usurped his Daddy, and we call Him Abba reverently, as in a contradiction, and the two together the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit tagging along sitting next to me and somewhere inside me during Sunday School.”

3. You will say my religion is a fantasy—the construct of a society in need of therapeutic measures to ensure its survival. And I will say, ‘so what if it is’? True weakness, your weakness, is the failure to dive into the illusion. It is only in the illusion that suffering is real. It is only in the illusion that happiness is real. Reduce me to a chemical, and I will forget the smell of both corpse and rose. And I will forget that I have forgotten the smell corpse and rose. When you expect the grace of the gods only to find yourself disappointed and yet still manage to slither back into hope like Satan into Eden then and only then may you give me a lesson on the meaning of strength. Acquiescence to the mundane is not strength. It is not even weakness. Weakness is a failure to reach the prize and acquiescence has no prize.

4. “You don’t mean ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know never means I don’t know. It means I do not want to say or I think modesty is more advantageous or I am not going to put the effort into thinking about it because if I do I might find out something I don’t want to. “Seek and you will find.” You know the answer. You just don’t give a damn where it’s more important to give a damn because you have no love of others in your heart because you have no love internally. It’s the insides and inner inconsistency of a man that no filter can hide. The eyes always tell, or the mouth contradicting the eyes; our cheek muscles betray us when our words juggle. I may not catch it at the time or care, but I always remember later about that moment I felt something funny when you said it. And what am I doing when I feel funny all the time, and don’t say something right then to stop you? Why don’t I demand clarification there and then? Does it mean I don’t know; or does it mean that I know and don’t want to say or modesty is more advantageous or I am not going to put the effort into thinking about it because if I do I might find out something I don’t want to”?

On God and Grammar

Wayne Proudfoot (not to be confused with the Proudfeet hobbits in Tolkien’s Shire) makes the argument in Religious Experience that grammar constitutes our conception of God, specifically his attribute of ineffability. It is not uncommon among religious traditions to find the attribute of ineffability ascribed to deities or moral thingamabobs like, for example, the Tao. Anselm’s “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought” and Aquinas’ esse in his account of Divine Simplicity fall into this category. God used in this sense acts as what Proudfoot calls a ‘place-holder,’ since the very ineffability of “God-ness” fails to function as a pure referent.

Aquinas is particularly clear that we cannot actually talk about the essence of God. Our language is insufficient. At best we can only do one of two things: 1.) identify negative differentia and 2.) employ positive differentia, that is, analogous properties of what God might be like. Negative differentia are things which God is not. He is not a stone, a train, a story, a concept, an abstraction, etc. On the other hand, He is like some things. He is something like “Love,” something like our “Father,” something like “the Good.” Aquinas fears that to reduce God to anthropomorphic terms is to remove our sense of His otherness. (If my Aquinas is rusty, forgive me; it’s been 3 or so years.)

In other words, God as a symbol is not a referent to an actual object. There is no correspondence. Weird, right? Some religious theorists have taken issue with this characterization, saying that it is a form of intellectual laziness or simply bad logic. To refer to an object which cannot be referred to is nothing short of nonsense.

Proudfoot, however, makes an interesting play, positioning himself somewhere between Aquinas and these other religious theorist. In a sort of quasi-Wittgensteinian move, God in use has a function distinguishable from a referent and acquitted from being nonsensical. God’s very ineffability functions to produce a sense of otherness in His believers. How? Ineffability has a ritual and belief function determined by grammar. The grammatical backdrop inherent to theological paradigms provides the belief in God’s ineffability, and that ineffability functions as a catalyst for a belief in His mystery. In order to maintain a sense of the mysterious, theologians have included ineffability within their definition of God. Thus Aquinas says exactly what he means, and his characterization of God is not nonsensical.

Whether Proudfoot is right is beyond me. Much needs to be said about Proudfoot’s sneaky psychological evaluation of our theologian’s motives. Likewise, much needs to be said about whether grammar can produce the meaning of ineffability independent of religious experience, or whether, as another option, a priori categories of God might be determined by Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Really, the question is whether the ineffability of God can be reduced to linguistic categories in the way Nietzsche construes the “leaf is the cause of leaf” problem. When does language constitute and create categories and when does it not? What I can say is that his approach is symptomatic of all things philosophy of language in the past century. Or to put it differently, his approach is nifty and I kinda like it.