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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Reading Augustine “after Heidegger” in a two-fold sense, in Part I we considered the ek-static or transcendent character of the self in Augustine’s Confessions. There we argued that it is a structural characteristic of the self to seek its own happiness, but that search can take different directions, either finding its joy in the world instead of God (C 10.23.34), or the “authentic happy life” which finds its happiness in the fruitio Dei (10.22.32). Here in Part II we turn to an analysis of these different directions of the self: first, to the inauthentic, fallen self who enjoys the world (§§ 4-5), and then the authentic self who constitutes the world differently (§§ 6-7).
1 Cp. also De vera religione 1.20.38‐39: 'The sin is evil. not the substance that is sinfully loved. […I Vice arises in the soul from its own doing.” (We follow the edition of De vera religione in CCSL XXXII, ed. K.‐D. Daur (Turnholt: Brepols. 1962), and will generally employ the translation of J.H.S. Burleigh in Augustine: Earlier Writings [though here modified]. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as VR.
2 Heidegger takes this to be not an Augustinian or Christian framework, but rather something appropriated from Plotinus and the Neoplatonic tradition—indeed, an appropriation which is incongruous with the originary Christian elements of Augustine's thought and thus subject to Destruktion, a Neoplatonic layer to be stripped away in order to retrieve Augustine's analysis of the factical Christian “struggle” and “trial”(tentatio) of being‐in‐the‐world. What Heidegger misses is that the uti/frui distinction is the condition for understanding life as tentatio, the temptation of ‘enjoying’ the world. Without this distinction, life would not be a struggle. We will return to a closer critique of Heidegger on this point below.
3 De doctrina christiana, 1.2.2. We follow the edition of CCSL XXXII, ed. Joseph Martin (Turnholt: Brepols, 1962) and will employ the translation Teaching Christianity, trans. Hill, Edmund O.P., The Works of Saint Augustine. I/II (New York New City Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as DC.
4 Book I takes up an exposition of things, and Books II‐III provide an analysis of signs. All of this falls within the larger project of instructor pastors on how to teach their congregations (that is, it is a book on method not “doctrine,” as older English translations suggested). The fiat three books are concerned with the “way of discovery” or biblical interpretation, while the fourth book takes up the “way of putting things across,” viz. preaching or 'rhetoric.
5 For a discussion of the relationship between signum, sacramentum, and mysterium in Augustine, see Dodaro, Robert OSA, “Sucrumentum Christi: Augustine on the Christology of Pelagius,”Studia Patristica XXVII, ed. Livingstone, Elizabeth A. (Leuven: Peeters, 1993). pp. 274‐280Google Scholar.
6 We are creatively appropriating here, not without parallel, Jean‐Luc Marion's distinction between the “idol” and the “icon” in his L'idole er le distance and God Without Being.
7 De Trinitate 9.13, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., The Works of Saint Augustine I/5 (New York New City Press, 1991).
8 This in an almost “Foucauklian” sense, as suggested by Brian Stock in Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self‐Knowledge. and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 14Google Scholar and passim.
9 The problem here is the adoption of categories which are not suitable or appropriate for the “phenomena” which they are attempting to describe (Ga 277, 280‐281). What is required, then, are new categories or concepts—formal indications.
10 Heidegger observes that already by the time of Augustine and “patristic ‘philosophy’”, which attempted to develop Christian doctrine in the context of Greek philosophy, Platonism had become deeply installed in Christian thought. Thus, “one cannot simply strip away the Platonism in Augustine; and it is a misunderstanding to believe that authentic Christianity [eigentlich Christliche] can be reached through Augustine” (Ga 60 281).
11 Augustine sees here a “battle of words”: “We are involved in heaven knows what kind of bade of words, since on the one hand what cannot be said is inexpressible, and on the other what can even be called inexpressible is thereby shown to be not inexpressible. This battle of words should be avoided by keeping silent, rather than resolved by the use of speech. And yet. while nothing really worthy of God can be said about him, he has accepted the homage of human voices. and has wished us to rejoice in praising him with our words” (DC 1.6.6). See my “Between Predication and Silence: Augustine on How (Not) to Speak of God” for further discussion of this theme.
12 Cp. here the old and analogous question of Aquinas as an “Aristotelian”, which, as Gilson was at pains to point out, he was mf. For a helpful analysis, see Jordan, Mark D., The Alleged Arisrotelianism of Thomas Aquinas, EGS 15 (Toronto: PIMS, 1992)Google Scholar.
13 On this point, see Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 49.
14 Elsewhere I have argued that Heidegger in fact “ontologizes” the Fall such that the structure of temptation is constitutive of human being. See my The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, IL: Inter varsity Press, 2000), pp. 87–113Google Scholar.
15 What the young Heidegger would refer to as the Vollzugsinn. the enactment‐sense, the fulfilment of a meaning in action.
16 To return is to be “gathered together,” a restoration of the self by continence (C 2.10.18; 10.19.40; 10.37.60). We will return to a more detailed discussion of this below in 5 6.
17 In contrast, during Augustine's exile away from God, though Cod appeared to be silent (2.2.2; 2.3.7). he in fact spoke through Monica, his mother (and picture of the Church). Thus Augustine is constantly ‘haunted’ by this voice—God/Monica—working in his ‘*conscience’ (2.3.7). calling him back from dissipation in the world, to a life of regathering, continence. One might hear structural echoes here of the call of conscience in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (§§54–60).
18 Augustine's systematic account of these narrative temptations is unfolded in Book X, which analyzes the ways in which the self is tempted by the world. The fallen self is absorbed by things and the world, rather than pointed to enjoyment in God by creation. As a result, “I plunged into those lovely created things which you had made” (C 10.27.38). The result is a “burden” and “trial” for the self “without respite”(10.28.39). Onus mihi sum, Augustine concludes: “I am a burden to myself”. Indeed, “is not human life on earth a trial in which there is no respite?” (10.28.39). Pulled apart by the temptation of worldly distractions and lust (cupiditate), the self is “disintegrated into multiplicity” and dispersed in the world, losing its identity. According to Augustine (following 1 John 2:15‐16). there are three fundamental forms of temptation: the lust of the flesh (concupiscentia carnis), the lust of the eyes (concupiscentia oculorum) or curiositas, and worldly ambition (ambitio saeculi, following the Vulgate). Due to limitations in space, and our desire to offer a productive reading which does not simply repeat Heidegger, we will not undertake further analysis of this here. For Heidegger's analysis. see GA 60, §§13–15.
19 On Augustine's account of public games and “spectacles” as inauthentic, see also C 3.2.2.
20 We see glimpses of an authentic, intersubjective community in a ‘commune proposal’ that Augustine and his compatriots had considered (6.14.24). However, this possibility was destroyed by another distracting relationship: to their wives: “On this [the wives' opposition]. the entire project which we had so well planned collapsed in our hands: it was broken up and abandoned” (6.14.24).
21 Cp. Being and Tune, P 27, where Heidegger also points to the “publicness” of the “they” as that which “levels” the self to a public, everyday (inauthentic?) self which is “dispersed” and must therefore find itself.
22 Unlike, for instance, St. Paul, Augustine's conversion is not constituted by a single, cataclysmic event, but rather involves a process: a conversion to the search Wisdom through reading Cicero's Hortensius (Bk 11); a conversion to Neoplatonism through the “platonic books” (Bk VII), and finally the “climax,” according to his account, in the garden in Milan, through the reading of Paul (which he had also begun earlier) which effect his conversion to Christian faith.
23 In 7.9.13. Augustine recounts his reading of these Neoplatonist texts, noting both what he found there, but also what was missing, signalling their insufficiencies. We might suggest that Neoplatonism would still be a mode of theotogia gloriae; what was missing was a theologia crucis—the story of embodiment, suffering, humiliation and death. “That these books do not have.” On the Incarnation, see 7.18.24ff. (Cf. Heidegger's critique of Augustine discussed above.) For a related discussion, see Caputo, John D., 'Toward a Postmodern Theology of the Cross: Augustine, Heidegger, Derrida,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Westphal, Merold (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 202–225Google Scholar.
24 For an analysis of the pivotal role of texts in all of the conversions in the Confessions, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self‐Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University press. 1996). ch. 3. “Reading and Conversion”.
25 In regione dissimilitudinis, trans. by Boulding as the “region of unlikeness.” Should we perhaps here in this an echo and antithesis of the imago Dei as being in the ‘likeness’ of God.
26 This is one site where Augustine's proto‐existentialism is in tension with his Platonism, particularly in his dealing with the question of evil by means of a theory of privation (7.11.17‐7.12.18) and a greater good defence (7.13.19). Because of his Christian commitments, he is also committed to the goodness of creation, but at the same time must provide an account of the inferiority of creation (otherwise creation would be God). Unfortunately (but perhaps inevitably) he attempts to solve this problem on a Platonic register of 'non‐being'; that is, creation is a ‘mixture’ of being and non‐being or privation. However, this solution in the end denies the commitment to the goodness of creation: if evil is privation, then creation, insofar as it is not God, always already lacks something. (Here we would prefer the way in which Aquinas side‐steps the Platonic notion of a ‘lack’ of creation, which haunts Augustine's account. For Aquinas, it is not because created things lack something that they are inferior; rather, it is simply because their being (esse) is something given to them. They are not self‐subsistent; in other words, there is a distinction between their essence (essentia) and their existence or act of existing (esse). Only in God do these coincide. See Aquinas, Deente et essentia.)
27 Is this not also the difference between the Augustinian self and Dasein? For Augustine, resolution is not enough; or rather, resolution is not possible without the assistance of grace. While “continence” and “resoluteness” play analogous roles within the two accounts, there is also a fundamental disanalogy.
28 It has been established that Augustine was guilty of an over‐reading of Pelagius on the basis of some of the excesses of his disciples. We would further suggest that the Port‐Royal tradition (including Pascal) also over‐read Augustine. (As John Burnaby suggested many years ago, “The system which generally goes by the name of Augustinianism is in great part a cruel travesty of Augustine's deepest and most vital thought.” See Burnaby, , Amor Dei [London, 1938], p. 231Google Scholar.) The result is a misleading notion of radical difference. For a discussion, see Bonner, Gerald, Augustine and Modern Research on Pelagianism (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1972)Google Scholar
29 The relations between these friends is one of “leaping ahead” rather than “leaping in” (see Being and Erne, pp. 122‐123/114‐115.
30 “Occasions” in the sense of the human teacher in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments.
31 For Augustine, such “habit” is a kind of self‐chosen bondage, a “necessity” which is the result of a distorted will enslaved by passion, which produces habit (8.5.10). Thus, he can speak of habit without resistance as a “necessity”, yet also concede that “I was responsible for the fact that habit had become so embattled against me; for it was with my consent that I came to the place in which I did not wish to be” (8.5.11). What is required is precisely a “new will” (8.5.10; 8.8.19).
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