The Metaphysical Structure of Augustine's Confessions
A Chart
In my last post, I laid twelve principles which guide my reading of the Confessions, which is influenced by a school of interpretation emerging from the Dalhousie Classics Department.
Among other things, I suggested that
The fundamental unity and systematic coherence of the Confessions (like any classic text) must be a presupposition of any serious exegesis, until the reverse is demonstrated conceptually (rather than through bare appeal to biographical or historical detail)…
Concretely, the “autobiographical” books (1-9) are not self-standing, and their unity with the “psychological” (10) and “exegetical” books (11-13) must be shown by any adequate reading…
The itinerary is at the same time the working out of a metaphysics of a) increasingly adequate mediation, or b) progressively determinate unity inclusive of ever more complete self-othering. Confessions is metaphysical always and everywhere and this forms the core of its deepest intelligibility.
I mere stipulated all this, in the form of theses. In order for it to be persuasive, the unity of the work as a whole must be shown, not merely posited; only the actual execution determines whether the so-called “exegetical” books are integral to the meaning of the work and whether Hegelian-sounding language like mediation and self-othering has a real purchase on the text.
Therefore, I have included in the chart below a threefold metaphysical outline of the book, drawn from the interpretative work of Robert Crouse, James Doull, and Wayne Hankey.1 It was from their readings of the Confessions that I drew the theses in the previous post.
I apologize for the small font size, but I thought it helpful to set the three frames side by side.
Robert Crouse, "Recurrens in te unum: The Pattern of St. Augustine's Confessions", in E. A. Livingstone, ed., Studia Patristica, vol. XIV, (Berlin, 1976), pp. 389-92. James Doull, “Augustinian Trinitarianism and Existential Theology,” Dionysius 3 (1979). Wayne J. Hankey, “Recurrens in te unum: Neoplatonic Form and Content in Augustine’s Confessions,” Augustine and Philosophy, ed. Phillip Cary, John Doody, and Kim Paffernroth, Augustine in Conversation: Tradition and Innovation (Lanham/ Boulder/ New York/ Toronto/ Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 127–44. Wayne J. Hankey, “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos,” Dionysius 35 (2017).