Twelve Theses on How to Read Augustine's Confessions
By Way of Halifax and Jena/Berlin
In what follows, I attempt to synthesize and develop a reading of this text which is associated with the Dalhousie Classics department. Despite key differences between them, it can be found set forth in the works of Robert Crouse, James Doull, and Wayne Hankey.1
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).
Therefore, the standpoint from which it is intelligible is one which can account for the whole and the relation of the parts to the whole. Although this whole emerges at the end, its implicit presence throughout should be presumed.
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.
This is thus NOT an autobiography, the story of contingent happenings in the life of one individual, albeit an exemplary one.
It is a generalized spiritual itinerary, or as Fr. Robert Crouse puts it, an itinerarium mentis in deum. It describes the “in-Godding” (Charles Williams, in another context) of soul as such, and every episode has been selected with an eye towards universality.
The fundamental principles of such itineraries are a) that levels of knowing and being correspond, and b) that there is an interpenetration and ultimate identity of the inward (psychic), upward (theological), and outward (social) mediations.
The sequence of stages in this universal journey of soul unfold with a kind of dialectical necessity, in which each stage culminates in a crisis which prepares for and is enfolded in the next.
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.
The most important philosophical context for this metaphysics is the strain of Neoplatonism mediated to Augustine through Porphyry and Marius Victorinus, in which there is an equalization of the hypostases and a tendency to replace Plotinus’ God beyond Beyond with God as Being.
The levels of mediation and unity tend to take the form of a series of trinities (starting with number, measure, weight etc.) which anticipate the increasingly adequate psychological analogies of de Trinitate.
In the context of the intelligible creation of reading of Genesis in the late books, there is a mutual nesting within each other of the conversions of soul/the cosmos as a whole.
More profoundly, this cosmic/psychic conversion turns out to be a moment in God’s explicitly Trinitarian self-conversion. This standpoint accomplishes a reversal of perspective—correlated with the Incarnation—in which the Goal turns out to include the Way, and the way up is the way down. It was this, most fundamentally, which the Platonists lacked.
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).