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AUGUSTINE and the PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION Jeffrey Olsen Biebighauser, MA. Thesis Submitted to the University of Nottingham F

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AUGUSTINE and the PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION Jeffrey Olsen Biebighauser, MA. Thesis Submitted to the University of Nottingham F AUGUSTINE AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION Jeffrey Olsen Biebighauser, MA. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 1 Abstract This essay traces the reception of Augustine in the 20th and 21st century phenomenological tradition. It gives special attention to recent monographs on Augustine by Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien, but contextualises these both fore (by examining the earlier work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as earlier and less determinative Augustinian engagements by Marion and Chrétien) and aft (by critically considering the philosophical, philological and theological implications of phenomenology for the study of Augustine). The cross-fertilization of its study of Augustine himself and its study of the various phenomenological appropriations of Augustine sheds new light on the Augustinian questions of Platonism, ontology, and the role of Scripture in philosophy. 2 I wish to express appreciation to the following people and institutions: For emotional, intellectual and financial support: Dorothy Metzger, Paul and Jo Biebighauser, Donna and John Olsen. For guiding the project's development fundamentally: Prof John Milbank, Dr Karen Kilby, Dr Conor Cunningham. For collegial encouragement and friendship: Eric Austin Lee, Aaron Riches, Anthony Paul Smith, Stuart Jesson, Joseph Vnuk, OP, Michael O’Neill Burns, Tommy Lynch, Daniel Haynes, Andrea Russell. For generous comments: Prof. Scott Huelin, Donna Olsen, Caleb Crainer, Dr Simon Oliver, Prof Lewis Ayres. For hosting my work: The Libraries of the University of St Thomas, which were so hospitable to the work that they are not even aware that I had no official business using their computers and reading their books. For the caffeination and hospitality without which the project truly never would have survived: Lee Rosy's, The Malt Cross, Jam Cafe, The Angry Catfish, Fireroast Mountain Coffee, Coffee Bene, Caribou Coffee 1265, Peace Coffee. And to my patient wife, Meghan. 3 List of Contents I. Introduction (page 5) II. Husserl and Heidegger on Augustine (page 17) III. Marion and Augustine (page 73) IV. Chrétien and Augustine (page 148) V. On Genesis (page 234) Bibliography (page 297) 4 I. Introduction “Mentitur qui te totam legisse factetur,” Isidore of Seville famously says to an imagined Augustine: The one who confesses that he has read all of you, lies.1 The difficulty of approaching Augustine is first a function of the sheer amount of words he wrote and said, and secondly a matter of the swath of genres in which he wrote and said them, and thirdly a matter of the variance of styles, intellectual positions, and temperaments which he adopted. Even if, in a mundane thought experiment, we can imagine a reader having brushed her eyes across all of these words, it is difficult to imagine her being able to make systematic sense of them all. We always approach Augustine in some sort of medias res, and our understanding of him is always provisional. We could translate Isidore more loosely: The best reader of Augustine is the one who does not deceive himself into thinking that he is reading Augustine entirely, or reading entirely Augustine. Perhaps the Reformation would have taken a much different shape if all of his 16th century adherents would acknowledge this fact. Perhaps we could make a similar case for the current ecumenical scene. But disputes on Augustinian turf are not limited to theological and ecclesial crises. If, in listing Augustine’s explicit and self-conscious descendents, theological figures come to mind first, they are nonetheless followed by similarly explicit and self-consciously Augustinian philosophers: 1 Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum (Migne PL 83.1109). 5 Descartes, Malebranche, Wittgenstein… Any number of theological and philosophical figures can function as an introduction to Augustine, and more than an introduction, a lens. The present essay takes it as axiomatic that no reader approaches Augustine without such a lens, without a guide, without some sort of prioritization of intellectual concerns, without a canon of supposed greater and lesser works, without presuppositions of which questions are worth asking, which answers are worth entertaining, and in many cases which genres are worth ignoring altogether. This thesis intends to introduce the phenomenological tradition as a lens onto the Augustinian terrain which has been emerging from continental Europe for the past century, and which has been especially prominent and coherent in the past decade. In it I will give a sense of the contours of this tradition: its intentions, its contexts, the textual ground on which it plays, its methodologies, and its limitations. I will make the case that the phenomenological readers of Augustine have all used Augustine for rhetorical ends, and more decisively for philosophical ends. I will draw attention to this interesting phenomenon in some of the earliest texts of the tradition, from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and I will sustain this sort of attention into a more extended reading of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean- Louis Chrétien. With regard to these latter thinkers, I will argue that their accounts of Augustine are bound at once to a theoretical fidelity to Augustine’s own thought – that is, they attempt to unpack what Augustine himself tries to communicate, independently of their own theological and 6 philosophical agenda – and to some extent to a theoretical fidelity to their phenomenological forebears. It will be the burden of much of this thesis to describe the specific fissures that this dual loyalty causes for their work, and to evaluate the success of their attempts to navigate such fissures. In making this assessment, I want to make my own loyalty clear: it lies with Augustine, and not with phenomenology. I will suggest throughout this work that there is significant overlap between the two, and I will make a case for why this is so. This work has already, in large part, been done for me by Marion and Chrétien themselves – Marion in particular takes many pains to elaborate a “proto-phenomenology” present in Augustine, and I find his account to point satisfactorily to several passages in Augustine which agree with, and even anticipate, certain phenomenological theses and methods. But ultimately, there are points of departure from Augustine in the dogmatic foundational texts of phenomenology – indeed, how could there not be, given the millennium-and-a-half of philosophical developments and departures between them? – and I intend to call the reader’s attention to places where I have found phenomenological shibboleths intruding on Augustinian shibboleths. Even more frequently, I will argue that while a particular conclusion of Marion or Chrétien is correct, it only captures a part of the picture, and by ignoring other related conceptual or textual material, they risk oversimplifying Augustine. The principle examples of this pattern are Augustine’s metaphysics, and Augustine’s relationship to the Neo- Platonic tradition. Since Marion in particular fights hard against the rather uncontroversial nature of the latter, and the very existence of the former, I 7 am relatively forceful in my critiques of his expositions of Augustine with regard to both. I have not done so with malice, but with the sincere belief that Marion wants to learn from Augustine, and that he closes himself off from such an education due to a surprisingly over-developed sense of loyalty to dogmatic phenomenology. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for my response to Chrétien’s monograph on Augustine – although Chrétien has himself outlined similar critical comments in his other works. This is a work on Augustine, and on his philosophical reception in the 20th century and beyond. One easy way of beginning – actually a surprisingly popular one – would be to point to etymology, and say that for Augustine, philosophy is the love of wisdom, and then discuss what Augustine says about love or about wisdom. Typically this is an excuse to talk a lot, sometimes without much rigor, and it tends to wind up being dismissive of, or wringing our hands about, what goes on in philosophy departments these days, lamenting that current institutional philosophy is not just a code for sophiology, or that philosophers do not talk enough about love. Although love will certainly become a theme for this work, because it is a theme for Augustine’s phenomenological interlocutors, I hope in my discussion of their work to avoid this hand-wringing. But even the wringing of hands is not entirely bereft of salutary motivation: it is not unrelated to one of the facets of Augustine that has been most attractive to moderns, namely that he wrote at least one of his major works in the first person, and therefore cast his philosophy into a very personal realm. The Confessions will 8 often mention, even on the same page, both the attractions and shortcomings of a particular philosophical school and Augustine’s struggles with toothache. There is a real sense that Augustine makes philosophy a practice, practiced by actual people, and that the ‘love of wisdom’ as a deeply personal quest, comparable to the love of another person for example, is more accessible or more exciting than the systematic acquisition, appreciation or rejection of various philosophical doctrines. One of the most characteristic and winsome trajectories of the phenomenological tradition which will emerge in the present essay is the real attempt to capture this “lived” nature of Augustine’s philosophy. But the phenomenologists – especially Heidegger – overcompensate for a real or perceived overemphasis on Augustine’s historical and intellectual context. This personal dimension is not easily separable from the more historical dimension, that which deals with these doctrines or schools. Augustine’s biographer Possidius is among the first to suggest the approach that the phenomenologists have, in recent days, taken.
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