Augustine's Confessions

ACTA CLASSICA XLIX (2006) 145-166 ISSN OO65-1141 AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS: THE SOCIAL AND LITERARY CONTEXT Annemaré Kotzé University of Stellenbosch ABSTRACT Augustine’s Confessions is to my mind one of the most misunderstood works from antiquity, perhaps chiefly because it seems to invite the present-day reader to identify with the author and his concerns, while, in the process, modern-day concerns are illegitimately superimposed onto the ancient work. The quest of my current research is to improve the level of comprehension for the Confessions through an examination of the world where it originated. This article takes a look at how certain aspects of the context of Late Antiquity in general and three texts from the third and the fourth centuries AD in particular should inform our reading of Augustine’s Confessions. Introduction It has not always been taken for granted that the Confessions has literary antecedents (I say more about this below): that the works I discuss here influenced Augustine’s writing was demonstrated already in the previous century by scholars like Georg Misch in his Geschichte der Autobiographie (first published early in the 20th century) and Pierre Courcelle in his Les “Confessions” de s. Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (1963). These scholars, however, focused only on how the autobiographical strategies in the antecedent works influenced the narrative of Augustine’s life story in the Confessions. And, although many readers – and in the previous century even scholars of the Confessions – sometimes seem to ignore this, the Confessions does not consist only of Augustine’s life story.1 It concludes with one book which is commonly 1 The tendency to disregard the last three or four books of the Confessions is manifested at its extreme in publications like the translation of the Confessions by Blaiklock (1983), announced on the front page simply as ‘a fresh translation with an introduction’ which consists only of a translation of the first ten books. The only explanation deemed necessary for the publication of this abridged version is provided in the introduction: ‘Book Ten seemed to provide a natural conclusion satisfying a modern reader … The mystical ponderings of the last three books are, for all that, quite detachable, and it is even a little difficult to probe the writer’s 145 labelled an excursion on memory, but still autobiographical in character (book 10), and three so-called exegetical books, on the creation story in Genesis 1 (books 11-13). One of the reasons for the lack of attention to other similarities between the Confessions and the antecedents acknowledged to have influenced it is that there is to this day no consensus about the unity and aims of the former.2 Neither do I profess to have the final answer. I am, however, convinced that we should allow our reading of this work to be influenced more significantly by a study of the world where it originated than has been the case up to now. In order to appraise the arguments presented in this article the reader has to keep in mind two of the issues that overshadowed scholarship on the Confessions in the previous century. First, scholars experienced great difficulty with the cohesion between, on the one hand, books 1-10, the autobiographical books, and, on the other, books 11-13, the so-called exegetical books3 – the infamous ‘problem of the unity of the Confessions’. It was postulated that the work was unfinished,4 that book 10 was interpolated at a later stage,5 and some of the great Augustinian scholars coined the phrase ‘Augustine compose mal’,6 which was quoted uncritically for decades. Today there is consensus that the work is a well-constructed literary whole, but the anomaly is that there is still no agreement as to what the genre or purpose of this whole is.7 purpose in placing them thus’ (9-10). See Williger 1929:81 or Steur 1936:17 for a discussion of more instances of abridged editions or translations. 2 For a discussion of this issue see Kotzé 2004:13-18. 3 See, for example, above n. 1. For discussions of the cohesion between the two sections of the Confessions, see, for example, Knauer 1957: especially 244-46, Tavard 1988, Miles 1992: especially 126, Bochet 1993, O’Connell 1996 and Holzhausen 2000. 4 A scholar as eminent as Courcelle held the view that the Confessions was incomplete: e.g. ‘le livre XIII ne devait pas dépasser le récit de la Création, et l’ouvrage allait être publié tel quel, dépourvu de conclusion d’ensemble’ (1968:25). 5 In the 1961 Penguin edition Pine-Coffin still takes this interpolation (as well as the uncertainty about the purpose of the last three books of the work) for granted: ‘Though it is generally agreed that Book X was a later interpolation, inserted to satisfy readers who were naturally curious to know how the faith had changed Saint Augustine’s life, there is less agreement about the purpose of Books XI-XIII’ (15). Also Courcelle is partial to this theory (1968:25). 6 Marrou 1958:61 et passim is probably the most prominent among these. See also Courcelle’s remarks on this (1968:20 n. 5). 7 The remarks by Grotz 1970 and Holzhausen 30 years later provide an interesting perspective on this issue: ‘Es gibt zwar sehr viele Gelehrte, die der Meinung sind, daß den Confessiones von Anfang an eine einheitliche Konzeption zugrunde liege, 146 Secondly, there is the heated debate on the ‘problem of the historicity’ of the Confessions that started in the 1880’s and raged far into the previous century. For many readers of the Confessions – the scholars were of course also often Catholic priests – Augustine was a hallowed saint and the idea that his conversion story could be a highly conventional presentation of a general type was totally unthinkable. The view that the work was sui generis suited their image of Augustine and his aims in the Confessions much better. My reading of the Confessions (Kotzé 2004) emphasizes that the work has a protreptic purpose8 as one of its main communicative aims and that it targets to an important extent its potential Manichaean audience. This consti- tutes a considerable deviation from traditional readings of the work that see Augustine’s fellow Catholics, especially those on the same spiritual level as himself, as the main intended audience and Manichaean concerns in the work as of only secondary importance. This view is summed up in Brown’s formulation (2000:153):9 The Confessions was a book for the servi Dei … it is a classic document of the tastes of a group of highly sophisticated men, the spiritales … It told such men just what they wanted to know about – the course of a notable conversion … It even contained moving appeals to the men who might join this new elite: to the austere Manichee and the pagan Platonist. It is mainly the prominence and strategic placement of sections with very strong Manichaean echoes in the Confessions, but also other characteristics of the text, that make this position in my view untenable. I have become convinced that the intended audience of the work is in the first instance the potential Manichaean reader together with the pagan Platonist and the ‘less spiritual’ or less advanced Catholic congregation member (who was probably exposed on a daily basis to the pressure of Manichaean proselytizing) and only to a lesser extent the spiritales. Hans van Oort has published an article nur aber, worin diese zu sehen ist, d.h., was das einigende Band zwischen Lebensgeschichte und Genesisexegese bildet, in dieser Frage ist man sich keineswegs einig’ (Grotz 1970:15); and ‘In den letzten Jahren scheint die Forschung bei der Behandlung der Frage nach Einheit und Aufbau der Confessiones zu stagnieren, wenn nicht gar zu resignieren. Ein Konsens ist zwar darin erreicht, daβ die 13 Bücher des Werkes eine Einheit darstellen, aber nicht, worin diese besteht’ (Holzhausen 2000: 215. 8 The argument for reading the Confessions as a protreptic was, as far as I can ascertain, first advanced by Feldmann 1994 and then followed up by Mayer 1998. 9 Brown’s 1967 formulation is repeated unchanged in the 2000 edition. 147 (1997) on Manichaean echoes in the very opening lines and in the first three books of the Confessions and his inaugural lecture at the University of Nijme- gen (2002: esp. 23-37) deals, amongst other things, with the way in which the whole of book 10 is structured to correspond to Manichaean categories of thought. I have shown that reading the Confessions with an eye on the basic tenets of Manichaeism and in close comparison to some of their documents, reveals a very important Manichaean subtext throughout the work, especially, and significantly, in the opening lines (2004:207-13), the middle section of the work (2001), the last section (2004:233-47, 2005) and the closing words (2004:245-47). This view of the intended audience(s) of the Confessions, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the view that the text is one that aims to change the life of its readers, a protreptic text. A more encompassing description of the communicative aims of the text would refer also to its didactic and apologe- tic intentions,10 and its pursuance of polemical goals in its treatment of Mani- chaean and neo-Platonic terms and categories, but it is primarily protreptic and eminently suited to win over especially Manichaean readers,11 and parae- netic, i.e. it aims to encourage and bolster those inside the Catholic church against other claims in a world where philosophical and religious rivalry is the order of the day.12 Thus, I am in agreement with Van Oort (2002:9) that readings that do not sufficiently take into account the Manichaean subtext throughout the Confessions can no longer be called responsible readings: Het is in het licht van de vele ontdekkingen op het gebied van die manichaica dat wij in staat (en zelfs verplicht) zijn Augustinus met nieuwe ogen te lezen … Merkwaardig is dan, dat er nog altijd Augustinus-specialisten zijn die menen die veruit belangrijkste kerkvader van het Westen … ook zonder kennis van die gnostiek [i.e.

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