Part I
VOICES OF
INFLUENCE THE UNQUIET HEART
St. Augustineâs Influence on Walker Percy
H. Collin Messer
In an unpublished essay written sometime in the late 1950s, Walker Percy staked out his unsparing assessment of contemporary American life using a distinctly European frame of reference:
Something is dreadfully wrong with the world of the emotionally mature, integrated man. What it is becomes clear in the writings of Heidegger and Marcel. The modern world, not merely the slums of Paris but the pleasant American suburb, is implicated in a special sort of tragedy. This tragedy is not the catastrophic wars of the 20th centuryâthough God knows these are tragic enough. These particular events are only symptoms of the tragedy; indeed they might even be said to be desperate attempts to escape it. The tragedy has rather to do with the fundamental banality, the loss of meaning, of modern lifeâwhat Heidegger calls the âevery-day-nessâ and the homelessness of life in the modern world, a world which Marcel refers to as a broken world. (âWhich Way Existentialismâ 7)
In its banality and despair, Percy argues, modern life is no life. In fact, it is here that Percy first uses that evocative phrase âdeath in lifeâ that so powerfully captures the malaise, the noxious particles, the ennui that beset his characters and at times Percy himself. In its pervasive sense of restlessness, as well as its profound skepticism regarding life in the City of Man, this fragment reflects just the earliest instance of a clear Augustinian frame of mind that has yet to be elucidated in Percyâs work. I contend that Percyâs embrace of Augustinian anthropology and phenomenology, as well as his emulation of St. Augustineâs confessional mode, illuminate some of Percyâs most important philosophical ideas and literary aims, and offer a robust foundation for his Christian existentialism.
Certainly, one fruitful approach to reading Percy over the years has been to link him with the existentialists. He invites such a connection in The Moviegoer via his choice of a memorable Kierkegaardian epigraph from The Sickness unto Death: â. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.â The existentialistsâ insistence on a certain phenomenologyâthat of an individual human being indwelling a particular predicamentâis foundational to the novel. Moreover, existential alienation viscerally pervades Binx Bollingâs narrative, not least in his wry observations about the apparent absurdity, sadness, and death-dealing diversions of the world, including his own âLittle Wayâ in Gentilly, the suburban New Orleans neighborhood where he lives.
Despite Percyâs clear existentialist commitments, however, only passing attention has been paid to his debt to St. Augustine, the fourth-century philosopher and theologian to whom much of modern existentialism is somewhat remarkably beholden. Augustineâs writings, particularly Confessions (401), cast a long shadow over Percyâs thought, and Iâm increasingly certain that this influence goes beyond Augustineâs already formidable impact on the Western literary tradition generally. Notably, Jay Tolson discovered in Percyâs unpublished works a sketch or short story entitled âConfessions of a Movie-goer (from the Diary of the Last Romantic),â but this allusionâwhile significant in its own rightâmerely hints at deeper influence and even kinship (109, 262). A number of Percy readers whom I appreciate and admire have mentioned Augustine as an important Percy forebear. However, in even the best scholarship, Percyâs debt to Augustine is often merely assumed or alluded to in the course of other excursions. Lewis Lawson, Marion Montgomery, and John Desmond, while their appreciation for Augustineâs relevance and stature is abundantly clear, generally have other fish to fry in the course of following Percy.
Nevertheless, in many essays and interviews over the years, Percy often invited comparison with St. Augustine. The bishop is frequently mentioned among the writers whom Percy remembers reading as a catechumen in the early 1940s. In a 1962 interview with the Charlotte Observer, Percy forthrightly acknowledges an Augustinian line of thoughtâeven a literary line of descentâleading back to Augustine: âThe following writers have meant most to me and in this order: Dostoievski, Kierkegaard, St. Augustine, Lawrence, Joyce, Gerard Hopkins, Marcelâ (Interview, Doar 5). In âPhysician as Novelist,â one of Percyâs last essays, he describes this debt more in terms of happenstance, as he recalls the development (in the course of writing The Moviegoer) of his own understanding of Binx Bollingâs predicament: âWhat happens to [Binx] is that in the very anxiety of his despair, cool as it isâindeed, as the very consequence of his despairâit occurs to him that a search is possible, a search altogether different from the scientific explorations mounted by scientists or by the most perceptive of psychoanalysts. So the novel, almost by accident, became a narrative of the search, the quest. And so the novel, again almost by accidentâor was it accident?âlanded squarely in the oldest tradition of Western letters: the pilgrimâs search outside himself, rather than the guruâs search within. All this happened to the novelist and his character without the slightest consciousness of a debt to St. Augustine or Danteâ (Signposts 193).
This allusion to pilgrimage in The Moviegoer is clearly Augustinian, as are some of Binxâs most vexing struggles with what he calls âflesh poor flesh.â More than once Percy would suggest that, much like the young Augustine in Confessions, his charactersâ quest for true selfhood and existential peace would necessarily involve a frank confrontation with their embodied existence, and principally their sexuality. Writing to Shelby Foote in 1970 about his just-finished draft of Love in the Ruins, Percy irreverently quipped, âWhat is it about? Screwing and God (which all Catholic novels since Augustine have been about)âto use Catholic somewhat looselyâ (Foote and Percy 147).
Not only does the pilgrimage of Augustine thematically and episodically presage that of Binx, but also The Moviegoer shares with Confessions a certain restlessness and even sadness. Peter Brown (author of the definitive English-language biography of Augustine) describes Augustineâs memoir as something remarkable and unique for its time: âIt is often said that the Confessions is not an âautobiographyâ in the modern sense. This is true, but not particularly helpful. Because, for a Late Roman man, it is precisely this intense, autobiographical vein in the Confessions, that sets it apart from the intellectual tradition to which Augustine belonged.â Augustineâs story, Brown asserts, is communicated via âa new, classic language of the unquiet heartâ (169). In Book I, Augustine is mystified and distressed by the alienation endemic to his very existence: âWhat, Lord, do I wish to say except that I do not know whence I came to be in this mortal life or, as I may call it, this living deathâ (Chadwick 6).1 In this disquiet, or âshakinessâ (to borrow one of Percyâs favorite terms), Augustine figures a type of pilgrim who becomes a recognizable headliner in Percyâs novels, starting with The Moviegoer. As we will observe, Augustine and Binx are painfully aware of grave troubles and contradictions that beset their respective worlds; both bemoan deep fractures within themselves.
Especially in Confessions, Augustine understands himself to be profoundly divided, at odds not only with God but with his own self as well. In the first four books of Confessions, the prevailing image is not merely some abstract doctrinal notion of âoriginal sinâ but rather that of a young man who feigns omnipotence but winds up scattershot, frenzied, and debased.2 At the end of Book II, for instance, Augustine recalls that âI slid away from you and wandered away, my God; far from your steadfastness . . . I became to myself a wastelandâ (Chadwick 74). Later he reflects, âI was at odds with myself and fragmenting myselfâ (Boulding 202). My favorite passage, though, comes from the beginning of Book II: âI will try now to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God and pursued a multitude of things, I went to piecesâ (62). (Perhaps we can now better understand Patsy Clineâs remarkable power to move us!)
By Godâs grace, this anthropological crisis necessitates a phenomenological trope of pilgrimage in Confessions. At the outset of Book I, Augustine famously writes of his (and our) essential restlessness: âYou stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in youâ (Boulding 39). His subsequent prodigalâs journey from Carthage to Milanâas recounted in Books IIâVIâcertainly dramatizes his pervasive sense of homesickness and despair. Later, in Book VII, Augustine has arrived at some wisdom regarding the phenomenological features of his journey, and he grasps that his pilgrimage must be understood and experienced in a way that not only requires intellectual assent, but also takes into account his affective and embodied experience: âI learned to discern the difference between presumption and confession, between those who see what the goal is but not how to get there and those who see the way which leads to the home of bliss, not merely as an end to be perceived but as a realm to live inâ (Chadwick 130). The image here is both arresting and beautiful as Augustine prefigures Gabriel Marcelâs homo viator. Augustine would often return to this trope. In a sermon preached in AD 418, he described the contours of our wayfaring in terms of wandering and worship: âDuring this time of our exile and our wandering, we say âalleluiaâ to cheer us on our way. At present âalleluiaâ is for us a travelerâs song; but by a toilsome road we are wending our way towards home and restâ (Sermons 156). Both passages are hopeful inasmuch as they look ahead toward a true homeland, but still a bit unsettling if one considers that Augustine is yet a pilgrim. Even after Augustineâs conversion, in Peter Brownâs words, his Confessions is ânot the affirmation of a cured man: it is the self-portrait of a convalescentâ (177), a description that perhaps captures Augustineâs ongoing appeal and relevance to those of us who often keenly feel our own displacement in the (post)modern world.
With this foregrounding in Augustinian anthropology (the self as alienated prodigal) and phenomenology (the self as embodied pilgrim), my aim is to explicate the confessional kinship between the bishop and the novelist by exploring not only the problems that beset the misapprehension of human embodiment, but also the perils and possibilities discoverable in the remarkable human practice of communication, whether as idle deflection or as authentic confession.
âFlesh Poor Fleshâ
The redemptive movement in Confessions is from multiplicity to unity, from the solipsistic self to others. Nearly a thousand years before Descartes âripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own houseâ (to quote Percyâs Tom More, Love in the Ruins 191), Augustine foresaw the problems besetting a self riven from itself. His legendary restlessness is at the root of his alienation from himself, from other people, and certainly from God. Augustineâs restlessness is also a constituent element of his existentialism. As James OâDonnell and other readers have understood, what haunts Augustine throughout most of Confessions is the larger sense of being somewhat dis-integrated: untethered and set adrift. In spite of worldly success, the center is not holding for him, and for the greater part of Confessions, he seems inadequate to the task of restoring it.
Early in Book II, he introduces the all-important trope of his sinnerâs exile, while at the same time alluding to his infamous struggle with lust, or cupiditas. OâDonnell offers an insightful gloss on the curious turn that Book II takes: âWhen he wants to penetrate the depths of his own iniquity, he chose to describe the theft of a few pears from a neighborâs tree (2.4â9). This narrative is placed in his sixteenth year, an idle time spent at home, his education interrupted by penury, his energies at the disposal of his fancies. An unflattering portrayal of his fatherâs reaction to his new maturity shows that it was a time when the powers of the flesh were beginning to flourish. Then suddenly we have him and a few friends snatching pears. To ask whether the theft is meant to represent symbolically the sexual indiscretions of youth is literal-minded, but some broad analogy at least is probably impliedâ (âConfessionsâ).
A major theme in all that follows in Confessions, Augustineâs cupiditas anticipates the dilemma that Percy would later describe in his essay âDiagnosing the Modern Malaiseâ as a âsymptomâ of a much graver problem. Addressing the broken sexuality of his day and its place in his novels, Percy insists that the sickness of Eros points to âan ontological impoverishment; that is, a severe limitation or crippling of the very life of twentieth-century manâ (Signposts 214). For both Augustine and Percy, then, the spirit of their respective ages is beset with a sadly diminished understanding of human being, particularly human sexuality.
In Augustineâs day, this impoverishment of the human is most forcefully expressed in the doctrine of the Manichees. The separation between body and spirit suggested by these early Gnostics convinced young Augustine of his self-division and then sought to persuade him that he bore no responsibility for his sexuality or for his individual predicament generally: âI liked to excuse myself and to accuse some unidentifiable power which was with me and yet not I. But the whole was myself and what divided me against myself was my impiety. That was a sin the more incurable for the fact that I did not think myself a sinner. My execrable wickedness preferred the disastrous doctrine that in me you, almighty God, suffer defeat rather than that, to be saved, I needed to surrender to youâ (Chadwick 84).
If we read carefully here we note that the âshakinessâ of the divided self is a given. What would most horrify Augustine in his later years, and Kierkegaard and Percy after that, is the alibi implied. Such dualism pre-sents a crippling sense of denial regarding the importance of our actions and our responsibility for them. Moreover, to deny our embodiment or to believe that our embodied actions have no real significance is to eschew our concrete, historical predicament. Never under these conditions does the prodigal have a chance of becoming a pilgrim. Instead he remains stuck within the vagaries of the selfâthe hapless terrain of the guru. Augustineâs Manichean phase was long and costly, leaving him with wounds from which he perhaps never fully recovered.3
Percy casts his critique of Cartesian dualism and the vexing problems of embodiment in language that is clearly reminiscent of Confessions (with the aid of Kierkegaardâs spheres of existence). Binxâs aesthetically inspired âsearch,â whether horizontal or vertical, chiefly diverts him from facing himself. His consumer citizenship, his office romances, his stock brokerageâall of these fail to provide him with a means of adequately making his way in the world. Although some of Percyâs later characters (Will Barrett and Tom More in particular) are given to more striking dualistic flights of angelism and bestialism, Binxâs proclivity toward the âaestheticâ most often revolves around sex. John Desmond describes âsexual desireâ as Binxâs âconstant nemesisâ (Walker Percyâs Search 69) and, similar to Augustine, it is always a sign and symptom of a deeper problem. Indeed, life is most painfully inauthentic to Binx in moments when the romantic or the sexual fails him, and his aesthetic mode is subsequently invaded by the malaise.
Nowhere is this made clearer in The Moviegoer than in the failed sexual encounter between Binx and Kate on the train to Chicago. This hapless love sceneâwhich would be comical if the stakes werenât so high for Kateâmasterfully dramatizes the perils of Manichean/Cartesian dualism. Binx should perhaps know better as the train pulls out of New Orleans, but he actually admits to enjoying what he describes as the âpeculiar gnosisâ (184) of trainsâthat is, I think, their inherent nowhere-ness, their moment-by-moment movement from non-place to non-place, sealed off from the world. Binx describes the scene, riding âat a witchâs level above the gravelly roofsâ (185) of suburban New Orleans and, later, âhigh in the air, squarely above a city streetâ (195) in Jackson. However, the further they go, the worse Kate feels, grim and cut adrift. In her desperation for some sense of rootedness and comfort, she propositions Binx. In his lament to Rory Calhoun afterwards, Binx confesses their failure: âWe did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor flesh failed us. The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit (for despising is not the worst fate to overtake the flesh), but until this moment seen through and canceled, rendered null by the cold and fishy eye of the malaiseâflesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hopeâquails and failsâ (200).
Augustine, in the throes of Manichean heresy, is tempted to believe that his body doesnât matter at all, or that at the very least heâs not responsible for it. Here, Percy dramatizes the other side of the same dualistic coin, ...