Consolation in Medieval Narrative

Augustinian Authority and Open Form

C. Schrock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137447814
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik des Mittelalters & der Frühen Neuzeit

Medieval writers such as Chaucer, Abelard, and Langland often overlaid personal story and sacred history to produce a distinct narrative form. The first of its kind, this study traces this widely used narrative tradition to Augustine's two great histories: Confessions and City of God.

CHAPTER 1

FOR THE TIME BEING: INTERPRETIVE CONSOLATION IN AUGUSTINIAN TIME

Augustine was a primary narrative warrant and exemplar for the Middle Ages. His Confessions and City of God served the medieval period as canonical autobiography and historiography, respectively. The Confessions was present from the first stirrings of the medieval autobiographical impulse. For instance, Guibert of Nogent in his Monodiae (1115) pastiches its prayerful opening, its self-deprecation, and the dominant personality of its author’s mother. Although the latter part of Guibert’s account diverges from the form and content of the Confessions, Guibert needed the Confessions to get him started. In on the ground floor of the genre, the Confessions appeared also at its height. Dante’s Commedia, the premiere medieval history and fiction of the self, owes a tremendous amount to the Confessions both theologically and structurally, as a burgeoning critical discourse has clarified.¹ Similarly, Augustine’s City of God cast a tremendous—some would say catastrophic—shadow over medieval historiography. Opposing Eusebius’s triumphal merger of church and Roman state, the City of God drains political space of historical meaning and diverts historians like Bede into strictly ecclesiastical matters. Lee Patterson has argued that the City of God salted the field of Christian history so thoroughly for medieval political historians that they had to reach all the way back to Vergilian linear narrative and the matter of Troy for models of narrative form.² Later medieval and early modern political theorists had to misread the City of God as an account of secular history and power relations in order to ground their own accounts in its authority.

This specifically narrative influence is startling because of Augustine’s strong philosophical affinity with Neoplatonism. The system of thought Augustine knew as Platonism and we have come to call Neoplatonism had strong antinarrative tendencies because it was radically dualistic. Expounded by Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry in the later half of the third century CE, it posited the “fall” or fragmentation and scattering of individual souls from the One eternal Soul into the evils of time and material bodies. The shape of such a Neoplatonic “story” generally consisted of one headlong curvilinear trajectory: getting back out of time as rapidly as possible and reacquiring a transcendent, self-nullifying vision of the One.³ Any emplotted narrative along the way would be beside the point; Neoplatonists ruthlessly focused on a closure that escaped space and time.⁴ That this vision of the One transcends not only time but language further demeaned narrative texts as failed attempts to communicate or to effect the incommunicable. Instead of making and inspiring stories, the Neoplatonic philosopher promoted silent contemplative stasis, the closure of perfect understanding. Thus, critics have been comparatively slow to treat Augustinian narrative practice as influential on subsequent literatures, although histories of ideas that begin with Augustine and invoke his influence remain legion.

Augustine’s grafting of sacred historical resources onto a Neoplatonic flight from narrative resulted, however, in a more complex and supple narrative form usable for later, nondismissive accounts of the temporal saeculum. The Neoplatonic interest in absolute closure coincided well with Christian concepts of conversion and eschatology. Whether they called it the flesh, the old man, or the regio dissimilitudinis, Christians knew that they needed to escape from something inherent in time. This escape was implicit in the notion of salvation. Yet personal experience and careful attention to the arc of sacred history taught Augustine that the closure of Christian salvation took a long time in coming and did not remove its recipients from time when it came. The incarnation of God as man definitively saved, redeemed, and illuminated humanity, but it did so within time. Submitting as it did to the strictures of time, the incarnation lent time a value unimaginable within pure strains of Neoplatonism. From a human perspective, sacred history contextualizes Neoplatonic insight, because history extends before and after the epiphanic moments when eternity breaks through.⁵ Understandably Augustine resists this shift from eternity to time in his own thinking. He frequently confesses himself perplexed about why God seems to value time and narrative.⁶ The tremendous energy necessary to write his stories, however, reveals how urgently he tries to reconcile the dichotomies of time and eternity, history and Neoplatonism, narrative and divinity.

The reconciliation of time and eternity is the shared burden of Augustine’s two great narratives: the Confessions and the City of God. Each work is consolatory because such reconciliation seemed impossible when Augustine wrote them. According to Peter Brown, the Confessions is not the work of an arrogant interpreter using his current sureties to close off his past confusions, but of a disillusioned Neoplatonist trying to wring sense from a personal history that dashed his ideal of a Christian philosophical lifestyle.⁷ For its part, the City of God responds to the fall of Rome, which was disastrous for Eusebian historiographies that had identified the Christianization of Rome as the eschatological closure to Christian history. Answering pagans (who implicated the Christianization of Rome in its fall) and fellow Christians (panicked at the loss of their neatly resolved metanarrative), the City of God leaches meaning from the fall of Rome, in particular, and Christian history, in general.⁸ Because the City of God follows no knowable shape or plot on earth after the incarnation, and is unidentifiable with, for, or against any political institution, overthrow of a political Christendom does not destabilize the Christian faith. Thus, in both narratives, Augustine tries to provide narrative resources to an audience (himself, his coterie, Roman Christians) whose previous triumphalist interpretation of personal or sacred history has recently been undermined.

Sharing a consolatory exigency, the Confessions and the City of God also share a consolatory narrative form. Epiphanies of a Neoplatonic clarity intervene in stories that otherwise would not be going anywhere: Augustine and Israel, both aimless in exile. The divine meaning inherent in conversion and incarnation at once transcends those earthbound stories and fulfills them, makes them linear. The stories do not, however, end when fulfillment arrives, but carry on into a third posthistorical stage as apparently aimless as the first and demanding a more temporally complex form of consolation. The postconversion Augustine and the postincarnation church suffer again from a lack of clear future orientation; they do not know exactly where or when their end will come, what it is to be, or what meaningful shape it will give their entire story. But they have also lost direct access to the transcendent clarity of their past epiphanies and now require consolation for both temporal directions. To console, Augustine’s narrative form relocates the closure of its linear narrative from the end to the center. The now-past epiphany contains authoritative meaning stable enough to shape a history, and interpretative improvisation on that past epiphany is the way to activate its meaning in the present.

Thus this narrative form ends in specifically figural interpretation, of a piece with Augustine’s broader strategies of reading signs and texts.⁹ As Augustine and other patristic writers practiced it, figural interpretation reads a historical past that produced more meaning than its present, more meaning than the literal.¹⁰ Only an authoritatively and retrospectively interpreting vantage point can harvest this surplus. Literal figures or “types” (in particular, the words and deeds of the Hebrew scriptures) find their ultimate meaning in an “antitype” (in particular, the Word/Deed of Christ during his incarnation).¹¹ A figural exegesis of one’s own narrative and contemporary situation could be prospective (current events are types foreshadowing a future fulfillment) or retrospective (current events are aftershocks explicating a prior antitype). Patristic figural exegesis had strongly retrospective elements, because it grounded the identity of the church and the soul in the written biblical record of prior history whose interpretation recapitulated historical signs and patterns in that contemporary church and soul. As the incarnation proved the Christian interpretive key for earlier Hebrew scriptures, so also the incarnation became the central principle of later Christian figural history and identity formation. Although both the center and the end of history, Christ could give Christian meaning only as the center,¹² a lost center because a past center, beautiful but absent (Expositions. 127.8).

The City of God is the first systematic figural historiography, reading the church as the latest version of an institution singular throughout history: the City of God that culminated in Christ’s incarnation and would also culminate in his return. Furthermore, Augustine’s innovation in the Confessions was an essentially figural autobiography, retrospectively grounded in a climactic conversion in the same way that church history grounded itself in a prior incarnation. Ending in a consolatory interpretation of past events, each narrative implicitly invites its readers to interpret the histories they know by refiguring the divine revelation they have been given, as Augustine did.

A Common Structure

In a variety of treatises Augustine insists that the individual human life and the history of the world have the same narrative structure.¹³ He makes the parallel explicit in the City of God 16.43, labeling the historical periods he is discussing as the childhood (Noah to Abraham), adolescence (Abraham to David), and adulthood of Israel (David forward). Although the parallel is not explicit in the Confessions, Robert McMahon has seen its transition from personal (books 1–10) to sacred history (books 11–13) as implying a structural link between the two histories.¹⁴ The conceptual links between personal and sacred history seem solid across every stage of Augustine’s career.

Despite this evidence, scholars have rarely associated the structures of the Confessions and the City of God with each other to suggest a narrative form that encompasses them both. Most see the two works as opposed forms: the first triumphalist in its premature closure, the second systematically amorphous in its destruction of potential meanings and endings. On the one hand, the peculiar power of the Confessions as a narrative derives from where its trajectory halts: after Augustine’s capitulation to the Christian way of life in the famous garden scene and after his mystical ascent with Monica at Ostia. It is a triumphalist narrative; he quits his personal story once he has the sense of an ending, then diverts the last three books into philosophical and exegetical territory. On the other hand, the City of God overthrows the possibility of meaning within contemporary history. Although history was linear until the incarnation, after that authoritative event it falls apart. By refusing to project a historical structure past the time period of biblical revelation, the City of God refuses form to current circumstance. This movement from triumphalist to aporetic narrative complies with a broader scholarly portrait of Augustine’s evolution from early Neoplatonism to a later, more thoroughly Biblicist theology, all the more reason to dissociate works from these opposing periods. Perhaps Augustine always believed that personal and sacred narrative coincided, but between the Confessions and the City of God he must have changed his mind about the shape of that narrative.

Scholarship on the narrative of the Confessions has usually discovered either a linear or a chiastic structure. The conventional understanding identifies book 8 as Augustine’s conversion to Christianity and, therefore, the climax of a more-or-less linear trajectory that begins in an infancy marked by a disordered desire Augustine will later theorize as original sin. Understood this way, Augustine’s conversion makes him one of the “prototypes of the Christian convert—great sinners redeemed from the error of their earlier lives by a single, dramatic moment of conversion.”¹⁵ John Freccero and Brian Stock have explained how this linearity enables the production of an authoritative text. Freccero argues that only the ontological shift of “conversion, the death and resurrection of the self” detaches the narrator absolutely from his own previous self and events and permits him to interpret them from a transcendent perspective.¹⁶ Thus, “logically, autobiography is a sequential narrative that moves toward its own origin.”¹⁷ Stock traces Augustine’s three-stage progression from oral to silent reading throughout books 1–9 of the Confessions. First, Augustine’s reading is sensory, empirical (he lives the events of his life); then cognitive in interpreting those signs; then meditative, uncoupling the images from the text and being mystically “taught from within” by them.¹⁸ In this account, Augustine’s shift in reading practice, not specifically his conversion, enables his autobiographical retrospect.¹⁹

Those who emphasize Augustine’s Neoplatonism most often see the Confessions as a chiastic descent and ascent, the soul’s return to its pre-existent union with the Divine. Robert J. O’Connell, in St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (1969), provides a comprehensive account of the Confessions’ structure as Neoplatonic. The Augustine of O’Connell’s Confessions is a soul fallen from its pre-existence into time, wandering away from the Divine by pursuing corporeal desires. In book 3 this Neoplatonic acolyte begins a return not to the Christian church but to the contemplation and mysticism of Cassiciacum and Ostia. The philosophy and exegesis of books 10–13 are an exercise of and reflection upon the narrative ascent of books 1–9. The final books complete a chiastic return to the Divine. McMahon converts O’Connell’s theological analysis into self-consciously literary terms, adopting “return to the origin” as a motif for his formalist analysis.²⁰ This shape is chiastic, a structure McMahon has attributed to the Confessions more than once.²¹ In a trilogy of book-length analyses, Phillip Cary has recently constructed an Augustine whose intellectual tools and categories remained Neoplatonic throughout his long career.²² Unlike McMahon and O’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.  For the Time Being: Interpretive Consolation in Augustinian Time
• 2.  “Quanto minorem consideras”: Abelard’s Proportional Consolation
• 3.  Three Figures of the Church: Piers Plowman and the Quest for Consolation
• 4.  Augustine and Arthur: The Stanzaic Morte and the Consolation of Elegy
• 5.  Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: Consolations at War
• 6.  The Tower and the Turks: More’s Meditative Consolation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index