Parting Knowledge

Essays after Augustine

Wetzel

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621897873
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

There are forms of knowing that seem either to come from a parting or to require one. Paradigmatically in Genesis, Adam parts from God in order to join in knowledge with his partner, the flesh of his flesh, and the result is a bereft but not unpromising knowledge, looking like a labor of love. Saint Augustine famously--some would say infamously--reads the Genesis paradigm of knowing as a story of original sin, where parting is both damnable and disfiguring and reuniting a matter of incomprehensible grace. Roughly half the essays in this collection engage directly with Augustine's theological animus and follow his thinking into self-division, perversity of will, grief, conversion, and the aspiration for transcendence. The remaining ones, more concerned with grace than with sin, bring an animus more distantly Augustinian to the preemption of forgiveness and the persistence of hell, morality and its limits, sexual piety, strange beauty, and a philosophy that takes in confession. The common pull of all the essays is towards the imperfection in self-knowledge--a place of disfigurement perhaps, but also a nod to transformation.

Groundwork

1

Agony in the Garden

Augustine’s Myth of Will

Augustine has often been thought to emphasize the will over other features of human psychology, principally reason and appetite. This is not surprising given his insistence not only on a soul’s absolute responsibility for its fallen condition but also on God’s absolute sovereignty over the choice and course of a soul’s redemption. Set within the context of a metaphysical tug-of-war between deficiently motivated perversity and mysteriously bestowed grace, the will tends to emerge in relief.

In this chapter, I am going to consider the genesis of this peculiar tug-of-war in Augustine (that is the task of section one), but mainly with the aim of downplaying its significance. Augustine’s offering of will comes less in his disposition to absolutize will than his willingness to trade in the absolutism for a good story about the complexity of desire—and desire for the flesh, in particular. I chart this shift of focus in two contexts: his confessional struggle with his own carnality (largely the theme of section two) and his reading of the Adamic struggle with carnality in Genesis (largely the theme of section three). Since Augustine’s confessional sensibilities are always exegetically informed, I never treat his personal confession as nakedly “existential.” I allow him, throughout the inquiry, to be a reader of texts. In my short conclusion, I suggest why his offering of will is best read as a story, still to be determined, about desire.

I. Absolute Resolution

When Augustine describes his moment of crisis in book 8 of the Confessions, where we find him agonizing in a garden over his inability to part himself from already discredited lusts, he casts his internal struggle as a conflict of two wills, one carnal, the other spiritual (conf. 8.5.10). More precisely he speaks of one will split into alienated personae (conf. 8.11.21); their mysterious original unity, now lost, leaves each side partial, diminished in strength, and vainly desirous for either a reconciliation or a final parting. The two sides of his split will—allies and enemies—wrangle to a stalemate, rendering their passive host momentously unresolved.

It is common enough to expect a Christian writer who writes of spirit’s ambivalence towards flesh to give the nod to spirit and valorize a flesh-restraining will. Augustine can be read, superficially at least, to fit that mold. He reports regaining his composure and coming to feel secure on the spiritual side of his will when a child’s voice singing, “pick up and read” (tolle, lege), alerts his attention to a book of Paul’s letters and to this, freely selected, verse (Rom 13:13–14; conf. 8.12.29): “No more wild parties and drunken fits, bedroom antics and indecencies, rivalries and wrangling; just try on Jesus Christ, your master, and don’t look to lusts to care for your flesh.” Augustine speaks of the heart-securing clarity that came with his encounter of this verse: his dark misgivings about his own resolve were scattered in the dawn of new confidence—“as if an untroubled light were to have flooded my heart” (quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo). He knew then that no partial will of his would ever lend him the strength to become whole again, but also that no doomed and desperate heroism was being asked of him as a condition of his redemption. Christ had already given Augustine the strength he needed to live forward, in spirit—the remnants of his old carnal life, still begging at spirit’s door, would continue to annoy, but they no longer threatened subversion.

Readers from the monkish Pelagius to the scholarly moralists of our own day have been both fascinated and appalled by Augustine’s pas de deux between human and divine will. From a place in his psyche mythically human and thus somehow Adamic, Augustine imagines himself to have willed his own fall from grace and descent into a psychology of conflict and blind ambition. Once into this postlapsarian life (the life that ironically begins for him at birth), Augustine has no prospect of willing his own way to safety. He is convinced that a purely human will to break with God can be converted and stabilized only by a grace that is free to invent virtues where it finds none. The part of this Augustinian spectacle that fascinates is its dramatization of an original choice: faced with the stark contrast between an unqualified good (life with God) and unqualified evil (life without God), a human being still apparently has a choice to make: either will the goodness of the good or be parted from all good. Is this kind of choice, assuming for now that it is a choice, of the essence of human responsibility, or is it already the expression of a perverse human desire to usurp creative control of anything of value? The ambiguity is rich enough to fuel a lifetime of uneasy moralism. The part of the Augustinian spectacle that tends to appall has to do with God’s part in redemption. It is one thing for a human being to veer from God for no good reason (such veering can suggest culpability of will); it is quite another for God to find nothing of merit in those whom he raises (that just seems like bad parenting). The idea that a divine father would love his sons and daughters well in excess of their particular virtues is of course more reassuring than troubling, and even a Pelagian can take some honest comfort from it, but Augustine comes to insist on the far more radical notion that God loves in his children only the virtues that he implants there himself—even the very desire for a virtue is a divine gift.

Augustine arrives at his doctrine of gratuitous election in 396, the first year of his long tenure as bishop of Hippo. His friend and venerable mentor, Simplician, who would succeed Ambrose in the See of Milan, had asked him to comment on some passages from Kings and, more importantly, on two perplexing selections from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Paul’s avowal in Romans 7 of his inability, as a carnal person, to adhere to a spiritual law, and his meditation in Romans 9 on God’s seemingly arbitrary preference for one mother’s son over another, for a Jacob over an Esau. In his responses to Simplician, Augustine stays with the reading of Romans 7 he had developed just a few years prior, in a cursory exposition of the letter. Paul, he claimed then, was not speaking in his own person when he spoke of being compelled by sin to act lawlessly; he was impersonating someone “under the law” (sub lege)—a person who sees the good of a divinely regulated life while being held, by a chain of habit, to lawless desire (ex. prop. Rm. 44). On the face of it, Augustine’s agonized self-portraiture in Confessions 8 is his personal rendition of this condition: having acknowledged the preeminent goodness of an eternal life, unfixed from mortal flesh, Augustine finds himself still habituated to old loves—sex and reputation, but sex especially. The vanities whisper to him of his own fear of finality and freeze his resolve (conf. 8.11.26): “You are sending us away? We will not be with you ever again from now to eternity; from now on and for all time, you will not be permitted this and that.” Augustine lets on that the “this” and the “that” are sexual fantasies, too graphic to spell out. What is he, or anyone caught between law and desire, to do?

On the basis of his reading of Romans 7, rehearsed for Simplician’s benefit, Augustine comes up with the appropriate counsel (Simpl. 1.1.14): “This is what is left to human initiative [libero arbitrio] in this mortal life, not living up to justice whenever we want but turning in humble petition to the one whose gift makes such living possible.” In short, it is human to pray for help, divine to deliver it. In his next response to Simplician, keyed to Paul’s reading of the Jacob and Esau story, Augustine effectively abandons any suggestion that a true prayer originates in human extremity and not in God, the giver of all good things. He had at one time surmised, while wrestling with Romans 9, that God must have foreseen and rewarded not the weaker twin’s virtue but his disposition, so unlike that of his rugged brother, to seek his strength outside himself (ex. prop. Rm. 60). Augustine does not rehearse that reading to Simplician; he offers it up for sacrifice. The virtue of faith, he finally admits, is no less a virtue than its cardinal offspring (courage and the rest); it too must be part of the package that God makes of a human life. At the end of his exegesis, Augustine recalls Paul’s own conversion: he was knocked from his horse, not answered in his prayers, and out of the savage will of a persecutor God fashioned a preacher of the gospel. Augustine concludes from this that “wills are elected” (Simpl. 1.2.22). In other words, the divine hand is at work in the entire history of a redeemed life, the dark past as well as the dimly anticipated future; God does not enter into a life by invitation only.

Augustine looked back on his responses to Simplician and noted that a big change in his own thinking had taken place there. He had come to see that the beginning of faith (initium fidei) is a divine gift, not a human initiative (persev. 20.52); this led him to concede, with a not wholly feigned reluctance, that God’s grace trumps human free will (retr. 2.1.1). There is no consensus in the scholarship over how big Augustine’s big change really was. Had he come to a sudden rejection of the classical ideal of a self-sculpted life, or had he always been cool to perfectionist ethics? Granting that he consistently advertised the God-sculpted life in his writings, did he nevertheless lose perspective when responding to Simplician and come to believe that a human being, to the divine artist, is just a passive lump of living clay?

Having engaged with questions of this sort for the better part of two decades now, I am impressed with how little bare-knuckled appeals to the will tell us about Augustine’s theological vision. Consider that faith-bestowing God of his, who gives the entire virtue. Augustine marks a distinction between two kinds of calling in his revised reading of Romans 9. Sinners like Esau, who are called but not chosen, can be expected to dissociate themselves from whatever gift of faith they may receive; their sin ultimately says more to them than does their rootless faith. For a Jacob, on the other hand, who is both called and chosen, there is no possibility of a permanent dissociation. God calls the elect “suitably” (congruenter; Simpl. 1.2.13), and their faith, despite the occasional waning, invariably waxes overall. It is difficult to determine in the abstract whether a providentially educated Jacob is his own person of faith or merely a vehicle for his creator’s self-enjoyment.

No doubt it is tempting to conclude that God is self-relating through Jacob and that nothing distinctively human could ever emerge redeemed from this kind of divine soliloquy—not in Jacob’s case, not in any case. But then there is this to consider. The faith that God creates in a person is not a virtue that Augustine imagines God to have or need; Christ has this virtue, to be sure, and has it perfectly, but he has it on his human side. Faith for Augustine is preeminently a creaturely virtue, as is any virtue that takes into its self-definition difference from God. A creature, but not God, has to endure not being God. There are virtues that facilitate this endurance, and however profoundly God may induce some human beings, the elect, to have them, these virtues necessarily have a distinctively human expression. Augustine surmises that God gives us two things in the gift of a virtue (Simpl. 1.2.10): that we will (ut velimus) and what we have willed (quod voluerimus). We share the “that” part, he explains, with God (God calls, we follow), while the “what” part, the good that is willed, is all God’s doing. If no real division of labor were being described here, then not even Christ would know what the difference is between God and a human being.

The failing of a bare-knuckled appeal to the will, when applied to Augustine, is its utter impatience with the idea, admittedly difficult, that a creator who relies on nothing to create can have heirs who are creative, but less than absolute, in their self-expression. Put another way, this is the idea that a difference in being does not resolve, upon analysis, into God and nothingness. The absolutized human will, defined by its capacity to refuse the entirety of its inheritance and embrace the void, suggests both the fear and the impossibility of being essentially related to something; the Go...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Provenance of the Essays and Abstracts
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Groundwork
• Part 2: Cultivation
• Works Cited