Augustine famously frames his Confessions with the concept of rest. He opens with the well-known words, ‘[O]ur heart is restless until it rests in you (inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te)’, and he closes with the request, ‘[G]rant us peace (pacem da nobis)’, that is, ‘the peace of quietness (pacem quietis)’.Footnote 1 What makes this literary device intriguing is not so much the repetition of the concept but the contrast. Whereas the Confessions opens with expressing the human desire for rest, it closes with a prayer for God's gift of rest. Such contrasting foci of the inclusio anticipate the dynamic interaction of the operation of God's grace and human response to God's grace, the elements of which are hinted by the literary structure and components of the Confessions. Sandwiched between these bookends lies an extended recollection of Augustine's past (Books 1–9), followed by his account of his present life and his understanding of memory (Book 10).Footnote 2 The opening of Book 10 echoes the motifs of the knowledge of God and delight/rest in the opening of Book 1,Footnote 3 thereby suggesting the link between rest and memory. We also find Augustine's account of his past expressed not in the form of an autobiography but as a confession – one that is saturated with the Psalms.Footnote 4
This essay articulates the logic of grace and rest in Augustine's Confessions, focusing on the ideas of memory, confession and the Psalms. The goal is not to present comprehensive treatments of these concepts; others have done so.Footnote 5 Instead, the aim is to draw links between central concepts in a way that has not yet been navigated. I argue that journeying towards rest comprises an intricate dynamic of the operation of God's grace and the human response of confession – both of which are mediated through the voice of Christ in the Psalms. The first part focuses on human response. I will outline the two necessary conditions for rest, namely, praise of God and forgetting of sins. These conditions are to be met in the faculty of human memory and through the act of confession. The second half of the essay accounts for God's grace. Pointing out that grace is mediated through Christ, I will show that the Psalms are the words of the whole Christ – i.e. of Christ and the church. The Psalms mediate God's address to Augustine as well as Augustine's approach to God through confession. The result is the forgetting of sins and the praise of God. The context of confession in journeying towards rest is ultimately the church, whose head is Christ.
Confession
Conditions for rest
To understand the dynamic of God's grace and confession, we must first understand where rest fits into the larger picture of Augustine's anthropology. Using rest as a ‘leitmotiv’ in the Confessions,Footnote 6 Augustine locates the concept within a framework of human existence conceived as a journey – an ascent to God. In the opening of the Confessions Augustine writes:
‘You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (Ps 47:2): great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable’ (Ps 146:5). Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being ‘bearing his mortality with him’ (2 Cor 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you ‘resist the proud’ (1 Pet 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.Footnote 7
Augustine acknowledges his existence – expressed with the concept cor – as God's creation,Footnote 8 a being that comes from God. Simultaneously, he observes a yearning for rest that is satisfied in God. In such a framework, as Augustine expresses with the imagery of journeying, one can travel away from God, failing to find rest,Footnote 9 or towards God who is the source of rest.Footnote 10 Things that are mutable and transient cannot ground the soul because ‘they lack permanence’.Footnote 11 Restlessness, on the other hand, depicts our existence when it does not rest in the Spirit.Footnote 12 The soul, therefore, ought to rest in God, who is always at rest, immutable and stable.Footnote 13 God is the ultimate fulfilment of human desires and the giver of happiness and peace.Footnote 14 Rest is the eternal peace of the sabbath, co-experienced with happiness and the beatific vision.Footnote 15 And it is towards such a goal that our hearts strive.
It is insufficient to say that we find rest in God; there are further necessary conditions for rest. In the opening paragraph of the Confessions, quoted above, Augustine lays down two conditions for rest. First, Augustine writes that humans desire to praise God and take pleasure in praising God. When such a desire is not fulfilled, they exist in a state of restlessness. In other words, restlessness comprises the lack of the fulfilment of a fundamental human desire, namely, the desire to praise God. Second, Augustine hints at the idea that ‘the witness of his sin’ and the witness that God resists the proud prevent one from praising God.Footnote 16 Such a condition is confirmed later in Book 1: ‘Who will enable me to find rest in you? Who will grant me that you come to my heart and intoxicate it, so that I forget (obliviscar) my evils and embrace my one and only good, yourself? … “[S]ay to my soul, I am your salvation.” After that utterance I will run and lay hold on you.’Footnote 17 However ‘forgetting’ and ‘sin’ are related, a matter to which I will return, suffice it to say that praising God and forgetting the past are the two conditions for rest.
Constructing memories
The process of the ascent to rest, that is, meeting the dual condition described above, begins within the faculty of memory. The praise of God and the forgetting of one's sins assume a memory of God and memories of one's sins. For Augustine, God is found within one's memory.Footnote 18 Once God is found in memory, one begins to reach for God.Footnote 19 At the same time, within memory one finds the recollection of his or her sins. The Confessions is Augustine's attempt to remember his past, focusing especially on his past sins. Thus, as Paige Hochschild notes, one finds in the faculty of memory both ‘a memory of past life (progress in faith), and a present perception of the divine (the graceful vision of God)’.Footnote 20 It follows that the praise of God and the ‘forgetting’ of sins need to be satisfied with respect to the faculty of memory.
Augustine seeks to satisfy the two conditions through imagination. Memories of God and one's past evils can be brought to praise and ‘forgetting’ because memory is not static; it can be constructed and given meaning. Augustine writes, ‘[B]y thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected’.Footnote 21 Todd Breyfogle explains that Augustine uses the faculty of imagination to order his memory and ultimately ascend to God.Footnote 22 Our ascension to God involves a right ordering of our memory; confession is one form of imagination through which Augustine organises ‘his memories and their meanings’.Footnote 23 Augustine's constructive view of memory allows him to combine memories and give meaning to them via rearrangement.
The dual condition for rest (praise and forgetting of sins) and its corresponding dual memory (of God and one's sins) map nicely onto Augustine's understanding of the act of confession. Augustine says, ‘Therefore I lay bare my feelings towards you, by confessing (confitendo) to you my miseries and your mercies to us (Ps 32: 22), so that the deliverance you have begun may be complete. So I may cease to be wretched in myself and may find happiness in you.’Footnote 24 Similarly, Augustine writes in his sermon on Psalm 29:
Lord my God, I will confess to you for ever. What does it mean, I will confess to you for ever? It means, ‘I shall praise you for ever.’ I have explained that there is confession of praise too, not only of sins. Confess now what you have done to God, and in the future you will confess what God has done for you. What have you done? You have committed sins. What has God done? He forgives you your sins when you confess your unrighteousness, so that hereafter you may confess his praises for ever and be pierced no more with compunction for your sin.Footnote 25
James O'Donnell identifies the well-known twofold form of confession in Augustine's works: praise (confessio laudis) and self-blame (confessio peccatorum).Footnote 26 Joseph Ratzinger notes that Augustine's distinctive take on confessio is that it is precisely through and in a denial of himself that he praises God.Footnote 27 In his mature theology, Augustine would say that confession continues in heaven, where we will rest. Yet an important distinction is that, while the praise of God will continue forever, the confession of sins will cease in heaven.Footnote 28 Confession thus satisfies the two conditions for rest.
Here we run into a potential inconsistency. Augustine says that we praise God for ‘what God has done’ for us, which entails the remembrance of what we ‘have done to God’. Yet one of the conditions for rest is ‘forgetting’. How are we to put these two claims together?
‘Forgetting’
‘Forgetting’ does not mean the deletion of memory. At first glance, Augustine seems to remain undecided on the issue of forgetting. Wrestling with the issue of forgetting in Book 10, he writes, ‘[W]hen I remember forgetfulness, both memory and forgetfulness are present’.Footnote 29 Yet it is possible to delineate what forgetting means. At minimum, forgetting involves remembering to some degree. Gerard O'Daly writes that, for Augustine, ‘Naming X and recognizing what the word means, or refers to, is an indication that we remember X (conf. 10.23).’Footnote 30 Thus, with such a definition of memory, ‘Augustine is obliged to accept that recognizing the meaning of “forgetting” is tantamount to remembering it.’Footnote 31 Hence forgetting cannot mean the ‘total absence’ of memory.Footnote 32
In Book 11, following the book on memory, one finds a clearer account of forgetting as an implication of focusing on an object. Book 11 deals with the problem of time: how can we temporal beings be united with God, who is eternal? The problem for Augustine is that we are distended in time; we are scattered, whereas God is one and eternal. Echoing Philippians 3:12–14, Augustine writes that we can overcome the problem of distension through extension and concentration:
‘Because your mercy is more than lives’ (Ps 62:4), see how my life is distension in several directions. ‘Your right hand upheld me’ (Ps 17:36; 62:9) in my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things; so ‘I might apprehend him in whom also I am apprehended’ (Phil 3:12–14), and leaving behind the old days I might be gathered (conligar) to follow the One, ‘forgetting the past (praeterita oblitus)’ and moving not towards those future things which are transitory but to ‘the things which are before (in ea quae ante sunt)’ me, not stretched out in distraction (distentus) but extended (extentus) in reach, not by being pulled apart (distentionem) but by concentration (intentionem).Footnote 33
For Augustine, we are either distracted (distentio) in time – i.e. the past and/or future within our memory/expectations – or extended (extentus) towards a stable object, i.e. Christ. Extension is made possible as one focuses (intentio) on a stable object. As O'Daly writes, extentus ‘is the positive complement of distentus, and the counterpart of intentio’.Footnote 34 This process involves forgetting the past. We can infer that forgetting refers to a particular mode of consciousness: extending towards God through concentration, rather than being distracted in temporal things. Put differently, focusing our consciousness on object x dims the attention to another object y; one calls this ‘forgetting’ y.
‘The things which are before’ Augustine cannot be temporal things, which distract him.Footnote 35 What lies before him is Christ, through whom he is gathered and apprehended. We must navigate a tension here. On the one hand, as he experiences it in his ascension with Monica,Footnote 36 the focus on God leads to intoxication with God's presence.Footnote 37 On the other, remembrance of one's past persists because we will remember our sins in heaven (though we will no longer confess our sins),Footnote 38 praising God for what God has done for us. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine desires to lay his memories, the good and the bad, before God.Footnote 39 One way to reconcile this tension is to acknowledge that it is not the past per se Augustine is narrating. Instead, Augustine's story is gathered in Christ through the Spirit so that he might be united with God.Footnote 40 Union with God does not entail the denial of one's existence or history, but an affirmation of one's existence that includes one's history – or, as it will be made clear, history narrated. Thus there is an intentional focus on God, whose presence overwhelms one, yet that focus inevitably leads to a coherent recollection of one's past. It is precisely that narration that leads Augustine to praise.
What then is the difference between recollection on earth that provokes anxiety and recollection in heaven where there is peace? I propose that the former kind of remembrance has power over the individual, distending his soul away from God, while the latter does not. That is, recollection of sins in light of God leads to peace. Augustine writes about his baptism with his son, Adeodatus: ‘We were baptized, and disquiet about our past life vanished from us (fugit a nobis sollicitudo vitae praeteritae).’Footnote 41 It is conceivable that it is not memory per se but the disquiet associated with one's past life that provokes anxiety. Hence it is possible, at least in Augustine's account, for memories to remain without provoking disquiet. As Augustine writes at the end of The City of God, we forget our sins in heaven not in the sense of forgetting when we are educated, but in the sense of ‘no longer [being] in misery’.Footnote 42 Noteworthy from the account of baptism is that it is not Augustine and Adeodatus who cause the vanishing of disquiet. This suggestive language leads us to consider the other side of the dynamic: God's grace.
Grace
Conversion to confession
So far, I have explicated the human role in the journey towards rest: confession through the reconstruction of memories and forgetting. Such a logic, however, is incomplete because Augustine himself sees that it is God who brings him towards rest: ‘In your gift we find our rest. There are you our joy.’Footnote 43 Grace leads us to our final telos, rest.Footnote 44 As Volker Drecoll puts it, in this long prayer full of praise to God and confession of sins, Augustine addresses God; and ‘He presents himself to the reader as the object of God's grace. His life is not interesting as such, but as the place where God's grace operates.’Footnote 45
Three brief remarks will suffice to establish the primacy of God's grace in the Confessions. First, Augustine speaks of the effects of his conversion by using the phrase ‘your converting me to yourself (convertisti enim me ad te)’.Footnote 46 As Nicholas Wolterstorff observes, in the account of Augustine's conversion in Book 8, there is a complete absence of the language of ‘decision’ or ‘will’. Instead, there is ‘the language of being overcome’.Footnote 47 Faith is what enables calling upon God, and faith is God's gift through the Son.Footnote 48 Second, grace also works in formation. Augustine seeks God's help to overcome temptations vis-à-vis the senses, the intellect and his relationship with others,Footnote 49 and he repeatedly asks, ‘Grant what you command, and command what you will.’Footnote 50 According to Drecoll, this (at least in the Confessions) is ‘the core of Augustine's theology of grace’.Footnote 51 Third, grace also works in introspection and ascension. To participate in truth, the soul must be enlightened by God.Footnote 52 Augustine writes, ‘When I first came to know you, you raised (adsumpsisti) me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being.’Footnote 53 Peter King points out that the use of ‘adsumpsisti’ – a term used both for Mary's assumption to heaven and for the Son's assumption of human nature – indicates that Augustine sees his ascension not as a result of his own agency but as a result of divine assistance.Footnote 54
Most importantly God's grace extends to the domain of memory and confession. For Augustine, God causes recollection: ‘“What shall I render to the Lord?” (Ps 115:2) who recalls these things to my memory.’Footnote 55 God had been in his memory all along, even while Augustine had been indulging in creation.Footnote 56 Hochschild explains that Augustine has memory of God because ‘God contains human memory, and in doing so fills it, illumines it, and speaks to it in a language it comprehends.’Footnote 57 Furthermore, as Breyfogle notes, God's grace operates on Augustine's memory, ordering memory through imagination.Footnote 58 By implication we can say that grace provides the grounds for confession, as Augustine writes, ‘My God, to whom your mercies make it possible for me to make confession’.Footnote 59 The same applies to forgetting. As quoted above, someone must enable rest, grant God's entry into Augustine's heart and cause forgetting.Footnote 60
At this point one must not err by disregarding human effort. For Augustine still believes that he is the one who ‘run[s] through’ his ‘memory’Footnote 61 and tells his story ‘to the best of my [his] ability’. He is the one who responds to God's will by confessing to God.Footnote 62 After forgetting, it is Augustine who embraces God.Footnote 63 Hence the journey to rest involves both God's grace and human response. One is not diminished by the other. As Carolyn Hammond writes, ‘The title Confessions, therefore, tells the reader to expect a conversation, which it depicts as a dialogue, in which the voice of the divine interlocutor is represented by evocations of Scripture.’Footnote 64
The whole Christ
How then does grace operate? At the end of Book 10, concluding that only God's grace can bring him back to God, Augustine asks, ‘Who could be found to reconcile me to you?’Footnote 65 The answer (as one would expect) is Jesus Christ, who is both human and God,Footnote 66 the true mediator revealed by God in his mercy.Footnote 67 Only through Christ Jesus who intercedes for us can one enjoy God.Footnote 68 This mediation occurs through the Word. Hochschild writes that, for Augustine, ‘God creates in principium, in his Word – through which Word, in person and in scripture, he seeks to bring man back to him again.’Footnote 69 Specifically, the Psalms – the voice of Christ – mediate God's grace and Augustine's confession. The remainder of the essay will show how such a Christo-psalmic mediation is at work in the Confessions. But before we turn to the use of the Psalms in the Confessions, we must first understand Augustine's theology of the Psalms.
Augustine interprets the Psalms christologically.Footnote 70 He writes, ‘If we want to keep to the path of correct understanding we must apply the whole psalm to Christ.’Footnote 71 Augustine grounds his interpretation of the Psalms in his soteriology. For Augustine, Michael Fiedrowicz explains, Christ participates in humanity and humanity's weakness, so that humans can participate in the divine life.Footnote 72 The key passage, for Augustine, is Psalm 21 [22], where he identifies the words of Christ on the cross. According to Michael Cameron, Augustine followed Paul's contrast of Adam and Christ (Rom 5–6), and saw the sinner crucified on the cross with Jesus. Life was exchanged for death when Christ ‘took up’ Adam's voice.Footnote 73 Cameron writes, ‘Augustine “triangulates” the words of the Psalmist, the words of the Savior, and the words of the Apostle: the plaintive cry of Psalm 21:2 fuses with Christ's cry of dereliction in Matt. 27:34 (Mark 15:34), and with Paul's articulation of our redemptive union with him in Rom. 6:3–9 (especially v. 6).’Footnote 74
Christ not only spoke on the cross for humanity, but Christ still speaks for humanity in the present as the head of the body, the church. In his sermon on Psalm 85 (referring to Psalm 21), Augustine delineates the consequence of God granting the Son who is both divine and human to be the head of the church:
The consequence is that when we speak to God in prayer we do not separate the Son from God, and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself. The one sole savior of his body is our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us, prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, and he is prayed to by us as our God. Accordingly we must recognize our voices in him, and his accents in ourselves. … We pray, then, to him, through him and in him; we speak with him and he speaks with us.Footnote 75
When we pray with the Psalms, Christ is speaking.Footnote 76 Because Christ represented humanity and spoke for them on the cross, members of Christ can confess to God.Footnote 77 The implication is threefold. First (as Michael McCarthy points out), the voice of Christ renders the psalm ‘our address to God’. Second, the psalm also becomes ‘God's address to us’.Footnote 78 And, third, the psalms spoken apply to the whole Christ.Footnote 79 Fiedrowicz explains, ‘Christ can only be the true bearer of the prayer if he is understood as “the whole Christ” (Christus totus), as “one human being” (unus homo) in the unity of a Head and body.’Footnote 80 In sum, God speaks to us through the Psalms; we speak to God through the Psalms; and this exchange applies to not just a single confessor but the members of the body of Christ.Footnote 81
Christo-psalmic mediation
The Psalms guide Augustine's confession.Footnote 82 One can identify in the Confessions the threefold way in which the Psalms operate, that is, our address to God and God's address to us, which work in the context of the church. First, the Psalms are used to address God in the present, that is, in the moment of confession. We see this in at least two ways, the first of which is Augustine's declaration of his understanding of who God is. For example, he writes, ‘“You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (Ps 47:2): great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable” (Ps 146:5).’Footnote 83 With his understanding of God, second, the Psalms are used as Augustine's (and the whole Christ's) voice to approach God. For instance, Augustine would say, ‘“Lord hear my prayer” (Ps 60:2) that my soul may not collapse (Ps 83:3) under your discipline (Ps 54:2), and may not suffer exhaustion in confessing to you your mercies, by which you have delivered me from all my evil ways.’Footnote 84 One also finds such a usage at the beginning of a book (e.g. to introduce the twenty-ninth year of his lifeFootnote 85). So not only do the Psalms express a range of Augustine's emotions,Footnote 86 but they also express his emotions (and thoughts) to God. In other words, the Psalms are like pillars in the Confessions, drawing together Augustine's thoughts and emotions to call upon God in the present through the act of confession.Footnote 87 Calling upon God becomes a reality because the Psalms are the voice of Christ.
Next, God addresses Augustine through the Psalms, where the Psalms are used to interpret Augustine's past. For example, Augustine tells how his mother admonished him against fornication and how he neglected it. As he looks back, he sees that they were God's warnings through Monica: ‘In her you were scorned by me, by me her son, the son of your handmaid your servant (Ps 115:16).’Footnote 88 Similarly, the Psalms give meaning to his past, especially with respect to sin. For instance, about his adolescent years, he writes, ‘As an adolescent I went astray from you (Ps 118:76), my God, far from your unmoved stability.’Footnote 89 Or, ‘I was in love with love, and I hated safety and a path free of snares (Wisd 14:11; Ps 90:3).’Footnote 90 The Psalms are woven into Augustine's account of his past, which is thus rendered into a coherent narrative. As Rowan Williams explains, ‘The psalm is a meaningful narrative structure, a history of the soul. And souls only have a history in conversation with God.’Footnote 91 While we cannot have perfect knowledge about ourselves in the same way as we know an entire psalm as we sing it, we can ‘imagine a wholeness of experienced history in our lives as if life itself were a text, as if the remembered story of our conversation with God represented part of an intelligible narrative or a single song’.Footnote 92 The Psalms, therefore, help one to understand him or herself in terms of a narrative.Footnote 93 Put differently, Christ illuminates Augustine's history, rendering it into a narrative in relation to God. It is through the Psalms that Augustine is gathered in Christ as one to ‘forget’ his past evil, while focusing on God.
Thirdly, the use of the Psalms in the Confessions entails a communal ascent. Augustine wrote with an audience in mind,Footnote 94 so that his confessions would be an example for them. More can be said. The totus Christus guards against confession as an individualistic act. Augustine gave priority to the voice of the church over the voice of the individual. Either one belongs to the church or does not.Footnote 95 For Augustine, to borrow the words of Fiedrowicz, the church is ‘the only sphere of experience within which an understanding of the psalm's words becomes at all possible for the individual. Only through membership of Christ's body can the praying individual enter fully into the experience articulated in the psalm and make it his own.’Footnote 96 And as Hochschild puts it, the ‘public nature of the act of confession’ is ‘a corporate work of meditatio’; ‘it is the very constitution of the Church on earth’.Footnote 97 At the same time, we would be mistaken to believe that the individual is lost in the crowd of the church. Augustine writes, ‘[E]ach one of us should at the same time hear his or her own voice since we are organically parts of Christ's body’.Footnote 98 Each member is preserved. Hence, though confession is ultimately a communal act, the individual is responsible for his or her own confession. Personal and communal confession, forgetting and praise lead the members of the body of Christ to rest.
Conclusion
We can sketch the logical order of the operation of God's grace and rest in the Confession as follows. To recreate humans by the Spirit, God bestows his grace through Christ. As Augustine sees it, grace operates in the faculty of memory, which is malleable. Specifically, the mediating work of Christ through the words of the Psalms allows Augustine to hear God's address to him, resulting in understanding his life as a coherent narrative in relation to God. Christ's mediation also allows Augustine to address God in the present, to confess his sins and praise God. When Augustine – via his narrative – is gathered as one in Christ, he ‘forgets’ his past evils. Finally, grace and confession through Christ/the Psalms operate in the context of the church, which renders Augustine's confession and journey towards rest a communal one.
For Augustine, the confession of the church and each member of the body is never complete on earth, just as his ascension with Monica was momentary.Footnote 99 In his sermon on Psalm 38 he cites Philippians 3:12–14 and comments that in his effort to follow the heavenly call, he and the church have not yet arrived but are on their way.Footnote 100 Augustine says that his life would be full of God, if he adhered to God; but he cannot experience this in the present as he struggles over having both regrets and joy from the past.Footnote 101 The dynamic of God's grace and human response with confession is essential in our earthly journey towards heavenly rest, which we might partially taste on earth.Footnote 102 Indeed, Possidius tells us, Augustine himself in his last days read the penitential psalms – perhaps confessing – as he saw rest drawing near.Footnote 103
