Intertextual Tension
The Aeneid of Vergil and the Psalter traditionally attributed to David so influenced Augustine's writing that one scholar has called the Confessions “a recapitulation of Vergilian epic in a Christian universe,” and another has described it as an “amplified Psalter.”Footnote 1 Since both works permeate Augustine's narrative, classicists and theologians have long studied the place of the Aeneid and the Psalms in the Confessions, but never in relation to each other.Footnote 2 Consequently, the dialogical quality of Augustine's text, which includes these radically divergent voices, has largely gone without comment. As paradigms of classical and biblical literature, however, the Aeneid and the Psalms contribute to the formation of the author's own voice and affections. Ancient readers, for instance, widely recognized Vergil's epic as the work of the summus poeta, a book with prophetic powers and the crown of Roman literature to be emulated by all Latin writers.Footnote 3 Early Christians, in turn, regarded the Psalter as the fabric of constant prayer, a kind of compendium of all scripture pointing prophetically to Christ.Footnote 4 Thus, the Confessions represent a struggle among powerful voices and emotions frequently operating at cross purposes.
Although in the last half-century interest in the Confessions' artistic design has repeatedly turned to Augustine's use of literary sources, new perspectives have complicated the issue of authorship.Footnote 5 Recognition of the intertextual quality of all writing has shifted scholarly focus from an author's originality to a text's embeddedness within antecedent traditions. Thus, to regard the Confessions as a recapitulation of the Aeneid or an amplified Psalter is to make a claim that far exceeds traditional understandings of Augustine's literary selection. The Confessions can now be seen as thoroughly interwoven with previous textual systems that even oppose each other. Literary studies in the last few decades have insisted that all texts absorb and transform previous discourses, yet not necessarily in a way that resolves tensions.Footnote 6 If the Confessions include a mosaic of both conscious and unconscious allusions to the Aeneid and the Psalms, the result epitomizes the clash Augustine felt between a culture dominated by the ancient classics and a new one formed by scripture.Footnote 7 What Daniel Boyarin notes about conflicts represented in the intertextual quality of Midrashic writings may also describe the Confessions: it “embodies the more or less untransformed detritus of the previous system. These fragments … and the fissures they create on the surface of the text reveal conflictual dynamics which led to the present system.”Footnote 8 This intertextual character of writing does not necessarily imply the intentional juxtaposition of sources on the part of the author. Rather, it demonstrates the way every writer or speaker is constituted by discourses he or she has read and heard.Footnote 9 Even if Augustine never draws an explicit comparison between the Aeneid and the Psalter, he does show that these texts powerfully shaped him in different, even discordant ways. The unique dialogue between the Aeneid and the Psalms within the Confessions, therefore, reveals not only how words—whether the words of the poet or the Word of God—construct Augustine, but also how various narratives inculcate conflicting patterns of emotion in him.
In this article I will demonstrate that Augustine presents the Aeneid and the Psalms as embodying incompatible forms of life. Each possesses a distinct cultural authority as well as a characteristic speech or voice to be imitated. By assimilating each voice, the speaker cultivates a set of emotions that represent and regenerate particular types of social relationships and cultural scripts. For the mature Augustine, Vergil's epic produces a template for an imperial culture that institutionalizes a disordered drive to exalt oneself over others and to effect one's own will.Footnote 10 The Psalms, by contrast, offer a therapeutic program to heal a disordered fixation on self and to help a person gradually cling to God. The Confessions show Augustine adopting the words of each, but the Aeneid abets his own ambition to garner praise from others while the Psalms reorient his desire so that he wishes to praise God alone. The classical poem elicits emotions deriving from false posturing and pride; the biblical songs enact the humble acceptance of one's true status as a creature.
Furthermore, such tensions between classical and biblical voices within the Confessions betray conflict among late-fourth-century textual communities as well as an underlying anxiety Augustine feels toward the use of language itself. As the art of moving souls through words, ancient rhetoric implied “a system of formal values”Footnote 11 and the diligent fostering of literary norms. These norms were rigorously maintained through appeal to massive imposing authorities such as Vergil. The Aeneid, above all, constituted a kind of “cultural scripture,” which not only exemplified proper literary style (Latinitas), but also perpetuated the ideals of the Roman imperium. The grammatici and rhetores who maintained standards of Vergilian eloquence (among whom the young Augustine was a rising star) had the important political function of propagating the imperial values that Vergil represented.Footnote 12 Moreover, they found themselves, through imitation and intertextual allusion, implicated within the same value system and affective patterns they reproduced. After Vergil, students of rhetoric would strive to emulate the great poet's talent at evoking a range of emotions through a wide variety of strategies.Footnote 13 By the late-fourth century, however, venerable classical models such as Vergil faced rivals. Many of the grammatical texts of this time attempted to galvanize classical culture against a growing Christian community that looked to very different literary paradigms. The commentary by Servius (ca. 380–425), In Vergili carmina, even promoted Vergil as a religious authority, and in his Saturnalia (ca. 431), Macrobius reacts against the kind of critique of pagan literature found among Christian authors.Footnote 14
In contrast to the epic authority of the Aeneid, the Psalms exercised a very different kind of influence among Christians of late antiquity. The rise of monasticism and ascetical custom throughout the fourth century had fully secured the Psalms' dominance as the prayer of the church. Though sometimes illiterate, the desert monks learned large sections of the Psalter by heart, and the use of the Psalms quickly spread beyond the monastic cell.Footnote 15 Augustine recounts that Monica joined Ambrose's Milanese congregation when it spent a whole night in the church singing hymni et psalmi in face of the persecution of the Arian empress Justina.Footnote 16 The sheer popularity of the Psalms as a source for a living biblical texture for Christians from a broad spectrum of social strata explains why patristic exegesis on David's book proliferates far more than commentaries on any other biblical text.Footnote 17 Such commentaries, moreover, routinely stressed the Psalms' power to cure destructive emotions.Footnote 18 The Alexandrian patriarch Athanasius indicated that, unlike other scriptural books, the Christian may read the Psalms “as if he himself were speaking,” and find in them “the remedy and corrective measure” for a vast range of affections.Footnote 19 Like Augustine after him, Athanasius believed that the Psalms anticipate Christ's humility in the incarnation and that, by patterning ourselves after the Psalms, our affective dispositions are modeled after that of the living image of perfect virtue.Footnote 20
Given the larger literary and cultural competition in the late-fourth and early -fifth centuries, therefore, the way Augustine constructs the Confessions out of diverse sources represents a strange paradox. On the one hand, he seems to reject the Aeneid while, on the other hand, he models portions of his own narrative on it.Footnote 21 To explain this apparent contradiction one scholar contends that Augustine redeems Vergil for the Christian by suggesting a kind of spiritual reading of the Aeneid.Footnote 22 I, by contrast, argue that in his Confessions Vergil is as unredeemed as Augustine himself. The Aeneid remains a kind of literary foil to the Psalms: the poem relating the “wanderings of some fellow called Aeneas” constitutes an anti-type to those “songs full of faith, outbursts of devotion” that Augustine discovers in Milan.Footnote 23 Vergil's evocation of Roman pride and disordered affection, which Augustine associates with his early life, contrasts with the Psalms' fostering of Christian humility. Since Augustine intends the Confessions to mark his spiritual progress, throughout the narrative allusions to the epic are overwhelmed by great swells of biblical verses. Even so, vestiges of the Aeneid recur up until the culminating vision at Ostia in Book Nine. Augustine has not thereby baptized Vergil. Rather, he can no more escape the influence of his classical past than he can presume to be the author of a new Christian “self.”Footnote 24 As Peter Brown notes, in the Confessions the “then” of the young man is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the “now” of the bishop. “The past can come very close: its powerful and complex emotions have only recently passed away; we can still feel their contours through the thin layer of new feeling that has grown over them.”Footnote 25
Like Augustine's enduring internal conflicts, therefore, the relationship between classical literature and scripture within his narrative reflects more of an uneasy truce than a clear triumph of latter virtues over former vices.Footnote 26 As he internalizes the voice of the Psalms, he signals his unease with Vergilian discourse. In what follows, then, I will show how the presence of the Aeneid and the Psalter in the Confessions represents this conflict and shift between major signifying systems. A focus on Books I and IX will make this dynamic especially clear. Both at the level of the work's overall narrative structure and within specific passages, we witness the selective assimilation of competing voices and hear their reverberating echoes. While Augustine valorizes the voice of the Psalms and rejects that of Vergil, fragments of the latter are never eliminated but remain as indications of the ideological tension that Augustine inhabits.
The Aeneid in the Confessions
Structural and Thematic Echoes
Although Augustine's explicit references to the Aeneid are few, the shadows of Vergil within the narrative of the Confessions are deep.Footnote 27 The whole structure of the Confessions may be understood as resembling the great Roman epic. In pursuit of his destiny, the hero wanders from place to place while endangered by snares, tempted by pleasures, graced with divine aid, and led by occasional visions. At key moments in the Confessions we hear echoes of the Aeneid. When the boy moves from Thagaste to Carthage, his reference to the “din of scandalous love affairs” intimates Aeneas's liaison with the North African queen Dido.Footnote 28 In Carthage Augustine enters into a relationship with a woman he will later dismiss and abandon. His disavowal of marriage, like Aeneas's in the fourth book of the epic, leaves him free to pursue his own vocation in Book VIII.Footnote 29
Divine revelation and command precipitate both protagonists' change of heart. For Aeneas, lingering in North Africa and avoiding his mission, it is the word of Mercury who bears the message from the father of the gods: “Astonished at such a great warning and command of the gods, he burns to depart in flight and to leave behind these sweet lands.”Footnote 30 For Augustine, dithering over Christian commitment and hesitating to convert, it is the reading of Paul's letter to the Romans in answer to the child's voice to “pick up and read”: “No sooner had I reached the end of the verse than the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades fled away.”Footnote 31 Although Augustine patterns his own reading of Paul not after Book IV of the Aeneid but after the story he relates of the court officials' reading of Athanasius's Life of Anthony, this famous scene unmistakably reflects the common practice of divination noted in Book IV of the Confessions. A person looking for guidance in the pages of some poet, particularly Vergil, finds a line that is “wonderfully apposite to the question at hand.”Footnote 32 Paul's letter to the Romans falls into the custom of sortes Vergilianae.
Augustine leaves Carthage for Rome far more easily than Aeneas, yet even here his departure betrays similarities to his epic counterpart. Aeneas steals away without telling Dido, just as Augustine slips away from Monica. Her cries resemble those of Dido, and Augustine's portrayal of his mother's reaction fits Vergil's characterization of the noble heroine at the end of Aeneid IV. When Monica comprehends that Augustine had taken flight, she “becomes insane with grief and cries” (insaniebat dolore et querellis), just as Dido, “conquered by grief, became mad” (concepit furias evicta dolore).Footnote 33 Later in the Confessions Monica appears in the guise, not of Dido, but of Aeneas's father Anchises. When Augustine sits with Monica at the window in Ostia, we can feel the Vergilian parallel. Resting from the labors of one long journey while preparing for another, Augustine looks over a garden and shares with his mother, who is about to die, a vision of eternal glory.Footnote 34 Similarly Aeneas, midway in his odyssey from Troy to Rome, contemplates with his dead father the future glory of the empire assembled in a green meadow.Footnote 35 Augustine's literary modeling exemplifies the ideal of those highly educated citizens who had “absorbed books so completely that they could exhale them.”Footnote 36 Thus, when Augustine speaks of the apparent fickleness of justice, he alludes to Mercury's suggestion in the Aeneid that a woman in love is varia et mutabilis, and in describing his young mother's readiness for marriage, he uses an expression, plenis annis nobilis, that Vergil coins to describe the Latin princess Lavinia.Footnote 37
Double Voicing and Emotional Conflict
Although the narrative structure of the Confessions bears similarities to that of the Aeneid, intimations of the epic always occur within a weave whose primary thread comes from the Psalms. Augustine's easy allusion to Vergil points to the long and labored process of rhetorical education that provides young men with stock phrases and poetic constructs worthy of emulation. The Confessions suggest not only that Augustine had learned his trade well but that his own life had been “shaped by imitation of the epic.”Footnote 38 Yet even when Augustine shows how profoundly he has been shaped by the voice of Vergil, the voice of David constantly opposes. In his earliest reference to the Aeneid, for instance, Augustine describes how thoroughly classical mimesis formed both his ability to speak and his capacity to feel. When discussing his love of Latin literature taught by the grammatici, he recounts his initial encounter with those letters:
in which I was forced to memorize the wanderings of some fellow called Aeneas, while forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep over Dido, who killed herself for love, when all the while in my intense misery I put up with never a tear, as I died away from you, O God, who are my life.Footnote 39
Although Augustine's reference to “some fellow called Aeneas” may connote a sense of disdain, both the literary chiasm (Aeneae … errores oblitus errorum meorum) and the way he compares Dido's death to his own spiritual dying underscore how closely the author links literary identification, his learning of emotions, and his own experience. While it seems strange for a boy to identify with the suicidal leanings of the great queen of Carthage, it is precisely by internalizing set roles that Augustine comes to understand and interpret his own emotions. Culturally narrated scenarios as well as adopted speech patterns shape his affective experience.
As dearly as Augustine the boy loved to weep over Dido, the author of Confessions regards the experience as based in a misperception of reality. Although he sees the usefulness of learning letters, the elaborate fictions of Aeneas or Dido are part of the sin and vanity of life that the psalmist clearly describes. Thus Augustine alludes to the wanderings of Aeneas and the death of Dido only after quoting Psalm 77, which says to God that “I am flesh and a shadow that walks and does not return.”Footnote 40 The psalm's assertion that the speaker is a walking shadow before God is thematically linked to the emptiness of poetic fantasies. Yet the biblical voice constitutes a true confession because it addresses God without self-deception and acknowledges the speaker's lowliness with all sobriety. By contrast, as he describes it in Book I, Augustine's failure to detach his own affective life from the story of Dido implicates him in a self-indulgent illusion. Her plight, after all, is a fiction; his own misery is real.
The risk the later Augustine sees in Vergilian emotions as opposed to those arising from the Psalms is that they divert our attention from its proper focus on God and reinforce patterns based on falsehood. Although Augustine avers that God alone will satisfy a person's desires, he also recognizes that humans are habituated through scripted roles to look for satisfaction elsewhere. Thus, cultural paradigms consign individuals to emotional frustration. Augustine characterizes this paradox with consummate artistry. Word repetition and antithetical phrases in the following passage underline the perversity of weeping for Dido's death rather than his own death, which comes about, not by loving one who doesn't exist (Aeneas), but by not loving the very God immediately present to him. I present his question in lines that illustrate the structure of Augustine's text:
What is there more pitiful than a pitiful person not pitying himself, weeping for the death of Dido, which came about by loving Aeneas, while not weeping for his own death, which came about by not loving you, O God.Footnote 41
Note too how the balancing of a line of Vergilian hexameter (Aen. 6.457) with Genesis 3:19 highlights central contradictions arising from Augustine's emotional investment in a fictional structure.
I did not weep for these things; I wept for Dido “slain as she pursued her last moment by a sword,” while I myself pursued the last things created by abandoning you, going from dust to dust.Footnote 42
Augustine is not insisting that it is wrong to weep for a fictional character. To pattern his own emotional life on that of the great epic heroine, however, represents the kind of self-delusion and affective formatting that ends, not in the acceptance of his existence as given by God nor in love of neighbor, but in the pursuit of that which is unreal, inherently frustrating, and, for that reason, deadly. Weeping for Dido is an Ersatz compassion.Footnote 43 It is empty because it yields no substantive good for others or for oneself. Compare Monica's tearful pleas for her misguided son, described in words reminiscent of the psalmist: “[y]ou heard her and did not scorn those tears of hers.”Footnote 44 As we shall see, in Book IX of the Confessions Augustine will show how the Psalms train him to weep appropriately. These early passages, describing the misdirected pity and misery he feels as he identifies with characters from the Aeneid, are set within a contrasting range of psalm references stressing God's authentic mercy toward his own misery. Regarding his fascination with shows, Augustine begs: “Look with mercy on these follies, Lord, and set us free who already call on you,” and in describing his studies, he prays that he may not grow weary confessing God's acts of mercy.Footnote 45
Learning to Speak
Augustine's allusions to the Aeneid function within his larger presentation of his education. Throughout Book I of the Confessions, the learning of language is especially fraught with moral problems, precisely because it is associated with the imitation of cultural patterns that Augustine regards as disordered. Augustine diagnoses the disorder as the result of “friendship of this world” (amicitia mundi huius) rather than love of God, and in the very passage in which Augustine quotes Vergil, he also quotes two psalms. He describes the alienation following the “friendship of this world” in the words of Psalm 72:27: “fornication from you.”Footnote 46 The voices that urge him to imitate the epic are those of the wicked flatterers whom the Psalmist curses in Psalm 39:16 because they shout euge! euge! while not promoting what will give him real joy.Footnote 47 Thus Augustine sees his early identification with characters of the Aeneid as revealing a corrupt web of social relations in which he finds himself.Footnote 48 As the Psalms frequently show concern for the wicked tongues of others, throughout the first book of the Confessions, Augustine describes how crucially linguistic convention is bound up with an ambiguous cultural reality. While he may wish that he could learn to use language without being implicated in a complex arrangement of social practices, to cultivate the tongue is to find oneself immersed in an inherited semiotic system that produces questionable relationships and a false sense of “self.” Augustine describes his education as entry into a common “pact,” “agreement,” or “arrangement.”Footnote 49 As a child, for instance, he discovers that by arranging words in a certain way he can manipulate others, and thereupon he enters “more deeply into the stormy society of human life.”Footnote 50 Later he asserts that if he asked how to spell Aeneas's name, those who spoke truth would respond “in accordance with the settled convention which people have among themselves in fixing those signs.”Footnote 51
Linguistic arrangement, however, constructs a speaker's sense of value and emotion. By learning a language through narrative structure one is necessarily swept into the “irresistible flood of human custom.”Footnote 52 The grammatici may argue that through classical myth youths learn words, but Augustine points out that such a process is hardly innocent. A boy, he concedes, may learn the words imbrem (shower), aureum (gold), gremium (lap), and fucum (scam) through the story of Danaae's rape as represented in the text of Terence's comedy, but their particular grouping (quo pacto) provides more than a lesson in vocabulary: “In this arrangement they say that Jove once sent a golden shower into the lap of Danaae, a scam done to the woman.”Footnote 53 An adolescent looking at this same story depicted in fresco receives a divine lesson in rape and with joy proclaims: “What a god! Little man that I am, I cannot make the heavens thunder, but I can do that all too willingly!”Footnote 54 The fellow who, like Augustine, learns such things easily and imitates well, enjoys cultural approval: “on account of this I was called a promising lad.”Footnote 55 But we hear nothing of the girl he tricks nor how she feels. Furthermore, the boy's treatment of the rape as if it were a game reminds us of Augustine's own love of play, which he cannot dismiss as an expression of childhood innocence because it is so closely tied to the uncontrollable desire to gain victory over others and reflects the same craving he finds among adults. In fact, Augustine admits that he himself is overcome by this lust to be counted as excellent.Footnote 56 When he cannot win by legitimate means, he cheats, and yet becomes angry if he is accused. Such rage, if permitted to grow, develops into an adult orator's lust for fame, when with savage hatred (odio inmanissimo) and with the fury of his own spirit (per mentis furorem), he destroys a man in court through elegant speech.Footnote 57
Augustine finds the approval he receives to be far from harmless, because it ties his personal formation to a vast, largely unreflective imperial culture fired by the lust for domination and praise.Footnote 58 If throughout the Confessions Augustine artfully narrates his life in terms which allude to the great Roman epic, we must never forget Vergil's prominence among the classics that first provided the young rhetor with a kind of affective education.Footnote 59 Indeed, Vergil's ability to arouse pathos and involve his readers in the emotion of a passage was something devoutly to be emulated.Footnote 60 When he speaks of his own rhetorical abilities, for instance, Augustine describes his early prize-winning performance in which he turned Vergil's hexameters into prose and declaimed in the manner of the wrathful Juno. As the queen of the gods whose “slighted power” and “eternal wound” enkindle her rage against the Trojans, Juno has the first speech in the Aeneid, and it falls to the young rhetor Augustine to imitate her envious passion.Footnote 61 Such competitive exercises were common in ancient rhetorical education. Quintilian, for instance, prescribes that students imitate epic orations by changing them into their own words, and the effect of Juno's emotions on the hearer becomes an object of considerable interest to Macrobius.Footnote 62 In Augustine's case, the contestant who most effectively evoked the proper affectus of wrath and grief of Juno wins the day.Footnote 63
The ire of Juno presented particularly vexing theological problems to late ancient commentators on Vergil, but for Augustine Juno's wrath and grief over her injured pride reflects his own fragile affective state.Footnote 64 He criticizes not merely his appropriation of an angry mythological persona but the deeper motivation formatting his cultivation of emotions: the desire to be recognized as great and his fear, shame, anxiety, and rage at the possibility that he might not be so regarded. In the passage in which he first discusses the Aeneid Augustine suggests that he learned Vergil in order to hear the shouts of “well done! well done!” everywhere about him. Not to hear these cries was a disgrace.Footnote 65 Augustine likewise assumed the role of Juno, herself the apotheosis of injured pride, in order to enjoy the dubious rewards of praise.Footnote 66 His subsequent apostrophe to God highlights the emptiness and falsehood he finds in cultural scripts that emphasize self-glorification and in social practices motived by the desire for prestige and public acclamation. The contrast with scripture is striking:
What did it profit me, O God, my true life, that my speech was acclaimed above those of my peers and fellow students? Was it not all smoke and wind? Was there no other material on which I could have exercised my intelligence and my tongue? Yes, there was: your praise, O Lord; your praise in the words of scriptures would have supported the drooping vine of my soul, and then it would not have yielded a crop of worthless fruit for the birds to carry off.Footnote 67
Whereas in imitating Vergil's epic Augustine assimilates the expression of vicious emotions of a non-existent deity only to earn his own glory from an audience he addresses, he regards an education in scripture as conditioning him to address and praise the true God alone.
After commenting on this custom of relating terrible deeds in elegant style for one's own praise and honor, Augustine clusters together a number of references to Psalms in an apostrophe to God.Footnote 68 The vacuity of the classical models he presents as leading him away from God differs from the steady progression of psalm verses that indicate movement back to the prodigal son's gentle father:
“You are exceedingly merciful and worthy of our trust” (Pss 102:8; 85:15).
“From this vast, deep sea you are even now drawing out to safety …” (Ps 85:13).
“… [a] soul that seeks you and thirsts to enjoy you” (Pss 41:3; 62:2).
“I have sought your face, O Lord, your face will I seek” (Ps 26:8).
In contrast with the way the Psalms move his soul, Augustine thus characterizes his rhetorical training as schooling his soul in falsehood from the beginning.Footnote 69 The falsehood of rhetoric, however, does not merely denote the artful use of language to stir people (which Augustine never abandons) but rather the production of a kind of fictional order, on which the speaker is emotionally dependent and in which the rhetor compulsively seeks to exalt himself over others.
In the theological view represented in the Confessions, rhetorical training reproduces again and again the archetypal sin of Adam and Eve: the attempt to replace God. The Aeneid, then, insofar as it represents the chief cultural authority of late antiquity by which proud rhetores might make themselves great, presents Augustine with a problem. Later, in composing the City of God, he uses a famous line from the Aeneid precisely to represent the arrogant spirit in which Romans commended themselves for something properly belonging to God, not the empire. “These will be your arts,” says Aeneas' father Anchises: “to spare the subjected and to wage war with the proud.”Footnote 70 In the Confessions Augustine uses Vergil in a manner that would earn any rhetor high praise. In respect to the larger theological purpose of the Confessions as “making truth,” however, Vergil functions in opposition to himself.Footnote 71 Allusions to the poet manifest the emptiness of the rhetorical art over which he is the supreme authority, the disorder of an educational system that shapes the emotional lives of young men around the desire for praise, the falsehood of an empire that makes itself the arbiter of all value and perpetuates its own dynamics of world dominance through a culture of self-aggrandizement.
The Psalms in the Confessions
A Different Tone
If Augustine characterizes his rhetorical formation as a gradual immersion into cultural narratives over which Vergil exercises great authority and which guide his quest for acclaim, he regards the Psalms as producing an entirely different culture and person. The very opening of the Confessions praises God in words suggesting at least three psalms: “Great are you, Lord, and worthy to be praised.”Footnote 72 Not only does this initial invocation to “you, O Lord” mark a significant shift in attention from the Aeneid's first focus on the “arms and man” of the Roman hero,Footnote 73 but it introduces a radically distinct anthropology. Augustine immediately presents the human being not as eager to be praised but as desiring—indeed created—to praise: laudare te vult homo … tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet (the human person longs to praise you … you stir us so that praising you will give us delight).Footnote 74 For Augustine, the drive for glory and self-satisfaction underlying a culture of pride proves self-defeating to a heart made “restless until it rests in you.”Footnote 75 Furthermore, unlike the rhetorical practice of reproducing a famous speech in one's own words, the opening lines of the Confessions are not Augustine's words but God's. Thus, they cannot be turned to the speaker's own praise.
At a non-theological, strictly linguistic level, however, the words of Augustine's Psalter have none of the polish so highly prized among the literati of late antiquity. They are truly humilia. Indeed, it may be difficult for us to appreciate fully just how much the style of scripture scandalized Augustine as “unworthy compared to the dignity of Cicero.”Footnote 76 Most of Augustine's Christian contemporaries never possessed a complete “Bible” as such. They encountered the writings of scripturae first and foremost by hearing them voiced, not by reading them as a text. Moreover, the scriptural “books” circulating in fourth- and fifth-century North Africa constitute what we now call the “Old Latin” (Vetus Latina) version of the Bible, an exceedingly awkward and literal translation of the Septuagint from the late-second century. To someone of Augustine's rhetorical background, the “voice” of such books must have sounded very peculiar. The vulgar sound of the Latin marked a serious fall from the Latinitas cultivated by rhetores and grammatici, and we must not underestimate the effect of this distinctive speech either in the social identity of a unique religious community or in the psychic formation of a member of that community.Footnote 77
Yet it was just such lowliness of style that made the Psalter available to a broader, more socially variegated community. In a commentary on Psalm 103:11 (“All woodland beasts will drink. The wild beasts will quench their thirst”), Augustine notes that, unlike the powerful torrents of Cicero or Plato, which are particularly forbidding to the uneducated, all social classes, the great and the small, are able to imbibe from the Psalms:
Imagine a voice resounding—Tully's perhaps. Some book of Cicero is read … Uneducated folk hear it, people of limited understanding. Which of them is bold enough to aspire to such works? These books are like crashing, turbulent waters, or at least like water flowing so dangerously that a timid animal dare not approach to drink…. Is there anyone who hears a psalm ring out and says, “That is above my head”? Take the strains of our present psalm, for instance; they conceal mysteries, to be sure, but so sweet are they that even children delight to listen to them. The unskilled approach to drink, and being satisfied they burst out into psalmody.Footnote 78
To Augustine these dynamics of the Psalter, which bring together persons of varied social positions, significantly contrast with classical literature, whose imitation and expression elevates the educated man above his fellows. Again, the person who through oratorical competition subtly interiorizes, for instance, the wrathful affectus of Juno grieving over her injured pride, will be more concerned in a court of law not to look bad than to avoid the rage through which he removes a fellow human from society.Footnote 79 By contrast, Augustine's immersion into linguistic patterns of scripture does not set him over others but places him with them. When he cites or alludes to Psalms in over 400 places throughout the Confessions, it is not simply a matter of showing artfulness or erudition. Rather, it reflects Augustine's immersion into the common liturgical life of fourth-century Catholic Christianity.Footnote 80 His daily recitation of the Psalms over the years colored his own self-understanding and self-expression.Footnote 81
In Book I of the Confessions, where Augustine describes his own education in speech and where we find the most explicit references to the Aeneid, some thirty or more allusions to the Psalms also appear. Yet in contrast to the language Augustine learns in order to move others, the language of the Psalms is granted, not mastered. The particular voice of the Psalms is that of humility before the creator, who is, in Augustine's view, completely other and alone worthy of praise. Furthermore, the apparent pretense of narrating one's own “autobiography” is severely undercut by language that continues to suggest that God could tell Augustine's story far better than he can. From the outset Augustine manifests the poverty of his own speech. In the proem of the book, for instance, after meditating on the difficulties of addressing God, Augustine asks, “What does anyone who speaks about you really say?” In words replete with Psalm verses, Augustine finally appeals to God whose aid he accepts in the form of scripture:
Through your own merciful dealings with me, O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say it so that I can hear it. My heart is listening, Lord; open the ears of my heart and say to my soul, I am your salvation. Let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you. Do not hide your face from me. Let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.Footnote 82
The passage is interwoven with verses that collectively establish the genre of confession. The plea for God to speak through “your own merciful dealings” echoes Psalm 106:8, 21, 31,Footnote 83 and the repetition of the prayer “Say to my soul, I am your salvation” is a direct quote of Psalm 34:3.Footnote 84 The appeal to God not to “hide your face” echoes a theme heard throughout the Psalter.Footnote 85 The expression of ardent desire for God's self-disclosure through the accumulation of imperatives—speak/say (dic, used four times), open (aperi), do not hide (noli abscondere)—emphasizes Augustine's longing.Footnote 86 The language of the Psalms reflects rightly ordered emotions because it focuses on God, not on the self.
The next paragraph, which concludes the proem, has an even higher density of Psalm citations. The quotation of Psalm 18:13, “Cleanse me of my hidden sins, O Lord, and for those incurred through others pardon your servant,” is speech that, with other psalm allusions, forms an antitype to the forensic rhetoric revealed at the end of Book I.Footnote 87 Instead of accusing and destroying another whom one cannot fully know in language that is deeply self-conscious, the Psalms are the words of a divine other, given to Augustine so that he can confess worthily and be rebuilt, not destroyed. Furthermore, the very confidence that the other knows what Augustine will say before he can himself formulate it removes the possibility of pretense and manipulation that characterizes the dynamics he learns from his society. His avowal, which evokes the Psalms—“I believe, and so I will speak (Ps 115:10). You know everything, Lord (Ps 68:6)”—suggests a transparency that grounds authentic speech.Footnote 88 Since God is immediately present to the heart, the only deception is self-deception: “For you are truth itself; nor do I wish to deceive myself, lest my iniquity be caught in its own lies (Ps 26:12). No, I do not argue the case with you, because if you, Lord, keep the score of our iniquities, then who, Lord, can bear it (Ps 129:3)?”Footnote 89 The language of the Psalms, for Augustine, recreates, rebuilds, and expands in a way that keeps all affections oriented toward God.
Book Nine: Learning to Speak Again
Although Book VIII is frequently considered the emotional climax of the narrative section of the Confessions, it is in Book IX that Augustine renounces the profession for which he had prepared his whole life. He presents himself for baptism, makes the famous ascent with Monica at Ostia, and grieves her death. The story of his conversion includes multiple references to losing and regaining his voice, and he finally learns to speak again through the Psalms. He knows it will please God to withdraw the ministry of his tongue from garrulity and to abandon a literature that served “lying insanity and forensic battles.”Footnote 90 Yet he presents his retirement from teaching the classics as coinciding with his espousal of scripture, which long before he had rejected because he was too proud to espouse a low style he regarded as “unworthy.”Footnote 91 Augustine describes this movement of his life with an unmistakable reference to the Psalms of Ascent.Footnote 92 The words of the Psalms penetrated Augustine and his companions to the core, while his own lungs failed, his tone became husky, and he could sustain no vocal effort.Footnote 93 Before he can speak again, his voice must be reconstituted, so that he can sing Psalm 26:8: “To you my heart has said, I have sought your face; your face, O Lord, I seek.”Footnote 94
While he does not mention Vergil by name, Augustine speaks of the learned conversation with his companions at Cassiciacum, where regular recitation of the Aeneid constituted a major part of the day.Footnote 95 He now desires to serve God, but his style carries the same academic pretense he had long ago learned in the “school of pride.”Footnote 96 His own companion Alypius even regards the name of Christ “unworthy” (dedignabatur) to be included in the transcript of their dialogues, for “he wanted them to smell more of the cedars of gymnasia, which the Lord has dashed, than of the Church's herbs, bringing health in face of serpents.”Footnote 97 Reference to gymnasia suggests schools in which he has trained his tongue, and the cedars of Lebanon (Ps 28:5) reflect the pride God alone can cure with a lowly herbal medicine.
At this point, after books in which he has made hundreds of allusions to Psalm verses, Augustine turns directly to the Psalms' therapeutic effect and their general accessibility to the life of one who prays them.Footnote 98 In this climactic scene, the voice of the Psalms heals the tumor of pride Augustine so closely associates with his rhetorical education. Immediately before noting his baptism, and at nearly the exact mid-point of the Confessions,Footnote 99 Augustine exclaims that at Cassiciacum the songs of David return him to health and provide him with a new voice:
What voices I gave to you, my God, when I read the psalms of David, those songs of faith, those sounds of devotion which excluded the proud spirit … what voices I gave in those psalms and how I was inflamed with love for you and burned to recite them, if I could, to the whole world as an antidote for the pride of the human race.Footnote 100
Augustine's repeated stress on “giving voice” to the Psalms not only implies contrast with his inability to speak from the “professorial chair of lying,” but looks even further back to his early account of learning to speak, where he threw his limbs and voice in an attempt to force others to do his bidding.Footnote 101 Thus we witness here the learning of a new speech, or better yet a “re-learning” of speech.Footnote 102 Whereas his former voice aimed at effecting his own will and satisfying his own desire for praise, this new voice “confesses.” It refashions Augustine's emotions and reorients them toward the God he had proudly resisted. Augustine burns (inflammabar, accendebar) to recite the Psalms because they have medicinal power to heal the entire human race of its inherited pride.Footnote 103 The universality of the Psalms, moreover, is commensurate with the strength of God's appeal: “All throughout the world they are sung, and there is no one who can hide from your heat (Ps 18:7).”Footnote 104
Assimilating Psalm 4
In Confessions 9.4.8–12, after making such a strong interjection about the Psalms, Augustine offers a prolonged reading of Psalm 4 and presents his emotional history in terms that follow its verses. Other scholars have argued that his exegesis duplicates the narrative structure of the Confessions as a whole and that his reading of the psalm before an imagined audience of Manichees has the function of persuading them to abandon their heresy.Footnote 105 Without contesting such claims, I would also argue that the reading represents a radical reorientation of his affective life by substituting the Aeneid and all it suggests with the Psalms. Unlike his boyhood exercise in which he fabricated an angry speech with words Juno never used, the point of reading Psalm 4 is to conform to the emotional pattern elicited by the scriptural locutions. The psalm begins with a confession of confidence that God hears when one calls (cum invocarem te, exaudisti me). Unlike the opening of the Aeneid, where the hero's first words are a cry of desperation against the cruelty of the queen of the gods, the psalm is addressed to “the God of my justice” (deus iustitiae meae).Footnote 106 Like Aeneas, Augustine finds himself in a moment of trial, but the divinity invoked in Psalm 4 leads him into spacious freedom (in tribulatione dilatasti mihi) rather than disastrous straits, and thus Augustine begs for pity: “Have mercy on me, Lord, and hearken to my prayer.”Footnote 107
The emotional climate surrounding his reading of Psalm 4 betrays multiple contrasts with his reading of the Aeneid in Book I of the Confessions. Whereas formerly he imitated the wrath of Juno, here he is indignant with the Manichees;Footnote 108 whereas in Book I he pitied a Dido who did not exist, here he pities real people with whom he once identified.Footnote 109 Unlike the empty grief he once felt for tragic stage events, Augustine's pain for the Manichees is finally oriented toward their authentic happiness.Footnote 110 He is moved with a vehement and bitter grief (vehementi et acri dolore) because they ignorantly refuse the sacramental medicine of scripture (illa sacramenta, illa medicamenta), which could make them healthy.Footnote 111 This insanity of the Manichees and their myths recalls the mirabilis insania he described in Book III, where he enjoyed the sorrow that fictional dramas generated in him, while he did not show the “truer mercy” (verior misericordia) of one who seeks the welfare and healing of a person in pain.Footnote 112
Throughout his extended reading, moreover, Augustine wishes to share the affections generated by the verses of the psalm, yet as a skilled speaker he knows the liability to duplicity. Hence, he desires that his witnesses be convinced of the sincerity of his emotion. Before and after his citation of the first line of the psalm, he says:
I could wish that they had been somewhere nearby, without my knowing it, and had gazed upon my face and listened to my voice as I read the fourth psalm in that place of peace…. Would that they had heard what these words of the psalm did to me, but heard without my knowledge, lest they think that it was for their benefit that I uttered words of my own, interspersed with yours! I would surely not have spoken, or not in the same vein, had I felt myself exposed to their ears and eyes; and even if I had, they would not have taken those words I uttered for what they were, the intimate expression of my mind, as I conversed with myself and addressed myself in your presence.Footnote 113
Although it is not clear whether Augustine imagines the Manichee listening to him read aloud or simply observing him as he reads in silence, the importance he assigns to his ignorance of another's presence (me nesciente … ignorante me) stresses the elimination of self-consciousness he has always encountered in using language. Since his infancy, he communicated with others in an attempt to recover from the mutual alienation human beings endured after the fall. The employment of signs, of which language is the most common form, intends to bridge the inner and outer worlds as well as to persuade the other towards one's own will.Footnote 114 Quite in contrast to the forensic art he teaches young men, then, his face and voice, both key aspects of an orator's carriage, are constituted in his reading of Psalm 4 with no reason to deceive. His speech before God expresses the innermost feelings of his soul, not the affectus he has learned to convey out of ulterior motives. Even the words he himself might speak in response to the psalm have an authenticity derived from their association with the divine word. Scripture has an efficacy that makes something of him.Footnote 115
The psalm's productive power derives largely from its nature as a direct exchange between God and Augustine. “Your good spirit” addresses him in the words of Psalm 4:3: “How long will you be heavy hearted, human creatures? Why love emptiness and chase falsehood?”Footnote 116 As a result, Augustine's fear, hope, and exultation in God's mercy yield candid expression through his own eyes and voice. Because he takes this verse as applying directly to his own pursuit of vanity and lies as a Manichee, he trembles as he hears it. These words “are addressed to the kind of person I remember myself to have been,”Footnote 117 yet Augustine hopes his own reaction as he recollects his former ways may move the presumptive witnesses, who continue to make the mistakes he did. Recognizing that he once accepted phantasmata in place of truth, “loud and strong I bewailed many an episode among my painful memories.”Footnote 118 Whereas once he identified emotionally with “some Aeneas” in wanderings that led him away from God, here the tearful remembrance of past sins is part of a narrative of return formatted by the psalm. Any current Manichee moved by Augustine's own lamentation might find in their sympathy for him a homeopathic cure: “Oh that they could have heard me, those who still love emptiness and chase falsehood! They might perhaps be so shaken as to spew it out, and then you would hear them when they cried to you.”Footnote 119 Augustine implies that God would hear them because they would now pray through the intercession of Christ, whom they accept as having had true flesh. For Augustine, confessing this “real death of the flesh for us” has the opposite effect of indulging in the death of Dido, as he did in Book I.Footnote 120
Augustine continues to read the psalm (legebam), whose next verse commands him “Let your anger deter you from sin.”Footnote 121 His avowal of being stirred by the verse (quomodo movebar) points again to the Psalms' power to arouse the emotions, but unlike other feelings of rage he has suffered, this anger is acceptable because it contributes to the correction of a sinner.Footnote 122 Thus it is a “fitting anger” (merito irasci), unlike any he felt as a Manichee, when he regarded sin as the product of an alien nature rather than a result of his own will.Footnote 123 Even before his association with the Manichees, he had learned to be angry for the wrong reasons, because his affections had been tied to self-centered patterns of communication. He was enraged, for instance, when his elders did not fulfill his interior desires and when his fellow nursling enjoyed the milk he desired for himself.Footnote 124 He imitated Juno's anger with the intention of securing his own praise.Footnote 125 Augustine's anger with himself over past sins recapitulates much of the content of the Confession, but the succeeding verses of the psalm move him from anger to a new kind of interior joy. No longer does he seek pleasures “by carnal eyes in the sunlight,” and he expresses his sympathy for those who “lick even the images of these things with their famished imagination.”Footnote 126 He wishes they would feel as he feels, and he imagines a dialogue in which he answers questions in the words of the psalm itself:
If only they would weary of their starvation and ask, “Who will show us good things?” (Ps 4:6). Let us answer them, and let them hear the truth: “The light of your countenance has set its seal upon us, O Lord” (Ps 4:7). We are not ourselves that Light which illumines every human being, but by you we are illumined, so that we who were once darkness may become light in you. Ah, if only they could see the eternal reality within! I had tasted it, and was frantic at my inability to show it to them; if only they would bring to me those hearts of theirs which lived in their outward-gazing eyes, outside and away from you; if only they would say, “Who will show us good things?”Footnote 127
Even with his education in rhetoric, Augustine does not have the power to lead others away from their own alienation. Somehow they must recognize their own interior fashioning after the light of God's countenance.
On the other hand, throughout his reading of Psalm 4, Augustine reaffirms the power of affective assimilation. He hopes that, by witnessing the depth of his own emotions, others may move toward conversion, just as he himself burned at the example of Marius Victorinus and the officials at Trier. When Augustine heard the story of the officials' emotional reading the Life of Anthony, he was wrenched back toward himself and set before his own face.Footnote 128 So too he hopes that Manichees and other readers of the Confessions may see themselves in Augustine's narrative and be turned by the progression of emotions that he recounts, in the words of Psalm 4, from his anger with himself (Ps 4:5a), to his compunction and sorrow (4:5b), and finally, after sacrificing himself (4:6), to joy in his heart (4:7). Images of physical location and sensation point to the spiritual sensitivity Augustine slowly cultivated throughout the narrative. Thus “you began to make me feel your sweetness.”Footnote 129 Because it is the Word of God, he suggests, the experience of reading the psalm heals the gap he had long hoped, through language, to bridge between his interior and exterior worlds: “As I read these words outwardly and experienced their truth inwardly I shouted with joy, and lost my desire to dissipate myself amid a profusion of earthly goods, eating up time as I was myself eaten by it; for in your eternal simplicity I now had a different “wheat and wine and oil” (Ps 4:8).Footnote 130
After acknowledging his new sustenance, he exclaims “with the deep cry of my heart” (clamore alto cordis mei) the penultimate verse of the psalm: “In peace! Oh, In Being itself! What did it say? I will rest and fall asleep” (Ps. 4:9).Footnote 131 The line suggests the eschatological goal sought by all human hearts, and it introduces a common Augustinian reflection: that God is Being itself, the immutable source and fulfillment of human desire. As in the beginning of the Confessions, Augustine stresses that in the end there is nothing besides God in which one may find rest: “nor … with striving for a host of other things that are not what you are, rather it is you, ‘you, Lord, who through hope establish me in unity'” (Ps. 4:10).Footnote 132 The initial invocation to the God of justice, therefore, culminates in a confession that one can be grounded and find personal coherence in God alone. No sooner does Augustine quote the final verse of Psalm 4 than he comments that, for all his passion for what he is reading, he himself can find nothing to do for those “deaf dead folk” insensitive to his emotion.Footnote 133 Although he can do nothing for them, his own reading of the psalm marks his own conversion from a time when he bitterly and blindly barked against honey-sweet scripture.Footnote 134
Immediately after this reading of Psalm 4, Augustine describes a toothache so grave that he cannot even speak. No longer a “word-peddler,” he can hardly breathe.Footnote 135 Once he is baptized, however, he finds his healing once again in the “singing church”: “Those voices flooded my ears, and the truth was still distilled into my heart until it overflowed in loving devotion; my tears ran down, and I was the better for them.”Footnote 136 Such wholesome tears are the result of an affectus pietatis generated by the recitation of hymns and psalms in nearly all parts of the earth. This new affect differs vastly from that which made him weep over Dido, and it endures through the end of Book IX, when a final allusion to Vergil occurs. As we have already seen, Augustine's and Monica's “vision” at Ostia resembles Aeneas's and Anchises's encounter in the underworld. The Vergilian scene was well known from theater as well as from the epic poem itself.Footnote 137 In spite of the literary parallels between the two scenes, including the setting in a garden, the context of a journey, and even the name of Ostia itself, the texture of Augustine's ascent is far more like his reading of Psalm 4 than it is like Vergil's depiction of the descent.Footnote 138 The speech intimates the unending Word of God precisely through a thick set of allusions to scripture, especially the Psalms.
When Monica herself dies, the Vergilian models of mourning appear to be replaced by a simple recitation of Psalm 100.Footnote 139 Yet Augustine still manifests traces of old emotions, and as therapeutic as his readings of the Psalms are, he remains emotionally conflicted to the end. The wounds he feels at the death of his mother are so great that he weeps for nearly an hour, and with some embarrassment he explains that he has been habituated to “carnal affection.”Footnote 140 Furthermore, even the singing of Psalms can present temptation. While acknowledging that souls are more “ardently enflamed with piety” when scriptural words are sung rather than spoken, he also admits that the sensuous gratification of music can itself become the focus of his desire rather than the Word of God.Footnote 141 Recalling how he wept when he first heard the Psalms being sung, he notes that Athanasius allowed only a slight inflection of voice, so that the words of the Psalter seemed proclaimed rather than chanted.Footnote 142 Though he claims to be moved more by substance than sound (non cantu sed rebus), this final passage relating the effect of the Psalms points to his continuing liability to be overwhelmed by the sweetness of music.Footnote 143 In this respect, the bishop still shows some affinity with the boy who once wept for Dido because the literary form was itself so moving. Still, in the context of the Confessions, Augustine looks to his reader for authentic compassion he did not know then: “Such is my condition: weep with me, and weep for me, you who feel within yourselves that goodness from which kind actions spring!”Footnote 144
Conclusion
Two and a half centuries after the young Augustine studied rhetoric, the Psalms had replaced Vergil as the literary authority to be emulated. A very new paideia had emerged. One early seventh-century Irish schoolboy dropped into the bog a set of his notebooks in which we can still read verses he inscribed from Psalms 30–32.Footnote 145 By 787 the full ecumenical authority of the Second Council of Nicea decreed that every bishop should have a complete knowledge of the Psalter.Footnote 146 In the Confessions, however, we witness an uneasy moment of transition and cultural tension. The Confessions reflects a literary space in which ancient Roman classics intermingle with the new Christian classics yet compete, as it were, for Augustine's soul and affections. Precisely within this dynamic state of competition Augustine comes to develop his own voice. This process is what the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls “ideological becoming,” which includes “selectively assimilating the words of others.”Footnote 147 Such assimilation is far from being unproblematic, since another's discourse aims not merely to be source of information and rules but “strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior.”Footnote 148 Vergil's Aeneid and David's Psalter, therefore, both aim, in such different ways, not only to dominate Augustine's own discourse but to format the way he sees and interacts with the world.
As the consummate rhetor, however, Augustine is always keenly interested in the power of discourses not only to evoke various affections but to give them meaning. Emotions, as movements of the will, have their own patterns of intelligence. Augustine weeps at the story of Aeneas and Dido, and he weeps as he hears the Psalms. In the former case, however, the trials he bemoans are of no consequence, whereas in the latter case the trials are his own. They are the very pith of his work, and he invites the reader to weep over him. Such wholesome sharing of emotions is a central feature of his mature theology of the Psalter, in which Augustine states that the Psalms are the vox totius Christi, the voice of the whole Christ. The voice of Christ's body, the church, that is, assimilates with that of the head, who assumed humanity in the Incarnation, so as to become one voice. The patterns of affection in the Psalms, therefore, reconfigure us into the person of Christ, and thus Augustine urges us to feel with the Psalms.Footnote 149 In the Confessions, however, diverging and unresolved emotions remain part of the conflict central to the movement of the narrative. The reader is invited to feel authentic compassion for Augustine in a way that he himself could never feel for Dido. He suggests that, to people who read the Confessions with proper affections, Augustine's own tensions will be the source of tears. He prays to God: “Do not, I entreat you, do not abandon your unfinished work, but bring to perfection all that is wanting in me.” Yet he does so with a community that will both sigh with relief as well as lament with him. “Let it be a brotherly mind,” he says, “which when it approves of me will rejoice over me, and when it disapproves will be saddened on my account, because whether it approves or disapproves it still loves me.”Footnote 150
c/ūtām
