In Book 9 of his Confessions, Augustine recounts that his mother Monica told him how ‘a weakness for wine gradually got grip upon her’ as a little girl.Footnote 1 After some time, so the story goes, God healed her from her bad habit. In this context, Augustine observes: ‘When father and mother and nurses are not there, you are present. You have created us, you call us, you use human authorities set over us to do something for the health of our souls.’Footnote 2 Even though at first sight this passage does not seem to pose any problems, one wonders about the exact meaning of the last part: etiam per praepositos homines boni aliquid agis ad animarum salutem. First, it is to be noted that Henry Chadwick's translation cited here leaves etiam untranslated. Moreover, it is not certain at all that Augustine really wants to say that God heals human souls ‘even by those human beings who are set over us’.Footnote 3 As the subsequent lines of this paragraph make clear, God freed Monica from her sin through her servant, who scoffingly called her young mistress ‘a little boozer’ (meribibulam).Footnote 4 This renders the phrase etiam per praepositos homines problematic, on the one hand, because the meaning of etiam (which often implies a kind of gradationFootnote 5) is unclear and, on the other, because it is difficult to regard Monica's servant as one of the ‘human authorities’. Nothing in the text compels us to identify this servant with the old famula of Monica's parents who, according to the preceding paragraph (9.17), was ‘vehement with a holy severity in administering correction and soberly prudent in her teaching’.Footnote 6 At any rate, the ancilla mentioned here (9.18) is depicted not as an authoritative person but rather as someone who quarrels with her young domina (that is, with Monica), not in order to heal or educate her but merely to irritate her.Footnote 7
Given these difficulties, it is unsurprising that conjectural emendations have been proposed. In his CSEL edition, Pius Knöll suggested to replace praepositos with reprobos.Footnote 8 If one adopts this conjecture, Augustine claims that God supports the health of human souls ‘even through base human beings’. Although this conjecture makes sense, it is rather hard to imagine how reprobos could have been corrupted into praepositos. Therefore, it is preferable to adopt one of the conjectures hesitantly proposed by Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694). With regard to our passage, the renowned French Jansenist remarks: ‘Iam pridem legendum esse suspicatus sum per perversos, vel per præposteros homines: quod secutus est autor versionis gallicæ. Cum tamen hic Mss. omnes cum editis consentiant, nihil ausus sum mutare.’Footnote 9 The French translation to which he refers is the translation by his brother Robert Arnauld.Footnote 10 In the Latin text printed in the margin of this translation, the Arnauld brothers preserve the traditional reading etiam per præpositos homines (as Antoine explains, because of the consensus among the manuscripts and the editions).Footnote 11 For two reasons, the conjecture praeposteros is to be preferred to peruersos. First, from a palaeographical point of view, praepositos is much closer to praeposteros than to peruersos. Second, since peruersus has a significantly higher frequency in Latin (and especially in Augustine) than praeposterus,Footnote 12 the conjecture praeposteros occupies the status of a lectio difficilior (which, according to a famous principle, is usually preferable to a more common and less difficult reading).Footnote 13
Surprisingly, the conjecture praeposteros disappeared in all recent editions.Footnote 14 This is due to Alfred Schröder's (rather feeble) defence of the reading of the manuscripts. According to Schröder, etiam must be understood here in the sense of ‘also’ (‘übrigens auch’). He paraphrases the sentence as follows: ‘[…] sonst waren es die Erzieher, die das Mädchen zur Tugend angehalten haben; jetzt aber konnte nur Gott helfen, der freilich ebenso der Wirkende ist bei den Erfolgen der Erzieher.’Footnote 15 This interpretation is quite strange: in contrast to what Schröder claims, it is not obvious—it is even improbable—that the relative clause starting with qui etiam per must be connected with the preceding story about the austere moral education Monica had received (this story actually ends some fifteen lines above).Footnote 16 It is much more likely that the relative clause qui etiam per […] salutem anticipates the subsequent part of the chapter. Furthermore, it would be bizarre to say, in the same sentence, that in the absence of human authorities God is present to human beings, while He also works through human authorities. If this were the meaning of the sentence, it would boil down to the platitude that God is always there. Schröder adds two other arguments against the conjecture praeposteros. He observes that the idea that ‘God elicits only occasionally (“gelegentlich nur”) something good from evil’ does not accord with Augustine's theology.Footnote 17 However, since Augustine does not assert here that God produces something good ‘only occasionally’, this argument is inadequate. Schröder's last argument is equally doubtful. In his view, it is unthinkable that Augustine would have expressed the fundamental idea that God brings forth something good from evil in a subclause.Footnote 18 However, if this were unimaginable, the same could be said about the two other relative clauses in this sentence, but as a matter of fact Augustine uses also subordinate clauses to designate God as the creator who calls human beings.
Despite their flaws, Schröder's arguments appear to have convinced James O'Donnell. In his monumental commentary on the Confessiones, he notes:
Neither [that is, neither reprobos nor praeposteros] would allow A<ugustine> a hint of sarcasm. […] The phrase ‘inimici litigantes’ below seems to answer to this phrase. A<ugustine> is, on the one hand, hard on the maid there (‘insania’ is rather strong), for being angry and looking out for her own neck rather than trying to help M<onica>; on the other hand, the maid is clearly praeposita at this stage in M<onica>’s life.Footnote 19
These observations are partly obscure or even false. The sentence to which O'Donnell refers—‘Just as flattering friends corrupt, so quarrelsome enemies often bring us correction’Footnote 20—corresponds only vaguely to the subclause under discussion. As said, Augustine does not present Monica's antagonist as her praeposita but rather as a defiant servant, that is, as a subordinate who should not have sneered at Monica.Footnote 21 In addition to this, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose some kind of hidden irony (let alone sarcasm) in this passage. Augustine's oxymoronic claim that ‘even from the unhealthiness (insania) of one soul’ God ‘brought healing (sanasti) to another’ should be taken seriously.Footnote 22 This claim indicates that he regards the ‘insane’ servant as one of the ‘wrong-headed human beings’ through whom God produces something good. Here it must be underlined that Augustine employs insanus, peruersus and praeposterus as quasi-synonyms: in several contexts, indeed, he closely links either the first two or the last two adjectives (or words derived from them) with each other.Footnote 23
In support of Arnauld's conjecture, three more points should be kept in mind. First, Augustine's phrase praeposteros homines may be reminiscent of a passage from Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum, where politicians, ‘who, after having been elected consuls, started to read the histories of their ancestors and the military rules of the Greeks’, are characterized as praeposteri homines (‘people reversing the right order’).Footnote 24 Since this iunctura is not found in any other classical or late antique author, it is not entirely implausible that Augustine borrowed it from the Roman historian whose literary style he admired so much.Footnote 25 Second, the anaphoric and climactic tricolon qui creasti, qui uocas, qui etiam per praeposteros homines boni aliquid agis ad animarum salutem culminates in a thought-provoking paradox (centred around the near oxymoron praeposteros homines boni aliquid). As is well known, the paradox is an important figure of thought in Augustine's rhetoric.Footnote 26 Third, and most relevant, the syntagm etiam per occurs in a number of other passages that also convey the main idea of Conf. 9.18, namely that God does good to human beings even by making use of sinners. According to Augustine, God sustains his people not only through the righteous ‘but even through Saul, who was condemned in all respects’; ‘even through Caiaphas, the Lord's most cruel persecutor, who did not know what he said, He uttered a momentous prophecy, namely that Christ ought to die for the people’.Footnote 27 The divine truth can be heard ‘even through bad and unknowing human beings’,Footnote 28 for instance ‘even through the hired servants’, who (unlike the good shepherd) abandon the flock, that is, ‘even through evil teachers’.Footnote 29 Writing about heretics, Augustine maintains that ‘even by them we are apparently warned of the end of the world’.Footnote 30 When the Pauline author of the First Letter to Timothy says that he ‘delivered some men unto Satan so that they may learn not to commit blasphemy’, Augustine takes this to mean that ‘[the Apostle] thought it good to better bad people even through the bad’.Footnote 31 This idea lies at the very heart of Augustine's theology of redemption. In his view, ‘God, our Redeemer, would not allow these things [namely extremely pernicious errors] to arise if it were not useful for his saints to be disciplined even through such temptations’.Footnote 32 More generally, ‘God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist’.Footnote 33 Accordingly, Augustine holds that God has not unreasonably created those who He knew would become evil, because ‘those who are fair and pious make progress even through the unfair and impious’.Footnote 34
Even evil and evil-doers have a crucial pedagogical role to play in Augustine's well-ordered universe.Footnote 35 This is also the theological upshot of the anecdotal episode about Monica and the ‘preposterous’ servant.
