The Theology of Augustine's Confessions by Paul Rigby

Author:Paul Rigby [Rigby, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

(which even if it is superseded is never abrogated) that “he who is delivered has good

ground for thankfulness, he who is condemned has no ground for finding fault,” 111

Augustine can ask in the next sentence,

“But if” it is said, “it was necessary that, although all were not condemned, He

should still show what was due to all, and so should commend His grace more

freely to the vessels of mercy; why in the same case will He punish me more than

another or deliver him more than me?” I say not this. If you ask wherefore;

because I confess that I can find no answer to make. And if you further ask why

this is, it is because in this matter, even as His anger is righteous and as His mercy

is great, so His judgments are unsearchable. 112

In the final sentence, the three discourses of moral “righteousness,” lyrical “mercy,” and

tragic “unsearchable” are configured together.

Wisdom teaches submission before an unverifiable faith:

This is profitable for us both to believe and to say, – this is pious, this is true, that

our confession be lowly and submissive, and that all should be given to God…. In

respect of what concerns the way of piety and the true worship of God, we are not

sufficient to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God. For “our

heart and our thoughts are not in our own power.” 113

Augustine’s silence is not an empty agnosticism, nor does he turn to the judicial. His

silence belongs to wisdom. In his silence he acknowledges, using words borrowed from

The Book of Wisdom (11:21) and from Paul in Romans (11:33), an inscrutable measure

beyond measure:

Only let us believe if we cannot grasp it, that he who made and fashioned the

whole creation, spiritual and corporeal, disposes all things by number, weight and

measure. But his judgments are inscrutable and his ways past finding out. Let us

say Hallelujah and praise him together in song; and let us not say, What is this? or,

Why is that? All things have been created each in its own time. 114

Predestination as inscrutable necessity demands the abandonment of recrimination and the

renunciation of moral narcissism with its interminable project of theodicy. Can one claim

that the moral vision shatters on the suffering of children and the innocent, and for

Augustine and his contemporaries, on the heartrending fact of their damnation, just as

surely as ours has before the untold sufferings of our own violent centuries? What is the

relation between evil as scandal and evil as fault? To what extent does the suffering of the

world surpass retribution? Can tragic pity lead us beyond theodicy with its ethical

rationalization of God’s holiness and its ancestral, communal sins set out before a

legislator God? In what sense does Augustine find himself alongside Job contemplating

the whole of creation before the Deus Absconditus?

Does tragic wisdom, with its inimical necessity for some, merciful necessity for

others, destroy the moral vision by surpassing it? Are inimical necessity and merciful

necessity to be held in a new tension or balance in which suffering can no longer be

simply chastisement? The Deus Absconditus of tragic theology permits of pity for justly

accused human beings, coupled with fear and trembling at the presence of the ineluctable

growing in concrete freedom: “Esau have I hated.” The second configuration, the

necessity of wisdom, resists logical, moral, or aesthetic reconciliation; one despairs of

meaning, of a world order. Wisdom offers only a non-narcissistic reconciliation beyond

recrimination. Here, we abandon our own viewpoint and learn to love the whole of

creation as it is and God for naught. Ricoeur describes the ascesis involved in abandoning

recrimination as “a renouncement of the infantile component of the desire for

immortality…. To love God for nought is to escape completely the cycle of retribution to

which the lamentation still remains captive, so long as the victim bemoans the injustice of

his or her fate. ” 115

Augustine’s response to the tragic supposes the full maturity of a moral vision of

God. In response, theodicy is born. With the failure of theodicy, he adopts an attitude of

submission, for there is no way to reconstruct the problem of evil by means of the moral

vision. Augustine wants us to abandon our search for “a private explanation, a finite

explanation,” 116 made to the measure of our own existence. If this is so, must he identify our freedom with inimical necessity; must he convert freedom and necessity into fate?

Some of the themes developed in Chapter 8 I have presented in abbreviated form in “The Role of God’s ‘Inscrutable Judgments’ in Augustine’s Doctrine of Predestination,” Augustinian Studies, 33 (2002): 213–22; “Augustine’s Use of

Narrative Universals in the Debate Over Predestination,” Augustinian Studies, 31 (2000): 181–94; “Original Sin,”

AttA, pp. 612–13.

9

The Lyrical Voice

Love me!

Why not make a clean break with the Augustinian tradition and, in particular, with its

doctrines of original sin, election, and predestination? The damnation of unbaptized

infants tormented many for more than a millennium. This teaching is now largely

discredited in the West along with Augustine’s predestination defense of religious

coercion. 1 Enlightenment thinkers chose to make a break. But in our violent centuries, we, the heirs of the Enlightenment, have suffered the consequences of its forgetfulness and

utopianism. 2 It has been my aim in this book to follow the way of critical remembering using the traditions deriving from the Enlightenment “to meet [Augustine] on his way, ” 3

so as to listen as one of the brethren, though never with the same immediacy.

The consequences for unbaptized infants of Augustine’s teaching on original sin and

for his religious enemies of his teaching on predestination and religious coercion are alien

and repugnant. Still, we are left with Augustine’s evident distress in attempting to handle

the repercussions of these beliefs. Augustine’s anguish suggests that his approach to these

teachings, his way of wrestling with these questions, might have been instructive for his

contemporaries.

Augustine resolves his decade-long struggle with dualism by ascribing the

ineluctable dimension of evil to freedom – the voluntary-involuntary – not to nature, and,

by establishing its historical reality, gives it ontological status. Even so, he must

acknowledge that he cannot understand the origin of evil choice. Original sin reveals a

profounder ignorance. It illumines the history of the experience of the sinful condition but

not its origin.

In our late modern world, we still use variations on tragedy’s narrative universals to

give voice to our helplessness in the face of the ineluctable and what Nabert calls the

“unjustifiable. ” 4 In Augustine’s day, the “heartrending” fate of unbaptized infants was the figure of “Suffering Itself.” In our day, Nabert’s “unjustifiable” figure of suffering is

trapped in genocidal civil wars and embodied in the drowned of the death camps. The

Auschwitz witness, Primo Levi, says: “The experience of the [Auschwitz] Lager with its

frightful iniquity confirmed me in my non-belief. It prevented, and still prevents me from

conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice: Why were the moribund

packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas? ” 5 Levi raises his voice in lamentation and disgust at the willed ignorance, indifference, and disdain he discovers for

people’s suffering in providence, election, or theodicy. 6

Tragedy can make no direct reply. It cannot transmit an alternative teaching. Tragedy

addresses itself to deliberation indirectly and then via the emotions “inasmuch as catharsis

addresses itself directly to the passions, not only in provoking them but in purifying them

as well.” 7 Augustine narrativizes his difficult apprenticeship to inscrutable wisdom with its “speculatively unavowable theology of divine blindness. ” 8 He journeys as a guilty victim through the persistent conflict identified in Manichean and Neoplatonic dualisms,

by means of the voluntary/judicial and the involuntary/impenetrable mystery of inherited

sin, to arrive at tragic self-knowledge. Here he abandons the search for a private, finite

explanation with its “platitudes of ethical monotheism.

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