On Self-Harm, Narcissism, Atonement, and the Vulnerable Christ by David Vincent Meconi;

Author:David Vincent Meconi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

(4) Fall from grace

The fourth component of the pear tree scene is found in Augustine’s description that in sinning he had in fact “leapt down from [God’s] strong support” into his own self-sufficiency. Is this not an echo of Lucifer’s own leap (Is 14:12) from the Father’s embrace into his own hell? Does Augustine not introduce this book by admitting that his adolescence was a time when he was blazing to be filled with hell? Lucifer is the first cast downward (Ez 28:16–17), as God the Father becomes the first to have ever lost a son. The dissatisfied Augustine presents himself here as an echo of the devil’s first fall from heavenly grace. Augustine the Prodigal has similarly reached the periphery of autonomy, above any restriction or commitment and has chosen to dwell apart from his loving Father’s embrace. Book 2 of the Confessions opens, after all, with Augustine’s admittance that as an adolescent he could not wait to be filled with the fires of hell (inferis), and even relates this confession to the dynamic of a tree and the shadows that inevitably fall from it:

There was a time in adolescence when I was afire to take my fill of hell. I boldly thrust out rank, luxuriant growth in various furtive love affairs …

Exarsi enim aliquando satiari inferis in adulescentia et siluescere ausus sum uariis et umbrosis amoribus …31

The terms inferis (lowly, hellish), siluescere (to run wild, woodsy), and umbrosis (shadowy, obscure) all foreshadow the pear tree and the subsequent darkness and consequent hell its violation brings about. To be filled with hell may be a way to be fed but it is no way to be satisfied.

This tricolon thus anticipates the main scene of conf. 2, setting the reader up nicely to understand how the pear tree scene is both the culmination of Augustine’s restless adolescences as well as the iconic moment which captures all other ungodly loves. Sin is to turn away from the deified life offered to all, and instead turn to the diabolical life of one’s own choosing (illa diabolica, ista deifica).32 It is to find oneself torn between loving God and loving self, to run away from God (following Adam into the thicket of shame at Gen 3:10) and thus be forced to find some level of contentment in one’s own shadowy self.

As we move to that scene in particular, then, we hear another descriptor for what Augustine’s soul does when it turns away from God. In choosing the Latin term dissiliens to describe his leap downward, Augustine is picking up on a word used as the abandonment of divine unity. This is what heretics and schismatics prefer instead of the solidity of orthodox doctrine or the community of ecclesia: whereas the truth of heresy shows a hatred of God, the divisiveness of schismatics proves a hatred of neighbor.33 Such “leaping from one place to another,” dissiliens, stems from a desire to be cut off from community and inevitably results in division and decay. It is most often used to describe the ontological privation of evil’s effects.

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