Three Studies in Augustinian Biography

What follows are three studies in which I pursue issues related to recounting the life of Augustine of Hippo. They came into being in the course of the 1990s, when I had completed my lengthy commentary on the Confessions and meditated again the long afterlife of Peter Brown's magisterial 1967 biography. Now (1999), Brown reports that he is preparing a new printing of the 1967 biography which will have a two-chapter epilogue, doubtless drawing upon the new Divjak letters and Dolbeau sermons discovered since the 60s (see note 50 below). The order of these essays, which really are drafts and fragments of thought towards a future work whose shape and date I would not care to predict, is roughly this: first, an essay on the challenges of writing and thinking about Augustine's life; second, a traditional narrative approach that seeks nevertheless to say some new things; third, a more systematic attempt to be comprehensive, brief, and yet evade some of the traditional temptations.

JO'D 14 July 1999

Those are the last words of the penultimate chapter of Peter Brown's magisterial biography.¹ This book, now nearly thirty years old, has exercised a huge dominion over the field of Anglophone Augustinian studies even in an age when those studies have exploded and flourished as never before. When an Anglophone reader begins to read Augustine, the first text read is still likely to be the Confessions, and I would surmise the third is City of God or some portion thereof, but to an extraordinary degree, Brown's biography is usually the second and sometimes the first. Certainly to those curious readers who come from adjacent disciplines to learn what they can of Augustine for their own purposes, the book is inescapable. Our Augustine is Brown's.

There was good reason for this ascent to eminence. In many important respects it was the first modern biography of Augustine, and it is still the only one. That is, it was the first narrative account that was both fully post-hagiographical and fully post-Freudian and that set out to construct a narrative of a man's life, not a bishop's. The early life of Augustine had long attracted biographical attention, but Augustine past the age of 45 and the writing of the Confessions offers so many challenges to the would-be biographer that he had been for the most part left alone. Brown accepted and mastered the challenge of maintaining narrative focus throughout. His success lay in a charismatic union of scholarship and interpretation. It is hard now to recapture the approving surprise with which this book was greeted, inasmuch as we have since come to recognize the master's style, even to track the efflorescence of its adjectives with guilty precision.

One characteristic feature of Brown's style and methodology probably comes close to encapsuling the power of the book. On the one hand, there is express disavowal of psychoanalytic interpretation: "The unexpected combinations, ramifications and resolutions that a properly sophisticated knowledge of modern psychology would lead us to expect, escape the historian." That sentence attracts a footnote: "The studies known to me ... [citing three landmarks of psychoanalytic interpretation of Augustine] show that it is as difficult as it is desirable to combine competence as an historian with sensitivity as a psychologist."² But eight pages later, in a sentence almost every reader of the book retains in memory, we hear him say "Far from being the libertine that some authors have imagined, converted at the age of 32 from a life of unbridled sensuality, Augustine was, in reality, a young man who had cut the ebullience of his adolescence dangerously short."³ That judgment is unintelligible to a reader, or from a writer, not deeply imbued with the platt-Freudianism of the twentieth century. That and similar turns of phrase led one scholar to call this book indeed "a 'closet' psychobiography."⁴ All our biographies today expect to be such, claiming no professional credentials but borrowing the interpretive apparatus.⁵ The sophistication of Brown's application, however, needs emphasis. What he had learned brilliantly at an early age was precisely the combination of narrative, interpretive, and investigative skills needed to produce a book in every way satisfactory to the biographical taste of his time.

To take one example of the transformation of Augustine at Brown's hands, consider the case of Julian of Eclanum. Brown's depiction of Julian as the youthful foil to the aging Augustine has been a central, if often barely acknowledged, part of the last generation's enthusiasm for working through Augustine's ideas on sexuality. Brown's Julian is an essential part of Brown's own later work, but also of that of countless writers of lesser erudition. But Julian is far from obviously the figure Brown makes of him. Hugh Pope's still essentially hagiographical biography of 1961,⁶ mentions Julian all of four times. Gerald Bonner's work of 1963⁷ mentions him only twice in the chapters devoted to "life".⁸ In Brown's account, he earns a chapter of seventeen pages of his own, and the narrative of Augustine's old age from that point on runs to a full fifty pages. This is not to say that Brown's reading is unduly emphatic; indeed, Brown is the first biographer to have worked so patiently through the mass of Julianic and anti-Julianic prose that survives. But Brown's reading, precisely because fresh and so far uncontested, has been decisive in a way that merits caution. The confident and polished young bishop, a liberal intellectual avant la lettre, is just the foil needed to set off Brown's depiction of Augustine as increasingly rigid, gloomy, and authoritarian. In an environment where Julian himself has not yet been the object of synoptic study on his own of adequate quality, a single powerfully effective account will take the day and encourage those who know it and little else to think that they have the story whole and complete.

Simply put, it is the power and success of Brown's biography that requires us, a generation after its appearance, to question it closely, to see what it has made of Augustine, and to question ourselves, to see what we now make of Augustine. The thought experiment may be put simply enough as this: what would the next life of Augustine look like?

II

To pursue that inquiry, I propose to take several soundings in Brown and in Augustine for comparative purposes. To begin, let us return to that deathbed scene and the commentary as quoted above. At that point, to the name "Plotinus", Brown appends this footnote:

"Plotinus, Ennead I,iv,7, (MacKenna 2, pp. 46-47); v. Pellegrino, Possidio, p. 226, n. 14, and Courcelle, Hist. littéraire, pp. 277-282."

Let us take those elements one at a time:

MacKenna's Plotinus:

If the Proficient thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter--kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork--how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or, Zeus!, by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Proficient, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body.⁹

Already, this juxtaposition makes the "of course" of Brown's version far from transparent. Possidius' first twentieth-century editor, H.T. Weiskotten, said he was "not able to identify this vague reference", but Pellegrino's edition two generations later cites the Plotinus. Still, at best, the words Possidius reports are a Latin translation verging on paraphrase. If we pursue the sources cited, we find, however, that the parentage of this attribution in twentieth-century scholarship is powerful. It is noted first (probably independently) by Willy Theiler¹⁰ and by P. Henry.¹¹ Theiler finds it "reizvoll" that A. consoled himself with the phrase of Plotinus, while Henry explained the textual divergence by arguing that Augustine revised the line as he cited it ("Jusque sur son lit de mort, Augustin est sensible aux charmes de la rhétorique"!) and took the citation as evidence of the power of Plotinus' influence on Augustine. But Henry, the Jesuit, noticed that "ce mot, dans son contexte original, les Ennéades, est teinté d'un nuance d'orgueil. Sur les lèvres d'Augustin, il se change en humble aveu de l'infirmité de l'homme et du néant de la créature. Praesumptio et confessio!"¹² Henry further points to the slightly later lines of Possidius in which Augustine has the penitential psalms posted around his sickroom and concludes, "c'est en récitant les Psaumes de la Pénitence qu'il rend … Dieu son ƒme de chrétien."

Pierre Courcelle's authority was added to this attribution in a short note¹³ in which he made the important connection to earlier echoes of the same phrase on Augustine's lips, from the time of the sack of Rome in 410, e.g., civ. 2.2, "Romam quippe partam veterum auctamque laboribus foediorem stantem fecerant quam ruentem, quandoquidem in ruina eius lapides et ligna, in istorum autem vita omnia non murorum, sed morum munimenta atque ornamenta ceciderunt." ("Rome was begotten and expanded by the labores of the ancients, but they had made it a shabbier thing while it stood than when it fell, for in its ruin stones and wood fell, but when the Romans themselves fell it was all the fortifications and ornaments not of their walls [murorum] but of their morals [morum] that fell.") Courcelle saw Augustine giving the Stoic theme a Christian value: it is the Christian sage's resignation and compunction that are on display. But Courcelle also took from the text a concluding lesson most relevant in 1944: "Belle fermeté, et qui nous serait très nécessaire, ... l'heure où tant de monuments historiques, et des villes entières, viennent de périr sous les coups de la guerre."

Now I have argued that the echoes from the time of the sack of Rome are decisive in showing precisely the Christianization of the theme by Augustine. "The 'quotation' is not to be taken as homage to Plotinus, therefore, but criticism in the same vein as that directed against the anti- Christian polemics attacked in civ.; here, A. is saying, is a non- Christian sage offering good advice; how much more likely, therefore, that a Christian will have hope in time of crisis?"¹⁴

The transparency of Brown's "of course" then is entirely dependent on our contemporary experience. In an age when Theiler, Henry, and Courcelle have collaborated to establish a filiation of text, the contingency, uncertainty, and distance that lie between Augustine's words and Plotinus' disappear in a purely scholarly "of course". But look again at Brown's presentation of the quotation itself: "these words of a proud pagan sage". The selection and presentation of this episode at the close of a chapter gives it a dramatic effect not justified by Possidius, in whom the connection between the "Plotinian" words and the express reference to the seven penitential Psalms is close and consequent. In separating them and in placing these at the end of a chapter, Brown begins a process of implicit interpretation highlighted by the words just quoted. What is striking about this passage ("reizvoll" was Theiler's word) is that the aged bishop quotes the "proud pagan sage". All three of those words are carefully chosen to highlight the distance from Augustine's putative status as humble Christian bishop. "Pride" in Brown's voice has none of the pejorative quality of, let us say, the "typho turgidus" of Conf. 7.9.13, when applied to the most important, if still anonymous, Plotinizer of Augustine's acquaintance. At all events, the choice of words is clearly meant to avoid the tone of, say, "arrogant polytheist charlatan": words equally applicable, did we not adhere to the decorum of academic deference, according to which the serene anti- clerical Plotinus merits a respect not always accorded Augustine.

The presentation of this moment in Augustine's life, then, carries with it an implicit judgment. Somehow or other, Augustine is not what, at that moment, we are to expect him to be. How can that be? This censoriousness only makes sense, I argue, if we have so far committed ourselves to following Augustine's narrative of his conversion that we accept, with him, that every moment of his life must be interpreted in terms of the change of life that the Confessions narrate. But we are not required to accept the converted life of Augustine on his terms. Rather, we are allowed to pursue him through the years and hold his behavior up to our expectations of what the fully converted Christian must be like. If, as I have argued, there is potentially a way to read the episode in terms that would suit Augustine's sense of his conversion, we are nevertheless inclined at the outset to let common sense -- our common sense, not his -- be our guide. If the argument I have suggested to give Augustine a favorable reading that deflates Brown's patronizing tone is valid, it is itself still valid in terms of an implied narrative of fundamental conversion.

III

The origin of that narrative of conversion is Augustine himself. Our researches into the Confessions over the last two generations have shown us as never before how clearly and deliberately Augustine went about constructing the story that did justice to his own experience. I have shown him virtually rehearsing the Confessions narrative in much smaller compass at lib. arb. 1.11.22,¹⁵ and in many similar ways it has become clear just how much the outline of Augustine's life that he gives depends on the interpretive equipment with which he shaped it. The interest of that life, when it is recounted for us, lies in part in the way in which the choice of interpretation by Augustine himself becomes a shaping factor on the way, from his middle years onward, he lived that life.

We can, however, watch Augustine choose the interpretation and see him seek to enact it, without necessarily accepting it as the full and only way to read the evidence for his life. Better, we can see the way the flight to narrative was a characteristic Augustine shared with others in his own time. "The central problem for fourth-century Christians was their own past. A continuous biography is the core of our sense of personal identity. This is true no less of a group's sense of identity. It needs to be able to recognize itself as one and the same group enduring through time, the heir of its own past."¹⁶ If we still struggle with a similar neediness, we are not justified in universalizing it. The centrality of conversion to the narrative in Brown's case is on full display in the chapter devoted to the climactic garden scene in Milan so familiar from the Confessions.¹⁷ On the one hand, Brown fails to supersede Augustine's narrative, and so his pages consist of little more than quotation (with ellipses to intensify the effect) of Conf. 8; but the title of the chapter is "Philosophy," hardly an obvious choice and yet at the same time one marvelously responsive to the nuances of Augustine's account.¹⁸ Near the end of his chapter, Brown allows himself this observation: "A sense of purpose and continuity is the most striking feature of Augustine's 'Conversion'."¹⁹ Brown does not resolve the quarrel raging a decade and more before he wrote, whether Cassiciacum or the Confessions provides a truer account of Augustine's experience, but he embraces both in this unresolving way.

The difficulty lies with the very centrality of biography to our notion of historical study, the subject of no satisfactory recent discussion known to me.²⁰ Even as our sense of the possibilities of history widens, there is a powerful attraction that pulls writers -- the present one included! -- to the coherent narrative of a single life. The anthropological and psychological assumptions run deep in our culture, and the virtual substitution of psychological for theological essentialism only reinforces a tendency we have little reason to want to suspend. And so we are driven to assume that comprehensiveness of narrative is good -- better than fragmentation -- and thus, in ancient and medieval studies more often than not we are driven to prefer the speciously knowable hero to more difficult and remote figures. To make the comprehensive narrative, of course, it is necessary to blend the hypothetical with the assured in ways that do not always do justice to the variable reliance we can place on the evidence. Real chronological problems must be elided or forced to a solution, and the tentativeness of a world in which there is always one more unfinished scholarly project²¹ that cannot be waited for is frozen into the narrative of the authoritative moment. Our biographical style, moreover, knows the Bildungsroman best, the narrative of youth and maturation. It does not know how to describe maturity and age, but struggles as best it can to impose its stereotypes. But in Augustine's case, we have ample reason to remember that the narrative of conversion was not ineluctable. For one thing, even so devoted an epistolary friend as Paulinus of Nola seems to have had something simpler in mind: not for him the taste of Gerard Manley Hopkins for a "lingering-out sweet skill" ("The Wreck of the Deutschland") -- something "at a crash" was more to his taste and perhaps to that of his contemporaries. Secundinus the Manichee and Vincent the Rogatist both weigh in, for their part, with admonitions that to some who knew the young Augustine, the narrative of the Confessions seemed a bit overblown, and it is well to bear in mind that even so friendly a reader as Consentius (ep. 12*.1) found it tough going.²² Julian of Eclanum seems to have used the text merely as a source for bits of scandal, and there is little sign that the Donatists were persuaded by its account. What biography would those readers have written?²³

IV

How then could we construct another story for Augustine's life, not to replace the conversion narrative but to supplement it? Can we achieve a kind of binocular vision, or better a vision from multiple perspectives? Suppose we sought out consciously, for purposes of illumination, "Augustine the unconverted"? Whom would we find? Would those deathbed words evade our censure or surprise?

First, we could notice that much of what Augustine himself accounts as central to his conversion consisted not so much of changing his own opinions as of discovering that Christian positions were consonant with his own beliefs, or at least his expectations of belief. The three questions he famously attributes to the Manichees (Conf. 3.6.10) -- whence comes evil, how may God's substance be conceived, and how were the fathers of the Old Testament justified in their private lives? -- each carried with them an implicit critique of imputed Christian answers, and in each case the change came when Augustine realized that Christians did not give the answer the Manichees accused them of.²⁴ Similarly in matters of Christology, though there is still some lack of consensus among scholars on just when and how Augustine's views assimilated themselves to orthodox Christianity, it is clear (Conf. 7.19.25) that a decisive step came when Augustine realized that orthodoxy was not the naive and indefensible thing he had thought it to be. For so central a tenet of Christianity, it is striking that Augustine does not report explicit movement on his part, but only the removal of a misunderstanding.²⁵ Further, Augustine's ascetic ideal was the philosophical sage.²⁶ He was brought to his conversion narrative by the intermediacy of Paul, Paul chosen because²⁷ he was the Christian rival of Platonic mystagogues. Paul had been where Plotinus claimed to have gone, and hence for an Augustine newly disappointed with his Plotinian "tentatives d'extase" (Courcelle's phrase), he was the appropriate guide, his texts ratified by a mystic wisdom. The authority of Paul, put another way, was no more than half-Christian at the point at which (on Augustine's narrative) it meant most to Augustine's conversion.²⁸ The philosophical sages over whom Paul triumphed, moreover, remain forever serious and respected figures for Augustine. Even when he disagrees with them, and even when in complex ways around and after 400 he realizes how anti-Christian Porphyry in particular had been, the Platonic authorities remain ones to be taken seriously and treated with respect.²⁹

Seen closely, indeed, the immediate trajectory of Augustine's formal "conversion" was deeply conservative. If any point in his life is to be marked as a venturesome philosophical or theological leap, it would be his youthful fling into the arms of Manicheism, the resolutely modern (one might almost say "New Age") cult of that time, sternly scientific and rationalist and at the same time daringly occult and dangerous. The movement to Christianity under the patronage of Ambrose is a movement towards the Ciceronian decorum of the public man, Platonist in spirit if not always in letter.³⁰ We do not need to read the Confessions very closely at all, indeed, to see in the narrative of Books 6-9 a time when Augustine manages to reconcile the religion of his mother (once suspect as "puerilis superstitio"³¹) with the culture and class of his father. The reconciliation of Monnica to Ambrose's way of doing things in religion is one sign of this, and the positioning of the narrative of Patricius' conversion to coincide with the moment where Augustine is baptized and Monnica departs for heaven reinforces it. Augustine had left Christianity in his youth to pursue a worldly career. When he finally discovered, through Ambrose's example, that it was possible to be a Christian and a gentleman (Cassiciacum is the essential rehearsal of this role), he was then ready to reconcile himself with the church of his mother.

Similarly, on return to Africa, nothing in Augustine broke with his past in any way that would occasion remark. Retirement to his estates, literary leisure, and the determined pursuit of a literary career even after accession to the Christian clergy all marked him out as traditionalist.

His epistolary habits in particular mark his pattern of expectations and his aims. The delight with which he takes up an epistolary démarche from Paulinus of Nola is one sign. His public epistolary engagements (e.g., with Maximus of Madaura) are another. Most telling of all is the way in which he comes into contact with Jerome.³² His first letter to Jerome (ep. 28) seems never to have been sent, but that it survives for us is a reminder that Augustine still preserved it as one of his own works. A second attempt seems to have been more successful in reaching Jerome and eliciting an answer,³³ but our attention is riveted by the adventures of the next attempt (ep. 40). This letter begins pursuit of the controversy over Paul's relations to Peter in Galatians. Written and sent in perhaps 397, it did not reach Jerome in any direct way. Instead, it seems to have gotten into circulation in Italy and the environs, where it was found on an island in the Adriatic by Sisinnius, a friend of Jerome, who had a copy made and sent it on to Bethlehem. Jerome's fierce reaction was understandable in the circumstances, but we should beware of taking sides in the ensuing rivalry. Augustine did not mean to write a book "contra Hieronymum", and was surely sorry that the original of the letter had not made it to Jerome's hands; but at the same time, we must assume that he was delighted to hear that the letter had had a literary success in Italy, and we may even suspect that he had taken steps to assure that it would. Engaging a leading literary figure in epistolary intercourse was a distinct way in which the bishop of Hippo, very much a man with a reputation yet to make, would come into the eyes of the select but influential Christian literary public then emerging. But what must be emphasized is how traditional a way of making your way in the world this was: there is little to separate Augustine from his elder contemporary Symmachus in this regard, except that Augustine had to work harder to make himself known.

In the same way, Augustine's struggle to find his voice as a writer³⁴ shows him staggering under the challenge of finding a way to be both writer and priest/bishop, but in the end he not only triumphs, but triumphs in a way that gives him a career as writer very much in a classical mode and employing classical genres.³⁵ If we think of the books that came into circulation in his lifetime, indeed, he will look very traditional -- the most distinctive genre that we have from his "pen", the sermon, is precisely the one that circulated least in written form in his lifetime. Instead he left letters and books in abundance, but only for their abundance and their content do they occasion remark. In this regard, it is instructive that a turning point in his literary career was his first book as bishop, unfinished for many years, but still showing where his head and heart were at that moment. The de doctrina christiana is a Christian version of Cicero's orator, and it cannot be coincidence that this gesture imitates Ambrose's own maneuver in writing the de officiis ministrorum in a similarly traditionalist mode. We know how to remark that Cicero has been Christianized and we have given that transformation full value, but it is equally important that it was thought necessary and useful to "do Christianity" in so Ciceronian a vein.³⁶

And of course it was Augustine himself, in a relentlessly modern exercise in "self-fashioning", who by his retractationes and by the indiculum of his work that comes to us with the name of Possidius, assured that his life would be known from his texts, and from his texts as he wrote them. The history of modern scholarship has been the history of collaboration in that exercise, as much as in the construction of the narrative of conversion. Erasmus' influence is decisive here as elsewhere,³⁷ but the Maurists and their modern avatars, the scholars of the Paris études Augustiniennes, have given us not only a consistency but also implicitly an orthodoxy of tradition.

I must emphasize again that the point of this exercise is not to replace, even in posse, the conversion-based narrative of Augustine's life with another. That would probably be impossible, first of all, and second of all, my point in beginning with a review of Brown's biography is to emphasize that it is precisely the assumption that one narrative must dominate that is most questionable in the way of proceeding that he both epitomizes and nearly transcends. The line of argument I have made here encourages us to return to consider just what "conversion" consisted of, but at the same time to begin to imagine knowing Augustine not as a single unity, presumably to emerge from the conflict of scholarly opinions, but as a figure seen through a prism -- a figure in that limited way not unlike ourselves and our contemporaries.

V

It is a fruitful time in which to begin to contemplate the Augustines we may find this way. The electronic transformation of the technologies of knowing, coincident with revolutions in critical theory, will require us to reconsider every aspect of our scholarly practice and purpose. Within the last decade, the five million words of Augustine's surviving oeuvre have suddenly become accessible as never before. At the same time, we feel vaguely threatened that in a flood of information the linear contemplative reading of individual texts will seem to be a thing of less value. We see as well a secular landscape where the past in which Augustine dwells is becoming ineluctably more remote. We may be at the point where a new boundary between "history" and "prehistory" will open up. The merely textual will recede from view as history is filled with the people and events that can be known from sound and video recording. We stand at a point when information, long a precious resource husbanded with skill and manipulated with craftsman's care, will cease to be scarce; and the economist will quickly tell us that in such a case, the value of the thing that has become ubiquitous drops precipitously. It is a vertiginous moment, but that vertigo should drive us to think already more carefully about what we expect of our past.

Against narrative, the next constructions of Augustine will emphasize the constitutive role of Augustinian self-fashioning, the way the mature Augustine created his own literary and public persona, attached to it a highly selective account of his early life, and both maintained and propagated that persona into succeeding generations. Thus "Augustine the Writer" is indeed one new persona that needs to be delineated.³⁸ But that figure is not a subset of the whole man, for the only life we can write is a creation of "Augustine the Writer". We resist that writer and so claim from his texts a "life" of our own choosing, but one that is utterly conditioned by his precedent creation of himself. But "Augustine the Politician" demands our attention as well. For many who knew him, his power lay in his regular annual visits to Carthage and the influence he wielded there. To know all of Augustine is to know him, after all, as none of his contemporaries did, and thus to falsify him by creating a whole that is quite different from a sum of the parts seen as parts.³⁹ The same can be said of "Augustine the Bishop," who has his own very large biographical book already,⁴⁰ but it is precisely that role that could not be given a chronological arrangement in the traditional mode.

But there are other more venturesome Augustines left to be excavated. Not only Augustine the unconverted, but Augustine the skeptic,⁴¹ Augustine the Manichee,⁴² perhaps Augustine the Donatist, certainly Augustine the Pelagian.⁴³ All the things Augustine feared to be, he was himself: this is probably true of all of us. It is precisely our most earnest asseverations that need most to be cast in doubt and whose opposites need to be kept in mind as plausible, and probably true even on our own reluctant and anxious admission. What is more remarkable is the way (particularly in the case of Augustine's "pagan" and Manichee sides) modern scholarship has internalized his anxieties and made them its own. When we disagree with him, we must disagree with him -- we are so far caught up in the toils of the arguments as he and his contemporaries constructed them. What we will now come to see is that continuity is not crisis, that the line between "pagan" and "Christian" need no longer interest us so passionately; similarly the lines between philosophy, mysticism, magic, liturgy, and religion will disappear.

VI

In an environment where these multiple images are possible, is there any room for another "life" of Augustine to compete with Brown? I think not. The maker of the next "life" of Augustine will be not so much creator as impresario of performances, organizer of tours and blazer of paths. There need not be, probably cannot be, a single narrative line, but a variety of modes of exploration. The result need not be the authoritative monologue, but will better be the continuing conversation, the ongoing dialogue among many participants over time and space.

The making of networks (i.e., the exploration of continuities) is precisely the post-modern approach,⁴⁴ as against what Lyotard and others identify as the disjunctive, discontinuous form of analysis native to modernism. Certain continuities will be reasserted and linkages improved. In practical terms, there will be real benefits any modernist Augustinian scholar can recognize, just as we all instinctively recognize the benefits of the computerized database of texts. Other areas of patristic study will be less securely closed off from the student of Augustine, as electronic texts of Ambrose and Jerome and their contemporaries will be as close at hand as any text of Augustine. Similarly, the boundary between sacred and secular texts will increasingly disappear, and the separation between students of the Christian and non-Christian traditions will continue to dwindle. Most challengingly, the boundary between Augustine's work and its afterlives will prove illusory, as we accept that we have Augustine only in the form of his influence. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the future that I have been sketching is that it continues the traditional way of thinking of Augustine as a man of his time, when our own very interest in him is the best reminder that his importance lies as much in what he has become as in what he was.

Closure in such a world will be impossible. No more the finished book, but rather the site of the continuing excavation. The author disappears (again!), and the isolated, autonomous scholar will disappear, and somewhere past that, it is reasonable to expect that "Augustine" will disappear as well. The autonomous figure of authority, proud inhabitant of the massive "collected works", was created as the coherent unit of humanistic study by Erasmus and his generation, and belongs to the world of print. Beyond the world of print, we will recover our perspective and lose some of our veneration. Before the next life of Augustine can be written, it will cease to be necessary.

Augustine's physical world was far smaller than the whole of the Roman empire. Apart from a few years in Italy in the 380s, he lived his life chiefly in three places: Tagaste, Hippo, and Carthage. His trips elsewhere in north Africa were few and limited. Though his words traveled widely, his spatial limitations are important to remember, not least because they kept him chiefly in the more urbanized and coastal north Africa, away from the high plains and the frontier, away from the districts where a rougher form of life and perhaps a more native form of religion held sway.⁴⁵

Augustine himself is a figure whose life we know too well.⁴⁶ He has offered us such a variety of materials, of such high quality, for reconstructing his life that it would be almost impossible not to use them, gratefully, to good advantage. But if we would use them, it is equally almost impossible not to use them to tell the story in the way he would have us tell it -- and therein lies the danger.

The evidence of the danger lies in the biographies of Augustine, on large canvas or small, that accumulate in our libraries. In the case of Brown, fully 40% of the book is taken up with the narrative of Augustine's life before his ordination as bishop -- before he achieved the position that made it possible for him to exercise a significant influence in his lifetime and after. Narratives briefer compass regularly find it impossible to restrain the narrative of early life into even so little as 40% of their bulk.

The reason for this preoccupation is famously not far to seek. The Confessions are not, indeed, an autobiography in any useful sense of the word, as those of us who write on them regularly aver. But they contain autobiographical narrative and vignettes whose power no recounter of Augustine's life can resist. Consider the episode at the end of Conf. 2 in which Augustine tells how he and a few youthful friends stole pears from a neighbor's tree and threw them to the pigs. An hour at most, ten minutes more likely, in the life of a man who lived near half a million waking hours, but the episode is unavoidable, even for those (the majority of readers today) who are baffled or disapproving at finding the episode at all or at finding it made much of.

The Confessions are the chief instrument by which Augustine shaped the narratives of his life. The achievement of that self-presentation lies in the way the narrative is made to revolve around a defining moment of conversion, localized to a specific place and time and dramatized in a particular way. From infancy to age 18 and again from age 27 until his death, any reasonable person who knew Augustine and was asked his religious affiliation would have said "Christian." For the intervening nine years, many would still have said the same, while others would have named a group, the Manichees, that non-Christians would have distinguished from Christianity at large only with difficulty. And yet Augustine has persuaded us that the religious drama of the years 386-87, when he decided to accept Christian baptism at the hand of Ambrose, is the interpretive key to his whole life. The issue has generally been not whether he is right in the frame he gives his narrative, but rather whether we have adequately tested his narrative in detail at all points against the other facts.

But he is virtually our sole source of facts. Even those documents of Augustine's life that come from other pens usually reach us because he allowed them to. We have today some 5,000,000 words from Augustine's pen, vastly more than we have from any of the famous writers of antiquity. None of that material survives against Augustine's will. Though from time to time we hear of scandalous accusations made against him, we hear of them only from him, or if he quotes them to take polemical advantage.

Augustine shaped his own survival with great care. Late in life⁴⁷ he compiled a catalogue of his own written works under the evasive title Retractationes (Reconsiderations).⁴⁸ Each work was listed with some description of the circumstances of its composition and its purpose, as well as corrections or explanations of difficult or controverted passages. The work does not so much record changes of mind as dig defensive trenches around things said imprudently, or simply in a different spirit, when he was young. The result is a catalogue of Augustine's authentic works, reinforced by the survival of a hand-list from Augustine's library, written by his disciple and authorized biographer Possidius (bishop of Calama, not far from Hippo, and a lifelong follower of Augustine).⁴⁹ Possidius' list includes not only "books" but also lists sermons and letters. Augustine left for the afterlife with a vastly better than average chance that his works would survive, be collected, and be read as his. The survival of so much of what he wrote is extraordinary.⁵⁰ (At least we may be sure that the surviving books are his. Judicious skepticism will stand alongside piety in the presence of the relics of his body presented to view in Pavia.)

The purposes of the modern student of Augustine may best be served if we come to the personal core of his life from the outside, working in. Accordingly, this essay will present Augustine's life not as a conversion narrative but as the unfolding of a dazzling piece of origami. We will begin with the textual Augustine who lies heavy on our shelves, proceed through the public Augustine (or rather the several Augustines known to different publics in his lifetime), and come only at the end to the man and his ultimate self-presentation. Such an approach gives more value to the social context within which he worked and more value to his social interactions with others. It will remain an open question how far the imperial individualism that Augustine practices and implicitly teaches is a useful discipline, whether for self-presentation or for historical analysis.

Augustine's books range from the highly personal and polemical to the lofty and abstract, but even the loftiest and most abstract are charged with a clear idea about where error lies and how it is to be opposed. For modern philosophical readers, the most important titles are well known: Confessions, De civitate Dei, De trinitate, De Genesi ad litteram, and the brace of early works written during and after Augustine's post-conversion winter of 386/87 -- de Academicis (also known as contra Academicos), De ordine, De beata vita, Soliloquia, and De libero arbitrio voluntatis. Philosophers today generally quail before, but then reluctantly plunge into, the late works against the Pelagians, looking for but not often finding solid ground on which to assess Augustine's views on free will and predestination. But the most generous armload of accessible and interesting works, available in translation and regularly read today, still adds up to only a small fraction of the surviving oeuvre. Least well represented in modern readings of Augustine are his letters (by happenstance of bulk and relative rebarbativeness -- the annotation needed for each letter and its moment of pedagogy or polemic can be annoying) and his sermons (because of their bulk, running to approximately 1/3 of the surviving oeuvre, and their short and scrappy focus on issues of pastoral urgency).

Augustine today, moreover, dances for us behind numerous veils. His Latin is correct and clear, but can be read effortlessly by few today. Accordingly, he penetrates contemporary thought in ways conditioned by the history of his translations, and there is no modern language that has yet seen a translation of his complete works.⁵¹ The prestige of French scholarship on Augustine has been undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that French Augustinians published, beginning in the 1950s, an extraordinarily valuable series of editions of Augustine's works, with Latin text and French translation, accompanied by learned and helpful notes. They remain a vital path into Augustine's work and thought for serious readers, even while they implant in those readers a style of interpretation characteristic of that particular Paris.

Augustine's books are for the most part today presented to us by those in the contemporary world who see themselves as his coreligionists. Modern Augustinian scholarship was in its formative decades overwhelmingly baptized, and indeed baptized Roman Catholic. It remains extraordinary that a provincial religious writer and churchman of sixteen centuries ago should be so fortunate as to have his works presented to our world by a relatively homogeneous and sympathetic body of interpreters. Here again, as with the Confessions, we know him too well. If we could forget that he is "Christian", and if we could forget the story he tells us of his own life, what would we think of him?

Here is one way to answer that question. Who was Augustine to his contemporaries in his lifetime? Beyond a circle of friends and colleagues, he came to public attention in a series of roughly concentric or at least overlapping circles.

Augustine the bane of "Pelagianism". This Augustine was known farthest and widest, beginning with the early 410s, when he was nearing 60. This renown was both good and bad for him, in that it propagated his name but won him influential and ferocious enemies. He ended his life in a futile and dispiriting literary combat with a learned Christian bishop from Italy, Julian of Eclanum, with whom he sparred endlessly before a Christian literary public on all Latin-speaking shores of the Mediterranean. At the end of his life, his reputation had penetrated erratically into the Greek church and an invitation was sent for him to attend the council of Ephesus -- but he had died before it could reach him in Africa.

The controversy in which Augustine found this fame was largely factitious. The "Pelagianism" that he attacked was a construct of his own, founded on his imputations of implications and logical conclusions to a writer who disowned most of them. When Pelagius was himself examined for his beliefs by a relatively independent and unbiased ecclesiastical court, in Palestine in 415, he came away vindicated.⁵² Augustine could not accept this and pounded away for a few years more on Pelagius himself, winning the Pyrrhic victory of papal approval for some of his own condemnations. The victory backfired when in his last decade, Augustine found himself under fire for it, from the doctrinaire Julian (who was willing to accept some of the conclusions that Pelagius himself shied from) and from devout Christian ascetics to whose belief and practice Augustine would have ordinarily been closely attuned. These last (some of them in Africa, rather more in Gaul) saw defeatism in Augustine's ideas and feared his view of predestination denied value to their ascetic achievements. Although Augustine's most extreme ideas were hotly confuted in these circles, he himself was rarely condemned as a heretic and his opponents were strikingly reluctant to mention him by name, so great was the prestige he had created for himself.

Augustine the Literary Lion. That prestige had come in good measure from long years of assiduous literary self-promotion. Beginning in the early 390s, while not yet himself a bishop, Augustine had carefully built for himself a choice audience of readers for his works beyond his homeland. Though his works doubtless circulated in Hippo and Carthage, we know he had found ways of bringing them to the attention of distinguished literary Christians elsewhere. Paulinus of Nola, in particular, a retired Christian gentleman in Italy, poet and literary man, seems to have been one conduit for Augustine's reputation and for his works themselves.⁵³ More strikingly, we have a fairly full record of Augustine's correspondence with Jerome in Bethlehem, showing a fierce but repressed competition of egos between the two ambitious men.⁵⁴ Though Jerome was a clergyman of the second rank, he had carved out a position of authority based on his learning and his status as impassioned and persuasive writer. Augustine came on the scene years after Jerome and set out to achieve a similar kind of reputation. Writing to Jerome in the early 390s was a way of calling himself to the older writer's attention and entering into the literary public that Jerome dominated. Over the years that followed, Augustine's books became well known outside Africa in upper-class Christian circles.

His time in those circles led to one of his two most famous and lasting books, De civitate Dei. The ostensible point of departure of that work is "pagan" reaction to the sack of Rome by Visigoths in 410 AD and the learned debates of upper-class refugees in Carthage. What if, so they supposedly argued, the fate of the city of Rome is due to our impiety toward the ancient gods and to our adhesion to the new Christian god? Should we perhaps revive ancient practices?⁵⁵ Augustine overwhelms those arguments in the first five books of De civitate Dei, which he wrote within a couple of years of the controversy's eruption, but he then continued for another decade and more to add another 17 books to the work, going far beyond what the moment of controversy called for. The work in the end outlines a large view of human history, from creation to apocalypse, and situates Roman, and indeed all Mediterranean, history within that perspective. It refutes every form of "paganism" that Augustine cared about, but chiefly the neo-Platonism that he understood from what he knew of Plotinus and Porphyry. The style of the first books shows that Augustine could play the part of the learned traditionalist to a fare-thee-well and take pleasure in using a pastiche of quotations from the most classical of Latin authors to demolish the pretensions of Roman religion.

Augustine the anti-Donatist. Augustine's most widely-known public persona, however, was one that requires a distinct effort of historical construction for us today. Augustine the anti-Pelagian has been made current to many following generations by the timelessness of the debates over grace and free will that he instigated and guided. Augustine the anti- "pagan" makes a case against a straw man enemy that moderns understand readily, so familiar are we with the glib juxtaposition of "pagans" and Christians in the Roman world.⁵⁶

But Augustine the anti-Donatist is a figure who has spoken directly only to a few moderns and, I venture to suggest, to none of our contemporaries. The most notable example of a modern resonating with Augustine on these points is Newman, who quoted a line of Augustine's directed against the Donatists as though it were his own mantra of conversion.

Augustine found the widest (if not always receptive) public for his writing and speaking as an opponent of Donatism.⁵⁷ He surely spent more of his energies as bishop of Hippo on this one issue than on all the other controversies of his career combined. After the last wave of official persecution of Christianity in the early 300s had ebbed, Christians in north Africa fell into two camps. To name them is to take sides, but perhaps one may characterize them as rigorist and latitudinarian. The rigorist camp held that those who had in any way compromised the ferocity of their Christian allegiance in time of persecution had thereby exiled themselves from the Christian community and required sacramental initiation in order to re-enter. Particular hostility was directed towards clergy who had handed over the books of scripture to the Roman authorities to be burnt. Traditores ("traitors," lit. handers-over) they were called and they were thought to have disqualified themselves as clergy by that act. Ordinary faithful who had fallen in similar ways were to be rebaptized and clergy, if such there were, who had fallen and sought clerical status again would have to be reordained.

The latitudinarian camp took no less harsh a view of the betrayals of the time, but took a higher view of the sacraments of the church. Baptism could only be administered once for all. If you lapsed from grace after baptism, then only by a tedious ritual of repentance could you, in principle, be re-admitted to communion. This may not sound latitudinarian, indeed is in some ways even more rigorist in theory than the other position, but in practice this community pursued lapses with less fervor and was more inclined to let bygones be bygones.

To make matters more complicated, the whole fourth century in Africa was punctuated by arguments over who the traditores had really been. Had the first bishops of the post-persecution latitudinarians really been themselves traditores? Or had, on the other hand (as was alleged, with good evidence), the leaders of the rigorist faction themselves included some who had fallen away and never been rebaptized? Each side accused the other of bad faith and bad behavior at every level, most persuasively.

But the rigorist faction inherited the traditions and practices of the church of Africa and throughout the fourth century, it dominated African life, despite numerous attempts by the latitudinarian party to invoke imperial authority against it. When Augustine became priest and then bishop at Hippo, he was a member of the minority community there. Moderns debate the social roots of both communities, cautiously concluding that the rigorists were more broadly planted in African society at a variety of levels (including the highest), while the latitudinarians tended to be confined to the more Romanized and urbanized segments of society.

Augustine made it his business as bishop of Hippo to fight for the latitudinarians against the rigorists -- hence for the "catholic" church (he uses the adjective in its root meaning of "universal", and he made much of the fact that his church was in communion with churches all over the Roman world) against the "Donatists" (so-called after a charismatic founding figure). He made common cause with his faction's bishop in Carthage, Aurelius, and for twenty years they were a tireless team, working together for the defeat of their opponents. Augustine wrote book after book, and together they pulled every lever of government influence. Eventually they prevailed by the latter route, when the emperor sent a commissioner to convene a hearing and resolve the issue. The commissioner, Marcellinus, was a devout layman who immediately fell in with Augustine. There was never any doubt at the conference, held in the baths at Carthage in June of 411 (we have the stenographic transcript of most of the three days of the conference), that he would find for Augustine's catholic party, and he did so. From that day onward, "Donatism" had no legal standing in Africa and effectively vanished from history. In all this period, Augustine often spent half his year in Carthage, preaching, writing and debating against the Donatists. Those audiences saw a learned and fluent preacher with a taste for the kind of debater's tricks of language and argument that audiences loved. They knew about his books and they knew about his influence with powerful people, and some of them encountered those books and that influence more directly. But he was pre- eminently a public and visible figure. Augustine always traveled reluctantly, but he took his anti-Donatist persona on the road from time to time, debating Donatist leaders and seeking converts. When he came to one or another small city, it was very much as a publicly recognized visiting dignitary, absorbed in the high politics of the moment. Many of those who knew him this way loathed him as a powerful figure in a party they abhorred, but such is the pathology of celebrity that the loathing was part of his power. This Augustine reached the most people, however superficially, and this Augustine shaped the impressions of Africans about all the other Augustines.

Augustine at Hippo. For all that Augustine made himself known to a wider world through his writings and his involvement in the affairs of the day, he still spent more of his time, from 391 until his death in 430, at home in Hippo than anywhere else. There he invented and struggled to define his role as bishop and leader of his community and there he performed the sacramental acts in which he and his followers believed that divine power flowed through his hands. (He tried to be in Hippo every year for the most sacred rituals of Easter, when new members were initiated to the community and received baptism.) He appeared serene before his congregation as they stood, row on row, straining to hear his voice. It troubled him that they venerated him so, for he was acutely aware of his own failings -- even to the point of what later churchmen would call scrupulosity. Did he delight to a fault in the beautiful music of the church service? When his mind wandered from prayer, did he return to the task promptly enough? He judged himself against a high standard and found himself wanting, and so felt unworthy in the eyes of his congregation. The writing of the Confessions was, among many other things, an attempt at self-understanding that would permit him to continue as bishop with this acute consciousness of imperfection.⁵⁸

But it is unlikely that Augustine's congregation shared his sense of those imperfections. To them he was a hieratic figure, dispenser of God's word and God's sacrament, but judge and jury as well. In increasing numbers, they came to him, divinely authorized and reliable, to settle their petty legal cases, in an age when Roman justice was more remote, more expensive, and more unreliable than ever. He expressed his frustration at the time he spent on this kind of business and finally, in his early 70s, designated a successor in order to hand over the worldly business of the bishopric so that he, Augustine, could retire to his study and his studies.

Those studies took place in a privileged space that Augustine carved out for himself. It is conventional but anachronistic to call it a "monastery": Augustine used the word monasterium a few times, specifically to speak of the little community he created in Hippo, but the word was so new and he used it so infrequently that it must have rung far more strangely on his contemporaries' ears than it does on ours. The word and the thing would have been unfamiliar: a household of men without women, men without social status (or at least without property), dressed in a way that set them apart, pursuing activities of marginal social value -- study and prayer. The ethos of the ascetic who separated himself from civil society was still a novelty in Africa and the choice to set himself apart in this way from civil society made Augustine relatively unusual among clergy of the time. Augustine's choices in Hippo made him more visible and better known and at the same time more remote than a more conventional cleric would have been.

The Young Augustine. Augustine came to Hippo when he was almost 37 years old. He lived another 39 years and from that period come most of the five million words that survive of his oeuvre for us. Half the ordinary life of a man on this earth he passed before he came to the city where he would make his lasting reputation. It is that half of his life that he tells us about in his Confessions, and about which we know less than we know about the later years.

For the years in Hippo, from 391 to his death in 430, are amply attested in his own voice, year by year, in his letters, sermons, and books. And in many ways such a self-presentation is more reliable than the retrospective and self-serving narrative of the Confessions. We know by name, moreover, no contemporary reader of the Confessions who was persuaded by its narrative.⁵⁹ (In the Retractationes [2.6, ed. Mutzenbecher] Augustine suggests that there were other readers who thought the book a great success, but he does not tell us their names and we have no way to interrogate them.) Of most interest are the two readers, one a Manichee, the other a member of a small sect that broke off from the Donatists, who both knew Augustine when he was a young man on the make. He recalls himself as a libertine: they recall him as a prig.⁶⁰ Augustine's narrative leaves them unmoved.

Can we recover a true narrative of Augustine's early years? No. The most we can do is hold to the elements of his narrative that are most likely to have been verifiable to his contemporaries. No reader will long resist the power of the Confessions, but for as long as we can maintain it, resistance is far from futile. What do we learn if we resist?

Augustine was born on the margins of gentility. To the poor, he was an aristocrat; to aristocrats, he was scion of a provincial, down-at-heels family. His father had connections who were wealthier and who could be drawn upon shamelessly to support, for example, the son's education. One scholar has astutely seen, indeed, in the way Augustine's father pressed to find resources for his son's education what he calls a "Balzacian novel before its time" -- a family that chose to invest heavily in the education of one precocious older son (there were at least two other children, one son and one daughter) in whose career the whole family would advance.⁶¹

Because Augustine invests the story of his schooling with philosophical and religious narrative (reading Cicero he somehow falls among the Manichees, and he is reading Cicero again fifteen years later when he is about to fall among the orthodox Christians), modern readers linger over the personal side of the story and pay little attention to the familial. In brief, the story is that Augustine left home at a very early age to pursue his schooling, pursuing it eventually with vigor and success all the way to Carthage. A year's rustication in his home town as a teacher was prologue to a bright near-decade teaching in Carthage and then a daring leap first to Rome and then to Milan to seek the heights of his profession. No sooner did he land, on his feet, in Milan, exalted at the age of thirty as imperial professor of rhetoric, called on to deliver formal court panegyrics and with every hope of a political career, than his whole family -- his mother, his brother, his sister, and at least one or two other junior relatives and hangers-on -- turned up in Milan, looking to hitch their wagons to his star. Their hopes began with, but were not limited to, a lucrative governorship. Had he ascended higher still, the profit for his retinue would have multiplied itself.

But in Milan Augustine's philosophical and religious interests derailed his self-interest. Controversy has raged for a century and more about just what happened in Milan and, since we have only Augustine's retrospective and self-serving narrative of a decade later to go by, we are unlikely to achieve certainty. He came under the influence of bishop Ambrose⁶² and became convinced that his own personal well- being depended on abandoning a worldly career and devoting himself to God in a special way -- not just joining the Christian church (though he did that formally in Milan in 387, taking baptism at the hands of Ambrose) but renouncing the life of the flesh and in particular abandoning the quite ordinary sexual life he had led with one quite respectable common-law wife (and mother of his child) and then with a somewhat less respectable "mistress" (the term is anachronistic: he took up temporarily with a lower- status woman when he was engaged to a higher-status fiancée). Nothing about Christianity required him to abandon sexual activity in order to be baptized, but Augustine sought something higher: the life of a Christian philosopher, separate and distinct from the ordinary run of Christian and excelling the most ascetic and ethereal of non-Christian philosophers.

Having made this choice of celibacy and science in the fall of 386, not yet baptised, Augustine took his household to the country for the winter -- there perhaps to test his sexual resolve in a setting less tempting than the cosmopolitan capital, and there certainly to pursue his philosophical studies. From those months at the country estate of Cassiciacum we have the earliest books surviving from his pen, dialogues written (and indeed enacted by himself and his friends and family) in a consciously Ciceronian vein. The first of them, De Academicis (usually and wrongly titled contra Academicos), takes up the radical skepticism to which Cicero himself was more than tempted and finds in it the basis for a mystical philosophy of Christianity. Certain knowledge is impossible, Augustine accepts from the Academics, and so one must give oneself over in faith to the fount of true knowledge who is (as it is revealed on the last pages of an otherwise quite secular book) Christ.

The philosophy to which Augustine gave himself at this moment in his life was one he eagerly sought in later years to assimilate to orthodox Christianity. Believing that Christianity could rival the ancients in every way, Augustine pursued a philosophy that got its doctrine from scripture, interpreted that doctrine in light of Plotinus, and hedged it around with mystical expectations that mixed Plotinian intellectualism⁶³ and ritual purification. To us today, this particular mixture of ideas is difficult to grasp and seems remote and artificial, but to Augustine it was indeed the new-age religion and philosophy for a truly elite intellectual of his time, more appealing even than Manicheism -- his first new-age enthusiasm -- had been.

And so it made perfect sense that he retired from his public career, retired from Milan, and went back home to become a more refined version of his father. He settled in Tagaste, the little town he came from, residing on the family property there, discharging the obligations of a gentleman and pursuing a life of philosophical leisure, writing contentious books and exchanging letters with like-minded friends. There he stayed for three years, from 388-91.

Why Augustine ever left Tagaste we will never know. The assumption of pious biographers has always been that his religious interests were consistent and persistent and that it was chance that took him to Hippo in 391 where chance again seized him and made him a clergyman: for so he tells the story himself, to the congregation at Hippo 35 years later.⁶⁴ But it is remarkable that he did not leave the isolation of Tagaste and did not think of accepting a life elsewhere until after his son had died -- until, that is, the worldly hopes of his family had been extinguished and until there was no son to whom to leave the property he had himself inherited from his father. Only with his son's death was Augustine properly rootless, only then eligible to take up easily the disconnected life of the monk.

Even then, he seems to have resisted. A letter by Augustine to his new superior, Valerius the bishop of Hippo, was clearly written a few months after his ordination -- forced ordination to hear him tell it -- at Hippo. It seems to be a letter of request to Valerius for permission to spend some time away from Hippo pursuing the study of scripture.⁶⁵ Modern readers have seen in this the devoted and studious Augustine of whom they are fond, casting a fresh eye on the Christian scriptures he was now bound to obey and preach. But there are several odd things about the letter, and a more credible interpretation would see it as a piece of politic revisionism. The subtext is this: seized and ordained a priest at Hippo, Augustine's natural impulse had been to flee, and he followed that impulse back to Tagaste. Once there, regretting his choice, perhaps fearing divine retribution, he wrote the letter to his bishop (to whom he would not have needed to write this request if both were in Hippo, and if there were no reason for a public declaration about his whereabouts and activities), putting a good face on what he has done and thus implicitly promising to return. And return he did, to become the Augustine of history. It could have been otherwise.

But even if that speculation about reluctance is ill-founded, it is worth underlining just how much the Augustine of 387-391, the man who had abandoned his worldly career and returned to Africa, was ready to disappear from view as a mild-mannered country squire with philosophical and literary interests. The role of a Paulinus of Nola is the most to which he might have aspired there, and nothing in his literary product of those years suggests that he would have had even that renown. It was only with his clerical ordination that he took up epistolary utensils to enter the eye of a broader Christian literary public, and only with the Confessions that he succeeded in producing work of a sort that would merit broad and lasting attention. Augustine of Tagaste in 390 is one of the great might- have-been-a-has-been's of world history, his father's son in more ways than one.

The Augustine of the Confessions. But if we trace the Augustines whom his contemporaries knew -- the bishop known for his books, the bishop known for his politics, the bishop known by his flock, and the young man who disappeared from view when the clergyman appeared -- it must be admitted that the Augustine of the Confessions does not disappear from history. Augustine the son of Monnica, Augustine the confessor, is one of the greatest creations of self-presentation that our literary past has to offer. And he holds and shapes the attention of readers more than the historical Augustine ever could.

The Augustine of the Confessions can be spoken of in various almost too-familiar ways. He invents (if Marcus Aurelius did not already invent it) a textual self whose interiority is not only on public display but seems to be the chief object of the narration. Events of past life are recounted and circumstances of present life are examined in order to reveal the inner man. But who is speaking in this narrative? Is it the inner man himself? Or is the inner man the object of attention of some subject lurking more deeply within the person? To ask those questions is to enter into the spirit of the book almost too wholeheartedly. At any rate, he provides a model unexampled in antiquity and unrivaled until at least Aelred of Rievaulx (and perhaps we must wait for Pascal or Montaigne) of self- presentation through meditative analysis of thoughts, emotions, and memories in a swirling and impressionistic dance of words. The ease with which twentieth-century readers have leapt to their Freudian task, quite sure that Augustine's narrative of his relations with his mother offers the key to his character, is a sign of the power of the text. A conscientious analyst would recognize this text not as the unselfconscious revelation that the Freudian couch seeks to elicit but rather as something closer to the first narrative that the analysand tells, defensive and disarming, diverting and deceiving, on entering the analyst's care. Breaking down that narrative and finding insight is a task that still remains to be done.⁶⁶

A central feature of the narrative lies in Augustine's creation of himself as a man driven by philosophy, persuadable by Cicero's dictum (de fin. 1.2.3) that the true student of philosophy never goes by half- measures but pursues truth relentlessly and endlessly. He shows us that philosophical urge turned into Christian faith but still undiminished, and generations of intellectualizing Christians have found comfort and example in that. The philosopher's Augustine takes three particular directions from the Confessions.

First, it is the book of memory. Book 10 of the Confessions famously divagates into a consideration of memory and its workings that has been widely influential if curiously understudied throughout modern philosophical history.⁶⁷ Augustine blends metaphors of space and of interiority in a persuasive and vivid portrayal of a huge and capacious hall, rich in furnishings, and yet so vast that valuable contents often go missing, contained in memory but somehow not present. Memory, moreover, seems at times in that account almost to become the self, and many readers find this persuasive -- we are the concatenation of our own experiences, present to ourselves. There are grave difficulties for Augustine's view to be derived from cognitive psychology, but he remains so sympathetic a figure that we forgive him his difficulties and admire his imagination.

Second, the Confessions are the book of time. The eleventh book no less famously pursues the question of a definition of time through scriptural and Plotinian byways, ending with a definition of time as a "distension of the mind" -- a strikingly mentalistic reading. Here too, Augustine is quoted, admired, and rarely criticized directly -- so great is his prestige.⁶⁸

Third, and in a different vein, the Confessions provides a narrative within which to read the self-indulgent and sometimes pretentious dialogues of Cassicacum -- De Academicis, De beata vita, De ordine -- and the associated works, esp. Soliloquia and the fragmentary and frustrating De immortalitate animae. In the winter after his determination to renounce sexual activity once for all, Augustine and his students, friends, and family retired to a country villa to re-create Ciceronian philosophical leisure. They read Vergil of a morning, and of an afternoon would playact the philosophical dialogue. The books report that stenographers took down their every word and swear that the texts represent debate as it really was. Modern readers have doubted that dialogue could naturally have unfolded so neatly, but omit to recognize (1) that the dialogues are carefully sewn together segments of conversation -- out of several months' residence in the country, barely two weeks of time turn up represented in the texts of these works; and (2) that the people who participated in these dialogues were quite consciously playing parts, recreating Cicero's Tusculum, whose texts they knew only too well. The books remain interesting as sophisticated readings and reapplications of Ciceronian thought and method in a Christianizing context. If nothing else from Augustine survived, these texts would be minor classics, on the order of the works of Minucius Felix or the emperor Julian, but the fact of Augustine's later career and the persuasive reading offered for them by the Confessions have given them a special place as charter texts in Augustine's way of thinking. For all that they were written by an unbaptized rhetorician going through a bout of something approaching depressive withdrawal, they loom large in modern readers' attention to Augustine because of their authorized place in the autobiographical narrative.

The Augustine of the Confessions has also given rise in modern times to the most lasting and ferocious of quarrels over his philosophical ancestry and affiliation. The text of the Confessions explicitly tells us of his discovery of the "books of the Platonists" in Milan in 385 and the powerful influence those books exercised. Now, the text in which the discovery is reported tells us with no apology that what Augustine thought he found in those books was identical with the content of the first words of John's gospel.⁶⁹ There are various ways to interpret that assertion, but behind it clearly lie some distinct acts of reading. Particularly since Pierre Courcelle's epoch-making book of 1950, much modern Augustinian scholarship has concentrated on identifying the nature of those books and the time and place of Augustine's various readings of them (presumably, at the outset, under the influence of Ambrose).⁷⁰ After a half-century of scholarship, debate still rages. There are two chief questions.

1. What did he read and when did he read it? The "what" question centers on the proportions of Platonic material that came to Augustine in the words of Plotinus and of Porphyry. Given that Augustine read the texts in Latin translations that had to be (given the difficulty of the Greek originals) exceedingly difficult and frustrating, finding the exact mix of Plotinus and Porphyry has been impossible. (Since Porphyry was Plotinus' disciple, biographer, editor, and abridger -- in the work under his own name called "Sentences" -- it is also likely that Augustine found some things that he thought were Plotinian but that were in fact Porphyrian.) The "when" question tries to trace Augustine's readership through 385 and 386 most closely, but is also concerned to know what later readings, particularly of Porphyry, occurred. The Augustine of 386 seems not to have known that Porphyry had notoriously written "Against the Christians" -- a work lost to the intolerance of his enemies. By about 399, Augustine seems to have discovered Porphyry's hostility, and that becomes a leit-motif of his later discussions of Platonism, notably those in books 8-10 of the De civitate Dei.

2. A different kind of debate has centered on Augustine's reception of Plotinian ideas and has pitted scholars against one another. Robert O'Connell, SJ, has held out contra mundum for over a generation for the position that Augustine was through most of his life a crypto- Plotinian, espousing a doctrine of the soul that he received from neo- Platonism according to which the soul of human beings had entered matter by a "fall" from the purity of uncorporeal existence Human life was hence a struggle to free the soul of corporeality. A broader consensus of scholars holds that Augustine's frequent protestations of his inability to determine an answer to the question of the soul's origin can be taken at face value. O'Connell's story requires us to complicate the traditional narrative of conversion with an inner conflict of lingering attachment to a central piece of unconverted doctrine through the years of Augustine's public profession as bishop. To be sure, Augustine is noticeably marked as he grows older by his fear of his own past, and he externalizes that fear: he attacks the Platonists in De civitate Dei and then strikingly turns his quarrel with Julian of Eclanum into a reprise of his attack on the Manichees. The last words of the last book Augustine wrote -- was working on when he fell ill to die -- are part of a slanging match in which Augustine and Julian take turns accusing the other of crypto-Manicheism.⁷¹ O'Connell's view suggests bad conscience about Plotinus: a minority view, but one that needs to be given serious attention.

What other Augustines are there yet undiscovered? I will close by suggesting that there are two, at least.

The first may perhaps just be coming into view. This is the Augustine who revealed himself at vast length in his letters and sermons, texts which constitute over 45% of the bulk of his surviving works. These texts have been mined for facts that fit the pre-determined structure of biographical narrative but have received far too little attention for their literary and philosophical content. Some new studies have begun to take these texts seriously, but it is striking that even these still tend to come from European Catholic scholars essentially accepting the portrait we have received. The impetus from the new Divjak letters and Dolbeau sermons (see note 7 above) will prove most fruitful if it broadens to include reconsideration of these long-known but under-studied masses of text.

The second Augustine I have tried to sketch here, one whose life is not defined by the narrative he himself supplies. This Augustine does not succeed in imposing his interiority upon us, does not succeed in making his own interpretation of his religious history the armature of everything we are to know about him. We cannot escape from the Augustine of the Confessions, but we owe him and ourselves the effort to see him in other lights, to find other ways of reading his narrative. When we do, he becomes less the extraordinary figure who wrote dazzling books and more readily understood as a man of his time and place. In important ways, this then makes it easier to give proper respect to the thinker and the writer.

Beyond and behind even those Augustines, was a man whose privacy we never penetrate. His earliest biographer closed with an account of the dying Augustine asking to have the seven penitential psalms written out and posted on the walls of his chamber, then asking to be left alone with those sobering words for his last hours and days.⁷² Many structures of interpretation could be erected around such a report, but we should not fail to see the image presented, of an old man who knows he is dying, choosing to be alone with words that come from his God and that tell him, insistently, and that are meant to let him tell himself how far he falls short of divinity. Our last impression of Augustine is of a man who never made things easy for himself.⁷³