Confessio itaque mea, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo, tibi tacite fit et non tacite. My confession, my God, beneath your gaze is made unto you by keeping silent and by not keeping silent.
—Augustine, Confessiones X, 2, 2, 14, 1421
There is a difficulty specific to the reading of Saint Augustine, so much does he appear at one and the same time unavoidable and inaccessible.
He is unavoidable because ever since he came on the scene, nobody has been unaware of him; nobody has neglected him. This is the case for his work and for his thought, as it was for his ordination and his rise to the bishopric; it was enough that he appear and that he speak for everybody to experience the evidence of his intellectual and moral authority. That he immediately confronted, indeed attracted, the most resolute opponents in the Church (during his lifetime and again and again over the centuries), as well as the most extreme adherents, that he was obliged to assume quite quickly the role of arbiter in the social life and politics of his Africa—all of this resulted directly from this stature and only anticipated his role as permanent and ever reactualized reference point in the history of thought. The greatest Christian theologians have laid claim to him, in the name of the most rigid orthodoxy, as well as to authorize sometimes heterodox innovations. Catholics and Protestants divide in both claiming fidelity to his teachings, while the Eastern Churches have often indicated their irreducibility to either by a virulent, though little argued, anti-Augustinian polemic. One could make of him equally the witness to the original faith and the inventor of the supposed driftings of modernity. Even those, indeed especially those, who separate themselves from him make no end of always laying claim to his patronage. Every Christian has an assessment of Saint Augustine, and every adversary of the Christian faith has his, too. But this fascination holds not only in the history of theology and in the entire spectrum of Christian communities; it is also at work in the history of philosophy. The medieval emergence of the separation between theology and philosophy happens in direct relation with Augustinian thought, often invoked as an Aristotelian counterpoint, but also sometimes favoring the autonomy of certain philosophical truths (in noetics, for example). Ever since Descartes, Saint Augustine finds himself frequently invoked as the protector of the novatores against Aristotelianism. Of course, even the Enlightenment can be read as having an ambivalent relationship with Saint Augustine: the criticism of the theology of grace and its ecclesiastical implications (Voltaire, d’Holbach, et al.), the revision of subjectivity on the basis of the primacy of affectus (Rousseau, et al.). Finally, though sometimes under cover of Pascal (in France) or Luther (in Germany), Saint Augustine gets set up as a central interlocutor, either first adversary to be deconstructed or powerful ally of deconstruction, for all the moderns, even including Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein2—so much so that the greatness of a thought is measured by the quality of its Augustinian quarrel. The result of all this is that nobody can claim as his or her own the resolution of Etienne Gilson: “We have therefore felt, like so many others, the need to go back to the source and study the Augustinism of Saint Augustine himself, so as to be better able to understand that of his successors.”3
Inaccessible—Saint Augustine appears so as soon as one tries seriously to “go back to the source.” Indications of this difficulty are not hard to find: the contradictory roles that the interpretive tradition always seems to make him play; the habit of selecting anthologies that dismantle the works so as to rebuild a system; reconstituting particular treatises to the detriment of wholes constructed by the author; assuming the lack of unity or poor composition of the greatest treatises (not only the Confessiones but even De Trinitate). One could multiply the rubrics and the examples. In fact, these are symptoms of a single but fearsome aporia: can one take a single, that is to say unitive, point of view on the immense continent of Saint Augustine? The enormous mass of the texts4 would demand of the perfect reader the competence of a historian and a philologist but also of a historian of philosophy, equally well versed as a historian of dogma and theology, of a biblicist who would also be a rhetorician, etc., to whom the effort and the erudition accumulated over the centuries would give access to all these points of view. But, in reality, we have to choose from all of them in order to find the ideal but indispensable point of view from which the fragments would become a whole, the point of view that was, at least in any given moment, that of Saint Augustine—and no longer that of a discipline and a specialist of this discipline who has mastery over a selection of texts, indeed over some section taken out of the work. Now this demand, already difficult to assume when faced with any author worthy of the name, becomes almost unbearable here because the three points of view that one might wish to adopt everywhere else turn out, in the case of Saint Augustine, to be impracticable.
The point of view called, lacking anything better, historical (social and political histories, history of ideas, literary history, etc.) has benefited in recent years from an extreme and no doubt legitimate privilege. It obtained indisputable and definitive results—as much concerning the African roots of the doctrinal quarrels (in particular, Donatism) and the expanded responsibilities of the Episcopacy (and in particular that of Saint Augustine) as concerning liturgical life, the teaching and interpretation of biblical texts, and so forth. No one can ignore them or dispense with them. But it remains all the more remarkable that these same outcomes always permit different, indeed opposed, interpretations. This is illustrated perfectly by the two conclusions reached successively by as faithful and reliable a historian as Peter Brown when he passes from the first to the second edition of his biography of Saint Augustine: the retractio inverts or, at least, radically corrects his conclusions about nothing less than freedom, sexual morality and the theology of marriage, the handling of Donatism, and the response to Pelagianism. As he himself recognizes with a laudable probity, the evolution of his results comes as much from his own lowering of his ideological cautions as from obtaining new information.5 And this evolution of the interpreter himself becomes in the end an even greater clue as it is the case of an author and a corpus broaching precisely the question of the conditions of the decision, of the affects that cannot not provoke it, and of the so to speak erotic interest that motivates it. The Augustinian doctrine of truth, desire, and the will renders the ambition to treat it solely with the resources of positive and objective information unrealistic and empty.6 In the same sense the very long and rich debate about the supposed Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine, even when conducted by scholars as eminent as P. Courcelle, no longer appears today as decisive as it appeared at its beginning. This is not to say that the question is without interest but that it seems less central if not marginal: first, because Saint Augustine does not use the fundamental concepts of any of the Neoplatonisms (be it only because God is identical with neither the One, nor a Principle, nor even the Good); second, because one author can influence another without passing through explicit readings; and finally, because it behooves us to take seriously his own judgment, unambiguously negative, on these doctrines.7 The privilege long granted to the question of the supposed Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine (and the Fathers of the Church in general) testifies perhaps as much to the preoccupation of the age and its interpreters as to an evident characteristic of he who had his roots rather in the practice of the Enarrationes in Psalmos.8 Once again, the approach of Saint Augustine, by virtue of the radicality of the spiritual decisions he is trying to carry out and to theorize, forbids us from pretending to exclude them or neutralize them. The interpreter can neither maintain the pose of the impartial spectator nor fall back on the false modesty of a factual investigation, by imagining that his inevitable presuppositions will not be disclosed at one moment or another.9 Nobody can leave intact from frequenting an author who wants only to speak from the point of view of Christ and demands it so insistently from his reader. It remains, of course, legitimate to study this or that Augustinian theme by trying to remain, as much as one can, in a perfect neutrality, and some excellent results can even follow from that. But these results will never concern the thought nor the question nor even the care of Saint Augustine himself; sometimes they even risk rendering these all the more inaccessible as they cover them over with other questions, indeed with correct answers to nevertheless foreign questions. In all cases these results will manifest negatively the necessity of at least trying to approach the point of view of Saint Augustine himself.
Could all of this be about adopting a philosophical point of view? Some have not hesitated to consider Saint Augustine a pure philosopher, to the point that Fénelon even claimed he was the accomplishment of Cartesianism: “If an enlightened man collected in the books of Saint Augustine all the sublime truths that this Father scattered throughout as if by chance, this extract, made carefully by design, would be far superior to Descartes’ Meditationes, even though these Meditationes are the greatest work of the mind of this philosopher.”10 But besides the fact that Descartes and Pascal refuse this patronage in advance,11 it could come from, at best, only an “extract, made by choice.” And, in fact, the philosophical appropriations of Augustinian theses or themes always proceed by selecting texts, often the same ones, always purged as much as possible of their biblical environment and their theological implications, obviously in opposition to the explicit declarations of Saint Augustine himself. Such is the case with the discussions of time in book XI of the Confessiones;12 those about memoria in book X;13 those about signs, in particular in book I, 8, 13;14 those about the supposed anticipations of the cogito; those on the pair uti/frui in De doctrina christiana; those concerning the weakness of the will; etc. In all these cases, some of which are very famous, it appears clearly, as we will see again and again, that the philosophical recoveries of Augustinian arguments not only do not conform to the point of view of Saint Augustine but most often contradict it explicitly. The position of the philosophical rereaders consists, in the least naive of cases, in not taking up the analyses of Saint Augustine except as material worth being used better than he himself did or containing precursors still unfortunately formed in an imprecise and deceptive theological gangue in need of being elevated to a conceptual level by neutralizing them with an at best “methodological” atheism. In other words, the very attention that the philosophers pay to the texts, more exactly to certain extracts of the Augustinian texts, offers the best proof that Saint Augustine does not proceed as a philosopher and that the philosophical point of view was never his own.
The paradox is even stronger coming from the other side. For it is not only the interest that the philosophers take in him that denies Saint Augustine the status of philosopher, but the theologians themselves evidence great defiance toward claims of his philosophical insufficiency—or at least those theologians who assume that theology can and must rest on a philosophy that would be appropriate to it, that is to say absolutely nontheological. We find a magnificent example of this interpretive tendency in the contributions of a colloquium organized for the fifteenth centennial of Saint Augustine’s death by l’Académie Saint-Thomas (23–30 March 1930). Assuming an Augustinian philosophy, the only question to arise concerned its relation to Saint Thomas Aquinas, understood as the model and norm of a correct articulation of philosophy and theology, the first being sure of its pure nature by reason alone, the second rationalizing the supernatural by the science of the revealed. Even Etienne Gilson evoked an Augustinian philosophy in these proceedings (“The Idea of Philosophy in Saint Augustine and in Saint Thomas Aquinas”), while M. Grabmann investigated the Augustinian (and biblical) principle “If you do not believe, you will not understand” more as a problem than as a shape of the intellect (“De quaestione ‘utrum aliquid possit esse simul creditum et scitum’ inter scholas Augustinismi et Aristotelico-Thomismi medii aevi agitata”). It fell to R. Garrigou-Lagrange to pose frankly the question that was decisive in the eyes of all: did Saint Augustine succeed in correctly separating nature from the supernatural (“De natura creata per respectum ad supernaturalia secundum sanctum Augustinum”)? In other words, did he succeed in distinguishing philosophy from theology (“utrum specifice distingueretur ex parte objecti formalis [philosophia] a theologia”)?15 Garrigou-Lagrange suggested that, despite it all and in a sense, he almost succeeded in doing so. In other words, Saint Augustine suffered from a philosophical insufficiency, at least from a certain sense of philosophy—a sense in which it conforms to the system of metaphysics.
Here comes to light the third and chief reason why a philosophical point of view does not permit an approach to Saint Augustine: his very understanding of philosophia contradicts in advance and head-on the interpretation, obvious for us, of philosophy as metaphysics. Taking up Saint Paul’s warning (and the New Testament hapax)—“Be on guard lest someone deceive you with philosophy, διά τῆς ϕιλοσοφία and the empty seduction following human tradition, according to the elements of this world and not of Christ” (Colossians 2:8)—Saint Augustine rejects the philosophical (Greek and therefore Ciceronian) uses of philosophy in order to retain only the most literal sense: “Amor putem sapientiae nomen graecum habet philosophiam, quo me accendebant illae litterae” (The love of wisdom bears in Greek the name philosophy, and in my reading [of Cicero’s Hortensius], that [alone] ignited my ardor). That alone, in opposition to those it seduces, because they cover their errors with this great name, flattering and honorable, “magno et blando et honesto nomine colorantes et fucantes errores suos” (Confessiones III, 4, 8). Loving wisdom can mean for a Christian only loving God: “verus philosophus est amator Dei” (the true philosopher is he who loves God).16 In short, philosophy is carried out only in the love of God, or else it is opposed to it and constitutes only an imposter. In this sense philosophy such as Saint Augustine understands it is opposed to philosophy in the sense of metaphysica. In this sense, too, one can indeed say that Saint Augustine lacks a philosophy in the commonly accepted sense: “It is clear, all the same, that this conception of philosophy does not correspond with what men commonly call ‘philosophy,’ that is to say with a rational knowing tending to the synthetic explanation of the real.”17 We therefore have to conclude—from the use of Augustinian texts by the philosophers, from the hesitancies of the modern theologians vis-à-vis his imprecision, and above all from his own sense of philosophia—that Saint Augustine never admits, when conducting his thought, a point of view that is philosophical in our sense of the term.
Should one conclude from this, by process of elimination and with the most innocent of all likelihoods, that he adopts a theological point of view? This response, in fact, seems untenable, too, for several reasons. First, if one sticks to the uses of the term, which are rare anyway, one will not let oneself be led astray by its minimalist definition: “theologia, quo verbo graeco significari intelligimus de divinitate rationem, sive sermonem” (theology, Greek term by which we mean to signify a reasoning or a discourse on divinity).18 This speech or this reasoning does not in any way concern what the moderns will name theologia, in either of its senses, which are, moreover, exclusive: either the understanding of Revelation, or theologia rationalis as one of the parts of metaphysica specialis, itself framed by metaphysica generalis (or ontologia).19 The Augustinian sense of theologia concerns much less, since it takes up the threefold division of the term by Varro: “Deinde illud quale est, quod tria genera theologiae dicit esse, id est rationis quae de diis explicatur, eorumque unum mythicon, alterum, physicon tertium civile” (De civitate Dei VI, 5, 1, 34, 64)—in other words, theologia or the poets’ discourse on divinity, that of the philosophi, and that of the city.20 This threefold division forbids making Saint Augustine the “theologian” of any of these three theologiae. This is because he eliminates two of them: first, that of the fables and the poets (whose ridiculous or immoral stories seem clearly unworthy of divinity); and, second, that of the city (which is purely political, reflecting the ideological pretensions of each city). There remains therefore only “theologia rationalis, quae non huic tantum [sc. Varro], sed multis philosophis placuit” (De civitate Dei VII, 6, 34, 140). This text is about that part of philosophy—physics, or more exactly, cosmology—that defines what in nature, in fact in the regular movements of the heavens, can give a certain visibility to the gods. And paradoxically, since philosophers alone reach this narrow but real rationality (“non cum quislibet hominibus . . . , sed cum philosophis est habenda conlatio” [De civitate Dei VIII, 1, 34, 228–30]), Christian thought (what we today call theology) can have discussions only with the philosophers, in no way with the other “theologies” of the pagans (by default, theologies of rationality).21 Thus, in the strict sense, that is to say, in the sense that he himself intended, Saint Augustine does not do, except quite tangentially, a theologian’s work.22 Rigorously speaking, he would do the work of a philosopher, in the strict sense of amator Dei, and so the discussion concludes: “verus philosophus est amator Dei” (De civitate Dei VIII, 1, 34, 230).
Thus, neither historical investigation nor philosophy nor even theology open access to the point of view from which Saint Augustine understood himself; without that, a reader can, at best, only understand him partially, at worst, take him for another, indeed mis-take him. In fact, this aporia has nothing new or surprising about it, and even though they formulate it in terms that are too conventional and narrow, the best interpreters have seen it and admitted it perfectly. Gilson, for example: “One never knows if Saint Augustine is speaking as a philosopher or as a theologian.”23 Or Karl Jaspers: “It is often asked if Augustine is a philosopher or a theologian. This division does not count for me. He is well and truly both in one, not one without the other.”24 Or as G. Madec sums it up: “It is widely admitted that Augustinian teaching lends itself poorly to the distinction of philosophy and theology.”25 But must we admit, in consequence, that the lack of a decision between theology and philosophy comes as a failure, or by a lack of precision, and deplore it? Couldn’t we rather suppose that he did not decide to admit this distinction? As if in passing, Gilson has an excellent formulation: Saint Augustine is to be found “on a plane which might be termed trans-philosophical.”26 How to think transphilosophically, if not perhaps also transtheologically, at least in the ordinary sense? Heidegger, at the beginning of his first treatise on time, tells us that he will not speak theologically and therefore not philosophically either: “nicht theologisch . . . , aber auch nicht philosophisch.”27 In fact, he was reproducing, without knowing it, the position of Saint Augustine, who was unaware in advance of a distinction that Heidegger would attempt to discuss afterward—the distinction between philosophy and theology (and a fortiori between the theologia drawn from the scriptures and the theologia as metaphysica specialis). This very distinction supposes the interpretation of both the one and the other term within the framework of metaphysics, not only its name (of which he was perfectly unaware) but, above all, its concept and system (which will be imposed only after him). It could be that Saint Augustine, who does not pose the question of Being, nor even that of being, who therefore does not name God in terms of Being nor as the being par excellence, who does not speak the language of the categories of being nor starting from the first among them, ουσία who does not investigate a first ground nor seek it in any subject whatsoever (whether one understands it as a substrate or as an ego), does not belong to metaphysics, neither explicitly nor implicitly. It could just as well be that he does not even belong to theology, in the sense that, with the vast majority of the Greek Fathers, it tries to speak of God, of principles, of the creation of the world, of the creation of man, of the incarnation, of the Holy Spirit, just as the Greek philosophers treat of nature, of the soul, of the world, of the categories, of the city, and even of the divine. For Saint Augustine does not so much speak of God as he speaks to God. In short, I assume the hypothesis that Saint Augustine was brilliantly unaware of the distinction between philosophy and theology because he does not belong to metaphysics.
It therefore behooves us to read him from a point of view that is at least negatively identifiable: from a nonmetaphysical point of view and, therefore, as our contemporary utopian, we who are trying to think from a postmetaphysical point of view. He would guide, in advance and without intending it, our hesitant steps by having thought before this after which we are trying to pass—metaphysics and possibly the very horizon of Being.
To develop and, if possible, to verify this hypothesis, I will have recourse to the figure of thought that strives most clearly, at least in its intention, to transgress metaphysics. In particular, I will try to employ the operative concepts of the phenomenology of givenness in order to assess whether they permit a more appropriate, coherent, and correct reading of the Augustinian texts. Thus, one could hope for a reciprocal trial: testing the nonmetaphysical status of Saint Augustine in and through a better intelligibility when he is interpreted according to the terms of a phenomenology of givenness, but testing also just how far the nonmetaphysical character of this phenomenology runs. To this end my attempted reading will call for what Saint Augustine himself called for, or enacted spontaneously: not employing the lexicon of the categories of being, not a fortiori importing the concepts of modern metaphysics, in one or the other of its states—in short, not speaking the language of metaphysics.