The question of time thus arises for Saint Augustine only on the basis of his affirmation of creation, in such a way that it derives its theological status from it. Thus I have wound up thinking time, in the end and at bottom, exclusively as the time of conversion. This means that it is not a question of the time of physical beings any more than it is a question of the time of beings in general, because it is no longer a matter of the time of the closed world but of the infinite site of creation. Or, rather, it is not a matter of the time of what the Greeks called kosmos, precisely because it comes from the event of creation, and creation does not, for Saint Augustine, pertain to the world but to what he understands, following the biblical nomenclature, as “heaven and earth.” For this phrase remains, despite its purported clarity, perfectly aporetic, since we speak, ordinarily, Greek. To this end it should be noted that in his numerous and ever again resumed commentaries of Genesis (none of which, for that matter, I would like to emphasize, bear the expected title peri . . . ), he speaks only very little, indeed almost never, of the creation of the world, as if he came to it, after the rational doctrines concerning the mens and God, in the end according to the Thomist, Cartesian, or Kantian order, in the fashion of a rational cosmology.1 Or, rather, when he turns to a consideration of the things of the world, he immediately sees them, too, inasmuch as created, on equal footing with the mens. Now, when the mens comes to recognize itself as created, it is confronted with something entirely other than its essence, its existence, and its mode of Being: it finds itself inscribed in the structure of the confessio, which precedes it and summons it as an address calls for a response, and a response that already speaks the language of the address itself (Chapter 1), in view of the love of truth, which alone gives access to the vita beata (Chapter 3, §§20–22), by way of nothing other than the conversion of time (Chapter 5). By good logic, then, one should infer from this that what we call, a bit hastily, the question of the world should, too, be thematized on the basis of creation. Such a “creation of heaven and earth” would repeat and complete the structure of confessio by extending it to the totality. It remains the case, however, that we do not know what precisely to understand by created, nor even by creation, since for us, inevitably caught in a metaphysical and Greek position, creation remains another way, imprecise and cursory, to say the totality of beings—or, more exactly, to not think it. But one can think the totality of beings in two very different ways, as Heidegger lets us see, perhaps against his declared intention.
Nobody has done more than Heidegger to point out the ontological insufficiency of the concept of creation, supposing that it is a matter of a concept. He admits that “creatureness [Geschaffenheit] in the widest sense of the production [Hergestellheit] of something is an essential item in the structure of the ancient concept of Being,”2 and he concludes from this that “within the region of created being, of the ‘world,’ in the sense of ens creatum,” not only “is every being that is not God an ens creatum,” but “the production of what subsists [present-at-hand] (Herstellung zu Vorhandenem) . . . constitutes the horizon on the basis of which Being is understood.”3 In this way the distinction between the ens creatum and ens increatum would be a mere translation, deprived of any and all phenomenological justification, of the division between God and all that is not God. It would hide the question of their modes of Being by covering it over with the univocal permanent subsistence (Vorhandenheit), itself deprived of any ontological legitimacy. God, bearing the title Creator, would intervene as the most perfect subsistent being, ens perfectissimum, instituting, by way of efficient causality, all the other beings, here understood as creatures. The doctrine of creation, whether it belongs to “ancient thought” or to “Christian thought,”4 is disqualified with the name of Vorhandenheit precisely because Heidegger interprets it as taking a position concerning beings, indeed one that would pretend to designate (wrongly) their mode of Being. He even declares this presupposition straightforwardly in a clear, since polemical, text:
Anyone for whom, for example, the Bible is a divine revelation and truth already has the answer to the question: “Why is there something, in general, rather than nothing?” even before it is asked: namely, being, insofar as it is not God himself, has been created by Him. God “is” in the role of uncreated creator. One who stands in the land of such a faith can in a way follow the questioning of our question and participate in it, but he cannot really question without renouncing himself as believer with all the consequences of taking such a step. He can only act as if.?5
In a word, creation offers an inept, or rather in-apt, response, because theologically based, to an ontological question, that it masks and misses.
But how can we not be amazed by the weakness of this objection? In the first place Heidegger assumes here (in 1935), without questioning it, the question “Why is there in general something, rather than nothing?” He does not in any way interrogate the metaphysical status proper to it, which, however, he had acknowledged already in 1929 when he evoked “the fundamental question of metaphysics: ‘Why is there something, in general, and not rather nothing?’”6 That one could and should put into question this question itself inasmuch as it remains essentially metaphysical will be confirmed quite clearly by a subsequent text (1949):
[This question] states: “Why is there something, in general, and not rather nothing?” Provided that we no longer think about the truth of Being from within metaphysics in the ordinary metaphysical sense, but according to the essence and the truth of metaphysics, one can also ask here: Whence comes it that beings have primacy everywhere and claim for themselves this “is,” while what is not a being, the nothing itself understood as Being, remains forgotten?7
Thus, the very question that faith supposedly would not comprehend or would not want to comprehend, far from opening the Seinsfrage, could, by contrast (owing to its origin in Leibniz, therefore metaphysics), close it or falsify it by privileging, from the very outset, beings to the detriment of Being, itself reduced to the rank of mere nothingness, or even of nothing, more “simple” than Being. Might it be the case that, strangely enough, faith has good reasons not to listen to a question that does not make the Seinsfrage heard but smothers it under the noise of beings?
But there is more. Heidegger takes it for granted that faith, in revolving around the doctrine of creation, pretends to respond to the question “Why is there, in general, something rather than nothing?” He supposes that creation aims to provide a biblical response, however inappropriate, to a metaphysical question—about the provenance of beings. Without this presupposition his objection does not stand even for one minute, but never is it demonstrated nor really stated clearly. Now is it really self-evident that “he for whom the Bible is a divine revelation and truth” seeks in it first and foremost “to possess answers” to “questions”? Even admitting it to be so, is it self-evident that he seeks the answer to this precise question, the one that asks, “Why is there in general something, and not rather nothing?” Is it clear that the Bible at any moment whatsoever raises the question why with regard to creation? Doesn’t creation offer, by contrast, the best example of an absence of any and all why—not by lack but by excess? And, for that matter, is it even self-evident that beings are at issue in the creation that remains, like the rose, without why? When, then, would the concept, or even only the word, ever appear? Moreover, with what right can one interpret what God creates as a being? With what right can one likewise interpret it as a subsisting (vorhanden) being since what is proper to the created would rather consist in the radical caducity that forbids it from subsisting on its own? The only response consists in the fact that, as Heidegger first recognized, “‘God’ is a purely ontological term” (ein ontologischer Titel)8 and is therefore in no way the biblical God, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” but rather the “God of the philosophers.” It could be that Heidegger here translates the theological thesis of creation into a mere answer to an ontological question, with the same degree of arbitrariness (in other words, by leaving the obvious uninvestigated) as does metaphysics (in this case Cartesian metaphysics) when it translates God the Creator into an ontological title. But instead of perversely coupling the biblical doctrine of creation to the metaphysical obsession with the why, therefore with the principle of sufficient reason, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to liberate it and not make creation into the response, at once forced and inept, to a question that it does not satisfy because it never even tries to? It is no more self-evident, for Christian thought, at least Saint Augustine’s, that the question of creation aims to establish the world than it is that, for it and for him, it aims to establish beings in their subsistence or whatever other mode of Being one can imagine. Hence, it may be concluded, Heidegger’s objection to the doctrine of creation is reversed and now appears as a very reliable negative indicator of the path to follow. I will no longer ask if creation responds to the question why concerning the world, but inversely I will seek the question to which creation provides a response, since this response does not take on, whatever the case, the guise of a cause, nor a sufficient reason, nor an ontology, still less a cosmology. It could be that creation does not provide any response other than the response itself—in the sense that everything, in heaven and on earth, emerges in the created only precisely for that, to respond.
Between creation and response there rules a reciprocal and necessary connection, which is deployed at once in a praise and a confessio. Creatures find themselves first in praise. I have already noted the fact that books XII and XIII of the Confessiones, which treat the story of creation, open with a confession of praise (“Confitetur altitudini tuae humilitas linguae meae, quoniam tu fecisti caelum et terram” [The humility of my tongue confesses it unto your highness, you made heaven and earth] [XII, 2, 2, 14, 344]) and conclude with a praise (“Laudant te opera tua, ut amemus te, et amemus te, ut laudent te opera tua” [Your works praise you, so that we may love you, and we love you in order that your works may praise you] [XIII, 33, 48, 516]). In fact, the pure and simple acknowledgment of the goodness (therefore also the beauty) of created things is equivalent in actuality to a praise, which no longer need be qualified explicitly as such: “et vidimus, quia bona sunt singula et omnia bona valde” (and we saw that each is [by itself] good and that all taken together are very good) (XIII, 34, 49, 14, 518). The entire “ordo pulcherrimus rerum valde bonarum” (perfectly beautiful order of very good things) (XIII, 35, 50, 14, 520) that concludes all the Confessiones completes the initial praise of God laudabilis valde (I, 1, 1, 13, 272). But there is even more and even earlier: the first thematic mention of creation, which appears, we saw, as early as book XI of the Confessiones, evokes the reading of the text of Genesis in terms that recall Romans 13 during Augustine’s personal conversion. That is, at Cassiciacum Saint Augustine hears tolle, lege: he hears and therefore takes (VIII, 12, 29, 14, 66), while here he asks to hear and to understand: “Audiam et intelligam, quomodo ‘in principio’ fecisti ‘caelum et terram’” (Let me hear and understand how “in the beginning” you made “heaven and earth”) (XI, 3, 5, 14, 278)—which is to say that his conversion, which begins by a reading of the scriptures concerning regeneration in God, is finally accomplished by another reading, concerning my creation by God. Between these two readings, however, a difference is to be noted: the first ends up at an individual conversion, while the second, the one that will interpret the creation of heaven and earth in the first chapters of Genesis, takes under its charge the entire community of readers, who share the same creation and the same community of prayer.
The exegesis of Genesis attempts to comprehend the creation of the plurality of things only by speaking in the name of the community of created men and, among them, that of the believers. As we saw above (Chapter 1, §6), the literary act takes on, with the exegesis of creation, a communal and liturgical status, because it aims to provoke, for the readers as well as for the author, the initial confessio: “Volo ‘eam [sc. veritatem] facere’ in corde meo coram te in confessione, in stilo autem meo coram multis testibus” (I want “to do the truth” [John 3:21] in my heart and in front of you in confession, but also with my pen before many witnesses) (X, 1, 1, 14, 140). Writing, in particular here the exegesis of Genesis, amounts to making us confess God “ut dicamus omnes ‘magnus Dominus, et laudabilis valde’” (XI, 1, 1, 14, 270). The plurality of created things is realized in a confession that is itself plural. In fact, the common confession of believers permits taking charge of created things as so many occasions to praise their creator. And it alone permits such a charge: the things themselves could not give themselves to be seen as created by God—in other words as given by God—if nobody interpreted them as such, as witnesses to the glory of God. The community of believers, of those who confess God in faith, is therefore the sole thing that permits seeing and saying things as created, therefore as not subsisting (non-vorhanden) because it alone hears and sees in them the goodness of God: “O si vitia nostra cohibeamus! Quia bona sunt omnia, quia bonus Deus fecit omnia; et laudant illum opera sua, considerata quia bona sunt, ab eo qui habet spiritum considerandi, spiritum pietatis et sapientiae. Undique laudatur Deus ab operibus suis” (O, if only we could contain our vices! [We would see] that all things are good because good God made them all; and all his works praise him provided they are considered as good, [as they are by] he who has the spirit to consider them so, the spirit of piety and of wisdom. Everywhere, God’s works praise him).9 Nothing less than the plurality of believers is needed to interpret the plurality of things as the beauty that refers to God and assigns them, then and only then, the dignity of creatures. For heaven and earth to “proclaim that they themselves did not make themselves” (clamant etiam quod se ipsa non fecerint) (XI, 3, 5, 14, 280), what is needed is that somebody pose to them a strange and not-so-evident question, one that asks if they come from themselves or from elsewhere: “Interrogavi terram et dixit ‘non sum’” (I asked the earth, and it replied, “It is not I”) (X, 6, 9, 14, 154). But what is even more necessary is somebody who knows how to hear the possible and silent response, “cui sileat omnino—quoniam si quis audiat, dicunt haec omnia ‘non ipsa nos fecimus, sed fecit nos qui manet in aeternum’” (somebody who is capable of an absolute silence—for if somebody would listen [truly listen], all things would say: “We ourselves did not make ourselves, but rather he who remains forever” [Psalm 99:3]) (IX, 10, 25, 14, 118).10 The exegesis of Genesis in fact ends at a hermeneutic, by the community of believers, of heaven and earth as gifts given by God—in other words, the interpretation of the creation story leads to interpreting the world as created.11 This is possible only by a universalized confessio of God, by all believers, with regard to all things, as so many gifts.
Creation appears—or, more exactly, heaven, earth, and all things appear—as created only starting from the confessio of the believers, who assume in the flesh (constituting and constituted) the interpretation of creation as praise rendered to God, acknowledged as such because invoked in the figure of the creator. Qualifying heaven, earth, or any other thing with the title creature amounts to literally praising in it God’s gift, to praising God by acknowledging him as creator. This means that the hermeneutic of creation consists precisely in not defining things as beings (still less as beings subsisting in an uninterrogated presence) but in acknowledging them as gifts received in the form of creation and offered in the form of praise—and thus whose presence is maintained only in this exchange. In fact, creation and praise reciprocate one another and render each other possible: “Te laudant haec omnia creatorem omnium” (These things all praise you [as] creator of all) (XI, 5, 7, 14, 282). In other words the formulation “Laudant te opera tua” (Your works praise you) (XIII, 33, 48, 14, 516) should be understood as a pleonasm, or rather as an equivalence. “Creation” does not belong to the lexicon of beings, being, or Being but to the liturgical vocabulary, like confessio and praise, which alone acknowledge and establish it.
Creation does not come at the beginning but after and within praise because it alone can and wants to interpret visible things as endowed with a beginning, therefore as created. There would not be any possibility of seeing the world as heaven and earth created by God if one did not first consent to praising God as God. Praise thus sets forth the liturgical condition for the possibility of recognizing creation—even if afterward and almost anachronistically, one can obscure the praise and posit creation as an ontic commencement. But this reversal of the real and primordial liturgical order into a cosmological order reconstituted a posteriori remains, even if it is convenient to accept it, a methodological artifice and, as such, is deprived of even the least bit of legitimacy in the eyes of the confessio. Creation does not render confessio possible, as the ontic place for its enactment, but it itself becomes possible only starting with confessio, its liturgical preliminary. In short, in and through its praise of God, confessio gives its first place to the creation of heaven and earth, not the inverse. Thus we understand the extent to which the question to which creation responds has nothing ontic or ontological about it. This question asks about the liturgical and therefore theological conditions for the praise of God and considers creation only as an output of the hermeneutic operation of praise—in and through the interpretation of heaven and earth as created and as silently proclaiming not themselves but God.
It is therefore necessary to begin by fixing the place of creation in praise if one wants later, by derivation, to see creation itself as a place. In fact, from the very opening of the Confessiones (in I, 1, 1) the issue has always been to deduce a place starting from praise. For if God gives himself as laudabilis valde, as he who is par excellence fit to praise, a question arises: how to praise him seeing as we do not know him and, in fact, seeing as he must first announce himself to us for us to invoke him: “Praedicatus enim es nobis” (You were said to us in advance)? We can therefore praise him (say him) only in response to his own announcement of himself (his prediction), such that praising him amounts to calling him upon oneself: “Quaeram te, Domine, invocans te et invocem te credens te” (I want, Lord, to seek you by invoking you and to invoke you by believing in you) (I, 1, 1, 13, 275). But what does it mean to invoke or to praise by invoking, if not to call God to come into myself, “in me ipsum eum invocabo, cum invocabo ipsum”? This coming of God into myself, which turns out to be the sole posture praise can adopt, supposes that I myself have the status of an open place for God to come into; but who am I to pretend to constitute a place when faced with God? “Et quis locus est in me, quo veniat in me Deus meus? Quo Deus veniat in me, Deus, qui ‘fecit caelum et terram’?” (And what place is there in me where my God might come into me? In what corner would God come into me, God “who made heaven and earth”?) (I, 2, 2, 13, 274). A contradiction arises here: I have no other place in me besides the one that God made; therefore God cannot come into me without my first coming into him or discovering myself always already in him: I am not a place for God; rather I take place in him. Praise cannot ask God to come into me, since I do not have a place to offer to him, where he would dwell as in his temple. In fact, of place, I have none other besides him, or more simply, besides the place that he himself has set up for me by creating heaven and earth. If praise there must be, it will call for an impossibility—that I come, myself, into his very own place, God—to wit, into God himself. “Et ego, quid peto, ut venias in me, qui non essem, nisi esses in me? . . . Non ergo essem, nisi esses in me, an potius non essem, nisi essem in te, ‘ex quo omnia, per quem omnia, in quo omnia’” (And what is it that I imagine I am asking when I ask that you come into me, me who would not be if you were not in me? . . . For I would not be if you were not in me, or rather I would not be if I was not in you, you “from whom all things come, by whom all things were made, in whom all things reside” [Romans 11:36]) (I, 2, 2, 13, 276). Once again creation does not respond to the ontic or ontological question, since it precedes it and, at best, renders it conceivable, but always as a derivative, in a secondary set of considerations. The metaphysical interpretation of creation, in fact, supposes that the question of place has already been resolved and in the basest manner conceivable: as the production of a world of beings by the exercise of an efficient causality. This interpretation quite simply does not see the difficulty, which resides in asking on the basis of what place a praise of the laudabilis valde can be set forth. The creation of heaven and earth (once again not the creation of the world, nor of beings, especially not subsistent) comes up only in order to respond to the original question, the confessio.
The absence in myself of the place for praise by confessio is illustrated by at least two aporiae. The first is almost self-evident. Since God created heaven and earth, he is found everywhere where heaven and earth are stretched out; in this sense I find myself from the outset already in him. This does not, however, resolve the difficulty, which by contrast becomes all the more formidable: in finding myself in heaven and earth, which come from him and are in him, I experience how great is the distance separating me from him; for, located in what is of, by, and in God, I do not discover myself exactly in, nor of, nor through God. I must, inversely, notice that God is not contained anywhere, especially not in what he created: “An non opus habes, ut quoquam continearis, qui contines omnia, quoniam quae imples continendo imples?” (Or is it that you have no need that some place contain you, since what you fill, you fill by containing it yourself?) (I, 3, 3, 13, 276). As it seems unacceptable to conclude that one part of God is present in heaven and earth while another would remain outside—seeing as one thereby supposes a univocal spatialization of God in his creation, it must be concluded by contrast that “ubique totus es et res nulla te totum capit” (you are entirely everywhere without anything comprehending you) (I, 3, 3, 13, 278). But then even the creation of heaven and earth, far from opening for us a place to receive God, reveals him as all the more secretissimus et praesentissimus, at one and the same time the most secret and the most present (I, 4, 4, 13, 278). Hence, the aporia of the place where and whence God could be praised by our confessio imposes its utopia.
This way of crystallizing the difficulty in fixing a place by mere recourse to the creation of heaven and earth refers us to a second aporia: the most pressing and the most evident, since it has, in fact, all along haunted the path we have been traveling, in particular when we were tracking the anonymity of the ego and the immemorial (Chapter 2, §12; Chapter 3, §16). The utopia of heaven and earth seems, throughout Saint Augustine’s itinerary, like a repetition (in book XII) and an anticipation (in book I) of the most constant utopia, that of the self: the creation of heaven and earth leaves me without place for praise because, more essentially, I know of no place (ubi) permitting me to dwell anywhere, much less in myself. If I do not offer a place where God can come, this is not first or only on account of my sin rendering me uninhabitable to his holiness12 but on account of a utopia constitutive of my finitude, which sin only orchestrates. We have already seen this once before in the gaps that sometimes arise between myself and myself to the point of alienating me from myself. For example, when the pain of losing a friend makes me hate all other things (“oderam omnia”), ones that nevertheless make up my own life (“mihi patria supplicum et parterna domus mihi infelicitas” [my homeland becomes a torture and the house of my father a great unhappiness]), to the point of transforming my own evidence into a question to myself: “factus eram mihi magna quaestio” (IV, 4, 9, 13, 422). Or again when the temptation to prefer, in listening to a song, the musical pleasure over the liturgical praise makes me no longer know who I truly am, that is to say where I am truly going with my desire, I discover myself once again outside myself: “mihi quaestio factus sum” (I become for myself a great question) (X, 33, 50, 14, 232). I can appear to myself as so frequent a question only because I do not, in fact, frequent myself—I lack access to myself, there where I truly dwell. My alienation in these crises attests that I do not know where to recover myself because, in fact, I do not have any proper place, because I no longer have place for myself nor for a self.
The same utopia leads me astray in the exercise of memoria. In its first sense this faculty offers the place par excellence for the mind since, in it, here, everything we think is buried (“Ibi reconditum est, quiquid etiam cogitamus”) in such a way that, here, I am even able to make reappear at will what is past (“Ibi quando sum, posco, ut preferatur quidquid volo” [X, 8, 12, 14, 162]). I can always therefore, in the normal course of things, encounter myself here (“Ibi mihi et ipse occurro meque recolo” [X, 8, 14, 14, 166]). In remembering everything, I dwell in myself; I have a place. But strangely (or, like a stranger), what is proper to my memory, to this place more my own than any other, consists also in that I am not always in command of it, since sometimes it dispossesses me of myself and does not come back to me: “Ecce memoriae meae vis non comprehenditur a me” (And look, the strength of my own memory is not something I comprehend) precisely when I do not remember or, worse, do not even remember having forgotten. Hence, I suffer from myself, because I no longer recover myself here, because the place is missing precisely there where I find myself, “laboro hîc et laboro in me ipso” (X, 16, 25, 14, 184). In other words I no longer know what I am because I no longer know where I am. “Nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum. Ergo animus ad habendum se ipsum angustus est, ut ubi sit quod sui non capiat? Numquid extra ipsum se ac non in ipso?” (I do not know myself entirely what I am. The mind is too narrow to contain itself, so narrow that it does not know where to find what is its own [place]? Would it find it outside itself and no longer in itself?) (X, 8, 15, 14, 166). I do not give place to myself.
The utopia runs still deeper. For there is still one place, just one, where I know that I find myself, at least where I would like absolutely to find myself, but this is the one place that I am incapable of reaching. That is, all men desire beatitude, unconditionally, but no one even knows where his knowledge of it comes from: “Nonne ipsa est beata vita, quam omnes volunt et omnino qui nolit, nemo est? Ubi noverunt eam, quod sic volunt eam? Ubi viderunt, ut amarent eam?” (Isn’t it the good life itself that all men want to the point that nobody, absolutely nobody, can be found who does not want it? Where then did they know it so that they want it so? Where did they see it to love it so?) (X, 20, 29, 14, 194). Not only do I admit as radically my own only the sole place that I know I cannot reach by myself, but I do not even know where I got the knowledge that I have of it since I absolutely do not know it. I do not even know from where it came to me, the place where I desire to find myself but where I know I cannot find myself.
Now, I who no longer have a place for myself (the quaestio), I who no longer give place to myself (memoria), I who do not know from where the place of my desire comes to me, I hear it named everywhere, provided that I no longer listen to myself but to heaven and earth inasmuch as created. For, if the things of the world remain mute so long as one interprets them as apparently subsisting beings (in fact, even this mindless thick-headedness already demands an interpretation, though it is ignorant of this), they say, in a loud and understandable voice, their place as soon as one succeeds (in fact, accepts) in hearing them as they say themselves, as creatures. At once, “si quis audiat, dicunt haec omnia: ‘Non ipsa nos fecimus, sed fecit nos qui manet in aeternum’” (if someone listens, they all say, “We are not made by ourselves, but he, he alone made us, he who remains for eternity” [Psalm 99:3, 99:5]) (IX, 10, 25, 14, 118).13 By proclaiming in a silent, but piercing, voice that they do not subsist in themselves, that they do not have a place in themselves, heaven and earth make plain that they arise from an other place besides their self, and this tacit yet evident acknowledgment is, in fact, already equivalent to praise—that is to say, to the mode of confessio that is appropriate for them. But, at the same time, heaven and earth, in proclaiming their utopia, overcome it, in recognizing it, transform it from quaestio into response, a response not only to the quaestio of their place (the place consists in an other place besides the self), but in general to the possibility of praise. Hence, since the interpretation of heaven and earth as created does not come from them, but from my interpretation of the world as not subsisting in itself and referring to its utopia, creation (its hermeneutic as created) appears as the response to the quaestio about my possibility of praise and confessio—by no means, once again, a response to the investigation that wants to know why there is something rather than nothing.
The possibility of confessio thus opens when the utopia (I no longer have place for myself, I no longer give a place to myself, and I do not know from where the place of my desire comes over me) is no longer fixed in itself, no longer closed on itself, no longer withdrawn as aporia, but itself becomes the response: when the not-here appears as an other place, or rather an otherplace, an alteration that displaces the place outside itself, outside even the self, in such a way as to open the over-there as my place. “Sed ubi manes in memoria mea, Domine, ubi illic manes?” (But where do you reside in this memory that is called mine, O Lord, where do you reside over there?) (X, 25, 36, 14, 205). For me (therefore, on the basis of my hermeneutic of the world as created, also for all things), the only here is over there such that I find myself when I head off for there where I am not. The desire for beatitude (therefore desire as such, since desire always desires beatitude) saves me only because it enjoins me to leave—but to leave from what, if not from the self, which clings to its here? Toward what in me, if not toward over there? Turning to God (which one names, without fully understanding what one says, conversion) designates first of all the exodus from the ubi toward an illic—which means, of course, that I am only because I arrive in him by praise: “Et ego dico: Deus meus ubi es? Ecce ubi es. Respiro in te ‘paululum,’ cum ‘effundo super me animam meam in voce exsultationis et confessionis’” (And I say, my God, where are you? But, look where you are: I breathe “a little” in you, when I pour out “over myself my soul in a voice that exults and confesses” [Psalm 41:8]) (XIII, 14, 15, 14, 450). But this suggests, above all, that I am in him only because, in the first place, he is in me and that in this way the illic, over-there, precedes and renders possible derivatively an ubi, here, for me. For me every ubi becomes an illic, which neither remains nor ever becomes again an ibi—I am in my place (ubi) only by not remaining in it as in a closed here, by forever passing elsewhere (illic). “Et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi quarebam. . . . Mecum eras et tecum non eram” (And behold you were inside [the place to reside], and I myself was outside, and I sought you here. . . . You were with me, but I myself was not with you) (X, 27, 38, 14, 208). The truth resides inside me, but not in me, because I am not inside myself, because my interior remains exterior so long as I do not become interior to my exterior itself. This reversal of the here and over there is not equivalent to the presence in me of God or a piece of the divine but indicates that I reach myself only by taking place over there—in this case, in God. For I have no place to take place so long as I stubbornly dwell here—in other words, stubbornly will that my ubi reside where I am, ibi: “Non ego vita mea sim: male vixi ex me, mors mihi fui: in te revivisco” (I am not myself my own life. On my own, I lived woefully; I was a death to myself. I return to life in you) (XII, 10, 10, 14, 358).14 Life, like the happy life, defines my place, which in both cases is found over there.
By converting the place, creation therefore offers, in the form of a hermeneutic of heaven and earth, but also of man, a response to the question of the possibility of praise. With it the aporia of the place becomes, just like a utopia, the very posture of confessio.
Creation, therefore, responds to the question of the possibility of confessio, and creation gives place to confessio by defining where those who must do so—in other words, all that is not confused with God—can do so. Creation does not define only what happens to be created but, first of all, that in view of which the created is created—accomplishing a confessio by praise of the creator. Creation gives place (ubi) to confessio by opening the dimensions where the created can direct itself toward the creator of a here (ibi) turning toward an over-there (illic). Three such dimensions can be specified, and this enables us to designate the site.
The first dimension opens out toward nothingness on the basis of the earth. More exactly, it is detected as early as the first reading of the verse that comments on the beginning (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”) by adding: “And the earth was obscure and empty, inanis et vacua” (Genesis 1:2). Or rather, for that is the version of the Vulgate about which he was ignorant (or which he refused), Saint Augustine prefers to reproduce literally the translation of the Septuagint: ἀόρατος ϰαἰ ἀϰατασϰεύαστος, invisibilis et incomposita.15 This choice does, indeed, seem better since, instead of two redundant terms (giving rise to inevitably loose translations), it lets us distinguish two different characteristics of the earth. First, it appears without form because it remains at bottom unorganized, without structure or composition. If what is at issue is indeed the original, primal earth, truly that of the beginning (primitus), then this notion implies logically (consequenter) that it is still without form or composition: “ipsa terra, quam primitus facit, sicut Scriptura consequenter eloquitur, invisibilis et incomposita” (De civitate Dei XI, 9, 35, 56ff.). Whence the paradoxical consequence that if we are talking about the earth of creation, but of a “creation born and without memory” (Péguy),16 then it is not a matter of the earth such as we see it, since we now see only forms in it: “non erat talis, qualem nunc cernimus et tangimus. Invisibilis enim erat et incomposita et abyssus erat” (it was not such as we see and touch it today, for it was invisible and not composed; it was an abyss) (Confessiones XII, 8, 8, 14, 354). But if it is an issue of an “informitas sine ulla specie” (a formlessness without form) (XII, 3, 5, 14, 348), then it is no longer a question of our earth, but of “informis material” (formless matter) (XII, 15, 22, 16, 376). The earth, such as we know it, would not have been created if, more originally and even though the biblical text does not mention it explicitly, matter had not also been and at the same time. The creation of the earth as formless and without composition implies that of matter. This implication has at least two consequences.
First, if primary matter is created, Augustine’s doctrine breaks with the Greek position (from Plato to Plotinus), despite all the similarities one would like to point out, by removing matter from the rank of principle. Whence an argument that proves decisive, though derivative, against the Manicheans: since materia comes, by creation, from God, it cannot constitute a principle of evil, because more essentially it does not constitute any principle whatsoever:
Neque enim vel illa materies, quam ὔλη antiqui dixerant, malum dicenda sit. Nam eam dico, quam Manicheus ὔλην appellat dementissima vanitate, nesciens quid loquatur, formatricem corporum: unde recte illi dictum est, quod alterum deum inducat: nemo enim formare et creare corpora nisi Deus potest. . . . Sed ὔλην dico quandam penitus informem et sine qualitate materiam, unde istae, quas sentimus, qualitates formantur, ut antiqui dixerunt. Hinc enim et silva graece ὔλη dicitur, quod operentibus apta sit, non ut aliquid ipsa faciat, sed unde aliquid fiat.
For even this matter, which the Ancients called ὔλη should not be called evil. I am not speaking of this ὔλη that Manes, in his demented vanity, not knowing what he was saying, claimed was formative of bodies, from which it was correctly concluded that he was introducing another god, for nobody can form and create bodies except God. . . . But I myself call ὔλη a certain formless matter without quality from which the qualities that we sense take form, as the Ancients said. Hence in Greek the wood to be worked is called ὔλη because it is of service to the workers, not because it itself makes something, but on account of the fact that it is that out of which something is made.17
Thus the earth presupposes matter, but matter itself presupposes creation. Therefore matter offers no place, neither to the earth nor to the confessio, but it receives itself just like all the other things (even if it does not yet have the rank of thing) in itself for the sake of working confessio.
But there is more: since matter has no place in the world and since it gives no place to the world, from where does it get its place? It can get it only from an other instance, still more empty, invisible, and formless than it, yet there is no longer any to be found: “Citius enim non esse censebam, quod omni forma privaretur, quam cogitabam quiddam inter formam et nihil nec formatum nec nihil, informe prope nihil” (I would sooner admit the nonbeing of what had no form than I would think something between form and nothing, neither formed nor nothing, formless next to nothing) (XII, 6, 6, 14, 350). On the hither side of matter, just at the limit of nothing (“illud totum prope nihil erat . . . jam tamen erat”), nearly nullified (“de nulla re paene nullam rem”) (XII, 8, 8, 14, 354), is found nothing other than nothing itself; and therefore “fecisti aliquid et de nihilo” (you made something even of nothing, out of and with nothing) (XII, 7, 7, 14, 352). It is a good idea, in other words, to use the two possible translations of de nihilo, for God does not merely create out of (ex) nothing in such a way as to exit from it and substitute for it being (after nothing comes being); he, above all, created with (de) nothingness so as to make being with nothingness itself. Nothingness, in the figure of de nihilo, does not hold merely the place of starting point for the created (as that from which it would have exited); it also holds the place of its material (as that of which it will always remain woven). The created does not emerge from nothing except by assuming it again at the heart of its very beingness. It should, then, be said, in a transitive sense, that the created is its nothingness and that it is so because God gives it to it: the created is its nothingness only because it is so by God, “abs te, a quo sunt omnia” (XII, 7, 7, 7, 14, 352). God, in creating the created, does not abolish nothingness in it, but assigns this very nothing to the created in assuming it as created by him. The de nihilo is understood and thought together with the a Deo. The a Deo balances, maintains, and subverts the de nihilo. “De nihilo enim a te, non de te facta sunt, non de aliqua non tua vel quae antea fuerit, sed de concreata, id est simul a te creata materia, quia ejus informitatem sine ulla temporis interpositione formasti. . . . Materiem quidem de omnino nihilo... fecisti” (With nothing, not with you, that is things were made by you, not with a matter not created by you or already there, but with concrete matter, because you formed the formless in it without the slightest temporal delay. . . . You truly did make matter absolutely with nothing) (XIII, 38, 48, 14, 516ff.).18 In this sense creation does not, strictly speaking, confer Being on the created but permits it to assume its nothingness in order to make it work at the confessio. Here what is is not absolutely, as if God remained an optional complement to the act of Being; to the contrary, here what is is only optionally, inasmuch as created and insofar as the de nihilo remains thought together with the a Deo, therefore is oriented to the confessio. The created remains an intermittent being, under contract to time, marching to the beat of a time determined by its praise: “Et inspexi caetera infra te et vidi nec omnino esse, nec omnino non esse: esse quidem, quoniam ab te sunt, non esse autem, quoniam id quod es non sunt. . . . Si non manebo in illo, nec in me potero” (I considered the other things beneath you, and I saw that they neither are absolutely nor are not absolutely. They are, of course, since they are from you, but they are not, since they are not what you are. . . . If I do not remain in him [God, my good], I will not be able to do it in myself either) (VII, 11, 17, 13, 618). Creation, which presents itself first as an event and an advent (Chapter 5, §35), also sets up a condition—the status of what does not take place in itself but in a nothing that sustains and cuts across an other than itself. In a sense, every created thing says: “Non ergo vita mea sim” (It is not I who am my own life) (XII, 10, 10, 14, 358).
A second dimension can also open a site for the confessio, this time in terms of the heavens—or, more exactly, the “heaven of the heavens.” That is, from his first reading of the verse “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Saint Augustine read it together with a surprising formulation found in Psalm 113:15–16, which itself already comments on Genesis 1:1: “Domino qui fecit caelum et terram, caelum caeli Domino, terram autem dedit filiis hominum” (Lord who made heaven and earth, the heaven of the heavens belongs to Him; the earth, he gave to the sons of men). There ineluctably follows an investigation concerning place: “Ubi est caelum, quod non cernimus, cui terra est hoc omne, quod cernimus? . . . Sed ad illud ‘caelum caeli’ etiam terrae nostrae caelum, terra est” (Where is the heaven that we do not see, by relation to which all that we see is earth[ly]? . . . But, in relation to this “heaven of the heavens,” even the heavens of our earth are earth[ly]) (XII, 2, 2, 14, 346). Even if the hypothesis of a τόπος νοητός has a long tradition, it falls to Saint Augustine alone to have elaborated this isolated, indeed marginal, biblical phrase into a concept of great importance. Just as the earth, once reinterpreted as invisibilis et incomposita, becomes matter and even the nihil of the de nihilo, in such a way as to give place for praise, so, too, do the heavens, once overinterpreted as caelum caeli, give another place for praise. The difficulty of this place stems from the imprecise, indeed contradictory, determinations, which render it all the more strange.19 It would seem at first that we are dealing with just an equivalent of the (Plotinian, indeed Aristotelian) νοῦς since the title of a caelum intelligibile (XII, 21, 30, 14, 390) is associated with that of mens pura (XII, 11, 12, 14, 360) or mens rationalis et intellectualis (XII, 15, 20, 14, 372), sometimes in the same sequence: “caelum intellectuale, ubi intellectus nosse simul, non ‘ex parte, non in aenigmate, non per speculum, sed ex toto,’ in manifestatione, ‘facie ad faciem’” (intelligible heavens, where the understanding goes together with knowing, not “in part, enigmatically, in a reflection, but totally,” fully manifest, “face to face” [1 Corinthians 13:12]) (XII, 13, 16, 14, 366). This makes it seem to be about the place where the knowledge of God becomes manifest and evident (but evidently not adequate). Yet the situation proves to be more complex since this intellectual evidence still comes from the created: the intelligible heavens still remain a creatura aliqua intellectualis (XII, 9, 9, 14, 356). They contemplate God as such, without sensible intermediary, but always from the point of view and within the essential limits of the created: “profecto sapientia, quae creata est, intellectualis natura scilicet, quae contemplatione luminis lumen est—dicitur enim et ipsa, quamvis creata, sapientia” (wisdom, which is created, intellectual nature to be sure, but wisdom which is light only by contemplating the light—it too is therefore said to be wisdom, though created) (XII, 15, 20, 14, 372).20 No gnostic temptation can insinuate itself here, therefore, since the contemplation, even purely intellectual, of God remains marked by the distance of the created from the uncreated, a distance that does not so much safeguard the divine privilege as it maintains the created in its possibility of praising. Thus, confessio alone unites with God, not mere knowledge, which remains only a means and a mode of it. Consequently, no distinction seems any longer to institute itself explicitly between the intellects united in this place, establishing hierarchies, for example among men and the angels or among the angels themselves, as if their differences blur here in the single office of confessio. This function alone is enough to characterize a common place where the intelligent created (human or angelic) praises God inasmuch as intelligible.
We are therefore dealing with a place, but one that embraces indifferently the angelic choirs (celestial hierarchy), the terrestrial church (ecclesiastical hierarchy), the eschatological mass of the elect, and the intelligible heavens, indeed the world of idealities, provided that the confessio of God the intelligible is put into operation everywhere by intellectual creatures. Thus this place receives explicitly the title of place par excellence, of domus tua and civitas tua (XII, 11, 12, 14, 360),21 that must be understood as the house or the city where God can come and dwell as God, without being disfigured, blasphemed, and killed. God can descend into the “heaven of the heavens,” as one descends upon a city, in order to sojourn or holiday there. For this city should not be understood as God’s proper place, his everyday residence, nor the city where he would be at home, but as the sojourn where he lets one come and meet or see him. Thus, these houses and this city do not belong to eternity, for the very purpose that we, we men like the other intelligent creatures, might have access to them. The “heaven of the heavens” draws as close as possible to the eternity of God but does not enjoy it, neither fully nor directly. This residence of God does not reside in God, therefore does not share his eternity, domus Dei, non quidem Deo coaeterna (XII, 15, 22, 14, 374). Between the “heaven of the heavens” and the eternity of God, things are never so intimate as to reach coeternity, but an exteriority always remains open for participation: “domus Dei non terrena neqe ulla caelesti mole corporea, sed spiritualis et particeps aeternitatis tuae” (the house of God, not terrestrial and not bodily, not even a celestial body, but spiritual and taking part in your eternity) (XII, 15, 19, 14, 370). Yet this intellectual but not eternal place for the praise of the intelligible manifests a new mode of temporality for the creature. For, though not eternal because not coeternal with God (“nec illa creatura tibi coaeterna est” [XII, 11, 12, 14, 360]), the “heaven of the heavens” benefits, if not solely, at least first of all and in the name of the other creatures, from the privilege of not being submitted to time (“nec in illa invenimus tempus” [XII, 15, 21, 14, 374])—at least not to time understood in the derived and devastated mode of distentio: “supergreditur enim omnem distentionem et omne spatium” (it overcomes all distension and space) (XII, 15, 22, 14, 376). The “heaven of the heavens” therefore appears, inasmuch as the place for intelligible praise, as a place free from distraction (from distentio). Does its privilege in space therefore bring with it a privilege in time? How to explain this new consideration and formulation?
The text adds that the “heaven of the heavens” is liberated from distraction and from space. But why space, since distraction refers in book XI to time? Because, no doubt, distraction is the definition of the time distended by temporal ecstases, ecstases that, themselves obliged to be distended and distending, spatialize time, to the point of distending it and dispersing it according to the model of space (see Chapter 5, §36). It must therefore be understood that while all the other creatures are strictly worldly and decline their temporality according to the most widespread and powerful model—namely, space partes extra partes—thereby deploying their time only by dispersing it and distending the mind in it, the “heaven of the heavens” makes an exception—precisely and to the degree that it participates in eternity (without however becoming annexed to it), it succeeds, “sine ulla vicissitudine temporum” (without the least variation in time) (XII, 13, 16, 14, 366), in deploying an intentional temporality (“secundum intentionem”) (XI, 29, 39, 14, 338). It can do this, however, only by letting itself be affected and taken up by the eternity that it does not possess: “te sibi semper praesente, ad quem toto affectu se tenet, non habens futurum quod expectet nec in praeteritum trajiciens quod meminerit, nulla vice varietur nec in tempora ulla distenditur” (holding present to you with all its [creation’s] affection, you who always remains present to it, it has no more future to expect, nor past to cross in order to remember, it no longer varies with any change nor is it distracted and pulled apart into any times) (XII, 11, 12, 14, 360). The “heaven of the heavens” overcomes the distension of time with an intention only insofar as it tends toward the divine eternity, therefore insofar as it adheres to it—tension by adherence: “cohaerentem Deo vero et vere aeterno, ut, quamvis coaeterna non sit, in nullam tamen temporum varietatem et vicissitudinem ab illo se resolvat et deflut” (adhere to God, the true and truly eternal, so that without being coeternal with him, it [this sublime creature, the “heaven of the heavens”] is nevertheless never unstuck from him and does not flow out in any alteration or change of time) (XII, 15, 19, 14, 370).
In fact, the privilege of the “heaven of the heavens” explains the situation of all creatures. Distraction (or temporal distension) characterizes them all by virtue of a more essential and all-encompassing, therefore also spatializing, mutability: “quia non de ipsa substantia Dei, sed ex nihilo cuncta facta sunt, quia non sunt id ipsum, quod Deus et inest quaedam mutabilitas omnibus, sive maneant sicut aeterna domus, sive mutentur, sicut anima hominis et corpus” (because none of them are made of [i.e., with] the very substance of God, but out of nothing such that some inherent mutability is still in them, whether they settle like the eternal mansion [“heaven of the heavens”] or change like the soul of man and his body) (XII 17, 25, 14, 380ff.). For all, the one question becomes how to reach a dwelling place where they settle despite their natural (created) mutability. That cannot come about through some new natural immutability (since eternity characterizes the uncreated alone); it will therefore have to happen through a disposition that is not natural but free and decided—an adherence through love: “inest ei tamen ipsa mutabilitas, unde tenebresceret et frigesceret, nisi amore grandi tibi cohaerens, tanquam semper meridies luceret et ferveret ex te” (the mutability is still in it [“the heaven of the heavens”], which could make it grow dark and cold, if it does not adhere to you by a great love, like a noonday always shining and burning with you) (XII, 15, 21, 14, 374). The creature, following the model of the “heaven of the heavens,” should not overcome the distraction of time by trying not to yield to spatial (spatializing, spatialized) changes through a correction of its nature (Manicheanism), nor by a supernatural knowledge (Gnosticism), but by a loving adhesion to God, in which, as an added bonus, it will also find cohesion with itself. This does not mean passing beyond time so as to pass into eternity, but surpassing the incoherence of distraction in and through love of the divine permanence, in a tension that itself still remains temporal. In this way the “heaven of the heavens” at last, after having been called domus tua and civitas tua, assumes the, eschatological, name new Jerusalem, which descends from the heavens to the earth: “recordans Hierusalem extento in eam sursum corde, Hierusalem patriam meam, Hierusalem matrem meam, teque super eam regnatorem” (remembering Jerusalem stretched out toward it with all my heart, Jerusalem my homeland, Jerusalem my mother, and toward you who rules over it).22 In this way the “heaven of the heavens” provides the paradigm for every place of praise for every creature because, though instituted from the first day of creation, it also takes on eschatological status: place for all confessions, therefore place for all the loving adhesions to God’s unalterability, arbiter of my confessions, “arbiter inter confessiones meas” (XII, 16, 23, 14, 378).
It now becomes possible to see a third dimension of the place of confessio. Or more exactly, to advance an interpretation of the concluding books of the Confessiones as themselves constituting a place, opening the place par excellence for every word that would like to be said as confessio. These three books are, in effect, organized, at least they can be read as being organized, trinitarily: each of them takes up in one of the figures of the Trinity (Trinitas omnipotens XIII, 11, 12, 14, 442) one of the ecstases of time.23 In this sense Confessiones XI lays out the present of the past and the immensity of memoria in terms of the Father: “Omnia tempora tu fecisti et ante omnia tempora, tu es” (You made all of time, and before all time, you are) (XI, 13, 16, 14, 298). As for Confessiones XII, it lays out the present of the present, keeps in its contuitus the inaugural now of the creation of heaven and earth: “in Verbo suo sibi coaeterno fecit Deus intelligibilem atque sensibilem corporalemque creaturam” (it is in his coeternal Word that God made the creature endowed with intelligence, sensible therefore and corporeal) (XII, 20, 29, 14, 388) and that “always contemplates the face of God” (semper Dei faciem contemplantem) (XII, 17, 24, 14, 380). Finally, Confessiones XIII lays out the present of the future, the eschatological expectatio, because the Spirit from the beginning watches over our future: “et Spiritus tuus bonus superferatur ad subveniendum nobis in tempore oportuno” (And your good Spirit hovered [over the waters] so that it could come to our assistance when the time comes) (XIII, 34, 49, 14, 518).
“Heaven of the heavens” and creation de nihilo therefore attempt to define the place where, or more exactly from where, the confessio can be lifted up. In fact, these places turn out, in the end, to be trinitarian: it becomes possible to praise God as God only if God himself gives the place and time for it. And where else would that be except in God himself?
So, the creature’s place is not found in itself but always in God, such that the place for the confessio of God is determined by and in God, to such an extent that creation consists only in the opening of the place of confessio. It is hence a universal rule. What remains for us to understand is how it is specified in the case of man.
The story of creation contains, on the sixth day and in the case of man, several peculiarities. If we admit the story as it is told in the Vetus Latina,24 each created thing was created according to its kind, “secundum genus suum,”25 in conformity with itself and itself alone. This version even emphasizes the self-identity of the individuation by kind when it adds “secundum similitudinem” (Genesis 1:11), indeed, when it insists “secundum suam similitudinem” (Genesis 1:11, 12). The created thing bears a likeness to itself; it resembles itself. In other words the work of creation, which separates and distinguishes in order to open distance (thus setting the conditions for the blessing of the created by God, as well as those for the praise of God by the created), requires referring each creature to itself, such that it resembles nothing other than its own kind, its own species, its own aspect (species)—in short, nothing other than itself in its ultimate essence. But, this is not how things go in the case of the creation of man. First, because in the story of his creation, the mention of kind (or of species) disappears: there is no reference of this created thing to its own proper essence: “Cur ergo et de homine non ita dictum est ‘Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram secundum genus,’ cum et hominis propago manifesta est?” (Why then did he not also say with regard to man: “let us make man in our image and likeness according to his kind,” since man, too, obviously reproduces [according to his kind]?).26 This modification does not involve some threat of no longer being able to reproduce (as a consequence of the first sin, for example) since what immediately follows is the blessing of his fruitfulness (Genesis 1:28: “Increase and multiply”). The sole explanation would come from the appearance of Eve, who shows up on the margins and as an exception to the species of the primordial man, so to speak. In order to understand this first peculiarity of the story of the creation of man (and woman), a second, still more explicit, one should be considered. In Genesis 1:26 creation no longer happens according to the creature’s resemblance to itself (“secundum suam similitudinem”) but according to its resemblance to an other besides itself—and, moreover, to an other of maximum alterity, since it is a reference to God: “non jam secundum genus, tanquam imitantes praecedentem proximum, nec ex hominis melioris auctoritate viventes. Neque enim dixisti: ‘Fiat homo secundum genus,’ sed: ‘Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similtudiem nostram,’ ut nos probemus, quae sit voluntas tua” (no longer according to a kind, as if we imitated some precedent nearby or lived under the authority of some man better [than us]. For you did not say: “Let man be according to his kind,” but: “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” so that we might know by the ordeal what your will is) (Confessiones XIII, 22, 32, 14, 482). Not only does the phrase ad similitudinem nostram literally contradict secundum suam similitudinem, but it is also substituted for kind (or species)—that is to say, it holds the place, in the case of man, of any and every definition: “Nec dicis secundum genus, sed ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram” (You did not say according to its kind [ours], but according to the image and likeness [yours]) (XIII, 22, 32, 14, 484). Whence this paradoxical consequence: man constitutes a creature par excellence and even particularly excellent, precisely because he does not have a kind or species proper to him, therefore does not have a definition that would appropriate him to himself. Man is defined by the very fact that he remains without definition—the animal properly without property.
This is not just an incidental remark; it concerns what Saint Augustine does not hesitate to name a mystery, in the sense of the magna quaestio that man becomes for himself (Chapter 2, §10) and also in the sense of a sacrament by which God blesses man by creating him. “Sed quid est hoc et quale mysterium est? . . . Dicerem te, Deus noster, qui nos ad imaginem tuam creasti, dicerem te hoc donum benedictionis homini proprie volnisse largiri” (But what is this and what mystery is it? . . . I would say, our God, who created us in your image, I would say that you wanted to grant properly to man the gift of your blessing) (XIII, 24, 35, 14, 490). However, Saint Augustine hesitates before this conclusion as the issue remains quite subtle. God also encouraged the animals to reproduce; he even blessed the fish of the sea (Genesis 1:22). What then is particular to the blessing of fruitfulness given to man? No doubt precisely that: man alone receives from God a blessing of fruitfulness, while he did not receive a kind or species thanks to which he could naturally reproduce—reproduce himself from himself. This means that if man propagates himself over the entire earth to the point of dominating it, he owes this not to his kind or his species (which he does not have), nor to his essence (which remains unknown), but to a direct and ongoing blessing from God. In what does this consist? Evidently in substituting for kind and species the ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram in order to hold the place of the absent essence. Thus man does not increase according to his kind, his species, and his essence—that is to say according to himself—but by the blessing come from elsewhere that sets him up from the get-go in the likeness and in the image of an other than himself, God. Man does not increase by an essential and internal law but solely by receiving God’s blessing, a blessing that consists only in being disposed according to the image and likeness toward God. Man does not have a proper essence but a reference to an other than himself, who, more intimate to him than himself (than his lacking essence), occupies the essential place on loan to him.
The image, by definition and essentially, can never provide an essence or a definition, which would be obtained by replicating, reproducing, and imitating another essence or definition—all the more so here, as the image concerns that for which man does not, by definition and essentially, have the means to constitute the slightest bit of image: God. Here, and in the case of man more than in that of any of the others, the image remains impracticable; consequently, it has to be thought starting from the likeness (similitudo). Obviously man does not bear the image of God as God the Son bears it toward God the Father through the connection of the Spirit, for only the Son is the image of the Father, while man is found only in the image of God: “Sed quia non omnino aequalis fiebat illa imago Dei tanquam non ab illo nata, sed ab illo creata, hujus rei significandae causa, ita imago est ut ad imaginem sit: id est, non aequaliter parilitate, sed quadam similitudine accedit. Non enim locorum intervallis, sed similitudine acceditur ad Deum, et dissimilitudine rededitur ab eo” (But because this image of God [man] was not absolutely equal to him, since not born of him but created by him, so as to make this point clear, this image is image inasmuch as unto the image—that is, it is not equal to it in a parity of God and man, but approaches it by some likeness. It does not draw near toward God by degrees of place but by likeness toward him and it grows apart by unlikeness away from him) (De Trinitate VII, 6, 12, 33, 550).27 It is not a matter of keeping or losing the image of God as a content (as if created in the image of God can count as a definition as categorical as rational animal, animal endowed with language, or animal that laughs), but of referring the image toward that unto which it is like. The image is not compared to a model, like a visible reproduction is to another visible thing accessible elsewhere: the image is borne only by that which refers itself across the likeness unto an original that remains, as such, invisible and only in the measure to which it so refers itself. The image consists only in the tension of referring itself to that to which it means to resemble. It appears only as this movement toward, and only this intentio ad keeps a likeness. Man bears the image of God instead and in place of kind, species, or essence inasmuch as he resembles Him. But he cannot, except absurdly, pretend to resemble him as a visible image is like a visible model, indeed as an intelligible image is like an intelligible model. This would seem to be the illusion of the Neoplatonists: establishing a positive likeness, one measurable by intervals, between the terms of the likeness. It must be that man resembles God otherwise—which means both in another way and by remaining in alterity. “Sola est autem adversus omnes errores via munitissima, ut idem ipse sit Deus et homo; quo itur Deus, qua itur homo” (In order to avoid all errors in advance, one thing alone is needed: that the same item be God and man, God toward whom it goes, man through whom it goes).28 This means that one must go toward the image through the likeness: man bears the image of God to the degree that he abandons any likeness to himself (ad suum genus, ad suam similitudinem) and risks resembling nothing—at least nothing of which he could have any idea or the species (ἰδεῖν εἶδος of which he could see. For man does not resemble God by resembling something visible or intelligible but mostly by resembling nothing visible or intelligible—in short, by resembling no image, especially not some so-called imago of God, but in bearing the likeness of the style of God. Man is a God, like a Cezanne is a Cezanne, a Poussin a Poussin—without anything behind or beside them that would be Cezanne or Poussin visible as themselves apart from the painting. No, the paintings of Cezanne and Poussin appear as such, without any other visible mark or signature, but still as paintings that bear all over the inimitable style of Cezanne or Poussin. As a Cezanne is a Cezanne, then, or a Poussin a Poussin, man is a God. He appears as God-made, as a God if he admits bearing God’s style, letting his own particular features be suppressed so that its provenance might come forward. Man is a God only as he returns from where he comes, to his most intimate other.29
We should not be misled into assimilating the image to a content of the likeness, for it provides less a content than a container, in the sense of a place where the likeness is at play in its varying degrees: “Ergo intelligimus habere nos aliquid ubi imago Dei est, mentem scilicet atque rationem.”30 Of course the rational mind offers the place for the likeness, but it does not offer its content. One can draw up a table of the images that offer a place in the rational mind of man for a likeness with the Trinity: considering this mind as a whole (De Trinitate IX), the triad mind, knowledge, and love (mens, notitia, amor) refers to the Trinity; considering man in his relation to the world, one sketches the Trinity with two other triads: first (according to XI, 2, 2–5), the thing seen, sight, and the intention that connects the one to the other (res, visio, intentio); second (according to XI, 3, 6–7), memory, interior vision, and the will (memoria, visio, voluntas); finally, and especially, one can privilege the triad of memory, understanding, and will (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas) following De Trinitate X, 11, 17.31 This last figure specifies the place of the best likeness: “Ecce ergo mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se: hoc si cernimus, cernimus Trinitatem; nondum quidem Deum, sed jam imaginem Dei” (Look, the mind remembers itself, understands itself, loves itself: if we see that, we see the Trinity; not yet God, of course, but already the image of God).32 But these triadic analogies disclosing an image of the Trinity do not display it in themselves as their stable content but solely in the degree to which they refer this content to God himself. A major text specifies this:
Haec igitur trinitatis mentis non propterea Dei est imago, quia sui meminit mens, et intelligit ac diligit se; sed quia potest etiam meminisse, et intelligere, et amare a quo facta est. Quod cum facit, sapiens ipsa fit. Si autem non facit, etiam cum sui meminit, seseque intelligit ac diligit, stulta est. Meminerit itaque Dei sui, ad cujus imaginem facta est, eumque intelligat atque diligat. Quod ut brevius dicam, colat Deum non factum, cujus ab eo capax est facta, et cujus particeps esse potest.
And therefore this final trinity of the mind is not the image of God inasmuch as the mind in itself remembers itself, understands itself, and loves itself, but because it can also remember and understand and love he by whom it was made. If it does that, it becomes itself wise. But if it does not do so, it is stupid, even when it remembers itself, understands itself, and loves itself. To put it briefly, let it worship the God not made, of whom it was made capable and in whom it can participate.33
To be sure, the three faculties make an image of God; however, it is neither the three faculties themselves, nor their reciprocal organization, nor even their possible and distant similarity to the three persons of the Trinity that does so—as the majority of commentators seem to say again and again—but rather their possibility of referring to God as he who can make them play among themselves the likeness of the trinitarian game of persons in it. The faculties offer a mere place, which becomes a visible and reliable image of the Trinity only to the degree that they receive (in the sense of capacitas) participation in the Trinitarian communion and, thus, play trinitarily, as if by derivation, among themselves. They appear as images only to the degree of their likeness, therefore tangentially, by changing degrees, measured by their participation. “Non sua luce, sed summae illius lucis participatione sapiens erit. . . . Neque enim participa-tione sui sapiens est [Deus], sicut mens participatione Dei” (It [the mind of man] will not be wise by its own light, but by participating in this great light. . . . For God is not wise by participating in himself, as in contrast the mind [of man] is wise by participation in God).34 What makes the image (pure place and simple possibility of similitude) a likeness does not stem from some status, a property, or an essence of this image but from the movement, from the tension and the intentio, toward God, therefore from the degree of participation allowed by the capacitas. In this sense the absence of a proper definition becomes for man the negative condition of the likeness toward God but a negative that must forever be increased and confirmed. Not only is man defined by his never-fixed likeness with God rather than by a fixed definition; but he is defined by this very absence of definition: it is proper to him not to appropriate himself or be appropriate to himself; it is proper to him not to resemble himself because that which he does resemble, God, does not coincide with his essence, nor with any essence whatsoever, because, God resembling nothing worldly, man too resembles nothing in this world. There is man only without properties and therefore without definition. To the question “quid sit homo?” (what is man?) hasn’t Saint Augustine at least once answered that he does not have to answer: “Nec nunc definitionem hominis a me postulandum puto” (I think that a definition of man cannot be asked of me now).35
The essential indefinition of man should be understood as a privilege. Lacking the power, lacking any obligation to be circumscribed, does indeed constitute a privilege—indeed the privilege of God according to the prohibition against “making any graven image, nothing that resembles what is found in the heavens” (Exodus 20:4), nothing therefore that would pretend to represent God by comprehending him. Would man therefore also find himself “in the heavens”? To be sure, first by becoming a nonresident alien (by participation), if not official citizen, of the “heaven of the heavens.” But also in the sense that—and this is the decisive paradox—what counts for God (that no name, no image, and no concept can pretend to comprehend him) also counts for man; neither one nor the other admits either kind, species, or essence. Man remains unimaginable, since formed in the image of He who admits none, incomprehensible because formed in the likeness of He who admits no comprehension. Strictly speaking, man resembles nothing since he resembles nothing other than Him whom incomprehensibility properly characterizes. Or again, if God remains incomprehensible, man, who resembles nothing other than him (and especially not himself), will bear the mark of his incomprehensibility. In other words, man, without kind, species, or essence, delivered from every paradigm, appears without mediation in the light that surpasses all light. Of this borrowed incomprehensibility, his face bears the mark precisely inasmuch as it reveals itself as invisible as the face of God.36 Man differs radically from every other being in the world by an insurmountable difference—one no longer ontological but holy. He no longer differs as the rational animal, ego cogitans, the transcendental I, absolute consciousness, the “valuating animal as such,”37 or even as “the lieutenant of nothing” (Platzhalter des Nichts),38 still less as the “shepherd of Being” (Hirt des Seins),39 but as the icon of the invisible God, εἰϰὼν τοũ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου (Colossians 1:15)—exactly as by participation in the image and likeness of the incomprehensible icon of the invisible. His invisibility separates man from the world and consecrates him as holy for the sake of the Holy.
In coming to this conclusion, Saint Augustine inscribes himself within an ongoing tradition of Christian theology, whose argument was formalized by Gregory of Nyssa:
The icon is perfectly an icon only so long as it is missing nothing of what is known in the archetype. Now, since incomprehensibility of essence (τò ἀϰαταληπτ òν τῆς οὐσὶας is found in what we see in the divine nature, it must necessarily be that every [icon] keeps in it too a likeness with its archetype. For if one understood the nature of the icon, while that of the archetype transcended comprehension, the contrary character of what we see in them would betray the deficiency of the icon. But since the nature of our mind, which is according to the icon of the Creator ὃςϰατ’ είϰόνα τοῦ ϰτίσαντος), escapes knowledge, it keeps exactly its likeness with its lord by keeping the imprint of the incomprehensibility [set] by the unknown in it (τῷϰαθ’ ἐαʋτὸν ἀγνωστῳ).40
Knowing man, therefore, demands referring him to God inasmuch as incomprehensible and therefore establishing by derivation his incomprehensibility, with the title image and resemblance. Augustine, too, came to this conclusion. While Saint Paul, for his part, posited that no one “among men knows the secrets of man, except the spirit of men in him” (1 Corinthians 2:11) and thereby assumed that man understood the secrets of man, Augustine is quick to posit the contrary: “tamen est aliquid hominis, quod nec ipse scit spiritus hominis, qui in ipso est, tu autem. Domine, scis ejus Omnia, quia eum fecisti” (and yet there is something in man that not even the spirit of man itself knows, which is [nevertheless] in him, but you, oh Lord, you know all of him [man], for you made him).41 Starting from this self-non knowledge nevertheless known by another, God alone, the operation of confessio must necessarily be launched, or rather the duality constitutive of a doubly oriented confessio, toward my ignorance of myself and toward the knowledge of myself by another: “Confitear ergo quid de me sciam, confitear et quid de me nesciam, quoniam et quod de me scio, te mihi lucente scio, et quod de me nescio, tamdiu nescio, donec fiant ‘tenebrae meae’ sicut ‘meridies’ in vultu tuo” (I will confess therefore what I know of myself, and I will also confess what I do not know about myself, since even what I know of myself is because you illuminate me that I know it, while what I do not know of myself I remain ignorant of as long as my shadows do not become like a noonday [Psalm 89:8] before your face).42 Man differs infinitely from man, but with a difference that he cannot comprehend and that, provided he intends to save it, he ought not comprehend.
In this way we verify again the principle that guides every itinerary toward oneself and toward God (for there is but one): “Interior intimo meo, superior summo meo” (Confessiones III, 6, 11, 13, 382). But we know now that the aporia of magna mihi quaestio coincides with the solution: the indefinition of man.
The indefinition of man, this privilege, implies that I do not reside in any essence but that, on the contrary, I resemble what has no semblance, God, without shape or εἶδος indescribable, incomprehensible, invisible—in other words, that I resemble nothing. Or, more exactly, that I resemble, that I semble by way of reflection, like the glittering light of the light that illuminates, I appear as the report of the rapport to the likeness of God, ad similitudinem Dei. I appear each time myself according as I move up (or down) the invisibly graded scale of my likeness, of my proximity or separation from the invisibility of God, whose invisible accomplishment I reflect more or less in the visible. What remains to be understood is by what scale I could travel from one degree to the other of this resemblance and if I could, in the end, should there be one, find a stable point in a visible reflection of the invisible. Managing this instability constitutes the ultimate, and the most disturbing, risk in the march toward this outside oneself, lacking which I will never become who I am. If I have to cross the resemblance and dwell in it, which momentum and drive can lead me there?
To go farther, we must go back to our point of departure, to the confessio. It has, since the beginning, put into operation the principle of rest and restlessness: “Et tamen laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae. Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietam est cor nostram, domec requiescat in te” (And he wants to praise you, man does, this tiny portion of what you have created. You excite him to love and praise you because you made us unto you, and our heart knows no rest so long as it does not rest in you) (Confessiones I, 1, 1, 13, 272). The way and the question open, therefore, with the observation of my restlessness—literally, my disequilibrium: so long as I rest in myself, I do not hold steady nor hold myself together. I cease to vacillate only if I find a place outside myself in God. I cannot not want (and love) to find my repose in God because I cannot settle in myself, or in anything else, if I do not settle myself in God. With perfect coherence the final moment of the confessio describes, in three successive passages, only the three actors of this rest: the one that completes creation, the one in which creation took place as a place of rest for the created, and, finally, the very rest in which creatures should end, if they admit an end, by settling as if in their own place. “Quamvis ea [sc. opera tua] quietus feceris, requievisti septimo die, hoc praeloquatur nobis vox libri tui, quod et nos post opera nostra ideo ‘bona valde,’ quia tu nobis ea donasti, sabbato vitae aeternae requiescamus in te” (Though you made your works while remaining restful, you rested on the seventh day, your book told us in advance that we, too, after our works (which are “very good,” since it is you who gave them to us), in the Sabbath of eternal life, we will find our rest in you) (XII, 36, 51, 14, 522). Put otherwise: “Etiam tunc enim sic requiesces in nobis, quemadmodum nunc operaris in nobis, et ita erit illa requies tua per nos, quemadmodum sunt ista opera tua per nos” (For then, too, you will rest in us, as now you work in us, and then this rest, yours, will be in us, as your actions are yours through us) (XIII, 37, 52, 14, 522). And finally: “Post illa [sc. quaedam bona opera nostra] nos requituros in tua grandi sanctificatione speramus. Tu autem bonum nullo indigens bono, semper quietus es, quoniam tua quies tu ipse es” (After them [some of our works, good ones], we hope to rest in your great sanctification. But you, who have no need of any good, you are always at rest, because you are unto yourself your own rest) (XIII, 38, 53, 14, 522ff.). God alone holds himself at rest because he alone holds himself in himself, such that everything that does not hold itself in God but remains in itself (willingly or not) cannot settle there, therefore does not settle at all or come to remain anymore at rest. God alone gives rest, because he alone has it. And he alone has it because he alone is it. And everything else, all the way until the ends of his creation, takes place (happens and is found) only in this rest. Creation, originarily eschatological, consists only in giving place to this coming of each creature into the place of its rest. This place, for man without definition, is found in nothing less than in the rest of God himself: “Nam et in ipsa misera inquietudine . . . satis ostendis, quam magnam rationalem creaturam feceris, cui nullo modo sufficit ad beatam requiem, quidquid te minus est, ac per hoc nec ipsa sibi” (For even in our unhappy restlessness . . . you show sufficiently how great you made your rational creature, since nothing less than you will suffice for its rest, not even itself to itself) (XIII, 8, 9, 14, 438). Short of God, man does not find himself, or find where he is.
Now, and this is a remarkable fact, the text that I just quoted, the one that defines the “heaven of the heavens” as place where one settles in the Spirit (“requiesceret in spiritu tuo”) and shows that man can find rest in nothing less than God (“magnam rationalem creaturam feceris, cui nullo modo sufficit ad beatam requiem, quidquid te minus est”) goes on to show how to measure the proximity or distance of each man with regard to this place: “Corpus pondere suo nititur ad locum suum. Pondus non ad ima tantum, sed ad locum suum. Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Oleum infra aquam fusum super auqam attolitur, aqua supra oleum fusa infra oleum demergitur: ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Minus ordinata inquieta sunt: ordinantur et quiescunt. Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror” (The body strives with all its weight toward its place. The weight does not push only down, but toward its place. Fire tends toward the higher, the stone toward the lower. They are [both] put into motion by their [respective] weight, [but] they seek their [own] places. The least ordered things remain without a place to settle: as soon as they recover their order, they settle down at rest. My weight, it is my love; wherever I take myself, it is my love that takes me there) (XIII, 9, 10, 14, 440). This argument looks limpid as well as decisive, for it does not say merely that “anima . . . velut pondere amore fertur quocumque fertur” (the soul, wherever it takes itself, takes itself there by love as by a weight)43 but specifies also, and above all, that it is ultimately for the soul a matter of its will: “Voluntas . . . ponderi similis est” (The will . . . resembles a weight).44 The details of this have yet to be understood precisely.
The point of departure for this argument does not concern, it is worth noting, the question of love but the strictly physical problem of the cause of local motion. On this issue Aristotle reasons in this way: “If each of the simple bodies has by nature a certain type of movement, for example fire upward and earth downward and towards the center, it is clear that the void cannot be the cause of motion.”45 To this distinction between movements up and down, he also adds the possible distinction, for each of them, between those that follow nature and those that contradict it (ϰατἀ ϕύσιν ϰαί παρἀ ϕύσιν)—in other words, by force or by nature (ἤ βίą ἤ ϰατά ϕύσιν).46 But it is doubtless wise, here and elsewhere, not to exhaust oneself in identifying the supposed Greek sources of Saint Augustine by arbitrarily offering erudite readings; it is enough to stick with Cicero, the common and most credible mediator:
The earthy and moist parts are borne by themselves and by their weight (suo pondere ferantur) in perpendicular angles toward the earth and the sea, while the two other parts, fire and animate, in contrast with the two previous ones which are borne by their gravity and their weight (gravitate ferantur et pondere) toward the central place of the world, are raised (rursum subvolent) in straight lines toward the celestial place, be it because their own nature desires higher things (ipsa natura superior appetente), or be it because they are pushed, by virtue of their lighter nature, by the heavier parts.47
Indisputably, Saint Augustine assumes as such this principle for the explanation of locomotion—as a physical theory. Several texts testify to this: “Lege naturae cedunt pondera minora majoribus, non modo cum ad proprium locum suo sponte nutu feruntur, ut humida et terrena corpora in ipsius mundi medium locum, qui est infimus, rursus aeria et ignea sursum versus; sed etiam cum aliquo tormento aut jactu aut impulsu aut repulso, eo quo sponte ferrentur, vi aliena ire coguntur” (According to a law of nature, the less heavy weights yield to the heavier, not only when they move themselves toward their proper place [in this way, the moist and earthly bodies tend toward the place at the center of the world, which is the lowest, while, inversely, the airy and fiery bodies tend upward], but also when they are compelled to move in another direction besides that which they would follow of themselves, by some mechanism, disturbance, attraction, or repulsion).48 He even attaches enough authority to this “law of nature” that he will rely on it as something like an experimental test in narrative form:
Pondera gemina sunt. Pondus enim est impetus quidam cujusque rei, velut conantis ad locum suum: hoc est pondus. Fers lapidem manu, pateris pondus; premit manum tuum, quia locum suum quaerit. Et vis videre quid quaerat? Subtrahe manum, venit ad terram, quescit in terra: pervenit quo tendebat, invenit suum locum. Pondus ergo illud motus erat quasi spontaneus, sine anima, sine sensu. Namque si aquam mittas super oleum, pondere suo in ima tendit. Locum enim suum quaerit, ordinari quaerit; quia praeter ordinem est aqua super oleum. Donec ergo veniat ad ordinem suum, inquietus motus est, donec teneat locum suum.
There are two kinds of weight. For weight is the impetus of any thing whatsoever insofar as it strives toward its [proper] place: such is weight. Take a stone in your hand; you feel its weight; it presses your hand, for it seeks to reach its place. And do you want to know what it is thus seeking to reach? Withdraw your hand, it goes to the earth and settles there. It has arrived there where it tended; it has found its place. Therefore this weight was a quasi-spontaneous movement, with neither soul nor sensation. For if you throw water on oil, the water tends by its weight to go downward. It tends, that is, toward its place; it seeks to put itself in order; for water above oil, this is not in order. So long as it has not returned into its order, movement does not settle and come to rest, until such time as it has arrived in its place.49
The “laws of nature” (almost in the modern sense) abide so firmly that Augustine will even mention them as objections to the possibility of miracles: “Ac per hoc, inquiunt, quoniam terra abhinc sursum versus est prima, secunda aqua super terram, tertius aer super aquam, quartum super aera caelum, non potest esse terrenum corpus in caelo; momentis enim propriis, ut ordinem suum teneant, singula elementa librantur” (And consequently, they say, since, in ascending from lower to higher, earth comes first, then the water above the earth, third is the air above the water, and fourth comes the heavens above the air, a terrestrial body cannot be found in the heavens; for these different moments balance each of the elements, such that they [each] find their proper order).50 Up until this point there has been nothing innovative on the part of Saint Augustine; he simply assumes a doctrine that was widely accepted at his time—to the point that one could even legitimate it theologically by the authority of the Book of Wisdom 11:21: “Omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti” (You arranged all things in order, measure, and weight), with the immense legacy that this verse is known to have.51 It is thus still only a matter of the laws of local motion and, in a restricted sense, of the laws of the world.
In fact, the innovation only starts when Saint Augustine no longer deals with a place in the world (neither physics, nor nature, nor local motion) but the place of he who confesses. How, it will be asked, can one pass from the laws of local motion to the place of confession? By an unforeseen tactical reversal: the laws of local motion will be elevated, transposed, and overtaken at the level of the rules of love; pondus, its tensions and its movements, will be displaced into the movements and intentions of amor. Saint Augustine undertakes this by bringing the formulation of Cicero (more so than those of Aristotle) together with one from Virgil: “Trahit sua quemque voluptas” (Each is led by his own pleasure).52 Still more surprising, he introduces it, in fact, in order to comment on a verse from the Gospel of John, “Nemo venit ad me, nisi quem Pater attraxit” (Nobody comes to me, if the Father has not attracted him) (John 6:44), in which he tries to explain how the Father, even if he attracts someone toward the Son, does not compel him and does not contradict his will, even though attracted:
Quomodo voluntate credo, si trahor? Ego dico: parum est voluntate, etiam voluptate traheris. Quid est trahi voluptate? “Delectare in Domino, et dabit tibi petitiones cordis tui.” Est quaedam voluptas cordis, cui panis dulcis est ille caelestis. Porro, si poetae dicere licuit “Trahit sua quemque voluptas,” non necessitas, sed voluptas, non obligatio, sed delectatio, quanto fortuis nos dicere debemus trahi hominem ad Christum, qui delectatur veritate, delectatur beatitudine, delectatur justitia, delectatur sempiterna vita, quod totum Christus est?
How do I believe willingly if I am attracted into belief? As for me, I say: you are only slightly led by your will, but [much more] also by pleasure. What does it mean to be attracted by pleasure? “Take pleasure in the Lord, and he will give you what your heart asks” [Psalm 36:4]. There is a certain pleasure of the heart for whomever the bread from heaven is sweet. For that matter, if a poet could say: “each is led by his own pleasure,” not necessity but pleasure, not obligation but delight, how much more so should we say that the man is led toward Christ who takes pleasure in the truth, who takes pleasure in beatitude, who takes pleasure in justice, who takes pleasure in life without end, all things that Christ is entirely?53
The breakthrough and the boldness consists in calling on Virgil to interpret John 6:44, so as to complete and correct Cicero (and Aristotle). Local displacement (ϕορά)—in other words, arrival in the proper place—no longer results only from a physical weight but also from pleasure’s inclination, which triggers in the heart the same spontaneity that gravity unleashes in the body. For what takes up and displaces the role of weight in the spirit does not come from (at least not first of all) “the weight of glory” Βάπος δόξης in Saint Paul’s sense,54 but from delectatio. By delectatio we must understand the fact not of taking pleasure (according to the ignoble expression of today) but of receiving it: “Delectatio quippe quasi pondus est animae. Delectatio ergo ordinat animam. ‘Ubi enim erit thesaurus tuus, ibi erit et cor tuum’: ubi delectatio, ibi thesaurus; ubi autem cor, ibi beatitudo aut miseria” (It is therefore pleasure that is something like the weight of the soul. For pleasure puts the soul in order. “There where your treasure will be, there too will be your heart” (Matthew 6:21): there where your pleasure is, there is your treasure; there where your heart is, there is beatitude or misery).55 Love is set forth according to a logic as strict as motion and, therefore, can be understood as rigorously as it.
A comparison between motion and love is thus established, one that ends up at an analogy of proportion, according to which what weight is to the body desire is to love. Sometimes the terms correspond strictly without admitting any difference: “Amant enim requiem, sive piae animae, sive iniquae; sed qua perveniunt ad illum quod amant, plurimae nesciunt; nec aliquid appetunt etiam corpora ponderibus suis, nisi quod animas amoribus suis” (For all souls love rest, the pious as well as the unjust; but by which path to reach what they love, most of them know not at all, and bodies too seek nothing with their weight, except what souls seek with their loves).56 But more often the terms respond to one another while maintaining a gap, for differences remain. First, this is because the relation between desire (for pleasure) and love serves as a paradigm for the relation between natural weights and bodies, and not the other way around, as common sense doubtlessly would expect: “Si essemus lapides aut fluctus aut ventus aut flamma vel quid hujus modi, sine ullo quidem sensu atque vita, non tamen nobis deesset quasi quidam nostrorum locorum atque ordinis appetitus. Nam velut amores, corporum momenta levitate nitantur. Ita enim corpus pondere, sicut animus amore fertur, quocumque fertur” (If we were only stones, waves, winds, a flame, and something of this sort, without any sensation or life, we would not however be deprived of some sort of appetence in our motions and their [right] order. For, just like loves, the pressings of bodies strive on by their lightness. That is, just as the spirit is borne by its love wherever it is carried, so too likewise the body by its weight).57 Motion follows weight, like desire follows love, to the point that the loving drive of the desiring soul becomes the paradigm for movements, even in things.
The drive of love in its desire does not serve as paradigm just for inanimate nature but even with regard to all the reasonable spirits; even men and the angels see their hierarchy modified according as the weight of love follows the law of nature or that of justice: “Sed tanutm valet in naturis rationalibus quoddam veluti pondus voluntatis et amoris, ut, cum ordine naturae angeli hominibus, tamen lege justitiae boni homines malis angelis praeferantur” (But it holds among rational natures like some sort of weight of the will and of love, which makes it such that, if, according to the order of nature, one should prefer angels to men, nevertheless, according to the law of justice, one should prefer good men to bad angels).58 When the desire deployed by love is at issue, weight loses the characteristics that it had when only the weight of a body is considered: concerning love, weight weighs even without nature, indeed against it, to the point of becoming a free or voluntary weight, which weighs there where it wills: “Qui motus si culpae deputatur . . . non est utique naturalis, sed voluntarius; in eoque similis est motui quo deorsum lapis fertur, quod sicut iste proprius est lapidis, sic ille animi: verumtamen in eo dissimilis, quod in potestate non habet lapis cohibere motum quo fertur inferius; animus vero dum non vult, non ita movetur” (But if one assigns blame to it . . . , this movement is no longer natural but voluntary. It is like the movement that carries the stone downward, in that it belongs properly to the mind, like its own to the stone; but it is also unlike it, in that the stone does not have the power to contain the movement that bears it downward, while the mind does not move thus unless it wills to).59 Love may indeed be explained as a weight, provided that we mean a free weight: free first from the constraints of matter, second from the limits of nature, and therefore, in the end, perfectly voluntary.
Saint Augustine therefore corrects the model of physics that explains local movement by the weight of bodies—not out of a concern to spiritualize or to edify but in order to adapt the paradigm of pondus to the theoretical requirements that love imposes on it. For in the case of love pondus must become voluntary and therefore set itself free from natural (and material) determinations, since it implies freedom in two ways: First, nobody can love except voluntarily; even if freedom does not always signify the choice of decision, a lover without freedom inevitably becomes a patient, indeed, soon enough a sick soul. Second, love supposes choosing some end for its love rather than another; consequently, the freedom of love necessitates splitting its weight and accordingly opposing one weight to another in order to do justice to the choice between two loves. There will be at least two loves and two weights: “Amores duo in hac vita secum in omni tentatione luctantur: amor saeculi et amor Dei; et horum duorum, qui vicerit, illuc amantem tanquam pondere trahit” (Two loves contend with one another during this life at each temptation: the love of the world and the love of God; and the one of these two loves that emerges victorious will transport the lover as by a weight).60 Love splits according as the desire of the soul, that is to say its weight, pushes it upward or downward. Love is so determinative of weight, and so loosely bound to the material sense of a bodily displacement, that Saint Augustine does not hesitate to assign it the upward movement as well as the habitual (physical) movement downward.
If weight can still make something fall, this fall is no longer physical, since it makes the soul fall and also brings about spiritual falls: “Mane si potes: sed non potes; relaberis in ista solita et terrena. Quo tandem pondere, quaeso, relaberis, nisi sordium contractrum cupiditatis visco et peregrinationis erroribus?” (Settle, if you can; but you cannot; you will fall back into your earthly habits. Under the weight of what weight, I ask you, will you fall back, if not that of the filth you have acquired through the clinging of your desire and the erring of your errors?)61 And therefore, faced with this weight that can make one fall in spirit, in spirit, too, can another weight operate, one that brings an ascent: “Quomodo enim oleum a nullo humore premitur, sed disruptis omnibus exsilit et supereminet: sic et caritas non potest premi in ima; necesse est ut ad suprema emineat” (As oil is compressed by no other liquid, but escapes them all and wraps around them, so, too, charity cannot be pressed down to the bottom. It must necessarily rise up and dominate).62 Here the paradox that appeared earlier finds the logic that structures it: I am to myself a weighty burden when I remain empty of God, who relieves me and lifts me up toward him, as soon as he fills me: “Nunc autem quoniam quem tu imples, sublevas eum, quoniam tui plenus non sum, oneri mihi sum” (But now, since you lift up the one whom you fill, seeing as I am not filled with you, I am to myself a burden).63 Filled with God, I undergo the impact of a weight oriented upward, while filled (in fact, stuffed) by myself alone, I undergo a weight oriented downward. Grace, in other words, the love come from God with the aim of returning me to him, exerts a counterweight, a weight that ascends, an uplift and an upbraiding. “Cui dicam, quomodo dicam de pondere cupiditatis in abruptam abyssum et de sublevatione caritatis? . . . Neque enim loca sunt. . . . Affectus sunt, amores sunt, immunditia spiritus nostri defluens inferius amore curarum, et sanctitas tui attolens nos superius amore securitatis” (To whom and how should I speak of the weight of cupidity [that leads] toward the sudden abyss and of the charity that uplifts? . . . It is not about places. . . . These are the affects, loves, the impurity of our spirit plummeting lower through love of its cares and your holiness lifting us up higher by love of assurance) (X, 7, 8, 14, 436). Love, like the weight from above, which comes from there and leads back, lifts us up toward our place, which is defined precisely by the fact that there and there alone we can settle: “In dono tuo requiescimus: ibi te fruimur. Requies nostra locus noster. Amor illuc attolit nos” (It is in the gift that you give that we find rest: here we enjoy you. Our rest, our place. Here, up to here, your love lifts us) (XIII, 9, 10, 14, 438). That weight not only could relieve us and lift us toward the heights, but in fact does so first and essentially when the issue is my proper place, this paradox imposes itself and ceases to appear surprising. The bottom line is that the ground always attracts—rather than grounds—precisely because it shows itself above, attracts from on high, weighs on us from above. Consequently, Christ constitutes the ground par excellence, the “fundamentum fundamentorum,” insofar as he comes from on high, like the heavenly Jerusalem descends from the heavens, descends like the “heaven of the heavens:” “Etenim origo fundamenti hujus summitatem tenet; et quemadmodum fundamentum coporae fabricae in imo est, sic fundamentum spiritualis fabricae in summo est” (And therefore the origin of this ground stands at the summit; and just as the ground of the corporal construction is found below, so is the ground of the spiritual construction found at the summit).64
I find my place only there where I truly want to dwell. And I truly want to dwell only there where my love pushes me, transports me, and leads me, as a weight leads, transports, and pushes. This weight must be known in order to know what I freely want. “Sed vis nosse qualis amor sit? Vide quo ducat. Non enim monemus ut nihil ametis, sed monemus ne mundum ametis, ut cum qui fecit mundum, libere ametis” (But do you want to know which love it is? See where it leads you. For we are not warning you to love nothing, but not to love the world so that you might love freely with he who made the world).65 I am the place where I confess, but I rest in this place only because my love pushes and settles me there like a weight. But it is a voluntary weight, since through it I love. And if I love there, I am there as in my self.
Love weighs, therefore, and with a weight that rises as well as falls, because it exerts a pressure, which pushes only of itself. It is not, however, a wild impulse, since the lover can always decide its direction and modify it, by his will or at least also by his will. It is not a pure will, perfectly at the disposition of the lover, since he can never suspend this pressure, reducing it or annulling it. At best, he can direct it, without extricating himself from it. Neither is it a conatus in suo esse perseverendi since it is not here a matter of being but of loving, possibly all the way to the point of suspending being in oneself, nor is it a matter of being in-self but of passing into an other, indeed of becoming other than oneself. As this unconditional and irreversible weight before which no indifference or ataraxy has any meaning, because it always pushes, from the outset and forever from behind me, with a pressure that makes me myself more than I make me myself, love is established as the ultimate condition for the possibility of the self. Absolute and unconditioned transcendental, love operates in such a way that no condition of possibility can impose any limits on it, nor therefore any impossibility. Its irreversible anteriority precedes me, in such a way that it imposes on me a nonnegotiable facticity—not only because all facticity, by definition, fixes and establishes me in myself without my having anything to say about it or any negotiation with it, but especially because inasmuch as it is a weight of love, this facticity, which concerns me right to the ground, in a certain sense no longer belongs to me. It no longer depends on me since it refers me to what I love, therefore to what I am not (and will perhaps never be) and what governs me by attracting me elsewhere, because it pushes me from else where than myself. The facticity of love fixes and assigns me, like all facticity, but in operating as love, it does not assign me to myself, nor does it fix me to myself, since it consists precisely in sending me off into an irrecuperable elsewhere. The sole possibility opened to me by the pressure of the pondus amoris resides simply in the determination of this elsewhere, in no way in its suspension (indifference) nor in its appropriation to myself (“authenticity,” to render, poorly, Eigentlichkeit). Love weighs on myself like the sky at the horizon, not that it oppresses me with a lid of anxiety but because it discloses to me an opening that will never be closed again: the opening onto the unshirkable, absolute, inalienable, but still always undetermined, possibility of deciding to love, of having to love whatever comes, whatever I might want, and whether I want it or not. This horizon, the never-impossible possibility of loving, is never closed, never goes on vacation. “Habet tamen omnis amor vim suam nec potest vacare amor in anima amantis; necesse est ducat” (All love has its strength, and love cannot take a vacation in the soul of the lover; in all things necessary, it leads).66 In other words:
Ipsa dilectio vacare non potest. Quid enim de quoquam homine etiam male operatur, nisi amor? Da mihi vacantem amorem et nihil operantem. Flagitia, adulteria, facinora, homicidia, luxurias omnes, nonne amor operatur? Purga ergo amorem tuum; aquam fluentem in cloacam, converte ad hortum; quales impetus habebat ad mundum, tales habeat ad artificem mundi. Num nobis dicitur: Nihil ametis? Absit. Pigri, mortui, detestandi, miseri eritis, si nihil ametis. Amate, sed quid ametic videte. Amor Dei, amor proximi, caritas dicitur. Cupiditas refrenetur, caritas excitetur.
Love cannot go on vacation. For what is it that is at work, even poorly, in any man whatsoever, if not love? Give me [an example of] a love on vacation, one which is doing nothing. Wicked deeds, acts of adultery, crimes, homicides, indulgence in luxuries, what is it that does these things if not love? Purify therefore your love; water flows toward the sewer; turn it toward the garden. Those very movements that you make toward the world, turn them toward he who made the world. Have we been told to love nothing at all? No, of course, not. You would be inert, dead, cursed, miserable if you loved nothing. Love therefore, but watch carefully what you love. The love of God, the love of the neighbor, these are called charity. Check [in yourselves] desire [cupiditas], but excite charity.67
Not only does the question never consist in to be or not to be, for it only concerns loving, but the question of love never consists in loving or not loving since as ultimate possibility, it demands of me, with neither break nor vacation, that I love no matter what. The question and ultimate possibility oblige me to decide on the subject of what I love—since in every case, whether I want to or not, whether I know it or not, I will love. “Nemo est qui non amet. Sed quaeritur quid amet. Non ergo admonemur ut non amemus, sed ut eligamus quid amemus” (There is nobody who does not love. But one must seek out what one loves. We are not asked not to love, but to choose what we love).68 There is nothing optional or facultative about love; it predestines us absolutely (schlechthin), with an irrecusable, inexcusable, and irremediable possibility. All that’s left is to decide how and what to love.
Such a transcendental determination of love implies that, formally at least, it is put into practice in the same way and according to the same logic, however different its object and occasions appear. Whatever I love, I always love for the same reasons and in the same fashion, which vary no more than love itself ever ceases to love—dilectio vacare non potest. But this univocal universality can be contested and, in fact, was by Anders Nygren, more so than by any other. He observes, rightly, that “the difference between Caritas and Cupiditas is not one of kind, but of object. By kind, Caritas and Cupiditas, Love of God and love of the world, correspond most closely.” Consequently, for Nygren “love is a longing indifferent in itself, whose quality is determined by the object to which it is directed.”69 But he objects that ἒρως and ἀγἀπη cannot coincide and are opposed as a Greek concept (Platonic and Neoplatonic) to a biblical concept (from the New Testament), term for term: The first defines a movement from low to high, human toward the divine, desire to save one’s life, desire for the good, which supposes its value already established, in opposition to a movement from high to low, of God toward man, by pure grace, at the risk of losing his life, without acceptance by anybody, and which establishes value. There results a “difference of kind.” I will not here dispute this thesis itself (in fact, untenable) but will limit myself to examining the conclusion Nygren draws from it: the Augustinian project consists in identifying these two contradictory concepts in a third, named caritas; in other words, “the meeting of the Eros and Agape motifs produces a characteristic third which is neither Eros nor Agape, but Caritas.”70 All the while straining to find the textual arguments to support his rash conclusion, he does not hesitate to conclude that caritas so understood has no Christian legitimacy but imports like contraband a Neoplatonic conception: “Indeed we might say that, for Augustine, Neoplatonic Eros has become the means of discovering Christian Agape.”71 The strangeness of this reasoning leaps right out at you: charity would not come to Saint Augustine from the revelation of Christ but from Neoplatonism, which in turn would have made him understand that love played a central role in this very revelation. In short, to find love in the New Testament, Saint Augustine would have had to learn its centrality from a well-known Neoplatonic concept, caritas! My own project does not demand refuting this inept argument but only assessing if the univocity of love leads Augustine to aporiae and incoherencies that excessively distort biblical revelation.
One piece of evidence should, at the outset, be recalled: the univocity of love in no way forbids Saint Augustine from indicating required distinctions among the modes in which it is put into operation. First, and above all, is the separation between two modes of love, so distinct that they are opposed term for term: “Duae sunt amores, mundi et Dei; si mundi amor inhabitet, non est qua intrat amor Dei; recedat amor mundi et habitet Dei” (There are two loves—one of the world, the other of God. If the love of the world inhabits you, there is no longer a point of entry for the love of God. Let the love of the world be withdrawn, and the love of God make its home in you). Or else: “Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestam vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui. Denique illa in se ipsa, haec in Domino gloriatur” (The two cities make up two loves: the earthly city, the love of self to the point of contempt for God; the heavenly city, the love of God to the point of contempt for self. And, finally, the former is glorified in itself, the latter in its Lord).72 This splitting of love into two opposed modes can and should be made more precise by using two distinct concepts. Either, desire (cupiditas) can be opposed to dilectio: “Quapropter non est praecipue videndum in hac questione, quae de Trinitate nobis est, et de cognoscendo Deo, nisi quid sit vera dilectio, imo vero quid sit dilectio. Ea quippe dilectio dicenda est, quae vera est; alioquin cupiditas est; atque ita cupidi abusive dicuntur diligere, quemadmodum cupere abusive dicuntur, qui diligunt” (For that, one need not consider anything [other] in this question, [which is posed to us] concerning the Trinity and knowledge of God, except what is the true dilection, or even what is dilection. For it is the true [alone] that must be named dilection; otherwise it is desire [cupiditas]; and then one speaks imprecisely about those who desire when one says that they love by dilection, just as one speaks imprecisely of those who love by dilection when one says that they desire) (De Trinitate VIII, 7, 10, 16, 58). Or else, this same desire (cupiditas) can be opposed to caritas: “Quae est radix? Caritas; hoc enim dicit apostolus: ‘Ut in caritate radicati et fundati.’ Quomodo enim ‘radix omnium malorum cupiditas,’ sic radix omnium bonorum caritas est” (What is the root? Charity, for the apostle Paul says, “[Let God give it to you to dwell in Christ] rooted and grounded in charity” [Ephesians 3:17]. Just as “desire [cupiditas] is the root of all evil” [1 Timothy 6:10] so too is the root of all good charity).73 Their shared opposition to cupiditas also permits him to sometimes assimilate one to the other, dilectio and caritas: “Quid vero aeternum est, quod aeternitate animum afficiat, nisi Deus? Amor autem rerum amandarum, caritas vel dilectio melius dicitur” (What then is eternal, that could affect the spirit with eternity, if not God? But the love of things to be loved [truly] is better named charity or dilection). Put otherwise: “Nihil aliud est caritas quam dilectio” (Charity is nothing other than dilection).74 There is so little a lack of precision that Saint Augustine even emphasizes that Latin has two terms, caritas and dilectio, to render the one Greek word ἀγάπη “Caritas alia est divina, alia humana: alia est humana licit, alia illicita. De his tribus caritatibus vel dilectionibus, duo enim nomina habet apud Latinos, quae graece ἀγάπη dicitur, quod Deus donaverit dicam” (With regard to these three dilections or charities, there are among the Latins two words to say the Greek ἀγάπ, what God, I say, gave to us).75 In the Augustinian lexicon there is no confusion to speak of, still less a hidden forced reading of texts: cupiditas falls under love (amor), but is distinguished very clearly from the love of God and the things of the heavens, which can be described as either dilectio (taking the profane term that designates benevolent love) or as caritas (when it is a matter of what the Holy Spirit sows in our hearts, according to Romans 5:5).
Let us therefore pose the question in terms other than those chosen by a groundless and insignificant polemic. This question aims to understand how love remains univocal in the role of transcendental horizon all the while being perfectly capable of being distinguished in different modes. Part of the difficulty no doubt comes from an all-too-quick reading of the celebrated distinction between two loves produced by the two cities: “amores duo, . . . scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, . . . vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui” (two loves, . . . namely, love of self to the point of contempt for God; . . . and love of God to the point of contempt for self” (De civitate Dei XIV, 28, 35, 464). In fact, it’s not a matter of an exclusive opposition, where one love would entirely disqualify the other, but of a radical passage to the limit (“usque ad”) of each of these two loves: thinking that if one loves the world, one must hate God, or the inverse. For the parallel between the two loves does not hold all the way until the end, or rather it all depends on what one means by to the point of, usque ad. If loving oneself (or rather wanting in vain, stubbornly and imaginarily, to love oneself) indeed ends up blocking one from loving God, inversely loving God, provided that such love is love for him and unreserved first, permits one to love also both oneself and one’s neighbor. God is not jealous about our love for self or for the neighbor or for any creature; he makes it possible, and he alone can do so: “Caritatem voco motum animi ad fruendum Deo propter ipsum et se atque proximo propter Deum; cupiditatem autem, motum animi ad fruendum se et proximo et quolibet corpore non propter Deum” (I call charity the movement of the spirit [that carries it] to enjoy God for himself and the self and the neighbor in view of God; and desire [concupiscence] the movement [that carries it] to enjoy self and neighbor and any body whatsoever otherwise than in view of God).76 Here the question does not bear on whether the enjoyment of oneself, one’s neighbor, or any body whatsoever is licit but of knowing first if that is even possible, then if that would be detrimental to the love of God. These two lines of questioning have just one response: enjoyment is possible only of God, who alone does not disappoint, because he alone stays in place (privilege of immutability) and alone offers the good without reserve, inasmuch as “ipsum bonum . . . bonum omnis boni.”77 Consequently, pretending to enjoy another thing, one that cannot offer the absolute good, whether it be myself, others, or some other body, leads to the disaster of cupiditas: disappointment, then hatred of oneself, others, and this very body itself. But reciprocally, to enjoy God—in fact, the sole enjoyment possible—renders possible at the same time, by extension and with reference to it (“propter Deum”), enjoying all the rest, since this rest constitutes precisely a gift of God. Whence the possibility and even the promise that if I enjoy only God for himself, all the rest can become lovable, no longer by cupiditas but well and truly by caritas. An extraordinary and fascinating text says this in so many words:
Quod verbum [mentis] amore concipitur, sive creaturae, sive Creatoris, id est, aut naturae mutabilis, aut incommutabilis veritatis. Ergo aut cupiditate, aut caritate: non quo non sit amanda creatura, sed si ad Creatorem refertur amor, non jam cupiditas, sed caritas erit. Tunc enim est cupiditas, cum propter se amatur creatura. Tunc non utentem adjuvat, sed corrumpit fruentem. Cum ergo aut par nobis, aut inferior creatura sit, inferior utendem est ad Deum; pari autem fruendem, sed in Deo. Sicut enim te ipso, non in te ipso frui debes, sed in eo qui fecit te; sic etiam illo, quem diligis, tanquam te ipsum. Et nobis ergo et fratribus in Domino fruamur.
This [mental] word is conceived by love, either of the creature or of the creator, that is to say changeable nature or unchangeable nature. Therefore either by desire or by charity: not that creatures should not be loved, but if this love is referred to God, it is [already] no longer desire, but charity. For it is when one loves creatures for themselves that it is desire. This then is why desire no longer helps he who [only] uses it, but it corrupts he who enjoys it. Since creatures are either equal to us or inferior, the inferior must be used for the sake of God; the equal must be enjoyed, but in God. For just as you must, yourself, enjoy yourself, not in yourself, but in him who made you; and likewise for him whom you love [by dilection] as yourself. And therefore let us enjoy ourselves and our brothers in God. (De Trinitate IX, 8, 13, 14, 98)
Therefore, it’s not a question of two parallel or opposed loves but of two modes of the same love: creatures, myself or my brother, can therefore be loved, and even loved with enjoyment, provided that they come to be loved in the enjoyment of God: the propter Deum (which should be understood more as in view of God rather than as with God as the motivation) becomes in Deo, a place and the place for all enjoyment, the enjoyment of God and therefore in it of every other thing.
The univocity of love thus permits converting cupiditas (which wants to enjoy without ever succeeding in it) into caritas (which alone permits enjoyment because it alone enjoys God, the sole enjoyable). This conversion no doubt also concerns, though in a manner less visible, dilectio and amor in their ordinary usages since it is played out in the will. For the two cities, like their loves, are distinguished in terms of the mode of our will, never in terms of a distinction of their own natures. Here is their definition: “duas societates angelicas inter se dispares atque contrarias, unam et natura bonam et voluntate rectam, aliam vero natura bonam et voluntate perversam” (two angelic societies, different and opposed each to the other, one of good nature and upright will, the other of good nature but perverse will) (De civitate Dei XI, 33, 35, 138). The nature given by God, and therefore always good, does not constitute the difference, which comes from the will alone. Evil comes from the hypostasis, not the essence, contrary to all Manicheanism and Neoplatonism. It even becomes possible to sketch a table of dispositions (Stimmungen rather than affectus or passions) of the spirit, deduced entirely from the permanent primacy of love in them: “Recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor. Amor ergo inhians habere quod amatur, cupiditas est, id autem habens eoque fruens laetitia; fugiens quod ei adversatur, timor est, idque si accederit sentiens tristitia” (It follows that good love is the upright will while the perverse will is bad love. Love that aspires to possess what it loves defines desire [cupiditas], that which enjoys it is called joy; that which flees from what is opposed to it defines fear, and if it feels what comes over it, sadness) (De civitate Dei XIV, 7, 2, 35, 374). In all cases it is an issue of love, univocal, declined by its modes, intrigues, and wills. It is never about not loving nor loving only God, but of knowing how to love each and all in the appropriate mode, God and the gifts of God: “Non te prohibet Deus amare ista, sed non diligere ad beatitudinem; sed approbare et laudare ut ames Creatorem” (God does not forbid you from loving these things, but he does forbid you from loving them by dilection in view of [believing that you are] finding beatitude there. Approve them and praise them so as to love God) (Commentary on the Epistle of Saint John II, 11, PL 35, 1995).
The univocity in which the different modes and names of love are imbricated is confirmed by three paradoxes, concerning, respectively, self-love, love of neighbor, and love of God. First of all, the obvious paradox that loving oneself becomes possible only for him who first and above all loves God: “Qui ergo se diligere novit, Deum diligit: qui vero non diligit Deum, etiam si se diligit, quod ei naturaliter inditum est, tamen non inconvenienter odisse se dicitur, cum id agit quod sibi adversatur, et se ipsum tanquam suus inimicus insequitur” (He who knows how to love himself [by dilection] loves God; he who, on the contrary, does not love God, even if he loves himself [by dilection], something he received by nature, it is not inappropriate to say about him that he hates himself since he is opposed to himself and persecutes himself as if he was his own enemy) (De Trinitate XIV, 14, 18, 16, 392). That is, in terms of the previous argument he forbids himself access to the place in Deo, the one and only place where enjoyment becomes in general possible—in this case the enjoyment of oneself. “Nescio quo enim inexplicabili modo quisquis semet ipsum, non Deum, amat, non se amat; et quisquis Deum, non seipsum amat, ipse se amat. Qui enim non potest vivere de se, moritur utique amando se; non ergo se amat qui ne vivat se amat. Cum vero ille diligitur de quo vivitur, non se diligendo magis diligit, qui propterea non se diligit, ut eum diligit de quo vivit” (I do not know how to explain it, but whoever loves himself and not God does not love himself; and whoever loves God and not himself loves himself. For one who cannot live from himself alone dies radically in loving himself—in effect, he does not [truly] love himself who loves himself so as not to live. While he who loves [with dilection] that from which he lives, in not loving himself [with dilection] loves himself more [with dilection] since he does not love himself [with dilection] so as to love [with dilection] he from whom he lives) (Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John CXXIII, 5 PL 35, 1968). To love oneself successfully, it is better to love that from which one lives than to love oneself directly, which one knows very well one cannot live from. Direct love of self dies of a great contradiction, one for that matter seen perfectly by him who decides for it: I know that I am not enough for myself, neither ontically as causa sui nor erotically as amor sui, such that I can scarcely even give myself my own death; but most often I prefer to die from and by virtue of myself than to live elsewhere than myself. There are those men for whom the evidence of God is the worst news, since they see it as a threat depriving them of the sole thing that they aim to give themselves—the autonomy of their death. This argument, besides its obvious conclusion, therefore provides a derivative result: the love of self, far from contradicting the love of God, therefore far from harming charity, calls for it and results from it.
A second paradox confirms the convertibility of each of the modes of love in the univocity of its concept: the love of others. Examining the declaration, as celebrated as it is deceptive: “Dilige et quod vis fac” (Love [with dilection] and do what you will) provides the occasion to see this. This declaration does not sanction any action or attitude whatsoever under the cover of the good intention of loving, which would excuse everything. It instead tries to set a strict rule for interpreting acts among men, according to a hermeneutic of love—that which love makes possible as Grundstimmung of man as lover. Consider this line of questioning. If a man punishes another, does that always deserve reprobation? If a man, on the contrary, coddles another, approbation? No, not if in the first case it is a father correcting his son, or if in the second, it is a trafficker luring his potential slave. There is, then, a criterion permitting one to see through appearances: does each want the good of the other—put otherwise, does he love the other? “Non discernuntur facta hominum, nisi de radice caritatis. Nam multa fieri possunt quae speciem habent bonam, et non procedunt de radice caritatis” (There can be no discrimination of the acts of men, except by charity, which is their root. For they can do many apparently good actions, which do not take root in charity). They must be discriminated, therefore, “ad discipinam dictante caritate” (according to what charity teaches), by performing in each case what can be called a reduction to charity: an action is worth what it reveals once it has been led back from its appearance in the natural attitude (sociological description, police statement, account of different facts) to its reality in charity. Hence a principle of discrimination: “Semel ergo breve praeceptum tibi praecipitur: Dilige et quod vis fac: sive taceas, dilectione taceas; sive clames, dilectione clames; sive emendes, dilectione emendes; sive parcas, dilectione parcas; radix sit intus dilectionis, non potest de ista radice nisi bonum exstitere” (Once a short precept was prescribed to you: love [with dilection] and do what you will. If you keep silent, keep silent with dilection; if you speak loud and strong, speak with dilection; if you chastise, chastise with dilection; if you are merciful, be merciful with dilection. Let at bottom the root [of your actions] be dilection; from this root nothing can grow but the good).78 The precept therefore means, in the final analysis, once the reduction has been made: love and do therefore all that you will, provided that it is for the sake of love and with love; put otherwise: love, provided that in every action you love. This is not a morality of intention (as in Kant) but a morality of action reduced to dilection.79 Is it, for all that, a tautology? No, since besides the fact that the reduction leads appearances back to the reality from which they arise, the criterion of charity (“de radice caritate”) passes through and is transcribed in dilectio (“radix sit intus dilectione”). It must be understood: act as you will, provided that you love, and love as you will, provided that this be with dilection or charity. By their equivalence, two parallel texts confirm this convertibility. One states the criterion of reduction according to love in terms of dilectio: “Tenete ergo dilectionem, et securi estote. Quid times ne male facias alicui? Quis male facit ei quem diligit? Dilige, non potest fieri nisi bene facias” (Hold fast to dilection and you will be safe. Why do you fear to do wrongly to someone? Who does wrong to him whom he loves with dilection? Love with dilection, it can only happen that you will do good). The other states it in terms of caritas: “caritas, de qua nihil mali potest procedere” (charity, from which nothing bad can proceed).80 To stick to the main point, we can conclude that love for the other, here more exactly for the neighbor, authorizes the passage, with univocity maintained, from caritas to dilectio and back.81 Nothing but the erotic reduction itself is at issue.
One final paradox remains and a final evidence for the univocity of love: the case of loving God. Confirming the pertinence of the question, there is a text in the City of God that deals explicitly with the question of the univocity of the words designating love: “nonnulli arbitrantur aliud esse dilectionem, sive caritatem, aliud amorem. Dicunt enim dilectionem accipiendam esse in bono, amorem in malo” (some have claimed that dilectio and caritas are one thing, and love another. For they say, dilectio should be used for good moments, and love in bad ones). Recalling that this opposition is not found in the profane literature (“Sic . . . nec ipsos auctores saecularium litterarum locutos”) and that the philosophers admit “amorem . . . erga ipsum Deum” (love even with regard to God), Saint Augustine holds that “scripturas nostrae religionis non aliud dicere amorem, aliud dilectionem vel caritatem” (the scriptures of our religion do not say that love is one thing, dilectio or charity another). To prove this, he bases himself on the account of Peter’s final mission in John 21:15–18. That is, Christ’s first two questions to Peter (“Do you love me?”) use ἀγαπᾶν, correctly translated by diligere, while Peter answers twice (“Lord, you know that I love you”) with ϕιλεῖν, correctly translated by amare. One could then, if one follows the supporters of an equivocity between dilectio and amor, argue that Christ repeats his question a third time so that Peter might finally understand that it is appropriate to respond with ἀγαπᾶν to a question that asks ἀγαπᾷς Now what happens is entirely the opposite: not only does Peter’s final response, the one held to be the best, maintain ϕιλεῖν (therefore amare), but in raising the question, Christ, too, uses for the first time this very same ϕιλεῖν (therefore amare), abandoning ἀγαπᾶν(therefore diligere).82 Shouldn’t we conclude from this that when the issue is committing oneself fully to Christ and assuming the mission of pastor of his Church, amare is more appropriate than diligere, contrary to current usage, which accords dilectio a gratuity and disinterestedness that is rejected for amor? At least, one might suppose he has found an argument for it here: “Ubi demonstratur unum atque idem esse amorem et dilectionem” (Where it is proven that dilectio and love are one and the same).83 At the very least God does not condemn one for loving him with love, as well as with charity or dilectio.
Thus is defined the univocity that permits love to admit, without diluting itself, the plurality of its meanings and modes. This plurality would be of no importance if it did not serve in turn to articulate the singular playing field of love. And this field itself would in the end hardly be important at all if it did not play for me a life-or-death function: defining my place. For love is indeed defined as a place, or rather defines my place for me: “Duo sunt amores, mundi et Dei: si mundi amor habitet, non est qua intret amor Dei. Recedat amor mundi et habitet [amor] Dei; melior accipiat locum. Amabas mundum, noli amare mundum . . .; et incipit habitare jam caritas, de qua nihil mali potest procedi” (There are two loves, one of the world and one of God. If love of the world should come to dwell [somewhere], there is no longer [a place] through which God can enter. Let the love of the world withdraw and the love of God come to dwell; let the better occupy the place. You used to love the world, love it no more . . .; and let charity begin to inhabit you, that from which nothing vile can proceed). Let us note the essential point: according to my love, dwelling varies. But for me it is not a question of changing my dwelling but of changing in me the dweller who comes to take place in me: charity takes place in me by occupying me in place of the world. It gives me to make me its place, to give place to it. “Facietis locum caritati venienti, ut diligatis Deum. Quia si fuerit ibi dilectio mundi, non ibi erit dilectio Dei” (Give [a] place to the charity that comes, so that you love God. For if here there was love of the world, here there will not be a love of God). I find my place according as charity takes place in me, or not. Thus am I as I am because I am there where I love: “talis est quisquis, qualis ejus dilectio est” (each is such as his love).84
We can now reconstruct the path Saint Augustine’s thinking took in quest of the self.
Here is the first moment: the question of acceding to oneself never consists in proving my existence but in testing my identity: “Quis ego et qualis ego?” (And as for me, who am I and what ego?) (Confessiones IX, 1, 1, 14, 70). My existence and my access to it are, in fact, only too well guaranteed by my facticity; for this guarantee, doubtlessly certain, nonetheless does not procure for me any assurance—or better, it assures me only the place where I suffer the ordeal and painfully discover that I do not know who I am nor what self falls to me as my own: “Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio” (I myself became a great question to myself) (Confessiones IV, 4, 9), and “Mihi quaestio factus sum” (To myself I become a question) (X, 33, 50, 14, 232). Because I know, in my facticity, that I am, I above all know, indeed I uniquely know, that I do not know myself radically (see Chapter 2 §10 and §12). The aporia—I do not know who I am, I am not myself—becomes my place, but it is a place where the self stays inaccessible to me. Therefore my self becomes a nonplace, mine, more myself than every accessible place. The second moment consists in measuring the aporia of this nonplace: “Ubi ergo eram, quando te quaerebam?” (Where therefore was I when I was seeking you?) (V, 2, 2, 13, 464). If I am nowhere, then setting out from where can I begin a search? I, in fact, do find myself nowhere, in no place from where I could find one—placeless like a stateless person who, in losing his land, ends up losing also his self. “Ego mihi remanseram infelix locus, ubi nec esse possem, nec inde recedere. Quo enim cor meum fugeret a corde meo? Quo a me ipso fugerem? Quo non me sequerer?” (I remained for myself a place of unhappiness, where I could not settle, and from where I could not leave. Toward where could my heart flee my heart? Where could I take flight from myself? Where would I not always follow myself?) (IV, 7, 12, 13, 428). For Saint Augustine has the lucidity or courage (something often lacking in the moderns) to not “tell stories”: if I do not have a place to take place because I have no access to myself, to the self, I cannot any the more go elsewhere to find another one, new, and perfectly my own, since I do not even have a point of departure, a place to leave. Only he could leave who already resides in himself as at home in his own place; without a place to oneself at the outset, without a point of departure, nobody can change place or self. I therefore cannot flee myself or localize myself, myself who departs from nowhere.
The third moment turns out to be decisive precisely because it does not consist in resolving, and therefore dissolving, the aporia but calls for it to be posited and thought as such. If I am neither in myself as a self identical to itself nor outside myself as departing from self, but indeed without a place, I can at the very least conclude from this that the question of my place cannot find a response through myself, who does not have a place. If, therefore, something like a self remains possible for me, I will never find it in my own nonplace but solely there where a place is found, even if it is not situated in my own domain. This place without me, before me, but only thus for me, who remains essentially outside and foreign to it, God alone is found there. As creator of the heavens and the earth, he alone opened the possibility of places for whoever differs from him and therefore also from itself. Or rather differing from God consists in receiving a place, which can therefore open outside God only on the basis of taking place, for the propriety of appropriating in a locality, more exactly of localization, that alone can be allotted to another by him who remains absolutely in a place because he remains himself to the point of taking place in himself, God. The aporia—my utopia, the fact that I have no place to take place, therefore no access to myself, to a self that is mine—is not dissolved but becomes the very thing that I must stare in the face, conceive and finally inhabit. I am this self that has no other place but to remain outside the place, which, elsewhere and already, is nevertheless found open. My place is defined as nonplace and not as an other place, as what remains out of place, that is to say more within me than myself.85 For my nonplace leaves me not only outside of myself, but in alienating me, it also closes to me every possible interior: “Intus enim erat [lumen]; ego autem foris” (The light was inside, but I was outside) (VII, 7, 11, 13, 604). “Ecce intus eras et ego foris. . . . Mecum eras et tecum non eram” (And behold, you were on the inside, and I was outside. . . . You were with me, and I was not with you) (X, 27, 38, 14, 208). The aporia of the place from now on becomes the very thing that must be inhabited as a place. It is a paradoxical place but a paradox in which I nevertheless find my sole possible place. “Tu eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” (You were more inside than the most intimate in me, and higher than the highest in me).86 What I am is not found in myself but in a place that is characterized in a twofold way. On one hand, as place, it is found to be more me than myself, therefore more in myself (or myself in it) than myself, who am out of place (except in it). On the other hand, as the place that escapes me absolutely, as the interior I lack, it turns out to be above the highest I can grasp. What is most intimate to me, my place, is found elsewhere than in myself, superior. I therefore find my intimate place only outside myself. If truly “ibi est locus quietis imperturbabilis, ubi non deseritur amor, si ipse non deserat” (the place where I might come to rest without any more disturbance is there where love is not abandoned, provided that it itself does not abandon) (IV, 11, 16, 13, 436), then the self finds its place—in other words, itself—only there where it loves, according to the principle that “talis est quisquis, qualis ejus dilectio est” (each is such as his love).87 Thus, I become myself (oneself) only in going toward an other and by finding in it my first place.
The ego is not itself therefore by itself—neither by self-apprehension in self-consciousness (Descartes, at least in the common interpretation) nor by a performative (Descartes, in a less commonly accepted reading), nor by apperception (Kant), nor even by autoaffection (Henry) or anticipatory resoluteness (Heidegger). The ego does not even accede to itself for an other (Levinas) or as an other (Ricoeur); rather, it becomes itself only by an other—in other words by a gift; for everything happens, without exception, as and by a gift: “Ista omnia Dei mei dona sunt. Non mihi ego dedi haec” (But all these things are gifts of God to me. For I did not give them to myself) (Confessiones I, 20, 31, 13, 328). I undergo the ordeal of myself (of selfhood) when I reduce each thing to the given in it. And I know that I am performing this reduction correctly when I reach in each thing what I cannot myself give to myself; the given thus reduced to the nongivable provides absolute and irrefutable testimony to the ordeal of the exteriority of the self’s place. What is it that comes over me really, that is to say as given? What I know I cannot myself give to myself: “Haec est tota scientia magna, hominem scire quia ipse per se nihil est; et quoniam quidquid est, a Deo est et propter Deum est. ‘Quid habes, quod non accepisti? Si autem et accepisti, quid gloriaris quasi non acceperis?’” (This is all of knowledge and the greatest: that man knows that he is by himself nothing; and that all that is is from God and for God. “What have you that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you glorify yourself in it as if you had not received it?” [1 Corinthians 4:17]).88 This is a famous verse but one whose use, always significant and crucial in the Augustinian text, is not limited to the debates about grace with the Pelagians. Or rather, grace not being limited to a particular domain of the debate but encompassing the entire horizon (creation, which defines the horizon, constituting the first grace and making possible all the others), the verse “What do you have that you have not received (τί δὲ ἔχεις ὃ οὐχ ἔλαβες)?” avails itself of the universal validity of an erotic reduction of experience in general to the given, including, and especially, the attempt to determine the self. Understood rigorously, this principle does not reduce to the status of gift received only all that I receive (being, being-good, life and eternal life, etc.), but also me who receives. And if the first of the gifts consists in the very possibility of receiving one, then it is necessary that the self receive itself as a gift. But, in this case, the ego discovers itself received like one of its other gifts, contemporaneous with, not anterior to, its other gifts, not preceding them, still less conditioning them. Here we must unmask the willed illusion that pretends there must already be a preceding ego to receive the gifts and that, therefore, it itself does not fall under the jurisdiction of the gift nor happen itself as a gift as given as the others, because it would render them possible. Just the contrary must be acknowledged: since it receives each thing as a gift, it is necessary that the ego itself come from a second-order gift, or rather that it receive itself first and on the most basic level, before the other gifts or exactly by accompanying them. Just as the I think in Kant accompanies every other thought, the ego accompanies every other gift and, for that very reason, must find itself given absolutely, unconditionally, and primordially. The reduction of each and every thing to the given implies obviously that the ego, so reduced, is reduced first to the rank of given—first gift, absolute and without remainder, unconditioned and thoroughly so. The reduction to the gift includes first of all the self.
The self comes over me like a given, which I receive at the same time as all the other givens. What receives itself at the same time as what it receives can be named the gifted.89 God gives place to what cannot yet receive because it is not yet there, not having by itself and for itself either a here or a there, either self or Being. For it belongs to the first gift, to the gift of origin (and deserves this title precisely for that reason), to give to what cannot yet receive, since it still has not yet found itself given. Saint Augustine describes the gifted with the greatest precision: “priusquam essem, tu eras, nec eram, cui praestares ut essem” (before I was, you were, and I used to not be, such that to me you conferred being) (XIII, 1, 1, 14, 424); “ut serviam tibi et colam te, ut de te mihi bene sit, a quo mihi est, cui bene sit” (so that I might serve and worship you, in such a way that it might come to me from you to be good, from you from whom it comes to me to be he to whom Being good comes” (ibid., 426). God gives the first gift by definition to him who still does not exist, et non existentibus. That God is with me before I am with him (“qui mecum est et priusquam tecum sim” [X, 4, 6, 14, 150]) goes beyond the question of grace and concerns that of my esse and my self, be it only because all is grace. The question of my Being falls under the gift, before ontology fixes and freezes it in an illusory permanence. “Deus autem nulli debet aliquid, quia omni gratuito praestat. Et si quisnam dicet ab illo aliquid deberi meritis suis, certe ut esset, non ei debebatur. Non enim erat cui deberetur” (God owes nothing to anybody because he gives all things gratuitously. And if by chance someone should happen to say that something is due to his own merits, at the very least it is certain that it is not owed to him for having been so. For there is not anybody to whom that would have been due).90 I become myself by receiving myself originarily from elsewhere—oneself not only by an other but coming from an other, oneself from elsewhere. In the self’s place is found elsewhere than the self, from where alone, as an other-self, more self than myself, the self can receive itself.
If I discover myself essentially given, too, a gift given even before anybody could receive it (and especially not itself), this paradox is the result of the paradox of the absolute gift in God and responds to it. For following a radical analysis on the part of Saint Augustine, God, in the person of the Spirit, is defined so absolutely as and by the gift that he does not even have to become, so to speak, given (datum, donatum) and therefore received to be accomplished already from the outset and forever as gift (donum), since he is already as such and by definition given, even though nobody yet can be found to receive him: “An eo ipso quo daturus erat eum [Spiritum sanctum] Deus, jam donum erat et antequam daretur. . . . An semper procedit Spiritus Sanctus, et non ex tempore, sed ab aeternitate procedit; sed quia sic procedebat ut esset donabile, jam donum non erat, et antequam esset cui daretur? Aliter enim intelligitur cum dicitur donum, aliter cum dicitur donatum. Nam donum esse potest et antequam detur” (Was he [the holy Spirit] already a gift even before he was given, on account of the fact that God meant to give him? . . . Or is it that the Holy Spirit is always proceeding, not in time but from [all] eternity? But if he processes in such a way that he would be givable, wasn’t he already a gift, even before anyone could be found to whom he could be given? For gift is to be understood otherwise, gift given otherwise, too. For there can be a gift even before a given). Put otherwise: “In tantum ergo donum Dei [Spiritus Sanctus] est, in quantum datur eis quibus datur. Apud se autem Deus est, etsi nemini detur, quia Deus erat Patri et Filio coaeternus antequam cuiquam daretur” (But for himself he is God, even if he is given to nobody [outside of God], because there was God coeternal in the Father and the Son before giving himself to anyone).91 Just as and because God is seen always already as a gift giving and giver without any condition, even that of its reception by some receiver outside God (and who, in all cases, could by definition never receive it as and as much as it gives itself—namely, with an excess lacking all measure), so, too, and consequently I find myself, me, always already given (gifted with and recipient of myself), even before having received reception of it. I have originarily the rank of gifted, given to oneself before being able to receive even one’s proper self. In the self’s place I receive reception of me from elsewhere than myself. The aporia of the self, therefore, never disappears—it is received as the horizon of my advance toward the immemorial.