Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
—Matthew 18:3
Wittgenstein personally admired Augustine and chose to open the Philosophical Investigations with an excerpt from Book I of the Confessions (1.8.13)—the part where Augustine is describing his passage from infancy into a first language. It is clear from Wittgenstein’s subsequent commentary that he is nevertheless critical of the picture of language that Augustine’s self-description seems to presuppose. While many readers of Wittgenstein have been ready to endorse and elaborate his critique of that picture, few have given much thought to the confessional context of Augustine’s offering and how that context may have informed Wittgenstein’s reception of Augustine. In this essay, I join the small company of readers who have given sustained attention to this issue and propose that Wittgenstein’s invocation of Augustine signals a new form of confessional writing.1 It is right to place the Philosophical Investigations in the genre of confession, but it is also true that its form of confession is novel, a transformation of the Augustinian paradigm.
I try to make good on my proposal by subjecting the inaugural passage of the Investigations—the excerpt from Confessions 1.8.13 and Wittgenstein’s gloss in PI §1—to two closely related readings. In the first, I emphasize the peculiar nature of Augustine’s recollection of his initiation into language. It is a problematic memory; strictly speaking, it is no memory at all. Augustine admits to being forgetful of his time as an infant, and so he clearly can have no recollection of what he was “thinking” before he could use words to convey his desires. None of this deters him, however, from inventing a memory of infancy based on what he has been able to infer from the testimony of nurses and from his own adult acquaintance with infant behavior. Augustine recasts his external access to infancy as a personal recollection, and in so doing he affects to have a more direct acquaintance with his original human desires than he in fact has. Since he admits to the pretense, he is obviously not trying to fool his readers into according him extraordinary powers of self-recollection. I take him to be dramatizing what his sense of himself must have been like at the time of his initiation into language. When Wittgenstein raises questions about Augustine’s picture of first language learning, he works to relieve his intended readers—all those tempted by what tempts Augustine—from having to buy into the necessity of Augustine’s picture.
It is crucial to my reading of Wittgenstein that Augustine’s memorial to his own infancy not be taken as a simple mistake about how any infant comes to acquire a first language. If it were a simple mistake, then we should be able to detach Augustine’s theory of language-learning from his memorialization of it and come up with a better theory. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein disavows having an interest in theorizing2; instead he seems bent on exposing some of the myriad ways that language-use gets unhelpfully idealized and set in theoretical stone. It may seem that Augustine moves away from theory and into the form and flow of his own life when he trades in an inference for a personal memory, but his resulting self-conception, from Wittgenstein’s perspective, remains hostage to a preconception about the work that words ideally do. In my second go at a reading of the inaugural passage, I emphasize this aspect of Wittgenstein’s critique. It is not so much that Augustine will be shown by Wittgenstein to have misremembered his entry into language, as if there were something here to get over and be done with; the suggestion is more that Augustine’s preconception of language-use hinders him from recognizing the different forms that an initiation into language can take.
This preconception—that ideal language-use assigns words to referents and does so without ambiguity—is no stupid prejudice; it is born of an innately human desire to be understood. The idea that we can speak with one another only if there is, in some ideality, a preconceived meaning for all the words we venture is nevertheless a tyrannical one. It encourages the notion—arguably infantile—that we are racing against one another in life to perfect the meaning of our words; the winner gets to be understood first. Wittgenstein associates the desire for idealized clarity with his favorite saint not to expose a weakness in Augustine’s character but to underscore that a mind even as great as Augustine’s can fall into this kind of temptation.3
The issue for me, however, is not whether Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine is admiring or respectful; it is whether his critique is invested enough in confession to be counted as confessional itself. If we stick to the root meaning of ‘confession’ (cum + fateor)—an act of speech that seeks its completion in another’s acknowledgement—then Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the play of meaning between speakers can be read to be broadly confessional. Admittedly this reading seems a far cry from the Augustinian paradigm, where to confess is to address God and trade in sin for grace. “I resolve to recall my passed-over impurities and my soul’s flesh-fixated corruptions, not,” writes Augustine (Conf. 2.1.1), “that I may love them again but that I may love you, my God.”4 His confession is indeed a communicative act that seeks acknowledgement from another (in the form of both judgment and forgiveness), but there is no possible substitute in his mind for God’s acknowledgement. Suppose that we drop God from confession, devote all of our attention to human interlocution, and think of sin as a disposition, fed by fear and arrogance, to fix a meaning that is still up for social negotiation. The chatty notion of confession that is apt to follow from this would be a parody, not a transformation, of the Augustinian notion.
The reading that stands most in the way of catching Wittgenstein’s confession is precisely the one that reads him as taking on Augustine without taking up Augustine’s theological preoccupations with sin and grace. This pragmatic, unmystical Wittgenstein persistently redirects a long and venerable tradition of idealism in philosophy, one often given to devotion, away from supramundane revelations and towards the inescapably imperfect but fully human business of improving human understanding. Those attached to this kind of reading do not, of course, see Wittgenstein as reducing the notion of confession to parody; they see him as abandoning the idea altogether—at least when the context is philosophical.
Take, as illustration, the case of Miles Burnyeat, whose influential essay on Augustine’s De magistro brings Augustine’s thesis there about teaching to the scene of Wittgenstein’s critique of Confessions 1.8.13.5 In De magistro, a dialogue that comes some eight to ten years before the Confessions, Augustine introduces and defends the surprising thesis that no one ever teaches anyone anything; properly speaking, Christ, the inner teacher, is the only teacher.6 With regard to the negative part of the thesis, Burnyeat is prepared to tease out the affinities between Wittgenstein and Augustine, both of whom notice that no outward display of signs—words, gesticulations, pictures—can ever guarantee the delivery of an intended meaning. The effect of this notice is that both Wittgenstein and Augustine accord the first-perspective an irreducible integrity: whether I grasp a meaning or not is in some primitive way, impossible to define further, about me. Burnyeat argues that Wittgenstein obscures this aspect of his kinship with Augustine by the way he chooses to excerpt Confessions 1.8.13; he leaves out the part where Augustine confesses to having learnt language not from adult speakers (maiores homines) but by means of the mind that God gave him.7 This is no simple case of inadvertence, thinks Burnyeat, but a decision on Wittgenstein’s part to stay clear of Augustine’s posit of an inner teacher, able to light up a mind from within. In Burnyeat’s words: “To leave out God and the Platonic mind for the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations was to accept Augustine’s problem as his own and to declare that it must now be solved in naturalistic, purely human terms.”8
Burnyeat’s sense of the indeterminacy of ostensively defined meaning, the integrity of the first-person point of view, and Wittgenstein’s revival, via Augustine, of “the ancient understanding of the complexity of understanding,”9 is considerably more subtle than I have been able to convey above. In this case, however, I am less interested in the subtle side of Burnyeat than in his blunt confidence that his readers will find his contrast between Wittgenstein’s naturalism and Augustine’s reliance on God of obvious philosophical import. Although I am not one of those readers, I suspect that the implied import is that Wittgenstein is more philosophical than Augustine; both men may have had a genius for seeing where a philosophical perplexity lies, but only Wittgenstein, the story goes, solves his perplexities honestly, in “purely human terms.” It strikes me, on the contrary, that a triumphant naturalism, when applied to Wittgenstein, ends up with little or nothing in the way of a triumph. Wittgenstein is just not very forthcoming with all those naturalistic solutions to philosophical problems. So he is either some kind of skeptical naturalist, a latter-day Hume, or he is not helpfully described as a naturalist.10 The problem with attributing a deus-ex-machina kind of supernaturalism to Augustine is that he never asks his God for superhuman understanding or for a redemption that would exempt him from having to reckon with time. What he hopes for from God is a reading of himself and his loves better than he has been able or willing to give.
It is not obvious to either Augustine or Wittgenstein that the problem of human understanding, when couched as the inability of one speaker to fix meanings in the head of another, is really a problem. If we take it to be a problem, then our real problem may be that we are moved to see a problem where there is none. The conception of philosophy that would attempt to address and undo a disposition to see a problem where there is none may be thought to liken a philosophical problem to a psychosomatic illness; the distress is real, but the source of the problem has been displaced by a fiction, a ghostly body-double. As Augustine becomes aware of his sinfulness, he begins to notice his disposition to fictionalize himself. He has been inclined, in all kinds of subtle ways, to confuse the pain of his alienation from God and his own body with an aching desire to find himself complete in the eyes of someone else. Eventually he finds himself able to take to heart this bit of Paul (Romans 13:14): “No more wild parties and drunken fits, bedroom antics and indecencies, rivalries and wrangling; just clothe yourself in Jesus Christ, your master, and don’t look to lusts to care for your flesh.”11
It is fair to wonder whether the need that Augustine feels to adopt God’s way of being human has anything to do with the “real need” (unser eigentliches Bedürfnis) that Wittgenstein invokes to free a philosophical investigation from a sublimed and, one might say, bodiless logic.12 It is also fair to wonder whether Wittgenstein’s fascination with words and his relation to them carries enough heart to move Wittgenstein into Augustine’s neighborhood. When I question Burnyeat’s confidence in Wittgenstein’s naturalism (a widely shared confidence), I am not hoping to apply a salve of bland religiosity to an awkwardly de-naturalized Wittgenstein. I am issuing a caveat: the naturalism that makes it easy for us to part Wittgenstein from Augustine’s company is likely to be no more illuminating than the bland religiosity it displaces.
There is in fact a significant divergence between Augustine and Wittgenstein over confession, and it shows up in Wittgenstein’s expropriation of Augustine’s confessional voice. I will speak to that divergence as explicitly as I can in the concluding section of my essay. In the meantime, I will be working through my two readings of the inaugural passage, hoping to show how Wittgenstein’s investment in his own initiation into a language is a form of confessing that he expropriates from Augustine. If someone still wants to call Wittgenstein’s takeover a move into naturalism, I have no objection provided that the naturalism invoked is not preemptive and the nature of Wittgenstein’s divergence from Augustine remains an open question.
Wittgenstein begins his Investigations by taking over a saint’s troubled memory of his murky human beginnings. It is Augustine’s memory; it is Wittgenstein’s own; it is no one’s. Much turns on the image of an unclaimed, perhaps abandoned, childhood.
Here is Augustine’s memorial to his infancy as Wittgenstein has, by virtue of his excerpting, chosen to define it (PI §1; Conf. 1.8.13):
When adults were calling something by name and doing so by moving their bodies in accord with an utterance, I would notice this and commit to mind the sound they were making when they wanted to point this thing out. That they wanted to do this was further apparent from their body language, the language that is, as it were, the natural speech of humankind: a change of countenance, a look, a gesticulation of limbs, a tone of voice that indicates an intent to seek and possess something, or reject and avoid it. Over time I made the right associations between words in sentences and sounds frequently used to point out objects, and once I had wrung the requisite sounds from my mouth, I used them from then on to announce my desires.
I have already indicated in my prefatory remarks what is tellingly selective about this excerpt. If Wittgenstein had begun his excerpt just a few lines prior to where he began it, we would know that Augustine remembers his boyhood (pueritas) but not his infancy (infantia) and that he discovered only later in life (later than his boyhood) the means by which he had first come to speak. In retrospect, he credits himself and God for bringing that means into some kind of fruition, but not the adults that were, as described above, modeling his words for him.
Left with what we have, Augustine is made out to be recalling his infant consciousness directly, and it turns out that his inner infant is remarkably given to soliloquy. He describes to himself his entry into language before he has ever acquired a public means of speaking. At first Wittgenstein glosses over this striking aspect of Augustine’s self-description. He simply tells us that Augustine’s words put him in mind of “a particular picture of the essence of human language” (ein bestimmtes Bild von dem Wesen der menschlichen Sprache)—one where words name objects and sentences coordinate names. On the face of it, Wittgenstein is alluding to the theory of meaning he was attempting to elucidate in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the great work of his early career, but the logically simple objects of the Tractatus and the names that are of their essence are hardly the stuff of an infant’s attention, even a preternaturally self-aware one.13 Wittgenstein asks us to imagine, in conjunction with Augustine’s picture, the following use of language (PI §1):
I send someone shopping, I give him a slip marked “five red apples.” He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a color sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer.
Wittgenstein’s shopkeeper is almost as odd as Augustine’s infant. Perhaps he was that infant once, but now that he knows the rudiments of a public discourse, he is no longer quite so infantile. Still we need to assume—as if there were some question—that he can count to five on his own. It is hard to know what to do with this picture. I want to ask, how did this shopkeeper get to be this way? Wittgenstein’s alter ego, the voice that craves definitiveness and perfect clarity, wants to know how the shopkeeper knows the meaning of his words.14 It is not a question that Wittgenstein seems interested in answering: “Well, I assume,” comes the response (PI §1), “that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.”
Augustine’s description of his move out of infancy does invite at least a question or two about the mechanics of the move, about what makes it work. His inner infant knows what he desires and deems his desires significant: they can be assigned signs and then signified to those who are aware of having, or of having had, the very same desires in themselves. But how does the infant ever know that his conception of the desire-sign conjunction is the very same conception that the speaking members of his world have been assuming all along? A slip of paper with the words “five red apples” scribbled on it does not, after all, look much like an armful of red apples, and a cry of “milk!” is no naturally nearer to a desire for milk than a cry of “milch!” or “lac!” or a word intoned more like a question. I suppose that as long as the shopper keeps getting his desired number of apples and the infant his milk, the matter of how words like “five” and “milk” manage to have meaning need not come up. Hence Wittgenstein’s curt dismissal of his alter ego’s metaphysical anxiety over meaning (PI §1): “But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’?—No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used.”15
Just as I can imagine the shopper always getting his apples from the shopkeeper, I can also imagine, admittedly with some strain, that Augustine’s infant always gets what he cries for. What I cannot imagine is that same infant entering into a language; for apart from having a desire go unmet, the infant has no motive to assign significance to any of his desires. At some point in a human life, memorable only after infancy, each of us faces a question of moment: am I being misunderstood, or is my desire being flatly refused? In the face of such a question, it would not be unnatural or even unusual for me to wonder whether I command the meaning of my words. Augustine reads his desire for command back into his infant awareness, apparently under the supposition that he once had, and perhaps still has, the ability to fix the meaning of his words on his own. If his memory is to be credited, then he knew what he meant by the words he used apart from having to participate in a prior practice of sign-exchange (e.g., apples for a slip of paper that says “apples”) and apart from having to take for granted the form of life that sustains the practice (e.g., the buying and selling of groceries).16 One easy moral of Wittgenstein’s shopping analogy is that Augustine has confused a question of meaning with a question of use; like every other infant on the planet, he learned how to use words before he ever knew or cared what they meant.
But like many easy morals this one too is misleading. It will incline us to think that Wittgenstein is idealizing language and reducing meaning to a matter of word-use. A first use of words, when idealized, gets accorded an extraordinary (I am tempted to say miraculous) power: it is able to contain all possible meanings within its own, preexisting idiom. It becomes, in short, the mother of all meanings. Consider, along these lines, the sentiment that Wittgenstein expresses about Augustine in Investigations §32:
Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions (hinweisende Erklärungen) that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And “think” would here mean something like “talk to itself.”
Assuming, as I think is the case, that Wittgenstein is offering a critique of Augustine, what is the critique? At the very least Augustine seems to have forgotten the difference between a speaking child and an infant.17 The “infant” of Confessions 1.8.13 already has a first language, albeit a private one, and he uses this language as a basis for acquiring a strange tongue—in this case the language into which he was born. However misguided it may be to think of one’s birth language as foreign, I do not think that Wittgenstein’s implied alternative is to publicize “infant” consciousness and exchange bad interiority for bad, perhaps worse, publicity. I hear his critique of Augustine hitting on the note of the child’s estrangement: Augustine describes being born into a life where everyone is a stranger to him—not hostile necessarily, but strange in the way that people from different countries can be strange to one another.
From here, I see two ways to develop Wittgenstein’s critique. In one we run with the notion that Augustine has illicitly shifted the focus of his memory. Let’s not forget that he was father to a son whom he well loved and long outlived. Around the time of the Confessions, when Augustine was a few years past forty and Adeodatus nearly ten years gone, Augustine may still have remembered something about his son’s infant efforts at first words. He would have remembered nothing, however, about his own efforts. No one—not Augustine, not Adeodatus—can remember his first entry into a language. When Augustine recasts his outside observer’s point of view as a piece of introspection, he asserts a memory where there can be none. If this line of critique is reliable, then a theory in developmental psychology—that infants lack self-awareness—will have been verified by way of a thought-experiment. Is it thinkable that we know the meaning of a word before we know how to use it? If not (and ‘not’ is the presumption here), then self-awareness is quite unintelligible outside the context of socially regulated language-use. Although I find this use of a thought-experiment to be out of keeping with Wittgenstein and tending (again) towards the idealization of language, I have a simpler reason for rejecting the line of critique I have just adumbrated: it pays no attention to the specificity of Wittgenstein’s critique. The child that Augustine describes cannot feel himself to be anything if he lacks self-awareness, but if that is Wittgenstein’s point, then why does he suggest, more particularly, that the child is strangely made out to feel like a stranger?
In the alternative line of critique that I am about to follow, we need to entertain a more radical possibility about Augustine’s fictionalized memory: that he does more than engage in a kind of sham introspection; he suppresses his memory of infancy altogether. The relevant memory is indeed wrapped up with Augustine’s sensitivity to the infancy of others, but here we might be tempted to think that no amount of sensitivity can turn an inference into a personal memory. And of course if we mean by “personal memory” an inner viewing, originally (and perhaps permanently) private, then it is surely right to think that infancy is either observed or inferred but never remembered. On the other hand, it seems perverse to insist too strongly on parents having to observe the infancy of their children and never getting to experience it. The sober truth may be that I cannot have the experience of others, not even the ones I love intimately and raise from infancy, but the more supple realization is that a parented life is never unambiguously bounded. We tend to spill into our parents as they spill into us, all the way back to Adam and his father. When Augustine draws a boundary about his infancy and resolves the domain of inquiry into either inference or private memory, he makes infancy unconfessable—something that can never come between progenitor and child, for good or ill.
In his critique of Augustine, Wittgenstein aims to move Augustine back to confession, or more accurately (as we shall see), he corrects Augustine’s confession in order to advance a confession of his own. He thereby honors one of Augustine’s professed hopes: to be received and corrected by a confessional reader, a brother in spirit: “He is brother to me,” writes Augustine (Conf. 10.4.5), “who delights on my behalf when he approves of me and grieves for me when he does not, for he loves me all the same whether he approves or disproves. It is to him and his like that I reveal myself.”
In my next section, I focus directly on the confessional aspect of Wittgenstein’s reading of Confessions 1.8.13. For the remainder of this one, I hope to suggest where some inkling of Augustine’s genuine memory of infancy can be found. Again this is not a matter of coming up with an alternative report of Augustine’s mental state; it is a matter of finding what truth there is in his confession of infancy. To this end, I rely on the distinction that Wittgenstein makes in the sketchy addendum to the Investigations (Part II), the passage where he speaks to the nature of true confession:
The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process. And the importance of true confession does not reside in its being a reliably correct report of a process. It resides rather in the special conclusions which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special criteria of truthfulness.18
Wittgenstein is using the notion of confession (Geständnis) loosely and so not with an overtly religious or moral intonation. Stanley Cavell evokes a basic sense of confession when he writes: “In confessing, you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you.”19 Let’s play out a bit what defeats or blocks confession at a basic level. You offer me some self-description and then tell me that I need, before presuming to understand you, to get into your head and note the meanings that you associate with your words. You are no longer confessing anything; you are mortgaging your words to a standard of correctness that neither you nor I can hope to meet. I cannot meet it because I cannot in fact get into your head. You cannot meet it because you cannot rely on your words to convey your intended meaning. When Augustine offers us his description of infancy in Confessions 1.8.13, he tempts us to get into an infant’s head and note there the presence or absence of a world of meaning. If we resist this temptation, we are left having to draw conclusions from a truthfulness that rests on the application of “special criteria.”
Wittgenstein says nothing about what those special criteria may be, but I suspect that nothing could be said about them in the abstract that would be other than vacuous. (And so why say anything?) When we turn to the specific case of Augustine’s confession of infancy and its truthfulness, we clearly have to have more than Confessions 1.8.13 to work with. Otherwise we are left with a self-description that invites alienation from the condition of infancy, of the sort that Wittgenstein’s describes in PI§32: the infant child, infancy itself, seems to belong to no one.
Tellingly we find more of what we need from Augustine in his description of his conversion. For most of Book VIII of the Confessions, he recounts the anguish he once felt over his spiritual impotence, his inability to discard his old and discredited erotic fantasies and resolve upon a new life. We get to hear his agonized argument with himself in a garden retreat, to feel the futility of argument, and to wonder with Alypius, his friend and silent witness, whether Augustine has a way out of his private Gethsemane. In far less space than it took him to define the anguish, Augustine finally describes the moment of turning (Conf. 8.12.29):
Suddenly I hear a voice coming from a nearby house—hard to say whether it was a girl’s or a boy’s; it just kept chanting the words: “pick up and read; pick up and read” (tolle, lege). Right away I felt more relaxed, and I began to think hard about whether children use a chant like that in some game they play. But I couldn’t remember ever hearing it before. My tears now in check, I stood up, convinced that the chant was nothing else than a divine command to me to open my book and read the first verse that comes to view.
Augustine’s book is a book of Paul’s letters, and when he opens it he hits upon Romans 13:13-14. At that moment an imperative to pick up and read gives way in his mind to an imperative to clothe himself (induite) with Jesus Christ, his master, and junk the old erotic fantasies: they do the flesh no good. He reports having no need to read further; a “light of relief” (lux securitatis) fills his heart.
Augustine’s reception of his new imperative is, I think, incomprehensible apart from the mediating voice of the child. It is a voice whose sexuality is latent (male or female, who can tell?) and whose offering to Augustine is to introduce him to a new, or perhaps just forgotten, form of play. Augustine takes that offering to be authoritative; he concludes that God is relating to him through a child’s voice. Perhaps the child’s voice just is God’s voice; Augustine already believes, after all, that God was once a child—having been a child is an aspect of who God is. Perhaps the voice conveys what God remembers about being a child, a memory that Augustine is being prompted to share as he turns to the serious business of picking up a holy book and looking for himself in its pages. A spirit of play is not frivolity to a beginner in life, but a necessity, and the adult looking for a new start in life may well have to remember this before continuing on with too much serious business. If Augustine can still hear the child’s voice in his divine call to a new humanity, then he is freed for a time from the oblivion that makes a child so strange to an adult.
The other way to read the force of the imperative, a reading I resist, is to accent Christ’s persona as Augustine’s lord and master and assume that Augustine is being given a divine gift of adult self-mastery—a gift that he is obliged over time, though perhaps a very long time, to accept. Whatever the merits of this reading, it tends to confuse self-mastery (which can’t be a gift) with being released from a tyranny (which can be). And it is not always an act of will that brings about a person’s liberation, but something more akin to a memory. A child’s desire, in its remembered innocence, can sometimes get the better of adult lust and redeem aging flesh from the violence of unmet needs. When that happens, the adult is, in effect, trying on an original innocence.
Augustine believed, in keeping with his complex teaching about original sin, that only Jesus and Mary were originally innocent. The rest of us have to remember all the way back to Adam for some connection to an innocent beginning, and Adam’s innocence did not, in any case, keep him from falling into sin. If adults and infants are equally defined by a history of disaffection, then infancy is simply disaffection looking for a name. But I do not think that this is Augustine’s settled view of the matter. Yes, he sees some connection, a bloodline, between infant desire and adult disaffection, but he also has some inclination to put Christ into that same bloodline. Even when he relates to Christ more as a garment than as an extension of his own skin, the promise of a greater intimacy is always there for him. In confessing to conversion, he confesses to an innocence, distantly remembered, that checks his presumption to be speaking out of disaffection alone. Perhaps he has to unspeak the illusion of a language before he can speak at all. If so, then his conversion is his awareness that he is still learning a first language.20
I return now to Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine’s picture of language, this time with a focus on its confessional aspect. Augustine confesses to sin, to a disposition to mistake his life’s end and so also to misconceive his life’s beginning. More than Augustine does, Wittgenstein sees misconception at work in Confession 1.8.13, where Augustine describes his way into words. The language that Augustine imagines as his first—an affair of matching names to concrete objects of desire—rests on a picture of language that Wittgenstein considers to be, if not mistaken, then impoverished. Say that Wittgenstein is right. It is hardly a confessional critique to point out the mote in a brother’s eye and not notice the beam in one’s own. Does Wittgenstein ever confess to difficulties of his own? And are those difficulties of a piece with a saint’s struggle to see through to the other side of a sinful disposition?
In the Investigations, Wittgenstein often gives voice to a disposition to expect the wrong kind of clarity in life. Here is one example (PI §101):
We want to say that there can’t be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal ‘must’ be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this “must.” We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there.
For Wittgenstein, the temptation to idealize language as logic and then expect reality to follow suit is neither trivial nor neatly intellectual, and it can operate in unexpected ways. In the preface to the Tractatus, the work of his most obsessed with clarity and yet given to nonsense, Wittgenstein tells us that the sense of his entire book comes down to this: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”21 But, as it turns out, Wittgenstein cannot speak about what makes a sentence speakable without lapsing into nonsense.22 This is because the narrator of the Tractatus finds himself in the same spot as the infant in Confessions 1.8.13: he has to give words to the preconceptions of meaning that give words meaning—as if he were somehow able to speak ahead of himself. Wittgenstein hopes to make a virtue out of the irony: once the Tractatus gets us to see that there can be no special language of logic and that the logic of our language, of any language, has to be taken for granted, we will be less likely to indulge in unintended nonsense and more likely to speak correctly. We will speak, that is, only about objects of sense, as Augustine’s child does, but with an adult’s comprehension of the broader world of objects, basically the world of natural science.23 More than this, we will have the good grace to honor logic, ethics, and aesthetics with a reverential silence. For now we know that there is no correct way to speak about what defies objectification.
In his preface to the Investigations, Wittgenstein encourages the notion that his new thoughts are all about his struggle to break from the grip of his old way of thinking:
Four years ago I had occasion to re-read my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking.24
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein counsels us to keep silent in the face of what fails to admit of a correct description. In the Investigations, we are invited again and again to play with the idea that where the one correct description seems impossible or unutterable, there many descriptions may be usefully ventured. What we are given in the Investigations is not logic, but forms of life.25 Wittgenstein tries to remind us there—and to remember himself—that what any of us begins with is a life and that this life can take a variety of forms.
Since it is not so easy to imagine having forgotten so mundane a truth, I can see why Wittgenstein would have wanted to bind his two ways of thinking—the old and the new—into a single book. We have to feel force of a temptation before we can take much interest in the life that is free from its grip. A confession of grace can sound puerile when the fight against sin is removed from it and we are left only with a vision of child’s play. Wittgenstein, as we know, never realizes his idea of publishing his two great works side by side, but he does bind his two ways of thinking together. In the Investigations the old way shows up as a voice of temptation, down but not out. If he were to have taken a more literal approach, setting his new thoughts against the letter of the Tractatus, he might have given us a more vivid sense of his self-scrutiny and struggle for catharsis. But I am more inclined to think that he would have succeeded mainly in making Augustine seem less interesting: Augustine makes the same mistake as the author of the Tractatus, but more crudely, like someone philosophically naive.
As the text of the Investigations now stands, Augustine holds a place of honor and authority. Wittgenstein allows Augustine to supply him with his most perspicuous picture of a subtle, but profound, temptation. In Confessions 1.8.13, Augustine writes as if the meaning of his words were given to him independently of his unfolding life in the flesh with others (a sin against the incarnation?); the result, as Wittgenstein shows us, is a picture of alienated childhood and a missing beginning to a life, a lost infancy. The moral for Wittgenstein is certainly not that Augustine is a clumsy philosopher, lacking in good grammatical sense (of course not all words are nouns); it is that Augustine’s need to confess is so serious, so close to the bone of a human life, that even his slip at confession is illuminating. Augustine’s slip in Confessions 1.8.13—the slip out of infancy and into something unconfessed—gives Wittgenstein a captivating insight into his old (and unconfessed) need for a “preconception of crystalline purity.”26
The picture of language in the Tractatus is not a pictorial picture: it is a verbal prompt of the imageless form that a proposition and a state of affairs (real or possible) supposedly share in common. Apart from that form, no proposition would make sense (i.e., have a truth-value). The self that intuitively grasps logical form is what Wittgenstein calls “the philosophical self” (das philosophische Ich). His characterization of it in the Tractatus is largely by way of negation: “The philosophical self,” writes Wittgenstein (5.641), “is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it.” That may not sound like much of a self to be, but keep in mind that the alternative, the self that is of interest to psychologists, is for Wittgenstein a rather dingy affair. It fears death, wills to live inside a narrow point of view, and looks for happiness in altered circumstances. Meanwhile the properly philosophical self stays above all that: it lives at the limits of the world (6.43), regards with sublime indifference the world’s particulars or the how of things (6.432), and, most beguiling of all, it never experiences death (6.4311). This is not a confessional self or any kind of self that looks at itself. If it were to write a book called, The World As I Found It, then it would, Wittgenstein suggests (5.631), have to leave itself out of the account.
Augustine too is hoping not to identify himself with a dingy, grasping, puny self, but he seems to know better than Wittgenstein that it is possible to live at the limits of the world and still be that self. In Confessions 1.8.13, Augustine affects to speak at the limits of spoken language; both the affectation and the ambition make his infant persona seem philosophical in the Tractarian sense of that notion. In Confessions 1.6.8, in a passage closely allied to the one Wittgenstein excerpts from 1.8.13, Augustine accords his infant persona its infantile desires:
Little by little I was becoming aware of my surroundings, and I began to want to indicate my wants to those able to satisfy them. I wasn’t able to do this, seeing that my wants were inside me and they were on the outside, lacking all sense for how to get into my soul. So I moved my limbs and used my voice, signing with my few signs, in the best way I could, what I wanted; but my signs did not really look like my wants. And when I wasn’t getting what I wanted, either due to a lack of understanding or in order to spare me harm, I grew resentful of the adults—free people, not slaves—who weren’t being subdued, and I revenged myself upon them with a flood of tears. I have learned that infants are like this from infants I have been able to study, and they showed me that I was like this, more so than the nurses who, unlike them, knew me back then.
The last sentence makes it clear that Augustine is not claiming introspection as the source of his knowledge. He has no memory of his own infancy, but as I tried to show earlier, in keeping with a suggestion from Wittgenstein, the offer of a confession is not the self-report of a mental state. With that caveat in mind, notice what Augustine is offering us here. From his adult study of infants he claims to know what he must have been like as an infant. He paints his infant self as a narcissistic tyrant, bent wholly on getting his wants met.
Still his portrait is not simply of a tiny self-aggrandizer; there is as much pathos in what he depicts as aggression. The infant is angry and frustrated because he finds that his body-language of desire is frequently breaking down. He tries to embody some desire of his, and the adults either miss his meaning or fail to respond to him for reasons he cannot yet comprehend, having little or no sense of harm. If he wants to recover an effective language of desire, he will need to study adult body-language, which will include verbal gesticulating, and cue his desires to that. It will finally be someone else’s body that will redefine for him the significance of his desires. We get the portrait of the infant-student attending to foreign bodies in Confessions 1.8.13. If we combine the student with the tyrant, we are left with someone who looks to lusts to care for his flesh (Romans 13:14) and forgets the significance of his own body; the portrait is of self-tyranny. Augustine has not reminded us of what it is like to be an infant; he has reminded us of what it means to remain an unconfessed sinner.
Now try to imagine the confession of the philosophical self. First hear this self speak about death and its freedom from death (6.4311):
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
In Wittgenstein’s German, the self that relates itself so to death is impersonal (“Den Tod erlebt man nicht”) and, because an impersonal self is everyone’s, it is also first-person plural (“Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos”). As I write about the passage above, I revert to the first-person singular, and I signal by this reversion the solipsistic perspective of the philosophical self, if one can still call a perspective the bare conceit of a perspective. Death is not an event in life: true, if my death is the only death that matters to me. Then I can claim, as if it were some kind of philosophical virtue, that I have no birth and no death: my recollection of the one is as inconceivable to me as my anticipation of the other. There is no “I” that comes to be and none that ceases: none, that is, until I recall that I may be someone in the eyes of someone else. My birth can be marked and celebrated; my death marked and mourned. Still I will not be able to claim the memories of my birth and death as my own; I can remember the limits of only the life that claims me from without—the one that enters my visual field and relieves me (for a time) of my timelessness. The memory of a limited life is always a confessional memory: it wrecks the integrity of the first-person point of view and puts us into one another’s keeping.
Having invited Augustine to open the Investigations, where the old philosophical self assumes a more recognizably human form, Wittgenstein does not then advance the argument—which would have been a rather ungrateful one—that Augustine’s first try at words is, as he describes it, inconceivable. It is conceivable that Augustine could have come to believe that he needed to translate his body into another’s or another’s into his own in order to be understood at all, but no one who loves Augustine will want to think that this is how he entered his life with others or how he exited from it. Wittgenstein’s loving tribute to Augustine is his playful insistence, carried throughout most of the Investigations, that Augustine’s picture of language in Confessions 1.8.13 is simply unnecessary.
If he had claimed more than this, insisting in the style of the Tractatus on what is impossible to say, he would have usurped the power of logos that Augustine reserves for God. No longer the master of words, Wittgenstein is prepared to confess, in a voice never entirely his own, the darker possibilities of conception—the ones that orphan the soul and render the body a prison-house or a coffin. He is also open to the possibility of correction without self-torment.27 I am tempted to say that Wittgenstein now writes out of humility, but I know too little about that peculiar virtue. It strikes me all the same that he begins the confession of his later philosophy when he looks without condemnation or approval at the unconfessed sin of someone he loves.
Once it is granted that the Wittgenstein of the Investigations is a confessional writer, his preference for conceptual perplexity over prayerful agony ceases to be a simple matter of a naturalized outlook: it speaks to a shift that he effects within the idiom of a confession, one that suggests more than a few degrees of separation between him and Augustine. I am ready now to speak to that confessional shift of focus, and I begin with a bit of anecdotal information. In one on his informal remarks on religion, Wittgenstein has this to say about his grasp of divine election:
In religion it must be the case that corresponding to every level of devoutness there is a form of expression that has no sense at a lower level. For those still at the lower level this doctrine, which means something at the higher level, is null & void; it can only be understood wrongly, & so these words are not valid for such a person.
Paul’s doctrine of election by grace, for instance, is at my level irreligious and ugly nonsense. So it is not meant for me since I can only apply wrongly the picture offered me. If it is a holy & good picture, then it is so for a quite different level, where it must be applied in life quite differently than I could apply it.28
Paul’s doctrine of election by grace is usually taken to have these elements: (1) all of us, by virtue of original sin, are hell bent on sticking with an unhealthy self-love, (2) some of us have nevertheless been predestined for a better love and (3) those precious few, the elect, are in no position to resist God’s “offer” of a better love.
The doctrine, thus parsed, is not Paul’s but Augustine’s. Augustine just happened to be very good at making the doctrine seem like Paul’s.29 It was from his reading of Romans 9 that he derived his doctrine of gratuitous and irresistible election, and with that doctrine in place he became ever more inclined to blame human beings for being Adam’s heirs. Original sin developed in Augustine’s mind into something between a fatal illness and a capital crime. If the trifecta of gratuitous election, irresistible grace, and original sin can be said to inform the Confessions—and it certainly would be hard to write out its influence altogether—then the Wittgenstein who finds ugly and irreligious nonsense in Paul is not likely to be reading Augustine at “the higher level.”
Personally I have always found it profoundly unhelpful when reading Augustine to suppose that his doctrines have a life apart from the confessional context that supplies them with their application. It is crudely correct to say that Augustine holds to unmerited election, irresistible grace, and original sin. But I cannot, any more than Wittgenstein can, imagine those abstracted doctrines as my truths; they suggest to me a picture I cannot apply but wrongly—a picture of willfulness and the abdication of love. On the other hand, I cannot remember having chosen to be born, I did not earn the love I was first offered, and I have been unable, try as I might, to refuse my need for unmerited love. My point is not that Augustine’s doctrines, once confessionalized, become ordinary and livable. I mean something more along these lines: that we cannot fairly distance ourselves from the confession he models for us simply by gesturing to a supernaturalism that only he (deluded man or superman) can appreciate. When Wittgenstein is feeling less Kierkegaardian and more Augustinian about religion, he resists the lure of false sublimity very well.
In one respect, Wittgenstein resists it better than Augustine does, and here is where I would locate Wittgenstein’s shift of confessional focus. He does not accept Augustine’s notion that we are born into a world having to will, ever more desperately over time, the privacy of our desires. Where there is a tendency to forget how often a desire to live can be for another’s desire to live, Augustine puts a darkly sublime will to preempt the exchange of desire that leads to mutual self-awareness. Too confidently he accuses himself of having pressed all his desires into the exclusive service of his own, original body—as if that determination were obvious. No wonder he discounts so easily the role that his parents may have played in eliciting his first words. They are, to his infant self, just two more adults more or less disposed to guess at his desires. They have to guess at his desires just as he has to guess at theirs. The language that sets in between outsiders is a monument to alienation. There is no sign of an original parenting here, no nod to the responsiveness that comes before all the guesswork. When Wittgenstein contests the necessity of Augustine’s account of language-learning, he contests the idea that the world is naturally an orphanage. I cannot confess to having been born to such a world; there would be no one, not even God, to take my confession.
I can confess only to the sin that reminds me that I lack the synoptic view of my condition. Were I to see ahead of all the exits and entries of my shared life with others, I would be making yet another exit and falsely imagining it to be my grand entry. Here Wittgenstein reassures me that a language of timeless definitiveness and a perspective at the limits of my world is not in any case what I want: none of that would meet my “real need” (eigentliches Bedürfnis). Augustine warns me that I have taken my taste of the knowledge that is both disaffecting and full of promise and that now only God can help me. I do not think, despite how it may sound at first, that Wittgenstein and Augustine are speaking to very different forms of deliverance. The God who writes the synopsis of Augustine’s life also remembers being an infant—a being whose power of logos lies in its need. Admittedly God’s entry into infancy is only one expression of the power of God, but it is the one that defines the rest. That, at least, is what Wittgenstein calls us to believe.
Here is Wittgenstein again, on Paul’s religion (though really Augustine’s):
In the Gospels—as it seems to me—everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There you find huts—with Paul a church. There all human beings are equal & God himself is a human being; with Paul there is already something like a hierarchy; honors and official positions.30
Doubtless Wittgenstein has a point to press against Augustine and his church, a serious claim of grievance. Still it is Augustine who describes his soul as a cramped lodging (domus angusta), a hut in need of repair (ruinosa).31 And what is a church really but a village of such huts?
1. I am especially indebted to Stanley Cavell and to two other interpreters of Wittgenstein who are also astute readers of Cavell: Stephen Mulhall and Richard Eldridge. Cavell has shaped my basic sense of Wittgenstein’s confessionalism, Mulhall has unearthed for me some of the theological content of that (peculiar) confessionalism, and Eldridge has helped me see why the unfinished business of Augustine’s conversion is so important to Wittgenstein. See Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002) and “Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations,” in Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) and Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially chapter 3, “The Child and the Scapegoat”; Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and “Wittgenstein, Augustine, Mind, and Morality,” in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Culture, ed. Kjell Johannessen and Tore Nordenstam (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1996).
2. As in PI §128: “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.” I will be taking all my quotations of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations from the third edition, German text and revised English translation, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
3. Norman Malcolm, a friend and student of Wittgenstein, noted Wittgenstein’s intense admiration for Augustine. See Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 59–60: “he revered the writings of St. Augustine. He told me he decided to begin his Investigations with a quotation from the latter’s Confessions, not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it.”
4. My source for Augustine’s Latin is James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, Introduction and Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). All translations of the Latin in this essay are my own.
5. His essay, “Wittgenstein and Augustine De magistro,” first appeared in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 61 (1987) 1–24. It has since been reprinted in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). My citations are keyed to the latter.
6. Garry Wills offers a very fine translation of De magistro (The Teacher) as an appendix to his annotated translation of Book I of the Confessions. The title of the ensemble is Saint Augustine’s Childhood (New York: Penguin, 2001).
7. There are some translation issues that have made this part of Confessions 1.8.13 less than self-evidently about autodidactic linguistic ability. Since I happen to agree with Burnyeat about how the issues should be resolved, I will not go into them here; but see Burnyeat, “Wittgenstein and Augustine,” pp. 300–1, n. 3, for the details.
8. Burnyeat, “Wittgenstein and Augustine,” p. 300.
9. Burnyeat, “Wittgenstein and Augustine,” p. 300.
10. The most influential attempt to render Wittgenstein into a late-modern skeptic has been that of Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). For a dense but rewarding response to Kripke, see Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), the chapter entitled, “The Argument of the Ordinary: Scenes of Instruction in Wittgenstein and in Kripke.”
11. I am translating Paul directly from Augustine’s quotation of him in Conf. 8.12.29. As my translation of the final clause is a bit free, here is the Latin: “sed induite dominum Iesum Christum et carnis providentiam ne feceritis in concupiscentiis.”
12. PI §108, and cf. his remark in PI §36: “Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.”
13. The Tractatus comes out of Wittgenstein’s experience in the First World War (he finished a draft a couple of months before his internment in an Italian POW camp). I will be using the D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness edition (London: Routledge, 1961). For my purposes, I need not go into the nitty-gritty of Wittgenstein’s picture-theory of meaning, but here is a small taste of the complexity surrounding his notion of a logically simple object, “2.0123: If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. (Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot be discovered later.”
14. In “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Cavell notices the presence in Wittgenstein’s text of two distinct voices: Cavell calls one voice “the voice of temptation” and the other “the voice of correctness.” The tempter’s voice asks for once-and-for-all clarity; the correcting voice undermines the motive for that request. For a more detailed discussion of Wittgenstein’s use of dual, even multiple, voices in the Philosophical Investigations, see David Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
15. This exchange ends PI §1, the passage I have been calling “the inaugural passage.” In Philosophical Myths, 96–106, Mulhall plays out an inventive reading of the shopping analogy: he suggests that the shopper is Wittgenstein’s stand-in for a child and that this stand-in is a far more promising representative of childhood than the child that Augustine portrays. The contrast seems less clear to me, but I am nevertheless indebted to the ingenuity and provocation of Mulhall’s reading.
16. The concept of a Lebensform or “form of life” is a term of art in Wittgenstein and one whose significance is much contested. For some insight into that contestation, see Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 160–69. I am not trying to lay a fix on Wittgenstein’s use of the term other than to suggest that a form of life is always shared. When Augustine writes about his initiation into language, he makes it seem as if he enters into his life with others only after he has inwardly established the significance of all his desires—established their coincidence, that is, with the signs that the adults around him were using to convey theirs. Note Conf. 1.8.13, the line that immediately follows where Wittgenstein’s excerpt leaves off: “So it was that I came to exchange tokens of vocalized desire (voluntatum enuntiandarum signa) with those around me and took my big step into the stormy sociability of human life, clinging all the while to my parent’s authority and the nod of other adults.”
17. The German word for “infant”—Säugling—picks up on an infant’s tie to the breast and not on a lack of language; even so, Wittgenstein is clearly struck by the prior literacy of Augustine’s first-language learner, whom he refers to as “das Kind.”
18. PI, Part II, sec. xi, 189e. In preparation for the third edition of the Investigations, Anscombe’s translation was updated and the text repaginated. In the second edition, the quoted passage is to be found on 222e.
19. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 71.
20. When he speaks of Augustine’s appeal to Wittgenstein, Eldridge emphasizes Augustine’s awareness of the intimacy between conversion and language-learning. I have taken a page (or two) from Eldridge and tried to develop his fundamental insight. See Leading a Human Life, 121–28.
21. Trac. 3.
22. In 6.54, the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes his famous declaration about the nonsensical nature of all of his propositions: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them.” The proper interpretation of 6.54 has given rise to a controversial new school of Wittgenstein interpretation, one largely associated with the efforts of James Conant and Cora Diamond. For a class portrait of this school, see The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000).
23. See Trac. 6.53, where Wittgenstein identifies correct method in philosophy: “. . . to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science.”
24. PI, preface, x.
25. PI, Part II, sec. xi, 192e (2nd edition, 226e): “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life.”
26. PI §108 “das Vorurteil der Kristallreinheit”
27. Wittgenstein was well known for the severity of his self-judgments and his compulsive need to confess his shortcomings to friends and acquaintances. For a sensitive but unsparing portrait of this side of his personality, see Fania Pascal, “Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir,” in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).
28. Quoted from Ludwig Wittgenstein: Culture and Value, A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. G. H. von Wright and revised by Alois Pichler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 37e. The remark dates from late November of 1937. I have slightly modified Peter Winch’s translation.
29. For Augustine’s reinvention of Paul, see two landmark essays: Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56 (1963) 199–215 and Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,” Journal of Theological Studies, new series, 37:1 (1986) 3–34.
30. Culture and Value, 35e.
31. Conf. 1.5.6: “Cramped is the place in my soul where you come to lodge: stretch it out, God, for it’s a wreck.”
NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I want to thank William Desmond, Richard Eldridge, and Paul Livingston for reading an early version of this essay and Rebecca Sheehan for inviting me to read that version at the Kelly Writers House of the University of Pennsylvania. For a much revised form of my essay, I owe a great debt to Matthew W. Irvin, Russ Leo, Ryan Vu, and Cord Whitaker, members of the editorial collective at Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics. See the issue devoted to Augustine and late secularism (Number 19/20, 2008). For my essay in its now final form, I have Phil Cary, the editor of this volume, to thank.