We all have our enemies, real or imagined. In Confessions XII Augustine adduces a cluster of his own opponents, contradictores who seem intent on rejecting his exegesis of Genesis. Some seem to be real enough, old enemies like the Manichees. But others appear more shadowy, persistent representatives of that old North African Catholicism whose Biblical literalism had soured him long ago on the childhood faith imparted by his mother.1 His sparring with these opponents throughout Book XII is somewhat vague and difficult to locate with any precision. As James O’Donnell remarked of this material in Book XII: “This dialogue is both internal and imaginary: the real conflict is between different interpretations that A. himself might choose to present.”2 This certainly seems to be true of many of the exegetical strategies under review. Yet there are also powerful emotions coiled beneath the surface of Augustine’s text, for some of these contradictory readings of scripture seem at times to be not just abstract matters but genuinely wounding attacks, cutting deep into the fabric of his new spiritual self.3 There is more going on in the internal dialogue of Confessions XII than just disputed exegesis. This paper is a tentative exploration of Augustine’s deeper conflict with these more disquieting contradictores. Its purpose is to understand the personally exigent issues that are at stake for Augustine. Section one will locate Book XII within the narrative purpose of the later books. The second section will offer an initial inventory of the contradictores. Then we will examine some of the texts that articulate the notion of the caelum caeli, the heaven of heaven, around which the most heated exegetical disputes of Book XII cluster. The final section will return to the contradictores in an effort to offer some suggestions about the true source of Augustine’s intense irritation with their approach to Genesis.
1. Schemes abound to explain the final, theological books of the Confessions.4 At the very least, it seems fair to say that these sections draw out theological issues that seemed to its author salient in the autobiographical narrative itself. Book X offers a long excursus on the power of memoria, followed by a contemporaneous examination of conscience by Augustine, now speaking explicitly with the authoritative voice of Episcopal introspection. On its surface, Book XI concentrates on exegesis of the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning God created. . . .” But the discussion centers in fact on the issue of time and eternity. Indeed Augustine’s interest is not just cosmological, that is, he is not concerned only, or even primarily, with explaining the emergence of the created, temporal cosmos from its eternal source. For behind his discussion of time and eternity lie its author’s autobiographical assertions—recorded in Books VII and IX—claiming to have given time the slip and to have ascended spiritually into the presence of eternal Wisdom itself.
This autobiographical residue can be found throughout Book XI’s ostensibly cosmological exposition. That is partly because this book, and indeed the other late books as well, are all exercises in scriptural contemplation. That practice, as Augustine describes it, is the outcome of his spiritual breakthrough in Milan. It was the practice of Ambrose, whose silent meditation on scripture once seemed arresting to the young North African rhetorician but which would later become an exemplary discipline for him as a Catholic.5 From those stolen minutes of scriptural contemplation came the great orations that brought the deeper coherence of the Bible to the skeptical mind of Augustine. Ambrose’s preaching, which impressed him for its substance as well as its style, had a dramatic impact on him, “convincing me more and more that all the knots of sly calumnies which our deceivers had tied against the divine books could be dissolved.”6 Most importantly, Ambrose’s contemplative reading demonstrated how to find the transcendent God by going within the soul rather than out into the physical cosmos. When Ambrose was rightly preaching the word of truth,7 he did so because he had come to understand the deeper meaning of scripture and now discerned that texts like Genesis 1:26 did not teach that humans were made in the likeness of God’s physical body. For God was not bound by a finite body, but was instead a spiritual substance (spiritalis substantia). It is worth noting that in this Ambrosian interlude Augustine upbraids his youthful, Manichaean self for “barking” (latrasse) against the idea of divine transcendence. We will hear more barking when we turn to the contradictores of Book XII.
Ambrose’s scriptural contemplation would one day become the practice of the bishop of Hippo, to be exhibited for others to observe in the later books of the Confessions. For it was Ambrose, adhering to 2 Cor. 3:6, who had allowed the spirit to give life and who then “laid bare the scriptures spiritually, removing the secret veil.”8 The later books of the Confessions are an exhibition of this method and a witness that the spiritual nature of God can be discovered by searching behind the veil of the literal meaning of scripture. This is how Christians can exercise a quotidian mode of contemplation, less episodic and dramatic than the unmediated contemplation of Milan9 or Ostia,10 but still a means of discovering the presence of the One who is “highest and yet nearest, most hidden and yet most present.”11
These two modes of contemplation—the mediated or scriptural, and the unmediated—are, in the end, about transcendence. And they are both catalyzed by the eternal Word which in each case lifts the fallen soul up, though in different ways. The ascension narratives of Books VII and IX do not describe autonomous spiritual acts, but instead record the action of the Word drawing the soul out of time and into eternity. The lynchpin of the conversion narrative is constituted, therefore, by these episodic encounters with transcendent and eternal Wisdom. The pilgrim only came to know the true nature of God when he discerned eternal being in his innermost soul, having been lifted up to a level that he himself did not inhabit.12 Unmediated knowledge of incorporeal truth13—that is what initiated his new life. This was at the behest of the eternal Word itself: “And so your Word, eternal truth, being above the higher parts of your creation, raises the one who is submissive up to himself.”14 The same breakthrough—from the temporal sequence of past, present and future to the eternal Wisdom—is decisive in the vision at Ostia. In order to understand the disputes of Book XII it is critical to notice how the apex of the Ostian ascension is an unmediated moment of association with the eternal and transcendent Wisdom. Then, as the souls of Monica and Augustine slip away, back into time and the dispersal of human discourse, Romans 8:23 is invoked—“the firstfruits of the Spirit”—suggesting an initial offering of their spiritual lives is somehow left there as an act of eschatological propitiation.15 This is a scriptural passage that will return in Book XII; here it is a marker of the soul’s momentary spiritual association with eternal Wisdom. In IX. x (25) Augustine reiterates this spiritual itinerary. Here the mediation of all language and every sign (omnis lingua et omne signum) is left behind, and then the divine voice is heard—not through the tongue of the flesh (non per linguam carnis) nor through the enigma of analogy (nec per aenigma simulitudinis)—but directly. This moment of unmediated understanding (momentum intellegentiae) was dispositive for his spiritual life, but it was also quite exceptional. Henceforth the practice of contemplation will be mediated, and his association with the eternal Wisdom will be grounded in discernment through the enigmas of scripture.
It is in light of these ascension narratives that the contemplative exegesis of the later books must be read. Through these episodes—at once cognitive and spiritual—Augustine comes to an absolute conviction of divine eternality and transcendence. Now he turns to the authorized means of mediated association with Wisdom, the sacred text itself. Scripture becomes a source for retrospective interpretation of the contemplative ascensions and a key to the spiritual geography that they revealed. Scripture offers the mediation by which that unmediated knowledge of the transcendent can be conceptualized and remembered. Without it, an event like Ostia would fall beneath the level of discourse required to make it meaningful. And yet, conversely, those instances of unmediated contemplation became, for Augustine, the keys to finding spiritual depth behind the literal meaning of the scriptures. It was direct awareness of the transcendent that gave him the initial impetus to look behind scripture’s surface enigmas. In the discussion of Genesis in Books XI and XII, the ascension narratives are never far from view, giving a subtle context and a personal dimension to his reflections on time and eternity. Repeatedly, and perhaps incongruously, these books shift from cosmological exposition to themes drawn from the ascension narratives. A good example is XI. iv (6), where heaven and earth are depicted as crying out that they were merely creatures and could not have brought themselves into existence. This is a reiteration of the voices of the created order in the Ostian narrative at IX. x (25) where they also admit their ontological contingency. So too the simultaneity of eternity, so prominently achieved at Ostia, is examined at XI. vii (9). At XI. xxvi (33) we discover that time is the distension of the mind—distentio animi. Time is the mind’s recognition of the soul’s scattered and confused existence in its fallen state. Indeed we are told that human life is a distension in several directions.16 But that broken existence will one day end, as it soon did for Monica, and the soul will retrace its earlier ascension and recover its place before the divine Wisdom. Then the soul will find stability and solidity in its form, there in the presence of divine truth.17 His thoughts, the innermost parts of Augustine’s soul, are now scattered in the confused events of time, until the fire of divine love purifies and melts him, and he flows back into God.18 Contemplation, eschatology and cosmology are thus all bound together in unfolding exegesis of Book XI.
2. The same is true of Book XII. Yet there is one important difference: Augustine’s text becomes explicitly dialogical and even polemical. The views of unnamed contradictores are now brought to the fore, alternative interpretations of Genesis to which Augustine feels constrained to reply. Some of his reactions are pained and his responses heated. There is considerable tension in Book XII; anxieties surface that suggest deeper conflicts behind the surface disputes about exegesis. Here is one of Augustine’s outbursts against the contradictores:19
Those who deny these things can bark as much as they want and sound off; but I will try to persuade them to remain silent and to allow your word into themselves. If they are unwilling and repel me, I beseech you, my God, do not be silent to me. Speak truly in my heart, for you alone speak so. And I will dismiss them blowing in the dust and sending soil into their own eyes.
And so the barking (latrent) has resumed. Something in the denials of the contradictores has deeply annoyed the bishop.
To get at that issue, we might begin with a brief inventory of the contradictores, and a survey of their differing objections.20 The first opponents he discusses at XII. xiv (17) are not really contradictores; they are straightforward enemies (hostes) of scripture. These are the Manichees.21 Since they reject the Old Testament, they are not exegetical interlocutors since too little is shared for contradiction. The second opponents then mentioned are those who do not despise Genesis but praise it.22 Yet they reject Augustine’s interpretation of it. This second group is the specific focus of his ire in the section just quoted above; they are the most annoying and damaging class of contradictores. Finally there is a third class of opponents: those with whom Augustine is pleased to debate about exegesis, for they accept all the insights that divine truth has spoken to his inner mind. These contradictores are the genial interlocutors of much of Book XII.23 Their alternative views on various points may indeed be correct, for there is no single, final interpretation of scripture. That position is enunciated at XII. xviii (27). God alone can be the arbiter in such matters. The common grounds of agreement for this exegetical discussion are iterated in detail at XII. xix (28). Those who have also been granted the inward insight for spiritual interpretation of scripture can come to see the deeper meanings of Moses who spoke with the spirit of truth.24 They may disagree with one another in their spiritual readings of scripture, but they share a common commitment to discovering a deeper truth. They may disagree on exactly what Moses intended, but they recognize that he wrote in veiled ways about a transcendent God.25 But those who have not had that deeper insight go so far as to deny such spiritual interpretations. And in doing so they deny—either directly or indirectly—that the transcendence of God can be found in scripture. These determined literalists are the hardened contradictores of Book XII.
This second class of contradictores is especially vexing: they accept scripture, yet their specific exegetical approach is sharply and critically opposed to his own. Why is Augustine so intensely negative in his treatment of them?26 Why doesn’t he just dismiss them as he does the Manichees? What is at stake here? The short answer is transcendence—which Augustine believes that he and Monica had encountered in an unmediated fashion at Ostia. These contradictores—the barkers—are seen by him to deny the validity of that claim by the literalism of their interpretation of Genesis. The critical point at issue is how to understand the word caelum in Genesis 1:1. In order to get at the core of this vexing dispute, we might now turn back to a consideration of Augustine’s overall project in Book XII and its theological significance. That will allow us to get some further perspective on these disputes.
The overt topic of Book XII is continuing exegesis of Genesis 1:1, concentrating on the meaning of caelum et terram. But this phrase is much richer—we are told—than it appears on a literal interpretation alone. Augustine insists on a spiritual reading, identifying the caelum of Genesis 1:1 with the caelum caeli of Psalm 113:16.27 His intent is to postulate a spiritual or transcendent heaven distinct from the cosmic or physical heaven. This conflation of the caelum of Genesis with the caelum caeli of Psalm 113 is announced at the very beginning of Book II, in ii (2). At issue is discovering Augustine’s core credendum in Genesis: belief in a God who transcends the cosmos and is, in consequence, its creator.28 This leads him to ask the question: where exactly does the caelum caeli exist? This is ostensibly an exegetical issue. Yet the larger issues are ontological and those are to be the main drivers here. The key questions before the reader are the validity of Augustine’s spiritual reading of Genesis and his postulation of a transcendental heaven generated by God as the first created product. A great deal hangs in the balance for his theology.
That this is so can be seen by a closer look at his exposition of the notion of caelum caeli. Augustine is concerned in his discussion of this concept to address two central problems for his transcendental monotheism. First, how can created reality be articulated so that production can occur without changing the nature of God? Second, how can God’s nature and function be explained without assimilating God to the cosmos? For Augustine, God is that which generates all finite existence in such a way that the value, nature, and character of this derivative reality are rooted in that source. But at the risk of ontological regress, the first principle must nonetheless be distinct from that which it is invoked to explain. And so God must be balanced, as it were, between presence and distance, between explanation and mystery. To address these issues, Augustine proposes a first product of divine generation, the heaven of heaven. This is at once entirely distinct from God, and yet also intimately connected to God. As the first product of creation, the heaven of heaven is uniquely representative of God’s perfection at the level of finite existence.
This understanding of divine production is laid out in XII. vii (7). Augustine begins with the notion of degrees of reality: the farther things are away from God, the more dissimilar they are to God, although the distance involved is not spatial.29 He also maintains that God, as the source of all reality, must be distinct from everything else, for nothing can be equal to him:30
And thus you, Lord, are not one thing at one time and something else at another, but self-same and self-same and self-same, holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty. In the beginning, which is of you, and in your wisdom, which was born of your substance, you made something from nothing. Thus you made heaven and earth not of yourself lest it be equal to your only begotten son and thus to yourself. And it would be in no way proper for anything to be equal to you which is not of you.
This is a Nicene formulation: the first product cannot be the only begotten son, for that would place the son among the created order. Moreover the first principle might be confused as being equal to its product unless a precise line of demarcation is established. The first created product is then identified at the beginning of viii (8) as the caelum caeli. It is both distinct from the only begotten son—the divine wisdom—and also from the physical and the visible heaven. It thus occupies an intermediary position. Yet Augustine is also keen to maintain that the heaven of heaven is very close to God, for only God is superior to it.31 This is reiterated and further developed at XII. ix (9):32
Without doubt the heaven of heaven, which you made in the beginning, is a type of intelligible creature. Although not by any means coeternal with you, O Trinity, it nonetheless participates in your eternity. Because of the sweetness of its joyful contemplation of you, it restrains its mutability. And without any lapse resulting from its having been created, by adhering to you it rises above the whole whirling vicissitude of time.
Thus we have a first creature which is intellectualis in nature. As an element of the intelligible world, it participates ontologically in the eternity of God. Yet that status is the result of its exercise of contemplation directed back towards the first principle, an exercise that is its delight. It is this attention to its source that checks any inherent tendency towards mutability and the vicissitudes associated with it. That gravity towards change and ultimately disorder is a mark of its creaturely status, for to be a creature is to be contingent. Thus the first product of divine creation is prone—by the fact of its creation—to declension into lower levels of reality. Yet it forestalls the effects of that nature by the intensity and immediacy of its direct contemplation of God. We can discern in this text several central claims:33
1. The caelum caeli is the first product of divine creation.
2. It exists outside space and time. It is an immaterial being at the intelligible level.
3. Although at the intelligible level, it is neither uncreated nor eternal.
4. It exists by participation in God’s eternity.
5. This participation takes the form of continuous contemplation.
6. That continuous contemplation prevents the mutability, to which it is liable as a created being, from taking hold.
7. Its exercise of contemplation is a free act.
Throughout this discussion of the caelum caeli in Book XII we find a series of “dominical audition” passages, instances where Augustine maintains that he has heard God’s voice in his inner ear. The formula—“you spoke to me with a strong voice in my inner ear”—is repeated with slight variations several times in XII. xi (11–12), underscoring the authority he attaches to his interpretation. This gives us a clue to the larger significance of the heaven of heaven in his theology. XII. xi (11) has two dominical audition passages. The first authoritatively restates the eternal and unchangeable nature of God and of the divine will.34
You have already spoken to me, Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that you are eternal, for you alone have immortality, since you are not changed by any shape or motion, nor is your will altered over time—because no immortal will is one thing and then another. In your sight this is clear to me; may it be more and more clear, I pray you, and in this manifestation may I abide with surety beneath your wings.
Eternality, immortality, immutability and volitional stability are here described as being interconnected. But beyond its theological content, the passage is especially interesting for the personal dimension of its claims. For the text makes a claim on a deep, spiritual insight that Augustine has already had, a spiritual cognition that is dominical in its origin and conveyed by interior contemplation. The prayer beseeches God to deepen and clarify that antecedent moment of insight. In some measure, that is Augustine’s purpose in Book XII: to amplify scripturally what he has already come to know through unmediated contemplation.
Section xi (11) continues in the same fashion with a second dominical audition:
Moreover you have spoken to me, Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that you have made all natures and substances which are not what you are and yet exist. And only that which is not from you does not exist. And the motion of the will away from you, who does exist, towards that which exists to a lesser degree, is a fault and a sin. And no one’s sin either harms you or disturbs the order of your rule, whether first or last. In your sight this is clear to me; may it be more and more clear, I pray you, and in this manifestation may I abide with surety beneath your wings.
Once again the interior audition offers metaphysical clarity. In this case a sharp line of ontological demarcation is set down between God and all else. God is the sole source of reality, which is represented as variable in degree. To exercise volition away from God is to move to a lesser level of reality, an act that is culpable. This recognition is, once again, a matter of clarity and surety within the soul, certified because of its divine origin.
Section 12 begins a third time with the exact same audition language, now referring explicitly to the heaven of heaven:35
Moreover you have spoken to me, Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that this creature whose delight is you alone, is not coeternal with you. And with a persevering purity it draws itself to you and never betrays its mutability on any occasion. For you are always present to it, and it holds onto you with its total affection. Having no future to expect and not passing into the remembered past, it is altered by no change and is not distended into the succession of time.
O blessed one, if this creature be thus, clinging to your blessedness, blessed with you as its everlasting dwelling and source of light! I can find no better name for the Lord’s heaven of heaven than your house, which contemplates your delight without any failure or departing to something else. That pure mind in concord is the unity in enduring peace of holy spirits, the citizens of your city in the heaven above this visible heaven.
This remarkable passage collects many of the central themes in Augustine’s understanding of the heaven of heaven and amplifies them. The authoritative pattern of dominical auditions is continued here. Again the eternity of God is distinguished from the created and mutable status of the caelum caeli. The contingency of its association with God is underscored, as is its consequent freedom from time. We should notice the unusual character of this claim. Not eternal, the caelum caeli is nevertheless not in time, never distended into the fragmentation of temporal succession. It occupies a middle zone of contingent temporality, having the potential for discrete, sequential moments in time, but forestalled from actualizing that option by its joyful adherence to God. Moreover the caelum caeli is described as God’s house, another term that has turned up before in Augustine’s descriptions of similar matters. One good example is the final section of Book IV, where it is said that souls should have no fear lest they have no place to return after their fallen life in the world. Their heavenly house suffers no ruin in their absence because it is God’s eternity.36 Now in Book XII that notion of a transcendent home for souls is being refined and clarified. It is not directly part of God’s eternity, only a willing participant in that eternity. But it is a stable dwelling place, now understood to be the collective contemplation of the saints concentrated purely and without cessation upon God.
Perhaps the most salient aspect of this exegesis is its defining emphasis on the transcendence of the caelum caeli and its location at the level of intellect. This Platonic dimension offers a metaphysical sub-text for Augustine’s otherwise cryptic assertions.37 Notable too is the collectivity of the caelum caeli. Whereas we had previously encountered it as a single entity, we now can discern that it is, in fact, a collection of souls. Again, Platonic resonance is evident—whether one thinks about either the collectivity of psyche or of nous in Plotinus. But whatever the source of this metaphysical model, here Augustine is accentuating the conjoined unity of our transcendent homeland. And the simultaneity of its collective mental life is also a critical feature on which he dwells. This is evident at XII. xiii (16):38
So in the meantime my understanding is that the heaven of heaven is an intellectual heaven, where the intellect knows simultaneously, not in part, not in an enigma, not through a mirror, but completely, openly, face to face. This knowing is not of one thing now and then of another, but—as has been said—simultaneous and without any temporal alteration.
The blessed souls of the caelum caeli are to be seen as engaged in joint intellection of God, simultaneous in their mental grasp of that higher level and free from any mediation. Their intellective knowledge has something of the character of God’s life, an approximation of the total simultaneity of eternity. Moreover they need no intermediary elements to perceive God intellectually, but do so directly and transparently. No wonder that, though created and thus contingent in its nature, the caelum caeli does not deviate from its continuous contemplation of its source. The immediacy of its association with God is collectively compelling and wholly beguiling.
3. Back now to the contradictores, specifically to that most challenging group of barking opponents. Their offense was accepting the Old Testament but rejecting a spiritual reading of it. In doing so, they were denying that there is a scriptural foundation for the transcendence of God. And moreover they were not only rejecting a central tenet of Augustine’s theology—one that he learned from no less an authority than Ambrose—but they were impeaching his own experience of God. For, as his personal narrative in Books VII and IX makes plain, it was those contemplative encounters with transcendent Wisdom that secured his commitment to Christ. The moment of unmediated understanding at Ostia is denied meaning if the scriptures do not teach an eternal God beyond time, space and the physical cosmos. The ascensions to which he had attributed the force of conversionary insight would lack biblical warrant. In his dispute with these contradictores in Book XII, Augustine clearly regards the core of his own spiritual narrative to be on the line. Indeed, he says so explicitly. The choice is between his confessions and the contradictions of his opponents, and he calls upon God to be the arbiter: arbiter inter confessiones meas et contradictiones eorum.39
The principal section on the contradictores begins at XII. xiv (17). It opens with a contrast between surface and depth reading of scripture, the latter being rejected by Augustine’s critics. With God as his arbiter, he returns once more to the content of a divine audition:40
Will you say that these things are false which truth speaks with a strong voice in my inner ear about the eternity of the creator: that his substance would never be changed over time nor his will be external to his substance?
Augustine goes on to explain that God’s will is not exercised through time. He wills once and simultaneously and forever: semel et simul et semper. Creation is not a new act of will and God did not undergo change in the act of production. Nor is his knowledge transient because of his grasp of the changes that occur in creation. All these aspects of the inner life of God are once again declared to be indubitable, for they have been spoken in his inner ear.41
Augustine then asks some critical questions with subtle implications—evidently too subtle for his most forceful opponents: Do the contradictores reject this eternal and transcendent God outright?42 No, they do not do so directly. Then what do they deny? The intelligible wisdom, the heaven of heaven: that is the point of their exegetical opposition. Augustine is acutely alert to the implications of that rejoinder. Without a mediating principle between the temporality of creation and the eternity of God, the latter would be drawn directly into association with the vicissitudes of time. Augustine believes that the heaven of heaven is a necessary level of reality, systematically required to secure the eternity of the creator. To deny its existence is to undercut divine transcendence. The contradictores who reject his spiritual reading of the caelum of Genesis are thus denying divine transcendence, even if they do not explicitly recognize that. They are, in effect, postulating a God who must contend directly with the matter which he creates in order to fashion the created cosmos. That theory would present God in the role of a demiurge, a cosmic craftsman who molds unruly and discordant matter into order. But Augustine wants to avoid that messy role for the transcendent God.43 God’s creation out of nothingness brings both the spiritual caelum and matter into contingent existence. And God does not engage in a new exercise of will in order to do so. An eternal God is not one who creates through volitional episodes, which then become part of his ongoing knowledge. That too would entail a loss of eternity and the transcendence of time. As he declares: “And I discover that my God, the eternal God, did not fashion creation by a new act of will, nor does his knowledge undergo any transience.”44 To secure a transcendent God, Augustine believes that an intermediary power must be postulated between the eternal God and the temporal flux of creation, and he discovers it through his spiritual interpretation of the caelum of Genesis 1:1. Augustine’s response to his opponents is to explain the logic of his position:45
What then? Do you deny that there is a certain sublime creation that adheres with such pure love to the true and truly eternal God that, though not coeternal with him, it never separates itself from him and never flows down into the change and vicissitudes of time, but rests in the truest contemplation of him alone? For since you, God, show yourself to that which loves you as you command and are sufficient for it, then surely it does not turn away from you nor towards itself. This is the house of God, neither made of earth nor corporeal from some heavenly mass, but spiritual and participating in your eternity since it is forever without stain. You have established it for ever and ever; you have given it a law that will never pass away. Yet it is not coeternal with you, since it is not without a beginning, for it was made.
What we find here, in direct response to the contradictores, is a plea to recognize the logic of Augustine’s exegesis. The notion of creation requires a first product that shares essentially in the nature of the created order and yet is somehow fundamentally connected to God. Augustine describes it here as a created mediator between God and creation, the finest creature because of its direct and unceasing contemplation of divine eternity. It has no matter, whether earthly or heavenly. It is a being that was made and had a beginning, and so it has a tacit temporal dimension. As such it shares a common nature with the temporal level of reality. It thus stands between the eternal and the temporal, between the creator and the created. Those who would deny this spiritual exegesis of Genesis are undercutting the inherent nature of God’s transcendence.
In XII. xv (20) Augustine pulls this discussion together by succinctly differentiating the eternal wisdom with the Trinity and the created wisdom to which the text of Genesis refers:46
For though we do not find that time existed before this wisdom, since wisdom was created before all things, certainly this is not your wisdom—God and father of wisdom—a wisdom that is wholly coeternal and equal to you, through whom all things were created and the beginning in which you made heaven and earth. But this other wisdom is indeed that which is created, an intelligible nature which is light by its contemplation of the light.
The conclusion of this line of exegetical analysis is thus a theory of two wisdoms: one that is divine and eternal, and a second that is intelligible and created. Both transcend the physical cosmos, though the created wisdom only participates in eternity. Its life is an everlasting act of contemplative attention upon its source.
Yet there is much more to the challenge of the literalist contradictores than just rival theological readings of Genesis. For rejection of Augustine’s idea of a transcendent caelum would also impeach his own confessions themselves. He had, after all, elaborately prepared his readers throughout the autobiographical narrative for those moments of transcendental insight when the divine wisdom was encountered without mediation. His ascension narratives in Books VII and IX were carefully wrought, expressing how those instances out of time were encounters between his mortal soul and its eternal creator, and not the spiritual self’s apotheosis.47 To achieve an understanding of those events, especially the vision at Ostia, Augustine needed to clarify what level of reality his soul, and that of Monica, had reached. How did his soul come into the presence of God? And, to attenuate the spatial metaphor, where was it at that critical moment of unmediated contemplative understanding?
His account of the vision at Ostia is a quite careful attempt to address these questions. We find Augustine using a series of images to express this contemplative encounter with eternal wisdom. And central to that depiction is a contrast between the highest station that the created soul can reach in contemplation and the eternity of uncreated wisdom. If we look back at these well-known passages from Book IX with the spiritual caelum of Book XII in mind, we might discern the connections that Augustine is making. Indeed in the first ascension account of IX. x (24) the uncreated wisdom features prominently:48
and we came into our minds and we transcended them so as to reach the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food. And there life is the wisdom through which all things come to be, both those that were and those that will be. But wisdom is not made but is as it was and always will be. Indeed in wisdom there can be no “has been” or “will be” but only “being,” since wisdom is eternal and “has been” and “will be” do not pertain to the eternal. And while we were talking and gazing at it, we just barely touched it by the total force of the heart. And we sighed and left behind the firstfruits of the spirit bound there, and we returned to the noise of our speech where a word begins and ends. But what is like your word, O Lord, which remains within itself, never becoming old and yet making all things new?
This is a familiar passage. Yet we might think about it from the perspective of Book XII. The souls that make this ascension are not themselves eternal, nor do they become so by this interior journey. Yet Augustine emphasizes that they do indeed come into the presence of wisdom and touch it to some limited extent. Two questions seem to follow from this extraordinary contact as Augustine describes it. First, if the souls do not themselves become eternal by reaching the divine wisdom, what is achieved by this ascension? Second, how are we to understand the use of Romans 8:23—the firstfruits of the spirit—to describe the aftermath of the souls’ momentary closure with eternity? An answer to both questions is offered by the caelum caeli of Book XII. In the retrospective reflections of that book, Augustine will amplify his understanding of the level of reality that these ascending souls had reached. For he had come to believe that the ascension at Ostia brought those souls to their proper place in the structure of creation. They have come to the heaven of heaven, the house of God, to which they may hope to return. Romans 8:23 is, after all, an eschatological text. Augustine employs it in reference to personal eschatology, to underscore hope for the soul of his mother, whose death is imminent, and for himself. The caelum caeli is for Augustine the unseen place for which we hope (Rom. 8: 23); it is where the souls hope to dwell forever in the presence of that eternal wisdom that they have now reached. They fall back into time leaving behind the firstfruits of their own spiritual harvest in the transcendent place of their hope.
The second iteration of the Ostian ascension at XII. x (25) helps draw out the unmediated nature of contemplation. After a long and rhetorically brilliant contrast of unmediated and mediated perception, he continues:49
but him whom we love in these things, we would hear without them. It was just so at that moment as we extended ourselves and in sudden meditation touched the eternal wisdom that remains above all things. If only this could be sustained and other visions of a far lesser sort could be withdrawn, then this could ravish and absorb and envelop in inward joys its beholder. And so too is everlasting life like that moment of understanding after which we sighed. Is this not what is meant by “enter into the joy of your Lord”? And when will that be? When we all rise again, but are not all changed.
Everlasting life for created souls will be a state of continuous contemplation of the eternal wisdom. The soul will enter into the joy of its Lord and be absorbed in divine contemplation without confusion, distraction, or cessation. And in Book XII that is the nature and condition of the caelum caeli. What Monica and Augustine enter spiritually in the ascension at Ostia is the house of God, the caelum caeli, the heavenly place where collective souls exercise continuous contemplation.
That instant of his soul’s transcendence is what is at stake for Augustine in the debate with the literalist contradictores of Book XII. Without scriptural support for a spiritual exegesis identifying a transcendent caelum, the biblical account of creation would not bear witness to what he believed his own experience had disclosed. The choice is between his confessions and the contradictores. It is this group that Augustine describes as barking and shouting; they are the ones who most disturb him with their assault on the caelum caeli. The connection between the disclosures at Ostia and the caelum caeli is then articulated in the argument’s dénouement at XII. xvi (23):50
I will enter into my chamber and sing songs of love to you, groaning indescribable groans on my pilgrimage and remembering Jerusalem with my heart stretched out towards it, Jerusalem my homeland, Jerusalem my mother; and to you above it, ruler, illuminator, father, tutor, husband, pure and strong delight and solid joy and all ineffably good things, and all these things at once since you are the one supreme and true good. And I will not be turned away until in the peace of this dearest mother, where the firstfruits of my spirit are and from which are my certainties, you gather all that I am from this dispersion and deformity and you shape and strengthen me forever, my God, my mercy. But as for those who do not say that all those things which are true are in fact false, and who honor your sacred scriptures brought forth by blessed Moses and who agree with us that we must follow its highest authority, but who contradict us on some matter, I say this: You, our God, be the arbiter between my confessions and their contradictions.
So it has come to this: a clear choice between those literalist contradictores and his own confessions. And it is now clear why this is so. If there is no spiritual heaven, no intermediary level to which the souls ascended at Ostia, then his confession of direct contemplation is impeached. We can see in this text the force of his commitment to this understanding of transcendence. God is the divine father, the one supreme good. The caelum caeli is our mother, our homeland, Jerusalem. It is the place where the firstfruits of his conversion were deposited in that ascension and from which he now derives the certainty of his spiritual knowledge. It is his hope that his soul will one day be gathered again to that level of reality out of the distention of time, there to be further formed in the image of the supreme good. In ascending after death to the caelum caeli, his soul will join a collective unity of souls that make up that heavenly Jerusalem, joined in everlasting contemplation of God. The conversionary force of his transcendentalism is thus bound up with this single idea.
Book XII is, therefore, about confession. It is a retrospective confession, a meditation on the audition of Ostia. Augustine revisits what he had heard there in the face of contradictores who deny what God said to him on that occasion in his heart. And what he then heard is resonant still within him, never to be denied, as he addresses himself to God in the face of his adversaries. Book XII traces a continued pattern of audition, as his memory recovers in words the unmediated revelation of Ostia. He finds the truth of that moment of understanding as well in the scriptures whose divine author is the same wisdom he enjoyed in that garden. This tells us something about the nature and structure of the Confessions as a whole. We can see the tacit unity of the work beneath its surface,51 as the inner meaning of that contemplative moment from long ago is now revealed before God and before those who would deny its significance. And we can discern here as well the nature of the God whom Augustine discovered at Ostia, a God who wholly transcends the physical world and who can be discovered by going into the interior of the soul through contemplation. The God of Ostia is a transcendent God, one whose very transcendence is written in the heart and in the scriptures. This, surely, no contradictor should deny.
1. For the Jesuit R. J. O’Connell, these appear to be “conservative Catholics” who resist Augustine’s Platonically grounded exegesis. Cf. R. J. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969) 18–20.
2. See James O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) vol. 3:318.
3. Cf. esp. XII. xvi (23).
4. See O’Donnell 1992, vol. 3: 150–54.
5. VI. iii (3).
6. VI. iii (4): . . . et magis magisque mihi confirmabatur omnes versutarum calumniarum nodos quos illi deceptores nostri adversus divinos libros innectebant posse dissolvi. All translations from the Latin are my own, based on the O’Donnell text (O’Donnell 1992, vol. 1).
7. VI. iii (4). Cf. 2 Tim 2:15.
8. VI. iv (6): . . . remoto mystico velamento, spiritaliter aperiret . . .
9. VII. x (16); VII. xvii (23).
10. IX. x. (23–25).
11. VI. iii (4): . . . altissime et proxime, secretissime et praesentissime . . .
12. VII. x (16): et cum te primum cognovi, tu adsumpsisti me ut viderem esse quod viderem, et nondum me esse qui viderem.
13. VII. xx (26): incorpoream veritatem.
14. VII. xviii (24): verbum enim tuum, aeterna veritas, superioribus creaturae partibus supereminens, subditos erigit ad se ipsam . . .
15. IX. x (24): et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis. et spiravimus et reliquimus ibi religatas primitias spiritus et remeavimus at strepitum oris nostri, ubi verbum et incipitur et finitur.
16. XI. xxix (39).
17. XI. xxx (40): et stabo atque solidabor in te, in forma mea, veritate tua . . .
18. XI. xxix (39): donec in te confluam purgatus et liquidus igne amoris tui.
19. XII. xvi (23): nam qui haec negant, latrent quantum volunt et obstrepant sibi: persuadere conabor ut quiescant et viam praebeant ad se verbo tuo. quod si noluerint et reppulerint me, obsecro, deus meus, ne tu sileas a me. tu loquere in corde meo veraciter; solus enim sic loqueris. et dimittam eos foris sufflantes in pulverem et excitantes terram in oculos suos . . .
20. Augustines applies the term contradictores repeatedly in the chapter to those who contradict his views: XII. xv (19), XII. xv (22), XII. xvi (23), XII. xxv (34), XII. xxv (25).
21. Cf. O’Donnell 1992 vol. 3:316: “The Manichees are certainly meant . . .”
22. non reprehensores sed laudatores libri Geneseos . . .
23. Esp. those whose positions occupy his attention from xx (29) through the end of the book.
24. XII. xx (29): ex his omnibus veris de quibus non dubitant, quorum interiori oculo talia videre donasti et qui Moysen, famulum tuum, in spiritu veritatis locutum esse immobiliter credunt . . .
25. Cf. XII. xxiii (32).
26. Particularly in the section running from xv (18) through xvi (23).
27. There are several studies of this concept in Confessions: Jean Pepin, “Recherches sur le sens et les origins de l’expression Caelum Caeli dans le livre XII des Confessions de S. Augustin,” Bulletin du Cange 23 (1953) 185–274; Roland J. Teske, S. J., “‘Vocans Temporales, Faciens Aeternos’: St. Augustine on Liberation from Time,” Traditio 41 (1985) 36–58; “The Heaven of Heaven and the Unity of St. Augustine’s Confessions,” American Catholic Philosophical Association Quarterly 74 (2000) 29–45. These articles are reprinted as chapters 13 and 14 of To Know God And The Soul: Essays on the Thought of St. Augustine, (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008). Cf. J. P. Kenney, “Transcendentalism in the Confessions, Studia Patristica XLIII, (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2006).
28. XII. ii (2): confitetur altitudini tuae humilitas linguae meae, quoniam tu fecisti caelum et terram . . .
29. XII. vii (7): sed tanto a te longius, quanto dissimilius, neque enim locis.
30. XII. vii (7): itaque tu, domine, qui non es alias aliud et alias aliter, sed idipsum et idipsum et idipsum, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, dominus deus omnipotens, in principio, quod est de te, in sapientia tua, quae nata est de substantia tua, fecisti aliquid et de nihilo, fecisti enim caelum et terram non de te. nam esset aequale unigenito tuo ac per hoc et tibi, et nullo modo iustum esset, ut aequale tibi esset quod de te non esset.
31. XII. vii (7): unum prope te . . . unum quo superior tu esses . . .
32. XII. ix (9): nimirum enim caelum caeli, quod in principio fecisti, creatura est aliqua intellectualis. quamquam nequaquam tibi, trinitati, coaeterna, particeps tamen aeternitas tuae, valde mutabilitatem suam prae dulce-dine felicissimae contemplationis tuae cohibet et sine ullo lapsu ex quo facta est inhaerendo tibi excedit omnem volubilem vicissitudinem temporum.
33. This summary is a revision of an earlier effort to sort out the logic of Augustine’s position in Kenney, 2006.
34. XII. xi (11): iam dixisti mihi, domine, voce forti in aurem interiorem, quia tu aeternus es, solus habens immortalitatem, quoniam ex nulla specie motuve mutaris nec temporibus variatur voluntas tua, quia non est immortalis voluntas quae alia et alia est. hoc in conspectu tuo claret mihi et magis magisque clarescat, oro te, atque in ea manifestatione persistam sobrius sub alis tuis.
item dixisti mihi, domine, voce forti in aurem interiorem, quod omnes naturas atque substantias quae non sunt quod tu es et tamen sunt, tu fecisti (et hoc solum a te non est, quod non est, motusque voluntatis a te, qui es, ad id quod minus est, quia talis motus delictum atque peccatum est), et quod nullius peccatum aut tibi nocet aut perturbat ordinem imperii tui vel in primo vel in imo. hoc in conspectu tuo claret mihi et magis magisque clarescat, oro te, atque in ea manifestatione persistam sobrius sub alis tuis.
35. XII. xi (12): item dixisti mihi voce forti in aurem interiorem, quod nec illa creatura tibi coaeterna est cuius voluptas tu solus es, teque perseverantissima castitate hauriens mutabilitatem suam nusquam et numquam exerit, et te sibi semper praesente, ad quem toto affectu se tenet, non habens futurum quod expectet nec in praeteritum traiciens quod meminerit, nulla vice variatur nec in tempora ulla distenditur. o beata, si qua ista est, inhaerendo beatitudini tuae, beata sempiterno inhabitatore te atque inlustratore suo! nec invenio quid libentius appellandum existimem ‘caelum caeli domino’ quam domum tuam contemplantem delectationem tuam sine ullo defectu egrediendi in aliud, mentem puram concordissime unam stabilimento pacis sanctorum spirituum, civium civitatis tuae in caelestibus super ista caelestia.
36. et non timemus ne non sit quo redeamus, quia nos inde ruimus. nobis autem absentibus non ruit domus nostra, aeternitas tua.
37. The Platonic aspects of the caelum caeli are examined in Teske, 2000.
38. XII. xiii (16): sic interim sentio propter illud caelum caeli, caelum intellectuale, ubi est intellectus nosse simul, non ex parte, non in aenigmate, non per speculum, sed ex toto, in manifestatione, facie ad faciem; non modo hoc, modo illud, sed, quod dictum est, nosse simul sine ulla vicissitudine temporum . . .
39. XII. xvi (23).
40. XII. xv (18): num dicetis falsa esse, quae mihi veritas voce forti in aurem interiorem dicit de vera aeternitate creatoris, quod nequaquam eius substantia per tempora varietur nec eius voluntas extra eius substantiam sit?
41. XII. xv (18): item quod mihi dicit in aurem interiorem . . .
42. XII. xv (19): quid ergo dicetis, contradictores? an falsa sunt ista? “non” inquiunt. quid illud?
43. On the long history of Platonic theology and the gradual demotion of the demiurge from the Timaeus, see J. P. Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology. (Providence, RI and Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1991), chapters 1 and 2.
44. XII. xv (18): et invenio deum meum, deum aeternum, non aliqua nova voluntate condidisse creaturam nec scientiam eius transitorium aliquid pati.
45. XII. xv (19): quid igitur? an illud negatis, sublimem quandam esse creaturam tam casto amore cohaerentem deo vero et vere aeterno ut, quamvis ei coaeterna non sit, in nullam tamen temporum varietatem et vicissitudinem ab illo se resolvat et defluat, sed in eius solius veracissima contemplatione requiescat, quoniam tu, deus, diligenti te, quantum praecipis, ostendis ei te et sufficis ei, et ideo non declinat a te nec ad se? haec est domus dei non terrena neque ulla caelesti mole corporea, sed spiritalis et particeps aeternitatis tuae, quia sine labe in aeternum. statuisti enim eam in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi; praeceptum posuisti et non praeteribit. nec tamen tibi coaeterna, quoniam non sine initio, facta est enim.
46. XII. xv (20): nam etsi non invenimus tempus ante illam—prior quippe omnium creata est sapientia, nec utique illa sapientia tibi, deus noster, patri suo, plane coaeterna et aequalis et per quam creata sunt omnia et in quo principio fecisti caelum et terram, sed profecto sapientia quae creata est, intellectualis natura scilicet, quae contemplatione luminis lumen est . . .
47. On these ascension narratives, cf. J. P. Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions. (London: Routledge, 2005), part two.
48. IX. x (24): et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israhel in aeternum veritate pabulo, et ibi vita sapientia est, per quam fiunt omnia ista, et quae fuerunt et quae futura sunt, et ipsa non fit, sed sic est ut fuit, et sic erit semper. quin potius fuisse et futurum esse non est in ea, sed esse solum, quoniam aeterna est: nam fuisse et futurum esse non est aeternum. et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis. et suspiravimus et reliquimus ibi religatas primitias spiritus et remeavimus ad strepitum oris nostri, ubi verbum et incipitur et finitur. et quid simile verbo tuo, domino nostro, in se permanenti sine vetustate atque innovanti omnia?
49. IX. x (25): sed ipsum quem in his amamus, ipsum sine his audiamus (sicut nunc extendimus nos et rapida cogitatione attingimus aeternam sapientiam super omnia manentem), si continuetur hoc et subtrahantur aliae visiones longe imparis generis et haec una rapiat et absorbeat et recondat in interiora gaudia spectatorem suum, ut talis sit sempiterna vita quale fuit hoc momentum intellegentiae cui suspiravimus, nonne hoc est: “intra in gaudium domini tui”? et istud quando? an cum omnes resurgimus, sed non omnes immutabimur?
50. XII. xvi (23): et intrem in cubile meum et cantem tibi amatoria, gemens inenarrabiles gemitus in peregrinatione mea et recordans Hierusalem extento in eam sursum corde, Hierusalem patriam meam, Hierusalem matrem meam, teque super eam regnatorem, inlustratorem, patrem, tutorem, maritum, castas et fortes delicias et solidum gaudium et omnia bona ineffabilia, simul omnia, quia unum summum et verum bonum. et non avertar donec in eius pacem, matris carissimae, ubi sunt primitiae spiritus mei, unde ista mihi certa sunt, conligas totum quod sum a dispersione et deformitate hac et conformes atque confirmes in aeternum, deus meus, misericordia mea. cum his autem qui cuncta illa quae vera sunt falsa esse non dicunt, honorantes et in culmine sequendae auctoritatis nobiscum constituentes illam per sanctum Moysen editam sanctam scripturam tuam, et tamen nobis aliquid contradicunt, ita loquor. tu esto, deus noster, arbiter inter confessiones meas et contradictiones eorum.
51. This point is also argued convincingly in Teske, 2000.