Confessio: responsive speech to grace as a manifestation of his self to God in the

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the attention is directed towards God rather than human miseries, it is impregnated with gratitude and praise.²²¹

The centrality of Augustine’s intention, since its first line, is to confess God’s mighty greatness and glory. As the psalmist, confiteor tibi, Domine (I will praise you, Lord), Augustine is grateful for the marvelous glories of God’s salvation, the mercies, for God being his healing doctor, for the forgiveness of his sins. Praise is the language of the Psalms, is the language of a confessing heart, one that understands that all that he is comes from the gift given him by God. The chorus is continuous throughout the books: Augustine praises the mercy that reached his misery.

Confessional language rejects an egocentric interior life and intentionally empties one’s self on the way to a loving Other. Augustine places himself as a beggar asking for grace to pray: “Allow me to speak in your merciful presence” (Conf. 1.6.7.), and through a language that does not only describe transformation but effects it, Augustine crosses from sin to praise, from pride to humility.

1.3.4 Confessio: responsive speech to grace as a manifestation of his self to God in the

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posture of the true Word of God, who emptied himself. As a skilled career rhetorician, Augustine had been heading towards reputation, rather than compunction. In his transformation of rhetoric, the language of confessio becomes, therefore, the opposite of presumption (Conf. 7.20.26). As a result, the creative process in his transformed use of words also fostered humbleness and hope in those around him (Conf. 10.3.4). The conversion of his rhetorical skills was bound to produce communion rather than self-affirmation, intimacy rather than competition. Consequently, Augustine’s transformation of language reinforces that Augustine is to serve his brethren and form a truthful Christian community. Humans cannot find true communion in pride, but only in humbleness. God resists the proud, and so does true ecclesial community. In a context of vulnerability, true confession creates a space not only for God, but for others who, along with Augustine, are companions in joy and in mortality, citizens in pilgrimage (Conf. 10.4.6).

It is significant that at the start of book eleven, Augustine quotes the same words from the psalms as in the prologue in book one. However, magnus dominus et laudabilis valde²²², are words set from a new beginning in a new context, a sort of second prologue, that of a joint declaration of praise from a confessing community. Rather than an individual confession, Augustine seeks to excitare, to arouse an affectionate devotion for God from himself and of his readers, so they together, may praise the greatness of their Lord. Courcelle pointed out that Augustine subtly plays in a reference of symmetry between the prologue of the first part (book 1) and the prologue of the second part (book 11).²²³ Knauser highlights that the most essential variation is that now Augustine pictures his readers as those who join his confession.²²⁴ After a meditation on past and present from books 1-10, Augustine conceives a new beginning in the book, the praises of a confessing community, united with him in love for God.

Already at book 10, and particularly at its closure, Augustine had set the Eucharistic language and placed an emphasis on the liturgical setting of a confessing

222. Once again using the language of the Psalms and echoing the first line of the work, the Latin words are the same as in two psalms, namely, Psalm 47:2 (48:1) `magnus dominus et laudabilis valde in civitate dei nostri, in monte sancto eius'; and Psalm 144(145):3 `magnus dominus et laudabilis valde et magnitudinis eius non est finis; laudabo nomen tuum in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi”. Which are also similar to `magnus dominus et laudabilis nimis', Psalm 95(96):4.

223. Courcelle, Recherches sur les confessions de saint Augustin, 26. In his own words, “Augustin souligne, par un jeu subtil de référence la symétrie entre le prologue de sa seconde partie et celui de la première.”

224 . Georg N. Knauer, Psalmenzitate in Augustins Konfessionen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck Und Ruprecht, 1955), 153.

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community, “I eat it, I drink it, I dispense it to others, and as a poor man I long to be filled with it among those who are fed and feasted. And then do those who seek him praise the Lord” (Conf. 10.43.70). Through the image of being a priest leading the Lord’s Supper where believers take part in feasting, Augustine prepares room for the new communal prologue at the start of book 11. As O’Donnell puts it, at the end of book 10 there is a discourse that does not only represent liturgical prayer, but accompanies and embodies it, not a descriptive treatise of what the Eucharist means, but an embodied appearance to us as at the altar.²²⁵ This image also suggests that Confessions’ communal voice of praise should be understood in the context of Augustine’s life and his position as the bishop of Hippo. His situation and ecclesiastical stand counts for the meaning and intentionality. And as a bishop, in a position that has the soul-caring process as a central interest, Augustine would be interested in nurturing a community of confessants: “the Confessions is a sacrifice which the bishop Augustine offers as a kind of Eucharist, an offering of praise in thanksgiving, for the sake of taking up his readers into God and through them advancing the redemption of all creation.”²²⁶ O’Donnell goes ever further, suggesting that, since books 1-10 are a meditation on past (1-9) and present (10), the first lines of the whole work, magnus es, domine (Conf.

1.1.1) can be read retrospectively as praise that arises from liturgical confession.²²⁷ On a deeper level, the communal confession of praise in book eleven carries more relationality, and shapes the way we retrospectively approach the first sentence of the whole Confessiones.

There is a symbolic return to the place once began, not as an individual private confession, but as a communal voice of praise in love. In the past, Augustine had been a career rhetorician that could disguise and speak deceitfully for his own self-interested purposes. But at the time of writing, he stood as a Christian pastor and orator in a confessing community that he was accountable to and that he loved. Augustine does not speak alone: he “speaks with”, cum- fessio, for the purposes of nurturing the church, desiring to serve the flock entrusted to him by God, “a longing on fire not for myself alone but to serve the brethren I dearly love” (Conf.

11.2.3).

Throughout Confessions, Augustine is well aware of the presence of his audience, their reactions and the effect of his words on them: “your spiritually-minded faithful will gently and lovingly laugh at me if they read these confessions of mine; all the same, that is

225. O’Donnell, Confessions, commentary on 10.43.70.

226. Ortiz, You Made Us for Yourself, 233.

227. O’Donnell, Confessions, commentary on 10.43.70.

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what I like” (Conf. 5.10.20). Book 10 describes Augustine’s present situation at the time of writing Confessions, at least ten years after his conversion. He wants to communicate what grace has done in his life and invite readers both to join in thanksgiving and in prayer as he faces his own current challenges. Here Augustine describes a double interest in writing the Confessions, related to both reader and writer. He had described his past in order to direct others towards God – but in book 10 he also describes his present so his own spiritual journey could be nurtured by the prayers and joy of his readers. Book ten is divided into three parts, focusing on the purpose of writing (which includes the effects on his readers), on memory and on the dangers Augustine was facing against concupiscentia.

As Christ calls Augustine to live under his new creation, a renewed humanity is brought by the Creator not only in Augustine but to those who hear God’s call and bow to the Creator. By the agency of the Holy Spirit, life becomes confession, an adequate sacrifice in a context of a humbled but recreated humanity. Even though lowering themselves, they are raised and lifted up, healed from false pride and nourished in true love (Conf. 7.18.24).

Augustine realized that the cor unum of the first Christians in Jerusalem was an important ideal for community life. Nowhere else but in the community described in the biblical book of Acts was the breaking of barriers so inspiring, uniting and world changing.

The voluntary giving of possessions was a visible expression of being-for-the-other; that marvelous community announced to the world the beauty of being of one heart and mind (Acts 4:32). After Pentecost, at the center of faith stands not only an individual but a community, empowered by the Spirit to become the restored humanity that re-presents Christ to the world. Augustine later would develop the implications of this oneness of heart experience, anima una et cor unum, both for monastic life and for his congregation through his sermons; solidarity of heart of those playing the same piece of music, tuned to each other playing the symphony of the song of love for God and neighbor.²²⁸ Augustine’s monastic rule has also become a source of inspiration for communal sharing of goods, as in the contemporary readings by liberation theologians such as Clodovis Boff.²²⁹

Augustine’s writing shows a communitarian sense from his early writings. As early as in Soliloquia, truth happens not in an isolated individual, but through persons-in-relation

228. Anthony Dupont and Pierre-Paul Walraet, “Augustine on the Heart as the Centre of Human Happiness,” Studies in Spirituality,25 (2015): 73.

229. Clodovis M. Boff, A via da Comunhão de Bens: A Regra De Santo Agostinho Comentada na Perspectiva da Teologia Da Libertação (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988).

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in community and where hearts and souls are well attuned. Later, as a priest and bishop, his pastoral ministry would be understood relationally, as God would call him to account for those who were under his care. The later Augustine started to realize even further how sin is related to a self that fails to live in community:

Augustine’s thought in his fifties began to be dominated by the notion that the roots of sin lie in the self’s retreat into a privacy which is deprivation: the self is deprived of community. All community — with God, with one’s fellows, and even with one’s own self — is fatally ruptured by sin. The radical flaw in human nature is now transcribed in terms of a retreat into a closed-off self.²³⁰

A relevant appropriation of the Augustinian tradition by the confessing community as a context of welcoming vulnerability is the one made by Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, firstly in his doctoral dissertation and then in his later book Life Together.²³¹ Bonhoeffer suggests that the goal of Christian community is an encounter of transformation as bringers of the Word of salvation in a context of vulnerability. The community creates space for transformation through confession and welcoming of the weak.

For Bonhoeffer, it is the power of a communal confession of sin, bringing truth and light, which finds the only way to create communities.²³² This is definitely in tune with Augustine’s own perspective in his “second prologue” at the beginning of book 11: Augustine seeks

230. Robert Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment in Augustine’s Spiritual Career (Villanova:

Villanova University Press, 1989), 31-32.

231. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 5 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). Bonhoeffer lived in the dark times of Nazi Germany, but highlighted that confession in community breaks the power of darkness and expresses a commitment to a life in the light. Bonhoeffer called his political and religious resisting group, which did not capitulate to Hitler, the “Confessing Church”. He emphasized the connection between confession and community, in which sin comes to light and through communal confession a breakthrough happens. His doctoral dissertation, named Sanctorum Communio, makes significant use of Augustine’s ideas. Bonhoeffer ties the Augustinian emphasis on charity as the church’s bond and its authority to forgive sins – not from the ecclesiastical office (in a time church authorities were bound to the state) but the community of saints, as the Christ who bears them is in their midst. See also Peter Frick, ed., Bonhoeffer's Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 13.

232. Bonhoeffer points out that, “In confession there takes place a breakthrough to community. Sin wants to be alone with people. It takes them away from the community. The more lonely people become, the more destructive the power of sin over them. The more deeply they become entangled in it, the more unholy is their loneliness. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of what is left unsaid sin poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the gospel breaks into the darkness and closed isolation of the heart. Sin must be brought into the light. What is unspoken is said openly and confessed. All that is secret and hidden comes to light. It is a hard struggle until the sin crosses one’s lips in confession. But God breaks down gates of bronze and cuts through bars of iron (Ps.

107:16). Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of another Christian, the last stronghold of self- justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders, giving up all evil, giving the sinner’s heart to God and finding the forgiveness of all one’s sin in the community of Jesus Christ and other Christians. Sin that has been spoken and confessed has lost all of its power. It has been revealed and judged as sin. It can no longer tear apart the community.” Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 110.

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Christian men and women that confess praise and sin together in a context of humble vulnerability, and in doing so, are transformed by the word of salvation.

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1.4 Augustine’s Confessions and philosophical therapy: confession as soul