The context that led to the narratives of conversion and Confessions

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absence of autobiographical content in the last three books placed Augustine beyond himself and within God’s dealings with the whole of creation. His future relies on loving God’s commands as he becomes a man that discovers delight in God’s law (Psalm 1).

Understanding Confessions as a theography helps us realize that the biographical content which is absent in the later books is not against the unity of Confessions, but actually testifies that a confessional narrative makes sense as part of a larger narrative of creation, redemption and consummation of God’s active presence in history. Confessiones starts declaring the greatness of God and continues affirming it throughout its end as a meditation upon God’s laws that guide his life. “Let me confess to you all I have found in your books, let me hear the voice of praise, and drink from you, and contemplate the wonders of your law, from the beginning when you made heaven and earth to that everlasting reign when we shall be with you in your holy city (Conf. 11.2.3). Augustine’s relational narrative sets personal history within the horizon of God’s greater redemptive story, and in doing so, becomes a paradigmatic account; but also a particular, contingent existence that points to the universal.

As a relational theographical description of his own journey, Augustine finds his own self by abdicating being the most important topic of his own narrative. As his particular story is deliberately placed within God’s creative action, Augustine’s Confessions points to the eternal presence of his Creator, Redeemer, friend and Lord.

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Augustine lived in a historical context that was ripe for Christian biographical accounts on the conversion of inner life. The Greco-Roman world already knew autobiographical accounts, such as that of Marcus Aurelius;¹¹³ however, the collapse of the Roman Empire turned people’s attention even further to the inner world. Furthermore, in Augustine’s lifetime, conversion of one’s inner life substituted martyrdom as the peak of Christian existence. The end of persecution and the position of relative peace that Christianity occupied abolished martyrdom, a public witness before the opposing authorities which had been the high point of one’s life of sacrifice to Christ. Conversion of inner life substituted martyrdom as the main sacrificial narrative: “accept the sacrifice of my confessions” (Conf.

5.1.1) writes Augustine.

In times of external collapsing such as the decline of the Roman Empire, the ruin of exterior cities created room for the exploration of interior houses: “the house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it”

(Conf. 1.5.6). As Brown suggests, in this historical period, the changes of one’s life and conversions would be interesting to anyone who heard this shared experience: “Augustine found himself with an audience used to intimate biography, and so, ripe for autobiography.

The stories that circulated about people concerned the events of their inner life.”¹¹⁴

Augustine’s Christian audience in Africa had already heard stories about interiority. St. Perpetua had already spoken from the heart, using the first person in her description of her time in prison.¹¹⁵ But this previous type of Christian biography dealt mainly with the story of martyrs. Their narrative was remarkable because of their death, the climax of life. In an age of persecution, one’s whole story lost prominence compared to the significance of their martyrdom. Peter Brown points out that the biographer of St. Cyprian passed over the forty years of his life and deliberately focuses only on his Christian life after baptism. That was the part that interested the Christian readers in the third century.¹¹⁶

During the first centuries of Christianity, state persecution had been an exterior enemy, but after Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 inaugurated a policy of religious freedom, the climax of one’s Christian life could not have been martyrdom anymore: it had to be conversion. Before the fourth century, the interaction between church and Empire used to

113. Former Roman Emperor (161-80 C.E), and stoic philosopher, he wrote Meditations.

114. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 152.

115. Ibid., 159.

116. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 159.

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be a precarious situation of a marginal group, which alternated times of relative peace and concentrated persecution in some parts of the Empire. However, after this context in which the blood of the martyrs would become the seed of the church (Tertullian), Christians saw church and state merge under the rule of Constantine. This ambiguous situation of church and state reinforcing mutual interests became the defining and dominating feature of their relations during that century.¹¹⁷ The power of the Roman Empire was turned to Imperial Christianity by the conversion of Constantine, the supreme emperor. In a narrow sense and politically speaking, it had been a story of conversion that gave Christianity its status of relative peace in the Roman Empire.

At the time of Augustine, many decades after persecution was abolished, Christians were not able to produce narratives of martyrdom, but could generate stories about one’s inner life before God, a journey of moral transformation. The narratives in the fourth century had to do more with inner healing than external tyrannical persecution, with conversion of the heart than the risk of denying faith before the political authorities. In the context of relative peace, conversion took the place of martyrdom and became the climax of Christian life. Confessions can be described as a soul journey in which the doubts of a man, the corruption of his loves and interior fragmentation were his adversaries. The opposition was not persecution as the centuries before, but interior opponents. God is Augustine’s guider and sustainer against the internal enemies, and he leads human life to its proper end. God is the deliverer from enemies, the rescuer from temptations: “you have enabled me to love you with all my strength and with passionate yearning grasp your hand, so that you may rescue me from every temptation until my life’s end” (Conf. 1.15.24).

The legitimacy of conversion and purity of faith was a great interest of debate for Christians in the fourth century. As Constantine waved back to Arianism, kept pagan images in currency, delayed his baptism and even ordered the death of his relatives, the validity of such so-called conversion was at stake. Augustine himself would not be an exception to the doubts of fellow Christians, as he threaded an unconventional path to ordination and had previously pledged allegiance to the Manichean sect with gnostic influences (a so-called

“Christian” group in the West, but not in the East). Furthermore, the end of persecution also raised the debates about the purity of the church. The unity of the church was wounded by the Donatist controversy in North Africa, a schism that had its roots in the “great persecution”

117 . Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity, Christian Theology in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132.

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(AD 303-305). During a fierce persecution, some clergy compromised to state and obeyed Diocletian’s edict to hand over copies of the Bible. After persecution was over, the rigorist group considered them traditores, betrayers of faith; then after a struggle over the important bishopric of Carthage, Donatus emerged as the voice speaking for the uncompromising, who separated themselves from the Catholic Church. They thought to be in continuity with the true church of the martyrs, as Donatus questioned “what has the Emperor to do with the Church?”¹¹⁸

Several reasons could be listed as Augustine’s motivations to write his Confessions, as the scholarly debate continues arguing over the importance of Manicheans or/and Donatists in the purpose of Augustine’s writing. In such a polemic and rigorist context, writing Confessions is definitely related to both groups, with the degree of relevance of each still being debated. It is, on one hand, a response to Donatists, who accused Augustine of being a crypto-Manichean and questioned his conversion. Therefore, one of Augustine’s most basic intentions for writing Confessions is a defense from suspicious questions over the authenticity of his conversion. As David Meconi puts it, Confessions “is no doubt his first public attempt to defend his Catholic conversion as authentic and fruitful.”¹¹⁹ Augustine was a suspicious character: he had been a member of Mani’s sect. He then was raised in the ranks of prestige and used to be a rhetorician in an imperial court with an Arian ruler. Moreover, his ordination had been an unusual arrangement which left Hippo, a small town of the periphery of the Roman Empire, with two bishops. The route which took Augustine to the priesthood was unorthodox, controversial and against his own will at first. Valerius, an aging Bishop at Hippo hurried to place Augustine as his assigned successor, and convinced the Primate of Numidia to ordain him as an auxiliary bishop. Such a situation was not only unheard of, but it was against the Council of Nicea’s recommendation.¹²⁰ Megalius, bishop of Calama and Primate of Numidia then sends a letter to Valerius (and others) mentioning his concerns over Augustine’s credentials, but it is Augustine that answers his letter.¹²¹ Only after Augustine’s response, is Megalius convinced that Augustine is apt to serve in the ecclesial clergy. To sum up, as a bishop that had been a Manichean and known publicly as a Christian for not very long, probably around 10 years (15 at most), Augustine would want to demonstrate, against

118. Donatus in Optatus, De schismate 3.3 119. Meconi, introduction to The Confessions, x.

120. Meconi, introduction to The Confessions, ix.

121. Ibid.

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Donatist claims, that he was thoroughly reliable as for his new position. Since there were those who still doubted his Christian worldview, it was a timely kind of an apology to his life,¹²² an apologia pro vita sua.

On the other hand, Confessions is not only a defense of Augustine’s credentials but also the fruit of Augustine’s zeal to impact and change his readers, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. On one hand, there were those from outside the Church, the implicit Manichean audience whom Augustine would like to bring to Christianity, some of them previously influenced by him as a Manichean; on the other, those among his own Catholic companions and congregation, whom his God commanded him to serve (Conf. 10.4.6).

Confessions is in this sense, as Annamaré Kotzé points out, a protreptic text,¹²³ a speech designed to persuade and instruct. It is a discourse that seeks to transform the reader. In order to reach the Manicheans, Kotzé suggests, there is a Manichean subtext across the work since its beginning until the last words.¹²⁴Furthermore, at Augustine’s time there would have been a renewed interest in cosmology: not only by the renewed popularity of Plato’s creation account in Timaeus but also as a consequence of the intentional diffusion of Manichean cosmology, with its worldview of conflict between the kingdom of darkness and light.¹²⁵ Read under this interest in cosmology, the account in the last three books could make more sense against the backdrop of a Manichean audience. Against Kotzé’s excellent perspective and attention to Augustine’s original readers, however, we contend that one should not oppose the healing of the author and the salvation of the audience. She writes:

Thus, I argue that for most 20th century readers the title ‘Confessions’ raises the illegitimate expectation, strongly influenced by a prominent work like Rousseau’s Confessions, of a self-searching autobiography. For Augustine’s contemporaries, in the context of early Christianity, however, this title would have had connotations that are almost diametrically opposite to this notion, denoting a work not primarily designed to achieve the healing of the author, but rather the salvation of his audience.¹²⁶

Augustine’s interest in saving his audience comes precisely as a consequence of the therapeutic effects of confessional language in his inner life. Kotzé seems to emphasize the salvation of the audience against therapeutic autobiography; but the salvation of his

122. Boulding, introduction to The Confessions, 10.

123. Annemaré Kotzé, Augustine's Confessions: Communicative Purpose and Audience, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 71 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

124. Ibid., 207-213, 233-247, 245-247.

125. Ibid., 145-166, 150-151.

126 Kotzé, Augustine's Confessions, 145-166, 153.

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audience and the therapeutic effects of a theography are not in opposition, but complement each other. As we will discuss in the next sections, salvation in Augustine’s Confessions is also related to placing one’s life under God’s healing grace. But since Augustine’s is a fully relational narrative, it includes an invitation to his audience to live under the hands of the Christus Medicus, one that follows his own transformation. His autobiographical account works for the salvation of his audience, not in opposition to the healing effects, but precisely as a consequence of being a therapeutic proposal.

1.2.3 Narrative and language in a rhetorician’s life