I NTRODUCTION

This part firstly seeks to introduce Augustine’s Confessions as a theography, a story that includes autobiographical content but points beyond itself, to God’s action in creation and history. Secondly, it discusses the dialogical and responsive framework of the Augustinian confessio by exploring the depth of relational language conveyed by Augustine.

Thirdly, by considering the ancient philosophical background and its re-appropriation, we suggest that Augustine’s Confessions is a relational theographical narrative with a confessional language that carries therapeutic consequences. Narrative, language and therapy:

in other words, the goal is to understand what kind of therapeutic relationship a theographical narrative proposes by excavating the layers of relationality in the language of Augustinian confession. Needless to say, in Augustine’s framework this relationality is therapeutic only within a theological framework of a life in response to God and neighbor.

Since theology,⁷² philosophy,⁷³ and psychology⁷⁴ have made a turn to the importance of stories and narratives, the first theme within the chapter is Augustine’s Confessions as a theography rather than a self-sufficient narrative. Augustine’s conversion is

72. Current theology has also turned to narrative approaches and different schools of narrative theology have emerged. The common challenge of these schools has been to find answers to the question whether narratives reconstruct theology itself in terms of valid and valuable re-interpretation or redefinition of faith or its role is primarily to highlight the contents of Christian convictions as the gospel stories become an inspiration for Christian witness in the world. In other words, does theology not only contribute to the descriptive approaches but also to the normative constructive process. Scholars in this debate are Paul Ricouer, David Tracy (Chicago School) and Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas (Yale School).

73. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Phillip Cary, John Doody and Kim Paffenroth, Augustine and Philosophy, Augustine in Conversation:

Tradition and Innovation (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Ricouer draws on Augustine’s Confessions for his Time and Narrative. For Ricoeur, personal identity can be considered in terms of a narrative identity: what story does a person tell about his or her life, or what story do others tell about it? In effect, narrative identity is one of the ways in which we answer the question “who?” Who is this? Who said that? Did that? Who is that?

Who are we?

74. Julia Vassilieva, Narrative Psychology: Identity, Transformation and Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Narrative psychology seeks models of personality and self on narrative principles. Julia Vassilieva not only outlines the major characteristics of the narrative turn in psychology but discusses the context which produced this turn in the discipline. For a more broad interaction between Augustine and psychology, see Sandra Lee Dixon, John Doody and Kim Paffenroth, Augustine and Psychology, Augustine in Conversation (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).

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a journey, a pilgrimage, something that is narratable, a story that can be told. But as Augustine retells, he places his story in the light of God’s salvific grand story as described in Scripture. Confessions is, therefore, a ‘theography’, or biography in service of expressing theology. It is a story centred on God rather than Augustine, a narrative directed and guided by divine providence carrying out transformation over human hearts. In a sense, the highest subject of the Confessions is not Augustine himself, but Augustine’s healer. Augustine’s search for God can be described as an investigative truth-seeking interiority, an encounter and reorientation of one’s heart towards the love of God. As O’Donnell suggests, Confessions is an artful presentation weaving themes of the Psalms, Genesis, Paul and Plotinus into a complex Trinitarian argument, the way God’s image in man was obscured by Adam’s fault and the ways God’s gift of grace restores it.⁷⁵ As a restless heart that heard the gracious calling that converted his inner life, a relationship of humility and vulnerability is established.

Augustine’s biography is therefore a dialogue containing an intentional description of a relational proposal that, in denying human arrogance before its Creator, recovers identity and vocation by occupying a certain position in this loving relationship.

Secondly, Augustine seeks a relational language that acknowledges God’s marvelous gracious healing, trying to affirm his continuous dependency on a divine Thou.

Confessions is a work situated at a transitional time in Augustine’s life, during the first years as a bishop when amidst pastoral challenges, theological discussions and Scriptural investigation, he experienced a renewed sense of being under the guidance of grace, which in turn, changed his speech, the way he approached language and interpersonal communication.

Grace converts not only hearts but also language, and in this new context Augustine’s self- expression is set for a radical change. Confessional language is both receptive and performative, a sacrificial response to love and a transformation in his inner life. Thoughtful inquiry on what Augustine means by confessing becomes a central task in understanding what kind of relational language emerges from Confessions.

Thirdly, Augustine’s Confessions is within the antiquity philosophy tradition that seeks a path to a happy life and has soul therapy as one of its main tasks. Therapy presupposes diagnosis, and in Hellenistic ethics and philosophical schools the disease of the soul was in the internal attitude that sought happiness in wrong places. In order to achieve the

75. James Joseph O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 65-85.

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highest good, the soul had to be delivered from its miscomprehension of the value of things.

This task was carried out by a philosopher who should also have been a physician of the soul.

According to Johannes Brachtendorf, its task was both to raise in the patient the knowledge of his illness and to develop therapeutic methods on which a man would become conscious of his disease and was led to a happy life.⁷⁶ Philosophy was to be psychagogy, theoretical wisdom integrated in a practical way of life as a therapeutic proposal. Through Augustine, however, it is not Hellenism but Christianity that takes to itself the soul therapy perspective that used to be in the domain of Hellenism. Its consequence is that Augustine Christianizes the concept of therapy,⁷⁷ linking to Christ himself who, as described in the gospels, had already described his mission as a doctor to heal the sick.⁷⁸ As a synthesis of ancient philosophy and theological understanding, the Augustinian confession aims at the happy and fulfilled life and is within the soul healing perspective; however, it has therapeutic properties only as a Christian narrative in dialogical language.

The three axes of this chapter, narrative, language and therapy are therefore interrelated: Confessions, a theographical narrative written probably around 397-401⁷⁹ during Augustine’s first years as bishop of Hippo, describes a middle-aged man looking at his soul in prayer and seeking an adequate dialogical communication with his gracious medical Doctor, the true therapist of his soul. Augustine of Hippo pens a storyline in which selected autobiographical details point towards a reality beyond themselves. They are present as expressions of his quest for truth and wisdom, which are ultimately met by God’s prior search for him. Confessions is, therefore, not an unintentional autobiography, but one that includes biography to express theology: it is the “theography” of his inner life healing and the therapeutic effects of his Lord and God. Augustine was later called by the Church “the doctor of grace”; but it is rather ironic that the title “doctor” does not fit the Augustine described in

76. Brachtendorf, Confissões de Agostinho, 23.

77. Ibid.

78. Mark 2:17; Luke 5:31.

79. Frederick Van Fleteren, “Confessiones,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed.

Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 227-322. In his late work Retractationes, Augustine looks back at the composition of his works and lists them in chronological order. Confessions is shown as the sixth work after his ordination as Catholic bishop. Since Augustine was probably consecrated during spring or summer of 395, the work recorded as before Confessions is De Doctrina Christiana, written in 396 and sent to Simplicianus in 398. Ambrose’s death on April 4th 397 is not mentioned. For a concise but apt discussion, see the Van Fleteren’s chapter. Van Fleteren describes that 397 is the terminus post quem for Confessions, the terminus ante quem is given by Contra Faustum Manicheum, the work listed immediately after Confessiones in Retractationes. Since the meeting with Faustus happened no later than the year 401, and possibly at an earlier date, imaginably in 397, Confessiones was most likely written between 397 and 401, but with an earlier date such as 397 as the usual assumed year.

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Confessions. The “doctor of grace” reference could even betray Augustine’s continuous reference to God as his doctor through grace and himself as a patient in need of healing, a perspective much present in Confessions: “let such a person therefore love you just as much, or even more, on seeing that the same physician who rescued me from sinful diseases of such gravity has kept him immune” (Conf. 2.7.15). A similar line of reasoning is carried by Augustine in later discussions, placing an emphasis on God as a medical doctor and assigning to grace the condition of therapy.⁸⁰ Acknowledging his ontological distance to the Creator, Augustine’s life is portrayed as a creature in need of divine healing; God, in his turn, is mysteriously but actively seeking humanity, and his grace through the humility of Christ heals the wounds of sinful human beings. Augustine’s Confessions pursues a relational language to capture the movement and beauty of this creator-creature unquiet exchange relationship, so distant in the nature of beings but at the same time so near in love, by Christ’s humble incarnation which heals human pride.

80. Thomas L. Holtzen, “The Therapeutic Nature of Grace in St. Augustine's De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio,” Augustinian Studies 31, no.1 (2000): 93-115. Holtzen suggests that, by conceiving grace as therapy, which heals the will and kindles a free love to God, Augustine answers the difficult debate on the efficacy of grace in relation to free will. Grace is efficacious precisely because it heals the will by carrying the love of God to the human soul.

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