Limits of a postmodern confession

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the horns, and it seemed to him that they would break his heart with joy. And never in after years could he hear a horn blown in the distance without tears starting in his eyes.”⁴⁴³ Even years later, Pippin could not hear the sound of horns without breaking down into tears. In a likewise manner, the Augustinian confessio is a response of a heart who heard the horns of salvation and cannot but break down into joyful tears, recognizing his vulnerability and praising his salvation. According to the description of the Life of Augustine, written by his friend Possidius, Augustine is in tears on his deathbed, contemplating the life he has lived,

“and this he himself did in his own last illness of which he died. For he commanded that the shortest penitential Psalms of David should be copied for him, and during the days of his sickness as he lay in bed he would look at these sheets as they hung upon the wall and read them; and he wept freely and constantly.”⁴⁴⁴

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As a way of life, postmodern confession strives for tolerance rather than certainty, pluralism rather than unity, vulnerability rather than certainty, truth as a contextual construction. For minorities and people on the margins of societies, postmodern values bring a breath of fresh air in affirming different kinds of existence as legitimate. On the other side, it could be argued that its emphasis placed in non-determinate arrival has substituted pilgrimage for tourism; postmodern lives may move towards places of pleasure, rather than sacrifice, and the consequence is a life without clear sense of purpose. As Bauman puts it metaphorically, postmodern heroism is in the “tourist”, who moves because he expects to find a more enjoyable place. Home is largely seen as unattractive, and they are set in motion according to their felt desire, and leave the location when new opportunities signal elsewhere.

Tourists do not belong to the place they are visiting, and intentionally keep their distance and avoid fixation. Postmodern lives value mobility, with few roots, setting camps, not households. Their alter-ego are the “Vagabonds”, the dark moons, the outcasts, tourists who went wrong and cannot move by the free choice of their itinerary.⁴⁴⁶ In postmodern societies, the biblical (1 Peter 2:11) and Augustinian metaphor of the Christian path, the pilgrim, with seasons and purpose to a final destination, is substituted by what Bauman calls a liquid life.⁴⁴⁷ Bauman suggests that postmodernity has brought an uprooted, temporary lifestyle. Since the quest is to evade a solid foundation in a permanent place, the postmodern individual seeks freedom without strict frames of reference and avoids making lasting commitments.

Confessiones is a dialogue between three persons, namely God, Augustine and his audience, and therefore, cannot be understood outside of self-giving relationality to God and neighbor. It is a confession of misery and praise, and follows the path of self-emptiness in order to humbly position himself and humanity in a personal relationship of love with the most venerated subject, the Creator God. Without regarding these elements, the three characters and the double confessional movement of acknowledging sin and praise, one might wonder if postmodern readers of Augustine have understood his perspective. Three limits of a postmodern confession will be suggested. Even though positive effects such as a vulnerability that opens space for the other, plurality that establishes tolerance and marginalized voices that are heard, the postmodern confession lacks the ability to integrate opposites and embrace mystery in a way that surrenders oneself to love. In the contemporary age of liquid lives and

446. See Zygmunt Bauman, “Tourists and Vagabonds: The Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity,” in Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 83-94.

447. Bauman, Liquid Life.

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loves, a postmodern confession is also less prone to sustain sacrificial responsiveness to relational commitments. Furthermore, the narratives of continual dislocation do not open space for a rooted balance between movement and permanence that allows human life to thrive. Even though the postmodern confession looks for a space for the unexpected and seeks to keep itself open to the unforeseen, it has missed much of Augustine’s central therapeutic perspective, which presupposes a healing perspective and a vision of recovery in God.

2.3.4.1 Opposites, Paradox and Mystery

The first limitation of a postmodern confession is that, by seeking to correct the excesses of modernity, postmodernity is not necessarily able to integrate opposites. Even though it strikes a necessary correction to a self-centered subject, as a response in denial to modernity, it can ignore aspects that were inconvenient in the previous structure but are still part of a coherent whole. A correction of an excess does not necessarily occur by polarization or reaction, but by holding together the dissimilar lines, in a both-and rather than an either-or perspective, by integration and conjunction. Life is intrinsically bound to some inescapable opposing dualities: night and day are inseparable pairs, light and shadow, recollection and expansion, movement and rest. Even peace finds its proper meaning if lived in the light of the possibility of conflict. Peace without criterion, or a “peace” that excludes justice runs the risk of suppressing one of the parties, generating resentment. A necessary correction of modern malaises may not happen by a reactive denial of its ideals, but by holding together the counterparts. The integration may include an initial necessary push-back, a first stage in a pendulum movement. The next step, aiming at recovering what is most significant, may include some element from the previous perspective which one sought to deny.

Every good story helps us to understand something about ourselves and our condition. Every well-written narrative has an element of truth that guides us about our situation in the world. This could also be a way of saying that we are not to choose between

“big” or “little” narratives, but both make sense as one participates, challenges, and enlarges the other. The biblical Scriptures, which contains the narrative of a larger story, the creation, fall and redemption of the world, also grows in meaning with its readers, who shed light in the larger story as they participate in the spiritual drama. Augustine associates his own little narrative of the theft of pears with the greater fall of Adam. If on one hand Adam is an

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inspiration for Augustine’s portrait of his story, on the other, he sheds light in our understanding of the fall through lived experience. Furthermore, even the small stories of the vulnerable faithful characters such as Hannah, a barren disposed woman (I Sam 1), or Ruth, a Moabite widow, become protagonists who carry on salvation history. Since grace is perfected in weakness, the ones conducting the larger story are precisely those on the margins of power whose story seems worthless. Postmodern confession resists oppressive ideological elements that have been part of Western master narratives: the biblical and Augustinian consciousness of responsive vulnerability can be an ally rather than an enemy in disrupting ideological worldviews that shields people from the unpredictable, vulnerability and death. Furthermore, Augustine suggests we are not to fear the infinite, the threat of God, but while being Christ’s beggars we can find ourselves participating and gifted by the larger stories.

Postmodern reading separates and disintegrates central aspects of Augustinian thought and does not hold its complementarity. Without its proper theological content, the postmodern reading does not comprehend the kenotic relational dimension which is the destiny of the Augustinian confession. As Wayne Hankey puts it, the postmodern reading exerts a series of separations and exclusions of key elements in Augustine’s compound of theological and philosophical elements:

The postmodern theological reading must exclude from Augustine: (1) the union of substance and subjectivity, (2) intellectual individualism independent of communitarian praxis, (3) self-presence as rational certainty simultaneously established against and constituting objectivity, (4) the unity of the normative and the rational which holds together knowledge and love and (5) the union of self-relation and the relation to God as other. Derrida has no interest in saving Augustine for Christian theology, but the rest of the project is his own. ⁴⁴⁸

The experience of speaking to God in Confessions is a passion for paradox, as demonstrated by the language used by Augustine in book one (Conf. 1.4.4).⁴⁴⁹ Just as night and day are inseparable pairs, life is made up of dualities, and finds deeper meaning by holding opposites together. However, as a prodigal son that abandons the incongruences of his former modern house, postmodernity could eliminate the condition of its own

448. Hankey, “Self-Knowledge and God as Other in Augustine,” 86.

449. “Ever active, ever at rest, gathering while knowing no need, supporting and filling and guarding, creating and nurturing and perfecting, seeking although you lack nothing. You love without frenzy, you are jealous yet secure, you regret without sadness, you grow angry yet remain tranquil, you alter your works but never your plan; you take back what you find although you never lost it; you are never in need yet you rejoice in your gains, never avaricious yet you demand profits. You allow us to pay you more than you demand, and so you become our debtor, yet which of us possesses anything that does not already belong to you?” (Conf. 1.4.4)

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reconciliation with its history and origin. It risks throwing away the pearls as it eliminates the dead shell. The correction of an excess does not necessarily happen through opposition, but by integration and conjunction, by keeping the parallel threads of the paradox.

2.3.4.2 Relational commitments in an age of disintegration and liquid love

The second limitation of a postmodern confession is that, even though postmodernity tends to hold living truth by loving truly, it seems less prone to sustain relational commitments in an age of disintegration and liquid love. In a capitalist consumer society and a supermarket culture that tends to keep options open, postmodern readings suspend the naming of the loved other. As Derrida insists in a general nameless alterity, if postmodernity takes itself as a way of living, it can foster an excessive fluidity in relationships, a “liquid love” that loses love’s gravitas. The Augustinian weight of love and ordo amoris is different from postmodern liquid love of an undefined and undetermined other that postpones adhering to a precise destination of love. For Augustine, love carries life in a certain direction and to a specific place.

Without a teleological confession, questions arise about the theme of responsibility and the absence on responsiveness in a postmodern Derridean confession.

Derrida focuses on a confession without destination, on which it is always the other who confesses in me, who decides in me, while at the same time claiming that this confession does not exonerate his responsibility.⁴⁵⁰

Even though Derrida suggests that one remains responsible, a postmodern confession, which has a strong ontology of alterity, may have a feeble ontology of responsibility. As João Manuel Duque points out, the irruption of the other in myself, in an interpellation that surpasses all my logical-rational or systematic categories, is an excess that summons me to an answer, a call towards responsibility.⁴⁵¹ Postmodernity emphasizes the irruption of the other in one’s self, but can minimize the importance of one’s ability to respond. As Paul Ricoeur argues in Soi-même comme un autre, the identity of who we are is related to a human being different from us, and at the same time, the gift of another that calls

450. Derrida, “Confessions and ‘Circumfession,” 25.

451. See João Manoel Duque, Para o Diálogo com a Pós-modernidade (São Paulo: Paulus, 2016), 43- 44.

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for our responsible responsibility.⁴⁵² In reaction against master narratives, postmodern thought could produce a thin subject that may not find a referential grid that upholds meaning in order to sustain its narrative involvements. It risks not carrying the weight of suffering love: by not having a goal towards which love strives, it may not be able to support one’s role in the story of others. Because postmodern lifestyle tends to be fluid rather than solid, it has less permanence to commitments for those whom one is called to uphold. A postmodern view of Confessions tends to emphasize the irruption of the other into myself, but does not place sufficient light on the responsiveness of which Duque speaks. Thus, it does not confront a missing central point in the pluralistic consumer culture that insists on keeping the options constantly in suspension: the responsibility for the other that begs for my answer. The Augustinian confession, on the other hand, is surrending his will to another; this replacement is intrinsically sacrificial and other-centered, as so many times Augustine links confessio with sacrifice (Conf. 5.1.1, 8.1.1, 9.1.1).

2.3.4.3 The Emergency of narratives of dislocation and a life that cannot find balance between “being still and still moving”

The third limitation of a postmodern confession is that, by the loss of the horizon and anchor of relational responsiveness, personal narratives in the contemporary world cannot find balance between moving and being still. Augustine, however, is a source of balance, for conversion is both disruption of the self and an invitation for a further union. As T. S. Eliot suggests, amidst the ruins of the dark and empty desolation, it is possible to strive for a deeper union and deeper communion that allows the paradoxical being “still and still moving”,

We must be still and still moving Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and empty desolation.⁴⁵³

452. Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1990). See also Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: Clark, 1984).

453. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “East Coker,” in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), V.

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As I have noticed within my private practice in clinical psychology, for those who have embraced deconstruction as lifestyle, personal stories tend to be narratives of continual dislocation. Even though these narratives positively affirm temporality and avoid unhealthy fixations, it also fosters anxiety and sometimes does not bring an amount of healthy relational constancy that maintains both the openness to otherness and a bond as self-giving responsiveness. Postmodern mentality values continuous dislocation, when sometimes the most needed and authentic attitude is to remain where you are, wait for the storm to pass and rebuild the shelter so others can find a better place upon their arrival.

Ironically, if my observations are right, a psychological consequence of a postmodern reading of Augustine could be the opposite of Confessions’ goal of finding the place the soul rests. Confessions proposes a journey that seeks and finds one’s place and true self in ordered love towards God, and at the same time is able to affirm provisionality, contingence and particularity, through a continuing loving conversion. Through conversion, the opposites of relational permanence and transience find their complementary movement, keeping stability while maintaining the need for identity transformation. As Jean-Luc Marion suggests, by dislocating the autonomous subject until its place in God, one finds au lieu de soi, the place of the true self.

In summary, even though a postmodern confession embraces a necessary critique of a self-absorbed, self-centred modern subject, it seems to be a confession that could entail some side-effects. Firstly, as postmodernity seeks to correct the excesses of modernity, the postmodern response seems less able to integrate opposite aspects, and therefore, cannot embrace paradox and mystery as the Augustinian confession does. Secondly, it seems less able to respond to love commitments in an age of liquid love than the proper Augustinian Confession. Thirdly, self-identity could be understood as a narrative of constant displacement and therefore less able to establish balance between dislocation and responsive love which is at the core of the Augustinian conversion experience.

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