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mother, Georgette, who is being confessed and is dying at the time of Circumfession. The unpredictability of her death and of death itself makes for the event.

In claiming a more radical confession, would it also not be asking which kenosis is more far-reaching, and in a sense, the one that corresponds better to a therapeutic ideal? For Derrida, it is an openness that unties space for the event, for the unpredictable, not naming otherness. Kenosis is no longer incarnation, for no incarnation can fully express God if there is one, thus flirting with atheism. Confession in Augustine’s perspective, on the other hand, is an emptying that opens space for a relationship towards a nameable destination which prevents the heart from wandering aimlessly. Questions arise about the validity of these confessions as modes of authentic living, or the existential implications of such confessions.

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that differs greatly from postmodern thinking: humans are endowed with a desire for responsiveness, et laudare te vult homo, manifested in a longing to praise (Conf. 1.1.1). In Augustine’s confession, contingency opens doors to self-emptying as an intentional reply to God’s grace. As God reveals himself and yet remains an unknown mystery, human happiness relies on seeking and adhering to this relationship, “now the happy life is joy in the truth; and that means joy in you” (Conf. 10.23.33).

Confession for Augustine has always a double movement, for it is never consciousness of sin without realization of grace. If anyone considers confession as solely admitting sins and finitude, confession is bound to failure: true confession is self-emptying which entails a complementary responsive act towards praising the loving kindness received.

When the burden of guilt is great, in which sins hinder an awareness of God’s love, the notion of Augustinian confession will not appear.⁴²⁸ The objective of raising an awareness of human sins is not to burden or oppress a guilty conscience. The gospel of grace is better comprehended by those who humble themselves, who are aware of their failures. A sense of one’s misery becomes constructive if it is understood under the light of grace: one can truly confess if saving grace plays a central role. That is why Confessions already expresses Augustine’s mature thought on grace, for it expresses existentially that salvation is a gift, raising an attitude of grateful humility. As the heart heard the call of the one who has converted his inner life, a special kind of relationality is established, an affinity of dependence and vulnerability. Not a realization of sin without grace, not desperation without hope, for grace is made perfect in weakness, a Pauline theme much appropriated by Augustine already present in Confessions (Conf. 10.3.4, 10.35.57) and deepened in the Pelagian controversy.

Since confession is an act recognizing the prior gesture of grace, surrender is the intrinsic attitude towards this encounter. It is the acknowledgement that someone has touched me and something happened in me that awakened and gifted my existence. Accepting one’s finitude, intentionally revealing wounds, is never the first movement, but a responsive laying down of pride and adhering to love. In his book “On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self,” Ian Clausen argues that surrender is the implicit posture in the Augustinian confession, for this loving encounter demands personal account of my place and location in

428. For a psychological perspective informed by theological reflection on the need to hold together guilt and grace see the work of a Swiss psychiatrist, Paul Tournier, Guilt and Grace (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962).

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the world.⁴²⁹ He rightly points out that a journey of desire unfolds its destination through a self-disclosing encounter, which makes me nothing but a lover on the way, in via.⁴³⁰ Confession, love and surrender are all intricately joined in the act of “laying bare the loving devotion” and arousing this love in him and the readers,

Why then am I relating all this to you at such length? Certainly not in order to inform you. I do it to arouse my own loving devotion toward you, and that of my readers, so that together we may declare, Great is the Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise. I have said already, and will say again, that it is out of love for loving you that I do this, even as we pray for things though Truth tells us that Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

We confess to you our miseries and the mercies you have shown us in your will to set us free completely, as you have begun to do already; and by so confessing to you we lay bare our loving devotion (Conf. 11.1.1).

As Clausen argues, in the Augustinian tradition, the tears of confession are not only self-emptying, but a path to occupy the place of the moral self, a position of personal reckoning and conversion, which is also a loving self-surrender, “now occupying the place of confession, prayer, and weeping – the place of the moral self, this man starts to reclaim himself as a lover.”⁴³¹ In affirming that self-surrender is the path to the moral self, the Augustinian perspective affirms we are only to arrive at our proper destination if love is the motion that stimulates one’s interior journey. Without recognizing the voice of the lover and responding to it, disregarding the ears of the heart (Conf. 1.5.5), one is left with a yawning void and the burden of isolated self-creation leading to inauthentic loves. Truth cannot be merely known: it must be loved, for the victory of truth is love.⁴³²

Augustine describes love as the weight of the soul, an appetite and a unitive force.

As weight of the soul, love directs the soul to its proper place. As appetite, in Augustine’s anthropology of dependence, the love of God appears in humanity as the pursuit of eternal values and the delight in lovely things.⁴³³ As unitive force, because of God’s gratuitous love, the heart is lightened and empowered to overcome self-centered desires by the work of the Spirit, “which bears us upward in a love for peace beyond all care, that our hearts may be lifted up to you” (Conf. 13.7.8). The Augustinian perspective includes a journey of desire

429. Ian Clausen, On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self. Reading Augustine (London:

Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 2.

430. Ibid.

431. Ibid., 126.

432. Victoria veritatis est caritas (Sermo. 358.1).

433. John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007), x.

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towards God that inspires a life of affection and surrender, directed to the union and in the loved one. Love, the unitive force of the soul, appetite and engine in search of what corresponds to happiness’ goal, is the weight driving the heart towards the dwelling in God:

“my weight is my love, and wherever I am carried, it is this weight that carries me. Your Gift sets us afire and we are borne upward; we catch his flame and up we go”(Conf. 13.9.10). The human being is carried by love, which is God himself: the place where humans are really themselves is in God.

Augustine emphasizes the centrality of love in the Trinitarian life and places love as the renewing element in our likeness to the Trinity.⁴³⁴ Johannes Brachtendorf suggests that, in the 13^th book of Confessions, Augustine sketches the idea that in the interiority of man there is a structure that is parallel to the Trinity, an idea that will be developed in works such as De Trinitate.⁴³⁵ Augustine establishes the notion of self-giving in love as a fundamental ontological reality. Since the love of God has been poured out in the hearts by the Spirit, the Gift, a continuous rhythm of giving and receiving is established at the heart of Trinitarian spirituality.⁴³⁶ As Canning pointed out, if love for God has an ontological priority, this self- giving response does not exclude love for another human being, for in practice, in concrete reality, love of neighbor comes first, expressing a unity of love of neighbor and God.⁴³⁷

I would like to suggest that Augustine’s concept of confession is related to the idea of “love’s crossing”. Crossing in English, traversée in French, can be described as a displacement between two points, which is characterized by a course with a starting point, a path and an arrival. Crossing is the action of traversing something, and it includes the idea of movement from one place to the other, possibly a body of water, a lake, river; it could also be applied to crossing land areas, such as deserts or forests. In addition to a geographical crossing, with boats and exterior landscapes, crossing describes an inner journey. It is a metaphor of the human condition, of the transformation of subjectivity. In biblical tradition, God’s people experience crossings, such as in the Exodus through the Red Sea or living years in the desert towards an expected land. Christ is portrayed calling his disciples to come to the other side or to cross the Sea of Galilee. While it is on one dimension an exterior traversée of

434. Mary Clark, “De Trinitate,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99.

435. Brachtendorf, Confissões de Agostinho, 289. It is also significant that De Trinitate starts being written in 399, when Confessions was still being composed, raising questions about similarities.

436. Clark, “De Trinitate,” 99.

437. Raymond F. Canning, The Unity of Love for God and Neighbour in St. Augustine (Louvain:

Augustinian Historical Institute, 1993).

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a lake in a boat (Mark 4:35), it is never merely an exterior crossing, for divine presence with them on the way reveals grace and increases confidence in love.

Christoph Theobald describes the existential human passage that is made possible by closeness with revelatory people, “boatmen” who give meaning to crossing of the inner life.⁴³⁸ They are people who trust in the mystery of existence and propose a new way of inhabiting reality. Leaving the undifferentiated crowd for a trajectory towards interiority, the space of singularity, these boatmen invite a crossing to the other side: these revelators wish that others, whose path is crossed by them, can get to the bottom of the experience of' revelation intended for them.⁴³⁹ Augustine of Hippo is a boatman that stirs the crossing of his audience’s interior life in conversion. By weaving the threads of meaning by linking texts to events,⁴⁴⁰ Augustine invokes in our common humanity an attention to interiority in contact with transcendence.

Interior crossing in Augustine is bound to theology, related to the action of God who pierced his heart and transformed the prodigal son’s inner life. The parable of the prodigal son, described in the Gospel of Luke, sets the framework of participation in God’s larger redemptive plan. Augustine is the prodigal son who could not love properly and travelled away to dissipate his substance in meretricious gratifications (Conf. 4.16.30). Leo Ferrari points out that there is a link in Confessions of “my path”, “my ways” (vias meas) and the prodigal son parable.⁴⁴¹ Augustine wanders with a stiff neck on his own path further away from God because he loves his ways and not God’s, amans vias meas et non tuas (Conf.

3.3.5). Interior crossing is then a movement from the disordered loves and its prideful ways towards the higher paths of God’s love. If on one hand Augustine is a model for the homo viator, the journeying man in pilgrimage, he is primarily, on the other, the son lost and found that in homecoming surrenders himself to grace.

This crossing from pride to self-surrender, from lost woundedness to broken homecoming is a confession of a vulnerable subject in awe. Love has a weight that carries me to a mysterious destination: it is unpredictable, I cannot capture the game, but it still continuously draws me towards itself. Postmodern thought opens itself to understand the

438. Theobald, A Revelação, 73.

439. Ibid., 153.

440. Ibid.

441. Leo Charles Ferrari, “The Theme of the Prodigal Son in Augustine's Confessions,” Recherches Augustiniennes Et Patristiques, no. 12 (1977): 108-109.

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vulnerable Augustinian confession, but the surrender does not go very far: postmodern confession acknowledges the unpredictable event, but in fear of tyranny, rejects the caritas that comes unexpectedly and makes me bow down and love the infinite. Would a responsive self-surrender in love not be a more radical confession? Confession of sin is an invitation for the joy of surrendering to grace. This is a crossing that Augustine, surrounded by the witnesses of faith, can propose and reveal. And it can only be so because of a trust in faith in the counter-intuitive mysterious embrace that has not called him a servant, but through an unpredictable event of a feast, raises him again as son. As Augustine writes, in this biblical encounter, the Father wipes away the tears, and this forgiving embrace makes Augustine weep even more. Maybe Augustine could respond to Derrida’s claim of his more radical confession by showing him his tears. In the Augustinian confession there are abundant tears:

As Augustine puts it, the prodigal cries twice, first as a lament of his woundedness and secondly for the joy of being accepted in that same vulnerability.

Let them only turn back, see! there you are in their hearts, in the hearts of all those who confess to you, who fling themselves into your arms and weep against your breast after their difficult journey, while you so easily will wipe away their tears. At this they weep the more, yet even their laments are matter for joy, because you, Lord, are not some human being of flesh and blood, but the Lord who made them, and now make them anew and comfort them (Conf. 5.2.2.).

The double crying, for lament and joy, sin and praise, are an evidence that Augustine does not deserve his place, but all that really matters is that the grace that sustains in weakness must be responded to in surrendered love. Augustine’s confessional stance is also captured mightily by Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son.⁴⁴² In this famous Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, father and son’s loving embrace stand out against the contrasting darkness.

In the novel The Lord of the Rings, J. R.R. Tolkien describes a scene in which the small hobbit Pippin finds himself hopeless face to face with the powerful commander of the forces of darkness, the Witch King. As Pippin faces his tragic death, he hears the call of horns coming from afar. An equally powerful cavalry, the riders of Rohan have come to Pippin’s assistance. He hears the sound of his salvation and is deeply moved. As Tolkien describes it,

“Pippin rose to his feet as if a great weight had been lifted from him; and he stood listening to

442 . Rembrandt Van Rijn, The Prodigal Son, 1669, oil on canvas, The Hermitage Museum, St.

Petesburg.

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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