The forefathers’ approach the Confessions

The real work of interpretation is to hear the text.

(Richard Hays, “A Hermeneutic of Trust”)

Since the beginning of modern psychology, Augustine’s Confessions and particularly his narrated inadequacies have been considered as biographical case study material to be fitted into psychological theory concepts.

In his classic work The varieties of religious experience, William James (1842- 1910) turned to the study of individuals that made their religious experiences public, and among those ‘religious geniuses’, Augustine is set as a proper case of a divided self.

Augustine was an emblematic example of a discordant personality, with melancholy in the form of self-condemnation for his own sins: “Augustine’s psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed.”³⁰³ James was a precursor to the modern venture to develop psychologies that explore religious experience, or psychology to illuminate and interpret the religious phenomena. In Varieties, the phenomenon of religious experience is examined through at least three different approaches, that of the experimental psychologist (description and classification), that of the pragmatist (significance and value) and of the theist-politheist (over-beliefs).³⁰⁴ As Jacob A. Belzen puts it, Varieties was a type of captatio benevolentiae, an appetizer for a more substantial dinner that was to come, the development of psychology and the emergence of psychology of religion.³⁰⁵

303 . William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 172. See also Donald Capps, “Augustine’s Confessions: The Story of a Divided Self and the Process of Its Unification,” Archive for the Psychology of Religion 29 no. 1 (2007): 127- 150.

304. Ruth Anna Putnam, “Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective,” in William James and

‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jeremy Carrette (London: Routledge, 2005), 149.

305. Jacob A. Belzen, “The Varieties, the Principles and the Psychology of Religion: Unremitting Inspiration from a Different Source,” in William James and ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jeremy Carrette (London: Routledge, 2005), 68.

115

The most vigorous critique to James’ approach comes from Charles Taylor. He suggests that James’ perspective, stemming mainly from an engagement with North American Protestant Christianity, which privileges individual feelings and beliefs, did not pay enough attention to the importance of collective religious life. James appears to look at the communal spiritual life as subordinate to religious private experience, “what James can’t seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of individual religious connections, but which in some sense constitutes or is that connection.”³⁰⁶ If Taylor’s critique of William James is right, Augustine’s Confessions could have been read in a more relational approach. This would render a closer stance to what Augustine himself intended, for his speaking to God is also meant to be heard by an audience, a community of hearers. The question posed about his audience in book 10 still remains: “will they really recognize me?” For Augustine, it is communal love that allows those who have not seen him lay ears to his heart (Conf. 10.3.4).

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis, assumed that religion was created by man for reasons of self-preservation, as a response to unconscious desires;

organized religion functions as a projection of orphanhood and childish narcissism.³⁰⁷ These childish longings were not meant be treated by structures of organized religion, which maintained a cycle of childhood dependency to a divine power; but by psychoanalysis, as one faced one’s own neurosis in a long-term treatment. Freud was surely a critic of religious experience: he was a medical doctor in the conservative and sexually repressing Vienna of the late nineteenth century, and grasped that there was too much under the surface that was being overlooked and repressed. Furthermore, with the development of science as a distinct body of knowledge and the discourse of inevitable confrontation between science and religious hierarchy, his times breathed the idea of inevitable conflict with organized religion, questioning its assumptions. As Margaret Miles points out, Freud’s life-long project was of the institution of a psychoanalytic knowledge. He set out to discredit religious belief and appropriate its niche: in order to establish psychoanalysis, Freud had to de-legitimize religion.³⁰⁸ It is likely that, since the previous cultural and social space of counselling was

306 . Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.

307. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. Todd Dufresne (Peterborough: Broadview, 2012).

308. Margaret Ruth Miles, “Augustine and Freud: the secularization of self-deception,” in Augustine and Psychology, eds. Todd Breyflog, Sandra Dixon, John Doody, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Morton Kelsey, Kim Paffenroth, and Paul R. Kolbet (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 119.

116

highly identified with religious institutions, in the figures of pastoral care given by rabbis, ministers and priests, Freud intentionally puts forward a therapeutic replacement, considering the religious perspective insufficient and pathological.

Religious institutions and the Catholic Church reciprocated with comparable enmities and hostilities. With few exceptions such as Oskar Pfister,³⁰⁹ Christians and the Church in the first half of the 20^th century opposed the “tyrannical” determination of Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian churches condemned the “pansexuality” model. For many decades, Freud’s works were disqualified. In the early 1950s, according to the Vicariate of Rome, it was a “mortal sin” when a Catholic turned to seek a psychoanalyst.³¹⁰ However, this story of enmity has also turned in recent years to a story of partial reconciliation. The Second Vatican Council exerted a significant role in stating that secular disciplines, such as psychology and sociology could play a role in the development of faith among Christians and at the same time recognized the difficulties of a thorough harmonization.³¹¹ More recently, Pope Francis has also described publicly the six months when weekly he profited from meeting a psychoanalyst in the 1970’s. This interaction turned in the end to be a two-way interchange: later, as his therapist was about to die, Bergoglio was called for, as he described it, a “spiritual dialogue”.

Of Jewish origin, Freud engaged religious figures such as Moses³¹² and did not occupy himself directly with Augustinian ideas; this charge would be later discussed by some major exponents who engaged psychoanalytical ideas, such as Carl Jung or Jacques Lacan. It is also worth noticing the absence of Sigmund Freud’s entry in the reception of Augustine in the wide-ranging Oxford Guide to the Reception of Augustine, which included, among entries,

309. Karin Wondracek, O amor e seus destinos: a contribuição de Oskar Pfister para o diálogo entre psicanálise e teologia (São Leopoldo: EST/Sinodal, 2005).

310. Andrea Tornielli, “Church and psychoanalysis, from condemnation to partial reconciliation,” La Stampa, August 31, 2017, accessed November 30, 2018.

http://www.lastampa.it/2017/08/31/vaticaninsider/church-and-psychoanalysis-from-condemnation-to-partial- reconciliation-yb3zn5cOzFwrl1Zw7CDrbL/pagina.html.

311. “Although the Church has contributed much to the development of culture, experience shows that, for circumstantial reasons, it is sometimes difficult to harmonize culture with Christian teaching. These difficulties do not necessarily harm the life of faith, rather they can stimulate the mind to a deeper and more accurate understanding of the faith. The recent studies and findings of science, history and philosophy raise new questions which affect life and which demand new theological investigations . . . In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made not only of theological principles, but also of the findings of the secular sciences, especially of psychology and sociology, so that the faithful may be brought to a more adequate and mature life of faith.”

Gaudium et Spes, section 5, 3

312. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: An Outline of Psycho-analysis and Other Works, trans.

James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 23 (London:

Vintage, 2001).

117

psychotherapy, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. But the Freudian absence does not mean Augustine and Freud have not been placed in conversation by different generations of psychoanalysts and contemporary authors. The task of reading Confessions under a psychoanalytical framework was picked up after the Second World War by patristic scholars and psychoanalysts, who were eager to use Augustine as a case study for Freud’s metapsychology.

Beyond the oft-used and simpler route of taking Augustine as an example of psychopathology for Freudian ideas or labelling psychoanalysis as non-compatible with Christianity, one can also find theoretical points of contact between Freud’s unconscious and Augustine’s Confessions. Even though not denying its major differences, one important insight, common to both, is the realization that one’s self is not the master of his own inner house. There is a space for discovery of what is hidden, not grasped by the exterior and ephemeral outlook. Both the Augustinian confession and the psychoanalytic setting propose a decentering of the self by an inner journey of self-discovery before another. By opening and speaking to either the psychoanalyst or to God, one is called to deconstruct false illusions and pride that so often characterize an unattended inner life.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychotherapist, formerly within Freud’s psychoanalytical circles and later founder of Analytic Psychology, often turned to Augustine to find support or endorsement for his own ideas; however, Jung repeatedly quoted Augustine in Latin but also misinterpreted and misjudged, even for words or ideas never claimed by Augustine himself.³¹³ According to Pârvan, Jung credits the origin of his ideas on archetype from Augustine. Nevertheless, instead of following Augustine’s perspective, the approach Jung takes when reading Confessions is that Christianity fostered the domestication of libidinal compulsions in late antiquity.³¹⁴ Jung sees Confessions within a larger struggle of a moral impulse that opposed behavioral decadence in favor of a more austere life. Augustine’s restlessness, therefore, is interpreted within the framework that a dissolute life is naturally conflictive and seeks to be resolved, such as in Alypius’ passion for the gladiatorial shows and the struggle against it.

As Jung reduced Augustine into his framework, evidence suggests that his reading of Augustine expresses his passionate yet ambivalent connection to Christianity. Son of a

313. Alexandra Pârvan, “Psychotherapy,” in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, eds. Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1244-1246.

314. Ibid., 1245.

118

Swiss Protestant Reformed pastor, Jung admired Christianity and religion as a deep psychological response to the unconscious but also sought to correct and rebuke it, as a doctor treats his ill patients. Jung’s assessment of Confessions and Christianity as domestication and austerity (even though Jung did not consider libido in exclusively sexual terms as Freud) shows itself partial and reductive. It shrinks the Judeo-Christian tradition, disregarding sources in which bodily expression and human sexuality are celebrated (as in the canonic book of the Song of Songs) or overlooks Christ’s and Paul’s struggle to go beyond a law- abiding and moralistic conservative first-century Judaism. Augustine believed that Christianity was about surrender and love and its different forms; in a Johannine fashion, Augustine contraposed love to dominance and fear. Furthermore, Jung is not completely accurate in his evaluation of Augustine, as he also invented an untrue quotation about Augustine in order to illustrate the unconscious nature of dreams:

Jung takes a creative use of Augustine a step further when he repeatedly offers a fictitious quotation from Augustine meant to illustrate eloquently his theory of the powerful and unrelenting unconscious: ‘I thank thee Lord, that thou dost not make me responsible for my dreams’. Thus, Augustine is forced into supporting Jung’s argument, not simply because Jung practically invented a quotation of Augustine, but, more importantly, also because this reflects precisely the opposite of what Augustine himself maintained in Conf. 10.30.41-42.³¹⁵

Even though Jung failed to comprehend Augustine’s thought on its own framework and the considerable distance between the perspectives, I would like to suggest the bishop of Hippo and the founder of Analytic Psychology have affinities that should not be neglected. One of them is on the level of diagnosis of the human predicament or the consequences of modernity to the human psyche. Jung’s critique of modernity pointed out the dangers of a culture that values rationality and efficiency and neglects the inner world. If Augustine were alive to critique modernity, he would very much agree with Jung’s diagnosis that contemporary people pay a high price by neglecting introspection. Jung suggested rationalism destroyed the ability to react to numinous ideas and symbols, and in believing to be free from superstitions, humanity lost spiritual values on an alarming scale. Jung realized the dangers of moral and spiritual traditions being disintegrated, and the consequence is universal disorientation and disassociation.³¹⁶Likewise, Saint Augustine highlighted the consequences of disordered affections and sought to model his story as part of a greater

315. Pârvan, “Pschotherapy,” 1245.

316. Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 82.

119

spiritual tradition. Jung believed his psychotherapeutic method was built upon the idea of confession, as an artificial introversion in order to make conscious the unconscious elements of psychic life; and valued Catholic confession as a way to combat man’s insecurity, suggesting a loss in Protestant circles with the absence of confessional practice.³¹⁷ A generous dialogue between Jungian thought and Augustine’s Confessions considering both differences and possible convergences is yet to be developed. Such dialogue would be better realized if it avoided the pitfall of considering Augustine’s Confessions as a test-case for Jungian theory.

The dialogue is more fruitful on a conceptual level, including themes as confession, individuation, mid-life transition, memory, persona, self and the role of symbols for subjective life.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) esteemed Augustine’s insights and placed him as a foreshadower of psychoanalysis.³¹⁸ Lacan particularly credits Augustine for highlighting the limitations, ambiguity and mistakes of language, “In short, Saint Augustine orients his entire dialectic around these three poles, error, mistake, ambiguity of speech.”³¹⁹ As Dollimore points out, Lacan’s project of re-presenting psychoanalysis in post-structuralist form approximated his thought to Augustine’s, that of an identity that is constituted rather than constitutive.³²⁰ Jacques Lacan has also spent a seminar on an investigation of Augustine's De Magistro, particularly observing the theme of language. Lacan’s admiration for Augustine’s work is described openly:

And it is quite telling that the linguists have taken fifteen centuries to rediscover, like a sun which has risen anew, like a dawn that is breaking, ideas which are already set out in Saint Augustine's text, which is one of the most glorious one could read. And I treated myself to reading it again for this occasion. Everything I have been telling you about the signifier and the signified is there, expounded with a sensational lucidity, so sensational that I am afraid that the spiritual commentators who have given themselves over to its exegesis have not always perceived all of its subtlety. They think that the profound Doctor of the Church has strayed off his path into rather futile things. These futile things are nothing other than the latest developments in modern thought on language.³²¹

317. Elisabeth Todd, “The Value of Confession and Forgiveness According to Jung,” Journal of Religion and Health 24, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 45.

318. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 20, quoted in Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 282.

319. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 260. More specifically, see “De Locutionis Significatione,” chapter XX.

320. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 281.

321. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 249.

120

Even though Lacan did not engage the Confessions fully, he admired Augustine for his registry of speech as an expression of ambiguity and his pertinent description of the problems of language. Suman Mennel describes Lacan’s interest in Augustine mainly because of Augustine’s “absence of a simple referential word-to concept or signifier-to-signified relation, the expansion of signification into the wordless realm of gesture and mime, and the location of speech in the register of error, mistake, and ambiguity.”³²² Mennel also points out that even though the treatment of language in De Magistro is highly appreciated, the same features are also present in Confessions with even more implications, a development in Augustine’s own thought Lacan himself did not pick up: “the themes Lacan finds in this early dialogue, written more than ten years before the Confessions, are exemplified more forcefully in the Confessions themselves, where their implications regarding the self are also developed.

In fact, the problems of communication through language that Lacan identifies are sharpened in the later text.”³²³Furthermore, Lacan seeks to rewrite Descartes’ cogito and brings the psychoanalysis notion of the unconscious to destabilize modern autonomy. His step to depart from the modern Cartesian self takes him to Augustine’s understanding of language. The relationship between Lacan and Augustine is worth reviewing: if Lacan believes Augustine foreshadows psychoanalysis, he seems to foreshadow a postmodern reading of Augustine.

The Lacanian and Augustinian interaction, particularly related to language theory, seems to be a field yet to be developed by scholars.³²⁴

Another use Lacan makes of Augustine is by taking a passage of Confessions to exemplify his own views on the importance of infant jealousy to human subjectivity. As a result, Lacan repeatedly quoted Augustine’s observation of pre-language infant rivalry in order to illustrate the important mirror stage of his theory, “I have watched and experienced for myself the jealousy of a small child: he could not even speak, yet he glared with livid fury at his fellow-nursling”³²⁵ (Conf. 1.7.11). As Barzilai suggests, key concepts of Lacanian thought are supported by analogies present in Confessions.³²⁶ Inheriting a comparable disgust

322. Susan Mennel, “Augustine's ‘I’: The ‘Knowing Subject’ and the Self,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2, no. 3 (1994): 291-324.

323. Ibid., 294.

324. See also Zachary Tavlin, “Signifying Truth: Augustine, Lacan and a Theory of Language,”

Language and Psychoanalysis 2, no. 2 (2013): 64-76.

325. Vidi ego et expertus sum zelantem parvulum: nondum loquebatur et intuebatur pallidus amaro aspectu conlactaneum suum.

326. Shuli Barzilai, “Augustine in Contexts: Lacan's Repetition of a Scene from the Confessions,”

Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture 11, no. 2 (1997): 200-221.

Barzilai describes the following connections through Lacan’s use of the rivalry scene description in Conf. 1.7.11:

121

to religion Sigmund Freud had, Lacan interpreted religion as an underdeveloped way out of conflict arisen by the loss of the maternal object,

what Lacan could apprehend, then, in the Augustinian anecdote of the jealous child was a twofold development: the initial exposure to maternal loss and its relation to the process of self-transfiguration. Yet, where Augustine invokes the divine (or symbolic) father in order to implement his passage from malaise to rebirth, Lacan does not in the first specular instance call upon or for paternal intervention. If one cannot have the maternal object—that is, the object irretrievably lost from the moment it is recognized as such, the object first constituted through separation—then one will be without it.³²⁷

By briefly retrieving important precursors of psychology and psychoanalysis, the picture that emerges, and has set the tone for the following generations, is on one side admiration for Augustinian geniality, and on the other, a selective appropriation to support contemporary approaches. Augustine is either a revered figure from ancient times to be recovered as a supporter of one’s new theories or a model of a neurotic patient that exemplifies the extent of one’s psychopathological standpoint. William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan, when approaching Augustine, have in common the absence of a comprehensive engagement with Augustine’s own perspective on therapy.