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American Academy of Religion

The Unnamed and the Defaced: The Limits of Rhetoric in Augustine's "Confessiones"
Author(s): Matthew G. Condon
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 4363
Published by: Oxford University Press
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The Unnamed and the Defaced:


The Limits of Rhetoric in

Augustine's Confessiones
Matthew G. Condon

This article addresses a seeming aporia for the modem reader ofAugustine's
Confessiones: why is it that Augustine refuses to name significant figures in
his life throughout his self-narrative? By way of attempting an answer, I
begin with the formal problems of the Confessiones, that is, how one should
approach such a fractured and rhetorically disciplined text. Then I address

the more specific problem that has been curiously neglected by a whole
range of commentators: the violent unnaming and defacing that occurs as
a result ofAugustine's willful forgetting of particular people who were once
close to him. I draw the conclusions that such unnaming was not an oversight committed by Augustine, that he does so in order to distance his own
conversion experience from less inspiring stories, and that this is part of a
conscious, rhetorical agenda to align his own name with certain distinguished members of the Latin Church.

AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONES is treated incorrectly if it is read strict


as an autobiography, a conversion narrative, or even as a theologically

inspired life story. The Confessiones is certainly more than all of what the
categories presume, just as it is more than a literary, theological, and philo-

sophical success. In fact, Augustine's rhetoric is designed (up to a poin

to show how difficult it can be for anyone to be sure of any life pattern. I

believe this is made most apparent in the limits of the Augustinian nar
tive, namely, in those moments of textual rupture: either in those m
ments when the narrative "flow" is suddenly broken apart by eruption
of memory, or God desire, or rhetorical self-loathing and the like; or

Matthew G. Condon is a Ph.D. candidate at the Divinity School, University of Chicago, Chica
IL 60637; and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Pur

University at Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202.


Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2001, Vol. 69, No. 1, pp. 43-63.
@ 2001 The American Academy of Religion

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44 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

those moments of glaring omissions when Augustine glosses over, refuses


to address, or just simply ignores otherwise important life events (such
as the death of his father) and the names of certain individuals (such as
the mother of his son Adeodatus).1 I will first address the formal problems with the Confessiones, that is, how one should approach such a fractured and disciplined text. Then I will address a more specific problem
that has been curiously neglected by a whole range of commentators:2 the
violent unnaming and defacing that occurs as a result of Augustine's willful

forgetting of particular people who were once close to him.

But first, it should not pass us by that Augustine's Confessiones articulates a range of concerns, from the confession of sins, faith, and praise for
God to confessions of knowledge and its limits. Since the subject narrating
is also the subject narrated, confession, as I see it, is a literary device that is
profoundly constitutive of self-identity. Its power is found, for example, in
its ability to reappropriate, to reconfigure and reinscribe one's self-identity

and the "absoluteness" of one's (completed) acts. Confession in and of itself is foremost a verbal act, and this is not lost in its etymological roots. The

modem English word can be traced back to the Latin confessio, which means

something like "acknowledgment," and this approximates Augustine's various applications of the term. In the past participial verb form of confiteor,
confiteri, we can determine its root, fateri, which is akin to fari, "to speak,"
which is in turn akin to the Greek phanai, "to say," that is, pho6n, "sound,"

or "voice," the prefix con- lending it the additional relational meaning of

"with," "together," or "thoroughly." Garry Wills best articulates Augustine's


broad use of confessiones when he translates it as "testimony" and not as "confessions," which he argues is an utterly confusing transliteration that "misses

the complexity of a word in which Augustine intuited an entire theology"


(1999b: xiv).3 Rather, Augustine's use of the term approaches the modem
1 This was also the case for Libanius of Antioch, a rhetorician like Augustine but Greek and about

a generation older, who, in his self-narrative, names his son but not his concubine (?278, 329); I
owe this reference to Brown 1967: 62, n. 5.

2 The rare exception may be Pierre Courcelle, whose Recherches sur les Confessiones de saint
Augustin may be the most thorough academic study on the Confessiones to date. Courcelle calls
attention to but does not analyze why Augustine dis/articulates silences voluntaires regarding les
personnages non nomms; rather, in order to clarify for historical reasons particular episodes (especially in the Milanese period) of Augustine's life, Courcelle at least attempts to identify some of
those persons not named (40-43), such as the Latin translator of the Neoplatonist books so important to Augustine's intellectual and spiritual development (named in the Confessiones only in
passing and in a later book as Victorinus; compare 7.9.13 with 8.2) or the emperor whom Augustine honors with a panegyric (6.6.9).
3 Wills's argument is so convincing that even Peter Brown (see 1999), who knows Augustine and
his sociohistorical context better than most, lavishly praises Wills for his insight and fresh approach.
However, I will not follow Wills's example and steadfastly refer to the Confessiones as The Testimony. To effect a compromise, I use the Latin title throughout because it will be more familiar to

the reader-at least, it may not be as discordant as The Testimony.

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 45

meaning of "credo," that is, a summary of religious beliefs, insofa


Confessiones clarifies Augustine's commitment to the Latin Churc
distancing him from his pagan and Manichean past.

Many of the formal problems literary critics have with the Confe

are actually due to its mode of writing. This text-a historical, Ch


conversion narrative ruptured by distinctly mixed confessional (or
prefer, testimonial) moments-ultimately serves a narrative of a s
in no way can be grasped by a single, definitive genre. Although
egories of "autobiography," "confessions," "memoir," and "conve
narrative" act as principles of legitimation (for genres are comp
normative rules applied to institutionalized categories), these sam

are subverted by the very formulations of self-narratives they seek t

trol. These texts customarily articulate complex narrative relatio


out expressing ready-made formulas of intrinsic or universally r
able structures. Self-narratives express, and depend on, mixed dis
that cannot always be easily isolated. Although Augustine's Conf
does indeed articulate "autobiographical" elements in general, it
presses distinct heterogeneous testimonial discourses in particul
ply labeling this text as "autobiography"-as James Olney, the le
American critic in autobiography studies, would have it, along w

of other leading critics and commentators such as Pierre Co

Northrop Frye, Karl Weintraub, Peter Brown,4 and Mark C. Tay


only is a misapplication of the term genre because this text cann
one generic designation alone but also does historical violence to t
because the term autobiography is a modern generic term not ava
Augustine.s It is an imposition of a generic form on material not
to receive it. Approaching a text as polyvalent as Augustine's Conf
in this manner establishes a narrow horizon of expectations. Mor

4 Indeed, even Augustine's great biographer Peter Brown commits this misreading.
Brown is aware of the problem of applying the term autobiography to Augustine's Conf
nonetheless makes use of it. Compare these statements from Brown: "The many attem

plain the book in terms of a single, external provocation, or of a single, philosophical idd
nore the life that runs through it" (1967: 165). And yet, Brown cannot resist generalizat
self: "The Confessions was an act of therapy" (1967: 165); "Only a very profound, inner re
have led him to write a book such as the Confessions: he was entering middle age. Thi
considered a good time for writing an autobiography" (1967: 163). I am not sure what
by that last sentence. Also consider the declaration, "The Confessions are a masterpiece o
intellectual autobiography" (1967: 167). The point is that Brown, who must know bett
fers to the text again and again as "autobiography."
5 Nor was it available to Franklin, whose "memoirs" gained the title of "autobiography
death; the same is true of Libanius's so-called Autobiography (which he himself gave the
peri tes eauton tuches). But what limits can one put on this term when there are such te
Autobiography of Surrealism, Autobiography of a Cathedral, The Autobiography of Ame

ness, The Autobiography ofScience, and The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotat
Bibliography?

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46 Journal of the American Academy of Religion


aging, this results in blinding the reader not only to the text's polyvalence

but also to its moments of textual rupture and rhetorical elision. "The
more original a book or a kind of writing is," writes Richard Rorty, "the
more unprecedented, the less likely we are to have criteria in hand, and
the less point there is in trying to assign it to a genre" (135). Although we
now have an ample number of texts we can stack up against it, Augustine's
Confessiones was a new kind of text, one that initiated a discourse that has
established the possibility and rules of formation for other texts that have
followed in its wake.

And yet, traditionally, or at least more often than not, Augustine's

Confessiones has been read-and usually taught-in one of two ways.


Either it is read as a narrative of a life in which the emphasis is placed on
the first nine retrospective books that culminate with the beginning of his
life as a Catholic and the death of his beloved mother-two events that

merge together in Augustine's narrative. Or it is read as a theological and/


or philosophical discourse: for example, there is Wittgenstein's famous
use of Augustine's story of language acquisition in the opening of his
Philosophical Investigations (?1-3), and there is also Ricoeur's meditation
on Augustine's three distensions of time in his Time and Narrative (531). Readers reading the Confessiones for its ideas downplay the selfnarrative, or simply ignore it, in order to cultivate its ideas-and certainly
much less dramatic and exciting parts.6 There are plenty of occurrences in
the Confessiones when Augustine pursues more "refined" ideas, such as the
question of unde malum (whence evil), his anti-Manichean polemics, his
theology of the interiority of God, not to mention, of course, books 11

through 13-the bane of autobiographical "purists" (such as Elizabeth


Bruss, Karl Weintraub, and in their own way Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida,

James Olney, and the early Philippe Lejeune). These final books of the
Confessiones go beyond Augustine's personal history, for there he treats
questions of time, creation, and biblical exegesis--questions that are difficult but still possible to consider as a narrative of the self. But those who
read the Confessiones for its flesh-and-blood story often ignore the text's
other part, those "problematic" books that philosophers and theologians
read only in order to illuminate their own more abstract pursuits.
Although the Confessiones is not often read as a whole, Augustine's
individual story, the story of his life, is the story of God training him to

attempt to interpret well the story beyond all stories, specifically to go


beyond and outside time, as Augustine discusses it in book 11, to an understanding of the narrative of creation in Genesis (Olney: 40). Or so

6 See, for example, Freccero, who connects these two parts well.

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 47

Olney believes, and he runs the risk of overly intellectualizing Au


(although Augustine's text certainly tends toward the cerebral). Bu
Augustine's training throughout the Confessiones more of an ed

into love? Indeed, he writes that it is "for the love of Your love I mak

confession" (amore amoris tui facio istuc, 11.1.1) and "so that I m
You, my God" (ut amem te, deus meus, 2.1.1).7 Augustine ascends
God's love, an ascent that does not come to a halt after his ritual

in the Catholic faith but, rather, one that is ongoing and conti
an ascent, however, that cannot begin without a descent into the
witness in the Confessiones, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out
of God characterized not by a neat intellectual progression towa
templative purity [as it is found in the Platonic tradition] but by
sive sense of longing, incompleteness, and passivity" (71). Augus
imagery is shaped by pagan eros and a human craving for God as
ticulates a shedding of worldly love (cupiditas) for a heavenly love
(see Arendt: 38), a shedding that is also "an ascent that strips aw
leaves behind the merely human in love" (Nussbaum: 61).9 This

long way in helping to explain the seeming incommensurability of th


parts" of the Confessiones: after book 9, Augustine no longer speaks
world but gradually shifts to scriptural commentary, the heavenly la

of God's love directed toward the earthly. For this reason, I believ

is a unity of interpretation in Augustine, at least a tentative unity, th

and perhaps connects his various scriptural intertexts with the i


tation of his life, which is at least demonstrated in the Augustini
of the Confessiones: I say "Augustinian unity" because, although
"halves" of the text are fragments and incomplete in and of them
he himself wrote the text to be read of a piece.10

Even if it is not his most original work, it is easy to forget j


original the Confessiones is, and it undoubtedly occupies a singul
in literary history. Still, Augustine was intimately aware of sever
conversion narratives in which he embeds his own, specifically
his friends and acquaintances whose stories he recalls in those c

immediately preceding his own conversion (Simplicianus, Am

7 I follow the usual convention when quoting from Augustine's Confessiones of citing
number followed by chapter and paragraph number (e.g., 8.12.29); all citations are fro
sions, vol. 1, Introduction and Text (1992); I consult English translations from two mode
(1961, 1991a), although I accept responsibility for all translations from the Confessiones.
8 Despite his conversion and obvious commitment to the Church and to living the Chr
Augustine begs God-after his baptism-not to give up on the transformation that ha
begun in him but, rather, to "perfect my imperfections" (consumma imperfecta mea, 10
9 We see this most clearly in Augustine's description of the vision of perfection he sh

his mother in Ostia.

10 On this thorny issue, see the extensive bibliography in Stock: 301-302 n. 1.

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48 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Vindicianus, Alypius, Nebridius, Ponticianus). Potential precursors to


Augustine's Confessiones are not hard to determine, including the disparate, casual self-reflections of Stoics such as Seneca, Epictetus, and especially Cicero or the self-revealing declamations of such early Christian
apologists as Justin Martyr and Tertullian. As already suggested, Neoplatonic prayer, a form of speculative prayer in search of wisdom and truth

that is directed to an unknown God lying far above the human mind, also

exerts its influence on the text (see Brown 1967: 165-166). Moreover,
popular narratives of martyrs like Saints Perpetua and Antony, not to
mention non-Christians like Emperor Marcus Aurelius's reflections and

self-admonishments that later were given the title Meditations or Libanius


of Antioch's Bios e peri tes heautou tuches (suspiciously translated as "Autobiography," which Augustine may have read in translation), are other
examples of first-person accountings of one's life available at the time he
began the Confessiones. However, the epistolary writings of Saint Paul are
most often invoked as significant precedents to Augustine's text qua conversion narrative, even though the story we have of Paul's own conversion on the road to Damascus is found in Acts 9, 22, and 26, in which he

appears as a character in another's story." And one cannot overlook the


influence of confessional and penitential Psalms as providing models for
Augustine. It should not pass us by that all of these narratives (except
Libanius's) were composed in an entirely different, pre-Constantine sociopolitical context. But Augustine's Confessiones qua self-narrative simply
surpasses prior works to which it can be compared, and it eclipses all of
these in literary importance and influence.
Any text will in some measure repeat others, quote others, but the great

ones do so always with a difference. As Weintraub comments, Augustine's


Confessiones "stands out with such a prominence in proportion to everything proceeding it that it is difficult to resist the assertion it is here that

the true autobiographic [!] tradition of the Western world took off" (17).
It is the great urtext of western self-narratives, joined perhaps only by
Rousseau's Confessions. In any case, texts like Augustine's Confessiones
evoke the image of a narrative much like Gordius's massive, disjointed,
twisted knot. Augustine himself acknowledges so much about his own text:

"Who can unravel this extremely twisted and tangled knot?" (Quis exaperit
itstam tortuosissimam et inplicatissimam nodositatem, 2.10.18); and "I have

11 Gal. 1:15-16 is also usually cited as evidence of Paul's radical conversion on the Damascus road,
but he barely mentions it ("but when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me
through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the
Gentiles"). Pauline precedence, of course, is not confined to Galatians-there are numerous selfreferences in all his letters (including such letters as I and II Timothy, which are regarded by modern scholars as "deutero-Pauline" but were not considered so by Augustine).

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 49

become a problem to myself' (laboro in me ipso, 10.16.25). In sho


Confessiones is not a simple story of a life lived.

When Augustine reviews his Confessiones in the Retractiones, h


vides some rather suggestive, if meager, commentary, and he calls
tion to a passage that I would like to examine more closely. Of al
ninety-three books reviewed, the Confessiones is the one that Aug
most fondly remembers. At least it is the one work about which A

ine demonstrates the most sentiment. As a seventy-three-year-old rem

bering and reexperiencing the memories of a forty-five-year-oldthe forty-five-year-old narrator of the Confessiones remembers
inscribes his life up to his thirty-third year-his narrative still h
power to move him some thirty years later. He writes,
The thirteen books of my Confessiones praise the just and good God

my evil and good acts, and lift up the understanding and affection of m
to Him. At least, as far as I am concerned, they had this effect on me wh
I was writing them and they continue to have it when I am reading them
What others think about them is a matter for them to decide. Yet, I kno

that they have given and continue to give pleasure to many of my bre
ren. The first ten books were written about myself; the last three ab
Holy Scripture, from the words: "In the beginning God created heave
and earth" as far as the Sabbath rest. (1968: 2.6.1)

That is to say, as far as Genesis 2:2. Even Augustine himself divi


book into two parts, which has led some critics, namely, Cource
to believe that he had initially begun the work as an extended com
tary on Genesis but became seduced by the subject of his self-nar
He does seem to have been theologically obsessed with Genesis, esp

its first chapters, for he returned to write extensive (and at times con

ing) commentaries on it in at least five different major works.12 Cour


view seems to have some weight inasmuch as many religious self-narra

since Augustine were requested by the author's confessors or som

authority figure; Augustine seems to have undertaken this task on his


initiative.

Augustine continues in the Retractiones by making two relatively m

criticisms of his Confessiones. One concerns a section in the thir

book, an exegetical account of the first chapter of Genesis. On this, he

12 In addition to books 11-13 of the Confessiones, Augustine wrote four other major co
taries on Genesis: On Genesis against the Manichees (388), On the Literal Interpretation of
(An Unfinished Book) (391), The Literal Meaning of Genesis (written over a period of fourt
from 401 to 415), and The City of God (begun in 413 and finished in 427). The unfinish
Interpretation and his commentary in the Confessiones are mostly concerned with Genesi
interestingly, compare the crucial differences in Augustine's early interpretation of the
in the year 388 with the one offered about two decades later in City of God.

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50 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

the discussion of the "firmament" "between the higher spiritual waters


and the lower corporeal waters" was done "without sufficient deliberation" and that such a subject is "exceedingly obscure." Much more interesting for the purposes of this article is what he says about his confessions
of misery at the death of a friend:
In the fourth book, after I confessed the misery of my soul at the time of
the death of a friend, saying that in some manner our soul had been made

one from two, I say: "And therefore perhaps I was afraid to die lest the
one whom I had loved so well would be wholly dead." This seems to me,
as it were, a trifling pronouncement rather than a serious confession, although this absurdity may be moderated to some extent by the word
perhaps which I added. (1968: 2.6.2)

This is quite a remarkable statement about a seemingly unremarkable


event in the Confessiones. The passage to which Augustine refers occurs
in book 4.6, as he approaches the nadir of his descent into sin as a Manichee adherent. What he writes in the Retractiones about this passage is
really quite trivial, almost as much of a "trifling pronouncement" as he
accuses himself of making in the Confessiones. The question needs to be
asked: what did Augustine fear about death that led him to this confessional passage? It seems that Augustine is afraid that if he should die, then

the memory of his friend-a friend whom he considered his second self
(alter eram, a phrase he uses to describe his relationship with his mother)
and a friend with whom he shared one soul (animam in duobus corporibus)-would die with him, for if his memory dies, then everything it contains will no longer exist. In other words, in his memory, the people of
his life continue to have life. This is quite important in terms of what

Augustine has to say about memory and about his equation between

memory and the soul, particularly about the epistemological claims he


makes throughout the Confessiones. But it is also very important in light
of what he does not say, about what he has passed over in silence, about
what and whom he mentions in mere passing.
Augustine devotes nine chapters, the greater part of book 4, to the
feelings he experienced surrounding the death of his unnamed friend as

well as to his reflections on death as a mature man and Catholic convert.

As he tells it, his friend was baptized a Catholic while deliriously ill, although he was, until then, a Manichee. Augustine, himself a Manichee,
teased him about his conversion when he recovered; but his friend was

hurt and astonished that Augustine would chide him for it. His friend
would die soon after. Upon his friend's death, Augustine writes, "I had
become a great puzzle to myself' (factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio,
4.4.9; cf. 10.33.50). Everything about him became a source of misery as

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 51

"grief darkened my heart, and wherever I looked I saw only death"


These feelings extended to his home and country, which remind
so much of his loss. In fact, Augustine came to hate all the places t
two friends had enjoyed together. He painfully and movingly lame
loss of his friend, and he writes, "I carried my bruised and bleedi
when it was tired of carrying me, but I found no place to set it do
rest]" (4.7.12). And yet he shrank from death, "perhaps" (fortasse) for

that if he should die, then the "one whom I had loved so well wo
wholly dead" (4.6.11). All of a sudden, perhaps for the first time

life, the young Augustine found himself forced to confront mortality

its "law" (modus), as well as the "law" of immortality for the soul

4.11).

I cannot go into detail here about what conclusions he reached about


death and mortality. Of more pressing concern, however, is Augustine's
examination of the power and nature of memory in book 10. As the reader

follows Augustine's meditations, it soon becomes clear that he equates


memory with the soul and the soul with one's real, if not always true, self.

Augustine tells us that who we are, at least how we know that we exist, is
by our memory. How, then, are we able to understand, rather, discover,
our true selves? It is to be discovered in those images that are retrieved
from memory.
James Olney's recent book Memory and Narrative demonstrates well
that Augustine's Confessiones has at least two different models for understanding memory: a temporal one and a spatial one. First, he observes,
the Augustinian temporal model of memory is much like a weaver weaving at a loom. Weaving, Olney claims, has become a characteristic metaphor for the operation of memory and has a long history in the tradition
of self-narratives since Augustine. In this model, the weaver's shuttle and
loom constantly produce new patterns, forms, and designs, and Augustine weaves into his self-narrative memories that are themselves in process and taking on new forms. If the operation of memory is one of process, then "it will bring forth ever different memorial productions and an

ever newly shaped self' (Olney: 20-21). Second, the spatial model suggests that memory is something fixed and static. According to Olney, it is

a site where the archaeologist of memories can dig down through layer
after layer of deposits to recover what one seeks. And when one finds the
memories one is looking for, they will be as they were when deposited,
unchanged except as they may have suffered from the decaying effects of

time (Olney: 19).


But it seems to me that Augustine's spatial metaphors of memory
should not be read as an "archaeological" dig. For one, such an image is
simply too modern; for another, Augustine just does not see memory as

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52 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

scraping away layers of dirt from obscure artifacts waiting to be discovered. This image is more Freudian than Augustinian. Rather, Augustine's
spatial metaphors are far from any such "archaeological" dig. Indeed,
Augustine refers to memory by using a whole variety of phrases: "storehouse," "great storehouse," "great treasury," "great field," "great treasure
house," "spacious palace," "vast cloisters," "vast capacity," "vast cache,"
"faculty of the soul," "wonderful system of compartments," and, finally
it contains everything "except what I have forgotten." Most important for

Augustine, it is in memory that "I meet myself and I remember myself


(10.8.14)-indeed, as Henry Chadwick observes, for Augustine, "the identity and continuity of the self is seen as rooted in memory" (70).
Augustine's images of memory in the Confessiones are more akin to
what it is like to enter a vast but cluttered museum of the soul, one that

has a somewhat disorganized conceptual space. Such a "great storehouse"


possesses things both interesting and not interesting, as well as things he
did not imagine were there-except, of course, what he has forgotten.
Nevertheless, the foundation of Augustine's Confessiones is memory, in its
experiential capacity as well as in its ontological import for Augustine. And

although memory is very much a part of who we are as mortal beings,


perhaps the most significant quality we possess, Augustine says he cannot understand all that he is, for "the mind is too narrow to contain itsel
entirely" (10.8.15). Yet what he says he is investigating throughout the
Confessiones is "it is I myself that remember, I the mind" (ego sum, qui
memini, ego animus, 10.16.25). Indeed, it would be fairer to say that he
equates memory not so much with the mind but with the self-that is,
who we are in this life is our memory: "I do not understand the power of
my own memory, although without it I cannot even speak of myself'
(10.16.25).13 As both a constructing, weaving, figuring loom and a somewhat cluttered, monolithic museum, Augustine's memory (both its de13 This theme, that the mind and the memory are one and the same thing, is repeated in

Augustine's De Trinite: "As regards things past one means by memory that which makes it possible
for them to be recalled and thought over again; so as regards something present, which is what th
mind is to itself, one may talk without absurdity of memory as that by which the mind is available
to itself, ready to be understood by its thought about itself, and for both to be conjoined by its love
of itself' (1991c: 14.3.14). I cannot go into detail about the triadic relationship in which Augustine
places the mind with love and knowledge (1991c: 9.1.8), which he begins to address in Confessiones
13.11.12 (De Trinite was begun while Augustine was well into the Confessiones). For purposes of
this article, let it suffice to say that it is the self that is recollected in memory and by memory; the
self/mind encounters itself in the act of remembering itself but only, Augustine admits, "through
a glass darkly" (see Hartle: 268). Memory is incomplete, and he acknowledges that there are cer-

tain things he passes over in silence (see below). What provides a sense of completeness for

Augustine's narrative, or narrative of memory, is God, specifically God's providence, which he now
sees as working throughout the entirety of his life; at least one can be sure that those things overlooked by Augustine are seen by God.

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 53

velopment and present concerns) holds the assorted artifacts tha


struct, figure, and are woven into the narrative of the Confessione

It should not pass us by that one theological doctrine that has rema

consistent throughout Augustine's continual evolution as a theolo


the notion that the fallen human being is a being moving towar
deaths: a bodily death and a death of the soul. Bodily death in thi
tence is unavoidable, and it is a necessary part of the fallen human
tion; it is the foundational distinction that marks us off as creatur
death, however, may be avoided so long as one is predestined for r

tion and the remembrance of God. If one were to review one's life in the

rigorous manner of Augustine's Confessiones, then one may see not only
an organizing pattern but also an inherent logic to events, a discoverable
pattern somehow willed by a superior agent, namely, God. But here, in
the passage concerning the death of his unnamed friend, we see a third
possible death, which Augustine hopes to soft-pedal in his Retractiones.
Augustine expresses, if only in passing, a fear of a totalizing death in the
defeat of human memory. This is a human, even pagan, fear, an anxiety
of total oblivion, of absolute death.14 Freed of all memory or no longer
woven into a pattern of remembrances, one dies totally. Being without a
human memory to confirm an existence after physical death is no better,
and perhaps even worse, than never having been born.
What is for me the interesting critical, moral, and theological ques-

tion about his friend's death-why his friend remains unnamed-also


concerns his father's death, the first person who "dies" in Augustine's
narrative and who "dies," moreover, a whole book length before his un-

named friend. It would seem that his friend's death must have been a much

greater loss to him than even the loss of his own father, as Augustine devotes no more than a mere phrase to his father's death. But he does devote almost an entire book to lamenting his unnamed friend, and he does
the same for his mother at the end of book 9. However, he couches his
father's death at least in an interesting way. He writes of the time when he

had just finished reading Cicero's Hortensius (a book now lost), which he
says led to his first turning away from sin and began, in a way, his ascent

toward "the truth"; it would also set the stage for his conversion to the
Manichees. Augustine writes that he did not read the Hortensius "for a
sharpening of my tongue, which was what I was buying with my mother's

financial support now that I was nineteen years old and my father being
14 This ancient fear is best formulated in Euripides' The Trojan Women, specifically when Hecuba
cries out to her captors, "What shall the poet say, / what words will inscribe upon your monument?"

(lines 1188-1189). It is up to the poet to retrieve these women from succumbing to an absolute
death, to retrieve their lives and their stories for the sake of continuity in the memory of others

(see Condon).

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54 Journal of the American Academy of Religion


dead two years. I was not redeemed [refero] by the book's sharpening of
my tongue nor by its style, but I was persuaded by what it said" (3.4.7).
But Augustine immediately ruptures his narrative with a two-paragraph confession of God desire: "How I burned, My God, how I burned
with longing to fly back to you, away from all earthly things, and I did not

know what you were doing with me" (3.4.8), and so on. Jarring, unexpected, almost impulsively, this eruption of God desire severs the narrative flow into a countercurrent, away from his father and toward God the
Father. Augustine buries his earthly father, as it were, under a steady tor-

rent of (displaced?) passion for God. It is of note that Augustine concludes


this burst of God desire with a litany on the name of Jesus: "One thing
doused my blaze of enthusiasm-the name of Christ was not there [in the
book]. For, by your mercy, Lord, this name, this name of my savior, your

son, my infant heart had piously drunk in with my mother's milk and I
preserved the memory deeply inside. Whatever book was without this name,

no matter how learned or polished or true, could not entirely grip me"
(3.4.8, emphasis added). But his father, who has so far remained unnamed,
appears in Augustine's narrative as little more than an ill-formed silhouette of a character, almost forgotten by his son's otherworldly desire.
Now at this point one may be tempted to offer a psychological reading of this elision, that Augustine consummates his Oedipal conflict by
slaying his father in narratively erasing his death as well as his life. Indeed,

the only story he tells of his father is the time his father publicly teased
him as a teenager in a public bath when he either began to show the first
signs of pubescent hair or had an erection (Augustine is again vague on
details; see 2.3). One may even argue that his excessive lamentations for a
friend whom he unnames are an occurrence of a return of the repressed
feelings he had toward his father. Augustine does indeed only name his

father much later and again only in passing as he briefly mentions

Patricius's deathbed conversion in the midst of his much greater mournful passages devoted to his mother's memory. Several critics, as well as
Peter Brown, have underscored the attachment between Augustine and
his mother, especially her unmotherly love for him, which Augustine calls

illius carnale, "carnal affection" or, as one translator has it, "her too jealous love"; Augustine also says, with shrewd alliteration, that she doted on
him "much more fondly than most mothers" (5.8.15). Certainly Augustine loved his mother more than his father, and no doubt Augustine was
a kind of "momma's boy." In a word, there is plenty of material here for
a psychoanalytic reading of the Confessiones.
But such a reading, I believe, in the end would only raise more questions than it would answer, for it would lead to, but explain away, rhetorical and ethical considerations regarding those unnamed by August-

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 55

ine. For the fact that he does not name the friend he laments so much

makes little difference, psychologically speaking. There are other


some perhaps even closer to him than his school friend and others
close, whom he does not name. For instance, he does not name t

peror to whom he offers a panegyric that helps him to win an ap

ment in Milan, and he does not name the proconsul of Cartha

bestows on him the laurels for winning a rhetoric contest. The abs
these names may be understandable, but more vexing is his unn
brother, who suddenly appears at their mother's deathbed (9.11.2
he never mentions his sister at all (see Chadwick: 58). Nor does he
the name of the mother of his son, to whom he clearly was dev

deeply grieved her forced departure from him after fifteen years tog

and he believed her vow that she (who was already a Catholic befor
would keep her promise that upon her return home in Africa she
live the remainder of her life in devout chastity. He mentions h
mother's name only once, and Monica is certainly a much more
tant person to him than anyone else in the Confessiones. And, ind
names his father twice, which is twice as often as he names Moni

Even more intriguing is the list of people he names repeatedly


plicianus, Ambrose, Nebridius, and Alypius. All these men were
came devout Catholics; each man either deeply influenced Augus

own conversion (Simplicianus, named seven times; Ambrose,

times) or was a close friend who converted before him (Nebridius

fourteen times) or an even closer friend who converted with him (Aly

twenty-two times).'" It would seem that to be "nameworthy" woul


to be not only a committed Catholic but a powerful and influenti
Alypius would become a bishop at Thagaste, where Augustine wa
and raised; Simplicianus succeeded Ambrose as bishop at Milan; Am
of course, would be canonized as a doctor of the Church. Even Ne

who died soon after Augustine's conversion but was by then a


catholicus (9.3.6), had such memorable arguments against the Ma

that Augustine would later make use of them for his own polemic
ings (see 7.2; given the success of his colleagues, one has to wonder
Nebridius's career would have taken him had his life not been cut
Is it not then interesting that his father only merits his name jus
Augustine informs us of Patricius's deathbed conversion (9.9.19,
And perhaps this is why we are never told the name of his friend

15 Augustine's son Adeodatus was baptized with him as well but is only named twice
the Manichee leader who so deeply disappointed Augustine such that he would grow dis
with the Manichees, is named six times. However, Faustus, too, is instrumental in August
tual conversion to Catholicism, though only in a negative sense.

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56 Journal of the American Academy of Religion


pared with his other named friends, this unnamed one's career in the Latin

Church was not very instrumental at all, and he was even less involved
with Augustine's own conversion to Catholicism.
But Monica's importance in the Confessiones cannot go unnoticed. So
far, she appears to be an exception to my argument because she is named
once only as Augustine laments her death and prays for her sins (9.13.37).
But Augustine gives her the strongest voice by "quoting" his mother more
than any other individual. Her voice is the strongest in the Confessiones
besides Augustine's and the disparate voices of the Psalms, Paul, the Gospels, and Virgil. Indeed, she is probably the one person most responsible for his conversion to Catholicism despite the divine inevitability
Augustine's rhetoric lends to it. But by giving her and others a voice, he
is able to break up a narrative that would otherwise be perfectly flat and
two dimensional. Monica is probably the most fleshed-out character in
his self-narrative.

Moreover, Augustine fictionalizes his Confessiones each time he lends


his voice to others, which is not often but often enough-up to and including the most powerful voice he hears, the child's voice in the garden
that precipitates his conversion.16 This voice, this genderless child's voice,
is, like the others, a metonymic and ventriloquized voice, a quoted voice
that could not be more displaced from the actual events that are narrated.
This voice of tolle lege has become freed of any flesh-and-blood speaker
and is now fixed forever in Augustine's narrative, rupturing his life into
two halves forever, although this moment has long been in gestation.
So how does Augustine respond to those other voices that he lends
his own voice to much like a ventriloquist would, not to mention the
devotional interruptions into his self-narrative and the maddening silences

apposite to the unnamed? There is one event-better, there is one sunaround which all things revolve in the Confessiones, and that is his conversion. Without the gravitational pull of that singular event, his selfnarrative would not hang together at all. This is not to reduce all meaning
and significance of his narrative to that of a conversion narrative; this is
not to collapse the orbiting masses into an all-embracing and greedy sun.
On the contrary, it is an assertion of the key relation that all the otherwise

16 The child whose voice he hears, chanting or singing, "take it and read, take it and read" (tolle
lege, tolle lege, 8.12.29)-this disembodied, nameless voice that compels him to pick up the text of
Paul's Letters and read the meaning of a random passage that would inspirit his dark night and
begin forever his life as a Catholic-he never sees, much less does he embody that floating voice. It
should not surprise us that he does not even tell us if it was a girl's voice or a boy's voice. The repetitive chant of tolle lege, tolle lege sounds almost as if the child were pouting about having to read
a school book, just like Augustine himself complained when he was a child forced by threat of
punishment to study when he would rather have played with his friends (cf. 1.9.15).

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 57

disparate episodic events have with one another despite being mer

strung together.17
But if this is so, what are we to make, then, of those unnamed, defa

friends of Augustine that I find myself returning to over and agai


denaming them, does he not, for the modern reader, negate their
tence? This makes me wonder what, if anything, we modern read
Augustine should make of Levinas's statement, "Perhaps the name
persons whose saying signifies a face-proper names, in the middle
these common names and commonplaces--can resist the dissolution

meaning and help us to speak" (4). Levinas persuasively argues t

person's name has as strong a value as confronting fully the face o


other, that names have power, a certain power to resist the dissolut
meaning. Are not our proper names intimately bound up with who
think we are, even at such a fundamental level that one's name pe
saturates the individual's personal identity? Is it possible to imagine
self nameless? Freud remarks that a person's name is a principal co

nent in one's person, "perhaps a piece of his soul" (139). It is ha

believe that Augustine simply forgot their names, or that they hav
ten lost in the "vast cloisters" (aula ingenti) of his memory, given
amazing demonstrations of his capacity to quote verbatim from tex
memorized years, sometimes decades, earlier. Rather, they are a v

of the weaving of his memory or, in this case, his willful forgetting, a
so forgetting, Augustine refuses to give them a face. Scratched out

editorial ministrations of Augustine, they have lost much, for the

ern reader of the Confessiones, to his rhetoric. By referring to them w

third-person abstractions, he seems to abstract from them their h


ity. More accurately, and more violently, he defaces them. It is up t

reader to fill in the blanks, as it were, just as Wills feels compelled to n

Augustine's unnamed concubine "Una," the Latin word for "woman,

his dead friend "Amicus" in order "to avoid periphrases" (1999

Why does Augustine do this? Why does he not name certain com
ions while frequently repeating the names of a chosen few? What

17 But this speaks ill for modern, secular self-narratives since the Enlightenment (especial
Rousseau) which generally lack this Augustinian unity to bind together their unavoidably e
events. Nowadays, it would seem, the only thing capable of unifying a life is a temporally
narrative line, even if it is as tenuous a one as Nietzsche's chronological ordering of the
reviews in Ecce Homo. The result is an often exhausting and very flat narrative (and too man
today "written" by celebrities). This is not to fault all modern self-narratives, and there ar
few that are more beautiful and at least as critically interesting as Augustine's Confessio
most important modern adaptation to try to capture the reader's interest is to fictional
life, which is exactly what some of the best modern narrators of self have done, such as
Dickens, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras
Proust, and Gertrude Stein.

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58 Journal of the American Academy of Religion


matter that Augustine, whose fame for friendship has warranted booklength commentaries,18 judges that certain names of friends will enter his

self-narrative and not the names of others? Courcelle offers some sugges-

tions as to why, but he does not pursue the ethical consequences of

Augustine's rhetoric. He only concedes this much: (1)Augustine does not


name because he deems it "unnecessary" (inutile); (2) sometimes a name
is not given due to "discretion," at least regarding his fianc6e and concubines; and (3) at other times it may be simply inexplicable, as with the
renowned, wise doctor who dissuades Augustine of his interest in astrology (4.3.4). But I find Courcelle's gloss that Augustine must have
judged that his dead friend's name was simply without interest to his
readers and to posterity simply unsatisfying and inadequate. In everyday practice, at least in modernity, the withholding of a name is often a
tool of subtle indignation or even an undisguised sign of contempt for
the other. There is no surer way to offend than to forget or pretend to
forget a person's name. Doing so suggests more than simply that we find
their names to be of little value-it also means that the persons themselves are deemed to be of little significance to us. I do not wish to suggest that Augustine felt intentional malice toward these companionsit is clear that he loved them. But one wonders what he was thinking
given his rhetorical mastery and care. Recall that even when he reviews
the Confessiones in the Retractiones, he does not bother to name his dead
friend again; rather, he seems more bothered by what he sees to be potentially misguided rhetoric or even perhaps by how much feeling he
expresses for this friend. Perhaps in a brief allusion to these oversights,
he only has this much to say about them as he nears the close of his selfnarrative: "I pass over many things, since I must make haste. Accept my
confessions and thanksgivings, my God, for the innumerable things
which still remain in silence" (9.8.17). Despite this petition, Augustine
promises that he will not omit a word "my soul can bring to birth" (mihi
anima parturit) as he begins his eulogy of Monica.

By defacing his companions Augustine underscores Hermogenes'


initial position regarding the language of names in Plato's Cratylus, that
(proper) names are purely arbitrary. For Hermogenes, who does not go
so far as Derrida's free play of signifiers but bears uncanny affinities with

the later Wittgenstein, names are not so much natural as they are conventional, a social construct: "When we give names to our domestic slaves,
the new ones are as correct as the old. No name belongs to a particular
thing by nature, but only because of the rules and usage of those who es-

18 See, for example, Arendt; Burt; McNamara.

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 59


tablish the usage and call it by that name" (Plato 1998: 385d).19 But if

are not the things they name, associated arbitrarily to the "thing
signify, personal names do, at least for us moderns, carry emotio
lences and have suggestive power (think of the names "Manson," "
"Hitler"). And mere names, to be sure, have the power to memor
tombstones that proclaim only a name and date, the listed names
Vietnam War Memorial and on the patches of the AIDS quilt.
Surely a personal name is not vital-its absence is not fatal: it is
a person's substance or of her or his soul. But by unnaming them
tine swallows his companions whole, leaving little trace of them e

few anecdotes that reveal more about him than about his defaced inti-

mates. Does not a person's name live with and by her or him because a
name itself has the power to confer a separate identity and a separate exis-

tence? If a personal name does no more than attempt to mark the individuality of a person, it still not only distinguishes a person's existence
from others' but acknowledges that a life is, or was, lived. And yet, is it
not the case that taking someone's name away is a calculated, rhetorical
act of disciplinary punishment? If, as Nietzsche says, "the lordly right of
giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the
origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers" (26), then power is wielded by those who can name, by those who
wield language, over those who cannot, or no longer can, wield it. What
Augustine perhaps willfully forgets in the "vast cloisters" of his memory
is the knowledge of the tragic poet, that names can be agents of personal
immortality and can give the dead a continuing role and presence. This
sentiment is echoed in Ecclesiasticus:

There are some of them who have left a name,

So that men declare their praise;


And there are some who have no memorial,
And have perished as though they had not lived,
And have become as though they had not been,
With their children after them. (44:8-9)

19 Hermogenes is opposing what he sees to be Cratylus's view, that there is a "natural correct-

ness" of a name for each thing, "one that belongs to it by nature" (Plato 1998: 383a). In his De
doctrina Christiana Augustine follows Socrates' lead and develops a theory of signs that incorporates both the natural and the conventional (although the purported aim of this text is to teach the
reader how to read Scripture in order to "discover" [proper] meaning as well as how to teach what

one has learned). Augustine does not touch on personal names as such-if he did, he would perhaps have to address them as an entirely different type of conventional sign from those he distinguishes (literal, figurative, unknown, and ambiguous) or perhaps as a synthesis of conventional
and natural signs.

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60 Journal of the American Academy of Religion


With one hand, Augustine denames; with the other, he punctuates his
self-narrative with powerful figures of the Latin Church. Names, especially

personal names, secure otherness while guaranteeing a certain order that


is free of confusion; names distinguish the otherwise indistinguishable. It
would seem that the imbalance between those unnamed and minimally
named converts and those comparatively overnamed converts is due to
Augustine's desire to align his narrative (and his own name) with esteemed
Catholics. By repeating their names he is attempting to place himself in a
certain class in which he wishes himself to be regarded by his Catholic
brethren.20 The conversion experiences of his unnamed friend and of his
father, for example, are weaker conversion experiences compared with
Augustine's own extended dramatic struggle. To be sure, his conversion

is equally (if not more) dramatic as those of Simplicianus, Ambrose,

Alypius, Nebridius, Antony, and Perpetua, the conversions of whom he


carefully narrates immediately before recounting his own. In this way,
Augustine at once distances his own conversion experience from less inspiring stories while aligning himself with certain distinguished others. It
is as if, at this relatively early stage in his career, he borrows their light in
order to ensure his own distinctiveness.21

It is difficult for me not to imagine that these defaced friends, these


two-dimensional beings and faceless exiles from the named, exist in some
state of narrative limbo. They do not suffer yet the totalizing defeat of
forgetfulness but only the humiliation of a willful forgetting. As August-

ine narratively produces his own life, the lives of these Augustinian Unnamed become indistinct, even vacuous, through his linguistic and rhe20 Keep in mind that the implied readers of Augustine's self-narrative (which is otherwise addressed
to God) are his fellow believers, his fraternus animus or "true brothers" (and not extraneous [strangers] or filiorum alienorum [alien foes]). Although at first he declares his audience to be God's mercy
(misericordia tua) and, significantly, non homo (1.6.7), he will acknowledge later, beginning in book
2 and culminating in book 10, that he is also addressing those of the "brotherly mind," who love him
whether they see good or evil in him: "I make my confession to you so that I may be heard by people"
(10.3.3) and "before many witnesses" (10.1.1). It is to this group that he "shall reveal what I am" or
will discover himself (indicabo me talibus): "[Although] I cannot demonstrate what I confess is true,
but those whose ears are opened to me by love [caritas] believe me" (10.3.3; see Asher for an insightful analysis of Augustine's rhetoric regarding his intended audience).
21 Wills comments that Augustine's and Ambrose's was at first a very cool relationship, one that
would remain cool for several years. Wills writes, and quite tellingly, "Augustine never corresponded
with Ambrose after leaving Milan, never dedicated a work to him, and for a long time did not mention his name in his own writings. As O'Donnell writes to me, Augustine 'only begins to use Ambrose
in later life when he needs him'" (1999b: 42, emphasis added); he adds parenthetically that Ambrose

appears only "as a fellow bishop whose example he can cite" (1999b: 42). It would appear that
Ambrose did not play a leading role in Augustine's conversion (1999b: 44-45). Rather, it was only
in the Confessiones that "even Ambrose" began "to look better in Augustine's eyes, as the providential occasion for his acceptance of grace" (1996: 94). Finally, Wills notes that as Augustine grew
older, beginning with the Confessiones and climaxing with his anti-Pelagian writings, "it is signifi-

cant that Augustine now quotes Ambrose with increasing frequency and devotion" (1999b: 140).

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Condon: The Unnamed and the Defaced 61

torical manipulations. And they will continue to remain mere outl


some defaced and shapeless human form to the extent that Augu
produces them as no more than rhetorical tools. Compared with
major players in Augustine's conversion, these censored others, the

quiet, intimate others of Augustine, as Levinas testifies, frustrate our


ings of the Confessiones and its testimony of love because their own v

were stripped from them the moment Augustine unnamed them.


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