Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
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
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1466069
Accessed: 11-10-2016 19:36 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
American Academy of Religion, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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.
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-
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
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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,"
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
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Many of the formal problems literary critics have with the Confe
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?
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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.
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
6 See, for example, Freccero, who connects these two parts well.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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
of God's love directed toward the earthly. For this reason, I believ
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
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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
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).
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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)
its first chapters, for he returned to write extensive (and at times con
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.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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)
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
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
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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
its "law" (modus), as well as the "law" of immortality for the soul
4.11).
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
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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'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.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
It should not pass us by that one theological doctrine that has rema
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-
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).
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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-
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
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-
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ine. For the fact that he does not name the friend he laments so much
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
fourteen times) or an even closer friend who converted with him (Aly
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.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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.
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).
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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
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
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.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
self-narrative and not the names of others? Courcelle offers some sugges-
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-
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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:
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.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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).
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Condon, Matthew G. "The Cost of Redemption in Conrad's Lord Jim." Lit1998 erature and Theology 12/2: 135-148.
Courcelle, Pierre Recherches sur les Confessiones de saint Augustin. Paris:
1968 Editions E. de Boccard.
Derrida, Jacques "Otobiographies." In The Ear of the Other. Otobiogra1985 phy, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions
with Jacques Derrida, 1-38. Ed. by Christie McDonald.
Trans. by Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Euripides "The Trojan Women." In Euripides III. Chicago: Uni1958 versity of Chicago Press.
Freccero, John "Autobiography and Narrative." In Reconstructing In1986 dividualism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Freud, Sigmund Totem and Taboo. Trans. by James Strachey. New York:
1950 W. W. Norton.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
1999a 6 May.
1999b Saint Augustine. New York: Penguin Books.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Philosophical Investigations. 3d ed. Trans. by G. E. M.
1958 Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 19:36:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms