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    Augustine's Confessions: A Biography
    Augustine's Confessions: A Biography
    Augustine's Confessions: A Biography
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    Augustine's Confessions: A Biography

    By Garry Wills

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    From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine’s Confessions

    In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills's biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions.

    Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics.

    With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateFeb 7, 2011
    ISBN9781400838028
    Augustine's Confessions: A Biography
    Author

    Garry Wills

    Garry Wills is the author of 21 books, including the bestseller Lincoln at Gettysburg (winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), John Wayne's America, Certain Trumpets, Under God, and Necessary Evil. A frequent contributor to many national publications, including the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books, he is also an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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      Augustine's Confessions - Garry Wills

      Augustine's Confessions

      LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

      Augustine’s Confessions

      LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

      The Jefferson Bible, Peter Manseau

      The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa L. Ochs

      Josephus’s The Jewish War, Martin Goodman

      The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes

      The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Carlos Eire

      The Book of Exodus, Joel S. Baden

      The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal

      The Talmud, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

      The Koran in English, Bruce B. Lawrence

      The Lotus Sūtra, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

      John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon

      C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, George M. Marsden

      The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis

      The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, David Gordon White

      Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn

      The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs

      The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore

      The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins

      The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel

      The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr

      The I Ching, Richard J. Smith

      The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

      Augustine’s Confessions, Garry Wills

      Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty

      Augustine’s Confessions

      A BIOGRAPHY

      Garry Wills

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Princeton and Oxford

      Copyright © 2011 by Garry Wills

      Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

      Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

      press.princeton.edu

      All Rights Reserved

      Cover illustration by Daren Magee

      Cover design by Matt Avery / Monograph

      eISBN 9781400838028 (ebook)

      Version 2.0

      First paperback printing, 2021

      Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-21764-2

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

      Wills, Garry, 1934–

      Augustine’s Confessions : a biography / Garry Wills.

      p. cm. — (Lives of great religious books)

      Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

      ISBN 978-0-691-14357-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessiones. 2. Christian saints—Algeria—Hippo (Extinct city)—Biography—History and criticism. I. Title.

      BR65.A62W55 2011

      270.2092—dc22 2010016452

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      CONTENTS

      A Note on the Translation vii

      CHAPTER 1 The Book’s Birth 1

      CHAPTER 2 The Book’s Genre 17

      CHAPTER 3 The Book’s African Days 26

      CHAPTER 4 The Book’s Ambrose 41

      CHAPTER 5 The Book’s Conversion 58

      CHAPTER 6 The Book’s Baptismal Days 78

      CHAPTER 7 The Book’s Hinge 98

      CHAPTER 8 The Book’s Culmination 112

      CHAPTER 9 The Book’s Afterlife: Early Reception, Later Neglect 133

      NOTES149

      BASIC READINGS155

      INDEX157

      A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

      All translations are by the author. Those from the Bible are given according to Augustine’s Latin citations of it.

      References to O’Donnell are to volume and page of James J. O’Donnell, Augustine "Confessions," 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1992).

      LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

      Augustine’s Confessions

      The Book’s Birth

      CHAPTER 1

      To write the biography of Confessions, we have to start in the delivery room—how and when was it born? We shall see that the when can partly be determined by the how. How did Augustine write Confessions? Well, in the strict sense, he didn’t—didn’t set words down on papyrus or parchment. Augustine has been painted, by artists as great as Botticelli, Carpaccio, and Benozzo Gozzoli, seated at a desk and writing. He did not do that. Oh, he undoubtedly wrote things like notes to himself, or lists of items, or instructions to individual brothers in his monastic community. But the books, sermons, and letters that have come down to us were all dictated to scribes. Even a book that feels as intimate as Confessions was spoken to several of the many scribes Augustine kept busy. That was the normal practice in antiquity. Even in prison, Saint Paul had a scribe on hand. Even when living as a hermit, Saint Jerome had teams of scribes. The population of ancient scribes was a vast one.

      Writing was a complex and clumsy process. That was especially true in the classical period, when papyrus scrolls were used. One needed at least three hands to unroll the scroll on the left, to roll it up on the right, and to write a series of columns in the intermediate spaces. Besides, even the mixing of the ink and trimming of the reed pens (quills arrived in the Middle Ages) had to be done while the scroll was held open at the spot reached by the scribe. Since the rolls were written on one side only, they could run to great lengths, as much as thirty feet long.

      Obviously, the author could not be doing all this and composing in his mind. The only efficient way to function was for the author to dictate to a shorthand writer (tachygrapher), who took the text down on tablets of wax or wood. Then this first scribe, with the help of assistants, would write the text on a scroll. Other scribes would copy this text on other scrolls—the only way to duplicate a text in the age before printing presses. A man would read slowly from the master text while a number of scribes created their own copies. There was no need for these secondary scribes to decipher the first man’s shorthand signs. After he made the master copy, multiple facsimiles were needed. Paul sent copies of the same letter to several places—to the churches of Galatia for instance. He sent his Epistle to the Romans to Jerusalem as well as to Rome. He also had to keep copies by him, for his own reference and to supply those asking for clarification of the record.

      Writings, created with such labor, could be lost in transit where couriers were careless or in peril—Augustine’s first letter sent to Jerome did not reach him, causing endless later trouble. Books could easily disappear if there were not enough copies made or preserved. Even though Augustine kept his own archives in good order, his very first book is irretrievably lost. Teams of scribes had to be kept at work all the time to bring a book into existence and keep it there. The Late Antique church historian Eusebius tells us that the church father Origen had seven tachygraphers and a horde of other scribes and calligraphers to replicate what the shorthand experts took down and wrote out (History of the Church 6.23).

      The making of books was an expensive as well as laborious and time-consuming process. One of the principal costs of Augustine’s episcopal establishment was the production of his many books. He wrote five million words that have come down to us, most of them after he became the bishop of Hippo. Isidore of Seville famously said that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine must be a liar. In a recently discovered letter (Divjak 23-A), Augustine says that in less than three months he had dictated 6,000 lines of text—James O’Donnell suggests he made the count for payment to his scribes.

      Besides all the scribal payments, there was the costly material of which books were made. To form double-ply sheets from the papyrus plant was labor-intensive, from cutting to cross-laying to drying. Even more difficult was the skinning, stretching, scraping, and drying of sheep or calf or goat skin to make parchment. And copyists had to keep the sheet numbers in order if they wrote the text before the sheaves (quires) were bound into a codex. Augustine had to be serviced by what amounts to a literary industrial complex in order to produce the amazing number of his books.

      It may distance Augustine from us if we think we are not communing with him directly as he writes in solitude, just as we read in solitude. But this is the exact reverse of the ancients’ view. Theirs was an oral culture; they learned better and remembered better when they heard words sounded by a human voice. Plato makes Socrates say that spoken discourse pierces to the soul, while writing lies on the surface (Phaedrus 276b–d). Ancient readers did not normally read in solitude. As writing was a cumbrous process, reading was a clumsy one. People most often read aloud, even when they were alone. Augustine says that it puzzled people to see Ambrose reading silently (Confessions 6.3). Reading was difficult, since the letters were written without word-separation or punctuation (scripta continua). When Paul sent a letter to a gathering, an official lector read it aloud—most in the gathering were not able to make sense of the written row of letters. That is why the author of Revelation says, Happy whoever reads these words out, and happy those who hear him (1.3).

      So even written words were shot through with oral elements—the vocal phenomena of the author at one end of the process dictating and a reader at the other end voicing the words. The writing was almost like a musical score—a set of signs to be given acoustical reality in performance. For Augustine’s contemporaries, this bypassing of the merely written would make his words all the more vivid. Paul hints at such bypassing of the written when he says to the Corinthians,

      Am I renewing my introduction to you—do I, like others, really need (or don’t I) credentials presented to you or by you? Yourselves are my credentials, written on my heart—there all can find and read them. You are in fact a letter sent by Messiah for me to deliver, one not written in ink but in the Spirit of the living God, written not on stone tablets but on the fleshy tablets of the heart. (2 Cor. 3.1)

      There are other ways writing was made to serve oral delivery. In Ezekiel’s vision, a hand reaches down from heaven with a scroll in it. "Man, eat what is in front of you, eat this scroll, and then go and speak to the Israelites" (Ezek. 3.1). The prophet digests the divine message so he can speak it. Similarly, the prophet in Revelation (10.10–11) swallows the little scroll in the angel’s hand, and the angel tells him to go prophesy. So, paradoxically, the oral externals of Augustine’s performance convey more inwardness to his original audience than writing alone could do.

      The difficulty of reading in the ancient world had another impact on Confessions. The scripta continua, with no word divisions, no chapter-and-verse markings, made it hard to look up citations in a scroll or codex Since

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