Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body 9780226585789

Citation preview

once out of nature

once out of nature

Augustine on Time and the Body

andrea nightingale

the university of chicago press chicago and london

andrea nightingale is professor of classics and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (1995) and Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (2004). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-58575-8 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-58575-1 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. Once out of nature : Augustine on time and the body / Andrea Nightingale. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-58575-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-58575-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. 2. Human body—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Time—Religious aspects— Christianity. I. Title. BR65 .A9N54 2011 [BT740] 233'.5—dc22 2010040231 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

for mark with all my love

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. —William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

contents

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

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1.

Edenic and Resurrected Transhumans

23

2.

Scattered in Time

55

3.

The Unsituated Self

105

4.

Body and Book

132

5.

Unearthly Bodies

164

Epilogue: “Mortal Interindebtedness”

197

Appendix: Augustine on Paul’s Conception of the Flesh and the Body

211

References

219

Index

241

ix

acknowledgments

I

want to thank my beloved father, Douglas Wilson, who passed away as I was beginning to write this book. My father was one of nature’s gentlemen—a poetic soul and a lover of the earth. Honored among fish, birds, horses, and rivers, my father taught me the prose of nature and the poetry of words. My love for him is a “beginning without end.” I thank my brave and brilliant mother, Diana de Armas Wilson, for her abiding love and endless support. She read parts of this book from its earliest stages and offered invaluable ideas and comments. I also want to thank Fiona Theodoredis, sister of my heart, who offered wisdom beyond words. Thank you, Molly and Kai Theodoredis, for teaching me about the cosmos. I am grateful to my beloved sisters Antonia Wilson and Miranda Ravin, who have given me so much support during this project. I also owe a huge debt to Rachel Jacoff, who first introduced me to Augustine; she has generously read most of the manuscript and helped me think through my ideas. I give special thanks to Alexander Nehamas, who read the entire manuscript and sent me fourteen pages of comments and criticisms. Thank you, AN, for honoring me with your brilliance and generosity. I also want to thank Rush Rehm for bringing wisdom to my little world and justice to the world at large. I am grateful to Robert Harrison for his rich forest of words; his discourses—spoken and written—have inspired all my thinking. Many thanks to Charitini Douvaldzi, who has been a brilliant interlocutor and a great supporter of this book. And thank you, Michael Hendrickson, for offering so many powerful and outlandish ideas. Thanks also to Josh Landy, who generously read an early draft of the introduction; his outstanding work as a scholar and a team teacher has informed many of my ideas. I am abidingly grateful to Sepp Gumbrecht, whose dazzling discourses have helped me push my ideas into new directions. Kathryn Morgan has generously offered xi

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her superb expertise in this and all my projects. I am grateful to Peter Hawkins for his beautiful essays on all aspects of Christian thought and for teaching me about manna. Thanks also to the members of the Philosophical Reading Group for so many years of great conversations. As always, I owe a profound debt to my mentor and friend Tony Long, who has read and commented on almost all my writings. As a thinker and a teacher, Tony has no equal. I feel honored to have worked with so many great scholars and students at Stanford (special thanks to my students Nico Slate and David Marno, who read early drafts of several chapters of the book). Thanks, also, to my research assistant, James Kierstead, who checked every quotation in this book and caught many of my errors. I am very grateful to the anonymous readers, who offered invaluable comments and criticisms. And I am thankful to my editor, Alan Thomas, who has been a staunch supporter of this book. It has been a pleasure to work with such an adventurous and intelligent man. It goes without saying that all errors in this book are my own. Finally, I offer thanks to the Boulder Flatirons: hiking and climbing on their rocky slopes gave me my first ideas about the physics of presence.

abbreviations

Individual Works CatRud.

De catechizandis rudibus (Teaching the Unlearned)

CD

De civitate Dei (City of God)

CJul.

Contra Julianum (Against Julian)

Conf.

Confessiones (Confessions)

Cont.

De continentia (On Continence)

C2EpPel.

Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum (Against Two Epistles of the Pelagians)

DBC

De bono conjugali (The Goodness of Marriage)

DBV

De bono viduitatis ad Julianum (The Goodness of Widowhood)

DCG

De correptione et gratia (Rebuke and Grace)

DCM

De cura pro mortuis gerenda (Caring for the Dead)

DDC

De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine)

DeMor.

De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum (The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life)

DeMus.

De musica (On Music)

DNC

De nuptiis et concupiscentia (Marriage and Concupiscence)

DSV

De sancta virginitate (Holy Virginity)

DUC

De utilitate credendi (The Usefulness of Believing)

DUJ

De utilitate jejunii (The Usefulness of Fasting)

DVR

De vera religione (True Religion)

Ench.

Enchiridion ad Laurentium (Enchiridion)

EnPs.

Enarrationes in Psalmos (Expositions of the Psalms)

Ep.

Epistulae (Letters)

Genlitt.

De Genesi ad litteram (Literal Interpretation of Genesis)

xiii

xiv

abbreviations

IoEv.

In Ioannis Evangelium tractatus (On John’s Gospel)

OpImp.

Contra Julianum (opus imperfectum)

OpMon.

De opere monachorum (The Work of Monks)

Retr.

Retractiones (Retractions)

Sermo.

Sermones (Sermons)

SL

De spiritu et littera (The Spirit and the Letter)

Trin.

De Trinitate (Trinity)

Editions CCSL

Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout, 1954–)

CSEL

Corpus scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna, 1866–)

PL

Patrilogia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne

N.B.:

I use arabic numerals for all references to ancient texts. All the translations from the Greek and Latin are my own, unless otherwise noted.

introduction

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n “Tortures,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska speaks eloquently of the experience of a person whose body is subjected to severe pain. As she says at the end of the poem: Nothing has changed. Except the run of rivers, The shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers. The little soul roams among those landscapes, Disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, Evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.

Here, Szymborska portrays a prisoner whose psyche—“soul”—wanders beyond its temporal and spatial location. The soul roams among landscapes beyond the borders of the body: it goes to rivers, forests, shores, deserts, distant glaciers. “Evasive and stranger to itself,” it cannot coincide with itself. It cannot stay in the here and now—it has no self-presence. The body, on the other hand, “is and is and is / and has nowhere to go.” Szymborska refers to a tortured prisoner, whose body cannot leave the prison or be “changed” from the state of pain to comfort. But even a free person occupies a single location in a specific place at any given time: his or her body “is and is and is” because it dwells “here” in the (passing) “now.” The body cannot evade itself or venture beyond its own boundaries. It is the psyche or soul that is evasive and dispersed, scattered into different spaces and times.

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In this book, I examine Augustine’s conception of human embodiment. I use embodiment to capture something larger than the body. Augustine conceived of humans as “embodied souls” dwelling in time. The human psyche and body are “temporalized,” albeit in different ways. In my investigation of embodiment, I analyze the temporalities that govern the soul and the body: the “internal time-consciousness” of the soul and the time that passes on earth, aging and changing the body. To understand these temporalities, we must examine Augustine’s conception of the soul and the body. While Augustine retains Plato’s body-soul dualism in all his works, he identifies the human being as the “marriage” of a soul to one particular body (and divorce is not an option). Every soul is wedded to a specific body that ages and changes in the passing now on earth. The soul—which dwells in the mode of temporal “distention”—“stretches away” from bodily presence, but it is grounded in a body and will receive this same body back (with alterations) on resurrection day. In Augustine, then, there is no escape from the body, though there is an eventual escape from time.1 Philosophers and thinkers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have offered powerful criticisms of the metaphysics of presence and the body-soul dualism in Platonism and Christian theology. Many of these thinkers have written extensively on Augustine. Consider Heidegger’s “Augustine and Neoplatonism” (which makes up half of The Phenomenology of Religious Life), Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine, Derrida’s Circumfession, Lyotard’s The Confession of Augustine, and Ricoeur’s analyses of Augustine in Time and Narrative and Memory, History, and Forgetting. These theorists focus on two sets of issues central to Augustine: (1) language, textuality, and narrative and (2) memory, temporality, and the metaphysics of presence. Surprisingly, however, they have little to say about the body.2 Of course, in the last three decades, thinkers and scholars have done extensive work on the “body,” the “body and society,” and “constructions of the body” in antiquity and later periods. Many classicists and philosophers have analyzed Augustine’s body-soul dualism and his theories of time. In addition, historians have offered excellent discussions of his ascetic practices and his life as a bishop, preacher, and monk. I draw on these theo-

1. According to Averil Cameron (1991, 68): “The theme of the incarnation of Christ imposed the language of the body, and with it bodily symbolism, on Christian writing. All the central elements in orthodox Christianity—the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Trinity, the Eucharist— focus on the body as symbolic of higher truth.” 2. Derrida’s Circumfession (1991/1993) is an exception here.

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rists and scholars in my efforts to rethink Augustine’s conception of time and the body. In this book, I use an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy, sociology, literary theory, and social history. This book focuses primarily on Augustine’s discourses on earthly life, where humans dwell in an “unnatural” and “exilic” state. As Augustine argues, humans are “resident aliens” (peregrinati) on earth: exiled from Eden, and “deformed” by sin, they must toil on this earthly journey toward a final resting place in heaven. On earth, humans live in loss and longing, in helplessness and hope. Augustine meditates at length on this painful human condition. He voices elegiac lamentations over psychic dispersion and bodily deterioration. And he creates a language of longing for a unified self: “I will not turn away from You, my God, my mercy, until You gather all that I am from this dispersed and deformed state to reform and renew me in the eternal present.”3 For a secular scholar, Augustine’s discourses on human exile on earth and an “unearthly” afterlife in heaven read like fascinating (but misguided) fictions. What, we may ask, do his views on embodiment have to offer us in an age dominated by science and technology? Augustine himself roundly rejected the investigation of the operations of nature—scientists and “natural philosophers,” he claimed, commit the sin of curiositas.4 In addition, he argued that the “vitiated” seed of Adam infected humans with the “morbidity” of lust: all humans have a chronic disease whose primary symptom is the body’s disobedience to the mind. The natural world offers no cure for this ailment—indeed, it is part of the problem. In Augustine’s view, humans are extraterrestrials who have “fallen” on a land where they do not belong. For humans, earth is a place of unbelonging. It may seem that Augustine’s discourses do not speak to our own historical moment. But, in this sexually liberated age, are we any more comfortable with our bodies or our place in the natural world? Consider Stephen Hall’s Merchants of Immortality, which examines scientific attempts to prolong human life by cloning, stem-cell research, and the development of “longevity genes.” Consider also the modern response to our estrangement from the natural world: the technological alteration of the earth and the

3. Conf. 12.16.23, quoting Ps. 58:18: Non avertar, donec . . . colligas totum quod sum a dispersione et deformitate hac, et conformes atque confirmes in aeternum, “deus meus, misericordia mea.” Note that Augustine’s extensive use of the Psalms in all his texts incorporates poetry into his prose. 4. Conf. 10.35.57.

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human body. We need not accept Augustine’s Christian doctrines and his ontological theories to understand his sense of psychic fragmentation and physical disintegration. The modern rejection of religion does not do away with our anxiety over illness and death. And it does not alter our ambivalent relationship to our bodies and the earth. Not surprisingly, modern science deals directly with many of the key issues addressed by Augustine: anxiety, aging, disease, and death. In place of religious solutions to our existential and physical problems, modern medicine offers ways to prolong life and to alter (“enhance”) our bodies and minds. Indeed, a number of scientists have argued that technology will eventually make death “optional.” These scientists promise us a new mode of dwelling in an unearthly habitation. Some contemporary thinkers use the word transhuman to capture the notion of a conscious and embodied being who will not age (or even die).5 In principle, the transhuman transcends the earthly world. In practice, this technological transhumation would wreak havoc on the earth. While modern transhumans are meant to come into being through technology, Augustine offers two models of transhumans made by a divine rather than a human creator—Adam and Eve in Eden and the resurrected saints in heaven. Augustine’s transhumans are, in different ways, “out of nature.” Adam and Eve, though they live in the Garden of Eden, are not a part of the natural world: they have immortal bodies and little sense of time. And the resurrected saints at the end of time are, once and for all, out of nature. These Augustinian transhumans invite us to explore the boundaries of the human. In Augustine’s grand narrative, the transhumans are, as it were, bookends that begin and end the many volumes of human life on earth. Augustine develops his notion of human embodiment in relation to the “transhuman condition.”6 In Augustine’s thinking, both humans and transhumans are out of nature. But humans have a particular—and poignant—relation to the natural world. Though they are earthly and mortal beings, they do not fully belong on earth. As Augustine says of the Christian “traveler”: “The man who understands that he is a pilgrim (peregrinum) in this world dwells in a tent. The man who sees himself sighing for his native land understands that he lives in a foreign country. . . . Why do we dwell in the wilderness, in a desert? Because in this world we thirst in a place that has no water. But let us

5. See, e.g., Ettinger (1974/2005), More (1999), McKee (2000), and Young (2005). 6. Clearly, Augustine also examines human life in relation to the eternity of God. More on this in chapter 2.

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thirst so that we will one day be satiated.”7 Here, Augustine identifies earth and the food chain as an alien habitat offering no true nourishment. For humans, the earth is a desert (and a place to be deserted). Where, then, do we dwell? As Augustine claims, humans have mortal bodies that (for now) are part of nature and the food chain. But their minds invariably “distend” into the past and the future (through memory and expectation): they cannot dwell in the present. Though their bodies are (temporarily) “in” nature, humans are not “of” nature.

THE EARTHLY WORLD Augustine and his fellow Christians had ambivalent feelings about the earth. On the one hand, they rejected the view that it is divine. Indeed, they considered this a pagan and idolatrous position.8 In contrast to pagan temples, Christian churches and shrines were not treated as dwelling places for God. As Paul said in Acts 17:24: “The God who created the world and everything in it, being the Lord of Heaven and Earth, does not live in the shrines of men.” Of course, Christians developed the notion of the holy land and holy places in the fourth century CE, but they did not view the earth itself as sacred.9 First and foremost, they identified a place as holy if Christ was present there during his incarnation. In addition, they came to identify the bodies or relics of the martyrs as holy. Here, human matter marked the site of divine presence on earth. For the Christians, earth and its nonhuman inhabitants had no purchase on divinity. Although the Christians did not consider the earth to be holy or divine, they did believe that it was a beautiful creation of God. Indeed, Augustine offered a veritable ode to natural beauty in the City of God: 7. IoEv. 28.9: Ille enim est in tabernaculis, qui se esse in mundo intelligit peregrinum. Ille se intellegit peregrinantem, qui se videt patriae suspirantem. . . . Quid est in eremo? In deserto. Quare in deserto? Quia in isto mundo, ubi sititur in via inaquosa. Sed sitiamus, ut saturemur. 8. Eusebius (Proof of the Gospel 3.2.10, 4.12.4, 10.8.64) claimed that Jews and pagans had “holy places,” whereas the Christians had a spiritual, not a physical, “holy land” (though he bends this view in dealing with Constantine’s celebration of Palestine as the holy land). On Eusebius’s discussions of the holy land, see Groh (1985) and Walker (1990). Wilken (1992, 88–91) contests Walker’s (1990, 108–16) claim that Eusebius bowed to Constantine’s view under sufferance. 9. In the early middle fourth century (and especially when the cult of the martyrs developed later in the century), we see the emergence of the notion of the holy land and holy places in the Christian imaginary. For useful discussions of this historical development, see Groh (1985), MacCormack (1990b), Markus (1990, chap. 10), Walker (1990), Wilken (1992), Markus (1994a), and Harrison (2000, 140–42). See also Fox (1987, 253), who claims: “In pagan Greek the word ‘holy’ applied to places, not to people; before the mid-fourth century the Christians acknowledged people, not places, as ‘holy.’”

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See the manifold and varied beauty of heaven and earth and sea, the amazing quality of light, sun, moon, and stars, shady woods, the colors and smells of flowers, the many diverse birds who sing and display their colored plumage, the many kinds of animals of all sizes—and the smallest truly amaze us since we marvel even more at the tiny work of ants and bees than at the gigantic bodies of whales. See also the grand spectacle of the sea when it clothes itself with various colors as with garments—sometimes green, sometimes red, and sometimes blue.10

In spite of this sensual portrayal of the natural world, Augustine insisted that Christians should not take pleasure in its physical beauty. Rather, they should treat this beauty as a mere sign of God’s wisdom and omnipotence. Augustine believed that the cosmos is “orderly” and “harmonious” when viewed as a whole. But humans do not have this god’s-eye view: It would be ridiculous to condemn the limitations of beasts, trees, and other mortal things that lack intelligence, sense, or life. These defects are part of their nature, which is liable to decay and dissolution. But they have received their nature from God, who perfected the beauty of the lower parts of the universe, giving them alternation and succession over the passage of the seasons. And this is a beauty of its own kind. . . . We, for our part, can see no beauty in this pattern or take delight in it. This is because, as mortal beings, we inhabit a section of it and cannot observe the whole design.11

As mortal parts of a greater whole, humans cannot see God’s large and perfect design. How, then, should one treat the earth? Augustine says that one should not “enjoy” the natural world but “use” it as a means to worship God:12 “Praise what is created, and love the Creator. Do not long to dwell in the building, but dwell in the Builder.”13 One must give praise for the natural world as God’s creation but not settle down in it as a proper abode. The true dwelling for humans is elsewhere.

10. CD 22.24. See also Conf. 11.4.6 on the beauty of nature. As Harrison (2006, 103) points out, Augustine frequently refers to the beauty of the cosmos as a way to attack the Manichaeans, who considered the created world an evil and corrupt substance. 11. CD 12.4. See also Sermo. 117.5: “Wherever you turn to see it, you will see parts.” 12. See esp. DDC bk. 1. 13. EnPs. 141.15: Lauda tu fabricam, et ama fabricatorem; et noli amare habitare in fabrica, sed habita in fabricatore.

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But Augustine goes further. In the Confessions, he rejects the study of nature and condemns his own lapses into nature watching: “There are many respects, in tiny and contemptible details, where our curiosity is provoked every day. . . . I no longer watch a dog chasing a rabbit at the circus. But, if by chance I come across a hunt going on in the countryside, it distracts me from thinking out some weighty matter. The hunt sparks my interest in the sport—not enough to lead me to change the direction of my horse, but it still shifts the inclination of my heart.” He calls this sinful act curiositas, and he turns to God for the cure: “If You did not prove to me my weakness and rapidly admonish me to use this event as a case for reflection (thus enabling me to rise up to You), and if You did not urge me to scorn this sight and pass it by, I would go on watching like an empty-headed fool” (10.35.57). Augustine is rich in refusals—refusals to see and know the earthly world. He vigorously turns away from the bodily realm, which offers nothing but sinful distraction: “When I am sitting at home, I am often fascinated when I see a lizard catching flies or a spider trapping them as they rush into its web. The problem is no different just because the animals are small. . . . When my heart opens to these distractions and is filled with throngs of vain thoughts, then my prayers are interrupted and distracted” (Conf. 10.35.57). In these passages, the nature watching features animals eating animals. Augustine sees, in short, the food chain in action, where living beings eat and are eaten. Yet he disciplines himself to turn away from this scene, confident that God will take human beings out of nature at resurrection day. The incarnation and resurrection of Christ mark a triumph over nature and death. By mortifying his flesh through rigorous ascetic practices, Augustine looks forward to a perfect, unearthly body. As he claims, God will take all human bodily matter directly out of the food chain and use it to fashion the resurrected body. In short, God will create a transhuman body that dwells outside time and nature.

TEMPORALITY One cannot investigate Augustine’s discourses on the body without examining his theory of time. Augustine set forth a radically new analysis of temporality in book 11 of the Confessions. This extraordinary book influenced the phenomenological theories of temporality set forth in the twentieth century. In Augustine’s view, when Adam and Eve “fell” into earthly bodies, they also “fell” into time. In my analysis of Augustine, I focus on two temporalities that govern human embodiment. First, I examine his discussion of inner time-consciousness in Confessions 11, which focuses on the psyche:

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I call this psychic time. As Augustine argues, the mind is always “distended” (“stretched”) into the past and the future through memory and expectation. The very word distention denotes something “swelling outward” from a central point. For Augustine, the human mind distends outward from the present moment into the past and the future. It therefore has no grasp on the present. Ontologically and psychologically, it always has memory and expectation and is thus distended into different temporal periods. This has significant psychological ramifications. First, the distended mind cannot experience divine presence in spite of its drive toward the metaphysics of presence. And, second, the mind cannot dwell in the here and now of the body—what I call the physics of presence.14 Since the mind is pulled forward and backward by memory and expectation, it distends away from bodily presence. In addition to his theory of psychic time, Augustine also conceived of a temporality that features the birth, aging, and death of all living organisms in the natural world. I call this earthly time. Augustine offers detailed discussions of the deterioration and death of the human body as time passes in the earthly world. Surprisingly, scholars have rarely addressed his discourses on the aging of the body on earth. Thinkers analyzing his theory of temporality focus almost exclusively on his analysis of mental distention in Confessions 11. For example, Paul Ricoeur identifies Augustine’s theory as “subjective time”; he places this in opposition to “cosmological time,” which is marked by the measured movements of the heavenly bodies.15 To be sure, some scholars have noted that, in Augustine’s discourses, God created time in the cosmos and on earth before he made Adam and Eve: as they rightly claim, Augustine fully acknowledged the operation of time in the physical world.16 Augustine does, indeed, argue that God created “natural” time before he made humans. But, as I suggest, we need to investigate this mode of temporality in relation to human embodiment and not just as an objective cosmic phenomenon. In Augustine’s theory, humans have bodies

14. See Nightingale (2007b) on this issue. Note the distinction between the physics of eternal presence (enjoyed by Adam, Eve, and the resurrected saints, who have unified minds and immortal bodies) and the physics of passing presence, which marks the human condition. See also the analyses of “presence effects” in Gumbrecht (2004, 2006). 15. Ricoeur (1985, vol. 1, chap. 1). Note that I use earthly time rather than cosmological time (which is Ricoeur’s term) to capture the notion of the life and death of the human body. My distinction between earthly time and psychic time differs from the traditional opposition between objective and subjective theories of time (the former is associated with the movement of bodies—especially heavenly bodies—and the latter refers to internal time-consciousness). I will discuss this in detail in chapter 2. 16. I discuss these scholarly positions in chapter 2.

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that are subject to earthly time and minds that distend in psychic time. I want to explore how this double temporalization affects the ways in which humans relate to themselves and to the natural world. In my analysis of Augustine’s theory of time, then, I examine two temporalities: earthly time and psychic time. As Augustine argues, humans cannot live in the present because their psyches experience time in the mode of distention. But the human body is a natural organism that occupies a place here on earth: it ages and changes in the passing now and will eventually die and enter the food chain. In short, as embodied souls, humans dwell in earthly time even though they do not experience this temporality in the mode of self-presence. Augustine’s conception of embodiment cannot be understood without addressing these two different temporalities.17 While nature passes and ages the body, humans experience and understand these changes in the context of social and political ideologies. Different cultures have different ways of measuring, ordering, and experiencing time. Time, then, is culturally and ideologically inflected even though it is not simply an ideological construct but an inexorable and natural phenomenon in the bodily world. As the sociologist Bryan Turner claims: “The human body is subjected to processes of birth, decay, and death, which result from its placement in the natural world, but these processes are also ‘meaningful’ events located in a world of cultural beliefs, symbols and practices.”18 I want to examine the cultural discourses and practices that informed Augustine’s conceptions of temporality. As scholars have observed, societies organize “social time” through evolving (and competing) discourses and practices.19 Augustine and his fellow Christians structured time through specific rituals, narratives, and cultural practices. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Christians effectively restructured time (and the ritual calendar), creating new and “unpagan” modes of relating to time and the body. I attend to this broader cultural context in my investigation of Augustine’s discourses on embodiment.

17. There are, of course, many theories of temporality that I do not examine in the book (though these have informed my thinking). For example, Husserl’s theory of protention and retention, and Heidegger’s theory of time, which focuses on the ontological—not the psychological— aspects of the human being (Dasein). And, in Time and the Other (1997), Levinas points out that every encounter with another human being is a confrontation with a different temporality (the “time of the other person”). I focus on Augustine’s explorations of temporality while also placing these ideas in the cultural context of Christian late antiquity. 18. Turner (1984, 58). As Bourdieu observes (1990, 69): “Symbolic power works partly through the control of other people’s bodies.” 19. On “social time,” see Gosden (1994), Gell (1992/1996), and Griffiths (2002).

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MATTER AND MUTABILITY To understand Augustine’s conception of time and the body, we must examine his account of materiality. Augustine meditated endlessly on the opening lines of Genesis, wrestling with the problem of the creation of the world ex nihilo. How could something come from nothing? Augustine focuses on the claim in Gen. 1:2 that “the earth was invisible and disorganized, and darkness was above the abyss.” He begins by identifying the “abyss” as a “nothing-something” (nihil aliquid) or an “is/is-not” (est non est). Since everything was “invisible and disorganized,” the abyss or nothingsomething was formless.20 But it had some tiny purchase on existence. Initially, Augustine imagines the abyss in terms of “vile and disgusting forms,” but he quickly realizes that even monstrous beings have form. He struggles to grasp a formless “something.” He concludes that the abyss, though formless, is “capable of receiving all visible and composite forms.” Indeed, the abyss is a fluid “transition” (transitus) between nothing and something—a transition that preceded material forms in the creation of the cosmos (Conf. 12.6.6). Where exactly does Augustine find this formless abyss? As he claims: “I inquired into the bodies themselves and looked more deeply into their mutability, in which they cease to be what they were and begin to be what they were not.”21 Here, Augustine looks at the forms of bodies in the created world, finding the nothing-something in the mutability of matter as it moves toward form. In focusing on the mutability of bodily forms as they “cease to be what they were and begin to be what they were not,” he also finds the passing of earthly time. As he claims: “In this [mutability], times can be perceived and measured; for time is made up of the alterations of things, whose forms undergo variation and change” (Conf. 12.8.8). In short, the nothing-something is a material transition from formlessness into form that constantly occurs as time passes on earth. Note, however, that bodily forms are always in flux even though one cannot always perceive the ongoing changes taking place in the physical world. Even within a formed body, there is a nothing-something that subjects it to ongoing transitions and changes. In his interpretation of Gen. 1:2, then, Augustine projects the mutability of matter in the created world onto the first moment of creation. “In

20. See the excellent discussion of Augustine’s views on creation ex nihilo in Harrison (2006, chap. 4). As Harrison rightly points out, Augustine associates “nothing” with “formlessness.” 21. Conf. 12.6.6: Intendi in ipsa corpora eorumque mutabilitatem altius inspexi, qua desinunt esse quod fuerant et incipiunt esse quod non erant.

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the beginning,” God created the nothing-something that marks the physical and temporal transition from chaos into (mutable) bodily forms. As Catherine Keller suggests: “For a moment, in this space of nothing full of something, a counter-ontology seems to emerge, a phenomenology of becoming.” But, as she argues, Augustine does not delve further into this material abyss; rather, he “displaces the cosmic chaos into the individual soul.”22 Keller emphasizes Augustine’s claim in the Confessions that his sinful soul “relapses and becomes an abyss, or rather feels itself to be an abyss.”23 But she moves too swiftly from the world of matter to the human psyche. For Augustine says that the nothing-something was part of the first creation of the material world, which existed before humans came onto the scene. And, in the created world, the nothing-something pervades all bodily forms. In addition, in the passage quoted above where Augustine refers to the soul’s abyss, he also claims that humans “bear the remnants of the darkness [of the abyss] in the body” (13.14.15). For humans, the nothingsomething that is the matrix of mutability affects both body and soul. Indeed, the fluctuations of the soul are in part a response to the mutability of the mortal body. Clearly, mutability plays a central role in the physical cosmos even after the creation of the world. Augustine posits a nothing-something in all natural bodies that change in earthly time (bodies that “cease to be what they were and begin to be what they were not” [Conf. 12.6.6.]). Even in Eden, matter and biological organisms changed in earthly time. As Augustine argues, animals and plants grew and died in Eden: the food chain was up and running from the very beginning.24 Of course, Adam and Eve did not experience these earthly changes in paradise: they had immortal bodies and unified psyches that dwelled in divine presence. It was only after the Fall— when they became mortal—that they saw the movements and changes on earth as temporalized. In short, they first understood mutability when they received mutable bodies themselves and experienced these bodily changes in the passing of time. But they could only interpret the factual and existential ramifications of their mortal bodies because their minds were now distended into memory and expectation. Aging and bodily changes take on meaning for humans because we remember being younger and anticipate getting older and dying. Matter starts to matter for humans when they see

22. Keller (2002, 75, 71). 23. Conf. 13.14.15: [Anima] relabitur et fit abyssus, vel potius sentit adhuc se esse abyssum. 24. I discuss Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden in chapter 1.

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deterioration and death awaiting them in the future. With newly temporalized minds, the “first humans” came to see the relation of their own mortal bodies to the earth and its inhabitants: they were now on the food chain. Yet they also sensed that they did not really belong on earth. Unlike animals, humans have minds that distend into the past and the future: this leads them to question their place in the natural world. Augustine meditates on mutability in many different texts. In all these discourses, he offers a glimpse of the nothing-something that affects the bodily and psychic realms: A person has a body that is not absolute being because it has no stability in itself. It is changed [mutatur] with the passing ages of life, it is changed with the changes [mutatur per mutationes] of places and of times, and it is changed [mutatur] by the diseases and defects of the flesh. The body cannot stand in itself. . . . Indeed, not even the human soul can stand still. It varies by countless changes [mutationibus] and thoughts. It is altered [immutatur] by countless pleasures. By how many desires it is cleaved apart and distended [diverberetur atque distenditur]. Even the human mind—the so-called rational mind—is mutable [mutabilis]. . . . Now it wants something, and now it doesn’t; now it knows something, and now it has no knowledge; now it remembers, and now it forgets.25

Here and elsewhere, Augustine offers a “counterontology of becoming” that stands in opposition to divine “Being.”26 But his meditations on mutability have an existential urgency that goes beyond these philosophical issues. As we will see, his discourses reveal his horror at death and the human place in the food chain. In short, his discussions of mutability exhibit a sort of rage against time and the mortal body.27

25. EnPs. 121.6: Quod corpus habet, non est idipsum; quia non in se stat. Mutatur per aetates, mutatur per mutationes locorum ac temporum, mutatur per morbos et defectus carnales: non ergo in se stat. . . . Anima humana nec ipsa stat. Quantis enim mutationibus et cogitationibus variatur! quantis voluptatibus immutatur! quantis cupiditatibus diverberatur atque distenditur! Mens ipsa hominis, quae dicitur rationalis, mutabilis est, non est idipsum. Modo vult, modo non vult; modo scit, modo nescit; modo meminit, modo obliviscitur. (Note that CSEL uses distenditur while citing discinditur in the apparatus criticus.) 26. See CD 14.11. Clearly, Augustine is not setting forth a “theology of becoming” in Keller’s sense. Rather, becoming (which is associated with the “being and nothingness” that defines all earthly life) is a prelude to the attainment of eternal Being at the end of time. 27. Of course, Augustine accepts that the lamentable human condition is a just punishment from God for the inherent sin in all humans.

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Augustine discusses embodiment and the place of humans on earth in many different texts. I focus on his mature writings (395 CE and following). In the 390s, Augustine undertook a detailed exegesis of Paul that profoundly affected his thinking.28 He wrote extensively on Paul, discussing his notion of the resurrected body and his (riddling) distinction between the “flesh” (sarx) and the “body” (sôma). In this same period, he was ordained as a priest (391 CE) and then made bishop of Hippo (395 CE). Augustine examined temporality and the interaction of the soul and the body in many of his mature texts and sermons. He delivered his sermons as live and unscripted performances to congregations at churches and shrines (his scribes turned these into written texts).29 In his writings and public performances, he explores the paradoxes of embodiment. In analyzing Augustine’s discussions of human embodiment, I use many sermons and treatises (including the City of God, the Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, The Usefulness of Fasting, Holy Virginity, The Goodness of Marriage, Marriage and Concupiscence, and On Continence). I place special weight on the Confessions, which sets forth Augustine’s theory of memory and time; it also reflects on his life and his relation to the social and natural worlds. Of course, this text offers a literary representation rather than a historical or factual account. Indeed, the Confessions is a generic hybrid that mixes together many different discourses—rhetoric, philosophy,

28. Fredriksen (1986, 1988, 1991) discusses the development of Augustine’s interpretation of Paul on the body and flesh in the 390s. As she points out (Fredriksen 1988, 111), Augustine developed his interpretation of Paul in the Lectures on the Epistles to the Romans 13–18, 10–12, and in To Simplicianus. Here, Augustine distinguishes between caro and qualitas carnalis: the flesh is a neutral material substrate, whereas the “carnal quality” is that of the soul, which is sinful because of the Fall of Adam and Eve. As Augustine says, both flesh and soul are carnal until they are redeemed. He changes some of these views later in his life (see Retr. 22.1; and my discussion of the Pelagian controversy in ch. 1). See also Wetzel (1992, 144–60) on Augustine’s reading of Paul’s Romans in the 390s. Recently, Harrison (2006) has offered an important challenge to the traditional view that Augustine’s early theology was transformed in the 390s; as she argues, his early texts are, for the most part, in keeping with the later theology. (See also Conybeare [2006], which reflects Harrison’s position.) In this book, I adopt the traditional view. I discuss Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s notion of the “flesh” and the “body” in the appendix. 29. Note that all of Augustine’s texts were dictated to “scribes” (notarii). As Augustine points out, there is a vast difference between dictating a text that is meant for a reading audience and delivering a sermon to a congregation (DDC 4.10.25). In giving his sermons, he did not work from a script (he even quoted the Bible from memory)—his scribes took down his sermons while they were being delivered in church (see Van der Meer 1961, 415–16; see also Possidius, Life of Augustine 15).

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poetry, theology—and abounds in biblical citations. I try to honor the literary, philosophical, and theological aspects of this text in my efforts to analyze Augustine’s conception of human embodiment. In my examination of transhuman life in Eden and Heaven, I focus on the City of God, The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Enchiridion, Taking Care of the Dead, the antiPelagian treatises, and the sermons on resurrection. In chapter 1, “Edenic and Resurrected Transhumans,” I investigate bodily life in Eden and in heaven (the “City of God”). Augustine’s descriptions of the transhuman condition set the stage for his discourses on human embodiment in the earthly world.30 In his theology, Eden, earth, and heaven are different “chronotopes”—“time-place” zones—where people dwell in different topographies and temporalities.31 As I suggest, Adam and Eve and the resurrected saints in heaven have little, if any, experience of time (their minds are not distended into the past and the future, although they do have some memory). In addition, their bodies are immortal and immutable and have no place in the earthly food chain. These transhumans dwell in the metaphysics of presence: their unified (and undistended) minds dwell in the present and, indeed, in divine presence. But these transhumans also dwell in the physics of presence: they experience their immortal and perfect bodies in the eternal now. I investigate Augustine’s paradoxical notion that Adam and Eve had immortal “animal bodies” and could have had (lackluster) sex in Eden and created an edenic race. I also analyze the Fall of Adam and Eve and their traumatic entrance into mortal bodies and distended minds. Augustine offers a detailed account of the resurrected transhumans at the end of time. Indeed, he meditates on the “moment” when time will end and the resurrected humans will dwell in the eternal now. After the last “atomic” moment passes into eternity, the humans—whose bodies and souls are pervaded by the nothing-something—become eternal “somethings.” Augustine offers detailed meditations on the life of the resurrected saints in heaven. In this peculiar chronotope, there is no garden or earthly life: the saints live in an eternal “city.” The saints in the City of God dwell in divine presence. With their perfect and unchanging bodies, they praise God and sing an “eternal yes.” And they also admire the beauty of each other’s bodies, whose inner organs are now visible: the stomach, intestines, womb,

30. I will not examine the incarnation of Christ and the church as the “body of God” since my focus is on human embodiment. 31. Although I take the term chronotope from Bakhtin, I use it in its most basic sense (I thus diverge from Bakhtin, whose examination of chronotopes focuses exclusively on literary genres).

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etc. reveal God’s design to the transhuman eye. Yet, as Augustine points out, these parts of the once-human body are now “useless.” Why, then, do the resurrected saints need to have these organs at all (let alone see them on view)? As I argue, the vision of the digestive and reproductive organs reminds the saints that they have been wrested out of nature and the earthly food chain. One may imagine that, in eternity, the resurrected saints have no memory or expectation since their minds are no longer distended in time. But Augustine does grant them some memory. While they have no expectation— since the eternal future has arrived—they do remember their sinful and painful lives on earth and thus understand God’s forgiveness and mercy. In addition, these blessed beings also remember people who sinned and are now subjected to eternal punishment in hell. In heaven, the saints are eternally aware of the tortured sinners in hell. In chapter 2, “Scattered in Time,” I turn from transhumans to the temporalized human. Here, I offer a new interpretation of Augustine’s theory of temporality. I begin by investigating his discussions of memory in Confessions 10, which form the basis of his conception of time. The memory contains past images and events that are “scattered” and “dispersed” in the storehouse of the mind: some memories are “ready at hand,” while others “sink into oblivion.” The memory enables the mind to connect the past with future possibilities and is thus essential to the human experience of time. I then turn to temporality, examining ancient philosophers whose theories of time influenced Augustine’s analysis. In Confessions 11, Augustine attacks the arguments of his philosophical predecessors and offers a new theory of temporality. In examining this theory, I start by investigating the earthly time that governs the aging and mortal human body. Scholars have not included this mode of temporality in their interpretations of Augustine’s theory of time, even though he discusses the passing of time in the natural world in this and other texts. I then turn to psychic time, offering a detailed analysis of Augustine’s conception of mental distention. How do these two temporalities interact in human life? The body occupies a specific place on earth in the passing now: as Szymborska puts it, the body “is and is and is.” At the same time, the mind stretches away from the presence of the body. As I argue, the body grounds the mind “here” in the (passing) present, while the mind stretches away from this passing now. The mind distends in psychic time, while the body changes in earthly time. These two temporalities—and their interaction in human life—help define Augustine’s notion of embodiment.

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In Confessions 11, Augustine uses three verbal activities in his analysis of mental distention: making a sound, reciting a hymn, and singing a song (canticum).32 As I argue, we must attend to the ways in which the mind and the body operate in these activities. The physical enunciation of the sound or song “grounds” the mind in the passing present on earth. By focusing on the role that the body plays in Augustine’s theory of distention, one can see the interaction of earthly time and psychic time. Ultimately, I bring together the aging of the body in earthly time with the distention of the mind in psychic time. Augustine’s theory of time is both philosophical and theological. In theological terms, the human experience of temporality reflects God’s punishment for original sin: being temporalized is a condition of exile from the eternal presence of God. In part, Augustine aims to contrast the transience of human life with the eternity of God. His theory of time thus reflects his belief in the metaphysics of presence. But the human experience of time also problematizes bodily presence—being here in a body. Rather than rehearsing the (well-known) criticisms of the metaphysics of presence, I want to explore the problem of the physics of presence. How does the body’s location in the here and now affect the “evasive” human psyche? Although the psyche is wedded to one body that needs regular attention and care, its mental distention in psychic time pulls it away from bodily presence. The stretching away of the mind from the bodily here and now affects the way in which humans relate not only to their own bodies but also to the natural world. Humans do not dwell in nature but in relation to nature. As Robert Harrison observes: “We humans do not speak the language of nature’s self-inclusion, but one of extraneous excess. Our logos is the outside of things—a boundary of finitude at which we are lost but which, in return, enables us to utter words at all. The words ‘tree’ and ‘rock’ are utterable because logos, in its longing, projects us beyond the containment of trees, rocks, wind and forests. In excess of the earth, we dwell in longing as in a house turned inside out.”33 As temporalized beings aware of their own mortality, humans do not quite belong on earth. They dwell out of nature. In a sense, they are extraterrestrials—or, as Augustine would put it, resident aliens (peregrinati)—on earth. In Augustine’s theology, after they

32. Most scholars take the song to be a recited psalm, ignoring the fact that this example involves singing. I call this the song example rather than the psalm example. 33. Harrison (1992, 229–30). On humans dwelling in relation to nature, see also Cronon (1996, 23–90), who offers an excellent analysis of various (and politicized) conceptions of nature in Western thinking.

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sinned, Adam and Eve fell into mortal bodies, which grow and change in earthly time. They also fell into psychic time: they could no longer live in the present (or in divine presence). Still, the fact that they were created in the “image of God” and granted “dominion” over the earth placed them above the natural world. In spite of their unfortunate situation on earth, they are lucky to be out of nature. For they are the only earthly species that will receive resurrected bodies after death. God will take their bodies out of the earth on the Day of Judgment. In Augustine’s thinking, only human matter matters. In chapter 3, “The Unsituated Self,” I analyze Augustine’s ongoing search for himself. In exploring his notion of the self, I examine his conception of the human as a marriage of body and soul. How does the incorporeal soul sense the body and the earthly world? To what extent does the interaction of the soul and the body constitute a self? In the Confessions, Augustine approaches this issue from a first-person perspective, analyzing his changing body and his distended mind. He also discusses his relation to the bodily lives of others, human and nonhuman. He is, of course, famous for making mental journeys into himself in his efforts to discover God. Indeed, he develops an entirely new discourse of interiority, privileging the “inner man” over the “outer man.” But he also places great emphasis on the mortality of the human body and its place in the earthly world. As I suggest, Augustine does not identify the “inner man” with the mind and the “outer man” with the body. Indeed, the human mind is both inner and outer. For the will (voluntas) ongoingly brings bodily sensations into the soul. Indeed, the will tends to “glue itself” to the earthly world. As Augustine claims, every act of sensation leaves “images” of the bodily world in the memory—mental images that are (rather surprisingly) part of the “outer man.”34 On earth, then, the human mind and soul are inevitably “outward bound.” Where, then, does Augustine find his mortal self? In the act of introspection, Augustine, the subject, investigates himself as an object. But both the subject and the object are mired in temporality. Indeed, Augustine inspects himself by looking in his memory, which contains images of past events that no longer exist, and which continues to take in new material as time passes by. We cannot understand this subject-object relation without factoring in temporality. In Augustine’s examination of himself, both the subject and the object are enmeshed in time. For this reason, Augustine cannot find a stable subject position from which he can investigate himself in his mind

34. Trin. 12.1.1. I discuss this in detail in chapter 3.

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and memory. In addition, he cannot take himself as an object of investigation without factoring in his body and the earthly world. As we have seen, his ongoing sensations of the bodily realm leave images of these sensory experiences in his memory. As Augustine searches for himself in his memory, then, he finds bits and pieces of the world. It is widely agreed that Augustine created a new kind of self in the Confessions. Most scholars have identified this Augustinian self with the mind or soul in separation from the body. Of course, Augustine’s extensive selfanalysis constructs a sort of interior mental space for the reader to inspect. I examine this mental interior, looking at the “divided will” and the “distended mind.” I also look at “rational self-reflection” in Augustine’s discourses— the activity in which the mind looks at the mind. But, in this activity, Augustine discovers an immortal mind, not a human self. Indeed, one cannot understand the Augustinian self in abstraction from the body. As I argue, Augustine’s self is a moving target: his body and soul, though married, live in different time zones. Since his mind is subject to psychic time and his body to earthly time, Augustine cannot find a stable place to situate himself. He looks for himself in his memory and finds past experiences and events that no longer exist except as images (and some of these images have faded into a blur). In addition, even as he investigates himself, his body continues to change and bring in new sensations. Not surprisingly, he finds a fragmented self riddled with absences and lacunae. The resurrected saint alone possesses self-presence and integrity. Augustine can become a self only when he is resurrected as a saint. In chapter 4, “Body and Book,” I examine the book as a physical object that acts as an interface between matter and meaning. I also analyze the ways in which Augustine positions himself as a reader and a writer. Clearly, he grants special status to the Bible. In contrast to Plato, he privileges the written text over oral discourse: the prophets’ discourses can disseminate divine truth only when inscribed in a book. As Augustine argues, the prophets must die so that their words can live. The textual inscription of prophetic utterances spreads God’s word in many times and places. In fact, Augustine identifies the Bible as “the word made flesh.” Unlike the incarnated Christ, however, the Bible is a material human artifact. Indeed, Augustine claims that God gave the Bible to humans just as he gave the “dead skins of animals” to Adam and Eve after they sinned and became mortal. Augustine thus associates the textual corpus, including the Bible, with temporality and death. I also investigate Augustine’s status as an author, looking in particular at his representations of himself as a sinner turned (aspiring) saint. How does

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his autobiographical Confessions (bks. 1–9) interact with the genre of hagiography? I examine Athanasius’s Life of Anthony—the first great hagiography in late antiquity—which catalyzed Augustine’s religious conversion. In Athanasius’s portrayal, the illiterate Anthony lived as a desert hermit and an ascetic “holy man” seeking for solitude and invisibility. Like many Christians of his day, Augustine revered Anthony and adopted some of the same bodily practices. But Augustine rejected the “counterworld” of the desert: he performed his ascetic practices in the public arenas of the church and the city. In the fourth century CE, the Life of Anthony spurred many literary and theological imitations. How did Augustine respond to these hagiographies? I look at Jerome’s Life of Paul and Life of Hilarion, which imitate—and attempt to outstrip—the The Life of Anthony. In these Lives (written before the Confessions), Jerome offers a new kind of monk-hermit as a model for educated men in the Christianized empire. Augustine takes this imitation one step further: he transforms Athanasius’s hagiographic text into an autobiographical narrative. Although Augustine does not identify himself as a holy man, he represents himself as an aspiring saint, thus offering a model for imitation. Finally, in contrast to the illiterate and solitary Anthony, Augustine chooses to write about himself (at length), seeking visibility over invisibility. By writing a Life in the first person, he creates a sort of autohagiography. Augustine puts his body on display in the Confessions. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler claims that language “emerges from the materiality of bodily life, that is, as the reiteration and extension of a material set of relations.”35 In the Confessions, Augustine shows how human language responds from (and to) the materiality of bodily life. Indeed, he represents himself as “speaking” in gestures and nondiscursive “language”: he weeps, groans, grimaces, collapses, tears his hair, and so on. Here, he communicates in a “body language” that (as he claims) transcends cultural differences.36 His representations of body language and his discussions of nonverbal communication invite us to see how bodily movements occuring in earthly time create meaning in a mind distended in psychic time. We find excellent examples of this heterochrony in his portrayal in the Confessions of the illnesses and deaths of two of his loved ones: at the moment of these bodily 35. Butler (1993, 69). As Louis Marin (1973, 924) puts it, the body is “the point where signifying experience accedes to cultural-discursive signification” (trans. from the French). 36. DDC 2.3.4. Clearly, gestures have different meanings in different cultures (see the essays in Bremmer and Roodenburg [1991] for investigations of this point). Augustine is aware of this fact, but, as we will see, he identifies certain actions, such as crying, grimacing, groaning, and sighing, as a transcultural mode of communication.

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deaths in earthly time, Augustine’s mind is “torn asunder,” dragged into old memories and a new set of expectations. In the Confessions, Augustine brings corpses into his corpus: dead matter passes into discourse and finds an afterlife in the text. In chapter 5, “Unearthly Bodies,” I look at two rituals that identified certain bodies as less than earthly: the “mortified” bodies of the ascetics and the “holy” bodies of the martyrs. In analyzing these ritualized practices, I focus on the ways in which theological and hagiographic discourses are embodied in ritual actions. As Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, the body “incorporates” beliefs in ritual practices.37 Following Bourdieu, recent scholars have suggested that the analysis of ancient rituals should not privilege texts and discourses over bodily practices.38 How, then, did the participants in these two ritual practices embody Christian doctrines in late antiquity? I look first at the cult of the martyrs. In this ritual practice—which started to spread in Augustine’s lifetime—Christians identified the dead bodies or (more commonly) body parts of the martyrs as “sites” of divine presence. These bodies took on an “unearthly” status. In this cult, the martyrs’ corpses were unearthed, both physically and discursively. Bishops and other churchmen disinterred the dead martyrs, had them cut up, and sent bodily fragments to shrines all over the Roman Empire. The annual festivals for the martyrs’ “birthdays” (which were actually the days on which they died) ritually invested these holy bodies with an unearthly status. In worshipping at the martyrs’ shrines, Christians incorporated specific discourses and practices. The rituals at these shrines made meaning out of (dead) matter. As Patricia Cox Miller suggests: “When a martyr’s dust, bone, or body becomes the center of cultic activity and reverence, it loses its character as a natural body and begins to function as a site of religious contact. No longer a mere object, it becomes a thing that signals a new subject-object relation, a relation of the human subject to the sanctifying potential of human physicality as locus and mediator of spiritual presence and power.”39 Ritual practices—including the narration of the martyrs’ passions and deaths—sacralized these bodily remains. In addition, the unearthly bodies of the martyrs were ritually identified as harbingers of bodily resurrection. The cult celebrated the human exit from earth at the end of time, 37. Bourdieu (1990, chap. 4). 38. See, e.g., Miller (1994, 144–48), who focuses on the performative aspects of ascetic practices, where “doing and acting . . . are creative of meaning in the ascetic context.” On ritual theory, see Smith (1987) and Bell (1992). See also Shaw (1998), who uses Bourdieu in her analysis of fasting in Christian rituals. 39. Miller (2008, 2).

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thus reconfiguring both time and place. I investigate Augustine’s (growing) embrace of the cult of the martyrs and his discourses on bodily healings that occurred when someone touched the relics or shrines of the martyrs. In his sermons and theological treatises, Augustine sanctifies the “holy” bodies of the martyrs but refuses to worship them, since this would involve idolatry. In his ritual celebrations of the martyrs’ festival days, he grants their bodies an unearthly status. I also examine Augustine’s ritualized ascetic practices and his efforts to “bruise the body to pleasure soul.” In adopting a rigorous (and often painful) ascetic regime, Augustine and other Christians embodied the passions of Christ and the martyrs. These individuals chose to mortify their flesh, in part, as a way of preparing themselves for resurrected bodies. But their adoption of these ascetic practices also responded to the horrors of bodily disintegration and death. By choosing celibacy, Augustine refused to bring more death into the world. And, in the practice of fasting, he temporarily removed himself from the food chain: he performs a sort of hunger strike against death. But why is it necessary to mortify and hurt the body (rather than simply mastering it)? Augustine argues that the “descent” into bodily pain enables one to “ascend” to God. Paradoxically, the mortification of a living body makes it less earthly: the Christian ascetic defies the earthly body, aiming to “kill off” mortality itself. In the “bloodless martyrdom” of asceticism, the Christians found ways to move their bodies up toward heaven. In the Confessions and other texts, Augustine offers a specific ascetic model for Christians to imitate: celibacy, fasting, and the rejection of sensual pleasures (within the context of “orthodox” Christian worship). Not surprisingly, Augustine was responding to competing theological views of “correct” bodily practices in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. As a bishop and theologian, he prescribed specific ascetic practices for Christian men and women, whether married, widowed, or single. As Bourdieu points out, “symbolic power works partly through the control of other people’s bodies.”40 Augustine’s sermons and texts have served to regulate the bodily practices—and especially sexual practices—of orthodox Catholics up to the present day. In sum, this book examines Augustine’s conception of the human being as an embodied soul that is doubly temporalized. In addition to analyzing Augustine’s views on the soul and the body, I introduce a heterochronic

40. Bourdieu (1990, 69 [see also 72–73]).

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theory of time. By introducing psychic time and earthly time, I focus on the temporalities that govern the mind and the body (respectively). I thus explore the notion that the human being dwells in two different time zones: while the body changes in earthly time, the mind stretches away from the present in psychic time. The mind’s transcendence of the earthly here and now gives humans a sense of being out of nature. Yet their bodies are physical organisms dwelling in the natural world. In examining human and transhuman life in Eden, on earth, and in heaven, I focus on the metaphysics—and the physics—of presence. Augustine seeks for synchrony in a heterochronic world; he longs for bodily presence in the realm of transience and mutability. In his discourses on embodiment, Augustine laments over the human condition and anticipates transhumation, where the earth is shucked off and humans are taken completely out of nature. In the epilogue, “‘Mortal Interindebtedness,’” I examine three modern writers who offer explorations of human embodiment that stand in stark contrast to Augustine’s theories. These writers embrace temporal change and finitude, renouncing edenic and resurrected bodies. Indeed, they insist on the human place in the food chain: after death, humans will become humic Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Karel Çapek meditate on the interindebtedness of mortal beings on earth. As they suggest, humans and nonhumans dwell in one ecosystem or “household.” These writers understand that internal time-consciousness (psychic time) pulls human beings away from bodily presence and makes them feel out of nature. But this unheimlich condition does not make Melville, Thoreau, and Çapek seek for a transhuman life on earth or in heaven. While Augustine wants humans to be taken completely out of nature at the end of time, these writers celebrate our mortal finitude and our earthly interindebtedness. They offer powerful rejections of transhumanity, whether this transhumation is constructed by theological disputations or by technological transmutations.

chapter one

Edenic and Resurrected Transhumans

When she ate the pomegranate, it was as if every seed with its wet red shining coat of sweet flesh clinging to the dark core was one of nature’s eyes. Afterward, it was nature that was blind, and she who was wild with vision, condemned to see what was before her, and behind. —Eleanor Wilner, “The Apple was a Northern Invention” Eternity is in love with the productions of time. —William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

I

n 410 CE, Alaric the Visigoth sacked the city of Rome. Although this violent event lasted only three days, the Visigoths burned the temples, looted the city, and killed many Romans. The Visigoths had already attacked Rome twice in 408–9: these sieges led to widespread starvation in the city, and some people even resorted to cannibalism. The sack of Rome in 410 had a profound impact on the Roman Empire. Although Rome was no longer the political capital of the empire, it was the symbol of civilized culture in the West. Many pagan senators and aristocrats lived there, nostalgically invoking the old Roman values. The city also had a large population of Christians, who worshipped at the famous Basilicas of Peter and Paul (and many other impressive churches that had been erected in the city). Not surprisingly, citizens of the Roman Empire reacted differently to the sack of Rome. Pagans claimed that the Christian rejection of the Roman 23

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gods caused this disaster; Christians argued that the city was harmed because it tolerated paganism, heresy, and immorality. Augustine had heard many reports about the destruction in Rome, and he encountered Roman families arriving as refugees in Carthage and North Africa. He wrote a number of sermons reacting to this event and opened the City of God with a meditation on the attack on Rome.1 At the opening of the City of God, Augustine offers a vivid depiction of the corpses of the people slain in Rome. Although he laments over the destruction, he claims that God will conquer death by resurrecting these bodies at the end of time: “But many could not even be buried, in all that welter of carnage.” Religious faith does not dread even that. We have assurance that the ravenous beasts will not prevent the resurrection of bodies. . . . If future life was obstructed by anything that the enemies may do with the bodies of the slain, then [Jesus] would not say, “Do not fear those who kill the body—they cannot kill the soul.” . . . It is true that many Christian bodies did not receive an earthly covering . . . but God knows the places in the earth and the air from which He will restore these to life.2

Augustine says that humans are “food for the beasts of the earth.” Whether buried or unburied, the corpses are part of the food chain and ecosystem until Judgment Day. This raises one of the most important issues in Augustine’s thinking: the human place in the natural world and in earthly time. The “ravenous beasts” can and will eat the corpses, but God will get these bodies back from the earth—even from the stomachs of animals—at the end of

1. Note especially De excidio urbis Romae, where Augustine reacts to the pagan claims that Rome was sacked because the Christians had offended the pagan gods. See also Sermo. 81.7, 105.12–13, 296.1.12; Ep. 99.1, 111.2, 136.2, 137.5.20, 138.3.14, 151.8–9; and DCM 2.3–4. On Augustine’s reaction to the sack of Rome (and its relation to the composition of the City of God), see Maier (1955), Courcelle (1948/1965, 65–77), Brown (1967/2000, chaps. 25–26), O’Daly (1999, chap. 2), Harrison (2000, 196–97), and O’Donnell (2005, 227–34). On the “barbarian” invasions in the Roman Empire, see Bowersock (1991) and O’Donnell (2008). 2. CD 1.12. Augustine continues: “The psalm says, ‘They have set out the mortal parts of thy servants as food for the birds of the sky; and the flesh of thy saints as food for the beasts of the earth. They have shed their blood like water all around Jerusalem, and there was not one to bury them.’ But this was said to underline the cruelty of the acts, not to stress the misfortune of the sufferers; for, although their sufferings seem harsh and terrible in the eyes of men, yet ‘the death of his saints is precious in the eyes of God.’” Note again the reference to the food chain.

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time. God will take the Christians out of the food chain, offering them denaturalized, transhuman bodies that will live eternally in the City of God.3 As Augustine observes, the human body incorporates food, excretes waste, spawns new life, and changes and ages as it heads toward death. Even a healthy human is the site of disintegration. In Augustine’s view, humans begin to die from the moment they are born (CD 13.10). As we have seen, a nothing-something pervades all human bodies, and this makes it impossible for them to maintain a single form. Indeed, the fact that one must regularly eat and excrete shows that the body is always in process. The very boundaries of the body are called into question since one’s body grows and wastes as one eats and digests: Our body continually passes away and loses something of itself; but we do not sense that loss because it is restored though the nourishment of food. . . . This phenomenon takes place in us now and in all our actions; it continues even when we rest. . . . Why would we use the word replenishment if nothing is lost? We eagerly fill our body with that which it loses by replenishing it with food. Therefore, because of this corruption of the body, we all face death. . . . This mortality is symbolized by the skins that Adam and Eve put on when they were exiled from paradise. Skins signify death because they are stripped from dead animals. (Sermo. 362.11.11)

For Augustine, the human body is permeated with death: it is disintegrating and losing parts of itself even before it dies. In short, humans are on the food chain as soon as they are born. As earthly bodies, they eat and are eaten. Adam, Eve, and the resurrected saints, by contrast, do not experience bodily disintegration or death: they have no place in nature or the food chain. In the City of God, Augustine locates Rome and Roman history in a “world history” that commences in Eden and reaches closure on Resurrection Day.4 In this chapter, I focus on the beginning and ending of this narrative: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the resurrected saints in the City of God. In Augustine’s theology, the resurrected body has some commonality with the edenic body: both are free of desire, pain, disintegration,

3. God also takes the bodies of non-Christians and unrepentant sinners out of the earthly world—they get resurrected bodies that will be tortured in hell for eternity. 4. In CD bks. 1–10, Augustine attacked the paganism of the aristocracy that had dominated intellectual culture in the Roman Empire, offering a new reading of Roman history. Note also Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans (Orosius begins in Eden and progresses to his own period of history), which was written at the behest of Augustine in 417–18 CE and also dedicated to him: this text aims to refute the pagan claim that the disaster was due to the neglect of the pagan gods.

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and death. But the resurrected saints enjoy a bodily life that is completely out of nature: they dwell in an eternal city rather than an edenic garden. An examination of Augustine’s transhumans sets the stage for an analysis of his conception of human embodiment. These transhumans mark the boundaries of the human. As I argue, Augustine’s celebration of transhumanity marks his rejection of the human place in nature and the food chain. Augustine’s transhumans dwell in unearthly chronotopes. First, they have perfect and immortal bodies that are not subject to earthly time. And, second, they have a transhuman sense of time since they dwell in the eternal presence of God: their minds are not distended into the past and the future in psychic time. In addition to examining the topoi of Eden and heaven, I want to investigate the temporalities—the chronoi—that operate in these “places.” Adam, Eve, and the resurrected saints are embodied creatures that live in the present. Although many scholars have analyzed Augustine’s discussions of the edenic beings and the resurrected saints, they have not fully explored the ways in which these transhumans experience time. As I argue, one cannot understand Augustine’s conception of embodiment without examining the temporalities that govern different kinds of life forms and the places where they dwell: we need to grapple with the chronoi as well as the topoi in both human and transhuman lives. In this chapter, I examine Augustine’s attempts to represent perfect and immortal bodies that dwell outside time, nature, and the food chain. And I also investigate the ways in which the transhuman psyche experiences eternal presence. This provides the foundation for the next chapter, which analyzes mental distention in psychic time and bodily disintegration in earthly time.

THE ANIMAL BODIES OF ADAM AND EVE Starting in the 390s, Augustine wrote extensively on Genesis, adopting different views as he developed his theology. In his early works, On Genesis against the Manichaeans (388–89 CE) and Confessions 12–13 (397–401 CE), he claimed that Adam and Eve had spiritual bodies that were incorporeal.5 But he changed this position later in his life, offering more literal readings of Genesis.6 I focus on his later works, especially the Literal Interpretation 5. Augustine also wrote an unfinished literal commentary on Genesis in 393 CE: De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber. The analysis in it stops before the arrival of Adam and Eve. 6. In his early work On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.19.30 and 1.23.39, Augustine argued that Adam and Eve were spiritual beings—the divine command to “reproduce and multiply” referred to a spiritual union; indeed, even the birds and fish in Eden did not reproduce physically. Augustine’s early works on Genesis must be understood in the context of the debate over

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of Genesis (401–14 CE) and the City of God (413–27 CE). In these texts, he claimed that Adam and Eve had “animal bodies.” They ate and drank and would have produced children in Eden if they had not sinned. But these animal bodies were very different from animals as we know them: they were immortal and immune to pain and disintegration. In addition, God created Adam and Eve as adults, with no sense of the past.7 The edenic beings, then, had no experience of earthly or psychic time before they ate the forbidden fruit. They did, of course, have language, but it was an “Adamic” language very different from our own.8 Adam and Eve were at one with themselves and with God, and their wills had complete control over their bodies. The edenic transhumans, then, were immortal, integrated, and perfectly good, though they did have the capacity to sin. Augustine says that Adam and Eve would have achieved the immortality of the angels if they had not eaten the forbidden fruit: “If the first man submitted to his creator . . . and obeyed his commands, he should pass over into the fellowship of the angels, attaining an immortality of endless joy, without an intervening death.”9 Indeed, they would have produced children in Eden. Reproduction, of course, involves change and generation. Since Adam and Eve were created as adults whose bodies did not change over time, it is difficult to understand edenic procreation even in its hypothetical formulation. Nonetheless, Augustine claimed that the offspring of Adam and Eve would all have grown up to be perfect adults: “If they lived

Jovinian’s theological claims about sex and marriage. In the late fourth century, Jovinian had launched a serious attack on asceticism, arguing that ascetics would not gain extra points in heaven (there was only one tier of heavenly reward for Christians). He argued that celibacy was no better than the proper Christian marriage (and also that Mary was not a virgin). He claimed that the ascetics were Manichaeans who considered the body to be evil, and he praised the institution of marriage. Ambrose and Jerome counterattacked. In De institutione virginis and Epistle 42 (both ca. 393 CE), Ambrose claimed that Adam and Eve could not procreate in Eden and that Mary was a virgin: this showed that virginity and celibacy were superior to the married state. Indeed, in Epistle 42, he calls Jovinian a Manichaean. In Against Jovinian (393 CE), Jerome says that Adam and Eve were virgins in Eden and launches a vicious attack on sex and marriage. Jovinian was excommunicated from the church in 393 CE. On the Jovianian controversy, see Clark (1986c) and Hunter (1987, 1993, 2000, 2005). 7. Gennlitt. 6.14.25. 8. In Genlitt. 6.3.4, Augustine says that Adam and Eve used language. He argues that their language differed from ours, which has been “differentiated” after the Tower of Babel (9.11.21). He meditated on Adam’s naming of the animals and on Adam’s verbal response when God brought Eve to him. In both cases, he argues, Adam was speaking “prophetically” since Adam’s words were spoken by Christ in Matt. 19:4–5 (9.19.36). Interestingly, Augustine claims that Adam could speak to plants, asking them questions about their nature and being “told” about God their creator (8.8.16). 9. CD 12.22. See also CD 13.1.

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faithfully and justly and served God obediently, Adam and Eve would have created offspring, but without the restless fever of lust or any labor pains in childbirth. They would not have created children who would replace their parents when they died; rather, the parents would remain in their prime . . . while their offspring would be brought up to the same perfect adult state until the correct number of saints had been reached” (Genlitt. 9.3.6). If Adam and Eve had not fallen, all the edenic beings would eat from the Tree of Life and enjoy “immortality and endless happiness.”10 In short, they would have generated an edenic race that would be perfect and immortal (of course this was at odds with the divine plan and thus purely hypothetical).

EDENIC SEX Augustine’s claim that Adam and Eve would have had sex in paradise was a truly radical move. In advancing this position, Augustine rejected the theological claims of almost all his contemporaries.11 As Peter Brown points out, in the late fourth and the early fifth centuries, the Catholic theologians who propounded rigorous ascetic practices viewed Adam and Eve as nonsexual, “angelic” beings: “The exponents of the ‘ascetic paradigm’ dealing with the decline and fall of Adam and Eve from their first ‘angelic’ majesty had usually been content to leave the slopes of Paradise veiled in a golden mist. For what mattered to men like Ambrose was not so much what had happened at that time, as the stance towards the present-day society ‘in the world’ that the ascetic might adopt. It was sufficient to place the present human person against the haunting backdrop of a pre-sexual and, in effect, a pre-social majesty of man’s first state.”12 Though he adopted Ambrose and Jerome’s position on Adam and Eve in his early writings, Augustine offered a new interpretation of Eden in his later years. He proceeded to make the shocking claim that Adam and Eve had animal bodies designed for sex and procreation in Eden.

10. “How fortunate were the first human beings! They were not distressed by any agitations of the mind, nor pained by any disorders of the body. And how fortunate the whole fellowship of mankind would be if our first parents had not sinned. . . . This happiness would have continued until—in accordance with the blessed words ‘increase and multiply’—the number of the predestined saints was fulfilled. And then another and a greater happiness would have been granted—the happiness given to the blessed angels” (CD 14.10). 11. The exceptions were (possibly) Jovinian (in Against Jovinian, Jerome indicates that Jovinian believed that Adam and Eve could have had sex in Eden [see Clark 1986c, 361]) and the Pelagians. Note that both Jovinian and Pelagius were excommunicated. On the theological debate over sex in Eden, see Clark (1986c), Brown (1988, 415–21), and Markus (1990, 58). 12. Brown (1983, 6).

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In arguing that Adam and Eve had animal rather than spiritual bodies, Augustine referred to Paul, 1 Cor. 15:42–48: So it is with the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown an animal body, it is raised a spiritual body. . . . So it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the animal, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.13

Rejecting competing interpretations of this passage, Augustine claimed that Paul offered “clear proof” that Adam and Eve had physical (and sexual) bodies: “The first man was earthly. . . . His body was animal [corpus animale], not spiritual. This is shown by the fact that it needed food and drink to prevent its suffering from hunger and thirst. . . . [If Adam had not sinned,] his body would have become spiritual [corpus spiritale] as a reward for obedience” (CD 13.23). It was no easy task to make a case for sex and procreation in Eden. As Augustine’s contemporaries argued, Adam and Eve did not have lust before they sinned—sex was, therefore, impossible. Augustine proceeded to offer a “lackluster” sexual scenario: If there had been no sin, marriage would have been happy in paradise. [Adam and Eve] would have given birth to beloved children, but they would not have experienced any lust to be ashamed of. Of course, as it stands, we have no example to show how this could come about. But it should not seem incredible that this particular bodily member was subject to the will, without any lust, seeing that so many other parts are

13. This is a translation from the Vulgate. Consider the passage with the key Greek words: “It is sown an ensouled body, it is raised a spiritual body [ͻ͸ͭͧ͹ͭͼͩͱ ͻᖨʹͩ΀ͽͿͱͲ΄͵ᓘͫͭͧ͹ͭͼͩͱ ͻᖨʹͩ͸͵ͭͽʹͩͼͱͲ΄͵]. . . . So it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit [͸͵ͭᖛʹͩͮ΁ͷ͸ͷͱͷᖛ͵]. But it is not the spiritual [͸͵ͭͽʹͩͼͱͲ΄͵] that is first, but the ensouled [΀ͽͿͱͲ΄͵], and then the spiritual.” In Greek, psychichon means “ensouled” or “enlivened,” not “animal” (though, as Robinson [1952, 29 n. 16] points out, in Paul, ΀ͽͿͱͲ΄ͺ is virtually interchangeable with ͻͩ͹ͲͱͲ΄ͺ, i.e., “fleshly”). Jerome chose to translate “ͻᖨʹͩ΀ͽͿͱͲ΄͵” as corpus animale. Note that, after Jerome wrote the Vulgate, Augustine clung to the Vetus Latina (now extant only in fragments), which offered a very basic and unadorned (if not always accurate) translation. As Augustine says in DDC (2.11.16, 2.15.22), it is useful to use multiple Latin translations of the Greek Bible while also consulting the Greek and the Hebrew. On the biblical translations and manuscripts that Augustine used, see Harrison (2000, 50–51).

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now obedient to the will. We move our hands and feet to perform their special tasks whenever we want. . . . So why shouldn’t we believe that the sex organs could have been obedient servants, moving at the bidding of the will, without lust?14

Adam would have moved his genitals not out of lust (libido) but at the direction of his will, just as one moves one’s hands or feet. Adam and Eve would have simply willed to have sex as a mutual and rational choice. Peter Brown claims that Augustine “was quite prepared to include the summa voluptas, the supreme, sharp pleasure of orgasm,” in his edenic scenario.15 But this was, sadly, not the case. Sex was not fun in Eden. Of course, the mind and the body operated in complete harmony in the edenic beings. But Augustine denies Adam and Eve the pleasure of orgasm. He offers, instead, a sex act performed with a “tranquillity of mind”: The seed of children could not have been sown with the disease of lust [libidinis morbo]. Instead, the sexual organs would have been activated by the same will that controlled the other bodily members. Then, without the alluring stimulation of passion [sine ardoris inlecebroso stimulo], the husband would have relaxed on his wife’s bosom in tranquillity of mind. . . . When it was time for sex, those parts of the body would not have been moved by turbulent heat but by a voluntary power [illas corporis partes non ageret turbidus calor sed spontanea potestas]; . . . the male seed would have thus entered the womb, which did not lose its integrity.16

14. CD 14.23. See also DNC 2.22.37. 15. Brown (1983, 7); see also Brown (1988, 417). Augustine believed that reason is entirely shut down when humans have sex; in Eden, reason is fully in charge of sexual intercourse. See also Cavadini (2005), who discusses lust in relation to the will and analyzes the problem of how Adam and Eve could have had sex without lust. 16. CD 14.26. See also CD 14.24: “Then [had there been no sin] the man would have sowed the seed and the woman would have conceived the child when their sexual organs had been aroused by the will, at the appropriate time and in the necessary degree, and had not been excited by lust. For we now set in motion, by our will, . . . members like the hands, feet, and fingers. . . . [In the same way,] man may have received from his lower members an obedience that he lost by his disobedience. It would not have been difficult for God to fashion him in such a way that even what is now set in motion in this flesh only by lust should have been moved only by his will.” See DNC 2.22.37: sexual intercourse took place with “a quiet acquiescence in its members, not a lust of the flesh [tranquilla membrorum oboedientia, non pudenda carnis concupiscentia]” (see also Genlitt. 9.10.18). Compare The Goodness of Marriage (an earlier text, published in 401), where Augustine offers three possible theories of the “fruitfulness” in Eden: (1) that children would have been created without sexual intercourse; (2) that in Eden fruitfulness referred to the

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The will—not the “turbulent heat” of the genitals—would have enabled Adam to inseminate the abidingly virginal Eve. Adam and Eve had been commanded to “increase and multiply”: they were designed to have sex, but without sexual desire or sensual pleasure. Indeed, one of the marks of the edenic beings was their lack of desire in general. Adam and Eve wanted for nothing. Augustine’s discussions of edenic sex caused a huge stir among the Pelagians. In contrast to other theologians in this period, the Pelagians believed that Adam and Eve were designed to have sex in Eden (and even have lustful desires). As Julian of Eclanum claimed, God created Adam and Eve in the “natural” form that all humans now possess: edenic bodies were subject to disease and death, but they also enjoyed earthly pleasures, including sexual pleasure. Though their bodies were mortal, Adam and Eve had “fully innocent natures, capable of virtue by the action of the will.”17 After they disobeyed God, they were not punished with physical death (which was natural and inevitable) but with “spiritual death.”18 If they lived virtuous lives, they would be resurrected in heaven; if not, they would be spiritually dead. This was true, not just of Adam and Eve, but of all human beings. The sin of Adam and Eve was not handed down to their offspring: each individual is born innocent and is free to choose virtue or vice.19 Augustine was appalled at this all-too-human interpretation of Genesis. How could Adam and Eve have had mortal and vulnerable bodies before the Fall? Revving up his rhetoric, he offers a horrifying portrayal of the “Pelagian paradise”: Let us place in that Eden, then, pregnant women, nauseated, pale, unable to tolerate food; others pouring out dead babies in miscarriages; others groaning and screaming during labor. And consider the children that are born: wailing, laughing, then talking and babbling, and later brought into school so that they might be taught to read while weeping beneath whips, canes, rods, and ingenious corporeal punishments. And, above all, there are countless diseases, demonic invasions, and bites of wild beasts (some that torment them, others that consume them entirely). And even

mind and virtue, not to a sexual act; and (3) that Adam and Eve had mortal bodies that could have reproduced and would have been granted immortality if they had not sinned (DBC 2.2). 17. OpImp. 3.82. See Lamberigts (2000) for a useful discussion of Julian of Eclanum and his debate with Augustine. 18. CJul. 4.14.65. 19. In advocating complete freedom of the will, the Pelagians attacked Augustine’s notion of the “perverted will” that was handed down by the original sin of Adam. For Augustine, humans do not have free will—they need the grace of God to make their virtuous actions possible.

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those who are healthy suffer pain and difficulty even with all the care of their parents, since there is grief and loss everywhere and longing for dead loved ones with all its heartache. It is a long task to pursue all the evils that abound in this life in Eden, yet none of these are due to sin!20

Needless to say, the Pelagian claim that humans were mortal (and lustful) in paradise ruined Augustine’s entire narrative of Eden and the Fall. For Augustine, all the pains of mortal life are due to sin, not to human nature in its original form. The rhetoric got more heated. Julian attacked Augustine’s version of edenic sex. Indeed, he poured scorn on Augustine’s suggestion that Adam had sex like a farmer sowing seeds in a field. As Augustine had put it in the City of God: “The instrument created for the task would have sown the seed on the ‘field of generation’ as the hand now sows seed on the earth.”21 Julian had a field day with this farming metaphor. As he claimed, Augustine would have preferred that humans did not have penises or vaginas at all: the whole of the woman’s body would have been a fertile “field.” Adam would have used plows and hoes to sow his seeds in Eve. And he would “harvest” the ever-fecund fields of her body. The poor woman would be scraped all over with farming tools! And Eve would have “sweated” children out of the pores and joints of her body—“like lice” (he adds)!22 Augustine clung to his basic argument. Adam and Eve were not a part of nature: they were immortal and did not grow and die like plants or animals. Indeed, Augustine’s whole narrative rests on the assumption that Adam and Eve were above the earthly world and the food chain. Though they had

20. OpImp. 3.154: Placetne vobis, ut ponamus ibi . . . gravidas nauseantes, fastidiantes, pallentes, alias in abortu puerperia immatura fundentes, alias in partu gementes et ululantes natosque ipsos omnes flentes, sero ridentes, serius loquentes et hoc balbutientes, in scholas postea duci, ut litteras discant, sub loris, ferulis virgisque plorantes, pro varietatibus ingeniorum distributa varietate poenarum, insuper innumerabiles morbos et daemonum incursus et ferarum morsus, quibus quidam cruciarentur, quidam et absumerentur; qui vero sani essent, sub incertis eorum casibus misera parentum sollicitudine nutrirentur; essent ibi etiam utique orbitates et luctus et amissorum carissimorum desideria cum doloribus cordis. Longum est persequi omnia, quibus malis abundat haec vita, nec sunt tamen ista ulla peccata. 21. CD 14.24 (the “field of generation” is an allusion to Virgil’s Georgics 3.136; there, the farmer prepares his mares for the seed to be sown in this “field”). Augustine uses the same image of the farmer in DNC 2.14.29. 22. OpImp. 5.14–15. Note that Julian’s lengthy treatises are not extant; we must extract his arguments from Augustine’s texts. See Pagels (1988, chap. 6) for an account of the Pelagian attack on Augustine’s doctrine of original sin (and Augustine’s counterattacks). See also Clark (1986d) and Lamberigts (2000).

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animal bodies, they were not ordinary animals. They did not experience the pain of hunger, thirst, disease, or aging. Yet (paradoxically) they did nourish their bodies with food and drink, and they were able to procreate: Adam and Eve would not have died if they had not sinned. Still, as human beings, they took nourishment since they had bodies that were not yet spiritual but animal (that is, earthly). Of course, those bodies did not get old and senile, and they did not die. The wonderful grace of God granted them this immortal condition, which they got by eating from the Tree of Life. . . . Of course they also took other kinds of food. . . . The purpose of these other foods was to prevent their animal bodies from experiencing any distress through hunger or thirst. (CD 13.20)

What does it mean to eat and drink before one is hungry or thirsty? Or to nourish a body that is not subject to disease or death? Augustine’s “literal” reading of Genesis offers the impossible notion of “immortal animals.” The Pelagians took Paul’s claim that “the first man was from the earth, a man of dust,” quite literally: Adam and Eve were created as mortals. Augustine, by contrast, wrested Adam and Eve out of nature, making them transhumans rather than humans.

TIME IN PARADISE Augustine’s Eden is—for the secular reader—a thought experiment that focuses on a felicity characterized by the lack of desire (cupiditas). Of course, there was love (amor) in Eden: Adam and Eve loved one another and also loved God. But this love did not take the form of a lack; rather, it featured an overflowing abundance that precluded all desire: Did the first human beings experience [painful] emotions in their animal bodies before they sinned? . . . Well, if they did feel these, how could they have been happy in paradise? Can anyone really be described as happy if he experiences fear or pain? And how could they fear anything when there was an abundance [afluentia] of good things and no threat of death or bodily sickness and when nothing was lacking [nec aberat]? . . . The pair lived in a happy partnership; their love [amor] for God and each other was uninterrupted. From this love sprang great joy since the object of their love was always present for their enjoyment [non desistente quod amabatur ad fruendum]. (CD 14.10)

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Clearly, all good things were “present” to Adam and Eve, and this effectively preempted the experience of desire. In Eden, the activities of eating and drinking offered a nourishment that prevented any feeling of need. The edenic beings never experienced bodily desires such as hunger, thirst, or lust. Augustine says quite explicitly that Adam and Eve did not experience desire (cupiditas).23 But, where there is no desire, there is also no hope. There is nothing to look forward to—no future good to hope for—since all goods are present at hand. Augustine makes this clear in a rather shocking passage in the City of God: Who would deny that the first human beings were happier in paradise, before their sin, although they had no certainty how long their bliss would last or whether it would continue forever [quamvis sua beatitudo quam diuturna vel utrum aeterna esset incertos]. . . . The first man was more blessed in paradise than any righteous man in this state of mortal frailty, as far as the enjoyment of the present good is concerned. But, as for the hope of the future [spem futuri], any human person in the extreme of bodily suffering is happier than those first beings. For it has been revealed to man with the certainty of truth—it is not mere opinion—that, free from all distress, he will share with the angels the endless enjoyment of God, whereas that first man, in all that bliss of paradise, had no certainty about his future.24

Here, Augustine claims that—“as for the hope of the future”—fallen human beings are “happier” than Adam and Eve because they possess hope! Although this may seem inconsistent with Augustine’s claim that Adam and Eve were blissful in Eden, we must remember that they did not have minds that distended into the past and the future. For this reason, Adam and Eve had no “hope of the future” (spem futuri): they were, in some sense, hope-

23. CD 14.26. Note that Augustine distinguishes between the love (amor) of God and ordinary (and, thus, sinful) desire. More on this below. 24. CD 11.12 (emphasis added). Note especially the last seven lines: Quantum autem ad spem futuri, beatior quilibet in quibuslibet cruciatibus corporis cui non opinione, sed certa veritate manifestum est sine fine se habiturum omni molestia carentem societatem angelorum in participatione summi Dei quam erat ille homo sui casus incertus in magna illa felicitate paradisi. Augustine offers a different account in the earlier Literal Interpretation of Genesis: he claims that Adam and Eve had no foreknowledge of their future fall and were, thus, “uncertain”; however, they did have “faith and hope” (Genlitt. 11.18.23). See also DCG 11.31–32, where he argues that earthly humans have received a “more powerful” grace from Christ than Adam and Eve received from God in Eden.

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less beings. As I would argue, this is because they had no sense of time. They were able to enjoy abundant joy and love in the present and could have done so forever if they had not fallen. Indeed, in Augustine’s account, Adam and Eve appear to have little, if any, sense of the past or the future. Of course, they do have some form of memory: they remember God’s commands. But they have no real past to remember. What does Augustine mean by saying that Adam and Eve were “uncertain” (incerti) about their future? Clearly, this was not an intellectual uncertainty that drove them to desire knowledge. For they were not anxious or fearful about the future. Rather, they were uncertain because they had no sense of the future at all. For this reason, they had nothing to fear or to hope for. In Augustine’s view, miserable and sinful humans are, paradoxically, happier than Adam and Eve because the faithful have certainty of eternal joy at resurrection. Of course, Adam and Eve first experienced a sense of the past and the future after the Fall. At this point, they were temporalized. At the psychic level, their minds were stretched into the past and the future (through memory and expectation). And, for the first time, they had hope. One can have hope and fear only if one has first lost something and can remember this loss. This can take place only on earth, where the human body ages in earthly time while the mind distends in psychic time.

NATURE IN EDEN For my purposes, Augustine’s discourses on the edenic transhumans set the stage for an investigation of his conception of human embodiment. In his view, the earth is not the proper home for human beings: with their minds distended in time and their mortal bodies heading for death, they dwell on earth with a “pain for homecoming.” For the Christians, this pain was translated into a hope for a better future. In Augustine’s grand narrative, Adam, Eve, and their offspring had to experience loss in order to understand good and evil (and the anger and mercy of God). And they also had to cultivate hope for a “home” with God at the end of time. As Augustine claims: “[After the Fall] ‘the eyes of both were opened,’ not to enable them to see (they could do that already), but to enable them to distinguish the good that they had lost and the evil into which they had fallen” (CD 14.17). This eyeopening experience marks the humans’ first experience of time: the sense of having lost the good things they possessed in the past. It also generated a desire for a return from exile and a reintegration of the mind and the body. Before the Fall, the animal bodies of Adam and Eve did not age, get

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sick, or die. The bodies of animals, however, did not enjoy this privilege. As Augustine says in a discussion of Adam in Eden: “If the first man used his free will in proud disobedience, thus offending God, he should live like the beasts, under the sentence of death.”25 Even in Eden, animals were mortal beings, subject to death. Some of Augustine’s opponents criticized this claim: since mortality is associated with sin and animals do not sin, why should they die? Hypothetically speaking, fallen humans should be mortal and animals immortal. Augustine responded that it was natural and right for animals to eat one another: “Someone is going to ask: ‘Why do beasts injure one another? After all, they do not have any sins (and thus their actions cannot be seen as a punishment), and they do not gain any virtue by these trials.’ The simple answer is that some are the proper diet of others. And we have no right to say, ‘There shouldn’t be any animals on which others feed.’ All things, you see, as long as they continue to exist, have their own proper measures, numbers, and destinies” (Genlitt. 3.16.25). In Augustine’s scenario, the animals in Eden were part of the food chain—which is governed by earthly time—while Adam and Eve experienced divine presence. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were punished with mortal bodies: they entered into earthly time and were subject to bodily decay and death. They had to “live like the beasts” when they took on mortal bodies and became part of the food chain. What, we may ask, of edenic plants? Did the trees in Eden flower, fruit, and lose their leaves? It is difficult to imagine this happening in the absence of seasons (Augustine insists that the weather in Eden was always perfect). As Wallace Stevens put it so beautifully in “Sunday Morning”: “Does ripe fruit never fall?” The very notion of the falling and decaying of fruit makes little sense before the Fall. Yet Augustine insists that the natural world was in full operation in paradise. Eden is a paradoxical place: an earthly garden where humans do not die. Augustine offers no answers to these paradoxes. He does not dilate on these issues, though he does say that Adam and Eve’s life in Eden “was so brief that it did not last even until their offspring should have any experience of it” (CD 22.21). (Compare Dante, who claimed that Adam and Eve lived in Eden for a mere six hours; Milton gave them a much longer spell in Paradise Lost; Lord Byron wonders, in Don Juan, how they could have made it through twelve hours without having sex.) Of course, sin was inevitable—part of God’s plan—and it deserved the ultimate pun-

25. CD 12.22 (emphasis added). See also CD 13.1.

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ishment. God “justly” condemned the edenic beings to be mortal humans. Adam, Eve, and their offspring became earthly beings. In his discussion of nature in Eden, Augustine insists that even revolting animals that feed on sick or dead bodies were part of the original creation of paradise: There is an important question about the creation of the minutest animals, whether they were created in the original establishment of things or came from the putrefaction of mortal things. Most of them, you see, are either bred from sickly living bodies, or from excretions, or from the vapors or disintegration of corpses; some also come from rotting trees and grasses and some from rotten fruit. But we know that God created all these animals. Indeed, all things have within them a certain worth or grace of nature, each of its own kind, so that in these minute creatures there is even more for us to wonder at. . . . God made all things with his great wisdom . . . and did not leave even the very last and least of things without due shape or form. All things disintegrate through properties that are natural, even though this disintegration [dissolutionem] fills us with horror, punished as we are by our own mortality. (Genlitt. 3.14.22)

Of course, these animals became revolting only when Adam and Eve fell into time and mortality. After the Fall, humans took on bodies that aged and died in earthly time. Augustine’s description of the illnesses, excretions, putrefaction, and disintegration of the mortal body offers a vivid picture of the place of the human body in the food chain. Clearly, people feel horror at bodily disintegration because they are conscious that all humans will die and their corpses rot. The human mind—distended into memory and expectation in psychic time—reacts to the age and death of the body as it changes in earthly time. Indeed, the sight of other people aging, ailing, dying, and entering the food chain causes a sort of rage against nature. Augustine offers a Christian solution to the horrifying fact that humans are part of the food chain: “Animals injure living humans either as a just punishment or to provide them with healthy and useful tests and trials. . . . But some may ask why animals also tear and devour the bodies of dead humans. Well, it really doesn’t matter through what channels that lifeless flesh passes into the hidden depths of nature [in naturae profunda secreta] since this flesh will eventually be extracted and refashioned [reformanda rursus eruatur] by the marvelous power of the Creator” (Genlitt. 3.17.26 [emphasis added]). When animals have fed on dead humans whose trials are

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over, God will “extract” the human body from the food chain at the day of resurrection.

THE FALL Augustine discusses the Fall of Adam and Eve and their transformation into mortal humans in many texts. In all his accounts, he says that pride was the root of this evil.26 Eve’s sin, however, differed from Adam’s since God created the male and the female with different levels of rationality. As Augustine claims, Eve was designed for procreation, not conversation: “What was Eve made for if not to produce children? For what other help could she offer? She was not meant to help Adam till the soil since there was no need for such assistance. . . . In fact, a male would have been a much better companion for Adam if he grew tired of solitude. For two men would live much more happily together than a man and a woman—with conviviality and conversation and on equal terms” (Genlitt. 9.5.9.). As Augustine claims in the Trinity, women have less rationality and self-control than men.27 They contain the image of God in their souls only by being “conjoined” with the male; when separated from men, they are inferior beings, made to serve their male masters.28 Eve, then, was associated with the lower, irrational part of the soul: for this reason, she was fooled by the serpent’s claims. Adam, by contrast, had complete rationality and was not deceived. He agreed to eat the fruit because he did not want to be separated from Eve and was worried over her welfare (Genlitt. 11.42). In short, he consciously chose their “close companionship” over the love of God.29 As Rosemary

26. CD 14.13: “It was in secret that the first persons began to be evil; and the result was that they slipped into open disobedience. For they would not have done that evil act unless an evil will preceded it. Now, could anything but pride have been the start of that evil will? . . . And what is pride except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation [perversae celsitudinis adpetitus]?” As Pagels (1988, 107–9) suggests, Augustine associates free will with disobedience: humans were designed to “obey” God, not to “act according to their own will” (CD 14.15). See also Harrison (2006, chap. 6), who offers a useful account of the Fall. 27. See esp. Trin. 12.3.3–4.4, 12.7.9–12. 28. Trin. 12.7.10: “The woman together with her husband is the image of God so that whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the task as servant, a function that pertains only to her, then she is not the image of God.” In making these arguments, Augustine had to deal with two competing biblical passages: Gen. 1:27, which indicated that women were created in the image of God, and Paul’s 1 Cor. 11:7, which claimed that women should cover their heads because they are a secondary reflection of the image of God. On Augustine’s view of women as an image of God and also as an inferior being, see, e.g., Van Bavel (1989a, 1989b), Power (1994), Matter (2000), Meconi (2000), Ruether (2007, 54), and Stark (2007a, 2007b). 29. CD 14.11. See also Genlitt. 11.42.58.

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Ruether observes: “Adam’s particular sin lay in losing male rank by obeying his wife (his lower self), rather than making his wife obey him as her ‘head.’”30 Of course, as Augustine points out, Adam also had his own agenda: he (vainly) opted for power and self-rule over obedience to God. Augustine offers a vivid account of the Fall in the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: “As soon as they disobeyed the commandment, they were inwardly stripped naked, and grace deserted them. They had offended by some sort of feverish delusion and by the arrogant love of their own independent power. Then they cast their eyes on each others’ genitals and lusted after them with a stirring movement that they had not previously felt. So that is what their eyes were ‘opened to.’ ”31 Once Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they experience the “disease” (morbus) of lust, which turns their eyes toward each others’ genitals. They feel a “stirring movement” that is not in accord with their mind or their will. At this point, the body operates in opposition to the will. In addition, the now distended mind understands the loss of its original, unified state of grace. As I have suggested, Adam and Eve fell into a twofold temporality: earthly time and psychic time. Let us look first at earthly time, which involves the ongoing changes and needs of the body. The most obvious mark of the fall into earthly time is the bodily experience of hunger, thirst, and sensual desires. The body feels pain, gets sick, and deteriorates with age. And it will eventually die and enter the food chain. In addition—and this was a big one for Augustine—humans now had to deal with the unruliness of the genitals. After the Fall, the genitals became resistant to the human will: “At times, the sexual urge intrudes uninvited; at other times, it deserts the panting lover, and, though desire blazes in the mind, the body is frigid. In this strange way, lust refuses service, not only when one wants to procreate, but also when one desires wantonness. For the most part, lust solidly opposes the mind’s command; but, at other times, lust is divided against itself, and, having aroused the mind, it fails to arouse the body.”32 Augustine focuses primarily on the male genitals: the penis gets erect at the wrong time and will not perform at the right time. For Augustine, impotence is as important as untimely erections. Both give evidence of the sinful, unruly body. Before the Fall, “the flesh did not yet give proof of man’s disobedience

30. Ruether (2007, 54). 31. Genlitt. 11.31.41: Mox ut ergo praeceptum transgressi sunt, intrinsecus gratia deserente omnino nudati, quam typho quodam et superbo amore suae potestatis offenderant, in sua membra oculos iniecerunt, eaque motu eo quem non noverant, concupiverunt. 32. CD 14.16. See also DNC 1.6.7.

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by a disobedience of its own”; after the Fall, the penis had a mind of its own (so to speak).33 As Michel Foucault puts it: “The arrogance of sex is the punishment and consequence of the arrogance of man. His uncontrolled sex is exactly the same as what he himself has been towards God—a rebel.”34 When Adam and Eve fell into mortal bodies (which dwell in earthly time), they also fell into psychic time. How did they experience temporality after the Fall? They received bodies that were subject to aging, disease, and death. And, crucially, they became conscious of this fact. Their minds were now distended into memory and expectation. They now had memories of past ailments and losses, and they had expectations of their own future deaths. They thus came to realize that their bodies would die like the beasts and enter the food chain.35 The mind lost its former integration and self-presence and was stretched out in time. As Augustine puts it in a description of the effects of the Fall: “As a result of that offense, [human nature] was subjected to all the process of the decay that we see and feel and (through that) to death; and the human psyche fell into confusion [ perturbaretur] and fluctuation [fluctuaret] as a result of the many great affections that were in combat within it.”36 In this passage, Augustine begins with the bodily “decay” over time and then moves to the psychic experience of time. The human bodies ages and dies in earthly time. But humans “see and feel” this fact because their minds stretch away from the present into memory and expectation. The language in this passage—being “confused,” “tossed about,” “fluctuating,” “swollen up”—picks up on the discourse that Augustine uses in his discussion of time and memory in the Confessions (I will analyze this in the next chapter). In Confessions 10–11, Augustine identifies the temporal distention of the mind (which “swells” beyond the present) with confusion and instability. He also claims that the mind contains a welter of “dispersed”

33. CD 14.17: “It is right to be ashamed of lust, and it is right that the members that it moves or fails to move by its own power, and not in complete conformity with our decision, should be called pudenda (‘parts of shame’), which they were not called before man’s sin; for, as scripture tells us, ‘They were naked and yet felt no embarrassment.’ This was not because they had failed to notice that they were naked but because nakedness was not yet disgraceful, because lust did not yet arouse their members independently of their decision. The flesh did not yet give proof of man’s disobedience by a disobedience of its own.” 34. Foucault (1985b, 370). See also Markus (1990, 61): “Man’s estrangement from god is reenacted in his estrangement from his body.” 35. “When they forfeited this condition, their bodies were subject to disease and death, which are present in the flesh of animals” (Genlitt. 11.32.42). See also CD 12.22. 36. CD 14.12: Ut tantae corruptioni, quantam videmus atque sentimus, et per hanc subiaceret et morti, ac tot et tantis tamque inter se contrariis perturbaretur et fluctuaret adfectibus.

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and “disordered” memories of past and ongoing events. The terminology that he uses in his theories of memory and time in the Confessions is directly echoed in his discussions of the Fall of Adam and Eve. As he puts it in the Confessions: “If Adam had not fallen away from You, there would never have flowed from his loins the brackishness of that sea that is the human race, so deeply curious, swollen in its storms, restlessly flowing here and there” (Non esset lapsus Adam, non diffunderetur ex utero eius salsugo maris, genus humanum profunde curiosum et procellose tumidum et instabiliter fluvidum; Conf. 13.20.28). For Adam, Eve, and their offspring, the mind is “swollen,” “fluctuating,” and “dispersed.” This mental dispersion is the effect of the Adam and Eve’s fall into psychic time. Augustine refers to this new experience of time in a fascinating passage in the City of God: Whereas the flesh is said to desire something or to suffer pain, it is, in fact, the man himself who has this experience. . . . Bodily pain is really nothing but a distress [offensio] in the soul arising from the body. This produces a disagreement with what is happening to the body [ab eius passione dissensio]. Likewise, mental pain—which we call sadness—is a disagreement [dissensio] with what has happened to us against our will. And sadness [tristitia] is usually preceded by fear [metus], which is also something in the soul, not the body. In contrast, bodily pain is not preceded by anything that we may call “bodily fear” [metus carnis], felt in the organism before the pain. (14.15)

The soul is in a state of dissent—it senses two different things that are at odds with one another. This inner dissension is a sign of a distended mind. The mind can sense different things because it has memory and expectation. In addition, it is connected to a human body that experiences pain and varying desires. In reacting to physical pain, the mind feels sad because the body is afflicted. But this sadness does not focus simply on the present pain: the mind remembers the period before the onset of pain and suffers over the loss. In addition, it feels fear—fear of more pain and loss. It swells into the past and into the future. It experiences the present pain in the mode of memory and expectation. The body, by contrast, feels pain or pleasure at any given moment but does not experience any sort of bodily fear of an imminent pain. This is because this body is located in a single place in the here and now and feels pains and pleasures as they come. While the body is situated in the ongoing now, the mind cannot dwell in the present: it experiences inner dissension because it is stretched into memory and

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expectation. This mental dissent with what is happening to the body shows that Adam and Eve have fallen into psychic time: these transhumans have become human.

THE RESURRECTED BODY Though he celebrated the bodily and psychic integrity enjoyed by Adam and Eve, Augustine had no interest in returning to Eden. In Christian theology, the Fall is a forward movement in a teleological narrative that ends on Resurrection Day. Indeed, the Fall of Adam and Eve generates a sort of nostalgia for the future. The word nostalgia was coined from the Greek words algia (pain) and nostos (homecoming).37 Since God was once the home for Adam and Eve and will later be an eternal home for Christians on Resurrection Day, Augustine’s feelings of nostalgia are rooted in his primal desire for a divine (and unearthly) habitation: “In Your house, there is no wandering [ peregrinata non est] . . . and none of the vicissitudes of time” (Conf. 12.11.13). The Christian goes home to God at the end of time rather than backward to an edenic, prelapsarian state. For Augustine, humans live as wanderers and resident aliens (peregrinati) on earth, exiled from their homeland. As Julia Kristeva observes, this discourse reflects Augustine’s desire to find “a signifying or symbolic elsewhere where he exists as a sheltered exile.”38 Let us fast-forward to the end: the resurrection of the body on Judgment Day. Many Christian theologians in late antiquity argued that the human body (and not just the soul) would be resurrected at the end of time. In contrast to the Platonists, who claimed that the philosophic soul would depart from the body at death and live an entirely spiritual life, Augustine argued that humans would get their bodies back on Judgment Day. This notion was based, in large part, on the belief in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. Christian theologians attempted to explain the resurrection of human bodies by referring to the famous passage from Paul: “How do the dead rise again? Or with what kind of body will they come? . . . There are bodies that are celestial and terrestrial. . . . So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it will rise in incorruption. . . . It is sown a natural body; it will rise a spiritual body. . . . We will not die, but we will all be changed. The trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:35–52). Paul’s reference to a 37. For an excellent discussion of nostalgia, see Boym (2001). 38. Kristeva (1980, 206).

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“celestial” or “spiritual” body gave rise to many different interpretations in Christian theology. Slowly, theologians came to a consensus that humans would receive their own individual bodies back at the end of time—bodies that would be perfected by God and transformed into a changeless and integrated whole.39 The resurrected body dwells outside earthly time in the presence of God. It is not a body as we know it: in contrast to the earthly body—which experiences pain, desire, deterioration, and death—it is eternally changeless, perfect, and incorruptible. And it dwells outside the food chain: it can neither eat nor be eaten. As Carolyn Bynum has shown, eating and digestion took center stage in the theological discussions of the resurrected body.40 Many theologians used the story of Jonah and the whale as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the human body at the end of time. The whale swallowed Jonah, who was dead and entombed for three days; on the third day, it regurgitated Jonah fully alive, all in one piece. The Jonah story offered “evidence” that every part of an individual’s body would be restored on Judgment Day. The earthly human body, of course, was part of the food chain: before death, worms, insects, and other animals ate away at it; after death, it was entirely eaten by beasts of all kinds. In short, the earthly world devours the body. But the body will be taken back from this earthly maw at the end of time. In order to restore his or her own body to each individual, God had to get all the bodily parts back from the digestive systems of the animals and from the soil of earth. Theologians took quite literally Luke’s claim that “not a hair of your head will be lost” (Luke 21:18). Though this passage in Luke does not refer to the resurrection, it provided evidence that the glorified body would include all the individual’s bodily parts, including every hair on the head. Consider a few examples of this point: the author of the Acts of Paul says: “Resurrection is of all our particular flesh. . . . We rise as did Jonah from the Whale, without a single hair or eyelash lost.”41 Tertullian (ca. 200 CE) makes a similar point in The Resurrection of the Body. To prove that every part of the human body is resurrected in all its particularity, he says:

39. For useful discussions of theological views of resurrection in late antiquity, see Grant (1948), Marrou and Bonnardière (1966), Mourant (1969), Van Eijk (1971, 1974), Miles (1979, chap. 5), Hinard (1987), Brown (1988, 46–51, 441–43), and Bynum (1995, 1–104). Note that Synesius of Cyrene (circa 373–414 CE), a contemporary of Augustine’s, did not believe in the resurrection of the body, though he was ordained as a Christian bishop in Alexandria (Miles 1979, 111). 40. See Bynum (1995, 53–58 and passim). 41. “Acts of Paul,” Coptic MS version, pars. 4, 39 (from Elliot 1993, 275, 280). See also the Book of Enoch 61.5.

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“You have it declared in scripture: ‘And I will command the fishes of the sea, and they shall cast up the bones that they have devoured, and I will bring joint to joint and bone to bone.’” In short, God will hunt down every bone and joint within the digestive systems of earthly animals. As Tertullian goes on to say: “In the case of Jonah we have good proof of God’s power since he comes forth from the fish’s belly uninjured in both his natures— his flesh and his soul” (32). The resurrected body, then, will be taken out of nature, out of the food chain. We find many iconographic depictions of this event in a number of churches and monasteries. Consider the beautiful mosaic of the Last Judgment in the cathedral at Torcello. There, we see an extraordinary scene of animals regurgitating various bodily parts. The angels take arms and legs, quite graphically, out of the food chain and restore them to (amputated) humans. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection was grounded in a rejection of time and nature.42 It made a frontal assault on the very food chain that gives humans life in the natural world (and also recycles the human corpse). Augustine associates the earthly body with change, disintegration, and death. At resurrection, however, death “shalt die” (as Donne put it), and the human body will be reintegrated. Why, we may ask, do people need to get their bodies back at all when these have caused them so much trouble on earth? And why should they get back all their bodily parts in heaven? Ancient theologians discussed these issues in copious detail, offering radically different views of the resurrected body. They relied on different passages from the Bible in their efforts to conceptualize resurrection. Some used biological metaphors (seeds growing into plants, eggs hatching, trees putting forth leaves), whereas others turned to metaphors of assemblage (a shattered pot restored, a temple rebuilt, a shipwreck reassembled). As Bynum shows, in the late fourth and the early fifth centuries, Latin theologians tended to avoid biological metaphors. They rejected the idea of a new thing growing out of a separate element. Theologians such as Jerome and Augustine thus moved from biological metaphors to the metaphors of assemblage.43 They focused on material continuity and bodily integrity. Augustine’s conception of the resurrected body determined the entire scholastic debate in the Middle Ages.44 In his early, Platonic works, Augustine 42. In spite of the fact that the natural world was considered good and beautiful because it was the creation of God. 43. Bynum (1995, 72 and passim). See also Grant (1948), Marrou (1966), Marrou and Bonnardière (1966), Mourant (1969), Dewart (1986, chap. 7). 44. On his mature view of the resurrected body, see Sermo. 361, 362; Ench. (421–23 CE); DCM (421–24 CE); and esp. CD bk. 22 (425–27 CE).

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did not believe in bodily resurrection; only the soul or spirit moved into eternity after death. But he changed his mind by 400 CE: the spiritual body referred to by Paul now had bodily substance.45 As Augustine put it: “What will the body be like, a body that will in every way be subject to the spirit— being made fully alive by the spirit, it will need no food to nourish it! For it will be not an animal body but a spiritual body, having the substance of flesh but without any fleshly corruption” (CD 22.23). The spiritual body, then, is a physical body that is completely “subject to the spirit.” It does not have animal needs (such as hunger or thirst) since it has no needs at all: “The bodies of the saints, after the resurrection, will not need any tree to preserve them from death or disease or old age, nor will they need any material nourishment to prevent distress from hunger or thirst” (CD 13.22). How, then, does God create the resurrected body, and what form does it take in heaven? In City of God 22, Augustine says that God will restore every single part of an individual’s body. He takes quite literally the claim in Luke 21:18 that “not a hair on your head will be lost.” Every single part of a person’s body is recovered by God, even if a body has been mutilated, eaten, burned, or decomposed: Whatever has perished from living bodies or corpses will be restored after death . . . it will rise—changed from the old animal body into a new spiritual body and clothed with incorruption and immortality. And even if—by some dire misfortune or the savagery of foes—the whole body should be utterly ground to dust and scattered into the air or water so that it has almost no existence at all, it will be removed from these places by the omnipotence of God. No, not a hair of its head will be lost. The “spiritual flesh” will be subject to spirit, but it will still be flesh, not spirit. (22.21)

The resurrected body will look like its human original, but with all its deformities removed. Every individual will be completely beautiful and perfectly proportioned: “When some ugliness is innate in a human body—which is a sign of punishment for the present state of mortals—the restoration will be such that the ugliness will disappear while the basic substance is preserved intact. Indeed, a human artist can melt down a statue that is deformed and recast it into perfect beauty so that none of its substance is lost, but only its

45. See Sermo. 361 and 362, the two most important sermons on resurrection (Augustine delivered them in the winter of 410–11, after the sack of Rome).

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ugliness” (22.19).46 Each individual will receive his or her own body—with all its particularities—at the time of resurrection: “To be happy, souls need not flee from the body but must receive an incorruptible body. And in what incorruptible body will they more fittingly rejoice than in the very one in which they groaned while it was corruptible?” (22.26). Indeed, Augustine thinks that it is likely that each person will have his or her own body when it was (or would have been) thirty years old (since this is the apex of human life and also the age at which Christ was thought to have died).47 Many theologians in late antiquity considered women a defective human form and argued that the saints would be resurrected in male bodies. As Augustine observes: “Because of these sayings—‘until we reach the perfection of manhood, the stature of the full maturity of Christ,’ and ‘being shaped into the likeness of God’s Son’—some think that women will not keep their sex at resurrection but will rise again as men since God made man out of clay and woman out of man” (CD 22.16). Augustine disagrees. If humans are to get every part of their bodies back, they will keep their sexual form: “The female sex is not a defect but a natural state. Of course it will not have intercourse or childbirth in heaven; the female parts, not suited to their old uses, will achieve a new beauty, and this will not arouse the lust of the beholder (for there will be no lust). Rather, it will inspire praises of the wisdom and goodness of God” (22.17). Once again, Augustine insists on the particularity of the individual. Though the female body was designed for reproduction, it no longer uses its reproductive organs but simply shines with beauty. At resurrection, the mortal and corruptible human body becomes a perfect and eternal body that is in complete accord with the spirit. As we have seen, Augustine insists on material continuity in his account of resurrection—God gets all the pieces of a person’s body back. But this account created

46. See CD 22.15, where Augustine says that the fat person will be slimmed down and the thin person beefed up. Compare Ench. 23, 89–90. 47. CD 22.15. This leads Augustine to the difficult problem of the death of infants or children. He argues that these youngsters had the potential to be adults, even if they have not fulfilled this potential: “They have it in design, not in actual mass, just as all the members already potentially exist in the seed, and even after birth some things are still lacking, such as teeth. . . . How could the Creator who made all things from nothing lack materials to add?” (CD 22.14). But this argument calls into question Augustine’s claim that God will get every material element back that made up a person’s body. Here, God does not use the same lump of clay; rather, he adds to the young body the matter it would have had if it had lived to age thirty. Note that Augustine reverts to the biological metaphor in this passage (which is not consistent with the assemblage metaphor).

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difficult conceptual issues. For example, since people grow hair and nails throughout their lives, they should get all this back on Resurrection Day. Augustine offered a solution to this problem: Now what answer can I give to the question about hair and nails? Once you understand that . . . nothing will be allowed to perish, then you will see that those things that might cause a monstrous enormity will be restored to the total mass of the body, not to the places where they would cause an ugly disproportion. For example, if a vase was made of clay and the whole was then reduced to the original lumps of clay and re-created a second time, it would not be necessary for that part of the clay that formed the handle to return to the new handle or the clay at the base to form a base again. . . . Rather, all the clay will turn into all the vase with no parts lost. Accordingly, if the hair (cut time after time) and the nails (regularly trimmed off) would produce ugliness by returning to their old places, they will not return to those areas. (22.19)

Happily, hair and nails will be reused in other parts of the body. As the vase metaphor suggests, God will make the body into a single lump of clay, which he then will use to re-create the original body into a perfect and beautiful form. In short, God will hunt down every part of the original body, taking it out of nature and the food chain: “As for bodies that have been consumed by wild beasts, or those parts that have disintegrated into dust and ashes, or those parts that have dissolved into moisture or have evaporated into air . . . it is inconceivable that any nook or cranny of nature, though it may hold those bodies concealed from our detection, could elude the notice of the Creator” (CD 22.20). There is something almost poignant about this removal of human matter from earthly matter. Clearly, this theological doctrine responds to the human fear of death and bodily decay. But it also marks a rejection of the earthly world that grounds our life.

HEAVENLY VISIONS In his discussion of the resurrected body, Augustine makes an important distinction between utility and beauty. On earth, our bodies are useful whether or not they are beautiful. After resurrection, utility disappears: “Hence we can easily infer that in the design of the human body dignity was a more important consideration than utility. For need [necessitas] is transitory; and a time will come when we will enjoy [ perfruamur] each other’s beauty for

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itself alone, without lust” (CD 22.24). Clearly, all resurrected bodies in the City of God will be beautiful, each in its own individual way.48 And, since the saints appear in their own individual bodies, they will all recognize one another (CD 22.29).49 Indeed, even the inner organs will be visible, in all their splendor: All the limbs and inner organs [membra et viscera] of the incorruptible body, organs now assigned to various necessary uses [ per usus necessitatis varios], will contribute to the praise of God, for then there will be no necessity [necessitas], but a happiness that is full, sure, untroubled, eternal. All those things . . . that now are hidden will appear, arranged through all parts of the body, within and without. A delight in the rational beauty of these, and all other things whose wondrous greatness will there be seen, will inflame the hearts of all rational beings to praise their great Creator.50

The resurrected body will look a bit like the Pompidou Center, with the inner organs on view. Not surprisingly, Augustine elevates vision over the other bodily senses in heaven: in contrast to the other senses, one can (almost) imagine having a static vision that does not take up time. Yet we may wonder why the resurrected saints need to see each other when they can eternally gaze at God. Augustine argues that seeing the design of the human body will lead the saints to praise the Creator ever more strenuously. Paradoxically, the intestines and organs that were made for earthly life—for eating, digesting, excreting, and procreating—take on beauty when they are no longer in use. On earth they were always changing, always in flux. Now they are eternally

48. Augustine imposes his own views about beautiful bodies on the resurrected saints—no one will be fat or thin, and the men will all have beards (though he offers no comments on female hairdos). See the rich discussion of philosophical theories of beauty in the West in Nehamas (2007), who offers an original interpretation of the way in which humans invest themselves in the things they find beautiful (beauty seems to promise happiness but does not always deliver). 49. Indeed, they will even be able to read each other’s minds: “Our thoughts will also be mutually open to one another [ patebunt etiam cogitationes nostrae invicem nobis]” (22.29). See Marrou and Bonnardière (1966, 129) for a discussion of Augustine’s notion of individuality in heaven. As Bynum (1995, 98) observes, Augustine “did not set himself the task of solving problems of identity and/or individuation” in any detail. 50. CD 22.30. See also CD 22.24: “If we were aware of it, we should find in the internal organs that make no display of beauty a beauty [ pulcritudo] of proportion so delightful as to be preferred to all that gives pleasure to the eyes in the outward form—preferred, that is, in the judgment of the mind, of which the eyes are instruments.” See also Sermo. 243.3–4.

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useless. They simply serve as a sign of God’s design. But surely this sign is no longer necessary: God is now present, and he has replaced the original human body with a much better design. Paradoxically, in looking at each others’ transhuman bodies, the saints see a fossilized human body. We may infer that this vision reminds them that they have escaped from earthly bodies and their former place on the food chain. In the City of God, the saints will know and see God “face to face” in the “eternal now.”51 In his discussions of human embodiment on earth, Augustine places great weight on language (which is associated with time). In his account of the resurrected transhumans, by contrast, he focuses on vision. Unlike hearing, which is grounded in process, vision is more static. Of course, we do not see all things at once on earth. But the saints in the City of God see all beautiful beings simultaneously (both physically and spiritually).52 Still, Augustine portrays the saints as turning their eyes in different directions and also blinking. Although he struggles to offer a vision of eternal presence, his claim that the resurrected saints have corporeal bodies makes it impossible for him to portray them in a static condition.53 Although Augustine sometimes refers to heaven as the “house” of God, his final picture is that of a city. In contrast to the depiction of the New Jerusalem in Revelations, there is no architecture in Augustine’s City of God. Augustine does suggest (following Paul) that there will be a “new earth and a new heaven.” Indeed, he claims that the universe will not be “annihilated” but “transformed”: the “outward form” disappears, but the “substance” is retained (CD 20.14). But this new substance has no relation to the earth as we know it. As Paula Fredriksen points out: “Defying both ancient Christian tradition and contemporary scientific thinking, Augustine insists that these corporeal bodies will dwell in the heavens. The Kingdom of God will not come on earth. Apocalyptic traditions of agricultural and human fecundity and harmony thus drop out of Augustine’s picture.”54 This should come as no surprise since the point of resurrection is to separate humans

51. As O’Daly (1999, 225) points out, it is unclear whether the resurrected saints experience eternity as “everlasting duration” (and, thus, experience some change) or the full and “eternal presence” of God. 52. Augustine ponders whether the saints will see God with their physical eyes: “Since it is certain that bodies are seen by the spirit, what if the power of the spiritual body is to be so great that spirit may also be seen by a body?” Although he admits some uncertainty about this issue, he believes that their eyes will see God (CD 22.29). See Miles (1983) for a discussion of physical vision and spiritual vision. 53. Note that Augustine associates motion with time. See, e.g., CD 12.16. 54. Fredriksen (1991, 86). See Marrou (1957, 72) on Augustine’s lack of interest in the redemption of the earth.

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from the earth. There are no plants or animals in the City of God. The resurrected saints are the only remaining earthly species. In Augustine’s City of God, the saints form a hierarchy even though they all have perfect bodies and souls.55 As scholars have shown, the theologians in this period insisted on a hierarchy of holiness even in heaven (as a reflection of social hierarchies on earth).56 According to Augustine, each individual receives a different degree of glory and honor. Interestingly, in Augustine’s theology, male and female saints can receive equal status in the City of God. Sexual practices on earth (rather than gender) place people in different tiers in heaven: Augustine ranks perpetual virgins above spouses and widows who chose celibacy after having had sex, and he puts all these above married people who engaged in sexual intercourse.57 In spite of this ranking, however, the lesser saints will not envy their superiors in heaven: “Although one will have a gift inferior to another, he will have the gift of not wanting more than he has” (22.30). Of course, the martyrs have an exceptionally high status and have the privilege of bearing “beautiful” scars on their bodies: “We feel such extraordinary affection for the blessed martyrs that in the City of God we will want to see the scars of the wounds that they suffered for Christ’s name. . . . For in those bodily wounds there will not be deformity but only dignity [dignitas], and the beauty of their valor [virtutis pulcritudo] will shine out” (CD 22.19). In this heavenly city, Augustine finds new markers for civic status.58 The City of God exists outside time, but the saints engage in certain specific actions in heaven (actions that seem to have a temporal aspect). Augustine insists that there will be no idleness in heaven even though the saints will not do any work: “I do not know what other occupation will exist where there will be no idle inactivity and yet no toil out of need [nam quid aliud agatur, ubi neque ulla desidia cessabitur neque ulla indigentia laborabitur, nescio]” (CD 22.30). He wrestles with this issue: “You say to me, ‘What will I do [after resurrection]? There will be no use for our limbs there, so what will I do?’ Well, does standing, seeing, loving, and praising not seem to you to be an action?”59 In Sermon 163, he offers further thoughts on this issue. After rejecting business, work, and most physical activi-

55. CD 22.30. See also Sermo. 132.3.3. 56. See, e.g., Dewart (1986, chap. 7) and Bynum (1995, 90–92). 57. See Ruether (2007, 64). 58. See the discussion of Augustine’s notion of the City of God and its distinction from the city of the New Jerusalem in Revelations in O’Daly (1999, 53–66). 59. Sermo. 243.9.8: Sed dicis mihi: quid acturus sum? usus membrorum ibi non erit, quid acturus sum? Nulla actio tibi videtur stare, videre, amare, laudare?

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ties, he says that the saints will praise God for eternity: “All our activity will consist in singing ‘Amen’ and ‘Alleluia.’ . . . Do not be saddened by this carnal thought, brothers, imagining that, if you remain standing and singing ‘Amen’ and ‘Alleluia’ all day, you would faint with weariness and fall asleep while uttering these sounds. . . . We shall praise God not just for one day, but, just as these days have no end in time, our praise does not cease.”60 Clearly, he worries that the activities in heaven may seem tedious (and hard on the body). But, as he claims, there will be no boredom or exhaustion since the resurrected life of the saints will be like that of the angels. Consider Augustine’s eloquent account of angelic life in the Confessions: “[The angels] have no need to look up to this firmament and to read so as to know Your word. They ever see Your face, and there, without syllables requiring time to pronounce, they read what Your eternal will intends. They read, they choose, they love. They ever read, and what they read never passes away. By choosing and loving they read the immutability of Your design. Their book is never closed, nor is their scroll ever folded up. For You yourself are a book to them and You exist for eternity.”61 Of course, the angels do not have bodies, whereas the saints do. Once one adds the body, time and motion slip back into the picture. Augustine says that the resurrected saints will be insatiably satisfied by God’s presence and truth. As Hannah Arendt shows, Augustine conceived of desire as a lack that comes to an end when it is fulfilled. But, in heaven, the saints love God eternally: this love is not cupiditas but caritas (or amor).62 Caritas is not a lack but an abundance. As Augustine claims: “God will be the end of our desires [finis erit desideriorum nostrorum]; but the end of desire marks the beginning of eternal love. God will be seen without end [sine fine], will be continuously loved [amabitur], and will be praised without weariness” (CD 22.30). On earth, the Christian practices faith, hope, and love, but, after resurrection, only caritas remains: “Faith will be replaced by the sight of visible reality, and hope will end in the happiness that we will attain. But love will actually increase when these things pass away. . . . Temporal things differ vastly from eternal things: temporal objects are more

60. Sermo. 163.28–30. See Marrou (1966, 34) on the “eternal yes.” 61. Conf. 13.15.18 (from Chadwick 1992). 62. As Arendt (1929/1996) shows, the Platonic notion of love as “lack” or “craving” bumps up against the Pauline notion of love as spreading the wealth of God’s love. For the most part, Augustine uses the word cupiditas to designate the first kind of love and caritas to designate the second (though he is not perfectly consistent). Cupiditas aims at filling a need, whereas caritas is a form of abundance and enjoyment.

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lovable before they are possessed, but they lose their appeal once they are obtained . . . but the eternal, when obtained, is loved more ardently than when it is desired.”63 In the eternal city of God, then, the saints stand, see, love, and praise. Augustine puts this eloquently in the closing lines of the City of God: “There, we will be still and see, we will see and love, we will love and praise. Behold what shall be in the end without end. For what else is our end, except to arrive at the kingdom that has no end?” One has to read the Latin out loud to sense the beauty of this passage: Ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster est finis nisi pervenire ad regnum cuius nullus est finis (CD 22.30). Here, we sense in the passing of language something that is, for the resurrected saint, “non-sense.”

TIME AT THE END OF TIME In the passage quoted above, Augustine speaks of “arriving at” the eternal kingdom of God. “Arriving” (pervenire) takes place in time, but existence “in the end without end” marks an exit from time into eternity. The end of time—eternity—is, of course, unimaginable. As Giorgio Agamben observes: “The end of time is actually a time-image represented by a final point on the homogeneous line of chronology. But as an image devoid of time, it is itself impossible to seize hold of and, consequently, tends to defer itself.”64 In Eden, as we have seen, Adam and Eve lived in an earthly paradise where plants, trees, and animals were growing and dying. Though Adam and Eve were out of nature by virtue of being perfect and immortal, there were natural changes in Eden: the animals ate plants and other animals, and these living beings were subject to death. Since they had immortal animal bodies, Adam and Eve ate to nourish themselves, but they never experienced hunger, and they also had the capacity to reproduce. The resurrected saints, by contrast, dwell completely beyond the realm of change. They are, in the fullest sense, out of nature. Augustine worries about the very moment of this change. He offers an interesting reflection on Paul’s claim that humans will be resurrected “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye”: “Men will be resurrected in an atomic moment. Most of you do not know what an atom is. The word ‘atom’ comes

63. DDC 1.38.42. See also Soliloquies 1.6.13: “since instead of believing through faith we shall know and instead of hoping we shall possess.” 64. Agamben (2005, 70).

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from the Greek word tomê, meaning a ‘part’; atomos in Greek means that which cannot be divided. . . . Relative to time, the atom is so brief that it cannot be further divided . . . this is an instant so brief that it can almost be reduced to nothing” (Sermo. 362.18.20). This atomic moment marks the border between time and eternity. In fact, this instant that “can almost be reduced to nothing” is the temporal counterpart to the “place” of the “nothingsomething” that preceded form in the first creation of the physical world. In the creation ex nihilo, the nothing-something was the transitional place where matter moved from formlessness into form in the passing of earthly time. The atomic instant at the end of time marks the moment when the human bodies leave earth and crystallize into eternal perfection. And, in this same moment, the distended mind unifies in the presence of God. Here, the human beings on earth—whose bodies and souls are pervaded by the nothing-something—are transformed into unearthly beings that lack nothing. After the atomic moment “passes” into eternity, the resurrected saints are eternal somethings. One would think that the resurrected saints would have no sense of time in the City of God: no memories or expectations would distend their psyches into the past or the future. In fact, Augustine says that the saints will have some memory even at the end of time. First, they remember the evils and sorrows they experienced on earth: “Everyone will be free from evil and filled with goodness, incessantly enjoying eternal delights, with their past sins and punishments forgotten [oblita culparum, oblita poenarum]. But they will not forget their liberation and, for that reason, be ungrateful to their liberator. Using rational knowledge [scientiam rationalem], they will also remember past pains [memor praeteritorum etiam malorum suorum], but, as for actually feeling them, these pains are completely forgotten” (CD 22.30). The saints would not praise God unless they remembered past pains that have been healed up. If all memory were erased, then there would be no sense that God forgave all sins and liberated humans from sin and death. The narrative makes sense only if one has first lost something and then recovered it. But memory is a product of time. Augustine struggles with this problem and offers an odd solution: There are two kinds of knowledge of bad and painful things—one where they are not hidden from the mind, the other where they stick in the senses of a person who has experienced them [experientis sensibus inhaerent]. So also there are two kinds of forgetfulness of painful things. The man with intellectual knowledge forgets them in one way, while

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the man who has experienced and suffered them [expertus et passus] forgets them in another way. The former forgets if he neglects his learning, the latter if he is free from distress. It is through this second kind of forgetfulness that the saints will forget past pains, for they will be so undisturbed that these will be completely erased from their senses. But by the faculty of knowledge—which will be strong in them—they will know not only their own past but also the eternal misery of the damned. Otherwise, if they don’t know that they were once wretched, how will they sing the mercies of the Lord for eternity? (22.30)

Here, Augustine claims that the saints will have a rational memory of their earthly lives but that these memories will not generate sadness, anxiety, or sensual pain. And, even more importantly, the saints will remember not only their own individual pasts but also the “eternal misery of the damned.” This seems a bit harsh. Indeed, as Nietzsche claimed (vituperatively), the happiness of the Christian was rooted in the revenge of the weak and impotent against the life-affirming pagans. To take pleasure in the eternal punishment of the sinners looks like schadenfreude—the suffering of others makes the Christian feel that much better for being saved. Augustine would argue differently: the saints can understand divine mercy and grace only if they remember that people who did not live Christian lives were damned to eternal hell.65 One cannot experience the eternal reward if one does not understand that eternal punishment was the alternative. At any rate, the resurrected saints do have memory: their minds are ever so slightly distended into the past, but not into the future. Just as the edenic beings had some sense of the past but not of the future, the resurrected saints have no sense of the future—which has arrived—but some sense of the past. But, in both cases, there is neither hope nor desire: the edenic and resurrected transhumans experience happiness in the presence of God. The edenic beings and the saints experience both the physics and the metaphysics of eternal presence.

65. As he says in Ench. 94: “When reprobate angels and men suffer everlasting punishment, the saints will know even more fully the benefits that they have received by God’s grace. As they contemplate the facts, they will see clearly the meaning of the expression in the Psalms, ‘I will sing of mercy and judgment.’”

chapter two

Scattered in Time

Who has turned us around like this, so that Always, no matter what we do, we’re in the stance Of someone just departing? As he, On the last hill that shows him all his valley One last time, turns, stops, lingers—, We live our lives, forever taking leave. —Ranier Marie Rilke, Eighth Elegy

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cholars and thinkers who have worked on Augustine’s theory of time have focused almost exclusively on the mind. Indeed, many have argued that Augustine offered a purely psychological and subjective theory of temporality. Bertrand Russell, for example, claimed that Augustine’s “absorption in the sense of sin . . . led him to excessive subjectivity” so that he “was content to substitute subjective time for the time of history and physics.”1 Although Augustine did offer a subjective account of time in Confessions 11, he did not turn his back on “the time of history and physics.” On the contrary, he claimed that God created the natural world and its distinct temporality before he made humans. As we have seen, time was in operation even in Eden: animals died and entered the food chain even though Adam and Eve were not yet temporalized. Once they sinned, Adam and Eve (and their offspring) became mortal and were subject to time as it passes in the natural world. But humans do not experience this temporality in the mode of immediacy: while their bodies change in the passing now

1. Russell (1948, 212).

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on earth, their minds distend into the future and the past.2 As “embodied souls” dwelling on earth, humans live in two different time zones: earthly time and psychic time. Traditionally, scholars have differentiated between subjective and objective time. Plato and Aristotle, for example, viewed time as an objective cosmic phenomenon that was governed by the motion of the celestial bodies.3 In Augustine’s theory of mental distention in Confessions 11, by contrast, we find a subjective account of time: here, the focus is on internal time-consciousness. Yet his overall theory of temporality is not confined to mental distention or subjective time. For Augustine also analyzed the time that passes on earth, which is not a subjective phenomenon. When he examined time passing in the bodily realm, however, he turned away from the movement of celestial bodies. He chose, instead, to focus on animate bodies on earth that are subject to age and death. The lifeless heavenly bodies thus played a minor role in his discussion of time.4 In short, he turned from celestial to human bodies, which age and change as time passes. When he analyzes bodily change over time, then, he attends to biological rather than cosmological bodies.5 Since Augustine offers a heterochronic theory of time, I have chosen in this book to avoid the terminology of objective time and subjective time (which conjure up traditional approaches to ancient theories of time).6 Instead, I have introduced psychic time and earthly time. I use psychic time to refer to Augustine’s claim that the mind distends away from the present into the past and the future (via memory and expectation). I use earthly time to refer to the aging and changing of bodies in the natural world as the seasons pass. As I argue, Augustine’s notion of psychic time cannot be un-

2. The literature on Augustine’s theory of time is extensive. In dealing with the Confessions, some scholars claim that Augustine offers a purely subjective theory; others argue that he offers both a subjective and an objective theory of time. In addition to the seminal discussion of this issue in Ricoeur (1985, esp. vol. 1, chap. 1), see Arendt (1929/1996, 28–75), Guitton (1933/1959, chaps. 7–8), Meijering (1979), O’Daly (1981), Castoriadis (1991), Polk (1991), Wetzel (1992, chap. 1), Flasch (1993), Lloyd (1993, chap. 1), Cavadini (1994), and Teske (1996). 3. I discuss the theories of time offered by Plato and Aristotle below. 4. Though these bodies were, of course, subject to change (like all bodies) and would be destroyed at the end of time. Plato and Aristotle, by contrast, believed that the stars were inhabited by divine souls (and, thus, were not lifeless). 5. Of course, one can measure these biological changes in reference to a cosmological standard, but the human body changes whether or not one makes a temporal measurement. 6. One could, of course, attempt to link objective time to earthly time and subjective time to psychic time. I am not comfortable with this move: I have introduced new terminology in order to clarify Augustine’ heterochronic theory of time and to foreground his interest in time as it affects the human body and soul.

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derstood in the absence of the natural world, where the mortal body dwells. The human mind always stretches away from the present moment, but this is not a random or abstract present. Rather, a person’s mind distends from the presence of his or her own body. Yet the body itself, though it dwells in the passing now, changes and ages as earthly time moves forward. In his analysis of temporality in Confessions 11, Augustine uses as his key examples the articulation of a sound, a hymn, and a song. The vocalization of words and sounds over a specific temporal period allows him to measure the passing of time and to analyze the distention of his mind. Clearly, these examples have a sensual basis, yet scholars tend to ignore the role that the body plays in Augustine’s discussion of time in the Confessions. As we will see, the body grounds the mind in the (passing) present, even though humans experience time in the mode of mental distention. I want to focus on the interaction of psychic time and earthly time in human life. Augustine offers a theological as well as a philosophical analysis of temporality. In his view, the human experience of time is not a value-neutral fact of life. Being temporalized is a punishment for original sin: Adam and Eve “fell” into mortal bodies and distended minds.7 In the Fall, they lost both self-presence and divine presence. Since the body changes all the time and the mind stretches away from the present moment, human beings cannot experience the physics or the metaphysics of presence. Augustine laments over this condition: “I have been scattered in times [in tempora dissilui] whose order I do not understand. My thoughts—the very inmost bowels of my soul—are torn to pieces in tumultuous vicissitudes, until that day when, purged and made liquid by the fire of Your love, I will flow into You.”8 Here, he refers to the scattering and tearing apart of the unified edenic psyche that once enjoyed a (near) timeless presence. The human mind is “scattered in times,” pulled into a multitude of memories and expectations and thus denied self-presence. Augustine imagines his final fusion with God as a transformation of his scattered soul and mortal body into a liquid substance that flows into divine unity. Of course, this cannot happen in time: this confluence will occur at resurrection. Paradoxically, this flowing will stabilize into eternal presence.

7. As Marrou (1950) points out, Augustine’s view of time is ambivalent since salvation history is rooted in specific historical events (especially in the incarnation of Christ). Time is necessary for humanity to move from sin toward salvation. 8. Conf. 11.29.39: Ego in tempora dissilui quorum ordinem nescio, et tumultuosis varietatibus dilaniantur cogitationes meae, intima viscera animae meae, donec in te confluam purgatus et liquidus igne amoris tui.

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In this chapter, I begin by analyzing Augustine’s discussion of memory in Confessions 10, which forms the basis of his theory of time. I then turn to temporality, examining both earthly time and psychic time. I offer a detailed interpretation of Confessions 11, focusing on the way in which the body and the mind operate in Augustine’s discussion of time. Finally, I examine the “tensions” of the mind in his theory: attentio, intentio, distentio, and extendere. Augustine foregrounds these “tensions of time” in a passage at the end of Confessions 11 that brings together his accounts of memory, forgetfulness, and temporality: See how my life is a distention [distentio] in several directions. Your hand upheld me, You the mediator between You the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things. . . . May I be gathered up from the old days, following the One. Forgetting the past and moving not toward future things that are transitory but into the things that are before—not being distended but extended [non distentus sed extentus], and not in the mode of distention but with active-attention [non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem]—I follow the prize of the high calling. (11.29.39)

As Augustine claims, he is distended or stretched into different temporal directions (i.e., into memories of the past and expectations of the future). He thus experiences a sense of fragmentation and distraction.9 At the end of time, however, he will be “gathered together from the old days to follow the One” (God), who does not dwell in multiplicity or in “future things that are transitory.”10 At that point, having forgotten the past, he will dwell “in the things before.” To understand this discourse, we must look at the Pauline text that Augustine quotes and transforms in this passage. As Paul said in Phil. 3:13–14:

9. For a useful discussion of the history of the word distentio, see O’Daly (1977). As O’Daly rightly observes (p. 268), Augustine associates distentio with a cluster of verbs dealing with the human sorrow over being “poured forth” and “torn apart” into multiplicity: effundo, multiplico, dissilio, dilanio, gemo, ingemisco. See also Boros (1958), who uses the sermons, the Expositions of the Psalms, and the Confessions to argue that Augustine associates temporality with “dissolution,” “devastation,” “dispersal,” “agony,” “aging,” “banishment,” “exile,” “wandering,” “nostalgia,” “blindness,” and “darkness.” Wetzel (1992, 37) rightly identifies distentio with entropy. 10. Conf. 11.29.39. Note that Augustine mistranslates the Pauline passage: he takes unum autem as the object of sequor (“I pursue the One”); the correct translation of unum autem is “This one thing I do” (New Oxford Annotated Bible) or “All I can say is this” (New English Bible). As O’Daly (1977, 270) points out, this misreading “allows [Augustine] to refer to the unity/ plurality contrast basic to his understanding of time and eternity.”

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“This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and extending myself toward those things before [ͼᔬ ʹᔮ͵ ᔄ͸ͧͻ΁ ᓘ͸ͱͳͩ͵Ͱͩ͵΄ʹͭ͵ͷͺ ͼͷᖌͺ ͬᔮ ᓜʹ͸͹ͷͻͰͭ͵ᓘ͸ͭͲͼͭͱ͵΄ʹͭ͵ͷͺ], I press on toward the prize of the high calling.” What does it mean to extend toward those things before? The Greek verb epekteinein means “to extend away from and toward” something. Paul extends himself away from the past: indeed, he wants to forget the past and extend himself toward God, who is “before” all things. Augustine takes Paul’s notion of “self-extension” (translated in Latin as extendens me) and places it in the context of his theory of time: he puts distentio in relation to both “extension” and “active-attention” (non distentus sed extentus . . . non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem).11 Extension has a spatial element, yet Augustine is trying to get beyond space. And “those things before” has a temporal sense, yet God dwells in eternity. To understand these paradoxes, we must analyze Augustine’s discussions of memory, forgetfulness, and temporality. Before examining these issues, I want to place Augustine’s rather dense discourse on temporality in the context of lived experience. Consider a sermon that Augustine preached on Psalm 121 that shows the interaction of psychic time and earthly time in human life: Do not our years fail every day? Do they ever stand still? The years that have come exist no longer; those that are still to come have no existence yet. The years that have passed have already slipped away, and the years in our future will slip away in their turn. The same is true even of a single day. Take today: we are talking now, at this moment, but the earlier hours have slipped away, and the hours ahead have not yet arrived. When they have arrived, they too will slip away and fail. . . . A person has a body that is not absolute being because it has no stability in itself. It is changed with the passing ages of life, it is changed with the changes of places and of times, it is changed by the diseases and defects of the flesh. . . . Indeed, not even the human soul can stand still. It varies by countless changes and thoughts. It is altered by countless pleasures. By how many desires it is cleaved apart and distended [diverberetur atque distenditur]!12

11. I discuss the difference between extension and active-attention (intentio) below. 12. EnPs. 121.6. Note that CSEL uses distenditur while citing discinditur in the apparatus criticus.

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In delivering his sermons, Augustine offered a bodily performance to a congregation at a specific place and time.13 When he refers to the passing of time “today,” as “we are talking now,” then, he invites his listeners to note the mutability and mortality of their own bodies at the moment that he is speaking. In this sermon, Augustine starts with a general account of the passing of time from a nonexistent future to a nonexistent past. He then brings the congregation’s attention to the time that is passing as they listen to him speak. At this point, he focuses on the bodily realm. The body is changing all the time. It changes as the seasons go by. It needs nourishment and shelter to survive. It suffers ailments and diseases as it gets older. As an earthly organism, it is subject to the temporality of the natural world. Or, to put it in my terms, it changes and ages in earthly time. After discussing the body, Augustine turns to the soul and the mind: these, too, are “mutable.”14 The soul is “cleaved apart and distended” because the mind teems with thoughts and desires. Of course the soul’s mutability differs from that of the body. The soul is immortal and does not age the way the body does (though it is affected by bodily ailments and travails). Indeed, the soul and the mind experience the world in a fashion very different from the way the body does. For, in every action or event, the mind has memories of the past and expectations of the future. It faces a changing sense of limitations and possibilities. In the passage quoted above, Augustine says that the soul experiences changes in its own thoughts: the very ability to use language and have thoughts indicates that it has a sense of the past and the future. It also has desires—cupiditates—which differ from mere bodily appetites: these desires reflect the sense of lack or loss. It is memory that registers this lack and expectation that orients the soul toward filling this emptiness. Indeed, Augustine explicitly associates these psychic desires with distention: the soul stretches into memory and expectation as it reaches out for fulfillment. This reference to the soul’s desire evinces a larger psychic problem—the fall from the divine presence. In Augustine’s view, the Fall of Adam and Eve created in humans a multitude of desires (some physical, others psychological). These desires pull them away from God. Indeed, the very experience 13. In DDC 4.10.25, Augustine implies that he did not deliver his sermons from a written script (reading from a written script, he says, would be dull and boring for the listener and would not generate the desired response). 14. Note that Augustine does not distinguish between the soul and the mind in this passage; in his philosophical discussion of distention in Confessions 11, he focuses specifically on the mind (which is, of course, an aspect of the soul).

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of desire conjures up a feeling of lack. As Augustine believes, what we lack is divine presence. And we also lack self-presence. As a punishment for sin, the human mind is torn into pieces and pulled away from the present. It is distended (distenditur) into memories and expectations. In this sermon, then, we begin to see the interface between earthly time and psychic time in human life: the body ages in earthly time, while the mind distends in psychic time. In short, we find a heterochronic theory of time where two temporalities intersect in human embodiment. As I argue, we can grasp this heterochrony only if we do not extract the body from Augustine’s theory of time.

MEMORY AS THE “STOMACH OF THE MIND” Augustine offers a seminal account of memory in Confessions 10.15 This lays the foundation for his theory of time in book 11. He begins by spatializing memory, depicting it as a vast region full of dark and hidden caverns. Paradoxically, the memory is a “receptacle” (receptaculum) that has no real boundaries: “Memory’s huge cavern, with its mysterious, secret, and indescribable nooks and crannies. . . . This power of memory is great, very great. It is a vast and infinite profundity. Who can plumb its depths? This power belongs to my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of myself [nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum]” (10.8.13–15). Augustine moves into his memory in order to find both himself and God. In searching for God in his (evasive) self, he offers a powerful exploration of the complexities of human memory. In Confessions 10, Augustine does not offer a robust theory of memory, but his analysis formed the basis of later philosophical discussions. He begins by claiming that his memory contains “images” (imagines) of things that he has sensed in the past (through smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, seeing). These images allow him to remember and reenact these sensory experiences in his mind. For example, he can sing memorized songs without 15. Augustine also discusses memory in detail in the Trinity. (The context there, however, is the trinity within the human mind; I focus on his discussion of memory in the Confessions, which prepares for the theory of temporality.) His discussion of memory has been extensively analyzed. (For a detailed bibliography, see O’Donnell [1992, 3:174–78].) See, e.g., Arendt (1929/1996, 28–75) for a neo-Heideggerian reading of his discussion of time and memory; O’Daly (1987, 131–51) for an analysis of the operation of memory from the perspective of the philosophy of mind; Stock (1996, chap. 8) for a discussion of memory and the creation of the self; Ricoeur (2004, 96–102), who places Augustine’s account in philosophical and especially phenomenological contexts (see also the brilliant work on memory in Ricoeur [2004]); Carruthers (1998, 12–100) on “locational” memory operating in communal, monastic circles; and Fredriksen (2005) on memory in relation to God.

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using his voice, see things from the past without using his eyes, smell familiar scents without using his nose, and listen to once-heard sounds without using his ears: Where are all the things that have been brought into the memory, each by its own entry, preserved [servata], distinctly and under general headings? Clearly, light and all colors and bodily shapes enter by the eyes, sounds by the ears, smells by the entrance of the nostrils, tastes by the door of the mouth. . . . All these things enter into memory, each by its own gate, and are deposited there [reponuntur]. The objects themselves do not enter, but the images of the perceived objects [rerum sensarum imagines] are on hand for the mind of the person recalling them. (10.8.13)

In addition to sensory images of the external world, the memory contains impressions of past emotional experiences—events in one’s life that featured desire, joy, fear, and sadness (10.14.21). Augustine puzzles over the fact that he remembers these former emotions without feeling them in the present. He can remember happy feelings when sad and sad feelings when happy. As he claims in a bold (and bodily) metaphor, the memory is the “stomach [venter] of the mind.” The stomach does not taste the “food” of these past emotional events, but it stores these things up. Of course, Augustine is not remembering free-floating feelings but the particular events that generated these feelings—events that happened in specific places at specific times of his life. As he puts it: “There [in my memory] I meet myself and recall myself—what, when, or where I did something and how I was affected when I did this.”16 We can see how this works in the narrative in Confessions 1–9, where Augustine portrays scenes from his past that generated specific emotional responses. The emotions retained in his memory, then, are associated with particular places, people, actions, and events. As Augustine claims, the memory also retains things that are nonimagistic. The knowledge of the liberal sciences, mathematics, and geometry are examples of nonimagistic memories. Certain skills and modes of thought do not present themselves as images. Augustine says that these memories are “more remote in an interior place that is no place” (10.9.16). Not surprisingly, he begins to move beyond spatial metaphors when he discusses nonimagistic memories. As Brian Stock observes: “As [Augustine’s] analysis proceeds, the metaphor of static containment is increasingly at variance 16. Conf. 10.8.14 (emphasis added): Ibi mihi et ipse occurro, meque recolo, quid, quando et ubi egerim quoque modo, cum agerem, affectus fuerim.

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with this understanding of the dynamics of recollection. What emerges is a working distinction between memory as a place and remembering as a process.”17 Augustine describes the way in which memory works in cases where it does not deal with sensory images: When we do not draw images through our senses but inwardly discern [cernimus] things in themselves as they are—without images—we find that this is nothing other than learning [discere]: by thinking [cogitando], we gather together [colligere] things that the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way [indisposite]; and, by concentrating our mind [animadvertendo], we take care that these things in the memory— where they previously lay hidden, scattered, and neglected [sparsa et neglecta]—are ready at hand and come easily to our intentio. (10.11.18)

Through thought and concentration, the mind recollects memories that are remote and hidden away and brings them to hand. It gathers together memories that are scattered and dispersed and makes them available for present use. Here, Augustine introduces the notion of intentio, which will play a leading role in his discussion of time. In Confessions 10–11, he distinguishes between two kinds of attention: attentio and intentio. It is difficult to define the latter term: the English word intention is not a satisfactory translation. As we will see, intentio is an active and deliberate mode of attention that focuses on future plans and expectations. I thus translate it as active-attention.18 In the passage quoted above, the mind uses active-attention to find scattered thoughts in the memory and collects them together to use in carrying out a planned action or to engage in analytic thinking. Memory is, of course, central to the psyche’s experience of time: I remember all things—things that I either have experienced or have believed from the words of others. Out of the same store of memory I myself weave together [contexo] past events with various likelihoods [similitudines] of things that I have experienced or have heard from others. And also from this I meditate on future actions, events, and hopes. . . . 17. Stock (1996, 216). 18. As Carruthers (1998, 16, 100) points out: “If intentio is part of every memory image, it is the coloration or attitude we have towards an experience.” In short: “The idea of neutral or objective remembering was foreign to monastic culture. As much as it is involved with cognition, memory was recognized to be involved also with the will and desire. The classic statement of this is in the De Trinitate.”

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Thus, I talk to myself, and, when I do talk, the images of all the things that I speak of are at hand [ praesto] from this same treasury [thesauro] of my memory; and I couldn’t talk about any of these things if the images were not there. (10.8.14)

Memory, then, not only contains images and ideas from the past, but also governs expectation: the mind uses memory to “meditate on future actions, events, and hopes.” By delving into the memory, then, one also finds future possibilities. Augustine indicates that the mind constructs new and different ideas by using images and thoughts from the past contained in memory. This implies not just the reproduction of past images or ideas but creative imagination: one comes up with new thoughts by recourse to past ideas and experiences.19

MENTAL DISPERSION Augustine describes his memory as a receptacle that contains past events and material for future possibilities. But these past events are dispersed and disordered in the memory: only active-attention (intentio) can gather together these scattered pieces and form a thought or a plan of action. Thus, a person necessarily thinks and acts in the midst of scattered memories and nearly forgotten events. Indeed, memory itself disorders one’s mind even as it contains materials that can be made orderly by active-attention. Let us briefly examine Aristotle’s conception of memory, which helps us to theorize Augustine’s analysis.20 In On Memory and Recollection, Aristotle makes a distinction between “memory” (mnêmê) and “recollection” (anamnêsis). Consider first his analysis of memory: “One might ask how one can remember something that is not present since it is only the affection [ pathos] that is present and the fact/event is not. Clearly, the affection—which is produced by sensation [aesthêsis] in the soul and in that part

19. Augustine makes this point about creative imagination much more clearly in Trin. 8.6.9, 9.6.10, 11.5.8; and Genlitt. 12.6.15, 12.23.49, 12.24.51. O’Daly (1987, chap. 4) offers an excellent account of Augustine’s theory of the “reproductive” and “creative” imagination. See also Carruthers (1998, 16–31) and Miller (2005a, 29–36). As Augustine says in Trin. 11.5.8: “The consciousness has the power of fabricating not merely things that have been forgotten but even things that have never been sensed or experienced; it can compose them out of things that have not dropped out of the memory by increasing, diminishing, altering and putting them together as it pleases. . . . Here one has to be careful not to lie or deceive” (from Hill 1991, 310). Clearly, the borderline between truthful creative imagination and fiction is rather porous. 20. O’Daly (1981, 171–75) claims that Augustine had read Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection. Compare Stock (1996, 403 n. 178).

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of the body that contains the soul—offers a kind of picture [zôgraphêma]. We call this condition memory. For the sensual stimulus impresses a sort of likeness [tupos] of the thing perceived, just as men make seals with signet rings” (450a26–27). Aristotle argues that memory (even in the case of abstract thought) involves a mental picture and thus belongs to the primary sense faculty (450a). Though his example of signet rings alludes to Plato’s description of images made in wax in the Thaeatetus (191c–e), he goes beyond Plato in his discussion of memory. For he makes a crucial distinction between (1) the memory image per se and (2) the soul’s understanding that this image refers to something other than itself: “If there is in us something like an impression or picture [tupos, graphê], why should the perception of this be a memory of something else and not just be itself?” (450b). He suggests that the soul can do both these things: it can perceive the image as something self-standing and also as something referring to another thing. For example, in the case of a portrait of a person, one can see it as a material object made up of shapes and colors, or one can see it as a picture representing someone who is not there (450b–451a): “So, in the soul, one object appears as a mere thought, and the other, being a likeness, is an aid to memory [mnêmoneuma]. . . . This occurs whenever we first think of it as itself and then change and think of it as referring to something else” (451a). In sum, memory “is a state induced by a mental image, related as a likeness to that of which it is an image . . . and it pertains to the primary sense faculty, that is, that with which we perceive time” (451a). Memory, then, works when the soul perceives present mental images as referring to objects or events that have been experienced in the past. It occurs “when time has elapsed” and there is a sense of a “before and after” (449b). Aristotle proceeds to distinguish memory (mnêmê) from recollection (anamnêsis). He does not use recollection in the Platonic sense of recollecting an incorporeal Form. Rather, he identifies recollection as an active mental search for a past event or idea stored in the soul. He contrasts this with memory, which is a passive affect of the soul (which contains “imprints” of past sensory events). Aristotle says that one recollects by actively focusing on images in one’s mind that are connected to one another as a sequence. One can recollect certain sequences of memories quite easily; in other cases, one has to “follow the trail in order” and use one set of memories or associations to track down other memories (451b). Of course, in an attempt to recollect an event, one can find many different images and associations, some of which are jumbled together. The agent has to find the right images and stay on the correct track in order to successfully recollect something. Aristotle indicates that the activity of recollection consists in

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“a sort of reasoning” (sullogismos; 453a), but the body is also involved because the images in memory have a sensual basis. In contrast to Aristotle, Augustine does not make a terminological distinction between memory and recollection. But his account reflects this Aristotelian distinction. First, Augustine portrays the memory as a passive receptacle of past sensations, emotions, and ideas. Indeed, his suggestion that the memory contains images (imagines) of past emotions and sensations picks up on Aristotle’s claim that past experiences form images and imprints in the memory.21 In Confessions 10, Augustine also indicates that memory’s passive receptacle makes it possible for the mind to actively remember things—what Aristotle calls recollection.22 In Augustine, the passive and active aspects of memory—memory and recollection in Aristotle’s terms—operate together in all deliberate activities: How many things exist in my memory that were once discovered and ordered and ready to hand—things that we have learned to know? Yet, if I stop remembering them for very short periods of time, then they sink below the surface and slip away into remote recesses. Thus, they have to be thought out again, as if they were quite new, drawn from the same place (for there is nowhere else for them to go). Once again they have to be brought together [cogenda] so as to be capable of being known; that means that they have to be gathered [colligenda] from their dispersed state [ex quadam dispersione]. (10.11.18)

Images and ideas have been imprinted in the memory and exist there in a state of dispersion; some memories remain clear, while others slip away into forgetfulness. The mind must actively recollect these things and put them into a coherent order. Yet it acts in the midst of disorder. Augustine attempts to re-member bits and pieces of his past that are scattered in his memory. But he must do this again and again since the memory of a given event becomes dispersed and forgotten as time passes. Of course, for Augustine, the very dispersion of the memory is a sign of sinful perversion. Indeed, he thinks that forgetfulness is rooted in sin: “Why 21. In contrast to Aristotle, however, Augustine does not believe that all memory images derive from sensory experience. 22. As Carruthers (1998, 68) points out: “Recollection is [for Augustine] a matter of will, of being moved, preeminently a moral activity rather than what we think of as intellectual or rational.” As the construction of the Confessions attests, for moral and theological reasons, Augustine chose to recollect some things and eliminate others.

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is it that we remember with effort but forget things effortlessly? That we learn with effort but stay ignorant without effort? That we are active with effort and lazy without effort? This shows how our depraved nature runs downhill and is ready to fall, as it were, by its own weight and how much help it needs to escape from this predicament” (CD 22.22). The very need to gather dispersed memories evinces the fall into psychic time that was the punishment for the sin of Adam and Eve. Once Adam and Eve were temporalized, their minds were stretched into memory and expectation. And, to make matters worse, the memory takes in some things and lets go of others as the body brings in new sensations in the passing of earthly time. As a person ages and time goes by, his or her memories tend to slip into the “sepulcher” of forgetfulness (Conf. 10.8.12). In Confessions 10, Augustine says that he finds it utterly mysterious that he can remember forgetfulness. How can forgetfulness be in his memory? Yet he does remember it: What happens when the memory loses something? This happens when we forget and attempt to remember. The only place to search is in the memory itself. If something other than what we seek comes to us, we reject it until the thing we want turns up. And, when it comes, we say, “this is it.” We could say this only if we recognized it, and we could recognize it only if we remembered it. It seems clear, however, that we had forgotten it. But perhaps it was not totally gone: a part was retained, and this was used to help in the search for the other parts. (10.19.28)

Memory is an imperfect and ever-changing storage bank. Indeed, it continually changes as time passes and new images are formed. Even at the time when Augustine is searching in his memory, his body continues to bring new impressions from the earthly world into his mind. In Confessions 10, Augustine looks into his memory to find lost pieces of his past. This effort of self-discovery is part of his ongoing journey toward integration. He fights against forgetfulness and distraction in his search for himself. In book 10, then, he does not simply offer an analysis of memory; he engages in an existential soul search: “I myself, Lord, labor on this, and I labor on myself: I have become a soil [terra] that requires hard labor and a great deal of sweat. For we are not examining the zones of heaven or measuring the distances between stars or seeking the weight of the earth: it is I myself who remembers, I the mind [ego sum qui memini, ego animus]. It is not surprising if what I am not is distant from me: but what is nearer to me than myself?” (Conf. 10.16.25). Augustine finds himself in scatters. Though

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he attempts to pull himself together, he can never quite achieve this goal: “I can find no safe place to settle my soul in, but in You alone. There let my scattered pieces [sparsa] be gathered together, and from You let no part of me depart” (10.40.65). As we will see, the dispersed and scattered pieces that clutter up the memory are directly linked to the mind’s distention in time. Of course Augustine’s entire investigation of memory (and his search for self) is nested in his attempt to discover and contemplate God. Consider the following passage, where Augustine attempts to rise above his memory to find God: I will transcend [transibo] even my power of memory, I will transcend it [transibo]. I will rise beyond it to move toward You, sweet light. . . . I am ascending through my mind up to You who are constant above me. I will transcend [transibo] even my power of memory, wishing to touch You. . . . Therefore, I will transcend [transibo] my memory so that I might touch Him, He who separated me from the four-footed beasts and made me wiser than the birds in the air. I will transcend [transibo] my memory so that I may find You—but where? . . . [I will transcend my memory] so that I may find You—but where? If I find You outside my memory, I am not mindful of You [si praeter memoriam meam te invenio, inmemor tui sum]. And how shall I find You if I am not mindful of You? (10.17.26)

Again and again, Augustine tries to transcend his memory. The very repetition of the phrase “I will transcend even my power of memory” (and the use of the future tense) shows that he is mired in temporality. He cannot achieve transcendence: he is stuck inside a mind that is always stretched out into memory and expectation. In this repetitive and extensive passage, Augustine distends rather than transcends. Augustine knows that God resides “above” the material world. But, in asking “where” God is, he conjures up some sort of place. In another lengthy soul search, he attempts to find God in his memory: See how widely I have ranged, Lord, searching for You in my memory. I have not found You outside it [non te inveni extra eam]. . . . But where in my consciousness, Lord, do You dwell? Where in it do You make your home? What resting place have You made for yourself? What kind of sanctuary have You built for yourself? You conferred this honor on my memory that You should dwell in it. But the question I have to consider

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is: in what part of it do You dwell? In recalling You I rose above those parts of memory which animals also share, because I did not find You among the images of physical objects. I came to the parts of my memory where I stored the emotions of my mind, and I did not find You there. I entered into the very seat of my mind, which is located in my memory, since the mind also remembers itself. But You were not there. . . . You are not the mind itself. . . . All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.23

After these exhaustive efforts, Augustine realizes that he cannot locate God in his memory either temporally or spatially: “You were not in my memory before I learned of You. Where then did I find You so that I could learn of You if not in the fact that You transcend me [nisi in te supra me]? There is no place, whether we go backward or forward; there can be no question of place” (10.26.37). God is not in a place or time. As a human searching for divine eternity, Augustine is in the wrong place at the wrong time: his mortal body changes in earthly time, and his mind distends in psychic time. He is unable to transcend either his body or his mind, both of which change all the time (albeit in different ways). The doubly temporalized human cannot grasp eternal presence. Augustine ends his discussion of memory in Confessions 10 with this gesture toward a timeless and placeless God. He then turns directly to a detailed analysis of his efforts to control his body (which takes up the rest of book 10). Although this may seem like a non sequitur, Augustine forges a clear link between the dispersion in his memory and the unruliness of his body. He attempts to collect himself by gathering together the right memories that keep him focused on God, but this mindfulness is made possible only if he strenuously controls his bodily urges. I examine Augustine’s ascetic practices in detail in chapter 5. But consider the passage that closes his discussion of bodily control at the end of Confessions 10. In describing his efforts to master his unruly body, Augustine deploys the same rhetoric of “dispersion” and “gathering” that he has just used in his analysis of memory: “By continence we are gathered together and brought into the unity from which we flowed into multiplicity [ per continentiam quippe colligimur et redigimur in unum, a quo in multa defluximus]” (10.29.40). Here, the control of the body through “continence”—rather than mindfulness and contemplation—offers a path toward a unified self. 23. Conf. 10.25.35–6 (from Chadwick 1992). I use Chadwick’s translation here because it gives an excellent sense of Augustine’s rhetoric in this passage.

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Of course this reference to continence recalls the conversion scene in Confessions 8, where Lady Continence shows up (in a vision) to counter Augustine’s nagging sexual desires. Lady Continence reaches out to Augustine and exhorts him to adopt a celibate life (8.11.27). It is no coincidence, then, that Augustine discusses asceticism and continence right after his analysis of memory and mindfulness in book 10. He quite deliberately links memory and the control of the body. As he suggests, continence—which enables him to control his bodily urges—works against the dispersed and perverse memories that distract him from God. He cannot simply use his mind or memory to worship God: he must train both his mind and his body in this pursuit. Controlling sensual urges allows him to keep God in his mind and memory, while remembering and confessing his “perverse” acts and urges fosters his ascetic bodily practices.

REMEMBERING TO FORGET Of course, even by practicing rigorous asceticism, Augustine cannot be brought into unity while he lives on earth. He purifies his body “day by day” to prepare himself for total integration at the end of time. He longs to forget the past and, indeed, to forget himself: “God must be loved in such a way that, if at all possible, we would forget ourselves [et amandus est Deus ita, ut, si fieri potest, nos ipsos obliviscamur].”24 But he cannot forget his body. No matter what he is doing with his mind, he must exercise ongoing control over his body. Even as a celibate bishop, his bodily urges continue to assail him: “In my memory—of which I have spoken at length—there still live images of past acts that are fixed there by my sexual habit. These images attack me. While I am awake their force is weak, but in sleep they not only are pleasurable but even elicit consent and are very like the act itself” (10.30.41). Here, Augustine links his memories of the past to his bodily urges in the present. He must train himself to remember the right things and forget the wrong things. Maintaining the correct state of mind helps him control his body, and, at the same time, his ascetic bodily practices help him be mindful of God. Clearly, Augustine remembers a great deal of his past and is happy to dilate on this in Confessions 1–9. Yet he says that he longs to forget the past. How is this accomplished? As Mary Carruthers has shown, the whole idea of forgetting oneself or (following Paul) forgetting the past must be under24. Sermo. 142.3. On self-forgetfulness (and the alienation of the self), see Arendt (1929/1996, 27–28), Markus (1966), and O’Donovan (1980).

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stood in the context of monastic culture: “To have forgotten some things in Augustine’s culture was a necessary condition for remembering others.”25 Augustine and his fellow Christians had to obliviate (or appropriate) pagan ideologies and replace them with the proper Christian discourses. Indeed, as Averil Cameron has shown, this involved a “competitive process of system construction.”26 Countering pagan ideological constructs, Christians now “remembered” the narrative of sin and salvation, incarnation and resurrection (and participated in rituals in which they repeated and embodied these ideas). In addition, Augustine urges his fellow Christians to remember their sins and to meditate on their own deaths. As Carruthers observes: “‘Expelling worldly cares’ does not mean that one should not think about one’s past life or future death in the most excruciating detail. Augustine described the steps of meditative prayer as beginning in fear, self-created by the most hair-raising recollection and imagination of one’s own death.” Of course, this meditation on sin and mortality can take on meaning only in a ritualized and communal context: “Communal forgetting was mastered by the Christians not through amnesia but by applying the memnotechnical principles of blocking one pattern of memories by another.”27 It is this willed forgetfulness that Augustine performs in all his writing. Augustine’s claim that one should forget the past, then, can be understood only in the context of his theological claims that humans have fallen into time and dwell in the hope for God’s eternal presence: “forgetting the past, not moving into future things that are transitory, but into the things that are before” (Conf. 11.29.38). In the Confessions, Augustine both celebrates and analyzes the Christian narrative of creation, the Fall, the incarnation, and resurrection. His discourse encourages the reader to forget wrongful ideologies and practices and to accept Catholic rituals and doctrines. As Carruthers rightly points out, the opposite of memory is not forgetfulness but the sin of curiositas, which distracts one’s attention and prevents one from focusing on oneself and God.28 As we have seen, Augustine claims that nature watching is an act of curiosity that keeps him from worshipping God: he thus trains himself to turn away from earthly creatures. Yet, even if he willfully forgets the natural world, he cannot forget his own body with its ongoing needs and sensations. The body dwells in the (passing) present and cannot be consigned to the forgotten past.

25. Carruthers (1998, 29). 26. Cameron (1998, 156). 27. Carruthers (1998, 95, 54). 28. Carruthers (1998, 82).

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PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND PLOTINUS ON TIME We move now to Augustine’s theory of time. To understand this theory, however, we must look at the philosophical discussions of time that influenced his thought. Augustine had read Plato’s Timaeus and some of Aristotle’s discussions of time; he was also familiar with Neoplatonic treatises that analyzed this issue. He directly responds to these philosophical theories in Confessions 11. Let me begin with a brief account of Plato’s conception of time. In the Timaeus, Plato famously claims that time is “a moving image of eternity” (ͭᓴͲᔸ    Ͳͱ͵ͯͼ΄͵ ͼͱ͵ͩ ͩᓴᖨ͵ͷͺ, 37d). In short, time is a “moving image” of the eternal and unchanging Forms. Plato finds this moving image of eternity in the circular motion of the heavens. It is the World Soul and (individual) divine souls that move the heavenly bodies in circles. The World Soul and the divine souls create circular motions in the heavens because their incorporeal minds (nous) move in perfect circles. Divine nous, with its circular motion, controls the physical motion of the heavenly bodies. But why is the circular motion of the heavens the image of the eternal Forms? Plato identifies circular motion as the best form of motion because it is orderly, uniform, and moves in the same place.29 Though the cosmic image of eternity must move (unlike its eternal and unchanging model), the motions and revolutions of the heavens are organized according to mathematical principles. The cosmos “moves according to number, which phenomenon we call time” (37d–e). Plato associated time, then, with the circular movements of the divinely driven heavens. In the Timaeus, Plato does not offer a detailed analysis of time, but he does conceive of time objectively. Time is a cosmic phenomenon. In Plato’s creation story, the Demiurge created humans after he created the cosmos (if one reads this text literally).30 Time and the cosmos, then, existed before human life on earth. Once humans come into the picture, however, time

29. As Plato explains in Laws 10, the motion of nous is a “revolution” that actually resembles circular motion since both “move regularly, uniformly, within the same compass, around the same center, and in the same direction, according to one formula and one ordering plan [ᓝ͵ͩ ͳ΄ͫͷ͵ͲͩᔲͼͤͶͱ͵ʹͧͩ͵]” (898a8–9). 30. The question of the appropriate hermeneutic strategy to adopt for the Timaeus (literal vs. allegorical) is based on how one interprets the relation between the Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Laws 10. Cornford (1937/1956), Skemp (1942), and Cherniss (1944, 1977) attempt to reconcile the three dialogues by rejecting a literal reading of the precosmic period depicted in the Timaeus. Hackforth (1936), Vlastos (1939), Easterling (1967), and Robinson (1970) read the Timaeus literally; they aim to unify the dialogues by suggesting that the soul is the cause of all motion in the created universe. Later Vlastos (1965), Herter (1957), and Mohr (1985) also read the Timaeus

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takes on a different aspect: “Vision [opsis] is the cause of the greatest benefit to humans since no account of the universe would have ever been given if men had not seen the stars or sun or heaven. The vision of day and night and the months and the revolutions of the years has created the art of number, and it has given us the notion of time as well as the ability to investigate the nature of the universe” (47a–b). Physical vision allows humans to see the changes in the seasons and the motion of the stars. This makes it possible for them to measure time numerically. Humans make temporal measurements by recourse to the uniform movements of the heavens. While the heavenly bodies trace out an image of the eternal Forms in their everlasting circular motions, humans dwell in the realm of rectilinear motion. While the nous in the human soul has circular motion, the body (and the irrational parts of the soul) moves in a disorderly fashion. To become a truly good soul, the philosopher must separate his mind from the body and perfect the circular motion of his nous in an imitation of the divinely governed heavens.31 In Plato, the mind with its circular motions does not sit well in an earthly body, whose motion is rectilinear. In a remarkable passage in the Timaeus, Plato describes the incarnation of the soul into a human body. This involves putting a circular peg into a square hole (as it were). When it enters the body, the circles of the noetic soul are smashed into pieces, and the (now) embodied soul starts to move in disjointed directions. It is hard to grasp fully what Plato means when he says that the circles of the soul are cut into pieces at incarnation, but his description reminds one of the world’s worst hangover: “waking up” in a body, the soul has no idea where it is and no memory of the night before. As Plato claims, everything looks upside down. The incarnation of the soul into a body is a massive psychic trauma, and it takes years for the soul to recover. Indeed, only a philosopher can fully recover from the trauma of incarnation by engaging in activities that perfect his noetic faculty. The philosopher does this by imitating the divine nous that moves the heavenly bodies and by using arguments that will reveal “true” Reality.32

literally but argue that Plato was simply not consistent in his views on physical causation and the soul’s role therein. 31. Nightingale (2004, chap. 4) examines the human “imitation” of the circular motion of the heavens. 32. In the Timaeus and the Laws, studying the heavenly bodies and understanding the mathematical principles that order heavenly motion are important elements in the practice of philosophy. See Nightingale (2004, chap. 4) for a discussion of Plato’s turn to astronomy in his later works.

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As Plato says in a powerful passage, the soul does not truly belong on earth: “God has given to each of us the kind of soul that dwells in the top of our body [the head] and that raises us up from earth toward our kindred in heaven [ͼᔰ͵ᓘ͵ͷᔐ͹ͩ͵ᖩͶͽͫͫͥ͵ͭͱͩ͵]—since we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant [;ͽͼᔴ͵ͷᔐͲᓜͫͫͭͱͷ͵ᓈͳͳᔬͷᔐ͹ͤ͵ͱͷ͵], if we are to speak truly. For it is by suspending our head and our root [ᖚͧͮͩ͵] from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the divinity keeps our whole body upright” (90a–b). Humans are upside-down plants, with their roots fixed in heaven. In Plato’s view, the rational part of the soul is akin to divine beings—it must ascend to that realm by perfecting its intellectual faculties. In this activity, the human soul must attempt to enact a moving image of eternity by perfecting the circular motion of its reason (nous). In studying the circular motion of the heavens and understanding the divine nous that generates this, the philosopher begins to “see” time in relation to eternity. In sum, the movement of the heavenly bodies offers humans a sense of time as a moving image of eternity while also allowing them to measure time in reference to this external standard. Plato thus offers an objective theory of time (in the context of a discussion of ethics, epistemology, and ontology). Let us turn now to Aristotle, who offers a more complex account of temporality. Aristotle analyzes time at great length, struggling with some of its most difficult paradoxes. At the beginning of Physics 4.10 (217b30–218a), he raises the question of whether time exists (an issue that will be central to Augustine). Since “some of it is past and no longer exists and the rest is future and does not yet exist,” how can that which is composed of “nonexistents” be said to exist? In response, Aristotle claims that time exists because of its connection to motion: “Why does time seem to us to be in everything, in the earth and the sea and the heavens? This is because time, being the number [arithmos] of motion, pertains to such motion wherever it exists, as an affection [ pathos] or disposition [hexis] of it” (4.14).33 Since the universe is always in motion, time is everlasting: If it is impossible for time to exist or to be conceived without the present “now,” and, if this “now” is a kind of middle that combines a beginning and an end—the beginning of the time that will come and the end of the time that has passed—then there must always have been time. . . . And, since every now is an end as well as a beginning, it is necessary that

33. See Sorabji (1983, 84–89).

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time always exists in relation to both these things. And, if time always existed, so did motion since time is some sort of affect [ pathos] of motion. (8.1 251b20–28)

Time, then, is an “affect” of physical motion in the universe. Aristotle believed that the universe is everlasting—it has no beginning and no end. Heavenly bodies have always been in motion, and these motions are fixed and unchanging. Since the cosmos is always in motion, time (as a pathos of motion) has always existed. Here, Aristotle articulates the objective theory of time: time is external to humans since it moves with the motion of the universe. But, in Physics 4.14, Aristotle poses a crucial question: would time exist if there were no conscious beings to count and measure motion? As he suggests: “If no other thing can count than the soul or the mind of the soul, it would be impossible for time to exist if soul did not exist.” Here, Aristotle conceives of the mind as an outside observer that measures the motions of bodies: “We say that time has passed when we have a perception [ͩᓸͻͰͯͻͱ͵] of the before and after in motion. . . . For, when we think [͵ͷͦͻ΁ʹͭ͵] that the extremes are different from what is in the middle, the soul [΀ͽͿͦ] says that the nows are two—the before and the after—it is then that we say that time has passed” (4.11, 219a25–30). It is the human soul that perceives bodily motions and sees that there are two different nows (the before and the after). By seeing things moving from one now to the next, the soul experiences time. Aristotle is aware that the soul itself can undergo change and can perceive time in different ways. Indeed, he suggests that humans have periods when they do not feel time passing at all: “Time cannot be disconnected from change; for when we ourselves experience no change in our thought or we are not aware of these things changing, no time seems to have passed. . . . So, just as there would be no time if there were no distinction between this now and that now but it were always to be the same now—as in cases when this other now escapes our notice—time does not seem to be in between [two nows]” (4.11, 218b20–30). In short, humans experience the passing of time differently depending on what they are doing (Aristotle uses the example of a person who has woken from a very long night’s sleep). Aristotle does not press this point, but he does imply that there is a subjective experience of time that does not fully cohere with his claim that time is an everlasting pathos of cosmic motion.34 The passing of 34. See Coope (2009), who argues that Aristotle thinks that time depends on the mind for its existence.

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time sometimes “escapes our notice” in spite of the perpetual motions that surround us. Aristotle stops short, however, of analyzing this subjective sense of time: he does not consider it necessary to delve into human consciousness and investigate the way in which the mind or soul experiences time. Let us look, finally, at Plotinus’s Enneads 3.7, which offers a careful analysis of time and eternity. Plotinus explicitly rejects Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of temporality. As he argues, time is not instantiated in the movement of bodies (or in the measure of this movement). Rather, time is generated by the World Soul.35 In Plotinus’s theory of hypostases, the “One” emanates downward into Intellect (nous), then into the World Soul, into the human soul, and, finally, into matter. Time occurs at the level of the World Soul. According to Plotinus, something in the Intellect (nous) becomes “restless” and begins to move away from it. This movement generates the World Soul. As the World Soul comes into being by moving “down” from the Intellect, time starts to move as well: “Since there was a restlessly active nature which wanted to rule itself and be on its own, and chose to seek for more than its present state, this moved, and time moved with it. And so, always moving on to the ‘next’ and the ‘after,’ and to what is not the same—but one thing after another—we made a long stretch of our journey and constructed time as an image of eternity.”36 This overweaning World Soul ends up constructing time as an image of eternity. As we have seen, Plato had argued that the Demiurge created time as a moving image of eternity by creating the heavenly motion of the World Soul and the World Body (with its planets and stars). In Plato, an external creator makes the World Soul, the cosmos, and time; in Plotinus, by contrast, it is the World Soul that actively creates time as an image of eternity. For Plotinus, time comes into being when the World Soul pulls away from eternity. The “self-actuated movement” of the World Soul splinters

35. There is a great deal of scholarship on Plotinus’s theory of time and the descent of the Soul from the Intellect (which produces time). See, e.g., Callahan (1948, 88–148), Rist (1967, chap. 9), Manchester (1978), Meijering (1979, 17–57, 90–93), Sorabji (1983, 152–63), Lloyd (1993, 26–33), O’Meara (1993, 12–43), Strange (1994), and Smith (1996). See also Beierwaltes’s (1967) discussion of diastasis in his commentary on Enneads 3.7.11.41. 36. Enneads 3.7.11 (from Armstrong 1966–88): ;΅ͻͭ΁ͺ ͬᔮ ͸ͷͳͽ͸͹ͤͫʹͷ͵ͷͺ Ͳͩᔲ ᓌ͹Ϳͭͱ͵ ͩᔐͼᕾͺͪͷͽͳͷʹͥ͵ͯͺͲͩᔲͭᓺ͵ͩͱͩᔐͼᕾͺͲͩᔲͼᔴ͸ͳͥͷ͵ͼͷᖛ͸ͩ͹΄͵ͼͷͺͮͯͼͭᖌ͵ᓙͳͷʹͥ͵ͯͺᓘͲͱ͵ͦͰͯ ʹᔮ͵ͩᔐͼͦᓘͲͱ͵ͦͰͯͬᔮͲͩᔲͩᔐͼᔴͺ>ᔅͿ͹΄͵ͷͺ@Ͳͩᔲͭᓴͺͼᔴᓜ͸ͭͱͼͩᓈͭᔲͲͩᔲͼᔴᔕͻͼͭ͹ͷ͵Ͳͩᔲͷᔐ ͼͩᔐͼ΄͵ᓈͳͳᗊᓝͼͭ͹ͷ͵ͭᓺͰᗊᓝͼͭ͹ͷ͵Ͳͱ͵ͷ΅ʹͭ͵ͷͱʹᕾͲ΄ͺͼͱͼᕾͺ͸ͷ͹ͭͧͩͺ͸ͷͱͯͻͤʹͭ͵ͷͱͩᓴᖨ͵ͷͺ ͭᓴͲ΄͵ͩͼᔴ͵Ϳ͹΄͵ͷ͵ͭᓴ͹ͫͤͻʹͭͰͩ. There is a long debate over the “we” in this passage, focusing on whether Plotinus refers here to the World Soul or to individual souls (see Smith 1996, 209 n. 26). For my purposes, this debate is not relevant.

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eternity into time. Crucially, the World Soul chose to “unfold” (exelittôn) and “separate itself out” (diastasis) because “it contained an unquiet faculty, always wanting to translate elsewhere what it saw there [in Reality], and could not bear to keep within itself the whole all together” (3.7.11). The World Soul, by wanting more for itself, ends up with less: “Unfolding itself, the Soul advances (as it believes) to largeness, but it dissipates this largeness by dividing things up; indeed, instead of maintaining unity in itself, it squanders this outside itself and thus advances to a weaker magnitude” (3.7.11). The World Soul’s act of “unfolding” itself into the succession of time is, in short, a fall from unity. Plotinus sometimes calls the World Soul’s restlessness and self-promotion tolma—“boldness” or “arrogance.”37 Indeed, the notion of the descent of the arrogant World Soul from the Intellect—which is a descent into time— may seem similar to the Christian story of the Fall. But Plotinus’s account of time does not feature individual human characters. Indeed, Plotinus does not analyze the human experience of time in his discussion of the “fall” of the World Soul from the Intellect.38 For this reason, he does not distinguish between psychic time and earthly time in human life. In fact, for him, “time as the life of the soul is prior to the time of the cosmos.”39 Ontologically, the World Soul has priority over matter, and the time that the World Soul produces in itself has priority over temporalized bodies.40 The World Soul, then, creates time and also physical bodies. As Plotinus claims: “If the Soul intends to go forth, it will produce a place for itself and, so, a body” (4.3.9). But the World Soul overflows the bodily realm: the body (and, indeed, the cosmos) “lies inside the World Soul” like a net in the ocean (4.3.9). Plotinus does not, then, link the human body to earthly time and the mind to psychic time. The World Soul creates both time and the body with its motions. This Plotinian scheme thus differs vastly from Augustine’s account of the fall into time.

37. See esp. Enneads 5.1.1. Note that Plotinus argues that the procession from the highest hypostases is due to their “generous nature” (4.8.6), which creates a tension between the goodness of the One and Nous and the “bold” and overweaning World Soul. See Smith (1996, 210). 38. As Rappe (1996, 268) rightly points out, there are limitations to the subjective point of view in Plotinus’s philosophy because “the empirical self is no longer the self with which the knower identifies, whereas the authentic self emerges as the pure subject of awareness, only uncovered when the various modes and objects of cognition are progressively shed.” For more detailed discussions of Plotinus’s notion of the self, see O’Daly (1973) and Remes (2007). 39. Lloyd (1993, 30). See also Smith (1996, 211). 40. See Enneads 4.3.9 for a discussion of the ontological priority of soul over matter. Of course, the human individual experiences time as an ensouled body or “empirical self,” but it aims to become the “true self” that exists outside time.

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AUGUSTINE ON EARTHLY TIME AND PSYCHIC TIME In contrast to his philosophical predecessors, Augustine believed that God created the cosmos ex nihilo. The eternal God created a temporal world out of nothingness. As we saw in the introduction, at the beginning of the creation God made an invisible formlessness (informitas) that had the tiniest purchase on existence. This nothing-something marked the transition into human and nonhuman forms in the cosmos: “The earth itself that You had created was formless matter, for it was ‘invisible and unorganized and darkness was above the abyss.’ From this invisible and unorganized earth, from this formlessness—this nothing-something—You created all things in this mutable world, but it was in a state of flux. In this [mutability], times can be perceived and measured; for time is made up of the alterations of things, whose forms undergo variation and change” (Conf. 12.8.8). In Augustine’s account, God created the world with its temporality before he created humans.41 The earthly world, once formed, is characterized by change in time’s forward arrow: plants and animals are born, grow, and die. As Augustine claims, animals lived and died in Eden. In God’s creation of the world, then, we find earthly time operating before Adam and Eve fell into time. Once Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they became temporalized. God’s punishment affected both the body and the soul of humans. The body ages and dies in earthly time, while the mind is stretched out in psychic time. Let us turn now to Augustine’s analysis of temporality in Confessions 11. Augustine begins with a basic question: “What, then, is time?”42 He proceeds like a skeptic, raising one after another question that challenges traditional views of time. In particular, he attacks the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of time. First, he argues, if time is marked by the movement of heavenly bodies, then time should be the movement of earthly bodies as well (11.23.29–30). Indeed, as he claims, God can vary the speed of the celestial bodies at any given time. One cannot find a fixed standard of measure in bodies whose motions are variable.43 Here, Augustine rejects the

41. See also CD 12.16. 42. There is a long debate over the question whether Augustine was seeking to conceptualize time or merely to measure time. Flasch (1993, 338–41) offers a survey of different views on this issue. I agree with Flasch, who claims that Augustine set out to conceptualize time, and not just to measure it. 43. In Conf. 11.23.29, Augustine argues that time would continue if the sun were not moving. For example, if the sun and the stars stop moving while a potter’s wheel continues to move, then time would have to be measured by something other than heavenly motion. The rotation of

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traditional notion that the celestial movements are immutable. Of course, his argument derives from his belief in a specific kind of divine power—a God who can both create and destroy the cosmos. Plato and Aristotle, by contrast, did not conceive of an omnipotent god who created the universe ex nihilo and could change its structure at will.44 Using this theological argument, Augustine challenges philosophical theories that treat time as an objective cosmic phenomenon. Augustine now introduces a radical claim: “Time is nothing other than a stretching out [distentionem], but of what I don’t know; it would be surprising if it were not a stretching out of my own mind [ipsius animi]” (Conf. 11.26.33). What, then, does he mean by distention? As some scholars have suggested, Augustine borrowed this idea from Plotinus’s conception of the World Soul’s diastasis (Enneads 3.7.11). But, as we have seen, Plotinus argues that the World Soul created time as it descended from Intellect (nous) and splintered eternity into the succession of time.45 Diastasis is not internal to the human mind. Rather, the World Soul—which is ontologically prior to human individuation—fragments the unity of the Intellect as it descends into multiplicity. Augustine’s theory of the distention of the human mind is radically different. In introducing this theory of mental distention, Augustine addresses (for the first time in the West) the phenomenon of internal time-consciousness. In developing this theory, he first asks whether time exists at all: “Since the present is made so that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? Its being is such that it will cease to be. So we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward nonexistence” (11.14.17). Still, as Augustine goes on to claim, we all have a sense of time: we have memories of past events and expectations of future possibilities.

the potter’s wheel does not add up to a day, yet its gyration does take place in time. Indeed, if the sun moved much more quickly around the earth, completing its circuit in an hour, the day as we know it could not be measured by that circuit. 44. Note that Plato’s Demiurge creates the cosmos out of unformed matter that existed before creation. See Sedley (2009) for an excellent discussion of various theories of creationism in Greek philosophy. 45. Guitton (1933/1959, 136–45) shows how Augustine’s theory of divine creation departs from Plotinus’s conception of time (a point that is reiterated in later scholarship). Compare Teske (1996), who argues that Augustine’s theory of time was based directly on Plotinus, Enneads 3.7. Teske (1996, 48–56 and passim) argues that Augustine believed in a Plotinian “universal soul” whose diastasis (or distention) generates objective time (while human souls experience subjective time). To argue for a universal soul in Augustine, Teske relies on Augustine’s early, Platonic writings (which he later retracted) and on one (rather unclear) passage in the Confessions (11.31.41).

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Augustine attempts to solve this paradox by claiming that the human mind is stretched into a “threefold present”: the “present of the past,” the “present of the present,” and the “present of the future.” The human mind experiences this threefold present because it always has memory, attention, and expectation. It is ontologically structured so that it stretches from the present into past memories and into future possibilities. Clearly, this mental distention makes it impossible for humans to live in the present: “No time is wholly present” (11.11.13). The threefold present, then, is infected with absence. As Augustine wrestles with this issue, he commands himself to “pay attention”: “Press on, my mind, and pay strong attention. . . . Pay attention, where the truth begins to dawn [insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter. . . . adtende, ubi albescet veritas]” (11.27.34). Here, he indicates that his mind must work against a welter of extraneous impressions to analyze this philosophical question. We may infer that his mind wanders and his body brings in new sensations and distractions even as he works on his theory. He struggles to ignore these distractions and to pay attention to the issue at hand. In this passage, Augustine uses active-attention (intentio) to stay focused. In foregrounding this struggle to pay attention—which is both mental and physical—he reminds us that this analysis is being composed by an individual living in a particular place and time. Indeed, he sticks to the first person throughout his analysis of temporality: “I,” an embodied being living in a specific place at a certain time in history, “struggle to stay focused, go through these test cases, have these experiences, and set forth these ideas.” By using the first person and calling attention to his efforts to stay focused, he emphasizes that his attempt to construct a theory of temporality is carried out by a person who is mired in time.

TIME’S MEASURE In his theory of temporality in Confessions 11, Augustine addresses the problem of measuring time. He boldly claims that he measures time in his mind. In advancing this argument, he begins with the example of measuring the length of a vocal sound: A physical voice [vox corporis] begins to make a sound. It sounds, continues to sound, and then stops. It is now silent. . . . Before it sounded it lay in the future. At that point it could not be measured because it did not exist; and now it cannot be measured because it no longer exists. At the time when it was sounding, measurement was possible because

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there was something that might be measured. Yet even then the sound had no permanence. It came and went. Yet perhaps it was, for this reason, more able to be measured. In the process of passing away, it was carried through a certain space of time [tendebatur in aliquod spatium temporis] by which it could be measured since the present occupies no length of time. (11.27.34)

Here, Augustine introduces the notion of a “space of time.” He identifies this space as a temporal “interval” (intervallum). As he argues, one can measure the interval “from the starting moment when the voice began to make a sound to the end, when it ceased.” Once the voice stops, the interval between the beginning and end of the sound can be measured (11.27.34). Augustine claims that he finds this temporal interval in his mind. His mind measures the “impression” (affectio) of the vocal sound that has entered his mind through his senses and is now located in his memory. After the sound passes, the impression of this event endures in the memory. As Augustine observes, if the sound starts but does not stop, then he cannot measure time. The sound must both begin and end for the measurement to be taken. Here, Augustine attempts to examine that aspect of the memory that allows us to remember a given event and have a (rough) sense of the amount of time this event took up. Clearly, his attempt to measure the duration of this event is not simply a mental operation. For, in this example, the sounding of a human voice over a period of time makes it possible for him to measure time in his memory. In short, he cannot measure time without reference to an action or event happening in the bodily realm (an action that takes place in earthly time). Augustine offers a more detailed account of this issue in a second example: the recitation of Ambrose’s hymn “God, Creator of All Things” (Deus Creator Omnium; 11.27.35). Note that he has referred to Ambrose’s hymn in a discussion of time earlier in the Confessions. In book 4, after saying that “there will never be a complete sentence unless one word gives way to another,” he proclaims: “from these [transient words], let my soul praise You, ‘God, Creator of All Things’ [Deus Creator Omnium]. But do not let my soul attach itself to these words with the glue of love [glutine amore] through the sensations of the body [ per sensus corporis]. For all these things move along a path toward nonexistence. They tear the soul apart [conscindunt] with destructive desires” (4.10.15). As Augustine himself admits, even Ambrose’s hymn (and other theologically “correct” discourses) creates pleasurable sensations (10.33.4). Though he tries to focus on the meaning of words and resist the sensual pleasures that accompany them, he cannot

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avoid the sensual aspects of human language. Still, he must avoid gluing himself to the physical world and enjoying sensual pleasures that tear the soul into pieces.46 Of course, the human mind is always distended and torn apart. But he tries to gather himself together (again and again) in his ongoing efforts to worship God. Let us now examine the example of the hymn of Ambrose. Augustine begins by pointing out that, in this hymn, the long syllables take “twice as much time” (duplum . . . temporis) to enunciate as the short ones: “I pronounce [the hymn] over and over, and I find that this is the case [i.e., that the long syllables take twice as much time to sing] since this is sensed by a clear sensation [sentitur sensu manifesto]” (11.27.35). Once again, he acknowledges that the hymn has a sensory aspect. Indeed, the recitation of it is a bodily act that takes place in earthly time. Of course, the mind experiences this event in psychic time: Augustine cannot know or recite this hymn unless his mind is distended into memory and expectation. Since his mind is always distended, it measures the temporal duration of an event in a specific way. Clearly, his mind can measure the temporal duration of the hymn only when it has ended and the act of recitation is lodged in his memory. Rather than using an external standard to measure the duration of the hymn, he claims that he makes this measurement in his mind: “It is in you, my mind, in which I measure periods of time” (11.27.36). How exactly does Augustine measure time in his mind? First, he cannot measure the temporal passage of the hymn unless he goes through the hymn from beginning to end, pronouncing each word and syllable. As we have seen, he compares the time passing in the long and short syllables in relation to each other. This indicates that he measures time relatively: one syllable, hymn, action, or event is (relatively speaking) “longer or shorter” than something else. Clearly, this relative mode of measurement does not offer an accurate measure of time. But he does not seek for an objective standard of measurement. He takes for granted that communities measure and organize time by recourse to an external reference. He turns instead to a deeper question: Why is it that human beings can remember past events as taking up a given amount of time in their memories, without reference to external standards? How is it that one can not only recall an event, but also remember it as a processual event that took up a certain amount of time? The impressions of past events in the memory are dynamic rather than static.

46. I discuss the sensation and the “glue of love” in chapter 3.

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Augustine is fascinated by the fact that the mind has an internal sense of the dynamism and duration of a given event. This leads him to claim that he can measure this duration by examining the impression left in his memory. Crucially, he does tell us how long it took to recite Ambrose’s hymn. He knows full well that his measurement of the hymn (and other events) in his mind is subjective. He focuses instead on how his mind can make these internal measurements at all. As he points out, the recitation of the hymn, when it is completed, no longer exists. He can measure this no-longerexistent event in the impression (affectio) left in his memory. Note that the recitation of the hymn takes place in earthly time while the mind experiences and measures it in psychic time. The mind can make this measure because it is distended into memory. Indeed, without memory, one would never have the notion of measurement. Once an event has come to an end, the mind retrospectively assesses and measures its duration. Of course, this internal measurement will be subjective. But a purely objective measurement of time, while eminently useful, brackets the problem of internal time-consciousness. Augustine chooses to set aside objective measurements of time and focus on the way in which the distended mind measures temporal duration. While an event takes place in the passing now of earthly time, the mind experiences this event in the “not-now” of memory, attention, and expectation. Once it is over, the mind retrospectively measures the duration of this no-longer-existent event in the memory. We must note, however, that, in Augustine’s theory of psychic time, the distended mind cannot operate in the absence of the body and the earthly realm. In the hymn example, Augustine measures the temporal duration in his mind of a bodily activity that took place in earthly time. Here, we begin to see the interface of earthly time and psychic time in human life. Augustine now adds an important claim. He says that he can recite hymns and other discourses silently, in his mind, and have the same experience as he would if he recited them out loud: “Without any sound or utterance, we go through hymns, songs, and any other discourse in our mind, and we go through all the lengths of the motions [motionum] and the relative amounts of time they take in passing. Indeed, we repeat [renuntiamus] these things in the same way that we would if we actually spoke them out loud” (11.27.36). Even if he goes through the hymn silently, in his mind, Augustine “speaks” the words in the same way as he would if he said them out loud. In his mind, then, he senses the movements of the hymn and “hears” the syllables and words as they go by. In short, even when the hymn is recited silently, it has a sensory aspect. To measure the hymn, Augustine must recite it in order, either silently or out loud. To make the measurement,

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he does not simply remember the hymn (“I remember that hymn perfectly”). He must actually recite the whole hymn, with each syllable and sound articulated in the proper order, so that a fresh sensory impression enters his memory. Once again, we see that his examination of time in his mind includes a bodily aspect. To understand his theory of psychic time, we must factor in the body and the earthly time that governs the bodily world. Indeed, Augustine’s entire argument rests on the fact that humans are subject to both earthly time and psychic time. Without the body, the mind cannot distend away from the (passing) bodily now into memory and expectation. After this analysis of measuring time, Augustine turns back to himself. He tells his own mind not to interrupt him with “the tumult of . . . impressions”: “It is in you, my mind, that I measure times. Do not interrupt me [mihi]—that is, do not interrupt your own self [tibi] with the tumult of your impressions [turbis affectionum tuarum]. In you, I say, I measure times [tempora metior]. The present thing that I measure is the impression [affectionem], which has been formed in you by things passing and remains even as they pass” (11.27.36). Augustine conducts a strange dialogue with himself: the “you” that is the mind is interrupting the “me,” which is also the mind. This splitting of the mind reflects the fragmentation of the self—a scattering caused by the distention of the mind. Yet the reference to the “tumult of impressions” also conjures up the bodily basis of the images that have been (and continue to be) formed in his memory. The very act of paying attention is a mental and physical struggle to stay focused in the midst of multiple mental and bodily distractions. Here, Augustine indicates that the impression left in his memory during and after he rehearsed the hymn is accompanied by other sensory impressions making their way into his memory at the same time. It takes great focus for him to attend to the hymn as it passes and to measure its duration once it has passed and created an impression in his memory. His body keeps interrupting and distracting his mind even as he attends to the hymn as it passes and attempts to make a measurement.47

ANALYZING DISTENTION In addition to analyzing temporal measurement, Augustine offers a detailed examination of the distention of the mind in psychic time. He begins this analysis with the example of the articulation of a vocal sound. This example

47. I discuss Augustine’s theory of sensation in chapter 3.

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illustrates the operation of the mind as it stretches into memory and expectation: Suppose that someone wished to utter a sound lasting a long time and decided in advance how long that was going to be. He would have planned this duration in advance [constituerit praemeditando]. Entrusting this to his memory, he begins to utter a sound that continues until it comes to the predetermined end. It has sounded and will sound. For that part of it which is finished has sounded, but what remains will sound. Thus, this action is being accomplished as present intentio transfers [ praesens intentio . . . traicit] the future sound into the past. The future diminishes as the past grows, until the future has completely gone and everything has passed. (11.27.36)

Here, a person decides to utter a sound that will last a certain amount of time. He stores up this plan in his memory (memoria) and expects to utter this sound in the future (expectatio). Clearly, this is a deliberate operation. As the sound passes, both memory and expectation come into play until the sound stops. In this basic example, we see the mind distended into the past and the future. But the theory of distention is far more complex than this. For, in Augustine’s account, there are active and passive modes of attention that play different roles in the stretching of the mind. In passage quoted above, intentio “transfers” the future (expected) sounds into the memory. Intentio, as we have seen, is an active form of attention that shapes time by planning and carrying out activities.48 But the human mind also experiences time in a passive mode. Consider the following passage, which focuses on attentio rather than intentio: How does the future, which does not yet exist, come to be diminished or wasted away? Or how does the past, which no longer exists, come to increase? This cannot happen unless there are three things in the mind that do this. For the mind expects and attends and remembers [expectat et adtendit et meminit], so that the thing that it expects passes through 48. Indeed, in other texts, Augustine identifies intentio with the will (see Miles 1979, 26). As Miles observes: “By De genesi ad litteram, Augustine had replaced the term ‘attention’ with ‘intention,’ an act of the will, a spiritual action. . . . The intentio of spiritus forms the link between the purely physical object of sensation and the purely spiritual activity of sensation. Its necessity was to account for the possibility of a unified activity.” In the Trinity, Augustine more or less identifies the will with love.

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[transeat] that part of the mind which attends [adtendit] and into that which remembers. And who can deny that the things to come do not yet exist? Yet there is already in the mind an expectation of things to come. And who can deny that the things in the past no longer exist? Yet there is still in the mind a memory of things past. And who can deny that the present time has no space because it passes away in a flash. But our attention endures [ perdurat attentio] so that the things that will be present proceed to become absent. (11.28.37)

Here, Augustine focuses on attentio (rather than on intentio, which actively transfers future expectations into memories). In this passage, he identifies attentio as a passive point of transit in the mind. The expected “things that will be present” pass through attentio on their way into memory. Attentio endures so that this temporal flow can continually happen. But what makes attentio endure (perdurat) in the present? The answer is simple, though it is generally overlooked in analyses of Augustine’s theory: attentio endures because the mind is connected to a body that dwells in the here and now. Clearly, attentio does not endure in some abstract now. Rather, it is grounded in the body, which changes in the passing now on earth. Though attentio is the “place” in the mind that divides the future from the past, it operates only in an embodied soul. Attentio endures in the “now and now and now” on earth, where our bodies dwell. It is the body, then, that grounds the mind in the ongoing now (though, for the mind, this now is a flash in the pan). In Augustine’s discussion of time, I argue, we must attend to the human experience of two different temporalities: the body changing in the passing now in earthly time and the mind distending into the past and the future in psychic time. Augustine fully acknowledges the interaction of these two temporalities in human life: If anything is changeable—whatever be its excellence—it does not truly exist; for there is no true existence wherever nonexistence has a place. Indeed, whatever can be changed, when it has changed, it is not that which it once was. And, if it is no longer what it was, a kind of death has taken place [mors quaedam ibi facta est]. Something that was there is gone and no longer exists. For example, the blackness has died out [mortua est] in the silvery locks of the aging old man and so also the beauty in the body of the careworn and crooked old man. . . . For in all our actions and movements—in short, in every activity of the creature—I find two times, the past and the future. I seek for the present, but nothing stands

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still. What I have said is now gone; what I am going to say has not yet come. What I have done is no longer present; what I am going to do has not yet arrived. The life I have lived is no longer present; the life I will live has not yet come. I find the past and the future in every movement of things.49

Here, Augustine tacks back and forth between the distention of the mind and the disintegration of the body. First, he portrays the body aging and changing in earthly time—the beauty in the man’s body dies away, and his hair turns white. But, as Augustine argues, humans notice and experience these bodily changes in psychic time: the mind cannot experience the world in the present but only in the mode of distention. The mind can understand the bodily changes that occur in earthly time only if it has memory and expectation. For example, the old man remembers his younger self with his dark hair, and he foresees his own death in the future. Of course, memory and expectation pull the mind away from bodily presence. The mind can apprehend the changes occurring in earthly time (which moves forward in the passing now) only by comparing the present to the past. In addition, expectation forces the mind to jump ahead of earthly time, moving toward various future possibilities. In the final part of the passage quoted above, Augustine turns to the example of speech. This example illustrates mental distention in psychic time: if “what I have said is now gone” and “what I am going to say has not yet come,” then I can remember what I have said and expect the things that I will say. In his mind, Augustine has memories that allow him to complete a sentence or a thought. Human language can operate only in a mind distended into memory and expectation. As Augustine says at the very end of this passage, “I find the past and the future in every movement of things.” In every bodily “movement” that happens in the passing now in earthly time, the mind finds the past and the future. In short, while his body continually moves and changes as time

49. IoEv. 38.10: Res enim quaelibet, prorsus qualicumque excellentia, si mutabilis est, non vere est; non enim est ibi verum esse, ubi est et non esse. Quidquid enim mutari potest, mutatum non est quod erat: si non est quod erat, mors quaedam ibi facta est; peremtum est aliquid ibi quod erat, et non est. Nigredo mortua est in capite albescentis senis, pulcritudo mortua est in corpore fessi et incurvi senis. . . . Nam in omnibus actionibus et motibus nostris, et in omni prorsus agitatione creaturae duo tempora invenio, praeteritum et futurum. Praesens quaero, nihil stat: quod dixi, iam non est; quod dicturus sum, nondum est: quod feci, iam non est; quod facturus sum, nondum est: quod vixi, iam non est; quod victurus sum, nondum est. Praeteritum et futurum invenio in omni motu rerum. See also Sermo. 340A.5.

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passes on earth, his mind distends into memory and expectation. As I argue, the mind’s distention in psychic time cannot be understood in abstraction from the changing mortal body in earthly time. It is difficult to fully grasp the way these two temporalities operate together. When one examines earthly time, one tends to lose sight of psychic time (and vice versa). Phenomenologically, we experience both these temporalities. But Augustine has to struggle to analyze this enigmatic phenomenon.

THE SONG OF TIME Augustine says in the Confessions that Ambrose had recently adopted from the Eastern churches the practice of “singing songs and psalms” in church. In Ambrose’s basilica, the congregation “used to sing together with both their hearts and their voices in a state of great enthusiasm.” As Augustine points out, singing in church keeps people from succumbing to sorrow and exhaustion during the service (9.7.15). Yet music creates sensual pleasure that is sinful. Augustine worries over this issue: “I sometimes wanted to banish all the melodies and sweet songs of the Psalms from my ears and from the church altogether.” Yet he decides to keep music and songs in his own church since they have “great utility in worship” and the congregation responds well to music (10.33.49). In his own case, however, he attempts to focus as much as possible on the words rather than the music.50 Let us turn now to the song example (or, as it is often called, the psalm example). Augustine begins by saying that he has memorized a canticum (not a psalmum)—he does not specify the form or content of this song. Unfortunately, since his “psalm example” has been endlessly rehearsed in the scholarship, it has lost contact with its musical origins. Indeed, the identification of the canticum as a psalm invites the reader to imagine a recitation (even though Augustine himself says that the Psalms were sung in church). As I argue, in interpreting this passage, one must attend to the sensual aspects of the song. Of course, the recitation of any discourse has a sensual basis: I emphasize the musical aspect of the song to foreground the role that the senses play in this example. Augustine says at the beginning of the song example that he plans to “enunciate this song” (dicturus sum canticum; 11.28.38). The word dic-

50. Conf. 10.33.50. Note that Augustine considers the idea of “chanting psalms . . . which is closer to speaking than singing”—a practice that Athanasius used in his church—but he rejects this option.

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turus seems to imply speaking rather than singing, but he clarifies this point when he says: “The feelings vary and the senses are distracted when a person singing or listening to a song that he knows remembers the past words and expects the future ones.”51 Here, he specifically refers to singing (cantare), not speaking. Indeed, as this passage shows, his senses are distracted both when he is singing the song and when he is hearing the song sung. The song itself is not simply a mental exercise: as Augustine sings the song, he experiences a variety of feelings and sensations. Of course he can also sing and hear memorized songs silently, in his mind. But the sensual aspects of music—with its tune and beat—do not disappear in “mental” singing. The song example deals with two different actions: the singing of the song and the analysis of the distention of the mind. This example needs careful consideration since it is central to Augustine’s theory of time: I am about to repeat a song [canticum] that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the whole song. But, when I have begun, that much of the song which I carry away [decerpsero] into the past is extended into my memory. The life of this act of mine [vita huius actionis meae] is stretched in two ways [distenditur], into my memory, because of the words I have already said, and into my expectation, because of those that I am about to say. But all this happens while my attention is present at hand [ praesens tamen adest attentio mea]: the future is transferred [traicitur] into the memory through this [ per quam (i.e., attentionem)] to become the past. (11.28.38)

Augustine plans to sing the song and expects to complete it in the future. Expectatio grasps the whole before he begins to sing and enables his mind to find each upcoming word while the song is being sung. Once he has finished the song, expectation comes to an end. During this action, his mind is distended into memory and expectation, but his attentio remains in the present: “All this happens while my attention is present at hand.” Each expected word of the song “is transferred into the memory through this [ per quam (i.e., attentionem)].” Once again, the attentio is a passive point of transit—it marks the present moment where expected future events move into memories of the past. Although Augustine does not use the word intentio in this passage, we can infer that active-attention is at work here: 51. Conf. 11.31.41: Nota cantantis notumve canticum audientis expectatione vocum futurarum et memoria praeteritarum variatur affectus sensusque distenditur.

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for it is by intentio that he actively carries away (decerpsero) each expected word and transfers it into memory. As Paul Ricoeur claims, intentio offers some redress over the onslaughts of time: “The present changes its meaning; it is no longer a point, or a point of passage, but a present intention. If attention deserves in this way to be called intention, this is so inasmuch as the transit through the present has become an active transition. The present is not simply traveled through, but man’s attentive mind [intentio], which is present, is relegating [traicit] the future into the past.”52 As we have seen, attentio is a mental awareness that operates only in the present—it is the place or point through which future expectation moves into the memory. Intentio, by contrast, has no purchase on the present: it uses memory and expectation to willfully carry out a deliberate action. It takes hold of things that are planned and expected in the future and transfers these into memory as the action is performed. It ongoingly focuses on future expectations until the planned action is completed. Ricoeur is wrong, then, in identifying intentio as a “present intention.” It is attentio, not intentio, that endures in the present. Intentio does not “change the meaning of the present”; rather, it contructs and carries out an action that takes on meaning in expectation and in memory. What happens, then, when a planned activity (such as the singing of the song) comes to an end? At that point, intentio has completed the task, and the entire event is lodged in the memory. This does not, however, mean that mental distention stops when the activity is finished. In fact, the opposite is the case. As Augustine claims, the human mind is always distended into memory and expectation, whether or not one is conscious of this fact. Indeed, humans can never overcome mental distention. Augustine uses the song example to offer a basic illustration of the operation of the human mind in the mode of distention. Since this example centers on a deliberate and finite activity, it does not capture the fact that the human mind is distended at all times. Clearly, the distended mind is rife with absence: the past and the future no longer exist, and the mind cannot hold on to the present (either the present moment on earth or divine presence). Augustine attempts to unify his psyche by contemplating the eternal God, but, as a mortal and transient being, he cannot grasp the divine presence. In addition, his mind is always stretching away from his body’s presence in the here and now. In Augus-

52. Ricoeur (1985, 1:19 [emphasis added]).

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tine, the mind cannot experience either the metaphysics or the physics of eternal presence.

RECOLLECTION, MEMORIZATION, VOCALIZATION Let us look now at the operation of memory in the song example. What kind of memory is Augustine using here? In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson offers an interesting exploration of this question. Bergson distinguishes between two forms of memory. He uses the examples of a “memorized” lesson and the “recollection” of individual events. He identifies the memorized lesson as “habit memory.” In this case, the lesson “is a part of my present, exactly like my habit of walking or of writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented.” One does not need to remember the act of learning the lesson in order to recite it. But, in the recitation, one does need to go through the words in the proper order, which takes time. As Bergson puts it: “The memory of the lesson I have learnt, even if I repeat this lesson only mentally, requires a definite time, the time necessary to develop one by one . . . all the articulatory movements that are necessary.”53 In reciting the lesson, he does not just recall an image of the lesson; he acts it out (like riding a bike). The memory of an individual event, by contrast, involves recollection. As Bergson claims, in remembering particular events, activities, or experiences, one actively seeks out “memory images” that “re-present” these past events: “In the search for a particular image, we remount the slope of our past.” One can recollect an image quickly, in a mere moment; alternatively, one may have to work to remember the details of a past event. Either way, in recollection, one does not act out the event in its original temporal order. The activity of recollection thus stands in stark contrast to habit memory, where one performs an action without having to recollect earlier events. In recollection, we “call up the past in the form of an image”; and, to do this, “we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment.”54 Augustine exhibits Bergsonian recollection in his autobiographical account in the Confessions. To gather these details from his past, he has to pull

53. Bergson (1950, 91). See also Bergson (1950, 93): “[Habit memory] has retained from the past only the intelligently coordinated movements which represent the accumulated efforts of the past; and it recovers those past efforts . . . in the definite order and systematic character with which the actual movements take place. In truth, it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.” 54. Bergson (1950, 91–92, 94 [emphasis added]).

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himself away from the “action of the moment” and search for images of his past in his memory. In the song example, Augustine has memorized the song and does not need to hunt it down in his memory. His vocalization of the song is thus a case of habit memory (in Bergson’s terms)—it is “lived and acted.” Even as he sings the song, however, he engages in a separate mental activity: he examines the way that his mind operates as the song is sung. In an act of self-reflection, he experiences his mind stretching into the past and the future. Note that he can engage in this act of self-reflection—and focus on his mind distending—precisely because he has memorized the song and does not need to recollect it (or “remount the past”).55 While he sings the song, he can “withdraw [himself] from the action of the moment” and focus on how his mind operates as the expected words pass through his attentio and move into memory. Augustine goes through the song in the proper order, which takes a certain amount of time. To sing the song out loud, he must use his body. But, even if he sings the song silently, he hears its movements in his mind. When he sings the song out loud or in his mind, then, the activity is both mental and sensual. In addition, whether he sings the song aloud or silently, he goes through it in roughly the same amount of time. In my view, the singing of the song passes in the earthly time that governs the body (and grounds the singing in the passing now). Yet Augustine understands the words, phrases, and the meaning of the song because his mind is distended into expectation and memory. Let us expand Augustine’s song example to make this heterochrony more clear: if a bard has memorized the entire Iliad and chants it from beginning to end (silently or out loud), his body will be several days older when the poem is finished. Yet, as the poem moves along in earthly time, his mind experiences this event in psychic time. In short, as each word of the poem sounds in the passing now of earthly time, his mind stretches away from the present into memory and expectation. Clearly, Augustine sings a song much shorter than the Iliad. But we still see earthly time and psychic time operating (and intersecting) in this action. At the end of the song example, Augustine makes a very strange claim: But all the while my attentio is present at hand [ praesens tamen adest attentio mea]: through that [ per quam] the future is transferred [traicitur] to become the past. What occurs in the song as a whole occurs in its

55. We must distinguish between finding (recollecting) an image of a performed text in one’s memory and reperforming this text in the present.

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pieces and its syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps that song is a part. It is also valid of the entire life of an individual, where all the actions are part of a whole, and of the total history of the “sons of man,” where all human lives are but parts. (11.28.38)

Here, he identifies as temporal units a syllable, a song, a lengthy action, the life of an individual, and the entire history of mankind. The syllables he utters are nested in the song, which is nested in a set of actions, which is nested in his entire lifetime, which is nested in all of human history. He considers each of these as parts of a larger whole (human history is a part of God’s plan).56 Yet one experiences these temporal units as an embodied soul living and changing in specific places at a certain time in history. Of course, no single person can experience all of human history: in moving toward the history of mankind, “the total history of the ‘sons of man,’ ” Augustine goes beyond his personal experience. Here, he moves out of internal timeconsciousness into the external world, where earthly time passes in a relentless fashion and history keeps on happening. How can we understand the analogy between a song and an entire human life or the history of mankind? The song is known; the future of individuals and historical events is unknown. Clearly, the song example does not help in cases where actions or events have not been memorized in advance—in cases where one does not have a clear sense of the ending. But, for Augustine, the final end is, in fact, a given (God given): regardless of specific historical events, death and resurrection are the lot of all humans. Augustine implicitly assimilates the memorized song to the Christian narrative that shapes human history. In this narrative, the beginning, middle, and end are already known. The salvational “song” thus provides him with a clear sense of the end of human history, with closure coming on Resurrection Day. Clearly, Augustine’s Christian beliefs have given him a specific set of expectations. As we saw in the song example, his expectatio “extends over the whole” before he sings the song. His expectation saw the whole because the song was stored in his memory. Although the future will come no matter what, expectations derive from the memory, which contains the material that the mind uses to construct future possibilities. Yet expectatio has a special feature of its own: all expectation—which looks toward the future— is associated with desires and emotions (a given memory may or may not 56. Augustine is, no doubt, alluding to Paul’s reference to being “parts of a whole” in 1 Cor. 13:9–13.

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have an emotional resonance). Some expectations are based on the fear of a painful outcome: one looks at one’s past and the present historical situation and comes to expect a terrifying future.57 Alternatively, one can find in one’s memory material for hope—the expectation of future blessings. Part of Augustine’s purpose in the Confessions is to instill in the reader the comforting expectation of an eternal life with God.

RE-PRESENTING TIME Augustine’s analysis of temporality takes the form of a representation. Indeed, Augustine represents mental distention by recourse to a spatial model: he maps the past, present, and future onto a time line. The future passes through the present and into memory in a linear fashion. Indeed, Augustine’s identification of the present as a point (punctum; 11.28.37) conjures up a line. As the linguist Gustav Guillaume has shown, in the attempt to represent time (as opposed to just experiencing it), one must construct a spatial model. In the case of grammar, one represents “verbal time” as an infinite time line, with the past and the future moving away from the point of the present. As Guillaume suggests, this linear image of time is a mental construction.58 The representation of time reorganizes lived time into a spatial image. The representation of time, then, cannot effectively capture the actual experience of time. As Giorgio Agamben points out: In every representation of time and in every discourse by means of which we define and represent time, another time is implied that is not entirely consumed by representation. It is as though man, insofar as he is a thinking and speaking being, produced an additional time with regard to chronological time, a time that prevented him from perfectly coinciding with the time out of which he could make images and representations. The ulterior time, nevertheless, is not another time, it is not a supplementary time added on from outside to chronological time. Rather, it is something like a time within time—not ulterior but interior—which only measures my disconnection with regard to it, my being out of synch and in noncoincidence with regard to my representation of time, but

57. This is different from feeling fear when something attacks or harms us in the present (though even that involves memory since one would not know that something was dangerous without having come to know that certain things are dangerous). 58. Guillame (1929/1970a, 1–13, 51–59); Guillame (1945/1970b, 17–24).

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precisely because of this, it allows for the possibility of my taking hold of it.59

Once one attempts to represent time and “take hold of it,” the experience of it has escaped one’s grasp. In his analysis of temporality, Augustine creates a spatial model that does not coincide with his actual experience of time. In the song example— which allows him to illustrate mental distention—he effectively maps the singing of the song onto a two-dimensional time line in which the expected future words and sounds move on a straight path into his memory. Yet, in Confessions 10, he portrayed his memory as a vast, three-dimensional space with many nooks and crannies. This three-dimensional model, however, plays no role in the analysis of mental distention. In the song example, he does not need to delve into the cavernous space of his memory to sing the song (since he has already memorized it). Even as he sings the song using habit memory, he steps back and focuses on the way in which his mind distends during this activity. Yet he still has to take one more step: he must turn his experience of mental distention into a representation. He thus proceeds to represent the passing of time—and the distention of the mind—using a linear model. This representation helps us visualize mental distention, but it cannot fully grasp the experience of lived time. Certainly, we do not experience time in ordinary life as moving in a line (to do this, we have to step back and construct some sort of time line). When we simply live time, we experience it phenomenologically. For example, as I write this (on the computer), I am hearing the whistle of a train, thinking about dinner, feeling a pain in my leg, remembering my father’s recent death, and smelling the lilies that are sitting on a nearby table (the list could go on). I write this sentence in the midst of these physical distractions. If I think about it, I can notice my mind stretching into memory and expectation. But, when I look into the future, I see many different possibilities opening out: what is ahead is not a point on a line. Likewise, when I look back into my memory, I see a wide range of experiences and events that offer different ways of relating to myself and to the world. In addition, my senses are pulling me into many different directions at any given time. Clearly, I am not in full control of my mental or psychic processes, and I cannot block out bodily sensations (though I can make an effort to ignore them). We should not, then, confuse Augustine’s linear representation of

59. Agamben (2005, 67).

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time with his actual lived experience. Indeed, his repeated references (and commands) to himself to pay attention and ignore all distractions in Confessions 11 remind us that his ordinary experience of time involves a multitude of sensations, impressions, memories, expectations, emotions, and roving thoughts. He thus shows the reader that he, the author, is trying to block out lived time as he steps back to analyze and represent temporality.

TEMPORAL TENSIONS I come back to the passage that I quoted at the beginning of the chapter. This passage comes directly after the song example and should be considered in the context of Augustine’s overall argument. Here, Augustine places distention in opposition to active-attention (intentio) and to self-extension (extentus). He thus foregrounds the tensions of time: See how my life is a distention [distentio] in several directions. Your hand upheld me, You the mediator between You the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things. . . . May I be gathered up from the old days, following the One. Forgetting the past and moving not toward future things that are transitory but into the things that are before—not being distended but extended [non distentus sed extentus], and not in the mode of distention but with activeattention [non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem]—I follow the prize of the high calling. (11.29.39)

Augustine begins by claiming that he regularly experiences distention and distraction. He longs to be “gathered up from the old days” (a veteribus diebus colligar) and thus released from temporal distention and psychic fragmentation. Augustine wants to forget the past (praeterita oblitus) and to move “not toward future things that are transitory but into the things that are before” (in ea quae ante sunt). This gathering up will occur in eternity. At the end of time, Augustine will unite with “the things that are before.” As we have seen, Augustine uses Paul’s Phil. 3:13–14 as the subtext in this passage.60 Paul offers Augustine several key ideas for his analysis of

60. Augustine analyzes this Pauline passage in many of his texts. See, e.g., De Doctrina Christiana (1.34.38): “The apostle—although still walking on a road and following the God who called him to the prize of a higher calling—‘forgetting what was behind and straining to what is before,’ had already moved beyond the beginning of the journey. He was not deprived of the One for

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time. First, he articulates the idea of an atemporal and incorporeal “before.” In Paul, the Greek word ἔμ͸͹ͷͻͰͭ͵ can have a spatial or a temporal sense: it can mean “before or in front of one” or “before now.” In Latin, the word ante has the same spatial and temporal senses as the Greek ἔμ͸͹ͷͻͰͭ͵. If one reads before (ante) spatially, then Augustine will unite with the things that are in front of him. But, since God is incorporeal, he does not occupy space. He cannot be “in front of” Augustine since he is above his creation. Alternatively, if one takes before in a temporal sense, then Augustine is referring to a time before time existed. He longs to forget the past and transcend all temporal befores. He looks forward to an escape from time—to the eternity that is before time.61 Clearly, the word “before” is a bit paradoxical: there was no time before time. What is “before” time is the eternity of God. As Augustine puts it, “God is both older than all things because He is before all things, and newer than all things because He is himself after all things [antiquior est omnibus quia ipse est ante omnia, et novior omnibus, quia idem ipse post omnia]” (Genlitt. 8.26.48). God is before and after all things because he is outside time. Paul also offers Augustine the notion of extending himself toward God: “This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and extending myself toward those things before [ͼᔬʹᔮ͵ᔄ͸ͧͻ΁ᓘ͸ͱͳͩ͵Ͱͩ͵΄ʹͭ͵ͷͺͼͷᖌͺͬᔮ ᓜʹ͸͹ͷͻͰͭ͵ᓘ͸ͭͲͼͭͱ͵΄ʹͭ͵ͷͺ], I press on toward the prize of the high calling.” Augustine borrows the Pauline notion of self-extension and places it in the context of distentio and intentio: “Not being distended but extended [non distentus sed extentus], not in the mode of distention but with activeattention [non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem], I follow the prize of the high calling.”62 How, then, do we make sense of these tensions of time? Paul Ricoeur offers an insightful reading of this dense Augustinian passage: whom the journey must be undertaken—the journey that is begun by all those who desire to arrive [ pervenire] at the truth and remain [ permanere] in eternal life.” Since he is now attached to God, Paul has “moved beyond” the beginning of the journey but has not yet “arrived” at God, who is “before” all things. 61. Arendt (1929/1996, 56) places the “before” at the beginning and at the end, i.e., before time was created and at the end of time: “The return to one’s origin can be an anticipating reference to one’s own end [se referre ad finem]. Not until beginning and end coincide does the twofold ‘before’ acquire its proper meaning. For the person who turns back to the absolute past, the Creator who made him, the Whence-he-came reveals itself as identical to the Whither-he-goes.” 62. Conf. 11.29.39. Note that Augustine’s use of this Pauline passage does not offer a literal translation of the Greek.

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While distentio becomes synonymous with the dispersal into the many and with the wandering of the old Adam, the intentio tends to be identified with the fusion of the inner man (“until . . . I am fused with You”). So the intentio is no longer the anticipation of the entire poem before its recitation which makes it move from the future towards the past, but the hope for the last things, to the very extent that the past that is to be forgotten is not the storehouse of memory but the emblem of the old Adam according to Paul in Philippians 3.12–14: “forgetting what I left behind I look forward not to what lies ahead of me in this life and will surely pass away but to an eternal goal. I am intent (sed secundum intentionem) upon this one purpose, not distracted (secundum distentionem) by other aims.” The same words recur: distentio and intentio, but this is no longer in a purely speculative context of aporia and inquiry but rather in a dialectic of praise and lamentation.63

Ricoeur is quite right to say that Augustine’s theory of temporality is not just an intellectual analysis: it evinces an eschatological “hope for the last things.” And he is also right to say that this theory is rooted in a theological discourse that praises God and laments over the sorrows of a sinful life (indeed, the dialectic of praise and lamentation resonates throughout the Confessions). Curiously, however, he does not address the notion of extension (extendere) in this passage. He focuses exclusively on intentio, which he associates with eschatological hope.64 I would argue that hope is not “intentional” but “extensional” (so to speak). One can, of course, use intentio to engage in the deliberate act of extending oneself toward God. But intentio alone does not fully capture the tensions featured in the theory. Let us look at the Augustinian passage again. Paul claims that he “extended himself toward those things before.” The Greek word for extending myself—ᓘ͸ͭͲͼͭͱ͵΄ʹͭ͵ͷͺ—features a particular temporal tension. As Agamben observes: “The two contrasting prepositions of epi (on) and ek (from), prepositions that go before a verb that means ‘to be in tension toward something,’ clearly convey the double movement in the Pauline gesture. The tension towards what lies ahead is produced on and out of what lies behind.”65 The Latin translation, extendere, does not capture this 63. Ricoeur (1985, 1:27–28). 64. In spite of his earlier claim that intentio is “present intention.” 65. Agamben (2005, 78). See also Arendt (1929/1996, 29): “The transit achieves oblivion of the ‘from’ over the ‘toward,’ whereby the forgetting of the origin obliterates the entire dimension of the past. ‘Extended’ toward what lies ahead (ante) and is ‘not yet’ (nondum), man forgets and disdains his own worldly past along with the world’s multiplicity from which he has collected

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double movement, but Augustine is clearly aware of the tension in Paul’s phrase. Indeed, in the passage quoted above, Augustine offers a careful meditation on the tensions of time, using a variety of tendere verbs. How, then, does extension (extendere) work with distentio and intentio? Let us look first at the opposition between intentio and distentio (non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem). Intentio gathers together disordered memories in its effort to construct a plan or an action that involves concentrated focus. But it can shape events only by actively focusing the mind on a specific set of memories and expectations. It does not overcome distention; rather, it offers a more coherent experience of time. Working against mental clutter, it uses specific memories and expectations to carry out activities that allow one to worship God (e.g., by controlling one’s body, helping one’s neighbor, etc.). In short, it directs and concentrates the mind but cannot overcome distention or integrate the psyche. Only God will gather together and unify the psyche at the end of time. On earth, humans must use intentio as a way to stay focused on God and on activities that support this orientation. Intentio works against distractions and interruptions and, for brief periods, can reduce the feeling of being scattered and torn apart in time. In the passage quoted above, Augustine also sets up the dichotomy between distention and extension (non distentus sed extentus). The Latin verb extendere means to “extend” or “reach out” over a distance. Once again, we confront a spatial metaphor that breaks down when the psyche actually reaches God. Whereas the in- in intentio suggests a move inward, the ex- in extendere pushes outward—away from the individuated psyche and toward the wholeness of God. How, then, does extension operate in Augustine’s thinking? Consider his discussion of extension in the Homilies on the First Epistle of John (4.6): The entire life of a Christian is a holy desire. What you desire, however, you don’t yet see. By desiring you are made large enough so that, when the time comes that you are able to see, you will be filled. For, if you wish to fill a purse and you know how great the amount is that will be given to you, you stretch and extend [extendis] the size of the purse. . . . In this way God extends our desire by delaying and extends our soul by desiring, and by extending it makes the soul capacious [sic Deus differendo

himself. . . . However, the absolute future that is reached in the transit remains forever what it is—sempiternally imminent, immovable by any human conduct and forever separated from human mortality.”

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extendit desiderium, desiderando extendit animum, extendendo facit capacem].

Here, the Christian extends himself by directing his desire toward God and allowing that desire to grow and expand. God, on his part, extends that desire precisely by delaying and deferring full gratification (while also offering hope). In extending a person’s desire, God also extends the soul and makes it more capacious. In the metaphor of the purse, Augustine spatializes extension. Ultimately, however, the soul is not spatial (since it is incorporeal). In addition, it must be extended to the point where it can accommodate the eternal God. It would have to become boundless and eternal to hold God in its “capacious” purse. In this example, the desire for God plays the leading role in the act of extension. One extends oneself by loving God, thus increasing one’s capacity to unite with the divine. We can begin to see how extension works in opposition to distention. Distention tears the mind away from self-presence and divine presence, while extension opens the soul to experience God’s eternal presence. Because temporality prevents humans from fully reaching God, we may identify extension as the movement of hope—hope for a home with God. As Augustine claims: “If there is a path mediating between the person who extends and that toward which he extends, there is the hope of arrival [quoniam si inter eum qui tendit et illud quo tendit via media est, spes est perveniendi]” (CD 11.2). For Augustine, of course, Christ is the mediating path between God and humanity. As I argue, one cannot understand extension without bringing in hope: hope works against distention by extending the soul toward eternity.66 Though it cannot overcome distention, hope moves the individual outward toward God. In Augustine, hope seems almost to conflate the journey with its goal while also maintaining the tension between earth and heaven, time and eternity. Augustine makes this point in an eloquent sermon: “Now, let us listen, brothers, let us listen and sing; let us feel desire for the city where

66. See the discussion of hope in the case of cultural collapse in Lear (2008). Lear takes as his test case the destruction of the Crow Nation, which was so devastated that “after this nothing happened” (a quote from Plenty Coups, the last great Crow chief). This book picks up on Lear (1999), which emphasizes the need to ask questions rather than assuming that one already knows the answer or solution to a problem. In both books, Lear explores radical (and hopeful) modes of “open-minded” questioning and listening. See also Ricoeur’s “Freedom in the Light of Hope” (in Ricoeur 1974, 402–24), which explores Christian hope as an “alogical . . . irruption into a closed order. . . . Hope, in its springing forth, is ‘aporetic,’ not by reason of lack of meaning but by excess of meaning” (411).

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we are citizens. . . . By desiring we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on the coast. . . . I am not in the place from which I am singing.”67 The “anchor” that is hope has been pitched from earth “into” heaven: the speaker is tensed between here and there, between time and eternity. The rope that links him to heaven pulls Augustine away from the place “here” where he is singing and lifts him to the divine “there.” Augustine is “not in the place from which he is singing” because he has extended himself to embrace God. Yet, at the same time, he occupies the place on earth “from which” he sings. Because he extends himself in hope, he both is and is not “here.” How, then, does extension differ from distention? One might think that extension is a mode of expectation. As we have seen, expectatio is the function of the distended mind that grasps a specific and understandable future event. But expectation operates within the distended mind, and Augustine is explicitly opposing extension and distention in this passage. In selfextension, the mind opens and expands itself toward a God who is, for the human, incomprehensible. One cannot find God in one’s memory and form an expectation of divine presence. God exists outside the mind and its temporal distention. God offers humans a boundless hope rather than a finite expectation. Augustine throws out the anchor of hope toward the unseen shores of divine eternity. It is desire and hope, then, that extend the soul from the bodily here and now to a boundless eternity. This hope is “cast” from the human world where the body ages in earthly time and the mind distends in psychic time. Indeed, temporality and mortality are the chasm that must be gotten over. In the Confessions, Augustine evokes the ongoing tension between the sorrows of earthly life and the joy of transhumation at the end of time: I also say: my God, where are You? I see You are there, but I sigh [respiro] for You a little when I pour out my soul upon myself in the voice of exultation and confession, the sound [soni] of a person celebrating a festival. Yet my soul is still sad because it slips back [relabitur] and becomes an abyss, or rather feels itself to be an abyss. My faith, which You have kindled to be a light at my feet in the night, says to it: “Why are you sad, soul, and why do you disturb me? Hope in the Lord.” . . . Hope and persevere until the night passes, which is the mother of iniquity, and

67. EnPs. 64.2–3: Iam ergo audiamus, fratres; audiamus, et cantemus, et desideremus unde cives sumus. . . . Iam desiderio ibi sumus, iam spem in illam terram, quasi anchoram praemisimus. . . . unde canto, non ibi.

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the wrath of the Lord passes. . . . We bear the remnants of the darkness [of the abyss] in the body, which is dead because of sin. Hope until the day breaks and the shadows disappear. (Conf. 13.14.15)

Reaching for the light even as he relapses into darkness, Augustine sighs and he sings. In his dark and mortal body, he waits and perseveres in hope. As Jean-François Lyotard says in his lyrical commentary on this passage: So night thickens, feebly streaked by the small light of hope. You, the creditor, have left us this hope in pledge . . . this credit over time. And it is considerable: however slender it be, this hope overturns time’s course with something like an advance blow, the torsion of tomorrow in today. . . . What I am not yet, I am. Its short glow makes us dead to the night of our days. So hope threads a ray of fire in the black web of immanence. What is missing, the absolute, cuts its presence into the shallow furrow of its absence. . . . The end of the night forever begins.68

Hope, then, is an “advance blow” over time. But this hope emerges from a human being whose body bears the “remnants” of the abyss or the nothingsomething from which it was created. Although God has given Christians advanced “credit” over time (offering them hope for eternal joy at Resurrection Day), they still have bodies that dwell in earthly time and minds that distend in psychic time. Augustine seeks to extend himself toward eternity in the mode of hope. As we will see in chapter 5, both the body and the mind cooperate in the act of extending a person toward God. Paradoxically, the human being attempts to extend himself or herself up and out of nature. In the Confessions, Augustine offers a theological as well as a philosophical account of time. His discussion draws a sharp contrast between time and eternity, human knowledge and divine knowledge. As Augustine observes in the song example, his memorization bears some resemblance to God’s omniscient knowledge of all things: just as he knows the whole song by heart, God knows all times and actions even though his knowledge is not stretched out in time (11.30.40). Yet Augustine is quick to point out that his own knowledge of the song can never compare with divine knowledge. He dwells in multiplicity, while God is an eternal “One.” Indeed, Augustine cannot even remember his own past in the way in which he memorized the

68. Lyotard (2000, 56–57).

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song. As he claims, many of his memories are “buried in forgetfulness” (sepelivit oblivio; 10.8.12). His memory contains a clutter of dispersed images. And his mind is scattered in time. As I have suggested, mental distention can be fully understood only in connection with the aging and changing of the body. Philosophers and scholars who have studied Augustine’s theory of time have not taken into account the human body, which is governed by earthly time.69 To some extent, Augustine invites the reader to make this very move: in Confessions 11, his analysis of temporal distention places great weight on the mind. Yet he can examine mental distention only by recourse to vocalizations: the utterance of a sound, a hymn, and a song. All three of these cases have a bodily aspect. And, in the hymn and the song, the words are both sensual and significant. As Augustine explains in Confessions 4: There are things that do not all have their being at the same moment, but, by passing away and by successiveness, they all form the whole of which they are parts. That is the way our speech is constructed by sounds that are significant. What we say would not be complete if one word did not cease to exist when it has sounded its constituent parts so that it can be succeeded by another. . . . These things [words] pass along the path of things that move toward nonexistence. . . . In words there is no point of rest—they lack permanence. . . . No one can fully grasp them even while they are present. (Conf. 4.10)

In analyzing time, Augustine reaches for verbal examples because they can be easily mapped onto a time line. Yet they cannot escape their sensual origins, which are experienced phenomenologically rather than in the mode of a linear representation. As we have seen, reciting a hymn or singing a song takes place in earthly time: time passes and events occur in the world as Augustine speaks or sings a given text. But his psyche experiences this time in the mode of distention. He cannot grasp bodily presence in the passing now of earthly time. He can understand his own bodily experiences only by way of memory and expectation: he remembers former bodily states and comes to understand that his body is aging and will eventually die. Earthly time marches on, but his mind jumps away from the ongoing now, moving backward into memory and forward into expectation.

69. Husserl makes this same mistake. As he explores time, the body effectively disappears; eventually, he ends up with a “transcendental ego” that has little relation to the body.

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As I have argued, by combining mental distention in psychic time with the aging and disintegration of the body in earthly time, Augustine offers a heterochronic theory of time. Even as the body changes as the seasons move forward, it grounds the human soul and mind in the passing now. The mind always distends from the here and now of the body. It cannot distend in an abstract now: it is the presence of the body that allows attentio to endure in the (ongoing) present. While many scholars have examined Augustine’s ontotheological metaphysics of presence, they have not attended to his discourses on the physics of presence. One cannot understand his theory of time without considering the interaction of the mind and the body. In sum, we can grasp Augustine’s conception of human embodiment only by recourse to a heterochronic theory of time. The distention of the mind pulls humans away from self-presence: we cannot coincide with ourselves. This gives us the sense of being out of nature. Yet, because we have earthly bodies, we are a part of nature. As beings living in two different time zones, we are both in and out of nature. Of course, Augustine’s goal is to transcend both earthly time and psychic time and enjoy the eternal God in the afterlife. In heaven, he will experience both the physics and the metaphysics of eternal presence. He will no longer have a mind distended in time but will behold the metaphysical and eternal presence of God. And he will also experience unchanging bodily presence in the eternal now.

chapter three

The Unsituated Self

And what about him, also known as “I,” namely Mr. Palomar? Is he not a piece of the world looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world on that side of the window and world on this side, perhaps the “I,” the ego, is simply the world through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr. Palomar. —Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

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remained an unfortunate place to myself, where I could neither stay nor depart [ego mihi remanseram infelix locus, ubi nec esse possem nec inde recedere]” (Conf. 4.7.12). What does it mean to be a person who cannot stay or leave the “place” (locus) that is himself? Augustine’s body stays in one place at a time, while his distended mind keeps leaving the present situation. Augustine considers himself unfortunate because he lacks unity and self-presence. Because he is doubly temporalized, he cannot coincide with himself. As he believes, he will receive a unified self only in the presence of God at the end of time. The Augustinian self is a moving target, full of absences and lacunae. In this chapter, I investigate Augustine’s “search for self” in relation to time and the body. Scholars have offered excellent analyses of the “narrative self” and the “grammar of selfhood” in the Confessions.1 I will not go over this ground, which focuses almost exclusively on discourse (and tends

1. The literature on this topic is vast. See, e.g., Vance (1973, 1984) (Vance coined the grammar of selfhood), Beaujour (1980, 37–47, 297–304), Spengemann (1980, chap. 1), Rothfield (1981), Freccero (1986a), and Lionnet (1989, 35–66). Stock (1996, chap. 2 and passim) offers an excellent discussion of the “narrative self.”

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to efface the body). Rather, I want to examine how being temporalized unsituates the self. I first analyze the (quarrelsome) marriage of the body and soul and the way in which the soul glues itself to the bodily world. How does the interaction of the soul and the body affect Augustine’s notion of the self? In some texts, Augustine examines his own mind in separation from the body: the mind thinks about the mind. In this act of “rational self-reflection,” however, he does not find a mortal self but an immortal mind. Ultimately, he searches for himself by looking in his memory for events in his past life—events connected to specific places and times. In this introspective search, he finds a fragmentary and evasive self. Since he dwells in two different time zones, he can never find a unified self on earth. In Augustine’s view, the self is realized only when the human becomes transhuman at the end of time. In exploring Augustine’s search for self, we need to analyze his conception of the “divided will” and his discourses on interiority. In particular, I look at his conception of the “inner man” and “outer man” and show how the outer bleeds into the inner (so to speak). As I argue, Augustine does not identify the inner man with the mind or the outer man with the body. While humans dwell on earth, the inner man is always outward bound. Augustine is, of course, famous for developing a radically new discourse of mental interiority. But he insists that the mind and the soul are linked to a human body (and that the soul cannot simply leave the premises). The interaction of the body and the soul makes the self evasive. As Augustine’s body changes in earthly time and his mind distends in psychic time, he can find no solid ground to stand on. This double temporalization effectively destabilizes the self. Finally, I investigate Augustine’s notion of the “weight of love” (pondus amoris). Augustine claims that the body “weighs down” the soul, moving it toward the earth. In worshipping God, however, the upward weight of love offers a counterweight to the heaviness of the body. In Augustine’s view, a healthy body will have a “lightness of being.” Of course, one can have this bodily health only when one is redeemed from sin at resurrection. At that point, with a unified soul and an unchanging body, one can finally coincide with oneself. The resurrected saint will be an integrated self for eternity. On earth, Augustine ongoingly journeys toward sainthood and selfhood.

THE MARRIAGE OF BODY AND SOUL Throughout his life, Augustine maintained the soul-body dualism that he originally found in the Platonists. But he countered the Platonists by el-

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evating the status of the body, making it a fit and necessary partner for the soul. As he says in a powerful sermon, his flesh will be his eternal friend: “Take away death, and the body is good. When this enemy death is removed, my flesh will be my friend for eternity. For nobody hates his own flesh. Though ‘the spirit lusts against the body, and the flesh lusts against the spirit,’ this is only a marital quarrel within the household. The husband argues but seeks concord and not dissolution.”2 The body is not just a friend but a spouse: the soul may “quarrel” with the body, but this is ordinary marital strife that aims at concord. Indeed, there can be no permanent divorce between the soul and the body since all human beings get their bodies back for eternity at the end of time (to be rewarded or punished). Of course, the soul departs from the body at death and must wait to get its body back at resurrection. But this temporary separation of the soul from the body is a traumatic and “unnatural” condition: “The death of the body, the separation of the body from the soul, is not good for anyone. . . . This violent sundering of the two elements, which are conjoined and interwoven in a living being [in vivente coniunctum atque consertum], is bound to be harsh and unnatural [contra naturam] as long as it lasts” (CD 13.6). Compare Plato, who portrays the incarnation of the soul as a wrenching psychic trauma and the separation of the soul from the body at death as a blessed release.3 Augustine rejects the Platonists’ claim that the soul should flee from the “prison” of the body. Instead, he praises “the sweet marriage bond of body and soul” (carnis et animae dulce consortium).4 Indeed, he insists that all people love their own bodies: “Nobody hates his body [corpus]. What the apostle said is true: ‘no one ever felt hatred for his body’ [Paul, Eph. 5:29]. Some say that they would prefer not to have a body, but they are wrong. For what they hate is not their body but its imperfections and its heavy weight. 2. Sermo. 155.14.15: Mortem tolle, et bonum est corpus. Detrahatur mors inimica, et erit mihi in aeternam caro mea amica. Nemo enim unquam carnem suam odio habuit. Etsi “spiritus concupiscit contra carnem, et caro concupiscit adversus spiritum”; etsi modo rixa est in ista domo, maritus litigans, non perniciem, sed concordiam quaerit uxoris (the biblical reference is Paul, Gal. 5:17). See also Cont. 7.18: “Altogether these two are both good—the spirit is a good and the flesh is a good. And man, who is composed of both, one ruling, the other obeying, is assuredly a good, but a good capable of change” (Prorsus ista duo ambo sunt bona: et spiritus bonum est et caro bonum; et homo, qui ex utroque constat, uno imperante, alio serviente, utique bonum est, sed mutabile bonum). 3. On the soul’s incarnation into the body, see Timaeus 43a–e. Plato speaks about the blessed “separation” of the philosophic soul from the body at death in many different dialogues. 4. Ep. 140.6.16. To be sure, Augustine uses the images of the body as a prison and as a tomb in his earliest work (Miles 1979, 97; Rist 1994, 98). (See also Courcelle [1974–75, 2:345–71] for a discussion of the theme of the body as a prison or tomb in antiquity.) But he changes his position by the late 390s (on this development, see Miles [1979, chap. 1] and Rist [1994, chap. 4]).

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They do not want to get rid of the body but to have an incorruptible body.”5 The human body is mortal and corruptible, and its heavy weight pulls the soul down. But this is not the true nature of the body, which was originally designed as perfect. Augustine attacks people “who wage war on their body as if it were a natural enemy [quasi naturaliter inimico suo corpori bellum ingerunt]”: “They are misled in their interpretation of the words, ‘the flesh lusts in opposition to the spirit and the spirit lusts in opposition to the flesh; for these are in conflict with one another.’ These words were spoken in reference to the ungovernable habits of the flesh; the spirit ‘lusts against the flesh’ not in order to destroy the body [corpus] but to make it subservient to the spirit.”6 On the contrary, one must love, not hate, the body: “We must instruct a person how to love his own body [corpus suum diligat] so as to look after it systematically and sensibly; for it is equally obvious that one loves one’s own body and wants it to be healthy and sound.”7

THE DIVIDED WILL By bringing the body and soul into a close and lasting union, Augustine rejects the Platonic claim that the soul should transcend the body. In Augustine, the true battle takes place within the soul, in the divided will. Augustine offers a detailed discussion of the will in Confessions 8, just before the conversion scene. At this point in the text, he has accepted Christ as his savior on an intellectual level. But he cannot fully convert because his will is too weak to give up sexual pleasure: The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind [animus] commands the body and is presently obeyed. The mind commands itself

5. DDC 1.24.24. Note that Augustine takes this passage from Galatians out of context: Paul used the phrase “no one ever felt hatred for his body” to communicate that husbands should love their wives. As E. Clark (1999) shows, passages from the Bible—both the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) and the New—were used by Christian theologians to argue for various ascetic practices; decontextualization was a useful tool for this mode of hermeneutics. In this passage in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine is arguing against extreme ascetics who were attempting to transcend the body (see E. Clark 1999, 135). 6. DDC 1.24.25. The reference in the quote is to Paul, Gal. 5:17. 7. DDC 1.25.26. See, e.g., Ep. 137.2: “The person [persona] of man is a mingling of soul and body, but the Person of Christ is a mingling of God and man, for, when the word of God is joined to a soul that has a body, it takes on both the soul and the body at once.” See also Genlitt. 12.35.68: “There is engrained in the soul a kind of natural appetite for administering to the body [inest ei naturalis quidem adpetitus corpus administrandi].” In his later writing, Augustine identifies the human “person” (persona) as a “mingling of soul and body.”

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and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to move, and this is so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet the mind is mind, and the hand is bodily. The mind orders the mind to will. It is the same thing, yet the command is not obeyed. What causes this monstrosity, and why does this happen? The mind commands that it should will, and it would not give the command if it did not will this, yet it does not perform what it commands. The willing is not entire, so the command is not entire. (Conf. 8.9.21)

The will is a part of the incorporeal soul and, indeed, an aspect of the mind. Augustine associates the will (voluntas) with the love that directs choice and assent: it is not just an intellectual operation.8 The human will is divided against itself, however, because it is perverted by original sin: So my two wills, one old and one new, the one carnal and the other spiritual [illa carnalis illa spiritalis], were in conflict with one another. . . . In this way I understood, through my own experience, what I had read: that “the flesh lusts in opposition to the spirit and the spirit lusts in opposition to the flesh.” I myself was in both [ego quidem in utroque], but more of me was in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved. In the latter case, it was “no more I” [iam non ego (Rom. 7:17)] since in more of it I suffered against my will than acted on it with my will.9

Here, in a reading of the Pauline struggle between the flesh (caro) and the spirit (spiritus) we find the opposition between the “carnal” will and the “spiritual” will (but not between the body and the soul). Augustine says that both the carnal will and the spiritual will dwell in his soul in a state of opposition. His will is thus divided against itself. How does this affect Augustine’s sense of self? Who—and where—is this “I” who speaks? “It was I who was willing and I who was unwilling;

8. On Augustine’s notion of the will, see Dihle (1982), Kahn (1988), Wetzel (1992, 126–38), and Rist (1994, chap. 5). 9. Conf. 8.5.10–11. See also Conf. 8.9.21: “The strength of the command lies in the strength of will, and the degree to which the command is not performed lies in the degree to which the will is not engaged. For it is the will that commands the will to exist, and it commands not another will but itself [nec alia sed ipsa]. So the will that commands is incomplete, and, therefore, what it commands does not happen. If it were complete, it would not need to command the will to exist since it would exist already. . . . So there are two wills. Neither of them is complete, and what is present in the one is absent in the other.”

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it was I [ego eram, qui volebam, ego, qui nolebam; ego eram]. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself, and I was scattered [dissipabar]” (8.10.22). This roving “I,” as it seems, is a moving target. In his repeated use of the word ego, Augustine emphasizes the fragmentation of the self. Indeed, he ponders whether he may be some sort of “monster” (Conf. 8.9.21). In the Confessions, he attempts to bring together his fragmented self by worshipping God: he aligns himself with the “correct” biblical voices and narratives, and he controls his rebellious body through ascetic practices. Yet he cannot achieve unity while he lives in a mortal body. The Confessions reflects this tension between fragmentation and unification, between dispersion and self-collection, between time and eternity. The key cause of this tension is the temporalization of the human being (which is the punishment for sin). Consider Augustine’s account of the backward and forward movement of his soul on its journey toward God: “For, not only to go forward, but to arrive fully at that place, involved nothing other than the will to go there—to will strongly and fully, and not to have a half-wounded will turning and tossing here and there, struggling with one part rising up and the other part falling down” (Conf. 8.8.19). To “arrive fully,” Augustine must be at one with himself. Yet this is an impossible ideal: the human dwells in time and cannot “arrive” at the eternity of God until the end of time. Since the human will is infected by the sin of Adam, it remains infirm throughout earthly life. The psyche tosses and turns, rises and falls, as it distends away from self-presence. Although Augustine’s conversion and baptism have made him a “new man,” he understands that this is but one step on the journey toward God. He never fully arrives. It may seem that, in focusing on the divided will, Augustine places less emphasis on the body per se. As Gedaliahu Stroumsa claims: “Just as it was being enlarged and unified through the integration of the body, the subject was at once broken again, in a new fashion. This time, the great divide was no longer between soul and body as representing lofty spirit and base matter but cut right through the subject itself. . . . It is precisely this rift within the human person that rendered the new reflexivity possible.”10 We should not forget, however, that the body and the natural world play a crucial role in the activity of the will. Indeed, the will regularly attends to the sensual world (so that a person can carry on in life), and it runs the risk of becom-

10. Stroumsa (1990, 30). See also Rist (1994, 184).

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ing glued to this world. As we will see, this agglutination can lead the soul to identify itself as a body, thus blurring the boundaries between body and soul.11 In Augustine’s case, his conversion to Christianity rests on his rejection of sex, which has become an addictive habit. At his conversion, God strengthens his will, thus allowing him to practice celibacy in spite of his lustful urges. Of course, even after Augustine adopts a celibate life, he continues to battle against sensual pleasures—pleasurable foods and melodious music, sights and sounds in the natural world, and sexual images that regularly assail him.12 His will is still divided, though he now has God’s aid in his fight against unruly impulses.

SENSING BODIES We come now to Augustine’s theory of the interaction of the soul and the body in sensation.13 Augustine argues that the soul, rather than the body, actively senses the physical world. Scholars have called this theory of sensation one-way interactionism because the soul does the active work in bodily sensation. As Etienne Gilson explains: “It is the soul which acts and keeps constant watch in each organ of the body. The body is either in difficulty or contented, and in both cases it wants the soul to know it. The material passion which the body undergoes is, then, a call directed towards the soul by the body, rather than an action exercised on the soul by the body.”14 It is the activity of the will that brings bodily sensations into the purview of the soul. The body does not act on the soul in the experience of sensation; rather, the will actively generates sensation. Of course, the will cannot sense anything in the absence of a body—the body’s passions ongoingly alert the soul. The soul, then, cannot simply ignore the body or the bodily world. It is “married” to a body and cannot turn away from this bond. Augustine’s discussion of vision offers a useful example of his theory of sensation. Augustine subscribes to an “extromission” theory of vision, whereby the “rays” of the eyes flow outward into the world: the rays “shine

11. This blurring is not ontological—it is the sinning person who identifies his or her soul with the bodily world. More on this below. 12. I discuss this in detail in chapter 5. 13. See Gilson (1967, 38–111), Miles (1979, chap. 1), Miles (1983), O’Daly (1987, 7–105), and Rist (1994, chap. 3). 14. Gilson (1967, 63). As Miles (1983, 129) notes, the senses offer different kinds of data, but the soul is the active agent in all modes of sensation (see also Bourke 1945, 237; and Miles 1979, 64).

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through the eyes and touch whatever we see.”15 The will comes first, sending the visual rays into the world through an act of attention (Trin. 11.5.9). Once the visual ray “touches” an object in the world, an imprint or image of this object is formed in the mind of the viewer. As Margaret Miles puts it: “The soul of the viewer both initially projects the visual ray, and it also ‘absorbs into itself’ the form or image of the object, which is then permanently retained by the memory. . . . The soul forms images of sensible things ‘out of its own substance,’ but the result is that the mind itself is formed by the very images it formulates and carries. The soul is ‘fitted together’ with them, or ‘takes the shape of’ the objects of its focused attention.”16 In this account of vision, we see the one-way interactionism that operates in Augustine’s theory of sensation. The will initiates the act of seeing something in the physical world; through this act, the mind is shaped and imprinted by these external things, which take the form of images. Not surprisingly, the will is easily ensnared in the physical world. Indeed, if the will’s attention to bodily sensations causes it pleasure and curiosity, the soul becomes glued to the physical realm. This “informing” of the mind by bodily images has important existential ramifications. In particular, when the soul glues itself to the physical world, it can develop a passionate overattachment to bodily sensations. This act of agglutination is caused by a love of the pleasures and distractions offered by the earthly world: “Such is the force of love that, when the mind has been thinking about things with love and has become stuck to them with the glue of care [curae glutino], it drags these things along with itself even after it returns to thinking about itself. The mind has fallen in love with bodies outside itself through the senses of the flesh and has become involved with them through a long familiarity.”17 When this occurs, the mind begins to think of itself as a body—as something that is “made like bodies” (Trin. 10.6.8, 10.8.11). This leads a person to adopt an “ungodly” materialist position (articulated by Stoic and Epicurean philosophers). In Augustine’s view, when a person comes to see himself as a purely bodily entity, he fails to

15. Trin. 9.3.3. For a discussion of ancient theories of vision, see Nightingale (2004, chap. 1), which gives a full bibliography on this subject. On Augustine’s theory of vision, see Miles (1983), O’Daly (1987, 82–85), and Miller (2005a, 29–30). 16. Miles (1983, 128). The quote is from Trin. 10.5.7–8. 17. Trin. 10.5.7: Tanta vis est amoris, ut ea quae cum amore diu cogitaverit, eisque curae glutino inhaeserit, attrahat secum etiam cum ad se cogitandam quodam modo redit. Et quia illa corpora sunt, quae foris per sensus carnis adamavit, eorumque diuturna quadam familiaritate implicata est. I use Hill’s (1991, 293) translation, which I have changed in minor ways. Note that Augustine emphasizes that this “love” is not true love but rather desire (8.7.10).

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distinguish his soul from the earthly world. The more a soul glues itself to the earthly world, the more it becomes alienated from itself: it identifies itself with nature—a mere “foster nurse,” as Wordsworth put it—instead of finding its true self in the presence of God. Yet even a person who successfully avoids this overattachment to the physical world is outward bound. There is no escaping sensation and the interaction between the soul and the body in human life. As Augustine claims, a mature and devout Christian can detach himself from the physical world for a short period of time and get a glimpse of God (turning from physical vision to spiritual vision). But, as he admits, this is a rare event in any life. While dwelling on earth, one must regularly attend to one’s own body and to the physical world in general. Interestingly, the soul’s addictive attachment to the physical world can actually change the constitution of the body: The will exerts such force in bringing together [the bodily object that it sees with the image of the body] that it identifies the sensation itself with the object. . . . And if this “coupling” activity is passionate—which we call love or covetousness or lust—it will affect the rest of that person’s body. In fact, if a body is not dense and unmalleable, it will even change its appearance and color. For example, the chameleon’s little body is easily transformed into the colors it sees. . . . And the children of living beings often embody the desires of their mothers, that is, the things that the mothers have looked at with particular pleasure. Since the first stages of the embryo are more tender and more malleable, children can easily reflect their mother’s intentions and the image produced in her by the bodies at which she has eagerly gazed. (Trin. 11.2.5)

At various levels, humans have a sort of chameleon capacity to liken themselves to the world around them.18 Humans identify themselves with the earthly realm through the glue of love and thus become more like these worldly things. As Augustine claims, Christians must look at the world in the right state of mind. They should focus their energies correctly and “use” the physical world as a way of worshipping God.19 In dealing with the physical world, they must practice the proper “economy of attention” (to borrow

18. Obviously, the chameleon example is just an analogy. 19. See Augustine’s uti/fruti distinction in DDC bk. 1, where he says that one should “use” but not “enjoy” the world.

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Lorraine Daston’s term).20 As Augustine observes: “While we live in the temporal order, we must fast and abstain from the enjoyment of what is temporal for the sake of the eternity in which we wish to live, but it is actually the passage of time that teaches us to hate the temporal and seek the eternal.”21 The fact that humans are aware of time passing makes them hate the temporal, no doubt because they can anticipate aging, loss, death, and the decaying corpse in the future. Yet, in the short run, the soul can easily fall in love with the world. Of course, Augustine does not believe that the earthly world is bad or evil in itself: “There is no harm in seeking after sensible things and retaining them in memory provided that you do not desire them for pleasure or flee from them like a coward if they give pain” (Trin. 11.5.8). Indeed, one can marvel at the world as long as one sees it for what it truly is: a creation of God. But seeing the world in the right way requires extensive training. The will is weak and is easily derailed by fear, desire, and pleasure. And it regularly glues itself to sensible things. Vision is a particularly problematic sense since one sees things all the time. In Augustine’s view, taking pleasure in beauty for its own sake is a form of cupiditas. Indeed, the “lust of the eyes” is so insatiable that it not only loves beautiful objects but even seeks out ugly and revolting things (like corpses), just for the sake of discovering something new (Conf. 10.35.55). How, then, can one avoid taking pleasure in beautiful objects? Augustine says that one should refer all these beauties to the “beauty of God.” Yet this is difficult to achieve since physical beauty so easily traps the soul: “Beautiful and varied forms—glowing and colorful—give pleasure to my eyes. . . . They touch me when I am awake, all day long, and do not give me a moment’s respite.” Indeed, even sunshine offers visual pleasure when it comes out, and it depresses the mind when it is clouded over” (Conf. 10.34.51). Only a rigorous ascetic regime (and the grace of God) can lead the Christian to resist sensual pleasure. One must mortify one’s flesh—choosing physical pain over pleasure—as a way of preparing for an unearthly body at resurrection.22 In heaven, the saints will experience bodily sensation in a

20. Daston (2004a) discusses the notion of “economies of attention” in an essay on the disciplines of attention developed by naturalists in the Enlightenment. Clearly, the scientists in this period were moving into a mode of “curiosity” that was replacing earlier economies of attention. 21. DDC. 2.63: A temporum autem delectatione, dum in temporibus vivimus, propter aeternitatem in qua vivere volumus abstinendum et ieiunandum est, quamvis temporum cursibus ipsa nobis insinuetur doctrina contemnendorum temporum et appetendorum aeternorum. 22. I will discuss the mortification of the flesh in detail in chapter 5.

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positive way: they will see only divine beauty and will both sing and hear eternal praises of God. Their unified psyches will experience bodily presence eternally. At that point, they will be transformed into transhuman selves.

THE MIND LOOKS AT THE MIND Augustine attempts to discover “who and what he is” throughout his mature writings. His approach to this question is complex and takes different forms in different texts. Let me focus here on two cases where he engages in “rational self-reflection”: (1) the act of thinking about oneself thinking (which reveals that one is a living, rational, willful being) and (2) the search for the image of God in the human mind.23 I want to examine these two activities of rational self-reflection because both focus exclusively on the mind in abstraction from the body. As I suggest, one should not identify these mental reflections with Augustine’s search for his mortal self. Let us look first at the act of thinking about oneself thinking. As scholars have noted, Augustine was fascinated by this activity of rational selfreflection.24 In the City of God, for example, Augustine observes: “If I am mistaken, I exist.” A nonexistent being cannot be mistaken; therefore, I must exist if I am mistaken. Since being mistaken proves that I exist, how can I be mistaken in thinking that I exist since my mistake establishes my existence? . . . It follows that I am not mistaken in knowing that I know. Also, just as I know that I exist, I also know that I know. And, when I know these two facts, I add love as a third thing of

23. On Descartes’s proto-Cartesian arguments and Augustine’s “rational self-reflection,” see Gilson (1967, 41–42), Taylor (1989, 131–34), Stock (1996, 259–73), and Sorabji (2006, chap. 12). These writers focus, for the most part, on the Trinity, which deals with the human mind as an image of the divine Trinity (the mind contains the trinity of memory, will, and understanding). Compare Rist (1994, 87–88), who distinguishes between the proto-Cartesian search for “inner truth” and the very different activity of “introspection” (where one investigates one’s own past and present activities, desires, and urges). 24. See, e.g., Taylor (1989, 130): “Augustine shifts the focus from the field of objects known to the activity itself of knowing. To look towards this activity is to look to the self, to take up a reflective stance. . . . In our normal dealings with things, we disregard this dimension of experience and focus on the things experienced. But we can turn and make this our object of attention, become aware of our awareness, try to experience our experiencing, focus on the way the world is for us. This is what I call taking a stance of radical reflexivity.” Taylor rightly calls attention to Augustine’s attempts to think about himself thinking, but he wrongly identifies this mental activity with human self-knowledge. For a discussion of ancient Greek conceptions of the self, see Long (1992, 2001). See also Gill (2006), who analyzes Greek and Roman notions of the self.

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no smaller value to these things that I know. Nor is the statement that “I love” a mistake since I am not mistaken in the things I love. (CD 11.26)

Here, we find a proto-Cartesian argument in which Augustine’s reflection on his own mental awareness proves that he exists and possesses (some) knowledge. Augustine also adds that he knows himself as a loving being. Let us compare these Augustinian claims to Descartes’s “cogito” argument: “I think, therefore I am.” In the Meditations and the Discourse on Method, Descartes not only proves that he exists but also identifies himself as a res cogitans. Indeed, he defines the human being as a “thinking substance”: only the mind—which is ontologically separate from the body—is human. By separating the human being from the bodily world, Descartes bumped into a serious philosophical problem: “I think, therefore I am” proves that “I” exist and am human, but “I” cannot prove this of others. In dealing with other people, Descartes could see their bodies—which belong to res extensa—but he could not get into their minds to confirm that they were res cogitantes.25 As many scholars have noted, he ended up in a solipsistic position: he could not prove that other humans existed without bringing in God. He thus created what modern philosophers call the problem of other minds. Anticipating Descartes, Augustine saw that he had no access to other people except through their bodies. But he believed that seeing people’s bodies offered him sufficient evidence that they were human. He drew this conclusion because he did not identify the human being solely with the mind (or soul). For example, in a discussion of the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself,” Augustine claims: “You should understand [by this commandment] your whole self—that is, your mind and body [animum et corpus]. And you should understand your whole neighbor—that is, his mind and body [animum et corpus eius]—since a human consists of a mind and a body [homo enim ex animo constat et corpore].”26 The human being, then, is psychosomatic and socially defined. One cannot “find oneself” simply by reflecting on one’s own mental activities. In Augustine’s view, the mind

25. Of course, for Descartes, the proof of the existence of God allowed him to go beyond his first “truth,” i.e., the proof of his own existence. 26. DDC 1.26.27. See also Cont. 12.26: “Indeed, the body is different from the nature of the soul, but it is not alien from the nature of man. For the soul is not made up of body, but, nevertheless, man is made up of soul and body” (Corpus quippe ab anima est quidem natura diversum, sed non est a natura hominis alienum. Non enim animus constat ex corpore; sed tamen homo ex animo constat et corpore).

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is aware of itself as a thinking and loving being, but it also knows its own body and recognizes other human beings through their bodies: “It is by an inner sense [interiore sensu] and not by corporeal eyes that a man knows his own life, by which he now lives in the body and makes these earthly limbs grow and live [qua nunc vivit in corpore et haec terrena membra vegetat facitque viventia]. But the lives of other men, though invisible, he sees through the body. . . . For we see human bodies, and we also see their lives, which we cannot see except through the body.”27 As Augustine points out, he experiences his own life—which includes his “earthly limbs” and “body”—in one way, through an “inner sense.” And he sees other people’s lives in a different way, by seeing their bodies and observing their actions. Yet, in both cases, he identifies humans as embodied souls. Of course, he does elevate the mind and the soul over the body. Indeed, it is the mind and the will that move a person in one or another direction. Still, the human is a composite of soul and body, and the soul cannot escape the body. Thinking about himself thinking, then, enables Augustine to investigate his own mind. But this activity does not allow him to find his mortal self. Let me turn now to the second activity of rational self-reflection—Augustine’s search for an image of God in himself. Augustine offers an extensive interpretation of the famous passage from Genesis (1:26): “Let us make mankind in our own image.” He argues that the true image of God exists in the human mind. In Trinity 9–14, he conducts a long search for this image in his mind by the act of rational self-reflection.28 In book 10, he identifies his search for the image of God in himself with the Greek command to “know thyself.”29 What sort of self does Augustine find in this mental search? Certainly, he does not identify the image of God in his mind with the mortal self. Rather, he commands his mind to pull itself away from the body and to “know itself” as an immortal mind (Trin. 10.8.11). In Trinity 9–14, Augustine attempts to move inward (and upward), step by step, from the bodily world, to the world of images in the memory, to a nonimagistic mental realm. He claims that, in making this journey, he 27. CD 22.29. See also CD 22.29: “Now we live among living men who display the motions of life, and whenever we see them we do not believe [by faith] but rather see that they are alive. Though we cannot see the life within their bodies, still we see it in them by means of their bodies, all doubt being removed.” 28. Augustine goes through a spectrum of weaker and stronger images of God that move from the outer man to the inner man. I deal here with the “truest” image, which is found in the mind of the inner man. 29. See the discussion of the meditation on the Greek command to “know thyself” in Augustine’s corpus in Courcelle (1974–75, chap. 8). Note esp. pp. 141–63, where Courcelle analyses this command in Trinity 10.

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can find clearer and clearer “traces” of the image of God in himself. But he repeatedly admits that he can find only shadowy traces of this image in his mortal life. Since the true image of God is perfect and immortal, he cannot find this while he dwells in the earthly realm. As he argues, a transient being can glimpse eternity only in the briefest of moments (Trin. 12.14.23, 14.15.21). Humans cannot escape from time or the body. In searching for the image of God in his mind, then, he keeps on bumping into his mortal being, which is located in the social and bodily realm.30 As Augustine says in the Trinity, when one thinks about oneself thinking, one has an immediate sense of oneself as a living, rational being. This act of mental self-reflection, however, is a relatively limited cognitive activity that is nested in the overall movement toward God. One engages in mental self-reflection as a step in the ongoing search for the image of God within oneself. As Etienne Gilson notes: “By rights, for the mind to recognize itself it should have to do nothing more than become aware of itself and apprehend itself; but . . . if it does this it obtains little more than a false appearance, i.e. its own image deformed and materialized by a heavy covering of sensible images.”31 The mind must attempt to pare away bodily images in its search for the image of God within itself. In the Trinity, Augustine claims that “the mind always remembers, always understands, and always loves itself, even though it does not always think about itself as distinct from things that are other than it.”32 In short, there is never a time when the mind does not remember, understand, and love itself, even if it is not engaging in the act of rational self-reflection. Augustine suggests that a person should deliberately think about himself thinking. From that starting point, he should use his mind to investigate its own trinitarian structure (memory, understanding, love)—a structure that reflects the trinitarian God.33 Here, the mind examines itself as an immortal mind, not as a mortal self. As Augustine claims: “What we have to find in

30. As Gilson (1967, 223) observes: “For neither a study of the divine image within us nor even the terms of the dogmatic formulae we use to define the Trinity gives us a real understanding of it. Moreover, after devoting the first fourteen books of the De Trinitate to probing this mystery, Augustine uses the fifteenth and last book to describe the radical differences between created images and the Trinity which creates them.” 31. Gilson (1967, 221). 32. Trin. 14.6.9. Note that Augustine offers a spectrum of trinities, which move from a distant and poor image of God to a perfect image of God (the latter being found at resurrection). 33. Augustine’s argument in the Trinity is quite complex: the image of God in man is perpetual self-memory, self-understanding, and self-willing. All these are found in the memory. This aspect of the memory, then, operates (ongoingly) in the present, but the human mind is nonetheless distended into the past and the future.

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the soul of man, that is, in the rational or intellectual soul, is an image of the Creator which is immortality ingrained in the soul’s immortality.”34 In the Trinity, Augustine attempts a mental ascent to discover not only the image of God in his mind but God himself. Yet, as Augustine admits, he cannot achieve this vision while he lives on earth: “For the time being, the mind does not see anything that is not unchangeable” (14.15.21). In this ongoing effort to find God, the Christian must “renew himself day by day . . . transferring his love from temporal things to eternal, from visible to intelligible, from carnal to spiritual” (14.17.23). As Augustine notes, the mental contemplation of God occurs only in the briefest of moments and even then only “through a glass darkly”: “Fix your eyes on that light and look at it if you can . . . but you are unable to fix your gaze there and observe this clearly and distinctly.”35 As Margaret Miles points out, Augustine believed that one could see God—with the eye of the mind—“in a trembling glance” but not with a “fixed gaze.”36 Of course, this contemplative glance is made possible only by the long process of prayer, ascetic practices, religious rituals, introspection, and charitable dealings with other people (all of which involve the body). Augustine observes that, as mortal beings, humans must use their minds to engage in “the performance of bodily and temporal actions” (Trin. 12.3.3). Indeed, these actions occupy the greater part of the Christian’s life.37 The sinful human being cannot escape the earthly and social order, where the mind and the body act (though never simultaneouly).38 In all his writings, Augustine represents himself as a temporal and mortal being searching for an eternal God. In some texts, he places a particularly strong emphasis on the effort to turn away from the physical world and contemplate God with the mind. The Trinity is, perhaps, the most extreme case: in searching for the image of God in his immortal mind, Augustine tries to separate his mind

34. Trin. 14.4.6 (from Hill 1991, 374): Ea est inuenienda in anima hominis, id est rationali siue intellectuali, imago creatoris quae immortaliter immortalitati eius est insita. 35. Trin. 15.27.50. See also 12.14.23: “The very acuteness of the mind is, as it were, beaten back and repelled.” 36. Miles (1983, 134). (Note especially the momentary “visions” of God in Conf. 7.10.16 and 9.10.25.) As Miles points out, spiritual vision is similar to physical vision in a crucial way: “Even the longing glance, brief as it is, has the two-way connecting power of the visual ray so that, while the soul pours its energy into its object, it is simultaneously informed by the vision” (1983, 136). 37. Thus, the image of God in the immortal mind is not attached to the earthly and temporal world or to the images in the human mind that come from the bodily realm. This image of God can be fully discovered only at the end of time. 38. See, e.g., Trin. 12.3.3, 12.5.5, 12.12.17, 14.8.11, and 14.15.21.

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from his mortal body and the earthly world. His acts of rational self-reflection, however, do not allow him to “know himself” as a human being on earth. To find his mortal self, he must confront his temporalized soul and body.

SEARCHING FOR A MORTAL SELF As Augustine says in the Confessions, humans cannot dwell in the present: “No time is wholly present.”39 As a physical organism, the human body continually changes as earthly time passes. And the mind is always distended into the past (through memory) and the future (through expectation). As Stroumsa suggests: “The continuum, for Augustine, is the temporal dimension, within which the recognition of the self takes place—a dimension ignored by the Greek philosophers and which links the subject to the cosmos in a new, historical way.”40 In contrast to the Platonists, where the key player is the incorporeal and everlasting soul, Augustine searches for a mortal self. But this self is a moving target. Since the mind is always distended in psychic time and the body ongoingly changes in earthly time, the self remains evasive. In Confessions 1–10, Augustine looks for himself through the act of introspection. Here, he examines his personal experiences of the social, physical, and psychic realm. Introspection, then, should be distinguished from rational self-reflection (where the mind inspects the mind in separation from the body). By engaging in introspection, Augustine finds events and experiences that have made up his life. Of course, introspection is utterly dependent on memory. Yet memory itself is not always reliable and does not have fixed boundaries that “contain” the self. In Confessions 10, for example, Augustine finds in his memory an evasive self: Great is the power of memory, a thing to be amazed at, a power of profound and infinite multiplicity [profunda et infinita multiplicitas]. And this is the mind, this is I myself [hoc animus est, et hoc ego ipse sum]. What then am I, my God: what is my nature? A life that is diverse, mul-

39. Conf. 11.11.13. See also Conf. 11.14.17: “The present is made in such a way that it passes into the past, so how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward nonexistence.” 40. Stroumsa (1990, 47). See also Miles (1979, 22): “For the hierarchical spatial model of the parts of the human being in Plotinus, [Augustine] substituted a temporal model; he now thinks in terms of describing the human being in process, itinerant through time.”

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tiform, and utterly immeasurable [varia, multimoda vita et inmensa vehementer]. See the broad plains and dens and caverns of my memory. . . . I run through all these things, I fly here and there and penetrate their working as far as I can. But the end is nowhere [finis nusquam]. (Conf. 10.17.26)

In the boundless “place” that is his memory, Augustine cannot quite discover himself. His self is a moving target, full of opacities and lacunae. In the Confessions, Augustine finds the material of his life story in his memory. How does he organize this material to construct a self? Using introspection, he searches through the “images” and “ideas” in his memory, “where they were hidden away, scattered, and neglected” (ubi sparsa prius et neglecta latitabant). He actively searches through these scattered memories and attempts to put them together to find a coherent self. Yet the memory changes over time and tends to move toward dispersion. Thus, whenever Augustine searches in his memory, he finds new images and ideas that need to be gathered together yet again. In his view, the true self must be fully integrated: his mind must have self-presence, and his soul and body must act simultaneously. Of course, one cannot achieve this integration on earth. The mortal self is fragmented and pervaded with absence. Indeed, Augustine defines the very act of thinking as a “gathering together from a dispersed state” (ex quadam dispersione colligenda) images and ideas stored in the memory (Conf. 10.11.18). This identification of thinking (cogitare) with the activity of gathering together memories offers a new sense of the mind. By associating mental cognition with memory, Augustine temporalizes the mind.41 Here, Augustine does not conceive of a “pure mind” that has a “view from nowhere.” Rather, he focuses on the human mind with its (changing) memories of specific events and ideas. Augustine attempts to gather together past experiences from different times and places in his effort to construct a stable self. Not surprisingly, he can never get to the bottom of himself. In his ongoing search in his memory, he effectively bumps into the unconscious.42 In re-membering himself, then, he is not able to “know himself.” Rather, in reflecting on his

41. On this passage, see Carruthers (1998, 33). Of course, Augustine’s philosophy of mind is far more complex than this quote suggests. Still, in all Augustine’s accounts of the mind, memory plays a central role. On his conception of the mind and rational understanding, see Gilson (1967, 38–111), O’Daly (1987), and Rist (1994, chap. 3). 42. As Augustine claims, God knows him much better than he knows himself.

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life experiences, his bodily sensations, and his (evolving) self-understanding, he finds in himself absences.43 In his attempt to discover himself in his memory, he does not find continuity or stability but a fragmented self that is scattered in time. He struggles to achieve a stable self but can never quite succeed. Of course, he can gather together certain pieces of his life and create a relatively stable “narrative self” (indeed, this is what he does in the first nine books of the Confessions). But this kind of narrative is, inevitably, reductive and leaves out pieces that do not fit into the story. Augustine believes that he must regularly engage in the act of selfinspection. He must track down his sinful acts, urges, and passions and confess them to God. As we have seen, he conducts this investigation by searching in his memory and its capacious storage bank. Using powerful imagery, Augustine offers a topography of his memory—broad plains, dens, and caverns—through which he “runs,” “flies,” and “penetrates.” As he claims, the memory is “the stomach of the mind”: this stomach contains past ideas as well as images of the bodily world. It is by delving into his memory that he can take both the subject and the object position: “I myself, Lord, labor on this, and I labor on myself: I have become a soil [terra] that requires hard labor and a great deal of sweat. For we are not examining the zones of the heaven or measuring the distances between stars or seeking the weight of the earth: it is I myself who remembers, I the mind [ego sum qui memini, ego animus]. It is not surprising if what I am not is distant from me: but what is nearer to me than myself?” (Conf. 10.16.25). Augustine reflects on himself, yet he cannot ultimately know himself. In this remarkable metaphor, Augustine is both the sweaty farmer and the soil being plowed. Yet he can take the subject and object positions only because his mind is temporally distended: this enables him to remember past events and experiences and to direct himself toward a future with God. Since his mind is distended in psychic time, his self is permeated by the nonexistence of the past and the future. “I” find “myself” in the past, which no longer exists, and in future possibilities, which have not yet happened. Or, better, “I” cannot fully find “myself” because my past is gone and my future has not arrived.44 In short, we cannot understand Augustine’s notion of the subjectobject position without factoring in temporality. In Augustine, both the

43. As Beaujour (1980, 9) observes. 44. As Augustine says in CD 14.13, the present disappears instantaneously into the “nonexistent” past because there is an element of “nothingness” in the human being. See IoEv. 38.10, where he offers an extensive discussion of the nonbeing of time.

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subject and the object are mired in time. This makes it impossible for Augustine to inhabit a stable subject position from which he can investigate himself (or anything else) as an object of inquiry.45 He nonetheless continues to inspect himself to the extent that this is possible. Of course, Augustine cannot take himself as an object of investigation without examining his own body and its place in the earthly realm. As we have seen, he finds in his memory sensual images of specific experiences he has had in the earthly and social world. Indeed, all social encounters are grounded in the physical world since the human body is the basis of social interaction. These images of the outer world have been lodged within his mind. The self that Augustine finds in his memory, then, contains bits and pieces of the bodily world. The boundary between self and other is thus blurred. In writing an autobiography, Augustine turns himself inside out. But he can do this only because his body brings the outside in.

THE INNER MAN AND THE OUTER MAN Let me turn now to Augustine’s discourses on interiority, which have traditionally been associated with the mind. As we have seen, Augustine does not identify the human being with the mind.46 Yet he regularly claims that Christians must turn inward. In addition, he develops an extensive rhetoric of the inner man, the inner ear, the inner voice, and the inner heart. How should we interpret these pervasive rhetorical tropes? What does he mean by the inner man? In part, Augustine models his interior journeys on the Neoplatonic philosophers and their quest for divine Being. Consider Augustine’s Platonic “ascent” in the Confessions, which occurs before his conversion: By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With You as my guide I entered into my most innermost citadel [intravi in intima mea]. . . . I entered, and, with the eye of my soul, I saw above this eye of my soul and above my mind the immutable light. . . . When I first saw You, You raised me up so that I might see something that exists and see that I did not yet exist, I who was seeing [ut viderem . . . nondum me esse, qui viderem]. And You gave a shock to the weakness of my sight

45. Here, the Augustinian subject differs from the Cartesian subject (for Descartes, the mind that investigates objects is above time and the body). 46. Even though he does believe that the mind is superior and should rule the body.

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by the strong radiance of your rays, and I found myself far from You “in a region of unlikeness” [in regione dissimilitudinis] and heard, as it were, Your voice from on high: “I am the food of the fully grown. Grow up, and you will feed on me.”47

Augustine enters into his “innermost citadel” in an effort to see God with his mind. He gets a tiny glimpse of God, but he does not achieve the Platonic contemplation of Reality or a Plotinian vision of the “One.” Using the language of vision that dominates Platonic writings, he fleetingly sees the reality of God. But this vision simply shows him his own ontological deficiency. Interestingly, this brief vision gives way to a verbal message from God: “Grow up, and you will feed on me.” Ultimately, the Word trumps Platonic vision. In this passage, then, Augustine bumps into the basic ontological difference between himself and God: “I did not yet exist, I who was seeing.” This “I” is defined negatively, as an inferior being dwelling in a region “unlike” God.48 This innermost self, then, is unrealized (not fully real). In the Platonists, the mind departs from the embodied human individual in the philosophical search for truth: reason alone makes the journey toward Reality.49 The Platonic writings, then, did not offer Augustine useful material for the search for a (Christianized) human self. To develop this new kind of self—with its unique interiority—he turned to biblical texts, especially the Psalms and Paul’s Epistles. Consider the following passage from Paul, which offered Augustine the notion of the inner man: “Even if our outer man is wasting away, our inner man is being renewed day by day.”50 Paul identifies the outer man with the body, which separates people from God: “Even though we know that being at home in the body [ᓘ͵ͼᖩͻΆʹͩͼͱ] 47. Conf. 7.10.16. See Courcelle (1968, 157–67) on Augustine’s vain attempts at Plotinian ecstasy. 48. Augustine’s reference to the “region of unlikeness” comes from Plato’s Statesman 273d and is echoed by Plotinus in Enneads 1.8. On Augustine’s notion of the region of unlikeness, see Courcelle (1963, 623–40), Courcelle (1968, 157–74), which discusses Ambrose’s citations of Plotinus and the influence of Plotinus and Ambrose on Augustine, and Courcelle (1968, 405–40), which analyzes ontological “unlikeness.” See also Freccero (1986b, 6–10) and Ferguson (1992). 49. This reflects Plato’s notion of the “degrees of reality” (with humans being less real than the gods and the Forms, though some human souls are more realized than others). Compare the interior journey that Augustine makes with his mother in Conf. 9.10.24–25: here, we find a sort of collective journey inward that includes two embodied individuals praying in one another’s company. 50. 2 Cor. 4:16. Greek text: ͭᓴͲͩᔲᔅᓜͶ΁ᓥʹᖨ͵ᓌ͵Ͱ͹΁͸ͷͺͬͱͩ;Ͱͭͧ͹ͭͼͩͱᓈͳͳᗊᔅᓜͻ΁ᓥʹᖨ͵ ᓈ͵ͩͲͩͱ͵ͷᖛͼͩͱᓥʹͥ͹ᕭͲͩᔲᓥʹͥ͹ᕭ. Latin text: Sed licet is qui foris est noster homo corrumpatur tamen is qui intus est renovatur de die in diem.

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pulls us away from the Lord, we are confident since we walk by faith and not by sight. . . . We would rather be away from the body [ᓘͲͼͷᖛͻΆʹͩͼͷͺ] and at home in the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6–9). In Rom. 7: 22–23, morever, Paul famously proclaims: “I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” In these passages, Paul creates an opposition between the mind and the body (or bodily members). He associates his inner man with the mind, which obeys God, and condemns his sinful and disobedient flesh.51 Augustine offers a complex response to this Pauline topos. As I argue, he does not identify the inner man with the mind or the outer man with the body. Indeed, he claims that the mind is both inner and outer. When he searches for himself inside his memory, then, he finds the confluence of the soul and the body. He thus finds himself both inside and outside his mind. In the Confessions, Augustine develops a complex rhetoric of the “inner” and the “outer.” For example: “I was seeking for you outside myself [quaerebam te foris a me], and I failed to find the God of my heart” (6.1.1). And as he says in a famous passage: “Late have I loved Thee, beauty so old and so new. . . . And see, You were within, and I was in the outer world and sought You there [et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam]” (10.27.38). He claims that he was in the “outer world” before he converted to Christianity. By living in the outer world, he suggests, he was actually dissociated from himself: “But where was I, when I sought after You? You were there before me, but I had departed from myself [a me discesseram]. I could not find myself, much less You” (5.2.2).52 Clearly, when Augustine says that he was “in the outer world,” he is not just referring to the physical realm outside his mind. Rather, he identifies the outer world with his egotistical and psychic attachment to worldly desires and pursuits, which distance him from God. In a remarkable passage, Augustine identifies a person who lives sinfully as “a perverted will casting its inwardness outward and puffed up outwardly” (voluntatis perversitatem proicientis intima sua et tumescentis foras; Conf. 7.16.22). The will, of course, is an aspect of the incorporeal mind. This element of the mind, however, is found in both the inner man and the outer man. For example, this image of the will “casting its inwardness

51. I discuss Augustine’s interpretation of the Pauline distinction between the flesh and the body in the appendix. Note that Paul’s discourse of the “inner” and the “outer” was associated with “the spirit and the letter” as well as with “the heart and the flesh.” 52. On self-alienation, see Arendt (1929/1996, 23–24 and passim) and Markus (1966).

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outward” and being “puffed up outwardly” makes it clear that the rhetoric of inside and outside does not map onto the mental interior and the physical exterior. The will becomes outer when it attaches itself to worldly things. Indeed, the notion of the tumescent will being “puffed up outwardly” seems to identify the sinful will with an erect penis. We do not, then, find a neat distinction between the mind as internal and the bodily realm as external. Rather, Augustine claims that willful desires for worldly things are unspiritual and, therefore, outer and external. When Augustine privileges the internal over the external world, then, he does not simply identify the outer world with materiality. Even unworldly Christians must dwell in the physical and social realm: they must chasten their bodies and deal charitably with their neighbors. Augustine offers an extensive analysis of the inner man and the outer man in the Trinity. As he suggests, the very images in one’s memories— which have come from sensory experiences of the bodily world—count as outer even though they are inside the mind: Let us see where we can locate the boundary between what we call the outer and the inner man. We should rightly call anything in our consciousness that we share with animals part of the outer man. It is not just the body alone that is said to be the outer man, but the body with its own kind of life attached (which keeps the body’s structure and all the senses that it possesses alive). Also, when the images of things sensed are fixed in the memory and looked over again in recollection, this is still something belonging to the outer man.53

The memory, which is in the mind, contains images of bodily things that a person has sensed in the past. Yet these images in the mind “belong to the outer man.” Here, a crucial aspect of the mind—the memory that retains images—is “outer.”

53. Trin. 12.1.1 (emphasis added). See also Genlitt. 8.25.47: “God speaks inwardly [to a perfect and blessed spiritual nature] in an amazing and ineffable way: neither through writing imposed on bodily materials, nor through words sounding in bodily ears, nor through the likeness of bodies formed in the imagination, as happens in dreams or in ecstatic states. Visions of this kind, though occurring more inwardly than the things that are brought to the spirit’s attention through the senses, are still like them, so that when they happen they cannot be distinguished from the senses at all. . . . Because these are more external than what the rational and intellectual mind gazes on in the unchangeable Truth . . . I class them among things that happen externally” (emphasis added).

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As Augustine says in the Trinity, the human will tends to attach or glue itself to the bodily realm.54 To counter this overattachment, one must use one’s will to pull away from the sensory realm: The will, by the movements of the body, separates the senses of the body from the physical world, either to avoid sensing or to stop from sensing something. For example, we shut our eyes or turn them away from something that we don’t want to see. In the same way, we shut our ears against noises and keep our noses from smelling. And, by shutting our mouths or spitting something out, we avoid flavors. As for touch, we pull the body away to keep it from touching something; or, if we have touched something, we throw or push it away. By moving the body, the will avoids attaching the bodily senses to physical things. The will does this as far as it can. But, because of our condition of servile mortality, sensations cause pain, and all that we can do is endure. (Trin. 11.8.15)

By loving God, the will can unglue the mind from the bodily world to some extent, but never with complete success. For, even when the will attempts to detach the mind from the sensible realm, it uses the body to perform this exercise—it must consciously make the body turn away from sensations (by shutting the eyes, closing the ears, etc.). In contrast to Plato, in Augustine the mind cannot just leave the premises. Of course, even if the will can succeed in shutting down the senses for a given time, it still must confront the images in the memory, which have been formed from a lifetime of bodily sensations. These images in the memory belong, as we have seen, to the outer man. Where, then, is the inner man? In my view, the inner man is not fully realized until the end of time. As long as humans have mortal bodies and dwell in time, they can never escape from being outer. The inner will always be infected by the outer. We cannot, then, neatly identify the inner man with the mind or soul and the outer man with the body. The mind is always outward bound as long as one dwells on earth.55

54. Trin. 11.8.15. See Markus (1990, 49). 55. Note Conf. 10.6.9, which appears to identify the inner man with the soul and the outer man with the body: “I see in myself a body and a soul, one external, the other internal. By which of these two should I have sought for God, whom I had inquired after from earth to heaven through my body, as far as I could send my visual rays as messengers? The inner part is better—to this my body’s messengers report to the mind, which presides and judges the responses offered by the heavens and earth and all things. These things said: ‘We are not God; He made us.’ My inner

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Where, then, does Augustine find his mortal self? As we have seen, he identifies the human being as a combination of a soul and a body. The soul (with the mind and the will) regularly senses the body and the earthly world. These sense perceptions leave images of the bodily realm in the memory (which is in the mind). And these memory images belong to the outer man. As a result, Augustine is outside even when he attempts to find himself on the inside. He looks for himself in his memory, which is outer insofar as it brings the world in. It is the interaction of the body and the soul that blurs the boundaries between the outer man and the inner man: the mind is not fully inner, nor is the body fully outer. To complicate things further, the body and the mind are constantly changing and shifting in different temporalities. The distended mind is always stretching away (into multiple memories and expected possibilities) from bodily presence. Meanwhile, the body in the passing now on earth continues to bring images of the ever-changing world into the memory. And the mind experiences this world in the mode of temporal distention: it does not just grasp these images pure and simple (in the now) but understands that they reflect past events that occurred at different times and in different places. It is no surprise, then, that Augustine finds a transient and fragmented self.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING Augustine associates the mortal human body with weight, a gravitational force that pulls the soul downward to earth. As he claims: “Our depraved nature [natura] runs downhill and is prone to fall, as it were, by its own weight [ pondere]” (CD 22.22). In the Confessions, he laments over the weight of his sinful and bodily desires: “I was torn from You . . . by my weight [ pondere], which was my sexual habit. . . . The body, which is corruptible, weighs down the soul, and the earthly abode weighs down the mind as it thinks

man knew these things through the ministry of the outer man. I, the inner man, knew all this—I, I the soul, knew this by means of the senses of the body [cognovi haec, ego, ego animus per sensum corporis mei].” Consider the context here: Augustine is trying to find God and looks into the heavens and the physical world and finds that they are not divine. The will uses the eyes to send forth “messengers” as far out into the universe as possible; the body also brings in data from the external world as a minister to the soul. But the identification of the soul with the inner man, and the body with the outer man, does not hold up since the soul knows things “through” the body. In this passage, the body serves as an intermediator between the internal and the external worlds. On Augustine’s theory of sensation, see Miles (1979, chap. 2) and O’Daly (1987, chap. 3).

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of many things [quoniam corpus, quod corrumpitur, adgravat animam, et deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem].”56 The heavy mortal body pulls one downward and glues the will to the physical realm. Crucially, however, not all bodies move downward: A body by its weight [corpus pondere] tends to move toward its proper place. The weight does not necessarily move downward, but moves to its proper position: fire tends upward and a stone downward. These are driven by their own weights and they seek their own place. . . . Things that are even a little out of place are restless; put them in their ordered place, and they come to rest. My weight is my love [ pondus meum amor meus]. By that I am carried, wherever I go. By Your gift we are inflamed [accendimur] and carried upward: we grow ardent and ascend [ascendimus], and we sing a song of degrees [cantamus canticum graduum]. (Conf. 13.9.10)

Here, Augustine says that his love and desire determine his sense of bodily weight. Since he is exiled on earth and, thus, “out of place,” he is a restless being. Lit on fire by God, his love carries him upward. As Kenneth Burke points out, in this passage Augustine plays on the verbal association of pendere, accendere, and ascendere: “All of a sudden, the word ‘weight’ must have conveyed to Augustine the sense of lightness, as though a stone were to levitate.”57 Yet this move toward lightness is achieved by “a song of degrees,” which takes place in time. Only the resurrected body—outside time—is completely devoid of weight. Augustine ponders the ways in which love can weigh down or uplift the soul: “How is it that the weights of various kinds of love [ pondera variorum et diversorum amorum] are distributed and felt in a single soul?” (Conf. 4.14.22). Different kinds of love weigh on the soul differently. The sinful will, which glues itself to bodily sensations, can pull the soul downward. Yet the love of God lifts one upward: “Let me talk about how the weight of desire [ pondere cupiditatis] pulls us downward into the steep abyss [abyssum] and how charity raises us up again through Your spirit, which was ‘borne above the waters’ ” (Conf. 13.7.8).

56. Conf. 7.17.23. Compare Cont. 8.21 (which also refers to Wis. of Sol. 9:15): “The corruptible body weighs down the soul.” 57. Burke (1961/1970, 163). Here, Burke is dealing with the rhyming sounds (not etymology).

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Here, Augustine recurs to the abyss referred to in the second line of Genesis. He identifies the abyss with the nothing-something in which matter transitions into form. As we have seen, the nothing-something is the very mutability of bodily things in an unformed (yet-to-be-formed) state. Created from nothing, the human has a chaotic and fluid element in its nature: it has “nonbeing” in its “being.” For this reason, the human psyche oscillates between the abyss and God, between becoming and Being. The abyss marks the mutability and annihilation of material forms. The desire that leads one to the abyss destabilizes the human being, causing a sense of vertigo, anxiety, and restlessness. By loving God, the soul moves itself above this abyss: “And so may we lift our hearts up to You, where Your spirit is ‘borne above the waters,’ so that we will come to the heavenly resting place when our soul has passed over these waters where there is no ground to stand on” (Conf. 13.6.7). The earth—and the mortal body—is fluid and unstable, the place of decay and death. For the human, the earthly body is heavy, hard to bear and carry. It pulls the soul into the abyss. Countering this burdensome and fearful weight, Augustine aims for the unbearable lightness of being. This requires having true bodily health (sanitas): “One should not be devoid of sensation like a stone or a tree or a corpse, but one should live in the body without being sensible of its weight—this is what it means to be healthy in the body.”58 Of course, this lightness of being will be experienced only at resurrection. For, as Augustine goes on to say, even the healthy body on earth feels weight: And, nevertheless, even if a man is healthy in this life, he still feels the weight of his healthy body. The healthy body weighs down the soul because it is corrupted and corruptible. It weighs down the soul because it does not obey the soul at the direction of the will. The body does obey in many things: it moves its hands to do things, its feet to walk, its tongue to speak, its eyes to see, and it directs its ears to hear voices: in these things the body obeys. But when one desires to change places, it feels the burden and the weight. The body is not moved so easily to go where the soul wishes. . . . A person proceeds with the soul [animo iam praecessit], but, when he arrives [ pervenit] with his body, he then senses what sort of burden he is carrying. For the weight of the flesh could not obey the will

58. Sermo. 277.5–6: Ergo non sic non sentire, ut non sentit lapis, ut non sentit arbor, ut non sentit cadaver; sed vivere in corpore, et nihil ex eius onere sentire, hoc est sanum esse. Et tamen quantumlibet sit homo in hac vita sanus, sentit etiam sani corporis pondus.

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with the speed [celeritatem] that was anticipated: the flesh could not be hurried along with such speed to where the soul wills and carries it. For the weight of the body is tardy and burdensome.59

In human experience, the body arrives after the will has commanded it and is, thus, belated. Paradoxically, while the body is located in the here and now, the mind feels that it makes a late arrival. In Augustine’s view, the heavy body feels slow because the mind races on ahead. This race is due to mental distention, where the mind stretches into future expectations. The mind distended in psychic time moves ahead of the body, which moves and changes in earthly time. This sense of the disconnection between the mind and the body serves to destabilize the self. As a doubly temporalized being, Augustine can never coincide with himself. The earthly body is heavy, chaotic, and hard to bear. The resurrected body of the saint, by contrast, will be weightless and blissfully “unbearable.” As Augustine says, God will “abolish the corruptibility of the flesh and restore its nature, retaining the harmony of design among its members while removing the sluggishness of its weight [detrahat ponderis tarditatem].” Indeed, the resurrected saints will be able to “set their bodies wherever they wish with the utmost ease in placement and in movement [situ motuque]” (CD 3.18). The resurrected body moves simultaneously with the will (CD 22.25). As Augustine indicates, he will achieve an integrated self only when his body and soul exit from time at resurrection. To become a self, then, he must first be a resurrected saint. On earth, he has a body that changes in earthly time and a mind that distends in psychic time. He is thus unable to situate himself on earth, whose watery abyss cannot offer any ground to stand on. Indeed, the human self is a moving target. If one looks for the self in the mind, one brackets the body that grounds the soul and the mind; if one tries to find the self in the interaction of body and soul, one finds disconnection and fragmentation. In Augustine’s view, then, one can find a unified self only outside nature, in the eternity of heaven.

59. Sermo. 277.5–6: Et tamen quantumlibet sit homo in hac vita sanus, sentit etiam sani corporis pondus. Aggravat animam etiam sanum corpus quod corrumpitur, id est, corruptibile. Aggravat animam, id est, non obtemperat animae ad nutum omnis voluntatis. Obtemperat in multis: movet manus ad operandum, pedes ad ambulandum, linguam ad loquendum, oculos ad videndum, ad sentiendas voces intendit auditum: in his omnibus corpus obsequitur. Mutandi loci cupiditas sentit onus, sentit pondus: non tanta facilitate movetur corpus ad perveniendum, quo desiderat. . . . animo iam praecessit, corpore quando pervenit, tunc sentit quale onus portet. Non potuit ad celeritatem praesumptam obedire voluntati pondus carnis: non potuit ea celeritate rapi, qua voluit, qua eam portat animus. Tardum et onerosum est.

chapter four

Body and Book

La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres. —Stéphane Mallarmé Here you will remain, my quill pen, hung from this rack on a copper wire. Although it’s hard to say whether you were well or badly made, you will live down many centuries, unless wicked and presumptuous writers take you down and profane you. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

B

ooks operate at the interface of matter and meaning. The book is a physical artifact, but the meaning of the words transcends materiality. Augustine regularly links language and temporality: the words that make sentences are spoken or heard in the passing of time. But, as he claims, words can take on meaning only in a mind that is distended into memory and expectation. This is true whether one communicates orally or in writing. Of course, oral discourse is articulated by a person at a specific moment in time, while an inscribed text addresses readers beyond the time and place of its composition. In some cases, published texts can outlast the life of their authors: the corpus lives beyond the corpse. As many scholars have noted, books play a crucial role in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine received an excellent education and, in his twenties, took up the position of a teacher of rhetoric (which focused on Latin literary texts). Later, as a theologian, he leveled vituperative attacks on the pagan literature and philosophy that had informed his early life. As he reports in the Confessions, his spiritual journey began when he read Cicero’s Hortensius at the age of nineteen. This text took the form of an exhor-

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tation—a “protreptic”—to live a philosophical life.1 Augustine had read a good deal of Greek philosophy in translation (which included Plato and the Neoplatonists, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics). Indeed, he turned to Christianity after immersing himself in the “Platonic writings.”2 As he claims in the Confessions, the Platonists articulated many basic Christian doctrines even though these “prideful” philosophers did not identify themselves as Christians (Conf. 7.9.13–14, 7.21.27). And, famously, Augustine converted to Christianity after opening the Bible and randomly reading the first passage that he saw (from Paul’s Romans). In fact, the very act of opening the Bible was motivated by Augustine’s earlier reading of the Life of Anthony. As Augustine says in the Confessions (8.6.15), he had discovered the Life of Anthony after hearing that two men working for the royal court in Trier had read this book and “instantly” converted to Christianity, resigning from their jobs and adopting a celibate life. Of course, for Christians in late antiquity, the Bible had a unique textual status: it was treated as a vessel of divine truth.3 Augustine claimed that the Bible served as the mediator between the embodied human and the eternal God. As he says in the Confessions: “Thus in the Gospels God speaks through the flesh [per carnem ait], and this sounds externally in human ears so that eternal truth should be believed and sought inwardly” (11.8.10). In the incarnation of Christ, the Word was “made flesh” for a short historical period; in the Bible, by contrast, God speaks through the “flesh” of a book to audiences living in vastly different places and times. Indeed, Augustine believes that the Bible will last until the end of time. How, then, did Augustine situate his own writings in relation to the Bible? Clearly, he believed that he was composing theologically correct books. But was it really correct for a Christian to write about himself in such detail?

1. The Hortensius was based on Aristotle’s Proptrepticus. The former is not extant, but we have many long fragments from the latter. 2. For useful accounts of Augustine’s education and reading, see Marrou (1938, 9–235) and Stock (1996, chap. 1 and passim). See Rist (1996, 405–6) and Harrison (2000, 12–13) for discussions of the Platonic and Neoplatonic texts that Augustine may have read (it is not fully clear what books/treatises he owned or read). 3. In the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, literacy was confined to the educated elite: for most Christians, the Bible was heard, not read. On the extent of literacy in the Roman Empire, see Beard (1991), Bowman (1991), Hanson (1991), Harris (1991, chaps. 7–8), Hopkins (1991), Harrison (2000, chap. 1), Bowman and Woolf (1994, chaps. 9–12), and Cameron (1998, 154–55). Beard (1991 and 2007) offers a useful discussion of how writing interacted with oral discourses in the dissemination of religious doctrines (both pagan and Christian).

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Of course, Augustine’s autobiographical discourse offers a model of the conversion from sinful and pagan practices to an unworldly Christian life (Conf. 1–9). Yet, in writing this discourse, Augustine places himself at center stage for all the world to see. I want to explore the difference between hagiographic texts representing holy men and Augustine’s autobiographical discourse, in which he portrays himself as an aspiring saint. In particular, I look at Christian hagiographies in the third and fourth centuries that portrayed holy hermits and monks practicing specific modes of asceticism. How did these texts affect Augustine as a literary writer? As I argue, in Confessions 1–9, Augustine sought for the very visibility that the hermits and monks strenuously avoided. In contrast to the authors of Christian hagiographies (which were written in the third person), he chose to write about his own life, representing himself as a sinner transformed into a (near) saint. He thus created a sort of autohagiography. I also examine how Christian hagiographies influenced Augustine’s specific brand of asceticism. First, I look at Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, which served as the catalyst for Augustine’s conversion to Christianity. Athanasius’s heroic account of this famous desert hermit offered a powerful role model for Christians to imitate in late antiquity. Following Anthony, many chose to adopt a radically ascetic lifestyle and move into the “counterworld” of the desert (thus “dying to the world”). The Life of Anthony was central to Augustine’s spiritual conversion. But Augustine did not adopt the life of the desert monk or hermit. He chose, instead, to engage in ascetic bodily practices in the public arenas of the church and the city. In writing the Confessions, he created an “Augustinian” conversion text that portrayed a new “art of living.” In developing a specific model for Christian imitation, Augustine offered a detailed representation of his bodily and psychic life in the Confessions. I explore the ways in which Augustine’s writings make meaning out of mutable matter—especially that of his own body, which ages and changes in earthly time. In the Confessions, he portrays himself as “speaking” in gestures and nondiscursive language. In addition to analyzing his “body language,” I examine Augustine’s representation of the bodily life of other people in the Confessions. In this text, Augustine describes the illnesses and deaths of two of his loved ones, thus bringing corpses into his literary corpus. I analyze these death scenes in the context of earthly time and psychic time: at the moment of a bodily death in the earthly here and now, Augustine’s mind is torn asunder. When the loved-one’s body dies in earthly time, the author’s mind is scattered in psychic time.

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TEXTUALITY Augustine fully understood that reading, writing, and dictating to scribes were bodily actions. Even silent reading involves the body. Consider Augustine’s account of seeing Ambrose reading to himself: “When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page, and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent” (Conf. 6.3.3). Augustine found it surprising that Ambrose did not read the text aloud, which was the common practice in antiquity.4 But, even if Ambrose’s voice and tongue make no sound, his eyes and the page are physical (though his interpretation of the words on the page transcends materiality). Augustine recognized that the Bible was a material artifact. How, then, could a corporeal object contain divine truth? In contrast to Plato, who privileged the spoken over the written word, Augustine finds truth in the Bible and in “theologically correct” documents.5 Clearly, he and his fellow Christians had appropriated the Hebrew Bible for their own purposes: the Hebrew prophets, they claimed, anticipated the Christian messiah, and other parts of the Hebrew Bible contained historical and theological “truths” that revealed Christian doctrine.6 Indeed, as Augustine points out, Moses’s prophetic words were “authorized” by the Christian God: May I hear and understand how “in the beginning You made heaven and earth.” Moses wrote this. He wrote this and went his way, passing out of this world. . . . He is not now before me, but, if he were here, I would grasp him and ask him to explain to me the creation. I would concentrate my bodily ears to hear the sounds coming from his mouth. If he spoke Hebrew . . . the sounds would not touch my mind at all. If he spoke Latin, I would understand his words. Yet how would I know whether he was telling me the truth? If I did know this, I could not gain this knowledge from him. Within me—within my inner thought—there

4. According to the scholarly consensus in the twentieth century, Augustine’s account of Ambrose in this scene was the first case of silent reading in the classical world. For a refutation of this claim, see Gavrilov (1997), especially his discussion of Augustine on pp. 61–66. See Goldhill (1999) for a history of reading in antiquity. As Goldhill points out (pp. 114–15), the Christian readers assumed a humble (and, at times, prostrate) position when they read the Bible. 5. On Plato’s views on writing, see Phaedrus 274c–277a. 6. Clearly, in appropriating the Hebrew scriptures, Christian theologians effectively attacked Jewish culture (and, in many cases, endorsed anti-Semitism). For a superb discussion of Augustine’s (relatively moderate) position on the Jews and Judaism, see Fredriksen (2008).

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would speak a truth that is neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin and that does not use a mouth and tongue as instruments or utter audible syllables. (Conf. 11.3.5)

Whereas Plato would want a Moses-like figure to engage in an oral dialogue with him, Augustine suggests that he would not be able to ascertain the truth even if he did meet Moses (and Moses spoke Latin). Augustine longs for the incorporeal God to speak directly to him. But he finds the divine word in the Bible, whose discourses were spoken and written by humans (with the aid of the Holy Spirit).7 He suggests that God’s truth could be spread abroad only after the biblical authors and prophets had died: Your divine scripture has more sublime authority since the death of the mortal authors through whom You offered truth to us. Lord . . . You know how You clothed human beings with skins when they became mortal by their sin. In a similar fashion, You extended the heavenly firmament of Your book “like a skin” . . . that You have placed over us by the ministry of mortal men. Indeed, it is through their deaths that the solid authority of Your utterances was published through them and, in a sublime way, spread out over everything inferior. While the prophets were alive on earth, this discourse was not extended [extentum erat] to express this supreme authority. You had not yet “spread out the heaven like a skin” [nondum sicut pellem caelum extenderas] [Ps. 103:2] or announced the fame of the prophets’ deaths in all places.8

7. Note Augustine’s claim about the writing of the Septuagint: “The truth is that there shone out from the Seventy so tremendous a miracle of divine intervention that anyone translating the scriptures into any other language will, if he is a faithful translator, agree with the Septuagint; if not, we must still believe that there is some deep revealed meaning in the Septuagint. For the same Spirit who inspired the original prophets as they wrote was no less present to the Seventy as they translated what the prophets had written. And this Spirit, with divine authority, could say—through the translators—something different from what He had said through the original prophets. . . . In the case of something in the Hebrew that is missing in the Septuagint, we may conclude that the Spirit elected to say this by the lips of the original prophets and not by the lips of their translators; conversely, in the case of something present in the Septuagint and missing in the original, we will conclude that the Spirit chose to say this particular thing by the lips of the Seventy rather than by the lips of the prophets” (CD 18.43). 8. Conf. 13.15.16: Sublimioris enim auctoritatis est tua divina scriptura, cum iam obierunt istam mortem illi mortales per quos eam dispensasti nobis. Et tu scis, domine . . . quemadmodum pellibus indueris homines, cum peccato mortales fierent. unde sicut pellem extendisti firmamentum libri tui . . . quos per mortalium ministerium superposuisti nobis. Namque ipsa eorum morte solidamentum auctoritatis in eloquiis tuis per eos editis sublimiter extenditur su-

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A single utterance of a living prophet cannot spread the truth very far in its oral formulation. The written text outlives its prophetic speakers. It is disseminated—“extended”—to a wide audience that transcends the place and time in which the utterance was first made. Augustine prefers the disembodied discourse of the Bible to the embodied speaker: the prophets must die so that the truth can live. Of course, the Bible celebrates the “fame” of the dead prophets and authors (13.15.16). It thus offers historical “truths” as part of God’s divine revelation. But Augustine reminds us that this text, the “voice of divine truth,” is a material object. Borrowing from Psalm 103—which proclaimed that God “stretched out the heavens like a skin”—Augustine says that God spread the “heavenly firmament” of the Bible over human beings “like a skin.” Note, in particular, that he associates the “skin” of the Bible with sin and death. As he claims in the passage quoted above, God gave the Bible to humans just as he gave the “skins” of animals to Adam and Eve to cover themselves after they had sinned. Indeed, “skins signify death because they are stripped from dead animals.”9 The Bible, then, is directly associated with human sin and mortality (and, indeed, with dead matter). At the same time, it serves as the divine word made flesh. It effectively mediates between the mortal, temporalized human and the eternal God. Augustine claims, in fact, that Christians should meditate on their own mortality as they read the Bible. As he says in a passage about the proper way to read the Bible in On Christian Doctrine: “One must above all else be turned by the fear of God toward knowing his will. . . . This fear must inspire us to reflect on our mortality and on our future death. With our flesh being pierced [clavatis carnibus], as it were, this fear will affix all the motions of pride to the wood of the cross.”10 By meditating on death, one enters into a state of “fear and trembling.” This has an effect on the flesh as well as the soul: as one reads the Bible, one feels one’s skin “pierced” at the thought of death and damnation. In his discussion of the Bible, Augustine evokes the earthly and psychic temporalities that govern human mortality. First, the words in the Bible make sense only to minds distended in psychic time: at any given moment,

per omnia quae subter sunt, quod, cum hic viverent, non ita sublimiter extentum erat. Nondum sicut pellem caelum extenderas, nondum mortis eorum famam usquequaque dilataveras. 9. Sermo. 362.11.11. Note also Augustine’s reference to the materiality of the firmament in Conf. 13.15.17. 10. DDC 2.7.9. Note that this is one of the seven steps that Augustine recommends that the reader follow in the effort to purify his or her mind in order to read the Bible properly (and find illumination).

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the human mind remembers the words that have been read or spoken and expects the words that are to come. Second, God spread his Word by way of an artifact made of plants and animals that grew and died in earthly time. In addition, the prophets and biblical writers lived and died in earthly time. Yet both psychic time and earthly time will come to an end on Resurrection Day. As Augustine puts it: “The preachers of Your words pass from this life to another, but Your scripture is extended over all people until the end of the age. Heaven and earth will pass away, but Your words will not pass away. For ‘the skin will be folded up,’ and the grass above which it was spread out will pass away with its beauty.”11 Here, Augustine refers to the end of time, when “heaven will be rolled up like a scroll” (Conf. 13.15.16).12 Heaven and earth will come to an end, and (sadly) there will be no more grass.13 Clearly, the “scroll” of the earthly heavens cannot encompass divine eternity. In Christian portrayals of the Day of Judgment, we find many graphic images of the winding of the scroll of the cosmos: two angels hold the curved edges of the scroll of the heavens and the earth—a scroll containing images of the sun, moon, and stars—and they start to roll it up as the dead are being raised up from their graves. Time is “wound up” as humans become eternal transhumans.

WRITING AND VISIBILITY Let us turn, now, to nonbiblical texts. How did Augustine treat these kinds of books? As a theologian, he spent a great deal of time identifying and attacking “heretical” discourses. But he also championed “theologically

11. Conf. 13.15.18: Transeunt praedicatores verbi tui ex hac vita in aliam vitam, scriptura vero tua usque in finem saeculi super populos extenditur. Sed et caelum et terra transibunt, sermones autem tui non transibunt, quoniam et pellis plicabitur, et faenum, super quod extendebatur, cum claritate sua praeteriet, verbum autem tuum manet in aeternum. 12. After quoting this passage from Isa. 34:4—“heaven will be rolled up like a scroll” (caelum enim plicabitur ut liber; 13.15.16)—Augustine makes another allusion to Isaiah several chapters later when he says that “the skin will be folded up” (13.15.18; quoted above). In the latter passage, he identifies the skin of the heavens with the skins that God gave to Adam and Eve (and with the skin of the Bible). 13. Compare Conf. 13.15.18: “[The angels] have no need to look up to this firmament and to read so as to know your word. They ever ‘see your face’ and there, without syllables requiring time to pronounce, they read what your eternal will intends. They read, they choose, they love. They ever read, and what they read never passes away. By choosing and loving they read the immutability of your design. Their book is never closed, nor is their scroll ever folded up. For You yourself are a book to them and You are ‘for eternity’” (from Chadwick 1992). In contrast to the heavens and the earth (“the scroll of the firmament”), God’s Logos is an open and eternal scroll that can never be folded.

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correct” texts. In the Confessions, he gives pride of place to the Life of Anthony, the first great Christian hagiography in late antiquity. Athanasius, a follower of Anthony’s, wrote this text (in Greek) several years after the hermit’s death in 356 CE.14 Evagrius of Antioch translated it into Latin in the early 370s, and the book quickly spread all over the Roman Empire. According to Athanasius, Anthony converted to Christianity one day when, meditating on the life of the apostles, he walked into church and heard the priest read a passage from Matthew (19:21): “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”15 As soon as he heard these words, Anthony converted to a new form of life. Renouncing the world, he set out to “forget the past” (including his parents and relatives) and to make himself a “new man” by prayer, rigorous asceticism, and the confession of his sins.16 Why did this book have such currency in the late fourth century? Consider, first, the protagonist. In his efforts to worship God, Anthony went to the desert seeking for solitude and—to the extent possible—invisibility. This allowed him to live a radically ascetic lifestyle and confront his own sinful demons. As Anthony suggests, each Christian should “recount to himself his actions of the day and night.” Anthony claims that this selfaccounting should take place (for the most part) in private: Let each one of us note and record our actions and the stirrings of our souls as though we were going to give an account to each other. And you can be sure that, being particularly ashamed to have them made known, we would stop sinning and even meditating on something evil. For who wants to be seen sinning? . . . So we will doubtless keep ourselves from impure thoughts, ashamed to have them known, if we record our thoughts as if reporting them to each other. Let this record replace the eyes of our fellow ascetics so that, blushing as much to write as to be seen, we might never be absorbed by evil things.17

14. On Athanasius, see Dorries (1949), Rubenson (1990, 1998), Brakke (1995), Cameron (2000), and Rousseau (2000). 15. Athanasius, Life of Anthony chap. 2 (from Gregg 1979, 31). On the holy man in late antiquity, see Brown (1971) and Anderson (1994). 16. Life of Anthony chaps. 3, 5, 7 (from Gregg 1979, 32, 33, 36). 17. Life of Anthony chap. 55 (from Gregg 1979, 73). To be sure, Anthony did believe that Christians should confess their sins to abbas or “fathers.” The point here is that most of the work should be internal, invisible to the eyes of others. On the way in which the monks and desert fathers gave and received news about the desert hermits, see Gleason (1998).

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One should confess to oneself “as if” one were admitting one’s sins to others: this private self-accounting replaces a public confession. Anthony, then, blushed to write and to be seen. To write a text produces a visibility that the hermit strove to avoid in his personal life. Indeed, according to Athanasius, Anthony was illiterate and eschewed the practice of reading and writing.18 Through Athanasius’s hagiography, Anthony became famous for his radical ascetic practices and his life as a hermit in the desert. As Athanasius claims, he lived on a bare minimum of food, fasting for long periods of time. And he worked with his hands to grow vegetables.19 Anthony gave up all his possessions and wore veritable rags for clothing. He spent long parts of his life in extreme isolation, minimizing his contact with other people. Yet he was followed by monks and disciples even into the most distant deserts of Egypt. In spite of his efforts to die to the world, he was observed, admired, and imitated (this made him leave and seek out more remote places). Even in his lifetime, he had many followers who set out to live monastic and hermetic lives.20 And, after he died, his life was recorded for posterity in a written narrative.21 Athanasius’s Life of Anthony offered a model of asceticism that was imitated by hermits and monks all around the Mediterranean region. As Robert Markus suggests: “Those who swarmed into the Egyptian

18. Life of Anthony 1 (from Gregg 1979, 30). See Rubenson (1990), who argues that Anthony was literate and that the letters of Anthony are genuine (as Rubenson suggests, the letters reflect an Origenist position rather than the anti-Arian position promoted by Athanasius). See also E. Clark (1999, 53–55) for a useful account of the topos of the “unletteredness” of the desert fathers. Even if the desert fathers were not as illiterate as the sources suggest, the idea that they were simple and illiterate had an important hold over the Christian imaginary (cf. Burton-Christie 1993, chaps. 3–4). Note that Augustine himself believed, on the basis of the Life of Anthony, that Anthony was illiterate (see DDC preface 7). 19. See Kelsey (1992) on Anthony’s body and its relation to the desert. Augustine discusses the work of monks in On the Works of Monks and the Rule. 20. Rousseau (2000) argues that the Life represents Anthony as a teacher of disciples (i.e., monks, ascetics, philosophers, and members of the Christian clergy). There is some evidence that, even during his long periods of isolation, Anthony communicated with monks and his followers. Note, however, that he shouts advice to his visitors through the door of his fort; clearly, he wished to keep himself secluded and unseen even while offering admonitions (Life of Anthony 13.4–5). See also Rubenson (1998, 50): “Although it was Pachomius, and not Anthony, who created the first monasteries in the sense of walled centers of communal living, it is Anthony who stands out as the author of monasticism, even in the Pachomian sources.” (Rubenson [1998, 50] defines monasticism as “the creation of a community permanently separated from ordinary society.”) 21. Note that Athanasius “records” that God told Anthony that he would be “famous everywhere” (Life of Anthony 10). Of course, it was Athanasius’s own text that made Anthony famous.

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desert in imitation of Anthony did so to find scope for the exercise of a heroism no longer demanded of them in urban churches.”22 In his efforts to retreat from the world, Anthony endeavored to “forget the past” and, to some extent, to exit from society.23 The practice of dying to the world, in fact, formed the basis of the life of hermits and monks in the fourth and fifth centuries. In Jerome’s Life of Paul and Life of Hilarion, for example, the hermits Paul and Hilarion attempted (though not always successfully) to avoid human contact. We find many other examples of this pursuit of solitude in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Paradoxically, the hermits’ efforts to live alone—invisible to humans—made many of them visible and, in some cases, quite famous.24 As Geoffrey Harpham suggests: “To be ascetic is to make oneself representable. . . . We owe to asceticism the notion that the exemplary self is observable, and especially that it is narratable—a notion that decisively distinguishes asceticism from mysticism.”25 Augustine, like many men in this period, revered Saint Anthony and considered him a heroic pioneer of Christian asceticism. He did imitate Anthony in adopting ascetic practices (though his regime was far less arduous).26 But he had no interest in the counterworld of the desert. Of course, the life of the desert hermit inspired more enthusiasm among Christians in the Greek East than in the Latin West. But many Christians in the West craved for the fastnesses of the desert.27 Jerome, for example, belonged to a group of ascetic Christians practicing in Aquileia, which included his friend Bonosus and Rufinus, his schoolmate from Rome. The group broke up in the 370s,

22. Markus (1990, 69). 23. See Harpham (1987, 24): “Impervious to history, the desert was an ideal site for askesis, and the man who went there placed himself under a virtual obligation to reinvent himself, creating a mode of being that owed nothing to family, community, or even subjectivity.” 24. Note that many ascetics chose to be ultravisible—to show off their emaciated and sickly bodies. See Miller (1994) on the way in which Christian believers viewed these ascetic bodies as “full of light.” 25. Harpham (1987, 27). 26. See Lawless (2000) for an excellent analysis of Augustine’s asceticism. I discuss this issue in detail in chapter 5. 27. See Rousseau (1978, 80) for a detailed discussion of the (at times, tense) relations between the desert fathers, the monks, and the church in the Greek East and Latin West in the fourth century CE. As Rousseau suggests: “While remaining aware of ascetic developments in the East, Christians of the West in the fourth century developed a particular style of religious enthusiasm, and a much greater readiness to link a life of dedication, more or less monastic, to the needs and anxieties of the church as a whole.” See also Frank (2000, chap. 1) for a description of the many Greek and Roman imitators of the saints described in hagiographies in late antiquity.

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with each man seeking a hermetic life: Jerome went to Antioch and lived for eighteen months in the Syrian desert (later becoming a monk), Bonosus became a hermit on an uninhabited Adriatic island, and Rufinus went to Egypt and became a disciple of the desert monks and Didymus the Blind.28 Augustine himself praises the desert hermits and admonishes people who believe that they have rejected humanity altogether: “I will say nothing of those who, in complete solitude—far from the eyes of men—inhabit completely deserted regions, living on water and basic bread, which is brought to them periodically. There, they enjoy a communion with God, to whom they cleave with pure minds. . . . Many think that they have deserted human life more than is fitting, without considering how much these hermits (whose bodies we are not permitted to see) benefit us by their prayers and their exemplary lives.”29 But, in spite of this praise of these “unseen” hermits, Augustine chose the city over the desert, the church over the cave.

HAGIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY In addition to offering the holy man as a role model for Christian ascetics, the Life of Anthony offered a literary model for writers and hagiographers. In the fourth century, the genre of ascetic hagiographies interacted with that of biography. Indeed, as Averil Cameron claims: Ascetic discourse in late antiquity frequently implied narrative, often in the form of biography. To that extent it imposed limits, implied an ending, and imposed closure on the way in which life was to be lived and understood. These biographies, embedded (as Christian examples were) in a broader scheme of Christian creation and salvation history, also implied a sense of narrative time. Real life, it hinted, should follow the patterns set in the texts, themselves accounts of exemplary lives. This kind of late ascetic discourse was profoundly mimetic. Integral to it is the implication that texts and real life—social behavior—are in fact closely linked. While appearing to be the discourse of retreat, and thus of the marginalized, it calls for an audience.30

28. See Williams (2006, 30). 29. DeMor. 66. In The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life, Augustine also praises the life of monks (67–68), which he seems to prefer to that of hermits. On Augustine’s monastic ideal, see Van der Meer (1961, 206–17) and Lawless (1987). 30. Cameron (1998, 154).

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Of course, biography had a long pedigree in the ancient world. But, as Arnaldo Momigliano has shown, the genre was transformed in the fourth century CE. In this period, writers endeavored to establish the holiness of individuals by virtue of their “contacts with divine beings” (in earlier biographical accounts, by contrast, writers dealt with “the interaction between a man’s individual ambitions and political circumstances”).31 In addition to individual biographies, writers composed collective biographies of wise and holy men—both pagan and Christian—in the late fourth and the early fifth centuries. Note especially Eunapius’s (anti-Christian) “Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists” and the anonymous “History of the Monks.”32 Both these texts contain hagiographic biographies. In addition, both offer evidence of the ongoing battle to identify the “true” holy man in opposition to unworthy rivals (whether Christian or pagan).33 Jerome entered the fray by writing three hagiographic Lives, which he published well before Augustine’s Confessions (375–86 CE). In these texts, he set out to rival Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, offering new kinds of monks and hermits.34 In the Life of Paul, for example, Jerome describes a hermit who is superior to Anthony.35 A well-educated man, Paul went to the desert in fear of persecution; there, he adopted a radically ascetic lifestyle and became an exceptionally holy man. In this (doubtlessly fictional) narrative, Anthony has been summoned in a dream to find a hermit greater than himself. After a long journey, he finds Paul in a deserted site in Egypt. Paul, now on the verge of death, tells Anthony to journey back, get his own cloak, and return with it. When Anthony returns, he finds Paul dead. He buries Paul in his own cloak, taking Paul’s tunic instead. Jerome has good reason to lay such strong emphasis on the cloak. In the Life of Anthony, Athanasius had

31. Momigliano (1987, 176). 32. Miller (2000) offers an excellent account of collective biographies in the imperial period and in late antiquity. 33. As Cameron claims: “Christian and Neoplatonic rivalries [in this period] seemed to be expressing themselves in a war of biography” (1991, 145). 34. On Jerome’s Lives, see Rousseau (1978, chap. 4), Rubenson (2000, 119–29), and Williams (2006, chap. 1 and passim). For translations of these texts, see Deferrari (1952). Note also Sulpicius’s Life of Martin, where the author attempts to make an unlettered and eccentric Martin more accessible to educated Christians. As Rousseau (1978, 147) suggests: “Sulpicius appears to have approved of the lesser importance attached to writing in Martin’s monastery at Marmoutier, and of the nobility’s willing abasement there.” But Martin is not a desert father; rather, he is an ascetic monk whose life focuses on the organization and government of monastic communities. 35. Burrus (2004, 26). Burrus analyzes all three of Jerome’s Lives, describing them as romantic and erotic discourses (24–49). As Rubenson (2000, 120) points out: “Jerome writes because he has stories to tell. . . . [He] constantly alludes to classical literature, using well known topoi of novels and biographies.”

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said that the dying Anthony had given his cloak to him (i.e., to Athanasius). In Jerome’s Life of Paul, Anthony gives his cloak to Paul (rather than to Athanasius). As Virginia Burrus remarks: “Jerome is quite pointedly redirecting the transmission of the Athanasian mantle of authority.”36 Jerome also uses the Life of Anthony as a model for his Life of Hilarion. In Jerome’s narrative, Hilarion, a very well-educated man, goes to the desert to become a disciple of Anthony’s. He first becomes a hermit and then a monk. Because too many followers flock to him, he chooses to leave Egypt and find other deserted places. He travels through different parts of the Mediterranean in his attempts to find solitude (all the while performing miracles wherever he goes). Note, however, that Jerome’s characters differ from Anthony in one crucial way: they are literate and cultured men. This transformation of the Antonine model reflects the fact that, in the late fourth century, Christian writers were responding to a new set of cultural conditions. As Rubenson points out: “Classical education and social respectability are harmonized [in Jerome’s Lives] with the ideal of Christian asceticism and obligations to the community.”37 Let us compare the Lives of Anthony, Paul, and Hilarion to Possidius’s Life of Augustine, which was published thirty years after Augustine’s death.38 In contrast to previous hagiographies, Possidius focuses almost exclusively on Augustine’s work as a bishop and priest. Unlike the heroic desert fathers and monks, Augustine comes across as a strong and virtuous leader of the Catholic Church. In the Life of Augustine, Possidius does not offer a drama of temptations, demons, or extreme renunciations. As Possidius claims, Augustine wore modest clothing, “neither luxurious nor too plain.”39 His table included meats, herbs, and vegetables, and he also drank wine (which Possidius justifies by quoting Paul’s praise of wine in 1 Tim. 5:23). Though Augustine’s dishes were made of clay, wood, or marble, he did have silver spoons.40 The Life of Augustine does, of course, exalt Augustine. But it celebrates him as a preacher, bishop, and theologian.41 Possidius chooses not

36. Burrus (2004, 175 n. 48). See also Frank (2000, 99). 37. Rubenson (2000, 123). 38. On Possidius’s hagiography of Augustine, see Stoll (1991). 39. Possidius, Life of Augustine chap. 22 (from Deferrari 1952, 99). See Van der Meer (1961, 235) on Augustine’s clothing. 40. Possidius, Life of Augustine chap. 22 (from Deferrari 1952, 99–100). 41. The iconography of Augustine in Catholic art bears this out: he is portrayed either as standing in his bishop’s hat as a father of the church or as sitting in his study surrounded by books (note especially Carpaccio’s famous Augustine in His Study, which has books all over the desk

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to discuss the material in the Confessions (presumably because Augustine had already covered this territory). He simply says: “Augustine wished to do this [write the Confessions] so that no one would think of him as someone other than he really was (or greater than rumor made him). With this in mind, the holy man most certainly did not fail in his practice of humility, since he did not praise himself but sought for deliverance from his Lord.”42 Of course, in the Confessions, Augustine does debase himself and praise God. But the Confessions also represents an exemplary (and near holy) ascetic Christian, offering a powerful role model for imitation. As we have seen, the Life of Anthony offered a literary model for writers and hagiographers. Although this text takes pride of place in the Confessions, Augustine did not adopt Anthony’s way of life. He made no effort to hide himself from the world or live as a hermit. In the Confessions, he does just the opposite: he writes extensively about his past, which he preserves from oblivion by memorializing it in a text.43 Of course, Athanasius’s Life of Anthony is but one of many texts that influenced Augustine’s autobiographical discourse. Still, this book takes center stage in the Confessions since it catalyzes four conversions in book 8, including that of Augustine. The comparison between Athanasius’s hagiography and Augustine’s autobiography is, I believe, revealing. Unlike the “simple,” illiterate Anthony, Augustine offers the model of an educated man attacking pagan texts and offering “correct” theological discourses. But, even more importantly, Augustine writes about his near-holy life in his own voice. We can thus see what happens when the Christian conversion story is told in the first rather than the third person: hagiography gives way to autohagiography.

and floor; Carpaccio adds an element of his own—a little white dog who appears to be “seeing the light” even more penetratingly than Augustine). 42. Possidius, Life of Augustine preface (from Deferrari 1952, 74). Note also Dante’s claim in the Convivio 1.2.12–16, where he says that it is permitted to speak of oneself in two cases: first, when it is necessary to defend oneself against disgrace or danger, as Boethius did; second, when it is instructive to speak of oneself in order to help others. As Dante claims: “This was Augustine’s motive for speaking about himself in his Confessions, for, in the development of his life, which progressed from bad to good, from good to better, and from better to best, he gives us example and instruction that no account by a mere witness, however faithful, could have supplied.” 43. There is a great deal of scholarship on the genre of the autobiography (and on Augustine’s “autogenerative” text). See, e.g., Vance (1973, 1984), Beaujour (1980), Spengemann (1980), Rothfield (1981), Freccero (1986a), and Lionnet (1989). On the genre of biography in antiquity, see Miller (1983), Momigliano (1987, 159–77), and Hägg and Rousseau (2000). On collective biographies in late antiquity, see Miller (2000b).

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Just as Athanasius wrote about Anthony to create a model for imitation, Augustine uses his own life story—the sinner turned aspiring saint— to generate converts and admirers (and to defend himself against detractors). He also claimed authority as an ascetic and a theologian, making a daring bid for cultural capital in a Christian world that honored humility and attacked self-promotion. I am not suggesting that Augustine deliberately set out to identify himself as a saint. Rather, I would argue, he engages in the “misrecognition” that Bourdieu claims is a necessary element in elite selffashioning.44 As Philip Rousseau points out, when he claimed that he could become a “friend [amicus] of God,” Augustine “was reaching out to embrace a new career, a new opportunity of instant success; and in his description of the conversion, he invited his readers to witness the birth of entirely new concepts of ambition and power.”45 Augustine’s autobiographical discourse thus offers a new model of power—one very different from that of Anthony.

AUGUSTINE ADDRESSES HIS AUDIENCE Augustine yearns for God, but he writes for men. He is well aware that, in writing about himself (and at such great length), he may attract hostility and denunciations. At times, he acts as though his only reader is God: “Allow me to plead before Your mercy, I who am but dust and ashes. Allow me to speak since I am addressing Your mercy and not man, who is my mocker” (Conf. 1.6.7). But he later admits that God does not need this book since he already knows everything about Augustine: “To whom do I tell all these things? Not to You, my God. But before You I declare this to my race, to the human race, though only a tiny part can light on this composition of mine. And why do I include this episode? It is so that I and my readers may reflect on the great depth from which we have to cry to You” (2.3.5). Augustine understands that he is writing for a human audience (and trying to create an “ideal” reader). Indeed, he regularly reminds us of his authorship and even highlights the present time in which he composes this text: “Consider what I am now, at this moment [in ipso tempore], as I set down my confessions” (10.3.4). In fact, he dictated this text to his scribes at a particular place and time in the physical world. As his mind distends into the past and the future, the man composing the book occupies a physical place 44. See Bourdieu (1977) and Bourdieu and Johnson (1993, 29–73). 45. Rousseau (1978, 93).

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at the time of dictation. As Michel Beaujour has observed, autobiography is “the only genre where the writing ineluctably raises questions about the locus of its own production, about the incarnation of the word and the afterlife of the body.”46 In the Confessions, Augustine’s autobiographical discourse is “incarnated” in a material artifact that outlives its author. Yet the entire text was generated by the author’s bodily actions in a specific place and time. In Confessions 1–9, Augustine writes about his sinful past and his conversion to an ascetic Christian in order to create a model for potential converts (indeed, the power of his conversion scene depends on the long account of his depravities). In book 10, after his conversion, Augustine discusses his present life as a Christian bishop. Here, he promotes his own ascetic practices: for example, he attempts to eat food like medicine, rather than to enjoy its flavor; he worries over his occasional wet dreams, which are at odds with his renunciation of sex; he rebukes himself for watching animal life in nature, which directs him toward the bodily world; and he worries over the pleasure that music gives to the senses. Clearly, he wrote about his ascetic bodily practices at the time that he was composing the Confessions to demonstrate his ongoing battle against sin and to offer a model for converted Christians to imitate. Still, Augustine feels anxiety about his readers, especially those who do not share his beliefs: “Who I now am in the very time I am writing these confessions many wish to know. . . . They wish to know and are ready to believe me, but they cannot have certain knowledge [of the truth of my words]. The love that makes them good tells them that I am not lying in confessing about myself, and the love in them believes me” (Conf. 10.3.4). Here, Augustine worries that his readers will consider his text a fiction (as well they might).47 He claims that he is not lying about himself, but the very suggestion reminds us that there is something deeply problematic in the (self-promotional) act of writing a text about oneself. Augustine’s worries about his readers erupt in a remarkable passage in book 9: As I read the 4th Psalm during that period of contemplation, I would have liked [the Manichaeans] to be somewhere nearby without me knowing they were there, watching my face and hearing my cries, to see what

46. Beaujour (1980, 288). 47. See Courcelle (1968, 235–58) for an investigation of the fictional status of the Confessions.

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that Psalm had done to me: “When I called upon You, You heard me, God of my righteousness; in tribulation You gave me enlargement. Have mercy on me, Lord, and hear my prayer” (Ps. 4:2). Without me knowing they were listening, lest they should think I was saying things just for their sake, I wish they could have heard what comments I made on these words. But in truth I would not have said those things if I had felt myself to be observed by them. . . . I wish I could have been heard by those who even now still love vanity and seek after a lie. Perhaps they would have been disturbed and vomited all this up.48

Augustine wishes that his Manichaean detractors were present in the room watching him read a psalm without his knowing they were there. In this wishful scenario, the Manichaeans must be secretly spying on him, for, if they knew that he saw them there, they would think that he “was saying things just for their sake.” If these detractors could secretly witness him reading a psalm, Augustine claims, they would see the “intimate feelings of his mind” and the facial gestures and cries that embody his interior life (9.4.8). Clearly, this scenario did not occur, as the author himself admits. But is this not what Augustine secretly longs for in writing the Confessions? He clearly feels uncomfortable about composing a book that might seem to be a fictional text written just for the sake of his readers. In an ideal world, he would prefer to be secretly observed—without his knowledge—by his detractors and admirers. Yet, at the same time, Augustine writes his autobiography precisely to make himself visible to people who are not present (his readers). Anthony, as we have seen, made valiant efforts to become invisible. Indeed, he locked himself in a fort for years while various monks and hermits spied on him from the outside, without his knowing it. In this and other cases, he does not know that his followers are watching him from outside the fort: he acts alone, unaware of his witnesses. In the passage quoted above, Augustine seems to long for this very situation. He wishes that people were secretly watching him as he reads, prays, and cries out to God. But the very fact that he wrote about himself for a reading audience points to a more important desire: to make himself visible. His life is inscribed in a material text published for all to read. Indeed, as we will see, his bodily corpus becomes a veritable spectacle in his literary corpus.

48. Conf. 9.4.8 (from Chadwick 1992 [emphasis added]).

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CONVERSION AND THE BODY In the Confessions, Augustine wrote the first confessional autobiography in Western literature, creating an entirely new genre.49 He published this book in 401 CE, when he was the bishop of Hippo, many years after his conversion (in 386). In the Confessions, he creates a text that focuses on, among other things, a regime of self-inspection and self-denunciation. His bodily life and sinful desires become an object of investigation: the writer, the subject, takes himself as the object. This mode of self-investigation evinces what Foucault calls “an epistemological condition enabling the individual to recognize himself in his singularity as a desiring subject and to purify himself of the desire that was thus brought to light.” Foucault claims that Christians developed an “epistemological condition” quite different from that of the pagans: the Christians treated their bodies, impulses, and thoughts as objects to be endlessly analyzed (and subject to rigorous control).50 Augustine exhibits this mode of introspection and self-analysis in elaborate detail in the Confessions: “I became a great question [magna quaestio] to myself” (4.4.9). In the first ten books of the Confessions, he offers an account of his life since infancy, describing his sinful urges and actions and representing himself as a new man after converting to Christianity. In writing this autobiographical book, he effectively made himself visible in a textual artifact that spread his story and ideas in ways that could not be accomplished in the oral format. Augustine’s journey toward God was fueled by a number of texts. After discussing the “bad books” that led him into sin in Confessions 1–7, he turns to the “good books” that catalyzed his conversion in book 8. Though the Confessions makes constant allusions to the Bible, the conversion scene in book 8 pivots on Augustine’s reenactment of Anthony’s conversion in the Life of Anthony.51 Indeed, throughout book 8, Augustine portrays a series of conversions generated by reading the Life of Anthony. Book 8 begins with the conversion of two unnamed men in Trier and ends with that of Alypius.

49. Of course, Confessions 10–13 move beyond the autobiographical narrative. The relation of bks. 10–13 to bks. 1–9 has received a great deal of scholarly attention. This issue is beyond the scope of my investigation. 50. Foucault (1985, 89). Porter (2005), criticizes Foucault’s claim that there is a major discontinuity between ascetic practices in pagan Greek and Roman cultures and in Christian culture. 51. Paul also figures largely throughout Confessions 8 and in Augustine’s conversion. Paul’s own conversion, as narrated in Acts, serves as one of the subtexts of Augustine’s conversion. See Fredriksen (1986) for a superb article on the relation between Paul’s and Augustine’s conversion stories.

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In these scenes, Augustine focuses on the instantaneous conversion generated by the Life of Anthony. In the conversion of the two unnamed men, the act of reading the Life of Anthony leads to an immediate conversion; the men instantly renounce their worldly professions and adopt a celibate life.52 In the case of Augustine and Alypius, the memory of Anthony’s conversion in the Life of Anthony leads them to read a random page of the Bible and undergo conversion. Yet, in Confessions 8, all the converts are transformed by reading a text, not by hearing a sermon (as was the case with Anthony).53 Although Augustine no doubt converted many pagans and “heretics” when he preached in churches, his model conversion scenes focus on reading, not hearing.54 Let us turn now to Augustine’s conversion. I will not offer an analysis of the entire scene: I focus here on Augustine’s transformation of the Antonine conversion. Augustine’s conversion is, of course, quite dramatic. Augustine re-creates the scene, which flashes back and forth between the inner world of his psyche and the external world. In the external world, we find his best friend, Alypius, who follows him step by step toward the place and time of his conversion. “Loyal, me-too Alypius” (as Kenneth Burke called him)55 converts immediately after Augustine: he is Augustine’s first imitator, his first convert. But he also serves as an external witness to Augustine’s conversion. He validates and celebrates the transformation. Augustine sought for a particular form of Christian life: the renunciation of a worldly profession and the rejection of marriage, sex, and sensual pleasure. Ordinary Christians in late antiquity did not give up their professions, nor did they reject sex and procreation (within marriage). But Augustine wanted to be extraordinary: for him, conversion demanded a complete renunciation of these worldly things. Augustine subscribed to the two-tiered model of Christianity: according to this view, celibate Christians achieved greater holiness than those who opted for sexual intercourse and procre-

52. On Augustine’s “rewriting” of the conversion of the pagan neoplatonist Victorinus in bk. 8, see Markus (1990, 29). 53. As Augustine points out in DDC preface, chap. 7: “Though lacking any knowledge of the alphabet, [Anthony] is reported to have memorized the divine scriptures by hearing them being read, and to have understood them by thoughtful meditation” (from Green 1995). 54. As Alexander Nehamas has suggested to me, if Augustine had converted by listening to a priest, as Anthony had done, this would have provided a human mediator between him and God; indeed, he would have had to defer to a priest, who would have taken center stage in the conversion scene (and had a higher status than Augustine). 55. Burke (1970, 63).

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ation.56 Augustine thus opposed Jovinian, who had launched an attack on asceticism in the last decades of the fourth century, arguing that celibacy should not be privileged over marriage (he also claimed that Mary was not a virgin).57 To be sure, Augustine rejected Jerome’s vitriolic denunciations of marriage. But he repudiated Jovinian’s one-tiered model, in which all practicing Christians were ranked equally (in the eyes of God), regardless of their ascetic practices. In the conversion scene in the Confessions, Augustine focuses in particular on the renunciation of sex. In the earlier books of the Confessions, he repeatedly excoriates his addictive sexual habit, which he identifies as the key obstacle to his quest for divine truth. In the conversion scene, he finally confronts the possibility of the total renunciation of sex. In a vivid personification, his sexual desires are given voice: “They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us’? . . . They were not frankly confronting me face to face on the road but whispering behind my back (as it were) and furtively tugging at me as I was moving away, trying to persuade me to look back” (Conf. 8.11.26). Augustine’s desires take on a palpable physical form: they tug at his flesh, whisper in his ear, and even talk behind his back. His own desires will not look him in the face (so to speak). They conjure up past pleasures and point out that he will never again have sex. But, as his desires pull him backward in time, Augustine encounters a vision of his future. He “sees” Lady Continence surrounded by a multitude of celibate Christians. She “reaches out” to him and beckons him to convert: “Can you not do what these many people, male and female, have done?” (Note that Lady Continence does not flirt with Augustine: she looks at him “without coquetry” [non dissolute].)58 Whereas Anthony followed the command in Matthew to “sell his possessions and give to the poor,” Augustine obeys Paul’s injunction: “Not in rioting and drunken parties, not in sex chambers and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry: put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (Rom. 13:13–14). Augustine’s conversion, then, centers on his bodily practices. Although he does not imitate Anthony’s “flight from the world” into the desert, Augustine does give up sex and mortifies his body with a range of ritualized bodily practices.

56. Conf. 8.11.27. On the one- and two-tiered models in late antiquity, see Brown (1967/2000, 217–21), Brown (1988, 358–65), G. Clark (1999), Markus (1990, 36–78), and Hunter (2005). 57. On the Jovianian controversy, see G. Clark (1999) and Hunter (1987, 1993, 2005). 58. Conf. 8.11.27. Compare Augustine’s flirtatious relationship with Sapientia in the Soliloquia.

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In imitating and transforming the Life of Anthony, Augustine creates a new model to imitate. Alypius demonstrates this Augustinian conversion by imitating Augustine’s act and adopting the same ascetic practices: he reads a passage from Paul and instantly converts. He promptly renounces his profession and joins Augustine in his new life as an ascetic man of the church. In Alypius’s conversion, however, the finger plays a central role. Augustine puts his finger in the Bible right after he converts; Alypius can then read the passage that comes right after the one that Augustine read. After Augustine, one converts by reading the Confessions and then fingering through the Bible.

THE TIME OF CONVERSION The Augustinian conversion features a crucial convergence of time and the body. In Confessions 8, Augustine portrays his own conversion as occurring at a pivotal moment in time. This moment marks the end of the “old man” and the birth of the “new man.” Of course in Augustine’s account, it is God who grants him the ability to convert to a celibate Christian life at this moment in time. How, then, does the eternal God enter into this temporal moment? Consider the conversion of the two unnamed men in Trier, which Augustine described early in book 8. These two men had high-level posts in the imperial bureaucracy (as agentes in rebus) and were “Friends of the Emperor.” One day, they went out for a walk in a garden (while the emperor was watching circus games) and found some Christians living in a little house on the grounds. The Christians tell these two men about this famous text, the Life of Anthony. One of the two men “began to read, to marvel, and to be inflamed by it, and even in the very reading [inter legendum] he meditated on taking up such a life and giving up his post at the civil service.” The man is “suddenly” (subito) filled with a “holy love” and feels shame at his worldly lifestyle. He announces to his friend that their profession is a worthless farce. He then returns to reading the Life of Anthony: “And in the pain brought on by the birth of a new life, he turns his eyes to the book again; he read on and experienced an inward change . . . and his mind was then rid of worldly affairs” (Conf. 8.6.15). The new convert tells his friend that he will quit his job and adopt a celibate life. His friend promptly joins him (and their wives go along with these arrangements “happily”). As Augustine indicates, the eternal God enters into a human soul at a given temporal moment—a moment in which eternity breaks into and interrupts time (as it were). Yet this happens only while one is reading the right book in the right frame of mind. This sudden conversion of the two men in Trier anticipates that of

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Augustine later in book 8. Consider Augustine’s own conversion. After seeing the vision of Lady Continence, Augustine rushes to a far part of the garden at his house and throws himself on the ground in a fit of despair, weeping copiously. There, he hears a childlike voice: “Take up and read.” This phrase “reminds” him of the conversion of Saint Anthony, which he had learned about recently in Athanasius’s Life. This memory leads him to open the Bible and read a passage from Saint Paul. As Augustine points out: “I neither wished nor needed to read further; instantaneously, even with the last word of the sentence [statim quippe cum fine huiusce sententiae] . . . all the darkness of doubt was dispelled” (Conf. 8.12.29). Augustine reads words that take on meaning in the passing of time. Indeed, in picking up the Bible, his mind is distended as he remembers reading the Life of Anthony and looks forward to a continent future. Meanwhile, his body acts and reacts in the earthly here and now. Yet the conversion itself is represented as instantaneous (statim). “Even with the last word of the sentence,” God turns Augustine into a new man. In this brief epiphanic moment, eternity bursts into time. Yet Augustine created this instant in a text written years after his conversion. Indeed, he took many years to compose and complete it. It is Augustine, not God, who crafts this epiphanic moment and offers his readers the opportunity to instantaneously convert to Catholic doctrines and ascetic bodily practices. He thus stages an entrance of eternity into time.

BODY LANGUAGE IN THE CONFESSIONS In the Confessions, Augustine fights a discursive (and a psychophysical) battle with his own body. He brings his body into language, effectively translating his corporeality into a literary corpus. Of course, we are dealing with a literary (and, for the most part, retrospective) representation of his bodily life. But we must remember that language itself is grounded in the body. Human language has both a material and an immaterial component: the mouth or the pen creates words, but the meaning of words is incorporeal. The communication of language is a bodily act that translates thoughts and feelings into the realm of meaning (whether by speaking or by writing). We cannot simply oppose language and materiality. As Shoshana Felman puts it: “The mouth is the precise place of mediation between language and the body.”59 Augustine is well aware of this issue, but he takes it even further:

59. Felman (2002, 37).

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human language is rooted in the body—and in temporality—but aims at an eternal Logos that transcends the earthly world. In Confessions 1–10, Augustine attempts to “translate” his bodily gestures into language. Here, I want to foreground his vivid descriptions of body language—that is, preverbal or nonverbal communication (which is rarely examined in the scholarship). In the Confessions, Augustine emphasizes the bodily element in human communication. For example, he discusses his attempts, as a toddler, to communicate with other people:60 On the journey to the present I moved from infancy to boyhood, or rather boyhood arrived and succeeded infancy. Infancy did not “leave,” for it had nowhere to go. . . . By groans and different sounds and various motions of my body [variis membrorum motibus], I tried to express the intentions of my heart to persuade people to meet my demands. . . . I pondered in my memory [memoria]: when people named an object and when, after the sound, they moved their body toward that object, I would observe this and infer that the word that they pronounced was the very name of the thing they showed me. . . . Their intention was clear from the gestures that are (so to speak) the natural vocabulary of all races— these are expressed by the face and glances of the eyes, the movements of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice.

In this rich passage, Augustine meditates on temporality, memory, and bodily expression. Even when he was a toddler, his mind was distended in time: he had memories and expectations, and he felt desires for future comforts. He communicated these desires in body language, through groans, gestures, and bodily movements. Indeed, he identifies this body language as the “natural vocabulary of all the races” (1.8.13). Elsewhere, he refers to bodily gestures, facial expressions, and nonverbal sounds as “visible words” (verba visibilia; DDC 2.3.4). Augustine takes this further. As a very young boy, he claims, he came to see that he had an interior life that was not accessible to others (and vice versa). He used body language in an attempt to communicate his inner desires to those outside him: “Little by little I came to be aware of where I was; and I had the will to signify what I wished to those who could fulfill my desires as I could not. For my desires were internal; adults were exter60. Obviously, Augustine does not remember these events: he relates them by way of his interaction with infants and toddlers.

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nal to me and had no means of entering into my soul. So I threw my limbs about and uttered sounds that were signs resembling my wishes” (Conf. 1.6.8). Here, he first discovers the Other by his confrontations with people who dwell in the earthly realm who are external to his body and to his interior mind and soul. As the narrative moves into boyhood, Augustine discusses his education and the “training of his tongue.” Once again, he emphasizes the bodily aspect of human communication. As a former teacher of rhetoric, he has much to say about the right and wrong uses of the tongue. In the Confessions, he castigates his early self for using his tongue to teach students pagan discourses and values: “It was a delusion that led me, as a boy, to believe that it was my duty . . . to excel in the tongue sciences in order to gain human honors and acquire false riches” (1.9.14). Indeed, he says that “the human tongue is our daily furnace” (fornax; 10.37.60). As Kenneth Burke points out, Augustine implicitly compares the burning tongue (fornax) to the heat of fornication in the brothel (fornix).61 Interestingly, Augustine loses his voice temporarily after he converts. Chest pains gave him laryngitis, thus preventing him from finishing the end of his courses in rhetoric (9.2.4). His tongue, as it seems, is being converted to better use.62 Augustine prays that he may use his tongue to communicate God’s truth: “When shall I be capable of proclaiming by the tongue of my pen all your exhortations and all your terrors and consolations and directives, by which you brought me to preach your word and dispense your sacrament? . . . From all temerity and all lying circumcise my lips, both the inner and the outer [circumcide . . . interiora et exteriora mea, labia mea]” (Conf. 11.2.3). Both the lips and the pen must be circumcised by God in order to body forth the truth. Augustine found the notion of the circumcision of the lips in Exod. 6:12, but he also meditated on Paul’s many discussions of the circumcision of the penis and the “circumcision of the heart.”63 Augustine’s metaphorical conflation of the tongue/lips and the penis highlights the bodily basis of human speech.

61. Burke (1961/1970, 140n). 62. See Lionnet (1989, 50). 63. See Boyarin (1994, chaps. 1, 3, 5) for an excellent analysis of the passages on circumcision in Paul (i.e., the circumcision of the penis and the circumcision of the heart). As E. Clark (1999, 209–10, 226–27) points out, Christian interpreters with an ascetic orientation spiritualized the practice of circumcision (following Paul’s notion of spiritual circumcision in Rom. 2:29 and Phil. 3:3).

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We find an even more vivid representation of body language in the narrative of Augustine’s conversion in Confessions 8.64 Augustine begins his account with the following description: “Then followed the grand struggle in my inner house, which I had vehemently stirred up with my soul in the intimate chamber of my heart” (8.8.19). In this narrative, he tacks back and forth between the internal realm of his consciousness and the external place where he and Alypius are sitting in a garden near their house in Milan. At the brink of his conversion, Augustine emerges from this inner struggle and cries out to Alypius, tearing his hair, striking his forehead, wringing his hands, and clasping his knees: “My uttered words said less about the state of my mind than my forehead, cheeks, eyes, color, and tone of voice.”65 His bodily gestures and contortions—his body language—speak more loudly than his words. He then bursts into a “torrent of tears” and turns away from the “astonished” Alypius. Alypius stands as an external witness to Augustine’s conversion. He reads Augustine’s body language before this experience is put into words. In the middle of this emotional outburst, Augustine turns away from Alypius and flings himself under a fig tree. There, he remembers Anthony’s conversion, and he “instantly changes [his] countenance” (statimque mutato vultu; Conf. 8.12.29). He then stands up and returns to Alypius, where he takes up the Bible, opening it to a random page. After reading the passage of Paul, his doubts vanish, and his face takes on a “tranquil appearance” (tranquillo iam vultu; 8.12.30). Here, his body language offers an external sign of his internal conversion.

CORPSE AND CORPUS In the Confessions, Augustine speaks about other human bodies as well as his own. Let me offer a few examples. He describes a human baby “enviously” watching another baby suckling at the breast. He also speaks of his mother’s breast, which fed him as a baby (though, he is quick to add, God provided the milk). Then there is his best friend Alypius, who had one sexual encounter and was utterly repulsed; he never made a second attempt.

64. I do not offer an interpretation of the conversion scene: my focus here is on the representation of the actions and passions of the body and the physical place where the action occurs. 65. Conf. 8.8.19. As Miles (1992, 33) points out: “In the process of a second birth, Augustine reverts to the body language of an infant, to the inarticulate, desperate emotion of a newborn that can only be expressed in bodily motion.”

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Alypius did, however, become addicted to gladiatorial games. He could not prevent himself from watching these violent events even when he tried to stop himself. Augustine relates how he behaved at the games: “Alypius kept his eyes shut and forbade his mind to think about such horrifying cruelty. He should have blocked his ears as well! A gladiator fell in the combat. The huge roar of the crowd struck Alypius with such great vehemence that he was overcome by curiosity. . . . His eyes were riveted, and he drank in the madness” (6.8.13). Of course, Augustine offers many representations of the bodily actions and passions of his mother, Monica. In many passages, she cries bitter tears and “groans” to God over her son’s spiritual condition. And, as Augustine says in his “memorial” eulogy after she dies, she had once been a tippler. He also claims that she dutifully served her (unfaithful) husband and managed to deal gently with his vicious temper (“many wives married to gentler husbands bore the marks of beatings and had disfigured faces”; 9.9.19). Although his father gets short shrift in this text, Augustine remembers going to the baths with him during his adolescence: his father, seeing his son’s naked body and its “pubescence,” celebrates the beginnings of his life as a sexual being (2.3.6). I will not comment on every bodily action or passion in this book. Rather, I want to look at two deaths represented in the Confessions. These deaths occur in earthly time, while the author responds to them in the mode of psychic distention. The body dies at a single moment—and, indeed, becomes a part of earth—while the author’s psyche is “torn to pieces” (dilaniatur), rent and pulled apart. In the Confessions, Augustine portrays the death of a beloved youthful friend and, later, that of his mother. The first death occurs before his conversion, the second afterwards. Clearly, Augustine juxtaposes these deaths to show the right and wrong ways for a Christian to mourn a loved one. In the first death scene, he plunges into grief because he is attached to temporal things; in the second, his faith reminds him that death has no sting. As we will see, these deaths highlight the bodily and temporal aspects of Augustine’s narrative. In Confessions 4, Augustine says that he had a beloved friend who was “the other half of his soul.” This friend was a fellow Manichaean, and the two of them spent all their time together (indeed, many scholars have wondered whether they were lovers). The friend becomes ill, “racked by fevers and lying senseless in a deathly sweat” (4.4.8). His Christian parents proceed to baptize him, fearing that he will die. He then wakes up and—to Augustine’s great surprise—has rejected Manichaeism for Christianity. The baptized body (together with the rituals that attend the baptism) has, apparently,

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induced God to convert the friend even when he was unconscious. From his bed, the friend proceeds to lash out at Augustine for making fun of the baptism since he is no longer a Manichaean but a believing Christian. Several days later the friend dies. Augustine now faces the bitterness of death: “Grief darkened my heart. Everyone on which I set my gaze was death. My hometown became a torture to me; my father’s house was a strange world of unhappiness. All that I had shared with him was, without him, transformed into a cruel torment. My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there. I hated all things because they did not include him, and people could no longer tell me, ‘Look, here he comes.’” This is, of course, a retrospective. As a Christian (a new man), Augustine lambastes his early self for feeling this kind of grief. But he offers a brilliant meditation on death and mourning. As he says: “I was tired of living and afraid of dying. I think that the more I loved him, the more I hated and feared the death that had stolen him from me—as if death were my fiercest enemy. And I imagined that death would suddenly destroy all humanity because it had destroyed him” (Conf. 4.6.11). Although Augustine personifies death, it is an illness of the body that has killed the friend: his body has now gone to earth (humus). There can be little doubt that illness and death reflect the “humic” aspect of the human being.66 The human body is a natural organism, and it ages in the passing of earthly time. In his grief, Augustine confronts, not only the dead body of his friend but also the fact that he himself is alive. Since his friend was “half of his soul,” he marvels that he can go on living without his other half. His body and soul are at odds with one another: I boiled with anger, sighed, wept, and was overwhelmed. I had no rest or any capacity to deliberate. I carried [with my body] my shattered and bloody soul, which did not yet have patience enough to be carried by me. And I was not able to find a place where I could put my soul. I found no contentment in the lovely groves, or in games or songs, or in the banquets provided for me, or in the pleasure of the bedroom and bed, or even in reading prose or poetry. Everything was a horror, even light itself. Everything was painful and hateful—except for groaning and tears. (4.7.12)

Augustine’s body “carries” his soul from place to place: his body is alive on earth, but he feels dead at heart. His body can take him to groves, to ban-

66. See Harrison (2005) on the link between humus and humanus.

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quets, and into the bedroom, but his soul hates all these physical pleasures. Augustine even loathes the light of the sun. He finds some solace in weeping, but this only reminds him of the good old days. After describing his friend’s death and his own agonizing grief, Augustine offers a brief meditation on time: Things rise and set. They emerge and begin to be (as it were). They grow to maturity, and, when they reach that, they grow old and die. Although not everything grows old, everything dies. . . . You, God, have given them this much, namely, to be parts of things that do not all have their being at the same time: by passing away and by succession, they form the whole of which they are parts. That is the why our speech is constructed by meaningful sounds. What we say would not be complete if one word did not cease to exist when it has sounded so that another can succeed it. (4.10.15)

Here, Augustine begins by emphasizing that “things” (res) in the natural world rise and set, grow and die: these occur in earthly time. Yet humans experience these changes in psychic time. They sense the past and the future even in the present moment (and, for this reason, they see their own inevitable death). Augustine makes this clear when he turns from the aging and changing of things in the natural world to the passing of words in human language. In the bodily world, spoken words are merely ongoing noises—these pass along in earthly time. But the words take on meaning because the human mind is governed by psychic time. Since the mind is distended into memory and expectation, it can make meaning out of the words that have already passed and the words that are to come. To understand a sentence or a discourse, one must remember all the words that have passed by and anticipate where the discourse may be going in the immediate future. For Augustine, the human ability to use language illustrates the fact that the mind operates in psychic time:67 since the mind always stretches away from the present—moving into memory and expectation—it can bring together words that are passed, passing, and to come. In this discussion of death and mourning in book 4, then, we find the double temporality that governs human life. Augustine follows this up by analyzing his experience of temporality in the case of bodily sensations. As he claims: “[Things in the bodily realm] 67. In his theory of time in bk. 11, Augustine uses the “successive” activity of speech as a paradigmatic example of the distention of the mind in psychic time.

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pass along the path of things that move toward nonexistence. In these there is no point of rest—they lack permanence. They flee away, and who can follow them with his bodily senses? . . . The sense of our flesh is slow because it is a bodily sense and it has its own limit” (Conf. 4.10.15). Here, he indicates that the flesh cannot capture or contain all the sensory data in the present environment since things in the earthly realm always change and “flee”: the physical senses are limited and can take in only so much. The body is in one place, slowly taking in sensory data, while the mind flits forward and backward in the mode of psychic distention. As we saw in chapter 3, the earthly weight of the body slows the soul down—the body lags behind the mind and its willful plans of action. The soul moves in advance (via expectation), and the body makes a late arrival. Augustine makes a similar claim in the passage quoted above: the body is limited in its ability to take things in because bodily sensation takes place in earthly time, and this feels slow to the mind, which races back and forth in psychic time. In this passage on temporality in book 4, Augustine offers a theoretical account of death and grief. His friend dies and his body goes to earth. Augustine, the survivor, remembers his friend’s life in the past while seeing, ever more vividly, his own death in the future. In pondering his future death, Augustine once again confronts the human corpse. This leads him to fast-forward to the resurrection: “Your body will die . . . but your putrid parts [putria tua] will receive a new flowering, and all your illnesses will be healed” (Conf. 4.11.16). God alone offers rest: resurrection will overcome death. The rotting and “putrid” corpse will be transformed into a flourishing body. As Augustine concludes: “If the sense of the flesh were able to grasp the whole and had not (because of Your punishment) been justly placed in a part of the cosmos, we would wish that everything present would pass away so that the whole of things could provide us with pleasure all at once” (4.11.17). The body—the “sense of the flesh”—cannot “grasp the whole” because it dwells in the passing now of earthly time (in the physics of passing presence). Augustine claims that the soul should turn away from the bodily realm and focus on God. In doing this, the Christian looks forward to the death of all earthly things and the transhuman life in the world to come. In heaven, one can experience pleasure—psychic and bodily—“all at once.” Let us turn now to the death of Augustine’s mother, which takes place shortly after his conversion. Monica dies at Ostia (at the mouth of the Tiber). Shortly before she dies, she says to Augustine: “My son, I no longer find pleasure in this life. I don’t know why I am here or what I have to do here. My hopes have been granted. The one reason that I wanted to live longer was to see you as a Catholic Christian before I died. God has granted this

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in a way well beyond my hopes—for I see that you have rejected worldly success and have become God’s servant. What have I to do here now?” (Conf. 9.10.26). She promptly falls into a fever and, for a while, loses consciousness. When she wakes up, she sees her two sons by her bedside. Fixing her eyes on them, she says: “Bury your mother here.” Augustine’s brother objects, insisting that they should take her back to Africa. But Monica tells them to “lay this body anywhere [hoc corpus ubicumque] and don’t let any worry disquiet you.” As Augustine suggests, his mother had once wanted to be buried next to the body of her husband. But, during the period of her illness, she told several of Augustine’s friends that she was “not afraid to leave her body so far from her own town.” As she said: “Nothing is distant from God, and there is no reason to fear that he will not acknowledge me at the end of the world and raise me up” (9.11.28). Monica does not care about the place she is buried: any place is fine as long as they pray for her soul. Her earthly grave, in short, has no relevance to her afterlife. Soon after this meeting with her sons, she dies. Augustine offers a detailed account of his response to his mothers’s dead body: “I pressed down her eyes [premebam oculos eius]. A huge grief flowed into my heart and flooded into tears. Then, by the violent command of my will, my eyes [oculi mei] sucked back this font of tears and dried up. . . . As soon as she had breathed her last, my son Adeodatus cried out in a loud lamentation. After we admonished him, however, he went silent. . . . For we did not think it fitting to perform the funeral with lamentations, tears, and groans” (Conf. 9.12.29). The bereaved proceed to sing a psalm at Monica’s deathbed. Later, they bury her body in a graveyard in Ostia: “And behold, when the corpse [corpus] was carried to the gravesite, we went and returned without crying. Even during those prayers (which we poured forth to You on her behalf), when her corpse was placed beside the tomb before burial [iuxta sepulcrum posito cadavere, priusquam deponeretur], . . . I did not weep” (9.12.32). Augustine closes his dead mother’s eyes and is left with her corpse (corpus, cadaver). His own eyes pour forth tears. Augustine then watches his mother’s body go into the earth, making a valiant effort to refrain from crying. In contrast to his grief over the death of his friend before his conversion, as a Christian he refuses to cry over his mother’s corpse, since she will find rest in God and be resurrected at the end of time. Augustine proceeds to analyze his own grief: “Now that I had lost the great support she gave me, my soul was wounded, and my life was torn into pieces [dilaniabatur vita], since her life and mine had become a single thing” (Conf. 9.12.30). This alludes to the passage in book 4 where he described his dead friend as the “other half of his soul.” In book 4, he plunged

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into a grief that took the form of fear and loathing. The death of his mother in book 9 evokes a different response. As a Christian, he sees that his mother was meant to die and go home to God. Yet his grief is still fierce, and he prays to God to relieve his pain. The pain continues unabated. As Augustine suggests, God allowed this pain to continue as an “admonition” to him: he should learn that the “fetter of habit [consuetudinis vinculum] is strong, even for those who follow the Truth.”68 Strong human attachments—even those of Christians—create sinful habits that pull one away from God. After pondering this admonition, Augustine decides to take a bath since he thinks that this will relax and restore him. But he feels exactly the same after the bath—he was not able to “sweat out the bitterness.” Finally, he takes a nap and wakes up feeling much better. “Alone in his bed,” he remembers the verses of Ambrose’s hymn (Deus Creator Omnium). After that, he allows himself to cry for himself and his mother for a “fraction of an hour” (Conf. 9.12.33). The body of Augustine’s mother is inert and motionless, while his psyche is (briefly) “torn into pieces.” Augustine does not plunge into despair, however, but turns toward God. He proceeds to “petition for his mother’s sins,” praying that God will forgive her (Conf. 9.13.35–37). And he also sets forth a sort of memorial of her life.69 Augustine offers a loving description of his mother’s life that portrays her as an upright, moral, and honest person. He does not fail to mention that she had a drinking problem when she was young, but he explains that she broke this habit after receiving a harsh rebuke. He praises her role as a wife, a daughter-in-law, and a mother. Indeed, he says, she was kind to her (difficult) husband and eventually managed to convert him to Catholicism. He also mentions her age when she died (fiftysix). Augustine writes a memorial for his dead mother that stands as a sort of epitaph for a corpse that—when he writes the Confessions—is lying far away. The text replaces that “any place” that was her grave.70 As Augustine says at the end of book 9: “May You inspire . . . all who read this book to remember Monica your servant at your altar.” Monica’s corpse ends up in a literary corpus.71

68. Conf. 9.12.32. This discourse of habit picks up on Augustine’s sexual habit. There is something rather chilling about referring to a loving human relationship as a habit. 69. Conf. 9.8.17–22. Narratologically, this passage occurs before the account of Monica’s death and burial. 70. As Chadwick (1992, 174 n. 30) points out: “Medieval pilgrims record the epitaph on Monica’s tomb at Ostia placed early in the fifth century by Anicius Aucherius Bassus, consul in 431.” 71. Compare Lionet (1989, 56), who suggests: “It is through the death of the mother’s body that Augustine can be resuscitated in spirit.”

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In a sermon on the martyr Saint Cyprian—who was a bishop of Carthage and a theological writer—Augustine compares the human corpse to the literary corpus: “Everywhere people have the great corpus of his books [magnum corpus librorum eius]. But let us here [in the Mappalia Basilica in Carthage] give even greater thanks to God because we have been found worthy to have with us the holy corpus of his limbs [sanctum corpus membrorum eius]” (Sermo. 313C.2). In this case, the corpse of the martyr is held in higher honor than his writings. The corpse is here, while his writings are disseminated in many different places. In the Confessions, the logic is reversed: the corpse is there (in Ostia), while the text is here before the reader. In both cases, the dead body is associated with the written text. And, in both cases, a person’s body has died in earthly time, while the survivor responds to these deaths in psychic time.

chapter five

Unearthly Bodies

I indulge myself In rich refusals. Nothing suffices. I hone myself to This edge. Asleep, I Am a horizon. —Donald Justice, “The Thin Man” I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? —Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”

I

n this chapter, I discuss two Christian ritual practices in late antiquity that “unearthed” the human body: the cult of the holy relics and the ascetic mortification of the body. In both cases, Christians identified certain human bodies as holy.1 In varying degrees, these bodies were ritually

1. See n. 1 of the introduction.

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detached from the earth. In the cult of the holy relics, the bodies of the martyrs took on an unearthly status: these “enlivened” corpses manifested divine presence on earth. The shrines of the martyrs contained dead bodies or (more commonly) bodily parts that channeled divinity. Paradoxically, the corpse of the martyr was the site and sign of unearthly, eternal life. I examine the ritual celebrations of the passions and deaths of the martyrs. How did these rituals make meaning out of dead matter? To what extent did Christian discourses and rituals make these corpses unearthly? I also investigate Augustine’s growing embrace of the cult of the relics and his discourses on the miracles occurring at the shrines of the martyrs. In his sermons and prayers at these shrines, Augustine ritually and discursively unearths the body of the martyr. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Christian ascetics set out to imitate the passions of Christ and the martyrs: they mortified their bodies in order to worship God and to reject sin and death. As Robert Markus has shown, in this period the increasingly powerful church needed to identify itself as the heir of the persecuted church. Many Christians adopted radical ascetic practices as a new mode of martyrdom: “From the fourth century on, Christian literature abounds in the commonplaces of martyrdom equated with monasticism and of virginity represented as bloodless martyrdom.”2 For Augustine, the persecuted martyrs left a heroic paradigm that cried out for imitation. One could emulate the martyrs by mortifying the flesh. The Christian ascetics could not sacrifice their bodies as the martyrs did, but they engaged in a daily (and “bloodless”) martyrdom by depriving their bodies of pleasure and sustenance. Of course, the living body of the ascetic could never achieve the holiness of the martyr’s corpse, which manifested divine presence on earth. But the Christian ascetics still aimed to make their bodies less earthly. For example, by avoiding procreation, the celibate refuses to bring more deaths into the world. Indeed, as Augustine suggests, if everyone simply stopped having sex, the human race would die out and thus “hasten” the day of resurrection (DBC 10.10). And the practice of fasting takes the ascetic (temporarily) off the food chain. In rejecting sexual activities and undertaking long fasts, the Christian ascetics attempted to pull themselves away from the earth. In Augustine’s view, the celibate and fasting person attacks the earthly weight of the body with the counterweight of spiritual love. By adopting these bodily practices, Augustine attempted to make his body more holy and less earthly. Of course, he and his fellow

2. Markus (1990, 71). See also Miles (1979, 43).

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ascetics transformed their bodies over a lifetime of ritualized practices. They could never achieve complete holiness in their lives on earth since they were infected with sin. Still, by gradually paring away their earthly nature, they prepared themselves for receiving resurrected bodies. Indeed, one could argue that these ascetics aimed to kill off mortality itself.

THE MATTER OF THE MARTYRS Even as they attempted to raise themselves up to heaven by the practice of asceticism, Christians in late antiquity found ways to bring heaven toward earth. We find this movement in the cult of the martyrs. To understand the celebration of the bodily matter of the martyrs, we need to consider the theological views on Christ’s incarnation in this period. At the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the Catholic Church declared that Jesus was fully God and fully human, thus raising many Christological controversies.3 Later in the century, at the First Council of Constantinople (381 CE), the Catholics ratified the Nicene Creed: Jesus had, indeed, been human during his incarnation. The incarnation of God into human flesh clearly opened up a new relation toward the body. As Peter Walker points out: “The Incarnation could allow a new attitude towards physical matter, the very stuff of the world. It could be used to affirm not just the goodness of the world order, of creation and humanity at a general level; it could also be used to inculcate a new approach to material objects and place, a new expectation that physical reality might in some way be important to the meeting of God and man.”4 Starting in the mid-fourth century, the martyr’s body became a site for the meeting of God and humanity. Many Christians believed that the corpses of the martyrs left holy traces on earth and that the relics of their bodies manifested God’s power in the material world. The cult of the martyrs effectively dignified matter. As Patricia Cox Miller points out, in the cult of the martyrs, Christians could not “invest the material world with too much meaning” since this would lead to idolatry. In identifying the martyrs’ bodies as holy, the Christians had to walk a fine line: they had to celebrate these holy bodies in a nonidolatrous fashion. As Miller observes, they could not “reify” or fully “materialize” the divine; at the same time, they could not adopt “a spiritu-

3. Of course, there were many different interpretations of the incarnation and, more generally, of the ontological status of Christ. I will not rehearse these interpretations, which are not pertinent to my argument. 4. Walker (1990, 81).

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ality fully devoid of earthly substance.”5 The “holy bodies” of the martyrs thus had the paradoxical status of being both material and unearthly. In the late fourth and the fifth centuries CE, the cult of the martyrs began to grow and spread. In Christian discourses and ritual practices, the miracle-making bodies of the martyrs testified to the presence of God on earth. As we have seen, Augustine considered the death of the human body and its place on the food chain as a punishment for original sin. The corpses of the martyrs, however, had a special status: the dead matter of their corpses was, miraculously, alive and powerful. The cult of the martyrs offered Christians in late antiquity an entirely new way of dealing with death and the grave. These “living dead” offered evidence that the body (along with the soul) would be resurrected at the end of time. The cult of the martyrs was a morbid affair: the original graves of the martyrs were discovered (often in dreams) and the corpses disinterred. This practice initially generated criticism from Christians as well as pagans. For example, in 362–63 CE, Julian the Apostate (the last pagan emperor) vehemently attacked this cult: “You keep adding corpses of the newly dead to the corpses of long ago. You have filled the entire world with tombs and sepulchers, though it is not said in your scriptures that you should grovel among tombs and pay them honor.”6 In 386 CE, moreover, the Christian imperial court in Constantinople issued two rulings proclaiming it unlawful to disinter, dissect, or move entombed bodies; in addition, it ordered that bodies could not be buried or cremated inside the city walls (thus upholding the pagan belief that the corpse was the site of pollution). In spite of these attacks and edicts, however, the cult of the martyrs spread throughout the empire. For example, several months after this ruling in 386 CE, Ambrose disinterred the bodies of Saints Protasius and Gervasius from the Shrine of Saints Felix and Nabor. As Ambrose said when he unearthed their bodies: “Their tomb was dripping with blood—the signs of their triumphant bloodshed fully visible—and the relics were found unviolated in their due place and order, with the head torn away from the shoulders.”7 Ambrose proceeded to move the relics of these martyrs—with great

5. Miller (2008, 116–17, 119). 6. Against the Galileans 335C (note that Julian referred to the Christians as Galatians). The pagan Eunapius (in the Lives of the Sophists 472) offered a vituperative attack on this “morbid” practice. See Brown (1981, 6–8) and Eno (1989a, 49–50). 7. Epistle 77 (22) 12 (CSEL 82.134.124–26): Sanguine tumulus madet, apparent cruoris triumphalis notae, inviolatae reliquiae loco suo et ordine repertae, avulsum humeris caput.

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ritual fanfare—into his own basilica in Milan, placing them under the altar.8 But, before burying these relics in his church, he had the corpses cut up into many pieces, packaged, and sent to other churches. Although Milan already had relics of martyrs in Christian cemeteries outside the city walls, the placement of the relics in Ambrose’s church effectively brought together the power of the martyr with that of the bishop and his church. Ambrose’s rehousing of the relics in the church became a model for other bishops and church leaders in the Latin West.9 Ambrose—and those who followed suit— thus disseminated the cult of the holy relics both physically and theologically.10 Paradoxically, these dismembered and disintegrated corpses offered a sign of bodily integration at the end of time. As Peter Brown observes, the martyred saint took on the role of the patronus to a new kinship group, that is, the “family” of Christians.11 Transforming the traditional Roman practice of patronage (as well as the constitution of the family), many Christians treated dead martyrs as “patrons” offering succor to their “clients.” The bishop who moved relics into his church or church cemetery effectively served as a visible patron on behalf of the invisible patronus, that is, the martyr. This effectively brought together two different kinds of patronage, strengthening the power of the church.

REFIGURING TIME AND PLACE As scholars have noted, the cult of the martyrs transformed traditional notions of place and time.12 The notion of the holy place—rejected by most

8. On the staging of this event, see Davidson (2000). It is likely that Augustine witnessed Ambrose’s placement of the relics of Saints Gervasius and Protasius in his basilica in Milan in 386. He mentions this event in Conf. 9.7.16 and, much later in his life (in the 420s), in Sermo. 286.4 and 318.1 and CD 22.8.2. 9. Brown (1981, 36–39). Note that, in this period, the bishops in Rome refused to send bodily relics to other churches, as Ambrose did. Their policy was to send “contact relics” (see Roberts 1993, 16). 10. On Ambrose and the spread of the cult of the martyrs, see, e.g., Van der Meer (1961, chap. 17), Saxer (1980, 170–229), Brown (1981), Markus (1990, 143–49), Roberts (1993, 13–16 and passim), Bynum (1995, 104–14), G. Clark (1999, 369 and passim), and Hunter (1999). 11. Brown (1981, 32–38). As Roberts (1993, 21) claims, the use of the word patronus for a martyr is first found in Ambrose’s Homilies on Luke (378 CE); it is fully elaborated only in the Natalicia of Paulinus (which he started writing in 395 CE). 12. Brown (1981, 7–11 and passim), Markus (1990, chap. 10), Roberts (1993, chap. 1), Markus (1994a), and Harrison (2000, 141–42). On Christian holy places in general, see MacCormack (1990b), Markus (1994a), and Harrison (2000, 141). As Markus put it (1994a, 271): “Places became sacred as the past became localised in the present.”

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Christians until 320–30 CE—took on a new status in the development of this cult. As Robert Markus points out: Christians of the post-Constantinian era defined their identity, their sense of being the heirs of their persecuted ancestors, in historical terms. But this indirectly contributed to giving place a new importance. Place was irretrievably involved in celebrating a martyr’s “birthday” or “deposition.” . . . The commemoration of the martyr had been tied, originally, to a physical place, that of the burial. . . . In this sense the tomb could always count as a “holy place.” Like the tomb, relics linked the martyr’s commemoration to physical places; but they made possible the multiplication of such places, liberating the possible holiness of places from the immovability of the tomb. (1994a, 270)

In late antiquity, the shrines containing the corpse or relics of a martyr took on the title the place: ᔅͼ΄͸ͷͺ or hic locus. In the Latin West, the epitaph hic locus was a common formula in inscriptions on the shrines of the martyrs.13 Peter Brown claims that this locus was “a place where the normal laws of the grave were held to be suspended.”14 The presence of the corpse or bodily relics of the martyrs made the place holy and, in some sense, unearthly. The cult of the martyrs also served to restructure the Christian sense of time: “If the Saint’s tomb is where heaven and earth meet, it is also the place where the past and the present meet.”15 Temporally, the rituals over the holy relics brought together the martyrs from the past, the Christians worshipping in the present, and the resurrected saints at the end of time. The past, present, and future meet in the place where these buried corpses or bodily parts are buried. Located on earth in the here and now, the dead martyrs also served as signs of the eschatological future: their past lives and deaths were ritually linked to resurrection. In the late 4th and early 5th centuries, the Christians instituted festival days for martyred saints almost every week of the year. The institution of these festivals transformed the church calendar (which competed with the pagan Roman calendar).16

13. On the frequency of this formula in North African shrines in this period, see Duval (1982, 2:468). 14. Brown (1981, 10–11). 15. Markus (1990, 24). 16. Markus (1990, 93–99). On the Roman calendar and the way in which Christians attempted to replace this calendar with their own ritual celebrations, see Feeney (2007, 28–42), Markus (1990, 98–108), Salzman (1990) (on the Codex Calendar of 354 CE), and Burgess (1999). On Roman conceptions of time, see Bettini (1988, 142–94) and Feeney (2007).

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On the festival of a martyr’s death day—which was conceptualized as his or her birthday—the bishops and clergy celebrated the Eucharist over the relics. At these festivals, the physical presence of the relics, together with the recitations of the passion stories (which detailed the valiant battles and gory deaths of the martyrs), assured the Christians that death “had no sting.” Clearly, the cult of the martyrs served in part to allay the fear of death. While some pagans found this “adoration of corpses” macabre, the Christians’ celebration of the holy relics allowed them to confront death and to find there the ultimate victory over mortality. Paradoxically, the corpses of the martyrs were not really dead: their afterlife was already manifest in the miracles wrought from the grave. The passions of the martyrs reflected the Christian belief in the divine incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. Like Christ, the martyrs were tortured and killed for their abiding belief in God. Of course, Jesus came back after the crucifixion in bodily form to demonstrate his resurrection, while the martyrs had not yet been resurrected. Still, for the Christians, the bodies of the martyrs had a palpable presence on earth since they served as the conduits of God’s miracles. Indeed, their dead bodies had a divine power, unlike other bodies on earth.17 In short, the relics of the martyrs brought heaven down to earth while helping those on earth draw closer to heaven.18 For Christian believers, then, the bodily remains of the martyrs channeled divine presence on earth. They provided a sign of God’s omnipotence and his victory over death. As Brown so beautifully puts it: “How better to

17. There were various views of the relation between God and the relic articulated in the late fourth and the early fifth centuries. For example, Victricius of Rouen offered a radically incarnational theology of the martyr’s relics: they incorporated divine presence and, indeed, were consubtantial with God. (On Victricius’s De laude sanctorum, see Eno [1989a, 38–41], G. Clark [1999], Hunter [1999], and Miller [2005b, 28–30].) Prudentius wrote poems to various martyrs (Peristephanon), petitioning them at their tombs for intercession (see Eno 1989a, 35–38; Malamud 1989; Palmer 1989; Roberts 1993; Ross 1995; Miller 2000a, 222–27; and Miller 2005a, 36–42). Augustine’s friend Paulinus of Nola wrote the Carmina for his personal protomartyr, Saint Felix. In it, he claimed that Felix’s bones were “living dust” (Carm. 27.400–405 [CSEL 30:279–80]; see, e.g., Walsh 1975, 1–30; Eno 1989a, 29–35; and Trout 1999, chap. 7 and passim). We have no solid evidence that Augustine read Prudentius or Victricius (though the latter sent De laude sanctorum to Ambrose, thanking him for sending the relics of Protasius and Gervasius from Milan; Victricius was also a friend of Paulinus of Nola’s). 18. As Saxer (1980, 311–13) points out, the more that the relics were disseminated to different shrines, the more the martyr was seen to be housed in the relic. As MacCormack (1990b, 7) suggests, Christians increasingly came to believe that the saint was resident both in the grave and in heaven.

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suppress the fact of death than to remove part of the dead from its original context in the all too cluttered grave? How better to symbolize the abolition in time in such dead than to add to that an indeterminacy of space? Furthermore, how better to express the paradox of the linking of heaven and earth than by an effect of ‘inverted magnitudes,’ by which the object around which boundless associations clustered should be tiny and compact?”19 The very presence of the material relic, then, transformed the notion of the holy body, both temporally and spatially. The martyrs were dead but also alive. Their relics were geographically scattered, but they gathered Christians from different places into a family unit. Indeed, the fragmentation of the martyrs’ bodies operated synecdochically—they served as parts of the whole that was the body of Christ. In my view, the disinterring and dismemberment of the martyrs’ holy bodies anticipates the divine removal of all human bodily matter from earth on Resurrection Day. Indeed, their very dismemberment offers a sign of divine re-membering at the end of time. And yet, even with the comfort offered by resurrection, the Christians retained a horror of the corpse and its entrance into the food chain. In chapter 4 of his seminal treatise On Resurrection, Tertullian says that every human body will end up “in time’s own gullet.” As Carolyn Bynum observes: “The very images used [by Christian theologians in the second and third centuries CE] . . . suggest that what God promised to those who die in his service was victory not so much over the moment of execution as over putrefaction itself. Resurrection was finally not so much the triumph of martyrs over pain and humiliation as the triumph of martyrs’ bodies over fragmentation, scattering, and the loss of a final resting place.”20 In the fourth and the early fifth centuries, theologians continued to worry over the human body’s entrance into the earth.21 Eating and being eaten were central preoccupations for Christian theologians in late antiquity. Clearly, the celebration of the Eucharist centered on eating and incorporating Christ’s body. This led some pagans to argue that the Christians were indulging in cannibalism.22 19. Brown (1981, 78). 20. Bynum (1995, 50). 21. Note that the fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius (looking back to the periods of martyrdom) says that the Romans scattered and burned the bodies of the executed martyrs in order to dash Christian hopes of resurrection. He also says that the Romans had to post guards to prevent Christians from stealing the ashes or bones of the martyrs in order to bury them. There is no evidence that the Romans regularly prevented the Christians from having access to the bodies of the executed. But, as the early martyr stories show, some Christians believed that the Roman authorities were attempting to mock the notion of resurrection by violating the corpses and keeping them from a timely burial. 22. See Benko (1986, 54–78).

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But the Christians believed that eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ pulled them away from their earthly bodies that consumed and digested food: Christ’s body was incorruptible, indivisible, and could not be consumed. The celebration of the Eucharist prepared Christians for receiving integrated and changeless bodies at the end of time.

AUGUSTINE ON THE “HOLY” CORPSE In his early years as a bishop, Augustine celebrated the martyrs’ festival days but did not believe that their bodily relics were the sites of miracles. The Donatists—Augustine’s schismatic rivals in North Africa—revered their martyrs with extraordinary passion. Indeed, Augustine accused them of “adoring the dust” that had been brought from the holy land (Ep. 52.2). He insisted that Christians should honor but not worship the martyrs since worshipping them would be a form of idolatry. Many other theologians in this period worried over the issue of idolatry. The priest Vigilantius, for example, leveled a powerful attack against the cult of the martyrs, offering detailed arguments against this practice (ca. 403 CE). His treatise is no longer extant, but these arguments are summarized (and rebutted) in Jerome’s Against Vigilantius (406 CE). Vigilantius argued that Christians were treating the relics of the martyrs as if they were pagan idols (and, thus, turning away from the spiritual worship of God). He particularly objected to the dissemination of the relics; indeed, he scorned the idea that the souls of the martyrs could “travel at will along with the relic of the body.”23 He makes a key point here: why should the souls of the martyrs be present in their dead bodies, especially bodies that had been dismembered and buried in many different places? As Vigilantius puts it: “Do the souls of the martyrs love their ashes so much that they fly around them and are always present, as if they would not be able to hear prayers if they were away from the grave?”24 The souls of the martyrs are at rest with God, he claims, not haunting their many tombs. Jerome offered a vitriolic counterattack. As he claims, the souls of the martyrs go where Jesus goes: “They ‘follow the lamb wherever he goes.’ If the lamb is everywhere, then the same must be true of the martyrs who are with the lamb.”25 23. Hunter (1999, 425). On Jerome and Vigilantius, see Brown (1981, 26–8), Eno (1989a, 41–4), Markus (1990, 148–149), and Hunter (1999, 401–26). 24. Summarized in Jerome, Against Vigilantius 6. Vigilantius did not believe that the martyrs could act as intercessors—their souls were at peace with God, far from earth (Hunter 1999, 426). 25. Here (Against Vigilantius 6), he uses Rev. 4:14 as evidence. See Eno (1989a, 43).

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In his early years, Augustine argued that the age of miracles was over.26 But he changed this position later in his life. Although he continued to maintain that Christians should not worship martyrs, he came to believe that the shrines of the martyrs generated divine miracles.27 In 416, the Spanish priest Orosius brought the relics of the body of Saint Stephen—newly discovered and unearthed in Jerusalem—to North Africa. In the following years, shrines and chapels for Saint Stephen were created in many towns and in the countryside near Hippo. Of course, there were already shrines of martyrs in North Africa. As Augustine says in a letter: “All of Africa is full of the holy bodies of martyrs.”28 But the relics of Saint Stephen generated an abundance of miraculous events. In one of his sermons, Augustine announces to his congregation the arrival of the relics of Saint Stephen in Hippo: “You are waiting to hear what has been enshrined in this place [in isto loco]. They are the relics of Stephen, the first and most blessed martyr. . . . The place [locus] where he was buried was demonstrated by preceding signs; and it was discovered to be just as it had been revealed in these signs. Many people received relics from that place [inde] because that was God’s will, and they came as far as here [huc]. So both this place and this day [et locus et dies] are being commended to your devotion.” Augustine emphasizes the discovery of the corpse (which “lay hidden” for years), the dissemination of the relics, and the presence “today” of the relics in “this place” (Sermo. 318.2). After the arrival of Saint Stephen’s relics, Augustine began to preach on the miracles brought about by the martyrs. He speaks of the bodily relics as “lifeless flesh adorned with a powerful mark of divinity”; these “bear witness to the truth that what dies does not perish.”29 Of course, the flesh of the corpse is lifeless, but the dead martyr is very much alive:

26. On Augustine’s denial of contemporary miracles, see DVR 25.47; and DUC 16.34. He recanted this view in his later years (see esp. Retr. 1.12.7, 1.13.5). On Augustine’s late embrace of divine miracles, see De Vooght (1939), Brown (1967/2000, 408–18), Courcelle (1968, 139–53), and Saxer (1980, 262–79). 27. On Augustine’s evolving views on the cult of the martyrs, see Van der Meer (1961, chap. 17), Marrou (1966), Miles (1979, 36–39), Brown (1981, 38–40, 60–62, 77–78), Eno (1989a, 49–85), Harrison (2000, 136–42), Miller (2000a, 216–19) and (2005a, 28–36). 28. Ep. 78.3. On the relics and narratives of Saint Stephen (which are based on Acts 7), see Martin (1958) and O’Donnell (2005, 174–79). Augustine preached many sermons on Saint Stephen after the relics arrived in North Africa (Sermo. 314–24). 29. Sermo. 275.3: Quid enim agit Deus, mira opera faciendo circa sanctorum corpora defunctorum, nisi testimonium perhibet, sibi non perire quod moritur.

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Stephen the martyr . . . has spread his light in those lands where he suffered, and he has visited our land in his death. But he would not be visiting us as dead if in death he were not alive. How so little a handful of dust can gather together so great a multitude! The ashes are hidden; the benefits are manifest. Think, dearest ones, of what God grants to us in the region of the living—He who has offered us so much from the dust of the dead. Saint Stephen’s body has been made famous the world over: but it is the merit of his faith that is commended to us.30

Saint Stephen is more alive in his death than he was in his life. Augustine suggests that the relics of his body have been disseminated throughout the world in the form of ashes: a small handful of dust brings together the “members” of the church (which is the body of God). The dismemberment and dissemination of the martyr’s body gather together the Christians into one community. But why should a “little handful of dust” have this effect? In Caring for the Dead, Augustine cautiously speculates that “the martyrs themselves are present at the same time in many different places, which are at great geographic distances—that is, they are present where their memorials are or near their memorials.” Alternatively, he claims: “They may pray for the needs of suppliants in a general sense, though they are removed from all converse with mortals, being in a place fitting with their merits.”31 Though Augustine admits to uncertainty on this issue, he does believe that the “memorials,” or shrines, serve to remind people of the passions of the martyrs and to call out for imitation. Indeed, in almost all his sermons on the martyrs, he suggests that Christians should imitate these heroic people: the martyrs “rejoice with us, not if we honor them, but if we imitate them.”32

30. Sermo. 317.1: Martyr Stephanus. . . . illas terras passus illustravit, istas mortuus visitavit. Sed mortuus non visitaret, nisi et mortuus viveret. Exiguus pulvis tantum populum congregavit: cinis latet, beneficia patent. Cogitate, carissimi, quae nobis Deus servet in regione vivorum, qui tanta praestat de pulvere mortuorum. Caro sancti Stephani per loca singula diffamatur: sed fidei eius meritum commendatur. 31. DCM 16.20: Utrum ipsi per se ipsos adsint uno tempore tam diversis locis, et tanta inter se longinquitate discretis, sive ubi sunt eorum memoriae, sive praeter suas memorias ubicumque adesse sentiuntur: an ipsis in loco suis meritis congruo ab omni mortalium conversatione remotis, et tamen generaliter orantibus pro indigentia supplicantum. Note that Augustine wrote Caring for the Dead in response to a question from Paulinus, who asked about the power of the martyrs to intercede for the dead and the living. See Trout (1999, 244–55), who discusses Augustine’s developing views on these issues in DCM and CD. 32. Sermo. 325.1. On imitating the martyrs, see also Sermo. 302.1, 304.2.

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Indeed, as he puts it: “We must be prepared to die each day, like the martyrs” (Sermo. 64A1). Augustine discusses the cult of the martyrs in great detail in City of God 22. He suggests—again with caution—that the martyrs function as intercessors (through the agency of God or the angels).33 And he lists a number of local miracles that occurred in his own region at the shrines of Saint Stephen and Saint Cyprian. Although some of these miracles occurred through prayer alone, most involve the act of touching the martyr’s relic or shrine (or touching a “contact relic” that was brought from the shrine). Let me offer a few examples. In one case, Augustine claims: “A relic of the most glorious martyr Stephen was being brought by the bishop, Praeiectus, to Aquae Tibilitanae, where a huge throng of people came out to greet him. A blind woman living there asked to be taken to the bishop, who was holding the relic. She gave him the flowers that she was carrying; when he returned these flowers to her, she pressed them to her eyes and immediately regained her sight.” In another case, the bishop of Castellum Sinitense (near Hippo)—while carrying “the holy burden” of the relic of the same saint—was cured of a fistula. A priest named Eucharius, moreover, recovered from a deadly illness when someone placed his cloak on the shrine and then returned and laid it on him in bed. In another example, the mother of a son who was crushed under a wheel placed him at the shrine of Saint Stephen; he immediately recovered and showed no signs of injury. At Hippo, a tax collector had died but was revived when his body was anointed with oil from the martyr’s shrine.34 In these and other cases, a sick (or dead) person touches either the relic, the shrine, or an item that has been in contact with the relic. Indeed, touching takes center stage in Augustine’s account of miracles.35 Of course, God (or an angel) is operating through the corpse or relics of the martyr. But the miracles occur by way of physical proximity to the martyr’s body, which is invested with a holy power. Indeed, as Augustine says in a sermon, the corpse of the martyr is holy: “But let us here give even greater thanks to God because we have been found worthy to have with us the holy corpus of his limbs [sanctum corpus membrorum eius]” (Sermo. 313C2). By identifying this corpse as a holy conduit of divine power,

33. CD 22.8, 9. See also Sermo. 284.5, 297.3, 313D1, 316.5, 313E8, 335H2, and 335K4. 34. All these examples are in CD 22.8. 35. On seeing and touching in Christian holy places, see Frank (2000, 104–33). On the “material turn” in late antiquity, see Harvey (2006) and Miller (2008).

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he effectively sees it as unearthly. The unearthly body of the saint is “here” channeling divine miracles from a heavenly “there.”36 Clearly, the martyrs gained this status by their glorious deaths, which are detailed in the passion stories (the Passiones or Gesta martyrum). These narratives do not offer entire life stories; rather, they focus on the period of life from the time of the martyr’s arrest to his or her violent death. Augustine explains the efficacy of the martyrs’ punishing deaths: The earth has been filled with the blood of martyrs as though by a seed, and the crops of the church have sprung from that seed. By being dead rather than alive, the martyrs have asserted Christ’s cause more effectively. They assert it today; they preach him today. Their tongues are silent; their deeds echo around the world. The martyrs were arrested, bound, brought to trial, imprisoned, tortured, burned at the stake, stoned to death, pierced through, fed to wild beasts. In all these events they were laughed at as worthless, but “the death of His saints is precious in the eyes of the Lord [Ps. 116:15].”37

Though the martyrs died long ago, they nonetheless “preach” Christianity “today” (hodie). Their tongues are silent, but their corpses speak volumes. The passion stories of the martyrs were read aloud as part of the ritual celebration of the saint’s day. These narratives effectively bring the dead martyr (and matter) to life. All of Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs key off of the passion stories. Not surprisingly, the body takes center stage in these sermons: We would have loved to have embraced and kissed those ravaged limbs if it had been possible. We marvel that those limbs could provide room for so many punishments. . . . For who would wish to see a savage tormentor—a man, having tossed humanity itself aside, raging against the body of a human being? Who would enjoy the spectacle of limbs wrenched apart on the rack of torture? Who would not hate seeing the shape of a man being

36. Here, Augustine seems almost to slip into the position of idolatry that he roundly deplores in all his writings. 37. Sermo. 286.4.3 (at the festival of Saints Gervasius and Protasius, ca. 425–30 CE): Quasi semine sanguinis impleta est martyribus terra, et de illo semine seges surrexit Ecclesiae. Plus asseruerunt Christum mortui, quam vivi. Hodie asserunt, hodie praedicant: tacet lingua, sonant facta. Tenebantur, ligabantur, includebantur, producebantur, torquebantur, urebantur, lapidabantur, percutiebantur, bestiis subrigebantur. In omnibus suis mortibus quasi viles irridebantur sed pretiosa in conspectu Domini mors sanctorum eius.

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violated, its bones stretched, wrenched apart, and laid bare as the flesh was dug off them? Who would not find this horrifying? Nevertheless, the justice of the martyrs made all these horrible things beautiful.38

Though he says that he would hate to see a man torn to pieces, Augustine nonetheless offers graphic images of torture and destruction. Yet these ugly images take on beauty because they reveal the courage and goodness of the martyr’s sacrifice. Here, Augustine engages in what Jas’ Elsner calls ritualized visualization—a practice in which secular modes of viewing are screened out by religious rites and practices.39 As Patricia Cox Miller has shown, Augustine created a “rhetorical aesthetic, constructing a kind of spiritual theater of the mind, in which ethical mimesis was paramount.”40 Indeed, he often used theatrical and agonistic metaphors in his sermons on the martyrs. He developed this discourse in part as a response to the “sinful” gladiatorial games, which offered competing events that affected church attendance.41 He offers a counterspectacle in his sermons on the martyrs: “Is there any greater contest, anywhere else, that we should be spectators of? There is not! The persecutor threatens death, he savages the healthy body, he plows with hooks, tortures with racks, burns with flames, brings on the wild animals. Here too he is conquered. Why is he conquered? Because ‘in all these things we are greater conquerers through Him who loved us’ [Rom. 8:37].”42 As Miller suggests, Augustine’s graphic sermons invited the congregations to see the spectacle in their minds and to imitate the martyr inwardly.43 By making these people

38. Sermo. 277A1: Amplecti et osculari, si fieri posset, dilaniata illa membra vellemus, quae tantis poenis sufficere mirabamur . . . quis enim velit saevientem videre carnificem, et hominem in corpus humanum humanitate amissa furentem? Quem cernere libeat divaricatos artus machinatione tormenti? Naturae figuram arte humanitatis arreptam, ossa extendendo separata, exarando nudata, quis non adversetur? Quis non exhorreat? Et tamen haec omnia et horrenda iustitia martyris pulchra faciebat. 39. Elsner (2000). 40. Miller (2000a, 218–19). 41. See, e.g., Sermo. 313A.3: “You can change your consuming addiction to spectacles. The church is offering your mind more honest and venerable spectacles. Just now the passion of Cyprian was being read. We were listening with our ears, observing it with our minds; we could see him competing, somehow or other we felt fear for him in his deadly peril, but we were hoping God would help him.” 42. Sermo. 299D.5: An aliquid aliud est, ubi maius certamen spectare debeamus? Non. Minatur mortem, saevit in salutem, exarat ungulis, excruciat tormentis, urit flammis, admovet bestias: et hic vincitur. Quare vincitur? Quia in his omnibus supervincimus per eum, qui dilexit nos. 43. See Miller (2000a, 216–19) and Miller (2005a, 28–36).

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visualize the martyr’s drama within their minds (thus rejecting the “lust of the eyes”), Augustine “retrains the senses to apprehend the meaning of the martyrs and their relics.”44 The congregation, then, could better understand the true meaning of the martyr’s death through this mental spectacle. But, to fully incorporate the Christian doctrines, they had to be physically present at the shrine with its bodily relics and participate in the ritual celebration. Augustine never lost sight of the shrine itself. In one sermon, he describes the pictorial images engraved on the shrine of Saint Stephen in Hippo: Here is the sweetest picture, where you see Saint Stephen being stoned and Saul watching over the garments of the men who are doing the stoning. And there is Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ. You heard the voice well: “Why do you persecute me?” You [Paul] were laid down, you were raised up: as a persecutor you lay prostrate, as a preacher you were set upright. . . . We all know that this act occurred by your own will, and we saw its fruits: Stephen was killed by your will. By the will of God, we see your fruits: wherever you are read, wherever you are recited, wherever you convert hostile hearts to Christ, wherever, as a good pastor, you collect great flocks. With Stephen, whom you stoned, you rule together with Christ. There you can both see each other and can both now hear my sermon: both of you, please pray for us. He will listen to you two, the One who crowned you. . . . This man here was the lamb, that man there the wolf. Now both are lambs. Let the lambs recognize us, and let them see us in the flock of Christ: let them commend us to Him in their prayers.45

The congregation looks at a pictorial series of events in the lives of Stephen and Saul/Paul. This iconography reminds the viewer of Stephen’s persecution, Saul’s role in this event, and the conversion scene where the “wolf” 44. Miller (2005a, 29). 45. Sermo. 316.5: Dulcissima pictura est haec, ubi videtis sanctum Stephanum lapidari, videtis Saulum lapidantium vestimenta servantem. Iste est Paulus Apostolus Christi Iesu, iste est Paulus servus Christi Iesu. Bene audistis vocem: Quid me persequeris? Stratus es, erectus es: prostratus persecutor, erectus praedicator. . . . Per voluntatem tuam scimus, vidimus fructus tuos: occisus est Stephanus per voluntatem tuam. Per voluntatem Dei, videmus fructus tuos: ubique legeris, ubique recitaris, ubique ad Christum adversantia corda convertis, ubique pastor bonus magnos greges colligis. Cum eo quem lapidasti, cum Christo regnas. Ambo ibi vos videtis; ambo modo sermonem nostrum auditis; ambo pro nobis orate. Ambos vos exaudiet, qui vos coronavit. . . . Ille tunc agnus erat, ille autem lupus erat: modo autem ambo agni sunt. Agni agnoscant nos, et in grege Christi videant nos: orationibus suis commendent nos.

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Saul became the “lamb” Paul. The pictures also remind the viewers that, here at the martyr’s shrine, these two persecuted saints are now interceding for their flock. Ultimately, however, both discourses and images are trumped by the miracle of a sick person healed at the shrine. As Augustine says in the City of God, a man who had lived with a spastic body and ongoing tremors came to the shrine of Saint Stephen and “gripped the railing of the sacred place [loci sancti] where the relics were buried.” He fell into a swoon and woke up fully healed. He came and knelt at Augustine’s knees. Augustine lifted him up, kissed him, and took him to his church: “The church was full and was resounding with shouts of joy. No one stayed silent . . . I greeted the people, and they cried out even more passionately. When at last there was silence, the texts from the Bible were read. But, when the time for my sermon came, I made only a few remarks . . . for I preferred to let them ponder the eloquence (as it were) of God as he revealed himself in his divine action rather than through the hearing of words” (22.8). Here in “this place” (hic locus), where the shrine contains the relics of the holy corpse, the martyr’s unearthly body is the site of a divine miracle. This earthly dust is alive.

RITUALIZED ASCETICISM As Christianity grew (in various branches) in late antiquity, its leaders and followers developed different orientations toward the body. To speak very generally, in the fourth century CE, hermits and monks had become “saints” of the Christian movement. Indeed, their ascetic practices provided models for Christians to emulate.46 In the fourth and fifth centuries, many Christians chose to be “athletes of Christ”: they opted for rigorous fasting and sexual abstinence as a way to transform their corrupt bodies. Though they could not completely transcend the earthly world, their ascetic practices effectively created a new relation to the body (of course, these practices were given a particular meaning by theological and hagiographic

46. In the Life of Anthony, Athanasius notes that other men were practicing this kind of asceticism when Anthony began his retreat from society. As Brown (1988, 337) points out: “By the end of the fourth century, for the first time in the history of the early Church, the distant, Latin-speaking provinces of the West—Africa, Italy, and Gaul—came into their own. . . . In many influential centers of the Latin world, the ascetic movement rapidly took forms that gave less prominence to the slow wisdom of the Desert Fathers and that shunned the ‘angelic’ freedom upheld by the monks in Syria. Even those Latins who were most attracted to continence and to the monastic life brought with them [different] views on the relation between the Church and the society.”

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discourses). Through fasting and celibacy, they prepared themselves for receiving a perfect resurrected body at Judgment Day—a body that will not eat or procreate. In short, they began the work of resurrection here on earth. Those who adopted this rigorous ascetic regime, then, attempted to elevate their earthly bodies toward heaven. In late antiquity, many religious and philosophical groups engaged in ascetic practices. The Christians had to differentiate themselves from these rivals by adopting specific doctrines and observing ritualized bodily practices. How, then, did Christians incorporate correct beliefs through rituals and ascetic practices? As Pierre Bourdieu claims in “Belief and the Body,” when a person participates in religious rituals, his or her body “does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past—it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. What is ‘learned by the body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.”47 Augustine writes at length about the role that the body plays in Christian rituals: in attending church, for example, there was a proper way to stand, kneel, pray, chant, groan, sing, cry, touch, prostrate oneself, gesture with the hands, take the Eucharist, and be bathed in baptism (note that Augustine’s congregation stood in church—often for hours when the sermon was long—with different areas assigned for women, men, and unbaptized attendees).48 In addition, the Christians created a sacred calendar that determined the time and place to worship at churches and shrines throughout the year. At certain religious festivals—especially those marking the birth, passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ—the church recommended fasting and the avoidance of sex. In these ritual actions and observances, the worshippers embodied and enacted Christian beliefs. Augustine and his Christian contemporaries paid very careful attention to the body. For Augustine, the body was a physical organism, but it also served as the sign of sin and redemption.49 The human body, though freighted with sin, could be partly purified by ascesis. In this period, the control of bodily desires was a crucial element in Christian self-fashioning. Christians were encouraged to transform their bodies into a “pure” vessel by attempting to resist all sensual pleasures. As Peter Brown has suggested: “To describe ascetic thought as ‘dualist’ and as motivated by hatred of the 47. Bourdieu (1990, 73). 48. See Van der Meer (1961, 388–90). Note that Augustine seated himself at a higher level in the church in a richly draped cathedra, surrounded by his deacons (who were members of his monastery). 49. Of course, the incarnation and resurrection of Christ gave the Christians an entirely new sense of the body and its potential resurrection.

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body, is to miss its most novel aspect: seldom in ancient thought had the body been seen as more deeply implicated in the transformation of the soul; and never was it made to bear so heavy a burden.”50 We must remember that ascetic practices took place, for the most part, in social and communal settings.51 For example, as a monk and a bishop, Augustine ate, drank, dressed, spoke, and interacted with people daily: his actions were public and visible. As Elizabeth Castelli observes, the body of the Christian ascetic was both a “map of social meaning” and a “site for religious self-formation.”52 Although Augustine did not undertake heroic bodily feats like those of the Stylites or the desert hermits, he did enact—and, indeed, perform—fairly rigorous ascetic practices.53 At the same time, he theorized these bodily practices in sermons and treatises. Augustine’s discourses on asceticism took place in the context of competing theological positions on “correct” social and sexual relations. In the late fourth and the early fifth centuries, priests and theologians heatedly debated the proper extent of ascetic practices (and, indeed, the efficacy of these practices). Jovinian, for example, argued for a one-tier approach to the body, claiming that those practicing celibacy and ascetic practices did not win any extra points with God. Augustine joined Ambrose, Jerome, and others who adopted a two-tier model, in which the ascetic “athletes of Christ” were considered holier than ordinary Christians.54 To be sure, Augustine stopped short of Jerome’s vitriolic attacks on marriage. Indeed, he condoned marriage and even sexual intercourse (as long as this was performed for the sake of procreation). But he clearly considered celibacy and other ascetic practices as a higher and holier form of life. Augustine says that the ascetic Christian must mortify his or her body in the mode of prayer and humility. In all ascetic practices, one must extend one’s soul toward God. As we saw in chapter 2, psychic “extension” offers some respite from mental distention. But the distention of the mind in psychic time can never be overcome during human life, even though prayer and

50. Brown (1988, 236). 51. As we saw in chapter 4, even the desert hermits had followers and attendants (in spite of their efforts to achieve solitude). 52. Castelli (1992, 134, 136). 53. Lawless (2000) offers an excellent discussion of Augustine’s asceticism in the context of Christian ascetics in Egypt and the Greek East. (See also Lawless [1987], which offers a detailed analysis of Augustine’s Rule.) As Lawless rightly points out, Augustine adopted a relatively moderate asceticism that avoided extreme bodily practices. 54. On the one- and two-tiered model, see Brown (1967/2000, 217–21), Brown (1988, 358–65), Clark (1986a), Markus (1990, 36–78), and Hunter (2005).

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ritual practices can (for a time) expand the soul in an effort to contain the divine. Still, one cannot simply extend oneself toward God with the mind, by prayer and meditation. To worship God properly, one must deal with the weight and burden of the flesh. How, then, does one control the burden of the body and use it to transform the soul?

THE MORTIFIED BODY In all his texts, Augustine claims that one should “mortify” and “crucify” one’s body in order to lift oneself up to God. What does it mean to mortify the body? As we have seen, Christians in this period associated rigorous ascetic practices with martyrdom. To mortify the flesh was to engage in a bloodless martyrdom. Paradoxically, killing off the mortal flesh prepares one to receive an immortal resurrected body. The Christian ascetics mortified their earthly bodies as a way of leaping over death and entering heaven. Of course, the perfect resurrected body lies in the future; for now, the Christians must treat their bodily lives as a temporary (and transient) journey from earth to heaven. How did Augustine understand and enact the mortification of the flesh? Consider his comment on Paul’s command in Col. 3:5 that Christians should mortify their earthly bodies: “ ‘Mortify [mortificate] your members that are earthly.’ . . . What does [Paul] want these people to mortify by the act of continence except those very movements that are still alive in them and have a certain intrusion of their own. . . . And how are these physical movements mortified [mortificantur] by the act of continence except when one does not consent to [these movements] with one’s mind and when the members of the body are not presented to them as instruments.”55 Augustine interprets Paul’s reference to the “members that are earthly” as bodily “movements” that operate in opposition to the mind. In short, he refers to the movement of the unruly parts of the body (especially the penis). One must mortify one’s body by refusing to consent to these sinful urges. In his discussion of the mortification of the flesh, Augustine also uses Paul’s claim that “those

55. Cont. 13.29: ‘Mortificate ergo membra vestra, quae sunt super terram’. . . . Quid ergo vult ut mortificent, opere scilicet continentiae, nisi motus ipsos adhuc in sua quadam interpellatione . . . viventes? Et quomodo isti mortificantur opere continentiae, nisi cum eis mente non consentitur, nec exhibentur eis arma corporis membra. See Paul, Col. 3:5: ͖ͭͲ͹Άͻͩͼͭͷᔖ͵ͼᔬʹͥͳͯͼᔬᓘ͸ᔲ ͼᕾͺͫᕾͺ͸ͷ͹͵ͭͧͩ͵ᓈͲͩͰͩ͹ͻͧͩ͵͸ͤͰͷͺᓘ͸ͱͰͽʹͧͩ͵ͲͩͲͦ͵; Vulgate: Mortificate ergo membra vestra quae sunt super terram, fornicationem, inmunditiam, libidinem, conscupiscentiam malam.

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who belong to Jesus have crucified the flesh [carnem crucifixerunt] with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). As Augustine argues: “We should make a cross for ourselves by curbing the pleasures of the flesh. . . . The Christian should hang on this cross continually throughout the whole of this life, which is spent in the midst of trials and temptations.”56 It goes without saying that mortifying and crucifying the body involve at least some physical pain. How, then, does inflicting pain on one’s body help one worship God? To understand the efficacy of mortifying the body, we must recall Augustine’s theory of the one-way interactionism between the soul and the body (discussed in chapter 3). As we have seen, Augustine claims in his theoretical treatises that the body plays a passive role in sensation: “The material passion which the body undergoes is a call directed towards the soul by the body, rather than an action exercised on the soul by the body.”57 The soul experiences sensation when the active will (voluntas) attends to the body’s passions. In short, the body plays no active role in sensation. But if the condition of the body does not actively affect the soul, then why bother to mortify the body at all? Augustine responds to these questions in his treatises on asceticism, especially The Goodness of Marriage (401 CE), Holy Virginity (401 CE), The Usefulness of Fasting (408–12 CE), and On Continence (414–16 CE). In these texts, he suggests that the body has an active effect on the soul. As Margaret Miles has shown, these treatises fly in the face of his official doctrine: “In the treatises we are discussing, the interaction described by Augustine is certainly two-way: any bodily abstinence is beneficial to the soul.”58 Clearly, Augustine could not advocate asceticism without allowing the body to actively affect the soul. For this reason, his practical treatises on asceticism bracket his philosophical doctrine on sensation. I want to focus on the two-way interactionism evinced in his texts on asceticism. How does mortifying the body benefit the soul? As he says in the Confessions: “By continence we are collected together and brought into the unity from which we disintegrated into multiplicity” (10.29.40). The ongoing practice of continence—which is associated with the rejection of all bodily desires and pleasures—helps unify the soul.

56. Sermo. 205.1: Reprimendarum carnalium voluptatum crucem nobis ipsi etiam faciamus. . . . In hac quidem cruce, per totam istam vitam, quae in mediis tentationibus ducitur, perpetuo debet pendere christianus. 57. Gilson (1967, 63). See also Bourke (1945, 237) and Miles (1979, 64). 58. Miles (1979, 65).

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In Augustine’s view, dealing with unruly bodily desires involved ongoing prayer. Augustine prays to God to grant grace, which makes it possible for him to control his bodily urges. As he says (repeatedly) in the Confessions: “Grant what you command, and command what you will.” Let us look briefly at prayer. One tends to assume that this is simply an internal, mental activity. Augustine disagrees: In praying to God, men do with their bodily members what is becoming for suppliants—when they bend their knees, when they stretch forth their hands or prostrate themselves on the ground, and whatever else they visibly do (even though God knows their will and heart’s intentions and does not need these gestures). In doing these things, a person excites himself [ipsum excitat] to pray and groan in a way that is more humble and more fervent. . . . Of course, these bodily motions cannot occur except by a preceding motion of the mind; but when these are performed outwardly in the visible sphere, the inward and invisible mind that made them is augmented. (DCM 5.7)

In praying, one performs certain bodily gestures “in the visible sphere” that “excite” and “augment” the mind. Prayer, then, involves specific bodily movements and actions.59 Indeed, Augustine regularly identifies praying with “groaning” (gemitus, gemein). Even if one is not reciting one’s prayers aloud, praying can be a noisy and rather spectacular affair.

SEX AND CELIBACY In every bodily practice, Augustine claims, the soul should extend itself toward God. This is not simply a mastery of the body but a transformation of the self. As Miles has observed: “The physical practices . . . effectively deconstruct the person’s physical and social habits and make possible the construction of a new orientation.”60 Let us look first at sexual lust, which was a major issue for Augustine. I do not need to rehearse his vitriolic attacks on sexual pleasure, which are well known. It should be emphasized, however, that he associated sexual intercourse with temporality and death. As Peter Brown puts it: “Sexuality and the grave stood one at each end of

59. On bodily prostration in prayer, which puts the worshipper in a humble position, see Grundman (1972) and Shaw (1996a, 302–4). 60. Miles (1989, 40).

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the life of every human being. Like two iron clamps, they delineated inexorably mankind’s loss of the primal harmony of body and soul.”61 Augustine links sex and temporality early in the Confessions, where he speaks of his sex life before conversion: “I was tossed here and there, was flowing outward and scattered abroad; I boiled over in my fornications [iactabar et effundebar et diffluebam et ebulliebam per fornicationes meas]” (2.2.2). Here, we find the same vocabulary featured in the discussion of temporality in Confessions 11. As we saw in chapter 2, Augustine uses the discourse of “flowing” and being “scattered” to describe the distention of the mind. In the passage on sex quoted above, the scattering of sperm in ejaculation effectively embodies the scattering of the mind in psychic time: Augustine describes himself as “flowing outward,” “scattering” his seed, and, thus, physically dispersed. Indeed, in this period of his life, he produced a son (whom he conceived with his concubine): his dispersed seed produced “more of himself” while also begetting a creature who would die. In short, sexual intercourse moves toward multiplicity, bringing new people into the earthly time that governs the life and death of the body. Augustine seeks for unity and integrity in the face of dispersion and multiplicity. In his view, practicing celibacy moves him toward unity. The celibate person avoids procreation, which simply brings more sinful people into the world. Augustine believed that creating children was no longer necessary in his own historical period—enough people had been born to fill up the number of the saints predestined to live in heaven.62 Ideally, then, married couples should avoid all sexual intercourse. As Augustine claims, when married couples do not use their genitalia, these bodily members are “put to death”: “If the promise of respect due to the other by either sex is observed in marriage, then chastity—that of souls rightly joined together— perseveres, and the members of both spouses languish and become almost corpselike [languescentibus et prope cadaverinis utrisque membris]” (DBC 3.3). Ongoing penile dysfunction, in short, is a glorious manifestation of the mortification of the flesh. Augustine accepted that celibacy was not for everyone. But he insisted that married couples should engage in sexual intercourse solely for the sake of procreation. And Christian couples should avoid sex altogether during

61. Brown (1988, 416). 62. DBC 9.9. As Augustine claims, the Jewish patriarchs in early history had to procreate to keep the population growing—and to continue the Davidian line—until the birth of Christ. In his own day, this was no longer necessary.

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Lent: “Let the body, which was relaxing in demonstrations of carnal affection, prostrate itself in the purity of prayer; let the arms that were entwined in embraces be raised and extended [extendantur] in prayers.”63 Here, we see the psychic extension toward God enacted physically in the extension of the arms in prayer. Of course the arms can do this only if they are not locked in an intimate embrace; rather, they must enact the soul’s willful extension toward God. Let us turn to Confessions 10, where Augustine refers to his present life as a celibate Christian who ongoingly battles against sensual pleasures. He offers a detailed record of the sinful impulses that assail him daily. In this section—which follows his discussion of memory—his analysis of each temptation is accompanied by a pendulous refrain: “Miserable wretch that I am . . . heal me, oh Lord.” He discovers these sinful impulses through introspection, which generates anguished meditations on his divided and sinful self. Augustine begins by analyzing “the glue of lust,” which was the pivotal issue in his conversion in Confessions 8. In “Sex and Solitude,” Foucault suggests that, for Christians such as Augustine, the battle of celibacy did not involve “a relation to other people but the problem of the relationship of oneself to oneself.” The ascetic battle takes place internally, in the will: “The main question of sexual ethics has moved from relations to people, and from the penetration model, to the relation to oneself and to the erection problem: I mean the set of internal movements which develop from the first and nearly imperceptible thought to the final but still solitary pollutions, through ascetic techniques.” Augustine does, indeed, engage in an ongoing hermeneutics of the self. But Foucault takes this further: “After Augustine we experience sex in the head.”64 Clearly, Foucault’s model focuses primarily on male sexuality. Yet Augustine himself tends to make this very move. His discussions of sex in Eden and after the Fall deal almost exclusively with the penis. Indeed, as he argues, women can have sexual intercourse without lust or pleasure, while men invariably experience lust and sinful pleasure in all sexual acts.65 Of course, he advocates virginity and

63. Sermo. 205.2: Corpus quod carnalibus affectibus solvebatur, puris precibus prosternatur. Manus quae amplexibus implicabantur, orationibus extendantur. 64. Foucault (1985b, 371, 372, 371). 65. DNC 1.24.27. See Clark (1986d, 299), who discusses Augustine’s claim that women could have sex without lust (which seems to make men more responsible for the transmission of sin than women).

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celibacy in women as well as men.66 But his theology places much greater weight on the male member. To what extent does Augustine’s battle against sexual urges reflect Foucault’s model? Consider his discussion of his struggle to be celibate. Even as a bishop, Augustine claims, images of his past sexual activities assault him: “They rush into my thoughts . . . even while I am awake, but in my sleep they come not only to give me pleasure [ad delectationem] but to the point of consent and are very similar to the act itself” (Conf. 10.30.41). These images cause sexual arousal even when he is awake, but then he can successfully resist these impulses. In his sleep, however, he consents and does the deed. We can infer that he is penetrating another person in his dreams. This is not merely a case of an “erection problem” (as Foucault puts it). Augustine adds that having sex in his dreams cannot be excused by sleep: his reason does not sleep when his body sleeps. In fact, his reason can, at times, resist sex in his dreams. Thus, when he consents to sexual intercourse in his dreams—and has nocturnal emissions—he commits a sinful act. As he points out: “[Sexual images] have power in my soul and in my flesh” (valet . . . in anima mea in carne mea). He asks God to free him from the “glue of lust,” which leads to the orgasmic “flow from the body” (ad carnis fluxum; 10.30.42). Is Augustine having “sex in the head”? He does believe that, when one consents to sex, the soul is in rebellion against itself. This rebellion occurs in divided and perverted will, which is housed in the mind. As we have seen, the human will became divided when Adam and Eve chose to rebel against God. They were then punished in soul and in body. The divided will now opposed itself: it lost its former unity and integration. In addition, it could not fully control the body, which now generated unruly impulses and physical movements. As we have seen, Augustine claims that the penis became resistant to the will after the Fall (in Eden, it could be moved by reason like an arm or a leg). One could argue, then, that consenting to sexual impulses is entirely a matter of the will. But the bodily impulses are brought on by visual images that come from the physical realm and are lodged in the memory. Indeed, Augustine explicitly says that the images from his memory of past sexual acts with other people assault him. Even if his present sexual impulses do not deal with another person whom he can physically penetrate, he is not just having sex in his head (in abstraction from another person’s body). Being aroused by the sight of a beautiful 66. In Holy Virginity, The Goodness of Marriage, and On Continence. Of course, Augustine approves of marital sex for procreation as a second-best option.

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body when awake or having intercourse with someone in his sleep involves physical images. The problem, then, is not just that the will cannot control the erection (hence causing what Foucault calls the erection problem). Rather, physical images of sexual intercourse with others have remained in his memory and cause erection and (in dreams) ejaculation. The “penetration model” has not disappeared.

HUNGER AND LONGING The situation becomes even more complicated when one deals with hunger and thirst, which are necessary in ways that sexual intercourse is not.67 As we have seen, the edenic body was changed after the Fall: it became mortal and subject to earthly time. The body is now destined to age, deteriorate, and die. Even a newly baptized Christian—freed of its sins—still hands original sin on to his or her offspring through intercourse. After the Fall, the body is earthly and cannot be perfected until it is unearthed at resurrection. The unruly penis is, of course, a key sign of the mortal body and sinful soul. But, as Augustine points out, the belly poses an even more urgent problem. Humans have to eat and drink in order to stay alive and, even then, they feed a body that will eventually die. Let us look first at hunger and the pleasures of the palate. As Augustine noted, anyone can fast—“Jews, Pagans, and Manichaeans” demonstrate this—but these fasts can still be sinful if one does not conduct them properly. If one takes pride in fasting or in other ascetic practices, then this involves self-love rather than the love of God (DUJ 4–5). If the Christian fasts correctly, he renews his soul by starving his body. But how does fasting bring this renewal? As Augustine says in the Confessions: “Daily, we restore the decay of the body by eating and drinking until in time You destroy both food and digestion . . . but in the present time food is pleasurable to me, and I fight against that sweetness so that I do not become a captive. I wage a daily battle by fasting, bringing my body into captivity” (10.31.43). He points out that eating is a necessity—food cannot be rejected altogether. But one can fast for periods of time and avoid overeating when at table. Still, anytime we eat food, we feel a pleasure that cannot be avoided: Hunger and thirst are painful—they burn and can destroy us as a fever does, unless the medicine of food brings aid. . . . You have taught me to

67. As Miller (2008, 257) points out, Augustine considered that reason could operate while one was eating but not in the heat of sex (see, e.g., CD 14.16).

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eat food the way that I take medicine. But, while I am passing from the pain of hunger to the comfort of satisfaction, the very transition sets an insidious trap of uncontrolled desire. The transition itself is pleasurable, and there is no other way of making the transition since this is forced on us as a necessity. Although we eat and drink for health, a dangerous pleasure joins itself to this process. (Conf. 10.31.43–44)

Hunger hurts. In spite of Augustine’s efforts to eat food “like medicine,” the basic act of replenishing a hungry belly brings pleasure and satisfaction. In fasting, he avoids this pleasure for a period of time. Clearly, the ascetic does not just control his or her body but actually gives it pain. As Theresa Shaw points out: “By the ‘annihilating power of pain’ one’s world is destroyed and new worlds are constructed.”68 How, then, are these “new worlds” brought about, physically and spiritually? In Augustine’s view, the practice of fasting takes one off of the food chain for a portion of time. As earthly beings, humans eat and are eaten: fasting pulls them away from this biological process. As Augustine claims, Christians must fast with an eye toward resurrection: “While we live in the temporal order, we must fast and abstain from the enjoyment of what is temporal, for the sake of the eternity in which we wish to live” (DDC 2.16.25). Of course, the food chain operates in earthly time: fasting does not stop the movement of time, but it pulls the body away from the earth. In The Usefulness of Fasting, Augustine offers an ideological superstructure for this ascetic practice. In this text, he focuses on the passage from Paul that I analyzed in chapter 2: “This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and extending myself forward to those things before, I press on toward the prize of the high calling” (Phil. 3:13–14). As we have seen, in Confessions 11, Augustine associated self-extension with the mind and the will, not the body: he extends himself in the mode of hope, throwing his psychic anchor into eternity. Indeed, he identified self-extension with making his soul a more capacious vessel that can be filled by God: “By desiring [God] you are made large enough so that, when that time comes when you will see, you may be filled. For, if you wish to fill a purse and you know how great the amount is that will be given to you, you stretch and extend [extendis] the size of the purse. . . . In this way God extends our desire by delaying and extends our soul by desiring, and by extending it makes the soul capacious [sic Deus differendo extendit desiderium, desiderando

68. Shaw (1998, 217).

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extendit animum, extendendo facit capacem]” (Homilies on the First Epistle of John 4.6). In spite of the metaphor of the purse, this passage does not refer to the body: it is the soul that desires, waits, grows, and expands to make room for God. In The Usefulness of Fasting, Augustine reworks this trope, focusing on the body’s role in worship: by denying food and drink to the body, one extends oneself toward God. How exactly does this work? Augustine begins by introducing the notion of extension, which informs the ritual practice of fasting: “When men are hungry, they extend themselves [extendunt se] toward something; while they are extending themselves [dum se extendunt], they are enlarged; while they are enlarged, they become capacious; and, when they have become capacious, they will be filled in due time.”69 In a swift rhetorical move, he transforms the hungry belly into a capacious soul: the hungry person should reject bodily food and stretch himself out for “spiritual food” (DUJ 1). As Miles puts it: “The psychic equivalent of hunger is longing.”70 In The Usefulness of Fasting, Augustine proceeds to offer a brief meditation on hunger and self-extension in the Pauline passage: “[Paul] said that he was not yet perfect . . . he said that he was extending himself [se extendi], he said that he was pursuing the prize of the heavenly calling. He is on the path; he is hungry; he wishes to be filled; he focuses on this; he longs to arrive; he is burning.”71 In a state of hunger, Paul extends himself toward God. Indeed, he has almost transcended his earthly body: “Paul was suspended midway between the dwellers of heaven and the dwellers of earth [ populum caeli et populum terrae]. He was going there [illuc] and moving from here [hinc]; he was extending himself there [illuc] and lifting himself away from here [hinc]” (DUJ 2). Paul has advanced beyond the “dwellers of earth” but has not yet arrived in heaven. The act of extension moves him from the earthly “here” to the heavenly “there.” He is lifted above the dwellers of earth: his bodily hunger—transformed into spiritual hunger—moves him away from his mortal body. For Augustine, then, fasting must be practiced in the mode of psychic extension toward God. Without this religious construct, this practice would not have beneficial effects (quite the contrary). It may seem that one can extend oneself toward God simply by the mental activity of contemplation.

69. DUJ 1: Homines autem dum esuriunt extendunt se; dum se extendunt, dilatantur; dum dilatantur, capaces fiunt; capaces facti, suo tempore replebuntur. 70. Miles (1979, 63). 71. DUJ 1: Dicit se nondum esse perfectum . . . dicit se extendi, dicit se sequi ad palmam supernae vocationis. In via est; esurit, impleri vult, satagit, pervenire desiderat, aestuat.

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Augustine disagrees: “Thus, then, we ought to direct our fasting. . . . We have not yet arrived, but we are on our way. Not yet do we rejoice there, but here we are eagerly anticipating. Why, then, is it beneficial to us to abstain from food and from carnal pleasure? The flesh draws one to the earth. The mind tends upward. It is caught up by love but slowed down by weight.”72 Bodily hunger—and the pleasures of eating—is earthly. The mortal body, with its heavy “weight,” drags one toward earth. Love offers the counterweight that pulls one up toward heaven. Once again, we see Augustine’s desire to remove the human body—to some extent—away from earth and the food chain. Augustine faces off against those who think that fasting is a masochistic exercise: “The tempter inwardly suggests such things as these: ‘What do you do that prompts you to fast? You are cheating your soul. You are not giving it what pleases it but are punishing yourself. You are your own torturer and executioner [tibi ipse ingeris poenam, tuus ipse tortor et cruciator existis]. Does it please God to have you torment yourself?’ ” (DUJ 3). In fact, the ascetic Christians should torture themselves as a latter-day form of martyrdom: one becomes one’s own tortor and cruciator. By fasting, one attenuates one’s body. Fasting is a sort of hunger strike against the earthly body and the food chain. But why should one mortify one’s body, which is bound to die no matter what? As Augustine argues, the body can block one’s path toward God: If you were seated on a beast of burden—a horse that by lashing around could throw you headlong—wouldn’t you want to accomplish your journey in peace by withdrawing food from the wild beast and subdue by hunger this animal that you could not subdue with the rein? Now, my flesh is my beast of burden [caro mea iumentum meum est]. . . . While it fluctuates in time [temporaliter fluitat], and while it is weighed down by mortality, the flesh lashes out and causes dangers to the mind. For the flesh is now corruptible, not yet resurrected. (DUJ 3)

The mortal body “fluctuates” as time passes, and these fluctuations can obstruct the mind. Augustine associates this fluctuation with pain and pleasure: the hungry body longs for food, and its satiation causes sinful pleasure.

72. DUJ 2: Gubernare itaque debemus nostra ieiunia. . . . Nondum pervenimus, sed iam imus; nondum ibi laetamur, sed iam hic suspiramus. Quid ergo nobis prodest abstinere aliquantum a pastu et laetitia carnali? Caro in terram cogit, mens sursum tendit; rapitur amore, sed tardatur pondere.

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But why should one bruise the body to pleasure the soul (as Yeats puts it)? Wouldn’t a more moderate approach—avoiding both pain and pleasure— have the same effect?73 Let us compare Augustine’s horse metaphor to Plato’s image of the charioteer and horses in the Phaedrus (a text that Augustine had read and referred to in his treatises). In the Phaedrus (253c–254a), Plato compares the tripartite soul to a charioteer (reason), a white horse (the emotion of pride, self-righteousness, or shame), and a black horse (physical appetite).74 The black horse is an irrational part of the soul that desires sensual pleasure and is utterly resistant to reason; the white horse lacks logos and is, for the most part, irrational, but it has the capacity to side with reason (which seeks truth and goodness). Although Plato identifies the dark horse as a part of the soul, he associates this part with bodily impulses and pleasures. Plato now makes this metaphor mobile: he portrays the charioteer and horses operating within the soul of a man in love. When the lover sees his beautiful beloved, the dark horse lurches forward, eager for sex. The charioteer, who recollects the Form of Beauty, pulls back on the reins. The dark horse feels the pain of the bit in its mouth and sits back on its haunches. This scenario is repeated until the dark horse—the sexual appetite in the soul—is fully disciplined and stops moving toward sexual pleasure. Indeed, the dark horse completely “ceases from its unruliness” (253e). Plato calls this self-mastery. The rational part of the soul masters its bodily and psychic impulses but does not cause pain to the body. Plato offers a similar picture in the case of eating and drinking: reason restrains the bodily desires for too much food or drink. Of course, this is most successfully accomplished by a philosopher whose contemplation of the Forms (fueled by the erotic desire for truth) overrides physical desires. In short, Plato offers a philosophy of selfmastery in which reason can completely subdue excessive bodily desires. Mastering the body, then, is quite different from the mortification of the flesh. The Platonic philosopher does not seek bodily pain (though he or she can easily withstand it by the activity of reason).75 On the contrary, the

73. To be sure, Augustine was more moderate than many other ascetics in his day, but celibacy and fasting did cause him severe frustration and bodily pain. 74. It is difficult to translate the thumoeides part of the soul (here represented by the white horse): some call it the spirited part, which is quite opaque. As Alexander Nehamas has suggested (in a personal communication), this part of the soul is associated with pride and self-respect. As he also notes, the white horse is able to “listen” to reason and is, thus, not fully irrational. 75. Note that Socrates does not go barefoot in the snow in order to hurt his feet. As with his excessive drinking, he is completely impervious to pain or pleasure.

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philosopher should exercise at the gym to keep himself healthy. Drinking alcohol is fine as long as it does not interfere with reason (note Socrates’ ability to drink all night and never get drunk). Of course, sexual intercourse counters rationality and should thus be avoided. Indeed, the philosopher should resist most sensual pleasures (seeing the beauty of human and heavenly bodies is an important exception). But this does not mean that one should deplete the body through rigorous ascetic practices. For Plato, the body is mastered so that it can serve (rather than obstruct) philosophical activities. To actively inflict pain on one’s body would be an unhelpful distraction. The Platonic philosopher controls his body so that he can contemplate metaphysical truths and put them into practice in the practical world. In short, he aims to master the body, not mortify it. In The Usefulness of Fasting, Augustine identifies the horse with the body (rather than with an irrational part of the soul). Unlike Plato’s dark horse, Augustine’s bodily beast will not respond to the reins. The Christian must, therefore, subdue the body by hunger. Fasting keeps the body from “leaping and prancing” and throwing its rider off course (DUJ 3).76 In Plato, one can master one’s body by the act of reason; for Augustine, by contrast, humans can never fully achieve self-mastery because they are infected with sin. Due to this chronic illness, the human reason or will cannot control the body. Indeed, bodily desire itself is a punishment for the Fall: Adam and Eve did not experience hunger, thirst, or lust in Eden. The mortal and unruly body on earth does not reflect transhuman nature as it was created by God in Eden. The human body is defective and unnatural. On earth, the Christian can manage this disease only by practicing the virtue of continence; the sickness of sin will be cured at resurrection.77 We may wonder why denying oneself food—and creating physical pain— helps one draw closer to God. Augustine addresses this issue in his sermons on Lent. Consider, first, his discourse of the mortification and crucifixion of the body: “The Word of God . . . will feed you in the heart as you set about fasting in the body; and in this way the inner man—nourished by its proper food—is able to chastise the outer man and sustain it all the more robustly. . . .

76. As Shaw (1998, 124–28) rightly points out, the church fathers in this period considered fasting a good way of reducing one’s desire for sex. Augustine’s “leaping and prancing” horse clearly conjures up sexual desire. 77. DNC 1.25.28: “Carnal lust is remitted in baptism, not so that it is put out of our existence, but so that it is not to be imputed for sin. Although its guilt is now taken away, it still remains until our entire infirmity is healed by the advancing renewal of our inner man, day by day, when at last our outer man shall be clothed in incorruption.”

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We should also make a cross for ourselves by curbing the pleasures of the flesh.”78 He makes this point even more clearly in another sermon on Lent: “Let us fast by humbling our souls as the day approaches on which the master of humility humbled himself, ‘becoming obedient even to the death of the cross.’ Let us imitate his cross, pinning down our lusts so that they are dominated by the nails of abstinence. Let us chastise our bodies and subject them to hard service. To avoid slipping into unlawful pleasures coming from the unruliness of the flesh, let us deprive the body as we chastise it even of lawful activities.”79 Clearly, Augustine considers fasting as a form of bloodless martyrdom. It is all very well to talk about fasting as a way of nailing oneself to the cross. But we must look beyond this rhetoric and examine the bodily pain brought on by fasting. How does this pain serve to raise up the soul? Augustine offers an interesting answer to this question: “People who fast in the right way are humbling their souls by the groaning of prayers and the chastening of the body with an unfeigned faith. The will, pulling away from carnal temptations, is ‘suspended’ [suspensa] by some sort of spiritual neediness and by the delight in truth and wisdom, even as it ‘descends’ into the feeling of hunger and thirst [ad famem sitimque sentiendam descendit eius intentio].”80 Here, the will “descends” into the belly and feels its gnawing hunger. It does not transcend the body but feels its pain. This descent into the belly is useful, however, only if the will is “suspended” by its need for God and by its love of truth. The individual needs divine aid and prays for this during the fast. As Augustine suggests, needing and loving God pulls the soul upward. The descent into the belly is (at least in principle) counteracted by the suspension of the soul. This suspension is fueled by one’s love for God, which moves upward like fire. The will, then, ascends to heaven at the same time as it descends into the pain of the body. This marks an imitation of Christ’s passion, though the human does not have complete divine

78. Sermo. 205.1: Dei sermo . . . ieiunaturos corpore, pascat in corde; ac sic interior homo cibo suo refectus, exterioris castigationem possit agere, et robustius sustinere. . . . reprimendarum carnalium voluptatum crucem nobis ipsi etiam faciamus. 79. Sermo. 207.2: Ieiunemus etiam humiliantes animas nostras, appropinquante die quo magister humilitatis humiliavit semetipsum, factus subditus usque ad mortem crucis. Imitemur eius crucem, abstinentiae clavis edomitas concupiscentias configentes. Castigemus corpus nostrum, et servituti subiiciamus: et ne per indomitam carnem ad illicita prolabamur, in ea domanda aliquantum et licita subtrahamus. 80. Sermo. 210.3.4: Omnis qui recte ieiunat, aut animam suam in gemitu orationis et castigatione corporis humiliat ex fide non ficta; aut ab illecebra carnali inopia aliqua spirituali veritatis et sapientiae delectatione suspensa, ad famem sitimque sentiendam descendit eius intentio.

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“uplift.” Still, in feeling both the weight of the body and the counterweight of love, the Christian ritually enacts the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. By extending the soul toward God and being suspended by love, the fasting Christian looks forward to the end of time. In this eschatological extension, the soul ascends to God while it descends into the pain of the body. As Elaine Scarry observes in The Body in Pain: “The self-flagellation of the religious ascetic . . . is not an act of denying the body, eliminating its claims for attention, but a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force. It is in part this world-ridding, path-clearing logic that explains the obsessive presence of pain in the rituals of large, widely shared religions as well as the imagery of intensely private visions that partly explains why the crucifixion of Christ is at the center of Christianity.”81 Although Augustine does not recommend self-flagellation in the strict sense, he does urge the Christian to mortify the body so that it takes on an “unworldly, contentless force” that counteracts the weight of mortality. We must remember that the ascetic Christian “performed” his or her bodily practices before the eyes of men. The simple life of the Christian ascetic offered a visual model for others to emulate (in the monastery, the church, or the city). Indeed, William James claimed in the The Varieties of Religious Experience that this kind of asceticism was “excessively worldly”: “If the inner dispositions are right, we ask, what need of this torment, the violation of the outer nature? It keeps the outer nature too important.”82 Certainly, one could argue that Christian asceticism was, at least in practice, Janus faced: the ascetic ascends toward God and, at the same time, acts before the eyes of men. While the Christian mortified his or her body in the mode of worship, these bodily practices were publicized and set up as models for imitation. They offered a visual distinction that separated a Christian holy person from ordinary Christians and sinful pagan ascetics. In sum, Christians in late antiquity ritually sacralized certain bodies, identifying them as holy and, to some extent, unearthly. In the Christian imaginary, the bodies of the ascetics gradually became more holy and less earthly. And the martyr’s holy corpse had the peculiar status of channeling divinity on earth. These rituals that brought the divine down to earth or lifted the body up to heaven reflect the ambivalent feelings that the Christians had toward the earth. On the one hand, God had created the cosmos 81. Scarry (1987, 33–34). 82. James (1958, 361).

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and all living beings and allowed his son to be incarnated as a mortal human: these divine acts effectively dignified matter. Yet, as Augustine shows, only human matter really mattered. The earth itself had no purchase on divinity. Indeed, as Augustine makes clear, the goal of the Christian life was to shed the mortal body and to be, once and for all, out of nature.

epilogue

“Mortal Interindebtedness”

A

s Ahab says in Moby Dick: “Cursed be that mortal interindebtedness. . . . I would be as free as air.”1 Augustine has argued that humans have no real debt to the earth. Yet he acknowledges that the human body is part of the food chain and subject to earthly time. Of course, he considers this a temporary state: humans toil on a journey that leads them to transhumanity. Indeed, his theology represents the human desire to not be human. He thus rejects “mortal interindebtedeness” and privileges transhumation. I want to look briefly at several modern authors who have meditated on the human place in nature and the mortal interindebtedness of all things on earth. These writers share Augustine’s belief that the human experience of temporality—which makes it impossible to dwell in the present—pulls us away from the earthly here and now. They acknowledge that humans are, in some sense, out of nature. But they respond to this problem very differently. They ask us to pay our debts to the earth. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s leg has been eaten by a whale, and he has created a prosthesis out of a whalebone. His flesh is part of the whale’s flesh, and the whalebone is attached to his body. Like it or not, he is indebted to the whale (and vice versa). Moby Dick has two sections on Jonah and the whale, where the preacher fulminates on sin and divine grace. Melville’s story, however, is antieschatological. By the end of the book, when the whale has destroyed everyone but Ishmael, it does not vomit up the men (as in the Jonah story). And there is no indication that God will take their human bodies out of the fish or the water at resurrection. Melville fully understood the Christian

1. Melville (1851/1964, 601).

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association of the Jonah story with bodily resurrection. But his narrative offers no afterlife: the crew of the Pequod simply becomes food for fish. Not surprisingly, Moby Dick has much to say about the food chain. In one scene, the crew members of the Pequod choose to eat the flesh of the first whale that they have killed. The whale has been attached to the side of the ship, with part of its body above water and part submerged below. The crew has taken some of the whale meat off the upper parts to eat for dinner, while the sharks eat the lower parts: Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a seafight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up into the ship’s deck, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewelhilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties.2

Eating is a “sharkish business” for all animate beings, including humans. Ahab longs to kill and eat the whale, yet he condemns the food chain since it keeps mortals interindebted. He despises the whale, and, one could argue, he also despises himself: he considers the food chain—and, indeed, mortality itself—an outrage. Yet he cannot cancel his debts to the earth, and he has no god to save him from death. Willy-nilly, he pays his earthly dues. Henry David Thoreau offers a powerful exploration of the mortal interindebtedness that Ahab abominates. Take, for example, Thoreau’s musings on a dead horse rotting near his cabin at Walden Pond: “We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and the inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this.”3 This passage reminds Thoreau of death—indeed, the carrion of the horse “disgusts and disheartens” him for this very reason. Yet he is “cheered” by the life and health of 2. Melville (1851/1964, 385). 3. Thoreau (1854/1983, 366).

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the natural world: he celebrates the food chain even though it includes his own future corpse. The curiositas that Augustine rejected when he turned away from nature watching leads Thoreau to develop an intimate knowledge of earthly beings. Thoreau fully understood that humans do not dwell in nature: the consciousness of time pulls them away from bodily presence. He makes this clear in the opening passage of “Walking,” where he discusses the activity of “sauntering.” The word sauntering, he claims, derives from two different French phrases: first, a journey to “Sainte Terre,” or the holy land. To saunter, then, is to undertake a pilgrimage to the holy land: “Every walk is a sort of crusade.”4 For Thoreau, all of earth and land is holy, and, thus, one can head for sainte terre on any walk. Yet he walks on a holy land that he can never fully reach: the walker makes an unfinished and unfinishable journey toward the earth. Thoreau glosses this point by referring to another French phrase etymologically linked to sauntering: sans terre, which means “being without earth or home.” He claims that humans are, in a very basic sense, “without earth.” Their sense of time pulls them away from nature so that they never feel fully present in the natural world. As he puts it: “We loiter in winter when it is already spring.”5 Memory pulls him backward in time, even as he lives in an “infinite expectation of the dawn.” He cannot experience nature in the mode of self-presence. For this reason, he is “without earth” (sans terre). He does not dwell in nature but in relation to nature. Yet he attempts to find himself and his humanity in relation to natural, nonhuman beings. Thoreau’s search for self is based on a new way of relating to bodily beings—human and nonhuman. As Thoreau says in his journal: “The poet writes the history of his body.” For him, the “history” of his own body is inextricably linked to the existence of other bodies, that is, the ecosystem that sustains him. Still, nonhuman beings confront him with their alterity. As he says in the essay “Maine Woods”: “I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature—daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks. The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”6 Thoreau attempts to “contact” earthly beings that vitally concern humans but do not fully include them. He is a sort of extraterrestrial trying

4. Thoreau (1982, 593). 5. Thoreau (1854/1983, 362). 6. Thoreau (1906, 3:36); Thoreau (1985, 646).

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to make contact with earth. Rocks, trees, the wind on his cheeks, the “solid earth”: he “trembles to meet them.” Thoreau believes that human and nonhuman beings live in a common “household” (oikos, whence comes the English word ecology). He believes that there is a kinship between humans, animals, plants, and even soil. As he says of his solitary life in the woods: “I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary.” Though akin to all life on earth, humans are a distinct kind of animal. Thoreau makes two seemingly contrary claims in “Solitude”: “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself”; “We are not wholly involved in nature.” These claims bear witness to the paradox of human life: we dwell both inside and outside of nature. Thoreau identifies himself as an earthly being but, at the same time, a wanderer without earth. He expresses this paradox in his discussion of getting lost in the woods: in his lostness, he comes to “appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature” even as he realizes “the infinite extent of our relations.”7 Nature is “strange” and alien to humans but also “related” to us in an infinite number of ways. Thoreau built a house in the woods—a mile from his nearest neighbor— where he lived and labored for two years. In his time at Walden, he conducted an experiment in domesticity. In the moving chapter “Solitude,” he responds to the question—frequently put to him—whether he was lonely in the woods. His answer: “I was never alone.” Here, he affirms the presence of nonhuman beings—“brute neighbors,” as he calls them—in his “household” (oikos). As he says in a striking phrase: “I am no more lonely than . . . the first spider in a new house.”8 What is this “first spider,” this “new house”? One may imagine that Thoreau is suggesting that he is the first spider in the new house that is his cabin at Walden Pond. But he makes it clear that the very opposite is the case: there is no such thing as a first spider and no such thing as a new house. There is no singular spider or singular house: no creature or household can exist without the ecosystem. Spiders live in the community of nature; houses are made out of trees, metal, and rocks taken from the natural world. Consider Thoreau’s own house. As he claims, he made it with recycled materials: he bought and dismantled an old cabin in order to get the wood and nails for his own cabin. He retrieved and recycled the old to create something new. This same issue of recycling emerges in a lovely passage 7. Thoreau (1854/1983, 177, 184, 217). 8. Thoreau (1854/1983, 182).

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on housecleaning where Thoreau takes all his wooden furniture outdoors so that he can sweep his floor. He notices how strange his furniture looks when it sits outside. And he then realizes that these items have themselves come from the trees that they now sit beneath.9 How new, then, is his house and his furniture? In these passages, Thoreau reminds us that we borrow from the earth—and we give our bodies back when we die. We are recyclers and, indeed, recycled into the earthly habitat. Let us look briefly at Thoreau’s bodily activities—his sensual, physical “contact” with earthly beings and entities. In his experiment at Walden Pond, Thoreau sets out to “know nature,” both his own and that of nonhumans. In building a house, cultivating vegetables, and investigating his nonhuman neighborhood, he develops a sort of carnal knowledge of the earth: “It was a singular experience, that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them . . . and I might add eating them, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans.” To know beans involves the work and sweat of the body and ongoing interactions with the beans (tending, touching, smelling, seeing, tasting). Thoreau develops an ever-greater intimacy with the ecosystemic household that feeds (and feeds on) the beans: the soil, the birds, the insects, the woodchucks, the weather, the rising and setting of the sun, and so on. This process involves an ongoing interaction of human and nonhuman beings: “What shall I learn of beans and beans of me?” Of course, Thoreau knew that, by growing beans and vegetables, he was altering and controlling the land—“making the earth say beans instead of grass.” But he also believed that his efforts served his “brute neighbors” as well as himself: “These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? . . . How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of weeds whose seeds are the granary of birds?”10 Here, Thoreau highlights and celebrates mortal interindebtedness. Indeed, he very deliberately pays his debts to the earthly “household.” I turn, finally, to Karel Çapek, a Czech writer working in the 1920s and 1930s who offered a powerful attack on transhuman aspirations. In several texts, Çapek wrote passionate diatribes against the technological domination of the earth. Consider his famous play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which introduced the word robot into the English language (the Czech word for robot means “forced labor”). In R.U.R., written in 1920, a scientist 9. Thoreau (1854/1983, 158). 10. Thoreau (1854/1983, 206, 212).

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called Rossum creates robots to serve as a labor force; his rival takes this technology further, making robots that feel pain and, eventually, the emotion of hatred. The robots rebel against their makers, and the humans end up at war with their own machines. We find a similar scenario in Çapek’s War with the Newts. In this scathing satire, a Dutch captain discovers giant, intelligent newts on a remote island near Sumatra. He teaches them to use knives, to attack sharks, and to collect pearls. Later, people turn the newts into war machines. In the end, the newts start to blow up continents to create new shores for themselves. Once again, technology turns against its human masters. We find a very different voice in The Gardener’s Year (1929). In this beautiful book, Çapek speaks eloquently—and wittily—of mortal interindebtedness. The author meditates on his activities as a gardener, taking his readers through the months and seasons of the year. The persona of the author—fanatic, ironic, erotic—is but one player in this drama. For Çapek keeps pointing beyond himself to the soil, the buds, the plants, the flowers, the weather. Not surprisingly, he also offers a radically un-Augustinian interpretation of Eden and earth, of life and death. The Gardener’s Year sets the human being in the context of the seasons and the passing months of the year. It addresses the human experience of time (what I call psychic time) in relation to the plants that flower in earthly time. Throughout this book, Çapek offers a compelling meditation on time and the body. He discusses how he anxiously bears up in the winter months, inspecting the temperature and the sky as he waits for the time to plant; in the early spring, he hacks away at the soil (with an aching back and sore legs) and plants his beloved seeds and seedlings (in an erotic trance). In the late spring and through the summer, he runs a race against time: he tries to keep up with the growth and decay in his garden—weeding, hoeing, pruning, composting, planting, and replanting. Çapek speaks eloquently about the temporalities that govern earthly and human life. The narrative of the Gardener’s Year advances chronologically through the months of the year: the passage of the seasons allows Çapek to address the conflict between the human experience of psychic time and the forward movement of earthly time. As he jokingly puts it: “The gardener wants eleven hundred years to test, learn to know, and appreciate fully all that is his.” In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) his short life on earth, the gardener becomes an expert on time and the body. First, he develops a carnal knowledge of the earth by digging, adding manure, composting, watering, transplanting, weeding, pruning, etc. But, as Çapek adds, he must know the right time of the season and year to perform each of these activities. Ripeness is all:

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When I was a little boy I had towards my father’s garden a rebellious and even a vindictive attitude, because I was not allowed to tread on the beds and pick the unripe fruit. Just in the same way Adam was not allowed to tread on the beds and pick the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, because it was not yet ripe; but Adam—just like us children—picked the unripe fruit, and therefore was expelled from the Garden of Eden; since then the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has always been unripe.

If the gardener acts too soon, his knowledge—and his garden—does not ripen. The Greek word kairos—the “right thing at the right time”—captures this notion of ripeness. Çapek rejects Adam’s immature, rebellious haste. At the same time, he does not celebrate Eden before the Fall: “If [the gardener] came into the Garden of Eden he would sniff excitedly and say, ‘Good Lord, what humus!’ I think that he would forget to eat the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; he would rather look round to see how he could manage to take away from the Lord some barrowloads of the paradisiac soil.”11 Çapek imagines going into Eden only to leave it with a wheelbarrow of soil. Çapek does not seek for the immortality of Adam and Eve or the unearthly Garden of Eden. Indeed, the very activity of gardening is grounded in earthly time and the finite life of the human being. Consider his wonderful account of the wilting and falling of flowers: Look at those flowers, in very truth they are like women: so beautiful and fresh, you can feast your eyes on them and never see all their beauty, always something escapes you. For beauty is so insatiable. But as soon as they begin to fade, I hardly know, but they cease to look after themselves (I am talking of flowers), and if one wished to be brutal, he would say that they look like rags. What a pity, my sweet beauty (I am talking of flowers), what a pity that time is so fleeting; beauty comes to an end, and only the gardener remains.12

Here, he compares the fading of the flower to the fading bloom of female beauty. The analogy is, in essence, a disanalogy: flowers bloom and produce seeds for further flowers and perennial plants bloom year after year. In human life, a person blooms only once. It is for humans that “time is 11. Çapek (1929/2002, 23). 12. Çapek (1929/2002, 67–8).

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so fleeting.” Flowers do not experience the passing of time. Çapek’s claim that “the gardener remains” indicates that the gardener remains outside the garden—he is, in a crucial aspect, out of nature. The garden itself is, in fact, a vital reminder that humans cannot dwell in the here and now. Çapek plays with the human constructions and measurements of earthly time. Here is one of his boldest claims: that spring begins in October and autumn begins in March. He thus destabilizes human constructions of time: Every year we say that Nature lies down to her Winter sleep; but we have not yet looked closely at this sleep. . . . Good Lord, is this sleep? You call this a rest? It would be better to say that vegetation has ceased to grow upwards because it has no time for it now; for it has turned its sleeves up and grows downwards, it spits in its hands and digs itself into the ground. Look, this pale thing here in the earth is a mass of new roots; look how far they push; heave-ho heave-ho! Can’t you hear how the earth is cracked under its enraged and collective charge? . . . here below is the real work, here, here, and here new stems are growing; from here to there, within these November limits, the life of March will spring up; here underground the great programme of spring is laid down. . . . While we only look at Nature it is fair to say that Autumn is the end of the year; but it is still more true that Autumn is the beginning of the year. . . . Autumn is the time when in fact the leaves bud. Leaves wither because winter begins; but they also wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny as percussion caps out of which the spring will crack. . . . It is only an optical illusion that my flowers die in autumn; for in reality they are born.13

Çapek tells us to look at—and, if possible, to feel with our hands—the life underground. The plants above ground wilt in the autumn in order to create roots and buds in the soil. In seeing the birth of flowers in the autumn, Çapek reverses the traditional sense that autumn and winter are the end of the year. Indeed, by identifying autumn as the season of birth, he turns the Christian story of the Fall on its head. Of course, there is no beginning or no end of the year in the natural world: it is only the human that remembers cold weather and expects warm weather (and calls these winter and spring).

13. Çapek (1929/2002, 105–7).

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Once again, the human experience of psychic time conflicts with the earthly time that governs the growth and death of living beings in nature. In his meditation on time, Çapek suggests that the future is contained in the present: [November] is the real spring; what is not done now will not be done in April. The future is not in front of us, for it is here already in the shape of a germ; already it is with us; and what is not with us will not be even in the future. We don’t see germs because they are under the earth; we don’t know the future because it is within us. Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many fat and white shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil, which is called the present day; how many seeds germinate in secret; how many old plants draw themselves together and concentrate into a living bud, which one day will burst into flowering life—if we could only see the secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living man—a man who grows.14

In this lovely passage, Çapek bears witness to the stretching of the human psyche into the past and the future. Humans are “encumbered” by the past while also containing the “secret swarming of the future.” It is, of course, the human, not the plant, that has a sense of time. Çapek suggests here that the activity of gardening invites one to be “a man who grows.” One does not do this by imitating plants—this is not possible—but by staying open to the swarming of a future that one cannot know or control. The activity of gardening evokes a sense of openness to a future that has no clear end or eschatological closure. In the passage quoted above, Çapek identifies the “old tilled soil” with the “present day.” The use of the word old in this passage must refer to humans, not to plants (plants do not experience age). The gardener has already tilled the soil in the past so that it has its given state as old tilled soil in the present. Çapek also says that “old plants draw themselves together” in an effort to produce new flowers. Again, he uses this as a metaphor for humans, who keep trying to draw themselves together to give birth to new things in the present. He does not, of course, mean that old humans can ward off

14. Çapek (1929/2002, 107).

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death by endlessly growing new things. He does claim, however, that the old human can grow and flower until he or she dies. He thus indicates what it means to be “a man who grows.” His work with soil and plant life helps him understand a sense of limit and makes him cultivate a more profound sense of humanity. As he claims: “The gardener lives for the future.” He does this by “giving more to the soil than he takes away.”15 In Çapek’s view, the gardener must begin with the soil—humus—not with the plants. The cultivation of the soil has primacy over all other gardening activities: “You must have a garden, though it be no bigger than a pocket handkerchief; you must have one bed at least to know what you are treading on. Then, dear friend, you will see that not even clouds are so diverse, so beautiful and terrible as the soil under your feet. . . . And from that time on you will not go over the earth unconscious of what you are treading on.” Çapek searches for a carnal knowledge of the soil. He wants to know the ground on which he treads. But he urges the reader to go beyond mere treading: one has to get one’s hands dirty, measure one’s bodily strength against the weight and thickness of the soil: “If you have no appreciation for this strange beauty, let fate bestow on you a couple of rods of clay—clay like lead, squelching and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes; which yields under the spade like chewing gum . . . ill-tempered, unmalleable, greasy, and sticky like plaster of Paris, slippery like a snake, and dry like a brick, impermeable like tin, and heavy like lead. . . . Then you will understand the animosity and callousness of dead and sterile matter which ever did defend itself, and still does, against becoming a soil of life.”16 Çapek beautifully articulates the resistance of the earth to human projects. As he points out, the garden itself, though shaped by man, does not fit the human body at all (Çapek’s brother offers witty illustrations of this point throughout the book in his line drawings of the strenuous—and nearly impossible—positions that the gardener gets into in his daily activities). The gardener must undergo numerous bodily contortions in his effort to plant, weed, hoe, and tend the garden: Gardeners have certainly arisen by culture and not by natural selection. If they had developed naturally they would look differently; they would have legs like beetles so that they need not sit on their heels, and they would have wings, in the first place for their beauty and, secondly, so that they might float over the flower beds. Those who have no ex-

15. Çapek (1929/2002, 88). 16. Çapek (1929/2002, 87, 88).

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perience cannot imagine how one’s legs are in the way, when there is nothing to stand on; how stupidly long they are if one has to fold them underneath to poke with the finger in the ground; how impossibly short they are if one has to reach to the other side of the bed without treading on a clump of pyrethrum or on the shoots of columbine.17

The shaping of a garden reshapes the human body: the gardener does not fully fit in his garden and must suffer pain and exertion in his efforts to make a garden. He gains bodily knowledge, but at a price: he learns quickly about his bodily limits. He realizes right away that he does not fully belong in this place, even though he has created the garden himself. The garden reminds us that humans are out of nature, creatures of unbelonging. Gardening cultivates, among other things, patience, renunciation, and the capacity to give up control. Çapek makes this point in his beautiful discussion of the weather: “ ‘Even January is not a time for idleness in the garden,’ say the handbooks on gardening. Certainly not; for in January the gardener cultivates the weather.” The very notion of cultivating the weather is, of course, preposterous. But this is precisely Çapek’s point. Gardeners cannot control the weather no matter how hard they try to cultivate it: When your watch stops you pull it to pieces and then take it to the watchmaker; if somebody’s car stops, he turns up the bottom of his overcoat and sticks his fingers in the machinery, and then sends it to the garage. With everything in the world it is possible to do something, but against weather nothing can be done. No zeal, no ambition, no newfangled methods, no meddling or cursing is of any use; the germ opens and a sprout comes up when it is time; and a law has been accomplished. Here you are humbly conscious of the impotence of man; soon you realize that patience is the mother of wisdom! After all, nothing can be done.18

The paradoxical notion of cultivating the weather is a call for humility: it emphasizes the “impotence of man” in the face of the weather.19 In Çapek’s view, one must accept and even celebrate one’s impotence. 17. Çapek (1929/2002, 37). 18. Çapek (1929/2002, 9, 32). 19. Çapek died in 1939, just as technology was starting to change the climate. He did not foresee this condition, though he fully understood the technological destruction of the earth. Now we cannot just “cultivate the weather” but must track the new weather systems generated by global warming.

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The gardener relies on earthly time: “A sprout comes up when it is time.” The gardener must be ever vigilant to the passing of the seasons and the changes in weather. And weather, as Çapek reminds us, is never reliable. Not surprisingly, the activity of gardening changes one’s relation to the weather. Or, more precisely, the weather changes one’s relation to the earthly world: “Your relation to things has changed. If it rains you say that it rains on the garden. If the sun shines, it does not shine just anyhow, but it shines on the garden. In the evening you rejoice that the garden will rest.”20 The gardener’s “relation to things” takes the form of care, anxiety, and concern. He no longer looks at the ground with indifference or as a resource for human use. Tending a garden cultivates, in the gardener, a deep sense of humility. Çapek is humbled—at times, even humiliated—by the act of tending plants and soil (humus). He cares for the earth even as he struggles with its indifference to humans and its ongoing resistance to his endeavors. In order to tend the soil and the living plants that grow in it, he must relinquish a fair measure of control. Plato believed that the human path to wisdom was grounded in the activity of “practicing death.” At the time of death, he claimed, the immortal soul of the philosopher will escape the body and find a better “home” in the incorporeal realm (lesser souls will transmigrate to new bodies on earth). As Plato argues, the philosopher should practice death in advance: he or she must attempt to separate the mind and the soul from the body here on earth. The soul must retreat from the physical, sensual world and engage in the rational contemplation of divine and metaphysical Beings (the Forms). Plato’s Socrates famously showed no fear of death, and he claimed that his soul would escape from his body as soon as he drank the hemlock. Augustine believed otherwise: everyone fears death, even those with the belief in Christian resurrection. Augustine considered the separation of the soul from the body at death as a horrible trauma, not a happy release. Yet he believed that he would receive an eternal and transhuman body at the end of time. His discourses and his bodily practices served to prepare him and his fellow Christians for death and the afterlife. By engaging in asceticism and mortifying the body, he was, in some sense, practicing death. But he also expected that bodily death was the beginning of a glorious afterlife: the human corpse would be unearthed at resurrection day to provide the matter for the resurrected body.

20. Çapek (1929/2002, 4–5).

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Thoreau and Çapek shows us a different way to prepare for death. When they grow plants, they care for animate and transient beings. In cultivating the soil, they also cultivate themselves. In gardening, they dig into the earth and find the source of life and death. They compost the ground that will compost their bodies in the future. They thus conjugate humus and humanus. And they celebrate their mortal interindebtedness. Thus humbled, they fall in love with the world that deals out life and death. As Çapek puts it: “After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by the perfumes of flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.”21

21. Çapek (1929/2002, 25).

appendix

Augustine on Paul’s Conception of the Flesh and the Body

I

n dealing with Augustine’s conception of embodiment, we must examine the Pauline distinction between the “body” (sôma) and the “flesh” (sarx)—a distinction that Augustine grappled with in many of his texts. As Peter Brown observes: “A weak thing in itself, the body was presented as lying in the shadow of a mighty force, the power of the flesh: the body’s physical frailty, its liability to death and the undeniable penchant of its instincts towards sin served Paul as a synecdoche for the state of humankind pitted against the spirit of God. . . . ‘The flesh’ was not simply the body, an inferior other to the self.”1 What, then, is the difference between the flesh and the body? As many scholars have shown, Paul generally identifies the flesh (sarx) with sin and at times identifies it as an independent force of evil.2 By contrast, the body (sôma) can have a more positive connotation in Paul. For example, 1 Cor. 15:42–54 offers a positive sense of the body: “So it is with the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown an ensouled body, it is raised a spiritual body

1. Brown (1988, 48). 2. Paul occasionally uses flesh in an ethically neutral sense, and he sometimes refers to the body in a negative sense: his terminology is not consistent. See Jewett (1971, 50–93), who offers a summary of different interpretations of Paul’s notion of the flesh. Brandenburger (1968) and Boyarin (1994, chap. 3) argue that Paul’s “flesh-spirit” dualism was based, in part, on Platonic dualism (which informed many branches of Judaism in late antiquity [see Segal 1990, 84]). Paul’s view of the body, by contrast, was not Platonic. See Cullman (1950/1962, 1965), who argued that the early Christians built their notion of resurrection of the body on the Jewish belief in the resurrection of the person, not on the Platonic soul. Following Cullman, Bultmann (1951) and Robinson (1952, 21–42) claim that, in Paul, the word sôma referred (primarily) to the “person” or the “community,” not to the physical body. Compare Gundry (1976), whose careful examination of the word sôma in Paul reveals that he was referring to a physical body.

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(ͻ͸ͭͧ͹ͭͼͩͱ ͻᖨʹͩ ΀ͽͿͱͿ΄͵ ᓘͫͭͧ͹ͭͼͩͱ ͻᖨʹͩ ͸͵ͭͽʹͩͼͱͲ΄͵).” Although theologians have quarreled over the meaning of the “spiritual body” since antiquity, it is clear that, in this passage, Paul uses the word sôma in a positive (uncarnal) sense. As Daniel Boyarin suggests, one finds in Paul the strange combination of “a biblically ‘positive’ sensibility towards the body, combined with a Hellenistic/platonistic devaluation of the physical.”3 In short, the body (sôma) takes on a positive value even as flesh (sarx) retains a Platonic devaluation. In the 390s, Augustine undertook a detailed exegesis of Paul that profoundly affected his thinking.4 He appropriated Paul in his efforts to work out some of his central theological issues (original sin, grace, will, predestination). Here, I focus exclusively on his discussions of the flesh and the body in Paul’s Epistles, which influenced his notion of embodiment. Not surprisingly, Augustine had to compete with other religious thinkers over the correct interpretation of Paul. As Paula Fredriksen points out: “In the centuries between his time and Augustine’s, Paul had his very greatest influence among the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, and the Christian dualists.”5 Augustine had been a Manichaean in his twenties, and he had to argue (for decades) that he was no longer a member of this sect. Though the Manichaeans venerated many different “holy” texts, they placed great weight on Paul’s Epistles: in their view, Paul had claimed that the body was evil and, indeed, a cosmic force battling against Goodness.6 Attacking this Manichaean position, Augustine attempted to rehabilitate the body. He argued (often vituperatively) against Manichaean and other dualistic theologies that treated the body as inherently evil or sinful. But he could not make this argument without Paul. He thus offered new interpretations of Paul’s references to the flesh and the body. Augustine uses several different strategies in his efforts to appropriate Paul. At times, he separates the flesh (caro) from the body (corpus), suggesting that Paul condemned the flesh but valorized the body. At other times, he conflates the flesh and the body, claiming that Paul offered a positive

3. Boyarin (1994, 61–62). 4. See n. 28 of the introduction. 5. Fredriksen (1991, 82); see also Fredriksen (1986, 22). Harrison (2006, chap. 5) offers a very useful discussion of Augustine’s interpretations of Paul. 6. See Fredriksen (1986, 22–24), Fredriksen (1988, 89–92), and Harrison (2006, 121–22). The Manichaeans relied on passages where Paul identifies the flesh and the body with sin and death. On Augustine’s disputes with the Manichaeans over Pauline passages, see Against Fortunatus 7, 16–17, 21; Against Faustus 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 24, 30, 31; DUJ 4; DeMor. 17.30, 25.46– 29.61; C2EpPel. bks. 1–2; and OpImp. 3.185 (to cite but a few examples).

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valuation of both. Clearly, Augustine had to struggle to make his case, offering arguments that were not fully coherent. But he did offer one very consistent position: that the body is not evil by nature and is an essential part of the human being. Let us look at some key Augustinian interpretations of the flesh and the body in Paul. In a sermon on the resurrection, Augustine tackles Paul’s claim in 1 Cor. 15:50 that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (which seems to be at odds with his assertion that Christians will receive a spiritual body at the end of time). As Augustine suggests: Paul wishes to explain why he uses the phrase “flesh and blood” [caro et sanguis]: in saying “flesh and blood,” he does not mean the nature of the body itself but its corruption, which will no longer exist [at resurrection]. For a body without corruption cannot properly be called “flesh and blood”; it is simply a body [corpus]. For, if it is flesh, it is corruptible and mortal; but, if it no longer dies, it is no longer corruptible. Therefore, without corruption, although the nature remains, it is no longer flesh but body [non iam caro, sed corpus]. And, if it is called “flesh,” this is not spoken properly but by a kind of analogy.7

Here, Augustine distinguishes between body and flesh. The flesh is corruptible; without this corruption (caused by original sin), it is not flesh but body. The body, then, does not have the negative connotations that one finds in the flesh. Consider also Augustine’s reading of Paul’s Gal. 5:19–21 in the City of God (14.2). Augustine once again separates the body from the flesh, claiming that “scripture does not confine the application of the term ‘flesh’ [caro] to the ‘body’ [corpus] of an earthly and mortal living being.”8 As he argues:

7. Sermo. 362.15.17: Atque ostendere volens quid dixerit carnem et sanguinem, quia non ipsam speciem corporis, sed corruptionem significat nomine carnis et sanguinis, quae corruptio tunc non erit. Corpus enim sine corruptione, non proprie dicitur caro et sanguis, sed corpus. Si enim caro est, corruptibilis atque mortalis est: si autem iam non moritur, iam non corruptibilis; et ideo sine corruptione manente specie, non iam caro, sed corpus dicitur: et si dicitur caro, non iam proprie dicitur, sed propter quamdam speciei similitudinem. 8. See also 1 Cor. 3:1–4: “And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people [͸͵ͭͽʹͩͼͱͲͷᖌͺ; spiritalibus] but rather as people of the flesh [ͻͩ͹Ͳͧ͵ͷͱͺ; carnalibus], as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh [ͻͩ͹ͲͱͲͷͧ; carnales], and behaving according to human inclinations?”

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Let us carefully examine the passage in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians [5:19–21] where he says that “it is obvious what the works of the flesh are—things such as fornication, impurity, lust, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, anger, jealousy, animosity, dissension, party intrigue, envy, drunkenness, and so on.” Among “the works of the flesh” [operibus carnis], which he listed and condemned, we find not only those dealing with sensual pleasure . . . but also those involving the faults of the mind, which have nothing to do with sensuality. For anyone can see that idolatry, sorcery, hatred, anger, jealousy, animosity, party intrigue, and envy are faults of the mind, not of the body.9

One cannot simply identify “the works of the flesh” with the body alone. In this passage, then, Augustine treats Paul’s notion of the flesh as a moral category.10 As he suggests, the word flesh designates all kinds of sin, whether bodily or psychic. Augustine offers a quite different interpretation of the flesh and the body in On Continence, a text that confronts Manichaean dualism. Here, Augustine identifies the flesh with the body and attempts to downplay the negative associations of the flesh found in Pauline passages. First, he brings in biblical passages that offer a positive sense of the human flesh and body.11 And he twice repeats Paul’s claim that “no one ever hates his own flesh” (Eph. 5:29).12 He then argues that Paul actually identified flesh with “man.” As Paul said: “For you are still of the flesh; as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh and acting in accordance with man?” (1 Cor. 3:3). Augustine identifies “being of the flesh” with “acting in accordance with man” (thus equating flesh and man). The flesh is not some evil and alien antagonist, as the Manichaeans believed, but an essential part of the human being (Cont. 4.11).

9. CD 14.2. See also Cont. 13.29, where Augustine discusses Paul’s Col. 3:5: “Put to death whatever in you is earthly [͵ͭͲ͹ᖨͻͩͼͭ ͷᔖ͵ ͼᔬ ʹͥͳͯ ͼᔬ ᓘ͸ᔲ ͼᕾͺ ͫᕾͺ]: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).” As Augustine points out: “It is wrong to think of the mortification of the members as relating to [just] the body, for Paul adds: uncleanness, passion, evil, lust, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” 10. See also GenLitt. 10.12.20, where Augustine explains that by flesh Paul does not mean “body,” but those impulses arising from both body and soul that separate man from God: “The cause of carnal lust is not the soul alone, much less the flesh alone. It comes from both.” 11. For example, John’s claim that Christ was “the Word made flesh” and Paul’s admonition: “Present your bodies as a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God” (Rom. 12.1). 12. Cont. 8.19, 9.22. Augustine uses this passage in many of his writings on the body.

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Augustine now proceeds to make a bold claim: “Both these things are good—the spirit is good, and the flesh is good; and man, who is composed of both, one ruling, the other obeying, is assuredly good, but a good thing capable of change.”13 The “change” that Augustine refers to is, of course, the Fall of Adam and Eve, which infected both the mind and the flesh with sin. Before the Fall, the mind and the flesh were good, and, for Christians, they will become good again when sin is removed at resurrection. At that point, there will be “perfect soundness in our flesh, without any discord.”14 In short, the mind and the flesh fall and rise together. The mind is not a “good” substance that battles against the “evil” flesh. Rather, the mind and the flesh operate together in both good and bad actions. In this treatise, then, Augustine elevates the status of both the flesh and the body while decreasing the autonomous (and seemingly good) powers of the mind.15 Of course, as Augustine points out, humans are inherently sinful, and they must pray for divine aid in the practice of continence and in the daily fight against temptations. Controlling the body and resisting bodily impulses is a crucial exercise for the Christian. By developing the virtue of continence, one renews oneself day by day. But one disciplines one’s body in the mode of spousal love—to make it a “temple of God” (Paul, 1 Cor. 6:19) that is obedient to the will. Later in his life, in dealing with the Pelagians, Augustine offered yet another interpretation of Paul’s view of the flesh and the body. The Pelagians considered bodily impulses and temptations as “natural” rather than inherently sinful. In their (perfectionist) view, the mind could easily master all sensual impulses, even those that get out of hand. They attacked Augustine’s claim that sin was handed down to humanity through the “vitiated” seed of Adam, which permanently “infected” all humans with sin.16 As they argued, Augustine believed that flesh was evil: he thus purveyed a

13. Cont. 7.18: Prorsus ista duo ambo sunt bona: et spiritus bonum est et caro bonum; et homo, qui ex utroque constat, uno imperante, alio serviente, utique bonum est, sed mutabile bonum. 14. Cont. 11.25: carnis nostrae sine ulla repugnatione perfecta sanitas. 15. Note that, in the later part of the treatise, Augustine points out that Paul did not identify the flesh with the body (Cont. 13.28–29), citing Gal. 5:19–21. He plays fast and loose here: at times he identifies the body with the flesh and at other times separates them. Still, his basic message is that the human flesh and the body are not evil substances operating in opposition to a good substance. 16. For a discussion of Adam’s “seed” in this debate, see Clark (1986d). On Augustine’s use of Paul in the Pelagian controversy, see Fredriksen (1988, 105–14). As Fredriksen has pointed out (1988, 109), Augustine believed that Adam passed on his sin and punishment “not to bodies but

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Manichaean doctrine. Augustine and the Pelagians went back and forth (for many years) with rival interpretations of Paul. As Peter Brown observes, the Pelagians “spoke of the moral achievements of St. Paul; they castigated all thoughts of a fatality of evil, and had upheld, in a darkening world, the nobility of man and the capacity of his nature to fulfill the perfect message of the Gospels.”17 Augustine’s notion of the vitiated seed and his rampages against sexual lust struck the Pelagians as a sickening misunderstanding of human nature (and a misreading of Paul). The Pelagians argued that Paul was able to perfect his own body, which was a natural organism created by God.18 Paul, they claimed, offered evidence that all Christians had free will and the ability to control their own bodies: they could thus achieve perfect goodness here on earth. Using Rom. 7:18–23, Augustine attacked this perfectionist view: After saying, “I know that there does not dwell any good thing in me,” [Paul] at once added an explanation, saying: “that is, in my flesh.” It is, then, the flesh—in which “there dwells no good thing”—that is brought into “captivity to the law of sin.” Now Paul has identified “the flesh” [caro] as that place where a certain morbid carnal affect [morbidus quidam carnis affectus] resides, which is not the form itself of our body [corporis]. . . . For, in men who are faithful, this actual bodily substance and nature [corporalem substantiam et naturam] . . . is already “God’s temple.” . . . Nevertheless, if our flesh [carnis] were not to some degree held captive under this law of sin (that is, under its own lust), this same apostle would not have said that we are “waiting for the redemption of our body” [redemptionem corporis nostri]. (DNC 1.31.35)

Here, Augustine attempts to rescue the body while acknowledging that there is a morbid affect in the flesh that makes all humans sinful from the time of conception. Adam’s seed became carnal as a punishment for his sin. The human body is good by nature, but it became corrupted by sin. In dealing with the Pelagians (and especially Julian of Eclanum), Augustine could not argue, as he did in other texts, that flesh was a moral category. Here, the issue was biological. As he had claimed, Adam’s seed

to persons and, thus, to souls as well.” This is the reason why infants, who have committed no sins, have to be baptized: their souls and bodies are infected by sin. 17. Brown (1967/2000, 373). 18. On Augustine’s controversy with the Pelagians, see Bonner (1963/2002, chap. 8), Brown (1967/2000, 340–77), Clark (1986d), Pagels (1988, chap. 4), and Brown (1988, 411–19).

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was infected when he ate the fruit, and he handed this “mortal illness” to his offspring in the act of intercourse.19 To bolster this position, Augustine referred to Paul’s remark in Rom. 7:25: “Therefore I myself am a slave to the law of God with my mind but am a slave to the law of sin with my flesh.” In Augustine’s view, Paul indicated that the flesh is permanently infected with sin (even though he did not explicitly refer to the seed of Adam). In responding to the Pelagians, Augustine argued that the physical flesh cannot be perfected on earth in spite of the fact that God created the human body as good. In Eden, Adam and Eve had bodies that were perfect and immortal. After they sinned, they and all their descendants were punished with mortal and unruly flesh. In Augustine’s view, then, Paul claimed that the flesh is sinful even though the body of the baptized Christian is the temple of God (which will be perfected in heaven). The body is not an alien or evil substance by nature, as the Manichaeans suggested. Still, it does have a “carnal affect” that makes it resistant to full control. Clearly, Augustine was walking a fine line between Manichaean and Pelagian doctrines. In arguing against Julian, who considered sex a natural act, Augustine repeatedly attacks the “unruly” penis and the “sinful” pleasure that attends sexual intercourse. Since intercourse leads to procreation, sex begets death. Augustine’s virulent attacks on sexual intercourse have led readers to think that he loathed the body. Rather, he had a love-hate relationship with it. He condemned the flesh (an earthly and sinful vessel) at the same time as he elevated the natural body (which was created as immortal and unearthly and made unnatural by sin).20 Mortality, in short, is an unnatural state that situates the human in the changing realm of bodily beings and in the scatters of time.

19. See, e.g., Genlitt. 9.17: “As soon as [Adam and Eve] transgressed the commandment, they contracted death itself in their members, like some fatal illness that changed that quality by which they were able to control their bodies in such a way that they would not have to say, ‘I see another law in my members fighting back against the law of my mind’ [Paul, Rom. 7:25].” 20. As Augustine puts it: “Even the death of the body was not inflicted on us by the law of our nature [lege naturae]; God did not create any death for man in his nature, but it was imposed as a just punishment for sin” (CD 13.15). The body is naturally good but lives an unnatural life owing to original sin.

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index

abyss, 10–11, 78, 101, 129–31. See also “nothing-something” active-attention, 58–59, 63, 64, 80, 89, 96. See also intentio Adam and Eve: in Çapek, 203; in Eden, 11, 14, 52; fall into time, 7, 11, 17, 35, 39, 55, 60, 67, 78, 215; as transhumans, 4, 26–38. See also sex Agamben, Giorgio, 52, 94, 98 Alaric the Visigoth, 23 Alypius, 149–51, 156–57 Ambrose, St., 28, 80, 83, 88, 135, 162, 167–68, 181 amor, 33–34, 39n, 51, 57n, 81, 106, 112n, 129, 191n. See also love angels, 51 animals, 36–37 Anthony, St., 19, 148, 151, 153, 156; Augustine’s view of, 141; Life of, 133–34, 139–40, 149–53 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 51, 61n, 97n, 98n Aristotle: Augustine’s reading of, 133; on memory, 64–65; on time, 56, 74–76 ascetic practices: Christian, 19–20, 139–41, 151, 165, 179–82, 188–95; Augustine’s, 147, 180–96 Athanasius, 19, 134, 139–40, 153 attentio, 58, 63, 86, 89–90, 92, 104 autobiography, 19, 134, 145, 147 autohagiography, 19, 134, 145

Bergson, Henri, 91–94 Bible, 18, 124, 133–37, 149, 151, 156, 179; Exodus, 155; Genesis, 26, 117; John, 214n; Luke, 43, 45; Matthew, 139; Psalms, 59, 88, 147–48. See also Paul, St. Blake, William, 23 body: of Augustine’s mother, 160–61; of Christ, 166; constant disintegration of mortal bodies, 25, 87; effect of desire upon, 113; as the grounding of the mind in time, 57, 86; and language, 153–56; marriage to the soul, 106–8; of the martyrs, 167; mortification of, 114, 164–65, 182– 84; of other persons, 116; in pain, 1, 41; resurrection of, 42–47, 131; role in sensation, 111; slowness of, 160; weight of, 127–28 books, 132–33, 138, 149 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9n, 20–21, 146, 180 Boyarin, Daniel, 211n, 212 Brown, Peter, 28, 30, 168–71, 179n, 180, 184–85, 211, 216 Burke, Kenneth, 129, 150, 155 Burrus, Virginia, 144 Butler, Judith, 19 Bynum, Carolyn, 43–44, 48n, 171 Byron (George Gordon), 36

Beaujour, Michel, 147 beauty, in Augustine’s theology, 5–6, 14, 45–50, 114–15, 138, 177, 192–93, 203, 206

Calvino, Italo, 105 Cameron, Averil, 2n, 71, 142 Çapek, Karel, 22, 201–9 caritas, 51 caro (flesh), 13n, 109, 191, 212–13, 215–16. See also flesh

241

242

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Carruthers, Mary, 63n, 66n, 70–71, 121n Cartesianism. See Descartes, René Carthage, 163, 216 Castelli, Elizabeth, 181 City of God, 14, 24–25, 48–53. See also heaven celibacy, 111, 184–88 Cervantes, Miguel de, 132 chronotopes, 14, 26 Constantinople, 166–67 continence, 69–70, 151, 153, 215 corpses: treatment of, 20, 23, 114, 130, 132, 134, 156, 160–63, 165–79, 185, 195, 199, 208 corpus, 133–34, 148, 153, 162–63, 212–13, 216 creation of the world: Christian, 10–11, 37, 53, 78; in Plato, 72 cupiditas, 33, 34, 51, 114, 131. See also desire curiositas, 3, 7, 71 Cyprian, St., 163, 175

Fall, 77, 187, 192. See also Adam and Eve; pride fasting, 189–94. See also hunger Felman, Shoshana, 153 fictional status of the Confessions, 147 flesh: and the body, 13, 211–17; and desire, 41; fleshly, 29n; lust of, 30n; and man’s disobedience, 39, 40n, 125; of martyrs, 173; and the mind, 107–12; mortification of, 165–66, 182–83, 185, 191–94; resurrection of, 43–45; the sense of, 159–60; sexual images and, 187; the weight of, 130–31; the word made, 18, 133, 137. See also caro food chain, 5, 7, 9, 11–15, 21–29, 32, 36–40, 43–44, 47, 49, 55, 165, 167, 171, 189,191, 197–99 forgetfulness, 67, 70–71 Foucault, Michel, 40, 149, 186–88 Fredriksen, Paula, 13n, 49, 212, 215n

Dante Alighieri, 36 Daston, Lorraine, 114 death, 134, 157–60, 167, 208–9 Derrida, Jacques, 2 Descartes, René, 115–16, 126 desire, 31, 51, 60, 189; holy, 99; the weight of, 129. See also amor; cupiditas diastasis: in Plotinus, 79 dispersion: mental, 64–70 distension/distentio, 2, 8–9, 15–16, 26, 40–41, 56–60, 68, 79–80, 84–90, 94–104, 128, 131, 157, 159–60, 181, 185 Donatists, 172

Gilson, Etienne, 111, 118 gladiatorial games, 157, 177 God, 49; ascetic worship of, 181–83; Augustine’s search for/journey towards, 61, 68, 70, 110, 118–19, 124–25, 149; beauty of, 114; as creditor, 102; eloquence of, 179; as the end of our desires, 51; as eternal, 90, 97, 152; eternal life with, 92; extension of our souls to, 100; fear of, 137; filling of our souls, 189; our final fusion with, 57; as incomprehensible to humans, 101; love of, 70, 130; as the One, 58, 96, 99, 102; as outside of space and time, 69, 97, 101; perpetual praise of, 51; as the planner of human history, 92; as provider, 156; truth of, in scripture, 136; as the unifier of our selves, 105 grief, 158–61 Guillaume, Gustav, 94

Earth: Augustine’s view of, 5; Christian and pagan views on, 5–7 Eden, 3, 4, 11, 14, 25–42, 52, 54, 55, 57, 78, 186–88, 193, 217; rejection of, 202–3. See also Adam and Eve; sex Egypt, 140, 142–44 Elsner, Jas’, 177 end of time, 4, 14, 20, 22, 24, 35, 42–43, 52–53, 58, 70, 96, 99, 101, 105–7, 110, 127, 133, 138, 161, 168–69, 171–72, 195, 208, 213 eschatology, 98, 169, 195, 197, 205 Eucharist, 171–72 Evagrius of Antioch, 139 expectation/expectatio, 5, 8, 11, 15, 20, 35, 37, 40–42, 53, 56–64, 67–68, 79–80, 82, 92–99, 101, 103, 120, 131, 132, 154, 159–60, 166 extension/extendere, 58–59, 96–102, 136–38, 177, 181–82, 184, 186, 189–90, 195

Hall, Stephen, 3 Harpham, Geoffrey, 141 Harrison, Robert, 16, heaven, 170, 182, 191. See City of God Heidegger, Martin, 2, 9n hermits, 19, 134, 139–48, 179, 181 heterochrony: Augustine’s theory of, 19–22, 56, 61, 79, 92, 104 Hippo, 149, 173, 178 holiness, 50, 143, 150, 165–66 holy land, 5, 172, 199–200 holy man: Christian, 134, 143. See also Anthony, St.

index

hope, 34, 51, 92, 98, 100–102 hunger, 188–94. See also fasting Husserl, Edmund, 9n idolatry, 21, 166, 172, 214 image of god: in the mind, 17, 38, 115, 117–20 images of the physical world: in memory, 61–66, 127 incarnation: of Christ, 2, 5, 7, 42, 133, 166, 170, 180n, 195; of the soul in Plato, 73, 107 inner man and outer man, 17, 98, 106, 117, 123–28, 193 intentio, 58–59, 63–64, 80, 85–86, 89–90, 96–101, 194. See also active-attention interactionism in sensation: one-way, 111; two-way, 183. See also sensation interiority, mental, 106, 123–28 James, William, 195 Jerome, St., 19, 28, 44, 141–44, 151, 172, 181 Jonah and the whale, 43, 197 Jovinian, 26n, 27n, 28n, 151, 181 Judgment Day, 24, 42–43, 180. See also end of time; resurrection Julian of Eclanum, 31–32, 216 Julian the Apostate, 167 Justice, Donald, 164 Keller, Catherine, 11 Kristeva, Julia, 42 language: Adamic, 27; body language, 19, 134, 153–56; as a an example of temporality, 40, 49, 52, 60, 87, 132, 159; in relation to materiality, 19; sensual aspects of, 82 Levinas, Emmanuel, 9n love: in Eden, 33; of external objects/the world, 112–14; the glue of, 81; in heaven, 51; the weight of, 106. See also amor; caritas lust, 29–30, 39, 113, 184, 186 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 102 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 132 Manichaeans, 147–48, 157, 188, 212, 214–17 Markus, Robert, 40n, 140–41, 165, 168n, 169 martyrs, 50, 165, 166–79. See also relics, cult of the holy matter: earthly, 10–11, 53, 78, 130, 132, 166–67, 176, 196, 199, 206–8; human, 5, 7, 17, 20, 47, 34, 137, 165 Melville, Herman, 22, 197

243

memory, 15, 60, 85, 103, 120–21; Aristotle’s theory of, 64–65; Augustine’s attempt to transcend, 68; in Bergson, 91–94; of processual/dynamic events, 82, 92; of resurrected saints, 52; as the stomach of the mind in Augustine’s theory, 61–64; topography of, 122. See also images of the physical world Milan, 156, 168 Miles, Margaret, 112, 119, 183–84, 190 Miller, Patricia Cox, 20, 143n, 166, 177, 188n Milton, John, 36 mind: distension of, 2, 8–9, 15–16, 26, 40–41, 56–60, 68, 79–80, 84–90, 94–104, 128, 131, 157, 159–60, 181, 185; the immortal, 117– 20; the mind looks at the mind, 115–20; the problem of other minds, 116–17; in relation to the self, 67; self-perception of, as a body, 112; splitting of, 84; upward tendency of, 191. See also image of god; will miracles, 165, 167, 170, 172–73, 175–76, 179 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 143 Monica, 157, 160–62 monks, 2, 19, 134, 140–44, 148, 179, 181 mortification. See body Moses, 135 music: Augustine’s view of, 88, 147 mutability of bodies and souls, 10–12, 59–60, 78 natural world: Augustine’s praise of, 6; Christian conceptions of, 17; willed forgetfulness of, 71. See also holy land nature watching: Augustine’s rejection of, 7, 71 neo-Platonists, 133. See also Platonism; Plotinus Nicaea, Council of, 166 Nicene Creed, 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54 “nothing-something”: in bodies and in souls, 10–12, 78, 102. See also abyss original sin, 57, 66–67, 109, 188 Ostia, 160–61, 163 pagans: and Christians, 71, 195; and Jews and Manichaeans, 188 Paul, St., 52, 109, 124, 153, 156, 178–79, 182, 211–17; Acts, 5; Augustine’s study of, 13, 155, 212; Corinthians, 28–29, 42, 45, 125, 211, 213–15; Ephesians, 107, 214; Galatians, 213–14; Philippians, 58–59, 96–98, 189; Romans, 125, 133, 151 Pelagians, 31–32, 215–17

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Plato, 18, 127, 133–35; on body-soul dualism, 2, 107; on memory, 65; on the mind, 73; on practicing death, 208; on time, 56, 71–74; on the tripartite soul, 192 Platonism, 42, 106, 107, 120, 124; of Augustine, 44, 106; implicit Christianity of, 133; in Paul, 212 Plotinus, 124; on time, 76–77 Possidius, 144–45 prayer, 184, 186 presence: physics and metaphysics of, 8, 16, 57, 91, 104. See also time pride, 38, 137, 188, 192 Prudentius, 170n Psalms. See Bible psyche, 1, 11, 40, 130; Augustine’s, 150, 157, 162; in Çapek, 205; as distended/scattered, 53, 57, 90, 99, 103, 110; as evasive, 16; and memory, 63; as temporalized, 2, 7, 9; of the transhuman, 26; as unified, 11, 99, 115. See also distention/distentio; soul; time rational self-reflection, 18, 106, 115–20 recollection: in Augustine, 66; in Bergson, 91; in Plato and Aristotle, 65 relics, cult of the holy, 166–79. See also martyrs resurrection: of Christians: 4, 14–15, 20, 24–25, 29, 35, 38, 42–51, 57, 106, 114, 131, 160, 171, 189, 193. See also Judgment Day Ricoeur, Paul, 2, 8, 61n, 90, 97–98, 100n Rilke, Ranier Marie, 55 Rome, fall of, 23 Rousseau, Philip, 146 Rubenson, Samuel, 144 Ruether, Rosemary, 38–39 Russell, Bertrand, 55 sarx (flesh), 13, 211–17. See also flesh Scarry, Elaine, 195 science: Augustine’s view of, 3 scribes, 13, 135, 146 scroll of the heavens, 51, 138 self, 17–18, 105–31; the fragmentation of, 84, 110; Thoreau’s search for, 199 sensation: Augustine’s theory of, 111–15 sermons: as bodily performance, 60 sex, 21, 184–88; in Eden, 28–33, 187; Augustine’s rejection of, 111, 147, 150–51 Shaw, Theresa, 189 skin, 137, 138 sôma (body), 13, 211–17

song, 57, 88–90, 92 soul: alienation from itself, 113; in grief, 158, 161; marriage to the body, 106–8; of martyrs, 172; in Plato, 74; in rebellion, 187; role in Augustine’s theory of sensation, 111. See also body; psyche Stephen, St., 173–75, 178–79 Stock, Brian, 62 Stroumsa, Gedaliahu, 110, 120 Szymborska, Wisława, 1 Tertullian, 43–44, 171 Thoreau, Henry David, 22, 198–201, 209 time: Augustine’s heterochronic theory of, 19–22, 56, 61, 79, 92, 104; author’s experience of, 95; Christian view of, 9; in conversion, 152–53; cosmological, 8, 72; earthly, 8–9, 18, 39, 56, 61, 81, 82–83, 86–88, 92, 101, 103, 158–60, 203; measure of, 80–84; objective theories of, 56, 72, 74–75, 78; psychic, 8–9, 18, 41–42, 56, 61, 82–83, 86–88, 92, 101, 159–60, 202; the representation of, 94–96; social, 9; subjective theories of, 8, 55; the tensions of, 58, 96–99. See also Aristotle; distention/distentio; Plato; Plotinus Torcello, cathedral of, 44 transhumans: of Augustine, 23–54; immortal bodies and undistended minds of, 26; technological creations of, 4 Trier, 133, 149, 152 trinity: in the human mind, 2n, 61n, 115n, 118 Turner, Brian, 9 Victricius, 170 Vigilantius, 172 vision: Augustine’s theory of, 111–12 visions: heavenly, 47–52 voluntas, 17, 109, 183. See also will Walker, Peter, 166 Whitman, Walt, 164 will, 41, 85n, 115n, 126–31; of Adam and Eve, 27, 29–31, 36, 38n, 39; the divided, 106, 108–11, 125; in sensation, 109, 112–14. See also original sin; sensation Wilner, Eleanor, 23 women: as inferior beings, 38, 46 Wordsworth, William, 113 World Soul: in Plato, 72; in Plotinus, 76–79 Yeats, William Butler, 192