601 - Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions

Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions
By Margaret R. Miles
New York, Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992. 144 pp. $15.95.

Margaret R. Miles, Bussey Professor of Historical Theology at Harvard Divinity School, offers an original and provocative reading of Augustine's Confessions: Whatever else it might be, and whatever other readings it may invite, the Confessions is a text of pleasure, which is to say that one experiences pleasure in the reading of it. Aware that, for many, the reading of the Confessions has been about as pleasurable as slogging through the book of Leviticus (few succeed in reading it cover to cover), Miles prefaces her book with a brief autobiographical account of her own, relating how she reread the Confessions while on vacation on the Greek island of Paros, and how she took her time

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doing so. She contrasts this setting with the settings in which she had previously read the Confessions, "in pressured preparation for classes and sermons."

The Confessions, in her view, is pleasurable on a number of levels, the most obvious and readily accessible being the beauty and richness of its language. But Miles is more concerned to explore its "seductive" pleasures, the fact that it seduces the reader into "passionate relationship" with the text, sometimes in violent disagreement, sometimes in frustration, and sometimes in sheer amazement that "a North African who lived over fifteen hundred years ago could express so accurately an idea or emotion one recognizes so intimately." Confessions is seductive in the sense that, if the reader comes to it with mainly voyeuristic interests, or with the intention that he or she will hold the book at a distance by passively nodding yes to everything the great Church Father says, such a reader will not find it possible to maintain such curious or respectful distance, but will be drawn into the text, much as Augustine, in the famous garden scene, was himself won over by "the chaste beauty of Continence in all her serene, unsullied joy, as she modestly beckoned me to cross over and to hesitate no more." Lacking her chaste beauty, Augustine seduces by promising more than he is ultimately prepared to deliver.

At the beginning, Miles focuses on Augustine's account of his own search for pleasure and his discovery that it is in the frustration of pleasure that one finds the true source of pleasure, who is God. Why God gives true pleasure while other desires fail is that pleasure requires both permanence and intensity, and only God offers both.

Miles then explores the textual strategies that Augustine uses to enhance the reader's vigorous engagement with the text. Here, her own text begins to seduce the reader, as she centers on Augustine's own enthusiasm for reading and on the fact that reading was always, for him, a potentially life-changing experience. But Miles devotes the lion's share of this chapter to the strategy of unresolved contradiction, showing how Augustine's contradictory statements about God's existence and activity and about Christ's body and mediatorship create in the reader "a pleasurable tension." The reader is not put off by these contradictions, but they instead "function to invite the reader into the text as conversation partner, opponent, supporter, and co-author." In what is to me the most arguable point in the book, she assumes that he is fully aware of these contradictions but chooses to let them remain, as an author's attempt to remove textual contradictions by exploring their inner coherence and demonstrating their consistency often deprives the reader of the pleasure of puzzling over these very contradictions. I wonder, though, if this is to give Augustine more credit than is his due, for, as I read the Confessions, Augustine sees himself as the consummate intellectual problem-solver, and he would not be inclined to let theological contradictions just dangle there from a desire to provide his reader pleasure. Theology, after all, is a game one plays in dead

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earnest, one which Augustine has every intention of winning. This leads me to think that the contradictions that she discovers are unintentional, and, if so, and if I were Miles, I would take some well deserved pleasure in having exposed this fact.

In Chapter Three, she looks at the eroticism of the text, noting how he uses the promise of sexual revelations to seduce the reader into the text and then, in frustrating the reader's "unholy" curiousity by leaving gaps, voids, and silences, woos the reader instead to his religious message. It is in this chapter that Miles, content in previous chapters to wonder admiringly at Augustine's achievement, begins to express what can fairly be called her displeasure. By "blocking" the reader and "insisting on the authorial privilege of interpreting his erotic experience himself, he does not permit the reader the co-authorship he has offered in another context-'anyone can read what I have written and interpret it as he likes.' " Moreover, "his account of sexual relationship is rendered questionable by his highly selective description of his feelings as they occurred," and he therefore drives a wedge between himself as narrator and the youth he once was, refusing "to be aware of the continuity and subjective integrity of his journey, to acknowledge that it was, in fact, by following with the utmost passion a destructive and treacherous path that he came to the emotional bankruptcy that led to a breakthrough." Committing the perennial mistake of parents, "he wants his readers to accept his conclusions without the experience of a similar learning process." (Interestingly, this is exactly Peter Berger's criticism of Karl Barth in The Heretical Imperative.) It is not surprising, then, that while there are "seductive female figures" in the Confessions-Continence being perhaps the most notable-there are no "seductive women." The "textual absence" of his partner of nearly fourteen years-the mother of his child-is symptomatic of this refusal to allow the "other" into the text on an equal footing. As far as his own sexual experience is concerned, he holds all the interpretive cards. His reader holds none.

In final chapter, Miles focusses on the last four books of the Confessions, noting Augustine's admission that, while his practice of continence has radically changed his own way of seeing the world, he continues to struggle with pleasures (such as overeating) that are not so easily renounced (after all, one cannot cease to eat). In the most insightful interpretation of these so-called "philosophical" books that I have read, Miles suggests that "the last books of the Confessions are, to me, profoundly sad" for "no real people appear in these books." Shades with astral bodies replace the colorful people of the earlier books, and those to whom he was strongly emotionally attached are now referred to, collectively and vaguely, as "fellow pilgrims." These concluding chapters are not, then, as many have suggested, philosophical reflections disconnected from the preceding narrative chapters, but are instead "autobiographical in the strictest sense, a continuation of the earlier books' narration of who he is." Only now, the chaotic

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painful vivid early life has given way to the orderly, recollected, service-oriented Christian life, and the author's mood is not one of joy but of sadness. There is beauty in these pages as well, but it is an abstract, contentless beauty. Unlike the young man who indiscriminately and recklessly spilled himself out on the ground, Augustine is now self-contained, but, in this self-containment, this triumph of soul over body, he demands that his reader, who was active in the text before now, become its passive listener.

Given her thesis-that for a book to be good it should give pleasure-it is inevitable that the reader of her book will judge it according to her own criterion. I can attest that her book met this test for me with miles to spare. Her thesis-that the Confessions is a text of pleasure-was enough to seduce me, and, once I was seduced, I was won over by her use of the same textual strategies (multiple readers and unresolved contradiction) that she says Augustine employed. As a man, I felt I was overhearing a conversation among women readers about their experiences with the Confessions, and I found myself wanting to interrupt with an audible cheer as she made a case for Augustine without flinching on women's issues. I was also won over by her willingness to leave some contradictions in her argument unresolved, the major one for me being that her claim for Augustine's book being pleasurable stands in apparent opposition to his own view that only God gives true pleasure. Does this mean that the Confessions is a text of apparent pleasure? To the extent that her reading is persuasive, the reader of her book is left with the problem of what now to do about the Confessions itself. Is it, as Wittgenstein suggests in the Tractatus, that having used the ladder to get here, we cast it aside?

Or maybe this is simply the difference between Miles and Augustine noted above, where, for her, the Great Beauty will continue to be sought within the sensuous sensible world-books qualify-whereas for him the Great Beauty is always beyond. As Eugene TeSelle has recently said of Augustine, "Other theologians have been able to say more-that God's self-relatedness makes possible a genuine relatedness to, and involvement with, the world and human beings. Augustine could not say that. Despite the brightness of divine light, and the warmth of divine love, with which he felt himself surrounded, he could not affirm, in the last analysis, that God might be concerned about, affected by, enriched or diminished by, the life of Augustine or any other finite being. And that-if we are not impressed by its majestic indifference-may be the ultimate loneliness." To which I would only add that there is a deep if paradoxical pleasure in the frustration of our desire to find God in the sensuous sensible world and in the world of human relationship, and there is a great beauty in Augustine's sad and bleak awareness that he and God are profoundly alone, together.

Donald Capps

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ