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528 - Language and Love: Introducing Augustine's Religious Thought through the Confessions Story |
Language and Love: Introducing Augustine's Religious
Thought through the Confessions Story
By William Mallard
University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. 252 pp. $35.00,
$16.95 (pb).
The fact that William Mallard, Professor of Church History at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, dedicates this book to "the students in my classes, past and present" indirectly indicates that it was written for a pedagogical purpose, that of making Augustine's religious thought accessible to students who might be tempted to believe that Augustine has little of interest or importance to say to them. Mallard's strategy (all professors need strategies) is to use Augustine's Confessions as a means to introduce the "larger outline of his mature theology." Recognizing, however, that the Confessions might not be viewed by students much differently from how they view Augustine's other writings-tempted as they are to believe that his life may also have little interest or importance for them-Mallard has a sort of dual strategy. By retelling the story of Augustine's life in "a clear, distinct English that nevertheless retains some of the rhythm and elevation of the original," he hopes to make the Confessions itself accessible, demonstrating that "Augustine had experiences that people today can recognize."
Like Augustine, we, too, have "restless hearts" because we, too, live in two different worlds simultaneously: the world of our mother's religious faith and the world of everything else. These two worlds have their own distinct languages, and while we may not be aware of the fact, we have been bilingual from our early childhood, even before we went off to school, because, whether we knew it or not, our parents spoke two
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530 - Language and Love: Introducing Augustine's Religious Thought through the Confessions Story |
languages. There was the language of faith (with its emphasis on putting others before self) and the language of the world (with its stress on ambition, success, and personal achievement). Augustine took for granted that his father spoke the latter language because this is the language of the world that fathers mostly inhabit. Confusing was the fact that his mother gave mixed messages. She "loved the 'God' world and taught it to her children carefully, though she wanted Augustine to succeed in the second world as well.... She taught him that nothing and no one was as important as his Father in heaven. Yet she did not have him baptized." She had high ambitions for her son and, yet, she also wanted him to internalize the language of faith. This, Mallard claims, is an experience that people today can recognize.
Augustine's solution to the problem is well worth such persons' consideration: What if there really is only one world and only one language, that we experience two worlds and two languages because we view the situation from our own perspective rather than from the perspective of how it is in fact (that is, God's own perspective)? It requires a great deal of unlearning to come to see things this way; so the key, as Augustine came to believe, is that one take it slowly, in small steps, like a child just learning to walk. The church, in spite of its obvious faults, including the major one that it often acts as if we live in a two-world reality, is a new home, as it were. For if our parental homes taught us to see the world as a hopeless duality, the church teaches us to see the world as one and to speak the language of oneness.
This, in a nutshell, is what Mallard takes to be Augustine's basic solution to the problem of human existence, and his chapters on the first nine books of the Confessions-culminating in Augustine's conversion- explore his struggle to make this solution his own, and lastingly so. Chapters one through three (covering books one and two and half of book three of the Confessions) form part one, "The Pattern of His Emerging Thought." Chapters four through twelve comprise part two, "His Mature Position Unfolds." Chapters four through six (covering the last half of book three through book seven of the Confessions) form section one of part two, "Creation ... (anti-Manichaean)." Chapters seven through nine (revisiting the last section of book seven and continuing through book eight of the Confessions) form section two of part two, "Salvation ... (anti-Pelagian)." Chapters ten and eleven (both on book nine of the Confessions) form section three of part two, "The City of God ... (anti-Donatist, anti-Pagan)." Chapter twelve (which returns to the first chapter of the first book of the Confessions) forms section four of part two, "A Trinitarian Theology." Mallard's decision to return to the first chapter of the first book of the Confessions was inspired by the fact that it points "to one of Augustine's final projects of religious thought, The Trinity, " and thus, "His end, epitomized in his trinitarian thinking, was the Confessions beginning all over again: faith seeking to think toward, and know, and praise God." And lest the reader complain that Mallard has disregarded the last four books of the Confessions (books ten through
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532 - Language and Love: Introducing Augustine's Religious Thought through the Confessions Story |
thirteen), he makes several references to these books in this final chapter, though I wish that he had made more of the fact that Augustine himself saw the last book of the Confessions as a commentary on Genesis 1, thus dramatizing for us the fact that his autobiography ends where the story of God begins.
Mallard's intention is not that this book would "serve as a substitute for reading the Confessions itself, " as it "is a kind of theological meditation on the Confessions and its major topics." He offers it as "one possible reading of the Confessions," and, recognizing that "countless others are possible, as well," his "aim is hardly to be definitive, but to introduce the rich potential of the text." At the risk of seeming evasive, I believe that each reader will have to judge whether a text about a text can succeed better than that text in "introducing" its own "rich potential." Mallard himself recognizes the problem when he says that the reader is invited to read his text "before, or after, or along with the Confessions, as seems helpful." Fair enough. Good professors want to be helpful to their students. And this is a helpful book. Yet, perhaps because helpfulness is so central to its vision of itself, I think that it gives inadequate emphasis to the ways in which Augustine's own text is rather unhelpful, especially in its own language of faith, as it makes a theological case for what Leo Ferrari has called "a scourging God. " Still,-perhaps the best strategy is first, to get the reader sufficiently interested in the text by exploring the good it can do and, then, to show that it houses its own problems for which the reader will necessarily turn to other authors and other texts for solutions.
Donald Capps
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ