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Parabolic Events in Augustine's Autobiography
By Donald Capps

"Augustine was middle-aged when he wrote the Confessions. While memoirs, usually written in old age, address the question, 'What has become of me?,' autobiography, usually written in mid-career, asks the question, 'What is becoming of me?' … Why does Augustine reproach himself so severely? … While Adam sought to hide his shame from God, Augustine dares to reveal his shame through his Confessions because he perceives that, through such self-disclosure, God will appear to him."

NUMEROUS studies of Augustine's Confessions have appeared in recent years, and any new contribution to this burgeoning literature may likely get lost in the cacophony of voices.¹ I risk this to propose a link between current theological fascination with story and narrative, and with pastoral theological interest in the distinction between shame and guilt.

I

The feature of the current story-narrative discussion I wish to isolate for special consideration arises from connections drawn between Jesus' parables, understood as metaphors of God's activity in the world, and autobiography, viewed as a metaphor of the self in the process of becoming.² Thus viewed, these two genres address interdependent questions: "Where in the world is God?" (parable) and "What is

Donald Capps is Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. A graduate of Lewis and Clark College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Chicago, Dr. Capps is the author of Pastoral Care, A Thematic Approach (1979), Pastoral Counseling and Preaching (1980), and Biblical Approaches to Pastoral Counseling (1981). His article on "The Psychology of Petitionary. Prayer," appeared in the July 1982 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY
¹ Among the most recent are three essays on the Confessions in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50 (1982): 349-409, and major portions of Janet Varner Gunn's Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
² See Sallie McFague, Speaking in Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). James Olney is responsible for the view that autobiographies are metaphors of the self. See his Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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becoming of me?" (autobiography). These questions are inseparable, for God's presence in the world has immediate bearing on what is to become of me, and what is becoming of me is one important clue to how God is present in the world. As metaphorical, both genres involve the penetration of mystery: (a) the mystery of God's activity in the world, and (b) the mystery of the self in the process of becoming. But, as John Dunne points out, these are not mysteries because they are unintelligible, but because they have inexhaustible meaning.³

How autobiography goes about illuminating the mystery of the self is similar to how parable works. In parables, familiar events are vehicles for shedding light on the mystery of God's presence in the world. As Lonnie Kliever points out, parables do not introduce us to some arcane or occult "religious" world. Rather, they shock us into seeing our familiar world in a new way and at a new depth-as a familiar world in which an unfamiliar presence is at work.⁴ Moreover, the fact that parables are eventful shows us that God's presence in the world is an active presence. Paul Ricoeur points out that in parables "the kingdom of God is not compared to the man who.. . to the woman who … to the yeast which … but to what happens in the story."⁵

Autobiography makes similar use of familiar events to shed light on the mystery of the self. Familiar, because the self is not some transcendent entity existing in splendid isolation from the raw experience of life. Events, because the self is not a static entity, but a dynamic process of becoming. Sallie McFague notes that the self in autobiography is "incarnated in concrete events…. And this, of course, is but another way of saying that the events are parabolic or metaphorical-they have extensions beyond themselves, they are richly complex images embodying the secret of a person's life, as, for instance, the moment in the garden is a metaphor of Augustine's life."⁶

Such parabolic events in autobiography resist our normal expectation of a coherent, carefully paced and well-organized narrative structure. There is one major reason why autobiography differs so much from biography. Unlike biography, where the demand for a coherent narrative is never consciously abrogated, there are numerous occasions in autobiography where the demand for narrative coherence takes a back seat to the impulse toward self-disclosure. Parabolic events are such occasions.

In the space of this essay, the most I can do is illustrate how parabolic events function, using Augustine's Confessions for this purpose.⁷ Let us

³ John S. Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 7.
⁴ Lonnie D. Kliever, The Shattered Spectrum: A Survey of Contemporary Theology (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), p. 178.
⁵ Paul Ricoeur, "Listening to the Parables of Jesus," in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 239-45.
⁶ McFague, pp. 154-55.
⁷ The Confessions is generally considered the first major autobiography even though the term "autobiography" is less than two hundred years old, and the first book called an autobiography by its author did not appear until 1834.

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examine the Confessions by asking the question: "How do parabolic events shed light on the self and its mystery?" Like most autobiographers, Augustine was middle-aged when he wrote the Confessions. While memoirs, usually written in old age, address the question, "What has become of me?," autobiography, usually written in mid-career, asks the question, "What is becoming of me?" The parabolic events in the Confessions focus that question for Augustine.

II

In the Confessions, there are five unusually self-disclosive events: (a) the pear-stealing episode, (b) the death of Augustine's unnamed friend, (c) his escape from his mother through an act of deception, (d) the famous garden experience, and (e) the mystical vision he and his mother shared shortly before her death. Because his formulation of the motherson relationship in the autobiography is complex, psychologically, symbolically, and theologically, I limit comment to those parabolic events in which his mother was not a major participant. This leaves three: (a) the pear-stealing episode, (b) the death of his friend, and (c) the experience in the garden.

To set the stage for our consideration of these three parabolic events, let us take a brief look at David Burrell's critique⁸ of a whole collection of psychological studies of the Confessions published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, under the guest editorship of Paul W. Pruyser.⁹ These studies, written by some of the major figures in pastoral theology and related disciplines, are criticized by Burrell for two reasons. In the first place, he contends that the authors are too ready to force their own psychological theories on the text, and in so doing they impose an explanatory hermeneutic on a text that itself wants to exhibit a hermeneutic of understanding. In the second place, they fail to take seriously the form of the text, centering on selected features of the text, especially those that support existing psychological theories, and fail to note how these features are integral to Augustine's theological intentions. But Burrell agrees with these studies on one critical point, namely, that Augustine engages in too much self-reproach. "Nothing," he says, "seems more obvious to a modern reader of the Confessions than the author's inveterate tendency to reproach himself from infancy on." As Burrell notes, "One feels that the grace of God which Augustine celebrates so generously should in ten years have worked a greater self-acceptance than the continued tone of self-accusation betrayed in the Confessions."

Why was Augustine, even at the time he wrote the Confessions, unable to accept himself? Why this continued self-condemnation? In Pruyser's view, Augustine continued to reproach himself because he wa

⁸ David Burrell, "Reading the Confessions of Augustine: An Exercise in Theological Understanding," Journal of Religion 50 (1970): 327-51.
⁹ These articles appeared in Vol. 5 (1965-66); authors included David Bakan, Walter Houston Clark, James Dittes, Paul Pruyser, Philip Woollcott, Jr., and others.

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unable, in any genuine sense, to accuse himself of wrongdoing. "Indeed," says Pruyser, "very little guilt feeling is expressed directly." Burrell concludes that, behind Augustine's self-reproach, is an inability to acknowledge his sinfulness and to present himself available for forgiveness. His self-reproach actually reflects "a lingering unwillingness to surrender" himself to God.

But a careful look at three selected parabolic events in the Confessions suggests a different angle on Augustine's self-reproach. The clue to this alternative perspective is Erik Erikson's observation that "shame is an emotion insufficiently studied, because in our civilization it is so early and easily absorbed by guilt."¹⁰ We moderns tend to view Augustine's self-reproach solely in terms of the dynamic of guilt and of the need, therefore, for divine forgiveness. But it is more accurate, both psychologically and theologically, to view this self-reproach according to the dynamics of shame. It is not that his self-reproach, because exaggerated, reflects an inability to acknowledge his wrongdoing. Rather his self-reproach is the effect of his decision to expose his "shameful self" to God. By focusing on three parabolic events in the Confessions, I hope to make a case for this alternative interpretation, and draw from this some conclusions regarding his answer to the questions: "What is becoming of me?" and "Where in the world is God?"

III

Take his account of the pear-stealing episode.¹¹ In this event, the sixteen year old Augustine and some friends shook a "great load" of pears from a tree that did not belong to them and then, instead of eating the pears, they threw them to the pigs. They stole, according to Augustine, simply because it was forbidden, not from desire for the fruit. His account of the actual theft is brief, but his interpretation of the event is quite lengthy. He severely reproaches himself for what he now considers an utterly senseless act. There is so much self-reproach, in fact, that various authors in the psychological studies mentioned above say that he grossly exaggerates the seriousness of his crime.

For Augustine, however, this pear-stealing episode reflects his whole attitude toward God's created order prior to his conversion to Christianity. He implies that his attitude toward the fruit he stole was similar to his attitude toward the young women with whom he consorted. He took what was not his, and did so not for love of the object of his quest, but purely for the pleasure of taking what was forbidden. This whole attitude now fills him with shame. He confesses: "Base in soul was I, and I leaped down from your firm clasp even towards complete destruction, and I sought nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself." He

¹⁰ Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 252.
¹¹ The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1960), pp, 69-76.

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senses that he is utterly exposed, naked before God. He would like, as he says, to "cloak over" his ignorance and his folly with the names of "simplicity" and "innocence." But he knows it will not work, for God "enlightens my heart and uncovers its darkness."

To be sure, Augustine also uses language of guilt and sin in his account of the pear-stealing. But when he concerns himself with what this episode reveals him to be in the eyes of God, he turns to the language of shame: God uncovers the darkness of his heart and there is nothing to cloak over his exposure to God's scrutiny.

When we recognize that shame is the central dynamic in this event, we begin to understand why Augustine engages in such extreme self-reproach. As Helen Merrell Lynd points out in her analysis of the nature of shame:

Shame is an experience that affects and is affected by the whole self. This whole-self involvement is one of its distinguishing characteristics and one that makes it a clue to identity. Separate, discrete acts or incidents, including those seemingly most trivial, have importance because in this moment of selfconsciousness, the self stands revealed. Coming suddenly upon us, experiences of shame throw a flooding light on what and who we are.¹²

Why does Augustine reproach himself so severely over the theft of some pears? Because the shame he experienced was total, involving the total self. In contrast, guilt is not such a total assault on one's self. An act of wrongdoing, even one of very serious dimensions, need not undermine our sense of who we are, for we can explain this action as unrepresentative or uncharacteristic of us. Guilt can be externalized, while shame is totally self-involving. As Lynd points out: "Experiences of shame appear to embody the root meaning of the word-to uncover, to expose, to wound. They are experiences of exposure, exposure of peculiarly sensitive, intimate, vulnerable aspects of the self."¹³ The pear-stealing episode is just such an exposure of Augustine's shameful self. The shame he experiences reveals a self he can hardly bear to acknowledge. At the same time, he recognizes that there is no point in trying to hide it from God, for God sees it too.

IV

A second parabolic event is Augustine's account of the death of a friend.¹⁴ At nineteen or twenty, he had just begun his teaching career in his native town. The friend, whom he had known from childhood, contracted a fever and lay for a long time in an unconscious state. When it appeared certain he would die, he was baptized a Christian. But he rallied temporarily and, during the time that he was in his senses, Augustine tried to joke with him about the Christian baptism so recently received. These jokes were not appreciated by his friend. Augustine say

¹² Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), p. 49.
¹³ Ibid., p. 27.
¹⁴ The Confessions, pp. 181-203.

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that "he was horrified at me as if I were an enemy, and he warned me with a swift and admirable freedom that if I wished to remain his friend, I must stop saying such things to him. I was struck dumb and was disturbed, but I concealed all my feelings until he would grow well again and would be fit in health and strength." But the friend did not get well. In a few days, after a relapse, he died.

Augustine's reflections on this episode center on his grief and sorrow over the death of his friend. He says that his native town and his father's house became a "torment" to him in the absence of his friend. But he also severely reproaches himself for making fun of his friend's baptism. The jokes about the baptism come back to haunt him, and he is profoundly ashamed of his behavior. Now, he says to God, "I do not blush to confess your mercies to me and to call upon you, I who once did not blush to profess before men all my blasphemies and to bark like a dog against you."

Except for this reference to blushing, Augustine does not use the language of shame to convey his deep sense of self-reproach for the way he treated his dying friend. Yet, this too is a situation in which shame, not guilt, is the deeper emotion. As Lynd points out, shame produces the sense that one's words or actions have been incongruous or inappropriate, and this is precisely how Augustine now views his attempt to joke about his friend's baptism:

It is peculiarly characteristic of these situations of suddenly experienced incongruity or discrepancy that evoke shame, that they are often occasioned by what seems a "ridiculously" slight incident. An ostensibly trivial incident has precipitated intense emotion…. It is the very triviality of the cause-an awkward gesture … an untimely joke … a witticism that falls flat-that helps to give shame its unbearable character.¹⁵

Undoubtedly, Augustine was humiliated when his friend rebuffed his joking manner, and was even more devastated when his friend died. "How could I have made jokes with a dying friend?" But the greatest humiliation of all would come years later when he viewed this event from his perspective as a Christian bishop, accountable to God. "Then I thought I was so clever and wise. Now I know my blasphemies were the barkings of a dog." The greatest shame be experiences in this episode is what he experiences now, as he opens his shameful past to God's intense scrutiny.

While a seemingly trivial, and certainly forgivable lapse, the shame his joking manner produced was totally self-involving. As Lynd points out:

To assume that any feeling of deep shame over a seemingly trivial incident is neurotic is to miss the point that it is characteristic of shame, as experienced by normal, healthy persons, that a seemingly insignificant occurrence can set off a whole train of associations that have profound significance for the whole self.¹⁶

¹⁵ Lynd, p. 40.
¹⁶ Ibid., p. 42.

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Shame resulting from such incongruous behavior usually involves a complete and sudden reversal from being totally at home in a situation to being thoroughly alienated and out of place. This is reflected in the fact that shame produces the urgent desire to bolt for the door, sink through the floor, or imagine that this is only a dream and, thus, not happening in the "real" world. There is a powerful sense of isolation, that "all eyes are on me," and they are the eyes of disapproval and accusation.

Augustine's account of this episode is filled with this sense of alienation. He notes that with his friend's rebuke he was "struck dumb," and while he hoped to reveal his feelings about the whole matter to his friend, he had no opportunity to do so. He also observes that he was absent from the room when his friend died, and that he left town very shortly thereafter. His decision to leave town was undoubtedly due to loneliness following his friend's death, but certainly shame was also involved. His incongruous behavior, seemingly rather harmless ("I was just joking"), was profoundly alienating. Yet, by recalling it now, he has determined to "return" to the place where he made himself look foolish, and to disclose his shameful self, once again, to God.

V

This brings us to the garden event, which is symbolically related to the pear-stealing episode.¹⁷ Both occur in the garden, and both therefore call to mind the Garden of Eden story, with its rich imagery of shame. Let me draw attention to just one facet of the garden event normally overlooked that bears directly on the matter of shame. Leading up to his account of the actual experience, Augustine tells about Ponticianus, a Christian and a high court official who had come to visit Augustine. During this visit, Ponticianus related the following story: He and three other men had gone for a walk in the Emperor's gardens. Two of the men wandered off by themselves. They came on a house where Christians lived, and found there a little book about the life of Saint Anthony. As one of the men began to read the book, he was filled with "sober shame." He turned to his companion and said: "Tell me, I ask you, where will we get by all these labors of ours? What higher ambition can we have at court than to become friends of the emperor?" Ponticianus tells how the man continued to read and "was changed within himself, where your eye could see. His mind was stripped of this world."

Augustine was deeply moved by this story. In the section of the Confessions which one translator entities "The Naked Self," he says that he was "overwhelmed with shame and horror while Ponticianus spoke of such things." Then, in the next section, entitled "In the Garden," he begins his account of the experience in the garden with this agitated query to his friend Alypius: "Are we ashamed to follow, because they have gone on ahead of us? Is it no shame to us not even to follow them?" Still, he found himself resisting, because "My lovers o

¹⁷ The Confessions, pp. 181 -203.

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old … held me back. They plucked at my fleshly garment, and they whispered, 'Do you cast us off?'… What filth did they suggest! What deeds of shame!" He sensed that after Ponticianus' moving testimony, the voices of his "lovers of old" were not as strong as before. Instead of contradicting him face to face, they were reduced to muttering behind his back and furtively picking at him as he moved from them. Yet, he could not wrest himself free of them: "I felt great shame, for I still heard the murmurings of those trifles, and still I delayed and hung there in suspense."¹⁸

But Augustine then heard a voice, as of a child, chanting, "Take up and read." The book he seized on was not the life of Anthony but a volume of Paul's letters. He opened the book and his eyes fell on these verses from Romans, chapter 13: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in gratifying its desires." Note the language here: "But put on the Lord Jesus Christ"-That is, leave your fleshly garment, clothe yourself in Christ, and you will no longer be naked, exposed before God. By putting on Christ he could stand before God without shame. Unlike Adam, in that other famous garden, he did not need to hide from God, because he was clothed in the Lord Jesus Christ. Instantly, on reading these words, a "peaceful light" streamed into his heart, and all the "dark shadows of doubt fled away." Now, he was at peace with himself, and he would, like Ponticianus' friend, relinquish his old loves and old ambitions.

In the first of his philosophical chapters in the Confessions, devoted to a "philosophy of memory," Augustine seems to comment on the spiritual change that his garden experience effected in him.

Lord, before whose eyes the abyss of man's conscience lies naked, what thing within me could be hidden from you, even if I would not confess it to you? I would be hiding you from myself, not myself from you. But now, since my groans bear witness that I am a thing displeasing to myself, you shine forth, and you are pleasing to me, and you are loved and longed for, so that I may feel shame for myself, and renounce myself, and choose you.¹⁹

Augustine understands that to hide himself from God, out of a sense of shame and exposure, is to hide God from himself. Following John Dominic Crossan's view that parable is the binary opposite of myth, I would suggest that what Augustine has done here is to reverse the implied meaning of the garden of Eden story.²⁰ In so doing, he has given us a different slant on the relationship of the self to God. While Adam

¹⁸ While I would not wish to make too much of this reference to murmurings behind his back, it is noteworthy that Erikson sees doubt as companion to shame. Shame is dependent on our consciousness of being upright and exposed, while doubt has much to do with a sense of having a front and a back side. If shame involves a "loss of face," then doubt entails fear of being attacked "from behind," an area which is necessarily hidden from our view. Childhood and Society, pp. 253-54.
¹⁹ The Confessions, p. 229.
²⁰ John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, Illinois: Argus Communications, 1975), p. 55.

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sought to hide his shame from God, Augustine dares to reveal his shame through his Confessions because he perceives that, through such selfdisclosure, God will appear to him. The problem with concealing one's shame is not that one thereby hides from God, but that one hides God from oneself. By forcing himself to confront his shame, Augustine opens himself to the presence of God.

VI

This brings us to the larger question of how the theme of shame has significance for Augustine's whole autobiographical project. By writing the Confessions, he renounced the most common way of dealing with our shameful past and instead chose a less traveled way. The common form of dealing with shame is amnesia: forgetting that these experiences ever happened. Amnesia is to shame as rationalization is to guilt.

But Augustine chose the more uncommon and riskier path of story. He called these experiences to mind and through the narrative of his life in the Confessions, he made them public. In recalling these experiences, he came face to face with his naked, shameful self. But this self-examination, however painful, was absolutely necessary. Why? Because to re-experience his shame through memory and narrative was to open himself to the presence of God.

In one sense, the "self " that he discloses in the Confessions is only one aspect of himself. Certainly, he could have written a much different autobiography had he chosen to center on his more public self, and given an account of his professional achievements or the development of his religious opinions. But, in another sense, by centering on his "shameful" self he disclosed his "total self" as viewed from God's perspective. In doing so, he established the expectation that autobiographers would focus on their shameful selves, disclosing their shame to themselves, to God, and to their readers.

What, then, is Augustine's answer to the critical autobiographical question, "What is becoming of me?" The answer is something like: "I am becoming a person who, in disclosing shame, is open to God." Through his Confessions, Augustine gives self-disclosure a central importance in the Christian life. By according self-disclosure such a prominent role, and accomplishing this through autobiographical narrative, Augustine left a permanent mark on autobiography. Through the Confessions, he has made it virtually impossible for autobiographers to avoid self-disclosure, and has insured that individual autobiographies will be evaluated for their self-disclosive power. We expect autobiographers, following Augustine, to "reveal" themselves, to disclose hidden aspects of the self, by which we normally mean those aspects which are peculiarly sensitive, intimate, and vulnerable.

But why do we expect this? Is it merely a matter of curiosity, of voyeuristic pleasure? For some readers, perhaps it is. For them, there will always be autobiographers who arc shameless enough to cater to such desires.

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But Lynd offers a much more profound explanation that ties directly into our analysis of Augustine's three parabolic events. She writes: "The import of shame for others may reach even deeper than shame for ourselves." She notes, for example, that parents sometimes feel greater shame for their children, and children feel greater shame for their parents, then either do for themselves. She notes, further, that in feeling shame for another person, we confront the very meaning of our lives. "Feeling with others in situations of exposure … forces us to face the questions of whether there is meaning and where truth and meaning lie."²¹ When we expect autobiographers to disclose hidden aspects of themselves, this may reflect our own desire, perhaps unarticulated but nonetheless real and urgent, to face the question of the meaning of our own lives. Through their shame, we address the meaning of our own existence.

VII

Consider the following parabolic event from Elie Wiesel's autobiography entitled Night.²² The episode occurs near the end of the account of his imprisonment at Buchenwald during World War II. Wiesel was fifteen years old at the time; his father was near death from exhaustion and starvation. He writes:

When I came back from the bread distribution, I found my father weeping like a child: "Son, they keep hitting me!"
"Who?" I thought he was delirious.
"Him, the Frenchman … and the Pole … they were hitting me."
Another wound to the heart, another hate, another reason for living lost.
"Eliezer … Eliezer … tell them not to hit me…. I haven't done anything…. Why do they keep hitting me?"
I began to abuse his neighbors. They laughed at me. I promised them bread, soup. They laughed. Then they got angry; they could not stand my father any longer, they said, because he was now unable to drag himself outside to relieve himself.
The following day he complained that they had taken his ration of bread.
"While you were asleep?"
"No, I wasn't asleep. They jumped on top of me. They snatched my bread … and they hit me … again."

This situation continued for a week, and then his father died one night while Eliezer slept. When he discovered in the morning that his father's place had been taken by another invalid, he found he could not weep: "It pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might have perhaps found something like-free at last!"

Undoubtedly, Eliezer felt shame for his father as the older man suffered insult and abuse, and became incontinent. His father's humiliation

²¹ Lynd, p. 57.
²² Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Avon Books, 1969), pp. 121-24.

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was a wound to Eliezer's own heart, another reason for Eliezer to despair of living. But we, as readers of this account, also feel shame for Eliezer when his response to his father's death was an involuntary sense of relief: "free at last!" Surely, we do not feel moral indignation toward Eliezer. It could hardly be a matter of guilt. But we feel his shame, share his shame, and as we experience shame for Eliezer, we face the question of the meaning of our own lives.

The shame of others, exposed through parabolic events, can unravel our own carefully constructed myths of life's meaning and purpose. In mythic events, as in the Garden of Eden story, humans experience shame, they hide, and God asks: "Where in the world have they gone?" In parabolic events, humans experience shame and they ask: "Where in the world is God?" When we encounter a parabolic event in an autobiography, our own myths of life's meaning and purpose are inevitably threatened, and we are forced to grope for new ways of perceiving the presence of God in our own world.

VIII

This exploration into Augustine's Confessions raises hermeneutical issues of a broader nature. Let me point briefly to four such issues.

(1) One issue concerns the grounds for designating an episode in an autobiography as a "parabolic event." Is this an arbitrary designation, or do certain rules govern our choice? In most cases, we have an intuitive sense of which events in an autobiography are parabolic. Like the parable, they compel us into the narrative and will not let go of us. Also, as previously noted, they typically upset the normal narrative flow. We find ourselves wondering why the autobiographer has chosen to give so much attention to this particular event, or we ask ourselves why the autobiographer seems to invest this event with so much emotion?

But to help us determine how a particular event functions parabolically, it is often useful to analyze the event in terms of the major components of a parable. Without pretending to any expertise in these matters, I would suggest that the parables of Jesus have the following structural elements: (1) the parable depicts an event of conflict, generally of an interpersonal nature. (2) This conflict results in an altered relationship between the principals in the story. The relationship between the participants at the beginning of the story has become a very different relationship by the end of the story. (3) The meaning of the event is communicated through the story itself. One does not look outside the parable for the "point" of the story. Rather, the story is the point. (4) The parable is open-ended without a neat and tidy resolution of the conflict situation. As Crossan points out, for parable "reconciliation is no more fundamental a principle than irreconciliation. You have built a lovely home, myth assures us; but, whispers parable, you are right above an earthquake fault."²³ (5) The parable emphasizes the impor

²³ The Dark Interval, p. 57.

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tance of perceiving what is not readily apparent. Through parables, our customary ways of perceiving our situation are challenged and upset because they misperceive how God is acting in our world.²⁴

We should note in this regard that autobiography affords an author the opportunity to perceive what was not perceived about an event when it first occurred. In a paradoxical way, autobiography is precisely about what was not experienced in the past, for perception is experience. Autobiography is not mere reminiscence. It is a restructuring of our perceptions of what we have been in order to gain a clearer picture of what we are becoming.

(2) A second issue that deserves attention relates to possible similarities between types of parables and types of parabolic events in autobiography. Crossan suggests that Jesus' parables fall into three major types: advent, reversal, and action.²⁵ He further suggests that parables reflect Jesus' own religious experience. This latter suggestion may be viewed in connection with John Dunne's observation that the major turning points in Jesus' life involved his relations with John the Baptist: Jesus' baptism, John's imprisonment, John's murder.²⁶

Perhaps it is not purely coincidental that Jesus' baptism was an advent experience, John's imprisonment was for Jesus a reversal, and John's murder was a moment of critical reckoning that called Jesus to resolute, fateful action. Significantly enough, the three parabolic events in Augustine's Confessions also fit this typology, with the pear-stealing event an advent (though in the more threatening sense of hiddenness and mystery, rather than discovery and joy), the friend's death a reversal, and the garden experience a call to resolute action. And perhaps some parabolic events, like some parables, reflect all three modalities. This seems to be true, for example, of Augustine's garden experience: it is simultaneously an advent (the voice as of a child and the startlingly appropriate text from Romans), a reversal (putting on the Lord Jesus Christ), and action (his decision to live a different kind of life). Perhaps certain parabolic events are especially decisive for the narrative as a whole because they thus partake of the fullness of the parabolic form.

(3) A question of relationship between Bible and autobiography suggests a third issue. While I have focused on the parabolic tradition in the Bible, considering it to be somehow normative for autobiography (since both parable and autobiography are narrative in form), it should be noted that autobiography has been influenced by other biblical forms.

²⁴ I have applied this model of the parable to pastoral care and counseling. See my Pastoral Counseling and Preaching (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), pp. 125-130 and Biblical Approaches to Pastoral Counseling (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), chap. 4.
²⁵ John Dominic Crossan, In Parables (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
²⁶ A Search for God in Time and Memory, pp. 8-14.

272 - Parabolic Events in Augustine's Autobiography

John Bunyan's Grace Abounding reflects Paul's prison letters; John Henry Newman's Apologia has strong patriarchal overtones; Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is reminiscent of wisdom literature, especially Proverbs; Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness reflects the influence of the Psalms; and some recent autobiographies by black Americans are in the prophetic mode. More attention needs to be given to the influence of biblical forms on religious autobiography, in regard to both literary structure and content. In fact, this biblical influence is one important reason why autobiography has taken so many different forms, and is therefore such a difficult genre to characterize.

(4) A fourth and final issue is the hermeneutical role of psychology in the study of autobiography. In discussing the Confessions, I have drawn heavily on two developmental theorists, Lynd and Erikson, for their views on the. dynamics of shame. But it would be profitable to explore additional ways that psychological theories might be used as interpretive devices in the study of autobiography. Let me simply note that I myself was introduced to the phenomenon of parabolic events not through the theology of story but through a psychological book, Erikson's Young Man Luther. What has received little attention in the critical assessment of Erikson's psychoanalytic study of Luther is the fact that he based his narrative on three parabolic events in Luther's life: the fit in the choir, the first mass, and the revelation in the tower.²⁷

These three events seem structurally and dynamically similar to the three events in Augustine's Confessions. Structurally, the fit in the choir involves advent, the first mass involves reversal, and the tower experience issues in resolute action. Dynamically, the fit in the choir involves exposure, the first mass involves incongruity, and the tower experience involves finding meaning through the shame of another (Christ's humiliation on the cross). Taken together, these events reveal through their parabolic structure, how God is active in Luther's world; and they disclose, through the dynamic process of shame, what Luther himself is becoming. These disclosures are, of course, interdependent.

IX

The striking similarities between the parabolic events in Augustine and Luther (not to mention Jesus) should not surprise us. For the more one reads in autobiography, the more one is inclined to believe Carl Rogers' oft-quoted axiom, "What is most personal is most general."²⁸ Or as Frederick Buechner puts it in his recent autobiography, "My assumption is that the story of one of us is in some measure the story of us all."²⁹ Autobiography enables an author to struggle with the question: "What is becoming of me?" But, in the final analysis, we read autobiography because we want to know: "What is becoming of us?"

²⁷ Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958).
²⁸ Carl B. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 26.
²⁹ Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 6.