Confessing Our Selves: Participation in Martyrdom After Constantine

Joshua Blanchard

University of Aberdeen

20/05/2023

In a world without physical martyrdom, Augustine articulates a psychologically interior account of life as death with Christ.

Christian ethics has drifted significantly from the questions familiar to us who intellectually ‘live’ in the patristic world. Namely: what does it mean to be happy? What does it mean to life and die with Christ? Or put more succinctly, in light of Christ what does it mean to be human? I am, in that sense, assuming a disposition of study that considers theology and ethics as two sides of this pursuit of God as imaged in Christ, witnessed by the apostles, and now revealed to use anew by Christ in the Scriptures through the fathers.

I am concerned with Christianity as following Christ in death. What that looks like in situations in which literal martyrdom is not available to us. In this pursuitI look to Augustine. I argue that writing in an empire recently rid of martyrdom, Augustine turns inward, to locate accounts of life and death within us. In focusing on the inner life, Augustine shifts accounts of the Christian life from the willing surrender of the body in martyrdom to the willing surrender of our inner life in confession.

In the next few pages I want to consider Augustine’s conception of the inner life in the context of this self giving of confession. because it’s outside of my expertise I’ll skip what can only be described as a crude rehearsing of the centrality of martyrdom in the early fathers. Instead, I consider Augustine’s account of his self and self-knowledge as a finite being distended over time and only known by God. in attempt to articulate Confession as an act of psychological death, and then look to Augustine’s own life for an example of what this might look like in practice.

To engage conf. as an ethical text is to accept that Augustine does introduce a concept of interiority, hitherto unknown in the Western world. While reflections on the soul and its interior composition are nothing new, Augustine’s reflections on turning inward to the inner-man (interiorem hominem) and his emphasis on the will (uluntas) shifts the Christian life away from the external actions of the individual and to reflection on one’s internal desires as moral qualities themselves.[1] Classical accounts of ethics focused on the external expression of inward virtue, while early Christian writers prior to Augustine were concerned with physical death in the pursuit of martyrdom.. As Peter Brown notes, ‘by the time of Augustine, the Church had settled down in Roman society. The Christians worst enemies could no longer be placed outside him: they were inside, his sins and his doubts; and the climax of a man’s life would not be martyrdom, but conversion’.[2] This marks a distinct shift in both ethics and anthropology. Where the earliest fathers spoke of embracing one’s humanity as literal death, Augustine crafts an account of spiritual death in a world without martyrdom.[3] One must read Augustine’s writings in this light, not concerned with the external institutions of Rome, but with the realities of the interiorem hominem as he seeks to ‘die with Christ’ in a world without martyrdom. Thus, Augustine’ shifts ethics from virtues of habit (consuetudo) to virtues of will (uoluntas).

This focus on uoluntas becomes central for Augustine’s union of selfhood and ethics in conf. In this early work, he first attempts to articulate the functions of the human soul, being, knowing, and willing (esse, nosse, velle).[4] Of these three, uoluntas is the subject of Augustine’s life and conversion in conf. and the problem of a divided will is the beginning of his problems both of identity and ethics. Wherever his will oscillates, so too does he feel himself disintegrate, moreover, as explored later in this chapter, it is in the reconciliation of his will, not his intellect, that Augustine finds stability of his being, and this ultimate reconciliation that he anticipates finding ultimate rest and stability for his soul. To read conf as an ethical text is to read the account of a human will, fluctuating the love of self (amor sui) and the love of God (amor Dei), and by extension, an account of Augustine floundering to find his own identity.

At the centre of conf. is Augustine’s paradoxical inspection of his inner-man, revealing the instability and dependence of his own life, and arousing within himself and his reader a greater love for God. Conf. arises out of Augustine’s own desire to share his soul, to praise God for the good and evil of his life, be known by friends both near and far to him, and to serve his readers as a model of Christian imperfection, arousing a love of God within them to receive the life he has received.[5]

Augustine himself defines the purpose of The Confessions: to ‘praise the just and good God for my evil and good acts and lift up the understanding and affection of men to him’.[6] The entirety of the work is an extrapolation of the reality that Augustine does not know who he is, but God does. As Charles Mathewes notes, ‘Augustine wants us to see our lives as much less intelligible than we usually think they are’.[7] Augustine admits his inability to understand himself and turns to God to provide that understanding. Augustine concedes that the narrative itself is out of his hands; he likewise shows that the narratives of his readers’ lives are out of their own hands.

The intentional rejection of the first-person perspective makes explicit Augustine’s lack of epistemic access to his own self. One can read conf. as a series of Augustine’s failed attempts to define or defend his identity in anything outside of the revelation of God in prayer.

Augustine chief problem of self-knowledge concerns the accuracy of his introspection, specifically his memory. Contemporary notions of identity are dominated by a stream-of consciousness, that one’s identity is sustained by one’s memory of themselves throughout their lives.[8] We typically follow Locke in claiming ‘I am the person who has had my experiences’, Augustine challenges the confidence of the recollection of these experiences.

Augustine’s describes memory as the faculty of both remembering what is past and anticipating what is future.[9] Though this complicates his ability to establish continuity of himself, as his memory if never present of his current self.[10] He writes ‘Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery…And this is mind, this is I myself…What then am I, my God?’[11] Despite the greatness of memory, he finds it, ‘characterized by diversity, by life of many forms, utterly immeasurable...the varieties there cannot be counted, and are, beyond any reckoning, full of unnumerable things’.[12] Augustine fails to find himself in the memory because he has too many memories, they are subjective in their collection, and subjective in their recollection.

Since it is the will that determines what the memory attends to, he is liable to compile a false narrative.[13] This is not intentional self-deception, for the mind itself remembers more clearly that which it desires; the understanding cannot direct the will to seek something it does not.[14] The intellect cannot decide what to commit to memory, but retains them without any conscious act of commitment.[15] The mind cannot force itself to remember that which it does not desire, either for its own sake or for the sake of others. However, that which excites the passions, the mind will remember without effort or awareness.

The contemplation of the entirety of oneself (as a stream-of-consciousness) in the memory would require not only that one never forget anything, but that one recall the fullness of this memory at once. Such a recollection is beyond the ability of the mind. Thus, the mind recalls what it wishes; it fashions narratives of the self, selecting the memories which confirm its initial desires. We cannot recall an objective autobiography, but instead select specific memories from which to re-narrate our lives, in accordance with our preconceived notion of who we want to be.

The critique of memory reveals the inherent limitations of identity as a stream-of consciousness, that Augustine is entirely uncertain of himself. Meanwhile, ‘to [God’s] eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is naked’.[16] Thus, if he desires an account of himself, he must turn to God who can provide such an account, writing ‘to hear you speaking about oneself is to know oneself’.[17] As Rowan Williams notes, ‘Augustine is attempting to locate his identity in the reception of himself by God, a hope of unity constructed by the steady and unbounded seeing and hearing of God’.[18]

In seeking God for his identity, Augustine seeks an account of his past and future, both of which are who he is as he is confessing. Though he undergoes temporal change, his identity as seen by God remains unchanged. Thus, Augustine recalls ‘The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together, to merge into you.’[19] The events of Augustine’s life, the narrative which he recalls and that which he can only anticipate, are temporal events, which flow into unanimity in eternity as one cohesive self. In this way, Augustine’s conversion is not a conversion from himself, but a conversion, a realignment to his true self, as known by God.[20] His act of conversion is better conceived as an act of confession, of self-giving, away from his own possession of himself and toward possession of himself by God. If death is the giving up of our lives, in in these psychological accounts confession is giving up our selves. Thus, the title is not a typo, but highlights the possessive nature of our conception of ourselves. I am not interested in rejecting the concept of the self, but our possession of it.

John Cavadini finds Augustine’s account of self-giving in Conf. to be decidedly eucharistic. Though I think Cavadini may be stretching the centrality of the sacrament in the text, he aptly identifies the one instance of Augustine at the altar in the confessions as the hinge between the narrative of the text, Augustine’s present-tense reflection, and his turn to exegesis. He notes, The Eucharist is thus a properly eschatological sacrament that mediates an identity suffused with hope in God's economy of mercy instead of in one's own ability to create an identity out of whole cloth, for which the only appropriate response is gratitude.’ Conf. 9.13.35 is a kind of celebration of mercy in which Augustine recounts his mother as one of the “merciful” to whom the Beatitudes (cf. Mt. 5:17) promise mercy, and yet there is no one truly merciful who is not already the beneficiary of God's mercy. Their only hope is in the intercession of that “healing remedy who hung upon the tree, the medicine for our wounds who intercedes for us.” In fact, Augustine here asks God to hear him “through (per)” that healing remedy.16 If even Monica's virtues are gifts of God, her life cannot have been so perfect that she could claim it as a settled achievement, a self‐made and self‐perfected identity.

Even Monica's life is not a self‐evidently settled achievement that one can look upon with any assurance, except by remembering and invoking the mercy of God dispensed from the altar. At the end of book 9, Augustine the bishop leaves his readers, fellow members of the Church whom he serves in episcopal ministry with “heart and voice and pen,” at God's altar remembering Monica by praying for her. “So may the last request she made of me be granted to her more abundantly by the prayers of many, evoked by my confessions, than by my prayers alone.”18 Augustine has rhetorically evoked the Eucharistic community, sacramentally formed in the memory of the price of our redemption. Formed in that memory, they can pray in hope, united with the intercession of Christ.

Famously, book following on the eucharistic passage of book 9, is the only place Augustine addresses Christ directly. Christ is mentioned here as the Redeemer, the true flesh and blood who truly died for us and now intercedes for us. And yet, outside of this one passage it is by addressing the Father that Augustine invokes this sweetness, this economy of mercy, for to address the Father is to respect the Trinitarian economy of salvation and to invoke it. This address does not make conf. less Christological; on the contrary, it makes it more so. “Confession” is a way of remembering that is Eucharistic, that is formed in the memory of the one who paid the price of his innocent blood and now intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father. Augustine's prayer, uttered in the Spirit, in its address to the Father, is joined to this prayer of Christ. The whole of conf. is an exercise in Eucharistic remembering, though we do not grasp that fully until Augustine is able to recount his baptism and then his own participation, as a baptized Catholic, in the Eucharist at his mother's graveside.

Book 10 emerges out of book 9’s ascent to the Eucharistic altar. It emerges out of Eucharistic remembering, in the midst of the Eucharistic assembly, all evoked by Augustine's skillful rhetoric. Book 10 will continue and deepen this Eucharistic remembering. It is explicitly addressed not only to God but also spoken “in the ears of believing men and women … your sons and my masters,” those whom God has ordered Augustine to “serve.”36 “To those, then, such people as you command me to serve, I will disclose myself not as I have been but as I am now, as I am still.”37 This will not be for them the same as hearing the truth directly from the fountain of wisdom, as Nebridius now hears it, but, in a sense, the Eucharistic community serves as a sacrament of such direct infusion by God's truth.

We are invited to believe that, in the Eucharistic community, whose very defining feature is nothing other than God's mercy, we can seek God in such a way that our seeking will succeed to the praise that, according to the opening lines of the work, will delight our restless heart.

Confession is this of deliberate self-giving. It is a rejection of any claim to know or define oneself. It goes beyond the act of conversion as recounted in book eight, as Augustine expounds the act of conversion to be an act of God, synonymous with the act of being formed into his true self, an Augustine that is in union with and at rest in God. As far as Augustine’s ethic depends on his anthropology, one can only identify a clear rejection of typical notions of the self, such as autonomy, rationality, or certainty. Instead, Augustine finds the human to be weak and ignorant: ontologically dependent, fraught with instability, given to his volitions, and uncertain of one’s own self. Consequently, the resultant ethic is centred on giving up the false notions of the self and being converted to a love of God.

Augustine expresses this most clearly in his exposition of Psalm 32 (en ps. 31).[21] Augustine reflects that he is happy (beatus) when he is forgiven.[22] Brian Brock is correct that Psalm 32 is at the centre of Augustine’s thought. He had it engraved on his wall beside his bed, and it structures his work.[23] One can see Augustine’s ethics and soteriology in the first line: ‘Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one to whom the Lord will impute no sin, and in whose mouth is no guile’.[24] His vision of the good life rests not on his virtuous actions, but on the action of God’s forgiveness. It is not that one does not have iniquity, but that God forgives the iniquity one has.[25] Happiness is a passive gift, in which the only actions of the recipient are themselves actions of God’s grace.[26] In this exposition, Augustine once again returns to the theme of confession, noting that it is confession that precedes happiness, ‘If he had shouted his sins aloud and kept quiet about his merits, you see, his bones would have been rejuvenated – his virtues, that is.’[27] It is not virtue that leads to happiness, but confession which leads to forgiveness; forgiveness allows for rest, and rest restores the individual to virtue. Thus, Augustine does suggest an ethic of virtue, but claims virtues are consequence, not a cause of happiness.

Having established these we can now look to the normative demands of confession: an embrace of our finitude, the acceptance of the impotence of rationality upon the will, the willing exposure of one’s moral failings, and the epistemic limitations of ethical discourse.

I believe that these reflections should temper, at least somewhat, the overly individualistic interpretations of conf.

But, as intimate as these exchanges with God truly are, they are not private: “I confess not only before you in secret exultation tinged with fear and secret sorrow infused with hope, but also in the ears of believing men and women. The psychological account of the Christian life not simply private and interior, but arises as the bonds of charity among the members of the one Body, the Spouse, are purified and perfected.

Augustine is certainly aware of God's mercy on his behalf, the price of Christ's blood that defines the whole Eucharistic community? Augustine is aware that he is the subject of this love, the love that binds a people and that re‐casts Augustine's whole identity. The person who is able to say, “I love you, Lord …. You pierced my heart with your word, and I fell in love with you,”46 whose heart is transfixed by the charity proclaimed in God's word, is the one aware of his heart transfixed by the price of his redemption, the same price paid for everyone and the price that binds all into one Body.

We can observe more closely the structure of the ascent to God through memory that Augustine undertakes in book 10. Like all ascents patterned after the Neoplatonic spirituality of inwardness, it is a path of deepening self‐awareness, and “remembering” is not simply an act of recalling the past – though that is involved – but, rather, of encountering and identifying oneself, and then giving that self away in confession to be received in Eucharist.

Crucially, this inadequacy of self-knowledge is not to be ignored or overcome, but embraced. As Rowan Williams notes that for Augustine, ‘the nature of self or soul, is to be understood in relation to the story of Christ’s acceptance of the weakness of mortality’.[28] Williams makes no pretensions to supernatural or transcendent human wisdom, much less to the human acquisition of divine or of the self. He notes that the Christ of conf. is not primarily a sage of heavenly wisdom, but instead communicates wisdom through enabling participation in Christ’s own temporal existence.[29] Augustine moves beyond his Neoplatonist influences to describe wisdom in terms of Christ’s descent, not intellectual assent.[30] If identity is determined by God’s attention to man, then the incarnation claims that this attention occurs through physical and temporal events, through human narrative, and through the Church. To receive oneself is to receive oneself in God, and to receive God requires the humility to embrace, not transcend, one’s finite and temporal situation.[31] Only in embracing one’s humility with the humble Christ, does one find participate in the unchanging being of God while still bound in temporal existence. As Augustine writes, ‘for my part, my God - you raise high my humble self and give rest to my toil, you hear my confessions and forgive my sins.’[32] Notably this comment appears in the present tense; it is not an anticipation of what will happen, but Augustine’s own description how in the act of confession, he is being met in Christ. It is this embrace of human dependence, volition, and weakness, and ignorance that forms what it means to join Christ in death in confession.

It means ascending to deeper awareness of oneself as a subject of the mercy that is dispensed in the Eucharist and which creates a community bound in charity. In book 10, Augustine “ascends” to God's mercy. One can therefore evoke the most intimate self‐revelations before God and yet confess them publicly because everyone involved, as a member of the Eucharistic community, is defined by the same unimaginably priceless mercy; beyond that, no one has anything to brag about. The intimacy with God is, in a sense, mediated by intimacy in truth and love with those whose lives are defined by that mercy and bound together through the price of our redemption that is “dispensed” from the altar. Confession such as this can only bear to be uttered when one is, like Monica, bound by faith to the sacrament that defines the very boundaries and contours of our identity.

a. Augustine Confesses and forgets.

This is most plain through Augustine’s own conversion, seen in the comparison of his disposition of his self-examination in book eight with that of his confession in book ten. Prior to his conversion, Augustine describes introspection as ‘gnawing at my inner-self…overcome by a fearful sense of shame,[33] ‘accusations against myself’,[34] ‘the single will split into many,[35] and the ‘dredg[ing] up all misery’.[36] Contrarily, he recounts his confession as an act in which by giving himself to God, he receives himself, and finds happiness. He writes in book ten, [You] are so an object of love that I am ashamed of myself and reject myself. You are my choice, and only by your gift can I please either you or myself…When I am evil, making confession to you is simply to be displeased with myself. When I am good, making confession to you is simply to make no claim on my own behalf’.[37] In confession the entirety of his person is present and exposed, but his will is directed away from himself.

Moreover, confession is not merely an act for oneself, but is a rhetorical act which evokes in others this same love of God. Augustine prays to the ‘physician of his most intimate self’ (medice meus intime) over his own confession:

Stir up the heart when people read and hear the confessions of my past wickedness, which you have forgiven and covered up to grant me happiness in yourself (beares me in te), transforming my soul…the heart is aroused (excutant) by the love of your mercy and the sweetness of your grace, by which every weak person in given power, while dependence on grace produces awareness of one’s own weakness. Good people are delighted (delectate) to hear about the past sins of those who have now shed them. The pleasure (delectate) is not in the evils as such, but that though they were so once, they are not like that now.[38]

Augustine reflects that confession evokes a change of will in both the confessor and those who hear the confession. Thus, when Augustine comes back to loving and desiring God in his conversion, it is not a break in the continuity of his nature, but a return to it. He notes, ‘We see the things you have made because they are. But they are because you see them…At one time we were moved to do what is good, after our heart conceived through your Spirit. But at an earlier time, we were moved to do wrong and to forsake you.’[39] In confessing his inability to desire rightly and thus find his proper weight and order, Augustine confesses that God alone can establish the proper object of his love, and he is thus converted to himself. He focuses not on a change of mind (mens), but on a change of heart (cor), as confession (and confessiones) is not an intellectual exercise, but a movement of the will away from oneself and to God.

This is modelled in Augustine’s own career. Augustine steps down from power, confesses publicly that his readers might be aroused toward a love of God, and only comes to office through the cajoling of his own Bishop. This is a confessing act. Augustine does not presume define his own life and career but gives his life up to the Church. He submits to the judgements of the authority over him. Reluctantly accepting a public life, he accepts a life of confession. As such, public confession is his first public act.

This is not introspection for its own sake, nor is it mere confession to another clergy. Rather, Augustine intends to begin his public life as a Roman official with a proclamation of moral failure. Whereas Roman officials tout their qualifications and achievements to bring honour to themselves as their positions, Augustine pre-emptively disqualifies himself for any such honour (superbia). He begins public life with a disposition of humility, if not inadequacy, expressing his condition as dependent, volitional, and restless. Having established that his attempt at union with the transcendent God depends upon the action of God, he is not concerned with the impossibility of the task, but only that he does not get in the way.

This helps explain the great professional irony of Augustine’s life: he had resigned from a prestigious academic post and a life of political praise, only to be forced back into a role of political prominence within a decade.[40] If Augustine’s reluctance to ordination and Bishop thereafter are any indication, his return to public life can only be explained as an act of self-giving. His own desire appears to have been to retain a relatively non-public existence, at Cassiciacum, at his family estates in Thegaste, or the monastery at Hippo Regius.[41] In accepting the office as bishop and in writing conf., Augustine sets aside for good any claim he had upon his own life. This comparison between two public offices expresses a distinction not in action of office, but in disposition. While public life for the sake of honour is self-love, public life as a service to others is self-giving.

It is significant that Augustine never returns to update his confessions. Aside from personal letters, and brief mentions in his sermons, this is his last work on himself. Even trin, with its analysis of the inner-man only examines the nature of the soul in abstract, not Augustine’s soul once more. Even his retractiones, are limited to the writings themselves, and not to Augustine, who he was or how he wants to be remembered. As Lancel notes, as a bishop, he was ‘a man whose life was no longer his own…who would forevermore renounce taking his ego as the subject of a discourse in the first person’.[42] His task now was to comment on the scriptures and to care for the people of Hippo Regius. Augustine’s political posture is the inverse of the Roman pursuit of personal honour in office; it is humble exposure, and then personal self-forgetfulness.

[1] Justin Martyr calls his own work a memoir. Behr WTN 98 [2] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, New Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 159 [3] See John Cavadini, “Two Ancient Views on Suffering and Death” in George Kalantzis and Matthew Levering, Christian Dying: Witnesses from the Tradition (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018). [4][4]Conf. 13.11.12 dico autem haec tria: esse, nosse, uelle. Augustine will later revise this trio in de trin. to be memory, understanding, and will, following greater conviction that one’s being is not in the mind, but in God. See de trin. 5.30. [5] Retr. 23; ep 24,1; en ps. 55.14 [6] Retr. 32.1, 130. [7] Charles Mathewes, ‘Book One: The Presumptuousness of autobiography and the paradoxes of beginning,’ in A Readers Companion to Augustine’s Confessions. Ed. Kim Paffenroth and Robert Peter Kennedy, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. 2003), 9. [8] See ‘Of identity and Diversity’, in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (London: Penguin Classics, 1997) 296-313. [9] Conf. 11.15.19, 232. [10] Conf. 11. 15.20, 232 [11] Conf. 10.17.26, 193. [12] Conf. 10.17.26, 194. [13] Conf. 10.8.12, 185-186. [14] Conf. 10.14.22. As Hill notes, here Augustine cites Cicero’s key emotions in De Finibus, 3.10.35; Tusculan Disputations 4.6.11. Augustine does not yet suggest his critique of Cicero’s categories of virtue forthcoming in De Civitas Dei, 5; 19. See Hill, The Trinity, 191. [15] Conf. 10.14.22, 192. [16] Conf. 1.1.1, 179. [17] Conf. 10.3.3, 180. [18] Rowan Williams, On Augustine, 9. See also Conf. 10.3.4. [19] Conf. 11.29.40, 244. [20] Conf. 11.29.39.244. [21] As the Septuagint, from which Augustine’s Latin translations of the Psalms combines Ps. 8 and 9, he lists each Psalm as one less than most modern translations, which follow the Hebrew numbering. Most Catholic and Greek lectionaries and psalters retain the numeration of the Septuagint. [22] For a full account of Augustine’s ethics from Psalm 32, see Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture, 0 edition (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007)., 140. [23] CITE BROWN [24] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms, Volume 1 Study Edition: Psalms 1-32, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding, New edition (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 2002). 31(2).9., 371. [25] En Ps. 32(2).12, 376. [26] En Ps. 32(2).9, 371. [27] Ibid, 375. [28] Rowan Williams, On Augustine, 1st Edition (London New-York (N.Y.) Sydney: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016). 12. [29] Ibid 11. [30] Ibid 12. [31] Ibid 12. [32] Conf 12.36, 266 et tamen ego, deus meus, celsitudo humilitatis meae et requires laboris mei, qui audis confessiones meas et dimittis peccata mea. [33] 8.18, 145 ita rodebar intus et confundebar pudore [34] 9.19, 146 …terminato autem sermon et causa qua uenerate, abiit ille, et ego ad me. quae non in me dixi [35] 9.25, 150 eadem anima est non tota uoluntate illud aut hoc uolens et ideo discerpitur graui molestia… [36] 9.29, 152 Ubi uero a fundo arcano alta consideration traxit et congessit totam miseriam meam in conspectus cordis mei… [37] Conf. 179 cum enim malus sum, nihil est aliud confiteri tibi quam displicere mihi: cum uero pius, nihil est aliud confiteri tibi quam hoc non tribuere mihi… [38] Conf. 10.4, 180 uerum tamen tu, medice meus intime, quo fructu ista faciam, eliqua mihi. Nam confessiones praeteritorum malorum meorum, quae remisiti et texisti ut beares me in te, mutans animam meam…excutant cor ne dormiat in desperation et dicat non possum” sed euigilet in amore misericordiae tuae et dulcedine gratiae tuae, qua potens est omnis infirmus qui sibi per ipsam fit conscius infirmatatis suae. Et delectat bonos audiere praeterita mala eorum qui iam carent eis, nec ideo delectate quia mala sunt, sed quia fuerunt et non sunt. Chadwick’s translation is ontologically timid here, claiming that evils ‘are not like that’ now. A stronger translation like Hammond’s reflects the definitiveness of the change: ‘they delight not because of the misdeeds, but rather, because they existed once, but now are no more’. LC, 2016. [39] Conf. 13.53, 304 Nos itaque ista quae fecisti uidemus, quia sunt, tu autem quia uides ea, sunt. Et nos foris uidemus quia sunt, et intus quia bona sunt; tu autem ibi uidesti facta, ubi uidisti facienda. Et nos alio temore moti sumus ad bene faciendum, posteaquam concepit de spiritu tuo cor nostrum; priore autem temopore ad male faciendum mouebamur deserentes te [40] Augustine resigned from his position in the empirical court in 386 and was appointed coadjutor Bishop in 395. The greater irony lies not in the return to public life, but the incomparable honour that Augustine did in fact attain as a result of this resignation. See Lancel 98-186 [41] See Brown 115-137. Augustine’s own reflection on this reluctance is best found in serm. 355.2 [42] Lancel, 204.