On Augustine compiles essays that Rowan Williams wrote on Augustine throughout his career. In this paper I suggest that Williams reads Augustine through the lens of joining in Christ’s humanity to transcend our own finitude. One must be careful in assessing a collection of essays over many years. To impose an agenda upon such work risks reducing the author’s explorations to a single polemic.[1] The only themes one can identify throughout these essays are those Williams identifies himself. As he acknowledges, they inadvertently focus on Augustine as someone who “reflects carefully on a central tension in the human condition – between the fact that we have to begin all our thinking and praying in full awareness of our limited, embodied condition and the fact that we are summoned by our creator to go beyond limited and specific desire, reaching out to an endless abundance of life.”[2] Williams identifies two fundamental themes of this tension: “the nature of the human in its relation to God and the character of Trinitarian divine love and its embodiment in Christ.”[3] These are complementary expressions of what it means for finite humans to love God; one can only address either of these themes in conjunction with the other. Williams argues that to be human is to share in the sufferings of Christ. Humans bear the image of God as far as they are subjects dependent on God; because humans are prone to self-love, this dependent disposition must continually be corrected through union with Christ in his suffering. Consequently, Christian theology must look at suffering not as interruptions from what means to be human, but as interruptions to what it means to be human.
ii. Augustine, like other Church fathers considered what is meant to be human in a teleological framework. If one is to ask what it means to be human, one must first consider the telos of the human, and how one attains it. Augustine claims that the proper end of a human is union with God. Unlike the Platonists, however, the means to this union is not intellectual ascent to the realm of the forms or the Plotinian One, but union with Christ, the man. Rather than rejecting the bodily limitations of humanity, in Christ Augustine sees a validation and embrace of the physical. Thus, humanity’s union with God occurs through imitating Christ in one’s embrace of physical limitation and accepting one’s dependence on God. This union with the incarnate Christ is most poignantly displayed in the embrace of one’s finitude and morality.
iii. The place of this embrace in Christian writings prior to Augustine is typically marked by joining Christ in death through the pursuit of martyrdom, emphasizing victory over external and temporal enemies. However, as Peter Brown notes, “by the time of Augustine, the Church had settled down in Roman society. The Christian’s worst enemies could no longer be placed outside him: they were inside, his sins and his doubts; the climax of a man’s life would not be martyrdom, but conversion.”[4] Augustine’s work thus makes a rhetorical move to remind his readers that their life is in Christ and not on Earth. They join Christ in death in sacramental, not literal, ways to remember their humanity as beings who die and hope for the resurrection.[5] One must read Augustine’s writings in this light, not concerned with the external institutions of Rome, but with the realities of the inner-man as he joins with Christ without martyrdom.[6]
iv. Therefore, in pursing the tension between human finitude and the call to union with the infinite God, Williams’s essays focus on the inner-man. His reading of the Confessions locates this finitude by situating humans, and specifically human self-knowledge, in time.[7] The emphasis on self-knowledge and certainty is a central point in Williams’s writings, because the notion of an independent self is the exact opposite of the dependent and mortal union with Christ that is the telos of mankind. Because knowledge is temporary, one cannot think of knowledge spatially as a collection of thoughts of either interior rationality or exterior empiricism. Drawing on the discussion of memory in book X of Confessiones, Williams identifies that one cannot have self-knowledge because one cannot escape identifying oneself with one’s own memory, recollecting what has been and anticipating what will be. This recollection is shaped by the present person who is remembering, and yet the act of remembering itself also shapes that person.[8]
v. Williams finds that Augustine’s question of memory and anticipation makes it impossible to objectively consider the person who is remembering and anticipating; the present self cannot observe herself apart from her memory. Thus, coherent self-knowledge would require an examination of what one is from a perspective not caught up in the paradox of memory. If memory is the narration of the future becoming the past, humans need someone other than themselves to “read” this narrative.[9] The problem of being finite, however, is the lack of access to that “other.” Thus, Williams says, “to know myself is to know a speaking subject trying…to come to terms with absence – the absence of God as an object…I know myself as an act of questioning, a lack and search, perpetually unsatisfied in this life, yet not frustrated.”[10] As a result of this lack, one is tempted to look for objectivity in other humans, but these desires also point to the inconsistency of the “self.”
vi. Like memory, one’s desires also frame the paradox of what is means to be human: because one wants objective self-knowledge, which the individual cannot sustain, she is left to desire finite goods.[11] Augustine’s teleology locates man’s true desire as a desire for an infinite God, which frees one’s desires from the risks of temporality. Thus, Williams sees Augustine as attempting to locate his identity in the reception of himself by God, a hope of a unity constructed by God’s steady and unbound seeing and hearing.[12] However, because he locates his identity in his reception by God, mankind’s knowledge of the “self” remains only known by God, whose knowledge is beyond human finitude. Thus, even though the relationship of the “self” to God is stable, it remains epistemically inaccessible.[13] Thus, central to what it means to be human is to know that humanity has no self-knowledge in itself, but in God’s knowledge.[14]
vii. For Williams, the Confessions is about how Augustine struggles to acknowledge this reality as fully transparent before God alone. This rejection of self-knowledge is not disaster or tragedy, since in being absent to a “self,” one is present to “a love which holds together what he cannot unify or sustain by his own resources."[15] Unlike a theory of a reflexive psychological self, whose memory is constantly interrupted by the present, the believing self trusts that God is holding his identity together without interruption.[16]
viii. Similarly, Williams is clear that Augustine’s treatment of self-knowledge in De Trinitate X must be read in context of the rhetorical purpose of the whole work, which is not arguing for self-certainty, but certainty of the self as the subject of something greater.[17] He reads the first nine books of De Trinitate as clarifying the structure of trinitarian language and the analogous functions of the mens.[18] Augustine argues that reasoning itself entails moving intentionally toward an object of desire.[19] Because certainty cannot be found in contingent knowledge, the object of this desire must be a non-contingent good. Williams reads lesser human desires as phenomenological, as noting and comparing those things one desires to find what is desirable about them. However, these phenomenological desires fail to identify an object of man’s true desire, as these various phenomena lack a common object to ground all human desire. Without God as a non-contingent good, the self is but a series of unconnected desires.[20] Williams claims that in orienting all desires to the good, one can understand desires for various objects as phenomenological expressions of a single desire for God.[21]
ix. This reading of Augustine makes self-knowledge unintelligible. To know oneself in reflexive isolation as suggested by those following Descartes would make the self the ultimate object of one’s desire, it would require that the self be the ultimate non-contingent good.[22] Further, to desire oneself as a non-contingent object would require that the “self” be a coherent and self-contained object, uninterrupted by problems of memory and finitude. Williams reads Augustine’s struggle with self-knowledge not as a denial of finitude in pursuit of certainty, but as an embrace of finitude. [23] The examination of one’s self is meant to bring one to the recognition of the inner life as mysterious and frustrating; revealing the superiority of the unchangeable God. The soul can glimpse that true reality is unchanging, but cannot attain it; creating a problem that is only solved by the incarnation, which validates one’s frustration in this finitude which enables humility for us. Therefore, in the Confessions Augustine prays to God, conceding that only God, not himself, comprehends the narrative he is attempting to recount.
x. Williams finds that by moving questions of certainty from contingent knowledge to a recognition humanity’s desire toward God, Augustine gives “an account of mental life in which the fundamental category is lack of and quest for another to love.”[24] As a result, one knows oneself as something that is not a full and determinate object. The question of self-reflection is therefore not “do I know anything?” but “do I know what I am doing?”[25] Williams believes Augustine is drawing his reader’s attention to man’s central activity as desire for God expressed in prayer, not intellectual reflection. It is only in the love of God that one can know her true self, because it is only in union with God that she is her true self. Thus, Williams claims the problem of self-knowledge is the problem of conversion; what one lacks is not knowledge, but love of God.[26]
xi. This is the key paradox: One must accept the limit of one’s humanity to join Christ – the man, prostrate and dead in His repudiation of the “finished self,” and yet to join Christ is to know the significance of what it means to be human in union with God, and what it means to be this particular human.[27] In the remaining essays, Williams develops his account of how exactly one joins with Christ.
xii. Williams claims, “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 knowledge, much less to the human acquisition of divine knowledge of self. He notes that the Christ of the Confessiones 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 neo-Platonist 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]
xiii. Williams continues this theme in “Sapientia: Wisdom and the Trinitarian Relations.”[32] While Augustine is concerned with self-relatedness, in de Trinitate XI.14 he denies that one can know or love herself at all unless he knows and loves himself as known and loved by God: “the mind comes to share in justice, wisdom, and love, by receiving them from God.”[33] This wisdom, sapientia, is not an intellectual wisdom, but participation in God’s knowledge of and love for himself. Augustine connects this inner-trinitarian love between Father and Son to the Image of God in man.[34] And yet, the image of God in humankind is paradoxical. While mankind’s mental faculties reflect the trinity, they only image God’s relationship. No efforts of the mind can bring one directly into relationship with God.[35] Williams reads Augustine as simultaneously highlighting mankind’s likeness to and difference for God, so that one images God only as far as her self-perception is a perception of difference and dependence.[36]
xiv. For this reason, Williams identifies Augustine’s theory of Christian belief not as intellectual ascent, but as moral descent with Christ.[37] While the neo-Platonists spoke of logos, they never imagined one’s encounter with logos being in flesh and time.[38] Augustine reflects on his time with the neo-Platonists noting, “I was not humble enough to receive Christ.”[39] Encountering Christ occurs when one is not an intellectual mystic seeking eternity by works, but a sick person in need of healing from a relationship and love from outside oneself. To know God is to join the suffering prostrate Christ: to throw oneself down on that level, and trust that ‘when he rises, you will rise.’[40] Thus, for Williams, encountering Christ does require self-knowledge, but not as the philosophers or psychologists understand it; rather, what matters is “the knowledge that we are in need, that we are not self-sufficient.”[41] Because the eternal word accepts the limits of humanity, so too must one not seek herself out of time and body, but accept God's grace to embrace finitude. As one looks to Christ, who is the voice of humanity and wisdom, she begins to see how she might grow into wisdom to see and live with God.[42] One’s encounter with Christ, her participation in the trinitarian doxology, is not a fixed achievement, but a journey “into ever greater dependence and longing, into a love that has no end.”[43] This “self-knowledge” is the beginning of what it means to be human.
xv. Citing J.-M. Le Blond, Williams observes that Augustine saw the incarnation as the revelation of the spiritual method: the sense of Christ as the path to the participatory knowledge of the transcendent God.[44] The unifying principal is Christ as sapientia: Wisdom is the contemplation of the eternal, God's delight in God. It is what one hopes to receive by grace, that he might share in the reflexive love of God. In Christ, the wisdom of the Platonists is overtaken by the humility of the incarnation, but God's wisdom only takes root in a person as they accept limitation and spiritual frailty as things they cannot overcome from within.[45] To imitate the incarnate Christ is to occupy his position with God, to join him in humility, which is the door to the eternal. While sapientia is ultimately the contemplation of God by God, the incarnation is what makes God approachable for those who are not God.[46] Williams notes, "The divine act of humility in the incarnation itself, portrayed in Confessions VII becomes the unifying theme of the life of Jesus." It is also the unifying theme of man’s life in Jesus; it is the only way that a life becomes intelligible.[47]
xvi. By now, I hope to have made clear that any connection between Augustine’s questions into the nature of the inner-man and the modern notion of a private, self-defined individual is an error.[48] It is this false independence that Williams sees as hindering mankind from worshiping God as dependent creatures. Augustine conceives of himself as an act of confessio, conjoined with Christ in his acceptance of his humanity and his praise of the Father. As Christ accepts the limits of humanity, so too must Christians accept bodily limitation and spiritual frailty as things one cannot overcome from within. Suffering is a constant reminder of mankind’s finitude, a liturgical act of joining with Christ who suffers.
xvii. In suffering we join with the prostrate Christ in the garden, dependent on the mercy of God to save us from humanity. Following Christ, who chose finitude, our finitude and suffering is not something to condemn, but a way to be imitate Christ in his acceptance of humanity. Williams notes, “The meaning of our salvation is that we are included in his life, given the right to speak with his divine voice, reassured that what our human voices say out of darkness and suffering has been owned by him as his voice, so that it may in some way be opened to the life of God for healing and forgiveness.” It is not just that Christ suffers with us; it is that we are drawn into his suffering that ultimately overcomes all sin and grief.[49] The Christian life – the human life cannot be lived without suffering, because we must live where Christ is, at the level of ruined, scarred humanity.[50] Thus, interruptions are not interruptions from normal life, but to the normal life of human finitude with Christ God's wisdom only takes root in us as we accept bodily limitation and spiritual frailty as things we cannot overcome from within. It is grace that humbles us to accept humility as the way to truth. In this, the self-reflective self betrays orthodoxy not just in its beginning, but in its function: to be with Christ is exactly not to retreat into the intellect, but to sit in the flesh in time.[51] To imitate the incarnate Christ is to occupy his position vis-a-vis God, to join him in humility, which is the door to the eternal. The divine act of humility in the incarnation itself is the unifying theme of the life of Jesus; so too is it the unifying theme of our life in Jesus.[52]
[1] While Williams did make alterations and commentary on his essays in preparing them for publication in this volume, the original essays often appeared in esoteric locations difficult to track down. Thus it is difficult to compare the original essays with those in this edition. I have tried to acknowledge his updated perspectives wherever he makes them known, but because the work was published afresh, not as old works with clearly demarcated commentary, I must assume each essay is written as a distinct publication, without reference to other works in this edition. [2] Rowan Williams, On Augustine, (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016) vii. [3] Ibid ix. [4] Peter Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, New Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 159 [5] 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). [6] For a full discussion of Augustine’s rhetorical purposes in his political writings, see Veronica Ogle, Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine’s City of God (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2020). [7] "A Question to Myself" Time and Self-Awareness in the Confessions” in Rowan Williams on Augustine, (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016) 2. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid 5. [10] Ibid 5 [11]Ibid 8. [12] Ibid 9 [13] Ibid [14] Ibid 10 [15] Ibid 20 [16] ibid [17] Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in Augustine’s Trinitarian Thought” in Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016) 155 [18] Ibid 157 [19] Ibid 158 [20] Ibid 158 [21] Ibid 161 [22] Ibid 161 [23] Ibid 165 [24] Ibid 161 [25] Ibid 166 [26] Ibid 170 [27] Ibid 13 [28] Ibid 12 [29] Ibid 11 [30] Ibid 12 [31] Ibid [32] Rowan Williams “Wisdom and the Trinitarian Relations” in Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016) 171-195 [33] Ibid 174 [34] Ibid 181 [35] Ibid 186 [36] Ibid 181 [37] Rowan Williams, “Augustine on Christ and the Trinity: an Overview.” in Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016) 131-139 [38] Ibid 131 [39] Ibid 132, citing Augustine. Confessions, trans Henry Chadwick. (Oxford: Oxford World Classics) 2010. VII [40] Ibid 132 [41] Ibid 132 [42] Ibid 134 [43] Ibid 139 [44] Ibid 141. Citing J.-M. Blonde, Les Conversions de s. Augustin (Paris: Aubier, 1950) 145. [45] Ibid 143 Citing Augustine, Confessions VII.ix.13 [46] Ibid 143 [47] Ibid 151 [48] Ibib 171-2 [49] 29 [50] Ibid 30, Citing Confessions 7.18-24 [51] Ibid 133-44 [52] Ibid 151, Citing Confessions VII.
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