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American Academy of Religion

The Dangerous Fruit of Augustine's "Confessions"Author(s): Lyell AsherSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp.227-255Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465671 .Accessed: 27/09/2011 00:34

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66/2

AR RTICLES

The Dangerous Fruit of

Augustine's Confessions Lyell Asher

What does confessing to God mean, but humbling oneself before God, not arrogating oneself any merits?

-Augustine, Sermon 23a

Self-love is cleverer than the cleverest man in the world. -La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

1. INTRODUCTION: THEOLOGY AND THEATRICS

In one of the six paintings he devoted to the life of St. Augustine, the French artist Carle Van Loo (1705-65) portrays the young priest early in his career preaching to a congregation of the faithful.' Entitled Predication de saint Augustin devant Valere, eveque d'Hippone, the painting has Au- gustine standing at the left of the canvas, elevated in a pulpit, with one arm braced against the marble podium and the other gesturing outward toward his audience. Augustine himself is the evident and titular focus of the painting, so it is remarkable that Van Loo depicts him from the side, in profile. We can still see his rapt expression from that angle, but it is apparent that a fuller view of him has been sacrificed in favor of his many listeners, most of whom we see from the front. Van Loo capitalizes handsomely

Lyell Asher is Assistant Professor of English at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR 97219-7899.

1 My thanks to Jim Soderholm, Ben Westervelt, and Rishona Zimring for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

227

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Asher: The Dangerous Fruit ofAugustine's Confessions 229

on this choice. He paints into the faces of this audience a rich spectrum of human attention: from the grave concentration of Bishop Valerius, to the pious admiration of the two women standing at the extreme right, to the child seated directly in front of them-the distracted one who doesn't hear a word. The variety of these dispositions might reasonably be considered the painting's true center of gravity. Baillet de Saint-Julien, a contemporary of Van Loo's, thought so and was particularly struck by the variety and beauty of the audience's facial expressions, observing that "[t]he various passions inspired by eloquence animate the personages of this evangelical scene" and that "each is affected according to his character."2' More recently, Michael Fried has adduced this painting, together with Baillet de Saint-Julien's comment on it, as evidence for the preoccupation in mid- eighteenth-century French art with "human beings wholly engaged in quintessentially absorptive activities" (15).

It goes without saying that Van Loo was aiming at pictorial credibility rather than historical accuracy in Predication de saint Augustin. But by emphasizing the reactions of the audience and in particular the remarkable variety of those reactions, Van Loo foregrounds an issue that was in fact very close to his subject's own heart. Throughout his career Augustine was intensely concerned with the nature of his audience's attention-not merely with the state of their absorption but with its object: he wondered whether it was theology or theatrics that they were interested in, the message or the messenger. As it happens, the audience that Van Loo represents in the painting had taught Augustine his first painful lesson in how easily such attentions could go astray. Possidius tells us that at his forced ordination in Hippo Augustine wept openly, overwhelmed at the prospect of his new burdens: but many in this congregation thought he was simply crying out of professional disappointment and assumed that he wanted a more prestigious position. Soon after his ordination Augustine was confessing in letters to the dangers of ecclesiastical office generally and continued to speak throughout his career about the perils of his position as a teacher and church official, a position that elevated him precariously above those with whom he had once stood as a peer.3 In one sermon he drew an invidious

2 I take the quotation and translation of Saint-Julien's comment from Fried: 22. 3 In letter 21 (391 C. E.) to Bishop Valerius, Augustine writes that "there is nothing in this life, and

especially at this time, easier or more agreeable or more acceptable to men than the office of bishop or priest or deacon, if it is performed carelessly or in a manner to draw flattery.... On the other hand, there is nothing in this life more difficult, more laborious, or more dangerous than the office of bishop or priest or deacon, but nothing more blessed in the sight of God, if he carries on the cam- paign in the way prescribed by our Commander" (Letters 1: 48; ca. 398). In sermon 23 (ca. 413) Augustine remarks that "although to all appearances I am standing in a higher place than you, this is merely for the convenience of carrying my voice better.

.... We bishops are called teachers, but in

many matters we seek a teacher ourselves, and we certainly don't want to be regarded as masters. That

230 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

comparison between himself and a popular entertainer,4 and in another excoriated those more interested in the personalities of the preachers than in the substance of what was preached. "Pay attention to what is said," he told his audience, "not the person who is saying it" (Ennarrationes 36, sermo 3). However heartfelt his request was, coming from the most famous man in the Latin West, this was still a tall order.

It is an order that highlights in any case the particular risk of the Con- fessions, a work that seems to court such illicit attentions from its audience inasmuch as "what is said" refers to the "person who is saying it." To be sure, the book aims far beyond its author's personal trials and tribula- tions. The word "confiteri" itself means not only to admit sins but to praise God, and in 419 Augustine himself had excoriated those poorly informed people "who immediately beat their breasts when they hear about confession in the scriptures, as though it can only be about sins, and as if they are being urged now to confess their sins" (sermon 29).' He knew that whether making a confession or receiving one, focus on the personal could lead quickly to a thicket of profane distraction. A decade or so earlier his friend Severus, Bishop of Milevis, had unwittingly demonstrated this danger to Augustine in a way that must have hit home. Severus had been reading the Confessions with evident admiration, and admitted that, were it not for Augustine's insistence on his indebtedness to God for his gifts, the Bishop's "chaste and sincere ministry, which shines so brightly through your wit and your insight ... would dazzle our eyes and focus them on itself (per- stringat oculos, et in se rapiat)" (letter 109; PL 33: 418). As this letter makes clear, there was no escaping the fact that whether it is sins that are admitted or God who is praised, it is still Augustine who admits, still Augustine who praises, and thus still Augustine who remains at the center of his reader's attention.6

is dangerous, and forbidden by the Lord himself, who says 'Do not wish to be called masters; you have one master, the Christ' (Mt. 23:10)" (Sermons 2: 56).

4 "I remember that I told your holinesses the day before yesterday that if we were a pop group (quia si citharoedi essemus) or putting on that kind of popular entertainment for your frivolities' benefit, you would have engaged us to give you a day, and everyone would have contributed what you could afford to our fee. But why should we amble through life, kept amused by idle songs (delectati vanis canticis) that will never be good for anything, fun at the time, turning sour afterward?" (1:264; PL 38: 79).

5 On Augustine's understanding of confiteri, see Brown: 1967: 175-176; Courcelle: 19-27; and Bon- ner, who quotes this passage in his discussion, 48-51. For the Bishop of Hippo's views on private and public confession, see Meer: 383-387.

6 Try as he might to lose himself and choose God, "things are not so simple in the Confessions," writes Michel Beaujour, "where the loss in question is effected, inscribed, according to the method that will be followed by profane self-portraits to invent (or 'express') the self" (39). I have discussed this issue in connection with one such profane self-portrait in my "Petrarch at the Peak of Fame." In his edition of the Confessions James O'Donnell avers that Augustine himself appreciated the paradox involved: "It is not that Augustine was unaware of the irony and room for self-contradiction that his habit of confessio gave," he writes, "far from it-but he was unable to refrain" (1:xli).


The prominence of Augustine's own person in the Confessions has provoked much comment from some of his best readers, who see in it further evidence of his insatiable love of praise.' And while it is true that his ego was of remarkable scope and stamina, it is equally true that he acknowledged the weakness frequently throughout his career. He makes it the central focus, in fact, of one of his last pieces of correspondence, a letter written to Darius in 429, only a year before he died. That the radically personal quality of the Confessions might seem to exercise as much as expunge this lasting proclivity is thus something of which Augustine could scarcely have been unaware. At times he addresses the question directly in the Con- fessions. But the direct approach tended to highlight the same circularity that gives rise to the problem in the first place. "For whatever any one does before the eyes of men in order to show himself to be a despiser of glory," he writes in The City of God, "if they suspect that he is doing it in order to get greater praise-that is, greater glory-he has no means of demonstrat- ing to the perceptions of those who suspect him that the case is really otherwise than they suspect it to be" (5.19). He cannot demonstrate that the case is otherwise because it is his case and his demonstration: he becomes praiseworthy in the very act of denying that he is praiseworthy.

This being so, it should be of some interest to consider whether there are other, more oblique ways in which this anxiety expresses itself in the Confessions. In Augustine's description of his past, for example, can we find subtextual evidence for an ongoing concern about the self-indulgence of the account itself? If so, are the concern and its more or less coded expression in the text purely personal matters, or are they substantively re- lated to the crisis of identity that the Christian Church was experiencing in the late fourth century? Addressing these questions to the Confessions as a whole is beyond the scope of the present essay. But book 2 invites special consideration, since it is there, in what is by far the shortest of the Confes- sions' thirteen books, that Augustine first acknowledges that he has an audience of readers. That he should do so in the same book in which he

7 Peter Brown says of Augustine's persona as revealed in the Confessions that it is "above all, gloriously egocentric" (1967:167), and more recently James O'Donnell sums up the situation admirably: "Few proponents of Christian humility have obtruded themselves on the attention of their public with the insistence (to say nothing of the effectiveness) that marks this work. For a man who felt acutely the pressure of others' eyes and thoughts, Augustine was often unable to refrain from calling attention to himself" (Confessions 1: xlii). Though I do not myself put forward a psychoanalytic reading of the Confessions, Volney Gay's admirable study-"Augustine: The Reader as Selfobject"-does so in ways that resonate with many of my own concerns. "Confessions was Augustine's solution to his culture's denunciation of narcissistic needs," he writes, " [u] niversal needs to feel esteemed and loved by a wholly good object re-emerged in his theology and in his grand, public confessions.... His would be a confession to God and to humans at the same time. It would gain him God's forgiveness and so union with Him, and an audience of readers who would mirror back to him their esteem" (65).


acknowledges the now-famous theft of a few pears is, I take it, something more than a coincidence. Much of what follows, in fact, can be read as an extended meditation on the possibility that the theft of pears is best understood not merely in connection with the deeds Augustine committed in his youth but in connection with what he is doing now in recounting them. On this view, Augustine's account of the event thus exemplifies Roy Pascal's remark that autobiography is less the uncovering of the past than "a revelation of the present situation" (11), where "the present situation" is taken to refer, initially at least, to the writing of the Confessions themselves. The incident both reveals and relieves, I shall argue, a number of the anxieties that grow up around the act of discursive self-examination, anxieties that are intensified by the efflorescence of Christianity in the late Roman Empire.

2. SELF-EXHIBITION AND SELF-EFFACEMENT

One reason for thinking that Augustine appreciated the dangers a ssociated with representing himself before an audience of readers is his subtle insistence throughout the first book of the Confessions that he has no readers. Up through the second chapter of book 2, in fact, he acts as though God were his only addressee. He doesn't write to God but calls (invocabo) upon him and speaks (loquor) to him while listening with his heart for a reply (aures cordis mei ante te). At every turn in these opening chapters he deprives the Confessions of both a human audience and a written form: this is not writing but speech, and not just any speech as it turns out, but private prayer. Sequestered within the boundaries of intimate conversation, this dialogue between a man and his maker is thus sheltered, at least initially, from what Augustine suggests would be the derisive attentions of outsiders: "I am addressing your mercy," he protests, "not a man who would laugh at me (non homo, inrisor meus)" (1.6).

Rhetorical forms conveying ostensibly private dialogues with God, Philosophy, or the author's own soul were not uncommon in antiquity. Nor was it particularly unusual to call such discourses prayers, a form that by Augustine's day was a "recognized vehicle for speculative inquiry" (Brown 1967: 166). What does distinguish the Confessions, though, at least in this opening book, is how literally Augustine seems to intend the designation, how tenaciously he mimics a spontaneous discourse of private piety, intended for God's hearing alone. Besides the terms he uses in this opening book to suggest the privacy of the exchange, the casual, even con- versational tone of the Confessions-Dodds famously characterized it as gossip (471)-together with the book's seemingly scattered organization


work to convey the sense of an unrehearsed utterance, transcribed exactly as it transpired."

Among the reasons for Augustine's wanting to conjure such an illusion, the most important one for my purposes is his concern to deflect the appearance of studied self-exhibition, a concern heightened by the precarious rhetorical position of confession itself, where the author of the discourse is also its subject. Framing the Confessions as a clandestine dialogue between Augustine and God counters this threat in a fairly obvious way. By affecting at the outset to have excluded a readership from his work, Augus- tine implies the irrelevance of this readership to the Confessions' composi- tion: read this though you may, it was not written with you in mind. This is the defensive posture of someone intent, at least initially, on conveying his absorption in prayer and his obliviousness to anything beyond that-a posture whose purpose Bakhtin summarized when he described Marcus Aurelius's struggle in the Meditations to exclude "'another's point of view" as an attempt to eradicate not merely a source of offense but a source of "vanity, vain pride" (145).

My suggestion that Augustine was worried about the appearance of prideful self-display is bound to seem insensitive to his claim, quoted above, to expect laughter, not admiration, from a human audience. But when we consider the way public discourse is treated elsewhere in this first book, that claim seems to be part of a defensive cover for an exactly contrary concern: an anxiety about the Confessions seeming, like every other instance of verbal exchange mentioned here, self-serving. The steady refrain of book 1, after all, is how from infancy language works the levers of power, how even before a child is able to speak he is fluent in the envious and bitter looks that he casts at another child being fed. Though nurses and teachers imagine that they root out such selfishness, in fact, says Au- gustine, they merely force it underground into more "civilized" channels. The baby's kicks and screams are just the first entries in a vocabulary of dissatisfaction that will take a lifetime-and considerable expense-to refine and develop. The infant who learns to use his tongue to get food and attention is succeeded by a student trained in the science of the tongue; the infant's desire for his mother's breasts is succeeded by the rhetor's desire for money and fame. Whether it is the young Augustine learning to recite a speech of Juno's from the Aeneid (1.17), the schoolmaster convulsed with

8 Dodds 471. Robert McMahon remarks that the apparent planlessness in the Confessions is inten- tional: "Augustine the author... plans this planlessness in order to dramatize the speaker's ongoing, often wandering search in prayerful encounter with God" (15-16). I take McMahon's point but put it to slightly different use.


rage and envy for losing a petty argument (1.9), or the orator handily defeating his opponent with malicious invective (1.18), each is performing but a later, more sophisticated variation on this original theme-the baby in his greedy flailings for food and attention.

In connection with book 1 of the Confessions it is conventional to remark Augustine's revolutionary emphasis on language and his uncommon interest in infants and children. The account he gives us here about his own childhood and language learning is indeed unprecedented in scope and detail. But the truth is that while acknowledging the biographical and theological importance of these deliberations, we tend to take them at face value, as if there were nothing at stake rhetorically in the contrast that emerges between the publicity of other discourses, on the one hand, each of which he inventories as yet another tool of power and prestige, and the feigned privacy of the Confessions, on the other, a light hidden profitlessly under a bushel, for God's eyes only. Not that there is anything about this distinction that either Augustine or his commentators would be inclined to disavow. On the contrary, the contrast between the discourses of caritas and cupiditas is among the first and most obvious points to be grasped about the book. But readers obligingly forget how much the Confessions themselves have to gain from this distinction and thus fail to consider the ways in which Augustine's defensiveness about the dubious act of writing the Confessions partially determines what he chooses to confess.

Few passages are more revealing in this regard than the one in which Augustine finally owns up to having an audience of readers. He interjects the admission with startling abruptness in the opening lines of the third chapter of book 2. Thus far he has described his childhood and education in Thagaste and his brief stay at Madauros where he studied literature and public speaking. This third chapter of the second book begins by reporting how in his sixteenth year he was called back to Thagaste where, as he will soon tell us, he festered, indulging his sexual appetite to the hilt and pulling the stunt for which book 2 is most famous, the theft of some pears. But before admitting what he did back then, he breaks quickly and unexpectedly into the present moment, the moment of narration, and finally comes clean about what he is doing now in writing the Confessions: he is not informing God of these things, he admits, but writing them down for his fellow Christians. I quote the opening passage of this third chapter.

During my sixteenth year there was an interruption (intermissa) in my studies. I was recalled from Madauros, the nearby town where I had first lived away from home to learn literature and oratory. During that time funds were gathered in preparation for a more distant absence at Carth- age, for which my father had more enthusiasm than cash, since he was a citizen of Thagaste with very modest resources. To whom do I tell these


things? Not to you, my God. But before you I declare this to my race, to the human race, though only a tiny part can light on this writing of mine. And why do I include this episode? It is that I and any of my readers may reflect on the great depth from which we have to cry to you (Ps. 129:1). Nothing is nearer to your ears than a confessing heart and a life grounded in faith. At that time everybody was full of praise for my father because he spent money on his son beyond the means of his estate, when that was necessary to finance an education entailing a long journey. Many citizens of far greater wealth did nothing of the kind for their children. But this same father did not care what character before you I was developing, or how chaste I was so long as I possessed a cultured tongue--though my culture really meant a desert uncultivated by you, God. You are the one true and good lord of your land, which is my heart. (2.3; emphasis mine)

I have reproduced the paragraph in its entirety in order to make plain just how unexpectedly Augustine jumps from his adolescent past to the narrating present, and then back again to the past as if nothing had intervened. Blocking out the italicized lines for a moment suggests how continu- ous the narrative would be without them, moving as it does from mention of Patricius's modest resources to a report of the widespread praise for his father's determination to spare no expense with his son's education. Augustine makes this nod to the reader with as little fanfare as possible- hurrying back to the narrative proper in order to be rid of a disquiet- ing task.

But it's worth resisting Augustine's own hasty retreat for a moment. One thing in particular that should detain us is the intriguing fact that this erratic break into the narrator's present precisely coincides with the mention of a break (intermissa) in his narrated past, that is, with his being called home from his studies in Madauros-as if the memory of having to look up from his books back then has prompted him, in mimetic fashion, to look up from the Confessions, the book he is writing now. To be sure, we are meant to understand that these are very different books from which he has looked up-as different, he implies, as arable land and a barren desert. But I suggest that his insistence on that difference in this passage has been provoked by a similarity that he implicitly acknowledges by recognizing his audience: to wit, that the Confessions are no less public a document than the ones he was taught to compose as a student of rhetoric and no less informed than they by his training in literature and oratory. Ironically, in the quotation above the fruits of that training are on display in the rhetorical device used to degrade it-in the paronomasia that makes a desert of his past dissertations: "... I possessed a cultured tongue (disertus)-though my culture really meant a desert (desertus) uncultivated by you."


Along similar lines, we might consider what actually transpires during each of these interruptions-the one in the story, the other in the discourse-that could further explain their remarkable concurrence here. The intermissa in his studies at Madauros, we know, inaugurated a period of heedless debauchery and extravagance. Unchecked by self-restraint or supervision, he was at the mercy of desires that tossed him this way and that-toward sex, thievery, and base inclinations of every sort. The dominant image is that of a garden left to seed, where "the brambles of lust grew high above my head and there was no one to root them out .. " (2.3). This, his sixteenth year, was easily the most corrupt period of his life.

If we turn now to the simultaneous break in the discourse, it seems strategically appropriate that Augustine should first acknowledge his audience of readers just here, while printing this catalogue of corruptions. For where better to recognize this potential source of pride than in the vicinity of things that he could only be ashamed of? Where better to acknowledge his readers than at a point in the story where he is least likely to be sus- pected of trying to impress them? To the point here is a passage from Plutarch's Moralia, in which he describes how those engaged in narratives of self-praise "blunt the edge of envy by inserting ... confessions even of poverty and indigence or actually of low birth" (145). We may thus legiti- mately wonder about the extent to which Augustine's catalogue of sins serves to counteract the "gloriously egocentric" persona that Peter Brown finds so evident in the Confessions as a whole (1967: 167).9

9 After all, the scope and detail of these admissions is unheard of in the life-writing of early Chris- tianity. Generally speaking, the Christian hagiographer assumed that the dissolute years prior to the saint's conversion were irrelevant. For his purposes a saint was not born until he was born again. "From what point shall I enter upon a discussion of his virtues if not from the beginning of his faith and from his heavenly birth," asks Pontius in his Life of St. Cyprian, "since, truly, a man of God's deeds should be reckoned from no other point than his birth in God"(6)? But Pontius might have looked at matters differently had he been narrating his own life rather than Cyprian's. For the liabilities of first- person discourse might have made the degenerate years prior to his own conversion worth mention- ing as "antidotes of self-praise," to borrow Plutarch's terminology. This accounts in all likelihood for St. Teresa (1515-82) of Avila's remark at the opening of her Life that "[h]aving been commanded and left at full liberty to describe my way of prayer and the favours which the Lord has granted me, I wish that I had been allowed to describe also, clearly and in fully detail, my grave sins and the wickedness of my life." Though she has been prevented from doing so, she says that this "would have been a great comfort to me" (21).

But we need not jump to the sixteenth century for our evidence. The risks associated with spiritual autobiography were glaringly apparent to Augustine's immediate precursor in Christian autobiography, Gregory of Nazianzus (329-89). When he came to the subject of his new life in Christ, he considered it essential to be as concise as possible. To record anything more than the essential elements of his salvation story, he thought, was to risk the appearance of conceited self-display. "Am I to hide the wonders by means of which God led me on ... [o]r am I to speak out boldly and publish what occurred?" he asks in his De vita sua. "One course seems ungrateful, the other not devoid of pride. Better to be silent, it is enough for me to know ... Just what is necessary then I shall make known publicly" (80). If Gregory deflected the appearance of pride by saying less about his life as a saint, Augustine worked toward the same end, I suggest, by admitting more about his life as a sinner.

Asher: The Dangerous Fruit of Augustine's Confessions 237

But of course there is more to it than that. For as we saw earlier in connection with book l's emphasis on language as a tool of domination, it isn't simply his sinfulness per se that Augustine uses as a counterweight against the potentially prideful aspects of the Confessions. He seems particularly concerned with sins that are thematically parallel to the act of writing about oneself before an audience of readers. Notice, for example, that in describing the debaucheries that take place during this year-long interruption of his studies, Augustine emphasizes their theatricality: they are not merely corruptions but corruptions on display. He was not only eager to please himself, he says, but "ambitious to win human approval" (2.1); desirous not only to love, but "to be loved" (2.2); interested not merely in the sexual act itself, but hungry for "the admiration it evoked" (2.3). What connection might there be between the spectacular aspect of his youthful transgressions and the spectacular aspect of his confessing them? One of pointed contrast, certainly: the pride with which he had repeated these sins before his compatriots has been replaced by the shame with which he recounts them before his readers. So crucial is this contrast to Augustine that he makes it the subject of the opening sentence of book 2: "I intend to remind myself of my past foulnesses and carnal corruptions, not because I love them but so that I may love you, my God." It is precisely in order throw into relief his present shame at these corruptions that Augustine emphasizes the pride he took in them in the past. His past pride helps feature, or point up, his present humility.

3. GRATITUITOUS THEFT, GRATUITOUS CONFESSION

It is in the context of such strategic contrasts that I want now to turn our attention to what is easily the most famous product of this interruption in his studies, the theft of pears. The theft does not seem immediately connected to the writing of the Confessions-certainly not in the way that his account of his rhetorical training does-and some readers have wondered at its even being able to bear the weight of the role that Augustine explicitly assigns it: as the quintessential demonstration of his corrupted will.'o But the incident evidently has a deep and abiding importance for Augustine. In the course of his discussion he makes it nothing less than the pivotal event of his youth, "his equivalent," Kenneth Burke remarks, "of Adam's first sin" (94). Curiously enough, though, this importance seems to begin and end with the Confessions: despite the tremendous heuristic

10 Brown quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes's remark to Harold Laski, "Rum thing to see a man making a mountain out of robbing a peartree in his teens" (1967: 172 n. 5). Courcelle (51-52) finds Augustine's distended analysis of the theft to be a matter of literary convention and cites the precedent of Macarius the Egyptian's account of his own relatively trivial theft.


value that Augustine ascribes to this event, he mentions it nowhere else in his oeuvre. This, together with the fact that he discusses the theft immediately after he admits to an audience of readers, invites us to consider the possibility that the theft has some essential relevance not merely to the question of sin but to the act of confession.

Everyone knows the story. Late one night Augustine and his cohorts enter a neighbor's orchard where a pear tree stands "laden with fruit, though attractive in neither colour nor taste"(2.4). Despite the fact that they have better pears at home, he and his friends shake the tree and carry off copious amounts of the fallen fruit. They eat only a little, if any, of what they steal and throw most to the pigs. They were tickled, he admits, to think of their hapless victims, who would never have imagined them capable of such a thing.

In the course of Augustine's reflections on this event two things about the theft become decisive: its gratuitousness and its fraternal character- the fact that it was committed by a group. Of the two, the gratuitousness of the theft has attracted the most attention, probably because of the im- pressive analysis it receives at Augustine's own hands. He and his cohorts stole the pears simply for the sake of stealing them, he says, for the pleasure of "doing what was not allowed" (2.4). Neither hunger, envy, nor revenge will account for what he did: "I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality" (2.2). But having concluded that the theft was utterly gratuitous, committed for its own sake, Augustine finds himself in something of a bind. For an act that operates beyond any familiar calculus of motives might lend support to the Manichaean doctrine of an indepen- dent evil, an evil that is as fully autonomous as God.

The questions that Augustine brings to bear on this event thus have to do with the apparent perversity of the pleasure that the theft affords. Worldly pleasure generally is no mystery to Augustine. Every created thing participates to varying degrees in the goodness of its Creator, and pleasure results from the unity enjoyed when our senses establish a rapport with the aspects of the world that are appropriate to them. Pleasure becomes sinful, says Augustine, only when we gravitate more toward the things at the bottom of the scale than those at the top, when we move downward toward creations rather than upward toward the Creator.

The strange thing about the theft, though, is that Augustine and his cohorts are as indifferent to creatures as they are to Creator: if they defy God, they also discard the pears. What then, if not the pears, is the fruit of this theft? "'What fruit had I,' wretched boy, in these things (Rom.6:21) which I now blush to recall, above all in that theft in which I loved nothing but the theft itself" (2.8)? The major break in the case comes when Augus- tine at last finds something for the theft to be dependent on, a precedent in

Asher: The Dangerous Fruit of Augustine's Confessions 239

the face of which the illusion of the crime's autonomy crumbles. He suggests that divine omnipotence is the theft's proximate model. What the thieves wanted was the kind of freedom and inscrutability that God alone possesses. In trying to free themselves from God, they had only confirmed their dependence on his example. In struggling for emancipation, he says, they had "perversely imitated" (perverse imitatus) God, creating little more than a "shadowy simulation of omnipotence" (tenebrosa omnipotentiae similitudine).

Given the subtlety of Augustine's own analysis, and the quantity of commentary since, what else is there to say about this event? And aside from the rather pedestrian fact that the theft has been written down in the Confessions, what might the theft have to do with the Confessions' compo- sition and publication?

Let me start near the end of the story with Augustine's description of the theft as a perverse imitation. This is, for all intents and purposes, Augustine's concluding judgment of the incident. But it is worth notic- ing that what first arouses his curiosity about the theft is not the way it imitates God but the way it deviates from man-or to be more accu- rate, the way it deviates from that principle to which man seems constitu- tionally devoted, namely, the principle of pleasure. It is for some dividend of pleasure, says Augustine, that people typically commit crimes. We are drawn to transgress God's laws by the thought of satisfying one of our baser appetites-for money, property, sex, power, notoriety, and so on. If one man has killed another, it is a safe bet that he did so "[b]ecause he loved another's wife or his property; or he wanted to acquire money to live on by plundering his goods; or he had suffered injury and burned with desire for revenge" (2.5). But in the theft of the pears none of these appetites seems to be anywhere present. Not even the desire for food can be adduced as a motive since the pears themselves are so flagrantly dis- carded. In short, if Augustine and his cohorts disobey God by stealing the pears, they would seem to defy human nature by not eating them. What is the purpose of such defiance? By jettisoning the ballast of ordinary human motives, they hope to rise above the realm of ordinary men, thus achiev- ing what Lionel Trilling once called "a sort of negative transcendence," a transcendence achieved "by freeing the self from its thralldom to pleasure"(81).

So understood, the theft offers a perfect parody of asceticism-prac- tices which are nothing if not experiments in "negative transcendence.""

11 Cf. Burke's remark in The Rhetoric of Religion: "It [the theft] was his foremost sin because it was, in substance, the complete perversion, or perfect parody, of his religious motives. It was such a parody because, first, it was a 'free' or 'gratuitous' crime (gratuitum facinus). That is, it was an act done not


St. Anthony revealed the calculus for ascetic acts when he said that "the state of the soul is vigorous ... when the pleasures of the body are weak- ened" (Athanasius: 142). In denying himself the comforts of rest, sex, and food, the ascetic forces the flesh into the service of the spirit's quest for transcendence. And so, after a fashion, do Augustine and his cohorts: they steal not for the selfish purpose of nourishing the body, and "without any motive on [their] part[s] of personal gain" (2.9), but to satisfy the "higher" aims of freedom and power. It is because such "higher" aims are in fact morally lower, of course, that the theft offers a parody, rather than a simple parallel, to the ascetic ideal. The thieves defy the self's more immediate thralldom to pleasure only to replicate that thralldom on another, still more debased level. They abstain from the jejune pleasure of food so as to indulge the more pernicious pleasure of pride.

Even if we accept this view of the theft as a parody of Christian self- denial, why should such a parody figure so prominently in the Confessions? It does so, I suggest, because the act of confession itself is the needful bene- ficiary of this parodic gesture: Augustine suggests what this book is by showing us what it is not, and what it is not is what it most runs the risk of resembling-namely, a prideful exhibition of ascetic fortitude and personal piety. Looking back now, we can see that Augustine invites us to put together these two apparently disparate acts-the theft of pears and the act of confession-in the very first lines of this second book, where he fore- shadows his discussion of the gratuitousness of the theft by speaking first about the potential gratuitousness of confession: "I intend to remind myself of my past foulnesses and carnal corruptions, not because I love them but so that I may love you, my God" (2.1). The risk he runs is that recounting his sin and not repenting it is what attracts him, just as the theft itself-and not the fruit-had attracted him and his accomplices. Since Augustine has not yet acknowledged his human audience at the beginning of book 2, there is some question, after all, as to why he should be reporting his sins to an omniscient God who, by definition, already knows about them. It would seem to be as superfluous an act as stealing what one already has. But in this opening paragraph of book 2 the justifi- cation Augustine gives for confessing is this: that recalling his wicked ways is for him the bitter pill (amaritudine) which works to point up God's sweetness (dulcedo) (2.1). I wonder if the truth of the matter isn't something more immediately, say rhetorically, practical: to wit, that in recalling this perversity from his past he subtly amplifies his piety in the present.

for some sheerly utilitarian gain, but out of pure dedication crime for its own sake. This would be a perfect parody of acts motivated not by any merely worldly hope of profit, but in terms of the Wide Beyond, as with acts done for the love of God" (94).


This purpose can be made still more evident by looking at the second feature that Augustine declares is essential to the theft: namely, its fraternal character, the fact that it was, indeed had to be, committed by a group. Why was company so crucial to the crime? Why was the theft, as Augustine suggests, inconceivable without it? Apparently, it is not that he was afraid to steal the pears all by himself. Propelled by less exotic motives, hunger let's say, he says he would gladly have stolen the pears single-handedly: "If I had liked the pears which I stole and actually desired to enjoy them, I could by myself have committed that wicked act, had it been enough to attain the pleasure which I sought" (2.8). But in this instance, he says, "had I been alone, it would have given me absolutely no pleasure, nor would I have committed it" (2.9). So it is less a matter of deriving courage from his cohorts than of deriving from their company a peculiar kind of pleasure, a hybrid of sorts, created by crossing gratuitous evil with bad company.

But what exactly does company bring to this equation? It is not enough to say that it helped trigger his own impulses or simply to repeat Augus- tine's remark that he needed to "inflame the itch of my cupidity through the excitement generated by sharing the guilt with others" (2.8), for that would beg the question as to why company should generate such excitement or help trigger such impulses in the first place. There is a more substantial lead in what he says earlier in book 2 about his sexual debaucheries-about how he had recounted them proudly to this same group and about how he had been "ashamed not to be equally guilty of shameful behavior when I heard them boasting of their sexual exploits" (2.3). He recalls taking pleasure not simply in the physical delights of sex but in recounting his exploits later to his companions-so much so, in fact, that he even owned up to crimes he had not actually committed so as not to feel less courageous than they (2.3).

The theft of pears pushes this exhibitionistic tendency to its logical extreme and in so doing distills the tendency to its essence. How so? We have seen that by neglecting the ostensible objects of the theft, the pears, Augustine and his cohorts "purify" the theft of any carnal desire, leaving only the transgression itself to be savored. But notice too that in com- mitting this crime as a group, they purify as well the kind of reciprocal admiration they had indulged in earlier when "boasting [to one another] of their sexual exploits." For the collective nature of the pear theft means that their appetite for admiration need not wait for a later occasion to be indulged as it had been earlier, when Augustine says that "they de- rived pleasure not merely from the lust of the act but also from the admiration that it evoked" (2.3). Now it can be satisfied simultaneously with the commission of the crime, inasmuch as an admiring audience is pro- vided to each of the thieves by all the others. They function less as a group


of accomplices, in other words, than as a group of immediate and reciprocal witnesses, before whom and with whom Augustine can bask in shame. Without these witnesses there would be no pleasure in the theft, which is why Augustine is certain that he would not have committed it without them.

It is interesting to note that the temptations of exhibitionism are a central-perhaps the central concern-for the Christian ascetic as well. We need only recall the biblical injunction against "practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them" (Matt. 6) and the many echoes of this warning in the writings of the Church Fathers. But in connection with the fact that the pears are stolen but not eaten, and that their not being eaten becomes the theft's tour de force, the most relevant of these warn- ings crops up in the writings of Augustine's younger contemporary, John Cassian. In his Conferences, composed more than a decade after the Con- fessions, Cassian quotes Abbot Serapion on the subject of vainglory in monastic life. The Abbot remarks that vainglory can be a useful thing for the monk, especially in resisting carnal sins, and observes that refusing food, for example, is more easily accomplished in a monastery in the company of others than in the desert, alone. "And on this subject," the abbot continues, "there is a very neat answer of Abbot Macarius to one who asked him why he was troubled with hunger as early as the third hour in the desert, when in the monastery he had often scorned food for a whole week, without feeling hungry. 'Because' said he, 'here there is nobody to see your fast, and feed and support you with his praise of you: but there you grew fat on the notice of others and the food of vainglory"' (5.12).12

I do not suggest that Augustine was familiar with the remarks of either of these abbots or that Cassian had Augustine's peccadillo in mind when he quoted them. But I would say that in remarking the difficulty of fasting alone and the ease of doing it in the company of his brethren, Abbot Macarius suggests just how fine is the line that separates the Christian exemplar from the exhibitionist and how precarious a footing the holy man was on when his acts of self-denial were given public venue. In fact, Abbot Serapion follows up these remarks by pointing out that while there is less harm in yielding to vainglory than to the many vices it supplants, "it is more difficult to escape the dominion of vainglory," for spiritual pride is

12 Though her book deals primarily with the way food and fasting structured the religious experi- ence of medieval women, Carolyn Bynum describes the ascetic competitiveness of late antique Chris- tians and reminds us that "for all the individualism, competition, and spiritual athleticism ... we must not forget that fasting was most basically something that brought Christians together-in grati- tude for God's gift of the harvest; in obedience to God's command of abstinence, violated in the Gar- den of Eden but fulfilled on the cross; in charity toward the neighbors who would benefit from alms; and in foretaste of union with the saints in heaven" (39).


far worse than carnal pride, since "it especially attacks those who are seen to have made progress in some good qualities" (5.12).

Likewise, it is not merely the proud sinner who menaces the writing of the Confessions but the potentially proud saint-not the one who takes pride in his sins but the one who may take pride in so forthrightly confessing them. So the thematic echoes we have noted between the act of confessing and the content of these confessions or, more specifically, between the confessions of pride and the pride of confession, may be considered the outcroppings of a tension that Augustine only makes explicit much later in the Confessions, in book 10. It would have been better, he suggests, if he had made his confessions in private, away from the scrutiny of others:

"I am poor and needy" (Ps. 108: 22), but am better if, secretly groaning, I am vexed with myself and seek your mercy, until my defect is repaired and I am perfectly restored to that peace which is unknown to the arro- gant observer. But the word proceeding out of the mouth and the actions which become known to people contain a most hazardous temptation in the love of praise. This likes to gather and beg for support to bolster a kind of private superiority. This is a temptation to me even when I reject it, because of the very fact I am rejecting it. Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory. For it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of. (10.38)

This passage articulates two concerns that bear directly on my inter- pretation of the pear theft: first, Augustine's recognition that public gestures of humility such as the Confessions may foster a private sense of superiority, and second, that an overt rejection of such superiority may occasion a covert sense of pride. If the first supports my conviction that the publication of the Confessions is itself one of the book's major sources of anxiety, the second suggests why an indirect parody of such publication is a more viable means of allaying this anxiety than a direct disavowal of any prideful intent: by way of this dramatic juxtaposition Augustine is able to subtly reject a motive that might only have been strengthened by a straightforward denial.

And this, finally, leads us back to a tension that was earlier left unre- solved-namely, how it is that Augustine finds it possible to insist on the privacy of the Confessions in book 1 only to acknowledge their publicity in book 2. I believe that it was important for him to suggest that the Con- fessions, unlike the pear theft, could have been a wholly private undertak- ing, that he could have all along been secretly, rather than publicly, groaning. The gradual, nearly seamless metamorphosis of narrative voice in the Confessions from private prayer to public testimonial has as its perfect foil an essentially public act for which-and now we may understand his nearly obsessive insistence on the point-no private equivalent exists:


"But alone I would not have done it, could not conceivably have done it by myself" (2.9).

4. EXCESS AND EXHIBITION

In connecting the writing of the Confessions with the stealing of the pears we have one final issue to consider that inevitably attaches itself to this discussion-Adam's sin in the garden of Eden, which Augustine's theft so obviously recalls. Earlier I quoted Kenneth Burke's comment that the theft is "his [Augustine's] equivalent of Adam's first sin." If Burke's remark suggests an identity between the two events, it also implies a difference: the theft is not the same as Adam's transgression, but Augustine's equivalent, which is as much to say his variation on the eating of the forbidden fruit. But in what ways does the theft of the pears vary from the sin of Adam and Eve, and how in turn might these variations be connected with the writing of the Confessions?

The most obvious departure from the Edenic myth has to do with the theft's gratuitousness. Whereas Adam's disobedience is incidental to his desire to take fruit from the forbidden tree, the taking of fruit by Augustine and his cohorts is incidental to their desire to disobey, a difference under- scored by the fact that the thieves simply throw the pears to the pigs. The theft of pears thus embellishes the Adamic original in the direction of unintelligible caprice and pointless expenditure. It is, in a word, exces- sive-and excess proves to be the dominant modality of the entire account: if there were only two malefactors in the Garden of Eden, the orchard in the Confessions is invaded by a whole company of offenders; whereas the biblical tree of knowledge was notable for the kind rather than the quantity of its fruit, Augustine's tree is positively laden with pears (pomis onusta); whereas the forbidden tree and its fruit had been unique in the Garden of Eden, the fruit of the pear tree is plentiful not only on this tree but elsewhere: "For I stole something which I had in plenty (abundabat) and much better (multo melius)"(2.4). And though Adam and Eve presumably take an unremarkable amount of the forbidden fruit, Augustine mentions that he and his cohorts carried away huge loads (onera ingentia) of what they steal. Everything, it would seem, has been fruitful and multiplied.

And yet this fruitfulness has come to dubious advantage to say the least-a point decisively captured in the central emblem of the story: "a pear tree near our vineyard, laden with fruit, though attractive in neither colour nor taste." Now it is true that Augustine's mention of the fruit's blandness further emphasizes the gratuitousness of stealing it. But there is something further to be noted: at the heart of this description is the timeworn principle that quantity comes at the expense of quality, an idea


familiar to the study of horticulture and culture alike. To students of the latter, the image of a tree crowded with colorless, tasteless fruit cannot fail to suggest, by way of contrast, the myth of the Golden Age, a time when virtue had not yet been thinned out by a burgeoning population and imperious appetites. If the bland but bountiful fruit represents the decay of such an age into more numerous but less substantial beings, it also occa- sions a literal instance of such decadence inasmuch as Augustine and his cohorts steal this fruit not out of hunger or genuine material need but out of a luxurious desire for novel excitements. The superfluousness of the theft is thus the wedded partner to the superabundance of the world, both of them being the ominous symptoms of society's progress into bored sa- tiation. It was to a description of such a society that Seneca devoted one of his more famous letters, and what he says there could serve as a gloss for the social decadence that Augustine represents in the pear-theft. Whereas in the Golden Age men had been satisfied to take from Nature only what was needed, he says in letter 90, the impulse of luxury encourages a prolif- eration of desires that turn their back on such natural necessities, so that those who want only what is enough are thought to be primitive and living in squalor. What had once been a world of communal ownership and mutual satisfaction, where men possessed "a character more robust than today," is now a world of avarice and thievery, where men kill other men, not out of fear or provocation, but "simply for entertainment" (176).

Seneca was excoriating his own time and his own leisured class, the first-century Roman aristocracy. But if the situation he describes is matched anywhere in the career of early Christianity, it is unquestionably in the period of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, precisely the time when Augustine was writing his Confessions and the Church was experiencing its most pronounced expansion. Of course, there had always been a fear that growth would dilute the true character of Christianity. The New Testament authors were already prophesying a church grown tired, corrupt, and sinking into half-heartedness.'3 Two centuries later Origen contrasts the plethora of converts coming into the church now with those of an earlier time, when "the faithful were few in numbers but were really faithful, advancing along the straight and narrow path leading to life."'4 But such concern reached a high point in the last two decades of the fourth century, when the burgeoning number of Christians made it difficult to tell whether the Church was converting the empire or the empire was converting the Church. Alarmed by this "progress," Jerome promises in his The Life of Malchus (391 C.E.) to write a history of the church from the

13 See, for example, 2 Thess. 2:3, 2 Tim. 3:1-5, and Rev. 3:14-19. 14 Hornm. in Jerem. 4.3. Quoted in Miles: 21.


apostolic age to what he calls "the dregs of time in which we live" to show how it "grew by persecution and was crowned with martyrdom; and then, after reaching the Christian Emperors, how it increased in influence and in wealth but decreased in Christian virtues" (315).

Now Augustine is not, by and large, so pessimistic as Jerome. On the subject of the mass Christianization of the Roman world he suggests, in a sermon preached in the year 400, that God's Kingdom is not a finite entity that is diluted by the growing number of converts, "because it doesn't have to be divided among them. It is a whole for each of them, because it is possessed harmoniously and amicably by the many" (3: 431). In other sermons he compares God to light which "the eyes of all people possess ... equally, they don't divide it between them" (2: 322), and says of God's inheritance that "it cannot be reduced in value by any number of co-heirs" (3: 288).

I suggest, though, that such assurances arise in reaction to his own deep sensitivity about the perils of prosperity. That he appreciated the value of hardship and struggle is evident from his surmise in The City of God that after Rome's victory in the last Punic war, the republic was de- bilitated by the ills "which sprang from the corrupt manners induced by prosperity and security," such that "the sudden overthrow of Carthage is seen to have injured Rome more seriously than her long-continued hostility" (3.21). It would have been difficult for Augustine not to see the Church's own prosperity and security in similarly ambivalent terms. For the first time in the history of Christianity converts to the faith could expect in the late fourth century to reap not only heavenly but earthly rewards. And to those who joined the Church in search of the latter Augustine issued this warning in 400: "For there are some whose reason for desiring to become Christians is either that they may gain the favor of men from whom they look for temporal advantages, or that they are reluc- tant to offend those whom they fear. But these are reprobate; and although the church bears the chaff until the period of winnowing ... let not such flatter themselves, because it is possible for them to be in the threshing- floor along with the grain of God. For they will not be together with that in the barn, but are destined for the fire, which is their due" (Catechising 17.26: 301). Here as elsewhere, Augustine strenuously avoids, as the Donatists had not, trying to winnow the wheat from the chaff himself. Yet he clearly sees that of the many who are called only few are chosen, and that the many called are growing more and more numerous with each passing day. "So we can take it that some are supernumeries, somehow or other superfluous," he remarked in sermon 270, "yet they are being gathered in (Intelliguntur ergo quidam supernumerarii, quodam modo superflui: colliguntur tamen)" (7: 295; PL 38: 1244).


I am claiming that the theme of excess which marks Augustine's repre- sentation of the pear theft registers his anxiety about the excess of the late antique Church, his fear that the quantity of converts to Christianity comes at the expense of quality. Each of the theft's primary elements-the huge load of pears, the company of offenders, and superflous theft- dilates and simultaneously dilutes its corresponding element in the Edenic myth-the single piece of fruit, the one couple, and the taking of what they did not already have-in a way suggestive of the difference between primitive and late antique Church. So interpreted, Burke's remark that the consortium peccantium (company of offenders) is "a perfect parody of Brotherhood within the Church" (94) finds remarkable historical footing. For it was around the time of Augustine's Confessions that this brotherhood was in danger of becoming a living parody of itself, threatened as it was by an increasing number of the half-hearted converts who were attracted by and contributing to the Church's "drift into respectable Chris- tianity" (Brown 1961:8). Years later, after all, in sermon 250 (ca. 416), Augustine uses multitudinousness as an expression of the Church's over- abundant harvest, turning Jesus' saying about the two catches of fish, the one before and the one after the resurrection, into a gloss on the present state of Christianity: "There in that first catch the number wasn't mentioned, it only mentioned a vast quantity, a definite number wasn't precisely stated. There are many now, you see, beyond number that is, they come, they enter, they fill the churches; they also fill the theaters, the same ones as fill the churches, they fill them beyond number" (7:122). With its emphatic multiplication of both pears and persons Augustine's version of Adam's transgression could thus be understood to adapt the Christian myth of the fall to present circumstances by braiding into that myth a concern about the numberless converts streaming into the Church.

The figurations of excess in the scene do more, though, than illumi- nate Augustine's general concern about the dangerous pace at which the Church was expanding. They index, I believe, a more personal anxiety about his own elevated position within that Church at the time he was writing the Confessions. And this is where we rejoin the argument of the previous section. There I advanced the idea that the crime's two essential characteristics-its gratuitousness and its corporate character-suggest what the Confessions are by showing us what they are not. I claimed that the indirection of this approach was necessitated by the very problem it was designed to overcome, namely, the blatantly interested character of first-person discourse. But beyond simply pointing out Augustine's peren- nial sensitivity to the pervasiveness of pride, nothing was said there about what, besides personal temperament, could account for his preoccupation in the Confessions with inoculating the book itself against that vice by find-


ing negative analogies for the book's own production. I want to close that gap by proposing that this evident concern about the motives for writing the Confessions is a particular instance of a larger uncertainty precipitated by the influx of converts to the Church around the turn of the century. This was an uncertainty "about what it meant to be a genuine Chris- tian," to quote Robert Markus, "in a society of fashionable Christianity" (1990b: 67)."

Now conversion narratives such as the Confessions give a first-hand account of what being a genuine Christian means by contrasting the present with the past. What has been called the "soteriological contrast pattern" of early Christian preaching, a pattern that follows the formula "Once you were-but now you are" (Dahl 33; cf. Freccero) is nothing less than the cornerstone of the conversion story's narrative structure. There is the life prior to conversion and the life after, and it is the difference between the two that allows the author to undertake the otherwise dubious task of writing about himself. For in writing about his sinful past, he is-ideally at least-writing about another person. "The new man knows, the old man does not know. The old man is the old life and the new man is the new life (Vetus homo est vetus vita, et novus homo nova vita)" (Enarra- tio in Psalmum 97.1; PL 37: 1253).

For all their many differences, however, in one significant respect the new man who writes the Confessions is actually very similar to the old man who is written about. It is not a similarity that springs immediately to mind, in part because discussions of continuity between the saved and unsaved Augustine have typically focussed on the period just before and immediately after his conversion and on the question of whether that conversion effected as dramatic an intellectual reorientation as the Confessions imply.'6 But looking ten years further down the road to the time when Augustine began writing the book, we can see that, intellectual differences aside, his elevated position in Hippo as a church official recalled the time

15 In his "Problem of Self-Definition" Marcus writes that "[t]he Christian communities had become effectively cross-sections of roman urban society. They had not only grown larger, but-more important-lost much of their social and cultural homogeneity. The human need which gave urgency to the question 'What am I?' had been more easily satisfied in the informal relationships. The lines which marked the Christians off from the world around them were becoming increasingly blurred as Christianity became more 'respectable' and as more and more Christians came to share the culture, the values, tastes and life-styles of their non-Christian contemporaries" (12).

16 On the basis of the discrepancy observed between the account of his conversion given in the Confessions, written at a decade's remove from the event, and the spiritual tenor of the philosophical dialogues written soon after his conversion was to have occurred, it has been suggested that Augustine was converted not to Christianity in 386, as the Confessions imply, but to Neo-Platonism. The Plotin- ian idiom of these dialogues, it is said, sorts oddly with someone who, according to the Confessions, is supposed by this time to have been talking so familiarly with the Christian God (et garriebam tibi... domino deo meo; 1.1). For an account of the controversy, see O'Meara: 131 ff.


before his conversion, when he was similarly elevated in Milan as a pagan rhetor.'7

A well-known sermon of Augustine's describes the circumstances sur- rounding his forced ordination at Hippo in 391, and in doing so makes it clear just how easy it was for him to connect the unconverted pagan rhetor of 385 with the presbyter and bishop who begins the Confessions a little more than a decade later. Both, this passage suggests, could be construed as creatures of power and ambition. "At the time [391] I was looking for a place where I could establish a monastery and live with my brothers. I had left behind all worldly aspirations: I did not wish to be all that I might have been, nor did I seek to become what I am now.... I had cut myself off from all those who loved the life of this world, nor did I place myself on a level with those who rule over the people" (Selected Sermons: 206). In what amounts to an apology for his success Augustine all but equates a provincial governor ("all that I might have been") with a bishop ("what I am now"), at least insofar as they both index his worldly aspirations. It was possible to make such an equation because Christianity's rise to domi- nance meant that one could aspire to church office as a place of social prestige and political power. Though not of a rank superior to that of Christ, as in H. L. Mencken's sneer, the fourth-century bishop was of a rank superior to almost everyone else. He was, no less than the governor, "on a level with those who rule over people"-hence Augustine's insistence on never having aspired to the post. To be sure, protesting against one's ecclesiastical advancement had been conventional among the clergy at least since St. Cyprian, who tried to refuse the bishopric at Carthage in 248 (Paredi: 122). But more was at stake in such protests once the church moved from the margins to the center of Roman culture. For now the admiration accorded officials from within the church was no longer offset by the persecution that, less than a century earlier, Christians had routinely faced from outside it. As the cases of Eusebius, Nectarius, Synesius, and Am- brose make clear, the move from secular career to sacred calling was becoming less of a leap than a short step."'

17 Peter Brown describes Augustine's anxiety about the continuities between the pagan rhetor in his past and the Church official in his future as follows: "It seemed inconceivable to Augustine that he should expose himself again, even in the interests of the Church, to what he had so recently rejected with such horror.... [I]n Hippo, Augustine was again exposed to what he regarded as his previous besetting weaknesses. For a bishop was a figure of authority. If he was to be effective, he had, at least, to be admired; he must concern himself with his reputation" (1967: 205). Cf. Brown (1996): 48-49.

18 However sincere St. Ambrose may have been, for example, when he spoke of the abrupt change that spirited him "from the platforms of this vain world and the clamor of public acclamation to the chants of the psalmist," the difference between the two worlds was only slight compared to what it had been a century earlier. "The office of bishop of Milan was certainly not inferior to that of the governor of the province in public influence, authority, and responsibility," Campenhausen remarks-


It is in part the shortness of that step that simultaneously provokes Augustine to write the Confessions and prevents him from making it the document of decisive spiritual change that Pelagius and others wanted it to be. Though Hippo was something of a provincial backwater, greatly out- classed by Milan and Constantinople, the status attached to the clerical positions there was nevertheless great enough to cause Augustine considerable concern. In suggesting that a good deal of this concern arose specifically from the fact that in the final decade of the fourth century Augus- tine saw himself becoming more fully enmeshed in a public world that, for all its differences, was uncomfortably and uncannily reminiscent of the secular world he thought he had left behind in 386, I am urging that we understand the Confessions as a response to this situation: an attempt not simply to recall but to reinscribe a line of demarcation separating the old life and the new at a time when the distinction between them seemed to be losing its clarity.

In the very act of inscribing that line, however, Augustine was in danger of obliterating it. He ran the risk of succumbing to the self-defeating aspect of self-designation, the trap so notoriously entered into by the Rhen- ish prelate who is supposed to have announced, "Humility is the rarest of all virtues; God be praised, I have it" (Curtius 408)! Though the paradox itself was nothing new in Christianity, it gained considerable torque once the Church moved from the margins to the center of Roman society. For with Christianity's rapid assimilation into a secular world, the increasingly pronounced gestures serving to distinguish the Christian life from those around it could be said to harbor the kind of pride and elitism that had been the hallmarks of Roman culture from which the Christian identity sought to disentangle itself. By running too vigorously away from the ethos of the saeculum, the Christian ascetic could end up running toward it.

Peter Brown has insightfully suggested that the decline of external opposition to the faith pushed the battle inside, into the individual Chris- tian conscience, where the enemies became "his sins and his doubts; and the climax of a man's life would not be martyrdom but conversion from the perils of his own past" (1967: 159). It should nevertheless be said that this migration of the conflict from outside to inside was by no means a

"[i]ndeed, in the precincts of the church he [Ambrose] could now find a new, and yet entirely appropriate, sphere of activity for his aristocratic roman traditions" (92). Arnaldo Momigliano includes St. Augustine among those creative minds that the fourth-century Church was now capable of attract- ing: "The fact that the aristocracy played a role of increasing importance in the affairs of the Church is only one aspect of what is perhaps the central feature of the fourth century: the emergence of the Church as an organization competing with the State itself and becoming attractive to educated and influential persons. ... A man could in fact escape from the authority of the State if he embraced the Church. If he liked power he would soon discover that there was more power to be found in the Church than in the State" (9).


fated necessity. Nothing required that the Chrisitian have enemies, even internal ones, after Roman hostility disappeared. But the flouresence of the Church immensely complicated Christian identity even as it made the task of defining that identity more urgent. With its new-found legitimacy there were a variety of worldly reasons for associating with the Church, and no one could be certain that his motives were untainted; certainty on that score might itself be a sign of latent corruption. Persistent doubts about his own motives helped to carve out Augustine's vast interiority.

Such doubts also helped to produce the significance he accorded the theft of the pears. Whatever the incident's ratio of fact and fantasy, the theft seems to have crystallized for Augustine a complex set of anxieties that grew up around his irradicable love of praise. More specifically, by means of this pecadillo he was able to put forward in a disguised form the circumstances under which the Confessions themselves might be misun- derstood as an exercise in cupidity rather than charity, and by so doing immunize the book itself against that threat. Such indirection was itself an exercise in humility, a recognition that motives in this world are always mixed, that our wills are, at best, gerrymandered. He makes the point elo- quently in The City of God, where the techniques of contrast and juxtaposition are treated as the pedagogy appropriate to a fallen world. "In truth, these two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effect their separation, and what I write for the glory of the city of God, that, being placed in comparison with the other, it may shine with a brighter lustre" (1.35). The cities are entangled in the world because they are entangled in every human heart and every human act- even in so fine an act as writing the Confessions. But the theft of pears pro- vides a background against which that writing may itself, like the city of God, shine forth with brighter lustre. The dialectical relationship between confession and the theft is sealed by Augustine himself, in fact, in a question he asks of both activities. "What was the fruit heretofore in these things?" he asks of his crime in book 2, just as he asks of his writing in book 10, "What is the fruit of my confession?"

Answering this latter question, about the fruit of the Confessions, can take us back to the painting with which this essay began. No doubt Carle Van Loo thought of Predication de saint Augustin-together with the five other paintings he devoted to the Saint's career-as a tribute to its subject. The artist's own regard for St. Augustine is evident in his depiction of the congregation, whose reverential expressions Van Loo has taken such pains to emphasize. But even as it celebrates him, the painting unwittingly sub- verts Augustine's injunction that we attend to the message rather than the messenger, converting as it does a scene of religious instruction into pure spectacle, an icon in the cult of personality to which the Confessions them-


selves contributed. After all, what is the subject of his sermon? What is he exhorting us to do? With one exception, the listeners in the painting know what we, the viewers of the painting, will never know. The exception is the distracted child at the extreme right who, oblivious to what is being said, looks out toward us, his kinsmen.

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