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Dialogue With God

Peter Brown

What is the correct reaction when we open the ‘Confessions’? It should, perhaps, be one of acute embarrassment.
October 26, 2017 issue

Reviewed:

Confessions
by Augustine, translated from the Latin by Sarah Ruden
Modern Library, 484 pp., $28.00

In 2012, Sarah Ruden brought us, in a crackling translation, the

second-century-AD Latin novel known as The Golden Ass of Apuleius.
The Golden Ass is full of impudent incongruities. A topsy-turvy tale
about a hapless young man turned into a donkey is combined with a
love story (of Cupid and Psyche) as bright and delightful as the
tapestries that would illustrate it throughout the late Middle Ages and
the Renaissance. Utterly unexpectedly, the book ends with the vision
of a goddess rising from the swell of a moonlit sea.1

Ruden now leads us to a yet more incongruous masterpiece. A little

over two centuries after The Golden Ass, we discover a person who
appears to be a highly Latinate North African such as Apuleius had
been—a product, indeed, of a school established in Apuleius’s own
hometown, Madauros (modern M’Daourouch, in Algeria, near the
tense border with Tunisia)—only to learn that he was a middle-aged
Christian bishop, with his back turned to us, speaking endlessly,
urgently to his God.

We call this riveting dialogue with God the Confessions of Saint

Augustine. It was probably written in 397 AD, a few years after
Augustine had become a Christian bishop in Hippo (modern Annaba,
in Algeria: one of the few good ports available west of Carthage,
sheltered by a row of promontories that protrude into the
Mediterranean like a fleet straining at anchor to take sail for Rome).

The Confessions is as much a jumble of contrasts as is Apuleius’s dirty,

courtly, and ecstatic tale. We try to anchor it by calling it the first
Christian autobiography—even, in more heady moods, the first
autobiography ever. But to call it an autobiography is a misleading
half-truth. In the first nine books of the Confessions, Augustine does
indeed describe his life from his birth in 354 to his conversion in Milan
in 386, and the death of his mother, Monnica, at Ostia, in late 387. Only
these books, accounting for slightly more than half of the text, deal
with Augustine’s past life. After that—for a further 206 pages in
Ruden’s translation—the great work floats triumphantly out to sea,
ever further away from modern expectations of an autobiography.

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In books ten and eleven, we are treated to minute self-examination

and to spells of philosophical heavy lifting on the nature of memory
and time. In the last two books, Augustine plunges into the shadowy,
magical forest of the Hebrew Scriptures to meditate on what Moses
had really meant when he described the six days of Creation.

S o what is the correct reaction when we open the Confessions? It

should, perhaps, be one of acute embarrassment. For we have
stumbled upon a human being at a primal moment—standing in
prayer before God. Having intruded on Augustine at his prayers, we
are expected to find ourselves pulled into them, as we listen to a flow
of words spoken, as if on the edge of an abyss, to a God on the far side
—to a being, to all appearances, vertiginously separate from ourselves.

The measure of the success of Ruden’s translation is that she has

managed to give as rich and as diverse a profile to the God on the far
side as she does to the irrepressible and magnetically articulate Latin
author who cries across the abyss to Him. Most translations of the
Confessions fail to do this. We are usually left with the feeling that one
character in the story has not fully come alive. We meet an ever-so-
human Augustine, with whom it is easy to identify even when we most
deplore him. But we meet him perched in front of an immense
Baroque canvas called “God”—suitably grand, of course, suitably
florid, but flat as the wall.

How does Ruden remedy this lack of life in God? She takes God in
hand. She renames Him. He is not a “Lord.” That is too grand a word.
Its sharpness has been blunted by pious usage. Augustine’s God was a
dominus—a master. And a Roman dominus was a master of slaves.
Unlike “Lord,” the Latin word dominus implied, in Augustine’s time, no
distant majesty, muffled in fur and velvet. It conjured up life in the raw
—life lived face to face in a Roman household, lived to the sound of the
crack of the whip and punctuated by bursts of rage.

In the house of Augustine’s parents, slaves were well thrashed for

gossiping. Monnica herself confronted wives whose faces bore bruises
from angry husbands, with the grim reminder that, after all, their
marriage contracts had handed them over to these men as so many
“slaves.” One should add that brilliant recent studies of the later
Roman Empire by Kyle Harper and others have left us in no doubt that
slavery was alive and well in Roman Africa and elsewhere, adding a
bitter taste to the social life, to the sexual morality, and to the
imaginations of Romans of the age of Augustine.2 In her introduction,
Ruden writes: “This imagery…may be harsh and off-putting, but a
translator must govern her distaste and try to make her author’s
thought and experience as vivid and sympathetic as it plainly was to
his contemporaries.” To do otherwise would be “condescending,
manipulative, and anachronistic.”

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To make God more of a person, by making Him a master, does not, at

first sight, make Him very nice. But at least it frees Him up. It also
brings Augustine to life. In relation to God, Augustine experiences all
the ups and downs of a household slave in relation to his master. He
jumps to the whip. He tries out the life of a runaway. He attempts to
argue back. Altogether, “Augustine’s humorously self-deprecating,
submissive, but boldly hopeful portrait of himself in relation to God
echoes the rogue slaves of the Roman stage.” (Indeed, the thought of
the bishop of Hippo as having once been the slippery slave of God—
like Zero Mostel as the plump and bouncy Pseudolus in A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum—somehow lightens the impression
of a seemingly inextricable roller coaster of sin and punishment that
we usually derive from reading the first part of the Confessions.)

For God can change His mood. Like any other free person, He can
show a different side. The Confessions is about the marvelous
emergence of new sides of God as Augustine himself changes in his
relation to God, over the years, from slave to repentant son to lover.
Ruden may have to defend her retranslation of the name of God from
“Lord” to “Master.” But her approach is a thoughtful one. It is
governed by a determination to present Augustine’s relations with his
God as endowed with the full emotional weight of a confrontation
between two real persons. She takes no shortcuts. Small departures
from conventional translations show her constant effort to capture an
unexpected dimension of tenderness (very different from that of the
slave owner) in God’s relation to Augustine and in Augustine’s to God.

To take small examples: Ruden does not have Augustine “embrace”

Jesus as if He were a proposition. He takes Him in his arms. When
Augustine looks back at his first mystical awakening, he cries: Sero te
amavi: “Late have I loved you!” It is a famous cry. But it is a little
grand. You and I would say: “I took too long to fall in love.” And this—
the less dramatic but more human turn of phrase—is what Ruden opts
for. Repeated small acts of attention to the humble, human roots of
Augustine’s imagery of his relations to God enable Ruden to convey a
living sense of the Being before Whom we find him transfixed in
prayer: “Silent, long-suffering and with so much mercy in your heart.”

A reviewer may add some touches to this picture. After the rude
shock of meeting God as a slave master, some attention might
also have been given, in Ruden’s introduction, to Augustine’s images of
the tenderness of God. I think particularly of the image of the doctor
and the eye salve. In the ancient world, the doctor was not the icy
professional that he or she has become in the modern imagination.
Unlike the surgeon, with his dreaded bag of knives, the doctor entered
the house as a figure of magical, tender care. In a world with nothing
like modern anesthesia, the doctor stood for the one principle of gentle
change made available to bodies all too often held rigid on the rack of
pain. His skilled words brought comfort, if only to the mind. His
skilled hands played across the body, untying, where possible, the
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knots of pain. His drugs always carried with them reassuring traces of
occult energies culled from herbs, which worked slowly and silently to
bring the pain-wracked body back to its natural state.

As for the eye salve: the bitter mixture known as collyrium was known
to everyone. Eye diseases (glaucoma and conjunctivitis) were
everywhere in the dusty landscapes of the Mediterranean. The dangers
to the eye of infected water were exponentially increased in every
Roman city by the splendor of their public baths. Even in the bracing
atmosphere of Hadrian’s Wall, 12 percent of the Roman garrison of
Vindolanda (near Housesteads Roman Fort in Northumberland) were
out of action, with eye infections predominating.

Hence the supreme skill with which Augustine uses medical

terminology in books six and seven of the Confessions to describe the
last, almost subliminal stages of his conversion. Here the crack of the
whip is silent. Nor does truth dawn suddenly for him in the garish,
broken-light manner of conventional conversion narratives. Instead,
we enter the gentle half-light of a Roman sickroom, as God, the
supremely tender doctor, tiptoes in to place his hand, at last, on
Augustine’s heart:

My swelling settled down under your unseen medicinal hand, and the…
darkened eyesight of my mind, when the stinging salve of…sufferings was
applied, was healing day by day.

Ruden also might have explained even more fully the carefully
constructed sense of vertigo induced by the direct encounter of two
totally incommensurable beings—a storm-tossed human and an
eternal God. She presents this supreme incongruity almost as an
occasion for merriment. In describing Augustine’s intellectual
fireworks, she stresses the element of free-floating, almost childlike
intellectual play beneath the eyes of God. Here was a Being so different
from us that even the most serious intellectual endeavor on our part
was vaguely ludicrous.

But Augustine also uses this sense of vertigo in a different way. He has
a deadly gift for miniaturizing sin. There are no large sins in the
Confessions. Those that he examines most closely are tiny sins. He
spends a large part of book two (nine entire pages) examining his
motives for robbing a pear tree. Modern readers chafe. “Rum thing,”
wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harold Laski in 1921, “to see a
man making a mountain out of robbing a pear tree in his teens.”

But Holmes was wrong to be impatient. Only by winnowing every

motive that played into that obscure act of small-town vandalism was
Augustine able to isolate the very smallest, the most toxic concentrate
of all—the chilling possibility that he had acted gratuitously, simply to
show that he (like God, and then like Adam) could do whatever he

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wished. The publishers were right to put on the jacket of this book,
which contains a succession of sins, each reduced to chillingly minute
proportions, the image of a half-eaten pear.

The publishers would have found it much harder to illustrate the

middle-aged Augustine’s notion of sex. By the time the bishop
approached his sexual temptations as he wrote book ten of the
Confessions in 397, they had thinned out for him so as to seem next to
transparent. He had abandoned sex for a decade. Sexual scenes
appeared only in his dreams. But they were there. They still spoke of
forces in him that were all the more enduring for being next to
imperceptible.

He speaks of these urges as a viscum—as a form of birdlime. We

should note the terrible precision of this word. Birdlime is not only
sticky. It is transparent. This barely visible substance would be placed
at the end of a rod that would then be inserted among the boughs of a
tree in such a way that the unsuspecting bird would hop without
noticing from the living branch on to the adhesive surface. (In the
fresco in a fourth-century bathhouse at Sidi Ghrib, nineteen miles
southwest of Carthage, the owner of the villa is shown setting out for a
bird hunt followed by a slave carrying a bundle of these deadly rods.)
This barely perceptible, cloying glue—and not the hot pleasures of the
bed, as we might expect—was what preoccupied the bishop. It might
still brush against the wings of his soul, slowing, if only a little, his
ascent to God.

Altogether, in reading book ten of the Confessions, we find Augustine

looking at his sins as if through the diminishing end of a telescope.
They are disturbing precisely because they are so very small but so
very tenacious. Confronted by sensuality and violence, ancient
moralists and Christian preachers had tended to deploy an “aversion
therapy” based upon rhetorical exaggeration. They pulled out all the
stops to denounce the shimmer of ornament, the drunken roar of the
circus, the rippling bodies of dancers and wrestlers, the sight of
beautiful women, and the languid seduction of perfumes. With
Augustine, all this falls silent. The effect of the baleful glare of material
beauty becomes no more than noting in himself a touch of sadness
when he was deprived for too long of the African sun: “The queen of
colors herself, this ordinary light, saturates everything we see…and
sweet-talks me with the myriad ways she falls on things.”

Even the noisiest, the most colossal place of all, and the place of
greatest cruelty—the Roman amphitheater—seems to shrink
drastically. Augustine knew only too well what a gladiatorial show was
like. He described his friend Alypius in Rome “guzzl[ing]…cruelty” as
he watched the gladiatorial games. But had the cruel urge to watch
gone away? No. No longer does Augustine follow the venationes, the

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matador-like combats of skilled huntsmen armed with pikes and nets

against lithe and savage beasts that had replaced gladiatorial shows all
over Africa:

[But] what about the frequent times when I’m sitting at home, and a lizard
catching flies, or a spider entwining in her net the flies falling into it,
engrosses me? Just because these are tiny animals doesn’t mean that the
same predation isn’t going on within me, does it?

For Augustine, this is no idle lapse of attention. It is a realization of

continued urges that is as disturbing as the thin voice of a ghost in a
lonely room: “You see, I am still here.”

But despite the eerie hiss of sin, Augustine also remembers that he had
tasted a little of the sweetness of God:

And sometimes you allow me to enter into an emotion deep inside that’s
most unusual, to the point of a mysterious sweetness, and if this is made
whole in me, it will be something this life can’t ever be.

And what is more, he remembered that he had once tasted this

sweetness in company. The astonishing (and little-noticed) fact about
the much-debated vision of Ostia, which occurred on the eve of
Monnica’s death in 387 and offered a view of “what the eternal life to
come would be like,” was that Augustine had experienced it along with
his mother: “We conversed together alone, very gently,” and the vision
had come to them both.

At the end of time, a vast company of humans and of angels would

share forever the same vision that Monnica and Augustine had shared,
if only for a fleeting moment. And they would do it all together. That is
the whole point of the last, triumphant book of the Confessions: for, up
above the heavens, “they always see Your face…and they lose
themselves in love for it.”

M eanwhile, there was a church to run. A body of hitherto

unknown letters written by Augustine in his old age, discovered
and published by the Austrian scholar Johannes Divjak in 1981, has
been much discussed and used by scholars, but has yet to receive its
due weight in our general image of Augustine. Pundits ourselves and
the students of pundits, we like to think of our heroes and heroines in
an elevated light. We expect the author of a Great Book such as the
Confessions to remain in his study—lucubrating darkly, for good or ill,
on weighty topics such as sex, subjectivity, and the self.

It should come as a salutary surprise to learn, from Letter 10 of the

Divjak collection, that in 428 AD—thirty years after the writing of the
Confessions, that is, and maybe only two years before his death—
Augustine, now seventy-four, was deeply engaged in an attempt to
block the slave trade out of the port of Hippo. Sent inland by slave

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traders, gangs of slavers had scoured the isolated hamlets in the

mountains behind Hippo, shipping cargoes of terrified peasants across
the sea. They may have sold them to landowners in Italy and Gaul who
were anxious to restock their estates after the disruption caused by the
barbarian invasions earlier in the century.

Augustine reported the affair to his old friend Alypius, who was in
Rome once again—no longer to watch the games, but to search the
libraries of the city for copies of imperial laws that might be used to
put an end to this “evil of Africa.” The church of Hippo had already
ransomed 130 of these captives. Well lawyered-up, the slave traders
had responded by suing Augustine for theft of their property. Ever
conscientious and on his guard to make a watertight case, Augustine
noted for Alypius the testimony of those rescued by the church:

Once when I was with some of those who had been freed from their
wretched captivity by our church, I asked a young girl how she had come
to be sold to the slave dealer. She said she had been taken from her
parents’ home…she said that it was done in the presence of her parents
and brothers. One of her brothers…was present [while Augustine spoke to
the girl] and, because she was little [and may well have known no Latin:
the hinterland of Hippo was still Punic-speaking],…he revealed to us how
it had been done. He said that thugs like these break in at night. The more
they are able to disguise themselves, the less likely the victims are to resist:
since they think they are a barbarian band. But if there were not traders
such as these [back on the docks of Hippo] things like this would not
happen.

For Augustine, service to the church had come to include such

humanitarian work, among so many other things. But it also continued
to mean the attempt to find, somewhere in this world—in common
prayer, in the collective singing of the Psalms, in the high drama of
saints’ feasts, and in the gathering for the Eucharist—some place for
the shared sweetness of God. A few years before his intervention in the
slave trade at Hippo, Augustine concluded one of his sermons on the
Gospel of John:

I sense your feelings of yearning, of eagerness, being lifted up with me to

what is above…. But now I will put away the copy of the Gospel. You are all
going to depart as well, each to your own home. It has been good, sharing
the Light together, good rejoicing in it, good exulting in it together; but
when we depart from each other, let us not depart from Him.

It is good to be reminded of such a man by a translation of his

masterwork that does justice both to him and to his God.

Peter Brown
Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at
Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor
in Early Christianity, and Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, which was
published last year. (February 2024)

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1. The Golden Ass, translated by Sarah Ruden (Yale University Press,

2012), reviewed in these pages by G.W. Bowersock, December 20,
2012. ↩

2. Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425

(Cambridge University Press, 2011) and From Shame to Sin: The
Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity
(Harvard University Press, 2013); see my review of the latter in
these pages, December 19, 2013, and Brent D. Shaw, “The Family
in Late Antiquity: The Experience of Augustine,” Past & Present,
Vol. 115, No. 1 (May 1987). ↩

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