Trappings of Woe
In his first sojourn at Carthage, the big city of sizzling desires, small-town Augustine, then in this nineteenth year of life, discovers Cicero’s Hortensius and finds its exhortation to philosophy persuasive, if not entirely compelling (he isn’t going to be giving up his secular ambitions any time soon). His father, Patricius, has been dead for about a year (we get little in the way of details here), and soon Augustine will be having a son of his own, Adeodatus, conceived in adolescent
exuberance—and recklessness. When Augustine, now in his early 20s, returns to Thagaste, his hometown, to teach grammar, he strongly reconnects with a childhood friend who follows him in his adherence to the exotic religion of the Manichees: a form of gnosticism, wherein redemption is to know what fundamentally you are not. When the friend dies of a fever, an inconsolable Augustine becomes wed to his own grief and is even fascinated by it. He hastily flees to Carthage, in hopes of outrunning the “great question” (magna quaestio) his
involuted grief has made of his love. The young bishop who is
remembering and confessing all this is painfully aware of how he has been able to violate love’s first imperative—to return love for love— and turn grief into a show.
A Grief Observed:
Augustine leaves Thagaste (his hometown of hard lessons) to continue his education in the big city: Carthage (371), he is 16/17 years old. (Patricius dies right around this time); about a year into his sojourn there (372), Augustine will have a son, Adeodatus, with a woman whose name he never discloses.
While in Carthage, taking in all the sights and temptations, Augustine is studying to be an advocate in the law courts. (He notes, cynically, that success in this profession requires high-level skills of deception; put otherwise, this is a profession about winning, not truth-seeking.) He is at the top of his rhetoric class, trying to keep clear of the
self-designated eversores: the unruly, actively disruptive students—bullies. A lot is going on for him in these early Carthage years: his father dies, he has a son, he hooks up with the Manichees, he discovers philosophy.
He comes across Cicero’s Hortensius (he is 18, or as he puts it, “in this 19th year”). It alters his affect (affectum).
Different for him: he doesn’t read the book for tips on how to be a better language-manipulator. He is struck with the notion that he can use his natural gifts, if he so chooses, for something other than an enhanced self-image (the false coinage of most forms of social recognition).
He notes in passing that his father has been dead for two years, and that his mother has been sending him the funds to continue his education.
Returns once again to Thagaste in 374, to teach grammar, the gateway course of study for rhetoric, and during his time back at home, he rekindles an old friendship, only to have that friend die on him about a year into their renewed relationship.
I. The Quality of Loss
This is a friendship that is intense and very sweet for Augustine (a redemption of childhood). Shared interests, a peer, and through Augustine’s influence: a Manichee.
conf. 4.4.7 (Chadwick):
For I had turned him away from the true faith, to which, being only young, he had no strong or profound allegiance, towards those
superstitions and pernicious mythologies which were the reason for my mother’s tears over me. So under my influence, this man’s mind was wandering astray, and my soul could not endure to be without him.
An odd way of putting it: Augustine cannot endure losing a friend whose life, he believed, was significantly under his control. Is it the friend’s loss he cannot endure, or it is the loss of being able to control his friend that wrecks him?
The friend, burning with fever, slips into unconsciousness, and his family has him baptized. This is contrary to Augustine’s interests, and Augustine resolves to make fun of the baptism once his friend’s fever breaks and he is feeling better.
immediate frankness he advised me that, if I wished to be his friend, I must stop saying this kind of thing to him.
Augustine backs off, but under the assumption that he will have a better chance later on to bring his friend back to his senses (to Augustine’s way of feeling, affectum); conf. 4.4.8 (Chadwick):
…I deferred telling him all of my feelings until he should get better and recover his health and strength. Then I would be able to do what I wished with him.
But he was snatched away from my lunacy, so that he might be preserved with you for my consolation. After a few days, while I was absent, the fever returned, and he died.
Complex sentiment:
sed ille abreptus dementiae meae, ut apud te servaretur consolationi meae.
Why would Augustine feel consoled by his friend’s death? It would seem that Augustine’s reaction to his friend’s death is anything but consoled, conf. 4.4.9 (my translation):
My heart was wholly in grief’s shade, and death was whatever I looked at. My native land was a punishment to me; my father’s house a
strange and luckless place. The things I had shared with my friend turned and tortured me cruelly in his absence. My eyes kept seeking him out everywhere, and he was gone. I hated everything because nothing had him; nor could anything still say to me, ‘look, he is on his way,’ as when he was alive and just away. I had become a great
question to myself.
The “great question” (magna quaestio): born of his fascination for his own grieving, the trappings of woe.
conf. 4.4.9 (Chadwick):
conf. 4.6.11 (Chadwick):
I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend. Although I wanted it to be otherwise, I was more unwilling to lose my misery than him.
II. The Involution of Grieving
Augustine speaks of love’s imperative: if you are loved, truly loved, then you are called to love back, to return love for love. An imperative of gratitude and of the essence of grace: it is a burden upon the soul, a burden of guilt, to ignore love.
conf. 4.9.14 (Chadwick):
This is what we love in friends. We love to the point that the human conscience feels guilty if we do not love the person who is loving us, and if that love is not returned—without demanding any physical response other than the marks of affectionate good will. Hence the mourning if a friend dies, the darkness of grief, and as the sweetness is turned into bitterness the heart is flooded with tears. The lost life of those who die becomes the death of those still living.
The reduction of affectum to spectacle (the diverting trappings of woe) is an abdication of love’s calling, a refusal of grace. And this abdication is mostly that to which Augustine confesses in book 4, with the
exception of this one sentiment, conf. 4.6.11 (Chadwick):
I did not wish to live with only half of myself, and perhaps the reason why I so feared death was that then the whole of my much loved friend would have died.
et ideo forte mori metuebam, ne totus ille moreretur quem multum amaveram.
This is Augustine’s half-hearted attempt to make narcissistic resentment out to be a form of heroic endurance.
In his Retractationes (Reconsiderations)—a late-in-life work of
retrospection—Augustine censures this sentiment for being wholly out of keeping with the serious business of confession.
The soul that cedes itself to the terrible prison of an involuted
affection, whereby love is rendered into self-preoccupation, is the soul that is ready to take a lesson from the God who embraces a mortal life and turns death into an unanticipated gift (a consolation for madness).
conf. 4.12.19 (my translation):
He who is our life came down to us, took up our death, and killed it with his own life’s abundance: and like thunder, he called us to return to him from here and into that hidden place from which he first came forth to us—the virgin womb. It was there that humanity was wedded to him, mortal flesh, not to be mortal forever. And like a bridegroom from the bridal bed he leapt with joy from there, a giant to run his course. For he did not delay, but ran calling out with his words, actions, death, life, descent, ascent—calling out for us to return to him. He left our sight, so that we might return to our heart and find him there. He went away, and look: here he is.
Consider:
The friend’s presence to (insane) Augustine: an absence
The friend’s absence (the sane rebuke) to Augustine: a presence Augustine needs to learn the difference between presence and absence: this takes in a trek from false presence to true absence (a great shock to the system) to restored presence (a reconfiguration of experience, released from sin).
Part of the offering there: knowledge of the difference between bereavement and a felt lack of wholeness.
Bereavement is the recognition from a place of dispossession of the unique goodness of a beloved; meanwhile, a felt lack of wholeness evokes the disposition to find in another’s goodness a sign of the goodness that is lacking in oneself (in this way the other person
becomes a bearer of value, the nuncio of a preconceived good and less likely a revelation of something new.)
What Augustine found lacking in himself: perhaps a sense of himself as a deep person, graced with wisdom and not just cleverness, and a good friend to his friends.
Denouement of this particular bout with sin-locked love:
Augustine heads back to Carthage, resolved to put his dead friend behind him and let time’s passage and a change of venue do its restorative work, conf. 4.8.13 (Chadwick):
Gradually time’s passage repaired me with delights such as I used to enjoy, and to them my grief yielded. But these delights were
succeeded not by new sorrows but by the causes of new sorrows.
non quidem dolores alii, causae tamen aliorum dolorum. OTHER FRIENDS are the causes of other sorrows. (Superficial
consolations and pleasures make for the suffocation of love. Augustine continues to confuse God’s security to love with the security he would invent, out of fear of abandonment, for himself. (It is
self-abandonment, and not its corrupted image as self-abandon, that he needs to embrace.)
To my mind book 4 is a rather dark book in the Confessions, perhaps the darkest.
But it does end on a sentiment of hope, a sentiment that the
Manichean Augustine, still fixated on his inner theatre, is yet able to take in:
conf. 4.16.31 (Boulding):
Let us turn back to you at last, Lord, that we be not overturned. Unspoilt, our good abides with you,
for you are yourself our good.
We need not fear to find no home again because we have fallen away from it;
while we are absent our home falls not to ruins, for our home is your eternity.
Questions:
2. It is an article of Christian faith that the dearly departed are
destined to find their place with God and want for nothing. Is grief compatible with this faith?
3. In book 4 of the Confessions, Augustine is confessing to a form of sinfulness that has taken on the trappings of woe. Is the grief that he describes there—all the bitter manifestations of sorrow over his friend’s death—genuinely grief, or is his grieving purely theatrical? 4. Is it possible to mourn the death of God? Consider here Augustine’s
