http://www.nybooks.

com/articles/2017/10/26/sarah-ruden-augustine-dialogue-god/

Dialogue With God

Peter Brown

October 26, 2017 Issue

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

1
2
 Saint Augustine of Hippo; painting by El Greco, 1590

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
beena product, indeed, of a school established in Apuleiuss own
hometown, Madauros (modern MDaourouch, 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 Apuleiuss
dirty, courtly, and ecstatic tale. We try to anchor it by calling it the first
Christian autobiographyeven, 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,

1The Golden Ass, translated by Sarah Ruden (Yale University Press, 2012), reviewed in these pages
by G.W. Bowersock, December 20, 2012.
3
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
Augustines past life. After thatfor a further 206 pages in Rudens
translationthe great work floats triumphantly out to sea, ever further
away from modern expectations of an autobiography.
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.

So 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 momentstanding 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 sideto a being, to all
appearances, vertiginously separate from ourselves.
The measure of the success of Rudens 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. Augustines God was a
dominusa master. And a Roman dominus was a master of slaves. Unlike
Lord, the Latin word dominus implied, in Augustines time, no distant
majesty, muffled in fur and velvet. It conjured up life in the rawlife
4
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 Augustines 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
imagerymay be harsh and off-putting, but a translator must govern her
distaste and try to make her authors thought and experience as vivid and
sympathetic as it plainly was to his contemporaries. To do otherwise
would be condescending, manipulative, and anachronistic.
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, Augustines 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 Godlike Zero Mostel as the
plump and bouncy Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forumsomehow 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.)

2Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275425 (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).
5
 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 Augustines 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 Gods relation to Augustine and
in Augustines 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 thisthe less
dramatic but more human turn of phraseis what Ruden opts for.
Repeated small acts of attention to the humble, human roots of
Augustines 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 Rudens introduction, to Augustines 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
6
comfort, if only to the mind. His skilled hands played across the body,
untying, where possible, the 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 Hadrians 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 Augustines heart:

My swelling settled down under your unseen medicinal hand,

and thedarkened eyesight of my mind, when the stinging
salve ofsufferings 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 beingsa storm-tossed human and an eternal
God. She presents this supreme incongruity almost as an occasion for
merriment. In describing Augustines 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.

7
 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
allthe chilling possibility that he had acted gratuitously, simply to show
that he (like God, and then like Adam) could do whatever he 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 Augustines 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.

8
 Angelico: The Conversion of Saint Augustine (detail), circa 1430s

He speaks of these urges as a viscumas 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
glueand not the hot pleasures of the bed, as we might expectwas
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

9
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 seeand 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 crueltythe Roman amphitheaterseems 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 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 Im 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 doesnt mean that the same predation isnt 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 thats most unusual, to the point of a mysterious

10
 sweetness, and if this is made whole in me, it will be something
this life cant 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 Monnicas
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 our faceand they lose themselves in love
for it.

Meanwhile, 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 ADthirty 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 traders,
gangs of slavers had scoured the isolated hamlets in the mountains
behind Hippo, shipping cargoes of terrified peasants across the sea. They
11
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 againno 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 homeshe said that it was
done in the presence of her parents and brothers. One of her
brotherswas 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 worldin common
prayer, in the collective singing of the Psalms, in the high drama of saints
feasts, and in the gathering for the Eucharistsome 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:
12
 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.

13