I saw Saint Augustine today, weeping under a fig tree as he watched me thumb through his Confessions on the toilet. In 4th century Hippo, most people probably shat communally as they sat atop stone privies designed to accommodate multiple participants. “Noli spectare. Perturbat me . . .”—this circumstance was perhaps not as convenient for light reading as is our current situation.
So, naturally, I could understand his confusion and disappointment as I skimmed over his conversion experience—the climactic triumph of his spirit over flesh—in such close proximity to excrement, which probably happens to be a good distance from the regenerate soul on the ladder of spiritual ascendance.
I know someone like Whitman wouldn't have minded and, in fact, would have likely welcomed this proximity; however, I had the distinct impression that Augustine was not pleased in the least. So I nodded, gently lay the book aside and began to think about the nature of sacred texts—particularly, whether or not they created or should be reserved for sacred spaces (unlike the one I currently occupied). Perhaps they demanded a more reverent physical and spiritual posture, a more solemn response.
For example, most patristic scholars contend that Augustine intended his Confessions to be read reflectively. He envisioned a connection between meditation, as a spiritual exercise, and reading. Thus, by tracing his own journey of self-discovery, which of course culminates in spiritual conversion, Augustine encouraged his readers to try out his method for themselves—uniting their own souls’ progress with the memory of their physical bodies’ passage through historical time just as he did. As Brian Stock suggests, “The individual life thereby became the setting for the reenactment of the biblical drama of alienation and return.” It is this speculation of Augustine’s authorial intent that consistently thwarts my attempts to shake the conviction that the bishop of Hippo did not imagine a toilet as the stage upon which my personal passion play, the death of my old self and resurrection of the new, would be reenacted. Ultimately, my disconcertedness emanates from the knowledge that the critical problem of Augustine’s Confessions is the translation of thought into action for both himself and his audience. And as I considered this problem with elbows upon knees, hands supporting head and bare feet pressed to cool linoleum, I couldn’t help but feel that my present action was not the most accurate physical translation of Augustine’s metaphysical message.
Perhaps when the saint gazed into the future to picture me reading his autobiography, I was seated beside a wooden prayer bench in a sunlit reading room as a single beam of light like a dove descended from heaven to anoint a particular passage before my eyes. Surely he did not suppose his most intimate work would be the subject of my powder-room perusal. To clarify, it’s not that I think Augustine is necessarily too stilted or sanctimonious to read on the toilet; it’s just that I don’t want to spoil his expectations. I don’t want to take lightly the ethical demands of his text—a text that is considered by many to be sacred.
This leads me to wonder whether secondary sources pertaining to Augustine are also off limits—perhaps, as long as I just skip over quoted passages? Only, this seems like a slippery slope because, as we all know, I’m not reading a first-hand account to begin with. I’m reading Henry Chadwick’s translation, which is only one translation in a long chain of translations and reinterpretations extending all the way back to the 4th century. And here in lies the problem—every new reading is new translation, meaning it must be the sense of the text that is sacred rather than the words on the page—and the sense seems inescapable.
Initially, I intended to suggest that bathroom reading might be a sort of litmus test for sacred texts—if you feel guilty reading it on the toilet, perhaps it’s sacred. However, for Augustine, all truth is God’s truth—all signs, natural and conventional, point to God. Thus, in the Augustinian semiotic explanation of the creation’s relationship to its creator, the sacred becomes inescapable--even on the toilet.
In light of this revelation, Augustine challenges us to assume vocations of “logobiography”— making it our lives’ objective to demonstrate the manner in which we are written into the text of God’s creation (here is where I begin to see obvious connections to our discussion of virtue-ethics). According to the saint, we should recognize our function as signs and producers of signs that point perpetually beyond our/themselves to the referent who subsumes the system of representation.
Of course, I’m not advocating that we return to a medieval world-view in which every mundane occurrence becomes a “sign” from God—I’m merely attempting to suggest that Christianity’s past and present rootedness in semiotics may be conceived of as a contiguous process. For example, I do not believe Augustine’s conception necessarily negates postmodernism’s notion that meaning is linguistically and thus socially constructed, but might rather suggest that the materials with which society constructs have their immutable origins in an original word. Therefore, while incorporeal conceptions such as love, justice and truth might ultimately originate in the logos, the corporeal and thus temporal and malleable manifestations of these conceptions are contingent upon the imbricated vocabularies we employ to communicate them. As reader-response critics Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs suggest, our “language enables the ‘word of God’ to ‘speak.’”
Thus, in the reciprocal relationship between creator and created, the word first spoken by God is incarnated in and perpetuated by the thought and action of humanity. And if—as I suggested in my response to Daniel’s recent post—the divine logos pervades and is perpetuated by manifold discourses, contact and negotiation between multiple and divergent perspectives can be conceived of as an essential element in a process of revelation, which Ricoeur describes as “opening something that is closed, of making manifest something that was hidden.”
Ricoeur’s conception of revelation as process also serves as a reminder of what Augustine refers to as our status viatoris—our perpetual state of being on the way, which provides a valuable caution against attempts to reconcile discordant discourses for the achievement of hegemonic consensus. As Bakhitn asserts, “Christ’s truth is real, but its authority cannot be known as dogma or proposition. Genuine truth always involves more work and more risk than dogma or propositions require of us.”
