Plato Revisited: Augustine’s Confessions

Generally speaking, Augustine’s Confessions seems to be a reworking of Plato’s metaphysics in relation to a Christian cosmology. Augustine speaks of the dichotomy between the body and the soul, the falseness of rhetoric, memory, sublimity, and desire. In addressing oratory, Augustine recalls Plato’s Gorgias and its subject matter inspired by rhetoric: Truth and the human condition.

Augustine’s Confessions conforms to an intellectual autobiography. The ethos has primarily a pedagogical intent, discusses the arts and sciences, and illustrates the present intellectual and spiritual development of the author. Augustine uses the events of his life in order to teach the reader the wisdom in piety to God. He discusses the importance of reading and writing, but sees nothing in this world, short of the word of God, that seems a worthy subject for rhetoric.

Rhetoric is therefore important in Augustine’s confessions. His word is based upon the Word: “Say unto my soul, I am Thy salvation. So speak that I may hear, Lord, my heart is listening; open it that it may hear Thee say to my soul I am Thy salvation” (5). Yet, Augustine states, the word in humans is corrupt and has only to do with persuasion, pretension, and distraction. Even the crying of babies, while they do not yet talk, inform their mothers of their hunger; humans are never innocent of desire (9). Humans learn this persuasion—“a kind of natural language common to all races”—through observation: “facial expressions, glances of the eye, gestures, and the tones by which the voice expresses the mind’s state” (9). Augustine concludes that since all communication seems to be persuasion, that any friendship in this world is fornication against God. Humans pretend to be amiable and conciliatory because they desire something and will use rhetoric to achieve that end.

Augustine’s rhetoric is a rhetoric of supplication that verges on a sexual desire for a unity with God. Rhetoric seems to be something of the body for Augustine, but the Word comes from God—words are “choice and precious vessels” (16). We, as humans, corrupt words by trying to use them to elicit some pretentious response. The words themselves are morally good (originally coming from God), but the poet’s use of them is vile (13). The poets show the gods as both divine and sinful; how, asks Augustine, can we not expect men to commit adultery when the poets depict Jove’s concupiscence (15)?

The pedagogue, then, in adumbrating literature, teaches the vile and base lies of man rather than illuminating the eternal word of God: “the sons of men observe the rules of letters and syllables taught by the speakers of our tongue before us [people observed, teachers, and poets], while they neglect the eternal rules of everlasting salvation taught by you” (17). Therefore, Augustine concludes, humans have venerated the rules of speech above any moral responsibility to other humans: the eloquent speaker “will be most vigilantly on guard lest a slip of the tongue he drop an ‘h’ and murder the word ‘human’: yet worries not at all that by the fury of his mind he may murder a real human” (18). So Augustine’s mistake in his early education, an error he sees many humans committing, was seeking “pleasure, nobility, and truth not in God but in beings He had created, myself and others” (19).

Augustine later realizes that he should seek not the eloquence of the word (which is human), but the Word itself (which is divine). Yet the word presented in the Bible seems to the young Augustine so simplistic that it could not possibly hold any great wisdom (39). He explains that he could not see the pith because he remained interested in the chaff: “I did not take great heed to learn what [Ambrose] was saying but only to hear how he said it: that empty interest was all I now had since I despaired of man’s finding the way to you” (82). Yet, he realizes, as Plato also does, that eloquence can lead to wisdom: “And while I was opening my heart to learn how eloquently he spoke, I came to feel, though only gradually, how truly he spoke” [emphasis mine] (82).

Augustine uses “feel”—a sort of existential understanding—in his last sentence. At the point of his discovering truth, reason breaks down and eloquence no longer matters, for truth “offers itself in the plainest words and the simplest expressions” (92) and finally in an individual solitude and contemplation that he observed Ambrose in so often. While the intermediary of the preacher is necessary at first, eventually belief must supersede talk and its concomitant eloquence. Augustine gives the example of oratory affecting one of his students, yet this effect precipitated through the student’s perceptions and actions because the student applied the lesson to himself. Yet some degree of wisdom must already be present for rhetoric to have a positive effect (95). And even more, subtle wisdom is needed to see that the Bible’s passages, ostensibly simple, actually contain a sublime profundity—pith with no chaff (92).

While rhetoric may help one reach the truth, it, ontologically, contains no truth, only false persuasion, pretension, and distraction. Augustine seems to suggest, like Plato’s ladder of love, that the seeker of Truth can climb a latter of rhetoric in his journey to God. At first he yearns for sheer physical gratification and appearance; yet this eloquence begins to give away as more of the truth is uncovered. Rhetoric, by slowly revealing its own vile nature, may lead to the truth by destroying itself in the preceiver’s mind. Finally, states Augustine, God uses rhetoric for his own purposes. Through God’s providence, rhetoric becomes a flailing whip and burning coals to punish and test his suppliants for some unknown purpose (95). This purpose probably leads to a greater wisdom—the Truth that Augustine ardently desires throughout his Confessions. In the end—an end free of talk, there is silence: “And so my confession, O my God, in Your sight is made silently: and yet not silently, for it makes no sound, yet it cries aloud in my heart” (173).

Related Posts

1. Rousseau’s Confessions I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of...
2. Plato’s Gorgias: How to Live Plato’s Gorgias addresses the question of rhetoric: is rhetoric an art...