“Creation in the Confessions.” In St. Augustine, The Confessions: Ignatius Critical Editions, edited by David Vincent Meconi (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012).

| | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 1/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Page: 475 Creation in the Confessions Jared Ortiz Hope College Introduction In the Confessions, Augustine lives, speaks, and thinks in terms of creation. Creation lies at the heart of the various struggles of his life; it informs the way he crafts his speech, and it makes up the fundamental rhythms of his thought. For Augustine, creation is not just one doctrine or theme among others, but it is the foundational context for all doctrines and all themes. If we want to understand the Confessions, we need to situate it within Augustine’s understanding of creation. This approach is not immediately obvious, but consider the following: the Confessions begins with Augustine seeking for a way to understand the distinction between the “Great” “Lord” and the “part of [his] creation”,1 and ends with a discussion of the eternal Sabbath rest prefigured on the seventh day of creation. The last three books are an extended meditation on the literal and figurative meaning of the creation account in Genesis, and the most frequently used phrase in the Confessions is “God who made heaven and earth”. For Augustine, creation is decisive, and the Confessions cannot be understood without taking stock of its fundamental importance. Augustine’s Understanding of Creation What, then, is Augustine’s understanding of creation? And, why is it so important? Augustine’s understanding of creation is the Church’s understanding, the faith given to the apostles, though this traditional doctrine takes on a characteristically 1 Saint Augustine, The Confessions, ed. David Vincent Meconi, S.J., Ignatius Critical Editions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), I.1.1. Subsequent quotations from this edition will be cited in the text. References are to book, section, and paragraph. 475 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 476 䡬 2/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz Augustinian form in the saint’s hands. It is so important because, as he understands it, the first article of the Creed contains the whole faith. Get creation wrong, and we get the rest of the faith wrong. But, get creation right, and everything else logically follows. For Augustine, creation provides the conceptual space for properly thinking about the mysteries of God. Augustine uses the word “creation” to mean various things: sometimes he means the divine activity that introduces being from nothing; other times he means all the things God has created, all of material and spiritual reality, what I will call “the world”. Augustine also uses creation in a broader and deeper sense as that which defines how he understands God and the world.2 Following Saint Paul’s teaching that creation reveals God, Augustine exclaims, “By hearkening to the concerted witness of your whole creation, [I] had discovered you, our creator, and your Word” (see Conf. VIII.1.2, p. 196).3 For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, creation is a revelation that not only sheds light on, but determines our understanding of the Creator, what and how he creates, and how his creation is distinct from and related to him. For the Christian, God is not a part of the world, but is utterly transcendent to it. This seeming truism, which can be found in any catechism, is not as obvious as it might seem. It certainly was not obvious to the young Augustine. When we want to think about God, we often unwittingly imagine him; that is, we make an image of him, and whenever we do, we 2 I am indebted to Msgr. Robert Sokolowski for these distinctions. See his illuminating The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995) and “Creation and Christian Understanding”, in Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), pp. 38–50. 3 See Romans 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Augustine alludes to this passage six times in the Confessions, four of which occur in Book VII when he comes to the proper distinction between God and the world for the first time. See VII.10.16; VII.17.23 (2x); VII.20.26; X.6.10; XIII.21.31. 䡬 Page: 476 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 3/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 477 477 reduce him to something within the horizon of the world. This is a perennial temptation of human reason. Augustine relates two of these imaginative reductions familiar in his day: when people ask, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” (see Conf. XI.10.12, p. 339), and when they think of God “in the guise of a man, or as some huge being possessed of immense power” who creates the world “outside of himself, as though located at a distance from him” (see Conf. XII.27.37, p. 398), they are imagining God as a being in the world subject to time and space as we are. Instead of understanding God as the transcendent Source of creation, he is understood as the highest thing in creation. This kind of thinking makes creation ultimate; it makes the stuff of the world all there is. But, for the Christian, the world is not ultimate but radically contingent, for God created it from nothing (ex nihilo). God is ultimate. He is the fullness of Being, sufficient unto himself, Goodness Itself, perfect and perfectly simple, who, without any change in himself, freely creates from nothing in a radical outpouring of love (see Conf. XIII.1.1–2.2; XIII.16.19). This means that God is utterly transcendent and distinct from the world, which, paradoxically, enables him to be intimately present to it (see Conf. I.4.4). God is Being Itself. This is the meaning of “I Am Who I Am”,4 God’s revelation of his name to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and God’s revelation to Augustine after he had read the Platonists (see Conf. VII.10.16). But, creatures are created from nothing, which means that they receive their being from Another. Creatures have what God is. Creatures have being by “participation”, by sharing in God’s Being, not in the sense that God is divided and creatures are a part of God (this is the Manichean error), but in the sense that God makes creatures to be like him in some way. The more a creature is like God, the more it participates in him, and the closer it is to him. Rational creatures participate most in God—they are an image of God in their rational souls (even if disfigured by sin), and 4 Exodus 3:14. 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 4/16 05/10/12 478 䡬 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz they vary in likeness to God depending on love, on the “movements of the heart” (see Conf. XIII.7.8, p. 414). In the world, creatures have being in different degrees, and the more creatures there are, the more good there is. God looks at each thing he creates and calls it “good”, but when he looks at the whole of creation, he calls it “very good” (see Conf. XIII.28.43, p. 452).5 So, an angel and a dog are better than an angel alone; a man and a rock are better than a man alone. But, God and the world are not better than God alone, because God is completely Good in himself. Creation does not add anything to the Goodness or Being of God, because God wholly Is and wholly is Good, even without creation. This does not mean that creation is worthless. On the contrary, God willingly chose it to be when it did not have to be; he loves creation into being. In the Christian understanding that Augustine inherited, our existence and the existence of all things in creation are understood as God’s good and utterly gratuitous gifts (see Conf. I.20.31). Augustine develops this traditional doctrine in distinctive ways.6 Through a combination of philosophical reflection and Christian exegesis, Augustine discerns that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit create in a threefold simultaneous act, which he describes under the terms “creation”, “conversion”, and “formation” (creatio, conversio, formatio). “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” 7 —this refers to the creation of formless matter (see Conf. XII.8.8). God called this formless matter back to himself through his Word: “Let there be light.” 8 This calling back through the Word constitutes the conversion of formless matter (utterly unlike God) to similarity with God (see Conf. XIII.2.2). The formless creature simultaneously receives its form as whatever it is supposed to 5 Genesis 1:31. The actual quote by Saint Augustine is “exceedingly good”. Augustine discusses creation throughout the Confessions, but offers a searching exegesis of the Genesis creation narrative in Books XI–XIII, providing a very precise summary in Book XIII.1.1–11.12. 7 Genesis 1:1. 8 Genesis 1:3. 6 䡬 Page: 478 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 5/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 479 479 be—“and there was light”.9 For rational creatures, “formation” means “illumination”, which, for Augustine, means being made in the image and likeness of God and having the capacity to lovingly participate in the Light of God’s Wisdom (see Conf. XIII.2.3). This creatio, conversio, formatio exegetical pattern is found throughout the Confessions and has profound implications for Augustine’s understanding of the world. Creation has a kind of “conversion torque”, a dynamic orientation toward the Creator, in its very being. This is the meaning of Augustine’s most famous line: “[Y]ou have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you” (see Conf. I.1.1, p. 3). To sin is to turn away from God, aversio instead of conversio, and this undoes our created being—we actually become less. We become dissipated, we lose our form, and our constitution trickles away toward that formless abyss out of which we were made. But, through the Incarnation, the Word calls us back to God; we are converted and re-formed according to his Image. This drama of creation, aversion, and re-creation is Augustine’s own story and, as we will see, the story of all creation. Creation as the Structure of the Confessions Augustine’s understanding of creation offers a number of illuminating ways for giving an account of the structure of the Confessions. We will look at only one of these, the one that comes out of Augustine’s own suggestion of the structure. He says, “The first ten books were written about myself; the last three about holy scripture, from the words: In the Beginning God created heaven and earth as far as the Sabbath rest.” 10 What is the connection between the two parts? The first ten deal with conversion, while the last three with creation. Augustine understands his own life, especially his conversion, as patterned after God’s original 9 Genesis 1:3. This comment comes from Revisions II.6.32, a work written at the end of his life, in which Augustine reviewed and commented on all of his writings. 10 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 480 6/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz creative act. The last three books on creation, then, provide the theological and metaphysical underpinnings for the first ten books on conversion. Augustine’s initial division can be refined further. Books I–V tell of Augustine’s creation and subsequent aversion and dissipation into created things. Books V–X tell of Augustine’s re-creation, his conversion back to God, and re-formation in his Creator. The exegetical pattern that Augustine discerned in the Genesis story—creatio, conversio, formatio (including aversio and re-creatio)—provides a framework for confessing his life. The creation narrative examined in Books XI–XIII offers Augustine, and us, a scriptural mirror through which we can understand our creation and re-creation after the Fall. Coming to Terms with Creation 䡬 In the Confessions, Augustine tells the story of his “coming to terms” with creation. The phrase “coming to terms” has a double sense: first, Augustine must learn the actual terms, that is, the appropriate metaphysical categories for thinking about creation properly; but, second, he must also come to accept the fact that he himself is created—he must “come to terms” with this truth in a moral way. There is an intellectual and a moral aspect to Augustine’s coming to terms with creation: both his mind and will are engaged. Although we will only be able to deal with a part of this drama—Augustine’s struggle with the Manichees and Platonists and the resolution of these struggles in the Catholic Church—our treatment will show how the whole Confessions can be understood in light of creation. After reading Cicero’s Hortensius, Augustine falls in love with Wisdom and turns to the Scriptures, seeking a path that contained the name of Christ. But, compared with the eloquence of Cicero, the Scriptures strike him as painfully vulgar (see Conf. III.5.9). Disappointed, he becomes susceptible to the questions and criticisms of the quasi-Christian Manichees: “[T]hey constantly asked me about the origin of evil, and whether God was confined to a material form with hair and nails, and 䡬 Page: 480 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 7/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 481 481 whether people who practiced polygamy, killed human beings and offered animal sacrifices could be considered righteous” (see Conf. III.7.12, pp. 61–62). To these troubling questions, the Manichees offered plausible answers: there are two coeternal principles, Light and Darkness, which are constantly at war. Evil does not come from God (as the Manichees accused the Catholics of teaching), but from a separate evil substance, which has invaded the good and taken it captive. God is not limited to a human shape, but is an “immense, luminous body” (see Conf. IV.16.31, p. 99). The human soul is a particle of God, which is trapped in an evil material body. The Hebrew scriptures are objectionable, the New Testament has been corrupted by Judaizers (see Conf. V.11.21), and the truth has been given to Mani, in whom the Holy Spirit was personally present (see Conf. V.5.8), and who taught that the Manichean Elect mediate between God and humankind (see Conf. IV.1.1). These answers have an air of plausibility and, unlike the Catholics who (it was alleged) demanded an uncritical faith, the Manichees promised the truth through reason alone. The Manichean answers directly addressed Augustine’s intellectual and moral struggles. Both his struggles and their answers were, at root, about creation.11 Manichean theology shows a profound confusion about creation: in short, it blurs the distinction between Creator and creation. For the Manichees, Light and Darkness are, in a sense, two gods who are understood in corporeal terms, infinite extensions of very fine material that are bounded only by one another. God is a divisible thing, for anything with extension can be divided. “When I wanted to think about my God”, Augustine says of his thinking while a Manichee, “I did not know how to think otherwise than in terms of bodily size, for whatever did not answer to this description seemed to me to be nothing at all” (see Conf. V.10.19, p. 121). The Manichees reduce reality to corporeality. 11 It is no accident that soon after his conversion Augustine wrote a work entitled On Genesis against the Manichees. 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 482 䡬 8/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz The world comes about from a cosmic struggle between the two coeternal principles, and is composed of Light trapped in Darkness. There is, therefore, an identity between the elements that compose the world and the elements that compose the coeternal principles. This means that, in the Manichean view of things, there is no ontological distinction between God and the world. The Manichean God (or gods) remains within the horizon of the world, superior, in a sense, but not transcendent. The flip side of this confusion is that the Manichees exalt creation to the level of God: the Light is trapped in the world, and the human soul is identical to God’s divided substance (see Conf. IV.15.26). This amounts to a denial that the human person is created, which, for the mature Augustine, is a denial of the most fundamental truth of what it means to be human. The Manichean confusion about creation has dramatic consequences for their understanding of salvation. Since the human person is a particle of the good God trapped in evil matter, he is essentially good, and evil is not something he does, but something he suffers from an alien source. Thus, there is no free will and no personal sin (see Conf. VIII.10.22–23). Each person is an instantiation, and therefore victim, of a cosmic struggle between Light and Darkness. Salvation comes from liberating the Light in the world and in ourselves through participation in the dietary regimen of the Elect whose ritual masticating releases the entrapped Light so it can return to the sun and moon, the repositories for liberated God particles (see Conf. III.6.10). The whole saving economy is turned upside down by the Manichees: God does not save the human person from his sin (for there is no sin); rather, the human person saves God from confinement and thereby saves himself. Because matter is evil, salvation means not the redemption of body and soul, but the separation of these incongruous elements. Redemption, for the Manichees, means the dissolution of the person back to his coeternal places of origin. The Manichean errors begin to loosen their hold when Augustine encounters Faustus, Ambrose, and, most importantly, the 䡬 Page: 482 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 9/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 483 483 Platonist books. Through them, Augustine begins to think about God and the world properly: he comes to recognize the “truth that is seen and understood through the things that are made” (see Conf. VII.10.16, p. 180). With divine help, Augustine is inspired by the Platonist books to attempt an ascent from created things to their Creator.12 Augustine withdraws from the outer world and enters into his own soul where he “sees” (with an intellectual vision) an “incommutable light far above my spiritual ken, transcending my mind”. It is different from the light he sees with his eyes: it is not simply a brighter version of natural light. He sees the light as “above” him, not by space or intensity, but “because this very light made me, and I was below it because by it I was made” (see Conf. VII.10.16, p. 179). Creation reveals the truth about God and himself. Augustine learns from the Platonists that God is not the highest thing in the world nor is he identical to it. Rather, God is ontologically distinct from the world, the transcendent Creator of it. Freed from his errors about creation, the problem of evil also falls into place. Evil is not some independent substance, and neither is God the source of evil. God is good, which means that all he creates is good. Evil, then, is a privation or corruption of that good. And, without a substantial evil to blame his troubles on, Augustine finds he is responsible for the evil in himself. After reading the Platonists, Augustine turns immediately to Saint Paul and finds there the same truth “but now inseparably from your gift of grace”. What the Platonists teach about God and creation is true, but it is not saving knowledge. They see the truth, but they do not draw the right conclusions about what this means, namely, “that no one who sees can boast as though what he sees and the very power to see it were not from you—for who has anything that he has not received?” 12 There are numerous ascents in the Confessions: IV.12.18–15.26; VII.10.16; VII.17.23; VII.20.26; IX.10.23–25; X.1.1–27.38; and Books XI–XIII considered together. 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 10/16 05/10/12 484 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz (see Conf. VII.21.27, p. 191).13 The Platonists’ teaching leads to pride (see Conf. VII.20.26), but Paul’s teaching leads to the humble acknowledgment that the truth and the ability to see the truth are God’s gifts. It is an acknowledgment about the truth of creation, not only that we are created, but of what it means to be created. For Augustine, this can only come about through the example and grace of Christ. Christ and Creation 䡬 Although Augustine always maintained a certain piety toward Christ, he struggled with how to understand him, for how one understands Christ is intimately related to how one understands creation. As a Manichee, Augustine adopted a form of Docetism, that is, a belief that God did not really become incarnate, but only appeared to do so. Augustine believed this because, as a Manichee, he thought that God and the human person are both beings in the world and so compete within the same order of causes. Thus, they cannot be united without being mingled or one canceling out the other (see Conf. V.10.20). Far from being salvific, the Incarnation is the very problem itself: God trapped in matter. To preserve God’s integrity, Augustine became a Docetist. Augustine could not follow the Platonists either because they rejected Christ. They saw the need for something to mediate between the transcendent God and his mutable creation, but instead of a mediator who was both God and man, they fell into worshipping demonic mediators in between God and humankind (see Conf. X.42.67). They could not accept the Incarnation because, they thought, it would overthrow their whole understanding of reality. For the Platonist, lower things depend on higher things for their existence—participation only works upward—but in the Incarnation God comes down to participate in our humanity (see Conf. VII.18.24). This was incomprehensible to them, and so they looked for a “link” to 13 Augustine is alluding to 1 Corinthians 4:7. 䡬 Page: 484 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 11/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 485 485 connect God, who is remote, to man, who strives on his own to ascend (see Conf. X.43.69). Lastly, before Augustine became a Catholic, he adopted what he calls a “Photinian” view of Christ: Christ was not God, but an unparalleled ethical teacher and “man of excellent wisdom” (see Conf. VII.19.25, pp. 187–88). Augustine agnostically refused to say how God is related to humankind in the Incarnation, keeping each within a separate sphere. Augustine converts from Photinianism to Catholicism when he personally encounters Christ, God and man, in the garden at Milan. The conversion is recounted in Book VIII, a book which I think can be fruitfully understood as a kind of “interior view” of the creating and converting Word. As Book VIII progresses, the Word calls Augustine ever closer to himself until, in the garden, Augustine finally “surrenders” to the Word and “enters in”. As Augustine tells it, the examples of Anthony, Victorinus, and the other imitators of Christ (see Conf. VIII.2.3–7.18)14 prepare the ground by exciting his desire for conversion and showing him the Way. His divided will prevents him from imitating them, and he despairs, until, in the midst of weeping, he hears a child’s singsong voice: “Pick it up and read, pick it up and read” (see Conf. VIII.12.29, p. 223). Interpreting this as a divine command, Augustine picks up the Scriptures and falls upon a passage exhorting him to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification of your desires.” 15 Instantly, “the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away” (see Conf. VIII.12.29, p. 224). What has happened here? The Word being imitated prepares Augustine to hear the Word speaking through the child’s 14 For “imitators of Christ”, see 1 Corinthians 11:1: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” The language of imitation is, for Augustine, creation language. The Word is the Image of the Father, the perfect Likeness, through whom all things are made in a Trinitarian act of creatio, conversio, formatio. All things, then, bear a likeness to God; they imitate God in their created being, because they bear the stamp of the Image and Likeness. 15 Romans 13:13–14. 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 12/16 05/10/12 486 䡬 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz words, which leads to the Word of the Scriptures, which leads to the Word made flesh. In each of these temporal events, the unchanging Word beckons Augustine to conversion, to increased likeness to Christ and so greater participation in God. When Augustine obeys the Word, he is illumined, and the image of God in him begins to be re-formed after the pattern of his original creation. Augustine is exhorted to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”, a clear reference to baptism (see Conf. IX.6.14, p. 239), which will complete the earthly incorporation into the Word (i.e., the Body of Christ, the Church) and make him a “new creation”.16 Augustine’s description here of how God interacts with the world arises from his understanding of creation. God acts in the world without in any way imposing himself on the events or on Augustine’s will: “The divine action is not an action by a worldly agent, it does not insert itself into the sequence of motives and causes.” 17 Since God is not a competing cause in the world, he acts in the world without encroaching on the integrity of the world. The events have a natural integrity in which all the actors act of their own volition, and at the same time God works through them to bring about his own ends. God does not manipulate Augustine’s heart to get him to convert; rather, through grace, he frees it from the external hindrances that divide it so that it can be fully at work while he is fully at work in it. “[F]rom what depth”, says Augustine, “was [my free decision] called forth in a moment, enabling me to bow my neck to your benign yolk and my shoulders to your light burden, O Christ Jesus, my helper and my redeemer?” (see Conf. IX.1.1, p. 226). Far from denying free will, grace establishes it. For Augustine, grace means greater participation in the divine life, and it comes through Christ, God 16 See 2 Corinthians 5:17. Frederick Crosson, “Structure and Meaning in St. Augustine’s Confessions”, in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 31. Crosson brilliantly illumines the noncompetition between God and the world and shows how this understanding opens up the meaning of the Confessions. 17 䡬 Page: 486 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 13/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 487 487 personally present in the world, whose activity in us makes us more free. Augustine probably does not grasp all of this in the garden, but his experience there leads him to the truth that the Church teaches: God is not remote from the world, but is intimately present to it and active in it through his Son. This possibility is opened up by the Platonists’ understanding of God and the world that also enables Augustine to understand the Incarnation: Christ is true God and true man (see Conf. X.43.68), two integral natures, which find union without conflict or competition in one “Person of Truth” ( persona veritatis). 18 The truth of the Incarnation at once radicalizes the distinction between God and the world and reveals a new relationship. It reveals that God can be united to humankind in a personal way; God can participate in our human nature without compromising his divinity (see Conf. VII.18.24). For this to make sense, we must deepen our understanding of God’s transcendence. In turn, the Incarnation also makes possible humanity’s personal union with God, which Augustine understands as the transforming of our nature into God’s. “I am the food of the mature”, God reveals to Augustine; “grow then, and you will eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food: you will be changed into me” (see Conf. VII.10.16, p. 180). We are not God, as the Manichees thought, but we are destined to become God by participation because God participated in us. The New Context Creation Establishes The truth about creation opens up the possibility of understanding the truth about Christ, and therefore salvation, while the truth about Christ completes our understanding of creation. Together, this understanding of God and the world establishes a new context from which all things are understood anew. 18 This translation is taken from Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1993), VII.19.25; see also p. 䡲䡲 in this edition. 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 14/16 05/10/12 488 䡬 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz Readers of the Confessions are often struck by how often Augustine quotes and paraphrases Scripture, especially the Psalms. For Augustine, this is not simply pious rhetoric, but his very keen insight that the new context demands a new language. In the world, the language of the world is generally sufficient to communicate about the things of the world. But in the new context, the language of the world is not sufficient to appropriately speak about God, because God is not a part of the world. Augustine finds a way to speak about the transcendent God in the Scriptures and to him in the Psalms. The Scriptures are the inspired Word of God, and so they are God’s speech about himself. The Psalms are the Word of God, which become the prayers of men and women directed back to God. God speaks to God through human beings who adopt the language of God to communicate with their God. The Psalms, as Augustine understands them, are the premier example of confession.19 Augustine uses the word “confession” in a number of senses. He uses it, as we do, to mean admitting our sins (see Conf. X.2.2), but he also takes pains to elevate another meaning, which, for him, is prior and more important: confession understood as praise and thanksgiving (see Conf. V.1.1; VIII.1.1). Even if we had never sinned, Augustine suggests, we would still have to offer God a confession of praise because God is, in himself, “exceedingly worthy of praise” (see Conf. XI.1.1; italics in original, p. 327). We would also have to give thanks because God created us ex nihilo, and this gift calls forth a response of gratitude. All these meanings of confession are a form of sacrifice (see Conf. V.1.1; VIII.12.38; XII.24.33), which are offered to God not in words alone, but in deeds and sacraments. Confession, in this deep sense, leads us right to the heart of Augustine’s understanding of life in the new context. Our life is God’s utterly gratuitous gift, which must be offered back to him in praise and thanksgiving. For Augustine, this means that we must turn our life into a confession, an acceptable sacrifice 19 In light of this discussion, it is worth reflecting on what Augustine means when he says that time is a psalm (see XI.28.38). 䡬 Page: 488 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 15/16 05/10/12 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Creation in the Confessions Page: 489 489 to the Lord. But we cannot do this on our own, for only God can give God an acceptable sacrifice, and so our words and deeds must be taken up sacramentally. Augustine understands the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist very much in terms of creation and confession. Baptism is the “sacrament of conversion” 20 in which we are incorporated into the Body of Christ and become a “new creation”.21 The bread and wine truly become the Eucharistic Body of Christ, which is the sacrament of ongoing re-formation and conformation to Christ. These sacraments complete the entering into the Word in this life, thereby beginning our transformation into God to be completed in the next. In the celebration of the Eucharist, the congregation unites itself to the bread and wine on the altar: the Body of Christ (the baptized congregation) offers itself along with and precisely as the perfect sacrifice of the Body of Christ (the Eucharist). The gifts God has given us in creation and elevated in re-creation are offered back to him in the sacrifice of the whole Christ. The Confessions itself is just such an offering (see Conf. XI.2.3), and this offering is, I would suggest, the deep meaning of confession. The Church as the Goal of Creation Augustine’s sacrifice of confessions culminates in Book XIII, which, despite its difficulty, is a beautiful and entirely fitting culmination for his endeavor: to “arouse the human mind and affections toward God.” 22 Book XIII presents itself as the magisterial summary of a master teacher; though, given the sheer density of Scripture quotes, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that Augustine presents it as an inspired summary of the Master Teacher. For twelve books, Augustine has exercised our minds and stretched our hearts; in the last book, he presents the Truth— or, the Truth is presented through him—in its entire splendor. It is, of course, no accident that its subject matter is creation. 20 Letter 98.9. See 2 Corinthians 5:17. 22 Revisions II.6.32. 21 䡬 䡬 | | CONFESSIONS-ORTIZ 16/16 05/10/12 490 䡬 2:13 pm 䡬 REVISED PROOF Jared Ortiz Book XIII has two major parts: a straightforward literal exegesis of Genesis 1:1–2 (see Conf. XIII.1.1–11.12), which we discussed above, and a spiritual or allegorical exegesis of Genesis 1:1–2:4 (see Conf. XIII.12.13–38.53), which interprets the creation story as the story of the Church. The structure of Book XIII suggests that the spiritual meaning completes and fulfills the literal or, more pointedly, that the Church completes and fulfills creation. Importantly, Augustine transitions from the literal to spiritual interpretation with a discussion of baptism, that is, the act by which creation becomes a new creation (see Conf. XIII.12.13). For Augustine, “the church is the divine origin and the goal of all things: God created the world for human beings, and human beings for himself, to share his life with them.” 23 The Church, at once human and divine, is the way and the goal for creation. For it is in the Church, the Body of Christ, that the world is sacramentally taken up, transformed, and offered back to God as a Eucharistic offering. It is in the Church, animated by the Spirit, that creation finds its voice of praise. Augustine employs both the form and content of his inspired exegesis in Book XIII to convey this deep truth. For now, the Church lives in “the flux of time where all is confusion”, but in the end, she will be “purged and rendered molten by the fire of your love” (see Conf. XI.29.39, p. 362). On her earthly pilgrimage, the one ecclesial heart of the Body of Christ is unquiet, but in heaven, “by contemplating the Light”, she will become “light itself” (see Conf. XII.15.20, p. 380). Then, our restless heart shall find rest. This rest, prefigured in the seventh day of creation, is an eternal Sabbath, a day without end (see Conf. XIII.36.51), when God will be our rest (see Conf. XIII.38.53), for he has made us and drawn us to himself and our heart is restless until it rests in him (see Conf. I.1.1). 23 Robert McMahon, “Book Thirteen: The Creation of the Church as the Paradigm for the Confessions”, in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, eds. Kim Paffenroth and Robert P. Kennedy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), p. 214. 䡬 Page: 490