Vulnerability, then, is not only passive exposure but also a condition for any form of active commitment. To be committed to something is to be vulnerable to success and failure. If you are committed to doing something, you are putting yourself at risk, since you will experience it as a failure if you are not able to do it. Yet it is only by taking that risk—of being committed—that you can enjoy and appreciate what you do. Similarly, if you are committed to someone, you are open to the wonder of receiving another person in your life, but you are also exposed to the danger of betrayal and loss. You cannot protect yourself against what happens through a solemn equanimity. Rather, you will experience what happens in terms of bliss and pain, success and failure, possibility and peril.
Augustine himself is sensitive to how deep such commitments can be. In book 4 of his Confessions, he recalls a friendship that lit up his time as a teacher of rhetoric in Tagaste. Augustine’s account of this friendship is so radiant that many scholars have wondered if the two young men were lovers. Augustine here speaks of a bliss that illuminated his life as never before. The friendship was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetnesses of life that I had experienced,” and “my soul could not endure to be without him.”20 Because of this intense attachment and receptivity, Augustine also becomes more vulnerable to the rhythms of time. He “longs with impatience” when his friend is absent and is seized by joy when he returns. Time spent together is an elevation to new heights, time apart an aching absence.
The experience of love thus brings a sharper focus to Augustine’s life, but it also makes him more deeply dependent on another. This predicament is expressed most poignantly in a line that Augustine invokes from the Roman poet Horace: “He was half my soul.” On the one hand, this means that Augustine had become so intimate with his friend that he shared the very substance of his being. On the other hand, it means that Augustine could be separated from himself—torn apart in the very substance of his being—if he were to lose his friend. And this is exactly what happened. After less than a year of their passionate relationship, his friend died, leaving Augustine haunted and bereaved:
My heart was darkened over with sorrow, and whatever I looked at was death. My own country was a torment to me, my own home was a strange unhappiness. All those things that we had done and said together became, now that he was gone, sheer torture to me. My eyes looked for him everywhere and could not find him. And as to the places where we used to meet, I hated all of them for not containing him; nor were they able to say to me now, “Look, he will soon come,” as they used to say when he was alive and away from me. I had become a great riddle to myself and I used to ask my soul why it was sad and why it disquieted me so sorely. And my soul did not know what to answer. If I said, “Trust in God,” it very rightly did not obey me, because the man whom I had lost, my dearest friend, was more real and better than the fantastic god in whom my soul was asked to trust.21
Augustine here keeps faith with his love for his friend, even though it makes him suffer from the pain of loss and run the risk of despair. This is an act of secular faith because it is devoted to someone who is finite and affirms a vulnerability that is also the source of love. “The reason why that grief penetrated me so easily and so deeply,” Augustine recalls, “was that I had poured out my soul like water onto sand by loving a man who was bound to die.”22 The Christian Augustine deplores this expenditure of love. He should have invested his love in the eternity of God rather than binding it to a life that could be lost. Yet Augustine’s own account of his experience testifies to a secular faith that remains legible in the Confessions. Given the fidelity to his friend, Augustine holds that an irreplaceable life has been lost and he refuses to be consoled by the thought of God, since his beloved friend “was more real and better than the fantastic god in whom my soul was asked to trust.”23
Augustine’s official narrative maintains that the God he refused was not the true Christian God he discovered later in his life. But Augustine’s writing also tells another story. The reason he refused to seek comfort in God was not because he had an inadequate understanding of divine eternity, but because he loved his friend—and the life they shared together—as an end in itself. He wanted their lives to go on, rather than ascend to eternity. As Augustine himself makes clear, such secular love is incompatible with a religious love of eternity. A religious love of eternity treats the mortal beloved as a means and must be careful not to love him in his own right. As Augustine explains in the first book of his Confessions, “My sin was in this—that I looked for pleasures, exaltations, truths not in God Himself but in His creatures (myself and the rest), and so I fell straight into sorrows, confusions, and mistakes.”24
Accordingly, Augustine implores his soul not to be “foolish” by trying to hold on to what passes away. Unless the soul turns toward the eternity of God “it is fixed to sorrows,” since all things that are temporal will cease to be.25 With remarkable precision, Augustine locates the risk of mourning not only in passionate love but also in the basic enjoyment of his physical senses. Merely to enjoy the light that illuminates the world is for Augustine a dangerous temptation, since it makes him dependent on something that is transient. “That corporeal light,” he explains, “is a tempting and dangerous sweetness.”26 Enjoying the light of the day leads him to want more light and to suffer when it is absent. Because he loves the light that makes the world visible, “if suddenly the light is withdrawn, I seek for it with longing. And if it is absent for long, my mind grows sad.”27 Similarly, when Augustine recites and is moved by a song, he warns himself against becoming attached to the sounds and words that vanish in time. “Do no let my soul attach itself to these words with the glue of love [glutine amore] through the sensations of the body. For all these things move along a path toward nonexistence. They tear the soul apart with contagious desires.”28
The attachment to a song or a melody is here a small-scale version of the attachment to a life that is torn apart by time (distentio). Instead of pursuing the passions of such a life, Augustine urges his soul to turn toward God’s eternal Word as “the place of peace that is imperturbable.”29 This turn toward eternity is the movement of his religious conversion.
III
As Augustine is well aware, even the most religiously devout person must live in a secular world, in being part of history and dependent on social relations. The decisive aspect of religious conversion, however, is that the secular world is treated as a means and not as an end in itself. If you go to church for the sake of experiencing the warmth of the community—with friends, family, and other members of the congregation—Augustine would reproach you for using the religious ritual as a means for the secular end of maintaining and celebrating social bonds. Augustine even worries that the use of music in Mass will make the congregation take too much pleasure in their bodily sensations and interactions, enjoying an experience that is temporal rather than contemplating the eternity of God. While Augustine acknowledges “the great utility of music in worship,” it should only serve as a means and not be enjoyed as a source of pleasure in itself. Thus, “When it happens to me that the music moves me more than the subject of the song, I confess myself to commit a sin deserving punishment.”30
Augustine’s aim is to convert the passion of a secular experience that is bound by time into a passion for the eternity of God. He wants to persuade us that it would be better to enjoy the stillness of eternity than to suffer from the drama of living on in time, torn between the past and the future.
Yet Augustine’s own account gives us good reasons to reject his appraisal of eternity. The attraction of eternity is supposed to be that “there you will lose nothing.”31 But if you can lose nothing in eternity, it is because there is literally nothing left to lose. Nothing that happens can matter anymore, and it is no accident that the “activities” offered in heaven turn out to be remarkably monotonous. “All our activity will consist in singing ‘Amen’ and
‘Alleluia,’ ” Augustine explains in one of his sermons, and “we shall praise God not just for one day, but just as these days have no end in time, our praise does not cease.”32 Leaving aside the question of whether one could sing or praise something forever, the real questions are why one would want to and how any significant aspect of who we are could survive the transformation to timeless rapture. Being absorbed in eternity, there would be nothing left for you or me to do, since nothing could begin or end. As far as I am concerned, I would be dead.
That eternity would entail the death of the self can be seen in Augustine’s own Confessions. Augustine provides a profound account of how the life of the self depends on the sense of time. The impossibility of reposing in a timeless presence—which Augustine laments as a fallen condition—is the possibility of living a life that is open to change and still has a future. Indeed, only someone who is subject to time can have a future at all. This future is never guaranteed, but if you close it down you close down any possibility of leading a life.
The condition of time is what allows anything to come into being. But it is also what destines everything to pass away. As Augustine reminds us, all the moments of our lives “pass away and no one can follow them with his bodily senses. Nor can anyone grasp them tight even when they are present.”33 Because the movement of time makes everything disappear, we are altogether dependent on memory and anticipation. Even sense perception is a matter of retaining what happens and relating it to what may come. Any given moment of our life is passing away, so we must hold on to it through memory—and open ourselves to the future through anticipation—to experience anything at all.
Moreover, Augustine makes clear that the distention of time reaches all the way into the deepest recesses of his soul. Even in his most devoted contemplations and engaged activities, he is torn by time, revealing his soul to be a distentio animi. In pursuing anything, he must stretch himself from the past toward the future and—in so doing—he runs the risk of breaking apart. This is why Augustine places such a profound emphasis on the power of memory. Without memory he could not hold himself together over time and not maintain his identity for even a moment. While the power of memory is fragile and exceeds his grasp, it gives him the chance of leading a life. “I cannot comprehend the power of my memory,” he writes, “since I cannot even call myself myself apart from it.”34
When Augustine turns to investigate his memory, he is therefore investigating the very condition of his existence. The power of memory may give continuity to his life, but it also reminds him of everything that is discontinuous with his current sense of self. While memory opens an interior space where he can resuscitate who he has been (“there I meet myself and recall myself”), it also reminds him of everything that is “hidden away, scattered, and neglected.”35 Moreover, Augustine is acutely aware of how even the most steadfast memory is susceptible to change, wear down, and be erased.
Nevertheless, Augustine confesses that “amazement grips me” when considering how memory can retain events of his life, allowing them to live on even though they have ceased to be.36 This is a distinctly secular sense of wonder. The object of his amazement is not a timeless eternity but the power of memory that belongs to a finite being. Indeed, Augustine openly avows that he could not live without it: “So great is the power of memory, so great is the force of life in a human being whose life is mortal.”37
In contrast, for the religious Augustine, memory is at best a means for ascending to God. “You are my true life,” he says in turning toward God, “I will transcend even this my power which is called memory. I will rise beyond it to move toward you.”38 Thus, while Augustine pursues a remarkable secular investigation of the depths of memory, his religious aim is not to remember but to forget the self. As he explicitly asserts: “God must be loved in such a way that, if at all possible, we would forget ourselves.”39
The same contrast between secular insights and religious piety can be traced in Augustine’s explorations of love. Just as Augustine’s philosophical work on memory speaks to a secular understanding of the self, the poetic and erotic qualities of his writing in the Confessions radiate beyond their purported religious aims. Even God is famously addressed as though He were a mortal beloved, tenderly invoked as “my beauty,” “most beautiful one,” “my life,” “my light,” “my sweetness.” Furthermore, in expressing his longing for God, Augustine speaks the language of a lover in the grip of fervent physical desire for his beloved:
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you….You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now I pant for you. I tasted you and I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I burn for your peace.40
The moving quality of this passage is intimately bound up with a sense of timing, evoking an event he could not have expected but which transformed his life. “Late have I loved you” renders an experience of something that happened before it was too late, as a matter of great fortune and precious circumstance. But the phrase also recalls that it could have been too late. This sense of peril persists in the deep dependence on another that Augustine expresses, with hunger and thirst making the fulfillment of his love a matter of life and death. As such, Augustine’s words could go to the heart of a secular experience of love. In secular love—where both lover and beloved are finite—the precariousness of time is part of what makes the love valuable and important. Everything that is given may be taken away and without this risk there would be nothing at stake in being devoted. Your love can animate and illuminate, but your receptivity to the beloved also leaves you vulnerable to someone who is beyond your control.
From Augustine’s religious perspective, however, the experience of vulnerability is only a means toward the end of union with God. As long as he is still searching for his salvation, he must endure desire and remain at the mercy of what happens. But the goal is to attain a state of being (reposing in the absolute presence of God) where desire has come to an end and nothing can shatter him ever again. He may “burn” with desire for the peace of God, but if this desire were fulfilled every flame of passion would be extinguished.
Augustine’s own writing thus allows us to see that a religious consummation of love would spell the death of erotic life. Augustine wants to convince us that this is a good thing. By dramatizing the risks of erotic passion, he wants to make us feel that being in the grip of desire is a lack that needs to be filled, a sickness that needs to be cured. He thus refuses to see what the power of his own erotic language reveals. The risk of being shattered is not a weakness to be overcome but remains in the fulfillment of love itself. The possibility of being touched is inseparable from the peril of being wounded and the exposure to loss is part of the experience of rapture.
Augustine’s blindness may be willful, since the vision is difficult and painful. To see that what you love is finite—and to see that the finitude of what you love is part of why you love it—is hard. It can really hurt, and there is no way to lose the pain except by losing the love itself. Yet the bond between love and grief is what I am asking us to see. To pursue this vision would be to write a secular—as distinct from a religious—confession. Such a confession would take up Augustine’s explorations of how the identity of the self depends on the fragile operations of memory and how the experience of time cuts through every moment. Like Augustine in his Confessions it would declare: “See, my life is distended” (Ecce distentio est vita mea).41 But unlike in Augustine, the distention of time would not be regarded as a fallen state from which we need to be redeemed by a religious revelation of eternity. Rather, the distention of time would be seen and felt as the opening of life itself. The task would be to “own” the fact that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind. While Augustine denounces the �
�glue of care” (curae glutino) that binds us to the world, a secular confession would maintain that it is only through finite bonds that we can seize our lives and become who we are.
IV
I turn here to the secular confession at work in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. First published in Norwegian and now the subject of wide international acclaim, My Struggle can be read as a contemporary response to Augustine. Ranging over 3,600 pages, the six volumes of My Struggle are framed by Knausgaard’s resolution to tell the truth about his life in detail. He places himself under the obligation to account for his life as it is actually lived, writing only about things he has experienced while confessing to how he experienced them—no matter how quotidian, painful, or intimate the details may be. The power of his project does not draw on a life of great adventures or on confessing scandalous thoughts and deeds. Rather, it stems from an extraordinary level of attention devoted to an ordinary life.
As readers, we get to follow the narrator and protagonist Karl Ove (avowedly identical to the author) in the midst of everyday life. At the time of writing My Struggle, he is in his early forties, absorbed and overwhelmed by being married with three young children. While this domestic life keeps getting in the way of his writing, he makes it a centerpiece of the story itself. We spend many pages going grocery shopping, pushing baby prams in the city, and attending to daily exchanges with his children—all rendered with a fidelity to everyday life that neither idealizes nor deprecates the experiences in question. We become attuned to the weight of waking up too early while trying to meet the demands of family life, the sinking feeling of facing an apartment in chaotic disorder, and the numbness that follows from an endless array of tasks. Yet the same attunement also yields the radiant moments of everyday life. Precisely because Knausgaard perseveres in exploring his mundane existence, he loosens the hold of habit and makes us see the world anew.
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