Saint Augustine: Confessions. Translated by HENRY CHADWIGK. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxviii -I- 305 pp. $7.95.
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| Cover Art:
Fra Angelico (The
Conversion of Saint Augustine)
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Saint Augustine is best known for his “restless heart.” He
is the first saint quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.[1] He is
also the most quoted saint in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and for
good reason. No other Early Church Father or author of antiquity has left us
with more writings than Saint Augustine. He penned almost 5.4 million words.
The Confessions, widely known as the first Western autobiography written, is
the best known of his work, most translated, and most widely read.[2] It is a
major source for social history as well as for religion.
Henry Chadwick was an Anglican priest, scholar, teacher, and
author. He served on the Anglo-Roman Catholic International Commission, whose
task it was to find common ground between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. As
a part of the path to denominational reconciliation, he put forward first
principles that his research had shown had been shared by most early
Christians. Professor Chadwick once called ecumenism “a good cause to die
for.”[3] He was General Editor of the Oxford History of the Christian Church,
Oxford Early Christian Texts, and penned numerous books on early Christian
history. Chadwick’s Oxford World’s Classics translation is the text reviewed
here. In his translation he used
the Skutella produced for Teubner of Leipzig in 1934. ("The Bibliotheca Teubneriana is the most thorough modern collection ever published of ancient (and some medieval) Greco-Roman literature. The series, whose full name is the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, consists of critical editions by leading scholars, with a full critical apparatus on each page."[4] "Skutella's edition is found in the Bibliotheca and based on ninth-century manuscripts, an age with a powerful interest in Augustine's theology."[5]) Augustine loved to use rhymes in his prose and Chadwick addresses the problem any translator has when approaching the Confessions: "The presence of so much rhyming in the Latin diction presents an insoluble problem to the translator. It is impossible to reproduce in another language without resulting in absurdity."[6]
The following is written of Chadwick's approach toward translating the linguistic rhythms of Augustin's writing:
He does not attempt to transmit the rhythms of Augustine's
prayers, but instead he minimizes the stylistic differences between the
soliloquies (where Augustine speaks directly to God) and the prose-narrative
parts. While this method diminishes the grandeur, poetry, and rhetoric of some
sections, it has the advantage of integrating the various parts of the work
into a whole. What is sacrificed in dignity by lessening the meditative quality
of the prayer passages is more than compensated by the gain in intensity and
sense of direct, dramatic action.[7]
Saint Augustine divided his Confessions into thirteen books.
Precise referencing came later, around the fifteenth century as a necessity for
the various readings and versions of Augustine’s Latin that has been copied
over the generations. In addition to his introduction, Chadwick provides a
translation with notes, bibliography, chronology, and index. Designated chapter
numbers are in Roman numeral followed by paragraph numbers. At the beginning of
every chapter and top of each page is a helpful description such as “Monica’s
Happy Marriage” and “In a Milan Garden.”
Also conducive is Scripture included directly within the text.
One cannot get a full picture Saint Augustine by reading
Confessions alone, as Chadwick acknowledges in the first page of his
introduction. Saint Augustine names himself not even once in these thirteen
books penned somewhere between AD 397 and 400. To understand Augustine, we need
to understand the time from which he writes. The empire at the time of Augustine’s ordination consisted of one early universal Catholic Church. The Church spanned the
East and the West, each with its own Emperor. The whole area had just come
into a unique time of unity under one emperor, Theodosious, that would last from
AD 392-395. Theodosius would be the last emperor to rule the whole Roman
Empire. The East would continue with its capitol Constantinople and its
strength in theological thinking while Rome, the capitol of the West, was soon
to fall under barbarian rule. Chadwick provides a short overview of Saint
Augustine’s life at the beginning of the book. Here he writes, “Against his
will he was forced into ordination in 391 and five years later became bishop at
Hippo…” Attentively, “forced against his will” is not a complete description
and I prefer the fullness of fact. Augustine was a Catechumenate for
almost thirty-three years. Following his Baptism into the Church, he lived a
life of prayer, study, and poverty within a shared community. At the time he
was invited to become a much needed aid to the then aging bishop of Hippo,
Valerius, Augustine was known even more
for his saintliness than for his scholarliness. The Church community implored
Valerius to make Augustine his aid and Augustine yielded to the request.[8]
In Confessions, Augustine outlines the journey traveled from
blessing to blessing. He calls us to remember where we belong in this life and
the next; with the one in whom we were created. Confessions is not just the
story of Saint Augustine’s life, conversion, and thoughts, it is the story of
every human soul. Therefore, it has stood the test of time and relevancy to
every generation for over sixteen centuries. Throughout Confessions, Augustine continually pauses, directs his reader away from himself and back toward Scripture; allowing his experiences to reflect the power of God as he praises God for his
fidelity. In fact, he begins the very first sentences of his work by rooting his writing firmly in the Scriptures with the Psalms
followed by his own genius which announces the major theme of his work: “To
Praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man
to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and
our heart is restless until it rests in you.”[9] Augustine establishes, from
the very beginning, the reason for the Christian journey.
Books I-X carry the reader through Augustine’s infamous
young life and important relationships. Although some translations leave out
books XI-XIII, Chadwick has expertly left the entire work in tact. The final
books shift to a treatise on human memory, time, and the beginning of creation.
These books are an important and insightful component of the journey and where
my own highest level of interested lay as I read Confessions.
“The contribution of St. Augustine on time and memory remains
significant, notwithstanding the sixteen centuries elapsed since
it was made, likely because of the universality of its contents.”[10]
What Augustine contemplated in his
ancient writing on memory has been proven through modern scientific psychology. Augustine suspected a memory system that allows using stored
information in a flexible manner for imagination of future events. In 2005,
Martin A. Conway claimed, “Remembering,
particularly in a social context, serves to share our impressions with others,
so that people embellish upon their recollections. Conway argued that over
time, coherence takes precedence over the principle of correspondence, which
refers to conformity of memories of one‘s experiences with reality.”[11] As we know and science has now proven, our past memories are subjective and tied to our own
experiences, which are not always reality or what is perceived by others.
Rather than a catalog of precise and detailed blueprints of past events,
Augustine envisioned past memory’s largest advantage is to aid us in envisioning
the future: “The affections of my mind are also contained in the same
memory. They are not there in the same way in which the mind itself holds them
when it experiences them, but in another very different way such as that in
which the memory’s power holds memory itself.”[12]
The past exists only cognitively in memory while the future
is merely humanly anticipated. God exists “now.” However, our “now” is very
different from his, as he exists in
the "eternal now." “St. Augustine was very likely the first philosopher to put
forward the idea that past and future could be seen as equivalent entities that
exist, as long as they are present in our consciousness.”[13] I highly recommend reading the final books of Confessions with this in mind. Augustine knew that earthy time is
something created by God for the human body to dwell in while eternal time is where
the human soul dwells. The two exist, meet, and function in the fullest meaning
of time when we live a life united with Christ. The beginning of Confessions,
together with the final books, show us something very important. No matter how broken the path traveled on a person's journey toward truth, God faithfully preserves our human integrity. The moment we realize where truth is found, our story becomes his and it is here that the personal life journey
makes sense.
Overall, my initial introduction to Saint Augustine’s Confessions
was solid and Chadwick’s translation was doable. I look forward to reading
Confessions again, with the second visit filtered through the mind and style of
a Catholic historian(s) such as Sheed, and/or Boulding. This is not
necessarily to find a difference, but to enhance the introduction.
______________________
2 Saint Augustine, Translated by David Vincent Meconi, The Confessions: Saint Augustine of Hippo, xii.
3 Douglas Martin, Henry Chadwick, Scholar of Early Christianity, Dies at 87, The New York Times Obituary (22, June 2008) at www.nytimes.com.
4 Bibliotheca Teubneriana at Wikipedia, at www.en.wikipedia.org.
5 Saint Augustine and Henry Chadwick, Confessions (Oxford University Press; New York, NY 2008), xxvi.
6 Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, x.
7 Thomas Renna, Reviews the book `Saint Augustine: Confessions,' translated by Henry Chadwick. Skutella-Solignac text; English format; Polemical nature, Church History. Jun93, Vol. 62 Issue 2, p241-242. 2p, at HACS EBSCO accessed 9 March, 2017.
8 Saint Augustine of Hippo Bishop, Doctor of the Church—354-430A.D., at EWTN, at www.ewtn.com.
9 Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, i:1:1.
10 Liliann Manning, Daniel Cassel, and Jean-Christophe Cassel, St. Augustine’s Reflections on Memory and Time and the Current Concept of Subjective Time in Mental Time Travel, Behavioral Sciences Open Access Psychology & Cognition Journal (1 June 2013), at HACS EBSCO accessed 11 March, 2017.
11 Manning et al, Reflections.
12 Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, X: Xiii 20: 190.
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