The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Augustine of Hippo · a prose prayer in thirteen books · written in Latin by Augustine as bishop of Hippo Regius: nine books of his life from infancy at Thagaste to his mother’s death at Ostia, one of memory and the present, three of time and the first chapter of Genesis · scored whole on Augustine’s Latin, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Latin quoted only where its words are certain, with Henry Chadwick’s translation for sense
Mode
Confession in its double sense, admission and praise; autobiography, philosophy and scriptural exegesis spoken as one prayer
Mythos
The Fall staged again for a theft of pears and undone under a fig tree; the prodigal son in the far country and his return; the Platonist ascent made alone and made with a mother
Phase
The late Roman West: the schools of rhetoric, the Manichees, the imperial court at Milan, and the church of Ambrose, written in the bishop’s years at Hippo
Presentation
Prose; thirteen books in the second person, the Psalms woven into nearly every paragraph; nine books of narrative, one of memory, three of exegesis
Register
A professional rhetor’s Latin turned to prayer: antithesis, chiasmus and wordplay that thinks, ranging from the nursery to metaphysics
Scale
One consciousness from the breast to the bishop’s chair, held against time, eternity and the creation of heaven and earth
Governing Proposition
Thirteen books spoken in the second person to God, who already knows everything they tell. Nine gather a life from infancy to a mother’s death; the tenth examines the gathering as memory; the last three follow memory into time, time into eternity, and eternity into the first chapter of Genesis. The wager is that a self told before a listener who cannot be deceived will be known as no memoir could know it, and that the restless heart of the first sentence can be carried, book by book, to the rest of the last.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde” (I.1.1). The first sentence is from the Psalms, and it is spoken to God, as every sentence after it will be. In the same paragraph the law of the book is laid down: the heart is restless “donec requiescat in te”, until it rests in you. Everything the thirteen books contain, from an infant at the breast to the first day of creation, is that restlessness looking for its object, and the reader overhears a prayer addressed to someone who already knows all of it.
The work is scored here whole as Augustine divided and published it: the Confessiones, thirteen books of Latin prose, written as bishop of Hippo Regius, and described by Augustine himself in the Retractationes (II.6) as one work, the first ten books about himself, the last three about scripture, from “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” to the sabbath rest. Books I to IX narrate a life from birth at Thagaste in 354 to the death of his mother at Ostia in 387. Book X is the present. Book XI is time and eternity; XII and XIII read the first chapter of Genesis. The last three are part of the unit and are scored, not set aside.
The first book examines what no one had thought worth examining: an infant. An infant, pale with jealousy at another at the breast (I.7.11), is looked at as closely as a grown man’s ambition. Then the schoolroom and its beatings (I.9), the grammar of Virgil, and a boy who wept for Dido and did not weep for his own death to God (I.13). Childhood becomes a moral and psychological object, and the boy who learns words in the first book was taken by Wittgenstein, sixteen centuries later, as the picture of language to be argued against.
Movement II
At sixteen, with friends, he stole pears, not to eat them, for they were not even good, but to throw them to the pigs (II.4.9). The book gives the theft seven chapters, while the father’s death is a clause and whole years go unrecorded. The reason is the argument: the book needs a sin with no motive but itself. “amavi defectum meum”, I loved my own failing. The scene is a second Fall staged on purpose, a tree, forbidden fruit, and a companionship that made the act possible, its sweetness and its complicity (II.9.17). The prodigal son’s far country opens here, and its hunger (II.10.18).
Then Carthage: “nondum amabam, et amare amabam”
“I did not yet love, and I loved to love” (III.1.1). At nineteen Cicero’s Hortensius turned him to wisdom (III.4.7), and for nine years he was a hearer of the Manichees (IV.1.1). His mother wept for him: the son of so many tears could not perish (III.12.21). The rhetor’s Latin is already at work in these books, antithesis and chiasmus and wordplay that thinks, with the Psalms set into the sentences so that his voice and scripture’s cannot always be told apart.
A friend died, unnamed in the book. Everything he looked on was death to him, and his home town a torment: “factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio”
“I had become a great question to myself” (IV.4.9). Grief for the friend was grief for the part of himself that had lived in the other (IV.6.11). The finding holds without the faith it serves: a person is opaque to himself, and the self extends into those it loves. The critical title of this page is taken from that sentence, because the whole book is the pursuit of the question it states.
Movement III
Then the Manichee Faustus (V.6 to 7). Rome followed, then Milan, as professor of rhetoric at the imperial city. There he watched Ambrose read with his eyes only, his voice and tongue at rest (VI.3.3), and Alypius at the games open his eyes against his will (VI.8.13). He wrote a panegyric on the emperor and saw a drunken beggar happier than himself (VI.6.9). The mother of his son, his companion of some fifteen years, was sent back to Africa (VI.15.25); the book never gives her name.
Then the books of the Platonists (VII.9.13), and the ascent made alone (VII.17.23). The story of Victorinus (VIII.2) and Ponticianus’s account of Antony (VIII.6.15) pressed on a will divided against itself: it could command the hand and not itself (VIII.8.20 to 9.21). His prayer had been “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo”
“give me chastity and continence, but not yet” (VIII.7.17), one line that holds the whole division in its turn.
In the garden at Milan, under a fig tree, a child’s voice: “tolle lege, tolle lege”, take up and read (VIII.12.29). A voice and a book, and the fall at the pear tree was undone at the fig. The two trees answer each other across six books, and the archetype is load-bearing: it is the structure of the narrative, not its ornament. Whether the scene records an afternoon or composes a figure has been argued since Pierre Courcelle’s Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (1950), and the argument has not closed. The page credits the construction where it is construction and charges nothing for the question.
Movement IV
He was baptised at Easter 387 with his son Adeodatus and with Alypius (IX.6.14), and the book remembers the congregation that sang hymns through the night under Justina’s pressure on Ambrose (IX.7.15). At Ostia, at a window looking on a garden, mother and son spoke together and reached for a moment the wisdom above all things, “toto ictu cordis”, with the whole beat of the heart (IX.10.24), and came back down to the noise of speech. It is the Platonist ascent made a second time, not alone. Then she died, in his thirty-third year and her fifty-sixth (IX.11.28). His eyes stayed dry, and the tears came only at night (IX.12).
Then the book turns without announcement from the past to the present. Why confess to one who already knows? The tenth book asks (X.3.3 to 4.6), and the answer is the form: the telling is the act of being known, the self examined before a listener who cannot be deceived. Memory opens as an interior the mind cannot contain. In the middle of it comes the book’s most quoted cry: “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova”
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new” (X.27.38).
The bishop examines himself under the three desires of the first letter of John, and the catalogue of temptations runs long (X.30 to 39). In it stands the line that became a stake: “da quod iubes et iube quod vis”
“give what you command, and command what you will” (X.29.40). Augustine reports that when it was quoted before Pelagius in Rome, Pelagius objected, and the line passed into the long quarrel over grace. A sitting bishop had laid out his sins, sexual and intellectual, for enemies who could and did use them.
Movement V
“Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio”
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know” (XI.14.17). Memory leads to time, and the eleventh book finds that time is lived as “distentio animi”, a stretching of the mind (XI.26.33), with three presents, of things past, things present and things future (XI.20.26). Husserl began his lectures on internal time-consciousness here, and philosophers who share none of its faith still read it.
Time leads to the eternal Word, and the Word to creation. The twelfth and thirteenth books read the first chapter of Genesis: the heaven of heaven, formless matter, the plurality of true readings, the Trinity and the church read into Genesis. Here the axes are charged: much of the weighing of rival readings and the allegory of the firmament could be shortened, elevation thins, and for long stretches the mode is argued rather than shown. The book ends in the sabbath of the seventh day, which has no evening (XIII.35.50 to 36.51), and its last words close the circle the first opened: “sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur”
“so, so will it be received, so found, so opened” (XIII.38.53).
The book has been read without a break since it was written. Petrarch carried it up Mont Ventoux and opened it at X.8.15; Teresa of Ávila read herself in it; Rousseau took its title to answer it; Heidegger lectured on the tenth book in 1921; Arendt wrote her dissertation on love in Augustine (1929); Wittgenstein opened the Philosophical Investigations with the first; Derrida answered it in “Circumfession” (1991). The Manichees, the court at Milan and the schools of rhetoric are gone, and the restless heart is still read for what they pressed on a person.
Act III · The Twelve
The narrative books pass the subtractive test as few autobiographies do, because they are ruthless in selection. The father’s death is a clause (III.4.7), the son a few sentences, whole years gone, while one theft of pears is given seven chapters, since the book needs a sin with no motive but itself. The death of the friend, the dismissal of the companion, Ponticianus’s story and the garden are each required by the argument about the divided will. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the last three books. Their place is argued and they belong; but much of the twelfth book’s weighing of rival readings and the thirteenth’s allegory of the firmament could be shortened without loss, and the catalogue of temptations in the tenth (X.30 to 39) runs long.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds without the author’s faith. A person is opaque to himself: “factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio”
“I had become a great question to myself” (IV.4.9). The will is divided against itself, and can command the hand and not itself (VIII.8.20 to 9.21). Evil may be loved as evil: “amavi defectum meum”, I loved my own failing (II.4.9). Grief for a friend is grief for the part of oneself that lived in him (IV.6.11). Memory is an interior the mind cannot contain, and time is lived as “distentio animi”, a stretching of the mind (XI.26.33). These are findings, tested for sixteen centuries. Held a step below the top because the scales are weighted where faith decides in advance.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Elevation is reached often, cold and warm. The opening: “Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde” (I.1.1), and the heart restless “donec requiescat in te”, until it rests in you. The friend’s death, when everything the young man looked on was death to him and his home town a torment. The child’s voice in the garden. Ostia, where mother and son reach for a moment the wisdom above all things, “toto ictu cordis”, with the whole beat of the heart (IX.10.24), and come back down to the noise of speech. Her death, his dry eyes, and the tears that came only at night. Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new (X.27.38). Held below the top because elevation thins in the long exegesis of the twelfth book.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The pear theft is a second Fall staged on purpose: a tree, forbidden fruit, a companion, and a sin wanted for its own sake, the fruit thrown to the pigs. The garden at Milan answers it: under a fig tree, a voice, a book, and the fall undone. The prodigal son is the frame of the life, the far country and its hunger (II.10.18; IV.16.30) and the return. Monica’s tears and the son of so many tears (III.12.21); the Platonist ascent made twice, once alone and once with his mother. The particular stays particular: the pears were not even good. Held at 9.0 because the archetypes are borrowed from scripture and the Platonists and made to carry, not made anew, and because the last books state their figures more than enact them.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Psalms, Paul’s letters, the Platonists, Cicero’s dialogues and the classical rhetoric Augustine taught. Nothing in it was this: a whole life told as a prayer, to God, with readers overhearing; childhood examined as a moral and psychological object; the narrator’s own sins, sexual and intellectual, laid out by a sitting bishop whose enemies, Donatists and former Manichees, could and did use them. The stake was real. Augustine reports that when “da quod iubes et iube quod vis”, give what you command and command what you will (X.29.40), was quoted before Pelagius in Rome, Pelagius objected, and the line passed into the long quarrel over grace. The unannounced turn from narrative to memory to time to creation is a second risk. Held below the top because confession and ascent were known forms; the swerve is in their fusion and scale.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Confessio means both admission and praise, and the book is both at once. Told in the third person, or to a human reader, it would be a memoir of conversion; told to God, who already knows it, the telling becomes the act of being known, and raises the question of why one tells at all (X.3.3 to 4.6). The second person is the instrument: the self examined before a listener who cannot be deceived. The order of the books enacts the argument: the past gathered, the gathering examined as memory, memory opening on time, time on the eternal and on creation, and the end in the sabbath rest where the first sentence began. Held below the top because the hinge at the tenth book is felt by many readers as a break, and the exegesis sometimes becomes a container.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence, not promise: sixteen centuries of reading by theologians, philosophers, poets and historians, and no exhaustion. The questions stay open. Is the garden a record or a composed figure? Pierre Courcelle’s Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (1950) opened that argument and it has not closed. Are the last three books the goal of the work or its appendix? Is Monica a saint, a pressure, or both? What is the unnamed mother of his son to the book’s account of love? The eleventh book’s account of time is read by philosophers who share none of its faith; Wittgenstein took the first book’s child learning words as the picture of language to argue against. The formal depth yields too: the Psalms, the answering trees, the two ascents. James O’Donnell’s commentary (1992) found new depth in nearly every paragraph.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The field is Latin literature of late antiquity and the Christian literature of both languages, with the classical forms of self-account behind them. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what writing about a self could do: inwardness, memory and the divided will made the matter of a book, and time made a problem of the mind. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the founding book of autobiography in the West and the pattern of the conversion narrative; Petrarch carried it up Mont Ventoux and opened it at X.8.15; Teresa of Ávila read herself in it; Rousseau took its title to answer it; Husserl began his lectures on internal time-consciousness with the eleventh book; Heidegger lectured on the tenth in 1921; Wittgenstein opened the Philosophical Investigations with it; Derrida answered it in “Circumfession” (1991). Held off the top because some reach comes through Augustine’s authority as a Father of the Church.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival on the step: the thirteen books survive whole, in Augustine’s own divisions, with the author’s later account of the work in the Retractationes (II.6). Presence is unbroken: read since it was written, in the monasteries, the schools, the Reformation on both sides and the modern university; translated into the major written languages and many times into English alone, by Pusey (1838), Pine-Coffin, Chadwick, Boulding, Wills and Ruden. It has outlived its conditions: the Manichees, the court at Milan and the schools of rhetoric are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on a person. Charged: its widest presence is partly a Christian and an academic one, and the last three books are read far less than the first nine. Held below the oldest works on the step, which are older and still more widely held.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on the Latin, as far as a reader of it can carry the judgment. The command is a professional rhetor’s, turned to prayer: antithesis and chiasmus, “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo”
“give me chastity and continence, but not yet” (VIII.7.17); wordplay that thinks, “nondum amabam, et amare amabam”
“I did not yet love, and I loved to love” (III.1.1); the Psalms set into the sentences so that his voice and scripture’s cannot always be told apart. The scene is made with a novelist’s economy: Ambrose reading with his eyes only, voice and tongue at rest (VI.3.3); Alypius opening his eyes at the games against his will (VI.8.13). Charged: stretches of the exegesis where the rhetoric repeats itself, and a habit of amplification that sometimes says a thing three times.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the infant, pale with jealousy at another at the breast (I.7.11), and the rest of the seventh day that has no evening (XIII.35.50 to 36.51). One law governs both: the heart is restless until it rests, and every motion between, appetite, ambition, friendship, philosophy, exegesis, is that restlessness seeking its object. The law holds across a very wide range: a child’s games and a theory of time; a mother’s habit of drinking as a girl (IX.8.18) and formless matter. The last words, “sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur”
“so, so will it be received, so found, so opened” (XIII.38.53), close the circle the first sentence opened. Charged: from the tenth book the mode turns from shown to argued for long stretches, and the sense of one physics is strained there, even where the logic is kept.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Held through one consciousness, and wider than it first appears. Consciousness and memory, as nowhere before. The family: Monica, Patricius, the son Adeodatus, the companion of some fifteen years sent back to Africa. Education: the schoolroom and its beatings (I.9), the grammar of Virgil, rhetoric taught as a trade in words. Friendship, its sweetness and its complicity (II.9.17; IV.8.13). The state: the imperial court at Milan, a panegyric on the emperor written while a drunken beggar is happier (VI.6.9), Justina’s pressure on Ambrose and the congregation singing hymns through the night (IX.7.15). The sacred on every page; the natural order, creation and time itself in the last books. Held at 9.0 because labour and society are seen from one narrow class and one road, and the social world is a ground for the soul’s journey, not an agent in it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.6, then The Unconcealment, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.5, then The Sublime at 9.3. Sixteen centuries of reading by theologians and philosophers with its questions still open; findings about the opaque self, the divided will, grief and time that hold without the faith they serve; the founding book of autobiography in the West; a text whole in its author’s divisions and read without break; and elevation reached from the first sentence to Ostia and the tenth book.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.4: the narrative books are ruthless in selection, but within the last three much of the weighing of readings and the allegory of the firmament could be shortened, and the catalogue of temptations runs long. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 9.0: the Fall and the prodigal son are borrowed and made to carry rather than made anew, and the social world is seen from one class and one road.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below The Inevitable at 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Augustine’s Confessiones, scored whole as Augustine divided and published it: thirteen books of Latin prose written by Augustine as bishop of Hippo Regius and described by him in the Retractationes (II.6) as one work, ten books about himself and three about scripture. Books XI to XIII are part of the unit and are scored. The work is complete and survives whole. References use the Maurist numbering of book, chapter and paragraph. Every axis is judged on the Latin, as the text printed in James O’Donnell’s edition and commentary (Oxford, 1992) gives it; the prose rhythm of the Latin is not judged by ear here, and nothing is charged to the work for that limit. Books I to XI are known closely; Books XII and XIII are known in their argument and main moves, less closely paragraph by paragraph. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Latin is quoted only where its words are certain, with the page’s own close rendering. Translations · Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), for sense; R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, 1961) and parts of Sarah Ruden (2017), as known. None is quoted, and no translation is charged to the work. Matters not verified or contested are not given or are given as contested: the exact years of composition, which are not fixed here; the proportion of the whole taken by the narrative books and the length of the Latin; the age of the earliest manuscripts; and whether the garden scene records an event or composes a figure, which is given as an open question.