Augustine for the Philosophers

The Rhetor of Hippo, the "Confessions," and the Continentals

Calvin L. Troup

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781481300872
• eBook ISBN: 9781481303033
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

St. Augustine of Hippo, largely considered the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, has long dominated theological conversations. Augustine's legacy as a theologian endures. However, Augustine's contributions to rhetoric and the philosophy of communication remain relatively uncharted. Augustine for the Philosophers recovers these contributions, revisiting Augustine's prominence in the work of continental philosophers who shaped rhetoric and the philosophy of communication in the twentieth century. Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Jacques Ellul, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Jean-François Lyotard, and Paul Ricoeur are paired with Augustine in significant conversations close to the center of their work.

Augustine for the Philosophers dares to hold Augustine's rhetoric and philosophy in dynamic tension with his Christianity, provoking serious reconsideration of Augustine, his presence in twentieth-century continental thought, and his influence upon modern rhetoric and communication studies.

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THE CONFESSIONS AND THE CONTINENTALS

Calvin L. Troup

Saint Augustine, fifth-century bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, sanctions the resurgence of rhetoric and philosophy of communication that began in the mid-twentieth century. He is an intellectual catalyst for many continental philosophers whose ideas have been formative in contemporary rhetoric and philosophy of communication, yet many working scholars remain unacquainted with Saint Augustine’s contributions. His significance within ancient and medieval traditions has been well documented and remains undiminished, but his work also intersects with current thought in ways many scholars might not anticipate.¹ The question is, though, What has led continental philosophers to engage Augustine deeply and directly on questions in rhetoric and philosophy of communication? In response, this volume invites readers to consider Augustine as a fulcrum for continental thought. The contributing authors are scholars fluent in the work of a cast of important continental philosophers: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Ellul. Each chapter explicates the substantial conversations between one of these thinkers and Augustine on issues in rhetoric and philosophy of communication. The chapters point to the many ways that Augustine can strengthen our grasp of continental thought and, taken together, commend further explorations of his rhetoric and philosophy of communication.

At least since Edmund Husserl, continental scholars have engaged the work of Augustine in the formulation and reformulation of their ideas related to rhetoric and philosophy of communication, but until quite recently, Augustine’s role in continental thought was not well known. Then two major figures in continental philosophy devoted late works to Augustine. Jacques Derrida wrote an extensive essay, “Circumfession,” published in Jacques Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington in 1993, and Jean-François Lyotard wrote Confession of Saint Augustine, published posthumously in 2000. These texts signaled what we now recognize as a long-standing pattern of engagement. In 2005, John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon published Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, which explored some of the philosophical implications of these relationships.

Of particular interest to scholars of communication and religion, Augustine’s most compelling intellectual work is informed by his pervasive religious presuppositions. Although some modern scholars have tried to ignore Augustine’s Christian intellectual commitments to extract secularized concepts from his work, the continental philosophers considered here were prone to admit Augustine’s Christian intellectual ground at least in part and engage him directly on questions of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and rhetoric, rather than to dismiss or ignore the Christian dimensions embedded in his ideas.² Therefore, at the nexus of continental philosophy and theory in formative postmodern moments, Augustine invites intriguing questions concerning intellectual contributions from religious grounds today. In this chapter, I first explain the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, with special attention to the influence of existential phenomenology. Second, I introduce benchmarks in Augustine’s Confessions that provide entry points for continental scholars working from existential, phenomenological, and rhetorical grounds. Third, I discuss important interpretive assumptions employed by continental thinkers that make engagement with Augustine’s philosophically plausible. The chapter concludes by considering openings for further inquiry with Augustine, followed by brief summaries of the chapters in the volume.

EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY, HERMENEUTICS, AND RHETORIC

The relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics is a prime point of contact between continental thought and Augustine. Hermeneutic scholars regard Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine as the field’s founding text, launching both biblical and philosophical hermeneutics.³ While Augustine’s hermeneutic theory resides primarily in books 1–3, rhetorical scholars tend to focus on book 4, which is typically read as a “Christianization” of Cicero, and ignore the first three books.⁴ Augustine himself regards the four books as a coherent whole, comprehending speaking performances that unite hermeneutics and rhetoric, wisdom and eloquence, in practice. That previous scholars have missed this connection reflects a broader, ongoing inattentiveness to the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric. As Michael Hyde and Craig R. Smith note, “An important relationship existing between hermeneutics and rhetoric has been overlooked by communication scholars,” with significant implications for the specifically epistemological functions of rhetoric and for rhetorical theory and criticism generally.⁵

Hyde and Smith suggest that to disclose the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric requires phenomenological inquiry, and they argue that all knowledge we acquire “is contextual, a product of the hermeneutical situation and therefore founded in rhetoric—the making-known of primordial interpretive understanding.”⁶ Although phenomenologists work across the grain of fixed methods, set techniques, and strict definitions, the phenomenological iterations and intuitions that inform this study hearken back to Husserl’s early call to return “to the things themselves.”⁷ Calvin O. Schrag explains common coordinates for inquiry within the broader tradition of existential phenomenology, from Husserl to Heidegger and through their intellectual descendants:

Philosophical analysis, description, and reflection need to take as their point of departure the world of immediate lived experience … from which all explications as to the nature and structure of reality must arise and to which they must return for validation. In my lived concreteness I experience presence in a world somehow irreducibly given, vaguely apprehended as spread out in space and qualified by a temporal becoming.⁸

From the givenness of experience, Schrag suggests that phenomenological analyses open up existential, ontological structures, explicating underlying conditions that inform human experience and providing categories for interpretation of such experiences.⁹ Thus we can begin to understand the compelling relationship between hermeneutics and existential phenomenology, or “hermeneutic phenomenology.”¹⁰

Hermeneutic phenomenology and rhetoric meet decisively in Augustine. We have seen the prima facie case for this in the structure of On Christian Doctrine; the sense of the text is fraught with such connections as well. In the prologue, Augustine introduces his rationale for Christian learning through the example of literacy and the value of texts.¹¹ Hermeneutics is the primary mode of inquiry from which he advocates the study of the liberal arts, including the study of pagan authors.¹² How could a person interpret the Scriptures, divinely revealed through ordinary people in decidedly different times and places, without a deep knowledge of different times, places, and ideas?¹³ Augustine espouses the value of “historical narration” in On Christian Doctrine.¹⁴ He then practices it in the Confessions, opening up the meaning of human life and lives through a coherent, intertextual narrative of a decentered subjectivity and fragmented will.¹⁵

The Scriptures permeate and center Augustine’s account, but all sorts of other people and discourses inhabit the text of the Confessions—which is a narrative uniting hermeneutics and rhetoric as a practical philosophy of communication. In fact, the Scriptures are not the end of Augustine’s hermeneutic project, as is often asserted; rather, they are the beginning. In the Confessions, he demonstrates the expansive applications of his hermeneutic theory to the Scriptures; to human texts, Christian and pagan, sacred and secular; and to the narrative of his own life.¹⁶ To explain Augustine’s work in hermeneutics and rhetoric in the words of his teacher, Cicero, speaking well requires both wisdom and eloquence. Good hermeneutics is a form of rhetorical invention: the practical wisdom required to interpret texts, to interpret different times and places, and to interpret experience. And interpretation requires phenomenological engagement. Meaning is not self-evident, whether textual, historical, or experiential. In Augustine, wisdom and hermeneutics function synonymously, as do eloquence and rhetoric, a perspective that positions hermeneutics and rhetoric as complementary and inseparable in good practice. The emergence of hermeneutic phenomenology in Augustine reinforces the fact that such approaches are hospitable to perspectives informed by religious faith. As Schrag says, they often “include worship—encounters with the Holy, and ‘acts of religious devotion.’ ”¹⁷ The Confessions draws readers in “alongside” Augustine; people sense an open invitation to interpret their own lives through phenomenological engagement with Augustine hermeneutically and rhetorically. We turn now to common textual benchmarks in the Confessions as identified by continental philosophers working in hermeneutic phenomenology.

BENCHMARKS IN THE CONFESSIONS

Twentieth-century scholars discovered many ideas in Augustine that advanced their phenomenological inquiries, often in provocative, helpful ways. What Augustinian texts were formative to thinkers in twentieth-century phenomenology readings? And what ideas in those texts were sufficiently intriguing to merit serious consideration? Our study turns to a preliminary review of these key texts that invited Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard into conversation with Augustine. They gather at the Confessions.

Augustine’s Confessions can be read simply as a prototypical autobiography, one by a highly reflective bishop of Hippo. However, to read beyond books 1–9, where Augustine narrates his past life, into books 10–13 alters the reading experience dramatically. Explicit phenomenological inquiries begin in book 10 and book 11, the philosophical heart of the Confessions. Once engaged, the story in books 1–9 can never be read the same way again.¹⁸ As we will learn, books 10 and 11 have provoked scholarly inquiry into Augustine’s present significance. Book 10, on memory, presents a phenomenology of self unique within antiquity. Book 11, on time and eternity, presents an unprecedented phenomenology of temporal existence. Both books contain new insights generated from Augustine’s received traditions—Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome; rhetoric, philosophy, and theology; orality, literacy, and incarnation.

BOOK 10: ELUSIVE SUBJECTIVITY

Heidegger’s lectures on the phenomenology of religion rely on book 10 as the existential and phenomenological nexus of the Confessions. Heidegger—lecturing through the whole of book 10 section by section—identifies the predominant phenomenological text in chapter 33: “For in your sight I have become a riddle to myself, and that is my infirmity.”¹⁹ Book 10 draws his attention because it “can be easily demarcated from the other books, as Augustine no longer relates his past, but rather tells what he is now: “ ‘ In ipso tempore confessionum mearum,’ quod sim (what I am ‘in the very time of the making of my confessions’).”²⁰ Heidegger devotes substantial attention to a phenomenologically rich consideration of temptation in chapters 30–38, and he explains Augustine’s phenomenological sensibilities as follows:

These experiences are not simply there, in a psychic stream, as it were, but they themselves are had in the experiencing.… And the question is precisely in what manner of concern these experiences are to be enacted. These experiences of concern are pulled together into a determinate manner of enactment according to their own sense—the sense of finis curae delectatio [the end of care, pleasure].²¹

Heidegger claims not that he is offering a phenomenological reading of the Confessions but that Augustine provides a phenomenological interpretation of himself.²² Heidegger continues:

Thus the enactment of experience is always insecure about itself. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Confessions and the Continentals
• 2 Augustine and Heidegger on Acknowledging the Importance of Acknowledgment and the Orator’s Art
• 3 Arendt and Saint Augustine: Identity Otherwise Than Convention
• 4 Lyotard’s Augustine
• 5 Love, and Interpret What You Will: A Postsecular Camus-Augustine Encounter
• 6 “A Limit That Resides in the Word”: Hermeneutic Appropriations of Augustine
• 7 Self-Identity and Time
• 8 A Time to Be Born, a Time to Die: Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative
• 9 Ellul and Augustine on Rhetoric and Philosophy of Communication
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index of People and Places
• Subject Index