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Monica's Tears: Augustine on Words and Speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Janet Martin Soskice
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The third volume of the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, translated by Herbert McCabe, is entitled (I have always supposed by him) Knowing and Naming God. These words make a concise brief for the philosopher of religion. Of its two movements, knowing God seems at first glance the more demanding and critical, yet it is evident that for Aquinas and the Patristic tradition which preceded him, naming God was of equal difficulty and weight. In fact the two cannot be separated for to name one must, in some sense know which, for the early theologians, formed an almost insurmountable obstacle to our speaking of God.

Augustine is continuously occupied with how we can know God, and with how we can name Him. It is the problem with which he opens the Confessions, for if we do not know what or whom we address then how can we call upon our Lord? To call upon we need a name, and a name involves definition and definition risks idolatrously presuming to know the divine essence.

How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself?

The primary Biblical text for the naming of God for Patristic and medieval readers alike was Exodus 3. 1-14, the story of Moses at the burning bush. Moses, herding his father-in-law’s sheep, is addressed by God and in the negotiations which follow Moses asks the Deity for a name,

And God said to Moses ‘I AM WHO I AM’ —you must say to the sons

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 83 , Issue 980 , October 2002 , pp. 448 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Confessions 1.2.2. All citations are from the translation of Maria Boulding, OSB (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997).

2 Rowan Williams has pointed out to me that here body obeys the call of God, even while the will cannot.

3 James O'Donnell points out that this passage of Book IX is remarkable in ancient literature as an account of a ‘sustained act of reading’. O'Donnell, J. J., Augustine: Confessions. Volume III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 91Google Scholar. The numbering of verses differs from our modern numbering. The latter is given after the slash mark.

4 Compare NRSV ‘How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?

5 Henry Chadwick translates in idipsum as ‘the Selfsame’, in some ways a preferable translation to ‘in Being itself.’

6 For ‘redeemed rhetoric’ see Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), Chapter One. ‘Augustine …depicts the new birth in faith which he experiences as a linguistic rejuvenation. He could now speak to God as unabashedly as a child: “I prattled to You”, he says. (Colish, p. 32, cit. Confessions 9.1.1). The simple strategy of speaking only words of Scripture is not, of course, enough for Augustine. The words of Scripture, even the names of the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit, were never far from the mouths of the Manichees he tells us, ‘exceedingly carnal and talkative people’ (III. 6. 10). The will must be directed aright by love.

7 Compare Plotinus, Enneads 6.7.

8 See Burnably, John, Amor Dei (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1991), p. 34Google Scholar.

9 228

10 Hadot, Pierre, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 154Google Scholar

11 Porphyry, On Abstinence, I, 27, I, cit. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 157.

12 See his De Vera Religione, 4.7)

13 Courcelle, Pierre, Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950), p. 222–3Google Scholar.

14 O'Donnell, p. 128.