Organizing Principles, Part 2

Saint Augustine's Sin
by Garry Wills

(Page 5 of 6)

In Testimony Book Two, the separation of water from earth on the third day calls to Augustine's mind Job 38.10-11: "I set limits for the sea, clamped on its locks and doors, and said: 'Come thus far only, you will not cross over, your flood will break back upon itself.'" That is what, to his sorrow, did not happen to him in his fluidly dissolute youth:

Who might have brought within boundaries my misery, turned to some purpose the evanescent beauties of extreme experience, and set a clear limit to their deliciousness, that the stormy waters of my youth might have seethed up only to the shoreline of marriage? [3].

The gathering in from dissipation that the third day stands for in Augustine's mind is a theme already sounded in the book's opening paragraph: "You gather me from my own scatterings, after I have torn myself from your unity and fallen into multiplicity." The water image is there again in [4]: "I frothed along in the wake of my driving passion."

There is an implicit reference to God's gathered waters in [6], at the public baths, where his father's scrutiny can see only earthly fertility, "clothed" in mortal nudity. This is in clear contrast to the scrutiny before baptism, when one is "clothed" in Christ. The waters of baptism are a saving flood.

The Prodigal. The rich opening paragraph of Book Two has suggestions of the prodigal son's departure and return - a pattern that has made some critics claim that the parable of Luke 15.11-32 is the armature around which the whole of The Testimony is formed.6 However exaggerated that may be, the Prodigal's tale is especially applicable to the book of Augustine's adulescentia, since the Prodigal was adulescentior (Luke 15.12), the younger brother. The Prodigal "longed to fill his belly with husks," just as Augustine - in the opening paragraph - "burned to be engorged with vile things." As the son "parted [divisit] the inheritance," destroying its unity, and "scattered out [dissipavit] his part," so Augustine is "torn [discussus] from your unity" to "fall into multiplicity." As the son "returned to himself," so God regathers Augustine from his self-dispersion (a dispersione). The son confesses that "I have sinned before [coram] you," and Augustine admits that he was "decomposing before [coram] your eyes." All those echoes of the Prodigal's plight are in the short opening paragraph.

The Prodigal in Luke (15.13) "goes into a far-off [longinquam] country." Augustine, in Book Two, "wandered farther [longius] from you, as you played out the leash.... I ranged farther out [porro longe] from you" [2]. He "left you [God] to range beyond all the limits of your law, though not beyond your scourge's reach" [4]. Like the son whose father waits at home, he is "'in distant [longe] exile from the comforts of your dwelling'" [4]. He is "on the crooked paths that men tread when 'going away from you, not toward you'"[6].

When famine strikes the far-off country where the Prodigal is residing, he succumbs to deprivation (egestas, Luke 15.14). Augustine, in his wandering from God, makes of himself "a terrain of deprivation" (regio egestatis, [18]).

3. Translating Book Two

Augustine is a jazzy writer. His passages are one continual play of rhetorical pyrotechnics. So true is this that some critics, like Edward Gibbon, call his style "usually clouded by false and affected rhetoric."7 But one would never know this from reading most translations. Their authors must have concluded that they could not or should not try to reproduce the continual wordplay, the acoustical effects, the intermeshing verbal arrangements. As a result they strip Augustine of what Gibbon found offensive, creating an intellectually "chaster" but emotionally more distant writer than one finds in the original Latin. This reduction may satisfy those who think rhetoric a matter of ornaments superadded to content. But Augustine clearly thought in terms of verbal matings, dancings, and duels. To wrench him free from those intellectual patterns is to lobotomize him.

Take a simple example. Here is a clause in [9], as Englished by the respected translator Henry Chadwick: "Our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed." That gives the "plain sense" of eo liberet quo non liceret, but it misses the lubricious sound of it, the way the verbs fold into each other with a serpentine sinuosity, enacting temptation. An English equivalent would be something like "Simply what was not allowed allured us." Or take nimis inimica amicitia [17], which Chadwick interprets rather than translates as "Friendship can be a dangerous enemy," missing the etymological play, the tight paradoxical formulation, the assonance (adding with nimis two more i-sounds to the four already present), and the alliteration of NiMis with iNiMica aMicitia, as well as the revulsion being expressed toward something that is supposed to be pleasant. Something much stronger is called for: "How infectious, then, is this affection."

Augustine is often funny, in a satirical way. This is true not only in his spirited polemics with the heretical, but in the self-mockery of his own sinful contradictions: "[There was] I, loftily downfallen, actively paralyzed, sowing arid and ever more arid sadnesses" [2]. He turns satire on his father when he puns on disertus and desertus at [5]. His father wants him to be verbally deft; so he turns a verbal trick on him, playing on the sounds: "so long as I should be verbally fertile - futile, rather." This is rhetoric making fun of rhetoric, as in his other use of the same pun in Explaining the Psalms 36.3.6: "You understand us better when we blurt out our message than when, trying to be deft, we are bereft" (disertudine ... deserti).

I do not translate the pun as "deft ... bereft" in [5] because it is embedded, there, in a long image having to do with the vegetation theme of the third day of creation: "[T]his father could not be bothered with my cultivation in your eyes, nor with my chastity, so long as I should become verbally fertile - futile, rather, without the tending you provide, God, my heart's gardener skilled and true." The agricultural terms are crescerem ... desertus ... cultura ... dominus agri. To maintain this continuity of imagery, I transfer the vegetation sense from one word in the pun (desertus) to the other (disertus). Augustine thought in terms of images, as Bible symbolism required. Neglect of this, or of any of his rhetorical tools, deprives the reader of an essential part of the experience of watching his mind work. For bravura effects, like the description of watery chaos in [2] (see pages 33-35), the translator must search out as many cognate English effects as he can find.

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.