miles, m. r. “infancy, parenting and nourishment in augustine’s confessions.” journal of the...

7/22/2019 Miles, M. R. Infancy, Parenting and Nourishment in Augustines Confessions. Journal of the American Academy o

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TheJournalof the AmericanAcademyof Religion,L/3

Infancy, Parenting, and Nourishment inAugustine'sConfessions

MargaretR. Mileshe Confessionsof St.Augustine,provocativeo modernreaders oritsinsistently contemporary flavor, yet difficult to translate into thelanguage with which we explore the self, is the record of a fourth-

century self-analysis.But The Confessions is not only recall and interpretationof Augustine'spersonal past, and his insights transcend the psychological. His"therapy" involves a process of orientation to a far more comprehensiveuniverse than the conflicts within the self, the family, and the communitywhich focus the interest of modern psychotherapy. His goals are moreambitious than those of contemporarypsychology. Yet the events and crises towhich Augustine draws attention, his understanding of the psyche asdeveloping by a series of resolutions which emerge from and incorporateearlier stages, and his insistence that intellectual knowledge is not enough toeffect change in settled patternsof behavior, all indicate the extent to whichAugustine'spreoccupations n The Confessions are catharticand therapeutic.The Confessions was written in about A.D.400, when Augustine was inhis early forties; the last thirty years of his life are not described in it. Theyears after the writing of The Confessions were marked, in many ways, bygreat productivity, but in them Augustine also saw the deterioration anddestruction of much of the objective part of his life's work in the Africanchurch. In these years, Augustine'spsyche became increasingly complex andweighted with pessimism regarding the fulfillment of human life in thepresent. It was in The Confessions that his understandingof human nature,so intimately tied to his understanding of his own process, began to beformulated. By the relentless examination of human nature nearest home,his own nature, Augustine attempted to describe and account for the mys-terious complexity of the "weights"of human existence: "I came to under-stand . . . through my own experience" (VIII, 5).

Margaret R. Miles (Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union) is Associate Professor ofHistoricalTheology at Harvard Divinity School. Her publications include Augustineon the Body (ScholarsPress, 1979), and Fullness of Life: Historical Foundations fora New Asceticism (Westminster,1981).

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350 Margaret R. Miles

How does a person organize experience so that life does not appear tobe a series of unrelated emotion-generating incidents? The intensity andimmediacy with which a late-Roman man such as Augustine was permittedand conditioned to experience emotion must have provided both incentiveto explore the emotional structure of his life and, simultaneously, made itdifficult to achieve perspective on these emotions. And Augustine needed, inthose last years of the fourth century, to collect and interpret his past inorder to prepare himself for the demanding and hectic present life of anewly appointed bishop of the church of North Africa. Because The Confes-sions has become a classic, we tend to overlook this pressure for personalorientation; a classic, by definition, takes on a quality of timeless relevancefor its readers.

Viewing The Confessions as therapy helps us to understand some ofthe difficulties of the book. The note of anxious introspection which oftenjarsthe first-time reader is to be expected in a therapeutic exploration. Also,the reader's frustration as Augustine over-describes some aspects of his lifeand omits to tell us items of basic interest in other aspects, may be partiallyalleviated by the recognition that Augustine is primarily interested infollowing the associations which seem most fruitful for his own task ofclarification and integration. Perhaps Augustine was thinking of The Con-fessions when he wrote to Marcellinus a decade later: "I confess to be oneof those who write because they have made some progress, and who, bymeans of writing, make further progress"(Ep. CXLIII, 2). As an old man ofseventy-four, Augustine testified to the value of the investment of time andenergy in The Confessions; he wrote in the Retractions: "They still moveme when I read them now, as they moved me when I first wrote them" (II,32). The Confessions was catharsis for Augustine both in the sense of recall,reevaluation, and reinterpretation of old personal dramas--"past history aspresent meaning"-and in the sense of catharsisas "the vision of completion,the experience of unification and ... transformation"(Miller:33). Books I-IX are largely re-collections of Augustine's past life; he describes his methodin these books: "I want to call back to mind my past impurities and thecarnal corruptions of my soul, not because I love them, but so that I maylove you, my God .... And gathering myself together from the scatteredfragments into which I was broken and dissipated during all that time when,being turned away from you, the One, I lost myself in the distractionsof themany" (II, 1). But even these recollections are constantly interwoven withmoments of completion and transformation; Augustine's confession is notonly of sin and faith, but also of praise. His reminiscences make sense to himonly in the context of the experiences of unification which are the founda-tion of his understanding of himself, the world, and God. Books X-XIII arean extended description of the cosmic setting of the individual life unfoldedin the earlier books.



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Infancy, Parenting, and Nourishment in Augustine'sConfessions 351

Augustine does not simply construct a "case history";The Confessionsis primarily therapy in the Platonic sense of a methodical conversion from a"misidentification of reality," to recognition of the reality, the patterns ofbehavior, that has been implicit but unidentified within one's most intimateand pressing experience (Cushman:passim).The Confessions is therapy inthe modern sense of retracing of events with attention to the emotions andimages that characterized those events; but it is therapeia in the ancientsense when Augustine gives this story of his life a cosmic setting and signifi-cance. The task of Platonic therapy is the construction of an articulatedorientationto a final, authoritative,and implicit reality. It is only in the lightof this reality-for Augustine, God-that he can see himself accurately:"You are the permanent light which I consulted about all these things,asking whether they are, what they are, and what weight they have" (X, 40).But it is not the "vision of completion," the cosmic setting of a humanlife as described in the later books of The Confessions that will occupy ushere. Rather, we will trace a significant theme in Augustine's recounting ofhis early life to the time of that great transformationof the structure anddynamics of his psyche that we call the conversion experience. The threadwe will draw from the colorful tapestry of Augustine's life for closer exami-nation is a major organizing theme which not only holds together manyother threads, but also indicates how the whole tapestry should be seen.Augustine's use of the language of infantile experience is, I will claim, notmerely rhetorical metaphor, but accurate description of what actuallyoccurred in his psyche in the garden of his rented home in Milan.In our time, which has begun to rediscover the significance of infantileexperience for the understanding of the adult psyche, it is both interestingand important to see that, despite major differences of assumptions andinterpretation, a fourth-century person realized and articulated the necessityof examining the human psyche from the first months of its existence inorder to understand its dynamics and to change its deficit patterns. More-over, Augustine was not just any fourth-century person; his compellinginsights, more than those of any other leader of the early centuries of theChristian church, have formulated the ideas of self and world, God and thechurch, that structure Western consciousness, whether our relation to thisinherited worldview is one of acceptance or resistance. There is always,then, self-knowledge to be gained from a more accurate perception ofAugustine's thought, and not only the delight of entering the conceptualworld of any historical person. The Confessions "aim to present the textureof our experience, not just coherently, but with the patternsmore visible andtheir significance more clearly displayed than before" (Fingarette:7).Let us see, then, how Augustine made sense of his experience. No otherlate Roman person found it necessary to go back to earliest infancy-even toprenatal experience-in order to understand the meaning of experience. YetAugustine found the roots of all experience in what is, properly speaking,



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352 MargaretR. Miles

pre-experience. His method, the observation of infants, assumes the univer-sality of infantile experience and is his only access to the dynamics of hisown infancy. What he observed and described was the anxiety of the infant;even though the reciprocity of the infant's need to suck and the mother'sneed to suckle virtually guarantee that the infant will be nourished, theinfant apparently does not trust that nourishment will be forthcoming:

I wanted to express my desires to those who would satisfy them; but this wasimpossible since my desires were in me and those to whom I wished toexpressthem were outside and could not by any sense perception of their ownenter into my spirit. And so I used to jerk my limbs about and make variousnoises by way of indicating what I wanted, using the limited forms of com-munication which were in my capacity, and which indeed were not very likethe real thing. And when people did not do what I wanted, either because Icould not make myself understood,or because what I wanted was bad for me,then I would become angry with my elders for not being subservient tome ... and I would avenge myself on them by burstinginto tears. (I, 6)

Not only the need for necessary nourishment, but fantasies of powerover the parents and possessionof the nourishing breast (I, 7) increase thechild's frustration when the object of his desire is not immediately pro-vided./1/ A "choice" has been made by the infant, motivated by anxiety,not to rely on the care that is volunteered but to grasp at objects withoutdiscrimination as to their beneficial effects./2/ Augustine called this anxiousgrasping at objects in the anxiety that something will be missed concupi-scentia/3/. He saw it most nakedly and clearly in the anxiety of the new-born (I, 7); he also found in the behavior of the newborn infant the form ofall future concupiscence. In future years the anxious grasping of the new-born will become the frenzied pursuit of sex, power, and possessionsthatAugustine illustrates with his own story. Concupiscence is merely given newobjects and a wider scope; the adult learns to conceal and rationalize, ratherthan eradicate, the agenda of concupiscence: "For it is just these same sinswhich, as the years pass by, become related no longer to tutors, school-masters,footballs, nuts, and pet sparrows,but to magistratesand kings, gold,estates, and slaves"(I, 19).

Concupiscence, then, pervades and organizes human life, from theanxiety-motivated responseof the infant to the adult struggle for sex, power,and possessions.It is not, we must notice, a pleasant aspect of human experi-ence. To interpret the element of concupiscence in human life as zestful andenergetic, giving interest and motivation to life, is to misinterpretin the mostfundamental way. Augustine walks his reader through a long and detailedexposition of his own experience with this deficit agenda, an experience heconsistently presentsas painful disorientation.Concupiscence, most apparentin infants and small children, should, Augustinesays,be given the sympathy itdeserves;and yet, "noone is sorryfor the children;no one is sorryfor the olderpeople, no one is sorry for both of them" (I, 9). Approximately twenty-five



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years after writing The Confessions, Augustine had not changed his mindabout the appropriate attitude toward the inevitable admixture ofconcupiscence in human life. In contrast to the universal agreement inclassical and late-classical literature that old age is the period of life most tobe pitied and shunned, Augustine identifies infancy, the period of life inwhich concupiscence is most evident, as the primary locus of the miseries oflife: "Who would not tremble and wish rather to die than to be an infantagain if the choice were put before him?" (Civ. Dei, XXI, 4).The original adaptive response of the infant in gasping for breath-ingrasping breath-is the responsethat will be articulated and become norma-tive as the lifestyle of the individual. The grasping response of the newbornbecomes the older child's motiveless theft. Basic to both is the anxiety thatsomething will be missed. What fascinates Augustine in his recounting of thefamous pear tree incident is the apparent gratuitousnessof the theft; becausethe incident is trivial, it illustrates most accurately the agenda of concu-piscence, the habitual indiscriminate grasping that has become automaticbecause of the constant repetition and reinforcement of this response. In asense, the object does not matter; it is the irresistibilityof habitual responsethat makes the pear tree incident a perfect paradigm of concupiscence:"Near our vineyard was a pear tree loaded with fruit, though the fruit wasnot particularlyattractive either in color or taste. I and some other wretchedyouths conceived the idea of shaking the pears off this tree and carryingthem away. We set out late at night . . . and stole all the fruit that we couldcarry. And this was not to feed ourselves; we may have tasted a few, butthen we threw the rest to the pigs .... I became evil for nothing, with noreason for wrongdoing except the wrongdoing itself" (II, 4). Later, in youngadulthood, even though he experienced what might have been a gratifyingdegree of success, Augustine describes his life as painful and unhappy: "Ipanted for honors, for money, for marriage .... I found bitterness anddifficulty in following these desires .... How unhappy my soul was then. I got no joy out of my learning ... I was eaten up by anxieties"(VI, 6).Along with his unfolding story of the anxiety-ridden agenda of his earlyyears, Augustine gives a detailed description of the role of his parents in hisdevelopment. Neither parent receives unambiguous appreciation fromAugustine;rather,he emphasizes their role in directing and conditioning thestyles of his pursuit of sex, power, and possessions.It was from his motherthat he received both physical and spiritual birth, and Monica was consis-tently and compulsively anxious for the temporal and spiritual well-being ofher son. In retrospect, Augustine interprets her warnings to him in adoles-cence as divine communication. Addressing God, he writes: "But though Idid not know it, these warnings came from you. I thought you were silentand that it was my mother who was speaking, but you were not silent, youspoke to me through her, and in despising her, I was despising you" (II, 3).But this is hindsight; at the time, Augustine found her overscrupulous,



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overbearing, and a nuisance. Her anxiety, her pressure on Augustine forprofessionalsuccess, and her "simple"faith, heavy with elements of supersti-tion, were all quite difficult for Augustine to accept./4/His father, Patricius, who died when Augustine was seventeen, was apoor but ambitious man who sacrificed to send Augustine to school. Augus-tine interprets this as no more than self-interest on Patricius's part, andindeed, blames Patricius for supporting the "wanderings"by which Augus-tine reinforced his concupiscence. He repeatedly refers to his father as"fallen,"and as affirming and encouraging Augustine'spursuit of sex (II, 3).Augustine describes himself as deprived of adequate male models: "Consid-ering the kind of men who were set up as models for me to imitate, it is nowonder that I was swept away into emptiness and that I went out of yourpresence, my God"(I, 18).

Augustine thus presents both of his parents as training and rewardingdifferent aspects of his youthful concupiscence. His conversion marks hisrejection of the worldly ambitions entertained for him by both parents andintrojected by Augustine himself at the same time that it compasses hisrejection of the agenda of concupiscence: "In these hopes (of professionalsuccess) both my parents indulged too much-my father, because he hardlythought of you at all, and only thought in the most superficial way (inania)of me; my mother, because in her view, these usual courses of learningwould be, not only no hindrance, but an actual help to me in attaining you.So at least I conjecture when I recollect to the best of my ability what thecharacters of my parentswere" (II, 3).We have thus far been following Augustine's description of infantileexperience and its extrapolation in adult experience as unrelievedly nega-tive. Before we look at another aspect of the infant's condition, we mustpause to sketch the anthropological assumptions that inform Augustine'sinterpretationof the infant's anxious reactions.

Concupiscence, according to Augustine, is an adaptive response to thefact that the very essence of human nature is its intentionality. Humanbeing does not contain "the good by which it is made happy" (Ep. CXL, 23).A person is, then, defined and organized according to the selection of objectsby which to be made happy. The center of personhood is this movementtoward an object or objects. Corresponding to this energy of desire in theperson, there is an intrinsic order in creation. Only by aligning oneself withthis intrinsic order of being, reality, and value can a person be happy: "Youhave made us for yourself, and our hearts are restlessuntil they rest in you"(I, 1). This statement concentrates Augustine's idea of personhoodas consti-tuted by the object of attention and affection. To say that one is in relation-ship with the object of one's desire is to put it inaccurately and misleadingly."Relationship" mplies a distance to be overcome, a gulf to be bridged; theperson is rather connected to what is desired, whether objectsof the sensibleworld, other human beings, or God. If the wrong "choice"of an object is



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Infancy, Parenting, and Nourishment in Augustine's Confessions 355

made, a choice that is hopelessly inconsistent with the intrinsic order of thecreated world, unhappiness is inevitable. And, as we have seen, the wrongchoice is invariably made in the earliest infancy and reinforced throughoutnormal development./5/ This is Augustine's diagnosis of the human condi-tion. His own story is the illustrationand validation of this thesis.But while he was "enslaved"to the agenda of concupiscence, Augustinewas unable to analyze the patternof his experience. It was only because of thechange in his behavior which resulted from his conversionexperience that hegained insight into his earlier operation. We will focus on Augustine'smany-faceted insistence that it was only by returning to the psychic condition ofinfancy that a reversal of the original "choice"could be effective. The imagerywith which he introduces the conversion experience is that of the child justlearning to walk:"Throwyourself on him. Do not fear. He will not pull awayand let you fall. Throw yourself without fear and he will receive you and healyou"(VIII, 1). This strongimagery suggests,as do severalother elements in theaccount, that what is necessary is a return to the earliest psychic condition ofanxiety, a stripping of the cumulative object-orientationwhich, in adulthood,has become ingrained behavior: "The worse part of me was stronger fromhabit than the better partwhich was a novelty"(VIII, 11).Habit contains an inertial effect which Augustine calls "deadness";"Ihesitated to die to deadness and live to life." The affective aspect of the"strong force of habit" is described as simultaneously containing intenseanxiety and "lethargy,""drowsiness,"or "sleep"(VIII, 5). Both the somno-lence and the anxiety of the newborn contribute to Augustine'scondition atthe time of his conversion. His "hesitation,"actually less a hesitation than aparalyzing tension, was the condition in which he was enabled to reverse the"choice"made in infancy and rectify his disorientationby orienting himselfto God, of whom he wrote elsewhere: "If anyone thinks of God as anythingother than life itself, he has an absurd idea of God" (De doct. christ. I, 8).But the only place from which life can commence is the place at which itwas initially arrested.The overcoming of the inertia and deadness which was the cumulativeresult of long years of reinforcing the attitude and behavior patterns ofconcupiscence cannot be achieved by conscious choice. If both the mode ofresponse and the object of one's orientation are to be altered, if, instead ofgrasping at objects,one is to become receptive-to trust-for the satisfactionof all desires, a new choice cannot simply be superimposed on the earlier"choice."Nothing less than returning to the terror and disorientation of theinfant state in its full intensity and, from the same condition in which theoriginal response was given, making a different response, will break the"violence of habit" in which Augustine was held as if in chains (VIII, 11).Augustine's psyche was so firmly invested in concupiscence that it wasinaccessible to the usual methods of bribing or bullying by which humanbeings talk themselves into consciouschoices.



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Augustine pauses in his account of the conversion experience to describeat length the bodily state which accompanied his mental "storm." Thepicture we receive is that of the random flailing motions of the newborninfant: "I made many movements with my body-the kind of movementswhich people sometimes want to make, but cannot make, either becausethey have not the limbs, or because their limbs are bound or weakened byillness. .... I tore my hair, beat my forehead, locked my fingers together,clasped my knee .... Then a huge storm rose up within me bringing with ita huge downpour of tears .... I flung myself down on the ground somehowunder a fig tree and gave free rein to my tears; they streamed and floodedfrom my eyes" (VIII, 8-12). Even Augustine's physical behavior reinforceshis narrationof his return to a condition of infancy.The moment of conversion occurs when Augustine realizes that theobjects he had so strenuously pursued and attempted to possesshad insteadheld and bound him in the paralysisin which he found himself. He sudden-ly saw himself, energetically following the course in which he was mostcompletely mistaken, as in fact led unerringly to this moment: "In my owneyes I was stripped naked" (VIII, 4). He saw that the meaning of his behav-ior and its motivation had been concealed primarily from himself: "Theeasiest person to deceive is one's own self" (Fingarette:2). Augustine'sconversion begins with a painful but accurate sight of himself: "But-you,Lord, were turning me around so that I could see myself; you took me frombehind my own back, which was where I had put myself during the timewhen I did not want to be observed by myself, and you set me in front ofmy own face so that I could see how foul a sight I was-crooked, filthy,spotted, and ulcerous. I saw and I was horrified,and I had nowhere to go toescape from myself" (VIII, 7)./6/ He now recognizes this psychic "place";he has been there before, and it now seems to him that he has neithermoved nor grown since the moment of that first response. In fact, he hasnot; he has learned nothing; he is still compulsively repeating his firstresponse. His tears and bodily convulsions now lessen slightly and hebecomes aware of a childish voice that says, "Tolle, lege -take and read "His response is obedience, the trusting appropriationof the message as forhim. It is this response that he must hereafter remember and reinforce; it isaround this incredibly fragile response that he must now begin to organizethe operation of his psyche. But this reinforcement, by decision after deci-sion to "throw yourself on him," can, unlike the original "choice," neverbecome the unconsciousagenda that the earlier choice had been. No uncon-scious pattern exists for the second choice, and so it must be consciouslykeptalive if it is not to fade and all traces of it to vanish from the psyche. Theattitude and responseof trust must replace the child's first response,but thistime, consciously.When we follow Augustine'sanalysis of the way in which concupiscenceis perpetuated, some important insights emerge. From the perspective of the



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self-knowledge he has gained in the conversion experience, Augustine saysthat concupiscence is not, in fact, "nourished"and perpetuated by its objects.The objects which are, as Augustine repeatedly insists, good in themselves,are neverthelessconsistently unsatisfying. The person, repetitiously followingthe grasping pattern of concupiscence, experiences an increasing lack ofnourishment: "For those who find their gratification in external things easilybecome empty and pour themselves out on things seen and temporal and,with starving minds, lick at shadows. Oh that they would tire of their lack ofnourishment and say, 'Who will show us good things?"'(IX, 4). The intrinsicincapacity of "things" to provide nourishment nevertheless prompts theperson to redouble his efforts to secure gratification, efforts which spin himdeeper and deeper into the ruts of habitual behavior. A short version of thesaga of Augustine's experience of "enslavement"to the agenda of concupis-cence is given in his description: "From a disordered will came concu-piscence, and serving concupiscence became a habit, and the unresistedhabit became a necessity. These were like links-so I call them a chain-holding me in a hard slavery"(VIII, 5).The "nourishment"of the habit of concupiscence, then, is in the gratifi-cation of a repetition compulsion; "scratchingthe itching scab of concupis-cence" (IX, 7), rather than enjoyment of the objectsof concupiscence, led toa perpetuation of the habitual response. Nourished only by "deceivingwords,"the psyche sinks into lethargy and anxiety (IX, 13). The quality ofrelationshipwith other human beings in this mode is dramatically presentedin Augustine's image of "eating one another up, as people do with theirfood" (IX, 2). The behavior of the infant at the mother's breast is more orless adequately concealed, but remains unaltered in adult behavior. Augus-tine has told us enough about his attachments to other human beings in hisearly life to indicate the extent to which friendship inevitably and automati-cally became grasping longing to possess the other. The possessivenessandjealousy that Augustine described in one newborn is the paradigm of hisown adult experience: "I myself have seen a baby who was envious; it couldnot yet speak, but it grew pale and looked bitterly at another baby sharingits milk"(I, 7). Of his experience of being "in love" he writes: "I was fetteredhappily in bonds of misery so that I might be beaten with rods of red-hotiron-the rods of jealousy and suspicion, and fears and angers and quarrels"(III, 1). In possessing,he was possessed;he was regularly unable to differen-tiate his own life from the life of the person he loved, whether it was hisfriend (II, 2; IV, 4) his mother (IX, 12), or his beloved (VI, 15).The affective component of Augustine'sreversal of the agenda of concu-piscence, he tells us, was the healing of the capacity to love. A directexchange occurs from the anxiety-ridden concupiscence which had orderedhis existence to participation in the love of God: "Now Scripture enjoinsnothing except love and condemns nothing except concupiscence .... Imean by love that affection of the mind that aims at the enjoyment of God



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for his own sake and of oneself and one's neighbor for God's sake. By concu-piscence I mean that affection of the mind which aims at the enjoyment ofoneself and one's neighbor without reference to God .... Now in proportionas the dominion of concupiscence is pulled down, in the same proportionthat of love is built up" (De doct. christ. III, 10). In contrast to concupis-cence, in which other human beings are used to reinforce and, temporarily,to alleviate the person's grasping anxiety-as the mother was used by theinfant-"loving the other in God"frees both oneself and the other. One cannow recognize and delight in the being and beauty of the other in a waythat is impossible while one's method of operation is concupiscence. Anxietyis not a condition in which enjoyment is possible. The curious phenomenon,revealed in Augustine's conversion experience, of a person busily deceivinghimself by thinking that he uses the other, while he is, in reality, enslaved tothe gratification received from the other, is one of the pervasive themes ofThe Confessions.There has been, Augustine tells us, an area of his life in which the agen-da of concupiscence have been even more strongly directed than in otherareas. He has felt most compulsive in the pursuit of sex. It is fashionable tosmile at Augustine's adolescent behavior as normal teenage behavior, butthis is to ignore his own evaluation of sex as dominating, dictating, andordering his life. Even if he had supplied us with many more concretedetails of his sexual activity, we could not make a more accurate evaluationfrom the vantage point of our "objectivity" han the evaluation of Augustinehimself, who found himself unfree in the pursuit of sex. Very simply,Augustine knew himself to be an addict, and the resolutionof this addictionby the conversion to celibacy was not a solution that Augustine urged onanyone else who was not similarly addicted./7/

We often neglect to notice, however, that Augustine'sconversion was notsolely from the sexual aspect of concupiscence, but also from the graspingpursuit of power and possessions. Sex, power, and possessions are inex-tricably interwoven in the agenda of concupiscence, and it was as a wholethat the life organized by concupiscence was rejected by Augustine, just as ithad been the whole agenda of concupiscence that had brought Augustine tothe point of paralyzed anxiety: "I was tired out and wasted away withgnawing anxieties .... It was really a great burden to me and to help mebear such a heavy form of slavery I no longer had the impulse and encour-agement of my old hopes and desires for positionsand wealth" (VIII, 1).One further aspect of the conversion account that we must note isAugustine's reporting of his experience as one of complete helplessness andfrustrationin which the grace of God operated to heal and unify. Augustinehad no sense of his own ability to reorder his psyche. Rather his experiencewas that of having his head "turned" for him./8/ Just as the infant'sresponse can be said to be "chosen"only in the broadest sense of the word,so Augustine insistson the gratuitousnessof his breakthrough.



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For the sake of drawing and discussing one of the strongest threads inAugustine's account of his conversion, we have not paid attention to otherimportant aspects.For example, the childlike naivete of obeying the voice thatsaid, "Tolle, lege," is balanced with the processof intellectual understandingwith which he had been consciously occupied through his youthful years.The conversion experience was not, then, only the result of a process ofbreaking down and breaking through the habit patterns of thirty years, butalso a process of gradual strengthening of his intellectual orientation. It wasthe convergence of both processes that prepared Augustine's conversion tothe amazingly strong and resilient synthesis of his maturity. The strength ofthis synthesis is, I think, indicated in the resolutionof his compulsive pursuitof sex. Describing his conversion to celibacy, Augustine calls it a "gift ofGod," not the result of a fierce and successful repression. He never tells usthat it was hard to maintain his celibate state, but only that he found ittremendously freeing: "Now my mind was free of those gnawing cares thatcome from ambition and the desire for gain, and wallowing in filth andscratching the itching scab of concupiscence" (IX, 7). Although we may findthe dramatic language of the converted addict overly dramatic when hedescribes what he has been converted from, we must honor Augustine'sdescription as an accurate indication of the way he experienced and inter-preted that experience.All of Augustine'stalk of growth in the Christianlife, then, relies on thenecessity of returning to the infancy condition and reversing the "choice"ofa deficit pattern of behavior. Without this return to the place at which truegrowth-the opposite of repetitious extrapolationfrom an initial response-was arrested, talk of growth is too naive, too superficial, too optimistic.Augustine uses the language of the nourishment of the infant to describe thefragile progressof the Christianwho must learn, just as the newborn learnedby extrapolating the response of concupiscence, to progress in the life oftrusting dependence on the new "parents" hat emerge from the conversionexperience, God and the Catholic church as mother and father. The mother-ing activity of God is especially emphasized. A direct transferof dependenceand attachment from the training of the earthly parents to the parenting ofGod has been effected.

Augustine's last mention of his parents in The Confessions demonstratesthat no longer are Monica and Patricius the "heavyweights"of Augustine'spsyche that they have been throughout his early years and into youngadulthood. He now sees them simply as "brethren," ellow pilgrims who, likehim, suffer and struggle. New and loving regard for his parents resultedfrom his disengagement from the training of his early years so that now,although he can accurately evaluate this training, he is not resentful butfinds that it was both inevitable and the particular route by which he wasled to the moment of conversion. Augustine, in his last mention of his par-ents, urges that "as many as shall read this may remember at your altar



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Monica, your servant, and Patricius, her husband, through whose flesh youbrought me into this life, though how I do not know. May they with holyaffection remember those two who were my parents in this transitory light,who are my brethren under you, Our Father, in our Catholic Mother, andmy fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem for which your people in theirpilgrimage sigh from the beginning of their journey until they return home"(IX, 13).But the importance of the new parenting that emerged from Augustine'sconversion experience can be stated much more strongly. Augustine'sconversion was not, strictly speaking, to Christianity, but to the Catholicchurch. As a Manichaean he had considered himself a Christian,and he hadrecognized more recently, but long before the experience in the garden inMilan, that he could not be content with any philosophy in which "thenameof Christ was not there": "For this name, Lord, this name of my Savior,yourson, had been with my mother's milk drunk in devoutly by my tenderheart, where it remained deeply treasured.So I could not be swept away byanything, however learned or well written or true, which made no mentionof this name" (III, 4). Augustine's "conversionof the will" can be describedwith greater precision as his return to the infantile condition and selection ofa different mother from whom to draw nourishment. Once the agenda towhich his earthly parents had trained him was broken, Augustine was freedfrom his attachment to them which had been so stressfullycharacterized bythe ambivalence of dependency and resentment. Augustine can now seeMonica as she is, can describe her as a poor weak creature with her own lifestory rather than as the tyrant of his youthful experience. He can ask hisreaders to pray God's mercy for her sins, and he can acknowledge her rolein bringing him to conversion (IX, 13).

Just as his infant nourishment had come from Monica's breasts, thenourishment of his infancy in the Catholic church is the food provided by"ourLord JesusChrist[who]made himself milk for us":As then the mother, when she sees her child unfit for taking meat, gives himmeat, but meat that has passed through her flesh, for the bread upon whichthe infant feeds is the same bread as that which the mother feeds on; but theinfant is not ready for the table, he is only ready for the breast, and thereforebread is passed from the table through the mother'sbreast,that the same foodmay thus reach the little infant; thus our Lord JesusChrist ... the bread,made himself milk for us, being incarnate and appearing in mortal shape....On this let us grow, by this milk let us be nourished. Let us not depart fromour faith in the milk before we are strong enough to receive the Word. (InPs. CXXX, 9, 11)

The church's training, paralleling that of the mother, is a carefullygraded program of nourishment and expectation of growth. Although onemust not demand solid food while still in earliest infancy and so run the riskof being "weaned before one's time," one must not want "to remain little"



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Infancy, Parenting,and Nourishment in Augustine'sConfessions 361

but must steadily advance from the milk of belief to the meat of under-standing under the guidance of the "Catholicmother"(Serm. XXIII, 3).

The protection of the father is also an accurate image of God's watchfulprotection of the infant convert; "I am only a little child," Augustine writes,"but my father lives forever and my protector is sufficient for me. For he isthe same who begot me and who watches over me" (X, 4). But it is thenourishment imagery of the providing breast that Augustine finds mostcentral to his description. God, Christ, and the Catholic church are alldescribed as providing this nourishment, and Augustine can find no moreperfect image of his new condition of dependency and trust than that of theinfant at the breast: "What am I, at my best, except an infant suckling themilk you give and feeding on you, the food that is incorruptible?" IV, 1).In contrast to the starvation rations yielded by concupiscence, thenourishment of God is the complete food of the psyche. Augustine is impa-tient with any description of what a person should do that does not providethe energy for doing it: "I found too that one is not only instructed so as tosee you, who are the same forever, but also so as to grow strong enough tolay hold on you, and he who cannot see you for the distance, may yet walkalong the road by which he will arrive and see you, and lay hold on you"(VII, 21). The difference between Augustine's earlier mystical experience(VII, 10), and the conversion experience was that in the former Augustine"saw,"but, since he had not stripped to the condition of psychic infancy, hislife was not fundamentally reoriented in consequence of what he saw. Theconversionexperience met the additional condition that the whole energy ofthe psyche was freed from the "strong force" of its habits, and from theobjectson which it was fastened, so that genuine growth could occur. Augus-tine's daily "nourishment"became no longer the anxiousgobbling of objects,but the trustworthy nutrient that he received from God, "our mother whosoothes and nourishes"(In Ps. XXVI, 2), by waiting with confidence andaccepting with gratitude.The complete and completely gratifying nourishment which supportsand strengthens the infant Christian is never outgrown; the progressof theChristian is gain without corresponding loss. In contrast to the "develop-ment" of concupiscence, in which the content of earlier stages is continuous-ly and restlesslychanged even though the pattern remains the same, growthin the Christian life preserves and integrates every stage of growth. Theearliest stage, belief, although it gradually becomes understanding, is notdiscarded: "In passing over these stages and steps of your age you are notgradually unfolded, but abiding in the way you are renewed. For it is notthat as the first dies the second follows, or that the rise of the third will bethe destruction of the second, or that the fourth is now born that the thirdmay die .... Though all these ages do not come at the same time, neverthe-less in a soul that is pious and justified they persiston equal and harmoniousterms" (Serm. CCXVI, 8). Trusting belief, and growth in the new response



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362 MargaretR. Milesand orientation, is the constant condition of the Christian: "Youset our feeton the way and speak kindly to us and say, 'Run, and I will hold you, and Iwill bring you through, and there also I will hold you."' The same "sweetdelight" that began to nourish Augustine at the time of his conversioncontinues to lead him to advance. Augustine describes the gratifying nour-ishment on which he is sustained in Confessions X, 6:

But whatdo I love whenI loveyou?Not thebeautyof thebodynorthegloryof time, not the brightness f light shiningso friendlyto the eye, not thesweet and variousmelodiesof singing,not the fragrance f flowersand oint-mentsandspices,notmannaandhoney,not limbsdelightful o theembracesof the flesh: t is not thesethatI love whenI lovemy God.Andyet I do lovea kindof light, melody, ragrance,ood,embracewhenI lovemy God; or heis the light, the melody,the fragrance,he food, the embraceof my innerbeing-there whereis a brilliance hat spacecannotcontain,a soundthattimecannotcarryaway,a perfume hatno breezedisperses, tasteundimin-ishedby eating,a clinging ogether hat no satietywilldisrupt.This s whatIlovewhenI lovemyGod.

NOTES/1/ Compare Klein'sdescriptionof the infant at the mother's breast:"The infant'sdesire for the ever-present, inexhaustible breast"makes for "unavoidablegrievances."Whenthe infant's eeling"that he mother s omnipotent ndthatit is up to her topreventall pain and evils from internaland externalsources"s not gratified, heresulting attitude of destructive rage, which Klein calls envy, "spoilsand harms thegood object which is the source of life.... The child feels recurrentanxiety that hisgreed and his destructiveimpulseswill get the better of him"(passim)./2/ Compare Piaget: "It is striking to observe.., .how the nursling, when hismother is getting him ready for his meals, counts very little on her for obtaining theobject of his desires; he makes a great fuss, becomes impatient, tries to grasp thebottle ... but is not at all content to await the natural course of events. It all hap-pens as though he depended only on himself to obtain his goal"(329)./3/ Augustine also uses the words libido and cupiditas as synonymous withconcupiscentia; see my discussionof concupiscentia in Augustine'sworks(Miles:67ff.)./4/ O'Connell suggests that Monica's persistent badgering of Augustine in hisearly years may have been counterproductive:"Her prayers and her tears had muchto do with his conversion, but one may be pardoned for wondering how long herpossessiveimportunitiesdid more to keep him away from the faith" (107)./5/ It is important to observe that in Augustine's description of concupiscence inThe Confessions we do not have the strengthened.versionof original sin that evolvedin the course of the controversywith Pelagius. Rather, his language is close to that ofPelagius in identifying the weakness and ignorance of the human condition as the



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Infancy, Parenting, and Nourishment in Augustine'sConfessions 363result of habit: "The law of sin is the strong force of habit" (VIII, 6). While it istempting to interpret Augustine's description of his youthful pursuits as an illustra-tion of the mechanics of original sin, this is unwarranted by the text. Augustine hasalready formulated in The Confessions, however, an argument against the futurePelagian description of how this "strong force of habit" can be overcome. Theprescriptive aspect of Augustine's view of human nature is already in place in TheConfessions, and will be discussed in the following section on his conversion experi-ence. It will remain to him to formulate a diagnosis of human nature that can sup-port his radical prescription./6/ See also Gay: "Freud argued that we would, if we saw clearly enough, wakeup feeling morally corrupt and broken"(549)./7/ Augustine did not consider his own "choice"of celibacy as normative, but asa gift, and he could imagine situations in which it would be counterproductive;hewrites, in Sermon CCCLIV, 9: "I dare to say that it is good for those who observecontinence and are proud of it to fall, that they may be humbled in that very thingfor which they praise themselves. For what benefit is it to anyone in whom is thevirtue of continency if pride dominates him?"/8/ See O'Connell's extended discussion of the expression fovere caput in TheConfessions (1968:65ff.).

WORKSCONSULTED

Brown, Peter1967 Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.Cushman, Robert1958 Therapeia, Plato's Conception of Philosophy. Westport, CT:Greenwood Press.Fingarette, Herbert1969 Self-Deception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Gay, Volney P.1979 "Against Wholeness." Journal of the American Academy ofReligion 48/4 (December).Klein, Melanie1957 Envy and Gratitude. New York:Dell.



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Migne, J. P., ed.1844-64 Patrologia Latina. (Confessionum; De civitate Dei; De doctri-na christiana; Epistula CXL; Epistula CXLIII; Ennarationesin Psalmos XXVI; Ennarationes Psalmos CXXX; SermoneXXIII; Sermone CCXVI). Paris. Translations from De civitateDei are adapted from Henry Bettenson, trans., The City ofGod (New York:Penguin, 1972).

Miles, MargaretR.1979 Augustine on the Body. Missoula:ScholarsPress.Miller, David L.1970 "Orestes:Myth and Dream as Catharsis."Myths, Dreams, and

Religion. Edited by J. Campbell. New York:E. P. Dutton.O'Connell, RobertJ.1968 St. Augustine's Early Theory of Man. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.1969 St. Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of the Soul. Cam-

bridge: HarvardUniversity Press.Piaget, Jean1954 The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Ballan-tine Books.Skutella, Martinus,ed.1969 S. Aureli Augustini, Confessionum. Stutgardiae in Aedibus:B. G. Teubneri. Translations from the Confessionum areadapted from Rex Warner, trans., The Confessions of St.Augustine (New York:New American Library, 1963).

miles, m. r. “infancy, parenting and nourishment in augustine’s confessions.” journal of the...

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