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Resting, Moving, Loving: The Access to the Self according to Saint Augustine Author(s): Jean-Luc Marion Source: The

Journal of Religion, Vol. 91, No. 1, The Augustinian Moment (January 2011), pp. 24-42 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/656605 . Accessed: 08/02/2011 07:51
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Resting, Moving, Loving: The Access to the Self according to Saint Augustine* Jean-Luc Marion /
University of Chicago

i. creation and the question of the self The rather obvious, although often overlooked, structure of the Confessiones suggests strongly that the questions about his own self, which have upset Saint Augustine within the rst nine books, nd some universal answers either from conceptual analysis (in Confessiones 10) or on biblical grounds (in Confessiones 1113). I would like to show, at least to suggest very briey, how the doctrines of creation (including those of the heaven of the heavens and of the creation de nihilo) contribute to dening the place where, or more exactly from where, the confessio can be lifted up and the self become accessible to himself. But, in fact, it becomes possible to praise God as God only if God himself opens the place and gives the time for it. And where would that be except in God himself? So, the creatures place is not found in itself, but always in God, such that the place for the confessio of God is determined by and in God, to the point that creation consists only in the opening of the place of confessio. It is hence a universal rule. What remains for us to understand is how it is specied in the case of man.1 ii. the human exception The story of creation contains, on the sixth day and in the case of man, several peculiarities. If we admit the story as told in the Vetus Latina,
* The arguments of this lecture come mostly from my book Au lieu de soi: Lapproche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008) (in translation at Stanford University Press). I am deeply grateful to Jeffrey L. Kosky for helping me in adapting and translating the nal draft of this text. For the sake of consistency, all the translations from Saint Augustine are mine. The original texts are cited according to the note bibliographique (Au lieu de soi, 14). 1 Throughout this article I use the English word man as the equivalent of Augustines Latin word homo. 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/2011/9101-0003$10.00

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each created thing was created according to its kind, secundum genus suum, in conformity with itself and itself alone. This version even emphasizes this self-identity of the individuation by kind when it adds secundum similitudinem (Gen. 1:11), indeed, when it insists secundum suam similitudinem (Gen. 1:11-12). The created thing resembles itself. In other words, the work of creation, which separates and distinguishes in order to open distance (thus setting the conditions for the benediction of the created by God, as well as those for the praise of God by the created), requires referring each creature to itself, such that it resembles nothing other than its own kind, its own species, its own aspect (species)in short, nothing other than itself in its ultimate essence. But for two reasons, this is not how things go in the case of the creation of man. First, because in the story of his creation, the mention of a kind (or of a species) disappears; this is to say that there is no reference of this created thing to its own proper essence: Cur ergo et de homine non ita dictum est Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram secundum genus, cum et hominis propago manifesta est? (Why then did he not also say with regard to man: Let us make man in our image and resemblance according to his kind, since man too obviously reproduces [according to his kind]?).2 This modication is not about some threat of no longer being able to reproduce (as a consequence of the rst sin, for example), since what immediately follows is the blessing of his fruitfulness (Gen. 1:28: Increase and multiply). The only explanation would come from the appearance of Eve, who shows up on the margins and as an exception to the kind (in the sense of gender) of the primordial man, so to speak. But now, how to explain this liberty taken with regard to the strict acceptation of the kind (genus)? In order to understand this rst peculiarity of the story of the creation of man (and woman), a second, still more explicit one should be considered. In Gen. 1:26, creation no longer happens according to the resemblance of the creature to itself (secundum suam similitudinem), but according to its resemblance to another besides itselfand moreover, to an other of maximum alterity, since it is a reference to God:
non jam secundum genus, tanquam imitantes praecedentem proximum, nec ex hominis melioris auctoritate viventes. Neque enim dixisti: Fiat homo secundum genus, sed: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similtudinem nostram, ut nos probemus, quae sit voluntas tua. [no longer according to a kind, as if we imitated some precedent nearby or lived under the authority of some man better [than us]. For you did not say:
2

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 3.12.20.

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Let man be according to his kind, but: Let us make man in our image and resemblance, so that we might know by the trial what your will is.] (Confessiones 13.22.32)

Not only does the phrase ad similitudinem nostram literally contradict secundum suam similitudinem, but it is also substituted for kind (or species)that is to say, it holds the place, in the case of man, of any and every denition: Nec dicis secundum genus, sed ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram (You did not say according to its kind [ours], but according to the image and resemblance [yours]) (Confessiones 13.22.32). Whence this paradoxical consequence: man constitutes a creature par excellence, and even particularly excellent, precisely because he has neither a kind nor a species proper to him and therefore does not have a denition that would appropriate him to himself. The human is dened by the very fact that he remains without denitionthe animal properly without property. And this is not just an incidental remark; it deals with what Saint Augustine does not hesitate to name a mystery, in the sense of the magna quaestio that man became for himself,3 and also of a sacrament by which God blesses man by creating him: Sed quid est hoc et quale mysterium est? . . . Dicerem te, Deus noster, qui nos ad imaginem tuam creasti, dicerem te hoc donum benedictionis homini proprie voluisse largiri (But what is this and what is this mystery? . . . I would say, our God, who created us in your image, I would say that you wanted to grant properly to man the gift of your blessing) (Confessiones 13.24.35). However, Saint Augustine hesitates before this conclusion, as the issue remains quite subtle: God also encouraged the animals to reproduce; he even blessed the sh of the sea (Gen. 1:22). What then is particular to the blessing of fruitfulness given to man? No doubt precisely that: man alone got from God a blessing of fruitfulness, while he did not receive a kind or species according to which he could naturally reproduce-re produce himself from himself. This would mean that, if man propagates himself over the entire earth to the point of dominating it, he owes this not to his kind or species (which he does not have), nor to his essence (which remains unknown), but to a direct and ongoing blessing from God. In what does this consist? Obviously in substituting for kind and species the reference ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, in order to hold the place of the absent essence. Man does not increase according to his kind, his species or his essencethat is to say, according to himself, but according to a blessing coming from elsewhere, which
3 See Jean-Luc Marion, Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing, Journal of Religion 85, no. 1 (2005): 124.

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sets him up to go in the resemblance and image of an other than himself, God. Man does not develop by some essential and internal law, but solely by receiving Gods blessing, a blessing that consists only in being disposed according to the image and resemblance toward God. Man has no proper essence, but refers himself directly to an other than himself, an other who, more intimate to him than himself (than his lacking essence), plays for him the role of essence by proxy. For the image, by denition and essentially, can neither provide an essence nor a denition obtained by replicating, reproducing, and imitating another essence or denitionall the more so as the image deals here with that for which man does not, by principle, have any means to sketch the slightest bit of a representation: God. Here, and in the case of the human more than in that of any other creature, the image remains impracticable; consequently, it has to be thought starting from the resemblance (similitudo). Obviously man does not bear the image of God as God, the Son, bears it toward God the Father through the connection of the Spirit; for only the Son is the image of the Father, while man is found only in the image of God:
Sed quia non omnino aequalis ebat illa imago Dei tanquam non ab illo nata, sed ab illo creata, hujus rei signicandae causa, ita imago est ut ad imaginem sit: id est, non aequaliter parilitate, sed quadam similitudine accedit. Non enim locorum intervallis, sed similitudine acceditur ad Deum, et dissimilitudine receditur ab eo. [But because this image of God [man] was not absolutely equal to him, since not born of him, but created by him, so, to make this point clear, this image is image inasmuch as to the image, that is, it is not equal to it in a parity of God and man, but approaches it by some resemblance. It does not draw near toward God by degrees of place, but by resemblance toward him and it grows apart by dissemblance away from him.] (De Trinitate 7.6)

It is not a matter of keeping or losing the image of God as a content (as if created in the image of God can count as a denition, as categorical as rational animal, animal endowed with language, or animal that laughs), but of referring the image toward that to which it bears the resemblance. The image is not compared to a model, like a visible reproduction is to another visible accessible elsewhere: the image is borne only by that which refers itself across the resemblance unto an original that remains as such invisible, and only in the measure to which it so refers itself. The image consists only in the tension of referring itself to that to which it means to resemble. It appears only as this movement toward, and only this intentio ad keeps a resemblance. Man bears the image of God (instead of and in place of kind, species, or

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essence) inasmuch as he resembles Him. But he cannot, except absurdly, claim to resemble him as a visible image resembles a visible model, indeed as an intelligible image resembles an intelligible model. This would seem to be the illusion of the Neoplatonists: establishing a positive resemblance, one measurable by intervals, between the terms of the resemblance. It must be that man resembles God otherwisewhich means both in another way and by remaining in alterity: Sola est autem adversus omnes errores via munitissima, ut idem ipse sit Deus et homo; quo itur Deus, qua itur homo (In order to avoid in advance all errors, one thing alone is needed: that the same item be God and man, God toward which going goes, man through whom going goes) (De civitate Dei 11.2). This means that one must go toward the image through the resemblance: man bears the image of God up to the point that he gives up any resemblance to himself (ad suum genus, ad suam similitudinem) for the sake of resembling nothingat least nothing of which he could have any idea, that is, any species. For man does not resemble God by resembling something visible or intelligible, but mostly by resembling nothing visible or intelligiblein short, by resembling no image, especially not some so-called imago of God, but in bearing the resemblance of the style of God. Man is a God, like a Ce zanne is a Ce zanne, a Rembrandt a Rembrandtwithout anything behind or beside them, that would be Ce zanne or Rembrandt, yet visible as themselves as part of the painting. No, the paintings of Rembrandt or Ce zanne appear as such, without any other visible mark or signature besides them, but only as paintings bearing all over the inimitable style of Ce zanne or Rembrandt. In this sense, man is a God. He appears as God-made, as a God insofar as he endorses bearing Gods style, and lets his own particular features be subdued, so that its provenance might appear. Man is a God only as he returns from where he comes, to his most intimate other. iii. the unimaginable image One should not be misled into assimilating the image to a content of the resemblance, for it provides less a content than a container, in the sense of a place where the resemblance is at play in its varying degrees: Ergo intelligimus habere nos aliquid ubi imago Dei est, mentem scilicet atque rationem (We understand therefore that we have somewhere where the image of God is, our mind indeed and reason) (Enarratio in psalmos 42.6). Of course, the rational mind offers the place for the resemblance, but it does not offer its content. Indeed, one can draw up a table of

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the images bestowing on the rational mind a resemblance with the Trinity: either by considering this mind as a whole (De Trinitate 9), so that the triad mind, knowledge, and love (mens, notitia, amor) refers to the Trinity; or by relating man to the world, so that to sketch Trinity with two other triads: rst (according to De Trinitate 11.2.25), the thing seen, sight, and the intention which connects the one to the other (res, visio, intentio); second (according to De Trinitate 11.3.67) memory, interior vision, and the will (memoria, visio, voluntas); or, nally and especially, one can privilege the triad of memory, understanding, and will (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas ; following De Trinitate 10.11.17). Eventually, this last gure species the place of the best similitude: Ecce ergo mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se: hoc si cernimus, cernimus Trinitatem; nondum quidem Deum, sed jam imaginem Dei (Look, the mind remembers itself, understands itself, loves itself: if we see that, we see the Trinity; not yet God, of course, but already the image of God) (De Trinitate 14.8.11). But all these analogous triads, though disclosing an image of the Trinity, do not display in themselves any stable and steady content, but nd meaning solely in the degree to which they refer this content to God himself. A major text species this:
Haec igitur trinitas mentis non propterea Dei est imago, quia sui meminit mens, et intelligit ac diligit se; sed quia potest etiam meminisse, et intelligere, et amare a quo facta est. Quod cum facit, sapiens ipsa t. Si autem non facit, etiam cum sui meminit, seseque intelligit ac diligit, stulta est. Meminerit itaque Dei sui, ad cujus imaginem facta est, eumque intelligat atque diligat. Quod ut brevius dicam, colat Deum non factum, cujus ab eo capax est facta, et cujus particeps esse potest. [And therefore this nal trinity of the mind is not the image of God inasmuch as the mind in it remembers itself, understands itself, and loves itself, but because it can also remember and understand and love he by whom it was made. If it does that, it itself becomes wise. But if it does not do so, it is stupid, even when it remembers itself, understands itself, and loves itself. To put it briey, let it worship the God not made, of whom it was made capable and in whom it can participate.] (De Trinitate 14.12.15)

For sure, the three faculties make an image of God; however, it is neither those three themselves, nor their reciprocal organization, nor even their distant similitude with the three persons of the Trinity that does soas the majority of commentators seem to say again and againbut rather the possibility that they might refer to God, as the one who can make them play among themselves the resemblance of the trinitarian game of persons in it. The faculties open a mere place, which becomes a visible and reliable image of the Trinity only insofar as they

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receive (in the sense of capacitas) participation in the trinitarian communion and, thus, play trinitarily, as if by derivation, among themselves. They appear as images only according to their resemblance, therefore tangentially, by changing degrees, measured by their participation: Non sua luce, sed summae illius lucis participatione sapiens erit. . . . Neque enim participatione sui sapiens est [Deus], sicut mens participatione Dei (It [the mind of man] will not be wise by its own light, but by participating in this great light. . . . For God is not wise by participating in himself, as in contrast the mind [of man] is wise by participation in God) (De Trinitate 14.12.15). What makes the image a resemblance does not stem from some status, a property, or an essence of this image, but from the movement, from the tension and the intentio toward God, therefore according to the degree of participation allowed by the capacitas. In this sense, the absence of a proper denition becomes for man the compelling and negative condition of the resemblance toward God, a negation that should forever be increased and conrmed. Not only is man dened by his never xed resemblance with God, rather than by a xed denition; but he is dened by this very absence of denition: it is proper to him not to appropriate himself or be appropriated to himself; it is proper to him not to resemble himself, because that which he does resemble, God, does not coincide with his essence, nor with any essence whatsoever. Briey, because God resembles nothing in this world, man resembles nothing in this world. Man is man only without properties and therefore without denition. To the question quid sit homo? (What is man?), Saint Augustine has answered at least once, provided that this may be an answer: Nec nunc denitionem hominis a me postulandum puto (I think that a denition of man cannot be asked of me now) (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum 1.4.6). iv. the privilege of unknowing However, this essential indenition of man should be understood as a privilege. The inability and the freedom not to be so circumscribed does indeed constitute a privilegeat least the very privilege of God according to the prohibition against making any graven image, nothing that resembles what is found in the heavens (Exod. 20:4), nothing therefore that would claim to represent God by comprehending him. Would man therefore also nd himself in the heavens? To be sure, rst by becoming a nonresident alien (by participation) of the heaven of the heavens, if not an ofcial citizen. Then also in the sense that what counts for God (that no name, no image and no concept can pretend to com-

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prehend him), also counts for man as well: neither one nor the other admits either kind, species, or essence. Man remains unimaginable, since formed in the image of He who admits none, incomprehensible because formed in the resemblance of He who admits no comprehension. To speak strictly and ofcially, man resembles nothing since he resembles nothing other than He whom incomprehensibility properly characterizes. Or again, if God remains incomprehensible, man who resembles nothing other than Him (and especially not himself) will bear the mark of his incomprehensibility. In other words, man, deprived of kind, species, and essence, delivered from every paradigm, appears without mediation in the light that surpasses all light. Of such a bestowed incomprehensibility, his face bears the mark precisely inasmuch as it reveals itself as invisible as the face of God. Man differs radically from every other being in the world by an insurmountable differenceone no longer ontological, but holy. He no longer differs as the rational animal, as ego cogitans, as transcendental I, as absolute consciousness, as the Dasein or even as the shepherd of Being (Hirt des Seins), but as the icon of the invisible God (Col. 1:15)exactly as by participation in the image and resemblance of the incomprehensible icon of the invisible. His invisibility separates man from the world and consecrates him as holy for the sake of the Holy. In coming to this conclusion, Saint Augustine inscribes himself within an ongoing tradition of Christian theology, whose argument was formalized by Gregory of Nyssa:
An icon can only be perfect insofar as it lacks nothing from what can be known in the original. So, since incomprehensibility pertains to what we see within divine nature, it follows necessarily that any icon should keep that similarity too with its archetype. For, would we comprehend the nature of the icon and would nevertheless the nature of the archetype surpass our comprehension, this opposition would attest the deciency of the icon. But, because the nature of our mind as referred to the icon of the Creator, overwhelms any comprehension, it keeps exactly its similarity with its model by keeping the seal of incomprehensibility on its own unknowing. (On the Creation of Man 11.3, Patrologia Graeca 44:156b)

Knowing man therefore demands referring him to God inasmuch as incomprehensible and therefore establishing by derivation his incomprehensibility, in the name of both image and resemblance. Augustine too came to this conclusion. While Saint Paul, for his part, argued that none among men knows the secrets of man, except the spirit of man in him (1 Cor. 2:11) and assumed consistently that manhood understood the secrets of man, Augustine is quick to posit on the contrary that tamen est aliquid hominis, quod nec ipse scit spiritus hominis, qui

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in ipso est, tu autem Domine, scis ejus omnia quia eum fecisti (and yet there is something in man that not even the spirit of man itself knows, which is [nevertheless] in him, but you, O Lord, you know all of him [man], for you made him) (Confessiones 10.5.7). Starting from this nonknowledge of oneself nevertheless known by another, God alone, it is necessary to launch the operation of confessio, or rather the duality constitutive of a doubly oriented confessio, toward my ignorance of myself and toward the knowledge of myself by another:
Contear ergo quid de me sciam, contear et quid de me nesciam, quoniam et quod de me scio, te mihi lucente scio, et quod de me nescio, tamdiu nescio, donec ant tenebrae meae sicut meridies in vultu tuo. [I will confess what I know of myself and I will also confess what I do not know about myself, since even what I know of myself is because you illuminate my knowledge of it, while what I do not know of myself I remain ignorant of as long as my shadows do not become like a noonday [Psalm 89:8] before your face.] (Confessiones 10.5.7)

Man differs innitely from man, but with a difference that he cannot comprehend and that, provided he intends to save it, he ought not comprehend. In this way, we verify again the principle that leads every itinerary toward oneself and toward God (for there is only one of them): Interior intimo meo, superior summo meo (Confessiones 3.6.11). But we know, now, that the aporia of magna mihi quaestio coincides with the solution: the indenition of man. v. the rest The indenition of man, this privilege, implies that I do not reside in any essence, but that on the contrary I resemble what has no semblance, God, without form, indescribable, incomprehensible, invisiblein other words, that I resemble nothing. Or more exactly, that I re semble, that is to say, that I semble re exively and appear in my re port to the resemblance of God (ad similitudinem Dei). I appear each time myself according as I move up (or down) on the invisibly graded scale of my resemblance, of my proximity or separation from the invisibility of God, whose invisible accomplishment I reect (more or less) in the visible. Then it remains to be understood which scale may I walk along from one degree to the other of this re semblance and if I could, in the end, nd a point of stability in a visible reection of the invisible. If I have to cross the re-semblance and dwell in it, which momentum and drive can lead me there?

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To go farther, let us go back to our point of departure, to the confessio. It has, since the beginning, operated in putting into operation the principle of rest and restlessness: Et tamen laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae. Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te (And he wants to praise you, man does, this tiny portion of what you have created. You excite him to love and praise you because you have made us [so that we might carry ourselves towards and] to you, and our heart knows no rest so long as it does not rest in you) (Confessiones 1.1.1). The question is all about my restlessnessliterally, of my disequilibrium: paradoxically enough, so long as I rest in myself, I do not hold up nor hold myself together, and I only cease to vacillate if I nd a place outside myself in God. I cannot not want (and love) to nd my repose in God, because I cannot settle in myself, nor in anything else, if I do not posit myself in God. With perfect coherence, the nal moment of the confessio describes, in three passages that follow, the three actors of this rest: the one that completes creation, but also the one in which creation took place as a place of repose for the created, and nally the very repose in which creatures should end, if they admit it as in their own place: Quamvis ea [sc. opera tua] quietus feceris, requievisti septimo die, hoc praeloquatur nobis vox libri tui, quod et nos post opera nostra ideo bona valde, quia tu nobis ea donasti, sabbato vitae aeternae requiescamus in te (Though you made your works while remaining restful, you rested the seventh day, your book told us in advance that we, too, after our works [which are very good, since it is you who gave them to us], in the Sabbath of eternal life, we will nd our rest in you) (Confessiones 13.36.51). Put otherwise: Etiam tunc enim sic requiesces in nobis, quemadmodum nunc operaris in nobis, et ita erit illa requies tua per nos, quemadmodum sunt ista opera tua per nos (For then too you will rest in us, as now you work in us, and then this rest, yours, will be in us, as your actions are yours through us) (Confessiones 13.37.52). And nally: Post illa [sc. quaedam bona opera nostra] nos requieturos in tua grandi sancticatione speramus. Tu autem bonum nullo indigens bono, semper quietus es, quoniam tua quies tu ipse es (After them [some of our works, good ones], we hope to rest in your great sanctication. But you, who have no need of any good, you are always in rest, because you are unto yourself your own rest) (Confessiones 13.38.53). God alone holds himself in rest because He alone holds himself in himself, such that everything that does not hold itself in God but remains within itself (willingly or not) cannot settle there and therefore does not remain anymore in rest. God alone gives rest, because He alone has

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it. And He alone has it because He alone is it. And everything else, all the way until the ends of his creation, has a place only in this rest. Creation, originally eschatological, consists only in giving a place to this advent of each creature in the place of its repose. And this place, for the man without denition, is found in nothing less than in the rest of God himself: Nam et in ipsa misera inquietudine . . . satis ostendis, quam magnam rationalem creaturam feceris, cui nullo modo sufcit ad beatam requiem, quidquid te minus est, ac per hoc nec ipsa sibi (For even in the misfortune of our restlessness itself . . . you show sufciently how great you made your rational creature, since nothing less than you will sufce for its happy rest, not even itself to itself) (Confessiones 13.8.9). Except for God, man would not nd himself, or nd where he is. vi. the weight Now, and this is a remarkable fact, this text which I just quoted, the one that dened the heaven of the heavens as a place where you nd a position in the Spirit (requiesceret in spiritu tuo) and explained that man could nd repose in nothing less than God (magnam rationalem creaturam feceris, cui nullo modo sufcit ad beatam requiem, quidquid te minus est), goes on to show how to measure the proximity or distance of each man in regard to this place:
Corpus pondere suo nititur ad locum suum. Pondus non ad ima tantum est, sed ad locum suum. Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Oleum infra aquam fusum super aquam attollitur, aqua supra oleum fusa infra oleum demergitur: ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Minus ordinata inquieta sunt: ordinantur et quiescunt. Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror. [The body makes every effort to push itself with all its weight toward its place. The weight does not push only down, but towards its place. Fire tends toward the upper, the stone toward the lower. They are [both] put into motion by their [respective] weight, [but] they seek their [own] places. The least ordered things remain without a place to come to rest: as soon as they recover their order, they come to rest. My weight, it is my love; wherever I take myself, it is my love that takes me there.] (Confessiones 13.9.10)

This argument looks limpid as well as decisive, for it does not say merely that Anima . . . velut pondere amore fertur quocumque fertur (The soul, wherever it takes itself, takes itself there by love as by a weight) (Epistula 157.2.9), but also and above all species that it is ultimately for the soul a matter of will, of its will: Voluntas . . . ponderi similis est(The will . . . resembles a weight) (De Trinitate 11.11.18). The details of this have yet to be precisely understood.

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It is worth noticing that the point of departure for this argument does not concern the question of love, but the strictly physical problem of the cause of local motion. On this issue, Aristotle reasons in this way: If each of the simple bodies has a natural locomotion, e.g., re upward and earth downward and towards the middle of the universe, it is clear that the void cannot be the cause of locomotion.4 To this distinction between movements upward and downward he also adds the possible distinction, for each of them, between those that follow nature and those that contradict itin other words, by force or by nature. But it is doubtlessly wise, here and elsewehere, not to exhaust oneself in identifying the supposed Greek sources of Saint Augustine by arbitrarily offering erudite readings; it is enough to stick with Cicero, the common and most credible mediator.5 Indisputably, Saint Augustine assumes as such this principle for the explanation of locomotion, namely, as a physical theory. Several texts testify to this:
Lege naturae cedunt pondera minora majoribus, non modo cum ad proprium locum suo sponte nutu feruntur, ut humida et terrena corpora in ipsius mundi medium locum, qui est inmus, rursus aeria et ignea sursum versus; sed etiam cum aliquo tormento aut jactu aut impulsu aut repulsu, eo quo sponte ferrentur, vi aliena ire coguntur. [According to a law of nature, the less heavy weights yield to the heavier, not only when they transport themselves toward their proper place (in this way, the moist and earthly bodies tend toward the place at the center of the world, which is the lowest, while, inversely, the aerial and ery bodies tend upward), but also when they are compelled to transport themselves in another direction besides that which they would follow of themselves, by some mechanism, disturbance, attraction, or repulsion.] (De quantitate animae 22.37)

He praises this law of nature even so highly that one can rely on it as one does on an experimental test:
Pondera gemina sunt. Pondus enim est impetus quidam cujusque rei, velut conantis ad locum suum: hoc est pondus. Fers lapidem manu, pateris pondus; premit manum tuum, quia locum suum quaerit. Et vis videre quid quaerat? Subtrahe manum, venit ad terram, quiescit in terra: pervenit quo tendebat, invenit suum locum. Pondus ergo illud motus erat quasi spontaneus, sine anima, sine sensu. Namque si aquam mittas super oleum, pondere suo in ima tendit. Locum enim suum quaerit, ordinari quaerit; quia praeter ordinem est aqua
4 Aristotle, Physics 4.8.214b1216. Denis OBrien has done his best to connect Saint Augustine with Iamblichus (Pondus meum amor meus [Confessiones XIII 9.10]: Saint Augustin et Jamblique, Revue dhistoire des religions 198, no. 4 [1981]: 423-28). Had Iamblichus dealt with love, which is not the case, this demonstration would have been more convincing. 5 See, e.g., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.17.40 and 5.24.69.

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super oleum. Donec ergo veniat ad ordinem suum, inquietus motus est, donec teneat locum suum. [There are two kinds of weight. For weight is the push of any thing whatsoever insofar as it strives toward its [proper] place: such is weight. Take a stone in your hand; you feel its weight; it presses your hand, for it seeks to reach its place. And do you want to know what it is thus seeking to reach? Withdraw your hand, it goes to the earth and comes to rest there. It has arrived there where it tended; it has found its place. Therefore this weight was a quasi-spontaneous movement, with neither soul, nor sensation. For if you throw water on oil, the water tends by its weight to go downward. It tends toward its place; it seeks to put itself in order; for water above oil, this is not in order. So long as it has not returned into its order, movement does not remain at rest, until such time as it has arrived in its place.] (Enarratio in psalmos 29.2.10)

The laws of nature (almost in the modern sense) abide so rmly that Saint Augustine will even mention them as objections (at least according to some people) to the possibility of miracles:
Ac per hoc, inquiunt, quoniam terra abhinc sursum versus est prima, secunda aqua super terram, tertius aer super aquam, quartum super aera caelum, non potest esse terrenum corpus in caelo; momentis enim propriis, ut ordinem suum teneant, singula elementa librantur. [And consequently, they say, since, in ascending from lower to higher, earth comes rst, then the water above the earth, third is the air above the water, and fourth comes the heavens above the air; a terrestrial body cannot be found in the heavens, for these different moments balance each of the elements, such that they [each] nd their proper order.] (De civitate Dei 22.11.1)

Up until this point, there has been nothing innovative on the side of Saint Augustine; he simply assumes a doctrine widely accepted at his timeto the point that one could even legitimate it theologically by the authority of Wisdom 11:21: Omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti (You arranged all things in order, measure, and weight) with the immense posterity that this is known to have. It is thus still only a matter of the laws of local motion, and, in a restricted sense, of the laws of the world. vii. love and motion In fact, the innovation only starts when Saint Augustine no longer deals with a place in the world (neither physics, nor nature, nor local motion), but of the place of he (or she) who confesses. How, it will be asked, can one pass from the laws of local motion to the place of confession? By an unforeseen tactical reversal, the laws of local motion will be el-

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evated, transposed and overtaken at the level of the rules of love; pondus, its tensions and its movements, will be displaced into the movements and intentions of amor. Saint Augustine undertakes this by drawing together the formulations of Cicero (more so than those of Aristotle) with another one, coming from Virgil: Trahit sua quemque voluptas / Each is led by his own pleasure (Bucolics 2.65). Still more surprising, he quotes it in fact in order to comment on a verse from the Gospel of John: Nemo venit ad me, nisi quem Pater attraxit / Nobody comes to me, if the Father has not attracted him ( John 6:44), in which he tries to explain how the Father, even if He attracts someone toward the Son, does neither compel him, nor contradict his will, even though attracted. And this is the argument:
Quomodo voluntate credo, si trahor? Ego dico: parum est voluntate, etiam voluptate traheris. Quid est trahi voluptate? Delectare in Domino, et dabit tibi petitiones cordis tui. Est quaedam voluptas cordis, cui panis dulcis est ille caelestis. Porro, si poetae dicere licuit Trahit sua quemque voluptas, non necessitas, sed voluptas, non obligatio, sed delectatio, quanto fortius nos dicere debemus trahi hominem ad Christum, qui delectatur veritate, delectatur beatitudine, delectatur justitia, delectatur sempiterna vita, quod totum Christus est? [How will I believe willingly if I am attracted? As for me, I say: you are only slightly led by your will, but [much more] by pleasure. What does it mean to be attracted by pleasure? Take pleasure in the Lord, and he will give you what your heart asks [Ps. 36:4]. There is a certain pleasure of the heart, for whom the bread that comes from heaven is sweet. For that matter, if a poet could say, Each is led by his own pleasure, not necessity but pleasure, not obligation but delight, how much more so should we say that the man is led toward Christ who takes pleasure in the truth, who takes pleasure in blessedness, who takes pleasure in justice, who takes pleasure in life without end, all things that Christ is entirely?] (In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 26.4)

The breakthrough and the boldness lies in calling on Virgil to interpret John 6:44, so as to complete and correct Cicero (and Aristotle). Local displacementin other words, arrival in the proper placeno longer results only from a physical weight, but also from pleasures inclination, which triggers in the heart the same spontaneity that gravity unleashes in the body. For, what takes up and displaces the role of weight in the spirit does not come (at least not rst of all) from the weight of glory in Saint Pauls sense (2 Cor. 4:17) as it could have been possible, but from delectatio. By delectatio, we must understand the fact not of taking pleasure (according to the debased way of speaking today), but of receiving pleasure:
Delectatio quippe quasi pondus est animae. Delectatio ergo ordinat animam.

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Ubi enim erit thesaurus tuus, ibi erit et cor tuum: ubi delectatio, ibi thesaurus; ubi autem cor, ibi beatitudo aut miseria. [It is therefore pleasure that is something like the weight of the soul. For pleasure puts the soul in order. There where your treasure will be, there too will be your heart (Matt. 6:21): there where your pleasure is, there is your treasure; there where your body is, there is blessedness or misery.] (De musica 6.11.29)

Love is set forth according to a logic as rigourous as motion, and therefore should be understood as rigorously as it. Thus there is established a comparison between motion and love, which ends up as an analogy of proportion, according to which what weight is to the body, desire is to love. Sometimes the terms correspond strictly without even admitting any difference: Amant enim requiem, sive piae animae, sive iniquae; sed qua perveniunt ad illum quod amant, plurimae nesciunt; nec aliquid appetunt etiam corpora ponderibus suis, nisi quod animas amoribus suis (For all souls love rest, the pious as well as the unjust; but by which path to reach what they love, the majority know not at all, and the bodies too seek nothing with their weight, except what the souls seek with their loves) (Epistula 55.10.18). But more often the terms respond to one another only with the reserve of a gap, for differences remain, because the relation between desire (for pleasure) and love works as the paradigm for the relation between natural weights and bodies, and not the other way around, as common sense certainly would have expected:
Si essemus lapides aut uctus aut ventus aut amma vel quid hujus modi, sine ullo quidem sensu atque vita, non tamen nobis deesset quasi quidam nostrorum locorum atque ordinis appetitus. Nam velut amores, corporum momenta levitate nitantur. Ita enim corpus pondere, sicut animus amore fertur, quocumque fertur. [If we were only stones, waves, winds, a ame, and something of this sort, without any sensation or life, we would not however be deprived of some sort of appetence in our motions and their [right] order. For, just like loves, the pressings of bodies strive on by their lightness. That is, just as the spirit is borne by its love wherever it is carried, so too likewise the body by its weight.] (De civitate Dei 11.28).

Movement follows weight, like desire follows love, to the point that the loving push of the desiring soul becomes the paradigm for movements, even in inanimate things. The push of love in its desire plays the role of paradigm not only regarding inanimate nature, but also over all reasonable spirits, for even men and the angels see their hierarchy modied according as the weight of love is exercised according to the law of nature or that of justice: Sed tantum valet in naturis rationalibus quoddam veluti pondus voluntatis et amoris, ut, cum ordine naturae angeli hominibus, tamen lege

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justitiae boni homines malis angelis praeferantur (But it holds among rational nature like some sort of weight of the will and of love, which makes it such that, if, according to the order of nature, one should prefer angels to men, nevertheless, according to the law of justice, one should prefer good men to bad angels) (De civitate Dei 11.16). When it is a matter of the desire that love sets forth, weight loses the characteristics that it had when dealing only with the weight of a body: insofar as love is concerned, weight weighs even without nature, indeed opposing it to the point of becoming a free or voluntary weight, which weighs there where it wants:
Qui motus si culpae deputatur . . . non est utique naturalis, sed voluntarius; in eoque similis est motui quo deorsum lapis fertur, quod sicut iste proprius est lapidis, sic ille animi: verumtamen in eo dissimilis, quod in potestate non habet lapis cohibere motum quo fertur inferius; animus vero dum non vult, non ita movetur. [But if one assigns the blame to it . . . this movement is no longer natural, but voluntary. It is like the movement that bears the stone downward, in that it belongs properly to the spirit, like its own to the stone; but it is still unlike, in that the stone does not have the power to contain the movement which bears it downward, while the spirit does not move thus unless it wants to.] (De libero arbitrio 3.1.2).

Love may indeed be explained as a weight, provided that we mean a free weight: free rst from the constraints of matter, second from the limits of nature, and therefore, third perfectly voluntary. Weight, understood this way, does not rst pertain to the physical and material world, but bears originally a spiritual and rational meaning. viii. dwelling out of myself Saint Augustine therefore corrects the model of physics that explains local movement by the weight of bodies; not out of a concern of spiritualizing or edication, but as a matter of adapting the paradigm of pondus to the theoretical requirements that love imposes on it. For, in the case of love, pondus should become voluntary and therefore set itself free from natural (and material) determinations, for it implies freedom in two ways. First because nobody can love without wanting to: even if freedom does not always signify the choice of decision, a lover without freedom inevitably becomes a patient, indeed soon a sick soul. Next because love supposes choosing some beloved rather than another; consequently, the freedom of love requires duplicating its weight so as to oppose one weight to another in order to do justice to the choice be-

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tween two loves. There will be at least two loves and two weights: Amores duo in hac vita secum in omni tentatione luctantur: amor saeculi et amor Dei; et horum duorum, qui vicerit, illuc amantem tanquam pondere trahit (Two loves contend with one another during this life at each temptation: the love of the world and the love of God; and the one of these two loves that emerges victorious will transport the lover as by a weight) (Sermo 344, 1).6 Love redoubled itself, to the extent that the desire of the soulthat is to say, its weightpushes it upward or downward. Love so radically reformulates the concept of weight and is so loosely bound to the material meaning of the displacement of bodies that Saint Augustine does not hesitate to assign it the upward movement as well as the habitual (physical) movement downwards. If weight can still make something fall, it is no longer an issue of a physical fall, since it makes the soul fall as well in spirit:
Mane si potes: sed non potes; relaberis in ista solita et terrena. Quo tandem pondere, quaeso, relaberis, nisi sordium contractarum cupiditatis visco et peregrinationis erroribus? [Stay, if you can; but you cannot; you will fall back into your earthly habits. Under the weight of what weight, I ask you, will you fall back, if not that of the lth you have acquired through the stickiness of your desire and the erring of your errors?] (De Trinitate 8.2.3).7

And therefore, facing this weight that can make one fall in spirit, in spirit too can another weight be practiced, one that makes ascend: Quomodo enim oleum a nullo humore premitur, sed disruptis omnibus exsilit et supereminet: sic et caritas non potest premi in ima; necesse est ut ad suprema emineat (As oil is compressed by no other liquid, but escapes them all and wraps around them, so too charity cannot be pressed down to the bottom. It must necessarily rise up and dominate) (In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 6.20). Here a paradox, which appeared earlier, nds it structuring logic: I am to myself a weighty burden as long as I remain empty of God, who relieves me of myself and lifts me up toward him, as soon as he lls me: Nunc autem quoniam quem tu imples, sublevas eum, quoniam tui plenus non sum, oneri mihi sum (But now, since you lift up the one whom you ll, seeing as I am not lled with you, I am to myself a burden) (Confessiones 10.28.39). Filled with God, I undergo the impact of a weight oriented upward,
6 7

See also Augustine, Confessiones 4.15.27 and 7.17.23. See also Augustine, De Trinitate 10.5.7.

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while lled (in fact, stuffed) by myself alone, I undergo a weight downward. Grace, in other words the love coming from God with the aim of returning me to him, exerts a counterweight, a weight that ascends, a relief, a rebound, and a remonstrator:
Cui dicam, quomodo dicam de pondere cupiditatis in abruptam abyssum et de sublevatione caritatis. . . . Neque enim loca sunt. . . . Affectus sunt, amores sunt, immunditia spiritus nostri deuens inferius amore curarum, et sanctitas tui attollens nos superius amore securitatis. [To whom and how should I speak of the weight of cupidity [which leads] toward the sudden abyss and of the charity that uplifts . . . ? It is not about a place. . . . These are the affects, loves, of the impurity of our spirit plummeting lower through love of its cares and your holiness lifting us up higher by love of assurance.] (Confessiones 13.7.8).

Love, like the weight from above, which comes from there and leads back, lifts us up toward your place, which is dened precisely by the fact that there and there alone we can place ourselves: In dono tuo requiescimus: ibi te fruimur. Requies nostra locus noster. Amor illuc attollit nos (It is in the gift that you give that we nd rest: here we enjoy you. Our rest, our place. Here, your love raises us up) (Confessiones 13.9.10). That weight not only could lift us up toward the heights, but in fact does so rst and essentially when the issue is my proper place, is a paradox that imposes itself because it ceases to appear surprising. The bottom line is that the ground always attracts rather than grounds, precisely because it shows itself above, attracts from on high, weighs on us from above. Consequently, Christ constitutes the ground par excellence, the fundamentum fundamentorum, insofar as he comes from on high, just as the heavenly Jerusalem descends from the heavens, as descends the heaven of the heavens: Etenim origo fundamenti hujus summitatem tenet; et quemadmodum fundamentum corporeae fabricae in imo est, sic fundamentum spiritualis fabricae in summo est (And therefore the origin of this ground stands at the summit; and just as the ground of the corporal construction is found below, so is the ground of the spiritual construction found at the summit) (Enarratio in psalmos 86.3 [both quotations]). I nd my place only there where I truly want to dwell. And I truly want to dwell only there where my love pushes me, transports me, and leads me, as a weight leads, transports, and pushes. I must know this weight in order to know what I freely want: Sed vis nosse qualis amor sit? Vide quo ducat. Non enim monemus ut nihil ametis, sed monemus ne mundum ametis, ut eum qui fecit mundum, libere ametis (But do

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you want to know which love it is? See where it leads you. For we are not warning you about not loving anything, but about not loving the world, so that you might freely love him who made the world) (Enarratio in psalmos 121.1). I am the place where I confess; but I rest in this place only because my love pushes and poses me there like a weight. But a voluntary weight, since through it I love. And if I love there, I am there as in my self.

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