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Editorial Review Product Description
`He who makes the truth comes to the light.'1 The truth that Augustine made2 in the Confessions had eluded him for years. It appears before us as a trophy torn from the grip of the unsayable after a prolonged struggle on the frontier between speech and silence. What was at stake was more than words. The `truth' of which Augustine spoke was not merely a quality of a verbal formula, but veracity itself, a quality of a living human person.3 Augustine `made the truth' - in this sense, became himself truthful - when he found a pattern of words to say the true thing well. But both the `truth' that Augustine made and the `light' to which it led were for him scripturally guaranteed epithets of Christ, the pre-existent second person of the trinity. For Augustine to write a book, then, that purported to make truth and seek light was not merely a reflection upon the actions of his life but pure act itself, thought and writing become the enactment of ideas.4
Behind this fundamental act of the self lay powerful and evident anxieties - evident on every page. Augustine is urgently concerned with the right use of language, longing to say the right thing in the right way. The first page of the text is a tissue of uncertainty in that vein, for to use language wrongly is to find oneself praising a god who is not God. The anxiety is intensified by a vertiginous loss of privacy. Even as he discovers that he possesses an interior world cut off from other people, he realizes that he lies open before God: there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee. ... Read more |
