Rhythm and Transformation Through Memory: On Augustine s Confessions After De Musica

Transcription

1 jsp Rhythm and Transformation Through Memory: On Augustine s Confessions After De Musica Jessica Wiskus duquesne university abstract: I read the whole of Augustine s Confessions (not merely book XI) as an extended essay on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, understanding the Confessions as a performative text as a text that enacts or performs the very content it describes. The key to this reading lies in a careful study of Augustine s use of psalms and hymns in his work, centered upon Deus, creator omnium. This hymn not only appears in book XI but forms an important structural element (as referenced also in books IV, IX, and X); it plays a similar and significant role in Augustine s De Musica as well. Through his interpretation of the performance of Deus, creator omnium in De Musica, Augustine presents a highly sophisticated notion of rhythm that discloses a nonlinear account of time essential to my reading of book XI of the Confessions; memory comes to be understood as illuminating not only the past but also the present and future. Moreover, the centrality of rhythm in De Musica allows us to understand how the structural whole of the Confessions is organized rhythmically, performing a beginning that serves as origin only retroactively, through relation or proportion to the end. keywords: Augustine, time-consciousness, rhythm, memory, music In book XI from the Confessions the book that famously examines the nature of time-consciousness Augustine enacts the very essence of the journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 30, no. 3, 2016 Copyright 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 328

2 on augustine s confessions after de musica 329 questions he investigates by turning to the performance of a psalm. What he seeks to understand is how a succession of events in time events that unfold and vanish can at once be part of a whole, like the notes of a melody that cohere into an expressive phrase. He says: Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched in two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past.... What occurs in the psalm as a whole occurs in its particular pieces and its individual syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps the psalm is a part. It is also valid of the entire life of an individual person, where all actions are parts of a whole. 1 And so it is through his own resounding voice through the expressive gesture of his psalm that Augustine comes to understand the events of his life not only in relation to their place in time but in relation to a whole a whole that he himself has created or performed. Not only in book XI, then, but through all thirteen of the books, the text or the story of the Confessions serves as a performance of Augustine s life that imbues it with a new expressive sense. The work of the Confessions as a whole is a performative text a text that enacts or realizes the very content it describes. Because its unfolding through time is absolutely linked to its content, it is not coincidental that Augustine, in book XI, turns to a psalm and, later, a hymn as gestures or time objects that disclose a specific phenomenological orientation toward time. Indeed, in this respect, the form of the expression in the Confessions as a whole may be understood as closely related to musical form. And so first, we will investigate Augustine s remarkable use of psalms in his work (as musical motifs, if you will). Then, I will use one of those motifs Ambrose s hymn Deus, creator omnium to place the claims of book XI of the Confessions in direct dialogue with an earlier work by Augustine, De Musica. Here, in De Musica, we will focus on Augustine s own very sophisticated analysis of rhythm. It is through rhythm that we will enjoy a fruitful alternative to more traditional readings of book XI that place an JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 329

3 330 jessica wiskus emphasis on the fleeting, restless movement of a now ; rhythm offers an understanding of time-consciousness grounded in the creative and dynamic performance of memory, whereby each beginning becomes understood as a beginning only retrospectively, through the ending, and the distension that is felt between the two makes possible a certain capacity for expression. Applying Augustine s own notion of rhythm to the Confessions, I argue, can deepen our appreciation for both the form and the content of the text. Indeed, a reading of book XI that presents the essential argument as a fugitive, infinitely thin now overlooks (or perhaps even treats as an embarrassment) the circuitous path of Augustine s work. Let us keep in mind that Augustine was perhaps the best orator of his time and that his eloquence sprang from the shape and flow of the spoken word. 2 This might inspire us to consider book XI as it would have been composed that is, as a form moving through time. On the Repetition of Psalms in the Confessions One of the most salient features of the Confessions is the way that the text is interwoven with psalms, such that their presence cannot but alert us to the musicality or rhythmicity of the work as a whole. Indeed, Confessions opens with a psalm: You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (1.1.1). We must keep in mind that to confess has a dual meaning: not only to lay bare one s sins but to acknowledge and praise God. The opening psalm thus emphasizes this dimension of confession: It is not only that, through confession, there is a recounting of the past in the sense of a description of past events; confession, as a transformative process, effects a reorientation toward the past. It is musical in the sense that a succession of sounds bears meaning as a whole, organic gesture. In other words, confession itself makes use of a creative kind of temporal process not a strictly linear progression experienced through the act of praising (e.g., of singing the praises of God). It is this singing this musical or rhythmic repetition through the psalms that structures the whole of Augustine s work. For example, at the opening of book XI (i.e., the celebrated book on time-consciousness), we hear again, You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (11.1.1) the same psalm from the very opening of the Confessions. Now, if we think about the Confessions as a chronological account of events, we cannot help but note that by the beginning of book XI we have followed Augustine through some three decades of his life, suffering his indulgences, thievery, JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 330

4 on augustine s confessions after de musica 331 strivings, indignations, bereavement, discoveries, and transformations. Yet here we are again in book XI, just as we were at the beginning: You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised. It is a signal, highlighting the close relation of the Confessions to poetic song form (with its motifs, recapitulations, and refrains). Why this poetic, musical form for what is often taken to be just an autobiography? Throughout the story that he recounts, Augustine expresses frustration about the successiveness of the words that he deploys. Speech falls away; the sound fades, and its existence is lost. In the beginning of book XI, for example, Augustine observes: The syllables sounded and have passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so on in order until, after all the others, the last one came, and after the last silence followed (11.6.8). Language is dependent upon a temporal movement that always passes away. But the musical elements of speech its repetitions, recapitulations, rhymes, metaphors, and rhythms should be understood as a hedge against this oblivion. Language that lacks this musicality falls away; it has no hold in memory. And so, if one wished to create a text that would be lasting, one would base it not solely on what the text purported to say but on the way that a certain kind of musicality as rhythmic relation, number, or proportion would govern the temporal unfolding of its form. And this is precisely what Augustine accomplishes: his work transcends the linear successiveness of words. The meaning of the Confessions memory as the ground of understanding is actually performed in the text itself. This is made evident not only through the repetition of the psalms, the decorated style of speech, and the circuitous wanderings of book XI s philosophical argument; my claim is that the structure of the Confessions as a whole makes manifest the very argument of book XI. There is a relation between the whole and the parts that is expressive, artistic, and specifically rhythmic rhythmic in the Greek sense (ῥυθμός as measured motion or time, constituted through a proportion or symmetry of parts). We therefore need to read the Confessions more like a kind of musical expression than an autobiographical narrative. The Structural Significance of Deus, creator omnium Let us not overlook the way that book XI that famous book on time attends to music: Deus, creator omnium. In book XI, Augustine turns to this hymn in an attempt to overcome (or at least embrace) the paradoxes he has encountered throughout his tortured exposition on the JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 331

5 332 jessica wiskus nature of time-consciousness. It is through this hymn that he feels he is able to transcend the fleeting passage of the present and the poverty of a consciousness condemned to an experience of the infinitely small now. We will need to take a closer look at this passage and the role that music plays within it, but for now, note that Deus, creator omnium is the very same hymn to which Augustine turns in book X of the Confessions the book on memory when he enumerates the various traps with which the senses ensnare his soul; Deus, creator omnium allows him to set his encounter with the fleeting, ephemeral world of the senses toward a higher, transcendent realm ( ). And looking further back (for Deus, creator omnium is referenced at four separate and significant moments in the Confessions), the hymn appears also in book IX, at what may be viewed as the greatest emotional release of the autobiographical portion of his work (when finally Augustine is able to weep for the death of his beloved mother). 3 This passage in book IX is itself a transformation of an earlier reference to the hymn, in book IV, where Augustine recounts the death of his boyhood friend (and the terribly depressed state into which he was consequently thrown). Here, Augustine the narrator, at remove from the action of the story, observes, Things rise and set, and everything dies. But then he announces, Let these transient things be the ground on which my soul praises you (Ps. 145:2), Deus, creator omnium ( ). Death, transience, and loss are juxtaposed against an expression of the whole through music Deus, creator omnium. The act of praising, singing, is placed against oblivion. And so it is not only the fact of the hymn s presence in the four books that is significant; so too is the fact that the hymn forges a relationship, retroactively, between the events of book IV and the events of book IX and the concerns of books X and XI, where the same hymn is employed for a reflection not on death but on the nature of eternity. Thus, the employment of the hymn across books IX and X helps to highlight the shift from an orientation toward death to an orientation toward eternity, and this, in turn, bears a likeness to the sense of the life events internal to book IX, where there is an end (the death of Augustine s mother) and a beginning (his baptism into the Christian faith). Not surprisingly, here there is a shift in style as well: book IX marks the end of Augustine s autobiographical recollections, and book X indicates the beginning of his internal reflections on memory. This shift in the work as a whole where endings become beginnings is made all the more expressive due to a rupture in the fabric of JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 332

6 on augustine s confessions after de musica 333 the text itself: a rupture created by the way that Augustine uses the hymn in book IX. Throughout the work, the references to psalms and hymns do not enter into the action of the story itself but are employed by Augustine the narrator as reflective meditations on his past. In book IX in book IX alone the hymn becomes part of the story. Augustine the protagonist, unable to grieve for the death of his beloved mother, lies down in bed and sings the hymn to himself, finally letting loose a flood of tears. There is an extraordinary kind of coiling up of temporality here; through the insertion of the hymn into the fabric of the autobiographical story, the narrator Augustine (the man of the present) the one who, all along, has been supplying these musical references is brought into contact with the protagonist Augustine (the man of the past). There is a kind of simultaneity, a rupture, the opening of an abyss. It is perhaps no small point, then, that Augustine s account of the death of his mother and his recollection of the hymn is preceded by his rapturous experience, shared with his mother, Monica, of the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things ( ). It is another abyss. How does a temporal creature, such as Augustine, see eternity? Indeed, he does not see it at all: from this place all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded ( ). What he encounters is not an image of God but the voice of God: We would hear his word, not through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the obscurity of a symbolic utterance. Him who in these things we love we would hear in person without their mediation. That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things ( ; emphases mine). It is through hearing that Augustine and his mother attain the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things ( ). What kind of listening? When Augustine searches (in vain) for words to convey the sense of his experience, he finds instead only silence, which he describes as the silence beneath the music of a psalm: 4 For if anyone could hear them [the proper words for which he searches], this is what all of them would be saying, We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity (Ps. 79:3, 5) ( ). The thematic relation between this account and Deus, creator omnium (God, creator of all) is clear, and a certain musical framework is thus woven into the texture of this extraordinary account of eternity, prefiguring the role that Deus, creator omnium plays in book XI. 5 Indeed, through the hymn, books IX and XI JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 333

7 334 jessica wiskus are connected retroactively; similarly, the use of Deus, creator omnium in the Confessions points back to a previous work in which Augustine used the same hymn. That work is De Musica, a music treatise in which Augustine explores, above all else, the effect of rhythm through time. 6 On Rhythm in De Musica Rhythm (numerus) is a term that pervades De Musica, and the work not only addresses the art of musical meter and poetic verse in a practical sense but applies rhythm to compelling philosophical and theological questions proposing a kind of marriage of Neoplatonic ideas to Christian scripture. 7 Why rhythm? Despite our common notion of rhythm as a series of definite, articulated sounds, the musician knows rhythm in quite a different way: as the connection or proportion between articulated sounds. It is as rhythm that the differentiation of past and present sounds generates meaning. That is to say, proportion, relationship (for example, the relationship between a second articulation and a first articulation), creates rhythm. There is a retrospective institution of meaning. Yet, because this is a performance through time and not an exercise in grasping objects, it is not as if we might hold the second note at the same time as the first note in our minds and thereby make a calculated or measured comparison between the two. (And in book XI of the Confessions, for example, Augustine is very insistent upon this point: the mind cannot position itself so as to take an external measurement of time.) Rather, like the two offset images of the stereoscope that initiate a vision of depth, two notes of a melody take on their meaning within the dimension of one whole, expressive phrase. That is the sense in which music moves: through retroaction, reconfiguration, and reinitiation, dependent on a double framework of memory and performance. And it is thus that rhythm is always expressive and creative. Augustine s analysis of rhythm presents a key necessary to our understanding of time-consciousness: of how there can be something other than a restless march of present moments. For De Musica (and especially book VI of De Musica), despite its title, is not merely a treatise on music; it is essentially an investigation of the nature of perception, of the creation of sense or meaning, and of consciousness of time. Augustine explores these issues by considering the different rhythms according to which we sense, participate in, and recognize sound. He carefully distinguishes six kinds of rhythms: JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 334

8 on augustine s confessions after de musica Judicial rhythms (which we use to judge the equality or proportion of things according to reason) 2. Sensual rhythms (which we use to judge via the sense of beauty or the pleasure that they bring to us) 3. Progressing rhythms (which we use as an activity of the soul every time we pronounce or perform a rhythm) 4. Occurring rhythms (which the soul or mind activates within itself in response to sense perception) 5. Memorized rhythms (the retained experiences of past rhythms) 6. Corporeal rhythms (the sensation or experience of sound vibration or proportionate relation) We might best understand these categories by thinking of corporeal and memorized rhythms together as rhythms that we sense or that we have experienced, occurring and progressing rhythms together as rhythms in which we participate through understanding or performance, and sensual and judicial rhythms together as rhythms according to which we recognize qualities such as beauty and equality. Thus, we sense, retain, respond to, perform, judge, and understand rhythms. Significantly, our cognition of music our ability to make sense of music, to gather the individual notes together into a meaningful whole depends especially upon the work of memory. For it should be clear that, although memorized rhythms themselves form a part of this hierarchical categorization, it is, above all, the function of memory that underpins the notion of rhythm itself. Without memory, there can be no differentiation no retrospective relation between past and present. Without memory, there can be no motion or time constituted through proportion. Moreover, without memory, there can be no cognition at all: for Augustine, thinking itself seems to be rhythmic. And this intuition, expressed first in De Musica, plays itself out later, in the Confessions. Rhythm and Time-Consciousness in the Confessions Cognition, according to Augustine, arises through the gathering together of ideas (in time). This he explains in book X of the Confessions (the very book devoted to the phenomenon of memory): By thinking we, as it were, JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 335

9 336 jessica wiskus gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand.... They have to be brought together (cogenda) so as to be capable of being known; that means they have to be gathered (colligenda) from their dispersed state. Hence is derived the word cogitate. To bring together (cogo) and to cogitate (cogito) are words related ( ). (And it is important that Augustine is using the repetition of sound as the basis for this claim of relatedness. Rhyming the relationship of assonance and consonance performs the same retroactive movement as thinking itself.) This bringing together or gathering together is precisely the accomplishment of time-consciousness, as he understands it in book XI, and it is fundamentally rhythmic or musical. Toward the end of book XI, Augustine marvels at his sense when singing Deus, creator omnium that he has the piece as a whole in his mind for how can his mind contain the previous notes and the anticipated notes together with the present notes all at once? It is not as if he is visualizing these notes (written notation of music had not yet been developed in Augustine s time). It is not the simultaneity of the visual field but the rhythmicity of the temporal field that makes possible his expressive performance. At any moment, Augustine the singer knows where he is within the whole; he can feel and shape a musical phrase. Time-consciousness, then, through music, is a power of gathering together always generated through the ground of memory. He feels the second note of the hymn as second in relation to the first note, differentiated through a stretching across or distension of time that, inasmuch as the second note is known through the first and the first through the second (or the end through the beginning and the beginning through the end), discloses not an infinitely thin now but a thick present a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things to come ( ). At work is neither linearity nor circularity but temporal depth: there is transformation, reorientation. What Augustine understands here, through the performance in book XI of Deus, creator omnium, is an understanding that we, in turn, must bring to the Confessions as a whole. As Augustine writes in the very last line of the Confessions, So. So shall it be received, so shall it be found, so shall it be opened ( ). 8 To remember is not simply to recollect but, in a sense, to create. And memory is not simply an image of the past that we see. Memory is rather like light itself: it changes the condition of visibility. 9 Our engagement with time, and especially with the past, is thus expressive. And JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 336

10 on augustine s confessions after de musica 337 perhaps this is what Augustine meant to search out through the Confessions all along not naive possession of the past but expressive rhythm generated through the creative capacity of retrospection. Why, after all, did Augustine set about crafting an autobiography an ordered account of the events of his life? At the opening of book XI, he questions the whole of the project upon which he has been laboring: Lord, eternity is yours, so you cannot be ignorant of what I tell you. Your vision of occurrences in time is not temporally conditioned. Why then do I set before you an ordered account of so many things? He admits, It is certainly not through me that you know them [the events of my life] (11.1.1). Yet Augustine then announces the purpose of his Confessions: But I am stirring up love for you in myself and in those who read this, so that we may all say Great is the Lord and highly worthy to be praised (11.1.1) the psalm from the very opening of the work. Indeed, at the end of the Confessions, what remains is only the act of confession. And we must keep in mind the dual meaning of confession: not only to lay bare one s sins but to sing the praises of God. Like a piece of music, Confessions performs its meaning, born of the resonance of memory. Moreover, like a piece of music, it constantly calls upon us to reinterpret it to bring it to life in the present and to affirm its expressive power. notes 1. Aurelius Augustinus, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), ; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers. 2. As Paula Fredriksen emphasizes, Like all ancient people, Augustine thinks of words and texts orally, in terms of their being spoken and heard. Paula Fredriksen, The Confessions as Autobiography, in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey, with the assistance of Shelley Reid (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2012), 95. See, for example, Augustine s argument in of the Confessions. The contemporary debate about whether the Confessions was meant to be spoken aloud or read silently by its readers is not at issue here; what is without doubt is that we readers or listeners were meant to engage with the work through time. 3. Alone in his bed, he recalls the first two verses of the hymn: Creator of all things. You rule the heavens. You clothe the day with light And night with the grace of sleep. JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 337

11 338 jessica wiskus So rest restores exhausted limbs To the usefulness of work. It lightens weary minds And dissolves the causes of grief. And, in a moment of anguish, Augustine s own grief dissolves. He writes: Now I let flow the tears which I had held back so that they ran as freely as they wished. My heart rested upon them, and it reclined upon them because it was your ears that were there ( ). 4. Indeed, Augustine relates that, as the experience of the eternal wisdom faded for both him and his mother, we returned to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has both a beginning and an ending ( ). At work in the Confessions is a suspicion of human speech. The text constantly seems to turn around and move forward only by returning back to amend what it had previously claimed. Augustine s Latin speech is also highly decorated (see, for example, ), and his constant rhyming should alert us, his readers, to the retroactive movement that his words realize; rhyming unfolds according to pairs, thanks to the institution of a relation between one word and a previous word rhyme, in other words, is rhythmic. Language that lacks rhythm falls away into oblivion. 5. Similarly, in book X, when Augustine declares his love for God (in opposition to a love for the things of the senses) and seeks the object of his love, he recognizes that he can turn to no physical phenomena (even as great and beautiful as they are): they themselves cry out to him, He made us (Ps. 99:3) (10.6.9) another motif related to Deus, creator omnium (from which he will quote later in that same book). 6. Not incidentally, De Musica was written by Augustine during the actual time of his conversion to Christianity, while the Confessions, composed some ten years after his baptism, purports to recount those very events. In many ways De Musica prefigures the Confessions, for the concerns of De Musica perception, cognition, and time-consciousness are also the concerns of the Confessions. Yet let us keep in mind that De Musica in structure and form is a treatise (not a particularly compelling work of literature). The Confessions goes much further than De Musica in this respect, as a performative work. 7. For example, Augustine draws explicitly upon the cosmological portrait of Plato s Timaeus in the same paragraph in which he quotes directly from the Gospel of Matthew. Aurelius Augustinus, De Musica liber VI, trans. Martin Jacobsson (Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell, 2002), For an analysis of this final paragraph of the Confessions, see Catherine Conybeare, Reading the Confessions, in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey, with the assistance of Shelley Reid (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2012), We might compare this to what is often described as Augustine s vision at Ostia a vision that, as I have noted, is more about hearing than about seeing the eternal ( ). JSP 30.3_08_Wiskus.indd 338