Augustine's Confessions and Voegelin's philosophy.(Eric Voegelin)

THOUGH ERIC VOEGELIN TOOK his epigraph for Order and History from Augustine, he wrote little about the saint and published nothing about the Confessions. (1) He linked his philosophy of history to Augustine's by commenting on a text from the Enarrationes in Psalmos: both thinkers understand personal and universal history as an exodus from time to eternity. (2) Yet despite Voegelin's lack of attention to it, the Confessions concretely embodies his philosophical analysis of human nature and history. For all the marked differences in idiom, the meditative texture and structure of the Confessions enacts Voegelin's "paradox of consciousness" in the divine-human encounter. Moreover, exploring what Voegelin and Augustine have in common renews our understanding of why their idioms differ. (3)

The "Restless Heart" and "the Paradox of Consciousness"

The best-known sentence in the Confessions comes in its first chapter and epitomizes Augustine's understanding of human nature. The praying speaker acknowledges that God stirs human beings to delight in praising him "because thou hast made us toward thyself and our heart is restless until it rests in thee" (quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te; 1.1.1). (4) (I have translated this literally, and thus awkwardly, to point up certain features.)

The allusion to Genesis 1:26-27, God's creation of human beings, resounds explicitly, for our ears, in "thou hast made us" (fecitis nos). But for Augustine's readers it was also evident in ad te, "toward thyself," because the Latin Bible renders the act as God's creating humans "toward [his] image" (ad imaginam) rather than "in" it. According to this understanding, Christ alone is the Image of God, and human beings are made "toward" that Image. But Augustine's "toward thyself" also implies an innate inclination in human nature: by our very nature we are drawn toward God. That is why the human heart is "restless" amidst all the goods of the created world. So many things please, but none of them, finally, satisfies. Augustine presents the restless heart and the joy that comes from worship as indices in this world that human beings are made by and for Someone beyond it. Hence, the Augustinian heart has both an incompleteness, for it is "restless," and a directionality, toward God. His phrasing, moreover, links the individual and the race: "our heart is restless until it rests in thee." This restlessness is manifested in every human heart and in the human race as a whole. In its context, the sentence explains why we delight in worship, and thus implies the Church. And the Church, as we shall see, carries Augustine's understanding of the meaning of creation and the purpose of human history.

Hence, creation is not merely an event that happened once, long ago, to Adam and Eve. Every human being is made "toward God's image," the restlessness of every human heart manifests its creation by God. Later in the Confessions Augustine touches on the divine presence in human beings even when we are not aware of it. Remembering when the young Augustine sought for God outwardly "according to the sense of the flesh," the bishop declares that God is "more inward than my innermost and higher than my uppermost" (interior intimo meo et superior summo meo; 3.6.11). Interior intimo meo may be freely rendered as "more intimate to me than I am to myself." The divine presence proves more intimate than the self because the self is formed by the contents of experience. The divine presence, however, constitutes the human being as such, as the creature made "toward [God's] image," and thereby enables human experiencing in the first place.

Similarly, addressing the divine Beauty "ever old and ever new," Augustine recalls that "You were within, and I was in the world outside, and sought you there" (10.27.38). Augustine unambiguously affirms that God is somehow present in actuating the consciousness of human beings, whether we know it or not. The divine presence in our nature makes us "restless" in our quest for happiness. Our search for "the happy life" (beata vita; 10.20-23) arises from our very depths, for we have no earthly experience of the happiness for which we long. This happiness is not an object of remembered experience, yet our desire for it quickens all that we do. This longing for we-know-not-what happiness is a longing to experience the divine presence--"When I seek you, my God, my quest is for the happy life" (10.20.29)--and it arises from the divine presence within us. For Augustine, God is the source and term, the origin and end, of all human desire.

This divine presence actuating human consciousness, interior intimo, is equivalent to Voegelin's "luminosity." Human consciousness differs from animal awareness because it is open to the full range of reality. This luminosity is manifested, for example, in symbols for the cosmos and the divine. It is evident in our desire to understand the meaning of our lives and thereby attune ourselves to orders (or contexts) beyond our individual selves. Luminosity points to "an event of participation between partners in the community of being," for every person is aware of participating in larger contextual orders, such as family and society and the world that contains them, and many acknowledge a relationship with the divine. (5) That conscious participation manifests itself in the human search for meaning.