The Confession of Augustine. (Book reviews: summaries and comments *).

Meconi, David Vincent

LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. The Confession of Augustine. Translated by Richard Beardsworth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ix + 96 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $12.95--There is something appropriate about Lyotard's last printed work being his most intimate and revealing. Best known for The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Lyotard died in the April of 1998, leaving his Confession d'Augustin, as Dolores Lyotard tells us in her "Forewarning," "scarcely half" finished (p. vii). Although his New York Times obituary claimed that "awaiting publication is his final book about the `Confessions' of St. Augustine" (April 25, 1998), this work is less a book about the Confessions as it is an insight into a twentieth century philosopher at the end of Iris life. Revealed here is a philosopher struggling with the perennial themes of Augustine's own odyssey: confession as praise and contrition. Perhaps it was Lyotard's own battle with leukemia and his growing sense of mortality that gave him such insights into Augustine's early fallacy of thinking of God as encircling and filling all things throughout space (Confessions, VII.5) that he is able to write, "Such is flesh visited, co-penetrated by your space-time, disturbed and confused with this blow, but steeped in infinity, impregnated and pregnant with your overabundant liquid: the waters of the heavens" (p. 11); and regarding the relationship between time and immunity (Confessions, XII. 12), Lyotard understands that, "God only sees himself in God. Compared with the incomparable brightness, all is night, and speech is noise after the silence of lauds. In the sky of skies, the heaven of heavens, wisdom celebrates its glory. The intelligence with which the angelic creatures are infused is not co-eternal with their creator, but it is exempt from becoming" (p. 43). Passages like these not only present Augustine in a new light, but invite readers to see themselves in this light as well.

This volume consists of five sections, the first being "The Confession" (pp. 1-57). Here Lyotard follows no strict path through the Confessions but rather traces such various themes as: "The Inner Human," "Witness," "Resistance," "Distentio," "The Sexual," "Consuetudo," "Oblivion," "Temporize," "Firmament," "Author," "Angels," "Trance," ending appropriately with "Laudes." These short comments not only bring the central themes of Augustine's thought alive in an exhilarating manner, but bespeak the significance of Lyotard's choosing to title this work in the singular. That is, perhaps Lyotard has captured exactly what Augustine meant by the confession offered throughout his Confessions: "Since to confess is to bring into language, to language what eludes language, the object has to be sacrificed, the most precious possession one has, as must be the case, is silence. To confess explicitly to that which has said nothing and says nothing, to give what one has not been, what one is not, is the exorbitant work to which Augustine harnesses himself: a working-through, we would say today" (pp. 26-7). To highlight that such thinking is not the traditional commentary on the Confessions, Lyotard chooses never to quote Augustine directly; rather, citations are placed loosely in the margins.

The last four sections have been added for publication, no doubt including further themes Lyotard hoped someday to finish. "Sendings" (pp. 65-77) come from a 1997 notebook: jottings which touch on themes of praise, time, and the possibility of pride while making oneself the principle subject of one's confession. "Fragments" (pp. 81-7) looks at the vulnerability of the Cross: "Savors, exhalations of flesh, touches of sound and gesture that make the blood of the community throb ... the red and black fiber of flesh, through which evil holds the creature in its darkness, through which it comes to pass that divine lightning sets him afire" (p. 85). "Pencil Sketches" (pp. 91-6) is a running reflection on the nature of sin, shame, and silence. Finally, "Fac-similes" offers ten or so pages of Lyotard's own handwriting of La Confession. With prose bordering on the poetic, Lyotard entices and captivates throughout. His final insights here disclose how Augustine's own autobiography is really an omni-biography: a story every soul tells as it comes to realize, as Lyotard's last line puts it, that only at the "end of the night forever begins." --David Vincent Meconi, S.J., University of Innsbruck.

* Books received are acknowledged in this section by a brief resume, report, or criticism. Such acknowledgement does not preclude a more detailed examination in a subsequent Critical Study. From time to time, technical books dealing with such fields as mathematics, physics, anthropology, and the social sciences will be reviewed