Abstract
Augustine of Hippo has become a patristic myth, a father of the church alternately revered and despised for his influence over the Middle Ages, Reformation, and every age since. He comes to us robed in all the weight of tradition, the quintessential Great Man who exercises writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida. It is hard to remember that he did not enjoy this aura at the start of his ecclesiastical career. Soon after his conversion, he unexpectedly became bishop of a minority church, outnumbered by the dominant Donatists of the region. As we saw in the last chapter, his was a polemical age, filled with vigorous contests over exegetical principles, and, indeed, over the very text of scripture. Augustine’s voice was initially one of many, and not the most widely acclaimed among them. The local and divided character of Christianity did not favor exegetical consensus behind the bishop of Hippo or Rome, for that matter. Augustine’s past created additional difficulties for him when he was suddenly entrusted with an ecclesiastical position: he had a reputation as a Manichean to overcome, before he could establish his Christian credentials and authority as a bishop.2 At this crucial turning point in his life, while preparing to assume episcopal office, he begins writing Confessions (c. 395), and in the process invents himself as a Christian bishop.3
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“quibus iussisti ut serviam, si volo tecum de te vivere.” (10.4.6) Augustine could have taken a hint from Philo, whose exegesis reveals similar inversions: see Kerstin Aspergren, The Male Woman: A Feminine Ideal in the Early Church, ed. Renèe Kieffer (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1990), 95–98.
Hence William E. Connolly discovers familiar gender codes: “Augustine enacts the traditional code of a devout woman [i.e., passive, obedient] with respect to this god and the traditional code of an authoritative male [active, authoritative, powerful] with respect to human believers and nonbelievers below him,” The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 58. This is one of the most original books on Augustine in recent years, and this analysis has proven influential (e.g., Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 140–47). From my perspective, Connolly’s binary gender oppositions are inapposite for Confessions, as are his assumptions about a father god. The idea that Augustine feminizes himself as a gesture of humility is not original to Connolly: see, e.g., John M. Bowers, “Augustine as Addict: Sex and Texts in the Confessions,” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 420–21, 424, 431–32.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33–34.
Other scholars point out similar challenges to patristic gender ideology, and I am indebted to their methodologies and insights, particularly to Elizabeth A. Clark, “Ideology, History, and the Construction of ‘Woman’ in Late Ancient Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 155–84
Elizabeth Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. J. Epstein and K. Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 29–49.
This remark applies only to Augustine’s rhetorical pose, not to his life. Augustine was apparently influenced by Ambrose’s interpretations: see J. Patout Burns, “Creation and Fall According to Ambrose of Milan,” in Augustine: Biblical Exegete, ed. Frederick van Fleteren and Joseph C. Schnaubelt (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 71–97. Stock fruitfully analyzes Augustine’s account of Ambrose in the context of his developing ideas about hermeneutics and illumination, Augustine the Reader, 59–64.
For Augustine’s theory of illumination, see Stock, Augustine the Reader, 23–42, 159–61, 190–206; Chadwick, Augustine, 48–51; G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 30–49. My analysis differs from theirs in discerning a Neoplatonic influence in Augustine’s representation of a transcendent Word.
Augustine’s representational strategy does not always cohere with his explicit statements about exegesis. Despite his theory of illumination, he is clearly influenced by his rhetorical training and education: see Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 265–84.
Far from unique to Augustine, the paradoxical “rhetoric of vulnerability… was… the classic language of male authority in the early Church,” Conrad Leyser, “Vulnerability and Power: The Early Christian Rhetoric of Masculine Authority,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 80 (1998): 160.
His construction parallels other contemporary ascetic definitions of power as a resistant alternative within dominant culture, for which see Richard Valantasis, “Constructions of Power in Asceticism, ” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 800–15.
For nuanced accounts of Augustine’s attitudes toward and relationships with women, see E. Ann Matter, “Christ, God and Woman in the Thought of St. Augustine,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 164–75; Bavel, “Augustine’s View on Women,” 5–53
Elizabeth A. Clark, “Theory and Practice in Late Ancient Asceticism: Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989): 31–44.
See, e.g., Jean Baker Miller, “Women and Power,” in Rethinking Power, ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 240–48.
Augustine’s theory of sin ultimately leads him to rationalize a rigidly hierarchical paradigm for church and state: on this, see Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 98–126.
Variations in the ancient text could partially explain his approach: see John S. McIntosh, A Study oj Augustine’s Versions oj Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912).
For cogent comments on how Augustine’s exegesis develops in these works, see Susan E. Schreiner, “Eve, the Mother of History: Reaching for the Reality of History in Augustine’s Later Exegesis of Genesis,” in Genesis 1–3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden, ed. Gregory Allen Robbins, Studies in Women and Religion, Vol. 27 (Lewiston: Edwin Meilen Press, 1988), 136–69
Elizabeth A. Clark, “ ‘Adam’s Only Companion’: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage,” Recherches Augustiniennes 21 (1986): 142–43
Ellizabeth A. Clark, “Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve: Interpretations of Genesis 1–3 in the Later Latin Fathers,” in Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity, Studies in Women and Religion, Vol. 20 (Lewiston: Edwin Meilen Press, 1986), 363–69.
Several scholars remark cogently on the problem of the divided will: Eugene TeSelle, “Exploring the Inner Conflict: Augustine’s Sermons on Romans 7 and 8,” in Augustine: Biblical Exegete, ed. Fleteren and Schnaubelt, 313–45; Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative, 53, 79; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 387–427.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Bantam, 1976), 40.
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© 2010 Theresa Tinkle
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Tinkle, T. (2010). Gender Trouble in Augustine’s Confessions . In: Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112032_3
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