Augustine and the Silence of the Sirens

Abstract

It is a truism to state that there are as many Augustines as there are interpreters or, in any case, schools of interpretation. His work could be called an opera aperta, albeit in quite a different sense from the way this expression was meant by its inventor, Umberto Eco. Eco’s use of this phrase mainly concerned modernist works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, whose very structure allows the reader to find his way in the labyrinth of the artwork without ever arriving at—or, for that matter, departing from—one single, fixed level of meaning. The metaphor of the opera aperta opened up a peculiar combination of structure and randomness, the latter made even more mysterious by modernism’s emphasis on austerity of form. While it cannot be denied that for Joyce the fact that every line and every word were meticulously planned and put in their proper place was the precondition for the emergence of riddles and clues, thus widening up the scope of language and meaning, for Augustine things seem to be quite different inasmuch as the flow and width of his discourse is in place right from the beginning. In his case, randomness seems to be part of the structure of the discourse itself, to the extent of beguiling Henri-Irenee Marrou—still the most prominent historian of Augustinian rhetoric—into accusing Augustine of a lack of rhetorical skills: “Saint Augustin compose mal.” Fortunately, Marrou retracted this accusation in a later edition of his book: