Augustine Confessions and the Impossibility of Confessing God

Abstract

This work attempts to understand why the work of of Hippo has experienced such a widespread revival in postmodernity, especially in the writings of Jacques Derrida. At first glance, an alliance between a postmodern atheist and a fourth century bishop and saint seems an unlikely one. However, it is not so strange if one considers that deals extensively with the problems of sin and guilt. The residue of his guilt survives even the grace of his conversion. The connection between and the postmoderns is, perhaps, found in the common experience of guilt. The postmoderns are plagued by guilt without the consolation of absolution: guilt for the excesses of modernity, guilt for the rape of the environment, guilt for the holocaust, guilt for surviving when so many others did not. This work contends that Augustine's thought and Derrida's thought are, both, enriched by this odd, but fruitful, play of interpretations. This chapter attempts to situate in a postmodern context. It will focus primarily on Augustine's text but read that text from a postmodern perspective. has experienced many revivals in the history of the West. But perhaps none so surprising as the current engagement with postmodernity. Moreover: Augustine has played an interesting role in postmodernism. Not only does he appear in Derrida's Circumfession and Memoirs of the Blind, but Lyotard, too, was working on the Confessions at the time of his death, and Heidegger's early lectures on St. have just been published in the Gesamtausgabe.* It will perhaps be through the revival of the Augustinian tradition of the restless heart that Catholicism will be able to engage in a real dialogue with postmodernity. Augustine's thought is resurrected and relevant again. The thinker at the birth of the medieval experiment is recalled to the center of discourse, albeit after a 1500 year hiatus. Nevertheless,