In book 12 of his Confessions, Augustine meditates further on the scriptural revelation of God as creator, that is, as having freely made out of nothing all things that are not God. Throughout most of books 11, 12, and 13, Augustine questions in particular how to understand the beginning of all things that are not God by appealing to the book of Genesis (a word that means beginning) and concentrating on its first words: In the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1). As he turns over the words of scripture and searches out their meaning or possible meanings, he takes great pains to preserve the complete otherness of God from everything created.
In the very short chapter 10, Augustine interrupts this inquiry, and he pauses to pray. In the remarks that follow, I want to look closely at chapter 10. He begins: “O Truth, light of my heart, let not my shadows speak to me (conf. 12.10.10; translation mine).” Augustine wants to hear what God himself reveals to us about himself; he does not want to substitute his own idea of God for the living God. The God who creates is not one more being alongside the beings he creates; he is beyond our experience and foreign to our understanding. Augustine is alert to our tendency to fall short of understanding God as he is, much as the Israelites tended to fall away from the living God and to substitute idols in his place. Pagan gods are less mysterious than the God who does not need creation in order to be God. Augustine prays to hear the word of the God who is Truth and not to find in the words of scripture a god fashioned by his own understanding.
And then, still in chapter 10, he reminds us of the central feature of the course of his life that he recounted in the first nine books. He fell away into the material world and sought the satisfaction of his heart there, but God called Augustine and drew him back to his true goal. And that is what he seeks in the words of scripture, which he likens to a fountain from which he will drink and live. He seeks only God, no likenesses and no substitutes.
Immediately after this, he says something arresting: “May I not be my life.” It is difficult to know what to make of this until he adds next: “Badly have I lived from myself; death have I been to myself: in you I revive. I have believed your books and their extremely arcane words” (conf. 12.10.10). Augustine tried to find satisfaction in creatures, but he found that even good things like friends and wisdom and family left his heart restless. These words restate the core of that journey, but they also show that his turn to God is not merely a turn to a different item on the menu, as it were. He is not like Goldilocks, who finally found a bowl of porridge to her liking.
Rather, he turns away from himself entirely and is absorbed in another person, the God who is not among the beings in the world. In that person he revives, and we recognize that his painstaking scrutiny for the meaning of scripture is not an effort in biblical scholarship. No, he seeks to find the person revealed in those arcane words. Augustine, the converted Augustine, now a bishop, does not possess the God he seeks. He is “burning and panting” (conf. 12.10.10) to drink from the fountain, that is, to hear the lone voice that can reveal the hidden God. We might say that Augustine is terrified of finding something other than God himself. He knows of the human tendency, indeed his own tendency, to settle for “my shadows,” that is, for something more familiar and comfortable than the God who both needs nothing and yet so loved the world as to be mindful of us.
“May I not be my life.” This sounds like an imitation of Christ’s kenosis, the emptying of himself involved in taking the form of a servant (Phil 2:7). For most of us, I suspect, there is something terrifying in saying this prayer and meaning it. It certainly runs counter to most of what we hear in the world around us about finding and following one’s passion or living true to one’s authentic self. Augustine rejects all of it: “May I not be my life.”