Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

120 Zohar Atkins
Him. He shows how prayer serves the purpose of the self, rather than God’s
needs. Thus, praising God is to some extent a selfish act, which is why Augustine
takes great pains to construct the right prayer. About to embark on a written
journey, which could be considered a extended prayer, he carefully asks God for
collective inspiration rather than personal sustenance, because God “thwarts the
proud” (Conf. 1.1). But, his opening concedes the impossibility of denying the
self altogether, for his second and third sentences, also taken from the Psalms,
subtly inform us of Augustine’s conscious, particular, and personal yoking of
holy verses to package his self, even if it rings as a byproduct of the Divine.
Augustine soon breaks into the first person with tremendous strength in a command:
“Grant me, Lord, to understand and understand whether a man is first to
pray to you for help or to praise you, and whether he must know you before he
can call you to his aid” (Conf. 1.1). Augustine frames his question in universal
terms, but it is nonetheless his question.
In the second chapter, he unreservedly begs, “How shall I call upon my
God for aid, when the call I make is for my Lord to come into myself” (Conf.
1.2)? He personalizes God with the possessive “my,” and he is the subject of the
sentence, with God as his object. This heavy, presumptuous, and unabashed
revealing of the self still seeks God’s approval, permission, and validation.
Augustine asks how he can come closer to God, but realizes that the act of
asking such a question is an answer in itself. Augustine’s model of humility, of
prayer that begs aid to pray, of self that desires the indwelling of God, uses the
unassuming and unthreatening act of questioning to highlight his self. His going
back and forth between ignorance and Socratic knowledge of that ignorance
aver his robust self-sanctification. By hailing his inferiority to and his
dependence upon God, he equips himself and his subsequent words with an
efficacy comparable to God’s voice, namely, the internal revelation of the soul.
Augustine welcomes God into his soul, realizing that the capacity even to
suggest such a statement stems from God’s already residing there.
When Augustine declares, “I should be null and void and could not exist at
all, if you, my God, were not in me” (Conf. 1961: 1.2), he proves this point. But
rather than critiquing the essentiality of his existence as a function of God and
not of himself, he celebrates the divinity that he contains. He offers the notion of
a sacred self to his readers as a way of inducing them to embrace their selves
through the acceptance of God. Augustine merges Neo-Platonism with Stoicism
to craft a new self, predicated on its cleaving to God, linked to other selves
through the cosmopolitan act of creation, and possessing the power to extend
itself to the heavens. 1 Augustine’s concluding question/answer, “No single thing
contains the whole of you” (Conf. 1.2), argues for the plurality of the image of
1 Book 1.2 “For you, my God, have said that you fill haven and earth, but I cannot go
beyond the bounds of heaven and earth so that you may leave them to come to me.”
Augustine argues that he cannot transcend as long as he exists materially, but by living
with God in his soul he can reach God.