Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

Augustine’s Imitatio Dei—A Rejection of Self Sacrifice 121
God. He allusively trumpets the biblical verse, “let us make mankind in our
image” (Gen. 1.26) to fashion a world, a “footstool” that must look upward, but
also to synthesize the pieces of God possessed in different selves, to reconstruct
and relive the vision of the logos 2 who once died for their sins.
Augustine seeks to know God, not in a biblical, corporeal sense but in a
platonic attempt to unite himself with God through total love and abandonment
of the non-godly. In his search for the ever-present Being that shapes his own
existence, Augustine runs through a series of contradictions: “You are the most
hidden from us and yet the most present amongst us, the most beautiful and yet
the most strong, ever enduring and yet we cannot comprehend you . . .
unchangeable and yet you change all things. . .” (Conf. 1.4). These paradoxical
pairings affirm our inability to know God, and as Boethius later asserts, to know
God is to become God. Augustine internalizes God, and feels God as the juice of
his soul; he has no need to explain God philosophically, only to proclaim, “You
are my God, my Life, my holy Delight” (Conf. 23). Though may rely on God to
legitimize his existence, and to stabilize his self, this daring, exalting, trinityevoking
pronouncement seems to affirm God. By calling God “my life” Augustine
is, in effect, calling his life “God.” Splendidly celebrating God’s infinity
through the limited self, Augustine connects through quill and parchment to a
boundless Being. Humbling himself again, he continues, “Is this enough to say
of you? Can any man say enough when he speaks of you” (Conf. 1.1)? Reverting
back to the universal, he demonstrates the availability of the self, of the
particular, of the wedding of temporal and eternal within all people.
Augustine aims to tackle the problem of sin in the world by levying
responsibility wholly on humanity. He disgracefully though necessarily points
out, “I sinned, O Lord my God, creator and arbiter of all natural things, but
arbiter only, not creator, of sin. I sinned” (Conf. 1.10). Yet, even this admission
to sin, despite relegating it to the sphere of the unnatural, confirms the power of
the self to avert its gaze from the good, to abandon itself. More importantly, by
confessing to his sins, Augustine acclaims himself both for changing and for
knowing his wrongdoings. When Augustine recounts, “I had not yet fallen in
love, but I was in love with the idea of it. . .I badly wanted to love something,”
and later, “I cared for nothing but to love and be loved” (Conf. 2.2), as his
motive for sinning, he distinguishes “the clear light of true love from the murk
of lust” (Conf. 2.2), and demonstrates the importance of God at the center or the
soul. Without God, the self-centered evildoer cannot survive. Nonetheless,
Augustine’s repentance, a process that he describes in his Confessions, offers
hope to the sinner, and shows him the mercy of God that will embrace him and
allow him to reenter his self if he returns to goodness. For Augustine, even the
2 John 1.1-1.14 describes the logos as the word of God, the means by which the world
came into being, and the means by which the world will be saved. The word is Jesus. “In
the beginning was the word. . .”