In which, in the moment of confession, two figures emerge: the apologist and human self-portraiture. From the very beginning self-scrutiny is a danger zone.
St Augustine by Sandro Botticelli
In his Confessions, the bishop of Hippo invokes the God he loves, calling him unceasingly in the vocative: Tu Thou or You. Augustine searches his heart, his conscience, his mind; he inaugurates self-portraiture in fiction.
Apologies take place in dialogue. They must be made in the presence of someone, the letter must be sent, the message delivered, the speech made to an audience, there must be an addressee. They share this character with confession and, in Augustines accents, the effect is unusually intimate, a personal heart-to-heart, which breaks down the boundary; Peter Brown writes, between prayer and literature. Echoing with the pleading, praise-singing, breast-beating and lyric laments of the Psalms, Augustine analyses his self, his life and character up to the year 397 when he is speaking to God although with his back turned to us.
Like Io, he cries out of wrongs done but in this case by himself. The particular individual with an individual case history, but also Augustine, a man like any other, he writes. He doesnt start with his own memories, but with the ordinary first experiences of any baby just as he has observed in others. He addresses God with insistent, plangent intensity: my confession, O my God, in Your sight is made silently, and yet not silently, for it makes no sound, yet it cries aloud in my heart .
Read extracts from St Augustine's Confessions
Through the deep digging psychic archaeology of the book, Augustine commands our interest and our admiration because his probing is so unrelenting and often breathtaking in its penetration; because he shows us someone scrutinising feelings for their value, their honesty, their depths their truth. In so doing, in writing in this way and making this canonical text, Augustine also inaugurates the utterance of the I or ego as a major, if not the major, point of origin for truth-telling.
This is where Augustine holds up a model of the apologist. He makes a reckoning of his inner being, he begs for Gods love and understanding for his faults and for forgiveness in exchange for his sincerity. The Confessions admits some small, particular crimes stealing pears when a young lad and grieves over a general predicament of human sinfulness, evidenced in himself especially as carnal lust. The act of avowal leads to acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and thence to renunciation. This text institutes, it could be said, the high virtue of putting oneself in the wrong.
Or, to express the same thought differently, Augustines Confessions enact the way an offender, seeing the offending part and plucking it out, as it were, anneals and refines and lightens his being. Augustine is too subtle, too eloquent, too persuasively anguished to be self-serving; but his example presents a warning of what supplicating, self-scrutiny can profitably achieve for the confessor.
IRA
In a statement in the republican newspaper An Phoblacht (Republican News), it said it offered "sincere apologies" to the families of those killed on Bloody Friday, when nine people were killed after 20 bombs exploded across Belfast on 21 July 1972.
"We also acknowledge the grief and pain of their relatives. The future will not be found in denying collective failures and mistakes or closing minds and hearts to the plight of those who have been hurt. "That includes all of the victims of the conflict, combatants and non-combatants."
Peter Brooks recent book Troubled Confessions tackles the relationship between law and literature, legal confession and autobiography, and he has shown lucidly and with great sensitivity, how the urge to confess in order to feel better can propel an accused subject to admit to crimes he or she never committed. The psychological hunger to gain the approval that confessing itself confers can overcome even the instinct for survival, and innocent men and women consent to incriminate themselves.
In his presentation of his personal story Augustine doesnt only express his sorrow at his own transgressions; he presents himself to God stripped of all his worldly achievements and authority; he abases himself, never dwelling on his position as a powerful bishop in a city in the largest province of the Roman Empire at a moment when the Church embodied authority. As if that werent enough, Augustine was presiding in courts that dispensed justice on a daily basis. But he lets little of this show; his cris de coeur shed layer after layer, not only of the psychic defences of self-love, but also deny the worlds returning gaze and its esteem. The narcissism here takes the form of pressing himself on God, the beloved; Augustine, having parted from a long cherished sexual companion, and renounced all sexual activity at great cost to his own nature, adopts God as his lover instead.
It is with doubtful knowledge, Lord, but with utter certainty that I love You. You have stricken my heart with Your word and I have loved You. And indeed heaven and earth and all that is in them tell me wherever I look that I should love You But what is it that I love when I love You? in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God the light and the voice and the fragrance and food and embrace in the soul I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I lie in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder .
St Therese of Lisieux
The founding document of autobiography, the model for the two great Catholic Saint Theresas, Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux, and their monumental works of autobiography, a forerunner of Freuds talking cure and of Prousts fiction, the Confessions grounds subjectivity in effect, and within that category of consciousness, in emotional, needy, supplicating lovingness.
The subjectivity in Augustines literary self-portrait wagers all its sincerity, its powers of persuasion in his humbling himself, by speaking as a woman to his beloved Lord God. Who else cries out in his book as he does? His mother, Monica. In the fourth-century Roman Empire, his representation of himself in this abject and powerless, Ionic state was far more startling than it is to us (and it has not lost that power after more than 1,500 years). There really was nothing to compare with Augustines Confessions before he wrote them, probably because no man would have thought of showing himself in such a demeaning light with such womanish weakness.
Im not saying, by the way, that women are weak; but that womanly weakness, as exemplified by Io, could be co-opted as a persuasive form of speech, and its representations confer unexpected authority on a non-female speaker.
The public apologies issued by statesmen and by the Pope on behalf of past transgressors live under the sign of Augustine. For the Pope, humbling himself, and with him the whole church, in order to beseech God for forgiveness and purification for all the 2000 years of wrongdoing, echoes the great confessing saints accents.
German Chancellor Willy Brandt on his knees at Auschwitz in 1970
click for full image
The founding document of autobiography, the model for the two great Catholic Saint Theresas, Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux, and their monumental works of autobiography, a forerunner of Freuds talking cure and of Prousts fiction, the Confessions grounds subjectivity in effect, and within that category of consciousness, in emotional, needy, supplicating lovingness.
The subjectivity in Augustines literary self-portrait wagers all its sincerity, its powers of persuasion in his humbling himself, by speaking as a woman to his beloved Lord God. Who else cries out in his book as he does? His mother, Monica. In the fourth-century Roman Empire, his representation of himself in this abject and powerless, Ionic state was far more startling than it is to us (and it has not lost that power after more than 1,500 years). There really was nothing to compare with Augustines Confessions before he wrote them, probably because no man would have thought of showing himself in such a demeaning light with such womanish weakness.
Im not saying, by the way, that women are weak; but that womanly weakness, as exemplified by Io, could be co-opted as a persuasive form of speech, and its representations confer unexpected authority on a non-female speaker.
The public apologies issued by statesmen and by the Pope on behalf of past transgressors live under the sign of Augustine. For the Pope, humbling himself, and with him the whole church, in order to beseech God for forgiveness and purification for all the 2000 years of wrongdoing, echoes the great confessing saints accents.
The British Queen is also head of a Church, and her apologies, issued in her capacity as Head of the Commonwealth, have rubbed off some of the chrism of her ecclesiastical office. German Chancellor Willy Brandt went down on his knees at Auschwitz in 1970, in a founding act of the new era of atonement through apology to acknowledge the evil of the third Reich and its murder of Jews and others it considered undesirables. As for Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, their apologies their confessions seek to heal and cleanse as vicars, by proxy, standing in for agents to whom they do not stand in apostolic succession. Whom are they speaking for? In politics, this is a false genealogy of power, it seems to me.
There are several more problems here: not least the violence done to history, to imagine it can be parcelled up and put away, that it can be ended. But, you might rejoinder, what if the actions do good, if they calm trouble, ease pain, or, in the language of conflict resolution, recognise the wrong? And in so doing manage to give right to the victims?
If healing is the consequence, surely apology, as in Augustines Confessions, adds to the sum of justice in the world? Or does something trickier lie within the public act? Apologies cannot work unilaterally, it seems to me. Augustine and the Pope, no doubt mindful of his example, depend on the compact with a listening God to reach the healed state they desire. Similarly, the Jewish prayer, recited on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, implies that God will incline his ear and grant what the prayer implores:
We have abused and betrayed, we are cruel
We have destroyed and embittered other peoples lives
We have been both violent and weak
We have yielded to wrong desires, our zeal was misplaced
Nothing escapes you, nothing is hidden from your gaze.
Our God and God of our Fathers, have mercy on us and pardon all our sins;
Grant atonement of all our iniquities, forgiveness for all our transgressions.
Korea
Kim Jong Il Answers Questions Raised by Japanese Kyodo News Service
Japan's settlement of the past necessitates a sincere apology and due compensation that takes into full consideration the whole range of damage and sufferings it inflicted upon the Korean people. The lack of solution to these core issues has so far curbed the improvement of bilateral relations and presented a variety of complicated problems.
God can be relied on, it seems, in ways that individuals cannot, and apology turns into atonement and shrives the apologist only when it meets and merges with the consent of the respondent. It is by agreeing to the spell, by the one who grants pardon, that the spell takes hold. So to my third scene, an ideal, perhaps, in which an apology is given and accepted, and forgiveness ensues.
- Sorry - The present state of apology
- Scene One: Io
- Scene Two: St Augustines Confessions
- Scene Three: The Marriage of Figaro
- Scene Four: Red Dust by Gillian Slovo
- Conclusion
Saint Augustine by Piero della Francesca
St Augustine's Confessions: extracts
Who can unravel such a twisted and tangled knottiness? It is unclean. I hate to reflect upon it. I hate to look on it. But I do long for thee, O Righteousness and Innocence, so beautiful and comely to all virtuous eyes - I long for thee with an insatiable satiety.
(2 X 18)
Let the brotherly soul love in me what thou teachest him should be loved, and let him lament in me what thou teachest him should be lamented. Let it be the soul of a brother that does this, and not a stranger - not one of those strange children, whose mouth speaks vanity, and whose right hand is the right hand of falsehood. But let my brother do it who, when he approves of me, rejoices for me, but when he disapproves of me is sorry for me; because whether he approves or disapproves, he loves me. To such I will declare myself. Let them be refreshed by my good deeds and sigh over my evil ones.
(10 IV 5)
Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error--not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.
(2 IV 9)
Woe is me! Behold, I do not hide my wounds. Thou art the Physician, I am the sick man; thou art merciful, I need mercy.
(10 XXIII 39) links to ideas of healing in Aeschylus
Behold, O Truth, it is in thee that I see that I ought not to be moved at my own praises for my own sake, but for the sake of my neighbors good. And whether this is actually my way, I truly do not know. On this score I know less of myself than thou dost. I beseech thee now, O my God, to reveal myself to me also, that I may confess to my brethren, who are to pray for me in those matters where I find myself weak.
(10 XXXVII 62)
