Vessey delivers second lecture on St. Augustine
James Strawley ’00

Dr. Mark Vessey,, who holds the Augustinian Chair in the Thought of St. Augustine, presented his second lecture on Oct. 26. The lecture was titled "Truths Stranger than Fiction: Augustine and the Novel." Building on his first lecture, Dr. Vessey discussed the question of how to read Augustine, and, "above all, how we read his best-known work, the Confessions."

Dr. Vessey began the lecture by describing the undoubted influence that the epic poems of Homer and Virgil had on the writings of Augustine. It has been long understood that these epic poems contained both myth and true historic events. Hence, Dr. Vessey asserts, "The question of the factual truth of his [Augustine’s] narrative is thus left open."

According to Vessey, this proposition leads us to the conclusion that Augustine’s work was clearly not just a story of his life. How then are we to read the Confessions? Dr. Vessey addressed this question in three parts. He first discussed the veracity of the work in order to show how Augustine, in essence, had created a new literary genre. He next discussed the fact that Augustine may have been more focused on having the readers look for the "truth" in the signs of the work rather than to its images. Finally, he discussed the fact that Augustine was ultimately guiding the readers to use the text as a means of self-examination.

"The truth of the Confessions cannot be reduced to its correspondence to the facts of the author’s life," said Vessey. Instead, "He is pointing to himself, in the hope that he, Augustine, will serve as a God-given sign to some of his readers." It is in following the story that Augustine teaches us to read and to recognize the signs of the text. If we keep reading the signs in the way Augustine is teaching us to, then the stories begin to be not just about Augustine, but about us. We shall begin to see the signs that point to us and demonstrate a need for self-witnessing. "For we make the truth by becoming visible to ourselves," said Vessey, "first in the presence of God who sees all things from outside time, then in the presence of others by a process of self-indication in time. That, on my reading, is the kind of narrative the Confessions is."