Comments on: What is Confession?

By: Jason Barr

Jason Barr — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:23:07 +0000

I think this is a really good point, there’s a tendency in modernity to conceive of any kind of speaking of God as conjectural navel-gazing whereas for Augustine the truth is the reverse – to speak of the self adequately one must first speak of God and confess the truth about God. The self is defined in light of God, and not vice-versa.

While it is undeniably true that we can only speak of God from our own contexts, and therefore our vision of God will be colored by that, I think it is possible to articulate words about God that touch upon (maybe “palpate” is a good word) truths that are not delimited by our own contexts – ways of speaking of God that burst out of our own visions and allow our ways of seeing, knowing, and speaking to be transformed. I have this Jean-Luc Marion-esque train of thought going on right now and I’m not quite sure how to articulate it.

By: Hill

Hill — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:39:28 +0000

Tell me about it.

By: Halden

Halden — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:38:07 +0000

Saving yourself is damn hard work I hear.

By: Hill

Hill — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:26:23 +0000

Life as a Pelagian is really freaking hard.

By: Hill

Hill — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:26:06 +0000

I’m not trying hard enough :(

By: Halden

Halden — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:05:55 +0000

We try.

By: Hill

Hill — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:24:08 +0000

Sorry didn’t mean it in that sense. I figured you Anabaptists had some sort of confession going on.

By: Halden

Halden — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:03:46 +0000

No, getting disgusted at myself for how I spend my time made me quit facebook.

By: Halden

Halden — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:03:18 +0000

It seems to me that on the experiential level there’s as much difference within these two forms of confession as there is between them.

And…I have done both…so there.

By: Hill

Hill — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:40:36 +0000

I’m just not sure that saying they are ultimately the same gets us. Anyone who has done either will tell you how radically different the experience of them is. Certainly one leads to the other and is in fact the precondition of the other. The human experience of the need to confess one’s sins seems experientially prior to doxology, however.

“If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me” or something.

By: R.O. Flyer

R.O. Flyer — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:51:56 +0000

Did reading the Confessions make you quit facebook?

By: Halden

Halden — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:39:49 +0000

Yes, the meaning is distinct, but I don’t think its fundamentally divergent. Its not two different things but two varied instantiations of one reality. In both cases confessing means to proclaim what is true. How that gets inflected depending on the subject matter under discussion will of course be different, but it seems to me that both sorts of confession are of the same genus.

By: Hill

Hill — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:32:37 +0000

Maybe more succinctly, we can confess our faith, and we can confess our sins, but the meaning of confess in each case is different, if somewhat related. I don’t think it really makes sense to say “confessing our sins” = doxology. The type of confessing Augustine is doing here may in fact equal something like doxology, but no one would really suggest that that is a “difficult moral duty.”

By: Hill

Hill — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:29:58 +0000

I’m pretty sure “Confessiones” (as in the title of this work) is intended in a sense distinct from what one might call “the Sacrament of Penance.”

As in… the title of this work does not have the same meaning as “confess” in the sentence: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

By: Austin

Austin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:33:25 +0000

This doxology is also a “spiritual practice,” as Hadot says. I.e., it is a way of re-formulating his own history colliding with God’s history, and as a practice, it is meant to develop a different perception of the world. As I understand what Augustine is doing, he’s trying to show his readers a technique for re-figuring one’s perception of what you’ve done, and in this way, show that all you do has its source in God, and hence any confession is ultimately confessing God.