Eternity's Ennui

"We shouldn’t be put off because it has ‘ennui’ in the title. But we should , however, in some ways be intimidated by the book. In its capaciousness, it is a modern City of God . But it’s not an aleatory choice on my part. You suggested that I might choose something from the philosophical or theological tradition of writing about Augustine. One of the things I find remarkable about this book is it is engaged with both the philosophy and the theology of Augustine’s thought, without being beholden to either discipline, as such, in its modern instantiation. What the book is doing is taking the notion of the punctum temporis seriously: the notion of this instantaneous point in time, that is all we can ever know. That is the object of our specific attention, while all around it is flux and indeterminacy. And it says, ‘Okay, what does that mean for conversion?’ Pranger contends that Augustine shows that it is meaningful for conversion inasmuch as it conveys a conversion that is only ever instantaneous and provisional. It’s only at an instant; it’s never just done and finished. I think this is a very important thing about Augustine’s thought. The book also asks what this view of time has to do with narrative. If this is your view of time, how can you even tell a story? It asks this, as I say, in a way that’s attentive to philosophy and theology but beholden to neither, but also attentive to language . Pranger talks about the opulence of Augustine’s language. And I think that’s a beautiful description of it; it expresses this sheer semiotic range across which he works. It’s also attentive to rhetoric—to the way in which Augustine’s thoughts are necessarily expressed, to some degree, within the conventions of rhetorical structures. It’s an incredibly cultivated, capacious book. One of the problems with a lot of secondary work on Augustine is that, as we said already, there are five million words to grapple with. And then, goodness knows how much secondary material there is to grapple with. My doctoral advisor used to say that people vanish down the Augustinian rabbit hole. There’s just so much and they forget to read anything else or think about anything else. And then it becomes a completely hermetic conversation. So another reason I love this book is it is the product of a truly wide ranging and cultivated mind. Pranger is bringing Augustine into conversation with Proust, into conversation with Samuel Beckett , into conversation with a particular favourite of his, Henry James. And he also comes back to music. Every now and then he engages the most unbelievably revealing metaphor from music. And the single best one I can describe is when he talks about this punctum temporis , he likens it to watching a conductor conducting an orchestra at a specific moment. He says the conductor, as it were, hits the note. And that’s the punctum temporis . But it’s all part of the continuous motion of the baton. And you could not describe which point it is—you can only hear the results. Now, obviously, music was produced in very different ways in Augustine’s time. But I think if Augustine were here watching an orchestra, he would say, Yes, that’s it. That’s what I was trying to express. And particularly given the contrast between the attentio (the focus) and the distentio animi (the drawing apart of the mind) that Augustine ultimately says is the nature of time. “Augustine’s greatest temptation as he tries to live an ascetic life is not food, drink, or sex. It is music” I hesitated over choosing this book, precisely because it’s a very difficult book. And there’s a very long chapter in the middle of it that takes predestination and its problems and its paradoxes really seriously. It really stares them down. I won’t even attempt to give a summary of what’s going on there. In the end, I decided I did want to propose it for two reasons. One is precisely because it draws on so many different disciplines. I didn’t want to just choose a work of philosophy, or, you know, something that was beholden to the philosophical discipline or theological discipline. I wanted a work that was attentive to Augustine as a literary presence too. The other reason is because the author himself legitimates reading it piecemeal. He has a preface called ‘Rambling’. Obviously, he wants people to read the book from beginning to end, but he says that a perfectly legitimate way to read it is to cherry-pick and to focus on specific sections. I think that’s an important thing to know for readers who might be daunted by it. The latter, exactly. He’s not making an argument for direct influence. Now, there are people who are incredibly significant, including I think, literarily significant, who have formed their thoughts through reading Augustine. I’ve already mentioned Hannah Arendt . Another work I pondered choosing was Derrida’s Circumfession . I think Derrida is one of the best readers of Augustine there has ever been. And it’s partly again from this very explicit North African perspective, but also again from this incredibly creative and transgressive mind. But the argument of Eternity’s Ennui is not that they are directly influenced by Augustine but that they are sensitive to the same problems, and grapple with them in ways that both resonate with and illuminate what Augustine does. It has changed at different moments according to which works of Augustine I’m reading and what I’m thinking about. Right now, it is precisely about the African angle. It is so important to know that this towering intellectual figure actually came from North Africa, because it genuinely does shake up a lot of people’s assumptions about who’s important, and where’s important. And a lot of people hearing this find it incredibly encouraging that this immense figure is not from a dominant part of the world. Of course, Carthage actually was quite dominant in late antiquity. But nonetheless, North Africa was in many ways peripheral to the Roman Empire."