"To Rest In Thee":
Conversion and Simple Subjectivity

 

Alan Van Wyk

 

In discussions of Western subjectivity, Augustine’s Confessions is often posited as a foundational text. On the one hand, the positive anthropology Augustine develops is credited as anticipating all the essential features of the Modern subject as, for example, willed and willing, and individual. On the other hand, the form of the Confessions, as autobiography, is turned to as the first instance of the creation of a narratively derived subjectivity, a derivation that has by now become necessary.

As important as these two features are, they both miss what may be more fundamental in Augustine’s work; namely, a certain logic of conversion. In the Confessions, we see displayed in and through Augustine’s life the logic of conversion whereby a differentiated, wandering and sinful life is converted into a simplicity through which it can find its rest (and reality) in God. In other words, I want to argue in this paper, we see in the Confessions, and Augustine’s work in a broader scope, a logic of conversion whereby difference is overcome and simplified in a subject existing in time. When we turn from Augustine’s Confessions to other texts, we see this same logic repeated in his understanding of the relation of the Trinity to the oneness of God and the unity of creation. Although I cannot, in the scope of this paper, fully develop this thesis, by focusing on this logic of conversion whereby difference is overcome in the name of simplicity, it would be possible to gain a better understanding of Augustine’s influence on Modernity.

 

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