Confessions Weird Tale Postmedieval

Artic le

Confess ions and the creation of thewil l : A weird tale

Matthew Bryan Gil l isDepartment of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN.

Abstract This essay examines Augustine’s Confessions as a horror tale using aphenomenological methodology with the intent of showing that this text is the literaryexpression of the author’s philosophical concept of the will. Elements of theweird tale serve as a literary model for this essay, so that it reads in many ways like ahorror tale relating Confessions’ horror tale. The main purpose of this approach is tode-familiarize this canonical and hegemonic text so we can escape its powerful spell andview it differently.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2014) 5, 72–91.doi:10.1057/pmed.2013.25; published online 8 November 2013

This essay is the fruit of a troubling discovery: Prof. A.’s influential Confessions –a longstanding literary and devotional classic (Courcelle, 1963, 201–547; Clark,1993, 92–106; Wills, 2011, 133–148) – conceals beneath its moralizing languageof self-discovery and spiritual homecoming a disturbing tale of horror.1 Putanother way, Prof. A.’s narrative masks his weird encounter with an extraordin-ary, otherworldly force that eventually overwhelmed and dominated him, leadinghim to join the cult of the Anointed Ones. The professor’s influence on thesubsequent history of this cult and on western thought in general makes itimperative to avoid even uttering his name in this essay. Indeed, his power as anauthor to ‘hypnotize’ his readers (as O’Donnell recently put it) hides the darkevents leading up to his historic initiation into the Anointed Ones, so that naminghim now only risks conjuring up established notions of him and The Confessions

1 I kindly thank thefollowing scholarsfor insights andencouragementthat helped withthe completion ofthis essay:Monica Black,Tom Burman,Erin Darby,

© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 5, 1, 72–91www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/

that prevent new thinking about the account of his ‘turn’ (‘conversio’) (O’Donnell,2006, 6). Instead, this essay offers a provocative and deliberately perverse restagingof his post-turn Confessions to examine the weird event behind his turn and toreveal the text itself as the literary expression of his profoundly influential conceptof the will rather than a reliable account of his early life and turn.

Here ‘weird’ serves as a phenomenologically informed term for describing anexperience that violates and overcomes a person’s most fundamental beliefsabout the cosmos. It is a dramatic point of no return where the world suddenlybecomes unfamiliar, strange, even horrifying. More than anything, one’s anthro-pocentric notions of space, time and existence in general are confounded: whatwas believed as true is now clearly ‘madness,’ whereas what would have beenmadness before is now inescapably ‘true.’ Whether willing or not, the personparticipates in a new and unfamiliar world, conceptualizing that experience sothat the weird reshapes the person even as that person conceptualizes the weird.

This essay argues that the weird should be accepted as troubling rather thanrenounced as troublesome. In that spirit, the first section here unveils thedisquieting nature of Prof. A.’s weird encounter with an otherworldly thing bydistinguishing it as historical event from his post-turn Confessions with itsunreliable narrative and moralizing, cultic discourse (Fredriksen, 1986, 20–34;O’Donnell, 2006, 5–6, 36–37). Through phenomenological approaches and byreading against the grain we will uncover the subterranean experience – thetroubling weird event itself – that lurks beneath the professor’s telling. Separatingthe raw event from the calculating, cultic narrative is necessary because Confes-sions is the product of the professor’s conceptualization of the weird, hisreimagining of the cosmos after his weird encounter, which transforms his pre-turn experiences within the post-turn weird framework. The second half of thisessay examines the professor’s concept of the will as the expression of his post-turn cosmos – a disturbing perspective whose legacy cannot be underestimated –

to show how, beneath its dramatic literary form, Confessions is a ruthlesslyphilosophical text designed to transform its readers in its own weird image.

Prof. A.’sConfessions has spawned a vast body of scholarship (Severson, 1996;Van Fleteren, 1999). Even beyond questions of cult, the work’s influenceon medieval, modern and postmodern conceptions of personal narrative andidentity is tremendous (Ricoeur, 1984, 5–30 and passim; Stock, 2001, 52–85;Caputo and Scanlon, 2005; Taylor, 2009, 26–46 and passim). What is particu-larly troubling about this vast body of work is that the link between theprofessor’s turn as historical event and his account of it in Confessions remainslargely intact, despite debates about the likelihood that key scenes of his turn arefictional creations (Courcelle, 1950, 188–202; O’Meara, 1954; Ferrari, 1989).The work is generally accepted as a spiritual and literary autobiography –

whatever literary license is taken with telling the story – and one whose messageabout the nature of evil speaks to the human condition (Evans, 1982, 1–7; Brown,2000, 151–175). The philosophical thrust of Confessions – the naturalization of

Ernie Freeberg,Maura Laffertyand the studentsof her Confessionsin Latin seminar,Gregor Kalas,Jacob Latham,Jack Love, JayRubenstein, TinaShephardson,Robert Wilken,the members ofthe University ofTennessee’sSeminar in LateAntiquity, andpostmedieval’seditors and twoanonymousreaders.

Confessions and the creation of the will

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the will to human experience – is allowed to stand as a self-evident component ofthe professor’s philosophizing and especially Platonizing tendencies (Courcelle,1963, 17–88; O’Connell, 1989, 75–80 and passim; Cary, 2000, 33–36, 47–49,63–76), or is embedded as a natural element in his expressions of earthly andheavenly desire (Miles, 1992; Burrus et al, 2010).

While some of the professor’s most recent critics have rightly encouragedcaution about the historicity of Confessions as a conversio account (Frederiksen,1986; O’Donnell, 2006), we must go much further. It is not enough to think theprofessor without falling under his spell, an undertaking O’Donnell describes as‘exhilarating and terrifying’ (O’Donnell, 2006, 6), for we must make Prof. A.downright unfamiliar in order to escape his cunning powers (O’Donnell, 2006).This means following Nietzsche’s advice that we think ‘untimely’ thoughts toescape the contextual constrictions on the imagination (Nietzsche, 1980, 62). Inso doing, we can avoid neutralizing and normalizing encounters with the weird incultural and social terms, ‘explaining’ them in this way and in the processexplaining them away.

Lastly, readers should note that this essay is offered as a weird event, adisruptive and violating encounter between readers today and Confessions, thatmost dangerous of all ancient or medieval texts. Such a method is indebted toGilles Deleuze’s creative approach to philosophy through which he restagedthinkers and their ideas, an act Deleuze himself described as philosophical‘buggery’ (Deleuze, 1983, 1990, 1995, 6). The results of his studies were‘monstrous’ offspring of earlier, influential figures that opened up new directionsin the debates about their ideas and significance. This essay’s Deleuzian restagingof Prof. A.’s tale and Confessions is both inspired by the literary mode ofarticulating weird encounters in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and informed byphenomenological approaches for analyzing them (Lovecraft, 2005; VanderMeerand VanderMeer, 2012). It is hoped that this essay’s monstrous restaging ofProf. A. will encourage other strange offspring to spread disquiet among thereaders of this and similar hegemonic texts.

The Phenomenology of the Weird

Prof. A.’s encounter with the weird happened during his tenure as professor ofrhetoric in Milan (Prof. A., 1992, 56–57).2 It occurred while on a retreat inwhich the professor read philosophy and discussed different views of the cosmoswith friends (Prof. A., 1992, 70–71, 73–102). These young intellectuals wereall successful in their careers, but all were equally sensitive and troubledabout the nature of the universe and their place in it (Prof. A., 1992, 64–68).In this tense atmosphere the professor encountered something far beyond hisimaginings: things without bodies (Prof. A., 1992, 80–82, 86). To someone who

2 ‘Prof. A,’ usedthroughout theessay, refers to‘Augustine’ on theReferences list.

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understood the world in terms of things as bodies, the notion of an existing but stillbodiless thing was strange and disturbing (Prof. A., 1992, 42–43, 73–74). But whatmade the professor’s experience so upsetting was that the entity he encounteredwas something – some alien thing – dwelling within him (Prof. A., 1992, 81–82).

Before examining the details of Prof. A.’s case, however, we must uncover thesecrets of the phenomenology of the weird. Phenomenology itself is a radical practiceof philosophy that attempts ‘to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, inthe broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as itmanifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer’ (Moran, 2000, 4). As Husserl,the founder of phenomenology, argued: we must return ‘to the things themselves’(‘an den Sachen selbst’) rather than let our preconceived notions of them – whetherthey are commonsensical, cultural, historical, religious or whatever – interfere withour experience of them (Husserl, 1970, 2, 252). For, as Husserl argued, conscious-ness is always ‘intentional,’ meaning that it is always directed at some particularthing (Husserl, 1970, 2, 552–596; Moran, 2000, 113–118). Correspondingly,objects are always ‘given’ to consciousness in a particular way, and it is in theirparticular state of givenness that we should consider them (Husserl, 1983, 44;Moran, 2000, 10, 16–17, 138–139). This was true for all objects of consciousness,including those not falling within the bounds of empirical methods.

The phenomenology of the weird examines encounters with objects beyond aperson’s realm of understanding. As such, these encounters are not everyday ones.Instead, they are fundamental violations of one’s sense of cosmic order through thealien. According to phenomenologist Waldenfels, ‘the alien emerges in the shape ofsomething extraordinary that cannot find its place in the respective order, and, atthe same time, as what is being excluded, it is not nothing’ (Waldenfels, 2011, 4).An alien or weird encounter happens without a person’s consent, bringing pathosand suffering in its wake (Waldenfels, 2011, 84). The extraordinary or alien is,therefore, a troubling phenomenon that evokes what Martin Heidegger termed‘dread’ (‘Angst’) and Sigmund Freud called the ‘uncanny’ (‘das Unheimliche’).Heidegger’s notion of dread is the experience of a person made suddenly anddisturbingly aware of their mortality, that is, their very precarious, very transitoryplace in the world (Heidegger, 1927, 244–253). As a result, the person must find away to continue living with a deep sense of their inevitable death. Heideggerdeveloped his phenomenology from Freud’s examination of the uncanny, whichfocuses on the alarming sense of strangeness, or the feeling of being ‘not at home’(a literal translation of ‘unheimlich’) in one’s own skin or physical surroundingswhen faced with something horrifying (Freud, 2003, 123–134).

But a key element of the weird experience is that it is an encounter withsomething that exceeds what can possibly be true in the world. Such anencounter involved what essayist and fiction author Howard Phillips Lovecraft –who first identified and examined weird phenomena in his essays, letters andfiction – described as experiences with things from the ‘Outside’ ( Joshi, 1990,168–229).3 These things brought forth ‘a profound sense of dread, and of contact



with unknown spheres and powers’ (Lovecraft, 1973, 16). Lovecraft, whosuffered from terrible and shockingly vivid nightmares as a child, expressed hisjoy in creating stories that fundamentally disturbed his readers’ understandingof the universe (Lovecraft, 2000, 122; Joshi, 2010, 34). He described the weirdsensibility as a ‘sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitiveminority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses ofunplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known worldfrom unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter,force, dimensionality, and consciousness’ (Lovecraft, 2000, 213). The encounterwith the alien, with things from Lovecraft’s Outside, evokes an unsettlingawareness of an entity beyond what is thinkable, but which is nonetheless thereto be experienced (Thacker, 2010, 1–3; cf. Waldenfels, 2011, 73).

Lovecraft’s unusual preoccupations enabled him to identify and capture in literaryform the weird as phenomenal experience. Though he worked in obscurity during hislifetime, Lovecraft has – like Edgar Allan Poe, according to Joyce Carol Oates –

exerted ‘an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horrorfiction’ (Oates, 1996), and a collection of his tales has recently been added to thedistinguished The Library of America series (2005). The literary sensibility of thesetales, coupled with a phenomenological approach, offer a way into examiningweird encounters. As something inconceivable and impossible, the weird is onlypartly describable and at best graspable in fragments and especially throughmetaphor. Husserl emphasized the mind’s playfulness when describing phenom-ena, much in the way that Lovecraft’s stories contain strange, fragmentary andsuggestive imagery to describe Outside things (Harman, 2008, 333–364). Meta-phor, in particular, captures the weird encounter by overcoming the dividebetween experiencer and object with poetic language (Harman, 2005, 101–124).Phenomenology is central to the study of the weird because it focuses on thevery conjunction of sensation, emotion and thought in order to bring other-wise unthinkable and indescribable things into the orbit of scholarly discussion.In this way, an examination of the weird is possible without denying the actualinaccessibility of weird phenomena.

The final secret of the weird is that it transforms what it encounters. Thismetamorphosis goes beyond what Heidegger described as the need to liveauthentically in the face of one’s own death. For, as Waldenfels puts it, ‘theexperience of the alien always affects our own experience and thus turns into abecoming-alien experience’ (Waldenfels, 2011, 3). Putting it another way, theweird somehow makes its own anyone or anything coming into contact with it:non-weird thing becomes weird thing. There is, however, a reciprocal element ofchange in this transformation. The becoming-weird experience also includes theperson’s conceptualization of the weird, a conceptualization in which the weird isincorporated into the cosmos by the cosmos being expanded to include the weird.

The divide between weird and non-weird is tremendous. This chasm can onlybe surmounted by an encounter with the weird, whether directly or through the

3 Asma draws thecomparisonbetween Freud’suncanny,Heidegger’s Angstand Lovecraft’snotion of cosmicfear (Asma, 2009,184–186, 188–190).

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weird-thing’s conceptualization of that encounter. Therefore, because this divideis so powerful and otherwise insurmountable, we will use the term ‘madness’ todescribe it. For the conceptualization of the weird involves complex shifts in thecosmos and the dramatic reassigning of values, so that what is true in the non-weirdcosmos is madness in the weird cosmos, and what is true in the weird cosmos ismadness in the non-weird. As the philosopher Kołakowski noted: ‘a philosophybecomes intelligible through a kind of initiation which is not preceded by an act ofintellectual understanding; we understand it in the very act of acceptance’(Kołakowski, 2001, 108). In these same terms, one cannot understand the weirdcosmos without contact with it, and one cannot have contact with it withoutaccepting it in some degree. The weird is, therefore, somehow an agent in itself, aforce that affects those encountering it directly or what it touches.

Let us now return to Prof. A.’s case. We will draw selectively from his account ofthe encounter with the weird and read those passages phenomenologically, payingspecial attention to the professor’s use of metaphors, which though drawn fromhis post-cultic discourse still contains the kernel of his dramatic experiences.When Prof. A. was on leave from his duties and enjoying the company of hisphilosopher friends, he discovered something he had never imagined before: bodiless-things. The professor learned how the Platonists described a different reality to theone he knew, an interior one, where these strange things existed. On the basis of hisresearches and his discussions with friends, the professor decided to conduct aPlatonist ritual to experience this interior world where bodiless-things allegedlyexisted in order to find out for himself what they were (Prof. A., 1992, 81–82).

It was then the professor encountered the weird. He looked within himself andentered into his ‘innermost places’ (intima), and there he saw something, somealien thing, which was not him (Prof. A., 1992, 81). It was a shining, but‘unchangeable light’ (lux inconmutabilis) that was so strange he struggled todescribe it: it was neither an ‘ordinary’ (vulgaris) sort of light that is ‘visible to allflesh’ (conspicia omni carni), nor a greater and more luminous version of the samekind – instead, it was ‘different, absolutely different’ (aliud, valde aliud) from anykind of light he had ever witnessed (Prof. A., 1992, 81). The thing was so strangethat, though he sensed it was within him, he was far off from it ‘in a region ofunlikeness’ (in regione dissimilitudinis). The thing’s brightness pained him verymuch, and it somehow raised him up to get a vague glimpse of its powerfulradiance so that when he saw it, he ‘trembled in love and horror’ (contremui[t]amore et horrore) (Prof. A., 1992, 82).

Here are several key factors. First, it is an encounter with the alien – with someother thing coming from a realm of ‘total unlikeness’ to the professor’s. That it isan ‘interior’ encounter only underscores its weird nature, showing that theprofessor’s ‘Inside’ is what Lovecraft described as ‘Outside.’ Second, the thing isindescribable, or beyond the professor’s powers to capture through description: itis a light, but an unnatural light that shines without changing and its brightness ispowerful enough to pain his ‘inner eye.’ Third, the thing acts upon the professor,



lifting him up to see it and hurting him. It is a thing that can and does affect him.Fourth, the professor’s response to this thing is physical and sensual: he trembles.As Carroll argues, the physical element in the horror emotion is central (Carroll,2010, 24–25). The Latin word horror comes from the verb horrere, whichliterally means ‘to have one’s skin crawl’ and was associated with encounters withotherworldly forces (Lewis and Short, 1879, 864–865; Glare, 1996, 804–805).The professor’s physical reaction involves the contradictory emotions of love andhorror in response to an unearthly power (not uncommon in ancient cults,including the Anointed Ones [Rosenwein, 2006, 145–147]), which evidences thething’s unthinkable yet undeniable and overwhelming presence.

The encounter, however, quickly became stranger. For the thing revealed toProf. A. that it had incredible powers to transform him into itself: ‘I am the foodof grown things: grow and you will devour me. And you will not change me intoyou as your flesh’s food, but you will be changed into me’ (Prof. A., 1992, 82;italics mine).4 Then the thing uttered its strange name – ‘Sum-Qui-Sum’ –

meaning something like ‘I Am Who I Am,’ and the professor found he wouldsooner doubt his own existence than the existence of the thing within him.5

Let us consider this alarming revelation for a moment. Sum-Qui-Sum’s claimabout itself is precisely weird: it is a bodiless thing inside the professor that claimsit will feed itself to the professor, be digested by the professor, but then – unlikeother food – it will turn the professor into itself. Wetzel suggests that thinking interms of fleshy digestion is merely ‘crudely materialistic’ (Wetzel, 2010, 56). Yet ifwe take this description (like Prof. A.’s portrayal of the thing as an unfathomable,painful and grasping light) as a metaphor capturing Sum-Qui-Sum’s otherwiseindescribable nature, then we must try to uncover the metaphor’s meaning andget at what Husserl called the thing’s ‘essence’ (Husserl, 1970, 249; cf. Moran,2000, 1–2, 134–135).

The professor’s metaphor subverts the usual meaning of interiority andnourishment: Sum-Qui-Sum is within the professor, like food that has been eaten,but unlike food the professor has previously eaten, it will transform him intoitself. The encounter between the body-thing (the professor) and the bodiless-thing (Sum-Qui-Sum) overcomes the professor’s thinking of nature, but henevertheless captures it in this strange and frightening image: the bodiless-thingclaims an unimaginable mastery over him that will cause him to be transformedinto something wholly different, something bodiless – the alien thing itself.

Prof. A. struggled against this becoming-alien experience, refusing to show thesubmission and obedience Sum-Qui-Sum demanded (Prof. A., 1992, 84–85).Confessions contains the traces of this historical struggle in the form of theprofessor’s reluctance to make the turn to the Anointed Ones, whom he came toidentify as Sum-Qui-Sum’s principal minions (Prof. A., 1992, 86–87). On thispoint, it is worth exploring the resonance between Prof. A.’s metaphor of thebecoming-alien experience (of Sum-Qui-Sum consuming him) with the AnointedOnes’ understanding of their deity as a shepherd to see how this connection made

4 Confessiones, VII,10, 16: ‘Cibussum grandium:cresce etmanducabis me.Nec tu me in temutabis sicutcibum carnis tuae,sed tu mutaberisin me.’

5 Readers will notethe allusion toExodus 3:14.

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sense to him. The Anointed Ones often describe their god (or its lieutenants) as ashepherd – the deity’s flesh-born son even claiming to be the ‘good shepherd’ intheir writings – while the cultists are its ‘sheep’ (Gan, 2007, 27–37; Baxter, 2011,125–165).6 While this terminology is generally said to emphasize the deity’s (or itsleading servants’) role as the sheep’s protector and provider, another unexploredand troubling meaning presents itself. For we might ask: Why does a shepherdmaintain a flock except to eat the sheep? Whether by the shepherd or anothermaster, the sheep are obviously there to be eaten. Even the harvesting of their woolonly foreshadows the harvesting of their flesh. The horrific imagery in the Book ofJeremiah of an angry deity, embodied in Israel’s earthly foes, devouring theHebrews as punishment for their infidelity puts the basic assumption of thisdisturbing metaphor (that the deity will devour the sheep) in stark relief simply bychanging the face of the deity from benevolent and protecting to monstrous andwrathful (Kalmanofsky, 2008, 58–67). To refuse the shepherd is to be amongwolves that compete with the deity and threaten its source of nourishment, thesheep (Ezekiel 22, 27; Matthew 7, 15, 10, 16; Luke 10, 3; Acts 20, 29).

Being ‘food for the alien’ and showing obedience to an otherworldly master aremetaphors for the becoming-alien experience that Prof. A. resisted. He employedanother metaphor in his notorious account of his reluctance to give up sexualpleasures in the process of his turn, which he described as a struggle in which ‘fleshlusted against spirit and spirit against flesh’ (‘caro concupisceret adversus spiritumet spiritus adversus carnem’) (Prof. A., 1992, 93).7 The professor as ‘flesh’ was thebody-thing resisting alien domination by the ‘spirit,’ the bodiless-thing, Sum-Qui-Sum. Prof. A.’s becoming-alien experience fundamentally involved the acceptanceof Sum-Qui-Sum’s weird hierarchical world of the Inside, where bodiless-thingswere superior to body-things (Prof. A., 1992, 75–76).

The struggle between Prof. A. and the thing from the Inside was not one ofequals. Sum-Qui-Sum had a strange and terrifying power to force the professor toview body-things – in particular Prof. A. himself – through its alien, bodilessperspective. In a dramatic moment in Confessions’ account of his struggle, Prof. A.wrote that Sum-Qui-Sum turned his mind’s eye around in the Inside so that theprofessor saw his body-thing self as alien and horrifying: he was ‘deformed’(turpis) and ‘crooked and filthy, spotted and ulcerous’ (distortus et sordidus,maculosus et ulcerosus) (Prof. A., 1992, 95–96). This alien perspective ‘horrified’(horreba[t]) the professor, although he did not have the power to resist theforceful control over his inner eye.

Sharing its alien vision with the professor was a dreadful moment in theprofessor’s turn. It involved what Freud called the uncanny experience of thedouble, in which the victim struggles with the uncertainty of knowing which ofthe two entities – the ‘original’ self or the double – they actually are (Freud, 2003,141–142). André Mandouze suggested that this passage of Confessions describeswhat a psychoanalyst would identify as an experience of alienation (Mandouze,1968, 468, quoted by O’Donnell in Prof. A., 1992, III, 42). As a result of this

6 Prof. A. himselfuses the termseveral times:Confessiones, III,2, 4; VIII, 3, 6; IX,3, 5; X, 36, 59;and XII, 15, 21.

7 The reference is toRomans 13:13.



inner doubt and turmoil, the professor tortured himself physically by tearing hishair and beating his forehead (Prof. A., 1992, 97). As has been recently argued,he drew from the image of the tortured Roman slave in Confessions to describehis mournful suffering from Sum-Qui-Sum here and elsewhere (Burrus et al,2010, 63) – obviously an image meant to emphasize his post-turn view of thecorrectness of his subsequent submission. Yet the account preserves the kernel ofhis stubborn resistance against the Inside thing, revealing how the professor felt‘sick and tortured’ (aegrotaba[t] et excruciaba[tur]) from the struggle: he resistedbecause each time he sensed he might be overcome by Sum-Qui-Sum andtransformed into ‘some-thing different’ (aliud), the thought ‘filled him with moreand more horror’ (ampliorem incutiebat horrorem) (Prof. A., 1992, 99–100).

Yet, at last, the professor was overwhelmed in the struggle (Prof. A., 1992,101). A weird, singsong voice called to him during the peak of his torture, tellinghim about the book nearby to ‘Take it, read it! Take it, read it!’ (tolle lege,tolle lege). He picked up the writings of the Anointed Ones nearby and thetext commanded him to abandon the ‘flesh.’8 Whether meant as a literal ormetaphorical account, the weird assault from Sum-Qui-Sum from within andfrom the words of the book in his hands together were enough to overcome him,and the professor succumbed to what seemed like madness before (Prof. A., 1992,103): He willed what Sum-Qui-Sum willed. The professor captured the uncannynature of this becoming-alien experience by describing the power to do as Sum-Qui-Sum wanted as something ‘called forth from some profound and secretdepth’ (‘de quo imo altoque secreto evocatum est’) within himself. A reward forhis submission quickly followed, but it was an alien sensation that now waswholly pleasing: ‘true and supreme sweetness… sweeter than all pleasure, but notto flesh and blood; brighter than all light, but more inward than all secret depths’(‘vera ... et summa suavitas ... omni voluptate dulcior, sed non carni et sanguini,omni luce clarior, sed omni secreto interior’) (Prof. A., 1992, 103).

The professor had become alien. He willed what Sum-Qui-Sum willed andenjoyed its overwhelming presence within him as sweet pleasure rather than as aterrifying alien. He was no longer Prof. A. body-thing, but weird bodiless-thing.This transformation entailed a kind of death – the end of his former self and thebeginning of a new self (or, as we shall see, selves) – a kind of madness in the formof an understanding of the cosmos that exceeded his earlier, body-thing world.This new universe was a hierarchical world of superior bodiless-things and basebody-things, a world once unthinkable, but now undeniably true.

The Conceptual ization of the Weird

When Prof. A. revealed Sum-Qui-Sum’s weird cosmos in Confessions a littleover a decade after his turn (Brown, 2000, 178), he unleashed a becoming-alien experience on his readers. Through a combination of dramatic and unique

8 The reference is toGalatians 5:17.

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first-person narrative and philosophical self-exploration, the professor hurled hisaudience directly into Sum-Qui-Sum’s realm of the Inside and insisted thatanyone not submitting to this bodiless master was a wicked and perverted horror,a deformed creature in rebellion against the cosmic order. Obedience was the onlymoral choice, for the denizens of the universe consisted only in Sum-Qui-Sum’sminions and enemies. Body-thing humans were ignorant of the Inside because oftheir corrupting experiences in the physical universe. Submission to Sum-Qui-Sum meant above all surrendering all of one’s desire to it: to desire things of theearthly, body-thing world instead of Sum-Qui-Sum was a dreadful perversion, thewellspring of all wickedness. The only escape for the professor’s readers fromtheir own horrific monstrosity was to follow his inward path; otherwise, theywere the source of cosmic evil.

Such is the logic of Prof. A.’s concept of the ‘will’ (voluntas) in Confessions, theconceptualization of his weird encounter with Sum-Qui-Sum. The concept of thewill creates a cosmos in which only two kinds of human entities can exist,perverted and corrected ones. It was not intended to articulate an experience of‘free will,’ but to alienate readers from themselves by creating a sense of crisis: asbody-things they had been corrupted and made into monsters through their ownworldly desires, which, as a result, led them to forget their ‘true home’ in theInside. In moralizing human desire in these terms, Prof. A. philosophicallyreframed the cosmos for his readers in the image of his weird struggle with andeventual submission to Sum-Qui-Sum.

Prof. A.’s concept of the will – rather than explaining the mysteries of good andevil and human freedom as the professor claimed and others have accepted as true(Arendt, 1978, 84–110; Dihle, 1982, 123–144; Kahn, 1988; Harrison, 1999;Karfíková, 2012, 89–103, 347–353; Marion, 2012, 145–190)9 – possesses adangerous power to limit the possibilities of human experience. For the nature ofthe conceptualization of the weird is that it transforms an individual becoming-alien experience into a universalizing one to be passed onto others so that they toobecome alien in that particular way. For this reason, we must refuse Confessions’claims to be an account of the author’s ‘spiritual journey’ to the ‘Anointed Ones’’deity (Gilson, 1960, 113–164) in order to see how the professor’s discussions ofthe nature of evil, human interiority and self-discovery, and the psychology ofdesire (Evans, 1982; Cary, 2000, 63–139; Fredriksen, 2008, 196–2010; Burruset al, 2010, 62–84) were intended to captivate the human imagination – literallyto hold it captive with his moral vision of the universe – and prevent alternate andcontradictory experiences. The professor’s debts to the Greek philosophicaltradition (especially Stoicism and Neoplatonism) and Roman thought, jurispru-dence and culture are well established (Dihle, 1982, 123–144; Kahn, 1988) andthey will not be examined here.

Uncovering the will’s weird origins allows us to put a new twist on whatWetzel has rightly termed the ‘absoluteness of the will’ in Prof. A.’s post-turnthought in that here we highlight the absolute nature of Prof. A.’s concept while

9 Note that theseauthors sometimesconsider writingsbesidesConfessions.



simultaneously (to borrow a phrase from Alain Badiou) refusing its ‘regime ofdiscourse’ (Badiou, 2003, 41; Wetzel, 2010, 48). Such a stance is necessary toavoid the professor’s rhetorical and philosophical powers to mesmerize hisaudience – powers that make him the most treacherous of ancient and medievalauthors (Arendt, 1978, 84; cf. Kahn, 1988, 235). He was, after all, the first‘philosopher of the will’ (in Hannah Arendt’s words (Arendt, 1978, 84; cf. Kahn,1988, 235)), who controls mood and sensibility by being at once frighteninglyauthoritarian about the necessity of submission to Sum-Qui-Sum while alsoseductively delightful about the bodiless pleasures involved in that submission(Miles, 1992, 8–12; Burrus et al, 2010, 62–84). To elude Confessions’ spell wemust see it with different eyes. To that end, we will first consider the elements thatmake up the professor’s concept of the will, and then examine his method ofcreating a becoming-alien experience for his readers.

Prof. A.’s concept of the will – like all philosophical concepts (Deleuze andGuattari, 1994, 1–34) – offers a universalizing explanation for the cosmos: everyhuman being without exception is a res volens, a ‘thing that wills.’ Fundamentalto his concept of the will was the professor’s unique explanation of evil (Evans,1982, 112–118; Prof. A., 1992, 74–75, 82–83): evil in the world was caused bybody-things desiring other body-things through their perverted wills, and allbody-things turned away from the bodiless were corrupt. Evil was, then,inseparable from corrupted wills and the professor’s own past was used toillustrate this point (Evans, 1982, 1–7). According to the professor, wickednessitself was the ‘perversity of the will’ (voluntatis perversitas) turned away fromSum-Qui-Sum (Prof. A., 1992, 84). He explained his struggle to resist Sum-Qui-Sum as the result of his perverted will being unwilling to accept what the bodiless-thing demanded (which, he claimed, his mind understood as good and correct)(Prof. A., 1992, 97–99). Only when the professor willed what Sum-Qui-Sumwilled was his will properly turned ‘back’ to the bodiless (Prof. A., 1992, 103).

For the professor, the will is intentional in the phenomenological sense, in thatit is always pointed at something specific, and the human being is subjectto whatever receives the will’s attention. The will’s direction defines its quality,since things ‘cling’ (haerere) to the objects of their will. Foundational to theprofessor’s weird cosmos was the superiority of the changeless bodiless-thingover changing body-things, which meant that one’s ‘cling’ needed to be directedto the superior, interior things (Prof. A., 1992, 75–76). Clinging to the bodilesswas natural and correct – the righting of a wrong intentionality – since theunchanging Sum-Qui-Sum was always within all changing body-things frombeginning to end (Prof. A., 1992, 84–85, 119–147). The inward turn andsubmission to Sum-Qui-Sum, therefore, became naturalized through the profes-sor’s discussion of memory as a re-discovery of Sum-Qui-Sum rather than theweird discovery it was.

Prof. A.’s becoming-alien experience begins with his remarkable choice ofauthorial perspective: a first-person voice narrates or ‘confesses’ his tale in an

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autobiographical style, which was utterly unusual at the time (Matthews, 2010,42–43). His choice of language was scriptural, placing it firmly in the tradition ofthe Anointed Ones (Wolterstorff, 2006; Burton, 2007, 112–132). Yet philoso-phically this first-person perspective has the disturbing effect of making Prof. A.himself and his experiences the basis of truth (Matthews, 2010, 42–43). In effect,the post-turn professor – the res volens – becomes a universal figure: his post-turnperceptions become our perceptions as we are swept along by his narration andphilosophizing.

Critical to the professor’s creation of a becoming-alien experience is how thispost-turn, first-person perspective enabled him to create an alienating image of hispre-turn self. Prof. A. adopted what Carroll describes as the rhetoric of horrorstorytelling in order to elicit from his audience the emotional response of ‘arthorror’ with its elements of fear and revulsion towards the monstrous (Carroll,2010, 27–35). The professor’s own particular horror language was influencedprimarily by the writings of the Anointed Ones, whose ancient Hebrew textscontained an especially well-developed horror discourse (Kalmanofsky, 2008,105–129 and passim). The language of fornication, perversion and infidelity,with its sexual overtones, was central to Hebrew descriptions of the complexrelationship between Israel and its deity, as was the tradition of describing thedeity, its agents and the Hebrews themselves in monstrous terms.

For the professor’s narrative, the horrific and alienating discourse he used todescribe his pre-turn self had the uncanny power of creating what we might call a‘doppelganger effect.’ As noted above, Freud (2003, 123–134) saw the doppel-ganger, or double, as one of the most disturbing psychic images, since it causes theexperiencer to feel uncertain which of the two is their actual self. In Confessions,the professor’s post-turn self looks on his wicked pre-turn self in horror andrevulsion as a disturbing double, leading his readers to do the same. The arthorror discourse makes it absolutely clear that the post-turn professor is the onewith which readers should identify. The next logical step in the professor’sbecoming-alien experience, of course, was that readers should view their ownbody-thing selves with horror and revulsion, and follow the professor on hisweird inward path to Sum-Qui-Sum.

Some examples of Prof. A.’s use of art horror in Confessions will illustrate thisprocess. The professor noted that from the very beginning he had a vast capacityfor ‘fault’ (‘peccatum’) as a nasty, selfish body-thing. As an infant, Prof. A.greedily wanted his mother’s milk and screamed when his wishes were notfulfilled (Prof. A., 1992, 6–7). The professor’s verdict was clear: ‘the weakness ofinfants’ limbs is blameless, infants’ hearts are not’ (‘imbecillitas membroruminfantium innocens est, non animus infantium’) (Prof. A., 1992, 7). As a child, hedisobeyed his parents, had to be beaten into doing his studies, and lied andcheated to overcome his competitors in school and play (Prof. A., 1992, 9, 10–11,13–15). The only thing he came to love was poetry, a sort of ‘madness’(‘dementia’) that only body-things could love since it was predominantly about



human failings (Prof. A., 1992, 11). By painting his childhood in these tones,Prof. A. showed his readers that from the very outset of life all body-things wereprone to wickedness and corruption in their ordinary doings.

Yet the professor made clear that the central matter in the corruption of the willwas the bodily impurities and corruptions one experienced when enteringadulthood (Prof. A., 1992, 16). That was when his body-thing self embracedphysical pleasures and his will fell into corruption so that he began to havepleasure in doing what was not allowed. When his father saw the proof of hisadulthood on a visit to the baths, he encouraged his son’s corruption ‘in his verydepths by the invisible wine of a perverse and sinking will’ (‘de vino invisibiliperversae atque inclinatae in ima voluntatis’) (Prof. A., 1992, 17–18). At thatpoint the professor became evil for no reason at all except to love ‘foulwickedness’ (‘malitia foeda’) and ‘rebellion’ (‘defectum’), and his ‘deformed soul’(‘turpis anima’) sought its ‘destruction’ (‘exterminium’) in ‘shame’ (‘dedecus’) forits own sake (Prof. A., 1992, 19). Evil acts such as lying about sexual encountersand the theft of pears (only to throw them away) were perversions that delightedthis evil pre-turn will, further seducing it away from its bodiless master (Prof. A.,1992, 17–19).

To indulge in body-thing pleasures was the signature of perversion, and theprofessor used imagery of adultery to characterize his corrupted and rebelliouswill: the ‘soul adulterates itself’ (‘fornicatur anima’) against Sum-Qui-Sum inturning away from the bodiless-thing. Indeed, gazing at this terrible doppelgangerfilled Prof. A. with a horror that he could only describe through images ofmonstrous decay and death: ‘O putrescence! O monster of life and abyss ofdeath!’ (‘O putredo, o monstrum vitae et mortis profunditas!’) (Prof. A., 1992,21). His seduction to evil was meant to overwhelm his audience with revulsion: ‘Itis disgusting! I do not want to think about it, I do not want to see it!’ (‘foeda est;nolo in eam intendere, nolo eam videre’). He was a ‘wasteland’ (‘regio egestatis’)onto himself – the very image of death (Prof. A., 1992, 22). From that point on,the professor became ‘deformed’ (‘deformis’) (Prof. A., 1992, 80, 134) and a‘slave to lust’ (‘libidinis servus’) (Prof. A., 1992, 71), and he was ‘filled withterrible uncleanness’ (‘plenus exsacrandis sordibus’) and ‘insane with a profaneheart’ (‘insanus corde sacrilego’) (Prof. A., 1992, 52, 53).

Yet the professor showed his audience that the perversion of the will evenextended to other body-thing pleasures. He saw his desires for success in hiscareer as a teacher of the liberal arts and then a professor of rhetoric, as well as hisenjoyment of literature, as further cause for making him one of the ‘restlesswicked ones’ (‘inquieti iniqui’) that flee Sum-Qui-Sum and become ‘deformed’(‘turpes’) by their perverse desires (Prof. A., 1992, 46). In his ‘madness’(‘dementia’), he loved the theater’s ability to move him to tears, and he lovedhis friends so much that he could not bear their passing (Prof. A., 1992, 23–34,37–38). Even one of his otherwise upright friends was seduced by the perverseinsanity of the circus and gladiatorial games (Prof. A., 1992, 64–66).

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At the heart of the will’s corruption was that it tended to ‘cling’ (‘haerere’) towhatever perversions it desired. He wrote how his ‘heart clung’ (‘cors adhaer-ebat’) to his unnamed lover, who was taken away as an impediment to marriage,but as a slave to lust he could not do without sexual companionship, and so foundanother lover to take her place (Prof. A., 1992, 71). He also demonstrated thatthe cling of the will was contagious, writing how his circus and games-lovingfriend, who ‘had not clung’ (‘non haeserat’) to the pleasure of sexual intercourse,began ‘to cling to the glue of this pleasure’ (‘haerere visco illius voluptatis’)after hearing the professor endlessly talk about his sexual desires (Prof. A., 1992,69–70).

‘Clinging’ in terms of haerere, of course, carried with it the connotation ofsexual intercourse (Adams, 1982, 181–182). The professor’s use of the term withhis lover underscores this sexual meaning. Prof. A. characterized the most difficultpart of his struggle against Sum-Qui-Sum as abandoning sexual intercourse – andthe language he would use of clinging to Sum-Qui-Sum is quite similar –

suggesting that he recalled the turn as the abandoning of one perverted, bodypleasure for a superior bodiless one. The professor wrote that the bodiless-thing’scling to Sum-Qui-Sum was one of delight, just like the body-thing’s sexual cling,but it exceeded the latter since ‘where it clings satiety does not rend it asunder’(‘ubi haeret quod non divellit satietas’) (Prof. A., 1992, 122).

The link between submission and desire is what Burrus et al term theprofessor’s ‘eroticism of obedience’ (Burrus et al, 2010, 81). For as bodiless-thingthe professor still enjoyed pleasure, albeit in a new, interior form that reframedSum-Qui-Sum’s domination of him into desirable submission. According to theprofessor, his new form of pleasure was superior to the older ones as befitted thenew weird-cosmic hierarchy of the Inside, while his pre-turn desires had beentypical of an ‘infirm soul not yet clinging to the solidity of truth’ (‘anima infirmanondum haerens soliditati veritatis’) (Prof. A., 1992, 42).

The central moment of the professor’s becoming alien experience for hisreaders was when (as discussed above) Sum-Qui-Sum forced the professor to seehis body-thing self from its weird perspective. In the same way that Sum-Qui-Sumforced his mind’s eye to see himself as a horror during his historical experience,the professor forced his readers to look at his disgusting and deformed image.Here readers were expected to be repulsed by the ‘crooked and filthy, spotted andulcerous’ (Prof. A., 1992, 95–96) body-thing professor, and they shouldfurthermore see this doppelganger as a monstrous sign pointing to their ownhorrific body-thing selves.10

Alienated from their body-thing selves, the audience would be swept along theprofessor’s path to the Inside. For the turn provided the only escape from thishorrific image of humanity – quite literally, in fact – since in turning towardSum-Qui-Sum bodiless-things no longer regarded the outer world with their will.In its simplest terms, according to the professor, this change in desire removed theevil from the will: ‘Good is it always for one to cling to you’ (‘bonum autem illi est

10 Prof. A. wouldlater reflect on thevalue of suchmoments ofreflective horror.See hisEnarrationes inPsalmos, XXX,



haerere tibi semper’) (Prof. A., 1992, 185).11 The professor emphasized thechange of his will in his turn, saying that Sum-Qui-Sum ‘emptied the abyss ofcorruption from [his] heart’s foundation’ (‘a fundo cordis [eius] exhauriensabyssum corruptionis’) so that he could will what it willed (Prof. A., 1992, 103).

Confessions’ weird cosmos exceeded the non-weird cosmos by adding theInside realm, one eternal and superior to the external, body-thing world. Sum-Qui-Sum ruled both realms timelessly from the Inside as rightful master, andthe professor assured his readers that the transformation from body-thing tobodiless-thing ‘by clinging’ (‘cohaerendo’) to Sum-Qui-Sum had advantages: itenabled the bodiless-thing to avoid suffering from the passage of time (Prof. A.,1992, 169), since a bodiless-thing ‘clinging’ (‘cohaerens’) to Sum-Qui-Sumremains with it in the Inside realm permanently and unchangingly through all ofthe changes of time (Prof. A., 1992, 171, 174). The transformation from body-thing to bodiless-thing was to become the very weird light that the professordiscovered in his Platonic ritual, which happened ‘by observing the light andclinging to it’ (‘intuendo illuminantem lucem eique cohaerendo’) (Prof. A., 1992,185). In other words, the professor taught his audience that the desirabletransformation into a bodiless-thing, which Sum-Qui-Sum claimed would hap-pen, occurred through the cling, the intentionality of the will.

Key to Confessions’ becoming alien experience was that Prof. A. projected histurn as a foregone conclusion throughout the entire work. Looking back on hisstruggle against Sum-Qui-Sum, the professor claimed that the teachings of theAnointed Ones ‘clung to his heart’ (‘haerebat in corde’) long before he actuallymade his turn (Prof. A., 1992, 77). He even noted that his weird, inward encounterwith Sum-Qui-Summade it clear to him so that he ‘in no way doubted to what [he]must cling’ (‘neque ullo modo dubitabam esse cui cohaere[t]’), although as a body-thing he struggled against it for some time (Prof. A., 1992, 84).

The intended effect of such discourse was to propel his readers along theinward path to Sum-Qui-Sum as an inevitable, irresistible event. Prof. A.radicalized (in terms of radix), or made absolute, the turn in the humanexperience of time and space by describing it as a return to origins, placing Sum-Qui-Sum at the very roots of all existence. Drawing on the Platonic notion ofmemory, Prof. A. claimed that Sum-Qui-Sum had unchangingly been within himsince birth, and through his memory he could recover the knowledge of whatbeing a moral bodiless-thing meant (Prof. A., 1992, 118–147).12 In one move theprofessor reframed his disturbing discovery of Sum-Qui-Sum, the bodiless-thingwithin him, into a re-discovery. He undertook a lengthy examination of theopening passages of the Anointed Ones’ scripture, which articulated their deity’screation of the cosmos, in order to overturn his older body-thing vision of thecosmos. The change of vision was foundational on both the individual andcosmic levels: the weird-cosmos became universal and his former understandingof the world was eradicated, torn out at the roots. His entire personal historyformed part of the tale in order to make that change as complete as possible until

en. II, s. 1, v. 2, c.5: ‘Nam estquaedam confusiotemporalis utilis,perturbatio animirespicientispeccata sua,respectionehorrentis, horroreerubescentis,erubescentiacorrigentis.’ (Prof.A., 1956, 194).

11 This is an allusionto Psalms 72:28.

12 On the professor’sappropriation ofthe Platonictradition ofmemory, seeCorradini (1997,128–136) andCary (2000,125–139).

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his pre-turn life was only thinkable through his weird experience. Readers sweptinto this becoming-alien experience found themselves utterly within Sum-Qui-Sum’s weird cosmos, and the old cosmos – that is, however they viewed theuniverse before encountering Confessions – was conceptually washed away.

Prof. A.’s creation of the will, his writing of Confessions, explained his resistanceto the otherworldly Sum-Qui-Sum as rebellion against a rightful master, so that theexperience of losing his powers of volition to the alien led him to frame that eventas a universal one: every human being dwells within the weird cosmos and everyhuman being is a thing that wills (‘res volens’) either with or against Sum-Qui-Sum.Confessions has been tremendously successful in making its weird cosmos seemnatural so that only in de-familiarizing it through the phenomenology of the weirdand laying open its central concept can its powerful spell be broken.

In undertaking to break this spell, it has been paramount to avoid the pietymost readers show Confessions for its religious, literary and philosophicalqualities, since this piety has surely contributed to the disturbing resilience ofProf. A.’s concept of the will. Its longevity among the Anointed Ones in the Latin-speaking tradition should not be surprising. Arguably the tale of the professor’sturn and his account of the nature of evil have remained central to the cult’sapproach to the human–deity relationship and many of the most important culticthinkers over the centuries have worked within the concept’s orbit (Arendt, 1978,113–146; Evans, 1982, 170–184; Knuuttila, 1999). Yet the will’s shadow is castfar and wide across the intellectual and cultural landscape of the western tradition(Mathewes, 2011, 59–103). Even post-medieval, non-cultic philosophers fromRené Descartes (Menn, 1998; Wetzel, 2000) to Schopenhauer (2010, 123–127)to Friedrich Nietzsche (Arendt, 1978, 158–172; Nietzsche, 1989) to HannahArendt (Arendt, 1978, 195–217; Mathewes, 2011, 149–200) have been influ-enced by it, showing its hold on modern thought is wide-reaching to say the least.In addition to these famous philosophers, Lovecraft – our premier connoisseur ofthe weird – saw the ‘will to power’ in the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzscheas the driving force of all organic life in the universe (Lovecraft, 2000, 115–116).In this way, one might suggest that the weird as a category of experience andthought was born from the professor’s concept. This shared legacy of the conceptof the will has even spawned a reaction among today’s radical cultists like Hanby(2003), who recently argued that the only relationship between Prof. A.’s notionof the will and its ‘modern nihilistic Cartesian’ descendent is that the latter is a‘perversion’ of the former (i) – a word revealingly chosen directly from theprofessor’s own discourse.

About the Author

Matthew Bryan Gillis is a lecturer in the history department at the Uni-versity of Tennessee, Knoxville. Co-editor and contributor to the volume



Ego Trouble: Authors and Their Identities in the EarlyMiddle Ages, he is currentlyuncovering another weird tale concerning the ninth-century Augustinian heretic,Gottschalk of Orbais (E-mail: [email protected]).

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