He who makes the truth comes to the light.' The truth that
Augustine made in the Confessions had eluded him for years. It
appears before us as a trophy torn from the grip of the unsayable
after a prolonged struggle on the frontier between speech and
silence. What was at stake was more than words. The `truth' of
which Augustine spoke was not merely a quality of a verbal formula,
but veracity itself, a quality of a living human person.
Augustine `made the truth'ÄÄin this sense, became himself
truthfulÄÄwhen he found a pattern of words to say the true thing
well. But both the `truth' that Augustine made and the `light' to
which it led were for him scripturally guaranteed epithets of
Christ, the pre-existent second person of the trinity. For
Augustine to write a book, then, that purported to make truth and
seek light was not merely a reflection upon the actions of his life
but pure act itself, thought and writing become the enactment of
ideas.
Behind this fundamental act of the self lay powerful and
evident anxietiesÄÄevident on every page. Augustine is urgently
concerned with the right use of language, longing to say the right
thing in the right way. The first page of the text is a tissue of
uncertainty in that vein, for to use language wrongly is to find
oneself praising a god who is not God. The anxiety is intensified
by a vertiginous loss of privacy. Even as he discovers that he
possesses an interior world cut off from other people, he realizes
that he lies open before God: there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to
flee.
Anxiety so pervades the Confessions that even the implicit
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