Elizabeth Klein: The Silent Word Speaks: Speech in The Confessions

"Have pity on me so that I may speak!" Augustine begs in the first book of The Confessions, "Grant me to plead before your mercy, grant me who is dust and ashes, to speak." (Conf. I.5.5). In The ConfessionsAugustine often petitions God for the ability to confess both his past sin and his present faith, to praise, to plead and to speak. These requests may seem at first superfluous, or at least rhetorical, as Augustine is pleading to do that which he is already doing. In this paper, however, I will argue that in the narrative course of The Confessions Augustine first renounces the prideful speech of rhetoric, and then turns to God to receive a new way of speaking. Augustine then not only believes that God is the source of his own speech in The Confessions, but he is also longing for his speech to approximate divine communication; that, is he longs for communication which is completely coherent, where the word does not pass into existence and out of it, but is spoken as eternal truth. I contend, moreover, that Augustine's Ostia experience is best understood as this kind of divine speaking, more so than as a divine vision.