23. Misch. Geschichte der Autobiographie
Von Georg Misch. ErsterBand: Das Altertum. Leipzig und Berlin: B. G. Teubner. 1907. 1
T his considerable volume is only one of three which shall contain a comprehensive history of autobiography. The work was undertaken in response to an offer of a prize for such a history, made through the Prussian Academy of the Sciences in 1900 ("Sitzungsberichte der Königlich
Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften," 1900, p. 55). Two manuscripts were presented—the one written more from the point of view of purely literary history (a history, therefore, of autobiographies), the other from a more philosophicosocial standpoint (a history, therefore, more of autobiography). The prize fell to the latter ("Sitzungsberichte," etc., 1905, p. 686); and it is this treatise, the first part of which now lies before us.
Although only a fragment of the whole work, this first part has nevertheless a completeness of its own. It gives us the entire history of autobiography in the old world. It has indeed a higher claim to unity than this merely external
fact may suggest. For the history of autobiography in the old world is not merely the history of the inception and development of autobiographical writing through a definitely marked literary period. It is the history of the growth of this literary form from its first tentative beginnings to its culmination; for this literary form reached its culmination as the old world was passing away. We can say even more than that. Both as a purely literary mode and as the expression of individuality autobiography attained its climax in a single work, which came into existence just as the old world was dying. The history of autobiography in antiquity may almost be read, therefore, as the history of the production of a single great work—the long preparation for it, ending in the finished product. And this is really the ground of our deepest interest in this history. For this one great work into which all these lines of preparation, so carefully traced by Dr. Misch, issue, is Augustine's "Confessions." The history of autobiography in antiquity may be looked at, then, as at bottom only an orderly study, in a genetic way, of Augustine's "Confessions." All that goes before them but leads slowly up the long slope to these heights. All that comes after rests in their shadow.
No one who reads Dr. Misch's detailed study of the origin and development not merely of autobiographical forms, but of autobiographical life-expression, will fail to feel this. Dr. Misch feels it himself, and from the beginning of his work keeps his readers' eyes set on the "Confessions" as the goal to which all tends. He is eager that it shall not be inferred from the circumstance that complete autobiographies in the strict sense scarcely attract attention in the Græco-Roman literature until the time of Augustine, that they were a new invention of that age. In point of fact, he insists, the bases for all the autobiographical developments of this age were laid in antiquity, "and Augustine's work is not a beginning but a completion" (p. 9). It is a part—a very large part—of his task to trace out the lines of development through which autobiography thus slowly came
to its rights. He begins at the beginning, by pointing out the autobiographical form which is taken in the Assyrio-Babylonian and Egyptian inscriptions. He fully recognizes, however, that the creation of true autobiography depends on the development of personality and the individualistic habit of looking at things. This he finds to have arisen first on Greek soil and to have received its first impulse from the introspection fostered by the Socratic self-consciousness, reinforcing our natural need of self-expression and desire to be understood—not to say to be admired.
Nevertheless autobiographical writing was slow in working out its inevitable destiny. Throughout the whole period of Greek culture up to the birth of Christ, it held only a very secondary place in literature. Only in the one species of political autobiography have we anything like a complete series of works of this order either preserved or witnessed to us. Beyond this, the cultivation of this literary form was in the hands of the rhetoricians, and it was from this subordinate region of life that the first
Greek autobiography worthy of its name—the so-called "Antidosis" of Isocrates—has come down to us (b.c. 353). In this artificial defense of himself against an imaginary opponent, the rhetorician, in full consciousness of the novelty of his task, undertook, for the benefit of the ill-informed and of future generations, to depict his own character, his course of life, and his training: to make known the truth concerning himself, and to set out "an image of his mind and of his whole life"; fondly hoping thus "to leave behind him a monument to himself more lasting than statues of brass." The example thus set by Isocrates was not, however, at once widely followed. At least there have come down to us, for the space of some three hundred years, outside of the steady succession of political autobiographies from Alexander down, little or no traces of autobiographical writing. After the time of Cicero, however, the stream began to flow with gradually increasing fullness, and by the second century
after Christ we find ourselves in the presence of an astonishing variety of autobiographical forms. Here side by side appear Hadrian's "Vita," Galen's treatises on his own books, Marcus Aurelius' "Meditationes," the romance of Apuleius with its autobiographical conclusion, the "sacred orations" of Ælius Aristides, the subject of which is his daily communion in his sickness with the deity, the visions of the martyr Perpetua and numerous
Hellenizing histories of conversion like those of Justin and Cyprian.
One of Socrates' immediate pupils, Antisthenes, on being asked what he had gained from philosophy, replied, "the power to hold converse with my soul." Yet throughout all the centuries alike of Hellenic and Hellenistic culture few attempts seem to have been made to create a literary form of self-inspection. The history of his development which Cicero gives in his
"Brutus" is perhaps the completest attempt at self-analysis which was made before Augustine (p. 196). From Cicero the line of the evolution of the literary expression of self-consciousness ran through Marcus Aurelius'
"Meditationes," to culminate in connection with Hellenistic Mysticism, in the lyrics of Gregory of Nazianzum and the soul-history of Augustine (p.
48). From the second Christian century on, there appears in particular a whole series of what we may call "conversion-histories." These move at first in the purely intellectualistic region, but more and more lay stress not merely on the result but the process. Rhetoricians, moral philosophers,
Christian Apologists all supply examples. It became the fashion for a would-be teacher, as a device of argumentation, to tell of his own conversion to the philosophical standpoint which he would fain commend.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of this fashion is supplied by Dio Chrysostom, the best of the cynico-stoic traveling preachers of the first century. He had had an uncommonly deep experience of transition, itself not uncommon at the time, from mere rhetoricism to practical philosophy; and on the basis of his varied experiences as a cynic apostle, he delivered in
Athens on his return from exile his great oration περὶ φυγῆς, in which he commends his experiences as a guide to life (p. 293). The narration of his conversion given by Justin Martyr at the opening of his "Dialogue with Trypho" is of essentially the same type: it is intended as an illustration of the insufficiency of heathen philosophy drawn from his own experience.
And the matter is not essentially altered when, in the next century, the climax is no longer a merely intellectual surrender to a new teaching, but is traced to the divine grace and attributed to the effect of baptism—as in Cyprian's letter to Donatus. Here too belongs the autobiographical sketch which Hilary prefixed to his "De Trinitate," as a description of how he came to be a believer in the true God, whom he commends to his readers.
Aristides of Smyrna claims to have invented, in his ἱεροὶ λόγοι (a.d. 170– 179), a new form of those religious orations which it was customary to deliver at religious feasts, in honor of the divinity which was being celebrated. The novelty of his performance consists, however, only in transferring the real motive of the discourse from the glorification of the deity—the materials for which might be gathered from other spheres than his own experiences—to the most intimate portrayal of the orator's own personality. Sick in body and soul, he had cast himself on the mercy of Asclepios, and now wishes to tell all the healing operations of the god of which he had been made the recipient. Thus throughout the whole
Hellenistic and Hellenistic-Roman period—say from 250 b.c. to 250 a.d.— the stock of autobiography (growing out of roots set in the Attic period) was flourishing and throwing out abundant branches to this side and that.
Its flowering-time was, however, not yet.
That came only in the changed conditions of the fourth century after Christ, as the old world was passing away and men, in the dissolution of the social fabric which had seemed so stable, were driven back upon themselves.
Seven hundred years after Isocrates had first invented autobiography as a
rhetorical form, the last of the great heathen rhetors, Libanius, opens the series of great autobiographies of the flowering-time of this species of literature (p. 357). From the century and a half beginning with, say, 360 a.d., more non-political autobiographies are known to us than from all the preceding years put together. And in what variety do they come! And how wide a sphere of interest do they sweep! "Now we could fancy we were holding converse with a monk or a feudal lord of the Middle Ages, now we see before us a later humanist, now we hear the tone of romantic lyricism, and Augustine's work in its tendency to the philosophical grounding of the life-whole recalls the type of the newer autobiography since Rousseau" (p.
357).
"In the seventh decade of the fourth century there falls the notable autobiography (now lost) written in the mixed style of the moral romance, by the converted Spaniard Acilius
Severus, the title of which, 'Peira or Catastrophe,' has been preserved for us by Jerome. The leader of the Syrian
Church, Ephrem ( † 373), wrote at about the same time autobiographical 'Confessions.' From the last famous representative of pure Rhetordom, the 'heathen' Libanius, to whom one of the greatest Christian preachers in the Greek tongue, John Chrysostom, went to school, we have a long autobiography, 'Bios or of my own Tyche'; nor is it without religious significance. His friend and admirer, the Emperor Julian, … was certainly prevented only by his early death from putting together his life in an independent representation. Then the new epoch in autobiography vigorously announced itself in Gregory of Nazianzum, the poet among the Church Fathers: his great autobiographical
poems from the eighth and ninth decades of the century, the product of ecclesiastical controversy and solitary contemplation, have internal form and beauty; and his subjective religious lyric, nourished on metaphysical speculation, stands over against the historical portion of Augustine's 'Confessions' as another typical form of the expression of personal religion. About a.d. 400 Augustine's book appeared. It made an epoch only in the West, since it was the Western culture alone which was able to bear
Augustine's spirit and to enrich itself from him. In the East, the development proceeds in the autobiographical species, too, along the antique way, and precisely because the working of genius is here not in question, the further constructions from this time, which nevertheless have their place in the general evolution, illustrate the necessity in the course of things. Along with Gregory, there appears in the Greek Church the Neoplatonic-Christian bishop Synesius of Cyrene; he too built out of his metaphysics a personal religious poem and in a special work, 'Dio or of my own
Life,' he delineated his conduct of his life (about 406). And that it was not in Gregory alone that the mighty conflicts of the Church awoke a sympathetic subjective echo, we are advertised by the title 'Tragoedia,' by which was designated the autobiographical work of a heresy-hating Bishop of Constantinople who was cast out as a heresiarch, Nestorius
—a work (about 432) of which we can now ascertain only that there was room in it for the justification of his own teaching, and for the communication of records after the fashion of the church history writing of the day. But even in
Latin Christendom, Augustine's 'Confessions' were not the end of the antique development; side by side with direct imitations of this work there were still composed in Southern Gaul and Ireland autobiographies of quite individual types. And while the Hellenistic traditions were still making themselves independently felt,—in autobiographical opening poems and in the end even in a great antique phenomenon, in Boëthius' 'Consolation of Philosophy' (524)—Augustine himself in the evening of his life produced still something new in this department, in his
'Retractations' (427)" (pp. 347–348).
We have transcribed this rather long passage because it sets Augustine's "Confessions" for us in the midst of its congeners and helps us to realize how much, in the matter of form at least, it belongs to its time. There was no lack of analyses of the human soul in that period: it was rather the epoch of searching studies of men—in history, biography, and romance. "The age in which Augustine's 'Confessions' came into being must be thought of as flooded with such soul-portraitures" (p. 110). Nor was it an age in which men were backward in speaking frankly of themselves. Witness, for example, the autobiographical opening verses not only of an Ausonius, but of a hymn-writer like Prudentius; and the autobiographical prolaliae of a Hilary. Or witness rather the smug satisfaction with which Jerome closes his work on "The Illustrious Men" with an account of himself. It is not because Augustine's "Confessions" do these things that they are so remarkable and great: it is because they do these things so remarkably and greatly. Needless to say that Dr. Misch fully appreciates the unique greatness of the "Confessions" among other books of their order which have come down to us from antiquity—or perhaps we should rather say
among other books of what Dr. Misch looks upon as of their order. For we cannot for ourselves admit that the "Confessions" are exactly described when they are called an autobiography or a self-portraiture, or an analysis of the writer's soul, or even a history of his conversion. The "Confessions" contain these things rather than are them. It is often a nice question, no doubt, whether a book of autobiographical contents shall be classed as strictly an autobiography or not. But the question does not seem to be so very nice a one, when the book to be classified is only in part of autobiographical contents, and even in its autobiographical contents does not seem to be governed by a strictly autobiographical motive. Only nine or ten of the thirteen books of the "Confessions" contain any autobiographical material at all, and as Dr. Misch duly points out (p. 424), a "full half of the autobiographical part of the work deals with one period of only four years—the time in which Augustine's conversion fell; the entire period of youth up to Augustine's twenty-eighth year being compressed into a first briefer part." It would appear more appropriate, therefore, to speak of the book as a "conversion-narrative" than as an autobiography, and to find its forerunner as such in Dio Chrysostum's περὶ φυγῆς and its analogies in the prolaliae of Justin and Tatian and Hilary and Augustine himself in his earliest and most Hellenistic writings, composed at Cassiciacum. Dr. Misch seems occasionally almost on the point of so classifying it, inadequate as such a characterization of the book obviously would be. And he frankly allows not only that Augustine's fundamental purpose lies outside the autobiographical narrative, which is really only ancillary to it, but that a very large portion of the contents of the book are out of place in an autobiography and mar the unity of the work considered as such. "The essential and conscious purpose of Augustine," he writes (p.
414), "does not lie in the narration of his individual experiences, but in the arousing of religious affections and ideas." Again (p. 415): "He not only
interposes in the life-history philosophical speculations, the unfathomable problems of which are resolved into questions addressed to God, but he adjoins to it as its last part—filling more than a quarter of the whole— purely didactic discussions, which, strung on the thread of the first chapter of Genesis, enlarge in turn on God, the Trinity, the creation of the world."
Such topics, Dr. Misch very properly remarks, one would expect to find discussed in a dogmatic rather than in an autobiographical treatise, and in their treatment he thinks the form of "confession" can be only artificially kept up. Dr. Misch has, of course, his own way, if not of justifying, at least of accounting for and so far of condoning the inclusion of this incongruous matter in an autobiography. Augustine passes at the eleventh book, it seems, for example, into a "confession of his knowledge and ignorance"— surely a topic sufficiently autobiographical. This appears much the same as to say with Dr. Gibb and Mr. Montgomery in their recent edition of the "Confessions" (p. 332) that what Augustine does here is to pass from the description of his religious and moral condition to outlining "what might be called, in modern phraseology, his 'theological position.' " Would it not be better frankly to allow that neither these closing books—constituting
"more than a quarter of the whole" work—nor much else in the "Confessions" can be brought without forcing into the legitimate scope of an autobiography or yet of a "conversion-history"? And that, therefore, the "Confessions," despite the wealth of autobiographical material which they contain, and despite the central place taken in them by Augustine, are not strictly speaking either an autobiography or a "conversion-history"?
In point of fact, the subject of the "Confessions" is not Augustine's self, nor were they written to make himself known; though they were so written as to make him known and to enable him to say that the first ten books are about himself. This Dr. Misch partly perceives, not merely in recognizing that in the autobiographical details which Augustine
incorporates into the "Confessions" he has a purpose beyond "the narration of his individual experiences," and in describing that purpose as "the awaking of religious affections and ideas," but also in discovering at the bottom of the "Confessions" the underlying purpose (securing their unity) not to make known the soul alone, but the soul and God. This Dr. Misch interprets as Neoplatonic mysticism. He wishes us to find "the fundamental religious sentiment of the 'Confessions' " in "the yearning of the mystic for cessation, rest, eternity" (p. 416), and its great end, in the depicting of the hidden working of God in all that is, and the rising of the soul towards and its losing itself in God. "For this," says he (pp. 417–418):
"For this is the kernel of the inner form: the several component parts are not brought together according to the rhetorical rule of pleasing variety, but the nature of the connection is the result of a firm structure, and this fundamental form itself is not simple, but issues from the higher unity which comprehends in itself the contradictions which are resolved in it. God and man draw apart from one another in the phenomena of life and in the description of these phenomena, and yet remain always bound together; in the hymns of longing and love their perfect unity sounds forth. The form does not wish to follow the historically given psychological reality of the individual existence, but will make perceptible that which is in truth going on in the objective reality: this reality lies in a metaphysical Beyond, out of which the narrated history, like a variegatedly agitated color-play, proceeds without separating itself from it—and the Beyond itself lies not in a transcendental distance, but in the continual presence of God's person, who embraces even
erring souls with His love and is to be found by their will.
Thus the history of the soul which the first ten books of the 'Confessions' depict and explain, receives its unitary structure through a Neoplatonic-Christian monotheistic mysticism, which conceives the relation of God with the soul at once as uniform presence and as historical process.
The inner form is two-voiced, comparable to the relation of two lines, one of which, symbolizing the Being of God, goes smoothly and quietly on from eternity to eternity, while the other, in broken, ultimately ascending course, pictures the struggle and striving of the soul towards its divine source and end; the two, however near they may approach each other, can never in any natural way come together, until the unfathomable experience of unity with God brings the resolution of all contradictions."
We certainly do not agree with Dr. Misch in this neoplatonization of the "Confessions"—as we do not agree with him in his too generous estimate of the amount of Neoplatonism Augustine carried over into Christianity with him and the consequent relation of his first Christian writings to his later ones. But there is involved in Dr. Misch's construction, however obscurely, recognition of the fact that Augustine is not primarily writing of himself in the "Confessions," but at least of the relation of God to his soul, or let us say, better, of the dealings of God with his soul. The true subject of Augustine's "Confessions" is not himself but God, and his real object in writing them was not that men might know him in all the depths of his being—though he does reveal himself in them in all the depths of his being: but that men might know God and learn from His dealings with Augustine the wonders of His Grace. Its fundamental note is
therefore not even that great declaration, "Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee," fundamental as this note is to the whole fabric of the "Confessions"; but may be summed up, in Augustine's own language, in the two words Ab Eo, "From Him!" And therefore Dr. Misch is perfectly right when he writes (p. 424): "All gifts of nature, even his mother herself and the nourishing of his infancy, are derived from the superabundance of Grace. It belongs to the nature of a pragmatic biography to carry the lifehistory as far back as possible, to the very generation itself: but in this case the exposition proceeds not from the natural derivation but from the metaphysical obscurity which surrounds the origin of the soul: and thus the narrator can advance regularly without a break from the introductory prayer." And therefore it was also that the "Confessions" from the first wrought so powerfully in the world as a religious force—even on Augustine himself, both when writing them and whenever he reread them (p. 414).
They focused men's eyes on God, the God of Grace, and worked in them that frame of mind which lies at the root of all true religion—utter dependence on God.
We have permitted our attention to drift somewhat away from Dr.
Misch's book to Augustine's. Our excuse is that it is Dr. Misch's aim to direct our attention to Augustine's book. We must return, however, for a moment, before closing, to Dr. Misch's volume. His analysis of Augustine's
"Confessions" as the culminating autobiography of the old world, filling some forty pages, is very able and suggestive. We have already indicated that there are some things in his view of the "Confessions" with which we cannot agree. There are many more to which our assent is very hearty; and the discussion as a whole is very informing. It is immediately preceded by chapters on the general tendencies of autobiography in this age of declining antiquity, and especially on the lyrics of Gregory of Nazianzum. In these chapters we are made acquainted with all the similar works which
immediately preceded Augustine's—including his own "Soliloquies." In a closing chapter the final shoots of the tree of antique autobiography are described to us—particularly the "Eucharisticos Deo" of Paulinus of Pella, the "Confession" of St. Patrick, Augustine's own "Retractations," and last of all Boëthius' "Consolation of Philosophy." One or two quotations may perhaps help us to catch the note in which Dr. Misch brings his survey of autobiography in antiquity to a close:
"Thus Augustine's 'Confessions' have entered as an active force into Time. They are one of the few books which in all periods in which spiritual life has existed in the West have been much read; the verbal expression of inward conditions has been influenced by Augustine up to our own day. He himself at the end of his life bore witness to the effect of his autobiography upon his contemporaries, and subordinated to it in point of effectiveness all his other writings, which were nevertheless of extraordinary influence. 'No one of my works has found a wider circulation, or more eager reading, than the books of my Confessions.' And already in the succeeding decade there appeared literary imitations of it: they continued among the newer peoples, ending by passing outside the religious sphere to coöperate in the development of spiritual history in the world's literature. The continuity of autobiography in the West rests in large part on the effect of this one work" (pp. 440–441).
"No fewer than four autobiographical works with the title 'Confessio' or 'Thanksgiving,' 'Eucharisticos,' are known to us from the century following the 'Confessions' (about 400). Three of their authors come from Southern Gaul; there had long existed there a lively literary impulse and rhetorical training held its place, unaffected by Christianity, into the time of the Ostrogoths, so that this province of the disintegrating western empire attained at last the leadership in the decadent literature" (pp. 442–443).
"This was the first wave of Confessions, which swept over the West and laid hold even of an unlettered man in the far
North. He who gave rise to it was a great writer without a fellow in the Latin tongue since Cicero and Tacitus.
Summoning all his art, Augustine related to the human race the history of the spirit; the spiritual development reached its goal with his conversion and the self-biography ended with the question, What am I now?—the answer to which gave a poetic delineation of the inner form of the religious life, which had hitherto been a closed book. To narrate his further life-history, his administration as bishop and his ecclesiastico-political acts, which would seem to be the natural ending of his autobiography, time—so the 'Confessions' explain—was too precious. What was left was his writings: in them he conceived was gathered up his work which belongs to God and the world. They gave him occasion for a special biographical work [the
"Retractations"], which coming from another attitude towards life, exhibits the self-delineation of later antiquity from a new side" (p. 455).
"What an immense undertaking it is, however, for a leading mind to take its own product again as material for treatment and to compact it into an ultimate whole! We think of Goethe, whom the idea of a history of his works, taken up as a consequence of a collected edition, drove onwards to the great product of an evolutionary-historical biography in 'Dichtung und Wahrheit.' Or of Vico's 'Vita,' which, remaining in the narrower limits of the exposition of his lifework, made for the first time in this type of authors the notion of a natural development fruitful for biography" (p.
456).
"Here again, as in the 'Confessions,' Augustine could borrow the outward form from literature. Independent treatises on their own books are encountered by us among the Hellenistic autobiographies, and it is no doubt simply an accident of transmission that this species is met with only in isolation, in the cases of Galen and Cicero. Hellenistic traditions were still operative in the epoch of Augustine; this is evident precisely for the lesser sorts of authorautobiography. The autobiographical opening poem appears not only in an Ausonius, but even in the hymn-poet
Prudentius, who expected a future reward for his pious verses and accordingly transmuted the enconiums with
which these autobiographies customarily ended into hopes for heaven; the biographical prolaliae in didactic writings served in Hilary and the young Augustine to display the spiritual development of the author, and Saint Jerome did not deny himself in his book on 'The Illustrious Men,' the addition at the end of his own self, with name, origin and catalogue of writings" (p. 459).
"Philosophy in person appeared to Boëthius. She bears the appearance of antiquity: her self-woven garment is faded, soiled and torn, but an inexhaustible youth and radiant eyes shine from her awe-inspiring countenance. She had once in her freedom pointed out to the Greeks the way to make men known in their personality; while still a maiden she was able to give to the best a consciousness of themselves.
Autobiography was as deeply indebted to her as to religion which found the divine kernel in men as 'life.' And the 'Consolatio philosophiae' along with Augustine's 'Confessions' stands, with Dante, under the foundations of the 'Vita nuova' " (pp. 465 f.).
It is with such words that Dr. Misch ends the first volume of his survey of the history of autobiography.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, vii. 1909, pp. 500–510.