On Nicholas Wolterstroff's Idea of Divine Discourse

HeyJ XLII (2001), pp. 283–310

ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS AND THE UNCANNY: ON NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF’S IDEA OF DIVINE DISCOURSE F. B. A. ASIEDU

Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA

To some the assertion that ‘God speaks’ is a commonplace. To others it is at best unintelligible or at worst nonsensical. After all, what exactly do we mean when we say, ‘God speaks’? What do we know about the subject and how can we be certain that the said subject ‘God’ actually does ‘speak’? Ostensibly, theists should have no problem with the claim that God speaks. But even this cannot be assured, since among theists, precisely what constitutes legitimate ‘God speak’ is a subject of great disagreement and perplexity. While acknowledging the audacity of the claim that God speaks, Yale philosopher and theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff was convinced that the topic demanded serious philosophical analysis. And so into this apparently uncharted territory Wolterstorff entered with his Wilde Lectures at Oxford University in 1993. The book that emerged out of those lectures proclaims his objective in its title, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks.1 Wolterstorff’s elaborate argument involves an appropriation of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, and at various points critical assessments of the theology of the word of Karl Barth, the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. Most of the discussion involving Barth, Ricoeur and Derrida serve as a foil for Wolterstorff’s defence of what he describes as ‘authorial-discourse interpretation’ against its enlightened detractors. This part of Wolterstorff’s discussion deals most directly with textual interpretation and, in particular, the interpretation of the Bible. This lies beyond the scope of my interest. What I should like to pursue is Wolterstorff’s use of two narratives he presents in his work to substantiate his claim that God speaks. The first narrative is found in the opening chapter. It is the well-known story of Augustine’s conversion found in Book 8 of the Confessions. The second narrative appears in Wolterstorff’s penultimate chapter. It is an account of certain experiences by a person to whom Wolterstorff gives the pseudonym ‘Virginia’. In between the uses of these two narratives © The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

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Wolterstorff sets out his philosophical arguments. The goal? To defend the rational and philosophical coherence of the claim that God speaks. And, as a corollary, the conviction that ‘it is possible for an intelligent adult of the modern Western world to be entitled to believe that God has spoken to him or her’ (p. 280). Wolterstorff believes he can draw this conclusion because, in his words, ‘the possibility seems to me to have been actualized in the case of Virginia’ (p. 280). Virginia and Augustine are the two exemplars: one modern, the other ancient. Although a number of reviewers have attended to other aspects of Wolterstorff’s argument,2 the role these two narratives play in his project has so far not attracted much interest. One reason for taking his use of Augustine’s narrative seriously is the paradigmatic status that narrative enjoys in some quarters.3 I will highlight certain parts of Augustine’s narrative on the way to discussing Wolterstorff’s use of the story. Then, I will turn to Virginia’s narrative and assess Wolterstorff’s use of that story against the idea of divine discourse that Wolterstorff finds exemplified in Augustine’s story. What I will try to demonstrate is that something happens to Wolterstorff’s argument by the time we get to Virginia. For in the end Wolterstorff appeals to notions of ‘the quasi-mystical’ and ‘the uncanny’ to legitimize the claim that God speaks. If my reading of Wolterstorff is correct, then, at the end of his discussion we still await a philosophical analysis of the quasi-mystical and the uncanny.4 My point is this: if we have to appeal to notions of the quasi-mystical and the uncanny to substantiate the claim that God speaks, then we have compounded one enigma with another, since notions of mystical experience and the uncanny are almost impervious to analysis. I say ‘almost’ because mystical texts or narratives about supposed mystical experience pose a host of problems about the relationship between the texts and the experiences that generate them.5 I should state at the outset what I have in mind in analysing Augustine’s narrative alongside Virginia’s. I have no intention of questioning the description that Wolterstorff provides of Virginia’s experiences. But I do intend to raise a number of questions about the problems of interpretation that appear in the narrative that Wolterstorff provides and about his use of Virginia’s story. My basic approach to both Augustine and Virginia’s narrative is the approach I take in reading any mystical text. It is hermeneutical. And it is from this standpoint that I will address whatever philosophical issues emerge from the texts. I. AUGUSTINE AND ALYPIUS IN A MILANESE GARDEN: PRELUDE TO DIVINE DISCOURSE?

According to Wolterstorff, Augustine’s account of the famous conversion scene in the garden at Milan illustrates precisely what Wolterstorff calls

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‘divine discourse’. By this he means an illocutionary speech act performed by God that directs a particular individual towards a specific act. When Augustine writes that he was converted by following the command ‘take up and read’ (tolle lege), he was responding to divine discourse, pure and simple. But is it so simple as that? This is how Augustine begins his narration of the events that led up to the ‘tolle lege’ scene:6 One day when Nebridius was absent for a reason I cannot recall, we received a surprise visit at home from a man named Ponticianus, a compatriot in that he was an African, holding high office at court. He wanted something or other from us. We sat down together to converse. By chance he noticed a book on top of a gaming table which lay before us. He picked it up, opened it, and discovered, much to his astonishment, that it was the apostle Paul. He had expected it to be one of the books used for the profession which was wearing me out. But then he smiled and looked at me in a spirit of congratulation. He was amazed that he had suddenly discovered this book and this book alone open before my eyes. He was a Christian and a baptized believer. He often prostrated himself before you, our God, at the Church with frequent and long time of prayer. When I had indicated to him that those scriptures were the subject of deep study for me, a conversation began in which he told of the story of Antony the Egyptian monk, a name held in high honour among your servants, though up to that moment Alypius and I had never heard of him. When he discovered this, he dwelt on the story instilling in us who were ignorant an awareness of the man’s greatness, and expressing astonishment that we did not know of him. We were amazed as we heard of your wonderful acts very well attested and occurring so recently, almost in our own time, done in orthodox faith and in the Catholic Church. All of us were in a state of surprise, we because of the greatness of the story, he because we had never heard about it (Confessions 8.6.14).

Ponticianus went on to say more about the ascetic movement, recounting a story about two courtiers at Trier who were converted upon reading the story of Antony of Egypt (Confessions 8.6.15). Then Ponticianus left. The drama of Augustine’s conversion began. I have cited the earlier part of the narrative because of the elements of chance, surprise, anticipation and expectation that it contains. Another thing that is of no little significance is the fact that Augustine had been studying Paul intensely: ‘Those scriptures were the subject of deep study for me.’ After Ponticianus left, Augustine was beside himself. The story is too well known to bear repetition here. Undoubtedly, the climax occurs when Augustine hears the words ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’. In a state of anxiety and perplexity about his wayward past, the weakness of his will, and his indecision, Augustine responds to the voice. In Wolterstorff’s words ‘the language is now the language of being overcome: Rejecting his former way of life and embracing a new way was not something he decided to do but something he found himself doing’ (p. 5). Wolterstorff insists that Augustine’s will is irrelevant at this critical moment. There was no decision to be made at all. ‘The language of decision has disappeared

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from the account,’ Wolterstorff asserts in reference to Confessions 8.12.29. He goes on: Earlier in the text, when Augustine was describing his state of mind before the final turning, will was central. ‘When I was trying to reach a decision about serving the Lord my God, as I had long intended to do, it was I who willed to take this course and again it was I who willed not to take it … But I neither willed to do it nor refused to do it with my full will’ (vii, 10). Now, when Augustine is describing the actual moment of turning, there is not a word about will, not a word about decision, not a word about resolution; just this: ‘as I came to the end of the sentence, … the light of confidence flooded into my heart …’ The language is now the language of being overcome (pp. 4–5).

Interesting as this sounds, it does not fully capture what Augustine describes about his divided will and the resolution that he finally found. Nor does it take into account his own words about the softening of his will on the threshold of conversion (Confessions 8.5.10ff.). In the excerpt from the Confessions cited in the passage just quoted from Wolterstorff, Augustine reflects on what he had been doing over a period of time as he tried to make up his mind. He does mention the fact that he was the one trying to serve God, and alludes to what he had long thought of doing. The point of this is not to show that there was something inherently defective in trying to take a particular cause of action. Rather, Augustine underscores his divided will, that at one and the same time he both willed and did not will to serve God. That is not quite the same thing as saying that at the final moment he did not have to will anything. But this seems to be the implication of Wolterstorff’s view here. Much of the drama sketched by Augustine involving Lady Continence in Confessions 8.11.25–27 has everything to do with Augustine’s will. The climax of the conversion is unintelligible without it. Furthermore, as most of Augustine’s interpreters have known, the account of his conversion found in the Confessions reflects something of Augustine’s discovery of Paul’s doctrine of electing grace in the mid-390s.7 This change in Augustine’s thinking about the working of the will in conversion took place shortly before he wrote the Confessions. That theological revolution influenced how Augustine came to speak about his will at the time and moment of conversion in 386. Yet he does not so reshape the events as to remove all language about a progressive development of a new will in him. ‘The new will, which was beginning to be within me,’ Augustine writes, ‘a will to serve you freely and to enjoy you, God, the only source of pleasure, was not yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of old habit. So my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration’ (Confessions 8.5.10). There is no need to insist on an absence of ‘willing’ or volition at the moment of conversion, when Augustine’s words are so patent. He himself

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writes about the emergence of a new will and a desire to serve God. This is already intimated at the beginning of Book 8 of the Confessions. The predisposition towards conversion is already set. Wolterstorff makes much of the difference between ‘deciding to do’ and ‘finding oneself doing’. But why does he insist on this difference? For him, there was a certain inescapable reality about what Augustine encountered in the voice, so that Augustine could not have responded otherwise. Wolterstorff also seems to lean towards the sudden nature of the conversion, and so writes that although Augustine ‘couldn’t tell whether the chanter was a boy or girl, it never crossed his mind to doubt that it was a child. And after the briefest reflection, he had no doubt that by way of the child chanting these words, God was then and there saying something, performing a speech action; specifically, an action of commanding’ (p. 5). In other words, there was no hesitation, doubt or ambiguity about the event. Augustine knew without a shadow of doubt that God had spoken to him through the child. But is this how Augustine describes his experience? Let us return to the conversion scene for a moment. Augustine writes that he ‘heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again “Pick up and read, pick up and read” ’ (Confessions 8.12.29). He then wonders ‘whether there might be some children’s game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one’. And so after checking his flood of tears he gets up. Augustine writes that ‘I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find’. Notice that Augustine speaks about interpretation. This brings into the narrative his pre-understanding of what ‘God’ could possibly do. Wolterstorff acknowledges this dimension of the experience. Second, it is Augustine who determines that what he hears must be a divine oracle. But, more importantly, he adds that he found warrant for his interpretation of the voice in the story about Antony of Egypt that Ponticianus had related to him only a short moment before. The basis for Augustine interpreting the voice as a divinely mediated sign is, therefore, inextricably tied to what he had just heard about Antony of Egypt. ‘For I had heard how Antony happened to be present at the gospel reading, and took it as an admonition addressed to himself when the words were read: “Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come follow me” ’ (Confessions 8.12.29). Augustine decides to imitate Antony. At an earlier time when Augustine visited Simplicianus of Milan and heard Simplicianus tell the story of Marius Victorinus’s conversion Augustine had also expressed the desire to imitate Victorinus. That yearning quickly floundered on the weight of Augustine’s moral difficulties (Confessions 8.5.10). Augustine had gone to see Simplicianus precisely about the specific course of action to take towards conversion, not whether

288 F. B. A. ASIEDU he needed to convert. So we should keep in mind that he had been anticipating his conversion ever since that visit to Simplicianus. In fact, becoming a baptized Catholic was the reason why Augustine sought a proper marriage in the first place (Confessions 6.13.23). If that route had been taken Augustine would not have needed a dramatic conversion. He was already a convinced Catholic, and a catechumen. What led up to the dramatic conversion was that although he was a convinced Catholic and a catechumen, he lived a desultory life in the aftermath of the departure of his concubine (Confessions 6.15.25). Augustine’s decision to imitate Antony captures the pre-disposition Augustine had for ‘hearing from God’. Augustine had not come to that position easily (Confessions 6 & 7); so to suggest, as I am doing here, that he was predisposed is not to lighten the drama of the conversion. It merely highlights the deliberate element in Augustine’s interpretative stance when he heard the voice. It is Augustine who decides the voice must be oracular. Alypius apparently did not hear any voice commanding him to take up and read. But he too would eventually ‘take up and read’, in another sense. And in the process he imitates Augustine. As Augustine tells it, soon after hearing the voice he ‘hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting’ and related to him what had happened. Augustine does not tell us what kind of conversation he had with Alypius about the voice. Which leads one to speculate: Did Alypius believe him implicitly or was he incredulous? Or did Alypius hedge on the outcome? Whatever Alypius thought about the voice Augustine claims to have heard we do not know. Nor does Augustine hint anywhere in his writings whether he or Alypius thought of checking to see whether there was indeed a child from the nearby house who might have been in a position to say what was said. What we do know for a fact is that when Augustine spoke to Alypius, he had not yet ‘taken up and read’. So his claim to have heard a voice, which he took as a divine command, remained to be tested. Alypius would be a witness, and a surprisingly curious witness at that. This element of the story is easily missed. The sequence is as follows: Ponticianus leaves; Augustine is in a quandary; in agony he leaves to go to the garden attached to the house; Alypius follows. ‘We sat down as far as we could from the buildings’ (Confessions 8.8.19). Because of the intensity of Augustine’s agony he moves away from Alypius so as to give vent to his tears. After a period of soul-searching he hears a voice saying ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’. He does not have the codex containing the epistles of Paul with him. This presents an interesting problem about the immediacy of the event.8 Since Augustine did not have the book right beside him, the supposed command needed to be interpreted in a way that made sense of that fact. But once Augustine decides to take the voice as a divine command he must act on it. So he runs over to Alypius and tells him about the command ‘tolle lege,

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tolle lege’. He then retrieves the book from the spot where Alypius had been sitting: ‘I seized it, opened it, and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit.’ This is how Augustine had determined to interpret the voice: I will fetch the book and open the first passage (caput) my eyes light on. It proved to be the passage containing Romans 13:13–14. Once he arrived at those verses there was no need to continue reading: ‘I neither wished nor needed to read further.’ Needless to say, Augustine would have read further and eventually found a passage that spoke to him, if Romans 13:13–14 had not been so apposite: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.’ Augustine’s conversion was final. ‘At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled’ (Confessions 8.12.29). II. NARRATIVE, SPEECH ACTS, AND THE PROBLEM OF INDETERMINACY

When Wolterstorff writes about ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’, he insists that ‘God was then and there saying something, performing a speech action’ (p. 5). This overlooks Augustine’s own point about interpreting the command ‘as’ a command from God, and about Antony’s example as Augustine’s justification for interpreting the voice as a divine oracle. Admittedly, whether one chooses to speak of Augustine taking the command ‘as’ a command from God or ‘as if’ it were God speaking might seem to be saying two very different things. But in this case, Augustine’s interpretative posture lends itself to either. This certainly introduces into his description an element of indeterminacy or equivocation in the ascription of intentionality to the ‘voice’. The narrative, however, does not preclude this construction. Obviously, to say that one takes a command ‘as if’ it were from God is somewhat less assured than saying that one takes it ‘as’ a command from God. The former permits ambiguity, the latter probably does not. Wolterstorff’s approach to Augustine’s narrative does not allow any ambiguity. He places much of the weight of his argument at precisely this point. Accordingly, God performs a speech act by using the voice of the child to command Augustine. So when Augustine interprets the voice as divine he is doing what God wants him to do. Wolterstorff does not hedge on this. And yet there is every reason to suspect that even Alypius, who was the only witness to the event, had not come to believe Augustine without any element of doubt. Alypius could not give attestation to the voice. Nothing Augustine says implies or even insinuates that Alypius heard the voice too. Am I insisting that Alypius doubted Augustine’s story? No. But I am suggesting that the narrative Augustine

290 F. B. A. ASIEDU furnishes allows for the possibility of ambiguity and a certain elasticity in what Augustine made of the voice in relation to the story about Antony that he had just heard. Alypius too had listened to the story Ponticianus told, but he had not heard a voice. But after Augustine claimed to have been converted when he followed through on the ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’, Alypius followed suit. It is almost as if Alypius waited for Augustine to test the claim that God had spoken. When Augustine told Alypius what passage he had read and had been converted, Alypius asked for the codex. What had been going on in his mind, which I did not know, he disclosed in this way. He asked to see the text which I had been reading. I showed him, and he noticed a passage following that which I had read. I did not know how the text went on; but the continuation was ‘receive the person who is weak in faith’. Alypius applied this to himself, and he made that known to me (Confessions 8.12.30).

Augustine’s description of Alypius’s action is instructive in another sense. For he continues that ‘without any agony or hesitation he joined me in making a good resolution and affirmation of intention, entirely congruent with his moral principles in which he had long been greatly superior to me’ (Confessions 8.12.30). Why does Alypius apply to himself a text that speaks about receiving a person weak in faith? And why does Augustine emphasize Alypius’s lack of hesitation in joining him in making a good resolution? Is the expression of a weak faith an allusion to how Alypius had initially thought of Augustine’s claim to have heard a voice? Or was this merely a recognition on Alypius’s part that he lacked the kind of unquestionable faith that Augustine had found? Alypius already excelled in the resolution Augustine was to make concerning continence. Alypius had been continent without Christian belief. Augustine knew this, though Alypius’s curiosity about Augustine’s views about sex nearly caused his downfall (Confessions 6.12.22). What remained for Alypius was not continence but faith, if he was to follow in the path Augustine had just set upon after reading Romans 13:13–14. This is probably what lies behind Alypius’s choice of a verse to apply to himself. And so, as one weak in faith, he followed Augustine. Augustine interprets the voice in imitation of Antony, Alypius reads Paul in imitation of Augustine reading Paul. Both Augustine and Alypius came to these choices after having turned inward upon hearing the stories told by Ponticianus. This inward turn precipitates the event of the voice speaking to Augustine, the decision Augustine makes that the voice must be a divine oracle, and Alypius’s desire to follow Augustine in reading from the codex. These considerations leave open the possibility that the voice Augustine heard may have been an inner voice. But I will leave this to speculation. Wolterstorff barely touches on the inwardness that underlies both Augustine’s and Alypius’s experience at this point. About Augustine, he

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writes that ‘the command was not addressed to some collectivity of human beings but addressed to him: God was commanding him to open his book of Scripture and read the first passage on which his eye should fall’ (p. 5). But then he adds: ‘perhaps the child was doing no more than uttering words – over and over for the sake of the sound of them. Or perhaps the child was also performing a speech action. If so, presumably that action was also an action of commanding or requesting’ (p. 5). This seems to suggest a certain element of whimsy or happenstance in the entire experience, though Wolterstorff insists that the ‘content of the command would have been different, however, from the content of God’s command. For the child did not know Augustine, and hence couldn’t issue such a command’ (p. 5). God certainly knows Augustine and so can issue a command to him in this way. The presumed theism here precludes any discussion as to how Augustine or anyone can substantiate the claim that ‘God speaks’, especially since these claims are common, almost universal, and often incommensurable. Not only because of the different religious traditions to which people belong. For even among members of the same traditions or within the same local communities there is often a great deal of disagreement about the plethora of claims made about what God says or doesn’t say, does or doesn’t do. This aspect of the issue scarcely enters Wolterstorff’s deliberations. The methodological posture of claiming to be dealing with the so-called religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, merely precludes discussion of the stark differences among the traditions. After all, what the New Testament claims to be God-speak is often at odds with what the Koran claims as divine speech. So merely to say that the religions of the book all believe that God speaks only acknowledges a formal agreement which on inspection means little. If the claim that God speaks is to receive more than formal justification Wolterstorff would have to take on the conflict of interpretations that afflict so many of the claims made about God commanding or requesting this or that act to be done by this or that person. Having a scriptural tradition as the possible basis for what claims people make about God speaking defers the problem of incommensurability and the conflict of interpretations. It does not remove them. Wolterstorff observes that ‘Augustine does not tell us whether he construed the admonition in question as issued only by Paul, or as issued by God by way of what Paul said’ (p. 5). But he surmises that it must be the latter. This seems unnecessary. By this point Augustine had been through many changes and had finally become a catechumen in the Catholic church. He already had an implicit idea of ‘scripture’ as he sat in that Milanese garden. Paul’s epistles were ‘scripture’. Alypius’s situation was not all that different. He may not have been a catechumen like Augustine, but he must have known what notions Catholic Christians attached to the epistles of Paul. Besides, both Augustine and Alypius

292 F. B. A. ASIEDU had been Manichees, and the idea of scripture was not foreign to the Manichaeans. Wolterstorff construes Augustine as saying that the admonition found in Romans 13:13–14 was issued to him by God through Paul’s words, whereas in Alypius’s case it is ‘not that God was then and there issuing a command to Alypius, but that Alypius was applying to himself a command issued more than three centuries earlier’ (p. 5). This distinction either ignores or overlooks what Augustine himself says about Alypius’s condition. Alypius too had been in turmoil. He confided to Augustine just what had been happening to him. His request that he be given the codex is directly related to what he had been mulling over, as Augustine was struggling with himself. Neither Augustine nor Alypius’s reading of Paul stands apart from the inward turn that characterized their time in the garden prior to Augustine hearing the voice. Augustine’s willingness to believe the voice was conditioned by his inward turn. Alypius’s willingness to follow Augustine’s example was also conditioned by his selfexamination. Hence my allusion a short while ago to the possibility that the voice Augustine heard may have been an inner voice. In response to the question, ‘why did Augustine believe that God was there and then speaking to him?’ Wolterstorff replies that ‘long before he stumbled into the garden, Augustine believed that God was a speaking God – that God says things to human beings. That belonged to his background beliefs’ (p. 6). But if the notion that ‘God says things to human beings’ belongs to the background belief of most, if not all, theists, can we assume that whenever that generic claim that ‘there is a God who speaks’ is particularized we must accept the particular event as a speech act of the said ‘God’? In Augustine’s case Wolterstorff contends that ‘neither then nor later did anything come to mind or happen to him which led him to doubt his interpretation. Quite the contrary: the light of confidence flooded his heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled’ (p. 6). This may claim more than Augustine’s words throughout his long career can substantiate. But even failing a thorough understanding of Augustine’s views about ‘God-speak’, does not this very episode demand a more nuanced interpretation of Augustine’s sense of ‘God speak’ than Wolterstorff proposes? Certainly Augustine’s life after the experience in the Milanese garden validated the experience. But that in and of itself does not prove beyond question that God spoke in the garden. What it proves is that Augustine’s response accomplished precisely what he hoped it would, namely that he would be converted to Catholic Christianity just as Antony and the courtiers of Trier had been converted. It leaves open the attendant claim that God spoke in the words ‘tolle lege’, since it was Augustine who interpreted the voice ‘as’ God speaking, because he had heard Antony do something similar. Wolterstorff seems to argue that merely because Augustine interpreted the voice ‘as’ God speaking, that settles the issue.

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If Augustine’s narrative exemplifies divine discourse in the way Wolterstorff proposes, it does so by a most indirect route. And this, only because Augustine claimed to be following the example of Antony, not because Augustine knew without a shadow of doubt that it was God who had spoken in what he believed to be the voice of the child saying ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’. The voice of the child is to Augustine what the voice of the lector is to Antony. Augustine assumed that if he followed the command to take up and read he would be converted in the same way that Antony was converted by following the command read out from the Gospel. Notice here that Augustine also claims not to have known anything about Antony of Egypt until Ponticianus told his story. So what is more remarkable is that Augustine so quickly accepted Antony’s example as a paradigm for himself. Why he imitated Antony is a fascinating example of the power of a story and the credibility of the one who told it. Augustine does not have to check the story to find out if it is true. He simply trusts Ponticianus, much as he had trusted Simplicianus before (Confessions 8.2.3ff.). It is not incidental that Augustine mentions what manner of life Ponticianus led, going out of his way to say that Ponticianus often prostrated himself in ‘frequent and long times of prayer’ before God (Confessions 8.6.14). Augustine accepts Ponticianus’s stories not only because of the exemplary lives they portrayed to Augustine but also because of the person who told them. So Ponticianus brought into Augustine’s life the story of Antony, who in turn drew Augustine towards scripture as a source of admonition. Didn’t Augustine already know that he could take the words found in scripture as therapy for his sick soul? He certainly did. So why at this particular time, and not before, or later? What made this moment unique, when Augustine had long known of his mother’s piety, had had the privilege of listening to Ambrose’s preaching, etc.? Why now? This question of timing is probably what lends some persuasiveness to Wolterstorff’s notion of divine discourse. The uncanny coincidences demand an explanation. On the other hand, the idea of divine discourse that Wolterstorff puts forth in appropriating speech act theory about illocutionary acts cannot fully account for the ‘tolle lege’ scene as an unambiguous speech act by God in the way that Augustine describes it. III. ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS AND THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISCOURSE: THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE INTENTIONALITY

Wolterstorff does not deny that the claim that God speaks is an attribution made by human beings on God’s behalf (pp. 114–115). So in a chapter titled ‘Could God cause events generative of Discourse?’ Wolterstorff tries to defend his view of God’s agency in effecting divine discourse.

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Wolterstorff’s way of obviating the problem of the subject in the claim that God speaks is to describe God as either deputizing others to speak on his behalf or appropriating other people’s discourse or other signs to effect God’s speech acts. Wolterstorff begins with the notions of deputized and authorized speech and ends with the idea that God does have the attributes and qualities of a speaker. And if God has the attributes of a speaker then at some point God must make an appearance. One cannot keep holding the fort, so to speak, for an agent who never puts in an appearance, and expect claims about the agent’s speech to be accepted without question. At this point, Wolterstorff’s argument stumbles on a problem. What sort of appearance does God have to make, since Wolterstorff also argues that divine speech has nothing to do with miracles? Wolterstorff goes out of his way to say that in Augustine’s experience in the garden there is no claim that there was a miracle involved. ‘If one is looking for it, one perhaps can spot in the process quick calculation of probabilities; but if so, what a careless job of collecting evidence! No careful research into children’s games. No hurdling the wall to ask the child why he or she was chanting these words. And – let it be noted – no miracles! Just a few quick thoughts resulting in Augustine finding himself saying to himself that this could only be God speaking to him’ (p. 6). While eschewing notions of the miraculous, Wolterstorff, however, turns to notions of the uncanny. This leaves one wondering. But first things first. Wolterstorff argues that ‘when words are the instruments of discourse, one needn’t oneself have produced tokens of those words. One may instead take tokens produced by someone else and authorize them as the instruments of one’s own speech – whereby they become that’ (p. 114). God, then, can deputize or authorize another person, willy-nilly, to do God’s bidding. God can use another person’s speech to perform God’s speech act. So God can speak without bringing about any actions generative of that speech, but at the same time, God must do something. This seems circuitous or unclear. But there is a logic here. Wolterstorff is careful to note that if God were merely an impersonal force then God would not have to make an appearance or identify himself. Everything could proceed by proxy. The personhood of God is compromised, however, if God remains hidden, never revealing himself. So although ‘it may well be the case that a great deal of God’s discourse is accomplished by way of deputation or appropriation, it can’t all be like that. At some point God must Godself do things which generate God’s acts of discourse. And in any case the religious traditions on which we have our eye – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are replete with purported cases of God discoursing in God’s own voice, without resort to deputation or appropriation’ (pp. 116–7). Wolterstorff continues: ‘So God must act if God is to speak. That is to say, God must causally bring about events generative of divine discourse’

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(p. 117). This brings into the discussion questions about divine intentionality and divine action. While Wolterstorff laments the assault ‘in our century’ on the idea of ‘God intervening in history’ (p. 117), he hedges on exactly how this is to happen. ‘Perhaps we ought to allow for the possibility that sometimes an event generative of God’s discourse is not part of any plan of God. This would happen, for example, if God deputized someone to speak in God’s name, and then, as to content, allowed the person freely to decide the specifics of what to say – within a certain range, of course. In such a case, the event of God’s saying what God did say by way of the actions of that person would not have been part of any plan of God; and that might be the case even though God foreknew what that would be. Not everything one knows will happen, as the consequence of implementing some action-plan that one has, is part of the plan’ (p. 117). It is important not to get bogged down in the deeply theological and philosophical issues implied in all this. What is critical for my purposes is the transition from these larger philosophical tenets to Augustine’s experience in the garden. Wolterstorff writes that ‘there was something quite specific God wanted to say to Augustine then and there. And God’s bringing it about that the child chanted “tolle lege” must have been part of God’s action-plan for generating that discourse-event’ (p. 117). He adds that the question that presents itself in this instance is this: ‘might it be that all those events generative of divine discourse, which have been part of some enacted plan of God, were part of God’s plan at creation – so that no particular intervention has ever been required’ (p. 117)? Wolterstorff drives a hard bargain. This requires a highly deterministic view of human acts. I am not sure such an understanding of human agency is defensible. Moreover, if we need so much ontology and theology (pp. 117–200) to carry the argument along, then isn’t the claim that God speaks inherently theological? Could it ever be otherwise? To turn to Augustine once more with the assessment that there and then God intended precisely what happened is also to misconstrue Augustine somewhat. Certainly, Augustine believed that God had converted him. But his understanding of what that voice meant was a supposition. It was not a matter of certainty. The supposition turned out to be highly determinative, when he followed through on it. Augustine also leaves no doubt that he intended to follow the example set before his eyes in the story of Antony that he had heard. It was enough for Augustine to say that because he had heard that Antony reacted this way to a reading from the Gospels and was converted, he too could take a voice as a divine oracle and become converted. Whether or not God in fact did speak is somewhat secondary, though not entirely irrelevant. The relevance, however, rests on the belief that God may have spoken, not on the certainty that God did in fact speak. One does not have to insist on any specific form of divine intervention

296 F. B. A. ASIEDU to appreciate this. Augustine’s narrative does not demand more than this. Wolterstorff appears uncertain just what kind of intervention he means to read in the ‘tolle lege’ scene. He wonders if planned intervention is required in this case, or whether one must merely suppose that whatever happened was determined with God’s plan at creation. I have tried to avoid this web of theological difficulties, but they are inescapable in the way Wolterstorff sets up his argument. He observes that ‘if all events in the created order were brought about by the activation of creaturely causal particular powers, and if the activation of those powers was always deterministic in character, then, given omniscience on God’s part, presumably so’ (p. 120). In which case, Augustine’s experience would have to have been a particular act of divine intervention. On the other hand, Wolterstorff notes, ‘someone might reply that if the child’s chanting of “tolle lege” at that time and place was just the consequence of the unrolling of the divine plan formed before the founding of the world and implemented at its founding, then there would be no reason to suppose that that event had this quite special character of being generative of discourse’ (p. 120). ‘But why should that be?’ Wolterstorff asks (p. 120). The problem Wolterstorff identifies here and discounts seems to me unremarkable. There is no need to object on the premise that the consequence of an act would not be generative. If one must have a full-fledged ontology and a theology of divine action in order to substantiate the claim that God speaks, then we are in the realm of theological convictions and beliefs about God. We are required to believe that God speaks and acts in a certain way before we can begin. In any event, Augustine did not spend all the time in the world investigating what transpired. But that is a far cry from the notion that Wolterstorff proposes, that ‘a significant feature of what transpired in the garden … is that Augustine did not, before concluding that God was speaking to him, determine to his satisfaction that he was confronted by a particular divine intervention. The question was never raised’ (p. 120). How this meets the problem is unclear. Trying to rest an argument on the suddenness of Augustine’s decision may be problematic. Augustine does not tell us if he even knew whether there were any children in the neighbouring house, or what Alypius thought of the entire episode, though as I have indicated there may be some vague allusion to Alypius’s possible scepticism in the reference to his ‘weak faith’. Moreover, and this is the substantive point, because Augustine indicates that he is following Antony’s example, there is a sense in which he does not need to verify anything. Whether there was a real child or whether it was all taking place in Augustine’s mind matters little. He claims to have heard something. He acts on it, and it turns out to have been precipitous. To even insinuate that he had no notion of divine command or divine intervention would be stretching credulity. So

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to suggest that Augustine did not see this event as a particular case of divine intervention is somewhat untenable. Without the model he found in the Antony story, much of how Augustine describes his response to the voice makes little sense. His experience in some ways re-enacts Antony’s experience, and does so by taking up certain elements in both Antony’s story and in the story about the courtiers at Trier. Augustine was not yet converted when he sat there listening to Ponticianus. But he was hardly a neophyte. This was not the first time he had heard or read anything purporting to be a divine command. He had the experience of his mother’s dreams before him (e.g., Confessions 6.13.23). He had the practice of Ambrose’s preaching in sight. He himself had become a student of Paul’s epistles. Yet it was not Monica’s dreams, nor Ambrose’s preaching that effected the act that took place in the garden. The question as to whether this was a particular case of divine intervention is implied in the very way Augustine tells the story. Doesn’t Wolterstorff himself concede this when he states that ‘it was the uncanniness of the coincidence between his [Augustine’s] situation and the child’s chanting those particular words that led him [Augustine] to his conviction’, a conviction that Wolterstorff believes ‘was reinforced by the uncanny relevance of what he read when he opened his book’ (pp. 120–1). Wolterstorff adds, on the other hand, that ‘one can imagine his having read something there which would have led him instead to retract the conviction that God had spoken to him through the chanting of the child’ (p. 121). This seems highly doubtful. The Augustine who was studiously poring over Paul’s texts was an Augustine yearning for transformation. He longed for the day when he could cast off his waywardness. Earlier, Wolterstorff precluded any serious deliberation on Augustine’s part. Now he proposes that the uncanny coincidence between the child chanting and the reading of Paul’s epistle to the Romans is what convinced Augustine. It is unclear what dividends are gained by preferring the idea of the uncanny to that of divine intervention or the miraculous, which Wolterstorff also precluded previously. In fact, Wolterstorff’s preference for ‘uncanny coincidence’ over ‘divine intervention’ makes less radical Augustine’s insistence of divine agency in his conversion. To begin with the claim that God speaks and then to turn to uncanny coincidences leaves one wondering where Wolterstorff finds the warrant for believing the claim that God speaks. Could we not just as easily assume that when people say that God has spoken to them they are simply theologizing in a God-ward direction the uncanny coincidences in their lives? This may not be entirely out of the question, and there is much in the way that Wolterstorff concludes his use of the story of Virginia that seems to lead in this direction. But more on Virginia later. Ostensibly, ‘the uncanny’, in Wolterstorff’s view, also precludes any deliberate act of interpreting what one experiences (p. 130). For Wolterstorff, ‘Antony and Augustine didn’t do anything that could be

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described as “setting about” interpreting. Though they interpreted, they didn’t set about doing that. They just found themselves believing that God was then and there saying so-and-so to them – rather as we, when engaged in conversation, typically interpret what our conversational partners say without setting about doing so’ (p. 130). I cannot see what difference this distinction makes. Augustine’s own attestation about interpreting the words ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’ as a divine command and his narrating the event to Alypius before actually taking the book to read militates against the view that Augustine did not set about interpreting. If we had some idea what conversation Alypius and Augustine had prior to Augustine ‘taking up and reading’, we might think differently. After all, what we do in conversation depends on precisely what sort of relationship already exists between the partners in conversation. The speed with which we understand the other(s) depends on all the preunderstandings we possess about the speaker, the subject matter, and all the various elements of the conversational situation. So we do set about interpreting, though it is rather instantaneous, which does not necessarily guarantee that our interpretations are correct or even acceptable to our partners in conversation. The distinction Wolterstorff proposes between ‘setting about’ and what takes place almost instantaneously does little to explain the uniqueness of Augustine and Antony’s situation. They both believed that such ‘speaking’, such oracular events, were possible. And if they were not, one could take them as such: Antony, on the premises of the Gospel story which contained the command, and Augustine, on the basis of Antony’s example. We do not need a theory about how both of them ‘found themselves believing that God was then and there’ speaking to them. Both Augustine and Antony chose an interpretation each believed legitimate. But a credible interpretation is not necessarily a matter of absolute certainty; it is however, a singular interpretation, that excludes other possibilities. And so Augustine interpreted the voice solely as a divine command. That exclusivity is what crystallizes the claim that God had spoken. But it is not a matter of unquestionable certainty. IV. VIRGINIA, ENTITLED BELIEFS, AND THE IDEA OF THE UNCANNY

In the penultimate chapter, ‘Are we entitled?’ Wolterstorff sums up his project as follows: After distinguishing various modes of speaking, and offering an account of its nature, I went on to argue that, from a theistic perspective, God could speak; there is nothing impossible in that. From those issues of discourse theory and of philosophical theology, we moved on to issues of interpretation. Here I singled out for near-exclusive attention that long-enduring practice, though now intensely controverted practice within the Christian community of reading the Bible so as to discern what God said

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by way of authoring it. I defended the legitimacy in general of authorial-discourse interpretation; and I considered how one ought to go about interpreting scripture if it is the single divine voice that one is looking for. Now at last we are face to face with the question does God speak (p. 261)?

Wolterstorff’s description of his achievement helps to locate the problematic that I have identified along the trajectory that he himself provides. As we noted previously, Wolterstorff began his study with an assertion that God does speak. This is implicit in his commentary on Augustine’s conversion experience. The question in this penultimate chapter, are we ‘now at last face to face with the question does God speak?’, is somewhat odd, if not a little jarring. What did Wolterstorff defend about Augustine’s experience, if not the claim that in that experience God had spoken to Augustine. There is already an epistemological settlement in the claim that ‘God speaks’. It is evident in the following acknowledgement: ‘Our situation is not that we and a few others have recently begun to entertain the proposition that God speaks, and are now wondering whether to accept or reject the proposition. Countless human beings, down through the ages, and on into our own time and place, have in fact believed that God speaks. Let us, then, pose our question in full recognition of that fact; let us ask how such beliefs are to be appraised’ (p. 261). Again Wolterstorff presents this as the next step in the project, but he had asserted this much in the opening chapters. I also argued much earlier that in fact the issue at hand is not the claim that God speaks, but rather the belief that God speaks. It is instructive that in the passage I just cited Wolterstorff alludes to this when he observes that people have always ‘believed that God speaks’. What should have come first in the discussion is how those beliefs are formed. This appears to be the project of the current chapter. So what should have been the first order of business actually becomes the last, even though all along it had been assumed. Wolterstorff does not acknowledge any problem with this. In fact, he seems to take it as the way it ought to be. We must be able to speak about God without having to decide in advance what we can or cannot say. And yet, from his own appeals to theistic arguments and ontology in his discussion about ‘God speaking’, this is somewhat flawed. The rhetorical structure might give the appearance that one can begin talking about God without dealing with the epistemological conditions for such talk. But no sooner has one begun than it becomes clear that the sign ‘God’ does not permit discourse about it without epistemological hackles. Wolterstorff may speak about God without doing his epistemology first, but the epistemology is implicit. Here is how he defines what it means to be entitled to believe something: A person S is entitled to his belief that p just in case S believes p, and there’s no doxastic practice D pertaining to p such that S ought to have implemented D and S

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And so he proposes to deal with a concrete example that should set us on our way about the claim that God speaks. ‘The main issue’, he reminds us, ‘is which, if any, of humanity’s belief’s that God said something is an entitled belief’ (p. 273). This way of framing the problem is a far cry from the way Wolterstorff began the discussion. He began with the acknowledgement that the claim that God speaks is audacious but common (p. 5). Along the way, he privileged the great scriptural traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Then he proposed that the claim that God speaks went beyond scripture. But in his chapter on entitlements, he contends that not all claims about ‘God speaking’ are valid. That is fair enough. But then who are those making the claims, and what traditions do they belong to? And who adjudicates on these claims? Wolterstorff argues that the question about entitled belief can only be settled in the concrete (p. 273). This is laudable, but it is far from clear where all the concrete claims that have been made historically, are being made, and will continue to be made, lead us. While Wolterstorff sees the expansive nature of the problem at hand, he seems far more concerned to answer a very different question, so that he says far less than the issues demand. What he is interested in is ‘whether it is possible for an intelligent adult of the modern Western world to be entitled to believe that God has spoken to him or her’ (p. 280). And on this score he wants to say ‘yes’. He writes, ‘I draw the conclusion because the possibility seems to me to have been actualized in the case of Virginia’ (p. 280). Is the project meant, then, as a defence of the rational coherence of the particular kind of theistic belief implicit in Virginia’s Christianity? Or does this extend to all the religions of the book that he mentioned in his preface? Wolterstorff writes that he chose Virginia’s example because it minimizes certain extraneous conditions, ‘in particular, considerations pertaining to the epistemology of testimony’ (p. 273). How would the argument fare if in fact the notion of divine discourse he adopts came from an Islamic mystic, who defends Allah and not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or the God of Jesus Christ? Or, deferring to Augustine’s case, would Wolterstorff be willing to make the arguments he proposes here by simply exchanging Augustine’s conversion to Catholic Christianity with his much earlier conversion to Manichaean religion, another religion of the book? I have my doubts. Wolterstorff prefaces Virginia’s narrative with a disclaimer that points in a very specific direction. He writes: Perhaps I should add that though Virginia is, and was at the time, a Christian, she neither is nor was what anyone would classify as an Evangelical. It’s worth saying

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that because Evangelicals have the reputation of believing that God speaks to them rather more often, and rather more trivially, than most of us think God would bother with; hence we quite easily dismiss their claims that God is on speaking terms with them (p. 274).

There are a number of issues in this disclaimer that deserve attention. If Evangelicals are making these claims, and Wolterstorff believes that the issue at hand is to determine which of the claims are entitled, does he not seem to suggest in the very distinction between ‘the trivial’ and ‘the not so trivial’ that Evangelicals often get it wrong? If the claims made by Evangelicals include these trivial episodes, are these primafacie cases of ‘false belief’? And what does this say of the claim that God speaks? What makes these Evangelicals unable to separate the true from the false? Is Wolterstorff’s choice of Virginia, the non-Evangelical Christian, intended to give warrant to those instances when Evangelicals are right about their claims, as far as Wolterstorff believes? And if not, why not? And then there is the question of the supposedly passive reception or recognition of divine discourse. In Wolterstorff’s words, Virginia’s experience was an experience which ‘befell’ her (p. 272). Doesn’t his choice of Virginia’s example already determine for us ‘true God speak’ versus ‘false God speak’, on the supposition that she found it happening to her? I mention this because Wolterstorff makes much of the passivity he claims to have discovered in Augustine’s case. I have already pointed out that the attitude Augustine brings to his hearing of Antony’s story and his experience of the voice do not demand the strict interpretation Wolterstorff proffers. It was enough for Augustine to say that he was following Antony’s example. The consequences would prove his choice as either useful or harmful. But it would not settle the question as to whether God did in fact speak at that particular moment. Wolterstorff, of course, is not as concerned about Augustine and Antony as he is concerned about us. ‘What we really want to know is whether we – intelligent, educated, citizens of the modern West – are ever entitled to believe that God speaks’ (p. 273). In this, he seems to me to privilege the ‘intelligent, educated, citizens of the modern West’. The problem attending belief in God and the claim that God speaks is not the peculiar anxiety of the educated and cultured minds of the modern Western world. When Alypius speaks about ‘receiving one who is weak in faith’, we are brought into the presence of a problem of theistic belief that is not uniquely modern. May I add here that Augustine’s friend Nebridius, who missed Ponticianus’s visit on the fateful day in 386, did not immediately follow in Augustine and Alypius’s steps. It is tantalizing to speculate on why he did not. He would do so eventually, a couple of years later. Certainly, the ‘intelligent, educated, citizens of the modern West’ will have to contend with certain cultural facts that may be

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peculiarly their own. But on what to make of ‘believing that God speaks’, I can hardly think they are in a unique situation about which Augustine knew nothing. A good deal of the ontology and theology Wolterstorff presents for his modern audience is standard fare for Augustine. Back to Virginia’s story. Wolterstorff mentions that there was a great deal of turmoil in the ‘parish of which Virginia speaks’ (p. 274). It was in the midst of the turmoil that God spoke to Virginia. Wolterstorff is persuaded that ‘all of us will have the sense of entering a strange and unsettling world’ upon reading the following. This is debatable. Whether or not one finds oneself entering a strange land depends to some extent on one’s horizon of expectation about what is common, likely, or normal in the religious experiences of people. I quote Wolterstorff’s rendition of Virginia’s narrative in full: On February 12, 1987, while folding laundry I suddenly knew with certain knowledge that Byron was supposed to leave St Paul’s Church. There was no external voice, but there was a brightening in the room at the moment of revelation. The experience was so overwhelming that I called my husband and invited him to come home for lunch. I did not discuss what had happened, but I needed to reassure myself of reality. Later that afternoon … I found myself sobbing. I knew the knowledge that I had been given was not me, and I knew that it was correct. As the day progressed, it became clear to me that there were seven, insistent statements that I needed to tell Byron. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before or to anyone I knew. I was awe-struck and terrified. Passing on the message accurately and with a preface that would allow him to hear it clearly became my goal … The next morning, when I went to see Byron, I was very agitated. Byron told me to take a deep breath or I would hyperventilate. We discussed God, and belief in God, and then I prayed out loud that I would be rendered speechless if what I was about to say was not indeed God’s will. I told him the seven statements: ‘Your work is done here. You have accomplished what you were sent to do. You are still young. There are great things in store for you. Do not be afraid. God will take care of you. I will help with the transition.’ This message was not a surprise to Byron. He had already come to that conclusion prior to our conversation. There had been a call committee at the church that past Sunday, about which I had known nothing … Byron did not get that call … I began to doubt my message. As I drove home from staff meeting one day in March, I said to God that if He wanted me to believe that the message had been divine, God would either have to give Byron a call or give me a message for someone else. Both came true … [A few weeks later, on a] Saturday night, there was a fierce thunderstorm which shook the screen next to our bedroom window. From 12:30 to 4 a.m. I struggled with God. There was another message. God was patient and kept repeating each sentence until I could not possibly forget it. It was only about a paragraph long. I knew it was for the Tuesday night meeting. But I did not know when to say it or how to preface it. I kept seeing the hall clock at church pointing to 8:45 … (p. 274).

Wolterstorff goes on to say that Virginia’s narrative continues ‘with her telling about delivering the message from God at 8:45 on Tuesday evening, and the response from the other participants in the meeting. ‘I was surprised’, she says, ‘at how perfectly everybody seemed to think what I had said fit in. There was a feeling of jubilation.’ Still she had her

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doubts. She went to see a priest who was recommended to her as a spiritual director’ (p. 275). Wolterstorff gives more of Virginia’s text concerning the priest and a psychologist she consulted later. The priest, it turns out, gave Virginia a lot of encouragement by affirming her experiences. He was extremely helpful in his affirmation of my experiences. I began to see how I could use my renewed spirituality in all aspects of what I was already doing. I felt stronger but still wanted to see a psychologist to be sure that I was mentally fit. I met with a psychologist at Harvard Community Health Plan and told her everything that had happened. After listening to my story, she said that these kinds of things happen all the time, and why was I surprised. She suggested a book that I might read, and thanked me profusely for sharing my experience with her. She did not feel that I required any further sessions … (p. 275).

Wolterstorff suspects that some of his readers will not be convinced in the least about the use to which he puts Virginia’s story or of the story itself. But I am not one of those whom Wolterstorff suspects of extreme scepticism here, nor am I persuaded that ‘Virginia was suffering from delusions and that she herself should have realized this’ (p. 279). Such a construction seems to me to claim too much in the way of objections. It would be difficult to sustain the delusional interpretation based on the narrative that Wolterstorff provides, and it seems to me to preclude counter-arguments to suggest this as the only likely construal that doubtful or critical minds might put on it. In fact, so much of what Wolterstorff presents of Virginia’s story puts one very easily in mind of many a medieval mystical text, with their claims of divine visitation accompanied by brightness and certain forms of illuminating presence. So it is interesting that in his comments about the narrative Wolterstorff himself turns to the phenomenology of mysticism: Curious but also problematic. V. AUGUSTINE, VIRGINIA, AND THE QUASI-MYSTICAL

At this point Wolterstorff’s comparison of Augustine and Virginia becomes revealing. When Augustine meets Virginia, it is Virginia who is the mystic and Augustine – well, it is not so clear. Wolterstorff also sets his comparison against the backdrop of interpreting scripture: ‘Reading and interpreting sacred Scripture for the divine voice consists in taking an enduring object, a text, and reading to find out what God said. Virginia’s case was very different. She wasn’t trying to find out what God said – she wasn’t on the lookout for divine discourse’ (p. 275). Actually, we cannot determine this from the narrative Wolterstorff furnishes. After all, if the parish she mentioned was already in turmoil, the desire for divine discourse may well have been there. It did not necessarily have to be an explicitly expressed wish. I am assuming that Wolterstorff has more information that clarifies this issue than I can gain

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from the account provided. Secondly, Virginia’s narrative bristles with hermeneutical themes. First, there is no voice, but she is fully persuaded something has happened because there was a brightening of the room. Wolterstorff, for his part, writes that ‘a non-sensory, quasi-mystical experience befell her, totally unexpected, which seems to have had the phenomenological character of God appearing to her as talking to her; and this immediately evoked in her the conviction that God was saying something to her – discoursing with her’ (p. 275). Wolterstorff goes on to contend that this was very different from Augustine’s case. In the first place, Virginia’s narrative points to a kind of ‘illumination’, not of herself or her mind or of insight, but of a physical presence, ‘a brightening of the room’. Is this not a sensory experience? I don’t know how else to describe it. Secondly, she precisely excludes a voice in any physical sensory sense. The question, then, is how she gets the messages. By the time she tells the story in the form that Wolterstorff has it, she already describes the moment of brightening as ‘the moment of revelation’ but she does not say that that was when she had those seven statements revealed to her. All she says is that there was no external voice but there was a brightness in the room, an experience so overwhelming that she called her husband to tell him about it. Later on in the narrative she speaks of knowing that ‘the knowledge she had been given was not me, and I knew that it was correct’. So, apparently, something must have been impressed on her mind at the time of ‘the revelation’. If that is the case, the sentence that follows permits a kind of second moment of interpretation and possible redaction. She notes that ‘as the day progressed, it became clear to me that there were seven, insistent statements that I needed to tell Byron’. This seems to indicate a period of reflection and reconsideration, or perhaps re-interpretation. It took some time for her to come to this conclusion. But then she frames the entire narrative with the assertion that ‘nothing like this had ever happened to her before or to anyone she knew’. This piece of the story clearly hints at her lack of expectation. But it does not preclude what other sorts of expectations she had about what needed to be done at that parish and about Byron. So I shall leave this second issue out of consideration. The rest of the narrative suggests other vistas. When Virginia finally tells Byron what she had received, he had already come to those conclusions. An interesting question looms. Was God’s speech to Virginia superfluous? Wolterstorff does not raise this question, but I don’t think it is a trivial one. The seven statements that Virginia says she received could easily have been arrived at by someone submitting Byron’s circumstance to serious reflection. (I am conscious at this point about the inherent indecency of subjecting someone else’s religious experience to such scrutiny.) Apparently, Byron had made this assessment. What was God then saying to Byron through Virginia that Byron did not already know? After all, if the claim is that God uses

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other people’s words to perform illocutionary acts, what was the special status of Virginia’s revelation as opposed to what Byron already knew? Now comes another complicating issue. According to Virginia’s narrative, something seemed to have gone amiss. Things did not proceed in quite the way she expected, which led to a test. This time God had to be tested: ‘if he [God] wanted me to believe that the message had been divine, God would either have to give Byron a call or give me a message for someone else. Both came true …’ (p. 274). At the risk of sounding like an unabashed sceptic, the interpreter or reader of Virginia’s story yearns for more at this point. It would be extremely helpful to know what ‘the message for someone else’ was and how that compared with the message to Byron, because the test itself raises a number of questions. Could it be mere coincidence that Byron received a call? And if not coincidence, did the absence of a call the first time negate the credibility of Virginia, but not Byron’s own sense of what was to come? How do we sort out these issues? The premise that a call to Byron and a new message to another person will be indication that the first message is divine isn’t as unproblematic as it appears. I will leave out of consideration the next episode in Virginia’s narrative. It should be recognized, though, that in the very form in which she tells the story, the element of coincidence is not precluded. Nor does she preclude the fact that she is the one who sets the terms for deciding on the divinity of the statements, even though she does not have an oracular source. My point here is not to question the experiences; my interest is to indicate the various levels at which different strategies of plausibility are adopted as a way of substantiating certain interpretations. Wolterstorff sees the differences between Virginia and Augustine this way. In Augustine’s case, he argues, ‘the phenomenology was not that of a non-sensory, quasi-mystical experience of God, appearing to him as talking to him’ (p. 275). Do we really know what a ‘non-sensory, quasi-mystical experience of God’ is? Virginia does not say that God talked to her, and neither does Augustine. In both instances something is interpreted ‘as’ God speaking. Notice that in the first episode in Virginia’s story the ‘brightening’ of the room is the initial sign of divine presence. It is later that she settles on what the seven statements are. In Augustine’s case, the story of Antony told by Ponticianus is the precipitating event that leads him to construe the voice he hears as a divine oracle. Then Augustine goes and reads Paul and is converted. Although Wolterstorff had earlier precluded any notion of the miraculous in Augustine’s case, he now proposes some kind of aura surrounding the event. He writes: Its core was the sensory experience of a child sounding out certain words – though one gets the impression that that did not exhaust the phenomenology, that there was

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F. B. A. ASIEDU in addition some strange sort of aura; and rather than this entire phenomenology evoking in Augustine the conviction that by way of the child talking, God was discoursing with him, it seems to have triggered a rapid ‘best explanation’ inference. Augustine rapidly inferred that the best explanation of his being confronted with the sounding out loud of exactly those words at exactly that time in his life was that God was bringing about that confrontation so as thereby to speak to him, to discourse with him (p. 275).

Wolterstorff concedes one thing and yet argues so as to preclude the concession. If, in fact, the phenomenology of the experience goes beyond simply what was entailed in Augustine hearing the voice, why the stress on the rapid reaction to a ‘best explanation’? I have already pointed out that the tendency of reading Augustine’s experience as a sudden response overlooks a number of details that Augustine provides. It was far from a sudden reflection. Furthermore, as I noted previously, he first tells the story to Alypius before he actually proceeds to find out if the event will be completed: a strange procedure in itself. Augustine does not mention any aura at all. So Wolterstorff’s suggestion here does not have a basis in the account. Why then this tack? Wolterstorff’s notion of ‘the uncanny’. Ultimately, Wolterstorff claims ‘the uncanny’ as a sort of everyday miracle. And it is to this that he refers both Virginia’s and Augustine’s experience. So why he precluded the miraculous in Augustine’s case at the beginning is unclear. He believes that while the uncanny emerges out of ordinary human experiences it goes beyond the everyday. ‘If God is going to say things to us,’ Wolterstorff contends, he must speak to us ‘in such a way that there’s a chance of our taking note; God has to do something which stands out from the rumble of ordinary existence’. He continues: ‘Must it be a miraculous intervention in the workings of the law of nature? That depends, in part, on what one takes laws of nature to be, and how much of what transpires in the world and human experience one takes to fall under their sway; and those are complicated questions’ (p. 276). Complicated indeed. Wolterstorff then adds. ‘But even if we conclude that it must be a miraculous intervention, that by itself isn’t enough. There may be all sorts of miraculous interventions in the workings of the law of nature of which we know nothing’ (p. 276). The point seems hardly relevant. If we know nothing, they are meaningless, they have not become ‘miraculous’ for us. If, however, we are to derive divine discourse from the context of the everyday experiences that people have, what exactly is the nature of divine discourse beyond uncanny coincidences? Wolterstorff’s comments here point out just how far his project is from the achievement promised. What Wolterstorff has done is to argue for the uncanny as a possible way of inferring that God has spoken. In this way, the uncanny becomes the sign of God’s presence. We are in the realm of the possible and the subjunctive. ‘If God is to speak to us, the

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discourse-generating event must somehow stand out from what I called “the rumble of ordinary experience”. Something uncanny – I don’t know of a better word – something uncanny must take place in one’s experience’ (p. 277). It is somewhat regrettable that Wolterstorff turns to mental disorders as a foil for the many ways in which the uncanny manifests itself. He observes that ‘we in the modern world know that the experiences of people in a state of mental disorder also sometimes have an uncanny quality’ in that it is not uncommon for people in such states to hear voices (p. 277). Virginia made sure to consider this possibility and only maintained her view of the matter after consulting with others who could know if she was mentally unstable. ‘In short, Virginia explored the possibility that there is another and better explanation of her uncanny experience than the one which just overwhelmed her at the time, viz., that God was speaking to her; but she doesn’t come up with a better one’ (p. 277). Let me suggest that these are not the only two options available. In fact, the notion that the experiences of people with mental disorders border on the uncanny prejudices the discussion too far in the way of the pathological. One does not have to accept the possibility of a pathological interpretation as the only alternative. The uncanny covers a much wider field. So it would be better to say that while the pathological option need not be discounted, it is the least interesting for understanding what is at stake. Better then to look at all those ‘normal people’ and their experiences of the uncanny. Then we will be in a position to theorize. Experiences are not self-interpreting. And if, as I have suggested, Virginia’s narrative, as Wolterstorff gives it, is already interpreted, then what demands attention is the particular construal that she gives her experience. In Wolterstorff hands, the story must either be pathological or divine. And yet it could be neither. This is not to say that I believe that it is neither; merely that the possibility is not excluded. Wolterstorff, however, closes off all other possibilities, and he exploits the idea of the uncanny for this purpose. It would be interesting to know precisely what the psychologist meant when she said that ‘these kinds of things happen all the time’. Do they happen to all kinds of people irrespective of their religious commitments? Do they happen only to people of Christian belief? Do they happen even to atheists? The normalizing of the experience is crucial for understanding what we mean when we say it is ‘uncanny’. For Wolterstorff, the uncanny has become the avenue through which God effects divine discourse. But suppose we theorized the uncanny differently. Suppose, in fact, what goes for the uncanny is more like what appears ‘miraculous’ to the one who experiences the event, as something unexpected, surprising, full of wonderment. Then what? Would Wolterstorff accept every instance of the uncanny as a moment of divine discourse?

308 F. B. A. ASIEDU And if not, how should we know the difference between the true and the false? So far, what Woltersorff has done is to insist that the uncanny coincidences in the stories of Augustine and Virginia provide the warrant for believing that God spoke. But there are many conversion narratives in the treasury of the world’s religions that make similar claims of divine or quasi-divine speech. To say this is not to suggest that the idea of ‘God speaking’ within the Christian tradition is impervious to philosophical analysis, only that it requires more than what Wolterstorff has so far proposed. And more so, if one uses conversion narratives, the uncanny, or so-called mystical experiences as the bases for construing how God speaks.

VI. CONCLUSION: A MODEST PROPOSAL

In conclusion, let me offer a proposal. If Wolterstorff insists on using Augustine to argue his case, then it should be clear from the preceding that there are a number of mitigating factors in the story he adopts from Augustine which raise questions about Wolterstorff’s notion of divine discourse. Beyond this a number of other considerations will also have to be kept in view. I mentioned earlier that it should have been enough for Augustine to suggest that in interpreting the voice ‘as’ a divine oracle he was doing something similar to what Antony had done, and that Augustine’s interpretation of the voice is inextricably bound with his imitation of Antony. This undoubtedly suggests an element of pragmatism into the supposedly divine element in the story. But the power of the narrative is not diminished on that account. If anything, it underscores an important theme in Augustine’s understanding of the nature of discourse, human or divine. For, in De doctrina christiana, Augustine provides a way for coming to terms with ambiguous signs, among other things. He does not consider it at all problematic that one might be led to the goal of interpretation while finding oneself lost in the thicket of false or questionable interpretations. His hermeneutics of love, outlined in De doctrina christiana 1.36.40–41, is intended to meet this problem. The resolution is simple. If, for example, someone adopts an interpretation of a biblical text that leads that person to a better understanding and expression of the love of God, the interpreter would have reached the goal, regardless of whether the specific interpretation he adopts of the text is right or wrong. Interestingly, Augustine’s interpretation of the ‘voice’ could be construed along these lines. So, whether or not he truly heard God would be beside the point. As long as the interpretation he adopted led him towards the love of God, he found the goal, even if he might have been mistaken in supposing that God spoke in the words he thought he heard, saying ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’. In other words,

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Augustine’s interpretation was ‘useful’. This is undoubtedly pragmatic, but eminently defensible. And it does not demand the kind of unquestionable certainty that Wolterstorff’s construct claims and requires of Augustine’s knowledge of God’s intentions. In addition, it allows for the kind of ambiguity that Augustine himself acknowledges in both De doctrina christiana and the Confessions as inherently woven into the fabric of discourse: many signs are simply ambiguous. Moreover, in the Confessions, Augustine adopts a rather elaborate set of strategies to defend the claim that God speaks, much of this dealing with the life of the soul, its remembrance of its past, and its search for happiness (and truth). So much of Confessions Book 10 is devoted to this. Augustine does not stop with Book 10, but takes up the ambiguity of scriptural texts in Book 12, raising any number of questions about the validity of multiple interpretations. If scripture, the one form of divine discourse that Augustine considers prima facie unquestionable, allows for multiple interpretations, what should that say about Augustine’s own narrative about something he thought he heard? One further point: this concerns Augustinian interiority. The exteriority of the spoken word or the external sign always makes room in Augustine’s thinking for the interior word that is spoken to the soul. Augustine almost always emphasizes the interior dialogue between God and the soul as a way of authorizing divine discourse (if we must use this phrase to designate ‘God speak’). His De magistro is a telling case. And even in the Confessions the inwardness that characterizes his claims about divine discourse cannot be missed. If we must appeal to Augustine to legitimize the claim that God speaks, we will have to attend, at the very least, to the intricate arguments of Confessions Books 10 and 12. Only then, can we be sure that Augustine is truly an ally in the way that Wolterstorff supposes. Notes 1 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2 Anthony C. Thiselton, ‘Speech-Act Theory and the Claim that God Speaks: Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse’, Scottish Journal of Theology 50 (1997), pp. 97–110; Charles Gutenson, ‘An Examination of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse’, Christian Scholars Review 28 (1998), pp. 140–54; Michael Levine, ‘God Speak’, Religious Studies 34 (1998), pp. 1–16. 3 See Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et postérité (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1963), on the influence of the Confessions through the centuries. See more recently, Paula Fredriksen, ‘Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Tradition and the Retrospective Self’, Journal of Theological Studies n. s. 37 (1986), pp. 3–34, who claims that Augustine’s story influenced the reading of Paul within the Christian tradition. Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 1–4, following Fredriksen, has given this notion canonical status. 4 I suspect that the account of the quasi-mystical and the uncanny that Wolterstorff would propose would be something similar to William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 146–225. 5 Bernard McGinn’s series in progress, The Presence of God: The History of Western Christian Mysticism, vols 1–3 (New York: Crossroad, 1991–1998), offers ample evidence.

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6 I adopt throughout Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 7 See, for example, Paula Fredriksen, ‘Beyond the Body–Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul against the Manichees and Pelagians’, Recherches Augustiniennes 23 (1988), pp. 87–114. 8 See the plates in Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire, between pp. 688 and 689. The iconography of this event proves terribly misleading. Augustine is often portrayed as having the codex of Paul right next to him at the time he hears the voice saying ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’.