Article

C o n f e s s i o n s a n d th e c r e a t i o n o f t h e
will: A weir d t a l e

M at t h e w B r ya n Gi l l i s

Department of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN.

Abstract This essay examines Augustines Confessions as a horror tale using a

phenomenological methodology with the intent of showing that this text is the literary
expression of the authors philosophical concept of the will. Elements of the
weird tale serve as a literary model for this essay, so that it reads in many ways like a
horror tale relating Confessions horror tale. The main purpose of this approach is to
de-familiarize this canonical and hegemonic text so we can escape its powerful spell and
view it differently.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2014) 5, 7291.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2013.25; published online 8 November 2013

1 I kindly thank the

following scholars
for insights and
encouragement
that helped with
the completion of
this essay:
Monica Black,
Tom Burman,
Erin Darby,

This essay is the fruit of a troubling discovery: Prof. A.s inuential Confessions
a longstanding literary and devotional classic (Courcelle, 1963, 201547; Clark,
1993, 92106; Wills, 2011, 133148) conceals beneath its moralizing language
of self-discovery and spiritual homecoming a disturbing tale of horror.1 Put
another way, Prof. A.s narrative masks his weird encounter with an extraordinary, otherworldly force that eventually overwhelmed and dominated him, leading
him to join the cult of the Anointed Ones. The professors inuence on the
subsequent history of this cult and on western thought in general makes it
imperative to avoid even uttering his name in this essay. Indeed, his power as an
author to hypnotize his readers (as ODonnell recently put it) hides the dark
events leading up to his historic initiation into the Anointed Ones, so that naming
him now only risks conjuring up established notions of him and The Confessions

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www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/

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Confessions and the creation of the will

that prevent new thinking about the account of his turn (conversio) (ODonnell,
2006, 6). Instead, this essay offers a provocative and deliberately perverse restaging
of his post-turn Confessions to examine the weird event behind his turn and to
reveal the text itself as the literary expression of his profoundly inuential concept
of the will rather than a reliable account of his early life and turn.
Here weird serves as a phenomenologically informed term for describing an
experience that violates and overcomes a persons most fundamental beliefs
about the cosmos. It is a dramatic point of no return where the world suddenly
becomes unfamiliar, strange, even horrifying. More than anything, ones anthropocentric notions of space, time and existence in general are confounded: what
was believed as true is now clearly madness, whereas what would have been
madness before is now inescapably true. Whether willing or not, the person
participates in a new and unfamiliar world, conceptualizing that experience so
that the weird reshapes the person even as that person conceptualizes the weird.
This essay argues that the weird should be accepted as troubling rather than
renounced as troublesome. In that spirit, the rst section here unveils the
disquieting nature of Prof. A.s weird encounter with an otherworldly thing by
distinguishing it as historical event from his post-turn Confessions with its
unreliable narrative and moralizing, cultic discourse (Fredriksen, 1986, 2034;
ODonnell, 2006, 56, 3637). Through phenomenological approaches and by
reading against the grain we will uncover the subterranean experience the
troubling weird event itself that lurks beneath the professors telling. Separating
the raw event from the calculating, cultic narrative is necessary because Confessions is the product of the professors conceptualization of the weird, his
reimagining of the cosmos after his weird encounter, which transforms his preturn experiences within the post-turn weird framework. The second half of this
essay examines the professors concept of the will as the expression of his postturn cosmos a disturbing perspective whose legacy cannot be underestimated
to show how, beneath its dramatic literary form, Confessions is a ruthlessly
philosophical text designed to transform its readers in its own weird image.
Prof. A.s Confessions has spawned a vast body of scholarship (Severson, 1996;
Van Fleteren, 1999). Even beyond questions of cult, the works inuence
on medieval, modern and postmodern conceptions of personal narrative and
identity is tremendous (Ricoeur, 1984, 530 and passim; Stock, 2001, 5285;
Caputo and Scanlon, 2005; Taylor, 2009, 2646 and passim). What is particularly troubling about this vast body of work is that the link between the
professors turn as historical event and his account of it in Confessions remains
largely intact, despite debates about the likelihood that key scenes of his turn are
ctional creations (Courcelle, 1950, 188202; OMeara, 1954; Ferrari, 1989).
The work is generally accepted as a spiritual and literary autobiography
whatever literary license is taken with telling the story and one whose message
about the nature of evil speaks to the human condition (Evans, 1982, 17; Brown,
2000, 151175). The philosophical thrust of Confessions the naturalization of
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Ernie Freeberg,
Maura Lafferty
and the students
of her Confessions
in Latin seminar,
Gregor Kalas,
Jacob Latham,
Jack Love, Jay
Rubenstein, Tina
Shephardson,
Robert Wilken,
the members of
the University of
Tennessees
Seminar in Late
Antiquity, and
postmedievals
editors and two
anonymous
readers.

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Gillis

the will to human experience is allowed to stand as a self-evident component of

the professors philosophizing and especially Platonizing tendencies (Courcelle,
1963, 1788; OConnell, 1989, 7580 and passim; Cary, 2000, 3336, 4749,
6376), or is embedded as a natural element in his expressions of earthly and
heavenly desire (Miles, 1992; Burrus et al, 2010).
While some of the professors most recent critics have rightly encouraged
caution about the historicity of Confessions as a conversio account (Frederiksen,
1986; ODonnell, 2006), we must go much further. It is not enough to think the
professor without falling under his spell, an undertaking ODonnell describes as
exhilarating and terrifying (ODonnell, 2006, 6), for we must make Prof. A.
downright unfamiliar in order to escape his cunning powers (ODonnell, 2006).
This means following Nietzsches advice that we think untimely thoughts to
escape the contextual constrictions on the imagination (Nietzsche, 1980, 62). In
so doing, we can avoid neutralizing and normalizing encounters with the weird in
cultural and social terms, explaining them in this way and in the process
explaining them away.
Lastly, readers should note that this essay is offered as a weird event, a
disruptive and violating encounter between readers today and Confessions, that
most dangerous of all ancient or medieval texts. Such a method is indebted to
Gilles Deleuzes creative approach to philosophy through which he restaged
thinkers and their ideas, an act Deleuze himself described as philosophical
buggery (Deleuze, 1983, 1990, 1995, 6). The results of his studies were
monstrous offspring of earlier, inuential gures that opened up new directions
in the debates about their ideas and signicance. This essays Deleuzian restaging
of Prof. A.s tale and Confessions is both inspired by the literary mode of
articulating weird encounters in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and informed by
phenomenological approaches for analyzing them (Lovecraft, 2005; VanderMeer
and VanderMeer, 2012). It is hoped that this essays monstrous restaging of
Prof. A. will encourage other strange offspring to spread disquiet among the
readers of this and similar hegemonic texts.

The Phenom enol og y of t he Weird

2 Prof. A, used
throughout the
essay, refers to
Augustine on the
References list.

74

Prof. A.s encounter with the weird happened during his tenure as professor of
rhetoric in Milan (Prof. A., 1992, 5657).2 It occurred while on a retreat in
which the professor read philosophy and discussed different views of the cosmos
with friends (Prof. A., 1992, 7071, 73102). These young intellectuals were
all successful in their careers, but all were equally sensitive and troubled
about the nature of the universe and their place in it (Prof. A., 1992, 6468).
In this tense atmosphere the professor encountered something far beyond his
imaginings: things without bodies (Prof. A., 1992, 8082, 86). To someone who

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understood the world in terms of things as bodies, the notion of an existing but still
bodiless thing was strange and disturbing (Prof. A., 1992, 4243, 7374). But what
made the professors experience so upsetting was that the entity he encountered
was something some alien thing dwelling within him (Prof. A., 1992, 8182).
Before examining the details of Prof. A.s case, however, we must uncover the
secrets of the phenomenology of the weird. Phenomenology itself is a radical practice
of philosophy that attempts to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in
the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as it
manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer (Moran, 2000, 4). As Husserl,
the founder of phenomenology, argued: we must return to the things themselves
(an den Sachen selbst) rather than let our preconceived notions of them whether
they are commonsensical, cultural, historical, religious or whatever interfere with
our experience of them (Husserl, 1970, 2, 252). For, as Husserl argued, consciousness is always intentional, meaning that it is always directed at some particular
thing (Husserl, 1970, 2, 552596; Moran, 2000, 113118). Correspondingly,
objects are always given to consciousness in a particular way, and it is in their
particular state of givenness that we should consider them (Husserl, 1983, 44;
Moran, 2000, 10, 1617, 138139). This was true for all objects of consciousness,
including those not falling within the bounds of empirical methods.
The phenomenology of the weird examines encounters with objects beyond a
persons realm of understanding. As such, these encounters are not everyday ones.
Instead, they are fundamental violations of ones sense of cosmic order through the
alien. According to phenomenologist Waldenfels, the alien emerges in the shape of
something extraordinary that cannot nd its place in the respective order, and, at
the same time, as what is being excluded, it is not nothing (Waldenfels, 2011, 4).
An alien or weird encounter happens without a persons consent, bringing pathos
and suffering in its wake (Waldenfels, 2011, 84). The extraordinary or alien is,
therefore, a troubling phenomenon that evokes what Martin Heidegger termed
dread (Angst) and Sigmund Freud called the uncanny (das Unheimliche).
Heideggers notion of dread is the experience of a person made suddenly and
disturbingly aware of their mortality, that is, their very precarious, very transitory
place in the world (Heidegger, 1927, 244253). As a result, the person must nd a
way to continue living with a deep sense of their inevitable death. Heidegger
developed his phenomenology from Freuds examination of the uncanny, which
focuses on the alarming sense of strangeness, or the feeling of being not at home
(a literal translation of unheimlich) in ones own skin or physical surroundings
when faced with something horrifying (Freud, 2003, 123134).
But a key element of the weird experience is that it is an encounter with
something that exceeds what can possibly be true in the world. Such an
encounter involved what essayist and ction author Howard Phillips Lovecraft
who rst identied and examined weird phenomena in his essays, letters and
ction described as experiences with things from the Outside ( Joshi, 1990,
168229).3 These things brought forth a profound sense of dread, and of contact
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3 Asma draws the

comparison
between Freuds
uncanny,
Heideggers Angst
and Lovecrafts
notion of cosmic
fear (Asma, 2009,
184186, 188
190).

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with unknown spheres and powers (Lovecraft, 1973, 16). Lovecraft, who
suffered from terrible and shockingly vivid nightmares as a child, expressed his
joy in creating stories that fundamentally disturbed his readers understanding
of the universe (Lovecraft, 2000, 122; Joshi, 2010, 34). He described the weird
sensibility as a sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive
minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of
unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world
from unknown innities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter,
force, dimensionality, and consciousness (Lovecraft, 2000, 213). The encounter
with the alien, with things from Lovecrafts Outside, evokes an unsettling
awareness of an entity beyond what is thinkable, but which is nonetheless there
to be experienced (Thacker, 2010, 13; cf. Waldenfels, 2011, 73).
Lovecrafts unusual preoccupations enabled him to identify and capture in literary
form the weird as phenomenal experience. Though he worked in obscurity during his
lifetime, Lovecraft has like Edgar Allan Poe, according to Joyce Carol Oates
exerted an incalculable inuence on succeeding generations of writers of horror
ction (Oates, 1996), and a collection of his tales has recently been added to the
distinguished The Library of America series (2005). The literary sensibility of these
tales, coupled with a phenomenological approach, offer a way into examining
weird encounters. As something inconceivable and impossible, the weird is only
partly describable and at best graspable in fragments and especially through
metaphor. Husserl emphasized the minds playfulness when describing phenomena, much in the way that Lovecrafts stories contain strange, fragmentary and
suggestive imagery to describe Outside things (Harman, 2008, 333364). Metaphor, in particular, captures the weird encounter by overcoming the divide
between experiencer and object with poetic language (Harman, 2005, 101124).
Phenomenology is central to the study of the weird because it focuses on the
very conjunction of sensation, emotion and thought in order to bring otherwise unthinkable and indescribable things into the orbit of scholarly discussion.
In this way, an examination of the weird is possible without denying the actual
inaccessibility of weird phenomena.
The nal secret of the weird is that it transforms what it encounters. This
metamorphosis goes beyond what Heidegger described as the need to live
authentically in the face of ones own death. For, as Waldenfels puts it, the
experience of the alien always affects our own experience and thus turns into a
becoming-alien experience (Waldenfels, 2011, 3). Putting it another way, the
weird somehow makes its own anyone or anything coming into contact with it:
non-weird thing becomes weird thing. There is, however, a reciprocal element of
change in this transformation. The becoming-weird experience also includes the
persons conceptualization of the weird, a conceptualization in which the weird is
incorporated into the cosmos by the cosmos being expanded to include the weird.
The divide between weird and non-weird is tremendous. This chasm can only
be surmounted by an encounter with the weird, whether directly or through the

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weird-things conceptualization of that encounter. Therefore, because this divide

is so powerful and otherwise insurmountable, we will use the term madness to
describe it. For the conceptualization of the weird involves complex shifts in the
cosmos and the dramatic reassigning of values, so that what is true in the non-weird
cosmos is madness in the weird cosmos, and what is true in the weird cosmos is
madness in the non-weird. As the philosopher Koakowski noted: a philosophy
becomes intelligible through a kind of initiation which is not preceded by an act of
intellectual understanding; we understand it in the very act of acceptance
(Koakowski, 2001, 108). In these same terms, one cannot understand the weird
cosmos without contact with it, and one cannot have contact with it without
accepting it in some degree. The weird is, therefore, somehow an agent in itself, a
force that affects those encountering it directly or what it touches.
Let us now return to Prof. A.s case. We will draw selectively from his account of
the encounter with the weird and read those passages phenomenologically, paying
special attention to the professors use of metaphors, which though drawn from
his post-cultic discourse still contains the kernel of his dramatic experiences.
When Prof. A. was on leave from his duties and enjoying the company of his
philosopher friends, he discovered something he had never imagined before: bodilessthings. The professor learned how the Platonists described a different reality to the
one he knew, an interior one, where these strange things existed. On the basis of his
researches and his discussions with friends, the professor decided to conduct a
Platonist ritual to experience this interior world where bodiless-things allegedly
existed in order to nd out for himself what they were (Prof. A., 1992, 8182).
It was then the professor encountered the weird. He looked within himself and
entered into his innermost places (intima), and there he saw something, some
alien thing, which was not him (Prof. A., 1992, 81). It was a shining, but
unchangeable light (lux inconmutabilis) that was so strange he struggled to
describe it: it was neither an ordinary (vulgaris) sort of light that is visible to all
esh (conspicia omni carni), nor a greater and more luminous version of the same
kind instead, it was different, absolutely different (aliud, valde aliud) from any
kind of light he had ever witnessed (Prof. A., 1992, 81). The thing was so strange
that, though he sensed it was within him, he was far off from it in a region of
unlikeness (in regione dissimilitudinis). The things brightness pained him very
much, and it somehow raised him up to get a vague glimpse of its powerful
radiance so that when he saw it, he trembled in love and horror (contremui[t]
amore et horrore) (Prof. A., 1992, 82).
Here are several key factors. First, it is an encounter with the alien with some
other thing coming from a realm of total unlikeness to the professors. That it is
an interior encounter only underscores its weird nature, showing that the
professors Inside is what Lovecraft described as Outside. Second, the thing is
indescribable, or beyond the professors powers to capture through description: it
is a light, but an unnatural light that shines without changing and its brightness is
powerful enough to pain his inner eye. Third, the thing acts upon the professor,
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4 Confessiones, VII,
10, 16: Cibus
sum grandium:
cresce et
manducabis me.
Nec tu me in te
mutabis sicut
cibum carnis tuae,
sed tu mutaberis
in me.
5 Readers will note
the allusion to
Exodus 3:14.

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lifting him up to see it and hurting him. It is a thing that can and does affect him.
Fourth, the professors response to this thing is physical and sensual: he trembles.
As Carroll argues, the physical element in the horror emotion is central (Carroll,
2010, 2425). The Latin word horror comes from the verb horrere, which
literally means to have ones skin crawl and was associated with encounters with
otherworldly forces (Lewis and Short, 1879, 864865; Glare, 1996, 804805).
The professors physical reaction involves the contradictory emotions of love and
horror in response to an unearthly power (not uncommon in ancient cults,
including the Anointed Ones [Rosenwein, 2006, 145147]), which evidences the
things unthinkable yet undeniable and overwhelming presence.
The encounter, however, quickly became stranger. For the thing revealed to
Prof. A. that it had incredible powers to transform him into itself: I am the food
of grown things: grow and you will devour me. And you will not change me into
you as your eshs food, but you will be changed into me (Prof. A., 1992, 82;
italics mine).4 Then the thing uttered its strange name Sum-Qui-Sum
meaning something like I Am Who I Am, and the professor found he would
sooner doubt his own existence than the existence of the thing within him.5
Let us consider this alarming revelation for a moment. Sum-Qui-Sums claim
about itself is precisely weird: it is a bodiless thing inside the professor that claims
it will feed itself to the professor, be digested by the professor, but then unlike
other food it will turn the professor into itself. Wetzel suggests that thinking in
terms of eshy digestion is merely crudely materialistic (Wetzel, 2010, 56). Yet if
we take this description (like Prof. A.s portrayal of the thing as an unfathomable,
painful and grasping light) as a metaphor capturing Sum-Qui-Sums otherwise
indescribable nature, then we must try to uncover the metaphors meaning and
get at what Husserl called the things essence (Husserl, 1970, 249; cf. Moran,
2000, 12, 134135).
The professors metaphor subverts the usual meaning of interiority and
nourishment: Sum-Qui-Sum is within the professor, like food that has been eaten,
but unlike food the professor has previously eaten, it will transform him into
itself. The encounter between the body-thing (the professor) and the bodilessthing (Sum-Qui-Sum) overcomes the professors thinking of nature, but he
nevertheless captures it in this strange and frightening image: the bodiless-thing
claims an unimaginable mastery over him that will cause him to be transformed
into something wholly different, something bodiless the alien thing itself.
Prof. A. struggled against this becoming-alien experience, refusing to show the
submission and obedience Sum-Qui-Sum demanded (Prof. A., 1992, 8485).
Confessions contains the traces of this historical struggle in the form of the
professors reluctance to make the turn to the Anointed Ones, whom he came to
identify as Sum-Qui-Sums principal minions (Prof. A., 1992, 8687). On this
point, it is worth exploring the resonance between Prof. A.s metaphor of the
becoming-alien experience (of Sum-Qui-Sum consuming him) with the Anointed
Ones understanding of their deity as a shepherd to see how this connection made

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sense to him. The Anointed Ones often describe their god (or its lieutenants) as a
shepherd the deitys esh-born son even claiming to be the good shepherd in
their writings while the cultists are its sheep (Gan, 2007, 2737; Baxter, 2011,
125165).6 While this terminology is generally said to emphasize the deitys (or its
leading servants) role as the sheeps protector and provider, another unexplored
and troubling meaning presents itself. For we might ask: Why does a shepherd
maintain a ock except to eat the sheep? Whether by the shepherd or another
master, the sheep are obviously there to be eaten. Even the harvesting of their wool
only foreshadows the harvesting of their esh. The horric imagery in the Book of
Jeremiah of an angry deity, embodied in Israels earthly foes, devouring the
Hebrews as punishment for their indelity puts the basic assumption of this
disturbing metaphor (that the deity will devour the sheep) in stark relief simply by
changing the face of the deity from benevolent and protecting to monstrous and
wrathful (Kalmanofsky, 2008, 5867). To refuse the shepherd is to be among
wolves that compete with the deity and threaten its source of nourishment, the
sheep (Ezekiel 22, 27; Matthew 7, 15, 10, 16; Luke 10, 3; Acts 20, 29).
Being food for the alien and showing obedience to an otherworldly master are
metaphors for the becoming-alien experience that Prof. A. resisted. He employed
another metaphor in his notorious account of his reluctance to give up sexual
pleasures in the process of his turn, which he described as a struggle in which esh
lusted against spirit and spirit against esh (caro concupisceret adversus spiritum
et spiritus adversus carnem) (Prof. A., 1992, 93).7 The professor as esh was the
body-thing resisting alien domination by the spirit, the bodiless-thing, Sum-QuiSum. Prof. A.s becoming-alien experience fundamentally involved the acceptance
of Sum-Qui-Sums weird hierarchical world of the Inside, where bodiless-things
were superior to body-things (Prof. A., 1992, 7576).
The struggle between Prof. A. and the thing from the Inside was not one of
equals. Sum-Qui-Sum had a strange and terrifying power to force the professor to
view body-things in particular Prof. A. himself through its alien, bodiless
perspective. In a dramatic moment in Confessions account of his struggle, Prof. A.
wrote that Sum-Qui-Sum turned his minds eye around in the Inside so that the
professor saw his body-thing self as alien and horrifying: he was deformed
(turpis) and crooked and lthy, spotted and ulcerous (distortus et sordidus,
maculosus et ulcerosus) (Prof. A., 1992, 9596). This alien perspective horried
(horreba[t]) the professor, although he did not have the power to resist the
forceful control over his inner eye.
Sharing its alien vision with the professor was a dreadful moment in the
professors turn. It involved what Freud called the uncanny experience of the
double, in which the victim struggles with the uncertainty of knowing which of
the two entities the original self or the double they actually are (Freud, 2003,
141142). Andr Mandouze suggested that this passage of Confessions describes
what a psychoanalyst would identify as an experience of alienation (Mandouze,
1968, 468, quoted by ODonnell in Prof. A., 1992, III, 42). As a result of this
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6 Prof. A. himself
uses the term
several times:
Confessiones, III,
2, 4; VIII, 3, 6; IX,
3, 5; X, 36, 59;
and XII, 15, 21.

7 The reference is to
Romans 13:13.

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8 The reference is to
Galatians 5:17.

inner doubt and turmoil, the professor tortured himself physically by tearing his
hair and beating his forehead (Prof. A., 1992, 97). As has been recently argued,
he drew from the image of the tortured Roman slave in Confessions to describe
his mournful suffering from Sum-Qui-Sum here and elsewhere (Burrus et al,
2010, 63) obviously an image meant to emphasize his post-turn view of the
correctness of his subsequent submission. Yet the account preserves the kernel of
his stubborn resistance against the Inside thing, revealing how the professor felt
sick and tortured (aegrotaba[t] et excruciaba[tur]) from the struggle: he resisted
because each time he sensed he might be overcome by Sum-Qui-Sum and
transformed into some-thing different (aliud), the thought lled him with more
and more horror (ampliorem incutiebat horrorem) (Prof. A., 1992, 99100).
Yet, at last, the professor was overwhelmed in the struggle (Prof. A., 1992,
101). A weird, singsong voice called to him during the peak of his torture, telling
him about the book nearby to Take it, read it! Take it, read it! (tolle lege,
tolle lege). He picked up the writings of the Anointed Ones nearby and the
text commanded him to abandon the esh.8 Whether meant as a literal or
metaphorical account, the weird assault from Sum-Qui-Sum from within and
from the words of the book in his hands together were enough to overcome him,
and the professor succumbed to what seemed like madness before (Prof. A., 1992,
103): He willed what Sum-Qui-Sum willed. The professor captured the uncanny
nature of this becoming-alien experience by describing the power to do as SumQui-Sum wanted as something called forth from some profound and secret
depth (de quo imo altoque secreto evocatum est) within himself. A reward for
his submission quickly followed, but it was an alien sensation that now was
wholly pleasing: true and supreme sweetness sweeter than all pleasure, but not
to esh and blood; brighter than all light, but more inward than all secret depths
(vera ... et summa suavitas ... omni voluptate dulcior, sed non carni et sanguini,
omni luce clarior, sed omni secreto interior) (Prof. A., 1992, 103).
The professor had become alien. He willed what Sum-Qui-Sum willed and
enjoyed its overwhelming presence within him as sweet pleasure rather than as a
terrifying alien. He was no longer Prof. A. body-thing, but weird bodiless-thing.
This transformation entailed a kind of death the end of his former self and the
beginning of a new self (or, as we shall see, selves) a kind of madness in the form
of an understanding of the cosmos that exceeded his earlier, body-thing world.
This new universe was a hierarchical world of superior bodiless-things and base
body-things, a world once unthinkable, but now undeniably true.

T h e C o n c e p t ua l i z a ti o n o f t he W e i rd
When Prof. A. revealed Sum-Qui-Sums weird cosmos in Confessions a little
over a decade after his turn (Brown, 2000, 178), he unleashed a becomingalien experience on his readers. Through a combination of dramatic and unique
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rst-person narrative and philosophical self-exploration, the professor hurled his

audience directly into Sum-Qui-Sums realm of the Inside and insisted that
anyone not submitting to this bodiless master was a wicked and perverted horror,
a deformed creature in rebellion against the cosmic order. Obedience was the only
moral choice, for the denizens of the universe consisted only in Sum-Qui-Sums
minions and enemies. Body-thing humans were ignorant of the Inside because of
their corrupting experiences in the physical universe. Submission to Sum-QuiSum meant above all surrendering all of ones desire to it: to desire things of the
earthly, body-thing world instead of Sum-Qui-Sum was a dreadful perversion, the
wellspring of all wickedness. The only escape for the professors readers from
their own horric monstrosity was to follow his inward path; otherwise, they
were the source of cosmic evil.
Such is the logic of Prof. A.s concept of the will (voluntas) in Confessions, the
conceptualization of his weird encounter with Sum-Qui-Sum. The concept of the
will creates a cosmos in which only two kinds of human entities can exist,
perverted and corrected ones. It was not intended to articulate an experience of
free will, but to alienate readers from themselves by creating a sense of crisis: as
body-things they had been corrupted and made into monsters through their own
worldly desires, which, as a result, led them to forget their true home in the
Inside. In moralizing human desire in these terms, Prof. A. philosophically
reframed the cosmos for his readers in the image of his weird struggle with and
eventual submission to Sum-Qui-Sum.
Prof. A.s concept of the will rather than explaining the mysteries of good and
evil and human freedom as the professor claimed and others have accepted as true
(Arendt, 1978, 84110; Dihle, 1982, 123144; Kahn, 1988; Harrison, 1999;
Karfkov, 2012, 89103, 347353; Marion, 2012, 145190)9 possesses a
dangerous power to limit the possibilities of human experience. For the nature of
the conceptualization of the weird is that it transforms an individual becomingalien experience into a universalizing one to be passed onto others so that they too
become alien in that particular way. For this reason, we must refuse Confessions
claims to be an account of the authors spiritual journey to the Anointed Ones
deity (Gilson, 1960, 113164) in order to see how the professors discussions of
the nature of evil, human interiority and self-discovery, and the psychology of
desire (Evans, 1982; Cary, 2000, 63139; Fredriksen, 2008, 1962010; Burrus
et al, 2010, 6284) were intended to captivate the human imagination literally
to hold it captive with his moral vision of the universe and prevent alternate and
contradictory experiences. The professors debts to the Greek philosophical
tradition (especially Stoicism and Neoplatonism) and Roman thought, jurisprudence and culture are well established (Dihle, 1982, 123144; Kahn, 1988) and
they will not be examined here.
Uncovering the wills weird origins allows us to put a new twist on what
Wetzel has rightly termed the absoluteness of the will in Prof. A.s post-turn
thought in that here we highlight the absolute nature of Prof. A.s concept while
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9 Note that these

authors sometimes
consider writings
besides
Confessions.

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simultaneously (to borrow a phrase from Alain Badiou) refusing its regime of
discourse (Badiou, 2003, 41; Wetzel, 2010, 48). Such a stance is necessary to
avoid the professors rhetorical and philosophical powers to mesmerize his
audience powers that make him the most treacherous of ancient and medieval
authors (Arendt, 1978, 84; cf. Kahn, 1988, 235). He was, after all, the rst
philosopher of the will (in Hannah Arendts words (Arendt, 1978, 84; cf. Kahn,
1988, 235)), who controls mood and sensibility by being at once frighteningly
authoritarian about the necessity of submission to Sum-Qui-Sum while also
seductively delightful about the bodiless pleasures involved in that submission
(Miles, 1992, 812; Burrus et al, 2010, 6284). To elude Confessions spell we
must see it with different eyes. To that end, we will rst consider the elements that
make up the professors concept of the will, and then examine his method of
creating a becoming-alien experience for his readers.
Prof. A.s concept of the will like all philosophical concepts (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1994, 134) offers a universalizing explanation for the cosmos: every
human being without exception is a res volens, a thing that wills. Fundamental
to his concept of the will was the professors unique explanation of evil (Evans,
1982, 112118; Prof. A., 1992, 7475, 8283): evil in the world was caused by
body-things desiring other body-things through their perverted wills, and all
body-things turned away from the bodiless were corrupt. Evil was, then,
inseparable from corrupted wills and the professors own past was used to
illustrate this point (Evans, 1982, 17). According to the professor, wickedness
itself was the perversity of the will (voluntatis perversitas) turned away from
Sum-Qui-Sum (Prof. A., 1992, 84). He explained his struggle to resist Sum-QuiSum as the result of his perverted will being unwilling to accept what the bodilessthing demanded (which, he claimed, his mind understood as good and correct)
(Prof. A., 1992, 9799). Only when the professor willed what Sum-Qui-Sum
willed was his will properly turned back to the bodiless (Prof. A., 1992, 103).
For the professor, the will is intentional in the phenomenological sense, in that
it is always pointed at something specic, and the human being is subject
to whatever receives the wills attention. The wills direction denes its quality,
since things cling (haerere) to the objects of their will. Foundational to the
professors weird cosmos was the superiority of the changeless bodiless-thing
over changing body-things, which meant that ones cling needed to be directed
to the superior, interior things (Prof. A., 1992, 7576). Clinging to the bodiless
was natural and correct the righting of a wrong intentionality since the
unchanging Sum-Qui-Sum was always within all changing body-things from
beginning to end (Prof. A., 1992, 8485, 119147). The inward turn and
submission to Sum-Qui-Sum, therefore, became naturalized through the professors discussion of memory as a re-discovery of Sum-Qui-Sum rather than the
weird discovery it was.
Prof. A.s becoming-alien experience begins with his remarkable choice of
authorial perspective: a rst-person voice narrates or confesses his tale in an
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autobiographical style, which was utterly unusual at the time (Matthews, 2010,
4243). His choice of language was scriptural, placing it rmly in the tradition of
the Anointed Ones (Wolterstorff, 2006; Burton, 2007, 112132). Yet philosophically this rst-person perspective has the disturbing effect of making Prof. A.
himself and his experiences the basis of truth (Matthews, 2010, 4243). In effect,
the post-turn professor the res volens becomes a universal gure: his post-turn
perceptions become our perceptions as we are swept along by his narration and
philosophizing.
Critical to the professors creation of a becoming-alien experience is how this
post-turn, rst-person perspective enabled him to create an alienating image of his
pre-turn self. Prof. A. adopted what Carroll describes as the rhetoric of horror
storytelling in order to elicit from his audience the emotional response of art
horror with its elements of fear and revulsion towards the monstrous (Carroll,
2010, 2735). The professors own particular horror language was inuenced
primarily by the writings of the Anointed Ones, whose ancient Hebrew texts
contained an especially well-developed horror discourse (Kalmanofsky, 2008,
105129 and passim). The language of fornication, perversion and indelity,
with its sexual overtones, was central to Hebrew descriptions of the complex
relationship between Israel and its deity, as was the tradition of describing the
deity, its agents and the Hebrews themselves in monstrous terms.
For the professors narrative, the horric and alienating discourse he used to
describe his pre-turn self had the uncanny power of creating what we might call a
doppelganger effect. As noted above, Freud (2003, 123134) saw the doppelganger, or double, as one of the most disturbing psychic images, since it causes the
experiencer to feel uncertain which of the two is their actual self. In Confessions,
the professors post-turn self looks on his wicked pre-turn self in horror and
revulsion as a disturbing double, leading his readers to do the same. The art
horror discourse makes it absolutely clear that the post-turn professor is the one
with which readers should identify. The next logical step in the professors
becoming-alien experience, of course, was that readers should view their own
body-thing selves with horror and revulsion, and follow the professor on his
weird inward path to Sum-Qui-Sum.
Some examples of Prof. A.s use of art horror in Confessions will illustrate this
process. The professor noted that from the very beginning he had a vast capacity
for fault (peccatum) as a nasty, selsh body-thing. As an infant, Prof. A.
greedily wanted his mothers milk and screamed when his wishes were not
fullled (Prof. A., 1992, 67). The professors verdict was clear: the weakness of
infants limbs is blameless, infants hearts are not (imbecillitas membrorum
infantium innocens est, non animus infantium) (Prof. A., 1992, 7). As a child, he
disobeyed his parents, had to be beaten into doing his studies, and lied and
cheated to overcome his competitors in school and play (Prof. A., 1992, 9, 1011,
1315). The only thing he came to love was poetry, a sort of madness
(dementia) that only body-things could love since it was predominantly about
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human failings (Prof. A., 1992, 11). By painting his childhood in these tones,
Prof. A. showed his readers that from the very outset of life all body-things were
prone to wickedness and corruption in their ordinary doings.
Yet the professor made clear that the central matter in the corruption of the will
was the bodily impurities and corruptions one experienced when entering
adulthood (Prof. A., 1992, 16). That was when his body-thing self embraced
physical pleasures and his will fell into corruption so that he began to have
pleasure in doing what was not allowed. When his father saw the proof of his
adulthood on a visit to the baths, he encouraged his sons corruption in his very
depths by the invisible wine of a perverse and sinking will (de vino invisibili
perversae atque inclinatae in ima voluntatis) (Prof. A., 1992, 1718). At that
point the professor became evil for no reason at all except to love foul
wickedness (malitia foeda) and rebellion (defectum), and his deformed soul
(turpis anima) sought its destruction (exterminium) in shame (dedecus) for
its own sake (Prof. A., 1992, 19). Evil acts such as lying about sexual encounters
and the theft of pears (only to throw them away) were perversions that delighted
this evil pre-turn will, further seducing it away from its bodiless master (Prof. A.,
1992, 1719).
To indulge in body-thing pleasures was the signature of perversion, and the
professor used imagery of adultery to characterize his corrupted and rebellious
will: the soul adulterates itself (fornicatur anima) against Sum-Qui-Sum in
turning away from the bodiless-thing. Indeed, gazing at this terrible doppelganger
lled Prof. A. with a horror that he could only describe through images of
monstrous decay and death: O putrescence! O monster of life and abyss of
death! (O putredo, o monstrum vitae et mortis profunditas!) (Prof. A., 1992,
21). His seduction to evil was meant to overwhelm his audience with revulsion: It
is disgusting! I do not want to think about it, I do not want to see it! (foeda est;
nolo in eam intendere, nolo eam videre). He was a wasteland (regio egestatis)
onto himself the very image of death (Prof. A., 1992, 22). From that point on,
the professor became deformed (deformis) (Prof. A., 1992, 80, 134) and a
slave to lust (libidinis servus) (Prof. A., 1992, 71), and he was lled with
terrible uncleanness (plenus exsacrandis sordibus) and insane with a profane
heart (insanus corde sacrilego) (Prof. A., 1992, 52, 53).
Yet the professor showed his audience that the perversion of the will even
extended to other body-thing pleasures. He saw his desires for success in his
career as a teacher of the liberal arts and then a professor of rhetoric, as well as his
enjoyment of literature, as further cause for making him one of the restless
wicked ones (inquieti iniqui) that ee Sum-Qui-Sum and become deformed
(turpes) by their perverse desires (Prof. A., 1992, 46). In his madness
(dementia), he loved the theaters ability to move him to tears, and he loved
his friends so much that he could not bear their passing (Prof. A., 1992, 2334,
3738). Even one of his otherwise upright friends was seduced by the perverse
insanity of the circus and gladiatorial games (Prof. A., 1992, 6466).
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At the heart of the wills corruption was that it tended to cling (haerere) to
whatever perversions it desired. He wrote how his heart clung (cors adhaerebat) to his unnamed lover, who was taken away as an impediment to marriage,
but as a slave to lust he could not do without sexual companionship, and so found
another lover to take her place (Prof. A., 1992, 71). He also demonstrated that
the cling of the will was contagious, writing how his circus and games-loving
friend, who had not clung (non haeserat) to the pleasure of sexual intercourse,
began to cling to the glue of this pleasure (haerere visco illius voluptatis)
after hearing the professor endlessly talk about his sexual desires (Prof. A., 1992,
6970).
Clinging in terms of haerere, of course, carried with it the connotation of
sexual intercourse (Adams, 1982, 181182). The professors use of the term with
his lover underscores this sexual meaning. Prof. A. characterized the most difcult
part of his struggle against Sum-Qui-Sum as abandoning sexual intercourse and
the language he would use of clinging to Sum-Qui-Sum is quite similar
suggesting that he recalled the turn as the abandoning of one perverted, body
pleasure for a superior bodiless one. The professor wrote that the bodiless-things
cling to Sum-Qui-Sum was one of delight, just like the body-things sexual cling,
but it exceeded the latter since where it clings satiety does not rend it asunder
(ubi haeret quod non divellit satietas) (Prof. A., 1992, 122).
The link between submission and desire is what Burrus et al term the
professors eroticism of obedience (Burrus et al, 2010, 81). For as bodiless-thing
the professor still enjoyed pleasure, albeit in a new, interior form that reframed
Sum-Qui-Sums domination of him into desirable submission. According to the
professor, his new form of pleasure was superior to the older ones as betted the
new weird-cosmic hierarchy of the Inside, while his pre-turn desires had been
typical of an inrm soul not yet clinging to the solidity of truth (anima inrma
nondum haerens soliditati veritatis) (Prof. A., 1992, 42).
The central moment of the professors becoming alien experience for his
readers was when (as discussed above) Sum-Qui-Sum forced the professor to see
his body-thing self from its weird perspective. In the same way that Sum-Qui-Sum
forced his minds eye to see himself as a horror during his historical experience,
the professor forced his readers to look at his disgusting and deformed image.
Here readers were expected to be repulsed by the crooked and lthy, spotted and
ulcerous (Prof. A., 1992, 9596) body-thing professor, and they should
furthermore see this doppelganger as a monstrous sign pointing to their own
horric body-thing selves.10
Alienated from their body-thing selves, the audience would be swept along the
professors path to the Inside. For the turn provided the only escape from this
horric image of humanity quite literally, in fact since in turning toward
Sum-Qui-Sum bodiless-things no longer regarded the outer world with their will.
In its simplest terms, according to the professor, this change in desire removed the
evil from the will: Good is it always for one to cling to you (bonum autem illi est
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10 Prof. A. would
later reect on the
value of such
moments of
reective horror.
See his
Enarrationes in
Psalmos, XXX,

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en. II, s. 1, v. 2, c.
5: Nam est
quaedam confusio
temporalis utilis,
perturbatio animi
respicientis
peccata sua,
respectione
horrentis, horrore
erubescentis,
erubescentia
corrigentis. (Prof.
A., 1956, 194).
11 This is an allusion
to Psalms 72:28.

12 On the professors
appropriation of
the Platonic
tradition of
memory, see
Corradini (1997,
128136) and
Cary (2000,
125139).

86

haerere tibi semper) (Prof. A., 1992, 185).11 The professor emphasized the
change of his will in his turn, saying that Sum-Qui-Sum emptied the abyss of
corruption from [his] hearts foundation (a fundo cordis [eius] exhauriens
abyssum corruptionis) so that he could will what it willed (Prof. A., 1992, 103).
Confessions weird cosmos exceeded the non-weird cosmos by adding the
Inside realm, one eternal and superior to the external, body-thing world. SumQui-Sum ruled both realms timelessly from the Inside as rightful master, and
the professor assured his readers that the transformation from body-thing to
bodiless-thing by clinging (cohaerendo) to Sum-Qui-Sum had advantages: it
enabled the bodiless-thing to avoid suffering from the passage of time (Prof. A.,
1992, 169), since a bodiless-thing clinging (cohaerens) to Sum-Qui-Sum
remains with it in the Inside realm permanently and unchangingly through all of
the changes of time (Prof. A., 1992, 171, 174). The transformation from bodything to bodiless-thing was to become the very weird light that the professor
discovered in his Platonic ritual, which happened by observing the light and
clinging to it (intuendo illuminantem lucem eique cohaerendo) (Prof. A., 1992,
185). In other words, the professor taught his audience that the desirable
transformation into a bodiless-thing, which Sum-Qui-Sum claimed would happen, occurred through the cling, the intentionality of the will.
Key to Confessions becoming alien experience was that Prof. A. projected his
turn as a foregone conclusion throughout the entire work. Looking back on his
struggle against Sum-Qui-Sum, the professor claimed that the teachings of the
Anointed Ones clung to his heart (haerebat in corde) long before he actually
made his turn (Prof. A., 1992, 77). He even noted that his weird, inward encounter
with Sum-Qui-Sum made it clear to him so that he in no way doubted to what [he]
must cling (neque ullo modo dubitabam esse cui cohaere[t]), although as a bodything he struggled against it for some time (Prof. A., 1992, 84).
The intended effect of such discourse was to propel his readers along the
inward path to Sum-Qui-Sum as an inevitable, irresistible event. Prof. A.
radicalized (in terms of radix), or made absolute, the turn in the human
experience of time and space by describing it as a return to origins, placing SumQui-Sum at the very roots of all existence. Drawing on the Platonic notion of
memory, Prof. A. claimed that Sum-Qui-Sum had unchangingly been within him
since birth, and through his memory he could recover the knowledge of what
being a moral bodiless-thing meant (Prof. A., 1992, 118147).12 In one move the
professor reframed his disturbing discovery of Sum-Qui-Sum, the bodiless-thing
within him, into a re-discovery. He undertook a lengthy examination of the
opening passages of the Anointed Ones scripture, which articulated their deitys
creation of the cosmos, in order to overturn his older body-thing vision of the
cosmos. The change of vision was foundational on both the individual and
cosmic levels: the weird-cosmos became universal and his former understanding
of the world was eradicated, torn out at the roots. His entire personal history
formed part of the tale in order to make that change as complete as possible until

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his pre-turn life was only thinkable through his weird experience. Readers swept
into this becoming-alien experience found themselves utterly within Sum-QuiSums weird cosmos, and the old cosmos that is, however they viewed the
universe before encountering Confessions was conceptually washed away.
Prof. A.s creation of the will, his writing of Confessions, explained his resistance
to the otherworldly Sum-Qui-Sum as rebellion against a rightful master, so that the
experience of losing his powers of volition to the alien led him to frame that event
as a universal one: every human being dwells within the weird cosmos and every
human being is a thing that wills (res volens) either with or against Sum-Qui-Sum.
Confessions has been tremendously successful in making its weird cosmos seem
natural so that only in de-familiarizing it through the phenomenology of the weird
and laying open its central concept can its powerful spell be broken.
In undertaking to break this spell, it has been paramount to avoid the piety
most readers show Confessions for its religious, literary and philosophical
qualities, since this piety has surely contributed to the disturbing resilience of
Prof. A.s concept of the will. Its longevity among the Anointed Ones in the Latinspeaking tradition should not be surprising. Arguably the tale of the professors
turn and his account of the nature of evil have remained central to the cults
approach to the humandeity relationship and many of the most important cultic
thinkers over the centuries have worked within the concepts orbit (Arendt, 1978,
113146; Evans, 1982, 170184; Knuuttila, 1999). Yet the wills shadow is cast
far and wide across the intellectual and cultural landscape of the western tradition
(Mathewes, 2011, 59103). Even post-medieval, non-cultic philosophers from
Ren Descartes (Menn, 1998; Wetzel, 2000) to Schopenhauer (2010, 123127)
to Friedrich Nietzsche (Arendt, 1978, 158172; Nietzsche, 1989) to Hannah
Arendt (Arendt, 1978, 195217; Mathewes, 2011, 149200) have been inuenced by it, showing its hold on modern thought is wide-reaching to say the least.
In addition to these famous philosophers, Lovecraft our premier connoisseur of
the weird saw the will to power in the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
as the driving force of all organic life in the universe (Lovecraft, 2000, 115116).
In this way, one might suggest that the weird as a category of experience and
thought was born from the professors concept. This shared legacy of the concept
of the will has even spawned a reaction among todays radical cultists like Hanby
(2003), who recently argued that the only relationship between Prof. A.s notion
of the will and its modern nihilistic Cartesian descendent is that the latter is a
perversion of the former (i) a word revealingly chosen directly from the
professors own discourse.

A b o ut th e A u th o r
Matthew Bryan Gillis is a lecturer in the history department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Co-editor and contributor to the volume
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Gillis

Ego Trouble: Authors and Their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, he is currently
uncovering another weird tale concerning the ninth-century Augustinian heretic,
Gottschalk of Orbais (E-mail: mgillis1@utk.edu).

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