'Shameless': Augustine, After Augustine, and Way After Augustine

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44:1, Winter 2014DOI 10.1215/10829636-2389479 © 2014 by Duke University Press

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“Shameless”: Augustine, After Augustine, and Way After Augustine

Steven JusticeUniversity of MississippiOxford, Mississippi

There is a tone that contemporary readers are apt to hear in medieval polem-ics, and those who know them best hear it most: a tone of urgent denuncia-tion that sounds savage, evasive, and a little sick. We have been told for the last two centuries that it is indeed savage; we have been told for the last three decades it is also sick and evasive. But neither the phenomenon nor the con-clusion has often been looked at straight on: it has remained a phenomenon of the middle range, a medium through which discourse is apprehended; it therefore tends to go without saying, and therefore without being thought about. It is worth thinking about.

One instance of it is the readiness of polemicists to decry opponents and their words as “shameless,” “impudent.” This word impudens, with its grammatical variants, appears so frequently that it seems almost to tap out the rhythm of thought. Choosing a single word has an obvious expository usefulness, since it opens habitual impressions to philological inquiry; but this is, I think, a great word for the purpose, condensing as it does into one lexical unit what seems the chronically prissy defensiveness of religious discourse. Here are three examples. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine at the end of his life is engaged in a fierce exchange with Julian of Eclanum; Julian has twitted Augustine with both hating sex and talking endlessly and indecently about it, archly noting that even Adam and Eve covered their nakedness. Augustine fires back, “It is worse to praise what they felt in their shame than to strip it bare, you most shameless man [impudentissime].”1 At the turn of the fourteenth century, some women religious enjoy a relaxed observance of claustration; Boniface VIII declares that they have “impu-dently discarded the modesty of nuns,” instructing them to go back to their convents and stay there.2 And in the eighteenth, Vincenzo Ludovico Gotti, cardinal- priest of St. Pancras, has read Spinoza’s letters to Oldenburg and encountered his claim that the Gospels’ resurrection account is incredible;

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he fires back, “It is you who are deceived, you most impudent of mortals, not the evangelists who wrote what they saw and what Christ himself gave testimony of.”3

Let’s call this tactic of denunciation the impudence gambit. Notice how it works. It rejects a claim or argument as not just erroneous but unwor-thy. It is avowedly ad hominem: it implies that failure of thought has fol-lowed from some failure of character. The thought called impudent does not rise even to the status of refutable error: it is a subrational animus on which extended argumentative attention would be wasted. The accusation peremp-torily refuses to continue discussion of the point as a waste of reason on the unreasonable. It is easy for us to suspect that this is just the point, that one attraction of the impudence gambit is excusing you from answering an argu-ment you do not know how to answer, to suspect that it is the bad- faith tac-tic of an orthodoxy defending itself with bullying because it cannot defend itself by persuasion. When baffled how to respond, declare your interlocu-tor beneath response. And it is easy to conclude that that shrillness is the symptom of a sore spot touched. So in the case of Boniface VIII’s canon criticizing nuns that have “impudently” discarded their modesty, two fine historians conclude that it bespeaks Boniface’s “obsession with female sexual purity.”4 In the case of Gotti, calling Spinoza’s skepticism “impudent,” Jona-than Israel’s Radical Enlightenment draws a similar judgment and has some fun with him along the way. At this point in the book, Israel is claiming that Spinoza rattled orthodox believers. As he concludes the chapter, he quotes Henry More calling Spinoza shameless, and concludes with Gotti doing the same:

Cardinal Gotti, among others, reiterated the stock reply: the truth of the testimony of the evangelists cannot be doubted, for good measure echoing Henry More’s designation of Spinoza — “You, the most impudent of mortals.”5

And he ends the chapter there. The effect is to strand Gotti in mid- bluster, a pathetic figure who wants to refute but can only fume. What Gotti wants to think a response to Spinoza is something Israel assumes we can recognize as a symptom of his anxiety and helplessness, his unwitting admission that he has nothing with which to withstand Spinoza’s claims.

Crying “impudence” seems by its very tone to invite these abrupt diagnoses of anxiety, and diagnosis like this has been for the last two gen-erations ubiquitous in literary and cultural history, the demotic expression

Justice / “Shameless” 19

of critique as a distinctive mode of addressing the past: a tool for reading sources “against the grain,” as we used to say, looking past what our authors do want us to see to find instead what they do not, or what they do not grasp themselves, about the conditions they rely on, or the interests they serve, or the grounds on which their assertions rest. For this purpose, moments in which authors apparently wish to proffer rational argument but produce instead a subrational animus, a twitch of orthodox defensiveness, offer an opening. The tactic of diagnosis in these cases is unself- consciously ad homi-nem: Gotti is useful because (as Israel presents him) he is not just wrong; he is so haplessly wrong that he lets slip how fragile is his intellectual confidence and how tenuous are its grounds. His assertion is therefore empty of ide-ational substance and therefore beneath analysis. Diagnosis, not argument, is called for.

Let’s call this interpretive tactic the anxiety gambit. Of course my point is how much it looks like the impudence gambit it here diagnoses. You might say that we have a standoff: Gotti calls Spinoza impudent, we call Gotti scared. But the similarity also offers a clearer view of that preference of ours, and of what is right and what is not about that style of scholarship.

The anxiety gambit has some odd features. One is that no particu-lar grounds seem needed to justify the judgment that anxiety has produced the utterance. In Israel’s treatment, an accusation of “impudence” counts as evidence of it. Careless treatment of a topic can indicate anxiety (Carolyn Dinshaw said that a wild accusation of homosexuality in a Lollard work might show how worried its author is about homosexuality);6 but then so can careful treatment (I said that one chronicler’s meticulous accounting of his abbey’s rights shows how scared he was that the rights were base-less).7 Deep concern shows anxiety (Kathryn Kerby- Fulton has said that a commentator gives a pedantically orthodox account of Marguerite Porete’s Mirouer because he is “panicked” by its heresies);8 but so does airy uncon-cern (Stephen Greenblatt says you can tell how anxious Poggio Bracciolini is about Lucretius’s ideas because he shows no interest in them).9 You are fleeing from something if you correct someone’s incoherence (Matthew dal Santo says that Gregory the Great’s insistence that saints work with Christ’s power witnesses his anxiety that the divine power is fractured);10 you are fleeing from something if you are incoherent yourself (Marvin Pope, who thinks Saint Bernard’s exegesis of the Song of Songs loony, ascribes the looniness to a fear of sex).11 Rhetorical modesty signals anxiety (to Christo-pher Celenza, Lorenzo Valla’s express diffidence about revising Saint Jerome shows that he fears giving the impression of challenging Jerome, or scrip-


ture itself.)12 You show your anxiety if you fancy that people are degrad-ing something you value (Gavin Langmuir thought that Christians’ anxiet-ies about the Eucharist provoked them to suspect Jews of desecrating it);13 it even signals your anxiety if they really do degrade it (Miri Rubin sug-gests that Christians’ anxiety may have provoked Jews to desecrate it).14 If you disapprove of a practice, you fear it (Katherine Zieman suggests that priests denounced gossiping at Mass because it made them worry about their authority);15 if you think an assertion untrue, you fear it (Steven Kruger says that Archbishop Tempier condemned the categorically naturalist explana-tion of visions because it made him nervous);16 if you don’t even mention something you show you fear it (Christopher Baswell concludes there is an anxiety about chaste kingship because it is “almost unspeakable”).17 Some of these diagnoses are probably right. But most of them do not bother showing that they are; and they can do so because it is conventional to assume that, in some sources and in some circumstances, disapproval of something may without investigation be construed transparently to mean fear of that thing: “anxious about” has become nearly a synonym for “critical of.”

Such judgment of anxiety can be found everywhere, and it comes cheap: it costs no more than a clause of assertion, but is offered as a substan-tive, not merely a decorative, assertion. When Dinshaw says that the Twelve Conclusions’ accusation of hermaphroditism is “anxious,” and when I say the same about Walsingham’s inventory of St. Albans lands, neither of us is just painting a mood, as one might speak of a morose retort or a merry paraphrase. The assertion of anxiety advances an interpretation: that the manifest content is so disarranged that it shows that the anxiety has dis-placed what its author hoped to say, and therefore lets us catch discourse in a moment of desperate makeshift. It concludes that the author is not in control of her assertion: she thinks she’s reasoning but is just rationalizing, thinks she’s responding but is just avoiding response. And it takes this assumption about the author’s feelings to witness something larger and more signifi-cant, a structural difficulty or incoherence, a guilty awareness, an unspoken sense of vulnerability in the position occupied. Since the real function of the reasons or stories is to neutralize or manage anxiety, as reasons and stories, they turn out misshapen: failed reasons, inconsequential stories. The distress evident in what authors say at those moments allows us to see through what they say, and to do it in passing: at a glance and without need for argument, we can discern a complex of ambivalences that our sources are at best half aware of and would presumably want to suppress.18

The anxiety gambit is so familiar to us that we accept it naturally


and without explanation, in everyday as well as scholarly discourse (“Some-body’s touchy”). The impudence gambit is so distant and alien that we turn naturally to the anxiety gambit to explain it. But they look a lot alike. Thus the philological discussion of Augustinian “impudence” that follows. The philological case proves an easy one to make once you examine instances; but it is a hard one to start, because each instance seems past salvage when you first pick it up. We have already seen Saint Augustine describe Julian of Eclanum’s “impudence” in a way that seems to confirm Julian’s charge that he has a leering fascination with what he discommends. Julian was not the last to say it: his charge that Augustine is driven to dishonesty and violence by impulses he does not recognize is a durable cliché. In the eighteenth cen-tury, Bayle says that Augustine “makes terrifying monsters of the smallest errors” and “stoops to the lowest sophistries” to snare them;19 in the twenti-eth, William Connolly says that Augustine’s unacknowledged rage for coer-cion shows itself in a nasty play of prurience and shame, that even silent dis-sent produces a “surge of anxiety” and an impulse to beat it down by shame or force.20 Though the judgment is not very bright, there are passages that give it some color; and it is these that we must look at.

The first stirrings of the coercive impulse seem to appear, for instance, in book 7 of the Trinity. He quotes Saint Paul calling Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 2:4). There is a puzzle, he says. The verse seems to imply that, without Christ, God would lack power and wisdom. But this thought would be “impious.”21 How do we avoid it? We might simply reject the verse, say that Paul was wrong. But this opinion Augustine rejects as impious and also impudent.22 It seems that impiety here denounces an unworthy thought about God, while impudence denounces an unworthy thought about authority, and that the charge of impudence is meant to silence such a thought without answering it. Taken alone, it is not a pretty passage, and it sounds as if Augustine wishes to bury the very thought of questioning the Bible under a heap of shame.

But this cannot be right, for later in the same work he uses an iden-tical judgment of impudence in a context this explanation could not explain. In book 15, Augustine discusses the academics’ claim that nothing can be known with certainty. His first counterexample is the famous si fallor, sum argument that anticipates Descartes’s cogito: Do I know that I exist? Perhaps I am wrong in thinking I do; but in order to be wrong, I must first exist; therefore I am not wrong.23 Then in the two instances following this he twice plays the impudence card:


Would it not be impudent to reply “Maybe you are mistaken” to someone who says “I wish to be happy”? . . . Again, if someone were to say “I do not wish to be mistaken,” . . . would it not be most impudent to say to him, “Perhaps you are wrong [about wanting not to be mistaken]”?24

These instances are like the case of Saint Paul a moment ago, in that they call a doubt impudence; they are unlike, because the impudence comes from doubting not a biblical author but just anybody (“quispiam”). Why? Is it that they both reject the possibility of doubting an authority in its own sphere — that the Bible is to be believed about the things of God just as people are to be believed about their own thoughts? But the idea that I am the most authoritative interpreter of my own desires is obviously wrong. Its wrongness is obvious to us; it is no less obvious to Augustine; among his most fundamental ideas is that people chronically misconstrue their own desires.25

It’s easy to show there is no question of authority at all in any of these passages. The two assertions he says it would be shameless to question are “I want to be happy” and “I want not to be incorrect.” Augustine often uses just these as instances of statements whose contradictories can never be true.26 You cannot wish not to be happy, beatus (if you think you do, that is only because the misery you think you would prefer seems to involve some great integrity or fulfillment). You cannot wish to be incorrect (if you think you do, that is because you are hoping to find, correctly, that the state of affairs is better than you now think it is, and to enjoy the correct knowledge that it is). Since you cannot coherently doubt these statements in your own case, neither can anyone else doubt them in yours or in anyone else’s — and that is unmistakably what Augustine means by calling such a doubt “impu-dent”: not because it is a bold retort that questions authority, but because it is an incoherent one that questions what cannot meaningfully be questioned. The case is analogous in the passage about Saint Paul. The topic under discussion is the doctrine of the Trinity. Augustine, like virtually all later commentators, agreed that this doctrine was unavailable to natural reason, knowable only by revelation. So in this discussion, the acceptance of revela-tion is formally and inevitably presupposed: to hold a view about what the Three Persons are is to accept that they are, and thus to accept the authority of Paul and the whole biblical revelation.

So far so good, but there has to be more to it; if Augustine just means “incoherence” when he says “impudence,” he could just say “inco-


herence.” Two further passages, both in book 15 of the City of God, help clarify. In a well- known passage of chapter 23, he discusses “sons of God” whom Genesis 6:2 say mated with the daughters of men. Who were they? He briefly entertains the possibility that they could be angels. So he asks: Can angels experience sexual appetite and satisfy it? There is some evidence that they can. Roman myth spoke of incubi and the freedoms they take with mortal women; and the Gauls say the same about the spirits they call dusii, “as attested by witnesses so numerous and of such quality that to deny it would seem impudent.”27 Now this assertion that Augustine says it would be impudent to deny is one he has no special interest in affirming, since he will conclude that the “sons of God” were Seth’s descendants, not angels; the question of these couplings proves otiose. Then what makes denying it impudent? Obviously there is no question of religious authority here: Augus-tine is not an apologist for pagan lore. Nor would there be formal incoher-ence in denying the Gauls’ testimony even if it is true, since it is not axiom-atically true and is not presupposed by the question. Nor is it axiomatic that witnesses, even trustworthy witnesses, must always be trusted. What is left is simply the impudence of rejecting testimony worthy of being accepted just because you cannot or will not believe it, of asking for empirical evidence then rejecting it when it is offered.

In other words, “impudence” is incoherence but also something more: it is a slovenly habit of mind, a bluff assurance that commits incoher-ence just because it is heedless of logical consequence and the conditions of responsible assertion. The impudent man is one so sure of his instinctive responses that he rejects claims on grounds no more compelling than mere personal incredulity. To argue “impudently” in Augustine’s sense is to ignore the conditions that, by arguing, you bind yourself to respect. To speculate about the divine Persons is already to have accepted scripture’s authority; you might argue about how to construe or apply it, but to “reject [its] author-ity” is to hollow out the ground you occupy. To ask if there is empirical evidence that angels can act on carnal impulses, and then to disqualify evi-dence because it says they can, is to swap premises on a whim. But it goes further than this: the force of the impudence gambit in empirical questions is to recall how far beyond certainty empirical answers are. The “shame” that one should have in intellectual and interpretative questions like this is a form of skepticism, not a specific against it.

A more celebrated passage in the same book shows what I mean. In chapter 9 of book 15 of the City of God, Augustine discusses the great ages that Genesis claims the early patriarchs achieved. These, he says, are


hard to believe, but that does not make them untrue. He draws an analogy. Virgil says that men of the heroic age were gigantic in size and power: Tur-nus, in his last battle, heaves up a rock that “twelve picked men could now barely support, such are the bodies earth produces for men.”28 This, too, is hard to believe, and many disbelieve it, says Augustine. But ancient tombs laid open “by various contingencies” — earthquakes, floods, erosion — have proved Virgil right. “I myself saw . . . on the shore of Utica a human molar so huge that, were it chopped down to the measure of our teeth, it seemed able to make a hundred of them.”29 This is an analogy with the case of the biblical patriarchs’ long lives, and it works like this. Instinctively, we dis-miss as absurd what Virgil says about Turnus’s size. But physical evidence has accidentally survived to prove our instinct wrong. Instinctively, we dis-miss what Genesis says about Methusaleh’s age. It is in the nature of this case that no physical evidence could survive (fossils don’t preserve duration), but our instinct is no more reliable. And so “we are the more impudent in not believing, the more surely we find fulfilled what we have already been told.”30 We disbelieve Virgil from common sense (I’ve never seen men that big); but when evidence washes up, “what we were already told” by Virgil is confirmed by experience, and our common sense proves bogus. Our objec-tion to the age of the patriarchs likewise has no warrant better than common sense (I’ve never seen people that old), and therefore has no warrant at all.

By this argument Augustine saddles empirical inquiry with a duty of chronic self- criticism. That men were never so big seemed a good assump-tion until that tooth washed up; indeed, until it did there was no cause even to notice it as an assumption; had the tooth not washed up, we would have had no reason to look for it. This is simply the condition of empirical knowl-edge: it cannot hope to recognize all its assumptions, cannot discover all the questions that might be asked because it cannot conceive of all the answers that might appear, cannot imagine forms of evidence that might emerge and those that could emerge but will not. Of course this is a generalized version of his larger argument in the City of God against identifying providential import in historical events: you cannot know that you know the relevant context. Knowing that you cannot, a normal intellectual prudence hangs all such inferences about with skeptical qualifications. Such prudence looks not only for the logical considerations that you might hope to master, but also the contingent evidentiary conditions that you never could. This passage, far from implying a “monolithic conception” of the world and its history,31 underscores the unknowability even of history’s dimensions, and therefore


its unavailability to any conception at all. (That Augustine could not antici-pate the conclusions that paleontology would draw about that molar merely makes his point.)32

Now the sense of “impudent” I have outlined so far is not original to Augustine. He already shares it with his opponent in his Unfinished Work, an unfinished polemic against Julian of Eclanum in the Pelagian contro-versy. I began with Augustine’s attack on Julian as a “most impudent man” for praising concupiscence but talking delicately about it. His use of the epi-thet picks up Julian’s own. The Unfinished Work is a riposte point by point; Augustine copies Julian’s arguments serially and inserts his own replies. In the first book, Julian has addressed Augustine with the same epithet used for the same purpose: “You call me the ‘enemy of God’s grace,’ most impudent man?” says Julian, “I who . . . condemned that mouth of yours, so full of the mysteries of the Manicheans, in my first book, from which you ripped these passages out of context.”33 He is saying that Augustine has been so misled by his forensic zeal that he misreads the very passage he quotes. Julian had enjoyed the same literary and rhetorical education Augustine had, and draws on conventions they share.34 Augustine’s use of “impudent” is important for us not because he uses it in an unusual sense, but because he so richly exemplifies its usual one and chases it so far down the trail of its conceptual implication. This sense remains a common possession of European writing for centuries.

It is this sense that Abelard’s “Christian” uses in his Dialogue of a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian. The unbelieving Philosopher has begun by declaring that “Jews are stupid and Christians mad.” But beginning his dialogue with the Christian, he expresses high expectations for the sophis-tication of the Christians’ “law”; the Christian replies that the Philosopher’s respectful words seem to “clash impudently” [impudenter dissonare] with his earlier declaration: “how can you now expect instruction in truth from those you have found insane?”35 In the context, this is not a complaint but a question, and the question is whether the Philosopher holds himself respon-sibly enough to his own utterances to be worth trading utterances with. This is an undeniable, and undeniably appropriate, use of the ad hominem energies of the impudence gambit, for the question is not about the Philoso-pher’s discourse but about his character as an interlocutor: is this man worth talking to?

It is in this sense that Samuel von Pufendorf uses impudent in the seventeenth century. He is discussing the mutual character of legal obliga-


tions, and says that any man would be “most impudent” who invaded his neighbor’s peace and then complained that the neighbor’s retaliation invaded his own.36 In this case, too, the ad hominem element is present and is plainly analytical: the reciprocity of obligation is so obvious that the man who ignores it is merely a buffoon. It is in this sense that Voltaire borrows from Pascal the riposte “Mentiris impudentissime,” in order to challenge an opponent to pro-duce the evidence his assertions assume.37 And it is in this sense that Cardinal Gotti calls Spinoza “most impudent of mortals.” Jonathan Israel says that Gotti is reduced to retorting that “the truth of the testimony of the evange-lists cannot be doubted,”38 but that is not what Gotti says. In the letters to Oldenburg (Gotti quotes the relevant passages), Spinoza says that the evange-lists thought they had seen Christ corporally risen and corporally ascending, but that they could have been deceived (“potuerunt decipi”), because they did not understand that Jesus was a teacher of “allegorical” truth whose res-urrection was “spiritual.” To this Gotti replies, “It is you, most impudent of mortals, who are deceived, not the Evangelists who recorded the things that they saw and the things to which Christ himself testified — unless you say, as perhaps you would not blush to say, that they were also deceived by Christ.”39 His point is not that their testimony “cannot be doubted,” but that Spinoza has given no reason why it should be: the evangelists offer empirical testi-mony to events he gives no empirical reasons for rejecting; and by his praise of Jesus as a spiritual and allegorical teacher, he has deprived himself of the only reasonable source of deceit that might be proposed. One might object to Gotti that Spinoza’s concessions about the good faith of the evangelists and the allegorical character of the Resurrection are transparently wry gestures. But Gotti knows that and says so.40 He suggests that, on the most generous reading, Spinoza has disguised an a priori commitment as an a posteriori judgment, has made a snide insinuation and then paraded it as an argument. Gotti need not labor at answering it because it answers itself.

I asked what these medieval and modern authors meant by “impu-dent,” and we now have got an answer. It is a good answer, as far as it goes, but it has partly lost track of the question. Granted, it is a mistake to question something one’s argument presupposes; but in what sense is it impudence to do so? It sounds like a harsh way to make a logical point. Surely this harshness, this intensity, is what seems to invite the judgment of anxiety. It is worth turning that direction now. Impudence is a failure to be ashamed; and so the next question must be what shame is.

• • •


There have been good discussions of shame in recent decades. These largely agree with each other, and with our common usage, in assuming that shame involves a shrinking from exposure that aspires to self- negation.41 It is not hard to get from this phenomenological account of shame as self- cancellation to the idea that the desire to inflict such distress on others implies the desire to cancel them, to annihilate them altogether — and that such a fantasy in turn implies one’s own distressed self- consciousness. That is why Augustine’s talk of impudence and genitals stripped bare can make him seem driven by unremarked demons. Martha Nussbaum thinks that what Augustine “does not like about human life . . . is that we cannot stop thinking for ourselves,” and that he therefore induces “a profound shame . . . at a very fundamental element of our humanity — our independence, our willfulness, our sexual and moral unpredictability. Instead of taking action as best we can, we had better cover ourselves, mourn, and wait.”42 Elaine Pagels some years ago tried to draw a straight line from Augustine’s dark and coercive shame to a dark and coercive politics.43

These learned discussions misconstrue the evidence; but they are right in sensing that there is something odd about how Augustine talks about shame. They are also right in looking to his famous essay on sexual shame in the City of God. This remarkable discussion in book 14 gives the most lucid portrait of the work of shame and of shamelessness, and it is the most important context for the passages we have examined from book 15. Here we see what shame measures, and what shamelessness is a failure of. Considering whether the body’s frailties are the cause or the effect of sin, Augustine cites the “Platonic account” [platonicam . . . sententiam] in book 6 of the Aeneid about how human bodies, “injurious” [noxia] to us, weigh down our souls and depress the vigor we bring from our heavenly birth-place.44 Augustine, of course, rejects this opinion: a Christian regards the body as the victim and not the villain. But Virgil comes up at all because his shame is the model for Augustine’s. They differ about its origins; about its character they are in harmony.

In either Virgil or Augustine, it is hard to recognize the “shame” described by Pagels or Nussbaum or Williams. Shame is not a shrinking, a covering, a quailing, nor is it an oppressive self- consciousness; correspond-ingly, impudence is not a sort of unruly mettle. In the funeral games for Anchises in the Aeneid, the boxing competition matches a confident Dares against the legendary but aging Entellus. The older man is losing; he throws a bad blow and staggers himself. His mistake makes him flare with anger so that “shame, and power grown conscious of itself, kindled his strength”


(5.455); he rallies suddenly and nearly kills Dares. The shame “kindles” his strength, sets fire to it — the familiar Virgilian image of passion — but it is “conscia virtus,” power that has come to know itself. This shame does not make Entellus wish “to disappear” (in Williams’s phrase); for one thing, he is not conscious of appearing before anyone. His eyes are not on any audi-ence, and he does not even notice his friend Acestes moving to help him as he hastens back to the fight. He is not even (as Williams might suggest he should be) his own audience, regarding himself in a third- personal way.45 He does not measure himself against the figure he would like to cut but against the power he knows he has. Shame is experienced as passion but functions as knowledge. So too young Pallas’s companions. The Arcadian prince’s foray in book 10 inflicts on those companions a shame that comes from their watching, not from their being watched; and this shame “arms” them for battle (10.397 – 98). And so too Dido. The shame that Anna’s encourage-ment “destroys” in her is, again, not something imagined as having herself in view, but by herself viewing what she has committed herself to, her hus-band’s memory (4.24 – 29). It is only later, long after she has quit her shame, that she identifies it with “fama.” When she is still making the choice, rather than ruing the choice already made, she thinks of pudor as simply the con-tinuation of the course that she has chosen — and she thinks of it in contrast to being swallowed by the earth. So shame is not pusillanimity, a desire to withdraw or cancel oneself. Shame is the choice by which a capacity to act knows itself and does act; impudence closes down action: when Dido “dis-solves her shame,” she starts loving and stops governing (4.86 – 90). Impu-dence is abjection and capitulation, not cheek.

Virgilian shame is the condition without which Augustinian shame makes no sense. Like Virgilian pudor, Augustinian pudor is an impulse toward knowledge registered more than face lost or passion suffered — though, like all knowledge, it can produce rages and humiliations and other power-ful and aversive emotions — an impulse toward assertion and accomplish-ment rather than inhibition. Of course in Augustine there is a new element of which the Aeneid is innocent. That is human fallenness: shame comes with guilt. And sexual shame is the most vivid and abrupt of its guises. In paradise, as Augustine famously speculates in the City of God, unfallen Adam and Eve experienced sexual climax without blanking into momentary stupidity, as Augustine says we now do (14.16); in paradise, the mind guided the organs of generation with the easy grace it still enjoys when commanding hand and foot (14.23). With the Fall, those organs grew capricious and con-founding. Their insubordination is a constant reminder of a selfhood that


is scattered and imperfectly wielded. The body blandly ignores the direc-tions of the mind. But the mind cannot return the snub. Though estranged from the body in one sense, the mind is bound claustrophobically with it in another: from the body’s random and mechanical impulses, the mind con-ceives desires that it did not originate as if it had originated them; and once it has done so, any enjoyment of those desires is routinely frustrated by the body that provoked them. Unwanted arousal and untimely impotence are the two sides of the confusion and self- estrangement that sex exemplifies in fallen life. His descriptions are almost Ovidian: sexual excitement “begs for entrance when it has not been invited, but cools in the body when the mind is fired with desire” (14.16). (This is the sort of thing Julian of Eclanum gets prim about when he accuses Augustine of potty- mouth prurience.) He names the phenomenon of inconvenient arousal with grim wit: once fallen, he says, Adam and Eve “found, in the bodily motions” of their genitals, an impudens novitas: an “impudent surprise.”

So in sex as elsewhere, impudence is not boldness of assertion, bold-ness of choice. It is not choice at all; that is the point; it is the unchosen reflex of the body working out a merely mechanical logic without the courtesy of notifying the mind; the mind, in its turn, is left only to ratify what it did not seek, or to resent what it thought it could count on. The genital action is “impudent” because it is untouched by evaluation and election, just a prod-uct of impulses, randomly engaged, that act on your choice rather than from it. Peter Brown reports that “the necessity” was rueful slang for the male member.46 It is a necessity that, Augustine says, acts mechanically but pulls thought and desire and imagination in tow.

And the mind, once fallen, resists itself just as the body resists it: it is unequal to controlling not only the body’s impulses but its own, and that is the source of the argumentative “impudence” discussed in the first half of the essay. Irresponsible assertions in the passages we have seen from the Trinity and the City of God are shameless in the same way that the sexual impudens novitas is shameless: seizing conclusions unwarranted by logic or evidence or consistency, with the imperious non sequitur of an untimely erection but with the solemn conviction that it has been quite rational. Such conclusions are hostage to impulse and inconsequentiality, but comically wear the look of rational consequence. It is not the irreverence of having thought too much, but the caprice of feeling certain without having thought. Shame, correspondingly, is the consciousness, uncomfortably reinforced by pratfalls in both spheres, of your inconsistency and inelasticity — of how little you belong to yourself.


That is what it comes to. Augustine presents a picture in which my actions and thoughts scarcely are actions and scarcely are “mine.” Their look of reason and choice is a mockery; so therefore is the freedom with which I fancy myself making them; so even, therefore, is the sense that I bring them forth. They betide me. I routinely misapprehend their origins and objects; I find the choices and commitments I consciously made being nullified, even conspiring with their own nullification, when passion or habit asserts itself. A self that is permeable to the accidents of its attachments, desires, and aver-sions is in a robust sense not its own; but that the self can recognize and rue this captivity means that there is a “self” that expects to be its own.

I said earlier that impudence is first of all a recklessness about your own engagements, and I showed some evidence that this position neither originates nor ends with Augustine, though his celebrity helps to make it a common usage. In this specification, it is a deficient possession of yourself: it is an inconsistency to which you descend as your attachments get the better of you. This sounds much more distinctively Augustinian, but its identify-ing elements are already in place when he is writing. His contemporary John Cassian — who knew Augustine’s work but did not draw this element from it — records the usage in his Conferences. Germanus appeals to Nestor about a special difficulty he experiences in prayer: he cannot expel from his mind the secular poems and the stories of battles that he learned as a child, so that when he is trying to concentrate on contemplation or the psalter “the impu-dent memory of these poems is intruded, or the image as of warriors fighting moves before my eyes.”47 Germanus “despairs of purification,” which means that he recognizes his responsibility for these thoughts. But he also feels them as something that draw him along from the course he has set for him-self, and Nestor’s response says that only a vigilant effort of self- possession can render his mind able to sustain its thoughts in their integrity.48

Nor, more interestingly, does the usage depend on the controlled environment of Augustine’s anthropology. That is, it is “Augustinian” in that Augustine makes its rationale most brilliantly clear, but it is durable when detached from it, and for centuries after is readily available to indict thoughts and actions that lack the courage of their premises because they are drawn away by a mix of impulse and indiscipline, to indict minds with too little daring, not with too much. Instances least interesting (but very com-mon) are those in which “impudence” names betrayals of formal agreements or undertakings by following the smooth slope of convenience; of this there are countless examples.49 More interesting are the many instances that call “impudent” the one who deliberately undertakes a voluntary commitment


whose consequences he thoughtlessly and impulsively resists; thus it is espe-cially common to describe as impudent monks who, converted deliberately and in adulthood to a severe version of the monastic life, display irritation against the very corrections their choice has led them to choose,50 or drift by inattention into the habits they have sought to correct.51 They will apply it to moral freeloading, seeking unearned rewards,52 and to intellectual free-loading, placing assertions or questions that ignore the premises they bring to bear.53

The picture I have tried to draw out of the usage of “impudent” and its forms in these traditions of polemic finds in shame and impudence some-thing quite different from what Williams and Nussbaum find: impudence a condition of lassitude and unintelligence, shame one of self- possession.54 And therefore shame is the condition of freedom. The souls at the base of Dante’s Purgatory, excommunicate but saved, appear “shamefast [pudica] in expression and dignified in their advance.”55 What they display does not look exactly like self- possession: they are a “fortunate flock” and move like one, so that when they see Dante’s shadow, those at the front of the group give way and surprise, “and all the others who came next, without know-ing why, did the same.”56 But their aimlessness is the refreshing first symp-tom of, and prerequisite to, the self- possession their ascent of Purgatory will confer: experiencing themselves undriven by any particular aim, they enjoy the dignity of choice. Choice is what Dante’s damned souls, whittled down to sheer repetition by their surrender to finite external aims, have lost.57 Though vivid, theirs is the vividness of portraits, choice and action frozen in an eternal sameness. The unmotivated “shamefast” wandering of these redeemed souls is the sign of their freedom from the dull persistence of infer-nal selfhood.

What all this suggests is that impudence — the failure to feel shame thus understood, the misfire in the mind that provokes the accusation of shamelessness — is a failure of freedom. It is also, and for that reason, a fail-ure of the mind’s own investment. The issue of freedom and unfreedom is obvious in Augustine’s instance of lust: the body that cannot control its responses leaves the soul at the mercy of whatever stimulus crosses its path. The same is true of the mind that is mortgaged to its impulses. For Augus-tine this assessment is explained by the doctrine of the Fall, but it was an assessment that had been offered by those who had never heard of that doc-trine, and was most memorably defended by someone who rejected it. For this connection between the operation of the passions and the failure of a free and integral personhood was made most efficiently by Gotti’s nemesis


Spinoza. The fourth book of the Ethics, concerned with the “affects” (for our purposes roughly identical to the passions), and titled De servitute humana, begins with the assertion that “A person exposed to his passions is in the power of accident, not in his own power [sui iuris], so that often he finds that though he sees the better course, he is forced to follow the worse.”58 Those last words of course recall another merely empirical observation of the divided will, wholly untouched by Christian doctrine: “Video meliora, proboque, / Deteriora sequor.”59 Such a person is hostage to the accidents of experience ( fortuna), for they carry the mind with them. In intellectual activity, this means that they carry the thought with them, which is to say that when thinking under the sway of passion you are not really thinking at all, and therefore you are not really thinking either: you are experiencing a sequence of thoughts that you have not produced and that do not produce each other, but are merely detonated by the chance sequence of objects that drift before you and pull you along. Spinoza could have no objection to Pas-cal’s declaration that a man’s disordered desire “settles his choice” without consulting him.60 And he could have no objection to the principles Gotti alleges when criticizing himself — that an animus has carried him beyond self- coherence — though obviously he would dispute Gotti’s application of them.

Stuart Hampshire’s classic essay on Spinoza calls impassioned self-hood a heteronomy not of the will but of the reason, but even this under-states the case.61 First, you can choose to abdicate autonomy; what Spinoza describes is someone who cannot manage to choose, or someone who by choosing once forecloses any return to choice. Second, the relevant con-cept would be not heteronomy but anomie, abandonment not to someone else’s program but to just one damn thing after another. The idea shared by Augustine and Spinoza — the familiar idea that your reason must steer the ship if you want to think yourself the pilot — had a long career in clas-sical and Christian philosophy and did not end there: “Wo es war, soll ich werden.” The opposition to it has been no less enduring, from Callicles through Nietzsche through Deleuze, which urges that this hierarchical vision of the soul — reason on top, passions down below — is a bad- faith ide-ological naturalization of the facts of social power, which the claim to neu-trality and universality works to conceal.62 These are not criticisms to which Spinoza is vulnerable, since there is no hierarchy of faculties in his case: rationality controls affect with affect, immediate allurements with the allure of truth. In any event, his objection to the power of affects is not that they are less dignified than reason; it is that their operation, because it is both


impersonal (not given a purposive shape by free action the agent can claim) and unprincipled (not given purposive shape by something greater than the agent), is therefore random: not something I do, but something that intrudes upon me. The “affective” man is not “sui juris,” does not exercise jurisdic-tion over himself; he “lacks agency,” as students like to say. And if Spinoza is immune to this critique, it is not clear that any notion of the primacy of reason is vulnerable to it: the question of the rightful “hierarchy” in the soul is a figure for the real question that absorbs Aristotle and Augustine: the question under what conditions you can think your thoughts and choose your choices, under what conditions you can meaningfully avow them and be held responsible for them. Now once set on the course, Spinoza’s discus-sion raises other difficulties for the personal identity and agency that he cares to salvage, since he must find the perfectly free man to be entirely in the power of thoughts that necessarily follow each other and which therefore are arguably as impersonal, though not as unprincipled or as turbulent, as passion’s caprice.63 That medieval religion recognizes this other side to the problem of thinking freely — recognizes it not just in its greatest achieve-ments, but routinely — I will show elsewhere. I am out of my depth here, and making for the shallow end even as I note the fact, but it is important to acknowledge the force of this classical and Christian and Spinozist and Freudian picture, because the “impudence gambit” of our premodern and early modern thinkers presupposes it: one calls “impudence” when a speaker is egregiously incoherent and uncontrolled, and unless coherence and con-trol are possible and pertinent norms for discourse, then their failure cannot reasonably be reprehended.

We late moderns are less prone to acknowledge that such rational control of either discourse or attachment is possible or desirable. But so much the worse for us if we do not, at least in our roles as historicist critics of litera-ture and culture. For not only does the impudence gambit require some such model of reason’s relation to desire; so does the anxiety gambit. You would never know this from looking at many instances of its use in recent scholar-ship. In most of the instances I’ve cited, and in hundreds anyone could cite, the mere description or quotation of an utterance seems thought to justify the diagnosis of anxiety. In most of these cases what the evidence shows is an utterance that is vehement, critical, self- important, unconcerned, pedantic, careful, elaborate, zany, resentful, magisterial; what the diagnosis concludes is that the vehemence, criticism, self- importance, and the rest really mask a defensive fear. But you only need to and only get to diagnose what has gone wrong in utterances when you can show that something has in fact gone


wrong: when a paralogism, a non sequitur, a disproportion, or an omission or a mistake breaks the chain of argument or narrative, or when you can establish what would be reasonable and appropriate and can show that the rhetoric darts beyond or falls short of that. And you cannot even imagine that you have found such a defect until you have reenacted the work’s logic, can name where and how it goes wrong, can specify what it should have said and why. When the content of interpretation is that a disrupting anxiety is present, and when the presence of the anxiety is taken for granted, the ques-tion has simply been begged.

The question does get begged. “Anxiety” has become for recent criti-cism a term as handy and as vacuous as “tension” and “irony” and “paradox” were a half- century ago. This must be one reason why “symptomatic read-ing” has come under attack from so many different quarters in the last few years.64 So, too, probably, has been the smug asymmetry that assumes that we can see through historical sources in a way they could not see through us. By functioning too often as an intellectual labor- saving device and as grounds for casual self- admiration, the anxiety gambit has besmirched its own reputation. It was too often a handy way to buff up a lack of inter-est as analytic dismissal, it cultivated the unintelligent conviction that cer-tain kinds of argumentative utterance are predictably pathological, and it allowed whole generations of medievalists to assume a knowingness about arguments we had not troubled to engage with. (The same could be true of the impudence gambit in the authors we study; as I said before, either can be empty; neither need be.)

The anxiety gambit has come under attack, and understandably. But I am not joining the attack; I am joining the defense. It has been noto-riously abused, but the abuse of a thing does not sweep away its legitimate use. Arguing about its merit is odd: it amounts to arguing about the merit of arguing. For one thing, and briefly, if you cannot investigate what discourse inadvertently signifies as well as what it advertently says, most forms of his-torical narration become impossible. And if you can do that, you can explain the gap between those things as the upshot of that kind of anxiety I have discussed. Second, and more consequentially, there is nothing in principle wrong with explanations that take the form Author X thinks that she has a reason sufficient for making assertion P, but she does not have such a reason; so there must be some other cause of her making it. But offering such an explana-tion does require first seeing whether Author X does have a sufficient reason. Sometimes a demonstration is offered. When Israel speaks of Bossuet’s “deep anxiety of spirit and intellectual uncertainty,” his thought “pervade[d]” by


“sinister presence[s],” he justifies this by pointing to the bishop’s choice merely to “reverse” Spinozism rather than confront it argumentatively.65 One can disagree with the judgment, but it faces squarely the obligations its diagnosis imposes. Usually, as I have said, such a judgment is offered with no explanation at all, on the evident assumption that the evidence speaks for itself, but of course it does not. Sometimes the demonstration is not offered but is implied as a kind of enthymeme. When Kerby- Fulton judges (with-out explanation) that M. N.’s glosses on Porete were “panicked” because he offers explanations that are both minute and distorting, this registers not as a merely intuitive response to a merely intuited emotional tone, but as a judgment that the care M. N. expends clarifying Porete’s utterances is both disproportionate (the claims are pretty clear as they stand) and self- defeating (he obscures more than he clarifies). Kerby- Fulton does not spell out her reasons, but that she has reasons must be acknowledged even by one who construes them differently (as I would).66

When done responsibly, then, the anxiety gambit takes the form of searching for the good reasons the author has for making an assertion, and turning to causes diagnostically discovered when no good reasons can be found. But that is also, identically, the form the impudence gambit takes in our sources when it is played responsibly. I started by observing that the two gambits looked surprisingly alike. I’ll now suggest that they look alike because they are the same gambit. Some instances make this especially clear. The substance of Augustine’s reproach of Julian of Eclanum in the pas-sage with which we began — “What they felt it is worse to praise than to bare” — is that Julian’s declared confidence in the goodness of sexual urges will not stand the test of a steady gaze: he is unwilling to name without euphemism what he complacently commends, and by this fastidiousness shows the same unease for which he blames Augustine.67 The diagnosis of impudence in this passage — like those in the Trinity and the City of God; like Abelard’s and Pufendorf ’s and Cardinal Gotti’s and Bernard’s and Hugh of St.- Victor’s; like the diagnosis of anxiety in Zieman’s and Kerby- Fulton’s and mine — identifies an apparent incoherence and explains it as the product of a misfire. There is no mystery why they should reduce to the same intellectual move: elucidating an utterance might reveal an incoher-ence in it, and nothing more is needed to prompt a diagnosis of impudence or of anxiety. But nothing less is needed to justify one: without incoherence there is nothing to explain. The assertion is sometimes heard that critique, in the sense of reducing utterances to conditions they do not acknowledge or at least do not wish to avow, is a distinctively modern enterprise.68 It is


not. The analysis that critique of this sort conducts is as available in the first century as in the twenty- first; what is distinctively modern is the sentimental preference for critique over the other forms of analysis on which it depends.

Since the impudence gambit and the anxiety gambit are really the same gambit, this essay cannot argue the superiority of either. But what has made the impudence gambit seem so easy a mark for the anxiety gambit does give it a certain clarity. Its explicitly aggressive and polemical form, its willingness to acknowledge its ad hominem judgments as ad hominem (and as judgments) acknowledges two premises. First, it acknowledges explic-itly the rational commitments that the judgment of impudence (the judg-ment of anxiety, too) must agree to accept if it is to have integrity; issuing the judgment means being ready with reasons. Second, and by that fact, it acknowledges that the opponent is an interlocutor, someone whose utter-ances deserve responses and not merely diagnoses — someone who has a right to ask for reasons. These acknowledgments simply spell out what the anxiety gambit no less than the impudence gambit agrees to by the form of the interpretation it offers: to expect rational consistency, to acknowledge it when it is there, and to resort to diagnosis only when it is shown not to be. Far from dissolving the standards of reasoned coherence, it depends on them. It also acknowledges that the reasons can be apprehended through time. Historical contingency and specificity do not call these standards into question; they are the precondition for even apprehending that specificity. The more respectfully criticism looks for the rational and imaginative con-sistence of its sources, the more powerful and less formulaic the diagnoses will be when they come. This is not just a better way of doing literary his-tory. It is the only way.

I have mentioned how the Christian in Abelard’s Dialogue chal-lenges the Philosopher with trimming: his praise of Christians seems to “clash impudently against” his earlier boast that Jews are stupid and Chris-tians mad. By floating the charge of impudence, the Christian asks the Phi-losopher whether he will stand by his assertions with argument, or will just cave before a challenge and prove himself too trivial to argue with. This challenge makes sense to the Philosopher, who replies that, in fact, his insulting boast was itself meant to rouse his interlocutors to their sharpest performance: sometimes people can be brought more readily to “give them-selves eagerly” to argument “by insult and reproach” than by more courtly request.69 And his explanation, in turn, makes perfect sense to the Chris-tian, who takes only a moment to say so before moving straight to debate in which they remain absorbed for the rest of the work.


A person can see their point: if you are unwilling to concede the possibility that your interlocutors — partners in conversation or medieval books — can get things wrong, and get things right, then you are unwilling to concede to them the privilege you are assuming for yourself, the privilege of holding a position; and if you don’t let those interlocutors — again, conver-sationalists or medieval books — challenge you on whether you are right or wrong, then you are not even trying to hold a position significantly yourself. Which is fine, but it gives you no good reason to speak, and gives no one else any reason at all to listen. If the past cannot catch us out in mistakes and inadvertencies, intellectual or moral, its study offers no more than diversion, and can expect no more than diversion’s reward. In these last pages I have made the point that the anxiety gambit, a device regularly used to bypass engagement with the argumentative claims of the past, assumes rational and argumentative justifications that it generally does not supply. But the flip side of the same point is that this deep idiom of our critical practice assumes, without acknowledging, a continuity with the past; if we just start taking seriously the judgments we routinely issue, we will take that continuity seri-ously too.

a

Notes

1 Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, bk. 4, chap. 65, in vol. 10.2 of Opera omnia, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina (hereafter PL), ed. J.- P. Migne, vol. 45 (Paris, 1865), col. 1377: “Homo impudentissime, quod senserunt quando erubuerunt, laudare peius est quam nudare.” Throughout, translations are my own unless otherwise attributed. I have silently regularized orthography.

2 Boniface VIII, Liber sextus, in Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus iuris canonici, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879 – 81), vol. 2, dist. 3, qu. 16, art. 1, prol.

3 Vincenzo Lodovico Gotti, O.P., Veritas religionis christianae . . . confirmata (Rome, 1735), 215: “Tu, mortalium impudentissime, deciperis; qui et ea quae viderunt et quibus ipse Christus testatus est, conscripserunt.”

4 James A. Brundage and Elizabeth M. Makowski, “Enclosure of Nuns: The Decre-tal Periculoso and Its Commentators,” Journal of Medieval History 20, no. 2 (1994): 143 – 55, at 145 and 153 respectively.

5 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650 – 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 229.

6 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 75.

7 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1994), 200.


8 Kathryn Kerby- Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revela-tory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 289.

9 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 221.

10 Matthew Dal Santo, “Gregory the Great and Eustratius of Constantinople: The Dia-logues on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers as an Apology for the Cult of Saints,” Jour-nal of Early Christian Studies 17, no. 3 (2009): 421 – 57, at 431 – 32.

11 Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, The Anchor Bible, vol. 7C (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1977), 123. He ascribes Bernard’s theological disagreements with Abelard to the same source.

12 Christopher Celenza, “Lorenzo Valla’s Radical Philology: The ‘Preface’ to the Anno-tations to the New Testament in Context,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Stud-ies 42, no. 2 (2012): 365 – 94, at 370.

13 Gavin I. Langmuir, “The Tortures of the Body of Christ,” in Christendom and Its Dis-contents: Exclusions, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000 – 1500, ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287 – 309, at 307.

14 Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 87.

15 Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 87 – 88.

16 Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 87.

17 Christopher Baswell, “King Edward and the Cripple,” in Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly, ed. Donka Minkova and Theresa Tin-kle (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 15 – 29, at 20.

18 See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 7. 19 Pierre Bayle, Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus- Christ, Contrain- les

d’entrer; ou, Traité de la tolérance universelle, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1713), 2:11: “On devient crédule. On se paie des plus méchans sophismes, pourvu qu’ils soient com-modes à sa cause. On se fait des monstres épouvantables des moindres erreurs de son adversaire; et, si l’on est avec cela d’un naturel véhément, où ne se porte- t- on pas?” (the application to Augustine is explicit in context).

20 William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Moral-ity (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993), 85 – 87.

21 Augustine, De Trinitate, bk. 7, chap. 1, par. 2, ed. W. J. Mountain and François Glorie, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (hereafter CCSL), vol. 50 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1968), 246: “aut Christum quidem Dei virtutem et Dei sapientiam esse fateamur sed eius patrem non esse patrem virtutis et sapientiae suae, quod non minus impium est?”

22 Ibid.: “ita impudenter et impie resistamus apostolo.” 23 Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Schrib-

ner’s Sons, 1950), 155 – 58; Jaakko Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Perfor-mance?,” Philosophical Review 71, no. (1962): 3 – 32, at 23 – 24.

24 Augustine, De Trinitate, bk. 15, chap. 12, par. 21, in CCSL 50A:492: “Quis est enim


cui non impudenter respondeatur, ‘forte falleris,’ dicenti, ‘volo beatus esse’? Et si dicat, ‘Scio me hoc velle et hoc me scire scio,’ jam his duobus et tertium potest addere quod haec duo sciat; et quartum, quod haec duo scire se sciat, et similiter in infini-tum numerum pergere. Item si quispiam dicat, ‘Errare nolo,’ nonne sive erret sive non erret, errare tamen eum nolle verum erit? Quis est qui huic non impudentissime dicat, ‘Forsitan falleris,’ cum profecto ubicumque fallatur, falli se tamen nolle non fallitur.”

25 Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Vintage, 1967), 96 – 105.

26 For two statements about being happy, see Augustine, Confessionum libri tredecim, ed. Lucas Verheijen, CCSL, vol. 27 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1981), bk. 10, chap. 20: “Nota est igitur omnibus, qui una voce si interrogari possent, utrum beati esse vel-lent, sine ulla dubitatione velle responderent”; and Ep. 130, in Augustine, Epistulae, ed. Alois Goldbacher, vol. 3, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (here-after CSEL), vol. 44 (Vindobonae [Vienna]: Tempsky, 1904), 50: “Ora beatam vitam; hanc enim habere omnes homines volunt; nam et qui pessime et perdite vivunt, nullo modo ita viverent, nisi eo modo se vel esse beatos putarent.” For a statement about being correct, see Confessionum libri tredecim, bk. 10, chap. 23: “multos expertus sum, qui vellent fallere, qui autem falli, neminem.” And for a statement about both being happy and correct, see Augustine, De libero arbitrio, ed. W. M. Green, CCSL 29 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1970), bk. 2, chap. 9, par. 26: “Ut ergo constat nos beatos esse velle, ita nos constat velle esse sapientes; quia nemo sine sapientia beatus est. Nemo enim beatus est, nisi summo bono, quod in ea veritate, quam sapientiam vocamus, cernitur et tenetur.”

27 Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL, vol. 48 (Turn-hout, Belg.: Brepols, 1955), bk. 15, chap. 23: “quosdam daemones, quos Dusios Galli nuncupant, hanc assidue hanc immunditiam et temptare et efficere, plures talesque asseuerant, ut hoc negare impudentiae videatur.”

28 Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 12, lines 899 – 900, in P. Vergilii Maronis Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Further citations of this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

29 Augustine, De civitate Dei, bk. 15, chap. 9: “Sed de corporum magnitudine plerumque incredulos nudata per vetustatem sive per vim fluminum variosque casus sepulcra convincunt, ubi apparuerunt, vel unde ceciderunt incredibilis magnitudinis ossa mortuorum. Vidi ipse non solus, sed aliquot mecum in Uticensi littore molarem hominis dentem tam ingentem, ut si in nostrorum dentium modulos minutatim con-cideretur, centum nobis videretur facere potuisse.”

30 Ibid.: “Annorum autem numerositas cujusque hominis qui temporibus illis fuit, nullis nunc talibus documentis venire in experimentum potest. Nec tamen ideo fides sacrae huic historiae deroganda est, cujus tanto impudentius narrata non credimus, quanto impleri certius praenuntiata conspicimus.” My translation of the last clause is inter-pretive, but I think gets the only possible meaning of the sentence. The usual read-ing of it is “the more surely we find its prophecies fulfilled.” But this is a non sequi-tur, since the chapter has said nothing about prophecies, and since the sentences that immediately precede and the sentence that immediately follows this all are talking about the physical evidence of primitive human size. Praenuntio does mean “fore-


tell,” and Augustine usually uses it to mean “prophesy”; but its strict sense is “tell in advance,” and here the logic seems to be this: what Virgil told us we would see and which (on the beach at Utica, for instance) we now see. The topic is not foretelling, but telling, the fact that the Bible makes assertions as yet empirically undemonstrated.

31 Jefferey J. Cohen, “Time Out of Memory,” in The Post- Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37 – 61, at 42.

32 Gaston Godard, “The Fossil Proboscideans of Utica (Tunisia), A Key to the ‘Giant’ Controversy, from Saint Augustine (424) to Peiresc (1632),” Geological Society, Lon-don, Special Publications 310, no. 1 (2009): 67 – 76.

33 Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, bk. 1, chap. 52: “Egone sum inimicus gratiae dei, homo omnium impudentissime, qui in primo libro meo, unde tu ista a contextu suo avulsa rapuisti, . . . os tuum mysteriis Manicheorum madens tuorumque damnavi?”

34 Albert Brückner, Julian von Eclanum, sein Leben und seine Lehre: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Pelagianismus (Leipzig, 1897), 16 – 17.

35 Peter Abelard, Dialogus inter philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum, in Petri Abaelardi abbatis Rugensis Opera omnia, PL 178 (Paris, 1885), col. 1635: “qua ratione nunc ab his, quos etiam insanos reperisti, tandem veritatis doctrinam exspectes.”

36 Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo: The Photographic Reproduction of the Edition of 1688, ed. Walter Simons, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 182: “utrinque stringens obligatio facit, ut munia pacis mutuo debeant exerceri. Adeoque ubi alter contra leges pacis talia adversus me suscipere aggreditur quae ad meam per-niciem spectant, impudentissime a me postulaverit, ut ego ipsum deinceps sacrosanc-tum habeam.”

37 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, vol. 52 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1826), s.v. “Philosophe,” 7:323. The allusion is to the fifteenth of Pascal’s Provincial Letters; Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Louis Lafuma (Editions de Seuil, 1963), 445 – 46.

38 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 229.39 Gotti, Veritas religionis christianae . . . confirmata, 215: “Tu, mortalium impudentis-

sime, deciperis, non evangelistae decepti fuerunt, qui et ea quae viderunt et quibus ipse Christus adtestatus est conscripserunt — ni dicas, ut forte dicere non erubesces, eos a Christ quoque fuisse deceptos.”

40 Ibid., 214 – 15: “Benedictus Spinosa, primum judaeus, factus deinde nominetenus christianus, et vere atheus, judaicam pertinaciam Christi resurrectionem negantem adhuc corde tenens, coloribus illam palliare, revera autem negare, ausus fuit, dicens totam historiam de resurrectione Christi ab Evangelistis traditam, non litteraliter, sed allegorice accipiendam esse.”

41 Shame involves “being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong con-dition. It is straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in sexual con-nections. . . . The reaction is to cover oneself or to hide”; “the desire to disappear, not to be there. . . . the wish that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty” (Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 78, 89). Shame’s “proto- form” is the rejected infant hanging his head (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity [Durham,


N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003], 37). “[S]hame involves the realization that one is weak and inadequate in some way in which one expects oneself to be adequate. Its reflex is to hide from the eyes of those who will see one’s deficiency, to cover it” (Mar-tha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2001], 196). “Shame results from the interaction between individual and society; it is predicated on the presence of witnesses who know the individual being shamed and who will continue to know the individual” (James Masschaele, “The Public Space of the Marketplace in Medieval England,” Speculum 77, no. 2 [2002]: 383 – 421, at 408 – 9).

42 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 555 – 56.43 Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 111 – 18.44 Augustine, De civitate Dei, bk. 15, chap. 3: “Virgilius Platonicam videatur luculentis

versibus explicare sententiam”; the words quoted are from Anchises’s description of the souls’ descent from and reascent to the upper air.

45 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 83 – 84, 93.46 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early

Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 84.47 John Cassian, Collationes, ed. Michael Petschenig, CSEL, vol. 13 (Vindobonae

[Vienna], 1886), 414: “aut impudens poematum memoria suggeratur aut quasi bellan-tium heroum ante oculos imago versetur. . . . [Nestor:] De hac ipsa re, unde tibi pur-gationis maxima nascitur desperatio.”

48 Ibid., 414 – 15: “Vacare . . . cunctis cogitationibus humana mens non potest, et ideo quamdiu spiritalibus studiis non fuerit occupata, necesse est eam illis quae pridem didicit implicari. Quamdiu enim non habuerit quo recurrat et indefessos exerceat motus, necesse est ut ad illa quibus ab infantia imbuta est conlabatur eaque semper revolvat quae longo usu ac meditatione concepit.”

49 See, for example, Innocent IV, absolving duties to Peter Bicher for his adherence to Frederick II; Karl Rodenberg, ed., Epistolae saeculi XIII e registis pontificum Romano-rum, 3 vols. (Berolini [Berlin], 1883 – 94), 2:451: “Cum igitur Petrus dictus Bicherius civis Vercellensis, qui pro eo quod quasi de nichilo exaltatus fuit de bonis ecclesiasti-cis, deberet, si recte saperet, etiam vestigia lambere clericorum, datus in sensum rep-robum F. quondam imperatori a nobis sacro approbante concilio reprobato impu-denter adhereat et patenter, per quod Deum et ecclesiam tanquam sathane satelles persequitur et impugnat.”

50 Bernard of Clairvaux, Expositio in Canticum Canticorum, sermon 42, par. 4, in vol. 2 of Opera omnia, PL 183 (Paris, 1854), col. 989: “Aliquoties additur et impudentia, ut non modo impatienter ferat quod corripitur, sed etiam id unde reprehenditur, impu-denter defendat.” Gérard Ithier of Grandmont, De institutione novitiorum, in vol. 2 of Hugonis de S. Victore . . . Opera Omnia, PL 176 (Paris, 1880), col. 928 (following Palé-mon Glorieux, Pour revaloriser Migne: Tables rectificatives [Lille: Facultés Catholiques, 1952], 68, on its authorship): “Tunc qui alienos actus scrutatur, impudens jure dicitur.”

51 Bernard, Expositio in Canticum Canticroum, sermon 16, par. 9, PL 183:852: “et de his, qui religiose vestiti, et religionem professi sunt, nonnunquam audivimus aliquos remi-nisci et jactitare impudentissime mala sua praeterita.” Conrad of Eberbach, Exordium


magnum cisterciense, sive Narratio de initio cisterciensis ordinis, ed. Bruno Griesser (Roma: Editiones Cistercienses, 1961), 129 – 30: “Monachus quidam, . . . contra for-mam et honestatem ordinis ubique vagabatur frequentans curias principum et saecu-laribus negotiis seipsum impudenter ingerens et in omni conversatione sua magis se gyrovagum quam monachum claustralem ostendens.”

52 Bernard, Expositio in Canticum Canticroum, sermon 13, par. 5, PL 183:836: “Quid mihi ergo cum victoria, si nec in praelio fui? Impudentissime mihi arrogo vel gloriam absque victoria, vel victoriam sine pugna.” Aelred of Rievaulx, De spirituali amicitia, bk. 3, chap. 21, in Opera omnia, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series secunda Latina, ed. J.- P. Migne, vol. 195 (Paris, 1855): col. 689: “Quidam perverse satis, ne dicam impudenter, talem amicum habere volunt, quales ipsi esse non possunt.”

53 Guigo I, Meditationes, no. 10, in vol. 2 of S. Brunonis Carthusianorum institutoris, nec-non ejusdem saeculi praecipuorum Carthusiensium patrum Opera omnia, PL 153 (Paris, 1880), col. 616: “Quae est adeo impudens mulier ut dicat viro suo: Quaere mihi illum aut illum cum quo dormiam, quia placuit mihi plus te, alioquin non quiescam? Tu tamen facis hoc viro tuo, id est Domino, cum praeter ipsum aliquid diligens, id ipsum ab eo petis.” Hugh of St.- Victor, De sacramentis, bk. 2, dist. 13, par. 11, in vol. 2 of Opera omnia, PL 176 (Paris, 1854), col. 544: “Fortassis non tibi sufficiet Apostolus qui hoc dicit, propterea non quod ita existimes intelligendum esse quod dicit Apostolus non omnes diligentes Deum in numero illorum ponere voluit, quibus omnia coope-rantur in bonum, nisi eos tantum qui secundum propositum vocati sunt sancti. Manifesta est veritas, nisi illam impudenter negare volueris.” Gratian, Concordia dis-cordantium canonum, pt. 1, dist. 47, can. 8, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 171: “Sed ait: quid iniustum est, si cum aliena non inuadam, propria diligentius seruo? O inpudens dictu! Propria dicis? que? ex quibus reconditis in hunc mundum detulisti?”

54 I hope it goes without saying that this does not assert that the Middle Ages “had a different concept of shame,” or “had a different experience of shame.” It asserts only that these medieval discourses used it differently. It asserts only that the noun pudor and the verb pudet name a different feeling. Self- disgust aspiring to self- concealment is something Virgil knows about and can describe; after setting fire to the ships, the sea- weary Trojan women disavow their deed and seek to hide, but this is signaled by the verb piget, “disgust,” with their own action as its object: “piget incepti lucisque suosque / mutatae agnoscunt excussaque pectore Iuno est” (Aeneid 5.678 – 79).

55 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Volume 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), canto 3, 1:29; my trans.

56 Ibid.57 The logic by which this transpires is explained by Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The The-

ory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), 38 – 41, 49 – 50.58 Spinoza, Ethica, in Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, 4 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Univ-

ersitätsbuchhandlung, 1925), 2:205: “homo . . . affectibus obnoxius sui juris non est, sed fortunae, in cujus potestate ita est, ut saepe coactus sit, quanquam meliora sibi videat, deteriora tamen sequi.”

59 Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1993),


bk. 7, line 20. A good discussion of Ovid’s line in the context of seventeenth- century philosophy is Jack D. Davidson, “Video Meliora Proboque, Deteriora Sequor: Leibniz on the Intellectual Source of Sin,” in Leibniz: Nature and Freedom, ed. Donald Ruth-erford and J. A. Cover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 235 – 53.

60 Blaise Pascal, Pensées 119, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 513: “. . . le détermine d’elle- même.”

61 Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of Mind and Other Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1971), 190.

62 This Nietzschean argument is made in an especially powerful form by Bernard Wil-liams, “The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato’s Republic,” in Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos, ed. Edward N. Lee, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, and Richard Rorty (Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1973), 196 – 206. Other more moderate criticisms have been advanced, as that this broadly “classical” focus on the passions distorts the picture of desire; see, e.g., Richard Moran, Author-ity and Estrangement: An Essay on Self- Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 2001), 116. Perhaps so, but this is arguably another way of saying that there are desires that are reasonable (that I own fully as mine) and others that are not (that I experience as a force upon me), which is the important distinction here.

63 Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956 – 1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 97 – 98.

64 Remarks on the character of this diagnostic impulse, in specific relation to histori-cal inquiry, have been recently and provocatively noticed in Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Paul Veyne, Quand notre monde est devenu chrétien (312 – 394) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007).

65 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 475.66 M. N.’s procedure to me is more easily explicable as “reverent exposition” that

deliberately corrects a passage serenely recognized as heterodox; see M.- D. Chenu, O.P., Introduction à l’ étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Montreal: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1950), 122; M.- D. Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1957), 364.

67 See John V. Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 105 – 9, on Augustine and verbal prudery.

68 E.g., Hans- Georg Gadamer, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Man and World 17, no. 3– 4 (1984): 313 – 23; Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 25 – 26.

69 Abelard, Dialogue, col. 1635: “Nonnunquam conviciis et improperiis facilius homines provocantur quam supplicationibus et obsecrationibus flectuntur et qui sic provocan-tur, studiosius satagunt de pugna quam qui orantur, moventur ex gratia.”

'Shameless': Augustine, After Augustine, and Way After Augustine

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