성 아우구스티누스의 『고백록』에 나타난 자서전적 서술전략과 신앙의 탐구

Abstract

St. Augustine's Confessions is not merely a book of private confessions of individual sins, but actually a book of religious education for his contemporaries. As the bishop of Hippo, facing lots of heretic ideologies, Augustine might have felt that it was his public duty to establish the religious faith more firmly for unifying the Catholic world. Hence his so many writings. In Confessions, a relatively earlier work, Augustine has many difficult religious problems to solve, so he selects some unique narrative strategies of autobiographical writing. Autobiography, taking the writer's very self as its subject, is adequate for examining deeply man's inner life, so it contains very efficient devices for exploring some religious motives. In Confessions, Augustine invents three kinds of autobiographical narrative strategies, "historical self-recollection" (in the first part: books 1-9), "philosophical self-exploration" (in the second part: book 10), and poetic self-expression (in the third part: books 11-13). While each part generates some religious problems that need to be solved in the next part, the three parts are established into definite structural coherence in the end. In the first part, the converted narrator distinguishes himself from the past guilty protagonist, showing how he could be illuminated and converted through God's graceful light. In the process he realizes that his own memory harbors God's image. In the second part, the narrator takes his present self as his subject, exploring the caves of his own memory to find out that he should rise above the range of memory for reaching his own soul and God's realm. In the third part, the nature of time is meditated because memory is activated in and deeply integrated with time. The narrator finally glimpses the image of God's eternity in time's on-going process of erasing itself and passing into non-existence. Exploiting those three autobiographical narrative strategies, Augustine successfully confesses his own and his contemporaries' utter praise of God's grace, fulfilling his own religious duty as the bishop of Hippo.