Idipsum

Idipsum et idipsum et idipsum, sanctus, santus, sanctus, dominus deus omnipotens.

Augustinus, Confessiones XII.vii.7.

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For the Curious

In principio...  This just happened to be the beginning of the Frustula Augustiniana back in 2017. I posted it on Facebook when I still had that, people loved it, and so it began. It is, so far, the second shortest of all the frustula.

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For the really curious

While O'Donnell's commentary on Conf. IX.iv.11 has plenty for us to chew on about idipsum in Augustine, he doesn't help with understanding where this odd use might have come from and whether Augustine knew that he was turning an adverbial into a name for being. Let's look at what we've got here:

• The very center of Augustine's thought (being)*
• found shaped through a Greek adverbial construction
• reinterpreted in order to praise the author of all our understanding and of every being.

Where did it come from? Augustine used the phrase id ipsum with specifying clauses throughout his life. Here's an example from the late 380s before he settled in Hippo:

Iam ergo ad eam partem veniamus, in qua dubitare adhuc videtur Alypius. Et primo id ipsum perspiciamus quale sit, quod te acutissime atque cautissime movet. (Let's now get to the matter that's still seems in doubt for Alypius. We should first thoroughly consider the nature of the very thing that moves you [to stand] most sharply and cautiously [in opposition]). Contra Academicos III.14.30.

And he never stopped using these two words in this manner. But, after he had committed the psalms to memory early in his priesthood and started to write – for himself apparently – commentaries on them (which became Enarrationes 1-16), they also took on a different meaning, becoming idipsum and used without qualifying clauses. Anyone can look at where he might have learned this phrase – from psalms 4.9, 33.4, 73.6, or 121.3. It translates the Greek ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό, a prepositional phrase with the adverbial force of together or as one, a translation of a Hebrew adverbial of equivalent force from the verb yachad (יָחַד), to unite. Jerome translates it with simul (yet the Nova Vulgata – why? – has retained idipsum in all four psalms: 4.9, 34.4, 74.6, 122.3)

Here's what I want to know:

Option A: Did Augustine know this Graecism (in id ipsum) and take liberties at making it mean what he wanted?

Option B: Was he confused by this oddity and made it a name for the divinity?

If A, Augustine did not read Scripture as tried to teach others to read it, as having an agency of its own. If B, then it is quite the happy fault: ignorance and error metamorphosed from a vague, intensified demonstrative into praise – a sign of a proclivity to find an underlying, unifying it that stands beneath everything. (Of Augustine's proclivity for this I have no doubt). But it gets even wilder: Augustine – unwittingly – enacts in these humble little words the Christian understanding of error in the histories of beings like us – for whom our mistakes become the foundation (through confessio) from which we grow into children of God – in idipsum (Ps. 4.9). Here we are, errant beings hungering to praise being itself which we cannot find, yet in search of which we so often stray – a paradox Augustine describes well in the beginning of his own story: et laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae, et homo circumferens mortalitatem suam, circumferens testimonium peccati sui et testimonium quia superbis resistis; et tamen laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae. The idea that this isn't really in our hands, that we're fooling ourselves if we think we can find a way out on our own, that every misstep and mistake – even if inevitable – could lead to something better than before is at the heart of Augustine's Confessiones and at the heart of the Christian belief in a felix culpa and the hope of the Ambrosian casta meretrix and of a life lived gratefully. I'd like to go with Option B, but I'm wondering if there's a C.

Perhaps all that is a bit too fanciful to find in this little idipsum. Then again, some find the very idea that there could be such a use of idipsum at all rather fanciful.

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*And, for Augustine, the ground of all thought itself.