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These lines, written by St. Augustine in The Confessions during the last years of the fourth century A.D., are used by Augustine to celebrate the omnipotence and compassionate goodness of God, and to affirm Augustine's own religious faith. |
Then emerges a historical gap from which anything could follow:
| Sixteen centuries later, Auerbach cites these lines as part of an examination of the representation of reality in Western literature. Two decades before Auerbach, these very same lines are cited by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land: |
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In this quotation, Eliot fuses lines from the Buddha's Fire Sermon with lines from St. Augustine's The Confessions. The juxtaposition of both Western and Eastern religions is indicative of the crisis of faith the Modernists inherited from the Victorians. In the modern post-Darwinian world, any unquestioning and simplistic belief in God and Christianity becomes close to impossible.
In Eliot's context, St. Augustine's words are no longer an affirmation of faith but an expression of doubt. The phrase is used by Eliot to mean something that is not only completely different from what Augustine had originally meant--it also refers to something that is, in fact, the exact opposite of Augustine's own intentions. As words on a page, the phrase is identical, but contextually, it nonetheless gives rise to contrasting meanings: faith versus doubt.
This demonstrates the open possibilities of citation that Derrida insists upon, which is also inextricably tied up with the open possibilities of history that Benjamin explores in the figure of the Messiah.
Janice Ho
