the cambridge companion to augustine - jesus christ · 2012. 6. 20. · cambridge companions online...

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Introduction

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Augustine’s work and influence, bothin his own period and in the history of Western philosophy after it. Patristic phi-losophy and theology, and every area of philosophy and theology in the latermedieval period, manifest the mark of his thought. In fact, at least until the thir-teenth century, when he may have had a competitor in Thomas Aquinas,Augustine is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the medievalperiod. Furthermore, although his influence is somewhat less after the medievalperiod, it is still important. Many of his views, including, for example, his theoryof the just war, his account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will,his attempted resolution of the problem of evil, and his approach to the relationof faith and reason, have continued to be important up to the present.

He was born around 354 AD in north Africa to Monica, who was ferventlyChristian, and Patricius, who was a non-believer for most of his life. His familywas not especially wealthy or distinguished, but they were able to afford a goodeducation for him of the sort common at the time, focusing on rhetoric. Hisfamily’s plan, with which he initially concurred, was that he should marry welland make his way in the world by means of his skill in rhetoric. While he waswaiting to make a suitable marriage, he took a concubine who bore him a son,Adeodatus. When Augustine sent his concubine away, Adeodatus stayed withhim. The boy seems to have been remarkably bright, as he is described inAugustine’s treatise De magistro, which also gives us an interesting witness to therelations between Augustine and his son. Adeodatus did not live to manhood; hedied not long after the time of the dialogue portrayed in De magistro.

Augustine’s mother Monica was determined that Augustine should become aChristian, but initially he joined the Manichaeans instead. Although most ofAugustine’s life was lived in Africa, in 383 AD he went to Italy, where he madethe aquaintance of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, himself one of the most forcefuland important Christian thinkers of the time. Many influences, including that ofAmbrose, came together to bring about Augustine’s conversion, and he was bap-tized in 387 AD. Moved by stories of desert ascetics that were then popular,

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Augustine also committed himself to a life of celibacy, a decision made famousby his moving description in the Confessions of the process leading up to it. In391 AD he was ordained priest, and a few years later he became bishop of theAfrican town of Hippo, an office he held until his death in 430 AD.

As bishop, he exercised a widespread influence. He was especially vigorous incombatting Manichaeism and the Christian heresies of Donatism andPelagianism. His controversies with these three common Patristic theologicalviews shaped his philosophy on such issues as free will and the problem of evil.In addition to his pastoral and administrative duties as bishop, he managed towrite extensively. His surviving works include roughly two hundred letters, fivehundred sermons, and a hundred philosophical and theological works.

His life spanned a turbulent period in the Church and in the Roman empire.He lived through the sack of Rome in 410 AD, and there were barbarian armiesoutside Hippo when he was dying. The Church during this period was also oftenin tumult. It was hammering out not only the shape of orthodoxy but also itsrelations to the state, and theological quarrels tended to become entangled withpolitical strife. The tenor of the time and the difficulties of understandingAugustine’s life in its historical context are laid out in detail in the chapter whichopens this volume, James J. O’Donnell’s “Augustine: his time and lives.”

Augustine made important contributions to every area of philosophy, andthere are many appropriate ways of ordering the various topics on which hewrote. Furthermore, in Augustine’s work – much more than in the work of amedieval philosopher such as Aquinas, for example – disparate topics are inter-woven in such a way that trying to disentangle them would do violence to thethought. So, for instance, Augustine wrote a great deal on the nature of the will,but his views on the will are also integral to his position on the relation of faithto reason, his account of virtues and vices, his attempted refutation ofPelagianism, and a host of other issues. There is, then, ineluctably some overlapamong the topics discussed in the chapters of this volume.

Augustine himself would certainly have put first, in importance to himself andto a philosophical comprehension of the world, an understanding of the natureof God and God’s relations to the world. Consequently, after O’Donnell’s intro-duction to Augustine’s life and time, the volume opens with a series of chapterson philosophy of religion.

John Rist’s chapter, “Faith and reason,” examines Augustine’s view of humanreasoning and its relation to religious belief, which has been taken as a charterfor Christian philosophy from Augustine’s time to our own. Faith is an epistemicstarting point, in Augustine’s view, especially for religious truths, but it is not theending point. The role of reason is to bring a person who believes to understandwhat he believes. Although faith is necessary for understanding, it is not suffi-cient; reason is necessary as well.

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William E. Mann’s chapter, “Augustine on evil and original sin,” and JamesWetzel’s chapter, “Predestination, Pelagianism, and foreknowlege,” examineAugustine’s contribution to particular topics in philosophy of religion, includ-ing the problem of evil and the apparent incompatibility of divine foreknowl-edge with human free will. In the process, each chapter also touches on a varietyof related topics. Mann examines Augustine’s account of the nature of goodnessand its relation to being; he also explains Augustine’s interpretation of the doc-trine of original sin, which plays a role in Augustine’s understanding of theproblem of evil. Wetzel considers Augustine’s theory of divine knowledge,including knowledge of the temporal future, and he shows the connectionbetween this theory and Augustine’s position on two closely associated theolog-ical topics: divine predestination and the role of divine grace in human salvation.

The last chapter in this section, Thomas Williams’s “Biblical interpretation,”serves as a useful guide to Augustine’s biblical commentaries and his exegeticaltheory. Augustine wrote a large number of biblical commentaries, and some ofhis most important philosophical and theological positions are hammered outin them. In addition, Augustine thought extensively about what it is to interpreta text, especially a text taken to constitute divine revelation, and his views on thissubject are instructive not only for their approach to the subject of biblical inter-pretation but also for their contribution to the topic of hermeneutics.

The next three chapters are on metaphysics and theology. These are intimatelyconnected for Augustine and cannot readily be separated from each other. Thisfact is made plain by the first chapter, Scott MacDonald’s “The divine nature.”As MacDonald explains, Augustine finds his way into Christianity by means ofa certain metaphysics which is heavily indebted to Platonism. This metaphysicsincludes a ranking of natures, with matter nearer the bottom of the hierarchyand immaterial minds closer to the top. At the very top is the divine nature itself.God’s nature is the foundation for all the others, not only because God is thecreator of everything in the world, but also because God is the highest good andbeing itself.

Mary T. Clark’s chapter, “De Trinitate,” considers the way in which this meta-physics is interwoven with the specifically Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In theprocess of elucidating Augustine’s interpretation of the doctrine, Clark alsotakes up various metaphysical issues, such as the concept of substance, which arefoundational for Augustine’s thought, as well as some elements in Augustine’sphilosophy of mind that he uses to illustrate his view of the relations among thepersons of the Trinity.

Finally, Augustine’s view of God as the atemporal creator of a temporal crea-tion is at the heart of his philosophical theology, and Simo Knuuttila addressesthis view of Augustine’s in his chapter, “Time and creation in Augustine.”Knuuttila explains Augustine’s account of time and eternity, which was very

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influential in the later medieval period. He also discusses Augustine’s under-standing of various other divine attributes, including divine freedom, omnipo-tence, and omniscience. A certain theory of modality and its connection to theactualization of possibilities in time is crucial to this part of Augustine’s thoughtas well, as Knuuttila brings out.

The next section, Augustine’s philosophy of mind, begins with Roland Teske’s“Augustine’s theory of soul.” Augustine accepted an account of the soul as inti-mately connected to the body and yet incorporeal and able to exist without thebody. Augustine’s views on this subject are influenced by Platonism; but, in hismature thought, he emphasizes that a human being is one substance constitutedof body and soul. Teske also explores Augustine’s speculations regarding thesoul’s origins, its creation and/or propagation, and its destiny after death.

The next chapter, my “Augustine on free will,” is concerned with Augustine’sstruggle to understand the nature of the freedom to be found in the will. Thereis widespread controversy over this part of Augustine’s thought, so much so thatit is sometimes hard to believe the participants in the controversy can be readingthe same texts of Augustine’s. I argue that part of the problem stems from thefact that contemporary theories about free will have formed the lenses throughwhich scholars have read Augustine’s texts, and that these theories are inade-quate to capture his position. For this reason, the chapter begins with a carefulconsideration of theories of freedom of the will in order to outline a theory notcanvassed in contemporary philosophy but more illuminative of Augustine’sposition. With this theory in hand, it is possible to produce a more or less ireniccompromise among competing interpretations of Augustine’s account of freewill.

The section concludes with Teske’s chapter “Augustine’s philosophy ofmemory.” As Teske points out, it is not possible to present Augustine’s theory ofmemory without bringing in his whole philosophy of mind, because forAugustine memory is intimately connected with all the other powers of the mind,including sense perception, intellectual cognition, and emotion or affection.Augustine is at pains to understand the way in which memory retains not onlypreviously acquired information and previous experiences but also previouslyfelt emotions; and he puzzles over the fact that it is possible, for example, toremember the experience of feeling joyful without feeling joyful while remem-bering. In his early work, he entertains the notion that memory preserves knowl-edge from a previous state of existence, but in the end he rejects this idea. Finally,the concept of memory is also important for Augustine’s philosophical theology.The relations among the persons of the Trinity can be modeled, on Augustine’sview, by considering the relations among human understanding, memory, andwill; and the modeling elucidates Augustine’s views of the mind as well as hisinterpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity.

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The next section, Augustine’s theory of knowledge, begins with GerardO’Daly’s “The response to skepticism and the mechanisms of cognition.” O’Daly’schapter sets Augustine’s views on human cognition in their historical context byshowing how they developed in response to a kind of skepticism popular in hisperiod. At an early point in his career, as he was becoming alienated fromManichaeism, Augustine gave serious consideration to the skepticism of theAcademics, who held that nothing can be known for certain. Augustine’s earli-est surviving work is a dialogue that attempts to refute this Academic position,and he returned to the subject several times in later works. In the course of devel-oping his position against skepticism, Augustine worked out his views about theway in which human cognitive faculties make contact with extra-mental realityand achieve knowledge of all sorts. His theory of sensation is based on thebiology of his day, and it is surprisingly sophisticated.

Gareth B. Matthews’s “Knowledge and illumination” focuses on Augustine’sunderstanding of the nature of knowledge. Augustine’s theory of knowledge isforged from different elements in his thought. His attempt to refute skepticismis certainly one; his struggle to understand language acquisition is another. Inelucidating Augustine’s account of perceptual knowledge, Matthews also exam-ines Augustine’s theory of sensation, but his conclusions are in disagreementwith those of O’Daly. O’Daly argues for a claim that Matthews disputes, namely,that for Augustine the objects of perception are images of the objects perceived.One uncontroversial hallmark of Augustine’s theory of knowledge is his insis-tence on the need for divine illumination. Matthews investigates the objects ofdivine illumination and Augustine’s reasons for taking illumination to be requi-site for knowledge.

For each of the remaining sections except the last, one contributor to thevolume has taken on the task of expounding an entire area of Augustine’s phi-losophy. Christopher Kirwan’s essay “Augustine’s philosophy of language” con-siders Augustine’s view of the nature and uses of language. Kirwan argues thatAugustine’s theory of language is largely derivative, and he examines the extentto which Augustine’s views were shaped by Stoic as well as Aristotelian theoriesof language. Augustine takes words to be signs, which are significative of things,although he is aware that there are different kinds of words and that some kindsof words do not readily fit this model. Kirwan also discusses Augustine’s notionof an inner word and the role of an inner word in human communicationthrough language.

Bonnie Kent undertakes the daunting job of examining Augustine’s rich andcomplicated ethics. This part of his work includes his account of the nature ofhuman beings and human happiness, and this topic in turn leads unavoidablyinto certain theological matters. Kent considers Augustine’s much-discusseddictum that only God is to be loved for his own sake and other human beings are

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to be loved only for the sake of God. To contemporary readers, this line cansound as if Augustine were recommending that we treat human beings as meansto some theological end, but Kent explains the line differently. On Augustine’stheory of value, every created thing has the value it does, however great thatvalue, only in relation to the Creator. An important part of Augustine’s ethics isbuilt around his recognition that the will can be divided against itself, and Kentshows the way in which Augustine struggled to reach a philosophical under-standing of conflict within the will. Augustine’s philosophical understanding ofthe will is interwoven with his interpretation of such theological doctrines asoriginal sin and what he takes to be the correct doctrine of grace and free will,and so Kent considers Augustine’s controversy with the Pelagians in this context.The chapter concludes with a discussion of Augustine’s theory of virtues andvices.

Paul Weithman’s chapter, “Augustine’s political philosophy,” deals with thoseelements in Augustine’s writings that make a contribution to what we now callpolitical philosophy. Although Augustine did not write any treatise specificallyin this area of philosophy, certain of his positions have been very influential inthe history of political philosophy. In one or another philosophical or theologi-cal context, Augustine wrote about slavery, property, the nature of justice, thepurposes of human government, the relations between Church and state, and theconditions for just war, among other such topics. His political theory is based onhis foundational notion of the world as divided into the city of God and theearthly city, which are identifiable on the basis of the loves that move the peoplein them. Augustine’s theory of the distinction between Christian and paganvirtues also plays a role in his theory of the two cities, and Weithman shows theway in which Augustine’s rejection of pagan virtues is connected to his theolog-ical views of human happiness.

The final section is an exploration of Augustine’s influence in the later medie-val period and afterwards. M.W. F. Stone’s chapter, “Augustine and medieval phi-losophy,” shows the variety of influences that Augustine had on philosophy inthe Middle Ages. Boethius, Eriugena, Anselm, and philosophers important inthe twelfth-century renaissance of Neoplatonic philosophy were all heavilyindebted to Augustinian thought, not only for particular theological and philo-sophical positions but also for his advocacy of the role of reason in humanunderstanding. Augustine is also often seen as the source of a thirteenth-centuryschool of thought, popular especially among the Franciscans, which was hostileto the reception of Aristotle. Stone argues that this scholarly commonplace is insome ways a caricature of a much more complicated reality. As Stone points out,even such leading proponents of Aristotelianism as Albert and Aquinas fre-quently cite Augustine and take his views as authoritative. Stone goes on to con-sider the various attitudes taken towards Augustine’s thought in the fourteenth

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century, where there is a distinctive neo-Augustinian movement, and in the earlyReformation period, where Augustine was an important influence on humanistthinkers.

Matthews’s “Post-medieval Augustinianism” concludes the volume with a dis-cussion of Augustinian concepts and views (whether explicitly recognized asAugustinian or not) in modern philosophy. Matthews argues that Descartes wasthoroughly Augustinian in his approach, particularly in his focus on a first-person perspective, as well as in certain of his philosophical views, such as hisview of the mind. Malebranche was explicit about his debt to Augustine, espe-cially for his theory of knowledge. Others, such as Grotius, were more influencedby Augustine’s theory of just war. Leibniz acknowledged himself indebted toAugustine for certain views in philosophy of religion, including the problem ofevil. Matthews goes on to canvass an array of other philosophers, including Mill,Berkeley, Wittgenstein, and Russell, arguing that in one respect or another thesephilosophers show the continuing power of Augustine’s thought.

Augustine’s thought is so rich and the scholarship on it is so diverse that cap-turing it adequately in one short volume is not possible. But the sixteen scholarswhose work is presented in this volume have provided a stimulating contributionto our understanding of Augustine. Their chapters constitute a provocative nextstep in the on-going project of comprehending, critically assimilating, andmaking use of Augustine’s deep and insightful legacy to Western philosophy.

NOTE

I am grateful to Scott MacDonald and Marjorie Woods for comments on an earlierdraft of this introduction.

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1JAMES J. O’DONNELL

Augustine: his time and lives

Our knowledge of Augustine’s world has transformed itself in the last genera-tion. Ever since the work of Gibbon, at least, the fourth and fifth centuries hadbeen marginalized in the historical imagination even of specialists. Gibbondescribed the decline of the Roman empire as “the triumph of barbarism andreligion” (in the form of Christianity). This was too good a story to disregard,and the evidence was overwhelming and unambiguous.

But from the 1960s onward, the concept of “late antiquity,” born earlier in thecentury, was used to transform our grasp of the period. French Catholics, ItalianMarxists, and German philologists all had a part to play, but late antiquity’smost persuasive apologist and the real shaper of the revolution is the liminalfigure of Peter Brown – an Irish-born Protestant on whom, as an infant, theemperor Haile Selassie laid ecclesiastically potent hands claiming descent fromSolomon. Brown made his mark as Augustine’s biographer and leads, thirtyyears later, the continuing reimagination of Augustine’s age. The diversity of thatworld and the ambiguity of its transformations are painted in richer and richercolors, and with each few years new tracts of space and time are infused withfresh vitality. The barbarians and the Christians of the age now appear to havehad more in common with each other and with their fellow Romans than weonce thought, and the many cultures of that Roman world now stand out ingreater and more differentiated relief.

Old conventionalisms about Augustine are quite true. He was born in the reignof Constantius II, in a Roman world flea-bitten at its borders by outside armiesbut fundamentally secure, and he died in the reign of Theodosius II in a part ofthe empire that no longer recognized Constantinople’s sway, in a city surroundedby besieging armies that all agreed were “barbarian” in origin and that wouldcapture his city and his province shortly after his death. In the world of his youth,it was still easy to imagine a world without Christianity; in the world of his oldage, it was beginning to be impossible to do so. Augustine continued to live inthe imaginary world of his youth and never fully realized the implications of aChristianized society. He lived most of his life as a member of one religious

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minority or another, and yet his writings have had wide influence among his fol-lowers in ages when they were in an unchallenged position of dominance.

Augustine’s physical world was far smaller than the whole of the Romanempire. Apart from a few years in Italy in the 380s, he lived his life chiefly in threeplaces: Tagaste, Hippo, and Carthage. His trips elsewhere in north Africa werefew and limited. Though his words traveled widely, his spatial limitations areimportant to remember, not least because they kept him chiefly in the more urba-nized and coastal north of Africa, away from the high plains and the frontier,away from the districts where a rougher form of life and perhaps a more nativeform of religion held sway.1

Augustine himself is a figure whose life we know too well.2 He has offered ussuch a variety of materials, of such high quality, for reconstructing his life thatit would be almost impossible not to use them, gratefully, to good advantage. Butif we would use them, it is equally almost impossible not to use them to tell thestory in the way he would have us tell it – and therein lies the danger.

The evidence of the danger lies in the biographies of Augustine, on largecanvas or small, that accumulate in our libraries. In the case of Brown, fully 40%of the book is taken up with the narrative of Augustine’s life before his ordina-tion as bishop – before he achieved the position that made it possible for him toexercise a significant influence in his lifetime and after. Narratives of briefercompass regularly find it impossible to restrain the narrative of early life intoeven so little as 40% of their bulk.

The reason for this preoccupation is famously not far to seek. The Confessionsare not, indeed, an autobiography in any useful sense of the word, as those of uswho write on them regularly aver. But they contain autobiographical narrativeand vignettes whose power no recounter of Augustine’s life can resist. Considerthe episode at the end of Conf. 2 in which Augustine tells how he and a few youth-ful friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree and threw them to the pigs. An hourat most, ten minutes more likely, in the life of a man who lived near half a millionwaking hours, but the episode is unavoidable, even for those (the majority ofreaders today) who are baffled or disapproving at finding the episode at all or atfinding it made much of.

The Confessions are the chief instrument by which Augustine shaped the nar-ratives of his life. The achievement of that self-presentation lies in the way thenarrative is made to revolve around a defining moment of conversion, localizedto a specific place and time and dramatized in a particular way. From infancy toage 18 and again from age 27 until his death, any reasonable person who knewAugustine and was asked his religious affiliation would have said “Christian.”For the intervening nine years, many would still have said the same, while otherswould have named a group, the Manichees, that non-Christians would have dis-tinguished from Christianity at large only with difficulty. And yet Augustine has


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persuaded us that the religious drama of the years 386–387, when he decided toaccept Christian baptism at the hand of Ambrose, is the interpretive key to hiswhole life. The issue has generally been not whether he is right in the frame hegives his narrative, but rather whether we have adequately tested his narrative indetail at all points against the other facts.

But he is virtually our sole source of facts. Even those documents ofAugustine’s life that come from other pens usually reach us because he allowedthem to. We have today some five million words from Augustine’s pen, vastlymore than we have from any of the famous writers of antiquity. None of thatmaterial survives against Augustine’s will. Though from time to time we hear ofscandalous accusations made against him, we hear of them only from him, or ifhe quotes them to take polemical advantage.

Augustine shaped his own survival with great care. Late in life3 he compiled acatalogue of his own written works under the evasive title Retractationes(‘Reconsiderations’).4 Each work was listed with some description of the circum-stances of its composition and its purpose, as well as corrections or explanationsof difficult or controversial passages. The work does not so much record changesof mind as dig defensive trenches around things said imprudently, or simply in adifferent spirit, when he was young. The result is a catalogue of Augustine’sauthentic works, reinforced by the survival of a hand-list from Augustine’slibrary, written by his disciple and authorized biographer Possidius (bishop ofCalama, not far from Hippo, and a lifelong follower of Augustine).5 Possidius’list not only includes “books” but also lists sermons and letters. Augustine leftfor the afterlife with a vastly better than average chance that his works wouldsurvive, be collected, and be read as his. The survival of so much of what hewrote is extraordinary.6 (At least we may be sure that the surviving books are his.Judicious skepticism will stand alongside piety in the presence of the relics of hisbody presented to view in Pavia.)

The purposes of the modern student of Augustine may best be served if wecome to the personal core of his life from the outside, working in. Accordingly,this essay will present Augustine’s life not as a conversion narrative but as theunfolding of a dazzling piece of origami. We will begin with the textual Augustinewho lies heavy on our shelves, proceed through the public Augustine (or ratherthe several Augustines known to different publics in his lifetime), and come onlyat the end to the man and his ultimate self-presentation. Such an approach givesmore value to the social context within which he worked and more value to hissocial interactions with others. It will remain an open question how far the impe-rial individualism that Augustine practices and implicitly teaches is a useful dis-cipline, whether for self-presentation or for historical analysis.

Augustine’s books range from the highly personal and polemical to thelofty and abstract, but even the loftiest and most abstract are charged with a

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clear idea about where error lies and how it is to be opposed. For modern phil-osophical readers, the most important titles are well known: Confessiones,De civitate Dei, De Trinitate, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, and thebrace of early works written during and after Augustine’s post-conversionwinter of 386 /387 – De Academicis (also known as Contra Academicos), Deordine, De beata vita, Soliloquia, and De libero arbitrio voluntatis.Philosophers today generally quail before, but then reluctantly plunge into,the late works against the Pelagians, looking for but not often finding solidground on which to assess Augustine’s views on free will and predestination.But the most generous armload of accessible and interesting works, availablein translation and regularly read today, still adds up to only a small fractionof the surviving œuvre. Least well represented in modern readings ofAugustine are his letters (by happenstance of bulk and relative rebarbative-ness – the annotation needed for each letter and its moment of pedagogy orpolemic can be annoying) and his sermons (because of their bulk, running toapproximately one-third of the surviving œuvre, and their short and scrappyfocus on issues of pastoral urgency).

Augustine today, moreover, dances for us behind numerous veils. His Latin iscorrect and clear, but can be read effortlessly by few today. Accordingly, he pen-etrates contemporary thought in ways conditioned by the history of his transla-tions, and there is no modern language that has yet seen a translation of hiscomplete works.7 The prestige of French scholarship on Augustine has beenundoubtedly enhanced by the fact that French Augustinians published, begin-ning in the 1950s, an extraordinarily valuable series of editions of Augustine’sworks, with Latin text and French translation, accompanied by learned andhelpful notes. They remain a vital path into Augustine’s work and thought forserious readers, even while they implant in those readers a style of interpretationcharacteristic of that particular Paris.

Augustine’s books are for the most part today presented to us by those in thecontemporary world who see themselves as his co-religionists. ModernAugustinian scholarship was in its formative decades overwhelmingly baptized,and indeed baptized Roman Catholic. It remains extraordinary that a provincialreligious writer and churchman of sixteen centuries ago should be so fortunateas to have his works presented to our world by a relatively homogeneous andsympathetic body of interpreters. Here again, as with the Confessions, we knowhim too well. If we could forget that he is “Christian,” and if we could forget thestory he tells us of his own life, what would we think of him?

Here is one way to answer that question. Who was Augustine to his con-temporaries in his lifetime? Beyond a circle of friends and colleagues, he cameto public attention in a series of roughly concentric or at least overlappingcircles.


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Augustine the bane of “Pelagianism”

This Augustine was known farthest and widest, beginning in the early 410s, whenhe was nearing 60. This renown was both good and bad for him, in that it prop-agated his name but won him influential and ferocious enemies. He ended his lifein a futile and dispiriting literary combat with a learned Christian bishop fromItaly, Julian of Eclanum, with whom he sparred endlessly before a Christian lit-erary public on all Latin-speaking shores of the Mediterranean. At the end of hislife, his reputation had penetrated erratically into the Greek Church and an invi-tation was sent for him to attend the council of Ephesus – but he had died beforeit could reach him in Africa.

The controversy in which Augustine found this fame was largely factitious.The “Pelagianism” that he attacked was a construct of his own, founded on hisimputations of implications and logical conclusions to a writer who disownedmost of them. When Pelagius was himself examined for his beliefs by a relativelyindependent and unbiased ecclesiastical court, in Palestine in 415, he came awayvindicated.7 Augustine could not accept this and pounded away for a few yearsmore on Pelagius himself, winning the Pyrrhic victory of papal approval for someof his own condemnations. The victory backfired when, in his last decade,Augustine found himself under fire for it from the doctrinaire Julian (who waswilling to accept some of the conclusions that Pelagius himself shied from), andfrom devout Christian ascetics to whose belief and practice Augustine wouldhave ordinarily been closely attuned. These last (some of them in Africa, rathermore in Gaul) saw defeatism in Augustine’s ideas and feared that his view of pre-destination denied value to their ascetic achievements. Although Augustine’smost extreme ideas were hotly confuted in these circles, he himself was rarelycondemned as a heretic and his opponents were strikingly reluctant to mentionhim by name, so great was the prestige he had created for himself.

Augustine the literary lion

That prestige had come in good measure from long years of assiduous literaryself-promotion. Beginning in the early 390s, while not yet himself a bishop,Augustine had carefully built for himself a choice audience of readers for hisworks beyond his homeland. Though his works doubtless circulated in Hippoand Carthage, we know he had found ways of bringing them to the attention ofdistinguished literary Christians elsewhere. Paulinus of Nola, in particular, aretired Christian gentleman in Italy, poet and literary man, seems to have beenone conduit for Augustine’s reputation and for his works themselves.9 Morestrikingly, we have a fairly full record of Augustine’s correspondence with Jeromein Bethlehem, showing a fierce but repressed competition of egos between the


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two ambitious men.10 Though Jerome was a clergyman of the second rank, hehad carved out a position of authority based on his learning and his status asimpassioned and persuasive writer. Augustine came on the scene years afterJerome and set out to achieve a similar kind of reputation. Writing to Jerome inthe early 390s was a way of calling himself to the older writer’s attention andentering into the literary public that Jerome dominated. Over the years that fol-lowed, Augustine’s books became well known outside Africa in upper-classChristian circles.

His time in those circles led to one of his two most famous and lasting books,De civitate Dei.11 The ostensible point of departure of that work is “pagan” reac-tion to the sack of Rome by Visigoths in 410 AD and the learned debates ofupper-class refugees in Carthage. What if, so they supposedly argued, the fate ofthe city of Rome is due to our impiety toward the ancient gods and to our adhe-sion to the new Christian god? Should we perhaps revive ancient practices?Augustine overwhelms those arguments in the first five books of De civitate Dei,which he wrote within a couple of years of the controversy’s eruption, but hethen continued for another decade and more to add another 17 books to thework, going far beyond what the moment of controversy called for. The work inthe end outlines a large view of human history, from creation to apocalypse, andsituates Roman, and indeed all Mediterranean, history within that perspective.It refutes every form of “paganism” that Augustine cared about, but chiefly theNeoplatonism that he understood from what he knew of Plotinus and Porphyry.The style of the first books shows that Augustine could play the part of thelearned traditionalist to a fare-thee-well and take pleasure in using a pastiche ofquotations from the most classical of Latin authors to demolish the pretensionsof Roman religion.

Augustine the anti-Donatist

Augustine’s most widely known public persona, however, was one that requiresa distinct effort of historical construction for us today. Augustine the anti-Pelagian has been made current to many following generations by the timeless-ness of the debates over grace and free will that he instigated and guided.Augustine the anti-“pagan” makes a case against a straw man enemy thatmoderns understand readily, so familiar are we with the glib juxtaposition of“pagans” and Christians in the Roman world.12

But Augustine the anti-Donatist is a figure who has spoken directly only to afew moderns and, I venture to suggest, to none of our contemporaries. The mostnotable example of a modern resonating with Augustine on these points isNewman, who quoted a line of Augustine’s directed against the Donatists asthough it were his own mantra of conversion.


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Augustine found the widest (if not always receptive) public for his writing andspeaking as an opponent of Donatism.13 He surely spent more of his energies asbishop of Hippo on this one issue than on all the other controveries of his careercombined. After the last wave of official persecution of Christianity in the early300s had ebbed, Christians in North Africa fell into two camps. To name themis to take sides, but perhaps one may characterize them as rigorist and latitudi-narian. The rigorist camp held that those who had in any way compromised theferocity of their Christian allegiance in time of persecution had thereby exiledthemselves from the Christian community and required sacramental initiation inorder to re-enter. Particular hostility was directed towards clergy who hadhanded over the books of scripture to the Roman authorities to be burnt.Traditores (“traitors,” lit. handers-over) they were called, and they were thoughtto have disqualified themselves as clergy by that act. Ordinary faithful who hadfallen in similar ways were to be rebaptized, and clergy, if such there were, whohad fallen and sought clerical status again would have to be reordained.

The latitudinarian camp took no less harsh a view of the betrayals of the time,but took a higher view of the sacraments of the Church. Baptism could only beadministered once for all. If you lapsed from grace after baptism, then only by atedious ritual of repentance could you, in principle, be readmitted to commun-ion. This may not sound latitudinarian, indeed is in some ways even more rigor-ist in theory than the other position, but in practice this community pursuedlapses with less fervor and was more inclined to let bygones be bygones.

To make matters more complicated, the whole fourth century in Africa waspunctuated by arguments over who the traditores had really been. Had the firstbishops of the post-persecution latitudinarians really been themselves tradi-tores? Or on the other hand (as was alleged, with good evidence), had the leadersof the rigorist faction themselves included some who had fallen away and neverbeen rebaptized? Each side accused the other of bad faith and bad behavior atevery level, most persuasively.

But the rigorist faction inherited the traditions and practices of the church ofAfrica, and throughout the fourth century it dominated African life, despitenumerous attempts by the latitudinarian party to invoke imperial authorityagainst it. When Augustine became priest and then bishop at Hippo, he was amember of the minority community there. Moderns debate the social roots ofboth communities, cautiously concluding that the rigorists were more broadlyplanted in African society at a variety of levels (including the highest), while thelatitudinarians tended to be confined to the more Romanized and urbanized seg-ments of society.

Augustine made it his business as bishop of Hippo to fight for the latitudinar-ians against the rigorists – hence for the “catholic” Church (he uses the adjectivein its root meaning of “universal”, and he made much of the fact that his church


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was in communion with churches all over the Roman world) against the“Donatists” (so-called after a charismatic founding figure). He made commoncause with Aurelius, his faction’s bishop in Carthage, and for twenty years theywere a tireless team, working together for the defeat of their opponents. Augustinewrote book after book, and together they pulled every lever of government influ-ence. Eventually they prevailed by the latter route, when the emperor sent a com-missioner to convene a hearing and resolve the issue. The commissioner,Marcellinus, was a devout layman who immediately fell in with Augustine. Therewas never any doubt at the conference, held in the baths at Carthage in June of411 (we have the stenographic transcript of most of the three days of the confer-ence), that he would find for Augustine’s catholic party, and he did so. From thatday onward, “Donatism” had no legal standing in Africa and effectively vanishedfrom history.

In all this period, Augustine often spent half his year in Carthage, preaching,writing, and debating against the Donatists. Those audiences saw a learned andfluent preacher with a taste for the kind of debater’s tricks of language and argu-ment that audiences loved. They knew about his books and they knew about hisinfluence with powerful people, and some of them encountered those books andthat influence more directly. But he was pre-eminently a public and visible figure.Augustine always traveled reluctantly, but he took his anti-Donatist persona onthe road from time to time, debating with Donatist leaders and seeking converts.When he came to one or another small city, it was very much as a publicly recog-nized visiting dignitary, absorbed in the high politics of the moment. Many ofthose who knew him this way loathed him as a powerful figure in a party theyabhorred, but such is the pathology of celebrity that the loathing was part of hispower. This Augustine reached the most people, however superficially, and thisAugustine shaped the impressions of Africans about all the other Augustines.

Augustine at Hippo

For all that Augustine made himself known to a wider world through his writ-ings and his involvement in the affairs of the day, he still spent more of his time,from 391 until his death in 430, at home in Hippo than anywhere else. There heinvented and struggled to define his role as bishop and leader of his communityand there he performed the sacramental acts in which he and his followersbelieved that divine power flowed through his hands. (He tried to be in Hippoevery year for the most sacred rituals of Easter, when new members were initi-ated to the community and received baptism.) He appeared serene before his con-gregation as they stood, row on row, straining to hear his voice. It troubled himthat they venerated him so, for he was acutely aware of his own failings – evento the point of what later churchmen would call scrupulosity. Did he delight to


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a fault in the beautiful music of the church service? When his mind wanderedfrom prayer, did he return to the task promptly enough? He judged himselfagainst a high standard and found himself wanting, and so felt unworthy in theeyes of his congregation. The writing of the Confessions was, among many otherthings, an attempt at self-understanding that would permit him to continue asbishop with this acute consciousness of imperfection.14

But it is unlikely that Augustine’s congregation shared his sense of thoseimperfections. To them he was a hieratic figure, dispenser of God’s word andGod’s sacrament, but judge and jury as well. In increasing numbers, they cameto him, divinely authorized and reliable, to settle their petty legal cases, in an agewhen Roman justice was more remote, more expensive, and more unreliable thanever. He expressed his frustration at the time he spent on this kind of businessand finally, in his early seventies, designated a successor in order to hand over theworldly business of the bishopric so that he, Augustine, could retire to his studyand his studies.

Those studies took place in a privileged space that Augustine carved out forhimself. It is conventional but anachronistic to call it a “monastery”: Augustineused the word monasterium a few times, specifically to speak of the little com-munity he created in Hippo, but the word was so new and he used it so infre-quently that it must have rung far more strangely on his contemporaries’ earsthan it does on ours. The word and the thing would have been unfamiliar: ahousehold of men without women, men without social status (or at leastwithout property), dressed in a way that set them apart, pursuing activities ofmarginal social value – study and prayer. The ethos of the ascetic who separatedhimself from civil society was still a novelty in Africa, and the choice to sethimself apart in this way from civil society made Augustine relatively unusualamong clergy of the time. Augustine’s choices in Hippo made him more visibleand better known and at the same time more remote than a more conventionalcleric would have been.

The young Augustine

Augustine came to Hippo when he was almost 37 years old. He lived another 39years and from that period come most of the five million words that survive ofhis œuvre for us. Half the ordinary life of a man on this earth he passed beforehe came to the city where he would make his lasting reputation. It is that half ofhis life that he tells us about in his Confessions, and about which we know lessthan we know about the later years.

For the years in Hippo, from 391 to his death in 430, are amply attested in hisown voice, year by year, in his letters, sermons, and books. And in many wayssuch a self-presentation is more reliable than the retrospective and self-serving


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narrative of the Confessions. We know by name, moreover, no contemporaryreader of the Confessions who was persuaded by its narrative.14 (In theRetractationes [2.6, ed. Mutzenbecher] Augustine suggests that there were otherreaders who thought the book a great success, but he does not tell us their namesand we have no way to interrogate them.) Of most interest are the two readers,one a Manichee, the other a member of a small sect that broke off from theDonatists, who both knew Augustine when he was a young man on the make. Herecalls himself as a libertine: they recall him as a prig.16 Augustine’s narrativeleaves them unmoved.

Can we recover a true narrative of Augustine’s early years? No. The most wecan do is hold to the elements of his narrative that are most likely to have beenverifiable to his contemporaries. No reader will long resist the power of theConfessions, but for as long as we can maintain it, resistance is far from futile.What do we learn if we resist?

Augustine was born on the margins of gentility. To the poor, he was an aristo-crat; to aristocrats, he was a scion of a provincial, down-at-heel family. His fatherhad connections who were wealthier and who could be drawn upon shamelesslyto support, for example, the son’s education. One scholar has astutely seen,indeed, in the way Augustine’s father pressed to find resources for his son’s edu-cation what he calls a “Balzacian novel before its time”: a family that chose toinvest heavily in the education of one precocious older son (there were at leasttwo other children, one son and one daughter) in whose career the whole familywould advance.17

Because Augustine invests the story of his schooling with philosophical andreligious narrative (reading Cicero he somehow falls among the Manichees, andhe is reading Cicero again 15 years later when he is about to fall among the ortho-dox Christians), modern readers linger over the personal side of the story andpay little attention to the familial. In brief, the story is that Augustine left homeat a very early age to pursue his schooling, pursuing it eventually with vigor andsuccess all the way to Carthage. A year’s rustication in his home town as ateacher was prologue to a bright near-decade teaching in Carthage and then adaring leap first to Rome and then to Milan to seek the heights of his profession.No sooner did he land, on his feet, in Milan, exalted at the age of 30 as imperialprofessor of rhetoric, called on to deliver formal court panegyrics and with everyhope of a political career, than his whole family – his mother, his brother, hissister, and at least one or two other junior relatives and hangers-on – turned upin Milan, looking to hitch their wagons to his star. Their hopes began with, butwere not limited to, a lucrative governorship. Had he ascended higher still, theprofit for his retinue would have multiplied itself.

But in Milan Augustine’s philosophical and religious interests derailed his self-interest. Controversy has raged for a century and more about just what happened


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in Milan and, since we have only Augustine’s retrospective and self-serving nar-rative of a decade later to go by, we are unlikely to achieve certainty. He cameunder the influence of bishop Ambrose18 and became convinced that his ownpersonal well-being depended on abandoning a worldly career and devotinghimself to God in a special way – not just joining the Christian Church (thoughhe did that formally in Milan in 387, taking baptism at the hands of Ambrose)but renouncing the life of the flesh and in particular abandoning the quite ordi-nary sexual life he had led with one quite respectable common-law wife (andmother of his child) and then with a somewhat less respectable “mistress” (theterm is anachronistic: he took up temporarily with a lower-status woman whenhe was engaged to a higher-status fiancée). Nothing about Christianity requiredhim to abandon sexual activity in order to be baptized, but Augustine soughtsomething higher: the life of a Christian philosopher, separate and distinct fromthe ordinary run of Christian and excelling the most ascetic and ethereal of non-Christian philosophers.

Having made this choice of celibacy and science in the fall of 386, not yet bap-tized, Augustine took his household to the country for the winter – there perhapsto test his sexual resolve in a setting less tempting than the cosmopolitan capital,and there certainly to pursue his philosophical studies. From those months at thecountry estate of Cassiciacum we have the earliest books surviving from his pen,dialogues written (and indeed enacted by himself and his friends and family) ina consciously Ciceronian vein. The first of them, De Academicis (usually andwrongly titled Contra Academicos), takes up the radical skepticism to whichCicero himself was more than tempted and finds in it the basis for a mystical phi-losophy of Christianity. Certain knowledge is impossible, Augustine acceptsfrom the Academics, and so one must give oneself over in faith to the fount oftrue knowledge who is (as it is revealed on the last pages of an otherwise quitesecular book) Christ.

The philosophy to which Augustine gave himself at this moment in his life wasone he eagerly sought in later years to assimilate to orthodox Christianity.Believing that Christianity could rival the ancients in every way, Augustinepursued a philosophy that got its doctrine from scripture, interpreted that doc-trine in the light of Plotinus, and hedged it around with mystical expectationsthat mixed Plotinian intellectualism19 and ritual purification. To us today, thisparticular mixture of ideas is difficult to grasp and seems remote and artificial,but to Augustine it was indeed the new-age religion and philosophy for a trulyelite intellectual of his time, more appealing even than Manichaeism – his firstnew-age enthusiasm – had been.

And so it made perfect sense that he retired from his public career, retired fromMilan, and went back home to become a more refined version of his father. Hesettled in Tagaste, the little town he came from, residing on the family property


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there, discharging the obligations of a gentleman and pursuing a life of philo-sophical leisure, writing contentious books and exchanging letters with like-minded friends. There he stayed for three years, from 388 to 391.

Why Augustine ever left Tagaste we will never know. The assumption of piousbiographers has always been that his religious interests were consistent and per-sistent and that it was chance that took him in 391 to Hippo where chance againseized him and made him a clergyman: for so he tells the story himself, to thecongregation at Hippo 35 years later.20 But it is remarkable that he did not leavethe isolation of Tagaste and did not think of accepting a life elsewhere until afterhis son had died – until, that is, the worldly hopes of his family had been extin-guished and until there was no son to whom to leave the property he had himselfinherited from his father. Only with his son’s death was Augustine properly root-less, only then eligible to take up easily the disconnected life of the monk.

Even then, he seems to have resisted. A letter by Augustine to his new super-ior, Valerius the bishop of Hippo, was clearly written a few months after his ordi-nation – forced ordination to hear him tell it – at Hippo. It seems to be a letterof request to Valerius for permission to spend some time away from Hippo pur-suing the study of scripture.21 Modern readers have seen in this the devoted andstudious Augustine of whom they are fond, casting a fresh eye on the Christianscriptures he was now bound to obey and preach. But there are several odd thingsabout the letter, and a more credible interpretation would see it as a piece ofpolitic revisionism. The subtext is this: seized and ordained a priest at Hippo,Augustine’s natural impulse had been to flee, and he followed that impulse backto Tagaste. Once there, regretting his choice, perhaps fearing divine retribution,he wrote the letter to his bishop (to whom he would not have needed to write thisrequest if both were in Hippo, and if there were no reason for a public declara-tion about his whereabouts and activities), putting a good face on what he hasdone and thus implicitly promising to return. And return he did, to become theAugustine of history. It could have been otherwise.

But even if that speculation about reluctance is ill-founded, it is worth under-lining just how much the Augustine of 387–391, the man who had abandoned hisworldly career and returned to Africa, was ready to disappear from view as amild-mannered country squire with philosophical and literary interests. The roleof a Paulinus of Nola is the most to which he might have aspired there, andnothing in his literary product of those years suggests that he would have hadeven that renown. It was only with his clerical ordination that he took up epis-tolary utensils to enter the eye of a broader Christian literary public, and onlywith the Confessions that he succeeded in producing work of a sort that wouldmerit broad and lasting attention. Augustine of Tagaste in 390 is one of the greatmight-have-been-a-has-beens of world history, his father’s son in more ways thanone.


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The Augustine of the Confessions

But if we trace the Augustines whom his contemporaries knew – the bishopknown for his books, the bishop known for his politics, the bishop known by hisflock, and the young man who disappeared from view when the clergymanappeared – it must be admitted that the Augustine of the Confessions does notdisappear from history. Augustine the son of Monica, Augustine the confessor,is one of the greatest creations of self-presentation that our literary past has tooffer. And he holds and shapes the attention of readers more than the historicalAugustine ever could.

The Augustine of the Confessions can be spoken of in various almost-too-familiar ways. He invents (if Marcus Aurelius did not already invent it) a textualself whose interiority is not only on public display but seems to be the chiefobject of the narration. Events of past life are recounted and circumstances ofpresent life are examined in order to reveal the inner man. But who is speakingin this narrative? Is it the inner man himself? Or is the inner man the object ofattention of some subject lurking more deeply within the person? To ask thosequestions is to enter into the spirit of the book almost too wholeheartedly. Atany rate, he provides a model, unexampled in antiquity and unrivaled until atleast Aelred of Rievaulx (and perhaps we must wait for Pascal or Montaigne), ofself-presentation through meditative analysis of thoughts, emotions, and mem-ories in a swirling and impressionistic dance of words. The ease with whichtwentieth-century readers have leapt to their Freudian task, quite sure thatAugustine’s narrative of his relations with his mother offers the key to his char-acter, is a sign of the power of the text. A conscientious analyst would recognizethis text not as the unself-conscious revelation that the Freudian couch seeks toelicit but rather as something closer to the first narrative that the anlaysand tells,defensive and disarming, diverting and deceiving, on entering the analysts’s care.Breaking down that narrative and finding insight is a task that still remains to bedone.22

A central feature of the narrative lies in Augustine’s creation of himself as aman driven by philosophy, persuadable by Cicero’s dictum (De finibus bonorumet malorum 1.2.3) that the true student of philosophy never goes by half-measures but pursues truth relentlessly and endlessly. He shows us that philo-sophical urge turned into Christian faith but still undiminished, and generationsof intellectualizing Christians have found comfort and example in that. Thephilosopher’s Augustine takes three particular directions from the Confessions.

First, it is the book of memory. Book 10 of the Confessions famously divagatesinto a consideration of memory and its workings that has been widely influen-tial if curiously under-studied throughout modern philosophical history.23

Augustine blends metaphors of space and of interiority in a persuasive and vivid


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portrayal of a huge and capacious hall, rich in furnishings, and yet so vast thatvaluable contents often go missing, contained in memory but somehow notpresent. Memory, moreover, seems at times in that account almost to become theself, and many readers find this persuasive – we are the concatenation of our ownexperiences, present to ourselves. There are grave difficulties for Augustine’s viewto be derived from cognitive psychology, but he remains so sympathetic a figurethat we forgive him his difficulties and admire his imagination.

Second, the Confessions are the book of time. The eleventh book no lessfamously pursues the question of a definition of time through scriptural andPlotinian byways, ending with a definition of time as a “distension of the mind”– a strikingly mentalistic reading. Here too, Augustine is quoted, admired, andrarely criticized directly – so great is his prestige.24

Third, and in a different vein, the Confessions provides a narrative withinwhich to read the self-indulgent and sometimes pretentious dialogues ofCassiciacum – De Academicis, De beata vita, De ordine – and the associatedworks, especially Soliloquia and the fragmentary and frustrating De immortali-tate animae. In the winter after his determination to renounce sexual activityonce for all, Augustine and his students, friends, and family retired to a countryvilla to re-create Ciceronian philosophical leisure. They read Virgil of a morning,and of an afternoon would play-act the philosophical dialogue. The books reportthat stenographers took down their every word and swear that the texts repre-sent debate as it really was. Modern readers have doubted that dialogue couldnaturally have unfolded so neatly, but omit to recognize (1) that the dialogues arecarefully-sewn-together segments of conversation – out of several months’ resi-dence in the country, barely two weeks of time turn up represented in the textsof these works; and (2) that the people who participated in these dialogues werequite consciously playing parts, recreating Cicero’s Tusculum, whose texts theyknew only too well. The books remain interesting as sophisticated readings andreapplications of Ciceronian thought and method in a Christianizing context. Ifnothing else from Augustine survived, these texts would be minor classics, of theorder of the works of Minucius Felix or the emperor Julian, but the fact ofAugustine’s later career and the persuasive reading offered for them by theConfessions have given them a special place as charter texts in Augustine’s wayof thinking. For all that they were written by an unbaptized rhetorician goingthrough a bout of something approaching depressive withdrawal, they loomlarge in modern readers’ attention to Augustine because of their authorizedplace in the autobiographical narrative.

The Augustine of the Confessions has also given rise in modern times to themost lasting and ferocious of quarrels over his philosophical ancestry and affil-iation. The text of the Confessions explicitly tells us of his discovery of the“books of the Platonists” in Milan in 385 and the powerful influence those books


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exercised. Now, the text in which the discovery is reported tells us with noapology that what Augustine thought he found in those books was identical withthe content of the first words of John’s Gospel.25 There are various ways to inter-pret that assertion, but behind it clearly lie some distinct acts of reading.Particularly since Pierre Courcelle’s epoch-making book of 1950, much modernAugustinian scholarship has concentrated on identifying the nature of thosebooks and the time and place of Augustine’s various readings of them (presum-ably, at the outset, under the influence of Ambrose).26 After a half-century ofscholarship, debate still rages. There are two chief questions:

1. What did he read and when did he read it? The “what” question centers on theproportions of Platonic material that came to Augustine in the words ofPlotinus and of Porphyry. Given that Augustine read the texts in Latin transla-tions that had to be (given the difficulty of the Greek originals) exceedingly dif-ficult and frustrating, finding the exact mix of Plotinus and Porphyry has beenimpossible. (Since Porphyry was Plotinus’ disciple, biographer, editor, andabridger – in the work under his own name called “Sentences” – it is also likelythat Augustine found some things that he thought were Plotinian but that werein fact Porphyrian.) The “when” question tries to trace Augustine’s readershipthrough 385 and 386 most closely, but is also concerned to know what laterreadings, particularly of Porphyry, occurred. The Augustine of 386 seems notto have known that Porphyry had notoriously written “Against the Christians”– a work lost to the intolerance of his enemies. By about 399, Augustine seemsto have discovered Porphyry’s hostility, and that becomes a leitmotif of his laterdiscussions of Platonism, notably those in Books 8–10 of the De civitate Dei.

2. A different kind of debate has centered on Augustine’s reception of Plotinianideas and has pitted scholars against one another. Robert O’Connell, S.J., hasheld out contra mundum for over a generation for the position that Augustinewas through most of his life a crypto-Plotinian, espousing a doctrine of thesoul that he received from Neoplatonism according to which the souls ofhuman beings had entered matter by a “fall” from the purity of uncorporealexistence. Human life was hence a struggle to free the soul of corporeality. Abroader consensus of scholars holds that Augustine’s frequent protestationsof his inability to determine an answer to the question of the soul’s origin canbe taken at face value. O’Connell’s story requires us to complicate the tradi-tional narrative of conversion with an inner conflict of lingering attachmentto a central piece of unconverted doctrine through the years of Augustine’spublic profession as bishop. To be sure, Augustine is noticeably marked as hegrows older by his fear of his own past, and he externalizes that fear: heattacks the Platonists in De civitate Dei and then strikingly turns his quarrelwith Julian of Eclanum into a reprise of his attack on the Manichees. The last


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words of the last book Augustine wrote – was working on when he fell ill todie – are part of a slanging match in which Augustine and Julian take turnsaccusing the other of crypto-Manichaeism.27 O’Connell’s view suggests badconscience about Plotinus: a minority view, but one that needs to be givenserious attention.

What other Augustines are there yet undiscovered? I will close by suggesting thatthere are two, at least.

The first may perhaps just be coming into view. This is the Augustine whorevealed himself at vast length in his letters and sermons, texts which constituteover 45% of the bulk of his surviving works. These texts have been mined forfacts that fit the pre-determined structure of biographical narrative, but havereceived far too little attention for their literary and philosophical content. Somenew studies have begun to take these texts seriously, but it is striking that eventhese still tend to come from European Catholic scholars essentially acceptingthe portrait we have received. The impetus from the new Divjak letters andDolbeau sermons (see note 6) will prove most fruitful if it broadens to includereconsideration of these long-known but under-studied masses of text.

The second Augustine I have tried to sketch here, one whose life is not definedby the narrative he himself supplies. This Augustine does not succeed in impos-ing his interiority upon us, does not succeed in making his own interpretation ofhis religious history the armature of everything we are to know about him. Wecannot escape from the Augustine of the Confessions, but we owe him and our-selves the effort to see him in other lights, to find other ways of reading his nar-rative. When we do, he becomes less the extraordinary figure who wrote dazzlingbooks and more readily understood as a man of his time and place. In importantways, this then makes it easier to give proper respect to the thinker and the writer.

Beyond and behind even those Augustines was a man whose privacy we neverpenetrate. His earliest biographer closed with an account of the dying Augustineasking to have the seven penitential psalms written out and posted on the wallsof his chamber, then asking to be left alone with those sobering words for his lasthours and days.28 Many structures of interpretation could be erected aroundsuch a report, but we should not fail to see the image presented, of an old manwho knows he is dying, choosing to be alone with words that come from his Godand that tell him insistently, and that are meant to let him tell himself, how farhe falls short of divinity. Our last impression of Augustine is of a man who nevermade things easy for himself.

NOTES

1 Perler 1969 is a meticulous guide to Augustine’s movements and evokes some of theflavor of his Africa.


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2 For readers seeking to consult this essay as a source of information or to refreshmemories, I supply here a few key dates in Augustine’s life.

13 November 354: born at Tagaste. Parents Patricius and Monica.360s–370s: studied at Madauros and Carthage, taught at Tagaste, then at

Carthage again; while in Carthage, his father died and Augustine took acommon-law wife and had a child.

384: pursued his teaching career to Rome, thence in the same year to Milan.386/87: abandoned teaching career, produced first surviving literary works,

was baptized, and determined to return to Africa, and did so in 388.Monica died while he was in Italy.

388–391: lived life of gentleman of literary and philosophical leisure atTagaste; death of his son.

391: was pressed into service as presbyter (roughly = “priest”) of the churchof Hippo Regius.

395/96: ordained bishop of Hippo.397: Confessions.411: final public defeat of Donatism; beginning of work on City of God and

beginning of Pelagian controversy.28 August 430: died at Hippo.

Brown 1967 is so masterly a narrative that I have annotated only specific referencesand matters where Brown’s book might not serve as an adequate guide. The freshestrecent recounting of Augustine’s life is Wills 1999, with especially fresh and effectivetranslations from Augustine. I have written at length on many of the issues here inmy commentary on the Confessions (O’Donnell 1992).

3 But he had been thinking about it for 15 years: Ep. 143.2–3.4 Englished as Retractations, trans. Bogan 1968.5 Never translated to my knowledge; Latin text available in Miscellanea Agostiniana

1930, 2.149–233.6 In the last two decades, two precious finds have added to the corpus. Johannes Divjak

brought to light over two dozen letters never before published and François Dolbeaua like number of sermons. The best approach to the new letters is Divjak 1987, in theseries “Bibliothèque Augustinienne,” vol. 46B, with text, French translation, andnotes; English translation by Eno 1989. The sermons have been published as Dolbeau1996; translated by Hill (1997).

7 The French Bibliothèque Augustinienne (described in the text here: now published bythe Institut des Etudes Augustiniennes in approximately four dozen volumes) hascome closest, but is now being rivaled by the English “A Translation for the Twenty-First Century,” under the general editorship of John Rotelle, OSA; but both sets arefar from complete at the present writing.

8 On this period and the gap between Augustine’s imagination and Pelagius’ teachings,see Wermelinger 1975.

9 Courcelle 1963, 559–607.10 Hennings 1994.11 Dyson 1998 is the newest version; Brown 1967, 287–329, is still the best introduction

to the circumstances of writing.12 That familiarity lubricates our reading of De civitate Dei: a little less familiarity

might bring greater understanding, howbeit at the price of greater effort. The notionof “pagan,” making no sense except as a Christian theological category, hurries us


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into thinking in ways quite alien to the period. See O’Donnell 1979.13 Frend 1985 is still the best connected narrative of the sect’s history, but is marked by

a certain partisanship that must be kept in mind.14 Books 10–13 of the Confessions (see O’Donnell 1992 passim) show Augustine strug-

gling with the role he had undertaken and the inadequacies he felt.15 The skeptics represent the breadth of Augustine’s polemical opponents: Secundinus

the Manichee (object of Augustine’s Contra Secundinum), Pelagius (described react-ing to Conf. 10 at De dono persev. 20.53), Vincent the Rogatist (Ep. 93.13.51), andJulian of Eclanum.

16 The Manichee was Secundinus (Epistula Secundini 3 – transmitted with Augustine’sC. Secundinum), the renegade Donatist Vincent (see previous note).

17 Lepelley 1987.18 McLynn’s Ambrose of Milan (1994) is a first-rate study and in many ways the best

new book on Augustine in many years.19 Augustine wrote, in the habit of that period, books of the “liberal arts” during that

winter and spring of 387, books meant to purify the mind from earthly matters byshowing it the eternal patterns through which one could ascend from language tonumber to the heavens and then to peace beyond. See Hadot 1984.

20 Sermon 355.21 Ep. 21.22 On the Freudian reading and misreading of the Confessions and of Augustine, see

O’Donnell 1992, 1.xxx–xxxi, esp. n. 32. The best modern essay on the topic isFredriksen 1978.

23 See O’Daly 1987.24 See Meijering 1979 and Sorabji 1983.25 Conf. 7.9.13, and see O’Donnell 1992 ad loc.26 Courcelle 1950; see O’Donnell 1992 on Conf. 7.9.13 for a summary of the issues.27 Contra Julianum opus imperfectum 6.41.28 Possidius, Vita Augustini 31.


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2JOHN RIST

Faith and reason

“Since the blindess of our minds is so great, by reason of the excesses of oursins, and the love of the flesh . . .They try to overcome the most stable foundation of the well-establishedChurch by the name and appeal of apparent reasoning.”

(Ep. 118.5.32)

If there is a God, it is possible that he cannot be known by our reason. If reasoncould attain to religious truths, faith would be unnecessary. If faith is needed,reason is somehow inadequate. But why? Either because the human mindcannot comprehend the mysteries of God in whole or in part, so that (at leastsome) religious truths – such as the Resurrection or the Day of Judgment,according to Augustine (De vera relig. 8.14, cf. De Trin. 4.16.21) – are inaccess-ible to unaided reason; or because such truths cannot be demonstrated and canonly be shown to be more or less plausible or possible; or because our mindsare now damaged and need to be habituated – by faith, by the practice of thevirtues or by both – to reason more effectively, and above all not merely torationalize.

Augustine normally holds that in this life we can know a certain amount aboutGod by reason alone, but not enough for happiness and salvation;1 that our con-sequent need for faith, that is for true belief, in matters of religion can be com-pared with our need for – and reliance on – belief in other areas of our lives; andthat our weakened capacity to reason, and consequent ignorance, must beexplained as a result of the original sin of “Adam.”

Three problems can be immediately identified. First, it is misleading to seeAugustine directly engaged with the problem of faith versus reason, since he nor-mally discusses the relationship between reason and authority.2

Secondly, in a late text, Augustine defines believing as “thinking with assent,”3

but since this formulation represents his standard position, we can ask – withoutfear of producing a false synthesis of his views – what he means by “assent,”examining in particular the relationship between willing, wanting, loving,

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intending, and determining, and hence his understanding of the “will” (volun-tas). Finally, since Augustine thinks within a tradition going back to Plato, wemust consider the relationship between Augustinian “faith” and Platonic“belief,” since in Augustine’s view – but not in Plato’s – faith (a variety of belief)seeks and understanding finds (De Trin. 15.2.2).

The modern problem of faith versus reason – as developed since the seven-teenth century – is part of a discussion of the nature of philosophy itself, hencethe concern whether Augustine should even be called a philosopher – or whether,despite his description of Christianity as a philosophy,4 he ceased to be a philos-opher when he converted. The modern problem is supposed to arise because phi-losophy, exclusively concerned with argument and argued conclusions, can allowno room for faith and authority, while Augustine holds that the philosophers failto recognize the limits of reason and, from his conversion, gives authority acertain priority: he tells us (C. Acad. 3.20.43) that he will never depart from theauthority of Christ, but that he will investigate his beliefs with the most sophis-ticated reasoning in the hope of advancing to understanding.5 Later, in the samespirit, writing in 410 or 411 to a certain Dioscorus (Ep. 118.5.33), he observesthat when the school of Plotinus flourished at Rome, some of them weredepraved by their indulgence in magic but others realized that Christ is the sumof authority and the light of reason: authority and reason are compatible.

Not for everyone – indeed not for Augustine himself – a simple unreasoningfaith. For all Augustine’s occasional deprecation (as in De quant. anim. 7.12) ofwhat is called “reasoning” but which in fact is mere noxious opinion about thefaith, he is prepared to endure the long circuitous paths which reason demands,6

urging that reason not be abandoned because of its frequent abuse (Ep. 120.1.6).Still, conventional philosophy is wrong in one important respect: it claims alwaysto start with reason,7 whatever the subject-matter. Such an apparently reason-able claim, Augustine wants to show, is irrational.

Long before returning to his mother’s Catholic Christianity Augustine hadbeen inspired to philosophy by Cicero’s Hortensius; then, believing himself to bethrowing off his fear of enquiry (De beata vita 1.4), he joined the Manichaeans;when they no longer satisfied, he turned, in the steps of Cicero and Varro, to theSkepticism of the New Academy. Both moves were undertaken in the belief thatreason alone could lead to the truth, even if the truth is that nothing can beknown for certain. Augustine always insists that the Manichaeans claimed –falsely as he later believed – to rely on reason alone. He told Honoratus that theydeclared that they would lay aside all awesome authority and by pure and simplereason bring to God those willing to listen to them (De util. cred. 1.2). TheCatholics, in their view terrified by superstition, were bidden to believe ratherthan reason, while they themselves pressed no one to believe unless the truth hadbeen discussed and unraveled.8 Their claim, however, faltered over astrology,

Faith and reason

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though for a while Augustine preferred the authority of that pseudo-science tothe skepticism of his friends Vindicianus and Nebridius (Conf. 4.3.6).9

With his loss of confidence in the Manichaeans, Augustine almost lost confi-dence in reason itself,10 returning to Ciceronian Skepticism. He was in no doubtthat assent – as the Stoics had it – should be given to the truth, but who was toshow him the truth (C. Acad. 3.5.12)? Perhaps to reach it is beyond the capacityof the human mind. Yet some forms of knowledge are possible: there is a certainknowledge of disjunctive propositions. We know that either p or not-p is the case(3.10.23), and we have certain knowledge in mathematics. And we have what hasbeen dubbed “subjective knowledge”: “When a man tastes something, he canswear in good faith that he knows that this is sweet to his palate . . . and no Greeksophism can deprive him of that knowledge” (3.11.26).11 Such claims confoundthe global versions of Skepticism normal in antiquity. If some knowledge is pos-sible, perhaps religious and metaphysical truth can be obtained.

Augustine never loses confidence that there is “truth”; the problem, as he seesit, lies with human capacity. The example of sense-knowledge suggests that first-hand experience is a possible route to knowledge, but there is a huge range ofpossible knowledge neither “subjective” nor mathematical nor logical; religiousclaims fall outside these limits, and after the Manichaean debacle, thoughinclined to despair, Augustine persisted in seeing the possibility of progress:

Often it seemed to me that truth could not be found . . . but often again, as Ireflected to the best of my ability how lively was the human mind, how wise, howpenetrating, I could not believe that the truth must lie undetected. Possibly themanner of seeking truth might be hidden and would have to be accepted from somedivine authority. (De util. cred. 8.20)

From such thoughts springs to Augustine’s regular recourse to Isaiah 7.9 (in theLatin translation of the Septuagint), “Unless you believe, you will not under-stand”12 – and the early De moribus ecclesiae catholicae indicates a similarapproach (2.3; cf. 7.11): the mind is weak and needs the guidance of authority;human wickedness clouds the light of truth. As yet, however, Augustine offers nomore radical explanation in terms of the “ignorance” resulting from original sinand its accompanying weakness of will (difficultas).

Yet the latter as much as the former is to provide Augustine with the resourcesto explain the present limited power of the human mind. We fail to understandnot only because “now we see through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13.12), but becausewe do not always want to know, or even want to want to know, what is good andtrue. A classic example, for Augustine, is strict atheism;13 in antiquity it was rare,and Augustine suggests that denial of God’s existence is often due to the moralcorruption of atheists: being slaves of desire, they do not want to believe in good-ness or recognize the truth.14 Even if they “know” the truth, their wickedness


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may choose other “riches.” Augustine himself did not want to know too muchabout chastity, lest he should feel impelled to it (Conf. 8.7.17).15 But for a thinkerin the Platonic tradition, reflection on the limits of our knowledge could onlypromote a re-evaluation of the low status of belief and consequent concern toidentify credible authorities.16

Skepticism about the ability of human reason to attain to knowledge, com-bined with a belief in truth itself, led Augustine to conclude that belief or faithis the only way forward. Accordingly he offers an analysis of different types ofcredibilia: facts to be believed.17 First, we have historical truths which can onlybe believed since we have no first-hand knowledge of them. In De util. cred.Augustine notes that we know on Cicero’s own authority of the execution ofthe Catilinarian conspirators. This authority is sound, as is that on which weknow who are our parents; our mothers identify our fathers, and various mid-wives and other servants corroborate the claims of our mothers. It would begrotesque to refuse reverence for our parents on the grounds that we do notknow who they are (De util. cred. 12.26).18 Augustine is impressed by the factthat some of the most basic human relationships – the love of a child for itsparents and the closeness of friends and married couples – can only depend ontrusting beliefs.19

Next, Augustine speaks of those epistemic situations where belief and under-standing go hand in hand: we believe in the truths of logic and mathematics onlywhen we understand what we belie

the cambridge companion to augustine - jesus christ · 2012. 6. 20. · cambridge companions online...

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