Saint Augustine

First published Fri Mar 24, 2000; substantive revision Fri Nov 12, 2010

Aurelius Augustinus [more commonly “St. Augustine of Hippo,” often simply

“Augustine”] (354–430 C.E.): rhetor, Christian Neoplatonist, North African Bishop,
Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the decisive developments in the western
philosophical tradition was the eventually widespread merging of the Greek
philosophical tradition and the Judeo-Christian religious and scriptural traditions.
Augustine is one of the main figures through and by whom this merging was
accomplished. He is, as well, one of the towering figures of medieval philosophy whose
authority and thought came to exert a pervasive and enduring influence well into the
modern period (e.g. Descartes and especially Malebranche), and even up to the present
day, especially among those sympathetic to the religious tradition which he helped to
shape (e.g. Plantinga 1992; Adams 1999). But even for those who do not share this
sympathy, there is much in Augustine's thought that is worthy of serious philosophical
attention. Augustine is not only one of the major sources whereby classical philosophy
in general and Neoplatonism in particular enter into the mainstream of early and
subsequent medieval philosophy, but there are significant contributions of his own that
emerge from his modification of that Greco-Roman inheritance, e.g., his subtle accounts
of belief and authority, his account of knowledge and illumination, his emphasis upon
the importance and centrality of the will, and his focus upon a new way of
conceptualizing the phenomena of human history, just to cite a few of the more
conspicuous examples.

 1. Context
 2. Reading The Confessions
 3. The Mysterious Woman From Northern Africa
 4. Ontology and Eudaimonism
 5. Philosophical Anthropology
 6. Psychology and Epistemology
 7. Will
 8. History and Eschatology
 9. Legacy
 Bibliography
o Selected Latin Texts and Critical Editions

o Selected English Translations

 o Selected General Studies

o Selected Secondary Works

 Other Internet Resources

 Related Entries

1. Context
Only four of his seventy-five years were spent outside Northern Africa, and fifty-seven
of the remaining seventy-one were in such relatively out of the way places as Thagaste
and Hippo Regius, both belonging to Roman provinces, neither notable for either
cultural or commercial prominence. However, the few years Augustine spent away from
Northern Africa exerted an incalculable influence upon his thought, and his
geographical distance from the major intellectual and political capitals of the Later
Roman Empire should not obscure the tremendous influence he came to exert even in
his own lifetime. Here, as elsewhere, one is confronted by a figure both strikingly
liminal and, at times, intriguingly ambivalent. He was, as already noted, a long time
resident and, eventually, Bishop in Northern Africa whose thought was transformed and
redirected during the four brief years he spent in Rome and Milan, far away from the
provincial context where he was born and died and spent almost all of the years in
between; he was a man who tells us that he never thought of himself as not being in
some sense a Christian [Confessions III.iv.8], yet he composed a spiritual autobiography
containing one of the most celebrated conversion accounts in all of Christian literature;
he was a classically trained rhetorician who used his skills to eloquently proclaim at
length the superiority of Christian culture over Greco-Roman culture, and he also served
as one of the central figures by whom the latter was transformed and transmitted to the
former. Perhaps most striking of all, Augustine bequeathed to the Latin West a
voluminous body of work that contains at its chronological extremes two quite
dissimilar portraits of the human condition. In the beginning, there is a largely
Hellenistic portrait, one that is notable for the optimism that a sufficiently rational and
disciplined life can safely escape the ever-threatening circumstantial adversity that
seems to surround us. Nearer the end, however, there emerges a considerably grimmer
portrait, one that emphasizes the impotence of the unaided human will, and the later
Augustine presents a moral landscape populated largely by the massa damnata [De
Civitate Dei XXI.12], the overwhelming majority who are justly predestined to eternal
punishment by an omnipotent God, intermingled with a small minority whom God, with
unmerited mercy, has predestined to be saved. The sheer quantity of the writing that
unites these two extremes, much of which survives, is truly staggering. There are well
over 100 titles [listed at Fitzgerald 1999, pp. xxxv–il], many of which are themselves
voluminous and composed over lengthy periods of time, not to mention over 200 letters
[listed at Fitzgerald 1999, pp. 299–305] and close to 400 sermons [listed at Fitzgerald
1999, pp. 774–789]. It is arguably impossible to construct any moderate sized and
manageable list of his major philosophical works that would not occasion some
controversy in terms of what is omitted, but surely any list would have to include
Contra Academicos [Against the Academicians, 386–387 C.E.], De Libero Arbitrio [On
Free Choice of the Will, Book I, 387/9 C.E.; Books II & III, circa 391–395 C.E.], De
Magistro [On The Teacher, 389 C.E.], Confessiones [Confessions, 397–401 C.E.], De
Trinitate [On The Trinity, 399–422 C.E.], De Genesi ad Litteram [On The Literal
Meaning of Genesis, 401–415 C.E.], De Civitate Dei [On The City of God, 413–
427C.E.], and Retractationes [Reconsiderations, 426–427 C.E.].

Born in 354 C.E. in Thagaste (in what is now Algeria), he was educated in Thagaste,
Madauros, and Carthage, and sometime around 370 he began a thirteen-year,
monogamous relationship with the mother of his son, Adeodatus (born 372). He
subsequently taught rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage, and in 383 he made the risk-
laden journey from Northern Africa to Rome, seeking the better sort of students that
was rumored to be there. Disappointed by the moral quality of those students
(academically superior to his previous students, they nonetheless had an annoying
tendency to disappear without paying their fees), he successfully applied for a
professorship of rhetoric in Milan. Augustine's professional ambitions pointed in the
direction of an arranged marriage, and this in turn entailed a separation from his long-
time companion and mother of his son. After this separation, however, Augustine
abruptly resigned his professorship in 386 claiming ill health, renounced his
professional ambitions, and was baptized by Bishop Ambrose of Milan on Easter
Sunday, 387, after spending four months at Cassiciacum where he composed his earliest
extant works. Shortly thereafter, Augustine began his return to Northern Africa, but not
before his mother died at Ostia, a seaport outside Rome, while awaiting the voyage
across the Mediterranean. Not too long after this, Augustine, now back in Thagaste, also
lost his son (389). The remainder of his years would be spent immersed in the affairs
and controversies of the Church into which he had been recently baptized, a Church that
henceforth provided for Augustine the crucial nexus of relations that his family and
friends had once been. In 391, Augustine was reluctantly ordained as a priest by the
congregation of Hippo Regius (a not uncommon practice in Northern Africa), in 395 he
was made Bishop, and he died August 430 in Hippo, thirty-five years later, as the
Vandals were besieging the gates of the city. However, when Augustine himself
recounts his first thirty-two years in his Confessions, he makes clear that many of the
decisive events of his early life were, to use his own imagery, of a considerably more
internal nature than the relatively external facts cited above.

From his own account, he was a precocious and able student, much enamored of the
Latin classics, Virgil in particular [Confessions I.xiii.20]. However, at age nineteen, he
happened upon Cicero's Hortensius, now lost except for fragments [see Straume-
Zimmermann 1990], and he found himself suddenly imbued with a passion for
philosophy [Confessions III.iv.7–8]. It is clear from his account of Cicero's effect upon
him that his passion was not for philosophy as often understood today, i.e. an academic,
largely argument-oriented conceptual discipline, but rather as the paradigmatically
Hellenistic pursuit of a wisdom that transcended and blurred the boundaries of what are
now viewed as the separate spheres of philosophy, religion, and psychology. In
particular, philosophy for Augustine was centered on what is sometimes misleadingly
referred to as “the problem of evil.” This problem, needless to say, was not the sort of
analytic, largely logical problem of theodicy that later came to preoccupy philosophers
of religion. For Augustine, the problem was of a more general and visceral sort: it was
the concern with the issue of how to make sense of and live within a world that seemed
so adversarial and fraught with danger, a world in which so much of what matters most
to us is so easily lost [see e.g. Confessions IV.x.15]. In this sense, the wisdom that
Augustine sought was a common denominator uniting the conflicting views of such
Hellenistic philosophical sects as the Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, and Neoplatonists
(though this is a later title) such as Plotinus and Porphyry, as well as many Christians of
varying degrees of orthodoxy, including very unorthodox gnostic sects such as the
Manicheans.

Augustine himself comes to spend nine years as a hearer among the Manicheans [see
Brown 1967, pp. 46–60], and while there are no extant writings from this period of his
life, the Manicheans are clearly the target of many of the writings he would compose
after his conversion to the more orthodox, if Neoplatonizing, Christianity he
encountered under Bishop Ambrose of Milan. The Manicheans proposed a powerful, if
somewhat mythical and philosophically awkward explanation of the problem of evil:
there is a perpetual struggle between co-eternal principles of Light and Darkness (good
and evil, respectively), and our souls are particles of Light which have become trapped
in the Darkness of the physical world. By means of sufficient insight and a sufficiently
ascetic life, however, one could eventually, over the course of several lives, come to
liberate the Light within from the surrounding Darkness, thus rejoining the larger Light
of which the soul is but a fragmented and isolated part.

As Augustine recounts it in the Confessions [see Confessions V.3.5 and V.7.13] and
elsewhere [e.g. De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae 1], he became disenchanted with the
inability of the Manichean elect to provide sufficiently detailed and rigorous
explanations of their cosmology. As a result, he began to drift away from the sect during
his sojourn in Rome, flirting for awhile with academic skepticism [Confessions
V.xiv.25] before finally coming upon the Platonizing influence of Ambrose and the
“books of the Platonists” [Confessions VII.9.13]. When Augustine eventually comes to
write about the Manicheans, there are three features upon which he will focus: their
implicit materialism (a widespread feature of Hellenistic thought, the Neoplatonists
being a notable exception); their substantive dualism whereby Darkness, and hence,
evil, is granted a co-eternal, substantial existence opposed to the Light; and their
identification of the human soul as a fragmented particle of the Light. According to
Augustine, this latter identification not only serves to render the human soul divine,
thereby obliterating the crucial distinction between creator and creature, but it also
raises doubts about the extent to which the individual human soul can be held
responsible for morally bad actions, responsibility instead being attributed to the body
in which the soul (itself quasi material) is trapped. Although Augustine is vehement and
at times merciless in his repudiation of the Manicheans, questions can still be asked
about the influence the Manichean world-view continued to exert upon his
understanding and presentation of Neoplatonic and Christian themes [see “Philosophical
Anthropology” below].

The single most decisive event, however, in Augustine's philosophical development has
to be his encounter with those unnamed books of the Platonists in Milan in 384. While
there are other important influences, it was his encounter with the Platonism ambient in
Ambrose's Milan that provided the major turning point, reorienting his thought along
basic themes that would persist until his death forty-six years later. There has been
controversy regarding just which books of the Platonists Augustine encountered
[O'Connell 1968, pp. 6–10; O'Donnell 1992, vol. II, pp. 421–423; Beatrice, 1989], but
we know from his own account that they were translated by Marius Victorinus
[Confessions VIII.2.3], and there is widespread agreement that they were texts by
Plotinus and Porphyry, although there is again controversy regarding how much
influence is to be attributed to each [O'Connell 1968, pp. 20–26; O'Donnell 1992, vol II,
pp. 423–4]. These uncertainties notwithstanding, Augustine himself makes it clear that
it was his encounter with the the books of the Platonists that made it possible for him to
view both the Church and its scriptural tradition as having an intellectually satisfying
and, indeed, resourceful content.

As decisive as this encounter was, however, it would be a mistake simply to view

Augustine's writings as the uncritical application of a Neoplatonic framework to a static
body of Christian doctrine. In his earliest writings [e.g. Contra Academicos, 386 C.E.],
Augustine is amazingly confident with regard to the compatibility of the two traditions
[see Contra Academicos 3.10.43]. But by the time he composes the Confessions (397–
401C.E.), he is already aware that there are significant points of divergence
[Confessions VII.20.26], and by the time he composes Book VIII of De Civitate Dei
(circa 416 C.E.), he still has laudatory things to say about the Platonic tradition, but it is
clear that the points of divergence have become more important to him and that he
regards the Roman Catholic Church as having sufficient internal resources to address
whatever difficulties confront it. Part of this gradual change of attitude is attributable to
his detailed study of scriptural texts (especially the Pauline letters), as well as his
immersion in both the daily affairs of his monastic community and the rather focused
sorts of controversies that confronted the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries.
Beyond his already noted, protracted battle with Manicheanism, there is also his
involvement in the North African Donatist controversy [see Brown 1967, pp. 212–225],
a controversy concerning the validity of sacraments administered in the wake of the
persecution of 304–305, and most especially the Pelagian controversy which engaged
him from about 411 until his death in 430 [see Brown 1967, pp. 340–52 and the section
on “Will” below]. In this latter case, serious issues arose regarding the role of grace and
the efficacy of the unaided human will, issues that, as we will see, played an important
role in shaping his views on human freedom and predestination.

These important qualifications notwithstanding, the fact remains that this Platonism also
provided Augustine with a philosophical framework far more pliable and enduring than
he himself is willing to admit in his later works. Moreover, this framework itself forms
an important part of the philosophical legacy that Augustine bequeathed to both the
medieval and modern periods.

2. Reading The Confessions

Augustine's Confessions is undoubtedly among the most widely read works in medieval
philosophy, for both philosophers and non-philosophers. Often hailed as the “first
autobiography” and as a “spiritual biography,” it is nonetheless a work that has to be
approached with considerable caution, for two main reasons. First, as is the case with all
biographies and autobiographies, it is an edited account of an individual's life.
Sometimes this feature is easy to overlook, but its significance is obvious enough: in
composing such a work, the author is obliged to engage in an editorial process in which
certain events and circumstances are highlighted and others omitted. Without this, the
work would be rather like a map that is as large as of that of which it is intended to be a
map, thus making it not a map at all. In order to bring some coherence to the material at
hand, there must be some effort to provide an interpretive framework for the material,
focusing on relevant and important highlights while omitting others that would obscure
those highlights.
The second reason is more specific to Augustine: trained as a rhetorician, Augustine has
a specific rhetorical strategy that needs to be kept in mind as one works through the text.
Presented as an extended prayer to God, Augustine is not merely telling the tale of his
own life, but also using his life as a concrete example of how an isolated individual soul
can extricate itself from this state and Neoplatonically ascend to a unity that overcomes
this isolation and attains to rest in God. Also important are the means by which he seeks
to accomplish this task: his selection of events is quite deliberate, and he especially
focuses upon his immersion and extrication from what he regards as his pre-reflective,
materialist and common sense view of the world; the various kinds of relationships that
both hinder and aid in this extrication; and the texts that he reads, some of which again
aid in the extrication and others of which are obstacles.

With respect to his relations with others, he begins with his ruminations upon infancy
and the isolation of the infant, which initially seems to be overcome by the acquisition
of language. But as he tells the story in Confessions I, language is itself a double-edged
sword: it is an instrument that can immerse us into the world, but it can also, if used
rightly, aid in transcending the world of the senses and ascending to the intelligible
realm where we find the unity and rest we seek. Of his remarks on friendship, especially
noteworthy are the theft of pears in Book II; the death of his anonymous friend in Book
IV; his accounts of Nebridius and Alypius; his account of his relationship with his
mother, Monica; and, perhaps most significant of all, the “vision of Ostia” that is
recounted in Book IX. Intertwined with his reflections on friendship is a progression of
texts that leads him to the Neoplatonic ascents of Book VII and Book IX; his initial
distaste for biblical texts owing to their rhetorical inelegance; his reading of Cicero,
which inflamed him with a passion for philosophy; his attraction to the texts of the
Manicheans; his reading of the Skeptics; and, most importantly, his reading of unnamed
books of the “Platonists” which helped him to overcome his predisposition to
materialism and paved the way for his non-Manichean, non-dualistic solution to the
problem of evil, which enabled him to engage in the Neoplatonic ascent and thereby to
overcome the fragmented isolation of bodies, the senses, and language. Although
Augustine is aware by the time he writes the Confessions that there are differences
between Christianity and Neoplatonism, he nonetheless makes its clear that the latter
makes it possible for him to regard the former as intellectually credible.

Books VIII and IX continue in this autobiographical vein: Book VIII is notable for its
complex and provocative accounts of Augustine's internal struggle of the will with
respect to embracing his new-found, more orthodox form of Christianity, as well as his
reading of I Corinthians 7:27–35, which finally completes his conversion. Book IX is
notable for the aforementioned “vision at Ostia” in which he and his mother together
ascend beyond the world of the senses and language in a manner akin to those ascents
recounted in Book VII, but with one notable difference: unlike most Neoplatonic
ascents, this one involves two individuals partaking in the ascent, which enables them to
communicate in a manner that overcomes the Neoplatonic view of the isolated nature of
the soul in this world.

The overarching Neoplatonic strategy of the first nine Books goes a long way toward
explaining what might otherwise be a strange shift in the remaining four books, in
which the autobiography recedes into the background. In Book X, Augustine focuses on
the role of memory as a route of access to the transcendence that he is seeking, and
Book XI emphasizes time and eternity, presenting the former as a psychological
“distention” of the latter which needs to be overcome to reach the unity and rest in God
that is the overall theme of the Confessions. This strategy, combined with the related
themes of the role of language and texts in his spiritual progress, also explains the fact
that Books XII and XIII are devoted to exegesis of the first chapters of Genesis. As
noted above, Augustine at first disdained biblical texts owing to their rhetorical
inelegance. Now, however, having a framework that enables him to discern their actual
inner depth, these texts acquire a prominence and indicate the culmination of that long
journey which began with his immersion into the double-edged domain of human
speech and written word. Moreover, these final Books, along with the Neoplatonic
framework he discovers in Book VII (though, as we have seen, it also governs the
structure of the Confessions as a whole), enable him to further probe the puzzles that he
raised in the first five chapters of Book I. In short, what once struck Augustine as the
texts least worthy of attention have now become the texts of all texts, because they
contain the answers to the questions and problems that have propelled him from the
very beginning of the Confessions.

For the reader interested in approaching the Confessions with more historical
background at their disposal, Brown (2000) and O'Donnell (2006) are reliable and
helpful resources.

3. The Mysterious Woman From Northern Africa

For many readers, one of the most troubling passages of the Confessions occurs at
VI.xv.25 where Augustine briefly discusses the abrupt dismissal of his unnamed
companion of thirteen years who is also the mother of his son Adeodatus. As Augustine
recounts it (Confessions VI.xiii.23), the dismissal was prompted by his mother's attempt
to arrange a respectable marriage for him: one that would aid him in attaining the
salvation that baptism could procure. It is also quite possible that it would serve him in
the pursuit of a more worldly career.

The custom of having a “concubine” (concubinatus) was not unusual at the time, and it
was virtually indistinguishable from formal marriage. But it could serve as an
impediment to social advancement unless it was replaced by the more formal
arrangement of matrimonium. What seems so troubling about this brief passage are the
facts that Augustine never names his companion, that the dissolution of the relationship
is treated with such brevity, and that Augustine almost immediately forms a relationship
with another woman while waiting almost two years for his prospective, arranged bride
to reach legal age for marriage (though the marriage never took place owing to
Augustine's subsequent “conversion” recounted in Books VII and VIII).

Hence, the obvious questions: Why the abruptness of the dismissal? Why not enter with
his companion of thirteen years into the more respectable relation of matrimonium?
Why anonymity for someone with whom he had spent thirteen years in a monogamous
relationship? Why the headlong rush into another, temporary relationship, whereas his
companion returned to Northern Africa vowing never to enter into another relationship?
Was their devotion to one another as asymmetrical as Augustine seems to suggest? Was
he as callous and as indifferent as the text seems to present him?

If one examines the text closely enough, there do seem to be answers to these questions:
some of them historically speculative, others definitely rooted in the text. In a
speculative vein (though not without foundation) one must wonder what the mysterious
woman's fortunes in Northern Africa would have been had her name been mentioned in
the text. Also, what was the social class of his companion? Differences in social class
could often prevent the transition from a relation of concubinatus to one matrimonium.

On a more textual level, it is obvious that Monica played a significant role in the
arrangement of the more respectable marriage for which Augustine was obliged to wait.
More importantly, Augustine makes it clear at VI.xv.23 that his companion's vow of
chastity is to be regarded as superior to his pursuit of another relationship, which was
prompted by lust rather than love, implying that this might not have been true of his
relationship with his companion of thirteen years. As for the anonymity of his
companion, this is not unusual in the Confessions as a whole. When he does mentions
names (e.g. Alypius, Nebridius, Faustus, Ambrose, Monica), they are names that would
have been known to contemporary readers of the text. But they also serve as character
types: most positive, but some (like the well-known Manichean Faustus) of a more
ambivalent sort. The fact that a name is not mentioned does not mean that Augustine's
relation with that person is insignificant. A prime example is his protracted discussion
of an anonymous friend in Book IV, a pathos-ridden account that leaves no doubt about
the importance of the relationship to Augustine. Indeed, given the overall rhetorical
strategy of the Confessions, in which his own life stands as a particular instance of the
soul's immersion in and extrication from the isolation and fragmented condition brought
about by the sensible world, it is more surprising when he does mention specific names.

But perhaps of most importance are two textual points which indicate the significance
of this relationship to Augustine. The first is that the episode he recounts is of an
intensely personal nature, not necessary to the rhetorical strategy of the Confessions as a
whole. But even more important is the imagery employed in his account of the
separation. He tells us that his “heart” (cor) was still attached(adhaerebat) to her, that it
was wounded (conscium et vulneratum), and that the separation “drew blood” (trahebat
sanguiem). There are only two passages in the entire Confessions which employ similar
imagery: his account of the death of his anonymous friend at IV.vi.11, and his account
of the death of his mother at IX.xii.30.

Given the imagery employed here, there does look to be some philosophical import in
this otherwise intensely personal passage: it is one example of the Neoplatonic
desperation of the individual soul's attempt to overcome its isolation by seeking unity
with others, a unity that can ultimately only be found in the unity with God (IV.ix.14
and XI.xxix.39).

Needless to say, this does not completely exonerate Augustine. If it was indeed under
Monica's influence that he dissolved the relationship, it is unclear why, given the
importance that he clearly attached to it, he could not have resisted her influence. And if
the choice was his own, then he appears even more culpable. But then, given the travail
of the soul's journey presented in the first six books of the Confessions,, perhaps this is
precisely the point.

4. Ontology and Eudaimonism

A good place to begin examining the larger contours of Augustine's legacy is his
account of the impact the books of the Platonists had upon him, i.e., his ontology and
the eudaimonism it is intended to support.

In the Confessions, where Augustine gives his most extensive discussion of the books of
the Platonists, he makes clear that his previous thinking was dominated by a common-
sense materialism [Confessions IV.xv.24; VII.i.1]. It was the books of the Platonists that
first made it possible for him to conceive the possibility of a non-physical substance
[Confessions VII.x.16], providing him with a non-Manichean solution to the problem of
the origin of evil. In addition, the books of the Platonists provided him with a
metaphysical framework of extraordinary depth and subtlety, a richly-textured tableau
upon which the human condition could be plotted. It can both account for the obvious
difficulties with which life confronts us, while also offering grounds for a eudaimonism
notable for the depth of its moral optimism. In this respect, the ontology that Augustine
acquired from the books of the Platonists is, in terms of its intent, not all that different
from the materialism of the Epicureans, Stoics, and even the Manicheans. What sets the
Neoplatonic ontology apart, however, is both the resoluteness of its promise and the
architectonic grandeur with which it complements the world of visible appearances.

In the books of the Platonists, Augustine encountered an ontology in which there is a

fundamental divide between the sensible/physical and the intelligible/spiritual
[Confessions VII.x.16]. In spite of the dualistic implications, this is clearly not intended
to be a dualistic alternative to the moral dualism of the Manicheans and other gnostics
[see, e.g. Plotinus, Enneads II.9]. Instead, the divide is situated within what is supposed
to be a larger, unified hierarchy that begins with absolute unity and progressively
unfolds through various stages of increasing plurality and multiplicity, culminating in
the lowest realm of isolated and fragmented material objects observed with the senses
[see Bussanich 1996, pp. 38–65; O'Meara 1996, pp. 66–81]. Thus, for Augustine, God
is regarded as the ultimate source and point of origin for all that comes below. Equated
with Being [Confessions VII.x.16], Goodness [e.g. De Trinitate VIII.5], and Truth
[Confessions X.xxiii.33; De Libero Arbitrio III.16], God is the unchanging point which
unifies all that comes after and below within an abiding and providentially-ordained
rational hierarchy.

Augustine, especially in his earlier works, focuses upon the contrast between the
intelligible and the sensible, enjoining his reader to realize that the former alone holds
out what we seek in the latter: the world of the senses is intractably private and isolated,
whereas the intelligible realm is truly public and simultaneously open to all [De Libero
Arbitrio II.7] ; the sensible world is one of transitory objects, whereas the intelligible
realm contains abiding realities [De Libero Arbitrio II.6]; the sensible world is subject
to the consumptive effects of temporality, whereas the intelligible realm is characterized
by an atemporal eternity wherein we are safely removed from the eviscerating prospect
of losing what and whom we love [Confessions XI.xxxix.39; see also Confessions
IV.xii.18]. Indeed, in the vision at Ostia at Confessions IX.x.23–25, Augustine even
seems to suggest that the intelligible realm holds out the prospect of fulfilling our desire
for the unity that we seek in friendship and love, a unity that can never really be
achieved as long as we are immersed in the sensible world and separated by physical
bodies subject to inevitable dissolution [see Mendelson 2000]. The intelligible realm,
with God as its source, promises the only lasting relief from the anxiety prompted by
the transitory nature of the sensible realm.
Despite its dualistic overtones, the overall unity of the picture is central to its ability to
provide a resolution of the problem of evil. The sensible world, for example, is not evil,
nor is embodiment itself to be regarded as straightforwardly bad. The problem that
plagues our condition is not that we are trapped in the visible world (as it is for the
Manicheans); rather, it is a more subtle problem of perception and will: we are prone to
view things materialistically and hence unaware that the sensible world is but a tiny
portion of what is real [Confessions IV.xv.24], an error Augustine increasingly
attributes to original sin [De Libero Arbitrio III.20; De Civitate Dei XIII.14–15]. Thus,
we have a tendency to focus only upon the sensible, viewing it as a self-contained arena
within which all questions of moral concern are to be resolved. Because we fail to
perceive the larger unity of which the sensible world is itself a part, it easily becomes
for us (though not in itself) a realm of moral danger, one wherein our will attaches itself
to transitory objects that cannot but lead to anxiety [Confessions VII.xi.17–18]. Given
the essentially rational nature of the human soul and the rational nature of the
Neoplatonic ontology, there is nonetheless room for optimism. The human soul has the
capacity to perceive its own liminal status as a being embodied partly in the sensible
world while connected to the intelligible realm, and there is thus the possibility of
reorienting one's moral relation to the sensible world, appreciating it for the goodness it
manifests, but seeing it as an instrument for directing one's attention to what is above it
[see Confessions VII.x.16 and VII.xvii.23]. Augustine's employment of this Neoplatonic
hierarchy is thus central to his Hellenistic eudaimonism [see O'Connell 1972, pp. 39–
40; Rist 1994, pp. 48–53; Kirwan 1999, pp. 183–4] which would redeem appearances
by means of situating them within a more primary, if often unacknowledged context.

With respect to questions about specific instances of natural and moral evil, this
ontology is even more subtle. Natural evils are attributed to the partiality of our
perspective, a perspective that is often the result of our myopic materialism and
tendency to focus upon our own self-interest. Understood within the larger context—
both the underlying order of the appearances and the providentially governed moral
drama within which they appear—natural evils are not evil at all [e.g. Confessions
VII.xiii.19 and De Civitate Dei XI.22]. With respect to the moral evil which is the
product of human agency, these are the culpable products of a will that has become
attached to lower goods, treating them as if they were higher. Moral evil is, strictly
speaking, not a thing, but only the will's turning away from God and attaching itself to
inferior goods as if they were higher [ibid.]. In De Civitate Dei, Augustine emphasizes
the privative nature of evil by referring to the will's pursuit of inferior goods as being a
deficient rather than efficient cause [De Civitate Dei, XII.7]. The inherent difficulty of
this notion aside [see Rist 1994, pp. 106–8], the point behind it is clear enough:
Augustine is using the resources of Neoplatonism to account for the phenomena we
label evil while stressing human responsibility, thus avoiding either substantializing evil
(as the Manicheans do) or making it the result of God's creative activity.

For all that Augustine takes from the books of the Platonists, there are two points where
he conspicuously departs from their ontology. Frequently, Plotinus asserts that the
ultimate principle, The One, is itself of such absolute unity and transcendence that,
strictly speaking, it defies all predication and is itself beyond Being and Goodness [see,
for example, Plotinus, Enneads, VI.9.3]. Augustine himself does not comment upon this
feature of Plotinus' thought, and thus one can only conjecture as to his reason for
resisting it, but given his repeated emphasis upon the soul's relation to God [e.g.
Soliloquia 1.2.7 and De Ordine 2.18.47], the Plotinian picture may have seemed to him
as positing too great a distance between the two, thus raising doubts about the ability of
reason to take us towards our desired destination [see Mendelson 1995, pp. 244–45].
The other departure from Neoplatonism moves in the opposite direction. Rather than the
danger of making the spiritual distance between God and the soul too great, there is as
well in Neoplatonism a tendency to bridge that gap in a manner troubling to someone
like Augustine, for whom the creator/creature distinction is fundamental. In Plotinus
and other Neoplatonists, the relation of the ultimate principle to all that comes below is
usually presented in terms of a sempiternal process of necessary emanations whereby
lower stages constantly flow from the higher [see Plotinus, Enneads IV.8.6]. Augustine,
not surprisingly, resists this aspect of the Neoplatonic ontology, always insisting upon
the fundamentally volitional nature of God's activity [e.g. De Genesi ad Litteram
6.15.26]. Nor should it be surprising that Augustine should find himself obliged to
depart in important respects from the Neoplatonic tradition. He is, after all, not merely
taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural
tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the
Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be
combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

For all the changes that affected Augustine between his initial encounter with the books
of the Platonists in 384–386 and his death in 430, he never abandoned this Neoplatonic
ontology's distinction between the physical/sensible and the spiritual/intelligible and its
hierarchy within which these realms are unified. However, these commitments still
leave much room for development as well as for tension and uncertainty. In particular,
Augustine's views on original sin and the necessity of grace in the face of the Pelagian
controversy raised serious questions about the efficacy of the human will. Complicating
the matter further is the question of the soul's origin, a question that has a significant
impact on Augustine's philosophical anthropology.

5. Philosophical Anthropology
With respect to Augustine's desire to find a viable alternative to the awkward and
intractable moral dualism of the Manicheans, there can be little question that his
embracing of Neoplatonism is a positive development. Not only does it allow him to
account for evil without substantializing it, but it also provides him with a unified
account of the moral drama that constitutes the human condition. Even so, this
metaphysical architectonic is prone to tensions of its own, some of which lend
themselves to a kind of moral dualism not altogether unlike that of the Manicheans.

For Augustine, the individual human being is a body-soul composite, but in keeping
with his Neoplatonism, there is an asymmetry between soul and body. As a spiritual
entity, the soul is superior to the body, and it is the province of the soul to rule the body
[e.g. De Animae Quantitate 13.22; De Genesi contra Manicheos II.11]. This presents a
fairly positive conception of the soul-body relation, one that clearly runs counter to the
Manichean picture of the soul's entrapment. Matters are somewhat less clear, however,
when we turn to the question of how the soul comes to be embodied.

With respect to the soul's “origin,” as Augustine frames the question, there is a strand of
uncertainty that runs unbroken from his earliest completed post-conversion work [De
Beata Vita, 386 C.E.] to the Retractationes of 427 C.E. In both works, Augustine
professes to be puzzled about the soul's origin [De Beata Vita 1.5 and Rectractationes
1.1 and 2.45/71], but his uncertainty is clearly evolving, and the absence of certainty on
the issue should not be interpreted as neutrality or indifference.

It is also important to note that, for Augustine, this evolving uncertainty is itself to be
understood against the backdrop of other points about which he never seems to waver
after 386. He became adamant, for example, that the soul is to be identified with neither
the substance of God, nor with the body, nor with any other material entity [Letters 143
and 166.3–4]. In addition to the status of the soul as both created and immaterial (both
points contrasting with the Manicheans), he also insists upon the mutability of the
human soul, a feature that not only serves to distinguish it from its creator but one that
he views as necessary to explain the possibility of moral change, be it for better or
worse [Letter 166.3; Confessions IV.xv.26].

In De Libero Arbitrio III.20 & 21 (circa 395 C.E.), when Augustine first attends to the
question of the soul's origin in a manner that focuses upon particular possibilities, he
does so as part of an anti-Manichean theodicy intended to show that it is the human soul
rather than God that is responsible for the presence of moral evil in the world. Thus, as
he later points out in Letter 143 (circa 412 C.E.), he is not concerned to adjudicate
between these competing hypotheses, but merely to show that each is consistent with a
non-Manichean, Neoplatonizing account of moral evil. Nonetheless, the four hypotheses
he does advance are important evidence about how he understands the conceptual
landscape [O'Daly 1987, pp. 15–20; Mendelson 1998, pp. 30–44], and the anti-
Manichean polemic notwithstanding, it is instructive that he makes no attempt to choose
between or even to offer a tentative ranking of them.

Interestingly enough, two of the four hypotheses require the soul's existence prior to
embodiment. On the first, the soul is sent by God to administer the body (henceforth the
“sent” hypothesis); on the second, the soul comes to inhabit the body by its own choice
(henceforth the “voluntarist” hypothesis). In later presentations of these hypotheses
(though not in De Libero Arbitrio III), Augustine treats the voluntarist hypothesis as
involving both a sin on the soul's part and a cyclical process whereby the soul is subject
to multiple incarnations [Letter 166.27]. The other two hypotheses, the “traducianist”
and the “creationist,” do not involve pre-existence, but there is nonetheless a significant
contrast between them. On the traducianist account, all souls are propagated from
Adam's soul in a manner analogous to that of the body, thus linking each soul to all
previous ones by a kind of genealogical chain. On the creationist hypothesis, however,
God creates a new soul for each body, thus creating a kind of vertical link between God
and each individual soul.

These hypotheses do not exhaust the logical possibilities, but they were the main
contenders in Augustine's time. There remains controversy over the extent to which
Augustine himself was inclined towards either of the hypotheses that required pre-
existence [O'Connell 1968, O'Daly 1987, pp. 15–20; O'Donnell 1992 II.34–5], but there
are passages in the Confessions [see Confessions I.6–8] and elsewhere [e.g. De Genesi
Contra Manicheos 2.8 (circa 388–9 C.E.) and De Genesi ad Literam Imperfectus Liber
1.3 (circa 393 C.E.)] that have led some to regard it as a possibility he takes very
seriously indeed, perhaps even preferring it, at least until the early part of the fifth
century [O'Connell 1968; Teske 1991]. Moreover, given the Neoplatonic architectonic
of the Confessions, this would not be all that surprising, for the notion that the
preexistent soul falls into the body is a conspicuous feature of Plotinus' thought as well
as of Neoplatonism in general [e.g. Plotinus, Enneads IV.8; Origen, On First Principles
1.4.4]. In this regard, it is also not surprising that Augustine should have come to
identify the hypothesis of the soul's voluntary descent into the body as involving both
sin and cyclicism. Not only are these features reminiscent of what he eventually came to
learn of Origen's view, but given the Neoplatonic framework underlying his conception
of the soul's origin, it is difficult to construe the soul's choice of embodiment in positive
terms.

There is a puzzle at the heart of Augustine's philosophical anthropology, however, that

raises serious questions about how we are to construe the human condition. Depending
on which of the four hypotheses one were to choose, our condition can be regarded as a
divinely ordained exile and trial (the sent hypothesis), the consequence of sin conjoined
with an almost immediately self-inflicted punishment (the voluntarist hypothesis), or as
some kind of relatively natural habitat (the traducianist and creationist hypotheses). In
the latter case, there remain questions about how to construe the soul's creation in
relation to God's activity (mediated in traducianism, direct in creationism) as well as
about how at home the soul is in the realm of nature.

By the time Augustine comes to write Letter 166 to Jerome in 415, there have been
significant developments in his thinking on this issue. While he does not here sharply
distinguish between the two hypotheses involving pre-existence, he is clearly bothered
by the cyclicism he has increasingly come to associate with pre-existence, especially as
it raises the prospect of a moral landscape wherein pre-incarnate and post-mortem sins
are a genuine possibility, for this would entail that that there can be no security even for
those who die in a state of grace [Letter 166.27]. Moreover, by the time he writes Book
10 of De Genesi ad Litteram, (circa 415–16 C.E.) he has a further objection to the
notion of pre-incarnate sin: this possibility, he writes, is ruled out by Romans 9:11
where we are told that the souls of the unborn have done neither good nor evil [De
Genesi ad Litteram 10.15.27]. Whether or not this poses a decisive objection pre-
existence is an obscure matter. In the discussion of De Genesi ad Litteram 10, a version
of the sent hypothesis does appear as a serious contender, but it is abruptly dropped
without explanation, leaving open the question of what lies behind the sudden omission
[O'Connell 1987, pp. 227–9; Mendelson 1995, pp. 242–7]. Whatever the reasons may
be, the fact is that henceforward, in this text and elsewhere [e.g. De Anima et eius
Origine, circa 419/20 C.E.], Augustine writes as if there are only two competing
hypotheses of the soul's origin, the traducianist and the creationist.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that in Letter 166 and De Genesi ad
Litteram [see especially Letter 166.27], Augustine makes clear his antipathy to the
traducianist hypothesis, an antipathy that, while unexplained, seems to go beyond the
materialism in which Tertullian had originally cast it. Creationism, however, hardly
offers an unproblematic alternative. Both Letter 166 and De Genesi ad Litteram reveal
concern over the question of the acquisition of original sin, an issue that becomes all the
more pressing when one considers the plight of the infant who dies unbaptized [Letter
166.16 and De Genesi ad Litteram 10.11–16]. The Pelagian controversy had by this
time brought to the fore the issues of grace and moral autonomy, and Augustine is now
adamant in insisting upon the necessity of grace and infant baptism in the face of what
he regards as Pelagian challenges to these views. In this context, the case of the infant
who dies prior to baptism seems to present the hardest case of all, and the creationist
hypothesis, with its direct account of the soul's relation to God's creative activity, seems
singularly at a loss to address it. Augustine feels obliged to confirm, contra the
Pelagians, the condemnation of the unbaptized infant, but on a creationist reading of the
soul's origin, this is hard to reconcile with divine justice, especially given the notion that
the unborn have done neither good nor evil. Not surprisingly, the Pelagians themselves
favor the creationist hypothesis, for it seems to fit best with their views on the
individual's ability to fulfill the moral obligations of the Christian life [TeSelle 1972, pg.
67; Bonner 1972 pp. 23 & 30].

It is thus, again, not surprising that there is an unofficial fifth hypothesis that can be
found elsewhere in Augustine's works. In De Civitate Dei, for example, Augustine
suggests that God created only one soul, that of Adam, and subsequent human souls are
not merely genealogical offshoots (as in traducianism) of that original soul, but they are
actually identical to Adam's soul prior to assuming their own individual, particularized
lives [De Civitate Dei, 13.14]. Not only does this avoid the mediation of the traducianist
hypothesis, but it also manages to provide a theologically satisfying account of the
universality of original sin without falling into the difficulties of God's placing an
innocent soul into a sin-laden body, as would be the case in a general creationism. To
what extent this constitutes a serious contender for Augustine's attention remains a
matter of controversy [O'Connell 1987, esp. pp. 11–16; Rist 1989; Rist 1994, pp 121–9;
Teske 1999 pg. 810]. As noted earlier, when Augustine writes of the soul's origin in the
Retractationes near the end of his life, he still asserts the obscurity and difficulty of the
issue, and he is clearly reluctant to take a decisive stand on it. Although he sometimes
downplays the seriousness of this uncertainty [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio III.21.59 and De
Genesi ad Litteram, 10.20], there is no getting around the fact that it leaves a significant
lacuna at the heart of his philosophical anthropology, one which leaves unanswered
crucial questions about how we are to understand the embodied status of the human
soul. His Neoplatonic framework commits him to the view that the physical/sensible
realm is an arena of temptation and moral danger, one wherein the human soul needs to
be wary about becoming too attached to lower goods. However, Augustine's enduring
ambivalence on the the question of the soul leaves open the possibility that the
physical/sensible realm is more than an arena of danger and that it is in fact a
fundamentally alien context, not altogether different from the Manichean view of
embodiment as a kind of entrapment. The ontological unity of the Neoplatonic
hierarchy notwithstanding, there appears to be room in it for a moral dualism that may
be as troubling in the end as that of the Manicheans.

6. Psychology and Epistemology

While Augustine remains vague about how we are to understand our embodied status,
there is never any question that human life is to be conceived in terms of the categories
of body and soul and that an adequate understanding of the soul is necessary for an
appreciation of our place within the moral landscape around us. Here Augustine is once
again best understood in light of the Greek philosophical tradition [see O'Daly 1987, pp.
11–15], in which “soul” need not have any spiritual connotations. It is, instead, the
principle that accounts for the intuitively obvious distinction between things that are
living and things that are not. To be alive is to have a soul, and death involves a process
leading to the absence of this principle. Thus, not only do human beings have souls, but
so do plants and other animals [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio I.8; De Quantitate Animae, 70;
De Civitate Dei V.10]. Augustine's view is not unlike what one finds, for example, in
Plato's Timaeus [e.g. 89d-92c] or Aristotle's De Anima [e.g. 414b-415a] where different
levels of soul are discussed in terms of ascending degrees of complexity in their
capacities, e.g., souls capable only of reproduction and nutrition, or of sensation and
locomotion as well, or finally, of rational thinking. As noted in the previous section,
there is an asymmetry in these functional capacities, and reason is seen as higher than
the others.

As the history of Classical Greek philosophy shows, this schema leaves open a number
of possibilities in terms of the relation of soul and body (dualism, hylomorphism, and
materialism, to cite some of the more obvious examples), as well as room for
disagreement concerning the soul's prospect for continued existence upon the
dissolution of the body (Aristotelians tended towards and Epicureans actually embraced
a mortalist position, whereas Platonists and Stoics were somewhat more optimistic). For
Augustine, however, it is virtually axiomatic that the human soul is both immaterial and
immortal. It is worth noting in this connection that while the Christian scriptural
tradition clearly alludes to the idea of post-mortem existence, the issue of the soul's
immateriality is another matter. It is not obvious that the scriptural tradition requires
this, and Tertullian (160–230 C.E.) is a prime example of an early Christian thinker who
felt comfortable with a materialist ontology [e.g. Tertullian, De Anima 37.6–7]. Thus,
while the immortality of the soul is arguably a point of happy convergence of these two
traditions, Augustine's emphasis upon the soul's immateriality, an emphasis that comes
to have enormous historical importance, seems largely a contribution of his
Neoplatonism. As we have seen, he insists upon the soul's mutability as being necessary
to account for moral progress and deterioration; however, it is also clear that there must
be limits to this mutability, and a material soul would not only run counter to
Neoplatonic ontology, but it would also impose upon the soul a degree of vulnerability
that would destroy the eudaimonistic promise that made the Neoplatonic ontology so
attractive in the first place.

In keeping with the intellectualism of the Greek philosophical tradition, Augustine's

psychology focuses upon the asymmetrical and dominant relation that reason is
supposed to exert over other capacities. Unlike post-Humean and post-Freudian views
wherein considerable attention is focused upon the role of the non-rational influences
that govern our thought, Augustine takes over the ancient Greek confidence in the
superiority of the rational over the non-rational. As we will see in the next section,
Augustine's views on the will tend to complicate things by qualifying the extent of his
intellectualism, but certainly in epistemic contexts his intellectualism tends to hold
sway. In this regard, the psychological hierarchy elaborated in De Libero Arbitrio II
[II.3–II.15 ] and elsewhere [e.g. Confessions VII.x.16 and VII.xvi.21] is a useful
illustration of his view.

In the psychology that emerges in De Libero Arbitrio II, Augustine posits a three-fold
hierarchy of things that merely exist, things that exist and live, and things that exist,
live, and possess understanding [De Libero Arbitrio II.3]. While he elsewhere allows
that plants have souls, his primary interest is in souls capable of understanding, and
here, as elsewhere, he is less concerned with a neutral description of the structure of
nature than with showing how the soul may find happiness by extricating itself from an
overly immersed relation to nature. This being the case, Augustine's psychology tends
to focus upon cognitive capacities, beginning with sense perception and working up to
reason. The criteria governing the hierarchy are the relative publicity of the object of the
cognitive capacity [De Libero Arbitrio II.7 & 14], the reliability of the capacity and its
object [De Libero Arbitrio II.8 & 12], and, corresponding to both of these, the relative
degree of immateriality and immutability of the object [De Libero Arbitrio II.8 & 14].
Relying upon the criterion of relative publicity, Augustine begins by noting that even
among the senses there is a hierarchy of sorts, for vision and hearing seem considerably
less private than both smell and taste, wherein part of the object must actually be taken
into one's body and consumed during the process [De Libero Arbitrio II.7]. Likewise, it
seems possible to see or hear the same object at the same time. In between these two
extremes is the sense of touch, since two individuals can touch the same part of an
object, but not at the same time. Augustine also emphasizes the fact that even in sight
and hearing, the most public of the senses, one's relation to the object is always
perspectival. For example, one's visual or aural relation to the object imposes limits
upon how many others can have a similar relation, as well as the nature of the relation
they can have. Thus, sense experience, in addition to relating to objects that are
material, mutable, and hence ultimately unreliable, is also intractably private, this latter
point being of considerable importance, as we will see, with respect to Augustine's
theory of illumination.

The senses are coordinated by what Augustine refers to as the “inner sense” [De Libero
Arbitrio II.3], a faculty that bears some affinities to Aristotle's common sense [see
Aristotle, De Anima II.6]. The inner sense for Augustine makes us aware that the
disparate information converging upon us from our various senses comes from a
common external source (e.g., the smell and taste belong to the same object one is
looking at while holding it in one's hand). The inner sense also makes us aware when
one of the senses is not functioning properly. In both of these respects, the inner sense
bears an organizational and criterial relation to the senses, not only combining the
information of the senses, but passing judgment on the results of this synthesis. It is for
this reason regarded as being above the other senses [De Libero Arbitrio II.5]. At this
point, however, we are still at a level shared with non-rational beings. It is only when
we go above the inner sense and turn to reason that we reach what is distinctively
human.

As with most thinkers influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition, Augustine

conceives of reason rather austerely, focusing upon the mind's ability to engage in
deductive reasoning, where logical necessity is the criterion of adequacy. The point is
an important one, for it helps explain the belief that reason is distinctively human
(intuitively, we may want to attribute instrumental reasoning to other species, but there
is still reluctance to attribute mathematical reasoning to them), as well as our tendency
to place such enormous significance upon the fact that humans are capable of reasoning.
Understood in this austere sense, i.e. in terms of the mind's ability to recognize logical
necessity, reason is not merely one instrument among many; instead, it becomes the
means whereby the human soul comes into contact with truths that are devoid of the
mutability afflicting the objects of the senses. For Augustine, reason is the cognitive
apex of the human soul, not only because it distinguishes us from other creatures, but
more importantly for the way it distinguishes us: it gives us access to truths that are of
an absolutely reliable sort [De Libero Arbitrio II.8].

It is also important to note that the necessity revealed by reason is not merely logical
and certainly not merely psychological. Augustine, like other thinkers influenced by the
Greek tradition, saw an ontological dimension in the truths of reason, i.e., an
isomorphism between the necessity that governs our thinking and the necessity that
governs the structure of that about which we are thinking. It is at this point that we
come upon the intersection of Augustine's psychology and epistemology, for even if we
assume a kind of isomorphism between the truths of reason and the structure of being,
there is an enduring historical controversy regarding what structure reason reveals as
well as how the truths of reason relate to the other cognitive capacities such as sense
perception and imagination.

As we have seen, from 384 onwards Augustine accepted a Neoplatonic account of the
ontological and moral condition in which we find ourselves. Moreover, the psychology
sketched in De Libero Arbitrio II and elsewhere reflects an ascending hierarchy of
capacities (sense perception, inner sense, and reason), providing a psychological
analogue to the ontological hierarchy. Not surprisingly, Augustine's epistemology
reflects these strongly Neoplatonic tendencies, but here, as elsewhere, it would be a
mistake to view Augustine's thought as an uncritical application of an inherited
framework; as is often the case in other areas, Augustine's approach to epistemology is
conditioned by his own religious and philosophically eudaimonistic concerns.

In particular, Augustine's epistemology seeks to exploit the psychological hierarchy

with the aim of showing the reader how to navigate through the corresponding
ontological hierarchy, thereby enabling us to reap the moral benefits of his Christianized
Neoplatonism. This point is important, for it helps to explain why Augustine can seem,
at times, so overtly indifferent towards questions that are central from the perspective of
later (especially post-Cartesian) epistemology. A case in point is Augustine's treatment
of Academic skepticism. As already noted, Augustine flirted with Academic skepticism,
and one of his first extant works, Contra Academicos (circa 386 C.E.) is a focused, if at
times idiosyncratic argument against Academic skepticism. Leaving aside Augustine's
claim that the Academic skeptics were really Platonic realists attempting to conceal
their view from those too simple to grasp its subtlety [e.g. Contra Academicos, 3.17.37
and Letter 1.1], the overall argumentative thrust of the text is nonetheless instructive
[see also Kirwan, 1983].

In the Contra Academicos, as elsewhere, Augustine attacks skepticism as an obstacle on

the road to a eudaimonistically-construed happiness. Thus he is content to show that
there are problems in the skeptic's claim to live by the likeness of truth (how can one
know the likeness of x if one professes not to know x itself?) [Contra Academicos
2.7.16–2.8.20], and to offer a set of examples where we do have certainty regarding the
truth [Contra Academicos 3.10.23 and 3.11.25]. What Augustine does not do is to
engage in any kind of foundationalist construction of basic beliefs, nor does he attempt
any kind of systematic defense of our ordinary epistemic practices so as to vindicate
them in the face of skeptical attack. Even when he offers his version of what later
becomes known as the Cartesian cogito [e.g. De Civitate Dei XI.26; De Trinitate 10.14;
see also De Libero Arbitrio II.3 and Rist 1994, pp. 63–7], he shows no interest in using
it to epistemically ground other beliefs [see Markus 1967, pp. 363–4]. Here, as
elsewhere, Augustine is content to attack skepticism on a piecemeal basis [see
Matthews 1972; O'Daly 1987, pg. 171; and Rist 1994, pg. 53].

Another, related, feature of Augustine's epistemology is his willingness to accept that

much of our belief about the world must as a matter of practical necessity rest upon trust
and authority. As he tells us in De Magistro, we cannot hope to verify all our beliefs
about history and even many beliefs about the present are a matter of trust [De Magistro
11.37]. Here as elsewhere, he emphasizes the role of belief as opposed to understanding,
pointing out not only that we must believe many things that we cannot understand but
also that belief is a necessary condition of understanding [see Contra Academicos
3.20.43; De Libero Arbitrio II.2; and Rist 1994, pp. 56–63]. From a Cartesian
foundationalist perspective, this can seem a troublingly circular view. However, we are
again obliged to note that Augustine's epistemological concerns do not lie in vindicating
our beliefs about the sensible world in the face of skeptical doubt, but in utilizing our
non-skeptical intuitions about the sensible world to construct an accessible and
rhetorically compelling account of our relation to the intelligible realm, the latter
serving as the haven towards which his eudaimonism consistently points. It is worth
noting, moreover, that even among those who do not share Augustine's enthusiasm for
the transcendental, there are many philosophers in this century who would applaud his
indifference towards Cartesian foundationalist concerns. Certainly, his views on the
relation of belief, authority, and understanding are worthy of contemporary attention.
But for Augustine himself, the primary concern is to lay the groundwork for what many
regard as the least compelling if nonetheless most conspicuous element of his
epistemology, the doctrine of divine illumination [see Markus 1967, pp. 363–73; Nash
1969; O'Daly 1987, pp. 199–207; and Rist 1994, pp. 73–9].

Augustine presents our grasp of the sensible world as grounded in a relatively

unproblematic relation of direct acquaintance [e.g De Magistro 12.39. See also
Burnyeat 1987], although there are places where his view is complicated by his
Neoplatonizing conviction that the higher (e.g. the mind) cannot be affected by the
lower (e.g. the body) [e.g. De Genesi ad Litteram XII.16 circa 415 C.E.]. In fact, he will
in places explicate the mind's relation to sensible objects by means of its focusing its
attention and noticing what is presented to it by the body without being causally
affected by the body; in the case of physical vision, he will even go so far as to adopt
the extramissionist view that a visual ray extends from the eye to the object as opposed
to an intromissionist view whereby the eye passively receives something from the
sensible object [e.g. De Quantitate Animae 23.43, circa 388 C.E.]. Even so, direct
acquaintance is at some level still a necessary condition for the formation of beliefs
about the external world, and the relation of the senses to sensible objects is regarded as
largely unproblematic. In De Magistro, for example, Augustine argues that the efficacy
of language is ultimately dependent upon direct acquaintance with the external world,
and even our ability to learn from others presupposes that what they tell us can be
reduced to elements with which one has had some prior acquaintance [De Magistro
11.37]. For Augustine, as for many classical thinkers, language is a kind of third realm
entity. Belonging neither to the world nor to mind, it is an instrument used by minds to
communicate about the world outside them, and direct acquaintance is what explains its
ability to do so. Thus, learning from others is a matter of being reminded of prior acts
with which we have been directly acquainted [De Magistro 11.36], although this
reminding can occur in such a way as to reconfigure elements from those prior acts, thus
accounting for the fact that our knowledge of the world seems to be extended by such
descriptions.

However odd such a model might seem, it is important to note the plausibility of some
of the assumptions that underlie it: (a) language is an instrument that mediates our
relation to the world and to other minds; (b) there is a distinction between signs and
what they signify; and (c) our relation to the sensible world is based on direct
experience. Each of these assumptions is subject to serious objections, and the past two
centuries have produced ample reasons to be cautious about them. Nevertheless, they
still have considerable pre-reflective currency, and for all its oddness, Augustine's
suggestion that learning is a matter of being reminded of prior acts of direct
acquaintance rests upon a set of common sense assumptions. This in itself is an
important point, for as noted above, much of Augustine's strategy in presenting his
epistemology is to exploit the relatively unproblematic nature of our relation to the
sensible world, and then to reason analogously regarding our relation to the more
secure, public world of intelligible objects. The question we are supposed to ponder is:
given that learning is really a matter of being reminded, and given that all such
occasions of being reminded depend upon acts of direct acquaintance wherein we are
taught by the things themselves [De Magistro 12.40], what does this imply about our
relation to those truths that cannot be accounted for by sense perception? In other
words, if we accept this as a viable model of our epistemic relation to the external
world, how do we proceed from it to explain our access to those truths whose certainty
goes beyond what can be experienced in sensible objects? The traditional example here
is mathematics [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio II.8], and in De Libero Arbitrio II, Augustine
even argues that our ability to count presupposes a notion of unity that is empirically
underdetermined [ibid]. There are, of course, other examples for Augustine besides
mathematical and logical truths. Of equal importance are such truths as the awareness
that all seek a happiness that goes beyond anything we have experienced in this life, that
good is to be sought and evil avoided, and the awareness that there is something above
and more reliable than the human mind [see De Libero Arbitrio II.9 and 12]. These are
the kinds of examples that Augustine regards as obliging us to reject the notion that our
relation to the sensible world is sufficient to account for all our beliefs and to believe
that there must be more, so to speak, to complete the picture.

That something more is provided by the doctrine of illumination, the thesis that God
plays an active role in human cognition by somehow illuminating the individual's mind
so that it can perceive the intelligible realities which God simultaneously presents to it.
Augustine is notoriously vague as to the precise details and mechanics of this divine
illumination [see, e.g. Nash 1969, pp. 94–124], and it is therefore easy to read it in an
uncharitable light. Viewed without sufficient attention to the few details he provides, it
can appear as if Augustine has made human cognition into a special act of divine
revelation, thus making the human mind into a merely passive receptacle and God into a
kind of epistemic puppeteer. For all its attendant vagueness, however, the doctrine is
rather more sophisticated than it might first appear.

In the account of illumination in De Magistro, Augustine uses an analogy as old as

Plato [see Republic VI.508a ff.] according to which the mind's relation to intelligible
objects is like the relation of the senses to sensible objects [see De Magistro 12.39; see
also Soliloquia 1.12 and O'Daly 1987, pg. 204]. In both cases, there is a need for an
adventitious object to be presented to the relevant capacity, as well as the need for an
environment that is conducive to the successful exercise of the relevant capacity. In the
case of vision, for example, this would be light; in the case of the mind's discernment of
intelligible objects, Augustine characterizes this, relying upon Platonic imagery of
which Plotinus is also fond [see Plotinus, Enneads V.3.8 and Schroeder 1996, pp. 341–
3], as an intellectual illumination that occurs within us by that which is above us. In
both cases, the criterion of success is the discernment of the actual details of the object
itself. Perhaps most important of all, both cases clearly allow for and rely upon acts of
direct acquaintance, since illumination is, above all, meant to be an account of the
conditions necessary for the mind to have direct acquaintance with intelligible objects.

Seen in this light, Augustine's view hardly seems to reduce human cognition to special
acts of divine revelation [see O'Daly 1987, pp. 206–7]. Illumination is instead
something that is available to all rational minds, the atheistic mathematician as well as
the pious farmer measuring a field [see Rist 1994, pg. 77]. Nor does it detract from the
mind's own activity and acuity, any more than a world of adventitious sensible objects
detracts from the activity and acuity of the senses. In both sensory and intellectual
perception, one can require a considerable degree of activity and acuity on the part of
the perceiver, and in both cases one can treat failed perception as a function both of the
extent to which the capacity is possessed by the perceiver and the perceiver's efforts to
employ it. What sets illumination apart from more familiar cases of sense perception is
that it enables us to do two related things that cannot be done by sense perception alone.
First and foremost, it explains how our knowledge can have the kind of necessity that
understanding (as opposed to mere belief) requires, a necessity that is always, it seems,
empirically underdetermined [see, e.g. De Libero Arbitrio II.8 and O'Daly 1987, pp.
180–1]. In this regard, Augustine's illuminationism is a worthy contender among more
familiar attempts to make intellectual cognition epistemically secure and reliable.
Though it has its own difficulties, it is not clear that Augustinian illumination is all that
more extravagant than Platonic recollection of a pre-incarnate existence [e.g. Plotinus,
Enneads V.5], Aristotelian induction of particulars that somehow leads to necessary and
universal truths [e.g. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19], psychologically private
Cartesian innate ideas [Meditations, “Third Meditation”], or Kantian transcendental
idealism, wherein we are obliged to sacrifice the isomorophism of reality and thought
that made necessity so attractive in the first place [e.g. Critique of Pure Reason,
“Preface” to the First and Second Editions]. Indeed, viewed in this regard, it is not all
that surprising that Augustinian illuminationism came to have the historical influence
that it did, nor that Malebranche, writing some twelve hundred years later, would, in his
concern with the psychologistic implications of Cartesian innate ideas, turn to
Augustinian illuminationism as a model for his vision in God [see, e.g. The Search
After Truth, Bk. II, Part Two, Chapter Six].

The second way in which illumination enables us to surpass what we are able to
accomplish by means of sense perception alone is even more tightly connected to
Augustine's Neoplatonizing eudaimonism. For souls which have become immersed in
the sensible world and which are thereby separated from other souls by bodies,
illumination is crucial to our attempt to recapture our lost unity. Unlike the perspectival
and private realm of sense perception, illumination holds out the prospect of fulfilling
the yearning to which Augustine's eudaimonism gives such prominence, the yearning to
find a realm wherein we can overcome the vulnerability that besets us and the moral
distance that divides us from one another. Both Augustine's Confessions and De
Civitate Dei in their own ways portray this sort of philosophical and spiritual
pilgrimage, and one would be hard pressed to find a better example than the vision at
Ostia at Confessions IX.10.23–25 [see “Ontology and Eudaimonism” above]. There,
Augustine and his mother Monica manage, albeit fleetingly, to find themselves in a
place that is clearly not in space, united in a way that overcomes the distance imposed
by their mortal bodies. This unification is for Augustine the eudaimonistic conclusion
through which the pursuit of knowledge is vindicated and to which it is, ultimately, to
be subordinated.
7. Will
As already noted, a conspicuous feature of the Greek philosophical tradition is its
intellectualism. Not only is nature seen as governed by patterns that are accessible to the
human mind, but human agency is conceived in terms that stress the role played by
reason in a life that is in keeping with the larger order [see Markus 1967 pg. 387].
Reason is an instrument that is not only capable of acts of theoretical representation, but
its exercise is also regarded as being of enormous practical significance. There are, to be
sure, important and powerful non-rational factors that are relevant to our actions (e.g.
appetite and desire), but in a well-ordered life they are to be constrained by the dictates
of reason [see e.g. Plato, Republic IV.441e-4441 and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
X.7.1177a10–X.9.1179a33].

As we have seen above [e.g.“Ontology and Eudaimonism” & “Psychology and

Epistemology”], Augustine is deeply affected by Greek intellectualism, and his own
Neoplatonizing Christianity is imbued with a hierarchical structure that emphasizes the
reliability of the intelligible in contrast to all that is sensible and physical. However, as
Augustine's views on human agency develop, this picture is complicated by an
increasing emphasis upon non-rational factors that influence our behavior and by a
tendency to regard intellectualism as insufficient to explain the dynamics of human
agency. Early in Augustine's career [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio I, circa 387/8 C.E.], there is
a conspicuous emphasis on the will, and it is here that one encounters some of the most
difficult and obscure aspects of his thought [see Djuth 1999, pg. 881]. Nevertheless, it
marks both a significant divergence from the Greek philosophical tradition and the
intersection of the philosophical and religious dimensions of his thought. Moreover, the
more Augustine immersed himself in theological questions, the more prominence the
nature and role of the will came to have in his writings, and his reflection upon the
limited powers of the unaided will has much to do with the pessimism of his later
writings.

An example of Augustine's increasing emphasis upon the will can be found in his
account of his intellectual and moral transformation in Confessions VII–VIII. As we
have seen [“Context” and “Ontology and Eudaimonism”], he credits the books of the
Platonists with making it possible for him to conceive of a non-physical, spiritual reality
[Confessions IV.xv.24; VII.i.1]. Likewise, they removed the intellectual stumbling
blocks that had made it so difficult for him to accept the non-Manichean form of
Christianity he found in Ambrose's Milan. However, when Augustine tells the story of
his conversion in Confessions VII and VIII, he makes clear that although he ceased to
have any genuine intellectual reservations regarding the Church [Confessions VII.xxi.27
and VIII.i.1], he remained unable to commit himself to the path he could see to be the
right one [see Confessions VII.xx.26, VII.xxi.27, and VIII.i.1]. Throughout his
discussion, Augustine indicates that certainty is not the issue; he regards his
predicament as falling outside the scope of intellectual assent. The ensuing discussion of
his struggle is surely one of the most famous in Christian literature [Confessions VIII in
toto, esp. VIII.viii.19–VIII.xii.30], and it is marked by a subtlety of introspective
analysis that defies any easy explication. Leaving aside the question of the accuracy of
his account [O'Connell 1969, pp. 4–9 and 101–104; O'Donnell 1992, vol. 3, pp. 3–4 and
55–71], it is clear that Augustine is providing a dramatic account of moral
transformation, one that stresses the role of intellectual discernment while at the same
time highlighting his conviction that no amount of discernment is sufficient to account
for what we might refer to, for want of a better phrase, as the phenomenology of internal
moral conflict. In terms of this agonistic inner turmoil, the will as both present and
emergent [Confessions VIII.v.11 and VIII.x.22] is on an equal footing with our powers
of rational discernment.

There are three distinct features that explain why the will comes to have such
prominence in Augustine's thinking. In Book I of De Libero Arbitrio, Augustine
endeavors to construct an anti-Manichean theodicy [De Libero Arbitrio I.2], one that
accounts for the presence of moral evil in the world without either substantializing it or
finding its source in divine activity. In this regard, the will is what makes an action one's
own, placing the burden of responsibility on the one performing the action [De Libero
Arbitrio I.11]. By the time he composed Book III of De Libero Arbitrio, however,
Augustine had come to conceive of the human condition in terms of the ignorance and
difficulty that attend it [De Libero Arbitrio III.18], and these features tend to complicate
the libertarian optimism of Book I by raising questions about whether it is even possible
for us to overcome the ignorance and difficulty. But even here, the will is intended to
serve as the fulcrum of moral responsibility [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio III.22].

Though closely related, the concern with moral responsibility needs to be distinguished
from the points raised in the above discussion of Confessions VII–VIII. In that context,
Augustine is still engaged in constructing an anti-Manichean portrait of the human
condition, but he is equally concerned with the aspect of agency that falls outside the
scope of a purely rational or intellectual analysis. This aspect of the discussion is
heightened by the fact that the choice involves a fundamental moral reorientation
running contrary to habits which have acquired a necessity all their own [Confessions
VIII.v.10], but Augustine's discussion of the example suggests that he sees it as more
than an idiosyncratic or isolated incident. Rather, it is intended to draw our attention to
an introspectively accessible range of phenomena that forces us to acknowledge a
fundamentally non-rational component of human volition.

There is, however, a third factor at work here. The problem of evil received a rather
different treatment in the non-Hellenic religious and scriptural traditions than in the
Greek tradition, a contrast that was not completely lost on Augustine as he increased his
familiarity with the former [e.g. Ad Simplicianum, circa 396 C.E. and Confessions
VII.ix.14]. Here, one finds less emphasis upon rational analysis and logical
argumentation than upon pledged community membership, trans-generational authority,
obedience to divinely-sanctioned standards, and, in some cases, an overt suspicion of
intellectualism together with an emphasis upon the necessity of divine aid for moral
transformation. This part of Augustine's inheritance helped to divert his attention away
from the strictly rational features of human agency, and to invite him to think about
rationality in new ways.

While it is no doubt a mistake to compartmentalize the religious and philosophical

aspects of Augustine's classical inheritance, it is often helpful to view his thought as
presenting a gradual movement away from a Greek intellectualism towards a
voluntarism emphasizing the profound ignorance and difficulty of the human condition,
as well as the need for divine aid to overcome the ignorance and difficulty. At the heart
of this shift of emphasis are Augustine's developing views on the will. Not surprisingly,
this development often has to be understood against the backdrop of the philosophical
and theological difficulties that come to occupy him over the years.
One of these difficulties is the relation of human free will to divine foreknowledge.
While it is tempting to view this as a conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, the
problem initially arises within the Greco-Roman tradition itself [see Rist 1994, pg. 268].
Although Augustine's initial treatment of the problem at De Libero Arbitrio III.2–4
seems innocent of this fact, his later treatment at De Civitate Dei V.9–10 shows that he
was aware of Cicero's discussion of the problem in De Divinatione and De Fato. It is
also worth noting that in later medieval philosophy, we see the mirror-image of this
problem in terms of the relation of divine freedom and power versus the extent of
human knowledge [see, e.g. The Condemnation of 1277; Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet
VIII, qu.9; John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, dist. 42]. In both cases, the problem is
attributable to the notion of necessity which underlies the Greek conception of
knowledge. In this particular case, the problem is how to reconcile the absolute
necessity that attends God's knowledge (i.e. if God genuinely knows that x is going to
happen, it is impossible for x not to take place—see De Libero Arbitrio III.4 and De
Civitate Dei V.9) with the idea that there can be no moral responsibility unless it is in
my power to choose to do other than I in fact do [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio III.3]. On the
surface, freedom to do otherwise seems to rule out the possibility of foreknowledge, and
conversely, foreknowledge seems to rule out the possibility of freedom to do otherwise.
In both De Libero Arbitrio and De Civitate Dei, Augustine's treatment of this problem is
complex and at times exceedingly obscure [see Rowe 1964 and Kirwan 1989,pp. 95–
103], but his aim is clear enough. Augustine is anxious, contra the Manicheans and
Cicero, to defend the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom by
arguing that the free exercise of the will is among the events foreknown by God and that
such foreknowledge in no way detracts from our culpability for our acts of willing [e.g.
De Libero Arbitrio III.3 & 4; De Civitate Dei V.9]. The obscurity of the details
notwithstanding, Augustine leaves no doubt that he wants to maintain both that God
does have foreknowledge of our actions and that we are morally responsible for them.

Augustine's view becomes even more complicated, however, due to theological and
doctrinal concerns. While the issue of predestination is not invoked in the discussion of
divine foreknowledge and human freedom at De Civitate Dei V.9–10 [see Rist 1994,
pp. 268–9], significant developments take place between the time Augustine composes
De Libero Arbitrio III (circa 395 C.E.) and De Civitate Dei V (circa 415 C.E.). In
particular, there are two events that have a momentous impact upon Augustine's work in
the late 390's until his death in 430. The first is his increasing familiarity with scripture
and the resulting modification of his earlier, Neoplatonizing views in light of what he
finds in those texts. Pivotal in this regard is Ad Simplicianum (396 C.E.), wherein he
focuses on a number of scriptural passages and begins to formulate his views on the
universality of original sin and the necessity of grace to overcome its effects [see
Bonner 1972, pp. 15–18 and Babcock 1979, pp. 65–67]. The second set of events center
on his involvement in the Pelagian controversy, which occupied him from roughly 411
until his death in 430. Under the pressures of this controversy and in conjunction with
his interpretation of scriptural and especially Pauline views on original sin and grace,
the intellectualistic optimism of his earlier work was gradually transformed into an
exceedingly grim view of the human moral landscape.

Pelagius himself is an obscure figure, as is his relation to the view that has come to bear
his name (Bonner 1972, 31–35), but at the heart of the Pelagian position seems to be an
emphatic insistence upon the principle that “ought implies can,” i.e. that it is
unacceptable to require individuals to perform actions that they cannot in fact perform
[Pelagius, Ad Demetriadem 2, op. cit. at Brown 1967, pg. 342; see also Bonner 1972,
pg. 34]. The Pelagian insistence upon preserving the kind of autonomy that seems
required by the moral ideals of Christianity set in motion a fierce controversy about the
nature of original sin and the role of grace in overcoming it [Brown 1967, pp.340–364].
In general, Pelagians tended to deny the kind of insuperable original sin that Augustine
believed he had found in scripture, and they proposed a milder view of grace as being
an aid to a will disposed to a Christian life, as opposed to being a necessary condition
for such a disposition in the first place [TeSelle 1999, pg. 635]. As is often the case with
disputes that have a deep moral urgency, the controversy acquired a ferocity that can
seem, from a modern perspective, out of keeping with the subtlety of the points made in
it, but it is precisely the sort of dispute that cannot but have lasting effects upon its
participants, and Augustine was one of the main participants during the last two decades
of his life.

By the time Augustine completed De Civitate Dei in 427 C.E., he came even more
emphatically to insist upon the conclusion to which his discussion in Ad Simplicianum
had led him, i.e., that original sin is both universally debilitating and insuperable
without the aid of unmerited grace [De Civitate Dei XIV.1]. Furthermore, there is a
predestination at work that is as rigorous as the foreknowledge by which God knows its
results [De Civitate Dei XIV.11]. Here too Augustine insists that we are morally
culpable for the sinful choices that the will makes [De Civitate Dei XIV.3], but under
the pressures of the Pelagian controversy—a controversy in which he will find his
earlier words being cited against him [see Retractationes I.9.3–6]—he presents these
views in a manner that is austere and uncompromising. So damaging are the effects of
the original sin that the human will is free only to sin [De Correptione et Gratia 1.2;
11.31; Rist 1972, pg. 223]. Thus, the human race is comprised of a massa damnata [De
Dono Perseverantiae 35; see also De Civitate Dei XXI.12], out of which God, in a
manner inscrutable to us [De Civitate Dei XII.28], has predestined a small number to be
saved [De Civitate Dei XXI.12], and to whom he has extended a grace without which it
is impossible for the will not to sin. While there is some controversy over whether this
grace is sufficient for redemption and whether it can be resisted [Rist, 1972, pp. 228ff.],
Augustine makes clear that it is as much a necessary condition as it is unmerited and
inscrutable. The ignorance and difficulty that afflict our condition in De Libero Arbitrio
III have become more than obstacles to be overcome by means of our will [De Libero
Arbitrio III.22]; they are now impassible barriers we have inherited from Adam, and
without unmerited grace we are utterly incapable of initiating even the smallest
movement away from sin and towards God. In De Libero Arbitrio I, Augustine suggests
that the will is confronted by a rational choice between a life spent in the pursuit of what
is temporal, changing, and perishable, and a life spent in the pursuit of what is eternal,
immutable, and incapable of being lost [De Libero Arbitrio I.7]. By the time he comes
to write De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio in 426 C.E., in the midst of the Pelagian
controversy, we find a vastly different picture. Here too the will is central, and here too
we are culpable for our sins, but gone is the earlier optimism. The post-Adamic will is
no longer in a position to initiate any choice of lives; the fact that we have any choice at
all is entirely a product of unmerited grace [see, e.g. De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio xx
and xxi], a grace that will be given to only a small number whom God has predestined
to be saved out of the vast number who are eternally lost.

Being more a matter of theology than philosophy, it can be tempting for those interested
in Augustine as a philosopher to turn away from his later thinking on the will, but one
has to be careful in doing so. To begin with, the boundary between the philosophical
and the theological is not as clear in Augustine as it is in later philosophers, and part of
what makes Augustine such a fascinating thinker is his refusal to compartmentalize his
thought in ways that are now taken for granted. Second, the development of Augustine's
thinking on the will, as unsettling as the resulting moral landscape may be, does oblige
one to confront questions about what a viable concept of the will should involve as well
as questions about how to determine moral culpability in the face of external
determination—questions that are as easy to overlook as they are difficult to address.
Finally, Augustine's reflections on the will had considerable influence upon those who
inherited his vast legacy and on his own account of how we are to understand the drama
of human history.

8. History and Eschatology

It is an irony that the man who bequeathed a Neoplatonic world view to the West also
gave us a way of conceptualizing human history that is at odds with some of its most
basic contours. In the Greco-Roman world in general and in Neoplatonism in particular,
the importance of history is largely in the cyclical patterns that forge the past, present,
and future into a continuous whole, emphasizing what is repeated and common over
what is idiosyncratic and unique. In Augustine, we find a conception of human history
that in effect reverses this schema by providing a linear account which presents history
as the dramatic unfolding of a morally decisive set of non-repeatable events.

For the present day reader, it is easy to overlook both the plausibility of the cyclical
view and the sorts of considerations that might stand in the way of the linear model with
which we have become more familiar. Not only are there the obvious patterns of the
seasons and the regularities discernible in astronomical phenomena, but, at a deeper
level, there is the indispensable role that regularity and the recognition of common
features play in our efforts to make the world intelligible. Moreover, the emphasis upon
the common-qua-universal is a conspicuous feature of the Greek philosophical tradition.
Thus, it is also hardly surprising that we find Aristotle telling us that poetry is more
philosophical than history because it is more clearly concerned with universals, whereas
history tends to be more concerned with particulars [Aristotle, Poetics 9.1451b1–7]; nor
is it surprising that Thucydides presents his account of the Peloponnesian War as
providing a pattern of events that will be repeated in the future [Thucydides, History of
the Peloponnesian War, I.22]; or that Plutarch recounts past lives in a manner clearly
designed to draw the reader's attention to patterns of virtue and vice rather than to
faithfully recount particular facts [see, e.g. Plutarch, Life of Pericles 1.1–2]; or, for that
matter, that Augustine himself would tell the tale of his first thirty-two years in the way
that he does, more concerned to capture the Neoplatonic drama of the soul's immersion
and extraction from the sensible/physical world than with providing a factual account of
dates, names, and places.

Approached from this angle, what wants an explanation is why one would subordinate
indispensable patterns and regularities in order to emphasize what is idiosyncratic and
unique . Here, as in the case of the will, it is important to understand that Augustine is
bringing together two quite disparate traditions, and here again one needs to take note of
his efforts to capture the data of revelation he sees embedded in Judeo-Christian
scripture. If one approaches these latter texts as presenting a Christian drama of the
soul's salvation, one cannot help but focus upon the unique, non-repeatable events that
define the drama, e.g., the fall recounted in the early chapters of Genesis, the
incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ in the synoptic and Johannine gospels,
and the final judgement foretold in Revelations. One must, however, exercise some
caution here. The cyclical and linear approaches are matters of emphasis rather than
mutually exclusive alternatives, and the scriptural traditions upon which Augustine
relies are certainly not devoid of cyclical motifs [e.g. Ecclesiastes 3.1–8], nor does
Augustine himself embrace one approach wholly to the exclusion of the other, as even a
cursory reading of his Confessions reveals. And, of course, the historically unique life
of Christ becomes a pattern for the Christian life in general [e.g. De Civitate Dei
XXII.5]. These points notwithstanding, there can be little question that Augustine
provides an account of human history that is at times resolutely linear, a tendency which
can be traced to the Judeo-Christian scriptural tradition.

Already in De Magistro (389 C.E.) Augustine is keenly aware that much of what we
need to believe falls outside the austere standards of his Platonic conception of
knowledge and understanding. Among the most prominent of these are beliefs based on
scripture [De Magistro 11.37; cf.12.39]. In the Confessions as well, even when
Augustine is especially laudatory of the Platonists, he is emphatic that there is much that
these books leave out. They cannot, for example, speak about those historical truths
definitive to the Christian view of redemption through the incarnation and passion of
Christ [Confessions VII.ix.13–14; see Bittner 1999, pg. 346]. Augustine is acutely
aware that scripture has an historical dimension, and he is sensitive as well to the
tensions between the scriptural tradition and the Neoplatonic framework upon which he
is relying, a tension that comes to eclipse much of the intellectualistic optimism we find
in his earliest completed post-conversion works, e.g. the Contra Academicos of 386
C.E. [see Contra Academicos 3.20.43 and “Context” above].

As we have seen, Augustine's increasing familiarity with the contents of scripture leads
him to focus more and more upon the historical dimension of this tradition, a dimension
alien to the intellectualism of the books of the Platonists. We have already seen this
development reflected in his interest in the fall and the subsequent necessity of grace set
forth in the Ad Simplicianum of 396 C.E. But it is in Augustine's sprawling City of God
[De Civitate Dei, 413–427 C.E.] that one finds his most extensive and focused treatment
of human history [see Rist 1994, pp. 203–255]. It is important to bear in mind, however,
that Augustine does not provide a philosophy of history of the sort that one might find
in a Vico, Hegel, or Marx; his concern is not with articulating a notion of history that
views its progress as intelligible, or that sees it as developing according to immanent
processes that are themselves accessible and worthy of study. Human history, for
Augustine, is subsumed by the larger context of an eschatology wherein history is the
temporal playing out of a divine justice in which the end is as fixed as the beginning
[see Bittner 1999, pg. 348]. While it is not for us to know all the details of the plot or its
conclusion [De Civitate Dei XX.2], we can nonetheless discern the general direction of
the drama, as well as the juridical nature of the conclusion at which aims.

The drama is, for the most part, a hauntingly somber one. Due to the universal
contagion of original sin wherein all have sinned in Adam, humanity has become a mass
of the deservedly damned [De Civitate Dei XXI.12] who have turned away from God
and towards the rule of self [see De Civitate Dei XIII.14; XIV.3 & 13]. By means of an
utterly unmerited grace, God has chosen a small minority out of this mass—the
smallness of the number is itself a means whereby God makes apparent what all in fact
deserve [De Civitate Dei XXI.12]—and thus human history is composed of the progress
of two cities, the city of God and the city of Man [e.g. De Civitate Dei XIV.28; XV.1 &
21; see Cranz 1972]: those who by means of grace renounce the self and turn towards
God, as opposed to the vast majority who have renounced God and turned towards the
self [De Civitate Dei XIV.28]. In this life, we can never be sure of which individuals
belong to which city [e.g. De Civitate Dei XX.27], and thus they are intermingled in a
way that thwarts any moral complacency. While the visible church bears a special
relation to the city of God, membership in the Church is no guarantee of salvation [e.g.
De Civitate Dei XX.9], and the history that is visible to us is merely a vestige of the
moral drama that takes place behind the scenes, defying the scrutiny of our weak and
often presumptuous reason [De Civitate Dei XX.21 & 22]. What is certain is that the
linear movement of human history aims at the eventual separation of the two cities [e.g.
De Civitate Dei XX.21 & 28], in which the members of each city are united with their
resurrected bodies [e.g De Civitate Dei XXI.1 & 3 and XXII.21] and given their
respective just rewards: for the small minority saved by unmerited grace, there is the
vision of God, a joy we can only dimly discern at the moment [De Civitate Dei
XXII.29]. For the overwhelming mass of humanity, there is the second death wherein
their resurrected bodies will be subject to eternal torment by flames that will inflict pain
without consuming the body [De Civitate Dei XXI.2–4], the degree of torment
proportional to the extent of sin [De Civitate Dei XXI.16], although the duration is
equal in all cases: they must suffer without end, for to suffer any less would be to
contradict scripture and undermine our confidence in the eternal blessedness of the
small number God has saved [De Civitate Dei XXI.23].

In De Civitate Dei as in the earlier Contra Academicos, Augustine is a eudaimonist who

enjoins us to seek a happiness understood in terms of our objective relation to an
hierarchical structure [e.g. De Civitate Dei XIV.25 and XX.21], and he still invokes
philosophy, rightly understood, as an instrument that can help us move towards this end
[De Civitate Dei XXII.22]. Moreover, he still views the world we experience as only a
small part of reality, and here too Augustine sees our earthly lives as perfected in a
realm that is outside the flux of history as we know and experience it [De Civitate Dei
XXI.26]. Much, however, has obviously changed. Gone is the confidence that the
“harbor of philosophy” [e.g. Contra Academicos 2.1.1] is the haven wherein we can
find the rest that we seek, and gone is the idea that the rational life will lead us to our
eudaimonistic end; gone as well is the breathless excitement with which Augustine
would enjoin others to pursue the life of rational enquiry [e.g. Contra Academicos
2.2.5]. In place of all this is a moral landscape that seems even sadder and more
unsettling than the sense of loss it was originally intended to relieve. And yet, even at
the very end of De Civitate Dei, Augustine makes clear that he still regards this as a
landscape which holds out the prospect of an incomparable vision and rest from all
anxiety, a renewed condition that defies all mortal estimation [De Civitate Dei XXII.30;
see also XX.21]. Now the aging Bishop of Hippo, Augustine still shows a trait he first
exhibited as a youthful convert at Cassiciacum: a keen sense of the moral darkness that
surrounds us and a philosophical penchant for the unexpected turn of thought by which
he would have us escape it.

9. Legacy
In the long and difficult controversy with the Pelagians, Augustine found his own
earlier writings on the will cited by his opponents as evidence that he himself once
advocated the view he came so vehemently to oppose [see Retractationes I.9.3–6].
What is more, he dies just as the Vandals are besieging the gates of Hippo, leaving
unfinished yet another work against Julian of Eclanum, a Pelagian opponent of
considerable intellectual resources who had, among other things, accused Augustine of
holding views indistinguishable from those of the Manicheans whom Augustine had
opposed so many years before [Bonner, 1999]. And here, perhaps, is an irony as cruel as
it is intriguing: eleven centuries later, when the Church to which Augustine had devoted
the last four and a half decades of his life was to split in a manner that still shows no
signs of reconciliation, both sides would appeal to Augustine as an authority on
questions of doctrine [Muller 1999; Grossi 1999].

Leaving aside the relative merits of these accusations and appeals, their mere existence
is only possible because of the diversity and astonishing range of Augustine's thought
over the course of his lifetime. Augustine's movement from a largely Hellenistic
eudaimonism to the increasingly somber eschatology of his later works is much more
than a mere shift of position. It is the emergent product of a mind continually immersed
in controversy and ever obliged to rethink old positions in light of new exigencies,
obliged to turn yet again the stone turned so many times before.

First and foremost in Augustine's legacy is the voluminous body of work that
encompasses this movement, revealing a range of thought only a handful of
philosophers have managed to achieve. The diversity contained in this body of work
defies any easy or succinct synopsis, and anyone who approaches it will find a range of
ideas that can alternately intrigue, surprise, and sometimes even disarm and shock. One
will also find a range of genres and styles, ranging from texts crafted with great
rhetorical subtlety to texts that seem to “jangle” with the “music” [O'Connell 1987, pg.
203] of one who is thinking aloud as he writes. For those who want arguments and
evidential support, it is there to be had, sometimes in repetitive abundance; for those
sensitive to and appreciative of the power of poetic imagery, that too is abundantly in
place. Indeed, as Robert O'Connell says, “Augustine constructed more through a play of
his teeming imagination than by the highly abstract processes of strict metaphysical
thinking” [O'Connell 1986, pg. 3].

But if that vast, multifaceted corpus is the basis of Augustine's legacy, it is also the
ultimate obstacle to any attempt at neatly packaging or compartmentalizing it within
some “ism” that can be neatly taxonomized. This is, of course, true of most major
philosophers, but it seems incontestably true of Augustine. In place of tidy boundaries,
there is instead the “jangle” of the corpus itself and the enormous influence it comes to
have. This influence is to be found, for example, throughout early medieval philosophy
(e.g. Boethius and John Scotus Eriugena), and in Anselm of Canterbury, including in
what later came to be known as the ontological argument [Proslogion, Chapters I–IV].
Augustine's influence is plainly discernible in Bonaventure [e.g. Itinerarium Mentis in
Deum] and others in the thirteenth century who sought an alternative to the
Aristotelianism then gaining currency (e.g. John Peckham and Henry of Ghent). Even
Thomas Aquinas, a pivotal figure in the rise of Aristotelianism, takes care to address
and to accommodate Augustine's view on illumination among many other issues. In the
modern period, the echoes in Descartes are conspicuous, both in the cogito [Matthews
1992] and elsewhere [Matthews 1999b]. And, of course, few philosophers have invoked
Augustine as explicitly and as frequently as Malebranche [see, e.g. “Preface” to The
Search After Truth]. More recently, one of the most influential works of twentieth
century philosophy, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, opens with a lengthy
quotation from Augustine's Confessions and a discussion of the picture of language that
Wittgenstein sees invoked in it [Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part I, pars
1–3 & 32]. And if this selective historical sampling were not enough, there is an
enormous body of secondary literature devoted to Augustine ranging across disciplinary
boundaries and across divisions within the philosophical community itself. In 1999
alone, there appeared, among numerous other works, a 900 page encyclopedia devoted
to Augustine as a religious and philosophical figure [Fitzgerald, 1999] and a volume of
essays by several prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition exploring Augustine's
relation to a variety of topics including consequentialism, Kantian moral philosophy,
and just war theory (an important issue which unfortunately falls outside the scope of
the present discussion) [Matthews 1999]. If one examines the diverse interests of those
influenced by Augustine together with the enormous body of secondary literature on
Augustine, one finds again what one cannot fail to discern in the Augustinian corpus
itself: a diversity as amazing as it is broad, one that defies any attempt at neat summary
or tidy explication, a diversity as rich as it is discordant. It is unlikely that this is the
legacy that Augustine would have wanted to leave behind, but it is a legacy of a sort that
only a handful of philosophers have managed to achieve. The obvious irony
notwithstanding, the discordance and diversity are both measures of, and testimony to,
an intellectual depth and range seldom equaled in the history of western philosophy.

Bibliography
 Selected Latin Texts and Critical Editions
 Selected English Translations
 Selected General Studies
 Selected Secondary Works

Selected Latin Texts and Critical Editions

The most common and most complete (but uncritical) edition of Augustine in Latin is
the seventeenth century Maurist edition of Augustine's Opera Omnia which is reprinted
in volumes 32–47 of J.P. Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina (Paris
1844–64), referred to below as PL. More critical texts are gradually emerging in four
main series:

 Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna: Tempsky, 1865–

[CSEL]
 Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout: Brepolis, 1953– [CCL]
 Bibliotheque Augustinenne, Oervres de Saint Augustin, Paris: Desclee De
Brouwer, 1949– [BA]
 Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana, Opera de S. Agostino, edizione latino-italiana,
Rome: Citta Nuova 1965– [NBA]

Given the voluminous number of Augustine's texts, the following list is confined to
those especially relevant to the present article. In what follows, the Migne volume [PL]
will be provided as well as those of any of the other above editions that have appeared.
For information on Augustine texts not listed here, the reader is referred to Fitzgerald
1999, pp. xxxv–xlii, and the reader can also feel free to contact the author via the email
address listed at the end of this article.

 De Beata Vita (On The Happy Life), circa 386/7 C.E.: PL32; CSEL63 (1922);
CCL29 (1986); NBA3 (1970).
 Contra Academicos (Against the Skeptics), circa 386/7 C.E.: PL32; CSEL63
(1922); CCL29 (1970); BA4 (1939); NBA3 (1970).
 Soliloquia (Soliloquies) circa 386 C.E.: PL32; CSEL89 (1986); BA5 (1939);
NBA3 (1970).
 De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will) Book I circa 386/8 C.E., Books II–III, circa
391–5: PL32; CSEL74 (1956); CCL29 (1970); BA6 (1952); NBA3/2 (1976).
 De Magistro (On The Teacher) circa 389 C.E.: PL32; CSEL77 (1961); CCL29
(1970).
 Ad Simplicianum (To Simplicianus) circa 396 C.E.: PL 40; CCL44 (1970).
 Confessiones (Confessions) circa 397–401 C.E.: PL32; CSEL (1896); CCL27
(1981). See also O'Donnell 1992, volume 1 in “Selected Secondary Works”
below.
 De Trinitate (On The Trinity) circa 399–422/6 C.E.: PL 42; CCL 50/50A.
 De Genesi ad Litteram (On The Literal Meaning of Genesis) circa 401–415
C.E.: PL42; CSEL28/1.
 De Civitate Dei (On The City of God) circa 413–427 C.E.: PL41; CSEL40;
CCL47–8.
 Retractationes (Retractations) circa 426/7 C.E.: PL32; CSEL36 (1902); CCL57
(1984); BA12 (1950); NBA 2 (1994).
 Epistulae (Letters) circa 386–430 C.E.: PL33; Ep. 1–30: CSEL34/1 (1895); Ep.
31–123: CSEL 34/2 (1898); Ep. 124–84A: CSEL44 (1904); Ep. 185–270:
CSEL 57 (1923); Recently discovered Ep.: 1*-29* BA46B (1987).

Selected English Translations

The following list is of standard and available English translations of the works cited
above. Again, there is no attempt to be exhaustive, and readers seeking information for
titles not listed should consult the relevant entry in Fitzgerald 1999 or contact the author
via the email address at the end of this article.

 De Beata Vita is translated in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for

the 21st Century, vol 1.3, New City Press, 1990–.
 Contra Academicos is translated in Against the Academicians and The Teacher,
translated by Peter King, Hackett Publishing Company, 1995
 Soliloquia is translated in Soliloquies, Library of Christian Classics, volume 6,
1953.
  De Magistro is translated in Against the Academicians and The Teacher,
translated by Peter King, Hackett Publishing Company, 1995
 Ad Simplicianum is translated in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation
for the 21st Century, vol. 1.12, New City ress 1990–
 Confessiones are translated in Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick,
Oxford University Press, 1991.
 De Trinitate is translated in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the
21st Century, vol. I.5, New City Press 1990–
 De Genesi ad Litteram is translated in St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of
Genesis, translated by John H. Taylor, Ancient Christian Writers, vol 41–2,
Newman Press 1982.
 De Civitate Dei is translated in The City of God Against the Pagans, translated
by R.W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought,
Cambridge University Press 1998.
 Retractationes is translated in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for
the 21st Century, vol. I.2, New City Press 1990–
 Epistulae are translated by W. Parsons in the Fathers of the Church series:
Letters 1–82, vol 12; Letters 83–130, vol. 18; Letters 131–64, vol. 20; Letters
165–203, vol. 30; Letters 204–70, vol. 32; recently discovered Letters *1–*29
are translated by R. Eno in vol. 81.

Selected General Studies

The following is a list of works that can be helpful as introductions, guides, or general
studies of Augustine's thought. The list represents a variety of viewpoints and
approaches to Augustine, but it makes no attempt at being exhaustive. Interested readers
should also consult Markus 1967 in “Select Secondary Works” below. The author
welcomes suggestions for further additions.

 Bonner, Gerald (1986): Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies, Canterbury

Press 1986.
 Brown, Peter (1967): Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, University of California
Press 1967.
 Brown, Peter (2000): Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (updated version of the
1967 version), University of California Press, 2000.
 Chadwick, Henry (1986): Augustine, Past Masters Series, Oxford University
Press 1986.
 Clark, Mary T.(1994): Augustine, Georgetown University Press 1994.
 Fitzgerald, Allan D. (ed.) (1999): Augustine Through the Ages: An
Encyclopedia, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.
  Gilson, Etienne (1967): The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, translated
by L.E.M. Lynch, Random House 1967.
 Kirwan, Christopher (1989): Augustine, The Arguments of the Philosophers,
Routledge, 1989.
 O'Donnell, James (1985): Augustine, Twayne's World Author Series, Twayne
Publishers 1985.
 O'Donnell, James (2006): Augustine: A New Biography, Harper Perennial
Books, 2006
 O'Meara, John J. (1954): The Young Augustine: The Growth of St. Augustine's
Mind Up to His Conversion, Longmans, Green & Co. 1954.
 Rist, John (1994): Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
 Wills, Gary Saint Augustine, Viking (Peguin Lives Series), 1999.

Selected Secondary Works

The following provides a list of works relevant to topics covered in the present article,
and most of the works listed are referred to at some point in the body of the article. The
author welcomes suggestions for further additions. Interested readers should also note
that there is an annual bibliographical survey of literature on Augustine in the Revue des
Etudes Augustininnes.

 Adams, Marilyn McCord (1999): “Romancing the Good: God and the Self
according to St. Anselm of Canterbury” in Matthews 1999, pp. 91–109.
 Armstrong, A.H. ed. (1967), The Cambridge History of Later Greek & Early
Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1967.
 Babcock, William S. (1979): “Augustine's Interpretation of Romans (A.D. 394–
396),” Augustinian Studies 10 (1979), pp. 55–74.
 Beatrice, P.F (1989): “Quosdam platonicorum libros: The Platonic Readings of
Augustine in Milan,” Vigiliae Christianae 43 (1989) 248–281.
 Bittner, Rudiger (1999): “Augustine's Philosophy of History” in Matthews 1999,
pp. 345–360.
 Bonner, Gerald (1972): Augustine and Modern Research on Pelagianism, The
Saint Augustine Lecture Series, Villanova University Press, 1972.
 Bonner, Gerald (1999): “Julianum opus imerfectum, Contra” in Fitzgerald 1999,
pp. 480–481.
 Bonner, Gerald (2007), St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human
Freedom, Catholic University of America Press, 2007.
 Bourke, Vernon J (1963): Augustine's View of Reality: The Saint Augustine
Lecture 1963, Villanova University Press, 1963.
 Bubacz, Bruce (1981): St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge: A Contemporary
Analysis, Edwin Mellin 1981.
 Burnell, Peter (2005), The Augustinian Person, Catholic University of America
Press 2005.
 Burnyeat, M.F. (1983): The Skeptical Tradition, University of California Press
1983.
 Burnyeat, M.F. (1987): “Wittgenstein and Augustine De Magistro,”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 61 (1987), pp.
1–24, reprinted in Matthews 1999, pp. 286–303.
 Bussanich, John (1996): “Plotinus' Metaphysics of the One” in Gerson 1996
pp.38–65.
 Caputo, John D. and Scanlon, Michael J. eds. (2005) Augustine and
Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, Indiana University Press 2005
 Conybeare, Catherine (2006), The Irrational Augustine, Oxford University
Press, 2006.
 Cranz, Edward F. (1972): “De Civitate Dei, XV,2, and Augustine's Idea of
Christian Society” in Markus 1972.
 Dodaro, Robert and Lawless, George, eds. (2000) Augustine and His Critics:
Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, Routledge 2000
 Djuth, Marianne (1999): “Will” in Fitzgerald 1999, pp. 881–885.
 Evans, G.R. (1982): Augustine On Evil, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
 Farrell, James M.: “The Rhetoric of St. Augustine's Confessions,” Augustinian
Studies 39:2 (2008), pp.265–91.
 Gerson, Lloyd P. (ed.) (1996): The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus,
Cambridge University Press 1996.
 Gorman, Michael (2005): “Augustine's Use of Neoplatonism in Confessions VII:
A Response to Peter King,”Modern Schoolman: A Quarterly Journal of
Philosophy vol. 82, no. 3 (March 2005), pp. 227–233.
 Grossi, Vittorino (1999): “Council of Trent” in Fitzgerald 1999, pp. 843–845.
 Harrison, Carol (2006), Rethinking Augustine's Early Theology, Oxford
University Press, 2006
 Harrison, Simon (2006), Augustine's Way into The Will: The Theological and
Philosophical Significance of De Libero Arbitrio, Oxford University Press
(2006).
 Holt, Laura (2008): “A Survey of Recent Work on Augustine,” Heythrop
Journal: A Bimonthly Review of Philosophy and Theology, 49:2 (March 2008),
pp. 293–308.
 Holscher, Ludger (1986): The Reality of the Mind: Augustine's Philosophical
Arguments for the Human Soul as A Spiritual Substance, Routledge & Kegan
Paul 1986.
 Humphries Jr., Thomas L: “Distentio Animi: praesens temporis, imago
aeternitatis,” Augustinian Studies 40:1 (2009), pp. 75–101.
 Kenney, John Peter (2002): “Augustine's Inner Self,” Augustinian Studies33:1
(2002), pp. 79–80.
 King, Peter (2005), “Augustine's Encounter with Neoplatonism,” Modern
Schooman: A Quarterly Journal of Philosophyvol. 82, no. 3 (March, 2005), pp.
213–226.
 Kirwan, Christopher (1983): “Augustine against the Skeptics” in Burnyeat 1983,
pp. 205–223.
 Kirwan, Christopher (1999): “Avoiding Sin: Augustine against
Consequentialism,” in Matthews 1999, pp. 183–194.
 Kotze, Annemare (2004), Augustine's Confessions: Communicative Purpose
and Audience, Brill 2004.
 Lyotard, Jean Francois (2000), The Confessions of Augustine, trans. by Richard
Beardsworth, Stanford University Press 2000.
 Markus, R.A. (1967), “Marius Victorinus and Augustine,” in Armstrong 1967,
pp. 331–419.
 Markus, R.A. (ed.) (1972): Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anchor
Books 1972.
 Matthews, Charles T. (2001), Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, Cambridge
University Press 2001.
 Matthews, Gareth B.(1972): “Si Fallor, Sum,” in Markus 1972, pp. 151–167.
 Matthews, Gareth B. (1992): Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartes, Cornell
University Press, 1992.
 Matthews, Gareth B. (ed.) (1999): The Augustinian Tradition, University of
California Press 1999.
 Matthews, Gareth B. (1999b): “Augustine and Descartes on Minds and Bodies”
in Matthews 1999, pp. 222–232.
 Mendelson, Michael (1995): “The Dangling Thread: Augustine's Three
Hypotheses of the Soul's Origin in the De Genesi ad Litteram,” British Journal
of the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 2 (1995), pp. 219–247.
 Mendelson, Michael (1998): “The Business of Those Absent: The Origin of the
Soul in Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram 10.6–26,” Augustinian Studies 29:1
(1998), pp. 25–81.
 Mendelson, Michael (2000): “venter animi/distentio animi: Memory and
Temporality in Augustine's Confessions,” Augustinian Studies 31:2 (2000), pp.
137–163.
 Mendelson, Michael (2001): “By The Things Themselves: Eudaimonism, Direct
Acquaintance, and Illumination in Augustine's De Magistro,” Journal of the
History of Philosophy vol. 39, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 467–489.
 Miles, M.E. (1979): Augustine on the Body, Scholars Press 1979.
 Muller, Richard, “Augustinianism in the Reformation” in Fitzgerald 1999, pp.
705–707.
 Nash, Ronald H. (1969): The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine's Theory of
Knowledge, The University Press of Kentucky, 1969.
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1968): St. Augustine's Early Theory of Man, Harvard
University Press 1968.
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1969): St. Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul,
Harvard University Press, 1969.
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1972): “Action and Contemplation” in Markus 1972, pp.
38–58.
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1986): Imagination and Metaphysics in St. Augustine,
Marquette University Press, 1986.
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1987): The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine's Later
Works, Fordham University Press, 1987.
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1993): “The De Genesi contra Manichaeos and the Origin
of the Soul,” Revue des Etudes Augustinennes 39 (1993), pp. 129–41
 O'Connell, Robert J. (1994): Soundings in St. Augustine's Imagination, Fordham
University Press, 1994.
 O'Daly, Gerard, (1987): Augustine's Philosophy of Mind, University of
California Press, 1987.
 O'Donnell, James J. (1992): Augustine: Confessions. Text and Commentary in 3
volumes, Oxford University Press, 1992.
 O'Meara, Dominic J. (1996): “The Hierarchical Ordering of Reality in Plotinus”
in Gerson 1996, pp. 66–81.
 Plantinga, Alvin (1992): “Augustinian Christian Philosophy,” Monist 75, no. 3
(1992), pp. 291–320, reprinted in Mathews 1999, pp. 1–26.
 Plotinus, Enneads, translated by A.H. Armstrong, 7 vols. Loeb Classical
Library, Harvard University Press, 1966–1984.
 Pollman, Karla and Vessey Mark eds. (2005), Augustine and The Disciplines:
From Cassiciacum to Confessions, Oxford University Press 2005.
 Rowe, William (1964): “Augustine on Foreknowledge and Free Will,” Review
of Metaphysics 18 (1964), pp. 356–63, reprinted in Markus 1972, pp. 209–17.
 Rist, John (1972): “Augustine on Free Will and Predestination” in Markus 1972,
pp.218–252.
 Rist, John (1989): Review of O'Connell (1987) in International Philosophical
Quarterly 1989.
 Rombs, Ronnie J. (2006), Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond
O'Connell & His Critics, Catholic University of America Press, 2006.
 Schroeder, Frekeric M. (1996): “Plotinus and Language” in Gerson 1996, pp.
336–355.
 Skerret, K. Roberts (2009): “Consuetudo Carnalis in Augustine's Confessions:
Confessing Identity/Belonging to Identity,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 37 (3):
495–512.
 Straume-Zimmermann, L., F. Broemser, and O. Gigon, eds. and trans. (1990):
Marcus Tullius Cicero: Hortensius, Lucullus, Academici libri Artemis 1990.
 Stump, Eleonore and Kretzman, Norman (eds.) (2001), The Cambridge
Companion to Augustine, Cambridge University Press 2001.
 Tell, Dave (2006): “Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Mememory in
Augustine,” Philosophy and Rhetoric vol. 39, no. 3 (2006), pp. 233–253.
 TeSelle, Eugene (1972): “Rufinus the Syrian, Caelestius, Pelagius: Explorations
in the Prehistory of the Pelagian Controversy,” Augustinian Studies 3 (1972), pp.
61–95.
 TeSelle, Eugene (1999): “Pelagius, Pelagianism” in Fitzgerald 1999, pp. 633–
640.
 Teske, Roland J. (1991): “St. Augustine's View of the Original Human
Condition in De Genesi contra Manichaeos,” Augustinian Studies 22 (1991), pp.
141–55.
 Teske, Roland J. (1999): “Soul” in Fitzgerald 1999, pp. 807–812.
 Teske, Ronald J. (2008): “Spirituality: A Key Concept in Augustine's
Thought,”Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Vol. 64, no. 1, January-March 2008,
PP. 53–71.
 Tekse, Ronald J. (2008): To Know God and The Soul: Essays on the Thought of
Saint Augustine, Catholic University Press of America, 2008.
 Van Riel, Gerd (2007): “Augustine's Will, an Aristotelian Notion? On the
Antecedents of Augustine's Doctrine of the Will,” Augustinian Studies 38.1
2007, pp. 255–279.
 Vander Valk, “Friendship, Politics, and Augustine's Consolidation of the Self,”
Religious Studies: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion
vol.45, no.2 (June 2009), pp. 125–46.
  Wetzel, James (1992): Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, Cambridge University
Press 1992.

Augustine
Augustine the African
by James J. O'Donnell

Augustine was born in Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 354 and died almost
seventy-six years later in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba) on the Mediterranean coast
sixty miles away. In the years between he lived out a career that seems to moderns to
bridge the gap between ancient pagan Rome and the Christian middle ages. But to
Augustine, as to his contemporaries, that gap separated real people and places they
knew, not whole imaginary ages of past and future. He lived as we do, in the present,
full of uncertainty.

Augustine's African homeland had been part of Rome's empire since the destruction of
Carthage five hundred years before his birth. Carthage had been rebuilt by Rome as the
metropolis of Roman Africa, wealthy once again but posing no threat. The language of
business and culture throughout Roman Africa was Latin. Careers for the ambitious, as
we shall see, led out of provincial Africa into the wider Mediterranean world; on the
other hand, wealthy Italian senators maintained vast estates in Africa which they rarely
saw. The dominant religion of Africa became Christianity--a religion that violently
opposed the traditions of old Rome but that could not have spread as it did without the
prosperity and unity that Rome had brought to the ancient world.

Roman Africa was a military backwater. The legions that were kept there to maintain
order and guard against raids by desert nomads were themselves the gravest threat to
peace; but their occasional rebellions were for the most part short-lived and
inconsequential. The only emperors who ever spent much time in Africa were the ones
who had been born there; by Augustine's time, decades had passed without an emperor
even thinking of going to Africa.

Some distinctly African character continued to mark life in the province. Some non-
Latin speech, either the aboriginal Berber of the desert or the derelict Punic the
Carthaginians had spoken, continued to be heard in dark corners. In some of the same
corners, old local pagan cults could still be found. When Augustine became a Christian
clergyman, he found Africa rent by an ecclesiastical schism that had its roots at least
partly in the truculent sense of difference maintained by the less-Romanized provincials
of up-country Numidia, near the northern fringes of the Sahara.

So a young man like Augustine could belong irretrievably to the world Rome had made,
but still feel that he was living on the periphery of that world. Augustine set out to make
himself more Roman than the Romans and to penetrate to the center of the culture from
which he found himself alienated by his provincial birth. But that was only the
beginning of his story.

Augustine was born on 13 November, A.D. 354, in Tagaste, a town large enough to
have its own bishop but too small for a college or university.[[1]] His parents, Patricius
and Monica, belonged to the financially imperilled middle class. They were well enough
off to have educational ambitions for their son, but too poor to finance those ambitions
themselves. The fourth century was an age of mixed marriages at this level of society, in
which devout Christian women like Monica were often to be found praying for the
conversion of their irreligious husbands. Her prayers were not unavailing; Patricius
accepted baptism on his deathbed. Though Patricius offered no direct impulse towards
Christianity for his son, he must not have been much more than a passive obstacle.

Of Augustine's childhood we know only what he chooses to tell us in the highly

selective memoirs that form part of the Confessions. He depicts himself as a rather
ordinary sort of child, good at his lessons but not fond of school, eager to win the
approval of his elders but prone to trivial acts of rebellion, quick to form close
friendships but not always able to foresee their consequences. He studied Latin with
some enthusiasm but never loved Greek. While he was leading what he wants us to
think was a rather conventionally boisterous adolescence (it is best to imagine him in a
crowd of conformists, but edging towards the quieter fringes of the crowd), his parents
were worrying about paying for his education. Finally, with the help of an affluent
family friend, they managed to scrape together enough to send him to the nearest
university town a dozen miles away, Madaura, the home of the famous second-century
sophist and novelist Apuleius, which was the second city in the life of the mind in
Africa.

After a time at Madaura, the youth's talents made Carthage inevitable. There he seems
to have gone at about the age of seventeen. Not long after, his father died and his
mother was left with modest resources and nothing to tie her to Tagaste. Augustine
himself quickly set up housekeeping with a young woman he met in Carthage, by whom
a son was born not long after. This woman would stay with Augustine for over a decade
and, though we do not know her name, he would say that when he had to give her up to
make a society marriage in Milan "his heart ran blood" with grief as she went off to
Africa--perhaps to enter a convent. The son, Adeodatus, stayed with Augustine until
premature death took him in late adolescence.

So far the conventional outward events of Augustine's young manhood. His intellectual
life was a little more remarkable. The education he had received in Tagaste and
Madaura had made him a typical late Roman pedant, with a comprehensive knowledge
of a few authors (especially Cicero and Vergil) and a taste for oddities of language and
style.[[2]] Only at Carthage did his education show any signs of breaking the usual
molds, but even then only in a conventional way. In the ordinary course of the
curriculum, he had to read a work of Cicero's called the Hortensius.[[3]] This book,
since lost and known only from fragments quoted by Augustine and other ancient
writers, was a protreptic, that is, a treatise designed to inspire in the reader an
enthusiasm for the discipline of philosophy. Through all his other vagaries of interest
and allegiance, until the time of Augustine's conversion to Christianity Cicero would
remain the one master from whom the young African learned the most; Augustine is in
many ways the greatest of Cicero's imitators in point of Latin style.

The zeal for philosophy led first in what may seem a strange direction. Fired with the
love of wisdom from his reading of the quintessential Roman politician, Augustine
immediately joined a religious cult from Persia that had planted itself in the Roman
world as a rival of Christianity: Manicheism. This sensual but sensitive young man,
brought up around but not exactly in Christianity, took his Ciceronian enthusiasm with
the utmost seriousness on the moral plane. He knew his own life did not in fact match
his noble ideals. He was torn between the conventional pleasures of adolescence and the
conventional rigors of philosophy. For this tension, Manicheism offered soothing relief.
Augustine was not to blame that he felt this way, the Manichees told him, for he was
only the pawn of greater forces that could, because Augustine was lucky and clever, be
propitiated. Security could be had without sacrifice, and guilt removed without
atonement.

The world the Manichees imagined was torn between two contrary powers: the perfectly
good creator and the perfectly evil destroyer.[[4] The world seen by human eyes was the
battleground for their cosmic conflict. The Manichees and their followers were the few
who were on the side of the good spirit and who would be rewarded for their allegiance
with eternal bliss. In the meantime all sorts of misfortune might befall the individual,
but none of the wicked things he found himself doing were his fault. If the devil does
compel sin, then guilt does not ensue. A few Manichees, the inner circle, were said to
live perfect lives already, but the claim was hard to verify since the many disciples were
kept busy waiting on the perfect few hand and foot, to keep the few from being
corrupted by contact with the evil world of matter. The many were thus kept on a leash
with easy promises and a vague theology.

Augustine was too clever to settle for vague theology for long. His most poignant
moment of disillusion is recounted in the Confessions, when he finally met Faustus, the
Manichee sage who would (Augustine had been promised) finally answer all the
questions that troubled Augustine. When the man finally turned up, he proved to be
half-educated and incapable of more than reciting a more complex set of slogans than
his local disciples had known.

But while Augustine soon dissented privately from the Manichees, he did not break
with them publicly. Even when he had decided the slogans were nonsense, they still
provided the assurance that all the evil in Augustine's life was not his own fault and
could not be let go of easily. Augustine associated with Manichees who thought he was
one of them as late as 384, more than a decade after his first involvement with the sect.

Once initial enthusiasm faded, Augustine's attention drifted from the niceties of
metaphysics to the realities of his career, which preoccupied him through his twenties.
At about age twenty-one, after four years or so in Carthage, he went back to his home
town to teach. He could well have stayed there forever, but his talent encouraged him to
entertain loftier ambitions. He left again the next year.

From this decisive return to Carthage can be traced a career to which the adjective
"brilliant" scarcely does justice. Seven years in Carthage matured the young teacher into
a formidable scholar and orator. Education in a university town like Carthage at that
time was a free-market enterprise, with each teacher setting up independently around
the city center to make a reputation and inveigle students into paying for his wares; it
was a competition in which many young men like Augustine must have fallen by the
way. Augustine prospered, however, for when he became unhappy with conditions there
(the students were rowdy and tried to cheat the teachers of their fees), he could think
only of one place to which to move--Rome.

Rome of the fourth century was no longer a city with political or military significance
for the Roman empire, but nobody at the time dared say such a thing. By common
consent, the pretense was maintained that this was the center of civilization--and so the
pretense became self-fulfilling prophecy. Academic prestige, the emptiest of glories, is a
matter of reputation rather than reality; Rome had a reputation stretching back for
centuries. Understandably it took Augustine a few months to find a place there, but
when he finally found his feet, he could not have done better.

Some Manichee friends arranged an audition before the prefect of the city of Rome, a
pompous and inept pagan named Symmachus, who had been asked to provide a
professor of rhetoric for the imperial court at Milan.[[5] The young provincial won the
job and headed north to take up his position in late 384. Thus at age thirty, Augustine
had won the most visible academic chair in the Latin world, in an age when such posts
gave ready access to political careers. In the decade before Augustine's rise another
provincial, Ausonius of Bordeaux, had become prime minister in the regime of a teen-
aged emperor whose tutor he had been.[[6]] Our estimate of Augustine's talents is based
largely on his later achievements; but that judgment together with his swift climb to
eminence as a young professor makes it safe to assume that if Augustine had stayed in
public life, he would have found very few limits to his advancement.

Augustine saw his prospects clearly. When his mother followed him to Milan, he
allowed her to arrange a good society marriage, for which he gave up his mistress. (But
then he still had to wait two years until his fiancee was of age and promptly took up in
the meantime with another woman.) He felt the tensions of life at an imperial court,
lamenting one day as he rode in his carriage to deliver a grand speech before the
emperor that a drunken beggar he passed on the street had a less careworn existence
than he.

Thus the strain of rapid advancement began to tell. His old perplexities rose again to
plague him. He had tried Manicheism and it had failed; he owed some allegiance to
Cicero, but in his day Cicero stood for little more than style and skepticism. He settled
for ambivalence and prudent ambition. He had been enrolled as a catechumen (pre-
baptismal candidate) in the Christian church by his mother when he was a child; he
acknowledged this status publicly (it was good for his career) to conceal anxiety and
doubt.

His mother was there to press the claims of Christianity, but Augustine could probably
have held out against her will alone indefinitely. Because, however, Monica was in
Milan, and because Augustine was in public life and needed connections, he was soon
caught between her and the most influential man in Milan, the bishop Ambrose. At first
their encounters seem to have been few and perfunctory, but soon (due regard for his
career probably required it) Augustine began to sit through a few of the bishop's
sermons. Here Christianity began to appear to him in a new, intellectually respectable
light. As before, his most pressing personal problem was his sense of evil and his
responsibility for the wickedness of his life; with the help of technical vocabulary
borrowed from Platonic philosophy Ambrose proposed a convincing solution for
Augustine's oldest dilemma. Augustine had besides a specific objection to Christianity
that only a professor of belles-lettres could have: he could not love the scriptures
because their style was inelegant and barbaric. Here again Ambrose, elegant and far
from barbaric, showed Augustine how Christian exegesis could give life and meaning to
the sacred texts.

Resolution of his purely intellectual problems with Christianity left Augustine to face
all the pressure society and his mother could bring to bear. More will be said below
about the inner journey of his conversion, but the external facts are simple. In the
summer of 386, not quite two years after his arrival in Milan, Augustine gave up his
academic position on grounds of ill health and retired for the winter to a nearby country
villa loaned by a friend in a place called Cassiciacum. He took along his family (son,
mother, brother, and cousins) and friends, plus a couple of paying students who were
the sons of friends. There they spent their days in philosophical and literary study and
debate. Some of their conversations were philosophical and religious and come down to
us in philosophical dialogues,[[7] and we know that they spent part of every day reading
Vergil together. Though Augustine says he often spent half the night awake in prayer
and meditation, the dialogues themselves are not dramatically theological. They seem to
have been modest attempts to use the professional expertise of a rhetorician and
philosopher to clarify technically the questions that had perplexed him. (The dialogues
show a charming modesty about the powers of philosophical argument. In the midst of a
long, abstract argument among the men, Monica would come into the discussion and in
a few words, often quoting scripture, summarize an argument more clearly and
concisely than the men had been able to do.)

In the spring of 387, Augustine and his friends returned to Milan for the forty days of
preparation for baptism that preceded Easter. Then at the Easter vigil service on the
night of Holy Saturday Augustine was baptized by Ambrose. Many people at that time,
when Christianity was the fashionable road to success in the Christian empire, may have
taken such a step casually and returned to their old ways, but Augustine was not one of
them.

The great world of Rome had to be given up. Ambition now seemed hollow and sterile.
Instead, Augustine and his friends decided to return to Africa, where they could still
command a little property at Tagaste, to live in Christian retirement, praying and
studying scripture. For a time their return home was held up by military disorders: a
usurper came down out of Gaul and killed the emperor who resided at Milan, with
ensuing disruption to the ordinary flow of commerce and travel in the western
Mediterranean. While Augustine's party was at the port of Ostia near Rome, waiting for
a boat back to Africa, Monica died.

Augustine returned to Africa at about the same age at which Dante found himself in the
dark wood--thirty-five, halfway to the biblical norm of threescore and ten. He settled
down at Tagaste in 389 with a few friends to form what we call, somewhat
anachronistically, a monastery; it was probably very like the household at the villa at
Cassiciacum in the winter of 386-87, but without the Vergil. Augustine would gladly
have stayed there forever.
But such talent and devotion could not be left alone. Two years later, while on a visit to
the coastal city of Hippo Regius, he found himself virtually conscripted into the
priesthood by the local congregation. He broke into tears as they laid hands on him in
the church and his fate became clear. Cynics in the audience thought these were tears of
ambition and disappointment at not being made bishop straight off, but they were only
tears of deeply felt inadequacy. Augustine had for some time been avoiding cities that
needed bishops in fear of just such a fate.

He soon enough accepted his fate. He asked his new bishop, Valerius, for a little time to
prepare himself for his duties. Now, if not before, he devoted himself to the mastery of
the texts of scripture that made him a formidable theologian in the decades to come. His
first expressly theological treatises come from this period, devoted mainly to attacking
the Manichees he knew so well. (Not only did his experience make him an astute critic
of the cult, but it was politic for him to take a stand publicly, to thwart the inevitable
innuendoes from other Christians that perhaps he had not truly abandoned the Persian
cult but was some kind of Trojan horse sent to subvert the church.) His abilities were
quickly recognized, and by 393 he was being asked to preach sermons in place of his
bishop, who was a Greek speaker by birth. The old man passed on in 395 and Augustine
assumed responsibility for the church at Hippo. He would remain at this post until his
death thirty-four years later.

Conventional accounts sketch Augustine's episcopal career in terms of the controversies

in which he took part. This brief sketch will do likewise; but I must first point out the
main inadequacy of this approach. Augustine's first order of business through the
decades of his episcopate was the care of the souls entrusted to him. Most of his life was
an endless round of audiences with his clergy and his people. He was constantly called
upon to adjudicate all kinds of disputes that had arisen in a world where the man of God
was more to be trusted as judge than the greedy magistrate sent from abroad to represent
Roman justice.[[8]] The real focus of his activity lay elsewhere still: the liturgy.

The early church was an institution centered upon the worship of the community. Of a
Sunday, every orthodox Christian in Hippo could be found jammed into Augustine's
basilica, standing through a service that must have lasted at least two hours. We know
from the hundreds of sermons that survive how much care and imagination Augustine
put into preaching, tailoring his remarks to suit the needs and capacity of his audience.
The man who had been orator enough to declaim for emperors must have been a
spellbinding preacher.

But even the homiletics of Augustine did not efface the dignity of the central act of
worship. God was present on the altar for these people and this event was the center of
Christian community life. Lukewarm believers in the throng attended out of respect for
social pressure and a fear of divine wrath and were not much moved, but for Augustine,
this was his central task. The controversies were only sideshow, important only when
they threatened to disrupt the unity of the community's worship.

But we know Augustine for his writings, and many of them were controversial. Three
great battles had to be fought: the first was an ecclesiastical struggle for the very life of
his community, the second a philosophical battle to effect the Christianization of Roman
culture, and the last a theological quarrel of great subtlety over the essentials of faith
and salvation. The first is the most obscure to moderns, while the second and third will
be treated in more detail in the chapters that follow. Here we will concentrate on the
ecclesiastical war that Augustine fought and won in his first decade and a half as bishop.

Donatism is the movement Augustine opposed, named after a bishop at Carthage some
eighty years before Augustine's time to Hippo.[[9]] In those days the church had just
recovered from the last bitter wave of persecution begun in 303 by the emperors
Galerius and Diocletian. When fear subsided, Christians could breathe again and
indulge in recriminations over the lapses of some of their number in time of trial.

The official position of the church was that those Christians who had compromised their
religion in time of persecution could, with due repentance and atonement, be readmitted
to full membership in the religious community. But there was a minority faction of
enthusiasts who insisted that cooperation with the authorities in time of persecution was
tantamount to total apostasy and that if any traitors wanted to reenter the church they
had to start all over again, undergoing rebaptism. Evaluation of the credentials of those
who sought reentry would be in the hands of those who had not betrayed the church.

The logical result of the Donatist position was to make the church into an outwardly
pure and formally righteous body of redeemed souls. The orthodox party resisted this
pharisaism, seeing in it a rigorism inimical to the spirit of the gospels. But Africa was
known for its religious zealots and the new Donatist movement proved a resilient one.
Even after official imperial disapproval had been expressed, the schismatic church
continued to grow and prosper. By the time of Augustine's consecration as bishop, in
fact, it looked as if the "orthodox" party was on the wane. In Hippo itself the larger
church and the more populous congregation belonged to the Donatists in the early 390s.
A constant state of half-repressed internecine warfare persisted between the
communities. Popular songs and wall posters were pressed into service in the cause of
sectarian propaganda. In the countryside, Donatist brigands ambushed orthodox
travelers in bloody assaults.

Augustine began his anti-Donatist campaign with tact and caution. His first letters to
Donatist prelates are courteous and emphasize his faith in their good will. He assumed
that reasonable men could settle this controversy peaceably. But Augustine quickly
discovered that reason and good manners would get him nowhere. In the late 390s, then,
Augustine resigned himself to a course of action others in the church had long been
urging: the invocation of government intervention to repress the Donatists. Augustine
was dismayed at coercion in matters of religion, but consented to the new policy when
he became convinced that the perversity and obtuseness of the Donatists were complete.
[[10]] Even charity itself demanded that the Donatists be compelled to enter the true
church in the hope that at least some would genuinely benefit from the change. They
could not be worse off than they were.

Even when this policy had been settled upon, another decade of instability remained.
Finally, in 411, an imperial commissioner conducted a detailed hearing into the facts of
the matter, attended by hundreds of bishops from both orthodox and Donatist factions,
and decided in favor of the orthodox party. From this time on Donatism was illegal and,
though the schismatic community apparently showed some signs of life in remote parts
of Africa until the Moslem invasions centuries later, the back of the movement had been
broken, and at least the security and position of the orthodox party had been guaranteed.
The principle for which Augustine fought deserves emphasis. Christianity was not, he
claimed, something external and visible; it was not to be found in obedience to certain
clearly-defined laws. Christianity was a matter of spirit rather than law, something
inside people rather than outside. Most important, the church had room within itself for
sinners as well as saints, for the imperfections of those in whom God's grace was still
working as well as for the holiness of the blessed. Augustine drew the boundary of the
church not between one group of people and another but rather straight through the
middle of the hearts of all those who belonged to it. The visible church contained the
visible Christians, sins and all; the invisible church, whose true home lay in heaven,
held only those who were redeemed. Charity dictated that the visible church be open to
all, not lorded over by a few self-appointed paragons choosing to admit only their own
kind.

In A.D. 410, the city of Rome, with all its glories, was taken by barbarians under the
leadership of the Visigoth Alaric. It is customary to say that shock waves ran throughout
the Roman world at this event, but it is more correct to say that shock waves ran
through those citizens of the Roman world prosperous enough to care about expensive
symbols of Roman grandeur. A fair number of wealthy Romans fled the city to country
estates in Campania, in Sicily, and in north Africa. Enough of them showed up in Hippo
for Augustine to warn his flock that they should receive the refugees with open arms
and charity.

Not long after the refugees settled on their African estates and began to frequent the
salons of Carthage, the more intellectual among them began to wonder aloud whether
their new religion might not be to blame for the disaster they had suffered. After all, the
argument ran, Rome had been immune from capture for fully eight hundred years; but
now, just two decades after the formal end of public worship of the pagan gods
(commanded by the emperor Theodosius in 391), the city fell to the barbarians. Perhaps
it was true what pagans had said, that the new Christian god with ideas about turning the
other cheek and holding worldly empires in low esteem was not an efficient guardian of
the best interests of the ruling class. Most of the people who indulged in these idle
speculations were themselves Christian. The "paganism" of these people was no revival
of ancient religion, but only the persistence of the ancient notion of religion as a bargain
you struck with the gods in order to preserve your health, wealth, and complacency.

Augustine was invited by a friend, the imperial commissioner Marcellinus, who was in
Africa to look into the Donatist quarrel for the emperor, to respond to these charges. He
knew that it was more than a question of why Rome fell; here were Christians who still
did not know what Christianity was about, how it differed from the Roman religions it
had replaced. His response was a masterpiece of Christian apologetics, City of God,
whose composition stretched over fifteen years. The first books, consoling those the
Visigoths had frightened, were published quickly and seem to have done their job. But
the work as a whole continued to come forth in installments, revealing a broad vision of
history and Christianity.

Marcellinus, a devout layman, also played a part in the the last great controversy of
Augustine's life. One of the refugees from Rome had been an unassuming preacher
named Pelagius, who had stirred up a moral rearmament movement at Rome.[[11]]
Pelagius seems to have appealed particularly to affluent ladies whom he urged to set an
example through works of virtue and ascetic living. He apparently had a considerable
effect for the good on the conduct of those with whom he came in contact. But
Augustine saw in Pelagius and his followers an extreme position exactly opposite to the
one he had just rebuked in the cultured critics of Christianity, but one no less dangerous.
Pelagianism, as we shall see in more detail later on, was theologically rather similar to
Donatism, in that it assumed that people could, by their own virtue, set themselves apart
as the ones on whom God particularly smiled.

Augustine never met Pelagius, though the latter had passed through Hippo in late 410.
Instead, he had to deal at all times with the "Pelagians," the most notorious of whom,
Caelestius, was apparently a good deal more tactful and restrained than his teacher had
been. While Pelagius went off to the Holy Land, where he became an unwilling center
of controversy as he visited the sacred sites, Caelestius and others back in Africa waded
into the fray with Augustine. Whatever the merits of the case, Augustine's side prevailed
in the ensuing controversy. The authority of the papacy was invoked eventually--not
without difficulty--and later that of the ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431. Pelagius
and his disciples were clearly and soundly defeated.

But the controversy did not end with the defeat of Pelagius. Augustine had to face
further questions, as the logical consequences of the positions he took against Pelagius
were examined by friend and foe alike. Both in Africa and in Gaul, monks and their
leaders protested that the Augustinian theology of grace undermined their own ascetic
efforts in the cloister. In Italy, the young bishop of Eclanum, Julian, engaged Augustine
in a bitter debate that tainted the last decade of the old bishop's life. A deep poignancy
marks the old man's dogged defense of himself and his belief against a young,
resourceful, and resilient foe.

Old age and pressing concerns at home eventually delivered Augustine from the
necessity of answering Julian. By 430, a band of barbarians had found its way even to
Africa. The Vandals, who had first come from Germany into Roman Gaul in 406 and
later passed through Gaul into Spain, had been invited into Africa by a Roman governor
in rebellion against the emperor. The Vandals, like the Saxons later in the same century,
proved to be deadly allies. In the summer of 430 they were besieging the city of Hippo
as the aged bishop lay dying within. Shortly after his death they captured the city. Not
long after, they captured Carthage and established a kingdom that lasted a century.

Augustine
Elements of Christianity
by James J. O'Donnell

Augustine's elevation to the bishopric of Hippo in 395 gave him full powers to preach
and teach in the church. Not long after, he characterized the bishop's life as one divided
between looking after his flock, snatching a little rest where he could, and meditating on
the scripture.[[1]] The last task was the most difficult and private: to preach and teach
meant to proclaim the biblical message.

Conscious of his duty, Augustine soon began a work in four books on scriptural
interpretation, which comes to us as his Christian Doctrine..[[2]] The first two books
and part of the third were written c. 395/396, while the remainder was added c. 426/427,
perhaps largely from notes and drafts retained from the earlier period.

Faith and Revelation

Just as an analysis of the use of language begins by using words of some kind, so an
exploration of Christian theology begins with assumptions central to that theology.
Augustine was conscious of these paradoxes, so Christian Doctrine begins with a dense
and subtle book in which he makes his assumptions explicit. Since the purpose of this
book is introductory, readers often pass through it briskly to get to the real business at
hand, the manual of exegesis in Books 2 and 3, without penetrating the sophistication of
thought and expression in this little summa of Christian teaching.

The starting point is deceptively simple and obvious. All teaching consists of two parts:
things and signs (1.2.2). Theology makes certain claims, using the signs of language,
about the things that make up reality. It begins with the metaphysical claim, to be
explored in detail in the later books of Christian Doctrine, that language and reality can
be securely related to each other in some way.

Every sign, of no matter what sort, is itself a thing. Semaphore gestures with the hands
are just so much flesh in motion; language is just so much blast of wind; a printed text is
just a curiously ornate arrangement of ink on paper. Before any sign can have meaning,
it must be given that meaning by some reasoning being. Hence there is no watertight
division between things and signs. Mark Twain's description in Life on the Mississippi
of the complex language the riverboat pilot could read where laymen could only see
ripples on the stream is a relevant parable of the conventional nature of language. For
the purposes of this preliminary book, Augustine will concern himself with things
insofar as they are things and leave the discussion of the interpretation of signs until
later.

In this world, things exist as we encounter them. Augustine thus defines only two
classes: the things that we enjoy and the things that we use (1.3.3). This, like the
distinction between signs and things, is a purely utilitarian distinction and makes (for
the moment) no metaphysical claims. Some things enter our consciousness as
instruments by which other things may be obtained or affected --they are there to be
used. Other things seem to have more final value, and are objects for which instruments
are employed..[[3]] At first it is unclear whether Augustine intends any absolute
distinction between classes of things or merely a distinction in our relations with things.
For the most part, the latter seems to obtain. Things to be enjoyed themselves seem to
fall into a hierarchy with a single highest good--enjoyed but never used--at the pinnacle.

But this ethical analysis will preoccupy us a little further on, after we have seen the
theological use Augustine makes of his distinction. Suffice it to say for the moment that
the distinction itself (like the distinction between things and signs) is purely neutral and
does not point towards any particular value system. Augustine's purpose in these short
opening chapters is to provide himself with a neutral vocabulary with which to describe
basic Christian doctrine. Indeed, the whole of the first book is a tour-deforce for the way
Augustine can use two simple a priori categories as the framework for a full and
comprehensive theoretical description of Christian theology.

Even after we appreciate this, we are slightly unready for the abrupt statement that soon
follows: "The things to be enjoyed are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the very Trinity,
one particular thing, the highest of things, the same to all who enjoy it." (1.5.5) Here the
philosopher, who has appreciated Augustine's analysis and perhaps likened it to that of
Kant, suddenly and urgently suspends his consent. So flat and arbitrary a statement as
this prejudices all debate about the way values will be assigned using the thing/sign and
use/enjoyment distinctions. Augustine knew this perfectly well; the aim of this treatise,
after all, was to discuss Christian doctrine. At some point, Augustine had to begin to
speak of specifically Christian things. He was not one to do so in any tentative or
questioning manner.

Two things need to be said about this assumption (some would say arrogation) of
authority. First, when he wrote these words, Augustine spoke as a bishop of the
Christian church, that is to say, as one of the direct successors of the apostles, with the
same authority to preach and teach in the church as they had. He spoke, not out of any
personal authority derived from superior wisdom and training, but out of the authority
that came to him by virtue of his office. He could say what the church said with no
diffidence at all.

Second, in due course he makes clear, as he describes the ways of God's intervention in
the world, how it is that this ecclesiastical authority makes sense within the structure of
Christian doctrine. But it must be admitted and emphasized that this work exists only
within that structure. Augustine was never concerned with demonstrating the truth of
the Christian religion entirely on the basis of principles accessible to the unaided human
reason. As Christian Doctrine makes clear, divine revelation, that is to say, intervention
in human affairs by a power anterior to all human reasoning, is the necessary condition
of Christian theology. Perhaps when that revelation has done its work well, it might be
possible to reconstruct the doctrines of Christianity as they would appear if the unaided
human reason were in fact capable of devising them, but even in that case, only faith
would make it possible to assent to that exercise of the rational faculty.

At any rate, Augustine is clear in stating where he begins: with the trinity. He lived at
the end of a century that had worked out the church's basic trinitarian doctrines, at the
ecumenical councils of Nicea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. Christians finally had a
universal vocabulary in which to state what they believed about God, Christ, and the
Spirit lucidly and concisely without error or imprecision..[[4]] Simple creeds are
important as a foundation for a treatise such as this; when new candidates for church
membership were instructed for baptism during the forty days before Easter, two themes
predominated: introduction to the creed as a statement of the essentials of belief (all
creeds were trinitarian in shape; what we call the Apostles' Creed was one of the most
common) and introduction to the Lord's prayer as the prime medium of spirituality.

In a few chapters, Augustine then states the essentials of Christian belief in God, with a
most important preamble: God is ineffable, that is, we can say nothing truly meaningful
about one who transcends the categories of human language. Indeed, it is the wisdom of
God that gives reasonableness to all things in human life. This feat is accomplished
through the incarnation of the Word of God--and suddenly we have moved to the
second person of the trinity. The mystery of incarnation is the nexus between God and
man, by which, "though God himself is our home, for our sake he made himself the very
road that would lead us home." A brief summary of the human life of Christ culminates
with the resurrection and ascension (1.6.6 - 1.15.14).

What follows is an assertion that the church is the true body of Christ (1.16.15). What
Augustine does not say so explicitly as we would like (but what would be obvious to his
audience) is that in his discussion of the church we are meant to see the presence of the
third person of the trinity, the Spirit. The foundation of the church at the first Pentecost
consisted in the gift of the Spirit to the apostles gathered in the upper room. Viewed in
this way, the three persons of the trinity represent God the unapproachable, God the
mediator, and God the indwelling spirit. Knowledge, through revelation, moves down
from above in this image, while human response moves back up from the church (body
of Christ) to Christ (Word of God) to the ineffable godhead itself.

Here in a dozen pages, then, Augustine has laid out his assumptions. Since they arise
from the teaching authority of the church he represented, his statement of them thus
resembles in outline one of those simple baptismal creeds. But although he has
presented this material in what seems to be a rather abstract and forbidding way, his is
in fact a manner precisely suited to the development of his hermeneutical theory and
practice in the following books. The second principal section of the first book of
Christian Doctrine is devoted to a sketch of the implications of the distinction between
use and enjoyment (1.22.20 - 1.34.38). This outline makes sense when seen as a
statement of the way in which members of the church, the body of Christ, are to conduct
themselves.

The fundamental principle persists in all its simplicity: human beings are to enjoy God.
All other things and people they are to use.

To our ears this sounds crudely exploitative. We do not like to "use people." We have
learned to appreciate the hidden costs of traditional social structures, and the self-
seeking possibilities of apparent altruism. Can Augustine be rescued from a charge of
cynicism? Perhaps..[[5]] He insists that what makes all the difference is the object
towards which "use" is directed. We are rightly repelled when we see at a man who
"uses" people to aggrandize power and satisfy greed; in that case, the object towards
which "use" is directed is the selfish interest of a single individual with no right to such
advantage over his fellows and no sure intrinsic goodness or benevolence to lighten his
rule.

For Augustine, the aim is altogether different. The center of all "enjoyment" is God--
perfectly good, perfectly benevolent, perfectly reliable. God rules creation in somewhat
the way that a playwright rules the stage, but God is much more firmly in control. God's
goodness is so complete and perfect that dependence on his judgment and authority is
completely without danger or risk. The behavior of petty tyrants in this world becomes,
in Augustine's view, a vicious mimicry of divine governance, with some of the structure
retained, but with all of the values perverted. What makes the difference is a good or
bad object of "enjoyment."
Augustine envisions, moreover, a situation in which all "enjoyment" of ourselves is at
least potentially ruled out. The goodness of God is so great and his judgment so reliable
that the individual can abandon all self-will and self-directed exploitation once and for
all. To say that Christians exploit others becomes then a special way of describing
obedience to the second of the two great commandments of Christianity: "Thou shalt
love thy neighbor." We are to love that which is good in our neighbors for the love of
God, while hating what is evil, and to "use" ourselves in exactly the same relentless and
uncompromising fashion. This kind of love sounds terrifying (perhaps "awesome" is a
better word), but if it can be given perfectly, with exact perceptions of good and evil, it
can lose all power to terrify. In like manner, something "terrific" always adheres to
Christian descriptions of heaven, for heaven's is a life that knows nothing of the quirks,
foibles, and small irrational attachments of human life in this world. The life described
is one fit only for heroes--but promised to all. No longer is it as universally obvious as it
once was that all men and women naturally desire such a life.

The Augustinian ethic reveals itself in practice as hierarchical. Proper use of all people
and things requires an accurate assessment of their relative value in the plan of
salvation. All right love is based on right knowledge. Order exists in nature, and only
when order is perceived (that is, only when nature is seen as God created it and not
merely as man imagines it) can the commandments of love genuinely be fulfilled. As
Augustine puts it, "That man lives in justice and holiness who is an uncorrupted judge
of things. He has an ordinate love and neither loves what he should not love, nor fails to
love what he should love, or loves one thing more than he should, nor loves two things
equally that deserve different loves, nor loves differently two things that deserve equal
loves. Every sinner, insofar as he is a sinner, is not to be loved; but every man, insofar
as he is a man, is to be loved on account of god. God is to be loved on account of
himself."(1.27.28)

The implications of the Christian idea of love that was preached throughout Europe for
over a thousand years deserve to be drawn a little more clearly. First, ordinary self-love
is put in its place. Men are part of a whole larger than themselves and their needs and
wants cannot dictate values to the whole. They have responsibilities, even to
themselves, to recognize that this is so and to refrain from asserting private advantage at
the expense of others--and even where others would not be hurt. The seven deadly sins
(pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth, and wrath), even if committed in perfect
solitude, do harm to the sinner. (A system of this kind takes the individual seriously in a
way that one which merely counsels that we refrain from harming others cannot. This
quality of the Augustinian system deserves to be called democratic.)

Second, love of fellow man appears in new light. The romantic love that was invented
in the middle ages and glorified in the modern world runs a risk of going astray, for
when the love of one person for another becomes all-consuming and exclusive, it begins
to resemble idolatry (the medieval authors who toyed with the notion we call courtly
love still knew this) and becomes a kind of false religion. When the lover's praise of his
mistress flirts with hyperbole, it is forgiveable, but when the hyperbole begins to be
taken seriously, some derangement has occurred.

Third, this view of love is profoundly communitarian. In a system in which every

person voluntarily knows and accepts his or her place in the ordered pattern of society
and acts for the best interests of every other member of that society and of the society as
a whole at all times, a theoretically perfect life is in view. The medieval world could
both attempt to establish such a system on earth and yet accept the inevitability of
failure through sin; the modern world either tries to establish such a utopian system
(under a variety of dictatorial regimes) or else (under more liberal regimes) refuses to
believe that such a system is even possible--both systems pervert the democratic ideal
by carrying it to excess. True love of neighbor eschews grand schemes that attempt to
impose one person's views on others and contents itself with doing what is possible.
"We ought to hope all men love God with us," (1.29.30) Augustine says, and explains
by a homely example. Consider, he says, the devoted fan of some theatrical celebrity
and how he loves everyone who shares his enthusiasm--not for the sake of those who
share the enthusiasm, but for the sake of the star they all admire; and consider how he
labors ceaselessly to spread his enthusiasm far and wide; and how he loathes with a
special passion anyone he finds who is indifferent to the charisma of the beloved. In
parody this is how God and man could behave towards one another, on condition that
man truly understood and accepted the perfect goodness and desirability of God.

At this point in Christian Doctrine, Augustine inserts what looks like a digression on
the relations of men and angels (1.30.31-33)..[[6]] Augustine stresses certain features of
the picture he has just drawn by making us consider it sub specie aeternitatis, and so he
draws us for a moment out of the morass of imperfect human society and bids us
consider heaven. Will we still love our neighbor in heaven? Yes, but in a much different
way; for there, our neighbors will no longer need our help to draw near to God, and our
love will concentrate itself much more directly on God himself.

This shows how much the sinfulness of human life makes love of neighbor a more
rather than a less urgent command. Our fellow mortals are in a state every bit as
perilous as our own, at all times in danger of eternal damnation and loss of God. In that
light, their need for our help becomes obvious and the legitimacy of conceiving love of
neighbor in terms of the use/enjoyment distinction becomes more intelligible.

The next section of Book 1 takes another unexpected turn. Suddenly Augustine is
talking about how God does not enjoy us, but rather uses us himself (1.31.34). First we
began with God, then saw the structure of divine involvement in human life, and now
have been considering the human response to that divine gesture. Here in the last
chapters of this part of the book, we return to the point at which we began, considering
the relation between God and man from God's point of view at last. This is a salutary
reminder that Augustine's view of the world is resolutely theocentric, and that indeed if
it were not so, we could easily charge him with hypocrisy. To take God's point of view
as the most important is a logical consequence of the principles Augustine has been
discussing in earlier chapters.

For since God is the central point of all that exists, God does not, in some half-hearted
reciprocal way, treat us just as we treat him. He acts instead with what could be
described as an act of justified selfishness, making us the instruments of his own
goodness and glory. God alone of all need not be humble. God is the source of all that
is: insofar as men share in his being, they are good; insofar as men are evil, they decline
to share that goodness and so earn punishment--which is, in the truest sense of the
hackneyed phrase, "for their own good." When we love God and God loves us, we act
in all ways in God, and thence comes all power to act for the good of all.
Hence a recapitulation of the themes of the book (1.32-35). First, the distinction
between use and enjoyment gains new force from the finality of what has just been said
about God; then, attention returns to the way that leads us home, that is, to Christ the
mediator. Finally, Augustine confronts us with the crucial point of contact where theory
becomes practice in the church animated by the spirit and, in particular, through the
revealing act of God in scripture. A brief chapter is worth quoting in full:

"The sum and substance of all we have said here is this: let the reader understand that the
whole aim and purpose of God's law and scripture is the love of that which is to be enjoyed
[i.e., God] and of that which can enjoy along with us [i.e., neighbor]; for there is no need of a
command to love ourselves. For us to know and do this, this whole worldly arrangement was
made by divine providence for our salvation. We are to use the world, not with the love and
delight we would show to our true home, but only with the passing love we would give a
highway or the vehicles of travel. We love the things that carry us only because we love the
place to which they carry us." (1.35.39)

This world, then, is not our true home. We belong with God. The world of creation is
inferior to its creator and can only offer a temporary resting place. (Man is unique in the
created world, for his soul, the thing that makes him special, is immortal and destined to
persist even in the presence of God--that is one part of what it means to say that man is
created in the image and likeness of God.) We are meant to live in this world as we
would live in a foreign country. If we are truly citizens of the homeland we have left,
we will pine for it, struggle to live according to its customs, and devote ourselves to
making our way home. On that journey, we should not become so enamored of the inns
and carriages that serve our journey that we give up the journey itself.

Human life, therefore, is transient. All that we touch passes away, and well it should; for
all that we touch is good if it leads us home to God, but bad if it keeps us from him. The
sweeping categorical effect of this principle cannot be minimized. As we shall see,
Augustine is always aware that even the trappings and instruments of ecclesiastical
office, which exist only to bring man closer to God, can themselves become instruments
of damnation if he begins to love them for themselves.

The principle is universal. Though all things are potentially good (if used for the proper
end), all things are potentially evil (if used for the wrong end, selfishly or idolatrously).
Augustine is often suspected of an innate hostility to material creation, and this view is
called (depending on the prejudice of the viewer) crypto-Manicheism or lingering
Neoplatonism. The fact is that his suspicion, in the mature years after his conversion,
had narrowed itself to focus upon the attitudes that people bring to material creation. If
they treat it with due tentativeness, as something good for the moment but to be
relinquished in a moment if love of God requires it, then both they and the things they
touch are good and beautiful. But no matter how beautiful created nature is, it can
become the focus for wrongful loves that lead people away from God. Then for those
people, it is evil.

A more general point demands attention in this context. On the one hand, there are
plenty of things that are intrinsically and objectively wrong to do; but at the same time
(and the paradox of those last four words will come back to haunt us later), the intention
with which men perform all acts (both those good and bad in themselves) is of
everlasting importance. In making this claim, Augustine seems to render absurd the
usual categories of logical analysis.

We will see time and again that such a taste for paradox is not incidental to Augustine's
thought. Rather, he sees in many of the formal contradictions of human thought the
persistent imperfection of the human mind. In Book 1 of Christian Doctrine, for
example, he asserted the essential unity of knowledge and action by claiming that all
right love (the only form of action that is morally justified) is based on and grows out of
right knowledge, and at the same time claimed that right knowledge, which contains the
command to love, is impossible unless united with right action in love. This theory
unites faith with love, for faith is the one valid source of knowledge for fallen men, and
love is the only acceptable moral response to that faith; but the combination of
principles is a challenge to our usual logical categories. What Augustine is claiming is
that the deepest of philosophical chasms, the distinction between subject and object, is
itself an illusion born of sin and not an inherent quality of reality.

Modern physicists suspect that the observer cannot separate himself from the system he
observes, but as heirs of the western philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato and
Aristotle they have found it difficult to cope with the realization. The radical difference
between Christian theology and that traditional western philosophy is nowhere more
sharply defined than here. What Augustine says is that we cannot exist in the world
simply as knower and observer. To do so is to condemn ourselves to a partial existence,
imperfect and incomplete. The fullness of human life comes only when knowledge and
observation are perfectly integrated with action and participation. The real Manicheism
of our culture is that of the philosophical tradition that invented the distinction between
mind and body--invented it because an imperfect world seems in practice to demand it,
because men can in fact behave as though such a distinction were possible. Christianity
turned away from that pessimistic habit of mind to claim that the semblance of division
is only temporary and comes about as a result of our own actions, not of anything
intrinsic in ourselves or the world.

Christian redemption is then the final healing of all the divisions that sin brings. Though
spirit and flesh are at war with one another in the disorder of the fallen world, in the
resurrection of the body they will be rejoined again in a harmony that Augustine insists
once existed. Better still, the deepest rift of all, between the eternal and perfect creator
and his mortal and sinful creations, will itself be healed in the unity of the beatific
vision. Evil itself will not merely be vanquished; it will be seen never to have existed.
All these doctrines defy the power of fallen reason to comprehend or accept them, for
fallen reason itself is the source of the mutually contradictory categories that seem to
make such ideas impossible. Christian faith, while claiming to be ultimately in complete
accord with authentic reason, starts out as a scandal to reason, insisting we believe pairs
of contradictory propositions simultaneously. Only faith can cross this divide;
Augustine begins on the other side.

Scripture and Interpretation

Christianity is a religion of the book, but the book did not spring out of a vacuum: hence
the first book of Christian Doctrine. The authority of the believing community precedes
and guarantees the authority of the book. Thus the Christian student of scripture brings
certain first principles along to the study of the book. The text itself, like the church, is
only an instrument of divine authority. For both church and scripture the active agent of
revelation is God, working through Christ, the Word.

Though we have placed his preliminary discussion under a separate heading, for
Augustine the first book of Christian Doctrine was part and parcel of his theory of
interpretation, because acceptance of the basic doctrines enunciated there was the
foundation of all understanding of scripture. According to our way of thinking, the
formally hermeneutic part of Augustine's treatise begins only with the last few chapters
of Book 1, where the principles outlined are restated to show their applicability to the
study of scripture.

The beginning of all exegesis is love of God and love of neighbor. "Whoever thinks he
understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up
the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it. Whoever has drawn
from scripture an interpretation that does fortify this love, but who is later proven not to
have found the meaning intended by the author of the passage, is deceived to be sure,
but not in a harmful way, and he is guilty of no untruth at all." (1.36.40)

Hence church doctrine makes it clear that all scripture will contain the praise of this
double love (caritas) and the condemnation of all that is contrary to it--and nothing else.
Here a special quality of a scriptural text is seen: in addition to whatever the initial
writer meant to put into a text, there is also, always and everywhere, this deeper divine
message. What is important, then, is that this deeper message be uncovered. This
approach imputes a fundamentally instrumental quality to scriptural texts: God works
on the individual soul through scripture, and however God works is good. Having a
correct opinion about the meaning of an obscure word in scripture is a good thing, but
ultimately irrelevant; but having a correct opinion about the need to love God and
reform one's life is not only a good thing, but ultimately the only thing to be expected
from scripture.

If love of God and of neighbor is the goal of interpretation, the enemy of interpretation
is whatever does not allow that love to grow. The root of all lovelessness is the self-
assertiveness of pride. The one who sets himself up as an authoritative interpreter of
scripture in opposition to the reasonable suggestions of colleagues or the benign
direction of the church goes far astray, even if he does uncover much arcane and
accurate lore in the process. Not only is caritas the goal of interpretation, it is also the
only reliable means of interpretation.

This is obviously a counsel of perfection. Augustine knew that all are sinners and all
interpretations of scripture are imperfect, and he wanted to make sure the student of
scripture knew it. All interpretation is tentative and incomplete; all the more reason why
the only question that means anything is the one that asks whether the Word of God is
acting in the reader's soul right now.

Charity abides, then. What passes away, for the interpreter of scripture, is the whole
apparatus of interpretation, both practical and theoretical. But the purpose of Christian
Doctrine is to provide all that apparatus. Augustine is at pains to make it clear that the
apparatus is just that, a collection of instruments to be discarded when rendered
obsolete. The reading of scripture itself, which the apparatus makes possible, is itself
only a halfway measure. If text and interpretation become obstacles in the way of the
goal, they are to be thrust aside and other instruments, even if less sophisticated one, are
to be found.

So Augustine's humble scholar opens the Bible and begins to read. How is he to
proceed? To give order to his manual, Augustine uses a rough-and-ready division of the
problems the exegete faces. The categories are not in fact hard and fast, but rather
represent two broad overlapping areas on a single spectrum. At any rate, the first book
of Christian Doctrine enunciated Augustine's doctrine about things, so the remaining
books deal with signs. In Books 2 and 3 Augustine deals with exegetical questions as
such, distinguishing problems concerning signs of whose meaning one is ignorant
("unknown signs"--Book 2) from those concerning signs whose meaning is confused or
unclear ("ambiguous signs"--Book 3). Both categories seem merely to deal with
different degrees of ignorance, but Augustine is on to something a little more important
here. In Book 2, he will deal with those signs whose meaning is conventional and
uncontroversial and that can be made clear simply by the acquisition of readily available
common knowledge (chiefly problems of text, language and historical context). In Book
3, however, he will approach the stickier questions of obscurity that come about when
authors deliberately use signs in ways for which there are no conventional
interpretations. Augustine's compartments are convenient, but not watertight.

Before treating unknown signs in detail, Augustine first plants the reader concretely in
front of scripture itself and outlines some of its characteristic features--that is, its
obscurities. Augustine on obscurity must be understood carefully. He sets no value on
obscurity itself; rather, he sees obscurity as evidence of sin-darkened intelligence. The
business of the exegete is to abolish obscurity, but Augustine does not claim to live in a
perfect world. He accepts obscurity in scripture and is not unaware of the particular
pleasures it brings. Just as he will say elsewhere that the fall of Adam was a felix culpa
(happy fault) because it made possible the incarnation, so obscurity is the result of sin,
but it provides opportunities for the redeemed intellect that would not be available
otherwise.

The disentangling of obscurities is a matter of simple pleasure first of all. The mixture
of obscurity and clarity in scripture is one way scripture adapts itself to the taste and
preference of every audience. "This was undoubtedly arranged," Augustine says, "by
divine providence to subdue pride with toil and to excite the understanding from the
boredom it readily suffers solving similar problems."(2.6.7) To clarify his point, he
gives an example.

"Let someone tell me of holy and saintly men: the church of Christ draws on their
strength and example to strip new converts of their superstitions and proposes them as
models to imitate for those it incorporates into itself. The believers, good and true
servants of God, shrug off the burdens of the world and come to the holy fount of
baptism, coming up to bear fruit in the spirit of the twin love of God and neighbor. --So
why is it that when I hear this spoken plainly and clearly, I know nothing of the special
delight that comes when I read that passage in Solomon's Song in which the church in
the figure of a beautiful woman is addressed: 'Your teeth are like sheared sheep come up
from the sheepdip, who all give birth to twins, and there is none barren among them.'"
(2.6.7; Song of Songs, 4.2) Remarkable enough to delight in teeth compared to a flock
of reeking sheep, but harder still to accept that this passage of Song of Songs is to be
interpreted as Augustine indicates. Granting him his reading for a moment though (we
will have much more to say about that style in a few pages), one can see that his point is
intelligible. The struggle to decipher a passage like the one quoted can certainly give the
intellect a taste of its most characteristic pleasures; the game only seems jejune to the
outsider. The obscurity of scripture, then, is bait for the learned and the wise, who might
otherwise turn away if the entire text were simple and direct..[[7]]

And so the search begins. Augustine marks out seven steps to wisdom for the study of
scripture to ascend. Wisdom begins with fear of God, which in turns becomes loyal
obedience (for faith precedes understanding)..[[8]] Both are passive qualities,
acceptance rather than action. The turning point in the approach to wisdom is the third
step: scientia, or knowledge (which, as we saw in the last section, is the basis of all right
action), to which the study of scripture is an important (but not the only) contributor.
Knowledge gives birth to strength, which is the source of good counsel, which leads to
purity of heart, which is the final prerequisite to wisdom. Wisdom, then, is the result of
both knowledge and action, faith and caritas. The opposite are all joined in unity.
Wisdom can also be identified with divine wisdom, that is to say, Christ. This is in fact
the ascent to Christ..[[9]]

The clarity and unity of Augustine's view of scripture study lets him turn from this
theoretical statement of its nature and value to the most elementary of practical
questions: what books does scripture contain? This was a pressing question in
Augustine's time, because there was still no universal agreement on the exact number,
division, names, and order of the books of the Bible. Manuscripts of the Bible were still
in circulation that preserved orders and canons going back to early days; indeed, single
complete manuscripts of the whole of the Christian scriptures were rare; when the
whole was broken up in parts for convenience in handling, it obviously facilitated the
loss of some parts and the mixing of versions of others. Augustine does not treat the
Bible as a fixed and magical text sent down from on high: such an attitude would not
match the vulnerable condition of the text as it came to him. He sees it as a document
that draws its practical authority from the church. This does not mean that the church
has independent authority, for the power to make such decisions is the power of the
spirit. The test of the inspiration of scripture, then, is its recognition by the inspired
church. This standard of selection is valid both historically (that is how in fact the canon
of scriptures came to be: churches decided upon it) and theologically (the authority of
both book and church is God's authority working in both).

Augustine's list is similar to that used today. The early church had gotten its Old
Testament originally in the Greek Septuagint version made in Egypt before the time of
Christ, and hence its canon includes the so-called apocryphal books, which do not occur
in the Hebrew canon (and which were, for that reason, excluded by the early Protestant
reformers). His New Testament is identical to the modern canon..[[10]]

Such is the outer form of the text. How is it to be read? First, a general knowledge of the
contents should be obtained by thorough reading. What such a reading could be like is
difficult now even to imagine. Augustine himself began serious study of scripture only
after his thirtieth year, yet by the time he became a bishop in his early forties he could
quote from memory from virtually every book of scripture at will. This is not to say that
he had memorized the whole of scripture, but what struck him as significant he had little
trouble committing to memory. This preliminary reading of scripture should let the
reader absorb the principal ideas of the text in those passages where the message is
simple and clear. With those ideas in hand the reader can proceed to face the
obscurities.

The first obvious step is to learn the languages in which the scripture is written. Though
Augustine himself was never more than a modestly competent Greek scholar and was
completely innocent of Hebrew, he knew enough to admit his lacks and lament them.
Where there are obscurities, the first step is to find out if they go back to the original
text or not. (To obviate some of these problems, Jerome compiled a handbook much
used in the middle ages that gave the meanings of those Hebrew words occurring even
in the Latin translations of scripture, mainly proper names..[[11]]) Augustine knew full
well where the problems in the existing Latin translations came from: getting them
translated from Hebrew into Greek was difficult and the task was performed
infrequently, but from Greek into Latin was a different story: "In the early days of the
faith, whoever came upon a Greek text of scripture and had some little facility in each
language seems to have set himself to translating." (2.11.16) Understandably, this
abundance of often only marginally competent versions could lead to much confusion.

Augustine deserves our sympathy and respect for his handling of language problems. In
an ancient society where language was mainly a spoken idiom and any knowledge of
reading and writing was comparatively rare, it was difficult to find someone who knew
a language you wanted to learn well enough to teach it--and who was willing to stoop to
the labor of teaching, a task usually left to professionals or slaves. No bilingual
grammars or dictionaries existed. The problem was more acute still when a Christian
sought to find a teacher for Hebrew: few learned Jews were willing to be much help.
Faced with these obstacles, the most Augustine could do was express a pious respect for
such competence in the alien tongues as could be found and then resign himself to
making do with an obviously deplorable situation. What is remarkable is the
considerable success that attended even these crippled labors. Luck, instinct, knowledge
or parallel texts, and perhaps a little inspiration combined to make Augustine a more
than decently competent interpreter of scripture by any standards.

After a brief summary of some working principles by which to judge translations (2.12-
14), Augustine states his own preferences: in the Latin translations, he likes the so-
called Itala version, while among the Greek versions he likes the Septuagint.(2.15).
[[12]] He was suspicious of the new version that his near-contemporary Jerome was
producing in the desert near Bethlehem. Here, if anywhere, is where Augustine can be
blamed for conservatism, but it must be remembered that people are always
conservative about their versions of scripture. Throughout the middle ages, even after
Jerome's revision became the basis of the so-called Vulgate, particular passages from
the old translation with theological significance were remembered and quoted as
authoritative, on the principle that nobody could tell for sure whether the theologically
preferable (if linguistically obsolete) version could with certainty be eliminated..[[13]]

After some observations on the naturally figurative habits of language (for the remedy
of which Augustine later wrote a book called Figures of Speech from the Heptateuch),
he discusses at length the secular expertise that could be brought to bear on a text of
scripture (2.16-39). He recognizes the utility of consulting the learned books of secular
science for information to help understand a text of scripture. If scripture mentions a
solar eclipse and you have never seen such a thing, a treatise on astronomy will
undoubtedly be of use. But Augustine is mainly concerned here with warning his
Christian readers of abuses that may arise from overhasty trust of secular authors.

History books, for example, are slippery witnesses. If they just contain a record of
events, well and good; but only scripture contains a record of events from which a
deeper meaning can be drawn. Natural science is useful, but astronomy particularly is to
be handled with care, since in antiquity astronomy included most of what we call
astrology. Augustine's concern is to make sure the reader understands that for the
Christian there can be no other independent, self-verifying, non-subjective source of
knowledge besides divine inspiration working through the church and its scriptures.
Omen and astrology are particularly to be avoided, but all abuse of the secular sciences
is to be avoided.

This is a skeptical way of looking at secular wisdom, but there is another side to it all.
Even philosophers, and especially the Platonists, can be read with profit--if proper care
is taken. The biblical image Augustine invokes was popular among Christians
considering the uses of secular wisdom. "Remember the Egyptians not only offered
idols and terrible oppression, which the Israelite people hated and fled, but they owned
vessels and ornament of gold and silver, and fine clothing besides, which the Israelites
took for themselves in secret as they left Egypt, claiming it all for a better use."(2.40.60)
The Christian student of scripture is to rob the Egyptians of their gold, taking what is
valuable from secular authors and leaving behind what is idolatrous and useless.

But none of these practical remarks penetrates to the essence of scriptural interpretation.
The prudent warnings of Book 2 could be directed with little change to anyone
undertaking the scholarly study of a difficult text. But for Augustine, scripture is not
just a difficult text, and scriptural study not just a matter of scholarship. Book 3 of
Christian Doctrine reaches the central questions.

So methodical is Augustine's mind that he is constantly impeded from getting to central

issues by the need to deal with (to him) unavoidable preliminary questions. What about
ambiguity that resists the application of specialized knowledge? First you must be sure
you have read the passage correctly. Have you read it with the correct punctuation and
deciphered its syntax correctly? (The ancient reader, confronted with a manuscript
devoid of punctuation, required reading skill of a different order from what we need
when we open our neatly printed books.)

Given these cautions, he is ready now to face fundamental problems of scriptural

ambiguity. The most important principle is that thing and sign be adequately
distinguished from each other. The literal meaning of a text (that is to say, its
presentation of things as things plain and simple) should be respected, but the reader
should be alert to detect any and all shifts into a more figural mode of speaking (when
the things are also signs of something besides themselves). This may be technically
imprecise, but it is still intelligible. Augustine is fond of these analytical distinctions
(like thing/sign) that work in a variety of shifting contexts. A scriptural text is nothing
but a collection of signs; but those signs are used to present things to our mind; but
some of the things presented to our mind have further signifying power either in
themselves or because the author has willed it so. Hence it makes sense to distinguish,
within the signs of a text, between signs to be taken literally and signs to be taken
figuratively.
Augustine had a scriptural basis for his undertaking. He quotes here (3.5.9) Paul to the
Corinthians, "The letter kills, but the spirit gives life." (2 Cor. 3.6) In that quotation is a
wealth of early Christian doctrine..[[14]] The Christian intuition is that all scripture is
scriptural. If the Bible is the revealed word of God, then every word of the Bible is itself
revelation. Paul naturalized the Old Testament as part of Christian scripture by insisting
that the fullness of New Testament revelation could already be glimpsed, in a partial,
evocative, and figurative way, through the Old Testament. The evolution of Christian
biblical criticism is the working out of this principle. For the Greek world, Origen (c.
180-254) was the great master of the technique, while the chief Latin authorities
(heavily dependent on Origen) were Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome..[[15]]

The name of the method is allegory, and its traditional ancient definition is "saying one
thing to mean another." In strictest sense, all reading is allegorical (when I read the
word "horse" I understand the thing horse), but in fact the term limits itself to the use of
language to carry a second meaning beneath the obvious surface. Christianity applies
this principle to the whole of scripture, with the adventurous difference that it does not
matter whether the author of the particular passage intended an allegorical meaning
consciously or not. At bottom, only one story is told anywhere in scripture: the
redemption of mankind by Christ. The story of David is an edifying tale (read in the
literal sense) of God working in the world, but (in the allegorical sense) it also
foreshadows Christ. The Song of Songs is a wedding song about ordinary mortals, but
allegory instructs the Christian reader that the bride and groom can be taken as the soul
and Christ, as the church and Christ, or even (in a popular medieval interpretation) as
the Virgin and Christ.

This technique can readily be extended to almost any text: it almost becomes a parlor
game. But for the early Christian church, including Augustine, it was serious business,
for it was founded in scripture itself (cf. Gal. 4.21-31). Scripture was the proper subject
of this treatment and--here is the central point--the literal, original sense of the passage
must not be blotted out by the elucidation of allegory. Pagans had allegorized their own
great works of literature when advances in philosophy left them embarrassed with the
crudity of the classics. Thus they would claim that the Odyssey, for example, was only
the story of the purification of a soul and its return to a heavenly homeland. What
distinguished such interpretations form the Christian treatment of scripture was that the
pagans ceased altogether to claim historical value for their subject text, admitting it to
be mere myth or fiction. Christianity managed, combining opposites, to insist on the
literal truth of the Old Testament narrative and on the allegorical significance of the
narrative..[[16]] Book 3 of Christian Doctrine is Augustine's guide to allegory. But
here, it is important to note, theory is more important than practice. Augustine is
concerned not so much with giving his readers tools to work with as with making sure
they have the right motives and principles at the outset. Instruments will come to hand
once readers are face to face with the scriptural text. But getting the one right answer
does not count for much.

This may be a surprising claim to make about a Christian theologian seeking to interpret
scripture, but it is true and illuminating. Augustine was not concerned with training
schools of exegetes who would work independently and emerge with identical
interpretations of the same passages; or who, if identical interpretations did not emerge,
would work together in an atmosphere of mutual cooperation and inquiry until they had
resolved their differences and agreed on a common line of reading. This would strike
Augustine as a much too self-important way of going about the business of
interpretation. Interpretations were not to be judged by any evanescent standard of
objective accuracy in the natural order but by the absolute standard of orthodoxy and
truth in the spiritual order.

In the practical order, what matters is the effect of exegesis. If an interpretation of

scripture builds up caritas or (what amounts to the same thing) attacks its opposite,
cupiditas (selfish desire), then it is, absolutely speaking, a good interpretation. (3.10.15)
As long as it is in accord with the rule of faith (regula fidei, which is in essence what
Augustine outlined in Book 1), conformity to some external, but purely human standard,
of correctness is immaterial..[[17]] In the grasp of eternal and divine truth, the exegete
is left free to be as subjectively independent as he can be. A multitude of divergent
interpretations may exist side by side without harm, as long as all meet the basic
standards of building caritas, destroying cupiditas, and following the regula fidei.
Conformity to caritas is conformity to the truth of heaven. The principle of the regula
fidei insists that the belief of the entire Christian community is in itself the adequate
practical guide. These two standards impose a considerable amount of what Augustine
would recognize as objectivity on the subjective fantasies of the exegete. What matters
is not the interpretation itself. The quality of the exegesis judged according to some
professional, technical standard is irrelevant. What counts above all is the life of the
believer who reads the scriptural text in the light of the interpretation. If the reader
profits, the method is of little importance.

The reader will surely demand that certain minimum standards of fidelity to the text and
plausibility are met, and that will exercise an further influence over the exegete. But it is
for the exegete to know his own audience well enough to know what line of
interpretation will help them most. Augustine still insists that the aim of any discourse is
its persuasive effect on the reader, not conformity to a pretended standard of excellence
and order.

After Augustine had outlined these basic principles of interpretation, he put Christian
Doctrine aside for what turned out to be thirty years. From a point in Book 3 (at the end
of 3.25.35), the work as we have it is a continuation made in the late 420s. With the end
of the theoretical part of Book 3, Augustine had said all he had to say that was original
and important about scriptural interpretation. Anything beyond that point would consist
of actual interpretation itself, so directly did the theoretical principles point towards the
act of reading itself. As we shall see very soon, the practical hints tacked on to the work
at the end are of limited applicability, and some are obvious. What are we to make of
the work's main line of teaching?

First, it constitutes the Augustinian statement of what is the most revolutionary thing
about Christianity. Christianity does not merely depend on faith in God, it is that faith.
Christianity asserts that there is another way to knowledge besides the ones sense and
fallen reason discover for themselves. Moreover, Christianity claims that this other way
is inaccessible to mankind's unaided efforts. But finally, Christianity asserts that,
beyond all expectation, the eternal living God--the only being not affected by sin and
the fall--has intervened in human affairs to make the better way accessible. So superior
is that way and so intimately related to the life we should lead that to follow it is in itself
salvation. The theological description of this, however open to conflicting readings, is
"justification by faith alone."
In this world, this faith is manifest, above all, in Christ. Before Christ there had been
intimations, and after him reactions; but Christ himself is the Word of God itself. His
incarnation is the central act of revelation. Second to Christ in the worldly order, there is
the church, endowed expressly by Christ with the authority of the spirit and, in Christ's
absence, designated the arbiter of Christian doctrine. Third in order comes scripture,
with the New Testament holding the key for a proper reading of the Old.

But finally there is nothing the church can do to guarantee that the message will reach
those to whom it expounds scripture. The church cannot of itself give life to mere
words--unless, says Augustine, grace intervenes to make it happen. The most the church
can do is to to try to keep the book (and itself) as transparent as possible. Hence the
practical and self-effacing quality of Christian Doctrine.

Preaching and Teaching

But practical guidance is not worthless. In the conclusion Augustine added to Book 3 in
426/427, there is a list of seven rules for interpreting scripture, borrowed from a
Donatist writer, Tyconius--a rare example of a patristic writer publicly acknowledging a
debt to a member of a schismatic sect. Two things made it possible for Augustine to do
this. First, the Donatist schism was no longer, in the late 420s, the pressing concern that
it had been when Christian Doctrine was begun in the 390s. Second, Tyconius was not
a typical Donatist and was, indeed, often in trouble with his own sect for ideas that
brought him closer to the orthodox party.

Diffidence at naming Tyconius may have been part of the reason for deferring
completion of Christian Doctrine. But my own opinion is that Augustine was daunted
by the task of providing specific rules for the interpretation of scripture in practice
(finding it, as I said before, easier to practice the art than lay down detailed guidelines),
laid the work aside, and then came back to it and found it easier to add Tyconius's by no
means useless rules than concoct new ones of his own. These rules can be taken several
ways, but however read, they fall into two categories.

The simpler category is the most practical. Rules number four through six ("Of Species
and Genus," "Of Times," and "Recapitulation") are the most "literary," dealing
respectively with treatment of the figure of speech we would call synecdoche, with the
symbolism of numbers, and with some quirks of narrative sequence.

The rest of the rules are more in step with the theological preoccupations of Christian
Doctrine. The first rule, for example, "Of the Lord and His Body," incorporates a
theology of the church on which Tyconius was much closer to the orthodox than to the
Donatist view, drawing its inspiration from Pauline texts treating the church as the body
of Christ. The second rule, "Of the Bipartite Body of the Lord," complements the first
by treating two aspects of the church, that which is in the world intertwined with earthly
society (and which appears as the visible church) and that which has already passed
over to the afterlife.

When Augustine set out practical guidelines, even borrowed ones, he stayed close to the
central theological principles of his hermeneutic, and did not involve himself in laying
down narrow rules that would in fact hamper the exegete. Niggling attention to detail in
a work like Christian Doctrine would only have fostered literal-mindedness and made
mockery of what Augustine was trying to do. Only a deep grasp of first principles will
suffice as a guide in individual cases, for the interpretation of scripture in the absence of
such a grasp of fundamentals is not only imperfect but actually evil.

He is a little more specific when it comes to suggesting how to proclaim the meanings
the exegete discovers in scripture. Book 4 of Christian Doctrine is a manual of
Christian rhetoric for the beginning preacher..[[18]] No modern reader will intuitively
appreciate the break this book made with the past--with late antiquity's past and with
Augustine's personal past.

By the last centuries of the Roman empire, ancient education had become almost
exclusively education in rhetoric. Lip service was paid to the artes liberales, but
education was essentially a matter of mastering language. In principle this is no very
bad system of general education, but no educational system works very well for very
long. The unluckiest systems are the ones that work reasonably well at the outset and,
when they begin to falter, are fossilized by an educational public that believes that if one
can somehow just get back to doing things the way they were done in the halcyon days,
all will be well. This fate had overtaken Roman education.

In the Roman republic, there was a need for the rhetorical education. Young men of the
upper classes needed to be skilled orators to succeed in the rough and tumble of public
life. By the time the early emperors had made their grip on Roman society unshakeable,
rhetoric was useful mainly as a device for flattering the tyrant--still a socially useful
skill, but less satisfying to the questioning mind. As time passed, rhetoric became
routine, the canon of authors studied thoroughly dwindled to a few classics, and the
classroom became ever more remote from the real world. We have only to read
Augustine's pagan contemporaries to see how lifeless, stilted, and dull the Latin
language could become in some people with the very best late Roman educations.

Augustine himself had been party to this conspiracy of tedium in his early life. For him
of all people to write this last book of Christian Doctrine was dramatic evidence of the
distance he had traveled since abandoning his career as a professor. Where Roman
education had become hidebound by rules and pedantry, Augustine here sends a gust of
dry, cool wind through the musty cubbyholes of the rhetoricians.

His central heresy, from an ancient point of view, was his insistence that
communication is more important than elegance. To be intelligible is a greater thing
than to be stylish. "What is the use of a perfect speech," he asks, "that the audience
cannot follow, when there is no reason for speaking at all if the people we are talking to
do not understand us?" (4.10.24) We hear the preacher rather than the teacher, a man
who now had a message of pressing urgency to get across and was willing to consider
seriously what was needed to make his point. This was what late Roman education had
been missing: something to say. He advocated a "diligent negligence," conscious of the
paradox, indeed exploiting its fruitfulness. (Though capable of the high style --as in
Book 1 of City of God--Augustine as preacher preferred a simple, direct style, artful but
lucid.) Augustine is short on specifics. He contents himself with naming the three levels
of style (the humble, the ordinary, and the elevated), not so much to exhaust the
possibilities as to suggest them and to make the point that there was more than one way
to preach the Word (4.18-26)..[[19]]
Apart from the simplicity of Augustine's approach and his insistence on clarity over
elegance, the role of theology in this rhetoric would have dismayed an ancient
rhetorician as well. What is Augustine's last, pressing hint for the beginning preacher?
To begin every proclamation with prayer (4.30.63). The preacher of the Word of God
must be in touch with God in order to preach well. He should practice what he preaches
(4.27.59). Rhetorical skill in antiquity could be developed entirely independent of
commitment to the truth or falsehood of what one was saying; knowledge could be
detached from life, but not for Augustine.

Hence the justification for the most practical of his suggestions: when in doubt, quote
scripture. (4.5.8) Extensive quotation is one guarantee, however limited, that God will
speak through the preacher and reach the audience. Beyond that, the preacher himself
will grow accustomed to thinking of the language of scripture as a system of discourse
in which he feels at home. The best preacher is the one at home with the language of
God.

Augustine's exegesis, seen now in the completeness of his theory, is wholly self-
effacing. Exegesis has no ultimate worth, nor is a career as exegete something to be
aspired to in itself. Only if interpretation ends by removing itself from between the
reader of the sacred text and his God is it successful. If it remains, it is as a barrier rather
than an instrument and contributes nothing to the happiness of either interpreter or
audience. The last words of the book show Augustine proclaiming his diffidence. "I
give thanks to God that I have been able to expound in these four books, with whatever
trivial ability, not what sort of person I myself am--for I have many failings--but what
sort of person he should be who works at the business of sound instruction--Christian
instruction--not just for his own benefit but for that of others." (4.31.64)

The literary work that probably took Augustine's time and energies immediately after he
left Christian Doctrine uncompleted was nothing less than the Confessions. From an
arid, but theologically satisfactory, statement of what the Christian interpreter of
scripture (that is to say simply, the Christian) should be, he turned to an open and honest
work of self-revelation that becomes, by its end, both a work of scriptural interpretation
and (almost) an instrument of divine revelation itself. A connection must exist between
the two works, but we are only beginning to fathom it.

Augustine
Christianity and Society
by James J. O'Donnell

The Critique of Ideology[1]

"Things are seldom what they seem," crooned Little Buttercup, full of a revelation that
would transform the society around her. Augustine would have agreed. No a priori
reason compels us to think that appearances, depending directly on the subjective
experience of the observer, give any very coherent picture of reality. The perceptions
that record these appearances have no compelling independent authority. On this point
Christianity shares the ground with other philosophical and religious traditions. It holds
that there is such a thing as real being, and even that the world of appearances is directly
related to the world of real being. But it claims that human perception and reason is for
now impotent to deduce the exact nature of that relation, although human beings do not
cease to create patterns that claim to define the relation. In short, human beings live in a
dream world from which they can be liberated into reality only with help from outside.
Hence, revelation.

Revelation is at the center of Augustine's thought, for it functions in the order of

knowledge as grace functions in the order of action, and right knowledge and right
action are impossible without revelation and grace. Hence at every turn in Augustine we
observe that the formal patterns according to which he interprets the world of
appearances derive directly from his understanding of the way God's Word works in the
world. So Christian Doctrine is the necessary preliminary to everything else in
Augustine. When we consider his view of what we may somewhat whimsically call
"macrotheology," this is especially true. To understand the relationship between
Christianity and society is nothing more and nothing less than to open the question of
the relation between competing interpretations of the nature of reality. Human societies
that evolve without Christianity differ among themselves about the meaning of sense-
knowledge and the nature of reality; but Christianity, wherever it appears, makes special
claims on the credence of nations. Civil societies form themselves as the visible
manifestation of commonly held principles. Taken at this level, Christianity presents a
radically different set of ideas about the nature of the world and the way men ought to
live within it.

Whether a "Christian society" as such has ever existed or can ever exist is irrelevant.
What is important is to understand how the Christian perspective intrudes upon the
complacencies of the world-views with which it comes into contact. In Christianity
through the centuries there is a constant tension between the actual order of society and
the principles Christianity proposes. What Christianity offers is an interpretation of
social reality that claims to come completely from outside human society (as revelation)
and that sets itself up as an insistent critic of the natural views of fallen men and
women. Christianity, as a social organization, is a constant reproach to the secular world
and a constant challenge to custom and mores (even when custom itself carries the
Christian name).

In theory and in practice, Augustine had words to describe this situation. In theory, his
familiar distinction between letter and spirit served him well. The letter represents hard,
empirical reality (or at least the world of appearances masquerading as such), things the
way they definitely seem to be to the unaided understanding. All of life, without benefit
of divine revelation, is a literal narrative, devoid of meaning and value, only an
interaction of atoms in the void. But in the presence of revelation, meaning and value
take shape under the power of the spirit.
In this way, deep faith and radical nihilism can be located at opposite ends of a
spectrum. Between the two lies a whole range of forms of belief and nonbelief.
Christianity can take two approaches to those who occupy the middle ground. All vague
stirrings of belief can be treated as well-intentioned motion towards God and embraced
in the all-enfolding arms of a generous church; or the same failures of total faith can be
treated as apostasy from God and consigned to the outer darkness. Paradox again:
Christianity takes both positions simultaneously. Christianity must remain, as one recent
observer has said, "radically open to all truth and to every value," for the presence of the
spirit cannot be denied in any of these stirrings. At the same time, Christianity itself is
meaningless unless it gives unyielding witness to the power of grace and total
commitment to the truth of revelation. So radical is the Christian claim that the latter
position is the one that usually predominates in Christian discourse.

Because Augustine never ceased to challenge the ideologies of the secular world with
the Christian message, he insisted on drawing the line between letter and spirit
(between, that is, fantasy and reality, between the world-asappearance and the world-as-
reality) as high and as sharp as he could. Even those in this world who see the message
of the spirit with rare clarity are still not fully assimilated to the reality the spirit
betokens. Only death can free them from "the body of this death" (Rom. 7.24) and bring
them home to authentic reality and true being, to God.

Thus even members in good standing of the visible church were still themselves more
on the side of the sinners than of the blessed. They are separated from those around
them not by any final distinction (that must await Judgment Day) but by the
intermediate distinction that is the result of grace working in their lives. The boundary
between the saved and the damned in this world, as long as people live, is completely
permeable. The church does not seal itself off from the world around it, but remains
permanently, vulnerably, open to it. Those outside can still come in at any time--and
those inside can fail, and fall, at any time. (This way of putting the Augustinian case
leaves aside the difficult subjects of grace, predestination, and perseverance that must be
faced when the relation of Christ to the individual soul is taken up. For the moment, we
can speak in social terms, with no window into individual souls.)

The implications of this view for our attitude towards natural society are simple but
staggering: The mass of humanity lives in a fantasy world. Human societies, created by
sinful men and women, are all based on mistaken notions of the nature of reality and are
merely dream castles. Societies constitute themselves to bring about results that are
impossible. Misery, discord, and death are absolute constants in human experience,
despite all the advances of civilization. Nevertheless, human beings retain the most
touching faith in the power of effort, scientific knowledge, and the innate good will of
their fellows to bring about a more rational and just society.

Ordinary men and women, left to their own devices, go on living in their fantasy world.
What sets Augustine's Christians apart is a vision of the real nature of the world in
which they live, or at least a glimpse of it. This joyful suspicion hardens them to face,
and to refuse to take at face value, the world of appearances. The faith and hope of the
Christian embolden him to be despairing about civil society. Where it is the natural
tendency of human beings to respond to change by clinging to institutions (thereby
guaranteeing the destruction of institutions), the Christian can bid farewell to fading
institutions and passing loves, secure in a love that lasts forever and a vision of reality
that depends for its goodness, not on the fragile creations of fallible mortals, but on the
eternal goodness of God.

In Augustine's time, Rome was the center of the world of fantasy. The literature and
culture of antiquity presented a society in which a visible civil institution, the Roman
empire, embodied all the hopes and expectations of reasonable men. Rome was,
everyone knew, eternal. Uncivilized peoples loomed outside the empire but they were
no threat to the magnificence of Rome. Vergil's Aeneid, read as a paean to imperial
Rome, was the center of the literary imagination and the text around which much of this
fascination hypnotically revolved.[2] Augustine himself knew that fascination, and in
both City of God and his Confessions he labored long to pay off his debt to Vergil while
disentangling himself forever from the mythology of civil power to which Vergil's text
lent itself.

Providentially for Augustine, something terrible happened to disturb the civil faith. The
sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 provided at least the pretext for a reassessment of
conventional ideologies. Some people appear to have used the event as an opportunity
to attack Christianity for failing to take care of Rome, but Augustine saw that the more
lasting message of the event was the weakness of Rome itself. Christianity gave
Augustine a perspective from which to view Rome, at least in the imagination, from
outside.

So he wrote City of God, in terms fit for a non-Christian audience, to provide first
Roman history, then all history, with a thoroughgoing Christian interpretation, to show
the presence of the spirit in the world in the literal world of appearances. Apologists
often use the device Augustine did, writing ostensibly for outsiders, when in reality they
speak mainly to insiders whose faith has been shaken (or shown to be insufficient) by
events around them. Modern readers do not much appreciate the destructive part of
Augustine's argument. To us it takes little effort to believe that the pagan gods of
antiquity were not in fact responsible for the rise and greatness of Rome. But in
Augustine's own day, his undertaking was still audacious. Plenty of professed Christians
were unready to deny that other forms of divine power besides the Christian one had
influenced, and could continue to influence, the affairs of men. Even Augustine granted
the pagan gods a claim to exist, but saw them only as feeble demons, allowed a small
sphere of mischief by an infinitely more powerful deity.

Cleaning house, as Augustine set out to do, of all the lingering faith in divinities other
than the Christian one was thus a drastic step to take. The question at issue was, where
was reality to be found? Were there many spiritual principles animating material reality
and giving it life and meaning, or was there only one? A plurality of experience destroys
community. Every man can have his own god and his own pattern. Reality becomes the
least common denominator of a plethora of subjective imaginings. For Christianity, on
the other hand, reality is the authentic pattern from which the human imagination has
defected. The unique, omnipotent God manifests himself throughout history, at all
places and at all times, as creator and lord of the world. On this rests the Christian claim
to know objective reality.

We now stand at sufficient distance to see how faith in Rome and its greatness had
become, by Augustine's time, a crutch on which a distraught and insecure people
wanted desperately to be able to lean. The elite of the empire went on deceiving
themselves as long as they could, long after the barbarians had come and gone. What
Augustine offered was a chance to throw away the crutch.

Scholarship has documented nothing about the late Roman empire more clearly, I would
venture, than that it deserved to fall. It had become a military dictatorship, existing to
protect and perpetuate itself, regardless of the cost it demanded from its subjects.
Augustine's contemporary Salvian, the priest of Marseilles, claimed (with some
justification) that barbarian invaders in the western half of the empire were often
greeted with open arms as liberators from the oppression of Roman taxation and
bureaucracy. Its culture was politically and morally bankrupt. The "successful" half of
the empire, the Byzantine east, was better than the west in preserving itself, and lingered
through a sterile middle age until final destruction came at the hands of the Turks in
1453. Nothing has come of Byzantium since.

Faced with Rome and the possibility of pluralism, Augustine in the first five books of
City of God set out to defend the Christian claim of unity. A single divine power, God
the father, is the source of all the world of appearances, is the center of the world of the
spirit, and is the foundation of all being and goodness. A claim such as this authorizes a
human society; for if there is a single source of meaning and value in the world, there
can then be agreement on moral principles. Only agreement on moral principles can
make a society function. The argument runs through City of God (from 2.21-24 to
19.21) as a debate with ideas from Cicero's Republic (a work known to us only in
fragments). Moral discord is the sure sign of impending disintegration. To a chaotic
society, the Christian church provides a radical life-giving principle that can dwell in the
world--for the church is a temporal institution in the service of a higher moral principle.

The first books of City of God require more annotation and historical comment than do
the later books. The first three books were written with that audience we described
above in mind--the refugees from Rome who were haunting the salons of Carthage in
the early 410s, lamenting their dismal fate and blaming the Christian God. Those books
were published together by the end of 413; the rest of City of God becomes more and
more general in its appeal and less tied to the immediate polemical situation. The first
book is the most closely tied to circumstances. For example, at least a few religious
women seem to have been in Africa who had escaped from Rome after suffering
outrages at barbarian hands; the largest section of the first book both encourages these
women and rebukes those who insulted them. (1.17-27)

The opening books of City of God, therefore, demonstrate by negative argument, with
polemical verve, that in the order of knowledge, God--the Christian God--prevails
alone. What remains is for Augustine to show that this God prevails in the order of
action--and love--as well. That is the business of Books 6 through 10.

To show the adequacy of the Christian claims, Augustine confronted the surviving
ancient philosophical tradition in debate. He began by making bold admissions. By
Augustine's time, the diversity of conflicting philosophical schools (Stoics, Epicureans,
Cynics, Academics, etc.) had virtually disappeared. To be a philosopher in the serious
sense of that word meant to be a disciple, at some distance, of Plato. Modern writers call
this movement Neoplatonism and confer the leadership of the school on Plotinus (d. c.
A.D. 265). This is a useful but somewhat imprecise form of reference. The people who
belonged to the school called themselves simply Platonists and claimed to owe
allegiance only to Plato himself, whom they interpreted in a variety of ways.[3]

What any reader of the surviving works of the Neoplatonists discovers is that in the
realm of speculation, they had much superficially in common with the Christians. In the
three hypostases of Plotinian thought one finds a parallel for the three persons of the
Christian trinity; this late Platonism contained a firm belief in the existence of a single
realm of the spirit that gave value and meaning to the lives of people living in the
material world. It softened this virtual monotheism by allowing that the ancient
religions were, in their various styles, talking about the same thing. The divine spirit
leaked through into the world of matter in a variety of forms, variously interpreted by
ignorant men in a profusion of different cults. A proper philosophical understanding, the
Platonists argued, would lead to an understanding of the unity of experience.

Augustine introduced the Platonists in City of God (see 8.2-12) so as to deal with the
question whether there was any possibility of salvation without revelation--whether, in
short, men's unaided efforts could lead them to right knowledge and hence to virtuous
life. He admitted that the Platonists were great philosophers and wise men, and
acknowledged their virtues, but then he proceeded to offer an explanation how this
situation had come about in a way that left the primacy of the Christian interpretation
unshaken.

Augustine's argument always had a scriptural basis. In the first chapter of Romans, Paul
sought to justify God's dealings with the heathens who had not heard God's revelation to
the Jews. The pagans, Paul argued, had no excuse for ignorance. "For the invisible
things of God are clearly known from the [visible] things of creation." (Rom. 1.20) Thus
on the one hand, even in a fallen world, direct, unaided knowledge of God remained
possible, in the sense that those who failed to achieve it were blameworthy for their
failure, but impossible, in the sense that in this fallen world no one ever achieves direct
knowledge of God.

To remedy this defect of human reason, revelation was given to mankind through the
instrument of the church. In practice for Augustine it is only through the revelation of
the spirit in the church that true knowledge can be acquired. What then of the
Platonists? They are allowed by God to exist to offer corroborating evidence. As the
most excellent and reputable of philosophical schools of antiquity, they are seen to have
gone a long way towards understanding the basic truths of theology (as seen by
Christians), without ever getting the whole picture. Formally, then, Augustine's
argument in Books 6 through 10 of City of God is this: If the best of philosophers (best
by virtue of the nearness of their approximation to Christian theology, as well as by
virtue of their reputation among men), cannot achieve a complete and adequate picture
of the divine dispensation for salvation, a fortiori no other philosophical sect can
provide such a picture. Without such accurate knowledge, salvation is impossible.

Philosophy fails in another, somewhat more significant way as well. It has no place to
stand. Philosophical knowledge takes the form of individual comments about the nature
of things emitted by learned and serious men on no authority except their own.
Philosophers may think that their conclusions are self-evident and may chafe at the
unbelief of the masses in the face of their sober and well-reasoned arguments. But
Augustine saw that this is not only a likely result, but a necessary one, in a fallen world.
One thing that was lost in the fall of man was the trust that underlies all human
communication. The story of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11.1-9) implied that sin renders
every individual an isolated fragment of consciousness, cut off from the consolation of
shared experience. If civil societies are created by men as fraudulent attempts to
duplicate the unity they instinctively desire but cannot achieve, so too in the
philosophical order, when the most pressing issues of salvation and happiness are at
stake, the most men can do is create new sects and philosophies, small attempts at an
intellectual tour-de-force by which a few individuals will pretend to have transcended
the conditions of human ignorance to attain real knowledge.

But such constructions in the realm of the spirit are no less fraudulent than great
empires in the realm of matter. Philosophical schools come and go, and the mass of
mankind is left alone, with no profit to show for all its deference to the sages.
Philosophy, finally, is so individualistic that it becomes undemocratic. Only the initiated
few can achieve the heroic feats of knowledge and thought that make them
philosophers. Their less learned fellows are condemned to make do with the much less
satisfactory frauds perpetrated by the pagan religions. Augustine, speaking for
Christianity, insists that if there is any salvation at all in this world, it must be accessible
to all, not merely to those with the money and leisure to pursue university studies in
philosophy.

In place of the sages then, Christianity offered a mediator, adequate and unique, not
only between what was divine and what was human, but even between human beings
themselves. Where the philosophers had only the arid consolations of logic, Augustine
preached the power of Christ. In Christ the divine principle entered the world, revealing
the will of God and providing a common basis for the mutual understanding (and love)
of all those who accepted him. Christian theology challenges the self-centered
intellectual autonomy of the philosophers by insisting on self-surrender and acceptance
of a power of knowledge coming, not from effort and innate virtue, but from outside the
individual.

The central paradox of Christianity underlies doctrine. On the one hand, mankind is
utterly responsible for its actions and its failures to achieve salvation independently--
hence the justice of damnation; but on the other hand, God intervenes in the affairs of
fallen mankind to provide a certain and independent means of redemption--hence the
mercy of salvation. For Augustine's contemporaries, this ineffable combination of
justice and mercy could be the largest stumbling block to Christianity.

But for now, while he was writing City of God, the logical ramifications of this theory
were not yet his concern. The purpose of the first ten books of City of God was
demolition, not construction. Much of his rhetorical skill went into making the Christian
alternative to the pagan claims emerge almost effortlessly and inevitably once the pagan
arguments were disposed of. The first five books cleared the central position for God
the father and creator in the disposition of the affairs of the material world, while the
next five books blast away at the pagan interpretation of the ordering of affairs in the
world of understanding and the spirit. When the smoke clears, God the son, Christ the
redeemer, appears at the center of the picture, the true power for salvation of individual
souls.
Where the first five books required historical annotation and illustration, the second five
require what is in some ways a more difficult effort of understanding. Augustine shared
with his opponents a common view of the reality of what we would call supernatural
phenomena. He did not need to debunk all claims of miraculous intervention into nature
by spirits other than the Christian God; he could simply revalue them as works of the
demons, the fallen angels of whom scripture spoke. All this makes alien reading for us,
but we should envy Augustine the polemical situation in which he found himself. He
merely had to explain the mysterious supernatural events his opponents alleged; the
skeptic is in the far more difficult position of having to deny the supernatural features of
the events outright.

Whether we should give credence to the ancient tendency to see miracles everywhere is
another question, not addressed by City of God. Augustine himself was for many years
disinclined to accept the probability of Christian miracle in his own day (holding that it
had been a special gift to the generation of the apostles), but later shifted his position
and in the last book of City of God a whole dossier of contemporary miracle stories
(almost entirely limited to cures of the sick) may be found (22.8). Augustine did not
possess anything like the same conception of natural/supernatural that we bring to such
stories; what was important for early Christians in miracle stories was not the event
itself (which was merely one more surprise in a surprising world), but the meaning of
the event. The New Testament speaks of miracles by Greek words that mean "signs and
portents," and even the word "miracle" itself derives from a Latin word meaning
"marvelous." In both languages the ancient focus was on the reaction of the observer,
drawing from the event meaning for his own life. The deity manipulated human affairs
in such a way as to bring about this communication. Seen objectively, the theology of
miracle had something of the qualities of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a miracle was
something that was meant to astonish and communicate a theological message
(whatever the nature of the event itself), then all the miracles recorded by the early
church were truly miraculous.

Thus Augustine could readily exploit the credulity of the pagan world from which
Christianity arose to establish the polemical structure of the first ten books of City of
God. In them he demonstrated the ruling power of God (Books 1 through 5) and the
redeeming power of Christ (Books 6 through 10) as the only adequate hypothesis to
explain the ways of the world. The world in which the pagans had lived, be it the
material world of Rome or the spiritual world of the philosophers and demons, did not
exist. It was a kingdom of fraud, built by fallen human minds attempting to make sense
of the world around them. Augustine was not insensitive to the nobility and high
intentions of the pagan sages, but he could not blind himself either to their failures. At
the end of the first ten books of City of God, Augustine stood poised between pagan and
Christian worlds, having shown the failure of the pagan world-view and intimated the
necessity of the Christian. His business in the books that followed would be to turn
away from the world that antiquity had made and show how Christianity proposed that
men and women go about living in the real, fallen world.

The People of God

Christianity defies time and validates history. On the one hand, the eternal vision of
God is the norm against which human notions of time are judged and found wanting;
sacramental actions destroy the supremacy of time, while eternal happiness, outside the
tunnel of transience, awaits the blessed. On the other hand, history has unique value.
Christ died once for mankind's sins and need not repeat the sacrifice. Cyclical theories
of history are ruled out and the whole pattern of human life is given a linear purpose.

Indeed, Christianity may be said to have invented history in the modern sense of the
term. Before Christianity, ancient writers of what we call history were often little more
than sententious purveyors of recent memories and old legends; at best, they chronicled
the events of their own society in light of hindsight and their own philosophical
preoccupations. Each generation lived isolated in time from all others, with only the
traditions and institutions of the political realm--as the ancient religions faded--to offer
escape from time into history. Christianity introduced the notion that the history of the
world might have a single pattern. A beginning, a middle, and an end spring up around
the whole of human existence. Instead of an endless succession of solipsisms, there is a
single human community, united across time and space, to which the Christian belongs.

This is the vision of the human condition that Augustine unfolds in the last dozen books
of City of God. His divisions are simple: beginning/middle/end, or rather past/
present/future. What we would recognize as history is all in the middle section, devoted
to the world after the fall and before the last judgment, suspended in the material interim
but revolving around the presence of Christ. The tasks Augustine set for himself in these
books were to explain the fall of man and its implications; then to prescribe the
Christian remedy for the ills of the present; and finally to explain the Christian hope for
the world to come.

First, the fall. Augustine knew full well that the seven days of creation were a literary
figure for a much more complex process whose temporal duration he did not care to
speculate about (11.6-8). Similarly, he believed in the historicity of the story of Adam
and Eve, but he did so in a world in which there was literally no reason why he should
not believe the story. He would not have found it difficult to adjust his views to accord
with the development of modern anthropology. Indeed, the Augustinian theory of
original sin becomes much easier to defend when the mythic qualities of the Adam and
Eve story are recognized. The result is that, in the terms we discussed concerning
Christian Doctrine, Augustine cheerfully accepts the literal meaning of the Genesis
story, but passes quickly on to what he knows is more important, the spiritual meaning.
Until the story's ramifications are applied to the whole church and to each Christian,
there is no point in lingering over its details.

"Two loves gave birth to two cities." (14.28) In this statement all the doctrine of City of
God is summarized, and in it we see reflected the more abstract formulas of Christian
Doctrine. The selfless love of God ("enjoyment") was replaced in Adam and Eve by
love of self, manifest in the first instance as the pride that leads to disobedience.

Augustine always emphasizes the rebelliousness the first sin entailed. The precise
command God gave was irrelevant. What mattered was that the serpent appealed to the
selfish longings of the first couple, and that appeal found a willing response. Though
repentance swiftly followed error, the pattern was instilled in the human race once for
all. For Augustine, the fact of sin in the world around him, the fact that men and women
enter the world in a state of separation from God, found corroboration in the biblical
story of the first couple. He never found a satisfactory theory to explain the transmission
of original sin, but of the fact of its presence he had no doubt at all.[4]
But City of God sets the human story of original sin in a wider context. The first error of
Adam and Eve was not something innate in them, but the response to a suggestion that
came from outside. Hence Augustine goes at great lengths into the origins of the two
cities in the fall of the angels. Satan was the highest of creatures, so he fell the lowest.
Pride again (the notion that the self is supremely loveable) was the seed of evil. This
planted in the world of creation the possibility of evil for man. Humanity seems to be
given the second chance offerred by Christianity because it was not itself the source of
all the evil in creation. The fallen angels enjoy no such redemptive favor.

Thus from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell there are created two separate
societies of angels and men, with a boundary between the two societies that runs right
through the earthly world. Augustine calls those societies civitates, which we usually
translate "cities," but which more precisely meant "communities," that is, cities in their
human dimension. The reasons for Augustine's choice of this metaphor are deeply
rooted in his theological writings. One obvious implication was that it enabled him to
pick up again the theme of pilgrimage he had used in Christian Doctrine and elsewhere.
[5]

The material world, then, is disputed territory, where the enemy holds sway for the
moment. The followers of Christ, the citizens of the heavenly city, must live in this
world as foreigners (peregrini, "pilgrims") do, using the laws of the city in which they
find themselves to shelter themselves, but always planning and preparing to leave that
city behind to return home. For those of the earthly city, the earth seems (wrongly) to be
home and they treat it as such, abandoning their claim to citizenship above.

This theme looms all through these books. First, however, Augustine had to explain
fallenness itself and what it entails, for it seemed he had painted himself into a logical
corner. God created all things, and insofar as they were created by God, they were good;
evil, then, is the mere absence of good, not--as the Manicheans claimed--an independent
power in itself. How then came evil into the world?

Not as a material presence, Augustine would say. Natural disasters may trouble the
hearts of men, but they are not truly evil. Evil resides only in the rational souls of fallen
angels and men. Those souls are, for Augustine, tripartite: the human soul exists,
knows, and loves.[6] The moral worth of the individual lies in the quality of the love,
that is to say, the quality of the will, and evil results from a turning of the will's love
away from the things it should seek (enjoyment of God, love of neighbor) to other
things (usually self-love).

So how does the will, created good by a good God, turn to evil? Augustine does not
know, nor can anyone know. "Seek not to find the efficient cause of an evil will. It is
not a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency. ... To defect from the one who is the
highest being to something that has less being, this is to begin to have an evil will. To
seek the causes of such a defect--deficient causes, not efficient ones--is like trying to see
darkness or to hear silence." (12.7) Evil is a nothing, and a turning to evil has no cause
(all causation is divinely ordered and hence good) but is entirely self-generated. The
most that can be said is that God created rational creatures with wills genuinely free so
their worship of God would be a source of glory. The source of evil is, finally, a
mystery, and a mystery that all of Augustine's later debates with the Pelagians never
tempted him to pretend he had solved.
More than logical trickery underlies this evasive answer. If the turning of the soul
towards evil were rational and comprehensible, there would be something good about it,
since all reason is good. Everything in the world that is intelligible is intelligible by
virtue of its reflection of God's creative power. When the will turns away from God it
thus separates itself from the goodness of creation into a self-created darkness that is no
longer intelligible. The real question was not so much how evil arose, but what it meant.
The condition of fallen men and women preoccupies Augustine through Books 11-14.
He concludes that the fall from grace led as well to a kind of fall from freedom. Human
beings after the fall remained entirely responsible for their moral failings, which come
about only as a result of their own free acts (on the hypothesis that original sin is
justifiably imputed to each individual at birth). But fallen people are not, because of the
chains forged by sin, capable of restoring themselves to God's favor by their own
efforts. By choosing to assert their own power rather than submit to God's, they
discover how powerless they are.

The most palpable manifestation of fallen human nature is concupiscence, the

importunate nagging of the flesh's desires. In the fall, the natural order and harmony of
the person was thrown into confusion. The will turned from God, knowledge was
darkened with ignorance, and a debilitating derangement of the will resulted. Thus, the
higher faculties of the person, were no longer in control as they were when the natural
hierarchy of the soul was undisturbed. The ensuing disorder is most visible in the
appetites of the flesh.

Augustine began with the observation of a pastor that it is in human sexuality that the
confusion and disorder of sin is most visible. Treating sexuality as a biological question,
he observed that human beings are scarcely masters of their own bodies, unable to
subject the sexual organs to rational control. Treating sexuality as a psychological
question, he saw the same recurring failure of control and discipline. From Paul he
heard confirmation of what he saw: "I see another law in my members, warring against
the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin." (Rom. 7.23) The
history of human relations is full of good intentions overthrown by powerful appetites, a
plight that cannot be blamed only on repressive social conventions.

But sexuality remained for Augustine fundamentally, even supernaturally good. His (in
many ways comical) depiction of what sex would have been like in the Garden of Eden
if Adam and Eve had not fallen shows him earnestly (and perhaps even with conscious
whimsy) attempting to give concrete form to his recognition of the fundamental values
of sexuality (14.21-27). To what extent Augustine may be made the parent of later
attitudes towards what now seem unduly negative is open to doubt; he did hold that
virginity was superior to marriage, but emphasized repeatedly that both states of life
were inherently good; he held that the purpose of sexual intercourse was procreation
and that even in marriage it was otherwise culpable, but he was careful to minimize the
burden of that fault. His contemporary Jerome had engaged in a famous battle of
pamphlets with Jovinian, a monk who held views of sexuality that sound refreshingly
modern; Jerome is far more negative than Augustine.[7]

But the implications of fallenness run far beyond the disorder of human sexuality. In
sexuality, lack of control manifests itself at every level of society. But that lack of
control stemming from confusion and selfishness is characteristic of human affairs of all
sorts in all times and places. The disorder began with the fall of the angels and entered
history with the fall of Adam. Indeed, it may be said that "history" in the limited sense
we now use is the result of the conjunction of human beings with sin. The middle four
books of the last part of City of God, Books 15- 18, recount the present condition of
human society, between the first sin and the last judgment, while the two societies
(heavenly and earthly) find themselves mingled together and doing battle with each
other in the arena of human society.

Such is the world of fallen man: the good mixed with the bad, seemingly inextricable:
"These two cities are intertwined here in this world and entangled with each other, until
they are to be separated at the last judgment." (1.35) No vision here of the saintly few
penned up temporarily among the mass of the damned, waiting for release; rather, the
boundary between the two societies runs through the hearts of individual men and
women. The two societies cannot be identified and distinguished in this world: that is an
absolute condition of fallenness.

Powerful forces in Augustine's time sought to identify the heavenly society with one
visible institution, with the Christian empire itself. Greek Christians in particular had
concluded that even biblical prophecy spoke of the coming age of happiness under
Christian emperors. They assumed that a special grace could be seen in the Roman
empire that had now given itself over to Christ.[8] This attitude grew and developed in
the middle ages, producing abundant imperial and papal misconceptions. Augustine
himself was invoked as a patron of this ideology, in a way that merits notice.

Augustine opposed all such identification of earthly societies with the heavenly society
of which the church is an earthly shadow. Even when he engaged in panegyric of a
recent emperor,[9] he saw in such an emperor virtue only when he saw personal
submission to the church of Christ. But Augustine made one crucial mistake in
judgment that led to much later confusion. In the early 410s, a young priest from Spain
named Orosius came to Africa seeking Augustine's advice on theological controversies
in his homeland. While he was there, Augustine apparently delegated him (we have
only Orosius's word on this) to compile a history of the calamities of the human race, to
show pagans that the Christian reading of history was true. (In Book 3 of City of God,
Augustine declined to outline his position in detail, fearing to become a "mere writer of
history." [3.18]) Orosius, however, did not fully grasp Augustine's ideas, but his energy
quickly produced seven books of universal history destined to have a wide readership in
the middle ages.[10] Augustine never actually disowned Orosius, but it is clear from
Books 15-18 of City of God that Orosius had gone astray. Orosius wrote as though
church, empire, and heavenly city could be identified in one confused mishmash. The
medieval audience was often readier to read Orosius's exciting (and gory) narrative than
to plod through twenty-two books of City of God, thinking to find Augustine's doctrine
in Orosius's pages. Given the extent of the medieval misrepresentation of Augustine that
ensued,[11] it is worth examining his attitude towards earthly societies (including
"Christian empires") in some detail. The first principle is paramount: that earthly
societies contain, just as people do, an undistinguishable mixture of good and evil.

Only if that point is kept in mind can the redemptive power of Christ in Augustinian
thought be fully appreciated. First, the coming of Christ gives sense to history. It places
a fixed and final benchmark by which all other events are measured. But the heavenly
city had been represented on earth before Christ's coming as well as after. Cain and
Abel were the earthly founders of both cities, and throughout the Old Testament
Augustine traces the pre-Christian history of redemption. The Old Testament patriarchs
did not merit salvation by their own deeds, for the grace that saved them was the grace
Christ brought. Though Christ came at a particular time, his grace pervades history.

Christianity and the church hold a central, but temporary place in the drama of salvation
history. They embrace the imperfection of human existence in the fallen world, and like
this world they will pass away. What is genuinely important for all men is the ultimate
progress towards union with God. Those who are outwardly in God's good favor (as
loyal members of the Christian church) but who are finally found wanting in divine
judgment have never been part of the heavenly city, appearances notwithstanding.
Similarly, those who have not been visible members of the church but who do
experience the transforming reality of God's grace (in Augustine's explicit discussion
these people are limited to the Old Testament figures, but nothing he says compels us to
keep the limits there) win final union with God.

In all this drama, Christianity and the church are far from irrelevant. The paradox is that
they are essential and yet dispensable. The message of grace could not have come into
the world without them, and the church continues to bear the special marks of divine
favor that make it a sure guide and a channel of grace. More than that, it is pointless to
speculate. Faith and hope, not assurance, are the marks of a Christian believer.

So, paradoxically, history is entirely changed by the intervention of Christ--and nothing

is changed. To the world of appearance, only appearances change. A new religion
comes to compete with the others, a new clique of the self-proclaimed elect declares
itself. But in reality, divine grace works unceasingly in the hidden recesses of the lives
of all those who open themselves to it. Much mystery surrounds the encounter of grace
and the will, and that mystery characterizes the church in the world. But for Augustine
in City of God, the elucidation of the ambiguity is less important than the recognition of
its main features.

Augustine's historical vision is far from narrow. The actions of Christ and his church
have affected only a portion of the human race in the conventional view of history, but
for Augustine it is the Christian revelation that gives all history its meaning. All history
is salvation history. The meaning given to human life by Christ by a single intervention
is true for all men and women everywhere. The message is sent forth to all nations, and
all nations can be called to receive it. This is the finality of the Christian message. What
remains is to be revealed, in the last days, will be revealed in accord with what is
already known, and no less universally. Despite its recursions into various forms of
exclusivity, Christianity gave the world the first vision of human history as a coherent
and organized whole, not merely as a welter of mutually hostile exclusivities.

For Augustine's account of human history in Books 15- 18, the primary text is always
scripture. This may appear to imply a kind of exclusivity in itself until we recall that
according to the principles laid down in Christian Doctrine, the allegorical interpretation
of that scripture is the medium by which the apparent exclusivity of the text is broken
down and the pertinence of every page to every age of history is clarified. Thus, when
Augustine expounds the spiritual, or allegorical, sense of scripture, he uses the limited
text of scripture as a key to unlock a vision wider than the text.
In this comprehensive view of human history, so trivial and evanescent a thing as the
Roman empire plays little part. Augustine had no wish to deny the achievements of that
empire, for in the world Augustine knew the Roman empire was easily the most
extensive and the longest-lasting exercise ever undertaken in creating a substitute for
paradise. But the Augustine who had once proclaimed an emperor's praises could, with
the guidance of the Christian message, tear himself away from the secular vision of
Roman glory. Once he did so, it was easy to turn back to the Roman world and see it as
no more ultimately meaningful than a modern scholar would.

By the time Augustine came to the end of Book 18, he was ready to recapitulate the
results of his attempt to disentangle human affections from human creations. Book 19
contains his vision of human society seen sub specie aeternitatis.[12] The evocation of
peace, true peace, the goal of human life even in fraudulent human societies created by
sinful people is profoundly appealing.

The subject is approached in several ways. A long and whimsically pedantic analysis
traces the 288 possible philosophical approaches to happiness that the Roman polymath
Varro had outlined (19.1-4). All are reduced to one way, the Christian way. An old
quarrel with Cicero, postponed from Book 2, is taken up to show where justice is absent
true community cannot exist (19.21). In communities robbed of justice by original sin,
the real peace of an ideal soci- ety cannot exist. (He had earlier asked, "What are
kingdoms without justice? Mere bands of hoodlums." [4.4])

The Christian community lives on, loving the true peace of the heavenly Jerusalem,
devoid of illusions about the transient world in which it finds itself. This illusionless
existence gives the Christian church a detachment from the secular world that in
practice it does not always maintain. While secular governments attempt to create
lasting peace in a world destined to know only strife and struggle until the last days,
there is a subversive quality about the life that Augustine imagines for the church in
these circumstances. She is, he says, to "use the peace of Babylon," (19.26) that is to
say, take advantage of all the limited and partial peace that human society can find for
itself, without ever settling for that peace. She is to use, not enjoy, the peace of the
earthly city, and always to keep her eyes focused on the ultimate goal. As citizens of the
heavenly city, Christians are always to recall where their true allegiance lies.

What then of the warfare of the earthly city? Augustine is often invoked as a kind of
patron saint of the Just War. The passage in City of God in which he expounds his
theory in its greatest detail deserves quotation in full: "But the wise man, they say, will
wage just wars. Surely, if he remembers that he is a human being, he will much rather
lament the need to wage even just wars. For if they were not just he would not have to
fight them and there would be no wars for him. The injustice of the opposing side is
what imposes the duty of waging wars." (19.7) For Augustine, the Christian's job is to
resist, conceding the justice of a cause only with reluctance, always on the lookout for
the moment justice deserts his own cause. The siege of his own Hippo in the last months
of his life seemed to Augustine a conflict both just and wretched, a calamity for the
people he had served lovingly for forty years.[13]

In earthly terms, the vision of human society City of God provides is unremittingly
bleak, even if indisputable. Most human societies, enamored with the daydreams of
politics, pretend the human condition is better than it is. Men forget history because they
do not want to remember that others have gone down paths of prosperity and
complacency before them. But in western Christianity since Augustine there has always
been a prophetic voice to proclaim the ultimate weakness of human political societies.
Christianity offers mankind a hope besides which the gloom of the human condition is
as nothing. Christian theology after Augustine is always hopeful and, in the deepest
sense optimistic. But for those who reject that theology, the vision of human society that
is left is stark and terrifying. In this sense as well, all history is salvation history. The
salvific quality of that history makes it possible to be realistically honest about the
damnable qualities of life in the interim; there are no easy ways out for Augustine.

In the last three books of City of God, Augustine gives substance to his hope. At the
close of human history in the present age, there come the last things: death, judgment,
heaven, and hell. Eschatological thought animated the early church long after it became
clear that the second coming would not occur in the lifetime of the apostles. The fathers
are not being morbid and gloomy when they speak of last things at times of material and
moral crisis in their society; eschatology is hope. We have lived too long in a society
growing from Christian roots and have become overfamiliar with the most vivid and
negative representations of eschatological themes to be able to see that hope fresh when
we encounter those themes in the ancient writers.

Augustine is in fact as restrained as a modern liberal theologian in his depiction of what

lies ahead. He knew the alluring dangers of too-explicit representations for popular
piety and contented himself instead with insisting on the most abstract of outlines of
future life. At one place he does list the principal scriptural manifestations that are
prophesied to accompany the last days, but he promptly qualifies what he says by
adding that he is sure all these things will happen, but he cannot be certain of the order
in which they will occur, nor does he think that the list is in any way exhaustive. (20.30)
He feels deeply the deceptive quality of metaphor in such description. Human language
is always a broken instrument, and thus it labors under a double burden. Not only is the
language itself suspect, but it draws its terms of reference entirely from a world that is
suspect as well. The notion of life itself is only partial and inadequate in human
experience and language. Whatever it is that the blessed will experience in their union
with God--that is life, and what we now experience is metaphor, even though language
tries to make it the other way around.

Augustine's discussion of the afterlife thus does not establish a clear picture of what
awaits, but instills expectant hope, while nurturing the faith and trust that will enable the
hopeful to accept what they find. The weakness of the human mind and its language are
just too great in the face of the greatest of mysteries. Theology can only instill reverence
and leave behind a residue of hope.

So far the purposes and so far the plan of City of God. Ten books outline the
weaknesses of the secular vision of history embodied in Roman life and thought, then
twelve books sketch the pattern of history, putting life here below in the middle panel of
a triptych, with God the creator standing before and God the judge standing after. This
vision of history draws authority entirely from outside the conventional limits of
history, and hence can claim for the transient affairs of time-bound men and women a
dimension of meaning no secular ideology can manage. We will debate to the end of
time whether any vision such as Augustine's can be valid or not. Augustine himself
would expect this, since the final revelation is by definition withheld until precisely the
end of time. For the time being (which is, Augustine would point out, all we have) the
rhetorical and polemical power of Augustine's vision in undermining the claims of
Rome and supplanting them with the claims of his own community was dramatic.

Augustine
Christ and the Soul
by James J. O'Donnell

The lofty theology of a book like City of God is always a little irrelevant. All of it may
be true. A full understanding of the dispensation of salvation may be impossible without
it. But in the end it is just another construction of the human intellect. Even if the
intellect is aided by divine illumination, its triumphs are still fleeting ones.

How God deals with the human race may be a matter of speculative interest. How Christ
redeems the individual soul is an urgent concern. The individual person has no other life
but his own. The Christian who believes in his God and longs to be united with him
deems all other concerns secondary, however important. The abuse this zeal fosters is
selfish concentration on personal salvation at the expense of a caring involvement in
human affairs, but to Augustine such concentration is always self-defeating. The path to
personal salvation lies through a future of personal self-abnegation in the love of God
and of neighbor. Paradoxically (that word again), to save one's soul means abandoning
all morbid preoccupation with self by immersion in self-effacing love. "He who would
save his soul must lose it." (Matthew 10.39) Thus, it is "microtheology" that presents
Augustine's vision of Christianity in its fullest development and that attracted the
fiercest controversy. In the last two decades of Augustine's life, the Pelagian
controversy forced him to examine his views on these subjects with passionate care.
What emerged in that period was a fuller statement of principle and a working out of
logical consequences, but not a new theology.[1]

The rudiments of the Augustinian theology of grace can be seen as early as the first
book of the Seven Various Questions for Simplicianus, written in the mid-390s when
Augustine confronted the paradoxes of Paul's letter to the Romans. Augustine was
fortunate, however, to be able to pursue his argument with the Pelagians in logical
sequence, which we will attempt to duplicate here. The central concerns are threefold:
sin (the condition of mankind left to itself), grace (the act of redemption in Christ), and
predestination (the condition of the liberated soul--the most mysterious matter of all,
and most fraught with complexities arising from the effect of grace on the will.)

The first thing Augustine wrote against the ideas of Pelagius (of whom he had barely
heard himself) was The Guilt and Remission of Sin; and Infant Baptism, written in 411
in response to questions from his friend Marcellinus.[2] In this pamphlet he dealt with
the fact, as he saw it, of original sin and raised the further questions about grace to be
answered in Spirit and Letter, to which we shall turn shortly. Fifteen more years of
controversy were to elapse before his final views on predestination and free will were
set down in the work that will occupy us last, The Predestination of the Blessed (429).

Sin

The human animal is a moral animal, and its plight is dismal. The best of intentions
demonstrably lead to the most disastrous of conclusions, and even the best of intentions
are but rarely sovereign. Human beings have an irrepressible capacity for disappointing
themselves and each other with their thoughts, words, and deeds. Conscience is more
than a chain by which the human mind irrationally constrains itself, and is at least the
evidence of a tension and dissatisfaction deeply planted in the race. The material world
presents us with things as they are (or seem to be) and does so brutally. But in the realm
of the mind, we consider things as they should be. The origins of the moral instincts
may be baffling, but their tenacity in the face of all discouragement is great. No vision
of human nature is adequate without an explanation of the nature of moral evil.

In Christian theology, the explanation is simple and blunt. The human race is separated,
temporarily but drastically, from the consoling source of being and goodness. Alone in a
world from which they have tried to banish God, men act as irresponsible children
suddenly lacking clear guidance and immediate punishment. As we saw in the last
chapter, the history of the species is the story of the separation and reunification of
creatures and creator. In the pages of revelation, the separation is documented by the
example of Adam. In City of God Augustine saw in the fall of Adam an essential
mystery: Evil enters the world, it persists, but it consists of nothing more than the
perversity of dependent creatures, fleetingly anonymous in their rebellion. Through sin,
death and all misery entered the world. The wounds of life are all self-inflicted.

But what does the sin of the first parents have to do with the present misery? The
weakest link in Augustine's theology of sin is his view on the transmission of original
sin. Literal acceptance of the Adam and Eve story created difficulties for him that he
need not have faced. Throughout his life, he visibly inclined to a theory of physical
propagation, according to which the disorder of the sexual appetites discussed above
was not only the sign of sin but the instrument of its transmission--hence, perhaps, a
special suspicion of sexuality. But it is also indisputable that Augustine was aware of
the dangers of this theory and ultimately refused to commit himself to any particular
hypothesis on the origins of individual human souls and the transmission of Adam's sin.
Instead, he confined himself to what he was sure of, namely the sin of Adam and the
presence of his sin in the species. Given those two points, the mechanism of
transmission was of less than supreme importance, and Augustine could indulge in an
agnosticism that maddened some of his contemporaries (and almost all of posterity).

In summary, he concludes that original sin is innate in human beings, even though the
responsibility for that sin does, quite fairly, inhere in each individual. The paradox here
is clear: original sin comes from Adam, but is the responsibility of each individual. Here
again, the pragmatic approach satisfied Augustine. To those who would debate the
fairness of this system of transmission, he would simply point out that every individual,
from the earliest age, is in fact a sinner. From even before the access of knowledge and
reason (the conditions we are accustomed to associate with moral responsibility) there is
the clear presence of selfishness--the basis of evil--and willed disobedience.[3]
And yet original sin differs from actual sin, that is, sin committed by the individual. The
sinfulness of the individual infant is not itself the same thing as original sin, but only the
evidence of the sinful propensities that original sin generates. Original sin brings with it
all the penalties discussed in City of God, and even when the responsibility for original
sin is taken away, the purely temporal damage (that is, the harm done to the species in
the material world) remains. Actual sin, on the other hand, does much less harm by its
secondary, temporal ill effects (sometimes none at all, at least to the naked eye), while
carrying with it a higher degree of responsibility and potentially eternal damage for the
soul of the sinner. Original sin is sufficient to deny the individual eternal blessedness,
but only actual sin can win real damnation.

Sin is not then a matter of chance or choice. Original sin is present in all from the outset
and is the reason for the continued propensity to sin that afflicts the species. Men do not
begin tabula rasa, blissful in ignorance and poised in sublime neutrality somewhere
between good and evil (a preposterous position, given Augustine's definitions of good
and evil), able to earn praise for doing good and blame for doing evil. Instead, all men
and women start with a handicap. Even when the eternal consequences of original sin
are removed by baptism, it still affects the soul so that every human being eventually
succumbs to sin.

This doctrine is fundamental to Augustine. It contributes to his skepticism about the

intellectual powers of mankind and hence to his reliance on divine revelation. It also
made him see the history of the species as a struggle with sin brought to an end only
when divine goodness intervenes and liberates men for eternity. But theory and practice
are never far apart in Augustine, and there are practical, pastoral considerations as well.

From earliest times, Christianity had preached baptism in Christ, a baptism of the spirit.
Liturgically, baptism had been part of Christian worship from the time of the apostles.
Theologically, it came to be understood as the act by which the church, transmitting the
power of the spirit in the world, welcomed sinners into its midst with a free gift of
forgiveness from the burden of sin. The power of forgiveness in the church had then to
be deployed in a different way to cope with the persistent sinfulness of the baptised
Christian. In Augustine's own time penance was still public; private confession is a
medieval innovation in the main. The cumbersome and frightening penitential discipline
(whose validity was periodically challenged by such as the Novatians and Donatists)
had conspired to encourage many, like the emperor Constantine, to postpone baptism--
the one sovereign remedy for sin--until the deathbed. Pastorally, this solution was
unacceptable, since it seemed to provide carte blanche for sin through the whole of life,
so long as sacramental grace was accessible at the very end. (That accessibility had a
disturbing correlation to the wealth and social position of the sinner; pagan criticism of
Christianity made much of this aspect of church practice.) By Augustine's day, timely
baptism was becoming more the rule. But when did the need for baptism emerge? Was
it only a remedy for the sin of the conscious, reasoning individual? Or did it speak to the
underlying sinfulness innate in the species? Given the views Augustine cherished, it is
not surprising that he chose the latter answer, and did so in keeping with the consensus
of Christian authority in his day. Pastorally, the consequence of this answer is simple:
infant baptism. If we are sinners from the womb, then from the womb we need
redemption. In a world where the infant's grasp on life was tenuous, the urgency was
strongly felt. Thus baptism offered immediate forgiveness of original sin and hence the
removal of all the eternal penalties for that ancient fault; in addition, the sacrament
washed the soul clean of the whole burden of actual sin that might have accumulated,
however slight. To die at the moment after baptism was to speed straight to heaven.

Outwardly, the sacrament marked a person's entry into full membership in the church.
Thus the child entered the church by an unearned favor, by which the eternal penalties
of original sin were removed. Only the actual sins of the individual after baptism could
do harm now.

Did Augustine consider baptism necessary for salvation? Yes, with a qualification.
From earliest times, the church had recognized that in certain cases, such as that of the
martyrs, the intention was as good as the act. For Augustine, there was little need to
speak of the accession of grace to those who had not been baptised, for in the Christian
Roman empire the sacrament itself was readily available. Negligence in its reception
was the only thing that could ordinarily forestall it.[4]

Practically speaking, baptism was the sacrament that formed the church itself.
Catechumens, outsiders contemplating entrance, continued to be only fringe members of
the community; it was still the custom to exclude them from the communion service of
the liturgy. Baptism, on the other hand, rendered the individual eligible for full
sacramental participation in the eucharist and was a necessary prerequisite for any
ecclesiastical office.

What was left untouched by baptism was concupiscence, the inclination toward sin that
original sin had introduced. The sacrament cleared the slate for the past and offered
support for the future, but it was not the end of the story. Sin remained a present
possibility for the Christian, and ultimate success was uncertain. Human life in the
church was full of hope, but still devoid of assurance. Only later in Augustine's life
would the precise theological definition of this dilemma (centered on the doctrine of
perseverance) come out. For the moment, in the last books of this little pamphlet of 411,
the concern was with life in a world burdened by sin. Having outlined the theology of
original sin and its pastoral consequences in the first book, Augustine returns to the
main topic. Is original sin universal? Yes. A further question poses itself neatly enough.
Is there now or has there ever been a human being born alive who was completely
without sin, original or actual? One and one only, according to Augustine: Christ, the
exception who literally proves the rule.[5]

The consequences of this pessimism are spelled out in detail. First, the ubiquity of sin,
even its "inevitability," do not remove any of the blame for sin. Human beings are not
mere puppets on whom sin is inflicted, rather they are free individuals who, however
mysterious it seems, bear full responsibility for the free act of one of their ancestors. For
this reason, sinlessness is both possible and impossible. Possible, "through the grace of
God and men's own free will, not doubting that the free will itself is ascribable to God's
grace," (2.6.7) and hence the blame that inheres as a result of sin, even original sin; but
impossible, in the sense that it does not in fact ever occur.

"There are on earth righteous people, there are great men, brave, prudent, chaste,
patient, pious, merciful people, who endure all kinds of temporal evil with an even mind
for righteousness' sake. If, however, there is truth--nay, because there is truth--in these
words, 'If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,' (1 John 1.8) and in these, 'In
thy sight shall no man living be justified,' (Ps. 142.2) they are not without sin. Nor is
there one among them so proud and foolish as not to think that the Lord's Prayer [with
its clause, 'Forgive us our trespasses'] is needful to him, by reason of his manifold sins."
(2.3.18)
With this one stroke Augustine makes all Christian statements about perfection and
righteousness partial and tentative. The perfection of the blessed in this life is not the
perfection of heaven. Anything less than the perfection of heaven contains an element of
the sinful.

Why does man not in fact avoid sin, if the possibility is guaranteed to him? The answer
will remind the reader of Augustine's theory of the origin of sin in City of God: "To this
question I might very easily and truthfully answer: Because men are unwilling. But if I
am asked why they are unwilling, we are drawn into a lengthy statement. And yet,
without prejudice to a more careful examination, I may say briefly this much: Men are
unwilling to do what is right, either because what is right is unknown to them, or
because it is unpleasant to them." (2.17.26) Argument can go no farther. Men sin,
because they sin. In this refusal to provide explanations, we can see the freedom of the
will that Augustine is eager to protect. Any cause or explanation he might assign for sin
would lessen the freedom of the will along with the blame. People are responsible for
their sins because they sin freely. The miracle of creation means that beings exist who
have this autonomy. The miracle of redemption means that a God exists who brings
them back from perdition when they have exercised their autonomy unwisely.

Men are thus separated from God by an awesome sentence that means they are divided
from all that gives life and joy. Worse, the separation is entirely of their own doing.
Worse still, for a charitable soul, everyone is afflicted with the same separation.
Pathetically, even tiny infants are not free from the contagion. The blight is intensely
personal. Men are separated from God, and hence are separated from themselves. Not
only do nations mistrust and threaten each other, but even small communities are full of
suspicion and crime. Not even the family household draws the line against hostility and
separation. Division and misery reach right into the heart of every individual. No one
can trust even himself fully, for no one is in control of his own acts at all times. We are
at war with ourselves.

Into this gloom, the Christian church--to all appearances merely an earthly association
of sinners--carries a message of divine salvation and offers a divine act of redemption--
not one hidden away in the holy of holies where only the perfect may enter, but one set
literally on the doorstep, accessible to all who will humble themselves to accept it.
Baptism releases the individual from the worst of chains and initiates the believer into
the life of grace. Much that is difficult remains ahead. Only with that beginning is the
fact of grace itself intelligible; but beginnings are not be scorned.

Grace[6]

The ancient religions were relatively consistent in their picture of the world. Divine
power, easily angered, surrounded human beings and threatened unspeakable wrath.
Prudent people discovered what it took to placate that divinity and sedulously undertook
the form of service most pleasing to the divine tyrant. In return, threats vanished and
earthly and heavenly delights began to be showered on the faithful votary. Divine favor,
moreover, was shown in different degrees for different levels of performance on the part
of the human partners to the contract.
Behind this ancient religious system lay a fundamentally incoherent anthropology. For
the gap between god and man was immense and unbridgeable. Human beings were
destined to a lifetime (perhaps an eternity) of settling for second best. Even in the
afterlife, the gods would remain distant and authoritarian. The best one could hope for
was a lessening of threats and dangers, a truce. On the other hand, there was an
altogether baseless optimism about the range of human powers. With accurate
knowledge about the will of the gods, any intelligent man could immediately (perhaps
after a physical rite of purification) set about the task of satisfying the god's desires.
Permanently humble, but unremittingly powerful, such was the nature of man.

But Christianity had too high a regard for the power of sin to accept such a view of
man's capacities, and too high a regard for the goodness of God to believe in an
arbitrary celestial tyrant. Instead of preaching final insignificance but present power,
Christianity reversed the polarities and discovered an anthropology pessimistic
regarding the capacities of sinful man but optimistic about his fate.

The coming transformation is the result of no innate merit on the part of the species. Sin
has pulled mankind so low that no right to divine favor remains. The favor that comes is
free and unearned, a gift from above. Men were created to give God praise and honor of
their own free will with undarkened intelligence, but they rebelled. They chose
ignorance over intelligence and impotence over self-control, but God blithely reached
out and pulled them up again.

This is the center of the Augustinian theology of grace. More can be said about the
philosophical basis of Augustine's theology of grace and free will, but for the moment it
should be kept in mind that for Augustine himself the firm central point was his
conviction of the reality of God's power and favor shown to sinful man. If human reason
could not understand the workings of this grace, that was deplorable (and Augustine
would labor mightily, as none before and few since, to bring about greater
understanding), but no failure to understand ever caused Augustine the slightest doubt
as to the truth of the doctrine he embraced.

Here, as always, Augustine's theology was fundamentally biblical and his method of
argument exegetical. After he had written The Guilt and Remission of Sin, the further
questions of his friend, the imperial legate Marcellinus, led him to expatiate further on
grace itself. He did so in Spirit and Letter, whose title reveals the intimate relation
between his thought on this subject and his theory of exegesis. This treatise is
Augustine's most compact and readable exposition of his theology of grace, and it has
the advantage of having been written before the passions of the Pelagian controversy
began to direct argument down lines that would ultimately obscure as much as they
illuminated.[7]

The question that elicited this treatise is the one that occupied much of the second book
of the earlier pamphlet for Marcellinus: can any man be perfectly just in this life?
Marcellinus now emphasized the apparent injustice of condemning men for sin if
sinlessness is not in their power. Augustine begins by reviewing his explanation that sin
is virtually inevitable, but inevitable as a result of earlier sinfulness rather than as a
result of an exterior constraint on human actions. This all leads to considering the
mechanism by which God deals with man in the Christian dispensation: hence the
relevance of the spirit and the letter.
When the intellect encounters revelation, its natural response is to scrutinize the literal
sense of the text: the instinct for scholarship runs deep in the species. The text is held at
arm's length and analyzed, not clasped to the breast and accepted wholeheartedly. But
Augustine believed that to take only the literal sense of the text is the choice of sinful
people determined to maintain themselves in sin-begotten autonomy and separation
from God. He urges the reader to let the spiritual meaning of the text do its work,
evoking the whole of salvation history and the place therein of the individual believer.
The relation between spirit and letter, moreover, is characteristically the relation
between the Old and New Testaments. The Jewish people of old had the words of God
in their Law, but they read those words literally and obeyed them punctiliously.
Christianity proposed an alternative spiritual reading of that Old Testament history.

Thus, the function of the law of the Old Testament was not to enact a law whose precise
observance could win an eternal reward. Rather the law was to reveal to mankind its
iniquities--nothing more: "Through the Law came an awareness of sin." (Rom. 3.20)
The proper response to the law is remorse and repentance and a longing for divine aid.
To take the law as a complete and exclusive set of commandments leading to perfection
is the sin of the pharisees. But Augustine, expounding Paul, is so clear on these points
that he should be allowed to speak for himself:

"The apostle wanted to commend the grace that has come to all nations through Jesus
Christ, lest the Jews should boast of themselves at the expense of other peoples on
account of their having the Law. First he says that sin and death came on the human
race through one man [Adam], and that righteousness and eternal life came also through
one [Christ]. Then he adds that "the law entered, that sin might abound. But where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound, so that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so
might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.'
(Rom. 5.20-21) ... For there was need to prove to man how corruptly weak he was.
Against his iniquity, the holy law brought him no help towards good, but increased
rather than diminished his iniquity, for the law entered that sin might abound. Thus
convicted and confounded, man might see that he needed not only a physician, but even
God as his helper to direct his steps so sin would not rule over him, and so he might be
healed by fleeing to the aid of divine mercy. In this way, where sin abounded grace
might much more abound, not through the merit of the sinner, but by the intervention of
his helper." (6.9)

An end is called, therefore, to all bargaining for salvation. Man is not a free, strong, and
independent (but subordinate) being dealing with a powerful adversary. He is a helpless,
self-shackled creature, first acknowledging error in the face of the law, then accepting
the free gift of redemption through the grace of the New Testament. This is the deepest
meaning of the duality of the testaments.

"What difference there is between the old covenant and the new is therefore obvious. In
the former the law is written on tablets, while in the latter it is written on hearts. ... In
the one man becomes a transgressor through the letter that kills, in the other a lover
through the life-giving spirit. We must therefore avoid saying that God assists us to
work righteousness and 'works in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure,' (Phil.
2.13) by addressing to us external commands of holiness. For he gives his increase
internally, by shedding love abroad in our hearts by the holy spirit that is given to us."
(25.42)
The apparent pattern of salvation history breaks down. Christ did not come simply to
revise and update (with perhaps some generous simplifications) the commands of the
Old Testament. Christianity does not simply humanize the monotheism of Judaism.
Where in the pre-Christian view, God is typically somewhere outside and above, now
for the Christian, God is also within the individual, exercising a transforming power
regardless of human merits.

This power is one that the subjects of the transformation, ordinary men and women, find
difficult to understand. Our deepest assumption is that we are here somehow all by
ourselves, part of a society to be sure, but still intrinsically ourselves alone. But
Augustine and Paul show us that we are opaque to ourselves. The conflict of wills and
instincts in man seems somehow alien, but it is not. The will to goodness and, where it
exists, the power to achieve that will are not man's but are the effect of the lord and
creator of the universe personally working within man, so far within that the mechanics
of the process elude perception. In reading the classical literature of antiquity, we often
feel that the writers envision the individual at peace with himself in a world that often
defies understanding. Augustine shows a reversal of things (which affected more of late
antiquity than just the Christian church) according to which the inner man becomes the
focus of mystery.

Grace is not a gift present to all men in the same way, which some choose to accept and
some reject. If this were the case, the gift would lose its power, and salvation would be
distributed in accordance with the merit of having accepted the gift. Where grace
prevails, it does so regardless of the choice of the individual subjected to it. The paradox
is that moral responsibility for rejecting God remains, while the moral merit for
accepting God is abolished by grace. This creates a two-fold system of judgment in
appearance, whereby it is just for God to punish the damned and merciful for him to
reward the blessed, and not at all inconsistent to treat the two groups differently. Those
unable to live with paradox are driven either to a harsh system of double predestination
or to a generous doctrine of final blessedness for all. Augustine, always sensitive to
paradox, had, as we shall see, a more complex response.

Pelagius held, apparently, that grace as spoken of in scripture consisted of the good
nature given to all men (which even sin only taints but does not destroy) and of
revelation given through Christ. Men are given a basic goodness and the knowledge to
employ that goodness. Their reaction then is their own free and responsible choice, by
which they earn or fail to earn eternal salvation. But for Augustine, nature and grace are
always two different things. The Pelagian analysis works if applied to Adam and Eve,
perhaps, but they chose badly and fell from the state of preternatural grace that was
theirs by nature. In a world vitiated by their sin, a second order of divine generosity was
needed if men were to be saved. The supernatural grace of Christ's redemption is special
medicine to heal a fallen world, and it works in special ways. Grace cannot simply be
reduced to God's sense of fair play.

This grace, then, is absolute. It forestalls all merit, instructs the sinner concerning what
is right, gives the power to do what is right, and is itself mysteriously the act of doing
what is right. What men do that is wrong, they do themselves; what they do that is right,
God does in them.
This system would seem to leave little room for free will. Human beings are either
sinners or puppets. The controversy Augustine fought on this point developed over a
decade, but it is important to see what Augustine had to say at the outset, in Spirit and
Letter. "Do we then by grace make void free will? God forbid! No! Rather we establish
free will. For even as the law by faith, so free will by grace, is not made void, but
strengthened. The law is fulfilled only by free will, but from the law comes knowledge
of sin, from faith the acquisition of grace against sin, from grace the healing of the soul
from the disease of sin, from the health of the soul freedom of will, from free will the
love of righteousness, from love of righteousness the accomplishment of the law."
(30.52)

True freedom of the will is the highest and noblest of human faculties, but it can be
seriously damaged and even destroyed by its own self-inflicted wounds. When Adam
and Eve encountered the divine command about the tree in the garden, then and then
only was the freedom of choice absolute. But all choices have moral effects, and only
the good choices are compatible with freedom of the will. God is absolutely good, and
all that is less than God is inherently less good. Turning the will from what is best to
what is less good places constraints on that will itself, constraints from which it cannot
then loose itself. Left to itself, the will that has chosen wrongly continues to choose
wrongly, and its freedom is damaged by its own act. Divine grace, on the other hand,
provides redemption from the self- inflicted loss of freedom and restores the will to the
original state of freedom. Obviously, none of this is as simple as Augustine made it
seem in Spirit and Letter, but he saw it just that clearly. The clarity of that vision
inspired all his later writing.

One consequence of this doctrine is that the final redemption of the soul is a matter for
heavenly judgment to determine. Christ brings redemption establishes a church by
which redemption is mediated, but this church has no magic power. This is no pagan
mystery religion, initiation in which brings automatic redemption once for all.
Augustine was intensely aware of the power of ecclesiastically mediated grace to bring
about miracles of moral reformation and of the lingering power of sin to reclaim even
those who had seemed on the road to salvation. He spoke once of the example of the
elderly man who had lived for decades chastely and continently in the peace of the
church, but then suddenly and inexplicably in old age took up with a young woman and
abandoned his earlier life of righteousness.[8]

Augustine holds therefore that divine grace works both absolutely and by degrees. Faith
and baptism mark the first stage on a long road. With divine assistance, that road will be
followed to its end, but if the assistance fails, failure remains possible. The liberation of
the will from the shackles of sin is only partial, and constant relapse in small matters is
inevitable, just as total relapse in large matters is possible. The Christian life is a
constant struggle--but not of the kind Pelagius imagined. It is not that men struggle with
vice--it is that divine grace struggles to overcome the inner tendency to turn away. Pride
on the other side struggles constantly to defeat virtue.

This principle finally answers the question that began Spirit and Letter. Even for the
baptised Christian living in evident harmony with the precepts of Christ and the church,
perfection of righteousness is nowhere to be found on earth. Perfection may be spoken
of, but only as a prefiguration, bearing as much (and as little) resemblance to the
perfection of the blessed as the outward appearance of Jesus, the carpenter's son, bears
to Christ, the risen Lord, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father.

This great paradox cleaves the world in half, leaving an endless array of lesser
paradoxes in its wake. Throughout his writings of this period, Augustine constantly
iterates his belief both in the paradoxical quality of the doctrine he has to preach and in
the ultimate resolution of those paradoxes in divine knowledge. Spirit and Letter ends
with a scriptural quotation that runs like a leit-motif through the anti-Pelagian writings
of Augustine.[9] As we prepare to turn to his elucidation of the deepest paradoxes of
freedom and predestination, it will be useful to see this quotation ending this chapter,
just as Augustine used it to conclude Spirit and Letter. Grave pitfalls await any
controversialist who enters the lists against Augustine without appreciating the
significance of these ideas. He introduces the crucial passage by another quotation from
Paul:

"'My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.' (2 Cor.
12.7-9) A fixed and certain reason remains, therefore, in the hidden depths of God's
judgments, why every mouth, even of the righteous, should be shut in its own praise,
and opened only for the praise of God. But what this reason is, who can unearth, who
can investigate, who can know? So 'unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past
finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his
counselor? Or who hath first given to him, that it shall be repaid to him again? For of
him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory forever, Amen.'"
(Rom. 11.33-36)

Free Will[10]

Readers with little taste for paradox find many frustrations in Augustine. Those
frustrations are about to come to a peak. For the fallen human intellect to understand the
workings of divine salvation is, for Augustine, a task destined to glorious failure.
Failure, because such understanding will be incomplete, but glorious, because the more
intensely that failure is realized, the closer the knowing person comes to God.

To begin with, as always for Augustine, there is God. To God, all that transpires is
intelligible and reasonable. God is omniscient, but also omnipotent. All that is, is of
God; creation is encompassed by God and dwarfed by him. Appearances are only
complicated shadows cast by simple realities we will never fully comprehend. Human
beings, created in the image and likeness of God, possess the faculty of reason, and in
theory nothing should prevent them from sharing divine knowledge. But in practice
something does interfere. Sin leads to ignorance and misunderstanding, and in this life
grace itself leads only to partial and incomplete restoration of the intellect.

But human beings pretend otherwise. They perceive small fragments of the
reasonableness of divine creation and think they know the whole story. They grasp a
piece of the truth and identify it with the whole. Then attention is drawn to a crucial
theological puzzle, a system of logic fails to resolve all the issues that are raised, and
scapegoats are sought. Men blame the system, blame the puzzle, blame God himself,
but never blame themselves.
The problems raised by Augustine's theology of sin and grace and its limitations were
thrust upon with most painful force in the last decade of his life, when some monks in
Africa and Gaul, concerned that the value of their own self-denying way of life was
undermined by what they saw as defeatist quietism, began propagating ideas that have
received in modern times the inaccurate name of "semi-Pelagianism." (The discussion
with the ascetics of Gaul and Africa, provides a more fruitful discussion for our
purposes than does the rancorous contemporaneous quarrel between Augustine and
Julian of Eclanum, though the issues are similar.) The conclusion they reached was that
God's grace is a reward for well-intentioned initial efforts by human beings.[11] In other
words, some limited role for human merit remains at the root of the theology of
salvation. What matters about this opposition is not so much its conclusions as the line
of reasoning that led to the dispute.

The monks observed that a thoroughgoing system of divine grace leads to logical
difficulties. If grace is absolutely sovereign and human merit entirely nonexistent, does
not freedom of the will disappear? Worse, does it not mean that it is God who chooses,
not only who will go to heaven, but also who will go to hell? Cannot those who go to
hell rightly blame the negligence and cruelty of a God who denied them the free gift
given to others just as undeserving? Can God be just if such whimsy reigns? Is God
really merciful?

A related question attacks the problem neatly: Is grace resistible? This would seem to
suggest an attractive escape route, for if grace is resistible, then those who are damned
are responsible for their own damnation. But if the answer to this question is
affirmative, we must ask if that means that grace is also acceptable, that is, if it is in the
power of human beings to reject it, is it not also in their power to accept it? And has not
merit returned to the system? If it is not in our power to accept grace, but only to reject
it, the justice and mercy of God remain in question, for God must foreordain which
people will be allowed to resist and which will be compelled to accept--and divine
whimsy, a terrifying notion, re-enters.

Augustine does not have a simple, comprehensive solution acceptable to all for these
dilemmas. His principle, as in the question of original sin, is to cling to what he knows
for certain, to attempt to provide explanations for difficulties, but then to stand with
what he knows by faith even when logical difficulties remain. Here as always,
revelation and experience are everything for Augustine; the arguments of the
dialecticians have no authority.

With those warnings, we can turn with trepidation to the Augustinian solution.
Augustine believes in predestination, but only in single predestination. God actively
chooses certain individuals to be the recipients of his grace, confers it on them in a way
that altogether overpowers their own will to sin, and leaves them utterly transformed, to
live a life of blessedness. But God does not choose beforehand to send others to hell.
God wills that all men be saved (cf. 1 Tim. 2.4), even as he takes actions that save only
certain individuals. Those who are damned, are damned by their own actions.

On these points, Augustine will not be shaken. His opponents (and a fair number of
would-be friends) through the centuries will insist that this solution is indistinguishable
from double predestination. It will be claimed that this view is pessimistic and
proclaims a tyrannical and arbitrary God. Psychology will be invoked to explain the
growing gloom of the aging Augustine.

Before we judge Augustine, however, we should attempt to understand him. He knew

his answer could only be half a solution. Evil and its sources were still wrapped in
mystery for him as the manifestation of non-being in the world of being. Augustine can
only attempt to explain the workings of God and his goodness, which are clear and
intelligible. To understand the condition of the evil creatures who will not win eternal
blessedness is painfully difficult. All this makes hard doctrine.

If the divine deliberation by which some are saved and some are damned is a mystery,
however, something less obscure can be said about the condition of the will of the
redeemed creature. We must consider for a moment the nature of the faculty of will
itself.[12]

In practical terms, it is scarcely too strong to say that the will is the personality. The will
is the part of the soul that chooses and acts. All choices are choices of will, and all acts
are acts of appetite, hence acts of love, either the divinely inspired love Augustine calls
caritas, or the sinful selfish love he calls cupiditas. Personal, conscious existence is not
somewhere outside the instrumental faculty we call will, rationally deliberating how to
employ that faculty to achieve its ends. Instead, existence, knowledge, and will are an
indissociable whole, and all deliberation and choice is of the will--of love. Given this
psychology, it is then logical to argue that the power of sin over the individual must be
considered when freedom is assessed. The will is always free of external control. There
is no such thing as a compelled act for Augustine, one that goes "against the will." Even
when we are "compelled" to do something, it is only that the conditions in which the
will freely operates are altered.

So freedom of the will from external constraint is always absolute. Its freedom becomes
impaired when it begins to choose the wrong kind of love and so to bind itself to
inferior choices in a self-perpetuating, self-damning process. When divine grace
intervenes, it liberates the individual from the bondage of wrong past choices. Precisely
how this happens is a little unclear to Augustine, but it is clear that God, without ever
tampering with the interior working of the will itself, can still direct its choices by
altering, in perfect omniscience, the circumstances that affect the will.

The whole process of grace is seen by God, eternally knowing all things, as a single
unity, but it appears to men as a series, sometimes a lifelong series, of events no one of
which necessarily entails any further event. Thus when human beings speak of grace,
they speak imperfectly. God's grace cannot be said to be working in the life of an
individual even when that individual is destined, at a later date, to rebel, fall into sin,
and choose damnation. Augustine describes this process best in another late treatise,
The Gift of Perseverance. From a human point of view, the divine grace that effects
salvation is best described as Initial Grace plus the Grace of Perseverance. From the
divine point of view, it is better to say that unless the Grace of Perseverance is present,
the Initial Grace is not finally grace at all but only some lesser gift.

The best way to see this process would be from the point of view of heaven. The blessed
soul, from the moment of first turning to God, lives in a state of constant indeterminacy.
Grace brings many gifts of consolation and strength, but each day brings new trials and
the need for new gifts. Whether the gifts will in the end match the trials will not be
known until the sorting out of the sheep from the goats at the last judgment. This
predestination appears in the world under most uncertain guise.

Practically, therefore, the life of the Christian is lived on the horns of a dilemma. Grace
must be firmly believed to be omnipotent; without grace nothing good can be done. All
that is good in the soul must come from God, while all that is bad is of one's own doing.
And yet all this appears to the individual as a matter of individual choices of that
frustratingly free will. The faithful Christian, therefore, is one who believes utterly in
God but who responds to the exigencies of daily life by living as though everything,
salvation included, depends on his own actions. God is all-powerful and predestining,
but the will is free, and the one who believes and hopes in God must act as though for
himself, but act out of a completely disinterested, selfless love--caritas, not cupiditas.

Nowhere does Augustine suggest that any of this is easy. The Christian is keenly aware
of the ambivalences of earthly existence and feels strongly the dilemmas of living as an
isolated individual subject to a commandment that requires him to think himself part of
a completely selfless and loving community. The damned can live in the world as they
see it, but the blessed are doomed to live, for the time being, in two worlds, one of
appearances, one of realities. In the world of appearances, they cannot avoid sin; but in
the world of reality, they must avoid it. In the world of appearances, they have freedom
of choice clear and simple, which they use for sin; in the world of reality, freedom of
choice is transformed utterly into a genuine freedom, which in fact chooses only the
good and hence looks (in the world of appearances) like something less than total
freedom. All the while, the evil flourish. Selfishness does turn out to be a remarkably
efficient way to go about living in the here and now--for the strong and the lucky.

This doctrine of the will deals with the central mystery of human existence, the question
of who we are and what we are here for. Augustine's answer had to be confusing and
obscure to many, perhaps finally and irrationally paradoxical even to the best-
intentioned of readers. But Augustine never wavered in maintaining this difficult
position. Instead he kept quoting Paul on the unsearchable judgments of God. He never
let it escape his attention that when the choice must be made between divine goodness
and human reason, the choice must be for God, not for man. That the problem remained
ultimately insoluble was for him in a sense merely evidence that God was still God and
man, fallen but on the way to redemption, was still man.

One further irony must be faced. The dilemmas of predestination create an urgent sense
of frustration by the absence of clear, logically compelling answers. Believers wonder at
the ineptitude of the theologians, while skeptics take the failure of the Christians to
settle the problem as evidence of the incoherence of the creed. The irony is that both
positions are correct, but neither is complete. For what is most significant is precisely
that insistence of the human mind on being given a straight answer. The human mind,
here and now, naturally expects all problems to have solutions. Men expect, even
demand, to make sense of the world. But that quality of the human mind is, to
Augustine, a proud and Pelagian trait. The intellect does not willingly yield its control
over action. Rebellion and skepticism are more characteristic, as is evident from (and
explained by, Augustine would say) the story of Adam and Eve.
The Pelagian position on Christianity is finally a pagan one. God creates the world and
issues his commands. Men are to learn the commands, obey them, and so win salvation.
The situation is simple, requiring merely that the rules be clear and intelligible and
devoid of paradox and confusion. The entire Augustinian system is radically opposed to
this. That God appears to us as a master of paradox tells him something about mankind,
but nothing about God. Faith, which is what grace instills in the heart, is the assertion
that God is God, despite the paradoxes that make him seem arbitrary, unjust, or
mysterious. For Augustine, God was always God, he was himself always a sinner, and
paradox and mystery were the price he had to pay.

Augustine
Confessions[1]
by James J. O'Donnell

Noverim te, noverim me: "I would know you [God], I would know myself." Augustine
wrote these words in one of his earliest works, but they retained their force throughout
his lifetime.[2] The irrefutable solipsism of self confronted with the absolute reality of
God, the wholly other: all of Augustine's thought moves between those two poles.

But those poles were not far distant from one another, with vast uncharted territory
between. Rather, they were elements of an intimate personal relationship destined for
permanent and indissoluble union. To treat God and self as two different things is to
introduce the fatal distinction that the serpent taught to Eve. The relation between
creator and creature is totally different from that which obtains between any two created
things in the material world. Each created object participates in a complex world of
material objects from which God seems far away. But the creator is equidistant from all
creatures--equally close to all.

Theologians write about God dispassionately and objectively, in serene detachment, but
in doing so avail themselves of a compendious device that runs the risk of negating the
truth of all they say. Christian theology only succeeds when the believer sees that the
story of all creation ("macrotheology") and the private history of the soul
("microtheology") are identical. Differences between the two are flaws of perception,
not defects inherent in things.

Saints do not have to be taught this identity, for theology realized is holiness. But even
saints, when they are theologians, often find it hard to embody their intuition in their
works. For Augustine, the crisis came early in life. Despite his reputation as a self-
revelatory writer, he left behind little direct testimony about the condition of his soul at
different times, but we can see that the first years of his episcopacy were a time of trial.
He had managed the transformation from virtual pagan to devout Christian with
reasonable equanimity. The map for that conversion was clear enough and commonly
followed. Even his elevation to the priesthood in the church of Hippo had brought with
it few fresh anxieties.

But the final elevation to the bishopric seems to have unsteadied Augustine a bit. The
transition was accompanied by some jibing from outside--suspicions of his Manichean
past, rumor of an illicit connection with a married woman, jealousy from some less-
educated African churchmen toward this well-educated outsider rising too rapidly to the
top. Those things, however, must have been only the surface disturbances. Augustine
was more deeply troubled by the implications of his new office.

Who was he to stand in such a place of eminence, with so many people depending on
him? He was still a sinner, but somehow he was also the conduit of divine grace
bringing redemption to other sinners. Now a preacher, he needed to be preached to
himself, but there was no one to do that. He had to stand alone before the people of
Hippo each week and proclaim God's word. How could the expectations of these people
not drive him to despair?

Two literary answers came out of this personal crisis. The first was perfectly
theological, detached, and serious: Christian Doctrine was begun, and carried out
through most of the third book, in the year or so after his elevation to the bishopric. In
it, as we have seen, Augustine sketched dispassionately the nature of the Christian
message and the mechanism of its proclamation to the world. It was a handbook for
others who would preach, but it was a personal statement of intent as well. How do I
preach, he asked himself? Christian Doctrine was the answer. But it was an incomplete
answer, in more ways than one. At about this time, he turned instead to writing the
Confessions.

Detachment and objectivity are not to be found in the Confessions. Analysis of divine
affairs is not only not kept apart from self-analysis, but the two streams are run together
in what often appears to first readers to be an uncontrolled and illogical melange. This
book's fascination for modern readers stems in large part from its vivid portrayal of a
man in the presence of his God, of God and the self intimately related but still separated
by sin, and of a struggle for mastery within the self longing for final peace. It is an
extraordinary book, no matter how studied.

The rest of Augustine's life was spent writing books of a more conventional sort. He
would analyze in painstaking detail the inner workings of the trinity, the whole course
of salvation history, and the delicate commerce between God and man in the workings
of grace and the will, all in an objective, detached, and impersonal style.[3] What is
different about them is that they were written by a man who had already written the
Confessions, made his peace with God insofar as that was possible, and drawn from that
peace (the forerunner of heavenly rest) the confidence he needed to stand at the altar
and preach or to sit in his study dictating works of polemic and instruction for the world
to read.

The reading of the Confessions given in this chapter, then, may seem somewhat strange.
The Confessions are not to be read merely as a look back at Augustine's spiritual
development; rather the text itself is an essential stage in that development, and a work
aware both of what had already passed into history and of what lay ahead. No other
work of Christian literature does what Augustine accomplishes in this volume; only
Dante's Commedia even rivals it.

Prayer--so all the authoritative writers state--is no simple matter. It is not easy to pray.
In view of that, we should direct our first attention to the form of Augustine's
masterwork and portion out at least some of our admiration for his accomplishment of a
very difficult task: praying on paper. The literary form of the work is a continuous
address to God. No human audience is directly addressed, although in Book 10
Augustine will wonder what such an audience might make of the work. But at all times
the direction of the work is towards God.

Such a work would seem doomed to failure. Prayer is private, but literature is
unfailingly public; prayer is humble, but literature is always a form of self-assertion;
prayer is intimate, but literature is voyeuristic. One might be able to depict another's
prayer successfully (for then the voyeurism and the self-assertion are the responsibility
of the author, not of the individual at prayer), except that no third party can ever enter
into the privacy of another's relation with God.

But somehow or other Augustine succeeds. The Confessions are marked by an unfailing
consistency of tone and authenticity of style. The believer and the writer function as
one, with no awkwardness or embarrassment. There is never a false note, no false
modesty, no posing for an audience. We come away convinced that, whatever else we
have learned, in it we have seen Augustine at prayer, as he was.

We need not insist that Augustine prayed in the privacy of his cell with just such words,
just such cadences, just such nuanced and orderly allusions to scripture, just such
unfailing intensity. The text is not the private prayer of a man on his knees in a chapel.
In fact, in the Confessions Augustine succeeded at something even more difficult than
transcribing his private devotions accurately. He has instead devised an idiom by which
it is possible to pray in a literary medium that is, to pray as one would have to pray with
pen in hand. This text does not represent Augustine's prayer life as signifier represents
signified; the text is itself the thing signified, the very prayer itself, the act of
communication between Augustine and God. Its relation to the rest of Augustine's
prayer life is not as snapshot to subject but as one subject to another.

The implications of this literary form come to be the subject of the Confessions
themselves in the tenth book. We must bear in mind that we are not reading a book of
any ordinary kind. This is emphatically not the "first modern autobiography," for the
autobiographical narrative that takes up part of the work is incidental content while
prayer is the significant form. The work is sui generis.

Sin

The Confessions begin as prayer. The first few pages are dense and abstract, but they
are of deep significance to the whole work and to Augustine's life, and they repay study.
The beginning is abrupt--and not Augustine's.

"Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised;

great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite." These lines juxtapose and combine two
Psalm texts (144[145].3 and 146[147].5). With them, Augustine embodies his own
principle from Christian Doctrine, that he who speaks of religion should rely on the
language of scripture itself. Though necessity often compels the believer to use his own
words, constant recourse to the very words of scripture provides a safety net over which
the speculative theologian and confused penitent may work.

The content of these lines is praise: a humble mortal enunciates the greatness of God,
greatness of action and contemplation, of power and wisdom, embracing all that is. That
greatness is in fact "greatly to be praised." Much of the Confessions will sound the same
laudatory note, and not by accident. We ordinarily interpret "confession" as a single-
valued term, acknowledgment of wrongdoing by a miscreant. But the etymology has
simply to do with emphatic agreement or acknowledgment. Confession of sin is the
negative form of confession. Confession of praise, on the other hand, is the
acknowledgment by the creature of the greatness and goodness of God. Confession of
faith is then emphatic assent to a set of facts about God and God's relation to mankind.

All three confessions occur in the Confessions.[4] If God and the soul are all Augustine
wants to know, and if they are to be known best in relation to each other, then
acknowledgement of the weakness of the individual and of the power and greatness of
God are two sides of the same coin. Sinful man sets himself in God's place; confession
of sin demolishes that preposterousness. Sinful man belittles God's power at the expense
of his own; confession of praise restores God's place in the sinner's eyes. Confession of
faith declares what has transpired to the community of believers. Seen this way,
confession is the working out of redemption itself in the life of the sinner. It is prayer
itself. The literary text, prayer on paper, becomes in this way again not a picture of the
working out of Augustine's salvation, but the instrument of salvation itself.

"And Thee would a man praise;

a man, but a particle of Thy creation;
a man, that bears about him his mortality,
the witness of sin,
the witness, that Thou resistest the proud:
yet would a man praise Thee;
he, but a particle of Thy creation."

God is great, but man is tiny, yet man, full of sin and death and rejection, somehow or another
reaches up, as improbable as it may seem, to praise summary of its contents. The natural
motion of the spirit is from the restlessness of alienation from God to the repose of peace and
union with God. The Confessions, among many other things, follow this path from restlessness
to peace itself. (A glance ahead at the last words on the last page of the Confessions [13.35-38]
will confirm this.) In the beginning, confusion and division; in the end, peace.

"Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first,

to call on Thee or to praise Thee?
and, again, to know Thee or to call on Thee?
For who can call on Thee, not knowing Thee?
For he that knoweth Thee not,
may call on Thee as other than Thou art.
Or is it rather,
that we call on Thee that we may know Thee?"

How does praise come about? Is it man's doing? But if it is his doing, how is it not inevitable--
for if all can know God, all would praise him, would they not? The precise sequence of
Augustine's question is this: In what order do the apparently separate acts occur of knowing
God, appealing to God, and praising God? Does not knowledge have to come first? (For
without knowledge, we would not know on whom we were to call or whom to praise.) Or is
perhaps that we pray first, in order to gain knowledge? (Augustine himself began by calling on
the name of God, but now he seeks knowledge (the word he uses is one he uses elsewhere in
similar contexts as a name for faith) and understanding. The answer to the question comes
from the source of all answers.

"But how shall they call on Him

in whom they have not believed?
or how shall they believe without a preacher?
And they that seek the Lord shall praise Him.
For they that seek shall find Him,
and they that find shall praise Him."

Scripture provides in this conflation of several passages, answers to all the questions.[5]
Invocation requires belief (faith) first; belief requires a preacher; praise comes after seeking
and is indeed part of a sequence that runs seeking-finding-praising. Given these data,
Augustine can answer his questions in rational order.

"I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling on Thee;

and will call on Thee, believing in Thee;
for to us hast Thou been preached.
My faith, Lord, shall call on Thee,
which Thou hast given me,
wherewith Thou hast inspired me,
through the incarnation of Thy Son,
through the ministry of the preacher."

Here is the essence: faith calls on God (seeking-finding-praising: that sequence follows
necessarily on calling on God, we are left to deduce), but faith comes from outside the
individual, through the second person of the trinity.

Thus God is great, mankind (though outwardly insignificant) is capable of praising God,
but this capacity is no accomplishment of man himself. God preaches his Word to man,
which results in faith, which results in invocation, which results in seeking, which
results in finding, which results in praise. So the economy of the Christian experience is
defined: faith is the beginning, unceasing praise (in heaven) is the end, and human life is
a journey from faith to praise, from restlessness to repose. God is the guiding force,
drawing men to himself despite their unworthiness.

Faith is thus the ground whence invocation rises. The next paragraphs deal with the
problem of invocation. What can it possibly mean to "call on God?" This puzzle
becomes the means by which Augustine expresses awe and reverence at the majesty of
God in a vivid, overtowering depiction of God, full of paradox:

"What art Thou then, my God?

What, but the Lord God?
For who is Lord but the Lord?
or who is God save our God?
Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent;
most merciful, yet most just;
most hidden, yet most present;
most beautiful, yet most strong;
stable, yet incomprehensible;
unchangeable, yet all-changing;
never new, never old;
all-renewing,
and bringing age upon the proud and they know it not;
ever working, ever at rest;
still gathering, yet lacking nothing;
supporting, filling, and overspreading;
creating, nourishing, and maturing;
seeking, yet having all things.
Thou lovest, without passion;
art jealous, without anxiety;
repentest, yet grievest not;
art angry, yet serene;
changest Thy works, Thy purpose unchanged;
receivest again what Thou findest,
yet didst never lose ...." (1.4.4)

Intellectually speaking, then, this book is a search for understanding. On this point a
little clarification is perhaps useful. Augustine, and the early Latin middle ages in
general, recognized a dual epistemology--an ideal theory of knowledge, and a practical
one. In the ideal world, God is known from the glory of creation itself. Human reason
suffices to deduce his existence, and full understanding of the deepest truths is
accessible to all. But for fallen man, sin intervenes. Revelation supplements creation as
a source of knowledge, and the authority of the church supplements faltering human
reason. What revelation and authority give is faith, simple faith, and the restlessness
with which Augustine begins. As the spirit of grace works, the strength comes to move
from the epistemology of the fallen world (and the faith it provides) to the epistemology
of unfallen man (of the Garden of Eden--almost of heaven) and the direct
understanding--mystical contemplation is perhaps a better term--that comes with it.

The Confessions open in faith and restless confusion. This work will show something of
how Augustine proceeded a little way from faith to understanding and will itself, as
literary text, be one of those steps. Perfect understanding (perfect repose) is impossible
this side of the grave, but every step of the journey is an image of the whole journey
(salvation history is the same story at all times in every place), and the text that begins
with faith in Book 1 and ends with rest in Book 13 can itself be part of the process
described (a part of the whole whose every part is the whole--paradox on paradox).

A work that begins at the beginning of personal salvation aptly begins with the
beginning of life. Augustine is justly famous for the insight he brings in these pages of
the Confessions to the dilemmas of infancy, even if his sober conclusions seem harsh to
us now. The justice of much of what he says cannot be denied, and when once we
realize where he begins, it is hard to deny him his conclusions.

To Augustine sin is always unprincipled self-assertion. What seems mere instinct for
survival in the beasts of the wild is in human beings a turning away from love of God
and neighbor towards pride and emptiness. The innocence of small children, Augustine
says, is chiefly inability in their selfishness to wield effective power over other people's
lives. But the first attempts to communicate and the first faltering steps are taken with
nothing but self-interest in mind. The infant's love for its parents is not caritas at all, for
it is all demanding and no giving.

But the speechless days of infancy are only prologue to Augustine's recollections. In the
first book of the Confessions he paints a picture of himself that highlights the
contradictions of his youth. It is a society no longer faithful to the old traditions but
insufficiently sure of its own mind to devote itself fully to the new religion that we see
reflected in Augustine's religious history. Throughout his early life, Augustine had a
powerful yen to believe. Through wanderings and confusions, he was constantly on the
brink of committing himself to some lofty ideal. Sometimes he even made the gesture.
Already as a child, when illness seemed life-threatening, he cried out for baptism
(1.1.17) and almost got his wish, except that his unexpected recovery seemed to render
the saving bath unnecessary for the time.

But at times religious affiliation could mean less to Augustine than the "natural"
inclinations of fallen man. He is not minutely revelatory of his indiscretions and
transgressions, but his self-analysis suggests at least the shape of his temptations and his
lapses. What information he gives, though, comes almost offhandedly and gives us little
idea of the quality of feeling and emotion that made his liaisons plausible.

Instead, when he wants to penetrate the depths of his own iniquity, he chose to describe
the theft of a few pears from a neighbor's tree (2.4-9). This narrative is placed in his
sixteenth year, an idle time spent at home, his education interrupted by penury, his
energies at the disposal of his fancies. An unflattering portrayal of his father's reaction
to his new maturity shows that it was a time when the powers of the flesh were
beginning to flourish. Then suddenly we have him and a few friends snatching pears. To
ask whether the theft is meant to represent symbolically the sexual indiscretions of
youth is literal-minded, but some broad analogy at least is probably implied. Although
the moral consciousness begins to function in childhood, it is with adolescence and
adulthood that the trivial indiscretions of childhood begin to harden into ugly
excrescences of moral insensitivity. The adolescent is father to the man. Of that much at
least Augustine meant to speak when he chose the pear theft for his meditation on sin.

In speaking of the pears, he strips away irrelevancies and focuses on the sinfulness of
the sin. Most immoral acts are undertaken with a purpose--or at least a rationalization
--that is at least in part expressly moral. Some innate, positive attraction of the act draws
the individual. Even so morally austere an author as Dante could portray the love of
Paolo and Francesca with sympathy for a fall that had come through excess of love and
enthusiasm; Augustine could well have recounted his own amours at least as deftly. But
there was nothing at all redeeming about the theft of the pears. The pears themselves
were paltry and unattractive, and the thieves did not even keep them; the comrades with
whom he made the theft were not particularly his friends, nor did he want their
approval; what attracted him was simply the thrill of the theft itself: forbidden fruit.

Surely Augustine never expected to be cast down to hell for a few pears. But at the same
time he felt with awe and horror that the obscure craving that had led him to the pears
was the sort of desire by which hell is chosen. To delight in evil for its own sake, to
assert one's own primacy in the world by arrogating other's goods to oneself for
whatever purpose--there is the embodiment of all evil. The second book of the
Confessions ends with Augustine facing his own adolescent act in all its trivial
magnitude:

"Who can disentangle that twisted and intricate knottiness? Foul is it: I hate to think on it, to
look on it .... I sank away from Thee, and I wandered, my God, too much astray from Thee my
stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land." (2.10.18)

The sins of manhood follow upon those of adolescence with drear inevitability. Despite
his preoccupation with himself (perhaps because of it) the world did not reject
Augustine, and his career began to offer hint of future glories. As he began to make his
way in the world, the tensions that had marked his childhood took on new forms and
created new anxieties. He was beginning a life as teacher and student of ancient
literature, committed to the propagation of the ancient ideas about man, nature, and the
divine that were rooted in the literary tradition. Cicero was his favorite guide in these
years, and it was the Hortensius of Cicero's that was the spur to all his searches for truth.

But the life of philosophy that this devotee of the classics actually found for himself
would not have been highly regarded by Cicero. Augustine took up with the Manichees
and pursued the life of perfection it offered. Manicheism was a self-absorbed movement
on the periphery of Christianity that crossed the line separating church from cult. It
seemed to offer a more rational, scientific picture of the world than did the simple--
Augustine may have thought superstitious--orthodox teachings. Augustine had many
reasons to find this sect attractive, for in it he found surcease from the plagues of an
obviously troubled conscience. Bad conscience can easily turn to neurotic obsession,
but Augustine did not remain a convinced Manichee long enough. Rationalism can not
substitute for reason, and the intellectual shoddiness of Manicheism soon turned him
away.

Augustine was left leading a curious double life. In public, he was a teacher and a
defender of the established order. In private, he was a half-hearted member of an illegal
cult whose promises he did not quite credit. For the time being, the headlong rush of his
career carried him unthinkingly along. The only qualms he had were instilled (he later
thought) by his mother, Monica.

We cannot tell, with the evidence we have, what Monica meant for Augustine before his
conversion. He could not have said for certain himself. In the Confessions he attributed
much to her early influence. His narratives indicate equally that her influence was much
ignored and resisted at this period. She wanted to see him a Christian, but he never
responded directly to her wish. Christianity itself he scorned, for being too familiar and
pedestrian. Only when he had taken a long journey through the exotic underside of late
Roman religious life could he return to Christianity and find in it something adequately
unfamiliar to carry promise of a happy future. He may well have thought, in early
manhood, no more than that Christianity was a good religion for women of little
education, like his mother; clever young men could do better for themselves.

The successes of his career mounted and mounted, but what Augustine remembered was
not so much the success itself as the ambivalences of that success. But a close friend,
perhaps the closest he ever had, was taken from him in a most disturbing way. (This
friend, like the mother of his son, is left nameless.) The friend fell ill, and his family had
the sacrament of baptism administered while he lay unconscious. The patient rallied,
and Augustine, full of the optimistic ebullience of the moment, spoke slightingly of the
ritual performed on the passive invalid. He was surprised to find that his friend took the
sacrament seriously and brushed away Augustine's jibes. To make matters worse, the
friend soon relapsed and died, in the peace of the church Augustine disdained. He had
lost his friend to death, and to the church as well.

Episodes such as this make up the fragments of autobiography that occur in the second
through fifth books of the Confessions. The tale of lapse and descent is not overdrawn,
except that to those who do not share Augustine's harsh judgment on his younger self, it
may seem excessive to have assigned any moral significance at all to the ordinary
anxieties and strains of life. The insistent pull of fleshly concupiscence, the inanities of
philosophical speculation, and the impatience of ambition all conspired to make
Augustine successful and dissatisfied; so far, Augustine is no different from many
others before and since. The young Augustine, much as we seek to know him, eludes
our grasp, as he escaped even the Augustine who wrote these pages.

This represented decline ends with the depiction Augustine gives of himself as he
turned an uncertain corner to his thirtieth year. His Manicheism had left him, with his
philosophical allegiance tentatively placed in the moribund school of academic
skepticism, which still offered rationalism but was not embarrassed--as Manicheism
was--by a body of idiosyncratic doctrines. Outwardly, the good of his career demanded
that he make no break with the ruling orthodoxy. The dismal fifth book of the
Confessions ends with the young Augustine betwixt and between, on the doorstep of the
church, confused and doubting whether to enter:

"So then after the manner of the Academics (as they are supposed) doubting of every thing,
and wavering between all, I settled so far, that the Manichees were to be abandoned;
-- judging that, even while doubting, I might not continue in that sect, to which I already
preferred some of the philosophers;
--to which philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving name of Christ,
I utterly refused to commit the cure of my sick soul.
--I determined therefore so long to be a catechumen of the Catholic Church, to which I had
been commended by my parents, till something certain should dawn upon me, whither I might
steer my course." (5.14.25)
Grace

Nothing so astonished Augustine as the change that came over him during his short
years in Milan. For that divine gift--such he had to believe it--he reserved the central
books of his Confessions of praise. To admire the majesty of the heavens or the
workings of divine providence through human history is one thing. That detached,
objective contemplation can be cheap and inconsequential. But when Augustine looked
back on his own life, he was amazed at the evidences of growth and change. Seeing God
at work in his own life, he would not deny the call that had made him a bishop.

No subject in the life of Augustine has excited so much discussion as the conversion he
recounts in the Confessions. The reader facing those pages for the first time should be
advised of some of the controversies and the importance that attaches to them.[6]

The bluntest question is the historian's: Is Augustine telling the truth? Does the highly
selective, theological narrative of the Confessions faithfully represent his life at that
period, or has he taken liberties with the facts? He would later (in Book 10) expatiate at
length on the peculiarities of memory: was he not perhaps himself the victim of
memory's selective powers in this case? The first works written after the crucial events
(mainly the Cassiciacum dialogues) do not support the narrative of the Confessions in
abundant detail. If the garden scene of the Book 8 was so crucial to his whole life, why
does no trace of it appear in any of the early works, some written as little as three
months after the event?

Broader questions deal not with the events themselves but with their significance.
Augustine's reading of the writings of certain Platonists were instrumental in effecting
his conversion to Christianity. How important a part did they play? Perhaps the events
of 386 amounted not to a conversion to Christianity at all, but to a conversion to
Neoplatonism. On that view, only Augustine's conscription into church affairs pulled
him the distance further that made him a real Christian.

Scholars still divide over the questions of historicity and have clustered around an
ambivalent answer on the influence of Neoplatonism. It is generally accepted that
Augustine converted to Christianity in 386, but then it is also generally accepted that the
Christianity of his early period was heavily laden with Neoplatonic ideas and
expectations.

The disparities between the Confessions narrative and the Cassiciacum dialogues need
not be significant, first of all, and can be explained by attending to the differences of
literary style and purpose between those works. The dialogues were philosophical works
in a Ciceronian mold, in which personal passions fit uncomfortably. The very proximity
of the dialogues to the events of the conversion explains their reticence. (The dialogues
were dedicated to some of his Milan friends; but it was just those friends to whom
Augustine regrets having given a disingenuous explanation for his retirement: 9.2.2-4.)
Having converted to a religion of humility and self-effacement, Augustine would not
have trumpeted his inmost feelings so soon and in so self-serving a way. A full decade
had to pass before he could devise the literary means, in the Confessions, to speak of his
most private experiences without pose or brag.
The philosophical quality of the dialogues illuminates Augustine's relation to
Neoplatonism. In 386 and immediately after Augustine was a Christian convert but not
yet a Christian theologian. Inexperience and the lack of relevant training held him back.
Instead, he was a professor of Latin letters with some competence in philosophical
analysis. He could write of the problems that Christianity raised within the strict
technical competence of his professional experience. The context of these dialogues is
more Ciceronian than Neoplatonic, and there is no lack at all of explicit references to
Christianity; but the characteristic Augustinian method of argument, in widening
exegetical circles starting from particular texts of scripture, is not yet there and only
comes to full maturity about the time of Augustine's consecration as bishop.

Furthermore, no religious conversion is complete and instantaneous. The one who

comes to a new creed always brings confused expectations and misunderstandings bred
in another environment. From earliest manhood, Augustine had been looking for an
answer to all life's questions, expecting a decisive turning by which everything would
be changed for the better. When he did finally turn to Christianity, he seems to have had
expectations the new religion could not fulfill. (He seems, for example, to have been
conditioned to seek and expect what we could roughly call mystical visions; the
expectation is encouraged by Neoplatonism, but fades as Augustine learns the Christian
way of life.[7]) Perfect peace, serenity, and tranquility of spirit did not come
automatically and permanently. In the ten years between the conversion and the writing
of the Confessions, Augustine modified his expectations and in doing so discovered
more accurately than he could have done before what was essential about his new
religion. Neoplatonic influences were at work in the years after 386, but these
influences were constantly on the wane, for Augustine had taken Christianity as the new
norm according to which all other religious and philosophical notions were to be
judged.[8]

In the central books of the Confessions (Books 6-9), Augustine contemplates the events
that led him to his new life. Much has been selected, edited, and rearranged to make this
picture. The description Augustine gives of these crucial events in his life is meant to be
theologically and spiritually accurate, arranged according to principles other than those
of strict chronology. With that caution in mind, the pattern and truth of these books
becomes evident.

The patron of Augustine's turn to Christianity would seem to have been Ambrose,
whose sermons demolished intellectual barriers Augustine had not been able to
surmount for himself and whose hands administered the baptism that made Augustine a
member of Christ's church. But Ambrose was always a little too high up and far away
for Augustine. The high affairs of the imperial court preoccupied Ambrose, and another
ambitious courtier working his way up into the fringes of that court cannot long have
detained his attention. He had seen many like Augustine before.

But Augustine may have emphasized Ambrose's remoteness to contrast him with the
Manichean leader Faustus in Book 5. He did manage a private audience on at least one
occasion (Letter 54.2.3). He had sought Faustus's advice as of a guru, but found only
some oratorical skill, and Faustus wound up studying classical literature under
Augustine. He went to hear Ambrose, to observe his oratorical style, was inspired to
seek him out as a guru, but was rebuffed by various difficulties. The Christian religion,
we are meant to infer, is not transmitted as secret doctrine by gurus, but proclaimed
publicly from the pulpit for all. Augustine could never reach Ambrose the guru, but
Ambrose the bishop reached him with his words and baptised him with his hands.

Before that baptism, there was still a world of confusion and uncertainty to face.

"And lo, I was now in my thirtieth year, sticking in the same mire, greedy of enjoying things
present, which passed away and wasted my soul, while I said to myself, 'Tomorrow I shall find
it. It will appear manifestly, and I shall grasp it. Lo, Faustus the Manichee will come and clear
every thing! O you great men, ye Academicians, it is true then, that no certainty can be
attained for the ordering of life? Nay, let us search the more diligently and despair not. Lo,
things in the ecclesiastical books are not absurd to us now, which sometimes seemed absurd,
and may be taken otherwise, and in a good sense. I will take my stand where as a child my
parents placed me, until the clear truth be found out. But where shall it be sought or when?
Ambrose has no leisure. We have no leisure to read. Where shall we find even the books?
Whence, or when procure them? From whom borrow them? Let set times be appointed, and
certain hours be ordered for the health of our soul. Great hope has dawned: the catholic faith
teaches not what we thought, and vainly accused it of. Her instructed members hold it profane
to believe God to be founded by the figure of a human body. And do we doubt to knock, that
the rest may be opened? The forenoons our scholars take up: what do we do during the rest of
the day? Why not this? But when shall we pay court to our great friends, whose favor we
need? When shall we compose what we may sell to scholars? When shall we refresh ourselves,
unbending our minds from these intense cares?'" (6.11.18)

Two problems continued to plague Augustine and suspend his assent to Christianity.
The first he alluded to in the passage just quoted, and was twofold. First, there was the
resolute materiality of the world we perceive and the consequent difficulty imagining
any kind of existence not bound to visible, tangible forms. But then there was the gross
corporeality of the Christian scriptures, particularly the Old Testament documents.
Augustine was bound in a world-as-it-seemed and a view of Christianity that seemed no
less bound to such a world.

Here Ambrose made from the pulpit his first contribution to Augustine's search. In his
sermons, he showed Augustine for the first time Christian scriptural interpretation as
Augustine would later describe it in Christian Doctrine. He elucidated the notion of
spiritual being in a way that taught Augustine how to think of God without binding God
into the world of matter. God as creator is only possible with such a vision. This finally
undermined Augustine's Manicheism, which had labored to find a place in the material
world for both God and evil. For Augustine, God had finally been liberated from the
struggle with evil, and evil itself no longer needed to be given a material form.

Now the problem of evil itself could be faced in a context that gave promise of a
solution. Judging by the arrangement of the Confessions, Augustine seems to say that
the first advance in understanding occurred in 384 and early 385, shortly after his arrival
in Milan, and there is verisimilitude to this. The initial impact of Ambrose on a mind
like Augustine's should have been great. If that is true, then the second stage of
Augustine's development, the resolution of the problem of evil, ran through the rest of
385 and perhaps into 386. For this, Ambrose was again, in a roundabout way,
influential.
There a lively interest in Ambrose's Milan in the writings of the late Platonists.[9] Even
though one of the leading Platonic writers, Porphyry (died c. 305), had written a book
directed against the Christians so vehement and effective that it was later the victim of
an unusually successful book-burning campaign, many of the ideas of the Platonists
were well-received. Marius Victorinus, of whom we shall hear again in closer
connection with Augustine's conversion, had translated Greek Platonic writings into
Latin, and these were widely read and discussed in the circle of intellectuals around
Ambrose.[10]

Not unlike the scholastics of the later middle ages, these Christian Platonists used a
secular philosophy to illuminate their own theological reflections. In the terms
Augustine used in Christian Doctrine, they were spoiling the Egyptians of their gold. In
an age when the trinitarian definitions of the Nicene creed were new-minted Platonic
discussions of the three hypostases (the One, the Mind, and the Spirit) sounded eerily
similar to the Christian principles.[11] The vocabulary of the Platonists offered
clarification for the complex and confusing testimony of scripture. Augustine was not a
leader in this movement, but he was an eager learner. Just what he read and how he
interpreted it remains a matter of heated controversy, but we can sketch his development
with the help of the Confessions.

Augustine had been troubled all his adult life by the problem of evil. If God is all-good,
the old question goes, how does evil arise? Worse, if God created all things, does this
not mean that he created evil itself? Is not a Manichean solution preferable to this
blasphemy?

The answer to which the Platonists led Augustine lay in the nature of being itself. Being
is not, for the Platonists, something absolute, but something contingent. Material
creation is not fully existent, but only participates in the being of the One, the creator
(which the Christians would readily identify with God the Father). The One has perfect
existence, but all other entities are only shadows of the ultimate model. Now all things
are good insofar as they are created, that is, insofar as they participate in the being of
God, but they are less than perfectly good insofar as they fail to resemble the all-good
essence of God. The will of a rational creature is capable of turning towards God, hence
participating more fully in God's goodness, and capable of turning away, hence
participating less fully. Evil lies in the absence of good, in the willful separation from
God that is the act of created beings. The natural tendency of created beings is to return
to unity with God, to full goodness. Evil is merely the name given to the turning away
from God of those beings. Properly speaking, evil inheres only in the wills of free,
rational creatures. The other things men call evil (the violent deaths of innocent people
in natural catastrophes, for example) are only manifestations of a divine providence that
men, with an incomplete view of reality, cannot fathom. Suffering is punishment or trial
for creatures, but is intrinsically good in itself insofar as it succeeds in reforming or
purifying them. If it fails the failure is that of the creatures, not of God.

This is a stark and radical theodicy, by which all the evil of the world is taken on the
shoulders of mankind. This principle would eventually smooth the way to Augustine's
doctrine of original sin, an awesome doctrine, bearable only because it brings with it
(for the believer) the hope the whole burden of evil does not stay with man, but has been
assumed again voluntarily by God, in the redeeming sacrifice of the cross.
Augustine's debt to Platonism is made explicit in the passage where he uses the first
verses of the Gospel according to John as his touchstone for assessing the Platonic
achievement (7.9.13-14). He finds in their writings plenty to parallel the notion of the
pre-existent Word and its function in creation, but what he finds lacking in them is
anything to correspond to the fourteenth verse: "And the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us." In that gap lies the difference between the despairing forced
cheerfulness of the Platonist and the hope of the Christian.

Once Augustine had seen his way past the problem of evil to a recognition of his own
guilt, all should have been well. Already at the end of Book 7, the Platonists and their
writings have sent him to the pages of Saint Paul and he sings the praises of the divine
grace (7.21.27). The intellectual obstacles to his acceptance of Christianity had fallen
away. He may even at the time have thought that he had reached his goal (cf. 7.20.26: "I
chattered on [about these matters] just like an expert").

But Augustine was about to discover the last secret Christianity has in store for men of
intellect and curiosity who consider its claims. In the end, intellect and curiosity are not
enough. The mind may be satisfied, but there is more to Christianity than the intellectual
apprehension of propositions; there is more to faith than belief. This discovery led
Augustine to the final surrender of heart and will that he would later recognize as
conversion.

The eighth book of the Confessions narrates, or seems to narrate, the last stages of
Augustine's conversion. Seems to narrate, for on examination it becomes clear that we
are not given a definite account of an orderly sequence of events. Rather, a variety of
episodes, with a similar theme but no indications of date, are grouped together to depict
the growing pressure Augustine felt in the last weeks or months before the decisive
episode.

The book is a compilation of conversion stories. Augustine and Alypius appear at the
end of a line that includes the desert monk Saint Anthony, two unnamed courtiers of
Augustine's own time, and the learned and renowned Marius Victorinus. The sequence
begins with Victorinus, and we should not think it mere coincidence. The story is told to
Augustine by Simplicianus, Ambrose's destined successor as bishop of Milan and the
closest ecclesiastical friend Augustine made in Milan. Simplicianus heard Augustine tell
of his encounter with the books of the Platonists in Victorinus' translation and saw a
chance to tell Augustine a story about a man very like Augustine himself(8.2.3-5).[12]

Victorinus was a distinguished student and practitioner of rhetoric and philosophy who
had earned the honor of a statue erected in his honor in the Roman forum. But he had
also found himself drawn to Christianity. He confided to his friend Simplicianus that he
was in fact already a Christian, but Simplicianus replied, "I will not believe it, nor will I
rank you among Christians, until I see you in the church of Christ." Victorinus, like
many another high-minded dabbler in religion, replied with depreciating humor, "So is
it walls that make people Christian?" Simplicianus was unmoved, on that occasion and
others, and insisted on public affiliation, with eventual success.

Simplicianus' tale of Victorinus was doubtless meant to nag at the professor's spirit
while he went on living in Milan, pursuing his public activities as teacher, finding his
attention brought again and again to the startling tales of conversions that upset the
routine of life lived in the secular world. The courtiers who abandoned their careers
when they found a copy of the Life of Saint Anthony (by the great Alexandrian bishop
Athanasius) even showed him, all unsuspecting, the method of his decision. Beyond the
public, civil Christian life in polite society, he began to encounter the monastic life,
outwardly shabby and unsocial, but increasingly attractive to many. Anthony had shown
the way for a radical renunciation of the secular world that would challenge thoughtful
Christians henceforth, whether they actually left the secular world or not, to examine
carefully the conditions of secular life and see how far those conditions might be
compatible with Christian commitment.

The pressures mounted. The Confessions capture and analyze the two-mindedness
Augustine found in himself, conscious of two conflicting wills working within him
simultaneously. His whole intellectual search had been an effort to reach a placid and
measured conclusion on the basis of which to effect a rational reorganization of his life,
but faith, that essential turning of the will towards God, is finally mysterious to the very
people who live with it.

In later years Augustine would resist all efforts to resolve the paradoxes of grace and
will. He had good intellectual and spiritual basis for that resistance, but the emotional
hardihood that kept him to his position in the face of all the pressures either to abandon
his definitions or to explain them in a facile way (and thus lapse either into Pelagianism
or Calvinism) came from his own experience. He could not account for the turnings of
his own will, much less for those of anyone else. He knew that it was his will, that his
decisions were free and voluntary, but he also felt that those decisions were
fundamentally impotent ones. Another power had been working at another level of his
soul, and in the presence of that power the ditherings of his own paltry liberty of choice
were insignificant.

So the history of human salvation is the history of human will and effort leading to sin
and error counterbalanced by divine will overmastering human powers and leading
people back to knowledge and holiness. Because the process affects the very
foundations of knowing and willing, it is impossible to represent it fairly in human
language. Those who have known the experience can never fully or adequately
represent it to those who have not. Augustine's example shows us that even the most
sensitive of converts finds it difficult to reconstruct the situation in which it was
possible not to be a believer, and this only makes it harder for the outsider to find the
picture credible. Rational argument may go on, and the hidden workings of grace may
use those arguments as instruments, but the main business of Christianity is not subject
to human control or management.

"Thus soul-sick was I, and tormented,

accusing myself much more severely than my wont,
rolling and turning in my chains,
till they were wholly broken,
whereby I now was barely held, but still was held.
... For I said within myself,
'Be it done now, be it done now.'
And as I spake, I all but enacted it.
I all but did it, and did it not;
yet I sank not back to my former state,
but kept my stand hard by, and took breath.
... The very toys of toys, and vanities of vanities,
my ancient mistresses, still held me;
they plucked my fleshly garment, and whispered softly,
'Dost thou cast us off? and from that moment
shall we no more be with thee for ever?'"(8.11.25-26)

The climactic scene that follows in the garden at Milan is unobtrusively surrounded
with echoes of other moments. The fig tree that will appear, for example, may very well
have stood in that garden, but we cannot notice it without recalling another fig tree in
the gospel (Jn. 1.48-50). Once again we are drawn to consider the questions of
historicity raised by this account, but if we are prudent, we will dismiss them as
irrelevant. The personal authenticity of what Augustine recounts to us makes his
reliability as an observer of surrounding events at the moment of secondary importance.
Whether it happened this way or not (to an outside observer's judgment), it is perfectly
clear that this is the way it was lived, and that is all that matters.

Augustine was sitting with Alypius in a private garden. "But when a deep consideration
had from the secret bottom of my soul drawn together and heaped up all my misery in
the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, bringing a mighty shower of tears."
(8.12.28) (Early Christians lived closer to the brink of tears in prayer than their modern
counterparts, tears of compunction.) Augustine goes apart from Alypius: "solitude was
suggested to me as fitter for the business of weeping."

"I cast myself down, I know not how, under a fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the
floods of mine eyes gushed out, an acceptable sacrifice to Thee.
--And, not indeed in these words, yet to this end, I spake much unto Thee: 'And Thou, O Lord,
how long? How long, Lord, wilt thou be angry, for ever? Remember not our past iniquities, for I
felt I was held by them.
--So was I speaking, and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo!, I heard
from a neighboring house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and often repeating,
'Take up, read; take up, read.' Instantly my countenance altered and I began to think most
intently, whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words, nor could I
remember ever to have heard the like." (8.12.29)

It has been suggested that the neighboring house was a church and the words part of a
liturgical ceremony; that the words were spoken by real children; and that it was all a
hallucination that Augustine cheerfully read as a sign from heaven. But Augustine himself left
the question open. The curious psychological verisimilitude of a situation in which his first
thought was not to obey but to ask pedantic questions about the source is worth noticing.

Augustine acted quickly enough, though. He remembered what he had heard of

Anthony, that a chance encounter with the words of the Gospel had changed his life. So
he went back to where Alypius was sitting and took the copy of Paul they had been
reading. He fell upon the first words that came to his eye.
"Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying:
but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in concupiscence."
(Rom. 13.13-14) No further would I read, nor did I need to: for instantly at the end of this
sentence, by a light of serenity infused into my heart, all darkness of doubt fled away."

"We have no right and we should not have the presumption to say that when he rose
from his knees in the Milan garden he was not altogether a 'new man.'"[13] Alypius,
reading further on the same page of Paul, found a text for himself and joined
Augustine's resolve. Augustine is hard on himself in Book 9 for having equivocated
about the step he should take next. He determined to stay out the teaching term a few
weeks longer rather than break away and resign immediately, and when he handed in
his resignation he alleged weakness of health--true, but incomplete as an explanation.
(However strong the effect of the garden scene immediately, only time could prove that
it was not a false dawn.)

Shortly after began the country-house idyll at Cassiciacum. The habits of the intellect
were too deeply ingrained to break suddenly, but we are also told that Augustine would
lie awake half the night, praying with tears. In the Confessions Augustine offers here a
reading of a Psalm text to show his new relationship with the scriptures. In the spring,
the group came back to Milan and Augustine and Alypius were baptised--a further step
also dismissed in a few lines. The scene in the garden was private; the baptism made the
decision reached there public. Walls do not indeed make people Christian, but
Augustine was only fully a Christian when he had entered those walls as a full member
of the sacramental community. (In Augustine's time, the eucharistic ritual was a matter
not discussed openly before the unbaptised; hence we are frustrated at having no
testimony here of the impression that ritual, and the sense of participation that came
with it, made, but the importance of the sacrament should not be ignored because of
ignorance.)

The narrative is almost at an end at this point, but Augustine has one last debt to pay. In
the short time Monica survived his baptism (less than a year), mother and son finally
understood each other. Not long before death overtook her as their party waited at Ostia
for a ship to Africa, an event occurred that seemed to Augustine to complete the
transition he had begun.

Augustine knew better than to try to have a name for what happened at Ostia. He
certainly knew better than to make it out to be more than it was. A foretaste of heaven,
coming as it did just before his mother's death, had a particular symbolic force, but
despite the parallels with Neoplatonic rapture, Augustine the bishop did not think the
whole of the Christian life would be a succession of these dramatic moments.[14] What
he was granted with his mother in those moments by another garden was just one more
gift. The ecstasy of mysticism is one of the highest and greatest gifts, but it is
inessential.

The whole chapter should be read to appreciate the quality of the moment (9.10.23-26).
The sensible world fell away and mother and son were completely at sea in their shared
union with God. This is in an important sense the decisive encounter with the Word of
God that had been only adumbrated in all the previous moments depicted in the
Confessions, even the one in that garden at Milan. This particular narrative comes,
moreover, in a literary work that is itself of a mystical kind. The special qualities
Augustine brings to this particular event are those of the time of his writing of the
Confessions. Memory and accurate reportage alone could not make the moment come
alive.

Monica's last message to her son as they stood together was to be a theme for the rest of
the life he faced from then on. "Son, for my own part I have no further delight in any
thing in this life." She was one of the few whose only worldly hope, for the conversion
of her son, had been fulfilled. "My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I
should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become his servant: what am I
doing still here?" (9.10.26)

The saints are those who live in the world but who are not quite of it. If we are justified
in calling Augustine a saint, it is probably accurate to say that he began to live his
sainthood just at this moment. Henceforth, he knew a freedom he had only suspected
might exist before. His future as a servant of God was out of his own hands. His
immediate return to Africa and the foundation of the quasi-monastic community at
Tagaste was to be thwarted by other needs of the church. He wound up in a city far from
his cloister, far from all the ambitions he had known, perfectly content to do the work
he found himself busied with. (Augustine in Hippo and Newman in Birmingham
resemble each other in more than a few ways, not least in the misplaced pity of those
who think their talents wasted in such obscurity.) The autobiography of Augustine the
sinner is at an end. Henceforth, Augustine is freed of time and narrative, and his
Confessions reflect that freedom.

Free Will

With Book 10, the reader must give up all hope of concluding that the Confessions
autobiography in any conventional sense. What narrative line there had been is lost
altogether and a more complex literary strategy obtrudes its presence upon the reader.
While it has been fashionable to argue whether the last four books have anything to do
with the first nine, the simple bulk of the material should give us pause: two-fifths of the
work's pages remain, and scarcely an autobiographical scrap is to be found among them.
We might rather argue that, since the pieces of reminiscence are so clearly confined to
one part of the work, it is more remarkable that the impression could ever have grown
up that the work was autobiography at all.

The place to begin to seek an authentic reading of this work is still with the fact of
prayer. The first nine books of the Confessions, written by the neophyte bishop in his
first episcopal years at Hippo, present a double image to our consideration. They are
about the early life of a sinful young man determined to find his own way to salvation
but destined to be dragged off in a direction he at first resented. But they are also the
prayerful reflection on those events of a mature man, a bishop in the church of Christ,
living out the transformation those books describe.

In Book 10 the images of the past fade away and we are left to face Augustine the
bishop, the product of the years of growth and change the first books suggest to us.
What we know of the early Augustine comes to us in the main through the eyes of this
middle-aged man. Any reading of the Confessions that does not confront him, and not
merely the phantasms of the young Augustine that he presents, is doomed to
inadequacy. And this bishop is a man of prayer.
But perhaps we need a more subtle description of the nature of prayer and confession to
understand what is going on here. Prayer is endemic to the human condition, in all
places and cultures. We know full well how self-centered and unloving such prayer can
be, even when it is as innocent as the child's plea for a new toy or revenge on a
playmate. Prayer, the turning of the mind and heart to God, takes place even where
grace is absent, but this inferior communication between God and man is still evidence
of the possibility of authentic communication.[15]

The sinner who prays in ignorance and darkness prays badly, and prays in the
imperative and subjunctive moods. He commands God to give him what he wants, he
pleads his cause. God's will is of no account. Such prayer begins to become authentic
only when it is founded in the knowledge that comes of revelation. God reaches down
to mankind with the gospel, and this forms the basis for the transformation of the
individual (we saw all this on the first page of the Confessions). Gradually, immature
prayer becomes what we will call (to distinguish it from the immature variety and to
conform to Augustine's usage) confession. The fully enlightened Christian would no
long need to speak in the irreal grammar of imperative and subjunctive. What God has
promised, God gives, and the indicative mood is adequate to present this. Hence, there
is no longer need for plea and impetration, but for confession and acceptance.

Prayer of the second kind is what Augustine the bishop is seeking throughout the
Confessions. Confession is man's part in revelation: God reveals, man praises, and the
circle is complete. In mortal life the process is imperfect, but the only business of the
saints in heaven is the praise of God, the complete fullness of confession begun here
below in the dark light of revelation.

Augustine's literary Confessions fall then into two parts. First, there is the reassessment
of his own past in the light of divine mercy that filled the first books. Augustine lived
through those years under a variety of delusions about himself and the world; as bishop
he can now look back in the light of revelation and see the true pattern of those years.
What was, as it was lived through, a puzzling search for truth and knowledge, turns out
to have been a piece of Christian salvation history all along, with its own fall into sin
and rise through grace.

But Augustine in the Confessions was concerned with the present as much as with the
past. Present imperfections were as puzzling and important to him as those of his past.
Confession is difficult and its success only partial, for the author of the confession is
still sinful and in need of grace lest he fall again. The last books of the Confessions,
among other things, bring us to Augustine at the moment of confession. They present
him, as he could then imagine himself, and they present his praise of God, working in
him as he then saw it.

The structure he imparts to this confession resembles a conventional examination of

conscience. To the outsider, such considerations can easily seem morbid and self-
absorbed. Here again the outsider is at a disadvantage. The whole of the Confessions is
a self-examination in the light of divine truth, and what passes for examination of
conscience is only a small part of this whole.

On another level, Augustine is demolishing his own human words by the

instrumentality of the divine Word. What were inadequate words arranged in immature
prayer now become an embodiment of the Word itself being given back to God. The
authority for all speech comes not from the human voice itself but from God's Word,
wholly outside human comprehension. Human beings no longer comprehend
themselves with their words, but God's word comprehends human beings and revitalizes
all discourse. What men say has meaning only if the divine Word speaks through them.
What men say of and for themselves is inauthentic. Prayer, in its fulfilled form as
confession, is the only form of discourse with a claim to legitimacy. Confession
becomes the vital basis of all discourse, hence of all human life insofar as it is human.
("Pray without ceasing": 1 Thess. 5.17.) All that is not confession is partial and
imperfect by comparison.

"Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me:

let me know Thee, as I am known.
Power of my soul,
enter into it, and fit it for Thee,
that Thou mayest have and hold it
without spot or wrinkle.
This is my hope, therefore do I speak." (10.1.1)[16]

The scriptural echoes are unusually important here. First, Augustine uses God's own words to
make the central prayer of the whole work--for self-knowledge based in divine knowledge.
Then he offers his whole soul to God as something to be possessed "without spot or wrinkle,"
deliberately using a phrase explicitly applied in scripture to the church as a whole (Eph. 5.27).
The individual human soul is inextricably part of the church and hence resembles it. Finally,
God's Word itself is the justification for speaking at all.

"For behold, Thou lovest the Truth,

and he that doth the truth,
cometh to the light.
This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession,
and in my writing, before many witnesses."

God himself strictly does not need the literary artefact for the act of confession to be
complete, but the text is the instrument by which confession comes before men as well as God
and hence obeys the twofold command to love neighbor as well as God. Putting confession in
writing does not limit or narrow its authenticity, but completes it and makes it a part of the life
of the whole church, the instrument of God's redemption on earth.

"What then have I to do with men,

that they should hear my confessions ... ?
A race curious to know the lives of others,
slothful to amend their own.
Why seek they to hear from me what I am,
who will not hear from Thee what themselves are?
And how do they know whether I speak true,
when from myself they hear of myself,
seeing no man knows what is in man
but the spirit of man which is in him?" (10.3.3)
The question of credibility underlines the question of authenticity. Why should readers who
come to the work in detachment and skepticism, merely curious to know what another
isolated individual happens to be like, believe what they read here? Will not skeptical readers
take this text prisoner, make it the grounds for their own religious, historical, or
psychoanalytical speculations, and ignore the author and his message?

"But because charity believeth all things

(that is, among those whom,
knitting them unto itself, it maketh one)
I also, O Lord, will in such wise confess unto Thee,
that men may hear,
to whom I cannot demonstrate whether I confess truly;
yet they believe me,
whose ears charity openeth unto me."

The answer lies in God's grace. Those who are bound together by the love of God, and who are
therefore part of the church, will see and understand in his story their own stories. Salvation
history is always and everywhere the same, and Augustine's story is--insofar as it is true
confession in the special sense--the story of every soul touched by grace. Charity, the
substance of grace at work in the world, becomes the means by which barriers of suspicion
and detachment are eradicated, and readers come to share the experience of a writer. This is
not a book to be read so much as it is a prayer in which the reader is to share.

"But what I now am, at the very time of making these confessions, diverse people desire to
know, who have or have not known me, who have heard from me or of me. But their ear is not
at my heart, where I am, whatever I am. They wish then to hear me confess what I am within,
whither neither their eye, nor ear, nor understanding, can reach. They wish it, as ready to
believe -- but will they know? For charity, whereby they are good, telleth them, that in my
confessions I lie not; and she in them, believeth me. ... But for what fruit would they hear this?
Do they desire to rejoice with me, when they hear how near, by Thy gift, I approach unto
Thee? And to pray for me, when they shall hear how much I am held back by my own weight?
To such will I discover myself." (10.3.4 - 10.4.5)

And so the microscopic self-examination begins, at much less distance than the voyage
of memory in the early books had allowed him to stand.

"Yet I know something of Thee, which I know not of myself. Truly, now we see through a glass
darkly, not face to face as yet. So long therefore as I be absent from Thee, I am more present
with myself than with Thee; and yet know I Thee that Thou are in no ways passible; but I, what
temptations I can resist, what I cannot, I know not. I will confess then what I know of myself, I
will confess also what I know not of myself. And that because what I do know of myself, I know
by Thy shining upon me; and what I know not of myself, so long I know it not, until my
darkness be made as the noon-day in Thy countenance." (10.5.7)

Even now Augustine cannot escape from the fields of memory. All human
consciousness and existence finds itself, Augustine discovers, in the memory, which is
the foundation of identity. If the chance agglomeration of sense experiences were all I
possessed, I would be lost in the void of the amnesiac. To begin to understand himself,
Augustine must now try to understand the faculty that he has used with such success to
recapture his early life. As he comes to the present, he discovers that a substantial part
of what he is, and therefore of what he wants to represent to his God and to his brothers
and sisters is that power of memory itself. That is what makes Augustine recognizably
himself.

"Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness;
and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I?
A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense. Behold the plains, and caves, and caverns
of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable things." (10.17.26)

Memory is where Augustine must be when he searches for God. In authentic self-knowledge,
Augustine knows God.

"See what a space I have gone over in my memory seeking Thee, O Lord; and I have not found
Thee without it. ... But where in my memory residest Thou, O Lord, where residest Thou there?
What manner of lodging hast Thou framed for Thee? ... I entered into the very seat of my mind
(which it hath in my memory, inasmuch as the mind remembers also) neither wert Thou there.
... Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee, but in Thee above me? Place there is
none. ... Everywhere, O truth, dost Thou give audience to all who ask counsel of Thee, and at
once answerest all." (10.24.35)

The self itself, seat of all human identity, is not absolute but contingent. We do not find God in
the self as much as we find that the self is in God. With this secret of self-knowledge finally
revealed, Augustine is ready to see himself as he is.

Augustine's ensuing meditations on his moral state as bishop are alien to us. If the
revelations of the first books seem a little tame to the sensation-seeker, the content of
Book 10 seems downright neurotic. Here is a man who has meditated long and hard on
the will of God and the power of grace, devoting himself in mature years to niggling
criticism of his own habits and actions. What, for example, is a bishop doing deploring
church music?

For at times he wishes the whole melody of sweet music used to accompany the Psalter
could be banished from his ears and his church's too. "That mode seems to me safer,
which I remember to have been told often of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who
made the reader of the Psalm utter it with so slight inflection that it was nearer speaking
than singing. ... Yet when it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than the words
sung, I confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music." (10.33.49-
50)

There is more than absurd scrupulosity at work here. As bishop of a Christian church,
living in monastic simplicity in plain sight of a large community, Augustine was all but
immune to the greater faults of life that flesh is heir to. The natural result of this state is
complacency, a confidence that one has finally triumphed over sin because one has
finally triumphed over the obvious forms of sin. No such comfort is to Augustine's taste.
Just as he can see the gratuitous love of wrong in his theft of pears at age sixteen, so
now he knows that, even for a bishop, at every turn, the things of this world hold a
perilous attraction for the soul, tying it down and keeping it from its natural course of
ascent to God.

Even to phrase the issue that way is to misrepresent it to Augustine's disadvantage.

Better to say that the fallen will turns towards the things of the world more than is their
due, misdirecting their use towards self-enjoyment rather than the love of God. The
ensuing enshacklement is, like all sin, entirely self-inflicted. The things of this world are
not at fault for being beautiful, but even things of this world explicitly in the service of
God, like the melodies of church music, are no less an opportunity for error than the
more obvious temptations.

This scrupulous analysis of the attraction inherent in material things may seem to spring
from a world-denying attitude, a painful and extreme puritanism. But this view is only
possible if Augustine's main point is ignored. To affirm the world to the exclusion of
God does harm, not only to the individual, but to the world itself. To make an idol of
something or someone is dangerous no less to the idol than to the idolator. Augustine is
so confident of the persistent power of the world to exercise its attraction, that he feels
safe in counterbalancing that power with his own deep suspicion.

"Notwithstanding, in how many most petty and contemptible things is our curiosity daily
tempted, and how often we give way, who can recount? ... I go not now to the circus to see a
dog coursing a hare; but in the field, if passing, that coursing peradventure will distract me
even from some weighty thought, and draw me after it: not that I turn aside the body of my
beast, yet still incline my mind thither." (10.35.57)

Even though he quickly turns such distractions to profit in the contemplation of God's works,
he is still dissatisfied: "To rise quickly is one thing, but it is another matter not to fall."

In this attitude lies a strain of perfectionism that is not necessarily morbid. Augustine
refuses to be satisfied with himself as imperfect creature; but at the same time, by his
very act of confession, we see that he recognizes and acknowledges the imperfections
he shuns. He knows full well that complete perfection is not a gift granted in this life.
Compunction in its absence is a high gift and in itself a sign of the growing attraction to
the heavenly life. To go on, aware of imperfections, however trivial, is a better thing
than to make light of them. Augustine's horror at the moral evil in the world around him
is genuine; if it were not matched by comparable horror at the evil and possibility of evil
within, it would scarcely be sincere.

"And Thou knowest how far Thou hast already changed me, who first healed me of the lust of
vindicating myself, that Thou might forgive all the rest of my iniquities, and heal my infirmities,
and redeem my life from corruption, and crown me with mercy and pity, and satisfy my desire
with good things. ... But, O Lord, ... hath this third kind of temptation also ceased from me, or
can it cease through this whole life? To wish, namely, to be feared and loved of men, for no
other end, but that we may have a joy which is no joy." (10.36.58)

The final trap that awaits Augustine the bishop is the one that would suggest to him that he is
now, after all, a bishop; he has, after all, put his whole life on paper for the world to see. Now,
surely, at last, he is able to grasp the reins of power and become the great man, God's special
messenger, that he was always meant to be. The respect and admiration of his flock
strengthens a sense of separateness and importance, while the hostility of heretics and others
outside can underline a tendency to self-righteousness. Bishops so closely resemble worldly
governors that they are readily assumed to live according to the same principles of power and
personal aggrandizement. That assumption itself puts great pressure on the occupants of the
office, however strong their intention to remain untouched by the temptations.

The self-portrait of Augustine in his weaknesses comes to an end. His past is a story of
personal inadequacy redeemed by divine mystery, his present is continuing story of
subjection to all the temptations the fallen will finds in the world, but his case is not
hopeless. Grace has taken a hand in his life, and the chasm separating him from God is
neither infinite nor incapable of being bridged. Here the story of the first ten books
comes full circle. On the first page of the Confessions, it was God who intervened to
make all discourse possible, through Christ's preaching ministry. Now at the end of the
tenth book, God's intervention again is necessary to make the speaker himself whole
and healthy, this time through Christ's redemptive mystery.

"But the true Mediator, whom in Thy secret mercy Thou hast showed to the humble, and sent,
that by his example also they might learn that same humility, that Mediator between God and
man, the man Christ Jesus, appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal just one;
mortal with men, just with God." (10.43.68)

Christ is both victor and victim, both priest and sacrifice, the Word made flesh and dwelling
among men.

"Affrighted with my sins and the burden of my misery, I had cast in my heart, and had
purposed to flee to the wilderness; but Thou forbade me, and strengthened me, saying,
Therefore Christ died for all, that they which live may now no longer live unto themselves but
unto Him that died for them." (10.43.70)

Augustine's memoirs lead up to this page of the Confessions, with its act of faith. The
turn to God that faith entails is constant and unceasing. Each hour brings a new
conversion, from past sins to future hope, leaving behind the self bound in time and
mortality to contemplate the transforming power of God outside all time and creation.
Augustine's mission as bishop is to turn his back on the past and live only for, not the
future, but the present -- conceived as eternal. In Book 11 he is compelled to consider
time itself as evidence of the created nature of earthly things, but for now, Augustine
has come to the end of his past, escaping from time into history, leaving himself behind
and embracing the Christ who gives history meaning.

"Too late I loved Thee,

O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new!
too late I loved Thee!
And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad,
and there I searched for Thee;
deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms,
which Thou hast made.
Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.
Things held me far from Thee,
which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all.
Thou called, and shouted, and burst my deafness.
Thou flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness.
Thou breathed odors, and I drew in breath
and I sigh for Thee.
I tasted, and hunger and thirst.
Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace."
(10.27.38)

In the Image and Likeness of God

The last three books of the Confessions are the principal obstacle to the work's
reputation for greatness in the literary, as well as the psychological or theological, order.
One scholar recounted no less than nineteen different theories that had been devised to
explain their presence and their relation to the rest of the work, then proceeded to add
his own.[17] Consensus still eludes us. What follows is neither a majority view (for
there is none) nor simple idiosyncrasy, but the serious student should bear in mind that
different interpretations abound.

The first ten books of the Confessions move from the origins of fallen life to the
dynamic present of the author, writing c. 397. The first page of the work states the
conditions out of which all reasonable speech arises and the first book takes us back to
the author's infancy. In the books that follow, the narrative takes the author from a state
of original sin to a state of sacramental grace. The text proceeds from the origins of all
discourse in divine revelation to the fulfillment of discourse in the redemption effected
by the incarnate Word. So far goes salvation history, down to the present, in both the
structure and content of the narrative.

What can possibly be left? The answer is trite but newly illuminating: God and the soul.
Noverim te, noverim me is still an adequate summary of Augustine's aspirations. But
now the fundamental rupture separating creature and creator has been healed. History is
over, in that sense. A bond of unity has been reforged. The future is now no longer the
story of sin in the world of time but of love in the world of timelessness. The Christian
lives in time between history and eternity, and it is into that world that Augustine the
author now escapes.

Book 11 opens in this new, divine present. Augustine now sees himself standing in
time, facing the eternal divinity: "Lord, since eternity is Thine, are Thou ignorant of
what I say to Thee?" (11.1.1)

"But how shall I suffice with the tongue of my pen to utter all Thy exhortations, and all Thy
terrors, and comforts, and guidances, whereby Thou broughtest me to preach Thy Word, and
dispense Thy Sacrament to Thy people? And if I suffice to utter them in order, the drops of
time are precious with me. Long have I burned to meditate in Thy law, and therein to confess
to Thee my skill and unskillfulness, the daybreak of Thy enlightening, and the remnants of my
darkness, until infirmity be swallowed up by strength. And I would not have aught besides steal
away those hours which I find free from the necessities of refreshing my body and the powers
of my mind, and from the service which we owe to men, or which though we owe not, yet we
pay." (11.2.2)

At the end of his journey through memory in the praise of God, Augustine finds himself
left with the scriptural text itself, the visible form of the divine revelation, through
which to perform his sacrifice of praise and prayer. The study of scripture in this sense
is not a special task set upon him because he is a bishop of the Christian church, for the
last sentence makes clear that the duties of his office tend to impede his devotion rather
than to enhance it. The duty to preach God's Word imposes responsibilities that could
take Augustine further and further from his own personal encounter with that Word.
Public responsibility and private need should coincide, but in a fallen world such is not
always the case.

"Lord, my God, give ear unto my prayer,

and let Thy mercy hearken unto my desire:
because it is anxious not for myself alone,
but would serve brotherly charity.
... Grant thereof a space for our meditations
in the hidden things of Thy law,
and close it not against us who knock.
For not in vain wouldst Thou have the darksome secrets
of so many pages written:
nor are those forests without their harts
which retire therein and range and walk,
feed, lie down, and ruminate.
... Let me confess unto Thee
whatsoever I shall find in Thy books,
and hear the voice of praise,
and drink in Thee,
and meditate on the wonderful things of Thy law;
even from the beginning,
wherein Thou madest the heaven and the earth,
unto the everlasting reign of Thy holy city with Thee."
(11.2.3)

The circle is full. The Word of God inspires quest and praise to begin, and the fullness
of that quest in this life is a return to the words of God in scripture. We have here a
preview of the content of the last three books: they will explicate the Genesis account of
creation, in which the whole history of creation is summed up. (The seventh day of
creation is the day of eternal rest towards which the holy city proceeds; the first six days
represent, inter alia, the six ages of man.) The last three books are thus an emblem of all
scriptural study, since they treat in detail a passage of scripture that stands for the
whole.

The opening chapters of Genesis were a constant source of illumination for Augustine;
in the years just following the writing of the Confessions he would write his great
Literal Commentary on Genesis. These last three books of Confessions give only a
highly selective sketch of Augustine's ideas on the subjects raised. They bear looking
into, to see what else is going on besides the simple exposition of a few verses of
ancient Jewish scripture. We find in them not merely an exposition of scripture, but a
self-conscious exposition of exposition itself. The principles of Christian Doctrine
should be kept steadily in mind while we examine these pages written so shortly after.

The core of Christian doctrine is contained in the first line of Genesis: "In the
beginning, God created heaven and earth, and the spirit of God was over the waters."
The fathers saw allusion here to all three persons of the trinity. The words "in the
beginning" are the same as those that begin John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the
Word," which all Christians took to denote the second person of the trinity. Since even
Augustine would know that the Greek version of the phrase could indicate not merely
circumstance but even instrument ("by means of the beginning"), it was easy to assume
that the deeper sense of the opening line revealed the three persons of the trinity were
actively present in the act of creation from the outset.

Any creation narrative implies a doctrine about the nature of God and the nature of
creature, focused on the process of creation itself. Augustine sees this, but almost
immediately diverts his discussion into what often looks to readers like a digression, the
long discussion of time that fills Book 11. He introduces the subject with the only joke
in the Confessions:

"See, I answer him that asketh, 'What did God do before He made heaven and earth?' I answer
not as one is said to have done merrily (eluding the point of the question), 'he was preparing
hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries.'" (11.12.14)

Augustine will answer the question seriously, for in it lies not merely the abstract
subject of time but the essence of creature, creator, and creation, joined together in a
unique philosophical nexus. The bulk of Book 11 works out a long and complex inquiry
into the nature of time. Philosophers still read these pages with curiosity and interest.
[18] For our immediate purposes, it is sufficient to consider the conclusion he reaches.

"It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times. ... The impression, which things as they pass by
cause in thee, remains even when they are gone. This which is still present, I measure, not the
things which pass by to make this impression. This I measure, when I measure times. Either
then this is time, or I do not measure times." (11.27.36)

Time is inherent in the created intellect, a category for describing the apparent
transience and impermanence of reality. Time is not even a created thing, for it is a
creation of created things. Intelligent created beings see the world around themselves in
a framework of their own invention, which they call time. This characteristic
distinguishes their experience from that of their creator. God as creator sees all things
simultaneously in a single vision, perceiving process and change but, freed of
experiencing those things in temporal succession, he does not experience time. The
creator lives outside created things and therefore, a fortiori, outside time. Time cannot
be, Augustine concludes, without created being.

Book 11, therefore, seems to deal with the fact of creation in the scriptural text and the
problem of time as theological obstacle. But these two tasks are one and the same. The
book is thus in reality devoted to the question of creation itself, looking at all times to
the first person of the trinity, God the Father of all things, eternal being who creates all
contingent, temporal being. Book 11 is therefore the book of creation.

Book 12 is by contrast the book of God's words; that is, of scripture; that is, of
knowledge--for all authentic knowledge comes from divine revelation. The formal
pretext for the discussion of Book 12 is the distinction between heaven and earth, which
Augustine takes allegorically to represent the difference between spirit and matter--
between things as they are and things as they seem. God's knowledge, manifested to us,
reveals this distinction. Otherwise we would be caught forever in the world of
appearances.

"Wondrous depth of Thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting to little ones. Yet
are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous depth! It is aweful to look therein, an
awefulness of honour and a trembling of love." (12.14.17)

Revelation is ambivalent and multi-leveled. The enhancement of human knowledge is thus a

constant transition from surface knowledge to inner knowledge, from letter to spirit, from
material appearances to spiritual, inner reality.

Just as Book 11 contained a long exploration of the problem of time itself, with full
consideration of objections and alternatives, so too the matter of Book 12 is elucidated
in an imagined debate with those who would gainsay the Christian interpretation of
scripture.

"With these would I now parley a little in Thy presence, O my God, who grant all these things
to be true, which Thy truth whispers unto my soul. For those who deny these things, let them
bark and deafen themselves as much as they please. I will essay to persuade them to quiet,
and to open in them a way for Thy Word. But if they refuse, and repel me, I beseech, O my
God, be not Thou silent to me." (12.16.23)

The apparent movement of reading is from text to author, from message to intention,
but revelation short-circuits the process. Something beyond mortal grasp intrudes to
keep the reader from moving directly from the written word to the intention of the
human author.

"For behold, O my God, I Thy servant, who have in this book vowed a sacrifice of confession
unto Thee, and who pray, that by Thy mercy I may pay my vows unto Thee, can I, with the
same confidence wherewith I affirm, that in Thy incommutable world Thou createdst all things
visible and invisible, affirm also, that Moses meant no other than this, when he wrote, In the
beginning God made heaven and earth? No. Because I see not in his mind, that he thought of
this when he wrote these things, as I do see it in Thy truth to be certain. For he might have his
thoughts upon God's commencement of creating, when he said In the beginning, and by
heaven and earth, in this place he might intend no formed and perfected nature whether
spiritual or corporeal, but both of them inchoate and as yet formless. For I perceive that
whichsoever of the two had been said, it might have been truly said; but which of the two he
thought of in these words, I do not so perceive. Although, whether it were either of these, or
any sense beside that I have not here mentioned, which this so great man saw in his mind,
when he uttered these words, I doubt not but that he saw it truly, and expressed it aptly."
(12.24.33)

The business of language is enlightenment, but in human hands it leads to uncertainty

and confusion. But revelation, working in the hearts of believers and in the church as a
whole, communicates through written texts that spring from human minds and
circumvents the sequence of author-intention -text. The author is no longer a mythic
icon established by the reader in accord with his reading of the text, nor is the text so
established either. Instead, both are reduced to instruments through which a deeper truth
about God and hence man can be descried. We know when we have used the text
properly not from any self-verifying quality of the text itself, but because the
independent act of God authorizes the text through the church externally and through
faith internally. The only word, in other words, is the Word.

If this is a fair summary of the content of Book 12 of the Confessions, a pattern is

forming. Book 11 dealt with existence, both temporal and eternal, and led to God as
creator and to the creature's relation to that God. Book 12 dealt with the conditions of
knowledge, elucidating the nature of knowledge through the revelation of the Word of
God in the hearts of believers. If this pattern continues, we should expect to find in the
thirteenth book some indication of the presence of the third person of the trinity?[19]

And in fact the full trinity is the subject of the opening pages of Book 13, and with that
discussion comes the clue we need to see the pattern of the last books. The three
fundamental qualities of existent being, Augustine says (13.11.12), are existence,
knowledge, and will. We have encountered this trinity before in the human personality;
now we see it deriving from the godhead itself. God the Father is God as eternal being,
source of all that exists; God the Son is God as knowledge, source of all that knows and
is known; and God the Spirit is God as will, that is to say, God as love, source of all
motion of heart and spirit.

With the fullness of trinitarian doctrine as it is imagined in Book 13, unity and variety,
the many and the one, have been harmonized in a system of unusual durability and
stability. But Augustine is not content merely to imagine the reality in a void. The
thirteenth book shows the spirit alive in the world and hence completes the triad begun
in Book 11.

The presence of the Spirit in the world is the church: Pentecost proclaimed as much.
Hence Augustine turns to consider the sacraments, the deeds of the spirit through the
church in the world. (Scriptural language begins to predominate more and more in this
book. We near the end in the presence of the spirit.) Consider the paragraph, for
example, beginning with the imagined command to baptism: "But first, wash you, be
clean ...." (13.19.24) Augustine's own baptism was a high point of Book 9, the
culmination of his conversion from the world to God. So too the presence in the world
of the church that baptizes in the spirit is the culmination of salvation history. From here
on, there is naught to do but wait and watch and pray for the coming end. The church
works through her ministers, who attract Augustine's attention a few pages further on:

"Now then let Thy ministers work upon the earth, not as upon the waters of infidelity [Gen.
1.2], by preaching and speaking by miracles, and sacraments, and mystic words: with
ignorance, the mother of admiration, intent upon them, out of reverence towards those secret
signs. Such is the entrance unto the faith for the sons of Adam forgetful of Thee, while they
hide from Thy face, becoming a darksome deep." (13.21.30)

This is a world made altogether new by the action of the spirit. Mystery and miracle
beget faith, but faith begets faith as well, and the spirit is always present. Mankind is
commanded to increase and multiply, by which Augustine understands (13.23.37) no
simple command to procreation but a deeper urge to growth and development in the
spirit for Christians and for the church. Though sin persists, the spirit creates hope in the
place of despair and gives new meaning even to the acts of sinners. This new life of the
spirit is a foretaste of what awaits.

The end of the Confessions is near, and in a text so emblematic of salvation history as
this one, the end of the text will be the end of all things. The six days of creation stand
for the whole history of creation. The seventh day is not merely a way of imagining the
continued eternal existence of God past the process of creation, but a way of imagining
the future for all mankind. The last paragraphs of the work blend theology and prayer in
the unique mixture we have learned to recognize as confession:

"O Lord God, give peace to us ...

the peace of rest, the peace of the sabbath,
which hath no evening.
... But the seventh day hath no evening,
nor hath it setting;
because Thou hast sanctified it
to an everlasting continuance. ...
That day may the voice of Thy book
announce beforehand unto us,
that we also after our works
(therefore very good,
because Thou hast given them to us)
shall rest in Thee also
in the sabbath of eternal life." (13.35.50-36.51)

Salvation history has therefore no end. It ceases to be muddled with actions and
distractions, but confession is eternal. This book comes to its last page, but is endless.
God continues to work, eternal and never endless.

"But Thou, being the Good which needeth no good,

art ever at rest,
because Thy rest is Thou Thyself.
And what man can teach man to understand this?
or what angel, an angel?
or what angel, a man?
Let it be asked of Thee,
sought in Thee,
knocked for at Thee;
so, so shall it be received,
so shall it be found,

so shall it be opened." (13.38.53)

With these last words we are reminded that the quest is not yet over, that the search is still
underway, still beginning anew at each moment. We close the book, in fact, on the Latin word
that means "shall be opened." The text is prayer and confession itself, but it is not exclusive.
Augustine the writer puts down the pen but does not cease to confess.

Augustine's Confessions move from ignorance towards knowledge, both reaching and
not reaching that goal. Reaching, in that faith is knowledge; not reaching, in that faith
only sees through a glass darkly. The last three books of the Confessions, embodying
the knowledge of God that Augustine the bishop and author is seen striving for at the
end of Book 10, well suit what has gone before.

But there is perhaps one further level of meaning to this peculiar text. Books 11-13 see
in God, in the persons of the trinity the qualities of existence, knowledge, and will. We
also saw that Augustine elsewhere made much of the parallel that exists between this
image of God and the form of human personality itself. The creature exists in the image
and likeness of God (Gen. 1.26) and shares in existence, knowledge, and will, insofar as
they come from God. Sin is the way men become less like God, redemption the way
they come to resemble him again.

There is thus a unique sense in which the last books of the Confessions are intimately
related to the first ones. The real movement of the Confessions is from an initial
apparent knowledge of self (and ignorance of God), which then recognizes itself as
fraud and ignorance. Augustine moves towards real knowledge of God, in three persons,
which is authentic knowledge of self. Noverim te, noverim me again: I can only know
myself if I know God; to seek to know myself in isolation is the folly of sin.

The first ten books dismantle the apparent knowledge of self with which the sinful
Augustine began. In those books, by a negative path, Augustine comes to know himself.
Real uncertainty remains, as is clear from the passage in Book 10 where the saintly
bishop admits he does not know to which temptation he might next submit.

Books 11 to 13 become more positive. By depicting God through scripture, Augustine is

giving the final, authentic depiction of himself? Augustine sees himself as, not a unique
and interesting sinner (for sinners are neither unique nor interesting), but as a being
created in the image and likeness of God. By describing that God, he describes himself
now more accurately than he could ever have done before. He describes others as well,
for saints resemble each other, despite the uniqueness of personality. ("Happy families
are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is the first sentence of
Anna Karenina.)

The Confessions depict in the end the Augustine with which the work began, but do so
with an authority that was lacking at the outset. What sets this pilgrimage apart is that it
makes the result a living possibility for every reader. The conclusion--knowledge of
God leading to knowledge of self--is one that is accessible to all.
The Confessions, then, contain two books. One is the book Augustine wrote. As such it
is itself an act of prayer and confession. But the other is the book that every reader takes
up, with two possible readings of the book to consider. We may read the text in a
detached, anthropological temper, treating it as a historical artefact of late antiquity, a
window through which to catch something of the life of that alien time. We may
accordingly study the author and his intentions in writing the text. When we do this,
however, we are not reading the text Augustine would have us read, and the difficulties
modern scholars experience with this text are the result of their professional insistence
on giving this text a reading it was never meant to have.

Augustine would never have wanted the text to be anything other than prayer and
confession for anyone. By leading in the last books to the abstract and difficult
discussion of the trinity and its image in man, he makes it possible for every reader to
duplicate the process through which he has gone, to go through that process for himself.
The very difficulty of the text thwarts analytic detachment and hurries the reader along.
Read in this way, the book is no longer Augustine's book, but our own book. The
creature in the image and likeness of God whom we learn to know from the last books is
no longer Augustine (as it was for the author of the text), but ourselves, creatures like
Augustine.

Read in this way, this text itself becomes a medium by which we may look past the
individual conditions of author-intention-text to a general truth. This work refuses to be
an icon for veneration and study in itself. The author himself declines to accept our
veneration. Rather, both conspire to pass our attention along imperceptibly to the God
that both represent. Ultimately text and author efface themselves, the reader closes the
book, and the whole process begins anew. The real book is opened, as the last words of
the Confessions indicate.

Augustine
Reconsiderations
by James J. O'Donnell

From his writings it is clear how this bishop beloved by God lived his life, as far as the
light of truth was granted him, in the faith, hope, and charity of the catholic church, and
those who read what he has written about the things of God can profit thereby. But I
think that those who could hear and see him speaking before them in the church could
profit more from him, especially those who knew how he lived among men."[1] So
wrote Augustine's friend and biographer, Possidius, not long after the old bishop died
(28 August 430). He felt what every reader of Augustine has known, the inadequacy of
trying to hear the message of this man through the written word alone. Every powerful
writer is doomed in this way to outlive his own grave, and to suffer the transformations
and deformations that later generations impose on one who is no longer able to protest
aloud.
For fifteen and a half centuries, Augustine's words have gone on being read and
misread, gone on fueling controversy and lending comfort. Whatever those words meant
in his lifetime, and whatever their role in the controversies of the day, they have meant
more and exercised more influence since their author's death than before. The history of
Augustine's posthumous readership is a part of any attempt to grasp the character of his
thought.

Augustine's own last contributions played an important role in shaping and directing
posterity's judgment of him. Augustine had lived long enough to see optimistic phrases
of his youth thrown up in his face by the Pelagians and their allies. He felt deeply the
gaps that separated past from present and present from future. We have seen how the
"historical" part of the Confessions, the painstaking archaeological investigation of his
own past, was meant to put that past to rest and in so doing to clear the stage for what
would follow. For Augustine, all human life is preface to a future the human
imagination can scarcely grasp; so at every point, the whole past becomes preface anew
and the future, whole and entire, remains.

Because Augustine continued to grasp the freshness of the future and refused to accept
the finality of the past, he maintained with surprising vitality in old age not only the
convictions that had fired him in the fervor of conversion, but even the tenacious power
to explore their implications further. This attitude produced what deserves to be
recognized as the first wrok in the history of Augustinian scholarship; it is a book called
the Retractationes (in English, best perhaps as Reconsiderations).

In 427, Augustine reopened the excavation into his own past, in a way almost as
remarkable as that which produced the Confessions: he set out to catalogue his own
works, part of a project that was to include a complete register of his letters and sermons
as well as his formal literary products. Only the first stage of the catalogue was
completed in the form of the Reconsiderations we have, but it is to that work, along
with an index compiled by Possidius shortly afterwards, that we owe not only our
knowledge of the identity and scope of Augustine's works, but even to some extent the
very survival of those works. No other ancient author came equipped with so detailed a
list of his works for medieval scholars to use in searching out copies with which to
supply their libraries. The works had therefore a better chance of survival.

But Augustine was not content merely to catalogue the past. He also reviewed it. For
every work listed, he says something of the circumstances of composition and
publication and adds something of the corrections and amendments that, in his old age,
he found necessary. A fair number of these alterations treat points that had come into
controversy since the rise of the Pelagian movement, but the corrections are scarcely
limited to such clarifications.

The Reconsiderations offer a final open chapter in an intellectual autobiography: "The

reader who reads my works in the order in which they were written may learn
something of how I progressed as I wrote them."[2] The ideas and themes of
Augustine's past literary works were not for him dead accomplishments of his past, but
living testimonies to faith. As such they were subject to change and improvement as
much as he was. The Reconsiderations retroactively turn every one of Augustine's
works into a kind of preface of its own. What is important is not that the works were
written at some dead time in the past, but that they continued to be read. What matters is
not his achievement in writing the works, but the reader's enlightenment on
encountering them. To that end, improvement, revision, clarification, and correction all
had a role to play. Confession and reconsideration go hand in hand.

The old Augustine observing the young Augustine at a distance, qualifying and
rephrasing but for the most part affirming: he is not a bad model for his later students to
follow. Not all of his readers have been so indulgent to his faults, though to be sure not
all have been so cautiously attentive to the nuances of what he said.[3]

Augustine's death did not transform his readers overnight from partisans to scholars.
The debates that had begun over grace and freedom in his lifetime lingered, to divide
and embarrass his followers. He was defended, vociferously--perhaps too vociverously,
against the criticisms of the Gaulish monks, by Prosper of Aquitaine (d. c. 463), but he
was also the thinly veiled target of an influential pamphlet, the Commonitorium of
Vincent of Lérins (d. c. 450), who proclaimed that Christian doctrine consisted in what
had been taught "always, everywhere, by everybody"--and hence by implication did not
include novel ideas about predestination propagated by African bishops. Behind both
these relatively minor figures stood the charismatic and magisterial authority of
Augustine's contemporary, John Cassian, a veteran of eastern monastic discipline who
had settled in Gaul and wrote two tremendously influential collections of essays on the
monastic life, his Institutes and Conferences; his authority and his restraint were equally
influential in keeping the controversy within remarkable bounds of toleration. Schism
was avoided. Eventually the cause of Augustine's doctrine was taken up by the greatest
Latin preacher of the early church after Augustine, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), who
shepherded the bishops of Gaul through an important council in Orange (in 529) at
which the essence of the Augustinian doctrine was affirmed even while certain doctrines
(particularly that of double predestination) were foresworn without prejudice to the
argument whether or not they could be found in the pages of Augustine.[4]

Augustine's reputation for learning and authority was not materially damaged by the
controversy. His generation had given the Latin church four remarkable writers--
Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Cassian--and there was never any question but that
the greatest of these was Augustine. For the Middle Ages, Augustinianism did not
consist solely or even primarily of his doctrines of predestination (this is exactly the
reverse of what must be said of the modern period); when controversy arose in these
matters, his name would be invoked (and there was a particularly lively outbreak in the
ninth century[5]), but his influence was sought most eagerly elsewhere. From the fifth
century to the twelfth in the Latin west, the preeminent cultural institution of
Christianity was the monastery. In the monasteries of this period Augustine's influence
knew its most unchallenged domination. In the sixth century, the Neapolitan monk
Eugippius (d. c. 535) put together a huge anthology of excerpts from the writings of
Augustine, for those who could not find time for reading all of him.[6] Pope Gregory
the Great (d. 604) is in many ways the most Augustinian of theologians, and at the same
time the most original of his early disciples: his thirty-five books of commentary on the
book of Job (his Moralia) are Augustinian in method and style, with few disagreements
on points of doctrine but some rather different emphases at the same time.[7] Isidore of
Seville (d. 636) made him an authority in Visigothic Spain,[8] and the immensely
learned Bede (d. 735), perhaps Augustine's greatest pupil, distinguished the Anglo-
Saxon church with a long series of commentaries on scripture.[9]
The reforms of Charlemagne (d. 814) in matters of education and church government
expanded the influence of all the great church fathers by improving the facilities for
copying and disseminating manuscripts, and by raising the level of teaching in the
monastic schools, but did little more for Augustine particularly than continue what had
been now a centuries-long tradition. It remained for the schoolmen of the first
universities--particularly that of Paris--in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to find new
ways of exploiting the rich vein of Augustine's teaching. In their works we see the
beginning of the process of continuous transformation, and even deformation, that has
been Augustine's fate since. The monks had not after all been very far from Augustine
in the underlying spirit and method with which they approached scripture and its
teachings. The new universities, half-drunk with the heady influence of Aristotelian
logic, replaced the scriptural commentary with the formal disputation as the chief
vehicle of theological argument: though they quoted Augustine with lavish praise[10],
their real function was to supplant him. Though he was still the object of great
veneration, he was no longer the latest and highest authority.

Veneration is often the subtlest form of betrayal. That Augustine's own teachings were
not exactly the same as those of the scholastics who praised him, imitated him, and
betrayed him can be seen in the later history of medieval theology. Martin Luther came
out of an Augustinian cloister to brandish Augustinian doctrines of predestination in the
face of late scholastic churchmen--but it was a sometime Augustinian monk, Erasmus,
who took up the challenge to debate Luther in the 1520's on precisely the issues of grace
and freedom that had been seemingly put to rest at Orange a millennium before.
(Erasmus also oversaw in the same decade the publication of the first complete printed
edition of Augustine's works.)[11]

From the Reformation dates the beginning of the tendency to give the name
Augustinianism narrowly to a limited body of pessimistic doctrines about grace and
freedom. Not surprisingly, the reputation of Augustine in later centuries often rose and
fell according to the reputation of just those particular doctrines. The Roman church
retained an ancestral reverence for his name and teachings, but found itself increasingly
compelled to disown in controversy specific propositions for which support could be
found--most embarrassingly--in the writings of Augustine himself. The respectful tone
and zeal for harmony that had been characterized the debates of the sixth century was
entirely absent in the sixteenth, to the lasting disadvantage of Augustine's reputation.
The Counter-Reformation marks the decisive ascendancy of the prestige of Aquinas
over that of Augustine in the Roman church, a transformation scarcely imaginable as
late as perhaps 1500.

The last great battle over Augustine's heritage among churchmen was fought in
seventeenth-century France. Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres (d. 1638), wrote a
monumental treatise, the Augustinus, published two years after his death, the fruit--he
said--of his having read the entire body of Augustine's works ten times, and the works
on grace and freedom thirty times. His teachings found fertile ground in an aristocratic
enclave of asceticism outside Paris, the convent of Port-Royal. The austere and rigorous
writers of this school, particularly Antoine Arnauld (d. 1694) and Blaise Pascal (d.
1662)--especially in his Provincial Letters, waged relentless polemical warfare against
the latitudinarian teachings of the Jesuits, in pitched battle for the hearts of the French
ruling classes. Papal condemnation in 1653 and partial capitulation by the Jansenists in
1668 marked the end of this brief flowering of Augustinian passion.[12] It should not be
overlooked, however, that the great edition of Augustine's works by the Benedictines of
St. Maur (beginning in 1672) is owed at least in part to the enthusiasm the Jansenists
fostered.

The heat of controversy did not offer much hope of a calm resolution to the question
whether a synthesis of predestinarian teaching such as Jansen's could satisfactorily
represent Augustine's many-sided character to a modern readership. The fading of
ecclesiastical controversy and the rise of critical scholarship in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries began to create an environment in which such questions could be
debated seriously and real progress made. For Augustine's reputation, this was at best a
mixed blessing: if the scholastics had replaced obedience with a sometimes faithless
veneration, the age of criticism has often accompanied its veneration with suspicion,
and old allegiances faded slowly. Catholic scholars were slowt o forgive Augustine for
the aid and comfort he offered Luther, but Protestants were no less slow to forgive him
for the medieval church and its practices.

In our own time, Augustine is no longer the venerable ancestor looming over every
ecclesiastical controversy that he was for so long, and this is almost certainly to his
advantage. We are freer than any generation since his own to confront him as he was, to
let him speak for himself, and to live out the implications of what he had to say. Little
has changed. The future of Augustine's teaching remains exactly what it was when he
was alive and writing; his works exalt and exhaust, just as they always have.

Prolegomena
confessionum mearum libri tredecim et de malis et de bonis meis deum laudant iustum
et bonum atque in eum excitant humanum intellectum et affectum. interim quod ad me
attinet, hoc in me egerunt cum scriberentur et agunt cum leguntur. quid de illis alii
sentiant, ipsi viderint; multis tamen fratribus eos multum placuisse et placere scio.
retr. 2.6.1
quotiens confessionum tuarum libros lego inter duos contrarios affectus, spem videlicet
et metum, laetis non sine lacrimis legere me arbitrer non alienam sed propriam meae
peregrinationis historiam.
Petrarca, Secretum
Hier ist des Säglichen Zeit, hier seine Heimat.
Sprich und Bekenn.

Rilke, Duineser Elegien 9.42-3

deus semper idem,
noverim me,
noverim te.

sol. 2.1.1
`He who makes the truth comes to the light.'1 The truth that Augustine made2 in the
Confessions had eluded him for years. It appears before us as a trophy torn from the grip
of the unsayable after a prolonged struggle on the frontier between speech and silence.
What was at stake was more than words. The `truth' of which Augustine spoke was not
merely a quality of a verbal formula, but veracity itself, a quality of a living human
person.3 Augustine `made the truth' - in this sense, became himself truthful - when he
found a pattern of words to say the true thing well. But both the `truth' that Augustine
made and the `light' to which it led were for him scripturally guaranteed epithets of
Christ, the pre-existent second person of the trinity. For Augustine to write a book, then,
that purported to make truth and seek light was not merely a reflection upon the actions
of his life but pure act itself, thought and writing become the enactment of ideas.4

Behind this fundamental act of the self lay powerful and evident anxieties - evident on
every page. Augustine is urgently concerned with the right use of language, longing to
say the right thing in the right way. The first page of the text is a tissue of uncertainty in
that vein, for to use language wrongly is to find oneself praising a god who is not God.
The anxiety is intensified by a vertiginous loss of privacy. Even as he discovers that he
possesses an interior world cut off from other people, he realizes that he lies open before
God: there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee.

Anxiety so pervades the Confessions that even the implicit narrative structure is
undermined. When on the first page we hear that our heart is restless until there is
repose in God, the reasonable expectation is that the text will move from restlessness to
rest, from anxiety to tranquility. In some ways that is true: on baptism care flies away, 5
and the last page looks forward to the tranquility of endless praise in heaven. But the
conversion story leaves the Augustine of this text far more uneasy than we might have
expected. The proper culmination for an optimistic Confessions would be mystic vision
as fruit of conversion (see introductory note to Bk. 10). But instead the last half of Bk.
10 and the whole of Bks. 11 to 13 - not incidentally the parts of the work that have most
baffled modern attempts to reduce the text to a coherent pattern - defy the expected
movement from turmoil to sedation and show an Augustine still anxious over matters
large and small. It is unclear at what date it became possible, or necessary, for
Augustine to endure that continuing tension. At the time of the events narrated in the
first nine books, he surely expected more repose for his troubles.

The book runs even deeper than that. Augustine believes that human beings are opaque
to themselves no less than to others. We are not who we think we are. One of the things
Augustine had to confess was that he was and had been himself sharply different from
who he thought he was. Not only was this true of his wastrel youth (to hear him tell it),
but it remained true at the time of confessing - he did not know to what temptation he
might next submit (10.5.7). We are presented throughout the text with a character we
want to call `Augustine', but we are at the same time in the presence of an author (whom
we want to call `Augustine') who tells us repeatedly that his own view of his own past is
only valid if another authority, his God, intervenes to guarantee the truth of what he
says. Even the self is known, and a fortiori other people are known, only through
knowing God. So Augustine appears before us winning self-knowledge as a
consequence of knowledge of God; but his God he searches for and finds only in his
own mind.
His God is timelessly eternal, without time's distention and hence anxiety, but also
without the keen anticipations and rich satisfactions, of humankind; his God is
perfection of language incarnate, without the ambages, and thus without the cunning
texture and irony, of human discourse; his God is pure spirit, without the limitations,
and thus without the opportunities, of fleshliness. That God is in every way utterly
inhuman; and yet (here we approach the greatest mystery of this book) humankind is
created in the image and likeness of that God - a resemblance that Augustine prizes
highly, and in which he finds the way to knowledge both of self and of God.

All of us who read Augustine fail him in many ways. Our characteristic reading is
hopelessly incoherent. Denying him our full cooperation, (1) we choose to ignore some
of what he says that we deny but find non-threatening; (2) we grow heatedly indignant
at some of what he says that we deny and find threatening; (3) we ignore rafts of things
he says that we find naive, or uninteresting, or conventional (thereby displaying that in
our taste which is itself naïve, uninteresting, and conventional); (4) we patronize what
we find interesting but flawed and primitive (e.g., on time and memory); (5) we admire
superficially the odd purple patch; (6) we assimilate whatever pleases us to the
minimalist religion of our own time, finding in him ironies he never intended; (7) we
extract and highlight whatever he says that we find useful for a predetermined thesis
(which may be historical, psychological, philosophical, or doctrinal, e.g., just war,
immaculate conception, abortion) - while not noticing that we ignore many other ideas
that differ only in failing to command our enthusiasm. So when, for example, Augustine
relies on the proposition that all truth is a function of Truth, and that Truth is identical
with the second person of the trinity, and that Jesus the carpenter's son is identical with
that same person - we offer at most a notional assent, but are compelled to interpret the
idea to ourselves, rather than grasp it directly. Just when we are best at explaining
Augustine, we are then perhaps furthest from his thought.

A formal commentary on the text is one way to subvert our impulses to misreading. The
text itself enforces a discipline on the commentator, drawing attention back to the
business at hand, which is mainly the exegesis of the most important layers of
discernible meaning in the text. The commentator is obliged to take stands on
controverted issues, but also has a responsibility to present views other than his own.
And even when the commentator presses a tentative and idiosyncratic line of
interpretation, he should at the same time present the evidence in a way that not only
does not preclude but actually facilitates disagreement. And the commentator must have
a respect for ambiguity verging on reverence.

The prolegomena presented here, therefore, fall into three parts. (1) An essay on the
history of the interpretation of the text and the methods that have proved fruitful in
pursuing Augustine's meanings to their various lairs. (2) A concise exposition of the
main lines of interpretation emphasized in this commentary, gathering material that
would otherwise be scattered through dozens of notes in the commentary. (3) Some
technical information to facilitate use of the text and commentary printed here.

Hearing Confessions
A Century of Scholarship
A hundred years ago, it is safe to say, everyone knew what the Confessions were about.
The main outline of the autobiographical narrative that is part of the first nine books
was clear enough, and the garden scene at the end of Bk. 8 was a cliché (and furnished
the illustration for the title page of many editions and translations - the voice bidding to
`take up and read' doing double duty, addressed to Augustine and to the devout reader).
The story was one of conversion, and the trajectory from plight to piety an unbroken
one. But that assurance was shattered by the great disturbing question (for which it is
conventional to divide the credit): was the story true? As told in the Confessions did it
not conflict in important ways with what we learn of the same period from other works,
works written closer to the date of the events recounted? Had piety and literature
neglected the truth? 6

The consequent quest for biographical fact and its appropriate assessment has driven
scholarship ever since. This movement was at first horizontal, ranging throughout
Augustine's œuvre for evidence to marshal. The classic works are those of Alfaric and
Boyer. 7 A counter-movement began in articles in the 1940s and reached its classic
expression in 1950 with the publication of Pierre Courcelle's magisterial Recherches. 8
That book worked a Copernican revolution in Augustine scholarship. 9 Courcelle's book
turned from the horizontal to the vertical, to weigh and assess each piece of evidence
more carefully, and to look beneath innocent texts not hitherto canvassed for indications
of the intellectual and emotional currents that had buffeted Augustine. In particular,
Courcelle took further than anyone else before him the investigation of the mechanism
of Platonic influence on the young Augustine, and pursued his quarry with rigor and
sobriety. The demonstration of the Platonic permeation of Christian intellectual
discussion around Ambrose at Milan was Courcelle's greatest achievement.

Courcelle's revolution had, however, more lasting effect on the study of Augustine's life
than on the study of the Confessions. The lively discussion and fertile investigations to
which he gave impetus concentrated increasingly on reconstructing the history of
Augustine's readings and opinions (chiefly in the period before his ordination), at the
expense of detailed studies of the rhetorical and exegetical strategies of the Confessions
themselves. Some common features of this generation's work can be extracted from the
mass of publications to help orient the present work.

First, the scholarship mirrored its own times. The abundance of post-Courcelle work
dates from the fifties and sixties; the `galloping' bibliography (the epithet was applied
by A. Mandouze) has slowed to a more dignified pace. One characteristic of that period,
here as in so many other areas of scholarship, was an optimistic positivism. Scholars
labored to construct large hypothetical schemas (embracing, e.g., the books Augustine
read and the people he knew) to make possible positive and permanent advances in the
study of the text.

Second, what was achieved was something whose essential quality becomes visible only
at a generous distance. The reading we have been given of Augustine is an essentially
gnostic one. This is no surprise, for we have been living through an increasingly gnostic
age. The emphasis has been on the secret, hidden, inner lore (Augustine's borrowings
from lost Platonic texts10 ), accessible only to the cognoscenti.

Third, for the first time, Augustine has been fitted out with a new intellectual position.
We see him now not merely as a provincial bishop, theologizing down the party line,
but as a man constantly in dialogue with the wider world of the non-Christian thought of
his time, accepting its excellences, quarreling selectively with its errors, sharing a
common ground of debate and discussion. That is exactly the position that Christians of
every stripe, but especially Catholics, were moving towards during the period in which
these scholarly investigations were carried out. Augustine turned out to be our
contemporary - to have been waiting for us to catch up with him.

To characterize the scholarly work of these last decades in this way may seem unduly
harsh. But the sum total of all that has been accomplished in the last forty years weighs
up to less than half what Courcelle accomplished in his one book. New lines of inquiry
and new questions have not been risked. The issues have remained those that Courcelle
defined, and the techniques remain his; infertility is the obvious fate of such debates.

Two works from outside the mainstream deserve special attention, as harbingers of
ways to move ahead. In 1955, G.N. Knauer published his Hamburg dissertation
Psalmenzitate in Augustins Konfessionen. This is the best modern study of the
Confessions as literary artefact. 11 At about the same time, a Leipzig Habilitation was
submitted by Horst Kusch, on the structure of the Confessions. The full work was never
published, and repeated inquiries have failed to unearth a copy. 12 Kusch published a
long article, 13 valuable especially for two ideas: first, that the structure of the last books
of the Confessions reflects the trinitarian and triadic patterns that obsessed Augustine
elsewhere; and second, that the three temptations of 1 Jn. 2.16 both reflect those triadic
patterns further and are significant for the structure of the early books of the
Confessions. In matters of detail, Kusch must be argued with, but his instincts were
sound. His work has been appreciated by some demanding judges, 14 but did not succeed
in reorienting debate.

But we have still not appreciated the Confessions purely as a work of literature. The
narrative of past sins and pious amendments fills little more than half the pages of the
work. What are the last four books doing there? The last catalogue of efforts to answer
that question is two decades old 15 and books and articles continue to appear addressing
it in one form or another. Some of the ideas they propose have merit, but none has been
presented in a way to compel, or even very strongly to encourage, assent. One
prevailing weakness of many of these efforts has been the assumption that there lies
somewhere unnoticed about the Confessions a neglected key to unlock all mysteries.
But for a text as multilayered and subtle as the Confessions, any attempt to find one, or
even a few, keys is pointless. Augustine says himself that he meant to stir our souls, not
test our ingenuity as lock-picks.

We may also mistrust readers who insist, or who insist on denying, that the work is
perfect and beyond reproach. That form of idolatry, like the complementary iconoclasm
with which it long disputed, has had its day. Better to heed an early reader of T.E.
Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom: `it seems to me that an attempted work of art may
be so much more splendid for its very broken imperfection revealing the man so
intimately.' 16 If we can hope to read on those terms, expecting little, grateful for every
fragmentary beauty, some further reflections may be in order.

Avenues of Approach
Every major modern book on the Confessions has been written by a Catholic or a
Parisian, or both. 17 To think of Alfaric, Boyer, Courcelle, Guardini, Henry, 18 Le Blond,
19
O'Connell,20 O'Meara, Pellegrino, 21 Solignac, and Verheijen is to come very close to
exhausting the arsenal of large-scale studies of this text. 22 The names of those who have
done the most important work in adjacent areas of research (e.g., Augustine's
theological development - Pincherle, 23 du Roy - or his intellectual equipage - Marrou)
follow the same law. There is even an important article by one scholar who has gone on
to become Cardinal Prefect of what is no longer the Holy Office. 24 The exceptions are
few and illuminating. There are Knauer's Psalmenzitate (but that work has been praised
but neglected by the Catholic/French establishment), Theiler's Porphyrios und Augustin
(another book with few followers), and Nörregard's Augustins Bekehrung 25 (rarely cited
since 1950). J. Burnaby's Amor Dei is neither French nor Romanist, but Burnaby was an
Anglican clergyman and Cambridge don, whose book was written directly against the
most outspokenly Protestant criticism of Augustine in this century, A. Nygren's Agape
and Eros. Gibb and Montgomery's edition and notes likewise came from two
Cambridge dons. Finally, P. Brown's biography is donnish and Oxonian, but written by
one who began life in Catholic Dublin and who has become in the years since the
Augustine book an honorary Parisian of a modern sort. His book is the least
preoccupied by the controversies that have surrounded this text for the last century.
Another honorable exception is E. TeSelle's Augustine the Theologian (New York,
1970), a marvel of eirenic Protestant scholarship.

Now Catholics, former Catholics, and Parisians need not be the only readers to take an
interest in this text. Augustine himself has had a checkered history in Roman Catholic
modernity, somehow suspect for having given aid and comfort, if not to the Reformers,
at least to Baius, Jansen, and their descendants. Leaving aside the quarrels of the first
part of this century, whose partisans have accepted

`the constitution of silence and are folded in a single party'

(Eliot)
, 26 we should not forget how much patristic scholarship owed to the discovery of liberal
Catholics that such study did not bring them in conflict with Thomistic orthodoxy but
offered a vocabulary and a range of reference broader and more flexible than what
Roman catechisms had to offer. That movement, whose founding patron was Joseph De
Ghellinck, S.J., culminated in the postwar establishment of the Corpus Christianorum
series, the luxuriance of the Études Augustiniennes establishment in Paris, and a host of
specialized projects in the field. Vatican II crowned the aspirations of those two
generations of scholars with gratifying success and at the same time undermined their
rationale. The generation of Catholic scholars that has flourished since the Council has
no need of the mild subterfuge of patristic reference to clothe their ideas; accordingly,
the great projects have seen a slow seepage of manpower to age, laicization, and more
fashionable studies. Worse in some ways, Catholicism has lost many of its enemies, or
at least the most learned of them, in eirenic, ecumenical times, and it is no longer
possible to rely on anticlerical French scholars coming to work in these areas with the
vigor with which they once sought evidence that the one, holy, catholic, and Roman
church had not always been as it is today. The history of Christianity has ceased to be a
vital concern for Christians and non-Christians alike, and the great and urgent question
that formed the subtext of so many historical debates of the last century, `was heißt
Christentum?', has lost its savor: and that marks a watershed in the history of our
culture. There remains, to be sure, an element of anxiety on all sides, a sense that a
figure like Augustine must either be defended or attacked, that large and immediate
issues are at stake - in a way they are not at stake, for example, among readers of Silius
Italicus or Notker Balbulus. If we could forget for a moment that he was a Christian,
and even forget for a moment that he was Augustine, he would probably appear very
different; but in those matters, memory's hold is unshakeable, and we cannot forget at
will.

All this needs to be said by way of preface to some brief remarks about specific issues
of interpretation that arise. The focus of modern discussion of this text has been the
place of neo-Platonism in Augustine's life and writings. The polemic has moved
between two poles: the attack on the plaster saint, beginning with the observation that
his `Christianity' was, at least for an important period in his life, very like a specific
non-Christian philosophy, and the defense, surrendering much of the plaster but
insisting on the authentic Christian essence. All parties seem to have agreed
unthinkingly on the principle that `Christianity' is in the first instance a body of
intellectual propositions about God and his creatures and about particular events in the
history of the relations between God and his creatures. On that view, movement into and
out of `Christianity' is a matter of intellectual discussion and assessment, ending in
assent or disagreement. If you believe in the Virgin Birth, you are Christian in a way
that someone who offers liberal quibbles is not. Arguments for and against the existence
of God are essential, and philosophy is the handmaid of theology. To argue then that
philosophy has dictated to theology tends to undermine the authenticity of theology.

In this network of assumptions, Augustine's dealings with the Platonists call his
theology into question. For one period of Augustine's life, from his public conversion to
Christianity in 386/7 to his ordination as a Christian cleric in 391, the evidence viewed
on those assumptions could be described in ways disturbing to traditionalists, who -
sharing those fundamental assumptions about the nature of Christianity - were in a weak
position to respond. Augustine's views appear so neo-Platonic as to be Christian in
name only. Was Christianity for Augustine only a convenient dress in which to present
ideas that were in origin non-Christian? To make that case (as Alfaric did) was to
subvert the self-consciousness of the Latin Catholic tradition: if Augustine is not a
Christian, then who is? If Augustine's version of Christianity is tainted, then whose is
not? It is no wonder that the attempt raised heated defense. Boyer's orthodox book in
response was sober, well-considered, and soundly argued, but it was not at its strongest
when it came to awkward historical facts. Courcelle's book found middle ground:
allowing plenty of room for Christianity, but insisting on the Platonic disposition of that
Christianity. Further, Courcelle widened the net to include Ambrose and show that
Platonized Christianity was the order of the day in imperial Milan of the 380s. The
reorientation Courcelle effected has not been seriously challenged.

The drawbacks of the traditional assumptions are evident even on their own terms. What
sort of thing is Christianity? When is it compromised by admixture from `outside'? The
view that `Christianity' is something unadmixed can itself be a Christian doctrine, but
that `Christianity' requires a rather specialized definition to be useful as a historical
category. If Augustine uses neo-Platonic terms to describe Christian teachings, and even
if he professes to see no distinction between a neo-Platonic teaching and a Christian
one, and even more, if he adopts a neo-Platonic principle out of a vacuum and makes it
part of his `Christianity', observers could think that the integrity and authenticity of his
Christianity were at risk. But if those principles happen not to conflict with any express
Christian doctrine `necessary for salvation' , and if Augustine then turns and flatly
denies some principle or other of neo-Platonism on no other grounds than that it
conflicts with something that scripture or church policy states, has he compromised
himself? Where does he get the confidence and authority to make such distinctions?
And if some other thinker, no less respected than Augustine among Christians, should
contradict Augustine on one of these points, who is to judge between them?

But does anyone think that Christianity is a thing of the mind only? Perhaps in Paris, but
surely not semper, ubique, ab omnibus. By way of thought experiment, consider only an
orthodox Reformed view of the matter. The question for that view is whether and when
Augustine acquired the theological faith that is the substance of salvation. Such a view
might be sympathetic to the most anti-Catholic parts of the French debate (surely the
dalliance with the platonicorum libri is not where we should see Augustine becoming a
Christian), but would be more inclined to accept the paradigmatic conversion of the
Milan garden scene as authentic. But do the Platonic doctrines then entertained and held
for years afterwards in some way compromise the integrity of that theological faith? On
available evidence, no clear judgment is possible.

The defects of both Protestant and Catholic modern views of Augustine and of this text
encourages us to look for alternatives. That which has proved most useful in the present
work is easily stated. For Augustine, and for late antique men and women generally,
religion is cult - or, to use the word we use when we approve of a particular cult,
religion is liturgy. Anti-clerical Parisians and Protestants may agree that priestcraft is
dangerous stuff, but Augustine would not concur with them. The central decision he
makes in the period narrated in the Confessions is not to believe the doctrines of the
Catholic Christians (that is important, but preliminary), but to present himself for cult
initiation - and the threshold there is a matter not of doctrine but of morals. Bk. 8, the
vivid narrative of hesitation and decision, depicts Augustine agonizing over whether he
could and would live up to the arduous standards he thought required of one who would
accept full initiation into the Christian cult. His decision to seek that initiation, taken
provisionally in August 386, 27 carried out on the night of 24-5 April 387, was the
centerpiece of his conversion.

Why do we downplay cult initiation for Augustine? There are several reasons,
beginning with our own prejudices. Few modern scholars (indeed, few moderns of any
stripe, including the most ardent proponents of a traditional doctrine of
transubstantiation) hold a view of the importance and efficacy of cult acts that even
remotely approaches the visceral reverence for cult that all late antique men and women
felt. We like to believe that there were serene and cultless philosophers in that age, not
exactly anticlerical but certainly not superstitiously devoted to ritual and ceremony.
Whether there were such people is perhaps irrelevant to the immediate case of
Augustine, for it is clear that he did not believe that such people existed. 28

A further evidentiary problem obtrudes to cut the cult-life of late antiquity off from our
view. Virtually all late antique cults, and Christianity was emphatically no exception,
kept the secrets of their rites closely held. Until 25 April 387, Augustine himself had
never seen what Americans may see on television any Sunday and every Christmas Eve
- the rituals of the Roman eucharistic liturgy. As a catechumen, he had been admitted to
the church to hear scripture readings, hymns, prayers, and sermons, but then he had
been politely shown the door when the central cult act was about to begin. In all the
years after his baptism and ordination, in all the five million surviving words of his
works, Augustine never describes or discusses the cult act that was the center of his
ordained ministry. Liturgical texts from late antiquity are few and terse, and late antique
commentary on liturgy itself even rarer. Much can be reconstructed, 29 but there is an
inevitable disproportion. Augustine is verbose about doctrine, close-mouthed about
ritual. He appears to us as a man of doctrine exclusively, though he himself tells us in
explicit enough terms otherwise. 30 There is a proportion to be redressed, and no
accurate guide to the correct balance. Augustine's Christianity was not 100% doctrine,
0% ritual, nor even 80%-20%; but was it 20% doctrine, 80% ritual? That is possible, but
on balance unlikely. We are left to wander between the extremes, following our
hunches. What is clear is that cult was decisive for him: without cult, no Christianity.
But he was prepared to be very lenient on matters of doctrine; error alone has rarely
been sufficient for excommunication: it is contumacy that draws anathema. He surely
admitted to full church membership many ordinary citizens of Hippo for whom halting
recital from memory of the apostle's creed and lord's prayer marked the upper limits of
their capacity to master the verbal formulae of their new cult.

To take such a view of Augustine's religion is perhaps only possible for a post-modern
reader, one who has learned afresh from the most recent generation of Parisians that the
map is not the territory, that the narrative is not the event, that a text is not a life. There
are important blanks in the Confessions: God is present but silent, Augustine's past life
is over (`dead' he says of his infancy at 1.6.9), and his present life extends beyond the
pages he writes in many ways, cult activity not least of them. From his earliest writings,
Augustine's program as writer aspired to knowledge of God and knowledge of self. But
God and Augustine we learn about only indirectly and at a rhetorical distance in the
Confessions. To remember that is to begin to understand better the text as text, and there
is perhaps the key to seeing the most vital feature of this particular text.

A text is not a life: so far, so good. To narrate one's past life and deeds is to put a pattern
of words next to a life (by nature patternless, full of event and incident) and to declare
that the words and the life have something to do with each other. `Something' is
probably the right word. Later in these prolegomena, we will see how the pattern of
words that appears in the Confessions had been taking shape in Augustine's texts for
years before this text was actually written. The Confessions offer no unedited transcript,
but a careful rhetorical presentation. But the writing of this text was itself part of
Augustine's life. `Confession' for Augustine, that act of `making the truth' , was itself an
important part of his religion, somewhere between doctrinal disputation and cult act -
perhaps even forming a link between the two. The life about which Augustine tells us in
his text finally slips beyond our grasp, and the cult-life about which he tells us little or
nothing is even more remote. But the life of this particular act of `confession', the
writing of this text by a man self-consciously turning from youth to middle age, is as
present to us on the page as our own lives - indeed, becomes as we read it a part of our
own lives. It is that fragment of the `life' of Augustine that is most accessible to us.

The purpose of this commentary, for all the technical apparatus, is to bring that part of
Augustine's life into the life of the reader. Philological scholarship takes its departure
from one text and generates another, and the movement is all too often away from the
object of the researches to the investigating subject; it is not optical illusion to think that
modern scholarship has been increasingly at risk from a narcissism in which the object
disappears from view and the scholarly subject takes center stage. That is a reason to
write commentary rather than interpretive essay: to facilitate the movement past the
commentator's words once again to Augustine's words - to Augustine's life.

One line of interpretation has been largely neglected here: inquiry into Augustine's
psychological makeup and history. The appeal of such an interpretation is great and its
lack regrettable, but there are compelling reasons for abstaining from the attempt. (1)
Judged purely by the standards of modern psychoanalysis, the Confessions do not
provide us with evidence of the quantity and quality necessary to make a well-founded
assessment. (2) Because there are either no ancient or medieval figures, or very, very
few, for whom such evidence is available, it is far from clear whether it is possible to
use the patterns detected by scientific investigators in the personalities of modern men
and women in assessing those long dead. Even assuming that the patterns detected by
science are universal, making the necessary adjustments for the different circumstances
of ancient public and private life is, flatly, impossible. 31 (3) In particular, it often seems
on reading psychological interpretations of Augustine that the moderns too easily yield
to Augustine's own insistence on the importance of his own conversion, as recorded in
Bk. 8 of the Confessions. (4) Any reading, especially a psychoanalytical reading, of a
text such as this should not be judged according to the simplicity it imposes but
according to the complexity it reveals. So, to take only one example, it is obvious that
Augustine's father and mother had very different effects on their son, but having made
the observation, there is little left to do but speculate, on purely a priori grounds, what
deeds and traits of Augustine's known life may have been influenced by family
relations. 32

Augustine should have the last word, his own advice to Paulinus of Nola on how to read
him: ep. 27.4, `sed tu cum legis, mi sancte Pauline, non te ita rapiant quae per nostram
infirmitatem veritas loquitur, ut ea quae ipse loquor minus diligenter advertas, ne dum
avidus hauris bona et recta quae data ministro, non ores pro peccatis et erratis quae ipse
committo. in his enim quae tibi recte, si adverteris, displicebunt, ego ipse conspicior, in
his autem quae per donum spiritus quod accepisti recte tibi placent in libris meis, ille
amandus, ille praedicandus est apud quem est fons vitae, et in cuius lumine videbimus
lumen sine aenigmate et facie ad faciem, nunc autem in aenigmate videmus. in his ergo
quae ipse de veteri fermento eructavi, cum ea legens agnosco, me iudico cum dolore; in
his vero quae de azymo sinceritatis et veritatis dono dei dixi, exulto cum tremore. quid
enim habemus quod non accepimus? at enim melior est qui maioribus et pluribus quam
qui minoribus et paucioribus donis dei dives est: quis negat? sed rursus melius est, vel
de parvo dei dono gratias ipsi agere quam sibi agi velle de magno. haec ut ex animo
semper confitear meumque cor a lingua mea non dissonet, ora pro me, frater; ora,
obsecro, ut non laudari volens, sed laudans invocem dominum, et ab inimicis meis
salvus ero.'

A Reading of the Confessions

The Confessions are a single work in thirteen books, written in AD 397 33 The first nine
books contain much autobiographical reminiscence covering the years AD 354-87; the
last three books contain an allegorical exposition of the first chapter of Genesis, and Bk.
11 in particular contains a long discussion of the nature of time. Bk. 10 is known mainly
for its long discussion of the nature of memory and for a disturbingly scrupulous
examination of conscience. There is no evidence that the work ever circulated in a form
other than the one we have, but some scholars believe that Bk. 10 is the fruit of second
thoughts, added after the other twelve books were complete. 34 Translators have
sometimes abridged the work by omitting part or all of Bks. 11-13.

The reading of this work presented here is loosely arranged according to the structure of
a scholastic quaestio. That structure helps make explicit the received views, the
difficulties that present themselves, a resolution of the difficulties with whatever new
contribution is possible, and, in many ways most important, a final discussion that does
justice to the merits of the received views while resituating them in the light of new
ideas. The presentation under Videtur is itself a reading of other scholars' readings, and
contains elements of new interpretation, and what appears under Respondeo does not
pretend to be entirely new or original.

Videtur:
The work as a whole is an intellectual autobiography, tracing the movement of
Augustine's opinions on matters of a philosophic and religious nature from his earliest
youth to the time of writing. The principal stages of this ascent from ignorance to
illumination are precisely identified: the two `tentatives d'extases plotiniennes' 35 of Bk.
7 and the vision of Ostia in Bk. 9. But other passages may be interpreted in the same
context. For example, 36 the description of the contents of the de pulchro et apto in Bk. 4
presents that work as though it were a doomed first attempt to ascend in the mind to the
summum bonum. It suggests two reasons for the failure of that ascent, ignorance of the
nature of God and ignorance of the nature of created things. 37 In that context, the first
`tentative' of Bk. 7 occurs after Augustine has been shown to have renewed his
understanding of the divine nature in the first pages of Bk. 7, culminating in the reading
of the platonicorum libri. But that `tentative' fails; the paragraphs that follow reveal
decisively Augustine's mature view of the nature, that is to say (under Plotinus' tutelage)
the non-nature, of evil: in other words, his discovery at that time of the essential
goodness of created things. In the wake of that discovery, the second `tentative' of Bk. 7
is, on Plotinian terms as Augustine understood them, a complete success. 38 It is not that
the Plotinian method did not work for Augustine; it worked, but it was not enough. It
left him disappointed and hungry for something different, perhaps richer, perhaps more
permanent, perhaps merely something more congruent with the realities of everyday
life. That is achieved in Bk. 9 at Ostia. The report of that vision begins with the most
explicit Plotinian allusion in the whole work, 39 but goes far beyond that Plotinian form
to an explicitly Christian, scriptural, and eschatological ending. 40 The vision of Ostia
anticipates the beatific vision. That new post-Plotinian ascent to vision becomes the
organizing pattern for the first half of Bk. 10, in which Augustine, in the presence of the
reader, does what he learned to do at Ostia. 41 Similar patterns of discourse keyed to the
ascent of the mind to God, and marked particularly by recurrence of the significant
quotation of Phil. 3.13, occur throughout Bks. 11-13. 42 (The pattern of successive
visions from Bk. 4 to Bk. 7 to Bk. 9 also matches a theory about three types of vision
that Augustine had expounded several years before writing the Confessions and returned
to in detail in the commentary de Genesi ad litteram years later; the vision of Ostia thus
matches the highest type of `vision' possible in this life. 43 )

Sed contra:
But all attempts to depict the Confessions as essentially or mainly a story of the ascent
of the mind to God encounter great difficulties - one extrinsic and one intrinsic.
Extrinsically, it is a priori difficult to accept that the mature work of a Christian bishop,
who will later express grave reservations about the worth of Platonic philosophy
(notably in civ.) would be itself a frank manifestation of that style of thought and
doctrine. 44 Intrinsically, the difficulty is that not all that is in the Confessions is included
in an explanation that focuses on the ascent of the mind to God. 45 Noticeably missing
from the summary in the previous paragraph is the obviously crucial Bk. 8; but the real
scandal of the work that overthrows such an unilinear attempt at interpretation is the
central Bk. 10 itself. If the work were an attempt to depict the ascent pure and simple,
then the memorable `sero te amavi' paragraph (10.27.38) would have served perfectly
well for the last paragraph of the work as a whole. Not only do Bks. 11-13 obtrude, but
the last half of Bk. 10, an affront to our disdain for such scrupulosity, makes nonsense
of any attempt at so limited a reading. 46 But that depiction of the present state of
Augustine's soul as a victim of the three temptations of 1 Jn. 2.16 must be taken
seriously; indeed, taken seriously enough, it opens another line of sight into the
organization of the earlier books of the work. 47 A pattern of conduct can be traced
through Bks. 2-4 according to which Augustine sins first according to the
concupiscence of the flesh (both the sexual sins of adolescence and the symbolic re-
enactment of the fall implied by the incident of the pear tree), next according to
concupiscence of the eyes (described mainly in Bk. 3, where he falls prey to one sort of
curiositas in his mania for the spectacula of Carthage and to another in his allegiance to
the Manichees), and finally according to ambitio saeculi (which is most lightly touched
on at this stage - see on 4.7.12). 48 The moral rise of Augustine, that parallels but does
not duplicate the ascent of the mind, follows a reverse order: his zeal for his public
career fades first at Milan, 49 then his adhesion to the spirit of curiosity that had led him
to the Manichees, 50 and only last his enslavement to the desires of the flesh. 51 It is that
liberation that comes between the Milan and Ostia visions and makes possible the
higher vision that he comes to at Ostia and in Bks. 10 and following. 52

Respondeo:
The garden scene is indeed central to the work: but in what way? It is in the garden that
Christ enters Augustine's life. The want felt and described at 7.18.24 is now filled. 53 A
restrictive reading of the place of Christ in the Confessions, such as that of M. Lods, 54
insists that the words of Rom. 13.13-14, particularly, as Augustine hears them at
8.12.29, do not satisfy our expectation of what the place of Christ in a conversion
should be. But the action of Christ in 8.12.29 is redemptive, salvific, and decisive. For
Augustine, after all, it is incarnation pre-eminently that redeems, and to come to
understand that incarnation accurately and to acquire in his life a pattern of conduct that
he thought required by an understanding of that incarnation - that, for Augustine, is a
very Christian, and Christ-centered, conversion.

The literal sense of the text of Rom. 13.14 cannot be pressed too hard here: `sed
induimini dominum Iesum Christum'. Christ is many things to Augustine (via, veritas,
vita, sapientia, verbum dei) and all of those things Christ is to Augustine in the garden.
The encounter with a scriptural text throws into new light the parallel line of ascent that
Augustine has been unwittingly following from his earliest life, an ascent mediated to
fallen humanity through the medicine of the scriptures (which offer one of the
incarnations of the Word). The ascent of the mind, as Plotinus had preached it, had run
to a dead end. Instead, an alternate path (via) 55 proved to be the true way to the goal
Augustine sought. Whatever is incomplete about this encounter with Christ is brought to
fulfillment in Bk. 9, through baptism (9.6.14), and culminates at the end of Bk. 10,
where Augustine closes the central book of the work with a passage of such dense
eucharistic imagery that it may best be thought of as perhaps the only place in our
literature where a Christian receives the eucharist in the literary text itself. 56

This view adds emphasis and shading to Augustine's preoccupation with the issue of
continence. The struggle to decide whether to lead a completely celibate life is the one
feature of the conversion narrative that ought to come as a surprise. If it were only a
matter of finding the answers to deep questions, Bk. 7 would be the end of the narrative.
That the issue of continence arose and became central to the decision in the Milan
garden that we call Augustine's conversion, this was not part of what Augustine had
bargained for when he set out to search for wisdom, nor was it what most people
approaching Christianity in this period were worrying about. 57 There was no reason
why Augustine could not have been baptized and still made that good marriage
Monnica arranged.

To understand the issue's place in the Confessions, we must pay attention to a lost work
of Ambrose's, written while Augustine was in Milan. The title is arresting: de
sacramento regenerationis sive de philosophia; 58 paraphrased, that would be `On
Baptism; or, Concerning Philosophy.' The argument is straightforward enough: The
way of the philosophers is not the true way, it is not enough to know the truth, one must
have in addition sacramental membership in the Christian church. Phrased that way, the
relevance to Augustine's position is clear. What is of greater interest, however, is that in
that treatise, Ambrose found it polemically necessary and useful to counter the claims of
the philosophers to have achieved a higher standard of moral life by their chastity;
`continence is the pedestal on which right worship rests,' says Ambrose. 59 That was the
challenge Augustine accepted: to become not merely Christian, but a Christian who
outdoes the philosophers in all their excellences. In order to present himself for baptism,
Augustine felt that he had to have achieved a degree of moral self-control that assured
him of a lifetime of continence. 60 His holiday that autumn of 386 at Cassiciacum was,
inter alia, a time to test his resolve away from the presumed temptations of court and
city living. 61

Ad primum:
What then of the apparent pattern of the work as a whole, the depiction of the ascent of
the mind? Though Augustine in the years after the Confessions will drift away from the
ascent-vocabulary of his youth, he certainly adhered to that way of speaking throughout
his literary works of 386-97 and in the Confessions themselves. It must also be
recognized that the substance of the ascent remains central to Augustine's activity. What
is presented to us in the Confessions is the transformation of the traditional
philosopher's ascent of the mind to the summum bonum into a uniquely Christian ascent
that combines the two paths that Augustine had followed in his own life. The exegesis
of a chapter of scripture that fills the last three books itself displays the union of the
intellectual and exegetic, the Platonic and Christian, approaches to God, setting a
pattern that becomes the center of Augustine's life's work, to be fulfilled only
eschatologically - a goal anticipated but not reached on the last page of this text. The
form is exegetical, the content apparently philosophical; but on closer examination the
content turns out to be more theology than philosophy. He sees traces of God the creator
in Bk. 11 in the juxtaposition of time with eternity and understands himself as separated
from God by his own position in time. He sees God the Son in the Word of revelation,
and understands his own relation to that revelation by unraveling in Bk. 12 the
perplexities and imperfections of human attempts to expound the divine word through
human mechanisms of interpretation. God the spirit animating history emerges in Bk.
13 as Augustine pursues his allegory of the first chapter of Genesis along lines
deliberately chosen to juxtapose creation history with church history, and to understand
his own role as a member of, and guide in, that church.

The Confessions, then, present themselves to us a book about God, and about
Augustine: more Augustine at the beginning, more God at the end. But Augustine does
not disappear in this work. Properly speaking, Augustine is redeemed, and insofar as he
is redeemed and reformed according to the image and likeness of God, he becomes
representative of all humankind. The work begins with a cry of exultant praise, `magnus
es domine et laudabilis valde' (1.1.1), voiced by Augustine. When the same line (a
scriptural text) is brought back at the beginning of Bk. 11, it is introduced `ut dicamus
omnes' (11.1.1). The reader is expected to share the last three books, for if all persons
are created no less in the image and likeness of God than Augustine, and if his readers
are bound to Augustine through God in caritas, the image (to use the right word) of
Augustine in these last three books is at one and the same time an image of what his
readers are themselves. In this way the work is both itself an act of confession, and at
the same time a model and pattern for other acts of confession, by Augustine and by his
readers, at other times and places. There is no paradox in suggesting that this intricate
interplay of images and patterns is both the culmination of Augustine's theological
meditations and at the same time a feat possible in the fourth century only for someone
who had read Plotinus, and read him very well.

The Confessions in Augustine's Life

The date of writing has been repeatedly canvassed and consensus achieved. Argument
from the retractationes places the work between 397 and 401, while the way Augustine
refers to Ambrose and Simplicianus makes us think that he had not yet heard at the time
of writing of Ambrose's death and Simplicianus' succession to the see of Milan in April
397. Rhetorical and stylistic unity and the intensity that runs through the book like an
electric current make it easiest to read as a work written entirely in 397. 62 Those who
emphasize the disparity of the parts of the Confessions and find plausible the arguments
for a double redaction or for the later insertion of Bk. 10 also find arguments for
extending composition down to 401. 63 In view of the available evidence, it is not
possible to press the matter to any firm resolution of these remaining disagreements.

Few proponents of Christian humility have obtruded themselves on the attention of their
public with the insistence (to say nothing of the effectiveness) that marks this work. For
a man who felt acutely the pressure of others' eyes and thoughts, 64 Augustine was often
unable to refrain from calling attention to himself. What his flock thought, for example,
of the long, magnificent sermon he once gave on the anniversary of his own episcopal
ordination 65 is impossible to recover at this distance. It is not that Augustine was
unaware of the irony and room for self-contradiction that his habit of confessio gave -
far from it - but he was unable to refrain. His best defence is in the idiosyncratic notion
of confessio that he uses to explain and guide his own words.
`Confession' in Augustine's way of understanding it - a special divinely authorized
speech that establishes authentic identity for the speaker - is the true and proper end of
mortal life. 66 He had struggled to find voice for this speech all his life. The corpus of
his earlier writings, seen in this light, offers a picture of development that is hardly a
linear progression. The conversions of Augustine were many, and they did not end in
the garden in Milan. 67

It is conventional to think that 391 marked an important turning, with formal affiliation
to the ecclesiastical hierarchy through ordination. 68 That moment brought a real shock
to Augustine and opened a difficult and frustrating period of his life, when one literary
project after another fell to pieces in his hands as a desperate writers' block settled on
him. 69 The first thing he wrote in that period was the dreadful util. cred. 70 -
unconvincing, lamely argued, poorly organized - and he managed to complete only his
commentaries on the sermon on the mount and on Galatians (while throwing up his
hands at giving Romans a similar treatment).

Two events of the mid-390s conspired to worsen the crisis and propel it toward
resolution: his new reading of Paul at the urging of Simplicianus, which included a
rediscovery of the importance he would attribute to Paul in telling the story of his Milan
conversion, and his ordination as bishop. 71 His writer's block claims its last victim in
the unfinished torso of de doctrina christiana, apparently intended as an authoritative
episcopal guide to Christian exegesis and preaching. 72 What freed his pen for the
prolific career and the masterworks we know was the writing of the Confessions
themselves. He discovered at length how to make `confession' in his special sense come
to life through his writing. 73 After the highly personal Confessions began the torrent of
his great works, including, significantly, a series of works re-beginning and then
completing triumphantly projects that had come to nothing in the years before the
Confessions. 74 Whether that new-found facility was achieved at the price of sacrificing
some of the unrelenting zeal for inquiry is a question that deserves further examination.
75
One work stands out in the post-Confessions years as a deliberate continuation of the
same enterprise in the same spirit: the de trinitate. 76 That is the only one of Augustine's
major works that is not either polemical or a scriptural commentary, and in it we can see
the trajectory of Bks. 11-13 carried to its logical conclusion, albeit not without
difficulties and course changes. 77 The farther we get from the writing of the
Confessions the harder it is to plot that trajectory as a constant purpose, but the ideas
and obsessions of his youth remain vivid for the aged Augustine. 78 It is a little observed
fact that what may be the last words we have from his pen, the last surviving lines of his
incomplete opus imperfectum contra Julianum do not attack Pelagianism, the bug-bear
of his old age, but Manicheism, the phantasm of his youth.

Other lines converge on the Confessions. 79 One additional element requires comment
and emphasis.

The commentary on 7.9.13 discusses the evidence for the history of Augustine's
readings in neo-Platonic, and specifically Porphyrian, philosophy. Augustine's readings
at Milan included Porphyry, but in a non-threatening way. He found there a Platonism
that led him towards Christianity and that he would criticize mainly for not going far
enough in that direction. By no later than the time of the de consensu evangelistarum
(399/400 or after), he had on the other hand read enough Porphyry to discover how
hostile neo-Platonism could be to Christianity. The de consensu evangelistarum and the
de civitate dei, and to some extent the de trinitate and de Genesi ad litteram as well,
show Augustine working out his `Christian Platonism' (or better, `Augustinianism') in a
way that no longer minimizes the separation. The achievement is a subtle one, for his
reading of Rom. 1.20ff provided him with an instrument for claiming that while there
was much true doctrine among the Platonists, there was error of a crippling kind in that
they did not worship God as they ought. It was courageous of Augustine to cling to the
truths he thought he had found in Platonism at this point, and not merely to reject the
whole package of Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry. Augustine's signal contribution to
Christian thought lies in the success of the great works in which he achieved his own
synthesis.

Doubt remains just when and how he came to reassess his Platonic authors, but the
Confessions are intimately bound up in this process. The last work of Augustine before
the Confessions to address the position of Christianity vis-à-vis Platonism was the vera
religione that shortly preceded his priestly ordination of 391. He turned away more or
less completely from the concerns and expressions of his Platonic period in the years
after ordination, as he struggled to find ways to write as a Christian clergyman ought to
write. With the Confessions he returned to his Platonic period and put a whole new
reading on it. The Augustine of the Confessions has drawn a clear line separating him
from the Platonists. The `ascents' of Milan are different in kind from that of Ostia and
from that which is presented in Bk. 10 of the Confessions. In that difference, to say
nothing of the content of Bks. 11-13, 80 lies the germ of the mature Augustine's
Christian Platonism, almost as full of admiration as ever for the accomplishments of the
Platonists, but with a new reserve and new boundaries. Cause and effect here are not to
be traced, and matters are confused by the ambiguities of the evidence (see on 7.9.13)
for the discovery of Porphyry's hostility to Christianity. If that occurred in the early
400s, i.e., very shortly after the Confessions, then no evidence from after that discovery
may be taken confidently to throw light on the attitude to Platonism in the Confessions.
What is clear is that already the Confessions mark a step away from the Christian
Platonism of Milan, and of Augustine's works from 386 to 391. His presentation of
Platonism in the Confessions is marked by his later discoveries, and the Platonism he
found at Milan is criticized in the Confessions on terms that were only possible after
leaving Milan. 81 That revision of his understanding of who he had been entailed a
revision of his understanding of who he now was, and that achievement in self-
knowledge seems to have been essential to the liberation he now found, refreshing old
lines of inquiry and freeing his pen to write the books that were to come. The
Confessions shows Augustine in the act of re-integrating elements of his thought and
life that had begun to come apart for him, and it is that re-integration that is the
foundation of his mature achievement. Without the `conversion' c. 397 that begat the
Confessions, it is unlikely that Augustine would have become the towering figure that
he is.

The motif of confession itself was importantly adumbrated in Augustine's earlier works
in various ways. Two particular cases require comment here.

One of the first works Augustine wrote at Cassiciacum (Nov. 386/Jan. 387) was the
book to which he gave a title of his own coinage: soliloquia. The work is a meditation
on the circumstances of Augustine's life, without autobiographical reflection in the main
82
The approach is `anagogic' and at the same time self-reflective. 83 The most striking
parallel to the Confessions is one of style and tone and overall approach. The opening
paragraphs (sol. 1.1.2-1.1.6) consist of prayer, praise, and invocation of a sort that could
often be mistaken for what appears a decade later in the Confessions. 84 There is not the
abundance of scriptural language, but the similarities are considerable. The soliloquia
lack the power and assurance of the Confessions, and they have accordingly found little
modern audience.

If the form of `confession' was emerging in Augustine's mind as early as 386, the
substance of the narrative books was taking shape as well. 85 We all tell our life stories
in formulaic ways, repeating ourselves with minor variations to different hearers. We
are fortunate in having one passage from before the Confessions that shows Augustine
doing exactly that - recounting his life story, howbeit briefly, and howbeit veiled as a
hypothetical case. The veil indeed is so heavy that the passage has not been noticed by
earlier students of the Confessions, but once the pattern is detected it cannot be ignored.
The text in question is lib. arb. 1.11.22: 86

`num ista ipsa poena parva existimanda est, quod ei [sc. menti] libido dominatur, 87
expoliatamque virtutis opulentia per diversa inopem atque indigentem trahit, nunc falsa
pro veris approbantem, 88 nunc etiam defensitantem, nunc improbantem quae antea
probavisset et nihilominus in alia falsa inruentem; nunc adsensionem suspendentem
suam 89 et plerumque perspicuas ratiocinationes formidantem; nunc desperantem de tota
inventione veritatis et stultitiae tenebris penitus inhaerentem; nunc conantem in lucem
intellegendi rursusque fatigatione decidentem: 90 cum interea cupiditatum illud regnum
tyrannice saeviat, 91 et variis contrariisque tempestatibus totum hominis animum
vitamque perturbet, 92 hinc timore inde desiderio, hinc anxietate inde inani falsaque
laetitia, hinc cruciatu rei amissae quae diligebatur, inde ardore adipiscendae quae non
habebatur, hinc acceptae iniuriae doloribus, inde facibus vindicandae . . . ?'

The passage may not antedate the Confessions by more than a couple of years, 93 but it
reflects a rehearsed narrative that would be developed more fully in the writing of the
Confessions. 94

`Confession' thus came in Augustine's hands to be the necessary and sufficient formal
complement to the substance of Augustine's early writing. From Cassiciacum (or
perhaps from the writing of the de pulchro et apto: see on 4.13.20), Augustine's writings
had been the record of the mind's ascent to God. There are places where Augustine
writes about the idea of the mind's ascent to God, and places where in his writings he is
himself clearly attempting an elevation of that sort: so the episodes recounted in Bks. 7
and 9. 95 The soliloquia are themselves a conscious `ascent', while the Cassiciacum
dialogues both discuss the issues and attempt to exemplify the practice. Indeed, all the
works Augustine wrote and published before the Confessions take one of three forms:
`ascent', 96 scriptural exegesis, or anti-Manichean polemic. 97 As suggested above, later
works as well practice the `ascent', even though Augustine writes about it much less
frequently. The success of the Confessions, seen in those terms, is that the work
integrated the private intellectual and religious experience of Augustine with the public
responsibilities of the bishop. To `confess' is to find an authentic voice with which to
express what is private in a way that can be shared with a wider public. How far the
discipline of the pulpit 98 helped Augustine find this voice can only be a matter of
speculation. 99 How far Augustine felt the Confessions a success is perhaps less a matter
for speculation, given his remarks in retr. 2.6.1, but the very existence of the
retractationes shows that the underlying urge to master life by creating a text that
provides the authoritative interpretation of that life was not entirely assuaged. 100

The Confessions are the last product of Augustine's youth and the first work of his
maturity. His familiar pattern of the six ages of life (see on 1.8.13) shows that
Augustine was conscious of that himself. His narrative of infantia, pueritia, and
adolescentia ends in the first years of iuventus with a clarification and strengthening of
will; the narrative was written just on the cusp between iuventus and the variously
named fifth age. All other impulses that gave rise to the Confessions notwithstanding, it
is not surprising that Augustine would have found the years around his forty-fifth
birthday congenial to renewed introspection. 101

It is impossible, then, to take the Confessions in a vacuum, and it is impossible to give

any single interpretation that will satisfy. Even these few paragraphs of summary give a
misleading impression of simplicity and directness, for a work that draws its rare power
from complexity, subtlety, and nuance. In uncovering one or another device of
construction or suggestion that Augustine employed, it may be that we do neither him
nor his intended readers - if there are many such yet with us - any favor. He was
assuredly the heir of an ancient rhetorical tradition that did not write to prove but to
persuade, that knew that a work must have its effect on a reader or hearer directly or it is
unlikely to have the desired effect at all. To take the Confessions apart piece by piece is
to run the great risk that when all the pieces are put back together the marvelous
machine will not run as it did before. But that is the task of the philologist: to take texts
already in danger of demise from great age and remoteness, dismantle and study them,
and then reassemble them and set them ticking. The only goal of interpretation is
reading: exegesis leads to the Word, and not the other way round. If it often seems
depressingly otherwise, then a renewed attention to our greatest master 102 of exegesis,
hermeneutic, reading - call it what you will - cannot fail to be instructive, even
(especially?) where it does not lead to agreement and outright discipleship.

Appendix: The `first confessions' of Augustine

103

de beata vita, 1.4

`ego ab usque undevicensimo anno aetatis meae, postquam in schola rhetoris librum
illum Ciceronis qui Hortensius vocatur accepi [3.4.7], tanto amore philosophiae
succensus sum ut statim ad eam me ferre meditarer [3.4.8]. sed neque mihi nebulae
defuerunt quibus confunderetur cursus meus, et diu, fateor, quibus in errorem ducerer,
labentia in oceanum astra suspexi. nam et superstitio [3.6.10] quaedam puerilis me ab
ipsa inquisitione terrebat, et ubi factus erectior illam caliginem dispuli mihique persuasi
docentibus potius quam iubentibus esse cedendum, incidi in homines quibus lux ista
quae oculis cernitur inter summe divina colenda videretur [3.6.10]. non adsentiebar, sed
putabam eos magnum aliquid tegere illis involucris, quod essent aliquando aperturi. at
ubi discussos eos evasi, [5.7.12] maxime traiecto isto mari [5.8.14-15], diu gubernacula
mea repugnantia omnibus ventis in mediis fluctibus academici tenuerunt [5.14.25].
deinde veni in has terras; hic septentrionem cui me crederem didici. animadverti enim et
saepe in sacerdotis nostri [5.13.23] et aliquando in sermonibus tuis, cum de deo
cogitaretur, nihil omnino corporis esse cogitandum, neque cum de anima [6.11.18,
7.1.1]; nam id est unum in rebus proximum deo. sed ne in philosophiae gremium
celeriter advolarem, fateor, uxoris honorisque inlecebra detinebar [6.6.9], ut cum haec
essem consecutus, tum demum, me quod paucis felicissimis licuit, totis velis, omnibus
remis in illum sinum raperem ibique conquiescerem. lectis autem Plotini paucissimis
libris [7.9.13], cuius te esse studiosissimum accepi, conlataque cum eis, quantum potui,
etiam illorum auctoritate qui divina mysteria tradiderunt [7.20.26], sic exarsi [8.5.10], ut
omnes illas vellem ancoras rumpere [8.11.25], nisi me nonnullorum hominum
existimatio commoveret [6.11.19]. quid ergo restabat aliud nisi ut immoranti mihi
superfluis tempestas quae putatur adversa succurreret? itaque tantus me arripuit pectoris
dolor, ut illius professionis onus sustinere non valens [9.2.4], qua mihi velificabam
fortasse ad Sirenas, abicerem omnia et optatae tranquillitati [8.12.30] vel quassatam
navem fessamque perducerem.'

contra academicos 2.2.3-6

`tu [Romaniane] me adulescentulum pauperem [2.3.5] ad studia pergentem et domo et
sumptu et, quod plus est, animo excepisti; tu patre orbatum amicitia consolatus es,
hortatione animasti, ope adiuvisti; tu in nostro ipso municipio favore familiaritate
communicatione domus tuae paene tecum clarum primatemque fecisti; tu Carthaginem
inlustrioris professionis gratia remeantem [4.7.12], cum tibi et meorum nulli consilium
meum spemque aperuissem, quamvis aliquantum illo tibi insito - quia ibi iam docebam -
patriae amore cunctatus es, tamen ubi evincere adulescentis cupiditatem ad ea quae
videbantur meliora tendentis nequivisti, ex dehortatore in adiutorem mira benivolentiae
moderatione conversus es. tu necessariis omnibus iter adminiculasti meum; tu ibidem
rursus, qui cunabula et quasi nidum studiorum meorum foveras, iam volare audentis
sustentasti rudimenta; tu etiam, cum te absente atque ignorante navigassem [5.8.14-15],
nihil suscensens quod non tecum communicassem ut solerem, atque aliud quidvis quam
contumaciam suspicans mansisti inconcussus in amicitia nec plus ante oculos tuos liberi
deserti a magistro quam nostrae mentis penetralia puritasque versata est. (4) postremo
quidquid de otio meo modo gaudeo, quod a superfluarum cupiditatium vinculis evolavi
[8.12.29-30], quod depositis oneribus mortuarum curarum respiro, resipisco, redeo ad
me [7.10.16], quod quaero intentissimus veritatem, quod invenire iam ingredior, quod
me ad summum ipsum modum perventurum esse confido, tu animasti, tu inpulisti, tu
fecisti. cuius autem minister fueris, plus adhuc fide concepi quam ratione conprehendi.
nam cum praesens praesenti tibi exposuissem interiores motus animi mei
vehementerque ac saepius assererem nullam mihi videri prosperam fortunam nisi quae
otium philosophandi daret, nullam beatam vitam nisi qua in philosophia viveretur, sed
me tanto meorum onere, quorum ex officio meo vita penderet, multisque necessitatibus
vel pudoris vel ineptae meorum miseriae refrenari, tam magno es elatus gaudio, tam
sancto huius vitae inflammatus ardore, ut te diceres, si tu ab illarum importunarum
litium vinculis aliquo modo eximereris, omnia mea vincula etiam patrimonii tui mecum
participatione rupturum [6.14.24]. (5) itaque cum admoto nobis fomite discessisses,
numquam cessavimus inhiantes in philosophiam atque illam vitam quae inter nos
placuit atque convenit, prorsus nihil aliud cogitare atque id constanter quidem, sed
minus acriter agebamus, putabamus tamen satis nos agere. et quoniam nondum aderat ea
flamma quae summa nos arreptura erat, illam qua lenta aestuabamus arbitrabamur esse
vel maximam, cum ecce tibi libri quidam pleni [7.9.13?], ut ait Celsinus, bonas res
Arabicas ubi exhalarunt in nos, ubi illi flammulae instillarunt pretiosissimi unguenti
guttas paucissimas, incredibile, Romaniane, incredibile et ultra quam de me fortasse et
tu credis - quid amplius dicam? - etiam mihi ipsi de me ipso incredibile incendium
concitarunt. quis me tunc honor, quae hominum pompa, quae inanis famae cupiditas,
quod denique huius mortalis vitae fomentum atque retinaculum commovebat? prorsus
totus in me cursim redibam [7.10.16]. respexi [7.15.21] tamen, confiteor, quasi de
itinere [7.21.27] in illam religionem quae pueris nobis insita est [1.11.17] et medullitus
implicata; verum autem ipsa ad se nescientem rapiebat. itaque titubans, properans,
haesitans arripio apostolum Paulum [7.21.27]. neque enim vere, inquam, isti tanta
potuissent vixissentque ita ut eos vixisse manifestum est, si eorum litterae atque rationes
huic tanto bono adversarentur. perlegi totum intentissime atque castissime. 104 (6) tunc
vero quantulocumque iam lumine asperso [9.10.23] tanta se mihi philosophiae facies
aperuit [8.11.27], ut non dicam tibi, qui eius incognitae fame semper arsisti, sed si ipsi
adversario tuo, a quo nescio utrum plus exercearis quam impediaris, eam demonstrare
potuissem, ne ille et Baias et amoena pomeria et delicata nitidaque convivia et
domesticos histriones, postremo quidquid eum acriter commovet in quascumque
delicias abiciens et relinquens ad huius pulchritudinem blandus amator et sanctus,
mirans, anhelans, aestuans advolaret.'

de utilitate credendi 1.2:

`nosti enim, Honorate, non aliam ob causam nos in tales homines incidisse [3.6.10], nisi
quod se dicebant, terribili auctoritate separata, mera et simplici ratione eos qui se audire
vellent introducturos ad deum et errore omni liberaturos. quid enim me aliud cogebat
annos fere novem [5.6.10], spreta religione quae mihi puerulo a parentibus insita erat
[1.11.17], homines illos sequi ac diligenter audire, nisi quod nos superstitione [3.6.10]
terreri et fidem nobis ante rationem imperari dicerent, se autem nullum premere ad
fidem nisi prius discussa et enodata veritate? quis non his pollicitationibus inliceretur,
praesertim adulescentis animus cupidus veri, etiam nonnullorum in schola doctorum
hominum disputationibus superbus et garrulus, qualem me tunc illi invenerunt,
spernentem scilicet quasi aniles fabulas, et ab eis promissum apertum et sincerum
verum tenere atque haurire cupientem? sed quae rursum ratio revocabat, ne apud eos
penitus haererem, ut me in illo gradu quem vocant auditorum tenerem [see on 5.7.13], ut
huius mundi spem atque negotia non dimitterem, nisi quod ipsos quoque
animadvertebam plus in refellendis aliis disertos et copiosos esse quam in suis
probandis firmos et certos manere [Bk. 5, passim]? sed de me quid dicam, qui iam
catholicus christianus eram? quae nunc ubera post longissimam sitim paene exhaustus
atque aridus tota aviditate repetivi, eaque altius flens et gemens concussi et expressi, ut
id manaret quod mihi sic adfecto ad recreationem satis esse posset et ad spem
reducendam vitae ac salutis.'

de utilitate credendi 8.20:

`edam tibi ut possum cuiusmodi viam usus fuerim, cum eo animo quaererem veram
religionem quo nunc exposui esse quaerendam. ut enim a vobis trans mare abscessi, iam
cunctabundus atque haesitans quid mihi tenendum, quid dimittendum esset [5.8.15,
5.10.19] - quae mihi cunctatio in dies maior oboriebatur, ex quo illum hominem cuius
nobis adventus, ut nosti, ad explicanda omnia quae nos movebant quasi de caelo
promittebatur, audivi, eumque excepta quadam eloquentia talem quales ceteros esse
cognovi [5.3.3, 5.6.10] - rationem ipse mecum habui magnamque deliberationem iam in
Italia constitutus, non utrum manerem in illa secta in quam me incidisse [3.6.10]
paenitebat, sed quonam modo verum inveniendum esset, in cuius amorem suspiria mea
nulli melius quam tibi nota sunt. saepe mihi videbatur non posse inveniri, magnique
fluctus cogitationum mearum in Academicorum suffragium ferebantur [5.10.19]. saepe
rursus intuens quantum poteram, mentem humanam tam vivacem, tam sagacem, tam
perspicacem, non putabam latere veritatem, nisi quod in ea quaerendi modus lateret,
eundemque ipsum modum ab aliqua divina auctoritate esse sumendum. restabat
quaerere quaenam illa esset auctoritas, cum in tantis dissensionibus se quisque illam
traditurum polliceretur. occurrebat igitur inexplicabilis silva, cui demum inseri multum
pigebat; atque inter haec sine ulla requie cupiditate reperiendi veri animus agitabatur.
dissuebam me tamen magis magisque ab istis, quos iam deserere proposueram. restabat
autem aliud nihil in tantis periculis quam ut divinam providentiam lacrimosis et
miserabilibus vocibus, ut opem mihi ferret, deprecarer. atque id sedulo faciebam; et iam
fere me commoverant nonnullae disputationes Mediolanensis episcopi [5.13.23], ut non
sine spe aliqua de ipso vetere testamento multa quaerere cuperem, quae, ut scis, male
nobis commendata execrabamur [5.14.24, 6.4.6]. decreveramque tamdiu esse
catechumenus in ecclesia [5.14.25] cui traditus a parentibus eram [1.11.17], donec aut
invenirem quod vellem aut mihi persuaderem non esse quaerendum.'

de duabus animabus 9.11:

`sed me duo quaedam maxime, quae incautam illam aetatem facile capiunt, per
admirabiles attrivere circuitus: quorum est unum familaritas nescio quomodo repens
quadam imagine bonitatis . . . alterum quod quaedam noxia victoria paene mihi semper
in disputationibus proveniebat disserenti cum imperitis [3.12.21], sed tamen fidem suam
certatim, ut quisque posset, defendere molientibus christianis. quo successu creberrimo
gliscebat adulescentis animositas, et impetus suos in pervicaciae magnum malum
imprudenter urgebat. quod altercandi genus quia post eorum auditionem adgressus eram
[3.6.10], quicquid in eo vel qualicumque ingenio vel aliis lectionibus poteram, solis illis
libentissime tribuebam. ita ex illorum sermonibus ardor in certamina [3.12.21], ex
certaminum proventu amor in illos cotidie novabatur. ex quo accidebat ut quicquid
dicerent, miris quibusdam modis, non quia sciebam, sed quia optabam verum esse pro
vero approbarem. 105 ita factum est ut quamvis pedetemptim atque caute, tamen diu
sequerer homines nitidam stipulam viventi animae praeferentes.'

contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant `fundamenti'

3.3:
`ego autem qui diu multumque iactatus tandem respicere [7.15.21] potui quid sit illa
sinceritas, quae sine inanis fabulae [4.8.13, 5.9.17] narratione percipitur; qui vanas
imaginationes animi mei variis opinionibus erroribusque conlectas vix miser merui
domino opitulante convincere; qui me ad detergendam caliginem mentis tam tarde
clementissimo medico vocanti blandientique subieci [7.8.12]; qui diu flevi, ut
incommutabilis et immaculabilis substantia [7.1.1ff] concinentibus divinis libris sese
mihi persuadere intrinsecus dignaretur; qui denique omnia illa figmenta, quae vos
diuturna consuetudine implicatos et constrictos tenent, et quaesivi curiose et attente
audivi et temere credidi, et instanter quibus potui persuasi, et adversus alios pertinaciter
animoseque defendi: saevire in vos omnino non possum, quos sicut me ipsum illo
tempore ita nunc debeo sustinere, et tanta patientia vobiscum agere, quanta mecum
egerunt proximi mei, cum in vestro dogmate rabiosus et caecus errarem.'
The Text and Commentary
Manuscripts and Editions
The textual tradition of the Confessions is generally sound. 106 The work is transmitted
in hundreds of medieval manuscripts, 107 of which one is late antique half-uncial, and
nine more are ninth century minuscule. All critical editions of the last century have been
based on the same (i.e., the oldest) manuscripts, progressively elucidating and defending
the tradition they represent.

The fullest description of the manuscripts utilized by editors is found in the preface of
the CCSL edition by L. Verheijen, though it should be borne in mind that no modern
editor has seen all the manuscripts he cites, and that they have not been collated afresh
since Skutella. The description and discussion that follow are derivative. 108

S
 Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Sessorianus 55. The script is half-
uncial and difficult to date. Lowe (CLA 4.420a) suggested late sixth century;
Bischoff (quoted at CCSL 23.xxxviii) once ventured `saec. V/VI', but has since
commented that he finds the half-uncial `rätselhaft' and `tantalizing' (see JThS
n.s. 34 [1983], 114n2, and Atti-1986, 1.412).
O
 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1911. Early ninth century, southern
France. 109
P
 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1912. Early ninth century, western
Germany. Reported by the editors together with two eleventh-century
manuscripts (Bambergensis 33 [B] and Turonensis 283 [Z]) with which it is
closely related.
C
 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1913. Mid-ninth century, Auxerre.
D
 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1913A. Mid-ninth century, Loire valley
(connected with Lupus of Ferrières). C and D are virtual twins, but both are
conventionally reported because C lacks the last two-thirds of book VII and the
first third of book VIII, where D is the sole witness to their common exemplar.
E
 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 12191. Part from the late ninth century
and part from the early tenth, from Tours.
G
 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 12193. Ninth/tenth century, Loire valley.
E and G are the two best representatives of a common tradition. (Also reported
with them are the inferior MSS Paris BN lat. 10862 [F: ninth-century] and
Munich clm 14350 [M: tenth-century].)
A
 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, HB.vii.15. End of the ninth
century, eastern France.
H
  Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 12224. Toward the middle of the ninth
century, near Lyons.
V
 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5756. Late ninth
century, northern Italy. AHV taken together represent another common tradition,
of which V is the least reliable witness.

Gorman's stemma (reproduced below) represents the most developed view of the
tradition. No one manuscript may be ascribed preeminent authority. Where S has the
advantage of great age, it has the disadvantages of haste and carelessness; it not only
omits and iterates words and phrases, but it substitutes synonyms (particularly particles
and conjunctions). It is the work of a man in a hurry. It was the favorite of Knöll. O is
perhaps the best single MS, and presents a perfectly readable text. It was the favorite of
Verheijen. There is general consent that CD provide independent testimony that can be
used to control the differences between S and O. The family EG offers further control,
which Verheijen largely neglected. The value of the testimony of P (+ BZ) and of AHV
has not been clearly delineated. 110 Finally, there is a wild card in all this, the testimony
of Eugippius, who gives some hints as to which witnesses may be trusted. 111

[archetype]
|
----------------------------------
| | |
alpha beta Eugippius
| |
----------- --------------------
| | | | |
S | | | |
| | | |
O | | ------------
| | | |
| ------- | -------
| | | | | |
CD E G P H V

The editio princeps was published between 1465 and 1470 at Strasbourg by Jean
Mantelin; editions appeared as part of three great collected editions of Augustine in the
sixteenth century (Amerbach's Basel edition of 1506, Erasmus/Frobenius at Basel in
1528-29, and the `Louvain' edition of 1576-77). The Maurist edition of the Confessions
appeared in the first volume of their great edition in 1679 (the whole completed in
1700). There have been five and a half critical editions in the last century.

Mention should be made of the edition of E. B. Pusey at Oxford in 1838, emending the
Maurist textus receptus in light of a few Oxford manuscripts; it is now of interest
mainly as a document of the Tractarian movement's interest in the fathers. 112 Not long
after, preparations began for the edition that eventually appeared in 1896 as volume 33
of the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. As was the practice in the
Vienna Corpus of the early days, collation of manuscripts and preparation of the actual
editions were carried out by different hands, with long delays. The Sessorianus collation
was begun by a hand unknown to the Vienna editor, P. Knöll, and completed by A.
Lorenz in 1867; a friend of Knöll's looked at doubtful passages upon later request.
Knöll's editorial principle was to find the oldest and best manuscript, and follow it with
a will. Here his favorite was S; Knöll's edition is marked by meticulous attention to
detail in the apparatus, but his choice of a lodestar makes his text reflect the carelessness
and haste of the scribe of S. 113 The text was reprinted with a few corrections (mainly
abandoning readings of S that were clearly unacceptable) in a Teubner editio minor in
1898. The Vienna text was reprinted at Cambridge with some judicious corrections in
1908 (rev. ed. 1927) with excellent notes by Gibb and Montgomery. An edition by P. de
Labriolle (1925) dissented from Knöll in favor of the Maurists from time to time, but
has little independent value; its importance is that it was for long the standard text cited
in French scholarship, and is still occasionally cited.

M. Skutella's Teubner edition of 1934 marked a real advance. Skutella looked

systematically at all the ninth century manuscripts and was wise enough to see that
manuscripts other than S could throw light on the text, and even to look at Eugippius
(though this latter task he did in no systematic way). He attempted a stemma, but the
result was little more than a declaration in graphic form that S was unrelated to all the
other manuscripts at which Skutella looked; hence he accepted in principle (though not
always in practice) any reading shared by S and any other MS. Unfortunately, while this
allowed him to abandon many of S's errors, it also reinforced many of its most vulgar
ones, where one or more of the other manuscripts' scribes had fallen into the same trap
of easy omission or iteration. But his text was easily the best the world had seen to that
date, 114 and it has been reprinted often since. 115 In 1969, it was reprinted by the
Stuttgart avatar of B. G. Teubner with careful vetting by H. Juergens and W. Schaub.

In 1970, L. Verheijen began in Augustiana a series of articles on the text of the

Confessions, culminating in his 1981 edition (volume 27 of Corpus Christianorum,
Series Latina). Verheijen discussed the relationships of the manuscripts at length,
essentially jettisoning Skutella's families BPZ, AHV, and GEMF, and relying entirely
for the constitution of his text on S, especially O, and also CD (while continuing to
report the readings of the rest of Skutella's manuscripts). The effect was to move further
away from S and closer to the Maurist textus receptus. The CCSL volume differs from
Skutella's text on dozens of points (catalogued in Verheijen's preface), but it cannot be
called an independent new edition. The apparatus is essentially identical, save for
typography, with Skutella's. 116

The Present Text

The text given here offers no advance in recensio, and prints no apparatus criticus -
there is discussion of textual issues in the commentary instead. It has however been re-
examined word by word, and numerous corrections made. Divergences from Skutella
(1969) and from Verheijen are noted in the commentary (except for orthographical
variants). The text as printed below is perhaps susceptible of amelioration; but it
contains nothing indefensible, and the points of real doubt are clearly signposted and
discussed.

The punctuation has been reviewed and revised throughout. 117 The result is a lighter
punctuation and, not infrequently, clarification of passages that have been left obscure
by editors reprinting without retractation the punctuation of their predecessors. 118
Quotation marks stand where they would appear in English, that is, where Augustine is
expressly introducing a quotation of ipsissima verba. This follows and refines
Verheijen's practice; earlier editions (e.g., Skutella) have marked in the same way
scriptural quotations, allusions, and echoes of every sort, which can be misleading.
What expectations Augustine had for the ability of his readers to recognize his other
citations, allusions, and echoes of biblical language cannot now be accurately judged.
The traditional paragraphs of our editions have been retained for convenience of
reference except where strong reasons have dictated a rearrangement; but the traditional
form of reference to book, `chapter', and `paragraph' is maintained. 119

Orthography is an even more vexed question, but less exegetically important. The
arguments and practice of Verheijen (CCSL 27.lxxxii-lxxxiv) have been taken for a
guide, even for consistency in quotations from editions of other works. 120

Whenever readings are reported in the commentary, those of SOCDG are always given;
others are presented as interest warrants; where no readings of editors are reported, it
may be presumed that the majority agrees with the reading printed in the text. When
there is disagreement, the views of the Maurists, Knöll, Skutella, and Verheijen are
consistently reported, others as interest warrants. But to be safe no argument from
silence should be taken from the non-report of a given manuscript or edition at any
point. 121

The Commentary
The first principle of exegesis is heuristic, to do for the text what needs to be done and
what can be done for that text at the present moment. The present work seeks to fill a
distinct gap, both in the absence of a formal commentary 122 and in the presence of
several long-neglected tasks for interpretation of the work itself. Issues of history and
doctrine raised by the Confessions have preoccupied scholars in modern times, to the
neglect of the questions of the philologist, who examines the nexus between narrative
and event not to determine what really happened, but what strategies shaped the
narrative to its final form and marshalled upon the page the particular words we
encounter, and how best we may understand the relation of parts to whole and whole to
parts.

The way forward for students of the Confessions lies in renewed and assiduous attention
to the most minute details of the text. 123 The form of a commentary maintains focus on
the significant detail, makes it possible to present evidence more fully, and provides the
reader with the materials for independent judgment; in addition, a commentary leaves
room to present new and useful material on topics removed from the main novelties of
argument the commentator may advance.

The principal tasks set for itself by this exegetical commentary are these: (1) To provide
a representative selection of the evidence illustrating the use and interpretation in the
Confessions of scriptural citations and scriptural language. (2) To seek out and
juxtapose to the text illustrative passages from Augustine's other works. (3) To report
the findings and views of modern scholars where they illuminate the text. (4) To discuss
and interpret the text in view of the material collected.

The method has in the main been to allow Augustine to be his own commentator. Few
authors of antiquity allow us this luxury, but if we had another 800,000 lines of Vergil
beyond the Aeneid, we would not be slow to take advantage of those riches to throw
new light on the epic; to perform this function in some obvious and straightforward
ways for Augustine is an opportunity too long neglected. This is not the full
philological, source-critical, historical, and philosophical commentary that has been a
declared desideratum of scholars for more than a generation. 124 It is meant to be a
working tool, contributing to dialogue, and has no aspiration to utter the final word. At
the same time, it must be admitted that the commentator's job is to make facts where
none existed before, 125 and in so doing to make the text itself a new thing. We must
respect the text, and those who have worked on the text before us; and in this case, we
must respect Augustine as well. Augustine has his limits, but it takes a very long time of
living with him (and with his limits) to be sure that you are perceiving those limits in
the right way, from the inside, with full awareness of the achievement implied by the
vast range of territory that Augustine does embrace.

One area of investigation has been reluctantly foresworn: the stylistic study of
Augustine's prose. To be sure, many of the individual observations on vocabulary and
phrasing contribute to a study of the style of this work, but there is room for a
systematic study that would rigorously compare this work to Augustine's other works
and to other ancient and late antique Latin works (the question of `Christian Latin' as
Sondersprache is ripe for fresh and venturesome treatment) and that would attempt to
do justice to the complex rhythms of the text. 126 The work is clearly sui generis and
worth further study on these lines. 127

This commentary differs from most Confessions scholarship of the last generations in
its relative inattention to questions of more remote Quellenforschung. First, that task has
been so exhaustively undertaken that, whatever riches remain to be discovered, it is
undeniable that other tasks have been comparatively neglected, and it is those that have
drawn my attention. 128 Second, it is important to distinguish between sources and
analogues. What Augustine himself may have read and known is what is most
important; what there may be in other early Christian writers that resembles, and even
illustrates, what Augustine has to say, has been sought out much less diligently.
Augustine's debt to Ambrose and Cicero has been pursued with some care and some
new and useful material has been found.

This commentary assumes that where there is no evidence to the contrary, it is fruitful to
expect that what Augustine says explicitly in interpretation of a verse of scripture at one
time in his career may be juxtaposed with the use he makes of it (without explicit
interpretation) elsewhere. Certainty in such juxtapositions is only rarely reached (and
then usually when the passages cited from outside the Confessions come from periods
close in time to the writing of the Confessions and preferably include citations both
before and after), but there are many fruitful probabilities this side of certainty. Where
Augustine quotes or alludes to a verse of scripture in the Confessions, and where
another of Augustine's works provides an explicit interpretation of that verse of
scripture that is not prima facie incompatible with its employment in the Confessions,
then surely it would be irresponsible for the commentator not to set the explicit
interpretation found elsewhere alongside the passage of the Confessions and to let the
reader judge how far the two texts throw light on one another. 129

This is not, alas, a commentary for the general reader, and neither is it a commentary for
a passive reader. My practice has been to refrain from commentary in my own voice
wherever possible, and to allow the texts to speak for themselves. Wherever possible,
quotation has been preferred to paraphrase, evidence to interpretation. The aim is to
give the reader the material with which to interpret rather than obtrude my own views.
True enough, selection and arrangement have a way of directing exegesis, but the active
reader will find ample resources for independent judgment. 130

Abbreviations and Methods of Reference

The Works of Augustine
The works of Augustine are cited according to the following abbreviations, 131 and from
the editions indicated. Where a given edition, however, introduces a novel system of
references, the conventional one has been preferred, to facilitate consultation of various
editions, and the fullest form of reference (book, chapter, and section) is given to reduce
ambiguity. The dates given for each work are meant only to provide an estimate for the
reader of the place each work holds in the chronology of Augustine's life. There are
many controversies. 132 For a fuller presentation of variant titles, refs. to retr. and
Possidius, and a conspectus of editions, see Aug.-Lex. 1.xxvi-xli; H. J. Frede,
Kirchenschriftsteller (Freiburg, 1981 and later supplements) has further details (e.g., editions
of individual letters and sermons). A baker's dozen of Augustine's works have still not been
seriously edited since the Maurists (of most interest: mus., mor., c. Iul., and Io. ep. tr.), and
most of the sermons also want critical edition. Moreover, some editions of the last century
(most notably: en. Ps.) are barely more than reprints of the Maurists. The defects of the
editions are most trying when we attempt to determine the scriptural text A. knew at any
given point, for there the tendency to Vulgate assimilation in medieval MSS and early modern
editors is a powerful force.

adn. Iob adnotationes in Job (399) 133 CSEL 28.2

adult.
de adulterinis coniugiis (420) CSEL 41
coniug.
adv. Iud. adversus Iudaeos (428/9) PL 42
agon. de agone christiano (396) CSEL 41
b. coniug. de bono coniugali (401) CSEL 41
b. vid. de bono viduitatis (414) CSEL 41
bapt. de baptismo contra donatistas (400/1) CSEL 51
beata v. de beata vita (386) CCSL 29
brevic. breviculus conlationis cum donatistis (411) CCSL 149A
c. acad. contra academicos (386) CCSL 29
c. Adim. contra Adimantum (393/4) CSEL 25.1
c. adv. leg. contra adversarium legis et prophetarum (420) CCSL 49
c. Cresc. contra Cresconium grammaticum et donatistam (405/6) CSEL 52
c. don. contra partem Donati post gesta (411) CSEL 53
c. ep. fund. contra epistulam quam vocant `fundamenti' (396) CSEL 25.1
c. ep. Parm. contra epistulam Parmeniani (400) CSEL 51
c. ep. pel.s contra duas epistulas pelagianorum (420/1) CSEL 60
c. Faust. contra Faustum manichaeum (397/9) CSEL 25.1
c. Fel. acta contra Felicem manichaeum (404) CSEL 25.2
c. Fort. acta contra Forunatum manichaeum (392) CSEL 25.1
c. Gaud. contra Gaudentium donatistarum episcopum (419) 134 CSEL 53
c. Iul. contra Iulianum (421/2) PL 44
 CSEL 85.1, PL 45
c. Iul. imp. opus imperfectum contra Iulianum (429/30) 135

c. litt. Pet. contra litteras Petiliani (400/3) CSEL 52

c. Max. contra Maximinum arrianum (427/8) PL 44
c. mend. contra mendacium ad Consentium (420) CSEL 41
c. prisc. et
contra priscillianistas et origenistas (415) CCSL 49
orig.
c. s. arrian. contra sermonem arrianorum (418/19) PL 42
c. Sec. contra Secundinum manichaeum (398) CSEL 25.2
cat. rud. de catechizandis rudibus (399) CCSL 46
civ. de civitate dei (413-426/7) CCSL 47, 48
conl. Max. conlatio cum Maximino arrianorum episcopo (427/8) PL 42
cons. ev. de consensu evangelistarum (399/400 - ?) CSEL 43
cont. de continentia (394/5) CSEL 41
corrept. de correptione et gratia (426/7) PL 44
cura mort. de cura pro mortuis gerenda (422?) CSEL 41
dial. de dialectica (387) PL 32 136
disc. chr. de disciplina christiana (398) CCSL 46
div. qu. de diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII (388/96) CCSL 44A
div. qu.
de diversis quaestionibus VII ad Simplicianum (396) CCSL 44
Simp.
divin. daem. de divinatione daemonum (407) CSEL 41
doctr. chr. de doctrina christiana (396 [completed 427]) CCSL 32
duab. an. de duabus animabus contra manichaeos (391/2) CSEL 25.1
Dulc. qu. de octo Dulcitii quaestionibus (422/5) CCSL 44A
Emer. de gestis cum Emerito donatistarum episcopo (418) CSEL 53
en. Ps. enarrationes in Psalmos (392/417) CCSL 38, 39, 40
enchiridion ad Laurentium de fide et spe et caritate
ench. CCSL 46
(422)
CSEL 34, 44, 57,
ep. (epp.) 137 epistula (epistulae) (386-430)
BA 46B
ep. cath. epistula ad catholicos de secta donatistarum (405) CSEL 52
exc. urb. sermo de excidio urbis Romae (411) CCSL 46
exp. prop. expositio quarumdam propositionum ex epistola ad
CSEL 84
Rom. Romanos (394)
f. et op. de fide et operibus (413) CSEL 41
f. et symb. de fide et symbolo (393) CSEL 41
f. invis. de fide rerum invisibilium (400) CCSL 46
Gal. exp. epistolae ad Galatas expositio (394/5) CSEL 84
gest. Carth. gesta conlationis Carthaginiensis (411) SC 194, 195, 224
gest. Pel. de gestis Pelagii (417) CSEL 42
Gn. c. man. de Genesi contra manichaeos (388/90) PL 34
Gn. litt. de Genesi ad litteram (401-15) BA 48, 49
Gn. litt.
de Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (393/4; 426/7) CSEL 28.1
imp.
gr. et lib. de gratia et libero arbitrio (418) PL 44
arb.
gr. et pecc.
de gratia Christi et de peccato originali (426) CSEL 42
or.
gramm. de grammatica (387) PL 32 138
haer. de haeresibus (428) CCSL 46
imm. an. de immortalitate animae (387) CSEL 89
Io. ep. tr. tractatus in Iohannis epistulam ad Parthos (406/7) PL 35
Io. ev. tr. tractatus in evangelium Iohannis (406-21?) 139 CCSL 36
lib. arb. de libero arbitrio (387/8-391/5) CCSL 29
loc. hept. locutiones in heptateuchum (419) CCSL 33
mag. de magistro (389/90) CCSL 29
mend. de mendacio (394/5) CSEL 41
de moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus
mor. PL 32
manichaeorum (388)
mus. de musica (388/90) PL 32
nat. b. de natura boni (398) CSEL 25.2
nat. et gr. de natura et gratia (413/15) CSEL 60
nat. et or.
de natura et origine animae 140 (419/20) CSEL 60
an.
nupt. et
de nuptiis et concupiscentia (419/21) CSEL 42
conc.
obiurg. obiurgatio (= ep. 211.) 141 Lawless, Rule
op. mon. de opere monachorum (401) CSEL 41
ord. de ordine (386) CCSL 29
ord. mon. ordo monasterii Lawless, Rule
pat. de patientia (417) CSEL 41
de peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo
pecc. mer. CSEL 60
parvulorum ad Marcellinum (411/12)
perf. iust. de perfectione iustitiae hominis (415) CSEL 42
persev. de dono perseverantiae (428/9) PL 45
praec. praeceptum Lawless, Rule
praed.
de praedestinatione sanctorum (428/9) PL 44
sanct.
ps. c. Don. psalmus contra partem Donati (394) CSEL 51
qu. ev. quaestiones evangeliorum (399/400) CCSL 44B
qu. hept. quaestiones in heptateuchum (419) CCSL 33
qu. Mt. quaestiones XVII in Matthaeum 142 (?) CCSL 44B
qu. vet. t. de octo quaestionibus ex veteri testamento 143 (?) CCSL 33
quant. an. de quantitate animae (387/8) CSEL 89
retr. retractationes (426/7) 144 CCSL 57
Rom. inch.
epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio (394/5) CSEL 84
exp.
PL 38, 39, MA I,
s. (ss.) sermones 145 (392-430)
etc.
s. Caes.
sermo ad Caesariensis plebem (418) CSEL 53
eccl.
s. dom. m. de sermone domini in monte (393/6) CCSL 35
sol. soliloquia (386/7) CSEL 89
spec. speculum (427) CSEL 12
spir. et litt. de spiritu et littera (412) CSEL 60
symb. cat. sermo de symbolo ad catechumenos (?) CCSL 46
trin. de trinitate (399-422/6) CCSL 50, 50A
un. bapt. de unico baptismo contra Petilianum (410/11) CSEL 53
util. cred. de utilitate credendi (391/2) CSEL 25.1
util. ieiun. de utilitate ieiunii (408) CCSL 46
vera rel. de vera religione (390/1) CCSL 32
virg. de sancta virginitate (401) CSEL 41

Biblical Citations
How best to cite scriptural texts that offer illumination or analogy to Augustine's words
is a vexing problem. 146 Augustine knew scripture mainly in Latin (he could decipher the
Greek when he had to, but had no Hebrew), and read the text in translation(s) that
mainly antedated Jerome's. Scriptural texts are cited in this commentary in versions that
come as close as possible to what Augustine would have known; but `as close as
possible' is an imprecise measure, and varies dramatically from one part of scripture to
another. There are certainly many inconsistencies in the commentary, and there are
probably places where a better (i.e., closer to Augustine's) version could have been
found; this is an area in which scholarship makes constant, but painfully slow progress.
The general principle employed (and decisive in cases of choice among more than one
possibility) has been to find the text closest to what Augustine seems to have had in
mind as he wrote the Confessions. What can be said beyond that is this:

1. For books of scripture for which there exist volumes of the Beuron Vetus Latina or of
A. M. LaBonnardière's Biblia Augustiniana, we are more or less well served. But
where, e.g., Vetus Latina provides us with a complete analysis of patristic citations of
Latin versions of Genesis, it must be borne in mind that for some verses (where
Augustine himself cited the particular verse frequently) we can say exactly what
Augustine had in mind; for some other verses (where Augustine cited the particular
verse frequently but in versions that varied from time to time), we can make a careful,
well-founded, but in the end unverifiable guess as to what may have been in his mind
when he was writing the Confessions; and for some verses, the VL text tells us what was
in circulation, but if Augustine never quotes it explicitly in his works, we are left
comparing the (or a) version-in-circulation with the words of the Confessions and
making our own judgment of the resemblance. 147 La Bonnardière's volumes offer more
help, confining themselves to passages actually cited by Augustine, but La
Bonnardière's first interest is not textual, and inevitably no collection of Augustine's
`citations' is ever complete - if only because disagreements as to what constitutes a
citation will linger.

2. For the Psalter we are in the best position. Augustine's enarrationes in Psalmos
comment on the whole of every Psalm, quoting the text, then frequently paraphrasing,
analyzing, re-quoting, and re-quoting again. The exact version of the Psalter on which
Augustine based each of the sermons could be reconstructed with very high accuracy,
especially because we have the further resources of Knauer's Psalmenzitate and of R.
Weber's Le Psautier Romain et les autres anciens Psautiers latins (Rome, 1953),
meticulously presenting the evidence for pre-Jerome Latin Psalters verse by verse. 148 So
far, it would seem, so good. But Augustine's sermons on the Psalms were delivered or
dictated over a period of 25 years, from 392 to approximately 417, while the
Confessions were written 397/401, in the first years of Augustine's episcopate. There is
no guarantee that the text Augustine had in mind in 397 is the same as that on which he
preached in 415, when the determining factor in the text of his sermon would have been
the liturgical usage of the local church. But nowhere are we better off than with the
Psalms. 149

3. For the book of Job, we are in the happy position of having a complete Latin
translation that closely matches what Augustine would have known, and we have
Augustine's own testimony (ep. 71.2.3) that he used it. This is a translation based
originally on the Greek Septuagint, and revised and corrected against the Greek text by
Jerome, printed at PL 28.61-114. This translation differs dramatically from Jerome's
later, better version.

4. For the remainder of the books of the Old Testament, notably including the
Apocrypha thrown into limbo in modern times, we possess no complete pre-Vulgate
Latin version, but we know that the Latin versions that existed were assiduous
renderings of the Septuagint (LXX). The Greek text itself will be quoted from A.
Rahlfs, Septuaginta (Stuttgart, 1935), and bare references will be made, always with the
LXX symbol. Where `VL' is apposed to OT references, it should be borne in mind that
the LXX Greek itself may be used as a check - to such an extent that sometimes it is
possible to `quote' the `VL' for an OT passage when what we are doing is quoting a
citation/allusion from some Latin writer, verified against the LXX Greek.

5. Many other individual texts of scripture are cited expressis verbis by Augustine in
works other than the Confessions. 150 Where possible, the first choice is to give a citation
in a form that is documented from Augustine, with a note ad loc.

6. When all else fails, which is often, the Vulgate is cited, following the most recent
critical edition, that of R. Weber, Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem 3 (Stuttgart,
1983), taking into account the large Roman critical edition and the New Testament of
Wordsworth and White. Occasionally a reading is chosen from the apparatus criticus of
the Vulgate if it seems closer to what Augustine had in hand on comparison with his
text.

Abbreviations
For bibliographical guidance, the reader should consult the volumes of the Fichier
Augustinien (Boston, 1970-), which incorporate and systematize, and are in turn
supplemented by, the annual bibliographical bulletins that appear in the Revue des
études augustiniennes. As the Augustinus-Lexikon fascicles appear, they too will have
valuable bibliography; a computerized bibliography prepared in Würzburg is also
promised. Listed here are the compendia that facilitate concise citation; these works are
by and large the most important and generally useful for the student going further. In
general, titles of articles are omitted. The latest edition noted is the one actually
consulted by me. [1], [2], [3] indicate elements in triads of terms or names representing
persons of the trinity: see on 1.7.12.

Alfaric Alfaric, P. L'évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin. Paris, 1918.

Arts, M. R. The Syntax of the Confessions of Saint Augustine.
Arts
Washington, DC, 1927.
Congresso internazionale su s. Agostino nel XVI centenario della
Atti-1986
conversione (Roma, 15-20 settembre 1986), Atti. Rome, 1987.
Aug.-Lex. Augustinus-Lexikon
Aug. Mag. Augustinus Magister
BA Bibliothèque Augustinienne
Brown Brown, P.Augustine of Hippo. London and Berkeley, 1967.
Brown, Body and
Brown, P. The Body and Society. New York, 1988.
Society
Burnaby Burnaby, J. Amor Dei. London, 1938.
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina.
CL Classical Latin.
Courcelle, P. Late Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources. Trans. H.
Courcelle, LLW
Wedeck; Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
Courcelle, Courcelle, P. Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin.
Recherches Paris, 1950; second ed. Paris, 1968.
Courcelle, Les Courcelle, P. Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition
Confessions littéraire. Paris, 1963.
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
Decret, F. Aspects du Manichéisme dans l'Afrique Romaine. Paris
Decret, Aspects
1970.
Decret, L'Afrique Decret, F. L'Afrique Manichéene (IVe - Ve siècles). Paris, 1978.
De Marchi, V. `De nonnullis Augustini Confessionum locis',
De Marchi Rendiconti dell'Istituto Lombardo, Classe di Lettere, Scienze morali
et storiche 96(1962), 310-16
Dulaey, M. Le rêve dans la vie et la pensée de saint Augustin. Paris,
Dulaey
1973.
du Roy, O. L'intelligence de la foi en la trinité selon saint Augustin:
du Roy
genèse de sa théologie trinitaire jusqu'en 391. Paris, 1966.
Guardini Guardini, R. The Conversion of Augustine. London, 1960.
Hagendahl Hagendahl, H. Augustine and the Latin Classics. Göteborg, 1967.
Hrdlicka, C. L. A Study of the Late Latin Vocabulary and of the
Hrdlicka Prepositions and Demonstrative Pronouns in the Confessions of St.
Augustine. Washington, DC, 1931.
Isnenghi, A. `Textkritisches zu Augustins “Bekenntnissen”',
Isnenghi
Augustiana 15(1965), 5-31.
Jones, A. H. M. The Later Roman Empire 284-602: A Social
Jones, LRE
Economic and Administrative Survey. Oxford, 1964.
Keil, H. Grammatici Latini Leipzig, 1857-1880 (repr. Hildesheim,
Keil
1961).
Knauer, G. N. Psalmenzitate in Augustins Konfessionen. Göttingen,
Knauer
1955; repr. in his Three Studies (New York, 1987).
 Kunzelmann, A. `Die Chronologie der Sermones des Hl.
Kunzelmann
Augustinus', MA 2.417-520.
Kusch, H. `Studien über Augustinus', Festschrift Franz Dornseiff
Kusch
(Leipzig, 1953), 124-200.
La Bonnardière, La Bonnardière, A.-M. Recherches de la chronologie
Recherches augustinienne. Paris, 1965
La Bonnardière, A.-M. Biblia Augustiniana. Paris, 1960-.
1960
 Livres historiques
1964
 Epître aux Thessaloniciens, à Tite et à Philémon
1964
 Douze petits prophètes
La Bonnardière,
1967
Biblia Augustiniana
 Deutéronome
1970
 Livre de la Sagesse
1972
 Livre de Jérémie
1975
 Livre des Proverbes
Lawless, G. Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule. Oxford,
Lawless, Rule
1987.
Lectio I-II, III-V, `Le Confessioni' di Agostino d'Ippona: Lectio Augustini: Settimana
VI-IX, X-XIII Agostiniana Pavese. Palermo, 1984-87.
Leumann, M., J. B. Hofmann, and A. Szantyr. Lateinische Syntax
LHS
und Stilistik. Munich, 1972.
Lieu, Manichaeism Lieu, S. N. C. Manichaeism. Manchester, 1985.
MA Miscellanea Agostiniana. Rome, 1930.
Madec, Saint
Madec, G. Saint Ambroise et la philosophie. Paris, 1974.
Ambroise
Mandouze, A. Saint Augustin: L'aventure du raison et de la grâce.
Mandouze
Paris, 1968.
Mandouze, Pros. Mandouze, A. Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, I:
chr. Afrique (303-533). Paris, 1982.
Marrou, H.-I. Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique. Paris 4,
Marrou
1958.
Mayer, C. P. Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der
Mayer, Zeichen 1
Theologie des jungen Augustinus. Würzburg, 1969.
Mayer, C. P. Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der
Mayer, Zeichen 2 Theologie Augustins. II. Teil: Die antimanichäische Epoche.
Würzburg, 1974.
Meijering, E. P. Augustin über Schöpfung, Ewigkeit und Zeit: Das
Meijering
elfte Buch der Bekenntnisse. Leiden, 1979
Milne, C. H. A Reconstruction of the Old Latin Text or Texts of the
Milne
Gospels used by Saint Augustine. Cambridge, 1926.
O'Daly, G. J. P. Augustine's Philosophy of Mind. London and
O'Daly
Berkeley, 1987.
OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary.
O'Meara O'Meara, J. J. The Young Augustine. London, 1954; corr. repr. 1980.
Otto, A. Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der
Otto, Sprichwörter
Römer. Leipzig, 1890; repr. Hildesheim, 1962.
Pellegrino, Les
Pellegrino, M. Les Confessions de saint Augustin. Paris, 1960.
Confessions
Perler, O. (with J.-L. Maier). Les Voyages de saint Augustin. Paris,
Perler
1969.
Pincherle,
Pincherle, A. La formazione teologica di Sant' Agostino. Rome, n.d.
Formazione
[1947].
teologica
Poque, Le langage Poque, S. Le langage symbolique dans la prédication d'Augustin
symbolique d'Hippone: Images héroïques. Paris, 1984.
RA Recherches augustiniennes
REAug Revue des études augustiniennes
Rousselle, Porneia A. Rousselle, Porneia (Oxford, 1988)
Zumkeller, A., ed. Signum Pietatis: Festgabe . . . C. P. Mayer.
Signum Pietatis
Würzburg, 1989.
Hensellek, W., et al., edd. Specimina eines Lexicon Augustinianum.
SLA
Vienna, 1987-.
Sorabji, R. Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in
Sorabji, Time
Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, 1983.
Souter Souter, A. A Glossary of Later Latin. Oxford, 1949.
TeSelle TeSelle, E. Augustine the Theologian. New York, 1970.
Testard Testard, M. Saint Augustin et Ciceron. Paris, 1958.
Theiler, W. Porphyrios und Augustin. Halle, 1933 (repr. in his
Theiler, P.u.A.
Forschungen zum Neuplatonismus [Berlin 1966], 160-248).
TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.
Bavel, T. J. van. Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin.
van Bavel L'humain et le divin dans le Christ d'après saint Augustin. Fribourg,
Suisse, 1954.
van der Meer van der Meer, F. Augustine the Bishop. London, 1961.
Verbraken, P. Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de
Verbraken
saint Augustin. Steenbrugge and the Hague, 1976.
Verheijen,
Eloquentia Verheijen, [L.] M. J. Eloquentia Pedisequa. Nijmegen, 1949.
Pedisequa
R. Weber, Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem (Stuttgart, 3
Vg.
1983).
Vetus Latina: Die Reste der lateinischen Bibel. Freiburg, 1951-.
VL (Beuron) (VL alone indicates a reading attributed to pre-Vulgate Latin
scripture for a book of scripture not yet treated by Beuron).
Warns, G.-D. I thus refer to several unpublished papers preliminary
Warns to a Berlin dissertation that Herr Warns has been kind enough to
allow me to see.
Weber, Psautier Weber, R. Le Psautier Romain et les autres anciens Psautiers
Romain Latins. Rome, 1953.
 Zarb, S. Chronologia operum s. Augustini secundum ordinem
Zarb
Retractationum digesta. Rome, 1934.

Editions and Translations Cited

Editions (cited by editor's last name except where abbr. is indicated):

 J. Amerbach (Basle, 1506)

 Erasmus (Basle, 1528)
Louvain
 T. Gozaeus and J. Molanus (Louvain, 1576)
Maur.
 Benedictines of St. Maur (Paris, 1679), repr. with minor alterations in PL 32
(1845)
 E. B. Pusey (Oxford, 1838)
 Raumer (Gütersloh, 1855)
G-M
 J. Gibb and W. Montgomery (Cambridge, second edition, 1927, reprinted
New York, 1979)
 P. Knöll (Vienna, 1896 [CSEL, 33]); I occasionally quote (and specify) his
ed. min. (Leipzig, 1898)
 F. Ramorino (Rome, 1909)
 P. de Labriolle (Paris, 1925-26)
Skut.
 M. Skutella (Leipzig, 1934; from the revision by Juergens-Schaub [Stuttgart,
1969])
 A. C. Vega (Madrid, fifth edition, 1968 [Biblioteca de autores cristianos,
11])
BA
 Bibliothèque Augustinienne [BA 13-14] (Paris, 1962: reprinting Skutella,
with annotaation by A. Solignac)
Pell.
 M. Pellegrino (Rome, 1975 [Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana]: this edition is
mainly a reprinting of Skutella, noted only for a few divergences; the translation
is cited as `Carena' [see below]).
Ver.
 L. Verheijen, (Turnhout, 1981 [CCSL, 27])

Translations (cited by translator's last name):

 J. K. Ryan (New York, 1960 [Image Bks.])

 R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth and New York, 1961 [Penguin])
 E. B. Pusey (reprinted in Everyman Library, London, 1962)
 J. Bernhart (Munich, 1955; repr. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987 [Insel])
 Bibliothèque Augustinienne (Paris, 1962; see above - the translation is by E.
Tréhorel and G. Boissou)
 R. Warner (New York, 1963).
  A. C. Vega (Madrid, 1968; see above)
 C. Carena (Rome, 1975; see above)

Acknowledgements
A work such as this is as variously and irremediably in debt at every turn as Mr.
Micawber. I will be content if someone says of me what Gibbon said of Augustine, that
my learning is too often borrowed, and my arguments are too often my own.

For funding in various amounts, I am indebted to:

 The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

 The National Endowment for the Humanities
 The University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences
 The University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation
 The American Council of Learned Societies

For moral support, encouragement, and scholarly consultation, I thank: J.V. Fleming,
G.N. Knauer, Henry Chadwick, Carl R. Fischer, Jr., MD, Paula Fredriksen, Julia Haig
Gaisser, Michael Gorman, Barbara Halporn, J.W. Halporn, Richard Hamilton, Col.
Morton S. Jaffe, James J. John, the late Robert E. Kaske (magister Regis et rex
magistrorum), Dale Kinney, George Lawless, OSA, Thomas Mackay, Robert A.
Markus, and Amy Richlin. My encounters with Augustine began two decades ago, in an
irretrievable place, and remind me at every turn of a friend of whom it can be said, as
Augustine said of Nebridius (ep. 98.8) that he was a most assiduous and keen-eyed
investigator in all matters dealing with doctrine and piety, and that what he hated most
of all was a short answer to a large question.

At an advanced stage, I had the use of the computer database of the Augustine
Concordance Project of the University of Würzburg, in the copy located at Villanova
University. It is a particular pleasure to express my gratitude to Fr. Allan Fitzgerald,
O.S.A., for making this facility available to me.

I have also had the advantage of reading unpublished work on the confessiones by G.-D.
Warns of Berlin and by Prof. Colin Starnes of Dalhousie University. I hope I have been
adequately scrupulous in indicating my debts to their work ad loc., and I am very
grateful to both scholars for their generosity and hope to see their work in print before
long.

I thank as well my students at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania:

C.E. Bennett, Robert Gorman, Sarah Mace, Laurie Williams, Elizabeth Beckwith, Karl
Maurer, Jeanette Jones, Anne Keaney, Erica Budd, arriet Flower, Lisa Rengo, John
McMahon, Michael Klaassen.

The participants in my 1985 NEH-sponsored seminar at Glenmede (Bryn Mawr

College) were present at the creation, and will find herein much that is familiar: J.
Randal Allen, Vincent J. Amato, Herbert E. Anderson, Floyd D. Celapino, James A.
Freeman, Kay S. Hodges, Patricia J. Huhn, Brother Joseph R. Kazimir, Kathleen M.
Macdonell, Sister Miriam Meskill, V.I., Linda M. Porto, M. James Robertson, Sister
Marie Clare Rutkowski, O.F.M., Patricia A. Walsh, Sister Patricia Welsh, R.S.M.
President Mary Patterson McPherson of Bryn Mawr College provided the facilities for
our seminar, but is also indirectly responsible for my having had the time and leisure to
complete this work, and thus deserves double thanks. I have given talks that anticipate
portions of the substance and argument of this work in settings under the auspices of the
American Philological Association (New Orleans, 1980), the University of
Pennsylvania (1981), the Lilly-Pennsylvania Program (Philadelphia, 1981), the Oxford
Patristic Congress (1983), Bryn Mawr College (1987), the American Philological
Association (New York, 1987), and The Colorado College (1988).

This work is evidence of the riches of three fine libraries, the Van Pelt Library of the
University of Pennsylvania, the Falvey Memorial Library of Villanova University, and
the Miriam Coffin Canaday Library of Bryn Mawr College.

J.K. Cordy and Hilary Feldman and the remarkable Press they represent never flinched
for a moment: no small achievement. `nec trepidus ero ad proferendam sententiam
meam, in qua magis amabo inspici a rectis quam timebo morderi a perversis, . . .
magisque optabo a quolibet reprehendi quam sive ab errante sive ab adulante laudari.
nullus enim reprehensor formidandus est amatori veritatis.' (trin 2. pro. 1)

Bryn Mawr 23 November 1990

1
 

John 3.21, as echoed by A. at 10.1.1. (References to the Confessions are given thus, by
book, `chapter', and `section'; but the expression `see on 2.2.3' is regular shorthand for
`See discussion in the commentary on 2.2.3.')
2
 

The translation may seem deliberately tendentious: for the Greek o( de\ poiw=n th\n
a)lh/qeian and the Latin `qui autem facit veritatem,' English translations prefer `he who
does the truth' (and Luther: `Wer aber die Wahrheit tut'). What `doing the truth' might
mean is anybody's guess, and the phrase is probably preferred out of fear of the
implication in `making truth' that the truth does not exist until it is made.
3
 

`Truth' in our sense is not a native concept in any of the languages of our tradition.
English true begins in Germanic as a physical description (of the wood at the center of a
tree trunk), becomes a moral description (of a faithful man - that sense persists as the
meaning of German treu), and only eventually becomes a metaphysical or ontological
category. (German itself borrows verus from Latin and makes it wahr to do duty in our
sense of true.) Latin verus (cf. OLD) follows a similar development, where `real,
genuine, authentic' is the original meaning and `consistent with fact' only much later.
Greek a)lhqh/s, the original, tells a similar story. These etymologic facts betray a
fundamental fault-line in Western thought, between being and discourse, reality and
truth. A.'s Christianity represents a mighty effort at bringing the two into harmony, and
the rejection of that Christianity leaves moderns to face again the unbridged chasm, the
inexhaustible subject of contemporary literary theorists; the essay of J. Kristeva, `Le
vréel' (translated as `The True-Real', The Kristeva Reader [New York, 1986], 214-37),
defines the issue with unusual clarity.
4
 

C. Mohrmann, RA 1(1958) 34:

`Toutefois, la parole n'est pas seulement, pour lui, moyen de communication avec les
hommes. On n'a qu'à lire les Confessions pour constater à quel degré l'expression
verbale est un facteur essentiel de sa vie spirituelle.'
5
 

9.6.14,
`fugit a nobis sollicitudo vitae praeteritae'
.
6
 

`Est-ce à dire que, dans ses Confessions, saint Augustin ait volontairement altéré la
vérité?':
G. Boissier, `La conversion de saint Augustin', Revue des Deux Mondes 85(1888), 43-
69 at 44
. Boissier has the credit for raising this question, and noting the disparity of accounts
between the Confessions and the Cassiciacum dialogues, but he did not press those
disparities and concluded that the two accounts could be reconciled - as has every major
study of the question since with the exception of Alfaric. The other disturber of the
peace was A. von Harnack, `Augustins Konfessionen', (Giessen, 1888), reprinted in his
Reden und Aufsätze 1(1904), 51-79. The canonization of Boissier and Harnack as
archetypal skeptics probably goes back to C. Boyer, Christianisme et néo-platonisme
dans la formation de saint Augustin (Paris, 1920; rev. ed., Rome, 1953), whose
introduction gives an excellent survey of scholarship 1888-1920.
7
 

P. Alfaric, L'évolution intellectuelle de Saint Augustin: I, Du Manichéisme au

Néoplatonisme (Paris, 1918), held that Augustine as bishop was eager to conceal that
his original conversion of c. 386 had been not to Christianity but to neo-Platonism;
Boyer, op. cit., offered the orthodox response. Alfaric was

`un prêtre passé au Modernisme'

(Solignac, BA 13.58)
; his book on Manichean scriptures has three dedicatees, one of whom is the leading
French `modernist' Alfred Loisy. Boyer was a priest in good standing.
8
 
P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (Paris, 1950; expanded
ed. 1968).
9
 

For contrast, a single bald assertion from the `Ptolemaic' age:

A. Dyroff, in the collective volume Aurelius Augustinus (Cologne, 1930), 47:

`Vor vielem sicher ist, daß in De ordine sich nicht die mindeste sichere Spur von
Neuplatonismus vorfindet, obwohl genug Gelegenheit dazu war. Auch Contra
Academicos und De beata vita verraten nichts Sicheres davon.'
10
 

For I believe it is true that every single Platonic text adduced in the scholarly debates as
one that A. may have read has been lost to us in the form that A. knew. Even Plotinus
he read in a Latin translation we no longer have and, given the difficulty of Plotinus,
any translation must have been a palpably different thing from the original.
11
 

Less ambitious but useful was the early work of Verheijen, Eloquentia Pedisequa
(Nijmegen, 1949).
12
 

I know of the work as Horst Kusch, “Der Aufbau der Confessiones des Aurelius
Augustinus” (Leipzig, 1951); the author is said to have died in an automobile accident
in the 1950s.
13
 

H. Kusch, “Studien über Augustinus,” Festschrift Franz Dornseiff (Leipzig, 1953), 124-
200.
14
 

e.g., J. Ratzinger, REAug 3(1957), 375-6: `Kuschs Arbeit scheint mir bezüglich der
Frage des Aufbaus und der Einheit der Confessiones das Beste und Gründlichste zu
sein, was bisher geschrieben wurde.'
15
 

K. Grotz, Warum bringt Augustin in den letzten Büchern seiner Confessiones eine
Auslegung der Genesis? (Diss. Tübingen, 1970), listing nineteen previously published
hypotheses attempting to answer his question. I have read widely, and profited slightly,
from the literary-critical essays of the last generation. The palm among such essays,
many of which make no pretension to scholarly adequacy, must go to R. Herzog, for a
venturesome reading of the work as a struggle to establish communication between the
confessing voice and the divine source of speech: in K. Stierle et al., Das Gespräch
(Munich, 1984), 213-50; discussed by E. Feldmann, in an essay in Der Stand der
Augustinus-Forschung (Würzburg, 1989).
16
 

Vyvyan Richards, quoted in J. Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1990), 686.

17
 

By `Catholic' I denote background and upbringing; views and practices at the time of
writing are less important. The Anglophone reader curious to pursue this localization
further may begin with the works of N. Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism
(Oxford, 1936), and Saint Augustine and French Classical Thought (Oxford, 1938),
especially the introductory chapter in the latter work.
18
 

La Vision d'Ostie (Paris, 1938).

19
 

Les conversions de saint Augustin (Paris, 1950).

20
 

St. Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

21
 

Pellegrino's book is subtitled in the French edition `Guide de lecture', and O'Meara's
second edition of The Young Augustine is similarly labeled `An Introduction to the
Confessions': but both are preoccupied - O'Meara almost to the exclusion of all else -
with using the Confessions to write the biography of A.
22
 

Eight of those eleven named were ordained Roman clergy at the time they wrote, one
had taken orders but later left the priesthood, and one studied for the priesthood without
taking orders. No woman has written a book on the Confessions to my knowledge (Prof.
Margaret Miles may soon fill that gap); the closest approach to date is the series of
articles in Convivium 25(1957) and 27(1959) by C. Mohrmann (a Francophone
Catholic).
23
 

Pincherle's odyssey of soul was apparently complex, but seems to have ended with
Rome. The range and variety of his work is little appreciated: some hints in the
memorial notice at Augustinianum 20(1980), 425-8.
24
 
J. Ratzinger, `Originalität und Überlieferung in Augustins Begriff der confessio',
REAug 3(1957), 375-92.
25
 

Tübingen, 1923, originally in Danish: Copenhagen, 1920, with roots in a 1911-12

seminar of Harnack's at Berlin.
26
 

Mandouze 131n1, `Les heurts de la période marquée par le modernisme et, plus
spécialement, les incompatibilités du protestantisme libéral et de l'intégrisme catholique
sont une chose, l'état d'esprit d'Augustin à Cassiciacum en est une autre.' Consider as
well the intensity and duration of the storm of controversy raised by Courcelle's study of
the garden scene (8.12.29-30). The controversy replicated the earlier battles occasioned
by application of scholarly instruments and criteria to biblical texts: literal narrative
seemed threatened, and with literal narrative faith itself seemed threatened. It is not
merely that the reaction to Courcelle could only have arisen in certain religious circles,
but Courcelle himself would not have written as he did were such a response not
inevitable. That is not to say that Courcelle wrote out of spite or in a deliberate attempt
to shock, but that his own curiosity and his own sense of what questions mattered had
been conditioned by an environment and a history that he shared with his opponents.
27
 

The provisional nature of that decision perhaps needs emphasis. Not until April 387 did
A. make the commitment to the Christian cult that he would regard as irrevocable. The
Cassiciacum dialogues come during a frustrating interim, and much of the peculiar
character of those works can be traced to that neither-fish-nor-fowl state of A.'s mind
and commitment at the time. Only in retrospect does the garden scene provide the
decisive moment: a lapse between August 386 and April 387 would have rewritten the
meaning of that scene completely.
28
 

Civ. 8.12 claims that Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus all recommended sacrifice to
the gods. Even Porphyry's life of Plotinus (V. Plot. 2) shows Plotinus sacrificing on the
birthdays of Socrates and Plato.
29
 

F. van der Meer's Augustine the Bishop, 277-402, is excellent on the evidence from A.;
by good luck, one of the few liftings of the veil to come down to us is Ambrose's own
description of baptismal rites, quoted in my notes on 9.6.14.
30
 

en. Ps. 103. s. 1.14,

`quid est quod occultum est, et non publicum in ecclesia? sacramentum baptismi,
sacramentum eucharistiae. opera enim nostra bona vident et pagani, sacramenta vero
occultantur illis; sed ab his quae non vident, surgunt illa quae vident.'
31
 

J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New York, 1961), raises questions
that I have not seen satisfactorily settled by students of psychohistory.
32
 

For what little I have to say, see on 1.11.17, with an excursus on fathers and mothers in
the Confessions. I leave to others to write the history of the psychoanalysis of A. Two
neglected studies seem to me of more worth than most of the better-known studies: W.
Achelis, Die Deutung Augustins (Prien am Chiemsee, 1921), was almost the first
Freudian reading of A., seeing in him traces of `inversion' (which is similar to, but in
many ways different from, `homosexuality' as commonly constructed today). His (hard
to find) book has a seriousness and an integrity that are, to my taste, almost universally
lacking in the later essays in the same vein that I know. Reading Achelis makes clear
how many other such essays have been written by students evidently engaged in their
own (dare one say Oedipal?) struggle with Augustine. The other study I commend is
thus an interesting exception because it was written by a woman: P. Fredriksen,
`Augustine and his analysts', Soundings 51(1978), 206-27.
33
 

For date, see below, chapter 3.

34
 

For Williger's thesis, followed by Courcelle and O'Meara, see preceding 10.1.1.
35
 

Courcelle, Recherches 157-67 and, in the second edition only, 405-40.

36
 

One might also instance 3.6.10ff, where the reading of the Hortensius and the
consequent turn to scriptures have ended in a mis-conversion, that to Manicheism.
There is just enough of a hint there in the wording of 3.6.11 that A. is aware of this as a
moment where the ascent might have begun but did not: the evidence is in the echo of
the prodigal son's behavior (`et longe peregrinabar . . . de siliquis pascebam') and the
first appearance of intellectus (`cum te non secundum intellectum mentis . . . sed
secundum sensum carnis quaererem'), the vehicle of right knowledge of God.
37
 

4.15.24, `non enim noveram neque didiceram nec ullam substantiam malum esse nec
ipsam mentem nostram summum atque inconmutabile bonum.' For a further trinitarian
implication, see on 4.15.24. See also on 5.10.20, `conaretur . . . repercutiebar', for the
consistency with which the pattern is carried through.
38
 

I cannot take the crucial phrase at 7.17.23 (`et pervenit ad id quod est in ictu trepidantis
aspectus') in any other way. See commentary for Plotinian echoes - and especially the
parallel texts in many other works of Augustine. Augustine is both more flattering to
Plotinus than we are commonly wont to admit (here, by granting that he has indeed seen
the `invisible things of God' [the crucial passage of Rom. 1.20 brackets the description
of the ascent in that paragraph], if only for a moment), and at the same time more
radically critical of him than we are willing to believe one so indebted to Plotinus could
be.
39
 

9.10.25, `si cui sileat . . .,' almost a translation from Plot. 5.1.2.
40
 

The text anticipates the full and perfect enduring audition of the Word of God, and then
explicitly equates that auditory event, using scriptural words of God to make the point,
with eschatological joy: `nonne hoc est, “intra in gaudium domini tui?”' [cf. Mt. 25.21]
41
 

For details, see preceding 10.1.1.

42
 

Cf. esp. 11.29.39-11.30.40 (n.b. 11.27.34, for the thematic echo of Ps. 99.3, `ipse fecit
nos' ) and 13.13.14.
43
 

The ascent is from corporal to spiritual to intellectual vision. See on 7.10.16 for details.
44
 

There is a marked drop-off in the frequency and intensity of Plotinian (or Porphyrian)
language in Augustine's works from the time of writing the Confessions. It would be
odd for him to have thought highly enough of the system to use it to shape so personal a
testament of faith, then let it largely drop away almost at once. The later works are
undeniably less rich in their reflection of Platonic ideas (and that is probably one reason
for the lack of sympathy they evoke in many scholars: the old Augustine has few friends
today). The theme is not abandoned, to be sure, and there has even been an attempt to
show that it is enriched by contact with a specifically Christian source: see S. Poque,
`L'expression de l'anabase plotinienne dans la prédication de saint Augustin et ses
sources', RA 10(1976), 187-215, tracing the later development in a few sermons,
notably Io. ev. tr. 20.11-13, in which she sees the influence of Basil of Caesarea.
45
 

The conventional way to deal with this objection has been to observe that Augustine did
not plan his literary works very well, and that changes of plan in mid-stream were
common. It remains astonishing that Courcelle (Recherches 23-6) could believe, e.g.,
that the last three books were the result of an attempt to conclude the Confessions with a
complete commentary on all of scripture, an attempt then broken off after three books
out of frustration at the amount of time and space it would take to complete that plan.
The belief that Augustine was an inept maker of books is now ex professo disowned (cf.
Marrou's famous palinode against his own early view: `jugement d'un jeune barbare
ignorant et présomptueux.' [Marrou 665]), but in practice seems to live on.
46
 

The rest of book 10 is a scandal to the doctiores; even when the rest of the book is
rescued from the second-class status to which Williger and others sought to relegate it,
the examination of conscience is ghettoized: Pincherle, Aug. Stud. 7(1976), 119-33,
modifies Williger to claim that only the examination of conscience (10.30.41-10.37.60)
was intercalated after a first draft of the rest was completed.
47
 

For confirmation that the three temptations are perverse imitation/reflection of the
trinity, see on 1.20.31, 2.6.13, and 9.1.1. There is clear evidence that A. could see triads
that reflect the trinity matched with triads of temptation and sin: civ. 12.1, `a superiore
communi omnium beatifico bono ad propria defluxerunt et habentes elationis fastum
pro excelsissima aeternitate, vanitatis astutiam pro certissima veritate, studia partium
pro individua caritate superbi fallaces invidi effecti sunt.' For the case of vera rel., see
du Roy 343-63 (343: `Chacune de ces concupiscences étant l'inversion de notre
dependance à l'égard de chacune des trois personnes divines, le redressement consistera
à retrouver notre authentique relation à chacune et à toute la Trinité'). A. could
elsewhere apply the triadic pattern of temptations to assist in the interpretation of
another narrative: s. 112.6.6-8.8 so reads the parable of the great feast (Lk. 14.15-24).
48
 

It is worth noting that the gravity of Augustine's fall measured against each of the three
temptations undergoes a reversal in Bk. 10: the risen Augustine has almost completely
vanquished concupiscence of the flesh, mainly conquered concupiscence of the eyes,
but finds himself yet a prey to ambitio saeculi. R. Crouse, in Neoplatonism and Early
Christian Thought (Festschrift A.H. Armstrong: London, 1981), 183, on the fall of the
soul through the three temptations: `What is represented here is the disintegration of
human personality by the progressive separation and opposition of the personal powers
of reason and will, first by the excessive or deficient love of the sensible (subordinate to
reason), then by the subordination of reason itself to will, in curiositas, and finally by
reason's contradiction in the willing of a lie.'
49
 

Cf. esp. the incident of the drunken beggar at 6.6.9.

50
 

Courcelle's view (Les Confessions 18-26) dating Augustine's final break with
Manicheism later than most others would accept has the merit of emphasizing that it
was Platonism that decisively answered for Augustine the questions that the Manichees
had pressed with such force.
51
 

In the garden scene specifically and Bk. 8 generally.

52
 

The interpretation here goes beyond conventional treatments (best: that of du Roy) of
the place of trinitarian triads in A.'s thought, insisting not only on their doctrinal
significance but on their rhetorical effectiveness. It is tempting to think that there might
be some perfect method of textual analysis that would employ these triads to reveal to
us at every turn in the Confessions exactly how A. was speaking of God: whether of one
person or another of the trinity, or of all three at one time. In many passages, it is true, it
is possible to define the direction of his discourse; and this commentary has probably
gone further than many would have thought possible (and than some will think
desirable) in making such identifications. But even if we accept that A. might have
intended such a rigid and rigorous consistency, it is not likely that he would have been
able to carry it through in practice for the whole length of this text.
53
 

There has been much debate over the Christological conversion of A., dating back to
Courcelle's `Saint Augustin “photinien” à Milan', Richerche di stor. rel. 1(1954) 63-71.
Discussions by all sides have followed the same pattern: analysis of the Christological
report given at 7.19.25, followed by close reading of Cassiciacum texts to determine
how much or little progress toward orthodoxy A. had made from the situation described
in the Confessions (e.g., the sound and sensible review of the debate and assessment of
the issues by W. Mallard, `The Incarnation in Augustine's Conversion', RA 15[1980]
80-98). The assumption is that at 7.19.25 A. reported that his conversion was all but
complete except for the matter of the incarnation (after making clear at 7.9.14 that he
thought the Platonists crippled by their lack of an incarnation doctrine), and that he then
proceeded to write six more books of the Confessions without ever suggesting how or
whether he managed to overcome that defect. This peculiar approach has been possible
because in attending to doctrinal questions we have fallen into the modern practice of
treating as purely intellectual matters, to be discussed and resolved as such, apart from
the exclusively moral considerations that preoccupy the A. of Bk. 8.
54
 

`La personne du Christ dans la “conversion” de saint Augustin', RA 11(1976), 3-34; at

28, `si Augustin a acquis la certitude que c'est une force du Très-haut qui a fait de lui un
vainqueur, cela ne veut pas dire que ce soit l'action propre de Jésus-Christ. . . .. [Rom.
13.13-14] est une parole de force en vue de l'action, une exhortation destinée à entraîner
la volonté déficiente, non une parole sur le Christ sauveur et rédempteur.'
55
 

See on 7.7.11.
56
 

See on 10.43.70; n.b. especially the use of Ps. 21.27.

57
 

To be sure, the Christianity of A.'s childhood and adolescence offered examples and
encouragement; the Hortensius contained such, as did other works of Cicero (e.g., Tusc.
4, esp. 4.9.22, ascribing the origin of the four perturbationes animi [cf. 10.14.22] to
intemperantia); the Manichees placed a high theoretical value on continence (whatever
their defects in practice: see on 8.1.2); and neo-Platonism offered its own twist,
presenting as its undoubted master one who `seemed ashamed of being in a body'
(Porphyry, v. Plotini 1, the opening sentence: Plwti/nos i) kaq' h(ma=s gegonw\s
filo/sofos e)w/|kei me\n ai)scunome/nw| o(/ti e)n sw/mati ei)/h) If it is surprising that the
issue arises when and where it does in the Confessions, it is also surprising that it did
not arise much earlier. How far that silence is an autobiographical datum (i.e., how far
A. really did ignore such exhortations before Milan and 386), and how far it is a
strategy of the autobiographer to enhance his dramatic presentation, we cannot tell.
58
 

See Madec, Saint Ambroise et la philosophie (Paris, 1974), 247-337. The title is attested
in full in three places in A.: Madec 269-76; (276: `Il pouvait s'agir d'un traité mis en
forme, dans lequel le mystère de la vie chrétienne inaugurée dans le “bain de la
régénération” était opposé à une autre doctrine de salut prêchée par le platonisme
antichrétien accrédité par Porphyre. Et c'est en ce sens que me semble devoir être
interprété le titre double.'), Madec 324 dates the work to no later than spring 387, and
probably 384/6. Madec is strictly correct when he says at 324, `Mais ni les Confessions,
ni les premières oeuvres ne semblent y faire allusion', but the reading of the Confessions
suggested here reveals that it was indeed influential. About the time of the Confessions
(ep. 31.8, of 396/7: Madec 249-50) A. was able to acquire a copy for renewed study,
that is, about the time of his reassessment of his own relations to Platonism (a time
when Ambrose would be a specially apt model if A. were concerned with finding a
valid attitude towards philosophy for a bishop to take), and his position grew
increasingly cautious and critical; note esp. that the Porphyrian Christology that is
implicitly attacked in Ambrose's work is a focus of A.'s attacks from 397 on (conf.
7.19.25, s. 62.7.9, cons. ev. 1.7.11, 1.34.52). If Madec is right that Ambrose and A.
were far apart in their view of Platonism while A. was in Milan (see Madec's summary
at 346-7), it also seems clear that the re-reading of this important book by A. at about
the time he wrote the Confessions was a force in drawing A. closer to Ambrose's views.

Ambrose's book attacked those who claimed that Christ had learned from Plato (ep.
31.8, doctr. chr. 2.28.43 [modified at civ. 8.11, retr. 2.4.2, to retract the claim that Plato
and Jeremiah were contemporary]), and it spoke strongly in favor of the redeeming
power of the sacrament of baptism (c. Iul. 2.5.14), linking to baptism a moral
reformation in matters of the flesh and praising continence (again c. Iul. 2.5.14 [where
Ambrose is quoted, and this is of great interest, taking Rom. 7 to apply to the converted
Paul, and not to the Old Man generally: see on 7.21.27 for the development A. himself
underwent on that text], c. Iul. 2.8.24, but especially c. Iul. 2.7.20, quoted below); the
work strongly implies something approaching a doctrine of original sin (c. Iul. 2.6.15
[with bits reechoed at c. Iul. 6.26.83, 3.21.48, c. Iul. imp. 2.8, 2.21, 2.31]), and attacked
Platonic reincarnation teachings (c. Iul. 2.7.19). For the consistency of Ambrose's
positions, worth comparing is the fragment of Ambrose on Isaiah from c. Iul. 2.8.23:
`sicut enim regeneratio lavacri dicitur per quam detersa peccatorum conluvione
renovamur, ita regeneratio dici videtur per quam ab omni corporeae concretionis
purificati labe mundo animae sensu in vitam regeneramur aeternam.'
59
 

c. Iul. 2.7.20, `“bona”, inquit, “continentia, quaedam velut crepido pietatis. namque in
praecipitiis vitae huius labentium statuit vestigia, speculatrix sedula, ne quid obrepat
illicitum. mater autem vitiorum omnium incontinentia [cf. conf. 8.11.27, where
continentia is a fecunda mater filiorum gaudiorum], quae etiam licita vertit in vitium.
ideoque apostolus non solum a fornicatione nos retrahit, verum etiam in ipsis coniugiis
modum quemdam docet, et tempora praescribit orandi. intemperans enim in coniugio,
quid aliud nisi quidam adulter uxoris est?”' The prestige of continence in various forms
with Ambrose is famous; the importance of this passage is the twofold link between
continence and confuting the philosophers on the one hand and right worship on the
other (see on 8.1.2 for reasons for taking pietas so explicitly of `right worship').
Ambrose's remarks are rooted in the philosophical tradition; two of the `Sentences of
Sextus' (§§ 86a and 231 [ed. H. Chadwick]) are echoed here, esp. 86a,krhpi\j eu)sebei/aj
e)gkra/teia, which itself descends from Socrates, quoted by Xenophon, mem. 1.5.4: see
Madec, Saint Ambroise 311-17.
60
 

The year 386 is pivotal in the history of the western church's attitude towards
continence. Ambrose by treatise and Martin of Tours by example were taking a new,
more demanding stand. Ambrose had a sister who was a consecrated virgin, and he
himself at age 35 or more became a bishop without ever having married. Jovinian
reacted in one direction, and Jerome in another (and in doing so alienated almost
everyone). A., it is notable, never accepted or praised Jerome's position, though he knew
it (b. coniug. 22.27 and often later, e.g., pecc. mer. 3.7.13, nupt. et conc. 2.5.15 and
2.23.38, c. ep. pel. 1.2.4, haer. 82, c. Iul. imp. 1.97-8; see R. A. Markus, `Augustine's
Confessions: Autobiography as a New Beginning, or, Manicheism Revisited,'
[forthcoming]); instead, in the after years when the Pelagian position was thrown in A.'s
face repeatedly by Julian, A. aligned himself firmly with Ambrose, trying for a middle
ground between extremes. That policy is responsible for the abundant quotations from
Ambrose in A.'s works against Julian, including most of the surviving fragments of the
de sacramento regenerationis sive de philosophia. (The tactic was brushed off by
Julian: c. Iul. imp. 4.110-113, esp. 4.112, `ceterum vel Ambrosii dicta, vel aliorum,
quorum famam vestrorum nitimini maculare consortio, clara benignaque possunt ratione
defendi.') A. is rarely given credit for his moderation. On the background and issues
involved see best A. Rousselle, Porneia (Paris, 1983; trans. Oxford, 1988), esp. chapters
8-11, E. Clark, `Vitiated Seeds and Holy Vessels: Augustine's Manichaean Past', in her
Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays in Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY,
1986), 291-349, Clark's `“Adam's Only Companion”: Augustine and the Early
Christian Debate on Marriage', RA 21(1986), 139-62 (but construing the history as a
debate on marriage rather than continence is a way of privileging the agenda of the
1980s over that of the 380s: much of what is idiosyncratic in what writers of that period
say about marriage may be at least partly explained by noting that their attention was
really elsewhere when they wrote many of the passages for which they are now taxed)
and Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York, 1988), 341-427. The curious
prestige Julian of Eclanum enjoys among moderns is to be explained only by his
usefulness as a club with which to beat Augustine. There is no evidence, after all, that
Christianity for Julian ever reached beyond the comfortable upper-class and upper-class
clerical circles into which he was born; A. the bishop is nowhere near so elitist or
authoritarian.
61
 

For the way the topic of continence develops in the Confessions, see further on 8.1.2
62
 

Cf. also ep. 38.1 of mid-397, `secundum spiritum, quantum domino placet, atque vires
praebere dignatur, recte sumus; corpore autem, ego in lecto sum. nec ambulare enim,
nec stare, nec sedere possum, rhagadis vel exochadis dolore et tumore. . . . ut oretis pro
nobis, ne diebus intemperante utamur, ut noctes aequo animo toleremus . . .' It is
sobering to think that the Confessions may have been dictated by a man lying prone and
enduring undignified and only marginally effective medical treatment.
63
 

The best discussion of the evidence is Solignac in BA 13.45-54, who takes the position
in favor of extended composition characterized here. Monceaux's argument, CRAI
(1908) 51-3, taken up by de Labriolle in his ed., p. vi, that the c. Fel. must be dated to
398 and thus provides a terminus ante quem for the Confessions, would support my own
view above, but is untenable: c. Fel.must be dated to 404.
64
 

See on 1.6.7 and 10.36.59ff.

65
 

s. Frang. 2 [= s. 339 + s. 40].

66
 

For further details, see preceding 1.1.1.

67
 

The line of criticism most likely to find Augustine vulnerable would argue that the
solution presented in the Confessions is too neat and well-crafted to be entirely
satisfactory. A reading of Augustine's later life and works starting from there would
differ on some, but not all, points from that sketched in the next lines of my own
argument here.
68
 

In 391 A. still felt the deaths of Nebridius and Adeodatus, who may both have died in
390.
69
 

Note these patterns: (1) Gn. litt. imp. (393/4) was left incomplete, to be revived and
redone differently and better after the Confessions in Gn. litt. (2) c. ep. Don. (a
systematic refutation barely begun and not surviving) went nowhere, but bapt. (in 6
books) follows the Confessions. (3) The Pauline commentaries of 394/6 (arising out of
discussions at Carthage when A. was a presbyter: retr. 1.23.1) go nowhere, until div. qu.
Simp. put him on the right track leading directly to the Confessions, and beyond the
Confessions to both trin. (see below) and to the anti-Pelagian controversy. (4) The c. ep.
fund. he undertook in 396 to refute systematically a central Manichee text: after another
failure, the idea lay dormant, until the massive c. Faust. of c. 399 finished the job. (5)
His comments on mend. at retr. 1.27 reveal it - the last thing he catalogued as written
before episcopal ordination - as another problematic work: `item de mendacio scripsi
librum . . . auferre statueram de opusculis meis, quia et obscurus et anfractuosus et
omnino molestus mihi videbatur, propter quod eum nec edideram.' (6) Finally, doctr.
chr. was a real attempt to deal with the problems of preaching; unfinished (until 427), its
task was performed much more humbly by the cat. rud. of 399/400. Some have
suggested from time to time that cat. rud., written about the same time as the
Confessions, offers in its model catechetical discourse an analogue of some sort for the
Confessions, even that the Confessions exemplify in practice the theoretical structure
recommended and demonstrated by cat. rud. This is at best loosely true (it is true, for
example, that A. recommends that the `narratio' of the catechist begin with Gn. 1.1 and
continue to the present [cat. rud. 3.5 and 6.10], and that matches the exegesis presented
in Bks. 11-13 of the Confessions), but worth considering; on that assumption, however,
consider this prescription from the other work: `But the greatest concern is to find the
way to catechize rejoicing, for the more it is possible to do that, the pleasanter the
catechesis will be' (`sed quibus modis faciendum sit, ut gaudens quisque catechizet
[tanto enim suavior erit, quanto magis id potuerit], ea cura maxima est' [cat. rud. 2.4]).
Is gaudens a reasonable adjective for the tone of voice of the Confessions?
70
 

Immediately following upon the brilliant vera rel., the last thing he wrote before
ordination.
71
 

Of great interest is the argument of M. Alflatt, REAug 20(1974), 113-34, that A. was in
part driven to the study of Paul and to the conclusions he reached by his 392 debate with
Fortunatus, in which he had to acknowledge that Paul had spoken of `involuntary sin'.
On A.'s rereading of Paul, best is P. Fredriksen, `Beyond the body/soul dichotomy:
Augustine on Paul against the Manichees and the Pelagians', RA 23(1988), 87-114.

In a tentative reconstruction of the sort offered here, this is probably where the evidence
becomes too thinly stretched to admit of much certainty. At any rate, it seems that the
first attempts to write about Paul are those of an idealist who still wants to believe that
he will achieve ascetic perfection. At some level there is conflict, and ordination as
bishop exacerbates the problem; and so in div. qu. Simp. he finds the reading of Paul
(which then helps him make sense of his own life in the Confessions) that enables him
to see how a relative failure to achieve perfection is compatible with all that he knows
and believes. (His new reading of Paul at first made things worse - Robert Markus
writes concisely but with great perception of the `intellectual landslide' of this period
[Conversion and Disenchantment in Augustine's Spiritual Career (Villanova, 1989),
23].) His vehemence in the face of the Pelagians is vehemence in the face of his own
younger, deluded self (hence the importance of quoting Ambrose in the last works, a
way of insisting that `what I converted to then was indeed the real thing, and even then I
was anti-Pelagian').
72
 

The link between the incompleteness of doctr. chr. and the writing of the Confessions
was made by A. Pincherle (cf. Formazione teologica di Sant' Agostino [Rome, n.d.
(1947)], 194, and elaborated by him, esp. in `Intorno alla genesi delle Confessioni',
Augustinian Studies, 5(1974), 167-76 (emphasizing the importance of A.'s new reading
of Paul) and `The Confessions of St. Augustine: A Reappraisal', Augustinian Studies,
7(1976), 119-33. (The eventual conclusion of doctr. chr. thirty years after the
Confessions shows the kinship between the two projects; the last words are: doctr. chr.
4.31.64, `ego tamen deo nostro gratias ago, quod in his quatuor libris non qualis ego
essem [conf. 10.4.6], cui multa desunt, sed qualis esse debeat, qui in doctrina sana, id est
christiana, non solum sibi, sed etiam aliis laborare studet, quantulacumque potui
facultate disserui.')
73
 

Mandouze 564: `Les sermons d'une part, les lettres d'autre part représentent deux
manières différentes - plus fragmentaires mais aussi sans cesse remises à jour, et donc
plus actuelles que l'ouvrage intitulé les Confessions - de continuer à confesser Dieu et à
le confesser en parlant aux hommes et en leur faisant part d'une vie qui ne pouvait plus
être une vie privée.' Miles Davis: `Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to
play like yourself.'
74
 

Augustine has a reputation for writing big books, so it is worth noting how slowly that
skill came to him. Before his ordination as bishop, his longest books were c. acad. (3
`books'), mus. (6 books, written in two stages but unfinished, and part of a larger project
that fell apart), mor. (2 books), lib. arb. (3 books, but written in two stages), Gn. c. man.
(2 books, but only part of what he had to say on that subject), s. dom. m. (2 books), and
doctr. chr. (broken off in the middle of the third book). By length, mus. ran to about
40,000 words, lib. arb., s. dom. m., and the torso of doctr. chr. each to about 30,000
words, and a few others approaching 20,000 words. By contrast, the Confessions run to
13 books and are about twice as long (c. 80,000 words) as anything he had previously
written. All his other large works were written later (longer than the Confessions: civ.,
Io. ev. tr., c. Iul., c. Iul. imp., c. Faust., trin., qu. hept., Gn. litt.; longer than anything
else pre-Confessions: cons. ev., spec., c. Cresc., c. litt. Pet., and bapt.).
75
 

That suspicion is more or less the gravamen of the charge against the mature Augustine
by du Roy (see du Roy 455): a less sympathetic student than du Roy would claim that
A. had sacrificed his intellectual freedom to become an orthodox defender of static
verbal formulae. The clash here is perhaps that between the private Augustine and the
public man who was fated to become `Saint Augustine' and to become himself not
merely a questioner but a voice of authority. See further on 7.1.1.
76
 

I disagree with the thesis, but admire the insight, of U. Duchrow, `Der Aufbau von
Augustins Schriften Confessiones und De Trinitate', Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche 62(1965), 338-67, at 363-7, for attempting to describe the way trin. represents
the logical next step to the Confessions.
77
 

Gn. litt. owns an honorable second place in the post-Confessions `confessional'

literature, and it is an essential tool for the interpretation of many passages in the
Confessions; but it may be taken as fundamentally anti-Manichean, and perhaps in a
way anti- (or at least meta-) Platonic.
78
 

It is true, as Brown 354 remarks, that he took a long time to bring himself to publish
both Gn. litt. and trin., and after that his career as a speculative theologian ended as he
plunged into the Pelagian controversy.
79
 

See M. Wundt, `Augustins Konfessionen', Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche

Wissenschaft 22(1923), 161-206 at 166ff, esp. on the canonical questions surrounding
A.'s ordination; and see also Pincherle's studies cited above.
80
 

Bks. 11-13 are the first clear sketch of the way the philosophical ascent of the mind and
the Logos-based (scriptural) ascent of the soul can be integrated. Just as the first half of
Bk. 10 represents what Ostia foreshadowed, so trin. is what the author of the
Confessions had to do next - it is the work most directly in the line of the Confessions,
and its completion was as important to A. as was completion of the Confessions (hence
his tenacity in the face of difficulties in finishing it, hence his irritation at having it
wrested from him before he was ready). (A parallel development may be observed in
the movement from quant. an. 33.70ff, the fullest handbook of the ascent to come from
A.'s pen, and doctr. chr. 2.7.9-2.7.11, which gives a seven stage ascent of the mind to
God based on Is. 11.2.)
81
 

J.J. O'Meara, Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles in Augustine (Paris, 1959), 155-70,
collects passages from the Confessions that seem to reflect the Porphyry of the de
regressu animae/Philosophy from Oracles. If any of them survive scrutiny, they may
profitably be taken in the sense I suggest here, as fruits of the reassessment, not as
distinct echoes of the Milanese period. It remains possible that A. had discovered
Porphyry's hostility by 397/401 (writing the Confessions) and that he only discussed the
implications later (see on 7.9.13 for dating problems), but that is the less likely
hypothesis.
82
 

But see 1.14.17, `nam cum triginta tres annos agam, quattuordecim fere anni sunt ex
quo ista [i.e., worldly wealth] cupere destiti, nec aliud quidquam in his, qui quo casu
offerrentur, praeter necessarium victum liberalemque usum cogitavi. prorsus mihi unus
Ciceronis liber facillime persuasit nullo modo appetendas esse divitias, sed si
provenerint, sapientissime atque cautissime administrandas.'
83
 

Cf. du Roy 176-7, esp. on the way trinitarian speculation and contemplation facilitated
the process.
84
 

sol. 1.1.4, `quidquid a me dictum est, unus deus tu, tu veni mihi in auxilium. una aeterna
vera substantia, ubi nulla discrepantia, nulla confusio, nulla transitio, nulla indigentia,
nulla mors, ubi summa concordia, summa evidentia, summa constantia, summa
plenitudo, summa vita, . . . cuius legibus arbitrium animae liberum est; . . . qui fecisti
hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem tuam, quod qui se ipse novit agnoscit. exaudi,
exaudi, exaudi me, deus meus, domine meus, rex meus, pater meus, causa mea, spes
mea, res mea, honor meus, domus mea, patria mea, salus mea, lux mea, vita mea.
exaudi, exaudi, exaudi me, more illo tuo paucis notissimo.' Only the last five words
invoke an unmistakeably Platonic background. On this text, see du Roy 196-206.
85
 

A footnote is the proper place to notice an incidental line of convergence on A.'s the
Confessions: the first fifteen chapters of Hilary of Poitiers' de trinitate, written a
generation earlier, though offering a schematic and abstract narrative, breathe the same
atmosphere as the Confessions. The quest for truth and a righteous life pursued in
conventional philosophical terms, the sense of liberation arising from a reading of John
1, and the reorientation of philosophical studies in the wake of that reading - all these
are in Hilary, and many of the scriptural texts that A. uses pivotally are there as well.
(Parallels mentioned briefly and incompletely by Courcelle, Les Confessions 95-6.
When A. read Hilary is not clear, though it is generally assumed, e.g. by du Roy and
TeSelle, that it was early, perhaps even 387.)
86
 

P. Séjourné, Rev. sc. rel. 25(1951), 343, touches glancingly on the parallel: `une fresque
de son itinéraire philosophique et un rappel de ses propres errements'.
87
 

Bk. 2: sexual profligacy.

88
 

Bk. 3: adhesion to the Manichees.

89
 

Bks. 5-6: adhesion to the Academics.

90
 

Bk. 7: `tentatives d' extase'.

91
 

Bk. 8: on the verge of the garden scene.

92
 

8.12.28, `procella ingens ferens ingentem imbrem lacrimarum'.

93
 

This passage was probably written at Rome as early as 387/8, but we cannot say for sure
that it was written before lib. arb. was revised and completed in Hippo during
Augustine's priesthood (391/5); a very similar passage at lib. arb. 3.18.52-3.19.53
restates and confirms what is here.
94
 

An appendix below presents several other texts that anticipate the structure and content
of the Confessions There is also admirable discussion of the development of the style
and of the `Denkform' of the Confessions through earlier works by W. Schmidt-
Dengler, Stilistische Studien zum Aufbau der Augustins Konfessionen (diss., Vienna,
1965), 206-26.
95
 
The notes on 2.6.12 suggest that a comparison of the Confessions with the detailed,
almost mechanical scheme of the mind's ascent that we have in quant. an. 33.70-76
gives some reason to believe that the biographical narrative of the Confessions is
organized to reflect a detailed and progressive pattern of `ascent'.
96
 

For the relative lapse in frequency of the `ascent' as a motif in A.'s writing after
ordination and before the Confessions, that is to say, in the works of the period when A.
was having difficulty planning and completing his literary projects, see F. Van Fleteren,
`The Early Works of Augustine and His Ascents at Milan', Studies in Medieval Culture
10(1977), 19-23 at 21.
97
 

The categories are far from mutually exclusive: du Roy 236ff is very good on the way
the first sections written of lib. arb. (basically the first book and the elegant `ascent' in
the second) are a less polemical first sketch of ideas reprised in (the polemical) mor. On
the place of anti-Manicheism, Mayer, Zeichen 2.438, sees that anti-Manicheism is a
dominant concern in A.'s exegetical writings (in a way that anti-Platonism, anti-
`paganism', and even anti-Pelagianism are not) because it was exegesis that rescued A.
from the Manichean sect, and it was bad exegesis that was the source of their errors.
Everything exegetical in A. down to 400 at least must be taken as having an anti-
Manichean sub-text (including, e.g., Bks. 11-13 here).
98
 

The successes of the last generation in establishing the chronology of A.'s preaching
ought now to lead to the history of his preaching, to trace themes, styles, and techniques
from one end of his career to the other.
99
 

But one line of speculation deserves privileged attention. The negative opinions that are
often held privately, and occasionally expressed publicly, about A.'s abilities as a
literary artist - the old chestnut about whether A. `composes badly' or not - employ a
model of literary composition from a more textual artistry. We assume that A. wrote, or
should have written, as we do, full of afterthoughts, revisions, rearrangements, etc. But
the ancient rhetorician worked, it seems obvious on reflection, in a far more
improvisational mode than we do. If music were the analogy, his idiom was jazz, not
classical (cf. H.-I. Marrou, Histoire de l'education dans l'antiquité [ed. 6, Paris, 1965],
300). The earlier adumbration of the structure of the Confessions at lib. arb. 1.11.22 is a
hint of the process of composition: inventio on a small scale, gradual elaboration in
(long lost to us) oral presentation, then the final virtuoso performance in the presence of
the secretaries. If A. composes as we do, then several years of labor are appropriately
imagined; but nothing in the work itself forbids us to think that it was rather the product
of a fortnight.
100
 
From A.'s circle, we have the view of Possidius, vita A. pr., `nec adtingam ea omnia
insinuare quae idem beatissimus Augustinus in suis confessionum libris de semetipso,
qualis ante perceptam gratiam fuerit qualisque iam sumpta viveret, designavit. hoc
autem facere voluit, ut ait apostolus, ne de se quisquam hominum supra quam se esse
noverat aut de se auditum fuisset crederet vel putaret, humilitatis sanctae more, utique
nihilo fallens, sed laudem non suam sed sui domini de propria liberatione ac munere
quaerens, ex his videlicet quae iam perceperat, et fraternas preces poscens de his quae
accipere cupiebat.'
101
 

The three most fruitful and creative periods of A.'s life all coincide with such
boundaries: Milan/Cassiciacum at about age 32-33, the Confessions and the following
outpouring of works at age about 45, and civ., the completion of other projects (e.g.,
trin.), and the plunge into the Pelagian controversy, at age about 60. It is not absurd to
consider conscious and semi-conscious influence of such periodization on a man's life,
when (a) we have textual evidence that he thought of his own life in such categories,
and (b) when we see ourselves measuring our own and others' lives by the twenty-first,
fortieth, and sixty-fifth birthdays. L. Pizzolato, in Le “Confessioni” di sant'Agostino
(Milan, 1968) and later works, employs the six days as a key to the structure of the
whole work, with some fruitful results (see on 1.8.13, 2.1.1, and 7.1.1). The difficulty is
that A. at the time of writing the Confessions is required by his scheme to be both
middle-aged (the fifth age) for Bk. 10 and old (the sixth) for Bks. 11-13. Pizzolato also
neglects the alternate scheme for seven ages proposed in vera rel. (see on 1.8.13).
102
 

In our cultural tradition: A.'s career was almost exactly contemporary with that of the
founders (or forerunners) of what would come to be known as Zen Buddhism (esp. Tao-
sheng, ca. AD 360-434: cf. H. Dumoulin, A History of Zen Buddhism [New York,
1963], 61). They would have understood each other instinctively. If that is not the
conventional view of Augustine, then whatever this commentary can do to suggest the
possibility is all to the good. That the parallels are not purely imaginary strikes the eye
from this paragraph from a respected and sober general work: `Here we already find the
essential themes which will characterize Augustine's thought throughout his career:
God's constant presence to the self, even when its attention is directed toward the
external world; the divine light as the source of all the truths that we apprehend; the
need to “remember” the divine presence and turn within; the goal of immediate vision
of God.' (TeSelle 68.) That links to the east are not preposterous to suggest at this
period, cf. civ. 10.32, where Porphyry's de regressu animae is quoted as assigning some
authority in describing the `universalis via animae liberandae' to the `Indorum mores ac
disciplina.' For a sketch of what is possible in a related direction, see F.-J. Thonnard,
`Augustinisme et sagesse hindoue', RA 5(1968) 157-74.
103
 

Refs. in brackets to parallel passages of the Confessions. The title of this appendix
echoes, and pays homage to, Courcelle's classic article, `Les premières confessions de
saint Augustin', REL 21-22(1943-44), 155-74. He concentrates on the first passage here,
beata v. 1.4, and more generally on texts with express autobiographical, `factual'
content, while this selection includes texts that partake equally, or more than equally, of
interpretation as against narrative. See also the passage from lib. arb. 1.11.22 quoted and
discussed above. Courcelle's form of presentation is enlightening in its own way, setting
out pieces of text in parallel columns; it is in part to complement his approach that the
integral texts are given here. For a more detailed presentation of beata v. 1.4, see now J.
Doignon, BA 4/1.135-40.
104
 

Maur. and Knöll read cautissime; comparable timidity of the scribes at 4.3.6, `Nebridius
. . . castus'.
105
 

This phrase corroborates the observation above that lib. arb. 1.11.22 and 3.18.52-
3.19.53 have personal reference for A.
106
 

Sound is not the same as flawless. The number of emendations accepted in any edition
is small, and loci desperati are very few (perhaps only 1.14.23 and 8.2.3). One passage
(12.28.38) had been the object of a universally accepted emendation since the Louvain
edition of 1576, but that is no longer tenable.
107
 

At present the count is approximately 333, but Verheijen (CCSL 27.lx) suspected
another hundred remain to be catalogued. See A. Wilmart, MA 2.259-268, as
supplemented by L. Verheijen, Augustiana 29(1979), 87-96, and by the continuing
volumes of Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des heiligen Augustinus
(Sitzungsber. Akad. Wien, 1969ff).
108
 

Important refinements were added by M. Gorman, JThS n.s. 34(1983), 114-45. I know
the MSS SOCDG from microfilms, using them as a check on the editions; fresh
collations of S and O convince me that Knöll, Skutella, and Verheijen may be relied on
(particularly as they offer a check on each other).
109
 

Dates and provenances of ninth century manuscripts attributed to Bischoff by Gorman,

art. cit. 115.
110
 

As A. Isnenghi noted (Augustiana 15[1965], 6), BPZ are fond of corrections that
smooth the text for the grammatically and doctrinally sensitive.
111
 
Only a small portion of the text the Confessions as a whole is included in Eugippius'
sixth-century anthology of Augustinian texts; I have suggested elsewhere (Augustiana
29[1979], 281-2) that the researches of Verheijen showed that of the existing ninth-
century witnesses, G offers the closest likeness to what can be descried of Eugippius'
text. Gorman, art. cit. 143-4, holds to the hope represented in his stemma that a
Eugippius-related codex may yet come to light representing a third overall branch of the
MS tradition. The only substantial contribution of Eugippius at present is the
demonstration that we may use at least CD and EG to corroborate S and O and to help
us in deciding between them when they disagree; but it is clear, as Gorman has proved
in detail, that what we have is only a respectable text, not a scientifically grounded one.
In default of a vast labor of collation of eleventh-century MSS, we may never have one.
112
 

Pusey's translation has a classic status among English versions, and remains in print,
though increasingly cut off from contemporary readers by its style. The best English
translation is that of J. K. Ryan.
113
 

Despite the attention to quisquiliae in the app., the errors of the underlying collations
were numerous. Skutella's edition excels Knöll's not least in accuracy of collations.
(And the reader who knows that Knöll preferred S habitually will be surprised to see
how often Knöll abandons that MS, but should know that in most of those cases, Knöll
had an incorrect report of S before him.)
114
 

The Madrid edition of 1930 by A. C. Vega was not widely read outside Spain until the
1950s when it was revised and expanded in the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos
(Madrid, 1951, 5th ed. 1968); what he did, Skutella did better, and neither of his
editions presented a real apparatus criticus (the BAC reprint seems to have been
expanded by use of Skutella). He has some useful notes.
115
 

Esp. in volumes 13-14 of the Bibliothèque Augustinienne, with French translation and
notes (a work of very great merit), and in the Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana (Rome,
1965), with some corrections by M. Pellegrino and translation and notes by C. Carena.
116
 

The published word index (Catalogus verborum quae in operibus Sancti Augustini
inveniuntur, VI: Confessionum Libri XIII [Eindhoven, 1982]) must be used with this
edition, but like the new Thesaurus Sancti Augustini (Louvain, 1989), the Eindhoven
volumes will be quickly rendered obsolete by computer technology.
117
 
In the commentary I have often silently modified punctuation of editions cited of A.'s
other works, mainly where older editions confuse with abundance, but I have modified
even good critical editions where it seemed the sense might be obscured.
118
 

See on 9.6.14, `et baptizati sumus' .

119
 

The `chapters' go back to Amerbach and the `paragraphs' to the Maurists: see Knöll,
CSEL ed., p. vi.
120
 

Although the manuscripts consistently have the familiar forms humiliare and
humiliatus, I have accepted the arguments of D. De Bruyne (MA 2.558-61) in favor of
the forms humilare and humilatus.
121
 

For those who wish to observe the practices of the scribes and editors, a more generous
selection of variant readings has been given in Book 1 than in later books; but for
detailed examination, Verheijen's apparatus has the most accurate and compendious
presentation.
122
 

The closest existing approximations are those of Gibb-Montgomery and Solignac; see
also the four volumes on the Confessions in the series Lectio Augustini: Settimana
Agostiniana Pavese (Palermo, 1984-87), containing thirteen essays, one on each book
of the Confessions in the tradition of the Lectura Dantis.
123
 

For a program, not all fulfilled here, see my paper at the Oxford Patristic Congress in
1983, published as `Gracia y oración en las Confesiones', Augustinus 31(1986), 221-31;
still to appear in Studia Patristica.
124
 

W. Theiler, reviewing Courcelle, Recherches, in Gnomon 25(1953), 113: `Ein

bedeutsames Buch, eine der wichtigsten Vorarbeiten für einen zukünftigen
wissenschaftlichen Kommentar zu den Konfessionen'; Knauer 21, `. . . daß ein
umfassender Kommentar zu den Konfessionen dringend erwünscht wäre' (the reviews
of Knauer, including that of Courcelle at REL 33[1956], 425, were full of similar
hopes); M. Pellegrino, `Per un commento alle “Confessioni”', REAug 5(1959), 439-46
(see 446, `. . . ricordando che un buon commento realizzato entro un termine di tempo
ragionevole sarà in ogni caso più utile d'un commento ideale che rimanga allo stato di
progetto . . ..'). More recently, cf. W. Steidle, Romanitas-Christianitas (Festschrift J.
Straub: Berlin, 1982), 527: `Eine durchgehende Kommentierung einzelner Bücher ist
gewiss ein Desiderat. Jedenfalls findet der Philologe hier noch ein weites, vielfach
unbeackertes Feld.'
125
 

See, for example, on A.'s habits of referring to living and biblical figures by name at
4.4.7 and 7.21.27.
126
 

The standard studies (F. Di Capua, MA 2.678-81, and M. Borromeo Carroll, The
Clausulae in the Confessions of St. Augustine [Washington, DC, 1940]) show that the
rhythms of the Confessions conform neither to the quantitative nor to the accentual
patterns preferred by ancient and medieval writers, and do not very closely resemble
those of A.'s own other works. Recent studies of late antique prose rhythm (e.g., S.
Oberhelman, CP 83[1988], 136-49.) confirm that uniqueness without approaching the
mystery any more closely. One hint may be found in Verheijen, Eloquentia Pedisequa
128-9, who observes that the `prosier' passages of the Confessions are more likely to
observe clausular rules, while the more idiosyncratically confessional passages obey
their own law. See also K. Polheim, Lateinische Reimprosa (Berlin, 1925; repr. 1963),
236-52.
127
 

The best single study, on a limited scale and not published, is W. Schmidt-Dengler,
Stilistische Studien zum Aufbau der Konfessionen Augustins (Diss. Wien, 1965).
Otherwise the best works touching upon style are C. I. Balmus, Étude sur le style de
saint Augustin dans les Confessions et la Cite de Dieu (Paris, 1930) (but as Schmidt-
Dengler observes, Balmus does not adequately take into account the biblical element),
Knauer's Psalmenzitate, Verheijen's Eloquentia Pedisequa, and L. Pizzolato, Le
fondazioni dello stile delle “Confessioni” di sant'Agostino (Milan, 1972); see also J.
Fontaine, Aug. Mag. 1.117-26 (on imagery), M. Pellegrino, Les Confessions, 267-315,
and several studies of C. Mohrmann, none systematic but all suggestive, esp. `Saint
Augustin écrivain', RA 1(1958), 43-66; `Considerazioni sulle “Confessioni” di
Sant'Agostino', Convivium 25(1957), 257-67, 27(1959), 1-71, and 27(1959), 129-39. P.
Cambronne, Recherches sur la structure de l'imaginaire dans les Confessions de saint
Augustin (microfiche thèse, Paris, 1982) is an immense study of certain themes
(ascent/descent, exile/return, exteriority/interiority) that I have not been able to draw
upon in useful ways here, but others may find it helpful; the work is not widely
disseminated and is very difficult to use: a fair sample of the method (rather subjective)
and content may be found in Cambronne's `Imaginaire et théologie dans les
Confessions', Bull. litt. eccl. 88(1987), 206-28.
128
 

I have taken heart from a footnote: du Roy 287n1: `Il est remarquable qu'à base de
presque toutes les tentatives d'intellectus fidei d'Augustin, il y a un texte scripturaire qui
en est l'amorce. . . . Mais la citation scripturaire accroche, pour ainsi dire, des thèmes du
néo-platonisme, lesquels, en revanche, en commandent l'interprétation.' It is too facile to
say that the neo-Platonic ideas control the interpretation: there is very often a marked
struggle going on. My approach seeks no more than to redress the balance here and
there in favor of the scriptural text.
129
 

This principle contradicts the prevailing impression (classically expressed by Marrou

246, quoted and discussed by du Roy 17) that A. changed his mind so often that works
of one period cannot reliably be interpreted by comparison with works of another
period. Readers of this commentary may decide in each individual case how great is the
danger.
130
 

Good advice for the active reader from an eighteenth century commentator on Milton,
quoted in A. Fowler, Milton: Paradise Lost (London, 1971), 18: `A Reader of Milton
must be Always upon Duty; he is Surrounded with Sense, it rises in every Line, every
Word is to the Purpose; There are no Lazy Intervals, All has been Considered, and
Demands, and Merits Observation.'
131
 

Based on Augustinus-Lexikon: Grundgedanken und Richtlinien/Technische Richtlinien

(Würzburg n.d. [1981?]), but I have made some modifications in detail and the
published Augustinus-Lexikon made alterations of its own.
132
 

The most reliable and compendious general surveys of chronology are Goldbacher on
the letters (CSEL 58: there are many revisions recorded in and suggested by A.
Mandouze, Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire: I, Afrique (303-533) [Paris,
1982], under names of recipients and authors), Verbraken on the sermons (P.-P.
Verbraken, Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de saint Augustin
[Steenbruge, 1976]), the list at CCSL 38.xv-xviii for the Enarrationes (with
modifications by H. Rondet, Bull. litt. eccl. 61[1960], 111-27 and 258-86, and 65[1964],
110-36, and by A.-M. La Bonnardière, Recherches de chronologie augustinienne [Paris,
1965]), and A. Mutzenbecher in her edition of retr. (CCSL 57) for the rest of the œuvre
(drawing upon O. Perler, Les Voyages de Saint Augustin [Paris, 1966]). The work of S.
Zarb remains fundamental, esp. his Chronologia operum S. Augustini secundum
ordinem Retractationum digesta (Rome, 1934 - reprinting articles in Angelicum for
1933 and 1934). I have not been able to gain access to a copy of the unpublished thèse
of A. Mandouze, Retractatio retractationum sancti Augustini (Paris, 1968), which
apparently covers the same ground. Of the works listed here, only 21 are given by
Mutzenbecher as having certain dates; virtually all the rest could have question marks,
though only a dozen or so are dated in a way at all arbitrary. There will be some
discussions in the commentary.
133
 
Reference made to chapter and verse of Job under discussion at the point of the citation;
users of the CSEL ed. can best follow these references using the app. script. at the foot
of the page.
134
 

Date from M.-F. Berrouard, arguing from ep. 23A* at BA 46B.541.

135
 

The CSEL ed. contains only Bks. 1-3.

136
 

There is also an edition by J. Pinborg (Boston, 1975).

137
 

n.b. the new `Divjak' letters with a separate numeration: epp. 1*-29*.
138
 

But cf. V. Law, RA 19(1984), 155-83, who convincingly argues that the authentic
vestiges of Augustine's treatise may be found in the so-called ars breviata.
139
 

The sermons on John have been the object of lively discussion. The landmarks are M.
Le Landais, Études augustiniennes (Paris, 1953), 9-95 (on the context of Io. ev. tr. 1-
16); A. M. La Bonnardière, Recherches de chronologie augustinienne (dating Io. ev. tr.
1-16 to 406/7 with Io. ep. tr., putting the rest off to 418 and after); D. F. Wright, JThS
n.s. 15(1964) 317-30 (separating Io. ev. tr. 20-22 from the rest); and M. F. Berrouard, in
BA 71.29-35 (accepting 406/7 for Io. ev. tr. 1-16) and BA 72.18-46 (dating Io. ev. tr. 17-
19 and 23-54 to 414, Io. ev. tr. 20-22 to 419/20). For Io. ev. tr. 55-124, ep. 23.A* now
lends credence to a date of 419: see M.-F. Berrouard, Les lettres . . . Divjak (Paris,
1983), 302ff.
140
 

Title as in Possidius and CSEL (the only critical edition); variant title (in PL and in
Aug.-Lex.): de anima et eius origine.
141
 

We may now, in the wake of L. Verheijen, La Règle de saint Augustin (Paris, 1967),
and of Lawless, Rule accept as authentic the ordo monasterii, obiurgatio, and the
praeceptum (critical texts at Verheijen, 1.148-52, 1.105-7, 1.417-37 respectively,
reprinted at Lawless, Rule 74-108).
142
 
Authenticity doubtful.
143
 

Authenticity controversial; defended and edited (ed. repr. in CCSL) by D. De Bruyne,

MA 2.327-40.
144
 

Refs. to retr. follow the conventional two-book scheme and `chapter' numbers as in
Mutzenbecher's edition.
145
 

The sermones post Maurinos [et post Morinum] reperti are designated by conventional
abbreviations, e.g., s. Den., s. Frang., s. Guelf.; most are published in MA 1, others (esp.
s. Lambot) have been published since in RB and REAug. For details, see Verbraken,
supplemented by the list at Aug.-Lex. 1.xxxix.
146
 

Names of biblical books follow the Vulgate, though the abbreviations are anglicized
(e.g., Jn., Lk.). To avoid confusion I always refer to `Ecclesiasticus' under the title
`Sirach'.
147
 

A hesitantly reconstructed text of Gn. 1 is printed preceding the commentary on 13.1.1.

148
 

And see D. De Bruyne, `Saint Augustin reviseur de la Bible', MA 2.544-78.

149
 

For other works on which A. commented, we are less soundly grounded and must
proceed cautiously in each case. Io. ev. tr., in particular, was written many years after
the Confessions and cannot be counted on to present a text identical with that which A.
used 397/401.
150
 

Some help comes from C. H. Milne, A Reconstruction of the Old-Latin Text of the
Gospels used by S. Augustine (Cambridge, 1926).
 Augustine, City of God*
by James J. O'Donnell

'Explicui tuos libros; neque enim tam languidi aut inertes erant, ut me aliud quam se curare
paterentur: iniecerunt manum, ereptumque aliis solicitudinum causis suis vinculis illigarunt ...,
ut ego anceps sim quid in illis magis mirer, sacerdotii perfectionem, philosophiae dogmata,
historiae plenam notitiam, an facundiae iucunditatem. ... Et usus es validissimo exemplo
recentis calamitatis, quo licet firmissime causam muniveris, tamen si utrumvis licuisset, id tibi
nolueram suffragari. Sed quando orta inde fuerat convincendorum stultitiae querela, necesse
fuit inde argumenta veritatis accersere.' (ep. 154.2, Macedonius ad A. [413/4])

These are the words of the first reviewer of the first installment of ciu.[[1]] Vicar of
Africa in the delicate year 413-414, after the uprising of Heraclian and the purge that
followed, Macedonius was the ideal reader for the 'magnum opus et arduum,' poised
between empire and church: he first wrote to A. (ep. 152) asking the bishop's views on
the delicate matter of episcopal intervention in the affairs of state. A. wrote back at
length (ep. 153), passing along a copy of the first three books of ciu.

It is good to heed the first reviewer's praises (for the happy combination of erudition and
argument, doctrine and eloquence), and his regret (that the work dilates on the late
catastrophe). His views give a useful perspective from which to consider the events of
410, and their echoes in Africa. That will lead naturally to a consideration of the
contents and sources of the work as we have it; but first it will be useful to review the
external facts as we have them for the composition and transmission of the work.

I. Dates of composition

The composition of ciu. occupied A. for at least a decade, perhaps fifteen years; cf. retr.
2.43.1. There are numerous indications of his progress on the work, from which a
tentative schedule may be constructed. The following outline summarizes the available
indications. Evidence for the dates is briefly indicated, but for fuller discussion one
should consult the note by G. Bardy in the BA edition of the retr. (12.587-588).

 Books 1-3: No later than 1 September 413; probably no earlier than late 412; book 1
may have circulated independently before the other two.[[2]]
 Books 4-5: In circulation by spring 415 (ep. 169).

 Books 6-10: Available by 417 (Orosius, hist., praef.; ep. 184a.).[[3]]

 Books 11-13: By 417/18 (ep. 184a; cf. ciu. 12.10 and trin. 13.9.12).

From this point, opinions diverge. Some think that all 22 books were finished by c. 422;
others insist on postponing 18 to at least 425 (citing ciu. 18.54.72: but others take the
arithmetic suggested there literally and insist on postponing that book until 429); but it
seems clear that the work was complete and out of A.'s hands by the time he wrote retr.
2.43.1 (426/7): 'Hoc ... grande opus tandem viginti duobus libri est terminatum.'
II. Manuscripts and editions

The first important document of the manuscript tradition of ciu. is the letter to Firmus
(now ep. 1A in CSEL 88). The purport of this letter for the manuscript tradition may be
summarized thus: (a) the 22 books were first prepared in separate quaterniones; (b)
together the quaterniones would be too bulky as a single codex; (c) hence A.
recommends that two codices be made, divided to incorporate the first ten books in one
manuscript, the last twelve in another. If further division is required, five codices are
recommended, to contain books 1-5, 6-10, 11-14, 15-18, and 19-22 respectively. It is
also clear that the individual books had come into circulation separately.

The last line of the letter to Firmus may indicate further important information:
'Quantum autem collegerit viginti duorum librorum conscriptio missus breuiculus
indicabit.' Following H.I. Marrou,[[4]] it has become the practice to treat the list of
chapter headings that occurs in many manuscripts (and which Eugippius seems to have
known in the sixth century when he made his excerpts from this work) as though it were
the breviculus here mentioned and to print the list at the head of the work. Though this
is an undoubted advance over the earlier practice of inserting the individual headings in
the text of the work itself, the headings may be post-Augustinian, and may even have
been written by Eugippius himself. In that case, whatever the 'breviculus' may have
been, we do not have it.[[5]]

Pending completion of the HUWA catalogue, we know of 394 medieval manuscripts of

all or part (or excerpts) of ciu., more even than of the Confessions. The most recent
analysis shows six manuscripts (and seven fragments) earlier than the ninth century;
thirty-one (plus twelve fragments and three collections of excerpts) survive from the
ninth century. More than half the ninth century manuscripts have not been used in any
critical edition. The most venerable manuscripts (on which our editions rely most
heavily) are: Lyon, Bibliotheque Municipale, 607 (L: North Italy, 6th century,
containing books 1-5); Veronensis XXVIII(26) (V: early fifth century [!], North Africa
[!], containing books 11-16), and Paris Bibliotheque Nationale lat. 12214 (C: Italy, sixth
century, containing books 1-9: to be supplemented with book 10 from the same codex,
now held at Leningrad, Publichnaja Biblioteka Q.1.4).[[6]] It will be seen that these
MSS offer impressively ancient testimony for the first sixteen books. Nevertheless, it
would be dangerous to assert that considerable improvement in the text, or at least
confidence in its foundations, could not be derived from a fuller examination of the
manuscript tradition than has yet been undertaken. Whether it is useful to think of two
different recensions of the work owing to A.'s own hand (see CCL 47.VII), which arises
from the differences between the readings of C and L and is further fueled from mention
in the letter to Firmus of the copy there transmitted as having been 'relectos,' could well
be resolved if we knew the MSS tradition better.[[7]]

The earliest printed edition of ciu. appeared at Subiaco in 1467; there are other
incunabula, of which the most important is that of Johannes Amberbach (Basel 1489).
In the following century, the edition with ample commentary by the Spanish humanist
Ludovicus Vives takes pride of place, but mention must also be made of the edition of
A.'s works prepared by the theologi Lovanienses (Antwerp 1576).

As with other works of A., the contribution of the Maurists is deservedly celebrated.
Their edition of ciu. appeared in 1685 and had the advantage of using the important MS
C, available to them in Paris. This edition was reprinted in volume 41 of Patrologia
Latina and elsewhere. There are two modern critical editions, of which only one has
continuing influence. The edition of E. Hoffmann (CSEL 40: Vienna 1899-1900) was
not well received,[[8]] leaving the field to the successive revisions of the edition
originally prepared by Bernhard Dombart and published by Teubner (Leipzig 1863);
Dombart revised his own work twice (1877 and 1905-08), while a fourth version was
revised by A. Kalb (1928-29). This edition has been taken over for volumes 47-48 of
CCL and provides the text in the BA (volumes 33-37, 1959-60). Other texts have
appeared (e.g., J. Welldon, London 1924), but none have independent critical merit,
while all earlier annotated editions yield to the BA edition. Nevertheless, there exists no
detailed philological commentary on even a single book of the ciu. There are
translations in every language, as well as bilingual editions with Latin text and
vernacular translation in several. Of unadorned translations, mention deserves to be
made of that in the series Fathers of the Church (New York 1950-52), with a lengthy
and important introduction by E. Gilson.

III. Circumstances of Composition

The rhetorical point of departure for civ. is clear and famous (retr. 2.43): 'Interea Roma
Gothorum irruptione agentium sub rege Alarico atque impetu magnae cladis eversa est.
Cuius eversionem deorum falsorum multorumque cultores, quos usitato nomine
paganos vocamus, in christianam religionem referre conantes, solito acerbius et amarius
Deum verum blasphemare coeperunt. Unde ego exardescens zelo domus Dei adversus
eorum blasphemias vel errores libros de civitate Dei scribere institui.' But A.'s rhetorical
strategy should not be allowed to obscure the sequence of events that led up to the work.

On 24 August 410 the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome, remaining to plunder for a
few days. The event is of modest importance among the military disasters of the late
empire, but it was too obvious a symbol to be viewed by contemporaries with any
balanced perspective. Jerome's disproportionate exclamations of grief (his epp. 123,
127, 130, etc.) are perhaps more famous than they deserve to be; other immediate
reactions are lacking. Our main historical sources for the events all date from after
years, when the events of that week had become the substance of polemic. How severe
the calamity really was cannot be said with certainty. It is safe to infer that there was
death and destruction, fire and plunder, and other injuries besides.

A.'s first known reaction to the events came in s. 81, preached at Hippo later in 410.
This text gives few circumstantial details of the sack; A. seems uncertain himself and
preaches under the assumption that the damage to the city may have been considerable.
He makes no mention of what will later be a central piece of his defense, that refugees
were granted sanctuary in the basilicas outside the City. There are already refugees
coming to Africa, for he closes thus: 'et in ista occasione multorum peregrinorum,
egentium, laborantium, abundet hospsitalitas vestra, abundent bona opera vestra.' (s.
81.9) There are already murmurs in the air: 'Locutiones illae, verba illa, quibus nobis
dicitur: Ecce quid faciunt tempora christiana, ecce quae sunt scandala. ... Ecce quae
nobis dicunt pagani: quae nobis dicunt, quod est gravius, mali christiani.' (s. 81.7-8) But
the response A. offers is already marked by the theme of citizenship and pilgrimage:
'Eia, christiane, coeleste germen, peregrini in terra, qui civitatem in coelo quaeritis, qui
angelis sanctis sociari desideratis, intelligite vos sic venisse ut discedatis.' (s. 81.7)
Some of the rhetorical devices that characterize ciu. are also in place: the pagan gods of
Rome are reproached for failing to preserve their first home, Troy, and Sallust and
Vergil are quoted to drive the point home. In short, there is worry in the air and A.
moves quickly to offer Christians the line to take; he shows no sign here that he shares
any of the extreme emotional response of a Jerome. The events entail for A., as they
always would, a threat against Christianity in the realm of ideas and ideology; the
material threat to the stability of the Roman regime is an incidental concern. The
response is in an accordingly lofty tone, buttressed with secular and sacred learning and
calm reflection.

A second sermon (s. 105) is variously dated to late 410 (Kunzelmann: at Hippo) and to
the summer of 411 (Perler: at Carthage). It resembles s. 81 on many points, though it
seems to have been preached at a time when the true dimensions of the catastrophe had
become known. There is still no mention of victims taking shelter in the basilicas,
though there is other special pleading of a kind that appears in ciu. (some of the
particular points do not recur). It is not true, he argues, that as soon as the old gods were
abandoned, Rome was taken: Radagaisus had been a pagan and a sacrificer, but he was
turned away (in 402), while Alaric's Visigoths, though not Catholic, were Christian.
Christians suffered in the sack (this is the first admission of this), but they knew how to
bear their sufferings. (Again there is a range of allusion to secular literature which is not
customary in Augustine's sermons, including a neat juxtaposition of two Vergilian texts
and a prosopoeia of Vergil himself to explain their opposition.)

A third sermon (s. 296, printed in a fuller version as Casin. 1.133 [MA 1.402-412]) is
securely dated to 29 June 411, almost a year after the events at Rome: the themes are un
changed, the evenness of tone still firm. The sermon, preached on the feast of Sts. Peter
and Paul, mentions of the basilicas at Rome, and yet does so to excuse their impotence
to protect Christians, not (as in ciu.) to exploit their power: 'Iacet Petri corpus Romae,
dicunt homines, iacet Pauli corpus Romae, Laurentii corpus Romae, aliorum martyrum
sanctorum corpora iacent Romae: et misera est Roma, et vastatur Roma: affligitur,
conteritur, incenditur; tot strages mortis fiunt, per famem, per pestem, per gladium. Ubi
sunt memoriae apostolorum? ... Ibi sunt, ibi sunt, sed in te non sunt. Utinam in te essent,
quisquis ista loqueris, quisquis ista desipis.... memoria est excitans amorem ad aeterna,
non ut terrae inhaereas, sed ut cum apostolo caelum cogites.' (Casin. 1.133.6-7)

A year after the fact, therefore, A. was still imperfectly informed about the events that
had occurred and, though concerned to defend Christianity against accusing murmurs,
had not lifted his pen on the subject. A fourth sermon (exc. urb.) completes the dossier
of his public reaction. This is A.'s most concentrated homiletic treatment of the sack,
marked by increasing concern to explain the sufferings of Christians. The text for the
sermon is Abraham's debate with God over the fate of Sodom and the ensuing bargain
by which God would spare the city if only ten just men were found within it. Were there
not ten just men at Rome, among so many Christians? Such is the question pressed by
men 'qui scripturis nostris impietate insidiantur, non qui eas pietate requirunt.' A.'s
answer has a quibbling nicety about it: 'Cito ergo respondeo, "aut invenit ibi tot iustos et
pepercit civitati, aut, si non pepercit civitati, nec iustos invenit." Sed respondetur mihi
manifestum esse quod Deus non pepercit civitati. Respondeo ego: "immo mihi non est
manifestum."' (exc. urb. 2) After all, Rome was not swallowed up by fire as Sodom
was; 'ab urbe autem Roma quam multi exierunt et redituri sunt, quam multi manserunt
et evaserunt, quam multi in locis sanctis nec tangi potuerunt!' Slaughter, torture, and
captivity inflicted upon the just all have scriptural precedents. 'Horrenda nobis nuntiata
sunt; strages factae, incendia, rapinae, interfectiones, excruciationes hominum. Verum
est, multa audivimus, omnia gemuimus, saepe flevimus, vix consolati sumus; non
abnuo, non nego multa nos audisse, multa in illa urbe esse commissa.' (exc. urb. 3) This
sermon is marked by stronger expressions of distress and sympathy than the earlier
ones: but the expressions have the mark of rhetorical calculation, as though A. now feels
that to make his point he must insist on the depth of his own feelings, where before it
had not suited his point to do so. At the same time, this sermon has none of the
apparatus of learned classical quotation of the earlier ones, and is directed against a
particular kind of murmurer who at least knows the Christian scripture, even if his
attitude towards it is not what A. would like.

There is no sign here of any panic in A. or in his flock. The energy A. expends on
refutation of the church's critics increases as time passes (though the threat of the
Visigoths had faded markedly with the death of Alaric and the movement of his troops
towards Gaul and Spain--they were in Gaul by early 412). His audience is always his
own flock and his concern seems to grow insofar as the criticism comes from closer at
hand--from those who read scripture, not merely from the urbane pagans who mocked
Christianity from a distance. There is thus little reason to think that ciu. as we have it
would ever have been written if things had remained as they stood a year after the sack
of Rome: the rhetorical opportunity the calamity offered might have been neglected. But
then A. was approached privately in ways that set his pen moving with greater ambition.

In the spring of 411, there had come to Carthage the imperial commissioner
Marcellinus, to preside over the conference of June 411 between Catholic and Donatist
bishops. The Donatist controversy was uppermost in A.'s mind through these months;
the successful outcome of the conference was the one goal on which his efforts were
bent. The results of the conference were richly satisfactory to him: Marcellinus was
everything he could have hoped for in an imperial representative, for he was not only a
skillful public official but a devout Christian and supporter of orthodoxy from
conviction as well as habit. In September 411 A. returned to Hippo from Carthage,
remaining there for about a year; from that period comes a revealing correspondence
between bishop and commissioner, in which we can trace the germination of ciu.

While A. was in the country in the winter of 410-11 recovering from an illness, one
particular refugee from Rome passed through Hippo whom A. would have profited from
meeting: Pelagius. His passage through Africa on his way to the Holy Land left a stir of
discussion, which came to A. through Marcellinus: the first two pamphlets of the long
stream that would attack Pelagius's ideas were written in response to (now lost)
inquiries from Marcellinus (pecc. mer. and spir. et litt.).

Into this discussion a mutual acquaintance then intervened. Rufius Antonius Agrypnius
Volusianus, sometime proconsul of Africa, later to be Prefect of the City of Rome and
Praetorian Prefect for Italy, scion of a venerable family, was not quite a Christian. His
mother was Christian, as was Volusianus's niece, the remarkable Melania the younger.
It is conventional to say flatly that Volusianus was a pagan; it is true that he received
baptism only on his deathbed in 437 in Constantinople, and then at the pressing instance
of Melania; from the clearly pagan side, Rutilius Namatianus was a friend and spoke
fondly of him. But there were many men of Volusianus's station in life in his time
whose allegiances do not fit neatly into one of only two categories. Nothing forbids us
to think Volusianus a politely interested, politely noncommittal figure, not unlike the A.
of 385, who used his status as catechumen to advance his career and who attended
Ambrose's sermons out of curiosity and prudence.

A. wrote to Volusianus in late 411 or early 412 (ep. 1.32)[[9]] at Volusianus's mother's
request, inviting him to discuss his difficulties in matters of religion. Volusianus replied
(ep. 135) with elaborate politeness, addressing A. thrice as 'domine vere sancte ac
merito venerabilis pater.' He told of a recent conversation among friends that had ranged
over rhetoric, poetry, philosophy, and theology (Volusianus adds careful flattery for
Augustine's presumed interest in each of these subjects): the group broke up when one
man, unnamed, raised shocking questions about the life of Christ: 'stupemus tacentes.'
The virgin birth, the infirmities of the human Jesus, and the paltriness of the wonders
worked by Jesus--all these objections are delicately posed. The other participants are too
modest to offer answers, 'ne dum incautius secreta temerantur, in culpam deflecteret
error innoxius,' and Volusianus resolves to refer the puzzles to A.

Marcellinus must have taken part in that conversation: he wrote at the same time to A.
(ep. 136), excusing the bashfulness of Volusianus, who is afraid to write all he wishes to
ask. (The questions Volusianus had attributed to someone in the group were likely his
own, whether he had voiced them or not.) Marcellinus describes Volusianus as a man in
danger of being lost to Christianity: 'homo qui a veri Dei stabilitate multorum quorum in
hac urbe copia est persuasione revocatur.' It is those men who throw up against
Christianity particularly the deeds of Apollonius of Tyana (whose life had been
translated into Latin twenty years earlier by the solemn pagan prefect Flavianus),
Apuleius, 'aliosque magicae artis homines.' (Hence the criticism offered in ep. 135 of
the miracles of Jesus: pagan worthies had done mightier things than these few cures.) It
is Marcellinus who now brings to A.'s attention the objection that is troubling
Volusianus the most deeply: Christianity's doctrine of turning the other cheek is
inconsistent with the management of a res publica. 'Nam quis ... Romanae provinciae de
praedatori non mala velit belli iure reponere? ... 'per christianos principes christianam
religionem maxima ex parte servantes tanta (etiamsi ipse [Volusianus!] de hac parte
taceat) reipublicae mala evenisse manifestum sit.' Marcellinus is careful himself to
make no direct mention of the disaster (compare Macedonius' fastidiousness at the
treatment of the sack in civ. itself).

Also present when these issues were discussed was an 'eximius Hipponensis regionis
possessor'--one of A.'s wealthy neighbors, who had offered ironical praise of A., while
professing himself unable to answer the questions raised. It is in such men, polite, self-
satisfied, Christian perhaps in name, but worldly men withal, that such objections had
the greatest strength. It was for them that Marcellinus sought A.'s help: 'libros confici
deprecor, ecclesiae, hoc maximo tempore, incredibiliter profuturos.'

A. responded to Volusianus and Marcellinus in kind. Writing to Volusianus (ep. 137),

he dealt with the questions raised in ep. 135. Important themes of civ. begin to appear:
the criticism alleged against Cicero in Books 2 and 19 is adumbrated: 'Hic etiam
laudabilis reipublicae salus: neque enim conditur et custoditur optime civitas, nisi
fundamento et vinculo fidei, firmaeque concordiae, cum bonum commune diligitur.' (ep.
137.17, cf. 138.10) The response to Marcellinus (ep. 138) more explicitly echoes the
doctrines and the rhetorical ploys already used in the sermons on the sack of Rome. The
first books of ciu. soon followed. The prefatory epistle at the head of ciu. attributes the
work's composition to a promise made to Marcellinus (and debitum is the word A. used
in the last paragraph the last words of Book 22, when Marcellinus was long dead, to
characterize the force that kept him at his task).

The first book of ciu. reflects the polemical situation in which A. wrote and the
rhetorical devices with which he chose to exploit his opportunity. The book offers two
principal arguments, in a kind of ring composition:[[10]] that those who criticize the
Christian god themselves benefitted from his protection by taking refuge in the basilicas
of the apostles; and that those Christians who suffered in the sack of the city lost
nothing of essential value and cannot complain of the injustice of God. The first
argument opens and closes the book, and compels us to infer that A. had in mind
specific individuals who were present in Africa at the time he wrote. The second
argument fills more than half the book and includes the long discussion of the plight of
religious women who had been raped during the siege. Once again, the shape and size
of the argument compels us to infer that A. had in mind to offer consolation for
particular individuals known to his audience.

It was the case of the women that posed the most delicate issues. Some women, filled
with shame at what they had suffered, had in fact committed suicide; this was a course
which had not been universally disapproved by earlier Christian writers. But there were
other religious women who had suffered the same indignity and who had escaped to
Africa, there to be confronted with the doubly galling taunts of those who suggested that
their God had failed them (in allowing them to be raped), and that they had failed their
vows of chastity by not emulating the example of their sisters in suicide (1.19: 'istos ...
qui Christianis feminis in captivitate compressis alieni ab omni cogitatione sanctitatis
insultant'). A. urges consolation upon just those women, exploiting and transforming in
his cause the most famous Roman exemplum of chastity, Lucretia.

The last pages of Book 1 return to the critics whose views are attacked: cultured
refugees, who escaped the sack by taking refuge in the apostles' shrines, and who now
wander from the churchs to the theaters of Carthage, Christians in outward show, but
separated from the faithful community in essentials: (1.35: 'sicut ex illorum numero
etiam Dei civitas habet secum, quamdiu peregrinatur in mundo, conexos communione
sacramentorum, nec secum futuros in aeterna sorte sanctorum, ... qui etiam cum ipsis
inimicis adversus Deum, cuius sacramentum gerunt, murmurare non dubitant, modo
cum illis theatra, modo ecclesias nobiscum replentes.').

A. is too polite to name these people. It is not likely he would speak so harshly if
Volusianus were the target of his words; but there must have been others, Christian in
name whose doubts and hesitations were the real source of unease that made A. so
polemically vigorous here. Whether there were real die-hard pagans, devout believers in
the ancient gods, in A.'s original audience, may sincerely be doubted. There is no reason
to think that the immediate pretext for writing ciu. came from outside the Christian
community. That the work emphasizes so strongly, from first page to last, that the
apparent bounds of that community do not precisely match those of the heavenly civitas
shows how strongly A. sought to reach those who bore the name and shared the
sacraments of Christ, but who were yet alien to the inner grace: 'perplexae quippe sunt
istae duae civitates in hoc saeculo invicemque permixtae, donec ultimo iudicio
dirimantur.' (1.35)
In sum, it was not precisely the sack of Rome in 410 that aroused A. to write ciu. but the
lingering contention it provoked among sophisticated citizens, Christian in name but
classical in allegiances. A. took up the challenge with a power and a firmness of
intention that still astonish his readers. The notion of writing about the two cities had
been already been in A.'s mind;[[11]] circumstances of the years after 410 offered him a
witty and polemically effective point of departure and provided the catalyst that allowed
the great work to precipitate itself from the creative centers of A.'s mind. He wrote
throughout for the kind of audience from which one can expect to hear characteristically
pagan arguments suggested, but to which one can nevertheless make the kind of
arguments that are characteristically Christian.

The first three books (either published as a group, or else the first preceded the other
two) appeared in the difficult year 412/13, when Africa was in an uproar over the
usurpation and revolt of Heraclian. That crisis cost Marcellinus his life (cf. ep. 151); ciu.
might well have been broken off after the Marcellinus' death. But it was not: the other
19 books appeared over the next decade or so, with never a mention of Marcellinus and
only the slightest hint on the very last page of the work's origins. In later books, events
of 410 could be mentioned without emotional or polemical overtones (e.g., 15.23): so
far did the book grow from its roots.

IV. Contents

Civ. is the longest single work presenting a sustained argument unified around a
coherent single theme to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity (apart from histories and
compilations, whose bulk is inherent in the matter and whose disposition is far less than
artful than that required in a work such as ciu.). Leaving aside collections of sermons
(e.g., on the Psalms or the Gospel of John), it is far and away the longest work
Augustine ever wrote, far longer than any of the surviving works of Plato or Cicero. It is
every inch the product of its times, both in style and in content. It should not therefore
be surprising that modern readers have differed widely in the interpretation of its
purport.

It can be taken as a livre de circonstance that grew out of control and into which A.
poured all manner of material as it occurred to him. It can be argued that the initial
polemical thrust carried him through three books, a second polemical inspiration carried
him through the tenth book, and then a third, purely theological, enthusiasm overtook
him and inspired the last dozen books. Both of these lines of interpretation take the
circumstances of 410-413 as the essential point of departure for all that followed and
insist that the common intent of apologetic and comfort for the distraught be the source
of any unity the work possesses.

Other interpreters see grander structure. For them the initial polemical movement was
quickly exhausted, and the inspiration that replaced it was the ambition to design a
grand plan for all of human history. At this point, opinions diverge between those
(mainly the more recent) writers who emphasize the philosophy of history detached
from particular circumstances and those (descendants in many ways of A.'s own
acquaintance Orosius) who saw a particular apology intended to identify the Christian
Church (and often the Christian Empire) of this world closely, if not exclusively, with
the City of God.
Both main schools of interpretation have flourished in the absence of a sustained
tradition of philological commentary and analysis of the text itself. It is not easy to
descry the structures and intent of a work of this sort, so much sui generis, so out of
temper with modern times; hence it is easy either to assert that no structure exists, or to
create one's own structure from a selective reading. With the discovery in this century of
the letter to Firmus, however, the case against order has been made much more difficult,
and studies of the structure and purport of the work have been brought closer to the text
of the work itself, much clarifying our knowledge.

A discussion of the detailed structure of the work and the individual books will appear
below. The following remarks on the principal themes and arrangement assume such
analysis at every point; they only attempt to extract a few main points in brief compass.
[[12]]

We first hear of the two cities in the vera rel., written at Tagaste in 389/91. The theme,
fundamentally scriptural, is not infrequent in A.'s works before Rome was ever
threatened. That he had conceived a work on the Two Cities on purely theological and
exegetical grounds is clear form an important text in the Gn. litt. 11.15.20:

'Hi duo amores, quorum alter sanctus est, alter immundus; alter socialis, alter privatus;
alter communi utilitati consulens propter supernam societatem, alter etiam rem
communem in potestatem propriam redigens propter arrogantem dominationem; ...
praecesserunt in angelis ... et distinxerunt conditas in genere humano civitates duas, sub
admirabili et ineffabili providentia Dei. ... De quibus duabus civitatibus latius fortasse
alio loco, si dominus voluerit, disseremus.'

Nothing in the original theme required the discussion be located in a contemporary,

polemical matrix. It was providence that gave A. the pretext for writing the work in a
way that found its target, and perhaps its audience, ready made. A.'s own desire to write
a work on the Two Cities may have contributed to the zeal with which he took up the
murmurs in the air after 410 and made them the object of such vehement polemical
attacks.

The fundamental pastoral point made by A. writing on the two cities is that Christians
live in this world but they are not of this world. They are present here as strangers
sojourning in a foreign country, enjoying the the blessings the world has to offer, but
always ready to move on.[[13]] Heaven is the Christian's true home, and it is to heaven
that his affections and his loyalties should be directed. It was probably the happenstance
observation of the analogy that obtained between this metaphor for Christian life and
the facts of the situation in Africa after 410 that inspired A. to join the intended work on
the two cities with the rejoinder to the skeptics of those years. The skeptics were to be
found among wealthy and discontented refugees from Rome, who found themselves
living as aliens in Africa, discontented and frustrated, taking the pleasures of the
theaters and shows, but always hankering to return to the great city far away. The neat,
even witty, polemical point of the opening book of ciu. is that the refugees have exactly
the right attitude: they need to realign their loyalties and their longings toward a greater
city, farther away, and then only will they see the fate of temporal kingdoms in true
perspective.
This juxtaposition of metaphor and reality begot the first ten books of ciu. But the
polemic against the pagans and their gods is never more than incidental to the main
purpose of the whole work. A work of demolition may be necessary and enlightening,
but it is the construction that follows that is of greater significance. The first books are
thus curiously divided between what we are inclined to think of as the merely
rhetorical--such as the mocking description of the gods of the Roman marriage bed and
their assorted functions at 6.9--and the more trenchantly argumentative--such as the
serious and on the whole sympathetic discussion of the merits and demerits of
Platonism in Books 8-10. The analysis of Rome's grandeur and decline in the opening
books offers a similar mixture: A.'s attitudes toward Rome were certainly ambivalent
and complex and throw much light on his dealings with imperial power and its
functionaries,[[14]] but it must nevertheless be admitted that ciu. is of much less use to
us as a source for these opinions than it would be if the subject had been more central to
the writer's purpose.

It is with Book 11 that the central, constructive stage of ciu. opens. It quickly becomes
clear that the debate of Books 1-10 is now for all intents and purposes over: either the
reader has been convinced, or he has left off the battle and departed (cf. 11.5). Scriptural
texts had been quoted throughout the first ten books, but here they take on their full
authority for the first time.

The organization of Books 11-22 is chronological, within the frame of scripture. The
method of Books 11-22 is exegetical, A.'s characteristic method. He will repeat in some
of its pages some of what he had said in several other places (notably Gn. litt. and conf.
11-13) about the creation and fall of men and angels in Genesis; his narrative of world
history (Books 15-18) would seem strangely selective and inconsistent to a reader of his
time accustomed to read the classical historians, or even the Christian chroniclers; but it
is nevertheless a progress through the most important pieces of the scriptural data. The
last books, finally, will place exegesis in the service of eschatology, culminating on the
last pages of the work with the anticipation of heavenly repose and order, to match the
peace and lack of division that is evoked on the first pages of Book 11.

It is to these books preeminently that later ages with pressing questions of their own
have come seeking A.'s answers. The philosophy of history and political theory embody
vital concerns of moderns; when they turn to A., it is in these pages that they find most
nearly what suits their purposes. Yet it must be asserted and constantly held in mind that
it was not to answer the questions of other ages that A. wrote. Any Augustinian
philosophy of history or theory of politics extracted from these pages will suffer from
grave defects at the outset; not only will his ideas bear the marks of the times in which
they were conceived, but they will only lend themselves to the very notion of a
philosophy of history or politics with the greatest difficulty and with the most glaring of
gaps.

Taken in himself, and read in the context of his times, A. has little to offer except
theology and exegesis: the fruits of his reading of history are the theological virtues of
faith, hope, and charity. A. would place no value whatever on the patterns he sees in
history if they were separated from his expectation of the four last things.

At the center of the whole work is a single scriptural theme, illuminated and made the
basis for an extended meditation on the whole message of revelation itself. The fall of
angels and men, itself the result of a derangement of loves, has brought schism into the
soul of man. In the natural state, man is now a stranger to himself, incapable of self-
knowledge; thinking himself good and virtuous but in reality full of pride and
disordered loves. How this can come about is a mystery in some ways (ciu. 12.7), but it
is a fact. Left to itself, human society would be nothing but the city of this world, cut off
from God, destined to die in body and soul.

But the fact of divine mercy and mediation (already adumbrated in the first ten books,
culminating in the vivid contrast between Christ and the demons in Book 10) has
nurtured a fragment of the original excellence of mankind. This spark exists in a portion
of the human race, and always has. Abel found favor with God; in all three ages of
divine dispensation (ante legem, sub lege, sub gratia), God has seen those who carry the
standards of the heavenly city. In the desolation of a sinful world, these figures have
held out the hope that the journey home is possible, that men need not resign themselves
to citizenship in a corrupt city but may already participate in the citizenship of heaven,
with faith and hope in its full restoration.

Human history between Adam and the second coming is thus radically incoherent.
There is one, readily visible pattern for the earthly city, marked by disasters and wars,
public and private, of every kind; but there is another pattern, dimly visible but
obscured by sin, according to which the heavenly city lives. It is the task of revelation to
remove the scales from the eyes of those who would look for this pattern; it is the role
of exegesis to bring home that message.

The aim of A.'s exposition is not to satisfy intellectual curiosity: none of his mature
works were ever written to that end. The purpose was entirely pastoral: to dismantle
first (in Books 1-10) the prevailing, all-too-natural, interpretation of the meaning of
human affairs, and then to find hidden just be neath the surface a second interpretation,
divine in origin, full of hope for the future. The error of those who would lament bitterly
the fall of a single earthly city of bricks and mortar is the error of those who are unable
to distinguish shadow from reality: the sovereign remedy is the intervention of the
divine Word of redemption and illumination. No wonder, then, that by the end of the
work the ground of discussion has shifted entirely away from where it started. In
demolition at the outset, A. could be whimsical, even sarcastic and mocking; in the
construction that follows, he abandons the tone and even the style of his earlier books
for the style of his own mature religious works.

V. Structure

Modern students have not always been kind to the literary qualities of ciu. Adverse
judgments on the structure and organization have been commonplace, and even the
work's most devoted students have often damned with faint praise. H. Scholz was
willing to admit that the first ten books could pass as a Kunstwerk, but of 11-22 he said,
"Es felht die Einheit und Konzentration. ... Der zweite Hauptteil ... ist ... ein lockeres,
halborganisiertes Gefüge.'[[15]] A detailed analysis of the contents led two American
scholars to find in ciu. the defects of homiletic digression, deviation from the subject,
superfluous arguments in vain pursuit of clarity, prolixity, repetition, and a penchant for
symbolism (especially number symbolism); their summary of the contents carefully
stigmatized the passages containing these defects. Fully one-fifth of the whole text was
so marked (and 60% of book ten was revealed to be a disfigurement to the integrity of
the underlying plan).[[16]] There is also this judgment to contend with: 'Un commerce
prolonge avec l'oeuvre augustinienne met bien souvent a l'épreuve la patience du'un
Français d'aujourd'hui: "Saint Augustin compose mal," "sa composition is beaucoup
trop lache," telle est la critique qui se formule spontanement.'[[17]] And yet A. was after
all a thoroughly trained and, before his conversion, notably successful practitioner of the
principles of ancient rhetoric. To be sure, the almost unparallelled length of his major
works and the lack of explicit rhetorical doctrine on the way to construct such extensive
arguments leaves us without obvious recourse to ways of explaining A.'s structures;
still, caution in adverse judgments is certainly necessary. This was handsomely
recognized by the author of the last quoted criticism, writing a decade after his first
judgment: '"Saint Augustin compose mal ...": jugement d'un jeune barbare ignorant et
presomptueux.'[[18]] Marrou's famous palinode and the pregnant suggestions that
followed opened the way for a more subtle and careful analysis of the underlying
movement of the work and an appreciation of its craft in the traditions of ancient
rhetoric.

It cannot be argued that A.'s work was be in every way to the taste of all of his own first
readers: yet Macedonius seems to have been quite satisfied. Much must be conceded to
the long period of gestation and composition: it would be difficult to sustain a close and
faithful adherence to a detailed outline when the subjects were so complex, and when
the work was of necessity only part of the literary activity, and literary activity only part
of the life, of a busy bishop.

It cannot be urged, for example, that the long series of miracles outlined in 22.8 stood in
mind when A. took up the pen to write the first page of Book 1: between Books 1 and
22 had intervened the return of Orosius from the east with the relics of Stephen and the
construction by Evodius of the memoria at Hippo to enshrine the relics and give a focus
to their power. But the discussion of the nature of a populus in book two is marked by a
promise to return to the subject "suo loco;" (2.21) the promise comes due seventeen
books later: "Quapropter nunc est locus, ut quam potero breviter ac dilucide expediam,
quod in secundo huius operis libro me demonstraturum esse promisi ...." (19.21.) This
implies a degree of control over material and its disposition that renders adverse
judgment liable to severe correction.

It must be borne in mind in seeking the rationale behind the composition of the great
works of the ancient rhetorical tradition is that the aim of such writing is persuasion
more than demonstration, successful deployment of rhetoric rather than dialectic.
Moderns prefer dialectic to rhetoric, prefer a careful and logical outline explicitly
articulated and closely followed. The ancients have little such to offer; late antique taste
must be allowed its preferences. Even the 'digression' has a place in such a structure.

The modern reader must above all be careful neither to denigrate nor to overpraise. The
principles on which A. worked are subject to criticism, and he did not always implement
them with the greatest success; he could juxtapose the serenity and lucidity of Book 19
to the seemingly endless expanse of loosely connected discussions of Book 18 (three-
quarters again as long as the average of the preceding seventeen books). But it does now
seem clear that there was a clear plan in outline at the outset of the work, and that in the
implementation of that plan A. seldom lapsed from giving a rhetorical performance that
did his reputation credit; the first books have a bravura quality that fades from the later
ones, and control wavers at times, but in the main the work must be accounted a
success.

It is necessary to add one further principle to elucidate the structure of ciu. There is
indeed a disparity of texture between Books 1-10 and 11-22. The first books, openly
'contra paganos,' are composed more in the secular manner of a Cicero; but 11-22,
where A.'s purposes and premises are now avowedly ecclesiastical, more closely
resemble in form and structure his own other works than they do the, for A.,
idiosyncratic Books 1-10. A close examination of the style of the two halves would
reveal comparable shifts: from the full and dramatic periodicity of the opening pages of
Book 1, we move to a more restrained and straightforward style in the later books. Here
again, we see A. determined in the first books to demonstrate his mastery of all the form
and content of classical secular culture, only to demolish the pretensions of that culture
and then revert, in the later books, to the humbler and more practical style of his
ecclesiastical writings in order to expound an ecclesiastical message.

The main lines of the architecture of the work, and something of the disparity between
the first and second halves, may be glimpsed in a compendious chart. No such outline is
of much value in itself; it should be read only as a suggestion of the depths that lie
behind such superficial analyis. Still, the symmetry and order of the work as a whole
cannot escape our notice. (The rightmost column prints the number of printed lines of
text which each book occupies in the CCL printing of the Dombart-Kalb text. Note
particularly that the measured symmetries of the first ten books gradually disintegrate in
books 11-22; and note that the books of the first ten which our chart links in pairs offer
remarkable testimony of symmetry. Books 1 and 4 comprise 2569 lines together, Books
2 and 3, 2568; Books 6 and 7 comprise 2211, 8 and 9, 2222; both 5 and 10 are
noticeably longer than the four books preceding to which they provide a conclusion.
Such statistical magic is not in itself enough to prove the orderliness of A.'s
composition, but it may be thought to provide some silent testimony in corroboration to

what is otherwise evident.)

A more detailed summary of the contents follows:

Part One: The incapacity of traditional Roman religion to bring

felicitas to its votaries.

Book I (the calamities of 410: Rome and God under Christianity):

A. Refutation (chapters 1-9)
1. negative discussion of criticisms arising from
events of 410, with much reference to classical authors
(1-7)
2. attitude for Christians to take in face of
criticism (8-9)
B. Consolation (chapters 10-29)
1. detailed discussion of points of confusion and
regret (10-27)
a. loss of wealth (10)
b. hunger and starvation (11)
c. lack of proper burial (12-13)
d. captivity and imprisonment (14-15)
e. stupra and suicide (17-27)
(1) events of 410 (17-18)
(2) the case of Lucretia (19-27)
 2. attitude for Christians to take in face of
misfortunes (28-29)
C. Criticism of non-Christian attitudes (30-36)
1. luxuria the root of unrest (30-34)
2. summary/outline of whole work (35-36)

Book II (the moral lapses of Rome before Christ):

A. Introduction (1-3)
B. The gods and moral decay
1. Theatrics and the gods (4-14a)
[14b-16: Plato vs. Romulus: epitome of the whole
book in miniature.]
2. Interpretation (17-24)
a. moderate view (< Sallust) (17-20)
b. extreme view (< Cicero) (21-24)
C. Summary and conclusion (25-29)
1. with reference to chapters 17-24 (25)
2. with reference to chapters 4-14 (26-27)
3. with reference to critics (28)
4. exhortation (29)

Book III (the material ills of Rome before Christ):

A. Preface (1)
B. External ills and disorders in the period of which
Sallust spoke in praise (2-17)
1. Trojan war (2-8)
2. Numa (9-12)
3. Rome under the kings (13-15)
4. The first consuls (16)
5. The republic to the Punic wars (17)
C. The Punic wars and their consequences: the fatal crisis
(18-22)
D. Internal ills and disorders: Gracchi, Marius, Sulla,
etc.
E. Conclusion (31)

Book IV (Rome and God under traditional religion):

A. Prolegomena (1-7)
1. Introduction/summary of books 2-5 (1-2)
2. Introduction to subject of Book 4 (3-7)
B. A.'s view of the gods (8-23)
1. minor deities (8)
2. Jupiter (9-13)
3. minor deities, esp. Felicitas (14-23)
C. Roman philosophical views (24-32)
1. unattributed view that gods are named from their
functions (24-25)
2. Cicero: gods as poetic figments (26)
3. Scaevola: threefold theology (27-28)
4. unattributed views on Terminus, Mars, Iuventas (29)
5. Cicero on anthropomorphism and superstition (30)
6. Varro on the preferability of monotheism (31)
7. summary: in the end, the Romans preferred the
poets to the philosophers (32)
D. Conclusion (33-34)
1. Rise of Christianity (33)
2. Judaism: counterexample by way of conclusion (34)

Book V (the role of the true God in governing all things, even
the Roman empire):
A. Fate (1-11)
 1. The stars (1-7)
2. Divination and other means of descrying fate (8-11)
B. Greatness of the Romans (12-21)
1. Gloria: they have their reward, the saints
have
better (12-16)
2. Rome as moral exemplum: their virtues no virtues
at all by comparison with the saints (17-19); further
comparison with Epicureanism (20)
3. God governs all things, even Rome (21)
C. Summary of arguments stemming from events of 410 (by way
of postscript to books 1-5) (22-26)
1. War and its severity (with reference to the defeat
of Radagaisus) (22-23)
2. The fortunes and virtues of Christian emperors
(24-26a)
D. Conclusion (26b)

Book VI (Civil theology: introduction):

A. Introduction (Preface, 1)
B. Varro and the tripartite theology (2-9)
C. Seneca (10-11)
D. Conclusion and review (12)

Book VII (Civil theology: the dii selecti):

A. Introduction (Preface, 1-4)
B. Naturalistic interpretations (5-26)
1. General overview (5-6)
2. Janus and Jupiter (7-12)
3. The other gods (13-22)
[Euhemerus and Varro: a pause in the long
argument (18-19)]
4. Recapitulation (23-26)
[Cybele: the most shameful of the gods (24-26)]
C. Conclusion (27-35)
1. Varro's failure (27-28)
2. Christianity's success (29-33)
3. Numa: the ultimate failure of the Varronian
approach (34-35)

Book VIII (Natural theology: the Platonists):

A. Introduction (1)
B. The best philosophy (2-12)
1. Overview of history of philosophy (2-4)
2. Superiority of the Platonists (5-12)
C. Debate with the Platonists (13-27)
1. Apuleius on demons (13-22)
2. Hermes Trismegistus (23-27)
D. Conclusion: demons vs. martyrs (26-27)

Book IX (Natural theology: demons vs. angels):

A. Introduction (1-2)
B. Demons and passiones (2-8)
C. Demons as mediators (9-13)
[possibility of another mediator (14-15)]
D. Nullus deus miscetur homini? (16-18)
E. Angels (19-23)

Book X (consideration of the claims of natural theology brings

out the true role of God the Son):
A. Introduction (1-3)
 B. Sacrifice (4-7)
C. Miracles and worship (8-22)
D. Purgation: debate with Porphyry (23-32a)
E. Conclusion (32b)

Part Two: The origins, history, and ends of the two cities

Book XI (Origins: creation, esp. of unfallen angels):

A. Introduction (1-4)
B. Creation (5-31)
1. Hexameron (5-8)
2. Angelology (9-20)
3. The goodness of all creation (21-28)
4. Angels again (29)
5. Hexameron again (30-31)
C. Summary and conclusion (32-34)
1. An acceptable alternative (32)
2. Summary (33)
3. An unacceptable alternative (34)

Book XII (Origins: esp. the fall of the angels, creation of men):
A. Introduction (1a)
B. Angels (1b-9)
1. Inherent goodness of creation (1b-5)
2. Origins of evil (6-9)
C. Men (10-28)
1. Time, eternity, human origins (10-21)
2. The implications of createdness (22-28)

Book XIII (Origins: esp. the fall of man and its implications):
A. The effects of the fall: death (1-11)
1. The fact of death (1-3)
2. Christian response (4-11)
B. The effects of the fall: second death (of the soul)
(12-18)
C. The effects of the fall: consideration of the material
and spiritual aspects of the body (19-24a)
D. Conclusion: the two Adams (24b)

Book XIV (Origins: two loves, two cities):

A. Introduction: secundum carnem, secundum spiritum vivere
(1-5)
B. Human wills, fallen and unfallen (6-14)
1. Amor and passiones in fallen man (6-9)
2. Pride and humility in unfallen man (10-14)
C. Human behavior, fallen and unfallen (15-27)
1. Consequences of the fall in concupiscence (15-20)
2. sexuality without passio as the hallmark of the
life of the flesh in unfallen paradise (21-27)
D. Conclusion: "Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo,
terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestem
vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui." (28)

Book XV (History: from the fall to the flood):

A. Introduction (1a)
B. The two cities: brothers at war in history and allegory
[Cain/Abel, Ishmael/Hagar, Romulus Remus] (1b-8)
[Methodological interlude: chronological difficulties
and the authority of the versions of scripture (9-16]
C. From Cain to the flood (17-21)
D. The flood (22-27)
Book XVI (History: from the flood to the kings of Israel):
A. The generations of Shem; general considerations on the
conditions of life before the covenant [esp.: Babel,
language, etc.] (1-11)
B. Abraham and his covenant with God (12-34)
C. From Abraham to David (35-43)

Book XVII (History: scripture and prophecy under the kings):

A. Prophecy (1-3)
B. Anna and Samuel (4-7)
C. David (8-19)
1. David in history (8-13)
2. Psalms concerning civitas Dei (14-19)
D. Prophecy from Solomon until the time of Christ (20-24)
[in more detail in book 18]

Book XVIII (History: recapitulation of the earthly history, past

and future, of both cities):
A. Introduction (1-2)
B. The two cities under Assyrian dominion from the time of
Ninus (3-14)
C. The two cities under Roman dominion(15-54a)
1. Earliest times (15-26)
2. The age of the prophets (27-41)
a. The prophets of the Old Testament (27-36)
b. The prophets and the pagan sages (37-41)
3. The establishment of the standard (i.e.,
Septuagint) text of the Old Testament (42-44)
4. The intertestamental period (45-48)
5. The coming of Christ and the church (49-54a)
D. Conclusion: The present intermixture of the two cities
"donec ultimo iudicio separentur" (54b)

Book XIX (Ends: peace):

A. Introduction: the 288 sects of Varro (1-4)
B. Misery of human condition (5-9)
C. Peace (10-26)
1. the peace that is longed-for (10-13)
2. the possibility of authentic peace in this world
(14-20)
3. Cicero and Porphyry refuted (21-26)
D. Peace the goal of the city of God, war of the city of
man (27-28)

Book XX (Ends: the last judgment):

A. Introduction (1-4)
B. Judgment in the New Testament (5-20)
1. Gospels (5-6)
2. Apocalypse (7-17)
3. Epistles (18-20)
C. Judgment in the Old Testament (21-29)
1. Isaiah and Daniel (21-23)
2. Psalms and Malachi (24-29)
D. Conclusion: Christ the Judge (30)

Book XXI (Ends: hell):

A. Introduction (1)
B. Eternal punishment and justice (2-12)
1. Refutation of objections (2-9)
2. Reasonableness of the doctrine (10-11)
 [Punishment and purgation: 13-16]
C. Eternal punishment and mercy (17-27a)
1. Origen's objections (17-22)
2. Refutation and explanation (23-27a)
D. Conclusion (27b)

Book XXII (Ends: heaven):

A. Introduction (1-3)
B. Resurrection (4-20)
1. Argument from miracle (4-12)
2. Subsidiary questions (13-20)
C. Eternal bliss (21-30)
1. Foreshadowed on earth (21-24)
[refutations of Porphyry and Plato: 25-28)]
2. Realized in the celestial city (29-30a)
D. Conclusion (30b)

VI. Sources

In none of A.'s works are the variety and the limitations of his indebtednesses more
clearly displayed than in ciu. A. was ever limited first by the literary culture on which
he had been brought up and second by the still narrow range of Christian literature
available to one working almost entirely in Latin.[[19]]

The classical education of A. had centered on the school authors of his time: the authors
of the quadriga Messii (Vergil, Cicero, Terence, and Sallust) loom large in any
assessment of his classical equipment, with Vergil and Cicero easily in the lead. The
perils of this preference for his knowledge of Roman history are particularly acute. The
traditional literary authors had lain dormant in A.'s mind for many years before 413. In
writing ciu. A. made a deliberate attempt to refresh his classical memory, to redeploy
his erudition, in the service of his great work 'contra paganos.'

But A.'s education had not been limited to the literary classics, nor is his range of
citation in ciu. so limited. From the time of his reading of the Hortensius, A. had
distinguished himself by zeal for the study of philosophy, with a seriousness that went
beyond what was customary in the schools of the time. Hence in ciu. we see some
authors cited who were not part of the standard school lists. The most notable is Varro,
whose Antiquitates are a heavily-quoted source (and A. in turn is an important source
for fragments of that work). There are also a number of quotations from Apuleius (and
the pseudo-Apuleian Asclepius): A. may have read Apuleius for the first time after he
heard of the work's popularity in the group around Volusianus (cf. epp. 136, 137).

Beyond these authors there can be discerned a penumbra of quotations, allusions, and
echoes to a number of other Latin authors; these quotations in the main stem from the
literary classics (e.g., a single citation of Persius), while the material derived from the
more pedestrian authors (e.g., Pliny the elder or Solinus) is often of debatable
provenance and may have come to A. indirectly.

The Greek sources that appear in ciu. conform to the pattern detected elsewhere. A.'s
recourse to original Greek texts is greater at this period than earlier in his career, but he
was still not reading any of the classical or Neoplatonic Greek authors in the original in
extenso; what he knows of Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry he knows from Latin
translations and from doxographers, though if a Greek text were available he may have
checked a particular point here and there. That is not to say that he is either ignorant or
unsophisticated: the discussion and refutation of the claims of the Platonists in Books 8
through 10 is remarkable, given the time and place of its composition. There is no final
consensus on the exact identity and nature of the Neoplatonic books that underlay his
discussion here; the works of J.J. O'Meara have evoked lively debate and thrown light
on many individual points, but consensus remains elusive.[[20]]

One point of filiation may be worth salvaging. The loss of most of Cicero's De
republica prevents us from tracing closely the influence it exercised on A. But some of
what A. found there was important to him, e.g., the definition of a populus quoted from
Cicero in Book 2 and taken up, seventeen books and ten years later, to become an
important part of the elegant and beautiful Book 19. There are affinities between the
underlying themes of the Ciceronian work and A.'s own effort in ciu., for all that A. is
deliberately attempting to suggest an entirely new way of thinking about human society
and the responsibilities of its citizens. (That Macrobius, it now seems, wrote his own
imitation of the De republica--his Saturnalia--in Africa around 430 could even be taken
as an indication that this learned traditionalist saw the intended rejoinder to De
republica in A. and posed his more loving imitation to counteract A.) At any rate, it is
clear that ciu. is--among many other things--A.'s final debate and settling of accounts
with Cicero. But what of Plato? There is just a trace in ciu. (22.28) that A. knew enough
of Plato's Republic to conceive his own work as the third stage of a debate that
connected Greek with Roman with Christian ideas about justice, peace, and human
society. That the first work ended with the eschatological myth of Er, the second with
the dream of Scipio, and the third with A.'s own evocation of last things suggests that if
the De republica had survived intact we might be in a position to descry a clearer line of
descent than we now know.

But for all the apparatus of secular literature brought to bear on the work's theme, the
texts of scripture still loom much larger in the work from one end to the other than do
all secular texts combined. There is a disparity between the first and second halves of
the work: Book 1 shows a preponderance of scriptural over classical citations (a ratio of
about 5 to 2), but for Books 2 through 8 the classical citations predominate (by about 3
to 1); it is in Book 10, with the assertion of the powers of Christ as mediator against the
claims of the daemones that the ratio again reverses, with scriptural texts preponderant
by about 3.5 to 1. In Books 11 through 22 on the other hand, the preponderance of
scripture is absolute (a ratio of about 12 to 1). Where the scriptural texts are quoted,
particularly in Books 11 through 22, the method is exegetical and the style consistent
with A.'s discussions of scriptural texts and problems in his other works.

When we ask what works of Christian non-scriptural literature A. knew and used, we
are on the shakiest ground. It was never A.'s habit to identify his sources, particularly
orthodox sources; even heretics often hide behind the ambiguous designation of quidam.
(The importance of Tyconius for the underlying concept of the two cities is particularly
im portant.[[21]]) The investigations of B. Altaner [[22]] offer the best general view of
A.'s debts to the Greek fathers. Further investigation is required to show how much of
what A. says against the pagans is in fact the fruit of his long ruminations and debates
involving the Manichees and Donatists, but it was against the work's rhetorical strategy
to discuss those sects openly.
VII. Analogues/Place in Career

The second great creative phase of A.'s career fell in the early 410's (the first fell c. 399-
401): the end of the long Donatist quarrel was probably the proximate cause of a new
release of energy and imagination, and the inquisitive and loyal presence of Marcellinus
must have contributed encouragement as well. Then we see A. bringing to completion
some of the great projects begun years earlier (trin., Gn. litt., en. Ps., Io. ev. tr.),
beginning ciu., and launching the first of his stream of pamphlets against the poison of
Pelagianism.

Ciu. therefore holds a place central to A.'s work and thought for concrete reasons. Of
A.'s other works, however, it may most profitably be compared with conf. One writer
has said of ciu. that it plays out on a wider stage the same drama of conversion that
animates conf.; this is not an optical illusion. The earlier, more private work had begun
with ten books that dismantled the errors of the past and reached, on the last pages of
the tenth book, Christ the mediator: the movement of the first ten books of ciu. is
remarkably similar, with the same result. The second part of conf. was devoted--to the
dismay of moderns--to the exposition of the first chapters of scripture, a small
Hexameron; the exposition of Genesis there is deliberately constructed to mark the
parallel between the seven days of creation and the whole of salvation history from
creation to last things. The last books of ciu. similarly begin with close reading of the
crucial opening pages of Genesis (supplementing Gn. litt.) and move towards the
eschatological tranquility of the last page.

It is not within the scope of this article to consider the influence exercised by ciu. in
later times; indeed, the story of its influence is a long and discouraging record of
misreading and misplaced reverence. A. had set out in ciu. to propose to his readers a
view of man's place in the world that differed materially on every main principle from
that which had underpinned Greco-Roman antiquity. It was the fate of Christianity in
his own time and in centuries after to make the task of realizing that view more difficult
for itself by following the perilous paths of power and glory. The union of church and
empire--a constant dream of the western middle ages, a depressing reality for the
eastern--obscured the practical value of A.'s doctrines and led many devout readers of
A. to share the hollow optimisms of their contemporaries, insecure in the hope that the
association of religious and secular power would lead by a tranquil path to the
establishment of a strong and secure out post of the heavenly city in the world here
below. The shattering of those hopes in modern times was a heavy blow for Christian
optimists, but it has made possible the return to his text and his authentic vision, which
eschews shallow optimism in favor of a faith that looks beyond all the disorders and bru
talities of secular, fallen society to an animating power that lies beyond--and at the same
time stands everpresent within the hearts of even the most helpless victims of the terrors
that come from barbarism--and civilization.

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MA 2.279-294.

Notes

*This study was written in 1983 on commission but never published; it has not
been updated since. Created in an earlier generation of computer technology, the
file on which this HTML- version was based had been stripped of its diacritical
marks, and so it is possible that there may still be a few French, Italian, and
German words appearing en déshabillé, for which I apologize.

[1.] A. tells us that a refutation of those three books was drafted but never
circulated by unnamed individuals (ciu. 5.26); the arguments of A. Cameron,
'Rutilius Namatianus, St. Augustine, and the Date of the De reditu,' JRS
57(1967) 31-39, at least raise the possibility that we can detect further evidence
of early readership.

[2.] See O. Perler, Voyages de saint A. (Paris 1969) 459.

[3.] Books 6, then 7-8, circulating earlier? See T.D. Barnes, 'Aspects of the
background of the City of God,' Univ. of Ottawa Quarterly 52(1982) 64-80.

[4.] 'La division en chapitres des livres de la "Cité de Dieu",' Melanges J. de

Ghellinck (Gembloux 1951) 1.235-249.

[5.] M. Gorman, 'A survey of the oldest manuscripts of St. Augustine's De

civitate Dei,' JThS 33.1982.408-09.

[6.] On MSS, see A. Wilmart, MA 2.279-292, HUWA, M. Gorman, art. cit.

[7.] See further, J. Divjak, 'Augustins erster Brief an Firmus und die revidierte
Ausgabe der Ciuitas Dei,' Festschrift Hanslik (Vienna 1977) 56-70.

[8.] P. Lejay, Rev. critique 49(1900) 165; 51(1901) 326.

[9.] On dates of these letters see M. Moreau, Le Dossier Marcellinus (Paris

1973) 49-52.

[10.] T. Orlandi, 'Origine e composizione del I libro del de civitate dei di

Agostino,' Studi classici e orientali (Pisa) 14(1965) 120-133.
[11.] A. Lauras and H. Rondet, 'Le theme des deux cités dans l'oeuvre de saint
Augustin,' Études Augustiniennes (Paris 1951) 97-160; J. O'Donnell, 'The
inspiration for Augustine's de civitate Dei, Augn. Studies 10(1979) 75-79.

[12.] For fuller analysis, not always agreeing in detail but together offering an
impressive body of scholarship, see H. Scholz, Glaube und Unglaube in der
Weltgeschichte (Leipzig 1911); A. Lauras and H. Rondet, art. cit.; J.J. O'Meara,
Charter of Christendom (New York 1961); J.-C. Guy, Unité et structure logique
de la 'Cité de Dieu' de saint Augustin (Paris 1961); and esp. R. Markus,
Saeculum (Cambridge 1970).

[13.] Cf. doctr. chr. 1.4.4 for the classic statement of the theme of the journey.

[14.] Cf. Markus, op. cit.

[15.] H. Glaube, op. cit. 14-17

[16.] R. Deferrari and M. Keeler, 'Saint Augustine's "City of God": its plan and
development,' Am. Jour. Philol. 50(1929) 109-137.

[17.] H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris 1938) 61.

[18.] Marrou, Retractatio (Paris 1948) 665.

[19.] The principal discussions are those of S. Angus, The Sources of the First
Ten Books of Augustine's "De civitate Dei" (Princeton 1906); H. Hagendahl,
Augustine and the Latin Classics (Göteborg 1967); J. O'Donnell, 'Augustine's
Classical Readings,' RA 15(1980) 144-175.

[20.] J.J. O'Meara, Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles in Augustine (Paris

1959), discussed by P. Hadot, 'Citations de Porphyre chez Augustin,' REA
6(1960) 205-244.

[21.] H. Scholz, op. cit. 78-81.

[22.] B. Altaner, Kleine Patristiche Schriften (Berlin 1967) 129-163, 181-331,

esp. 224-252 on Origen.