This chapter presents the Augustinian version of two Platonist concepts, inward turn and intellectual vision, which form the context of other developments in Augustinian inwardness, such as inner space. Augustine’s inward turn, as illustrated in Confessions 7, is conceived as a turning of the soul’s attention toward itself, in order to found a project of philosophical inquiry in which the soul examines its own cognitive powers, ascending from sense perception to intellect and finally looking above its own mind to the intelligible Truth. The point of this project is missed if one tries to read Augustine in light of the Thomistic nature/grace distinction, which cannot allow that seeing God is a natural function of the human mind. I propose that the experience of vision for Augustine is best understood not as mysticism but as a form of what we would call insight. It is the sort of experience one can train for by getting a good education.
Augustine’s inward turn is first and foremost a way of directing the mind’s attention, and on that basis it is also a form of conversion and a project of philosophical inquiry. The language of conversion (Latin conversio, Greek epistrophē) is based on verbs that mean “to turn one’s attention.”1 What conversion is about, for Augustine as well as for Plotinus and Plato, is turning one’s attention to look in a different direction from before, in order to find what is divine and ultimate.2 To turn inward, as Plotinus and Augustine do, means looking for the divine in the self (and of course specifically in the soul) and therefore requires a view of the soul and its relation to the divine that would make sense of directing one’s attention that way. Hence a commitment to turning inward generates a conception of inner space, a dimension of being within the soul where one can turn to look for God.
For Plotinus, as we have seen, the inner space of the soul is none other than the intelligible world, which is the divine Mind. For Augustine, on the contrary, the inner space of the self is not divine—in Christian theological terms, it is created rather than uncreated, creature rather than Creator—and precisely so it is the soul’s own inner space in a way that Plotinus’s inner space was not: it is the first version of what we in the West now call “the inner self.” The rest of my study is devoted to tracing how this new conception of the self emerged within the context of the overarching project of inward turn: how Augustine, wanting to heed Plotinus’s admonition to turn “into the inside,” found that he had to conceive that inner realm rather differently from Plotinus.
Augustine came to the concept of inner self by exploring thoughts that were new to him, and this involved quite a bit of fumbling around and poking into blind alleys. But what stood fast for him in all the fumbling and poking was the conviction that some sort of turn to the soul was necessary, because God could not be found in the world of bodies. Amid all his confusion and changes of mind about the nature of the soul and how to turn to it, he never doubted the negative side of the inward turn: that he must turn away from bodies. Hence we can begin to see the shape of Augustine’s inward turn by starting with what it turns away from. The inner space of the soul emerges as an alternative to the literal space of the bodily world.
To begin with, we can return to Confessions, book 7,3 and look more closely at the problem to which the inward turn was a solution. The problem is where to find God, but more specifically, it is how to conceive of God in non-bodily terms. Where can one turn, where direct one’s attention, to find a thing that occupies no space in the bodily world? The answer is Plotinian in inspiration: one must awaken to a different kind of vision, one that has been going on all along in the soul without being noticed.4 Augustine’s inward turn is a project of awakening oneself to that vision; it is an epistemology, a pedagogy, and an ethics for the mind that desires to see God.
The problem, he tells us at the outset of book 7, is that he could not conceive of anything but bodily existence, which he in effect defines as existence that takes up space in the sensible world (the kind of existence that Descartes would later call res extensa). As a result of this inability, he says, “I was forced to think of something corporeal, either permeating the space of the world or spreading infinitely beyond it.”5 He could not conceive of anything that was “neither extended over some spatial distance nor capable of being diffused and thinned out or condensed and packed tighter.”6 Hence even the omnipresence of God he pictured as a kind of distention, a spreading out part-by-part through the spaces of this world like water in a sponge—as if one part of God was in one area, another in another area, and so on.7 For unless he conceived of God spread out in space, he could not conceive of God at all, since “apart from such space I could see only nothing, absolutely nothing, not even an empty space.”8
The author of the Confessions proposes a diagnosis of this failure to see what is to be seen. As with Plato and Plotinus, it is moral uncleanness, the culpable love of bodily things, that hinders vision, like an impurity or disease in the eye. His mind or heart is carnal, fixed on things of the senses, even though he would rather see something better. Hence his soul’s vision is clouded by phantasms, imaginary mental pictures derived from the senses, which he knows are carnal and misleading but which he can no more get rid of than he can permanently sweep a cloud of gnats from his sight with a wave of his hand.9 This problem of freeing the mind from phantasms, which is part and parcel of the ethical problem of freeing the heart from love of bodily things, is a recurrent theme of Augustine’s early works.10
The author of the Confessions is convinced that the way to lead the soul beyond its fascination with the senses is to turn its attention inward to get a reflective grasp of its own incorporeal nature. If the soul could only see itself, it would begin to see what non-bodily things are like. Hence in the Confessions Augustine traces his difficulty with conceiving God back to a lack of self-knowledge. If the soul was only pure enough to see itself and understand what it was already doing, then it would not seem so inevitable that every form of existence must be bodily and spatial. “For my heart ranged over the same kind of images as the forms to which my eyes were accustomed”—that is to say, over images of corporeal things—“and I did not see that the very attention [intentionem] which formed these same images was not such a thing as they were.”11 Turning inward means, to begin with, attending to the soul’s own attention, which is not a bodily thing and thus is closer to God than the bodily things the soul is used to seeing. As with modern versions of the “turn to the subject,” of which Augustine’s project is the ancestor, it is not what the soul sees but the soul’s seeing that is the great clue for philosophers to follow.12
Hence Augustine’s inward turn, as he sketches it in book 7 of the Confessions, turns from bodies to look at the soul’s cognitive powers, beginning with how it handles senseperception.
And so [I passed] step by step, from bodies to the soul that perceives by means of the body, and then to that interior power [vis] to which the bodily sense announces exterior things (this much the beasts arc capable of) and then further to the reasoning power [ratiocinantem potentiam] to which what is taken from the bodily senses is referred for judgment.13
Thus begins a progression that Augustine describes in a later book of the Confessions by saying: “Through my soul itself I will ascend to him.”14 In both books he describes an inward turn that begins at the lowest of all the cognitive powers, the senses, in order to look at how the mind receives and judges their input. Then he passes quickly to something higher and more inward, the soul’s interior sense (or what Aristotle called the “shared” sense), which correlates and unifies the diverse reports of the five external senses.15 But this too is a function that our souls share with the irrational souls of beasts, so Augustine proceeds further up and further in, to the soul’s rational power, which sits in judgment over the data of the senses, determining their truth or falsehood.
The progression is both inward and upward: not only from body to soul, but also proceeding within the soul itself from the lowest faculties, which can perceive only things of the body, to what is highest and best in us, our rationality, by which we can perceive intelligible and immutable things. The final stage of the inquiry thus focuses on the highest of our cognitive functions: reason’s capacity for intellectual vision. In this inquiry, reason investigates itself. So Augustine continues:
This also [i.e., the reasoning power], finding that it was mutable in me, raised itself to its own intelligence, and “drew thought away from habit,” removing itself from the contradictory crowd of phantasms, to discover by what light it was sprinkled when without any doubtfulness it cried out that the immutable was to be preferred to the mutable: whence it knew the Immutable itself (which unless it somehow knew, it couldn’t possibly prefer it with certainty to the mutable). And it arrived at that which is [see Exodus 3:14] in the stroke of a tembling glance. Then indeed I saw intellectually your “invisible things, by means of the things that are made” [Rom. 1:20].16
The judgment that immutable (hence incorruptible) being is to be preferred to mutable (hence corruptible) being is the one thing Augustine mentions that he was certain about in the quandary stated at the beginning of book 7. So here he reflects on the source of that certainty, and he can only conclude that it came from immutable Being itself, which is the light in which all certain knowledge is seen. This can be none other than what he has just called Truth:
For, seeking whence I approved the beauty of bodies, whether heavenly or earthly, and what was present to me in judging correctly concerning mutable things and saying, “This should be so, that should not”—so, seeking whence I judged, when I judged so, I found the immutable and true eternity of Truth above my mutable mind.17
Here immutable Truth, there unchanging Being—and elsewhere eternal Beauty, unbroken Unity, incorruptible Good—all are names for the same God, who is the immutable light by which the mutable mind makes all its judgments, when it judges correctly about what is or what is true, what is beautiful or good or one. To see this light is to see the open secret of the mind, the Form that makes all judgment possible. This eternal and divine light has been present all along in the mind, unbeknownst to it, bestowing the very capacity for judgment by which it is a mind, as the light of this world bestows upon the eye the capacity for sight that makes it an eye.
As with Confessions 7 generally, this description of a step-by-step ascent through the powers of the soul is important to us not because of what it says about the events leading up to Augustine’s converson in 386 but because of how it spells out an inward turn that the author of the Confessions wants to tell us about in 400.18 From that standpoint, its Plotinian sources are less important than its Augustinian ones. It reads like a summary of an earlier work of Augustine, the second book of the treatise On Free Choice, which also proceeds from the senses to the inner sense and up to the intellect and its ability to judge sensible things by the light of Truth, eventually ending with a glimpse of the intelligible Truth itself, which is above the human mind because it is immutable and the human mind is not.19 This elaborate project of inward turn, ascending through an examination of the powers of the soul, is echoed elsewhere in Augustine’s early work,20 including three times in the Confessions,21 and also shapes key elements in his later thinking, especially in the grand inquiry into the analogies of the Trinity in the soul in the second half of the treatise On the Trinity.22 The glimpses of God that Augustine reports in Confessions 7 are summary statements of that ongoing philosophical project of inward turn—of arriving at an understanding of God through an examination of the cognitive powers of the soul ascending from senses to inner Truth.
Except for the much later inquiry in the treatise On the Trinity (an inquiry that is set in motion precisely because the vision of God as Truth and Good does not help us see God as Trinity)23 the key moment in all these efforts to execute the project of inward turn comes when the mind or reason turns from looking inward to looking upward and discovers that immutable Truth is implicit in all its judgments. God is the light that makes intellectual vision possible, the Truth by which all truths get their truth, the Good by which we learn to prefer the better to the worse, the Beauty that is the source of all the loveliness that we love, the ultimate Unity that unites and thereby gives being to all that is.24 Thus the inward turn, which begins with an examination of the wherewithal of human knowing, ends with the insight that it is Truth that makes all knowing possible, and this very insight is a glimpse of the nature of God.
To see the soul’s seeing is thus necessarily to catch a glimpse of immutable Truth. For unlike the bodily sense organs, the rational soul is never a passive recipient of external stimuli. Because its very nature is to understand, it necessarily judges the truth of what it sees, and it can do that only in the light of the immutable Truth that is the standard of all that is true in the changeable, created world. Precisely by noticing this, the soul that has turned inward can subsequently look upward, at the immutable Truth in light of which it judges, and gazing straight at Truth can recognize that it is above itself, because Truth is immutable while the soul is mutable—Truth being wholly light like the sun, while the soul is a place that can be tainted by darkness.
At this point in fact something else happens: the eye of the soul, which is not yet pure, is dazzled by the brightness of eternal Truth and falls back to its accustomed semidarkness, bearing with it only a memory of that splendid moment of vision. So the double movement in then up is followed by a third movement, the fall back to the region of darkness, poverty, and unlikeness to God.25
But the momentary glimpse is enough to solve the problem of how to conceive of God. For now the soul knows from experience26 that an incoporeal being that is not spread out in space is not necessarily “nothing, absolutely nothing.” As Augustine’s soul asks itself, “Is Truth nothing, just because it is not spread out through finite or infinite reaches of space?”27 The being of Truth is of course the answer to all Augustine’s questions, since Truth is God. As Augustine explains elsewhere,
God is not distended or diffused through places whether finite or infinite (as if there could be more of him in one part than in another) but is present as a whole everywhere—just like Truth, which no one in their right mind would say is partly in this place and partly in that; for after all Truth is God.28
This conception of the integral omnipresence of the divine, its presence “as a whole everywhere” (totus ubique, in Augustine’s oft-used technical vocabulary) was first formulated by Plotinus.29 In Augustine it becomes the centerpiece of the Platonist alternative to his youthful materialism and a central conviction guiding him in his inquiries into the new dimension of the soul, the inner space that is not literally a space.30
At this point we need to make a digression on how Augustine’s philosophical alternative contrasts with others—alternatives that he never heard of, because they came centuries after him. These alternatives are important to us, however, because they form the interpretive grid through which Augustine is read and misread. Augustine’s inward turn must be contrasted with interpretations of Augustine that cannot admit the seriousness of his belief in the intelligibility of divine Truth.
The problem is that in the wake of Thomas Aquinas, Roman Catholic scholars must look askance at anyone claiming that it is natural for the soul to see God—and since they do not want to look askance at Augustine, they typically interpret him as if he never made any such claim. They interpret him, in other words, as if his theology conformed to the requirements of a specifically Thomistic doctrine of nature and grace. My procedure here is exactly the opposite: I interpret Augustine as if it never crossed his mind that human nature needs to be elevated by a supernatural gift of grace in order to see God.
Of course this does not mean that Augustine thought grace was unnecessary—he was after all the one gave the West its distinctive categories for thinking about grace by insisting, in his writings against the Pelagians, that we cannot overcome the effects of sin without the help of God’s grace. But for Augustine grace was always divine healing and help against sin, not supernatural elevation required by the lowliness of our nature. Hence in his own treatise On Nature and Grace, the master-image is of God the great physician, healing the infirmities of our diseased nature and helping us on our way.31 By grace God restores and purifies, redeems and justifies our nature so that it can perform its proper function, which is to enjoy the happiness of intellectual knowledge of God. And because of sin and its effect in us, we cannot hope to attain righteousness and the beatific vision without this grace. But Augustine describes grace as healing and helping, not supernaturally elevating nature. For it belongs to the very nature of the mind to raise its eye to gaze upon what is above it, the immutable Truth. Hence grace restores nature, healing it and helping it to attain the divine vision that is natural to it but was lost in the Fall.
The relation of nature and grace deserves our special attention because it has profoundly affected Roman Catholic interpretation of Augustine, which is far and away the most important tradition of Augustine interpretation in the past century. The contrast between Augustine and Thomas on nature and grace is subtle, as well as unfamiliar to those outside the Roman Catholic theological tradition. Moreover, it is not made any clearer by the complex formulations that arose from an agonizing controversy about nature and grace that preoccupied much of Roman Catholic theology in the middle decades of the twentieth century. But perhaps just here, in the last decades of a powerful neo-Thomism, is the clearest place for us to start.
In the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII wrote against those who “vitiate the true gratuity of the supernatural order by affirming that God could not make intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.”32 To be “ordered to beatific vision” means to have as one’s goal or fulfillment (telos) the vision of God. Augustine’s belief in the intelligibility of God puts him on the wrong side of the pope’s disapproval, for it implies that it is the very nature of intellectual beings to find their fulfillment in seeing God. For Augustine, God could no more make minds whose fulfillment lay elsewhere than he could make eyes whose fulfillment lay in the dark.
This poses great difficulties for Roman Catholic interpretation of Augustine. Many Roman Catholic theologians (including Pope John Paul II) follow Augustine in believing that the desire for God is a deep and ineradicable part of our very being.33 Yet in defending “the gratuity of the supernatural order” Pius XII committed Roman Catholic theology to the view that God could have created a “pure nature,” in the neo-Thomist sense, that is, a human nature whose orientation is solely toward this world and its temporal goods. However, precisely by making this commitment explicit, he also showed Roman Catholic theologians how to affirm the existence of this desire without compromising the gratuity of the supernatural order: the thing to do is affirm the possibility of a “pure nature” while denying its actuality (God could have created things this way but didn’t).34 Hence when speaking of Augustine and other Church Fathers, who of course had never heard of the Thomistic concept of the supernatural, a theologian who wants to be loyal both to the Roman Catholic teaching office and to the Fathers will speak in a way that sounds very strange to Protestant ears. The Fathers will be said to concern themselves with “concrete” or “actual” nature, by which is meant a human nature that is not “pure nature” but rather has the addition of the grace of a supernatural calling to beatific vision.35
As someone who respects but does not hold himself bound by the teaching office or magisterium of the Church of Rome, I will not adopt this carefully nuanced way of speaking. For in my judgment it obscures a key historical point: Augustine talks as if it is simply natural for the soul to see God. This does not mean he thinks it is easy or automatic, that it can happen without growth and discipline, hard work and virtue and righteousness, and above all the help of grace. Indeed for Augustine the road to happiness is long and arduous, and because of our sinfulness we cannot even get on the right road without divine assistance—but at the end of it we find a homeland that is natural to us. Moreover, it could not be otherwise. For Augustine there can be no intellect that is not by nature oriented toward enjoying the happiness of seeing intelligible Truth.
The point is stated clearly enough in Augustine’s essay “On Ideas.”36 It is the nature of the mind’s eye, when purified of sin and lust for sensible things, to see the Ideas in the divine Mind. For Platonic Ideas are the natural and proper objects of the intellect (it would be astonishing for a Platonist to say otherwise). In locating them in the divine Mind, Augustine places all that is really and truly intelligible on the Creator side of the Creator/creature distinction. All understanding of things other than God is less than full understanding (i.e., what the Platonist tradition calls opinion or faith rather than knowledge) and is made possible only because the divine light of Truth illuminates them—just as sensible things are visible only as illuminated by the sun, which is the light of the sensible world.
Roman Catholic scholarship on Augustine was affected long before Humani Generis by the fact that this Augustinian view of the mind’s relation to Truth was prohibited by the Holy Office in 1861, in its decree against “ontologism.” This is the Office’s label for a nineteenth-century movement in Roman Catholic theology that attempted to combine an Augustinian view of the intelligibility of God with post-Kantian doctrines of intellectual intuition. The notion, roughly, was that we see all things in God. More precisely, the “ontologists” held that the human mind by nature understands things in the light of the divine Being, so that the divine Being is implicitly understood in every act of human understanding.37
The decree against ontologism was a decisive turn toward a more Thomistic view of the relation between God and the human mind. In Thomas’s rather empiricistic version of Aristotelian epistemology (in contrast to Alexander of Aprodisias’s more Platonizing interpretation of Aristotle) the universal forms that the human mind understands are intelligible species abstracted from sensible things38 and hence are created things, not the uncreated Ideas in God. Thus we can understand the truth about created beings without catching a glimpse of the divine Being and Truth that is their ultimate ground.39 For Augustine, on the contrary, all intelligible things (i.e., all things that are properly understood by the intellect) are contained in God, who is “the immutable Truth containing all that is immutably true.”40 Augustine’s three-tiered ontology has no place for intelligible forms or species except at the top of the hierarchy of being—as uncreated Forms in the mind of God. Hence Augustine’s cosmos has no room for the created forms that Aquinas calls “intelligible species.”41
The official censure of ontologism has caused serious problems for Roman Catholic Augustine scholars, who have turned up abundant evidence that Augustine’s account of intellectual knowledge is indeed ontologistic. Etienne Gilson, for example, defends Augustine from charges of ontologism in a long and subtle exegetical argument,42 yet he is too insightful not to see how formidable are the obstacles to his exegesis, and in fact he points them out clearly enough to undermine his own interpretation.43 He is acutely aware, for instance, that his attempt to divide Augustine’s epistemology neatly into natural knowledge of created things and supernatural knowledge of God cannot be squared very easily with key texts in Augustine’s treatise On the Trinity.44 Johannes Hessen, a Franciscan and an influential expositor of Augustine’s epistemology, has a similar problem. His interpretation comes very close to making Augustine an ontologist but swerves away from that conclusion at the last moment by appealing to a distinction between mere intellectual vision of Truth and a higher mystical-religious vision of God.45 But this is a distinction that has no support in the texts. Augustine describes his deepest and most “mystical” experiences in terms of Reason’s vision of God as Truth.46 A more accurate account of Augustine’s epistemology comes from a Protestant, Ronald Nash, who does not hesitate to conclude that Augustine really is an ontologist.47 I myself am persuaded by Nash’s interpretation, as well as his criticism of Gilson. However, it is not my aim here to prove that Augustine is an ontologist; the point rather is that unlike Roman Catholic scholars I have no commitment to avoiding interpretations that implicate him in ontologism.
Finally, it is important to note that the contrast between Augustine and Aquinas on nature and grace cannot be reduced to the contrast between Augustine’s Platonism and Aquinas’s Aristotelianism. For one thing, as we saw in chapter 2, the Neoplatonism to which Augustine is indebted got its account of Ideas in the divine Mind not from Plato but from Aristotle, by way of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Moreover, the Thomistic nature/grace distinction runs counter to Aristotle and indeed to all ancient philosophy in its implication that beatitude (i.e., ultimate human happiness or fulfillment) is not, strictly speaking, natural. One can only imagine Aristotle scratching his head over this implication and asking, “You mean to say, Thomas, that happiness—eudaimonia, the fulfillment of human nature—is not natural to it? But what could be more natural to a nature than its own fulfillment?”48
Thomas’s way of distinguishing nature and grace is, I would suggest, a consequence not of his Aristotelianism but rather of his particular place in the history of the Christian traditions, at a point when the West was engaged with new intensity not only with ancient philosophy but also with Eastern Christian theology. Aquinas had many problems to solve in reconciling the theological legacies of East and West, and one of them arose from the contrast between Augustine and Denys we noticed in the previous chapter. On the one hand Thomas has the Augustinian legacy that conceives of beatific vision as the fullness of intellectual vision, but on the other he inherits Denys’s emphatic doctrine of divine incomprehensibility. The problem is: how can our happiness consist in seeing God with our intellect if God is above intelligibility? In short, how can we have beatific vision of an incomprehensible God? The answer is that “seeing the essence of God belongs to the created intellect by grace and not by nature.”49 This is why a supernatural elevation is necessary for ultimate beatitude: even after the created mind is purified and its nature is restored to a sinless condition, it cannot see God. So grace functions not only to cleanse and restore the mind’s eye but to give it a vision that is beyond its natural powers: grace not only heals and helps but supernaturally elevates.
This way of distinguishing nature and grace is a typical example of Thomas’s procedure of reconciling diverse strands in the Christian traditions by making appropriate distinctions. But this particular distinction has had an especially long and influential life. For my purposes the important thing about it is that it reconciled Denys and Augustine by leaving Augustine’s commitment to the intelligibility of God firmly behind,50 and thereby making it difficult for later Roman Catholics to read Augustine with historical accuracy. Hence there are many aspects of Augustine’s inward turn and its dependence on the concept of intellectual vision that, in my view, have yet to be clearly understood—for the richest tradition of Augustine scholarship in the twentieth century was not in a good position to see them.
With Thomas’s nature/grace distinction, the West leaves behind the ancient philosophical convictions (shared by Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics alike) about the sufficiency of Reason for ultimate happiness and takes a step toward modern, secularized conceptions of reason. In modernity “reason” comes to mean a function that is earthbound if not outright antireligious, something to be compared to grace and faith as lower is to higher (in both Thomism and Protestantism) or else contrasted with them as good sense is to superstition (in much of the Enlightenment). Taking such contrasts for granted makes it difficult to appreciate the whole ancient legacy of philosophy, as Augustine knew it, which assumed that reason was a divine function in human beings and that the goal of intellect was a divine knowledge. The true Augustinian spirit returns to the West in movements where a divine function is restored once more to Reason, as in post-Kantian idealism and the movements that Roman Catholicism repudiated under the names “ontologism” and nouvelle theologie. (The success of Rahner in particular was to revive the Augustinian elements in the Thomist synthesis without falling afoul of official Roman Catholic teaching in these repects.)
Slightly less true to the spirit of Augustine are theological movements whose focus is experience rather than reason, as in Protestant liberalism. The author of the Confessions is of course one of the great masters of those who want to take an experiential route to God. Among Roman Catholic scholars, this results in a tendency to interpret the key texts of the inward turn (especially those of Confessions 7) as a form of mystical experience. Both labels, “mystic” and “experiential,” are misleading insofar as they tend to be set in contrast with “reason.” For Augustine the workings of reason are profoundly experiential, as the vision of the intellect is the deepest and most divine experience we can ever have. If this is mysticism, it is the mysticism of one who thinks of God as a divine Mind rather than an incomprehensible One. Its aim is not a union that transcends all understanding but precisely the understanding of God: to see God with the mind’s eye. Augustine’s visionary experiences thus do not—by his own account at least—elevate his mind above its own rational functions but precisely fulfill its nature as mind, just as seeing is the fulfillment of the nature of the eye. Hence his is an ecstasy not of unknowing but of insight. For Augustine the vision of God is more like Archimedes discovering a deep truth of mathematics and shouting “Eureka! I’ve found it!” than like the transrational experiences reported by the medieval mystics.
Another way to put this is to say that Augustine is a rationalist, but in as odd and un-modern a sense as he is a mystic. To him Reason says, “I study to give you joy.”51 Hence the first grand execution of the project of inward turn in his career takes the form of a proof of the existence of God that concludes with a meditation on the theme that happiness is the enjoyment of Truth.52 Augustine is not the sort of rationalist whose goal in life is to find proofs for God’s existence, but rather one for whom the whole point of reasoning is to get us beyond proofs arid words to see God for ourselves with the mind’s eye. Hence his experience of God, unlike most forms of mysticism, is something nearly all thoughtful people have felt for ourselves. We all know what it is like to work hard at understanding a mathematical proof, pondering it, asking questions, trying various possible solutions, yet somehow we just don’t get it—until suddenly, maybe after giving up and having turned our attention elsewhere, we are overtaken by a blessed moment of understanding. “Aha!” we say, in place of Archimedes’ “Eureka!” and we speak of light bulbs turning on, while ancient Platonists speak of sudden illumination or kindling that bursts into flame.53 It is a moment experienced as pure intellectual joy. Imagine what this must mean for a Platonist, especially one who believes that all unchanging truth is found in the very Mind of God. If only this flash of insight could become our permanent mode of being, we would be happy—ultimately happy, with no further happiness to seek. Such is precisely the beatific vision, which lifts us above all mortal pleasures and joins us to eternal Truth and Beauty. That is why a moment of insight is the climax of Augustine’s inward turn, both subjectively and objectively: it is both the experience he aims to attain and the highest object of his investigation into the nature of the soul. Insight is the moment in time when the mind’s eye glimpses immutable Truth; it is Time touching Eternity, a foretaste of eternal blessedness, an experience of God.
“Insight” is thus probably the best modern category to use in interpreting Augustine’s epistemology, in hopes of avoiding the kind of misinterpretation that stems from imposing later categories and distinctions on an ancient thinker. A focus on insight can help prevent us from making inappropriate separations between Reason and Experience or drawing disciplinary boundaries between such forms of philosophical inquiry as epistemology, psychology, and ethics. For Augustine what human life is all about is achieving the blessedness of wisdom, and therefore what morality is all about is purifying the mind’s eye, healing it of its defects and equipping it with the virtues it needs to see the Truth clearly. Hence the goal of human life is defined epistemologically (wisdom and understanding), the road is defined in ethical terms (virtue and purification), and the whole process must be understood psychologically (as a turning and journey of the soul). To separate these disciplines and discuss a topic like “Augustine’s epistemology” apart from his ethics and psychology (not to mention his ontology and theology) is to make nonsense of it. If we see insight as the central experience of human life, then we will be much less tempted to take these separations seriously. Above all, we will understand that for Augustine Truth is the most inward object of desire, not a mere external or accidental fact that must be complied with, as if the only time we ever saw Truth was in proofs we did not understand or preaching we did not like.
However, while refusing to impose later distinction on Augustine we need to observe distinctions that Augustine takes more seriously than we do, especially that between soul and body, inner and outer. Unlike his interpreters, Augustine never forgets his belief that human beings are divided into two parts, body and soul, and that what is true of the one may not be true of the other. His focus is not on what theologians about a generation ago incessantly called “the whole man.” His inward turn is emphatically and explicitly a turning of attention away from one part of the human being and toward another—a turn away from the body, in order to gain the tranquil joy of contemplation by the mind alone, unsullied by the lusts of our senses and the clamoring needs of our flesh.
“There is nothing sweeter to the human mind than the light of truth” says Cicero,54 in a saying so strikingly Augustinian that it is tempting to take it as a summary of Augustine’s thought. It certainly does illuminate the dynamic unity of his philosophy, religion, ethics, psychology, and epistemology.55 But what Cicero lacks, once again, is the name of Christ.56 So the summary we need of the heart of Augustine’s thought goes: Happiness is seeing Truth, and Truth is Christ. The one clause sums up what he learned from ancient classical thought, the other what he learned from the teaching of Church and Scripture. But the synthesis implied by putting these two clauses together is disrupted by Nicaea, which will not allow Christ to be the intelligible Truth that reveals the incomprehensible Father.57 As a result, nearly every Nicene theologian but Augustine regards the whole Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as incomprehensible rather than intelligible—shining with a glory that the mind finds dazzling and overwhelming rather than sweet. Thus for Aquinas reason is insufficient for beatific vision, and for Thomism, as for most of modernity, reason is something whose competence extends only to things of this world. This secularization of reason would surely have struck Augustine as terribly carnal, like a return to Stoic or even Epicurean views of the mind. In any case, it was a development he did not anticipate, and this makes him hard for modern readers to understand properly. But it also means that Augustine offers modern readers a distinctive excitement and beauty, as he holds together in a kind of original, almost unconscious unity, things that we are used to assuming must be far apart: reason and joy, inquiry and devotion, education and ecstasy, truth and happiness.
For Augustine these unities fall apart only because of sin and its penalty, ignorance.58 Indeed part of the excitement of reading Augustine is that he offers explanations for separations we take for granted—including, as we shall see later, the separation of soul from soul in the privacy of the inner world. But the separation we must concern ourselves with now is the primary one overcome by the inward turn, the distance between us and beatific vision. If there is nothing sweeter to the mind than the intelligible light, then why do we find it so hard to learn Truth? The explanation lies with a key metaphor used to describe the cause of the third movement, the fall back down after the movement “in then up.” Augustine speaks of his mind’s eye being dazzled, unable to bear the brightness of the intelligible light. This talk of dazzlement is found frequently in his writings and evidently records a fundamental element of his religious experience.59 Always the explanation he gives for it refers to some defect in mind’s eye: it is unhealthy, made sick and weak by carnal desires, so that it cannot bear the brightness of the intelligible Sun above it but rather longs for the darkness of sensible things at the ontological level below it. Dazzlement, in other words, is a result not of our natural incapacity but of the sinful corruption of our nature.
Long before Thomism, Catholic theology was heading in quite a different direction from Augustine on this point. More than a century before Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury attributed the dazzlement of the mind’s eye to nature rather than sin. He certainly does not rule out sin as a factor that contributes to the phenomenon, but his emphasis clearly lies elsewhere. When he speaks of the “weakness” and “darkness” of the mind’s eye, he seems to be thinking of its creaturely limitations, its “narrowness” and “littleness” compared to the God it seeks:
Is its eye darkened by its own weakness or is it dazzled by your glory? Surely it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by you. Indeed it is both obscured by its own littleness and overwhelmed by your immensity. Truly it is both constricted by its own narrowness and overcome by your vastness.60
Thus from the dazzling phenomenon of the glory of God Anselm draws the conclusion, quite apart from our sin, that God is “more than any creature can understand.”61 For Anselm, as for Denys, the source of all light and visibility is itself too bright to be visible: so God, the intelligible Sun who gives light to the mind and therefore intelligibility to all being, dwells in a glory too dazzling to be intelligible.
For Augustine, things are quite different. He is convinced that “those endowed with vigorous, healthy and really strong eyes have nothing they would rather look at than the Sun itself.”62 It is as if Augustine were having an argument with Anselm (and Denys and Thomas) over whether it’s ever safe to look straight at the sun, and Augustine is taking the position that the only ones who can’t are those whose eyes are sick and weak. This means that once the mind is healed of its sin and cleansed of its evil desires, there is nothing further it needs in order to see God:
So when you are such that none of the things of earth delight you at all, then believe me, at that same moment, at that very point in time, you will see what you long for.63
Purity of heart, interpreted Platonistically as a mind cleansed of desire for sensible things, is evidently all we need to see God.64
It is natural, Augustine thinks, to look straight at the intelligible Sun. But to say something is natural is not to say it is easy, as the analogy with natural processes of the body makes clear. It is natural for a human body to grow to healthy adulthood, but that does not mean that every child will live to adulthood or that a vigorous adulthood can be attained without proper nourishment and frequent exercise. What is more, if the body is weakened by disease or the ill effects of bad habit, laziness, and poor nutrition, then it will have to take its medicine, which may be unpleasant. Augustine will use all these metaphors to explain why the road to blessedness is arduous and long. The distance yet to be traveled is signaled especially by the metaphor of the dazzled eye, driven back into its wonted darkness by the radiance of a Sun that is too bright for its gaze. This dazzlement is a symptom of illness: “The eye loves darkness because it is not healthy.”65 Therefore, to be dazzled by the glory of God is not our natural condition but a weakness to be overcome by healing and further training—that is, by the kind of efforts that do not transcend our nature but restore and strengthen it.
To judge by the structure of the first book of the Soliloquies, where the treament of intellectual vision culminates in a discussion of how to strengthen weak eyes, it seems the metaphor of dazzlement played a large role in attracting Augustine to the Platonist metaphor of intellectual vision in the first place. While the talk of intellectual vision provides apt metaphors for Augustine’s theory of knowledge and splendid descriptions of the soul’s ultimate fulfilment, talk of weak, sick, and dazzled eyes provides even more apt metaphors for Augustine’s morality and pedagogy: it suggests in all the right ways the obstacles preventing us from seeing God and how we are to overcome them. The obstacles are in ourselves: they are the ignorance, ill-health, and infirmity of our mind’s eye, for which we are to blame because of our love of temporal things. It is as if our bad habit of staring at dim figures in the darkness has weakened our eyes and made them susceptible to all kinds of disease and corruption. Later Augustine combines this account of the obstacles to salvation with the conception that human nature in general has suffered a kind of corruption.66 But in his early works the spotlight is on individual failure: each soul’s vices account for its own particular distance from beatitude, each soul’s carnal habits account for its own inability to bear the strong light of the intelligible Truth, and each soul’s lack of training explains why it has not yet developed the ability to see God.
The opposite side of the coin from the metaphor of dazzlement is thus the program of strengthening weak eyes through education and moral purification. In Soliloquies Augustine aims to give a deep philosophical explanation of how and why this program is supposed to work. The key element in this explanation is taken straight from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: a good liberal education is the training that strengthens the mind’s eye so that it can see the intelligible Sun. After describing how some eyes are healthy and strong enough to look straight at the Sun without flinching, the author describes what seems to be his own present condition:
There are others, however, who are hit hard by the very radiance they intensely desire to see, and often they are glad to retreat into the darkness without having seen it. It is dangerous to want to show them what they are not yet capable of seeing, even though they are already such as may rightly be called “healthy.” Therefore they need exercise first, a useful delay and nourishing of their love. To begin with they should be shown certain things that do not light up on their own but can be seen in the light, such as a garment or a wall or something of that sort. Next, something that shines more beautifully, not indeed on its own but in that light, such as gold, silver, and the like—but not so radiant that it hurts the eyes. Then perhaps, within limits, this earthly fire should be shown, then the stars, then the moon, then the glow of dawn and the brightness of the early morning sky. By these [steps] sooner or later—whether [proceeding] through the whole order or skipping some—getting habituated, each according to his own state of health, one will see the sun without flinching and with great pleasure. This is the sort of thing the best teachers do for those who are most eager [studiosissimus] for wisdom—not sharp-eyed but already seeing something. For the task of a good education [bonae disciplinae] is to attain this by a certain order—since without order it would be almost incredible luck.67
Thus for Augustine, as for Plato, the right studies in the right disciplines are just what the doctor ordered to cure the diseases of our minds’ eye—or to strengthen those eyes that are in good health but have not yet reached their full potential. Since they fulfill their potential by gazing straight at the intelligible Sun, the First Principle of all things, it follows (for Augustine) that the point of a good liberal arts education is nothing less than to see God.
Such a view of education sounds absurd to modern ears, but it is part and parcel of the peculiar unity of Augustine’s thought—the way he holds together reason and religion, epistemology and joy. It is also a view of education that would hardly have surprised the author of the Allegory of the Cave. Despite its influence on later views of mysticism and religious illumination, the Allegory is described by Plato himself not as an account of mystical experience but as an illustration of the nature of education.68 The point—which is crucial to his whole program of training philosopher-kings in the Republic—is that a good education leads to a vision of the supreme Good. Precisely here, interestingly, Augustine ends up siding with Plato against Plotinus. Plato’s theory of education makes no sense at all unless human minds can grasp the First Principle, which Plato calls here “the Form of the Good.” Therefore he, like Augustine, thinks it natural for the mind’s eye to gaze straight at the intelligible sun69—in contrast to Plotinus,70 but also to most of the Nicene Christian tradition as represented by Denys, Anselm, and Aquinas.
While much of the epistemology sketched in the Soliloquies and the other Cassiciacum works is left behind in the writings of Augustine’s maturity, intellectual vision remains central for him, defining the fundamental relation between God and the soul. Intellectual vision is the fundamental metaphor for intelligibility, the Platonist kinship between soul and eternal things that is the foundation for the Neoplatonist inward turn. Augustine inherits both concepts, intellectual vision and inward turn, from the Platonist tradition, and the themes of his own career as a Platonist mimic the order of development of these concepts in history: first intellectual vision, then inward turn—and then finally Augustine’s concept of inner self. Hence the development of inwardness runs along two converging tracks: both Augustine’s career and the Platonist tradition begin by being concerned with the concept of intelligibility (conceived as the vision of the mind’s eye), and then in the course of investigating the nature of intelligibility develop a concept of inward turn. Then the final achievement of Platonist inwardness is Augustine’s concept of the private inner space of the soul, which is fully developed by the end of his early period, in the Confessions. Each successive concept provides the context of inquiry in which the next develops: Plato’s concept of intelligibility provides the conceptual framework of Plotinus’s inward turn, and Augustine’s adaptation of Plotinus’s inward turn provides the context of problems that result in the new concept of soul as private inner space.
This chapter has introduced Augustine’s concepts of inward turn and intellectual vision as the context for the development of his most original contribution to the history of inwardness: the private inner space. Once Augustine articulates his project of inward turn, it becomes the framework within which he conducts his investigation of the concept of intelligibility, which defines the relation of the soul to God. Before that time, we have what I call the “prehistory” of Augustine’s inwardness—a set of themes, concepts, and problems that lead to the inward turn and the inner self but have not yet arrived there. The dominant context of investigation during this earliest phase of Augustine’s career, when he is trying to understand intelligibility without an fully articulated project of inward turn, is a program of education in the liberal disciplines, modeled at least in part on that of Plato in the Republic, with the same goal as that expressed in the Allegory of the Cave: to gaze straight at the intelligible Sun without flinching. It is to this program that we next turn.