This chapter paints the developmental background of the inquiries in Augustine’s early period that led him from inward turn to inner space. This “prehistory” of Augustine’s inwardness begins at Cassiciacum, where Augustine takes the presence of Reason in the soul as the great clue to the relation between the soul and God. The developmental starting point of Augustine’s inquiries is to be found not in Plotinus but in Cicero, whose philosophy includes, along with Stoic materialism, a Platonist turn from bodies to the soul, which would continue to affect the shape of Augustine’s mature version of the inward turn. At the beginning of his career all Augustine’s philosophical sources, and his Christology as well, were based on the premise that there was some divine power intrinsic in the soul. Hence the Cassiciacum dialogues conclude by sketching a program of education designed to remedy Augustine’s own ignorance, and to reveal the divine nature of Reason.
The inward turn comes before the private inner space. There is a project of inward turn in Plotinus (his exhortation for the soul to turn “into the inside”) and even a conception of an inner world (i.e., the intelligible world) but no private inner space belonging only to a particular individual soul. Augustine was engaged in a fully articulated project of inward turn (a modification of Plotinus’s inward turn) at least since the time of the second book of On Free Choice, about a decade before the writing of Confessions, in which he first elaborated the concept of a private inner space of the soul.
In book 2 of On Free Choice, Augustine examines the lower powers of the soul without invoking a picture of inner space, and when he comes to deal with the power of intellectual vision, the space he pictures is explicitly public. For the Truth the mind sees when turned inward is one and the same for all who see it; it cannot be anyone’s private possession.1Nor does it need to be cut into pieces in order to be shared, like bodily things that must be divided among the many who are greedy for them. Augustine elaborates this contrast using an astonishing image: he pictures Wisdom as a beauty who has many lovers, all of whom can embrace her wholly without taking away from what her other lovers can have and enjoy of her.2 Clearly at this point Augustine is still working with a Plotinian conception of inner space—an inner world that is the same for all souls. What we find within is common, not private property (commune, not proprium or privatum).3
Augustine develops the concept of a private inner space in the course of working through problems in this project of inward turn. For he wants to appropriate the Platonist tradition of divinity within but he does not fully understand it, and its relations with the Catholic tradition contain some pitfalls of which he is not yet aware. To see the roots of this development and its problems, however, we must go back before the second book of On Free Choice and examine what I call the “prehistory” of Augustinian inwardness, in the writings of Cassiciacum and the next year or so thereafter. In this chapter we need to familiarize ourselves with the context of this development—the soil, as it were, in which these roots were planted.
The most striking thing about the prehistory of Augustinian inwardness is that Augustine dramatized the inner space long before he conceptualized it. That is to say, before Augustine formulated a concept of an inner space of the soul, he wrote a drama staged in that space. It is an unprecedented kind of drama, and Augustine gives it the unprecedented name Soliloquia (“Soliloquies”), apologizing for the ugly sound of his neologism.4 We should imagine the drama taking place mostly at night, as Augustine lies in bed at Cassiciacum thinking over the discussions of the previous day:5
For a long time I had been turning over many and various things within myself, for many days searching for myself and my good, and what evil is to be avoided; and suddenly there spoke to me—either I myself, or someone else outside, or else inside, I don’t know—for this very thing is what I am working so hard to know. So, R. said to me . . .6
From the Retractations we learn (what is easy enough to discover from the context) that “R,” Augustine’s dialogue partner, is Reason (ratio).7 It is also easy to guess that the topic of the conversation to follow is none other than this opening question: who is it that speaks to Augustine in his solitary meditations? In other words, in the inner drama of the Soliloquies Augustine is discussing with Reason the question of what Reason really is. This is ultimately the same topic of discussion that is announced a little later on, when the philosophical inquiry is ready to begin—after Augustine, in obedience to Reason, has prayed for divine assistance:
A: There, I have prayed to God.
R: So what do you want to know?
A: Everything I prayed for.
R: Sum it up in brief.
A: I desire to know God and the soul.
R: Nothing else?
A: Nothing at all.8
If all Augustine wants to know is God and the soul, and the identity of Reason is the very thing Augustine was working so hard to know, then the conclusion has to be that Augustine thinks he will understand the nature of God and of the soul once he knows who or what Reason is. But of course the character named Reason does not just sit still and wait to be contemplated. In the Soliloquies Reason is not just the object of investigation but its guide—“Augustine”’s inner teacher. Hence the reasoning activity of the soul is simultaneously investigated and dramatized in the Soliloquies, and both the investigation and the dramatization are meant as clues about the relation between God and the soul.
Who Reason is remains throughout the Soliloquies an unanswered question—a topic of exploration and a problem to solve. In the Cassiciacum dialogues, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, Augustine has already explored a number of possible identities of Reason, and now in the inner dialogue of the Soliloquies (which was meant to be the crown of all his efforts at Cassiciacum but is left unfinished) his hope is to arrive at some definite solution to the problem, confident that once he understands Reason he will know himself and God.
“Augustine”’s partner in this inner dialogue is in fact a mysterious and rather formidable character. In contrast to that other character, called “A.,” for “Augustine,”9 this one does not bear the name of one born of woman, one who will eventually return to the dust whence he came. The name “Reason” suggests no temporal or historical origin, no fleshly or mortal end. And Reason’s conduct in this conversation befits a being immortal and divine: whereas “Augustine” is the student, bewailing his ignorance and grasping at new insights, “Reason” speaks with unshakable certainty, like one who has always known. For anyone who comes to the Soliloquies after reading Plotinus, it is hard to imagine what this could be besides a dramatization of the life of the Plotinian soul, divided between a higher part that is immutable and unfallen and a lower part that has descended to this body of earth, blinded by ignorance and error, and contaminated by concerns about society, marriage, and death (concerns about which Reason interrogates “Augustine” in a kind of moral self-examination or examination of conscience that occupies a prominent place later in the first book of Soliloquies).10 The dialogue between the anxious student named “Augustine” and the perfect intelligence named “Reason” seems intended to dramatize the temporal process by which the lower part of the soul gains hard-won insights into immutable Truth—the tortuous path of inquiry by which a lover of wisdom, not yet wise, comes to catch intermittent and partial glimpses of eternal Truth, through his contact with a part of himself whose ultimate identity is not temporal at all. The great moral and intellectual struggle of human life, according to Plotinus, is for the lower part of the soul to be called by the higher part away from its lusts and troubles in the material cosmos and back to the vision of higher and eternal things.11 Augustine’s Soliloquies reads very much like a dramatization of this struggle, with “Reason” taking the role of the higher part of the soul and “Augustine” the lower part.
But there is another possible identification of Reason to consider here. Several years later Augustine writes a treatise On the Teacher, which comes to a climax when Augustine discusses how we learn intelligible things. At this climactic point he speaks of an inner Teacher, whose counsel we listen to (consulimus) in our “inner man.” That certainly sounds like his teacher in the Soliloquies. But in On the Teacher his name is Christ, the Virtue and Wisdom of God:
But concerning the universals which we understand [intellegimus] we do not listen [ consulimus] to anyone who speaks in outward sounds but rather to the Truth presiding inwardly over the mind itself—although perhaps by words we are admonished to listen. We listen to him teach, who is said to dwell in the inner man, Christ the immutable Virtue and eternal Wisdom of God, to whom indeed all rational souls listen, but who is available to them only to the extent that they can hold [capere] him, according to their own good or evil will.12
It is important to bear in mind that for young Augustine, the explorer at Cassiciacum, both these identifications of Reason—Plotinus’s higher part of the soul and Christ, the Virtue and Wisdom of God—are possible, and he might indeed be considering the possibility of combining them. If, as suggested earlier, his Trinitarian thinking still bore traces of subordinationism,13 then it would not be so surprising for him to interpret Christ dwelling in the heart as the immutable and divine part of the soul, mediating to us knowledge of God the Father in his role as Wisdom and Truth. I must hasten to add: this is only a possibility, and it is not one that he eventually adopts. Yet by the same token, it is crucial for any sensitive interpretation of Augustine’s earliest writings to be aware that this is a young man for whom many possibilities remain open—because, just like the character “Augustine” in the Soliloquies, he really is uncertain of where he is going and does not yet know which of the possibilities he is exploring will eventually be ruled out.
What he is certain of is that Reason is the crucial clue to what he is looking for. In a stroke of great boldness he puts a promise in the mouth of Reason: “Reason, who is speaking with you, promises to show God to your mind as the sun is shown to the eyes.”14 It is astonishing to think of Augustine writing this promise down. One wonders on what authority he thought he could put such words in Reason’s mouth—the author Augustine promising the character “Augustine” that the fictional character named Reason can do all that he (Augustine!) says he can. There is great uncertainty in this young man, but there are also high hopes.
As will become apparent at key points in our investigation of the prehistory of inner space, what Augustine does not know is a factor that any interpreter of his earliest writings must keep in mind—following the lead of Augustine himself, who portrays himself at Cassiciacum as one made deeply anxious by his own lack of learning. His ignorance at this time, it should be noted, embraces not only most of the Bible and the Christian tradition, but also Neoplatonism. At Cassiciacum he is only beginning to read and understand the books that would become the sources of his mature Christian Platonism. Hence it is misleading to place on a work like the Soliloquies the label “Augustine’s early Platonism.” This work is rather an exercise in which Augustine is still trying to learn Platonism as well as Catholic Christianity and is not yet getting either of them quite right. He is an explorer who has some blind alleys to poke his head into before he finds the right road.
To understand the aim of Augustine’s inquiry into the identity of Reason at Cassiciacum, some positive idea of the starting point of his explorations is necessary. As interpreters of Augustine’s earliest writings, we need a conception of his point of departure to replace the misleading label “Augustine’s early Platonism.” If the writings of Augustine’s early period take a trajectory that arrives in the end at the mature Christian Platonism of Confessions and On Christian Doctrine, then how shall we mark its begining? What terminus a quo belongs at the other end of the trajectory from this terminus ad quem? “Ignorance” is not a sufficient answer, for in fact Augustine knew a great deal. Some of it he would rather forget, like the theology of the Manichaeans. But he also had a stock of philosophical knowledge on which he wanted to build, and this came mainly from Latin sources, especially Cicero.15 Cicero’s texts were, then as now, a centerpiece of Latin education—taught literally from grammar school, that is, in the school of the grammaticus.16 Cicero also provided the central textbooks for the teaching of rhetoric, Augustine’s old job.17 It is obvious in the Cassiciacum dialogues themselves that there are no philosophical writings more familiar to young Augustine, more carefully studied arid easily drawn on, than Cicero’s.18 It is in fact this Ciceronian point of departure, rather than Neoplatonism or Catholicism, that is most noticeable on the surface of the Cassiciacum dialogues.19 The contrast with the Confessions is instructive, for it is just the opposite of what one is led to expect after hearing of “Augustine’s early Platonism.” In order to understand the Confessions the most important books to have on hand are the Bible and the Enneads, whereas in the Cassiciacum dialogues Cicero is far more frequently quoted, discussed, and relied on than any other author, sacred or profane.20
The young man writing at Cassiciacum is a professional rhetorician who has recently quit his job to devote himself full-time to philosophical inquiry, and he has learned most of his philosophy from Cicero, another professional rhetorician who took up philosophical writing after political events forced him into retirement. All this adds up to a very unprofessional philosophical training, as Marrou puts it:
his philosophy teacher was not Plato or Aristotle but Cicero, that amateur. . . . Philosophically, Saint Augustine was an autodidact, with all that word evokes of persistent effort and also of irremediable imperfection.21
In the Cassiciacum writings we can trace the course of this philosophical autodidacticism, which reaches a peak of intensity in the Soliloquies, where Augustine has no teacher other than the Reason within him, in part because there is no teacher on earth who is ready and able to help him.22 What he does have is some books that have changed his life and his mind. In the Cassiciacum works we can read Augustine’s efforts to make a connection between the Ciceronian philosophy that had set him afire back when he was a student and the Plotinian philosophy that set him afire just that summer.23
In fact the move from Cicero to Neoplatonism is not as awkward as one might have thought, and Augustine is not the only one to have tried it. The most famous example of a project of Platomzing Cicero is Macrobius’s Neoplatonist commentary on Cicero’s Scipio’s Dream. But Augustine had an example nearer at hand, in the sermons of the bishop of Milan. Some time before his conversion, he probably heard Ambrose’s sermon “On Jacob and the Happy Life” (De Jacob et Vita Beata), which described the regenerative effects of baptism by borrowing from Cicero’s Stoic portraits of “the wise man” and then by quoting large sections of Plotinus’s treatise “On Happiness.”24 Augustine tries a similar but not so fully Plotinian movement from Stoic conviction to underlying Platonist ontology in the Cassiciacum dialogue On the Happy Life, where he argues that the (Stoic) imperviousness to the blows of fortune praised by Cicero is only conceivable if the wise man possesses something that is immutable (i.e., something like Platonic ideas).25 This trajectory from Ciceronian Stoicism to Neoplatonism has its most important precedent, however, in Plotinus himself, whose many critical engagements with Stoic thought often end up with him appropriating Stoic concepts (purified, of course, of the Stoics’ materialist ontology).26
Another reason why the transition from Cicero to Neoplatonism can be made rather smoothly is that there is a great deal of Platonism in Cicero himself. Cicero was eclectic in principle and in practice: an adherent of the moderate, “probabilist” wing of Academic skeptics (called the “New Academy”), he made it a principle to follow whatever impression or argument seemed most probable, which resulted in practice in his borrowing from a wide variety of sources, Academic, Peripatetic, and Stoic—a practice he justified also by claiming (along with the other wing, the “Old Academy”) that all three of these schools taught basically the same thing in different words.27 The Hortemius, for example, was modeled on Aristotle’s early work the Protrepticus.28 And one of the Academic sources from which he borrowed quite extensively was none other than Plato himself. We have in fact one book of Cicero, the first book of the Tusculan Disputations, that contains a fair amount of what could be called Cicero’s Platonism.29 This is the Platonism Augustine would have known before reading Plotinus and “the books of the Platonists” described in Confessions 7. As we shall see, there are reasons for thinking this Ciceronian Platonism had already attracted Augustine’s interest before he read Plotinus. A glance at it will help us see what Platonist assumptions young Augustine already had in mind when he first read the great Neoplatonist—what kindling, as it were, was set afire by those “very few books of Plotinus.” For when Plotinus’s writings came into Augustine’s hands in the summer of 386, they were received by a mind asking questions to which Plotinus seemed to have the answers.30
The first book of Tusculan Disputations argues for the immortality of the soul on the basis of an inquiry into the nature and composition of the soul. It contributed to both the language and the conceptuality of Augustine’s inward turn, as Augustine himself signals by using Cicero’s words to indicate a key step in the inward turn in Confessions 7. The reasoning power of the soul, Augustine says, rises up to examine its own intelligence as it “draws thought away from habit,” by withdrawing from the contradictory crowd of phantasms (mental images drawn from the senses) in order to look at the mind alone, illuminated by the immutable Light.31 He is echoing Tusculan Disputations, book 1, where Cicero says: “It takes great ability to call the the mind back from the senses and draw thought away from habit.”32
Cicero says this at a turning point in his exposition. Up to this point, he had been arguing for the immortality of the soul on the grounds that all nations of the earth believed in it—a consensus gentium argument, based on the principle that “the agreement of all peoples [consensio omnium gentium] is to be accounted a law of nature.”33 The Stoics used this type of argument to prove the existence of the gods (on the premise that all the world believed in gods of some sort or other), and Cicero adapts it to make a proof of the immortality of the soul. At this point, however, Cicero turns from the agreement of all peoples to the reasoning of the wise—from the many to the few, as a Platonist would say—and builds a philosophical case for the divinity and eternity of the soul, in which Plato is called as chief witness.34 Unlike the general run of the human race, who imagine the soul after death inhabiting the underworld as if it still had something like a body, the philosophers who follow Plato know how to call the mind away from the senses and its old habits of perception, in order to conceive of the soul as entirely separate from the body.35 A few pages later Cicero translates a proof for the immortality of the soul from the Phaedrus,36 then recounts the story of Socrates and the slave boy in the Meno, giving a brief exposition of Plato’s Ideas or Forms that emphasizes their immutability and their connection with Platonic Recollection.37 He wraps up his discussion of the Platonist view of the soul with a summary of the Phaedo, which he concludes by reiterating the importance of separating the soul from the body:
What else are we doing when we call the soul away from pleasure, that is, from the body, and from the republic, from business of every kind—what, I say, are we doing but calling the soul to itself, compelling it to be with itself and leading it away from the body as far as possible?38
There is no inward turn here—no turning to enter an inward space of the soul—but this is certainly interesting preparation for someone to read Plotinus’s inward turn. In addition to giving Augustine an acquaintance with Platonic Ideas and the doctrine of Recollection, this book would help him in the crucial business of taking the right things for granted: the real philosophers, Cicero is telling Augustine, all draw the soul away from the body and the senses. What is more, they all take the soul as a clue to the nature of God, for “there is in the human soul something divine.”39 The piety of these philosophers is thus obedience to the divine command, “Know Thyself,” which both Cicero and Plotinus interpret to mean “know thy soul.”40 Our souls possess a “divine power” (divina vis) of which blood and bone are not capable. Hence Cicero is bold enough to say, like Plotinus, that the soul is a god.41
The notion that the soul turns to itself to find divinity is thus not something that Augustine must wait to hear about from Plotinus. Rather, he brings it to his reading of Plotinus and thus recognizes in the great Neoplatonist a deeper and more convincing version of these Platonist themes than he found in Cicero. Above all, Plotinus offers Augustine a much more powerful version of the turn to the soul, because Plotinus has a firm grasp of the key Platonist notion of intelligibility, which is strikingly absent from Cicero’s writings. Cicero can give a definition of Platonic Ideas, but he says nothing about the power of the mind’s eye to see them; he mentions Platonic Recollection, but he says nothing about the soul’s capacity for intellectual vision, without which Platonic Recollection is merely mythology. Hence Cicero’s argument for the immortality of the soul must in the end take quite a different route from the concept of kinship between soul and Form that is at the heart of the Phaedo.
In fact, Cicero’s main proof of the immortality of the soul is still Stoic, even materialist—for without some sort of connection or kinship between soul and Form, there is in the end no alternative to conceiving of the soul as composed of material elements. This is something that takes a little getting used to, for modern readers: in the ancient world one could be a materialist and still believe in God and the immortality of the soul. Indeed, one could believe that the soul is divine, precisely because it is made of the same material as the gods.42 In Stoic materialism, for example, the soul contains living, divine fire, just like the stars, which are celestial gods. When soul and body are separated at death, therefore, there is a separation of diverse kinds of elements: the body, made of the two lower elements, earth and water,43 returns to the ground, but the soul, made of higher elements, fire and perhaps air, seeks its natural resting place on high.44 For fire rises upward as naturally as stones fall downward: sparks and flames rise because they are gravitating toward their natural resting place, which is not on earth but in heaven, among the fiery stars. Hence according to Cicero, the soul after death quite literally goes to heaven, which is its true home.45
All of this continues to have an attraction for Augustine even in the days of his mature Platonism, but he takes it metaphorically and allegorically (the way a good Platonist takes much of the Bible). The soul is of course not literally made of fire, but the good soul does burn, as it were, with charity and as a result is borne upward toward God by a kind of spiritual gravitation, which Augustine sums up in his famous apothegm “My love is my weight.”46 In the realm of the will, to love God means to rise to God, as in the physical world the heat of a thing afire pulls it upward to the sky.
It is worth seeing how Cicero, despite his materialist ontology, can affirm the soul’s superiority to the body in a way that continues to appeal to Augustine even after he has imbibed Plotinus’s Neoplatonisrn. Cicero in fact vacillates on the question of the composition of the soul, unsure whether it is made of Stoic fire or the Aristotelian fifth element (quintessence).47 However, the same basic line of argument follows from both conceptions. In an earlier work, the Consolatio, Cicero had in fact based an argument for the immortality of the soul on the premise that the soul was made of the fifth element,48 and it differed so little from the argument he undertakes in the first book of Tusculan Disputations that he incorporates the key passage of the former treatise into the latter. The basic argument is that
There is nothing present in these natures [i.e., the lower elements, earth and water] that has the power [vis] of memory, mind, and thought, which retains the past and foresees the future and can embrace the present. These are wholly divine, and could not have come to the human being from anywhere but God. Therefore that nature and power of the soul is unique, and quite distinct from these familiar and well-known elements. So whatever there is that perceives and knows, lives and sees, is celestial and divine—and for that reason must be eternal. And indeed God himself, who is understood by us, cannot be understood except as a mind that is absolute and free, separated from all mortal admixture. . . .49
The nerve of this argument is a premise Cicero attributes to Aristotle in his account of the fifth element or quintessence.
Aristotle . . . having accepted those four familiar kinds of elements, from which all things originated, was of the opinion that there was a fifth nature, from which came the mind. For thought and foresight, learning and teaching, the ability to discover [invenire] something and to remember so many other things, to love and hate, desire and fear, grieve and rejoice—these and the like he thought were not present in those four elements. . . .50
When the argument shifts from the Aristotelian premise of a divine fifth element to the Stoic premise of a divine fire, Cicero simply relies on the Stoic view that the two higher elements, fire and air, were the only ones with the power to act as efficient causes, while the lower, heavier elements, water and earth, were passive and causally inert.51 Since the body is composed of the two lower elements (which make up blood and bone and the like) while the soul is composed of the two higher ones (for the soul is “a fiery breath,” made of fire and air) all human activities must be caused by the soul rather than the body.52
As an example of this superiority of soul to body, Cicero offers an account of sense-perception:
For even now [i.e., in the embodied state] it is not with the eyes that we discern what we see, nor is there any sensation in the body. ... It is the soul that sees and hears, not those parts which are as it were windows of the soul. . .,53
Cicero supports this claim with psychological observations that are quite congenial to Neoplatonisrn and its convictions about the causal superiority of soul to body. Most notable is an argument about the soul’s power of “shared sense” (sensus communis),54 by which we compare the reports of various senses:
For it is with the same mind that we comprehend dissimilar things, such as color, taste, heat, smell, and sound—which the soul could never recognize by means of those five messengers [nuntiis, i.e., the five diverse sensory systems of the body] unless everything were referred to it and it alone was the judge of them all.55
The mature Augustine can adopt this line of reasoning with no appreciable modifications, using it to describe an early stage in the soul’s reflection on itself in the inward turn. As we turn to ourselves, the first and easiest thing for us to see is our own sensory activities, and Cicero’s argument about the “shared sense” (which Augustine calls “the interior sense”) serves to show that even sense perception involves more than just the bodily organs. Augustine’s first elaborate statement of the project of inward turn begins with a rather lengthy treatment of the power of interior sense.56 Later sketches of the inward turn frequently include resumes of this earlier treatment, often formulated using Cicero’s vocabulary. For instance in the description of the inward turn in Confessions, Augustine presents his examinination of the powers of his own soul as an ascent
step by step from bodies to the soul which senses things through the body, and thence to its inner power, to which the bodily sense announces [annuntiaret] external things (and which the beasts also possess) and thence to that reasoning power to which what is taken from the bodily senses is referred for judgment.57
Both the language and the thought here are Ciceronian. The same power is again treated briefly in Confessions 10 as the first step of the gradual ascent inward through the soul to God.58
The fact that this Ciceronian reasoning survives intact into Augustine’s mature work is indicative of how little is required to Platonize it. Despite Cicero’s materialist conception of the soul, his argument about the “shared sense” already has the key conceptual feature that a Neoplatonist account of the senses must insist on: it gives the soul absolute causal superiority over the body. This is a point that modern readers may find hard to believe, but it is important to recognize that from Augustine’s point of view, all the important philosophical authorities (from Cicero to Plotinus), not to mention Reason itself, favored the view that bodies can have no causal effect on souls. Thus, for example, in one of his early accounts of sense-perception, his aim is precisely to show that even in sense-perception bodies do not affect the soul.59 This account is heavily indebted to Plotinus,60 but the notion that it is the soul, not the body, that is active in sensation would have been familiar to Augustine from Cicero.
What we see in the Cassiciacum works, I suggest, is Augustine, thoroughly persuaded by Cicero’s admonitions to turn from the body to the soul, working vigorously but cautiously to assimilate newfound Plotinian doctrines about God and the soul. Plotinus’s rigorously immaterialist account of the nature of the soul and its relation to the intelligible world offered a more cogent and thrilling account of the possibility of the soul’s turning to itself than the one Augustine had originally learned from Cicero. What is new about Plotinus, for Augustine, is the Platonist concept of intelligibility and its promise of a powerful account of the inner relation between the soul and God. What is not new is the thought that, because there is something divine within, the soul should turn away from bodies toward itself.
In other words, for Augustine at Cassiciacum the divinity of the soul is an old familiar song, not a sudden, passing fad brought on by an overly enthusiastic reading of “the books of the Platonists.” It has deep roots in a decade and a half of his thinking about the relation of God and the soul as a Ciceronian philosopher and as a Manichaean believer as well. It is the sort of thing one takes for granted in the cultured milieu of ancient thought, and at Cassiciacum Augustine treats it as a rather straightforward implication of the common definition of “human being” as “rational mortal animal.” An irrational animal is of course a brute beast, while an immortal animal is classically a god (for animal is simply Latin for “that which has a soul,” hence refers to anything that is alive, while “immortal” is nearly synonymous in classical usage with “divine”). The human being, understood as a compound of rational soul and mortal body, thus stands midway between these two levels of life, above the brutes but below the immortals (pagan gods or Biblical angels). Yet the soul is not supposed to rest content at this merely human level. Rather, the two characteristics, “rational” and “mortal,” indicate two opposite directions of movement:
I believe that by them the human being is admonished both where to return and what to flee. For as the progression of the soul toward mortal things is a Fall [lapsus], so the regress or return ought to be to Reason. By the one word, “rational,” it is separated from the brutes, by the other, “mortal,” it is separated from divine things. Unless it retains the one it will be a brute; unless it turns itself away from the other, it will not be divine.61
This is expressed in terms so commonplace that a Cicero, a Mani, and a Plotinus could all agree with it—hence I take it, in its very commonness, as a summary of the point of departure for Augustine’s philosophical and theological development. How far it is from orthodox Christian teaching can be measured by noting that it stands in obvious conflict with the belief that we are brought to blessedness by the death of Christ or the resurrection of the body, both of which imply that mortality does not necessarily separate us from divine things.62 The only feature of this definition of human nature and destiny that consorts better with Christian orthodoxy than with Cicero is the suggestion that the soul is not intrinsically divine but must become so (as in the Eastern Orthodox conception of deification).
That suggestion is in fact out of keeping with the rest of the Cassiciacum writings, where Augustine takes the more common philosophical position that even in its wayward and ignorant state, the soul contains something divine. For instance, in the preface to Against the Academics Augustine lets us know that his theme is the storm-tossed voyage by which “the divine mind [animum] inhering in mortals” makes its odyssey to “the port of wisdom.”63 The clear implication is that even a soul that is only seeking wisdom already has something divine in it. Thus a little later in the preface Augustine urges his patron Romanianus to awaken “that very thing which is divine in you.”64 In the debate that takes up the body of the book, Augustine defines the happy life as “living according to what is best in a human being.” This is the part of the soul (animi) called “mind or reason” (mens or ratio), which ought to rule over everything else in the human being.65 Later in the discussion his student Licentius (Romanianus’s son) calls this “the part of the soul [animi] that is divine.”66
This way of talking about reason or the best part of the soul seems quite in keeping with the role of the character named “Reason” in the Soliloquies. Yet I do not think we are in a position to see what Augustine is getting at until we hear Licentius say “undoubtedly there is even in human beings a divine power [virtus].”67 Once again it seems to me we must hear echoes of the apostle’s description of Christ as “the Power [virtus] of God and the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Christ is both the Wisdom of God whom we seek and the Power or Virtue of God that makes it possible for us to seek him, as we saw in the treatise On the Teacher.68 No other interpretation of these passages makes sense in connection with Augustine’s biography: for although Augustine at Cassiciacum is not as orthodox a Catholic as one might expect, and he may always be much more of a Platonist than most orthodox Christians could wish, he is never simply a pagan. As he could not give himself wholly to a pursuit of wisdom in which “the name of Christ was not there,”69 so he could not desire a divinity in himself that did not bear the name “Christ.” Hence at Cassiciacum, the divinity of the soul is a Christological theme—just like the concept of finding God in the soul in Augustine’s mature version of the inward turn. In fact the latter is the successor to the former in Augustine’s development: it is what replaces the divinity of the soul once Augustine reaizes that no version of the intrinsic divinity of the soul, even a Christological one, is compatible with Catholic teaching.70
The exploration of the identity of Reason in Soliloquies is an attempt to work out a concept of divine presence in the soul that will help Augustine preserve the best of what he learned from Cicero while appropriating the exciting new things he is learning from the texts of Plotinus and the Christian Neoplatonists in Milan. At this point he does not quite realize that orthodox Catholic teaching has no place for the divinity of the soul, and in fact his prime worry about orthodoxy lies elsewhere. In addition to the aims of preserving the best of Cicero and constructing a Christian Neoplatonisrn, the Cassiciacum writings pursue the project of repudiating Manichaeanism and overcoming the old habits of thought associated with it.
The Manichaean heresy is the negative side of Augustine’s point of departure, the thing he wants to leave behind. Interestingly, the habit of mind he most fervently wants to overcome is something Manichaeanism had in common with Cicero: materialism. “The greatest and almost sole cause of my inevitable errors” in his Manichaean days, Augustine tells us, was his inability to conceive of a non-bodily reality-so that “when I thought of my God, I did not know how to think of anything but corporeal bulk, and it did not seem to me that anything existed which was not like that.”71 His other errors were “inevitable,” he thinks, because they followed by logical necessity from this chief error.
This is another thing that may take a little getting used to. Nowadays the Manichaeans are remembered mainly for their dualism, but Augustine thinks their errors flowed ultimately from their materialism.72 According to Augustine’s portrait of them, the Manichaeans thought everything that exists has a corporeal and spatial mode of being-that is, it takes up space in what we would nowadays call “the physical world.”73 Consequently, both Good and Evil were a kind of stuff or material substance, and the whole world was divided into the Good Stuff and the Evil Stuff.74 From this materialist ontology follow two consequences, one about Evil and the other about Good, that were targets of Augustine’s repeated criticism.
The first consequence is that in conceiving both Good and Evil as material substances, the Manichaeans put them on the same level ontologically: the Evil Stuff had been around as long as the Good Stuff and would continue to exist as long, and therefore Evil was just as real as the Good. This means that God (who is made of the Good Stuff) was no more real than Evil. Evil was as old as God, existing eternally in its own right independent of him, something he neither created nor had providential control over. For Catholics, who believe that God created all that exists and governs it with justice and wisdom, this was a wholly unacceptable conclusion. The objectionable feature, however, is not the dualism of Good and Evil per se (for of course Catholics too believe that it is important to distinguish between good and evil) but the raising of Evil to the ontological status of a substance existing independent of God-and this is the consequence specifically of Manichaean materialism, which makes evil a kind of stuff or material substance.
This consequence is done away with in Neoplatonist ontology, according to which the lower, sensible world is good, not evil, precisely because it is not independent of God but rather reflects and participates in his goodness, though in a lower and lesser way. Thus everything that has any positive existence is good, having its origin in the one and the same First Principle, while evil is only a corruption or defect in existing things that mars and destroys them.75 Evil is emphatically less real than Good, indeed it is unreality itself. Evil is nothing but a defect or corruption in that which exists, a lack of being, goodness, beauty, or truth.
The second consequence of Manichaean materialism is that the Good Stuff, having its being in space, can be pierced and torn asunder.76 Evidently, this was precisely what it was threatened with in the great cosmic battle that, according to Manichaean mythology, led to the formation of the present evil universe. Augustine’s friend Nebridius discomfitted the Manichaeans by pointing out that the very possibility of God’s being threatened by Evil implies that God is corruptible—a consequence that nobody, least of all the Manichaeans, really wanted to accept.77 Hence this implication becomes one of Augustine’s most powerful weapons in debate against them.78 In order to secure the incorruptibility of God, Augustine is convinced, one needs something like the Platonist doctrine of the immateriality, immutability, and non-spatiality of intelligible things.
Augustine’s dissatisfaction with the Manichaeans’ view of the soul is of a piece with his dissatisfaction with their view of God. Like Cicero and the Stoics, the Manichaeans believed that God and the soul were made of the same stuff, the luminous heavenly material that we can literally see with our eyes.79 The Manichaeans taught that the soul was divine and heavenly in origin, a portion of the Good Substance that was unfortunately trapped in this evil world of bodies. The story goes80 that in the beginning the evil “race of darkness” was separate—literally, spatially separated—from the good realm of light. Things started going wrong when the evil race attacked the region of the good, threatening God himself and forcing him to respond with a sort of counterattack. So God sent a portion of his own substance—our souls—willy-nilly into this dark world. Here they were captured, as it were, behind enemy lines and imprisoned in the darkness of mortal bodies.
The whole story made no sense, as Nebridius pointed out, unless somehow the race of darkness threatened God with harm—and if God could be harmed then he was corruptible. Furthermore, if the story is true, then the very fact that the soul is suffering in this dark world means that the divine substance actually is suffering harm and is therefore corruptible. Thus in the two earliest appearances of Nebridius’s argument in Augustine’s writings, Augustine relies on the premise that the soul is divine, reasoning from the (universally admitted) fact that the soul is presently in an evil state to the (scandalously unacceptable) conclusion that God is corrupted, by way of the Manichaean premise that the soul is a fragment of divine substance.81 Some scholars have seen in these passages Augustine rejecting the divinity of the soul,82 but that is not the case. In both passages Augustine’s harsh words are all reserved for the “impious” and “ridiculous” view that God is corruptible, while the premise of the divinity of the soul is accepted, at least for the sake of the argument, without demur.
We must bear in mind that Augustine borrows this argument from Nebridius, his friend and fellow ex-Manichaean, not because he is a heresy hunter but because he is working to free himself from errors that were once his own—and the divinity of the soul is plainly not the error from which he is most anxious to be freed. His objection against the Manichaeans, rather, is that their materialism makes both God and the soul vulnerable to external threats. The whole point of affirming that there is a divine element in the soul is to make the soul immortal and unshakable, not to make God corruptible and subject to suffering.
The connection between God and the soul was thus a theme that lay in Augustine’s heart ever since his Manichaean days, and the attraction of Platonism is that it gave a more satisfactory account of this connection than any he had encountered before. Instead of linking God to a fallen and vulnerable soul, it linked the soul to an incorruptible and immutable God. The central argument of the Soliloquies, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a kind of conceptual reversal of Nebridius’s argument, using the same mediating premise of the divinity of the soul: whereas in Manichaeanism the corruptibility of the soul “rubs off,” as it were, on God, in the “true philosophy” Augustine has found at Cassiciacum the immutability of God “rubs off” on the soul. This argument, aiming to reverse the great failure of Manichaeanism, is “Reason”’s answer to “Augustine”’s plea near the beginning of the Soliloquies, where he asks to learn about God and the soul and nothing else. The note of anxiety and determination in this plea arises from Augustine’s glance back at the pit of heresy he is escaping and from his high hopes for the truth toward which he is journeying. But common to both the Manichaean past and Neoplatonist future is the premise that the soul’s nature and destiny is bound up with the nature and attributes of God.
At Cassiciacum, Augustine conceives the divine mind or reason inhering in mortals as both the subject and object of investigation. Reason makes its homecoming by coming to understand what reason itself is. Hence Augustine’s intellectual journey at Cassiciacum has a definite direction and path. The first dialogue, On the Happy Life, an exhortation to philosophy in the spirit of Cicero’s Hortensius, argues that happiness consists in Wisdom, the mind’s finding of Truth.83 The next dialogue, Against the Academics, rejects the claim that merely seeking after truth is sufficient for happiness (book 1) and then refutes the Academics’ skeptic claim that truth can never be found (books 2 and 3). Having cleared away the skepticism that would make true knowledge (and hence true happiness) impossible, Augustine turns to deal with our actual situation of ignorance in the last of the Cassiciacum dialogues, On Order. Here the problem of human ignorance is placed in a cosmological setting, as the central instance of the problem of the place of evil in the providential order of God.
In the first book and a half of Ore Order, Augustine’s student Licentius is portrayed as making significant but hesitant progress in understanding this problem, guided by divine inspiration but also falling back at times into the darkness of ignorance.84 But at a crucial juncture in the middle of the second book, it is clear he can go no further.85 The problem that stumps him is the same one that Augustine himself found most intractable, according to the Confessions: the origin of evil (unde malum?).86 In fact not only Licentius, but the whole company of Augustine’s friends, relatives, and students struggles in vain to understand the origin of evil in the providential order of God.
There are quite definite reasons for this moment of dramatic perplexity in the dialogue, on the part of its author as well as its participants.87 The question Augustine is faced with here is one that both Manichaeans and Platonists answered by telling about the Fall or descent of the soul into bodies. Augustine (the author as well as the dialogue participant) does not know exactly how to go on from here, for he has not finished sorting out the differences between the two.88 If a human being is the rational, mortal animal who should flee from the mortality shared with the brutes to seek the immortality of Wisdom by means of Reason, then it would be impossible for a good Creator to have have made us this way originally, wrapped in the ignorance and mortality of the body. So how then did embodiment and its attendant ills come about? Augustine rightly spies great difficulties and dangers in this topic, and he is not yet prepared to discuss it.89
Thus the predicament of the little group at Cassiciacum is Augustine’s own predicament as well: none of them are really prepared to answer the question they are presently faced with. Into the troubled silence of the whole company Augustine speaks, therefore, announcing an end to the present discussion, which is getting “out of order,” and proposing that the question be put off until their minds are better trained.90 Accordingly, at this moment of dramatic crisis, when the situation of this company of inquirers serves as a perfect illustration of their intractable intellectual problem (ignorant of the source of their own ignorance and its place in the providential order established by divine Wisdom) Augustine helps them all out by proposing what appears at first to be a change of subject. Instead of talking about the providential order of things in the cosmos (the ordo rerum) he will tell them of a curriculum or order of studies (an ordo disciplinae) that will prepare them to understand the ontological order of things.91 In other words, Augustine, who is not yet ready to solve this dangerous problem in theory, proposes a solution in practice, sketching a program of education in the seven liberal disciplines whose purpose is to lead us from our current state of ignorance to a knowledge of the Truth. The program culminates in the study of philosophy, which is mainly concerned with issues of Platonist ontology such as the nature of evil and the relation between God and the soul.
The discussion of the order of studies that takes up the rest of On Order thus shows, in effect, how the mind is to be trained to understand and articulate the (Plotinian) insights into the nature of evil that Licentius and others had had earlier in the treatise. It represents Augustine’s programmatic first stab at assimilating his newfound Neoplatonism, combining it with his previous knowledge, and harnessing it to solve longstanding intellectual problems. Well aware of his own ignorance and lack of learning, he is formulating a plan to educate himself by writing textbooks in all the liberal disciplines.92 His goal is to ascend step by step from knowledge of corporeal things to knowledge of incorporeal things.93
The notion that the way to reach a vision of ultimate realities is through a program of liberal education goes back of course to Plato, particularly to the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic. But there is a distinctively modern flavor to this enterprise as well: Augustine’s project amounts to an attempt to provide philosophical foundations for the culture in which he was raised.94 His curriculum of studies would introduce students to the fundamental achievements of the ancient classical tradition and then trace them back to the timeless truths of reason. For the study of the liberal disciplines is to lead us from the sensible world to the intelligible world. In On Music, the one textbook that Augustine actually completed, the first five books contain a discussion of poetic meter (i.e., audible numbers) and then the last book ascends from these to a Platonist-Pythagorean vision of the formative power of eternal numbers. Presumably something similar was in store in Augustine’s treatment of the other disciplines: an ascent from teaching about sensible things to insight into the intelligible things that are their ultimate source. And as we shall see, the climactic discipline, philosophy, has the task of uncovering the nature of the Reason that is at the foundation of all the others.
Only a fraction of this vastly ambitious program ever saw the light: the big six-book study On Music, a lost book On Grammar, an unfinished book On Dialectic that is still extant. We can in addition get an idea of what Augustine might have said about geometry in On the Quantity of the Soul, which contains an extended geometry lesson (which it seems to me must be modeled on the Meno itself) complete with explicit conclusions drawn about the psychological basis of recollection. However, our interest here lies not in Augustine’s attempts to execute the program but his sketch of it in On Order, for this provides the immediate context of his exploration of the identity of Reason in the Soliloquies, as well as the crucial background for understanding the very strange argument for the immortality of the soul that is its central concern.
Augustine introduces his proposed curriculum of studies by way of an allegorical narrative in which a personified Reason founds the seven liberal disciplines.95 In the beginning, Reason invents words as a means of expression, to bind soul to soul in society.96 Then it proceeds to establish the three arts of language: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (the medieval trivium). First comes grammar, the basic art of literacy, which includes both the study of language per se and also the interpretation of literature.97 Then comes dialectic, the art of argumentation that we now call logic, whose task is “to define, distinguish, and draw conclusions.”98 Finally there is rhetoric, about which Augustine, the recently retired teacher of rhetoric, has scarcely a good word to say.99
Before proceeding to the next group of disciplines (Augustine’s version of the medieval quadrivium) Reason has a wild thought:
At this point Reason wanted to be caught up [rapere] in blessed contemplation of divine things. But lest it fall [caderet] from on high, it sought gradual steps, and constructed for itself a road through its own possessions, an order.100
Perhaps the language of fall in this passage is meant to be a hint as to how Augustine was thinking of developing a doctrine of the Fall. If so, then to fall is to be overly ambitious, intellectually hasty, trying to know more than one is ready to understand.101 In any case, Augustine clearly desires an order of studies that will preserve the soul from falling out of order and being mislead by its own premature speculations. He tells the participants in the dialogue that they cannot solve the problem of evil because they are themselves “out of order,” trying to understand deep philosophical subjects without the proper education.102
Augustine evidently regarded his own seduction by Manichaeanism as due to a similar failing, a kind of rationalistic overconfidence abetted by his lack of learning. In his twenties, as a bright and inquisitive young man escaping from the hidebound traditionalism of the African church, he had trusted his own insightfulness rather than the authority of Catholic teachers who actually knew more than he did about the way of wisdom, and therefore he was easily taken in by Manichaean promises of rational explanations in place of the Catholic Church’s insistence on putting faith before understanding.103 He suggests on several occasions that he would not have been taken in by their crudely materialist views if he had had a good liberal education.104 The disciplines, it seems, furnish effective weapons against heretics and their carnal, materialist errors.
So Reason wisely restrains its wild thought, defers the beatific vision, and proceeds instead to found the mathematical disciplines of music, geometry, and astrology. The first of these means specifically the study of poetic rhythm or meter—which in Latin (and until a couple of centuries ago, in English as well) was called “numbers.”105 The discipline of astrology requires a slightly more lengthy comment. When Augustine reviews his early program in the Retractations, some three decades later, he silently replaces astrology with arithmetic on the list of disciplines in the curriculum. In fact not long after Cassiciacum Augustine devised a rather famous criticism of astrological determinism.106 Yet it is not surprising that astrology was on the original list at Cassiciacum, for it had recently been instrumental in freeing him from Manichaean mythology. Classical astrology encompassed, along with a great deal of what we now regard as superstition, a fair amount of sound astronomy, including calculations of planetary movements and eclipses that were precise enough to refute the cosmological myths of the books of Mani, which the Manichaeans insisted on taking very literally.107
All these disciplines, however, are merely steps on the way up to philosophy, which stands at the peak of the liberal arts. The discipline of philosophy takes up the results of the previous disciplines and investigates their ultimate source. Its agenda is set by the twofold question of God and the soul.108 This of course is precisely the agenda Augustine himself takes up in his next work, the Soliloquies, which represents his private inner investigation of philosophical issues that his students and companions at Cassiciacum are not ready for. But here in On Order he makes this much clear to the whole company: philosophy is the discipline that will answer their vexing questions about evil and much more besides.109 For “the order of studies of wisdom” is aimed at fitting us to understand the order of things in general,110 and the ultimate aim of this understanding is nothing less than the vision of God, who is “the very fount whence flows everything that is true, being himself the Father of Truth.”111
These philosophical goals are to be reached through Reason’s finally achieving selfunderstanding. Reason is at the basis of all the liberal disciplines, but only in philosophy does it turn to investigate its very self. As it looks back upon the rationality of the lower disciplines and is especially impressed with the role that number and measure play there, it conceives of a daring new project:
It ventures to prove the soul immortal. It has diligently treated all subjects, and has clearly perceived itself capable of many things—and whatever it is capable of, it is capable of through numbers. It is moved by a kind of astonishment, and begins to suspect that perhaps it is itself the number by which everything is numbered—or if not, at least there is what it is trying so hard to reach.112
So at the culmination of the program of education in the liberal disciplines, Reason has an insight that leads to the central project of Soliloquies, the proof of the immortality of the soul. It has attained this insight by examining its own role in the other disciplines, being led back from the disciplines themselves to its own role as their founder—hence in effect from Augustine’s curriculum of liberal education to the question at its heart, “Who is Reason?”
In pursuing these questions, Augustine sketches a precursor of his project of inward turn. After his account of the twofold question of philosophy Augustine describes the philosophizing soul:
So the soul, holding onto this order and now given over to philosophy, begins by looking into itself [prime se ipsam inspicit]. And now that this learning [eruditio] has convinced it that Reason is its own, or is itself, and that either there is nothing better or more powerful in Reason than number, or else Reason is nothing other than number, then it speaks with itself thus: “I, by some secret and inner motion of mine, can distinguish and connect [i.e., by relations of logical consequence] the things that are learned [ea quae discenda sunt, i.e., the subject matter of the disciplines], and this power of mine is called Reason. . . .”113
The very idea of “soliloquy,” of inner conversation between the soul and its Reason, begins here. What these two will converse about is precisely the question of who they are: are they identical with one another? Is one of them the same thing as the number by which all things are numbered?
This number of all numbers is, as any Platonist knows, One, from which all other numbers derive.114 Hence the soul’s awareness of its own power of distinguishing and drawing logical consequences (which Augustine had earlier made the special concern of the discipline of dialectic) leads it to consider the nature and power of oneness. Whatever needs to be distinguished is something that has no true unity, whereas that which is to be logically connected is something that thereby achieves its proper unity and being.115 Evidently Augustine aims to ponder the Neoplatonist theme of Unity as the source of all beings via an examination of the logical unity and interconnection of the intelligible truths that are taught in the liberal disciplines, which is revealed by dialectic.116 This passage is in fact a practice run for his later, deeply Neoplatonist accounts of Unity as the source of all being.117
The proof of the immortality of the soul that Augustine intended to be the crowning achievement of the Soliloquies is forshadowed at the end of the soul’s soliloquy in On Order.118 The basic premise is that Reason, whatever it is, is immortal. Augustine’s defense of this premise sheds light on the identity of Reason from a new angle:
“One to two” or “two to four” is in the truest sense a reason [ratio], and this ratio or reason was no truer yesterday than today, tomorrow, or next year; and if this whole world fell in ruins, this ratio could not cease to be. For this thing is always such [semper talis est].119
The oddly phrased final sentence echoes Cicero’s definition of Platonic ideas: “Plato thought that . . . that alone truly exists which is always such as it is, which he called idea?”120 Reason or ratio, in the sense that Augustine uses it in this passage, thus clearly has the characteristics of Platonic Ideas—as he had learned about them already from Cicero, long before he read Plotinus. Cicero and Plotinus both point toward Platonic ideas as immutable things with which the soul, for all its apparent mutability and the threat of mortality, has some deep relationship—though Plotinus has far more interesting things to say about that relationship than Cicero. The conceptual problems surrounding that relationship are marked above all by the word “Reason,” which designates both the soul’s power of intellectual vision and the changeless, intelligible things it sees.