It is hard to prove a negative, especially in history. To claim that someone was the first to do something is implicitly to make the negative claim that no one had ever done it before, and to demonstrate that would require a comprehensive survey of everything that was ever done up until then. Hence I do not think I have proved that Augustine was the first person ever to conceive of the self as a private inner space. I do hope, however, that I have come a long way toward showing that he invented the concept of private inner space, in the sense that he constructed the concept himself rather than finding it in anyone else’s writings. This is not sufficient to prove that no one ever thought of it before, but does show that, even if someone else came up with it earlier,1 Augustine gives the concept of inner self a new beginning. And I think it is safe to say that this Augustinian beginning stands at the head of the Western tradition of inwardness as it comes down to us. Whatever might be the case with an unknown predecessor, our inwardness originates from Augustine—and for a historian of Western thought, that is the important point. That is the point that I hope will illuminate our interpretations of Western philosophy, theology, and psychology, and indeed our interpretations of ourselves.
Though it falls short of proof, I hope I have offered strong evidence in favor of the claim that no one before Augustine conceived of the self as a private inner space, by demonstrating that this concept arose as the solution to a quite specific problem that no one before Augustine is likely to have had.2 Augustine’s problem is how to locate God within the soul, without affirming the divinity of the soul. He wants (like Plotinus) to find the divine within the self, while affirming (as an orthodox Christian) that the divine is wholly other than the self. He solves this problem by locating God not only within the soul but above it (as its Creator) thus modifying Plotinus’ turn “into the inside” into a movement in then up—first entering within the soul and then looking above it. The concept of private inner space arises in consequence of this modification, for the place in which we find ourselves when we have entered within (and not yet looked up) is our very own space—an inner world of human memory and thought, not identical with the intelligible world of the divine Mind.
To see how and why Augustine invented the private inner space of the self is to understand something about the possibilities of self-understanding available to human beings in the West. We are people who are capable of thinking that we have found God by looking inside our little selves. We can talk of finding ultimate meaning within, as if such talk made perfect and obvious sense. And we are in the habit of finding problems with something called “the external world.” For once you have conceived of an inner self, you think differently about the external and the other. If there is an inner world, then the world we all live in can be “merely external,” and you can worry whether it is lifeless and meaningless like a Newtonian mechanism. You can even worry whether the external world exists. In the Western tradition one can write books about Our Knowledge of the External World, as if there were no question that we all start out in our own internal world and the real problem is to build an epistemic bridge to the external world.3 Other cultures have entertained the skeptical thought that the visible world is illusory, but only in the West could such skepticism breed fears of solipsism. For only if you think of the visible world as “external” to your own inner space can you worry that if you fail to prove its existence you may turn out to be alone in a solitary world.4 Only in the West could it be a major philosophic and cultural achievement to undo or deconstruct this problem—to unask, as it were, the question of solipsism.5
Thus a new concept can be used in contexts its author never imagined, and there beget new problems. We who inherit Augustine’s legacy can ask questions about the inner and the outer that would not have occurred to him. We can think of our private inner space as something to escape from. We can worry that the world outside is barren and dead, a mere mechanism devoid of glory and intelligence. And we can think of our inner visions as a matter of faith rather than reason, and worry whether to believe what we see there. Or we can think of the inner world as a matter of experiences beyond or beneath reason, and seek there a divinity that does not shine with clear intelligibility but rather touches us in ways too deep for understanding, there at the hidden center of our being. We can, in other words, start with Augustine and reinvent something like Plotinus, as some medieval mystics and nineteenth-century idealists did and as contemporary American Gnostics are now doing.6
Above all, Augustinian inwardness bequeaths us a problem about otherness. If we look inside ourselves to find what we love most, how do we recognize it as other than our self? Or conversely, how can we find among “merely” external things an other who is really worth loving? Can we really know what is outside ourselves, much less love it? Can we really know and love the other as other? Lurking behind these questions, I think, is a concept that Augustine did not know but that shaped his view of the inner self all the same, because of its proximity to the Platonist concept of intelligibility: the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist notion that true knowledge is a kind of identity between knower and known. If Aristotle and Plotinus are right, then understanding must ultimately obliterate otherness. To know X is to be no other than X. Augustine would deny this, of course. His inwardness is precisely a project of finding an other in the self. But we can wonder whether he does justice to the otherness of what he loves when he deprives himself of the resource of saying his beloved is outside himself. “Outside” is a terribly handy word, if what you love about someone includes the fact that he is quite different from yourself. If our beloved is other than ourselves, should we not be glad to look for him outside our selves?7
I mentioned in the introduction that my study treats inwardness as a concept, not an experience. But it is a concept meant to turn our attention in a particular direction, and therefore it generates experiences—many important experiences in the history of Western culture. I am making a point of being critical of the concept, because the experiences worry me: I do not think that “inward” is the right direction to look to find what is other than the self. The very metaphor is incoherent: what eyeball can turn to look inside itself? Yet worse than incoherent, it is ugly: for what eye does not love to look outside itself? What lover desires to find her beloved by looking in her self? Though the thing cannot be done, the desire to do it is possible, maybe even common. And I think we would do better to desire what is outside ourselves.
An inward turn becomes attractive whenever the world outside seems the wrong place to find the good you’re looking for—when the “external world” comes to look uninviting, dead, or meaningless. To some (not all) medieval mystics, alienated from the life of this world, it may have seemed inevitable that human flesh, being mortal and perishable, is a thing from which we must be freed; while to some (not all) modern philosophers it may seem inevitable that the physical world is lifeless and mechanistic, devoid of consciousness and thought—not the place to look to find ultimate meaning. In either case, dissatisfaction with the external world can provide a motive for looking inward, and the strange Augustinian metaphor of turning the eyes of the soul inward may appear to be exactly what we need. It is as if both medievals and moderns could stand with Augustine at the beginning of Confessions 7, looking out upon the external, spatial world in which we would ordinarily say we live, shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “No—whatever it is I want, it can’t possibly be found here. But where else can I look?” At such a moment an inward turn appears inevitable. If the outer world cannot show me the good I seek, where else is there to look but the inner one?
Orthodox Christian belief in Jesus Christ undermines the motives of inwardness by making it seem much less inevitable that we must find the divine elsewhere than the external world. There is nothing more external than flesh, yet the Catholic Church since the year after Augustine’s death has explicitly taught that in Christ’s flesh we find the life-giving power of God.8 Much has been built on this teaching: Eastern Orthodox use of icons, Roman Catholic devotion to the sacraments, and Protestant preaching of the Gospel—all understood as means by which God gives us life from Christ incarnate.9 Founded thus on the flesh of Christ, Christian piety has long insisted on a kind of “outward turn.” How Augustinian inwardness and other Platonist strands in the Christian tradition can be reconciled with this turn to Christ’s flesh is the matter of some of the deepest and most interesting tensions of Christian thought.
These tensions are not least interesting in Augustine himself. Much of his career as teacher of the Church is concerned with articulating the importance and value of external things—even their necessity for our salvation. For although God is found within, we are outside,10 and thus for Augustine the road back to the God who is inward and eternal requires the right use of external and temporal things. On this road, established by what he calls God’s “temporal dispensation,”11 we encounter or undergo many things that fit us for eternal life: the humility of Christ, the purification of the mind’s eye, the building up of charity, justification by faith, and the authority of Christian teaching. How these lead us in the end to the blessedness of seeing God is a long story that Augustine could not tell without saying something positive about the relation between the inner self and external things.
The great limitation of this book is that I have not had space to discuss the positive relations between inner and outer in Augustine’s thought. I have thus omitted what I love most about Augustine: how, in obedience to the external authority of the Church’s teaching, he ended up making decisive concessions to the importance and even necessity of the external things of the faith. That story would make another book—longer, more complicated, and more surprising than this one. Here I have restricted myself to tracing his invention of the private inner space and its motives, and therefore have discussed only his desire to turn away from external things. But the story of Augustinian inwardness is not complete until the inner self is situated in relation to Word and Sacrament, Church and Incarnation. The surprises in the rest of the story stern from Augustine’s consistent, resourceful, and increasingly subtle attempts to maintain the priority of inner to outer, precisely as the external things of the faith come to occupy center stage in his thought.
Lest misunderstanding arise from the truncated version of the story of Augustinian inwardness that I have told so far, let me in closing mention three of these surprises—fundamental themes for my further work—that are of great importance for understanding the shape of Augustine’s intellectual development.
The first surprise is about the concept of signs. This concept is central to Augustine’s account of the value of external things. Augustine originates medieval and modern semiotics by classifying both words and sacraments as a species of signs.12 His is the first expressionist semiotics, in which signs are understood as outward expressions of what lies within. It is also a Platonist semiotics, in that the most important use of signs is to signify intelligible things. Of course, being by definition sensible and therefore external, signs cannot adequately represent the inner truth; for no Platonist would say that a sensible things can make intelligible things intelligible. Hence the surprise: for Augustine we do not learn things from signs, but the other way around—we come to understand the significance of a sign only after we know the thing it signifies.13 Thus for example the proper interpreter of Scripture is one who already knows the spiritual things it signifies and therefore is not captive to a literal reading of its signs.14
The crucial theological implication of this surprise is that no sign—neither word nor sacrament—can be an efficacious means of grace. For no external thing can convey to us an inward gift.15 The now standard Roman Catholic view that the sacraments not only signify but confer grace is a departure from Augustine, rooted in twelfth-century developments.16 This medieval view of the sacraments, rather than Augustine’s view, was in turn the ground for Luther’s doctrine of the Gospel as an external word that bestows on us the righteousness it signifies.17 Thus in regard to the crucial question of whether external signs can have salvific power, the crucial divide is not between Catholic and Protestant but between the medievals and Luther on the one side and Augustine and Calvin on the other. Calvin speaks for Augustine as well as for many Protestants when he warns us not to “cling too tightly to the outward sign.”18 But Luther speaks for many Roman Catholics when he insists that we can never cling too tightly to external means of grace such as the sacraments and the Gospel of Christ.19
The second surprise is about grace. Grace is an inward gift, inwardly given. It changes our will inwardly—not by coercion, but by attraction, like falling in love as depicted by Plato and Plotinus.20 Augustine’s doctrine of grace is thus not a break with philosophy but his epochal attempt to synthesize Platonism and Paul, eros and agape. The surprise is that for Augustine grace is originally connected with reason, not with faith. This can be shown by tracing key trajectories in the development of his thought. For example, Augustine’s anti-Pelagian contention that grace consists in our being inwardly taught by God21 can be traced back to his much earlier view of Christ as inner teacher,22 which is a variation of the yet earlier theme of Reason as inner teacher in the Soliloquies.
An even more important trajectory concerns the steadily widening scope of grace. At first Augustine sees grace helping us only with our inward relation to intelligible things above us, but later in his career he sees grace as indispensable even in our use of external things, which are ontologically beneath the soul and therefore by nature under its power. Thus over the course of Augustine’s career grace is necessary first for vision, then for love, and finally even for faith. The scope of grace widens from the most inward function of the mind (understanding of intelligible things) to that which is more external (faith in authoritative teaching).
To begin with vision: it was clear to Augustine from the very beginning of his career as a Christian writer that we cannot ultimately understand God unless our mind’s eye, presently diseased and defiled by sin, is healed and cleansed by grace so that its inner vision is not distracted by attachment to external things. Otherwise what we experience when we look inwardly toward God is not beatific vision but dazzlement. But for some time Augustine thought that Christian love or charity has its ultimate source in our own will, since its function is not to understand eternal things but merely to seek them. All we have to do in order to love as we ought, Augustine initially thought, is to will to do so—and what could be more in the power of our will than the will itself?23 But by the time he wrote Confessions, he thought differently. It is still true that all we need to do is will—yet he finds that we cannot will as we ought, unless we have the inner help of grace.24 The mature Augustine, in other words, thinks that not only the success of our intellect but also the rightness of our will is dependent on grace. We sinners need God’s help not only to see him, but even to want to see him.
Yet for a long time, even in the midst of controversies with the Pelagians, Augustine hesitated to affirm that faith too was wholly dependent on grace. Augustine’s doctrine of justification spells out a process that begins with faith, engenders love, and culminates in understanding.25 The process moves from outward to inward: from faith in the external teaching of Church and Scripture to love of inner things (using temporal things only in order to enjoy eternal things) to the final inner vision of God. Could not the beginning of this process, which concerns only external things, be determined fundamentally by our own will? Unlike eternal things, we have power over external things. So could it not be that the choice whether or not to believe is in our power? In the early stages of the Pelagian controversy Augustine had not yet taken a clear stand on such questions.26 But near the end of his life he came explicitly to the conclusion that even the choice to believe is impossible for us sinners unless grace comes first.27
The final surprise is about faith and its relation to reason. For Aquinas, faith deals with things beyond the ken of reason, and for Luther faith is more inward than reason. Both these views are departures from Augustine—facilitated by Augustine’s teaching that faith too is impossible without grace, but leading to misunderstanding if read back into Augustine’s writings. First of all, Augustine frames the issue not in terms of faith and reason but rather in terms of faith and understanding, or authority and reason. In both these pairs, the first term is related to the second as external is to internal. Authority is a feature of external teaching, while Reason is the power of inner vision. Faith means believing what an external authority teaches, while Understanding is that seeing for oneself which reason desires.28 The gist of Augustine’s view of faith and reason is thus summed up in his use of the scriptural passage “Unless you believe, you shall not understand.”29 He takes this to indicate a temporal priority of faith to understanding—as if to say, faith is where we begin but understanding is where we end up. And of course it is the end, the goal or telos, which gives meaning to the beginning—for as Augustine insists very emphatically, the journey is pointless apart from its destination.30
In one of his latest writings, Augustine says, “It is begun in faith, but completed by sight,”31 echoing one of his earliest works, in which he says, “Authority comes first in time, but Reason is first in reality.”32 If I am correct in interpreting Augustine’s experience of intellectual vision as a form of what we would now call insight,33 then the point of these sayings is not hard to see. The road to understanding often begins with our believing what our teachers tell us—as when we believe a mathematical formula on the authority of our math teacher, even though we cannot really see what it means. But of course if we are good students then we desire to understand the changeless truth it signifies—to see it for ourselves, with our own mind’s eye. The mere external formula does not contain what we are looking for but is simply an external sign—a reminder of where to look, Augustine would say, admonishing us to direct our attention away from the world of the senses.34 If, in studious love,35 we seek to understand what the formula signifies, we may be rewarded with vision—that brief moment of insight when we say, “Aha! now I see it!” What we see is located within us, not in the external world. But what we long to see most of all is God, who is the changeless Truth containing all that is changelessly true.36 Our goal is to leave behind the external authority of mere signs, words, and formulas, to enjoy an intellectual vision that is beatific—not transitory like earthly insight but enduring forever, the very substance of eternal life. Or at least so Augustinian inwardness would have us believe.
If I am right about these surprises, as well as those I have described at greater length in the text of this book, then Augustine is not what any of his successors-Protestant or Roman Catholic, authoritarian or liberal, me or my readers—want him to be. He not only made us who we are, but he is different from what we thought—which means perhaps we too are different from what we thought. To encounter him on his own terms is thus enthralling and liberating, dangerous and instructive, all at once. That is Augustine’s fascination, beyond what any of us find in him to love or be dismayed about. I too am dismayed as well as enthralled by this great figure, my father in the faith who says many things I do not want him to say. Whether I have done justice to his many fascinations, both lovely and dismaying, I leave to my readers to judge.