There are varieties of inwardness, so it is important to know which one is being investigated in this book. My concern here is with the concept of self as private inner space or inner world—a whole dimension of being that is our very own, and roomy enough that we can in some sense turn into it and enter it, or look within and find things there. This, I take it, is the deepest and most thoroughgoing form of inwardness; other forms shall be of interest in this investigation only insofar as they lead up to it. In this regard all roads lead to Augustine: the thesis I argue here is that he invented the concept of private inner space. The argument for this thesis consists of two narratives: one telling of the tradition of philosophy upon which Augustine drew (part I) and the other of the development of Augustine’s own thought (part II). The aim is to watch the concept of private inner self as it is under construction: to discern its Platonist philosophical foundations, its Christian theological connections, its memorable metaphorical texture, and the motives that led to its being constructed in the first place.
The inwardness being tracked down in this book is a concept, a way of thinking about the human self, and therefore an element in human self-understanding. As such it has worked its way deeply into the intellectual heritage of the West and therefore into the experience of Western individuals, many of whom have experienced themselves as inner selves. But the focus of investigation here is the concept, not the experience. Without the concept, people would describe their experiences differently, and there would be no phenomenon of inwardness to track down in the texts. Moreover, as I hope to make clear from the texts, this concept did not arise directly out of experience, as if it was the expression of some deeper, inarticulate feeling. Rather, it is the product of highly articulate philosophical inquiry, arising in a quite definite theological context in order to solve quite specific conceptual problems.
Its use in technical philosophical discourse is the reason why the concept of a private inner space is something more than a metaphor. The inner space of the self is of course not literally “inner” like the space inside a box. It is not literally a space at all and therefore not “inner” in a spatial sense. This is a new, incorporeal sense of “inner,” associated specifically with the soul rather than the body, which begins as a metaphor and becomes established as a piece of technical terminology in Neoplatonist metaphysics. Thus it retains much of the imaginative power of metaphor while also gaining a new literal sense, the sense established by its use in a particular philosophical and theological discourse. The inner space is a dimension or level of being belonging specifically to the soul, distinct from the being of God above it (and within it) and from the world of bodies outside it (and below it). It is like a space, however, in that it is a dimension of being that can contain things: things are found and seen there, as well as lost and hidden there.
The inner space has its ancestors and cousins. Part I of this study tells the tale of the ancestors, part II is concerned with the thing itself, and a planned sequel deals with its important cousin, which I shall call “expressionism.” This cousin has perhaps the most ancient lineage of all, which can be traced back to very old and widespread talk about how people can hide their thoughts in their heart and bring them forth in speech. Augustine gives new rigor to this talk by identifying the hidden heart with the private inner space and conceiving speech as an expression of what lies within that space. It was an epochal innovation when Augustine classified words as a species of signs, and treated signs as external indications of the inner will of the soul—thus laying the groundwork for medieval understandings of word and sacrament as well as much of modern semiotics and theory of language. But that subject takes us beyond the scope of this book, to Augustine’s account of how the inner self is related to external things and especially how signs communicate or express what is within.
Although expressionism is not the variety of inwardness being tracked down here, it does make a contribution to it that should be mentioned now. One of the things that makes the inner space private is that it is hidden from view: other people cannot look within it. That we can hide what is in our hearts or minds is a commonplace that goes back long before Augustine and extends beyond any one tradition: both Homer and the Hebrew Scriptures speak of this sort of thing. The contribution this notion makes to later forms of Western inwardness is unmistakable when, for instance, Paul contrasts being a Jew “in appearance” (i.e., because of circumcision) with being a Jew “in what is hidden” (i.e., in the heart)—and then this is translated in the King James and Revised Standard Versions of the Bible as “outwardly” and “inwardly,” respectively (Romans 2:28-29). Paul is not using the vocabulary of inwardness here, but translators in the wake of Augustine find it natural to translate his words into that vocabulary—and the reason they find it natural is because Augustine himself made the connection for them: the inner is that which is hidden in the heart.
Augustine frequently describes the inner as “hidden,” meaning that we cannot see each other’s minds or souls. But when I speak of the “privacy” of the inner self, I have more in view than just the contrast between what is hidden in the heart and what is outwardly manifest. There is another conceptual contrast whose field of force, as it were, shapes this space, and that is the contrast between what is common to all souls and what belongs properly to one individual rather than another. For a Platonist, this contrast has some distinctive features. Since the best things in reality are One not Many, they are things that souls can only have in common. Thus, for example, wisdom in one soul is not ultimately different from wisdom in another, for there is ultimately only one true Wisdom. This Platonic Idea or Form of Wisdom is common to all, not the private possession of the individual, and it is equally available to all who have eyes to see it. Hence it is not so obvious that the inner self must be private. On the contrary, the natural thing for a Platonist to say (once Platonism acquires a concept of inner space) is that the inner realm is public not private, since the goods in it are common possessions rather than private property.
The new and specifically Augustinian contribution to the notion of the inner space—the thing that distinguishes it from previous forms of Platonist inwardness—is precisely that Augustine’s inner space is actually private. However, Augustine is different from most of his successors in the West in that for him this privacy is not natural or good but results from our estrangement from the one eternal Truth and Wisdom that is common to all. The inner self is private only because it is sinful, fallen away from God.
To bring into focus the particular variety of inwardness we are looking for, we can place Augustine’s picture of the inner self between representative pictures from two ancestors and a descendant—like putting four snapshots in a row. The oldest snapshot is Plato’s picture in the Allegory of the Cave: an eye that has escaped from bondage in the lower darkness is now gazing upward, away from itself, at the sun. There is no inwardness here, but there is a key concept, intelligibility or intellectual vision, which will be at the heart of later Platonist inwardness. The next snapshot gives us the much less familiar picture of Plotinus: the soul is like a sphere revolving around the source of all light at the center of the universe and turning inward to see it. Our particular souls are each points of light on the revolving sphere, capable of looking outward upon the darkness or turning into the inside to behold the realm of light. This inner realm is the Platonist’s “intelligible world,” which has now become an inner world—although unlike Augustine’s inner space it is common to all, not private. Augustine’s picture comes third, and it is of an inner palace, with great courtyards open to the sun. To see the light means both entering within and looking upward—combining Plotinus’s inward turn with Plato’s ascent to vision. The result is that what you find when you turn inward but not upward, is your own private inner space. Last, there is John Locke’s picture of a dark room where there is nothing to see but images projected within. No sun shines into this room from above, and even the windows afford no direct view of the external world but only serve as a lens to project images of what is outside onto a blank inner wall. The thread of continuity tying these pictures together (like four beads on a string) is the metaphor of the soul as an eye, based on the Platonist notion of intelligibility as the visibility of something to the eye of the mind. Plato’s picture is intellectual vision pure and simple, Plotinus’s is intellectual vision construed as inward turn, Augustine’s is intellectual vision resulting from a turn first in then up, and Locke’s picture is of a self with no direct intellectual vision of anything but its own private inner world, seeing only the images of things outside.
Hence Western inwardness can be traced back to the Platonist inward turn, represented by Plotinus, which is adopted and modified by Augustine to produce the concept of private inner space, which later undergoes modifications of its own in Locke and others. As we go from Plotinus to Augustine to Locke, we find the inner world shrinking—from a divine cosmos containing all that is ultimately real and lovely (in Plotinus) to the palace of an individual soul that can gaze upon all that is true and lovely above (in Augustine) to a closed little room where one only gets to watch movies, as it were, about the real world (in Locke). It is a progression in which the inner self contains progressively less of reality and divinity—from Plotinus’s divine inner self, to Augustine’s inner self, in which God can be found, to Locke’s inner room where there can be literally no idea of God.
The story I tell here will focus on the development that leads from Plato to Augustine, with only a brief glance ahead at Locke. It is a generational narrative: grandfather Plato’s concept of intelligibility (chapter 1) gets married to Aristotle’s identity theory of intellectual knowledge (chapter 2), whence is born Plotinus’s concept of inward turn. The inward turn is then espoused by Augustine (chapter 3) and married to his Christianity in what may be a shotgun wedding (chapter 4). Later this marriage is misconstrued by kind-hearted descendants who don’t want to think ill of their honored ancestor (chapter 5). In the climactic narrative, Augustine’s outgrows earlier flirtations in order to espouse the inward turn (chapter 6), which, after a miscarriage (chapter 7) and a difficult labor (chapter 8), gives birth to an inner self that is private (chapter 9) yet spacious like an inner world (chapter 10).