1. For this focus on traditions of inquiry I am indebted to Alisdair Maclntyre, though I do not share his particular approach to issues of relativism and the incommensurability of traditions.
2. The recognition that philosophers work from a heritage of problems goes back at least to Aristotle (for example, Metaphysics 3:1).
3. Notice that Genesis 3, which Paul (in Rom. 5:12–21) interprets as the story of the origin of sin and death, contains no mention of movement from a higher place to a lower. That the Christian tradition calls it “the story of the Fall” is due to the prevalence of Platonist exegesis in later interpretations. The original version of the Fall story is not in the Bible but in Plato’s Phaedrus 246a-249c—see “The Other World” in chapter 1.
4. The exceptions prove the rule. In the Christian Bible only two extraordinary individuals, Elijah and Jesus, are described as going to heaven (apart from temporary visionary experiences). But these two are not dead. They are taken up bodily and alive, and they are expected to return. Of course Revelation 6:9–11 pictures souls in heaven, but only those of the martyrs, which must wait under the altar almost as if they were being held in storage until the consummation of the kingdom. The point about them is that they are not, in the traditional sense, “in heaven”—for they are not happy and they will not be until the heavenly City descends to earth so that God may dwell among human beings (21:2–4).
5. See Karl Barth’s definition of theology at the outset of his Church Dogmatics, I/1: p. 4.
6. This approach I owe in large part, directly or indirectly, to Victor Preller’s reading of Aquinas in Divine Science and the Science of God (see especially p. 25).
7. On this contrast, see Cullmann, “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?”
8. Here and throughout this book I use the word “Catholic” in the ancient sense familiar to Augustine, which is roughly synonymous with “orthodox” (lower case). Hence “Catholic” here stands in contrast with “heretical” and “schismatic” but not (anachronistically) with “Protestant.” Where I intend a contrast with Protestantism or Eastern Orthodoxy I will speak of “Roman Catholicism.”
9. De Trin. 3:2. (All translations from ancient and medieval texts in this book are my own. For the manner of citation of Augustine texts, see page xvii. For the abbreviations of their titles, see appendix 1.)
10. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Early ‘Theory of Man, chapter 4.
1. See Alexander of Aphrodisias’s preface to his treatise On the Soul, the opening of Plotinus’s treatise “On the Soul” (Ennead 4:3.1; see also 5:1.1) and Cicero’s interpretation of the god’s command in his treatment of the nature and immortality of the soul, Tusc. 1:52. The same connection between self-knowledge and knowledge of the divine is found in the Nag Hammadi treatises (see Robinson, IX, 3,45.1–6, VII, 4,117.3–9, II, 7,138.16–18, II, 3,61.32–35, and XI, 3,56.15–20) and in Manichaean writings (see Brown, pp. 47–49).
2. Discourses 3:22.38–39.
3. Marcus Aurelius Meditations 7:59.
4. For example, Epictetus Discourses 1:4.18.
5. Epistle 41:1.
6. Ibid. 41:2 (guardian spirit) and 41:6 (divinity of soul).
7. For the Stoic contribution to inwardness see Aubin, pp. 62–63 and 175–176; Dodds, Pagan and Christian, pp. 80–81; Courcelle, Recherches, pp. 393–404; and Theiler, “Plotin und die antike Philosophie,” pp. 155–156. These scholars agree in seeing the inwardness of the Roman Stoics as leading to Plotinus, where it is finally—and for the first time—incorporated into a systematic metaphysics of inwardness. Thus the language of inwardness evidently needs Platonist ontology if it is to be more than simply an intriguing metaphor. (Even when it appears in the Stoics it can be identified as part of a “Platonizing” trend in later Stoicism—see Pohlenz, pp. 320–323.)
8. It seems likely the “inward turn” originated in middle Platonism before Plotinus, although this depends on dating of the originals of various treatises from Nag Hammadi showing significant Platonist influence, where something like an inward turn seems clearly present (see for example Robinson, XI, 3,52.9–12, III, 2,66.24, and III, 5,128.2–5). In at least one case this is connected, as in Plotinus, with an identity theory of knowledge (11,3,61.20–35)—a theory that was evidently known to the Valentinians (see 1,5,54.40–55.12).
9. Plotinus is acutely aware of the Stoic tradition and very concerned to spell out where he agrees and disagrees with it. See especially Ennead 1:4, which contains a critique of Stoicism as well as a great deal of the language of inwardness.
10. The noetos topos, in Republic 6:508c, 509d, and 7:517b.
11. Phaedrus 247b–e.
12. Republic 7:514a–515c; see also the “true heaven, the true light and the true earth” of Phaedo 108e-111c.
13. On the contrast between Plato and Plotinus on this point, see Theiler, “Plotin und die antike Philosophie,” p. 155–156.
14. Charmides 160d. Socrates here urges young Charmides to “look into yourself” to discern what temperance is, since that is a virtue that everyone agrees Charmides has in his soul. The course of the conversation soon shows, however, that such firsthand looking is not a sure source of knowledge about the nature of one’s own self or its virtues. Introspection is not the road to self-knowledge. By contrast, in the Alcibiades I (possibly spurious, but possibly one of Plato’s early works), where temperance is defined as self-knowledge (133c), obedience to the divine command “know thyself” is possible because one can see oneself, in the mirror of a friend’s soul: it is like seeing one’s own eye reflected in the pupil of another’s (132e-133b). Thus the odd metaphor of introspection or looking inward is rejected in favor of the more coherent metaphor of reflection.
15. Republic 9:591e.
16. Theaetetus 189e.
17. Philebus 38c–40c.
18. Philebus 39b.
19. Sophist 263e.
20. Phaedo 79d. The term for “akin” is syngenes, which occurs frequently to designate the soul’s relation to the other world where there is no change and death: see Phaedo 84b. Republic 6:490b and 10:611e. The suggestion is not only that the soul is somehow like the Forms but that soul and Forms are in some way kin or family, having a common origin, so that in leaving the body behind at death and going to the changeless realm of the Forms, the pure soul is in effect returning home.
21. See Timaeus 90c.
22. See Snell, p. 8–9, and Kittel, 9:608–609.
23. Phaedo 64a-67e.
24. The Homeric picture of the fluttering psyche exiting the body with the last breath lies behind Cebes’ question in Phaedo 70a. Socrates addresses Cebes’ worry in 7od, which leads him into the discussion of the soul’s kinship and likeness to the Forms, 77d-84b.
25. See Snell, chapter 1, on Homer, and Wolff, pp. 1–66, on the Hebrew Scriptures’ use of the anthropological terms translated “soul,” “flesh,” “spirit,” “heart,” and so on.
26. The doctrine of Forms is related to the immortality of the soul as premise to conclusion. See especially Phaedo 76e: “if these things [i.e., Forms] do not exist, then the argument we’ve been conducting [i.e., about the soul] is pointless.”
27. This is an attempt to render the untranslatable phrase aei osautos kata tauta. echonti heautoi (Phaedo 80b; see the similar phrasing in Republic 5:479a). Cicero also tries to render this phrase, with results that Augustine mimics; see “The Self-Examination of Reason” in chapter 6.
28. Phaedrus 248e.
29. See Phaedrus 250c (body as tomb), Phaedo 82e (embodiment as imprisonment), and of course Republic 7:514a-518b (life in the cave).
30. The Academy, the school founded by Plato, was dominated by skepticism during most of the Hellenistic period (Augustine’s Against the Academics is an attempt to refute this form of skepticism). Cicero, who in addition to being an orator was an Academic skeptic and one of our most important sources for understanding the Hellenistic Academy (he was the only person educated there to leave us a significant body of extant philosophical writing), traces the Academy’s skeptical theory and practice back to Socrates (Academica 1:44–45) and particularly to the reading of Socratic dialogues (Academica 1:46 and 2:74). For an overview of the history of the Academy told from this perspective see Sedley, “Motivation,” (especially p. 10) and Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, chapter 3 (especially pp. 88–89). See also “Ciceronian Point of Departure” in chapter 6.
31. I take for granted here the common scholarly view that the Meno marks a transition from the earlier Socratic dialogues to the great middle dialogues such as Phaedo and Republic, as Plato starts to go beyond Socratic dialectic but has not yet formulated the doctrine of Ideas. For an introduction to this view of Plato’s development, see Kraut, especially pp. 3–9. For details on dating the Meno in particular see Bluck’s edition, pp. 108–120.
32. Meno 8od.
33. “Seeking and learning are wholly recollection.” Meno 81d.
34. See the usage in Meno 85c and 86a, as well as Phaedo 73a. Republic 7:518c (in “The Allegory of the Cave”) uses the same verb to describe the power of intellectual vision present in the soul.
35. Note how Socrates’ comments on the slave boy’s puzzlement in 84a–c parody Meno’s description of his puzzlement in 8oa-b.
36. De Trin. 12:24.
37. Meno 86a. The phrase “for all time” is ton aei chronon, which combines the words for time and eternity, literally, “for forever time.”
38. Hence for the Platonist tradition “human” or “man” means soul and body together. The soul alone is not human, because it may be reincarnated in the body of a brute if evil and it has a divine destiny if righteous. Only the soul caged in a human body is both more than brute and less than god.
39. Phaedrus 246a-250c.
40. Meno 72c. See the similar formulations in Euthyphro 5d and 6d.
41. Republic 7:514a-519b.
42. De Trin. 12:24. “Artificer” is Conditore, a reference to God the Creator but also an allusion to Plato’s Demiurge or cosmic Artificer in the Timaeus, which Augustine (like many Christians before and after) interprets as an approximation of the Christian doctrine of Creation.
43. See “Falling into Division” in chapter 9.
44. De Lib. Arb. 2:33—a phrase to which I will often return, as it indicates the heart of Augustine’s Platonist ontology.
45. Compare Phaedo 65a-67a (the project of the soul investigating purely and by itself, apart from the body and its senses) with Confessions 7:1–2 (the project of conceiving of God in a purely incorporeal way, free from all contamination and distraction by the sense-based phantasms of the imagination). There is a recognizable continuity in the two projects, which will be of great importance to us later in this study.
1. On the Soul 3:8, 431b20-432a2; see also 3:4,429b5 and 3:7,431a1.
2. See Nichomachean Ethics 10:7, especially 1177b26–31. The identification of mind and wisdom as the divine in us goes back to his Protrepticus (see Ross’s fragment 10c, which During regards as the conclusion to the work)—whence it quite possibly reached Augustine via Cicero’s Hortensius.
3. Metaphysics 12:9,1075b34; see also 12:7,1072b22. In this chapter I shall use the terms “mind” and “intellect” and “intelligence” as equivalents to nous (in both capitals and lower case), shifting from one term to another depending on context and on the historical connections I am trying to evoke. The related verb, noein, I shall translate as “understand” or “know” (in the specific sense of intellectual knowledge), avoiding the translation “think,” which is frequently used in Aristotle translation but is in my view misleading because it suggests process and the possibility of error. “Contemplate” (rendering Aristotle’s theorem) is used to indicate the act of knowing, as opposed to a piece of knowledge retained in memory but not under active consideration at present.
4. See Aristotle On the Soul 3:4,430a2-9, and more explicitly, Alexander of Aphrodisias On the Soul 86:14–23, which is basically an exposition of Aristode on this point.
5. This is the point of Aristotle’s remark that “in the individual, potential knowledge is temporally prior to actual knowledge, but in the universe as a whole it is not even temporally prior,” On the Soul, 3:5,430a21.
6. Ibid. 3:8,432a3–8.
7. Metaphysics 12:7,1072b14–25.
8. Ibid. 12:9.
9. This interpretion of Aristotle involves identifying the God of Metaphysics 12:7 with the “active mind” or “agent intellect” of On the Soul 3:5.
10. Cicero, on behalf of the Academy, makes the claim that not only Plato and Aristotle but even Zeno the Stoic taught substantially the same thing in different words; see “Ciceronian Point of Departure” in chapter 6.
11. The treatise is no longer extant. See Beutler.
12. The use of Aristotle in the later Neoplatonist schools is one of the central themes of A. C. Lloyd’s work; see his contribution to the Cambridge History (followed up in the illuminating study by I. Hadot) as well as his Anatomy.
13. During and Owen trace Aristotle’s course of development from the empiricism of his youth to something more like Platonism in his later thought. Ontologically, the development is from an early treatise like the Categories (where true being or ousia is identified with the concrete individual, e.g., Socrates) to the view of Metaphysics 7 (where the true being of a thing is its species-Form, e.g., “human”). The older view of Aristotle’s development, represented most powerfully by Jaeger, argues that Aristotle moved in the opposite direction, starting out under the shadow of Platonism and maturing into an Aristotelian empiricist. I prefer the former view, since the latter seems to me to underestimate young Aristotle’s originality, critical ability, and logical acumen. After all, this was the young man who invented the discipline of logic.
14. Just to mention two points that will come up again later, there is the influence of Aristotle’s critique of Platonic Ideas on Stoic materialism (see Hahm, pp. 7–8) and the influence of Aristotle’s notion of a fifth element on the Stoic notion of divine fire (pp. 92–93).
15. See Owen, “The Place of the Timaeus.”
16. For a modern interpretation of Aristotle along these lines see Lear, pp. 116–141.
17. See Moraux, Alexandre, p. xxiii, and Fotinis’s edition of Alexander On the Soul, p. 155.
18. Alexander of Aphrodisias On the Soul 2:4–9. All the same, it is worth noting that this is Alexander’s own treatise on the subject of the soul, not his commentary (now lost) on Aristotle’s treatise of the same name.
19. See Moraux, Alexandre, p. xvi.
20. Porphyry Life of Plotinus 14. See Armstrong, “The Background,” p. 406, and Merlan, “Greek Philosophy,” p. 120.
21. Dillon hypothesizes for instance that this is the reason for the anti-Aristotelian polemics composed by the leading Athenian Platonist, Atticus, at about the time Alexander was beginning his career. In fact it is most likely that the target of this polemic was Alexander’s teacher Aristocles, whose Platonizing interpretation of Aristotle would have threatened the distinctiveness of Platonist teaching (Dillon, p. 248–250). On the Peripatetics’ ambiguous location on the spectrum between Stoicism and Platonism, see Merlan, “Greek Philosophy,” p. 122.
22. “The separation [chōrizein] is the cause of all the unacceptable consequences concerning the Ideas,” says Aristotle in Metaphysics 13:9,1086b7. For his full account of the origin and defects of Plato’s theory of Ideas, see Metaphysics 1:9 and 13:4. Notice that Aristotle consistently calls the target of his criticism “ideas” (ideai). In this chapter I shall consistently use Plato’s other term for them, “Form” (eidos), in order to stress the continuity between Aristotle’s views and Plato’s.
23. ST 1,79.7.
24. Alexander of Aphrodisias On the Soul 85.20–86.4.
25. For Alexander these two processes are basically identical, ibid. 85:15.
26. Ibid. 90:1–10. See Aquinas’s rebuttal of this view, which he knew as Avicenna’s, in ST 1, 79.6.
27. On the Soul 90:11–19; see 81:1–13, which suggests that these two kinds of Forms may be the objects of the intellect in action and in contemplation respectively, which Alexander correlates with the (ultimately Platonic) distinction between opinion and knowledge.
28. Ibid. 89:11–21.
29. Ibid. 90:19–91:6.
30. Ibid. 88:24–89:11, alluding to the comparison of the Good to the sun in the Allegory of the Cave, Republic 6:507a–509b Alexander is taking up a hint from Aristotle himself, who compares the agent intellect to light in his On the Soul 3:5,430a16.
31. The importance of the Aristotelian theology of divine Mind is a familiar theme in the scholarly literature on Middle Platonism: see Witt, pp. 125–126, Dörrie, pp. 202–205, Dillon, pp. 13 and 24, Armstrong, “The Background,” pp. 402–404. The most illuminating representative figure here is the Middle Platonist Albinus or Alcinous (fl. 150 AD); see Dillon, pp. 282–283.
32. The great study of the concept of Mind or Nous in the Platonist tradition before Plotinus is Kramer’s. Festugière’s second volume is perhaps the most extensive study of the notion of God as World-Soul in this period; his fourth volume deals with the notion of an incomprehensible One prior to Plotinus.
33. For an excellent introduction to Plotinus’s ontological hierarchy see Armstrong, Architecture, as well as the shorter and more accessible “Plotinus,” especially pp. 236 258.
34. Republic 6:509b. See likewise the Allegory of the Cave, where the Good is pictured as above the other Forms, like the sun shining on the earth (7:516b).
35. Parmenides 137c–142a (the so-called “first hypothesis,” a dialectical exercise concerning the notion of the absolute One, which concludes that such a thing cannot be spoken of, or known, or be-which Neoplatonists took to be a profound description of the First Principle through a kind of via negativa).
36. Ennead 5:3.5–6 and 5:9.5–8.
37. Whereas for Plato the soul is a self-mover (Phaedrus 245cd, Timaeus 36e-37b, Laws 10:895b-896c), for Aristotle the soul is an unmoved mover (On the Soul 1:3). Hence Aristotle’s soul, unlike Plato’s, is immovable—and thus that much closer to eternity and the immutable nature of the Forms. In this, as in several other points of psychology, Plotinus sides with Aristotle rather than Plato. His doctrine of the immutability of the higher part of the soul clearly owes more to Aristotle than to Plato: see how Ennead 1:1.1–3 develops the thesis of the immovability and impassability of the soul in Aristotle’s On the Soul 1:4,408a29-408b32 (see also Ennead 3:6.1–5).
38. Plotinus explicitly mentions Aristotle’s identity theory in Ennead 5:9.5, assimilating it to the Parmenidean identification of being and knowing and the Platonic theory of Recollection. Armstrong, in “The Background,” seems to have been the first modern scholar to appreciate how important Aristotle’s theory is in Plotinus.
39. The key text here is Ennead 4:8.4 and 8; but see also 1:1.10, 3:4.3, 3:8.5, 4:3.12, 5:3.4, 6:4.14. The concept of an unfallen higher part of the soul would have been conveyed to Augustine in Ennead 5:1.10, where it is identified as the divine part of the soul, “which Plato calls ‘the man within’ [in Republic 9:589a].”
40. Enneads 3:4.3, 6:5.7, 6:7.35, and 6:9.9.
41. In Ennead 1:2.4 Plotinus identifies the work of the four virtues with the task of conversion (i.e., turning) and purificaion. See how conversion, liberation, and purification—that is, turning, freeing, and purging—are equivalent in Phaedo 64e, 65a, and 66ab, respectively. In the same vein Augustine speaks of “those virtues which purify the soul by conversion” in De Musica 6:52.
42. Ennead 1:4.4; contrast Eudemian Ethics 7:12,1245b19.
43. Enneads 6:5.4,6:5.12, and 6:9.6. For the full range of Plotinus’s use of the term “infinite” to describe what is divine, see Sweeney, chapter 9.
44. Armstrong, “Plotinus’ Doctrine of the Infinite,” p. 56. This contrasts with Christian and Jewish theology, where the affirmation that God is infinite had long been commonplace, as “from Philo [of Alexandria] onwards, it was natural to believe that God was infinite and his infinity is stated without hesitations or reservations.”
45. In fact peras is, by Plato’s own account, the term for the boundary lines that define a geometrical figure, Meno 76a.
46. Enneads 5:1.7,6:7.32.
47. For example Enneads 3:8.8,4:3.17,5:1.11, 6:5.5,6:8.8,6:9.8.
48. See Ennead 5:3.10: “It must be that . . . knowledge [noesin] is always in otherness as well as, necessarily, in identity. For the things that are principally known are both the same and other than the knower.”
49. For example, ibid. 3:8.8–9, 5:1.4, 5:3.10, 5:6.2, and 6:7.41. The key point is stated succinctly in 6:9.2: “Since it [the divine Mind] is both knower and known, it must be dual and not simple, and is therefore not the One.”
50. See ibid. 5:1.7; 5:3.11 and 15; 5:9.6.
51. Ibid. 6:4.3.
52. See ibid. 3:2.2.
53. The term “hypostasis,” so suggestive of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, is not found in Plotinus’s writings but only in the title of Ennead 5:1.1 (“On the Three Principal Hypostases”)—and Plotinus did not assign titles to his own treatises but left that to his students (Porphyry, Life, of Plotinus 4). Hence I generally prefer to speak of three ontological “levels,” mainly to indicate that different philosophical concepts come into play at each level of Plotinus’s hierarchy.
54. This division of the soul among bodies is discussed by Plato in Timaeus 35a, a text that serves as a springboard for some of Plotinus’s most important meditations on the nature of embodiment. See Enneads 1:1.8,4:1,4:2,4:3.19, and 6:4.4.
55. Ennead 4:8.4.
56. See ibid. 4:2.1.
57. The doctrine that the higher part of the soul is by nature immutable and therefore unfallen is evidently unique to Plotinus. Proclus rejects it in Elements 211, and other Neoplatonists reverted to Plato’s view that the soul is a self-mover (not an unmoved mover) and hence not immutable. See Macrobius’s lengthy criticism of Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul as unmoved mover in Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 2:13-17, which must have been cribbed from some Neoplatonist school text, perhaps by Porphyry (see Courcelle, Late Latin Writers, p. 43). Note Plotinus’s explicit awareness of the fact that his doctrine of an immutable “higher part” of the soul is a novelty that “boldly goes against received opinion,” Ennead 4:8.8.
58. Ennead 5:9.8. See the fuller discussion of intelligible part-whole relations in Ennead 4:9.5; for why this degree of unity among intelligible things nonetheless does not lead to confusion, see Ennead 5:9.6. Gurtler builds a very plausible systematic interpretation of Plotinus’s philosophy around this analogy (Nous is to noeta as a science is to its theorems) and the “experience of unity” that results when this science is reflected in the knowledge of the soul.
59. “Each is all” and “all are together” are mottos that occur frequently to sum up Plotinus’s discussion of the contents of the intelligible world. See Enneads 1:8.2,3:3.7, 4.2.2,5:3.15, and 5:8.4, as well as the references in note 60.
60. Ibid. 5:9.5–6 and 3:8.8. The fact that there are many minds or intelligences in the one Mind is the basis for Proclus’s development of a hierarchy of divine intelligences and thence for the celestial hierarchy of angelic intelligences in Pseudo-Dionysius.
61. Plotinus develops the thesis of the unity of all souls in Ennead 4:9 and 4:3.1–8. This notion is not wholly alien to Augustine, as we shall see. Indeed, it is altogether a less out-of-the-way notion than one might expect. For the conceptual connection between the unity of Mind (“Averroism”) and the oneness of all souls, see Merlan, Monopsychism, pp. 54–56, who shows that precisely parallel issues arise concerning the transcendental ego or Bewusstsein überhaupt in the Kantian tradition, which is on this score a conceptual descendant of Plotinus’s view of the unity of all souls (pp. 114–124).
62. On the structural parallel between the realm of the divine Mind and the realm of Soul in respect of one and many, see Enneads 4:3.5, 5:9.6 (where the science/theorem analogy is applied to soul as well as Mind), and 6:4.4 (where the parallel is most systematically presented).
63. See Heiser, pp. 37–44, on the way that the embodied soul’s characteristically discursive reasoning (logismos) breaks up into parts what in the realm of Mind is never divided.
64. See Ennead 6:5.7 on partial insight: “At first no doubt not all will be seen as one whole.” See also 4:4.1.
65. 1 Corinthians 13:12.
66. See how Recollection is grounded in Identity in Enneads 5:9.5 and 6:9.11.
67. The phrase “into the inside” (eis to eisō) is so common in Plotinus it is almost a cliche. It often occurs together with the verb epistrephein, “to turn”—or as it would naturally be translated into Latin, “to convert” (convertere); see for example Enneads 1:6.8,5:8.11, and 6:9.7. For Plotinus’s very rich use of this verb, see Aubin, chapter 8.
68. What follows is a synthesis of several passages (listed roughly in order of importance for this purpose): Enneads 6:9.8–10, 5:1. 11, 4:3.17, 6:5.5, 6:8.18, 3:8.8,4:1 (Loeb 4:2), 1:7.1.
69. Ennead 6:5.7. (The “lucky tug” refers to Athena descending from heaven and coming up on Achilles from behind to yank him by the hair and pull him back from rash action, Iliad 1:194–200.) O’Connell (St. Augustine’s Early Theory, p. 62–63) argues that this passage of Plotinus played an important role in the alchemy of Augustine’s imagination up to the time of Confessions.
70. De Ord. 1:3 (note the metaphor of the center of the circle), De Quant. Anim. 69 (the soul is both many and one). Much later, the notion that there is an inner and invisible unity of souls plays an important role in Augustine’s account of original sin in Adam and in his doctrine of the invisible unity of the Church.
71. See hereafter, p. 107. The Plotinian passage just discussed is the perfect illustration of why for Plotinus the inner self is not private.
1. Ambrose was one of the most prominent exponents of orthodox trinitarianism in the West, devoting to the Nicene cause not only his formidable political skills but also his long treatises On the Faith and On the Holy Spirit. Augustine may not have read these treatises at the beginning of his career, but he would certainly have heard the same theology in Ambrose’s sermons; see Williams, p. 151.
2. For what philosophical knowledge Augustine did have prior to reading Plotinus, see “Ciceronian Point of Departure” in chapter 6.
3. On the issue of Augustine’s knowledge of Greek language and literature I follow Courcelle, Late Latin Writers, chapter 4. On his use of Latin writers the best guide is Hagendahl, reinforced by Marrou’s magisterial study of Augustine’s education, Saint Augustin.
4. See Conf. 4:28.
5. The Timaeus is the only work of Plato of which Augustine demonstrates more than a fragmentary knowledge. Augustine refers frequently to Plato’s creation-story in City of God, noting its agreement with Genesis (Civ. Dei 8:11) and showing a special fondness for the speech of the supreme god in Timaeus 41a-b (see Hagendahl, pp. 131–138 for an extensive list of allusions and quotations). Hagendahl (p. 535) and Courcelle (Late Latin Writers, p. 169–170) concur in the judgment that Cicero’s translation was the edition known to Augustine.
6. For Augustine’s use of such sources in general see Solignac, “Doxographies et manuels dans la formation de saint Augustin.”
7. For the importance of this Ciceronian book for Augustine’s Platonism, see the second, third, and fourth sections of chapter 6 and the fourth, fifth, and sixth sections of chapter 10 hereafter. It seems to me rather likely that Augustine knew some of the geometry lesson in the Meno (as the inspiration for the geometry lesson in De Quant. Anim.) as well as the Allegory of the Cave (which seems to undergird the non-Plotinian aspects of Augustine’s epistemology in Sol. 1:12 and 1:23, discussed in “Education for Vision” in chapter 5) through some—unknown and purely conjectural—doxography on theories of education; for education is a subject on which he is unusually well informed.
8. Conf. 7:13.
9. The debate was conducted on philological ground: not doctrines but phraseology was the basis for inferences that Augustine read this or that treatise. For reviews of this controversy and how to read its outcome see Solignac’s introduction to the Bibliothèque Augustinienne edition of Confessions; O’Meara, “Augustine and Neo-Platonism”; and O’Connell, Early Theory, chapter 1.
10. Theiler, “Porphyrios und Augustin.” See the criticisms by Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition litteraire, I, i,2.
11. I will take it as certain that Augustine read Enneads 1:6 (“On Beauty”), 1:8 (“What and Whence Evil?”), 5:1 (“On the Three Primary Hypostases”), and 3:2–3 (“On Providence”)—there is little scholarly disagreement about these. In addition, I will take it as very likely that he read Enneads 6:4–5 (the treatise on Omnipresence), 4:7 (“On the Immortality of the Soul”), 5:8 (“On Intellectual Beauty”), 4:8 (“On the Descent of the Soul”) and 4:3–5 (the treatise on problems regarding the soul). Less probable but still rather likely arc Enneads 6:9 (“On the Good or the One”) and 3:7 (“On Eternity and Time”). Last, for my own more unusual judgments: it seems to me probable that he also read Ennead 1:2 (“On Virtues”), for reasons that will emerge in “The Intelligibility of God” in chapter 4 (note 57), as well as Ennead 1:3 (“On Dialectic”) which I think must be in the background of his extraordinary views on the nature of dialectic in the Soliloquies (see “The Bizarre Identification” in chapter 7). The most important point to note, however, is that I will try to make my thesis independent of minor disagreements about which treatises belong on the list of those Augustine read, by showing that the Plotinian conceptuality I attribute to Augustine could have come to him from any number of treatises. Such concepts as the inward turn and the divinity of the soul are too pervasive in Plotinus’s writings to be missed even by someone who has read very few of them.
12. De Beata Vita 4 (written only a few months after the event). Although most manuscripts have “a very few books of Plato,” Henry has made a convincing and widely accepted argument (on the basis of the text—critical principle of lectio difficilior) that the reading found in a minority of MSS, libri Plotini in place of libri Platonis, is “absolutely certain,” in Plotin et I’Occident, pp. 82–89.
13. Augustine tells of editing some manuscripts of Virgil while at Cassiciacum (C. Acad. 1:15 and 2:10) and of having his students there read the Hortensius (C. Acad. 1:4; see also 3:31); his extensive use of Cicero’s Academica in his own treatise against the Academics suggests that he had that work on hand also.
14. For a judicious summary of these early developments in modern Augustine scholarship, see Norregaard, pp. 1–14.
15. See especially Courcelle, Recherches, chapters 3 and 4, as well as pp. 251–255 of the conclusion.
16. See De Beata Vita 4 (“the sermons of our priest”), De Util. Cred. 20, and above all, Conf. 5:23–24.
17. This was first uncovered by Courcelle (Recherches, chapter 3) and extensively confirmed by later studies. See Nauroy, P. Hadot, “Platon et Plotin dans trois sermons de saint Ambroise,” Solignac, “Nouveaux Paralleles,” and Madec on the “Plotinian sermons” in his Saint Ambroise, pp. 61–71.
18. Among contemporary Augustine scholars, it is Robert J. O’Connell who does us the favor of emphasizing most consisently the fact that Augustine was constantly renewing and deepening his acquaintance with the books of the Neoplatonists, at least up to the time of the Confessions and probably beyond.
19. See “Ciceronian Point of Departure” in chapter 6.
20. So Courcelle, in his reconstruction of the summer of 386, Recherches, p. 157–167. This part of Courcelle’s work strikes me as ingenious but questionable.
21. Conf. 7:13–14.
22. For a similar approach to this issue, see O’Connell, Images, chapter 2, especially pp. 115–118, 160–161, and 195–197.
23. Most notably, Augustine understands Platonist immaterialism far better in the Confessions than at Cassiciacum, where his main argument is in fact incompatible with the Plotinian doctrine of omnipresence—a doctrine that is central to his conception of the incorporeality of God in the Confessions; see “A Diagnosis” in chapter 7.
24. Conf. 7:16. The first clause is: “Et inde admonitus redire ad memetipsum, intravi in intima mea, duce Te.”
25. Ennead 1:6.8 (the treatise entitled “On Beauty”). This passage (and its sequel immediately following) is interwoven with the parable of the Prodigal Son in Conf. 1:28 and alluded to again in Conf. 8:19, as well as quoted and praised in Civ. Dei 9:17, with explicit attribution to Plotinus (a rare thing in Augustine or any Christian writer). It may have become Augustine’s favorite passage because he first heard it in a sermon of Ambrose, De Isaac vel Animo 78–79.
26. It should be emphasized that Narcissus’s fate does not serve as a warning against self—love, but rather against loving one’s image as reflected in material things like water or one’s own body, which is a kind of image of the soul. The last thing Plotinus would disapprove of is the self—love of the soul. A similar lesson is taught using the same mythic imagery in the context of a Gnostic story of the Fall in the first treatise of the Hermetic Corpus, Poimandres (Hermetica 1:14).
27. Ennead 1:6.8. Augustine picks up the reference to feet, chariots, and ships in his allusions to this text in Conf. 1:28 and 8:19. Closing one’s eyes in order to attain true vision is another theme of Poimandres (Hermetica 1:30).
28. Sol. 1:7.
29. Ennead 4:7.10 (subsequent references to line numbers are from this chapter). For evidence that Augustine read this treatise, see Du Roy, p. 130 n.6, and Verbeke.
30. See also Ennead 3:4.3: “each of us is an intelligible world.” On being identical with the Light within, see Enneads 1:6.9 and 6:9.9 (end).
31. This “golden soul” motif appears also in Ennead 1:6.5, the treatise that we are most sure Augustine read. A similar metaphor, describing the “spiritual man,” was used by the Gnostics, according to Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1:6.2.
32. We must keep reminding ourselves of ancient conditions of reading: most of Augustine’s “readers” were illiterate and would have heard these books read aloud. Hence they were quite literally an “audience,” a set of hearers. See Brown’s introduction to the Hackett edition of Confessions, p. xi, for an illuminating reconstruction of the conditions of readership in Augustine’s era.
33. However, if O’Connell is right (in Early Theory, pp. 106-111) then there is one extraordinarily dense and allusive paragraph where Augustine hints at the kind of kind of idolatry he found in the books of the Platonists (Conf. 7:15)—though whom he expected to be able to decipher these hints is hard to imagine.
34. Conf. 7:16.
35. This use of one Platonist concept to correct another, so as to bring it in line with Catholic teaching is a method employed again in Civ. Dei 13:16 and 22:27.
36. See Conf. 7:23 where, after catching a glimpse of God “in the stroke of a trembling glance” Augustine finds himself too weak to gaze steadfastly at that dazzling light, and hence falls back to his usual self, “bearing with me only a beloved memory.” But evidently it was such a memory that helped him solve the series of conceptual problems in 7:17–22. Compare the account of how a flash of insight is retained in memory and thence put into language in De Cat. Rud. 3.
37. Augustine affirms quite explicitly that pagan Platonists have seen God, De Trin. 4:20 (compare 12:23) and Civ. Dei 9:16.
38. De Mag. 46.
39. It is precisely for this reason that O’Connell, despite his strong emphasis on the Plotinian character of Augustine’s thought, stands opposed to the thesis of Alfaric and others that Augustine’s early writings are really Neoplatonist rather than Christian:
Whether or not he was a Catholic must. . . be allowed to depend on his readiness to accept what the Church holds to be her belief, once it becomes plain to him what it is. And here there can be not the slightest question of his willingness to do that. Everything we have seen at Cassiciacum [i.e., his earliest writings] argues for it. (Early Theory, p. 260)
40. In the preface and first chapter of Proslogion, respectively. These formulas are often mistakenly attributed to Augustine. The latter does have a close precursor in Augustine’s sermon 43:4, where he imagines himself saying “Believe, so that you may understand” to someone who would rather say “I understand, so that I may believe.”
41. De Trin. 15:2.
42. Enchiridion 5.
43. In Augustine’s early work, the moral cleansing of the mind’s eye (needed to strengthen it to gaze at the bright light of Truth without flinching) is the essential function of Christian faith: see Sol. 1:12, De Util. Cred. 2, De Fide et Symbolo 25. The key scriptural text in this connection is Matthew 5:8 (“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”). But just as seeing God is defined by Platonist conceptions of intellectual vision, so purification of the heart is defined in Platonist fashion as a cleansing from the stain of sensible attachments (for the Platonist concept of purification of soul see for example Phaedo 64a-67d, Enneads 1:2.4 and 1:6.9, and Trouillard, especially chapters 10 and 11). Augustine’s early emphasis on purification by faith is the precursor to his immensely influential interpretation of Paul on justification by faith (as one can clearly see in an early text such as De Div. QQs 83, section 68.3).
44. Augustine’s whole ethics is based on the opposite of the common modern sentiment that the journey is more important than the destination, De Doct. 1:39.
45. For more details on how Augustine elaborates the relation between inward turn and external signs, see my conclusion.
46. Ennead 5:8. For the likelihood that Augustine read this treatise, see O’Connell, Early Theory, p. 167–168, and the whole of chapter 8.
47. See Ennead 6:9.11, describing the culmination of the ascent to contemplation of the One: “So then there was not two, but the seer himself was one with what he saw; it was not so much a seeing as a being-made-one.” Metaphors of vision must be dropped as we ascend from the level of Mind to the level of the One, that is, from the realm of intelligible Forms to that which is above Being and Form. See likewise Ennead 6:7.34–35 (where Plotinus once again introduces a notion of inward vision only to say that this is more like unification than vision) and the helpful comments of Schwyzer, “‘Bewusst’ und ‘Unbewusst’ bei Plotin,” p. 376.
48. In turning inward to be united with the One, the soul “arrives not at something else but at itself,” as Plotinus says in Ennead 6:9.11.
49. See De Mag. 38.
50. See the similar description of separation from God at the end of Ennead 6:9.7. This striking metaphor is echoed in Conf. 10:38: “Late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You. And behold, You were inside, and I was outside” (similarly Conf. 7:11 and 4:18). There is more than scintillating rhetoric here. According to Augustine we become united with what we love (De Ord. 2:48, De Lib. Arb. 1:33; see also De Vera Rel. 23—similarly Ennead 1:6.9). Consequently, in loving external things we ourselves become in an important sense “external,” dwelling outside our own souls in the world of perishing bodies.
51. Similar Plotinian references to the (temporal) priority of faith to understanding and vision are found in Enneads 1:3.1 and 6:9.4. Augustine probably drew on these passages in his own formulation of the faith/understanding relation; see O’Connell, Early Theory, pp. 223–225.
52. Other treatments of this problem: Enneads 1:4.10, 4:8.8, and 5:1.12. The best scholarly discussion of Plotinus on this question remains that of Schwyzer, “‘Bewusst’ und ‘Unbewusst’ bei Plotin,” especially p. 371.
53. See the similar remark in Ennead 4:7.10, quoted in “Some Plotinian Readings” earlier.
54. See likewise the function of faith in Augustine’s early epistemology: by faith the soul “believes that what it should turn and look at is something that will make it happy or blessed, once seen” (Sol. 1:13) and
so long as the soul is in this body, even if it fully sees, that is, understands God, yet because the senses of the body still perform their own function they can lead us into doubt if not deception—so faith can be said to be what resists them, and believes something else to be true. (Sol. 1:14)
55. De Fide Rer. Inv. The title is perhaps also meant as a biblical allusion (to Heb. 11:1) but this looks less likely in the Latin.
56. Conf. 10:34.
1. For the effect of this on Augustine’s career, see “A Program of Education” in chapter 6.
2. See the third letter of Cyril to Nestorius, and the eleventh of the famous twelve anathemas appended thereto, conveniently found in Stevenson, pp. 284 and 288, or Hardy, pp. 352 and 354. This letter, with its anathemas, is traditionally included among the decrees of Ephesus 431, although there is some confusion about the content of the original Acts of the council and it seems likely that, like Cyril’s second letter to Nestorius, this letter and its anathemas was read with approval but not formally adopted (see Grillmeier, pp. 414–415). For a fine introduction to the issues under discussion at the council, see Young, pp. 213–229.
3. It is useful to be aware that unlike the English words “flesh” and “carnal,” which have their primary etymological associations with meat, the Greek word sarx (from which we get “sarcophagus”) has its primary etymological associations with death and mortality. Hence “life-giving flesh” has the same paradoxical flavor as a phrase like “life-giving mortality.”
4. Ho esō anthrdpōs, Romans 7:22,2 Corinthians 4:16, and Ephesians 3:16. The noun is the generic word for “human being,” not the word for “man,” but I have kept the traditional translation “inner man” in order to preserve continuity with previous discussions in the literature, and also because any other rendering (such as “inner self”) is likely to be misleading or to beg important questions of this investigation.
5. Ho entos anthrōpos, Republic 9:589a.
6. See Wolff, pp. 40–58.
7. Ephesians 1:18. Most scholars think this “Pauline” letter was not actually authored by Paul himself but by someone in the Pauline circle. But it is enough like Paul’s writing that I assume the author is, like Paul, a Hellenistic Jew and probably a native speaker of Greek.
8. For a fascinating and plausible speculation about where Paul got the phrase, see Jewett, pp. 391–401, who also gives a summary of the history of scholarly discussion on the subject. Jewett’s suggestion is that Paul picked up the phrase from Gnostic opponents and put it to polemical use, in the process changing its meaning from the Gnostics’ “spirit” or “spiritual man” (pneumatikos) to something more like the Hebrew “heart.” Jewett’s account, while more detailed and interesting, shares the key features of the account I am proposing here, namely, that the ultimate source of the phrase is Platonic but that Paul’s use of it does not commit him to Platonism (much less to Gnosticism). With that in mind, I would add one more consideration in favor of Jewett’s view: Plato’s “man within” occurs in a passage that seems to have inspired Gnostic thinking about the three “races” of men (“spiritual,” “psychic,” and “earthly”). The importance of this Platonic passage for Gnosticism is confirmed by its appearance, in a garbled Coptic translation (without the phrase “man within”), in the Nag Hammadi library (IV,5). Hence the missing link between Plato’s “man within” and Paul’s “inner man” may be Paul’s Gnostic opponents, who based some of their anthropology on this text of Plato—which subsequently became a standard text for some Gnostic groups and thus found its way into Coptic and thence into the Nag Hammadi collection.
9. A more striking version of the same phenomenon is the Epistle to the Hebrews, which makes extensive use of a Platonist contrast between the true temple in heaven, the place of eternal redemption, and its temporary shadow and imitation on earth (a contrast found in previous Jewish literature, e.g., Wisdom of Solomon 9:8 and Philo, Who is Heir 112) but then defies straightforward Platonist reading by speaking of the resurrected Christ—an embodied man, not a pure soul—as if he literally brought his own physical blood into the eternal sanctuary (9:12 and 9:24).
10. At least this seems to be the most plausible conclusion to draw from Eusebius History of the Church 6:19.6 (on Origen’s philosophical education) combined with Porphyry Life of Plotinus 3 (on Plotinus’s education). Both refer to an Alexandrian teacher named Ammonius, who was apparently an apostate Christian; see Dodds, “Numcnius and Ammonius,” p. 31; there are, however, some serious incongruities on the two accounts, and it is possible that two distinct Ammoniuses arc in view; see pp. 35–36 and 43–44.
11. See “The Prologue to the Commentary on The Song of Songs” (in Origen, Greer, trans.), pp. 217–231. The identification of the inner man with the soul is explicit on p. 223.
12. See Rahner’s study, “Le début,” which cites and discusses the key texts. To these texts should be added, as Madec notes, Origen’s “Dialogue with Heraclides” (see especially pp. 444–453).
13. Brown paints Africa as the corn belt and Bible belt of the Roman Empire, pp. 19–27; for the appeal of Manichaean sprituality in this environment, see pp. 42–45.
14. Conf. 5:23–24. On Ambrose’s use of the language of interiority, drawn from Scripture, Origen, and Plotinus, see Madec, “L’homme intérieur.” It is striking how much of this use is concentrated in works that originated at about the time Augustine was living in Milan and listening to Ambrose’s sermons: the expositions on the Gospel of Luke, on Psalm 118, the Hexameron, and the sermon “On Isaac or the Soul.” For the dating, see Courcelle, Recherches, pp. 123–124. According to Madec, Ambrose’s concept of interiority is of a piece with his use of philosophical concepts in general: in a word, undigested. Ambrose is capable of transcribing words, phrases, sentences, and whole paragraphs from a philosophical source like Plotinus into his sermons (without attribution) and then polemicizing fiercely against “philosophy.” One of Madec’s conclusions about this puzzling phenomenon is that Ambrose is a fine pastor but no philosopher, as his rather mechanical and literal borrowings from philosophical sources contrast with Augustine’s profound and personal integration of philosophical themes into Christian spirituality (see “L’homme intérieur,” pp. 300–302, and the conclusion of his Saint Ambroise et la philosophie, pp. 346–347). From this I draw the further conclusion: Ambrose may well have been the one who initially provided Augustine with the language of inwardness (introducing Augustine to Plotinian inwardness in his sermons before Augustine read Plotinus for himself), but Ambrose could never have devised an original philosophical concept like the inner space of the self; that was Augustine’s doing.
15. In Ennead 5:1.10, a treatise Augustine certainly read, Plotinus gives an exegesis of the phrase ho eisō anthrōpos (“the inward man”), which he explicitly attributes to Plato (though the phrasing is actually closer to Paul!). He alludes to Plato’s phrase again in Ennead 1:1.10 (which it is much less likely that Augustine read).
16. See De Beata Vita 35 and De Ord. 2:7. Beginning with Sol. 1:12 talk of the mind’s eye becomes programmatic and incessant.
17. For Augustine’s considered view on the meaning of “inner man” language in Paul, see De Div. QQs 83, section 51, where he deals with exegetical issues (such as the connection between the “inner man”/“outer man” contrast and Paul’s “new man”/“old man” contrast and Christ/Adam contrast) and places the concept of inner man in the context of his ontology and psychology—all without evoking an inward turn or inner space.
18. Conf. 10:8–9. This passage also alludes extensively to the five inner senses.
19. “Behold, body and soul in me are present to me, the one outwardly and the other inwardly,” ibid. 10:9. The context is one in which Augustine is explaining not the inner powers of the soul but the objects of sensible perception and is preparing the transition from one to the other: “The inner man knows these things through external servants. I, the inner, know these things—I, I the soul, through the senses of my body.”
20. See De Trin. 11:1, 12:1, 12:13, 13:4, 13:26, 14:4, 14:10. Most of these usages occur in the course of introducing or recapitulating some part of the overall inquiry.
21. See De Mor. Eccl. 36 and 80, where Augustine quotes the phrase from Paul (2 Cor. 4:16) but it does not lead him into any discussion of inwardness. This work is earlier than De Magistro, according to Retractations.
22. De Mag. 2. Similar phrasing recurs in section 38 (“Christ who is said to be in the inner man”), discussed in “Who Is Reason?” in chapter 6. Compare De Ver. Rel. 72, where truth “dwells in the inner man.”
23. Eph. 3:16–17. The conflation is easy enough to achieve, as it could conceivably result just from an odd punctuation of the Latin, as follows: “ut det vobis secundum divitias gloriae suae virtute corroborari per Spiritum ejus, in interiore homine habitare Christus, per fidem in cordibus vestris in caritate radicati et fundati.” The standard punctuation is rather: “. . . per Spiritum ejus in interiore homine, habitare Christus per fidem in cordibus vestris, in caritate radicati et fundati . . .”
24. 1 Corinthians 3:16, as quoted in De Mag. 2.
25. See Romans 8:10, Galatians 4:19, and Colossians 1:27 (all second person plural). The first-person usage in Galatians 2:20 is unusual and therefore particularly striking.
26. See Romans 10:14–17.
27. For example Conf. 4:11 and 4:13.
28. Conf. 4:18. “Deep in the heart he is” renders “intimus cordi est.” The quote is from Isaiah 46:8, mistranslating a Hebrew text that means something more like: “Call it to mind, you transgressors.”
29. Ibid. “Happy life” (beata vita), it should be noted, is a technical term (taken from Cicero) translating the key term of Greek philosophical ethics, eudaimonia.
30. Conf. 4:19. The quote is from Psalm 19:5.
31. Conf. 4.19.
32. De Doct. 1:38. See Mayer, Zeichen, 2:249–261 for the via/patria scheme in Augustine’s Christology and its relation to his ontology (especially the contrast between mutable and immutable being) and ethics (especially the contrast of uti and frui, things to be used and things to be enjoyed). The relation is basically quite simple: because Christ’s humanity is mutable, not immutable (hence temporal, not eternal), it is way, not goal, to be used rather than to be enjoyed. Christ’s flesh is not a thing for us to cling to.
33. The significance of external things—and how this coheres with Augustine’s ongoing project of inward turn—is a subject for another study. See the conclusion.
34. 1 Corinthians 1:24. A more accurate rendering would be “Christ the Power of God and the Wisdom of God,” translating Paul’s dynamis with potentia, but Augustine always translates it with virtus, which can mean power but also ethical virtue. The philosophical attraction of this translation is obvious: it identifies Christ with two terms that are at the very center of ancient philosophy.
35. See for example C. Acad. 3:20, De Ord. 1:32, Conf. 3:8, Civ. Dei 8:1, De Trin. 14:2.
36. Conf. 7:13–14.
37. Conf. 3:7. The quote is from the parable of the Prodigal Son, a text that Augustine often associates with Plotinian themes of inwardness, and particularly with Ennead 1:6.8 (which he deliberately conflates with the language of this parable in Conf. 1:28). The prodigal son “comes to himself” and says “let me arise and go to my father,” a double movement in which Augustine sees the in then up movement of the inward turn. See Civ. Dei 11:28 and Retract. 1:7.3 (in Migne, 1:8.3).
38. Conf. 3:8.
39. Ibid. 3:9.
40. Ibid. 3:10.
41. Ibid.
42. C. Faustum 20:9. Faustus is, of course, quoting 1 Corinthians 1:24.
43. 1 Corinthians 1:24 is referred to twice in the Cassiciacum dialogues (at a time when Augustine quotes the Bible very infrequently), and it stands at the head of Augustine’s Christology in his early writings. See C. Acad. 2:1, De Beata Vita 34, De Lib. Arb. 1:5, De Mor. Eccl. 1:22, De Quant. Anim. 76, De Musica 6:52, De Vera Rel. 3, De Mag. 38, De Div. QQs 83, sections 11 and 26—and this does not count all the times Christ is simply referred to as “the Wisdom of God.”
44. A complete translation of this brief treatise is found in appendix 2. It is actually section 46 of Augustine’s answers to Eighty-three Different Questions, hence the usual citation is De Div. QQs 83, section 46. But for convenience most scholars refer to it under the title De Ideis. Hence I shall call it Augustine’s essay “On Ideas.”
45. For the genesis of De Div. QQs 83, see Retract. 1:26. For this period in Augustine’s life, after his conversion in Milan and return to Africa but before his forced appointment as a clergyman at Hippo, see Brown, chapter 13.
46. This historical fabrication is a patristic commonplace (see Justin Martyr Ad Graec. 20 [in Ante-Nicene Fathers], Clement of Alexandria Strom. 1:22, Origen C. Cels. [in Ante-Nicene Fathers], 4:39) of which Ambrose is particularly fond. See in Augustine De Doct. 2:43 (reporting Ambrose’s views) and Civ. Dei 8:11 (backing away from some of the more implausible suggestions made in the previous text). On the lost work in which Ambrose makes this argument, see Madec, Saint Ambroise, pp. 249–279 and 323–337.
47. For this architectural usage see De Ord. 2:34.
48. See the very similar argument in support of the Platonist concept of “intelligible world,” which Augustine makes near the end of his life:
Plato indeed did not err in saying there was an intelligible world. . . . For “intelligible world” is a name for that eternal and immutable Reason by which God made the world. Whoever denies this, must say in consequence that God made what he made irrationally [irrationabiliter], or else that when he made it or before made it, he did not know what he was making, if there was with him no reason for making it [ratio faciendi]. But if there was—as indeed there was—then this seems to be what Plato called the intelligible world. (Retract. 1:3.2)
49. See for example Aquinas, ST I, 15.1. Notice that in handling the first objection Aquinas sides with Augustine against Pseudo-Dionysius (or Denys, as I call him hereafter), the most systematic Christian Platonist among the Eastern Fathers.
50. See the fourth and eighth of the “chapters of Italus,” in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (read every year in solemn liturgy on “the Sunday of Orthodoxy” in the Eastern Churches), in Gouillard’s edition, p. 59 (11. 198–200 and 220–224). See also Gouillard’s commentary on pp. 194–195, which identifies the background assumptions.
51. Aquinas defends Augustine’s essay “On Ideas” by pointing out that in locating Ideas in the mind of God rather than outside God, Augustine sides with Aristotle against Plato (ST I, 15.1, ad 1). This may be a surprise, but Thomas is quite correct: for Augustine got his doctrine of divine Mind from Neoplatonism, which got it from Aristotle via Alexander of Aphrodisias and others, as we have seen in chapter 2.
52. Augustine will even use the Nicene term consubstantialis in this connection, in De Lib. Arb. 2:32–33.
53. That all intellectual vision involves seeing God, even though not all intellectual vision is fully beatific, is a conclusion that follows from Plotinus’s doctrine of the soul, sketched earlier (see especially the end of “Some Plotinian Readings” in chapter 3): for the fallen soul can have partial vision of what is indissolubly one (the dividedness belongs to the soul in its disunified state, not to the intelligible thing it sees). I use the word “glimpses” to designate this partial and fragmentary vision, which achieves only a partial and temporary happiness.
54. For instance Pseudo-Dionysius (or Denys) will speak of eternal models or exemplars (paradeigmata) “preexisting” in the unity of God as causes (aitias) or formative principles (logoi) in the one Logos (On Divine Names 824c and 872c). Maximus the Confessor, close student of Denys’s texts and revered Eastern theologian, elaborates in some detail the concept of eternal formative logoi within the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity (see Meyendorff, pp. 134–135). It would surely be plausible for Augustine to claim that these logoi are rationes by another name—which are in turn Platonic Ideas by another name. But unlike Augustine, Maximus insists that these are incomprehensible, in the sense of “beyond intelligibility,” akatanoeton (Ambigua, PG 91:1080a).
55. ST I, 12.1 and 12.7. A similar usage occurs in Kant, where “noumenon” (which is Greek for the thing understood in intellectual knowledge) designates precisely what is beyond the scope of human understanding.
56. Whatever is true of the divine being will be true also of the Ideas, since “an Idea in God is nothing other than his essence.” (ST I, 15.1 ad 3).
57. Augustine often insists that the soul is “nearer” to God than any other creature is (e.g. De Quant. Anim. 77, De Mor. Eccl. 1:18, Civ. Dei 11:26). This terminology apparently comes from Plotinus, who uses it as equivalent to Plato’s talk of souls being “akin to” divine things in Ennead 1:2.2 (where he says the soul participates in Form more than bodies do because it is “nearer and more akin” to Forms than the body is). Augustine may have this passage in mind when he explains that the soul is nearer to the eternal reasons than bodies are, in De Immort. Anim. 24. Other Plotinian references to the kinship between soul and Form that would have been familiar to Augustine are found in Enneads 1:6.9 and 5:1.1.
58. See especially De Div. QQs 83, section 51.2.
59. See Ep. 18:2 (translated in appendix 2). This three-tiered ontology is never far from Augustine’s mind when he is discussing the soul. For more detailed exposition, see Bourke, Augustine’s View of Reality (pp. 3–7), as well as his anthology The Essential Augustine, pp. 43–66, where he provides a selection of passages from Augustine explaining the conceptual structure of this hierarchy of being and its three levels.
60. Translations of these two key Augustinian texts are provided in appendix 2.
61. Augustine is certainly aware of the Plotinian concept of the One, and in fact he uses conceptuality from that level elsewhere (most importantly in articulating the unity of the Trinity, e.g., in De Trin. 6:8 and Civ. Dei 11:10, where he uses a doctrine of divine simplicity that he explicitly attributes to the Platonists in Civ. Dei 8:6). But in the early period his focus is clearly on God as intelligible Mind. It is not clear why Augustine thought he could apply conceptuality from both levels to the Christian God without contradicting himself, but the possibility might have been suggested to him by a tendency in Porphyry to blur the distinction between the top two levels (detected by P. Hadot in Porphyre et Victorinus, 1:482–485).
62. On the Divine Names 1:5, 593b.
63. Proclus Elements 166–183. There is the complication that this proliferation extends even to the level of the One, where Proclus places a hierarchy of divine unities or “henads” (Elements 113–165). I take this to be an elaboration of concepts that from a Plotinian perspective belong properly at the level of Mind rather than One (for the latter ought to include no hierarchies, distinctions, or plurality). Hence I would trace Denys’s angelic hierarchy back to Plotinus’s Mind via a historical line of descent passing through the divine hierarchies of fifth-century Neoplatonism.
64. I do not mean to say that this was the first time. A similar mutation seems to have occurred in Gnosticism, whose heavenly realm, pleroma, is populated by beings called aeons or archons (“principalities”), which often look very much like a cross between Platonic Forms and Jewish angels. But Denys is separated from the gnostics by the same thing that separates him from Proclus: the orthodox Christian doctrine of Creation.
65. It should be emphasized that the doctrine of divine incomprehensibility is not an idiosyncracy of Denys’s but has been the official teaching of the Eastern churches ever since the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century: see for example Basil C. Eun. 1:12 and Ep. 234, Gregory of Naziansen Orat. 28:3–4 (the 2nd Theological Oration) and Gregory of Nyssa C. Eun. 2:3 and De Sanct. Trin. (= Basil Ep. 189:6). This doctrine is not dependent on Neoplatonism, but it plainly has an “elective affinity” with Plotinus’s doctrine of the incomprehensible One, an affinity that shows itself with particular clarity in the Neoplatonist Denys. (Note that the treatises just cited are not philosophical or mystical works but expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity.) The universal acceptance of this doctrine is evident in John of Damascus’ seventh-century treatise De Fide Orthodoxa (see especially 1:4), a compendium of the teachings of the Greek Fathers that could also be called the world’s first systematic theology text, which became highly influential in the Latin world beginning in the twelfth century (see de Ghellinck, pp. 374 404).
66. On the Divine Names 1:1, 588b.
67. Mystical Theology 1:1,997b.
68. On the Divine Names 7:3, 872b.
69. For the respect in which Augustine’s view of intellectual vision follows Plato rather than Plotinus on this point, see “Education for Vision” in chapter 5.
70. Denys is capable of saying that God is quite simply unintelligible (a-noetos), in The Celestial Hierarchy 2:3,141a. If he is Mind at all, he is “unintelligible Mind,” nous anoetos (On the Divine, Names 1:1, 588b); he is neither an intelligible nor a sensible thing, neither noeton nor aistheton (On the Divine Names 7:3, 869c). Other vocabulary for incomprehensibility in Denys includes aperileptos and akataleptos, as well as agnōstos (literally “unknown”).
71. Even Denys’s images of “divine darkness,” such as those in the opening of the Mystical Theology, are meant to express the superabundance of light, not its absence.
72. Sermon 117:5. The passage begins: “Ad mentem Deus pertinet, intellegendus est. . . .”
73. For example in Aquinas, ST I, 12.7 “comprehend” means “know completely.” However, one further complication of the terminological history should be noted. The medieval theologians could use the term comprehensor to describe the blessed, following the Vulgate translation of 1 Corinthians 9:24, “sic currite ut comprehendatis”—a usage Aquinas defends in ST I-II, 4.3. But this usage (which implies that God is comprehensible in some sense) is not one from which Aquinas draws any philosophical implications. When he calls God incomprehensibile it is normally the Augustinian sense of the word that he has in mind.
74. De Mag. 33–41.
75. De Doct. 3:9–13. See Augustine’s hermeneutical debt to Ambrose as described in the Confessions: the reason why Ambrose did and Augustine did not understand the Scriptures is because the one could and the other could not “think of a spiritual substance” (Conf. 5:25) and thus read Scripture spiritually rather than literally (Conf. 5:24).
76. Also translated “of one essence” or “of one being” (Augustine uses the standard Latin translation consubstantialem), this is the famous homo-ousios clause of the Nicene creed, whose exact meaning has often been in dispute but which all the orthodox traditions agree excludes any inequality between Father and Son. For at the very least, the clause implies that the Son is not a different or lower kind of God from the Father.
77. This “subordinationism” was a much broader and more widely accepted form of doctrine than the Arian heresy. It was central to the Alexandrian theology of the third century (including both Clement and Origen) and was represented by such respectable churchmen as Eusebius of Caesarea, the famous Church historian. But along with Arianism, it was ruled out in the wake of Nicaea; see Young, pp. 17–18.
78. In the Cassiciacum dialogues, Augustine twice hints at the sort of via negativa that suits a theology of the incomprehensible One rather than the intelligible Mind: God is “best known by not knowing” (De Ord. 2:44), “of whom there is no knowledge in the soul, except to know how it does not know him” (De Ord. 2:47). Augustine never develops these hints any further, and indeed the latter flatly contradicts the project he pursues in the Soliloquies, his next work, which concludes with an attempt to prove that there is a divine knowledge in the soul. Their presence in Augustine’s earliest writings is best explained, I think, in connection with the detection by Du Roy (the leading scholar of the doctrine of the Trinity in Augustine’s early period) of traces of subordinationist thinking in these writings (Du Roy, pp. 154–168). Although even at Cassiciacum Augustine is already informed about Nicene doctrine and hence rejects in theory any hierarchy in the Trinity (insisting for instance that the third person of the Trinity proceeds “without any degeneration,” De Ord. 2:16; see the same language in De Beata Vita 35), he does tend to associate the second person of the Trinity particularly with the intelligibility of God, in a way that suggests a kind of subordinationist substructure to his thinking. Thus he relates the Son to the Father, as Truth to “the Father of Truth” (De Ord. 2:51) and as Wisdom, which is “the measure of the soul” (De Beata Vita 33), to the “supreme Measure,” which is unmeasured by any other measure (De Beata Vita 34). This suggests a Plotinian hierarchy of the Father above Form giving Form to the Son who thereby mediates Form to the Soul. (See Du Roy, pp. 156–159, for likely Plotinian sources; in this scheme the Holy Spirit is identified with Reason in the Soul, Du Roy, pp. 130–143, a theme we shall see much more of later on.) My guess is that the scattered hints at negative theology in his earliest works were meant to be connected with the incomprehensibility of the Father but had to be dropped once Augustine had fully overcome the vestiges of subordinationism in his own thought.
79. Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, and Luke 9:28–36.
80. See Palamas, Triads 3:1.9–24 (Meyendorff, pp. 71–82).
81. 2 Corinthians 4:6.
82. See Aquinas ST III, 62.5.
1. Aubin, pp. 24–26 and 55–59.
2. See the metaphors of turning in Plato’s Republic 518a 521c, 525c, and 532b. For “turning” in Plotinus, see “Turning into the Inside” in chapter 2.
3. See the earlier discussion in “In then Up” in chapter 3.
4. See Enneads 1:6.8, Augustine’s favorite passage from Plotinus, quoted in “Some Plotinian Readings” in chapter 3.
5. Conf. 7:1.
6. Ibid. 7:2.
7. Ibid. 7:7.
8. Ibid. 7:1. The reference to “nothing” here is a leitmotif of Augustine’s various formulations of this particular problem.
9. Ibid.
10. Sol. 2:34, De Musica 6:32 and 51–52, De Vera Rel. 18, and (using the term “false images”) De Ord. 2:43. As the passage from De Musica makes particularly clear, the phrase “turning to phantasms,” which for Thomas Aquinas signifies a natural and essential stage in human knowing (ST I, 84.7), can for Augustine only mean something pathological, tantamount to the Fall of the soul—its turning from higher to lower things.
11. Conf. 7:1.
12. On the continuity between Augustine and modern turns to the subject, see Taylor, especially chapter 7 (though I read the nuances of Augustine’s Platonism rather differently).
13. Conf. 7:23. The phrase “I passed” is supplied in brackets, because the Latin sentence actually has no main verb.
14. Conf. 10:11.
15. Conf. 7:23 and 10:11. Augustine would have learned about this Aristotelian concept from Cicero; see “The Superiority of Soul in Cicero” in chapter 6.
16. Conf. 7:23. The phrase “drew thought away from habit” refers to the “carnal habit” mentioned earlier in 7:23 (to be discussed hereafter); it is also a quotation from Cicero, Tusc. 1:38 (discussed in “Cicero’s Turn to the Soul” in chapter 6 and “The Location of the Soul” in chapter 10). The judgment that the immutable is to be preferred to the mutable is presented as an example of a truth so evident to the mind that no one (not even a Manichaean) could want to deny it (see the conclusion to C. Faustum, 33:9, where the conviction that God is incorruptible and immutable is presented as “naturally implanted in every human mind”).
17. Conf. 7:23.
18. For this methodological perspective, which informs all my comments on the Confessions, see “Augustine on ‘the Books of the Platonists’” in chapter 3.
19. De Lib. Arb. 2:8–39.
20. See especially the ascent from sense to memory to intellect, designed to prove the non-spatiality and therefore incorporeality of the soul and (a fortiori) of God, C. Ep. Fund. 40–41.
21. That is, Conf. 7:16, 7:23, and 10:8–38.
22. See especially the inward and upward movement announced in De Trin. 11:1 and 12:1.
23. We may glimpse God as Truth (see the end of De Trin. 8:2) and as Good (8:3) yet still have no hint of how to conceive God as the coequal Trinity taught by Nicaea. That is why Augustine seeks some analogy of the Trinity that will help us understand it (8:8), and it should be no surprise by now that the place he looks to find this analogy, this clue to the nature of God, is none other than the soul—just as in Conf. 7.
24. For the interlocking judgments of truth, unity, being, goodness and beauty, all dependent on the light of divine Truth, Unity, Being, Goodness and Beauty, see especially De Vera Rel. 52–60, but also De Lib. Arb. 2:22 (unity), 2:33–35 (truth), and 2:36 and 46 (good)—and note of course Conf. 7:17–21, the meditation on the goodness of all being that follows from Augustine’s first glimpse of Truth.
25. So end both glimpses of God in Conf. 7 (i.e., 7:16 and 7:23).
26. See the summaries of what he learned from the books of the Platonists, in Conf. 7:26 and 8:1.
27. Conf. 7:16.
28. Ep. 118:23.
29. See especially his treatise on the topic (given the title “On Being being one and the same, everywhere at the same time, as a whole”), Enneads 6:4–5. For the influence of this treatise on Augustine see O’Connell, “Ennead VI, 4 and 5” and Early Theory, chapter 1.
30. See “The Lesson of Geometry” in chapter 10.
31. See especially De Nat. et Grat. 29.
32. Denzinger-Schonmetzer, section 2318.
33. See for example John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth 6–11, which unfolds a deeply Augustinian anthropology, and the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, part I, section 1, chapter 1, subsection 1, “The Desire for God.”
34. Here, for example, is a classic formulation from Karl Rahner, in his essay “Nature and Grace” (p. 185):
If someone affirms: I experience myself as a being which is absolutely ordained for the immediate possession of God, his statement need not be false. He will only be mistaken if he maintains that this unconditional longing is an essential element of “pure” nature or if he says that such pure nature, which does not exist, could not exist.
This unconditional longing has its source in the graced component of concrete human being that Rahner calls “the supernatural existential” in “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace,” pp. 311–317.
35. For this general strategy for reading the Church Fathers, see the discussion of “the ambiguity of nature,” in von Balthasar, pp. 270–273, and the reference to Humani Generis, pp. 343–344.
36. See appendix 2.
37. For a thorough but highly unsympathetic study of this movement, as well as of the meaning of the official interventions against it, see Fonck; for a more sympathetic treatment of the movement in its historical context, see McCool, chapter 5. Not all the theses that the Holy Office rejects under the name “ontologism” apply to Augustine, but the first three are pertinent:
1. Immediate knowledge of God, at least in habit, is essential to the human mind or intellect, in such a way that without it nothing can be known; for it is the intellectual light itself.
2. The Being in which we understand all things and without which we understand nothing, is the divine Being.
3. Universals, considered in their objective reality [a parte rei considerata], are not really distinct from God (Denzinger-Schonmetzer, sections 2841–43).
Substitute “Truth” for “Being” in thesis 2, and you have the crowning insight of Augustine’s inward turn. And of course you can substitute “Truth” for “Being,” because for Augustine they are logically coextensive (or as the medieval logicians would say, “convertible,” ST I, 16.3).
38. ST I, 85.1. Note the equivalence of “universal” with “intelligible species,” which is a created component of things in the temporal world, quite different from the eternal Ideas in the Mind of God.
39. See ST I, 84.5, where Aquinas’s interpretation of Augustine’s essay “On Ideas” avoids Augustine’s ontologist conclusions by imposing a non-Platonist epistemology at the decisive point.
40. De Lib. Arb. 2:33: “incommutabilem veritatem haec omnia quae incommutabiliter vera sunt continentem.”
41. Contrast ST I, 12.11 ad 3, where Aquinas’s argument against an Augustinian ontologist position is clinched by the observation:
Therefore just as to see anything sensibly it is not necessary that the substance of the sun be seen, so also to see an thing intelligibly it is not necessary that the essence of God be seen.
This comparison has no force against a position that locates all truly intelligible things in God—analogous to locating everything that is visible within the sun. And that is precisely Augustine’s postion: all intelligible truths are contained in the one intelligible Truth.
42. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, pp. 77–111.
43. Gilson’s conscience as a historian seems to be nagging him when he writes:
I am prepared to admit that there is much to be said against my interpretation of Augustinian illumination. One might justly say that it oversimplifies both texts and doctrine in order to explain it more easily. However, I propose it only to the extent that the facts warrant its acceptance, and, in short, as a psychological rather than an historical solution to the problem. (Ibid., p. 88)
I am at a loss how to understand this last remark, except as a sort of verbal squirm of discomfort. Note also the extraordinary remark:
To be sure, Augustine made no mistake when he thought that he found a doctrine of divine illumination ready-made in Plotinus, and yet he had no idea how far removed from it he was himself. (Ibid., p. 109)
It seems we must regard Gilson’s interpretation as a correction of Augustine’s own understanding of the meaning of his thought.
44. Ibid., pp. 92–96.
45. Hessen, pp. 189–190.
46. Note the central role of the term “Truth” (veritas) in the classic “visions” of Conf. 7:16 and 7:23.
47. Nash, chapters 7 and 8 (the latter with detailed criticism of Gilson).
48. For divine contemplation as the fulfillment of what is best in human nature (i.e., not its mortal part, but rather reason or mind), sec Protrepticus, fragments 6 and 10c (Ross), Eudemian Ethics, 7:15, 1249b10-22, and Nichomachean Ethics 10:7,1177b16–1178a9. Thomas’s way of accommodating such texts is to distinguish between two kinds of happiness, natural and supernatural, and to propose that the happiness Aristotle has in view is the merely natural sort, in contrast to the ultimate beatific vision, which is supernatural (ST I, 62.1). One can only wonder what Aristotle (or Alexander of Aphrodisias or Plotinus) would have made of such a distinction; in any case one can hardly call it “Aristotelian.”
49. ST I, 12.4.
50. Of course the medieval tradition known as “Augustinian illuminationism” (represented by the older Franciscans and most influentially by Aquinas’s great contemporary Bonaventure) remained closer to Augustine on this point than the Thomist tradition. Yet Gilson has a much easier time exonerating Bonaventure from the charge of ontologism than Augustine, because the key distinction he tries to impose on Augustine’s texts is actually to be found in Bonaventure (Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, p. 362; see especially Bonaventure’s responsio in Disputed Questions concerning Christ’s Knowledge, question 4). The key distinction is that the eternal reasons in God are the regulative causes of our intellectual knowledge rather than its immediate objects. Consequently, intellectual vision (which does indeed involve some dim and indirect perception of the eternal reasons in God) is different in kind from beatific vision (where we actually gaze at the essence of God). Thus Bonaventure can affirm with Denys that in the final mystic ascent to God “all intellectual operations must be left behind” (The Journey of the Mind to God 7:7). Such mysticism, with its assumption of divine incomprehensibility, is foreign to Augustine; it means abandoning precisely the activity of the intellect in which, by Augustine’s reckoning, the soul finds its ultimate happiness.
51. Sol. 1:9.
52. De Lib. Arb. 2:35–39.
53. See De Cat. Rud. 3 and De Trin. 8:3 (sudden illumination) and C. Acad. 2:5 and Conf. 3:8 (suddenly kindled fire—an image that Augustine seems to associate especially with his philosophical reading). Such metaphors have a history going back at least to Plato, Ep. 7 (344b).
54. Acad. 2:31.
55. See the Augustinian parallel, “For what does the soul more strongly desire than Truth?” In. Joh. Evang., 26:5. This saying arises in the context of Augustine’s theology of grace. He is explaining how divine grace moves the human will by attraction rather than compulsion: it reveals that which the soul most deeply desires, the Truth. The soul’s innate desire for Truth is the reason why grace and free will are in harmony with one another rather than in competition. Thus Augustine’s anti-Pelagian theology makes no sense apart from his Platonist epistemology.
56. Conf. 3:7. See “Wisdom by Another Name” in chapter 4.
57. See “Consequences of Nicaea” in chapter 4.
58. On ignorance and moral weakness as the penalties of sin, see De Nat. et Grat. 81. For Augustine there is something horrifying and unnatural about ignorance even in infants; see De Pecc. Mer. 1:67.
59. Just a sampling of the more important passages: De Beata Vita 35, Sol. 1:23, De Mor, Eccl. 3 and 11, De Quant. Anim. 25, De Lib. Arb. 2:42, De Mag. 21, De Util. Cred. 4, Conf. 7:16 and 7:23, Civ. Dei 11:2, De Trin. 1:4, 8:3, 12:23, and 15:10.
60. Proslogion 14.
61. Ibid.
62. De Lib. Arb. 2:36.
63. Sol. 1:24.
64. For use of this biblical motif (Matt. 5:8) see De Div. QQs 83, section 12 (which, Augustine informs us in Retract. 1:26, is a quotation from a treatise On the Need for Purifying the Mind in order to See God, by a Carthaginian Neoplatonist who died a Christian), and Ep. 147:26 (citing Ambrose: “God is not seen in any place but the pure heart”).
65. Sol. 2:24.
66. See for example On Nature and Grace 22.
67. Sol. 1:23. See Republic 7:515e-516b, which describes the same process using very similar imagery.
68. Republic 7:514a. (Beware of translators who render paideia here as “enlightenment” rather than “education”!)
69. The final stage of Plato’s ascent is when one is “able to see the sun, not its image in water or some alien medium, but itself by itself in its own place, and contemplate what sort of thing it is,” ibid. 7:516b.
70. Plotinus links his view of the incomprehensibility of the First Principle not to the account of the Good in the Republic but to the paradoxical dialectic on the One above Being in Parmenides 137c-142a (see e.g. Ennead 6:7.32).
1. De Lib. Arb. 2:27–28.
2. Ibid. 2:37.
3. For these Plotinian themes in De Lib. Arb. 2, see O’Connell, Early Theory, pp. 52–57.
4. Sol. 2:14.
5. See De Ord. 1:6 and Ep. 3:1 for Augustine’s habit of solitary night-time meditation.
6. Sol. 1:1. These are the opening words of the dialogue.
7. Retract. 1:4.1. See “Reason who speaks with you” and “I, Reason,” in Sol. 1:12.
8. Sol. 1:7.
9. I will put the name “Augustine” in quotes when referring to “A.,” the character in the Soliloquies, to distinguish him from the author of the Soliloquies (the latter, not the former, is the source of the words spoken by “Reason”).
10. Sol. 1:16–26.
11. Enneads 5:1.10, 6:9.8, 1.1:3.
12. De Mag. 38, alluding to Ephesians 3:16–17, “being strengthened in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (see “Christ in the Heart” in chapter 4) and 1 Cor. 1:24, “Christ the Virtue of God and the Wisdom of God” (see “Wisdom by Another Name” in chapter 4).
13. See “Consequences of Nicaea” in chapter 4 (note 78).
14. Sol. 1:12.
15. Few scholars would dispute Courcelle’s judgment that “[i]t was . . . Cicero who supplied St. Augustine with the most lucid information on ancient Greek philosophy. Furthermore, Augustine studied him very conscientiously” (Late Latin Writers, p. 167). For Augustine’s direct acquaintance with classical Greek philosophy, which was never more than spotty, see “A Central Issue in Augustine Scholarship” in chapter 3.
16. See Marrou, Saint Augustin, pp. 17–19.
17. Interestingly enough, Quintilian has left no unambiguous trace in Augustine’s writings (see Keseling), although it is hard to imagine Augustine teaching rhetoric all those years without some familiarity with Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (see Hagendahl, p. 676).
18. Seneca, the only ancient Latin writer known primarily as a philosopher, left little impression on Augustine’s writings, and Hagendahl concludes that except for a discussion of Seneca’s treatise On Superstition in Civ. Dei 6:10–11, Augustine “took little, if any, interest” in him (Hagendahl, pp. 677–680).
19. For convenience of reference I shall restrict the term “Cassiciacum dialogues” to the three earliest works: De Beata Vita, Contra Academicos, and De Ordine. But the term “Cassiciacum works,” as I shall use it, includes in addition the Soliloquia, which was also written at Cassiciacum but is not in the ordinary sense a dialogue. Because of this difference in genre and the difference in purpose that underlies it, there are a number of generalizations that hold for the three Cassiciacum dialogues but not for all four Cassiciacum works. In particular, “more Ciceronian than Platonist” is a description that fits the dialogues better than the Soliloquies—though as we shall see, the latter is in fact a good deal more Ciceronian and less Platonistic than has often been thought.
20. The first of the Cassiciacum dialogues, De Beata Vila, is probably modeled on Cicero’s Hortensius, which Augustine quotes by name in De Beata Vita 10 and mentions also in 4 (describing the same stirring encounter that we hear of later in Conf. 3:4). The second Cassiciacum dialogue, Contra Academicos, cites Cicero frequently as an authority on philosophy (see C. Acad., e.g. 1:7, 2:26, 3:31, and 41), which is not surprising, since it is based on philosophical information provided in Cicero’s Academica. The extent of Augustine’s debts to Cicero can be measured by consulting Hagendahl and Testard, and is also evident in the excellent edition of Against the Academics by O’Meara, whose extensive notes are extremely alert to the Neoplatonist resonances of the text but emphasize quite rightly that the Ciceronian debts come first and foremost.
21. Marrou, Saint Augustin, p. 248 (ellipses in original).
22. Sol. 2:26. See Conf. 6:3–4 (Ambrose was too busy to answer his questions) and De Util. Cred. 20 (“If there were anyone [at that time] able to teach me, he would have found me most suitable and very ready to be taught”).
23. Augustine himself suggests a deep connection between his reading of Hortensius as a student (Conf. 3:7–8) and the events of the summer of 386 in Conf. 8:17, describing both as being set afire or inflamed in De Beata Vita 4.
24. On the dating of the sermon see Palanque, pp. 154–156, 514–516. The Stoic themes are most noticeable in De Jacob et Vita Beata 1:23–24 and 1:35 (see Nauroy, p. 120). For the extensive borrowings from Plotinus’s “On Happiness” (Ennead 1:4), which are especially prominent in 1:28–36, see Solignac, “Nouveaux parallèles.”
25. De Beata Vita 10–11 and 26–28.
26. On Plotinus’s critical engagement with Stoicism see especially Theiler, “Plotin zwischen Plato und Stoa,” and note Porphyry’s observation that “hidden Stoic doctrines as well as Peripatetic ones are mixed in with his writings” (Life of Plotinus 14).
27. See De Nat. Deo. 1:11-12, Acad. 2:99–100, and especially Tusc. 5:32–33, where Cicero defends his probabilistic eclecticism by referring to historiography of philosophy that he learned from the “Old” (anti-skeptical) Academy, headed by Antiochus, who claimed that the Academics, Peripatetics, and even Stoics all taught basically the same thing; see Acad. 1:17–18,1:43, and 2:15, De Fin. 4:3,5:22, and 5:74, and De Legibus 1:38 and 54–55.
28. See the testimonia cited in Ross’s edition of Aristotle, 12:26. Ruch’s reconstruction of the Hortensius situates it in the tradition of Aristotle’s Protrepticus, pp. 18–27.
29. For the respect in which Cicero can be called a Platonist, see Gersh, 1:67–71.
30. Testard (1:157–176) gives us a picture of how a young man with a head full of the Hortensius might have responded to the Christian Neoplatonism of Ambrose’s Milan (as portrayed by Courcelle). In the next section I take a similar tack with the first book of Tusculan Disputations, a book that had a less dramatic impact on Augustine’s mind but that has the advantage of being extant. It will be clear from what follows that I agree with Hagendahl’s judgment (p. 516) that “Testard underrates the influence of the Tusculans” on Augustine.
31. Conf. 7:23: “et abduxit cogitationem a consuetudine.”
32. Tusc. 1:38: “Magni est autem ingenii sevocare mentem a sensibus et cogitationem ab consuetudine abducere.” Augustine quotes this sentence in full in Ep. 137:5—discussed in “The Location of the Soul” in chapter 10.
33. Tusc. 1:30 (see also 1:35: “omnium consensus naturae vox est”). This part of Cicero’s argument occupies Tusc. 1:26–37. Augustine’s argument from the historical success of the Church, through which “all peoples have been persuaded to believe” is cast in the mold of a Ciceronian-Stoic consensus gentium argument (De Vera Rel. 6).
34. Cicero’s proof for the immortality of the soul is couched as a proof of its divinity (Tusc. 1:38,50, and 66–67; see the quote from Hortensius in De Trin. 14:26: “we have souls that are eternal and divine”). The two terms are, in classical usage, well-nigh synonomous: the immortals are the gods, and hence to prove the soul is immortal is to prove it is a god. Augustine, unlike most later Christians trying to prove the immortality of the soul, cannot ignore this classical usage.
35. Tusc. 1:36–37.
36. Tusc. 1:53–54 (translating Phaedrus 245d-246a).
37. Tusc. 1:57–58. For Cicero on Platonic Ideas, see “The Self-Examination of Reason,” hereafter; for Cicero on Platonic Recollection, see “Powers of the Soul” in chapter 10.
38. Tusc. 1:75. The discussion of the Phaedo occupies Tusc. 1:71–75.
39. Tusc. 1:56: “inesse in animis hominum divina quaedam.” Note the verb inesse, echoing the verb eneinai, which Plato uses in his “enlargement” of the soul; see “Enlarging the Soul” in chapter 1.
40. Tusc. 1:52 and Ennead 4:3.1 (the beginning of Plotinus’s treatise on the soul, which nearly all scholars agree Augustine read).
41. And like Plotinus, he quotes a poet to do it, Tusc. 1:65. See Ennead 4:7.10, discussed earlier in “Some Plotinian Readings” in chapter 3.
42. Hence “if God is breath or fire, then so is the soul of man” (Tusc. 1:65) and “whether the soul is breath or fire, I would swear it is divine” (1:60).
43. In ancient physics the four material elements (earth, water, air, and fire) are arranged in a hierarchy that is ordered quite literally from lower to higher: earth at the bottom, then water on top of the earth, then air above the water, and fire the highest of all (unless, with the early Aristotle, one believes in a fifth element, which is a sort of hyperfire and the true constituent of souls and stars).
44. Tusc. 1:40 and 42–3. “Air” is added to fire here because there is some vacillation in the Stoic tradition (and hence in Cicero) about whether the soul is simply fire or whether it is pneuma (“spirit” or “breath”), which consists of hot air (and hence of both elements, fire and air). For a guide to the complexities of Stoic theory on this subject, see Long and Sedley, 1:281–280. Cicero translates pneuma as anima; hence in Tusc. his term for soul is not anima but animus—in contrast to Augustine, for whom anima means “soul” and animus means specifically rational soul or mind.
45. Tusc. 1:51. The same materialist ontology underlies Cicero’s description of “going to heaven” in Scipio’s Dream (i.e., De Re Publica 6:9–29). These two Ciceronian works are the earliest extant texts known to me that present a literal “going to heaven” as the normal form of afterlife for the good soul. The gradual development of this theme in the Jewish pseudepigraphal literature seems to take place later.
46. Conf. 13:10 (see also Civ. Dei 11:28). Cicero himself provides the key equivalences for this Augustinian allegory: the fire of the soul is its desire, and the heavenly desire is love of seeing truth (Tusc. 1:44).
47. Cicero is one of our most important sources for this early doctrine of Aristotle and the cosmology it implies. See, in addition to the quotations hereafter (which, together with Acad. 1:26, are counted by Ross as fragment 27 of Aristotle’s lost dialogue On Philosophy), De Nat. Deorum 1:33 (fragment 26) and 2:42 and 44 (fragment 21).
48. Tusc. 1:65.
49. Ibid. 1:66.
50. Ibid. 1:22. On the significance of the pairing of “discover” and “remember” see “Powers of the Soul in chapter 10.
51. See Acad. 1:24–26.
52. Tusc. 1:42.
53. Ibid. 1:46.
54. The concept goes back to Aristotle (On Memory 450a10, On Sense 7, On the Soul 3:2), but it had evidently become rather commonplace by Cicero’s time.
55. Tusc. 1:46.
56. De Lib. Arb. 2:8–12.
57. Conf. 7:23.
58. Ibid. 10:11.
59. De Musica 6:7–10.
60. For details see O’Conncll, Early Theory, p. 166.
61. De Ord. 2:31. This ought to be recognized as the predecessor to the statement of Augustine’s three-level ontological hierarchy in Ep. 18:2, which also contrasts two opposite directions of movement, one above and the other below the human soul. See “Voluntary Separation?” in chapter 8 and appendix 2.
62. On the incompatibility of Augustine’s earliest writings with the Catholic doctrine of resurrection, see “Resurrection Avoided Then Accepted” in chapter 9.
63. C. Acad. 1:1.
64. Ibid. 1:3.
65. Ibid. 1:5.
66. Ibid. 1:11: “illam divinam partem animi.” For the context of discussion in which this notion of the divinity of the soul is raised, see Cary, “What Licentius Learned.”
67. C. Acad. 1:22.
68. De Mag. 38—quoted earlier in the section “Who Is Reason?”
69. Conf. 3:8. See “Wisdom by Another Name” in chapter 4.
70. See “Soul as Creature” in chapter 8.
71. Conf. 5:19. This of course is the same problem formulated at the outset of Conf. 7—discussed earlier in “A Turning of Attention” in chapter 5.
72. Augustine shows how the Manichaeans’ errors about the nature of Good and Evil are logically derived from their materialism in Conf. 5:20 (see also 7:7 and 3:12).
73. The Manichaeans themselves did not think of themselves as materialists, as they reserved the term “matter” (hyle) for the evil principle, so that the Good Stuff was in some sense non-material (see C. Faustum 20:3, where Faustus the Manichaean is speaking, and 20:14, where Augustine contrasts the Manichaean view of matter unfavorably with the Platonist-Aristotelian view). Nevertheless, as Augustine demonstrated quite convincingly in his debates with them, the Manichaeans were in fact committed to a materialist ontology, as they conceived of all that exists in spatial (and therefore bodily) terms.
74. See especially C. Ep. Fund. 16 and 19–26, where Augustine directs his antimaterialist critique of Manichaeanism against a text by Mani himself.
75. This Platonist account of evil, worked out (in conscious opposition to Christian Gnostics) by Plotinus, was preached by Ambrose (e.g. De Isaac 61, which is based on Ennead 1:8, as Courcelle points out, Recherches, p. 107) and no doubt was taught by various members of the Christian Neoplatonist circle in Milan (see pp. 153–156, 168–174). It becomes the ontological key to many of Augustine’s anti-Manichaean polemics, for example, De Mor. Man. 1–11, De Vera Rel. 21, De Nat. Boni 1–6, Conf. 7:17–19. Notice that in all these passages, the evil of the rational soul stems not from its nature but from its will: evil results from a voluntary turning to lower (i.e., sensible) goods.
76. According to Augustine (De Mor. Man. 26) the Manichaeans cannot consisently deny that everything in the region of light is made of the Good Stuff, that is, consists of the divine nature itself. That means that when the race of darkness attacks the region of light it is threatening harm to the very substance of God (C. Ep. Fund. 26).
77. Conf. 7:3.
78. See especially C. Fort. 7–9, which is the record of a public debate where Augustine pressed this point ruthlessly against a hapless Manichaean opponent.
79. Hence as a Manichaean Augustine was taught that “You, my Lord God, the Truth, were a huge bright body, and I a fragment of that body” (Conf. 4:31). As Augustine points out (in De Mor. Man. 26 and C. Ep. Fund. 26), given the Manichaeans’ dualism, the only alternative to being made out of the luminous Good Substance (the same as God) is to be made out of the gross Evil Substance (the same as “the race of darkness”).
80. Augustine’s fullest account of Manichaean cosmogony is found in C. Ep. Fund. 19–26. For a contemporary presentation (not obscured by Augustine’s polemics) of ancient Manichaeanism on the nature and origin of the cosmos, see Bonner, pp. 162–170.
81. This version of Nebridius’s argument occurs in the second half of De Ord. 2:46 and in De Mor. Man. 21–23. The latter passage is much clearer, and I read the former in light of it. For a careful reading of the former on its own terms, see O’Connell, Early Theory, pp. 124–130.
82. Most notably O’Meara, Studies, pp. 143–144.
83. De Beata Vita 34–35. Note that both Wisdom and Truth are explicitly identified here as “the Son of God” (see Cor. 1:24 and John 14:6, respectively).
84. Intimations of divine inspiration: De Ord. 1:10,1:16–17,1:19,1:23,1:28. Falling back into the darkness of ignorance: 1:29–30,2:21. For the Cassiciacum dialogues as the story of Licentius’s education see Cary, “What Licentius Learned.”
85. De Ord. 2:23.
86. Conf. 7:7. Note that the Manichaeans had a very definite and astoundingly literal answer to this question: evil originated from a specific physical location, a region of darkness separated in space from the land of light, C. Ep. Fund. 19.
87. This moment of perplexity must be understood as a deliberate contrivance of the author, for the purpose of making a quite definite point. I take for granted O’Meara’s contention (in the introduction to his edition of C. Acad., pp. 23–32) that these dialogues, although no doubt based loosely on actual conversations at Cassiciacum, are fundamentally fictional and not historical compositions—just like every other philosophical dialogue written in antiquity. This is a matter of importance for anyone interpreting them: the course of these conversations and the views expressed by all the characters (not just Augustine) should be interpreted as the products of authorial intent, not the exigencies and accidents of actual conversation.
88. Augustine certainly does have the Neoplatonist doctrine of the Fall on his mind, as is especially evident in De Ord. 1:3 (see Solignac, “Reminiscences plotiniennes et porphyriennes dan le debut du De Ordine”). On the nature of his hesitation, see “Voluntary Separation?” in chapter 8.
89. The difficulties and dangers never disappeared. Within two years of completing a magnificent ontological explanation of the fallenness of the soul in De Vera Rel. (c. 392) Augustine writes: “The soul—I have looked into the cause of it and I admit it is most obscure-errs and is foolish, as we see, until it achieves and grasps wisdom” (De Util. Cred. 14). The related question of exactly how the soul came to be in the body remains unanswered all his life, as he remarks a few years before his death in a review of his early works: “And as for what pertains to the origin of the soul and how it came to be in the body ... I did not know then nor do I know to this day” (Retract. 1:1.3). Augustine has only warnings to offer those who would navigate the “treacherous waters of such a question” (De Anima et Ejus Origine 1:7), and given the rocks and shoals and potential shipwrecks that faced him in adjusting his doctrine of the soul to the demands of the controversy with the Pelagians, one can see why. See O’Connell, Origin of the Soul, for a detailed chart of the shoals in those dangerous waters.
90. De Ord. 2:24.
91. De Ord. 2:24. It is useful to bear in mind that “order” in this dialogue is defined in dynamic and relational (and therefore hierarchical) terms: it is defined “downward” as God’s conducting (agere) of the temporal world (De Ord. 1:28,2:2,2:11) and “upward” as “what leads to God” (1:27).
92. This is not the last time Augustine would learn his lessons by writing his own books about them. He defends his project of writing on the Trinity, for instance, with the admission: “I confess myself to have learned, by writing, many things I did not know” (De Trin. 3:1).
93. Retract. 1:5.3 (Migne, 1:6).
94. The picture of philosophers anxious to secure the foundations of Western culture is central to one of the most well-known postmodernist narratives seeking to characterize what is specifically modern in modern philosophy, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
95. This narrative was probably inspired by a similar account of the origin of human culture in Cicero, Tusc. 1:62–4 (see also the protrait of Philosophy as mother of language and literature, founder of law, and teacher of morality and disciplina, Tusc. 5:5)—discussed in “Powers of the Soul” in chapter 10.
96. De. Ord. 2:35.
97. Ibid. 2:35–7. The equivalent Latin term for the discipline the Greeks call grammatica is, Augustine points out, litteratura, literally, the study of letters.
98. Ibid. 2:38.
99. Ibid. 2:38.
100. Ibid. 2:39.
101. See the allegory of intellectual pride in De Beata Vita 3, as well as the account of the origin of evil in De Vera Ret. 67–68. Licentius’s wild speculations about divination and determinism earlier in the treatise provide an example of what can happen when the uneducated mind too eagerly draws conclusions from its brief flashes of insight (De Ord. 1:14–15). Notice that to this extent, Augustine retains the Academic skeptics’ ethical disapproval of rashly giving one’s assent to opinions.
102. De Ord. 2:24.
103. See De Util. Cred. 2 and 21, C. Ep. Fund. 6, C. Faustum 16:8. For the anti-intellectual traditionalism of Africa in Augustine’s youth, see Brown, pp. 42–43. In his own self-portrait the young Augustine emerges as a fine specimen of the proverbial snot-nosed kid, taking pleasure in refuting his Catholic elders in order to make them look bad and promote his own self-conceit (Conf. 3:10).
104. For example De Ord. 2:46, De Quant. Anim. 63, De Mor. Eccl. 1, De Util. Cred. 16–17. Book 5 of the Confessions is organized around the contrast between the Manichaean “bishop” Faustus and the Catholic bishop Ambrose, the one a shallow pate who merely pretends to know the liberal disciplines, the other a genuinely learned teacher of Catholic truth who helps rescue Augustine from his errors. See especially Conf. 5:3,13, and 24.
105. For Augustine’s conception of “music,” see Marrou, Saint Augustin, pp. 197–210.
106. De Div. QQs 83, section 45. For later and better known versions of the same criticism (based on the argument that by an astrologer’s reckoning, the fates of twins should be indistinguishable) see DeDoct. 2:32–34, Conf. 7:8–10, and Civ. Dei 5:1–7.
107. Conf. 5:3–6. See Brown, p. 57, and Ferrari, pp. 44–49.
108. De Ord. 2:47.
109. Ibid. 2:46.
110. Ibid. 2:47. “Ordo studiorum sapientiae” here reflects, as often in the Cassiciacum writings, a Ciceronian definition of one of Augustine’s key terms: philosophy is studium sapientiae (Tusc. v.\—see C. Acad. 1:20, Conf. 6:18 and 8:17).
111. De Ord. 2:51.
112. Ibid.2:43.
113. Ibid. 2:48. The verb inspicere at the beginning of the passage means literally “to look into,” but can often mean simply “to examine,” precisely as when we say in English “I’ll look into the matter.” Hence it is not clear whether Augustine is actually thinking of the soul looking within itself here: he could be, and certainly in a few years he would be.
114. See De Lib. Arb. 2:22–23.
115. De Ord. 2:48.
116. Compare how in Plotinus the Unity and Multiplicity in the intelligible world are related as a science is to its theorems; see “Unity and Division” in chapter 2.
117. De Mor. Man. 8–9, De Vera Rel. 58–60 and 65–66.
118. Augustine marks the end of the soul’s speech to itself very clearly by echoing the words he used to introduce it: “This and many other such things the well-educated [bene erudita] soul says to itself [secum loquimur]” De Ord. 2:50. Everything between this point and the beginning of the soliloquy just quoted (from De Ord. 2:48) should be placed in quotation marks, as representing the soul’s speech to itself.
119. De Ord. 2:50.
120. Tusc. 1:58: “nihil enim putat [sc. Plato] esse, quod oriatur et intereat, idque solum esse, quod semper tale sit, quale est; idean appellat ille.” Cicero in turn is echoing Plato’s way of talking about the immutability of the Forms (e.g. Phaedo 80b and Republic 5:479a); see “The Other World” in chapter 1. Cicero defines Plato’s term idea also in Acad. 1:30, stressing once again its immutability, the fact that it is always “such as it is” (tale quale esset).
1. Meno 86b. See Pepin, “Une nouvelle source,” pp. 54–55 (in “Ex Platonicorum Persona” pp. 214–215).
2. Sol. 2:24. Augustine’s terminology is rather fluctuating. His aim is to prove the immortality of “the soul” (anima), but the central term of the discussion is usually “the mind” (animus). The two words are of course very close in meaning, and he switches freely from one to the other (as in De Immort. Anim. 7). If I could have done so without intolerable awkwardness (and misleading suggestions of the presence of words like rationalis) I would have translated animus as “rational soul” and reserved the English word “mind” for the Latin mens. As it is, I have adopted the usual translator’s compromise, using “mind” for both animus and mens.
3. The Soliloquies does not explicity identify God with Truth, yet it makes no sense apart from that identification, and there can be no doubt that Augustine is already well aware of this. For instance, the “argument at the beginning of this book” to which this passage refers (Sol. 2:2) is a proof that Truth would continue to exist even if the whole world ceased to be—which can only mean that Truth is God. Note also that the Son of God is unveiled as Truth at the climax of De Beata Vita 34, which precedes Soliloquies.
4. Sol. 2:34–35. The allusion to Platonic Recollection is more unmistakable in the sequel, De Immort. Anim. 6 (see the section “Immutable Things in the Mind” hereafter), as well as in De Quant. Anim. 34, and it is explicit in Ep. 7:2. Augustine indicates his later change of mind about Platonic Recollection (consistent with the critique of the Meno discussed in “Problems of Intelligibility” in chapter 1) in Retract. 1:4.4 and 1:8.2. Note, in this early endorsement of Recollection, Augustine’s emphasis on the formula that I emphasized earlier, in “Enlarging the Soul” in chapter 1, as a precursor in Plato’s writing of later inwardness: knowledge is present in the soul. Augustine briefly explores the connection between Recollection and Inward Turn in De Musica 6:34–36, where someone who is “reminded by being questioned” (i.e., in a Socratic/Platonic dialogue) about the discipline of music is said “to move himself inwardly in his own mind [intrinsecus apud mentem suam movere se] toward something from which he recovers what he had lost” (6:35), which means he “moves himself inward to God to understand unchangeable truth” (sese intus ad Deum movet, ut verum incommutabile intelligat, 6:36).
5. De Mag. 2. Note that for Augustine all words are signs (3).
6. Sol. 2:20.
7. Such a view, in addition to being outrageously foolish, is hardly likely to be Augustine’s, because the previous half of the same book (i.e., Sol. 2:1–18) is devoted largely to an analysis of the nature of falsehood and error.
8. Augustine’s argument here could be an adaptation of Cicero, Academica 2:26: “No one finds what is false” (Nemo invenitfalsa).
9. Conf. 1:20–27; see also 3:2–4. He minces no words here, either, pointing out that a poetic story (fabula) is a lie (mendacium), Sol. 1:19.
10. Sol. 2:19.
11. Disciplina disputandi or disputationis is Augustine’s formulation of the central term of the discussion in Sol. 2:19–21. He also speaks of ratio disputandi (2:21 and 2:27) and ars disputoriae (2:19). His usage here follows Cicero, who can refer to dialectic as the scientia or ratio disputandi (De Part. Orat. 79). Cicero’s usage probably stems from the Stoic conception of dialectic as ars, ratio, or scientia disserendi (De Fin. 2:26, 4:8, and 4:10, Tusc. 5:72, De Oratore 2:157, Topica 6, De Legibus 1:62; see Diogenes Laertius 7:42).
12. De Ord. 2:30.
13. Ibid. 2:38.
14. Ibid.
15. The role of distinguishing true from false, as well as drawing valid conclusions, is one Cicero regularly assigns to dialectic, following the Stoics. See De Oratore 2:157, De Part. Oral. 78, De Legibus 1:62, Tusc. 5:72, and especially Acad. 2:91, which indicates that the Stoics gave dialectic the job ofjudging what is true and false in other disciplines—a point that would have been reinforced for Augustine by his own studies in dialectic, in which he was dependent mainly on Stoic sources (see Pepin, Saint Augustin et la dialectique, pp. 72–98 and 180–187).
16. C. Acad. 3:29: “perfecta dialectica ipsa scientia veritatis est.”
17. Sol. 2:21.
18. Ibid. 1:27 (“si quid verum est, veritate utique verum est”). This straightforwardly Platonist premise is reiterated in 2:29 (‘Veritas . . . qua verum est, quidquid verum est”).
19. Ibid. 2:21 (immediately following the previous quote).
20. Ibid, (immediately following the previous quote).
21. See “Education for Vision,” in chapter 5.
22. See for example Gregory of Nyssa on the spiritual value of being educated in
the disciplines [mathemata] by which the understanding is excited to virtue, geometry and astronomy, and the apprehension of truth through numbers, and all the methods of demonstrating what is unknown and confirming what is known, and above all, the inspired philosophy of Scripture. (On Infants’ Early Deaths, PG 46:181c = NPNF ed., P-378)
Clement of Alexandria says similar things about the liberal disciplines (see Lilla, pp. 169–173) in the context of an overall program of Christian appropriation of classical culture that bears many resemblances to Augustine’s program at Cassiciacum (see in particular Clement’s pre-Nicene, subordinationist doctrine of the Logos, which holds the whole project together conceptually, Lilla, PP-199–212).
23. Moreover, traces of Augustine’s early interest in the liberal disciplines as guides to unchanging Truth remain in his more mature works, for example De Doct. 2:48–61 and De Trin. 12:23.
24. See “Who Is Reson?” in chapter 6.
25. The Son of God is “ipsa disciplina et forma Dei” (Ep. 12). See likewise the association of forma and disciplina with the second person of the Trinity in Ep. 11:4.
26. Retract. 1:5.1. It is here also that Augustine tells us the work is a sketch for an uncompleted continuation of the Soliloquies (“quasi commonitorium . . . propter Soliloquia terminanda, quae imperfecta remanserant”).
27. De Immort. Anim. 1.
28. Ibid. 6.
29. Ibid. 2.
30. De Immort. Anim. 10.
31. Sol. 2:22.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. See Conf. 4:28–29. On Augustine’s use of Aristotle’s Categories at this point see Du Roy, p. 178. It is worth noting that this early logical treatise represents Aristotle at his most un-Platonistic; see “Alexander’s Interpretation of Aristotle” in chapter 2.
36. Aristotle, Categories 2,1a24-6.
37. Sol. 2:2.
38. Sol 2:22.
39. For detailed discussion see “Turning into the Inside” in chapter 2.
40. See especially Enneads 5:5.9 (where the general principle is explained), 6:4.2, and 4:3.20–22 (where the principle is applied to body and soul-the soul is not in the body, but the other way around!). Note also Ennead 5:1.10, where Plato’s “inner man” (Republic 9:589a), the higher part of the soul, is located “outside” the material cosmos and thus “outside of space altogether” like the World-Soul enveloping the cosmos “from outside” (in Timaeus $6e) or like the Ideas themselves, which are located metaphorically beyond the outermost heavens (in Phaedrus 247c).
41. See “A Philosophical Project” in chapter 5.
42. De Quant. Anim. 61; see “The Location of the Soul” in chapter 10.
43. Sol. 1:29. This contention not only is un-Platonistic but smacks of lingering Manichaeanism, as it implies that divine things are properly absent from the lower world.
44. Ibid.: “Quidquid est, alicubi esse cogitur.”
45. De Div. QQs 83, section 20.
46. Acad. 1:24 (“Nihil est enim quod non alicubi esse cogatur”). See Hagendahl, p. 55. The ultimate source of this principle may have been a remark that Plato makes about the material world in Timaeus 52b.
47. That is, De Immort. Anim. 1 and 5.
48. For a sample of this sort of apologetics, which is a recurrent motif of modern Augustine scholarship, see Mourant, pp. 3–18.
1. C. Acad. 1:23” “sapiens . . . se ipsum in semetipsum colligit . . . in se atque in Deum semper tranquillus intenditur.” The words are put in the mouth of Licentius, Augustine’s student, but they echo Augustine’s own words in the preface to another of the Cassiciacum dialogues, where he takes lack of self-knowledge to be the great cause of error and says the way to know oneself is by “collecting the mind in oneself and keeping it in oneself,” “animum in se ipsum colligendi, atque in se ipso retfnendi” (De Ord. 1:3).
2. De Ord. 2:19.
3. Retract. 1:1.4; see also 1:1.2.
4. De Immort. Anim. 7–8.
5. Ibid. 9.
6. Ibid. g. Note again that this makes Reason’s immutable existence dependent on the soul.
7. Ibid. 10.
8. Ibid. 10.
9. Ibid. 10.
10. Ibid. 11.
11. For this reversal, see “A Diagnosis” in chapter 7.
12. See Pepin, “Une curieuse declaration idealiste.”
13. De Immort. Anim. 11.
14. See “Divinity in the Soul before Plotinus” in chapter 6.
15. De Immort. Anim. 11. This freedom from external compulsion was soon to become the core of Augustine’s early conception of will, in De Lib. Arb. 1:19–21 and De Duab. Anim. 14.
16. De Immort. Anim. 11. Augustine here echoes Plato’s famous dictum that there is no envy or jealousy in the Creator, Timaeus 2Qt.
17. See “A Program of Education” in chapter 6, on Augustine’s deliberate avoidance of this topic.
18. De Immort. Anim. 11. Augustine’s statement of this problem and his response to it is condensed, ambiguous, and perhaps hesitant, and here is the whole of it:
However, it would not be utterly absurd if someone said that the mind was separated from reason voluntarily [voluntate . . . animum sefarari a, ratione], if there could be any separation from one another of things that were not contained in space.
It is not even clear that this is meant to be a rejection of the possibility until a few lines later, at the end of the paragraph: “Therefore the mind cannot be extinguished unless separated from reason; but it cannot be separated, as we have argued above; therefore it cannot perish.”
19. For example, things in the intelligible realm “are separated by otherness, not by space [ou topdi]” Ennead 6:4.4 (and similarly Ennead 6:9.8); Plato’s call to separate soul from body refers of course to a “separation that is not in space [to chōrizein ou topōi” (Ennead 5:1.10), and likewise our flight from the evils of this world is “not in space” (Ennead 1:8.7). AH these passages are from treatises that seem to have made a great impression on Augustine-but evidently they have not yet had their full impact at the time he is writing “On the Immortality of the Soul.”
20. See Retract. 1:5.2, which comments on this passage and quotes as refutation Isaiah 59:2, “Your sins make a separation between you and God.”
21. Ennead 1:6.8. (“Our Fatherland is that whence we came, and the Father is there. What then is our journey, our flight? Not by feet. . . . Nor should you procure horse-chariot or ship.”) On the importance of this favorite Plotinian passage for Augustine, see “Some Plotinian Readings” in chapter 3. Plotinus’s talk here of a flight “not by feet” would have reinforced for Augustine the reference to a flight “not in space” in Ennead 1:8.7.
22. Conf. 1:28.
23. Augustine has mentioned this downward and outward movement before (De Ord. 1:3) and associated it with the soul’s appetite for the many rather than the one (“eo egestatem patitur magis [sc. anima], quo magis appetit plura complecti”). The more desire, the more division and impoverishment of soul—but that does not mean that desire is the cause. In fact the cause seems rather to be ignorance, and specifically lack of self-knowledge: “cujus erroris maxima causa est, quod homo sibi ipse est incognitus.”
24. De Immort. Anim. 12.
25. Incidentally, this shows that Augustine has not yet fully understood the Catholic doctrine of creation out of nothing. For as Athanasius points out, if the soul is created out of nothing, then no metaphysical principle but only the kindness of God can prevent an evil soul from returning to its original state of sheer nothingness (On the Incarnation of the Word 3–5).
26. De Vera Ret. 21–28. An earlier and simpler exposition of the essentials of this ontology is worked out in De Mor. Man. 1–9. On the new metaphysical approach that Augustine takes here, see Du Roy, pp. 183–196.
27. The soul’s paradoxical flight from omnipresence (Conf. 5:2; see 2:3) is futile because, for one thing, God is “more inward than what is inmost in me” (interior intimo meo, 3:11), so that the result of the soul’s joining itself with external things is “You were inside and I was outside” (10:38; see 7:11). Hence “Your omnipotence is not far from us, even when we are far from You” (2:3).
28. The theme of God as the life of the soul-a life it can lose—becomes prominent very soon after this point and is central in the Confessions: see De Mor. Eccl. 19 (commenting on Paul’s declaration that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ in Rom. 8:39, Augustine says, “that by which we love God cannot die, except by not loving God”), De Lib. Arb. 2:41 (“As the soul is the whole life of the body, so God is the happy life of the soul”), De Vera Ret. 25 (“The body flourishes by the soul, and the soul by the immutable Truth, who is the only Son of God”), De Duab. Anim. 1, Conf. 3:10,10:29, and 12:13, De Trin. 4:5 (“As the soul dies when God leaves it, so the body dies when the soul leaves it”) and 14:6 (“the soul also has its death, when it lacks a happy life”), Civ. Dei 6:12,13:2, and 13:15, De Pecc. Mer. 1:2 (“the death of the soul which takes place in sin”). Of course any number of biblical passages testify that the soul is not, as Plato thought, immortal: for example, “the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. 18:4).
29. Ennead 4:8.4–8.
30. I agree with Pohlenz (p. 457–458), Dihle (chapter 6), and Kahn in thinking that something new and epochal came on the scene with Augustine’s concept of Will: he seems to have been the first to formulate the notion of a faculty of choosing that could not be reduced to some combination of reasoning and desire.
31. Cicero’s conception of natural law is of course Stoic in origin, but (as is often the case with Cicero’s Stoic conceptions) it is already partly Platonized: he describes the natural law as eternal and identifies it with the mind of God, saying that this is the true law, in contrast to the laws of human communities, which vary from place to place and time to time (De Leg. 2:8–11). This is the central idea developed by Augustine in De Lib. Arb. 1:11–15.
32. De Lib. Arb. 1:16–24. The question with which this passage concludes, about why our souls suffer the penalties of this mortal life, is not fully answered until 3:24–28, where Augustine describes how the divine order includes the punishment of sin by placing sinful souls in corruptible bodies.
33. See “A Program of Education” in chapter 6.
34. De Lib. Arb. 1:35. The verbs here, avertitur and convertitur, echo the description of the two possible directions of movement of the soul in De Immort. Anim. 12, where Augustine makes the fresh start described earlier in “Voluntary Separation?” Augustine is clearly trying to follow up the insights of that fresh start here.
35. Augustine is already clear on this key ontological implication of the doctrine of Creation: if God created all things, then all things that exist are good (DeLib. Arb. 1:4–5). See Conf. 7:18, “Whatever is, is good.”
36. This startling implication is one of the many very odd features of this book that have been passed over in the scholarship. It is perhaps the starkest demonstration of the fundamental incompatibility between the ancient contemplative ideal of Platonism and the biblical gospel, and Augustine has the merit of both putting it in front of us in terms that are hard to miss and subsequently proposing a way of reconciling the two traditions that has become so deep a part of the Christian tradition that the incompatibility is nearly always missed. The incompatibility, in general, is this: Platonism attempts to leave mortality behind, both one’s own and others’; whereas in the Christian Scriptures godliness means doing as Jesus does, which clearly includes indiscriminate love for the nearest piece of human mortality in the area, called “your neighbor.” (Unfortunately this incompatibility has been obscured for decades by Nygren’s attempt to interpret it as a contrast between selfishness and unselfishness.)
37. De Doet. 1:20–37.
38. Sol. 1:7. For a sample of Augustine’s efforts to live out this view of human love in practice, which are both sincere and ambivalent, see Ep. 2.
39. De Lib. Arb. 1:27.
40. Ibid. 1:25. “Good will” here is defined in Ciceronian fashion as “the will by which we desire to live rightly and honorably [konesteque] and to reach the highest wisdom.” Augustine connects this with the will to be happy, another notion he learned from Cicero. The argument of Cicero’s Hortensius opens with the thesis “certainly we all will [volumus] to be happy” (as Augustine tells us in De Trin. 13:7). Throughout his life Augustine takes this to be a fundamental, necessary truth of the ethical life and an ineradicable feature of the rational soul (see e.g. De Beata Vita 10, C. Acad. 1:5, De Lib. Arb. 2:28, Conf. 10:29, Civ. Dei. 10:1).
41. The fact that De Lib. Arb. 1 aims to work out in an ethical register the same basic line of thought that Sol. 2 works out in an epistemological register is indicated by a striking parallel: while the crowning argument in Sol. begins by establishing the premise that disciplina is always true (2:20), De Lib. Arb. begins by establishing that disciplina is always good (1:2).
42. Tusc. 5:67.
43. DeLib. Arb. 1:28.
44. Cicero presents this as a point of view common to both Academics and Peripatetics (Acad. 1:22) as well as Stoics (De Fin. 3:30).
45. See De Mag. 38 and De Mor. Man. 10 (quoting Luke 2:14, and following the Old Latin and Vulgate mistranslation ol ‘endohias, “well-pleasing,” as bonae voluntatis, “of good will”).
46. For the importance of this New Testament phrase in Augustine’s early thought see “Wisdom by Another Name” in chapter 4 and “Divinity in the Soul before Plotinus” in chapter 6.
47. Of the post-Cassiciacum philosophical dialogues, only the first book of On Free Choice and (according to my conjecture in the note 48) the main body of On the Quantity of the Soul could possibly be earlier—although both treatises are listed later in the Retractations.
48. There is a clear repudiation of the divinity of the soul in a philosophical dialogue written at about the same time, On the Quantity of the Soul (sections 3 and 77), but this is tacked on to the beginning and the end of the treatise without playing any role in the main course of the argument. In On the Morals of the Catholic Church, on the contrary, the identification of Christ the Virtue of God as something distinct from and independent of the soul is part of the warp and woof of the argument.
49. From this point of view, the event that made Augustine into a Church Father was not his conversion in 386, by which he won the free time to philosophize, but rather his quite involuntary ordination in 391, by which he lost his free time and became a servant of the Church and of his unlearned congregation. Brown is particularly illuminating on the contrast between these two events, both in his biography of Augustine (chapter 14) and in his informative introduction to the Hackett edition of the Confessions (especially pp. ix-xi).
50. See “Consequences of Nicaea” in chapter 4.
51. See for example De Fide 1.14–16 and De Sp. Sanct. 1.1 and 5. Note especially the conceptual connection that becomes central for Augustine: “Every creature is mutable” (De Sp. Sanct. 1:5.63).
52. Some of Ambrose’s anti-Arian work was preached as sermons before being published as treatises, according to Williams, p. 151.
53. DeLib. Arb. 1:5.
54. For example De Fide et Symbolo 5; De Vera Rel. 13.
55. For this soteriological implication of Nicaea, see “Consequences of Nicaea” in chapter 4. For Augustine’s understanding of this point in his later works, see Civ. Dei. 9:14–15 (commenting on 1 Tim. 2:5, he says that Christ “is the Mediator in that he is man”). The Greek Church Fathers saw the same point quite clearly; see for example Gregory of Nyssa, C. Eunomius 2:12).
56. See “Christ in the Heart” in chapter 4.
57. DeMor. Eccl. 18, quoting Romans 8:38–39.
58. DeMor. Eccl. 20.
59. Ibid. 20. I take this warning to be addressed to himself, because it could not be addressed to his opponents in this treatise, the Manichaeans, who did not think of the mind as “invisible and intelligible.”
60. Ibid. 21.
61. Ibid.
62. Conf. 1:28.
63. In general, when Augustine says “love of God” he means our love for God rather than God’s love for us, unless he says something explicidy to the contrary; see Burnaby, p. 99.
64. De Mor. Eccl. 22.
65. Ibid. 9–10.
66. De Immort. Anim. 10; see the earlier section “Inseparably in the Soul.”
67. DeMor. Eccl. 10.
68. Ibid. 9. Cicero defines virtue as a habitus of the soul in De Inv. 2:59. That such a definition was by then a commonplace and not the property of any particular school of philosophy is shown by the fact that this is a textbook on rhetoric. But of course this definition, as well as the closely related notion that virtue is a qualitas of the soul, do go back to Aristotle; see especially the treatment of virtue as habit (hexis) and quality (poiotes) in Categories 8,8a25-34,a treatise familiar to Augustine.
69. See “A Diagnosis” in chapter 7.
70. Conf. 7:11.
1. See De Musica 6:37–42 (the whole of book 6 is very illuminating-and very Plotinian) as well as De Gen. c. Man. 2:20–34. On the Plotinian character of the doctrine of the Fall in these books see O’Connell, Early Theory, chapter 6. For present purposes note especially De Musica 6:53:
By pride the soul lapses into certain actions that are in its own power, and neglecting the universal law, it has fallen into doing certain things that are private [privata], and this is called apostasizing or turning away [apostatare] from God.
2. Ep. 18:2 (for full text, see appendix 2). See my discussion of this three-tiered ontological hierarchy in “The Intelligibility of God” in chapter 5.
3. See especially De Ord. 2:19. This discussion takes up the first part of On Order, book 2, before the conversation gets stuck on the question of the origin of evil.
4. De Ord. 2:18.
5. De Immort. Anim. 4.
6. Ep. 18:2.
7. De Lib. Arb. 2:14 and 33–35, Conf. 7:23 and 10:11: see De Vera Ret. 56–57, C. Faustum 20:7.
8. What follows is deeply indebted to the work of Robert J. O’Connell, especially St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Man. My account of the development of Augustine’s thought is substantially in agreement with O’Connell’s, though f stress even more strongly than he the point that Augustine is less Plotinian at Cassiciacum than he becomes later (see pp. 193–197).
9. By “dualism” here I mean primarily soul/body dualism. However, in ancient thought this tends to shade over into “dualism” in the sense discussed in the section “Divinity in the Soul before Plotinus” in chapter 6, a sharp distinction between good and evil, where evil is closely associated with the body.
10. The body is “an evil” (Phaedo 66b), and the great reward of a good life on earth is for the soul to live forever without it (114c). Above all, the fundamental ethical metaphor of purification, defined as separation of soul from body (80c), implies that the body is dirt that does not belong on the soul and needs to be cleaned off.
11. Timaeus 36e–38a.
12. Ennead 4:8.1.
13. It may well be that on this point a distinction should be made between Origen himself and the Origenism that was condemned by later Church councils (especially the second Council of Constantinople in 553). Origen, like Plotinus, affirms that there was no time when the world of bodies was without souls (De Princ. 2:2.2; compare Ennead 4:3.g). However, Origen is not so clear that the embodiment of souls is a proper and inherent feature of the goodness of the cosmos (apart from the purpose it may serve as penalty or training for wayward souls). Plotinus, on the contrary, quite forcefully affirms that embodiment is a result of the outpouring of goodness from the intelligible world to the sensible (Ennead 4:3.13). Whether Plotinus’s two-sided claim that the soul’s descent is both necessary (a result of divine beneficence) and culpable (a result of willful arrogance) is ultimately consistent is another question (see Ennead 4:8.5).
14. The goodness of the creation, and the soul as the ultimate source of evil, are two of the most prominent lessons learned as a result of reading “the books of the Platonists,” according to Conf. 7:17–22.
15. Note for instance how Plotinus puts in a good word for Matter in the same treatise where he insists on the soul’s culpability in the Fall, Ennead 4:8.6.
16. See the condemnation of matter as the primal evil in Enneads 1:8.14 and 2:4.16.
17. See Enneads 4:7.10 and 1:6.7. which treat embodiment as dirty—discussed in “Some Plotinian Readings” in chapter 3.
18. Brown, p. 11 (on Manichaean optimism sec p. 59). Augustine indicates that he did have such a need in his Manichaean period by blaming himself for it in Conf. 5:18 (see the connection of this theme with divinity of the soul in Conf. 4:26).
19. De Pecc. Mer. 1:9–20. For the development from Manichaen optimism about the soul and pessimism about the material world, to Augustine’s mature pessimism about the corruption of the soul and optimism about the goodness of the created world (where literally “whatever exists is good,” Conf. 7:18)—in sum from psychological optimism and cosmological pessmism to the reverse—see Cary, “God in the Soul.”
20. De Ord. 2:31, quoted and discussed earlier in “Divinity in the Soul before Plotinus” in chapter 6.
21. Ibid. 2:50.
22. See Cicero’s picture of the soul literally going to heaven without the body, discussed in “Cicero’s Turn to the Soul” in chapter 6.
23. For this concept, see “Divinity in the Soul before Plotinus” in chapter 6.
24. C. Acad. 2:2; and see 2:22, where the soul that has “grasped Truth” returns “to the region of its origin,” that is, “will return to heaven.” A soul that originated in heaven did not originate with a body, and returns there having been freed from it.
25. Ibid. 3:20.
26. Sol. 2:36. In Augustine’s later works, this phrase would be a reference to this mortal body, which will be replaced by a spiritual body in the resurrection (see De Pecc. Mer. 1:2). But in this context the phrase means the human body as such, as can be seen in Sol. 1:14, where the phrase “while we are in this body” refers to the period of time when we have “senses of the body” that “perform their proper work.” Augustine is looking forward to how things will be after that which is proper and essential to the human body, the senses and their work, is left behind.
27. De Quant. Anim. 76.
28. De Quant. Anim. 81. Note that the notion of the soul “activating” (agendo) the body parallels Augustine’s early view of the Incarnation of Christ, where the eternal Wisdom of God “activates the man himself” (ipsum hominem agens), De Ord. 2:27 or “assumes and activates a body of our kind” (2:16).
29. For Augustine’s interest in this doctrine, which is ambivalent but enduring, see Teske. Key passages on this topic include De Ord. 2:30, De Immort. Anim. 24, De Quant. 69, and Retract. 1:11.4—and, as Teske argues, the famous discussion of time in Conf. 11:17–41.
30. De Musica 6:51.
31. Civ. Dei 13:16–17 and 22:26.
32. Ennead 4:8.2–4.
33. Phaedrus 248c.
34. Ennead 4:8.4 (end).
35. Ibid. 4:8.4–8.
36. Like the intelligible world itself, the soul is inherently many as well as one; see “Unity and Division” in chapter 2.
37. See Ennead 6:5.7, translated and discussed earlier in the section “Turning into the Inside” in chapter 2.
38. Note the connection between the Fall and concern with “private things” [frivata] in De Musica 6:53, and see O’Connell’s discussion of the Augustinian theme of the individual soul’s “own life” (propria vita) in Origin, pp. 15–16 and 340–350.
39. Evidently as late as the Confessions, Augustine still wants to conceive of the Fall of the soul as having its terminus a quo in eternity-as O’Connell shows in his reading of Augustine’s famous inquiry into the nature of time in Conf. 11 (see his St. Augustine’s Confessions, chapter 15). The anchor in eternity, however, is not an immutable and divine part of the soul but rather what Augustine calls “the Heaven of Heavens,” a sempiternal, intellectual creature, mutable but not temporal (very much like an unfallen universal Soul, though not exactly a World-Soul, because it does not animate or move any part of the world, not even the material heavens). This creature is the original and final home of our individual souls (chapter 16, on Conf. 12:1–21).
40. In his mature works Augustine hesitates and changes his mind about the origin of the soul, as O’Connell shows in some detail in Origin. The theory he ends up with (like several that went before) remains more hinted at than fully developed, but the keynote seems to be that in the beginning all souls were in some sense identical with “the first man”: Civ. Dei 13:14, De Pecc. Mer. 3:14, C. Jul. Op. Imp. 2:177, De Mupt. et concup. 2:15, Enarr. in Pss. 84:7 (see O’Connell, Origin, pp. 299–304).
41. Civ. Dei 22:29.6. See also De Bono Conjug. 2, Ep. 92:1–2 and 95:8. The thought probably goes back to Ennead 4:3.18, as O’Connell argues in Early Theory, pp. 163–165.
42. De Gen. c. Man. 2:32.
43. Civ. Dei 19:5–7.
44. See De Pecc. Mer. 1:66–67. Augustine always spoke of the ignorance in which infants are born with a kind of sympathetic horror: see Sol. 2:36, De Trin. 14:7, Civ. Dei 21:14 and 21:22.
45. Conf. 1:8.
46. For the Lockean self as a watershed in modernity, see Taylor, chapter 9.
47. Locke 2:11.17.
48. Conf. 10:12 (lata praetoriae and campos) and 10:14 (aula ingenti).
49. Ibid.10:38.
50. Ibid. 7:11.
51. For this fundamental aim of Locke’s project, see Wolterstorff, “The Migration of the Theis-tic Arguments,” pp. 40–56, or (for a much fuller account) John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, especially pp. 118 133.
52. Locke 4:195–16.
53. This contemporary American phenomenon is portrayed polemically by Lee and sympathetically by Bloom; what interests me of course is a point that the two portraits have in common, the divinity and eternity of the inner self. This rediscovery of the Plotinian divinity underneath the Augustinian self is not uniquely modern: something similar may have motivated the mysticism of Meister Eckhart.
1. As Augustine is of course well aware: what lies within is in “an inner place, not a place” (interiore loco, non loco), Conf. 10:16.
2. See “A Diagnosis” in chapter 7.
3. Conf. 10:26. Quantum sum is one of many verbal echoes of Augustine’s earlier treatise On the Quantity of the Soul, discussed hereafter in the section “The Size of the Soul.”
4. Ibid. 10:38.
5. Ibid. 10:13.
6. Ibid. 10:17.
7. Ibid. 10:19.
8. Ibid. 10:35. The phrase ex quo (“the point at which”) is often translated “from the time when.” But it is important to observe that the Latin does not actually mention time and thus leaves open the question of whether Augustine first learned of God in time or in eternity.
9. The earliest documentary evidence of an artificial memory system is found in a fragment called Dialexeis, which is pre-Aristotelian and probably of Sophist origin (see Yates, p. 29). Yates’s work remains the indispensable reference for anyone who wishes to understand the ancient techniques of artificial memory, and in what follows I am much indebted to her.
10. The clearest description of this procedure is Quintilian’s, in Inst. Orat. 11:2.17–22.
11. See Cicero De Oratore 3:354 and 360; the anonymous rhetorical treatise (once ascribed to Cicero) called Ad Herennium 3:30; and Quintilian Inst. Orat. 11:2.21 (quoting Cicero).
12. Ad Herennium 3:31–32. For similar rules see Cicero De Oratore 2:358.
13. Mary Carruthers, in her extraordinarily rich study of medieval practices of memory The Book of Memory, occasionally reads post-Augustinian metaphors into pre-Augustinian texts. This seems to me to be happening, for example, when she writes, “Likening memory to an inner room or recess is also very common in antiquity” (p. 40). The only text she cites in support of this claim is Quintilian 10:3.30, where “thought should make for itself a private place” even in the midst of crowds and journeys and other company (“Quare in turba, itinere, conviviis etiam faciat sibi cogitatio ipsa secretum”). This is not an account of memory but an interesting nonce metaphor describing how we can be mentally “off by ourselves” even when surrounded by other people. It does not indicate a permanent aspect of the self but a technique of making some temporary privacy in which to hear ourselves think.
14. De Mem. 1,450330–32. (Note also the reference to a memory system based on “places” in 2,452al4). The metaphor of retention in wax evidently originated with Plato, whose use of it in Theaetetus lfuc-e and ig4c-e suggests a different account of memory from the doctrine of Recollection, which he appears to deny a little later (iQ7e).
15. Aristotle Rhet. 3:1, Diogenes Laertius 7:43. See the earlier discussion of the meaning of “invention” in my preface.
16. The five parts are: Invention, Arrangement (dispositio), Style (elocutio), Memory, and Delivery (pronuntiatio). See Cicero De Inv. 1:9, De Oratore 1:142, Orator 54, and the anonymous treatise Ad Herennium 1:3; Quintilian gives a history and defense of this fivefold division in Inst. Orat. 3:3–3-917.
17. Quintilian Inst. Orat. 3:1.12, traces the use of communes locos back to Pythagoras and Gor-gias. See Marrou, History, p. 54.
18. See for example Rhetoric 1:2,1358312 and 2:22,1396b28-1397a6 and Topics 8:1,155b8.
19. “We call those arguments which can be transfered to msny esses, common places,” Cicero De Inv. 2:48. For the history connecting these ancient loci communes with modern “commonplaces” see Ong, Presence of the Word, pp. 79–87. This book together with Ong’s Orality and Literacy, mskes fsscinsting resding for snyone interested in the psychological presuppositions of the literary culture in which Augustine’s mind moved, including presuppositions about such things as memory and invention. Also immensely valuable in this regard is Carruthers’s The Book of Memory, which corrects Ong 3t many significsnt points.
20. Cicero Topica 7. See also De Part. Orat. 1:3.
21. De Trin. 8:14.
22. Cicero De Part. Orat. 109, De Fin. 4:10.
23. Ad Herennium 3:28. The similarity with our words “thesaurus” and “inventory” is of course not accidental.
24. Cicero De Oratore 1:18.
25. Even in Augustine the thesauri of memory seem to be like a treasure chests in which things and images are stored and then taken out on demand, rather than an inner room one might walk around in (Conf. 10:12–14). See Carruthers, p. 35.
26. Sol. 1:1. Note also Augustine’s use of the word excogitata to describe the thing found, which reflects Cicero’s definition of inventio ss “ecogitatio rerum verarum aut veri similium quae csussm probabilern reddant” (De Inv. 1:9).
27. C. Acad. 2:9. The whole argument of this treatise is asrried on using the two key terms “seek” and “find,” as O’Connell points out, Early Theory p. 237.
28. See the discussion of the inward turn in Confessions 7 in “A Turning of Attention” in chapter 5.
29. This is what I shall call Ep. 137, which is Augustine’s only book-length treatment of the Incarnstion.
30. Ep. 137:2 (rehearsing questions originally put in Volusianus’s letter to Augustine, Ep. 135:2).
31. Ep. 137:4 and 7. Plotinus is of course not mentioned by name, but the doctrine is unmis-takeably his, as Augustine knows perfectly well.
32. Ep. 137:5.
33. See especially Conf. 10:15, quoted in the section “What Is Found in Memory” hereafter.
34. Tusc. 1:38; see Conf. 7:23—discussed in “Cicero’s Turn to the Soul” in chapter 6.
35. The magnificent overview of the whole material creation in Conf. 10:9–10 serves the same argumentative purpose as the poetic evocation of the material cosmos in Tusc. 1:68–69 and is quite possibly modeled on it.
36. Tusc. 1:67. Augustine agrees with Cicero about the physical eye (De Quant. Anim. 44) but disagrees about the eye of the soul.
37. On Cicero’s understanding of the relation between God and the soul, which is based on their being made of the same material, see “Cicero’s Turn to the Soul” and “The Superiority of Soul in Cicero” in chapter 6.
38. Tusc. 1:70.
39. De Anima 1:5,41b19–27. Augustine accepted this view, as we can see from C. Ep. Fund. 20.
40. See Ennead 6:4.4 and 6:5.12. The omnipresence of the World-Soul is also suggested by Plato’s talk about soul being distributed indivisibly among the divided bodies of the material world in Timaeus 35a, which serves as the textual jumping-off point of Plotinus’s theory of omnipresence in Enneads 6:4–5. But once again it is worthwhile noting how much Plotinus (and through him Augustine) is indebted to Aristotelian psychology, and precisely in those places where Aristotle disagrees with Plato.
41. Ep. 137:5.
42. This is the extra Calvinisticum (so named by Lutherans who disagreed with it): the claim that Christ’s divinity exists extra carnem, outside his own flesh (see Muller, p. 111). Augustine thinks we will understand why this must be true once we understand that something similar is true of our own souls: extra carnem nostram vivimus. Thus both divine Incarnation and ordinary human embodiment are examples of the way that higher things are present to lower things in the manner of Plotinian omnipresence—present in power and activity but not confined to a particular location in space. See O’Connell Early Theory, p. 274.
43. De Quant. Anim. 60.
44. Ibid. 61.
45. Ibid.
46. The “learned men” to whom Augustine refers include no doubt Plotinus and probably Porphyry, as well as perhaps some Christian Neoplatonists of Milan. See Henry, Plotin et I’Occident, pp. 73–75, and Pepin, “Une nouvelle source,” pp. 56–70 (in “Ex Platonicorum Persona”, pp. 216–230).
47. See “A Diagnosis” in chpater 7. Note especially the theory of embodiment in Ennead 4:3.22, where the body is located in the soul rather than the other way around.
48. See “The Superiority of Soul in Cicero” in chapter 6.
49. Tusc. 1:56–65.
50. Tusc. 1:70. A note on the two other features of the soul mentioned in this passage: “the beauty of virtue” is a theme Augustine met again, much more fully developed, in his favorite treatise of Plotinus, Ennead 1:6.4–6. “Quickness of movement” is in part an allusion to Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul from its power of self-movement in Phaedrus 245a-246a, which Cicero translated and incorporated into Tusc. 1:53–54. it also goes back to Cicero’s explanation of how the soul manages to break free of this lower world to get to heaven: “nothing is faster than the soul” (Tusc. 1:43). This remark seems to have impressed Augustine enough for him to make the odd claim that God moves even faster than the soul (Ep. 118:23).
51. Cicero’s descriptions of memory and invention in Tusculan Disputations echo his definition of them in his rhetorical treatise On Invention 1:9. In both, memory is “of things and words” (rerum et verborum in Tusc. 1:65) and invention is treated as a cogitatio (Tusc. 1:61) or excogitatio (De Inv. 1:9). See Augustine’s use ofcogitare and its cognates in Comf 10:18, describing how we re-collect things that have previously been found (inventa).
52. Tusc. 1:62.
53. Ibid. 1:64.
54. Ibid. 5:5.
55. C. Acad. 1:3 and De Beata Vita 1.
56. See “The Self-Examination of Reason” in chapter 6.
57. Tusc. 1:57.
58. Augustine’s early endorsement, of the theory of Recollection (“what is called learning is nothing other than recollecting and remembering,” De Quant. Anim. 34) is formulated in words taken not from Plotinus or Plato but from this passage of Cicero (see Hagendahl, p. 143). Likewise, his later critique of the Meno’s doctrine of Recollection (De Trin. 12:24) owes so much to this passage that Courcelle can even suggest that Augustine’s knowledge of Socrates’ famous geometry lesson with the slave boy is derived entirely from this Ciceronian passage (Late Latin Writers, p. 171)—though I think that suggestion goes too far. For the pervasive thematic connection that Augustine sees between Socratic questioning, remembrance, the liberal disciplines, and gradual steps of ascent—all found together in this one Ciceronian passage-see for example De Ord. 2:39, Retract. 1:6 (some editions, 1:5.2), De Immort. Anim. 6 (“being well questioned [bene interrogati] by someone else about the liberal arts,” which echoes the bene interroganti respondentem a little further on in the Ciceronian passage) and De Mag. 21 (“by gradations accommodated to our infirm steps”), and De Musica 6:1.
59. Tusc. 1:58. The last clause is pithy: cognita attulit.
60. De Quant. Anim. 34.
61. Tusc. 1:60–61.
62. Fundus, capacitas, and immensa recur in De Quant. Anim. 9 and Conf. 10:15–16 and 26. The questions Cicero raises in this passage, we shall soon find, are the questions with which De Quant. Anim. begins.
63. Tusc. 1:57. This language too is echoed repeatedly in De Quant. Anim. 9 and Conf. 10:12, 15, and 26.
64. Tusc. 1:60.
65. The title does not sound so odd, of course, if one has been reading a great deal of Cicero, who asks about the magnitudo of the soul in Tusc. 1:50 (quoted hereafter) and wonders how much memory or mind (quanta memoria or quanta mens) some people have in Tusc. 1:59—or a great deal of Plotinus, who often speaks of “a greatness that is not great in bulk” (Enneads 5:8.2,6:4.5; see also the end of 4:3.9).
66. For example C. Ep. Fund. 2of, Ep. 137:5–6, and Conf. 7:1–16 and 10:8–38.
67. They are not so much answered as dismissed at the very end of the treatise, De Quant. Anim. 81.
68. Tusc. 1:37.
69. Ibid. 1:50–51.
70. De Quant. Anim. 4. Here Augustine uses potentia and virtus as equivalents (something he can also do in ethical contexts such as De Musica 6:55). Vis, the Ciceronian term for a “power” or faculty of the soul, which Augustine uses frequendy in Confessions; 10, is of course etymologically related to virtus.
71. Whence is the soul? From God (De Quant. Anim. 2). What sort of thing is it? Similar to God (3).
72. Ibid. 4.
73. Ibid. 5.
74. Ibid. 5. “Not nothing” becomes a leitmotif of Augustine’s inquiries into non-spatial modes of being, as seen in “A Turning of Attention” and “A Philosophical Project” in chapter 5.
75. Ibid. 8: “Imagines ergo illorum locorum mernoria continentur.”
76. Ibid. 9.
77. Ibid. 9.
78. Ibid. 9.
79. De Quant. Anim. 10.
80. The metaphysics of geometry that underlies Augustine’s inquiry here goes back ultimately to Plato’s lecture on the Good, as reported in Aristotle’s work On the Good, fragment of which are preserved in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other commentators (see especially Ross, fragment 2). The key intuition is that simpler and less divisible things are the first principles from which more extended things originate: the line is generated from the point, the plane from the line, and the solid from the plane. That is why the point is most powerful, containing “virtually” (i.e., by way of power) the whole world. See of course the geometrical construction of the sensible world in Timaeus, beginning at 53c.
81. De Quant. Anim. 19.
82. On the importance of this theme in Neoplatonism, see “Unity and Division” in chapter 2.
83. De Quant. Anim. 18.
84. Ibid.19.
85. Ibid. 19 and 23. The imagery of circle and center is found frequently in Plotinus, as noted in “Turning into the Inside” in chapter 2, but Augustine here seems especially indebted to a discussion of the “shared sense” in Ennead 4:7.6, where it is specifically the human soul that is like the center of a circle: the soul is the unifying central point to which diverse senses lead, like radii leading from circumference to center. This use of the image of the point goes back to Aristotle’s treatment of the shared sense (De Anima 3:2,427a10) via Alexander of Aphrodisias, who is the first to make the soul the center point to which all sensations are brought to be unified (see Henry, “Une comparai-son,” especially pp. 434 and 437). This seems to be the historical cornerstone of later talk about the sensible world as “the external world.”
86. De Quant. Anim. 23. See the description of the life of the fallen soul as divided and “distended” in time, Conf. 11:38–39.
87. De Quant. Anim. 24.
88. Conf. 10:15.
89. “I became to myself a region of impoverishment (regio egestatis]” (Conf. 2:18), and “I found I was far from You in the region of dissimilarity [regio dissimilitudinis]” (Conf. 7:16), and likewise, “I have become to myself a land of difficulty [terra difficultatis]” (Conf. 10:25). In every case, the reference is not to the external world as such (which is good, because created by God) but to the soul in its carnal attachments, trying to find happiness by loving external things which, being perishable, must inevitably be lost.
90. Ibid. 10:15.
91. Ibid. 10:38.
92. De Trin. 10:11.
93. Conf. 10:38. The paradoxes of our being with and without God are a continuing theme of Augustine’s work, from De Ord. 2:3–5 to De Trin. 14:16.
94. Conf. 10:27.
95. Ibid. See Luke 15:8.
96. Conf. 10:28.
97. Ibid.10:26.
98. Ibid. 10:29. This builds on a thought he worked out many years earlier: “As the soul is the whole life of the body, so God is the happy life of the soul” (De Lib. Arb. 2:41).
99. Conf. 10:29.
100. Ibid. 10:31. “Experienced” is a term defined by a contrast that Augustine had earlier established (in 10:14) between what is experienced (experta) and what is believed (credita). The point is that our memory of happy life is not taken on faith: it is not something we believe in because someone told us but something we have tasted for ourselves. Augustine later changes his mind on this point. It remains true that everyone wants to be happy, and no one can love and seek what is utterly unknown, and therefoe “we all do know happy life” (De Trin. 13:8)—but only by believing the Scriptures and not by remembering it (De Trin. 14:21). Behind this change of mind lies a very complex evolution in Augustine’s thought from a Plotinian Fall of the soul to his mature doctrine of original sin, which retained a number of Plotinian features (see O’Connell, Origin, pp. 265–281 and 337–350).
101. Conf. 10:33.
1. The most likely candidate for inventor of the private inner self before Augustine might be one of the Gnostics. The Gnostics indeed often show a decided affinity for the language of inwardness (see in the Nag Hammadi corpus Gos. Mary 8:19–20, Dial. Sav. 125:2 and 128:3–5, Gos. Truth 32:20–40, Gos. Thorn. 32:20–33:6, 37:27–26, 38:9–10 and 48:16–17, Exeg. Soul 131:14–28, Gos. Eg. 66:24–25, Teach. Silv. 94:28–29,106:15, and 117:26–29, Ep. Pet. Phil. 137:22–23, Allogenes 52:10–13—this last sounding much like Plotinus). So far as I can tell (being no reader of Coptic), some Gnostics have something like a concept of inward turn, but none have any concept of private inner space.
2. The closest parallel to Augustine’s problem I have found is in Gregory of Nyssa, the Greek Church Father whose interest in philosophical psychology is most like Augustine’s. Gregory too is attracted to the Platonist language of inwardness but insists that the soul is not identical to God but only like him, created in his image. However, I do not find that Gregory’s talk of what is within the soul goes beyond highly suggestive metaphor. To judge for yourself, see for example De Virg., chapter 12 (searching for the lost coin “within oneself”), De Opif. Horn. 10:3–4 (“the city of the mind which is within us” as an inner container or receptacle filled by the operations of the senses) and De Anima et Res. 28c (“looking at the world within us,” i.e., at the soul as microcosm). These passages can be found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers edition of Gregory’s works, pp. 358, 395–396, and 433, respectively-but as always one must check the original Greek, which uses the language of inwardness less frequently than the Victorian translators do.
3. The book is by Bertrand Russell. For a classic introduction to this problem, see his The Problems of Philosophy, chapter 1.
4. For an impressive example of a philosopher taking the problem of solipsism with absolute seriousness, see the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations.
5. See G. E. M. Anscombe’s testimony to the “medicinal” effect of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, in her Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind, p. viii.
6. See the conclusion to chapter 9.
7. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, has been a wellspring of thought on this issue. For an account of knowledge of other persons that avoids relying on inner/outer contrasts, see Cary, “Believing the Word.”
8. See “Life-Giving Flesh” in chapter 4.
9. See “Consequences of Nicaea” in chapter 4. On Christ’s deified flesh as the foundation of legitimate use of icons, see the first of John of Damascus’s “Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images.” On the passion of Christ incarnate as the source of the sacraments, see Aquinas, ST III, 62.5. On the Word of God as giving us Christ, see Luther’s “Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” LW35:117–124.
10. The lamentation “You were inside and I was outside” (Conf. 10:38) comes immediately after Augustine’s exploration of memory as the inner space in which we find God and leads into a discussion of the lifelong battle against temptation.
11. Augustine uses the term “temporal dispensation” (dispensatio temporalis) as equivalent to the Greek theological term oikonomia, or economy of salvation (see De Fide et Symbolo 6 and 18 and the phrase suscepti hominis dispensatio in Ep. 11:4). It describes all of God’s activity in history on behalf of our salvation and especially of course the Incarnation and historical life of Christ. On the place of the “temporal dispensation” in Augustine’s Platonist ontology, see Mayer, Zeichen, 1:259–271.
12. The locus classicus for this classification is De Doct. 2:1–6, but see also De Mag. 1–4 (words as signs) and Civ. Dei 10:5 (sacraments as signs).
13. This is the key thesis of De Mag. 33–40. For the importance of this thesis in shaping Augustine’s mature theology, see Mayer, “Philosophische Voraussetzungen” and “Taufe und Erwahlung.”
14. De Doct. 3:9–13; see Conf. 5:24–25.
15. The crucial conceptual point here is that causal efficacy always flows downward in Augustine’s ontological hierarchy, from God to souls to bodies-and never in the reverse direction (hence never upward and inward). God can change souls, and the soul can move and animate bodies, but bodies can have no causal effect on souls. In fact, for Augustine, no body is an efficient cause of anything, for the only efficient causes in the universe are wills (Civ. Dei 5:9). That is to say, only things at the higher two levels of the ontological hierarchy can have causal efficacy-which rules out the possibility of any external sign being an efficacious means of grace.
16. See especially the twelfth-century Summa Sententiarum 4:1 (attributed to Hugh of St. Victor), which underlines the point that sacraments are signs that not only signify grace (as Augustine taught) but confer it.
17. For Luther the Gospel contains divine promises, as the Law contains divine commandments, and “the promises of God give what the commandments of God demand” (from the treatise on “The Freedom of a Christian,” in LW 31:349). That Luther conceives the efficacy of the Gospel promise on the model of sacramental signs that confer what they signify is particularly clear in the 1519 treatise on “The Sacrament of Penance” (7,1731:3–23) where the Word of Absolution plays the role of sacramental sign. Later, the same Word of Absolution is called “the true voice of the Gospel” in Lutheran confessional documents (Apology of the Augsburg Confession 12:39, in Tappert, p. 187). For the development of this line of thought in Luther’s early work see Bayer.
18. Institutes 4:14.16.
19. It will perhaps help my readers to know that I am a critic of Augustinian inwardness primarily because my thinking on Word and Sacrament derives from Luther’s emphasis on the externality of the object of faith. See his Large Catechism, on Baptism:
faith must have something to believe, something to which it may cling. . . . Thus faith clings to the water and believes it to be Baptism in which there is sheer salvation and life, not through the water . . . but through its incorporation with God’s Word and ordinance and the joining of his name with it. . . . the entire Gospel is an external, oral proclamation. In short, whatever God effects in us he does through such external ordinances. (Tappert, p. 450)
20. The Platonist tradition (in contrast, for instance, to the Stoics) has always linked mind with love and has always portrayed love as something that comes over us unbidden, quite independent of our power of choice. Hence Plato attends to the phenomenon of falling madly in love in Phaedrus 244a-257b and Symposium 215a-219e, followed by Plotinus in his essay “On Beauty,” Ennead 1:6.4 and 7 (see also Enneads 1:3.2 and 6:9.9). Augustine is thoroughly Platonist in believing that love of higher things is an inward gift flowing from the Beloved.
21. On being inwardly taught by God see De Grat. Christi 1:14, De Praedest. 13, and In Joh. Evang. 26:7. See also the theme of grace as the inward light of the mind in De Pecc. Mer. 1:37–38 and 2:5, DeNat. et Grat. 56.
22. DcMag. 38.
23. See De Fib. Arb. 1:26 and 3:7.
24. Conf. 8:20–21; see also De Grat. et Lib. Arb. 31.
25. This progression from faith to love to vision is the organizing framework of Augustine’s argument in De Sp. et Litt. 51–59.
26. At this stage Augustine argues that faith is in our power (De Sp. et Litt. 54), but he also insists that it is a gift of God-leaving open the possibility that human choice is the decisive factor in determining whether this gift is Littactualy received (De Sp. et Litt. 60).
27. The issue of whether the beginning of faith (initium fidei) is due to grace or our choice is settled in De Grat. et Lib. Arb. 28–29 and De Praedest. 3 (see Augustine’s account of his earlier views in 7).
28. For the Plotinian meaning of this contrast, see “Inner Vision and Faith” in chapter 3.
29. Isaiah 7:9, as translated by the Old Latin version from the Septuagint. This verse turns up frequently as a methodological principle in Augustine’s works, for example De Lib. Arb. 1:4 and 2:6, De Mag. 37, De Fide et Symbolo 1.
30. DeDoct. 1:4.
31. Ench. 5.
32. “Tempora auctoritas, re autem ratio prior est,” De Ord. 2:26.
33. See “The Experience of Insight” in chapter 5.
34. For signs as reminders or admonitions, see De Mag. 36.
35. For studiousness as a form of love that desires to pass from sign to thing signified, see De Trin. 10:1–2.
36. DeLib. Arb. 2:33.