In the previous chapter I discussed aspects of sacred reading in the writings of John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia. This was merely a sketch of a large subject and, as such, was intended to act as a preface to the present chapter, in which I propose that Augustine, in his writing about the self, brings together the reading techniques of lectio divina and classical rhetorical thinking on the literary and creative imagination.
In support of that thesis, the chapter is organized in two parts. In the first, I review the approach to the imagination in the Roman rhetorical tradition, taking examples from Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine himself. Then, using lectio divina as a foundational background, I turn to Augustine’s transformation of Greek phantasia into Latin imaginatio, and examine the implications of his thinking on the imagination in selected theoretical statements on the subject as well as in illustrative texts from the Confessions.
A convenient place to begin is the statement on imaginative representation in the opening paragraphs of Cicero’s Orator. This short work was written in 46 B.C. in the form of a letter to Marcus Junius Brutus, one of Cicero’s rivals, who had asked him on more than one occasion to describe the type of orator whose eloquence, in his view, was of the highest order (eloquentiae genus . . . summum et perfectissimum, 1.3). In Cicero’s opinion, the question is interesting but rather difficult to answer in a definitive manner. There are many orators, and each has his own style of delivery. By what criterion can one decide which is “best”? This would be a daunting task in practical terms and even rather hard to formulate at a purely hypothetical level.1
In the end Cicero has an answer to propose, but it is not one that directly addresses the question Brutus has in mind. All those who work in the fields of literature or philosophy, he points out, are obliged, in the course of their activities, to recognize the limits of their natural endowments. It would be gratifying if one could write like Homer, philosophize like Plato, or deliver a speech like Demosthenes. However, in the period in which he and Brutus are living, there are no figures whose respective abilities are the equal those of such renowned figures in the past.
The acknowledgment of this fact should not be taken as a source of discouragement by those who, like Brutus, wish to compare the relative merits of orators in their own day. The achievements of such speakers, while falling short of the ideal standards of the past, can nonetheless be considered worthy of the praise of their contemporaries, if their contributions to the field of oratory come within reach of what can be judged to be the highest level that can be attained in their day (magna sunt ea quae sunt optimis proxima).
In attempting to delineate (fingendo) the best type of orator, therefore, it is not incorrect, in the first instance, to form an image (formare) based on eminent figures in the past. Yet he and Brutus must not lose sight of the task before them, which is the evaluation of public speakers living in the present. In that context, he continues, the pair may have overlooked an important dimension of their inquiry. The “unsurpassable ideal” of which they have been speaking, “which is seldom attained in a speech as a whole, is sometimes present in a part of a given speech and in some speakers”2 in their own time.
Cicero then talks briefly about the second type of excellence and proposes a generalization concerning the principle on which he thinks it is based. In order to do this, he returns to the question of the imitation of the ancients, to which he has alluded through the figures of Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes, but now tackles the issues from another direction.
The image of a beautiful thing, he proposes, which may exist either in the mind or in physical reality, is never quite as good as the object itself. In his view, this is an inherent limitation of the mimetic tradition in art and literature. His example is the image of a person’s face in the mind of an artist, which is never the equal of the face itself, no matter how skillfully it is drawn or sculpted.3 Further—and this is his major point—the superiority of the original in comparison to the copy is not something that is perceived readily by the eye, the ear, or the other senses; it can only be embraced by the mind, that is, by thought or imagination.
Cicero’s argument is illustrated by the examples of paintings with which he assumes Brutus is acquainted, as well as by the statues of the celebrated sculptor, Phidias (480–430 B.C.), which were widely regarded as achievements of unsurpassed beauty throughout the Hellenistic period. It is to the latter that he draws special attention. When Phidias was engaged in creating his renowned statues of Jupiter and Minerva, he suggests, the artist did not have his eyes focused only on living persons, who were acting as models of the deities and from whom he assumed the fine qualities of their features could be taken. On the contrary, there was, residing within his mind, a notion of beauty itself, unparalleled in its excellence (in mente insideat species pulchritudinis eximia quaedam, 1.3.8). It was on this that his inward gaze was focused, and it was this view in turn that guided his hand in producing the deities’ shapes and appearances.
Cicero concludes that there are two sources of beauty in Phidias’s sculptures. One arises from their outer forms, which are perceptible after they are finished and placed on view. The other has its origin in an interior and abstract source of beauty that exists in the mind of the sculptor before the statues of the gods are brought into being. Cicero is referring here to a principle of thought or imagination to which the sculptures give visual and spatial representation, while in itself this principle remains unrepresented.4 In a comparable manner, he observes, we can imagine a perfect type of eloquence existing in the mind (animo), whereas by means of our ears we can only be the recipients of its copy or imitation (effigiem); and this, he notes, being outer, is inferior to what exists in thought (cogitatio). He adds, possibly as an afterthought, that these forms of things (rerum formae), which are inspired by the artist’s inner resources, are comparable to what Plato had in mind when speaking about eternal and unchanging ideas.
This statement concludes the preface to the more detailed and practical outline of the qualities of a desirable orator, which occupies the remainder of the text of the Orator. As this is the only extensive discussion of the role of the imagination in the work, it may be useful to reflect on the conclusions Cicero has reached and their implications.
First of all, let us note that at Orator 1–14, as elsewhere in his writings, Cicero has no single term for referring to the activity of the imagination. The words he uses in the passages discussed, such as cogitatio, mens, and animus, are taken from conceptual domains in which the imagination is not usually the primary focus of interest.
Second, it is not entirely clear what is meant at 3.10 by the passing reference to Plato’s “ideas.” This would seem to be a combination of Platonic mental representations, in which the senses are not normally involved, and a composite notion, possibly influenced by both Aristotle and Stoic sources, in which the data of the senses are assumed to play a fundamental role in understanding things as they actually exist. In support of this view, let us note that, while beauty’s inner source is described in the language of pure forms, the specific examples of excellence or perfection that Cicero has in mind are taken from the lives of real people, as noted, those of Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes.
There is still another unusual feature of Cicero’s remarks. The description of an ideal type of oratory is made in the context not of speaking, as one might expect, but of painting and sculpture. Cicero has a lot to say about verbal eloquence later in the Orator, in the form of technical advice for those engaged in public speaking; however, in his introduction to the subject he prefers to tackle the issues in a theoretical manner and almost exclusively by analogy with the visual arts. As a consequence, it is not clear whether he is talking about imagination in the sense of the mind’s power to form visual or auditory images, as a result of listening to someone speak, or the more general problem of images from the time of Phidias, as these are taken up, for example, by Plato, at Sophist 262a–d, or by Aristotle, at De Anima 3.3, either of which, individually or in combination, may lie in the background of his remarks. This question is complicated by the fact that the Stoic sources on which Cicero may be basing his view of tangible images may themselves have contained Aristotelian influences.
One further observation may be made about Orator 1–14, which provides an introduction to the second example of the use of the imagination among Latin writers that I wish to discuss. This concerns the relationship between the inner source of excellence about which Cicero is speaking and the concept of mimesis, to which I have already referred. If Cicero had been thinking along Platonic lines, as he suggests, there would be a connection between the ideal of the perfect orator and the living representation of that perfection. In order for that to exist, there would have to be a contemporary equivalent of Demosthenes (even though, he notes, Demosthenes has no equal among the ancients or moderns: admirabile est quantum inter omnis unus excellat (1.6)). Inasmuch as this contemporary is comparable to Demosthenes, the operative principle at work would be the imitation of an ancient public speaker.
However, when he speaks of configuring (fingendo, formabo) this personage a few lines later, it is not the principle of mimesis that he has principally in mind. He is asking a more manageable question. This is whether, by making use of his own inner resources, the practicing orator can improve on the achievement of his contemporaries and come within reach of the elevated ideal he and Brutus are talking about. Recall that this is a quality of oratory that, according to Cicero, is evident only in some speeches, in fact in parts of a speech rather than the whole. His point is this: the superior orator works toward perfection from the inside, just as Phidias is thought to have envisaged from within the design of the statues of Jupiter and Minerva. If the sculptor had used living models, the result would have been mimetic rather than imaginative. It follows that in Orator 1–14 the mimetic and the imaginative are being contrasted, with the latter taking priority.
The second author whose statements on the topic of the creative imagination in Roman rhetorical writing I would like to examine briefly is Quintilian, who, influenced by Cicero, takes up the subject in the Institutio Oratoria, published around 95 A.D.
There are two relevant comments in this work. The first has as its topic the peroration (or conclusion) to a public speech, in which, Quintilian maintains, an expression of emotion is occasionally permissible (6.1.1; 6.2.1). He is aware that appeals of this type have been criticized by philosophers and court officials. The philosophers’ disapproval is understandable, in his opinion, since in their eyes any argument based on emotion is inherently flawed. It is less clear to him why those involved in civil suits should entertain a similar point of view, since situations arise regularly in legal proceedings in which a resort to the emotions appears to be the only way of reinforcing the claims of truth, justice, or the public interest.5
Quintilian reminds us that for the ancients there were two kinds of emotions. One was called pathos in Greek and adfectus (emotion) in Latin. The other was ethos in Greek, and, since there is no corresponding term in Latin, is usually rendered as mores (moral habits or customs).6 Quintilian concludes that what was known as ethics in Greek thought was usually referred to as moral philosophy in Latin. He concedes that the term mores can be an indication of almost any habit of mind (omnis habitus mentis); however, as he employs the word, it refers to a single property or peculiarity of morals (morum quaedam proprietas) within which there is a potential role for the emotions.
He makes a further set of distinctions between pathos and ethos. In his view, pathos is generally interpreted as pertaining to emotions that have been aroused (concitos), while ethos is reserved for those that are more restrained and composed (mites atque compositos). In the one, the emotions are vehemently agitated (violenter commotos), in the other, calm and placid (lenes). In the former, they appear to command (imperare), in the latter, to persuade (persuadere). Consequently, when we are under the influence of pathos, it is to be expected that we will find ourselves in a state of excitement or confusion (perturbatio), whereas when we are motivated by ethos, the result is usually an expression of benevolence and goodwill (benevolentia).7
Finally, in contrast to pathos, the expression of emotion associated with ethos requires less output of energy, although necessitating no less skill and experience. This is utilized more frequently by speakers than pathos, Quintilian observes, and is constantly in demand by their audiences. As a result, in one form or another ethos has acquired a role in almost all the cases that come before the courts. In his view, this popularity has come about because ethos is both an emotional and an ethical category, based, as noted, on the orator’s innate sense of goodness (quod ante omnia bonitate commendabitur).
In sum: if the tone of a peroration is mild and courteous, as required for ethos, the sense of pleasure and affection that is produced in the minds of the hearers (audientibus) would appear to derive both from the facts in the case and from the speaker’s moral character.
At 6.2.25, Quintilian adds a further point to this outline of the two types of emotion utilized by public speakers. This concerns what he considers to be a largely unrecognized insight on the topic of the audience’s response to such emotional appeals. This, he notes, he is prepared to evaluate on the basis of his personal experience (experimento meo) as a speaker and a teacher, rather than through manuals of instruction. This practical experience has taught him that the best way to give rise to emotions that are truly and legitimately felt in others is to feel them first oneself.8 It is pointless, he argues, for a speaker to give an imitation (imitatio) of grief, anger, or indignation, artificially making his looks agree with his words, if he does not accommodate what he says to his preexisting state of mind (animum). The purpose of this aid to eloquence (eloquentia), on those occasions when such expressions of emotion are appropriate, is to bring the latent potential of the mind (vis mentis) into accord with the truth of the morals (veritas ipsa morum) under consideration. From a different direction, therefore, but with a similar argument, he is, like Cicero, critical of mimesis.
To put his argument more generally, if we wish our words to have the power of authentically felt emotions in the minds of those to whom we are expressing them (whether as actors or speakers), we must make sure that an appropriate state of mind exists within us before they are actually expressed. This not only involves the work of the imagination: it also means that an implicitly rational decision has to be made about the connection of these emotions to the case, dispute, or ethical issues under scrutiny. It is only by means of such a preparatory engagement on our part that our outwardly spoken discourse, that is, our oration (oratio), can be said to have its origin in the same type of mental disposition (in tali animo) as it is supposed to produce subsequently in the minds of the persons who hear it, react to it emotionally, and ultimately pass judgment on it.9
Will the listener truly grieve, Quintilian asks, if he can find no trace of genuine grief in the words by which he is supposed to be moved? Will he display real anger, if the orator who wishes to arouse such an emotion fails to display it himself? Will he be moved to tears, if the pleader’s eyes are dry? If none of these are possible, then, as noted, the first lesson for the orator to learn in expressing emotions in a public speech is that he must be capable of conveying to the audience the fact that he has thought out ahead and created within himself the same emotional range as he seeks in his audience.10
But how is it to be brought about that we feel such emotions, when emotions are not always, in fact only rather rarely, subject to our personal control,11 as, for example, in the case of an outburst of anger? By way of answer to this question, Quintilian tentatively proposes the concept of inner visual representations: these, he notes, are what the Greeks call phantasiae and the Latins visiones, through which the images of absent things are represented in the mind in such a vivid manner that we seem to see them with our very eyes or to have them physically before us. In Quintilian’s view, a person who is capable of creating such mental images will at the same time gain extensive control over the direction of his emotions.12 He will be able to present words, things, and actions to himself as if they were true and real,13 and this will set the stage for his rhetorical performances, in which he will be able to recreate genuinely felt emotions in his audience. Note that this involves a double representation, first in his mind and later in the minds of his listeners.
There is nothing surprising about this capacity, which, Quintilian maintains, we all have within ourselves in some degree, even though we may be unaware of its presence and uninterested in the uses to which it can be put. Every person has experienced image formation at one time or another, sometimes, he grants, in moments of leisure, when a variety of shapes and impressions move randomly in and out of our thoughts. Also, we engage in the projection of images in our fantasies and daydreams; on these occasions the images are frequently accompanied by unrealizable desires on our part, and it is easy for us to be taken in by them, even if we are aware that they are inventions. In this way we may become the victims of our own mentally created imagistic rhetoric. We can visualize ourselves traveling to exotic places which we do not know, crossing distant oceans of which we have only heard, engaging heroically in would-be battles with our enemies, giving public speeches for which we acquire fame, and even profiting from the riches we would like to have but do not possess.
But if it is possible for us to be misled by such images, Quintilian maintains, and willingly misled, it would seem, it is also possible for us to be taught some valuable lessons by them. The products of our imagination can be put to positive uses by lawyers, as, for example, when a speaker defending a client attempts to see within his own mind (animo) the circumstances that have given rise to the evidence presented in a case. He can, for instance, recreate the image of a murderer attacking his victim, the victim’s vain plea for mercy, and the fatal blow, followed by agony and death. Through these false images—false, he emphasizes, because they cross the fine line between what took place, however improbable, and what might have taken place, however plausible—the lawyer, as defender of justice, is able make a convincing case for the defendant.
The term Quintilian employs to describe the vividness of such scenes when they are represented in the mind is enargeia, which, he notes, Cicero translates by illustratio (vivid representation) and evidentia (clarity, distinctness). As a result of this sharpness of view, the speaker not only gives a verbal account of what has taken place (dicere); he also appears to be showing or demonstrating the events (ostendere), and thereby more easily arouses the emotions of the listeners, since they can readily envisage themselves as being at the scene of the crime themselves.14
The topic of enargeia is taken up again at 8.3.62–71 within a lengthy discussion of literary style, choice of language, ornamentation, and sententiae.15 In Quintilian’s view, what we mean by ornamentation or elaboration (ornatum) in a formal speech goes beyond what is sharply defined and plausible (perspecuo ac probabili) and consists in three elements, namely clarity of conception, appropriateness of expression, and brilliance of embellishment.16 Enargeia, therefore, which, he notes, is also called representation (repraesentatio) by some writers, is more than clarity (perspecuitas), since in the case of clarity the object perceived merely allows itself to be seen in the open (patet), whereas, in enargeia, it seems actively to show or display itself (ostendit), virtually calling itself to our attention. In Quintilian’s view, it is a great gift for an orator to be able to express in words (enuntiare) the facts about which he is speaking with such accuracy, clarity, and precision (clare) that the audience has the impression that these facts are, so to speak, on view (ut cerni videantur). For oratory, if it is to be effective, cannot appeal only to the ears (ad aures). To reiterate: the judge of the case has to have the impression both that he is listening to an account of the facts and that, through the speaker’s words, these facts are being placed before the eyes of his mind (oculis mentis ostendit). Quintilian terms this the image of something depicted entirely in words (tota rerum imago . . . verbis depingitur).17
Although Quintilian acknowledges a debt to Cicero in these discussions of phantasia and enargeia, his account differs in two important respects. Recall that, at Orator 7–10, Cicero utilizes the concept of an image in sculpture or painting to describe the perfection of an image that is only capable of being grasped by the mind. By contrast, in Quintilian, Gerard Watson points out that “we have a variation of the theme of phantasia producing what it has not seen: here it is a case of the listener seeing something that has not been said.”18 The difference arises between images expressed in words and images arising from words.
We may add to this observation the fact that in Cicero the chief interest in the discussion of images lies with the speaker, whereas in Quintilian there is a greater concern with the capacity of the audience (hearers or readers) to recreate the images in question in their minds. And this is a clue to another difference between their approaches. They are both aiming at Cato’s image of the orator as an ethical person;19 however, for Cicero this desirable quality arises chiefly from training in philosophy, whereas for Quintilian it is an aspect of rhetoric and therefore inseparable from the words that are actually spoken. For, in his view, as noted, ethos is superior to pathos, since it is through this type of expression of emotions that there is created in the minds of the hearers of a speech the same benevolent disposition that is at work in the mind of the speaker. It is out of this responsive situation that the evidence for the speaker’s inherent goodness arises. It is a tricky argument, one, I believe, to which Plato would have been opposed on principle and on which Cicero would have expressed serious reservations.
In the second part of this chapter I wish to suggest that these techniques of the imagination, namely phantasia and enargeia, are placed within the framework of sacred reading by Augustine in his consideration of the activity of the imagination in the creation of the self. I refer to this combination of disciplines as the work of “the contemplative imagination,” giving equal weight in this notion to the roles played by sacred reading and images in the mind.
However, before turning to this topic, I think it would be helpful to provide illustrations of Augustine’s independent use in the Confessions of the rhetorical figures discussed in the passages I have taken from Cicero and Quintilian, and to say a few words about the philosophical context in which he places these visual techniques, which differs considerably from that of the Roman rhetorical tradition. My first illustration is a discussion of the use of emotions in drama; the second is taken from the climactic moment in the Confessions when God permits Augustine to resolve the inner emotional conflict that is the source of the fragmented self of his preconversion years.
These chapters deal in order with Augustine’s youthful love affairs (3.1.1) and with his attraction for the theater (3.2.2–3). On the former, he echoes themes widely found in Roman love poetry; however, no comparable background material has been found for his statement on the emotions that he experienced as spectator at dramatic performances. A number of ancient writings on the subject are ruled out. He did not know Aristotle’s statements on the theme; in any case, Henry Chadwick notes, his view “is closer to Plato, Republic 10, 606–7 and Philebus 48a–b.”20 But, as he did not know these either, in my view it is possible that he was influenced by the account of emotions at Institutio Oratoria 6.2.29–31, to which he could easily have had access in his activities as a professor of rhetoric.
If that hypothesis can be accepted, his brief but incisive commentary on emotions in drama at the beginning of book 3 can be viewed, not as an isolated statement made on the basis of personal insights, but as part of a continuous and interdependent set of reflections on the subject in late Hellenism, which would of course include the already analyzed statements of Cicero and Quintilian. The emotionally charged episodes that are described in these chapters in the Confessions follow each other without pause in book 3, and can therefore be taken as sequential examples of moral waywardness which proceed from one type of psychological bondage to another. Augustine differs from Quintilian in treating both direct and indirect emotions and in passing in a rather different way from the personal to the collective expression of emotion. The second of these types will be taken up again in his account of the uncontrolled emotions experienced by Alypius during the cruel and bestial spectacle of the games, which his friend tries but fails to resist (Conf., 6.9.14).
At 3.1.1 Augustine begins the discussion by describing his unreflective commitment to sexual encounters in Carthage as a form of emotional addiction, even enslavement. The path to this type of dependency was prepared by the moral atmosphere of the city—a frying pan, as he puts it, sizzling with illicit and disgraceful love affairs (sartago flagitiosorum amorum). He was then twenty-two. He had never been in love, and as a consequence longed for amorous experience: he was overcome with desire; in love with love itself (Nondum amabam et amare amabam. . . . Quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare).
In these charged phrases the theme of ethos makes its appearance within three philosophical and theological frameworks. These are (1) his hunger for spiritual nourishment, (2) his entrapment in the world of the senses, and (3) his willful polluting of the formerly unsullied waters of personal friendship by means of his uncontrolled desires. Worst of all, he appears to be aware of his dependency and to derive enjoyment from it:
I rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured. . . . My love was returned and in secret I attained the joy than binds one in irons. I was glad to be in bondage, tied with troublesome chains. As a result I was beaten with the red-hot rods of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and contention.21
In the second stage of this involvement at 3.2.2–3, the theme of ethos is extended, as it is in the Insitutio Oratoria, but the question Augustine asks is different from that of Quintilian. The latter wants to know why we should express emotions that we do not feel, such as feigned grief at a person’s death, which run the risk of appearing inauthentic, even implausible, to others, especially those to whom one is trying to convey the opposite impression. By contrast, Augustine is asking how we can allow ourselves to express emotions in which we know we do not believe, and why, if we allow ourselves to express them, we consciously do so for pleasure, in open defiance of rational or objective moral considerations.
For Quintilian, emotions are admissible (in oratory) on the condition that there is some exercise of control. This is provided by the facts in the case, the legal system, and the studied timing of the appeal. Personal pleasure is not part of the equation. By contrast, Augustine assumes that emotion is capable of overriding the conventional frameworks for rational action within which we normally conduct our lives, including legal codes; the motivating force, thus deregulated, is nothing other than personal gratification. As this desire is not the work of reason, it follows that no mere assertion of reason is subsequently capable of controlling it. What is most disturbing about such expressions of emotion, from Augustine’s point of view, is that they appear to arise from within ourselves by means of forces that are inaccessible to our conscious minds—from a region that we would nowadays associate with the “unconscious.” It is because this inner realm is a mystery to us that we have the impression that the emotions in question are operating outside the traditional guidelines of our moral thinking, which Augustine, no less than Quintilian, believes to be principled by external and objective order, in Augustine’s case by God.
Augustine asks why we go to the theater expecting to witness sufferings that we would not personally wish to endure. Why do we not try to avoid them, as we would in real life? On the contrary, we attend the play’s performance in the anticipation that an invented scenario will be enacted. We desire a false expression of emotion in others in order to produce a falsely originating but genuinely felt emotion in ourselves.
A second set of issues arises for Augustine in relation to the fictional nature of the plays themselves; this of course does not occur in Quintilian, since legal cases are presumably concerned with established facts. How are we to judge the ethical value of our emotions, Augustine asks, even if these emotions are genuinely felt, if we know that the events on which they are based are false? Put in another way, why does our knowledge of the plausibility of the events not play a part in shaping our moral attitude toward them?
Augustine tells himself: When I suffer, I call it misery, and when I feel compassion for the sufferings of others, I call it mercy. But what am I to think of the misery or mercy that I feel when I know that the source of such sufferings is fictitious? I am not inspired to help the person who suffers in a play, and yet I am invited to grieve on his behalf. And the greater the pain experienced by the actors in the drama, and the more successful their performance in the audience’s opinion, the greater is my pleasure in the grief that I experience. My dissatisfaction does not arise from the fact that that my feelings rest on false premises, as Quintilian might assume; however, it may arise from inadequacy of the performance. Nonetheless, my reaction at a play has one thing in common with Quintilian’s notion of oratorical persuasion. My feelings are a response to the level of professionalism in the acting, just as Quintilian’s putative judges and juries respond to the technical proficiency of the speaker in the case.
The relationship between performer and audience in these cases is not precisely the same. Quintilian’s lawyer performs before a judge and jury, whereas the actors in the plays Augustine saw in Carthage perform before a group of spectators. The judge and jury are united in their response, whereas Augustine and his fellow theatergoers are not. Some may like the performance, whereas others may disagree. And a few, like Augustine, may ask themselves larger questions about the ethical dimension of playacting. The examples also differ if we consider the negative scenario, namely that in each case there is a failure to convince. Let us say that the lawyer loses his case, despite the adequate use of both phantasia and enargeia. He is in the same situation as the actors if they fail to entertain their audience. But whereas, in Quintilian’s case, it is the performer’s expectations that are frustrated, in Augustine’s it is those of the audience. The bishop of Hippo has thereby gone a step farther than his predecessor in shifting the ethical responsibility for such emotions from performer to audience. That is an important move, one that is consistent with Augustine’s thinking about the potential ambiguity of verbal signs.
Augustine also differs from Quintilian on the intentions that are involved in the expression of invented emotions. In the case of both the lawyer and the theatergoer, these are preceded by anticipation. The lawyer anticipates winning his case; the theatergoer anticipates a satisfactory performance. In a sense, gratification is felt before gratification can begin. In the case of the lawyer in the above example, this experience of emotion ends, unfortunately, with unsuccessful pleading. His emotions are shown to be false, not because they are inauthentic, but because they fail to convince.
Augustine has another type of scenario in mind. This arises from the fact that, in his view, image formation, as well as the subsequent work of the imagination, form together an inherent element in all human thinking. This is clear from his example. If I am a member of the audience at a play, he proposes, I may have experienced a foretaste of my satisfied emotions in my mind before the play begins, especially if I know in advance what it is about and the names of the actors, the nature of the roles they habitually play, and so forth. However, if the performance does not live up to my expectations, I am disappointed, not only because of the quality of the acting, but, also, and perhaps principally, because the experience of the play, as a fabrication, does not satisfy my personal illusions, which were clearly in place before it began. As a theatergoer, I know these emotions to be false in one sense, namely that they are based on a fiction, which is the play; but now, in the wake of my disappointment, I know them to be false in another, by not living up to or sustaining my own fantasies, which are the result of my innate tendency to form images. Far from rejecting the fictitious elements in a theatrical performance in these circumstances, therefore, I may anticipate and even embrace them.
Like the enslavement to love in 3.1.1, this is a framework in which my dubiously inspired but genuinely felt emotions can be expressed. It is only a step forward from Quintilian’s view of emotions, but it is a major one. For in Augustine’s view, the worst aspect of this type of inducement arises from the fact that the sufferings of the actors in the end become the principal objects of our desire. No less than in amorous pursuits, they are a form of enticement by the outer senses that exists for the sole function of satisfying those senses. They have no value except in relation to an experience of misery which we know to be inauthentic. The performance of a drama in the theater is therefore much like the performance of sexual desire in the individual, inasmuch as both are grounded on emotions arising from worldly situations. There is no flow from inner to outer, as in genuine or ethically informed feelings, but instead the opposite, a movement from outer to inner, and, in the end, toward an awareness that such inwardness as exists is entirely constructed. It is a form of mimesis, but one in which original and copy are confused. The indiscriminate lover and the impassioned theatergoer are alike in that they are unable to perceive the difference between appearance and reality. Living in illusions, they do not wish to be relieved of them, as Augustine notes:
At that time, poor thing that I was, I loved to suffer and sought out the occasions for such suffering. So when an actor on stage gave a fictional imitation of someone else’s misfortunes, I was the more pleased; and the more vehement the attraction for me, the more the actor compelled my tears to flow.22
In the light of this evidence, we can propose that, in writing the Confessions, Augustine adopted an attitude toward the imagination that was a development, directly or indirectly, out of the discussion of the subject in texts such as Orator and Institutio Oratoria. Like Cicero, he was convinced that there is an inner model or ideal for all existing objects of beauty; and like Quintilian, he was dubious about expressions of emotion that are based on mere imitation. In a more general sense, the vividness of the narrative in books 1–9 suggests that he was sympathetic to the use of phantasiae or visiones, as well as to the clarity that Cicero called illustratio or evidentia and Quintilian enargeia. I turn to this conception of visio in the second part of this chapter and in Chapter 5.
Where he chiefly differed from Cicero and Quintilian on this topic was in his moral outlook. This is demonstrable in the Confessions; it is even clearer in De Doctrina Christiana, begun a year earlier, in which verbal ambiguity and truth are major themes. This work was Augustine’s Gorgias, so to speak, in which he offered a critique of rhetoric within a compelling theory of signs; however, the essentials of his argument for right reason in this work are found in a different form at Confessions 3.2.3–4, where he sums up his thinking in terms of plays as fictions and actors as falsifiers of emotion. The chief question in his mind, from an ethical standpoint, is not why we are persuaded by such techniques, as it is for Cicero and Quintilian, but why, as members of the audience, and as Christians, we do not forcefully reject them as mere gratifications.
The description of emotional experiences in the opening chapters of book 3 is not an isolated incident in the autobiography, but forms a part of a series of scenes which have as their subject the education of Augustine’s own emotions. These can be described as stages of a narrative history of the emotions in the Confessions, and as such they constitute a parallel for his intellectual evolution through Manichaeism, the libri Platonicorum, and the Pauline letters. In both departments, moreover, namely those of the emotions and the intellect, his difficult journey terminates in his conversion to the religious life in book 8.
The chapters concerned with his conversion (8.7.17–8.12.30) provide an excellent testing ground for the hypothesis concerning the staged use of the rhetorical techniques for image formation in the autobiography, and this is the second text I wish to discuss. However, before turning to these interlocked episodes, it is perhaps helpful to recall that the concluding scenes in book 8 have been the subject of a lengthy controversy in Augustinian scholarship. At the center of this debate was the question of their historical accuracy, and the parameters of the subsequent controversy dovetail nicely with what Augustine himself seems to have had in mind concerning fiction and truth in dramatic representations.
Since the publication in 1946 of Pierre Courcelle’s seminal study of the sources and analogues of the narrative books of the Confessions,23 few students of the issues are any longer convinced that the conversion episode and the events that led up to it took place precisely as Augustine describes them. Courcelle’s method consisted in comparing the narrative account in book 8 with what we can learn of this critical period in Augustine’s life from autobiographical statements elsewhere in his writings. The result of his inquiry was to question many of Augustine’s assertions concerning his conversion and in the end to give us a much improved understanding of the factual background of the narrated scene. Yet it left unanswered a question with which this phase of Augustinian research had begun. This had to do with Augustine’s reasons for departing from the provable record of his life (although that was not in itself unusual in ancient biography), and for substituting for the known and retrievable facts a story that was clearly the product of his creative or literary imagination. Put in a more general form, the question is why phantasia and/or imaginatio come to play so large a role in this critical episode in the Confessions.
The problem can also be posed at a philosophical level. We have to ask what Augustine had to gain through the use of literary and rhetorical methods that would have been condemned by the thinker whom he most admired for his views on the subject, namely Plato. Courcelle’s response to this question was that his rhetorical skills were deployed in this instance for largely theological purposes.24 This cannot be denied; yet it is doubtful that this can constitute the entire explanation for their use, since he could have accomplished the same ends through the use of purely discursive methods, without having recourse to rhetorical embellishments, as he does, for example, in books 8–15 of De Trinitate, whereas book 8 of the Confessions is unapologetically rhetorical in design and execution. In other words, it is not that Augustine made use of a rhetoric of the imagination, but that he used it deliberately and highly effectively. Despite the mystical dimension of the final scene in book 8, which takes us beyond language into the realm of faith, there is no point in the story of Augustine’s conversion when rhetoric yields to discursive theological writing; not even, I would maintain, in the celebrated analysis of the “two wills,” which immediately precedes the decision to enter the religious life, since this episode, in which there is a logical progression of ideas, achieves much of its philosophical force from Augustine’s personal anxiety as the narrative approaches its climax. These chapters, therefore, are not only a work of the imagination: they are also, in some sense, Augustine’s justification for the use of the imagination. That is the issue to which we must turn our attention.
A tentative answer to the question raised by Courcelle can be made if we recall that this approach to imagination has developed to this point in essentially three stages in the narrative books of the Confessions. The first stage is the criticism of ancient epic poetry in book 1; the second, the discussion of drama in book 3; and the last the conversion scene in book 8. The first is dominated by Plato’s rejection of poetic imagery as being misleading, chiefly in book 10 of the Republic, and the second by Quintilian’s rejection of false emotions for their inauthenticity and inability to persuade, in the texts discussed above. The second, as noted, outlines a complex theory of dramatic representation, in which a fictive external narrative in a play is replaced by a genuine internal narrative of the emotions in the interpreting subject.
The third stage in book 8 effectively combines the views of Cicero and Quintilian, while the shadow of Plato’s rejection of poetry lingers in the background of Augustine’s thinking, never forcefully restated but not entirely forgotten. His chapters in the conversion scene are comparable to Cicero’s short discourse at the beginning of the Orator in one sense, namely that they are concerned with an inner ideal, which in this case consists in the highest form of religious commitment, pure faith. They are likewise comparable to Quintilian in the use of phantasia and enargeia, which render with unique vividness the particular pathway leading to Augustine’s taking up of this commitment. What is perhaps unprecedented, at least in the light of books 1 and 3, is Augustine’s view of himself as both subject and object of his emotional evolution up to and during the conversion scene. As the actor in the drama, this time his own, he is the person who performs emotions that are described, and, as author of the drama, he is the person who analyzes the effect of the performance, both on himself and on the reader.
This design is revealed in a single line of Psalm 115:16, which is quoted in the opening phrases of book 8: “You have broken my chains.” These are the chains of sensual and emotional gratification, recalling the enslavements of sex and drama at 3.1.1–3.2.2: words that return in only a slightly different form in order to tempt him at the critical moment in his reflections on his future, when he is bemused by memories of sensual temptation (8.11.26). His desire at this point is not to be more certain of God, but to be more stable in him: non certior de te, sed stabilior in te esse cupiebam. For everything in his life up to that moment has been in the state of flux that is so memorably framed in the Confessions’ opening lines in terms of the restless heart, which can find its peace only in God.
His wavering is now between his commitment to the church and his desire for wealth and worldly honors; these are traditional topics of criticism in ancient Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic ethics. He is also considering the stability of a good marriage, which will bring him wealth and an improved social position. He goes for advice to Simplicianus, the former bishop, who baptized Ambrose, and is sent in turn to the rhetorician, Marius Victorinus, the story of whose courageous decision to be baptized in public is a model he cannot yet imitate. In a state of ever increasing anxiety,25 he receives an official called Ponticianus, who informs him of religious houses set up by Ambrose in the precincts of Milan. He is told the story of three nameless civil servants in Trier who were converted on reading the Life of St. Antony. He reflects on the numerous times he has been tempted by literary models of the Christian life and yet in the end postponed the critical decision to become part of it.
The problem arises from his will, a fact that he recognizes and mulls over in a lengthy interlude. But this is not an entirely original set of reflections. As he describes his situation, the seat of this inner struggle is once again the heart (8.8.19), that is, the source of his emotions; as a consequence, we find ourselves on the familiar ground of the discussion of real and false emotion in books 1 and 3. On this occasion it is not others’ emotions that are under consideration, namely those of characters in the Aeneid and the new comedy, but his own. His emotional isolation within his own narrative is dramatized in each of the short episodes that follow the debate on the two wills.
Still imprisoned in his thoughts, he enters the garden adjacent to the house in Milan where he and Alypius have been living together. His erratic movements and facial expressions are signs of his inner turmoil. He has in the background of his thoughts the fateful sin of Adam: this tells him that the weakness of the will and the problems of the emotions have historical origins, which mortals cannot overcome on their own. He is tormented by the memory of his old loves, but his resolve is strengthened by the appearance of two personifications, Conscience and Continence. The climax of this series of scenes is a release of pent-up emotion and a pouring forth of tears, after which he hears, or thinks he hears, a voice telling him to pick up the text of scripture, open it, and read the passage that is before his eyes. Mindful of Antony’s conversion along the same lines, he reads silently Romans 13:12–14, in which Paul admonishes his readers to forsake riots and drunkenness, eroticism and indecency, as well as useless ambitions. This is an expansion of the types of enslavements that he speaks about in book 3 (3.1.1–3.2.2).
To reiterate: this scene is a performance by Augustine for Augustine. The actor, pictured in the spring of 386, is witnessed by the author, writing in 397–400. In this way, the denouement of book 8 incorporates the scheme for persuasion through the emotions outlined by Quintilian, and does so in an original format, the autobiography. It is a format in which, through memory, the emotions act like signals that are sent and received by different states of the same person. In Quintilian there is no place for this type of retrospective imagination in the expression of emotion. In Augustine, by contrast, the emotional facts with which he is dealing turn out in the end to be fictions, since the series of events that generate these emotions is rearranged, if not invented, by himself. The imagination therefore plays a role in his theory of persuasion by means of the emotions that it does not play in Quintilian, or, for that matter, in any ancient author. In the end, Augustine’s position is one that can admit the fictitious nature of literary representations, including of course his own, provided that the recipients, including himself, are aware of their ethical implications. As author in this context, and as his own spiritual director, he is clearly the implied reader of the Confessions, who, he believes, through a false story, may undergo a true conversion.
I now turn to the second topic of this chapter, in which my purpose is to provide an outline of the way Augustine uses sacred reading as a framework for the creative imagination in his configuration of the self. Once again my discussion is divided into two parts. In the first, I continue the analysis of lectio divina from Chapter 1 and provide one example of Augustine’s adaptation of the technique from the Confessions.26 In the second, I turn to the history of phantasia/imaginatio, drawing attention to the manner in which Augustine combines the program of sacred reading with the concept of the rhetorical or literary imagination.
I begin with a necessary word about the conception of the self within the religious writings of the period. In John Cassian, Benedict, Gregory the Great, and other pastoral authors, the prevailing attitude toward the self, as noted in Chapter 1, was essentially that of self-effacement. The readers of biblical texts thought of themselves as being insignificant before the omnipotent word of God. By reading in an ascetic or meditative fashion, in which the subjective and interpretive dimensions of the reading process were subordinated to the objectivity of the scriptural text, these readers indirectly acknowledged this relationship. In Cassian and Benedict it is through continual prayer that a person of a contemplative or spiritual turn of mind is able gradually to become acquainted with his true and inner self, which, as a dimension of the soul, is imprinted with the permanence of God’s “image and likeness.”
The energies of the monastic reader in search of self-knowledge were thus concentrated on cognitive and emotional interaction with biblical texts. The passages selected for these readings were read slowly and reflectively, with both body and mind. They were first voiced aloud, and at the same time thought about, then re-voiced in the mind, as this meditative thinking proceeded. As some monastic writers put it, the texts were masticated, as if they were a kind of physical nourishment, in the hope that spiritual “digestion” would ensue. This type of reading involved a great deal of repetition; it also meant that texts from different historical layers of the Bible were read and reread in essentially the same way. Although it was recognized by such writers as Jerome and Augustine that a diversity of statements and styles of expression were found in the Bible, they were convinced that the purpose of all of them was the same, namely the reinforcement of faith.
In its combination of the physical and mental, this activity can be contrasted with the reading that is associated with various forms of exegesis, interpretation, or hermeneutics. Despite a commitment to self-effacement comparable to what is found in lectio divina, there was in this approach to texts a process of self-exploration at work, which brought into play the reader’s creative imagination. In the purest forms of lectio divina, such as those reported by John Cassian, one can speak of the attitude of the reader toward his personal self during the reading experience as passive or receptive. By contrast, in interpretive and reconstructive reading, the reader’s disposition was active and outgoing, inasmuch as a part of the reading experience consisted in the internal examination of his subjective reaction to the text: a reaction which, needless to say, could be the result of a diversity of influences, including gender, educational levels, and material conditions. In distinguishing between these two types of reading, temporal factors also came into play, since, in lectio divina and interpretive reading respectively, the question of the nature of the self arose within different zones of time. In lectio divina, in which the text was read, recited, or committed to memory, the consideration of the self came about within the same period of time in which the oral reading was taking place. By contrast, in interpretive reading, whether it was carried on orally or silently, alone or in a group, questions of selfhood entered the process chiefly, if not exclusively, after the oral performative reading was finished.
The guidelines for lectio divina, that is, for noninterpretive sacred reading and self-direction, remained relatively stable throughout the Middle Ages; however, those concerned with interpretive reading underwent a considerable evolution, resulting in a complex three- or fourfold method for making sense of biblical texts. Two of these, the literal and anagogical, related directly to the reader’s construction of self. By the fifteenth century the branch of sacred interpretive reading known as lectio spiritualis, which developed out of lectio divina, had been expanded to cover a wide range of reading, writing, and contemplative strategies in the field of religion. These interpretive procedures were eventually codified, as in the case of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, and in this form they represented an alternative to the conventional ways of approaching the self through more systematic thinking in philosophy or theology, in particular with those associated with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. In the practices or exercises involved in lectio spiritualis, the question of the self was addressed locally and pragmatically in a textual context (as later in Montaigne, who practices a secular version of this type of meditative reading). In this approach, there was normally a dialogue between reader and text that effectively revived and extended the Socratic elenchus; however, in this case the interchange did not take place between individuals representing different positions, as in Plato, or in his late ancient admirers, such as Epictetus, but in a literary and commemorative genre of dialogue in which an individual carried on a conversation with himself alone.
As it grew into a major approach to the institution of readership in the late Middle Ages, this type of reading increasingly made use of both words and images. Here again, its practices differed from those of late ancient sacred reading, at least as recorded by John Cassian. In this style of reading the reader was chiefly concerned with images arising in biblical texts, whereas in later medieval interpretive reading consideration was given to images as they arose in the texts and in the reader’s mind, as well as to the potential relationship between the two. It must be kept in mind that during the late ancient period, when there were precedents for lectio spiritualis, such images were almost exclusively depictions of religious subjects. Also, only a small number of the period’s commentators on the question of images made a connection between the visual meditations inspired by sacred texts and the vehicle in which such images were coming into being, namely the reader’s imagination. Among these were Augustine and Boethius, who set the stage for medieval explorations of the self in an autobiographical and imaginative form, frequently using images as their point of departure.
There is one other feature of this branch of sacred interpretive reading to which attention should be drawn in connection with the history of the self. This consists in the capacity of the contemplative methods to which I have been referring to overcome the diversity of medieval languages by means of an intellectual procedure that was in principle accessible to them all, namely reading. As noted, during the late Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages the unity of classical Latin was challenged by a wide variety of neo-Latin and proto-Romance languages. As a consequence of this linguistic evolution, it is not possible to look upon the medieval notion of the self—if indeed we may speak of there being only one such notion—as developing from a single conceptual model arising in grammatically inert classical Latin. The chief unifying force in thinking on the self was in fact derived from reading, or more precisely, from sacred reading, which was the most widespread form of the discipline in the late ancient and medieval periods. This heritage of connections between the reader and the self was passed on to the Romance languages, which constituted the medium in which problems of the self were increasingly presented after the twelfth century, however now within a greater diversity of interpretative procedures and more complex relations between authors and audiences, culminating in Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, published in 1305, which justifies the use of Tuscan alongside Latin. By means of this historical development, as it spread to other languages, reading gradually democratized thinking about the self in a manner that had not been possible in disciplines such as ancient philosophy and rhetoric, in which training was restricted to a tiny élite.
To summarize: the approaches to the self that arise, respectively, from noninterpretive and interpretive sacred reading are essentially those of self-effacement and self-construction. Augustine brought the two together into a single view of the self; however, the work of combination had already begun in sacred reading itself, since lectio spiritualis, in its early phase of development, shared the same meditative and contemplative methodology. It follows that, instead of configuring independent notions of self-identity for these practices, one might think of them, however cautiously, as representing different aspects of a single perspective. In this view, a late ancient and medieval notion of the self that is implicit in the discipline of sacred reading may not be one in which total self-effacement is considered desirable nor one in which there is envisaged a wholly autonomous type of self-construction. That is what we find in Augustine’s ambivalent attitude toward the self, which consists, on the one hand, in elements of self-denigration arising from the view that sin is ineradicable in mortals, and on the other, in elements associated with the more individualistic notion of the self, based on such notions as subjective self-awareness and freedom of will.
The method most frequently utilized to achieve this equilibrium in Augustine is the same as in earlier noninterpretive and interpretive traditions, namely the use of reading, writing, and other contemplative disciplines. It is through this process that the individual practicing a form of sacred reading, whether this was reading itself or one of its derivatives (such as psalmody or liturgy), was able to humble himself before the biblical text and to eliminate from the encounter with God’s word any unwanted features of his self. It is through the same method that the individual engaged in interpretive reading was able to concentrate his energies on an internal extension of the writings before him, which effectively became an extension of himself. Of course individual readers could and did interpret this ascetic program in different ways and, in one way or the other, all of them moved toward the poles of self-effacement or self-construction. But rarely do we find a reader who carries self-effacement to such an extreme that we know nothing about his personality from the record left by his writings. Equally rarely do we find a spiritual reader who is so taken up with internal self-construction that there is no echo of the foundations of his thinking in the sacred texts with which his speculations have begun.
As an illustration of this cooperative engagement in the creation of a notion of selfhood, I would like to look briefly at Confessions 5.1.1–5.2.2. This passage consists in two paragraphs of confessional prayer preceding Augustine’s account of his meeting with the Manichaean bishop, Faustus of Milev, at age twenty-nine, possibly in 383.
The prayer is a brilliant combination of the reading techniques associated with both noninterpretive and interpretive reading. At one level, namely that of lectio divina, Augustine’s devotional statement consists in a series of quotations from scripture, chiefly taken from the Psalms, but also from Paul, the Book of Wisdom, and Revelation; at another, it can be approached as a group of reflections on philosophical and theological topics drawn chiefly from Paul and Plotinus. In the sections of the prayer that arise from the method of noninterpretive sacred reading, Augustine’s personality is dramatically subordinated to the passages of scripture to which he alludes through carefully selected phrases. In those arising from other sources, each statement makes a contribution to a presentation of self that is articulated within the themes of sin, redemption, and salvation. It is as a dimension of this theological design that Augustine’s self-construction takes place at this critical moment in the Confessions, when he is about to abandon dualism for a more integrative view of the self within his return to traditional Christianity and eventual conversion to the religious life.
The use of the methods associated with lectio divina is made clear from the opening statement, in which he implores God:
“Accipe sacrificium” confessionum mearum “de manu linguae meae.” (5.1.1., 1–2).
“Accept the sacrifice” of my confessions from “the hand of my tongue.”
Here we have two phrases drawn from scripture, namely accipe sacrificium (cf. Ps. 50:21) and de manu linguae meae (Prov. 18:21), the latter being a virtual catchword for the type of oral reading and devotion associated with lectio divina (cf. Rom. 10:8). Further quotations in the opening phrases confirm the impression that the foundation of these two paragraphs consists in Augustine’s previous readings, recitations, and memorizations of scriptural texts. He wishes to confess in God’s name (ut confitear nomini tuo, Ps. 53:8); he begs God through his words to “heal” his “bones” (et sana omnia ossa mea, Ps. 6:3), so that they might declare, “Lord, who is like you?” (et dicant: domine, quis similis tibi?: Ps. 6:3; Ps. 34:10). He admits that he cannot hide from God’s sacred fire (5.1.1, 4–7; Ps. 18:7). He praises God in love and confesses his mercies in praise (5.1.1, 7–8; Ps 118:17, Ps 118:75, Ps. 145:2, Ps. 106:8, 15, etc.). His weary soul rises slowly upward, supported by the works of God’s creation and in the end transcending them (5.1.1, 11–13; Ps. 71:18; Ps. 135:4). He knows that only the restless and wicked attempt to flee the deity (5.2.2; 1, Ps. 67:2), but it is impossible to get beyond his reach (5.2.5; Ps. 138:7). In blindness the wicked stumble (5.2.6; Rom. 11:7–11). They have abandoned God but do not realize that he will not abandon them (5.2.7; Wisd. 11;25). In time he will wipe away their tears (5.2.16; Rev. 7:17; Rev. 21:4).
If we examine the contexts from which these references to scripture are drawn, it becomes clear that they form part of a larger design than is contained in the phrases themselves. This is suggested by means of the renunciation of sin and the consequent upward movement of the soul. The project is announced in the opening statement of 5.1.1, which combines the ideas of sacrifice and confession. In Psalm 50, which is the probable source of this connection, the psalmist says,
Have mercy on me, O God.
In your great tenderness wipe away my faults. . . .
For I am well aware of my shortcomings,
I have my sin constantly before me. (Ps. 50:2–5)
The other references to scripture at 5.1.1 reinforce these statements—the inability to conceal one’s sins from God (Ps. 18:7), the necessity of thanks and praise (Ps. 118:175, etc.), and the notion of the mind’s elevation (Ps. 71:18; 135:4).
Subsequently, two components of the design are revealed to the reader. One is the predictable theme of self-effacement. Within the biblical passages to which allusion is made, as well as within Augustine’s comments, there is little overt talk of the self. The emphasis is on the words of scripture, as they are read and meditated. The author’s self is not by any means obliterated: it is present as a thinking and feeling entity, whose vehicle is Augustine’s voice, as conveyed in the cadences of his literary style. However, within the opening phrases of 5.1.1, it is also made clear by Augustine that this authorial and speaking self is not an autonomous force but is being configured, as noted, in a literary fashion beneath the omnipresent panoply of scripture, which acts as its framework and scaffolding. His words are offered to God by means of “the hand” of “the tongue” (Prov. 18:21), but it is the words of scripture that “heal” (Ps. 6:3). God has no need of his words in order to know what is in his heart (5.1.1, 4–7). As a consequence, there is no point in his talking about himself.
Yet, even during this process of effacement, a second theme makes its appearance; this consists in a subtle depiction of Augustine’s inner self in Confessions 5.1.1–2, which is given literary shape by a combination of biblical and philosophical sources, essentially, as noted, those of Paul and Plotinus, which are organized by means of the principles of sacred interpretive reading. The way is prepared in 5.1.1 and developed in 5.2.2. In 5.1.1, Augustine observes that the heart of man may be closed but is incapable of permanently shutting out God. One of the paths by which God finds his way into the person’s inner core is through the subject’s awareness of divine creativity, which is present everywhere in life:
Your creation never ceases to praise you. Every spirit continually praises you with mouth turned toward you; animals and physical matter find a voice through those who contemplate them.27
The praise that is mentioned here recalls the meditative space of the opening lines of book 1, in which there appears, tentatively at first but unmistakeable in its contours, the struggling self of Augustine himself:
To praise God is the desire of man, who is a little piece of your creation. You inspire him to take pleasure in offering your praise, because he is your creation. (Conf., 1.1.1, 6–7)
In a metaphor with possible Plotinian roots, Augustine thus envisages the fallen as having a shadowy, insubstantial existence, like areas of darkness in a bright and beautiful painting (5.2.2, 1–3).28 Paraphrasing a passage from Romans 11:7–11, he pictures those who flee from God as inadvertently stumbling over him in their darkness. For they do not realize that God is to be found not in one place but everywhere:
No space circumscribes you. You alone are always present, even to those who have taken themselves far from you. . . . Let them turn, and at once you are in their heart—in the heart of those who make confession. (5.2.2, 10–12)
Here, notably, one does not come upon the passages of scripture that are Augustine’s point of departure at 5.1.1, but the inner life of the subject himself, as his self, informed by those passages, seeks to define itself and to define its relationship to God. In a final plea for self-enlightenment, Augustine asks:
Where was I when I was seeking for you? You were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you.
The final message of Confessions 5.1.1–2 is that the authentic person whom Augustine is looking for has in fact been found, and this has come about by means of a movement in his thinking from lectio divina to interpretive and imaginative reading.
I would now like to turn to the sources of this imaginative element. This involves approaching the issues from another direction, namely the transformation of the notion of the imagination itself, as represented by the Greek term phantasia and its Latin translation in Augustine’s writings as imaginatio.
The roots of his thinking on the subject are not altogether clear. He did not have access to the central texts on phantasia in Plato, Aristotle, or the Stoics, in which the term is used chiefly in discussions of the theory of knowledge; he had to rely on the restatement of their views in the works of later thinkers, among them Cicero, Quintilian, and especially Plotinus, who, although a Platonist, placed a high value on knowledge acquired by means of the senses.
From this branch of Platonic thinking Augustine absorbed the view that it was necessary for the mind, in its interpreting function, to pass judgment on sensory impressions, in order not only to show what they have in common and how they differ, but to inquire into the source, nature, and validity of the impressions themselves.29 From the Aristotelian tradition he appears to have adopted the distinction between phantasia and perception, proposing that the one, concerning sense impressions alone, is comparable to a physical capacity, such as sight, whereas the other, involving the interpretive capacity of the mind, can take place when nothing is actually seen, as in a dream or vision. This is his position in book 12 of De Genesi ad Litteram, as well as earlier, in the dialogue Contra Academicos, where he demonstrates an awareness of the Stoic doctrine by which the senses were considered to be a source of certainty concerning objects as well as the conceptions that they bring about in the mind, which were termed kataleptikai phantasiai.
A more direct source for his views on the imagination was a work by Plato with which it is certain he was familiar. This is the Latin translation of the Timaeus, which was widely read in late antiquity. Under its influence, and in harmony with his successive interpretations of the book of Genesis, Augustine grounded his thinking on interpretation in a manner that placed emphasis on the passage of objective time. On this view, there are essentially two kinds of knowledge, which correspond to different levels of being or existence. These are represented respectively by the eternal world of God and the temporal world of mortals. The one can be understood through the mind, and is the source of truth, while the other is grasped by means of the senses, and, as Plato argued, is sustained principally by doxa or opinion. Truth is perceived fully by God alone, although glimpses are occasionally permitted to mortals in exceptional circumstances. It is here that the Augustinian notion of the imagination came into play, both as an interpretive tool and, as noted, as an element in self-construction, in the Confessions.
As creator of heaven and earth, the god of the Timaeus is conceived as a supreme artist, and the created world is his acknowledged masterpiece. By contrast, human artists, working on more manageable projects, have to rely on a combination of perception and intuition. In this type of Platonism, when
mingled with Stoicism, the status of phantasia was . . . elevated because phantasia was central to the Stoic theory of knowledge. . . . The once lowly phantasia (in Platonic and Aristotelian thinking) was to be praised as the faculty which could give us unexpected visions of reality. After that the development of the notion of the creative imagination was easy.30
However, there is one feature of phantasia that is found in Augustine but not in Plato, although it consists in a Christian adaptation of the scheme for creation that is similar in some respects to that of the Timaeus. This concerns the role of history, which, in Augustine’s writings on the subject, acts as an intermediary between the eternal and temporal dimensions of existence. The Platonic elements in this design came to Augustine via philosophy, in particular from his reading of Plotinus and possibly Porphyry in the spring of 386; the historical perspective was a product of his studies in the Bible during the same period, in particular from his interpretation of the Pauline letters. In his synthesis of these traditions he argues that our primary source of information about the world consists in what we receive through the five senses (as well as a sixth, the internal sense, which transfers the data of the other senses to the mind); however, everything in the universe that is perceived through the senses and understood in the mind has been brought into being by means of a historical process. Augustine was also convinced that, however much we learn from the senses and however much we may be capable of subjecting that acquired knowledge to philosophical analysis, it is nonetheless the authoritative text of scripture, as a repository of historical facts, from which we learn the most concerning the reality of the existing world. This is because the Bible is the chief source accessible to mortals on God’s original and continuing activity.
This notion of historically grounded but ongoing creativity differs from the view of creation that is found in Augustine’s chief nonbiblical source on the subject, namely Plotinus, who, as noted, is an important commentator on the problem of phantasia and one of his chief sources of inspiration. A text that forcefully illustrates this difference is found at Enneads 3.8.3–4, where Plotinus discusses the creative dimension of nature. Here it is proposed that if nature causes other things to move and change while remaining unmoved and unchanged itself, then nature must be part of a creative and contemplative process which is itself changeless. But how can nature be said to be something that contemplates and at the same time something that is the result of contemplation? Plotinus argues that this cannot come about merely by a sort of reason or reasoning (logos). For, if by “nature” we mean what it is, we cannot separate what nature is from what nature does. Its making must, so to speak, be a type of contemplation and its contemplation a type of making (3.8.3):
If anyone were to ask nature why it creates, if nature cared to listen and to reply to the inquirer, it would say: “You ought not ask but to understand in silence: you, I mean—just as I am silent and not in the habit of talking. Understand what, you ask? That what comes into being is what I see in my silence, as an object of contemplation. . . . My act of contemplation makes what it contemplates, as the geometers draw their figures while they contemplate.”31
Plotinus may have in mind Plato’s description of geometrical configurations at Timaeus 53C–55C, but, as Hilary Armstrong remarks, “the intuitive spontaneity of the process here, as contrasted with the careful and deliberate mathematical planning in Plato’s symbolical description, brings out clearly an important difference in the mentality of the two philosophers.”32
Plotinus likewise differs from Augustine, who would have read this passage with interest. In his writings on the topic, the notion of intuitive spontaneity is associated not with an abstract contemplative process, as in the quoted passage, but with the historical activity of God, as noted, in the original and continuing creative processes in the universe. In accounting for this development Augustine attributes Plotinus’s idea of creativity in nature to the activity of the will in God, which, in a comparable manner, creates what and when it desires to do so and is not in any way dependent on the actions or thoughts of mortals. In Plotinus and Augustine the basic causal principle is similar: this is not a form of rationality, as in Plato, but a dialogic process within nature itself, about which Plotinus is led to ask:
What does this mean? That what is called nature is a soul, the offspring of a prior soul with a stronger life; that it quietly holds contemplation in itself, not directed upward or even downward, but at rest in what it is, in its own repose and a kind of self-perception, and in this consciousness and self-perception it sees what comes after it. . . . If anyone wants to attribute to it understanding or perception, it will not be the understanding or perception we speak of in other beings: it will be like comparing the consciousness of someone fast asleep to the consciousness of someone awake. For Nature is at rest in the contemplation of itself. (3.8.4)
If we substitute God for the personified Nature in such a statement, and add Augustine’s distinction between two types of sensory impression, phantasia and phantasma, we have the connection between Plotinus’s notion of the creative process through nature and Augustine’s notion of the creative process through history.
It would appear, therefore, that, using Platonic, Stoic, and Plotinian sources, although we are not sure in what order of priority, Augustine possessed all the necessary equipment for a new and interesting synthesis on the workings of phantasia. However, as I see it, while the elements of a consistent and consolidated view of the issues are present in his various statements on the theme of the imagination, the synthesis itself, which many scholars have hoped to find in these discussions, was never actually written. The closest Augustine came to stating his views on the subject in a fully coherent form was in a literary rather than philosophical work, namely the Confessions. His systematic and philosophical statements on the theme are partial and incomplete. The lack of a fully worked out view of the problems in his discursive writings on phantasia can be demonstrated through a brief review of three of his major comments on the subject, which take place, respectively, in letters 6 and 7, in book 12 of De Genesi ad Litteram, and in book 8 of De Trinitate, to which I now turn.
Augustine’s earliest reflection on phantasia, and his only completely philosophical statement on the theme, takes place in an exchange of letters with Nebridius, in 389. In letter 3, written to his young friend two years earlier, Augustine had stated that “the sensible world is certainly—although how I don’t know—an image of the intelligible.”33 He added to this Platonic dogma a series of questions and answers:
Of what do we consist? Soul and body. Which is preferable? The soul, of course. What is praiseworthy in the body? Nothing but beauty. And what is the body’s beauty? A harmony of its parts, along with agreeable coloration.
In his mind, the central issue was whether
this form is better when it is true or false? Who would doubt that, when it is true, it is better. But where is it “true”? In the soul, surely. Consequently the soul is to be loved and esteemed more than the body. But in what part of the soul does this truth exist? In the mind and understanding. What is the opposite of these? The senses.
Nebridius had responded to these statements with a number of queries, but these, his student notes, had gone unanswered.34 Yet the discussion had evidently advanced beyond the initial consideration of the sensible and intelligible components of reality,35 since, in letter 6, where it is next taken up, Nebridius is able to refer to their previous exchange of views as having already passed through its preliminary stages. In a rhetorical flourish, he acknowledges the contribution to his thinking that has been made by his master’s careful documentation of the teachings of Christ, Plato, and Plotinus; however, he prefers to turn his attention to two questions that have arisen out of their own long-standing discussion. These have to do with memory and images. In his view not every image requires memory, but no memory can exist without an image (quamuis non omnia phantasia cum memoria sit, omnis tamen memoria sine phantasia esse non possit). He asks Augustine whether he agrees.
The second of these questions is the more straightforward of the two. Nebridius is asking whether the operation of the imagination can take place without the participation of the senses.36 If so, this would account for the fact that we sometimes have images in our minds that have not arisen from the outside but are produced when the mind is directed by the senses to the contemplation of its own internally generated forms.
The first question is more complicated, because it is more general in scope, and anticipates a problem that might have been raised by Augustine himself, if one takes into account the views that he subsequently expresses in letter 7. This concerns what happens in the mind when we remember what we have understood or thought about anything (quid, cum recordamur nos intellexisse aut cogitasse aliquid?).
Nebridius’s answer to this hypothetical problem is not altogether clear and involves a pair of alternative routes from the senses to the imagination, between which he appears reluctant to choose. When we have understood anything that is corporeal or temporal, he states, we generate what pertains to mental impression or to imagination (genuimus quod ad phantasiam pertinet). Then we do one of two things: (1) we join words to understanding and thought; words, that is, which are not lacking a temporal dimension and which pertain to sense or imagination; or (2) we have experienced something through thought and understanding that is able to produce a memory in the imaginative part of the soul.37 Nebridius is in a quandary on the matter and asks his teacher for help.
Augustine’s answer is found in letter 7 and contains his earliest and possibly finest statement on the use of the creative imagination for literary and ethical purposes. He disagrees with Nebridius’s notion that memory cannot exist without the images or imaginary appearances that his friend terms phantasiae.38 However, in responding to this view, he points out that, while by means of memory we recall things from the past (rerum praeteuntium), nonetheless the memories by which we engage in this recollection appear in our minds as they exist in the present (manentium). As examples of this double view, Augustine notes that while he remembers his father, Patrick, who died sometime in the past, he also remembers that his father is no longer alive, and this occurs in the present. Again, he remembers Carthage, which he left as a young teacher of rhetoric, and yet he recalls that Carthage still exists, despite the passage of time since he left. In both cases something from the past is stored in memory, which is active in the present, and yet the two entities are remembered, namely his father and a city, from what he saw rather than from what he sees.39
His account of these relationships, which are attributed to phantasia, represents a change of direction, and in some sense an advance in thinking on the nature of the imagination in previous writing on the subject in the sources that we can ascertain that he had read. He agrees with Nebridius on one point: an object that is perceived cannot become a memory without at the same time becoming an imaginary appearance (uiso illo imaginario), which, he notes, is usually called phantasia. But he draws his friend’s attention to the fact that there are types of memory for which no inner visual representation is needed. These consist in information of a conceptual nature, which, unlike sense data, may be lodged in our memories without our being aware of it. His example of this type of knowledge is taken from Socrates’s account in the Meno of an uneducated slave boy who, without any instruction in geometry, was able to solve simple geometrical problems through a series of Socrates’s questions and answers.
As I will argue in Chapter 5, Augustine does not adhere to the doctrine of reminiscence, by which, Plato proposed, such knowledge is transferred from one soul to another, but he is convinced that we possess certain mental endowments, such as the capacity for speech, numbers, or memory, which are lodged in us from birth and can be brought out by teaching, in which a kind of mimesis plays a part.40 These capacities differ from the memories of specific things or events, whose existence in our minds depends on the past of our personal experience and the formation of mental impressions. As principles by which the mind works, the knowledge of speaking or numbers has a latent but permanent presence in our minds, and, as such, has no need of stimulation by means of the external senses or the resulting internal formation of images (imaginatione). In this sense, these fall outside the range of phantasia.
Augustine dismisses Nebridius’s notion that the soul, if deprived of the outer senses, would be able to form accurate images (imaginari) of things in the external world. If that were the case, the mental images produced by those experiencing dreams or hallucinations, being internally generated, might be judged as reliable as those that are based on things that are actually seen. According to his understanding of Platonic principles, these images might be considered more trustworthy than those originating through the senses, owing to the possibility of errors in sense perception. Consequently, as Augustine sees the issues, the faculty of image formation (imaginatio), which originates entirely in the mind, cannot be viewed as a type of recollection in the mind (commemoratio . . . in anima), but must be seen as an inference based on potential or actual error (falsitatis inlatio), or, more accurately, on its mental imprint or impression (inpressio). In advancing this idea, Augustine is aware that, in the imagination of people who are awake, as well as in the mental processes of those who are asleep or insane, the mind is capable of producing forms that the subjects have never actually seen (ut eas formas et facies cogitetur quas numquam uidimus, 7.2.3).
It would appear, therefore, that phantasia operates equally well with realities, which we sense, and with fictions, which we invent. This is an important connection, to which Augustine devotes the remainder of letter 7, beginning with a recapitulation of his views in the form of a classificatory scheme. The types of images to which Nebridius is referring, which he, like so many others, calls phantasiae, can be divided into three classes (in tria genera), insofar as they are produced (1) by the senses or by sensing (sensis), (2) by reflection or thought (putatis), or (3) by calculation or determination (ratis, 7.2.4).41 As examples of (1) he offers things that he has actually seen, such as the appearance of Nebridius, the grammarian Verecundus (whose villa at Cassiciacum he was lent in the winter of 386–387), or the city of Carthage (where he once studied and taught). For (3) he gives the examples of numbers and dimensions; the latter are of two sorts, namely those found in nature and those produced by the mind. As an instance of the former, he suggests the shape of the universe or numbers, and of the latter, geometrical figures or musical rhythms.
In case (1) potential error is avoided by physical appearance and in (3) by logic and reason. A lengthier explanation is provided for case (2), which Augustine evidently finds difficult to discuss as precisely as (1) and (3). In attempting to give an account of this type of phantasia (which he laconically characterizes through the past participle of putare, meaning here to think, suppose, or illustrate), he provides the reader with his first extensive description of the literary and philosophical imagination in his writings.
To this faculty, he notes, belong the images of things that we suppose to have been so, or even in reality to have been so (quae putamus ita se habuisse uel se habere), the former suggesting, as elsewhere, the possibility of being taken in by one’s own perceptions and fantasies. We either think up these phantasiae ourselves (ipsi fingimus) or configure them (figuramus) indirectly, for example, when a story is read to us, or when we hear, compose, or have an inkling of a fabulous tale (cum legitur historia et cum fabulosa uel audimus uel componimus uel suspicamur).
Augustine divides these products of the imagination into two kinds, namely figures taken from literature and figures invented to support an author’s position. The first includes images that appear in the mind (ut occurrit animo) based on the reading of literary texts or in attendance at the theater, for example, the face of Aeneas, the figure of Medea in her chariot of winged serpents, or characters in the comedies of Terence, such as Chremes or Parmeno. The second includes a variety of images to which the erudite (sapientes) resort in communicating what is true by what is false, for the sake of the ignorant or uneducated (stulti). The latter are frequently based on superstition but alleged to be fact by the speaker; examples include the inferno of Phlegeton and the wooden stake that allegedly supports the northern sky, (and notions of this sort, he observes, arise with unusual frequency in the minds of such unreliable observers of the outside world as poets and heretics). It is legitimate, he proposes, to use these and equally improbable notions when we are engaged in configuring or thinking of something (fingimus et putamus), or when support is sought for one or another position in open debate (inter disputandum, 7.2.4). But these thoughts are not of course to be trusted, since, as pure creations of the imagination, they are falser than images based on the senses (at istas imagines quis dubitauerit istis sensibilibus multo esse falsiores, 7.2.5).
In a final statement Augustine attempts to give a psychological dimension to these invented images. How does it come about, he asks, that we think of things that we do not see? This could not take place unless there were a certain power inherent in the mind of diminishing and increasing (nisi esse uim quandam minuendi et augendi animae insitam, 7.3.6). This perceptual capacity can be observed, for example, when a bird such as a crow comes into view, since it seems to increase in size as it comes closer. By subtracting or adding to its features, which we recognize, it is even possible, by means of a mental configuration alone, to produce the features of a bird that no one has ever seen.
Such invented or fictional images are able to break into our thoughts spontaneously (in talibus animis figurae huiusce modi uelut sua sponte cogitationibus inruant), proving to Augustine’s satisfaction that it is possible for the mind of the person imagining (animae imaginanti) to produce things by addition or subtraction which in their totality have not been experienced by the senses, even though from time to time parts of them may have been perceived. As an example, Augustine offers himself, who, as a child reared near the Mediterranean, was able to imagine the sea from seeing only the movement of water in a small cup, whereas, until he came to Italy, the taste of strawberries and cherries, which he did not know in his youth, was impossible for him to imagine.
In letters 6 and 7 Augustine and Nebridius discuss the imagination through epistolary dialogue. One has the impression of a well-articulated but reasonably spontaneous exchange of views on a long-standing philosophical problem. There are references to supporting texts in letter 7 (e.g., the plays of Terence), but by and large the two parties in the conversation base their statements on their own reasoning.
By contrast, Augustine’s lengthy discussion on the imagination in book 12 of De Genesi ad Litteram takes the form of a commentary on a biblical text, namely 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, where Paul relates the following story:
I know that fourteen years ago a Christian man was laid hold of and as such taken all the way to the third heaven, whether in the body I do not know or whether out of the body I do not know—God knows; and I know that this man was caught up into paradise, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows—and that he heard unutterable words that a man is not permitted to speak.42
This statement is the point of departure for a lengthy discussion of visual representations in which the Pauline text is analyzed at three levels: (1) the original experience of mental elevation, (2) the interpretation of this experience by Paul, and (3) the philosophical implications, as implied by Paul according to Augustine.
The discussion is divided into two sections. Chapters 1–5 are concerned with Paul’s assertions about what he did and did not know about the transport of the unnamed Christian to the third heaven, and in some sense to paradise, and with whether these experiences differed or were the same. Chapter 6 introduces the more general problem of visiones, which takes up the remainder of the book (cc. 6–37). Since visio, in the sense of an appearance or something seen, is an acceptable translation of phantasia, the second section of De Genesi 12 has to be considered one of Augustine’s lengthy statements on this aspect of the creative imagination.
By way of introduction to this theme, he proposes that there is one type of visio that excels all others. This takes place when something is seen, not as an image of an object, imaginatively (imaginaliter), but in itself (proprie). This is a reiteration of one of the ideas put forward by Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine himself on the question of artistic or poetic inspiration, now, however, illustrated by a biblical text and as a result placed in an exegetical context. From a philosophical point of view, Augustine is saying that the sort of visio which is seen in itself is not seen through the body (non per corpus videtur), that is, by means of the external sense of sight (12.6.15), but internally, in the mind.
After making this clear, he abandons the purely philosophical discussion of the issues and introduces a classification of visiones based on levels of meaning in the scriptural maxim, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). When this precept is read (in hoc praecepto cum legitur), he notes, it becomes apparent that there are three classes of visions (tria genera visionum).
1. The first is that which takes place by means of the eyes and consists in the visual perception of the letters of the written text (unum per oculos, quibus ipsae litterae videntur). In this case a physical object is physically perceived.
2. The second is that which arises in the spirit of man, when a neighbor is thought about, even though he may be absent (alterum per spiritum hominis quo proximus et absens cogitatur). Here a physical being is recalled as a physical presence but not as a physical reality, perceptible to the senses.
3. The third arises through the focusing of the mind’s attention, by which the love in question is itself brought into view (tertium per contuitum mentis, quo ipsa dilectio intellecta conspicitur). Here the meaning of an abstract notion is arrived at by inner vision or perception alone.
It is these divisions that Augustine subsequently employs as a model for understanding the type of visio that is involved in Paul’s story at 2 Cor. 12:2–4. The next stage of the argument takes place at De Genesi 12.6.15. Here he reiterates the threefold division of images that is discussed in letter 7, namely those arising from sensory impressions, suppositions or recollections, and the by-products of thought. However, a modification is introduced: the images in the third category, that is, those originating in the mind, are understood to arise from either seeing or reading. This raises the possibility of moving back and forth between philosophy and exegetical theology on the assumption that, with respect to visiones, comparable operations of the mind are involved.
This interdependence, I suggest, accounts for a change in the threefold scheme as initially proposed: it shifts the subsequent discussion of visiones into a form in which greater weight is given to theology than to either philosophy or rhetoric. The change is not evident in Augustine’s reflections on the first type of visio, which, he notes, can take in everything in earth or heaven that can be seen with the naked eye, or with the second, which consists in corporeal things, even if absent, that require the operation of memory and image formation.
The first case is self-evident and requires no commentary on Augustine’s part. He takes as the second the occasion when we visualize earth or heaven while in the dark; at that point, he correctly observes, we are seeing not with our eyes, that is, with our bodies, but with our minds or souls (ubi nihil videntes oculis corporis, animo tamen corporales imagines intuemur). What we have in view may consist in the true (veras) images of things we have previously seen, which have been retained in memory, or, alternately, those that are made up (fictas), as it were, by thought or imagination (cogitatio).43
When we turn to the third category, we encounter an implied orientation toward exegesis which characterizes much of the subsequent discussion of visiones. For this type of visio, by which we have in inner view of our love for our neighbor, is the product not of seeing but of reading, instruction, and subsequent reflection. In Augustine’s view, this type of visio is superior to visiones 1 and 2, since its content cannot be seen as an image similar to itself but is seen in itself (eas res conspicitur). For love, he notes, is not visualized in one way when it is present and in another way when it is absent: it can only be seen clearly in one way, since its image is entirely produced in the mind. It has presence and permanence in itself.
The types of visiones to which Augustine has been referring by means of illustrations from scriptural texts are now denominated as corporale, spirituale, and intellectuale (12.6.16). Of these terms, the first presents no problems, since it is entirely dependent on the senses, while the third, called intellectuale or intelligibile, is proper to the mind, which only sees through itself (mens quippe non videtur nisi mente, 12.10.21). However, the term spirituale requires a word of explanation (12.6.18).
Two connotative fields are singled out for discussion, one historical, the other psychological. The first arises from the contrast between the “natural” and “spiritual” in conceptions of the body, to which Paul refers in stating: “What is sown as a natural body shall rise as a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44). In Augustine’s view, this refers to the state of the body after the resurrection, when it will be revived in the spirit alone and have no need of corporeal underpinnings. In this respect the meaning of “spirit” is roughly equivalent to that of “soul,” as suggested by a number of scriptural texts (e.g., Ps. 148:8; Eccles. 3:21).
The other sense of “spirit,” which is more relevant to the discussion at 12.6.16, is one in which the term “spiritual” is used for describing the activity of the mind itself, in the exercise of reason and judgment which characterizes the understanding of every sort of image. For there exists in every mortal, Augustine notes, what may be termed an eye of the soul, to which pertain the image and knowledge of God,44 and this has its origin in the soul’s very creation. In support of this notion he makes reference to two Pauline texts in which attention is drawn to the notions of imago and agnitio (image and knowledge). These are Ephesians 4:23–24 and Colossians 3:10, where, respectively, the apostle speaks of putting on the new man (induit novum hominem), created in accordance with God’s design, and renewing the interior man in the knowledge of God according to the divine image by which he was originally created (qui renovatur in agnitione Dei, secundum imaginem ejus qui creavit eum).
Spirituale here is opposed to corporale, as Augustine notes, citing texts such as Galatians 5:17, where Paul speak of the desires of the flesh working against the spirit, and John 4:24, where the apostle refers to worshipping God in spirit and in truth (in spiritu et veritate). While truth, as an idea in the mind, is in principle separated from the body, there are occasions when an element of corporality is present; an example arises, as previously noted, if I think of the neighbor whom I love as myself, even though he may be absent (cf. Matt. 22:39). In this case I am seeing an object in my mind which has a body and I am seeing it in itself, rather than as an image; yet I am not seeing it as I would other bodies by means of my body (cf. 12.6.15).
In Augustine’s view, the paradigm for this way of thinking about visio is the resurrection, whose language is echoed in Paul’s twice reiterated comment at 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, namely “whether in the body I do not know or out of the body I do not know, God knows.” We can conclude that the emphatic statement “God knows,” in which the ideas of “knowing” and “not knowing” are effectively swept away, is a reference to a specific type of metaphysical experience. This arises from the fact that, in Paul’s view, the explanation of the vision of the third heaven, being “unutterable,” is unable on that account to be revealed to him or to anyone else by means of human language.
This is a commonplace of Augustine’s thinking about language, which is explored in detail in book 1 of De Doctrina Christiana. Once the distinction between these types of communication enters the discussion, it is inevitable, in Augustine’s way of looking at things, that philosophy will be complemented, if not at times replaced, by hermeneutics, since the observation on communication depends on the interpretation of biblical texts in which God is said to “speak,” either through language, action, or symbols. This is the type of discussion that takes place in the following chapters, in which an account is given of the second type of visio within the threefold scheme by means of Augustine’s theory of signs. As this option appears in book 2 of De Doctrina Christiana, where it is discussed at length, it is conceived as an aid to the interpretation of passages of the Bible.
Augustine introduces this perspective on the problem of phantasia by announcing to his readers that the different meanings of the word spirituale, which he has derived from selected biblical texts, do not in his view fully exhaust the senses of the term in the second kind of visio. As a consequence, he adopts a different type of explanation of these images, which takes its point of departure from Paul’s statement at 1 Corinthians 14:14: “If I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my understanding is unfruitful” (Si enim oravero lingua, spiritus meus orat, mens autem mea infructuosa est). Augustine interprets the word “tongue” as referring to some form of obscure and mystical signification (intelligitur . . . obscuras et mysticas significationes). In using the word, he proposes, Paul is speaking to the type of signification that can instruct no one if the potential for understanding in his mind has effectively been removed (si intellectum mentis removeas), since, at that point in the process of communication, the subject would be hearing what he does not in fact comprehend (audiendo quod non intelligit).
Here, at a human level, we have a parallel for Paul’s statement at 2 Corinthians 12:2–4 to the effect that the unnamed individual who experiences the vision he describes did not know whether the perception of the third heaven took place in the body or out of the body, since God had not revealed its meaning to his understanding; that is, there was no interpretable connection between the event, which he accepted as fact, and its meaning, which, at that point, remained a secret or hidden, since the words that were spoken were not those by which it could be adequately described.
The point is underlined by another quotation from Paul, namely 1 Corinthians. 14:2: “For he who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, although the spirit is speaking mysteries.” Augustine notes: “[Paul] makes it sufficiently clear that in this passage he is referring to a sort of tongue in which there are significations, such as the images of things and their likenesses. When these are not in the understanding, they are said to be in the spirit (cum autem non intelliguntur, in spiritu eas dicit esse).”45 While it is the signs of things and not things themselves that are produced by the tongue, which is the bodily member that is put into motion when we speak, it is clear that in this passage Paul was referring to the production of signs before they are understood (signorum prolationem priusquam [res] intelligantur). In this case, in Augustine’s view, a revelation (revelatio) could take place involving knowledge, prophecy, or doctrine (vel agnitio, vel prophetia, vel doctrina; 1 Cor. 14:6).
At 12.11.22, Augustine again illustrates the difference between corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual visiones by means of the already quoted maxim,46 “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39), however this time adding a further word of explanation. When the statement is read, he recalls, the letters are seen corporeally, the neighbor is thought of spiritually, and love is brought into view intellectually.47 Once the letters have been read, they are absent from view and their corporeal presence has vanished; however, they can still be thought of spiritually, just as the neighbor in question, although conceived spiritually, can be present.48
By contrast, in the case of the notion of love these options are not available. Love cannot be seen as a substance in itself (per substantiam suam); that is, it cannot be viewed by means of the bodily eye, and is therefore not a phantasia. Nor can it be thought of by means of an image of the body that is similar to it, but which exists solely in the mind, to which Augustine gives the name phantasma, since it is in the intellect that this type of visio is known and perceived.49 The eyes of the body are incapable of seeing by means of either spiritual or intellectual vision; instead, they act as messengers, so to speak, announcing what has been perceived externally, as objects, to the internal and judgmental sense of the spiritual sense of sight.50 Augustine will elsewhere speak of this as the work of the internal sense, which coordinates the inputs of the exterior senses and relays them to the mind, where they are sorted, judged, and recorded.
By overseeing and directing the data furnished by the eyes, and by transferring these from the corporeal to the spiritual level, spiritual vision acts as a parallel for this work of interpretation. This situation arises from the transfer of bodily images to the mind, which is capable of placing them in an ethical context. Augustine hints at this connection between the perceptual and interpretive functions, which is brought about by the will, in the remainder of chapter 11. If the soul were irrational, like that of animals, the message from the eyes would go only to the spirit, and not at all to the intellect, which presides over the spirit. Consequently, after the object in question has been taken in by the eyes (phantasia) and an announcement has been made to the spirit, the spirit produces a secondary image (phantasma), which is passed on to the intellect. It is in the intellect that the decision is made as to whether the object that has been seen is the sign of a thing (rei signum est). If so, its meaning is either understood immediately in the intellect or is sought out by means of a method that is utilized only by the mind.51
This type of transition is illustrated by the story of Belshazzar’s feast from Daniel 5:5–28. This episode is understood by Augustine as an example of a corporeal vision interpreted by an intellectual vision. The hand that the king sees writing on the wall of his palace is taken to represent the imprinting on his spirit of the image of a corporeal object, namely letters, by means of the bodily sense, that is, the eyes. When this corporeal vision was finished, Augustine argues, the image of the letters remained as a spiritual vision in thought (in cogitatione). In this way two types of visio, namely corporale and spirituale, were completed, representing the transition from one type of text orientation, namely the physical text, which is perceived by the sense of sight, to another, the imaged text, which is understood in the mind. The visual sign is produced before the eyes of the body in the same way as, within Augustine’s general theory of signification, the oral sign is presented to the ears. In his view, this visio was seen in the spirit by Belshazzar but not yet understood, since it had appeared only before the king’s corporeal eyes, even though his mind was active in inquiring into its meaning. In other words, interpretation in the mind begins proactively, even before the signum actually enters the mind, where it can be interpreted and understood. The visio intellectualis of which Belshazzar is incapable is then experienced by Daniel, who interprets the handwriting on the wall as a prophecy (12.11.23).
This example completes the transition from philosophy to exegesis in content as well as in method, since what we have in fact is an illustration of reading by means of a reading. Augustine next turns to a number of ways in which the mind can contribute to modifications in the scheme of corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual visiones, thus returning the discussion to philosophy. One of these connections arises through the degree to which we are conscious of the passage from one form of vision to another. Let us take the situation in which we are awake, and the mind is not alienated (alienata) from the bodily senses but remains in touch with them. In this condition we are able to distinguish a corporeal from a spiritual vision, that is, from the type of vision in which we think of absent bodies by means of the imagination (qua corpora absentia imaginaliter cogitamus). The ability to make such a decision lies within our mind’s capacities, whether (1) we are recalling things that we know from memory, whether (2) we are thinking of things that we do not know but which are given shape by the thinking that takes place within the spirit itself, or whether (3) through decision or conjecture, we fashion in our minds things that do not exist anywhere in any form (sive quae omnino nusquam sunt, pro arbitrio vel opinatione fingentes).
This last can take place when a thought is given too great an extension, or when too much attention is paid to it (nimia cogitatione intentione); alternatively when, owing to illness, a person’s mind is affected by delirium and fever. It is also possible for the opposite to take place, that is, for one to be in a state of mind in which attention is paid only to one’s internal thoughts and the mind is completely cut off from the activity of the senses. In this situation, one can experience a corporeal vision, but the objects that are in view will not be perceived by the subject, even though the eyes may be wide open. Here the mind is concerned with the images that are presented to the spirit, or recalled there, or with images created in the mind itself. Such images may have a special meaning for those who are ill, asleep, or in a state of ecstasy, and, if they are understood, it is owing to the spirit’s activity in unfolding their meaning to the mind (12.12.25). Augustine thus reserves a considerable latitude of interpretation for spiritual visions in a pathological context.
Chapters 13 to 22 of De Genesi 12 deal with particular problems within the field of imagination. These include divination (12.13), evil as a source of deception (12.14; cf. 12.25), carnal desires experienced in dreams (12.15), the delusions of people suffering from delirium or physical pain (12.17), and impediments to sense perceptions (12.20). At 12.16 an important note is added to what has been said about the retention of images in the memory and their role in the stabilization of the life of the imagination. What is remarkable about a spiritual vision, Augustine observes, is this: spirit takes precedence over body and the image of a body comes after the real body; yet that which is second in temporal succession is produced within that which is prior in nature, that is, the real body. However, because spirit is superior to body, the image of the body that is formed in the spirit excels the body itself in its substance.52
This conclusion relates to the notion of spiritual reading insofar as there is auditory retention of the syllables of words that are read, which is essential for their meaning. For unless the spirit continually formed within itself and retained in memory an image of the word perceived through the ears, one would not know whether the second syllable was actually second, since the first would no longer exist once it had impinged upon the ear and passed away. All conventions of speech, all harmony of song, and every orderly movement of the body, Augustine argues, could be dissolved and come to nothing, if in the spirit there were not a memory of past motions to act as guide for those to come. The essential point is this: the spirit would not harbor the memory of such past motions unless it had formed them in the imagination within itself.53 And it is not only these actions with which it is concerned but also those of the future, well before those actions take place.54 The ultimate source of these images in the soul remains a mystery, Augustine maintains, just as in everyday speech there are many words that we regularly use and whose origin we do not know (12.18.39).
Neither letters 6 and 7 nor De Genesi ad Litteram 12 take up the role of the imagination in the sort of ideal person Cicero has in mind in his opening statement in Orator, when he is speaking of the perfect orator. However, this question is addressed briefly in book 8 of De Trinitate, a work written between 399 and 420, in which books 8–15 take up among other things the problems of cognition associated with the threefold image of the Trinity.
Throughout De Trinitate, Augustine adheres to a variant of the scheme for the perception and comprehension of images outlined in letter 7. This is summarized at the beginning of book 11, where he notes that, when we see an object, three things are involved: (1) res, the object itself, (2) visio, the sighting by which it is perceived, and (3) animi intentio, the attention or intention of the mind, which directs sight to its object.55
The discussion of these elements initially takes shape in book 8, where the reader is reminded that the names of the three persons of the Trinity are used in two ways. They are the particular names given to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and are the names that are “spoken of relationally between each other” (quae relatiue dicuntur ad inuicem, 8.1.1). Therefore, when we say, for example, that the figures of the Trinity are both good and omnipotent, we are not speaking of qualities in three different persons but of relations in one God. Such statements are made according to their essence (secundum essentiam), since to say that they exist (esse) is to say that they are great, good, wise, and so forth. In other words, names imply qualities, and vice versa.
How then can it be that in the Trinity, with respect to these qualities, two or three persons are not greater than one alone? In Augustine’s view, this paradox cannot be grasped by the sensory perceptions of mortals, which are limited by the habits or conventions of the flesh (consuetudo carnalis, 8.1.2). The senses can only perceive created things (ipsa . . . creata) from the outside; they are incapable of seeing from within the truth by which they are created (ueritatem autem ipsam qua creata sunt non potest intueri). For it is only truth that truly exists, and in this truth no one thing has more being or existence than another. As a consequence, we cannot say of the Trinity, as we might say of two pieces of gold, that one is greater than the other.
In understanding the Trinity in this relational manner, we get no further ahead in our thinking by the use of the literary imagination. We cannot conceive the three persons of the Trinity, for example, as we would a threefold division in fables (fabulae), as in the story of Heracles’s overcoming the three-headed monster, Geryon.56 Nor can we envisage the triune God along the lines of anything that we see (or do not see) in the heavens. For even if, in the sort of thinking that is associated with image making or with the imagination (imaginationis cogitatio), one were able to magnify the light of the sun as it is conceived in the mind as much as possible, in order to make it seem, in degrees, to be brighter or stronger than it ever was before, and even if this increase in brightness, which is entirely dependent on the mind, were to take place by as much as a thousand degrees, the radiance in the end would not be the equal of the light of God. Augustine adds that other analogies based on literary or metaphorical schemes are likewise to be rejected in this type of comparison, for example, the notion of spirits without bodies. All such views are inexact and misleading, since mortals are encumbered by corruptible bodies and dependent on the uncertain data of the senses. They are unable to understand fully and completely how God can be truth, since they are impeded by the mists of bodily images (caligines imaginum corporalium) and the clouds of phantasms (nubila phantasmatum). We perceive the truth of God in an instantaneous flash of insight, but this is a fleeting moment in our experience and does not last. We rise temporarily, but inevitably fall back to our habitual and earthly way of thinking (relaberis in ista solita atque terrena, 8.2.3).
This statement is a mixture of ideas from Plato and Plotinus. Augustine’s point of departure is Platonic doubt about the value of sense data. But his scheme includes the Plotinian notion of mental elevation, through which the individual moves upward from the senses to the mind and beyond. It is the metaphor and metaphysics of seeing that gives a framework to his statements on these themes and leads him in due course to a problem similar to that posed by Brutus to Cicero concerning a perfect orator. However, in the end his solution is the result of a nonphilosophical line of reasoning, and it is here that I would like to bring a more general question to his discussion of phantasia.
The section in question begins in book 8, chapter 3, with an enumeration of things that can be called good. Among these are creation, living things, a healthy life, friends, and their affection—even the eloquence of a polished lecture, as Cicero and Quintilian propose, which succeeds in moving the audience toward the conclusion desired by the speaker. On the other hand, when we say that we love God because he is good, we are not distinguishing between one sort of good and another, as in these examples of good things, nor are we trying to persuade anyone of anything using emotional appeals. On the contrary, we recognize that God is nothing more or less than good itself (ipsum bonum).
In the next stage of his argument Augustine departs from the classical lines of thought utilized by his predecessors in the rhetorical tradition and strikes out in a direction of his own, basing his conclusions on considerations of will and language. He asks us to think about what takes place when we hear the words, “good soul.” In his view, two things are understood, namely “soul” and “good.” It is one thing to be a soul, another to be good. The soul does not bring itself into being by its own act of will; however, in order to be a good soul, it has to perform an act of will, which consists in turning itself toward the good. The human soul has this unique characteristic, namely, that it can freely choose to be good or bad, and thus to incur praise or blame. However, in order to become good, after deciding to do so, the soul has to look for guidance from something that it is not, namely, the good, since, as agreed, it is not innately good. The only thing toward which it can turn (conuertat) is the good itself, which it loves, desires, and therefore approaches (cum hoc amat et appetit et adispicitur).
As a consequence, Augustine proposes, we can assert that there can be no goods that change over time (mutabilia bona) unless there exists a single good that does not change over time (incommutabile bonum). It is to this that the soul must convert itself in order to become good (se igitur animus conuertit ut bonus sit). Augustine conceives the decision to be good on the part of the soul as its entry into a state of self-awareness, which requires a continual effort of will to be maintained and perpetuated. The soul must remain steadfast in good, and inhere in it, so that it can profit from its presence. It is in fact from this willful participation in the good that the soul derives its being, as contrasted with the contrary, namely absence of the good, which would render it incapable of being.57 This decision in favor of the good is an act of faith, not a source of knowledge, on the part of the soul. For we do not know the good toward which we are directing our thoughts, any more than, as Paul says, we can see God “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).
If that is the case, how can it be said that we love (diligamus) something that we are unable to see (uidebimus)? For who can say in truth that he loves what he does not know (Sed quis diligat quod ignorat?). Something can be known and not loved, but can something be loved and not known? It follows that no one can love God before, in some sense, knowing him (nemo diligit deum antequem sciat). And what does it mean to know God (deum scire), if not to see him in the mind or soul (cum mente conspicere) and, in this fashion, to perceive him with certainty (fermeque percipere)? It is possible for those who have pure hearts and practice faith, hope, and charity to see God, and it is to this end that works of religion (divini libri) are studied for the soul’s benefit (in animo aedificanda). The result is that it is possible for someone of faith to believe in God without knowing him, and in this sense God is loved before he is known.58
With this conclusion Augustine arrives at a problem shared by a number of ancient schools of philosophy, namely the care of the soul. Care must be taken, he notes, lest the soul, in trusting in what it does not see, perceives something that it has configured for itself which it itself is not (ne credens animus id quod non uidet fingat sibi aliquid quod non est), and thereby love what is false. This would be tantamount to placing faith in phantasia or imaginatio. In rejecting this alternative, Augustine falls back once again on a variant of the Platonic mistrust of the senses. When we believe in corporeal things of which we have heard or read but have not seen, he notes, our minds represent them as things with a bodily delineation and features (fingat sibi animus aliquid in lineamentis formisque corporum). It will occur to anyone engaged in this type of thinking or configuring (cogitanti) that the image in the mind may be either false or true, but even if it is true, no profit can be derived from it, since there is no way that an objective verification can be made. For who, for example, on reading the writings of Paul, or hearing accounts of his life and works, is not capable of creating a picture of the apostle’s face in their minds (non fingat animo et ipsius apostoli faciem)? There would doubtless be many possible portraits of this type, all based on purely subjective considerations. However, in Augustine’s view, the correct way to approach this sort of problem is not to begin with invented images of what Paul looked like (facie corporis) but, guided by faith, to take as our point of departure the sort of life that he led, through God’s grace, and the kinds of deeds that he performed (ita uixerunt et ea gesserunt), all of which is attested in scripture.
On this view, what is the source of our affection for the apostle? Is it because he was once a living human being? That cannot be possible, for since he died in the past, the memory of death is with us in the present, as argued in letter 7. Also, the source of our affection for him is his just soul, which is unaffected by the passage of time. We know what a soul is because there is a soul in each of us. This is not something that we can see with our eyes; nor do we acquire our knowledge about the soul either from its features or from its similarity to other souls. Yet, paradoxically, there is nothing that is so intimately known by each of us as our souls, since it is by means of our souls that we know everything else that we know.59 We recognize the movements of bodies from their resemblance to our own movements, as it appears before our eyes; however, no one can perceive the movement of the soul, even though, within our souls, we are aware that movement is taking place. Consequently, if we know the soul of another person, we do so based on our knowledge of our own souls, believing of that person what we do not in fact know of him.60 For we not only know that we possess a soul but can learn something about what a soul is from our reflections on it.
However, when we turn to the question of a “just man,” as we do in forming an image of Paul, a different criterion applies. As noted, we know what a soul is simply from the fact that each of us has a soul. By analogy, we cannot understand what a just man is unless we are just ourselves.
Augustine’s subsequent argument is complicated and can be summarized in point form as follows. First, on the question of a “just man” belief is not sufficient: we need certain knowledge. But how is this to be acquired? Augustine is convinced that we cannot love what we cannot observe by means of sight. This is a reinterpretation of Paul’s view of faith. Yet how are we to see the just soul of the just man, since nothing pertaining to his state of mind appears before our eyes? In Augustine’s view, and this is his second point, the answer lies within the will. If a man is not just and desires to become just, he must express the intention of becoming just, which implies that he desires or loves a just man who actually exists, since, again, we must judge by what we see since we cannot see into his soul. It is only in this way that someone who is not yet just can say that he knows what a just man is. However, Augustine notes that the Platonic problem remains, since we have to ask in what sense such a person can say with confidence that by this process he actually “sees” the attractive ideal of justice. The only possible answer is that we know what a just man is from within ourselves (In nobis igitur nouimus quid sit iustus). For when he seeks to utter the words “a just man,” Augustine only finds the meaning of the words he is speaking in his own mind or soul. The same is true if he asks another person the question. He too must find the answer within himself. To seek what is justice, therefore, involves a method, but it is one in which the relevant questions and answers arise entirely within the mind of the individual.61
This is an exploration of the Pauline scheme as well as an original application of the Socratic elenchus. However, at this point in the discussion Augustine also moves in a different direction from either Cicero or Quintilian on the questions of images by taking up the notions of both phantasia and phantasma, considered in relation to each other. These terms, which frequently enter his reflections on internal representations, are applied to the image of a person that is formed of purely abstract qualities. Again Augustine notes that he can find the image of Carthage in his mind, because he has lived there, but Alexandria, where he has not lived, can only be configured as a product of his imagination. The important point is that in both cases it suffices for him to pronounce the syllables of the place names in order to bring before his internal view an image of the locality. Once this image is in his mind, he is able to describe these cities in detail for others, who can in turn judge the accuracy of his descriptions, if they are familiar with them. Further, he notes, while he is engaged in speaking these syllables, he is at the same time able to gaze within upon the mental pictures of these cities, as they are conjured up, both from the realities he knows, in the case of Carthage, and from studied inventions, in the case of Alexandria; and, believing these for what they are worth, respectively, he concludes that he will likewise have trust or faith in the descriptions of cities in the words of others. The essential link is between language and putative reality, not, as in Plato, between appearance and reality, since, within this scheme, the statuses of the images of Carthage and Alexandria are equally valid with respect to the syllables pronounced.
But when it is a question of a just man, Augustine proposes, the concepts of phantasia and phantasma do not apply in precisely the same way. In his view, the remarkable thing about the soul, in its attempts to frame a mental picture of Paul, is that it can visualize his “just soul,” and it also perceives that this is not the same just soul that, with some effort, his own soul may be able to perceive within itself. In other words, the same rules for other minds that apply to images generated within the soul, for which there is no external model, apply to those which are generated from either sense perceptions or the accounts of others, as in the cases, respectively, of Carthage and Alexandria. Although Augustine does not have a specific term for this type of image generation, it might tentatively be called a work of the creative imagination, inasmuch as it is an image, which he has conceded, but one that is based on no antecedent model which he can recognize, since, as he notes, he cannot recognize the quality of justice in another person, even one who is dead, without first being able to recognize it in himself. In the end, therefore, the mental picture that he forms of Paul is composed of a combination of faith and intentions, and, as such, is superior in his view to images made up from sense data that are perceived first- or second-hand by the perceiving subject.
What conclusions can we draw from these three discussions of phantasia? First, it is clear that Augustine has taken important steps in progressing beyond Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Stoic notions of visual appearances and has entered into the realm of the contemplative imagination in his discussion of texts. In this respect he is following Cicero and Quintilian; however, in pursuing this course, he takes an intellectual route that differs from that of his Roman predecessors in as much as it involves reading.
In his exchange of letters with Nebridius, his analysis of the problem of memory images is based chiefly on psychology and philosophy; in the examples taken from De Genesi 12 and De Trinitate 8, it is based exclusively on statements in biblical texts. The earlier stage of his thinking is a reflection of his confidence in reason before his baptism and ordination; the later discussions are illustrations of his thinking on reason within the principle of authority. Reason is not entirely replaced by authority as the discussion moves forward from his pre- to post-conversion period; however, instead of being utilized to advance arguments that are true or false according to their logic alone, reason is used as a tool to defend statements which are assumed to be true. To Augustine’s way of approaching the question of the soul’s powers, they constitute the most authoritative statements on the subject, and while they may demand a rational explication, they do not demand a rational defense of their truths, which are historical rather than philosophical in nature.
Augustine’s solution to the philosophical dimension of the problem, therefore, is not, strictly speaking, philosophical. Where he truly succeeds in transcending ancient thinking on phantasia is in shifting the burden of his argument from philosophy to literature, as he does in the Confessions. In this work it is not his arguments about the truth or falsity of images that are the center of attention, but the manner in which he applies his theory of phantasia and phantasma to his own experience. His presentation is compelling, as Quintilian might say, because it is convincing: the emotions that he generates in his readers are those that he truly appears to have felt himself. In the end it does not matter that he has dealt with the philosophical dimension of the subject in a fragmentary and incomplete fashion, rather than approaching it in the more disciplined manner of figures whom he admires on the subject, especially Plato and Plotinus. For his long-range purpose in taking up the topic is not to provide a purely philosophical account of phantasia, but to use what he knows about it from philosophy and psychology in the production of an entirely new type of theological literature, in which the various episodes in a story are woven together by memory and history. In this he is the Christian successor, not only to Plato, but also to Seneca and Plutarch.