In Book 3 of his Confessions Augustine describes his encounter with Cicero’s book, Hortensius. He says that reading that book changed his life and led him to devote himself to philosophy. But the way he describes this conversion to philosophy might make a present-day philosopher wonder whether what Augustine was converted to bears any significant resemblance to what we think of as philosophy today. Augustine writes:
The book [Hortensius] changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be toward you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart. (3.4.7)1
One suspects that an applicant for graduate study in a good philosophy department today who submitted a personal statement that included the line, “I long for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart,” would not gain admission. And so one might well wonder how there could be anything to say about Augustine’s philosophy that would be relevant to what we now think of as philosophy.
There are other reasons to suspect that none of the works of Augustine would likely appear on a “must-read” list for philosophers today. After all, Augustine lived almost his whole life in North Africa, which was not, at the time, an important intellectual or academic center. To be sure, he did spend five years in Italy. But after that visit he returned to North Africa and never again strayed very far from the town of his birth. He became Bishop of Hippo Regius, which was a significant port city at the time, but hardly an intellectual center—except for the presence in it of Augustine.
Augustine was both by training and by early profession a rhetorician, not a philosopher. He became an important theologian and counts as one of the “Fathers” of the Christian church. He did read for himself some Neoplatonism. But much, perhaps most, of what he knew of philosophy he got from reading Cicero, who was not himself an original philosopher. Moreover, Augustine seems not to have known, personally, any (other) philosopher of real significance. For all these reasons one might reasonably expect that he would have little of interest to engage a philosopher today.
Yet, all expectations to the contrary, Augustine was indeed a philosopher of significant originality and enormous influence. For one thing, he was the first great Christian philosopher. Moreover, he and St. Thomas Aquinas were the two most influential Western philosophers in the medieval period. In a way it is odd to count him as a medieval philosopher. His dates, 354–430 CE, place him more appropriately in “late antiquity” than in the Middle Ages proper. However, since historians of philosophy are reluctant to multiply periods beyond necessity, he counts among them as a medieval philosopher, indeed, one of the most important medievals.
Arguably the most striking innovation in Augustine’s thought is its incorporation of a first-person perspective. To be sure, Augustine did not write everything he wrote from an explicitly first-person perspective. But significant portions of what he wrote take this point of view. Consider his Confessions, which assumes the literary form of an “overheard” personal prayer. Incidentally, it is also the first important autobiography in Western literature. Then there is his Soliloquies, which is a dialogue between Augustine himself and reason, and therefore an “inner dialogue.” In that work Augustine admits that he himself has coined the word that serves as the book’s title, Soliloquia,2 where, as he says, he understands this work to record the soul’s conversation with itself.
Intriguingly, it may also be the case that Augustine’s early work, On Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio), was meant as an inner dialogue. Modern editions make this work a dialogue between Augustine and his friend and later fellow bishop, Evodius. However, Simon Harrison has pointed out that no manuscript copy of this work identifies the speakers in the dialogue as Augustine and Evodius, or, indeed, identifies the speakers at all. The speaker names, “Augustine” and “Evodius,” appear first in Auerbach’s printed edition of 1506.3 They are thus a Renaissance interpolation. Augustine may actually have intended this work, too, as a dialogue with himself.
One obvious consequence of Augustine’s interest in taking a first-person perspective is his recognition that ‘I exist’ may state an important beginning point for philosophy. Consider this exchange from On Free Choice of the Will, understood now, as perhaps it always should have been understood, as Augustine’s conversation with himself:
Augustine: To start at the beginning, with the most obvious, I will ask you first whether you yourself exist. Are you perhaps afraid that you are being deceived by my questioning? But if you did not exist, it would be impossible for you to be deceived.
[Self:] Let us move on. (2.3.20)
No ancient philosopher had thought that the statement each of us can make by saying, “I exist,” expresses a thought of any great philosophical significance. Augustine changed that, even if it was not until Descartes formulated his cogito, ergo sum that the world appreciated fully the philosophical significance of doing philosophy from a first-person point of view.
Augustine tells us in his Confessions, at 4.13.20, that the first book he wrote was something he called On the Beautiful and the Fitting (De pulchro et apto). But that work did not survive. Fortunately, his next work, a dialogue called Against the Academicians (Contra academicos), did survive. It is a dialogue aimed at responding to the skepticism of the “New Academy,” usually thought to have been founded by Arcesilaus in the third century BCE. Although this dialogue is not an inner dialogue, the way Augustine responds in it to skepticism, as we shall see, brings out the importance of Augustine’s first-personalism.
In young adulthood Augustine had been a Manichean “auditor,” or disciple. But, after nine years in that role, he became disenchanted with Manicheanism and overburdened with belief more generally. About the time he left Carthage for Rome, he found himself attracted to the skeptical view of the “Academicians,” that is, the followers of Arcesilaus and the New Academy, who held, he writes, that “everything was a matter of doubt and that an understanding of the truth lies beyond human capacity” (Confessions 5.10.19). His flirtation with skepticism did not, however, last very long. In Contra academicos, written three years after his arrival in Italy, Augustine discusses a criterion for knowledge put forward by Zeno of Citium, according to which something can be known just in case it cannot even seem to be false. Arcesilaus, the Academic skeptic and Augustine’s interlocutor at this point, supposes that, since nothing satisfies this definition, there is no knowledge. In response to him Augustine reasons this way: “Knowledge still doesn’t abandon us, even if we are uncertain about [Zeno’s criterion]. We know that Zeno’s definition is either true or false. Hence we do not know nothing”4 (3.9.21). Augustine goes on to offer knowledge claims of his own that he dares the skeptic to reject, including this one: “I’m certain that the world is either one [in number] or not—and, if there isn’t just one world, the number of worlds is either finite or infinite” (3.10.23). Augustine imagines the skeptic responding to this claim of certain knowledge by pouncing on the assumption that there even exists a world. This is Augustine’s response to that skeptical move: “I call the whole that contains and sustains us, whatever it is, the world—the whole, I say, that appears before my eyes, which I perceive to include the heavens and the earth (or the quasi-heavens and quasi-earth)” (3.11.24). This response makes a philosophically startling suggestion. And, of course, in offering this response it draws on Augustine’s first-person perspective in philosophy. Augustine here stipulates that “world,” as he is now going to use the term, in response to the skeptic’s challenge, will simply be whatever “appears before his eyes” (quod oculis meis apparet). But even talk about what appears before his eyes is already to suppose that he at least has eyes, before which things appear. Eyes are presumably physical things. And if something appears before those physical things, there is presumably a physical world that includes both the eyes and perhaps what appears before them.
Strikingly, Augustine is prepared to withdraw even from the common-sense assumption that there is a physical world “out there” to appear to him. That is why he adds the intriguing qualification: “or the quasi-earth and quasi-heavens” (aut quasi terram et quasi caelum). Thus he is not including in what he is calling “the world” an independently existing heaven and earth. He adds: “If you deny that what seems so to me is the world, then you’re making a fuss about a name, since I said I call this ‘world’” (ibid.). Now it seems that the reference to (physical) eyes has been canceled as well and what Augustine is stipulating should be called “world” is simply one’s phenomenal world. That suspicion is reinforced by his response to the next skeptical challenge: “You’ll ask me: “Is what you see the world even if you’re asleep?” It has already been said that I call ‘world’ whatever seems to me to be such (3.11.25).”
The idea is thus that I can know, even in a dream, that there is a world, if what “world” means is only “whatever seems to me to be such.”
Richard Rorty, in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, refers to the novelty of the concept of mind we find in Descartes, as well as in John Locke. Before them, Rorty writes, there had not been “the conception of the human mind as an inner space in which pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before a single Inner Eye.”5 In a footnote Rorty acknowledges that “there are passages in Augustine which are remarkably close to passages usually cited from Descartes to show the originality of his notion of “thinking” to cover both sense and intellect.6 To back up his point, Rorty goes on to cite a paper of mine, in which I refer to the above passage from Augustine’s Contra academicos. And so, as Rorty acknowledges, the novelty of the Cartesian concept of mind had been anticipated by Augustine.
To see how fully Augustine develops what we moderns think of as Descartes’s concept of mind, we need to read Book 10 of Augustine’s On the Trinity, which is devoted to understanding mind (mens). There Augustine characterizes the mind as something that “lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges” (10.10.14). Similarly, Descartes, in Meditation II characterizes the mind, the “thinking thing” (res cogitans), as something that “doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.”7
Augustine’s characterization of the mind, although similar to Descartes’s, is not identical with it. The most striking difference between the two characterizations concerns the connection Augustine makes, and Descartes rejects, between thinking and living. For a discussion of this point, and its considerable significance, see my paper, “Consciousness and Life.”8
No doubt Augustine’s most famous response to skepticism is his claim to know that he exists. (What could be more first-personal than that?) Although this response is mentioned in the passage from On Free Choice of the Will quoted above, and even in a passage in his Contra academicos (at 3.9.19), it is more fully developed much later, in Book 15 of his On the Trinity and in Book 11 of his City of God. Here is the latter passage:
In respect of these truths I have no fear of the arguments of the Academics. They say, “What if you are mistaken?” If I am mistaken, I am [Si fallor, sum]. Whoever does not exist cannot be mistaken; therefore I exist, if I am mistaken. Because, then, I exist if I am mistaken, how am I mistaken in thinking that I exist, when it is certain to me that I am if I am mistaken. (11.26)
The anticipation here of Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum is quite clear. One should add that Augustine does not go on, as Descartes does, to reconstruct what he can be truly said to know on the foundation of “I exist.” However, in Book 15 of On the Trinity, where Augustine offers a parallel justification for “I know that I am alive,” he argues that he can parlay that bit of knowledge into an indefinitely large number of things that he also knows. Thus he writes:
If only such things [as the knowledge that I am alive] belong to human knowledge, then they are very few; unless it be that they are so multiplied in each kind that they are not only not few, but are even found to reach an infinite number. For he who says: “I know that I’m alive,” says that he knows one thing; if he were then to say: “I know that I know that I’m alive,” there are already two things. Indeed this, that he knows these two, is already to know a third thing; and so he can add a fourth and a fifth, and innumerable more, so long as he is able to do so. But because he cannot either comprehend an uncountable number by adding units, or speak uncountable times, he comprehends this very fact most certainly and says both that this is true and so uncountable that he cannot comprehend or speak the infinite number of its words. (15.12.21)9
Exactly how this “multiplication thesis,” as we may call it, is supposed to work is not immediately obvious.
Jaakko Hintikka, in his seminal work, Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions,10 cites the above passage as an early assumption of the “KK Principle” (If I know that p, then I know that I know that p). In fact, according to Hintikka’s reading of this passage, Augustine not only considers “I know that I know that p” to follow from “I know that p,” he considers the two statements to be equivalent.11 I myself once thought that Hintikka was right in supposing Augustine to be at least making implicit appeal to the KK Principle here. However, I no longer think that is correct. Charles Brittain has called my attention to a passage in the previous book of On the Trinity, which offers what I now think is the best explanation of Augustine’s KK claims. Here is part of that passage:
. . . one who reminds another [of what he knows] may rightly say to the one he reminds, “You know this, but you do not know that you know it; but I shall remind you and you shall find that you know what you thought you did not know.” (14.7.9)
According to this passage, I can know that p and not realize that I know it. However, if I am reminded or otherwise come to realize that I know that p, then I know that I know that p. So Augustine may not suppose that it follows, by a principle of epistemic logic, from “I know that p” that I know that I know that p. But, if Augustine is not here relying on the KK Principle, how does he go from “I know that I am alive” to “I know that I know that I am alive” and, especially, how does he get to innumerably more knowledge claims? I’ll try to say a little bit later what Augustine might think makes the multiplication thesis plausible.
Under much discussion among epistemologists today are closure principles for knowledge. Suppose that, in broad daylight, I see a tree. Do I know that I see a tree? That seems right. But presumably I also know that actually seeing a tree entails that know I am not asleep and only dreaming that I am seeing a tree. Now if knowledge is closed under known entailment, then it follows from
(1) I know that I see a tree plus
(2) I know that actually seeing a tree entails that I am not asleep and dreaming entails
(3) I know that I am not asleep and dreaming.
Yet there are circumstances in which one might be inclined to accept (1) and yet reject (3). So, it seems, one should reject the general principle that knowledge is closed under known entailment, and so reject (2). Indeed, that seems to be Augustine’s view.
Augustine makes a distinction between two kinds of things known, as in the very passage from On the Trinity we have been discussing:
In fact, since there are two kinds of things which are known, one [kind] is [knowledge] of things which the mind perceives through the bodily senses and the other [kind] is [knowledge] of those things which it perceives through itself. These [Academic] philosophers have babbled many things against the senses of the body, but they have been utterly unable to cast doubt upon the most certain perceptions of the things that are true, which the mind knows through itself, such as that which I have already mentioned, “I know that I’m alive.”
But far be it from us to doubt the truth of those things which we have perceived through the senses of the body. For through them we have learned of the heavens and the earth, and those things in them which are known to us insofar as He, who has also created us and them, wanted them to become known to us. Far be it also from us to deny what we have learned from the testimony of others; otherwise, we would not know that there is an ocean; we would not know that there are lands and cities which the most celebrated fame commands. (15.13.21)
Augustine here clearly thinks that one can have knowledge of the world through the senses. But he is also inclined to think that, as a general thing, one does not know whether one is dreaming. So he will reject the alleged entailment from “I know I am seeing a tree” to “I know I am not dreaming,” as in (2) above. For a different reason, he will also reject the suggested entailment from “I know that I’m alive” to “I know I’m not dreaming.” On his view, I would have to be alive to be dreaming. So dreaming, far from being incompatible with being alive, actually requires being alive, according to Augustine’s reasoning above.
I have already suggested that Augustine does not think “I know that p” entails “I know that I know that p.” On his view, apparently, knowing that one knows is realizing that one knows and one can know that p and yet fail to realize that one knows that p. So, according to him, I know that I am alive and, if I realize that I know this, I know that I know that I am alive. But how does Augustine think one can go on to generate “innumerable more” knowledge claims from knowing that one is alive and knowing that one knows this?
A close look at On the Trinity 15.12.21 above reveals that the sort of multiplication Augustine has in mind here is, to put the point paradoxically, multiplication by addition. Thus, let’s begin with
(4) I know (that I’m alive).
Knowing that I’m alive is something I can achieve, Augustine thinks, by an inner knowledge. Now suppose I realize, by this same inner knowledge, that I know that I’m alive. Then
(5) I know (that I know that I’m alive).
Augustine says that in knowing (that I’m alive), I know one thing, and in knowing (that I know that I’m alive) I know a second thing. But he adds that in knowing the first and second things, I know a third thing, and so on ad infinitum. Why does he think that? The simplest answer would be that he thinks knowledge is closed under conjunction. Thus, if I know that 2 + 2 = 4 and I also know that 2 + 3 = 5 there is also a third thing I know, namely both that 2 + 2 = 4 and that 2 + 3 = 5. But now I can know a fourth thing, namely, that I know the first, the second, and also the third. And so, by this reasoning, I can see that I know an innumerable number of things.
So far the principle that knowledge is closed under conjunction seems to be quite innocuous. However the principle, although apparently innocent, can be shown to make trouble for other assumptions we are likely to make. A prominent source of trouble is what has come to be called the “Preface Paradox.” As originally formulated by D. C. Makinson,12 the paradox concerns rational beliefs, but it can be restated as a paradox about knowledge.
We are to imagine an author who has made a number of knowledge claims in a book. In the preface the author says something to this effect:
Although I have been scrupulous about each of the knowledge claims I have made in this book, I realize that even the most conscientious scholar will occasionally make a mistake. So, in all modesty, I must say that I know there will be at least one knowledge claim that is, unfortunately, false. I invite readers to point out any mistakes I have made.
If knowledge is closed under conjunction, then the author claims to know (1) everything set forth as a knowledge claim in the book as well as (2) that at least one claim in the book is false. And if knowledge is closed under conjunction, then what the author says in the preface, put together with what is claimed in the rest of the book, is incoherent.
I mention the Preface Paradox, not because Augustine discusses it, but only to point out that Augustine’s implicit appeal to the idea that knowledge is closed under conjunction introduces a topic under discussion by epistemologists today. And Augustine seems to rely on it to multiply the items of knowledge he thinks he has by virtue of knowing that he is alive.
Is this multiplication thesis a mere intellectual curiosity? Not at all. It is important to Augustine to think that he can parlay his knowledge that he is alive, plus his knowledge that he knows this, into an indefinitely large store of knowledge. And the reason it is important to him is, apparently, that he sees his mind as an image of God’s mind. He thinks that the infinite greatness of God’s mind is beyond our human comprehension. Nevertheless, he also thinks that the greatness of his own mind is, in a certain respect, beyond his understanding. And, in that limited respect, it resembles God’s mind.
Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with this quotation from Book 1 of Augustine’s Confessions:
When they [my elders] named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.13
Wittgenstein takes this passage to mean that, as a young child, he learned the meaning of words by having the objects they name pointed out to him by his elders. Wittgenstein himself rejects this view of language acquisition. But, as Myles Burnyeat has pointed out,14 the passage Wittgenstein quotes is prefaced with these words:
It was not that grown-ups instructed me by presenting me with words in a certain order by formal teaching, as later I was to learn the letters of the alphabet. I myself acquired this power of speech with the intelligence which you gave me, my God. (11.8.13)
So Augustine also rejects the picture of learning by ostension that Wittgenstein had taken him to be committed to. In fact, in his early dialogue, On the Teacher, Augustine brings out the Wittgensteinian point that any attempt to “show” the meaning of a word by pointing to what it names or denotes will be subject to multiple interpretations. Here is an important exchange with his son, Adeodatus, from that dialogue:
Augustine: Come now, tell me, if I, knowing absolutely nothing of the meaning of the word, should ask you while you are walking what walking is, how would you teach me?
Adeodatus: I should walk somewhat more quickly.
Augustine: Don’t you know that walking is one thing and hurrying is something else? (3.6)15
Later on in the dialogue Augustine uses the example of trying to show what birdcatching is, and hence what the expression “birdcatching” means, by a demonstration of birdcatching. There follows this exchange:
Augustine: On seeing this birdcatcher, he follows closely in his footsteps, and, as it happens he reflects and asks himself in his astonishment what exactly the man’s equipment means. Now the birdcatcher, wanting to show off after seeing the attention focused on him, prepares his reeds and with his birdcall and his hawk intercepts, subdues, and captures some little bird he has noticed nearby. I ask you: wouldn’t he then teach the man watching him what he wanted to know by the thing itself rather than by anything that signifies [that is, by words of a language]?
Adeodatus: I’m afraid that everything here is like what I said about the man who asks what it is to walk. Here, too, I don’t see that the whole of birdcatching has been exhibited.
Augustine: It’s easy to get rid of your worry. I add that he’s so intelligent that he recognizes the kind of craft as a whole on the basis of what he has seen. (10.32)
In this passage Augustine presents his son as having more appreciation of the problem of “ostensive learning” than he has himself. In any case, it is clear that a satisfactory solution to the problem will require a major epistemological commitment.
Augustine’s major epistemological commitment is his idea that we come to understand, not only a priori truths, but also things like what walking is, and what birdcatching is, by an inner illumination. This idea appears in his writing, apparently for the first time, in On the Teacher, in the following passage:
[Augustine:] When we deal with things that we perceive by the mind, namely by the intellect and reason, we’re speaking of things that we look upon immediately in the inner light of Truth, in virtue of which the so-called inner man is illuminated and rejoices. Under these conditions our listener, if he likewise sees these things with his inward and undivided eye, knows what I’m saying from his own contemplation, not from my words. Therefore, when I’m stating truths, I don’t even teach the person who is looking upon these truths. He’s taught not by my words but by the things themselves made manifest within when God discloses them. (12.40)
Thus, Augustine’s account of how it is that we can have knowledge is not based on the idea of abstraction, as we find it in the Aristotelian tradition. The abstractionist’s idea is the we acquire concepts by abstracting universals from particulars and general truths by abstraction them from particular truths. Augustine’s idea of intellectual illumination, including the appeal to a light metaphor, is rather Platonic. But Augustine rejects Plato’s idea that learning is recollecting things the soul has known from a previous life. “We ought rather to believe,” he writes, “that the nature of the intellectual mind is so formed as to see those things which, according to the disposition of the Creator, are subjoined to intelligible things in the natural order, in a sort of incorporeal light of its own kind” (On the Trinity 12.15.24).
In Book 15 of Augustine’s On the Trinity we also get the idea that an “inner word,” or concept, mediates between (1) the word or phrase of a natural language and (2) items in the world around us our words can be used to refer to. This development in his own thinking helps him resolve a difficulty he had raised already in the On the Teacher (at 7.20) about how two words can mean “as much” (tantundem) without meaning “the same” (idem), that is, how they can have the same extension without having the same meaning. Thus Augustine supposes that every word (verbum) is a name (nomen) and the other way around, but, nevertheless verbum and nomen do not mean the same thing. We might say that something is called a verbum for one reason and a nomen for another. The idea of an inner word, or concept, or meaning, mediating between the things it can be used to refer to seems to alleviate this problem.
The idea that thinking is the speaking of inner words, found already in Plato’s Theaetetus (at 189e) and Sophist (at 263e), is also prominent in Augustine, again, for example, in Book 15 of his On the Trinity. But it is Augustine to whom, for example, William of Ockham refers when he develops his own idea of mental language in his Summa logicae 1.1.
When Plato has Socrates argue in the Phaedo that we have knowledge we could not have acquired in this life and therefore our souls must have existed before they took on this bodily form, he argues for soul-body dualism from an impersonal point of view. In his other arguments for soul-body dualism Plato also reasons from an impersonal point of view. Augustine, by contrast, argues for mind-body dualism in Book 10 of On the Trinity from a first-personal point of view. He argues there that the mind (mens) is fully present to itself and so knows and is certain of its own substance or nature. However, he goes on, the mind does not know nor is it certain that it is air or fire or any other body that philosophers have theorized it to be; therefore, it is none of these things, that is nothing bodily (10.10.16).
Anticipating the critics of Cartesian dualism over a millennium later, Augustine himself presents the philosophical problem of other minds, that is, the problem of how any one of us can know that other living creatures have minds. Augustine’s answer to this problem is a form of what we know in recent philosophy as the Argument from Analogy. “Just as we move our body in living,” he writes, “so, we notice, those bodies are moved,” and so we come to think that there is a mind [animus] present in another body, “such as is present in us to move our mass in a similar way” (On the Trinity 8.6.9).
I knew myself to have a will in the same way and as much as I knew myself to be alive. (Confessions 7.3.5)16
References to the will, and indeed, to his own will, are very prominent in Augustine’s writings. Albrecht Dihle17 and others have maintained that the concept of the will originated with Augustine. Certainly there is nothing exactly like the idea of the will to be found in Plato or Aristotle. In On Free Choice of the Will Augustine writes that the will, which he thinks is the first cause of sin, is itself uncaused. “What cause of the will could there be?” he asks rhetorically, “except the will itself?” (3.17.49.168). So the human will is free. It is also, he thinks, that component of our being that makes us moral agents, capable of sin, but also capable of moral rectitude.
For us today the main threat to the idea that each of us has free will is the plausibility of causal determinism. For Augustine, by contrast, the main threat to free will is the idea of God’s foreknowledge. If God foreknew, indeed, foreknew before all creation, that Adam would sin, then it may well seem that Adam had no choice in the matter—or, at least, no free choice in the matter. Moreover, it seems that, if Adam had no free choice in the matter, Adam should not be held culpable for his sin.
Augustine’s efforts to show that, contrary to appearances, God’s foreknowledge is compatible with free will are most prominent in Book 3 of his On Free Choice of the Will. One of his responses is to say that we cannot will what is not in our power. So what we will is in our power, and, “since it is indeed in our power, it is free in us” (3.3.8.33). Evodius, Augustine’s nominal interlocutor in that work, points out that God’s foreknowledge should apply to Himself as well as to us. Thus it should include what God Himself will do, before He does it, without limiting His perfect freedom. Since God’s foreknowledge of what He will do does not rule out His having free will, it should not rule out free will in the case of a human agent either (3.3.6.23–24).
Although the first-person perspective is salient in much of Augustine’s philosophical thought, it is not true that everything he discusses philosophically he discusses from his own first-person point of view. Thus he has much to say about the world, which, of course, he views as God’s creation. However, even on this topic, as we shall see when we come to discuss what he has to say about time, he manages to put the stamp of his first-personalism on what he has to say.
Augustine wrote no fewer than five commentaries on the creation story in the book of Genesis. He rejects, or at least severely qualifies, the picture of God the Creator as a divine craftsman, which is, for example, found in Plato’s Timaeus. “You did not hold anything in your hand,” he writes in Confessions 11.5.7, “of which you made this heaven and earth, for how could you come by what you had not made to make something?” According to Augustine God created heaven and earth out of nothing (ex nihilo). Although Augustine concedes that the opening verses of Genesis allow multiple defensible interpretations, he insists that nothing besides God exists, except through God’s creation, not even space or time.
Interestingly, Augustine also, like Descartes after him, supposes that God sustains creation. If God’s power “ever ceased to govern creatures,” he writes,
their essences would pass away and all nature would perish. When a builder puts up a house and departs, his work remains in spite of the fact that he is no longer there. But the universe will pass away in the twinkling of an eye if God withdraws his ruling hand. (Literal Commentary on Genesis 4.12.22)
One thing that motivates Augustine’s discussions of the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis is to make coherent sense of the story one finds there. In his nine years as a Manichean he had heard over and over again the derision with which Manicheans treat the book of Genesis. In his On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees he tells us that they ridicule the creation story by asking this question: “If God made heaven and earth in some beginning of time, what was he doing before he made heaven and earth? And why did it suddenly take his fancy to make what he had never made previously through eternal times?” (12.3).18
In Book 11 of his Confessions Augustine returns to this Manichean taunt and argues that God created time “in the beginning,” when he created heaven and earth. So the Manichean taunt falls flat. It didn’t “suddenly take his fancy to make what he had never made previously through eternal times” because there was no time before God created it. But that leads Augustine to ask, famously, “What, then, is time?” He adds, “If no one asks me, I know; if I should want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know” (11.14.17). This passage is emblematic of philosophy. In a way, time is an everyday notion. We all know what it is. We also know how to tell time and keep our appointments. But we will be unlikely to be able to give an account of the nature of time that will satisfy a philosopher.
To begin his discussion of the nature of time Augustine draws on a perplexity to be found in Aristotle (Physics 4.10), but not likely to be original even with him. Augustine draws it out to underline its importance. Times are long or short, he points out. But it is obvious, he thinks, that the past is no more and the future is not yet. Only the present exists. But, strictly speaking, not all of the present century, the present year, the present day even the present minute is ever really present. Strictly speaking, only the “now,” conceived as a durationless divider between the past and the future, is ever present. But that is neither long nor short, so it cannot be time. Thus, if only the present exists, there is no time.
Characteristically, Augustine resolves this conundrum by looking inward. “It is in you, my mind, that I measure my times” (11.27.37). So time is the measure of something mental. That is, it is the measure of past events as remembered, future events as anticipated, and present events as experienced and held together in the mind. This is a classically subjective view of time.
This famous discussion of the nature of time is embedded in an account of God’s creation of heaven and earth according to the beginning of the book of Genesis. Augustine wrote no fewer than five commentaries on the biblical creation story, the longest being his De genesi ad litteram (Literal Commentary on Genesis). In Confessions 11 he responds to the skeptical challenge (which he attributes in other works to the Manicheans), “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” His response is that, in creating heaven and earth, God created both time and place. Thus there was no “before creation” (11.8.15), nor was there any place where God made heaven and earth (11.5.7).
In the Confessions Augustine rejects the idea that time could be the measure of the movement of the heavenly bodies. In the other commentaries, however, he claims that time is the measure of motion. On perhaps the most plausible interpretation of these writings, his idea is that “unordered time” began with the thinking of the angels. But human time began with the creation of Adam’s mind.
The problem of evil seems to have occupied Augustine’s thinking throughout most of his adult life. It is, no doubt, central to what he found attractive about Manicheanism in his nine-year period as a Manichean disciple. If there is a cosmic principle of evil coeval with, and equally powerful to, the cosmic principle of good, then there is no philosophical problem of evil, that is, no philosophical problem about how it can be that evil exists. It is when we suppose, as Augustine came to believe, that “God is good and is most mightily superior” to everything else that the problem becomes acute. “Then where and whence is evil?” Augustine asks (Confessions 7.5.7).
Augustine considers simply denying that evil exists. “Can it be,” he asks, “that there simply is no evil?” he asks. Then, he reasons, the fear of evil is unfounded. Still, an unfounded fear of evil would itself be evil (ibid.). Augustine returns a little later in Confessions 7 to embrace the Neoplatonic idea that evil has no real substance; instead it is privation and so, in a way, does not exist.
In various of his writings Augustine finds the root cause of evil in human free will. And he insists that having free will is necessary for moral agency. His idea is that, first, even though God created human beings and they created evil, God did not therefore create evil. Moreover, genuine moral agency is such an important good that God, in His goodness, gave it to human beings, despite His foreknowledge that Adam and his progeny would choose wrongly and create evil.
In On Free Choice of the Will Augustine’s interlocutor, Evodius, is not satisfied with this response. “Doesn’t it seem to you,” he asks Augustine, “If free will is given for acting morally, it ought not have been possible to turn it to sinning. Shouldn’t it have been like justice, which was given to a human being for living in a good way?” (2.2.4.8).
We might expect Augustine to argue that, quite possibly, even an omnipotent being could not grant human beings free will without the possibility that they would use it wrongly. But, toward the end of his life anyway, Augustine allows that the blessed in heaven will have the most perfect freedom of the will, which carries with it an inability to sin (City of God 22.30). But, he argues, this perfect freedom could not have been given to Adam or his progeny, without letting them partake in God’s impeccable nature.
Especially striking in Augustine’s writing is his discovery of evil in himself, as in this passage of his Confessions: “I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it” (2.4.9).
I have argued elsewhere that Augustine rejects this principle, which is embraced by Plato, Aristotle, and still considered a truism by many philosophers:
(W) Wanting something is always wanting something one believes at the time to be good.
If he does reject (W), as I believe he does, he does so partly, perhaps chiefly, because of reflections on his own personal motivation.19
Given Augustine’s first-personalism in philosophy it should be no surprise that he is an intentionalist in ethics. In his Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount he identifies three conditions necessary and sufficient for a complete sin: (i) suggestion, (ii) pleasure, and (iii) consent. The immediate inspiration for this account is the saying of Jesus, “Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). On Augustine’s view, consent to perform a sinful action already constitutes a complete sin; no “outward” action needs to have been carried out.
Augustine’s intentionalism leads him to worry about whether he is responsible for the acts of his dream self. Here is a passage in which he seeks relief from this worry:
You [O God] commanded me without question to abstain “from the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the ambition of the secular world” (1 John 2:16). You commanded me to abstain from sleeping with a girlfriend and, in regard to marriage itself, you advised me to adopt a better way of life than you have allowed (1 Cor. 7:38). And, because you granted me strength, this was done even before I became a dispenser of your sacrament. But in my memory of which I have spoken at length, there still live images of acts that were fixed there by my sexual habit. These images attack me. While I am awake, they have no force, but in sleep they not only arouse pleasure but even elicit consent, and are very much like the actual act. (10.30.41)
Augustine longs to dissociate himself from the sinful acts of his dream self. There seem to be three possibilities:
(1) He is not his dream self, so the sinful acts of his dream self are not his.
(2) What happens in a dream does not really happen, so his dreamt sins are not real sins.
(3) ‘Ought’ implies ‘can,’ and so, since he has no real control over the acts of his dream self, he has no obligation to see to it that his dream self does not sin.
Augustine seems to want to affirm (1). He writes, “During this time of sleep surely it is not my true self, Lord my God?” But then, finding himself in his reason, he writes:
Surely reason does not shut down as the eyes close. It can hardly fall asleep with the bodily senses. For, if that were so, how could it come about that often in sleep we resist, and mindful of our commitment and adhering to it with strict chastity, we give no consent to such seductions? (ibid.).
As for (2), the trouble for Augustine is that he thinks he gives actual consent to commit adultery in his dreams. Given his strong intentionalism in ethics, he has committed a sin, even if no bodily action follows the consent.
As for (3), Augustine thinks we do no good apart from the grace of God. So if he resists seduction in a dream, it can only be through the grace of God. “It cannot be the case, almighty God,” he writes, with at least a tinge of resentment, “that your hand is not strong enough to cure all the sicknesses of my soul and, by a more abundant outflow of your grace, to extinguish the lascivious impulses of my sleep” (ibid.).
Thus, although it seems to him unfair to count dreamt adultery as a sin, it is unclear how his various ethical, metaphysical, and religious commitments can allow him to escape moral responsibility for acts he commits in his dreams.20
Readers are sometimes surprised by the psychologically self-reflective nature of Augustine’s Confessions. The richly introspective character of that work seems to make it unexpectedly modern. But the modernity of Augustine’s thought extends, not only to its psychological richness, but also to Augustine’s philosophical point of view. No doubt it was Descartes who first convinced modern philosophers that it might be valuable to try to reconstruct what one actually knows, if anything, by starting over with the foundational certainty of “I think, therefore I am.” But, in several important respects, Descartes was anticipated in his first-personalism by Augustine. Moreover, Augustine’s first-personalism in philosophy, as I have tried to bring out, is of more than historical interest. I have tried to highlight some of the ways in which Augustine was not just a philosopher of his own remote time and, to us, rather obscure place, but also a philosopher for us here and now.
1. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). All quotations from the Confessions, except the one used by Wittgenstein to begin his Philosophical Investigations, and the translation by Simon Harrison acknowledged in footnote 16, will be taken from this translation.
2. Soliloquies 2.7.14.
3. Harrison, Simon, The Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of Augustine’s De Libero Arbitrio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 2.
4. Translations from Augustine’s Contra academicos are taken from Against the Academicians and the Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).
5. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
6. Ibid., 50–51.
7. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, II, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
8. Philosophy 52 (1977), 13–26; reprinted in David M. Rosenthal, ed., The Nature of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 63–70.
9. Translations from Augustine’s De trinitate are taken from On the Trinity: Books 8–15, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10. Jaako Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
11. Ibid., 107.
12. D. C. Makinson, “The Paradox of the Preface,” Analysis 25/6 (1965), 205–7.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) 1.
14. M. F. Burnyeat, “Wittgenstein and Augustine De Magistro,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 1987, 1–24.
15. Translations from On the Teacher (De magistro) are taken from Against the Academicians and The Teacher, trans. Peter King, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).
16. tam sciebam me habere voluntatem quam me vivere. I am using Simon Harrison’s translation here. See “Do We Have a Will? Augustine’s Way in to the Will,” The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 195–205.
17. Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
18. On Genesis, trans. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002) 40.
19. For discussion of this point see chapter 13, “Wanting Bad Things” in my Augustine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
20. For a further discussion of these issues see Chapter 8, “Philosophical Dream Problems,” in my Augustine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). See also William E. Mann, “Inner-Life Ethics,” and Ishtiyaque Haji, “On Being Morally Responsible in a Dream,” which are chapters 7 and 8 respectively of The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).