Augustine of Hippo—bishop, saint, church father, and theologian—is also a philosopher. Indeed the word “also” is misleading, because philosophy is not an add-on to all his other work, but is well-nigh inseparable from everything he does. As he frequently reminds his readers, “philosophy” means love of wisdom, and in that sense he expects that every worthy impulse in human life will have something philosophical about it, something directed toward the attainment of wisdom. In Augustine’s own writing we find this expectation put into practice in a stunning variety of ways, as key themes of Western philosophy and intricate forms of philosophical argument turn up everywhere: in the story of his own life in the Confessions, in his writings against his opponents, and even in his sermons to local congregations. The collection of essays in this book examines just a few aspects of the relation of Augustine and philosophy, both in Augustine’s own practice as a philosopher and in his interaction with other philosophers, both past and future.
We begin by focusing on aspects of Augustine’s own philosophy. Johannes Brachtendorf begins the collection with an essay arguing that Augustine, when dealing with philosophy, follows two strategies. First he holds on to the idea of philosophy as an endeavor of reason alone. Second he limits the power of philosophy to the realm of reason, as opposed to the will. Philosophy teaches well, but it is unable to convert the human soul. Through this claim Augustine makes room for faith and divine grace as the sole condition for human salvation. With his first strategy Augustine follows the ancient notion of philosophy; with his second strategy he critizes the central idea of ancient thinking that philosophical ethics could be a way to happiness. Augustine’s view on philosophy as supporting but not replacing faith lived on in Aquinas, Descartes and Kant.
Frederick Van Fleteren’s essay considers the sense in which Augustine is a philosopher. The distinction between philosophy and theology postdates Augustine by a good eight hundred years. Augustine is philosopher in the etymological sense of the term—he searches for wisdom. According to Augustine the best of ancient philosophy finds its fulfillment in the wisdom of Scripture. Christianity provides the means to attain the end which the best of ancient philosophy saw. The criterion of acceptance of ancient philosophy is harmony with the Bible. Augustine interprets and assimilates his sources into his own original synthesis.
Gareth Matthews then shows how Augustine the philosopher is our contemporary. Augustine introduced the first-person perspective to Western philosophy, responding to the threat of global skepticism with his si fallor sum (“If I am mistaken, I exist”), which predates Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum by twelve centuries. His discussion of knowing that one knows anticipates debates today about closure principles for knowledge. His reflections on language acquisition, a priori knowledge, mind-body dualism, intentionalism in ethics, even time and creation, all reflect his characteristic first-person point of view. Moreover, the richly introspective character of his thought makes Augustine seem unexpectedly modern.
Alexander R. Eodice next takes us to Book XI of the Confessions, where Augustine gives an extended philosophical account of the nature of time. There he raises certain puzzles about the measurability and divisibility of time as a kind of physical phenomenon and is seemingly left with the prospect of having to assert the unreality of time. Dissatisfied with this conclusion, Augustine argues that time is real but only as a function of consciousness. Eodice reviews the major strands in Augustine’s argument and considers three critical responses to it: the first is directed against the argument’s opening idea that, given the distinction between time and eternity, time cannot be created in time; the second questions Augustine’s metaphysical conclusion that time is extendedness of mind; and the third, from Wittgenstein, challenges the very sensibility that gives rise to philosophical problems like that of time in the first place.
Phillip Cary contributes an essay defending Augustine’s compatibilism while critiquing his doctrine of election. Augustine’s compatibilism is his teaching that human free will is compatible with divine grace, even the prevenient grace that determines what we shall will. Augustinian Christians, who pray for the gift of grace and give thanks to God for granting them a good will, are not irrational in accepting this compatibilism, Cary argues, but they cannot give a reason why God chooses to bestow such grace to some people rather than others. Thus the doctrine of election or divine choice, which marks a crucial point at which religion exceeds the bounds of philosophy, looks to be not merely beyond intelligibility and reason but arbitrary and unjust. Cary argues that a more biblical doctrine of election, in which God chooses some for the blessing of others, does not have this problem.
Jesse Couenhoven rounds out examination of Augustine’s philosophy by showing how in the Confessions, Augustine tries to reject the possibility of our sinning in dreams by arguing that the mind’s eye is passive before them, much like seeing what happens to persons who are awake. His own moral psychology, however, undermines this view: Augustine believes that his full mind is implicated in his dreaming, partly because he believes he owns thoughts he cannot (without divine help) refrain from having. This point is clarified in his anti-Pelagian writings, where Augustine argues that we are judged in our waking lives not primarily for actions but states of mind, yet that we lack control over our states of mind even while awake. One can be responsible for one’s dream-actions, as well as for the content of one’s dreams, because one is often personally present in one’s dreams in much the same way as one is present in one’s waking mental life. Dreams can teach us about our own hopes and fears—and, as King Solomon learned, “some merits shine out even in dreams.”
The second part of our collection, which deals with Augustine and other philosophers, begins with two essays on Augustine’s own interaction with other thinkers. Wayne Hankey’s essay “Recurrens in te unum,” which takes its title from Augustine’s assertion in Book XII of the Confessions that “all things return to you, the One,” shows how Augustine (Books I–IX) and the created universe as a whole (Books XI–XIII) come forth from the One and return to him, thereby demonstrating some features of the Neoplatonism of the Confessions. Aspects of both form and content are considered and the essay concludes by drawing together Books I, XII and XIII. Because Augustine describes his movement to the Platonism which enabled his conversion to Christianity as a passage by way of forms of Stoicism, philosophical physics, and Academic Skepticism, treatments of these enter into Hankey’s account of Augustine’s philosophical journey.
John Kenney examines Book XII of the Confessions from another angle, exploring the tension between Augustine and several groups of opponents. The most pressing of these contradictores—who are Nicenes and not Manichees—reject Augustine’s spiritual exegesis of Scripture, in particular his metaphysical understanding of the “heaven of heaven” in his interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. The underlying question is a larger one: the conception of divine transcendence which Augustine advocates. As such this polemical interlude late in the Confessions helps us to recover the persistence of materialist forms of Christian orthodoxy and to discern the revisionist force of Augustine’s Christian transcendentalism.
Next we have two essays that focus on Augustine and his medieval successors. In his essay, Paul A. Macdonald Jr. expounds the accounts of Christian faith offered by Augustine and Aquinas, with the aim of deriving an enduring epistemological model of Christian faith. This entails analyzing central claims of both thinkers in order to determine how Christian beliefs are reasonable as well as properly grounded. Augustine argues that Christian faith is reasonable insofar as it is derived from a viable epistemic authority—the Catholic Church—which proclaims divine truths we could not attain by following reason alone. Augustine, along with Aquinas, also shows us that the true “ground” of faith—that which actually moves or leads us to believe—is the grace of God, which illumines the intellect and charges the will inwardly with love, thereby furnishing a basis in the intellect and the will for believing what the Church proclaims about God. Macdonald further argues that this ground of belief is distinctly rational, in a more contemporary epistemological sense, insofar as it is distinctly truth-conducive: through it, God directs and draws us to form and hold true beliefs about God, thereby also enabling us to know God (or at least begin to know God) in this life.
Roland Teske’s essay points out the influence of Augustine on three areas of the philosophy of Henry of Ghent. The essay first focuses on Augustine’s influence on Henry’s arguments against Academic Skepticism. Secondly, it examines how Henry’s account of human knowing is deeply influenced by both Augustine and Aristotle, and attempts to combine them into a coherent whole. Finally, it examines Augustine’s influence on Henry’s metaphysical argument for the existence of God. Though Augustine certainly influenced Henry in many other areas of his philosophy, these three clearly show that the Augustinian influence was both extensive and profound.
Our examination of Augustine and other philosophers concludes with two essays about Augustine’s presence in modern philosophy. James Wetzel shows how Augustine is the inner voice of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy; one may even say that he is the voice of Wittgenstein’s conscience—the part of him that refuses to reduce philosophical problems to mere problems of logic, the part that calls him to work on himself. The first entry of the Philosophical Investigations starts off with a quotation from Confessions 1.8.13, where Augustine is recalling his emergence out of infancy and into a stormy life of communicable desires. In his subsequent commentary, Wittgenstein ignores at first the odd spectacle of a soliloquizing infant (the strange child of Augustine’s recollection) and focuses instead on the picture of language that Augustine seems to have been presuming: that sentences are strings of words, that words are names of objects, that the objects are the meanings of the names. This can seem a natural, albeit childishly simple, picture, but through Wittgenstein’s artful analysis we are gently led to notice its arbitrary and distorted features, born of a fundamental forgetfulness. It turns out that Wittgenstein has taken up Augustine’s confessional voice at a moment of dialectical breakdown, where Augustine lapses into soliloquy and imagines himself more alone and bereft of parenting—whether human or divine—than he can possibly be. Consequently Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine’s picture is both a restoration of Augustine’s confessional voice and the introduction of this voice into the inner life of Wittgenstein’s own philosophy.
Our collection concludes with John Caputo offering a reading of two twentieth-century philosophers reading Augustine. He introduces readers to the text of Heidegger’s 1921 lecture course on Augustine’s Confessions, an important precursor to his major work, Being and Time, as well as to Derrida’s text Circumfession, an autobiographical reflection on his circumcision and his mother’s death, which includes many allusions to Augustine’s Confessions. Caputo finds in these contrasting texts two quite different versions of a theology of the cross: Heidegger’s leading to an interpretation of life as struggle (Kampf) and Derrida’s leading to prayers and tears and suffering flesh.
The collection of essays in this book does not attempt to present a full-orbed presentation of Augustine’s philosophical thinking, but rather offers diverse soundings in Augustine’s philosophy and perspectives on his interactions with other philosophers. The result is not one picture of the relation of Augustine and philosophy but many, as the authors of these essays ask many different questions about Augustine and his influence, and bring a large diversity of interests and expertise to their task. Thus the collection shows that Augustine’s philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.