Augustine of Hippo

Aurelius Augustinus

Somewhere in his forties, in the middle of the book that would invent the examined inner life, Augustine wrote a sentence that still unsettles: factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio, I had become a great question to myself (Confessions IV.4). No philosopher before him had said anything quite like it. The Greeks had told us to know ourselves, but they assumed the self, once known, would prove orderly: reason on top, appetite below, virtue a matter of getting the hierarchy right. Augustine looked inward and found something stranger. A will that wants and refuses the same thing in the same breath. A memory vast enough to frighten the man who carried it. A mind transparent to God and opaque to itself. Almost everything he thought begins from that opacity, and so, in a way, does the long Western habit of treating the self as the first thing worth interrogating.

The interrogation took the form of the Confessions (composed around 397 to 401), thirteen books addressed not to a reader but to God, which is why the book prays and argues at once and never settles for being one rather than the other. The first nine books trace a life: a clever provincial boy from Thagaste in Roman North Africa; the Cicero he read at nineteen, the lost Hortensius, which lit a desire for wisdom that never went out (Confessions III.4); a decade inside Manichaeism, the dualist sect that blamed the world's evil on an independent kingdom of darkness; years teaching rhetoric in Carthage, Rome, and Milan; and the long, reluctant approach to the baptism he finally accepted in 387. Then the last four books drop the story entirely and turn to memory, to time, to the opening verses of Genesis. The life was never the point. It was the specimen, the one interior he could examine from the inside, and he used it to ask what a self is made of.

The will at war with itself. The Greeks had a tidy account of wrongdoing: no one does evil knowingly, vice is a species of ignorance, and to see the good clearly is already to want it. Augustine knew from the inside that this was false. In the most famous small scene in the book he steals pears he does not want, from a tree whose fruit he will throw away, for no motive but the thrill of the trespass itself (Confessions II.4): a wrong done not in ignorance of the good but in something close to spite toward it. In the years before the change he prayed the most honest prayer in the literature, da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, grant me chastity and self-control, but not yet (Confessions VIII.7). Here is a will that knows what it should want, half-wants it, and quietly works against itself. Ambrose's preaching in Milan had already reopened a scripture his younger self had dismissed as crude; but when the break came, in a garden in 386, it arrived less as an argument won than as a kind of release, a child's voice over a wall chanting tolle lege, take up and read, and a line of Paul's doing in an instant what years of his own reasoning could not. Out of that experience Augustine drew the doctrine that would crack Western Christianity open a thousand years later: if the will is genuinely bound, it cannot free itself, and the turn toward the good has to be a gift, grace given before merit rather than wages paid for it. Pelagius, who taught that we can simply choose rightly, became his great antagonist, and the Augustinian answer, that our rescue is God's work and not our own, runs straight through Luther and Calvin and the severe Augustinianism of Pascal. It is also the teaching modern readers resist most, because predestination seems to mock the very freedom Augustine did more than anyone to discover. He never dissolved the tension. He thought it was real, and he refused to lie about it.

Time and the distended soul. Book XI of the Confessions holds the question that made Augustine a philosopher's philosopher: quid est ergo tempus? What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know (Confessions XI.14). The puzzle deepens the harder he presses. The past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist; the present, if it had any stretch at all, could be split into a past part and a future part and so would not be the present. Measured strictly, time appears to be built entirely out of what is not. His way out is one of the genuinely new ideas in ancient thought: time is not a feature of the moving world but of the mind that holds it, a distentio animi, a distension of the soul across what it keeps. The past is present as memory, the present as attention, the future as expectation; the three tenses are three ways a mind reaches past the vanishing edge of now. We do not observe time passing. We are the place where it passes. Fifteen centuries later Husserl reopened the study of inner time-consciousness by quoting this passage outright, and Heidegger's account of human existence as through-and-through temporal grows from the same seed. The man was a bishop in a fraying province. He was also, in Book XI, doing phenomenology before the word existed.

The inner teacher. If time turned out to live in the mind, so did much that Augustine had expected to find in the world. Book X leads him into what he calls the fields and the vast palaces of memory, a space so large it alarms him: the mind cannot contain itself, and yet it somehow holds the sky and the sea and the stars. Where do the changeless truths come from, the ones no eye has seen, that two and three make five, that justice is better than its opposite? Not from the senses, which deliver only this case and that one. Augustine answers with illuminatio: the mind sees such truths by a light that is not its own, the way the eye sees colour only by a sun it did not kindle. From this comes the startling claim of his dialogue On the Teacher, that no one is ever really taught by another's words, that words can only prompt, and that the teacher who actually instructs is already within. Two of the largest later quarrels in philosophy open as arguments with this Augustine. When Wittgenstein begins the Philosophical Investigations by quoting the Confessions on how a child learns language by having things pointed at and named, he is casting Augustine as the spokesman for a picture of meaning he intends to take apart. And when Descartes hunts for the one certainty that survives total doubt, he is recovering a move Augustine had already made against the ancient skeptics: si fallor, sum, if I am deceived, I exist (City of God XI.26). You cannot be wrong about your own existing, because being wrong at all takes a someone to be wrong. The cogito has a North African ancestor.

Two loves, two cities. In 410 the unthinkable happened: Rome was sacked by Alaric's Goths, and the pagans who had watched the empire go Christian had their verdict ready. The old gods, neglected, had pulled back their protection. Augustine answered with the City of God (composed 413 to 426), twenty-two books that grew into the first genuine philosophy of history, and his reply refuses the question's own terms. There are not Christian cities and pagan cities, and Rome is not really the subject at all. There are two cities marked off by two loves: the earthly city, built by love of self carried to contempt of God, and the City of God, built by love of God carried to contempt of self. The two are not the empire and the Church, nor even this world and the next; they run invisibly through every nation and every congregation, two peoples mingled in one street and told apart only at the end of time. The political payoff was large and intended. No empire, not even a baptized one, is the Kingdom; earthly peace is real but next-to-last; and what looked like virtue in a city that loved the wrong thing was, he argued, at best a splendid kind of vice. He had stripped politics of its halo. A thousand years on, Machiavelli would build a whole science of power on the far side of this distinction, simply by denying that the heavenly city had any standing to judge the earthly one.

The Platonist cure. None of this would have been thinkable without the books Augustine read at the turning point. Around 386, before his baptism, he came on the Enneads of Plotinus in a Latin translation, and they handed him the instrument that finally broke the Manichaean spell. The Manichees had needed two first principles because they could not see how a good God could make a world with evil in it. Plotinus showed him a third way: evil is not a thing at all. It is a privation, a good gone missing, the way blindness is not a dark substance but the absence of sight. A wholly good source can be the origin of everything that is, precisely because evil is what is not. From the same well Augustine drew his lifelong Platonism: God as the One toward which the restless soul is travelling home, and the eternal Forms lifted out of some free-standing heaven and set inside the mind of God, where they become the divine ideas by which the world is made. What he added was Christian and decisive. The God of Plotinus does not stoop; Augustine's does. He read the prologue of John, that the Word became flesh, and the letters of Paul on grace, and welded the philosophers' ascent to a descent that no philosopher had dreamed. The Platonists, he said, could show the soul the homeland it was looking for. They could not show it the road.

The room is built from the works that have been read without a break for sixteen centuries: the Confessions in Edward Pusey's 1838 translation, the City of God in Marcus Dods's 1871 version, and the writings from the Donatist controversy, where Augustine worked out what a sacrament is and why the holiness of the church does not rest on the holiness of the priest who happens to administer it. Begin with the Confessions, which can be read as literature long before it is read as doctrine; come to the City of God once the smaller book has made the larger one's stakes plain. The chat cites by work and book.chapter, so that Confessions XI.14 or City of God XIV.13 points to a passage you can find in any edition, dated idiom or modern.

What keeps Augustine present is not a system, which he never tidied into one, but the discovery that the inner life will repay unlimited attention. Anselm turned his faith-seeking-understanding into a method; Aquinas built grace into a cathedral of distinctions; Luther read the doctrine of grace until it split the medieval church; Pascal and the Jansenists pressed it to its hardest edge; Kierkegaard mapped the structure of conversion from the inside; Hannah Arendt wrote her first book on the idea of love in Augustine and went on arguing with him for the rest of her life; the young Camus took Augustine and Plotinus for his thesis before he wrote a single novel; and Heidegger lectured on Confessions XI as the place where Western thought first took time seriously. None of that is quite why he is worth reading now. The reason is plainer and stranger: a person opens the Confessions expecting a fourth-century bishop and meets instead a mind sixteen hundred years gone describing the inside of their own. Very few books survive that test. This was the first one to set it.