51. Ep. 3.1–4 (CCL 31:6–8); trans. Parsons, FOTC 12: 7–10 (modified). (continued)
The Philosopher 65 these six books, however, only after I was baptized and had returned to Africa from Italy, since at Milan I had only begun to explore this art. Of the other five arts also begun there—dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, and philosophy—I just had first drafts, and I myself have lost even these. But I think that other people have some of them.52
The Hierarchy of Being
As he remarked in Soliloquies, he was concerned to "know God and the soul." In this and the next passage, we will see two brief examples of his early meditation on God and the soul. Around 390, Augustine wrote a very brief note to a friend named Caelestinus, asking him for comments on some of his early anti-Manichean writings. Augustine then sketched a dense, schematic outline of his metaphysical worldview. From Letter 18:
(2) Since I know you so well, here is something both great and brief. There is a nature changeable in both time and space, namely, the body. And there is a nature changeable not in space but in time, namely, the soul. And there is a nature which is changeable neither in space nor in time, and that is God. What I have spoken of here as changeable refers to the creature; what is unchangeable, to the Creator. But since we speak of all that exists as existing insofar as it endures and is unified, and since every form of beauty is a form of unity, and you see at once in this classification of natures what is highest, what is lowest (yet still exists), what is in the middle (being greater than the lowest and less than the highest). The highest is Beatitude itself, the lowest can be neither happy nor wretched, but the middle lives wretchedly by inclination, blessedly by conversion. One who believes in Christ does not love the lowest, is not proud in the middle, but thus becomes fit to cling to the highest. And this is the whole of what we are commanded, urged, and set aflame to do.53
52. Retr. 1.6 (CCL 57:17); my trans., based on Bogan, FOTC 60:21–22. A sketch of his views on the liberal arts of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, geometry, as well as philosophy, appears in De ordine 2.12.35– 18.47. For an exploration of this unfinished project, see the essays in Pollmann and Vessey, Augustine and the Disciplines. Augustine says here that he had lost the first drafts, but that others may have them. One, it seems, did survive: his De dialectica. The Maurists rejected the authenticity of the text that has come down to us by that title, but most scholars now accept it. For the text and a translation, see B. Darrell Jackson and Jan Pinborg, eds., Augustine: De Dialectica (Boston: Reidel, 1975).
53. Ep. 18.2 (CCL 31:44); my trans., based on Parsons, FOTC 12:44.