Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
early "things I wrote while still a catechumen . . . were puffed up with the usages of secular literature."11 He had yet to hone either the poetic immediacy of Confessions or the more populist style of his sermons. However quaint or mannered these early works seem to us, they remained popular in elite circles throughout his lifetime.
These writings pre-date Confessions, of course; they also overlap with its time-frame. For more than a century, scholars have probed and debated how the Augustine of the dialogues differs from the Augustine of the Confessions. In 1918, Prosper Alfaric famously appealed to these early works to argue that "morally as well as intellectually, it was Neoplatonism Augustine converted to rather than to the Gospel."12 That assessment has been roundly refuted, dismantled as a false antithesis, thanks to the researches of Pierre Courcelle, who argued that "Neoplatonism and Christianity were, for the thinking leaders of the Milanese church, intimately tied together and not, as some moderns have believed, opposed. This synthesis, already elaborated, was one to which Augustine gave his entire adherence."13 In Milan, Augustine converted not simply to Catholic Christianity, but to an intellectually sophisticated brand of it, one that had drawn on Neoplatonist perspectives, but selectively and critically. And that selective and discerning appropriation was one Augustine continued. No pagan Neoplatonist worth his salt would have been happy with Augustine's synthesis. At this juncture, Augustine felt optimistic that there were legitimate and commendable theological convergences between thinking Christians and sophisticated pagan monotheists like Plotinus and Porphyry. His rhetoric at this early date would be irenic.
We see here the beginnings of his dialogue not only with others, but also with himself. Augustine's thinking was no fixity; it was always probing, shifting, moving. This chapter gives the earliest freeze-frame we have of that movement. Some ideas here are the first enunciations of abiding concerns (e.g., interiority, the search for happiness); others would go through rapid developments and new applications (e.g., words as signs, the inner teacher); still others would undergo serious modification (e.g., the disparaging of the body, the optimistic estimate of Neoplatonism), even reversal (e.g., freedom of the will). During this same period, especially once he moved to Thagaste, Augustine began directly confronting Manicheism. His earliest anti-Manichean writings (e.g., On the Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, On Genesis Against the Manichees) overlap with this period. For purposes of clarity, I have postponed treating
11. Retr. prol. 3 (CCL 57:6); trans. Bogan, FOTC 60:5. 12. Prosper Alfaric, L'évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin: I. Du manichéisme au néoplatonisme (Paris: Nourry, 1918), 380–81 (my trans.).
13. Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions, 252–53 (my trans.).