13. Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions, 252–53 (my trans.). (continued)
The Philosopher 43 these works until Chapter 6.14 Even so, we need to remind ourselves that even in Augustine's strictly philosophical works, there is often a subtle, under-thesurface wrestling with issues raised by or raised against Manicheism: e.g., the origin of evil, the freedom of the will, the nature of the soul.
Voyage to the Port of Philosophy
In Reconsiderations, Augustine lists On the Happy Life as his second work, but it was the first he actually completed. Composed at Cassiciacum on his birthday in November 386, this brief dialogue explores a theme that stands at the heart of the ancient philosophic quest: What is happiness? He opens the work with a dedication to Manlius Theodorus, a Platonist philosopher he met in Milan, and here gives the earliest account of his spiritual journey, a sort of Confessions in miniature. He articulates this more in philosophic terms than in overtly Christian phraseology. From On the Happy Life:
(1.1) If the sea-voyage to the port of philosophy—a port-city from which one heads out on firm footing into the land of the happy life—were to be conducted via reason and the will itself, I do not think it rash, great and most noble Theodorus,15 if I said that far fewer are likely to arrive in port than those few, rare individuals whom we actually see launching out for it. For since in this world either God or nature or necessity or our own will or a combination of some or all of these has tossed us around, here and there, blindly as in the billowing waves of a stormy sea (the matter is very obscure, but you have already set out to shed light on it), how very few would perceive where best to exert oneself or where best to return to unless, at some time, some sort of tempest should send us in a direction that to fools would appear wrongturned, and thrust us, without our realizing it and against our off-course wanderings, onto that most excellent land. . . .
(1.4) At age nineteen, when I read in the school of rhetoric that book of Cicero's called Hortensius,16 I became inflamed by such a great love of philosophy that I considered devoting myself to it at once. Yet I was not free of those foggy mists which confused the course of my journey, and I confess that for
14. I debated with myself whether to place selections from On Free Will (De libero arbitrio) in this chapter, since its genre and its concerns are philosophical. Because books 2 and 3 were composed after 391 and because its concerns are anti-Manichean, I decided to place them in Chapter 6 rather than here.
15. "Most noble Theodorus": In De ordine 1.11.31, Augustine lavishes praise on Theodorus "as a man standing in very high esteem, excelling others by his ingenuity, eloquence, and preeminently by his spirit." In retr. 1.2, he says that he regrets the high praise.
16. "That book of Cicero's called Hortensius": Augustine cites it most famously in conf. 3.4.7 (as we saw in Chapter 1); it is also cited in c. Acad. 1.1.4; Trin. 13.4.7, 14.9.12, and 14.19.26.