270.2092—dc22

Marquette Studies in Philosophy

No. 66 Andrew Tallon, Series Editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Teske, Roland J., 1934Augustine of Hippo : philosopher, exegete, and theologian : a second collection of essays / by Roland J. Teske. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 66)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-764-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-87462-764-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. I. Title.

BR65.A9T438 2009

270.2092—dc22 2009008574

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the

American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

table of contents

Dedication............................................................................................................. 7

Acknowledgments................................................................................................ 9

Introduction........................................................................................................11

Augustine as Philosopher

Ultimate Reality according to Augustine of Hippo.......................................21

Augustine, Flew and the Free Will Defense....................................................39

Platonic Reminiscence and Memory of the Present in St. Augustine..........61

Augustine of Hippo on Seeing with the Eyes of the Mind...........................77

St. Augustine's Epistula X: Another Look at 'Deificari in otio'.....................97

Augustine as Exegete

St. Augustine, the Manichees, and the Bible.................................................111

The Criteria for Figurative Interpretation in St. Augustine........................127

St. Augustine and the Vision of God.............................................................145

St. Augustine on the Good Samaritan...........................................................167

St. Augustine's Use of 'Manens in Se'.............................................................193

Augustine as Theologian

St. Augustine on the Humanity of Christ and Temptation.......................215

Augustine, Maximinus, and Imagination......................................................235

The Definition of Sacrifice in the De ciuitate Dei.........................................253

The Image and Likeness of God in St. Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus.........................................................................................................271

Bibliography......................................................................................................281

Index of Names................................................................................................293

In Loving memory of Mary Ann wendling teske

1918–2008

Acknowledgments

The articles in this volume were previously printed elsewhere. I thank the editors of the books and journals in which they were first published and acknowledge that they retain the copyright to them.

"Ultimate Reality according to Augustine of Hippo," The Journal of Ultimate

Reality and Meaning 18 (1995): 20–33.

"Augustine, Flew and the Free Will Defense," Proceedings of the Jesuit Philosophical Association (1980): 9–27.

"Platonic Reminiscence and Memory of the Present in St. Augustine," New

Scholasticism LVIII (1984): 220–235.

"Augustine of Hippo on Seeing with the Eyes of the Mind," in Ambiguity in

Western Thought, ed. Craig J. N. de Paulo, Patrick Messina, and Marc Stier (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 72–87 and 221–226.

"St. Augustine's Epistula X: Another Look at 'Deificari in otio,'" Augustinianum 32 (1992): 289–299.

"St. Augustine, the Manichees, and the Bible," in Augustine and the Bible, ed.

P. Bright, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1999. Pp. 208– 221.

"The Criteria for Figurative Interpretation in St. Augustine," in De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture, ed.by D. W. H. Arnold and P. Bright. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. 109–122.

"St. Augustine and the Vision of God," in Augustine: Mystic and Mystagogue, ed. F. Van Fleteren, J. Schnaubelt, and J. Reino (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). Pp. 287–308.

"St. Augustine on the Good Samaritan," in Augustine the Exegete, ed. F. Van

Fleteren and J. Schnaubelt (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 347-367.

"St. Augustine's Use of 'Manens in Se,'" Revue des études augustininnes 39

"St. Augustine on the Humanity of Christ and Temptation," Augustiniana 54

"Augustine, Maximinus, and Imagination," Augustiniana 43 (1993): 27–41.

"The Definition of Sacrifice in the De ciuitate Dei," in Nova Doctrina Vetusque:

Essays on Early Christianity in Honor of Fredric W. Schlatter, SJ, ed. Douglas Kries and Catherine Brown Tkacz (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). Pp. 153–167.

"The Image and Likeness of God in St. Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus," Augustinianum XXX (1990): 441–451.

Introduction T

his volume contains a group of previously published articles on Augustine of Hippo that were written over past three decades. The articles are grouped according to their principal focus. Some were written principally on philosophical aspects of Augustine's thought, which is quite in accord with my academic background and work. But others deal with Augustine's interpretation of scripture, a topic that loomed large in Augustine's writing and work as a pastor in Hippo and that I could not avoid in coming to terms with Augustine's thought. Finally, some clearly take up theological topics, such as the humanity of Christ, the meaning of sacrifice, the Arianism of Maximinus, our being made to the image of God in Augustine's second commentary of Genesis. The volume is subtitled a 'Second Collection' since I have already published a volume of previously published articles on Augustine and the present volume accordingly represents a second collection of such articles, which like the second collection at Mass may be slimmer than the first or equally rich.

Augustine as Philosopher "Ultimate Reality according to Augustine of Hippo" can serve as an introduction to the thought of the bishop of Hippo since it touches upon his life and works, his Neoplatonism, his hierarchical view of the universe with the God, who exists in the highest manner at its summit. Although Augustine was greatly indebted to the great Neoplatonist philosophers, Plotinus, whom he regarded as Plato redivivus, and Porphyry, and although he insisted that they came to know God as the cause of existing, the source of understanding, and order of living, he also saw the limitations of these great philosophers who failed to recognize the work of Christ in his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. Like much of what I have written on Augustine, the present article emphasizes his debt to the great Platonists for his concept of God and the soul as incorporeal or non-bodily beings and of God as non-temporal. "Augustine, Flew and the Free Will Defense" was one of the first articles I wrote on Augustine. In the context of Antony Flew's argu-

12 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian ment against Alvin Plantinga's version of the free will defense of God on the problem of evil in the world, I tried to show that Augustine has a version of the free will defense in book two of De libero arbitrio and that Augustine's version of the argument avoids at least some of the problems that Flew points to in Plantinga's version of the argument. The crux of Augustine's argument is that free will, though not one of the great goods, like justice, which cannot be misused, is a good and one necessary for our being able to attain the highest good, namely, happiness in the vision of God. The evil, however, with which Augustine is most concerned is the evil of sin, not with the evil that human beings cause by the misuse of their freedom. Furthermore, Augustine sees that moral evil or the evil of sin lies in the will rather than in anything that the will produces. Moral goodness and moral evil consist in turning to God and turning away from God, that is, in loving God and our neighbor or in not loving God and our neighbor, and without free will one could not love God and neighbor. Such love is the great good that free will makes possible, even if free will also means that we can go wrong and turn away from the love of God and neighbor. That is, Augustine's version of the free will defense basically claims that the creation of creatures capable of love, which has to be free if it is to be love, is what counterbalances the existence of moral evil or sin. In "Platonic Reminiscence and Memory of the Present," I took on Etienne Gilson's claim that Augustine replaced the Platonic doctrine of a memory of the past with his own doctrine of a memory of the present. The elimination of the Platonic memory of the past means that the soul does not now remember what it saw in some previous existence before coming to be in these present bodies. Although Augustine clearly does use memory to refer to the mind's contemplation of things whose existence is not past, but present, he is also clear in some of his earlier writings that knowing is remembering. And in Letter 7 he claims that those who reject present memory of intelligible things that we saw in the past, that is, before the fall into these bodies, are misinterpreting Socrates's famous discovery. Even in De trinitate where he has given up any memory of our previous happiness, he insists that the soul does not now remember its previous happiness in Adam or elsewhere, since that has been completely forgotten. One cannot, however, forget something that one did not previously experience.

introduction

"Augustine of Hippo on Seeing with the Eyes of the Mind" was originally presented as the inaugural address for the Donald J. Schuenke Chair in Philosophy, which I have been privileged to hold during the past years. In the lecture I pointed to the difference between what I called Augustine's 'official account' of what intellectual knowing is and what I called his 'unofficial account' of such knowing. While the official account, that is, the account that he gives when describing what it is to know intellectually, entails that the eyes of the mind see intelligible objects in an intelligible world without any role for the senses. The official account, I claimed, runs into a number of problems, which are inevitable for someone who takes intellectual knowing to be a seeing of intelligible objects with the eyes of the mind. But his unofficial account of knowing is much more plebeian and often seems to be merely an ability to grasp and articulate concepts of intelligible realities, more the sort of thing that we might describe as insights, such as the grasp of what it is to be non-bodily or non-temporal. "St. Augustine's Epistula X: Another Look at 'Deificari in otio'" examines the phrase from Augustine's early letter to his friend, Nebridius, in which Augustine describes the life of philosophy that he and his friend had hoped to live together. The phrase is interesting since it is one of the few times that Augustine spoke of our deification or becoming godlike. Although some scholars have regarded that expression as a mark of selfishness and presumption and as purely philosophical rather than Christian, I argue that the phrase need not and probably should not be so regarded and that the leisure that Augustine and Nebridius desired can be understood as Christian, although the letter to Nebridius is quite philosophical in its tone, perhaps because of Nebridius' penchant for philosophy.

Augustine as exegete The second cluster of articles are concerned with Augustine as biblical exegete. In "St. Augustine, the Manichees, and the Bible," I first looked at the role of the Bible in Augustine's conversion to Manichaeism. Augustine had considerable trouble with the style of the Old Latin version of the scriptures, with the anthropomorphism of the Old Testament, and with the supposed immorality of the Hebrew patriarchs. Secondly, I examined the Bible that he knew as a Manichee. He would have rejected the entire Old Testament and a good deal of the New, which the Manichees found unacceptable, either because it quoted the

14 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

Old Testament or because it contained other content opposed to their beliefs, such as the genealogies of Christ or the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Thirdly, I turned to his use of the Bible against the Manichees where I dealt with the canon of the scriptures, the proper approach to the biblical text, and figurative interpretation of the Bible. "The Criteria for Figurative Interpretation in St. Augustine" is closely related to the previous article since Ambrose's figurative interpretation of scripture was one of the key factors in Augustine's return to the Catholic Church in 386–387. I examine two criteria that Augustine used for having recourse to a non-literal or figurative interpretation of the biblical text. The first criterion is what I call, following J. Pépin, the absurdity criterion according to which one must have recourse to a figurative interpretation when the literal interpretation of the text leads to absurdity or something unworthy of God. But there is also a second criterion of figurative interpretation, namely, that everything scripture that does not refer to faith and morals must be regarded as figurative. The article examines Augustine's reasons for moving to the second criterion that clearly maximizes the extent of figurative interpretation and points out some of the interpretations to which the maximizing second criterion leads. "St. Augustine and the Vision of God" originated from my interest in some passages in the early Augustine in which he spoke of some persons who were able to attain in this life a vision of God beyond which no one cannot go even in the hereafter. I found that such statements in Augustine's early works were not simply examples of his initial enthusiasm for Neoplatonism and that he did not abandon such views in his later works. In De Genesi ad litteram and in Epistola 147 he in fact spelled out the psychology and theology of such a vision of God in the very substance by which he is God, a vision that he thought Moses and Paul enjoyed as well as some of the great Neoplatonist philosophers. "St. Augustine on the Good Samaritan" examines Augustine's interpretation of the parable of the good Samaritan in which, following many of the other Fathers of the Church, he sees the good Samaritan as Christ and the man left half-dead on the road as the whole human race injured by sin. Although modern exegetes have regarded such a Christological interpretation of the parable as far-fetched, I argue that there is much to be said in favor of the traditional patristic interpretation, which certainly is an interesting way of reading the parable and one thoroughly in accord with the faith. Given the Christological interpretation, the punch line of the parable, "Go and do likewise," really tells us to love our neighbor as Christ has loved us. "St. Augustine's Use of 'Manens in Se'" examines Augustine's use of the Wisdom 7:27b, which states that wisdom, "remaining in itself, renews all things." After looking at all the quotations and allusions to the verse that I could find, I concluded that Augustine used the verse most frequently, although not exclusively, in speaking of the Word, which, though it remains immutable in itself, entered into activity in creation and in human history. Although Augustine did not find in Plotinus that the Word of God personally entered human history, he did find in Plotinus that the immutable God, while remaining in himself, could act in the world. Hence, the article illustrates another way in which Plotinus helped Augustine toward an understanding of the God of the Christian faith.

Augustine as theologian The final cluster of articles is more theological than the previous two. "St. Augustine on the Humanity of Christ and Temptation" took its origin from some of the things that Marilyn McCord Adams said in his 1999 Aquinas Lecture, What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology, in which she pointed to the varied understanding of Christ's human nature among medieval theologians. At that time I was making translations of Augustine's anti-Pelagian works and was intrigued by some of the things of which Julian accused Augustine. As a result I turned to his use of various biblical texts on Christ's temptations. I found, for example, that Augustine interpreted Christ's words on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" as something that Christ spoke in the person of his body since he himself, being God, could not have felt abandoned by God. Similarly Julian accused Augustine of a form of Apollinarism because he seemed to make Christ immune from any sort of sexual temptations. I suggest that the human nature that Christ assumed in Augustine's Christology was the human nature that existed in Adam before the fall rather than the human nature in which we are now born after the fall. "Augustine, Maximinus, and Imagination" originated with my translations of the Collatio Maximini and the Contra Maximinum, works

16 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian in which Augustine debated the Arian bishop, Maximinus, and then followed up the debate with two books of further refutation. Maximinus was most probably a Goth and represented the later Homoian Arianism, which acknowledged Christ as God, but as one less than the Father. Augustine accused the Arians of thinking of the Trinity in terms of "carnal thought," that is, they pictured the three persons in bodily terms with the imagination rather than by the intellect. Thus he claimed that they interpreted John 5:19 by imagining the Father as a master craftsman and the Son as his apprentice, who can do nothing he has not seen the Father do. Maximinus's insistence upon sticking with biblical language and his eschewing of all philosophy left him, I argue, with no way to think of God and of the three persons as nonbodily. Hence, he pictured them as one next to the other and distinguished them as greater and lesser. In conclusion I argued that some contemporary theologians who bemoan the Hellenization of Christianity fail to realize the sort of alternative that the Church would have faced without the spiritualist metaphysics that Augustine and others learned from Neoplatonism. "The Definition of Sacrifice in the De ciuitate Dei" examines Augustine's definition of sacrifice, which has been the subject of considerable controversy. In fact one distinguished theologian, namely, Guy de Broglie, has argued that Augustine did not intend to offer a definition of sacrifice in that work and did not offer one. Augustine's claims that "what everyone calls a sacrifice is a sign of the true sacrifice" and that "mercy is the true sacrifice" do seem to call into question the death of Christ on Calvary and the Mass, actions that the Church has consistently called sacrifices. In the article I found that I agreed with the views of Yves de Montcheuil, which puts a more favorable interpretation on Augustine's words. He sees the words of Augustine as a definition of sacrifice and claims that the sacrifice of Calvary is the one universal work of mercy that is represented in the Eucharistic sacrifice and unites redeemed mankind to God. On the other hand, I should perhaps have been more sensitive to Augustine's minimizing of the role of any external signs or realities, including the external sacrifice of Christ's body on Calvary and the sacraments is conferring grace. "The Image and Likeness of God in St. Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus" examines Augustine's early interpretation of the image of God, one that he soon abandoned. In this early commentary on Genesis, which Augustine had left unfinished, he interpreted our being made to the image of God as our being made unto the image of Christ who is the Image of God. Augustine then broke off this first literal commentary with the next verse about God creating them male and female. I suggest that it may have been due to the fact that maleness and femaleness have to be understood in terms of the body, while Augustine at that time thought that prior to sin Adam and Eve did not have bodies, although Augustine's stated reason has to do with the plural verb and "our image" indicating that we were made to the image of the Trinity, which is non-bodily. In conclusion, I hope that the greater availability of these articles published together will be of benefit to students of the thought of Augustine of Hippo who continues to be the Father of the Church who has formed Western Christian thought for the past sixteen centuries and who will surely continue to do so in the years ahead.

augustine as philosopher

Ultimate Reality according to

Augustine of Hippo

I. Augustine's Life and Works A ugustine was born on November 13, 354 in the North African town of Thagaste, now Souk Ahras in Algeria, the son of Monica, a Christian, and Patricius, a pagan. He received his early education in Thagaste and then in neighboring Madaura, later moving to the port city of Carthage for more advanced studies where he became a teacher of rhetoric. At Carthage he fell in love with philosophy, encountered intellectual difficulties with Christianity, and abandoned the faith of Monica. In his search for wisdom he became a "hearer" among the Manichees, and he remained for at least nine years in that dualistic gnostic sect, which promised him knowledge without having to believe. In order to find a better teaching situation he moved first to Rome and then to Milan where he came in contact with Ambrose, the bishop, whose preaching offered him some solutions to his problems with the Catholic faith. In Milan he also encountered a group of Christians, including Ambrose, who were strongly influenced by Neoplatonist thought and who brought him into contact with the writings of Plotinus and possibly of Porphyry. These works allowed him to conceive of God and the soul as non-bodily realities and provided him, at least to a large extent, with solutions to his intellectual difficulties with Christianity. Having dismissed his mistress, the mother of his son, Adeodatus, and determined to live a life of celibacy, Augustine was baptized in Milan at the Easter Vigil of 387. Monica, who had followed him to Rome and to Milan, died in the same year while she and Augustine were awaiting at Ostia a ship to return them to Africa. Once back in Africa Augustine founded a monastery at Thagaste and then at Hippo, after he was pressed into ordination to the priesthood in 391. He was consecrated bishop in 395 and succeeded Valerius in 396 as bishop of Hippo where he presided over the church until his death in 430.

22 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

Augustine's writings are many and voluminous. Electronic data bases have recently made his four and one half million extant words readily available. In his own Revisions, which he wrote shortly before his death, Augustine surveyed his books, amending or defending them as needed, and listed ninety four works. He was still to write more, and he made no mention of his Letters, of which approximately 300 are extant, or of his Homilies and Sermons, of which over 500 have come down to us. His best known writings are his Confessions, in which he recounts in the form of a prayer to God his own past life and his return to him, and The City of God, which he wrote as a defense of the Christian faith against the pagans in the face of the fall of Rome to Alaric's forces in 410. His The Trinity marked a peak in systematic theology that would remain without rival until at least the time of Thomas Aquinas. Augustine's writings were most often products of controversies with various heretical groups, such as the Manichees, the Donatists, the Arians, and the Pelagians. Augustine's many anti Pelagian works earned his the title: Doctor Gratiae—Teacher of Grace. He is commonly recognized as the greatest of the Western Fathers of the Church. Even in his own lifetime St. Jerome, with whom he had once fiercely quarreled, called him "the second founder of the faith."

II. Augustine and Neoplatonism Toward the beginning of the twentieth century Prosper Alfaric touched off a storm of protest when he claimed that both morally and intellectually Augustine of Hippo was converted to Neoplatonism in 386 rather than to the Gospel, 1 even adding that, if he had died shortly thereafter, he would have been remembered as a committed Neoplatonist, slightly tinged with Christianity.

2 Others, e.g., Charles Boyer, argued strongly that Augustine became a Christian rather than a Neoplatonist, often minimizing the influence of Plotinus and Porphyry upon his intellectual development.

3 Pierre Courcelle brought the dispute to an end, at least to a large degree, by the discovery that in the 1 Prosper Alfari, L'évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin: I. Du manichéisme au néoplatonisme (Paris: Nourry, 1918), p. 399. 2 Ibid., p. 527. 3 See Charles Boyer, Christianisme et Néoplatonisme dans la formation de saint Augustin (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1920), p. 203, and John J. O'Meara, Saint Augustine. Against the Academics (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1950), p. 21.

Ultimate Reality according to Augustine of Hippo

Milanese Church, in which Augustine was baptized by St. Ambrose at the Easter vigil in 387, there was a group of Christians, including their bishop, who were strongly influenced by Neoplatonism so that Augustine could be seen as having been converted both to Neoplatonism and to the Christian faith rather than to one or the other.

4 That the Neoplatonists strongly influenced Augustine at the time of his Baptism and continued to influence him even in his mature years, as a Christian bishop has been commonly recognized and can be illustrated from such texts as the following. In his earliest surviving work, Augustine reminds Romanianus, his patron and a man he had led to Manichaeism, of how his reading of Cicero's Hortensius had, when he was but nineteen, set him afire with the love for philosophy. But thirteen years later, when the books of the Platonists let fall, he adds, "a few drops of oil upon that little flame, they stirred up an incredible blaze—incredible, Romanianus, incredible—perhaps more than you would believe of me. What more can I say? More than I would believe of myself."

His early enthusiasm for Neoplatonism was such that, a few years later in The True Religion IV, 7, he did not hesitate to say that, if the great Platonists "could again live this present life with us, they would surely see by whose authority human beings are more readily helped, and with the change of a few words and ideas (paucis mutatis verbis atque sententiis) they would become Christians, as several Platonists of recent and our own times have done." As an example of such conversions to the Christian faith, Augustine surely had in mind Marius Victorinus, who translated into Latin Plotinus's Enneads and whose conversion to Christianity, described in Confessions VIII, served as a model for Augustine's own conversion. If such praise for Neoplatonism can be dismissed as part of Augustine's early enthusiasm for "the books of the Platonists" or "of Plotinus,"

6 his statement in The City of God VIII, 5, that "none have come closer to us than the Platonists" must be taken seriously as his mature view. I have argued elsewhere that the union of Neoplatonism and the Christian faith in Augustine spelled the birth of Christian metaphysics

4 Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les "Confessions" de saint Augustin (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950), p. 230. 5 Answer to the Academics II, ii, 5. 6 Confessions VII, ix, 13, and The Happy Life I, 4.

24 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

7 That claim is, I believe, correct, though it needs to be carefully understood. The union of Neoplatonism and Christian faith did not mean for Augustine a mingling of the two such that there resulted a tertium quid in which neither preserved its identity. Rather, the Christian faith was always for Augustine the norm or standard in accord with which he adopted elements of Neoplatonism or of what he took to be Neoplatonism, not to dilute or falsify, but to understand the Christian message.

in the Latin West.

8 Given such necessary qualifications, it was Neoplatonism I contend that provided the framework within which Augustine articulated for himself—and for the Church in the West for centuries to come—an understanding of the Christian faith. In providing that framework, Neoplatonism—at least to a large extent—provided Augustine with his view of what is ultimately real and the source of meaning.

III. A Hierarchical Universe As the basis of his presentation of Augustine's view of reality, Vernon Bourke took the three-tiered structure of the universe: "At the top is God, in the middle is the human soul, and at the bottom is the world of bodies."

9 Augustine expressed this hierarchical view in many texts. 10 For example, in Letter 18, written in 390 to his friend, Caelestinus, to whom Augustine had sent some of his early anti-Manichaean writings, he describes his three-tiered view of reality as "this small, but precious gem" (hoc quiddam grande et breve). At the lowest level there is "a nature that can change in both place and time, such as body." Next comes "a nature that can in no sense change in place, but can change in time, such as soul." Finally, at the top of the hierarchy there is "a nature that cannot change in either place or in time, and that is God."

7 Roland J. Teske, "St. Augustine as Philosopher. The Birth of Christian Metaphysics." The Saint Augustine Lecture 1992. Augustinian Studies 23 (1992): 7–32, here 20–21. 8 James J. McEvoy, 1992. "Neoplatonism and Christianity: Influence, Syncretism, or Discernment?" in The Relationship between Neoplatonism and Christianity, ed. by Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey (Dublin: Four Courts, 1992), pp. 155--170, here pp. 165–170). 9 Vernon J. Bourke, Augustine's View of Reality. The Saint Augustine Lecture 1963 (Villanova: Villanova Press, 1964), p. 3. 10 Ibid., pp. 27–28. 11 Letter 18, 2.

For Augustine being clearly has degrees so that some things are more than others. In the same Letter 18, he goes on to explain that "everything that we say is is insofar as it remains and insofar as it is one." Thus natures are more in proportion to their sameness or oneness. He adds, "You surely see in this division of natures what is in the highest manner (summe sit), what is in the lowest manner and yet is, and what is in the middle, more than the lowest and less than the highest." He further explains, "The highest is beatitude itself; the lowest can be neither happy nor unhappy, but the middle one lives unhappily by turning down toward the lowest and lives happily by conversion to the highest." He adds a brief mention of Christ of the sort, which, taken by itself, would seem to support Alfaric's view, "One who believes Christ does not love the lowest, is not proud over the intermediate, and thereby becomes suited to be happy by clinging to the highest." For the young Augustine this stance toward the hierarchy of sameness seems to sum up the whole task of the Christian's life: "And this is the whole of what we are commanded, admonished, and set afire to do." The idea of a three-tiered universe and the conviction that the human soul attains happiness only by clinging to its God remained basic to Augustine's view of reality from the time of his conversion until his death in 430.

IV. He Who Is in the Highest Manner Augustine's hierarchy in ascending order of bodies, souls, and God is obviously one of decreasing changeability so that the highest is utterly unchanging and unchangeable. The God to whom Augustine comes in his ascent of the mind to God in Free Choice II is the immutable Truth, he who truly is (vere est),

12 for to be truly is to be immutably. "To be is the name of immutability. For everything that is changed ceases to be what it was and begins to be what it was not. Only he who is not changed has true being, pure being, genuine being."

13 So too, a favorite Augustinian term for God is "the Selfsame"—at once the Psalmist's Idipsum and the Platonist's to; aujtovn.

12 Roland J. Teske, "The Aim of Augustine's Proof that God Truly Is," International Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1986): 253–268, here 262–263) 13 Sermon 7, 7. 14 James Swetnam, "A Note on In Idipsum in St. Augustine," The Modern Schoolman 30 (1953): 328–231.

26 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

The simplicity of God, which Augustine understood in Plotinian terms, underlies divine immutability.

15 "There is, then, one Good, which is simple and, for this reason, immutable, namely God."

16 The simplicity of God's nature means "that, insofar as he is said to be something in himself, not in relation to another, he is what he has. Thus he is said to be living in himself, because he has life, and is himself life," with no distinction between what he is and what he has.

17 As simple, he does not have anything that he could lose; "no accident is present in God, because there is nothing that can be changed or lost."

18 Augustine is well aware that the Scripture says that God is "multiple, because he has many qualities in himself, but he is those qualities which he has, and he is all of them, while being one."

19 God exists as simple, "because his being is not one thing and his living another, as if he could be not living. Nor is his knowing one thing and his being happy another, as if he could know without being happy. Rather, what for him is to live, to know, to be happy—that is for him to be."

20 It is especially the simplicity of God that accounts for our inability to think anything worthy of him, though we ought always to think of him, and that accounts for our inability to say anything adequate of him, though we ought always to praise him by speaking well of him (bene dictio), that is, by blessing him.

Augustine clearly acknowledges that he learned from the Platonists to think of God and of the soul as non-bodily. He says of himself as late as his first stay in Rome, "I wished to meditate on my God, but I did not know how to think of him except as a vast corporeal mass, for I thought that anything not a body was nothing whatsoever. This was the greatest and almost the sole cause of my error. As a result, I believed that evil is some substance. ..."

22 Shortly afterward, having taken a post in Milan, he heard Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and Theodorus, a Christian Neoplatonist, speaking of God and the soul as if they were 15 W. Gundersdorf von Jess, "La simplicidad de Dios en el pensamiento agustiniano," Augustinus 19 (1974): 45–52. 16 The City of God XI, 10. 17 Ibid. 18 The Trinity V, iv, 5. 19 The City of God XI, 10. 20 Ibid. VIII, 6. 21 The Trinity V, i, 1. 22 Confessions V, x, 19–20.

not bodily. He wrote to Theodorus, "I noticed—often in the words of our priest and at times in yours—that, when one thinks of God, one should think of nothing bodily, and the same holds for the soul, since it is the one thing in the world closest to God."

23 Looking back on his youth from the vantage point of the Christian Neoplatonism he learned in Milan, Augustine admits, "And I had not known that God is a spirit, who does not have members with length and breadth and who does not have any mass. For a mass is smaller in a part than in the whole, and if it is endless, it is smaller in a part marked off in a certain space than in its endless extent. A mass is never whole everywhere, as a spirit is, as God is."

Unlike every bodily mass, which is never whole in all its parts, Augustine's God is omnipresent—not merely in the sense that he is present everywhere, like air extending endlessly, as some have thought, but in the sense that he is present everywhere and present as a whole wherever he is.

25 Hence, Augustine can address his God with the words, "You, most high and most near, most hidden and most present, who do not have some larger members and some smaller, but you are everywhere whole (ubique totus), and never confined in place. ..."

26 Though the Christian prays, "Our Father, who art in heaven," Augustine warns that one should not think that God, "who is whole everywhere by his incorporeal presence, is there and not here. ..."

27 So too, in the opening paragraphs of the Confessions, Augustine forces his reader to confront the paradoxes of God's omnipresence. He invokes—calls into himself—the God who fills heaven and earth, though, as Augustine says in prayer, "I do exist, and yet would not be, unless you were in me. ... To what place do I call you, since I am in you? Or from what place can you come to me?"

God's absolute immutability implies eternity, not merely in the sense of duration without beginning or end, but in the sense that there is neither past nor future, but only the present in God. As God's omnipresence means that he is whole everywhere (totus ubique), his eternity

23 The Happy Life I, 4. 24 Confessions III, vii, 12. 25 Letter 118, 4. 26 Confessions VI, iii, 4. 27 Letter 120, 3. 28 Confessions I, ii, 2.

28 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian means that he is whole all at once (totus simul). "He is, and he truly is, and by reason of the fact that he truly is, he is without beginning or end."

29 While past and future are found in all motion, there is neither past nor future in the truth which remains, "Examine the changes of things and you will find 'Was' and 'Will be.' Think of God, and you will find 'Is,' where 'Was' and 'Will be' cannot be."

30 Or, as he puts it in language no less difficult in Latin than in English, "There is in him only 'Is'; there is no 'Was' and no 'Will be,' since what was is no longer and what will be is not yet, but whatever is in him is only 'Is.'"

31 Not merely was Augustine the first Christian thinker, at least in the Latin West, to come to a philosophically articulated concept of God and the soul as non-bodily, but he was the first—except possibly for Gregory of Nyssa in the East—to come to a concept of divine eternity as tota simul, as having neither past nor future, but only the present.

32 And so well did he teach the Latin West to think of God as non-bodily and non-temporal that it is often assumed that these ultimately Neoplatonic doctrines are explicitly contained in the New Testament.

33 Augustine's God is in himself absolutely immutable; he is unchanging and unchangeable in his being, knowledge, or will. "For, as you are in the fullest sense, you alone know, who are unchangeably, who know unchangeably, who will unchangeably."

34 Yet, he is a God who acts in the world, bringing about newness without any newness in himself, changing other things while remaining in himself unchanged. In his Confessions Augustine addresses his God as "immutable, yet changing all things, never new, never old, yet renewing all things ... ever acting, ever at rest, gathering without being in need, filling and protecting, creating, nourishing, perfecting, seeking, though you lack nothing."

35 In fact, Augustine claimed to read in the books of the Platonists that the Son of God "remains unchangeably before and above all times and that souls receive from his fullness so that they might be happy and are

29 Homilies on the Psalms CXXXIV, 9. 30 Homilies on the Gospel of John XXXVIII, 10. 31 Homilies on the Psalms CI, sermon 2, 10. 32 Roland J. Teske, "St. Augustine as Philosopher," here 19–20. 33 François Masai, "Les conversions de saint Augustin et les débuts du spiritualisme en Occident," Moyen âge 67 (1961): 1–40, here p. 13. 34 Confessions XIII, xvi, 19. 35 Ibid. I, iv, 4.

renewed by sharing in the wisdom that remains in itself so that they might be wise."

36 He finds both in words of Scripture concerning Wisdom, which "while remaining in itself, renews all things" (Wis 7:27), and in similar words of Plotinus the doctrine that the ultimate reality can remain immutably in itself, while being the source of change and newness in other things.

Despite the decidedly Neoplatonic features of Augustine's God, it is this same God who is active in the world and has revealed himself in history. When Moses asked the Lord his name, "the Lord said to him, 'I am who am,' and he repeated, 'He who is sent me to you.' He did not say: 'I am God,' or: 'I am the maker of the world,' or: 'I am the creator of all things' ... but only: 'I am who am.'"

38 Augustine interprets the name of God in Exodus 3:14, "He who is," in terms of absolute immutability that makes God unlike any creature: "Perhaps it was," Augustine comments, "much even for Moses, as it is much for us—and far more for us—to understand the meaning of 'I am who am' and 'He who is sent me to you.'"

39 If Moses could not grasp the meaning of "He who is," then much less could the people to whom he was sent. "For," Augustine adds, "what mind can grasp, 'I am who am'?" For this reason, Augustine explains that God, whose proper name is the incomprehensible "He who is," added in his mercy, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."

40 Having said to Moses what he is in himself, he also indicated who he is for us, namely, the God who revealed himself to the Jewish people and in Jesus Christ.

V. What the Neoplatonists Saw In The City of God VIII, 6, Augustine examines the various philosophical views of God known to him from the ancient world; for him the Platonists surpass all others, inasmuch as these philosophers ... saw that God is not a body and, therefore, passed beyond all bodies in their search for God. They saw that whatever is changeable is not the sovereign God and, therefore,

36 Ibid. VII, ix, 14. 37 Roland J. Teske, "St. Augustine's Use of 'Manens in Se,'" Revue des études augustiniennes 39 (1993): 291–307. 38 Homilies on the Gospel of John XXXVIII, 8. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.

30 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian passed beyond every soul and all changeable spirits in their search of the sovereign God.

Not merely did these great philosophers ascend to the immutable God, but "they saw that which is."

41 In the books of those philosophers, Augustine tells us, he found that they even saw that God has an only-begotten Son through whom all things were made; "they saw that which is, but they saw it from afar," because in their pride they did not glorify God or give him thanks.

According to Augustine, Plato brought philosophy to its perfection and divided it into three parts: moral, natural, and rational. In these respective parts Plato located "the end of all actions, the cause of all natures, and the light of all reasons."

43 Each of the parts of philosophy had to do with God, for God is the creator of all else, the light of every mind, and the source of human happiness. Augustine tells us that the great Platonists came to know "the true God" as "the author of things, the source of the light of truth, and the bestower of beatitude."

44 Or in other words he claims that the Platonists found in God "the cause of existing, the source of understanding, and the order of living," and points out that these titles correspond to the three divisions of philosophy: natural, rational, and moral.

45 They searched after and found "God without whom no nature subsists, without whom no instruction teaches, without whom no action is profitable." That is, Augustine found—or at least thought he found—in the God of the Neoplatonists "the one God, the author of this universe, who is not only non-bodily above all bodies, but also incorruptible above all souls: our principle, our light, our good."

46 The reason why the Platonists are preferable to all others is that: "they knew God; they found the cause of all that has been made, the light for perceiving the truth, and the fountain for drinking in felicity."

47 41 Ibid., II, 3. 42 See Goulven Madec, "Connaissance de Dieu et action de grâces. Essai sur les citations de l'Ép. aux Romains I, 18–25 dans l'oeuvre de saint Augustin." Recherches augustiniennes 2 (1962): 273–309, here pp. 284, 308–309). 43 The City of God VIII, 5. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. VIII, 4. 46 Ibid. VIII, 10. 47 Ibid.

Further to spell out Augustine's view of ultimate reality and meaning, one can hardly do better, at least if one prescinds from articles of the Christian faith, than to follow the triadic pattern he so often employed in the texts just cited from The City of God as a guide to the principal contribution of the Neoplatonists. Hence, let us turn to God as cause of existing, the source of understanding, and the order of living.

a. The Cause of Existing Despite the doctrine of a necessary emanation of all else from the One that is found in Plotinus, Augustine held that God created the world out of nothing, neither out of himself nor out of some matter that he did not create. In Manichaeism, with which Augustine was associated as a "hearer," or layman, for nine years before the conversion leading to his Baptism in 387, Augustine had known an account of the origin of things and an explanation of the evil in the world that he once found attractive. In that account the good God made the world, but made it out of an evil matter that he himself did not make,

48 while human souls were seen as particles of God—literally divine, because made from the nature of God—trapped in the prisons of their bodies. Augustine came to see that the changes obviously present in human souls as clear evidence that they are not what God is. Writing to Paul Orosius in 415, Augustine says, "I have argued many times against the Manichees that, although the soul is immortal in its own way, it is proved to be changeable for the worse by its failure and for the better by its progress. This argument shows with utter clarity that the soul is not the substance of God."

49 Everything other than God, Augustine saw, was made by God, but made out of nothing. "A creature is said to be from God not in the sense that it has been made from his nature; it is said to be from him for the reason that it has him as the source of its being, not so that it was born from or has proceeded from him, but so that it was created, established, made. ..."

50 Some things God made out of other things that he had created, as in the Genesis account he made the man from the dust of the earth and the woman from the man's rib; other things he made "out of no other thing, that is, from nothing

48 Heresies XLVI, 4. 49 To Orosius in Refutation of the Priscillianists and Origenists I, 1. 50 The Nature and Origin of the Soul II, iii, 5.

32 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian whatsoever," such as "heaven and earth, or rather the whole matter of this whole earthly mass created with the world."

The influence of Platonism upon Augustine's view of creation, as well as the correction of that view by the rule of faith, is well illustrated by Augustine's discussion of the Platonic ideas in a brief question that was to bear a decisive influence upon the later Middle Ages. As he saw it, the rationality of the created world is guaranteed by the divine ideas in accord with which God created it. Though Plato, Augustine concedes, first used the term, "ideas," the reality was, he suspects, known to other wise men. Regardless of their name—for one can call them "forms" or "species" or "patterns" (rationes) in Latin—"the ideas, which are principles, are certain stable and immutable forms or patterns of things; they are not themselves formed and, for this reason, are eternal and existing always in the same way and are contained in the divine mind."

52 God, after all, did not create the universe without reason, and each creature has its own reason or pattern, which must be located in the mind of the creator, since he did not look to a pattern external to himself in creating.

But if these patterns of all things created or to be created are contained in the divine mind, and nothing can be in the divine mind save what is eternal and immutable, and Plato called these principal patterns ideas, not only are there are ideas, but they are true, because they are eternal and remain the same and immutable.

Hence, it is by participation in these ideas that there comes to be whatever exists. As the intelligibility of the world is guaranteed by the ideas, in accord with which God creates the universe of creatures, so its goodness follows upon his goodness. In the Timaeus 29e Plato said of the Demiurge, "He is good, but one who is good never has any envy whatsoever of anyone." Augustine most probably encountered this theme of the generosity of the good in Plotinus.

54 It is a theme that recurs frequently in Augustine, especially when he discusses why God created

51 Ibid. 52 Eighty-Three Different Questions 46. 53 Ibid. 54 Du Roy, L'intelligence de la foi en la trinité selon s. Augustin. Genèse de sa théologie trinitaire jusqu'en 391 (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1966), p. 474.

the world. Though he at times simply answers, "Because he willed to," he at other times answers, "Because he is good."

55 In fact, he appeals to the divine goodness, even to the point that at times it sounds as though, given his goodness, God could not have not created the world and its full panoply of beings from the highest to the lowest.

56 In The Trinity XI, v, 8, he says, "God made all things very good, for no other reason than that he himself is supremely good." So too, in The Literal Meaning of Genesis IV, xvi, 27, he argues that, if God "could not make good things, he would lack power; if, however, he could and did not, he would have great envy. Hence, because he is almighty and good, he made all things very good." At times Augustine verges toward a Leibnizian optimism. He tell Evodius in Free Choice III, v, 13 that

God, the maker of all good things, has already made anything better that occurs to you with true reason. ... there can be something in the nature of reality that you do not think of with your reason. But there cannot fail to be what you think of with true reason. For you cannot think of something better in creation that has escaped the artisan of creation.

Hence, Augustine says to God in his Confessions that things of this world cry out to us that they have been made. "The voice by which they speak is their presence to our senses. And so, you, Lord, who are beautiful made them, for they are beautiful; you who are good made them, for they are good; you who are made them, for they are," and yet compared to God they are not, nor are they good, nor are they beautiful.

b. The Source of Understanding As early as his Soliloquies, written at Cassiciacum before his Baptism in Milan, Augustine speaks of God as a certain ineffable and incomprehensible light of minds.

58 Augustine conceived of human knowing as a kind of seeing, not a seeing with the eyes of the body, but a seeing

55 Robert-Henri Cousineau,, "Creation and Freedom: An Augustinian Problem: 'Quia voluit'? or 'Quia bonus'?" Recherches augustiniennes 2 (1963): 253–271. 56 Roland J. Teske, "The Motive for Creation according to Saint Augustine," The Modern Schoolman 65 (1988): 245–253. 57 Confessions XI, iv, 6. 58 Soliloquies I, xiii, 23.

34 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian with the eyes of the mind. God, as the light of minds (lux mentium), stands to the eyes of the mind as the sun stands to the eyes of the body.

59 As the sun illumines sensible things so that they are visible and the sun is itself visible, so God illumines intelligible things, such as the intellectual disciplines, so that they can be understood by the eyes of the mind, and God himself is intelligible.

60 Augustine tells us that, after reading the books of the Platonists, he entered into himself and saw by the soul's eye an unchangeable light above his mind. "It was not this ordinary light ... nor a greater light of the same kind. ... Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. ... It was above my mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made by it. He who knows the truth knows that light."

61 God, the eternal truth, is "the intelligible light in which and by which and through which are intelligibly bright all things which are intelligibly bright."

62 Just as for bodily seeing one needs eyes that are healthy and open and that look at what is to be seen, so the mind has its own eyes that are made healthy by faith and whose look or gaze is reason.

63 Moreover, as our bodily seeing is impeded by fog or clouds, which prevent our seeing or filter the light, so the eyes of the mind have their own clouds: images or phantasms, that have to be swept away like "pesky flies from the interior eyes." Then, in thinking of God, spiritual people "may become used to the purity of that light, and by it as a witness and judge they may prove that these bodily images rushing upon their inner gazes are utterly false."

64 Once Augustine pleads for a person who can think without images, "Give me someone who can see without any imagining of carnal objects of sight; give me someone who can see that the principle of everything one is the One alone, from which everything one is."

65 Besides the seeing with the eyes of the body, Augustine distinguishes two further levels of seeing or vision. There is spiritual vision by which we see "not bodies, but likenesses of bodies," that is, images in

59 Ibid. I, vi, 12 . 60 Ibid. I, viii, 15 . 61 Confessions VII, x, 16. 62 Soliloquies I, i, 3. 63 The Greatness of the Soul XXVII, 53. 64 Homilies on the Gospel of John CII, 4. 65 The True Religion XXXIV, 64.

the mind, and there is the intellectual vision by which we see intelligible realities with the eyes of the mind, such as "charity, joy, peace ... and God himself, from whom and through whom and in whom are all things."

66 How we are to understand such a vision of God remains one of the most disputed areas of Augustinian studies, with scholars divided about what it means to see things in God or in the divine light.

67 Though in many texts Augustine seems merely to say that human beings see intelligible things in God in a sense analogous to that in which we see sensible things in the sunlight, that is, by means of light of the sun, at other times he seems to say that we see the divine ideas themselves or see the eternal truth, namely, God himself. For example, in discussing the divine ideas, he comments that only the rational soul among God's creatures "surpasses all things and is next to God, when it is pure" so that, illumined by the intelligible light, it can "see, not through bodily eyes, but through its ... intelligence, those patterns, by whose vision it becomes blessed."

68 So too, he says, "In that eternal truth by which all temporal things have been made, we see by the sight of the mind the form in accord with which we are and in accord with which we do something—either in ourselves or in bodies— with true and right reason."

69 What is clear is that Augustine thought that the divine truth served as the norm or rule by which the truth we attain is judged and that certitude and truth of human knowledge is a participation in the truth, which is God.

c. The Order of Living As the highest good, God is the source of human happiness. In Cicero's Hortensius, a work written as an exhortation to the life of philosophy, which Augustine read at the age of nineteen and which set him afire with the love of wisdom, Augustine read that "we all certainly want to be happy."

70 The statement appears again and again in

66 The Literal Meaning of Genesis XII, xxiii, 49 and xxiv, 50. 67 Ronald H. Nash, The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1969), pp. 94–124. 68 Eighty-Three Different Questions 46. 69 The Trinity IX, vii, 12. 70 The Happy Life II, 10.

36 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

71 and the desire for happiness is arguably at the very heart of Augustine's thought.

Augustine's writings,

72 In a very early work, The Happy Life, Augustine claims that, in order to be happy, one must have what one wants, provided, of course, one wants what is good and has no reason to fear the loss of that good against his will. Hence, only one who has the unchangeable good, namely, God, can be happy, for one who has God can only lose him by willingly turning away from him in sin. Moral philosophy investigates the highest good to which we refer all we do and which we seek, not for the sake of something else, but for its own sake. Once we have attained it, we seek nothing else for our happiness.

73 Plato, Augustine says, "calls God the highest good; hence, he would have a philosopher be a lover of God. And since philosophy leads to the happy life, one who loves God will be happy in the enjoyment of him."

74 Indeed, Augustine claimed that happiness was the only reason for being a philosopher,

75 and defined happiness as "joy in the truth" (gaudium de veritate), the truth, of course, being God himself.

In some of his earliest writings Augustine thought that some few human beings could attain, even in this life, a wisdom that entailed a beatitude, beyond which one could not go even in the next.

77 However, he soon came to a deep appreciation of the wounds that human nature had suffered from sin that left it in need of healing, a healing of the ignorance and weakness that would be complete only in the next life.

78 Though the great Neoplatonists came to the knowledge of the true God, though they saw the goal, saw that which is, they saw it only from afar and scorned the humble way to return to their fatherland, namely, through faith in the cross of Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and human beings. "They were able to see that which is, but they

71 See Werner Bierwaltes,, Regio Beatitudinis: Augustine's Concept of Happiness. The St. Augustine Lecture 1980 (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1981), p. 34). 72 See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, tr. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 115. 73 The City of God VIII, 8. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. XIX, 1. 76 Confessions X, xxiii, 33. 77 On Order II, ix, 26. 78 Nature and Grace XIX, 21–XXI, 23 and XXXV, 41.

saw it from afar. They refused to hold to the humility of Christ. They contemned the cross of Christ, the ship on which they might safely come to that which they were able to see from afar."

79 Though they had to cross the sea, they rejected the wood (lignum)—the wood of a ship, the wood of the cross. Despite Augustine's harsh criticism in his mature years for the Platonists, who in their pride rejected the way of humility, namely, faith in the humanity of the savior, he never denied the greatness of their achievement: they came to see the God who is. "They were able to see that which is, but they saw it from afar."

Even when he stresses the need for the humble way of faith, which they rejected, he thinks of the relation between faith and vision in a Platonic framework. Twice Augustine cites the words of Plato in Timaeus 29c, "As eternity stands to what has come to be, so truth stands to faith."

81 The statement is, Augustine tells us, perfectly true. He is saying that, as the eternal being of God stands to the world of change and becoming, so the vision of the truth stands to faith in temporal events. Though the vision of the eternal truth is the goal, the way to the truth is faith in the humanity of Christ. As Plato's pivsti~ had as its object what comes to be, so Christian faith is directed toward the temporal events that are the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As Plato's ejpisthvmh had as its object the eternal and really real, so the vision of God, to which the Christian looks forward in hope, will be the contemplation of the eternal being of God. For the Christian, Christ is in his humanity the way, as he is in his divinity the truth. "Because we believe that what had come to be in him has passed over to eternity, so too, when faith has come to the truth, what has come to be in us will also pass over."

82 Even when he was articulating the Christian's participation in the "passing over of the Lord" (transitus Domini), Augustine did so within the Platonic categories of temporal becoming and eternal being, of faith in the former to be replaced by vision of the latter.

83 For Christ is at once the way and the truth, both our knowledge as

79 Homilies on the Gospel of John II, 4. 80 Ibid. 81 The Trinity IV, xviii, 24 and The Agreement of the Evangelists I, xxxv, 53. 82 The Trinity IV, xviii, 24. 83 Roland J. Teske, "The Link between Faith and Time in St. Augustine," in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum. Collectanea Augustiniana II, ed. by E. Muller, J. Lienhard, and R. Teske (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 195–206.

38 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian the object of faith and our wisdom as the goal. "Christ is, then, our knowledge; the same Christ is our wisdom. He implanted in us faith that concerns temporal things; he himself reveals to us the truth that concerns eternal things." Hence, "it is by him that we go to him," for he is both the way and the truth, both our knowledge and our wisdom.

I have tried to express what Augustine of Hippo held to be the ultimate reality and the source of meaning. I have argued that it is the omnipresent, immutable, and eternal God, who is the author of our being, the light of our minds, and the source of our happiness. I have tried to show that this framework within which Augustine articulated his understanding of the Christian faith was deeply influenced and clearly shaped by the Neoplatonism that he discovered in the Church of Milan, although what he accepted from Platonism and what he rejected was always determined by the rule of faith. I have tried to show that Plotinus and the Platonists remained his intellectual guides throughout his life. Plotinus remained such, in fact, even as the bishop of Hippo faced the approach of death. Possidius, his first biographer, tells us that in 430, the year of his death at the age of 75, as Hippo was threatened by the invading Vandals, Augustine "was comforted by the saying of a certain wise man: 'He is no great man who thinks it a great thing that sticks and stones should fall and that men, who must die, should die.'"

85 The saying is taken from Ennead I, 4, 7. Peter Brown adds in comment, "Augustine, the Catholic bishop, will retire to his deathbed with these words of a proud pagan sage"—surely not because Plotinus was a proud man, if indeed he was, but because he was one of those few wise men who saw that which is, albeit from afar.

84 The Trinity XIII, xix, 24. 85 Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 425.

Augustine, Flew, and the Free Will Defense I n his recent book, The Presumption of Atheism and Other Essays, Antony Flew has an essay entitled, "The Free Will Defence."

1 I read this essay while I was teaching a graduate course on St. Augustine and was dealing with his struggles with the problem of evil in De libero arbitrio.

2 I had also been reading at roughly the same time the statements in the last two General Congregations regarding our mission to struggle against atheism.

3 Since Flew's essay presents a clear and strong argument that a set of claims that theists make about God and evil is inconsistent, a paper examining his argument seemed a suitable piece of work to present to Jesuit philosophers. Flew's essay is directed against the version of the free will defense that Alvin Plantinga has developed in his book, God and Other Minds.

4 I became convinced that there is a version of the free will defense present in St. Augustine that escapes some, if not all, of the difficulties that Flew finds in Plantinga's version of the argument. In this paper I shall sketch briefly the version of the free will defense that Flew presents and attacks. Then I shall outline the version of the free will defense that Augustine develops in Book Two of De libero arbitrio. Finally, I shall turn to what are, I believe, the crucial points of difference between the two versions and shall try to indicate why the Augustinian version of the argument seems sound. Though I have

1 Antony Flew, The Presumption of Atheism and Other Essays (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), pp. 81–99. 2 Saint Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, translated by Anna S. Benjamin and L.H. Hackstaff, with an introduction by L.H. Hackstaff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). All subsequent quotations from De libero arbitrio will be from this translation, but will indicate the book, chapter, and paragraph numbers from the Patrologia Latina text. 3 Documents of the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus, ed. John W. Padberg, SJ (Saint Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1977), pp. 76–80 and 416–417. 4 Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 131–155.

40 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian named Augustine in the title of the paper since I started out with his work, I shall also appeal to St. Thomas in the body of the paper, especially where St. Augustine needs further clarification or lacks precision.

I. Flew's Version of the Free Will Defense According to Flew, the free will defense is an attempt to answer the problem of evil; it attempts to show that it can be consistent to maintain that there is a God, that this God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, and that there is much evil in his creation. Flew says that, though one usually views this as a problem of reconciling the God hypothesis with recalcitrant external facts, it can also be seen "as one of overcoming an apparent internal inconsistency within the system itself."

5 The first move in the argument is to insist that divine omnipotence does not mean that God can do what is logically impossible.

6 The next step is to claim that "the capacity to choose is a logically necessary precondition of the realization of various high values. ..."

The third step is to claim that God does give at least to men this capacity to choose. The argument then claims that the gift of free will necessarily implies the possibility of choosing what is bad as well as the possibility of choosing what is good, that some or even most human creatures do choose through their own fault what is wrong, and that "all the evil of and consequent upon these wrong choices is ultimately more than offset by the actually achieved sum of these higher goods of which the capacity to choose is the logically necessary condition."

8 The capacity to choose does not entail that any wrong choices are made; yet many wrong choices have been, are being, and will be made. They will be used as the logically necessary foundations of such goods as acts of fortitude or forgiveness which will count as items in the sum of alleged higher values that is supposed to offset the sum of actual evils in the world. The defense is then extended to cover all evils by claiming that all evils in the world directly or indirectly stem from wrong choices. Furthermore, one should also argue that the evils resulting from wrong choices are not unjustly distributed and that the sum of

5 Flew, Presumption, p. 81. 6 Ibid. Flew here cites St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 4. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

Augustine, Flew, and the Free Will Defense

goods outweighs the sum of evils. As Flew sees it, the key to the argument is the claim that "there is a contradiction in the suggestion that God could create a world in which men are able to do either right or what is wrong, but in fact always choose to do what is right."

9 Flew then turns to the question of compatibilism versus incompatibilism.The basic question regarding free will is not: free will or determinism, but free will and determinism or free will and indeterminism. A compatibilist holds both free will and determinism; an incompatibilist holds either free will or determinism. Flew attacks Plantinga's libertarian incompatibilist position and argues that one cannot be a traditional theist who holds that God creates, conserves, and cooperates with every act of his creatures and also be an incompatibilist who holds that free acts are uncaused. On the other hand, one cannot be a compatibilist and maintain that God is not responsible for the evil choices and their consequences.

10 Hence, Flew conlcudes that, if "the Compatibilist is ultimately right; then the Free Will Defence offers no hope whatsoever of justifying the ways of God to man."

11 If, however, the incompatibilist is correct— and Flew argues that he is not—then the problem is to square libertarian free will with the essentials of theism. For, if we really had libertarian free will, "we should all possess a premise from which we should have to deduce ... that such a Creator does not exist."

12 Thus Flew presents the theist with a dilemma: either compatibilism is true, or incompatibilism is true. If incompatibilism is true, then God escapes the blame for the evil in the world, but cannot be the creator he was thought to be. If compatibilism is true, then God is guilty as charged of all the evil in the world. In any case, God cannot be both perfectly good and creator; hence, the upshot of Flew's examination of the free will defense is the necessary non-existence of the alleged defendant.

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 93. Flew here cites St. Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles, III, 67, where Aquinas says, "Every operation ... of anything is traced back to him as its cause" Flew goes on to cite Luther (p. 94) and concludes that both Aquinas and Luther were compatibilists and that "the nightmare of the Great Manipulator is not ... the peculiarity of Calvin and Calvinism; but a necessary and immediate consequence of the essential theist doctrine of Divine creation" (p. 96). 11 Ibid. 12 lbid.

42 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

Before turning to Augustine's version of the free will defense, some preliminary remarks on Flew's argument are in order. First of all, I agree with Flew that to extend the argument to cover all evils in the world involves some bold factual postulations. I do not know how one might plausibly argue that all the admitted evils in the world are directly or indirectly the results of wrong choices made by creatures. Secondly, even in cases where certain evils can be shown to be directly or indirectly consequences of the wrong choices of creatures, I do not know how one might argue that all the resultant evils are justly distributed. Thirdly, it follows that the free will defense, as far as I can see, cannot be a complete answer to the problem of evil. If the free will defense is going to be to any extent a correct answer to the problem of evil, it will be at most a partial answer. Furthermore, if libertarian free will means that the act that is said to be free is an uncaused act, then Flew is, I believe, correct in maintaining that libertarian free will is incompatible with an essential tenet of theism. Within the context of traditional theism, to say that God is not the cause of human freedom or human free acts is to say that human freedom or human free acts do not exist.

13 For theism clearly maintains that God creates and conserves all that exists apart from himself and that he cooperates with every action of every creature.

14 To say that a free act is an uncaused act, as Hume has pointed out, leaves no one responsible for the act—neither a human nor a divine cause or agent.

15 Moreover, if the free act is uncaused and yet the cause of other events, it is an uncaused cause that would provide the premise from which one would have to deduce that such a creator as theists claim to exist does not exist.

16 This move, of course, sharpens the problem that a theist must face: If God is the cause of all that exists apart from himself, then how can one maintain that he is not the cause of sin and other evils within his creation?

13 Gerard Smith, SJ, Freedom in Molina (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1966), p. 225. "And to say that God does not cause freedom or that there is no freedom is to say pretty much the same thing." 14 Aside from the texts to which Flew refers, namely, SCG III, 67 and 88–89, see also S.T. I, q. 104, a. 2 and q.105, a. 4 and a. 5. 15 David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), Section VIII, Part II, pp. 98–99. 16 Flew, Presumption, p. 99.

And this is the question that Evodius raises for Augustine at the beginning of Book One of De libero arbitrio: "Tell me, please, whether God is not the cause of evil?"

II. Augustine's Version of the

Free Will Defense At the beginning of Book One of De libero arbitrio, Augustine distinguishes two senses of evil. We speak of someone doing evil and of someone suffering evil. The Augustinian version of the free will defense is directly concerned only with doing evil, though we do sometimes suffer evil as a result of having done evil.

18 By the end of Book One Augustine has settled for himself that "we commit evil through the free choice of the will"

19 He has given a preliminary definition of what it is to do evil, namely, to neglect eternal things and to follow temporal things. "All sins are included under this one class: when someone is turned away from divine things that are truly everlasting, toward things that change and are uncertain."

20 Furthermore, nothing lies more within the power of the will than the will itself.

21 A good will, i.e., "a will by which we seek to live rightly and honorably and to come to the highest wisdom," lies in the power of our will.

22 Furthermore, a good will is something "more excellent than all the goods not in our power ...."

23 One who is a lover of his own good will possesses the four virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice and will enjoy the happy life.

24 There remains, however, at the end of Book

17 Augustine, De libero arbitrio I, 1, 1. 18 Ibid. Thus Augustine will say that we suffer unhappiness as a result of doing evil. See Confessions VII, 3, 5. Similarly Aquinas distinguishes malum culpae and malum poenae in relation to the will; see S.T. I, q. 48, a. 5. 19 De libero arbitrio I, 16, 35. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. I, 12, 26. 22 Ibid. I, 12, 25 and 26. 23 Ibid. I, 12, 26. Augustine's claim about the excellence of a good will recalls Kant's similar claim. See Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, 11. 24 De libero arbitrio I, 13, 20. The happiness of which Augustine speaks is something that is attained in this life. Indeed, in the earlier De ordine II, 9, 26, he spoke of an intellectual contemplation of God that is attainable by

44 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

One the question "whether free will ... ought to have been given to us by him who made us."

25 Since the possession of free will is a necessary condition for our being able to do evil or to sin, why is God not the cause of our doing evil? At the beginning of Book Two, Evodius asks "why God gave man free choice of the will, since if he had not received it he would not be able to sin."

26 If God has given man free will for acting rightly, then man should not be able to use it to sin.

27 Hence, there is the prior question: Is free will a good gift or is it a gift from God?

28 Though Evodius believes that God gave us free will and that it is therefore a good gift, Augustine insists that "we want to know and understand what we believe."

29 Hence, he sets out to prove that God exists, that all things insofar as they are good are from God, and that free will is a good.

Augustine's argument for the existence of God is long and technical as well as beyond the scope of this paper. It is, however, important for this paper to see that Augustine insisted on establishing by reason the existence of God as the source of every good before tackling the question of why God is not the cause of our doing evil. For, once he has proved that God exists, he has a fixed point of reference and is not dealing merely with the internal consistency of a set of statements.

31 Moreover, through his own intellectual struggle with the question of evil, Augustine found that before one can answer the question, whence those who have undergone the proper philosophical disciplina and cannot be surpassed even after this life. 25 De libero arbitrio I, 16, 35. 26 Ibid. II, 1, 1. 27 Ibid. II, 2, 4. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. II, 2, 6. 30 Ibid. II, 3, 7. 31 This point is, I believe, extremely important. For, first of all, if one is dealing with a set of claims that seem inconsistent, one can alleviate the inconsistency by rejecting any one of the claims. If one is not committed to the theistic claims about God, it will seem easiest to reject some or all of those claims. But what is more important is that the view that evil is a privation of good seems to be a direct consequence of the theistic view of God as infinite creator of all else. Hence, if Augustine establishes that God exists and is the source of all else, then evil cannot be something positive.

32 And the prior question was one that he could not answer until he was able to conceive of God as an infinite, immutable spiritual substance.

is evil, one must answer the prior question, what is evil.

33 It was only after he came to the concept of God as spiritual substance that he could see that evil is not a substance, but a privation of good.

34 Hence, the concept of God as immutable truth and wisdom that can be shared in common by all rational beings without becoming proper to any rational being and without being changed by the rational beings that share it is crucial to the answer to the problem of evil.

35 For, once God is conceived as an infinite spiritual substance and creator, it follows that evil cannot be a positive reality. Of almost equal importance to Augustine's version of the free will defense is his view of the created world as hierarchical. There are within the world things that merely exist, but do not live or understand, and there are things that exist and live, but do not understand. Finally, there are things that exist, live, and understand, such as, the soul of man. The latter sort of things that exist, live, and understand are more perfect than things that lack either understanding or life.

36 There is also a hierarchy within man of cognitive activities. The common or interior sense is superior to the five bodily senses, and reason or un-

32 De libero arbitrio I, 3, 6. See also De natura boni 4: "Proinde cum quaeritur unde sit malum, prius quaerendum est quid sit malum." So too when Augustine says that he sought in an evil way the answer to the question, whence is evil, the male quaerebam would seem to refer to his asking the wrong question first. Confessions VII, 5, 7. 33 In Confessions V, 10, 19–20, Augustine says, "I thought that anything not a body was nothing whatsoever. This was the greatest and almost the sole cause of my inevitable error." He then adds: "As a result, I believed that evil is some such substance. ..." 34 "For if I were only able to conceive a spiritual substance, then forthwith all those stratagems [of the Manichees] would be foiled and cast out of my mind. But this I was unable to do" (Confessions V, 14, 25). 35 The concept of God as a spiritual substance developed in Book Two of De libero arbitrio is equally as important to Augustine's aim as is the proof that God exists. Augustine never doubted the existence of God; his problems stemmed rather from his inability to conceive of a spiritual substance. For Augustine's dependence upon Plotinus in this crucial section of Book Two see: Robert J. O'Connell, SJ, Augustine's Early Theory of Man, A.D. 386–391 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 52–57. 36 De libero arbitio II, 3, 7.

46 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian derstanding is superior to the inner sense. Reason, the "head or eye of the soul," is the most noble part of man.

37 Augustine then argues that, if we can find something that not only exists, but is superior to our reason, that will be God. Though Evodius objects that God is "rather that to whom nothing is superior," Augustine replies that "if you find that there is nothing superior to our reason except what is eternal and immutable," then either that will be God or, if there is any-thing superior, it will be God.

38 Thus, the Augustinian God is immutable truth and wisdom in accord with which we judge, but about which we do not judge. All creatures are mutable, though there is no creature superior in nature to the rational soul of man. Just as there is a hierarchy of beings in the Augustinian world and a hierarchy in human knowing, so there is within man another hierarchy of goods. There are the least goods or bodily goods without which man can live rightly. For example, one can still live rightly without eyes or without a limb, though the absence of eyes or of a limb in man is obviously a great evil. There are also within man the great goods by which man cannot live wrongly. These great goods are the virtues. For example, through justice one cannot live wrongly; such goods cannot be used wrongly precisely because "the very action of a virtue is the good use of those things we can also use for evil.

39 However, there are also intermediate goods without which one cannot live rightly, though, like the least goods, they can be used wrongly. Among these intermediate goods is free choice of the will. Thus, though free choice of the will is a necessary condition for doing evil or sinning, it is also a necessary condition for acting rightly.

40 Hence, free will is a good and is a greater good than those goods without which a man can live rightly, though it is a lesser good than the great goods by which a man cannot live wrongly. When the will clings to the immutable good that is common to all, i.e., to God who is the highest good, then man lives a happy life. For happiness is "that disposition of the spirit which clings to the im-

37 Ibid. II, 6, 13. 38 Ibid. II, 6, 14. 39 Ibid. II, 19, 50; also II, 18, 48–50. 40 What is significant in Augustine's argument is that acting rightly or acting wrongly is a matter of acts of the will, not external actions. The goodness or evil of external actions derives from the goodness or evil of the will.

41 Each man's happiness is his own good, but is attained only through clinging to the highest good common to all. In happiness lie all the virtues that man cannot use wrongly and that are the great goods proper to each man. Thus, the will, an intermediate good, obtains the first good and the great goods proper to each man, i.e., happiness and the virtues, by clinging to the common and immutable goods, truth and wisdom. Hence, free choice of the will is a necessary condition of man's attaining his proper and primary good and the great goods, the virtues.

mutable goods" and "is man's proper and primary good."

42 Thus Augustine argues that the gift of free will is a necessary condition for the realization of other goods of great value. On the other hand, by turning from immutable and common goods to its own private good or to some external goods or to some good lower than itself, the will sins. The will turns to its own private good when it desires to be its own master; it turns to external goods when it busies itself with the private affairs of others or with whatever is of no concern to it; it turns to goods lower than itself when it loves bodily pleasures. Thus Augustine's revised definition of sin includes pride, curiosity, and lust.

43 But what the will turns toward when it sins, namely, its own private good, the goods of others, or lower goods, are nonetheless all goods. So too the will itself is a good, though an intermediate good. "Evil is a turning away from immutable goods and a turning toward changeable goods. This turning away (aversio) and turning toward (conversio) result in the just punishment of unhappiness, because they are committed, not under compulsion, but voluntarily.

Though the free will itself is a good and though what the sinner turns toward are goods, yet the movement of the will from an immutable good to a changeable one, i.e., the movement of the will away from God, is a sin and is evil. Since God cannot be the cause of sin, what is the origin of this movement?

45 Augustine says that, if he answers that he does not know, Evodius may be disappointed. "Yet that

41 De libero arbitio II, 19, 52. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. II, 19, 53. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. II, 20,54.

48 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

46 The movement of the will away from God is a defective movement, and every defect comes from nothing.

would be the truth, for that which is nothing cannot be known."

47 Yet the defect is voluntary and, hence, lies within our power.

The turning of the will from God to some lesser good is a defective or disordered movement; as the willing of a good, it is good, but as deficient and disordered, it is evil, The deficiency and disorder is a privation of direction and order that should be there. Once the evil that we do is seen to be rooted in a deficient or disordered willing, the origin of sinful willing does not require a positive evil cause.

Hence, Augustine's version of the free will defense deals with the evil that we do. The evil that we do is voluntary. Sin lies in the movement of the will away from God toward lesser goods. However, free will is itself a good, though an intermediate good. Though it is a necessary condition of our doing evil, it is also a necessary condition of our living rightly, of clinging to God, the highest and common good of man, and of obtaining happiness, man's highest proper good, as well as the great goods, the virtues. Consequently, in giving us free choice of the will, God has given us a good gift. The evil of sin, of a movement of the will away from God, is a defective movement which, though voluntary, has no positive cause of its defectiveness or disorderedness. Hence, God cannot be its cause. Therefore, though without free will we would not be able to sin, God is not to be blamed for giving us free will. At the beginning of this paper, I said that I would focus upon what I believe are the crucial points of difference between the two versions of the free will defense after I had indicated the main outlines of the two versions. What I see as the crucial points of difference can perhaps best be dealt with under three headings: divine goodness, moral goodness and evil, and free choice and causes.

46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 For an exposition of Aguinas' further development and clarification of Augustine's doctrine, see Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942), pp. 22ff.

Augustine, Flew, and the Free Will Defense 49 III. Divine Goodness One of the main points of difference between the two versions of the free will defense lies in the different views of divine goodness. As we have seen, Augustine's argument intends to show that the gift of freewill is a good. Though it is not the greatest good of man, free will is a necessary condition of obtaining man's greatest good. Though it is through free will that we sin, our willing is within our power so that we can will rightly or wrongly. If willing rightly or wrongly is within our power, then it is we who are to blame if we will wrongly. Whether God could have given us a better sort of freedom by which we would as a matter of fact always will rightly is a question that Augustine does not raise within the context of the free will defense. Yet within the version of the free will defense that Flew uses, there is implicit the claim that, if God is to be all good, then he ought to have made man so that he always chooses to do what is right, unless, of course, it is logically impossible for God to have done so. More simply put, the version of the free will defense that Flew examines claims that God's goodness entails that the goodness of God's creation be limited only by logical impossibility, that the world be the best that is possible. Augustine, on the other hand, is content to have argued that creation is good and that free will is a good. The key to the version of the free will defense that Flew uses is that "there is a contradiction in the suggestion that God could create a world in which men are able to do either what is right or what is wrong, but in fact always choose to do what is right."

50 That is, it is supposed to be logically impossible for God to create free creatures who always choose to do what is right, i.e., who freely, but always choose not to sin. The reasoning behind this position would seem to be that God can do whatever is not logically impossible if he is omnipotent and that a world in which creatures freely, but always choose to do what is right is a better world than a world in which creatures sometimes choose to do what is wrong. Therefore, in creating the latter sort of world, God would have chosen a world less good than is consistent with his being all good, unless the former sort of world were an impossible one. But to fail to choose to create the best sort of world, when one can, is a failure in goodness. Hence, to maintain both that God is omnipotent and that he is all good, one has to maintain that a world in which men

50 Flew, Presumption, p. 82.

50 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian freely and always choose what is right is not logically possible. If such a world is not logically possible, then God can be both omnipotent and all good. In his recent book, The God of the Philosophers, Anthony Kenny, in a chapter entitled, "Omnipotence and Goodness," suggests that "the dispute between those, who like Abelard and Leibniz, think that God must have chosen the best world, and those who, like Aquinas, think that God must have chosen a good world but could have chosen other better ones" reflects a dispute in ethics between "partisans of the right and partisans of the good."

51 He argues that those who maintain that an all-good God must have chosen the best possible world are operating with a criterion of morality that claims that in any given situation there is only one right choice, usually, the choice that produces the optimal results or most felicific consequences. Within such a view a choice of a lesser good is a failure in goodness. However, in other moral perspectives, for example, in a morality of law, one is obligated to avoid evil and to choose a good, and in most situations there are more good choices than one available. Thus he argues that "the morality by which Abelard and Leibniz judge the divinity is a morality of rightness, not of goodness."

52 And a morality of rightness goes hand in hand with some form of consequentialism, which has an easier time justifying evil as a means toward good.

53 Now it seems to me that the version of the free will defense that Flew employs does involve the view that God must choose the one right course of action, namely, the action that produces the best possible world. So too, it seems that in Flew's version moral evil is justified by the larger resultant sum of higher goods.

54 Within a law-like morality, which is much more typical of the Christian tradition, moral goodness entails that one choose one among the (usually) many good actions available. However, such a morality cannot justify evil means by good ends.

55 Kenny leaves the resolution of the theologi-

51 Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 115. 52 Ibid., p. 116. 53 Ibid. 54 Flew, Presumption, p. 82. 55 Kenny, God, pp. 115–116.

56 Though his brief history of the dispute about divine benevolence and its relation to different views of morality is illuminating, it does not settle the issue, and it does not get to the root of the matter. To the best of my knowledge Augustine never argued that this world was the best possible world or that the goodness of God required that he create the best possible world. Augustine did argue that this world was good, that each nature was good, that there is a hierarchy of goods in this world, and that the totality was very good.

cal dispute to moral philosophers for its resolution.

57 Aquinas clearly thought that this world is not the best possible and that God could have made another world better than this one.

58 He argues that the goodness of anything is twofold. There is, first, its essential goodness. In this sense, to be rational is of the essence of man. With respect to this sort of goodness, God cannot make something better than it is, though he could make something else better than it.

59 There is another goodness that lies outside of the essence of a thing. In this sense, to be virtuous or to be wise is a good of man. With respect to such a good, God can make things he has made better than he has made them.

60 If one dispenses with this distinction, one can simply say that God can make another thing better than anything that he has made. Yet God cannot create in a better way than he has, since he creates with his infinite goodness and wisdom, though he can create better things than he does.

61 This universe, given the beings that it contains, could not be better, though God could make other beings or add more beings to those he has made so that there would be another and better universe.

62 In answering an objection that, if God could make better things than he made and did not will to do so, he was mean (invidus), Aquinas simply answers that it does not belong to any creature to have

56 Ibid., p. 117. "... so here we may leave the theological problem to wait on the progress of moral philosophy." 57 Confessions VII, 12, 18. 58 S.T. I, q. 25, a. 6 ad 3um. 59 Ibid., corpus. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., ad 1um. 62 Ibid., ad 3um.

52 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

63 Hence, in Aquinas' view God could have made a better world than he has made; he could have made men wiser and more virtuous than they are. He could have made men at least less sinful, if not sinless.

been made better than God has made it.

64 However, what God has made is good, and the fact that sin and other evils exist is not seen by Aquinas as inconsistent with God's goodness or benevolence, even though God could have created another and better world. If God had to create the best possible world if he created a world at all, then God is free in the sense that he could create or not create, but he is not free in the sense of being able to create this or that world. Aquinas held that God is not necessitated in creating, for any creature is a finite good and, as such, cannot necessitate God's will. "Since God's goodness is perfect and can exist without other things, since no perfection is added to him from other things, it follows that it is not absolutely necessary that he will things other than himself."

65 And Aquinas adds, "With respect to those things which he does not will necessarily, he has free choice."

66 God necessarily wills, according to Aquinas, his own infinite goodness; however, no finite good is able to necessitate God's will. However, if God had to create the best possible world, he would have only the freedom to will or not to will that world; he would not have freedom of choice to will this world or that world. If he is to create a world, he would be necessitated to create that one world that is the best possible world. It would follow that, given God's decision to create, the only world he could create is that world which is the best. That world then would impose some necessity upon God. He would be determined by the goodness of the world that is the best possible so that he could create no other. Hence, this position would seem to make God dependent upon something other than himself and would remove freedom of choice from God. If God is dependent upon something other than himself, then he cannot be the infinitely perfect God of theism. And if God does not have freedom

63 Ibid., ad 2um: "non est autem de ratione creaturae alicuius, quod sit melior quam a Deo facta est." 64 Indeed faith tells us of at least one human person who did not sin, though that person did not lose her free will. What God did in one case is certainly not logically impossible in that case or in others. 65 S.T. I, q. 19, a. 3. 66 S.T. I, q. 19, a. 10.

of choice, then he would lack a perfection that human persons have. Or it would seem that human freedom would not involve freedom of choice.

67 For it would not seem that God could give to his creatures a perfection that he himself lacked.

IV. Moral Goodness and Moral Evil The different views of divine goodness operative in the two versions of the free will defense are reflected in their views of moral goodness and moral evil in human actions. According to Plantinga, moral evil is "the evil that results from human choice or volition," and physical evil is "that which does not."

68 Thus, "suffering resulting from human cruelty would be moral evil," but "suffering due to an earthquake ... would be physical evil"

69 For Plantinga and Flew moral evil, it would seem, lies primarily in the results of choices and volitions, i.e., it lies in the actions chosen and the consequences of those actions. There are at least three elements present: 1) the choice and/or volition, 2) the action resulting from the choice and/or volition, and 3) the results of the action. Though Plantinga seems to speak of moral evil as the result of choice and volition, Flew speaks of the evil of choices and the actions resulting from choices.

70 However, moral evil in their version of the free will defense seems to lie primarily in the action and its results; whereas, for Augustine and Aquinas moral evil lies primarily in the act of the will.

71 To avoid the confusion of speaking of two senses of moral evil, I shall use 'sin' to refer to moral evil in the Augustinian and Thomistic sense.

67 If God does not have free choice, then either his creatures cannot have it or it is not a perfection, but a limitation. Descartes, for example, regarded liberty of indifference as an imperfect form of freedom; hence, God would not have such freedom. See Descartes, Meditations IV; HR I, 175. However, if one regards freedom of choice as a perfection, then an all perfect God must have it and, as creator, could give it to some of his creatures. 68 Plantinga, God, pp. 131–132. 69 Ibid., p. 132. 70 Flew, Presumption, p. 82. 71 "At every point in the discussion he insists on the fact that it is not the external action of the body which is essentially sinful, but the inner intention of the will." Vernon J. Bourke, Augustine's Quest for Wisdom (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1945), p. 93. See also, S.T. I-II, q. 20, a. 1.

54 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

Hence, in Flew's version of the free will defense the aim is to defend the goodness and omnipotence of God, given a world in which moral evil lies primarily in the results of human choices. Hence, it is essential to such a version of the free will defense to show not merely that God could not have made men who were free and who did not do evil, but also that the evil resulting from wrong choices is outweighed by the sum of higher goods. Just as in assessing the divine goodness a consequentialist ethical norm was used, so too in assessing human choices it is the consequences that count. On the other hand, for Augustine and Aquinas moral goodness or sin lies primarily in the act of the will, and the goodness or evil of the external action is derivative from the act of the will. The Augustinian version of the free will defense attempts to show that God's gift of free will is a good gift even though it is through free will that we are able to sin. The evil that humans suffer requires another sort of argument. However, this fact does not lessen the problem for Augustine. Sin, like any evil, is a privation of a good. However, a privation always is in a subject that is good. Evil as a privation is parasitic upon a good, and the degree of evil corresponds to the degree of good in which the evil exists. As Maritain has said,

The more powerful this good is, the more powerful evil will be— not by virtue of itself, but by virtue of this good. That is why no evil is more powerful than that of the fallen angel. If evil appears so powerful in the world of today, this is because the good it preys upon is the very spirit of man.

The evil of sin that lies in the free will of man is consequently the greatest. As the rational soul of man for Augustine is next to God in ontological perfection, so the evil of man's will is the greatest of evils. On the other hand, the goodness of a good will that clings to God and contains all the virtues is the greatest of created goods. Thus for Augustine the free will defense does not involve a calculus of consequences in accord with which the sum of higher goods must outweigh the sum of evils. Without free choice of the will there would not be the good will that clings to God, and that will is man's greatest proper good, even though it is through free will that man can turn away from God through sin—the greatest of evils.

72 Maritain, Problem, pp. 2–3.

So too Aquinas sees the evil of sin (malum culpae) as depriving the will of order toward the divine goodness. For that reason God does not will the evil of sin.

73 Indeed, it is impossible for God to will the evil of sin, for he necessarily wills his own goodness and to sin is to turn away from that goodness.

74 Thus sin for Aquinas is directly opposed to the uncreated goodness that is God and not merely to some created good.

75 Though God can will natural evils and the evil of punishment insofar as they are connected with the good of the order of the universe or with justice, God cannot will at all the evil of sin. He does not will the evil of sin in itself, for that would mean that God sins, which is logically impossible. He does not will the evil of sin per accidens, because, as directly opposed to the divine goodness, sin cannot be a means to a greater good. Nor is there some good that God wills that necessarily entails that sin occur. To say that God does not will sin in itself or per accidens and that he does not will that sin not occur is to say that he permits that sin occur. Perhaps it sounds old-fashioned to try to maintain that the greatest of evils is sin or the perversity of a will turned away from God and that the greatest of goods is a will clinging to God in love. However, within a hierarchical universe and within a world created by a God who is wisdom and truth and love, it can hardly be otherwise.

V. Free Will and Causes Flew holds a compatibilist position and claims that most classical philosophers and theologians did so as well.

76 That is, he holds both determinism and free will. If determinism means that choices and actions are caused, then it is true that Augustine and Aquinas are determinists. If libertarian free will is taken to mean that a free choice or volition is an uncaused cause, then Aquinas at least would not share the libertarian position. Flew is, I believe, quite correct in maintaining

73 S.T. I, q. 19, a. 9. 74 S.T. I, q. 19, a. 10 ad 2um. 75 S.T. I, q. 48, a. 6: "Malum vero culpae opponitur proprie ipsi bono increato: contrariatur enim impletioni divinae voluntatis, et divino amori quo bonum divimun in seipso amatur: et non solum secundum quod participatur a creatura." 76 Flew, Presumption, p. 96.

56 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian that a theist ought to maintain, if he is consistent, that free human choices and volitions are caused by God. Flew distinguished between what he calls motions and movings, i.e., between cases where my arm is moved, though I do not move it—a motion, and cases where I move my arm—a moving. "All movings are actions or parts of actions; all action involves moving or abstentions from moving; while choice too surely has to be understood by reference to actions or possibilities of actions."

77 Given this distinction, one can furthermore maintain that "people could usually—indeed, if we take the word 'do' strictly, could always—do other than they do do."

78 He further insists that, if someone claims that one of the social sciences has shown that no one ever can do other than he does, then either he has misread his source or the discipline in question is in error.

Plantinga, on the other hand, defines determinism so that the possibility of alternative action is precluded. "To say of Jones' action A that it is causally determined is to say that the action is question has causes and that given these causes, Jones could not have refrained from doing A."

80 The sense of 'cause' that Plantinga employs makes the action inevitable given the causes. Flew regards this as the normal sense of cause when one is speaking of causing inanimate objects and some brutes. However, when we are speaking of causing someone to do something, we do not mean that the action we cause another person to perform is one that he could not have helped performing. In the second sense of 'cause' what "is caused is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and 'causing him to do it' means affording him a motive for doing it."

81 In this sense, we cause students to do assignments and at least sometimes to turn them in on time. But when we cause someone to do something by giving him a motive for acting, we do not deprive him of the ability to do otherwise. Indeed, our presenting him with a motive presupposes that he can do otherwise, even though some motives are such that he might say, "I had no choice." Yet even in such a case where the caused agent might claim that he had no choice,

77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Plantinga, God, p. 133. 81 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1940), p. 285, quoted from Flew, Presumption, p. 98.

in a fundamental sense he did have a choice though the alternative might not have been what a reasonable person would have chosen. When Flew turns to the question of how God causes our choices and actions, he finds that the first sense of 'cause' is inapplicable, for a cause in that sense would deny the obvious realities of choice and action. The second sense of 'cause' will, however, not do either, for causing in the second sense is immediately discernible by the motivated agent. Hence, Flew looks for a third sense of 'cause.' He suggests that "by direct physiological manipulation" God might "ensure that someone performs whatever actions ... [He] determines."

82 The actions of this creature would still be genuine actions so that the manipulated person could in a fundamental sense have done otherwise.

83 But God would be the Great Manipulator who by means of physiological changes causes all human choices and actions. However, if God causes all human choices and actions in this fashion, he is surely the one to be blamed for any wrong choices and actions. And the morality of the situation is even more grotesque since he is also judge, jury, and executioner.

Flew's argument, of course, fails if there is another sense of 'cause,' besides the three senses that he has examined. However, before turning to another sense of 'cause,' let us see whether the third sense will do. Even though the manipulated agent would not be conscious of the divine causality that causes his choices and actions, it would seem that such physiological changes would render the choices and actions inevitable. If through such physiological manipulations God is going to ensure that certain choices and actions take place, then, given the changes effected by divine manipulation, the choices and actions are inevitable. Indeed, there would seem to be no difference between the first sense of 'cause' that Flew rejects because it runs against the known facts of human choices and actions and the third sense of 'cause.' For, given the effects of the divine manipulation upon the agent, he could not choose or do otherwise than he does. Certainly, our will would not be in our power, as Augustine claims, nor would we be masters of our

82 Flew, Presumption, p. 99. 83 Ibid. As I understand this claim, the agent could have done otherwise if he had chosen to do otherwise, and he could have chosen to do otherwise if he had been otherwise manipulated. 84 Ibid., pp. 96 and 99.

58 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian actions, in Aquinas' terms. And with advances in physiology we might well count on evidence that our actions are inevitable to be forthcoming. Flew understands choices by reference to actions and possibilities of actions. With Aquinas it seems that just the opposite is true. Actions are understood as free or not with reference to choice. Furthermore, for Aquinas human choices have causes. The will is necessarily inclined toward the good and with necessity tends toward happiness which consists in the possession of God.

85 However, precisely because the will is necessitated toward the good in general or toward God, it is not necessitated with respect to any finite good. With respect to means toward an end, the will is free; yet there have to be finite goods perceived as means to an end grasped as unconditionally good before the will can after rational deliberation choose one of the finite goods. As in cases where we cause someone to do something by presenting him with a motive, so in other cases a human agent can motivate himself through the discovery of alternative means to a good that for him is perceived as unqualifiedly good. Just as the motives we present to others do not ensure that the others will choose and act accordingly, so not every motive or finite good that an agent discovers for himself ensures his choice of that good. Since free choices are not uncaused insofar as there must be motives for a rational choice, a free choice is not an uncaused act. And if libertarian free will means that the free act is uncaused, then Aquinas did not hold libertarian free will. On the other hand, if to be caused means to be rendered inevitable, given certain prior events or changes, then he denied that the will is caused in that sense. A necessary condition for a free act of the will is that there be no temporally prior event or set of events that render the act inevitable.

86 In other words, for Aquinas, the question regarding free choices is not whether or not they are caused, but how they are caused. A free choice is not merely unconstrained, but not necessitated. Some contemporary philosophers have admitted that there is such a third

85 S.T. I, q. 82 a. 1 and a. 2. 86 See my article, "Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Divine Transcendence," The New Scholasticism LIII (1979): 283–294, here 286.

view of human freedom and have referred to it as the theory of selfdetermination.

87 Earlier in this paper I granted that Flew is correct in claiming that, if libertarian free will means that free acts are uncaused, then libertarian free will is incompatible with theism. Flew is also correct in claiming that, if God causes human choices by physiological manipulations, he—and not human agents—is responsible for whatever good or evil actions men do. He is also correct in claiming that God in the role of the Great Manipulator could cause human choices and actions so that men freely, i.e., without constraint, always choose to do what is right. However, by such physiological manipulations God could not cause human choices and actions that are free in the sense of self-determination so that the human agent is responsible for his good and evil choices and actions. Through physiological manipulations God as the Great Manipulator would remove the possibility of human morally good and morally evil acts in the Augustinian and Thomistic sense. However, human choices that are free in the sense of self-determination are not uncaused, though they are not necessitated. For the purposes of this paper it is not necessary to establish that free choices in this sense do occur. Flew is claiming that a set of statements that theists make about God and evil is inconsistent. He has shown that, if God's causing human choices and actions is conceived as achieved through physiological manipulation and if human choices and actions are free in the sense of unconstrained, then God is responsible for the evil men do. However, that men are free in the sense of self-determination does not mean that human choices are uncaused. That men are free in this sense is at least logically possible, and that men are free in this sense is what theists, such as, Augustine and Aquinas, claim. Can the God of theism cause such free human acts to occur? Flew appeals to Aquinas' claim that omnipotence does not mean that God can do what is logically impossible. However, omnipotence does mean that God can do whatever is logically possible. Flew is correct in claiming that a theist must, if he is consistent, maintain that God causes human free choices,if human free choices occur. However,

87 For example, see William K. Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1973), 2nd ed., p. 76. For a presentation of Aquinas' view of freedom as self-determination, see Vincent C. Punzo, Reflective Naturalism (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 25ff.

60 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian even God cannot cause a human free choice that is not free. I have in a previous paper attempted to state Aquinas' solution to the question of how divine causality does not destroy human free acts.

88 The solution there is worked out in terms of an implicit definition of divine transcendence. If God knows, wills, and causes this free act to occur, then this free act occurs. However, it is a free act that occurs, and it occurs with conditional necessity which does not destroy freedom.

VI. Conclusion In this paper I have tried to argue that there is present in Augustine a version of the free will defense that is significantly different from that which Flew attacks. In the version that Flew employes God's goodness is taken to mean that he would create the best world that he could. Thus God cannot have freedom of choice, but is necessitated to create the best possible world. In the Augustinian version God's goodness means that he created a good world, but he could have chosen a better world. Thus God has freedom of choice in creating. In the Flewian version moral goodness and moral evil are seen to lie primarily in actions and their results; in Augustine's version moral good and moral evil lie primarily in the acts of the will either clinging to God or turning away from God. Finally, I have tried to argue that Flew's presented alternatives between libertarian (uncaused) free choice and unconstrained (caused) free choice do not suffice. For Aquinas at least a free choice is caused and unconstrained, but not necessitated. Furthermore, if free choices are possible in that sense, then a God who is omnipotent is able to cause such free choices, though he does not and cannot will the evil of sin.

88 See my article "Omniscience," pp. 283–294. This article is a presentation of Fr. Bernard Lonergan's position, which in turn is developed out of Aquinas.

Platonic Reminiscence and Memory of the Present in St. Augustine I n The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine Etienne Gilson acknowledges that Augustine in his earlier writings used the language of Platonic reminiscence and was at one point even inclined to accept the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul.

1 Gilson claims, however, that Augustine's doctrine of divine illumination "implies not Platonic memory of the past, but Augustinian memory of the present, and this is something altogether different."

2 He tells us that Augustine continues to use the language of 'remembrance' and 'reminiscence,' but he uses these terms in a non-Platonic sense. "The Platonic recollection of the past gives way to that Augustinian memory of the present whose role becomes more and more important."

Subsequent commentators on Augustine seem to have agreed with Gilson and to have found his statement to be quite apt. For example, in the introduction to the Bibliothèque Augustinienne edition of the Retractions, Gustave Bardy says,

As soon as one substitutes the memory of the present for the memory of the past, everything becomes clear; the soul does not remember what it has seen in the course of a previous existence. It rediscovers or recognizes what it has seen, what it does not cease to see in God.

So too in his edition of the De Trinitate, P. Agaësse says,

1 Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (London: Victor Gollanz, Ltd., 1961), pp. 82, 71–72. This translation by L. E. M. Lynch is of the second French edition of Introduction à l'étude de saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1943); the first edition appeared in 1929. 2 Gilson, p. 82. 3 Gilson, p. 75. I have not been able to find any such claim by any commentator on Augustine or any reference to such a claim prior to the date of the first edition of Gilson's work. 4 Saint Augustine, Les Révisions. Bibliothéque Augustinienne series of Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, vol. 12. (Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer et Cie, 1950), p. 147.

62 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

In brief, for a memory of the past, Saint Augustine is led to substitute a memory of the present, that is, the theory of reminiscence is replaced by the theory of illumination, already present in the Soliloquies (I, 8, 15).

Le Blond goes even further to suggest that for Augustine memory is primarily a faculty of the present, not of the past.

6 And in a passing comment Vladimir Lossky refers to the "Augustinian noetic of the 'memory of the present'" as "the Christianisation of Platonic reminiscence."

7 So too Ronald Nash says of Augustine's mature position, "Augustine's theory of recollection, then, is not a remembering of the past. It is, on the contrary, a remembering of the present."

In view of the importance attributed to Augustine's doctrine of 'memory of the present,' one would expect that the textual evidence for this doctrine would be both unambiguous and abundant. Such, however, is not the case. In fact, there seem to be but two texts that formally speak of remembering the present or of memory of the present. Moreover, it is disconcerting to find that the first of these texts, namely, Letter VII, does not substitute 'Augustinian memory of the present' for Platonic reminiscence. Rather in that text Augustine attributes memory of the present to Plato. Furthermore, the second text, De Trinitate

5 Saint Augustine, La Trinité. Deuxiéme Partie: Les Images. Bibliothéque Augustinienne series of Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, vol. 16. Translation by P. Agaësse, notes by P. Agaësse and J. Moingt. (Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer et Cie, 1955), p. 624. 6 J. M. Le Blond, Les Conversions de s. Augustin (Paris: Aubier, 1950), p. 16. 7 Vladimir Lossky, "Éléments de 'Théologie Négative' chez Saint Augustin," Augustinus Magister, I, 577. 8 Ronald H. Nash, The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969), p. 83. Nash claims that in the Retractationes Augustine still maintains "the thesis that learning is a kind of remembering" (p. 83). He argues that this sort of remembering must be different from the Platonic view which requires the pre-existence of the soul—a doctrine that Augustine had by then rejected. He then finds in De Trinitate XII, 15, 24 grounds to conclude that Augustine holds "a remembering of the present." He bolsters this conclusion with a further quotation from Retractationes I, 4. Finally, he says, "Augustine can speak of recollection as a remembering of the present because truth is always available to us in the sense that Christ will make it available if we are attentive to it" (p. 84). However, that Augustine speaks of such a remembering of the present is not at all clear.

Platonic Reminiscence and Memory of the Present

XIV, 10, 13–11, 14, seems to be limited to mind's memory of itself. And, hence, it would not seem to be able to be applied to all intelligible objects. The purpose of this paper, therefore, will be to re-examine the Gilsonian claim that Augustine replaced Platonic memory of the past with his own doctrine of memory of the present.

Before we turn to an examination of the texts, it will be helpful to distinguish at least two senses in which 'memory of the present' is used. In one sense, 'memory of the present' is used to refer to recalling to mind objects that have been experienced in the past, but that have not ceased to exist and are, therefore, presently existing. For example, when I recall Chicago, I recall something that I have seen in the past and that has not ceased to exist, but exists at the present. My memory, however, of a building that has burned down is a recollection of an object that I experienced in the past and that has ceased to exist. Such a memory, then, is a memory of the past, i.e., of an object that is past. So too my recollection of the class that I taught yesterday is memory of the past, but my recollection of myself or of God is a memory of realities that are present and have not ceased to exist, even if I have experienced or known them in the past. There does not seem to be anything particularly problematic about 'memory of the present' in this sense, for, though one recalls an object that is presently existing, his experience of that object is past. Because one's experience of the object occurred in the past, he can now remember that object in the straightforward sense. However, the prior experience of the object

9 In examining the references to Augustine given by Gilson and others who place considerable importance upon 'Augustinian memory of the present,' one finds a wide selection of texts to which appeal is made. Gilson rejects Letter VII as containing memory of the present in the Augustinian sense; he appeals to a variety of texts from which he argues to a memory of the present stripped of any association with the past, such as, De Trinitate XV, 21, 40; XIV, 6, 8–7, 10; X, 3, 5; Confessions X, 25, 36; Retractationes I, 8, 2 and I, 4, 4, and De Trinitate XIV, 11, 14. It is not at all clear that "memoriae tribuimus omne quod scimus" (De Trinitate XV, 21, 40) entails 'Augustinian memory of the present.' Bardy refers only to Retractationes I, 8, 2, upon which he is commenting.

note on the rejection of Platonic reminiscence refers to De Trinitate XII, 15, 24. R. A. Markus refers to Letter VII, De Trinitate XII, 14, 23; Confessions X, 8, 12–27, 38; De Trinitate XV, 21, 40 and XIV, 11, 14. V. Lossky refers to De Trinitate X, 1, 1–2, 4 and XIV, 21, 40-41. Nash refers to De Trinitate XII, 15, 24 and Retractationes I, 4, 4.

64 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian seems to be a necessary condition of one's being able to remember that object now. The Augustinian doctrine of 'memory of the present,' however, if it is to replace Platonic reminiscence that involves recollection of past experience and pre-existence, must not merely claim that the object remembered is presently existing, but must also make the further claim that the object was not first experienced in the past, then retained in memory, and finally recalled. In other words, for the the present, of which Gilson speaks, the pastness has to be eliminated. Here is the point of Gilson's claim that "Thinking, learning, and remembering are all one to the soul."

10 That is, if 'Augustinian memory of the present' is to replace Platonic reminiscence, then the Augustinian memory must be freed from reference to the past. R. A. Markus, for example, says that Augustine extends its [memory's] scope step by step until it includes everything that the mind is capable of knowing or thinking about, whether it is actually thought about or not. This is why the mind can be said to 'remember' objects such as God, the eternal truths, or the mind itself, none of which are 'remembered' from previous experiences. …

Augustine's memory of the present can replace Platonic reminiscence with its implication of a previous experience and pre-existence only if 'memory of the present' means not merely that the object remembered is present or presently existing, but that—to use Augustine's words— it is not the case that "retention in memory is earlier in time than the

10 Gilson, p. 75. After mentioning the role of the inner-teacher and divine illumination, Gilson says, "Consequently, association with the past ceases to be an essential characteristic of the memory. Since the soul remembers everything present to it even though unaware of it, we can say that there is a memory of the present which is even far more vast than the memory of the past" (p. 102). Here Gilson appeals to De Trinitate XIV, 11, 14 and XV, 21, 40. 11 R. A. Markus, "Augustine," in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 371. "Augustine's conception [of memory] has two roots: the ordinary common-sense conception of memory as the mind's ability to preserve and recall past experience, and the Platonic conception as revised by him to free it from reference to the past" (p. 370).

vision in recollection"—as, he says, in the case of mind's memory of itself.

I. Letter VII and Memory of the Present As early as 389 Augustine was encountering some difficulty in finding acceptance for the idea that we can remember not only things that are past, but also things that are present. He begins Letter VII by telling Nebridius that there can be memory without images or phantasms.

First of all, one must see that we do not always remember perishing things, but frequently things that remain. Hence, though memory claims for itself a hold on past time, it is nonetheless partly of things that have left us behind and partly of things that we have left behind.

Thus, in remembering his father who has died, Augustine recalls what has left him and does not now exist. But when he remembers Carthage, he remembers what he has left and what still exists.

However, in each of these two kinds of things, memory retains past time. For I remember both that man and that city from having seen them and not from now seeing them.

Thus Augustine distinguishes the presentness or pastness of the object remembered and the presentness of the act of remembering from the pastness of the act of having seen his father or Carthage. Though the object remembered may still exist, memory depends upon the pastness of having seen the object, not upon a present act of seeing it. The example of remembering Carthage shows that 'memory' can be used of things that have not ceased to exist. He then tells Nebridius,

12 De Trinitate XIV, 10, 13. 13 Letter VII, 1, 1–2. The translation of the texts from Augustine here and elsewhere in this article is my own unless otherwise noted. The translation in the Fathers of the Church series seems to me to have completely missed the sense of the passage. Marcus Dods' translation is much clearer, though "we have, in the stream of mental activity, left these behind" as a translation of "a quibus ... defluximus" removes the clear allusion to the fall of the soul from the intelligibles. The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Trans. by Marcus Dods. Volume VI. The Letters of Saint Augustine (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1872), p. 14.

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Some unjustly attack Socrates' famous discovery in which it is asserted that things which we learn are not presented to us as something new, but are recalled to mind by recollection.

Their claim is that memory is only of past things, but that the things we learn by our intellect, on the authority of Plato himself, remain always, cannot be destroyed and, therefore, cannot become past.

These critics, Augustine points out, do not attend to the fact that that vision by which we formerly saw these things with our mind is past.

Nor do they attend to the fact that because we have flowed down from those things and have begun to see other things in another way, we see the former things again by recalling them, i.e., through memory.

With regard to this passage R. A. Markus has claimed that the knowledge recalled "is not really derived from past experience" and that "memoria does not necessarily refer to the past. ..."

14 Robert O'Connell, however, has correctly, I believe, interpreted Letter VII as claiming that "it is on the basis of the pastness of our having glimpsed them [the eternal truths] that we can now remember them."

15 In Letter VII Augustine clearly maintains a doctrine of memory of the present. The intelligible objects, from which we souls have flowed down, are ever-present; however, our seeing them with the mind was in the past, presumably "before the soul used the body and the senses" (Letter VII, 3, 7). Now we have begun to see other things, i.e., sensible things, in another way, i.e., with the eyes of the body, and we recall the ever-present intelligible objeets through memory. Yet what Augustine says here is not sufficient for what Gilson calls 'Augustinian memory of the present.' He says regarding Letter VII,

14 Markus, p. 370. 15 Robert J. O'Connell, SJ, St. Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 130, n. 4. O'Connell says of De Trinitate XII, 21 and 24, "There, it would appear, Augustine is striving to liberate his conception of 'memory' (now become an acknowledgement of God as present, rather than God as present-but-object-of-a-pastvision) from the implications of Platonic reminiscence and pre-existence."

If his [Augustine's] mind had been settled on the point, this would have been an excellent opportunity to substitute the Augustinian memory of the present for Platonic recollection of the past, but Augustine does not do so. ...

Yet there is clear mention of a memory of present intelligible realities on the basis of a past vision. For Gilson 'Augustinian memory of the present' means not merely that what is remembered is present, but that there is no past experience on the basis of which we now recall those realities. Nonetheless, Letter VII is one of the two texts—to the best of my knowledge—in which there is formal mention of a memory of the present.

II. De Trinitate XIV and Memory of the Present The other text in which there is explicit discussion of 'memory of the present' is De Trinitate XIV, 10, 13–11, 14. In the latter section Augustine is dealing with the image of the Trinity found in memory, understanding, and love. He raises an objection, "But someone will say that it is not memory by which the mind, which is always present to itself, is said to remember itself." In support of this objection Augustine points out that in dealing with the virtue of prudence, Cicero divided it "into memory, understanding, and foresight and assigned memory to past things, understanding to present things, and foresight to future things." Augustine notes that certain foresight is beyond human ability unless it is God-given as it was in the case of the prophets. On the other hand, memory of past things and understanding of present things are certain, though understanding is of present incorporeal things, not of corporeal things that are present to the eyes of the body. To show that it is legitimate to speak of memory of something present, Augustine appeals to the authority of Vergil who said that Ulysses "did not forget himself " (Aeneid, III, 629).

For, when Vergil said that Ulysses did not forget himself, what else did he wish to be understood than that he remembered himself? Therefore, since he was present to himself, he could not remember himself unless memory pertained to present realities.

And so Augustine concludes that

16 Gilson, p. 284, n. 11. Gilson admits that Augustine was inclined toward holding the doctrine of the soul's pre-existence at this period.

68 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian as in past things that is called memory by which it happens that they can be recalled and remembered, so in the case of a present reality—as the mind is to itself—that should without absurdity be called memory by which the mind is present to itself so that it can be understood by its thought and so that both can be joined by their love.

In this passage Augustine clearly argues that memory can legitimately refer to something present; he uses the mind which is present to itself as an example. There is, however, no indication that this memory of the present is intended to replace Platonic reminiscence. As a matter of fact, this passage seems to do no more than urge the legitimacy of speaking of a memory of a present object—precisely the Platonic doctrine that Augustine was explaining to Nebridius in Letter VII. However, the preceding section in De Trinitate XIV marks a departure from the earlier view and throws a different light on the section we have just seen. In the earlier section Augustine, in speaking of knowledge of temporal things, says,

Some knowable things temporally precede knowledge of them. Such are those sensibles that were already in things before they were known; such too are all those things which are known through history. On the other hand, some knowable things begin to be at the same time as knowledge of them. Thus, if something visible, which previously did not exist, arises before our eyes, it certainly does not precede our knowledge of it.

Augustine provided a further example of an object of knowledge and knowledge of it being simultaneous, namely, a sound and the hearing of the sound.

Nonetheless, whether they precede in time or begin to be at the same time as knowledge of them, the knowable things generate the knowledge of them. But once knowledge has been acquired, when those things which we know are reconsidered by recollection, after they have been stored in memory, who does not see that retention in memory is prior in time to vision in recollection and the union of both of these by the will as a third element?

Thus far what Augustine has said seems unproblematic. First we know things, then store them in memory, and later recall them. In the case of knowledge of temporal things, the knowable things generate knowledge of them, and such things are retained in memory before they are seen in recollection. "But in the case of mind, however, it is not so." Augustine claims that in the case of mind there are three points of difference. First, mind is not adventitious to itself.

17 Thus mind does not come to mind from somewhere else. Second, mind does not come to be in mind as faith comes to be in mind. Faith, which was not, comes to be in a mind that already existed. Mind cannot so come to be in itself already existing. However, the third point of difference is the one most relevant to our topic.

After knowledge of itself mind does not by recollection see itself as stored in its memory as if it were not there before it knew itself. For from the moment it began to be, mind never ceased to remember itself, to understand itself, and to love itself.

The three claims that Augustine makes, namely, that mind does not come to mind from someplace else, that mind does not come to be in itself as a virtue comes to be in a mind, and that mind does not first know itself, then store itself in memory, and later remember itself in recollection, are obviously claims about mind. However, there is nothing in these texts that indicates that in the case of any other intelligible object such as God, the retention in memory is not prior to vision in recollection. Indeed Augustine's argument for each of these claims seems to rest upon the unique relation that mind bears to itself such that it cannot come to itself from elsewhere, cannot come to be in itself already existing, and cannot store itself in memory as if it were not in itself before it knew itself. There are, of course, other texts in Augustine in which there is talk of memory of realities that are present. In the straight-forward sense of 'memory of the present' all talk of memory of God, for example, is concerned with memory of a reality that can never be past, but is

17 It is interesting to find that Augustine uses "adventitia"—the same word that Descartes was to use in Meditation III in speaking of the kinds of ideas. 18 In the beginning of De Trinitate X Augustine argues that the mind is always present to itself and that the mind, therefore, always knows itself, even if it does not always think of itself. Lossky's appeal to this text as a justification for memory of the present is puzzling.

70 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

19 However, for what Gilson calls 'Augustinian memory of the present' more than the presentness of the object is required; the more that is required is the elimination of previous experience of such a reality as a condition of the possibility our remembering it.

ever-present.

An examination of the texts from Letter VII and from De Trinitate XIV have not offered much support to Gilson's claim that Augustinian memory of the present replaces Platonic recollection of the past. Perhaps an examination of Augustine's rejection of Platonic reminiscence will provide evidence for the alleged important role for memory of the present.

III. Augustine's Rejection of

Platonic Reminiscence In the well-known passage in De Trinitate XII, 15, 24, Augustine explains his rejection of Plato's doctrine of reminiscence and the pre-existence of the soul. Plato tried to persuade us, Augustine claims, that the souls of men lived here even before they governed these bodies and that, hence, it is that those things which are learned are rather remembered from being previously known than known for the first time.

Augustine reports the evidence from the Meno of the slave boy who was questioned on geometry. He argues that if this were recollection of things previously known, all people or almost all people would not be able to respond in this way when questioned. For, not all were geometers in a previous life, since geometers are so rare in the human race that hardly one can be found.

Augustine offers as a more credible explanation of the nearly universal ability to respond correctly to such question that the nature of the intellectual mind was so made that, subjected to intelligible things by the ordering of its Creator, it sees them in a

19 For example, De Trinitate XIV, 15, 21 speaks of God as being always. "He neither once was and now is not, nor is now and once was not, but as he will never not be, so he never was not." The ever presentness of Augustine's God certainly allows one to speak of memory of God as memory of the present. However, it is not clear that all memory of God is stripped of reference to the past. 20 Gilson, p. 102.

certain light of its own kind, just as the eye of the flesh sees what lies before it in this corporeal light—a light of which it was created capable and to which it is suited.

Augustine also points out that the fact that we distinguish black from white without a teacher does not imply our having known them prior to being in this flesh. Furthermore, he asks why we can only so respond to questions with regard to intelligible things and cannot do so with regard to sensible things unless we have seen them while in this body or believe others about them. He simply rejects the claim of Pythagoras of Samos to have remembered such things from a previous incarnation and likens such supposed memories to the sort of false memories that occur in dreams. He attributed the doctrine of repeated incarnations to evil spirits and claims that, if we all passed from life to death and from death to life again and again, we would all remember what we saw in other bodies. Clearly Augustine does not find Plato's claim that learning is remembering from a previous existence to be the correct explanation of our being able to respond correctly to questions about geometry and such intellectual disciplines.

21 He clearly attributes such an ability to our natural order under the intelligible realities and to the illumination by the incorporeal light.

21 Besides De Trinitate XII, 15, 24 there are two other texts dealing with Augustine's rejection of Platonic reminiscence and the pre-existence of the soul, namely, Retractationes I, 4, 4 and I, 8, 2. In the latter text Augustine is commenting on his statement in De quantitate animae, 20, 34, that he believes "the soul brought with it all the arts and that what is called learning is nothing but remembering and recalling." He tells us that this statement should not be taken "as approving that the soul once lived either here in another body or elsewhere either in a body or out of a body or that the soul learned in another life what it answers to questions since it did not learn it here." He finds it more credible that the soul can respond correctly to questions because of its intelligible nature and its connection with intelligible and immutable things. He adds that in any case the soul does not bring with it all the arts since some of them pertain to the senses of the body. "But what the understanding alone grasps, when the soul is well questioned by itself or another, the soul answers having remembered." The "recordata respondet" of this text provides about the best evidence I have found for 'Augustinian memory of the present,' i.e., for remembering what one did not previously know. 22 The expression, "luce sui generis," is ambiguous. It might mean that the light is of the same nature as the mind, or it might be interpreted to mean that

72 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian

He clearly rejects all memories of sensible things from a previous incarnation and rejects the view that we are repeatedly incarnated. For one like Augustine who regarded life in the body as "living death or deathly life" (Confessions I, 6, 7), the doctrine of repeated incarnations was a ghastly idea.

Though Augustine here clearly states that divine illumination provides a more plausible explanation for the correct responses regarding geometry by a person uneducated in such matters, he does not appeal to 'memory of the present' as replacing Platonic memory of the past. Indeed in the immediately preceding paragraph Augustine seems to speak of learning, forgetting, and remembering the intelligible and incorporeal reasons of things in the straightforward sense. What triggers the explanation of his rejection of Platonic reminiscence is the fact that what our mind has grasped and stored in our memory may be completely forgotten. In such a case, under the guidance of teaching, we will come back to what had completely slipped our mind and will discover it as it was.

However, what Augustine seems to have held in the Confessions and even up to the time of Letter CLXVI (415 A.D.) is that the soul pre-existed its incarnation and brought with it into this life a memory of its former happiness and of its God.

25 Augustine's rejection of repeated incarnations of the soul, of the soul's remembering all the arts or at least the intellectual disciplines, and of the soul's remembering sensible things from a previous incarnation is not incompatible with the nature of the light is of a particular kind. See Gilson's long note, pp. 289–290, n. 46. 23 "One bout with mortal misery is quite enough—an endless repetition of falls is what he finds 'horrible,' whether Origen, Plato, or Plotinus proposes it" (Robert J. O'Connell, SJ, "Augustine's Rejection of the Fall of the Soul," Augustinian Studies, IV (1973), p. 30. 24 De Trinitate XII, 14, 23. The implication here seems to be that, though completely forgotten, the truths remain or still exist so that they can be rediscovered under the guidance of teaching. 25 Besides O'Connell's book on the Confessions and his article on Augustine's rejection of the fall of the soul (see notes 15 and 23 above), see his St. Augustine's Early Theory of Man, 386–391 A.D (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).

his maintaining that the soul has a memory of its happiness and of God from prior to its embodiment.

Another text, namely, De Trinitate XIV, 15, 21, deals with precisely the memory of the soul's happiness and the memory of its God. There Augustine rejects a memory of a former state of happiness, though he still speaks of a memory of God.

When it [the soul], however, correctly remembers its Lord, after having received his Spirit, it is fully aware—because it learns this by interior instruction—that it cannot rise up except by the gratuitous love of God and that it could not have fallen except by its own voluntary failure. It does not, of course, recall its own happiness; that was and is no more, and the soul has completely forgotten it. And, therefore, it cannot be made to remember it.

What is striking about this text is that Augustine does not say—as one would expect—that the soul does not remember its happiness because it never was happy. Rather he says that the soul's happiness is a thing of the past; it is no more. The soul has completely forgotten it and, therefore, cannot be made to remember it.

28 What seems to have gone unnoticed is that Augustine explicitly states that the happiness of the soul was once and is no more. Furthermore, what has been completely forgotten so that one cannot be made to remember it must have once been known. There is simply no way that one can completely forget what he never knew. These claims do deny any remembrance of the soul's happiness such as Augustine seems to have held in the Confessions. That happiness has been completely forgotten; its having been completely forgotten, however, requires that it did once exist. Though the soul cannot remember its happiness, it does believe concerning it the Scriptures of its God, which are worthy of belief and

26 See Retractationes I, 8, 2, for Augustine's rejection of his earlier belief that the soul brought with it into the body all the arts. See Retractationes I, 4, 4, for his rejection of his early claim in Soliloquies II; 20, 35 that "those learned in the liberal disciplines uncover such knowledge buried in themselves when they learn and they in some way dig it out." 27 La Trinité II, 637. The note on "commemoratus" argues that it should be translated as passive, not as a deponent verb. 28 "Non sane reminiscitur beatitudinis suae: fuit quippe illa et non est, ejusque ista penitus oblita est; et ideoque nec commemorari potest" (De Trinitate XIV, 15, 21). The Latin could scarcely be more clear that that happiness once did exist, has been completely forgotten, cannot be remembered.

74 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian have been written by his prophet. Augustine, of course, is referring to the Genesis narrative of paradise and man's fall. Consequently, the previous state of happiness that has been completely forgotten is that happiness that the soul enjoyed in Adam in paradise.

In contrast, however, to its happiness which the soul has completely forgotten, the soul does remember the Lord its God.

For he always is; he neither once was and now is not, nor is now and once was not, but as he will never not be, so he never was not. And he is whole everywhere, and on account of that the soul lives and moves and is in him, and therefore it is able to remember him.

Augustine immediately goes on to say that the soul's ability to remember its God does not rest upon some knowledge of God that the soul had in Adam or somewhere before being in this body or when it was first made.

Not that it recalls this, because it had known him in Adam or somewhere or other before the life of this body or when it was first made in order to be inserted in this body. None of these things does it remember at all; whatever of these things there is has been wiped out by forgetfulness.

Once again it is clear that the soul, when it remembers its Lord, does not remember what it knew in Adam or what it knew prior to its incarnation in this body or what it knew when it was first created. Augustine does not say that all of these have been wiped out by forgetfulness, but that whichever of these there is has been forgotten. To say that whichever of these is the case has been forgotten implies, of course, that one of these was the case. The expression, "quidquid horum est," avoids the implicit affirmation that the soul knew its Lord in Adam or before its incarnation or when it was first made. On the other hand, Augustine does not say: "If one of these is the case, it is completely forgotten." He says, "Whichever of these is the case it has been completely forgotten." Thus he implies that one of the three hypotheses mentioned is correct, even though any such previous knowledge of God has been completely forgotten and does not account for our being able to remember

29 De Trinitate XIV, 15, 21. Since the soul has completely forgotten the happiness it had in Adam so that it cannot be made to remember it, that happiness is with respect to its forgottenness on a par with the state of infancy which none of us remembers and about which we must believe others. See Confessions I, 6, 10.

God now. Have we then in such remembrance of God an instance of 'Augustinian memory of the present' in which all reference to the past has been removed? Here it is not only that which is remembered that is present, but there is no past vision of God, it seems, as the basis of the soul's being able to remember God.

Yet all reference to the past is not removed. Though the soul does not remember God on the basis of a knowledge that it had in Adam or before its embodiment, the soul was touched by God's light in the past when it was turned away from its God.

But the soul is made to remember [its Lord] in order that it may be turned toward the Lord as toward that light by which it was being touched (tangebatur) in some way, even when it was turned away from him.

Because God always is—"as he will never not be, so he never was not"—and because he is whole everywhere, the soul not merely now lives, moves, and is in him, but always has lived, moved, and existed in him since it began to be. Augustine says that the soul is able to remember its God because of God's eternity and omnipresence, but that does not exclude any reference to the past. In fact, it would seem to imply a reference to the past. Furthermore, he says that the soul was being touched by God's light even when it was turned away from God, and there a reference to the past is explicit. In De Trinitate XIV, 15, 21, Augustine clearly rejects a remembering of the soul's happiness or of God from some previous existence prior to embodiment. However, his grounds for the rejection of such memories are not that we never enjoyed such happiness or such knowledge of God. Rather his grounds for rejecting such memories are that the soul has completely forgotten such happiness and such knowledge of God. Whereas in the Confessions the memory of happiness and of God seemed to be the grounds for affirming the soul's pre-existence, by the time of De Trinitate—some twenty years later—the soul's enjoyment of happiness and knowledge of God prior to its embodiment is regarded as completely forgotten. But Augustine still holds that we were once happy and once knew God. Thus pre-existence remains in some form, even though its Platonic grounds have been removed.

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IV. Conclusions Of the two texts I have been able to find in which St. Augustine formally mentions a memory of the present, the first text, Letter VII, attributes the doctrine to Plato and insists upon a past vision of the objects remembered even if the objects are not past, but present. Gilson himself discounts this text as representing 'Augustinian memory of the present.' The second text, De Trinitate XIV, 10, 13–11, 14, does maintain a memory of the present in which there is no association with the past or in which reference to the past is eliminated. However, that text deals with mind's remembering itself, and it offers no justification for extending to other objects the claims made for mind's memory of itself. Furthermore, there are no grounds in the later text for claiming that Augustine either intended or saw such a memory of the present as replacing Platonic memory of the past. In examining Augustine's rejection of Platonic reminiscence, we found that Augustine does regard divine illumination as a more plausible explanation of the Meno phenomenon. However, he makes no mention of a memory of the present as replacing Platonic memory of the past. Furthermore, the treatment of the soul's memory of its happiness and of God in De Trinitate XII—the very points to which as late as the Confessions Augustine appealed as evidence for holding the soul's pre-existence—offers no support for Gilson's claim. Though the soul does not, according to De Trinitate XII, remember its happiness, that state did exist and has been completely forgotten. The soul does remember its God, not because it recalls some knowledge it had of God in Adam or before its embodiment, but because the soul lives, moves, and exists in God who is eternal and whole everywhere, and has lived, moved, and existed in him and has been touched by his light even when it was turned away from him. Hence, I conclude that 'Augustinian memory of the present'—in the sense in which Gilson speaks of it—is neither found in St. Augustine nor used to replace Platonic memory of the past.

Augustine of Hippo on Seeing with the Eyes of the Mind A dozen years back, when I was asked to give the St. Augustine Lecture at Villanova University, my first choice of a topic was what Augustine understood by intellectual knowing, that is, by "intelligere," but I soon realized that the topic was beyond what I could handle at that time. I am not sure that I can deal with the topic even now in a satisfactory manner, but I cannot think of a better topic, nor am I likely to have a better occasion. The topic of intellectual knowing in Augustine is central to much of his thought, but what he says about intellectual knowing is not, in my judgment, always consistent with instances of such knowledge that we find in his writings. My thesis is that there is an official account of what he meant by intellectual knowing, that is, the sort of account that he did give of what it is to know intellectually, and that there are serious problems with that account of knowing, problems that are not found at least in some instances in which we can observe Augustine's activity in knowing intellectually or in bringing someone else to some instance of intellectual knowledge. If my thesis is correct, the conclusion will throw some light on several problems or debates that have occupied some contemporary Augustine scholars. I mean, for example, how we are to understand those passages in Book Seven of the Confessions that Pierre Courcelle described as vain Plotinan attempts at ecstasy or failed attempts to ascend to the vision of God. Hence, this lecture will have three parts and a conclusion: 1) Augustine's official account of intellectual knowing, 2) some difficulties with that account, 3) some actual instances of intellectual knowing, and 4) some concluding reflections.

I. The Official Account Augustine's account of intellectual knowing is highly Platonic. When, for example, St. Thomas speaks of intellectual knowing in his Summa of Theology I, qu. 84, a. 6, he contrasts the positions of Democritus and Plato with that of Aristotle. While Democritus held that all of our knowledge was sensory and that what we know are only bodily

78 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian things, Plato distinguished the intellect from the senses and held that the intellect was an immaterial power that did not use a bodily organ and that the intellect knew immaterial forms separated from bodies. Aristotle, on the other hand, distinguished the intellect from the senses and maintained that the intellect, which is an immaterial power, is also a power of a soul that is the form of a body and that the intellect understands intelligible forms that it abstracts from material things by the agent intellect. Augustine's view comes very close to that of Plato, as St. Thomas well knew. Augustine understands intellectual knowing by analogy with seeing with the eyes of the body. He develops this account of the two forms of seeing and points to the many parallels between them. He says that "to understand is to the mind what to see is for the senses."

1 Hence, Augustine identifies seeing God with understanding God.

2 So too, we have eyes of the mind just as we have eyes of the body.

3 And we see with the mind as opposed to seeing with the body.

4 But in order to see something with the eyes of the body, it is not enough to have eyes. Our eyes must also be open and healthy, and they must look in the right direction. There must also be something there to see, that is, a object that can be seen. So too, there must also be light to make the object visible. Similarly, the eyes of our mind must be open and healthy. In Book Seven of The Confessions, for example, Augustine describes how his face was so swollen with pride that the eyes of his mind could not see God.

5 In the Soliloquies he says that the eyes of the mind are healed by faith, hope, and love.

6 With the eyes of the body it is one thing to

1 De ordine II, 3, 10: "Menti hoc est intelligere, quod sensui videre." 2 Soliloquia I, 6, 12: "Sine tribus istis igitur anima nulla sanatur, ut possit Deum suum videre, id est intelligere," and Soliloquia I, 7, 14: "Ergo cum animae Deum videre, hoc est Deum intelligere contigerit, videamus utrum adhuc ei tria illa sint necessaria." 3 De vera religione 19, 37: "Hinc jam cui oculi mentis patent, nec pernicioso studio vanae victoriae caligant atque turbantur, facile intelligit, omnia quae vitiantur et moriuntur, bona esse, quanquam ipsum vitium, et ipsa mors, malum sit." 4 Epistula 7. 5 Confessions VII, 7, 11: "Et haec de vulnere meo creverant, quia humiliasti tanquam vulneratum, superbum; et tumore meo separabar abs te, et nimis inflata facies claudebat oculos meos." 6 Soliloquia I, 6, 12.

Seeing with the eyes of the mind

7 The mind's gaze or look is reason, and reasoning is the movement of the mind over things that the mind gazes upon.

look and another to see; so it is with the mind.

Furthermore, just as for the eyes of the body to see anything, there must be some visible object present, so for the eyes of the mind to see anything there must be an intelligible object present. Augustine tells us in Answer to the Academics, one of his first extant works, where he presents a summation of the history of philosophy, that Plato's great achievement was the realization that there are two worlds. "After all," he says, "it is enough for what I want that Plato held that there are two worlds, one an intelligible world, where the truth itself dwells, and this sensible one, which we obviously perceive by sight and touch."

9 In another early dialogue, On Order, Augustine has the chutzpah to instruct his saintly mother, Monica, in the rudiments of philosophy and to claim that Christ himself taught that there were these two worlds. "Christ himself," Augustine said, "indicated well enough that there is another world far removed from these eyes, which the intellect of a few healthy human beings sees. For Christ did not say: 'My kingdom is not of the world,' but: My kingdom is not of this world" (Jn 17:36).

10 And Augustine, of course, located the intelligible world in the mind of God. After some speculation about whether Plato was the first to maintain that there were the Ideas or Forms, Augustine located them in the divine intelligence. "For," he says, "the principal ideas are certain forms or stable and immutable patterns of things, which are not themselves formed and are, for this reason, eternal and always existing in the same way and which are contained in the divine intelligence."

11 They are principal ideas, I think, in the sense that they are principles

7 Soliloquia I, 6, 12: "Non enim hoc est habere oculos quod aspicere; aut idem hoc est aspicere quod videre." 8 De quantitate animi 27, 53: "Ut ratio sit quidam mentis aspectus, ratiocinatio autem rationis inquisitio, id est, aspectus illius, per ea quae aspicienda sunt, motio." 9 Contra Academicos III, 17, 37. 10 De ordine I, 11, 32: "Esse autem alium mundum ab istis oculis remotissimum, quem paucorum sanorum intellectus intuetur, satis ipse Christus significat, qui non dicit, Regnum meum non est de mundo; sed, Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo." 11 De diversis quaestionibus octaginta tribus, qu. 46, 2: "Sunt namque ideae principales formae quaedam, vel rationes rerum stabiles atque incommuta-

80 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian or ajrcaiv of things in this sensible world. "Only a rational soul," Augustine tells us, "is permitted to gaze upon them by that part of itself by which it is excellent, that is, by the mind and reason, as if by its face or by its interior and intelligible eye."

12 Not every rational soul is suited for that vision, but only one that is holy and pure, "that is, one that has its eye, which sees these ideas, healthy, pure, calm, and like these things that it strives to see."

13 Furthermore, Augustine concedes that there are good and religious persons who cannot, nonetheless, gaze upon these ideas. He, however, claims that believers must maintain that there are such ideas in the mind of God if they are to hold that God knew what he was doing when he created the world and that he governs it providentially.

Bodily eyes that are open, healthy, and looking in the right direction still do not see a object that is present unless there is light that makes the object visible. So too, the eyes of the mind need an intelligible light, and for Augustine God is that light of our minds. He says, "There is a certain ineffable and incomprehensible light of minds. Let this ordinary light teach us as much as it can how that light acts."

15 For some people have such healthy and strong eyes that they merely have to open them to see the sunlight, while others have to be gradually brought to see things the sunlight illumines until they are strong enough to look upon the sunlight itself. The light of minds is the Wisdom of God,

16 the true light that enlightens every human being who comes into this biles, quae ipsae formatae non sunt, ac per hoc aeternae ac semper eodem modo sese habentes, quae in divina intelligentia continentur." 12 Ibid.: "Anima vero negatur eas intueri posse, nisi rationalis, ea sui parte qua excellit, id est ipsa mente atque ratione, quasi quadam facie vel oculo suo interiore atque intelligibili." 13 Ibid.: "Et ea quidem ipsa rationalis anima non omnis et quaelibet, sed quae sancta et pura fuerit, haec asseritur illi visioni esse idonea: id est, quae illum ipsum oculum quo videntur ista, sanum, et sincerum, et serenum, et similem his rebus quas videre intendit, habuerit." 14 Ibid. 15 Soliloquia I, 13, 23: "Lux est quaedam ineffabilis et incomprehensibilis mentium. Lux ista vulgaris nos doceat quantum potest, quomodo se illud habeat." 16 Confessions XI, 11, 13: "O Sapientia Dei, lux mentium."

17 Just as the light of the sun makes other things visible by its light and is itself visible, so the intelligible light makes other things intelligible and is itself intelligible. "And so," Augustine says, "as in this sun we can observe three things: that it is, that is bright, and that it illumines, so in that most hidden God whom you want to understand, there are three things: that he is, that he is understood, and that he makes other things to be understood."

world, as St. John said.

18 In prayer Augustine addresses God: "O God, the intelligible light in whom and by whom and through whom all things are intelligibly bright that are intelligibly bright."

Contemporary scholars are more in agreement about what this divine illumination cannot mean than they are about what does mean. Scholars universally agree that Augustine's theory of divine illumination does not mean that God produces concepts or knowledge in our minds in the way the Avicennian agent intelligence caused human knowledge by producing ideas in our minds as it also produced forms in things in this sublunar world. So too, scholars are almost universally agreed that in Augustine God does not act like the Thomistic agent intellect, which abstracts universals from sensible things. For Augustine has no doctrine of universal ideas or abstraction. Some scholars claim—quite anachronistically—that Augustine held a version of ontologism, somewhat like Père Malebranche in the seventeenth century and like various nineteenth-century Catholic thinkers, such as the Italian Antonio Rosmini-Serbati and the Belgian Gerhard Ubaghs of Louvain. At least one prominent scholar held that it was before their embodiment that human souls were enlightened and that they now vaguely remember what they saw then. But there is, as I said, little

17 In Joannis evangelium tractatus, tr. 12, 5: "Quia ergo non videbatur lux hominum, id est lux mentium, opus erat ut homo diceret de luce testimonium, non quidem tenebrosus, sed jam illuminatus. Nec tamen quia illuminatus, ideo ipsa lux; sed ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine. Nam non erat ille lux. Et quae erat lux? Erat lux vera, quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum." 18 Soliloquia I, 8, 15: "Ergo quomodo in hoc sole tria quaedam licet animadvertere; quod est, quod fulget, quod illuminat: ita in illo secretissimo Deo quem vis intelligere, tria quaedam sunt; quod est, quod intelligitur, et quod caetera facit intelligi." 19 Soliloquia I, 1, 3: "Deus intelligibilis lux, in quo et a quo et per quem intelligibiliter lucent, quae intelligibiliter lucent omnia."

82 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian agreement about what Augustine saw as the real role of divine illumination. There are certainly texts in which Augustine seems to say quite clearly that at least some human beings in this life can see and have seen the very substance by which God is what he is. Though he explicitly ascribes such a vision only to Moses and Paul, he perhaps extends it to the great Neoplatonists as well.

20 He certainly says that the great philosophers "saw that which is, but saw it from afar."

21 They saw the fatherland where we are to go, but in their pride they refused the way to it, namely, the Word become flesh. There are other texts in which he says that we can and do see with the mind the eternal patterns or ideas in the mind of God. Etienne Gilson, the great historian of medieval philosophy, whose The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine written in the 1920s still continues to be a valuable source, classified those texts in which Augustine spoke of a vision of God or of things in God as mystical and classified all the other, less problematic texts, as ones referring to our natural knowledge. There is one final point of similarity between seeing with the eyes of the body and seeing with the mind that I want to mention. At times things interfere with our bodily vision. For example, clouds or fog can prevent us from seeing even the sun, and gnats can get into our eyes. So too, phantasms, that is, images of bodily things, can like clouds or fog or gnats prevent our seeing with the eyes of the mind. Images rush into our minds like clouds or fog and have to be brushed away like a swarm of desert gnats. Hence, Augustine prays in The True Religion for someone who can think without imagining sensible objects.

22 Thus far I have tried to illustrate Augustine's "official" account of what it is to understand in which he compares the mind's knowing with the eyes' seeing. Bernard Lonergan describes Augustine's theory of understanding as empiricism's most sublime form, but faults the bishop of Hippo for supposing that, because seeing is obviously knowing, seeing is obviously what knowing is.

23 Next, I want to turn to and

20 See "Augustine on the Vision of God," in Augustine: Mystic and Mystagogue (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 287–308. 21 In Joannis evangelium tractatus tr. 2, 4: "Illud potuerunt uidere quod est, sed uiderunt de longe." 22 De vera religione 64: "Date mihi qui videat sine ulla imaginatione visorum carnalium." 23 See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 412.

emphasize some of the problems with the "official" account of what it is to know.

II. Problems with the Official Version If to know with the mind is analogous to seeing with the eyes, there, of course, have to be intelligible objects that the mind sees. We have seen that Augustine considered Plato's discovery of the intelligible world and the Ideas as one of his great contributions to philosophy and as something that a Christian has to believe in, even if we do not ourselves see that world and those Ideas. Furthermore, Augustine located the Ideas in the mind of God. For, as St. Thomas wisely noted, Augustine saw that it was against the faith to leave such creative substances outside of God and, for this reason, placed them in the mind of God.

24 If we listen to Augustine's official version of what it is to know intellectually, it seems to follow inevitably that he held that we know intelligible objects and truths in knowing the divine ideas—and not merely in the way that we see visible things in the light of the sun, but by seeing the divine ideas themselves. Let me illustrate this point from Augustine's argument for the existence of God, which he presents in Book Two of Free Choice of the Will. The basic structure of the argument is a hypothetic syllogism. Augustine gets his partner in the dialogue, Evodius, the future bishop of Uzalis, to agree that, if there is anything higher than the human mind, at least, if that something is eternal and immutable, that something is God, or God exists. Hence, Augustine has to show that there is above the human mind something that is eternal and immutable, and he does this by showing Evodius that there are truths of mathematics and of wisdom that are eternal and immutable. Augustine says to Evodius: "If without the use of any instrument of the body, neither of touch, nor of taste, nor of smell, nor by the ears, nor by the eyes, but by itself, reason sees something eternal and immutable, it must at the same time admit that it is inferior and that that being is its God."

25 Unlike the conclusion of one of the Five Ways of St. Thomas,

24 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, qu. 84, a. 5 cor. 25 De libero arbitrio II, 6, 14: "Quae si nullo adhibito corporis instrumento, neque per tactum, neque per gustatum, neque per olfactum, neque per aures, neque per oculos, neque per ullum sensum se inferiorem, sed per seipsam cernit aeternum aliquid et incommutabile, simul et seipsam inferiorem, et illum oportet Deum suum esse fateatur."

84 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian the term of Augustine's argument is reason's act of seeing something eternal and immutable, which is reason's God. Before turning to the truths of mathematics and of wisdom, Augustine spends a number of paragraphs in an exercitatio animi, an exercising of the mind, in which he compares the act of seeing with the acts of the other external senses. His aim is to convince Evodius and us that what we see with our eyes can be something common and public for many or all of us to see, while what we taste or smell cannot be common and public in the same way. For, in tasting and smelling something, we change what we taste and smell so that it is something private and proper to each of us. Hence, he concludes, "We must understand by 'proper' and 'private' that which each of us alone possesses, which each senses in himself, and which properly belongs to his nature. But that is 'common' and 'public' which is perceived by all who sense it without any destruction or change of that object."

Then Augustine says to Evodius, "Come on now, pay attention, and tell me whether something is found that all who reason see in common, each with his own reason and mind, though what is seen is available to all and is not changed for the use of those to whom it is available, like food or drink, but remains incorrupt and whole, whether they see it or not."

27 Evodius mentions "the nature and truth of number," 28 which is available to all who reason and which every one who calculates tries to grasp by his own reason and intelligence. At this point Augustine has to face the objection "that these numbers are impressed on our mind, not from some nature of their own, but from those things that we at-

26 De libero arbitrio II, 7, 19: "Proprium ergo et quasi privatam intelligendum est, quod unicuique nostrum soli est, et quod in se solus sentit, quod ad suam naturam proprie pertinet: commune autem et quasi publicum, quod ab omnibus sentientibus nulla sui corruptione atque commutatione sentitur." 27 De libero arbitrio II, 8, 20: "Age, nunc attende, et dic mihi utrum inveniatur aliquid quod omnes ratiocinantes sua quisque ratione atque mente communiter videant, cum illud quod videtur praesto sit omnibus, nec in usum eorum quibus praesto est commutetur, quasi cibus aut potio, sed incorruptum integrumque permaneat, sive illi videant, sive non videant." 28 De libero arbitrio II, 8, 20: "Ratio et veritas numeri omnibus ratiocinantibus praesto est. . . ."

29 Evodius claims that, even if we perceive numbers by the senses of the body, we do not grasp in that way the laws of addition and subtraction, and he points to the incorruptible truth that seven plus three equals ten. Augustine, nonetheless, proceeds to show that numbers themselves cannot be derived from the senses of the body. He points out that each number is a multiple of one and argues that one cannot be attained by the bodily senses because everything we perceive by those senses is many. Any body we perceive has many parts, such as a right side and a left, a top and a bottom, a front and a back. Hence, he concludes, "And for this reason we grant that no body is purely one, though we could not count so many parts in it unless they were distinguished by a knowledge of one."

tain by the senses of the body, like certain images of visible things."

30 Augustine is claiming that a knowledge of one is a condition of the possibility of counting the many parts we find in any body. He says that he does not find one in any body and asks, "When, therefore, I know that a body is not one, I know what one is. For, if I did not know one, I could not count many parts in a body."

31 Having established that a knowledge of one is the condition of the possibility of knowing the multiplicity in any body, Augustine turns to some simple rules of number, such as the double of any number "x" follows "x" numbers after "x." In any case, like "seven plus three equals ten," these truths about number are eternal and immutably true. So too, Augustine gets Evodius to admit that there are truths of wisdom that are immutable and eternal, such as, that we should live justly, that we should subordinate the worse to the better, that we should treat equals as equal, and that we should give each what is his own, and he insists that these truths are available to all who see them.

29 De libero arbitrio II, 8, 21: "Tamen, si tibi aliquis diceret numeros istos non ex aliqua sua natura, sed ex iis rebus quas sensu corporis attingimus, impressos esse animo nostro quasi quasdam imagines quocumque visibilium, quid responderes?" 30 De libero arbitrio II, 8, 22: "Propterea nullum corpus vere pureque unum esse concedimus, in quo tamen non possent tam multa numerari nisi illius unius cognitione discreta." 31 De libero arbitirio II, 8, 22: "Ubi ergo novi quod non est corpus unum, quid sit unum novi: unum enim si non nossem, multa in corpore numerare non possem." 32 De libero arbitrio III, 10, 28: "Item, juste esse vivendum, deteriora melioribus esse subdenda, et paria paribus comparanda, et propria suis quibusque

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And after exploring the relation between number and wisdom, Augustine says to Evodius, "Hence, you will by no means deny that immutable truth exists and contains all these immutable truths. You cannot say that it is yours or mine or any human being's, but is available to and offers itself, like a light hidden and yet public in marvelous ways, to all who see the immutable truths."

33 Augustine still has to argue that the immutable truth is superior to our mind in order to come to the conclusion that God exists and truly exists. But in the passage just quoted there is also the problem that we see many immutable truths (incommutabilia vera) of number and wisdom. These truths are contained in the immutable truth, and the immutable truth is God. What, then, is the relationship between the many immutable truths that we see and the immutable truth that contains them? The relation between veritas and vera, between the truth and objects that are true, would seem, in so Platonic a context, to be participation. For example, Augustine says in an earlier commentary on Genesis, "But chastity is chaste by participation in nothing; rather, by participation in it whatever is chaste is chaste. That chastity is, of course, in God where there is that wisdom that is not wise by participation, but by participation in which every wise soul is wise."

34 The relation between the immutable truth and those things that are immutably true cannot, however, be the same as the relation between wisdom and wise souls or between chastity and chaste souls. A soul that is wise or chaste by participation can, after all, cease to be wise or chaste; it is not immutably wise or chaste. But the truths of mathematics and of wisdom that are immutably and eternally true. They are, furthermore, things that are common and public and that are available to all who use their reason to see tribuenda, nonne fateberis esse verissimum, et tam mihi quam tibi atque omnibus id videntibus praesto esse communiter?" 33 De libero arbitrio II, 12, 33: "Quapropter nullo modo negaveris esse incommutabilem veritatem, haec omnia quae incommutabiliter vera sunt continentem; quam non possis dicere tuam vel meam vel cujusquam hominis, sed omnibus incommutabilia vera cernentibus, tanquam miris modis secretum et publicum lumen, praesto esse ac se praebere communiter." 34 De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus 16, 57: "Castitas autem nullius participatione casta est, sed ejus participatione sunt casta quaecumque casta sunt. Quae utique in Deo est, ubi est etiam illa sapientia, quae non participando sapiens est, sed cujus participatione sapiens est anima quaecumque sapiens est."

them. Hence, I am convinced that participation will not work here to account for the relation between the vera and veritas, between those truths and the truth.

35 Augustine says that the immutable truth contains the many immutable truths. I suggest that the immutable truth contains the many immutable truths in the way in which a mind contains the many truths it knows. But that leaves us with the problem that our minds or the minds of those whose eyes are open, healthy, gazing in the right direction, etc., literally see those immutable truths in the mind of God, who is the Truth. Now, to say the very least, it is a strange proof for the existence of God that moves from seeing the divine ideas in the mind of God to the existence of God.

By way of confirmation of this, we find in Book Three that Augustine argues that, though there can exist in the world something that we do not think of by our reason, there cannot fail to exist what we think of with a true reason.

37 "Nor can you, after all, think of something better in creation that will have escaped the author of creation. The human soul, in fact, is naturally connected to the divine ideas (divinis rationibus), upon which it depends, when it says, 'This would be better than that.' And if it speaks the truth and sees what it says, it sees it

35 In BA 6 (Paris, 1952), p. 525, F. J. Thonnard appeals to the principle of participation. He distinguishes "deux modes d'être des vérités éternelles: l'un participé, en notre esprit, où elles vivent sous la forme multiple des règles des nombres et de la sagesse; l'autre absolu, dans la source du Verbe, où elles vivent sous la forme parfaite de l'infinie simplicité de la Vérité divine; et des unes à l'autre, des participations à la Source, il faut s'élever au moyen du principe de causalité ou de raison suffisante, qui est, sous sa forme augustinienne, le principe de participation." 36 I have argued that what we have in De libero arbitrio is not so much a proof that there is a God as an argument that God is truly, that is, that he is immutable and non-bodily. See my "The Aim of Augustine's Proof that God Truly Is," International Philosophical Quarterly XXVI (1986), 253–268, as well as "The De Libero Arbitrio Proof for the Existence of God," Proceedings of the Jesuit Philosophical Association (1987): 15–47; in revised form in Philosophy and Theology 2 (1987): 124–142. 37 De libero arbitrio III, 5, 13: "Potest ergo esse aliquid in rerum natura, quod tua ratione non cogitas. Non esse autem quod vera ratione cogitas, non potest. Neque enim tu potes aliquid melius in creatura cogitare, quod creaturae artificem fugerit."

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38 With an almost Leibnizian optimism Augustine says that, if with true reason we know that God ought to have made something, even if we do not see that thing with our eyes, we should believe that God did make it.

in those ideas to which it is connected."

39 And the reason he gives is that "one would not see in thought that it ought to have been made except in those ideas by which all things have been made. What is not there, no one can see with true thought, and it is not true."

Even in later works Augustine says quite clearly that the mind at least of a few human beings attains the intelligible forms in the mind of God. In Book Twelve of The Trinity, for example, Augustine distinguishes wisdom and knowledge and tells us that to wisdom there pertain the eternal intelligible and incorporeal patterns (rationes) of things. "They, however, remain, not fixed as if in places like bodies, but in their incorporeal nature they are, like intelligible things, available to the gazes of the mind, just as these visible or tangible things in places are available to the senses of the body."

41 He adds, "To attain to these patterns is the privilege of a few, and when one attains them, to the extent it is possible, the person who attains them does not remain in them, but is driven back, as if his eyes have been stuck, and there is produced the passing thought of a reality that does not pass."

42 Given Augustine's official view of intellectual knowing, we are faced with the problem that the mind of a few is able to attain in this life a vision of

38 De libero arbitrio III, 5, 13: "Humana quippe anima naturaliter divinis ex quibus pendet connexa rationibus, cum dicit, Melius hoc fieret quam illud; si verum dicit, et videt quod dicit, in illis quibus connexa est rationibus videt." 39 De libero arbitrio III, 5, 13: "Credat ergo Deum fecisse quod vera ratione ab eo faciendum fuisse cognovit, etiamsi hoc in rebus factis non videt." 40 De libero arbitrio III, 5, 13: "Non enim cogitatione videret fuisse faciendum, nisi in iis rationibus quibus facta sunt omnia. Quod autem ibi non est, tam nemo potest veraci cogitatione videre, quam non est verum." 41 De trinitate XII, 14, 23: "Manent autem, non tanquam in spatiis locorum fixa veluti corpora: sed in natura incorporali sic intelligibilia praesto sunt mentis aspectibus, sicut ista in locis visibilia vel contrectabilia corporis sensibus." 42 De trinitate XII, 14, 23: "Ad quas mentis acie pervenire paucorum est; et cum pervenitur, quantum fieri potest, non in eis manet ipse perventor, sed veluti acie ipsa reverberata repellitur, et fit rei non transitoriae transitoria cogitatio."

the divine ideas, at least momentarily. For those eternal, intelligible, incorporeal patterns or ideas are available to the gazes of the mind, just as visible and tangible things offer themselves to the bodily sight and touch.

III. Augustine's Unofficial Version of

What Knowing Is We have seen what I have called Augustine's official version of what intellectual knowing is, namely, that to understand is to see an intelligible reality with the eyes of the mind. We have seen that there are problems with his account of knowing as a seeing. The principal problem is, in my opinion, that the official version entails that, in knowing intellectually, we see the divine ideas in the mind of God. The official version, therefore, makes his argument for the existence of God at best a sort of intuition and at worst question-begging. Furthermore, the role of divine illumination seems to remain an unexplained and perhaps an inexplicable metaphor. With reference to the various senses of scripture, scholars have often pointed out that it is necessary to look at what Augustine does rather than merely at what he says. I suggest that with reference to intellectual knowing, we should also look at what Augustine does rather than merely at what he says. Hence, I will examine two instances in which we can see how Augustine tries to bring others to an intellectual knowledge of something. First with:

(a) Jerome and the Incorporeality of the Soul In 415 Augustine wrote to Jerome in Bethlehem, a holy, but cantankerous priest with whom he has earlier quarreled. Augustine asked Jerome for help with the question of the origin of the soul, that is, with the question of how post-Adamic human souls come to be in bodies, a problem that Augustine was never able to resolve to his own satisfaction. In the letter Augustine wanted to show Jerome that he knew something about the soul, and one of those things that he claimed to know was that the soul was incorporeal. In order to avoid a merely verbal dispute, he first of all clarifies what he means by a body and says that, if every substance is a body, then the soul too is a body. Similarly, if someone wants to maintain that only an absolutely immutable and omnipresent substance is non-bodily, then the soul is a body. "But if

90 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian only that is a body that stands or moves with some length, breadth, and depth through some area of place, so that it occupies a larger place with a larger part of itself and a smaller place with a smaller part of itself and is smaller in a part than in the whole, the soul is not a body."

43 In order to show that the soul is not a body in this sense, Augustine appeals to the evidence from sensation that the soul is stretched out through the whole body, not by a local diffusion, but by a vital attention. He produces an argument that "the whole soul is simultaneously present through all the parts of the body, not smaller in smaller parts and larger in larger parts, but more intensely in one place and less intensely in another, whole in all the parts and whole in each part."

44 I do not want to examine the argument here in detail, but to focus on what Augustine does to prove to Jerome that he knows that the soul is not a body. He first makes it clear what he means by a body and defines something incorporeal by contrary properties. He appeals to our awareness of ourselves in sensation and claims that the whole soul could not be aware of something that happens in only a part of the body, unless the whole soul were present in each part of the body. For, when I feel a pain in my toe that I stub, my whole soul is aware of the pain in one small part of my body, though the soul continues to animate the rest of my body. And, if I manage to burn my finger while my toe is still hurting, my whole soul also becomes aware of the pain in my finger. Hence, the whole soul is present in the whole body which it animates, but the whole soul is also present in each of the parts, as is shown by my awareness of the pains in my toe and in my finger. He concludes, "Hence, whether it should be called a body or non-bodily, the soul is understood to have a certain nature of its own, created with a substance more excellent than all these elements with a worldly mass, and it cannot accurately (veraciter) be thought of in some picturing of bodily images, which we perceive through the senses of the flesh. Rather, it is understood by the mind and sensed by

43 Epistula 166, 2, 4: "Porro si corpus non est, nisi quod per loci spatium aliqua longitudine, latitudine, altitudine ita sistitur vel movetur, ut majore sui parte majorem locum occupet, et breviore breviorem, minusque sit in parte quam in toto, non est corpus anima." 44 Ibid.: "Nam per omnes ejus particulas tota simul adest, nec minor in minoribus, et in majoribus major; sed alicubi intentius, alicubi remissius, et in omnibus tota, et in singulis tota est."

45 That is, the incorporeal nature of the soul cannot correctly be thought of (cogitari) by means of any bodily images, but is understood (intelligi) by the mind. When he says that it is "sensed by life (vita sentiri)," I think that he means that the soul's sensory awareness provides the evidence of the soul's presence as a whole in the whole body and in each of its parts. That the soul is incorporeal in that sense cannot, however, be imagined, but can only be understood by the mind. This sort of intellectual knowing is hardly a seeing of an intelligible object in an intelligible world. It is rather an insight into the sort of reality the soul must be if we are to account for the evidence provided by sensory awareness, an insight that transcends anything that we can picture and is expressed in a definition of the soul's incorporeality. Second with: life."

(b) Consentius' and Knowledge of God In 410 a young theologian from the Balearic Isles by the name of Consentius wrote to Augustine, asking for help in how to think about God. Consentius tells Augustine that he is convinced that the truth about God should be sought from faith rather than reason. Otherwise, he fears that "no one except philosophers and professors will attain happiness."

46 He is, moreover, convinced that heresies all stem from neglecting the authority of scripture and indulging in rational arguments. Like almost everyone in the Latin West prior to Augustine, Consentius was a man who pictured God to himself as a huge sort of body. He tells Augustine that he believes "that God is an infinite magnitude of a certain inestimable light and that the human mind, though it thinks lofty thoughts, is not sufficient to judge its quality nor measure its quantity nor imagine its beauty."

47 God, according to Consentius, is something that "has an incomparable form and inestimable beauty, which at least Christ could see even with the eyes of the

45 Ibid.: "Unde intelligitur anima, sive corpus, sive incorporea dicenda sit, propriam quamdam habere naturam, omnibus his mundanae molis elementis excellentiore substantia creatam, quae veraciter non possit in aliqua phantasia corporalium imaginum, quas per carnis sensus percipimus, cogitari, sed mente intelligi, vitaque sentiri." 46 Epistula 119, 1: "si enim fides sanctae Ecclesiae ex disputationis ratione, non ex credulitatis pietate apprehenderetur, nemo praeter philosophos atque oratores beatitudinem possideret." 47 Epistula 119, 3.

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48 He quotes from one of his writings where he had said, "God is one, and the persons are three. God is undivided; the persons are divided. God is within all things; he is beyond all things. He includes the last things, fills the middle things, and transcends the highest. He is poured out beyond all things and through all things. But the persons subsisting in themselves are distinguished by their proper character and are not mingled in confusion."

flesh."

49 He adds, "God, therefore, is one and is everywhere, because there is no other besides him and there is no empty space where another could be. All things are filled with God, and apart from God there is nothing."

50 Consentius clearly thought of God in terms of a Stoic corporealism of the sort that Augustine himself described as his own view early in Book Seven of the Confessions, where he says that he had thought that God was "a great corporeal substance, existent everywhere throughout infinite space, which penetrates the whole world-mass, and spreads beyond it on every side through immense, limitless space."

51 Or, to use the image he employs a few paragraphs later, the whole of creation is like a huge, but finite sponge in the infinite sea of God, who fills every part of the sponge and stretches endlessly beyond it. Consentius is well aware that Augustine says "that God should not be thought of as some body," not even as "a light a thousand times more bright and more intense than this sun."

52 But Consentius thinks that to think of God as non-bodily means to think of him like righteousness or piety. For he concedes that we cannot think of righteousness or piety as bodily, unless we imagine some female figures, as the pagans

48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.: "Deus, inquam, unus est, et personae tres sunt. Deus indiscretus est, personae discretae sunt. Deus intra omnia, trans omnia est, ultima includit, media implet, summa transcendit, ultra universa et per universa diffunditur: personae autem sibi constantes, proprietate secernuntur, non confusione miscentur." 50 Epistula 119, 4: "Deus ergo unus est, et ubique est; quia et alius praeter illum non est, et locus non est vacuus ubi esse alius possit. Plena sunt Deo omnia, et praeter Deum nihil est." 51 Confessions VII, 1, 2. 52 Epistula 119, 5: "Ais non tanquam aliquod corpus debere cogitari Deum. Nam etiamsi quispiam animo lucem millies quam hujus solis clariorem intensioremque confingat, nullam illic Dei similitudinem comprehendi posse."

do, but he adds that he "still cannot think of God, that is, of a living nature, as being like righteousness, because righteousness is not living in itself, but in us."

53 That is, if he thinks of God as righteousness or piety, which he admits are not bodily, he finds that he cannot regard such abstractions as living in themselves, but only as living in righteous human beings. Augustine replied to Consentius in Letter 120. He tells Consentius that he should hold that correct faith about the one God and the three persons, even if he cannot understand it, but he also urges Consentius to love understanding very much.

54 He tries to bring Consentius to understand that God is incorporeal. He warns him, "When you think of these things, drive away, deny, reject, cast aside, flee from whatever comes to mind with the likeness of a body."

55 One of the ways in which Augustine tries to get Consentius to transcend imagination or picture-thinking and to understand God involves the technique that he learned from Plotinus of bringing together images that clash with each other and force one beyond images.

56 Augustine takes the verse from Isaiah where it says, "The heaven is my throne, but the earth is my footstool" (Is 66:1). He says, "Even if we understand this in a carnal sense, we ought to believe that he is there in heaven and here on earth, though the whole of him is not there because his feet are here and the whole of him is not here because the upper parts of his body are there."

57 Another passage of scripture, he tells us, "can shake off for us this carnal thought." For Isaiah also said, "He measured the heaven

53 Ibid. 54 Epistula 120, 3, 13: "Intellectum vero valde ama." 55 Epistula 120, 3, 13: "Et quidquid tibi, cum ista cogitas, corporeae similitudinis occurrerit, abige, abnue, nega, respue, abjice, fuge." 56 I pointed out another example of this move in "Heresy and Imagination in St Augustine," Studia Patristica, Vol. XXVII, ed. E. A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993), pp. 400-404. See also Robert J. O'Connell, St. Augustine's Early Theory of Man, A.D. 386–391 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968), pp. 58–60. 57 Epistula 120, 3, 14 : "Nam etsi carnaliter acceperimus quod scriptum est, Coelum mihi sedes est, terra autem scabellum pedum meorum; et ibi et hic cum esse credere debemus: quamvis non totum ibi, quia hic essent pedes; nec totum hic, quia ibi essent superiores corporis partes.

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58 If one brings the two sets of images together, they clash and shatter each other so that we are forced to transcend them. Augustine says, "Who can sit in the space of the palm of his hand or can put his feet in a space as small as his fist can grasp? Unless perhaps the vanity of the flesh goes so far that it is not enough to attribute human members to the substance of God if it does not also make them monstrous so that the palm of his hand is wider than his hips and his fist is wider than both palms joined together."

with the palm of his hand and the earth with his fist" (Is 40:12).

59 Augustine explains that he says this "in order that, when those things that we hear in a carnal fashion conflict with one another, we may be admonished by them and think of spiritual realities in a way that is ineffable."

60 Thus Augustine tries to bring Consentius to an intellectual grasp of the incorporeal nature of God by shattering one image against the other so that he is forced to transcend the imagination to a grasp of a reality that cannot be pictured or imagined, but can only be understood. This sort of intellectual knowing is, in my opinion, a seeing or insight into the nature of God that is much more plebeian than the seeing of the official version, which seems closer to an account of a mystical experience or of the vision of God by the blessed than of a philosophical insight.

IV. Concluding Reflections There are instances of knowing in Augustine's works that are closer to the official version than to the unofficial version that I have tried to illustrate. I think, however, that it is important to see that not every instance of intellectual knowing in Augustine involves a vision of intelligible things in the divine ideas or a vision of God himself. Furthermore, Augustine's official version of what it is to know intellectually

58 Epistula 120, 3, 14: "Quam cogitationem carnalem, rursum illud nobis excutere, quod de illo scriptum est, potest: Qui coelum mensus est palmo, et terram pugillo." 59 Epistula 120, 3, 14: "Quis enim sedeat in spatio palmi sui, aut in tanto loco pedes ponat, quantum ejus pugnus apprehendit? Nisi forte in tantum caro vana progreditur, ut ei parum sit humana membra substantiae Dei tribuere, si ea non etiam monstruosa confingat, ubi palmus lumbis, et pugillus ambabus palmis conjunctis sit latior." 60 Epistula 120, 3, 14: "Sed haec dicuntur, ut cum sibi non conveniunt quae carnaliter audimus, eis ipsis admoniti, ineffabiliter spiritualia cogitemus."

can be misleading and has, I think, misled some students of Augustine. Let me offer an example of this. In Book Seven of his Confessions Augustine speaks several times of his coming to a vision of God. He tells us that he was admonished by the books of the Platonists to return into himself and that he entered into his inmost self under God's guidance. He says, "I entered and saw with a certain eye of my soul above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the immutable light, not this common light visible to all flesh, nor was it a greater light of the same kind. . . . Nor was it above my mind like oil above water nor like the heaven above the earth, but it was higher because it made me and I was lower because I was made by it."

61 Later he speaks of his having imagined God as extended over infinite stretches of space, but God, he says, soothed his head and closed his eyes so that he would not see vanity. He continues, "I withdrew from myself a little, and my insanity subsided. And I woke up in you, and I saw that you are infinite in another way, and this vision was not drawn from the flesh."

62 If one understands these instances of seeing in terms of the official version, these passages from Book Seven are records of momentary mystical visions that Augustine enjoyed at Cassiciacum in the months before his baptism. If, however, one understands those instances of seeing in terms of philosophical insights, one can understand Augustine's "I saw" in a non-mystical sense, and one can, furthermore, view the later part of Book Seven subsequent to his encounter with the books of the Platonists, not as presenting a series of historical events that occurred over a relatively short period of time, but as presenting a set of philosophical or theological insights that sum up his newly found understanding of the Christian faith in the light of what he learned from Plotinus, an understanding that he need not have acquired over a few weeks or months, but that he more likely came to over a number of years of philosophical and theological reflection. The latter I suggest is a more plausible reading of these texts, which have troubled students of Augustine for decades. I have not, of course, settled the question of how to interpret what Pierre Courcelle called vain Plotinian attempts at ecstasy, but I have at least shown that one need not interpret Augustine's words as claims of having seen as a momentary, ecstatic visions of God.

61 Confessions VII, 10, 16. 62 Ibid. VII, 14, 20.

Augustine's Epistula X: Another

Look at "Deificari in otio" I n 1962 Georges Folliet published a provocative article dealing with the meaning and source of Augustine's phrase in his letter to his friend, Nebridius: "deificari in otio."

1 Folliet points to previous works by Thimme, Bardy and Stoop

2 and states that all three say that the phrase should be understood "in a philosophical sense, as describing the blessed repose of the philosopher, the wise man, in whom the love of the world has died." He adds, "Undoubtedly, the word deificari cannot be understood here of the elevation to the supernatural order by grace, in view of the reflexive sense of the verb in the phrase and the complement in otio added to it."

3 On the basis of the supposedly reflexive sense of the verb, F. Van der Meer says of the phrase, "To be free from business and so be made like unto God—that was the thing for which they now had time, Augustine wrote quite simply to his intimate friend Nebridius, without ever guessing how selfish and presumptuous were those words."

4 On the other hand, André Mandouze finds in the otium of Thagaste a considerable advance over the leisured life in philosophy that was the goal of Cassiciacum and finds in the common life of Thagaste the be-

1 "Deificari in otio". Augustin, Epistula X, 13," Recherches Augustiniennes 2 (1962): 225–236. 2 W. Thimme, Augustins geistige Entwicklung in den ersten Jahren nach seiner "Bekehrung" (386–391) (Berlin, 1908), p. 29, n. 1; G. Bardy, "Divinisation," in Dictionnaire de spiritualité III, c. 1390–1391; J. A. A. A. Stoop, Die deificatio hominis in die Sermones en Epistulae van Augustinus (Leiden, 1952), p. 48. 3 Folliet (my translation), p. 266: "[T]ous trois se contentent de dire qu'elle doit être comprise dans un sens philosophique, comme décrivant le repos bienheureux du philosophe, du sage, chez qui l'amour du siècle est mort. ... Nul doute que le mot deificari ne peut s'entendre ici de l'élévation à l'ordre surnaturel par la grâce, vu le sens réfléchi qu'a ce verbe dans la phrase et le complément 'in otio' qui lui est adjoint." 4 F. Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: Church and Society at the Dawn of the Middle Ages (New York: Harper, 1965), p. 209.

98 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian ginnings of Western monasticism. He claims that certain experts have failed to see this advance and have thought they were justified in denouncing the selfish and presumptuous character of this undertaking.

5 Similarly, George Lawless points out that the otium of Thagaste "is a far cry from the leisure of the philosophers" and finds in it "the seeds of the future bishop's mature thoughts on contemplation."

6 Hence, Epistula X and the phrase "deificari in otio" merit another look.

I. Epistula X: Its Context and Content Between 387 and 389 Augustine carried on with his friend, Nebridius, a fairly extensive correspondence of which we have twelve letters, nine from Augustine and three from Nebridius.

7 Augustine begins Epistula X, addressing the claim of Nebridius that Augustine has neglected the plans for their living together.

8 Augustine points out that reason seems

5 "Il est vraiment étrange que, sur le caractère de l'otium partagé à Thagaste, certains spécialistes aient pu se méprendre: au lieu de considerer le progrès que représente ici, par rapport au simple otiose uiuere du rêve milanais, la formule du deificari in otio, ils ont cru pouvoir dénoncer le caractère égoiste et présomptueux de ce propos'"(Saint Augustin: L'aventure de la raison et de la grâce [Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1968], pp. 206–207. Mandouze here refers to and cites Van der Meer; see the previous note. He concludes, "Aussi, sans rénier l'otium envisagé á Milan, l'otium réalisé à Thagaste représente avant tout le cadre obligatoire d'une vie religieuse oú le partage des biens figure et, en même temps, rend possible l'assistance fraternelle et la communion spirituelle" (Saint Augustin: L'aventure de la raison et de la grâce [Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1968], p. 209. 6 G. Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 51. 7 Nebridius died shortly thereafter, probably in 390. In the Confessions Augustine speaks of Nebridius as a chaste youth and good friend who had no use for divination (IV, iii, 6); he left his home and mother in Carthage to be with Augustine in Milan (VI, x, 17) and debated the problem of evil with Augustine and Alypius (VI, xvi, 26). Nebridius provided Augustine with the decisive dilemma against the Manichees (VII, ii, 3) and tried to get Augustine to give up his interest in horoscopes (VII, vi, 8). Nebridus became a teacher in Milan and was absent when Ponticianus visited Augustine and Alypius (VIII, vi, 13-14). Nebridius had held that Christ's flesh was a mere phantasm, but later became a Christian and died soon after his return to Africa (IX, iii, 6). 8 The letter in which Nebridius made this claim does not seem to have survived, though Nebridius raises the question in Epistula V and Augustine

Augustine's Epistula X: Another Look at "Deificari in otio" 99 to indicate that Augustine and his companions most probably could better live as they proposed in Thagaste rather than in Carthage or in the country.

9 What then about Nebridius? Augustine suggests various means by which Nebridius might come to them, but the mother of Nebridius will not tolerate his absence, especially given the weakened state of his health. Augustine could go to Nebridius.

But there are present here men who cannot come with me, and I regard it as unthinkable (nefas) to abandon them. You are able to be comfortably at home in your mind; effort is needed that these men can do the same thing.

Augustine rules out traveling back and forth, for the distance is long, and undertaking such a trip again and again means not attaining the leisure he has desired. Furthermore, Augustine's bodily health sets a limit on what he can do. Augustine begins the crucial paragraph with the statement:

To have in mind through the whole of life journeys that can never be restful and easy is not the mark of a man who bears in mind that one last journey which is called death and which alone, as you know, one should truly keep in mind.

Augustine points out that "God has granted to certain men whom he chose to be governors of churches that they not only bravely look forward to death, but eagerly desire it and undertake the toils of overseeing the churches without any anxiety."

12 There are others "who are touched upon this topic in the beginning of Epistula IX. 9 Epistula X, 1: CSEL 34, 23: "sed cum perprobabilis ratio demonstare uideatur hic nos potius quam Carthagini uel etiam in rure ex sententia posse degere, quid tecum agam, mi Nebridi, prorsus incertus sum." 10 Ibid: "at hic sunt, qui neque uenire mecum queant et quos deserere nefas putem. tu enim potes et apud tuam mentem suauiter habitare; hi uero ut idem possint, satagitur." Compare with this passage Augustine's advice to Nebridus in Epistula IX, 1: CSEL 34, 20: "confer te ad animum tuum et illum in deum leua, quantum potes." 11 Epistula X, 2: CSEL 34, 23: "Profectiones ergo, quas quietas et faciles habere nequeas, per totam cogitare uitam non est hominis de illa una ultima, quae mors uocatur, cogitantis, de qua uel sola intellegis uere esse cogitandum." 12 Ibid: "dedit quidem deus paucis quibusdam, quos ecclesiarum gubernatores esse uoluit, ut et illam non solum expectarent fortiter, sed alacriter

100 Augustine Of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete & Theologian brought to such works of administration by the love of temporal honor" and still others "who, as ordinary citizens, desire the busy life."

13 To neither of these latter groups is granted "this great good," namely, that they become familiar with death "amid noisy and restless comings and goings." But "both of them could become God-like in leisure."

Augustine adds that, if this is not true, then he is, if not the most foolish, certainly the laziest of men, because without carefree leisure "I cannot taste and love that pure good."

15 Augustine adds that one must withdraw "from the tumult of perishing things" if one is to be free from all fear, "not out of insensitivity, nor out of recklessness, nor out of the desire of empty glory, nor out of superstitious belief." From such a freedom from fear there arises "that solid joy that should be compared to no delights in any way at all."

If such a life free from fear is not the lot of humans, why, Augustine asks, do we at times attain such a freedom from cares (securitas)? And why we do attain it the more frequently we "adore God in the inmost temple of our mind?"

17 Why does it continue when we move to action from that shrine? We do not fear death when we speak of it and desire it when we do not. Augustine knows well the ascents upwards (itinera in superna) of Nebridius and his frequent experiences of the sweetness of the mind's dying to the bodily love. Hence, Nebridius will not deny that a man's whole life can become free of fear so that he is truly etiam desiderarent et harum obeundarum labores sine ulto angore susciperent. ..." 13 Epistula X, 2: CSEL 34, 23-24: "qui ad huius modi administrationes temporalis honoris amore raptantur... qui cum sunt priuati, negotiosam uitam appetunt. ..." 14 Ibid: "sed neque his... neque rursum his ... hoc tantum bonum concedi arbitror, ut inter strepitus inquietos conuentus atque discursus cum morte familiaritatem, quam quaerimus, faciant; deificari enim utrisque in otio licebat." 15 Epistula X, 2: CSEL 34, 24: "aut si hoc falsum est, ego sum omnium ne dicam stultissimus, certe ignavissimus, cui nisi proueniat quaedam secura cessatio, sincerum illud bonum gustare et amare non possum." 16 Ibid.: "magna secesssione a tumultu rerum labentium, mihi crede, opus est, ut non duritia, non audacia, non cupiditate inanis gloriae, non superstitiosa credulitate fiat in homine nihil timere. hinc enim fit illud etiam solidum gaudium nullis omnino laetitiis ulla ex particula conferendum." 17 Epistula X, 3: CSEL 34, 24: "in mentis penetralibus adorat deum?"

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