Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
society, and the world through love. Wisdom, the most active of all active things, reaches from end to end mightily. Through intimacy with the divine Persons the soul attains likeness to Wisdom and shares in divine creative and providential action, illuminating and loving action. Augustine experienced the Christians of his day participating in such action.
To understand the soul's movement toward union with God recorded in the Confessions we need to be aware of Augustine's ladder of being or hierarchy of natures: above the soul, which as life-giving is called anima and as intellectual, animus, there is mens or mind, receiving its spiritual substance "from above," as spiritus. Below the soul there is sensus, and below sensus there is corpus. The conversion described by Augustine in the first part of the Confessions was from sensus to mens, from one level of the soul's life to another as he became aware of his philosophical capacities through reading Cicero's Hortensius and the books of the Platonists. Later, through the gifts of faith and love, came that conversion to God which unified his various levels of human existence by healing the division in his heart. At last he could declare: "And now, my soul, I say to you that you are my better part; you animate the whole bulk of the body, giving it life—a thing which no body can do for another body. But your God is for you, also, the life of your life.''15
To try to enjoy that divine life Augustine by thought ascended above the summit of his soul. He ascended beyond the lifeforce, beyond the force of perception to "the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where lie the treasures of innumerable images of all kinds of things brought in by the senses."!® In his memory was all that he had learned from the liberal sciences. He remembered not only how he had learned them but how he felt when he did. The multiplicity within the memory symbolized for him human life as a "life variously manifold and quite immeasurables #
He ascended beyond this memory-force and drew near to the Light above, to God who transcends the memory. Because God is Truth, and the mind participates in truth, to remember what we
15. Ibid., X.6. 16. Ibid., X.8. 17. Ibid., X.17.