AUGUSTINE, ST.
(354–430)

St. Augustine, also known as Aurelius Augustinus, was one of the key figures in the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. He was born at Thagaste, in north Africa, and died as the invading Vandals were closing in on his episcopal city, Hippo. He lived through nearly eighty years of the social transformation, political upheavals, and military disasters that are often referred to as the "decline of the Roman Empire." His life also spanned one of the most important phases in the transition from Roman paganism to Christianity. The old Roman pagan tradition was by no means dead, although the Roman emperors had been Christians since Constantine's conversion some forty years before Augustine was born. Augustine's youth saw the brief rule of Julian the Apostate as well as the last great pagan reaction in the empire, which broke out in the 390s. Nevertheless, it was during this period that the Roman state adopted Christianity as the official state religion. Medieval Europe began to take shape within the framework of the Roman Empire.

Augustine belonged to the world of late Roman antiquity, and its cultural and educational system had a decisive and lasting role in shaping his mind. His education, following the standard pattern of the time, was almost entirely literary, with great stress on rhetoric. Its aim was to enable its recipients to imitate the great literary masterpieces of the past. It tended, inevitably, to encourage a conservative literary antiquarianism. The culture it produced rarely rose above the level of the sterile cult of "polite letters" and generally had little contact with the deeper forces at work in contemporary society. There were many creative minds still at work; but even at their best, their thought was largely derivative. This is especially true of the philosophy of the period. Its stock of learning was in large part contained in compendia, though works of Cicero were still widely read, and those of the Neoplatonist thinkers gave inspiration to both pagans and Christians.

This culture and its educational system were the two sources that supplied the initial impulse for Augustine's thinking. His search for truth and wisdom began with his reading at the age of eighteen of a now lost dialogue by Cicero, the Hortensius. The work made an impact that Augustine could not forget and that he often mentions in his later writings. When he recounts the experience in the Confessions (III, 4, 7), written in his forties, he tells us that it was this work that changed his interests and gave his life a new direction and purpose: the search for wisdom. The search led him far afield; but looking back on it, Augustine could interpret its start as the beginning of the journey that was finally to bring him back to God.

Philosophy and Christianity

It was not until 386 that Augustine was converted to Christianity; he was baptized the following year. Meanwhile, his career as a teacher of rhetoric took him from his native Africa to Italy, first to Rome and then to Milan. During this period he was under the spell of the Manichaean religion. Its teachings appeared for a time to offer Augustine the wisdom for which he had been searching, but he became increasingly dissatisfied with it and finally broke with the sect through the influence of his new friends in Milan, Bishop Ambrose and the circle of Christian Neoplatonists around him. In Milan he learned the answers to the questions that had worried him about Manichaean doctrine, and there he encountered a more satisfying interpretation of Christianity than he had previously found in the simple, unintellectual faith of his mother, Monica. There was no deep gulf between the Christianity of these men and the atmosphere of Neoplatonic thought of the time. At this stage of his life Augustine saw no need to disentangle exactly what belonged to Christian and what to Neoplatonic teaching: What struck him most forcibly was how much the two bodies of thought had in common. The blend of Neoplatonism and Christian belief won his adherence, and the moral conflict recounted in his Confessions (Books VI–VIII) ended with his baptism.

Even in 400, when he wrote his Confessions, he spoke of the teachings of the "Platonists" as preparing his way to Christianity. In a famous passage (VIII, 9, 13–14) he describes Neoplatonism as containing the distinctive Christian doctrines about God and his Word, the creation of the world, and the presence of the divine light; all these he had encountered in the books of "the Platonists" before reading of them in the Scriptures. What he had failed to find anticipated in Neoplatonism were the beliefs in the Incarnation and the Gospel account of the life and death of Jesus Christ. Later in life Augustine came gradually to see a deeper cleavage between philosophy and Christian faith; but he never ceased to regard much of philosophy, especially that of the Neoplatonists, as containing a large measure of truth and hence as capable of serving as a preparation for Christianity.

From Milan he returned to north Africa and retired to live a kind of monastic life with like-minded friends until he was ordained, under popular pressure, to assist the aged bishop of Hippo as a priest. Within four years, in 395, he became bishop of Hippo. From the 390s onward, all of Augustine's work was devoted to the service of his church. Preaching, administration, travel, and an extensive correspondence took much of his time. He continued to lead a quasi-monastic life with his clergy, however, and the doctrinal conflicts with Manichaeans, Donatists, Pelagians, and even with paganism provoked an extensive literary output. Despite this multifarious activity, Augustine never ceased to be a thinker and scholar, but his gifts and accomplishments were turned increasingly to pastoral uses and to the service of his people. The Scriptures took a deeper hold on his mind, eclipsing the strong philosophical interests of the years immediately preceding and following his conversion.

Augustine did not, however, renounce his philosophical interests. He shared with all his contemporaries the belief that it was the business of philosophy to discover the way to wisdom and thereby to show people the way to happiness or blessedness (beatitudo ). The chief difference between Christianity and the pagan philosophies was that Christianity considered this way as having been provided in Jesus Christ. Christianity could still be thought of as a philosophy, however, in that its aim was the same as that of other philosophic schools. The ultimate source of the saving truths taught by Christianity was the Scriptures, which for Augustine had supplanted the teachings of the philosophers as the gateway to truth. Hence, authority rather than reasoning, faith rather than understanding, came to be the emphasis of "Christian philosophy." For although the pagan philosophers had discovered much of the truth proclaimed by the Christian Gospel, what their abstract speculation had not, and could not have, reached was the kernel of the Christian faith: the belief in the contingent historical facts that constitute the history of salvation—the Gospel narrative of the earthly life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Belief and Understanding

Belief in the above facts was the essential first step along the way to saving truth and blessedness, but it was only a first step. Faith, while required of a Christian, was not in itself sufficient for a full realization of the potential rationality of man. For Augustine, an act of faith, or belief, was an act of rational thinking, but of an imperfect and rudimentary kind. In a late work he defined "to believe" as "to think with assent" (De Praedest. Sanct. 2, 5). The act of believing is, therefore, itself an act of thinking and part of a context of thought. What distinguishes it from understanding or knowledge is best brought out by Augustine in passages where he contrasts believing with "seeing." By "seeing" Augustine meant either vision, literally, or, metaphorically, the kind of knowledge to which its object is clear and transparent. This kind of knowledge could be acquired only through direct experience or through logical demonstration, such as is possible in mathematics and other forms of rigorous reasoning. Believing, though a necessary and ubiquitous state of mind without which everyday life would be impossible, is therefore a form of knowledge inferior to understanding. Its object remains distant and obscure to the mind, and it is not intellectually satisfying. Faith demands completion in understanding.

In this emphasis on the priority of belief and its incompleteness without understanding, we may see a reflection of Augustine's own intellectual pilgrimage. His tortuous quest for wisdom, with its false trails, had ultimately led him to consider the Christian faith as the object of his search. But this faith offered no resting place, for Augustine never lost his passion for further intellectual inquiry. His faith was only the first step on the way to understanding. He never ceased to regard mere faith as only a beginning; he often returned to one of his most characteristic exhortations: "Believe in order that you may understand; Unless you shall believe, you shall not understand." The understanding he had in mind could be fully achieved only in the vision of God face to face in the life of blessedness; but even in this life, faith could be—and had to be—intensified in the mind by seeking a deeper insight into it. Progress in understanding, founded on faith and proceeding within its framework, was part of the growth of faith itself. After his conversion, then, reasoning and understanding were for Augustine no longer an independent, alternative route to faith. They still had their work, but now within a new setting and on a new foundation.

Some things, like contingent historical truths, could be the objects only of belief; others could be the objects of either belief or understanding (understanding means having an awareness of grounds and logical necessity). For instance, a mathematical theorem can be believed before it is understood. With understanding, however, belief inevitably follows. God, Augustine thought, belongs among the objects that are first believed and subsequently understood. In the process of gaining this understanding, the ordinary human endowments of rational thought, culture, and philosophy have a part to play. They form the equipment of which a Christian may avail himself in the work of seeking deeper insight into the meaning of his faith.

In his De Doctrina Christiana Augustine discusses the ways in which the various intellectual disciplines may serve to assist the Christian in understanding the faith he derives from scriptural sources. Philosophy, along with the other branches of learning, is here seen as subordinated to the service of a purpose outside it, that of nourishing and deepening faith; it is no longer to be pursued for its own sake, as an independent avenue to truth. It is also in De Doctrina Christiana that Augustine uses the image of the children of Israel, on their way to the Promised Land, spoiling the Egyptians of their treasures at God's bidding: In the same way, Christians are bidden to take from the pagans whatever is serviceable in understanding and preaching the Gospel. Again, we may see here a reflection of Augustine's narrowing of interests and the growing dominance of pastoral concerns in his mind. The theoretical statement of his subordination of secular learning and culture and their consecration to the service of preaching the Gospel (in its widest sense) is contained in the program laid down in the De Doctrina Christiana.

Therefore, Augustine is not interested in philosophy, in the modern sense of the word. Philosophical concepts and arguments play a subordinate role in his work; and where they occur, they are usually employed to help in the elucidation of some aspect of Christian doctrine. Typical examples are his use of Aristotle's Categories in an attempt to elucidate the notions of substance and relation in the context of Trinitarian theology, especially in his great work De Trinitate ; his subtle inquiries into human knowledge and emotions, in the second half of the same work, with a view to discovering in man's mind an image of God's three-in-oneness; and his analysis of the temporal relations "before" and "after," undertaken to elucidate the nature of time in order to solve some of the puzzles presented by the scriptural doctrine of the creation of the world. In all these cases and many more, his purpose would be described today as theological. In Augustine's day the distinction between theology and philosophy did not exist, and "philosophy" could be—and often was—used in a sense so wide as to include what we should call theology.

To study Augustine's thought as philosophy is in a sense, to do violence to it: It is to isolate from their purpose and context what he would have regarded as mere techniques and instruments. To focus attention on what Augustine would have regarded as belonging to the sphere of means, however, allows us to see something more than a mere agglomeration of philosophical commonplaces derived, in large measure, from Neoplatonism. Augustine's originality lies not only in his determination to use his inherited philosophical equipment but also in the often slight, but sometimes profound, modification it underwent at his hands. And in the service of Augustine's purpose, many old ideas received new coherence and new power to move. Through his "spoiling of the Egyptians" much of the heritage of late antiquity received a new life in the European Middle Ages.

The Mind and Knowledge

At an early stage of Augustine's intellectual development, the skepticism of the Academic tradition of philosophy appears to have presented him with a serious challenge. His early philosophical dialogues, written in the period immediately after his conversion, are full of attempts to satisfy himself that there are at least some inescapable certainties in human knowledge on which we may absolutely rely. The basic facts of being alive, of thinking, or of simply existing are disclosed in one's immediate awareness of oneself. But Augustine did not limit the range of what was indubitably reliable in one's experience; nor did he seek to build an entire structure of indubitable knowledge on the basis of the absolute certainties of immediate awareness and its strict logical consequences, as René Descartes was to do. He tried instead to vindicate the whole range of human knowledge as being capable of arriving at truth, though also liable to err.

His vindication proceeds on two fronts, according to the fundamental duality of knowledge and of the objects corresponding to it. This duality, like much in his theory of knowledge, is of Platonic origin. Plato is the source of his belief that "there are two worlds, an intelligible world where truth itself dwells, and this sensible world which we perceive by sight and touch" (C. Acad. III, 17, 37); and of its corollary, that things can be divided into those "which the mind knows through the bodily senses" and those "which it perceives through itself" (De Trin. XV, 12, 21). Although he never departed from this dualistic theory of knowledge, Augustine also always insisted that all knowledge, of either kind, is a function of the mind, or the soul.

He defines the soul as "a substance endowed with reason and fitted to rule a body" (De Quant. Anim. 13, 22). Augustine's use of the conceptual framework of the Platonic tradition made it difficult for him to treat man as a single, substantial whole. He did, nevertheless, attempt to stress the unity of body and soul in man as far as his inherited conceptual framework allowed. In a characteristically Platonic formula he defines man as "a rational soul using a mortal and material body" (De Mor. Eccles. I, 27, 52). The soul is one of two elements in the composite, but it is clearly the dominant partner: The relation between it and its body is conceived on the model of ruler and ruled, or of user and tool. This conception gave Augustine considerable trouble in his attempt to work out a theory of sense knowledge.

sense and imagination

It was a basic axiom of Augustine's view of soul and body that while the soul can act on the body, the body cannot act on the soul. This is a consequence of the user-tool model in terms of which he understood their relation. The tool cannot wield its user; the inferior in nature has no power to effect or induce any modification in the higher. Augustine could not, therefore, elaborate a theory of sense knowledge in which the bodily affections would in any way cause or give rise to modifications in the soul; nevertheless, he insisted that even sense perception was a function of the soul, one that it carried out through the bodily sense organs. The mere modification of a sense organ is not in itself sense experience, unless it is in some way noticed by the mind. Augustine's problem was to explain this correlation between the mind's awareness and the modification of the organ without allowing the latter to cause or to give rise to the former.

In an early discussion of this problem, Augustine tried to explain the process of seeing as a kind of manipulation by the mind of its sense organs, much like a blind man's manipulation of a stick to explore the surface of an object (De Quant. Anim. 23, 41–32, 69). This is very much in line with his general conception of the relation of the body to the mind as that of an instrument to its user, but its inadequacy as an explanation of sense perception may have been apparent to Augustine. At any rate, he later came to prefer an account constructed in quite different terms. This account (elaborated in De Genesi ad Litteram, Book XII and generally underlying his later views, for instance, those stated in De Trinitate ) is based on a distinction between "corporeal" and "spiritual" sight. Corporeal sight is the modification undergone by the eyes in the process of seeing and is the result of their encounter with the object seen. Spiritual sight is the mental process that accompanies corporeal sight, in the absence of which the physical process cannot be reckoned as sense experience (since all experience is a function of mind). Spiritual seeing is not, however, caused by corporeal seeing, since the body cannot affect the mind. Indeed, spiritual sight is a separate process that may take place in the mind spontaneously, in the absence of its corporeal counterpart—for instance, in dreaming or imagining. The mental processes involved in sight and in dreaming and imagination are identical; what is before the mind is, in all these cases, of the same nature. What the mind sees in each case is not the object outside it, but the image within it. The difference between sensation and imagination is that in sensation a process of corporeal seeing accompanies the mental process; this is absent in imagination.

Augustine never quite answers the question of how we may know the difference between perception and imagination. The part, however, which he attributes to attention in the process of sense perception is important and gives a clue: It is attention that directs the mind's gaze, and it appears that it is attention that checks the free play of imagery in the mind. Thus, perception and imagination can be distinguished in experience by adverting to the presence of attention; its presence immobilizes the creative imagaination and ensures that the content of the mind has some sort of rapport with the bodily senses and their world. It is difficult to escape the impression that under the guise of "attention" Augustine has introduced what he had begun by excluding—mental process as responsive to bodily change. This is the peculiar difficulty that his two-level theory of man never quite allowed him to escape.

Augustine also speaks of a third kind of sight, one that he calls intellectual. This, the highest kind of sight, is the work of the mind whereby it interprets, judges, or corrects "messages" from the lower kinds of sight. The type of activity Augustine has in mind here is exemplified by any act of judgment on the content of sense perception; for instance, the judgment that an oar partly submerged in water is not actually bent, even though it looks bent. This activity of interpretation and judgment brings us to the second kind of knowledge, that which the mind has independently of sense experience.

reason and illumination

In his account of sense knowledge, Augustine's Platonic inheritance was a source of difficulty. In the elaboration of his views on reason and intelligence, the reverse is the case: Augustine's account of these is largely an adaptation of the fundamental tenets of the Platonic tradition. Typical instances of knowledge that the mind has independently of sense experience are the truths of mathematics. Here Augustine discovered the universality, necessity, and immutability that he saw as the hallmarks of truth. Although he did not believe that knowledge obtained through the senses possessed these characteristics, Augustine widened the scope of truth considerably beyond the necessary truths of mathematics and logic. He thought that our moral judgments and judgments of value, at least of the more fundamental kind, also shared the character of truth. He did not, however, trace this universality and necessity of such propositions to their logical form or to the nature of the definitions and logical operations involved in them. (He wrote fourteen centuries before Immanuel Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments.)

Like all his predecessors and contemporaries, Augustine thought that this kind of knowledge was just as empirical as sense experience, and that it differed from the latter only in having objects that were themselves superior to the physical objects of sense experience by being immutable and eternal, and therefore capable of being known with superior clarity and certainty. The knowledge open to the mind without the mediation of the senses was conceived as analogous to sight; indeed, Augustine often speaks of it as sight, sometimes qualifying it as "intellectual sight." Its objects are public, "out there," and independent of the mind that knows them, just as are those of physical sight. In its knowing, the mind discovers the objects; it does not create them any more than the eyes create the physical objects seen by them. Together, the truths accessible to this kind of knowledge form a realm that Augustine, following the whole Platonic tradition of thought, often calls the intelligible world. This he identifies with the "Divine Mind" containing the archetypal ideas of all things. He was not, however, the first to take this step; this identification was the key to all forms of Christian Platonism.

Before Augustine, Plato had already used the analogy between sight and understanding. Its details are worked out in the analogy of the sun in the Republic. Here the intellectual "light" that belongs to the world of intelligible forms is analogous to the visible light of the material world. Like the latter, it renders "visible" the objects seen by illuminating both them and the organ of perception—in this case, the mind. All understanding is a function of illumination by this light. The intellectual light that illuminates the mind and thus brings about understanding is spoken of in various ways by Augustine. Since it is a part of the intelligible world, it is naturally conceived as a kind of emanation from the divine mind or as an illumination of the human mind by the divine. Augustine also refers to it as the human mind's participation in the Word of God, as God's interior presence to the mind, or even as Christ dwelling in the mind and teaching it from within.

Plato had tried to account for the mind's knowledge of the forms in the theory, expressed in the language of myth, that this knowledge was left behind in the mind as a memory of its life among the forms before it was enclosed in an earthly body. After some early flirtation with this theory of reminiscence, Augustine came to reject it; to hold that the mind's knowledge derived from a premundane existence would have raised serious theological difficulties. Therefore, instead of tracing this knowledge to a residue of a past experience, he accounted for it in terms of present experience; it was the result of continual discovery in the divine light always present to the mind. For this reason, too, his conception of memoria became so widened as to lose the reference to past experience that memory necessarily implies in English. Augustine's memoria included what we should call memory; in it, he thought, were preserved traces of past experience, as in a kind of storehouse or a stomach. But memoria included very much more than this. He speaks of our a priori mathematical ideas, numbers and their relations, as being contained in it; and in the course of the tenth book of the Confessions, in which he devotes a long discussion to the subject, the scope is so widened as to extend to our knowledge of moral and other values, of all truths of reason, of ourselves, and of God. It is, in effect, identified with all the latent potentialities of the mind for knowledge.

Memoria and divine illumination are alternative ways of expressing the basis of Augustine's theory of knowledge. The theory is, in its essence, the belief that God is always intimately present to the mind, whether this presence is acknowledged or not. His presence pervades everything and is operative in everything that happens. To this metaphysical principle the human mind is no exception. The only difference between the human mind, in respect to the divine presence within it, and other things is that unlike these other things, the human mind is able to turn freely toward the light and to acknowledge its presence, or to turn away from it and to "forget" it. Whether the mind is present to the divine light or not, however, the light is present to the mind; on this presence is founded all the mind's ability to know.

The manner of operation of this illumination in the mind and what exactly it produces in the mind have been the subject of much debate. This uncertainty is due partly to the enormous variety of expressions used by Augustine to describe the divine light, but it is also partly the result of approaching Augustine's views with questions formulated in terms of concepts between which he would not have made a distinction. It is clear, at any rate, that Augustine did not think that the divine light in the mind gave the mind any kind of direct access to an immediate knowledge of God. This kind of knowledge was, to him, the result of understanding, a goal to be reached only at the end of a long process—and not this side of the grave. If, however, we ask further what exactly he thought illumination did reveal to the mind, the answer is more difficult. In particular, if we ask whether he conceived illumination primarily as a source of ideas in the mind or, alternatively, as providing the mind with its rules for judgment, the answer is not at all clear. He did not distinguish as sharply as one might wish between the making of judgments and the formation of concepts; he often speaks of both activities in the same breath or in similar contexts, or passes without the least hesitation from one to the other in the course of discussion. Sometimes he speaks of illumination as implanting in the mind an "impressed notion" (notio impressa ), whether it be of number, unity, wisdom, blessedness, or goodness. Such passages suggest that Augustine thought of illumination primarily as a source of ideas, as providing "impressed notions." It is clear, however, that such "impressed notions" were also to serve as the yardsticks for judging all imperfect participations in individual instances of these notions. And in other passages, again, illumination is spoken of not as supplying any ideas or notions but simply as providing a criterion of the truth or falsity of our judgments.

It was very easy to pass from ideas to judgments in Augustine's way of speaking of illumination. In addition, Augustine's language when he speaks of the mind's judgment made in the light of divine illumination often has further overtones; the judgment he speaks of appears as a kind of foreshadowing of the ultimate divine judgment on all human life and action. The basic reason why Augustine had found Platonic metaphysics so congenial was that it harmonized so easily with the moral bearings of his own views; and its theories, especially in some of their more imaginative and dramatic expressions, allowed themselves to be exploited to serve Augustine's interests as a moralist. In his discussion of knowledge, as in his discussion of the relation of mind and body, ethical considerations very often play the major part. The central theories of Platonic thought buttressed views held by Augustine primarily on account of their moral bearings.

Will, Action, and Virtue

Morality lies at the center of Augustine's thought. There are many reasons for this, the most noteworthy being his conception of philosophy. As we have seen, philosophy was for Augustine far from being an exclusively theoretical study; and morality itself belonged to its substance more intimately than the discussion and analysis of moral concepts and judgments. Philosophy was a quest for wisdom, its aim being to achieve man's happiness; and this depended on right living as much as on true thinking. Hence the practical orientation of Augustine's thought—an orientation that it shared with most contemporary forms of thinking.

On human conduct and human destiny Augustine's thinking was, of course, molded very largely by the New Testament and by the Christian church's tradition in understanding its conceptions of divine law and commandment, of grace, of God's will, of sin, and of love. Much of this, being specifically theological in interest, lies outside the scope of this presentation of Augustine's thought. What is remarkable is the extent to which Augustine was prepared to read back the characteristic teaching of the Christian church into the works of the philosophers, Plato in particular. Thus he held that Plato had asserted that the supreme good, possession of which alone gives man blessedness, is God. "And therefore," Augustine concluded, Plato "thought that to be a philosopher is to be a lover of God" (De Civ. Dei VIII, 8). Rapprochements of this kind helped to reconcile the Christian and the Platonic teachings to each other; in Augustine's treatment of ethical topics the characteristically Christian themes and distinctively Platonic concepts are so closely interwoven that they are often inseparable.

Augustine is able, therefore, to define blessedness itself in terms that make no reference to any distinctively Christian teaching, for instance, when he says that man is blessed when all his actions are in harmony with reason and truth (cum omnes motus eius rationi veritatique consentiunt—De Gen. C. Man. I, 20, 31). Blessedness, according to this view, does not consist simply in the total satisfaction of all desires. In another discussion Augustine makes this more explicit: While blessedness is incompatible with unsatisfied desires, the satisfaction of evil or perverse desires gives no ultimate happiness; hence blessedness cannot be identified simply with total satisfaction. "No one is happy unless he has all he wants and wants nothing that is evil" (De Trin. XIII, 5, 8; for the entire discussion, see ibid. XIII, 3, 6–9, 12). The only element in all this that is specifically Christian is the insistence that this happiness cannot be attained by man except with the aid of the way revealed by Christ and of God's grace given to men to enable them to follow it.

The dramatic account, given in his Confessions, of his own turning to God, though steeped in the language of the Bible and throbbing with the intensity of Augustine's feelings, is, at the same time, an illustration of a central theme in Greek metaphysics. The book opens with a powerful evocation of his coming to rest in God; it ends with a prayer for this rest, peace, and fulfillment. This central theme of longing and satisfaction is a commonplace of Greek thought from Plato's Symposium onward. Man, according to the cosmology implicit in this picture, illustrates in his being the forces that are at work in nature in general. Man, like everything else, is conceived as part of a vast nexus of interrelated things within an ordered hierarchy of beings that together form the cosmos. But it is an order in which the components are not stationary but are in dynamic rapport; they are all pursuing their own ends and come to rest only in attaining these ends. Their striving for rest, for completion or satisfaction, is the motive power that drives all things toward their purposes, just as weight, according to this image, causes things to move to the places proper to them in the cosmos—the heavy things downward, the light upward. Augustine thought of the forces that move men as analogous to weight and called them, collectively, love or loves. In a famous passage he wrote, "My weight is my love; by it am I carried wheresoever I am carried" (… eo feror quocumque feror—Conf. XIII, 9, 10).

love, law, and the moral order

Man, however, differs from other things in nature in that the forces that move him, his "loves," are very much more complex. Within him there are a great many desires and drives, impulses and inclinations—some of them conscious, others not. The satisfaction of some often involves the frustration of others, and the harmonious satisfaction that forms the goal of human activity appears to be a very distant and scarcely realizable purpose. The reason for this is not only the multiplicity of elements that go into the making of human nature; a further reason is the fact that these elements have been disordered and deprived of their original state of harmony. Augustine interpreted this aspect of the human condition as a consequence of the sin of Adam and the fall of man.

There is, however, a further respect in which man differs from other things in the way his activity is determined. This lies in the fact that even with his disordered impulses, he is not—at least not entirely—at the mercy of the conflicting forces within him. His activity is not, so to speak, a resultant of them: He is, in some degree, capable of selecting among them, deciding which to resist, which to follow. In this capacity for choice Augustine saw the possibility of what he called voluntary action as distinguished from natural or necessary behavior. He called this human capacity "will." It is a source of some confusion that he used the term love, or its plural, loves, to designate the sum total of forces that determine a man's actions, whether they are "natural" or "voluntary." As a collective name for natural impulses, "love" is therefore morally neutral; only insofar as the will endorses or approves love of this kind is love morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. Augustine expresses this graphically by distinguishing between loves that ought to be loved and loves that ought not to be loved; and he defines man's moral task in terms of sorting out these commendable and reprehensible loves in himself and putting his loves in their right order.

Augustine's favorite definition of virtue is "rightly ordered love" (as in De Civ. Dei XV, 22). This consists in setting things in their right order of priority, valuing them according to their true worth, and in following this right order of value in one's inclinations and actions. The idea of order is central to Augustine's reflections on morals. Before becoming a Christian, he had believed with the Manichaeans that the existence of good and of evil in the world was accounted for by their different origins, respectively from a good and an evil deity. The Neoplatonism of his Christian friends in Milan helped Augustine find an alternative explanation, one that was more in keeping with the Christian doctrine of one world created by one God. According to this theory, evil had no independent, substantial existence in its own right; it existed as a privation, as a distortion or damage within the good. All evil was thus in some sense a breach of the right relation of parts within a whole, a breach of order of some kind. Hence the great emphasis on order in Augustine's thought, from the time of his conversion to the writing of his last works.

Augustine calls the pattern to which human activity must conform "law." Law is, in the first place, the archetypal order according to which people are required to shape their actions and by which their actions are to be judged. Augustine makes it clear that by "law" he means very much more than the actual legal enactments of public authorities. These "human laws" deal only with a part, greater or lesser, of human conduct; they vary from place to place and from time to time; they depend on the vagaries of individual legislators. The true "eternal law" by which all human behavior is judged leaves no aspect of man's life out of its purview; it is the same everywhere and at all times. It is not quite clear how Augustine conceived the relation between divine and human, eternal and temporal, law. His terminology is variable, and although he thought that human law ought to seek to approach the divine, or at least not to contradict it, he does not appear to have denied its claim to being law even when it failed to reflect the eternal law. Also, as we shall see, he appears to have changed his views on this matter in the course of his life.

The "eternal," or "divine," law is in effect the intelligible world or the divine mind (see discussion of reason and illumination above) insofar as it is considered as the pattern that should regulate activity. The language in which Augustine speaks about the divine law is the same as that which he uses in speaking of the eternal truth, and he believed that the achievement of wisdom consisted in pursuing this truth by understanding and then embodying in oneself the order understood. It is clear that there is no significant difference between "eternal law" and "eternal truth"; the two are identical: Eternal law is eternal truth considered under its aspect as a standard of moral judgment. Thus, the problem of how the eternal law is known to men is the same as the problem discussed above of how the eternal truth is known. Here, too, he speaks of the eternal law as being "transcribed" into the human mind or of its "notion" as being impressed on the mind. The deliverance of conscience or reason as manifested in moral judgment is thus no less and no more than the human mind's illumination by the eternal law, or its participation in it; Augustine describes conscience as "an interior law, written in the heart itself" (lex intima, in ipso … corde conscripta—En. in Ps. 57, 1). He refers to this law, inscribed in man's heart or known to him by reason, as "natural." He can thus speak of law (eternal or natural), reason, and order interchangeably when discussing the ordering of human action to bring about its virtuous disposition.

In defining this order of priority in value, the following of which constitutes virtue, Augustine makes a fundamental distinction between "use" and "enjoyment." These two forms of behavior correspond to the twofold classification of things according to whether they are valuable for their own sake or as means, for the sake of something else. Things valued for themselves are to be "enjoyed," things valued as means are to be "used"; the inversion of the relation between use and enjoyment is the fundamental perversion of the order of virtue. To seek to use what is to be enjoyed or to enjoy what is to be used is to confuse means with ends. The only object fit for enjoyment, in this sense, is God; he alone is to be loved for his own sake, and all other things are to be referred to this love. In elaborating this theory, Augustine was expressing the traditional view that it behooves people to journey through their lives on Earth as pilgrims and not to regard any earthly goal as a fit resting place. This did not, of course, imply, to Augustine's mind, that nothing but God was a fit object of love; on the contrary, it was a way of stressing the need to put loves in their right order and to love each thing with the kind and degree of love appropriate to it. Although he clearly conceived of love as capable of an endless series of gradations, Augustine is usually content to speak of two kinds of love, which he contrasts: charity (caritas ) and cupidity (cupiditas ). The basic distinction is between upright, well-ordered, and God-centered love and perverse, disordered, and self-centered love. A great deal of Augustine's thinking and writing hinges on this distinction.

The individual virtues interested Augustine less than the concept of love. He was content to take over the classical enumeration of the four cardinal virtues. But his own characteristic thoughts on the moral life are always developed in terms of love rather than of any of the virtues. Indeed, as we have seen, he defined virtue in terms of love; similarly, he liked to define the individual cardinal virtues as different aspects of the love of God. This tendency is one of the most important links between what we would distinguish as the theological and philosophical sides of his thought.

The World and God

Order is a key idea in Augustine's reflections on the morality of human behavior. It also plays a large part in his reflection on the physical universe in its relation to God. The world of nature was not in itself an object of particular interest to Augustine. In cosmological thinking of the kind to be found in Aristotle's Physics, for instance, he had little interest. The physical world concerned him only insofar as it was related either to man or to God. Order, then, for Augustine was the expression of rationality. In human action this was something that men should seek to embody in their conduct; in the world of physical and animate nature, which did not share the freedom of human activity, order expressed the divine rationality at work in all natural happenings. To human eyes, however, this order was often glimpsed only in isolated instances, while a great deal of disorder was manifest in the misery, disease, and suffering with which the world is shot through. In part these frustrations of order were held to be due, ultimately, to the initiative of human sin; in part they were held to be merely apparent and capable of being resolved within a perspective larger than that of finite human vision.

Behind the world order stands its author and sovereign ruler, God. All things testify to his presence; the world is full of his "traces" (vestigia ). God's presence in and behind his creation was, for Augustine, not so much something to be established by argument as it was the premise, taken for granted, of a further argument. This argument, to which Augustine returned on a number of occasions, is particularly well expressed in a chapter of his Confessions (X, 6, 9, and 10). He there speaks of putting things to the question in order to allow them to reveal themselves as dependent on their creator. It is clear that what primarily interested Augustine was the questioner's moral attitude: The point of his argument is not so much that the order and beauty of things imply the existence of God, but rather that since God had created them, we must so discipline ourselves as to see things for what they are—his handiwork—and to value them at their true worth and worship only him, their creator—not his handiwork. Again, the moral concern is uppermost in Augustine's mind.

This is not the case with the discussion of the problem of time, in Book XI of the Confessions. The problem was forced on Augustine's attention by the scriptural doctrine of creation, but it is clear that it fascinated him and that he pursued it simply because he was interested in it. Manichaean objectors to the Christian doctrine of creation from nothing had raised difficulties about speaking of an absolute beginning. These critics had pointed out that in our ordinary language there is no room for an absolute beginning of the kind envisaged by adherents of the doctrine; we can always ask what happened before something else, even if this was the first of all happenings. Questions of this kind revealed the arbitrariness and absurdity of the belief that God made the world out of nothing: What was God doing before the creation? Why did he create the world when he did and not sooner, or later?

In answer to these difficulties Augustine in effect undertook a critique of the conception of time that underlay them. Such difficulties arise from the fact that time is thought of as having the same kind of being as the events and happenings going on in time; the question "What happened before time?" was thought to be of the same logical form as questions about what happened before any particular events. Augustine denied this assumed logical similarity behind the grammatical similarity of the questions. He pointed out that whereas it makes sense to ask what happened before any particular event, it does not make sense to ask what happened before all events, because time is the field of the relationships of temporal events, and there could ex hypothesi be nothing before the first temporal event. In this argument Augustine in effect rejected the conception of time according to which time has a substantial reality of its own, and he adopted a theory according to which time is the field of temporal relations between temporal events.

He did, however, go further in his reflections on time. Neoplatonic thought had always treated time in close relation to the soul, and Augustine could scarcely avoid discussing this topic. The reality of the past and of the future puzzled him: Can what is not yet but will be, and what is no longer but has been, be said to be? If not, then only the present has any reality. But if only the present is real, then reality shrinks to a dimensionless point at which the future is becoming the past. Augustine resolved the whole problem by locating time in the mind and adopting at the end of his discussion, though with hesitation, a definition of time as "extension [distentio ], I am not sure of what, probably of the mind itself" (Confessions XI, 26, 33).

Another question that the doctrine of creation raised for Augustine concerns the natural activity, functioning, and development of creatures. This problem arose from the need to harmonize the story of the creation of the world in seven days or, according to an alternative version, at once, with the fact that some things came into existence only after the creation took place. Augustine's solution of this problem lay essentially in asserting that God created different things in different conditions; some left his hands complete and ready-made, others in a potential or latent state, awaiting the right conditions and environment for their full development. The latter are analogous to seeds, which are thought of as containing in themselves the fully developed plant in potency; and on this analogy, and using the traditional vocabulary, Augustine called these potentialities for later development "seminal reasons" (rationes seminales, or causales ).

Apart from helping him to resolve the apparent contradiction between the belief in a primordial creation and the concept of continued development as a process of natural causality, this theory of "seminal reasons" also prompted Augustine at least to begin to feel his way toward some conception of nature and natural causality. At times, he comes very close to the later medieval distinction between the "First Cause" and the whole range of "second causes," the distinction according to which things depend in different senses both on God (the First Cause) and on their own immediate or distant created causes. Augustine, too, tried to endow the world of created causes with a specific reality of its own, one distinct from the causal activity of God in the world. In this he did not quite succeed. His failure becomes apparent in his treatment of miracles. He did not treat these—as the Scholastics later did as effects of the First Cause (God) produced without the instrumentality of second causes. He allowed the distinction between the two orders of causality (which he had never clearly formulated and which is hinted at, rather than stated, in his writings) to disintegrate during his discussion of miracles. In this context the very idea of "nature" is so widened as to include the miraculous within its scope. Miracles do not contradict the order of nature; they contradict only our idea of this order, an idea based on our restricted view and limited experience. They are not against nature, since nature is God's will; they are only against nature as it is known to us. The distinction between nature and miracle vanishes here, and in his well-known chapter in The City of God (X, 12) they become synonymous to the extent that nature itself and man, its crown, become the greatest miracles of all.

Individuals in Society

Society was not one of the subjects that loomed large in Augustine's earlier thought. Such hints as he gives us of his conception of society in his earlier works (those written before the mid-390s) suggest that he thought that organized human society and the state were part of the worldly dispensation whereby man is assisted to fulfill his destiny. A properly ordered society, like a properly ordered moral life, is a stage on the way to man's ultimate destination in eternity; and as far as Augustine's hints enable us to tell, he expected a properly ordered society to reflect, particularly by means of its legal institutions, the perfection of the eternal, intelligible world.

In step with his theological development, however, his views on human society underwent profound changes, and by the time that society became an important theme in his reflection, especially in his great work The City of God (written 413–427), these views had been radically transformed. An important factor in the course of this transformation was the increasing stress Augustine had come to lay on the power of sin in human life and in all earthly institutions, on man's need for redemption through Christ, and on his need for grace. In the most general terms Augustine came to see man's destiny and his realization of it more in terms of the scriptural pattern of a redemption-history and less in terms of the Neoplatonic theme of the ascent of the soul. Accordingly, human society came to be understood more in terms of its horizontal, historical relationships within the divine plan for men's salvation and less in terms of what we might call its vertical relationship to the intelligible world.

The first event in the course of the biblical redemption-history, man's fall from grace through Adam's sin, is of decisive importance for Augustine's changed attitude to organized human society. To live in society, according to Augustine, was natural to humans; without society they would not be able to realize fully their human potentialities, and the company of their fellow human beings was necessary to them. This, he held, was as true before man's fall as after; even in his state of primal innocence, in full possession of his nature prior to its distortion by sin, man was a social animal by nature; even the life of the blessed in heaven is a social life. But although Augustine believed that man's nature is social, he did not agree with Aristotle that it is also political. Politically organized society—the machinery of authority, government, and coercion—is, in Augustine's view, not natural to man. It was a useful and necessary arrangement for man in his fallen condition, and indeed the purpose of political society was to remedy at least some of the evils attendant upon man's fallen state. Its function was to check the social disorder and disintegration that followed from the general loss of order at the Fall. The institutions of government, the subjection of governed to government, and the coercive power of political authority over its subjects are thus but one instance of the subjection of man to man, and this was something that, Augustine held, did not exist in man's primal state of innocence. No slavery, servitude, or subjection could exist in that state of natural integrity; these things make sense only if understood as God's punishment for the sin that incurred the loss of integrity and, at the same time, as his dispensation for coping with the needs of man's condition in his new, fallen state.

Augustine used the traditional language of Christian theology to state his view of political society. For reasons to be considered below, he never drew out, at least not explicitly, the full implications of this view. In this view of society, however, the legitimate functions of the state are very much more restricted in scope than in theories according to which man is by nature a political animal. In Augustine's view, the state's sphere is confined to the requirements of social order and welfare; the individual's ultimate welfare and eternal destiny lie outside its realm of competence, whereas they are very much a part of the state's interest if the state is thought of as an ordinance of nature, as an indispensable means of man's realizing his ultimate destiny. In Augustine's estimate, the task of the state in the economy of salvation would be rather to establish the conditions in which men may work out their own salvation in relative peace and security than actively to promote their individual salvation through legislation and coercion.

The state was, for Augustine, synonymous with the Roman Empire; and having revised his ideas on the state in terms of the large categories of the scriptural redemption-history, he had inevitably to take the measure of the state he knew in this same perspective. Here his ideas make sense only if seen as a rejection of views of the empire generally current among Christians during the fourth century, after the adoption of Christianity by the emperors. The empire, represented as eternal ever since Vergil's day, was now widely regarded among Christians as an essential instrument of divine purpose in history, bound up with the possibility of salvation and destined to last until the end of time. It had been taken up into the dimension of the biblical redemption-history. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 gave a profound shock to this mentality. It led Augustine, whose mind had already moved a long way from the popular picture, to devote his greatest work, The City of God, to a reappraisal of the empire's place in the divine providential plan. The upshot was that the empire was no longer allowed an eternal destiny and was removed from the dimension of the redemption-history; the possibility of salvation was not necessarily bound up with it as a means of God's grace. It was simply one of a series of empirical, historic societies. The eternal categories of sin and holiness, of salvation and reprobation, did not apply to it or, indeed, to any other human assembly; they were embodied only in what Augustine called the earthly city and the heavenly city.

The two "cities" consist, respectively, of those predestined to eternal glory and those predestined to eternal torment or, as Augustine also defined them (clearly intending the various definitions to be equivalent), of those who live according to God and those who live according to man, of the altruistic and the selfish, of those whose love is upright and those whose love is perverse, and so forth. In none of these senses, however, have the two "cities" any discernible reality as communities until their final separation at the Last Judgment. In all discernible human communities they are inextricably intertwined. Here again we may see Augustine's modest estimate of the state's function, for when he discusses it in this context, the realm of the state is identified with the sphere in which the concerns of the two cities overlap. Its task is to secure the temporal peace: the order, security, and material welfare that both the wicked and the righteous cities require during their earthly careers. Its concern is with specifically communal, public matters affecting all its members. Citizens of the heavenly city will not, of course, be content with the welfare and peace thus secured: They will use these things but refer their use to the ultimate enjoyment of a peace beyond the terrestrial.

The general tendency of these views of Augustine's was to undermine the extremely close links that had come to exist between the empire and the Christian church, especially during his own lifetime. He was clearly ill at ease with the current representations of this relationship; but there were considerable pressures working on the minds of his contemporaries to keep them active, and Augustine himself was not exempt from their operation. In the course of the struggle with the Donatist movement in north Africa, a dissenting movement increasingly repressed by the imperial authorities, he came gradually and reluctantly to give his consent to the coercive measures that were being brought into use against the movement. His endorsement of these means of repression ran counter to the most fundamental direction of his thought. Although his endorsement must be regarded as a development in his practical, pastoral, and political attitudes rather than as a reversal of his basic views on the nature of political society, it left deep marks on those views. In later centuries his use of the Gospel phrase "Compel them to come in" (Coge intrare —Luke 19:23) and its consecration of repression, persecution, and coercion paved the way to much tragedy. It also helped to obscure the most profound and most original of his contributions to Christian political thinking.

See also Neoplatonism.

Bibliography

The most complete and generally reliable Latin edition of Augustine's works is the edition by the Benedictines of Saint-Maur (1679–1700). It supersedes all earlier editions and was reprinted in J. P. Migne's Patrologia Latina, Vols. 32–46 (Paris, 1841–1842), with some unfortunate variants and errors. It is also the basis of the texts of the works now being published in Bibliothèque augustinienne (with French translation and useful notes). Modern critical editions of many works exist, mainly in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna) and Corpus Christianorum. Details are in E. Dekkers, "Clavis Patrum Latinorum," in Sacris Erudiri 3 (1962).

English translations of many works appear in various series, such as Loeb Classical Library, Library of the Fathers, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Library of Christian Classics, The Fathers of the Church, Ancient Christian Writers, and the Catholic University of America Patristic Studies. A detailed, convenient, and fairly up-to-date list of translations is included in the bibliography by J. J. O'Meara appended to Marrou's Saint Augustine.

Of short introductory works, the best is H. I. Marrou, Saint Augustine (London: Longmans, 1957), translated from the French in the series Men of Wisdom. It contains a brief biography and a discerning characterization of Augustine's thought by a great scholar, as well as a selection of illustrative texts in translation. R. W. Battenhouse et al., A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), has been superseded by G. Bonner, St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (London: SCM Press, 1963), as a survey and guide to Augustine's career and literary output. An essential to understanding Augustine in the setting of contemporary education and culture is H. I. Marrou, Saint Augustine et la fin de la culture antique (Paris, 1938), completed by his Retractatio (Paris, 1949). On Augustine as a bishop, see F. van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop (London: Sheed and Ward, 1962).

Among the many books on Augustine's intellectual development and his conversion, P. Alfaric, L'évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin (Paris: Nourry, 1918), stands behind much of the subsequent controversy; C. Boyer, Christianisme et néo-Platonisme dans la formation de saint Augustin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1920), is one of the best-balanced replies provoked by it. P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin (Paris, 1950), has put the problem on new footing altogether; it is further pursued, with qualifications, by J. J. O'Meara, The Young Augustine (London: Longmans Green, 1954).

Of the philosophical aspects of Augustine's thought, the best general account is E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, translated by L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960). See also the survey by R. A. Markus in Critical History of Western Philosophy, edited by D. J. O'Connor (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964).

On particular aspects, see C. Boyer, L'idée de vérité dans la philosophie de saint Augustin (Paris, 1941); J. Guitton, Le temps et l'éternité chez Plotin et saint Augustin, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1955); and E. Dinkler, Die Anthropologie Augustins (Stuttgart, 1934), on the topics named in their titles. M. Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinitätslehre des heiligen Augustinus (Münster, 1907), is the classic work on Augustine's theory of mind and the Trinitarian speculations based on it. Also valuable on his theory of knowledge are J. Hessen, Augustins Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 2nd printing (Berlin, 1960), and R. Jolivet, Dieu soleil des esprits (Paris: Desclée, de Brouwer, 1934).

On ethical topics, see J. Mausbach, Die Ethik des heiligen Augustins (Freiburg, 1909); T. Deman, Le traitement scientifique de la morale chrétienne selon saint Augustin (Paris, 1957); J. Burnaby, Amor Dei (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938); and R. Holte, Béatitude et sagesse: Saint Augustin et le problème de la fin de l'homme dans la philosophie ancienne (Paris, 1962). On the state and society the least unsatisfactory accounts are Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of Saint Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) and the short treatment by N. H. Baynes, The Political Ideas of St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei (London: G. Bell, 1936).

Many of the most important recent articles on Augustine are to be found in one of the following collections: Augustinus Magister: Communications et actes du Congrès international augustinien (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1954); Recherches augustiniennes, Vols. I and II (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1958–1963); Studia Patristica, Vol. VI, edited by F. L. Cross; Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 81 (1962); and in the quarterly journal Revue des études augustiniennes.

The most up-to-date and best-selected bibliography is Bibliographia Augustiniana, appended to C. Andresen, ed., Zum Augustin-Gespräch der Gegenwart (Darmstadt, 1962), which is Vol. V in the series Wege der Forschung. Gilson's book (see above), in which the classified selection of the original is replaced by an alphabetical list in the English translation; B. Altaner, Patrologie, 5th printing (1958); and O. Bardenhewer, Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, Vol. IV (Freiburg, 1924; reprinted 1962), also have good bibliographies. Current literature is surveyed in the bibliographical supplements to Revue des études augustiniennes.

R. A. Markus (1967)