## 1. Life



Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus) lived from 13 November 354 to 28
August 430. He was born in Thagaste in Roman Africa (modern Souk Ahras
in Algeria). His mother Monnica (d. 388), a devout Christian, seems to
have exerted a deep but not wholly unambiguous influence on his
religious development. His father Patricius (d. 372) was baptized on
his deathbed. Augustine himself was made a catechumen early in his
life. His studies of grammar and rhetoric in the provincial centers of
Madauros and Carthage, which strained the financial resources of his
middle-class parents, were hoped to pave his way for a future career
in the higher imperial administration. In Carthage at the age of ca.
18, he found a mistress with whom he lived in a monogamous union for
ca. 14 years and who bore him a son, Adeodatus, who was baptized
together with his father in Milan and died a little later (ca. 390)
aged 18. Ca. 373 Augustine became a "hearer"
(*auditor*) of Manicheism, a dualistic religion with Persian
origins that, in Northern Africa, had developed into a variety of
Christianity (and was persecuted by the state as a heresy). His
adherence to Manicheism lasted for nine years and was strongly opposed
by Monnica. Though probably active as a Manichean apologist and
missionary, he never became one of the sect's
"elect" (*electi*), who were committed to
asceticism and sexual abstinence. In 383 he moved to Milan, then the
capital of the western half of the Empire, to become a publicly paid
professor of rhetoric of the city and an official panegyrist at the
Imperial court. Here he sent away his mistress to free the way for an
advantageous marriage (a behavior presumably common for young
careerists at that epoch). At Milan he underwent the influence of
Bishop Ambrose (339-397), who taught him the allegorical method
of Scriptural exegesis, and of some Neoplatonically inclined
Christians who acquainted him with an understanding of Christianity
that was philosophically informed and, to Augustine, intellectually
more satisfactory than Manicheism, from which he had already begun to
distance himself. The ensuing period of uncertainty and
doubt--depicted in the *Confessiones* as a crisis in the
medical sense--ended in summer 386, when Augustine converted to
ascetic Christianity and gave up both his chair of rhetoric and his
further career prospects. After a winter of philosophical leisure at
the rural estate of Cassiciacum near Milan, Augustine was baptized by
Ambrose at Easter 387 and returned to Africa, accompanied by his son,
some friends and his mother, who died on the journey (Ostia, 388). In
391 he was, apparently against his will, ordained a priest in the
diocese of the maritime city of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba/Bone
in Algeria). About five years later (ca. 396) he succeeded the local
bishop. This ecclesiastical function involved new pastoral, political,
administrative and juridical duties, and his responsibility for and
experiences with an ordinary Christian congregation may have
contributed to modify his views on grace and original sin (Brown 2000:
ch. 15). But his rhetorical skills equipped him well for his daily
preaching and for religious disputes. Throughout his life as a bishop
he was involved in religious controversies with Manicheans, Donatists,
Pelagians and, to a lesser extent, pagans. Most of the numerous books
and letters he wrote in that period were part of these controversies
or at least inspired by them, and even those that were not (e.g.,
*De Genesi ad litteram*, *De trinitate*) combine
philosophical or theological teaching with rhetorical persuasion
(Tornau 2006a). Polemics against his former co-religionists, the
Manicheans, looms large in his work until about 400; the debate with
them helped to shape his ideas on the non-substantiality of evil and
on human responsibility. The Donatist schism had its roots in the last
great persecution at the beginning of the fourth century. The
Donatists saw themselves as the legitimate successors of those who had
remained steadfast during the persecution and claimed to represent the
African tradition of a Christian "church of the pure".
Since 405 the Donatists were subsumed under the imperial laws against
heresy and forced to re-enter the Catholic church by legal means;
these measures were intensified after a conference at Carthage (411)
had marked the official end of Donatism in Africa (Lancel &
Alexander 1996-2002). By way of his assiduous writing against
the Donatists, Augustine sharpened his ecclesiological ideas and
developed a theory of religious coercion based on an intentionalist
understanding of Christian love. Pelagianism (named after the British
ascetic Pelagius) was a movement Augustine became aware of around 412.
He and his African fellow-bishops managed to get it condemned as a
heresy in 418. While not denying the importance of divine grace,
Pelagius and his followers insisted that the human being was by nature
free and able not to sin (*possibilitas*). Against this view,
Augustine vigorously defended his doctrine of the human being's
radical dependence on grace, a conviction already voiced in the
*Confessiones* but refined and hardened during the controversy.
The last decade of Augustine's life is marked by a vitriolic
debate with the Pelagianist ex-bishop Julian of Aeclanum who accused
Augustine of crypto-Manicheism and of denying free will while
Augustine blamed him and the Pelagianists for evacuating
Christ's sacrifice by denying original sin (Drecoll
2012-2018). Controversy with pagan traditionalists seems to have
reached a peak after 400, when Augustine refuted a series of
objections against Christianity apparently extracted from
Porphyry's treatise *Against the Christians*
(*Letter* 102; Bochet 2011), and after 410, when the city of
Rome had been sacked by Alaric and his Goths. The *City of
God*, Augustine's great apology, was prompted by this
symbolic event, though it is by no means just a response to pagan
polemics.
 Augustine's life ended when the Vandals besieged Hippo; he is
said to have died with a word of Plotinus on his lips (Possidius,
*Vita Augustini* 28.11, after Plotinus, *Enneads* I
4.7.23-24).


## 2. Work



Augustine's literary output surpasses the preserved work of
almost all other ancient writers in quantity. In the
*Retractationes* ("Revisions", a critical survey of
his writings in chronological order down to 428 CE) he suggests a
threefold division of his work into books, letters and sermons
(*Retractationes* 1, prologue 1); about 100 books, 300 letters,
and 500 sermons have survived. Augustine's literary career after
his conversion began with philosophical dialogues. The first of these,
written in Cassiciacum in 386/7, deal with traditional topics such as
skepticism (*Contra Academicos*), happiness (*De beata
vita*), evil (*De ordine*) and the immortality of the soul
(*Soliloquia, De immortalitate animae*). Augustine continued to
pursue these issues in dialogues on the immateriality of the soul
(*De quantitate animae*, 388), language and learning (*De
magistro*, 388-391), freedom of choice and human
responsibility (*De libero arbitrio*, begun in 388 and
completed perhaps as late as 395) and the numeric structure of reality
(*De musica*, 388-390). The treatise *De vera
religione* (389-391) is a kind of summa of Augustine's
early Christian philosophy. After the start of his ecclesiastical
career he abandoned the dialogue form, perhaps because he realized its
elitist and potentially misleading character (G. Clark 2009; Catapano
2013). Of the works from his priesthood and episcopate, many are
controversial writings against the Manicheans (e.g., *Contra
Faustum Manichaeum*, around 400), the Donatists (e.g., *Contra
litteras Petiliani*, 401-405; *De baptismo*, 404) and
the Pelagians (e.g., *De spiritu et littera*, 412; *Contra
Iulianum*, 422; *De gratia et libero arbitrio*,
424-427; and his last and unfinished work *Contra Iulianum
opus imperfectum*, which preserves a substantial portion of the
otherwise lost treatise *Ad Florum* by his Pelagian adversary
Julian of Aeclanum). Among the philosophically most interesting of
these works are *De utilitate credendi* (391-392, a
defense of faith/belief against Manichean rationalism), *De natura
boni* (399, a concise anti-Manichean argument for the doctrine
that evil is a privation of goodness rather than an independent
substance), *De natura et gratia* (413-417, a reply to
Pelagius' treatise *De natura*) and *De correptione et
gratia* (426/427, refuting a Christian version of the Stoic
'Lazy Argument' that had been put forward against Augustine's
doctrine of grace). Augustine is however most famous for the five long
treatises with a wider scope he composed between 396 and 426. The
*Confessiones* (ca. 396-400), probably his most original
work, is "philosophy in autobiography" (Mann 2014) rather
than an autobiography in a modern sense. It shows how an individual
life--Augustine's own--is made sense of by God's
providence and grace as well as by his creation and economy of
salvation. *De doctrina christiana* (begun in 396/7 but
completed only in 426/7) is a handbook of biblical hermeneutics and
Christian rhetoric; it delineates the semiotic dichotomy of
"things" (*res*) and--especially
linguistic--"signs" (*signa*) and critically
assesses the importance of the classical disciplines for the biblical
exegete. *De trinitate* (begun in 399 and completed in 419 or
perhaps as late as 426) has impressed modern philosophical readers by
its probing analyses of the human mind as an "image" of
the Divine Trinity. *De Genesi ad litteram* (401/2-416)
is an attempt at winning a philosophically justifiable cosmology from
the opening chapters of Genesis. Here as in most of Augustine's
works philosophy is inseparable from biblical exegesis. The monumental
apologetic treatise *De civitate dei* (begun in 412, two years
after the sack of Rome, and completed in 426) argues that happiness
can be found neither in the Roman nor the philosophical tradition but
only through membership in the city of God whose founder is Christ.
Among many other things, it has interesting reflections on the secular
state and on the Christian's life in a secular society. The
sermons document Augustine's ability to adapt complex ideas to a
large and not overly learned audience. Two long series on the Psalms
(*Enarrationes in Psalmos*, ca. 392-422) and the Gospel
of John (*In Iohannis evangelium tractatus*, ca. 406-420)
stand out; a series of sermons on the First Letter of John (*In
epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem*, 407) is
Augustine's most sustained discussion of Christian love. The
letters are not personal or intimate documents but public writings
that are part of Augustine's teaching and of his ecclesiastical
politics. Some of them reach the length of full treatises and offer
excellent philosophical discussions (*Letter* 155 on virtue;
*Letter* 120 on faith and reason; *Letter* 147 on the
"seeing" of God).


## 3. Augustine and Philosophy



From ancient thought Augustine inherited the notion that philosophy is
"love of wisdom" (*Confessiones* 3.8; *De
civitate dei* 8.1), i.e., an attempt to pursue happiness--or,
as late-antique thinkers, both pagan and Christian, liked to put it,
salvation--by seeking insight into the true nature of things and
living accordingly. This kind of philosophy he emphatically endorses,
especially in his early work (cf., e.g., *Contra Academicos*
1.1). He is convinced that the true philosopher is a lover of God
because true wisdom is, in the last resort, identical with God, a
point on which he feels in agreement with both Paul (1 Corinthians
1:24) and Plato (cf. *De civitate dei* 8.8). This is why he
thinks that Christianity is "the true philosophy"
(*Contra Iulianum* 4.72; the view is common among ancient,
especially Greek, Christian thinkers) and that true philosophy and
true (cultic) religion are identical (*De vera religione* 8).
In case of doubt, practice takes precedence over theory: in the
Cassiciacum dialogues Monnica, who represents the saintly but
uneducated, is credited with a philosophy of her own (*De
ordine* 1,31-32; 2.45). At the same time, Augustine sharply
criticizes the "philosophy of this world" censured in the
New Testament that distracts from Christ (Colossians 2:8). In his
early work he usually limits this verdict to the Hellenistic
materialist systems (*Contra Academicos* 3.42; *De
ordine* 1.32); later he extends it even to Platonism because the
latter denies the possibility of a history of salvation (*De
civitate dei* 12.14). The main error he faults the philosophers
with is arrogance or pride (*superbia*), a reproach that does
not weigh lightly given that arrogance is, in Augustine's view,
the root of all sins. Out of arrogance the philosophers presume to be
able to reach happiness through their own virtue (*De civitate
dei* 19.4, a criticism primarily directed against the Stoics), and
even those among them who have gained insight into the true nature of
God and his Word (i.e., the Platonists) are incapable of
"returning" to their divine "homeland" because
they proudly reject the mediation of Christ incarnate and resort to
proud and malevolent demons instead, i.e., to the traditional pagan
cults and to theurgy (*Confessiones* 7.27; *In evangelium
Iohannis tractatus* 2.2-4; *De civitate dei*
10.24-29; Madec 1989). In his first works Augustine epitomizes
his own philosophical program with the phrase "to know God and
the soul" (*Soliloquia* 1.7; *De ordine* 2.47) and
promises to pursue it with the means provided by Platonic philosophy
as long as these are not in conflict with the authority of biblical
revelation (*Contra Academicos* 3.43). He thereby restates the
old philosophical questions about the true nature of the human being
and about the first principle of reality, and he adumbrates the key
Neoplatonic idea that knowledge of our true self entails knowledge of
our divine origin and will enable us to return to it (cf. Plotinus,
*Enneads* VI.9.7.33-34). While these remain the basic
characteristics of Augustine's philosophy throughout his career,
they are considerably differentiated and modified as his engagement
with biblical thought intensifies and the notions of creation, sin and
grace acquire greater significance. Augustine is entirely unaware of
the medieval and modern distinction of "philosophy" and
"theology"; both are inextricably intertwined in his
thought, and it is unadvisable to try to disentangle them by focusing
exclusively on elements that are deemed "philosophical"
from a modern point of view.


## 4. The Philosophical Tradition; Augustine's Platonism



Augustine tells us that at the age of eighteen Cicero's (now
lost) protreptic dialogue *Hortensius* enflamed him for
philosophy (*Confessiones* 3.7), that as a young man he read
Aristotle's *Categories* (ib. 4.28) and that his
conversion was greatly furthered by his Neoplatonic readings (ib.
7.13) as well as by the letters of Paul (ib. 7.27; *Contra
Academicos* 2.5). He is more reticent about Manichean texts, of
which he must have known a great deal (van Oort 2012). From the 390s
onwards the Bible becomes decisive for his thought, in particular
Genesis, the Psalms and the Pauline and Johannine writings (even
though his exegesis remains philosophically impregnated), and his
mature doctrine of grace seems to have grown from a fresh reading of
Paul ca. 395 (see
 7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin).



The most lasting philosophical influence on Augustine is Neoplatonism.
He does not specify the authors and the exact subjects of the
"books of the Platonists" (*Confessiones* 7.13)
translated into Latin by the fourth century Christian Neoplatonist
Marius Victorinus (ib. 8.3) he read in 386. In the twentieth century
there was an ongoing and sometimes heated debate on whether to
privilege Plotinus (who is mentioned in *De beata vita* 4) or
Porphyry (who is named first in *De consensus evangelistarum*
1.23 ca. 400) as the main Neoplatonic influence on Augustine (for
summaries of the debate see O'Donnell 1992: II 421-424;
Kany 2007: 50-61). Today most scholars accept the compromise
that the "books of the Platonists" comprised some
treatises of Plotinus (e.g., *Enneads* I.6, I.2, V.1,
VI.4-5) and a selection from Porphyry (*Sententiae* and,
perhaps, *Symmikta Zetemata*). In any event, the importance of
this problem should not be overrated because Augustine seems to have
continued his Neoplatonic readings after 386. Around 400 he had
Porphyry's *Philosophy from the Oracles* at his disposal;
in *De civitate dei* 10 (ca. 417) he quotes from his *Letter
to Anebo* and from an otherwise unattested anagogic treatise
titled, in the translation used by Augustine, *De regressu
animae*, the influence of which some have suspected already in
Augustine's earliest works. For the philosophy of mind in the
second half of *De trinitate* he may have turned to Neoplatonic
texts on psychology. While the exact sources of Augustine's
Neoplatonism elude us, source criticism has been able to determine
some pervasive features of his thought that are doubtlessly
Neoplatonic in origin: the transcendence and immateriality of God; the
superiority of the unchangeable over the changeable (cf. Plato,
*Timaeus* 28d); the ontological hierarchy of God, soul and body
(*Letter* 18.2); the incorporeality and immortality of the
soul; the dichotomy of the intelligible and the sensible realms
(attributed to Plato in *Contra Academicos* 3.37); the
non-spatial omnipresence of the intelligible in the sensible
(*Confessiones* 1.2-4; *Letter* 137.4) and the
causal presence of God in his creation (*De immortalitate
animae* 14-15; *De Genesi ad litteram* 4.12.22); the
existence of intelligible (Platonic) Forms that are located in the
mind of God and work as paradigms of the sensible things (*De
diversis quaestionibus* 46); the inwardness of the intelligible
and the idea that we find God and Truth by turning inwards (*De
vera religione* 72); the doctrine of evil as lack or privation of
goodness; the understanding of the soul's love of God as a
quasi-erotic desire for true beauty (*Confessiones* 10.38; cf.
Rist 1994: 155). A distinctly Platonic element is the notion of
intellectual or spiritual ascent. Augustine thinks that by turning
inwards and upwards from bodies to soul (i.e., from knowledge of
objects to self-knowledge) and from the sensible to the intelligible
we will finally be able to transcend ourselves and get in touch with
the supreme being that is none other than God and Truth and that is
more internal to us than our innermost self (*Confessiones*
3.11; MacDonald 2014: 22-26; Augustine's biblical proof
text is Romans 1:20, quoted, e.g., ib. 7.16). Ascents of this kind are
ubiquitous in Augustine's work (e.g., *De libero
arbitrio* 2.7-39; *Confessiones* 10.8-38;
*De trinitate* 8-15). Whether the condensed versions in
the *Confessiones* (7.16; 7.23; 9.24-26) should be read
as reports of mystical experiences is difficult to determine (Cassin
2017). An early version of the Augustinian ascent is the
project--outlined in *De ordine* (2.24-52) but soon
abandoned and virtually retracted in *De doctrina
christiana*--of turning the mind to the intelligible and to
God by means of a cursus in the liberal (especially mathematical)
disciplines (Pollmann & Vessey 2005). It is remotely inspired by
Plato's *Republic* and may have had a Neoplatonic precedent
(Hadot 2005), though use of Varro's work on the disciplines
cannot be excluded (Shanzer 2005). As late as *De civitate dei*
8 (ca. 417) he grants, in a brief doxography organized according to
the traditional fields of physics, ethics and epistemology, that
Platonism and Christianity share some basic philosophical insights,
viz. that God is the first principle, that he is the supreme good and
that he is the criterion of knowledge (*De civitate dei*
8.5-8; cf. already *De vera religione* 3-7). In
spite of these important insights, Platonism cannot however lead to
salvation because it is unable or unwilling to accept the mediation of
Christ. It is, therefore, also philosophically defective (*De
civitate dei* 10.32).



Cicero is Augustine's main source for the Hellenistic
philosophies, notably Academic skepticism and Stoicism. As a part of
his cultural heritage, Augustine quotes him and the other Latin
classics as it suits his argumentative purposes (Hagendahl 1967). His
early ideal of the sage who is independent of all goods that one can
lose against one's will is inherited from Stoic ethics (*De
beata vita* 11; *De moribus* 1.5; Wetzel 1992:
42-55). Though the implication that the sage's virtue
guarantees his happiness already in this life is later rejected as
illusory (*De trinitate* 13.10; *De civitate dei* 19.4;
*Retractationes* 1.2; Wolterstorff 2012), the Christian martyr
can be styled in the manner of the Stoic sage whose happiness is
immune to torture (*Letter* 155.16; Tornau 2015: 278).
Augustine's Manichean past was constantly on his mind, as his
incessant polemics shows; its precise impact on his thought is however
difficult to assess (van Oort (ed.) 2012; Fuhrer 2013; BeDuhn 2010 and
2013). The claim of Julian of Aeclanum that with his doctrine of
predestination and grace Augustine had fallen back into Manichean
dualism has appealed to some modern critics, but Julian must ignore
essential features of Augustine's thought (e.g., the notion of
evil as *privatio boni*) to make his claim plausible
(Lamberigts 2001).


## 5. Theory of Knowledge


### 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty



Augustine's earliest surviving work is a dialogue on Academic
skepticism (*Contra Academicos* or *De Academicis*, 386;
Fuhrer 1997). He wrote it at the beginning of his career as a
Christian philosopher in order to save himself and his readers from
the "despair" that would have resulted if it could not be
proven that, against the skeptic challenge, truth is attainable and
knowledge and wisdom possible (cf. *Retractationes* 1.1.1). The
sense of despair must have been very real to him when, after having
broken with Manicheism but still being unable to see the truth of
Catholic Christianity, he decided to "withhold assent until some
certainty lighted up" (*Confessiones* 5.25). His
information about skepticism does not come from a contemporary skeptic
"school", which hardly existed, but from Cicero's
*Academica* and *Hortensius*. Much of the discussion in
*Contra Academicos* is thus devoted to the debate between
Hellenistic Stoics and skeptics about the so-called
"grasping" or kataleptic appearance, i.e., the problem
whether there are appearances about the truth of which one cannot be
mistaken because they are evident by themselves (Bermon 2001:
105-191). Unlike the original Stoics and Academics, Augustine
limits the discussion to sense impressions because he wants to present
Platonism as a solution to the skeptic problem and to point out a
source of true knowledge unavailable to the Hellenistic
materialists.



Unlike modern anti-skeptical lines of argumentation, Augustine's
refutation of skepticism does not aim at justifying our ordinary
practices and beliefs. To refute the Academic claim that, since the
wise person can never be sure whether she has grasped the truth, she
will consistently withhold assent in order not to succumb to empty
opinion, he thinks it sufficient to demonstrate the existence of some
kind of knowledge that is immune to skeptical doubt. His strategy
therefore consists in pointing out 1) the certainty of
self-referential knowledge (the wise person "knows
wisdom", *Contra Academicos* 3.6; the Academic skeptic
"knows" the Stoic criterion of truth, ib. 3.18-21);
2) the certainty of private or subjective knowledge (I am certain that
something *appears* white *to me* even if I am ignorant
whether it is really white, ib. 3.26); 3) the certainty of formal,
logical or mathematical, structures (ib. 3.24-29), knowledge of
which is possible independently of the mental state of the knower,
whereas the reliability of sense impressions differs according as we
are awake or dreaming, sane or insane. Modern critics have not been
very impressed by these arguments (e.g., Kirwan 1989: 15-34),
and an ancient skeptic would rightly have objected that being limited
to subjective or formal knowledge, they could not justify the
dogmatists' claim to objective knowledge of reality (cf. Sextus
Empiricus, *Outlines of Pyrrhonism* 1.13). Yet this is not
Augustine's point. To him it matters to have shown that even if
maximal concessions are made to skepticism concerning the
unknowability of the external world attainable by the senses, there
remains an internal area of cognition that allows for and even
guarantees certainty. This is why *Contra Academicos* ends with
a sketch of Platonic epistemology and ontology and with an
idiosyncratic if not wholly unparalleled reconstruction of the history
of the Academy according to which the Academics were in fact
crypto-Platonists who hid their insight into transcendent reality and
restricted themselves to skeptical arguments to combat the materialist
and sensualist schools dominant in Hellenistic times until authentic
Platonism emerged again with Plotinus (*Contra Academicos*
3.37-43; the story is still told in *Letter* 118 of 410,
where the renaissance of Platonism is however connected with the rise
of Christianity). The only realities that meet the Hellenistic
criterion of truth and guarantee absolute certainty by being
self-evident are the Platonic Forms (*Contra Academicos* 3.39;
cf. *De diversis quaestionibus* 9; Cary 2008a: 55-60).
The "objects" of knowledge that appear in
Augustine's anti-skeptical arguments thus either are the
Platonic Forms themselves or at least point out the way of accessing
them. This squares with the early Augustine's tendency to
interpret the Forms, or at any rate the most basic among them, as
"numbers", i.e., as the formal and normative structures
and standards that govern all reality and enable us to understand and
evaluate it (*De ordine* 2.14; 16; *De musica*
6.57-58; O'Daly 1987: 101-102; see also
 5.2 Illumination).
 Strictly speaking, Augustine's anti-skeptical arguments do not
justify the claim that knowledge can be derived from the senses;
having sensible and mutable objects, they cannot but yield opinion or,
at best, true belief. The later Augustine, in a more generous way of
speaking, widens the term "knowledge" (*scientia*,
to be distinguished from "wisdom", *sapientia*) so
as to include what we learn through sense perception and from reliable
witnesses (*De trinitate* 15.21; cf. *De civitate dei*
8.7; *Retractationes* 1.14.3; Siebert 2018; see
 5.3 Faith and Reason).



Augustine's most famous anti-skeptical argument is what is
commonly called his "cogito-like" argument because it is
similar to (and probably inspired) the Cogito of Descartes (Matthews
1992; Menn 1998; Fuchs 2010). Like Descartes', Augustine's
cogito establishes an area immune to skeptical doubt by inferring from
my awareness of my own existence the truth of the proposition "I
exist". Even if I were in error in uttering this proposition, it
would still be true that I, who am in error, exist (*De civitate
dei* 11.26: *si enim fallor, sum*; for the exact
reconstruction of this argument cf. Horn 1995: 81-87; Matthews
2005: 34-42). The argument does not yet appear in *Contra
Academicos* but is easily recognized as a development of the
argument from subjective knowledge (*Contra Academicos* 3.26);
Augustine considers it a valid refutation of skepticism from his
earliest (*De beata vita* 7) to his latest works (*De
trinitate* 15.21; for further attestations see *Soliloquia*
2.1; *De duabus animabus* 13; *De libero arbitrio* 2.7;
*De vera religione* 73; *Confessiones* 7.5; 13.12). The
scope of the argument in Augustine is both wider and narrower than in
Descartes. The Augustinian cogito lacks the systematic importance of
its Cartesian counterpart; there is no attempt to found a coherent and
comprehensive philosophy on it. On some occasions, however, it works
as a starting point for the Augustinian ascent to God (*De libero
arbitrio* 2.7, where the ascent leads to an understanding of God
as immutable truth and wisdom; for a condensed version, cf. *De
vera religione* 72-73, where Augustine even makes
supra-rational Truth the source and criterion of the truth of the
cogito itself). The most impressive example is the second half of *De
trinitate.* Here the attempt to reach a rational understanding of
the mystery of the Trinity by means of an inquiry into the structure
of the human mind starts with an analysis of the mind's
inalienable self-love and self-awareness (see
 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;
 Augustine does not, however, claim that the mind's certainty
about itself entails a similar certainty about the nature of God).
Augustine's cogito argument is not limited to epistemology but
can also be employed in an ethical context because it proves not only
my existence and my thinking (and, by implication, my being alive) but
also my loving and willing. I am as certain that I will as I am
certain that I exist and live, and my will is as undeniably mine as is
my existence and my life. Therefore, my volitions are imputable to me,
and it is I who am responsible for my choices (and not some evil
substance present in my soul but foreign to my own self, as, on
Augustine's interpretation, Manichean dualism would have it; cf.
*De duabus animabus* 13; *Confessiones* 7.5; *De
civitate dei* 5.10).


### 5.2 Illumination



Augustine's theory of knowledge--his so-called doctrine of
illumination--is a distinctly non-empiricist epistemology based
on a probably Neoplatonic reading of Plato's doctrine of
recollection (Burnyeat 1987; MacDonald 2012b; King 2014a:
147-152; Karfikova 2017). Like Plato and his
followers, Augustine thinks that true knowledge requires first-hand
acquaintance; second-hand information, e.g., from reliable testimony,
may yield true and even justifiable belief, but not knowledge in the
strict sense.
 In the case of sensible objects--which, strictly speaking, do
not admit of knowledge at all but only opinion--such
 first-hand acquaintance is possible through sense perception.
Cognition of intelligible objects, however, can be neither reached
empirically by means of abstraction nor transmitted to us
linguistically by a human teacher (see
 5.4 Language and Signs);
 rather, such cognition requires personal intellectual activity that
results in an intellectual insight, which we judge by a criterion we
find nowhere but in ourselves. The paradigm of this kind of cognition
are mathematical and logical truths and fundamental moral intuitions,
which we understand not because we believe a teacher or a book but
because we see them for ourselves (*De magistro* 40, cf. *De
libero arbitrio* 2.34). The condition of possibility and the
criterion of truth of this intellectual insight is none other than God
(a view attributed, with explicit approval, to the Platonists in
*De civitate dei* 8.7), who, in the manner of a Neoplatonic
immaterial principle, is both immanent and transcendent in relation to
our soul. Augustine mostly explains this Platonizing theory of a
priori knowledge by means of two striking images: the inner teacher
and illumination. The former is introduced in the dialogue *De
magistro* (ca. 390) and remains frequent especially in the sermons
(e.g., *In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem* 3.13;
Fuhrer 2018b); according to it, Christ is present in our souls and by
"presiding over" them like a teacher guarantees the
truthfulness of our understanding (*De magistro* 38-39,
cf. Ephesians 3:17 for the image and, for the idea that truth
"lives in the inner man", *De vera religione* 72).
The latter appears first in the *Soliloquia* (1.12-15)
and is ubiquitous in Augustine's writings (cf. esp. *De
trinitate* 12.24). It is ultimately derived from the Analogy of
the Sun in Plato's *Republic* (508a-509b; cf. Rist 1994:
78-79). In the *Soliloquia* Augustine says, in a manner
strongly reminiscent of Plato, that just as the sun is both visible
itself and illumines the objects of sight so as to enable the eye to
see them, God is intelligible himself and illumines the intelligible
objects (which are here identified with the objects of the liberal
disciplines and subordinated to God) so as to enable reason (the
"eye" of the soul) to activate its capacity for
intellection. The later version in *De trinitate* explicitly
presents divine illumination as an alternative to Platonic
recollection and situates it in the framework of a theory of creation.
Here Augustine says that the human mind has been created by God in
such a way as to be "connected" to intelligible reality
"from below" (*subiuncta*) and with a capacity
(*capacitas*) that enables it to "see" the
intelligibles in the light of intelligible truth, just as the eye is
by nature able to see colors in the light of the sun. Obviously,
"capacity" in this case does not mean pure potentiality
(as in the *tabula rasa* theory endorsed by Augustine's
interlocutor Euodius in *De quantitate animae* 34) but
comprises at least implicit or latent knowledge of moral and
epistemological standards. Both images, if properly read, should
preclude the misunderstanding that Augustine's gnoseology makes
human knowledge entirely dependent on divine agency, with the human
being becoming merely a passive recipient of revelation (cf. Gilson
1943: ch. 4 and Lagouanere 2012: 158-180 for the debates
about Augustinian illumination in medieval and modern philosophy).
Cognition does not simply result from the presence of Christ in our
soul but from our "consulting" the inner teacher, i.e.,
our testing propositions that claim to convey a truth about
intelligible reality (or even a general truth about sensible objects,
cf. *Letter* 13.3-4) against the inner standards we
possess thanks to the presence of Christ (*De magistro*
37-38; this way of "consulting" the inner truth is
repeatedly dramatized in the *Confessiones*, e.g., 11.10;
11.31; Cary 2008b: 100). And while every human being is
"illumined" by the divine light at least from behind so as
to be able to pass true judgments about right and wrong or good and
evil, in order to develop these natural intuitions to full knowledge
or wisdom and to be able actually to lead a virtuous life, we need to
convert to God, the "source" of the light (*De
trinitate* 14.21). Thus, while all human beings are by nature
capable of accessing intelligible truth, only those succeed in doing
so who have a sufficiently good will (*De magistro*
38)--presumably those who endorse Christian religion and live
accordingly. This strong voluntary element intimately connects
Augustine's epistemology with his ethics and, ultimately, with
his doctrine of grace (on the parallel structure of cognition and grace in Augustine
see Lorenz 1964). Like all human agency, striving for wisdom takes place
under the conditions of a fallen world and meets the difficulties and
hindrances humanity is subject to because of original sin.



In order to illustrate what he means by "seeing things by
ourselves" "in the light of truth", Augustine often
cites the example of the Socratic maieutic dialogue (*De
magistro* 40; cf. *De immortalitate animae* 6; *De
trinitate* 12.24), and in some passages of his early work he seems
to subscribe to the Platonic doctrine of recollection (familiar to him
from Cicero, *Tusculan Disputations* 1.57) in such a way as to
imply the preexistence of the soul (*Soliloquia* 2.35,
retracted in *Retractationes* 1.4.4; *De immortalitate
animae* 6; *De quantitate animae* 34, retracted in
*Retractationes* 1.8.2). It is difficult to tell whether the
early Augustine literally believed in recollection and preexistence
(Karfikova 2017; O'Daly 1987: 70-75;
199-207), not least because he was aware that some Neoplatonists
interpreted Platonic recollection as an actualization of our
ever-present but latent knowledge of the intelligible rather than as a
remembrance of our past acquaintance with it (*Letter* 7.2, cf.
Plotinus, *Enneads* IV.3.25.31-33; O'Daly 1976).
If, as in *De immortalitate animae* 6, recollection is taken to
prove the immortality of the soul (as it did in the *Phaedo*),
it is hard to see how preexistence should not be implied. In any
event, it is imprecise to say, as it is sometimes done, that Augustine
gave up the theory of recollection because he realized that
preexistence was at variance with Christian faith. In *De civitate
dei* (12.14 etc.) Augustine emphatically rejects
Platonic-Pythagorean metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls as
incompatible with eternal happiness and the economy of salvation, and
in *De trinitate* (12.24) the *Meno* version of the
recollection theory, which implies transmigration, is rejected in
favor of illumination. Yet it is a fallacy to claim that recollection
entails transmigration. The early Augustine may have believed in
preexistence (perhaps simply as a corollary of the immortality of the
soul), but there is no evidence that he believed in the transmigration
of souls; conversely, his rejection of transmigration did not prevent
even the late Augustine from considering preexistence--at least
theoretically--an option for the origin of the soul
(*Letter* 143.6 from 412; cf.
 6.1 Soul as a Created Being).


### 5.3 Faith and Reason



Whereas modern discussion tends to regard faith and reason as
alternative or even mutually exclusive ways to (religious) truth, in
Augustine's epistemological and exegetical program the two are
inseparable. He rejects the rationalism of the philosophers and,
especially, the Manicheans as an unwarranted over-confidence into the
abilities of human reason resulting from sinful pride and as an
arrogant neglect of the revelation of Christ in Scripture (*De
libero arbitrio* 3.56; 60; *Confessiones* 3.10-12).
Against the fideism he encountered in some Christian circles (cf.
*Letter* 119 from Consentius to Augustine) he insisted that it
was good and natural to employ the rational capacity we have been
created with to search for an understanding of the truths we accept
from the authority of the biblical revelation, even though a true
understanding of God will only be possible after this life when we see
him "face to face" (*Letter* 120.3-4). In
this epistemological and exegetical program, which since Anselm of
Canterbury has aptly been labeled as "faith seeking
understanding" (cf. *De trinitate* 15.2: *fides
quaerit, intellectus invenit*) or "understanding of
faith" (*intellectus fidei*), faith is prior to
understanding in time but posterior to it in importance and value
(*De ordine* 2.26; *De vera religione* 45;
*Letter* 120.3; van Fleteren 2010). The first step toward
perfection is to believe the words of Scripture; the second is to
realize that the words are outward signs of an internal and
intelligible reality and that they admonish us to turn to and to
"consult" inner truth so as to reach true understanding
and, accordingly, the good life (cf.
 5.2 Illumination;
 5.4 Language and Signs). 
Philosophical argument may be of help in this process;
yet as Augustine notes as early as in *Contra Academicos*
(3.43), it needs to be tied to the authority of Scripture and the
Creed to prevent the frailty of human reason from going astray (cf.
*Confessiones* 7.13). The Augustine of the earliest dialogues
seems to have entertained the elitist idea that those educated in the
liberal arts and capable of the Neoplatonic intellectual ascent may
actually outgrow authority and achieve a full understanding of the
divine already in this life (*De ordine* 2.26, but contrast ib.
2.45 on Monnica). In his later work, he abandons this hope and
emphasizes that during this life, inevitably characterized by sin and
weakness, every human being remains in need of the guidance of the
revealed authority of Christ (Cary 2008b: 109-120). Faith is
thus not just an epistemological but also an ethical category; it is
essential for the moral purification we need to undergo before we can
hope for even a glimpse of true understanding (*Soliloquia*
1.12; *De diversis quaestionibus* 48; *De trinitate*
4.24; Rist 2001). To a great extent, Augustine's defense of
faith as a valid epistemic category rests on a rehabilitation of true
belief against the philosophical (Platonic and Hellenistic) tradition.
Augustine neatly distinguishes "belief" (*fides*,
the word he also uses for religious faith), which entails the
believer's awareness that he does not know, from
"opinion" (*opinio*), defined by the philosophers
as the illusion of knowing what one in fact does not know (*De
utilitate credendi* 25; *Letter* 120.3). Without belief in
the former sense, we would have to admit that we are ignorant of our
own lineage (*Confessiones* 6.7) and of the objects of the
historical and empirical sciences, of which, as Augustine asserts in a
critique of Platonism, first-hand knowledge is rarely possible (*De
trinitate* 4.21). The belief that a person we have not seen was or
is just may trigger our fraternal love for him (*De trinitate*
8.7; Bouton-Touboulic 2012: 182-187; conversely, Augustine asks
those who are united with him in fraternal love to believe what he
tells them about his life, *Confessiones* 10.3). And obviously,
the crucial events of the history of salvation, Jesus' death on
the cross and his resurrection, cannot be known but only believed qua
historical events, even though qua signs they may lead to
understanding by prompting us to an intelligible truth (*De
trinitate* 13.2). Thus, while no doubt faith in revelation
precedes rational insight into its true meaning, the decision about
whose authority to believe and whom to accept as a reliable witness is
itself reasonable (*De vera religione* 45; *Letter*
120.3). Even so, belief may of course be deceived (*De
trinitate* 8.6). In ordinary life, this is inevitable and mostly
unproblematic. A more serious problem is the justification of belief
in Scripture, which, for Augustine, is the tradition and authority
(*auctoritas*, not *potestas*) of the Church (*Contra
epistulam fundamenti* 5.6; Rist 1994: 245).


### 5.4 Language and Signs



Augustine's philosophy of language is both indebted to the
Stoic-influenced Hellenistic and Roman theories of grammar and highly
innovative (Rist 1994: 23-40; King 2014b). He follows the Stoics
in distinguishing between the sound of a word, its meaning and the
thing it signifies (*De dialectica* 5; *De quantitate animae* 66; cf. Sextus Empiricus, *Adversus
mathematicos* 8.11-12 = 33B Long-Sedley), but he seems to
have been the first to interpret language as such as a system of signs
and to integrate it into a general semiotics (Fuhrer 2018a: 1696; Cary
2008b; Mayer 1969 and 1974). In his handbook of biblical exegesis and
Christian rhetoric, *De doctrina christiana* (1.2;
2.1-4), Augustine divides the world into "things"
and "signs" (i.e., things that, apart from being what they
are, signify other things) and furthermore distinguishes between
"natural" or involuntary signs (e.g., smoke signifying
fire) and voluntary or "given" signs (a distinction akin,
but not equivalent, to the older discussion about nature or convention
as the origin of language). Language is defined as a system of given
signs by means of which the speaker signifies either things or her
thoughts and emotions (*Enchiridion* 22). In the exegetical
framework of *De doctrina christiana*, the "thing"
signified by the verbal signs of Scripture is God, the Supreme Being.
Augustine therefore begins with a sketch of his theology and ethics
centered around the notions of love of God and neighbor before he sets out his biblical hermeneutics which,
again, posits love as the criterion of exegetical adequacy (Pollmann
1996; Williams 2001). The words of the Bible are external signs
designed to prompt us to the more inward phenomenon of love and,
ultimately, to God who is beyond all language and thought. This may be
generalized to the principle that external--verbal and
non-verbal--signs operate on a lower ontological level than the
inward and intelligible truth they attempt to signify and that they
are superseded in true knowledge which is knowledge not of signs but
of things. This holds not only for words, even the words of Scripture,
but also for the sacraments and for the Incarnation of Christ
(*Contra epistulam fundamenti* 36.41). Augustine's most
sustained discussion of language, the early dialogue *De
magistro*, asks how we learn things from words and relates
linguistic signification to the epistemology of illumination (Nawar
2015). After a long discussion of how verbal signs signify things or
states of mind and how they relate to other signs, it turns out,
rather surprisingly, that we do not learn things from signs at all
because in order to understand the meaning of a sign we already have
to be acquainted with the thing signified. This is ultimately a
version of Meno's paradox, and Augustine solves it by
introducing the metaphors of the inner teacher and of illumination,
i.e., by means of an internalist theory of learning recognizable as a
Neoplatonic interpretation of Platonic anamnesis (*De magistro*
38-40).
 This does not mean that words are useless. They inform us about
things that are inaccessible to direct acquaintance and thus generate
true belief; most importantly, they admonish us to
"consult" the inner teacher and to understand things by
ourselves (this, according to Augustine, is the whole point of the
Socratic dialogue). This goes even for the acquisition of language
itself: We understand the sign "bird-catching", not simply
by being shown a person engaged in that activity and being told that
he is signified by that name, but by observing him and figuring out
for ourselves what "bird-catching" means (ib. 32; on this
and Wittgenstein's criticism of what he took to be
Augustine's view of language acquisition, see Matthews 2005:
23-33). In the later books of *De trinitate* and in the
sermons on the Trinity, Augustine frequently refers to a phenomenon
called "inner word", which he uses to explain the relation
of the inner-Trinitarian Word or Logos from the Prologue of John (John
1:1) to Christ incarnate. Just as the spoken word signifies a concept
that we have formed within our mind and communicates it to others, so
Christ incarnate signifies the divine Logos and admonishes and assists
us to turn to it (cf. *De trinitate* 15.20; *De doctrina
christiana* 1.12; *Sermon* 119.7; 187.3). In *De
trinitate* Augustine expands this to a theory about how the inner
word or concept is formed (14.10; 15.25; cf. 15.43). The inner word is
generated when we actualize some latent or implicit knowledge that is
stored in our memory. It is not a sign, nor of linguistic nature
(Augustine insists that it is neither Latin nor Greek nor Hebrew), but
rather seems to be a kind of a-temporal intellectual insight that
transcends language (cf. *De catechizandis rudibus* 3).
Properly speaking, then, the theory of the inner word is not a
linguistic theory at all.


## 6. Anthropology: God and the Soul; Soul and Body


### 6.1 Soul as a Created Being



Like most ancient philosophers, Augustine thinks that the human being
is a compound of body and soul and that, within this compound, the
soul--conceived as both the life-giving element and the center of
consciousness, perception and thought--is, or ought to be, the
ruling part. The rational soul should control the sensual desires and
passions; it can become wise if it turns to God, who is at the same
time the Supreme Being and the Supreme Good.
 In his Manichean phase, he conceived of both God and the soul as
material entities, the soul being in fact a portion of God that had
fallen into the corporeal world where it remained a foreigner, even to
its own body (*De duabus animabus* 1; *Confessiones*
8.22). After his Platonist readings in Milan had provided him with the
adequate philosophical means to think about immaterial, non-spatial
reality (*Confessiones* 7.1-2; 7.16), he replaced this
view, which he later represents as a rather crude dualism, with an
ontological hierarchy in which the soul, which is mutable in time but
immutable in space, occupies a middle position between God, who is
totally unchangeable immaterial being (cf. MacDonald 2014), and
bodies, which are subject to temporal and spatial change
(*Letter* 18.2). The soul is of divine origin and even god-like
(*De quantitate animae* 2-3); it is not divine itself but
created by God (the talk about divinity of the soul in the Cassiciacum
dialogues seems to be a traditional Ciceronian element, cf. Cary 2000:
77-89; for a Plotinian interpretation see O'Connell 1968:
112-131). In *De quantitate animae*, Augustine broadly
argues that the "greatness" of the soul does not refer to
spatial extension but to its vivifying, perceptive, rational and
contemplative powers that enable it to move close to God and are
compatible with and even presuppose immateriality (esp. ib.
70-76; Brittain 2003). An early definition of soul as "a
rational substance fitted for rule over a body" (ib. 22) echoes
Platonic views (cf. the definition of the human being as "a
rational soul with a body" in *In Iohannis evangelium
tractatus* 19.15; O'Daly 1987: 54-60). Later on, when
the resurrection of the body becomes more important to him, Augustine
emphasizes--against Porphyry's alleged claim that in order
to be happy, the soul must free itself from anything
corporeal--that it is natural and even desirable for a soul to
govern a body (*De Genesi ad litteram* 12.35.68), but he
nevertheless remains convinced that soul is an incorporeal and
immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a
body. In the *Soliloquia* (2.24), following the tradition of
Plato and of Cicero's *Tusculan Disputations*, he
proposes a proof for the immortality of the soul which he expressly
introduces as an alternative to the final proof of the *Phaedo*
(*Soliloquia* 2.23, cf. *Phaedo* 102d-103c). The proof
is constructed from elements from Porphyry's *Isagoge*
and his *Commentary on Aristotle's Categories* (rather
elementary texts that Augustine would have encountered long before his
Platonic readings at Milan) and seems to be original with him (Tornau
2017). It says that since truth is both eternal and in the soul as its
subject, it follows that soul, the subject of truth, is eternal too.
This is fallacious, because if truth is eternal independently of the
soul it cannot be in the soul as in its subject (i.e., as a property),
and if it is a property of the soul, it cannot ensure its eternity. In
the incomplete draft of a third book of the *Soliloquia*
preserved under the title *De immortalitate animae*, Augustine
therefore modifies the proof and argues that soul is immortal because
of the inalienable causal presence of God (= Truth) in it. It turns
out however that even if this version of the proof is successful, it
only demonstrates the soul's eternal existence as a (rational)
soul but not its eternal wisdom (*De immortalitate animae* 19;
Zum Brunn 1969: 17-41 [1988: 9-34]), in the hope of which the
interlocutors had set out to prove the immortality of the soul in the
first place (*Soliloquia* 2.1). After *De immortalitate
animae*, Augustine never returned to his proof. But neither did he
disown it; as late as *De trinitate* (13.12), he endorses the
Platonic axiom that soul is by nature immortal and that its
immortality can, in principle, be proven by philosophical means. He
also sticks to his conviction that immortality is a necessary
condition of happiness but insists that it is not a sufficient
condition, given that immortality and misery are compatible (cf.
*De civitate dei* 9.15 on the misery of the wicked demons).
True happiness will only be realized in the afterlife as a gift of
God's grace, when, thanks to the resurrection of the body, not
just the soul but the human being as a whole will live forever.
Resurrection, however, is not susceptible of rational proof; it is a
promise of God that must be believed on Scriptural authority (*De
trinitate* ib.).



Together with an essentially Platonic notion of the soul, Augustine
inherits the classical problems of Platonic soul-body dualism. How can
soul fulfil its task of "governing" the body (cf. *De quantitate
animae* 22) if it is incorporeal itself? And how are
corporeal and psychic aspects related to each other in phenomena that
involve both body and soul, especially if, like passions and desires,
these are morally relevant? These problems are further complicated by
the Platonic axiom that incorporeal entities, being ontologically
prior to corporeal ones, cannot be causally affected by them.
Augustine's solution is indebted to Plotinus' strategy of
making the relation of the soul to the bodily affections an
essentially cognitive one (O'Daly 1987, 84-87;
Holscher 1986, ch. 2.2.1; Nash 1969, 39-59; Bermon 2001:
239-281). With Plotinus, he insists that sense perception is not
an affection which the soul passively undergoes (as Stoic materialism
would have it, where sensory perception was interpreted as a kind of
imprint in the soul) but its active awareness of affections undergone
by the body (*De quantitate animae* 41; 48; *De Genesi ad
litteram* 7.14.20; Plotinus, *Enneads* I.4.2.3-4;
Brittain 2002: 274-282). In *De quantitate animae*, the
framework of this theory is the general argument that the relation of
soul to body must be conceived of not in terms of space but of
"power" (see above). In *De musica* (6.11), this is
developed into the idea that sense perception is the soul's
awareness of modifications of its own formative and vivifying
activities that result from its reacting to the external impulses
undergone by the body. In addition to the usual five senses, Augustine
identifies a sensory faculty that relates the data of the senses to
each other and judges them aesthetically (but not morally; *De musica* 6.5; 19);
in *De libero arbitrio* (2.8-13) he calls this the
"inner sense" (on the Aristotelian background cf.
O'Daly 1987: 102-105).



In Neoplatonism it was disputed how soul, being immortal, immaterial
and ontologically superior to body, came to be incorporated
nevertheless. The basic options, present already in Plato's
dialogues, were either that the disembodied soul had
"fallen" into the corporeal world because of some error
(as in the *Phaedrus* myth) or that it had been sent into the
cosmos by God to impart life and order to it (as in the
*Timaeus*; for harmonizing Neoplatonic exegeses, see Plotinus,
*Enneads* IV.8, and Macrobius, *Commentary on Cicero's
Somnium Scipionis* 1.10-14). Augustine addresses the issue
in the horizon of his doctrine of creation and, in the period of the
Pelagian Controversy, of the debate about the transmission of original
sin (see
 9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).
 In *De libero arbitrio* (3.56-59), he distinguishes the
three options of creationism (God creates a new soul for every newborn
body), traducianism (the soul is transmitted from the parents to the
child like corporeal properties), and preexistence, which is
subdivided into the Platonic options of voluntary or god-sent descent.
After 412 all these options come to the fore again (*Letters*
143.5-11; 166; 190; and the treatise *De anima et eius
origine*). Augustine discards none of them officially except for
the notion, wrongly associated with Origenism, which was considered a
heresy at the time, that incorporation was a punishment for a sin
committed by the pre-existent soul (*De civitate dei* 11.23).
In practice, he narrows the debate down to the alternative between
creationism and traducianism, which appear to have been the only
options taken seriously by his Christian contemporaries. Augustine
refused to take a stand till the end of his life, probably because
neither option really suited his purposes (Rist 1994: 317-320;
O'Connell 1987; Mendelson 1998): Creationism made original sin
very difficult to explain; traducianism was functional in this
respect, but it was a materialist and even biologist theory that ran
counter to Augustine's Platonism and was further compromised
because it had been brought up by his African predecessor Tertullian
(d. c. 220 CE), a Stoicizing corporealist who had ended his life as a
heretic (Rist 1994: 123).


### 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God



Augustine deploys what we may call his philosophy of the mind most
fully in his great work on Nicene Trinitarian theology, *De
trinitate*. Having removed apparent Scriptural obstacles to the
equality and consubstantiality of the three divine persons (bks.
1-4) and having set out the grammar, as it were, of adequate
speaking about the Trinity by distinguishing absolute and relative
propositions about God and the three Persons (bks. 5-7; King
2012), he turns to an analysis of the human mind as an image of God
(bks. 8-15; Brachtendorf 2000; Ayres 2010; Bermon &
O'Daly (eds.) 2012). The basis for this move is, of course,
Genesis 1:26-27. Augustine follows a long-standing Jewish and
Patristic tradition, familiar to him from Ambrose, according to which
the biblical qualification of the human being as an image of God
referred not to the living body (a literalist reading vulnerable to
the Manichean charge of anthropomorphism, cf. *Confessiones*
6.4) but to what is specifically human, i.e., the "inner
man" (2 Corinthians 4:16, quoted, e.g., in *De trinitate*
11.1) or the mind (*mens*). Assuming, in a Platonist manner,
that "image" in this case does not merely mean an analogy
but a causal effect of the original that reflects the essential
features of the latter on a lower ontological level,
he scrutinizes the human mind for triadic structures that meet the
Nicene requirements of equality and consubstantiality and may thus
give a--however faint--understanding of the Triune God. The
general pattern of his argument is the Augustinian ascent from the
external to the internal and from the senses to God; but since human
reason is, whether by nature or due to its fallen state, hardly
capable of knowing God, Augustine this time is obliged to interrupt
and re-start the ascent several times. The final book shows that the
exercise of analyzing the human mind does have preparatory value for
our thinking about the Trinity but does not yield insight into the
divine by being simply transferred to it (*De trinitate*
15.10-11). The three elements Augustine discerns in all our
cognitive acts from sense perception to theoretical reason or
contemplation are: [1] an object that is either external to the mind
(as in sense perception) or internal to it, in which case it is an
image or a concept stored in our memory; [2] a cognitive faculty that
must be activated or "formed" by the object if cognition
is to come about; [3] a voluntary or intentional element that makes
the cognitive faculty turn to its object so as to be actually formed
by it. The last element ensures the active character of perception and
intellection
 but also gives weight to the idea that we do not cognize an object
unless we consciously direct our attention to it (MacDonald 2012b).
Though this triadic pattern is operative on all levels of human
cognition, Augustine contends that only the mind's intellectual
self-knowledge on the level of contemplative reason (its "memory
of itself, knowledge of itself and love of itself") qualifies as
an image of God because only here are the three elements as closely
related to each other as in the Nicene dogma and because they are as
inalienable as the mind's immediate presence to itself (*De
trinitate* 14.19). This idea is carefully prepared in Book 10,
which contains one of Augustine's most remarkable arguments for
the substantiality of the mind and its independence of the body
(Strozynski 2013; Brittain 2012a; Matthews 2005:
43-52; Bermon 2001, 357-404). Augustine begins by arguing
(in a manner reminiscent of his cogito-like argument; see
 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty)
 that the mind always already knows itself because it is always
present to and hence aware of itself. This pre-reflexive
self-awareness is presupposed by every act of conscious cognition. If
so, however, the Delphic command "Know thyself" cannot
mean that the mind is to become acquainted with itself as if it had
been unknown to itself before, but rather that it must become
conscious of what it knew about itself all along and distinguish it
from what it does not know about itself. As the mind in its fallen
state is deeply immersed in sensible reality, it tends to forget what
it really is and what it knows it is and confounds itself with the
things it attaches the greatest importance to, i.e., sensible objects
that give it pleasure. The result are materialist theories about the
soul, which thus derive from flawed morality (*De trinitate*
10.11-12). If it follows the Delphic command, however, the mind
will realize that it knows with certainty that it exists, thinks,
wills etc., whereas it can at best merely believe that it is air, fire
or brain (ib. 10.13).
 And as the substance or essence of the mind cannot be anything other
than what it knows with certainty about itself, it follows that
nothing material is essential to the mind and that its essence must be
sought in its mental acts (ib. 10.16). Full self-knowledge is reached,
then, when the mind's inalienable self-awareness (*se
nosse*, "to be acquainted with oneself") is actualized
to conscious "self-thinking" (*se cogitare*). How
this relates to the mind's pre-reflexive presence to itself is
not entirely clear (for problems of interpretation, see, e.g., Horn
2012; Brittain 2012b), but Augustine seems to think that not only the
mind's intellectual self-thinking but already its immediate
self-awareness is triadically structured and an image of the Triune
God (*De trinitate* 14.7-14). Again, the ethical side of
the theory should not be overlooked. As a strong voluntary element is
present in and necessary for an act of cognition, what objects
(imaginations, thoughts) we cognize is morally relevant and indicative
of our loves and desires. And while the triadic structure of the mind
is its very essence and hence inalienable, Augustine insists that the
mind is created in the image of God, not because it is capable of
self-knowledge, but because it has the potential to become wise, i.e.,
to remember, know and love God, its creator (ib. 14.21-22).


## 7. Ethics


### 7.1 Happiness



The basic structure of Augustine's ethics is that of ancient
eudaimonism (Holte 1962), but he defers happiness to the afterlife and
blames the ancient ethicists for their arrogant
conviction--resulting from their ignorance of the fallen
condition of humankind--that they could reach happiness in this
life by philosophical endeavor (*De civitate dei* 19.4;
Wolterstorff 2012; for a more optimistic view, cf. the early *De
ordine* 2.26). He takes it as axiomatic that happiness is the
ultimate goal pursued by all human beings (e.g., *De beata
vita* 10; *De civitate dei* 10.1; *De trinitate*
13.7, quoting Cicero's *Hortensius*; for an interesting
discussion of how the desire for happiness relates to our equally
natural desires for pleasure and for truth cf. *Confessiones*
10.29-34; Matthews 2005: 134-145; Menn 2014: 80-95).
Happiness or the good life is brought about by the possession of the
greatest good in nature that humans can attain and that one cannot
lose against one's will (e.g., *lib. arb.* 1.10-12;
especially in his early work Augustine shares the Stoics'
concern about the self-sufficiency and independence of the wise and
happy person, cf. Wetzel 1992, 42-55). This structure Augustine
inscribes into his Neoplatonically inspired three-tiered ontological
hierarchy (*Letter* 18.2)
 and concludes that the only thing able to fulfil the requirements for
the supreme good set by eudaimonism is the immutable God himself. The
Supreme Being is also the greatest good; the desire of created being
for happiness can only be satisfied by the creator. As Augustine puts
in concisely in *De beata vita* (11): "Happy is he who
has God". Alternative formulations are "enjoyment of
God" (*De civitate dei* 8.8; *De trinitate*
13.10), "contemplation of God" or "enjoyment of
truth" (*De libero arbitrio* 2.35). To "have"
God means in fact to know and, especially, to love God; Augustine
therefore interprets Psalm 72:28 ("For me it is good to cling to
God") as a biblical *telos* formula or definition of the
supreme and beatifying good (*De civitate dei* 10.18; Tornau
2015: 265-266). We are, in other words, happy, wise and virtuous
if we turn to or "convert" to God. If we turn away from
him and direct our attention and love to the bodies--which are
not per se bad, as in Manicheism, but an infinitely lesser good than
God--or to ourselves, who are a great good but still subordinate
to God, we become miserable, foolish and wicked (*Letter* 18.2;
*De libero arbitrio* 2.52-54; *In Iohannis evangelium
tractatus* 20.11). Virtue is "love that knows its
priorities" (*ordo amoris, De civitate dei* 15.22)
whereas vice or sin perverts the natural order. Just as after the Fall
all human beings are inevitably tainted by sin, we need to be purified
through faith in order to live well and to restore our ability to know
and love God (*De diversis quaestionibus* 68.3; Cary 2008a:
12-13). Augustine does not discard the intellectual element
inherited from the ancient (Socratic) ethical tradition, and his
notion of conversion is certainly inspired by Neoplatonist
"return" (*epistrophe*), but Augustine enhances the
ethical relevance of conversion and aversion by emphasizing their
voluntary character (cf. already *De immortalitate animae*
11-12).
 The element of will or love is also crucial to the distinction between
"enjoyment" (*frui*) and "use"
(*uti*) that is first fully developed in *De doctrina
christiana*, bk. 1 (c. 396) and remains basic for his ethical
thought. Following the ancient insight that we pursue some goods for
their own sake and others for the sake of other and greater goods,
Augustine states that to "enjoy" a thing means to cling to
it with love for its own sake whereas to "use" it means to
love it for the sake of another thing which we want to enjoy. We love
absolutely only what we enjoy, whereas our love for things we use is
relative and even instrumental (*De doctrina christiana* 1.4).
The only proper object of enjoyment is God (cf. *De civitate
dei* 8.8 where the same view is attributed to the Platonists).
Wickedness and confusion of the moral order results from a reversal of
use and enjoyment, when we want to enjoy what we ought to use (all
created things, e.g., wealth, bodies or ourselves) and to use what we
ought to enjoy (this probably refers to the "carnal"
understanding of religion of which Augustine often accuses the Jews).
An obvious problem of this system is the categorization of the
biblically prescribed love of the neighbor. Are we to enjoy our
neighbor or to use her? Whereas natural moral intuition suggests the
former, Augustine's systematic seems to require the latter. The
problem is inherited from ancient eudaimonism, where it takes some
philosophical effort to reconcile the intuition that concern for
others is morally relevant with the assumption that ethics is
primarily about the virtue and happiness of the individual. Augustine
is aware of the problem and gives a differentiated answer. In *De
doctrina christiana* (1.20-21) he somewhat tentatively
suggests that to love our neighbor means to use him, not because he is
merely instrumental to our happiness but because we are enjoined to
love him as ourselves and because we love ourselves rightly only if we
refer our self-love to our desire to enjoy God. Love of the neighbor
thus means to desire his true happiness in the same way as we desire
our own. In substance, this remains Augustine's view also in his
later work (cf., e.g., *In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus
decem* 1.9), but he then prefers to avoid the counter-intuitive
and potentially misleading talk about "using" fellow
humans and replaces it by a description of fraternal love as
"mutual enjoyment in God" (e.g., *De trinitate*
9.13; cf. already *De doctrina christiana* 1.35; 3.16; Rist
1994: 159-168; O'Donovan 1980: 32-36;
112-136). "In God" is presumably added to prevent
the misunderstanding that we are to enjoy the neighbor "in
herself" or "in ourselves" without reference to God.
This would mean that we expect our true happiness from her, which no
human can give; the result of this misdirection would be extreme
misery in the case of the neighbor's loss (cf.
*Confessiones* 4.9-11 on Augustine's excessive
grief after the death of his friend; Nawar 2014).


### 7.2 Virtue



In principle Augustine follows the view of the ancient eudaimonists
that virtue is sufficient or at least relevant for happiness. There
are however several important modifications. (1) The entire structure
is made dependent on God's prevenient grace. True virtue
guarantees true happiness, but there is no true virtue that is not a
gift of grace.
 (2) Augustine accepts Cicero's definition of virtue as the art
of "living well" but emphatically rejects his equation of
living well and living happily, i.e., the Stoicizing claim that a
virtuous disposition is equivalent to happiness (*De libero
arbitrio* 2.50; *De civitate dei* 4.21; *De moribus*
1.10; contrast Cicero, *Tusculan Disputations* 5.53). Our
postlapsarian life on earth is inevitably the locus of sin and
punishment, and even the saints are unable to overcome the permanent
inner conflict between "the spirit" and "the
flesh", i.e., between good and evil volitions or rational and
irrational desires in this life (*De civitate dei* 19.4,
quoting Galatians 5:17). The perfect inner tranquility virtue strives
for will only be achieved in the afterlife. (3) Augustine replaces the
ancient definition of virtue as "right reason" (as in
Stoicism) or "activity in accordance with reason" (as in
the Aristotelian tradition) with a definition of virtue as love of God
or, in later texts, as love of God and neighbor. Virtue is an inner
disposition or motivational habit that enables us to perform every
action we perform out of right love.
 There are several catalogues of the traditional four cardinal virtues
prudence, justice, courage and temperance that redefine these as
varieties of the love of God either in this life or in the eschaton
(*De moribus* 1.25; *Letter* 155.12; cf. *Letter*
155.16 for the cardinal virtues as varieties of love of the neighbor;
*De libero arbitrio* 1.27 for descriptions of the virtues in
terms of good will). His briefest definition of virtue is
"ordered love" (*De civitate dei* 15.22). This does
not mean that virtue becomes non-rational (for Augustine love and will
are essential features of the rational mind; see
 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God),
 but it does mean that it becomes essentially intentional. The
criterion of true virtue is that it is oriented toward God. Even if
Augustine occasionally talks as if the four cardinal virtues could be
added to the Pauline or theological virtues of love, faith and hope to
make a sum of seven (*Letter* 171A.2), they are best taken as a
subdivision of love, the only one of the Pauline virtues that persists
in the eschaton (*Soliloquia* 1.14).



These modifications have several interesting consequences. Even though
Augustine postpones the happiness that is the reward of virtue to the
afterlife, he does not make virtue a means to an end in the sense that
virtue becomes superfluous when happiness is reached. To the contrary,
he insists that virtue will persist in the eschaton where it will be
transformed into eternal unimpeded fruition of God and of the neighbor
in God. Then it will indeed be its own reward and identical with
happiness (*Letter* 155.2; 12). Both eschatological virtue and
virtue in this life are thus love of God; they only differ in that the
latter is subject to hindrances and temptation. For this reason, those
who have true love of God--e.g., Christian martyrs--are
happy already in this life, at least in hope (e.g.,
*Confessiones* 10.29; Tornau 2015). Augustine's
description of eschatological and non-eschatological virtues
(*Letter* 155) is partly modelled on the Neoplatonic doctrine
of the scale of virtues with its ascending hierarchy of social or
civic, purificatory and contemplative virtues (Tornau 2013; Dodaro
2004a: 206-212; Dodaro 2004b). When analyzing virtue in this
life, Augustine takes up the Stoic distinction, familiar to him from
Cicero (*De officiis* 1.7-8), between a virtue's
final end (*finis*) and its appropriate action
(*officium*; cf., e.g., *Contra Iulianum* 4.21; *De
civitate dei* 10.18). The appropriate action that characterizes
virtue in this life but is no longer needed in eternal bliss is to
subdue the lower parts of soul to reason and to resist the temptations
that emerge from the permanent conflict between good and bad volitions
(as it were, a permanent "akratic" state; see
 7.4 Will and Freedom)
 that results from our fallen condition (*De civitate dei*
19.4). As the examples of the best philosophers and the heroes of
Rome's glorious past teach, whom Augustine regularly accuses of
love of glory, these actions may easily spring from other motivations
than the true love of God. Augustine therefore distinguishes between
true (i.e., Christian) virtue that is motivated by love of God and
"virtue as such" (*virtus ipsa: De civitate dei*
5.19) that performs the same appropriate actions but is, in the last
resort, guided by self-love or pride (ib. 5.12; 19.25). Among other
things, this distinction underpins his solution of the so-called
problem of pagan virtue (Harding 2008; Tornau 2006b; Dodaro 2004a: 27-71; Rist 1994:
168-173) because it permits ascribing virtue in a meaningful
sense to pagan and pre-Christian paradigms of virtue like Socrates
without having to admit that they were eligible for salvation. If a
"teleological" perspective on virtue is adopted that
exclusively focuses on ends, the virtues of the pagan must be judged
vices rather than virtues and will be punished accordingly (*De
civitate dei* 19.25, the passage from which the non-Augustinian
phrase that pagan virtues are "splendid vices" seems to be
derived; see Irwin 1999). An "operative" perspective
however reveals that as far as appropriate actions are concerned,
virtuous non-Christians differ from the foolish and wicked but are
indistinguishable from virtuous Christians. From this point of view,
Socrates is closer to Paul than to Nero, even though his virtue will
not bring him happiness, i.e., eternal bliss. That he envisages a
perspective on virtue that abstracts from the causal nexus of virtue
and happiness is perhaps Augustine's most significant departure
from ancient eudaimonism.


### 7.3 Love



Love is a crucial and overarching notion in Augustine's ethics.
It is closely related to virtue
 and often used synonymously with will (e.g., *De trinitate*
15.38; in the cogito-like arguments, love and will are
interchangeable, cf. *De civitate dei* 11.27 with
*Confessiones* 13.12) or intention (*intentio*).
Augustine's basic text is, of course, the biblical command to
love God and neighbor (Matthew 22.37; 39), which he is however
prepared, throughout his life, to interpret in terms of Platonic
erotic love (Rist 1994: 148-202). As in the *Symposium*
and in Plotinus (*Enneads* I.6), love is a force in our souls
that attracts us to the true beauty we find nowhere else but in and
above ourselves; it drives us to ascend from the sensible to the
intelligible world and to the cognition and contemplation of God
(*Confessiones* 10.8-38, esp. 38). Even Christian
fraternal love can be described, in a manner reminiscent of the
*Phaedrus*, as a kind of seduction through another's real
or assumed righteousness (*De trinitate* 9.11). In a more
general way, love means the overall direction of our will (positively)
toward God or (negatively) toward ourselves or corporeal creature
(*De civitate dei* 14.7; Byers 2013: 88-99;
217-231). The former is called love in a good sense
(*caritas*), the latter cupidity or concupiscence
(*cupiditas*), i.e., misdirected and sinful love (*De
doctrina christiana* 3.16). The root of sin is excessive self-love
that wants to put the self in the position of God and is equivalent
with pride (*De civitate dei* 14.28). It must be distinguished
from the legitimate self-love that is part of the biblical commandment
and strives for true happiness by subordinating the self to God
(O'Donovan 1980). In his earlier work, Augustine has some
difficulties incorporating love of neighbor into the Platonic and
eudaimonist framework of his thinking (*De doctrina christiana*
1.20-21, see
 7.1 Happiness).
 After 400, in the context of his reflections on the Trinity and his
exegesis of the First Epistle of John (esp. 1 John 4:8; 16, "God
is love"), he finds the solution that love is by its very nature
self-reflexive. In loving our neighbors, we of necessity love that
love which enables us to do so itself, which is none other than God;
love of God and love of neighbor are, accordingly, co-extensive and,
ultimately, identical (*De trinitate* 8.12; *In epistulam
Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem* 9.10). Right and perverse
love or intention--charity or concupiscence--thus becomes
the predominant and even the single criterion of moral evaluation;
Augustine's ethics may in this sense be labeled intentionalist
(cf. Mann 1999 on Augustine's "inner-life ethics").
He keenly insists that each and every action, even if it is externally
good and impressive, can be motivated either by a good or an evil
intention, by right or perverse love, by charity or pride. This goes
for the actions prescribed by the Sermon of the Mount and even for
martyrdom (*In epistulam Iohannis tractatus decem* 8.9, partly
relying on 1 Corinthians 13:3). It is therefore impossible to give
casuistic rules for external moral behavior. The only thing possible
is the general recommendation to "Love and do what you
will" (ib. 7.8), i.e., to take care that the inner disposition
or intention behind one's actions is love of God and neighbor
and not self-love or pride. It is important not to misunderstand this
as moral subjectivism, which Augustine's ontological and ethical
assumptions exclude. He never excuses evil deeds done "with the
best intentions" or with a subjectively pure conscience, and he
does allow for actions that are always condemnable because they cannot
possibly result from love, such as heresy. In a sense, his ideal agent
is a successor of the Stoic and Neoplatonic sage, who always acts out
of inner virtue or perfect rationality (the latter Augustine replaces
with true love) but adapts his outward actions to the external
circumstances (cf. Sextus Empiricus, *Adversus Mathematicos*
11.200-201 = 59 G Long-Sedley; Diogenes Laertius 7.121;
Porphyry, *Sententiae* 32). Augustine's intentionalism
has, however, the ambivalent implication that, since love and will
inevitably belong to the privacy of the mind, the inner motives for a
person's external agency are unknowable to anyone except the
agent herself and God. On the one hand, this limits the authority of
other people--including those endowed with worldly power or an
ecclesiastical office--to pass moral judgments. Augustine
repeatedly recommends withholding judgment so as to preserve humility
(*De civitate dei* 1.26; *Sermon* 30.3-4). On the
other hand, Augustine makes our inner motivational and moral life
opaque even to ourselves and fully transparent only to God
(*Confessiones* 10.7; *In Iohannis evangelium tractatus*
32.5). We can never be fully sure about the purity of our intentions,
and even if we were, we could not be sure that we will persist in
them. All human beings are therefore called to constantly scrutinize
the moral status of their inner selves in a prayerful dialogue with
God (as it is dramatized in the *Confessiones*). Such
self-scrutiny may well be self-tormenting; the obsession of Western
Christianity with inner latent guilt here has its Augustinian roots.
The public staging of Augustine's confession before God in the
*Confessiones* may, among many other things, represent an
attempt to remedy the loneliness of Christian self-scrutiny (cf.
*Confessiones* 10.1-7).



Augustine's intentionalism also provides him with arguments in
favor of religious coercion. As the objective of right fraternal love
is not the neighbor's temporal well-being but his eternal
happiness or salvation, we must not passively tolerate our
fellow-humans' sins but should actively correct them if we can;
otherwise, our motivation would be inertia rather than love (*In
epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem* 7.11; cf.
*Letter* 151.11; *Ad Simplicianum* 1.2.18). Catholic
bishops are therefore obliged to compel heretics and schismatics to
re-enter the Catholic church even forcibly, just as a father beats his
children when he sees them playing with snakes or as we bind a madman
who otherwise would fling himself down a precipice (*Letter*
93.8; 185.7; and *Letter* 93.1-10 in general). Obviously,
this is a paternalistic argument that presupposes superior insight in
those who legitimately wield coercive power. While this may be
acceptable in the case of the Church, which according to
Augustine's ecclesiology is the body of Christ and the
embodiment of fraternal love, it turns out to be problematic when it
is transferred to secular rulers (Augustine rarely does this, but cf.
*Letter* 138.14-15). And as even the Church in this world
is a mixed body of sinners and saints (see
 8. History and Political Philosophy),
 it may be asked how individual bishops can be sure of their good
intentions when they use religious force (Rist 1994: 242-245).
Augustine does not address this problem, presumably because most of
his relevant texts are propagandistic defenses of coercion against the
Donatists.


### 7.4 Will and Freedom



Though other Latin philosophers, especially Seneca, had made use of
the concept of will (*voluntas*) before Augustine, it has a
much wider application in his ethics and moral psychology than in any
predecessor and covers a broader range of phenomena than either
Aristotelian *boulesis* (roughly, rational choice) or Stoic
*prohairesis* (roughly, the fundamental decision to lead a good
life). Augustine comes closer than any earlier philosopher to positing
will as a faculty of choice that is reducible neither to reason nor to
non-rational desire. It has therefore been claimed that Augustine
"discovered" the will (Dihle 1982: ch. 6; Kahn 1988;
contrast Frede 2011: 153-174 who, mainly on the basis of *De
libero arbitrio*, emphasizes Augustine's indebtedness to
Stoicism). Augustine admits both first-order and second-order
volitions, the latter being acts of the *liberum voluntatis
arbitrium*, the ability to choose between conflicting first-order
volitions (Stump 2001; Horn 1996; den Bok 1994). Like desires,
first-order volitions are intentional or object-directed and operate
on all levels of the soul. Like memory and thought, will is a
constitutive element of the mind (see
 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God).
 It is closely related to love and, accordingly, the locus of moral
evaluation. We act well or badly if and only if our actions spring
from a good or evil will, which is equivalent to saying that they are
motivated by right (i.e., God-directed) or perverse (i.e.,
self-directed) love (*De civitate dei* 14.7).
 With this basic idea in view, Augustine defends the passions or
emotions against their Stoic condemnation as malfunctions of rational
judgment by redefining them more neutrally as volitions
(*voluntates*) that may be good or bad depending on their
intentional objects (*De civitate dei* 9.4-5; 14.9;
Wetzel 1992: 98-111; Byers 2012b). The mechanics of the will in
Augustine's moral psychology is strongly indebted to the Stoic
theory of assent, which it however modifies in at least one respect.
As in Stoicism, the will to act is triggered by an impression
generated by an external object (*visum*). To
this the mind responds with an appetitive motion that urges us to
pursue or to avoid the object (e.g., delight or fear). But only when
we give our inner consent to this impulse or withhold it, does a will
emerge that, circumstances permitting, results in a corresponding
action. The will is the proper locus of our moral responsibility
because it is neither in our power whether an object presents itself
to our senses or intellect nor whether we take delight in it (*De
libero arbitrio* 3.74; *Ad Simplicianum* 1.2.21), and our
attempts to act externally may succeed or fail for reasons beyond our
control. The only element that is in our power is our will or inner
consent, for which we are therefore fully responsible. Thus, a person
who has consented to adultery is guilty even if his attempt actually
to commit it is unsuccessful, and a victim of rape who does not
consent to the deed keeps her will free of sin even if she feels
physical pleasure (*De civitate dei* 1.16-28). Augustine
therefore defines sin as "the will to keep or pursue something
unjustly" (*De duabus animabus* 15). The second stage in
the above structure, the involuntary appetitive motion of the soul, is
reminiscent of the Stoic "first motions", but it also
corresponds to the "impulse", which in Stoicism does not
precede consent but follows it and immediately results in action.
Temptations of this kind are, in Augustine, not personal sins but due to
original sin, and they haunt even the saints. Our will must be freed
by divine grace to resist them (*Contra Iulianum* 6.70; see, on
this theory and its Stoic and Platonic background, Byers 2013:
100-150; J. Muller 2009: 157-161; Sorabji 2000:
372-384; Rist 1994: 176-177).



Augustine's thinking about free will (*liberum arbitrium*
or *liberum voluntatis arbitrium*) undergoes some development
during his career. In the 390s, opposing the dualistic fatalism of the
Manicheans, he uses the cogito-like argument (see
 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty)
 to demonstrate that we are responsible for our volitions because we
are as certain that we will as we are certain that we exist and think
(*De duabus animabus* 13; *De libero arbitrio* 3.3;
*Confessiones* 7.5; S. Harrison 1999). A contemporaneous
definition of will as a movement of soul toward some object of desire
emphasizes the absence of external constraint, and the ensuing
definition of sin as an unjust volition (see above) seems to endorse
the principle of alternative possibilities (*De duabus
animabus* 14-15). In *De libero arbitrio*, free will
appears as the condition of possibility of moral goodness and hence as
a great good itself; but as it is not an absolute good (which is God
alone) but only an intermediate one, it is liable to misuse and,
hence, also the source of moral evil (*De libero arbitrio*
2.47-53). In his early exegesis of Paul's chapter on
divine election (Romans 9), Augustine is keen to establish that Paul
did not abolish free will (*Expositio quarundam propositionum ex
epistula apostoli ad Romanos* 13-18). With all this,
Augustine is basically in harmony with the traditional view of early
Christian theology and exegesis, which is still adopted in the 420s by
Julian of Aeclanum when he blames Augustine for having fallen back
into Manichean fatalism and quotes his early definitions against him
(Julian, *Ad Florum*, in *Contra Iulianum opus
imperfectum* 1.44-47). Things change with *Ad
Simplicianum* 1.2 and the *Confessiones*. By c. 400 CE,
Augustine had come to the conclusion that our ability to make choices
was seriously impaired by the fallen condition of humankind and that
it made little sense to talk about free will without reference to
grace. The optimistic-sounding claim in the first book of *De
libero arbitrio* (1.25-26; 29) that it is in our power to be
good as soon as we choose to be good because "nothing is as
completely in our will as will itself" was probably never the
whole story; already in book 3 of the same work Augustine says that
the cognitive and motivational deficiencies caused by Adam's sin
("ignorance and difficulty", ib. 3.52; S. Harrison 2006:
112-130) seriously compromise our natural ability to choose the
good, and in his later, especially anti-Pelagian work he radicalizes
this to the idea that original sin makes us unable to completely
subdue our sinful volitions as long as we live, so that we live in a
permanent state of "akrasia" or weakness of will (*De
natura et gratia* 61-67; *De civitate dei* 19.4;
*De nuptiis et concupiscentia* 1.35). But he never questions
the principle that we have been created with the natural ability to
freely and voluntarily choose the good, nor does he ever deny the
applicability of the cogito argument to the will (cf. *De civitate
dei* 5.10) or doubt that our volitions are imputable to us. What
grace does is to restore our natural freedom; it does not compel us to
act against our will. What this means is best illustrated by the
narrative of *Confessiones* 8 (for particularly lucid
interpretations, see Wetzel 1992: 126-138; J. Muller 2009:
323-335). Immediately before his conversion Augustine suffers
from a "divided will", feeling torn apart between the will
to lead an ascetic Christian life and the will to continue his
previous, sexually active life. Though he identifies with the former,
better will rather than with the latter that actually torments him, he
is unable to opt for it because of his bad habits, which he once
acquired voluntarily but which have by now transformed into a kind of
addictive necessity (ib. 8.10-12). Earlier philosophical
traditions would have interpreted this "akratic" state as
a conflict of reason and desire, and Manichean dualism would have
attributed Augustine's bad will to an evil substance present in
but foreign to the soul, but Augustine insists that both wills were
indeed his own. Using medical metaphors reminiscent of Hellenistic
moral philosophy, he argues that his will lacked the power of free
choice because the disease of being divided between conflicting
volitions had weakened it (ib. 8.19; 21). His ability to choose is
only restored when, in the garden scene at the end of the book, his
will is reintegrated and healed by God's call, which immediately
frees him to opt for the ascetic life (ib. 8.29-30). Before,
when he had just continued his habitual way of life, this had been a
non-choice rather than a choice, even though, as Augustine insists, he
had done so voluntarily. In substance, this remained his line of
defense when, in the Pelagian controversy, he was confronted with the
charge that his doctrine of grace abolished free will (*De spiritu
et littera* 52-60; cf. *De correptione et gratia* 6).
While the Pelagians thought that the principle of alternative
possibilities was indispensable for human responsibility and divine
justice, Augustine accepts that principle only for the first humans in
paradise (*Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum* 1.47; 5.28;
5.40-42 etc.). In a way, by choosing wrongly Adam and Eve have
abandoned free will both for themselves and for all humankind.
Original sin transformed our initial ability not to sin into an
inability not to sin; grace can restore ability not to sin in this
life and will transform it into inability to sin in the next (*De
civitate dei* 22.30; *De correptione et gratia* 33).


### 7.5 Will and Evil



Augustine's notion of will is closely related to his thinking on
evil. The problem of the origin of evil (*unde malum*), he
claims, had haunted him from his youth (*Confessiones* 7.7). At
first, he accepted the dualist solution of the Manicheans, which freed
God from the responsibility for evil but compromised his omnipotence
(ib. 3.12; 7.3). After having encountered the books of the Platonists,
Augustine rejected the existence of an evil substance and endorsed the
Neoplatonic view (argued e.g., in Plotinus, *Enneads* I.8) that
evil is in fact unsubstantial and a privation or corruption of
goodness. In his mature view, which was largely developed during his
anti-Manichean polemics, everything that has being is good insofar as
it has been created by God. There are of course different degrees of
goodness as well as of being (*Letter* 18.2),
 but everything that is real is good "in its degree", and
the hierarchical order of reality is itself a good creation of God
(Bouton-Touboulic 2004). Augustine therefore rejects Plotinus'
view that prime matter is equivalent to prime evil, because the
formlessness of matter is not pure negativity but a positive, and
hence divinely created, capacity to receive forms
(*Confessiones* 12.6; see
 10. Creation and Time).
 A created being can be said to be evil if and only if it falls short
of its natural goodness by being corrupted or vitiated; strictly
speaking, only corruption itself is evil, whereas the nature or
substance or essence (for the equivalence of the terms see *De
moribus* 2.2) of the thing itself remains good
(*Confessiones* 7.18; *Contra epistulam fundamenti*
35.39 etc.; for a systematic account, *De natura boni*
1-23; Schafer 2002: 219-239). While this theory can
explain physical evil relatively easily either as a necessary feature
of hierarchically ordered (corporeal) reality (*De ordine*
2.51), as a just punishment of sin, or as part of God's pedagogy
of salvation (*Letter* 138.14), it leaves open the question of
moral evil or sin itself. Augustine answers by equating moral evil
with evil will
 and claims that the seemingly natural question of what causes evil
will is unanswerable. His most sustained argument to this effect is
found in his explanation of the fall of the devil and the evil angels,
a case that, being the very first occurrence of evil in the created
world, allows him to analyze the problem in its most abstract terms
(*De civitate dei* 12.1-9; cf. already *De libero
arbitrio* 3.37-49; Schafer 2002: 242-300;
MacDonald 1999). The cause can neither be a substance (which, qua
substance, is good and unable to cause anything evil) nor a will
(which would in turn have to be an evil will in need of explanation).
Therefore, an evil will has no "efficient" but only a
"deficient" cause, which is none other than the
will's spontaneous defection from God. The fact that evil agents
are created from nothing and hence are not, unlike God, intrinsically
unable to sin is a necessary condition of evil but not a sufficient
one (after all the good angels successfully kept their good will). In
this context Augustine, in an interesting thought experiment, imagines
two persons of equal intellectual and emotional disposition of whom
one gives in to a temptation while the other resists it; from this he
concludes that the difference must be due to a free, spontaneous and
irreducible choice of the will (*De civitate dei* 12.6). Here
at least Augustine virtually posits the will as an independent mental
faculty.


### 7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin



From the Middle Ages onwards, Augustine's theology of grace has
been regarded as the heart of his Christian teaching, and with good
reason. As he points out himself, his conviction that human beings in
their present condition are unable to do or even to will the good by
their own efforts is his most fundamental disagreement with ancient,
especially Stoic, virtue ethics (*De civitate dei* 19.4;
Wolterstorff 2012). After and because of the disobedience of Adam and
Eve, we have lost our natural ability of self-determination, which can
only be repaired and restored by the divine grace that has manifested
itself in the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ and works inwardly
to free our will from its enslavement to sin.
 Confession of sins and humility are, therefore, basic Christian
virtues and attitudes; the philosophers' confidence in their own
virtue that prevents them from accepting the grace of Christ is an
example of the sinful pride that puts the self in the place of God and
was at the core of the evil angels' primal sin (*De civitate
dei* 10.29).



The main inspiration for Augustine's doctrine of grace is, of
course, Paul (even though remarks on human weakness and divine help
are not absent from the ancient philosophical tradition and especially
from Platonism which had had a strong religious side from the
beginning; Augustine claims that with such utterances the Platonists
inadvertently "confess" grace, cf. *De civitate
dei* 10.29; 22.22). The radical view that the gifts of grace
include not only external good works and the internal volitional
disposition that allows us to perform them but even the very first
beginnings of faith--in later technical terminology: that grace
is not "cooperative" but radically
"prevenient"--is however his own, and it took several
years to take shape in his thought. There is some debate on the stages
of this development (for diverging reconstructions, see
Karfikova 2012; Cary 2008a; Drecoll 2004-2010;
Drecoll 1999; emphasis on the shifts in Augustine's thinking:
Lettieri 2001; Flasch 1995; emphasis on continuity: C. Harrison 2006),
but it is generally agreed that Augustine's doctrine of grace
reached its mature form c. 395-397 with *Ad Simplicianum*
1.2, after several years of intense reading and exegesis of Paul, and
gained higher profile during the Pelagian controversy after 412.
Augustine emphasizes the necessity of grace for both intellectual
understanding and moral purification already in his earliest works
(cf. esp. *Soliloquia* 1.2-6), but seems to have been
concerned to leave room for human initiative at least with respect to
faith and will (which would be in line with his concern, prominent
throughout the 390s, to safeguard human responsibility against
Manichean fatalism). In his early exegesis of Paul, he explains
God's apparently gratuitous election of Jacob and rejection of
Esau (Romans 9:10-13) with God's foreknowledge of
Jacob's faith and Esau's infidelity (*De diversis
quaestionibus* 68.5; *Expositio quarundam propositionum ex
epistula apostoli ad Romanos* 60), a "synergistic"
reading that relies on the assumption that salvation results from the
cooperation of divine grace and human initiative and that had been
standard in early Christianity since Origen. This explanation is
explicitly rejected in *Ad Simplicianum* (1.2.5-6; 8;
11). In this pivotal text, Augustine, true to his program of
"faith seeking understanding",
 attempts an exegesis of Romans 9:9-29 that satisfies the
philosophical requirements of God's justice and benevolence
while taking seriously the Pauline point that God's election is
entirely gratuitous and not occasioned by any human merit. The guiding
intention of Romans 9, Augustine now says, is to preclude vainglory
and pride (ib. 1.2.2) rather than to safeguard human responsibility
(as had been his view in *Expositio quarundam propositionum ex
epistula apostoli ad Romanos* 13-18). Augustine rehearses
all possible reasons for God's election of Jacob--his good
works, his good will, his faith and God's foreknowledge of
each--and discounts them all as amounting to an election from
merit rather than from grace. Starting from the primordial willingness
to heed God's call to faith, then, everything that is good in
Jacob must be considered a gift of divine grace. Free will has nothing
to do with the reception of that gift because nobody can will to
receive a divine call to faith nor to respond positively to it so as
to act accordingly and perform good works out of love (*Ad
Simplicianum* 1.2.21; for the Stoically-inspired theory of agency
behind this see
 7.4 Will and Freedom).
 While gratuitous election is, apart from being consoling,
comparatively easily squared with the axioms of divine benevolence,
justice and omnipotence, its corollary, the equally gratuitous
reprobation and damnation of Esau, is a serious philosophical problem
(ib. 1.2.8). If it is not to violate the principle of God's
justice, it obliges us to assume some kind of evil in Esau, which is
however excluded by Paul's explicit statement to the contrary
(Romans 9:11). Augustine's solution is his doctrine of original
sin. Both Jacob and Esau have inherited Adam's guilt that his
sin has spread over all humankind--a debt that God remits for
Jacob but exacts from Esau for reasons that, Augustine admits,
necessarily elude human understanding but are certainly just. Since
the Fall, humankind is nothing but a "lump of sin" that
God might justly have damned as a whole but from which he has chosen
to save some individuals and to transform them into "vessels of
mercy" (ib. 1.2.16, cf. Romans 9:23). The notion of original sin
was not invented by Augustine but had a tradition in African
Christianity, especially in Tertullian.
 The view that original sin is a personally imputable guilt that
justifies eternal damnation is, however, new with *Ad
Simplicianum* and follows with logical necessity from the
exegetical and philosophical claims made there about divine grace and
election (Flasch 1995; contrast *De libero arbitrio*
3.52-55). The theory of *Ad Simplicianum* is illustrated,
with great philosophical acumen and psychological plausibility, in the
*Confessiones* (especially bk. 8) and remains in place during
the Pelagian controversy till the end of Augustine's life.
Curiously, however, there are passages even in his anti-Pelagian work
that seem aimed at safeguarding freedom of choice and, accordingly,
admit of a "synergistic" reading (*De spiritu et
littera* 60; Cary 2008a: 82-86 and, for a different
interpretation, Drecoll 2004-2010: 207-208). After 412,
pressed by his Pelagian opponents, Augustine paid increasing attention
to the mechanics of the transmission of original sin. The result was a
quasi-biological theory that associated original sin closely with
sexual concupiscence (see
 9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).



An obvious implication of Augustine's theory of grace and
election is predestination, a subject prominent in his last treatises
against the Pelagians (e.g., *De praedestinatione sanctorum*,
written after 426) but already implied in *Ad Simplicianum.*
God decides "before the constitution of the world"
(Ephesians 1:4), i.e., (in Neoplatonic terms) in the non-temporal way
that matches his transcendent, eternal being (*De civitate dei*
11.21; see also
 10. Creation and Time),
 who will be exempted from the damnation that awaits fallen humankind
and who will not ("double predestination"). This knowledge
is however hidden to human beings, to whom it will only be revealed at
the end of times (*De correptione et gratia* 49).
 Until then, nobody, not even a baptized Christian, can be sure
whether grace has given her true faith and a good will and, if so,
whether she will persevere in it till the end of her life so as to be
actually saved (*De correptione et gratia* 10-25; cf.
 7.3 Love).
 Like the Stoic determinists before him, Augustine was confronted with
the objection that his doctrine of predestination made all human
activity pointless ("Lazy Argument"). While in Hellenism
this had largely been a theoretical issue, it acquired practical
relevance under the circumstances of monastic life: some North African
monks objected to being rebuked for their misbehavior with the
argument that they were not responsible for not (yet) enjoying the
gift of divine grace (*De correptione et gratia* 6). Taking up
ideas from *De magistro*
 and from *Ad Simplicianum*, Augustine replies that rebuke may
work as an external admonition, even as a divine calling, that helps
people turn to God inwardly and hence must not be withheld (*De
correptione et gratia* 7-9). To the query that
predestination undermines free will, Augustine gives his usual answer
that our freedom of choice has been damaged by original sin and must
be liberated by grace if we are to develop the good will necessary for
virtue and happiness. The medieval and modern debate on whether grace is
"irresistible" is, therefore, to some extent
un-Augustinian (cf. Wetzel 1992: 197-206); some, especially
later, texts do however present prevenient grace as converting the
will with coercive force (*Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum*
1.36-37; cf. already *Ad Simplicianum* 1.2.22; Cary
2008a: 105-110). A problem related to predestination but not
equivalent to it is divine foreknowledge (Matthews 2005: 96-104;
Wetzel 2001; for general discussion, Zagzebski 1991). Augustine
inherits it from the Hellenistic discussion on future contingents and
logical determinism that is best documented in Cicero's *De
fato*. His solution is that while external actions may be
determined, inner volitions are not. These are certainly foreknown by
God but exactly as what they are, i.e., as ours and as volitions and
not as external compulsions (*De civitate dei* 5.9-10;
cf. *De libero arbitrio* 3.4-11). This argument is
independent of the doctrine of grace and original sin; it applies not
just to fallen humankind but also to Adam and Eve and even to the
devil, whose transgression God had, of course, foreseen (*De
civitate dei* 11.17; 14.11).


## 8. History and Political Philosophy



Augustine's *City of God* is not a treatise of political
or social philosophy. It is an extended plea designed to persuade
people "to enter the city of God or to persist in it"
(*Letter* 2\*.3). The criterion of membership in the city of God
(a metaphor Augustine takes from the Psalms, cf. Psalm 86:3 quoted,
e.g., in *De civitate dei* 11.1) and its antagonist, the
earthly city, is right or wrong love.
 A person belongs to the city of God if and only if he directs his
love towards God even at the expense of self-love, and he belongs to
the earthly city or city of the devil if and only if he postpones love
of God for self-love, proudly making himself his greatest good (*De
civitate dei* 14.28). The main argument of the work is that true
happiness, which is sought by every human being (ib. 10.1),
 cannot be found outside the city of God founded by Christ (cf. ib. 1,
prologue). The first ten books deconstruct, in a manner reminiscent of
traditional Christian apologetics, the alternative conceptions of
happiness in the Roman political tradition (which equates happiness
with the prosperity of the Empire, thus falling prey to evil demons
who posed as the defenders of Rome but in fact ruined it morally and
politically) and in Greek, especially Platonic, philosophy (which,
despite its insight into the true nature of God, failed to accept the
mediation of Christ incarnate out of pride and turned to false
mediators, i.e., deceptive demons; bks. 8-10 have an interesting
disquisition on Platonic demonology). Augustine's approach in
the second, positive half is Scriptural, creationist and
eschatological; this fact accounts for the specific character of its
historical dimension. The history of the two cities begins with the
creation of the world and the defection of the devil and the sin of
Adam and Eve (bks. 11-14); it continues with the
providentially-governed vicissitudes of the People of Israel (the
first earthly representative of the city of God) and, after the coming
of Christ, of the Church (bks. 15-17, supplemented by a survey
of the concurrent secular history from the earliest Eastern empires to
contemporary Rome in bk. 18); and it ends with the final destination
(*finis*, to be understood both ethically as "ultimate
goal" and eschatologically as "end of times") of the
two cities in eternal damnation and eternal bliss (bks. 19-22;
for the structure and basic ideas of the *City of God* see
O'Daly 1999). To a great extent, Augustine's approach is
exegetical; for him, the history of the city of God is, in substance,
sacred history as laid down in Scripture (Markus 1970: 1-21).
Obviously, however, the heavenly and earthly cities must not be
confounded with the worldly institutions of the church and the state.
In history, each of these, and the Church in particular, is a mixed
body in which members of the city of God and the earthly city coexist,
their distinction being clear only to God, who will separate the two
cities at the end of times (ib. 1.35; 10.32 etc.). While the city of
God is a stranger or, at best, a resident alien (*peregrinus:*
ib. 15.1; 15.15) in this world and yearns for its celestial homeland,
the earthly city is not a unified body at all but lies in continuous
strife with itself because it is dominated by lust for power, the most
widespread form of the archetypal sin of pride in political and social
life (ib. 18.2). All this is in agreement with Augustine's ideas
on predestination and grace;
 the history of the two cities is essentially the history of fallen
humanity. This dualistic account is however qualified when, in the
part of the work that moves closest to social philosophy, Augustine
analyzes the attitude a Christian ought to adopt to the earthly
society she inevitably lives in during her existence in this world.
Starting, again, from the axiom that all human beings naturally desire
what is good for them, he innovatively determines the goal that every
individual and every community in fact pursues as "peace"
(*pax*), which, in his view, is largely equivalent with natural order and subordination. There are higher and lesser degrees of both individual
and collective peace, e.g., the control of the emotions through
reason, the subordination of body to soul, the subordination of
children to parents in the family or a functioning hierarchical order
in the state; at the top is "peace with God" or the
subordination of the human mind to God (ib. 19.13; Weissenberg 2005).
The lower forms of peace are relative goods and, as such, legitimately
pursued as long as they are not mistaken for the absolute good.
Political peace and order is sought by members of the city of God and
the earthly city alike, but whereas the latter "enjoy" it
because it is the greatest good they can attain and conceive of, the
former "use" it for the sake of their peace with God,
i.e., in order that they and others may enjoy an unhindered Christian
religious life (ib. 19.17; 19.26; for "enjoyment" and
"use" see
 7.1 Happiness).
 Political peace is thus morally neutral insofar as it is a goal
common to Christians and non-Christians. Augustine criticizes Cicero
because he included justice in his definition of the state (Cicero,
*De re publica* 1.39) and thereby gave the earthly state an
inherent moral quality that in reality is the privilege of the city of
God (*De civitate dei* 19.21). He himself prefers a more
pragmatic definition that makes the consensus about a common object of
"love" (i.e., a common good agreed on by all members of
the community) the criterion of a state; the moral evaluation is not a
matter of the definition but depends on the evaluation of the goal it
pursues (cf.
 7.3 Love).
 The early Roman Empire, which strove for glory, was more tolerable
than the Oriental empires that were driven by naked lust for power;
the best imaginable goal pursued by an earthly society would be
perfect earthly peace (ib. 19.24; Weithman 2001: 243-4).
Christians are allowed and even called to work for the well-being of
the societies they live in as long as they promote earthly peace for
the sake of their citizens' and their own true happiness; in
practice, this will usually mean furthering Christian religion (ib.
5.25-6, on the Christian emperors Constantine and Theodosius;
*Letter* 155.12; 16; Dodaro 2004b; Tornau 2013). But the doctrine
of the two cities deliberately precludes any promotion of
the emperor or the empire to a providential and quasi-sacred rank. Not
even Christians in power will be able to overcome the inherent
wretchedness of fallen humanity (*De civitate dei* 19.6). Like
the vast majority of ancient Christian theologians, Augustine has
little or no interest in social reform. Slavery, meaning unnatural
domination of humans over humans, is a characteristic stain of
postlapsarian human life and, at the same time, an evil that is put to
good effects when it secures social order (ib. 19.15; Rist 1994:
236-239). War results from sin and is the privileged means of
satisfying lust for power (ib. 18.2; 19.7). Nevertheless, Augustine
wrote a letter to refute the claim that Christianity advocated a
politically impracticable pacifism (*Letter* 138). His
Christian reinterpretation of the traditional Roman Just War Theory
should be read in the framework of his general theory of virtue and
peace (Holmes 1999). To be truly just according to Augustinian
standards, a war would have to be waged for the benefit of the
adversary and without any vindictiveness, in short, out of love of
neighbor, which, in a fallen world, seems utopian (*Letter*
138.14). Wars may however be relatively just if they are defensive and
properly declared (cf. Cicero, *De officiis* 1.36-37) or
commanded by a just authority even short of the special case of the
wars of the People of Israel that were commanded by God himself
(*Contra Faustum* 22.74-78).


## 9. Gender, Women, and Sexuality



Outright misogyny is rare in Augustine, but he lived in a society and
worked from a tradition--both Greco-Roman and
Judeo-Christian--that took the natural and social subordination
of women to men largely for granted (cf. Borresen 2013: 135
and, for a sketch of the social and familial realities of late-antique
Roman Africa, Rist 1994: 210-213; 246-247). Augustine
interprets the Genesis tale of the creation of woman (Genesis
2:18-22) to mean that, Eve having been created as a helper to
Adam and for the sake of reproduction, she was subordinate to him
already in paradise (*De Genesi ad litteram* 6.5.7; 9.5.9).
This situation is exacerbated by the Fall; under the conditions of
fallen humankind, marriage is, for the wives, a kind of slavery that
they should accept with obedience and humility (as Monnica did; cf.
*Confessiones* 9.19-20 and, on marriage in Augustine in
general, E. Clark 1996). In his early anti-Manichean exegesis of
Genesis, he allegorizes man as the rational and woman as the
non-rational, appetitive parts of the soul (*De Genesi contra
Manichaeos* 2.15, cf. *De vera religione* 78; *De Genesi
ad litteram* 8.23.44; the pattern is well attested in the
philosophical tradition). On the other hand, he insists--as until
then few Christian theologians had done--that the meaning of the
Genesis tale was not purely allegorical but that sexual
differentiation had begun to exist in paradise and would persist in
the resurrected bodies of the blessed because it was a natural part of
God's creation (*De civitate dei* 22.17). Following the
Greek philosophical (in particular, Platonic) conviction that the soul
and especially its highest, intellectual part is not gendered as well
as the Pauline eschatological promise that in Christ "there is
neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:28), Augustine argues that
the words of Genesis 1:26-27 on the human being having been
created in the image of God imply that woman is human like man because
she has an intellectual soul and because it is not the gendered body
but the intellectual soul that makes the human being an image of God
(*De Genesi ad litteram* 3.22.34; Borresen 2013:
136-137; cf. also
 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;
 the view that woman is made in the image of God is far from
uncontroversial in ancient Christianity). The inner tension of the
view that woman is intellectually equal and, at the same time, by
nature socially inferior to man makes itself felt in Augustine's
exegesis of Paul's saying that women, but not men, should veil
themselves because man is made in the image of God (1 Corinthians
11:7). Augustine compares man with theoretical and woman (the
"helper" of Genesis 2:18) with practical reason and claims
that while theoretical and practical reason together or reason in its
entirety is an image of God just as the human being as such is, in virtue
of its reason, an image of God, practical reason alone, being directed toward corporeal
things and but a "helper" of theoretical reason, is not. (By implication, woman is an image of God qua human being, but not qua woman.) The
practice enjoined by Paul is meant to signify this difference (*De
trinitate* 12.10-13). This exegesis safeguards the
godlikeness of woman against a widespread patristic consensus and, it
appears, against Paul himself, but at the same time defends social
inequality and even endows it with metaphysical and religious
significance (Stark 2007a).



Two women figure prominently in Augustine's literary output
(Power 1995; G. Clark 2015): his mother, Monnica (her name appears
only in *Confessiones* 9.37), and his partner for fourteen years,
the mother of Adeodatus. In the dialogues of Cassiciacum, Monnica
represents a philosophical way of life based on the natural intuitions
of reason and on an unshakable Christian faith together with a life
according to the precepts of Christian morality (*De beata
vita* 10; *De ordine* 1.31-32). She, and the
uneducated but faithful in general, may not be able to reach happiness
in this life by means of an ascent to the divine with the help of the
liberal arts, but they will certainly see God "from face to
face" in eternal bliss (*De ordine* 2.45-46).
Behind this idealization may be the male Christian philosopher's
nostalgic desire for a "natural" holiness untainted by
secular occupation and learning (Brown 1988: ch. 13, on the Greek
theologians and bishops of the fourth century). Monnica's
prominence and idealization in the *Confessiones* has provoked
much, and mostly fruitless, psychological speculation. Augustine
represents her influence on his religious life as pervasive from his
earliest years onwards and even compares her to the Mother Church
(*Confessiones* 1.17). She embodies ideal Christian love of the
neighbor (see
 7.3 Love)
 in that she furthers Augustine's Catholic faith with all her
means (mostly, tears and prayer) and never indulges his Manicheism
despite her motherly affection (e.g., *Confessiones* 3.19).
With this she however combines, especially in the earlier books, more
mundane motives, e.g., when she arranges a marriage for Augustine in
the hope of both fencing his sexual concupiscence and assisting his
worldly career (ib. 6.23). Like the other human influences on
Augustine reported in the *Confessiones*, she is used by God as
an instrument of his grace in a way she neither foresees nor wills.
Only after Augustine's conversion does she rise to saintly
perfection, especially in the "vision of Ostia" when,
shortly before her death, mother and son, after a long
philosophico-theological conversation, reach a sudden insight into
what contemplation of the transcendent God in eternal bliss must be
like (ib. 9.24-25). The chapter on the dismissal of
Adeodatus' mother for the sake of an advantageous marriage (ib.
6.25; Shanzer 2002; Miles 2007) has been unpalatable for many modern
readers. Yet what is unusual about it is not Augustine's
behavior but the fact that he mentions it at all and, from hindsight,
reflects on the pain it caused him. True to the deliberately
counter-intuitive and often provocative procedure of the
*Confessiones*, he singles out an emotion that, then as now,
most people would have easily understood but which he nevertheless
interprets as a mark of his sinful state because it resulted from the
loss of a female body he had, in a kind of mutual sexual exploitation,
enjoyed for the sake of pleasure (*Confessiones* 4.2; for the
underlying defective view, common in antiquity, of erotic
relationships cf. Rist 1994: 249) instead of "enjoying"
his female neighbor "in God" and relating their mutual
love to him (cf.
 7.1 Happiness;
 compare Augustine's excessive grief about the friend of his
youth in *Confessiones* 4.9-11 and contrast his
post-conversion mourning of Monnica, ib. 9.30-33).



Augustine's views on sexuality are most prominent in his
anti-Pelagian treatises, where he develops a theory about the
transmission of original sin from the first couple in paradise to
every human being born since, making sexual concupiscence the prime
factor in the process (cf. E. Clark 1996 and 2000, who also takes into
account Augustine's Manichean past). In Augustine's
ethics, concupiscence (*concupiscentia*) does not have a
specifically sexual meaning but is an umbrella term that covers all
volitions or intentions opposed to right love (see

 Nisula 2012). The transgression of Adam and Eve did not consist
in sexual concupiscence but in their disobedience, which, like the
evil angels' primal sin, was rooted in pride (see
 7.5 Will and Evil).
 For this disobedience they, and all humankind with them, were
punished with the disobedience of their own selves, i.e., the
impossibility of fully controlling their own appetites and volitions
and the permanent akratic state (the "coveting of the flesh
against the spirit", in the words of Galatians 5:17) that marks
fallen humanity. The inability of human beings to control their sexual
desires and even their sexual organs (witness the shameful experiences
of involuntary male erection or of impotence: *De civitate dei*
14.15-16) is just an especially obvious example. Unlike most
earlier Christian writers, Augustine thought that there was sexual
intercourse in paradise and that there would have been procreation
even without the fall; he did not share the encratic ideas of some
ascetic circles who hoped to make good for the first sin through
sexual abstinence, and he had comparatively moderate views on
virginity and sexual continence (*De sancta virginitate*;
Borresen 2013: 138; Brown 1988: ch. 19). But he thought that
Adam and Eve had been able to control their sexual organs voluntarily
so as to limit their use to the natural purpose of procreation; in
paradise, there had been sexuality but no concupiscence (*De
civitate dei* 14.21-23). Original sin had destroyed this
ideal state, and since then sexual concupiscence is an inevitable
concomitant of procreation--an evil that may be put to good use
in legitimate marriage, where the purpose of sexual intercourse is the
procreation of children rather than bodily pleasure (*De nuptiis et
concupiscentia* 1.16; *Contra Iulianum* 3.15-16), but
that nevertheless subjects every newborn human being to the domination
of the devil from which they need to be freed through baptism (*De
nuptiis et concupiscentia* 1.25-26; for energetic criticism
of Augustine's views on concupiscence, *inter alia*
because of their impact on the sex morals of modern Christianity, see
Pagels 1989, for moderate defense Lamberigts 2000).


## 10. Creation and Time



Just as the late-antique Platonists developed their cosmological
thinking by commenting on Plato's *Timaeus*,
Augustine's natural philosophy is largely a theory of creation
based on an exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis, on which he
wrote five extended, and occasionally diverging, commentaries (*De
Genesi contra Manichaeos*; *De Genesi ad litteram liber
imperfectus*; *Confessiones* 11-13; *De Genesi ad
litteram*; *De civitate dei* 11-14). The longest and
most important of them is the *Literal Commentary on Genesis*
(*De Genesi ad litteram*). "Literal" does not mean
"literalist" but denotes the hermeneutic assumption that
the text is really about the creation of the world (as opposed to a
moralist or prophetic allegorical reading of the kind proposed in
Augustine's early *De Genesi contra Manichaeos*; the two
approaches are compatible because Augustine, like Origen and the
Jewish exegete Philo before him, believes in the existence of multiple
layers of meaning in Scripture; see *De Genesi ad litteram*
1.1.1 and, in general, *De doctrina christiana*, bk. 3). In
line with his epistemology of illumination and his theory of verbal
signs,
 Augustine takes the biblical creation tale as an
"admonition" that prompts him to devise, with the help of
the "inner teacher", a rational theistic cosmology based
on Trinitarian theology (for rejection of explanations that contradict
the findings of the natural philosophers or the laws of nature cf.,
e.g., *De Genesi ad litteram* 2.9.21). In *De Genesi ad
litteram*, in the *Confessiones* and, to a lesser extent,
in *De civitate dei* Augustine presents his exegesis in a
questioning manner and keeps the results open to revision. The reason
is that, according to the hermeneutics developed especially in bk. 12
of the *Confessiones*, the authorial intention of the
Scriptural text, or indeed of any text, cannot be recovered, so
that--given that the truthfulness of Scripture can be taken for
granted--different and even incompatible readings must be
considered as adequate if they agree with what the text says and if
they are sanctioned by the truth which we access inwardly through
reason and which is, ultimately, God himself (see esp.
*Confessiones* 12.27; 43; *De doctrina christiana* 3.38
where Augustine claims that the Holy Spirit providentially allowed for
a plenitude of Scriptural meanings in order to prompt different people
to different aspects of the truth; Williams 2001; van Riel 2007; Dutton 2014: 175-179;
and, on the epistemological foundations of this hermeneutics, Cary
2008b: 135-138). The basic and recurrent features of
Augustine's cosmological thought are these (cf. Knuuttila 2001:
103-109; Mayer 1996-2002, each with references): God does
not create in time but creates time together with changeable being
while resting in timeless eternity himself (*Confessiones*
11.16; *De Genesi ad litteram* 5.5.12; the distinction of
eternity and time is Platonic, cf. *Timaeus* 37c-38b; Plotinus,
*Enneads* III.7.1). Creation occurs instantaneously; the seven
days of creation are not to be taken literally but are a didactic
means to make plain the intrinsic order of reality
(*Confessiones* 12.40; *De Genesi ad litteram* 1.15.29).
Like the demiurge in the *Timaeus*, God creates out of
goodness, i.e., out of his good will and his gratuitous love for his
creation (*De civitate dei* 11.24). In creation, all three
persons of the Trinity are active, with, roughly, the Father
accounting for the existence, the Son (to whom, in Augustine's
reading, the opening words of Genesis, *in principio*, refer)
for the form or essence and the Holy Spirit for the goodness and
orderliness of every created being (*Confessiones* 11.11;
*De civitate dei* 11.24). As the causality of the Trinity makes
itself felt everywhere in creation, Augustine likes to describe
created beings in their relation to the divine cause in a triadic
manner, using, e.g., the categories "measure",
"form" and "peace/order" (e.g., *De vera
religione* 13; *De natura boni* 3; *De civitate dei*
12.5; cf. Schafer 2000 and, for a very thorough discussion, du
Roy 1966). These "traces" of the Trinity in creation must
not be confused with the Trinitarian structure of the human intellect,
which, alone among all created beings, is an image of God.
 Changeable being is not generated from God (which, according to the
Nicene Creed, is true only of the Son) but created out of nothing, a
fact that partly accounts for its susceptibility for evil.
 More precisely, God "first" creates formless matter out
of nothing (which is why matter in Augustine, unlike in the
Neoplatonists, has a minimal ontological status; cf.
*Confessiones* 12.6; Tornau 2014: 189-194) and
"then" forms it by conveying to it the rational principles
(*rationes*) that eternally exist in his mind (*De diversis
quaestionibus* 46.2) or, as Augustine prefers to put it, in his
Word, i.e., the Second Person of the Trinity. This formative process
is Augustine's exegesis of the biblical "word" of
God (Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1). Incorporeal and purely intellectual
beings, i.e., the angels, are created from intelligible matter which
is created out of nothing and converted to the creator so as to be
formed through the "hearing" of God's word, i.e., by
their contemplation of the Forms contained in God (*De Genesi ad
litteram* 1.4.9-1.5.11, an idea inspired by the Neoplatonic
pattern of abiding, procession and return). Corporeal being is created
when the Forms or rational principles contained in God and
contemplated by the angels are even further externalized so as to
inform not only intelligible but also physical matter (*De Genesi
ad litteram* 2.8.16; 4.22.39).



All this is the framework of Augustine's famous meditation about
time in the *Confessiones* (11.17-41), whose context is
an exegesis of Genesis and which constantly presupposes the
distinction of time and eternity (much has been written on this text,
but particularly illuminating treatments are Flasch 1993; Mesch 1998:
295-343; Matthews 2005: 76-85; Helm 2014; Hoffmann 2017).
Augustine opens the section with the question, "What is
time?" (*Confessiones* 11.17) but in fact has no
intention of giving a definition of time. Whereas his accounts outside
the *Confessiones* center on cosmic or physical time, he here
focuses on how we experience time from a first-person perspective and
what it means for us and our relationship to ourselves and to God to
exist temporally. In this sense, the purpose of the book is ethical
rather than cosmological. Augustine begins by observing that though of
the three familiar "parts" of time, past, present and
future, none really exists (the past having ceased to exist, the
future not existing yet, and the present being without extension),
time doubtless has reality for us. This is so because time is present
to us in the form of our present memory of the past, our present
attention to the present and our present expectation of the future
(ib. 11.26). The phenomenal proof of this claim is the experience of
measuring time by comparing remembered or expected portions of time to
each other or of repeating a poem we know by heart, when, as we
proceed, the words traverse our attention (the present), passing from
expectation (the future) to memory (the past; ib. 11.38). We would
thus be unable to relate past, present and future events, to remember
the history of our own lives and even to be aware of our personal
identity if our being in time was not divided into memory, attention
and expectation and, at the same time, unified by the connectedness
and the simultaneous presence of these. This ambivalent state
Augustine calls "a distention of the soul" (ib. 11.33;
38-39, perhaps echoing Plotinus, *Enneads* III.7.11.41);
this is the closest *Confessiones* 11 comes to a definition of
time. The stability of this precarious unity is however dependent on
the higher unity of the eternal God--as the whole narrative of
the *Confessiones* teaches, we cannot make sense of the memory
of our life unless we perceive the ceaseless presence of God's
providence and grace in it. Toward the end of the book, Augustine
introduces the Pauline "straining forward to what lies
ahead" (Philippians 3:12-14)--as he reads it, the
orientation or "intention" of the soul toward God--as
a counterpoint to the soul's distention in time and concludes
with an exhortation to turn from the dispersion of temporal existence
to the timeless eternity of God which alone guarantees truth and
stability (ib. 11.39-41).


## 11. Legacy



Augustine's impact on later philosophy is as enormous as it is
ambivalent (for an overview, see Fuhrer 2018a: 1742-1750; for
all questions of detail, Pollmann (ed.) 2013; for *De
trinitate*, Kany 2007). Although he was soon accepted as a
theological authority and consensus with him was regarded as a
standard of orthodoxy throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, his
views--or more precisely, the right way of interpreting
them--continued to trigger controversies. In the ninth century
the monk Gottschalk took Augustine's doctrine of grace to imply
double predestination (a term coined by him); he was opposed by John
Scotus Eriugena. The philosophical discourse of early scholasticism
(11th-12th centuries) largely centered on
Augustinian themes. Anselm's proof of the existence of God
develops the argument of *De libero arbitrio*, bk. 2; the
ethicists' debates on will and conscience rest on the
assumptions of Augustine's moral intentionalism, and
Abelard's view that ethics is universal and applicable to both
human and divine agency may be read as a response to the problems in
Augustine's theory of divine election. With the growing
influence of Aristotle from the thirteenth century onwards, Augustine
came to be interpreted in Aristotelian terms that had largely been
unknown to himself. Thomas Aquinas and others had little interest in
Augustine's Platonism, and there was a certain tension between
the medieval tendency to look for a teachable philosophical and
theological system in his texts and his own way of philosophical
inquiry that was shaped by the ancient tradition and left room for
tentative argument and was open to revision. Medieval political
Augustinianism projected the conflict of the Two Cities onto the
Church and the State. Martin Luther (1483-1546) agrees with
Augustine on the absolute gratuitousness of grace but does not follow
the Augustinian (and scholastic) ideal of *intellectus fidei*
and makes faith in the Gospel the decisive condition of salvation. In
his debate with Erasmus on free will, he voices a quite Augustinian
pessimism about human freedom. The variety of Protestantism that was
inaugurated by Jean Calvin (1509-1564) accepts double
predestination. In the seventeenth century Descartes' cogito was
soon recognized as an Augustinian idea and triggered a refreshed
interest in Augustine's epistemology. In the same epoch, the
Jansenist movement put forward a radical interpretation of
Augustine's theology of grace and justification that was
fiercely combated by the Catholic Church. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the leading philosophers of Enlightenment,
German Idealism and Romanticism showed little interest in Augustine,
and even, in the case of Nietzsche, outright contempt. He remained,
however, an important figure in Neoscholasticism or Neothomism, a
philosophical reaction of Catholic philosophers against Enlightenment
and Idealism which continued to inform Catholic theological
scholarship on Augustine till the 1950s and beyond. In the twentieth
century, Augustine's philosophy of time (*Confessiones*
11) received enormous and unprecedented philosophical attention from
thinkers like Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), some of
whom credited Augustine with their own subjectivist understanding of
time. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) wrote her doctoral dissertation
on Augustine's philosophy of love and blamed him, not uncommonly
for her epoch, for degrading love of neighbor to an instrument of
personal happiness. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) takes issue
with what he considers Augustine's view of language and language
acquisition throughout his analysis of language in the
*Philosophical Investigations*. Postmodernist thinkers
(Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank) have set Augustine's notion of
self, in which love is perceived as an integral part, against the
purported egoism and isolation of the Cartesian subject, which is
considered the hallmark and, as it were, the birth defect of
modernity. Like their medieval predecessors, modern and postmodern
appropriations of Augustine are selective and inevitably conditioned
by contemporary concerns, sometimes resulting in secularized readings.
Contemporary Western culture has little sympathy for Augustine's
yearning for an inner divine light or for his less than optimistic
views about human autonomy and the secular. Nevertheless, the richness
of his thought continues to fascinate readers.