by Dr. Phillip Cary, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

Both ACS 1000 and ACS 1001 at Villanova have an Augustinian component. In Traditions in Conversation (ACS 1000), the requirement is to teach a text by Augustine. In Modernity and its Discontents, (ACS 1001), the requirement is to consider an Augustinian theme. The following essay is to provide aid, guidance, and ideas for ACS teachers who are confronting these requirements without the benefit of specialized knowledge of Augustine and who may appreciate some help in negotiating the philosophical and theological landscape on which his thought moves. It proceeds in roughly chronological order, from his philosophical antecedents (I) to the theological core of his thought (II) to consideration of some Augustinian themes which have been influential up to modem times (III). An appendix (IV) offers some bibliographic advice.

In both seminars, it is useful to keep a crucial paradox in mind: Augustinian themes are both strange to us and deeply familiar. Augustine' s ancient ways of thinking are not ours (and hence pose a challenge of historical understanding to our students) yet his thought has profoundly shaped Western culture up to and including modernity and thus has influenced all of us, Catholic or not. Reading Augustine is a little like going back in a time machine to meet our great-great-grandfather. The man speaks a foreign language, think outlandish thoughts, and comes from a different country, indeed a different world from our own--yet he undeniably helped make us who we are. To understand this stranger is to begin understanding things about ourselves which we had scarcely noticed before.

I. Philosophical Framework: Christian Platonism

Two fundamental influences determine Augustine's worldview: the Christian tradition and ancient Platonism. These are not two entirely separate things. At the time Augustine wrote, elements of Platonist philosophy had been playing a role in Christian thought for centuries. For instance, the Platonist idea of the immortality of the soul had long been joined to the New Testament proclamation of the resurrection of the dead. The synthesis of these two quite different concepts is so familiar (and so deep a part of the Catholic tradition) that few people nowadays notice the difference. For instance, when asked about life after death most of our students will tell a Platonist story (viz: after your body goes into the ground, your soul goes to heaven) and not even notice the contrast with the Biblical story (where Jesus' s followers go to his tomb to find that his body is no longer there, because as the angel says, "He is not here, he is risen").

As this example illustrates, the synthesis of Christian faith and Platonist philosophy is both ancient and familiar--and was so already in Augustine's time. It also illustrates certain tensions that are important in Augustine' s thought. Platonism is in many respects more "spiritual" than Christianity: where Platonists look forward to the immortality of a soul separated from the body and purified from all contact with bodily things, the Christian Gospel promises a resurrection of the body, a prospect which Plato would have dreaded. The philosophical problems faced by a Christian Platonist revolve around the fact that the Christian Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, place more value on bodies than Platonism can allow.

At the center of Augustine's synthesis of Platonism and Christianity is the love of Wisdom--which as Augustine often reminds us is the very meaning of the word "philosophy. " But Christianity too is the love of Wisdom, for (as one of Augustine' s favorite Bible verses puts it) Christ is himself "the Wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24). Hence philosophers and Christians ultimately have the same Beloved, which they both call by the name " Wisdom. " The great difference is that Christians, as it were, ' know her also by her human name, Jesus Christ. (1)

One can think of Augustine as a Christian speaking in Platonist language, interpreting the Christian faith using Platonist concepts. He does not make use of all the vocabulary or conceptuality of Platonism, but focuses rather on words and themes that Platonism and Christianity have in common, such as love, life after death, and "the other world. " For those not familiar with ancient philosophy, the best introduction to the Platonist version of these themes comes from Plato himself.

On love, see the second half of Symposium (Socrates' speech, 199c-212c).

On the "other world, " see the "Allegory of the Cave " Republic 7: 514a-521 a, often anthologized).

On life after death, see the first half of Phaedo (57a-87b). The Phaedo also contains Plato's most important exposition of the dualism of body and soul (the notion that the soul is imprisoned in the body and escapes at death). These three readings will give you the gist of the Platonist component of Augustine's worldview. However, as a point of literary history it is important to realize that Augustine read very little of Plato himself, but learned most of his Platonism from later "neo-Platonists, " such as Plotinus (see below, part N).

For non-philosophers reading Augustine, the most important thing to know about Platonism is something rather foreign to modem thought: the distinction between sensible and intelligible. Sensible things are anything we can perceive with our five senses--the whole world of things which we nowadays call "physical. " (Beware: this term will mislead you if you try to use it in explaining Augustine. What we now call "physical, " an ancient Platonist like Augustine would rather call sensible or visible, bodily or corporeal, earthly or temporal). Intelligible things, on the other hand, are what we see with the intellect alone--things visible only to the mind's eye. These are what Plato calls "Forms " or "Ideas. " He does not mean ideas or concepts in our minds, but rather the eternal paradigms or models which give form, law and regularity to things in the sensible world.

The simplest illustrations of the sensible/intelligible distinction come from mathematics. Think of the difference between a triangle you draw on a chalkboard, (which is sensible) and a triangle you prove something about in geometry (which is intelligible). On a Platonist reckoning, these are two entirely different kinds of being. The chalk triangle is a cheap and temporary imitation of the perfect and unchanging triangle which is contemplated, for instance, in the Pythagorean theorem. Like any triangle you can see with your bodily eyes, the chalk triangle' s lines are not perfectly straight, its angles do not precisely add up to 180 degrees, and so on. Hence for a Platonist it is not really a triangle but only an imitation of one, a shadow, reflection or image of the true triangle, which has perfectly straight lines, exactly 180 degrees--and no bodily existence. Thus for Platonism the ideal triangle (i.e. the Platonic Idea of the triangle) is the real thing, while the bodily, chalk triangle is but its fleeting shadow.

This is a notion that takes some getting used to. Things we nowadays think of as abstract and insubstantial are according to Platonism the most real things of all, while the things we think of as concrete and "physical" are less real--Augustine will call them transitory, perishable, fleeting, deceptive. Truth is found in unchanging and incorporeal things. To search for Wisdom among bodily things is like trying to discover geometrical theorems by measuring chalk triangles: the best you can get is a fluctuating approximation, not real insight into the nature of things. Hence intelligible things have more truth as well as more reality than sensible things. The world of intelligible things is the true world, that deep "other world" which we cannot see with our bodily eyes. It has more reality or being than the visible world because it is unchanging, which means it will never perish--and that which endures forever has more reality than things which exist only temporarily. True being is thus unchanging being. The chalk triangle will not last for long, but the ideal triangle has no beginning and no end. Hence for Augustine the sensible is related to the intelligible as the temporal is to the eternal.

The intelligible world includes more than just mathematics. It is also the realm of ethical ideals, which again are more real than their earthly or visible counterparts: true and eternal Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom, not to mention the True, the Good and the Beautiful--i.e.. e. ultimate Truth, the supreme Good, and eternal Beauty. These are what is primarily meant by the phrase " Platonic Ideas " or " Platonic Forms " or "the intelligible world. " For an ancient Platonist these Forms are related to the sensible world in two ways: as paradigms and as objects of desire. The sensible world originates from them as a copy does from its original or paradigm. Just as mathematics gives form to the bodily world, so Justice and the Good give form to the human world. In both cases, of course, the earthly world is only an imperfect imitation of the eternal one: our justice is at best a reflection of eternal justice, as the chalk triangle is at best an image of the real one.

Hence to desire what is true and perfect is to long for intelligible things-to search for ultimate Wisdom, i.e.: to philosophize. The intelligible world is not only more real than the sensible world, it is more desirable, more lovely. For Augustine, as for Plato, our longing for this world of eternal truth is the source of all our loves. We love sensible things because they are a shadow of the eternal Beauty,(2) and we are miserable on this earth because our ultimate good and final happiness lie in possessing the true realities which we can only catch glimpses of here.
So you can see that the sensible/intelligible distinction underlies a great many of the contrasts that Augustine is concerned with in his writings: temporal and eternal, mutable and immutable, corporeal and incorporeal, bodily and spiritual, earthly and heavenly, fleeting and stable, perishable and imperishable, mortal and immortal, shadowy and bright, deceptive and true. When he describes the great crisis of his early intellectual life as his being "unable to think of any substance other than what these eyes are accustomed to see, " (3) he is referring to the problem of rising from sensible to intelligible, from the vision of "these eyes" of the body to the vision of the mind's eye, seeing a light which is "wholly other" than the ordinary light of day--the light of intelligible Truth. (4)

The key metaphysical connection between Plato and Augustine is that Plato's intelligible world is located within Augustine's God. According to Augustine, Platonic Ideas are literally Ideas in the Mind of God. True justice is God' s Idea of Justice, the eternal Law is the Law in God' s mind and--what is perhaps most important to bear in mind when reading the CONFESSIONS --Truth, Goodness and Beauty are for Augustine names of God. Thus to see intelligible things is to see God. This is the happiness we ultimately long for, the BEATIFIC V1SION (i.e. literally "the seeing which makes happy"). Our longing for the happiness of seeing God is what makes us dissatisfied with earthly things: it is why " our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, " as Augustine says at the outset of the CONFESSIONS. Our whole life in this world is a journey toward that ultimate vision, that Wisdom which is our true home.

Or at least that is what our earthly life should be. But of course the journey has many dangers, detours, and blind alleys, all of which can be summed up under the heading "sin." One could also speak of "misery" (from miseria which in Augustine's Latin serves as a technical term for the absence of happiness). For Augustine misery or unhappiness means being far from God, wandering among earthly things, and sin means loving these things as if they were ultimate, as if they were what could really make us happy. This explains something important and peculiar about the emotional tone of Augustine's writing: his confessions of sin evoke feelings of longing and loss rather than guilt. Of course Augustine thinks that if we sin we are objectively guilty or culpable, but his subjective response to that fact is not the feeling we nowadays call guilt but something more like grief or even nostalgia. It is a strange but characteristically Augustinian confession of sin when he prays, "Late have I loved You, 0 Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You! " (Confessions 10:27.34).

II. Theological Core: Charity and Christ

Platonism and Christianity interact most fruitfully in Augustine' s conception of charity. This does not mean giving to the poor (the theological term for that is not " charity " but " alms "). Rather it is a form of love, specifically the love of God and neighbor, in obedience to the twofold command of Christ (Matt. 22:34-40). (Thus almsgiving, if done out of genuine love for the poor, is one form of charity, but only one among many). Charity is the fulfillment of the law of Christ, the highest and in a sense the only duty of a Christian, since "whoever loves has fulfilled the law, " as Paul says (Romans 13:8). This is what Augustine means. when he makes the famous statement, "love, and do what you will. " (5) If you have charity, the true love of God and neighbor, then whatever you will to do is right.

There is much that is lovely about Augustine's concept of charity and that may be of particular value for our Catholic students. Mary of them come to us with a crude and rather ugly conception of their own religion: they will tell you that what religion is all about is following God' s rules in order to be rewarded by being sent to heaven. The Augustinian name for this dreary sort of religion is " servile obedience. " It contrasts with " free " or " filial " obedience, as a slave knuckling under to his master out of fear contrasts with a freeborn son obeying his father out of love. Augustine argues that people whose motive for obedience is extraneous reward or punishment inevitably become like slaves who only refrain from breaking their master' s rules because they fear the consequences. ( 6) Complying with the Law of God without delight, they cannot but find it an intolerable burden, a form of oppression and alienation. (Augustine' s diagnosis of this religious pathology is confirmed in my experience by the tone with which students who believe in following God's rules to go to heaven write about God: it is a tone of ill-concealed resentment).

Free obedience has a distinctive motive: the longing for God and delight in doing his will that come from loving him. After all, the most important rule of all ("the first and greatest commandment, " as Jesus puts it in Matt. 22:38) is simply to love God with one' s whole heart. The other part of charity--love of neighbor--means that one should help other people love God as well, since this is their way to happiness too, the way to that ultimate Good which we all have in common. Hence for Augustine the Christian life does not consist in doing chores so we can get rewarded, but rather in delighting in God and longing for him---for which the only reward is to get what we long for and delight all the more in it.

In the Augustinian tradition the picture of "heaven" functions to represent how this ultimate fulfillment, this crown of all delight and longing, takes place. In point of fact however, Augustine (like the Bible) does not talk much about "going to heaven" but rather about "eternal life" (aeterna vita, a Biblical term which he equates with beata vita, a Ciceronian phrase which translates the Greek philosophical term eudaimonia, which can be rendered variously "happiness," "beatitude," "blessedness" or--in recent philosophical discussions-- "human flourishing" ). Eternal life is thus the same thing as happiness or blessedness--whatever it is that makes for ultimate human fulfillment. And the clearest way of saying what this fulfillment actually consists in, according to the Augustinian and Catholic tradition, is not "heaven" but "beatific vision. " What heaven really is, is seeing God. Thus Charity, the true obedience to God's Law, consists of the longing that brings us to our true happiness and the enjoyment which is its attraction and consummation. In other words, what "following God's rules" really amounts to is desiring with our whole heart to see God and helping others do likewise.

Closely related to charity is another Augustinian and Catholic theological concept which most of our students have not heard of. grace. This concept means that God makes himself delightful to us, literally gives us the gift of delighting in him through his Holy Spirit, thus building us up in charity and helping us toward eternal life. For Augustine the road to God is one upon which we can make no progress without God' s own help. The power that leads us home is not our ability to follow rules but God' s gift of his own Beauty, which teaches us to delight in him and shows us the way to himself. Hence we find eternal life not because we can follow rules but because God can give us a great gift. Of course having received this gift, we are indeed capable of following the Law of God, for the gift he gives is our love for him, which is itself the fulfillment of all his laws.

In his conceptions of charity and grace, Augustine synthesized Platonism and Christian thought in a powerful and appealing way. But there are other theological concepts in which Augustine' s Platonism and his Christianity stand in some tension. These tensions center around the person of Jesus Christ, who is after all central to Christianity--but who is also inevitably going to look like a serious anomaly when placed in any philosophical framework, Platonist or otherwise. Catholic theology took several hundred years to deal with this anomaly, and the result was the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity (formulated at the council of Nicea in 325) and Incarnation (formulated at the council of Chalcedon in 451). Augustine's career takes place between these two councils, and he makes major contributions to the development of Christian doctrine from Nicaea to Chalcedon.

To understand what Augustine is getting at when he talks about Christ it is useful to know the basics of these two fundamental doctrines of Catholic faith--Trinity and Incarnation. Both of them are grounded in the belief that the man Jesus Christ is nothing less than God. The doctrine of the Trinity develops the conviction that Christ is divine and combines it with monotheism. Augustine sums up this doctrine by saying: Christ is God, and so is God the Father, and so is the Holy Spirit; and yet there is only one God. The logically difficult part is that the Father is not the same as Christ, and Christ is not the same as the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the same as the Father--and yet there is still only one God. (7)

The Incarnation is the doctrine which relates the humanity of Christ to his divinity. Here the key idea is that Christ is both true God and true man. This means that his being God does not make him any less human, and his being human does not make him any less God. In other words, according to Catholic doctrine it is a mistake to say, "Jesus can't be God; he' s too human. " Nothing in his humanity compromises his divinity. Conversely, nothing in his divine nature makes him any less human. He is not simply God looking human or God in human appearance (as in the heresy called "Docetism"). Nor is he simply God taking over a human body: as true man, he has everything that properly belongs to human nature, including soul as well as body. (8) Of course he has no sin, but this lack is not inhuman but rather a restoration of human nature to its proper perfection.

Modem readers who are out of sympathy with Christian orthodoxy should resist the tendency to regard these doctrines as obscure or irrelevant hair-splitting--at least if they want to understand Augustine. Augustine takes these doctrines very seriously, and is extraordinarily interested in them. To see why, start with the fact that they are astonishing (or unbelievable, if you wish) and then try to imagine how astonishing the consequences would be if you actually believed them. Both are aimed at supporting the belief that one particular human being (and no other) is God. This is hard for any philosophy to swallow, but especially Platonism. And that creates some of the most interesting tensions in Augustine' s work.

Platonism does not seek for Wisdom in this visible world, yet the Catholic faith teaches that the Wisdom of God walked the earth as an ordinary human being, as visible as you or I--and got crucified for his trouble. And this murdered man is nothing less than the eternal, divine Truth! Plato taught that at death our immortal souls are separated from the body and its corruption (a word you will see often in Augustine: it implies rotting and decay) and if we have been virtuous, our souls leave the body behind forever so as to contemplate the Forms eternally--yet the Christian Gospel preaches that Jesus rose bodily from the dead, and that our hope is to be raised to new life with him. Platonist spirituality means a turning away from things of this world, yet Catholic piety centers on eating Christ's human flesh in the Eucharist. So long as Christ remains central to Christianity, the sensible world--and especially that one sensible thing called the flesh of Christ--will have an eternal importance that Plato could never have anticipated.

How Augustine negotiated these tensions is one of the most interesting and hotly debated questions in the past century of Augustine scholarship. Unfortunately, a mere pair of suggestions on this point must suffice for present purposes. The first suggestion is to sit up and take special notice whenever Augustine mentions humility, for that word designates what is perhaps the prime purpose of the Incarnation in Augustine's view. In becoming human, the eternal Son of God humbles himself, taking on the vulnerability, corruptibility, mortality, and pain of human life--and that is the key to the Incarnation's salsify power. Secondly, when wondering what positive value the visible world has for Augustine, consider the category of "sign. "In a sense all visible things are signs of the invisible God who created them, but this is especially true of the Sacraments (such as the Eucharist) which are signs of divine grace, and the teachings of Church and Scripture, where God speaks in human words (for words, too, are a type of sign).

III. Influential Augustinian Themes

Much of what is distinctive in Augustine' s thought results from his brilliant and highly original efforts to synthesize Platonism and Christianity. This distinctively Augustinian synthesis is in turn built into the foundations of later Western culture, not only in the middle ages but also in modernity. This is what makes the business of treating Augustinian themes in the modem course (CHS 1001) so interesting. If your specialty lies in any field of Western literature and history, medieval or modem, you probably already know a great many Augustinian themes. The trick is to recognize that they're Augustinian.

One strongly Platonist theme of Augustine's which has played a major role in modem thought is his conception of the inner self If we nowadays find it natural to talk of an "inward turn" or of "looking inward" to find God, we have Augustine largely to thank for it. Platonists talk of turning away from bodily things to find what is intelligible and divine, but Plato himself pictures the intelligible world as above the soul, not inside it (e.g. in the Allegory of Cave). Later pagan Platonists such as Plotinus made the move from " above " to " within, " locating the intelligible world within the divine Mind and the divine Mind within the soul. Thus the search for divine and intelligible things came to mean a turning into the interior of the soul. Augustine in effect combined these two pictures, and mapped a journey first inward then upward. (9) This means the space we reach halfway along this journey (having turned "in" but not yet "up") is our own private inner space, the inner world of our own souls.

It also means that the search for self-knowledge is the first step in the quest for knowledge of God. Hence any modem thinker who sees a connection between turning to oneself end turning to God, between autobiography and religious quest, as well as anyone deeply concerned with inner/outer contrasts (especially one who think of the

Having a concept of inner self changes one' s concept of the sensible world. One can begin calling it "the external world, " and to speak of "merely external things" in a pejorative way. One can also acquire new anxieties, such as "how can I know whether the external world really exists? " This is a specifically modem question, not one that Augustine himself ever asked, but it could not be asked at all without using Augustinian concepts such as the self as a private inner world.

Another modem anxiety is one that Augustine himself shared. If our inmost being is our true self, then how can we really know other people--how can we get access to their true inner selves? Ever since Augustine himself, the West' s answer to this Augustinian question has relied on a key Augustinian concept: the notion of signs as expressions of the inner self. Words and gestures are interpreted as external signs that express, indicate or signify what lies within. (10) Thus to know another person is to find a way of bridging the distance between the external sign and the inner reality it expresses. This Augustinian theory of signs or semiotics has been fundamental not only for Western views of the self but also for Western views of language and meaning, underlying the work of thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam, John Locke, Ferdinand de Sausurre and Jacques Derrida. The structuralist linguistics of Sausurre, for instance, as well as its deconstruction by Derrida's "post-structuralism," relies on the assumptions of Augustinian semiotics.

Related to the inner/outer contrast is Augustine's distinctive way of dealing with the problem of faith and reason. Augustine tends to pose the problem in terms of two parallel distinctions: authority/reason and faith/understanding. ( 11) Reason is our mind's inner eye, the ability to see intelligible truth, to be illuminated by divine Wisdom, or to take counsel with Christ the inner teacher (all different ways of saying the same thing). Authority by contrast is external teaching, heard with the ear of the body rather than seen with the eye of the mind. It is like the difference between believing the Pythagorean theorem because your teacher told you, and understanding it for yourself-seeing" it the way you do when you say "Aha! I get it now. Now I see what it means!" Hence faith, for Augustine, means believing what some external authority teaches--and Christian faith in particular means believing the teaching of the Church and the Scriptures. By contrast, understanding (intellectus) means seeing intelligible things for oneself with the mind' s inner eye <the intellect) without any external mediation, as will happen in its fullness in the beatific" vision.

Augustine of course thought that the authority of the Church harmonizes with everything that reason can see, because true philosophy and Christian faith seek ultimately the same Wisdom. But in allying faith and authority with the external, and reason and understanding with the internal, Augustine established a contrast that modems often see in quite a different light. Because authority is external, it is easy to find it alienating. Hence nearly all American students can be heard to say, " No one can tell me what to believe. " In effect, they are taking an anti-Augustinian stand on the Augustinian issue of the relation between authority and reason. (It is also by the way quite unCatholic: it is part of the Catholic Church's official teaching that the Church has the authority and the duty to teach the faithful what to believe in matters of religion and morals).

It is after all, quite a natural question: why should one put faith in the authoritative teaching of the Church, rather than try to understand things for oneself with one's own minds For Augustine, who had a restless and searching mind, this was a particularly urgent question. His basic answer is that "unless you believe, you will not understand. (12) It is as if to say: you must listen to your math teacher's explanation of the Pythagorean theorem and trust in it before you can expect to understand things for yourself. Hence we begin in faith, but end in understanding--faith is the seeking, understanding the finding. (13) Hence in contrast to many modem religious views, Augustine does not think that faith sees more deeply than reason. Rather, faith is the necessary prelude to rational understanding. Understanding (seeing for oneself) is the destination while faith (believing what you're taught) is merely the road to get there.

However, it is true to say that in our present fallen condition, we can see further by faith than by reason. Rational inquiry or philosophy by itself cannot bring us to Wisdom, because our mind' s eye is wounded and half-blinded by sin and in need of being healed and strengthened by faith. Just as for Plato the impure soul cannot see intelligible things, so too for Augustine the mind' s eye is impure--but only faith in Christ can fully purify it. Being purified and justified by faith, (14) we receive the grace of charity, thus becoming capable of seeking God with our whole hearts and delighting in him we seek--so that we can hope in the end to be one of those pure in heart who see God. (15)

Parity of heart of course means a restoration of will as well as mind. For Augustine the two are scarcely separable. As the mind seeks wisdom, the will seeks happiness--and both are found in God, who is the Truth we long to know and the Beauty which delights us forever. Whereas Augustine associates mind with seeing and knowing, he associates will with turning and seeking, loving and being attached to what one loves. If the act of the mind is to know, the act of the will is to love. It is love which turns the mind' s eye to seek what it is looking for in this or that direction--higher or lower, inner or outer. All acts of the will are for Augustine acts of love, acts of seeking and desiring which aim at finding and being united to what is loved. Hence loving God draws us closer to union with him. Augustine thus describes charity as a love which is ardent and burning, because like fire it gravitates " upward. " (16)

Earthly loves, by contrast, drag us downward--or pull us apart, as we become attached to a multitude of external things. (17). The name for this multitude of loves which contrast with charity is concupiscence or cupidity. Sometimes the word is translated "lust, " but it means far more than sexual lust: it can refer to any attempt to find one's happiness apart from God. Hence greed (love of money), ambition (love of honor) and even pride (a perverse love of self are all types of concupiscence. In keeping with the theme of purity and his suspicion of earthly loves, Augustine can use a vocabulary of dirtiness and filth to describe concupiscence. But he also has a rhetoric with deeper resonances than this. All love unites, and to love mortal things is therefore to be united to what must inevitably slip from our grasp. Sinful love is not just dirty but anguished, for it is the love of that which we must inevitably lose.

Thousands of poems have been written on this Augustinian theme, sighing over the mutability and transience of mortal beauty and grieving over its inevitable loss. Of course the poets' conclusions are often the reverse of Augustine's--carpe diem, " seize the day, " " gather ye rosebuds while ye may, " and so on. When Robert Herrick urges virgins to make the most of time and Andrew Marvell importunes his coy mistress, they too are taking an unAugustinian stand on an Augustinian issue.

It is worth knowing that some scholars (18) think Augustine invented the concept of will. Greek philosophers (writing long before Augustine) did not even have a word for "will" but spoke rather of "choice"--i.e. of decisions about what to do that stemmed from rational consideration of what we want and how to get it, or else from our irrational wants getting the better of our reason. In other words, choice was the outcome of some combination of reason and desire, rather than the exercise of a special power called "will. " (Even a phrase like "the will of God" in the Old Testament refers to particular plans and purposes, not to a faculty of choosing). To have the concept of will is thus to add an extra layer to one's account of the self, tracing the act of choosing back to a special faculty of choosing rather than to the familiar powers of reason and desire. This in turn allows Augustine to add a dimension of inner drama to his account of psychological conflict. An Aristotle could talk about how desire might overcome reason, but it takes an Augustine to dramatize this as a paralyzing inner struggle between two contrary wills Confessions 8:5.10-12 and 8.19-11.27)--a dramatization which finds many echoes in modem depictions of inner conflict.

If Augustine invented the concept of will, it was because he had several jobs for it to do. One was to explain the origin of evil, which Augustine traces back to a primeval "perversion of the will."(19) The human will becomes evil by turning away from God, which first happens with Adam and Eve. Augustine is thus one of the many Christian theologians who locate the source of all evil ultimately in human choices, beginning with the Fall of Adam.

For Augustine this is a necessary implication of the doctrine of creation, i.e. the belief that (as the Creed says) God created "all things visible and invisible" and that (as the first chapter of Genesis says) all that he created was good. If all things are created by God and God creates nothing evil, then two conclusions follow. First of all, evil is not a thing (not a " substance " as Augustine puts it in his central discussion of the problem of evil in Confessions 7:11.17-16.22). This does not mean that evil is utterly unreal, but rather that it has the kind of negative reality that a shadow or a hole has--or to use more' sophisticated images, the kind of reality that a defect or a disease has. Evil is to good as blindness is to the eye. God made the eye, but he did not make it blind. Moreover blindness is not a thing, but rather something lacking in a thing: an eye is blind if it lacks the power of vision that is natural and proper to it. Hence evil is not a substance but only a corruption of substance--something missing that ought not to be missing. The eye is a substance, but blindness is only the corruption of that eye, not a substance in its own right--not a "thing. " Likewise the mind is a substance, but ignorance is a defect or corruption in that substance--and the will too is a substance, and sin is its corruption.

The second conclusion is that the only possible source for all the evil in the world is the choices of free, rational beings. Hence for Augustine evil is caused by something good--our freedom of will--which we use to evil purpose. This is a key conceptual point which takes some getting used to: the cause of evil is something good. In Augustine's metaphysics, it could not be otherwise. Since for Augustine "everything that is, is good" (Confessions 7:12.18), evil, that non-thing, can only come from something good. Hence the cause of evil is one of the good things that God created, namely free will. (The same goes for the devils, by the way, who were all originally angels of light, but became evil by rebelling against God of their own free will).

Hence it is a deep Augustinian conviction that if we are evil it is our fault, not God' s or the world' s. It is the Manichaean, not the Augustinian, who blames his evils on outside forces ("the devil made me do it" or "I couldn't resist the temptation" or any form of "I didn't really have a choice"). Thus the Augustinian concept of freedom brings with it an enormous sense of responsibility, but also a powerful vindication of the goodness of existence. When things go wrong it is not because God can't help it or because "shit happens, " but ultimately because of our own free will, our own deliberate fault. But by the same token, our redemption in Christ spells the redemption of the whole creation and the healing of all its ills. Of course this Augustinian vindication of the goodness of existence, with its extraordinary emphasis on human responsibility for evil, is not widely accepted nowadays--but the modem alternatives to it are often developed in more or less explicit contrast to the Augustinian view. Once again we find anti-Augustinian positions taken on an Augustinian issue.

The story of the Augustinian will, however, has yet more twists and turns. For along with freedom of will there is weakness and conflict of will. The will, once corrupted by its own evil choices, is not so free to do good as it originally was--as a diseased eye is not so free to see as it was when it was healthy. Evil can come only from freedom, but from evil there results loss of freedom. We who, have inherited Adam's din (whose presence in us is called "original sin") are not as free to choose the good as he was. We are beset by two penalties of original sin: ignorance of the good and difficulty in choosing it. The latter is what Augustine means by weakness of the will, which he dramatizes as a paralyzing struggle between a good will and an evil one in Confessions 8.

This weakness of will explains the need for divine grace. All our good depends on loving God, and all we need to do to love God is to will it--and yet we are too weak to will it (like a diseased eye that is too weak to look at the light of day). Grace comes to give us the strength to delight in God--a strength we can no more choose to have than a person could choose to delight in the sunlight or to fall in love.(20) God's grace is indeed very much like a radiance of delight which turns us in the direction of our true Beloved, our ultimate happiness. The tricky part here (much discussed in the next millennium and a half of Christian theology) is that grace must move our will without taking away our freedom. Augustine insists that God' s grace does not take away free will but restores it, by allowing us to choose the good that we are not strong enough to choose without God's help. Yet Augustine also insists grace does effectually cause us to will the good--i.e., it moves us to choose the good voluntarily and freely.

Augustine is thus one of the most influential exponents of a view of free will that contemporary philosophers call compatibilism--the belief that freedom of will is compatible with our will being determined by outside causes. In Augustine' s case, of course, the cause under consideration is the grace of God, which is not exactly an outside cause, but rather an inward gift which reaches us at the very core of our being. No mere external or sensible thing can determine the win's choices, and when God moves the will it is not as an external cause but as an inner presence which is closer to us than we are to ourselves. (21)

If this argument satisfies you (and there are many who remain quite dissatisfied) there is one more serious problem to face:' predestination. For Augustine (as for Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and most of the major theologians of the Western tradition) all things happen because God willed for them to happen that way. But that is what he calls providence, not predestination. Predestination, it turns out, has to do specifically with how God gives grace, and especially with what Augustine (following Paul in Romans 11:5) calls "the election of grace. "

"Election" here means "choice," as in the Biblical idea of a Chosen People, and the closely related notion that God chose Jacob over Esau before either was born (Romans 9:10-16). The election of grace, as the Augustinian tradition understands it, means that God chose from eternity to give grace to some undeserving sinners (e.g. Jacob) and not to others (e.g. Esau), thus redeeming some and allowing others to go their own sinful way to damnation. There is nothing unjust in this, Augustine argues because all have sinned and all deserve damnation--belonging to what Augustine calls the "mass of damnation" (referring to the "one lump" of Romans 9:21). Hence in damning Esau God does justice, and in giving grace to Jacob he grants undeserved mercy. Thus, Augustine contends, divine predestination is inequitable but not unjust. This conclusion is profoundly unPlatonist, deeply Biblical, and utterly unacceptable to most modem readers--though again, it was taught by most of the major theologians of the Western tradition, nearly all of whom were Augustinians of one stripe or another.

Since this conclusion is in fact unbearable for most of us today, it is worth mentioning the most common way for contemporary theologians of an Augustinian stripe to get around the problem. The strategy is to move in the direction of a Biblical universalism, arguing that the election of grace centers not on Jacob to the exclusion of Esau but rather on Christ for the inclusion of the whole human race. The Chosen One par excellence is Jesus, who gave his life to redeem the whole world. The danger of this strategy is that it must downplay Biblical talk about hell and damnation which Augustine, like the rest of the Christian tradition, has tended to take very seriously. But this is a risk which most contemporary theologians are willing to take.

1) CF. CONFESSIONS 3:4.7-5, WHICH TURNS ON PRECISELY THIS POINT. THE GENDER PECULIARITY THAT ETERNAL WISDOM IS FEMININE (LATIN SALPIENTIA, GREEK SOLPHIA) WHILE THE HUMAN CHRIST IS MALE, IS REFLECTED IN AUGUSTINE'S OWN WRITING, e.g. IN CONFESSIONS 9:10.24-25 (THE VISION AT OSTIA SHARED BY AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER MONICA) WHERE ETERNAL WISDOM IS GRAMMATICALLY AND RHETORICALLY FEMININE.

2) FOR AUGUSTINE, AS FOR PLATO, THE OBJECT OF LOVE ALWAYS HAS THE ASPECT OF THE BEAUTIFUL. CF. THE RHETORICAL QUESTION 'IN CONFESSIONS 4:13.2O,- DO WE LOVE ANYTHING BUT WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL?

3) CONFESSIONS 7:1.1. CF. IBID 5:14.25: - IF ONLY I COULD HAVE CONCEIVED OF A SUBSTANCE THAT WAS SPIRITUAL, ALL THEIR [MANICHAEANS] STRONGHOLDS WOULD HAVE BEEN THROWN DOWN AND CAST OUT OF MY MIND.

4) SEE HOW CONFESSIONS 7:10.16 ANSWERS THE PROBLEM POSED IN CONFESSIONS 7:1.1F.

5) FROM THE SERMONS ON THE FIRST LETTER OF JOHN, 7:H.

6) ON THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER H.13 AND 14. 26.

7) AUGUSTINE, ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 1:5.5.  Augustine's great treatise On the Trinity is too advanced for our beginning students.

8) This is what Augustine's friend Alypius needed to learn in Confessions 7:19.25.  (The heresy which denies that Christ has a human soul is called
Apollinarianism).

9) e.g. CONFESSIONS 7:10.16 AND 10:6.8-26.37; ON FREE WILL 2:3.7-6.14: self as private inner world where ultimate meaning is found) is likely to be indebted to Augustine, directly or indirectly.

1O) THE FOUNDATIONS OF THIS WESTERN "EXPRESSIONIST° SEMIOTICS WERE LAID IN AUGUSTINE'S TREATISE ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 2:1.1-5.6, AS WELL AS HIS EARLY WORK ON THE TEACHER.

11) 'KEY TEXTS IN WHICH AUGUSTINE DEVELOPS THESE DISTINCTIONS ARE ANTHOLOGIZED IN BOURKE, THE ESSENTIAL AUGUSTINE PP.23-33 (See below, PART IV).

12) THIS DICTUM, WHICH IS QUOTED OR ALLUDED TO FREQUENTLY IN AUGUSTINE'S WORKS, IS TAKEN FROM AN ANCIENT AND INACCURATE TRANSLATION OF ISAIAH.

13) SO ON THE TRINITY 15:2.2 ("FAITH SEEKS, UNDERSTANDING FINDS') AND ENCHIRIDION §S ("IT IS BEGUN IN FAITH, PERFECTED IN VISION").

14) "JUSTIFIED BY FAITH" IS OF COURSE BIBLICAL LANGUAGE, USED ESPECIALLY BY PAUL IN THE LETTER TO THE ROMANS (e.g. 3:2H) AND GALATIANS (e.g. 2:16). "PURIFIED BY FAITH° ALSO HAS BIBLICAL ANTECEDENTS (e.g. HEBREWS 9:14 AND 10:22) BUT IN AUGUSTINE'S USAGE IT HAS DEEP PLATONIST RESONANCES AS WELL, RECOGNIZABLE TO READERS OF PHAEDO, WHICH MAKES A SYSTEMATIC CONTRAST BETWEEN PURE AND IMPURE SOULS (e.g. 67A).

15) AN ALLUSION TO MATTHEW 5:8--A FAVORITE PASSAGE OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISTS, FOR REASONS THAT WILL BE EVIDENT FROM THE PREVIOUS NOTE.

16) IN ANCIENT PHYSICS, EACH ELEMENT GRAVITATES TO ITS NATURAL PLACE--EARTH DOWNWARD, AND FIRE UPWARD TOWARD ITS HOME IN THE STARS: THIS IS THE BASIS FOR AUGUSTINE'S FAMOUS METAPHOR, "MY LOVE IS MY WEIGHT" IN CONFESSIONS 13:9.10. CHARITY HAS A WEIGHT THAT PULLS US METAPHORICALLY UPWARD. LIKE FIRE.

17) AN IMPORTANT NUANCE HERE IS THAT THERE IS NO SIN IN LOVING EARTHLY THINGS SO LONG AS ONE DOES SO IN THE MODE OF USE RATHER THAN ENJOYMENT (UTENDO. NOT FRUENDO). IT IS LIKE THE WAY TRAVELERS CAN USE THE REFRESHMENT OF AN INN ON A LONG AND WEARY JOURNEY, EVEN THOUGH THEY DO NOT TRUE REST AND PEACE UNTIL THEY FIND THEMSELVES AT HOME (ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 1:3F).  AUGUSTINE IS NOT ONE OF THOSE MODERNS WHO THINKS THE JOURNEY IS MORE IMPORTANT  THAN THE DESTINATION!  ON THE CONTRARY, IT IS ONLY THE DESTINATION THAT GIVES MEANING TO THE JOURNEY. CONCUPISCENCE IS LIKE PREFERRING THE INN TO HOME, STAYING WITH CALYPSO OR NAUSICAA RATHER THAN CONTINUING THE ODYSSEY BACK TO PENELOPE.

18) IN PARTICULAR ALBRECHT DIHLE, THE THEORY OF WILL IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY (U. OF CALIFORNIA, 19$2). Cf. ALSO ALASDAIR MCINTYRE, WHOSE JUSTICE? WHICH RATIONALITY? (NOTRE DAME, 1988) PP. 156ff, WHICH PLACES THIS AUGUSTINIAN INVENTION IN THE CONTEXT OF A SWEEPING NARRATIVE OF THE HISTORY OF WESTERN THOUGHT ABOUT THE PERSON.

19) CONFESSIONS 7:16.22. RECALL THAT "PERVERSION" HAS THE ROOT MEANING OF "TURNING AWAY." HENCE THE PERVERTED WILL IS "TWISTED AWAY FROM YOU, O GOD, THE HIGHEST SUBSTANCE, TO LOWER THINGS" (ibid.)

20) SEE PLATO'S BRILLIANT AND IMMENSELY INFLUENTIAL DESCRIPTION OF LOVE AS A KIND OF UNCONTROLLABLE DIVINE MADNESS IN P 250E-253C AND SYMPOSIUM 215A-218B, AND COMPARE PETER BROWN, AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, p. 155

21) FOR THIS STRIKING AUGUSTINIAN THEME, CF. CONFESSIONS 3:6.11 (GOD IS 'MORE INWARD THAN MY INMOST SELF") AND 10:26.38 ("YOU WERE WITHIN, I WAS WITHOUT," I.E. AUGUSTINE WAS ATTACHED TO OUTWARD THINGS BY CONCUPISCENT LOVES AND THUS UNABLE TO SEE GOD WITHIN).
 

IV. Some Biographical Recommendations

1. A. Translations of the Confessions
   1. F.J. Sheed (Hackett) does the best job with the electrifying high poetry of Augustine's writing. Peter Brown's wonderful introduction almost makes up for the lack of explanatory notes.
   2. Rex Warner (Mentor books, Dutton Signet) takes the prize for sheer clarity and readability. It includes a brief introduction by Vernon Bourke, but no notes or Scriptural references.
   3. H. Chadwick (Oxford) is the most learned translation, with excellent scholarly notes that will, however, often be of use more to the teacher than to the student.
   4. John K. Ryan (Image) is pedestrian but reliable, with copious notes at a quite elementary level, sometimes imposing rather flatfooted "Vatican I" style interpretations on the text.
   5. E.B. Pusey (various publishers) is an outstanding 19th-century translation still in print, written in a sonorous, self-consciously lofty style that adds an extra layer of difficulty to an already difficult text. Not recommended for our students.
   6. R.S.Pine-Coffin (Penguin) goes too far in the direction of paraphrase, obscuring both the logic and the poetry of the Confessions. Not recommended.
    
2. B. Teachable texts other than Confessions:
   1. On Free Will (also translated On Free Choice of the Will) is an early work that a philosopher might consider teaching. It is densely argued but does not delve into the technical theological issues of grace and predestination that occupy Augustine's later treatises on the will. Hackett has a inexpensive paperback edition.
   2. On Christian Doctrine would be a possibility for theologians to consider. In this treatise Augustine lays down key distinctions that were formative for medieval theology, such as uti/frui and signum/res. There is a paperback edition in the Library of Liberal Arts series, now published by MacMillan.
   3. Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love is Augustine' s own brief introduction to his mature theology of charity and grace. It includes a classic and frighteningly consequential exposition of his doctrine of predestination. There is a paperback edition by Regnery Gateway.
   4. Selections from City of God are worth considering, especially for philosophers and political theorists. Image Books has an abridged edition, Penguin a complete edition. For a focus strictly on Augustine's political theory there are two collections of his Political Writings (by Hackett and by Regnery Gateway) which combine selections from City of God with selections from Augustine's letters, in which he deals with crucial matters of practical politics such as the legal persecution of the Donatist schism.
   5. The Essential Augustine, edited by Vernon Bourke in a Hackett paperback edition, contains an anthology of excerpts, mainly philosophical.
    
3. C. Good secondary literature to start with:
   1. For Historians : Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (paperback from U. of California). One of the great biographies of all time, this highly readable book provides an introduction to Augustine' s social and historical world as well as his life and thought.
   2. For Teachers of Literature : Robert J. 0' Connell, S.J., Soundings in Augustine's Imagination (paperback from Fordham U. Press). An engaging study of Augustine' s literary imagery--higher and lower worlds, soul as wayfarer, God as mother who caresses the head of her child--illuminating the poetic logic and religious power of the Confessions. The later chapters get rather specialized, but the first three chapters are a terrific introduction to how Augustine' s mind and literary imagination work.
   3. For Philosophers Plotinus, Enneads (Penguin has published a generous selection of the most important Enneads in the wonderful MacKenna translation, but the smaller selection in the Hackett Essential Plotinus, translated by 0' Brien, is also good). Plotinus is probably the only great philosopher that Augustine read extensively. Look especially at Enneads 1: 6, " On Beauty " (Augustine's favorite), 5: 1, " On the Three Primary Hypostases" (a primer on neo-Platonist ontology that influenced many of the Church Fathers) and 4:3, "On the Soul", 1:8 "On What and Whence is Evil" (Plotinus' treatment of the burning issue of Augustine's early intellectual life), and 4: 8 "On the Soul' s Descent into the Body" (Plotinus' account of the Fall).
   4. For Theologians : Burnaby, Amor Dei. A look at Augustine' s spirituality from the vantage point of its key concept, the love of God.
    
4. 1. J. 0' Donnell, Confessions (Oxford, 1992), includes Latin text plus two volumes of up-to-date commentary in English.
   2. A. Solignac (Biblioteque Augustinienne) Les Confessions, an old standard, containing Latin text with French translation, extensive introduction and superb notes.
    

Augustinian Themes in the Modern Period (ACS 1001):  Selected Faculty Statements

Dr. Margaret Connolly, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

From its beginnings, Core Humanities has made one of its guidelines the exploration of an Augustinian theme in the "modem" semester of the program. In February, 1997, a workshop on "Augustinian Themes in the Modem Period" was convened, with three chief purposes in mind: to make visible to ourselves how we carry out this guideline at the present moment, to make multiple models available to new faculty, and to facilitate further thought among faculty already engaged in the endeavor. To accommodate diverse teaching schedules, two sessions of the workshop were held. At the first, presentations were made by Drs. Phillip Cary and Emmet McLaughlin, which are found in published form elsewhere in this manual. At the second, Drs. Earl Bader and Michael J. Scanlon, 0. S.A. discussed their approaches to Augustinian themes. Fr: Scanlon's remarks followed, broadly, the shape of his brief statement published below, while Dr. Bader plumbed the Jungian section of his course description, ex awning overlaps between Augustine and Jung with regard to the shadow, inwardness or care of the soul, dreams and symbols, and love.

In preparation for the workshop, faculty were asked to describe how they treated Augustinian themes in their courses. A few of the more detailed statements are reproduced below, including those of Fr. Scanlon and Dr. Bader. They represent a sampling of where we were on this issue some five years into the Core Humanities Program. Traces of the early days of the program, when there were. prescribed texts for the modem period, can still be discerned; certainly the influence of the current list of suggested modem authors and texts shapes the treatment of Augustine. One statement has been updated following the week-long intensive seminar on Augustine sponsored by the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in Summer 1997, attended by several Core Humanities faculty. Future sessions of that seminar, as well as continued faculty development initiatives within Core Humanities, are expected to advance the appropriation of Augustine to the next level of sophistication and depth. The faculty statements of Spring 1997 published here are one effort to develop and extend among ourselves a culture of literacy (to borrow the title of the summer seminar) "In Dialogue with Augustine. "

Dr. Earl Bader, English Department

This course explores texts that interrogate the enlightenment project, Descartes, and the scientific method. The two writers I use right at the beginning of the course to play off against Descartes are Pascal and Marquez. Pascal, as a mathematician and a collaborator with Descartes as well as a Christian apologist, is a natural. I can use as many or as few of the Pensees as I want. Pascal's electric prose style enacts and embodies his anguish of uncertainty. His idea of The Bet paves the way for Kierkegaard and the idea of being utterly committed to one's choices. Marquez introduces a nonEuropean tone of voice and cadence with his "magical realism" . A short story like "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" raises the whole idea of psychic phenomena which science doesn't catch in its cause-and-effect net.

Students actually respond well to Hegel and the idea of a developing world consciousness, the idea that only now is God beginning to become God, that Jesus didn't know he was God until the cross, to process theology. Hegel lets me say things about Teilhard and the idea of a noosphere and an Omega point. I've used a range of selections from Kierkegaard over the years. EitherlOr raises the idea that choice involves the whole of being, that the chooser must be utterly immersed in the thing chosen. Fear and Trembling explores Kierkegaard's retelling of the Abraham and Isaac story and the concept of faith where one cannot know. Sickness Unto Death raises the notion that death makes life possible and that we are in despair because we are not able to die authentically.

Dostoevsky' s Notes From Underground is a brilliant and devastating critique of the whole enlightenment project and the idea that we can engineer human happiness a la Crystal Palace. Dostoevsky raises questions about the necessity of sin and evil and what happens in a planned city like St. Petersburg which makes no allowance for man's fallen state. Rilke's "Ninth Duino Elegy" is a wonderful poem about man as the shepherd of Being and why this earth needs us to take it into our awareness. Rilke raises Heideggerian ideas without students having to fight through Heidegger' s prose style. I've tried Heidegger in the past but with minimal success. Like Heidegger, Rilke believes that we are already rooted in Being by our very existence, that Being itself is languaged, that language is the house of Being. Rilke lets me think about why we need metaphor and poetry, and to loop back to Descartes' dream of a language of mathematical exactness.

The thinker who allows me the greatest flexibility in raising Augustinian themes is Carl Jung, whom I teach in tandem With Freud. Jung's whole life was dedicated to giving his Calvinist minister father' s faith back to him on a new basis, using psychology to reclaim theology. I use his last essay "Approaching The Unconscious " (1961) written at the end of his life where he responds to the atomic bomb, the Iron Curtain, and the Nazi death camps as well as talking about persona/shadow and the collective unconscious. For Jung, God is a psychic fact and comes to us in dreams and symbols whether we ask for this to happen or not. Jung felt deeply that psychiatry let him do science and the humanities, physiology and art at the same time.


Dr. Phillip Cary, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

The Augustinian themes for my CHS 1001 course this semester come from Pope John Paul II, whose encyclical The Splendor of Truth develops a very Augustinian anthropology as the basis for a discourse about moral Truth, conscience and freedom. We begin the semester by reading portions of this text, and we end by revisiting it in conjunction with readings from Nietzsche, who develops a diametrically opposed view of moral Truth. For the Pope, moral Truth structures the universe and made our hearts for Itself, while for Nietzsche, the very idea of moral Truth literally makes us sick. I take Nietzsche to be articulating the logical conclusion of one strand of modem thought, whose aim is to find freedom from precisely the sort of objective view of moral Truth that is represented so powerfully by the Pope.

Exactly which Augustinian themes will come to the fore awaits our actual reading of the texts. But one theme is the modem concern with freedom, usually defined as a liberty of indifference ("I get to do whatever I want") contrasted with an Augustinian understanding of freedom as the power to enjoy the Good (which, Augustine thinks , is what I really want). Behind this Augustinian <and Platonic, and Pauline) view of freedom lies a fundamental conviction about the triangular relation between self, God and world: God is the Truth our minds desire to know and the Good we most desire to have, and our very self is therefore oriented toward him; moreover the created world is good in that it is designed as the road to him (and can still serve that purpose despite being impaired by the Fall), while the social authority of church and Christian tradition is instituted to teach us how to follow this road rightly.

Every one of these Augustinian concepts becomes problematic in the modem world -- or conversely offers itself as a solution to modem problems. So in between Nietzsche and the Pope we will read stories which represent key modem concerns about self, world, and ultimate moral Truth, and see how the Pope's Augustinian concerns play when run through those stories. In Paradise Lost we will look at the notion of a universe structured by moral Truth and the possibility of rebellion against it, as represented most eloquently by that very modem character, Milton's Satan. In Pride and Prejudice we watch an intelligent, good-humored and kind-hearted character maneuver through a foolish social world with stultifying mores, and make her life (and others' ) come out right despite it all, with the help of a difficult but faithful friend and perhaps a smidgeon of divine grace. And in Huckleberry Finn we watch an honest and naive character in a profoundly corrupt social world wrestle with his own corrupted conscience (which tells him that returning his best friend to slavery is the only right thing to do).

Prof. Joseph Casino, History Department

The theme of this course, "The Pursuit of Happiness, " was actually suggested to me by my reflections on St. Augustine's Confessions and his City of God, and by my questioning of the exact meaning of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. It struck me that throughout history, great thinkers in wrestling with questions about religion, law, rights, freedom, justice, opportunity, beauty, truth, and goodness, were fundamentally talking about human happiness. I thought it would be fascinating to compare the uses of that term over a long period of time -essentially to compare the world of St. Augustine, and his intellectual descendants, with the world of Thomas Jefferson, and his intellectual descendants. Over the past several semesters, I have put together a selection of readings, discussions, and films which address this fundamental question.

Since I always teach the section of the Villanova Seminar which begins with 1650, none of the readings and discussions is based directly on St. Augustine. But if St. Augustine and his ideas are not explicitly part of the requirements for this course, the tradition of his thought is definitely implicit throughout. I assume that most of my students have read in Confessions and City of God in CHS 1000, and so we can simply refer to those writings if need be. In discussing something like the pursuit of happiness, it is nearly impossible not to refer to St. Augustine's thoughts.

For example, we begin with a premise that there is no question about humanity's desire for happiness. St. Augustine said, "It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy" (City of God, Book X, Chapter 1). And he asked, "Is not the happy life that which all desire, which indeed no one fails to desire?" (Confessions, Book X, pars 29). Now, we may not read St. Augustine on the universality of the desire for happiness; but when we quote Blaise Pascal, "Man wishes to be happy, and only wishes to be happy, and cannot wish not to be so" (Pensees, 169), are we not invoking an Augustinian idea?

In any case, what we are about is something voiced by St. Augustine when he asked, "But who are happy, or how they become so, these are questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs endless and angry controversies ... (City of God, Book X, Chapter 1). In class, we generate considerable debate over such issues as what can and should produce happiness, the conflicting claims of duty and happiness, individual happiness versus the common good, the completeness of happiness, and the distinction between temporal and eternal happiness -- all topics originally entertained in St. Augustine's writings. When we read Hobbes's Leviathan on the absolute necessity of the state in promoting human happiness or Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality on the failures of the state in that regard, we are always ready to bring in St. Augustine's comments on the Roman Empire for a comparative assessment. St. Augustine's frequent comments on the transitory nature of happiness not rooted in God are always in evidence in our discussions of the temporal, as opposed to the eternal, happiness found in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby When we read in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding how desire, unregulated by understanding, often drives the will to will short-term pleasures over long-term happiness, it is St. Augustine's explanation that the reason men do not always seek happiness in the truth is "because they are more strongly taken up with other things which have more power to make them miserable, than that which they so faintly remember to make them happy" that is being reiterated (Confessions, Book X, pars 33). And of course, the Platonic elements in St. Augustine are there when we begin to discuss Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method.

More specifically, at least one of the four essays required by me involves the students in a comparison between St. Augustine's thoughts and those of writers after 1650. The proposition which they are asked to support or refute with ideas from our post-1650 writers is one found in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. All three argue, in their very different ways, that when men say that what they want is happiness, they imply that, having it, they would ask for nothing more. If they are asked why they want to be happy, they find it difficult to give any reason except "for its own sake. " They can think of nothing beyond happiness for which happiness serves as a means or a preparation. True happiness has finality; it is the summum bonum. The momentary "feeling" of happiness does not last; it leaves another and another such moment to be desired. Therefore, "feeling" happy is not the same thing as "being" happy, because it lacks finality. This is evident in St. Augustine's distinction between "use" and "enjoyment" in On Christian Doctrine (Book I, Chapters 3-5). The students must frame their essays in the form of a dialogue between the "modem" authorities (including themselves) and the "ancients" (Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas). In preparation for this essay, the students are given a brief refresher on the ideas of the " ancients " in this regard.

Dr. Margaret Connolly, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

I have taught Augustinian themes in the modem period in two ways, with different syllabi, the first time dealing with the question of evil in human nature, and the second time considering free will and finding meaning in one' s life. In the first syllabus, I focused first on light then on dark aspects of human history, followed by a coda. The enlightenment texts emphasized the privileging of rationality -- as opposed to authority, tradition, or scripture -as the instrument for determining truth in the sciences (Descartes) and later in religion, as well as goodness in the social and political order. Romantic texts were Treated partially as a reaction against all this rationality, but largely as a continuing enthronement of the self-defining self, the self not limited by referenced to context, community, or tradition. The authors read in the enlightenment and romantic periods had for the most part an implicit or explicit assumption of the goodness, reliability, and improvability of human nature (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, The Declaration of Independence, Emerson, Whitman). The course then turned to slavery (Frederick Douglass), imperialism ("Heart of Darkness"), and the holocaust (Night), in texts that make a confrontation with evil unavoidable. The coda of the course dealt with Christian responses to evil, in particular the rescue of Jews during World War II.

The second syllabus was developed partly in response to the number of times I had heard students say in the classroom, when discussing a character/persona in a text (fictional or non-fictional), "Well, he didn't have any choice. " Augustine, once he made the transition from Manichaeanism, was among the figures heavily involved with exploring the concept of free will in Western thought (his ideas on the subject evolved throughout his lifetime). The theme for the course was set with Viktor Frankl's text Man's Search for Meaning. There he discusses his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, establishing that even when the most extreme limits are placed on freedom of action, still there are constant choices to be made between better and worse ways of responding to reality and shaping one's self. Another parallel between Augustine and Frankl lies in Frankl's assertion that one finds the meaning of one's life only when one focuses outside the self, whereas focus on the self creates neurosis. In The Confessions, once Augustine turns his focus toward God, understood as other than himself <as opposed to Augustine's Manichaean understanding of self as a part of the divine), the misery of his early adulthood vanished. These frameworks concerning choice and success or failure in finding meaning in life could be used with virtually any set of texts in the humanities. My reading list included texts by Moliere, Goethe, Anne Bronte, Jacobs, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Frank.

Dr. Steven Grosby, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

In my modem sequence of Core Humanities, I have four texts that explicitly take up matters of religion and, in particular, Christianity. The intention behind the selection of those four texts is to explore the different ways that religion and especially Christianity shape modem life. I shall briefly indicate the different ways the four texts do this, proceeding from the least obvious to the most obvious, the latter clearly containing Augustinian themes per se.

1) In Tocqueville's Democracy in America, I pay particularly close attention to those famous sections in the book on the relation between Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, and democracy.
2) In Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, my primary interest is not merely the evidently important relation between Christianity and modem economic life, but rather explaining to the students such concepts as asceticism and their importance for the conduct of their own lives.
3) Van Gennep's Rites of Passage is the classic religious/anthropological investigation into such religious patterns of transformation as baptism, etc.
4) It is especially in the great novel The Silence by the Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo where many Augustinian and explicitly Christian themes are developed. Indeed, one of the characters of the novel is named Monica. Of the various themes in the novel, perhaps the central one is Endo's exploration of the relationship between Jesus and Judas through the relationship of the characters Rodrigues and Kichijuro. In The asignment for the first paper of the semester, I have the students explore another theme of the novel, namely the difficulties posed in realizing the universal mission of Christianity.

Dr. Marylu Hill, Assistant Director, Villanova Center for Liberal Education

I use St. Augustine as a point of reference frequently in the modern section of the Augustine and Culture Seminar. The Confessions, for example, provides a useful starting point with a comparison between Augustine's concept of personal revelation of God's grace through the word of God (tolle lege) and the Reformation, which helps set up the Enlightenment's concern with the self versus the society. Augustine's battle with a conflicted sense of self and the angst of self-consciousness further serves to anticipate the collapse of the autonomous and unified self in the 19th and 20th centuries. Augustine on free will is clearly pertinent at this point as well. As a class, we will debate Augustine's ideas on original sin within the framework of post-Darwinian philosophy and theology; in addition we will address Augustine's championing of a patriarchal church/society in the wake of feminist theory and multicultural concerns.

Augustine sets up a surprisingly useful framework of concepts and questions for the late-twentieth-century reader. Most useful for my sections of CHS 1001 is his concern for language and text -- and his view of the instability of the text and the fleeting quality of human language (oral rather than written). Augustine offers interesting and fruitful parallels to post-modem debates about language, texts, and meaning; any number of post-modem philosophers could be brought into the discussion -- I might use Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida as starting points. But the texts I could see using with undergraduates in connection with Augustine are as follows: Umberto Eco' s The Name of the Rose -- which brings in post-modem semiotics along with medieval theology; Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing -- which explores the problem of mistaking the sign for the signifier in the realms of art and love (love also being an Augustinian theme); and T.S. Eliot' s poems The Waste Land (which incorporates quotations from The Confessions and which portrays an ailing community in need of healing) and, perhaps even sharper regarding the Augustinian element, "Ash Wednesday" (with its central movement from human words -- portrayed as noise and whirling motion -- to the silence of the eternal Word -- the stillpoint of a turning world). All the above works address problems of reading and interpreting; by comparing Augustine is finely-tuned awareness of language and the slippery nature of interpretation of signs to some of the philosophers and literary works listed above, we can chart the parallels as well as note some of the crucial differences that mark Augustine' s stance in the modem world.

Dr. Mercedes Julia, Modern Languages and Literatures Department

Book VIII of St. Augustine's Confessions is read and discussed in class in relation to the confessions that permeate Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment. We make a distinction between St. Augustine, having total faith and confidence in the forgiveness of God, and Raskolnikov who is lost, doubts and can only confess to another person. Sonia, Raskolnikov's girl friend, in the novel represents the Christian values. Students are encouraged to see the difference between the times and the crisis of modem man. In Dostoyevsky, however, what is interesting is that salvation for the protagonist can only come about when he has accepted those Christian values that he thought he could ignore. Dostoyevsky makes a strong point in the novel presenting those values as part of the human make-up, our basic instincts of solidarity with humanity and a force unknown to us that we may call God.

At another point of the seminar we look at two Chapters of Ortega y Gasset's essay, The Revolt of the Masses (Chapters 7 & 8). Here Ortega speaks of the ingratitude of modem individuals towards the history that has preceded their times. According to Ortega, the majority of people are ignorant of and ungrateful for what they have received from the sacrifices of other epochs. The characteristic of our time, according to Ortega, "is not that the vulgar believes itself super-excellent and not vulgar, but that the vulgar proclaims and imposes the rights of vulgarity or vulgarity as a right. " In class we discuss the meaning of excellence according to Ortega, which is very much linked to the Christian values: effort to become the best you can become, and kindness and gratitude toward your fellowman.

Throughout the seminar, a set of values is offered and explained in light of the different periods the Western world undergoes: i.e. romanticism, modernism and postmodernism. At the end, the students have gained an understanding of the causes and motivations that have led to the modem spiritual crisis the world is experiencing, together with a sense of our importance in bringing about positive change, at least in the lives we live and the lives of those we come in contact with. Students are encouraged to write the final essay on a topic dealing with some of the issues covered during the seminar. Those interested in the topic of the Confessions, for example, are encouraged to read Rousseau's Confessions, and the book of Peter Axthelm, The Modern Confessional Novel, where a study of differences from St. Augustine to today is presented.

Dr. Debra Romanick, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

"With [God] as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel ... I entered and with my soul's eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind. " (Confessions, VII. x)

In his Confessions, St. Augustine reveals that the path to God is an inward one: in order to find what is above himself, he must first enter within himself. With its inward looking account, the Confessions ushers in the modem tradition of inner journeys and introspective writing. In this course, we shall consider a variety of "inner journeys " which took place several hundred years after St. Augustine and in very different contexts -sometimes occasioned by outer journeys. Where do these more modem inner journeys take us? In what way does each one treat St. Augustine's idea that descending within oneself leads one above and beyond oneself?

Descartes' Discourse on Method presents us with an inner journey in search of certain knowledge. Despite its inward-looking groundwork, however, Descartes' project looks outward towards the discovery of physical laws which govern the external world, and which could form the basis of modem science. In class, we shall discuss the relation between scientific discovery and moral truth, and whether Descartes, like the Manichaeans, is a dualist who is at heart a materialist. A short selection of Blake' s poems will challenge the primacy of scientific logic as the means to discovering human truth.

Turning to Austen's Emma , we shall see an inner journey where the protagonist must overcome her own pride to discover the intricacies of human life. Pride as a block to self-awareness and wisdom will provide another Augustinian echo. A lecture by Cardinal Newman will situate the issue of self-knowledge within the framework of the university -- and the university, in tam, within an order proceeding from God. What is the relation between a liberal education and self-knowledge?

Freud's Five Lectures will introduce the idea of the unconscious, and develop the notion of an inner journey as bringing to light inner struggles. We shall consider what constitutes the larger order which Freud's psychology presupposes, comparing his account with Augustine's similarly psychological account of internal struggle. Conrad will offer a voice expressing distrust of inner journeys which lose touch with concrete realities.

Finally, a selection of Holocaust writers -- Levi, Frankl, and Borowski -will provide the opportunity for us to discuss inner journeys under extreme conditions, and in connection with the theme of suffering and evil. Our last text, Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, will offer an account of how one man's inner journey of suffering led to psychological insight and spiritual hope.

Dr. Michael J. Scanlon, O.S.A.,Theology and Religious Studies Department

The theme of my course is "The Meaning of the Self in Modem and Contemporary Thought. " To the extent that Augustine can be understood as anticipating modem anthropology in his "mediation of personhood to the West, " I refer to this thesis in our exploration of the authors chosen for the course.

1. Descartes - In discussing the Meditations I show the similarity between "Augustinian interiority" and Descartes' "turn within" to find a secure foundation for knowledge in his clear and distinct ideas. " I also point out the differences between the two in Augustine's discovery of divine immanence as "the Light through whom we see the light" and Descartes' focus on the self as the "thinking thing" wherein he proves the existence of God as a basis for the security of this poetic self.

2. Pascal - Pascal presents a " modem Augustinian self, " formed by the influence of Augustine' s anthropological themes of sin and grace in the context of the religious conflicts of 17th-century France wherein both Catholics and Protestants understand themselves in Augustinian terms (Catholic Jansenism and Calvinist Protestantism).

3. Kant - Kant's critical "turn to the subject" continues the Cartesian project and is, again, similar to Augustinian inwardness. The differences, of course, are obvious -- but Kantian "transcendental" philosophy is broadly within the Augustinian trajectory. There are also interesting connections between Kantian political philosophy and Augustine's political theology. Then there is the interesting issue of Karat' s (and modernity's) ideal of autonomy vs. Augustinian theonomy -- but with ethical connections between the two in terms freedom and the " sobriety" of Karat' s ontological ethics in relation to Augustine' s ethical realism.

4. Chopin - the emergence of feminism raises the interesting issue of "Augustine and Women, " a topic of increasing attention today -- given the fact that so many contemporary Augustinian scholars are women.

5. Grenz - Grenz's little book, A Primer on Postmodernism , is a helpful introduction to the contemporary attempt to move away from the monological self of modernity to the contemporary ideal of the dialogical self. Here Augustinian personalism has much to be retrieved -- his erotic search for truth in conversation with others, etc. Also the contemporary linguistic turn recalls Augustine the rhetor and his love of language (the venditor verborum!).

Augustinian Themes in the Modern Period
 

Villanova University Workshops, organized by Dr. Margaret Connolly

I.    Augustine on Sin and Grace,  Dr. R. Emmet McLaughlin, History Department

At the heart of Augustine's theology lies a problem, sin, and a solution, grace. Both concepts are alien to our students, especially the first. But having no grasp of sin and the fallen human nature that that implies means that our students have real difficulties understanding what Augustine wants to teach. If one does not recognize the problem, one has troubles understanding the solution. I often compare the sinful nature of fallen humankind to alcoholism and the process of salvation to the 12 Step Program of AA and other groups. (This is no coincidence. AA's approach is classically Christian, but secularized.) Like alcoholism being sinful is the result of one's own decisions. One knows that one should not drink/sin, but one simply cannot help oneself. Also like alcoholism sin is self-destructive as well as being a social problem. As in the 12 Step Program, redemption from sin requires that one must finally acknowledge that one is not in control and needs help from an outside force. For Augustine this outside help was grace. It was absolutely essential. To believe that one could save oneself without God's aid and intervention was sinful in itself, and thus part of the problem and not the solution.

Augustine' s vision of fallen human nature, and that means everyone after Adam and Eve with the sole exception of Christ, is very dark. Strangely, it centers on another key motif in Augustine: love. Both sin and grace are defined by love. However, unlike our students who often think that love itself is an absolute good, for Augustine it was what you loved that was determinative. True love is love of God and love of others because of God. Sin is self-love or love of others without reference to God. And love itself is not the sentimental or romantic love. For Augustine love provides one with their fundamental orientation to existence. If one thinks of self-love in terms of self-interest one can see what Augustine means. Even when one does not consciously think about it, one's actions and choices are driven by self-interest. A measure of the depravity of fallen human nature is that we are all driven by self-interest, and what is worse, accept it as natural and acceptable. But, Augustine would argue, this is actually false self-interest. True self-interest for humans is precisely love of God. There are three premises behind this belief. 1) God really exists, 2) God made everything, 3) God maintains everything in existence. As the source of our being, as the source of our nature God is like air and food. He nourishes us. Or, in a simile borrowed from the Platonic tradition, God is the sun. He gives us life and well-being. To turn away from God would be equivalent to a plant turning away from the sun. It would wither and die. Sin is turning away from God. It is self-destructive behavior. It is its own punishment. Grace on the other hand is the warmth and light of the sun bringing health and nourishment. To change the simile somewhat: The human heart is about the size of a fist. The sinful heart is a cold and clenched fist until grace opens it and gives it warmth and life. The open hand is now able to both receive gratefully and to give freely. Grace allows humans to truly love God and other human beings in an unselfish way.

Though self-love informs all sin for Augustine, it is perhaps best represented by what was for Augustine the worst of the deadly sins and the root of all evil: Pride. This is captured best, I think, by Milton' s Satan who declares he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. For Augustine, in the face of God' s goodness and our ingratitude, we have nothing whatsoever of which to be proud. Rather we should be "proud" of God and praise him. This is the reason why humility is such a virtue, and not the false humility of those who are assured of their own undoubted worth, but the real thing. I am afraid that Augustine would find the contemporary concern for self-esteem to be deeply sinful. I hesitate to think of what he would say about the banners in Connelly center about Wildcat Pride. And this points up a problem, especially for those who teach the second half of CHS. At least with regard to these issues Augustine is fundamentally antimodem. The pursuit of human autonomy which has characterized Western Culture at least since the Enlightenment is quite wrong-headed and sinful for Augustine. Rather we should acknowledge our utter dependence upon God. Only in this way can humans achieve wholeness and happiness.

If modernity- is a problem for Augustine, perhaps post-modernity offers some opportunities. As many of the old certainties are undermined a sense of being lost and unsatisfied grows. Augustine would have recognized this. He himself, as a young man, had wandered through the philosophies and religious movements of his day before finding a safe harbor in Christianity. In the City of God he would argue that Christianity provided the only escape from the assured mutual destruction of the various competing philosophical schools. He was also deeply reassured by the fact that he was not left to his own devices, but could rely upon a good and merciful God to guide and save him. Students may find this side of Augustine comprehensible and attractive.

Since my own interests are in the pre-modem era I cannot suggest many readings to help in the CHS 1001. 1 have already mentioned Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). Pascal's Pensees (1657-58?) would also be useful. His vision is deeply Augustinian, but as one of the makers of the scientific revolution, he already looks forward to the modem era. Students often find him fascinating. Finally, C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters (1942). This exploration of the nature of human sinfulness through the medium of an exchange of letters between an experienced devil (Screwtape) and his subordinate (Wormwood) about the temptation of a young Christian convert is both amusing and solidly grounded.


II.  Two Contrasts, Dr. Phillip Cary, Former Arthur J. Ennis Fellow

Augustine loved to think in contrasts. Today I will mention two of them, one very familiar, one rather less so. Both have been influential in the modem period, although the typical modem view evaluates them differently than Augustine does.

1. Eternal and Temporal Beauty. This contrast, which structures much of the narrative of Augustine's Confessions, is one of the great themes of Western literature. Every poet who sighs over the mutability and transience of mortal beauty is touching a theme dear to Augustine' s heart, though often the poets draw a very unAugustinian moral from this very Augustinian theme. Everyone agrees that to love what can perish is to make oneself vulnerable to the grief of loss. Therefore Augustine urges us to set our hearts on the supreme and eternal Beauty which is God, who can never be taken away from us by death. The poets usually give other advice, along the lines of carpe them ("seize the day"). Robert Herrick, for instance, famously advises virgins to make much of time and "gather ye Rosebuds while ye may." Such poetic advice is sometimes cheerfully hedonist, at other times darkened by the shadow of death, and often both, as in John Gay' s song about the pleasures of youth: Let us dance and sport today Ours is not tomorrow Youth's a bird Ries swift away Age is naught but sorrow Dance and sing Time's on the wing Life never knows a return of Spring... Anyone familiar with Western literature will be able to multiply examples of this sentiment-a typical example of an Augustinian theme which modernity has turned, as it were, upside down.

2. Reason and Authority is a crucial epistemological contrast in Augustine' s thought. It is the difference between seeing something for yourself (with your mind's eye) and believing what you are told. We need to do both, Augustine argues, because although our goal is always to see for ourselves, we must start out believing what we do not yet understand. This is specialty true in religion, where the eye of our mind is not yet pure and strong enough to see God, which is the goal of beatitude obtained by the blessed in heaven. Hence we must believe the divine authority of Church and Scripture.

Authority, in Augustine' s sense, is an epistemological rather than political category. It makes him think not of rulers but of teachers. A good teacher is an authority on his subject, be it grammar or rhetoric or religion. Believing in the authoritative teaching of the Church is thus a little like believing what your math teacher

Augustinian Themes in Modernity, tells you, even though you do not yet understand it for yourself. You see the Pythagorean theorem written down, you believe it's true (because your teacher tells you so, and you trust her authority) but you can't yet see the truth of it for yourself. According to Augustine, that's our situation as we come to God through the Church. We must begin by believing what we are told upon good authority, so that we may eventually come to understand for ourselves. As Augustine puts it (quoting an old translation of Isaiah 7:9) "Unless you believe, you shall not understand. "

Authority is an especially problematic notion in modernity, in large part because Reason stands to Authority as internal to external. While the vision of the mind' s eye is always our very own, an inner vision, authority comes to us from outside our own minds, confronting us with a claim to knowledge which does not originate with us--and thus it is something from which we can easily be alienated. Alienation from external authority is indeed a key theme of modem thought (as Jeffrey Stout has shown in his fine book, The Flight from Authority). Descartes and Locke could talk as if the authority of old books only hindered one' s search for real knowledge, and Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" essentially defined enlightenment as the turn from trust in authority to trust in reason. So once again we have a deeply Augustinian contrast which modernity tends to evaluate quite differently from Augustine himself.