← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Foreign. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust online at www.historyoffphilosophy.net. today's life and Augustine's Confessions When I was a graduate student, I enrolled in a seminar on Augustine. The first day of the course, the students filed in to find the professor sitting next to a portable radio which was playing some Miles Davis. We took our seats and waited for a few minutes, baffled, wondering whether we'd found our way to a music appreciation class by mistake. Finally, the professor turned the music off and explained that Augustine wrote the way Miles Davis played trumpet, improvising on traditional themes with the individuality of the artist revealed in the riffs. This illuminating comparison has obviously stayed with me, given that I still remember it almost 20 years later. That's the sort of teaching that inspired me as a student and perhaps planted in my mind that I might get away with mentioning Buster Keaton occasionally when I became a teacher myself. Of course, starting with an autobiographical episode like this is itself a rhetorical trick, and a trick that is typical of our age. Walk into any bookstore and you'll find shelves and shelves of autobiographies with their well worn narrative themes of personal struggle and redemption, their uneasy combination of retrospective self critique and carefully crafted self justification. It is hard for us to imagine that anyone needed to invent the idea of writing that sort of book. But someone did invent it at the dawn of the fifth century. The author, of course, was Augustine and the book was the Confessions. Like a Miles Davis record, it innovates by making familiar themes seem new. The conversion narrative of the Desert Father Anthony is mentioned in the very same breath as the climactic moment of Augustine's own conversion. We are meant to see Augustine's story within the context of literature on such Christian heroes as Anthony, but Antony is a hero who displays superhuman self control against supernatural enemies, literal demons of temptation. Augustine varies the theme by making himself all too human. His conversion story is told intimately and vividly, and Augustine depicts his own weaknesses with equal vividness. The effect is that the reader can identify with Augustine can imagine being in his position, thus the reader can imagine following his path. To use another 20th century comparison, Antony was the superman of ancient Christian literature, an almost otherworldly figure of unattainable virtue. Augustine was Spider man, whom we meet as a conflicted adolescent in search of himself and who remains prone to weakness and self doubt, just like the rest of us do. Augustine was not bitten by a radioactive spider, but by the philosophy bug. It came in the form of Cicero's dialogue, the Hortensius, which is now lost. Augustine read it as a young man while studying rhetoric and was converted to the cause of philosophy, not yet to the Christian faith. His mother, the long suffering and pious Monica, longed for Augustine to adopt her religion and but her belief was not shared by Augustine's father. He had other plans for the precocious young man. The family was not wealthy, but money was scraped together to send Augustine for a first rate education in his hometown of Thagaste and then Carthage, both on the northern African coast. For the time being, Augustine would follow his father's dream of riches on earth rather than his mother's dream of riches in heaven. It took a full 12 years after reading the Hortensius for Augustine to reach his moment of conversion. By that time he was in Milan where he had been pursuing a career as an up and coming rhetorician, earning his keep as a teacher and wasting his time on such tasks as a panegyric for the Emperor Valentinian II. Those 12 years take up most of the autobiographical part of the Confessions. As he writes, Augustine is in his 40s and looking back on his youthful search for a satisfying way to take up Cicero's exhortation to pursue philosophy. He is attracted by astrology and by a sect called the Manichaeans, named after their founding prophet Mani. In the Confessions, Augustine depicts the Manichaean teaching as one that appealed to his naive youthful impulses. In particular, he associates it with materialism and the Gnostic view of evil as a second principle opposed to God. After his conversion, Augustine would go on to write works in refutation of the Manichaeans. But as a young rhetoric student in Carthage, Augustine was impressed by the Manichaean doctrine. Disenchantment set in when he had a chance to meet a Manichaean teacher named Faustus, who struck Augustine as having more style than substance. Yet it was precisely the Manichaeans conception of substance that Augustine had difficulty shaking off. Again and again in the Confessions he explains that he could not help imagining God and also evil as physical, material things. God, for instance, he conceived as a body penetrating the cosmos the way that water soaks through a sponge. This is highly reminiscent of the Stoic understanding of God. So it's appropriate that Augustine was liberated by reading those anti Stoic philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry. He came across Latin versions of their writings translated by a man named Marius Victorinus. We'll come back to him in a future episode. Thanks to these books of the Platonists as he calls them, Augustine was finally able to abandon his materialist assumptions. Plotinus explained to his satisfaction that something could exist without being a body. Just as important, Plotinus theory that evil is a sort of non being or privation dispelled the Manichean idea of evil as an autonomous second principle. This section of the Confessions shows Augustine as closer to the attitude of a Clement than a Lactantius. Philosophy is not a target for mocking attack, but a useful bridge towards faith. On the other hand, Augustine emphasizes that the Platonist books did not teach him that the all important truths about the incarnation and sacrifice of God's Son. This is why even the combined forces of Cicero and the Platonists were unable to lead Augustine away from sin and self interest to a truly philosophical way of life. Only the example of Christ could speak to Augustine's will and not just his intellect. Paradoxically, he needed to will a change in his own will and this he remained unable to do. It was not for lack of good role models. In Milan he had not only his mother who had moved to be with him, but also access to the greatest cleric of his age, Ambrose. Augustine was pushed powerfully towards conversion by hearing Ambrose's sermons. He at first attended these simply to enjoy Ambrose's considerable rhetorical prowess. But in this case there was substance along with the style and Ambrose's message began to sink in. Yet not deep enough. Augustine tells us of his encounter with Ambrose a full three books prior to the story of his eventual conversion. The intervening sections of the Confessions provide a powerful illustration of that all too familiar human dilemma. Knowing what one should do and refusing to do it. Thanks to the dream team of Cicero, Plotinus and Ambrose, Augustine's mind has been converted. He rejects the false teachings of astrology and Manicheanism, accepting the existence of a good immaterial supreme God. But he is too tied to the pleasures of the flesh to react accordingly. Augustine compares his situation to that of a man who knows he needs to get out of bed but just can't summon the will to get up. I have to admit that this example sounds horribly familiar to me and I'm in good company if it was also used by Marcus Aurelius. In a more famous passage, Augustine describes himself as praying to God, make me chaste and temperate, but not yet such conflict within the will is one of the central themes of the Confessions and of Augustine's writings in general. The phenomenon has already been explored earlier in the narrative with the famous description of a young Augustine stealing fruit from a pear tree with his friends. The irony of the story, with its inevitable reminiscence of the Garden of Eden, is that Augustine did not even want the pears. The theft was an utterly perverse act. He was sinful for the sake of being sinful, something Augustine still finds difficult to understand years later as he writes the Confessions. The theme of internal conflict reaches a peak in the scenes leading up to Augustine's conversion, in which he is desperate with desire to become a Christian but unable to make himself do so. What ties him to his former life is, above all, sexual desire. As a young man, he had a mistress of many years with whom he fathered a son. Rather unfairly, he tries to connect this liaison to the Manichaeans. But neither the young Augustine nor the Manichaeans were as debauched as he would like us to believe. In fact, Augustine mentions in passing that he was faithful to the mistress through these years. And the modern reader is less likely to be shocked by the affair than by the casual way the unnamed woman is sent away when a marriage is arranged for Augustine. To be fair, Augustine does tell us that he was terribly upset at the time, though not so upset that he refrained from taking custody of their son. As for the woman's point of view, we are told only that she vowed never to take up with another man. I like to imagine Augustine's mistress getting together with Anthony the Great's sister, who was dispossessed and packed off to a nunnery by her brother. They might have shared some choice observations about the noble ascetic impulses of ancient Christianity. Our look at the ascetic movement a few episodes back makes it easier for us to understand Augustine's dilemma here. Why, we might be wondering, doesn't he just convert to Christianity and get married? It's not as if all Christians had to become celibate after all. But the Confessions makes clear that Augustine and several of his friends thought of Christian conversion as requiring renunciation of all worldly, a career, theatrical and gladiatorial shows, and above all, marriage and sexual relations. In the face of this all or nothing choice, Augustine faces an opponent more formidable than any Manichaean himself. His eventual victory comes in a garden where Augustine has been weeping over his inability to defeat his own desires. He suddenly hears a child's voice from nearby, chanting in Latin, tole, lege, take, read. Seizing up his copy of the Bible and opening it at random, he reads from Paul's letter to the Romans instructing him to put on Christ, put aside lust. Like Paul himself when he was knocked from the horse, Augustine is finally converted. As I've already mentioned, Augustine alludes to a different parallel, Antony the Great, who was similarly persuaded to give up his riches by reading the Bible. At this climactic point, we are still only in the eighth of the Confession's 13 books. The autobiographical portion continues on through book nine, with three story of Augustine's baptism and the death of Monica. Following a mystical vision shared by mother and son, it now becomes clear that Augustine is not content to write the first psychologically nuanced autobiography. He wants to write a psychologically nuanced autobiography that ends with a few metaphysical speculations on the nature of memory and time, and, for good measure, a bit of scriptural exegesis. But what does the story of Augustine's life have to do with the philosophy of time or a commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis? The temptation is to say that Augustine's was not just any life, and that he cannot tell his story without indulging in that most Augustinian of pursuits, faith seeking understanding. But it might be truer to say again that Augustine is offering his own story to us only as one particularly vivid example. His path to God is one we are all called to follow, and it raises questions that confront us all. When he looks back on his own life, how does his past manage to live on in his mind? Indeed, is his past anything more than a memory? Furthermore, the story we have just seen is one of Augustine overcoming his separation from God. But even his conversion can bring him to God only partially, precisely because he is a creature subject to change and imperfection, where God is eternal and perfect. Thus Augustine laments at the very end of his philosophical analysis of time that he is scattered across time rather than being fully and eternally present. The same point is made more generally in the final book, which uses the beginning of Genesis to explain how an eternal God can relate to the temporal world he creates. Thus, the autobiography is powerfully connected to the closing philosophical section. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the Whole Confessions is both philosophical and autobiographical. The theme of creation's separation from and return to God is approached in two ways. First by telling Augustine's life story, and then by examining what it means that we are all able to have life stories in the first place because we live in time and not in unchanging eternity. Even in this section, Augustine retains his habit of acute psychological observation. He asks, what is time? And then, as long as nobody asks me Then I know. The puzzles he raises about time were already raised by Aristotle and by skeptical philosophers who Augustine knew well, thanks to his exposure to Cicero. Indeed, in one early work, he criticized the academic skeptics. But there is no ancient text that explores the paradoxical nature of time as thoroughly as the 11th book of the Confessions. The fundamental problem is identified by Augustine when he asks how time can have any length. Past time is already gone, and future time has yet to arrive. That leaves only the present time to exist as having length. But a length of time, a month, a day, a minute, a second, cannot be present. Only this instant right now can be present, and that seems to have no length. Indeed, although Augustine doesn't mention this, Aristotle had described the present instant in Greek to nun, which literally means the now, as a durationless division or limit between past and future. So Augustine is like me when I'm failing to get out of bed in good company. He finds common cause with the Stoics too, when he says that if time exists, it needs to be some kind of extension or distension. But how can this be if time has no length? To solve this problem, Augustine turns to the example of a spoken phrase, giving the not very randomly chosen example Deus creator omnium, God, Creator of all. It takes time to utter these eight Latin syllables, so the sound of the entire phrase is never present as a whole, any more than every minute in an hour could be present all at once. Yet we have no difficulty hearing this phrase as a unity and understanding it. This can only be because our minds are at least, if we know a bit of Latin, remembering and interpreting the sound as it passes into our ears. We retain the parts of the phrase that have already sounded and anticipate the syllables yet to come. He also uses the example of hearing a song. Suppose you are listening to a Miles Davis trumpet solo. The solo may go on for minutes, but your mind is capable of putting it all together into one more or less coherent experience. Admittedly for you, its coherence may depend on how much you know about jazz theory, how and which part of Miles career it comes from. Augustine infers from these observations that it is the mind that creates temporal extension. A long past time is simply a memory of past events as having taken a long time to happen, and likewise for the expectation of a long future time. This account helps him solve another problem, too. It seems that the only things that exist are things that exist now, given that past things no longer exist and future things do not exist yet. But then, how can it be true to say for instance, that Socrates drank hemlock, or that there will be a Buster Keaton movie on TV tomorrow. This is a problem that still fascinates philosophers today. Some who are called presentists agree with Augustine that past and future things do not exist, hence their name. Disappointing for those who were expecting these to be philosophers who always show up with a nice present. Other philosophers who reject presentism attack the position in part by pressing this question about Socrates and Buster Keaton. What is it that makes past and future tense statements true if neither past nor future things exist in any sense? Already, back in the late 4th century, when he existed, Augustine was proposing an answer. Past and future things reside in our memory or expectation, and in that way they do exist presently. Whether you find this persuasive or not, I hope you'll join me in rejoicing that the Confessions is one thing from the past that does still exist. This work is one of Augustine's three masterpieces. It offers us not only one of the great life stories of antiquity, but also an ideal orientation for Augustine's contributions to the history of philosophy. It takes in all the themes of his career. The flirtation and then break with the Manichaeans prefigures a life dominated by polemic not only against these Manichaeans, but also against rival Christian sects, the Donatists and Pelagians. Augustine's internal conflict is resolved only with a kind of divine intervention. Take and read. This sums up Augustine's stance on human freedom, stance he developed in large part in his polemic against the Pelagians. According to the Augustinian view, we can succeed in this struggle only thanks to divine assistance. This is so because all of us inherit sin from Adam, a sin which we cannot remove through mere effort. God's grace is needed, which is why his son had to be sent and sacrificed for us. The Confessions also also display the complexity of Augustine's attitude towards pagan culture and especially the pagan philosophers. This question will again be central in the second of Augustine's masterpieces, the City of God. Here he criticizes pagan religion and political values and asks what relationship a committed Christian could have towards the secular political world. In the City of God, pagan philosophers come in for heavy criticism. Yet throughout his career, Augustine also draws on the philosophers, especially the Platonists. Their influence is felt even, or perhaps especially, in Augustine's most ambitious work of theology on the Trinity. Its project, already announced at the end of the Confessions, is to understand how humans are images of God and thus characterized by trinitarian relationships. In explaining this, Augustine develops new and innovative ideas in the philosophy of mind. Both of these masterpieces will be occupying us in future episodes, but first we're going to be staying with a theme suggested by that last book of the Confessions, where Augustine uses his philosophical analysis of time and eternity to interpret the opening verses of Genesis. We'll be turning to two shorter works on the teacher and on Christian teaching. These may not qualify as milestones on the order of Augustine's three masterpieces, but they will allow us to understand Augustine's views on communication, including the special kind of communication found in Scripture. So it would make me kind of blue if you didn't join me for Augustine on language. Next time on the history of philosophy without any gaps, SA.