The Mystery of Continuity. Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine (review)

476 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:3 JULY 1988 phy since Descartes, what can be said for and against the modes serves as an excellent introduction to philosophy itself. Approached with the authors' sophistication and open-mindedness, the modes turn out to be remarkably resilient. The study of them, so far from being antiquarian, should be a sine qua non of any budding epistemologist. Accessible as the book is to a wide readership, the authors have also produced a major scholarly work. They wear their learning wittily and modestly, but in all kinds of ways---textual emendations, elucidation of arcane references, comparative material from other ancient authors, etc.--they have advanced the subject at the cutting edge. This is particularly to be welcomed at a time when post-Aristotelian philosophy has become a major focus of interest. I have a few disagreements over details. The account of Academic scepticism (a4- ~5) is too bland; Arcesilaus and his successors were not "critics" as distinct from "positive sceptics." The "unknowability of everything"--which they did not claim to know (how could they?)--is consistently reported as their "doctrine," thesis, or philosophical position. Barnes and Annas (41) find "not the slightest force" in Sextus' argument which infers differences in the ways animals are affected by the same things from differences in the manner of their reproduction. I, on the other hand, find it highly plausible to suppose that oviparous creatures view the world differently from mammals . (Think too of the force attached by some people to prenatal experience, objections to test-tube babies, etc.) On page 3 ~ we read: "Animals... are not impressed by the same appearances from the same things." No. The correct translation, if "appearance " is used to translate phantasia, is: "animals... are not subject to the same appearances from the same things." Phantasiai cannot impress, or do anything: they are the impressions which external objects generate via the sense organs. I mention this point, trivial though it is in context, to register the hope that in the next edition, the authors will opt for "impression," not appearance, as their translation ofphantasia. (Clearly they would not have written, "animals... are not impressed by the same impressions from things.") "Appearance" buys its linguistic link with phainesthai at too high a price. Given its fundamental importance in the modes of scepticism, phantasia is much better translated by a word which unambiguously signifies, as "appearance" does not, the way the individual subject is affected. A. A. LONG University of California, Berkeley. Jaroslav Pelikan. The Mystery of Continuity. Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. Pp. x+177. $14.95. Jaroslav Pelikan is best known for his monumental history of doctrine, The Christian Tradition, four volumes of which have appeared so far? Its encyclopedic learning and ' The ChristianTradition. A Historyof the Developmentof Doctrine(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1971-84). BOOK REVIEWS 477 its magisterial objectivity guarantee that it will be the definitive work in the field for a long while to come. Along the way Pelikan has found time to deliver and to publish several sets of lectures that focus on aspects of his larger labor: Development of Christian Doctrine (the St. Thomas More Lectures for 1965), ~ The Vindication of Tradition (the Jefferson Lecture for 1983),3 and now this book, which combines the author's Richard Lectures for 1984 and his Hale Lectures for 1986.4 The Mystery of Continuity is devoted to St. Augustine, in particular to the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity by which his thinking is structured. Chapter x, which remarks the continuity of Augustine the Christian with Augustine the neo-Platonist, sets the stage for the discussions that follow: the continuity of the self through the discontinuities of time, the continuity of history in spite of temporal dispersions and upheavals, the continuity of the divine nature in the trinity of persons, the continuity and discontinuity of nature and grace (the Pelagian controversy), the continuity of the church temporal and eternal, the continuity of the communio sanctorum (the Donatist controversy), and the relation of sign and sacrament. The book concludes with an epilogue on...