Encounters with God in Augustine's Confessions: Books VII-IX

Notes

Notes PREFACE 1. References to the Confessions and to Augustine’s other writings are given in parentheses in book, chapter, and paragraph form. The purpose of this convention is to permit readers to find the references in any Latin edition and in any translation. 2. Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin, 2nd ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968), 188–202 and Les “Confessions” de Saint Augustin dans la tradition litteraire, antecedents et posterite (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1963), 91–197; Aime Solignac, “Bibliotheque Augustinienne,” Oeuvres de saint Augustin (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1962), vol. 13, 252–255 and vol. 14, 548; and F. Bolgiani, La conversione di s. Agostino e l’VIII libro delle “Confessioni” (Turin, 1956). 3. Two examples of what I have in mind are Courcelle and Robert J. O’Connell, both of who filter Augustine’s thinking too exclusively through Neoplatonic spectacles. Courcelle’s hypothesis that Augustine was not only influenced by a circle of Neoplatonists, but that Ambrose had citied Plotinus in his sermons and might even have been the person who introduced Augustine to Neoplatonic ideas suggests that the young philosopher was more a Neoplatonist than a Christian at the time of his conversion. [Courcelle, Late Latin Writers and their Greek Sources, trans. H. E. Wedeck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 79–92, esp. 81]. For further discussion of this issue see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new edition with an epilogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 496–498 and James O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions , vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 413–418. O’Connell approaches the problem of Augustine’s Neoplatonism by focusing his attention on the Neoplatonic doctrine of the fall of the soul, by which he claims that Augustine was influenced decisively. His examination of the issue begins with a series of articles: “Ennead VI, 4 and 5 in the Works of St. Augustine ,” Revue des études Augustiniennes 9 (1963): 1–39); “The Plotinian Fall of the Soul in St. Augustine,” Traditio 19 (1963): 1–35; and “The Riddle of Augustine’s ‘Confessions: A Plotinian Key,” International Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1964): 327–372) and continues in a series of later, book-length publications: St. Augustine’s 139 140 Early Theory of Man: A.D. 386–391 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968); St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge , MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969); Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); St. Augustine’s Platonism (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1984); Imagination and Metaphysics in St. Augustine (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1986) and The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine’s Later Works (New York, NY: Fordham Press, 1987). 4. In developing this distinctively Augustinian framework, it is not necessary to claim that Augustine is a Christian rather than a Neoplatonist, as Boyer argued in his well-known controversy with Alfaric, who claimed that the Bishop of Hippo concealed the fact that his conversion in 386 was not to Christianity but to Neoplatonism. [C. Boyer, Christianisme et néo-platonisme dans la formation de saint Augustin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1920) and Prosper Alfaric, L’évolution intellectuelle de Saint Augustin: I, Du Manichéisme au Néoplatonisme (Paris: Nourry, 1918)]. However, it is necessary to move beyond the mediating position of Courcelle according to which Augustine is more a Neoplatonist than a Christian. See Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de S. Augustin (Paris: Boccard, 1968), 7– 12, 138. See also A. Pincherle, “Sources platoniciennes di l’augustinisme,” and the debate between them [Augustine Magister, vol. 3 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1954), 71–93, 97, 100]. In this book, I develop the view that Augustine’s thought tilts in the direction of Christianity, however Neoplatonic it may be. This tilt is expressed in four ways: first, Augustine is committed to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo rather than to the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation; second, his doctrine of the fall is more radical than the fall of the soul in Neoplatonism, both because it involves the fall of the entire person [Augustine, On the Catholic and the Manichean Ways of Life, vol. 56, The Fathers of the Church, ed. R. J. Deferrari, trans. D. and I. Gallagher (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press,1966], 1.22.40; The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. by John H. Taylor in Ancient Christian Writers, vols. 41–42 (New York: Newman Press, 1982...