In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter eight Rationalizing Faith Augustine now occupied the same place with respect to Christianity that he once did to Manichaeism. He had been swept up in the attractiveness of a faith, and a community practicing that faith, largely by his own attribution and embellishment of expectations. He expected “great and hidden goods” (Ord 2.9.26) in the one as he had in the other, but he did not yet know specifically what they would turn out to be. He perforce had to accept the authority of those who keep the mysteries before he was allowed to receive them. This authority set out the prerequisites of initiation: a code of conduct producing perfection of life and worthiness to receive the mysteries. When training has rendered the individual docile, when the body is transcended and the mind quieted, then the superior person may see beyond the surface of discipline and cult to the transcendental truths hidden within them, which in turn leads to an understanding of the nature of intellect, which contains or is the sum of all things.1 Finally, one ascends to comprehension of the nature of the source of all things. The construct is pure Plotinus; but in place of the latter ’s rather vague advice to begin with a flight from the senses Augustine had hit upon the idea of substituting the specific regimen of the Nicene Christian communion. Yet in his new attraction to Nicene Christianity, Augustine risked merely repeating his experience as a Manichaean, holding back with mental reservations , bifurcating his conduct between intellectual pursuits and cultic activity, never allowing them to form a single identity capable of displacing his unre- flective personal habits and preferences. He could easily find as many prob- Rationalizing Faith 219 lems with Nicene Christian doctrine as he had with Manichaean teachings. He had his doubts. We can safely conclude this, not only from his own clear statements to that effect (Ep 1.3; Acad 2.3.9, 2.9.23), but from the fact that he did not rush out to be baptized,2 or even to sit at the feet of a Nicene preceptor . He chose instead to gather his thoughts, and to try to articulate them as a coherent picture of the new universe he had up to this point only intuited, in order thoroughly to persuade himself of its validity. We might consider Augustine’s retirement to Cassiciacum a trial run of the kind of future he was then imagining for himself, fulfilling an attraction to the life of the mind he had toyed with for a decade. The offer of a colleague for the use of his small country estate allowed Augustine to make plans to realize a kind of summercamp version of his dream of a philosophical community, which he had been entertaining off and on for some time with his Manichaean compatriots Alypius, Nebridius, and Romanianus. Unfortunately, other factors complicate this promisingly straightforward picture. Although I have sought to stress the active appropriation of power by Augustine in voluntarily submitting himself to self-forming systems, it would be a mistake to allow this to obscure completely the more familiar face of power as an external force with mechanisms of coercion at its disposal. With Augustine’s withdrawal from Milan we encounter another of those “inconvenient coincidences” that litter his career. As we have seen, sometime in the summer of 386 c.e., Augustine received word that he had been named in the prosecution of Manichaeans in Carthage, and that an indictment or judgment against him, having the force of a warrant, had been issued. Augustine’s fate depended entirely on how far this warrant reached outside Africa—a difficult question for us to answer. Yet Augustine had already displayed a tendency to take such legal matters very seriously , perhaps more than they realistically deserved. It is therefore difficult to avoid drawing a correlation between this judgment against Augustine back in Africa, and his sudden departure from Milan and resignation of his position, since it so completely repeats his pattern of reaction from three years earlier. It is true that he offers a perfectly plausible motivation for his retirement to a country estate in his desire finally to implement his longstanding plan for a sort of ascetic intellectual commune. But this explanation leaves a number of details of the situation unaccounted for. The first of these details is the secretive character of his plan to depart, which he is...

Share