Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (review)

Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. By Phillip Cary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 214 pp. $45.00.

Writing a book about Augustine is always a risky business. For one thing, one always faces the challenge of saying something new--so much has already been written about him that it is difficult for a new scholarly study to avoid the snares of either repeating earlier interpretations or of simply commenting critically on them. More important, one faces the challenge of engaging in dialogue with a mind that--in Augustine's own image--never came to rest. A prodigiously creative thinker and writer, whose own career led from a professorship in rhetoric, to a few years of philosophical retirement, to a forty-year "public life" in the Church as priest and bishop, Augustine found himself constantly writing and speaking in new roles, answering new questions that were both posed by others and generated from within. As a result, identifying Augustine's thought on almost any issue means following a trajectory, tracing development, and keeping a wary eye on chronology (which is often conjectural), context, and intended audience.

Phillip Cary's new book deals admirably with both these risks. Although he offers a solid bibliography of modern Augustinian scholarship, and acknowledges his debt to the (not uncontroversial) work of Robert J. O'Connell, S.J., on the Platonist and Neoplatonist character of Augustine's early view of the human person, Cary focuses his attention on Augustine's own writings and those of the philosophers who influenced him, rather than on modern debates. The aim of his book is precisely to study the development, from his earliest dialogues set at Cassiciacum through the first ten books of the Confessions--from 387 until about 400, in other words--of Augustine's conception of human consciousness as an "inner, private space" where we meet both our true selves and God. As Cary emphasizes, this book is not intended to be a comprehensive account of Augustine's view of human subjectivity or even a broad discussion of his early transformation as a thinker, from rhetorician and philosopher to preacher and interpreter of the Church's faith. Characterizing himself as "both an intellectual historian and an adherent of [Christian] orthodoxy" (ix), Cary is interested, above all, in pointing out Augustine's "place" in the history of Christian thought: his inheritance from classical philosophy and his influence, direct and indirect, on Western theology and the post-enlightenment conception of the self.

The argument of the book is laid out clearly and summarized several times. The Platonist and Stoic traditions, Cary points out, both conceived of the human soul as in some sense divine. Plotinus, who synthesized most earlier philosophical traditions into his own highly original blend, identified the divine, eternal forms which lie at the root of all intelligibility and which emerge from an even deeper-seated transcendent unity, as the single, inner layer of all consciousness; in "turning within," focusing the attention on those forms, the individual mind discovers its own identity as a sharer in the single, divine principle of conscious life. Augustine acknowledges in the Confessions that he was influenced by his early reading in classical philosophy, especially as it had been distilled for Latin use by Cicero, and that his discovery of "some books of the Platonists"--probably Latin translations of several of Plotinus's essays--were crucially important in moving him past Manichaean misconceptions of the materiality of God and the ontological status of evil. Cary argues here that Augustine moved from a highly Platonist view of the soul as immutable and therefore in some sense divine through its own inner contact with eternal Truth (in his Soliloquies), to a Christian recognition of the unbridgeable difference between God and creatures and an awareness of the soul's "fall...