To Know God and the Soul: Essays on the Thought of St. Augustine (review)

This volume consists of a number of Teske's previously published essays (between 1981 and 2000) on Augustine—on the whole, fourteen articles organized according to four general themes: Augustine and Neoplatonism, God and Speaking about God, Creation and Beginnings, The Soul and Time. These writings, however, offer much more than an elaboration of these specific themes in Augustine. Teske has made a career of studying the early development of Augustine's intellectual life and, as a result, the reflections in each of the sections invite us to examine Augustine's intellectual development and the struggles and probings associated with these developments in his understanding of Christian faith. The first two parts are particularly noteworthy in showing how Augustine's search for a deeper understanding of the meaning of the Scriptures and Christian faith drew him to Manichaeism and Stoic materialism. This search led him, in turn, to the libri platonicorum, and Teske shows how Augustine developed the means to comprehend spiritual intelligibilty, their related horizons, and the import of these for the intelligibility in the Scriptures through listening to sermons of Ambrose, especially by overcoming the bias of literal readings and presuppositions about corpuscular reality.

The second part of the book turns to the way Augustine developed rather sophisticated differentiations in the use of argument and inference. If neoplatonic philosophy carved the path for Augustine to new horizons of meaning and their intelligible notions, Augustine's reading of Aristotle's Categories, offered him the resources for thinking in a remarkably differentiated way about the way we use words, about distinct types of intelligibility and about how, at the intersection of reason and faith, there is always something about God's own existence that remains beyond, even if it calls for, the best of our efforts to comprehend. Teske underscores how Augustine not only crafted for himself notions of spirituality itself, of the incorruptibility of the soul, and the immutability and eternity of God, but also how he was responsible for introducing these notions into the West.

Still, Augustine's understanding was not guided simply by a fascination for philosophical notions on their own. His own encounter with neoplatonic thought remained dialectical through and through. Indeed, the essays in the third and fourth parts of the book, dedicated to questions of cosmology (creation) and anthropology (human soul), show how Augustine's fundamental faith in the goodness of creation and in the goodness of God helped to guide him through the debates, resolve issues, and offer a higher viewpoint from which to probe further and more deeply his understanding of the governance of the world, of time and eternity, and of the origin of the soul. The fourth set of essays testifies to the modest judgment, humility, and pastoral care Augustine exhibited in advancing his own argument. Worth signalling among these reflections was Augustine's interpretation of the scriptural reference at the beginning of Genesis to the "Heaven of Heaven." Teske sees here a clue not only to cosmological inteligibility but also a clue on behalf of resolving the long-debated question of the unity of the Confessions. For my own part, I can only wonder while pondering the features that Teske underlines in Augustine's reflections on the "Heaven of Heaven" whether we might in fact have here an initial theological elaboration of such notions as prime matter and pure potency that were to play a compelling role in western metaphysics and theological literature.

Finally, if Teske provides us with an insightful profile of Augustine the scholar at work, this is matched in many ways by how these essays reflect Teske's own development as an Augustinian scholar. Each essay is introduced by a comment by Teske on the place of the particular writing in his own development and on how he would refine or maintain certain positions given recent debates and advances in Augustinian studies. This would be an...