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Chapter Four Broken Images of the Divine F Ratherthanprovidingasupposedlystaticsummary,muchofthebestcontemporary work on Augustine carefully traces the development of his thought, often correlating it to events in his life.1 One great virtue of this approach is that it maps the changes in his views over time, illuminating every contour and ridge of his evolving conceptions, and thereby aids a more precise grappling with his ideas.Another virtue is suitability toAugustine’s thought itself, which “proceeds by way of ceaseless inquiry”2 and is preserved in a vast collection of writings, almost all of which were provoked by particular circumstantial needs or controversies,and most of which can be dated quite precisely, thus presenting an almost irresistible field for historical investigation and narration, wherein the dynamism of Augustine’s intellectual production can be represented afresh. Nevertheless, I do not follow such an approach here, for reasons both of substance and of compositional necessity.The necessity is obvious:To give a full account of the development of Augustine’s anthropological ideas would dreadfully prolong the present study and would overwhelm the comparison with Xunzi. Furthermore, others have done this work, and done it well.3 I proceed instead by giving my own relatively brief analysis of Augustine’s mature views of the human person, which I take to be developed most compellingly in On theTrinity, although present in numerous other texts as well. The bridge concepts of human nature and personhood outlined in chapter 2 provide the organizing architecture. I thus present Augustine’s developed anthropological thought as a generally unified systematic edifice that at least aims at comprehensiveness and coherence, even if it sometimes falls short. I would contend that this interpretive strategy is justified byAugustine’s own understanding of truth as unified in and indeed identical to the one God, eternal and unchanging (Conf. 10.23.33, 13.29.44). Augustine recognized ◆ 85 ◆ 86 BROKEN iMAGES OF THE diViNE that his own human attempts to articulate an account of divine truth varied somewhat, but he did not think this undercut the unity and stability of the truth he sought (Retr., prologue). In other words, despite his splendidly profligate creativity, Augustine himself aimed at systematic unity of thought, and so it is not inherently distorting to attempt to reconstruct his ideas in this way. However, at times it will still be useful to discuss changes and tensions in his views, and I will not hesitate to do so when it will clarify his ideas or the comparison with Xunzi’s. To suggest that such a unified account is necessarily “static,” already dead, is perilously close to an anachronistic misrepresentation of some of Augustine’s own deepest intellectual commitments. It also bespeaks a veiled distaste for his final positions on God and humanity, without directly engaging them. In this chapter, I explore those ideas of Augustine that can be grouped under the bridge concepts of “human nature” and “person.” I examine his accounts of natura and its role in his metaphysics, salvation history, and anthropology, and the integrally related idea that humans are created in the image of God, with minds that remember, understand, and will. I then fill out the background to these themes by discussing his concept of persona, his ideas about the human mixture of body and soul, the question of the orientation of the soul and its loves, and his views on “concupiscence” and “habit,” concluding with a synthetic treatment of his conception of the will and its debility. auguStine on human nature Augustine uses the word natura and its cognates,derived from the deponent verb nascor,“to be born,” about 5,000 times in his works, and he specifically discusses the natura of humans more than 800 times.4 Appearances are in this case not especially deceiving,for natura overlaps closely with its English derivative “nature.”Augustine sometimes uses the word to refer to Nature in general, the orderly, created cosmos (e.g., Trin. 3.7), but more often he means by it the particular nature of a certain sort of thing, that is, its constitution and mode of being and activity, its essential characteristics that define it as a unified class (Trin. 6.4, 7.7). The immediate context forAugustine’s frequent use of these terms is his youthful affiliation with and later renunciation of Manicheism. Manicheism was a variant form of late antique Christianity, with a supplementary revelation from Mani, a third-century Babylonian. Mani taught a baroque cosmology marked by a radical dualism of...

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