The Mysticism of Saint Augustine

Re-Reading the Confessions

John Peter Kenney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134442713
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Epistemología en filosofía

Augustine's vision at Ostia is one of the most influential accounts of mystical experience in the Western tradition, and a subject of persistent interest to Christians, philosophers and historians.
This book explores Augustine's account of his experience as set down in the Confessions and considers his mysticism in relation to his classical Platonist philosophy. John Peter Kenney argues that while the Christian contemplative mysticism created by Augustine is in many ways founded on Platonic thought, Platonism ultimately fails Augustine in that it cannot retain the truths that it anticipates. The Confessions offer a response to this impasse by generating two critical ideas in medieval and modern religious thought: firstly, the conception of contemplation as a purely epistemic event, in contrast to classical Platonism; secondly, the tenet that salvation is absolutely distinct from enlightenment.

Part I
FLIGHT TO THE ALONE

“Through a man puffed up with monstrous pride, you brought under my eye some books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin.” Thus in Book Seven of the Confessions, Augustine recounts his discovery of several Platonic works that helped advance his philosophical reflections and catalyze his rejection of Manichaeism. We will never be certain what Augustine read. But it is almost certain that Augustine studied sections from the Enneads of Plotinus and perhaps some works by Plotinus’s student (Brown 1967) . When he wrote the Confessions more than a decade after the events, it was the distinctive theories of the Plotinian school that became central to his representation of Platonism. Regrettably we do not possess the Latin translation by the Christian convert and rhetorician Marius Victorinus that Augustine used, so we cannot be sure exactly what Augustine had before him as he investigated those complicated treatises. These Platonic texts were initially mediated through the influence of Ambrose and his Christian intellectual circle in Milan. In the decade or more after his first reading of the Platonists in June or July of 386 until his writing the Confessions, Augustine may well have continued his Platonic studies on his own in North Africa. Indeed his Christian associate Nebridius, in a letter written in early 389, approves of the fact that Augustine’s epistles to him are “full of Christ, and Plato, and Plotinus” (Epistle 6). Yet we can only guess at how systematic and sustained Augustine’s engagement with Platonism actually was.

Uncertainty regarding Augustine’s Platonic syllabus is only a minor concern. The Confessions make abundantly clear that Augustine was profoundly influenced by the libri Platonicorum and he presents that debt both as an endorsement of the intellectual sophistication of his new Christian theology and as a point of departure against which to develop his Christian theology. The Confessions explicitly claim Platonism as an ally of Christianity, especially in reference to contemplation of the transcendent. But Platonism is also chastised as deficient in its claims about the powers of the soul and the salvific efficacy of contemplation. It is this ambivalent appropriation of Platonism that warrants our independent analysis of the thought of the Plotinian school. On that basis we will then be able to consider the full significance of Augustine’s nuanced theological critique, and come to some judgment about the larger significance of this crucial exchange at a defining moment in the development of Western theology.

1
THE ROOT OF THE SOUL

“The world is full of gods” (Kirk and Raven 1957: 94). Such was the view of Thales of Miletus from the sixth century BC. Eight centuries later, in the Rome of Plotinus, little would seem to have changed. The spiritual world of late antiquity remained suffused with divinities, indeed, the vocabulary of gods, powers, and spirits had been enriched by the cosmopolitan reach of the Roman imperium. New spiritual faces appeared in old roles, novel names answered to ancient pleas, yet the discourse of petition and propitiation had remained much the same. The surface logic of cultic polytheism had endured. Both civic polytheism and the more personal cults of salvation were central to the religious life of the empire. The former had been much transformed to meet the needs of the great imperium, while the latter had become central to the religious lives of men and women throughout the vast Roman world.

But the old gods of classical antiquity, however august their power and intimate their presence, were not transcendental beings. Never did they break free from the dome of the physical cosmos, independent of the constraints of time and space. They inhabited the same universe as humans, although their status within that sphere was highly exalted and their power greatly to be feared. They were the invisible ones, the immortal ones, whose life was a continuous and everlasting prolongation of time. They were readily to be envied, for the human imagination could grasp quite immediately the joys of their unending existence. Their cult often required physical proximity, while claims of their occasional association with mortals demanded that their presence be made ascertainable in human lives. Yet they too were bound in their immortality by time, defined by the logic of their everlasting existence. They were free only from the exigencies of temporality, not time itself. Nor were they independent of space, however remote the locus of their dwellings. Their invisibility itself betokened spatiality, attenuating this dimension by redrafting its defining visual field. Indeed the gods were so worthy of human fear, respect, and tender gratitude, because they were common members of our cosmos. (Burkert 1985; 1987)

There was more, however, to the story of Greco-Roman religion than the gods of polytheistic cult. Beside the tapestried pantheon, there was another, less anthropomorphic spiritual tradition, one whose distinctive representation of divinity would grow increasingly persuasive in late antiquity. This alternative trajectory was given definition by a tangled cluster of self-described philosophers who claimed the mantle of Plato. While the origins of this separate current in ancient theology are various and its history replete with differing accounts of the character of sacred reality, it was the Platonist school that emerged by the second century AD as the dominant strain. The Platonists of late antiquity understood themselves to be the inheritors of a spiritual tradition of great antiquity. Even by the standards of contemporary scholarship, this claim is credible. The Platonism of Plotinus and his school has demonstrable foundations in archaic Pythagoreanism and more directly in the Old Academy of Plato and his successors (Dillon 1977: chapters 1, 5–7).

This lineage defined a spiritual understanding that did not so much reject the pantheon as decline to privilege it. Indeed the gods featured prominently in the apologetic literature of the Platonist school, beginning with Plato’s Apology. Socrates is there depicted as enjoying Delphic support for his theological questioning and as being under the tutelage of a personal daimōn. Again, in late antiquity, the trope of divine aegis was invoked by Porphyry in support of the authority of his master, Plotinus. In the tenth chapter of his Vita Plotini, he portrays the “philosopher of our time” as having as his tutelary spirit no mere daimōn, but an actual god (Armstrong 1966: 33–36). Not surprisingly, the life of the sage was replete with portentous events. When he died, Amelius, his pious philosophical associate, inquired of the Delphic oracle where the soul of Plotinus had gone. Porphyry reverently recorded Apollo’s lengthy reply. Apollo exhibits his long-standing preference for the Platonist school, dating back to his recognition of Socrates as the “wisest of men,” and eulogizes Plotinus. This oracular encomium from “Phoebus of the thick hair” tells us much about the religious sensibilities of learned pagans of the third century. It presents the gods as active supporters of Plotinus’s spiritual quest to be free of the incarnate world, from “the bitter wave of this blood-drinking life.” It was they who had sent to him “a solid shaft of light so that your eyes could see out of the mournful darkness.” As a result, the philosopher was able to see “many fair sights which are hard for human seekers after wisdom to see.” Thus represented, the gods had become, as it were, accessories to a deeper spiritual process, one whose logic was independent of them. The oracle thereby discloses a fundamental understanding of the nature of things to which the gods conform and which they serve. The gods were thus enlisted to support a spiritual tradition that would conserve their presence while also superseding them.

The center of gravity in pagan theology now plainly lay elsewhere, beyond the gods. To be sure, these divine beings would continue to receive respectful interest in philosophical circles; they remained the foundation of Hellenic cultic piety and as such were never religiously displaced. But for later Platonists, the cosmos had deeper spiritual strata. The archaic Pythagoreans had discovered this, with their devotion to numbers. Such powers were unlike the gods of the pantheon, not only because of their remote, numerical natures, but above all because they seemed to dwell in a different domain. The implication of such thinking was made abundantly clear by Plato, whose two world theory – of being and becoming, of forms and particulars – articulated, with remarkable force and some measure of clarity, the notion of a transcendental realm. The forms or ideas in Plato’s dialogues initiated prolonged reflection on a level of reality outside the spatial confines of the physical cosmos and independent of time. These conceptions did not emerge with complete exactness in the Platonic dialogues, although a general outline of the idea of transcendence did.

It was to this transcendent realm of being that theological interest among Platonists was focused throughout late antiquity. What was the scope of this world outside time and space? What were the powers of its constituents? Were they sufficient for the production of the lower world of becoming, or were other forces required as well? These were questions upon which the closely associated Pythagorean and Platonist schools exercised their training in dialectic and to which they gave differing answers. Yet they were unified in their commitment to this transcendent and divine realm, and clear in their belief that it could be made accessible in some measure to the highest capacity within the human soul. This program of access to the transcendent was termed theōria, contemplation. If religious initiates in the mysteries of cultic polytheism could mix easily with the unseen, so too could philosophers become spectators of the eternal world of being itself, once purified by the practice of virtue and directed by the mental exertion of dialectic. The project of intellectual and moral ascension outlined by the mantic priestess Diotima in the Symposium and reiterated in the Republic became for later Platonists an immediate and persuasive ideal. For Platonic theology in late antiquity, theōria became the central religious ideal, for it constituted the practice of transcendence.

The force of this ancient transcendentalism was intense in the Enneads of Plotinus, a collection of treatises on philosophical themes written in Rome between about 254 and 270, and published by Porphyry, Plotinus’s student, in 301. Plotinus described human life to be an unsteady spiritual state, not only in a psychological or moral sense, but ontologically. For on his account, our inner self can shift between different levels of reality. Our soul is a spiritual rover, awakening to its subsistence in the interstices of temporal flux and immutable being. Our inchoate goal is to transcend the exigencies of life in the world. Indeed our end is divinization, becoming “like unto the divine,” in the famous phrase of Theaetaetus 176b, now read as assimilation to being and to the divine forms. Of this Plotinus was certain. He contrasted the Olympians gods, understood by him as contemplatives of a superior station, with the higher divine objects of intellectual gaze:

For all the gods are majestic and beautiful and their beauty is overwhelming: but what is it which makes them like this? It is Intellect, and it is because Intellect is more intensely active in them, so as to be visible… They are surely beautiful just because they are gods. For they certainly do not sometimes think rightly and sometimes perversely: their thinking is always right in the calm and stability and purity of Intellect, and they know all things and are acquainted, not with mortal matters, but with their own divine ones, with all which Intellect sees. The gods which are in heaven, since they are free for contemplation, continually contemplate, but as if at a distance, the things in that higher heaven into which they raise their heads: but the gods in that higher heaven, all those who dwell upon it and in it, contemplate through their abiding in the whole of that heaven.

(V.8.3: 18–31)

This contemplation is characteristic of both mortals and immortals alike, although human embodiment weakens our contemplation, making it a pro-treptical hope rather than a natural state.

But the intelligible forms were not, in Yeats’s phrase, “the ghostly paradigms of things.” They are more vital, more vivid, more real. Everything that emerges into temporal instantiation in the material world is present there, original and perfect. Nor do these principles separately exist in some heavenly inventory. They are interrelated, following complex patterns of intelligible connections which human dialectic can only begin to describe. Thus the transcendent realm was for Plotinus a composite unity. This unity-in-diversity can be seen in the following description of the vitality of the intelligible world:

If one enquires, therefore, where the living beings come from, one is enquiring where the sky there comes from; and this is to enquire where the [universal] living being comes from, and this is the same as where life comes from, and universal life and universal Soul and universal Intellect, when there is no poverty of lack of resource there, but all things are filled full of life, and we say, boiling with life. They all flow, in a way, from a single spring, not like one particular breath or one warmth, but as if there was one quality which held and kept intact all the qualities in itself, of sweetness along with fragrance, and was at once the quality of wine and the characters of all tastes, the sights of colours and all the awarenesses of touch, and all that hearings hear, all tunes and every rhythm.

(VI.7.12, 20–30)

Plotinus understood the Platonic forms to be both the intelligible objects of knowledge and themselves intelligences. The contemplative soul encounters not merely an interstitial collection of paradigms, but a host of entities each engaged in the process of self-reflection. By thinking themselves, these self-thinking minds reflect not only upon their own natures, but, in the process, come to grasp the nature of other forms. The cold logic of conceptual entailment now crackles with synaptic life as these intelligible minds contemplate their interrelationships. This Plotinian doctrine is one of his most striking innovations and seems to be a concept drawn from several sources, including: the Aristotelian notion of a self-thinking divine mind, the plurality of divine minds intimated at Metaphysics, Lambda 8, Plato’s account of the weaving together of the forms at Sophist 248c ff., and the Middle Platonic conception of the forms as divine thoughts (Kenney 1991: 15–32). What emerges in the Enneads is a living network of transcendental and eternal divine minds, intellects that have a capacity for mutual perception. They are, in Leibnizian terms, monads with windows. In a passage that follows the one just quoted from V.8, Plotinus explains this divine life; he begins with the Homeric notion of the easy life of the gods:

For it is “the easy life” there, and truth is their mother and nurse and being and food – and they see all things, not those to which coming to be, but those to which real being belongs, and they see themselves in other things; for all things there are transparent, and there is nothing dark or opaque; everything and all things are clear to the inmost part to everything; for light is transparent to light. Each there has everything in itself and sees all things in every other, so that all are everywhere and each and every one is all and the glory is unbounded; for each of them is great, because even the small is great; the sun there is all the stars, and each star is the sun and all others. A different kind of being stands out in each, but in each all are manifest.

(V.8.4, 1–11)

The transcendental world is thus a unity of distinct entities that are bound together by the very process of contemplating their own natures. Unlike the lower world, where the constituents of becoming must struggle against the constraints of time and space to discover their foundational selves and their true connectivity with others, each intelligible asserts its connection to all others as an outgrowth of own life.

One of the most striking aspects of Plotinus’s account of being was his commitment to the existence of ideas of individuals (V.7 and IV.3.5). It was not unprecedented, having been debated, as far as we can tell through the dim historical record, by some Middle Platonists such as Alcinous (Didaskalikos, 9). Plotinus’s regnant intuition seems to have been personalist in character, that is, that there is a fundamental significance that attaches to human individuals and this must be written into the structure of the transcendental world. Thus there is an idea of Socrates, an “Autosocrates,” that endures throughout eternity and is the subject of periodic reincarnations. This thesis was critically important, since it is this higher self that allows both for our immediate knowledge of the forms and for our contemplative access to transcendental being. What is at stake is made evident at the very beginning of Plotinus’s treatise devoted to ideas of particulars:

Is there an idea of each particular thing? Yes, if I and each one of us have a way of ascent and return to the intelligible, the principle of each of us is there. If Socrates, that is the soul of Socrates, always exists, there will be an absolute Socrates in the sense that, in so far as they are soul, individuals are also said to exist in this way in the intelligible world.

(V.7.1, 1–5)

The doctrine was thus grounded in the idea of “soul,” and so applied to all animate entities and perhaps beyond them even to apparently inanimate entities where there is still some vestigial presence of “soul.” The doctrine seems to have originated in Plotinus’s reflections on the ultimat significance of human individuality. He rejected the notion that there could merely be a single form of humanity, which would serve as the universal, abstract principle of all humans. Human individuals must be more than just the fleeting instances of a single transcendental form. The significance of their individual natures seemed to him to be sufficient to warrant inclusion in the intelligible world:

No, there cannot be the same forming principle for different individuals, and one man will not serve as a model for several men differing from each other not only by reason of their matter but with a vast number of special differences of form. Men are not related to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Flight To The Alone
• Part II Vision At Ostia
• Part III A Living Soul Of The Faithful
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index