The Anthropological Analogy
In Book ii of his Confessions, written shortly after his accession to the bishopric at Hippo Regius in present-day Algeria, Aurelius Augustinus (354â430) recounts an episode from his youth. The dramatic, almost histrionic, terms of his reminiscence seem overwrought in relation to the incident itself, in which a teenager and his friends divested an unlovely tree of its crop of fruit and fed the profits of their enterprise to a herd of swine.
Augustine spends an entire chapter of his spiritual autobiography turning over this event, inquiring into his motives (âWretch that I was, what did I love in you, my act of theft, that crime which I did at night in the sixteenth year of my life?â), his intentions (âWhat fruit had I, wretched boy, in these things which I now blush to recall âŚ?â), and how he might make restitution (âWhat shall I render to the Lord?â) (Conf. ii.6.12â16). âI went astray from You, my God, far from Your unmoved stability. I became to myself a region of destitutionâ (Conf. ii.10.18). Why does Augustine interrogate the affair at such length, with such intense scrutiny, and in terms so self-flagellating?There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither colour nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets [described earlier, at Conf. ii.3.8, as the âstreets of Babylonâ]. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. (Conf. ii.4.9)
It has been suggested that one of the reasons that he does so is because his recollection of the event is in fact a parable, pointing allegorically or metaphorically beyond the event itself to several significant biblical themes.1 First, there is original sin. Augustine only ever describes the purloined fruit of the tree as poma, the same generic word used in the Vulgate to refer to the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. He trains his penetrating gaze, moreover, entirely on a single tree. Like Adam, Augustine sinned not because of âany lust of the fleshâ, but because of âa loving concern for mutual friendshipâ, which directed him away from his telos in God (Gn. litt. xi.49). Second, there is redemption. As Augustine was called by his comrades at the fruit tree to sin, a decade or so later he will understand an overheard childrenâs (or harvestersâ) singsong chant as instructing him to set to reading the Bible, which he will do under a fig tree, the biblical symbol for security (1 Kings 4:25), and at which moment he will make a decision to be baptised as a Christian .2
Here, then, is one elaborate analogy in the writings of St. Augustine. But it is certainly not the only one. Augustineâs writings are saturated by analogy. Often and significantly, analogical relations in Augustine point to real proportions between different aspects of creation. He maintained, for example that the six stages of the history of mankind reflect the six days of creation (Jo. ev. tr. ix.6.1â3). And it was Augustine who posited that the four liberal arts constituted an ascending ladder of knowledge via measurement, from geometry (measuring inert and inorganic spaces), through music (which measured the relationship between the soul and the body) and then astronomy (the movements of heavenly bodies moved by the World Soul), to arithmetic (which was the science of measurement in itself) (Mus. vi.1.1).3 Augustine would surely have agreed with an important contemporary theologian that âwhen we see things as like each other in terms of their differences, we are sensing the involvement of the finite with the infiniteâ.4
The present book concerns itself with a specific analogy developed by Augustine, namely the analogy of the self and the city, or what more loosely (certainly with respect to the part of the pair designating political community) we could describe as the analogy between the soul and the state, the person and the polis.5 After Plato, Augustineâs was the next canonical elaboration of this analogy, which would go on in one form to nourish the body politic of the Middle Ages, and in another to help breathe life into the personality of the state from the early modern period.6 Chiara Bottici uses the term âdomestic analogyâ to cover such comparisons between individual and city as have appeared in the history of political philosophy .7 I have found that I need another term, however, because, in the first place, the domestic-analogy notion was coined to describe the presumption that relations between states are patterned on the relations between individuals, and, in the second, it better fits those arguments in the history of political thought which read off the implications of patriarchal, paternal or conjugal relationships for the organisation of political power .8 I therefore use the term âanthropological analogyâ as a shorthand for the analogy between self and city.
Technically, in an analogy A is said to stand to B as C stands to D. C and D may be the same (âGod is to me as my father is to meâ). Analogy is a cousin of metaphor (A is B), but more complicated, comparing two complex entities rather than a complex to a simple one. That is why Kant could argue that analogy âdoes not mean, as the word is commonly taken, an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect similarity of relations between quite dissimilar thingsâ.9 Analogy is also a cousin of simile (A is like B), metonymy (A refers to B and B is commonly associated with A, as when âDowning Streetâ is used to mean âthe British governmentâ), synecdoche (A refers to B and is a component of B, as when âLondonâ is used to mean âthe United Kingdomâ, or âgovernmentâ is used to mean âstateâ) and allegory (B is taken to represent an unmentioned A).10 The strict distinctions between metaphor and its cousins notwithstanding, all are grounded in the idea that A can be pictured as B, so that, in Augustineâs own words, metaphorical or analogical reasoning comprehends all forms of thinking in which âone thing is understood from anotherâ (Trin. xv.9.15).11 These are not mere rhetorical tropes or figures of speech but together run through all human thought and language.12 Their function is to represent but also to âpersuade others to accept our representationsâ.13 âEverywhere there are things standing for other thingsâ, writes James Alexander, âand it is all we can do to make sense of the sense we make in politics â.14 Augustineâs anthropological analogy is a chapter in one of the greatest stories ever told, a story about how we came to represent the world to ourselves as being constituted in a particular way, and to persuade ourselves of the soundness of that representation. Nobody should be in any doubt about how the analogy between the state and the individual has become practically a dead metaphor, meaning that it pervasively and almost subconsciously reinforces both vernacular and scholarly discourses about politics .15
Tertium Quid?
Augustineâs anthropological analogy has been adverted to many times in passing,16 but to my knowledge only Patricia L. MacKinnon has studied the soul-state analogy in Augustine in any detail.17 MacKinnon demonstrates that for Augustine âthe relations internal to the individual soul are the index and determining factor of the form of polityâ, and thus that the state for Augustine is analogous to the soul, the soul writ in more expansive proportion.18 She confines her analysis, though, to Augustineâs anthropological analogy inasmuch as this bears on what he designated the civitas terrena or Earthly City in his self-described magnum opus, The City of God against the Pagans. This, however, is only one of Augustineâs eschatological cities, the other being the civitas Dei or City of God , to which MacKinnonâs chapter does not attend . What is more, the author of City of God is also the author of The Trinity, a man who sees threes ever...