On Augustine’s Confessions: his early encounters with Ambrose

As Augustine moves closer to submission under biblical authority, which is accomplished in the Milanese garden at the end of Book VII, it has already been noted that a certain “wager” in the midst of his suspicions put him in a place to receive catholic teachings about and from the Bible before the garden scene. An important detail in Augustine’s wager was skipped over, and must be revisited.

Before the wager could have happened, Augustine had to be given the smallest glimmer of hope with regard to the Bible. Even though something may promise infinite gain for the gambler, if there is no likelihood of achieving it, then there is no wager: if the Bible were to have no possible refutation for the Manichæan attacks, then the Bible and the Church that teaches from it are not at all an option. But in Book V, Chapters xiii-xiv, just before Augustine becomes a catechumen, he takes the words of Ambrose to heart. Ambrose’s influence on Augustine’s thinking, especially with respect to the Old Testament, cannot be passed over.

In brief, Augustine listens to Ambrose only because the latter is a renowned rhetorician. He wishes to hear how well Ambrose speaks, and does not care of what. But in the listening, what is said eventually takes hold of Augustine and infiltrates some of the Manichæan strongholds, undermining their attack on the Old Testament’s validity.

This brings up the earlier consideration of style and content in the episode about Cicero’s Hortensius. Just as in the reading of that book, here with Ambrose he approaches him desiring to get some great rhetorical training; and just as with that book, the content of some of the words slips in. He weighs the words carefully, and finds Ambrose to be worthy of his fame. And despite trying to keep his mind off the content, he is able to note the effect of Ambrose’s message, at least in retrospect:

And verily with the sweetness of his discourse I was much delighted: which, however it were more learned, yet was it not so pleasing and inveigling as Faustus his was, the manner of the oratory I mean, though for the matter there was no comparison. For Faustus did but rove up and down amongst his Manichæan fallacies; but Ambrose taught salvation most soundly. But salvation is far enough from sinners, such as I was at that instant; and yet I drew little and little nearer toward it; but how, I knew not.

At least twice before—the reading of the Hortensius and the refutation of Faustus—has a great rhetorician changed Augustine’s mind, he being quite unable to explain how. The Hortensius gives him beautiful words and yet dissuades him from the career path of a lawyer, in which Augustine has been planning to put such words to money-winning use. Next Faustus gives him beautiful words and yet simultaneously shows the inadequacy of Manichæan thought behind the words. And here again Ambrose gives him beautiful words whose effect on him is unanticipated.

In a previous post the effect of these words was described as the deciding factor in the wager to become a catechumen. What is of interest here is the role Ambrose the human teacher has in relation to the Old Testament, which consists of supposedly “God-breathed” words, as at 2 Timothy 3.16, whose authority is the question of most of the Confessions. Of Ambrose there is no question that Augustine thinks of him as an angel of God: “To him was I led by thee, unknowing, that by him I might be brought to thee, knowing it.” According to God’s own plan, it seems, Ambrose is a necessary part of Augustine’s journey. He is responsible for changing Augustine’s views of the Old Testament, at least just enough to expose him to the remainder of biblical doctrines and allow for a non-literal hermeneutic. The Bible, though, apart from Ambrose, would have forever been subject to the abuses of the Manichæan interpretations and dismissals. It, being in need of interpretation at all, was unable to defend itself in the world. So we return to the point brought out in Plato’s Phædrus about writing.

With this instance, it seems that the Bible is need of defending. It seems that even it, as a text, is not exempt from the dangers associated with writing. Does Augustine also think of it as merely an excellent specimen among the infinitude of books?

On Augustine’s Confessions: his wager among the books

Along Augustine’s long road toward submission to biblical authority, he comes to a place where he takes up the Academic philosophers’ recommendation to suspend belief about some matters until certainty arises. The astronomers are adequate to expose the dubious character of the Manichæan fables, but this does not give him enough reason to take up the Bible again. He also does not hold on to the Academics, for the same reason that he says he did not overly admire Cicero’s Hortensius, given in Book III, Chapter iv:

Perchance it was that book I was stirred up, and enkindled, and inflamed by: this thing only in such a heat of zeal took me off, that the Name of Christ was not in it. For this Name, according to thy mercy, O Lord, this Name of my Savior thy Son, had my tender heart even together with my mother’s milk devoutly drunken in, and charily treasured up: so that what book soever was without that Name, though never so learned, politely and truly penned, did not altogether take my approbation.

So now two elements have come into focus:—unwillingness both to rejoin the Manichæans and to submit wholeheartedly to the Academic philosophers. But the lack of will toward these two sects does not adequately account for his decision to join the Church in Milan as a catechumen. This seems to come out of nowhere. Augustine, at this point, has not submitted himself to catholic doctrine, nor accepted the claims of the Bible’s legitimacy or authority. To this point he writes the following in Book V, Chapter xiv:

For first of all the things began to appear unto me as possible to be defended: and the Catholic faith, in defense of which I thought nothing could be answered to the Manichæans’ arguments, I now concluded with myself, might well be maintained without absurdity: especially after I had heard one or two hard places of the Old Testament resolved now and then; which when I understood literally, I was slain. Many places therefore of those books having been spiritually expounded, I blamed mine own desperate conceit, whereby I had believed, that the Law and the Prophets could no way be upheld against those that hated and scorned them.

Ambrose’s preaching had at least exposed Augustine to alternate possibilities for biblical interpretation, though not supplied him with adequate counter-argument or refutation of the Manichæans. Augustine has only the possibility of a refutation. He doubts that the Manichæans accurately describe the natural world, that biblical doctrines necessarily lead to absurdity, and that the philosophers can offer him the wisdom that he craves. There are many possibilities, but no feelings of certainty, no signs of necessity.

Yet did I not resolve for all this, that the Catholic way might be held safely; seeing it might be able both copiously and not absurdly, to answer some objections made against it: nor yet did I conceive that my former way ought to be condemned, because that both sides of the defence were equal. For although the Catholic party seemed to me not to be overthrown, yet it appeared not to be altogether victorious.

Philosophically, Augustine has the negative. This might mean that he is an Academic philosopher par excellence.  But when considered psychologically, he might say of himself merely that he is unwilling. He has been unwilling toward the Manichæans and the Academic philosophers, and now it is clear that he is equally unwilling toward the Church.  Rather than a philosophical virtue, Augustine seems to think his unwillingness is a sign of intellectual failure.

And so there remains a little confusion about his decision to join the Church as a catechumen. Why would he make this move? Why would he submit himself to biblical doctrine without the positive, without the will, and without faith?

At first glance, there is no sense in it. A reader might be suspicious that Augustine is knowingly omitting from the narrative some reason for making this move. This suspicion should be rejected for two reasons:—first, because part of Augustine’s project is to show how God mercifully moved him throughout his life toward the catholic faith, and so to leave out a known reason for becoming a catechumen would only take away from that project, since all reasons so far have been redeemed and subsumed under God’s gracious plan;—second, because the move is not as unreasonable as the first glance might suggest. To the second point, Descartes in Part III of the Discours says that he will continue to go along with the laws and customs of his country and keep himself in the religion in which he was instructed from his youth, even while claiming to enter into a skeptical project. Maybe Augustine’s thinking matched this. But in case anyone calls the honesty of Descartes’ words into question,* another plausible answer might be found in Pascal’s wager argument. In Pensée 233† he writes,

You wish to go to the faith, and you do not know the way; you wish to be healed from unfaithfulness, and you ask about the cure for it: learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all their goods; these are people who know the way that you wish to follow, and who are cured of an evil of which you wish to be cured. Follow the form through which they began: that is, doing everything as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses spoken to them, etc.; that will make you believe, even naturally, and you will be rendered compliant.‡ – But this is what I fear. – And why? What do you have to lose?

What Pascal describes may in fact be based on his interpretation of instances like Augustine’s own story, but the anachronism does not take away from the thought behind what is written: What has Augustine got to lose by joining the Church while he waits for a sign giving further direction? Having determined that Manichæanism is a risk, and that the Academic philosophers do not promise what he craves, and knowing that the Church does at least promise such, while being unsure of the substance behind that promise, he is making the gamblers move to stay in the game and wait to see what cards turn up.

Before this point, he had been prevented from such a wager because of the high risks that he had associated with the Bible and biblical doctrine. Ambrose’s preaching, however, changed the stakes. Mirroring Pascal’s account of the relationship between miracles and demonstration in Pensée 842,° this is the pivotal point where Augustine obtains the first half of what is sufficient for his conversion, namely, the lack of conflict between the Bible and his own criteria for reasonableness. Ambrose’s words make it less repugnant to him, and he no longer dismisses it on the basis of the absurdity of its content, as he had done previously because of his Manichæan prejudices. So the thinking that goes into Pascal’s wager now applies, once there is any probability, however slight, given to the claim of the authority of the Bible, since it presents infinite gain to Augustine if true and no loss if false.

More needs to be said for the sermons of Ambrose that effect this wager, and also the large change in Augustine’s hermeneutics that comes from reflection on 2 Corinthians 3.6.

*And rightly, I think, should we suspect Descartes of being less than honest.

†My translation.

‡The verb in French is abêtir, which means to be rendered bête or beastlike. It has connotations to docility, tameness, acquiescence, submission, dullness, silliness, stupidity, and simplicity. Pascal’s use of it here has some shock-value, but I think that he also means what he writes.

°The following is my translation of one of the paragraphs in the middle:

The proofs that Jesus Christ and the apostles draw from the Scriptures are not demonstrative; for they say only that Moses said that a prophet would come; but they do not thereby prove that this is the one, and that was the entire question. These passages, therefore, are used to show that someone is not against the Scriptures, and that there appears to be no conflict, but not that there is agreement. Now, this is sufficient, exclusion of conflict, along with miracles.

The word translated conflict is répugnance in French, here taken in the logical sense of inconsistency, incoherency, incompatibility, impossibility, etc. In Augustine’s case, the last two sentences could be modified: Ambrose’s interpretations are used to show that the Bible is not in conflict with the criteria for reasonableness, and that there appears to be no conflict, but not that there is agreement. Now, this is sufficient, exclusion of conflict, along with submission of the will. So Augustine has the first part, and does not find the second until the garden scene in Milan.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the first steps toward accepting biblical authority

Augustine before his conversion had a strange relationship to the Bible. His thirst for “the immortality of wisdom” that he got from Cicero’s Hortensius, as in Book III Chapter iv, encouraged him to take up the Bible after years of disdaining it, but he could not bring himself to appreciate it at the time, for he came to the text already distrusting the content.  Diverse Manichæan teachings had undermined Christian claims about biblical authority, and he also found the style “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence” that had led him to approach the text again. As long as anyone despises both the content and the style of a text, it has nothing to offer him. So Augustine was repelled from it.

How would it be possible for him to approach the Bible and read it successfully? He could admire its style if he would radically alter his taste, or else forsake, or forget, his highly technical knowledge about literature and style. But even if he achieved admiration of its style, this would make the text enjoyed in the same way that a painting is enjoyed, as Socrates describes in the Phædrus; it would offer nothing to him but light pleasure, being unable to answer its questioners or teach any new knowledge. Words read as merely pleasing sounds are themselves mute. By this Augustine might have come to admire the Bible, even its writers, and even the personages of its stories, but admiration falls short of the required adoration. The Gospel Accounts repeatedly tell of how Jesus Christ tries to draw a distinction between mere fans and his faithful disciples: to love Jesus Christ for his eloquence would be an ironic failure to hear what he says.

Again, how to approach the Bible and abide? He would need to find a way to apprehend its content without Manichæan contentions before he could ever honestly examine it, let alone be content with it. This is precisely what the books of some astronomers and philosophers did for him. He found in them claims to the wisdom that he craved from Cicero’s exhortation, and also highly plausible accounts that ran against the mystical teachings and fables of the Manichæan books. Against the astronomers, Faustus, the great Manichæan preacher, fell short and was forced to acknowledge so much. And then the skeptics gave young Augustine a place to stand suspended; now the Manichæan fables were as dubious to him as the Bible. The end of Book V, Chapter xiv, describes how he loses his love for the one, but does not thereby gain an appreciation for the other:

[I judged] in that very time of my doubt, that I could not safely continue in that sect, before which I now preferred divers of the Philosophers: to which Philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving Name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the curing of my languishing soul. This therefore I determined, so long to be a catechumen in the Catholic Church, (which had been so much commended unto me by my parents) till such time as some certain mark should appear, whereto I might steer my course.

His participation in the church as a catechumen is the intriguing detail here that will be explored in another article with the help of Blaise Pascal.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the Hortensius dialogue provides the negative

Augustine, in the Confessions, recalls a few books from his studies in youth that he considers to have contributed to the overall confession of his life. Among those of which he gives favorable mention is Cicero’s Hortensius,* described in Book III Chapter iv.

When Augustine is around eighteen or nineteen, he is supposed to be acquiring the excellences of oratorical and written style in order to become a lawyer. He approaches the reading of Cicero—“whose tongue almost everyone admires, though not so his heart”—expecting to find beautiful language that he might adopt for his own uses in the rhetorical fields. But Augustine takes the Hortensius to heart in a strange way: he enjoys what is written more than how it is written! This aberration is celebrated by Augustine because that book happens to contain an exhortation to philosophia, which Cicero straightforwardly defines as “the love of wisdom,” as opposed to the common love of dispute that characterizes many activities under the same name. The change in his manner of reading coincided neatly with a message that would change his young views and values.

This was what delighted me in that exhortation, that it did not engage me to this or that sect, but left me free to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace Wisdom itself, whatever it was.

It was a turning point in his life in which he left behind “vain hopes” of becoming a wealthy or famous lawyer in order to pursue “the immortality of wisdom.” He even admits that at this time his prayers were turned toward God. And then he writes at the beginning of the next chapter, “I resolved thereupon to bend my studies toward the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were.”

Before examining his view of the Bible, it is worth looking at Augustine’s account of the Hortensius in light of the Phædrus dichotomy between books that are barren and those that are fecund. While Augustine speaks favorably of it, he does not bother sharing with the reader any of its content other than the exhortation to love wisdom and how that exhortation led him to reexamine the Bible. It cannot be considered among the fruit-yielding books, because it lacks a manner of endurance. He receives it, and he takes its words upon him, but they do not positively teach him. The Hortensius only provides the negative. In other words, it only leads him away from his current practices, but does not impregnate him with knowledge beyond its own words. It is efficacious, but not fecund. It tells him to pursue wisdom, but Augustine adds “quæcumque esset”—Wisdom itself, “whatever it was”—showing that he was entranced by the thought, but that its marrow escaped him at the time.

In Chapter v he admits that the Bible’s message eluded him in his youth, even though the exhortation to wisdom had encouraged him to read it. It seemed “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence. For my swelling pride soared above the temper of their style. . . .” Evidently the impression left by the Hortensius, while providing the negative, did not teach Augustine the humility that he considers prerequisite to an understanding of the Bible. It gave him the appearance of wisdom by means of the exhortation to pursue wisdom, but it did not give him the wisdom itself; and so he did not at that time pursue the catholic faith, in which he believes wisdom is found, but fell into the good words and strange Manichæan teachings.

Bringing the Hortensius under the scheme developed from the Phædrus is convenient for speculating about Augustine’s views on the matter, but it will become clear that his views on the Bible do not fit so conveniently into the scheme.  This is equally insightful, though, and so the scheme will continue to be used to bring out a principle that Socrates and Phædrus did not anticipate.

*Because the dialogue is no longer extant, Augustine’s account must suffice for a judgment in this inquiry.

On Plato’s Phædrus: two kinds of writing and questions about Augustine’s treatment of the Bible in this scheme

Note: I have come to reconsider the content in this article, and it will be re-posted at a later date.  I particularly disagree with my reading of the “image” at the end, and will soon be adjusting my interpretation accordingly.

At the end of Plato’s Phædrus, 274C-275B,* Socrates relates a myth, supposedly Egyptian, of the god Theuth speaking to the king-god Thamus about the arts he wishes to give to humankind. Of Theuth’s greatest gifts is writing. He tells the king that writing will be the drug that augments memory and wisdom. Thamus, however, disagrees, saying instead that it will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls” by keeping them from the habitude of recollection and the exercise of memory. Written words remind the learners, but have nothing to do with aiding memory. The distinction is important. For Plato, as described in the Meno, what people call learning is nothing but the soul’s recollection of knowledge it had possessed before its current bodily indwelling. To exercise the memory, then, directly enhances the capability of learning, because it works the same intellectual muscles required to dig up eternal things forgotten in the soul. But to be reminded of something has nothing to do with learning, and it presupposes that the one reminded has already learned, already recollected, the eternal knowledge from within the soul; having what the writer has learned external to him gives him the freedom to no longer practice searching it out within himself, and so he gets out of the habit of searching his soul altogether, thereby reducing his capacity for learning. The distinction between the aid to memory and the reminder might be carried further in the following analogy: the aid to memory is to the reminder as a question is to a dogma, and as a living interlocutor is to a dead book. The antecedents are all stimuli for learning, whereas the consequents are only crutches by which one ceases to think and rests in the ease of merely repeating old knowledge.

Plato through Socrates through Thamus goes on to speak even more disparagingly of writing: “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally not know anything; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Now a nuance is taken into consideration. Above, it was made clear that writing would help someone who had knowledge to keep his knowledge nearby, while atrophying his faculties of recollection. But here, what is at issue is the effect of the writing on those who have not written it, the effect of knowledge that is given from outside and not sought and found within the learner. The conclusion seems to be that the student of the dead book may at best be a parrot for another man’s knowledge, but he himself does not thereby know. The reminders in writing can never be clear or certain for those who have not written them, that is, for those who have not known the things before reading them. This will all take a twist of meaning when it is brought back to Augustine’s thoughts about the Holy Spirit, but Plato has more to say about writing that will aid the inquiry.

Socrates, at 275D-E,* notes that, no matter how lifelike a painting might seem, the painting does not respond to the looker. A piece of writing is exactly like this painting, having the semblance of understanding, but not having life. If the reader asks the words a question, they only give one answer, they only repeat themselves. They cannot read between their own lines, and they cannot explain themselves. They also cannot discriminate: “when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not.” As was pointed out above, writing will give the semblance of knowledge for those who are reminded of something they themselves have not yet learned. It would be better if the words could choose to whom they reveal their meaning and to whom not, acting as reminders to those who have knowledge, and being inaccessible to those who have no business reading them. But as it is, they are perpetual victims, susceptible to violence at all times. They are like illegitimate children, always needing the help of their father the writer to come to their defense. Should he stop defending them, there is nothing to protect them from misuse or abuse.

Shall we conclude that writing is always in some way harmful and always being harmed whenever it is read? Socrates and Phædrus, at 276A, consider another kind of writing that stands in stark opposition to what has already been said, and this second kind will give us substantial questions for comparison between Plato’s view of writing and Augustine’s view of the Bible. This second kind is like the legitimate son from the same father as the other. It is legitimate because it was written according to knowledge in the writer’s soul. Being so, it does not need its father’s protection, but is brought up able to defend itself, discriminating between those to whom it speaks. Phædrus muses that such a speech coming from knowledge is living and ensouled, and that the written form of it is an “image” proper. A careful distinction must be made here: this image is not the same as the mute painting or the dead book mentioned above. It does not enter the soul as a mere appearance, as a shell of something, but as a shell carries with it the substance of the thing imaged. It is like a seed, and hence Socrates goes on to describe the responsible and knowledgeable writer as a serious farmer, 276A-277A.

More of the Phædrus will inform some later inquiries, but what has been brought up so far can be brought back to the Confessions in a series of questions. Augustine tells us much of his early education and his experience with particular books. Some of them he remembers with reverence, like Cicero’s Hortensius, and others he scorns as distractions from God’s call to repentance, like Virgil’s Æneid. But over and above them all Augustine puts the Bible, and of especial interest in his debate with the Manichæans are Genesis and the Old Testament.  Does Augustine draw the same distinction as the Phædrus between the dead books and the living? Is it as simple as saying the world’s books are illegitimate sons, and the Bible legitimate? Are the former mute like a painting, but the latter able to impregnate the reader with knowledge? The Bible’s relationship to the dichotomy brought up by Plato will be very insightful, leading directly into a rich understanding of Augustine’s thoughts on Moses, the Holy Spirit, and the role of reading for Christians, which will come up in a few of the following articles.

*All Phædrus citations come from Jowett’s public domain translation.

On Augustine’s Confessions: hermeneutics with love

In Book XII of the Confessions, Augustine acknowledges the large variety of interpretations that arise from the first few sentences of Genesis. In the midst of discussing these, he takes a whole chapter, xxv, to propose a fundamental rule for Bible teachers: in no way should they compromise love in discussions about the meaning of the written word.

Behold now, how foolish a conceit it is, in such plenty of most true opinions, as may be fetched out of those same words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses principally meant: and thereby, with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself; for whose sake he spake everything, whose words we go about to expound.

When I first read this I found it a little surprising. Augustine himself had some very strong opinions about Genesis, for the most part supporting an allegorical hermeneutic for the whole creation story. This kind of interpretation he thought was instrumental in combating some, like the Manichæans, who used peculiar literal readings of passages in Genesis as a means to discredit the Old Testament, to maintain that its putative contradictions render it useless for any instruction. So it is conceivable that, because of his success in combating the Manichæans, he would have highly valued his own opinions. Augustine, however, appears very sensitive to the verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,”* from James 4.6, 1 Peter 5.5, Proverbs 3.34 Septuagint. This he cites in the second sentence of Book I, and then he repeats it many times throughout the whole. He acknowledges his own great intelligence and skill as a writer, but he fears the fruit of these excellences if his pride should get hold of them. So he would rather be contradicted than stand firm in his conceit. To this point he writes about the proud who love their own opinions and assert them too strongly:

Whereas they are so earnest, that Moses did not mean what I say, but what they say; this I neither like nor love: for even if it is so, yet is this rashness of theirs no sign of knowledge, but of over boldness; nor hath seeing further, but swelling bigger, begotten it. And therefore, O Lord, are thy judgments to be trembled at; seeing that thy truth is neither mine, nor his, nor a third’s; but belonging to us all, whom thou callest publicly to partake of it: warning us terribly not to account it private to ourselves, for fear we be deprived of it. For whosoever challenges that as proper to himself, which thou propoundest for all to enjoy, and would make that his own, which belongs to all; that man shall be driven from what is common to all, to what is properly his own; that is, from truth, to a lie. For he that speaketh a lie, speaketh it of his own.

That last sentence, qui enim loquitur mendacium de suo loquitur, is a fairly literal translation of the Greek, ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, of Joh. 8.44, which is in reference to the devil, who is often associated with pride and prideful men, as at III.vi and X.xliii. Augustine believes that human conceit runs together inextricably with the devil’s deceit. On this premise alone we could consider the healthy fear of our own pride justified. But Augustine’s main point, getting back to that rule for Bible teachers mentioned above, is that pride leads to discord and upsets love. If we believe what Jesus Christ said about the two greatest commandments at Matthew 22.37-40—especially this last verse, “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets”*—then we believe that our treatment of Genesis is also swallowed up by the commandment to love our neighbor, and therefore we should conduct ourselves in love and never let our reading cause discord, undue argument, or strife. To this point Augustine rightly cites Paul at 1 Corinthians 4.6: “Let us not therefore be puffed up in favor of one, against another, above that which is written.”

*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.