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.