Two Readings of St Augustine

Extract

In the literature that survives from the ancient world Augustine is unrivalled, except perhaps by Cicero, for the range and intimacy of his writings. The lovely folio pages of the edition published in Paris by the Benedictines of St Maur from 1679-1700, still the most recent more or less complete edition of the extant works, contain by far the greater part of the titles catalogued after Augustine’s death by his disciple Possidius. Certainly enough has survived for us to see the personality and ideas of Augustine unfold over more than forty years, from the first flush of conversion at Cassiciacum, expressed in the almost adolescent idealism of the Soliloquia and the De beata vita, until his death at Hippo in 430, with the last chapters of the De civitate Dei completed some years before, and the Retractationes cut short, as scrupulosities should be.

The Confessions were written in the earlier part of this period. In book seven Augustine tells us that he finally rid his mind of the lees of Manichaeism by his reading ‘certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin’ (vii 13: I have cited throughout the paragraph divisions of the Maurist edition, without the chapter divisions of the editio princeps). In book eight Augustine is converted to Christianity by reading St Paul. But the conversion has still a Platonic element, for Augustine describes his experience in the garden at Cassiciacum partly in language that Plotinus had used to describe the soul’s ascent to the beautiful.