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Transforming Light
(PDF form)
CHAPTER FOUR: AUGUSTINE'S CASSICIACUM DIALOGUES
My apprehension, at that time, was not that precise. It
was something vaguer that made me devote my free time to
reading Plato's early dialogues...and then moving on to
Augustine's early dialogues written at Cassiciacum near
Milan. Augustine was so concerned with understanding, so
unmindful of universal concepts, that I began a long
period of trying to write an intelligible account of my
convictions. (1)
1. AN INTELLIGIBLE ACCOUNT OF CONVERSION
In the summer of 1933 Lonergan was in Montreal finishing his
regency, a period of teaching for young Jesuit scholastics, and
preparing to begin the study of theology in the fall. In Augustine
the focus of his reading became again, as in reading Newman,
someone explicitly a Catholic Christian. In Augustine intellect
and its activities are one part of a larger picture, the picture of
Augustine's whole life: his moral struggles, his wrestling with the
currents of his own time, his wrestling with God. Years later
Lonergan would write of Augustine:
a convert from nature to spirit; a person that, by God's
grace, made himself what he was; a subject that may be
studied but, most of all, must be encountered in the
outpouring of his self-revelation and self-communication. (2)
Lonergan specified the works of Augustine that he read in the
summer of 1933 as the ones written at Cassiciacum, perhaps the
modern Cassiago near Lake Como, outside of Milan, in November, 386.
These dialogues are the De Beata Vita (The Happy Life), Contra
Academicos (Answer to Skeptics), the De Ordine (Divine Providence
and the Problem of Evil) and the Soliloquiae (The Soliloquies). (3)
The dialogues took place at a mountain villa lent to Augustine
by a friend, Verecundus, where he had retired with his mother, his
brother, his son, and several pupils, after the events of his
conversion in August, 386.
You are faithful to your promises, and you will repay
Verecundus for his country house at Cassiciacum, where we
rested in You from the world's troubles, with the
loveliness and eternal freshness of your paradise.
(Confessions, 9,3)
At the time Augustine was experiencing some physical ailments,
perhaps brought on by the emotional upheaval of his conversion, and
at least one of the motives for the vacation was just physical
rest. There are a number of "homey" references to life at the
villa in the beautiful foothills of the Alps during these fall
months of 386 and the coming together of this small band of friends
around Augustine: references to taking care of the farm, the
weather intermittently sunny and rainy, watching a cock fight,
Augustine waking in the middle of the night and listening to the
on-and-off flow of water in a drain clogged with autumn leaves. In
this context of rest, the "otium liberale" of creative leisure that
Augustine had so long desired, the group frequently convenes,
indoors or outdoors weather permitting, with a scribe at hand, to
dialogue about the central issues of life:
What is the good life? Does it consist in great
possessions? But do not great possessions bring the fear
of their own loss? Is "wisdom" the way to a happy life?
a wisdom in which the lower levels of the human person
are subordinated to the human mind? (De Beata Vita)
Also,
Does wisdom consist in knowing the truth or only in
seeking the truth? Can any truth be known with
certitude? Is there the Truth that can enlighten us about
what is truth? How come to a vision of such Truth?
(Contra Academicos)
In addition,
If God is good, how account for evil? Does evil, like
the jagged edges of a single stone in a mosaic, fit into
some larger plan, some larger order in the universe?(De
Ordine)
Finally, in the Soliloquies the dialogue with others becomes
a dialogue of Augustine with his own mind and soul - and with God.
These dialogues took place when Augustine was thirty-three
years old. Lonergan read them in 1933 when he was twenty-nine years
old. The question can be raised why Lonergan chose to read
precisely these dialogues of Augustine; why not some of Augustine's
later writings?
Perhaps the answer can be found quite simply in Lonergan's
previous reading in Plato; these early Augustinian dialogues are
patently "Platonic" in inspiration. In fact, they are so
rationally argued and philosophical that some critics have
emphasized the discrepancy between the highly religious and
"incantatory" nature of the account of Augustine's conversion in
the Confessions and these highly philosophical reflections. (4) Some
have contended that his conversion of August, 386, was really a
conversion to the Neo-Platonic philosophy which fills the
dialogues, and not primarily to Catholic Christianity. For
example, the incident of the "Tolle lege" in the garden in Milan,
so central to the Confessions, is absent here.
Today it is generally conceded that the context of these
philosophical reflections is indeed fundamentally religious and
Christian. (5) The religious and moral underpinnings gleam through
the dialogues. There are references to "our priest," that is,
Ambrose. There are Monica's uniquely religious contributions to
the dialogues, which Augustine highly approves. There are
references to the incarnation, the Scriptures, invocations of the
Trinity, the "sacra" and "mysteria" of Christian belief and
worship. The fervent prayer at the beginning of the Soliloquies
shows that the author of the Confessions is already present in
these dialogues. Above all, there is explicit deference to the
"authority" of faith. For Augustine at this point faith plays an
essential role in coming to the "true and authentic philosophy."
Nevertheless, the general focus of these dialogues is
philosophical; but the "philosophy" Augustine has in mind is a
combination of the Platonic philosophy which had just recently
opened his mind to Christianity and his newly appropriated
Christian faith. Just emerging from his famous "conversion
experience" described so movingly in the Confessions, in these
dialogues Augustine is obviously trying to set his convictions into
some kind of intelligible framework. Afraid perhaps of being
carried away with the emotion of the moment, he is trying to
consolidate the fruits of his conversion in rational terms. (6)
Consequently, both in his own mind, for his own self-understanding, and because he is still in contact with his Neo-Platonic friends, Augustine's dialogues are couched in philosophic
categories. To put it in terms of the later Lonergan, at this
point Augustine was aiming at clearly expressing the intellectual
conversion whose pivotal moment took place in the spring of 386,
the intellectual conversion that opened the way for the religious
and moral conversion of the following summer.
Our method here will not be to provide an exhaustive account
of each of these dialogues, but rather to highlight the themes that
will later find their way into Lonergan's own writings. These
themes are:
1) Conversion from corporeal thinking;
2) Refutation of skepticism;
3) Faith and understanding;
4) Veritas: from truths to the Truth.
These themes represent concrete understandings that occurred
to Augustine in the course of his own journey; they facilitated
concrete understandings in Lonergan's own intellectual journey.
We might begin by noting that in the first completed
Cassiciacum dialogue, the De Beata Vita, Augustine invokes the
image of a philosophical journey over the sea of life to the port
of true philosophy. He recalls the beginning of his own journey in
his reading of Cicero's Hortensius at the age of nineteen.
From the age of nineteen, having read in the school of
rhetoric that book of Cicero's called Hortensius, I was
influenced by such a great love of philosophy that I
considered devoting myself to it at once. (DBV 1,4)
What the Hortensius represented for Augustine, as he
beautifully recounts in the Confessions, was that it inspired in
him a disinterested search for the truth, a desire that remained
beneath the surface of his life throughout all the years of his
moral and philosophical wandering:
Quite definitely it changed the direction of my
mind...Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as
worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I
longed after inward wisdom. I had begun that journey
upwards by which I was to return to You...The one thing
that delighted me in Cicero's exhortation was that I
should love, and seek, and win, and hold, and embrace,
not this or that philosophical school but Wisdom itself,
whatever it might be. The book excited and inflamed me;
in my ardor the only thing I found lacking was that the
name of Christ was not there. For with my mother's milk
my infant heart had drunk in, and still held deep down in
it, that name according to your mercy, O Lord, the name
of Your Son, my Savior; and whatever lacked that name, no
matter how learned and excellently written and true,
could not win me wholly. (Confessions 3,4) (7)
Years later, in Insight, Lonergan would repeatedly write of
"the pure, detached, disinterested desire to know." The desire for
the truth evidenced in Augustine, irrespective of philosophical
schools, must have struck a deep chord in the young Lonergan. In
addition, as with Augustine and his reading of the Hortensius and
later, "certain books of the Platonists" (Confessions 7,9),
Lonergan's philosophical journey had also been marked by certain
books: Newman's Grammar of Assent, Joseph's Introduction to Logic,
Stewart's Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, and now...Augustine's
dialogues at Cassiciacum.
2. CONVERSION FROM CORPOREAL THINKING
Yet I was not free of those intellectual mists which
could confuse my course, and I confess that for quite a
while I was led astray, with my eyes fixed on those stars
that sink into the ocean.(DBV 1,4)
The reference is to Augustine's involvement in the fantastic
myths of the Manichees from 374 to 383. This eastern cult held all
kinds of imaginative tenets about the battle between the two
principles of good and evil. These two principles, God and Satan,
each had its own kingdom, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of
darkness. Satan invaded the kingdom of light and did battle with
the Primal Man, an emanation from the God of Light. In their
battle Satan overcame the Primal Man and his "five elements" and
these latter remain as scattered elements of light in the kingdom
of darkness. Jesus personifies the light elements imprisoned in
darkness and the whole of human history is concerned with the
freeing of the light elements from the realm of darkness and
restoring them to the kingdom of the light.
A childish superstition deterred me from thorough
investigation, and, as soon as I was more courageous, I
threw off the darkness and learned to trust more in men
that taught than in those that ordained obedience, having
myself encountered persons to whom the very light, seen
by their eyes, apparently was an object of highest and
even divine veneration. I did not agree with them, but
thought they were concealing in those veils some
important secret which they would later divulge.(DBV 1,4)
Within the Manichean community a small body of the Elect
engaged in certain ascetical practices so as to release more
effectively the elements of light from the darkness. These
consisted in such things as the eating of certain foods and the
practice of celibacy. Augustine was not a member of the elect, but
only one of the larger number of Hearers (auditores) among the
Manichees for whom there were no such strict rules. They were
encouraged to virtue, but if they did fall into sin, they were
consoled by the teaching that they were not responsible; sin was
rather the work of the foreign power of evil at work within them.
Augustine rejected the religion of the Manichees in 383 when
he realized the unintelligible nature of these myths and was very
unimpressed with the philosophic understanding of the Manichee
leaders. Nevertheless, as Newman said of some of his own early
reading, his imagination was "stained" by these doctrines for years
to come. (8)
They cried out "Truth, truth;" they were forever uttering
the word to me, but the thing was nowhere in them. (3, 6)
According to the Confessions, the chief intellectual obstacle
in Augustine's journey to Christianity - besides the moral
obstacles so emphasized in the Confessions - was his need to
imaginatively "picture" things which cannot strictly speaking be
pictured: whether those things be God or even his own conscious
self. It is a theme that Lonergan took up more than fifteen hundred
years later in the introduction to Insight.
St. Augustine of Hippo narrates that it took him years to
make the discovery that the name "real" might have a
different connotation from the name "body." (9)
This theme is present in the Cassiciacum dialogues in
embryonic form. For example, what struck Augustine in listening to
the sermons of St. Ambrose was the incorporeal character of God and
the soul.
For I have noticed frequently in the sermons of our
priest, and sometimes in yours, that, when speaking of
God, no one should think of Him as something corporeal;
nor yet of the soul, for of all things the soul is
nearest to God. (DBV 1, 4; cf. SOL 2,4,6; 2,17,31)
And again, in the Contra Academicos:
The populace is rather prone to rush into false opinions,
and through familiarity with bodies, a person very
readily - but very dangerously, as well - comes to
believe that all things are corporeal. (CA 3, 17, 38)
The Confessions bring out this theme much more forcefully and
fully. Surely the young Lonergan was familiar with these passages.
Though I did not even then think of You under the shape
of a human body, yet I could not but think of You as some
corporeal substance, occupying all space, whether infused
in the world, or else diffused through infinite space
beyond the world. (Confessions 3, 1; cf. 3, 6)
When I desired to think of my God, I could not think of
him save as a bodily magnitude - for it seemed to me that
what was not such was nothing at all: this indeed was the
principal and practically the sole cause of my inevitable
error. (5, 10)
Augustine even thought of evil as a type of bodily substance.
I did not know that evil has no being of its own but is
only an absence of good, so that it simply is not. How
indeed should I see this, when the sight of my eyes saw
no deeper than bodies and the sight of my soul no deeper
than the images of bodies? (3, 7)
In my ignorance I thought of evil not simply as some kind
of substance, but actually as a bodily substance, because
I had not learned to think of mind save as a more subtle
body, extended in space. (5, 10)
At one point Augustine set out to write a treatise "On the
Beautiful and the Fitting" and in the course of this writing he
faced the question of the character of his own mind and soul.
...it was by corporeal examples that I supported my
argument. I did consider the nature of the soul, but
again the false view I had of spiritual things would not
let me get at the truth - although by sheer force the
truth was staring me in the face. I turned my throbbing
mind from the incorporeal to line and colour and bulk,
and because I did not see these things in my mind, I
concluded that I could not see my mind. (4, 15)
The philosophical issue, as he slowly began to realize, was
the character of his own mind.
My mind was in search of such images as the forms of my
eye was accustomed to see; and I did not realize that the
mental act by which I formed these images, was not itself
a bodily image. (7, 1)
As he had stated in the De Beata Vita, he learned from Ambrose
not to interpret the Scriptures in a corporeal way. It was while
listening to the homilies of Ambrose that some of Augustine's
imaginative ways of thinking began to dissolve. For example, some
of the Manichean objections to the anthropomorphisms of the
Scriptures were themselves based on imaginary ways of thinking.
If only I had been able to conceive of a substance that
was spiritual, all their strong points would have been
broken down and cast forth from my mind. But I could
not. (5, 14)
Slowly Augustine began to believe in the reality of the
unseen: what Lonergan will later speak of as the world "mediated by
meaning." It is a world mostly mediated to us by belief.
I began to consider the countless things I believed which
I had not seen, or which had happened with me not there
-so many things in the history of nations, so many facts
about places and cities, which I had never seen, so many
things told me by friends, by doctors, by this man, by
that man; and unless we accepted these things, we should
do nothing at all in this life. Most strongly of all it
struck me how firmly and unshakably I believed that I was
born of a particular father and mother, which I could not
possibly know unless I believed it on the word of others.
(6, 5)
Augustine sensed the falsity in the Manichean position, but
still held back from believing the Christian faith as he heard it
expounded by Ambrose.
Nothing of what he said struck me as false, although I
did not as yet know whether what he said was true. I
held back my heart from accepting anything, fearing that
I might fall once more, whereas in fact the hanging in
suspense was more deadly. I wanted to be as certain of
things unseen as that seven and three make ten. For I
had not reached the point of madness which denies that
even this can be unknown; but I wanted to know other
things as clearly as this, either such material things as
were not present to my senses, or spiritual things which
I did not know how to conceive save corporeally. (6, 4)
What was happening, as Lonergan would later point out, was a
movement begun by Christians in other areas of the ancient world to
think of God, not on the analogy of matter, but properly, on the
analogy of spirit.
The point was picked up by Clement of Alexandria who
taught that the anthropomorphisms of the bible were not
to be taken literally and, thereby, started the century-long efforts of Christians to conceive God on the analogy
of spirit rather than of matter. (10)
But first, before satisfactorily addressing this problem,
Augustine was forced to consider another issue: can we know
anything for certain? Having been mistaken once in his beliefs,
how could he be certain he would not be mistaken again?
3. REFUTATION OF SCEPTICISM
After I had shaken them off and abandoned them, and
especially after I had crossed this sea, the Academics
for a long while steered my course amid the waves, while
my helm had to meet every wind. (DBV 1,4)
After leaving the Manichees, Augustine faced another major
obstacle on the way to truth and that was the sceptics' philosophy
that truth could not be attained. He himself had embraced this
philosophy between 383 and 386 and he felt deeply that many people,
influenced by scepticism, were threatened by a despair of attaining
the truth. This philosophy had a stultifying effect on the mind and
was a great obstacle to faith.
For the sceptics of Cicero's "New Academy" the truly wise
person will refuse to give assent to anything; for the wise person
merely seeks the truth. Lest this lead to a paralysis of action,
the sceptics held that some things resemble the truth, that is,
they are probable, and probability is a sufficient basis for action
in this world.
Augustine pointed to the inconsistencies in the Academics'
position. For someone to know what "resembles the truth," that is,
what is probable, one must know some truth. Sometime later
Augustine would articulate his method for showing the implicit
possibility, and indeed inevitability, of knowing the truth:
Everyone who knows that he has doubts knows with
certainty something that is true, namely, that he doubts.
He is certain, therefore, about a truth. Therefore
everyone who doubts whether there be such a thing as the
truth has at least a truth to set a limit to his doubt;
and nothing can be true except truth be in it.
Accordingly, no one ought to have doubts about the
existence of the truth, even if doubts arise for him from
every quarter. (11)
Augustine devotes a great portion of the Cassiciacum dialogues
to refuting the Academic position. His basic position, one he
would develop later in the De Trinitate, is that there are certain
ineluctable truths, especially truths of the self and reason, that
it is "self-contradictory" to deny. Centuries later Bernard
Lonergan would pay tribute to Augustine's basic methodology:
For Augustine, the mind's self-knowledge was basic; it
was the rock of certitude on which shattered Academic
doubt; it provided the ground from which one could argue
to the validity both of the senses of one's own body and,
with the mediation of testimony, of the senses of the
bodies of others. (12)
In the Contra Academicos Augustine vindicates the validity of
the senses. Against the classic argument of the delusion of the
senses by the oar that appears bent in water, Augustine places the
emphasis on the acting subject, even the subject as being deluded. (13)
He admits the appearance of the delusion, while maintaining the
truth of the fact that the acting subject sees or feels this or
that. If there were reason to believe the senses were deceived,
one would need to study the causes for the different appearances of
things.
Therefore, as to what they see with regard to an oar in
the water - is that true? It is absolutely true. In
fact, since there is a special reason for the oar's
appearing that way, I should rather accuse my eyes of
deception if it appeared to be straight when it is dipped
in water, for, in that case, they would not be seeing
what they ought to see. (CA 3,11, 26; cf. SOL 2, 6, 10)
The act of sensing itself, as an internal fact of the subject,
remains certain and secure, and in its own manner true.
"Nevertheless," says someone or other, "I am deceived if
I give assent." Restrict your assent to the mere fact of
your being convinced that it appears thus to you. Then
there is no deception, for I do not see how even an
Academic can refute a man who says: "I know that this
appears white to me. I know that I am delighted by what
I am hearing. I know that this smells pleasant to me.
I know that this tastes sweet to me. I know that this
feels cold to me." Tell me, rather, whether the oleaster
leaves - for which a goat has a persistent appetite - are
bitter per se...I know not how the oleaster leaves may be
for flocks and herds; as to myself, they are bitter.
What more do you wish to know? Perhaps there is even
some man for whom they are not bitter...Have I said they
are bitter for everyone? I have said they are bitter for
me, but I do not say that they will always be so...This
is what I say: that when a man tastes something, he can
in good faith swear that it is sweet to his palate or
that it is not, and that by no Greek sophistry can he be
beguiled out of this knowledge. (CA 3, 11, 26)
Salvino Biolo, a commentator greatly influenced by Lonergan,
has commented on the above passage.
Here it is a case of the acting subject affirming oneself
as conscious of one's internal phenomena through the
mediation of external objects, which are not themselves
the primary focus of the interior testimony. (14)
Biolo goes on to say that here in the Contra Academicos it is
a question of the certain and irrefutable self-affirmation of the
subject on the level of experience. The focus is on sensitive
consciousness, affirmed however by conscious judgment.
In the Soliloquies Augustine argues to the immortality of the
soul by an analysis of truth and its inherence in the human soul.
He begins by engaging in a dialogue with his own Reason.
R. Do you, who wish to know yourself, know that you
exist?
A. I know it.
R. How do you know it?
A. I do not know.
R. Are you conscious of yourself as simple or composite?
A. I do not know.
R. Do you know that you are moved?
A. I do not know.
R. Do you know that you think?
A. That I know. (SOL 2, 1)
Two basic facts are here held to be immune from doubt and
ignorance: first, the human subject inevitably knows that he
exists; and secondly, he knows that he thinks. Augustine brings
out the immediacy of the "knowledge" that the concrete subject has
of himself as existing and acting through the very fact that he
thinks. As Biolo comments on this text:
It is a self-affirmation lived, not reasoned to; it is
an existential consciousness internal to the fact of
being a person and being a thinker. Nothing is said of
the nature of this knowledge. It seems to me that the
sense implied in the text demands that typical
"consciousness" that the thinking subject has as a
subject, that is, before formulating and objectifying
oneself for one's interior thought. It is merely an
intimate experience of oneself as a human being, which
adds nothing entitatively to existence and thought, but
accompanies them from within as self-consciousness. (15)
Biolo traces this theme throughout Augustine's writings,
especially its clearest expression in the De Trinitate. But there
is another example of the same theme which I would like to mention
here, since it comes soon after the Cassiciacum dialogues in the De
Libero Arbitrio. Lonergan might have included this in his early
reading, since it includes an emphasis on "intelligere," which he
later remembered as so prominent in Augustine. In this work
Augustine aims at proving the existence of God by beginning with
the first evidences of the human spirit: one's personal existence,
about which one cannot be mistaken, because existence is the first
condition of the possibility of error itself. Also, since the
existence of his interlocutor, Evodius, is evident through the fact
that he actually lives, his living is also at the same time
evident. The two facts are evidently true. The interlocutor
clearly understands them. Therefore, Augustine passes on to a
third fact, the fact of understanding.
A. Therefore, this third fact thing is likewise manifest,
namely that you understand?
E. Yes, it is evident. (De Libero Arbitrio 2, 3, 7)
And thus there is touched upon the understanding, the most
noble element in the human person, precisely because it implies the
other two, and not vice versa. Augustine's interlocutor gives the
reason:
For the one who understands both necessarily lives and
exists.
Biolo comments:
This third fact, the intellectual act, enjoys a
fundamental transparency, which illuminates also the
other two, a transparency manifest to the subject
precisely in the act of understanding: "it is evident you
understand." The Holy Doctor thus professes in this
text, concretely, in a manner implicit but clear, the
luminous self-witness inherent in the person as actually
understanding, and thus with indestructible certitude
known to be both existing and living. It is the human
intellectual consciousness which emerges and becomes
evident to the interlocutor even as he exercises it, and
which affirms itself as a distinct value different and
superior for its nobility and dignity, not only from the
inanimate world of stones, but also from the biological
and psychological world of animals. (16)
The unifying science that concerns the self is philosophy and
the result of refuting academic scepticism is a philosophical
knowledge even more certain than numbers.
I now say to both of you: Beware lest you think that you
know anything except what you have learned at least in
the manner in which you know that one plus two plus three
plus four is ten. And, likewise, beware lest you think
either that in philosophy you will not gain a thorough
knowledge of the truth, or that truth can by no means
become known in this manner. Believe me - or rather,
believe Him who says: 'Seek, and you shall find' - that
knowledge is not to be despaired of, but that it will be
even more manifest than those of numbers. (CA 2, 9)
4. FAITH AND UNDERSTANDING
In the Cassiciacum dialogues we see Augustine as an ardent
lover of philosophy - for this is associated in his mind with
wisdom and with happiness. In his own case this search had first
been delayed through his involvement with the Manichees and now,
more recently, with Academic scepticism. Finally, at length,
I came into this land; here I have learned to know the
North Star, to which I entrust myself. (DBV 1,4)
"This land" is the land of true philosophy which combines the
best of the world's philosophy with Christian wisdom. He had come
upon "certain books of the Platonists" and compared them with the
authority of those who taught the Divine Mysteries. (17) It was this
combination that so "inflamed" him that he was able to cast asunder
all the anchors that kept him from sailing into the harbor of true
philosophy. That philosophy was an amalgam of reason as expressed
in the Platonic writings and of authority as embraced in the
teachings of the Church.
It was especially in the sermons of "our priest," Ambrose of
Milan, that the subject of such philosophy was broached: God and
the soul, a preoccupation of the Platonic tradition. The study of
the soul gives us knowledge of ourselves; that of God gives us
knowledge of our origin, the Parent of the universe of whom reason
can give no adequate knowledge since he is better known by not
being known (melius scitur nesciendo). (DO 1, 18, 47)
Later on in the dialogues Augustine will speak of such
philosophy as "our true and solitary habitation," "our sacred inner
shrine." (DO 1, 3, 9) In the Contra Academicos there is again an
extravagant praise of philosophy whose two-fold paths of reason and
authority are distinct, but not separate. His benefactor,
Romanianus, had furnished him with certain books "packed with
thought," (libri quidem pleni), which produced in him a marvelous
effect:
They at once enkindled in me such a conflagration that I
scarcely believe it of myself. What importance did I
then attach to any honor? Was I affected by human pomp?
by a craving for empty fame? or, in fine, by the bond and
bondage of this mortal life? (CA 2, 2, 5)
Augustine describes his reaction to such books:
Certainly, no one doubts that we are impelled toward
knowledge by a twofold force: the force of authority and
the force of reason. And I am resolved never to deviate
in the least from the authority of Christ, for I find
none more powerful. But, as to what is attainable by
acute and accurate reasoning, such is my state of mind
that I am impatient to grasp what truth is - to grasp it
not only by belief, but also by comprehension. Meanwhile,
I am confident that I shall find among the Platonists
what is not in opposition to our Sacred Scriptures. (CA
3, 20, 43)
The "true and authentic philosophy" Augustine has in mind in
these dialogues is a combination of Christian faith and the
philosophy of Plato mediated to him by the Neo-Platonic writings of
Plotinus and perhaps Porphyry. Though this philosophy has gone
through many mutations, still a single valid doctrine has filtered
through. Speaking of Plato and his "re-appearance" in Plotinus,
Augustine says:
Then Plato's countenance - which is the cleanest and
brightest in philosophy - suddenly appeared, especially
in Plotinus. (CA 31, 41-42)
What Augustine obtained from the Neo-Platonic stream of
philosophy was a unifying vision of God, the eternal Truth and
Light, ever present to the human self, even when the latter's
attention was directed toward the external world. According to
Plotinus, the human soul, fallen from its pre-existent state - a
doctrine later repudiated by Augustine - animates the human body by
forming a portion of matter as an expression of its inward life,
even while it is able, in principle, to remain "within itself" and
"outside" all that is corporeal. (Enneads IV, 3, 9-10) (18) In this
condition the soul becomes enslaved to the things of the body and,
becoming fascinated with the brilliant reflections of the divine in
the material world and, losing sight of itself, it "turns" toward
them and "goes forth" from itself and "becomes present" not to
itself but to the body (9,12,17). As Eugene TeSelle notes:
Both of these aspects - the power of man's inward life
over his bodily actions, and his enslavement by his own
affections for the finite - were a matter of experience
to Augustine; he could give unconditional assent when he
read them in Plotinus or in Porphyry. He could say along
with them but out of personal conviction, for himself,
that the soul has gone outside itself (progressus) and is
poured out (a seipso fusus) into the world of
multiplicity, from which it needs to return to itself and
thereby to God, who is present within the self. And he
could say, again with them, that the way of return is
through "fleeing sensible things altogether" (SOL
1,14,24; cf. DO 2,11,31), without thereby meaning to
suggest that the soul must lose all relation to the
body. (19)
Although Augustine had perhaps come across this Platonic
schema only recently - he probably read the Platonic books in the
beginning of the summer of 386 - he had thoroughly interiorized
it. (20) The analogy of spirit demanded a conversion in one's
understanding of one's own spirit. After years of intellectual
searching and wrestling with his own moral life, and after a
sojourn in the gardens of the Academics, Augustine was able, with
the help of the books of the Platonists, to make the beginnings of
his own intellectual breakthrough.
In these dialogues Augustine emphasizes the possibilities of
the knowledge of God; but when it comes to the actual human
condition, that is a different story. Even when people catch some
glimpse of the light shining inwardly upon them, they are unable to
endure its splendor because of their impurity of mind; afraid to
turn toward the light, they fall back into their accustomed
patterns. (DBV 4,35; CA 1,1,3; 2,2,5; SOL 1,6,12) And in the case
of most people, there is no awareness at all of the divine
presence. In their concern with external things they have turned
away from God and forgotten him. (21)
Consequently, in the present condition of humanity people need
to be shown the way to return to God; and God in his "clemency" has
made this way known. (DO 2,5,6)
Human reason would never lead such souls to that
intelligible world if the most high God had not
vouchsafed - through clemency toward the whole human race
- to send the authority of the divine intellect down even
to a human body, and caused it to dwell therein, so that
souls would be aroused not only by divine precepts but
also by divine acts, and would thus be enabled to reflect
on themselves and to gaze upon their fatherland, without
any disputatious wranglings. (CA 3,19,42)
It is here that the authority of faith finds its essential
role in relation to reason. (22) Authority is the doorway that must
be humbly entered; but it leads to the further treasures of
rational knowledge, and this is the goal aimed at by revelation
itself. Reason supplies arguments which aid the comprehension of
the truths of revelation; and at the same time reason exercises the
mind so that it will be capable of beholding spiritual things.
For Augustine this second practical goal is extremely
important, reason's "anagogical" character, leading the mind toward
the goal of immediate vision and accustoming it to the intelligible
realm so that it will not be blinded by the light of eternity.
Believe me, then, you will attain to these things when
you will have given attention to learning, by which the
mind, heretofore in no way fitted for a divine planting,
is cleared and cultivated. Now these discourses,
precious to us by reason of their association with your
name rather than by the satisfaction of our own work,
will, I am sure - especially if you will have the good
will to co-operate and make yourself a part of this very
order of which I am writing to you - sufficiently show
you what is the nature of all this clearing and planting,
and what mode of procedure it demands, and what it is
that reason promises to those who study and are good. (DO
1, 1, 4; CA 3, 9, 20; SOL 1, 13, 23; 2, 20, 34)
There is then a process that Augustine himself experienced of
moving from being so wrapped up in the senses that he could not
think except in representative images to another type of thinking,
a type of thinking that is characterized by veritas: "the truth:"
If anything is true, it is through truth that it is true.
(SOL 1,15,27)
Will anyone deny that that is Truth itself through which
all branches of learning are true?...that by which all
things are true is through itself and in itself the true
Truth. (SOL 1,11,21)
Such is the truth of the soul; such is the truth of God. And
that is all that Augustine desires: "Noverim te; noverim me."(SOL
1,2,7; cf 2,1,1; also DO 2,18,47) It is the philosophic desire in
his soul that has brought Augustine back to himself and to the
courts of "true philosophy."
Divine authority, which is "true, reliable, and supreme,"
which transcends every human power, bids the human person not to be
held down by the allurement of sensible things, but to fly to
reason, for it tells him that he can acquire great things by the
use of this power. And yet, whatever reason can attain is
transmitted in a more hidden manner and with greater assurance
(secretius firmiusque) "through those sacred teachings in which we
are initiated and by which the life of those who are good is
purified not by the intricacies of arguments, but by the authority
of the Mysteries." (DO 2,9,27)
Perhaps it is significant that, soon after reading Augustine,
Lonergan wrote a 25,000 word essay - now lost - on the act of
faith. It was in reading Augustine that Lonergan was led to
articulate the relationship between faith and human reason.
5. VERITAS: FROM TRUTHS TO THE TRUTH
Henry Chadwick in the introduction to his translation of the
Confessions brings out how the Neoplatonic schema on personal
conversion is part of a total vision of the return of the whole
universe to the One. (23) The dialogue, De ordine, asks how a divine
and beneficent Providence can be said to exercise a universal
guidance and control when lack of harmony appears so evident both
in the physical and the moral order. The difficulty, Augustine
believes, is due to two causes: first, the scope of the human
person's vision is so limited that he cannot discern the unity and
perfection of the entire plan of the universe.
If one were examining the details of an inlaid pavement,
and if his searching eye could grasp no more than the
outline of one little cube, he might censure the
artificer for lacking skill of arrangement and order. On
this account he might think the uniformity of the little
stones disarranged, just because the drawn lines,
harmonizing into one integral form of beauty, could not
be seen and examined all at once. Something very similar
to this is found in the case of uninstructed men, who, on
account of their feeble mentality, are unable to grasp
and to study the integral fittingness of things. They
think the whole universe is disarranged if something is
displeasing to them, just because that thing is magnified
in their perception. (DO 1, 1, 2)
Secondly, in the present condition of humanity the person
finds himself so "immersed in sensible things" that it is no easy
task for him to refuse to accept at face value the information
received by way of the senses and to seek the truth within the
sanctuary of one's own mind.
The chief cause of this error is that man does not know
himself. Now, for acquiring this self-knowledge, he
needs a constant habit of withdrawing from things of the
senses and of concentrating his thought within himself,
and holding it there. This they alone succeed in doing
who definitely mark out in solitude the impressions of
opinion which the course of daily life has made, or
correct them by means of the liberal branches of
learning. When the soul has returned to itself in this
manner, it understands what is the beauty of the
universe. (DO 1, 1, 3)
This process is keenly reminiscent of a quote from Lonergan in
an article on Insight published in 1958. He is speaking of the
importance of moving from "our own little worlds" to the universe
of being grasped by true judgment. This move requires a constant
correction of our own private worlds. However, Lonergan notes,
quoting Thomas Aquinas:
I am inclined to believe...that this constant and
sedulous correction does not occur without a specifically
philosophic conversion from the homo sensibilibus
immersus to homo maxime est mens hominis. (24)
For Augustine, very helpful in this journey of the soul's
return to itself is the proper study of the liberal arts. In them
reason is exercised and can establish its mastery over the senses.
In the De Ordine Augustine establishes this by reflecting on the
various disciplines, beginning even with those that directly
concern the delights of the senses, such as cuisine, music and
architecture. Even in these studies there is a distinction between
the delight of the senses and delight in reason's mastery through
the senses.
Reason becomes more aware of itself in the art of grammar
wherein the proper use of words is considered. Higher again on the
scale of the liberal arts is the study of numbers which have an
"immortal" quality about them. Finally, there is dialectics, the
"discipline of disciplines:"
This science teaches both how to teach and how to learn.
In it, reason itself exhibits itself, and reveals its own
nature, its desires, its powers. It knows what knowledge
is; by itself, it not only wishes to make men learned,
but also can make them so. (DO 2, 13, 38)
In dialectic reason provides us with a revelation of itself:
it discloses what it is, what it wishes, what power it has.
Therefore it is the highest and most useful of the disciplines. (DO
2, 13, 38)
It could be said that dialectics is precisely the exigent
discipline that Augustine is exhibiting in these dialogues: the
Socratic quest exposing superficial views and moving the mind to
"the Truth" whose influence on the human soul is, indeed, at the
origin of the quest. Such a science of "right reasoning," of
bringing everything to a synthetic grasp of a higher unity, has a
mathematical quality to it and, indeed, Augustine connects the two:
No one ought to aspire to a knowledge of those matters
without that twofold knowledge, so to speak - the
knowledge of right reasoning and that of the power of
numbers. And, if anyone thinks that this is indeed a
great deal, let him master either numbers alone or only
dialectics. But, if even this seems limitless, let him
merely get a thorough understanding of what unity in
numbers is, and what its import is - not yet in that
supreme law and order of all things, but in the things
that we think and do here and there every day.(DO 18, 47)
As one reads these dialogues one cannot help but remember the
long analyses in Lonergan's Insight of mathematical and scientific
understanding. All point to the human importance of what Lonergan
will call "the intellectual pattern of experience," that
concentrated attention that pulls the mind out of distracting
images and helps it attain to truth.
Augustine wrestles with the nature of various dimensions of
imagination and its distinction from intellect. He notes, for
example, that imagination can be misleading, pouring false colors
and forms into the mind, so that even truth-seekers are misled.
For like the fabled Proteus, who impersonates the truth, false
images constantly strive "to deceive and delude us through the very
senses which we use for the needs of this life."(CA 3,6,13)
On the other hand, the mind can through the process of
abstraction arrive at what is essential.
Thus, for example, thought depicts to itself and, so to
speak, displays before the eyes squares of varying size.
But that inner mind which desires to see the true rather
turns aside, if it is able, toward that vantage whence it
judges that they are all squares. (SOL 2,20,35)
In the same passage the distinction between imagination and
intellect is captured, significantly enough, by geometric examples,
one of them Lonergan's favorite, the circle.
A. What if someone tells us that the mind judges
according to what it is wont to see with the eyes?
R. Why, then, does it judge, if, indeed, it is well
instructed, that a true sphere of any size whatsoever is
touched by a true plane at only one point? What thing of
this kind does the eye ever see or can it see, when
nothing like it can be pictured even by the imagery of
thought? Do we not prove this whenever we describe by
the mind's imagining the tiniest circle and draw lines
from it to the center? For, when we have drawn two
lines, between which one can hardly insert a needle, we
are unable to draw, even in our imagination, other lines
between them in such a way that they will reach the
center without touching each other. Yet, reason asserts
that lines without number can be drawn, and that, in
these unbelievable narrow spaces, the lines can meet only
in the center, so that in every space between the lines
a circle can be described. Since the phantasy is
incapable of doing this, and since it fails more than the
eyes themselves -because it is through the eyes that the
phantasy is imposed on the mind - it is evident that the
phantasy is far different from the Truth, and, as long as
it is seen, the Truth is not seen. (SOL 2, 20, 35)
One position that made a particular impression on the young
Lonergan was Augustine's emphasis on "intelligere," understanding.
Now it does not seem that this word occurs that often as such in
these early dialogues of Augustine - in the Soliloquies he promises
to discuss "understanding" in the future. Still, the reality is
there: Augustine's emphasis on question and answer; the
dialectical dialogue that goes on with others and, at its deepest
level, with oneself; his high regard for dialectic's "tools" of
definition, division and distinction (SOL 2,11, 20ff); his
introspective account of the processes of human consciousness,
etc..
Eugene TeSelle summarizes Augustine's fluid terminology in
these dialogues:
Reason... can mean (a) the "eye" of the mind, (b) the
mind's "looking" (adspectus), its attending to possible
contents of knowledge without yet grasping them; (c) the
mind's thinking (ratiocinatio), the activity of inquiry
as it moves among the data, guided by the rules laid down
in the science of dialectic, classifying and
distinguishing things through definition and partition,
separating them with disjunctive propositions and joining
them through formal implication (CA 3; De quantitate
animae, 25, 47; 26, 51-27, 52); and finally (d) the
completion of the process either in an immediate vision
("intellectus"), a union of mind with that which is known
(this is the Plotinian way of describing it) or, at a
lower level, in a "grasping" of something with unshakable
conceptual knowledge ("scientia" [and this is the Stoic
and Academic way of describing it]). (25)
There is a singularly interesting use of the term,
intelligere, in the section where Augustine is speaking of the
purification of the soul in order to see God. We will quote it in
both Latin and English for it brings to mind a fundamental theorem
concerning knowledge which Lonergan will later emphasize in
studying Aquinas:
Ipsa autem visio, intellectus est ille qui in anima est,
qui conficitur ex intelligente et eo quod intelligitur;
ut in oculis videre quod dicitur, ex eo sensu constat
atque sensibile, quorum detracto quolibet, videri nihil
potest.
However, this vision itself is the understanding which is
in the soul, brought forth by the one who understands and
that which is understood: just as in the eyes, what is
called "seeing" consists of the sense itself and the
thing sensed, either of which being withdrawn, nothing
can be seen. (SOL 1,6,13)
One is reminded of Aquinas' axiom, owed to Aristotle and often
alluded to by Lonergan: sensus in actu est sensibile in actu,
intellectus in actu est intelligibile in actu: the sense in act is
the sensible in act; the intellect in act is the intelligible in
act. This principle itself is opposed to the empiricist myth of
the confrontation of the "blooming buzzing confusion" of sense data
over against the sensing organ. On the contrary, sensation already
structures and patterns its object in the very act of sensing.
Similarly, intellect is primarily one with its object prior to
sorting out the complexities of objectivity and subjectivity.
The above paragraph also reminds one of the section in the De
Ordine where Augustine is pointing out the benefits to reason if it
submits humbly to the dictates of the authority of faith:
When he has become docile through these precepts, then at
length he will come to know: (a) how much wisdom is
embodied in those very precepts that he has been
observing before understanding; (b) what reason itself
is, which he - now strong and capable after the cradle of
authority - follows and comprehends; (c) what intellect
(intellectus) is, in which all things are, or rather,
which is itself the sum total of all things; (d) and
what, beyond all things, is the source of all things. (DO
2,9,26)
For Augustine in these dialogues the Truth, veritas, is that
by which all things are true. The Truth is that which is the
source of all truths and which illuminates the mind as to what is
true. Ultimately, the Truth is the Word of God and the Light of
God.
Now consider, as far as it is required for the time
being, something concerning God Himself drawn from that
comparison of sensible things, which I will now teach
you. God is, of course, intelligible, as those
principles of the sciences also are intelligible, yet
there is a great difference between them. The earth is
visible and light is visible, but the earth cannot be
seen unless it is brightened by light. So, likewise, for
those things which are taught in the sciences and which
everyone understands and acknowledges, without any cavil,
to be most true - one must believe that they cannot be
understood unless they are illumined by something else as
by their own sun. Therefore, just as in this sun one may
remark three certain things, namely, that it is, that it
shines, and that it illumines, so also in that most
hidden God whom you wish to know there are three things,
namely, that He is, that He is known, and that He makes
other things to be known. (SOL 1,8,15) (26)
In the incantatory prayers at the beginning of the Soliloquies
Augustine invokes God under the title of the true and intelligible
Light.
I call upon Thee, O God the Truth, in whom and by whom
and through whom all those things are true which are
true.
O God, Intelligible Light, in whom and by whom and
through whom all those things which have intelligible
light have their intelligible light. (SOL 1,1,3)
Later in his life Lonergan will refer to Augustine's doctrine
of the inner and outer teacher to exemplify his own teaching on
religious experience. (27) His specific reference will be to
Augustine's De Magistro, written several years after the
Cassiciacum dialogues, after Augustine's return to Africa.
Concerning universals of which we can have knowledge, we
do not listen to anyone speaking and making sounds
outside ourselves. We listen to Truth which presides
over our minds within us, though of course we may be
bidden to listen by someone using words. Our real
Teacher is he who is so listened to, who is said to dwell
in the inner man, namely Christ, that is, the
unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God.(11, 38) (28)
I have learned by your warning words, that by means of
words a man is simply put on the alert in order that he
may learn; also that very little of the thought of a
speaker is made evident by his speaking. I have also
learned that in order to know the truth of what is
spoken, I must be taught by him who dwells within and
gives counsel about words spoken externally in the
ear.(14, 46) (29)
5. CONCLUSION
Reading these dialogues was certainly a great consolation for
the young Lonergan. Obviously, his personal journey was far
different from Augustine's. He had never "wandered" far from the
Catholic faith, as had Augustine. Still, he was a young man of
quite independent views, one who, although a Jesuit scholastic, had
defined himself as a "nominalist," because he could not accept the
official scholastic philosophy of his day.
Like Augustine, he had recently experienced a great "release"
in reading Platonic philosophy. And like Augustine, his life -
moral and religious - was connected with his thinking and his
thinking was connected with his life. It behooved him to get
things straight. "What on earth is this all about?" seemed to be
his constant quest. He sought the truth - and this was one of the
major Augustinian categories that was to influence him: "veritas."
So many themes are present in these early dialogues of
Augustine that it is not difficult to see how they prepared the way
for Bernard Lonergan's own intellectual conversion. There is
Augustine's honest desire for the truth, irrespective of
philosophical schools. There is his obvious commitment to
following out that desire, to submitting to the normative demands
of reason, the intellectual pattern of experience that allows all
relevant questions to arise. There is tremendous respect for
liberal learning. There is Augustine's commitment to
introspection, to coming to terms with the facts of his own
consciousness and the inevitability of those facts. There is the
dawning conversion to understanding God and the human spirit in
terms of spirit and not in terms of matter. There is the
transcendental a priori of Truth - veritas - that enables us to
come to know any truth.
Augustine had a profound sense of the moral and religious
implications of the pure desire to know. He knew the destructive
force of human desires and their deleterious effect on human
imagination and, consequently, human thought. As the years went on
he would come to a greater awareness of the "reign of sin" that
plunged human society into darkness and the absolute need for the
liberating grace of Christ. In his unpublished writings on the
philosophy of history from the mid-1930's Lonergan will refer to
Augustine's doctrine that sin is from the human person, an
unintelligible that has no "reason," and that infects all of human
society. Everything else, all good thoughts, motives and actions,
are ultimately rooted in God. (30)
Still, as Lonergan would later point out, Augustine's work was
done in the world and language of common sense. In Insight he
would even point out the remnants of a type of empiricism in
Augustine's doctrine of illumination.
For years, as he tells us, St. Augustine was unable to
grasp that the real could be anything but a body. When
with Neo-Platonist aid he got beyond that view, his name
for reality was veritas; and for him truth was to be
known, not by looking out, nor yet by looking within, but
rather by looking above where in an immutable light men
consult and contemplate the eternal reasons of things.
It is disputed, of course, just how literally St.
Augustine intended this inspection of the eternal to be
understood. Aquinas insisted that the Uncreated Light
grounds the truth of our judgments, not because we see
the Light, but because our intellects are created
participations of it. (31)
But, as Lonergan would several times point out, Augustine's
vocabulary, like Newman's, was a "common sense" vocabulary.
Because he had no fixed technical language with which to express
what he knew, his language floated. In a remarkable comparison
with Aquinas Lonergan spoke of Augustine:
Augustine was not a technical theologian, a theoretical
theologian. He was a person who knew the human soul in
an extraordinary way. He knows more about consciousness
than Thomas does. But he was not a technical
theologian. (32)
In thinking of Augustine, then, it is well to remember, not
just the remarkable religious conversion of August, 386, but the
quieter turning point in the spring of 386 when he read "certain
books of the Platonists" and came to an intellectual conversion in
his understanding of himself and of God.
It seems that something in this rang a bell in the soul of the
twenty-nine year old Lonergan when he read these early Cassiciacum
dialogues in the summer of 1933. In fact, as we mentioned
previously, in Insight Lonergan uses Augustine's change of mind in
386 as a paradigm of the transformation that he is seeking to
facilitate in the minds of "sufficiently cultured" readers of the
twentieth century.
Indeed, Lonergan once described intellectual conversion as
meaning as much as Augustine meant when he spoke of "veritas." (33)
From his later writings it seems evident that Lonergan intended to
do just that. From now on his concerns, though always with the
concrete processes of human consciousness, will also include the
metaphysical dimensions opened up to him by Augustine's
understanding of veritas.
*********************
1. Second Collection, 265. Cf. also Caring About Meaning, 22 and
48; also Understanding and Being, 250, where he claims the order
was from Newman to Augustine to Plato.
2. Verbum, x.
3. Quotations from these sources will be indicated in the text as
following: DBV (De Beata Vita), CA (Contra Academicos), DO (De
Ordine) and SOL (The Soliloquies). Unless otherwise noted, our
references and translations will be from The Fathers of the Church,
Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume 1, Ludwig Schopp, editor (New
York: Cima Publishing Co., 1948).
4. Cf. Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1970) 39; check also 59-60. Also Peter Brown, Augustine
of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1969).
5. Cf. TeSelle 59-60.
6. As Newman said in the Apologia when he became aware of some
intimations of profound changes in his own future life: "I
determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason."
Apologia pro vita sua, 119. Newman needed time to determine "the
logical value" of his experience and its bearing on his duty.
Peter Brown speaks of the period of Augustine's dialogues in a
similar way: "Seen in his works at Cassiciacum, this "conversion"
seems to have been an astonishingly tranquil process...As
[Augustine] wrote to Zenobius, some men deal with the wounds
inflicted on them by the senses by "cauterizing" them "in
solitude," while others "apply ointment to them" by means of the
Liberal Arts. (DO 1,1,2) Plainly Augustine, surrounded by his
relatives and pupils, his library in Cassiciacum well stocked with
traditional text-books, had chosen the more gentle treatment of the
Liberal Arts." Augustine of Hippo, 113.
7. Our references to the Confessions will be from the translation
by F.J. Sheed, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Books I-X (New
York: Sheed and Ward, 1942).
8. Cf. Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, 7.
9. Insight, 15 (xx). Cf. 778-779 for the editors' note on this
statement.
10. Bernard Lonergan, Doctrinal Pluralism (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1971) 67-68. Cf. also Method in Theology, 307;
319; 329; 344.
11. De vera religione 39, 73, John H.S.Burleigh, trans., Augustine:
Earlier Writings, The Library of Christian Classics VI
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953).
12. Verbum, xii.
13. Somewhere in Lonergan's writings he refers to this classic
example of the oar appearing bent in water; I have not been able to
locate the reference.
14. Salvino Biolo, La Coscienza nel "De Trinitate" di S. Agostino
(Rome: Libreria Editrice dell'Universita Gregoriana, 1969) 12. My
translation.
15. Ibid., 13-14.
16. Ibid., 15.
17. Cf. Confessions 7, 9, 13.
18. It is interesting to note that in a letter to his superior
from Rome in 1935 Lonergan mentions that among the few books he
possesses are selections of Plotinus' Enneads.
19. TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, 70.
20. As Peter Brown says: "It was a reading that was so intense and
thorough that the ideas of Plotinus were thoroughly absorbed,
"digested" and transformed by Augustine...For Augustine...Plotinus
and Porphyry are grafted almost imperceptibly into his writings as
the ever present basis of his thought." Augustine of Hippo, 95.
21. Cf. TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, 68.
22. "Augustine understands auctoritas not in the abstract sense
that the word "authority" has in modern political theory, but more
in the classical Latin sense of authentic and authoritative
testimony to or disclosure of something that is not directly
known." Ibid., 74.
23. Henry Chadwick, Saint Augustine's Confessions (New York: Oxford
University Press: 1992) xxiv: "The last four books make explicit
what is only hinted at in the autobiographical parts, namely that
the story of the soul wandering away from God and then in tears
finding its way home through conversion is also the story of the
entire created order. It is a favorite Neoplatonic theme, but
also, as Romans 8 shows, not absent from the New Testament. The
creation, made out of nothing, is involved in the perpetual change
and flux of time. It falls into the abyss of formless chaos, but
is brought to recognize in God the one source of order and
rationality. Because it comes from God, it knows itself to be in
need of returning to the source whence it came. So Augustine's
personal quest and pilgrimage are the individual's experience in
microcosm of what is true, on the grand scale, of the whole of
creation. Augustine found his story especially symbolized in St.
Luke's account of the parable of the prodigal son. But this
parable also mirrors the evolutionary process of the world as
understood by the Neoplatonic philosophers of the age." In that
light one can understand how the last four books of the Confessions
on memory, time, eternity and creation are just the cosmic
dimension of what is illustrated in an autobiographical way in the
first nine books.
24. Collection, 148.
25. TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, 82-83.
26. For an exposition of the various usages of veritas in
Augustine, see the monograph of Lonergan's Roman dissertation
director, C. Boyer: L'Idee de Verite dans la philosophie de Saint
Augustin (Paris: 1941; original edition, 1920).
27. Third Collection, 229.
28. Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. H. S. Burleigh
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953) 95.
29. Ibid., 101.
30. Unpublished notes on the Philosophy of History, available at
the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.
31. Insight, 412; cf. 370. Also Verbum, 73 where, after describing
Augustine's position, Lonergan says: "The Platonism of this
position is palpable, for its ultimate answer is not something that
we are but something that we see; it supposes that knowledge
essentially is not identity with the known but some spiritual
contact or confrontation with the known." For the various
possibilities of meaning of Augustine's theory of illumination, cf.
Eugene Portalie, A Guide to the Thought of Saint Augustine
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960) 109-114. This is the
English translation of Portalie's article on Augustine published in
the Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique. In his notes on the
philosophy of history from the mid-1930's Lonergan mentions
Portalie's work on Augustine.
32. Interview with Bernard Lonergan in Curiosity at the Center of
One's Life (Montreal: Thomas More Institute Papers, 1987) 403-404.
33. "Method in Catholic Theology," Method: Journal of Lonergan
Studies, vol 10, n. 1 (Spring 1992) 10-11.
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