Current Seminar:
• Augustine's De Trinitate
1/27/2007
Book X, Chapters 1-2
Steve Graves
We continue the psychological exploration of mental image via examining the love that scholars have of knowledge. The investigation is to
whether the student loves the subject before knowing the subject. Some platonic ideas are explored briefly – does the student love an Idea of the
subject without knowing and if not, how is it possible to love the subject before knowing it? The background is, of course, that Augustine argues
that is impossible to love without knowing.
Augustine concludes that the scholar must know of the subject and that his premise of love requiring knowledge of the objects is substantiated through
the examination.
I am not convinced that Augustine has defined “love” specifically enough to agree or even disagree with him in Book 10 and that to be keen on a subject
is not equivalent to love.
It occurs to me that Augustine fails to examine the possibility that many scholars may love the pursuit of learning more than or at least as much as
the knowledge acquired, and that it is possible that the satisfaction of obtaining in-depth knowledge of a topic, the status acquired in academic
community and the pleasure of satiated curiosity, among other factors may explain love of study. In other words the means are as important as the
end.
More interesting arguments of self-knowledge and self-awareness are examined in Chapter 2. How do we know of the mind and how does the mind
grasp itself? He points out that even knowing that we do not know is a knowing of ourselves.
Conversational notes: The last half of Book 10, Chapter 2, are pastoral comments which allude clearly to the Fall and explains why Augustine is
intent on explicating the issue of understanding self. Read this first for the foundation of the two chapters.
Chapter 1 is primarily involved with differentiating between loving the unknown and loving the knowing of the unknown or learning of the unknown.
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