Current Seminar:
• Augustine's De Trinitate
2/10/2007
Book X, Chapters 3-4
Terrence W. Carlson
Chapter 3
St. Augustine discusses the various ways that many thinkers have mistakenly thought of the nature of the mind or inner man. These erroneous
views are all in varying degrees, materialistic. In his view, they confuse the nature of the mind with the manner in which it perceives the
images, through the material senses. St. Augustine then reviews the various philosophers, the pre-Socratic physicists, who debated what part
of the body had the highest value, the blood, the brain, or the heart. Many of these thinkers thought of the mind as something mortal.
St. Augustine states that these opinions are in error not because they lack knowledge of the nature of the mind, but because they needlessly add
material qualities which they need in order to think about any nature. He emphasizes that the mind is a center of self-awareness or reflexive
presence. The mind naturally reflects on itself. The mind is open through the bodily senses to the physical world. St. Augustine
asks where does the mind go to look for and come upon itself. He argues that the mind has become too focused on loving sensible or bodily images
and can no longer recognize itself and its own operations. The mind must think about itself and realize by its very essence that there was never
a time when it did not love itself, when it did not know itself. For St. Augustine, the mind can know itself because it is present to itself.
St. Augustine asserts that the mind begins to truly know itself only through the effective use of memory, understanding, and will. Memory
and understanding possess the awareness and knowledge of many things and the will permits us to rightfully use and enjoy them. St. Augustine
states that there have been many differing theories about what man knows through the material senses, but no one, in his view, doubts that man lives,
and remembers, and understands, and wills, and knows, and judges.
Chapter 4
St. Augustine now focuses exclusively on the proper use of memory, understanding, and will in man and uses the relationship of these three faculties
as a parallel to the relationship of the Trinity. The trinity of the remembering, understanding, and willing of the self is seen as an image of
the inner workings of the Trinity. St. Augustine closes Book X by asking, "Are we already then in a position to rise with all our powers of
concentration to that supreme and most high being of which the human mind is the unequal image, but the image nonetheless?"
Book X, Chapters 3-4
Br. Dunstan Robidoux, OSB
In chapter 3, Augustine tries to bring a reader to a critical distinction which acknowledges the difference between a consciousness of sense and a
consciousness of self or, in other words, a consciousness of consciousness. Admittedly, he does not use these words but, yet, Augustine argues
that the use of material analogies in order to think about the nature of the mind is an unnecessary step if our object is to move toward
self-knowledge. Disputes exist among interpreters of the mind who attempt to use one material analogy or another, and so these disputes indicate
an uncertainty which sharply differs from the lack of doubt which exists when each persons adverts to her or her experience of self-consciousness. The
very attempt to move to a knowledge of self reveals a set of activities which one cannot do without and which cannot be identified with acts of sense
(but with acts of consciousness). Self-inquiry and self-reflection reveals an inner life or an inner reality which serves as a possibility condition
for all exercises of thinking and knowing and this includes all experiences of doubting which lead to questions and inquires which, in turn, can lead to
understanding and knowledge. The certainty of self-consciousness (inner experience) is to be contrasted with the ambiguity of sense experience
(outer experience). This difference reveals the reality of one’s mind as a better analogy for coming toward a deeper understanding of things which
transcend our incarnate, created order.
In chapter 4, Augustine argues that, as one distinguishes between memory, understanding, and will, one cannot avoid noticing that each of these
activities contains the others in a completely mutual way. A radical identity exists between memory, understanding, and will, and the identity
of these activities points to the unity, power, and significance of the human mind, the human intellect. It tends to be a little noticed reality
which is only really noticed for what it is as one moves away from a preoccupation with a life of sense through a new, introspective form of inquiry
whose object is something which lies within a person instead of something that lies outside a person. Through a growth in self-knowledge of a form
that can better understand the unity of the human mind and which can also draw a greater number of critical distinctions with respect to the different
activities of the mind, one has a basis for moving toward a theology of God which before one did not have.
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