THE HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL SETTING

It must ever be impossible to detail all the factors which govern our attitudes to the society in which we live or wish to live. Two, however, are obvious enough: firstly, the sort of world itself which surrounds us – to understand which involves us in historical investigations and explanations; secondly, the goals we propose for our own lives. In the case of Augustine the historical questions are complicated by the unusual events of his own lifetime: not only, though importantly, the establishment at the end of the fourth century of Catholic Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, a process accompanied by the active suppression of other forms of Christianity and a concerted attack on pagan temples, rituals and cults; but also far-reaching geopolitical changes within the social structure of the Roman Empire as a whole. Whereas at the beginning of Augustine's lifetime, and indeed during the period of his youth and of his years in Italy, the Roman imperium still seemed fixed and more or less unchanging, from the early fifth century the foundations of that society itself were shaken by barbarian onslaughts – Rome itself was briefly ruled by Alaric's Goths in 410 – and by factionalism and separatist pressures from within. Hence came an increasing decentralization, a fragmentation of the imperial power and a decline in the prosperity of the cities which formed the building-blocks of the Empire itself.

Augustine was a Platonist before he was a baptized Christian, and he was an admirer of Cicero before he was a Platonist. From Cicero and from his rhetorical training and teaching he acquired a concern that was theoretical as well as practical with words as tools of persuasion, and hence an incentive to think about some long-standing Stoic and Epicurean disputes about the nature of signs, verbal and otherwise: his knowledge of the matter may be said to be professional.

Augustine's treatment of signs is chiefly to be found in three works, two of which – plus a substantial part of the third – were completed within about ten years of his conversion: On Dialectic (387), The Master (389), Christian Teaching (begun in 396). On Dialectic was part of an early and abandoned project – a victim, according to Augustine, of the burden of ecclesiastical office – to show how the liberal arts can be harnessed to the service of Christianity: the theory presumably was that they all lead to and are measured by Truth, which is God (True Religion 31.57). As Augustine put it in the Reconsiderations (1.6), they can lead the student from the corporeal to the incorporeal ‘by certain definite steps’.

AUGUSTINE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Augustine's body eventually rested in the now obscure Church of San Pietno in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, but his influence remained alive and visible. Had he lived longer, he would have continued the contemporary debate about the quality of his own work. Suppose him to have been allowed to return to life in the late twentieth century to write his Reconsiderations over again. Suppose that, in so doing, he were not only to update his material where he found it necessary, but to persist with one of the principal objectives of the original work: to leave behind a set of writings from which the enemies of the Church, above all Pelagians of various stripes, could draw no comfort.

One of the reasons for the surviving historical influence of Augustine is that he escaped from his own philosophical past and bequeathed himself, apparently – but only apparently – without such a past, to his Western successors. But if Augustine's philosophical and theological strength derives in part from his comparative intellectual isolation, that isolation contributed in less happy ways to the reception of his writings and to the nature of his influence, both before and after his death.

LOVE AND INSPIRATION

Augustine learned from many sources, but his varied learning is often originally ill-digested and years later far from totally assimilated. When a degree of assimilation occurs, it may have been prompted by challenges which have arisen almost by chance. Especially in the decade or so after his conversion, Augustine was constantly driven to reassess what he had learned from the Greek philosophical tradition: from the Stoics and to a greater degree from the Platonists. For although he had learned from Plotinus how to surmount various forms of materialism, his experience of Christian life, first as a devout layman, and later as a priest and bishop, made him increasingly aware of new and hitherto unexpected ways in which the tenets and goals of Neoplatonism and Christianity are in conflict. Even at the time of his conversion, though believing Neoplatonism to be compatible with Christianity, he already held it to be incomplete.

We have already seen how Christian experience and biblical reflection affected Augustine's treatment of a series of traditional problems about the relationship of the soul to the body; but nowhere is Augustine's reassessment more evident, or more far-reaching, than in his account of moral behaviour and of virtue; and nowhere is it more acute than in his treatment of the Christian commandment to love one's neighbour.

It is not difficult to understand why love of neighbour presented problems for Augustine both at the philosophical and at the personal level.

INTRODUCTION

Augustine prays to understand God and the soul. But why not understand the human being? Or is the human being the soul? If the human being is not the soul but the soul and body, what is the relationship between the soul and the body? And why did Augustine not pray to understand the body as well as the soul? Full answers to these questions, involving as they do a lengthy investigation of the development of Augustine's thought from his conversion to his death, would require a series of detailed and technical discussions beyond the scope of the present study; yet some sort of answers are essential, for here if anywhere is the ‘core’ of Augustine's thought. Let us begin with two philosophical reasons why, in the Soliloquies, Augustine wants to understand the soul, rather than the human being, and then outline why he later concluded that there is an important sense in which it is not possible to understand the soul (or at least one's own soul) without knowing something of its body. Only then shall we find that his view of the relationship between the soul and its body has changed as well.

AUGUSTINE'S INTEREST IN SCEPTICAL ARGUMENTS

It is necessary to consider Augustine's treatment of scepticism for two reasons: historically it enables us to evaluate an important and ongoing aspect of his intellectual growth; philosophically it helps us to understand the claims he wants to make about the importance of belief as distinct from knowledge, and the priority of understanding to both. It is principally on Cicero's Academics that Augustine's writings on scepticism, and more generally on epistemology, depend. Such material was not available in the Neoplatonic texts with which he became familiar. His knowledge of Plato's Meno and Theaetetus was derivative, and he knew nothing of Aristotle's Analytics or of any Stoic or Sceptic epistemological texts in Greek.

We get to know, at least in part, by communicating with other people. Augustine's account of given signs shows that he held such communication to be flawed, but not impossible, in our fallen condition. Speakers are able to express at least part of what they wish to express, though hearers will not necessarily be able to understand them. If we want to pursue the matter further, therefore, we must consider the learning capacities of the hearer, or rather not only his learning capacities qua hearer (or reader), but more widely how Augustine supposed that he acquires beliefs, information and understanding of a variety of types of subject-matter.

In 419, or a little later, Julian attempted to pin a charge of Manichaeanism on Augustine, claiming, among other things, that Augustine's account of sexuality in marriage implied that the marriage act is vicious in itself. For Augustine had insisted from as early as The Desserts of Sinners (1.29.57) that the ‘disobedient members’ indicate original sin and the birth of children ‘in concupiscence’ (2.4.4).

The ensuing argument, still unfinished when Augustine's death prevented the completion of the last work Against Julian, was partly provoked by Augustine's use of the word concupiscentia itself. As we have seen, what he meant to represent by this term, at least in the phrase concupiscentia carnis, was a generalized weakness of the ‘flesh’, to which we can improperly assent. But ‘misunderstanding’ arose from the fact that, though concupiscentia is not limited to sexual desire, autonomous sexual arousal, being its most obvious visible effect, conveniently served as a symbolic representation of the phenomenon as a whole.

Augustine's assessment of the origin of this general weakness, which he saw as a defect, not a sin, and which in its sexual form makes males look like animals, is that it is acquired as a penal result of the fall. According to Julian, however, Augustine's ‘real’ view is that sexual desire is sinful in itself, not merely that it is vitiated by the sinfulness of Adam. Against this rendering of Augustine's position, Julian offered his own alternative, that libido as presently experienced is to be described as a morally neutral ‘natural appetite’ (Marriage and Concupiscence 2.7.17, apparently only in men (Against Julian 5.5.23)), or as ‘vigour of the members’ (2.35.59).

The world of Greco-Roman antiquity came to an end both gradually and dramatically. Many attempted to transform its thought, but among them Augustine was the most radical and the most influential, though the transformation he attempted was not always the transformation he produced. To transform is not necessarily to improve, and Augustine was handicapped by his lack of knowledge of much of the best classical philosophy. In the late twentieth century we know more about the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the Stoics than he did, though we do not always convert our knowledge into understanding. Augustine's more limited knowledge may even be thought to have left the originality of his own mind less constrained.

Unlike us, Augustine lived on the frontier between the ancient world and mediaeval Western Europe. For ill or for good, or it may be for both, the transformation he effected left an indelible mark on subsequent Western thought. Despite his lack of resources, he managed to sit in judgement on ancient philosophy and ancient culture.

BEING AND GOODNESS

In sorting through Augustine's descriptions of man's nature, knowledge, loves and hates, as well as of the harsh and morally disoriented society in which he lives, we have always tried not to lose sight of his insistence on the necessity of a radically theistic explanation of the facts that he has unearthed. In Augustine's view, only a theistic explanation makes sense of the gap between man's aspirations to the good life and the reality of the life he lives. Below the ‘problems’ of man lies the ‘problem’ of God.

Thus far, apart from treating the basic question of arguments for God's existence in chapter 3, and noting Augustine's insistence, against the ‘Greeks’, that creation is from nothing and that thus there is a huge and unique gap between the nature of God and those of his creatures, we have faced the problem of God only indirectly. In finally confronting parts of Augustine's ‘philosophical’ theology head-on, it is easy to begin with the obvious point that – Trinity and Incarnation aside – Augustine's account of God is much indebted to its Platonic or Neoplatonic roots; and Augustine saw something even of the Trinity in Neoplatonic theory. The unchangeable Platonic Forms, in an old tradition, exist in God's mind. Augustine's God too must be unchangeable; he can will change but not change his mind.

As with the God of all Platonists and Christians, there is a sense in which Augustine's God is unknowable (On Psalms 145 (144).6; Sermon 117.3.5).

I should perhaps apologize for devoting a longish paper to a very well-known document, which has been glossed again and again by every historian of Pyrrho and ancient Scepticism. My excuse for doing so is double: first, there is a general agreement, I think, on the crucial importance of this document for any attempt to reconstruct Pyrrho's thought; secondly, I would like to offer a new, and I hope reasonable, reading, of some of the most disputed points in it.

The text comes from Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, Bk.xiv, ch. 18, paragraphs 1–5 (= Aristocles fr. 6 Heiland = Pyrrho test. 53 Decleva Caizzi. See the Greek text in the Appendix to this chapter). Eusebius, as is well known, writes at the beginning of the fourth century AD, with the aim of exposing the absurdities and inconsistencies of most pagan philosophy. He makes abundant use of some good sources, in particular the Peripatetic philosopher Aristocles of Messina, whose date has been recently pushed back from the second half of the second century AD to the end of the first century BC. The work of Aristocles used by Eusebius was an important treatise in ten books, with the title π∈ρί ϕιλοσϕίaς. Most of Eusebius' chapters 17 to 21 comes from Book VIII of Aristocles' On Philosophy, dealing successively with Xenophanes and Parmenides, the Sceptics, the Cyrenaics, Metrodorus and Protagoras, and finally Epicurus. The extracts usually include a short doxographical section and a long critical section.

I am very happy and proud to have been given the opportunity of presenting the following papers, for the most part translated from French, to an English-speaking readership. At a time when voices are heard in my country, sometimes with distinctly chauvinistic overtones, standing out against the socalled tyranny of the ‘Publish in English or perish’ injunction, I do not feel any urge whatsoever to apologize, especially since a similar, if not exactly identical, collection is about to be published by the Presses Universitaires de France. But I must confess that I am by no means displeased that the present volume will slightly anticipate it. This is because its publication is something of a tit-for-tat: for my taste for Hellenistic philosophers and my attempts to work on them have been, if not wholly aroused, at least enormously stimulated and fostered by the powerful revival of interests which they have enjoyed in Englishspeaking countries (not to mention others, Italy in particular) for the last twenty years or so. Not that French scholarship and academic teaching have neglected them: witness the works of Victor Brochard on the Sceptics, of Emile Brehier on the Stoics, of Victor Goldschmidt on the Stoics and Epicurus: pioneering works indeed, as everyone would agree, I believe, and not in the least dated.

The so-called ‘Ontological Argument’ (hereafter: OA), which claims to establish the existence of God on the basis of his essence alone, is probably, together with the Liar Paradox, the Third-Man Argument and some other jewels of the same water, one of the most fascinating legacies of the whole Western philosophical tradition. Its official inventor, as is well known, is Anselm of Canterbury (eleventh century); new versions of it were devised by Descartes and some of his most prominent followers; a radical criticism was offered by Kant; and some modern philosophers have tried to revive it under new guises (Plantinga 1965, Hick and McGill 1967, among others, offer comprehensive reviews of this long story). As usual, some historians invoked the nil novi sub sole philosophico, and claimed that the OA had been already adumbrated, or even actually elaborated, by some ancient philosophers. Plato's name was mentioned in this context, by virtue either of some ‘ontological’ moves in the final argument for the immortality of soul in the Phaedo (e.g. Gallop 1975, p. 217; Schofield 1982, p. 2; Dumont 1982, p. 389 n. 6), or of the unique ontological properties of the Good in the Republic (Johnson 1963); some statements of Aristotle's about necessary and eternal being have also been invoked circumstantially (Hartshorne 1965, pp. 139–49); passages from Philo, Boethius and Augustine are standardly quoted as well.