Motivation

Sarah Catherine Byers

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139086110.003

2 Motivation

In our quest for answers about a famous and puzzling passage of the Confessions that pertains to motivation, we have found it to be like texts wherein Augustine uses a Stoic-inspired account of propositional perception.

This promises to be interesting in a number of ways. If Augustine’s understanding of motivation is indebted to Stoic perception theory, then he may also be closer to the Stoics on emotion than has been previously recognized, given that Stoics thought emotions are caused by perceptions that something good or bad has been, or will be, lost or gained. That would be important because the Stoics’ “cognitive psychology” of affective well-being has received special attention, given the present clinical success of cognitive therapies.¹ Furthermore, a breakthrough in our understanding of Augustine’s motivational theory should also elucidate his account of moral development, including the vexed question of his changing account of grace, which he thinks affects moral progress.²,³ More generally, if a Stoic perceptual theory is operative in all these areas of Augustine’s moral psychology, this would pose a challenge to lines of interpretation that have questioned the importance of rationality for the Augustinian self and its moral-religious life.⁴

Before pursuing such topics, we must discover how motivation motivates, in Augustine’s view. It is because we have not yet done this that distinctive features of Confessions 8.11.26–27 remain unexplained. For instance, the Confessions passage describes attraction toward doing or omitting to do actions; but the examples we saw in Chapter 1 were not of perceived actions, but of what we might call merely epistemic impressions about states of affairs.⁵ Yet there is an obvious difference between seeing that something is the case and seeing that something is to be done. Not everyone who sees that there is a glass of wine on the table drinks it, and not everyone who recognizes a person as arrogant avoids dealings with him. Precisely how does motivation differ from merely epistemic perception, on Augustine’s view? Then there is a difference between some of the content of the mental language that we seem to have in the Confessions passage, and the content in the examples in the previous chapter. The Confessions depict the mind’s experience of mental imperatives (in addition to assertibles and dubitatives) whereas those examples did not; and imperatives are also found in Persius’ fifth Satire, which has a Stoic patrimony. Are these imperatives significant for Augustine’s account of motivation in particular, and do they indicate a relation to Stoicism? Another unexplained fact is that in the Confessions Augustine says that his dispositions that are “suggesting” acts to him are “loves”;⁶ but love is not part of the Stoic epistemological model that we have seen thus far.

In order to get to the bottom of these matters we should first consider Stoic epistemology as applied in their theory of action. Then we can move on to consider whether, and if so how coherently, Augustine utilizes this and other intellectual traditions such as Platonism and Christianity in the account that the Confessions passage presents.

Here again, the method of using rhetorical texts should help us. For Augustine’s sermons – in this like Seneca’s letters – are often hortatory and therefore can be expected to manifest details of his theory of motivation.⁷

2.1. Stoic “Motivating (Hormetic) Impressions”

When the Stoics applied their epistemology to the topic of human motivation, they posited a distinct kind of impression. Given that not everyone who sees a glass of wine drinks it, and not everyone who judges another to be arrogant avoids dealings with him, a distinct kind of perception is needed in order to explain why the same intentional object moves one person to act, but not another. Terminologically, the action-inducing impression is distinguished from the purely epistemic sort by the qualifier “hormetic” (phantasia horme¯tike¯), so called because it is apt to produce an occurrent impulse (horme¯) toward an action.⁸

The only extant reference to this kind of impression is found in a passage on Stoic ethics preserved by Johannes Stobaeus.⁹ (Stobaeus wrote in Greek; we consider more proximate Latin sources for Augustine in Sections 2 and 4.) It specifies that a hormetic impression is a perception of some action as appropriate to the perceiver, because the action is concerned with something that contributes to his or her well-being.¹⁰ No further information about the impression is provided, but given the work of Lloyd and Inwood, a plausible theory can be formulated about the content of the sayable meanings (lekta) that accompany hormetic impressions.¹¹ The theory presupposes that more than one sayable is necessary for motivation. One would be an assertible stating that it is appropriate to perform some act with regard to the object – for the text also stipulates that impulses are directed at the predicates (verbs) contained in assertibles.¹² There would also presumably be an adjective referring to the act’s perceived aptness for contributing to the perceiver’s well-being: the healthfulness, utility, pleasantness, or moral excellence/beauty of the object to be attained. These so-called “practical adjectives”¹³ are apparently descended from Aristotle’s three “objects of choice,” and perhaps also from Plato’s observation that people pursue what appears to be attractive and “lacking” to them.¹⁴ The adjective is presumably in the assertible about the fittingness of the action (“It is fitting for me to drink that tasty wine”), or in a distinct assertible which accompanies it (“That wine looks tasty,” “It is fitting for me to drink tasty things”).

But Inwood suggested, in light of Chrysippus’ definition of impulse as “the reason of man commanding him to act,” that a complete account of a hormetic impression should posit an imperative sayable accompanying the impression.¹⁵ Moreover, Seneca’s references to self-command seem to lend weight to Inwood’s interpretation.¹⁶ So the hormetic impression of a glass of wine also says, “Drink that wine.” Apparently, an action is caused when one both assents to the assertible that it is fitting or that the wine is tasty, and “obeys” the self-command by setting oneself in motion to perform the action, which setting in motion is called impulse (horme¯).

Abstracting from this and reflecting on it a bit, it seems reasonable to think that the imperative should be inferred from the assertible about fittingness (e.g., “It is fitting, so do it”). Otherwise we have different sayables which are clustered together but logically unrelated, and it will be difficult to give an account of how these are parts of one single impression. Alternatively, if we deny that there is only one impression here and give each sayable its own impression, it may be difficult to explain how each of the various impressions is essential in motivation. Furthermore, if the command were an inference it might be easier to explain what it means to “obey” a self-command (by assent) as opposed to merely thinking a self-command (in the impression). We could say that the self-command has become effective because the assertible premise that it is fitting for me to do the act has received assent. But the Stobaeus text does not enter into details like these.

Note that there should in principle also be an “aphormetic impression,” which would be an impression that some action ought to be avoided because doing it would be harmful. We must posit this because there is a counterpart to impulse, which is impulse away from an action (aversion, aphorme¯).¹⁷ To return to the example: avoidance of an arrogant person would be possible because of an action-inducing impression having the sayable, “Avoid him!” as well as, “He is arrogant” or “it is fitting for me to avoid that arrogant person.”

2.2. Motivation and Imperatival Linguistic Forms in Latin Texts

Did Augustine know a Stoic theory that imperatival mental language was characteristic of motivation? Is this the reason for the presence of imperatives in Confessions 8.11.26–27? There is no extant Latin doxography preserving this account of the motivating impression. But there are two extant channels through which he might have been exposed to elements found in this theory of motivation, and there is a nonextant text, known to Augustine, which may well have contained the whole account.

In the first channel was the idea that spoken imperatives are effective in motivating another person to act. This claim was in rhetorical and ethical works known to Augustine. Quintilian reports that in handbooks on rhetoric, “exhortation” (exhortatio) has been added to the classical lists of sentence-forms.¹⁸ This addition appears to be from the influence of Stoicism, for exhortation had a specifically Stoic context; it was associated with a branch in ethics, “the hortatory.”¹⁹ Cicero mentions this branch of ethics (cohortatio) in the On Goals, where he also ties it to effective rhetoric.²⁰ Seneca preserves the most complete account,²¹ specifying that hortatory ethics (adhortatio) employs a particular kind of discourse: admonition (monitio/admonitio), also known as counsel (consilium). In the examples of admonition he offers, the form is usually the imperative. (An occasional variation on this is still semantically imperative but syntactically an assertion which serves as a polite way of issuing a command, namely “It is not necessary to do that.”)²²

Given the interplay between lists of rhetorically effective sentence-forms and the Stoic list of interior sayables (lekta), a relation that we saw in Chapter 1, it is plausible to think that the “exhortation” listed in Quintilian and employed by Seneca corresponded to the imperative in the list of sayables (lekta) recorded in Diogenes Laertius (that is, the prostaktikon). So, someone who knew of this relation (as Augustine seems to have), might infer that not only is a spoken imperative effective for motivating someone else, but that within the mind of a single person, motivation operates as kind of self-exhortation, a microcosmic and reflexive version of the persuasion of one person by another.²³

Augustine certainly seems to have been familiar with the idea that the motivation of one person by another is brought about by the use of imperatives. We saw in Chapter 1 that among the linguistic “meanings” (sententiae) to which he draws attention in his rhetorical works is the imperative (modo imperativo pronuntiare). And in the sermons, when analyzing scriptural sentences for his listeners, Augustine treats the imperative as synonymous with the “exhortative” or “hortatory” (exhortatio, hortari),²⁴ and says that exhortation is speaking to someone in order “to excite will” (ut excitetur voluntas).²⁵ He often pairs the exhortative with “admonishing” (admonitio/monere),²⁶ along with other related concepts and terms used by Seneca.²⁷ Again, in the On Christian Teaching, the kind of speech whereby an orator may move people to action has specific forms: entreaties, rebukes, exhortations, attempts to restrain.²⁸ At least some of these forms would seem to involve the use of imperatival verb forms, whether phrased negatively (rebukes, attempts to restrain would include “Don’t do x”) or positively (exhortations, entreaties would include “Do x”).

The second extant channel more explicitly described an individual’s motivation as imperatival language in the internal forum of the mind, though without explicitly saying that this mental language subsists in a motivating impression. And this increases the likelihood that Augustine would regard motivation as perception in which the mind formulates for itself a mental imperative. Seneca reports: “Suppose that I ought to take a walk (oportet me ambulare): I do walk, but only after uttering this command to myself and approving this opinion of mine.”²⁹ Persius, as already noted, describes an individual’s motivation as the interior speaking of imperatives. It seems that both of these are presentations of the Stoic theory of motivation in illustrative terms, though neither explicitly provides an epistemological context by using the term “impression” (visum) or related terms (as Augustine does with “appearing” in Confessions 8.11.27).

Perhaps most importantly, we cannot forget that the Stoic account of the motivating impression itself may well have been presented in the now-lost portion of Cicero’s On Fate.³⁰ Cicero tells us that in it he had presented the Stoic account of “assents”³¹ in connection with logic or the theory of discourse (ratio disserendi), including an analysis of sentences (enuntiationes).³² Because this analysis would likely have distinguished among sayables such as assertibles, dubitatives, and imperatives, and because voluntary action is the theme of the On Fate as a whole, it makes sense that Cicero would have singled out the sayable that is characteristic of motivation, namely the imperative.³³ So it is not implausible to think that Augustine had an account of the Stoic motivating impression in the first book of On Fate. Moreover, there is an independent reason to think that this work served him as a source of philosophical terminology in the field of action-theory: Augustine’s use of “will” (voluntas) to render Stoic “impulse” (horme¯) in works such as the City of God, the On Free Choice, and the Confessions has a precedent in Cicero’s use of voluntas for horme¯ in the fifth book of the On Fate.³⁴

From Confessions 8.11.26–27, it certainly looks like Augustine held the epistemological theory that human motivation is perception involving imperatives thought by the mind. It is “appearances” in his own mind that “exhort” Augustine and issue imperatives in quasi-speech. But how representative and well-developed is this account?

2.3. Motivating Impressions in Augustine

Augustine signals that he has an epistemological account of motivation in his commentary on Psalm 118: he is committed to a distinction between different kinds of knowing, one in which we simply know, the other by which we also act.³⁵ As he tells us elsewhere, the difference between these kinds of knowing is a difference of perceptual impression (visum): “from a diversity of impressions the impulse of souls is different,” and this is why someone at one time wants to be rich, or wise, or in business, or to fight with the military, but at another time does not want to do these things.³⁶ And in the On Christian Teaching, there is the same distinction between purely epistemic matter for consent, and matter consent to which constitutes a decision to perform an action (ad actionem adsensio).³⁷ We find a great deal more information about Augustine’s views on these topics in his own exhortative rhetorical works and his moral treatises.

2.3a. “Suggestio” as a Technical Term for the Motivating Impression

On one of the occasions when Augustine, in a manner reminiscent of Persius’ fifth Satire, preaches that avarice urges us to do things that we ought not consent to do, he uses the term “suggests.” “Avarice suggests, lust suggests, gluttony suggests … he restrains himself from all, answers back to all, turns away from all.”³⁸ Because this term “suggests” also occurs repeatedly in the Confessions passage that interests us, it is worth inquiring whether it has a particular meaning related to motivation.

As it turns out, the term “suggestion” (suggestio), mentioned as the “first stage of sin” in the early On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount,³⁹ appears with some frequency as a well-defined concept in his sermons and ethical treatises. Though it is obviously not a literal translation of the Stoic term “motivating impression” (phantasia horme¯tike¯), it should be understood as a technical term for it. The words suggestio and suggerere were used in this way by other Latin authors of the fourth century, most strikingly by Rufinus translating Origen’s “an impression that calls forth impulse” (phantasia horme¯n prokaloumene¯),⁴⁰ and also, occasionally, to mean “temptation,” by the Latin translators of the Life of Antony,⁴¹ by Ambrose,⁴² and by Jerome.⁴³ Augustine, however, uses the term more precisely than the latter three authors, as a technical term for a motivating impression, and with more details of Stoic epistemology than we find in Origen. This becomes clear when we turn to the On Continence and to the copious evidence of the sermons, and then compare this evidence to the usage of these other authors.

In the On Continence, the context is action; as its name suggests, the purpose of the treatise is to analyze and exhort readers to this virtue, and this involves stipulating what counts as incontinent action, and what does not. Augustine emphasizes that a mere impression (visum) or suggestion (suggestio) is not an incontinent act, but consent is blameworthy. In order to distinguish sentential content that has not yet received assent from that which has, he employs a metaphor signifying different degrees of articulation. Mere impressions indistinctly “whisper” or “murmur” (susurrare) their content, because the perceiver’s relationship to them is still noncommittal. (Recall that in Confessions 8.11.26–27, Augustine experiences “suggestions” that “whisper” quasi-speech.) This preconsensual “murmuring” is not something done by us, it is just something that we “have.”⁴⁴ In contrast, interior “speaking” is assent of the mind (“heart”),⁴⁵an interior act that is a necessary condition of external voluntary action (as he also asserts in the On the Trinity):⁴⁶

The ‘inclining of the heart,’⁴⁷ what is it if it is not consent? For he has not yet spoken who has not yet consented by inclining his heart to the onrushing suggestions of all sorts of impressions (visa) in his heart. If, however, he consented, he has already spoken in his heart.... without the consent of our mind … our cogitation itself … is affected in a certain manner by their suggestion and whispering, as it were.⁴⁸

The term suggestio appears not only here, but frequently throughout this book; as it is not a term that Augustine uses in the context of epistemic impressions, it seems reasonable to infer that it is a special name for a motivating impression. Notice, too, that the quotation just given also implies that Augustine uses suggestio to refer specifically to the sentential contents of impressions. For he says that consent is given “to the suggestions of the impressions” (suggestionibus visorum), which sounds very much like the Stoics’ stipulation that consent is given to the lekta that subsist in rational impressions, and not, strictly speaking, to the impressions themselves (the phantasiai). So the “whispering” suggestiones of Confessions 8.11.26 now look like references to the sayables of action-inducing impressions in particular.

Additional reasons for taking suggestio and suggerere as references to motivating impressions having intelligible content come in the sermons. We learn that a suggestio is something that “happens” to someone (pati)⁴⁹ prior to consent,⁵⁰ and that it is a phantasma,⁵¹ which happens “in thought” (in cogitationibus)⁵² or simply is “thoughts” (cogitationes).⁵³ It is perspicuous that suggestio is reserved for perception of actions: what is “suggested” is fraud, adultery, blasphemy, praise of God, etc.⁵⁴ As the reference to the “suggested” praise of God makes clear, though Augustine sometimes uses the term interchangeably with “temptation,”⁵⁵ it is a general name for any action-inducing impression; this must be why he often takes the trouble to qualify suggestio with “mala” when he is talking about a temptation, a suggestion toward a morally bad action.⁵⁶ And like the Stoic hormetic impression with its practical adjectives, the suggestion “shows” us the attractive thing to be obtained by doing the act: so, for instance, “we are tempted by the delights of earthly things; we struggle daily with suggestions of unlawful pleasures,”⁵⁷ or a suggestion “sets out riches.”⁵⁸

Augustine indicates that the thoughts suggested are sentential. There is, first of all, a sentence by which the perceiver thinks that doing the action will bring happiness. This is an assertible, either a compound conditional or a simple assertible. In the sermons we find this description: “Something unlawful has come into your mind; do not keep your mind there, do not consent.... Spurn the very suggestion. But it suggested wealth: ‘There is great wealth there, much gold; if you commit this fraud, you will be rich.’”⁵⁹ Here it is of course implied that the person thinks that being rich will make him happy.⁶⁰ Similarly, in Confessions 8.11.26, when Augustine is seeing incontinent acts, they imply with their interior speech that if he fails to do incontinent acts, he will not be happy: “From this moment we shall never be with you again, not forever and ever … from this moment this and that are forbidden to you now and forever.”

More interesting, however, is the fact that imperatival content is part of suggestions, in addition to this thought about happiness. In Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 143, for instance, he says that avarice and innocence alternately suggest actions by saying: “Do it, and take it.”⁶¹ And, of course, in the Confessions passage the appearance of continence also uses imperatives.⁶² Though there are instances in Augustine’s corpus wherein he does not explicitly provide an imperative for the suggestio being described, his use of the term “suggestion” itself indicates that he probably thought that all these impressions contain an imperative. For when he uses the verb suggerere to describe spoken language, he typically does so when there is an imperative utterance.⁶³Moreover, he uses monere and suggerere interchangeably,⁶⁴monere being for him (as for Seneca)⁶⁵ associated with the issuing of commands.⁶⁶

Observe that this account of the suggestio fits quite nicely with, and helps to fill out the details of, Augustine’s account of motivation in On Free Choice 3.25.74–75. There, Augustine says that the impulse to do an action cannot be elicited unless there is a preceding impression (visum) that elicits it; and he repeatedly uses the term suggestio for this impression, indicating that it has imperatival content.⁶⁷

The question I raised earlier in connection with Stoicism,⁶⁸ namely, how within the same motivating impression an assertible that an object will contribute to one’s well-being is related to the imperative sayable, is not spelled out clearly in Augustine’s texts, just as it was not in the Stoic sources. Nevertheless, there is an indication of what Augustine may have thought (or would have thought, had someone posed the question to him). He alludes to a distinction between wistfully thinking that it would be nice to get an object, and actually experiencing a preconsensual mental imperative to get it. The difference apparently lies in one’s assessment of the feasibility of the action whereby it could be attained. If the mind notices that the action is practically impossible, one does not experience a suggestio in which an imperative subsists, but instead a wistful optative: “‘Oh if only I could get to that woman! But I can’t, she’s carefully guarded, she has a watchful husband, I haven’t got an accomplice. If I took the risk I’d be caught.’”⁶⁹ In contrast, it seems, if one sees that the desired action is a live option, one thinks that the action is fitting and the imperative follows as an inference. (“She is available; it is fitting for me to go to her; so, go to her.”) This interpretation is confirmed by the Confessions; for Augustine there compares his dueling suggestions for continent and incontinent actions with someone who is hesitating about whether to “steal from another person’s house if occasion offers, or … to commit adultery if at the same time the chance is available.”⁷⁰

To conclude, it is clear that the descriptions of motivation found in the On Continence, the sermons, and the On Free Choice contain some of the hallmark features of the Stoic hormetic impression as we understand it today from our Greek sources, and that the Confessions passage also has these characteristics.

2.3b. Motivating Impressions without “Suggestio”

This conclusion is only reinforced when we move away from the technical term “suggestion,” and consider additional descriptions of motivation in the sermons. Such texts describe temptation as speech of the rational soul (animus) which is “whispered” or “murmured” in the imperative mood. On one occasion, for instance, we are offered an analysis of the classical scenario in which a person wants to drink but knows she should not.⁷¹ The motivation to drink is “silent discourse” (sermocinatio tacita) occurring prior to consent, wherein an intentional object is viewed as possessing the adjective “pleasing,” and the mind experiences an imperative:

The fever tells you, ‘Drink cool drinks.’ … Silent speech is being addressed to you, it presses the dryness in your throat, [the idea of] a cool drink delights you … Don’t yield to it.⁷²

We are told that this applies more generally to other cases of motivation.⁷³

Similarly, we hear that when desire to commit adultery has sprung up in the heart, one may either consent or not. The lust speaks interiorly, using the jussive subjunctive: “Lust has raised her head … she will say, ‘Let’s do it.’”⁷⁴ The same idea appears in other sermons, where dispositions of concupiscence and avarice are said to interiorly “demand” or “order” one to do something.⁷⁵ Among Augustine’s other favorite examples is the case of martyrs, who, he supposes, must have experienced some motivation to deny their religion in order to save their lives. On one occasion, he invites his audience to place themselves in the shoes of the persecuted and imagine their first reaction, prior to consent: “Your soul, perhaps, is saying to you, ‘Beg him not to strike!’”⁷⁶ And in a sermon preached in 397, concurrently with the writing of the Confessions, the martyr’s soul “whispers interiorly” (anima susurrat intrinsecus), murmuring (anima murmurabat) imperatives and an assertible: “‘Deny him; stay alive; you can repent afterward’... That’s the soul … You, soul, were murmuring, ‘Deny him.’”⁷⁷

2.3c. Augustine’s Unusual Sophistication among Latin Christian Writers

What we have seen thus far makes it clear that although Augustine’s notion of suggestio is in some respects like that of the Latin Christian authors of the third and fourth centuries mentioned in 2.3a, he is distinctive for the greater epistemological sophistication with which he uses it. His own usage, which clearly refers to an impression motivating one toward an action – whether the action is morally good or bad – is closest to what we find in Origen as translated by Rufinus.⁷⁸ This is in contrast to Jerome, Ambrose, and the Life of Antony, where suggestio is a way of referring to temptation, but has no clear epistemological status or description. However, Augustine’s epistemological subtlety surpasses even that of Origen-Rufinus: he provides sentential content for suggestions,⁷⁹ and Rufinus sometimes makes mistakes in philosophical terminology that Augustine himself does not make.⁸⁰ Moreover, whereas Origen, like Jerome and Athanasius, is largely concerned with suggestions occurring by the agency of demons, angels, or God, ⁸¹ Augustine is interested primarily in suggestions that occur as natural epistemological items.⁸² Even in the minority of cases wherein he attributes them to the agency of demons, the suggestion is not merely the “casting in” of a thought from outside, but is brought about in conjunction with one’s foregoing disposition; it is oneself who cognizes or formulates the act as attractive.⁸³ And although he will say that God sometimes “inspires” a person to be motivated,⁸⁴ he thinks that in such cases the person is being given an epistemological item, the motivating impression. (It is analogous to a miracle in which God makes water flow from a rock:⁸⁵ in such a case, it is water, the natural substance, that is flowing, despite its supernatural origin.)

These facts indicate that philosophical discussions of epistemology, rather than specifically Christian tenets and contexts, lie at the root of Augustine’s account of suggestions. He assimilated the Stoic epistemology on its own terms before moving beyond the Stoics to expand the number of possible origins for such impressions to include (in the minority of cases) God or demons.

2.4. Return to confessions 8.11.26–27: Summary of Stoic Elements

Returning now to a detailed look at our paragraphs from the Confessions, let us recap our findings by first recalling the context. Clearly it is about action: incontinent versus continent actions.⁸⁶ While Augustine had long ago come to believe that celibacy (“continence”⁸⁷) was something in theory appropriate for a philosopher,⁸⁸ he saw it as incompatible with his personal well-being. He had seen the continent state as laboriosus, had imagined that in it he would be miser, and had conceived of this kind of life as a poena.⁸⁹ However, after he hears from Ponticianus stories about people who decided to live lives of total continence, the virtue appears attractive; and this is the point of paragraph 27.

Notice that what Augustine says he sees in paragraph 27 are the qualities that he now recognizes continence to have: dignitas, honestas, in contrast to the previous negative adjectives. Now honestum is the Ciceronian word used to render the Greek to kalon in its philosophical sense of the beauty of moral virtue. Thus it corresponds to one of the qualities which the Stoics thought had motivating power. Dignitas is similar in sense: Cicero sometimes uses dignitas as a synonym for honestum, and Augustine links the two elsewhere in his corpus.⁹⁰ Continence, of course, is as if speaking. There are four imperatives in addition to three interrogatives⁹¹ and four assertibles. Continence “exhorts” him to come forward – the term hortatoria is reminiscent of Seneca’s adhortatio – and clearly this “coming forward” means to enter into a lifestyle characterized by the omission of one set of actions, and the performance of a different set. It is also clear, from Continence’s promises that he will be safe, that continence is appearing as something which will make him happy, that is, contribute to his well-being, in contrast to the earlier adjective miser. In short, this seems to have all the essential elements of a Stoic hormetic impression. The point of the paragraph is that the virtue of continence was for the first time seen by him as hormetic rather than aphormetic.

The personifications of the “frivolities and vanities” in paragraph 26 and the end of 27 have most of these same elements, if not all. The “this and that” which he perceives are the actions he has been accustomed to doing. The Stoics thought that impressions could arise from the memory as well as from direct sensory experience, and Augustine shows that he agrees with them about this elsewhere in his corpus;⁹² this present case is an example. Augustine the author in retrospect pronounces the acts dirty (dedecora), but in this moment being described, Augustine the character in the story is seeing them as necessary for his well-being.⁹³ The term suggerere occurs three times, letting us know that these are indeed action-inducing impressions. The metaphor of interior “whispering” or “murmuring,” also used three times, makes it clear that there is sentential content that has not yet received assent. The only thing lacking is a sayable in the imperative mood – unless it is right to think that this is implied by the term suggerere itself.

Thus, in Confessions 8.26–27, the appearance, suggesting, whispering, murmuring, and quasi-speech of imperatives and other sentences is one instance of a widely used account of motivation, and this account was developed from Stoic epistemology. Augustine (the author) is describing how Augustine (the character in the story) was having successive, contradictory impressions about what kind of action would make him happy. He is interpreting himself to himself via this Stoic motivational model.

Given these findings, we can speak a bit less tentatively about the relative importance of various proximate sources for Augustine. Persius is the only one among the suggested literary precedents for Confessions 8.11.26–27 who describes imperative sentences “heard” interiorly. But as we have already observed, Persius gives us the sayables without mentioning the accompanying impression, whereas Augustine provides this epistemological context by alluding to impressions (visa) in poetic terms. Seneca also describes motivation as interior self-command, but without explicitly making reference to perception. And given that Augustine’s use of suggestio is more philosophically sophisticated than that of the other Christian authors he knew, those texts could not have been his most formative sources. The lost portion of Cicero’s Academica is not likely either.⁹⁴ The evidence suggests that Augustine knew a doxography of Stoic action theory. This was probably in the lost part of Cicero’s On Fate, as already mentioned in 2.2, but perhaps in some other nonextant Latin summary of Stoic ethics.

2.5. A Note on the Augustinian “Divided Self”

Opening up for us now is a window offering a better view on the Augustinian “divided self” than has been available before.⁹⁵ For Augustine’s description of these two impressions (pro and contra continent actions) is framed by a discussion of how he wishes he could come to a decision, but is unable to do so.⁹⁶ This is one of the better-known depictions of acrasia in the history of the west.

Everything we have just seen indicates that the indecision is not a conflict between rationality and noncognitive faculties of the soul.⁹⁷ Instead of a conflict between the faculty of reason and the generative power’s raw physical craving for sex, Augustine describes a kind of cognitive dissonance, his experience of contradictory impressions. At that moment he was no longer sure that the actions he had until then considered necessary for his well-being actually were so;⁹⁸ but neither was he sure that his happiness lay in adopting a new lifestyle, as is evident from the fact that he does not immediately consent to the hormetic impression of continence. To borrow Henry James’ distinction between three kinds of celibates – those by nature, those by option, those by essence⁹⁹ – Augustine was the second type, and he is here describing his experience of “seeing” both options (continent and incontinent) as choice-worthy. When he says that in this condition “the rational soul commands itself to will … and yet it does not do it,”¹⁰⁰ he means that the person is experiencing in his discursive reason (animus) a motivating impression, with its hallmark sayable the imperative, but that because there is not yet consent, there is no will/impulse to undertake an act.

He stresses that he has these conflicting motivating impressions because he has contradictory dispositions (new and old).¹⁰¹ His “parts of will” are therefore partial commitments to various lifestyles, each of which is organized around some perceived highest good. The sermons again are complementary; they give the same picture of acrasia and have elements in common with Persius.¹⁰²

So Augustine is in line with the kind of view found in Seneca’s letters and moral treatises, where the term “part” of the mind is sometimes used to refer to a moral disposition;¹⁰³ insofar as there is “weakness of will” in Stoicism,¹⁰⁴ it is on this model of conflicting impressions and dispositions.¹⁰⁵ Striking also are Augustine’s similarities to Origen’s Stoic-style description of the weak-willed person in On Principles 3.4.3–4. Here Origen, like Augustine in Confessions 8, is arguing against the Manichean account of weakness of will.¹⁰⁶ Indeed, by the time Augustine writes the Confessions, he has apparently come to regard the cognitive dissonance model of acrasia as the only viable philosophical alternative to the problem of moral identity which dogs the Manichean theory.¹⁰⁷ Moreover, given his sources, it seems likely that Augustine would have regarded the “warring thoughts” model of acrasia as common to diverse philosophical schools, and therefore as the time-tested, correct account. The Epicureans per Cicero weigh in on the side of it, speaking of conflicting and incompatible counsels (consilia).¹⁰⁸ Perhaps more importantly, the Platonic model as it is presented in Cicero, who was probably a source for Augustine’s knowledge of the Timaeus and some paraphrases of the Republic, suggests that the “inferior part” of the soul can be reasoned with and can understand interior speech, a rational operation.¹⁰⁹ (Arguably the model of acrasia is ambiguous in Plato himself.)¹¹⁰

We will have more to say about Augustine’s understanding of Platonic “parts” of the soul in particular, and its relation to his understanding of Plotinus, in Chapter 4. For it is in the context of preliminary passions that Augustine alludes to what he calls “Platonic” soul “parts.”

2.6. Consent and Refusal of Consent

On the Stoic view, assent is given to the propositional content of the impression (the sayables). We saw that in the On Continence Augustine describes the decision to act, the consent to a motivating impression, metaphorically as “speaking” or “pronouncing” interiorly, whereas interior “whispering” or “murmuring” is propositional content which one has not yet judged to be true.¹¹¹ Now the rhetorical texts allow us to say more about this distinction.

From one sermon, it looks as though Augustine thinks that consent is an effective interior speaking of an imperative. When someone is presented with two options for action, the soul or mind consults (interrogare) itself and then chooses (eligere), which choice is a response to itself (respondere tibi anima tua) that is a speaking to itself (tibi dicere anima tua) in the imperative:

If anyone were to say to you, ‘Either give me what you’re hoarding in the ground [i.e. some treasure], or right now I’ll remove your eyes’ … ask yourself; your soul will answer you for your body: ‘Give it all away, preserve my windows [eyes].’ That’s what your soul says to you: ‘I’ve got two windows in your face, through them I can see this light; give the gold away, lest my windows be blocked up.’ So you give everything away for your eyes.¹¹²

Given Augustine’s account of motivation, which we have seen earlier, we infer the following. The perceiver who hears the offer of saving his eyes at the expense of his treasure must cognize that auditory experience interiorly. Such cognition, assuming the person had even a slight attraction to saving his treasure, would actually require two suggestions, each carrying its own imperatival content (“Save my eyes!” and “Save my treasure!”). Consent to one and refusal of consent to the other has as its content an imperative that affirms or repeats the suggestion to save the eyes, and contradicts the suggestion to save the treasure; that is represented by Augustine here as, “give the gold away, lest my windows be blocked up.”

Other sermons clearly use this model. When lust speaks interiorly, using the jussive subjunctive (“Let’s do it”), Augustine advises: “You must fight back by contradiction.... You must answer, ‘Let’s not do it.’”¹¹³ We are told that the person who responds in this way does not consent and has therefore not been defeated by lust.¹¹⁴ Elsewhere he echoes this: to refuse consent is to “answer back” (respondere) to suggestions,¹¹⁵ accomplished by interior use of the jussive, in refutation of the preceding suggestion.¹¹⁶

Rhetorical texts like these again serve as a hermeneutical key for the Confessions. When Augustine describes how “the shadows of dubitation dispersed” in paragraph 29 of Confessions book eight, it is clear that he is saying he gave consent to the impression of continence; for he says that he resolved (placitum, propositum) to live a continent life thenceforward. This consent has imperatival sentential content, which commands him to take on the virtue of continence, and contradicts the suggestion of incontinent acts: “make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.”¹¹⁷ Notice the repetition of the same sentential content in the impression and in the act of assent – though whispered and doubted in the case of the impression, but held as true and resolved upon in consent – which is precisely what we would expect if Augustine were using a Stoic model in which consent is given to the sayable subsisting in an impression. The impression (“appearance”) of continence in paragraph 27 has the quasi-speech, “Stop your ears to your impure members on earth and mortify them”;¹¹⁸ the consent to continence in paragraph 29 is constituted by his interiorly saying, “make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.”¹¹⁹ Similarly, the impression of incontinence in paragraph 26 is a suggestio of incontinent acts, saying that his happiness requires that he continue doing them: “Are you getting rid of us? From this moment, we shall never be with you again, not forever and ever; from this moment this and that are forbidden to you now and forever”; the refusal of consent to this impression in paragraph 29 is constituted by the sentence, “[Let us walk] not in eroticism and indecencies.”¹²⁰

We are left with the question of what the difference would be between thinking an imperative in an impression, and thinking an imperative as consent. The “self-consultation” that Augustine locates in between the two is presumably an important part of the answer to this question. We are connecting the dots here because Augustine is not explicit about this, but it seems that the mind second-guesses the eudaimonistic claim made by the impression. Given that in texts where Augustine distinguishes impressions from consent, he often marks out the difference as one of ratiocination (animus) for impressions versus an evaluative activity of higher reason (mens) for consent, and given that he thinks it is proper to mens to rank goods hierarchically (ranking both their ontological status and their relation to the normative goal of life),¹²¹ it seems that the transition from impression to consent would involve the mind’s comparison of the relative value of the goods at stake in performing or not performing the action. The proposed act may require a choice between a temporal and a moral/eternal good in the sense that it is an intrinsically immoral act,¹²² such as lying in order to save one’s life. Or it will require a choice between temporal goods.¹²³ Once the evaluative reason judges that the goods that the impression “sets out” as being attainable by the action will in fact contribute to one’s happiness, then one repeats the imperative without any mental reservation. This is consent to the motivating impression.

2.7. What Has Love To Do with lekta? A Coherent Synthesis of Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, and Christianity

Some questions still remain about Confessions 8.11.27, however. Granted that Persius, when under the influence of Stoicism, is the only precedent who personifies virtue and vice with the same details of interior speech that we find in Augustine, the reader is still struck by certain features that are not found in Persius (nor in the other literary precedents mentioned earlier).¹²⁴ The personification in Augustine’s text depicts continence as attractive but pure, alluring and challenging him to come, with arms open to embrace him, fertile; and the “appearance” is associated with mental pleasure (continence is blandiens, hilaris, and a “mother of joys”). Here the eros-theory of the Symposium comes to mind. Similarly, when Augustine says that he was seeing continence “in” the examples of chaste people who had been described to him by Ponticianus, Plato’s claim that we love goodness and beauty “in” particulars as a means to loving the standard for these, the kalon itself, seems operative. Because the kalon is also one of the objects of choice in the Stoic account of motivation, we have here a point of overlap between the Stoic and Platonic threads in Augustine’s account. Yet distinctively Platonic content is provided by Augustine’s references to the aesthetic appeal of moral purity.

Again, while the notion of a motivating impression and the syntactic forms Augustine attributes to his suggestiones are inspired by Stoicism, there is distinctively Christian content in the sayables of the suggestions in Confessions 8.11.26–27. For instance, the impression of continence contains the imperative, “Cast yourself on him … he will heal you,” a reference to God.

It is not necessary to belabor either of these facts, because Augustine’s Platonism and Christianity are not in question. However, brief attention should be paid to them. This analysis will permit us to consider the more important question of the philosophical viability and merits of the synthesis that Augustine forges from these three traditions.

2.7a. Eros and Motivation

The theme that action is caused by love runs through Plato’s Symposium from Phaedrus’ opening speech, and is articulated most completely by Socrates, who says that eros is of procreation and begetting children in the beautiful, the “children” being acts (erga).¹²⁵ The account of someone climbing a “ladder” of love objects – that recurs in Plotinus, presumably Augustine’s proximate source for this material¹²⁶ – makes a distinction between purely epistemic perception, and motivating perception. The person at the bottom of the “ladder” – who loves corporeal objects and organizes his life around attaining them – is not ignorant that the ontologically superior objects exist, but he does not perceive them as beautiful things that he lacks. So the maturation process is a perceptual shift in which ontologically superior (more stable) things, and things having moral beauty,¹²⁷ come to be seen by the perceiver as necessary to his happiness.

That Augustine, too, considers love a fundamental ground of action is evident from the City of God, which has as its theme two societies characterized by two different ways of living, that is, acting, created by two loves (amores); and he explicitly asserts that love is a necessary condition and contributing cause of action in his sermons. So, “Love, and you do (dilige, et facis). To the extent that you love, to that extent you do; insofar as you will have done less, you love less.”¹²⁸ Despite a lingering tendency in the popular mind to see in Augustine’s terminology (amor, dilectio, caritas) loves of different natures, he thinks that all these loves are forms of desire for a perceived good; what differentiates them are the objects loved, not something intrinsic to the love itself.¹²⁹ Hence, he explicitly says that various terms for love can be used synonymously.¹³⁰ Though he often reserves cupiditas and concupiscentia for eros directed at something that is wrongly perceived as an end for the agent, and caritas for desire for God or for virtue,¹³¹ the fact that this is not absolute – as when he speaks of the blameworthy desire for money as “charity for money” (pecuniae caritas)¹³² – belies his philosophical position. Even God’s merciful love for us, the hallmark of agape¯ as opposed to eros in Nygren’s influential dichotomy, is treated as an instance of eros: God is enamored with the image of himself, pure beauty, in us.¹³³ Love of neighbor, wishing the good of the other, is similarly a case of being enamored with and trying to enhance the image of God in the other’s soul.¹³⁴

How does Augustine avoid philosophical redundancy when he (Platonically) claims that love is a source of action, but (Stoically) claims that a hormetic impression provokes action? He holds that love and the hormetic impression have different intentional objects: the former is directed at the things (substances or states of affairs) to be attained or brought about by action, the latter at the action itself. The motivating impression answers the question, “How is one motivated to do an action?” and love answers the question, “Why is one motivated to do an action?” Both elements are necessary, he thinks, to fully explain an action. Some of Augustine’s examples of the sentential content of impressions cited earlier make this relation clear. We remember, for instance, that a suggestion to commit fraud says “Commit this fraud, and you will be rich”; but Augustine adds that it is a person who loves riches who is motivated to commit fraud.¹³⁵

The Stoics recognized this distinction between things and actions: the practical adjectives (such as “pleasing,” “healthful”) are perceived qualities of objects or states of affairs, and it is these that, in conjunction with imperatives, stir motivation. But Augustine thinks that by grounding his account in eros theory, he is improving upon the Stoics’ stipulation that the practical adjectives are practical because of oikeio¯sis, a term by which the Stoics refer to a living thing’s affinity for its own well-being, its predisposition to sustain and perfect itself.¹³⁶

While Augustine knows and endorses the claim that we have a natural inclination toward self-preservation,¹³⁷ he says that in humans there is added to this the power of intellect, which can discern intelligible standards (regulae) of truth, justice, goodness, and beauty.¹³⁸ So he presumably thinks, like Plotinus, that the Stoic account of human happiness is inadequate because it lacks a robust account of a proper object for the intellect.¹³⁹ In the case of the well-being of the body, oikeio¯sis entails an orientation toward outward things (food, etc.) which fill a lack in the human being.¹⁴⁰ However, in the case of the mind’s well-being, there is no object the possession of which is itself satisfying for the mind.¹⁴¹ Apart from this, Augustine obviously thought that there was an evidential problem for the Stoic theory: human beings learn from their experiences of disappointment that only by the intellectual possession of something which is good in every respect and cannot be lost because it is eternal, can they be satisfied.¹⁴²

With regard to ethical motivation such as we see in Confessions 8.11.27, then, although Augustine agrees with the Stoics that for humans possession of the virtues is constitutive of well-being, he declines to reduce the virtues to mere qualities of the mind itself. A hormetic impression of continence is possible because continent actions conform to an intelligible, stable standard of continence, and the mind has an orientation toward this standard owing to its possession of “traces” of the eternal standards in its memoria, which enable it to recognize ethical qualities in particular actions. The moral qualities of actions are real, therefore, because they correspond to both the extramental (eternal) standard and to the innate preconceptions in the mind. The mind’s predisposition to be filled, finally, by the contemplation of the standards themselves (that exist in God) is the specific difference of human nature, and in human ethical motivation takes on the role which oikeio¯sis did for the Stoics. So, being motivated to perform an action because one thinks it is the noble thing to do (“for the sake of the honestum/kalon”) – that is, an instance of ethical motivation – Augustine thinks is only possible if someone perceives (rightly or wrongly) some action as conforming to a stable criterion that transcends temporal customs and vicissitudes.

Even in cases of nonethical motivation, the mind’s ability to recognize the ontological goodness of objects, which goodness is a necessary – though not sufficient – condition of their being relationally good for a human agent (good for me in these circumstances), depends upon its possession of the standards of natural goodness in the memoria.¹⁴³ So in a simple motivation “to eat food,” or “to get warm,” Stoic self-preservation is in play; but given that Augustine wants to say, unlike the Stoics, that these objects are (ontologically) good, the term eros could also be used in an extended sense: this is a desire for good things that complete oneself, considered as an animal. Hence, Augustine’s old habits of sexual activity are described as his “old loves” – love of bodies and of the comforts of familiar companionship. For other nonethical motivations, such as the natural desire for “peace” that he describes at length in City of God book nineteen, there is a Symposium-like attraction for beauty (symmetry, proportionality, “the tranquility of order”) in temporal arrangements of the sensible realm.

So it is a metaphysical backdrop, a theory of innate ideas, and an erotic longing for intelligibles as such¹⁴⁴ that Augustine adds to the Stoic perception theory. Because the Stoics’ perception theory does not itself logically entail materialism (though they were in fact materialists), Augustine’s use of a different metaphysical background does not compromise his appropriation of their epistemology. Nor does his importation of innate ideas and of eros – and eros is not a feeling, incidentally¹⁴⁵ – result in an incoherent eclecticism, given that he places these in the higher mind, rather than in the powers of impression and assent.

Plotinus’ Ennead 5.3.3 is therefore similar in some ways to Augustine’s account of perception. Plotinus here asserts that the terminus of sensory perception is the formulation of mental sentences in the discursive reason but that when such a sentence is about “goodness,” the standard (kano¯n) of goodness used in these sentences is provided by the higher intellect. Unlike Augustine, however, Plotinus does not use this account of propositional perception often, nor does he have a thematic distinction between motivating and merely epistemic impressions, nor does he distinguish between various syntactical forms of sayables in impressions (depending on what is being perceived and how) – whereas Augustine does do these things.

2.7b. Delight and Motivation

Returning to the tradition of Plato’s Symposium, notice that Plato and Plotinus spoke of cheerfulness or gladness at the approach of the beloved – that is, anticipated delight at the thought of possessing the object loved.¹⁴⁶ Augustine adopted this idea. Love is a desire to possess something; this possession is necessarily enjoyable;¹⁴⁷ the thought of possessing/enjoying it gives anticipatory pleasure, also called “sweetness” (suavitas). Thus, in contrast to Seneca, according to whom ethical motivation can occur by the thought of sheer duty without any delight,¹⁴⁸ Augustine thinks that we have to see the action we choose as a means to some object the possession of which delights us.¹⁴⁹

Unlike Platonism, however, Augustine posits an intermediary between the eros and the delight: you are aware that you cannot actually possess the object without taking some action, so the anticipated delight depends upon the sayables in the motivating impression. Hence, the higher mind (mens) perceives an object or state of affairs as falling under the description “good,” discursive reason (animus) cognizes an action by which it may be attained, and delight is felt in an interior sense¹⁵⁰ as a result of these thoughts. To be suffering cogitationes in a suggestio implies that one has been in the first place stimulated by desire for an object, and one is then pleased (blanditur) by the thought of what it will be like to possess it after having acted to get it.¹⁵¹ This hybrid of Platonic and Stoic material explains the significance of the Augustinian trio “suggestion-delight-consent” discussed by Mann and MacDonald:¹⁵² delight arises (surgere) as a result of seeing something as desirable and cognizing that some action is a way to get the object.¹⁵³ Hence Augustine says that the motivating impression, the “type of impression by which will may be moved” is one that “delights.”¹⁵⁴Confessions 8.11.26–27, where the impressions to continent and incontinent acts are both associated with “delight” (delectatio) or “cheerfulness” (hilaritas), is one instance of this. Augustine, owing to his cognitive dissonance, felt in an interior sense alternately that living the virtue of continence would be enjoyable (hence continence is the “mother of joys”), and then that incontinent acts would be enjoyable.

2.7c. New Wine, Old Wine Skins?

The presence of specifically Christian content in the impressions described in Confessions 8.11.26–27 can now be better understood and quickly assessed. Is it an integral part of a coherent account of motivation, or does it introduce a discordant note?

The content is there as an instance of the means-ends relations that Augustine thinks are present (often implicitly) in all motivation. It is thematic in the Symposium, though less so in Stoicism, that all motivation is teleological: nearly everything is done for the sake of something else, ultimately (in Platonism) for the transcendent good that cannot disappoint. The twist here is that in Confessions 8 Augustine makes use of the particularly Christian claim that in cases where moral improvement happens to be at issue, the ethical means, that is, the abilities to do virtuous actions, are given by grace originating in Christ and offered through the Church.¹⁵⁵ Hence “cast yourself upon him … he will heal you” is among the imperative sayables in the impression of continence, and the consent is effected by the reading of a biblical text with the imperative, “...put on the Lord Jesus Christ....” It means, as he indicates earlier in the book, that he should make himself able to do continent actions by being baptized.

However, in cases where moral improvement does not happen to be the issue, this Christian content will not appear, although means-ends relations will. Thus Augustine compares his successive impressions of continence and incontinence to deliberation about “whether to kill a person by poison or by a dagger; whether to encroach on one estate belonging to someone else, or on a different one.”¹⁵⁶ These two examples are of deliberation about various means to doing some one kind of action, but Augustine goes on to compare his situation to that of someone who is attracted to different types of actions that might take her to a more general goal, such as pleasure or happiness: “whether to go to the circus or to the theater if both are putting on a performance,” whether “to steal from another person’s house if occasion offers, or … to commit adultery if at the same time the chance is available.” Hence Augustine seems to think of motivation as generally goal-oriented; the Christian content of the sayables in Confessions 8.11.27 is one example of this general feature of his account. The Augustinian theory of motivation itself is not intrinsically Christian or theological; rather, Augustine has a theory of philosophical psychology that is developed from Stoic and Platonic claims about motivation, and he also thinks that this anthropological model is coherent with the specifically Christian claim that grace is a means to the development of virtues.

2.8. Summary of Augustine’s Motivational Theory: Contemporary Relevance

So Augustine’s theory of action is modeled on Stoicism, but contains additives from the Platonic tradition, in the form of desire and delight. For the reasons stated in Section 2.7a, the resulting synthesis should be considered a coherent position developed from these two earlier schools, rather than merely unreflective eclecticism.

In motivation, there is first of all perception of an object as good and good for oneself. In other words, love is provoked; this is not a feeling, but an awareness in higher reason (mens)¹⁵⁷ of oneself as indigent in relation to some perceived good object. If the mind then sees that some action is possible that would result in possession of the object, a motivating impression results, which includes the cognizing of mental sentences about how attaining the object will contribute to one’s happiness, and of a command to go after it; this takes place in the discursive part of the mind (animus).¹⁵⁸ Psychic delight at the anticipated possession of the object to be gained by doing the action results from the impression, because the perceiver views the action as a way of gaining possession of the object. This delight is experienced in an interior sense. The mind now evaluates its impression, questioning the claim that getting the object (via the action) will contribute to happiness; and it either assents or dissents by issuing to itself an imperative that commands doing or not-doing the action.

Which is the dominant note in Augustine’s theory, Stoicism or Platonism? It is clear that the Stoicism is primary for describing the genesis of a concrete action, because an action is provoked by an impression having sayable content and consent. Nevertheless, given that the discursive part of the mind is the least excellent part, in Augustine’s view, and given that the psychological underpinning, attraction for objects, is conceived of in Platonic terms, the Stoicism and Platonism are equally important.

From a contemporary point of view, what is intriguing about this synthesis is the way that it coherently combines cognitivism and sensibility in motivation. At the end of the twentieth century, Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton surveyed the past one hundred years of ethics. They focused in part on accounts of ethical motivation that had sought to combine personal interest and affective involvement with cognitivism. Simply put, the problem that such theories might serve to resolve is how, after Hume, to make ethical motivation essentially involve affective response without also making feelings the criteria of ethics. (If feelings were the criteria, whose feelings would be criterial? Why? Surely the feelings of the majority are not necessarily appropriate.) Kant’s ethics in the Grounding, though careful about establishing human rationality as an objective criterion for ethics, insisted that the desire for happiness and other such “feelings” do not enter into authentically moral motivation. This gives rise to legitimate worries about the aridity of a purely cognitive account – that is, the dubious ability of purely cognitive processes to elicit motivation.

Darwall et al. drew attention to twentieth-century “sensibility theories” as potentially offering a middle path through this Scylla and Charybdis. These theories posited that evaluative judgments presuppose acts of perception essentially involving the exercise of affective or conative propensities, analogous to perception of secondary qualities like humorousness. Not everyone finds a joke funny, only those with the “sense” of humor to appreciate the joke. The humorousness is something that comes to be in the interaction of the joke and the pleasure one feels owing to one’s disposition to be pleased by this kind of joke. It is similar with moral judgments, it was argued. For example, the judgment that “It is good/right to intervene in this situation” would be cognitive both in the sense that it was a rational act, a thought, and in the sense that it was susceptible of being evaluated as true or false; but it would also be an act of perceiving a situation as “calling for intervention,” where perceiving the needfulness of intervening essentially included feeling outrage or pity, or feeling moved to help.¹⁵⁹

This has some similarities to what we have seen in Augustine: the intentional object is perceived as related to or requiring some response from oneself, one feels something (in Augustine’s case, delight), one’s dispositions condition one’s perceptions as in the case of Augustine in Confessions 8.11.26,¹⁶⁰ and one formulates a propositional judgment such as “It is good to intervene.” Arguably, however, the contemporary accounts do not ultimately secure cognitivist ethical judgment. So long as the feeling is essential to making the judgment be true – and it is, if moral qualities are secondary qualities – we seem to be thrown back onto the Humean horn of the dilemma.¹⁶¹

In the end, Darwall et al. recommended a return to the history of philosophy:

Too many moral philosophers and commentators on moral philosophy – we do not exempt ourselves – have been content to invent their psychology or anthropology from scratch and do their history on the strength of selective reading of texts rather than more comprehensive research into contexts.¹⁶²

Our recovery of Augustine’s well-integrated account thus looks rather timely. Darwall et al. may have had in mind a return to the modern figures who lie behind the contemporary accounts, rather than to premodern authors. But it is precisely because Augustine has a richer (Platonic) account of reason than is found either in modern or in Stoic accounts of rationality that he is able to be “objectivist” about the criteria of ethics and at the same time incorporate personal interest and affective involvement.

1 For more on this, see Ch. 3.2.

2 Moral progress is surely dependent upon motivational shifts, and these motivational shifts are brought about by grace, Augustine comes to think; so a better understanding of the role of perception in motivation promises to elucidate his views about how grace acts on the mind.

3 Cary (Reference Cary2008a), Harrison (Reference Harrison2006).

4 For example, the notion that Augustine is to be classed with “voluntarist” thinkers of the later medieval period, or with modern approaches like that of Kierkegaard; or see recently Conybeare (Reference Conybeare2006) 144ff.

5 See the examples in Ch. 1.6b (that time was wasted, that God lacks know-how).

6 Here I follow Chadwick in rendering antiquae amicae meae as “my old loves”; as O’Donnell points out, by this phrase Augustine does not refer to imaginative representations of his past girlfriends, but personifies his own long-standing desires (cf. meretices cupiditates in conf. 4.16.30) (O’Donnell (Reference O’Donnell1992) commentary on 8.11.26). See further Section 7a of this chapter.

7 So, e.g., en. Ps. 70.1.17, asserting that it is the function of the preacher is to admonish people how they should live; cf. en. Ps. 53.5, en. Ps. 44.3. For evidence that Augustine was familiar with Seneca’s moral letters, see civ. 5.8, quoting ep. 107.11 (Seneca’s translation of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus).

8 Stobaeus, Eclogues 2 (containing the Epitome of Stoic Ethics) Ch. 9–9a. See, e.g., Inwood (Reference Inwood1985) 224ff., LS 53Q, and Brennan (Reference Brennan and Inwood2003) 266 n. 20 and 268 n. 24. Horme¯ follows upon assent to a hormetic impression; it is comparable to what we call “intention” (cf. Stobaeus 2.86.17–2.87.6 (LS 53Q), “one would correctly define impulse by saying that it is a movement of thought toward something in the sphere of action,” trans. LS), but also implies setting oneself in motion to do what is intended; it is a sufficient cause of action, unless there is an external impediment. Cf. Cicero fin. 3.15.49: “cognitiones comprensionesque … appetitionem movent,” although this fails to indicate a specific kind of impression.

9 Stobaeus is believed to have worked in the fifth century c.e.; traditionally his source for the Stoic material has been thought to be a text of Arius Didymus, first century b.c.e. (for a summary of the history of transmission, see Pomeroy [Reference Pomeroy1999]; Inwood [Reference Inwood1995]).

10 “What activates impulse (horme¯), they say, is precisely an impression capable of impelling (= phantasia horme¯tike¯) a proper function (to kathe¯kon).

11 I differ only slightly from the theory of Inwood (Reference Inwood1985) 55ff. (referencing Lloyd) by stipulating the presence of an adjective in the assertible, which makes explicit the relevant quality of the object. The inclusion of the adjective seems important given Lloyd’s observation that Aristotle’s “objects of choice” have an analogous role to the Stoic kathe¯konta (Lloyd [Reference Lloyd and Rist1978] 236).

12 Stobaeus 2.88,2–6 (LS 33I).

13 These qualities are divided by the Stoics into the “preferred indifferents” (ta proe¯gmena) such as health, wealth, pleasure (DL, 7.102–103, 105–106) and the “choice-worthy” (to haireton), namely the morally fine (to agathon (see DL, 7.99 and 7.101)). Both are able to stir impulse or aversion: DL, 7.104.

14 Aristotle NE 1104b30–35 on the morally fine/beautiful, the useful, and the pleasing; Plato, sym. 200e, 201b–c on being in a state of “lacking” (endee¯s) the good and beautiful, and see further Section 7a of this chapter.

15 Plutarch’s report of Chrysippus, on horme¯ as the reason of man commanding him to act, using logos prostaktikos: de Stoic. 11, 1037f (LS 53R). See Inwood (Reference Inwood1985) 61–62, also referencing NE 1143a4–11.

16 So ep. 113.18: “Suppose that I ought to take a walk (oportet me ambulare): I do walk, but only after uttering this command to myself and approving this opinion of mine” (trans. Gummere [1925] adapted). Some other texts of Seneca using the notion of self-command are collected in Inwood (Reference Inwood2000), though Inwood himself does not make the connection with the hormetic impression in this work; his focus instead is on the question of the historical development of different concepts of “will.”

17 So “aversion is prohibitive reason” (Plutarch de Stoic. 11, 1037f (LS 53R)).

18 Quintilian cites Rutilius (Publius Rutilius Lupus) and Gorgias of Athens (both early first century c.e.)), and Celsus (second century c.e.), as sources inst. 9.2.102–103.

19 A part of ethics rejected by Ariston of Chios, a pupil of Zeno of Citium (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7(= Against the Logicians 1) 12). Quintilian gives the same Greek term: parainetikos.

20 fin. 4.3.6–7.

21 Letters 94–95 record a debate about what is required for a morally good life: Is it enough to know general laws, or must one also learn applications? Whereas principles state general norms such as definitions of the cardinal virtues, precepts (praecepta) state how the virtues are to be lived out in specific cases (ep. 94.1, 94.17, 94.32, 95.63). Seneca follows Cleanthes (against Ariston), arguing that both principles and precepts are required. Cf. the brief mention in DL, 7.125–126, and Aristotle’s earlier treatment of maxims in rh. 2.21. See also the discussion in John Cooper, who argues that Seneca emphasizes exhortative rhetoric at the expense of philosophical arguments about why Stoic ethical claims are true ([2004] 313ff.).

22 “Non est quod ...” In Seneca ep. 94.20, five examples of admonitio are in the imperative; and cf. 94.50.

23 Cf. lib. arb. 3.25.75.

24 Thus at en. Ps. 99.2 iubet and hortatur are interchanged, and see en. Ps. 30.1.24 (“‘Love the Lord...’ the prophet again exhorts (hortatur)”), en. Ps. 30.2.3.11, en. Ps. 33.1.1, en. Ps. 33.2.6; en. Ps. 33.2.10 (where Augustine glosses “Approach to him, and you shall be enlightened” as exhortatio); cf. en. Ps. 36.3.8, en. Ps. 38.12, en. Ps. 48.1.12, en. Ps. 64.3, en. Ps. 66.1, en. Ps. 67.5, and 67.40, en. Ps. 70.2.6, en. Ps. 100.1, en. Ps. 102.1, en. Ps. 145.2 and 145.5, en. Ps. 148.3. The jussive is also used: en. Ps. 62.15, en. Ps. 66.8, en. Ps. 94.10.

25 en. Ps. 118.1.1.

26 For admonitio in the imperative mood, see e.g., en. Ps. 48.1.9, en. Ps. 44.33, en. Ps. 77.12 and 77.44, en. Ps. 113.1.8, en. Ps. 117.2, en. Ps. 118.5.2 and 118.15.1, en. Ps. 138.26, en. Ps. 143.6, en. Ps. 144.17, en. Ps. 145.9, en. Ps. 150.7. For the jussive ut or ne, see en. Ps. 77.1 and 77.11, en. Ps. 92.1, en. Ps. 94.4, en. Ps. 113.2.2.

27 Such as “rebuke” (obiurgatio), “consolation” (consolatio), “dissuasion” (deterrere, revocare), and “praise” (laudatio): en. Ps. 38.3: “monendo, obiurgando, hortando”; en. Ps. 126.11: “monet, obiurgat”; en. Ps. 54.8: “Adesto, loquere, exhortare, blandire, minare, corripe”; cf. en. Ps. 36.2. Compare also en. Ps. 30.2.2.2 to Seneca ep. 94.43, 94.46–47 (velut edictum and examples). Augustine also explains admonition as the giving of precepts (praecepta) that, like Seneca, he treats as synonymous with counsel (consilium): en. Ps. 49.6, en. Ps. 55.15, en. Ps. 59.4, en. Ps. 48.1.9 (consilium dare and monere are interchanged twice). Lastly, in glossing “Your wrestling is not against flesh and blood” (Non est vobis; Augustine’s translation of Eph. 6:12 happens to differ from the Vulgate, which has “Non est nobis ...”) as admonitio, Augustine interprets it as the polite construction for the imperative (en. Ps. 30.2.3.2, en. Ps. 34.1.4); cf. Seneca ep. 94.20.

28 4.4.6: “obsecrationes et increpationes, concitationes et coercitiones et quaecumque alia valent ad commovendos animos, sunt necessaria.”

29 ep. 113.18. Trans. Gummere (1925) adapted.

30 Clark argued that a single archetype containing the complete fat. and translation of Plato’s Timaeus, among other works of Cicero, was mutilated and the incomplete version then copied in the ninth to eleventh centuries (Clark [Reference Clark1918] 323–326, 340–341). This view is followed by MacKendrick (Reference MacKendrick1989) 351 n. 2.

31 fat. 17.40.

32 fat. 1.1.

33 The extant fat. 18.42–44 does contain the more general point that assent (adsentire) requires a foregoing impression (visum), and the context here is impulse and action (see 17.40).

34 See Appendix II.

35 en. Ps. 118.17.3: “...cum itaque alia sint quae ideo discimus ut tantummodo sciamus, alia vero ut etiam faciamus.” Cf. en. Ps. 118.17.9.

36 div. qu. #40. “Ex diversis visis diversus appetitus animarum est...” My trans. Cf. en. Ps. 118.8.5: the first step in motivation to right actions is “that it may appear how useful and honorable they are (prius est enim ut videatur quam sint utiles et honestae).”

37 doct. chr. 4.13.29. Cf. doct. chr. 4.4.6, 4.10.25, 4.12.28, 4.13.29, 4.19.38, 4.23.52 ad actionem quamlibet adsensio requiritur, an act of consent which effects a change of life (vitae mutatio). Cf. s. 145.1, making statements about motivation that are similar to both Simpl. 1.2.21 and doct. chr. 4.23.52: “Qui enim non movetur, nec mutatur,” etc.

38 en. Ps. 99.11. Trans. Tweed et al. adapted.

39 12.34.

40 Rufinus uses suggestio in prin. 3.1.4, referring back to 3.1.2’s repeated use of the phrase phantasia horme¯n prokaloumene¯. Origen’s phrase “impression which calls forth an impulse” is not literally carried over by Rufinus in 3.1.2 or elsewhere; Rufinus plainly does not understand much about the philosophy Origen is using, and sometimes makes mistakes in translating. However, the concept itself of an action-inducing impression is carried over well enough as the proper meaning of suggestio, as for example, Rufinus: “Nothing else ought to be thought to happen to us as a result of these good or bad things which are suggested to our heart, except only a being stirred up and an incitement provoking us to either good things or to bad. But it is possible for us … to cast away from ourselves depraved suggestions and to resist the very bad persuasions...” (My trans.) “Nihil tamen aliud putandum est accidere nobis ex his, quae cordi nostro suggeruntur bonis vel malis, nisi commotionem solam et incitamentum provocans nos vel ad bona vel ad mala. Possibile autem nobis est … abicere a nobis pravas suggestiones et resistere persuasionibus pessimis ...” (3.2.4); see also esp. 3.3.4.

41 They occasionally used it (suggerere cogitationes for hupoballein or hupotithenai logismous) in order to describe Antony’s experience of temptation. See vit. Ant. 5: the non-Evagrius translator once uses suggerere for hupoballein; Evagrius once uses it for hupotithenai. Cf. notes in Ch. 1.1.

42 Temptations are “suggested” in Explanatio Psalmorum 12 1.37, Expositio Psalmi 118 16.12, Expositio evangelii sec. Lucam 4 and 8, and De Officiis 1.5.17.

43 Comm. in ep. ad Ephesios 2.4: “operantes … libido suggessit”; ibid.: “facimus quod indignatio, furor, ira suggesserint”; Comm. in ep. ad Titum 1: “insanias quas ebrietas suggerit … iacere … proruere … clamare … dormitare...”

44 On sententiam habere, see e.g., en. Ps. 31.2.25; cf. en. Ps. 42.6.

45 “Heart” (cor) in Augustine is sometimes, as here, synonymous with mind (mens) as the capacity for cogitation/ratiocination and assent. On this sense of cor, see de la Peza (Reference de la Peza1962) 66–67, 73–76, 81–82. And cf. s. 265C.1, where cor = intellectus, ingenium, ratio, cogitatio, consilium. Cf. s. 45.9: “a man cannot perpetrate with his members what he has not said to himself in his heart. He has conceived a word in his heart, and it has been commissioned to act.”

46 trin. 9.7.12–9.9.14: “Nemo enim aliquid volens facit quod non in corde suo prius dixerit” (9.7.13); this word is “brought out” or “given birth to,” i.e., consented to, by the mouth of the heart (os cordis). Cf. trin. 15.10.20.

47 He is glossing Ps. 140:4’s “inclining of the heart” with Stoic epistemological categories.

48 cont. 2.3 and 13.30. “Declinatio cordis quid est, nisi consensio? Nondum enim dixit, quisquis in corde occurrentibus suggestionibus quorumque visorum nulla cordis declinatione consensit. Si autem consensit, iam corde dixit [= 2.3]... mente non consentitur … nostra cogitatio … eorum quodam modo suggestione et quasi susurratione tangatur [= 13.30].” Trans. adapted from McDonald (Reference McDonald1952).

49 en. Ps. 33.2.8; s. 4.9.

50 en. Ps. 48.1.6, en. Ps. 75.4–5, en. Ps. 84.10, s. 32.11.

51 en. Ps. 102.5–6. Cf. DL 7.49–50, 7.61 on the representation in thought (phantasma dianoias) as the product resulting from the process of receiving an impression (phantasia).

52 en. Ps. 36.3.19, en. Ps. 48.1.6.

53 en. Ps. 99.11, en. Ps. 122.12, en. Ps. 129.12, s. 335K.6.

54 E.g., en. Ps. 97.6, s. 128.8, en. Ps. 103.4.6, en. Ps. 145.3.

55 en. Ps. 58.1.4, en. Ps. 62.17, en. Ps. 102.5, en. Ps. 120.11, en. Ps. 127.16, en. Ps. 136.7. Cf. the “first suggestion of sin” (prima peccati suggestio) in en. Ps. 103.4.6.

56 E.g., en. Ps. 54.5, en. Ps. 138.14, en. Ps. 75.4, en. Ps. 36.3.19, en. Ps. 122.12, s. 128.8. Suggestions toward morally bad actions are also qualified by “prava” in Origen-Rufinus; see e.g., 3.2.4, 3.3.6.

57 en. Ps. 136.7: “Delectationibus temporalium rerum tentamur, et colluctamur quotidie cum suggestionibus illicitarum voluptatum.”

58 s. 94A.2: “lucra ponit.”

59 en. Ps. 103.4.6 (trans. Tweed et al. adapted); cf. en. Ps. 90.2.7.

60 Cf. s. 150.4: “The bad man says, ‘Unless I do something bad, I won’t be happy.’”

61 en. Ps. 143.5–6: “‘Fac et tolle.’ … ‘Fac et tolle.’...”

62 As a reminder, the full text of conf. 8.11.26–7 is in Appendix I.

63 When a scriptural text says that one character issued a command to another (e.g., “Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9)), Augustine glosses it by saying that the character “suggested” a course of action (en. Ps. 97.6, en. Ps. 103.4.7, s. 343.10). When a character makes a statement, Augustine alters the quoted text to make it an imperative to perform an action, and says that this was a “suggestion” (re the serpent to Eve in the garden, en. Ps. 70.2.6)). Similarly, “Praise the Lord, oh my soul” (Ps. 145) Augustine says is an instance of suggerere (en. Ps. 145.3), and the devil tempting Christ: “Command these stones to become bread” is a suggestio (en. Ps. 8.13). See also s. 335D.3, where one’s neighbors “suggest” the use of amulets: “Do it!” and s. 16B.1, where the commands of God in scripture (“Do not steal”) are said to be God suggesting (suggerere).

64 en. Ps. 48.1.9; cf. en. Ps. 91.3, where the monitiones of God (presumably the ten commandments) have as their contrary the suggestiones of the devil.

65 See notes in Section 2 this chapter.

66 E.g., en. Ps. 44.33, en. Ps. 48.1.9.

67 The imperatival content is alluded to by his use of the terms praeceptum and suggerere; see notes in Sections 2 and 3a this chapter.

68 Section 1 this chapter.

69 s. 45.9.

70 conf. 8.10.24 (“si subest occasio … si facultas aperitur”), emphasis added.

71 See, e.g., Plato, Rep. 439a–c.

72 s. 229E.3: “Febris dicit: ‘bibe frigida’... sermocinatio tacita tibi loquitur, ingerit faucibus siccitatem, facit frigida delectationem … Noli illi cedere.” See further in the paragraph for cedere as consentire. Trans. Hill adapted.

73 Augustine develops this scenario into an analogy for temptations generally. A person with a proclivity to be attracted to wrong actions because of his past habitual sins is said to have a “fever.” God, or the eternal law, is represented by a doctor, and an evil act is one which goes against “the doctor’s orders.” Cf. s. 9.10 wherein the dispositions avarice, luxury (cf. Persius), and hatred are said to be fevers, and en. Ps. 63.9 and s. 88.7 on fever and the physician.

74 s. 335J.2–3. “Surrexit concupiscentia … Dicet illa: ‘Faciamus.’”

75 “Stimulat, instat, exigit, ut mali aliquid facias” (s. 77A.3). Cf. en. Ps. 57.2, where prior to judgment (iudicium), “aliud iubet avaritia.”

76 s. 161.6: “Anima tua forte dicit, ‘Roga illum, ne feriat.’” trans. Hill adapted.

77 s. 13D(= 159A).12. Trans. Hill adapted. “... ‘Nega, vive: ages postea paenitentiam’... Anima est … Tu autem, anima, murmurabas: ‘Nega illum.’”

78 See Section 3a this chapter.

79 The suggestiones in Origen-Rufinus prin., in the vit. Ant. and in Jerome lack sentential content, though they do sometimes say it is “thoughts” (cogitationes) that are being proposed. The vit. Ant. also says that objects such as “property,” “the pleasure of food,” etc. are “suggested” or “sent in” to the mind prior to consent. See vit. Ant. 5 and prin. 3.2.4, 3.3.4, 3.3.6. Origen-Rufinus prin. 3.2.4 mentions Zech. 1:14 (LXX), “And the angel who was speaking in me (loquebatur in me) replied,” as evidence for the claim that angels can suggest thoughts to humans, but does not develop any account of the “speaking” or tie it to impressions (visa/phantasiai).

80 E.g., Rufinus makes “a certain will or incitement” stand in for phantasia horme¯n prokaloumene¯: “fantasia, id est voluntas quaedam vel incitamentum.” Augustine, on the other hand, never makes so basic an error as to use impression (visum) and will (voluntas) as synonyms (so, e.g., Simpl. 1.2.21 calls a motivating impression “the type of impression by which will may be moved” (tale visum quo voluntas moveatur); for further discussion of this text, see Ch. 7.3a and Ch. 7.3d).

81 The vit. Ant. uses suggerere exclusively for the promptings of the devil (Section 5); Origen-Rufinus takes pains to assert that not all temptations come from demons (some come from the body, prin. 3.2.1–3.2.2), but devotes the bulk of his attention to accounts of suggestions by good and bad angels or by God (prin. 3.2.4, 3.3.4, 3.3.6). Cf. Origen-Rufinus, In Leviticum Homiliae 12.7, 16.6, In Exodum Homiliae 1.5. Jerome uses the term mainly for cases of demonic temptation or to describe inspiration by the Holy Spirit; in addition to the texts cited in Section 3a this chapter, see Comm. in Danielem 4.13, Comm. in Proph. Jonam 1, ep. 53.3, Comm. in Proph. Sophoniam 2, Comm. in Proph. Malachiam 1, Comm. in ep. ad Ephesios 3.5, Comm. in ep. ad Titum 1.1, Tract. in Ps. 100 (where the submissiones which the devil “suggests” are cogitationes). And see especially the similarity between Jerome’s Vita Sancti Hilarionis 5–8 and the vit. Ant. passages cited earlier.

82 Of the thirty-three Augustinian references to suggestiones used for this study, twenty-two are naturally occurring suggestiones, and eleven demonic ones. The examples cited in the previous section are for the most part naturally occurring; but for suggestiones coming from the devil, see en. Ps. 24.3, en. Ps. 48.1.6, en. Ps. 70.2.6, en. Ps. 90.2.6–7, en. Ps. 103.4.6, en. Ps. 127.16, s. 4.39, s. 32.11, s. 94A.2.

83 He insists that the devil can only effectively “suggest” to someone’s preexisting disposition (see en. Ps. 143.5–6; s. 32.11).

84 This is the subject of Ch. 7.

85 For this comparison, see en. Ps. 113.1.12.

86 conf. 8.11.26–7 with conf. 8.1.1–2; cf. 6.15.25, 7.16.22.

87 That continence means celibacy here, see note in Ch. 1.1.

88 conf. 6.14.24–25. Cf. Carey (2008b) 173.

89 conf. 6.12.22; “putabam enim me miserum fore nimis” (conf. 6.11.20); and of Ambrose: “caelibatus tantum eius mihi laboriosus videbatur” (conf. 6.3.3).

90 Cicero inv. 2.55.166 and the specialized sense of dignitas as authority, for which good moral character is also implied (honesta auctoritas) (inv. 2.55.166). Cf. Augustine’s c. Iul. 4.14.68 on the conjunction of an excellent state of being (dignitas) with an honorable state (honestas), i.e., a virtuous state (the virtue of temperance (modus) is under discussion).

91 Cf. Ch. 1.4 on the dubitative sense.

92 See trin. 11.6, 11.12, 11.14, and imagination based on memory, trin. 9.10, 11.17; s. dom. m. 1.12.34; lib. arb. 3.25.75.

93 Cf. Section 3a this chapter.

94 The topic of ac. is not human action, so there is little reason to think that text missing from the Academica would have been devoted to a detailed account of motivation. The lost portion of Cicero’s Academica is the first book of the first edition (“Catulus” = close in philosophical content to books 1–2 of the second edition, of which half of book 1 survives). Augustine probably had this second version; see Glucker (Reference Glucker1978) 86 n. 236 and (Reference Glucker and Powell1995) 116 n. 4. See also Brittain (Reference Brittain and Brittain2006) xvii–xviii, Griffin (Reference Griffin, Inwood and Mansfeld1997) 15, 26, Burnyeat (Reference Burnyeat, Inwood and Mansfeld1997) 277–279.

95 The secondary approaches and opinions are manifold. The account I give here has some similarities with Müller (Reference Müller2009) 364–366 and MacDonald (Reference MacDonald, Gracia and Yu2004) 83. Some other examples: Rist (Reference Rist1994) 185 compares and contrasts Augustinian and Aristotelian acrasia in terms of first- and second-order desires; Saarinen thinks Augustine relies upon Platonic and neo-Platonic divisions of soul to explain acrasia ([1994] 28–29); Chappell discusses Augustinian “bad will” and various versions of acrasia in Aristotle, using distinctions and interpretative questions inspired by contemporary analytic philosophy ([1995] 112ff., 178–187); Thero asserts both that Augustine is a voluntarist in contrast to an intellectualist, and that he thinks acrasia is caused by error of the mind ([2006] 54); Pang-White speaks of an initial assent of the intellect or the will, and a following choice by the will ([2003] 152–154). Joyce asserts that Augustine had something close to the Platonic view of acrasia in which “the human soul was divided into faculties, one of which was designated ‘the will.’ The strong distinction between the will and the rational faculty meant that acrasia, though needling, was not an overwhelming problem” ([1995] 316). Byers (Reference Byers2007) I would characterize as mostly correct, but for a better treatment of “parts of the animus,” see Ch. 4.5.

96 deliberatio, pendere: conf. 8.8.19, 8.10.23, 8.10.24, 8.11.27.

97 We might expect that it would be, given that Augustine had read Plato’s Timaeus, perhaps in the translation by Cicero. In that kind of a view, the “parts” of the soul at war in acrasia are metaphysical categories: the soul contains reason, spiritedness, and appetite, which are, respectively, its capacity to think, to experience desire for victory and anger, and to feel bodily desires for pleasure. Here each faculty is limited to only one kind of activity, so neither spirit nor appetite can think, etc.; and each makes use of a specific organ or organ system, with the functionally less sophisticated faculties making use of organs located below the head: Tim. 73d, 70a–e, 86d–87a, 90a, 91e. Elimination of moral conflict depends upon the reduced use of the lower organs, resulting in a taming of the associated soul-faculty (Tim. 86c–d, 89a, 90b). If we read the Timaeus’ description of the nature of the human soul onto the descriptions of moral tripartition in books four and nine of the Republic (but for cautions about the advisability of doing so, see Rist Reference Rist, Goulet-Cazé, Madec and O’Brien1992), this is Plato’s understanding of moral conflict. A version of this kind of account is also present in Aristotle NE 1.7, 1098a3–7, 1.12, 1102a25–b35, 7.3, 1147a35.

98 Thus he says that he was listening to them with much less than half of his attention, conf. 8.11.26, and that they were putting their questions half-heartedly, 8.11.27.

99 James (Reference James and Gooder1990) 15.

100 conf. 8.9.21. Trans. Chadwick adapted.

101 conf. 8.5.10, 8.9.21.

102 While the language Augustine uses can sometimes sound like a reference to a Timaeus-type model, the meaning or interpretation he gives of his own terminology has more in common with Stoicism because he speaks of suggestiones that carry sentential content. So in en. Ps. 143.5, he speaks of a conflict between “you” and “the carnal part within you,” but explains this “carnal part” as one of your moral dispositions (namely, avarice, which is reminiscent of Persius’ account of acrasia in the fifth Satire). Both you and your disposition experience “suggestions” that speak interiorly in the imperative mood; and this is what it means for “you to be divided against yourself.” The “carnal part” is therefore not a noncognitive part. Again, he describes the soul “rebelling against itself,” and being divided ex parte, ex parte: but he explains the part to be resisted as envy that endures over a period of time (therefore a disposition, or as he calls it, a “fever”) that “suggests” courses of action (en. Ps. 63.9). In another sermon, the presumably habitual anger (ira) which you have for your enemy “shouts at you and contradicts you,” that is, contradicts what “you” are intending to say interiorly (s. 315.9–10). Manifestly, avarice, envy, and anger are here not being described as functions of nonrational parts of the soul.

103 So Seneca, ep. 113.15, iustitia pars est animi.

104 Inwood (Reference Inwood1985) 5 and LS 321 say that there is no such thing as a divided self in Stoic psychology; but they are referring to a model in which the conflict is between the power of reason and noncognitive faculties. See Boeri on Sorabji and Gosling, regarding oscillation between judgments or impressions ([2005], 396, 406) and Joyce (Reference Joyce1995) 333.

105 tranq. 1.4–17 recounts examples of acrasia, which Seneca calls “fluctuation” (fluctuatio) and “instability of good character/intention” (bonae mentis infirmitas). Various dispositions (frugality, luxuriousness, etc.) are in conflict. As in Augustine’s Confessions and sermons, these opposing aspirations are sometimes described as a speaking to oneself (“Placet: ‘...’ ”); but they do not constitute actual decisions, as is clear from the fact that Seneca says they are not dangerous, that is, have not received consent.

106 prin. 3.4.4: “A conflict of thoughts (cogitationum) arises in our heart and certain representations [of actions] are suggested to us (verisimilitudines suggeruntur) which incline us now this way and now that … this is found to be the case with all men, whenever a doubtful matter comes into consideration and they look ahead and deliberate which is the better or more useful choice to make. It is in no way surprising, therefore, that if two representations occur to a man in turn and suggest contrary modes of action they should drag the mind (animus) in different directions.... so long as it is uncertain what is the true and useful course, the mind is dragged in different ways.” Trans. Butterworth (Reference Butterworth1973) adapted. While the phraseology of the mind being “dragged” is reminiscent of Plato (rep. 439a–b; cf. Phaedrus 247b), Origen has already rejected the theory of tripartition as an explanatory account, saying that there is no evidence for it in the scriptures. Moreover, in contrast to the account he gives here, which is indebted to Stoicism when he speaks of diachronic representations, Plato’s account of acrasia in rep. (436b, 439b) explicitly depends upon the thesis that the soul is simultaneously dragged in contradictory directions. For the Manichean context, see prin. 3.4.2; so both Origen and Augustine speak of the acratic person being one self, yet fighting against himself (Origen-Rufinus prin. 4.3.3: a semet ipso discordans; Augustine conf. 8.11.27: ista controversia non nisi de me ipso adversus me ipsum).

107 He tells us in conf. 8 that he thinks the philosophical benefit of his warring impressions model is its ruling out of the Manichean view that one’s ‘bad side’ is not really oneself, but a foreign substance or second soul coexisting with the true self. This account of acrasia which we are seeing in the Confessions and sermons marks a shift from his earlier position on how to refute the Manichean position on weakness of will (duab. an. 13.19 opts instead for a distinction between “exterior” and “interior” soul parts, where one part accesses the sensible and wants pleasure, and the other, intelligence, accesses the intelligible and wants the honestum). On different chronological stages in Augustine’s understanding of “soul parts,” see further Ch. 4.5.

The Timaeus, though obviously different from the Manichean account in a number of respects, allows that bodily conditions can penetrate into the lower parts of the soul and thereby make a person involuntarily morally base (87a–b).

108 fin. 1.18.58.

109 Where Cicero speaks of a soul-part “devoid of reason” rationis expers, his actual examples of what it means for reason to “enslave” this part use a model of interior persuasion (sermo intimus), suggesting that the inferior part can be reasoned with and can understand interior speech, a rational operation (So Tusc. 2.21.47–22.51). To Augustine reading Cicero, it probably would have seemed that the Platonic model of acrasia could be interpreted as a conflict between right reason, and dispositions which lack reason in the normative though not the descriptive sense. The notion that a warring soul would be characterized by conflicting interior thoughts that are speechlike, which Augustine saw in Persius and Seneca, would seem to be compatible with this Platonism.

O’Daly (Reference O’Daly1987) 12 n. 37 was right to be skeptical of Hagendahl’s hypothesis that Augustine relied on Tusc. 1.20 for his acquaintance with the Platonic tripartition of the Republic (O’Daly, however, does not suggest an alternative source text). In fact, Tusc. 2.20.47–22.51 is more relevant.

110 In Republic book four, the spirited faction of the soul can concur with reason when reason whispers “You must not”; and the possibility is held out that both spirit and appetite can have the belief (doxa) that they should listen to reason (rep. 442d; 440b, e). This has provoked literature attributing reason to the appetitive power; a summary list of it is in Gerson (Reference Gerson and Hoffman2008) 45 n. 10. Cf. the discussion in Gill (Reference Gill2006) 306–308 and Carone (Reference Carone and Salles2005) 368ff., and Rist’s (Reference Rist, Goulet-Cazé, Madec and O’Brien1992) cautions against reading the Timaeus onto the Republic.

111 Section 3a this chapter.

112 s. 265C.1. For the term eligere to describe this act, see 265C.2. Trans. Hill adapted. Cf. s. 301A.5: “Here comes some threat to the Faith; you’re told, ‘If you persist in it, I will take away everything you have.’ I interrogate your soul. If you say in your soul (in animo tuo), ‘Let him take what I have (Tollat quod habeo); I’m not giving up the Faith,’ you are both holding on to something [sc. the Faith], and renouncing something [your possessions].” Trans. Hill adapted.

113 s. 335J.3. “Pugna tu contradictione.... Responde tu: ‘Non faciamus.’” Trans. Hill adapted, emphasis added.

114 Ibid. Cf. s. 154.12: “Lust rebels, and you don’t consent. You take a fancy to another man’s wife, but you don’t give your approval … you pronounce against the sententential content [of the suggestio] (profers aduersus eam sententiam)... ‘I don’t want to,’ you say, ‘I won’t do it.’”

115 en. Ps. 99.11.

116 en. Ps. 103.4.6, e.g.: “What is ‘the head of the serpent’? [It is] the first suggestion of sin … ‘Let the world’s wealth perish (pereat), lest it be the loss of my soul.’ In saying this (haec dicens), you have watched for the head of the serpent, and you have trampled on it’” (glossing Genesis 3:15). Trans. Tweed et al. adapted.

117 Using Rom. 13:14.

118 Using Col. 3:5.

119 Using Rom. 13:14.

120 Using Rom. 13:13.

121 See e.g., civ. 1.32 on praeponere, trin. 15.4.6, civ. 1.22.

122 Cf. conf. 3.8.15.

123 Note that this would be accidentally a moral choice; Augustine seems to assume that all actions in the concrete circumstance are morally evaluable, because even intrinsically neutral acts such as driving a car are done either as instrumental for living a virtuous life, or for some other goal which is wrongly perceived as the highest good.

124 See Ch. 1.1.

125 E.g., 178d, 179a–b183d, 191a–b, 197a, 211d, 216e.

126 Though with some variation in the order of the “rungs”: e.g., Enn. 1.6.1–2, 1.6.7, 1.6.9. Pace Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum2001) 531 n. 3, it is not a “vexed question” whether Augustine read Plotinus or not; he quotes from Plotinus by name at e.g., civ. 9.17 and also says that he has read Plotinus in beat. vit. 1.4 (of course, he read him in a Latin translation). Instead, there has been debate about how much Porphyry Augustine read in comparison to Plotinus.

127 The ontologically superior things are souls, human institutions and laws, theoretical sciences, and the Form of Beauty itself.

128 s. 19D(= 130A).5: “Dilige, et facis. In quantum diligis, in tantum facis; in quantum minus feceris, minus diligis.” Trans. Hill adapted. Cf. en. Ps. 85.24 (“if our love (amor) grows cold, our action will grow cold”), s. 53.11: “Take charity away, and that’s the end of your doing anything (Tolle caritatem et perit quod agis),” en. Ps. 49.15: “be the mind inflamed with love, let the same love hurry off the limbs to its use.” Cf. also en. Ps. 31. 2.5: “What is it in any of us that prompts action, if not some kind of amor?”

129 At trin. 9.2.2, the definition of love (What is loving (amare) something except wanting to possess it in order to enjoy it?) matches that of the div. qu. #35, and both echo the Platonic definition of eros; cf. trin. 14.6.8. Again, civ. differentiates the two societies by the objects of their love (amare): God is the object loved by good people, while the earthly city craves or clings (inhians, inhaerens – note the erotic metaphor) to earthly pleasures as if they were the only ones (civ. 14.28, 15.15, 14.7). Cf. en. Ps. 121.1 on amor immundus vs. amor sanctus as love of perishable things vs. love of God. So, e.g., in conf. 4.8.13 friendship is understood as a species of the genus of desire for something to be gained in the interactions: either virtue, or knowledge, or mental or physical pleasure, or convenience (reminiscent of Aristotle’s distinction between three kinds of friendships, corresponding to the three objects of desire); this is followed by a Symposium-like discussion of participation/gradation of objects to be loved (conf. 4.12.18).

130 civ. 14.7. So in s. 53.11 caritas is glossed as strong desire, provoking action: “charity, by which we long, by which we struggle to attain, which kindles our hunger and gives us a raging thirst ...” Cf. desiderium for caritas in ep. Io. tr. 4.6.2 and en. Ps. 38.6.

131 Cf. en. Ps. 9.15.

132 conf. 5.12.22.

133 See ep. Io. tr. 9.9.2, 8.10.2–3, 9.3.2.

134 ep. Io. tr. 8.5.1, 8.10.1–2, and passim.

135 So, e.g., s. 229S (sermon has no paragraph divisions): “If anyone desires money, he’s moved by money, he wants to acquire it.” (“Si quis desiderat pecuniam, movetur ad ipsam pecuniam, vult illam adquirere.”)

136 See e.g., Cicero fin. 3.6.20–7.23, ac. 2.8.24–25; cf. fin. 5.10.27, 5.11.30, 5.11.33, DL, 7.85ff. See also the discussion in Inwood (Reference Inwood1985) 185ff. and Pembroke (Reference Pembroke and Long1971) 130.

137 So conf. 1.20.31.

138 en. Ps. 99.5 on “a principle of unity, termed spirit or soul, present in all living things, urging them to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and the preservation of their own soundness (ad conservandam incolumitatem suam),” stipulating that intellect is something additional. On the mind’s power to discern and judge in accord with the regulae, see civ. 5.11, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 21.16, 22.24, 22.29; lib. arb. 2.12.34.

139 Plotinus, 1.4.2.

140 So, e.g., Cicero, fin. 5.9.24; DL, 8.86.

141 Though the Stoics do not deny that human reason is partly speculative, the ultimate end of life is to act with right reason in the selection of what is natural and the performance of all befitting actions (DL, 7.88) and so speculative understanding is secondary in importance to the moral virtues (see, e.g., fin. 5.13.38; cf. discussion in Engberg-Pedersen [Reference Engberg-Pedersen1990] 46). Plotinus and Augustine of course think that this activism follows from the Stoics’ materialism: since all matter is corruptible and mutable, there can be no proper object of understanding in a materialist system. See also the discussion of problems concerning how virtue contributes to self-preservation in the Stoic model (Schofield [Reference Schofield and Inwood2003] 243 n. 24); cases where the exercise of a virtue (such as courage) requires one to be killed or commit suicide might seem to be difficult examples, given the ambiguity of Stoic accounts of the afterlife (on which see Frede [Reference Frede, Athanassiadi and Frede1999], 51; Rist [Reference Rist1969] 257–258).

142 The entire Confessions is an apology for this position; cf. civ. 22.1. See also s. 156.7: “The Stoic … is quite mistaken; I mean it’s simply untrue, it’s absolutely incorrect that a person who has the enjoyment of the virtue of his soul is happy.”

143 The “standards of natural goodness” are the Forms of natural kinds, which exist in God’s mind along with the Forms of the virtues.

144 Contrast Conybeare’s (Reference Conybeare2006) 141–144 dichotomy between “reason” and Neoplatonic intellectualism versus erotic metaphor in Augustine.

145 See Section 8 this chapter.

146 The lover is said to be hileo¯s … kai euphrainomenos at sym. 206d; cf. he¯done¯ in Ennead 1.6.7.

147 So, e.g., div. qu. #30.

148 ep. 76.28–29.

149 So in s. 159.3 he insists that it is axiomatic that whatever is loved gives delight: “nothing is loved except that which delights (non enim amatur nisi quod delectat).”

150 See Ch. 3.5c.

151 Cf. s. 335K.6.

152 Mann (Reference Mann and G. Matthews1998) 150; MacDonald (Reference MacDonald, Gracia and Yu2004) 81.

153 See en. Ps. 48.1.6: “What is his head [the head of the serpent]? The beginning of an evil suggestion. When he begins to suggest evil thoughts, then you thrust him away before pleasure arises and consent follows.” Cf. s. dom. m. 1.12.34.

154 Simpl. 1.2.22; for further treatment of this text, see Ch. 7. Cf. en. Ps. 75.4, where delectatio is “suggested,” and en. Ps. 128.8: a suggestio in which “delectat adulterium.” Again, on one occasion when speaking of the martyr’s interior battle against temptation, he gives the following close-up view of what is going on internally: “The sweetness of this life was saying, ‘Deny him.’ He wouldn’t listen … Overcoming the sweetness of life inside, he overcame the persecutor outside” (s. 335J.1). So Augustine will speak of “sweet suggestion,” and say that a suggestion “tingles” with psychic delight in addition to suggesting that an action be done. He frequently uses titillatio in conjunction with or as a synonym for suggestio or temptatio (s. 93.13, s. 139A.2, en. Ps. 102.5, s. 53A.11, s. 145.5, s. 151.4 and 8, s. 154.3 and 14, s. 155.3 and 9, s. 301.3, s. 305.4, s. 335J.2, en. Ps. 143.6). In s. 98.6 we hear in a generalized account of habituation: “prima est enim quasi titillatio delectationis in corde; secunda, consensio; tertium, factum; quarta, consuetudo.”

155 See further Ch. 7.3d.

156 conf. 8.10.14.

157 For Augustine, feelings are psychic pains or pleasures experienced in an “inner sense,” though they are caused by cognitive apprehension (see Chapter 3.5c). But eros is mental awareness itself: see trin. 10.8.10–11.

158 E.g., trin. 11.8.12, where cogitatio is the discursive use of images; trin. 12.12.17, where scientia actionis is discursive thought (ratiocinari) about things in the sensory world, and trin 14.7.10, where the lower power of the mind is the locus of knowledge of “human things,” by which we may do right actions.

159 Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton (Reference Darwall, Gibbard and Railton1992) esp. 152 n. 86, 154–156, 163–164 n. 109, citing McDowell, Wiggins, and Johnston.

160 When his habits bind him to see incontinence as attractive.

161 Cf. Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton (Reference Darwall, Gibbard and Railton1992) 157–158 on the difficulty within the sensibility theories of distinguishing a “normal” moral sensibility from an “abnormal” one (1992) 159 n. 99. Cf. ibid. 161–162.

162 Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton (Reference Darwall, Gibbard and Railton1992) 188–189.

Book contents

2 - Motivation

Information

2 Motivation

2.1. Stoic “Motivating (Hormetic) Impressions”

2.2. Motivation and Imperatival Linguistic Forms in Latin Texts

2.3. Motivating Impressions in Augustine

2.3a. “Suggestio” as a Technical Term for the Motivating Impression

2.3b. Motivating Impressions without “Suggestio”

2.3c. Augustine’s Unusual Sophistication among Latin Christian Writers

2.4. Return to confessions 8.11.26–27: Summary of Stoic Elements

2.5. A Note on the Augustinian “Divided Self”

2.6. Consent and Refusal of Consent

2.7. What Has Love To Do with lekta? A Coherent Synthesis of Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, and Christianity

2.7a. Eros and Motivation

2.7b. Delight and Motivation

2.7c. New Wine, Old Wine Skins?

2.8. Summary of Augustine’s Motivational Theory: Contemporary Relevance

Footnotes

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Book contents

2 - Motivation

Information

2.1. Stoic “Motivating (Hormetic) Impressions”

2.2. Motivation and Imperatival Linguistic Forms in Latin Texts

2.3. Motivating Impressions in Augustine

2.3a. “Suggestio” as a Technical Term for the Motivating Impression

2.3b. Motivating Impressions without “Suggestio”

2.3c. Augustine’s Unusual Sophistication among Latin Christian Writers

2.4. Return to confessions 8.11.26–27: Summary of Stoic Elements

2.5. A Note on the Augustinian “Divided Self”

2.6. Consent and Refusal of Consent

2.7. What Has Love To Do with lekta? A Coherent Synthesis of Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, and Christianity

2.7a. Eros and Motivation

2.7b. Delight and Motivation

2.7c. New Wine, Old Wine Skins?

2.8. Summary of Augustine’s Motivational Theory: Contemporary Relevance

Footnotes

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Why this information is here

Accessibility Information

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