4 Preliminary Passions
With regard to the category of affective reactions called “preliminary passions” (propatheiai)1 or “first movements,”2 Augustine made a significant contribution to the history of philosophical accounts of affectivity. He resolved a problem in the Stoic theory as it was known to him from his sources: the question of the cognitive cause of preliminaries. These reflexlike affective reactions were said to occur without the judgments that would constitute emotions properly so called (pathe¯ or eupatheiai); yet given the Stoics’ rational psychology, any affective reaction would seem to require some cognitive cause.
It is important to emphasize this last point. Stoic preliminary passions are not merely physical reactions. If they were, then Augustine could not be described as developing his account from Stoic principles, but would instead be misunderstanding or rejecting the Stoic theory.3 However, it is clear in the Stoic sources that preliminary passions are changes in the rational soul (animus) caused by impressions made on the mind.4 Hence preliminary passions are not something that animals have: they are defined as preludes to and preparatory of passions, in the technical Stoic sense of the word “passion.” “Prelude” and “preparatory” are ways of alluding to the fact that they are caused by the sayables (lekta) in a rational impression; for assent is essentially constitutive of passions, and the prelude to assent is an impression in which the subject formulates mental sentences to which assent can be given or not given. Seneca indicates this in his descriptions of the genesis of anger and Gellius gives an account coherent with Seneca’s when he summarizes Epictetus’ account of preliminary fear, as we shall see in greater detail later. There is mention of bodily reactions in connection with preliminaries, but that is because the soul changes (preliminary passions) are described as analogous to reflexive bodily reactions5 or as the cause of these bodily reactions.6
Augustine rightly refers to preliminaries as cases in which “without a person’s consent, his animus is agitated (turbatur),”7 and as “feelings anticipating the proper function [i.e., consent] of the mind and reason” (passio8praeveniens mentis et rationis officium),9 and he describes them on thirty-two different occasions in his sermons. He developed the implications of Stoic cognitivism by identifying the cause of preliminary passions as doubt, meaning a dubitative sayable subsisting in an impression. We saw in Chapter 110 that Augustine seems to have thought that the dubitative is specially constitutive of impressions concerning personal happiness; and so it is appropriate and unsurprising that he should now apply this claim to the case of preliminary passions, given that affects, for him as for the Stoics, depend upon perceptions about events deemed relevant to personal happiness.
Augustine described the cognitive cause of preliminary passions only in his sermons; he did not do so in his other, more obviously philosophical works, although the descriptions in the sermons harmonize with what he does say about preliminary passions in more argumentative, formal works such as the City of God. That peculiar fact can presumably be explained as follows. Augustine wrote his theoretical works for specific purposes (usually apologetic); in such works, introducing his theory about the cognitive cause of preliminary passions would not have been useful. However, in the sermons, where his purpose is often to instruct in how to overcome temptation, detailed analysis of preliminary passions was conducive to his goal. There are a large number of these sermons, and most of them are not clearly localizable to a narrow period of Augustine’s writing career; thus they can reasonably be taken to represent a consistent and considered view on his part.
4.1. Augustine and His Sources
In Augustine’s sources, these nonconsensual affects are described variously as the results of past passions (“shadows” or “bites”)11 and as “preliminaries” of full-blown passions (primi motus, proludentia, primae agitationes animi, primi ictus animi),12 but scholars have agreed that these descriptions refer to the same phenomenon. The idea is that a preliminary passion is proximately caused by a (false) impression and remotely caused by previous assent to false impressions, which damaged the mind, making it prone to faulty impressions. Seneca and Gellius allude to internal acts that have corresponding physiological manifestations. So Seneca says that preliminaries to anger are caused by the impression (species, opinio)13 that one has been injured, without approval or acceptance (adprobare, capere) of the impression as true;14 the person who has such a preliminary reaction “thinks” (putavit) that he has been injured and wants to take vengeance (voluit ulcisci),15 yet Seneca contrasts this impression with judging that it follows that one ought to be avenged,16 with comprehending (intellegere) that one has been injured,17 and with knowingly becoming angry.18 Gellius, summarizing Epictetus’ position, reports that preliminary fear is provoked by impressions (phantasiai, visa), and describes the internal state of the subject as follows: “we yield to natural weakness (naturali infirmitati cedere) rather than judge (censere)” that the impressions are true.19
Seneca indicates how the transition from preliminary passion to passion proper may occur in the case of anger: by brooding over suspicions and believing things for which one has insufficient evidence. Such credulity contributes to the “growth” of preliminaries into a judgment of the mind from which anger is born.20
As I shall illustrate shortly, there are similarities between Seneca’s account of preliminaries to anger in the On Anger and Augustine’s accounts of the same phenomena in his sermons; he makes use of the same metaphors and identifies the same causes of anger as Seneca does.
It is also clear that Gellius’ summary of Epictetus’ account of preliminary passions significantly influenced Augustine. The latter summarizes this text, in the interest of solving a problem or furthering his argument, in two places: City of God 9.4 and Questions on the Heptateuch 1.30. Despite what Sorabji has claimed,21 in both cases Augustine shows awareness of the distinction between a preliminary, which is not caused by a judgment of the mind (mens), and a passion, which is. In City of God 9.4–5, he explains that the preliminary passion (which he calls a passio praeveniens mentis et rationis officium) does not oust the virtue from a sage’s mind (mens).22 In the Questions on the Heptateuch he uses Attic Nights 19.1 to defend the virtue of Abraham. Genesis states that “panic came over Abraham, and behold, a great fear seized him.”23 Yet Augustine holds that Abraham was wise.24 Seeking to reconcile these two facts,25 he interprets the statement about Abraham as a description of preliminary fear. He summarizes Attic Nights 19.1,26 and says that Epictetus’ account is to be “diligently applied” to Abraham’s case.27
In both these texts, Augustine says that such preliminaries befall the “animus” as opposed to the mens. The essential question, as he sees it, is whether the mens consents; the “animus” which is affected upon the receipt of preapproved impressions designates a distinct set of powers. Because Seneca regularly attributes superficial changes and preliminary passions to the animus, but judgment that constitutes a passion to the mens,28 and because Gellius, too, specifies that the mens is not involved in preliminary passions that move the animus,29 Augustine is in line with his Stoic sources when he invokes a mens-animus distinction.
But what does Augustine mean by saying that the preliminary passion is in the animus? It would seem that he ought to mean that there is some rational component in the preliminary affective reaction. For, as has been widely recognized, Augustine consistently uses animus to connote rationality.30 Given this sense of animus, and the fact that Seneca and Gellius had alluded to rational impressions as causes of preliminary passions,31 it would not be surprising if Augustine had actually gone on to posit mental sayables in impressions as the cause of preliminary passions.
4.2. The Dubitative as the Cause of Preliminary Passions
In one sermon, we see Augustine setting up the problem. Reflecting on those accounts of preliminary passions with which he was familiar,32 he argues that a reflex reaction of panic fear to a surprise event cannot be explained except as a wavering in (though not a loss of) the virtue of the impressed person,33 which must be due to a momentary weakness in said person’s apprehension of the truth (“light”). It cannot be explained solely by reference to a quality intrinsic to the surprising event itself, but must have a cognitive cause:
Generally something comes on us of a sudden.... The earth quakes, thunder is sent from heaven, a formidable attack is made upon us, or a horrible sound is heard. Perhaps a lion is seen on the road … perhaps robbers lie in wait for us … we panic … Why? Because my courage has failed me. For what would be feared, if that courage still remained unmoved? Whatever bad tidings were brought, whatever threatened, whatever sound was heard, whatever happened, whatever was ‘horrible,’ would inspire no terror. Where does that trouble [i.e., the reflexive terror] come from? … Why has my courage failed me? The light of my eyes is not with me.34
The problem that Augustine identifies is the following. The sage is supposed to know that death and physical suffering do not merit fear.35 But if the sage knows this at the moment when a life-threatening event befalls her, then why does she react as if the thing merited fear? Why does she have an impression to which she cannot assent without forfeiting her wisdom? Events such as noises or the view of a large animal cannot be inherently, necessarily terrifying; they only terrify when they are interpreted (however briefly) as having a certain import by the one who becomes panicked. There are only two variables in the equation, and the external event is not causing the sage to see it as something which it is not. Hence the cause must be a momentary weakness in the sage’s apprehension of the real import of the situation (i.e., of the truth, or “light”). The pejorative English phrase “easily impressed”36 conveys something of the point Augustine is making.
When Augustine says here that the person having an immediate panic reaction is “moved” in his courage, he is employing language that Seneca himself had used of the person who experiences a preliminary passion: “his mind will be moved from its usual calm.”37 But Augustine is not asking the kind of etiological question that Seneca answers when he asserts that preliminary passions arise because of a “past wound” to the soul (i.e., previous assent to falsehood, a passion). Instead, Augustine is rather obviously asking about the proximate psychological cause. If it is not a judgment of the mind, then what is it?
In other sermons, Augustine specifies that this cognitive cause is doubt. The texts wherein he specifies this are not in theoretical discourse, for the context determines the language used in the sermons. The language is given in scriptural phrases and stories which he uses to analyze and moralize about affectivity. Thus the key to discovering what Augustine thinks about preliminary passions is to notice which scriptural passages he habitually puts to this didactic purpose. Conversely, failure to take this phenomenon into account will result in failure to recognize important features of his account.
In fact, several scriptural phrases have a virtually technical function in Augustine’s sermons. He uses them consistently to refer metaphorically to preliminary passions. (He thereby puts into practice Cicero’s advice that metaphors should be used frequently in oratory.38) There are three such “technical” metaphors; Augustine employs these to describe preliminary jealousy, fear, craving, and anger: a slipping foot, an irritated eye, and a speck (in the eye) versus a beam.39
As odd as it may seem at first to treat metaphors as constituting a theory about the cognitive cause of preliminary passions, the practice is warranted given that these are precise analogies whose elements consistently represent cognitive acts, powers of the soul, and specific affective states. Moreover, what Augustine says in these sermons in metaphorical language harmonizes with what he says in more theoretical terms about the preliminary fear of Gellius’ sage at City of God 9.4 and Questions on the Heptateuch 1.30.
It will be observed in what follows that while much of the material for Augustine’s account of preliminary passions comes from scripture, it is Augustine who designates this material as having the meaning it does; it is by no means explicitly designated as such by scripture itself.40 It is Augustine’s search for the causes of human affective responses that discovers relations between disparate phrases in the scriptural text and unifies them into a single psychological account.
4.2a. Preliminary Jealousy, Fear, and Cupidity: The Slipping Foot
The image of a slipping foot recurs in Augustine’s sermons as a metaphor signifying doubt. He develops the metaphor from the scriptural phrases “I almost lost my footing, my steps were nearly overthrown,”41 “ ‘If ever,’ I said, ‘My foot has slipped ...,’”42 and “[they] disturb the paths of your feet.”43 The distinction between doubting whether some proposition is true and assenting to it is quite clear in a sermon on Psalm 72, part of which we saw in Chapter 1, where we saw that Augustine says the dubitative is part of an impression (visum):44
Almost my feet were moved, almost my steps were overthrown.... My feet were moved toward going astray (ad errandum), my steps were overthrown toward falling (ad lapsum): not entirely, but almost (non omnino, sed paene) … I was already going astray, I had not gone (ibam non ieram); I was already falling, I had not fallen (cadebam non cecideram).... How has God known, and is there knowledge in the Most High? ... these are dangerous words, brethren, offensive, and almost blasphemous (paene blasphema) … This is why I say, ‘and almost [blasphemous]’: he has not said, ‘God has not known’; he has not said, ‘There is no knowledge in the Most High’; but he is asking, hesitating, doubting (quaerens, haesitans, dubitans). This is the same as he said a little while back, My steps were almost overthrown. How has God known, and is there knowledge in the Most High? He does not affirm it (non confirmat), but the very doubt is dangerous.45
Variations on this metaphor of a slipping foot as the mind’s experience of a dubitative occur in other sermons. Stumbling, staggering, and sinking represent doubt, while standing firmly (in keeping with an accepted sense of stare in Augustine’s day),46 or having already fallen or sunk, signify commitment to some proposition, i.e., assent.47
The important thing to notice, for our purposes, is that Augustine applies the slipping foot metaphor for uncertainty to the cognitive state of someone having a preliminary passion. In fact Psalm 72 turns out to be one example of this: Augustine goes on to say that the psalmist is struggling with preliminary jealousy. Such a person is experiencing a dubitative about whether it is possible for him to be happy, given his lack of temporal goods. He describes his state thus:
[He’s saying], ‘I saw that they who did not serve God had that which I desired … and my feet were almost moved.’48
So then, what does he mean [by saying], I almost lost my footing, and my steps were nearly overthrown? ‘I almost slipped,’ he’s saying, ‘I almost fell.’... Because I was jealous, he says, of sinners, observing the peace of sinners, that is, ‘on seeing bad people do well I staggered and reeled’ … Notice how in staggering he is on the verge of falling, how close he is to ruin.49
Augustine had said that the slipping foot signified doubt about the “knowledge” of God; we see clearly here that the knowledge in question is ‘know-how’ – God’s competence in distributing temporal goods. And Augustine associates this doubt with the question of the value (praemium) of temporal goods:
That’s why his feet were almost moved; that’s why his steps were nearly overthrown; that’s why he was close to ruin. Look at what a dangerous position he has gotten into; he says there, And I said, ‘How has God known? And is there knowledge in the Most High?’ Notice what a dangerous position he has got into by looking for earthly good fortune from God as though it were of great value.50
That Augustine here depicts the issue as one of whether temporal goods have “great value” reminds us of his position on what makes a morally bad emotion, a passion, be bad. It is caused by a false judgment that a temporal good has the value of eternal goods, an overvaluation that is incompatible with properly valuing eternal goods, given that the virtues alone are necessary and sufficient for happiness. Hence, the person who has a passion is willing to sacrifice virtue51 and therefore a passion is a “sin,” an abandonment of virtue. So in this passage, the “dangerous position” of the doubter is that he is considering making the false judgment that something that is necessary for his happiness has been withheld from him, but granted to others who are undeserving. That judgment, if he makes it, will cause the passion of jealousy.
Furthermore, Augustine’s belief – shared with the Stoics – that God’s governance is ultimately responsible for the distribution of temporal benefits explains why the dubitative about the value of temporal goods is reducible to a dubitative about God’s providence being inept or unjust. Given God’s responsibility,52 Augustine held that passions provoked by the absence of an overvalued temporal good are in fact about God’s providence. So, in the case of a preliminary passion, someone lacks a temporal good that he thinks may be necessary for happiness; and therefore he holds (at least by implication)53 that God may have misallocated that good.
Doubt is identified as the source of other preliminary passions when Augustine uses the gospel story of Peter beginning to sink while walking on the sea. Although the gospel account says Peter was fearful, it does not indicate that his state was propathetic.54 But Augustine explicitly links other scriptural phrases about slipping feet to this description of Peter, and to Jesus’ question, “Why did you doubt?” Thus Peter’s sinking, but not having sunk, is a distinction between cognitive aspects of affective states: that of doubt versus assent and preliminary passion versus passion.
So Peter functions as a symbol of someone who has a preliminary to fear:55 “Look at Peter, who was the symbolic representative of us all: now he’s trusting, now he’s tottering … in his being filled with alarm, and his staggering … he represents the weak.”56 Peter’s slip represents the fact that when someone is faced with a misfortune, he “experiences inner dread.”57 This dread is associated with doubt, which Augustine contrasts with enlightened thoughts or constancy in belief. For instance:
Listen to what the psalm says now: Beside myself with fear.... In another psalm he declared, ‘If’ I said ‘my foot has slipped, your mercy, Lord, came to my help.’ … Think what a good illustration … we have in Peter.... Peter climbed out of the boat and began to walk. He went bravely … but when he felt the force of the wind he was frightened.... Beginning to go under, he cried, ‘I’m sinking, Lord!’ And Jesus stretched out a hand to him and pulled him up, saying, ‘Why did you doubt?’ … I cried to you, says the psalmist.... It is as though he is telling us, ‘Believe me, I know what I am talking about. I was in trouble, I called upon the Lord, and he never let me down … he enlightened my thoughts and strengthened [me in] my agitation.’58
Peter too … staggered … he began to tremble.... And yet when he grew afraid he cried out.... Then the Lord took him by the hand and said … ‘Why did you doubt?’ … This fulfilled what was said in the psalm: ‘If,’ I said, ‘my foot has slipped, your mercy, Lord, came to my help.’59
Augustine explains that the “enlightened” thought which cuts doubt short is the proposition that to be rich is to have riches that cannot be lost in a shipwreck (i.e., to have eternal goods).60 This is the same point that he makes when he summarizes Gellius’ report of Epictetus in the City of God. There he says that the sage avoided the passion of fear insofar as “he was both able to suffer that agitation, and to hold the opinion firmly in his mens that life and bodily welfare, the loss of which was threatened by the raging storm, were not goods which make their possessor good, as does justice [an eternal good].”61 Note that this formulation “goods which make their possessor good” is almost exactly the Stoic formulation of virtue recorded in Diogenes Laertius: that good which makes its possessors praiseworthy.62
Peter’s beginning to sink recurs as a motif in Augustine’s descriptions of preliminary passions; he uses it to refer to preliminary craving as well.63 Peter is a symbol of someone who wavers through desire (fluctuat cupiditate),64 beginning to deviate slightly from virtue, and coming dangerously close to desiring temporal goods as ends in themselves. Such a person does not yet, however, crave temporal goods in such a way as to sin. He has not yet perished (sinned);65 he is staggering, and only beginning to sink. Augustine emphasizes the cognitive cause of this beginning of desire while unfolding the meaning of the story:
Human beings … are often thrown off balance by human praise and fame, and are on the verge of going under. That’s the meaning of Peter shaking … in the sea … the soul (animus) struggles against the desire for human praise.... Those who call you well-off lead you astray, and disturb the paths of your feet.... Cry out, Peter, as you stagger, and say, ‘Lord, save me.’ … He does indeed rebuke you and say … ‘Why did you doubt?’... [resuming the interpretive summary of the gospel story:] all doubts and hesitations were laid to rest; the stormy sea was stilled, and thus they came to the safety of terra firma.66
This gospel that has just been read … about the apostle Peter … is advising us to take the sea as meaning the present age and this world … my foot has slipped. It’s a psalm speaking, the words of a sacred song … they can be our words too … [The Lord] rebuked the doubter … ‘Why did you doubt?’.... Think of the world and this age as the sea.... You love God; you’re walking on the sea, the swell of the world is under your feet. You love the world; it will swallow you.... Consult … your own desire.... See if some inner wind is not blowing you off course.... If your foot has slipped, if you stagger, if there is something you are not subduing, if you begin to sink, say, ‘Lord, I perish, deliver me.’ Say, ‘I perish,’ in order not to perish.67
In this latter quote especially, we see that the ontology which Augustine brings in to back up Cicero’s allusions to “great goods”68 entails that since eternal goods are “in” God (i.e., of God’s nature), failure to ascribe the proper value to them constitutes a turning away from God, a sin.69 Preliminary passions are about God at least by implication.70
4.2b. Preliminary Anger: The Irritated Eye
The words of Psalm 4:5, “Be angry and sin not,” had already been interpreted as a reference to an involuntary propatheia of anger by Origen.71 Jerome, too, had glossed the verse this way.72 Augustine offered a similar interpretation: “Be angry and sin not.... Even if you are angry, sin not. That is, even though a movement of the soul (motus animi) rises up which, as a penalty for sin,73 is not under our control, at least refuse to consent with your reason and mind (mens).”74 And he often speaks of a sort of “anger,” which is not yet a passion but only “close to” (prope)75 it. To do so, he frequently uses metaphors developed from the scriptural phrase, “My eye is troubled through anger (turbatus est prae ira oculus meus).”76 Augustine could have been inspired by Cicero to use the phrase thus; the latter compared the rational soul when disordered by a passion (animus conturbatus) to a disordered eye (oculus conturbatus).77
Augustine makes the distinction between preliminary anger and real anger by differentiating an irritated eye in an imperfect condition from a blind eye: “Before one passes into darkness, then, the eye is irritated by anger; but one must prevent … the eye from becoming blinded.”78 The mens is the eye of the soul,79 and “the loss of the understanding of the truth … is the blindness of the mind.”80 Someone with preliminary anger is “troubled”81 but is only on the verge of assent to the false proposition that would constitute the passion of anger:
Cease from anger, and leave indignation. Don’t you know where that anger is leading you? You are on the verge of telling God he is unjust, it’s tending toward that.... Look at what it gives birth to; smother the wicked conception. Cease from anger, and leave indignation, so that now, returning to your senses, you may say, My eye is troubled through anger.82
As if to make clear that this preliminary, troubled mental state is doubt, Augustine explains: “My eye is troubled through anger … As if in a storm and waves he were beginning to sink, like Peter.”83
The troubled but not blinded eye (mind) also forms the basis for Augustine’s use of the phrase, “Do not let not the sun go down on your anger”84 as an exhortation to prevent preliminary passions from becoming passions. He explains that the sun (light, truth) has gone down on one’s anger once one assents to falsehood and therefore is guilty of a passion: “the true light is righteousness and wisdom, which the mind (mens) ceases to see once it has been overcome (superata) by the perturbatio of anger, as if by cloudiness (nubilo); and then it is as though the sun has gone down on a person’s anger”;85 “do not let the sun go down on your anger, lest perhaps you become angry and the sun goes down on you, that is, the sun of righteousness deserts you, and you remain in darkness.”86
Up to the point of being “overcome by cloudiness,” awareness of the truth (“light”) is apparently reduced (the mind is apparently “clouded”), though not utterly lacking. We saw that Augustine attributed preliminary fear to a weakness in the apprehension of the truth by means of the phrase, “the light of my eyes is not with me.” And he explicitly identifies a preliminary cloudy state with dubitation when he mentions preliminary sadness: “He did not doubt, he did not hesitate, he did not becloud his devotion with sadness”;87 “no sadness beclouded his most devout mens.”88 Thus by the exhortation “do not let the sun go down on your anger,” Augustine means “do not let uncertainty about a false proposition become assertion of a false proposition.”
4.2c. Preliminary Anger: The Speck versus the Beam
Finally, again taking “eye” to represent mind, Augustine saw in the scriptural contrast between a speck of wood and a beam in the eye yet another opportunity for the exhortation to prevent preliminary passions (caused by a dubitative) from turning into passions (caused by assent to falsehood). Thus he interlaced the phrase “do not let the sun go down on your anger” with his exegesis of this gospel image.
On such occasions, he showed his indebtedness to Seneca by transposing the images of birth and growth by which Seneca had described the transition from primus motus to the passion of anger89 onto the speck-beam distinction. The result is a hybrid image, in which the speck of wood is alive; it is a shoot which, having been born, can grow into a beam. This organic rendering of the splinter is an unexpected bit of exegesis, given that there is no hint of it in the scriptural passage itself (nor is there any connection with anger therein).90 Augustine’s manner of speaking only makes sense as a mixing of the gospel passage with metaphors like those of the On Anger. And Augustine, like Seneca, says that the transition to passion is fostered by suspicion.
In these cases, to distinguish “anger” that is not yet a passion (recall Psalm 4:5) from the passion of anger, Augustine often calls the former “anger” and the latter “hatred.”91 He defines hatred as the desire for revenge,92 which he equates with enjoying or benefiting from someone else’s misfortune;93 and he indicates that hatred is a sin, but “anger” is merely a precursor to a sin.94 This is compatible with the fact that in the City of God he follows the convention of the “veteres” in calling the desire for revenge “anger”;95 it is clear that although he is not particular about the terminology he uses, he thinks that what is a sin is desire (with assent) for revenge.
For someone familiar with the metaphors, the distinction between preliminary anger and the passion of anger, and between the cognitive states of each of these, is evident in the following (as is the Senecan description of the transition):
Anger is a speck, hatred is a beam. But nourish a speck, and it becomes a beam … so to prevent the speck from becoming a beam, do not let the sun go down on your anger.96
So anger is not yet hatred; we do not hate those with whom we are angry; but if that anger remains and is not quickly uprooted, it grows into hatred. This is why scripture bids us, Do not let the sun go down on your anger; it is urging us to pluck out newly-aroused anger before it turns into hatred … that speck is a little shoot that may grow into a beam if it is not plucked out at once. This is why the psalmist does not say, ‘My eye has been blinded by anger’; he says it is irritated. If it were being blinded, that would mean there was hatred there already, not anger … therefore John says, Whoever hates his brother is still in darkness. Before one passes into darkness, then, the eye is irritated by anger; but one must prevent anger from turning into hatred, and the eye from becoming blinded. That’s why the psalmist says, My eye is troubled through anger.97
It is human to get angry. But anger, born as a short-lived shoot, should not be irrigated by suspicions and become the beam of hatred. Anger is one thing, hatred is another … in comparison to hatred, anger is a shoot. But a shoot, if you nurture it, will be a beam. If you pluck it out, it will be nothing.98
There is a beam in your eye. Why is there a beam in your eye? Because you neglected [to pull out] the speck born there … you cultivated it in yourself, you watered it with false suspicions; by believing the words of flatterers about yourself, and the bad words of detractors about a friend, you nurtured it.99
4.3. Objection and Reply: Development or Corruption of Stoicism?
An objection might be raised against Augustine’s foregoing account, which touches on its plausibility, its status as a development from Stoicism, and its own internal coherence. As we saw at the outset of this chapter, Augustine associates preliminary emotions with imperfect virtue (a “movement” in the courage of a person, for example), and says that the doubt that causes them is an imperfection. But what justification does Augustine have for this negative evaluation? Why is the dubitative experienced in preliminary emotions not merely a morally neutral uncertainty? Moreover, the Stoics, as well as Augustine, say that someone who experiences a preliminary passion is not doing anything wrong. So is Augustine contradicting himself here, as well as doing violence to the Stoic view?
Augustine comes very close to asking the first question in a context where affectivity is not at issue. He asks why Moses should be represented in scripture as being censured for a sudden, unpremeditated doubt (subita ac repentina dubitatio),100 thus showing that he sees the force of this kind of objection. The answer he gives in this other context does not help us to answer our question;101 nevertheless, an Augustinian answer can be constructed.
It seems that Augustine is probably thinking along the following lines. Apparently he believes that to have a single impression the sentential content of which is dubitative, is implicitly to assent to a statement of possibility. Someone who has the impression that it may be a great good or evil that is at stake, but does not actually believe that the temporal good in question has the value of an eternal good (has not assented), must be judging (implicitly) that the proposition in question is possibly true. “Implicitly” judging means that if she were interrupted and asked whether she believed the statement were possibly true, she would say yes.
Assent to the proposition that something is possibly true is logically the same as assent to a disjunction of the form “Either x is true, or x is not true.”102 In the case of preliminary passions, the contents would be: “Either this temporal good is at least equal in value to virtue, or it is not at least equal in value to virtue.” One judges that two contradictory theses about the intentional object are both possibly true, and that one is in fact the case, but is unsure which of the two is true.
Now we should recall that Augustine thinks virtue entails wisdom, and then consider the actual truth value of the disjunction that the person having a preliminary passion implicitly assents to. In any particular case, one of the statements in the disjunction is in fact true and the other is in fact false. This means that even though this disjunction is analytically “true” (because one of the disjuncts is true), the person who is thinking it is in fact confused about the reality confronting him. By assenting to the disjunction, the doubting person thinks that something that is in fact false may be true. This weakness in comprehension, then, is why Augustine would think that a preliminary passion indicates an underlying, slight imperfection in virtue or wisdom.
The other reason why Augustine negatively evaluates the dubitative, despite the fact that he thinks the person has not actually committed a moral offense, is that he, like his Stoic sources, holds that preliminaries occur because the soul is in a “wounded” or “scarred” condition as the result of faulty judgments in the past. Augustine uses the “past wound” idea found in Cicero and Seneca to the same effect, and he expands it to include not only previous passions committed in one’s own particular life, but also the soul wounds inherited from the original sin.103
4.4. Augustine’s Ownership of this Account: Previous Patristic Sources
It is clear from Augustine’s sermons that he had considered the problem of a cognitive cause for Stoic “preliminary passions,” and had adopted a theory that this cause is doubt, that is, a dubitative sayable accompanying an impression. This contribution to the history of philosophical psychology appears to be uniquely his own. None of the pagans make this move, even though Augustine’s account can be seen as a development from Seneca, who says that preliminary anger is caused by putare or opinio. We have already seen that certain passages of exegetical works by Jerome and Origen make explicit use of the term propatheia; but these give no description of the mental state accompanying preliminary passion. The idea of the dubitative preliminary passion is not in the Bible, although Augustine makes use of biblical texts when describing it.
But what about other earlier scriptural commentaries, which do not contain the actual term propatheia, but gloss the speck and the beam and slipping foot, and which Augustine may have referred to for his preaching?
The idea that preliminary passions are caused by doubt is hinted at in scriptural commentaries by Origen and Jerome. Their commentaries admit of being understood as references to preliminary passions, although they do not explicitly make this connection nor use the epistemological concepts we find in Augustine.
In Jerome we find only a very swift interpretation of Peter’s being frightened as his being “a little bit frightened,” a sign that he was doubting: “he [Peter] was a little bit tempted (paululum relinquitur temptationi) … [and] because he was [thus] a little bit fearful (paululum timuit), it was said to him, O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”104 This constitutes an interpretation of the scriptural text, given that in scripture there is nothing about Peter being only slightly fearful. As such, it could have contributed to Augustine’s understanding of Peter’s state as preliminary fear.
A precursor to Augustine’s account may also be seen in Origen if we recall that Augustine, when describing Peter, sometimes says that the sea represents “this age,” and that Peter’s slipping represents a temptation in which one begins to love or desire the world (crave temporal goods) in preference to God (containing the criteria of eternal goods). In two passages from successive chapters of Origen’s Homilies on Exodus, we find an identification of uncertainty (ambiguitas in Rufinus’ translation) with temptation, and the claim that Peter’s walking on the water is an analogy in which to sink is to sin or to love present things: “They sank in the depth like a stone [Ex. 15:5]. Why did they ‘sink in the depth like a stone’? Because they were not the kind of stones from which sons of Abraham could be raised up [Matt. 3:9] but the kind which love the depth and desire the liquid element, that is, who seize the bitter and fluid desire of present things.”105 But Origen does not state that uncertainty causes preliminary desire, nor does he speak of doubt as part of a perceptual impression, as Augustine does, for example, when he uses a slipping foot as a trope for the preliminary passion of jealousy.
Consideration of Origen and Jerome therefore points to the conclusion that there was no preexistent theory that the cognitive cause of preliminary passions is doubt; it would have been necessary for Augustine to reflect upon, synthesize, and give an epistemological backing to these scriptural commentaries, if he used them.
Our conclusion looks secure, therefore, that it was Augustine’s own reflection on the problem of preliminary passions which resulted in this contribution to the history of philosophical psychology. Though not called upon to think about the problem by the more formal, theoretical writing tasks he often had at hand, he nevertheless reflected upon the incomplete Stoic account and developed it in a fittingly “cognitivist” manner.
However, indebtedness to Philo will be discernible on the related topic of the preliminary good emotions, which will occupy us in Chapter 5.
4.5. A Remaining Puzzle: Soul “Parts.” Latin Platonism, or Stoicized Plotinus?
Preliminary passions caused by dubitative sayables accompanying impressions can safely be attributed to Augustine, given the sermons; but does this cohere with his talk of preliminary passions in “soul parts”? Turning back to the City of God, and looking also to the anti-Pelagian work Against Julian, this is the question that confronts us. We saw in Chapter 2 one of the more eminently late antique features of Augustine’s thought, namely, the way that he coherently combines elements from different philosophical schools to develop his own distinctive position. Our inquiry now is whether his use of the terms “inferior parts of the soul” and “vicious parts of the soul” to describe the seat of preliminary passions (e.g., City of God 9.4, 9.6, 14.19, 14.23, 15.7, 19.21, Against Julian 4) is another instance of this, or whether on this topic Augustine’s corpus is merely a disorganized heap, with Stoic cognitivism in one set of texts, and a view that nonvoluntary affects arise from the body and pass into nonrational soul powers, in another set.
4.5a. “Inferior” and “Vicious” “Parts” of the Soul
In order to answer this larger question about coherence, we need first to know what Augustine means by these terms, and this in itself is daunting. Both “inferior parts” and “vicious parts” are traceable to Plato’s Republic; but it is not entirely clear there whether the parts are inferior merely in the metaphysical sense (less excellent faculties because nonrational), or in the moral sense (morally bad dispositions), or somehow both.106 (The Greek term used by Plato for “inferior thing,” to cheiron, could in principle have either sense.) Furthermore, Chrysippus is quoted in Galen as using the terminology of “soul parts” homonymically, to refer both to powers of the soul such as reason or sensory powers, and to acquired moral dispositions such as justice.107 This duality of meaning was carried over via Latin texts drawing on both Platonism and Stoicism (Cicero and Seneca), to Augustine himself.108 It is a thorny matter, therefore; even O’Daly does not enter into an analysis of this question of “inferior” and “vicious” parts in his Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind.
Then, too, we should notice that there are clearly identifiable chronological stages in Augustine’s way of speaking. He shifts from speaking of “inferior parts” to speaking of “vicious parts,” at around the year 421–422.109
The question thus becomes even more complicated. Does Augustine intend these to be synonymous, given that they are used in identical contexts (feelings of anger, lust, and envy)? Or does the terminological shift signal a conceptual shift, a changing of his mind about this topic – say, from a belief in inferior faculties, to a belief in morally vicious dispositions, as the locus of preliminary passions or emotions generally? It seems quite unlikely that Augustine ever (even before 420) thought that preliminaries are caused by inferior parts in the sense of non-rational powers, given the large number of sermons we have seen which rely on a model of preliminaries resulting from cognitive activity, all of which are dated by scholars to 418 or earlier. But since the dating of sermons is conjectural, we cannot put too much weight on that and should investigate using other texts.
4.5b. Vicious Parts
Luckily for us, Augustine defines “vicious parts” in the Against Julian, thereby providing us with a foothold from which to begin.
Certain philosophers said that it [lust, libido] was a vicious part of the rational soul (animus).... But I say that lust is the vice itself which makes the soul or any part of it vicious, so that, once the vice has been healed, the whole substance is healthy. Wherefore even those philosophers seem to me to have called lust a vicious part of the soul in a figure of speech, because the vice called “lust” is found in that part, just as we use “house” for those who live in it.110
By “that part” Augustine clearly means the power of generation,111 rather than a moral disposition; but he says that this power may have a moral disposition (vitia, affectionalis qualitas, consuetudo)112 “in” it. His point is that the generative power itself is not intrinsically (naturally, ontologically) evil or lustful, but is “vicious” when its possessor has an evil moral disposition that uses this power inappropriately. Now Augustine is here offering us his interpretation of Plato as presented by Cicero; as he tells us, this term “vicious parts” is being borrowed from Cicero’s On the Republic.113 By the plurals “certain philosophers,” and “those philosophers,” he might not have in mind anyone more specific than the “Old Academy” of Cicero and Varro; but he could be thinking of Latin Platonists such as Apuleius and Chalcidius, who also used “vicious parts” to render Plato’s “inferior thing” (to cheiron).114 (We do not find this terminology of “vicious parts” in Platonic Christian sources, such as Ambrose or Origen translated by Rufinus.) Augustine takes himself to be correcting these philosophers’ sloppy manner of speaking, but what are we to make of his interpretation?
Despite Augustine’s “but I say ...,” this is not his original interpretative move, but seems to point to the influence of Plotinus, who says virtually the same thing: virtue or vice come to be present in the spirited and appetitive parts of the soul, making the parts themselves morally evil or good.115 Moreover, Plotinus says this in a similar context (Plotinus mentions the appetitive part, Augustine the generative power). Notice, however, that Plotinus is here quite close to Chrysippus.116
Precisely what it means, philosophically, for a moral disposition to be “in” a power is an interesting question. Lust is, Augustine tells us, a tendency to think (putare) that enough is not enough. Unlike raw hunger or thirst, which is the sensate soul’s awareness of a physical need, lust is a love (amor) of sensual pleasure caused by the erroneous idea that it is to be sought as an end in itself, rather than viewing it as a by-product of right actions done as components in a life aimed at wisdom.117 A person with “vicious parts,” therefore, has attitudes in which goods are incorrectly prioritized; particular soul-powers and their associated organ systems are habitually used by this attitude, and hence the attitude is “in” them.118 Once the vicious part (attitude, evaluative schema) is provoked by circumstances into an occurrent preliminary lust, we have the option of either consenting, or rejecting the incipient lust.119
4.5c. Inferior Parts
Now that we are relatively clear about that, our question is about “inferior parts.” Is this synonymous with “vicious parts?” Is it a reference to morally bad dispositions? Or does it refer instead to functionally inferior powers? Augustine does not define the phrase, and it is not used by extant Latin authors prior to him, except, rarely, by Cicero in the Tusculans, who is again working from Plato’s Republic.120 We cannot assume that Augustine’s use of the phrase “inferior parts” signals the influence of the Timaeus in a now-lost Latin translation, although that may be the case. Cicero’s extant translation of the Timaeus cuts off just as he is about to describe the soul, and we should not presume that he spoke of “inferior parts,” because as we have already seen, other Latin writers used “vicious parts” for the inferior soul-powers of the Timaeus.121 Moreover, Augustine’s confident use of this terminology in City of God book nine suggests that he is accustomed to seeing “inferior part(s)” habitually in an author or authors; but it is not found in Augustine’s Latin paraphrases of Porphyry,122 nor in other authors such as Apuleius or Chalcidius. And so we are again thrown back upon Plotinus.
In fact, the term “inferior thing” (to cheiron) does frequently appear in Plotinus. It refers to the set of soul-powers engaged with the world of change – powers used in discursive, sensory, and vegetative activities, as well as social-civic-moral life – as distinct from the active intellect; but it also refers to acquired moral character that is base. These two senses of “inferior,” the epistemological-metaphysical and the moral, are linked in Plotinus’ account. Though “inferior thing” primarily refers to a morally neutral set of powers, which can have either vicious or virtuous dispositions in it,123 it in fact has morally bad dispositions as a kind of proper accident, because matter itself entices the soul to become sensual, morally bad.124 Hence, people typically tend to pursue mutable things as if these will make them happy. Thus, most of us do not merely engage in lower-level activities and life functions via the “inferior thing,” but live a savage or bestial life by virtue of it – the epistemologically inferior life is the morally “defiled” life of Republic book nine. It stands to reason that this “inferior thing,” with both its senses, was rendered pars inferior by a Latin translator of the Enneads, and is reflected in Augustine’s use of the term “inferior parts.”
“Inferior parts” in City of God 9.4’s discussion of preliminary passions therefore refers, I submit, to something along the lines of Plotinus’ powers of imagination and impression (phantastikon) and of discursive reason (dianoe¯tikon; Augustine: animus, having visa and cogitationes). These are cognitive powers inferior to the higher mind (nous/mens) which is capable of understanding intelligibles as such. But “inferior parts” also implies an immoral orientation toward “outward” things. This, after all, is the model of the On the Trinity – which was written concurrently with the City of God – where the outward orientation which typically accompanies the habitual exercise of the epistemologically “inferior” power is morally bad: the soul’s love is directed to temporal things as ends rather than means to eternal truths and virtues.125 Augustine does not think that these parts are themselves intrinsically morally inferior or superior, but that the excessive use of the inferior power is related to vice in two ways. First, the excessive use results from an overestimation of the importance of the temporal objects with which they are concerned. Second, it compounds this overestimation into an habitual sensuality.126 In the Commentaries on the Psalms and the sermons, this same account of epistemological-moral inferiority appears, explicitly using the term “inferior part of the soul.”127 So, even if it were to turn out that Augustine’s occasional language of “inferior parts” in the City of God book nine came from a now-lost translation of the section on human creation in the Timaeus, he understands this concept along Plotinian lines, where it connotes moral dispositions as well as powers of soul.
We can conclude, then, that Augustine’s “inferior parts” and “vicious parts” are synonymous in meaning, though not in emphasis. Apologetical motives drive his transition from the term “inferior” to “vicious” parts in the years 421–422 (the City of God book fourteen): Julian denies that the tendency to lust is a morally bad thing; Augustine thinks lust is by definition vicious and our tendency to be lustful is morally bad; in order to emphasize that, he uses the Latin Platonists’ term “vicious part.” Once this polemic against Julian’s Pelagianism has begun, the additional sense of “epistemologically inferior power” or “lower part of reason” is no longer referred to by use of the name “inferior,” but it is nonetheless indicated by his statements that lust is essentially “thinking” that sexual pleasure is more important than it is, in the Against Julian.
4.5d. Preliminary Passions “in” Inferior/Vicious Parts
Now for the larger question of the coherence and advisability of this mingling of Plotinian and Stoic ideas. It seems clear that Augustine conceives of himself as holding a synthesis of the two schools on this topic of how the preliminary passions fit into human psychology, and uses the Stoicism as a kind of regulating influence over Plotinus, who also alludes to preliminary passions. His use of Plotinus is selective. He alters Plotinus’ epistemological framework a bit, in order to emphasize the distinction between impression and assent. Whereas in Plotinus’ accounts of involuntary or preliminary passions, the impression and judgment are both in the discursive power (dianoe¯tikon),128 with the emphasis being on the distinction between changeable acts such as these, and the intellect’s contact with the Forms, Augustine bifurcates Plotinus’ discursive power and groups its higher ability (judgment, consent) with the intellect itself, attributing both the power of consent, which evaluates impressions, and the higher intellect (memoria), to the mens.129 He also rejects the cosmic trappings of Plotinus’ “inferior thing,” stripping away the physics and account of reincarnation from the epistemology and moral psychology. (For Plotinus, the inferior powers are liable to entice us to become morally inferior simply because they have contact with matter,130 and this Augustine denies.)131 In the late work Against Julian, Augustine is still insisting that the Stoics are “first rate ethicists,” and when he argues that lust is intrinsically bad because a false thought causes it, rather than a neutral physiological fact that merely needs to be moderated, this places him on the Stoic side of the debate about affectivity.132
If Plotinus is thus subordinated to Stoic themes and if Augustine distances himself from Plotinus’ view that matter itself tempts one to evil, then why, we might ask, does Augustine use Plotinus’ language of “the vicious or inferior thing” at all in the City of God? He likes Plotinus’ idea that both preliminary passions and passions proper manifest an attachment to temporal things133 (though he is careful to maintain that the attachment is not equally strong in each case, given that the former are nonconsensual). And Plotinus’ account of the discursive power as a hinge that can turn back and forth between unchangeable things and temporal things, helps Augustine to emphasize what is at stake in a preliminary passion: the discursive reason is hanging in the balance between lives organized around two types of objects having distinct hierarchical status. One is thinking that temporal goods may have the value of moral, eternal goods. If one assents to this, one will be overvaluing temporal goods, thus decisively “turning” toward them and away from eternal goods. Augustine finds this useful as a way of filling out what was left unsaid in his Stoic accounts, which had indicated that preliminary passions are caused by impressions, but had not emphasized that in a preliminary, someone is considering false, morally dangerous, propositional content.
So, coming back to a concrete example, the preliminary fear at issue in City of God 9.4 would be, Augustine thinks, caused by an impression that the temporal good of life may have the value of virtue (eternal goods). (That is, in such an impression, we “estimate” (aestimare) the intentional object as such.)134 This is a proposition we would not be considering (in doubt about) at all, unless we were somewhat more attached to temporal goods than they merited. In other words, the way that the epistemologically inferior power of impression is being used shows that its possessor has an imperfect disposition. But the power of impression is not capable of giving consent (non consentiendo), and the disposition is not so strong that it has compelled us to give consent, so we are not having a passion proper. In this way, the accounts of preliminary passions in the sermons as cognitively caused by impressions are compatible with Augustine’s talk of “inferior parts” or “vicious parts” in the City of God.
1 For discussion about the date at which the concept came into use, see Graver (Reference Graver2007) 88. Latin reference to the thing itself (in Cicero) predates extant texts containing the Greek term propatheia. The Greek term is first recorded in Philo of Alexandria (pace Kaster and Nussbaum (Reference Kaster and Nussbaum2010) 110, who assert that the term was first used by Origen), who uses it somewhat incorrectly; see further Ch. 5.3–5.
2 The name made current in English by Sorabji (from the Latin primi motus, used by Seneca); see e.g., Sorabji (Reference Sorabji2000) 378–379.
3 Sorabji (Reference Sorabji2000) 377 claimed that Gellius presented Stoic preliminary passions in a misleading way because he made a mistake when paraphrasing Epictetus’ lost text, giving us “to be jittery” (pavescere), implying an affective disturbance, when he should have said “to grow pale” (pallescere), indicating a physical reaction; and he argued that this mistake resulted in Augustine, who relied upon Gellius, misunderstanding Stoic preliminary passions. But Sorabji himself acknowledges that Seneca (who was familiar with old Stoic material firsthand) also uses expavescere for reactions that are not emotions proper (377 on ira 1.3.8). Furthermore, even if Sorabji’s contrast between Epictetus and Gellius were right, we know that Augustine was familiar with Seneca and Cicero, thus not exclusively dependent upon Gellius. For more thorough responses to Sorbaji, see notes in Section 1 of this chapter, and Ch. 2.5f.
4 See the citations and detail given in the next section (Ch. 4.1).
5 ira 2.4.2.
6 ira 2.3.1–5.
7 civ. 14.15.
8 On his use of the term “passio” for a preliminary, see Ch. 3.5f.
9 civ. 9.4.
10 Sections 5 and 6.
11 Cicero, Tusc. 3.83; Seneca citing Zeno, ira 1.16.7.
12 Seneca ira 2.1.3, 2.4.1, 2.3.4, Gellius NA 19.1. For discussion of these and other passages, see e.g., Stevens (Reference Stevens2000) passim and Graver (Reference Graver1999) passim.
13 This odd use of opinio for an unassented-to impression (so different from Cicero’s use) is noted by Inwood, who argues that Seneca is making a distinction between two types of rationality ([1993] 174–177, 179).
14 ira 2.1.4, 2.3.5.
15 ira 2.3.4.
16 ira 2.1.5, 2.4.1.
17 ira 2.1.1, 2.1.5.
18 ira 2.3.4, 2.1.1.
19 NA 19.1.14–21; translation Rolfe adapted.
20 ira 2.4.1, “praeparatio adfectus … incipiant, crescant” with ira 2.24.1–2.
21 See notes 3 and 25–27 this chapter.
22 See civ. 9.4–5, e.g., 9.5: “... the Stoics allow this version of ‘passions’ to visit the animus of the wise man, who in their system is free from every vice. Thus they do not consider these experiences themselves to be vices when they affect the wise man in such a way that they can do nothing against the virtue and order of his mens.” Trans. Levine et al. adapted.
23 “Pavor irruit super Abraham, et ecce timor magnus incidit ei” (Genesis 15.12).
24 E.g., en. Ps. 72.21: “Am I to say something different from that which Abraham said, from that which Isaac said, from that which Jacob said, from that which the Prophets said? … Is there greater wisdom in me than in them? Greater understanding in me than in them?”
25 He begins his exegesis: “On account of those who hold that those perturbations [like fear] do not befall the soul of the wise man, it must be considered whether it [Abraham’s state] be the sort of thing described by A. Gellius in his books of the Attic Nights” (qu. Hept. 1.30: “Tractanda est ista quaestio – propter eos qui contendunt perturbationes istas non cadere in animum sapientis – utrum tale aliquid sit, quale A. Gellius commemorat in libris Noctium Atticarum”). Sorabji (Reference Sorabji2000) 379 treats Augustine’s “sit” as an existential, so that he gets the result: “We must discuss the question whether there is such a thing as A. Gellius mentions...” Esse can, of course, have existential force; but there is no apparent reason why that force should be assumed here and in the discussion which follows the existence of such a thing is not the issue. Augustine’s question is only whether this is the state that Abraham was in.
26 “... he [the Stoic philosopher on board the ship] brought out a certain book by the Stoic Epictetus, where it was read that the Stoics had not held that no sort of perturbation befalls the soul of the sage, in the sense that nothing of that sort appears in his feelings (affectibus), but that ‘perturbation’ was defined by them as [that state] when reason yields to such changes [of soul]; but when it does not yield, that is not to be called a perturbation” (qu. Hept. 1.30: “protulit librum quendam Epicteti Stoici, ubi legebatur non ita placuisse Stoicis nullam talem perturbationem cadere in animum sapientis, quasi nihil tale in eorum adpareret affectibus, sed perturbationem ab eis definiri, cum ratio talibus motibus cederet; cum autem non cederet, non dicendam perturbationem”). This shows understanding of the conceptual distinction between pathos, involving consent of the mind, and propatheia, which does not, pace Sorabji (Reference Sorabji2000) 379, 380.
27 qu. Hept. 1.30: “Sed considerandum est quemadmodum hoc dicat A. Gellius, et diligenter inserendum.” This sentence is not included by Sorabji, 380, who stops translating before Augustine’s exposition has ended.
28 ira 1.16.7, 2.2.2, 2.3.5, 2.4.2.
29 NA 19.1.17–18.
30 Thus he never uses it to refer to animal souls; see e.g., Hill (Reference Hill and Hill1991) 260, O’Daly (Reference O’Daly1987) 7, Clark (2001) 97.
31 For Seneca, putare, and for Gellius, cedere; see above. For cedere/eixis in the Stoics, see Inwood (Reference Inwood1985) 75–77.
32 Seneca mentions thunder and oncoming assault of the enemy at ira 2.2.4 and 2.3.3; the example of thunder is also in Gellius, NA 12.5.
33 On wavering, see Section 2a this chapter.
34 en. Ps. 37.15, citing Ps. 37:11; trans. Tweed et al. adapted. The Latin is: “Plerumque irruit nescio quid repentinum … contremescit terra, tonitrus datur de caelo, horribilis fit impetus vel strepitus, leo forte videtur in via … pavetur [cor] … Unde hoc? Quia deseruit me fortitudo mea. Si enim maneret illa fortitudo, quid timeretur? Quidquid nuntiatur, quidquid frenderet, quidquid sonaret, quidquid caderet, quidquid horreret, non terreret. Sed unde illa perturbatio? … Unde deseruit fortitudo? Et lumen oculorum meorum non est mecum.” Underlined emphasis added. Augustine knows that perturbatio is Cicero’s technical term for Stoic passion (pathos) (see e.g., civ. 9.4), but he does not accept that the term need be restricted to such a narrow scope. See Ch. 3.5f.
35 Because according to the Stoics, only the virtues are good enough to merit emotions; see civ. 9.5 and e.g., Tusc. 3.74, 3.76–77, fin. 3.35; see also Ch. 3 passim.
36 Meaning that someone’s perceptions of things betray a lack of sound judgment about what is important or valuable.
37 ira 1.16.7.
38 de orat. 3.52. 201; orat. 39.134.
39 There are twelve instances of the slipping foot metaphor; there are thirteen featuring the irritated eye; there are seven usages of the speck vs. the beam metaphor.
40 Although Augustine’s interpretations are in his opinion compatible with what is in scripture.
41 Psalm 72:2.
42 Psalm 93:18. See e.g., en. Ps. 76.4.
43 Isaiah 3:12. See e.g., s. 75.10.
44 Section 6.
45 en. Ps. 72.8 and 72.20, citing Ps. 72:12.
46 Augustine spells out the figurative sense on which the use of stare for holding fast to an opinion is based in en. Ps. 106.12: “Quid est ‘stetit’? Permansit, perduravit … non transit.”
47 E.g., en. Ps. 31.2.3, en. Ps. 30.3.2.2, s. 80.6, s. 232.4.
48 en. Ps. 72.9.
49 s. 48.3–4, citing Ps. 72:1–3; cf. s. 19.4.
50 s. 19.4: “...videte ad quod periculum venerit quarendo a Deo pro magno praemio terrenam felicitatem”; trans. Hill adapted.
51 Cf. Ch. 3.5a.
52 See e.g., en. Ps. 31.2.26: “Refer the scourge that falls on you to God, because the devil does nothing to you unless by permission from our powerful God, who may allow it either as a punishment or a discipline.”
53 E.g., “whether you blame God directly or in a roundabout way through fate … in one way or another you are willing to find fault with God” (s. 29B.7).
54 Matthew 14:29–31: “And Peter going down out of the boat, walked upon the water to come to Jesus. But seeing the wind strong, he was afraid, and when he had begun to sink, he cried out, saying, ‘Lord, save me.’ And immediately Jesus stretching forth his hand took hold of him, and said to him, ‘O you of little faith, why did you doubt?’”
55 In addition to the following passages, see en. Ps. 54.5, en. Ps. 93.22, s. 75.1.
56 s. 76.4.
57 en. Ps. 30.2.3.10.
58 en. Ps. 30.2.3.10–11, citing Psalm 30:23 and Psalm 93:18; here I depart from my usual practice of using the trans. of Tweed et al. and use Boulding (Reference Boulding2000) adapted.
59 s. 80.6, citing Lk. 17:5 and Psalm 93:18.
60 en. Ps. 30.2.3.12.
61 civ. 9.4.
62 DL, 7.100.
63 In addition to the following passages, see also en. Ps. 93.25 with en. Ps. 93.22.
64 s. 76.9.
65 See e.g., s. 153.10: “‘But I died.’ What’s the meaning of ‘I died’? I became a transgressor”; cf. en. Ps. 54.7, s. 67.2.
66 s. 75.10, citing Is. 3:12. Trans. Hill adapted. I have omitted the words “with alarm” in the sentence, “That’s the meaning of Peter shaking with alarm in the sea”; the mention of fear is distracting given that our focus is on what is being represented (preliminary cupidity), rather than the story itself.
Somewhat confusingly, elsewhere in this sermon (s. 75.4–5) Augustine switches back and forth between using “being tossed about by storms of desires” to signify temptations (being “on the verge of going under”), as he does here, and using it to signify desires which are actually passions.
67 s. 76.1 and 76.8–9, citing Psalm 93:18. Trans. Hill adapted.
68 See Ch. 3.5a.
69 See lib. arb. 1.16.35, 2.19.54 on the definition of sin. For the identification of the virtues with God (because of the metaphysics), see e.g., s. 107A.3: “You will possess God. You will be full of God.... However much God has given you, however much piety he has granted you, however much charity, however much justice he has granted, however much chastity, whatever he has granted you of himself, cannot be superfluous. Your inner riches are enormous. What are they called? God.”
70 Certainly the extent to which one is aware of the implication depends upon one’s awareness of metaphysics. But that does not prevent it from being a fact, according to Augustine. His reasoning is that God is not a projection of the human mind, but part of reality whether people recognize him or not. For example: “It was because sin was forbidden [by the Law] that it was recognized for what it is” (s. 283.2, emphasis added).
71 In his commentary on Psalm 4:5: the Greek word propatheia, translated by Rufinus prima commotio, and defined as: “involuntarium … Docet ergo hoc loco Scriptura esse iram aliquam quae non sit peccatum … nondum a libera voluntate orta nos urgeat”. For other texts of Origen (and of Jerome) containing propatheia, see Layton (Reference Layton2000) 266, and (Reference Layton and Blower2002) passim.
72 Comm. In Epist. Ad Ephesios 2.4 (glossing verse 26): “‘Be angry and sin not.’ This is taken from the fourth psalm … a double name of ‘anger’ is accepted not only among us, but also among philosophers. [It is called anger] either when, having been harmed by an injury, we are stirred by natural stimuli: or when, with impetus at rest, and fury having died down, the mind can possess judgment, and nevertheless desires revenge against him who is thought to have done the harm. Therefore I think that the present statement is about the first [kind of] ‘anger,’ and that it is conceded to us as men … nevertheless in no way may we be carried away by an impetus of fury into violent raging whirlpools [of anger].” My trans. Compare Jerome’s distinction to Seneca, ira 2.1–3: one thing is that which results from the general condition of mankind, in which there is a mental shock which affects us when we are moved by an impression of injury; another is that which is caused by a considered judgment that revenge is justified.
73 Augustine holds that preliminary passions result from damage to the soul caused by either personal sin or the original sin; see e.g., civ. 14.12 and 14.15, and discussion in Section 3 of this chapter.
74 en. Ps. 4.6: “irascimini, et nolite peccare.... Etiam si irascimini, nolite peccare; id est, etiamsi surgit motus animi, qui iam propter poenam peccati non est in nostra potestate, saltem ei non consentiat ratio et mens.”
75 en. Ps. 36,1.9.
76 Psalm 6:8.
77 Tusc. 3.15.
78 en. Ps. 30.2, 2.4.
79 E.g., s. 88.14: “the eye is healed when it understands ...”; s. 88.5–6: “The light which concerns the eye of the mind … is eternal wisdom”; Augustine’s references to the mens “seeing” are constant.
80 en. Ps. 6.8.
81 The terms used for unsteadiness are turbatus, conturbatus, perturbatio. For this use of perturbatio, see Ch. 3.5f.
82 en. Ps. 36,1.9: “desine ab ira, et derelinque indignationem [Ps. 36:8]. Nescis quo te provocet ira ista? Dicturus es Deo quia iniquus est, illuc pergit.... Vide quid pariat; suffoca malam conceptionem. Desine ab ira, et derelinque indignationem, ut iam respicens dicas: Turbatus est prae ira oculus meus.”
83 en. Ps. 54.5. Cf. s. 63.2–3 for unsteadiness of mind (with reference to Peter “in the waves”) as temptation.
84 Ephesians 4:26.
85 s. 75.5.
86 s. 58.7.
87 s. 299E.5, regarding Abraham’s preparation to sacrifice Isaac (“non dubitavit, non haesitavit, non devotionem tristitia nubilavit”).
88 s. 305.4: “nulla tristitia mentem devotissimam nubilaret.” In this passage, Augustine is arguing that prior to his passion Christ did not himself have the sort of sadness which would be exemplified by Peter’s slipping (cf. en. Ps.31.2.26, and en. Ps.30.2.1.3 with en. Ps. 30.4.3.10); he felt sadness (by a sort of transfer) “in us” who are subject to preliminaries of sorrow. In this Augustine differed from Origen and Jerome, who had tried to reconcile Christ’s perfect wisdom with Matthew 26:37 by emphasizing that Christ only “began to be” sorrowful, i.e., by describing his “sorrow” as a propatheia (see Jerome Commentariorum in Mattheum 26:37; Origen Commentariorum Series 90). Apparently Augustine did not think this interpretation sufficient for maintaining the perfection of Christ. Sorabji (Reference Sorabji2000) 349, 353 drew my attention to Jerome and Origen.
89 ira 2.1.1: incipiat; 2.2.1: nascitur; 2.4.1: incipiant, crescant; 2.22.4, 2.24.1: suspicions impel us toward anger.
90 Matthew 7: 3–5: “And why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, and do not see the beam that is in your own eye? Or how do you say to your brother, ‘Let me pull the speck out of your eye’, when there is a beam in your own eye? You hypocrite, first pull out the beam from your own eye, and then you will see, so as to pull out the speck from your brother’s eye.”
91 Verheijen (Reference Verheijen1971) 17–31 drew attention to some of the passages I shall cite and interpreted them as references to a distinction between the perturbatio of anger, and the morbus of hatred (cf. Tusc. 4.21 and 4.25). While it is true that when contrasting anger and hatred, by “anger” Augustine sometimes designates a sin less grave than the sin of hatred (e.g., s. 82.2, which is not cited by Verheijen), Verheijen missed the characteristic marks of the preliminary vs. passion distinction which appear in some of Augustine’s exegeses on the straw and the beam.
92 s. 49.9.
93 Literally, “feeding off of” another’s misfortune, s. 211.6.
94 s. 211.1, en. Ps. 30.2.2.2–4, en. Ps. 4.6, en. Ps. 54.4 and 7; in s. 63.2–3, too, anger is the “temptation” although there is no contrast with hatred.
95 See civ. 14.15.
96 s. 49.7.
97 en. Ps. 30.2.2.4 citing Ps. 6:7 and 1 John 2:11; here I depart from my usual practice of using the trans. of Tweed et al. and use Boulding (Reference Boulding2000) adapted: “Ergo ira nondum est odium; nondum odimus eos quibus irascimur; sed ista ira si manserit, et non cito evulsa fuerit, crescit et fit odium. Ideo ut recens ira evellatur, et in odium non convertatur, hoc nos docet scriptura, dicens: Non occidat sol super iracundiam vestram.... Festuca ista et surculus, nisi cito evellatur, trabes futurus est. Non ergo ait: ‘extinctus est oculus meus prae ira,’ sed turbatus. Nam si exstinguitur, iam odium est, non ira.... Hinc ait Ioannes, Qui odit fratrem suum, in tenebris est usque adhuc. Antequam ergo eatur in tenebras, conturbatur oculus in ira; sed cavendum est, ne ira vertatur in odium, et oculus exstinguatur. Iste ergo dicit, Turbatus est prae ira oculus meus.”
98 s. 211.1; trans. Hill adapted.
99 s. 49.7. Cf. s. 114A.6: “... that fresh (recens) anger is a tiny speck, scarcely noticeable. Fresh anger troubles the eye, like a speck in the eye: my eye is troubled in anger. But that speck is nurtured by suspicions, is strengthened with the passing of time. That speck is going to become a beam.” Trans. Hill adapted. Verheijen (op. cit.) drew my attention to this passage.
100 s. 352.4, in reference to Moses striking the rock twice (Num. 20:8–11).
101 He gives an allegorical reading of the doubt; but this is an explanation which, since Augustine himself holds that the anecdote is historical as well as symbolic, leaves the fact of Moses’ censured doubt unexplained. It fails to explain why doubt in the face of a surprising event is a defect.
102 I noticed after writing this that Newman (Reference Newman1870) makes essentially the same point in analyzing the act of doubting (though not in the context of Augustine): “doubt, wavering distrust, disbelief … There is only one sense in which we are allowed to call such acts or states of mind assents … assents to the plausibility, probability, doubtfulness, or unworthiness of a proposition....” (6.1.2).
103 civ. 14.12 and 14.15.
104 Comm. in Matt. 14:30–31. My translation.
105 In Exodum Homiliae 6.4. Cf. 5.4: “But who is so blessed, and who is so freed from the weight of temptations that no uncertainty creeps up on his mind (ut nulla menti eius cogitatio ambiguitatis obrepat)? Look at that great foundation of the Church, its most solid rock upon which Christ founded the Church. What does the Lord say? Why did you doubt, O you of little faith?” Trans. Heine (Reference Heine1982) adapted. Cf. In Exodum Homiliae 6.4 where he says that Peter was a “little bit fearful” (paululum trepidaverit).
106 Rep. 4 (444b), 9 (589d). In book nine the inferior thing in the soul is very clearly morally inferior (e.g., defiled, miaros, cf. Phaedrus 247b, kakos for the bad horse), though the other sense of “lower” is suggested by the fact that the three parts are the same in name as the parts of the Timaeus. For differentiation of “moral parts” from “powers,” in the Republic and Timaeus, see the lexical work and discussion in Rist (Reference Rist, Goulet-Cazé, Madec and O’Brien1992) passim.
107 Galen, PHP 5.2.49. The Galen passage contains three words for “part,” with two different senses. First we are told that the powers of the soul which constitute an animal as a rational animal are called “parts” (mere¯), and it is explained that these powers are dispositions (diatheseis), which is to say innate/natural qualities of the corporeal substance that is the mind. Once this equivalence between “part” and “disposition” has been established, another word meaning “part” (morion) is used to indicate an acquired disposition of virtue or vice. Next a third word for “part” (merismos) is used to again refer to the powers of the mind, when he asserts that virtue or vice is in the various powers. Presumably Chrysippus’ last point is that virtues and vices are states of mind which have been acquired through the habitual use of a mental power (mainly assent) in a particular way, and that once acquired virtues and vices may influence the way the assent is exercised.
108 Cicero is in direct contact with texts of Plato and of orthodox Stoics; for “parts” as powers of the soul in Cicero, see fin. 5.12.34, 5.13.36; for “parts” as both dispositions (love of justice (iustitiae custodia) and faculties (e.g., memory), see fin. 2.34.113. When he is working directly off of Plato’s Republic (compare e.g., Plato rep. 430e–431a to Cicero Tusc. 2.20.47–21.47), he sometimes explicitly glosses the “part lacking reason” as “lacking right reason (recta ratio),” e.g., Tusc. 4.36.78 (cf. Plato rep. 444b on “straying” of parts); at other times, it is implied (Cicero rep. 2.67, where he is working off of Plato rep. book nine). Augustine’s talk of “reining in and taming” and “commanding” the affects of the inferior or vicious parts (civ. 14.19, 15.7) comes from Cicero’s rep. 2.67, 3.25.37 and Tusc. 2.21.47, 2.22.51.
For “parts” as dispositions in Seneca, see ep. 113.15 (“iustitia pars est animi”) and const. 6.2 on the moral character of the person as the “pars melior”; for “parts” which look like Timaeus-style faculties, see ep. 92.1 and 92.8. Inwood (Reference Inwood, Brunschwig and Nussbaum1993) argues (against Holler, Pohlenz, Voelke, and Zeller) that the presentation in ep. 92 is for the sake of the argument, “a merely dialectical move.”
When we look at Augustine’s corpus as a whole, we meet five different phrases, of which some refer to powers of the soul, others to moral dispositions. He speaks of parts of mind (partes mentis), parts of reason (partes rationis), parts of will (partes voluntatis) which are said to ‘divide’ the rational soul (discerpunt animum), parts of the rational soul (partes animi), and parts of the soul (partes animae). “Parts of the mind” or “of reason,” and “part of the soul” (mentis, rationis, animae) make appearances in On the Trinity, where Augustine uses them for the speculative and practical cognitive powers in the first two cases, and for the power of imagination possessed by nonrational animals in the latter case. (At trin. 12.7.10 the speculative and practical powers of the mind are partes mentis; at 12.12.17, pars rationis is the practical power. At trin. 10.8.11 pars animae refers to the imagination, which both humans and animals have; cf. 10.5.7, 10.7.10, 10.8.11, 12.3.3, 12.8.13.) The comparatives “superior, inferior” are used to refer to the distinctive objects of the speculative and practical powers (the speculative power has metaphysically superior objects, eternal truths, which are accessed via an “interior” retreat from the distractions of sensation; the power of planning action has inferior objects, things and facts known in the “exterior,” temporal world of flux. See trin. 12.7.10, 12.10.15, 14.3.5). Less frequently, they refer to the function of each power (trin. 13.1.1, officium excellentius), or as a description of the powers (potentiae mentis) themselves (trin. 14.7.10). Occasionally “parts of the rational soul (partes animi)” is used synonymously with “parts of reason” or for “capacities of the soul which we share with beasts” (nonrational faculties such as imagination or sensation) (trin. 4.18.24 and 12.7.12 (cf. c. Acad. 3.12, c. Adim. 28.2) respectively). “Parts of will which divide the rational soul” refers to moral dispositions (see Ch. 2.5, and cf. trin. 11.5.8).
109 His use of “vicious parts” in the c. Iul. written in 421–422 is correlative with his usage in civ. book fourteen, where he begins to use “vicious parts” rather than “inferior parts” (which he had used in book nine), and consistently sticks to this new term until the end of the book. City of God 14 seems to have been written around the time of Against Julian: civ. was written over twelve years (413–425/426), the date of Against Julian is three-quarters of the way through those twelve years (422), and book fourteen is nearly three-quarters of the way through the City of God as a whole (22 books total).
110 c. Iul. 6.18.53. Trans. Teske (Reference Teske and Rotelle1999) adapted. Subsequent quotations of c. Iul. are also from this translation.
111 Cf. c. Iul. 6.18.55 passim, e.g.: “lust of the reproductive organs (genitalium concupiscentia), with which we are born as a result of original sin.”
112 6.18.54, 6.18.56 (being a sort of person, talis), 6.19.58, 6.19.62. The term “dispositional quality”(affectionalis qualitas) is coming from Aristotle’s Categories 8; it is introduced by Julian in reference to Augustine’s position, to refer to an enduring quality (lustfulness) as opposed to a passing feeling.
113 c. Iul. 4.12.61, 5.8.33, 6.18.53, civ. 14.23 quoting now-lost passages of Cicero rep.
114 Apuleius, DP 2.9, on the respective virtues of the rational soul (wisdom and prudence) and of the “vicious parts” (fortitude, temperance), cf. Plato rep. book 4 (442a–d); Chalcidius, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 2.184 (“the weakness of the intemperate man votes in favor of the vicious parts of the soul against reason”), 186–187 (the top part of the soul is made by the Demiurge, the vicious parts are made by demons; the vicious parts which are subjoined are anger and desire (ira et cupiditas)), 2.261 (“obviously the sufferable part of the rational soul also signifies the vicious [part]”). Augustine uses Apuleius’ DDS in civ. 8, of course; but compare also Apuleius’ DP 2.9 with Augustine, Gn. adv. Man. 2.13.18. Courcelle (Reference Courcelle and Wedeck1969) 170 argues that Augustine did not use Chalcidius’ translation of the Timaeus, but compare Chalcidius’ Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 2.261 (on impetus) to Augustine’s early Gn. adv. Man. 2.17.26 (on impetus).
115 3.6.2, arguing that Plato’s (Pythagorean) definition of virtue as a harmony of parts and vice as disharmony (cf. Rep. 4) requires that there be, prior to this, virtue (arete¯) or vice (kakia) in each part. Cf. 1.1.2: the inferior thing in the soul can have better or worse dispositions (diatheseis).
116 Cf. note 107.
117 c. Iul. 4.14.65–67, 4.14.69–70.
118 Compare and contrast Nightingale (2011) 215–217.
119 c. Iul. 4.13.64–14.65.
120 Plato in 431a speaks of the superior (to beltion) and inferior (to cheiron); Cicero first (Tusc. 2.21.47) renders this latter as the effeminate part (mollis), probably owing to Plato’s comparison with women and children at rep. 431c, then in 2.22.51 renders it the inferior part.
121 See note 114.
122 Though Porphyry’s (in translation) “spiritual soul” (anima spiritalis), which refers to Plotinus’ dianoia (cf. the account in civ. 10.9), gets glossed by Augustine as “part of the soul inferior to the mind” (animae pars mente inferior) in civ. 10.27.
123 1.1.2.
124 So 3.3.4, 3.4.2, 3.4.3, 3.4.5, 4.3.32. Thus, Plotinus distinguishes between the animal life of man (meaning animal functions) (zo¯e¯), and morally inferior (kakos) character (e¯thos), the life of a beast (the¯rion) in 3.4.2–3; but the two are mingled in his account: when someone pursues the images of sense, she becomes sensual, and reincarnation ensures that one who voluntarily acquires a bestial character will literally be a wild beast in the next life. Note that Augustine’s use of the terms animalis pars, aliud animale (Gn. adv. Man. 2.11.16ff.) may be from Plotinus’ zo¯e¯/zo¯ion.
125 The discursive power of impression can be turned, via its attention, either to the “rules” of thought existing in the higher mind, or toward the world of change. This power goes by the name “part of rationality” (pars rationis), but sometimes also by the name “part of the rational soul” (pars animi); and it is occasionally called “inferior” to the mind as speculative (trin. 14.7.10; cf. 4.18.24). Cf. Plotinus, 4.8.7, 5.3.3.
126 trin. 12.7.10; cf. 12.12.17.
127 en. Ps. 145.5–6: “in medio quodam loco rationalis anima constituta,” echoing Plotinus on the “middle” of the soul, inferior to the higher mind (nous/mens) which is capable of understanding intelligibles as such, but superior to vegetative and bare sensory functions shared with animals. Cf. Plotinus 2.9.2, 4.4.18, 4.8.7, 5.3.3. Here Augustine explains habituation as the origin of the morally bad dispersion into exterior things, the love of business or cura negotiorum which is “in” the inferior part, and he attributes discursive thought (cogitatio) to this part. (It is clear that his use of anima, rather than animus, to describe a human soul and its thoughts, is owing to the scriptural text he is assigned to preach from (“Lauda, anima mea, Dominum”) and thus is not a philosophical choice meant to indicate nonrational soul powers). Cf. s. 154.8, 9, 12, and 14 on lust and the exterior/interior orientation; there is mental language in the inferior part, so the inferior part is apparently a discursive power having a vicious disposition.
128 Cf. 1.1.9 “an impression (phantasia) which has not waited for the judgment (krisis) of the reasoning power (dianoe¯tikon),” 1.2.5, desire (epithumia) only as far as the impression (phantasia), 1.2.6, 1.4.15 on the child within him, 3.2.4 on the “first beginning,” 3.6.4 (in an involuntary passion (pathos aproaireton), an unevaluated impression (anepikritos phantasia) causes bodily disturbances of pallor, etc.).
129 So e.g., in civ. 10.27, he renders Porphyry’s (translated) anima intellectualis as mens; but in civ. 9 and elsewhere, consent is given by the mens.
130 E.g., 1.8.14, 4.7.9, 6.3.9, 6.4.15, 6.7.3, 6.7.19. Notice that Augustine does not think this view was held by Plato; cf. civ. 14.5 on the Timaeus.
131 Hence in civ. 14, beginning to use the Latin Platonists’ term “vicious” parts, he shows that Plotinus is still in the background when he feels the need to specify that “these parts were not vicious in paradise before the sin [i.e., not vicious merely by their contact with created bodily organs]” (“hae … partes in paradiso ante peccatum vitiosae non erant”).
132 c. Iul. 4.13.64, 4.15.76. On this “debate,” see Ch. 3.2.
133 See Plotinus 1.4.14–15 and 1.8.15.
134 civ. 9.4: to attach value to (pendere), to hold in esteem (aestimare).
