Maniqueismo y Platonismo

Probing into the dark recesses of memoria Augustine has come to see it as his presence to hirnself as a being in whom the recordatio of his own past and the expectatio of his future are integrated in his present experience. 13 Far more important to an understanding of Augustine's mind than all the changes it underwent, on so many fronts, is that it is always caught in this tension between the past and the future "enchained" in his present being. The intellectual effort involved in recovering the past and the ardent longing for a distant goal in an unimaginable future, both eluding his grasp - these are the twin keynotes of the

Confessions.

Wholeness: Manicheism and Platonism This insight was not wholly new to the Augustine of the Confessions. It is undoubtedly linked with his conversion from Manicheism, perhaps, of all the conversions which have been traced in his career, the one which brought with it the most profound upheaval and was to have the most momentous consequences in his spiritual life. As a young man he had already undergone an earlier conversion: the intellectual restlessness of a brilliant student was then directed by a reading of Cicero's lost work, Hortensius, toward the quest of wisdom. Augustine was now launched on the ardent pursuit of a pilgrimage towards an unknown destination. His first port of call was to serve hirn only as abrief resting-place. The religion of the followers of Mani satisfied, for a time, his powerful urge to 13. Cf. e.g. Conf., X.8.15-9.16.

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understand the reason behind the apparent irrationality in the world, the presence of evil and its conflict with the good; and it provided hirn, at the same time, with the cosmogonic symbolism in which he could objectify his own inner tensions. For a man of powerful emotions, conscious of the ease with which feelings could be stirred beyond the control of the rational mind, Manichean teaching provided a powerful set of images which made such inner conflict readily comprehensible as the endemie conflict between a world of light and a world of darkness, played out on the stage of the human personality. The myth enabled the disciples of Mani to see their own inmost reality as a fragment of the light trapped in a world of darkness, destined to be set free from its prison to return to its true horne. In such terms Manichean doctrine made inner conflict comprehensible: man was an episode in the inter-cosmic waters of the two powers. It explained inner conflict and furnished a solution to the problem of evil; but it did so, as Augustine was soon to realize, at too great a price. The Manichean way of resolving the problem of evil, as Augustine discovered listening to Ambrose's preaching in Milan, 14 absolved the believer from responsibility. He was a victim of forces foreign to his true self, im personal forces of darkness which could be disowned as alien. "I still held the view," Augustine wrote ofhis lingering attraction to Manichean teaching, "that it was not we that sinned, but some other nature sinning in us ... I very much preferred to excuse myself and accuse some other 14. P. Courcelle, Recherehes sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin, (Paris, 1950) p. 100 has indicated the Ambrosian background of Augustine's discovery.

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thing that was in me but was not I ... But in truth I was one whole: it was my impiety that divided me against myself' , .15 'Ehe great discovery which lay between Augustine's youthful Manicheism and the need he feIt to search into the remote recesses of memoria in Book X of the Confessions is the recognition that the darkness was part of his self, not something to be disowned or sloughed off as alien, but to be integrated within the "one whole" which he now saw was "I," in a certain sense his disen'chantment with Manicheism was a conversion to the darkness, an assimilation of the shadow. The mysterious power of memoria which Augustine encounters and delves into in this book represent his discarding of this shadow, Manichean conception of selfhood, and its vast expansion to embrace the previously disowned darkness. Here he has come to terms with the shadow, the impenetrability of layers of the self to the sharp beam of consciousness. Writing about his perception of scents, Augustine wondered: "perhaps I am deluded; for that darkness is lamentable in which the possibilities in me are hid'den from myself, so that my mind questioning itself on its own powers feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report l6 ... In fact, I cannot wholly grasp all that I am"l? It is not Augustine's experience that is unique here. It is the experience 6f any man who learns to integrate a fragmented personality, who attains resolution of inner conflict in mature acceptance; and it is the experience from which the greatest of art is born - that of Mozart's G 15. Conf., ~10.18; cf. ibid., VII.3.5. 16. Conf., X.32.48. 17. Conf., X.8.15.

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minor quintet, or the last B flat piano concerto, or the late sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 18 What marks Augustine out among the thinkers of Antiquity is that he feIt the necessity of charting this process of integration in terms of philosophical concepts forged and a language adapted for the purpose. 19 This, reduced to its core, is the achievement of his probing of memoria in Book X of the Confessions. 18. On the B flat piano concerto (K. 595) Alfred Einstein writes: "Indeed, the work stands at the 'gate of heaven,' at the door of eternity. But when we term this Concerto a work of fareweB we do so not at aB from sentimentality, or from any misconception of this 'last concerto for clavier.' " In the eleven months that remained to hirn, Mozart wrote a great deal of various kinds of music; it was not in the Requiem that he said his last word, however, but in this work, which belongs to a species in which he also said was his greatest. This is the musical counterpart to the confession he made in his letters to the effect that life had lost attraction for hirn. When he wrote this Concerto, he had two terrible years behind hirn, years of disappointment in every sense, and 1790 had been even more terrible than 1789. He no longer rebeBed against his fate, as he had in the G minor Symphony, to which, not only in key, but in other ways as weB, this concerto is a sort of complement. . . The mood of resignation no longer expresses itself loudly or emphatically; every stirring of energy is suppressed; and this fact makes all the more uncanny the depths of sadness that are touched in the shadings and the modulations of the harmony... But the most moving thing about it is that in it Mozart received the divine gift of being able zu sagen was er leide (to tell the fulness of his suffering) ... (Mozart: his character-his work, (E.tr. London, 1971) pp. 328-9). On the B minor Quintet (K. 516): What takes place here can be compared perhaps only with the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane. The chalice with its bitter potion must be emptied, and the disciples sleep . the Minuet says nothing else than "Not as I will, but as thou wilt" . .(ibid. , p. 201). The sonnets in which Hopkins combines the expression of his pain, frustration, protest, and resignation, as weB as prayer, thanksgiving and hope for grace, are, especially "My own heart let me sore have pity on," "Thou art indeed just, Lord" and "The fine delight that fathers thought." 19. Cf. Erich Auerbach 's judgment on Augustine's discussion of the transition from childhood to adolescence (Conf. 1.8): "such a passage would be unthinkable before Augustine" -Mimesis: the representation ofreality in Western literature (E.tr., Princeton, N.J., 1968) p. 71.

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In writing his Confessions, Augustine had come to accept hirnself as uItimateIy problematic: "I have become a question to myseIf."20 In this acceptance lies the clue to some of the central theological insights he would uphold Iater in his career. It is hard to doubt, for instance, that this is what committed hirn to the unrelenting struggle against Donatism. We have Iearnt much about Donatism, and about Augustine's attitude towards it, in recent years. 21 But when all is said about the history of the controversy and the development of Augustine's theology in the course of it, the bedrock of his repudiation of Donatism is a conviction which goes deeper than the polemics and deeper even than the overtly avowed theology. His impatience with the Donatist concept of a pure Church ofthe gathered elect is the impatience of a man who has come to see that the conflict between the powers of light and darkness, of sin and holiness, cannot be confined within cIearIy drawn frontiers. A man cannot be sure even of hirnself, Augustine once wrote; how much Iess of another! "Therefore do not pronounce judgement before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes ofthe heart."22 He had come to terms with the impossibility of penetrating into the shadows of his own self in his Confessions; and if a man must Iearn to accept the darkness which is apart of his own life , and if he 20. Con/., X.33.40. 21. For a general survey, see my "Christianity and dissent in Roman North Afriea: ehanging perspeetives in reeent work," Studies in Church history 9 (Cambridge, 1972) pp. 21-36, repr. in my Froln Augustine to Gregory the Great (London, 1983) eh. VIII. 22. Ep. 130.2.4, quoting I Cor. 4.5. I have diseussed this in my Saeculum: history and society in the theology 0/ Saint Augustine (Canlbridge, 1970), pp. 123-4.

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must pray to be able to live as a quest ion in God's sight, how much more must a Church be able to do likewise! Here we are very close to the roots of his impatience with the idea of a Church of the "pure." The same impatience was to be the driving force of Augustine's opposition to the teaching of Pelagius. At first, and for several years, Augustine treated Pelagius with considerable respecL What he respected in Pelagius was, above all, his determined opposition to Manichean dualism and determinism, its tendency to undermine man's own responsibility for his sins. As late as 415 Augustine wrote of Pelagius as a man "burning with ardent zeal against people who excuse the sinful human will by appealing to human nature."2J It is curiously ironical that Pelagians should have suspected Augustine of having relapsed into Manicheism, and that the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum was to make this charge the chief substance of his bitter attack on Augustine. Augustine had no difficulty defending himself against such misunderstandings, of his own views as weIl as of those of the Manicheans. That debate does not concern our present subject. But thc deep imprint left by his break with Manichean doctrine on all his subsequent thought is to be seen in his opposition to Pelagian as much as to Donatist teaching. He quickly discerned the profound affinity between Pelagian and Donatist ecclesiology. The fundamental error at the roots of both movements was their impatient, peremptory anticipation here and now of the eschatological purity which 23. De nato et grat., 1.1; On Augustine's initial admiratiün für Pelagius, changing intü disapprüving reserve, see De gest. Pe!., 23.47; De pecc. mer. et rein., Il I. I. I.

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would characterise the Church in its final state. "Both contended for a pure Church, the one (i.e. the Donatists) by external separation, the other (the Pelagians) by internal migration. "24 Against them both Augustine upheld the image ofa mixed Church, one which could comprehend, in this interim, the tares along with the wheat, the goats along with the sheep, until their final separation at the end. His impatience with the ecclesial perfectionism of the Donatists and the moral perfectionism of the Pelagians sprang from the same root: his early disenchantment with the Manichean quest for purity. But by the time he came to define his stand against Pelagianism, his thought had been vastly elaborated and enriched by a long theological development during the intervening years. A sermon he preached at the height of the Pelagian controversy takes us back to the crucial point of Augustine's break with Manicheisnl, the indivisibility of the seI f in all its inner struggle; and yet at the same time, the need to accept responsibility for the sin within the self is also enriched by a matured theology of the fallen state: "The fact that the urges of the flesh drive against the spirit is not something outside me, for I am not made up of a nature contrary to it; and that I do not consent to its urges, that too is something within me . . . What I long for is to be healed as a whole, for I am one whole: not that my flesh were for ever removed, as if it

24. G. Bonner, Auguslille alld 1110derll research Oll Pe!agial1islll (Villanova, 1972) p. 36. On this theme, see also R.E E\'ans, Olle alld ho/y (London, 1972) pp. 95-97.

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were something alien to me, but that it be healed, one whole with me ...."25 Each of Augustine's conversions, and each of the disenchantments which accompanied them, left their imprint on that unbroken and unceasing growth which we call his intellectual or spiritual development. Whatever ancient Pelagian or some modern critics of Augustine thought, his break with Manicheism was not only complete, but decisive for much of his later thought. There is no doubt that a good deal remained in his ways of thinking and of expressing hirnself that would be reminiscent of his Manichean paste But due allowance must here be made in the first place for the penchant of late antique rhetoric for organizing its exposition in terms of striking antitheses, and in the second place for the kind of quasi-dualism which is feIt rather than thought. This "feIt dualisrn" pervades much late Antique thought and literature, pagan and Christian, moral and ascetic, and Augustine's personality was peculiarly susceptible to the feeling of "being something double, a contradiction, , '26 even when he was most strenuously asserting the deep and genuine unity of the self and the 25. Sermo 30.3.4. Compare the passages quoted from the Conjessions above, n. 15. For an elaboration of the underlying theology of sin and salvation, see De civ. Dei, XIV.2-3. 26. Cf. Simone Petrement's distinction between metaphysical dualism and feIt dualism, from whom the quotation comes. I owe it to M.R. Miles, A ugustine on the body (American Academy of Religion, Dissertation Series 31, Missoula, Montana, 1979), p.2. She goes on to observe that 'Metaphysical dualism is the conceptual formulation of this experience: "it's not because two worlds or two principles have been conceived, that the necessity of a difficult passage and a profound change has been affirmed, but it is because this passage and this change have been affirmed that two worlds have been imagined".' (Quotations from S. Petrement, Ledualisme chez Pfaton, fes Gnostiques et fes Manicheens (Paris, 1947), pp. 32 and 8.

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need for a moral and ascetic discipline to bring about the fullest integration of the flesh in the inner life of the self.

Platonism and Saint Paul: Order and Tension We have been considering the manner in which his break with Manicheism was to determine some of Augustine's most firmly settled attitudes in later life. So far I have been laying the emphasis here on what his revulsion from Manichean views meant for Augustine, and especially for the conviction beneath many of his later views on the unity and inclusiveness of the self as weIl as of the Church. I have not, so far, taken any notice of the conversion wh ich was the obverse of Augustine's disenchantment with Manicheism. That, too, had its contribution to make to the shape of Augustine's thought. His break with the religion of Mani was accompanied by a conversion to the philosophical ways of the 'Platonists' eagerly read and debated in the avant-garde intellectual circles of Milan. The philosophy which Augustine and his friends found so intoxicating in their reading-parties and country-house retreats encouraged them to see the world as a vast ordered cosmos. Its source was the transcendent One, beyond speech and beyond thought, wh ich communicated itself to beings below it in the infinitely ordered hierarchy down to the lowest levels in the system. The universe was pictured as a sort of cascade of divine light descending from its transcendent origin, dissipating itsel f gradually in multiplicity, limitation, and, ultimately, the darkness of nonbeing. The descending self-communication of the One constitutes a cosmic hierarchy which provides the soul

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