[The reference for On Providence should be 3.2, 3, and for On the Three Primary Hypostases, 5.1.—Trans.]
been able to draw excessive conclusions.2 However, Saint Augustine’s testimony is sufficiently explicit. And the celebrated passage of the Confessionson the “books of the Platonists” gives us a very clear account of the question. Despite its length, permit us to quote the passage in full. Everything that follows will be instructive for us: “I read . . . that at the Beginning of time the Word already was; and God had the Word abiding with him, and the Word was God . . . [and that] the Word, who is himself God, is the true Light, which enlightens every soul born into the world . . .
“But I did not read in them that the Word was made flesh and came to dwell among us . . . [and] they do not say that he dispossessed himself, and took on the nature of a slave, fashioned in the likeness of men, and presenting himself to us in human form; and then he lowered his own dignity, accepted an obedience that brought him to death.”3 Opposing Incarnation to Contemplation, Saint Augustine had clarified for the first time the oppositions and similarities between these two forms of thought.
b) But at least how far does this influence reach? What is striking in Augustinian thought is that it gathers, in a few years,4 the hesitations and reversals of Christian thought. Highly passionate, sensual, the fear of not being able to maintain continence, all these delay Augustine’s conversion for a long time.5 But he also has a taste for rational truths. It is this concern for reason that leads him to adhere to Manichaeanism, and even to Carthage, in the midst of an exuberant and voluptuous life.6
- Alfaric, L’Évolution intellectuelle de Saint Augustin.
- Confessions VIII, C, IX: “Je lus . . . que le verbe était dès le commencement; que le verbe était en Dieu et que le verbe était Dieu; qu’aussi dès le commencement le verbe était Dieu . . . que le verbe de Dieu, qui est Dieu, est cette lumière véritable qui illumine tout homme venant en ce monde . . . Mais je n’y lus pas le verbe a été fait homme et a habité parmi nous . . . mais je n’y lus pas qu’il s’est anéanti soi-même en prenant la forme d’un esclave; qu’il se soit rendu semblable à l’homme en se revêtant de ses informités; qu’il s’est humilié et a été obéissant jusqu’à la mort.”
[Saint Augustine, Confessions, 7.9, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), 144–45.—Trans.] - 354, 430.
- Confessions VIII, ch. 1: “Adhuc tenaciter colligabar ex femina.”
[Saint Augustine, Confessions, bk. 8, ch. 1: “I was still held firm in the bonds of woman’s love,” ibid., 158.—Trans.] - Cf. Salvian, De Gubernatore Dei, Patrologie Latine, VII, 16–17: “Débordants de vices, bouillonnants d’iniquité, des hommes engourdis par le vice et enflés de nourriture puaient la sale volupté.” [Salvian, On the Government of God, bk. 7, ch. 16, trans. E. M. Sanford (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 211: “[For I see the city] overflowing with vice, boiling over with every sort of iniquity—full indeed of people, but even fuller of dishonor, full of riches but fuller still of vice.” Camus’ reference should be De Gubernatione Dei, Patrologia Latina. It seems odd that Camus would offer a French translation of this passage when he claims to be citing a Latin text.—Trans.]
On many points, Manichaeanism merely continued Gnosticism, but it promised demonstrations. This is what attracted Saint Augustine.7
But the problem of evil obsessed him as well: “I was still trying to discover the origin of evil, and I could find no solution.”8And he is haunted by the idea of death.
“[These were the thoughts which I turned over and over in my unhappy mind,] and my anxiety was all the more galling for the fear that death might come before I had found the truth.”9 Greek in his need for coherence, Christian in the anxieties of his sensitivity, for a long time he remained on the periphery of Christianity. It was both the allegorical method of Saint Ambrose and Neoplatonic thought that convinced Saint Augustine. But at the same time they did not persuade him. The conversion was delayed. From this it appeared to him that above all the solution was not in knowledge, that the way out of his doubts and his disgust for the flesh was not through intellectual escapism, but through a full awareness of his depravity and his misery. To love these possessions that carried him so low: grace would raise him high above them.
Saint Augustine found himself therefore at the crossroads of the influences that we are here attempting to determine. But what is the precise extent of these influences? This is what must be defined.
c) What Saint Augustine demanded beside faith was truth, and be side dogmas, metaphysics. And through Augustine, Christianity itself demanded it. But if one moment he adopts Neoplatonism, this was in
- ConfessionsVII, 67, 24. Tes. col. 739 [sic]: “Il me persuadait que je devais me fier à des maîtres qui m’instruiraient plutôt qu’à ceux qui procéderaient par autorité.”
[Saint Augustine, Confessions:“He persuaded me that I must have confidence in the masters who instruct me rather than in those who would proceed by authority.”—Trans.]* - De Beata vita 4 [sic]: “Je cherchais d’où vient la mal et je n’en sortais pas.”
[Saint Augustine, Confessions, 7.7, trans. Pine-Coffin, 142. Nowhere in De Beata Vita have I been able to find the remark Camus cites. The passage I have offered in its place is found in the Confessions, which seems to be its real source.—Trans.] - Confessions LVII, col. 152 [sic], Patrologia Latina, vol. 33, col. 737: “J’étais rongé par la crainte de mourir sans avoir découvert la vérité.” Cf. also his fear of death: Confessions VI, 16; VII, 19–26; Soliloquia I, 16; II, 1.
[Saint Augustine, Confessions, 7.5, trans. Pine-Coffin, 139.—Trans.]
order soon to transfigure it. And through Augustine, Christianity itself demanded it.10 Our task is to clarify the meaning of this transfiguration. As we have seen, Plotinus provides Saint Augustine with a doctrine of the intermediate word and, what is more, a solution to the problem of evil.
The hypostasized intelligence actually clarifies the destiny of Christ as the word of God. “We have learned from a divine source that the Son of God is none other than the Wisdom of God—and most certainly the Son of God is God . . . but what do you think the wisdom of God is if not truth. And indeed, it has been said: I am the truth” (De Beata Vita, ch. IV, no. 34, P.L.I. 32, col. 975). As for evil, Plotinianism teaches Augustine that it is tied to matter and that its reality is entirely negative (Conf.VII, 12, VIII, 13). And by this all Saint Augustine’s doubts seem to have vanished. But for all that, conversion did not come. There is this curiosity about the author of the Confessions,namely, that his experience remains the perpetual reference for his intellectual pursuits. Satisfied but unconvinced, he himself remarks that it is the Incarnation and its humility that Neoplatonism has been unable to offer to him. Only after having understood this did an outburst of tears and joy come to deliver him in the garden of his home. It was virtually a physical conversion, so total that Saint Augustine moves progressively toward renouncing all that was his life and to consecrating himself to God.
It is therefore this place, given to Christ and the Incarnation in Christianity’s originality, that one must note in Augustine. These are the formulas and themes that he asked of Neoplatonism. The figure of Jesus and the problem of Redemption will transfigure everything. It is this conjunction of Greek themes and Christian dogmas that we must attempt to examine in a few points of Augustine’s doctrine.
B. Hellenism and Christianity in Saint Augustine
1) Evil, Grace and Freedom. In the examination of such specifically
Christian problems, our constant task will be to bring to light, in
- J. Martin, Philon, 1907, p. 67: “After St. Paul, the fathers naturally had to adopt the language that Greek and Alexandrian speculation had created; and by means of this language they expressed the truths that neither Philo nor any Alexandrian had conceived”; and Puech, Les Apologistes grecs du IIe siècle de notre ère:“The essential fact is that in principle, the doctrine of the Apologists is religious and not philosophical; they believe first of all in Jesus, the Son of God. And they thus understand his divinity by the pre-existence of the word.” And finally Le Breton, Les Origines du Dogme de la Trinité, 1910, p. 521: “If the Theology of the Logos appeared to be so profoundly transformed, it is because the person of Jesus to whom it had been applied imposed upon it these transformations.”
Augustinianism, the fundamental themes of Christianity. To tell the truth, a simple reminder will suffice, since we have already studied these themes.
a) We will not go back over the importance that the problem of evil assumes for Saint Augustine. However, it is necessary to note the extreme fecundity of this obsession. It is by beginning from this point that our author has been able to develop his most original doctrines. This same wealth will force us to divide our material. On the one hand, Saint Augustine’s thought is maintained doctrinally; on the other, in reaction to Pelagius. Let us examine first his general doctrine, and then
