Confessions

Book VII contains far fewer biographical details than any other up until this point. With Manicheism and the philosophy of the Academics abandoned, Augustine spends most of Book VII explaining the steps that remained on his path toward conversion, of which there are essentially four: an ontological argument for God’s existence, Neoplatonism, the writings of Paul the Apostle, and the mediation of Jesus.

An ontological argument is one grounded in the nature of existence. The first Christian ontological argument is credited to Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th-century monk and saint. Anselm’s proposition holds that, since it is greater to exist than not to exist, and since God is defined as that entity greater than which nothing can be conceived, God must exist, for if God, the greatest thing conceivable, did not exist, then whatever happened to be the greatest thing in existence would be inferior to God even though he did not exist, and yet this cannot be since his non-existence would make him inferior, which would then contradict his essence as the greatest thing conceivable. While many over the years have discounted Anselm’s argument as a tautology—an argument that must be true simply by virtue of the definitions of its constituent terms and that therefore really proves nothing—their apparent logic has allowed them to endure and persuade for centuries (Oppy, Graham. “Ontological Arguments.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2019).

As Augustine discounted the skepticism of the Academics, his ontological intuitions about God became a necessary step toward his acceptance of Christianity, even if he did not articulate them as a full argument for God’s existence the way Anselm would:

From the core of my being I believed you to be imperishable, inviolable and unchangeable, because although I did not understand why or how this could be, I saw quite plainly and with full conviction that anything perishable is inferior to what is imperishable, and I unhesitatingly reckoned the inviolable higher than anything subject to violation, and what is constant and unchanging better than what can be changed (115).

Although Augustine now accepted that the Christian God must by definition be real, he did not understand what form such a God could take and remained troubled that this God would have created a universe that included sin. The ideas of the Neoplatonists provided him what he needed to move forward.

At the core of Neoplatonist philosophy are the teachings of Plato, in particular his theory of forms. Plato posited that everything that we can perceive is in fact an imperfect manifestation of that thing’s immaterial form, its flawless essence, which exists in some realm we cannot reach or perceive directly. Plato believed that our souls have some memory of these forms from a time when they, too, existed within that realm, and so we are able to judge how good or bad something is by recalling its form and determining how closely that form is approximated. A circle is commonly used to demonstrate this. To draw a perfect circle is impossible, and yet the fact that we can all attempt to draw a perfect circle demonstrates that we can conceive of a perfect circle, which Plato would say is evidence that we have some memory of the form of circularity. Instinctively, this form allows us to judge a good circle from a bad one. To misjudge not only would be evidence of insufficient time devoted to remembering the forms, but would hamper any utility we hoped to obtain from that circle, as a circular wheel, for instance, will be more useful the more perfectly circular it is (Silverman, Allan. “Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2014).

Although these ideas were spiritual even for Plato, they took on a more fully religious dimension in the writings of third-century Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism. Plotinus proposed that the entire spiritual nature of the universe functions in the same manner, that everything we perceive was created as a consequence of the excessive spiritual excellence of “the One,” a sort of fundamental form of everything, and that our intellect, which allows us to perceive these things and appreciate their divine origin, is proof of the One. Thus, failure to root existence in the One is akin to misjudging the quality of a circle, and that failure prevents one from living a virtuous, rational life (Silverman, Allan. “Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2014). These ideas allowed Augustine for the first time to understand that "evil has no being at all” (129), instead arising out of disproportionate valuation of God’s perfect goodness, which must be valued above all, and the ranging levels of goodness throughout creation, each element of which must be valued according to the degree to which it is in fact good.

While this conceptualization would have enormous implications not just for Augustine but for Christianity as a whole, he was at that point unable to “continue steadfastly in the enjoyment of my God” (130). Even after his Neoplatonist vision, the One, or God in Augustine’s conception, felt too distant and intangible to give Augustine the strength he needed to put his “carnal habit” behind him and live a Christian life (130). The answer lay in the final two steps awaiting Augustine on his journey toward conversion: Jesus was the mediating figure Augustine needed, but he would require the writings of Paul the Apostle to reach a useful and accessible conception of Jesus.

That Jesus should function as the necessary steppingstone between an imperfect human such as Augustine and a perfect God comes as no surprise. This aspect of Christianity has long been one of its greatest appeals. Augustine provides an eloquent explanation of Jesus’s allure for a sinner like him:

Jesus […] raises up to himself those creatures who bow before him; but in these lower regions he has built himself a humble dwelling from our clay, and used it to cast down from their pretentious selves those who do not bow before him, and make a bridge to bring them to himself (132).

For many like Augustine, the divine feels far more attainable when it takes human form, and especially when that human form has made the ultimate sacrifice so that our inevitable and original sins will be forgiven.

Naturally, Augustine had long been aware of Jesus. The issue, then, was that Augustine’s conception of Jesus was hazy, muddled by competing viewpoints on who and what Jesus was, most of which the Catholics Church recently had or soon would declare heresies. Tellingly, even his recollections are inconsistent. Here in Book VII his primary struggle was that he thought of Jesus as “no more than a man, though a man of excellent wisdom and without peer” (132), yet back in Book V he describes his issue as just the opposite, that he had been unable to conceive of a Jesus who was “born in the flesh” (90). Clearly, Augustine was in need of some credible source to facilitate a functional understanding of Jesus as both man and god, which was exactly what he found in Paul the Apostle.

That Paul was critical for Augustine is no surprise either. Without the writings of Paul, Christianity would be unrecognizable. Born Jewish and originally known as Saul of Tarsus, Paul never actually met Jesus. On the contrary, he actively persecuted early Christians after Jesus’s crucifixion, angry that they were perverting his Jewish faith. A few years later, Paul claimed he had been visited by Jesus, an experience that resulted in his conversion to Christianity and a radical reframing of the religion. Paul took the teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, teachings that primarily depict Jesus as human and, despite some variations, were firmly rooted in Jewish doctrine, and reinterpreted them to emphasize Jesus’s divinity, his sacrifice, the salvation that sacrifice promised, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Most significantly, he universalized Christianity, overriding the assertions attributed to Jesus in the Gospels that instructed his followers to adhere to Jewish laws, such as mandated circumcision (Sanders, E.P. “St. Paul the Apostle.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Apr. 2020). Truly, an understanding of Christ and Christianity in the form that had become dominant and that Augustine himself would reaffirm and expand is impossible without a deep familiarity with the works of Paul. It naturally follows, then, that upon studying these writings, Augustine’s “problems melted away [and] your chaste words presented a single face to me, and I learned to rejoice with reverence” (134).

At least as important to this spiritual progress was the epiphany Augustine experienced as a result of his Neoplatonist meditation. In the end, most believers do not reach their faith via logic and argumentation, even if, for someone like Augustine, these approaches are necessary as well. Still, most people require a so-called religious experience, and this appears to be exactly what Augustine underwent when he “entered under your guidance the innermost places of my being” (127). The manner in which he describes the “incommutable light” he encountered is highly reminiscent of the equally inexplicable “faculty [Monica] could not explain in words” by which his mother claimed to be able to identify God (112). Augustine’s light was “far above my spiritual ken, transcending my mind: not this common light which every carnal eye can see” (127). Augustine further claims that, in this same experience, he heard God’s voice, but that he “heard it as one hears a word in the heart” (128). This experience, more singly formative for his conversion than any philosophical realization, reached Augustine in no verifiable manner, via none of the five senses. Much like Paul’s visitation from Jesus, Augustine’s experience was an irrational, inexplicable communion with the divine. Afterwards, conversion was only a matter of time.

For modern readers, both Christian and non-Christian, slavery’s matter-of-fact appearance may be concerning. While the practice is universally decried nowadays and every mainstream branch of Christianity invokes scripture to condemn it, in Augustine’s time and long after, slavery was a fact of life ordained by the Bible, a fact that may explain why the only thing he finds worthy of objection in Firminus’s story is its reliance on astrology, not the owning of a human being. With other moral positions that have changed drastically over the history of Christianity, how Augustine's perspectives may or may not have shifted remains a matter for speculation. However, with slavery Augustine eventually proved to be far ahead of his time. About 25 years later, Augustine wrote in The City of God, “[God] did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation,—not man over man, but man over the beasts. […] The prime cause, then, of slavery is sin” (Aurelius Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods, T. & T. Clark, 1871, p. 324. Project Gutenberg, 8 Apr. 2014).