Besides the arts of rhetoric and persuasion, there was a third pursuit for the liberally educated man, a pursuit only a gifted seeker could successfully embark on: the way of philosophy. Beyond the literary arts lies, however dimly perceived, the Ascent to Truth, to Wisdom. In Augustine’s day, this ascent was illumined by the works of one great teacher: Plato, the Greek philosopher who had been Socrates’s pupil and who was born in the time and place that all educated men looked to as the Golden Age—Athens in the fifth century B.C.
If the liberal arts were for the few, philosophy was for the fewer. Many liberally educated men did not even assent to the goal of philosophy, because they did not think it possible to attain to Truth or Wisdom with any certitude. Cicero was such an agnostic: after a long pursuit of philosophical truth, he found himself siding with the Skeptics, who believed in the uncertainty of all ultimate knowledge (though he inclined in moral matters to the school of the Stoics, who believed with certitude that virtue will yield happiness). Cicero’s even-tempered agnosticism will come as no surprise to anyone in our world who has noticed what a convenient philosophy it makes for Cicero’s contemporary children: publicists, marketeers, and all those who seek to motivate us to do what we might otherwise not think to do. As a philosopher, Cicero was the great packager of his age, an unoriginal thinker with real flair, a sort of Will Durant, who could dramatize all the currents and schools of thought so that anyone might understand them well enough to talk about them at a cocktail party.
But Augustine wanted Truth, not cheap success: such a pressure-cooker psyche can settle for nothing less. He soon abandoned the simple, emotional Catholicism of his mother and adopted something more exclusive and recherché: the religion of Mani, a Persian syncretist who had taken this and that from here and there and come up with something that can only strike us as a California cult—a little Christian symbolism, a large dose of Zoroastrian dualism, and some of the quiet refinements of Buddhism. It was called Manicheism. For a while, it let Augustine off the hook. For one thing, it absolved him from any responsibility for his raging lusts: in Mani’s system, Good was passive, unable to battle the gross and fleshly evils that raged against it. It was a made-to-order religion for a smart young provincial who needed to explore every dark corner of the boiling city and experience every dark pleasure it had to offer—and at the same time think himself above the herd. But it couldn’t keep up with Augustine’s fearlessly inquiring mind. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormonism, it was full of assertions, but could yield no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.
We don’t know what Augustine read, but we know he devoured books. By his own admission, he never learned Greek properly. Plato, however, was readily available in translation— and “packaged” by commentators of far greater profundity than Cicero. Plato was in the air Augustine breathed, the figure a thoughtful young man must sooner or later test himself against.
Augustine, disappointed with Manicheism and now appointed to his first big job as professor of rhetoric at Milan, forms a new—and, of course, exclusive—group: a temporary “monastic” community of like-minded young men who mean to ascend to Truth with the aid of Plato and his Latin commentators. Their earnest intentions will eventually be thwarted when their wives-to-be object to all this moping about. And, soon enough, Augustine’s mother will arrive on the scene, creating, as she always does, emotional tornadoes and hurricanes— a sort of one-woman African Sturm und Drang. But the establishment, even for a short time, of such a community gives us an idea of how seriously and personally the pursuit of philosophy could be taken in the ancient world—something far closer to an ashram than to a modern department of philosophy. And this community will provide Augustine with the seedbed he needs for his own philosophy to germinate.
Socrates, at least in Plato’s accounts of him, did not so much build a positive philosophy as pose questions, questions that show up the utter foolishness of his interlocutors’ assumptions. He, of course, invented the Socratic method, forcing his students to start their quest for Truth with a confession of their own ignorance. Plato, the product of this method, reasons with delicate skill toward the creation of a large and airy edifice—the grandest construct of ancient philosophy.
Plato begins with his own experience of a spark of divinity in all the creatures of the natural world, a spark he experiences particularly in himself and other human beings—in other words, the daimon of Socrates. But the spark is experienced within a world of corruption and death, the world of the flesh. It is worth our while to take a few moments to receive Plato in his own words, for they give us an idea both of the challenge confronting Augustine and of the flavor of the Augustinian ashram. (Most of Plato is impenetrable on first reading. If it begins to give you a headache, skip to the end of the passage— and just take my word for it.) Here is Plato in the Phaedrus on the spark, the daimon—the soul:
Of the nature of the soul [psyche in Greek], though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing:—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground—there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings!
The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way to heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demigods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve march in their appointed order. They see many blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed gods are passing, everyone doing his own work; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide happily; but the others labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained:—and this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to
mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true existences in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the interior of the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer putting up his horses at the stall, gives them ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink.
Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while another only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, go away, and feed upon opinion. The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall at her first birth pass, not into any other animal, but only into man; and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature; that which has seen truth in the second degree shall be some righteous king or warrior chief; the soul which is of the third class shall be a politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth shall lead the life of a prophet or hierophant; to the sixth the character of a poet or some other imitative artist will be assigned; to the seventh the life of an artisan or husbandman; to the eighth that of a sophist or demagogue; to the ninth that of a tyrant;—all these are states of probation, in which he who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously deteriorates his lot.
Plato is the greatest of all Greek prose stylists, and through his tightly woven sentences run threads of delicate beauty and allusive grace. He doesn’t sound like anyone else; and he convinces us not only of the largeness of his mind, but of the genuine mysticism of his spirit. He tells us from the start that he is using metaphor, but we cannot help believe that he has glimpsed the world beyond the veil. He has at least as much in common with the wisdom of the east—with Buddhism and Taoism—as he does with the subsequent philosophy of the west. He is simply the great philosopher, and the difficulty one experiences in understanding him is not a difficulty based on superficial obfuscation but on his genuine profundity. No one grasps Plato by reading him through quickly or once.
So it was for Augustine, and thus the necessity of the ashram and stillness and philosophical companionship. Augustine’s spirit resonates with the plangent chords of Plato: the restless, exiled soul, looking everywhere for its true home, feasting on sewage while dimly remembering the nectar and ambrosia of high heaven. Plato is right, and his are the most profound descriptions in all the ancient world of the miraculous golden flashes of yearning embedded in the dross of reality—the out-of-jointness of the universe. Who else, Augustine asks himself, even talks of these things? And then the answer comes to him: Saul of Tarsus, the wiry, bald-headed Jew whose awkward, importunate letters, signed “Paul,” the Christians have been using as scripture: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”
Surely this is meaningless coincidence: what could a sweaty little nobody, dashing about the Mediterranean basin, have in common with the loftiest philosopher of all? And yet … Augustine begins to read Paul seriously. He entertains the possibility that Plato even has something wrong—that the ascent to Truth is not a task the philosopher takes upon himself and succeeds at by his own effort. Has the great Plato mistakenly equated knowledge with virtue? For if the flesh and the spirit are at war, isn’t the human enterprise doomed to failure—even when joined by the most exalted philosophical types? Mustn’t Paul be closer to the mark when he says of preborn souls (the same souls Plato is describing in his metaphor of the charioteers): “For whom [God] did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified”? In other words, if we mud-spattered human beings are ever to ascend to Truth, we can do it only because God, a force ineffably greater than our war-torn selves, has predestined us and calls us upward. We will never make it under our own steam.
Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point in the Confessions is a full-scale emotional breakdown. And all over an idea? Yes, for Augustine ideas do not float free, abstracted from their human context. He personalizes everything, even the most rarefied philosophical utterances. Without education, he would probably have been a self-destructive provincial roustabout, always smoldering with one fire or another. With the discipline of his education, he is transformed into that unusual specimen: neither denatured academic nor effete upper-class connoisseur, but a man of feeling who takes ideas seriously. As with Tolstoy and Joyce, both educated wildmen, the riotous blood of his homeland beats forever in his veins—and animates his every thought.
While talking with his fellow seeker Alypius, he begins to weep uncontrollably. This “mighty shower of tears,” as he calls it, comes upon him out of nowhere—“from the secret bottom of my soul.” Abashed, he runs from the house into the garden, throwing himself under a fig tree and “giving full vent to my tears.” He begins to wail near-nonsense, for no reason he can understand: “And Thou, O Lord, how long? how long, O Lord! Will you stay angry forever?”
From a house bordering the garden, he hears a child’s voice, chanting nonsense of its own: “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege” (“Take, read, take, read”). Never having heard this children’s song before, he decides it is a sign, meant for him. He returns to the house and takes from the table (where the stunned Alypius is still sitting) the book he had been reading earlier, an edition of Paul’s letters. In the time-honored fashion of the ancient world, he opens the book at random, intending to receive as a divine message the first sentence his eyes should fall upon. The sentence he reads is: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
Augustine is caught. He submits himself to the death of the flesh through baptism—and to the Christian God.
We have been using Augustine as a lens for viewing the classical world. What is about to be lost in the century of the barbarian invasions is literature—the content of classical civilization. Had the destruction been complete—had every library been disassembled and every book burned—we might have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all of classical history, D
emosthenes and Cicero and all of classical oratory, Plato and Aristotle and all of Greek philosophy, and Plotinus and Porphyry and all the subsequent commentary. We would have lost the taste and smell of a whole civilization. Twelve centuries of lyric beauty, aching tragedy, intellectual inquiry, scholarship, sophistry, and love of Wisdom—the acme of ancient civilized discourse—would all have gone down the drain of history. All but a few lines of Sappho and much of the work of the Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—did go down that drain. And we very nearly lost the whole of Latin literature.
We did lose, at any rate, the spirit of classical civilization. “At certain epochs,” wrote Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, “man has felt conscious of something about himself—body and spirit—which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection—reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways—through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world.” The struggle for existence and the struggle with fear now gain the ascendancy once more, and what remains of classical civilization will be henceforth found not in life but between the covers of books.
How the Irish Saved Civilization Page 5