The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  I pointed out earlier that the argument of determinism receives its actual poignancy only if a Foreknower is introduced who stands outside the temporal order and looks on what is happening from the perspective of eternity. By introducing such a Foreknower, Augustine was able to arrive at the most dubious and also most terrible of his teachings, the doctrine of predestination. We are not interested here in this doctrine, a perverse radicalization of Paul's teaching that salvation lies not in works but in faith and is given by God's grace—so that not even faith is within man's power. You find it in one of the last treatises, On Grace and Free Will, written against the Pelagians, who, referring precisely to Augustine's earlier doctrines of the Will, had emphasized "the merits of the antecedent good will" for the reception of grace, which was given wholly gratuitously only in the forgiveness of sins.120

  The philosophical arguments, not for predestination but for the possible co-existence of God's omniscience and man's free will, occur in a discussion of Plato's Timaeus. Human knowledge is of "various lands"; men know

  in different ways things which as yet are not, things which are, and things which have been. [But] not in our fashion does He look forward to what is future, nor does He look at what is present nor look back at what is past, but in a manner far and profoundly different from the way of our thoughts. For He does not pass from this to that [following in thought what has changed from past to present to future], but He sees altogether unchangeably; so that all things which [for us] emerge temporally—the future which is not yet as well as the present that already is and the past which is no more-are comprehended by Him in a stable and sempiternal presence: nor does He see differently with the eyes of the body and differently with the mind, for He is not composed of mind and body: nor [does He see] in different fashion the now, the before, the later; for His knowledge, unlike ours, is not a knowledge of three different times, present, past, and future through whose variations our knowledge is affected.... Nor is there any intention that passes from thought to thought in Whose bodyless intuition all things which He knows are present together at once. For He knows all times with no temporal notions, just as He moves all temporal things with no temporal movements.121

  In this context, one can no longer speak of God's Foreknowledge; for Him, past and future do not exist. Eternity, understood in human terms, is an everlasting present. "If the present were always present ... it would no longer be time but eternity."122

  I have quoted this argument at some length because if one can assume that there is a person for whom the temporal order does not exist, the co-existence of God's omniscience and man's free will ceases to be an insoluble problem. At the very least it can be approached as part of the problem of man's temporality, that is, in a consideration of all our faculties as related to time. This new view, explicated in the City of God, is prepared for in the famous eleventh book of the Confessions, to which we now briefly turn.

  Regarded in temporal categories, "the present of things past is in memory, the present of things present is in a mental intuition [contuitus—a gaze that gathers things together and "pays attention" to them], and the present of things future is in expectation."123 But these threefold presents of the mind do not in themselves constitute time; they constitute time only because they pass into each other "from the future through the present by which it passes to the past"; and the present is the least lasting of them, since it has no "space" of its own. Hence time passes "from that which does not yet exist, by that which has no space, into that which no longer exists."124 Time, therefore, cannot possibly be constituted by "the movements of the heavenly bodies"; the movements of bodies are "in time" only insofar as they have a beginning and an end; and time that can be measured is in the mind itself, namely, "from the time I began to see until I cease to see." For "we measure in fact the interval from some beginning up to some kind of end," and this is possible only because the mind retains in its own present the expectation of that which is not yet, which it then "pays attention to and remembers when it passes through."

  The mind performs this temporalizing action in each everyday act: "I am about to recite a psalm.... Hie life of this action of mine is distended into memory in respect to the part I have already recited and into expectation in respect to the part I am about to recite. Attention is present, through which what was future is conveyed over [traiiciatur], that it may become past." Attention, as we have seen, is one of the major functions of the Will, the great unifier, which here, in what Augustine calls the "distention of the mind," binds together the tenses of time into the mind's present. "Attention abides and through it what will be present proceeds to become something absent," namely, the past. And "the same holds for the whole of man's life," which without the mind's distention would never be a whole; "the same [also] for the whole era of the children of men, of which all the lives of men are parts," namely, insofar as this era can be recounted as a coherent continuous story.125 "

  From the perspective, then, of the temporality of the human faculties, Augustine in the last of the great treatises, the City of Cod, returns once more to the problem of the Will.126 He states the main difficulty: God, "though Himself eternal, and without beginning, caused time to have a beginning; and man, whom He had not made previously, He made in time."127 The creation of the world and of time coincide—"the world was made not in time, but simultaneously with time"—not only because creation itself implies a beginning but also because living creatures were made before the making of man. "Where there is no creature whose changing movement admits of succession, there cannot be time at all ... time being impossible without the creature."128 But what, then, was God's purpose in creating man, asks Augustine; why did He "will to make him in time," him "whom He had never made before"? He calls this question "a depth indeed" and speaks of "the unsearchable depth of this purpose" of creating "temporal man [hominem temporalem] who has never before been," that is, a creature that does not just live "in time" but is essentially temporal, is, as it were, time's essence.129

  To answer "this very difficult question of the eternal God creating new things," Augustine first finds it necessary to refute the philosophers' cyclical time concepts, inasmuch as novelty could not occur in cycles. He then gives a very surprising answer to the question of why it was necessary to create Man, apart from and above all other living things. In order, he says, that there may be novelty, a beginning must exist; "and this beginning never before existed," that is, not before Man's creation. Hence, that such a beginning "might be, man was created before whom nobody was" ("quod initium eo modo antea nunquam fuit. Hoc ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit").130 And Augustine distinguishes this from the beginning of the creation by using the word "initium" for the creation of Man but "principium" for the creation of the heaven and the earth.131 As for the living creatures, made before Man, they were created "in numbers," as species beings, unlike Man, who was created in the singular and continued to be "propagated from individuals."132

  It is Man's character of individuality that explains Augustine's saying that there was "nobody" before him, namely, nobody whom one could call a "person"; this individuality manifests itself in the Will. Augustine proposes the case of identical twins, both "of a like temperament of body and soul" How can we tell them apart? The only endowment by which they are distinguished from each other is their will—"if both are tempted equally and one yields and consents to the temptation while the other remains unmoved ... what causes this but their own wills in cases ... where the temperament is identical?"133

  In other words, and somehow elaborating on these speculations: Man is put into a world of change and movement as a new beginning because he knows that he has a beginning and will have an end; he even knows that his beginning is the beginning of his end—"our whole life is nothing but a race toward death."134 In this sense, no animal, no species being, has a beginning or an end. With man, created in God's own image, a being came into the world that, because it was a beginning running toward an e
nd, could be endowed with the capacity of willing and nilling.

  In this respect, he was the image of a Creator-God; but since he was temporal and not eternal, the capacity was entirely directed toward the future. (Wherever Augustine speaks of the three tenses, he stresses the primacy of the future—like Hegel, as we saw; the primacy of the Will among the mental faculties necessitates the primacy of the future in time speculations.) Every man, being created in the singular, is a new beginning by virtue of his birth; if Augustine had drawn the consequences of these speculations, he would have defined men, not, like the Greeks, as mortals, but as "natals," and he would have defined the freedom of the Will not as the liberum arbitrium, the free choice between willing and nilling, but as the freedom of which Kant speaks in the Critique of Pure Reason.

  His "faculty of spontaneously beginning a series in time," which "occurring in the world can have only a relatively first beginning" and still is "an absolutely first beginning not in time but in causality" must once again be invoked here. "If, for instance, I at this moment arise from my chair in complete freedom ... a new series, with all its natural consequences in infinitum, has its absolute beginning in this event."135 The distinction between an "absolute" and a "relative" beginning points to the same phenomenon we find in Augustine's distinction between the principium of the Heaven and the Earth and the initium of Man. And had Kant known of Augustine's philosophy of natality he might have agreed that the freedom of a relatively absolute spontaneity is no more embarrassing to human reason than the fact that men are born—newcomers again and again in a world that preceded them in time. The freedom of spontaneity is part and parcel of the human condition. Its mental organ is the Will.

  III. Will and Intellect

  11. Thomas Aquinas and the primacy of Intellect

  More than forty years ago, Etienne Gilson, the great reviver of Christian philosophy, speaking at Aberdeen as the Gilford Lecturer, addressed himself to the magnificent revival of Greek thought in the thirteenth century; the result was a classical and, I think, lasting statement—The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy—on "the basic principle of all medieval speculation." He was referring to the fides quaerens intellectum, Anselm's "faith asking the intellect for help" and thereby making philosophy ancilla theologiae, the handmaid of faith. There was always the danger that the handmaid might become the "mistress," as Pope Gregory IX warned the University of Paris, anticipating Luther's fulminant attacks on this stultitia, this folly, by more than two hundred years. I mention Gilson's name, certainly not to invite comparisons—which would be fatal to myself—but, rather, out of a feeling of gratitude and also in order to explain why, in what follows, I shall avoid discussing matters that were dealt with long ago in such a masterly way and whose result is available—even in paperback.

  Eight hundred years separate Thomas from Augustine, time enough not just to make a saint and Father of the Church out of the Bishop of Hippo but to confer on him an authority equal to that of Aristotle and almost equal to that of the Aposde Paul. In the Middle Ages such authority was of the utmost importance; nothing could be more damaging to a new doctrine than a frank avowal that it was new; never was what Gilson called "ipsedixitism" more dominant. Even when Thomas expressly disagrees with an opinion, he needs an authoritative quote to establish the doctrine against which he will then argue. To be sure, this had something to do with the absolute authority of God's word, recorded in books, the Old and the New Testament, but the point here is that almost every author that was known—Christian, Jewish, Moslem-was quoted as an "authority," either for the truth or for some important untruth.

  In other words, when we study these medieval works we must remember that their authors lived in monasteries—without which such a thing as a "history of ideas" in the Western world would not exist—and that means that these writings came out of a world of books. But Augustine's reflections, by contrast, had been intimately connected with his experiences; it was important to him to describe them in detail, and even when he treated such speculative matters as the origin of evil (in the early dialogue On Free Choice of the Will), it scarcely occurred to him to quote the opinions of a host of erudite and worthy men on the subject.

  The Scholastic authors use experience only to give an example supporting their argument; experience itself does not inspire the argument. What actually arises from the examples is a curious kind of casuistry, a technique of bringing general principles to bear on particular cases. The last author still to write clearly of the perplexities of his mind or soul, entirely undisturbed by bookish concerns, was Anselm of Canterbury, and that was two hundred years before Thomas. This, of course, is not to say that the Scholastic authors were unconcerned with the actual issues and merely inspired by arguments, but to say that we are now entering an "age of commentators" (Gilson), whose thoughts were always guided by some written authority, and it would be a grave error to believe that this authority was necessarily or even primarily ecclesiastical or scriptural. Yet Gilson, whose mentality was so admirably attuned to the requirements of his great subject, and who recognized that "it is due to scripture that there is a philosophy which is Christian, [as] it is due to the Greek tradition that Christianity possesses a philosophy," could seriously suggest that the reason Plato and Aristotle failed to penetrate to the ultimate truth was to be found in the unfortunate fact that they had not "the advantage of reading the first lines of Genesis ... had they done so the whole history of philosophy might have been different."1

  Thomas' great unfinished masterwork, the Summa Theo-logica, was originally intended for pedagogical purposes, as a textbook for the new universities. It enumerates in a strictly systematic manner all possible questions, all possible arguments, and presumes to give final answers to each of them. No later system I know of can rival this codification of presumably established truths, the sum of coherent knowledge. Every philosophical system aims at offering the restless mind a kind of mental habitat, a secure home, but none has ever succeeded so well, and none, I think, was so free of contradictions. Anyone willing to make the considerable mental effort to enter that home was rewarded by the assurance that in its many mansions he would never find himself perplexed or estranged.

  To read Thomas is to learn how such domiciles are built. First, the Questions are raised in the most abstract but non-speculative manner; then, the points of inquiry for each question are sorted out, followed by the Objections that can be made to every possible answer; whereupon an "On the contrary" introduces the opposite position; only when this whole ground has been laid does Thomas' own answer follow, complete with specific replies to the Objections. This schematic order never alters, and the reader patient enough to follow the sequence of question upon question, answer upon answer, taking account of each objection and each contrary position, will find himself spellbound by the immensity of an intellect that seems to know it all. In every instance, an appeal is made to some authority, and this is particularly striking when arguments that are being refuted have first been brought forward backed by an authoritative quotation.

  Not that the citation of authority is the only or even the dominant way of argumentation. It is always accompanied by a kind of sheer rational demonstration, usually iron-clad. No rhetoric, no kind of persuasion is ever used; the reader is compelled as only truth can compel. The trust in compelling truth, so general in medieval philosophy, is boundless in Thomas. He distinguishes three kinds of necessity: absolute necessity, which is rational—for instance, that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; relative necessity, which is that of utility—for instance, food is necessary for life or a horse is necessary for a journey; and coercion imposed by an outside agent. And of these only the last is "repugnant to the will."2 Truth compels; it does not command as the will commands, and it does not coerce. It is what Scotus later called the dictamen rationis, the "dictate of reason," that is, a power which prescribes in the form of speech (dicere) and whose force has its limits in the limitations of rational intercourse.


  With unsurpassed clarity, Thomas distinguishes between two "apprehensive" faculties, intellect and reason; these have their corresponding intellectually appetitive faculties, will and liberum arbitrium or free choice. Intellect and reason deal with truth. Intellect, also called "universal reason," deals with mathematical or self-evident truth, first principles needing no demonstration to be assented to, whereas reason, or particular reason, is the faculty by which we draw particular conclusions from universal propositions as in syllogisms. Universal reason is by nature contemplative, while the task of particular reason is "to come from one thing to the knowledge of another, and so ... we reason about conclusions, that are known from the principles."3 This discursive reasoning process dominates all his writings. (The Age of Enlightenment has been called the Age of Reason—which may or may not be an apt description; these centuries of the Middle Ages are certainly best called the Age of Reasoning.) The distinction would be that truth, perceived by the intellect only, is revealed to and compels the mind without any activity on the mind's part, whereas in the discursive reasoning process the mind compels itself.

  The argumentative reasoning process is set in motion by die faith of a rational creature whose intellect naturally turns to its Creator for help in seeking out "such knowledge of the true being" that He is "as may lie within the power of my natural reason."4 What was revealed to faith in Scripture was not subject to doubt, any more than the self-evidence of first principles was doubted by Greek philosophy. Truth is compelling. What distinguishes this power of compulsion in Thomas from the necessitation of Greek alētheia is not that the decisive revelation comes from without but that "to the truth promulgated from without by revelation, responded the light of reason from within. Faith, ex auditu [for instance, Moses listening to the divine voice], at once awoke an answering chord."5