This Day in Philosophy — 28 August: Augustine's death and two new sermons

Augustine died on 28 August 430 at Hippo Regius — the city of Annaba in present-day Algeria. He was seventy-five.

His was not an ordinary death: the city was under siege by the Vandals. As Rome's order in North Africa came apart, the greatest thinker that order produced was leaving the stage.

He had been bishop of Hippo for thirty-five years.

A new discovery: two unknown sermons#

One of the most striking pieces of philological news this year concerns Augustine.

Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg, began work on a manuscript that had come into his hands: a twelfth-century volume originally belonging to the abbey of Bad Doberan and now held at the Pelplin monastery in Poland.

The manuscript contained six sermons by Augustine. Two of them were previously unknown.

The texts treat the Old Testament story of the witch of Endor — the scene in the first book of Samuel in which King Saul consults a medium and has her summon the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel. In the newly found sermons Augustine suggests that Saul may in the end have repented and received God's mercy.

Authentication took two years. At a summer school held in Vienna in the autumn of 2025, close to twenty specialists in Latin philology examined the texts and concluded unanimously that they were Augustine's.

The first critical edition — Latin text, German translation, historical and theological context, and an analysis of authenticity — is due to appear at the end of this year.

Two texts being added to a thinker's corpus sixteen hundred years after his death is not a common event in the history of philosophy.

The Confessions: the book in which philosophy changed shape#

The Confessions (roughly 397-400) did something new not only in what it said but in how it was made.

Until then philosophy had been written as dialogue, treatise or letter. Augustine built a text addressed not to another person but directly to God. And yet the reader is there too, which is why the work is at once prayer, confession and analysis.

That is why it is counted the first autobiography in Western literature. But its deeper novelty lies elsewhere: it made the inner life — memory, desire, irresolution, self-deception — a subject of philosophical inquiry.

Time: the most quoted passage#

The discussion of time in the eleventh book of the Confessions is among the most frequently quoted passages in the history of philosophy.

Augustine asks what time is, and gives his famous answer: “If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.”

The analysis that follows is remarkable. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present is a boundary without extension. How, then, is time measured?

Augustine's answer moves time into the mind: the past exists in memory, the future in expectation, the present in attention. Time is a stretching of the soul (distentio animi).

This analysis directly shaped Husserl's phenomenology of inner time consciousness; Heidegger's early lecture courses, too, rest on readings of Augustine.

Will and freedom#

Augustine's second great contribution is the concept of the will.

In Greek philosophy moral failure is generally ignorance: the person who chooses badly does not know the good. Augustine objects. The theft of the pears in the Confessions is his evidence: as a boy he did not want the pears he stole, he was not hungry, he did not even eat the fruit. He stole because it was wrong.

The question this opens occupied Western thought for centuries. How can a person act against a good he knows to be good? What is the will, and can it be independent of reason?

The line runs to Kant, to Schopenhauer and finally to Nietzsche — the Nietzsche we marked in this column last week, who in mounting the fiercest of all attacks on Christian morality was still drawing on the psychological depth Augustine had opened up.

The City of God#

When Rome was sacked in 410, the blame was laid at the Christians' door: the city had fallen because the old gods had been abandoned.

Augustine's answer was The City of God, a work of twenty-two books written over fifteen years.

The distinction it draws has proved durable in political philosophy. There are two cities. The earthly city rests on love of self, the city of God on love of God. These are not two separate institutions but two orientations, interwoven throughout history.

Politically the conclusion is bracing: no worldly order can claim absolute legitimacy. The state is necessary but it is not final.

The distinction framed the medieval argument between church and state, and its traces can be followed into debates about secularisation.

1749: Goethe#

On the same day, in 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt.

Goethe did not consider himself a philosopher and kept his distance from systematic philosophy. His place in the history of philosophy is nonetheless beyond dispute.

Faust is reckoned the most philosophical text in modern literature on the limits of the desire to know. His work on colour set itself against Newton and proposed a conception of science that defended the qualitative side of experience — Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour returns to that argument.

The notion of the Urphänomen, the primal phenomenon, which he developed in his studies of nature, proposes that instead of seeking a law behind appearances we should see the structure within the appearance itself. That stance has a close kinship with German idealism and with Hegel in particular; both men belonged to the Weimar-Jena circle.

Hegel, whose birthday we marked yesterday, visited Goethe and told him he was right about colour.

In Turkish#

Augustine's Confessions has been translated into Turkish several times, and The City of God is available in Turkish as well. Goethe's Faust and his Theory of Colours have both been rendered into Turkish.

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Note: Augustine lived fourteen centuries before the invention of photography. The cover image is the portrait painted by Philippe de Champaigne between 1645 and 1650.