Augustine of Hippo: the philosopher who turned inwards

Say the name Augustine and a handful of images arrive: a North African bishop, the Confessions, sin, the City of God.

That portrait conceals his extraordinary modernity as a figure in the history of philosophy.

For Augustine is the philosopher of these questions:

Who am I? Where is the past? Does the future exist at all? Does my will belong to me? How far can I trust my own mind? Why does a person do the thing he does not want to do?

Every one of them is today the business of psychology, the philosophy of mind, consciousness research and the argument about free will.

His laboratory was his own mind#

He was born in 354 at Thagaste in North Africa and died in 430 at Hippo.

To read his intellectual biography as a conversion from paganism to Christianity is a serious omission. The Confessiones is also one of the most thorough investigations of the inner life in the whole of recorded history.

Looking for God, Augustine went into the human mind. And there he met time.

“What, then, is time?”#

One of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy is asked in the eleventh book of the Confessions.

The paradox Augustine constructs is simple and destructive.

The past is no longer. The future is not yet. And the present is not long enough to stand on — for any interval that can be divided is partly past and partly future.

In what sense, then, does time exist?

Augustine's answer moves the question elsewhere. Time exists in the mind:

The past → as memory. The future → as expectation. The present → as attention.

The three dimensions of time coexist within the unity of the human mind. His famous formula is distentio animi: the stretching, the distension of the mind.

For a thought from the fifth century this is startlingly modern. Time here is no longer merely a physical quantity measured by clocks; it is something lived.

Husserl's analysis of internal time-consciousness, Bergson's durée and Heidegger's account of temporality are all heirs of these pages.

And the question we discussed this week in our Lebowitz Prize file — whether remembering is reading the past or rebuilding it — is still asked inside the frame Augustine built.

Consciousness and self-knowledge#

This is why philosophers of mind take an interest in him today.

In the De Trinitate, the threefold structure he builds out of the mind's knowing and loving of itself — memory, understanding, will — is an exceptionally subtle account of how the mind gains access to itself.

He also has an argument that arrives twelve hundred years before Descartes's cogito: Si fallor, sum — “If I am deceived, I exist.” That is his answer to the sceptic. Even being deceived requires someone to be deceived.

Descartes knew of the resemblance and acknowledged it in a letter. But the difference matters: for Augustine this is not a first principle on which a system is founded, it is a step on the inward road to God.

Did he invent the will?#

Among Augustine's most contested legacies is the will. Some historians trace the modern concept of the will back to him.

The matter is more complicated than that.

For Augustine, freedom is not simply being able to choose what you want. A person sometimes knows what he wants and still cannot do it — because desire is divided against itself.

He tells this most vividly through his own life. The Augustine of the years before his conversion is torn between two wills: “This is what I want” and “No, I want to live otherwise.”

Both are his will.

The problem is therefore not merely the classical struggle between reason and desire. The will can be divided within itself.

Look at the modern psychology of addiction, at weakness of will (akrasia), at the literature on self-control, and it becomes clear why this thought is still surprising. Augustine developed the will as a mental faculty more independent than anything in ancient thought, and placed it at the centre of moral responsibility.

The problem of evil#

His youthful Manichaean period matters, because it meant he lived the problem of evil not as an abstract puzzle but as an intellectual crisis.

The Manichaeans offered an easy solution: there are two principles, good and evil, and evil is an independent power.

Augustine rejected it, because the solution paid for itself with God's absoluteness.

His own answer: evil is not a being but a privation of the good (privatio boni). Blindness is not a thing; it is the absence of sight. So it is with evil.

The move has a price, and the price is debated: can something defined as a privation account for what the victim suffers? But its power is plain enough. It carries the problem of evil out of ontology and into ethics — the trouble lies not in the structure of being but in the orientation of the will.

Politics#

The City of God is too often waved through under the label “Christian political philosophy.” Yet the book's occasion is concrete: Rome was sacked in 410 and the Christians were blamed.

Augustine's reply is more than a defence. The question he asks is this: can a state ever really be just?

His famous passage is merciless. Without justice, what are kingdoms but bands of robbers on a grand scale?

From this comes the doctrine of the two cities: civitas dei and civitas terrena. These are not two institutions but two orientations of love — one resting on the love of God, the other on love of self. And throughout history they are found entangled with one another.

This is a direct reckoning with the Cicero file we published this week. Augustine takes Cicero's definition of the res publica and turns it against him: if a state requires genuine justice, then Rome was never a republic at all.

And Foucault#

As we described in today's Foucault centenary file, the fourth volume published after Foucault's death — Confessions of the Flesh — is largely about the early Church Fathers, and Augustine holds the central place in it.

Foucault's thesis is a critical view of Augustine's legacy. The practice of confession made of the human being a subject obliged to tell the truth about itself continually. The line that runs from therapy to social media begins here.

Augustine's inward turn is thus both the birth certificate of the modern subject and, on Foucault's account, its trap.

Why is he still alive?#

Because his questions have not died.

Who am I? Is the person I remember really me? Where is the past to be found? Can a person be master of his own will? Is time outside the mind or inside it?

None of these is merely theological.

Augustine's real legacy is perhaps this: he showed that to understand the world outside, a person must first turn to the world within.

And for that reason he is more than a philosopher who lived in the fifth century: he is an ancient voice still speaking inside the modern head.

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On 2 September this column covered the two new sermons of Augustine that the Würzburg Latinist Christian Tornau found in a manuscript in Poland.

Note: since Augustine lived long before photography, the cover image is Botticelli's tempera panel in the Uffizi.