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Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism infuses Augustine's entire conception of God and God's creation. Plotinus founded the school, which views God as a spiritual substance inherent in all things; as Augustine puts it, "in filling all things, you [God] fill them all with the whole of yourself" (Book 1). In the Neoplatonist view, all things (including souls) have this infinite, timeless, and unchangeable God as the cause of their existence—everything exists only to the extent to which it participates in God. The Neoplatonist account of evil is also extremely important to Augustine. According to this doctrine, evil has no actual existence—things are "evil" or "wicked" according to a hierarchy of being in which some things are closer to God's supreme and infinite being than others. Evil arises only as a relative quality: things further down in the hierarchy have less complete being than things higher up, and so are imperfect or "evil" by comparison. This view, in which the goodness of individual things varies but everything is part of a whole from God's point of view, allows Augustine to answer Manichee challenges about the source of evil.

Manicheism

Augustine comes across the Manichee sect in Carthage, when he goes there for his studies. He ends up believing strongly in Manichee doctrine for nearly ten years, until rational philosophy and astronomy persuade him that the colorful Manichee cosmology is false. The self-declared prophet Mani claimed that God was not omnipotent and struggled against the opposing substance of evil. The Manicheans also believed that the human soul was of the same substance of God. The opposition of these views is one of the main themes of the Confessions. Manichee doctrines depended heavily on visualization of the concepts of God and evil, and this dependence greatly delayed Augustine from coming to know God without imagining him.

Time/Temporality

Time is the subject of Book 11 of the Confessions, in which Augustine explores the relationship between God's timelessness and his creation's experience of time. Augustine emphasizes the view that God's creation of the universe did not occur at any point in time, since time only came into being with creation: there was no "before." God has nothing to do with time, and in his eyes all time is present as one unified moment. His creation, however, experiences time (which Augustine sees as a painful quality). Augustine argues that, although we assume there is a past and a future, neither have any existence. Even the present instant has no dimension or duration. Thus, "time cannot be said to exist." Augustine suggests that time may be a kind of "distension," a stretching of the soul (as opposed to a quality of the outside world). This is a sign of distance from God—creation has fallen away from God's eternity into successive time.

Multiplicity

If creation turns away from God's eternity to become mired in temporality, it also turns away from God's unity to become scattered into multiplicity. Augustine follows the Neoplatonist view of multiplicity as a marker of flawed being, or distance from God.

Mind/Soul

The mind or soul (the terms are somewhat interchangeable in Augustine) is the element that animates human beings. It is the "life of the body," commanding the body, receiving and storing sensory input, and using concepts and ideas. It is not, however, God or some kind of piece of God. The Manicheans made the mistake of identifying the soul with God, an opinion that Augustine now strongly rebukes. The soul or mind is also the site of Augustine's search for God, which he pursues by looking inward to find the truth that transcends the soul. This process leads to the extended investigation of memory (which is a feature of the mind) in Book 10.

Spiritual Substance

A spiritual substance is a substance that exists without any spatial qualities at all, and it is the substance of God. The understanding of spiritual substance is one of the final steps Augustine makes before his conversion to Catholicism. Partly due to the influence of Manichee images of God as an immense body of light, Augustine has difficulty conceiving of God without resorting to any visualization whatsoever. Spiritual substance, however, cannot be visualized, because it has nothing to do with space--it is both everywhere and nowhere. Augustine tells us in Book 12 that spiritual substance is the substance of the heaven of heavens, the order of near-perfect creation, whose counterpart is formless matter (of which the firmament and the earth were made).

Justice

Though this is not a primary theme of the Confessions, Augustine sees all the events of his life as divinely just; he sinned, suffered, and was saved all according to God's perfect justice. There is very little sense of cause and effect in this idea of justice, since sinning is largely its own punishment (Augustine speaks of his early sexual adventures as a "hell of lust"). Following the Neoplatonists, Augustine suggests that a disordered mind or perverted will is punished by its own miserable state and by its attachment to transient things. The only true reward is the return to the stability of God.

Memory

Memory is the subject of most of Book 10. Augustine's idea of memory is infused with Plato's argument that learning is really a process of the soul remembering what it knew before birth. After investigating the contents of the "vast storehouse" of memory (which contains sensory images, skills, emotions, and ideas), Augustine argues that any recognition of truth is really a process of "assembling" scattered pieces of a kind of eternal memory of God. Memory is strange for Augustine because it contains images that can be re-experienced almost like the original. He wonders at his capacity to remember sights from long ago almost as if he were seeing them again, as well as his capacity to remember emotions without feeling them. Memory is also the place where Augustine finally locates time. Rather than an external phenomenon, measurable time exists solely in the mind (or soul)—the future is that which we imagine based on present signs, and the past exists only in our memory.

Skepticism & the Academics

As he gradually becomes disillusioned with Manichee beliefs, Augustine comes close to this Greek school of total doubt that anything is certain. Referring to the skeptics as the Academics (the school began at Plato's Academy), Augustine says he found them to be "shrewder" than most other schools of thought. First Neoplatonism and then Catholicism would come to fill in the gap left in him by Manicheism, and Augustine eventually emphasizes faith more than the demand for absolute proof.

Free Will

According to Augustine, although their choices are ultimately part of God's plan, humans have the free will to choose to turn toward God or away from him toward the lower spectrum of the created order. Evil, though it ultimately has no existence of its own, appears due to this turning away from God. The concept of free will is important to Augustine in opposing the Manichee notion of evil as a dark substance in conflict with God. If this were the case, humans would have no responsibility for their wicked acts. Augustine's view maintains that evil (or what appears to be evil) is a misdirection of the human will.

PLACES

Thagaste

Augustine's hometown in Eastern Algeria (then part of the Roman empire). After growing up and attending primary school in Thagaste, Augustine left the city for Carthage for further studies. He returned to Thagaste afterward to begin his teaching career, leaving again for good after the death of a close friend there made the city unbearable.

Carthage

Augustine moved to Carthage twice: once for further studies in rhetoric after finishing grade school in Thagaste, and once after the death of his close friend (again in Thagaste) left him too stricken with grief to stay in his hometown. On neither occasion is the city a good experience for Augustine (at least in retrospect). The first time he goes, he describes it as a "cauldron of illicit loves." The second time, he finds his students too rowdy and decamps for Rome.

Rome

Augustine moves to Rome from Carthage, hoping to find students who are less rowdy. The students in Rome turn out to be dishonest, however, and Augustine moves on to Milan after a short tenure.

Milan

Milan is the last place Augustine lives in the Confessions, and it is the site of his final steps toward Christianity and of his conversion experience in the garden. Just prior to this experience, he and his friends Alypius and Nebridius live in close contact, ardently pursuing truth together.

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