St. Augustine Talks to Himself and Creates a Masterpiece

There used to be a trope in popular culture of weird people who talked to themselves. Often disheveled, they’d pace back and forth as they carried out both sides of a conversation, oblivious to the world around them. In such a world, parents taught their kids to not do this—or, at least, not out loud—as an attempt to properly socialize them.

By and large, this trope has faded away. Not because we’ve come to accept talking to yourself as socially acceptable. Rather, there just aren’t enough people doing it for it to be a relatable cultural phenomenon.

Talking to yourself, for whatever awkwardness it may or may not have betrayed, required engaging with one’s own self in a way that we’ve become remarkably good at avoiding. We’ve replaced this with the constant chatter of podcasts in our ears as our noise-cancelling headphones block out not only the world around us but much of the world within us as well.

There is much to be said about our dying practice of talking to ourselves as a window into our modern malaise, but this is not that piece.

Instead, this is a piece about a particular intra-personal conversation, one that, when put to paper, introduced a new form in western literature. In this week’s essay, we will look at St. Augustine’s innovative conclusion to his Cassiciacum Dialogues: Soliloquies.

The title, Soliloquies, might bring to mind faint echoes of high school English classes. It sits somewhere in your brain next to “Iambic Pentameter” and the taste of cafeteria food. For most of us, soliloquies are those things that Shakespearean characters brought forth, speeches alone on stage that perhaps you read out in class in stilted and struggling attempts.

True as this association is, the idea begins not with Shakespeare or even theater in general, but with the writings of a young Augustine of Hippo while still a catechumen. It’s one of his many neologisms. Basically, it is a shoving together of solus (alone) and loqui (to speak) to create a word for speaking to oneself, which is precisely what Augustine does in Soliloquies.

As I mentioned, this forms the conclusion of his Cassiciacum Dialogues, works which for some mysterious reason have not been generally read as a unified collection despite the fact they were written as such and clearly build upon one another.1

This work, however, departs from the previous three (all of which I’ve written about on this Substack) in an important way. Those dialogues featured Augustine as teacher with his family members and students as dialogue partners whom he leads to understanding through dialectical exploration. In this final dialogue, these characters fade from the scene, leaving Augustine alone with himself. Or, more specifically, [his] Reason. Reason is now the teacher and Augustine is the impatient and often confused student who too readily accepts faulty premises only to later realize his mistakes.

In terms of surviving works from antiquity, Soliloquies is the first of its kind. Beyond being innovative in form, the structure is one that places Augustine in a position of humility. Reason pokes and prods Augustine, forcing him to realize not only his intellectual deficiencies but also his moral deficiencies. It’s a brilliant literary device as the work itself is interested in the topic of self-knowledge and the form of the book allows for this to happen on multiple levels. As Augustine is trying to understand self-knowledge generally, he is pushed to experience this personally, and we, the readers, are able to watch this play out within him.

Categorizing the content of Soliloquies is difficult, not least because it’s unfinished (more on that below). The most common description would probably be that it’s a philosophical dialogue about the immortality of the soul. For students of Augustine, you’ll know that he has another work that bears the title On the Immortality of the Soul, but that is actually just notes for the third book of Soliloquies that Augustine never finished, and those notes were published against his will. Later in life, when he was reviewing his works, he found the notes inscrutable.

Describing Soliloquies as a dialogue about the immortality of the soul runs into the same trouble as talking about On Order as a theodicy. In the latter, Augustine takes one step back from theodicy and asks, “how can we become the kind of people who could properly understand the problem of evil?” In the same way, Soliloquies probes the question of the soul’s immortality by first asking, “how do we know anything?” and also, “how do we become the type of people who can know sublime things like the nature of the soul?” In another parallel to On Order, Augustine thinks that knowledge of divine realities first requires a knowledge of ourselves. So, Soliloquies is as much about knowledge as it is about the soul.

With this in mind, we can appreciate why Book I of Soliloquies is something of an interrogation of Augustine by Reason in which Reason seeks to determine what Augustine loves. Only if Augustine supremely loves wisdom will he be able to be wise, and only if he’s wise will he be able to understand the soul.

This moral dimension to knowledge which says that attaining knowledge requires you to be a certain type of person was much more common in the Greco-Roman world than it is today. By and large, people today don’t see living a virtuous life as a prerequisite for being a good philosopher. But Augustine did—as did the likes of Plato, Plotinus, Cicero, et al.

To indulge in a brief aside, we would do well to revive this insight. While we shouldn’t expect our theologians to be morally perfect, we would be wrong to think theological acumen and virtuous living are disconnected. The extent to which we think they are separable is likely an indication of our misunderstanding of the nature and task of theology, which goes far beyond having a high verbal IQ.

As readers of Augustine’s Confessions will be aware, the great saint was not shy about revealing his own sinfulness. In Soliloquies, we find Augustine succumbing to the same temptation many of us do: pride. In this first interrogation by Reason, Augustine insists that he has firmly put away the lusts of the flesh. He is a single-minded catechumen focused on pursuing nothing but knowledge of himself and God.

Like a wise spiritual father, Reason allows this assessment to go unchallenged at first. It takes no longer than a day for Augustine to realize that he has not come nearly as far as he confidently declared. In a matter of a few pages, Augustine is confessing that on the very night of his assertion of triumphing over lust, his mind was given over to erotic fantasies. Augustine, ever the mirror to our own experiences, shows that pride goes before the fall and that the Christian life is often one of overestimating our saintliness.

And yet, praise be to God, there was grace for Augustine and there is grace for us. After realizing that he is not quite as sanctified as he previously believed, Augustine is kept from despair. Without denying that true understanding requires a soul free of the passions, Reason continues the conversation. Having addressed the moral dimension of knowledge, it turns to the structure of knowledge.

Many essays could be written on Augustine’s epistemology. There are interesting overlaps between Augustine and Descartes as Augustine tries to narrow in on the very few things he knows. As I mentioned in my essay on Against the Academics, Augustine at this point in his life was much more of a skeptic than one might expect. The list of things he knows is miniscule (basically geometry). It’s important to note that he explicitly states that the contents of this dialogue are still in the sphere of probability, not true knowledge.2 There’s much to ponder in that admission, but, for today’s purposes, I want to focus on just two aspects of Augustine’s epistemology.

First, I’m struck by the book’s insistence on how we know that we know. That is a different question from how we know things generally. One of the first issues that Reason presses in this dialogue is getting Augustine to determine what it will mean to know something and how he’ll be able to recognize the fact that he knows something.

If you don’t spend much time puzzling over epistemology—and that might be better for your sanity—this could seem an odd question. Knowing that we know something is often immediate (i.e., without mediation). Sometimes knowledge is marked by a sense of eureka or what we might call a lightbulb moment. Most of the time, though, we’re not asking how we know that we know something. We just have knowledge and that experience of knowledge is self-evident to us.

As I said, puzzling over epistemology isn’t always wise. It can lead you down endless paths of introspection that leave you thinking about brains in vats. That’s not why Reason takes this path in the dialogue. Augustine has set out to know God, and Reason is asking a fairly sensible question: what does that mean, and how would you know that you’ve achieved your goal? Think of the “measurable” in SMART goals.

Specifically, Reason asks Augustine what will be considered “enough.”3 Augustine hesitates to say that it could even be possible to know “enough,” to satisfy his longing to know God. Reason, however, argues without some way of identifying knowledge, pursuing God is futile—a bit like making your life’s goal getting to California but not accepting any method of recognizing you’re in California. If “Welcome to California” signs, the cliffs of Yosemite, or your car careening into the Pacific Ocean don’t cut it, you might be out of luck.

The goal of this opening exchange is to get Augustine to realize that knowledge of God, however sublime and transcendent it is, comes about through a process that is analogous to other knowledge. Here’s the idea: God as “object”4 transcends other objects of knowledge. However, your mind as subject remains the same whether knowing grasshoppers, geometry, or God. While the dialogue doesn’t reach terra firma on the question of how you know that you know something, at the very least some level of agreement is reached that knowing God is analogous to knowing other realities. Therefore, we can pursue God with confidence that, when we find Him, we’ll know we’ve found him as surely as we know parallel lines will never cross.5

With that quasi-settled, Augustine can then move on to the three-fold structure of knowledge. He explores this by way of analogy to sight. To “know” something via sense-perception is not as simple as having eyes. Instead, we need:

1. Healthy Eyes

2. Attentive Looking

3. Seeing (as the result of the previous two)

In a similar ways, to know intelligible things, we need:

1. A Mind free of the passions

2. Reason capable of focusing on something

3. Understanding (as the result of the previous two)

Connected to this triad is another: the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. These are both medicine for the mind which bring it to health and an inspiration for contemplation of higher things. In other words, without faith, hope, and love, we wouldn’t be able to know God nor would we care to know God. Reason puts this quite nicely:

“But looking itself cannot turn the eyes (even though they’re now healed) to the light unless three things remain: faith, by which it is believed that the reality one should be turning to look at is such that it will make one happy when it is seen; hope, by which it is expected that when one has looked well, one will see; charity, by which one longs to seen and enjoy.”6

As in his other dialogues, there are trinitarian echoes here. The God whom we seek to know is a Father who reveals Himself in the Son and stirs us to seek Him by the power of the Holy Spirit. While this dialogue is philosophically focused, we should not take it to be a “secular” treatise on knowledge or the soul. Reason itself enjoins Augustine to pray (I might add, the opening prayer of this book is worthy of deep meditation). All of this is pursued by the grace of God. Indeed, we are only able to understand because our minds are a reflection of God.

It’s often said that Augustine has a “psychological” model of the Trinity in which God is like a mind and its relationships to itself in memory, understanding, and will. But it would be more accurate, at least here, to say the mind is like God. The lesser is like the greater. The mind is the way it is because God is who He is and has created man in His image.

And this helps us tie together why the mind must be healed. Why it needs faith, hope, and love. God is the source and summit of faith, hope, and love. If the mind is to comprehend God and the soul, it must be conformed to God, and it can only do this through the theological virtues.

At this point, I’ve said quite a lot about a dialogue on the soul without saying hardly anything about the soul. This is intentional. Augustine insists we answer the question before the question. In my reading of this dialogue, the method is more important than the conclusions. This is underscored by the fact that the dialogue is unfinished. We don’t get the final answers on the soul and its immortality.

And I think this is intentional. Augustine had decades to finish this work. It’s not as though he died in the middle of writing it. He simply set it aside. Furthermore, there are other works which he started, set aside, and then came back to, but he didn’t with this one.

Why?

Part of that may be that Augustine was uncomfortable with some of his points in this dialogue. He tells us in Retractiones that he regrets some of his account of knowledge, which bears the imprint of Neoplatonism with imagery of “digging up” knowledge that is buried in us. So maybe he just thought it was too far gone.

But he doesn’t really go that far.

Of course, we can’t know for sure, but part of me wonders if even an elderly Augustine felt that he still hadn’t overcome the interrogation in Book 1. There, Reason essentially asked if his soul was pure enough to truly understand the soul, and he quickly found it was not. Perhaps Augustine’s path looked like becoming progressively more aware of his own sins and choosing to not speak beyond his station.

Admittedly, this is highly speculative and doesn’t entirely jive with his later theological approach, but, hey, this is Substack, and I think that’s a nice way to think of it. Is that not reason enough to maintain it?