Intellectual Self-knowledge in Augustine (De Trinitate 14)

Collection des Études Augustiniennes

Série Antiquité - 192

LE DE TRINITATE DE SAINT AUGUSTINExégèse, logique et noétique

Actes du colloque international de Bordeaux, 16-19 juin 2010, édités par Emmanuel BERMON et Gerard O’DALY

Préface de Rowan WILLIAMS

Institut d’Études Augustiniennes

PARIS

2012

Ouvrage publié avec le concours de l’Institut universitaire de France, de l’Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3 et de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)

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Intellectual Self-Knowledge in Augustine (De Trinitate 14.7–14)

In De Trinitate 14.7-14, Augustine tries to explain the thesis of De Trin. 10 that the human mens always remembers itself, always knows itself, and always loves itself—a thesis I will abbreviate to “slrk” (pronounced “slurk”).1 But it remains unclear what the thesis amounts to, as we can see from contemporary scholars’ disagreements about the significance of Augustine’s doctrine of intellectual self-knowledge.2 Is it part of a wider Augustinian claim about the transparency of “the mental”?3 Or a thesis about a primitive and essentially inarticulate form of self-awareness?4 Or just a relatively simple claim about the mind’s potentiality for

1. See AUGUSTINE, De Trin. 14.7.10: “If we refer to the inner memory of the intellect, by which it remembers itself, and the inner understanding, by which it intellects itself, and the inner will, by which it loves itself—the case in which these three are always together, and always have been since the moment they began, whether they were thought or not …” (Nam si nos referamus ad interiorem mentis memoriam qua sui meminit et interiorem intellegentiam qua se intellegit et interiorem uoluntatem qua se diligit, ubi haec tria simul sunt et simul semper fuerunt ex quo esse coeperunt siue cogitarentur siue non cogitarentur …) Cf. De Trin. 14.13 & e.g. 10.11, 14.9 & 14.11.

2. For brief introductions to the wider context of Augustine’s project in De Trinitate 10 & 14, see G. J. P. O’DALY, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, Berkeley, 1987, chapter 7, esp. pp. 207–11, and J. RIST, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 85–91 & 145–47. Two more general works on the De Trin. are cited in n. 11 below. A detailed review of the philo-sophical literature on De Trin. is given in R. KANY, Augustins Trinitätsdenken. Bilanz, Kritik und Weiterführung der modernen Forschung zu „De Trinitate“, Tübingen, 2007, esp. pp. 246–63 & 279–94.

3. This was the view championed by the late Gary Matthews; see G. MATTHEWS, Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes, Ithaca, 1992, pp. 39–41, and his Augustine, Oxford, 2005, chapters 5–6, esp. pp. 39–42 & 51–2. This approach derives to some extent from the comparison between Augustine and Descartes, pursued by Gary with characteristic clarity and penetra-tion through the last three decades. For a detailed analysis of these themes in De Trin. X, see E. BERMON, Le cogito dans la pensée de saint Augustin, Paris, 2001.

4. This is the standard view amongst modern Augustinian scholars, starting from at least M. SCHMAUS, Die psychologische Trinitätslehre des hl. Augustinus, Münster, 1921 (reprinted

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self-knowledge?5 Since I disagree with all these views,6 my aim in this paper is to reconsider Augustine’s thesis by asking a basic exegetical question about slrk: what exactly does Augustine mean when he says that the mens always remembers itself, always knows itself, and always loves itself? My focus will be on the way in which he explains and defends the first two claims concerning the intellect’s self-memory and self-knowledge in De Trin. 14.7–14 (rather than its self-love, which is treated in 14.15–26). My hope is that working through his arguments in defence of these two claims will elucidate some central implications of Augustine’s doctrine of intellectual self-knowledge for his model of the human mens. But I will start by addressing the meaning of slrk head on, before turning to the arguments in De Trin. 14.7–14 in sections 2 & 3.

I. – GENERAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE MEANING OF SLRK

We can get some idea about the meaning of slrk, I suggest, by looking at some general constraints on a plausible interpretation of the formulation itself. The first is that the subject of the thesis in De Trin. 14, the mens, is the human intellect, rather than the “mind” or rational soul (animus) as such. This constraint is one that is easily overlooked given the fluidity of psychological terms in Augustine’s work. But in Book 10, where slrk is first introduced, Augustine already explicitly restricts the reference of mens to what he calls “the rational intelligence,” i.e. the mind minus its non-rational representational faculties of memory and perception (De Trin. 10.7). The thesis is thus not supposed to apply to the subject of our ordinary rational experience as such, since ordinary thoughts are constituted in part by some form of representational content (as Augustine shows in De Trin. 8–9 and explains in detail in Books 11–13). This restriction is further qualified in De Trin. 12.1–3, where we learn that a “rational intelligence” should be regarded,

1967), esp. pp. 230–85. Classic forms of it have been proposed by J. BRACHTENDORF, “Der menschliche Geist als Bild des trinitarischen Gottes – Ähnlichkeiten und Unähnlichkeiten,” in Gott und sein Bild, J. Brachtendorf (ed.), Paderborn, 2000, pp. 155–70, and in his book, Die Struktur des menschlichen Geistes nach Augustinus, Hamburg, 2002, esp. pp. 218–29; and by C. HORN, “Selbstbezüglichkeit des Geistes bei Plotin und Augustinus,” in Gott und sein Bild, pp. 81–103. A more phenomenological version is found in L. HÖLSCHER, The Reality of the Mind: Augustine’s Philosophical Arguments for the Human Soul as a Spiritual Substance, London, 1986, chapters 3–4.

5. This is a view suggested by the distinction between habitual and actual knowledge applied to Augustine’s view of the [sic] soul by THOMAS AQUINAS, De ueritate Q.10 a.8; as a result, it is very familiar to historians of medieval philosophy.

6. A further view is the influential thesis of A. C. LLOYD, “Nosce teipsum and conscientia,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 46/2, 1964, pp. 188–200, that the unclarity about Augustine’s intentions derives from his conflation of two discrete philosophical projects, which correspond roughly to the first and third proposals above; cf. L. GERSON, “Epistrophe pros heau-ton: History and Meaning,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 8, 1997, pp. 1–32, esp. pp. 26–8.

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strictly speaking, as a simple intellect, i.e. an entity in virtue of which we can have access to intelligible objects—albeit one which gives rise to the derivative capacities of reason.7

If this is right, the first constraint has two implications. First, since slrk is not a thesis about “the mind,” it is not a claim about the “I” (ego) that is a mystery to itself in Confessions 10 or that we learn is the subject and persona that has a mens in De Trin. 15.11 & 15.42. This is vital to the coherence of Augustine’s theory of mind, I think, as well as the consistency of De Trinitate, because he is not only profoundly aware of the complexity of human psychology elsewhere—e.g. the mind’s latent desires and multiple levels of activity—but also committed in this work to theories of perception, memory and attention that rule out slrk as a thesis about the mind or animus as such. (He argues in De Trin. 11.15, for instance, that one can perceive and move without rational attention when rapt in thought; it fol-lows, he thinks, that one did not and can’t later have any further cognitive access at all to those psychological operations.) Hence I conclude that slrk does not imply any general theory of the “transparency of the mental.”

The second implication of Augustine’s construal of the mens as an intellect is that we know something about the metaphysical status of the entity that always loves, remembers, and knows itself. We know from Book 10, for instance, that it is an immaterial substance, since Augustine thinks that his argument that the intellect has complete self-knowledge (De Trin. 10.5–6) shows that it is both immaterial (because perfectly self-reflexive) and a substance of some sort.8 He spells this out with his remarks in De Trin. 10.10 & 10.13 that it accordingly constitutes a “nature” and a “life.” What he means by these Platonist terms is, first, that the intellect is not “in” or dependent on another (natural) subject but rather itself the subject of certain properties or acts, and, secondly, that it is a subject whose existence consists in an immaterial activity. These views—which draw on the post-Aristotelian categorical theory Augustine set out in Books 5–7 and applied to the intellect in 9.3–9—no doubt also explain the claims in 10.7 & 12.3 that the intellect has causal powers, i.e. that it can generate the “derived capacities” such as reason, perception, and memory that constitute the animus. But what I want to argue in this paper is that they show that we shouldn’t succumb to the temptation to reduce slrk to a thesis about mere potentiality—the intellect’s self-knowledge seems rather to constitute its permanent activity, i.e. what Augustine calls a kind

7. This later restriction of the sense of the term mens allows for some ambiguity over its use in De Trin. 10, where it leaves space for two sorts of content: intellectual content as such—intelligi-bles—and non-representational rational content—e.g. immediate rational awareness of ourselves. But the ambiguity should not be fatal in De Trin. 14, since Augustine tells us in De Trin. 13.26 & 14.1 (cf. De Trin. 14.10–1) that he treats the rational capacity (and its scientia) in De Trin. 13, and the intellectual capacity (and its sapientia) in De Trin. 14.

8. See L. HÖLSCHER, The Reality of the Mind, London, 1986, chapter 4, pp. 182–212, “The mind as a spiritual substance.” On the notion of “substance” in De Trin., see R. TESKE, “Augustine’s Use of ‘Substantia’ in Speaking about God,” The Modern Schoolman, 62, 1985, pp. 147–63.


of life. So much for the first constraint, on the subject of slrk: the mens that always remembers, knows, and loves itself, is an intellect, narrowly construed, and thus an immaterial substance constituted by its essential activity.

The second constraint concerns the trinitarian formulation of slrk—i.e. the remembering, knowing, and loving of itself the thesis ascribes permanently to the mens. This formulation derives from the general assumption Augustine makes about the basic structure of cognition, such that any cognitive act can be analyzed into three elements or aspects: its content, the entertaining of that content, and the will or desire involved in the cognitive agent entertaining that content then. In accordance with this model, Augustine feels entitled to draw slrk directly from his argument in De Trin. 10.5–6 that the mens always has complete self-knowledge (see 10.7, 10.11 & 10.19).9 (The success of this argument is not at issue here; but it is roughly that prior self-knowledge is presupposed by the possibility of self-inquiry and that partial self-knowledge is incoherent in the case of the mens.) Thus Augustine takes our question about the meaning slrk to be a more precise form of an investigation of the intellect’s self-knowledge, because its knowing itself eo ipso involves its having itself to hand (remembering itself) and the requisite will to know itself (loving itself).

Now we might have some questions about the plausibility of Augustine’s gen-eral model and his specific applications of it to the mens and its knowledge in De Trin. 10. But I want to stress here just two points about Augustine’s claims there that tell immediately on our interpretation of slrk. First, a central idea in Book 10 is that, although the sort of activated or conscious self-knowledge enjoined on us by the Delphic oracle presupposes that the intellect already and always knows itself in some other sense, we still can and should exercise this knowledge consciously: that is, our own intellect should “think” itself, and do so intellectually, i.e. by isolating itself from any material or representational accretions we are prone to conflate with it (De Trin. 10.7–13). But that means that slrk cannot be primitive in the sense of essentially inarticulate: it is rather an intellectual activity that can be realized in a conscious thought or episode of intellection.

Secondly, and more controversially, I think that Augustine assumes that there is some causal connection between the permanent activities of slrk and the general faculties of memory, will, and understanding involved in any case of conscious intellection. The idea seems to be that the complete reflexivity of the intellect’s permanent self-knowledge shows that the activities involved in this knowledge are (exhaustively) identical with the intellect: if they weren’t, the intellect’s knowledge of itself would be partial. So if the intellect has further capacities—for instance the capacity to come to know mathematics, or to have conscious intellection of itself—it seems that these must somehow depend on and be derived from slrk, its

9. This is the model that Augustine deploys throughout Books 8–10, and goes on to apply to perception and memory in Book 11, and to rational and intellectual knowledge in Books 13 & 14, respectively.


self-knowledge. So much for the second constraint, on the meaning of the trinitar-ian formulation of the intellect’s self-knowledge in slrk.

The third constraint concerns the final element in the thesis slrk, i.e. the per-manence of the intellect’s complete self-knowledge. There seem to be two ways in which the intellect might plausibly be said always to know itself: either (a) by knowing at every given time during its existence its current acts, states or disposi-tions at that time, whatever they happen to be, or (b) by knowing, at all times during its existence itself, that is, I suppose, its essence or substance or nature (Augustine uses these three terms interchangeably in De Trin.). But I think that De Trin. 14 gives us a clear answer on this question, since we are told in De Trin. 14.6 that man is an immortal image of god in virtue of his immortal—i.e. permanent and unchanging—rational and intellectual capacities. For he justifies this claim in De Trin. 14.11–3 by showing that the intellect or slrk alone meets the set of require-ments for permanence in the image. These are that it, unlike the other sorts of human thought or cognition considered in Books 11–13, is neither caused externally, nor temporally adventitious, nor known before it is remembered.10 The crucial feature here for our purpose is the ban on temporal adventitiousness, which Augustine uses in both passages to rule out even such stable and non-representational mental dispositions as one’s enduring personal Christian faith on the grounds that they were formed after the intellect’s creation and will be altered in the after-life. Thus if Augustine regards any intelligible objects other than its own structure as falling in the scope of the intellect’s self-knowledge, they can only be ones that it knows connately, or as part of its own nature. I don’t think Augustine accepted innate knowledge at the time he wrote De Trin. But even if this were Augustine’s view, it would still mean that the second option (b) is correct: what the intellect always knows, loves, and remembers of itself is something strictly unchanging, not any changeable acts, states or dispositions its permanent activity may give rise to.

Taken together, then, the three general constraints on an interpretation of the thesis that the human mens always remembers itself, always knows itself, and always loves itself, suggest something like this. First, that the thesis means that the human intellect is an immaterial substance that knows (loves and remembers), at all times during its existence, its essence. Secondly, that the essence it always knows (loves and remembers) just is its permanent, and apparently contentless, activity of knowing (loving and remembering) itself. And, thirdly, that this perma-nent self-directed trinitarian activity can in some way also be realized in a temporal act of conscious self-intellection.

I’m not sure how plausible that will strike you as a preliminary interpretation of Augustine’s formulation of slrk. But one way to increase its plausibility, I think, is to look at its function in the economy of the work as a whole. Augustine’s philosophical aim in Books 8–15 is to find an image of God in man that fits the

10. See De Trin. 14.10.13, cited in n. 17 below.


facts about God to the extent that they are ascertainable in other ways.11 What we are sure of about the archetype is that it is a trinitarian substance, which is eternal and unchanging, and whose internal structure is appropriately conceived by anal-ogy with a self-directed act of thought (a uerbum). The human image that he has identified and elaborated in De Trin. 10.1–14.14 comes in two variants. The first is the irreducible nature of our intellect, constituted by slrk, a trinitarian substance, which is immortal (though created) and unchanging. The second is in the intellect’s episodic and conscious act of self-intellection, which is a self-directed thought with a trinitarian structure. If I have identified them correctly, these images have the merit of identifying essential features of the intellect (as we would expect given Genesis 1.26). But they are inadequate with respect to the analogy because the human case yields either something permanent that is not ‘thought’ (slrk) or a self-directed thought that is not permanent. So in De Trin. 14.15–26 he turns to another image, which depends on the perfection of the human intellect: the saints’ perfect contemplation of god, which provides for a permanent thought of a permanent object (which is also the intellect’s ground and cause).

At any rate, the way to test this interpretation of slrk is to look at Augustine’s elaborate analysis in De Trin. 14.7–14 of the thesis of the intellect’s self-knowledge, which he established in Book 10. When we turn to the arguments in De Trin. 14.7–14 it is clear that their purpose is to confront two problems about the relation between slrk and its realization in a conscious thought in the human image of god:

(1) What is the sense in which there can be permanent (self-)knowledge without its realization in a conscious thought? Is it properly self-knowledge when it is just “in the memory”?

(2) If it is, how should we understand the precise relation between these two sorts of (self)-knowledge, i.e. between permanent self-knowledge and its episodic conscious realization? With luck, his answers to these questions will help us to determine the role of the activity of self-knowledge in Augustine’s model of the human intellect.

II. – SLRK AND MEMORY

In this section, I look at the arguments on the first question (1) above, and the main one, as Augustine conceives it: in what sense can slrk involve permanent self-knowledge—as opposed to self-memory—if it is only permanent “in memory”?12

11. See e.g. J. SULLIVAN, The Image Of God. The Doctrine of St. Augustine and Its Influence, Dubuque, Iowa, 1963, or L. AYRES, Augustine and the Trinity, Cambridge, 2010, for, respectively, lucid philosophical and theological analyses of Augustine’s general aims (in English).

12. The passage has received little explicit commentary in recent years, except for two detailed analyses by J. BRACHTENDORF, Die Struktur des menschlichen Geistes, Hamburg, 2002, chap-ter VIII, esp. pp. 218–29, and by L. HÖLSCHER, The Reality of the Mind, London, 1986, chapter 3, esp. pp. 133–42.


It is hard to see how Augustine wants to respond to this, because the argumentative structure in De Trin. 14.7–14 is complex and dialectical. The argument is developed in three stages: (1) The first distinguishes the intellect’s permanent self-knowledge from its episodic self-thinking (14.8). (2) The second explains its self-knowledge by a complex analogy with our disciplinary knowledge (14.8–10), designed to show how self-knowledge could amount to more than just self-memory despite its not being exercised in conscious thought. (3) And the third argues that the assign-ment of the intellect’s self-knowledge to memory is sui generis because it isn’t first learned or known and then remembered: the intellect’s self-presence should be understood as a unique form of memory (14.11–13).

Before turning to these arguments, however, we should note that Augustine’s final answer (as outlined above) is a bit disconcerting: it looks at first as if his basic response is to construe self-knowledge as a form of dispositional memory (stage 2); but his actual conclusion seems to be that the intellect’s self-knowledge is manifested in its permanent self-presence, which in turn constitutes its self-memory (stage 3). It is not clear whether this is a way of vindicating the permanent activity of self-knowledge or rather a way of neutralizing it as merely a form of memory. Examining the arguments that yield it should clarify this, of course, but it may help to start off by seeing why a simple way in which one might sum up the gist of Augustine’s answer to the first question is too easy.

The simple interpretation is just to reduce Augustine’s solution to a distinction between potential—i.e. permanent—and actual—i.e. episodic and consciously thought—self-knowledge. There is something right about this suggestion, although it’s hard to see how it does justice to the complicated argumentative structure of the passage. The main problem for it, I think, is that Augustine holds that slrk is in some way actively implicit in our ordinary conscious experience, even if our intellect never “thinks itself.” This is why he stresses its continual presence to itself, and why De Trin. 14.18–20, for instance, insists that the intellect’s self-love has ineliminable effects on our experiential life even if it is never “thought”; and why De Trin. 14.8 indicates that the intellect’s self-knowledge has actual effects in our ordinary conscious thoughts (see section 3). So what he finds attractive about the analogy with our knowledge of arts or disciplines, I suggest, is not the simple distinction above, but rather the idea that they are what we can call active second potentialities, i.e. causally active dispositions that continuously frame our experience. If this is right, the central difficulties he needs to address through the multiple qualifications of De Trin. 14.8–14 are two fundamental dis-analogies between disciplines and slrk:

1) The dispositional causal efficacy of the disciplines is due to the process of learning them, while slrk is not learned but still retains a similarly active presence in our experience.

2) Our access to the disciplines is mediated by representations in our memory, while the intellect is present to itself immediately.

The dialectical investigation of slrk begins in De Trin. 14.7 with the obvious objection posed by the case of infants: it is hard to believe, Augustine thinks, that infants have conscious self-knowledge or can “think their inner things” (cogitent


sua interiora).13 This shows, as he had already noted in De Trin. 10.7, that we need to distinguish the intellect’s permanent self-knowledge from its conscious self-thought, since the latter is episodic—and, worse, as Augustine argued in De Trin. 10, often confused.14

After clarifying the mechanism of self-thought—which I will reserve for sec-tion 3—De Trin. 14.8 gives Augustine’s initial response to the first objection: slrk is active even when it is not consciously thought, in the way that our disciplinary knowledge is active in memory:

But when it is not thinking itself, it’s true that it is not in its own view and that its gaze isn’t informed from itself, but it nevertheless knows itself as if it were its own memory of itself. It’s like the case of someone skilled in many disciplines: what he knows is contained in his memory, and part of it is in the view of his intellect only when he’s thinking about it, while the rest is stored in some secret grasp—i.e. what we call his “memory.” (That’s why we adverted [in Book 11] to the trinity in which the object from which the gaze of the thinker is informed was located in memory, while the informing itself was like an image impressed from it, and what joins the two together was love or will.) So when the intellect comes into its own view in thought, it intellects and recognizes itself, and for that reason this intellection or knowledge comes to be. After all, an immaterial thing comes into view when it is intellected and is known by intellection.15

The initial suggestion here is that slrk is always present in the same way as one’s acquired knowledge of e.g. grammatical theory is “in memory” when one isn’t exercising it. But in the first two paragraphs of De Trin. 14.9 Augustine notes

13. De Trin. 14.5.7: “So what should we say about the intellect of infants who are still tiny and immersed in such ignorance of things that the darkness of their intellects horrifies the intellect of a person that does know something? Should we believe that even such an intellect knows itself, but that, because it’s so intent on the things it has begun to perceive through the bodily sense (and with a delight increased by their novelty to it), it can know itself but can’t think itself?” (Quid itaque dicendum est de infantis mente ita adhuc paruuli et in tam magna demersi rerum ignorantia ut illius mentis tenebras mens hominis quae aliquid nouit exhorreat? An etiam ipsa se nosse credenda est, sed intenta nimis in eas res quas per corporis sensus tanto maiore quanto nouiore coepit delectatione sentire, non ignorare se potest sed cogitare se non potest?)

14. Both defects of conscious self-thought are explained by the same mechanism: the lower, representational, capacities of the animus exert a curious fascination on the agent, which hinders the self-conscious use of the intellect in the young and leads adults to credit materialist philoso-phies of mind; see De Trin. 14.7—cf. 10.7–17.

15. De Trin. 14.6.8: “Cum uero non se cogitat, non sit quidem in conspectu suo nec de illa suus formetur obtutus, sed tamen nouerit se tamquam ipsa sibi sit memoria sui. Sicut multarum disciplinarum peritus ea quae nouit eius memoria continentur, nec est inde aliquid in conspectu mentis eius nisi unde cogitat; cetera in arcana quadam notitia sunt recondita quae memoria nun-cupatur. Ideo trinitatem sic commendabamus ut illud unde formatur cogitantis obtutus in memoria poneremus, ipsam uero conformationem tamquam imaginem quae inde imprimitur, at illud quo utrumque coniungitur amorem seu uoluntatem. Mens igitur quando cogitatione se conspicit, intel-legit se et recognoscit; gignit ergo hunc intellectum et cognitionem suam. Res quippe incorporea intellecta conspicitur et intellegendo cognoscitur.”


that the analogy might wrongly imply—since slrk is not in fact acquired by first becoming known and then remembered—that the intellect only “remembers itself” permanently, i.e. that it doesn’t know or love itself before it is exercised in thought. So he uses the objection that merely remembering something can’t amount to knowing or loving it to distinguish the case of an ordinary memory-trace—the capacity to recall a simple fact, for instance, about American history—from the relevant features of acquired disciplines in virtue of which it makes sense to say that their possessor still actively knows and loves them when she isn’t exercising them. The feature Augustine singles out is their ready availability for immediate exercise. But I take it that we’re supposed to see that acquired disciplines have further permanent causal effects on our experience: they make things within their ambit salient to us and hence liable to elicit our active exercise of the relevant discipline, for instance, and un-consciously structure our memories of particular events that fall within their competence. If this is right, the revised suggestion is something of the sort I alluded to above: slrk can be considered to pertain to memory in the way that an acquired discipline does, i.e. as an “active second potentiality” that permanently modifies our experience, irrespective of its exercise in conscious thought.

Augustine is dissatisfied with this suggestion, however, as we can see from his introduction of a second example in the third paragraph of De Trin. 14.9 (the reading case):

But when we haven’t thought of something for a long time and aren’t able to think of it without being reminded, in some odd way we don’t know that we know it (if one can put it like that). Then the person reminding the other person can rightly say: “You know this but you don’t know that you know it. I’ll remind you and you’ll find yourself knowing what you thought you didn’t know.” Books do the same, when they’re about things the reader finds are true through his reason—i.e. not when the reader merely believes the writer’s statement that such and such is true (as when one reads a history), but when they’re about things the reader himself finds are true as well, whether he finds them in himself or in the truth itself through his intellect.16

The example makes it clear, I think, that the direct source of his dissatisfaction with the revised suggestion is that slrk is not immediately available for conscious exercise by most people—in fact, very few of us ever seem to attain it. Augustine meets this objection by correctly pointing out that we are often unaware of knowing

16. De Trin. 14.7.9: “Hinc admonemur esse nobis in abdito mentis quarundam rerum quasdam notitias, et tunc quodam modo procedere in medium atque in conspectu mentis uelut apertius constitui quando cogitantur; tunc enim se ipsa mens et meminisse et intellegere et amare inuenit etiam unde non cogitabat quando aliunde cogitabat. Sed unde diu non cogitauerimus et unde cogitare nisi commoniti non ualemus, id nos nescio quo eodemque miro modo si potest dici scire nescimus. Denique recte ab eo qui commemorat ei quem commemorat dicitur: ‘Scis hoc sed scire te nescis; commemorabo et inuenies te scientem quod te nescire putaueras.’ Id agunt et litterae quae de his rebus conscriptae sunt, quas res duce ratione ueras esse inuenit lector, non quas ueras esse credit ei qui scripsit sicut legitur historia, sed quas ueras esse etiam ipse inuenit siue apud se siue in ipsa mentis duce ueritate.”


things that our behaviour, for instance, shows that we must know. (An example involving a skill or discipline might be the knowledge of Latin metrics many of us acquired at primary school: this directly modifies our actual experience of reading any sentence of Latin, but may well be something we believe ourselves to be entirely ignorant of or at best to have completely forgotten.)

But the more serious problem the reading case is supposed to defuse is the first of the two central dis-analogies between acquired disciplines and slrk: the current availability of an acquired discipline in any degree—and so its presence in us and continuous causal effect on us irrespective of our awareness of it—is derived from the prior process of learning to exercise it (consciously). The virtue of the reading example is thus that it offers an explanation of our ability to acquire an active second potentiality without a process of conscious learning, because we find it somehow already present in our memory, as slrk is. We can elucidate Augustine’s example by recalling his explanation in Confessions 10.17–8 of the way in which we learn the theorems of liberal arts such as rhetoric: the abstract objects of such disciplines don’t enter our memory through perception or experience, but rather seem to pre-exist at some deeper level of memory. To learn the theorem “There are three kinds of rhetorical question”—or to have that abstract object itself available and in your memory—is a matter of “collecting” or structuring what is already there. So the reading case thus allows Augustine to conclude provisionally in De Trin. 14.10 that the analogy with the disciplines suggests how slrk could involve self-knowledge and yet still “pertain to memory,” i.e. fail to ever be consciously exercised: like the discipline of rhetoric (so understood), it could be an active second potentiality “in” our memory (even if one that isn’t acquired through a process of learning something external or previously unknown).

It’s clear from De Trin. 14.11–3, however, that Augustine doesn’t think this disciplinary model is going to work, since he insists there that self-knowledge is radically different from all the other sorts of cognition he has considered in the work: whatever we can say about acquired disciplines, only slrk actually meets the requirements of being neither caused externally, nor temporally adventitious, nor known before it is remembered.17 We can see part of the problem, I think, by looking a bit more closely at his explanation for our ability to learn rhetoric

17. De Trin. 14.10.13: “But it’s not like that with the intellect. For it’s not adventitious to itself, as if its own self came to it (i.e. in something that already existed) from elsewhere. Nor as if it didn’t come from elsewhere, but rather its own self was born in it (i.e. in something that already existed), in the way that a faith that didn’t exist arises in it (while it’s something that already exists). Nor does it see itself by recalling itself after already coming to know itself, as if it sees itself once it has been set in its memory—as if it hadn’t already been there before it came to know itself. Far from it, since from the moment it began to exist it has never stopped remembering, intel-lecting and loving itself, as I have already shown.” (Porro autem in mente non sic est: neque enim aduentitia sibi ipsa est, quasi ad se ipsam quae iam erat, uenerit aliunde eadem ipsa quae non erat; aut non aliunde uenerit, sed in se ipsa quae iam erat, nata sit ea ipsa quae non erat; sicut in mente quae iam erat, oritur fides quae non erat: aut post cognitionem sui recordando se ipsam


in Conf. 10.18. The suggestion that we “learn” abstract objects by “collecting” what is already there in memory is not an appeal to Platonic innatism. The claim is rather that we come to know a theorem like “There are three kinds of rhetorical questions” by a process of structuring our empirical experience of actual speeches. So what we already know isn’t the abstract theorem, but rather that the set of individual speeches or fragments of them that we have heard and remember. We assent to our teacher’s claim that there three kinds of question on the basis of a set of representational items constituting our memory of particular speeches. It’s not unreasonable for Augustine to point out that our assent in this or the reading case is a matter of “recognizing” something already “in ourselves.” But the abstract item that we recognize is something radically different in kind to what we already knew: it is not a case of renewed or re-cognition. So the analogy between slrk and the disciplines fails: since they must be known or learned before they are remembered, they are temporally adventitious (as well as caused externally in the way just described).

The second problem for the analogy is that by the time he wrote De Trin. 14 Augustine had rejected the thesis of Conf. 10 that the current availability of acquired disciplines to the artist should be explained by the immediate presence of the res ipsa in memory (however it came about). For Augustine argues in De Trin. 12.23 (cf. De Trin. 14.21), as a prelude to his well-known attack on Platonic innatism in De Trin. 12.24, that such abstract or intelligible objects never actually reside “in the memory.” What we retain in memory while we are not exercising our knowledge is rather a set of representational “traces” (uestigia elsewhere in Augustine, logoi in Plotinus) in virtue of which the intellect can easily return to the object it grasped immediately in intellection.18 If so, the analogy between slrk and the disciplines fails in a more basic way: a second potentiality is the wrong sort of analogue for the intellect’s self-knowledge because its permanent retention in the mind is ultimately explained by its artist’s possession of representational items stored in the lower faculties of the animus. Augustine can’t accept that model

uelut in memoria sua constitutam uidet, quasi non ibi fuerit antequam se ipsam cognosceret; cum profecto ex quo esse coepit, numquam sui meminisse, numquam se intelligere, numquam se amare destiterit, sicut iam ostendimus.)

18. We can spell this out crudely as the idea that the memory traces of prior rational thoughts (such as “Now I see that there are three kinds of rhetorical question”) allow us to think or talk about this theorem, but this isn’t the same as the privileged intellectual state of actually “contem-plating” or directly understanding it. The sort of cases Augustine alludes to in De Trin. 12.23, however, are more complex: there, perceiving some sensible particular triggers our memory, and the structure of our memory that results from our having acquired the relevant discipline leads us to “contemplate” or directly understand the intelligible object that explains it. Hearing a song, for example, allows a musician to contemplate an abstract ratio, which she can later remember either by retaining the particular sound or by a rational representation, like the sort of rule formulated in a musicological text.


for slrk, since the single datum he insists on throughout Books 10 & 14 is the permanent and immediate (or non-representational) presence of the intellect to itself; see e.g. De Trin. 10.10, 10.16 or 14.8 (section 3, below).

Hence, Augustine’s emphatic re-endorsement of the intellect’s permanent self-knowledge, as well as self-love and self-memory, at the end of De Trin. 14.13 seems to me to indicate that he eventually rejects the analogy with the disciplines: its self-knowledge is not something we can characterize as merely “in” memory. Unfortunately, the alternative solution he offers is not very clear, since the con-nection between the new notion of “memory of the present” that concludes the dialectic in De Trin. 14.14 and slrk is not made explicit. I take it, though, that the conclusion he wants us to draw depends on the relation between the intellect’s presence to itself and his hint at the start of the dialectic, in De Trin. 14.8, that it always knows itself “as if it were its own memory of itself” (tamquam ipsa sibi sit memoria sui).

At any rate, De Trin. 14.14 starts with an objection to the thesis that the intel-lect’s permanent presence to itself is appropriately called “memory” because the former explains its remembering itself. The objection is that there is no memory of present things, because memory is aptly defined by Cicero as that by which one can recollect something, and so always involves a connection to the past (whether or not the object recalled still exists). Augustine dispatches the charge of linguistic impropriety by an appeal to a Virgilian usage: to say that Ulysses “didn’t forget himself” is to imply that he did remember himself; but what he remembers is presumably not his past experiences, but what he is now, i.e. his cunning and courage. “Hence,” Augustine concludes:

… just as in the case of things that are past we call “memory” that by which they can be recalled or recollected, so in the case of something that is present—which is what the intellect is to itself—we can without absurdity call “memory” that by which it is available to itself so that it can be intellected by its own thought and the two conjoined by its love of itself.19

A connection to the past is unnecessary for memory in this extended sense: all one needs is something present to oneself in virtue of which one can recall or “think” something. But the intellect’s availability to itself for thinking just is its presence to itself; so its presence to itself constitutes its memory of itself.

But how does this help with the original question, about the status of the intel-lect’s permanent self-knowledge? How does the result that the intellect is its self-memory, rather than something stored “in memory,” help to explain the thesis that the intellect always knows itself, irrespective of its conscious thoughts? I think

19. De Trin. 14.11.14: “Cum sibi ergo praesens esset, nullo modo sui meminisset nisi et ad res praesentes memoria pertineret. Quapropter sicut in rebus praeteritis ea memoria dicitur qua fit ut ualeant recoli et recordari, sic in re praesenti quod sibi est mens memoria sine absurditate dicenda est qua sibi praesto est ut sua cogitatione possit intellegi et utrumque sui amore coniungi.”


that there are two ways in which we construe the conclusion that the intellect always remembers itself through its self-presence. The first is reductive: all Augustine means here is that the intellect has the capacity to reflect on itself at any time just because all it needs to do that is to be itself—it doesn’t need a representation or process of learning. The second is metaphysical, and appeals to the Augustinian claims about slrk sketched in section 1. On this view, the presence of the intellect to itself is a consequence of its essential activity of self-knowledge: the presence to itself of an immaterial entity is explained by the self-reflexive cognitive activity that constitutes the entity. The advantage of the second construal, I think, is that it gives an appropriately non-material explanation for the intellect’s being itself, and one which is reflected in the way in which it is always causally active on our experience, whether we are thinking about it or not.

I’m not sure if this gives us a good answer to the original question. But I think that what Augustine wants us to conclude is that we can’t reduce self-knowledge to self-memory or vice versa, because these are two facets of the single trinitarian activity that is the intellect. So whatever we want to say about self-thought, we shouldn’t make the intellect inert. Perhaps that is disappointing, although I hope that consideration of Augustine’s treatment of the analogy with our memory of acquired disciplines is not otiose, because it shows us how something might be available to conscious thought, and causally active on our ordinary experience, without being actually thought.

III. – SLRK AND CONSCIOUSNESS

That’s as far as I can take the dialectical investigation of the intellect’s permanent self-knowledge in De Trin. 14.7–14. So now I want to turn to our second problem from section 1 fin. above, about the relation between permanent self-knowledge (slrk) and its episodic exercise in conscious intellectual thought. Our aim here is to identify the precise content of the intellect’s self-thinking in Augustine’s treatment of this subject in De Trin. 14.8. Given that he construes the intellect’s conscious self-thinking as the activation of its permanent self-knowledge, if we can figure out the sort of content Augustine ascribes to intellectual self-thought, this should help us confirm or disconfirm our thesis about the nature of its perma-nent self-knowledge.

I will start with a review of this rather dense passage. As you will recall, the prob-lem comes up here in response to the case of infants, who are incapable of thinking about their minds, and the parallel situation of adults (cf. De Trin. 10.7–17), who do think about their minds, but very rarely achieve conscious self-intellection. So after reminding us of his general error theory—the fascination with representation that hinders or obscures the intellect’s conscious self-thought—Augustine explains why it’s so difficult:

But such is the power of thought that, in a way, not even the intellect itself puts itself in its view somehow except when it thinks itself; and for this reason it’s so much the case that nothing is in the view of the intellect except what it’s thinking about that not even the intellect itself—i.e. that by which whatever is thought is thought—can be within


its view in any other way than by thinking itself. Though how it can fail to be in its own view when it’s not thinking itself, given that it can never be without itself (as if it were one thing, and its view another), is something I can’t discover.20

To see what he is doing here, we need to begin with his general model of thought (cogitatio) in the work. The model follows his basic analysis of cognition in iden-tifying three aspects to an occurrent episode of thinking: its content, one’s thinking or entertaining that content, and the will that enables this to take place—although the third element is not addressed in De Trin. 14.8. Augustine identifies the first element, the content of thought, as an object present to the intellect in virtue of the faculties of perception, imagination/memory, reason or intellection itself.21 He construes the second element, the thinking itself, as a matter of the intellect having a content “in its view” (its conspectus here in De Trin. 14.8).

This model looks rather too simple for a general analysis of thought. But it’s important to note two restrictions on it. First, despite the range objects it covers, it applies only to rational and intellectual thought-contents: it is not a model of perception or memory as such, since those capacities can be exercised independ-ently of rational thought (see e.g. De Trin. 11.15).22 And, secondly, its construal of thinking as having something in view limits even rational and intellectual thought to the conscious exercise of the capacity of intellegentia. As a result, it is best understood, I think, as a model of high-level consciousness, since we (and perhaps Augustine elsewhere) may well think that episodic rational or even intellectual thought can take place below that threshold of awareness.23

In De Trin. 14.8, Augustine applies this model to the case of self-thinking, where the object of consciousness is in some sense identical to its subject. So how does the intellect think itself? Augustine starts, in the passage cited above

20. De Trin. 14.6.8: “Tanta est tamen cogitationis uis ut nec ipsa mens quodam modo se in conspectu suo ponat nisi quando se cogitat, ac per hoc ita nihil in conspectu mentis est nisi unde cogitatur ut nec ipsa mens qua cogitatur quidquid cogitatur aliter possit esse in conspectu suo nisi se ipsam cogitando. Quomodo autem quando se non cogitat in conspectu suo non sit cum sine se ipsa numquam esse possit quasi aliud sit ipsa, aliud conspectus eius, inuenire non possum.”

21. A typical list of the range of contents for our cogitationes is given in De Trin. 15.16.

22. They are also “monitored” by inner sense, although Augustine rarely appeals to this capac-ity in De Trin.; see G. J. P. O’DALY, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, Berkeley, 1987, pp. 102–5 and C. BRITTAIN, “Non-Rational Perception in the Stoics and Augustine,” OSAP, 22, 2002, pp. 253–308, esp. 288–301.

23. That Augustine is discussing high-level consciousness seems to be confirmed by his remarkable description of the nature of conspectus in De Trin. 15.15.25: it is the “possibility for thinking,” a “formable but not yet formed thing” belonging to our intellect, “which we cast here and there in this flexible motion, when now this, now that, is thought, as each gets discovered or strikes us.” (ipsam possibilitatem cogitationis … Sed quid est quod potest esse uerbum et ideo iam dignum est uerbi nomine? Quid est, inquam, hoc formabile nondumque formatum nisi quiddam mentis nostrae quod hac atque hac uolubili quadam motione iactamus cum a nobis nunc hoc nunc illud sicut inuentum fuerit uel occurrerit cogitatur?)


(De Trin. 14.6.8), by distinguishing between the intellect’s self-thinking and some other states involving partial self-awareness that might be confused with it. One kind of irrelevant state he might intend to single out here is what we might call “background consciousness”: our implicit awareness of having this particular object in view. In a perceptual case, for instance, this may involve our awareness of there being e.g. a visual field in which we locate it. But something similar seems to be true for all conscious thoughts, since Augustine stresses in De Trin. 14.8, and more clearly in De Trin. 15.16, that there is a certain sense in which it is impossible not to “see” or have in view one’s own thought.24 I take it that this refers to what we can call “rational awareness”: the sort of awareness that we are now having this particular thought, P, which can yield a subsequent second-order thought such as “It seems to me that P” or “I know that it seems to me that P” (cf. Cont. Acad. 3.26). This is, I think, the kind of awareness in virtue of which we can have apprehension or (con)scientia of our own propositional acts or attitudes such as our faith (see De Trin. 13.5 & 14.5). None of these states are relevant here, however, because Augustine has identified the content of a conscious thought as the first-order object the intellect has directly in view, i.e. in this case, itself.

So how does the intellect think itself directly? The sequel in De Trin. 14.8 explains, using the Platonist arguments already set out in detail in De Trin. 9.3–7 & 10.6, that it does so neither by one part having another part in view, as if it could view itself externally, nor by doubling itself, as if it were two things. For, he concludes:

If you consult the truth, it replies that none of these <explains self-thought>, since when we think like this we are only thinking of imaginative representations of bodies—and it’s quite certain to the few intellects able to consult the truth about this question that the intellect isn’t something like that. So the remaining option is that the intellect’s view is something pertaining to its nature, and that when the intellect thinks itself its view is recalled to its nature, not spatially but by an immaterial conversion.25

So the short answer is that the intellect’s episodic capacity for self-thinking is due to two things: first, its conspectus, rational or intellectual consciousness, belongs to its nature; and, second, it’s immaterial nature permits it to turn back to itself.

24. See De Trin. 15.9.16: “And this is a deeper enigma, that we don’t see what we can’t not see. For who doesn’t see his own thought? And who does see his own thought (I mean with the inner view itself, not by one’s carnal eyes)? Who doesn’t see it—and yet who does? Yet a thought is a kind of seeing of the mind <whatever its objects are>.” (Et hoc est grandius aenigma ut non uideamus quod non uidere non possumus. Quis enim non uidet cogitationem suam? Et quis uidet cogitationem suam [non oculis carnalibus dico sed ipso interiore conspectu]? Quis non eam uidet, et quis eam uidet? Quandoquidem cogitatio uisio est animi quaedam …)

25. De Trin. 14.6.8: “Nihil horum nobis ueritas consulta respondet quondam quando isto modo cogitamus non nisi corporum fictas imagines cogitamus, quod mentem non esse paucis certis-simum est mentibus a quibus potest de hac re ueritas consuli. Proinde restat ut aliquid pertinens ad eius naturam sit conspectus eius, et in eam quando se cogitat non quasi per loci spatium sed incorporea conuersione reuocetur.”


So much for Augustine’s rather brief and enigmatic account of the mechanism of the intellect’s self-thinking. What exactly is the content of self-thinking so construed? As Augustine has explained it, the intellect thinks itself when its view is directly in its view, or it is conscious of its consciousness directly. What does that mean? Our answer depends, I think, on how we read two ambiguous features of the account. The first is the Platonist phrase “immaterial conversion,” which can refer either to self-reflexivity as such (the intellect knowing or thinking that something is the case about itself) or to intellectual self-reversion (the intellect knowing or thinking itself).26 The second is the phrase “think itself,” which we know from its context within the wider dialectic of De Trin. 14.7–14 must mean a conscious exercise in thought of the intellect’s permanent self-knowledge, but which might refer either to the exercise of a theorem (or part) of that knowledge or of the disposition or activity that constitutes it.

The standard, “narrow” answer is, I think, to combine the first option in either case.27 On this view, the intellect thinks itself in the relevant sense when it has a self-reflexive thought whose content is a theorem of its self-knowledge – when it thinks a thought such as “I’m alive,” “I know that I’m alive” or “I want to be happy” (see De Trin. 15.21 & 15.25).28 Such thoughts are self-reflexive in the same way as my thought that I have the impression that P or the intellect’s thought that it knows geometry or a geometrical theorem. But they differ in that they are both wholly intellectual—unlike the impression case, which involves representation—and assert a proposition that pertains to the permanent nature of the intellect.

26. On the connections between these two notions, see L. GERSON, “Epistrophe pros heau-ton: History and Meaning,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 8, 1997, pp. 1–32.

27. This is explicit in the detailed analyses of the passage by J. BRACHTENDORF, Die Struktur des menschlichen Geistes, and L. HÖLSCHER, The Reality of the Mind, cited in n. 12 above. The views endorsed by the scholars listed in nn. 3–4 above also seem to presuppose an interpretation of this sort.

28. See De Trin. 15.15.25: “The same is true even of things that are known in such a way that they can never be lost, given that they are present and pertain to the nature of the mind itself, such as our knowing that we are alive (for this knowledge stays <in the mind> for as long as the mind exists, and since that’s for ever, it stays for ever too). Even in this case and in any other such examples we can find—i.e. the sort of case that we should look for the image of God in—although they are always known, still, since they are not always thought, it is hard to see how they could constitute an eternal ‘word’, given that our ‘words’ are constituted by our thoughts.” (Illa etiam quae ita sciuntur, ut numquam excidere possint, quoniam praesentia sunt, et ad ipsius animi naturam pertinent, ut est illud quod nos uiuere scimus [manet enim hoc quamdiu animus manet, et quia semper manet animus, et hoc semper manet]: id ergo et si qua reperiuntur similia, in quibus imago Dei potius intuenda est, etiamsi semper sciuntur, tamen quia non semper etiam cogitantur, quomodo de his dicatur uerbum sempiternum, cum uerbum nostrum nostra cogitatione dicatur, inuenire difficile est.)


The answer I want to advance, however, combines the two second options.29 On this “substantive” view, Augustine’s idea here is that self-thinking involves both having a direct grasp on an intelligible object which is itself, i.e. something like the essence of the intellect, and seeing (self-reflexively) that it is identical with the content of its thought. (This conjunction yields “self-reversion,” or what I have earlier called “fully reflexive self-knowledge.”) And this means that the account in De Trin. 14.8 makes the very substantive claim about the content of self-thinking that it is the conspectus. So, what the individual intellect grasps in self-thought, on this view, is itself, i.e. its own enduring structure, which turns out to be its being this individual consciousness (an “empty” consciousness, as it were, whose content can vary through time).

The difference between the two views can be captured, I think, by noting that “narrow” self-thinking is a species of rational thought, which expresses a proposi-tion about the intellect’s nature, while the “substantive” version is a special case of intellection of its nature. This doesn’t mean that the content of the latter couldn’t be represented by the formula “I’m alive.” But if it were, given Augustine’s substan-tive claim, this thought would have to be identical with the conspectus, because being an individual consciousness is what it is for an intellect to be alive. And, given the trinitarian structure of the intellect, the content of its thinking “I’m alive” in this way of wouldn’t be distinct (ad se) from the content expressed by “I know I’m alive” or “I want to be happy,” because being an individual consciousness is a cognitive and desiderative activity or life.

Since the choice between these two views rests on systematic differences over the correct interpretation of Augustine’s epistemology and psychology, I won’t pretend to offer a systematic defence of my preference for the “substantive” view here. Instead, I will content myself with mentioning a few reasons why it might be worth considering. First, this view of intellectual self-thinking provides an appro-priately conscious twin for the kind of self-knowledge I have ascribed to Augustine in section 2. For, one might think, consciousness just is the exercise or life of an intellectual nature: the intellect’s self-presence is the ground of consciousness, just as its self-knowing is the ground for its self-thinking.

Secondly, this interpretation seems to me to be a contextually natural reading of the claim in De Trin. 14.8 that the intellect thinks itself when its view is the direct object in its view. It’s true that having something in view must in general cover the whole range of thoughts one can have about the object in view, so one might think that having the intellect in view here should cover any sort of self-reflexivity, including “narrow” self-thoughts. But Augustine has ruled out in De Trin. 14.8 the standard narrow kinds of self-reflexivity—such as background consciousness and

29. Something like this view is perhaps intimated by E. BOOTH, “St. Augustine’s ‘notitia sui’ related to Aristotle and the Early Neo-Platonists IV,” Augustiniana, 28, 1978, pp. 183–221, esp. 217–20, although it is hard to pin down the specific interpretation of our text in this long and wide-ranging set of studies.


rational awareness—which are involved in ordinary thoughts. And this restriction in content to the object as such is what we should expect in De Trin. 14 anyhow, since Augustine’s general project in this book is to investigate the intellect as such, i.e. the immortal image of god in virtue of which we have access to intelligible objects, such as the intellect itself and god, through direct intellection.

And finally, though I don’t have space to argue for this here, I think it offers the basis for a causal explanation for “narrow” self-thinking and the other derived cognitive powers Augustine assigns to the intellect.

Let me instead try to draw the threads together by re-stating four conclusions I have ascribed to Augustine. (1) The intellect’s permanent activity of self-knowl-edge explains its self-presence. (2) Since slrk explains the permanent presence or availability to itself of the intellect, it is the source of consciousness. (3) Slrk is accordingly the ground for the intellect’s conscious exercise of self-knowledge in self-thinking. (4) Slrk is an active second potentiality because it is reflected in ordinary consciousness by less complete kinds of rational self-awareness. I allow that this still leaves the relation between the intellect’s self-knowledge and self-thinking rather mysterious; but perhaps you’ll agree that this is not unparalleled in the trinitarian context, since it mirrors, in some degree, the relationship between the 1st and 2nd persons in the divine trinity.

CONCLUSION

I will finish with a brief historical conclusion of my own. If Augustine’s theory of the intellect was anything like the sketch I have offered, it was a radical revision of the Platonist theories he drew on. The central notion of Platonist psychology is that the metaphysical core of the human soul is a knowledge of reality, whether through its own unconscious connection to the Forms of the divine intellect (as Plotinus believed), or in virtue of its being constituted by the set of ‘ratios’ (or logoi) that reflect the Forms (as other Platonists thought). To replace this with a purely self-directed and so effectively contentless activity that finds its expression in an originally empty consciousness is to strip the human intellect of its divinity. But that of course is what Augustine intended.30

Charles BRITTAIN

Cornell University

30. I am very grateful to audiences of earlier versions of this paper, given at Cornell, Toronto, and London, and especially to Emmanuel Bermon, Tad Brennan, Scott MacDonald, and Jennifer Whiting, whose help and encouragement was invaluable. I am also particularly glad to acknowl-edge the generosity of the School of Advanced Studies at London for their support of my research on Augustine through the S.T. Lee Professorial Fellowship for 2010–11.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Rowan WILLIAMS, Préface ............................................................................... VII

Emmanuel BERMON, Introduction : exégèse, logique et noétique ....................... 1

Mark EDWARDS, How to Refute an Arian: Ambrose and Augustine ................. 21

Marie-Odile BOULNOIS, L’exégèse de la théophanie de Mambré dans le De Trinitate d’Augustin : enjeux et ruptures ...................................... 35

Isabelle BOCHET, La puissance de Dieu à l’œuvre dans le monde. Le livre III du De Trinitate d’Augustin .......................................................... 67

Josef LÖSSL, Augustine’s Use of Aristotle’s Categories in De Trinitate in Light of the History of the Latin Text of the Categories Before Boethius .............. 99

Peter KING, The Semantics of Augustine’s Trinitarian Analysis in De Trinitate 5–7 ....................................................................................... 123

Gerard O’DALY, A Problem in Augustine’s Use of the Category of Relation in De Trinitate V and VII ............................................................................. 137

Christophe ERISMANN, La divisibilité de l’espèce selon Augustin, De Trinitate VII ............................................................................................ 145

Matthias SMALBRUGGE, L’image de soi-même, la question du double sujet ... 161

Anne-Isabelle BOUTON-TOUBOULIC, Qu’il n’y a pas d’amour sans connaissance : étude d’un argument du De Trinitate, livres VIII-XV ... 181

Christoph HORN, Augustine’s Theory of Mind and Self-Knowledge: Some Fundamental Problems ...................................................................... 205

Johannes BRACHTENDORF, Time, Memory, and Selfhood in De Trinitate ...... 221

Scott MACDONALD, Augustine’s Cognitive Voluntarism in De Trinitate 11 ... 235

Christian TORNAU, The Background of Augustine’s Triadic Epistemology in De Trinitate 11–15. A suggestion ............................................................. 251

Isabelle KOCH, Trinitas fi dei. Sur les apports de la méthode analogique trinitaire à la définition de la croyance (Augustin, De Trin. XIII) ............... 267

372 TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Beatrice CILLERAI, La mens-imago et la « mémoire métaphysique » dans la réflexion trinitaire de saint Augustin ............................................... 291

Charles BRITTAIN, Intellectual Self-Knowledge in Augustine (De Trinitate 14.7–14) ................................................................................. 313

INDICES

Bibliographie ................................................................................................ 333Index biblique .............................................................................................. 353Index des œuvres d’Augustin ....................................................................... 355Index des auteurs anciens et médiévaux ...................................................... 363

TABLE DES MATIÈRES ....................................................................................... 371

Intellectual Self-knowledge in Augustine (De Trinitate 14)

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