The Augustinian Imperative: Saint Augustine and the Discovery of the Self – Discourses on Minerva

The Augustinian Imperative is, as scholar William E. Connolly writes, “the quest to move closer to one’s truest self by exploring its inner geography.” Jean Bethke Elshtain notes, “Augustine stresses our capacity to love, and he dethrones, not reason, but too narrow an understanding of rationalism.” To say that Augustine holds a tremendous influence over western culture would be an understatement. He is the most important individual in the history of western Christianity whose shadow also looms over much of western philosophy, especially modern philosophy, despite its secularized incarnation, which still wrestles with that “quest to move closer to one’s truest self.”

Despite Augustine’s legacy, many people who know the name have never read him. And if he is remembered at all, it is as the inventor of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Beyond being factually inaccurate, this perception distorts what Academia primarily addresses when dealing with Augustine’s legacy: not his theology of sin and salvation, but his theology and philosophy of the self, of consciousness, of authenticity.

Augustine’s most prominent contribution to western culture is summed up by those two statements from William E. Connolly and Jean Bethke Elshtain: Augustine provides for us the first systematic attempt to understand the self – not, as the Greek philosophers would have it, by looking outward into the cosmos and to Nature, but by looking inwardly, that “inner geography” of the human heart and soul. Many very ignorant and uneducated people, propagandists of the New Science, like to say that Augustine placed faith over reason. Such people have never read Augustine, for Augustine says, in De Trinitate, that the soul is the “rational intellect,” the rational part of the human mind. To possess reason is to be made in the image of God. As Elshtain says, “Augustine stresses our capacity to love” and, in doing so, dethrones “not reason, but too narrow and understanding of rationalism.”

For Augustine, coming to terms with the self means exploring the true organ of human existence: not the mind, but the heart, the true seat of what compels human action and influences human decision-making. For Augustine, reason is the secondary essence of human nature; love is the primary essence of human nature. Concerning Augustine’s elaboration on original sin, he notes in his various writings, especially The City of God, that it was human reasoning that caused Adam and Eve to fall into the web of deception and lies. To sin, according to Augustine, is to lie to oneself about the nature of reality in relationship to the nature and desire of love. We choose, therefore, to “live by lies” and not by truth which is love. “Truth is Love,” as he famously declared.

What Augustine does, then, in the history of philosophy is marry philosophy with theology. Theology is concerned with persons and personality; God, after all, is a Person. Philosophy, as Augustine also knew from his education, is concerned with Nature: physis in Greek.

In the Confessions, Augustine’s pursuit of philosophy to understand himself ended in failure. What Augustine came to realize was that his attempt to understand himself, who he was, was doomed to failure because philosophy was a hobbled intellectual enterprise. With its concern just for the outer world of objects and things, philosophy had cut itself off from the inner world of the self, of the human heart, of self-consciousness. As Augustine laments, when he searched for God and sought to understand himself, he could not find God “out there” and, therefore, couldn’t find himself out in the vast space of the cosmos. It was only by turning inward, Augustine realizes in his eureka moment, that he discovered God and himself.

This “inward turn of the self,” the incurvatus in se, is what scholars concentrate on when assessing Augustine’s immense legacy to western intellectual culture. Augustine proceeds to provide an elaborate and systematic philosophical-theology, marrying the philosophy of nature: objects and things, with the theology of personhood and personalism: self and subjectivity. Mihi question factus sum, Augustine famously said: I have become a question to myself.

Thinking, not observation, becomes the key to understanding. Thinking is, of course, an internal enterprise. In thinking about oneself, Augustine moves beyond the mere materialism of Epicureanism and Manicheanism which had dominated his early life. In thinking about oneself, Augustine probes the innermost geography of human nature: the heart. “Our heart is restless until it finds rest in thee,” as one of Augustine’s most famous phrases in the Confessions announces.

The word that Augustine uses the most in his corpus of writing is Cor and Amor/Caritas, Heart and Love. It’s not surprising that these would be his most used words in Latin given how he links the two together. To have a heart is to have the possibility to love. To love entails having a heart. To understand oneself, one must understand the nature of love, the nature of the human heart, and how the human heart influences the actions of our embodied existence.

This is why Christianity, in comparison to the New Science of modernity, seems radically introspective and, in the words of imbeciles like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, “anti-science.” Christian theology, following Augustine, is concerned with the inner world of the self, of subjectivity, of persons and personhood. Once you understand this so much of our contemporary rhetoric and language-usage begins to make sense. Augustinian theology deals with the self, the inner world of the human heart, and, therefore, morality – how we should relate to others. Knowledge of love and human relationships, Augustine asserts, is the truest form of wisdom in life. It does one no good, Augustine continues to explain, to know all the secrets of the cosmos if one doesn’t know how to love and relate to other human beings.

The New Science of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Rene Descartes, and the Enlightenment project dethrones this concern with the self in relation to others. Wisdom is not knowledge of the self in relationship to others, wisdom, as Bacon explained, is knowledge of the operations of the world. This is what leads, of course, to the philosophy of utilitarian scientism.

In our world today, we are living through the battle between what remains of the “Augustinian Imperative,” that concern with the self, authenticity, and how to love and relate with others vs. the New Science, the concern with the outer world, the operational laws of the universe, and what that knowledge implies for our own existence. But, as Elshtain says, it is exactly that kind of narrow rationalism, which takes for itself the monopoly of the word reason, that Augustine dethroned in favor of a deeper rationalism and rationality: one concerned with the self, the heart, and the nature of love.

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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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