Soliloquies

Augustine of Hippo, restated

A complete modern restatement of the Soliloquia.

Why This Book Exists

In the late summer of 386 a professor of rhetoric in Milan resigned his chair. He gave his health as the reason. His lungs and his voice had in fact given out, which made the excuse both true and convenient.

His name was Aurelius Augustinus. He was thirty-two, North African, and everything about his life that could be counted was going well. Public orator to the imperial court. A track that ended in a governorship. A salary, a household, a reputation, and every one of them early.

Everything that could not be counted was going wrong.

He had spent a decade inside a religion he no longer believed1. He had lived fifteen years with a woman whose name he never once records, had a son by her, and had sent her back to Africa to clear the way for an advantageous marriage his mother had arranged. The marriage never happened. What happened instead was a collapse in a garden, which he would describe thirteen years later and which is now the most famous conversion in Western literature.2

None of that fame existed yet. What existed was a sick man with no job, no plan, and the loan of a country house at Cassiciacum, north of Milan, where he moved for the winter with his mother Monica, his son Adeodatus, his brother, two cousins, two students, and his oldest friend Alypius.4

He was also, at thirty-two, still unbaptized. That surprises modern readers, but it was ordinary. Baptism washed away everything before it and nothing after, so fourth-century families routinely postponed it, sometimes to the deathbed, rather than spend it early on a life still being lived badly. Monica had enrolled him as a catechumen in infancy and then waited. He was still waiting himself, for Easter, when Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, would finally baptize him.5

He could not sleep. So he started arguing with himself.

What came out of it has no real precedent. It is not a treatise and not a memoir. It is the transcript of an interrogation in which the interrogator and the accused are the same man, and the accused keeps losing. There was no word for a book like that, so he made one: soliloquia, speaking alone. Every soliloquy written since is downstream of a sick man in a borrowed villa who could not stop asking himself questions.

He wants two things, and he says so on the first page. He wants to know God, and he wants to know his own soul. Nothing else, he insists. The rest of the book is spent finding out whether that is true, and it is not.

Read it before the Confessions. This is the part I care about most, and it is why I made an edition rather than simply recommending a translation.

The Confessions was written around 397, more than a decade after this winter, by a man who was by then a bishop himself and already knew the conversion had held. Every sentence about 386 is shaped by knowing how it turned out. The garden reads as a climax because he knows it was one. Retrospective narratives are edited by their endings even when the author is scrupulously honest, and Augustine was.

This book does not know it is a conversion story. It is a man who has just lost his career, his household, and his certainty, and who has no idea whether any of this will hold. Nothing protects him, because the thing that would protect him has not happened yet. That is why Reason can take him apart, and why he ends one section weeping and refusing to promise anything further.

So it offers what the Confessions structurally cannot: Augustine before he became Augustine. You can catch him holding positions he later abandoned. The body as a cage the soul escapes. Learning as the recovery of something already buried in us. The confidence about his own chastity that his own dream demolishes eight sections later. Read the mature synthesis first and all of this looks like juvenilia. Read it first and the Confessions becomes a report on what happened to a man you have already met.

Two things sharpen it further.

He spends this book building a case that the soul survives death. Within a year his mother is dead. Within three, his son. The Confessions grieves both. Whatever you make of the argument here, it stopped being abstract for him almost immediately.

And the ending is a setup. The book breaks off on one unanswered fear: that the soul might survive and still forget everything, including whatever truth it found. Reason has no argument left and offers a promise instead. Book X of the Confessions is the great sustained treatment of memory. That is not a coincidence of subject matter. The question he could not answer at thirty-two is the one he gives an entire book to at forty-three.

So the case comes down to this. The Soliloquies is the question. The Confessions is what a decade of living with it did to the man asking. Read them in that order and the maturing is not a matter of tone or impression. It is specific, and you can point at it.

Why I restated it. Not because the ideas have aged. They are startlingly current: what it means to know a person rather than know about them, whether your senses can be trusted, how you would ever tell a real conviction from one you have simply never been tested on, whether anything you are is going to survive you. What has aged is the prose. Augustine wrote fast, in fourth-century Latin, for readers who shared his education, and the English most people can reach was made a century or more ago for readers who shared a different one. The result is a book with a live pulse under sentences nobody speaks anymore.

People start it and stop, and they stop for reasons that have nothing to do with the argument. That is the problem I set out to solve. A book this early and this unguarded should not reach only the readers willing to fight the syntax for it. I wanted it available to someone who will read it once, at the right moment, and then go to the Confessions knowing exactly who they are about to meet.

What this is, and what is underneath it. A complete restatement in contemporary English. Complete is the operative word. Every section of both books is here, and not only the conclusions but the reasoning that reaches them, including the passages that are difficult, technical, or unflattering to their author. Where he is boring, this is boring. Where his argument fails, it fails here too. Where he says something a modern reader will dislike, it is on the page rather than quietly gone.

The base text is the English translation by Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, published in Boston in 1910 and long in the public domain. Every section carries a citation to its exact place in the original, by book, chapter, and section, so any passage can be set beside the Latin or beside any scholarly translation. This is a restatement, not a new translation from the Latin, and it does not pretend to be one.

What has been added, and how you can tell. Augustine assumed you knew who Alypius was, what the Academics taught, and why a man might cite Cicero. You reasonably do not. So this edition supplies it: short identifications in the text where a bare name would stop you, and thirty-six numbered notes that say precisely where each piece of information came from, separating what is in the Soliloquies from what comes from the Confessions and from what is a scholarly guess. Six longer notes stand inline, at the few places where a reader will otherwise draw a conclusion the book does not support. Nothing has been added silently. Wherever a sentence gives Augustine something to say that he did not say, a note tells you so.

Contents

Book One

Book Two

Notes on the Text

Appendix: For Further Thought

Reference

Each section heading carries a ✦ that jumps to its reflection questions; each appendix entry carries a § that jumps back to the text.

How to Read the Page

Two more things before the first page. Reason is a character in this book, but Augustine also uses the word for the faculty of reasoning itself, so at one point he says the soul's gaze is reason while Reason is the one speaking. Both senses are live at once, and that is not a slip in the translation.

And Truth and Wisdom are consistently she.7 That is grammatical gender in Latin, where veritas and sapientia are feminine nouns. It is not a claim about the gender of anything divine.

The whole book happens inside one man's head, so nothing in it is spoken aloud. Nothing here is in quotation marks for that reason. Four different things are going on, and each is marked by where it sits on the page rather than by punctuation.

Indented, behind a rule: this is Reason. Every time Reason speaks, long or short, it looks like this.

Flush left, in plain type: this is Augustine's answer. His turn in the exchange, the reply he is giving to the question just asked.

Flush left, in italics: this is Augustine stepping out of the exchange. Not answering Reason, but talking past him to whoever is reading: setting a scene, admitting something, telling you what he thinks about what he just said.

Note — Flush left, opening with this bold tag: this is the present editor, not Augustine and not Reason. These notes are the only words in the book that nobody in 386 wrote. Skip them and you lose nothing but context.

The distinction that matters most is the second against the third. Augustine answering is Augustine caught; Augustine narrating is Augustine composed, at his desk, months of illness later, deciding what to tell you.

Book One

The Problem of Writing Any of This Down ✦

(I.i.1)

For days I had been going in circles.

Not idle circles, the kind that keep you up. I wanted three things, and I wanted them badly enough that the wanting had started to feel like an illness. I wanted to know what I actually am. I wanted to know what is genuinely good for me. And I wanted to know what I ought to be running from.

And then, in the middle of that, something spoke.

I still don't know what it was. I'd like to know. Was it me? Was it something other than me? Was it inside or outside? I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is what it said, and because it kept talking, and because what it said kept being right, I'm going to call it Reason and let it speak for itself.

It opened with a strangely practical question.

Suppose you actually found it. The thing you've been tearing yourself apart looking for. Where would you put it, so you could move on to the next thing without losing it?

Memory, obviously.

And is memory equal to that? Does it hold everything the mind finds?

No. Of course not. It isn't and it doesn't.

Then you'll have to write it down.

And this is where it gets worse, because I am sick. Not inconvenienced, sick. Writing is physically hard for me. And I can't dictate this, because dictation puts another person in the room, and this conversation only works when there is nobody in the room at all.

You're right, and I can't see a way to do it that doesn't humiliate me.

What came back was a piece of practical instruction. I have followed it exactly, which is why this book begins the way it does.

Then pray. Ask for health, and ask for help getting what you're after. And write the prayer down too, make it the first thing. Having done that much, you'll be braver about the rest. Then set down your conclusions, briefly. And don't write for a crowd. A few people from your own town is plenty.

So: the prayer first.

The Prayer ✦

(I.i.2–6)

Note — The prayer is a litany, a long chain of addresses, each one naming God by something he does. Two of its claims are easy to misread. When Augustine says evil "is nothing," he does not mean evil is harmless or unimportant; he means it isn't a thing: not a substance God made, not a rival power, but a corruption in something that was good. He had spent nine years in a religion that taught the opposite, and getting free of it nearly killed him. And near the end he says that the people who seek God rightly are the ones God caused to seek him. That circle is deliberate. He is saying he cannot even take the first step on his own, not that trying is pointless.

God. Founder of everything.

Help me. First, to pray properly at all; then, to be the kind of person whose prayer deserves a hearing; and finally, to be set free.

You are the one through whom everything exists that could not have existed on its own. You are the reason that things bent on destroying themselves don't finish the job. You made this world out of nothing, this world that everyone who has eyes can see is beautiful. You don't manufacture evil; what you do is keep it from becoming as bad as it wants to be. And to the few who run for shelter into what actually is, you show the thing nobody wants to believe: that evil is nothing. Not a rival power. Not a substance. Nothing.

You are the one through whom the universe is complete even counting the parts of it that have gone wrong. Dissonance means nothing to you, because you hear the whole piece, and at the end the worst of it resolves into the rest. Every creature capable of loving loves you, whether it knows that's what it's doing or not.

Everything is in you, and no creature's shame stains you, no creature's malice injures you, no creature's error misleads you. Nobody gets to see what is true without first being made clean enough to look.

Father of Truth. Father of Wisdom. Father of the life that is actually alive. Father of blessedness. Father of what is good and what is beautiful. Father of the light the mind sees by. Father of whatever it is that wakes us up, and of the promise in us that keeps insisting we go home.

You are Truth, everything true is true in you and by you and through you. You are Wisdom, everyone wise is wise in you and by you and through you. You are the life that is really living, the blessedness of everyone blessed, the goodness and beauty of everything good and beautiful. You are the light the mind sees by: not a thing the mind looks at, but the light that makes everything else in the mind visible at all. Your kingdom is the whole country the senses have never once visited, and the laws down here are borrowed from up there.

To turn from you is to fall. To turn toward you is to stand up. To stay in you is to stand. To leave you is to waste away. To come back is to revive. To live in you is to be alive.

Nobody loses you who wasn't deceived first. Nobody looks for you who wasn't warned first. Nobody finds you who wasn't made clean first. To abandon you is to die. To want you is to love you. To see you is to have you.

Faith gets us moving toward you. Hope lifts us. Love joins us to you.

You are the reason we aren't simply wiped out. The reason we get warned to stay awake. The reason we can tell good from evil at all, and run from the one and after the other. The reason hardship doesn't finish us. The reason we can serve well and govern well.

Through you we finally work out which is which, that some things we were sure we couldn't live without aren't even ours, and some things we treated as nothing turn out to be everything. Through you the world's bait stops holding us down. Through you, losing what we own doesn't make us less. Through you the better part of us stops taking orders from the worse. Through you death is swallowed whole.

You turn us around on the road. You strip off what isn't and dress us in what is. You make us worth hearing. You defend us. You lead us into all truth. You keep us sane and don't let anyone else take that from us. You call us back when we wander, bring us to the door, and see to it that it opens when we knock. You give us the bread that is life, and the water that ends thirst for good.10

Come to me. Be on my side.

Whatever I say from here on, help me say it. You, the one God. The one thing that is real and does not change. Where nothing clashes and nothing is confused. Where nothing shifts, nothing runs out, nothing dies. Where it is all harmony, all light, all steady, all abundant, all alive. Where nothing is missing and nothing is wasted.

You set the laws the sky turns by. The poles rotate. The stars run their courses. The sun brings on the day and the moon takes the edge off the night.

And the whole order of things holds its astonishing steadiness the only way physical things can, by doing it again. Light and dark trading places, and that is a day. The moon filling and emptying, and that is a month. Spring, summer, autumn, winter coming back around, and that is a year. The sun finishing its circuit. The stars returning, after ages, to where they first came up.

Your laws stand still so that everything restless and changeable never quite falls into chaos. Age after age it gets reined back into something that at least resembles standing still.

By your law the soul's will is free,13 and consequences fall where they fall with an evenness nobody can bribe.

There is nothing above you, outside you, without you. There is nothing that isn't beneath you, in you, with you. You made a human being in your own image, which anyone discovers the moment he actually knows himself.

Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. My God, my master, my king, my father, my cause, my hope, my wealth, my honor, my house, my country, my rescue, my light, my life. Hear me in that way of yours that very few people understand.

At last, at last. I love you alone, follow you alone, look for you alone. I'm ready to serve you alone, because you're the only one with any right to govern, and I want to be under your government.

So give the order. Command whatever you want. But heal my hearing first, because I can't make out what you're saying. Heal my eyes, so I can catch it when you so much as nod. Throw out whatever is diseased in me, so that I can recognize you when I see you. Tell me where to look, and I believe I'll do whatever you say.

Take me back. I ran away from your house and I want to come home.14 I've been punished enough. I've been owned by your enemies long enough, the ones you already have underfoot. I've been played for a fool long enough.

Take me back. I'm running from them now, the way I once ran from you, and they took me in, and I never even belonged to them. I know I ought to come back. Open the door; I'm knocking. Teach me how to get to you.

Because here is everything I've got: I want to. That's it. That's the whole inventory. I know one thing and one thing only, that what's fleeting and falling apart should be spurned, and what's fixed and permanent should be chased. That much I'm doing. How to get to you I do not know. Suggest it. Spell it out. Give me the equipment for the trip.

If the people who take shelter in you find you by faith, then give me faith. If by strength of character, give me that. If by knowledge, give me knowledge. Increase my faith, increase my hope, increase my love. Your goodness is like nothing else.

I am groping after you. And whatever the handholds are. I'm asking you for those too. Because if you abandon a man, he's finished; but you don't abandon anyone, since you are the sum of everything good, and nobody who looks for you the right way fails to find you. And here's the part that undoes me: the people who look for you the right way are the ones you caused to look that way. So cause me to look for you, Father. Don't let me wander off the road. And when I come looking for you, don't let me be handed anything instead of you.

If I want nothing besides you. Then let me find you now. But if there is still something else in me that I want, then you clean it out of me yourself, and make me fit to look at you.

As for the rest, for whatever concerns this mortal body of mine, I don't know how it can be useful to me or to the people I love, so I'm handing it to you. Instruct me about it as needed. What I'm asking for is the one thing: turn me, in the deepest part of me, toward you. Let nothing get in the way as I lean in your direction. And for as long as I'm carrying this body around, let me be clean and generous and just and sensible, a real lover and a real student of your wisdom, fit to live in your house.

Amen. And amen.

Two Things, and Nothing Else ✦

(I.ii.7)

There. I've prayed.

So what do you want to know?

The things I just prayed for.

Summarize.

I want to know God and the soul.

Nothing else?

Nothing else at all.

Then start looking. But first, explain something to me. What would it take? How would God have to be shown to you before you'd be willing to say, that's enough?

And I have no answer. I don't know how he'd have to be shown to me for me to say enough, because I don't think I know anything at all in the way I want to know God.

Then what are we doing? Don't you think we'd better establish what it means to know God sufficiently, so that when you get there, you'll stop looking?

Yes. Obviously yes. But I don't see how to do it. Because what have I ever known that's like God, such that I could point at it and say: knowing God would be like that?

He turns this around on me immediately.

If you've never known anything like God, how do you know you haven't known him yet?

Because if I'd known anything like him, I'd love it. And as it stands I love only God and the soul, and I don't know either one.

So you don't love your friends?

How could I love the soul and not love them?

Then you love gnats and lice on the same principle.

No. I said I love the soul. Not every living thing that has one.

But that's the trap. A living thing with a soul is exactly what a human being is, that's the definition, and gnats qualify under it too. So either your friends aren't human, or you don't love them.

They are human and I do love them, but not for the bare fact of being alive. For the kind of soul they have: one that can reason. I love reason wherever I find it. I love it in thieves. I'm allowed to love the reasoning part of a man while justly hating what he's doing with it. So naturally I love my friends more, in proportion as they use that capacity well, or even just want to.

I Don't Even Know My Best Friend ✦

(I.iii.8)

Fine. But suppose someone said to you: I'll make you know God as well as you know Alypius. Wouldn't you thank him and say, that's enough?

Alypius has been my closest friend since we were young men in the same African town.3 He has followed me from post to post for years, and he was beside me at the end of everything that happened this summer. If there is a person on earth I know, it is him.

I'd thank the man. I wouldn't say that's enough.

Why not?

Because I don't know God even as well as I know Alypius, and I don't know Alypius well enough either.

Then be careful you're not simply being arrogant. You want to know God well enough, and you can't even manage that with your closest friend.

That doesn't follow. Compare the stars to my dinner: my dinner is the trivial thing. And yet I have no idea what I'm eating tomorrow, while I can tell you exactly where in the sky the moon will come up. Ignorance about the small thing doesn't make confidence about the large thing arrogant.

So would you settle for knowing God the way you know where tomorrow's moon comes up?

No. That's not enough either, because that's known by the senses. And for all I know, God, or some hidden natural cause, could change the moon's usual course tomorrow, and everything I'd assumed would turn out false.

Do you think that will happen?

No. But I'm after what I can know, not what I can believe. You can fairly say we believe everything we know. You can't say we know everything we believe.

So in this project you're throwing out the testimony of the senses entirely?

Entirely.

Then your closest friend, the one you say you only partly know. Do you know him by sense or by intellect?

Whatever I know of him by sense, if the senses know anything at all, is cheap, and I've had enough of it. The part of him that makes him actually my friend is his mind, and that's what I want to reach by intellect.

Is there another way to reach it?

None.

Then you're prepared to say your closest friend is unknown to you?

Why wouldn't I? The truest law of friendship I know says you should love your friend neither less nor more than yourself. So, since I don't know myself, what insult is it to him that I call him unknown? Especially since I don't think he knows himself either.

Then note what just happened. If the things you want to know are the kind pursued by intellect, then when I accused you of arrogance, you shouldn't have brought up dinner and the moon. Those are sense. You changed the subject without noticing.

Saying It Is Not Knowing It ✦

(I.iv.9–10)

Never mind. Answer this instead. Take the philosophers you've actually been reading. Plato, and Plotinus after him, whose books cracked something open in you not long ago.6 If what they said about God is true, would it be enough to know God the way they knew him?

It doesn't follow that because what they said was true, they knew it was. Plenty of people talk beautifully about things they don't understand. I did it a moment ago: in that prayer I asked to know a great many things, and I named them, but I wouldn't have been asking to know them if I already did. Naming them wasn't the problem. I wasn't speaking out of intellectual comprehension. I was speaking out of things I'd picked up here and there and stored in memory and shored up with as much faith as I could manage. Knowing is something else.

Then tell me: do you know what a line is, in geometry?

That I do know.

And you'll say that out loud, with the skeptics listening? The ones who hold that certainty is never available to anybody?8

Not particularly worried, no. Their rule is that a wise man must never be caught in an error, and I'm not wise. So for now I'm not afraid to admit I know what I know. When I get to Wisdom, I'll do whatever she tells me.

No objection. Do you know the sphere the same way you know the line?

Yes.

Equally well? Or one better than the other?

Equally. I'm not deceived about either.

And did you get these by sense or by intellect?

The senses were a boat. They carried me where I was going, and then I got off and dismissed them, and standing on dry land I was unsteady on my feet for a long time. Honestly, I think you could swim on dry land more easily than learn geometry by the senses. They're some help in the elementary stages. That's all.

So you'll call this knowledge?

I will, if the Stoics allow it. They reserve the word knowledge for the perfectly wise man and grant the rest of us something lesser. Fine: I'll take the lesser thing they concede even to fools. But I'm not much afraid of the Stoics. I hold these as things I know.

Then get on with it, so I can see where you're going.

Don't rush. We have time. Be very careful what you accept, don't agree to anything in a hurry. I'm working to make you happy, and happy in the kind of certainty where you'll never fear a collapse. And you're treating this like it's easy and telling me to hurry.

God make it as you say. Ask what you want, and if I do it again, rebuke me harder.

Very well. Is it obvious to you that a line can't be split down its length?

It is. A line has length and no width, so there's nothing to split.

And across?

Infinitely.

And is it equally obvious that if you slice a sphere at two different distances from its center, you never get two circles the same size?

Yes.

Now, are the line and the sphere the same thing, or different?

Obviously wildly different.

Then look at what you've just agreed to. You know each of them equally well, even though they differ enormously. So although the objects of knowledge differ, the knowing by which you know the one is identical to the knowing by which you know the other.

Who's denying that?

You were. Just now. When I asked how you'd have to know God to say enough, you said you couldn't answer, on the grounds that you know nothing like God. But look: the line and the sphere aren't alike either. And I never asked what you know that's like God. I asked what you know in the same way you want to know God. The line and the sphere are not remotely similar, and yet your knowing of one is the same as your knowing of the other. So: would it be enough to know God the way you know the geometrical sphere, that is, to have no more doubt about God than you have about it?

The Earth and the Sky ✦

(I.v.11)

However hard you push, I won't say that.

I don't dare say I want to know God the way I know those things, and for two reasons.

First: the line and the sphere differ, but not so much that a single field of study can't handle both. No geometry has ever claimed to cover God.

Second: if my knowledge of God were going to be the same kind as my knowledge of these, then I ought to be getting as much joy out of geometry now as I expect to get out of God later. And I'm not. Set beside him, I more than despise those things. It seems to me that if I ever did reach him and see him the way he can be seen, all of this would drop straight out of my memory. As it is, it's already an effort to call it back, because of how much I want him.

Grant all of that. Knowing God would delight you far more than knowing these lesser things. But the delight isn't what makes the apprehension different. Do you look at the ground with one kind of seeing and at the open sky with another, just because the sky moves you more? If your eyes are working, and someone asked whether you were as certain you'd seen the earth as that you'd seen the sky, you'd say yes. Even though the earth doesn't thrill you the way the sky's beauty does.

That illustration gets me, and I'll admit it.

So I'll say this instead: what geometry and the rest can prove differs from the majesty of God by exactly as much as the ground differs from the sky, enormously, in kind, and is no less certain for it.

Sound Eyes, Looking, and Seeing ✦

(I.vi.12–13)

Good, that you're moved by it. Because I promise you this: God will be shown to your mind the way the sun is shown to your eyes.

The mind has eyes. They are the soul's senses. What geometry and the rest can prove is made visible to the mind the way the sun's light makes the earth and everything on it visible to the eye. But it is God himself who does the shining.

And I stand to the mind exactly as sight stands to the eyes.

Which is a distinction worth slowing down for. Having eyes is one thing. Using them to look is another. Actually seeing is a third. So the soul has a three-part job: it must have eyes it can use, it must look, and it must see.

Eyes it can use. The soul's eyes work when she is clean of every bodily taint, when the craving for things that die has been flushed out and held at a distance. And at the beginning only one thing is equal to that job: Faith. None of this can be demonstrated to a soul wrecked and feverish with wanting. Unless she is well she cannot see; and she will not do the work of getting well unless she believes that being well will let her see.

But suppose she has that faith. She believes it is exactly as described, and that this is the only road. If she nonetheless gives up hope of ever recovering, won't she abandon the effort, and start despising her physician's orders?

Here I have to say plainly what may otherwise trip a reader. The voice I am arguing with calls itself Reason, and reason is also the name of a power I have. Both are meant at once. The thing questioning me is the thing in me that does the looking.

She will. And especially because a sick person genuinely experiences those orders as cruel.

Then Hope has to be added to Faith.

Yes.

And suppose she has Faith, and Hope that she can be healed, but she doesn't love the light she's been promised, doesn't want it. Suppose long habit has made her shadows comfortable and she's decided she ought to be content with them. Doesn't she still throw out her physician?

Immediately.

Then a third is needed. Love.

Nothing is more necessary.

So: without all three, no soul is well enough to see, that is, to know her God.

Now. When you have sound eyes, what's left?

That the soul look.

Looking. And the soul's gaze is reason. But since not everyone who looks sees, the right and complete kind of looking, the kind seeing actually follows from, has its own name: Virtue. Virtue is reason straightened out and brought to full working order. Not a list of good behaviors. A faculty functioning correctly.

And even sound eyes can't turn toward the light unless those same three hold. Faith, believing that what the gaze is aimed at is the kind of thing that will make her happy to see. Hope, expecting that once the eyes are fixed properly the sight will actually come. Love, wanting to see it and to have it.

Seeing. That kind of looking is followed by the sight of God himself, and there the gaze stops, not because the soul couldn't keep looking, but because there is nothing past him left to look at. This is reason perfected, Virtue arriving where it was going, and the happy life follows from it.

And this seeing is a joining, of the one seeing and the thing seen. Exactly as bodily sight is a joining of the eye and the visible thing. Take away either side and nothing is seen at all.

What Survives the Vision ✦

(I.vii.14)

Now suppose it has happened. The soul sees. She grasps God. Are all three still needed?

How would Faith still be needed, when she has sight? How would Hope, when she is holding the thing she hoped for?

Love is the only one that isn't reduced. It is enormously increased. Once the soul has seen that one genuine beauty she will love it more; and unless she fastens on it with enormous love and refuses to turn away toward anything else, she cannot stay in that sight at all.

Though there is a qualification while we are still in bodies.

Even a soul that fully grasps God is still carrying one, and that body's senses keep filing their ordinary reports. They can no longer deceive her outright, but they can still make her wonder. And whatever it is in her that holds out against them, that keeps believing the opposite of what her eyes insist on, still deserves the name Faith. Likewise, even after she has grasped God and found real happiness here, the body keeps giving her trouble; so she still needs to hope that after death it stops. Neither Faith nor Hope quits the soul while she is here.

But afterward, when the soul is complete in God, only Love is left holding her there. She can't be said to still have faith that these things are true, because nothing false is soliciting her anymore. And she can't be said to have anything left to hope for, because she has all of it, securely.

So: three things concern the soul, being sound, looking, seeing. And another three, Faith and Hope and Love, are needed for the soul's health and for her gaze; all three are still needed for the sight itself while she is in the body; and after this life, Love alone.

God Is the Light, Not the Thing Lit ✦

(I.viii.15)

Now pay attention, and I will give you as much about God himself as can be given by comparison with visible things.

God is available to the mind the same way the plain certainties of geometry are available to the mind. But with an enormous difference.

The earth is visible. Light is visible. But the earth cannot be seen unless light makes it visible. That is the situation of everything the disciplines deal with: anyone who grasps those things admits they are entirely true, and yet it is not credible that they could be grasped at all unless something lit them up. Some other sun, belonging to the mind rather than the sky.

So of the ordinary sun you can say three things. That it exists. That it shines. That it makes other things visible.

And of that most mysterious God you want to know, you can say the same three. That he exists. That he is grasped. That he causes everything else to be grasped.

Those are the two subjects, yourself and God, that I am willing to teach you. Now tell me how you are taking all this. As likelihoods, or as certainties?

This is the point most worth carrying out of this book, and I want it stated in my own voice before I answer.9 God is not one more object the mind inspects. He is what the mind sees by: the reason anything is intelligible at all. You do not look at light. You look at everything else because of it.

As likelihoods. Obviously. Though I admit I'm being stirred to hope for something better. Because apart from those two statements about the line and the sphere, nothing you've said is anything I'd dare call outright knowledge.

No surprise. Nothing so far has been demonstrated tightly enough to force you.

Are You Actually Healthy? ✦

(I.ix.16)

Why are we dawdling? Let's get on with the trip. And the first stage is finding out whether we're in any condition to travel. Do you love anything besides knowing God and knowing yourself?

As I feel right now, I'd answer: nothing. But the safer answer is I don't know.

Because this has happened to me before. I'd be convinced nothing could move me anymore, and then something would surface in my mind and disturb me far past what I'd thought possible. Or the reverse, something would drift through as a passing suggestion and not disturb me much at all, and yet the mere fact that it had shown up disturbed me more than I expected.

Right now it seems to me there are only three things that can still get to me: fear of losing the people I love, fear of pain, and fear of death.

So you love living surrounded by the people dearest to you, you love your own health, and you love your life in the body, because otherwise you wouldn't be afraid of losing them.

I admit it.

Then the bare fact that your friends aren't all with you, and that your health isn't what it should be, causes you real distress. That has to follow.

It does. I can't deny it.

And if you suddenly knew, with certainty, that your body was completely sound, and saw everyone you love comfortable and provided for and gathered with you, wouldn't you be nearly out of your mind with joy?

Nearly? If that of all things suddenly happened to me, how would I contain myself? How would I hide it?

Then you are, right now, agitated by every disease and disturbance the mind is subject to. And with eyes in that condition you have the nerve to want to look at that Sun?

You're drawing conclusions as if I couldn't feel exactly how far my health has come, which plague has retreated, and which one is still holding ground. Prove it.

The Inventory: Money, Status, Sex, Food ✦

(I.x.17)

Note — Read this section knowing that the book takes it apart. What follows is Augustine at his most self-satisfied, and it does not survive: eight sections from here Reason produces evidence from his own sleeping mind that every claim he is about to make is false, and he breaks down weeping. The passage on marriage is the ugliest thing in the Soliloquies and the most personal. Months before writing it he had been made to send away the woman he had lived with for some fifteen years and who had borne his son, so that he could marry someone advantageous. He didn't marry her either. The disgust he expresses here is not the calm judgment of a philosopher on women; it is a wound talking, and the book treats it as a symptom rather than a doctrine.

You're aware, aren't you, that even a healthy eye is often hurt by this ordinary sun, turns away, and runs for shade? So you're thinking about your improvement rather than about what you claim you want to see. Let's do this properly. Do you want money?

It isn't what I'm after. I'm thirty-two,11 and I stopped wanting money about fourteen years ago, and if it landed in my lap now, I'd want no more of it than a free man needs to live on. It took exactly one book to do it, a lost dialogue of Cicero's that I was assigned as a student and that rearranged my life.12 Wealth isn't to be craved. If it arrives, administer it carefully. That was all it took.

Status?

That one, I admit, I've only recently stopped wanting.

A wife? Suppose she were beautiful, modest, agreeable, well-educated, or at least easy for you to teach. Suppose she brought enough of a dowry that supporting her wouldn't eat into your leisure, since you're indifferent to wealth anyway. And suppose you could be confident she'd never cause you any trouble at all. Wouldn't that delight you?

Decorate her however you like, pile on every desirable feature. I've decided there is nothing in the world more to be avoided than going to bed with someone. Nothing knocks a man's mind off its high ground faster than wanting a woman and the touch you can't have a wife without. So if looking after a household is part of a wise man's work, and I'm not convinced it is, then a man who marries for that reason alone is admirable. Fine. But not a man to copy. There's more risk in the attempt than there can be reward in the result. Enough to say that for the sake of my own free mind I've resolved not to want a wife, not to look for one, and not to take one. Rightly and sensibly, I think.

I didn't ask what you've decided. I asked whether you have actually beaten the desire itself, or whether you're still fighting it. This is about the soundness of your eyes.

I don't seek or want anything of that kind now. I remember it with horror and disgust. What more do you want? And it improves daily, as my hope of seeing that higher Beauty grows, and it consumes me, every other desire and delight converges in that direction.

Food?

What I've cut out doesn't trouble me. What's still permitted I enjoy when it's in front of me, but it could all be taken away without annoying me. When it isn't there, the appetite doesn't presume to interrupt my thinking. And don't ask me any more about food or drink or baths or any other bodily pleasure. I want them only as far as they're good for my health.

The Sleeping Plague ✦

(I.xi.18–19)

Real progress. But some things are still in the way of that Light, and I think this next test will settle it fast. Either there's nothing left to beat, or the root of the infection is still sitting under every one of these weeds we think we pulled, and we've gotten nowhere.

Here it is. Suppose you became convinced that you could only chase Wisdom alongside your friends if you had enough money to keep everyone fed. Would you want money then?

I admit I would.

Now suppose public office raised your standing enough to turn a great many people toward wisdom. And suppose your own closest friends couldn't get free of what they want and turn to God unless they became men of consequence themselves, and that only your standing could make that happen.

Wouldn't those honors suddenly look very much worth having? Worth chasing hard?

Just as you say.

A wife I won't push on; maybe no such necessity exists. But suppose her money could support everyone you want under one roof, comfortably. Suppose she wanted that arrangement herself. And suppose her family's name put those same useful honors within easy reach.

I'm not sure you'd have any business turning that down.

How would I even dare hope for something like that?

You're answering as though I asked what you hope for. I didn't. I'm not asking what would displease you among things that are unavailable. I'm asking what would please you if it were offered.

A dead disease is one thing; a sleeping one is another. There's an old saying that fits: every fool is out of his mind the way every dungheap stinks. You just don't smell it until something turns it over15. And it matters enormously which one we're dealing with here. Has the desire actually been cured, or has it merely gone quiet because you've stopped believing you could ever have the thing?

I can't answer that. But you'll never convince me that in the frame of mind I know I'm in, I've made no progress.

I think it seems that way to you because although it's possible you'd want such things, you wouldn't want them for themselves. They'd look desirable to you for some other reason.

That's exactly what I've been trying to say. When I used to want money, it was because I wanted to be rich. Honors, which I've admitted dominated me until recently, I wanted because of some glamour about them I can't even name. And when I looked for a wife I was looking for pleasure without loss of reputation, and nothing else. Back then I wanted those things in themselves. Now I reject them completely. But if the things I do long for can only be reached through them, then I'll take them, not to be cherished, but to be put up with.

Well said. I don't think things asked for solely on account of something else can be called desired at all.

What You Actually Want Your Friends For ✦

(I.xii.20–21)

Now: why do you want the men you love to live with you? Or to live at all?16

So that we can investigate God and our own souls together. That way whoever finds something first can pass it to the others without any trouble.

And if they don't want to investigate?

I'll persuade them to want to.

And if you can't, because they think they've already made the discoveries, or think the discoveries can't be made, or because they're preoccupied with wanting other things?

Then I'll still hold on to them, and they to me, as though we could.

But suppose their presence is genuinely an obstacle to your inquiry. Wouldn't that be awkward? And if it couldn't be otherwise, wouldn't you rather be alone than stuck like that?

I confess I would.

So you don't want them to live, or to live with you, for any reason except finding Wisdom.

That's the case.

And if your own life were shown to be an obstacle to reaching Wisdom, would you want it to continue?

I'd get out of it immediately.

And if you were shown that you could reach Wisdom equally well in the body or out of it, would you care which?

If I could be certain that nothing worse was waiting for me afterward, and that I wouldn't lose ground I'd already gained, no, I wouldn't care.

So you're afraid to die in case death lands you in some worse condition where the knowledge of God is taken from you.

More than that. As I've come to understand it, I'm afraid not only of losing what I have, but of having the door shut on the things I'm still standing in front of, amazed. Though what I've already got hold of, I trust, will stay with me.

So you want your life to continue, not for its own sake, but for Wisdom's.

Yes.

Then only fear of pain is left, and that one probably moves you by its own force.

Even that I don't fear much, except that it interferes with my inquiries. Not long ago I had a toothache so severe that I couldn't think continuously about anything unfamiliar, anything that required real concentration was simply out of reach. And even then it seemed to me that if that Illumination had disclosed itself to my mind, I'd either have stopped noticing the pain entirely or have carried it as though it were nothing.

That's the worst pain I've had to bear so far. But I keep thinking about how much worse it could get, and that pushes me toward a line I've read in Celsus, who wrote on medicine long before our time and had more occasion than most to think about pain.18 He says the greatest good is wisdom and the greatest evil is physical suffering. His reasoning doesn't strike me as absurd. We're made of two parts, mind and body. The mind is the higher part, the body the lower. So the greatest good should be the best thing the higher part can hold, and the greatest evil the worst thing the lower part can suffer. Wisdom is the best thing in the soul; pain is the worst thing in the body. Therefore: to be wise is the greatest good, and to be in pain the greatest evil. I don't think he's wrong.

We'll come back to that. Wisdom herself, whom we're pushing toward, may well talk us out of it. But if it does turn out to be true, we'll hold exactly that view.19

Wisdom Will Not Share You ✦

(I.xiii.22)

So let's find out what kind of lover of Wisdom you actually are. You want to take hold of her and look at her with nothing in between and nothing dishonest in the wanting, as though she were unveiled. She allows that to very few of the men who want her.20

Think about what you'd expect. If you were burning for some extraordinarily beautiful woman, and she found out you loved somebody else on the side, she'd be entirely within her rights to shut the door. Wisdom is no different. She won't show you her face unless you want her and nothing else.

Then why am I still out here? Why the waiting, and why does it hurt this much?

I've proved I love nothing else. Anything you don't love for its own sake you don't really love at all, and Wisdom I love for herself. The rest of it, the things I still want and still dread losing, my life, my quiet, my friends. I want because of her.

And look how far it goes. I don't merely avoid resenting her other lovers. I go out looking for more of them. People who'll want her alongside me. Who'll stand there astonished with me. Who'll take hold of her with me and have her with me. The more of her we share, the more they become my friends.

Not Everyone Climbs the Same Way ✦

(I.xiii.23)

That's exactly what lovers of Wisdom should be like. Union with her is pure and uncontaminated, and those are the people she's looking for. But she isn't won by one route only.

Each person comes to know this singular and most genuine good according to his own health and strength. There is an intellectual illumination of an indescribable and mysterious kind, and ordinary light can teach us something about that higher Light, as far as it can.

There are eyes so strong and so healthy that they can turn full on the sun the moment they open, without flinching. For them light is a kind of health in itself; they need no physician, maybe only advice. For them, believing, hoping, and loving is enough.

But there are others whose eyes are injured by the very brightness they so badly want to look at, and who keep turning away and going back with relief to their shadows. These people are not sick, their eyes work. But showing them what they can't yet take is never safe. They have to be brought along: their desire encouraged, and its satisfaction wisely postponed.

And here is the sequence, a training program for the eyes, working up by degrees of brightness.

Start with things that don't shine at all and are only visible because light falls on them: cloth, a wall, anything of that kind. Then something still not shining on its own but which throws light back more beautifully, gold, silver, and the like, though not so bright that it hurts. Then a moderate fire. Then the stars. Then the moon. Then the first grey light before dawn. Then the sky brightening as the sun comes up.

Anyone who works through those, in order, or skipping a few, will end up looking straight at the sun without flinching, and with enormous pleasure.

Good teachers do something like this with people who want Wisdom badly and can already see, but whose sight isn't strong yet. Arriving at Wisdom takes a right order of approach, and it is hard to believe anyone gets there happily without one.

But we've written enough for today. Your health has to be considered.

The Only Instruction There Is ✦

(I.xiv.24)

The next day.

Give me the instructions. I'm begging you. Go ahead, whatever you want, however you want it. Make them as hard as you like, as brutal as you like. If it's something I can physically do, I'll do it, and I'll get to the thing I want.

I can teach you one thing. I don't know anything else.

Let go of what your senses hand you.

While we're still hauling this body around, be careful that nothing sticky from the senses gums up our wings. Because when the wings are whole and working, their job is to lift us out of the shadows into that higher Light.

And that Light won't show itself to anyone locked in this cage. Not unless he's become the kind who can actually fly when the door finally opens, whether the cell gets broken open or simply rots away, up into the air he was built for.

So here's the whole instruction. On the day nothing on earth can charm you, that day, that hour, you will see what you've been asking for.

Note — This is the most Platonist passage in the book, and it's the one most easily turned into something Augustine did not mean. The body as a cage, the soul as a bird, that imagery comes from Plato, and Augustine is thirty-two and freshly soaked in it. He does not stay here. The mature Augustine argues hard against contempt for the body, insists the resurrection is bodily, and treats creation as good. Even inside this book the picture is qualified: the sentence isn't "hate what you see," it's "don't get stuck to it."

The Eye That Loves the Dark ✦

(I.xiv.25)

And when will that be? Because I don't think it's possible to arrive at that complete contempt for lesser things until I've first seen the thing that makes them look worthless.

That is the bodily eye saying: once I've seen the sun, I'll stop loving darkness.

It sounds like the right order. It's nowhere near it. The eye loves darkness precisely because it isn't healthy, and it can't look at the sun unless it is healthy.

The mind gets fooled here constantly. It boasts and thinks itself healthy, and then, as if it had grounds, complains that it can't see. But that Beauty knows when to disclose herself. She takes the physician's role herself, and she knows better than her patients who is fit to look at her.

We've come up far enough that we seem to ourselves to see. But how deep we were sunk, or how far we've actually risen, we aren't allowed to feel or judge. And so, because we haven't got a worse disease, we conclude we haven't got one.

Notice what happened only yesterday. We announced, with total confidence, that no bodily craving was obstructing us any longer, that we loved Wisdom alone and wanted everything else on her account. You said a woman's touch struck you as worthless, foul, unbearable. You said it while we were sitting here discussing whether you wanted a wife.

And then, that same night, asleep, your own body answered the question for you.17

It was less than it used to be. I'll grant you that much. It was nothing like what you'd spent the afternoon claiming.

So let that most private physician of yours show you both what his care has already gotten you out of, and what is still left to cure.

Breaking Down ✦

(I.xiv.26)

Stop. Please, stop.

Why are you tormenting me? Why do you dig so deep?

I'm weeping past what I can stand. From here on I promise nothing. I claim nothing. Don't ask me about these things again.

You're right that the one I'm desperate to see will know himself when I'm well. Let him do what he likes. Let him disclose himself when it suits him. I'm handing myself over entirely to his care and his mercy, because I believe he doesn't ever stop lifting up the people who lean toward him. And I will not pronounce one word about my own soundness until I've actually looked at that Beauty.

Do nothing else. But stop crying now and pull yourself together. You've wept far too much, and it's badly aggravating the pain in your chest.

Would you set a limit on my tears when I can't see any limit to my misery? Or tell me to think about my body's health when the thing I actually am may be rotting?

No. I'm begging you: if you're any use to me at all, take me by some less exhausting route. Get me near enough to that Light, which, if I've come any distance at all, I think I can now bear, that my eyes will be ashamed to go back to the shadows I came out of. If you can even say I've left them, when they can still coax my blindness.

One Glimpse Before the Book Ends ✦

(I.xv.27)

Let's close this first volume, if you're willing, so we can start a second one on some favorable footing. This inclination of yours mustn't go slack for lack of the right exercise.

Absolutely not. I refuse to let this book end until you've opened up at least some faint gleam about the nearness of that Light I'm fixed on.

Your divine Healer consents to give you that much, some brightness I can't name is touching me and inviting me to lead you there. So be completely receptive.

Lead. Grab me and drag me wherever you want.

Do you truly say you want to know God and the soul?

That's my entire concern.

Nothing more?

Nothing whatever.

What? You don't want to comprehend Truth?

As if I could get near either one, God or my own soul, except through Truth.

Then Truth has to be known first, in order that they can be.

Agreed.

So let's start here. Truth and true are two words. Do they stand for two things, or one?

Two, I think. Take any quality and the thing that has it: courage is one thing, a brave man is another. Chastity is one thing, a chaste person is another. It works that way with a great many words. So Truth is one thing, and a thing called true is something else.

And which of the two ranks higher?

Truth. Because chastity doesn't come from chaste people, chaste people are chaste because of it. Same with courage: brave men don't manufacture courage, they participate in it. And in the same way, if something is true, it's true because of Truth.21

True Things Die; Truth Doesn't ✦

(I.xv.28)

When a chaste person dies, does Chastity die?

Not at all.

Then when a true thing dies, Truth doesn't die with it.

But how does a true thing die? I don't follow.

You're surprised? We watch a thousand things die in front of us. Take that tree. Is it a tree but not a real tree? Or is it a real tree that somehow can't die?

You don't trust your senses, so you might tell me you're not even sure the tree is there. Fine. But you won't tell me that if it's a tree, it isn't a real one. That's not your eyes talking, it's your mind. A fake tree isn't a tree at all. If it's a tree, it's a real one.

Agreed.

And a tree is the kind of thing that gets born and dies?

I can't deny it.

Then it's settled. A real thing can die.

A real tree can be cut down. I'll grant you that much.

So real things die and Truth doesn't. Exactly the way the chaste man dies and Chastity doesn't.

Agreed. And I'm waiting to see where you're taking this.

Only the Immortal Really Is ✦

(I.xv.29)

Does this proposition strike you as true, whatever exists has to exist somewhere?

Nothing has ever won my agreement so completely.22

And do you grant that Truth is?

I do.

Then we're obliged to ask where she is. And she isn't in some region of space, unless you think something other than a body can occupy space, or that Truth is a body.

I think neither.

Then where do you think she is? We've agreed that what is can't be nowhere.

If I knew where she was, I probably wouldn't still be looking.

Can you at least conceive where she might be?

If you suggest it, maybe.

She certainly isn't in mortal things. Because whatever is in a thing can't survive if the thing it's in doesn't survive, and we agreed a moment ago that Truth remains even when true things pass away. So Truth is not in mortal things.

But Truth is, and Truth is not nowhere. Therefore immortal things exist.

And nothing is true in which Truth isn't. Which means nothing is, unless it is immortal. A false tree is not a tree, false wood is not wood, false silver is not silver, anything false is not. And everything that isn't true is false. Therefore nothing can rightly be said to exist except what is immortal.

Now go back over that chain carefully, in case some concession you made shouldn't have been made. But if it holds, we've accomplished nearly the whole undertaking, as will perhaps be clearer in the book that follows.23

Thank you. I'm grateful. And in the silence I'll go back over all of it, carefully and suspiciously, provided no shadows come back and start pleasing me, which is what I dread.

Have steady faith in God, and commit the whole of yourself to his care as far as you can. Refuse to be your own, or to will by your own power. Declare openly that you're the servant of this most merciful and gracious God. Then he won't fail to lift you to himself, and he'll let nothing happen to you except what's good for you, even when you can't tell that's what it is.

I hear it, I believe it, and I obey as far as I'm able, and unless you want something else from me, I pray with everything in me that I'll be able to do more and more.

Meanwhile, it's well. What you do next is whatever he instructs you to do, once you've seen him.

End of Book One.

Book Two

What I Actually Know About Myself ✦

(II.i.1)

We've been interrupted long enough. Love is impatient, and until it gets what it loves there's no bottom to the grief. So: the second book.

Immediately.

And let's believe God will be with us.

Let's genuinely believe it, if that's even in our power.

Our power is him.

Then pray. As briefly as you can.

God, always the same: let me know myself, let me know you.

That's the prayer. Done.

You want to know yourself. Do you know that you exist?

I do.

How do you know it?

I don't know.

Are you one single thing, or are you assembled out of parts?

I don't know.

Do you know whether you move yourself?

No.

Do you know that you think?

I do.

So it's true that you think.

It's true.

Do you know whether you're immortal?

I don't.

Of all the things you've just said you don't know, which would you most want to know first?

Whether I'm immortal.

So you love being alive.

I admit it.

Would it be enough, then, if you learned you were immortal?

It would be a great deal. For me, it would be too little.

And this 'too little', how much joy would it give you?

Enormous joy.

Enough that you'd never weep over anything again?

Over nothing at all.

And if it turned out that this immortal life was one where you'd never be allowed to know any more than you know here, would you hold back the tears then?

I'd weep my life away.

Then you don't love living for the sake of living. You love living for the sake of knowing.

I grant it.

And what if knowing itself turned out to make you miserable?

I can't believe that's possible in any case. But if it were, then nobody can ever be happy. Because right now the only thing making me miserable is my ignorance, and if knowledge is going to make me miserable too, then misery is permanent.

Now I see the whole shape of what you want.

Believing that nobody is made unhappy by knowledge, you're arguing that understanding produces happiness. Nobody is happy who isn't alive, and nobody is alive who doesn't exist. So you want to exist, to live, and to know, but to exist in order to live, and to live in order to know.

And you already know that you exist, that you're alive, and that you know.

What you want to find out is whether all three of those go on forever; or whether none does; or whether some survive and others don't; and if they all survive, whether they increase or diminish.

That's it exactly.

So if we prove we'll live forever, it follows that we'll exist forever. And then all that's left to look into is knowing.

Truth Cannot Be Killed ✦

(II.ii.2)

That's a very clean order.

For now, the order is that you answer carefully, and only when you're convinced.

Agreed.

If this world goes on forever, is it true that this world goes on forever?

Who doubts it?

And if it doesn't go on, isn't it likewise true that it doesn't?

No argument.

And once it's gone, assuming it goes, won't it then be true that the world is gone? Because for as long as the world is still here is true, it's still here. The two statements can't both stand.

Agreed.

Now. Can anything be true if Truth doesn't exist?

No.

Then Truth is still there even after the world stops being there.

I can't deny it.

And if Truth itself were destroyed, wouldn't it be true that Truth had been destroyed?

Who'd deny that?

But nothing is true unless Truth exists.

I granted that a minute ago.

Then Truth can't be destroyed. There's no way to do it. Any statement announcing its death would have to be true, and there'd be nothing left to make it true.

Nothing could be more solid than that. Keep going.

Who Exactly Is Deceived? ✦

(II.iii.3)

Now tell me: does the soul have sensation, or does the body?

The soul, it seems to me.

And intellect, does that belong to the soul?

Unquestionably.

To the soul alone, or to something else too?

I can't see anything else except the soul, unless it's God, whom I could imagine as intellect's dwelling.

Let's look at this. What would you think if someone told you that wall over there was not a wall but a tree?

Either that his senses were in error, or mine, or that he was using the word 'wall' for something else.

And if it appeared to you as a wall and to him as a tree, couldn't both be true?

Not at all. One and the same thing can't be both a tree and a wall. However it might appear to each of us separately, one of us necessarily has a false conception.

And if it's neither tree nor wall, and you're both wrong?

That could happen, of course.

That's the possibility you skipped over just now.

I admit it.

And if you both recognized it was something other than it appeared to be, would you be deceived then?

No.

So a thing can present a false appearance to a person without deceiving him?

It can, the wall goes on looking like a tree, and I go on not believing it.

Then it has to be granted: the one who is deceived is not the one who sees false things, but only the one who assents to the false as true.

Granted, without question.

And the false itself, why is the false false?

Because it appears other than it actually is.

So if there's nobody for it to appear to, there is nothing false?

That follows.

Then falsity isn't in things. It's in sensation. And the man who doesn't accept the false as true isn't deceived. And if sense is deceived while we are not. Then it has to be granted that sense is one thing and we are another.

I have nothing to say against that.

But suppose the soul is deceived. Would you dare say in that case that you aren't deceived?

How could I possibly?

But there's no sense without soul, and no falsity without sense. So the soul either produces falsity or collaborates with it.

What's gone before compels that.

Falsity Will Never Run Out ✦

(II.iii.4)

Now tell me, does it seem possible to you that falsity might someday not exist?

How could that seem possible to me? Finding Truth is so difficult that it seems more absurd to say falsity might stop existing than that Truth might.

And do you think something that doesn't live can have sensation?

That can't be.

Then there it is. The soul lives forever.

You're handing me joy too fast. Slower. One step at a time.

And yet if the things you've already agreed to are right, I don't see what's left to doubt.

It's too soon. You'll convince me I agreed too quickly long before you convince me my soul is safe. But go on, lay it out, and let me watch how you get there.

Then watch, and stop me anywhere you like.

You told me falsehood can never run out. You thought it was easier to imagine Truth going than falsehood going. And you told me falsehood only exists where something senses it. Put those together and sensing can never run out either.

But nothing senses without a soul to do the sensing. So there is always a soul.

And nothing senses without being alive. So the soul is always alive.

That's all it is. Four things you handed me, in the order you handed them over.

A Blade Made of Lead ✦

(II.iv.5)

That's a dagger made of lead. It looks like a weapon until you try to cut something with it.

Because if I grant you that the world couldn't exist without human beings in it, you're now in a position to conclude that human beings are immortal and that the world is everlasting along with them. Which proves too much, and therefore proves nothing.

Well watched. Even so, we've established something not trivial: that the world of sense cannot exist apart from soul, unless at some point there turns out to be no falsity in the nature of things.

I admit that's the consequence. But I think we should now look much harder at whether the earlier concessions were stable, because I can see real progress being made toward the soul's immortality.

Have you considered sufficiently whether you granted something too quickly?

Quite sufficiently. I see no failure of caution anywhere.

So it's established that the nature of things can't exist apart from a living soul?

Established only this far: that souls may succeed one another, the newly born replacing the ones that die.

And if falsity could be eliminated from the nature of things, wouldn't it follow that everything would be true?

That follows, I see.

Tell me why this wall seems true to you.

Because I'm not deceived by how it appears.

Because it is in fact what it seems to be?

Exactly.

Then: a thing is false because it appears other than it is, and true because it is as it appears. Remove the observer and there's nothing either true or false. But remove falsity from the nature of things and everything is true. And nothing can appear to anything except a living soul.

So the soul remains in the framework of things, whether falsity can be eliminated or not.

I see the earlier inference is now more solid. But we've gained nothing real. Because the thing that actually disturbs me is still standing: the world is never without souls, but only because birth follows death. They're always here, not from immortality, but from succession.

No Soul, No Body ✦

(II.iv.6)

Does it seem to you that material things, the ones available to sense, can ever be fully grasped by the mind?

It doesn't.

And does it seem to you that God uses senses to know things?

I don't dare say anything rash about that. But as far as I'm permitted to guess: God doesn't use senses at all.

Then we conclude that sensation is possible only to a soul.

Tentatively. As far as probability allows.

Do you grant that this wall, if it isn't a true wall, isn't a wall?

I grant nothing more willingly.

And that anything which isn't a true body isn't a body?

That too.

Then follow it: nothing is true unless it is as it seems; no sensible object can seem except to the senses; nothing except the soul can sense; no body is a body unless it's a true body. It follows that unless the soul exists, the body cannot exist.

You're driving me so fast that I can't get hold of what I'd object with.

The Stones Nobody Sees ✦

(II.v.7)

Pay closer attention.

Here I am.

This stone exists. And it's true insofar as it isn't really other than it seems. And if it isn't true, it doesn't exist. And it can't seem except to the senses.

Then follow it out. There are no stones buried in the earth where nobody can see them. That stone in front of you can't exist unless somebody's looking, and the moment we walk away it stops existing, provided nobody stays behind to watch it. A locked chest, however full, contains nothing. That block of wood isn't wood anywhere but on its surface, because the inside of anything you can't see through escapes every sense entirely, and therefore has to be counted as not existing at all. If it existed it would be true; a thing is true only by being as it appears; the inside of the wood doesn't appear; so it isn't true; so it isn't there.

Or do you have an answer to any of that?

I can see it follows from what I agreed to. And it's so absurd that I'd sooner take back whichever step you like than accept it.24

No objection from me. But you have to pick which one goes. Choose:

That things can look like something with nobody there to see them. Or that sensing can happen without a soul to do it. Or that a stone can exist without being a real stone. Or that we've been defining real wrong from the start.

Let's take the last one.

Every Definition I Try Collapses ✦

(II.v.8)

Then define it. What is real?

Something is real when it actually is what it looks like, assuming somebody is there who can look and wants to.

Then nothing nobody can look at is real. And here's a second problem. If a thing is fake when it isn't what it looks like, and this thing looks like stone to one man and wood to another, is it fake and real at the same time?

The stone-and-wood case bothers me less. I don't mind one thing being real and fake at once. Compare anything to two different things and it comes out large and small both; nothing is large or small on its own. Those words only ever describe a comparison.

It's the other one that worries me, that a thing nobody can look at turns out not to be real. That's the one I can't live with.

And if you say nothing is real on its own, aren't you afraid you've just said nothing exists on its own? Because whatever makes this wood, makes it real wood. You can't have it being wood with nobody watching, and yet not being real wood.

Then let me define it this way, and I'm not afraid the definition will be disproved for being short: what seems true to me is what is.

Then nothing can be false. Because whatever is, is true.

You've backed me into a corner, and I can't find my way out. It's come to this: I'm unwilling to be taught by anything except these questions, and I'm now afraid of being asked another one.

Praying in the Dark ✦

(II.vi.9)

God, to whom we've committed ourselves, certainly has this work in hand, and will get us out of the tight place, if only we believe, and pray to him with the whole heart.

There's nothing I'd rather do right now. I have never been this far inside the dark.

God, our Father, who tells us to pray and gives us what we ask, if praying to you makes us better people who live better lives, then listen to me, groping around in these shadows, and put out your hand. Hold your light in front of me. Call me back from wandering off. Under your guidance let me return to myself, and return to you.

Amen.

Now concentrate as hard as you're able, and listen closely.

Speak, I'm begging you, if anything at all is coming to you, before we go under.

Concentrate.

I'm all attention.

Every Fake Is a Copy of Something ✦

(II.vi.10)

Then let's open up the real question. What is a falsehood?, and here I'll ask you to hear two things in that one word, because our language gives us only the one and it will cost us later. A fake is a thing that isn't what it appears to be: a painted horse, a face in a mirror. An untruth is a statement that misses: a sentence about a woman flying. The same word covers both, and half our confusion this morning is going to come from that.

Probably nothing more than something that isn't the way it looks.

Slow down. Let's put the senses on the stand first.

Here's the thing. You never call something you saw false unless it looked like something real. The man in your dream isn't a real man. He's a fake one, and the only reason you can call him a fake is that he looked like the real thing. If you dream about a dog, you don't wake up saying you dreamed about a man. And the dog is a fake too, for the same reason: it looked like a dog.

Or take someone wide awake who mistakes a horse for a man. What fooled him? The fact that for a second the horse looked like a man. If it had looked like nothing but a horse, he could never have made the mistake.

No argument at all. And I notice the mistake only works one way round. I've never once looked at a man and taken him for a horse. Whatever is doing this, it needs a resemblance to work with, and it needs the resemblance pointed in a particular direction.

It's the same everywhere. We call a painting of a tree a fake tree. The face in the mirror, a fake face. Towers that seem to slide by when you're sailing past them, fake motion. An oar that looks bent where it enters the water, a fake break. And the only thing making any of them fake is that they look like the real thing.

Twins fool us. Two eggs fool us. Two stamps from the same ring fool us. Same reason every time.

I follow, and I agree completely, and I'm slightly unnerved by how ordinary the examples are. None of these is an exotic case. This is just what it's like to have eyes.

So here's where that lands. Everything your eyes get wrong, they get wrong because something looked like something else. Resemblance is where fakes come from.

I can't deny it.

Sorting the Copies ✦

(II.vi.11)

Let's sort this forest out. Copies come in two kinds: even and uneven.

Even, where the likeness runs both directions equally, identical twins, two stamps from the same ring. Neither one is the original.

Uneven, where the lesser thing resembles the greater. Nobody looks in a mirror and says I look like my reflection. The reflection looks like me. There's a direction to it.

The uneven kind splits again, by where the copy comes from. Some show up in the mind; some arrive through the senses. And the mental ones split once more. Some get triggered by something the senses reported, the towers that seem to slide past a moving ship. Others the mind builds by itself out of what it has in storage, which is what dreams are, and possibly what madness is.

Now the visible copies, the ones that pass for the thing they resemble. Some are made by nature and some by living creatures.

Nature has two methods. Children come out looking like their parents. That's one. Every reflecting surface in the world is the other. Notice that even when a man makes the mirror, he doesn't make the face in it.

Living creatures make pictures and likenesses of every kind. Whatever ghosts produce, if they produce anything, goes in that pile too.

And shadows. A shadow is the likeness of a solid thing, a sort of fake body, so it belongs here as well. Anything facing the sun throws light back on one side and drops a shadow on the other.

Anything there strike you as wrong?

Nothing at all. It sorts cleanly, which is what worries me. I've been agreeing to each division as it comes and I can't see the shape of the thing you're building out of them. But go on. I want to see where this ends up.

The Other Four Senses Say the Same Thing ✦

(II.vi.12)

Let's hear from the other senses before we call it settled. I want them all saying the same thing, that a fake is always a copy.

Hearing gives you almost as many. You catch a voice without seeing who's talking and take it for someone else who sounds like that. Then the weaker copies: an echo. The ringing in your own ears. Those wind-up toys built to whistle like a blackbird. What sleepers hear, and what madmen hear.

And the notes a musician calls wrong make the point better than anything. A note is wrong precisely because it's nearly right. Nobody mistakes a slammed door for the tune.

Following?

Easily.

Then quickly, so we don't lose the morning. Can you tell one lily from another by its smell? Honey from this hive from honey from that one, by taste? A swan's down from a goose's, by touch?

Not one of them. And I notice I want to argue about it and can't. I keep reaching for some difference I'd be able to name, and there isn't one. My nose and my tongue and my fingers all report the same thing twice and have no idea they've done it.

And when you taste or touch or smell things in a dream, you're being fooled by a copy too, a copy so thin there's nothing behind it at all. The less there is to it, the worse the fake.

That's true, and it's a strange thing to say out loud. A dream of honey is a worse fake than a painting of a horse, and it's worse precisely because there's less of it, less substance, less to hold, less of anything. The thinner the thing, the further it falls short of what it's imitating.

So every sense you have can be fooled by something that merely looks, sounds, tastes like the real thing. And even when you aren't fooled, when you catch the difference and refuse to be taken in, you still reach for the same word. You call the thing a fake. And you call it that because it resembled something real.

I can't doubt it.

The Objection That Wrecks It ✦

(II.vii.13)

Now watch closely while I walk the same ground again. It'll be quick.

Say whatever you want. I've settled something in my own mind, that I'm going to take this long way around without complaining about it, however far it winds. I can feel where we're heading, and I want to get there badly enough to stop resenting the road.

Good. Then: you're looking at a dozen eggs that all look alike. Can you point at one and call it a fake?

Of course not. If they're all eggs, they're all real eggs.

And the face in the mirror. How do you know that one's a fake?

You can't touch it. It doesn't make a sound. It can't move on its own. It isn't alive. I could go on for an hour.

You're impatient, so I'll skip ahead. Suppose the people you meet in dreams, walking around, talking to you, could be grabbed and held when you woke up. And suppose that once you had them, they turned out to be exactly like the people you talk to when you're awake. In every respect. Would you still call them fakes?

How could I?

Then look at what you've just done to yourself. You said they'd be real because they matched the real thing perfectly, with nothing left to tell them apart. And you'd been saying all morning that things are fake because of where they fail to match.

So which is it? If matching perfectly makes a thing real, then resemblance is where truth comes from, and it's the failure to resemble that makes a fake. You've had it backwards the entire time.

I've got nothing. And I'm embarrassed by how fast I agreed to all of it.

Why This Book Is Called Soliloquies ✦

(II.vii.14)

Don't be. Being wrong out loud is the whole reason we're doing it this way.

Since there's nobody here but us, I want this written down and called Soliloquies, talking alone. It's a new word and possibly an ugly one, but it's accurate.

Here's why it matters. Nothing gets at the truth better than two people asking each other questions. The trouble is that almost nobody can stand to lose. Get a real argument going and sooner or later something ugly goes off, somebody's pride takes a hit, and from then on they're defending themselves instead of thinking. Sometimes you can see it happen. Usually you can't.

So it's quieter this way, and it works better: I ask the questions and I answer them.

Which means you never have to be afraid to go back. When you've tied yourself in a knot, say so and we'll untie it. Any other way, there's no getting out.

It's Both, So It Can't Be Either ✦

(II.viii.15)

Fair enough. But I still can't find the mistake. The only candidate is where I said a thing is fake because it resembles something real, and nothing else even comes close to deserving the name.

And yet I have to admit the opposite at the same time. We call things fake because of where they fail to match. So not-resembling causes it too. And now I'm stuck, because I don't see how one thing gets caused by two opposite things at once.

But what if this is the one case of its kind, a genuine exception? Everyone knows that out of all the countless kinds of animal, only the crocodile moves its upper jaw to chew. Odd things do happen exactly once. And on the other side: you can hardly find any two things so alike in every detail that no detail turns up where they differ.25

I take the point. But a fake is both like and unlike the real thing, and I can't work out which half earns it the name.

Say it's the difference that makes it fake. Then everything is fake, because there's nothing real that isn't unlike something else in some detail.

Say it's the resemblance. Then the eggs start shouting that they were real and they matched, and I still can't get away from the man who wants me to admit everything is fake, because everything resembles something.

And if I get brave and say it takes both working together, where does that leave me? In the same place. Everything is partly like and partly unlike everything else, so everything is fake.

The only door left is to go back to: a fake is something that isn't the way it looks. Except that's the door with all the monsters behind it, the ones I thought I'd got clear of an hour ago. Because the moment I say that, I'm saying the real thing is whatever is the way it looks, and then I'm right back to nothing being real unless somebody's around to look at it. I can already feel the rocks under the hull. Rocks that are down there being real rocks, with nobody looking at them at all.

And if I say the real is simply what is, then it doesn't matter who argues with me: there's no room left for anything to be fake.

So every bit of it comes back, and I don't see what all this patience has bought me.

What the False Actually Is ✦

(II.ix.16)

Cheer up. I refuse to believe we asked for help and got nothing.

After all that, only two kinds of thing still deserve to be called fake. Something pretending to be what it isn't. Or, wider than that, something trying to be real and not making it.

The first kind splits in two, and what splits it is intent.

Things out to fool you. These actually want you taken in, which means there's a mind behind them, sometimes one that reasons, sometimes just an animal's instinct. You call a man a liar when getting people to believe him is the whole point.

Things that are simply made up. These come from people inventing on purpose, and here's the difference: a liar always wants to be believed. An inventor usually doesn't. Comedies and half the poems ever written are stuffed with invention meant to delight you, not fool you. Anyone telling a joke is inventing. People who make untrue things with no intention of deceiving anybody are still, in a sense, in the falsehood business, and nobody can deny they're making things up.

Things Straining Toward Being ✦

(II.ix.17)

Go on. You may finally be explaining falsehood without committing any. But that second kind, a thing trying to be real and not making it. What does that look like?

We've been tripping over them all morning. Look at your reflection. Doesn't it seem to be trying to be you? And isn't it fake for exactly one reason, that it never gets there?

It does.

And every painting, every carving, every made image of anything, aren't they all straining to be the thing they were copied from?

I'm convinced of it. And it's an odd way to have to talk, as if a painting had wants. But I can't describe what a painting is doing any other way. It's aimed at something. It reaches, and stops short, and stays there reaching.

So you'd agree that what fools people in dreams, and what fools the mad, belongs in the same group?

More than anything else does. Nothing reaches harder toward being real, toward what the rest of us see when we're awake. And they're still fakes, because reaching is all they do. They never arrive.

The sliding towers. The bent oar. Shadows. Need I keep going? They're all the same thing.

All of them, and I'd have said so an hour ago if you'd asked me straight. What I couldn't have told you is why they belong together. Now I can. Every one of them is straining at something it can't reach.

I won't bother with the other senses. Anyone who has thought about it for ten minutes already knows: out of everything the senses hand us, what we call fake is whatever is trying to be real and isn't.

The Actor Who Has to Be False to Be True ✦

(II.x.18)

You're right. But why do you keep poems and jokes out of that group? What's the difference?

Wanting to be fake is one thing. Not being able to be real is another.

Plays belong with paintings and statues, comedies, tragedies, the cheap farces, all of it. A painted man, however good the likeness, can never be as real as the lines in a comic script are. Because the lines aren't choosing to be false and aren't false out of any appetite of their own. They just do, as well as they can, what the writer built them to do.

Now take Roscius, the best actor on our stage, nobody disputes it.26 When Roscius plays Hecuba, queen of Troy, he chooses to be a fake Hecuba. By nature he's a real man. And he's a real tragedian by the very choice that makes him a fake queen. Play Priam and he's a fake Priam, because he's performing the man without being him.

And out of that comes something strange that nobody can deny is true.

Which is?

That every one of these things is real in one respect because it's fake in another. They can only do their job by being fakes of something else.

Take the fakeness away and the whole thing collapses. How is Roscius a real tragedian if he won't be a fake Andromache, a fake Hector, a fake Hercules, a hundred fake others? How is a painting of a horse a real painting unless it's a fake horse? How is a reflection a real reflection unless it's a fake man?

So if some things have to be fake one way in order to be real another way, why are we so afraid of fakes? Why do we want the truth this badly?

I don't know, and it bothers me. All I can see is that none of these are things to live by.

Because to be real as myself, I shouldn't have to fake anything, putting on other people the way actors do, or mirrors, or that bronze cow of Myron's that people swear live cattle walk up to27. I want the kind of truth that isn't two-faced. That doesn't buy being real on one side by lying on the other.

What you're asking for is enormous. And holy. And if we ever find it, won't we have to admit that Truth itself, the thing every true thing gets its name from, has just been brought to life by everything we've said up to now?

I won't argue with that.

Is the Study of Literature True? ✦

(II.xi.19)

Note — Three words are about to do a great deal of work, and all three mean something narrower today than they meant to Augustine. A discipline (his word is scientia) is any organized body of knowledge, geometry, music, medicine, the study of literature; not laboratory science, which is fifteen centuries away. Literature (his word is grammatica) is the whole business of reading and interpreting texts, not the rules for commas. And the art of reasoning (his phrase is the science of disputation) is logic, how to define a term, sort things into categories, and tell a valid inference from a bad one. Keep these three straight and what follows is clean. Miss them and it is gibberish.

Does the art of reasoning strike you as a true discipline, or a false one?

Who doubts it's true? But the study of literature is a true discipline too.

Equally true?

I don't see how anything can be truer than true.

What's truly true has nothing fake in it. And a minute ago you were upset that some things couldn't be real without also being fake. So, aren't myths and obvious inventions exactly what literature spends its time on?

They are. But literature isn't what makes them invented. A myth is a made-up story told for pleasure or for use; it arrives that way. Literature is the caretaker of language, and the job forces it to collect everything anybody has ever said or written. It doesn't make any of it false. It takes charge of it and teaches you what's true about it.

Fine. And for now I don't care whether those definitions are exactly right. My question is which of the two just did that piece of work, literature, or the art of reasoning?

I can't dodge that. Look at what I just did to answer you. I said what a myth is, and then I said what literature is, and then I set the two side by side so you could see they weren't the same thing. That's defining and sorting. And defining and sorting aren't literature's tools. They're logic's. I borrowed them to defend literature and didn't notice I was borrowing.

Daedalus Never Flew, and That's Why the Fable Is True ✦

(II.xi.20)

Now literary study itself. If it's true, isn't it true by the very thing that makes it a discipline? The word comes from learning. Nobody learns and holds onto something who can't be said to know it. And nobody knows something false. So every discipline is true.

I see nothing careless in that little argument. But I'm worried someone will conclude that even the myths are true, since we do learn them and we do remember them.

Did our schoolmaster want us to know the myths he taught?

He was ferocious about it.

Did he ever demand we believe that Daedalus flew?28

Never. But if we hadn't memorized the story itself, he'd have made sure our hands were too sore to hold anything for the rest of the day.29

Then do you deny that the story exists, and that Daedalus is reported that way everywhere?

I don't deny it.

Then when you learned it, you learned something true. Watch the inversion. If Daedalus really had flown, and the boys were reciting the account as a myth, a fiction, then what they'd memorized would have been false, because the thing itself would have been true.

So the marvel from earlier comes back around. Unless it is false that Daedalus flew, the story of the flight of Daedalus cannot be a true story.

I finally have it. But I'm waiting to see what it buys us.

Only this: that we weren't reasoning badly when we said a discipline can't be a discipline unless what it teaches is true.

And how does that help?

Because I want you to tell me what makes literary study a discipline. Whatever makes it true is the same thing that makes it a discipline.

I don't know how to answer.

Do you think that if it contained no defining, no distinguishing, no sorting into categories, it could be called a discipline at all?

Now I see where you're going. And no. I can't think of a single field of knowledge that doesn't run on definitions and categories and chains of reasoning.

That's what any of them actually consists of. You take a claim apart. You put every relevant piece where it belongs. You leave nothing out that should be in, you let nothing in that doesn't belong, and the whole thing holds together. That assembled whole is the only reason we call it a field of knowledge at all.

And that same whole is what makes it true.

That follows, the arrangement is what makes it a field of knowledge, so the arrangement is what makes it true.

Logic Turns Out to Be Truth Itself ✦

(II.xi.21)

Now tell me: which field of knowledge holds the rules for defining, classifying, and sorting?

I've already said. Those belong to the art of reasoning.

Then literary study is made both a discipline and true by the very art you were defending a moment ago. And I'm entitled to say the same about every field of knowledge, because you said, correctly, that you can't think of one where defining and sorting isn't the thing that makes it a discipline at all.

And if the same thing that makes them disciplines is what makes them true, can anyone deny that the thing they are all true by is Truth itself?

I'm nearly there. What stops me is that we're counting the art of reasoning as one field among the others. I'd have thought Truth is what makes that one true, rather than the reverse.

Sharp of you. But you don't deny that a discipline is true by whatever makes it a discipline?

That's exactly the trouble. I called reasoning a discipline, and on that basis called it true.

Then could it be a discipline in any other way than by having everything within it defined and sorted?

I have nothing to say.

But if that's precisely its own business, then it proves itself a true discipline by itself. So who would find it strange if this, the thing everything else is true by, should turn out to be, in and through itself, Truth?

Nothing stops me now from going over to that view.

Two Ways of Being In Something ✦

(II.xii.22)

Then attend to the few things that remain.

If they're such that I can understand them, I'll agree freely.

We both know that saying a thing is in something can mean two different things.

First: it's sitting there and could be moved. This log is in this room. The sun is in the east.

Second: it's in the thing in a way that can't be undone. The shape in the wood. The light in the sun. The heat in fire. Knowledge in a mind.

Or do you see it differently?

I've known that distinction since I was a boy, and I'll agree to it without hesitation.

Then do you grant that what can't be separated from the thing it's in can't survive if that thing dies?

Necessarily. And more than that, even when the thing survives, what's in it may not. The color of my body will change with age or illness while I'm still alive.

But that doesn't apply evenly. It applies to whatever merely rides along in a thing without being essential to it. Take that wall: it's some color, but it doesn't need that color to be a wall. Paint it white or black and it's still a wall.

Some properties aren't optional, though. Fire without heat isn't fire. Snow that isn't white isn't snow. Take away the heat and you haven't recolored the fire. You've abolished it.30

Then the Soul Is Immortal. Except I'm Still Afraid ✦

(II.xiii.23)

As for your question, whether a property can stay behind after the thing holding it is gone, who could possibly allow that? It's monstrous, and utterly foreign to the truth, that a thing which couldn't possibly exist unless it were in a subject could still exist when the subject doesn't.

Then the thing we were looking for is found.

What do you mean?

What you heard.

Is it already established beyond question that the soul is immortal?

If what you've agreed to holds, then beyond any question at all. Unless you want to say that the mind, even if it dies, is still the mind.

I'll never say that. What I'll say is that if it can die, then it was never a mind in the first place.

And I won't take it back just because great philosophers have said the mind can't let death into what it is, and that wherever it goes it carries life with it. Here's what worries me about that.

Light fills any room it enters, and cannot take darkness into itself, those are opposites; that much is true. But put the light out, and the room goes dark anyway. So a thing that is the enemy of darkness, and can never contain darkness, can still surrender the room to it by being extinguished, exactly as it could have by leaving.

That's my fear. That death comes to the body the way dark comes to a room, with the soul, like a light, sometimes walking out, and sometimes simply going out.

Nothing protects the body from dying. But between a light carried out of the room and a light snuffed where it stands, obviously the one to want is the first, the soul led out intact and taken somewhere, if there is a somewhere, that it can't be snuffed. And if that isn't on offer, if the soul is a flame lit inside the substance of the body and can't burn anywhere else, then every death kills both at once. In which case the life to choose, so far as a man gets to choose, is whichever one lets what's alive stay alive safely and quietly. Though if the soul dies, I don't see how that's possible either.

Lucky are the people who have somehow been persuaded that death isn't worth fearing even if the soul dies with the body.

No argument and no book has yet managed it for me.

The Proof, Stated Once and Straight ✦

(II.xiii.24)

Stop grieving. The human soul does not die.

How do you know?

From what you've already told me. And you were careful about every piece of it.

I don't recall being careless about any of it. But put them together now and give me the end of it. Don't question me any more. I want to see what that enormous circuit was for. If you're only going to list back things I already said, what good does it do me to say them again? Why hold the joy just out of reach, if we've actually got something?

You're right, and I'll do it your way. Only listen closely, this goes fast.

Here I am. Say it. Why are you killing me by inches?

Start here. When something lives inside a thing and can't be pried out of it, the two go together. If the one lasts forever, so does the other. You can't have heat outliving fire.

Now. Knowledge lives inside a mind exactly that way. Not sitting in it like a coin in a purse, built into it, the way heat is built into fire.

So if knowledge lasts forever, the mind it lives in has to last forever with it.

And knowledge is Truth. And Truth, as we settled at the beginning of this book, is the one thing that cannot be destroyed.

Which leaves you where I've been trying to bring you all morning. The mind endures. You may not call it mortal.

And if you want out of that, you can't simply dislike it. You'd have to go back and show me which step is wrong.

Two Things Still Wrong With It ✦

(II.xiv.25)

I'd give myself over to joy immediately, except that two things hold me back.

First: it bothers me that we went the enormous way around, down a chain of reasoning I couldn't now retrace, when the whole thing turns out to fit in six lines. A proof that could have been short and wasn't makes me suspicious of it, as though the length were hiding something.

Second, and worse: I don't see how knowledge can be built into the very nature of a mind when so few people have any. Especially logic. Even someone who has mastered it was ignorant of it as an infant and for years afterward.

And we can't say uneducated people don't have minds. Nor can we say that knowledge they've never encountered is somehow already sitting in them.

So if both of those are absurd, one of two things has to give: either Truth isn't permanently in the mind, or knowledge isn't Truth.31

We May Need Better Books Than We Have ✦

(II.xiv.26)

You see now that the long way around wasn't wasted. We've been trying to find out what Truth is, and I admit we haven't found it in this particular forest, though we've walked down nearly every path in it.

So what do we do? Abandon the whole thing and wait for some book to fall into our hands that settles it? A great many were written before our time that we've never read. And rather than pronounce on what we don't know, we do have people within reach, men writing on exactly this, in prose and in verse, whose work we know and whose minds we know. There's no reason to despair of finding what we want in their books.

Above all because one of them is here, a few miles down the road: the man in whom we've watched an eloquence we'd mourned as dead come back to life. He has already taught us, in his own writing, how to live. Will he really let us stay ignorant of what life is?

He is the bishop of this city, and before long he will be the one who baptizes me.32 I don't think he would refuse, and I hope a great deal from that direction.

What grieves me is that we never manage to show him how much this matters, how we feel about him, or about wisdom. If he understood how thirsty we are, he'd pour himself out far more often than he does. He settled the question of the soul's immortality long ago and is entirely at peace about it. And perhaps he doesn't realize there are people who have been living inside doubt for years, and that it is cruel to leave them there, especially when they're asking.

There is another man who knows exactly how anxious we are, from long friendship. But he's far away and we're stuck here, and we scarcely get the chance to send him a letter. In his retreat somewhere across the Alps,33 I believe he has written a poem that drives the fear of death out, and breaks up that cold stupor in the soul, hard as ice that has stood for centuries.

But in the meantime, while we wait for help that isn't in our own hands, isn't it shameful to throw the days away with the whole mind left dangling like this?

Where Is God in This? ✦

(II.xv.27)

Where is that God we prayed to and begged? Not for money, not for pleasures, not for high position and public honors, but for an open road for people looking for their own soul and for him.

Does he desert us like this? Or is he the one being deserted?

It is utterly unlike him to desert people who are seeking such things. And so it should be utterly unlike us to desert such a Leader.

So, if you're willing, let's go back over the reasoning that got us to two things: that Truth lasts forever, and that the art of reasoning is Truth. You've said those aren't firmly established, and that our conclusions therefore aren't safe.

Or shall we instead go after the other question, how knowledge can be sitting inside an uneducated mind, which we still have to call a mind, uneducated or not? You seem troubled enough that we need to debate again what you'd already conceded.

Let's take Truth first, whether it really does last forever, and whether logic really is it, and come back to the uneducated mind afterward. Settle the foundation and I think the rest stops being an argument.

So be it. But bring everything you've got to it. Because I notice that while you're listening, you want the answer so badly that you keep expecting it in the next sentence, and so you concede propositions put to you before they've been properly examined.

You may be right, and I'll do my best to beat that weakness. Start your questions, before we lose time on unnecessary things.

Truth Cannot Perish, Again ✦

(II.xv.28)

As I recall, we concluded that Truth can't be destroyed. Because if the whole world went, and Truth went with it, it would still be true that the world and Truth had perished. But nothing can be true without Truth. So in no sense can Truth perish.

I recognize those conclusions, and I'll be astonished if they turn out false.

Then let's look at the other matter.

Let me reconsider a little longer, so I don't retreat in disgrace again.

Then answer this. Is it true that Truth has been destroyed, or isn't it? If it isn't true, Truth is still here. And if it is true, how is anything true once Truth is gone? What's left to make it true?

Nothing is left for me to reconsider. Go on to the other matter. We'll certainly do everything we can so that learned and careful people can read this and correct any oversight, though I don't think anything can be said against this conclusion, now or ever.

Medea's Flying Serpents ✦

(II.xv.29)

Is Truth called Truth for any reason other than that it's the thing by which any true thing is true?

For no other reason.

And is anything rightly called true except because it isn't false?

It would be madness to doubt it.

And isn't the false what approximates the likeness of the true and yet isn't the thing it resembles?

I can't see anything else that could so readily be called false. Though we do customarily call things false that are very far from resembling the true.

Who denies that? But even those keep some faint copy of something real.

How? Take the line every schoolboy has recited. Medea escaping through the air in a chariot pulled by winged snakes.34 What part of that imitates anything true? There is no such creature and there never was. A thing that absolutely cannot exist can't be copied from.

You're right. But don't you notice that a thing which is absolutely nothing can't even be called false? Because if it's false, it is; and if it isn't, it isn't false.

Then can't we say that inconceivable monstrosity about Medea is false?

Certainly not. Because if it's false, how is it monstrous?

Then I'm looking at a miracle. So when I hear that line about the winged snakes harnessed to her chariot. I don't get to call it false?

You obviously do. Because the thing you're calling false exists.

What exists, exactly?

The sentence uttered by the verse.

And how is that a copy of anything real?

In its enunciation. It's constructed exactly as it would be if Medea had actually done the thing. The false sentence imitates the true sentence in its structure.

And if it isn't believed, imitating the true only in the manner of the telling, then it's so false that it doesn't even deceive. If it wants to be believed, it has to imitate credible truths.

Now I see there's an enormous difference between things we simply recite and things by which we assert something. So I agree. Because the only thing that gave me pause was this: that we correctly call nothing false unless it possesses some imitation of a true thing.

Who wouldn't be rightly laughed at for calling that stone over there false silver? But if he affirmed that the stone is silver, we'd say he was making a false statement, giving voice to a false judgment. Whereas we could, I think, without absurdity call lead or tin false silver, because it imitates the thing. And there our judgment isn't the false part. The thing the judgment is about is.

Why "False Lead" Sounds Wrong ✦

(II.xvi.30)

Well understood. But now see whether we can suitably call silver by the name of false lead.

That doesn't please me.

Why not?

I don't know. I only notice that it's violently against my will that it should be called that.

Perhaps because if it were, silver, being the superior thing, would seem to be dishonored? Whereas it's a kind of honor to lead to be called false silver.

That's exactly what I was trying to say.

And I think the same principle explains a piece of our law. A man who performs in women's dress loses his standing as a witness in court. Whether the right name for him is a false woman or a false man I couldn't say, but true performer certainly fits.

Note — This exchange is about naming, not about people. Augustine has just established that calling lead "false silver" flatters the lead, while calling silver "false lead" insults the silver, so a false-X label always points up the scale. He reaches for a Roman legal disqualification as one more illustration of that rule, the way he reached for the crocodile. Read as a verdict on anyone's identity it is being asked to carry weight it was never built for, and Reason's reply immediately pulls in the opposite direction.

We can take that up another time, because a great many things ordinary opinion finds shameful turn out, on inspection, to have started from an honest and even admirable motive.

Here's a real question. A man puts on women's clothes to slip past an enemy army and win his country's freedom. Has he made himself less of a man, or more? And here's another. A wise man is convinced that his staying alive matters to other people. He is freezing, and the only clothing available is a woman's. Should he refuse it and die of the cold?

As I said, later. But you can see how much judgment it takes to work out how far such things can go before they really are indefensible.

For now this is enough: nothing can be false except by imitating something true.

Is Anything True Without Imitating Anything? ✦

(II.xvii.31)

Move on to what's left. I'm well persuaded of this.

Then here's my question. Set aside the subjects we were educated in, and the pursuit of wisdom belongs on that list. Outside those, is there anything so real that it doesn't have to be fake on one side to be real on the other? Anything not stuck in the actor's position, playing Achilles?

Plenty, I'd have thought. I don't need a field of knowledge to tell me the stone over there is a stone. And it isn't copying anything in order to qualify. Name that one and a thousand more follow on their own.

I see. But doesn't the single word body cover all of them?

It would, except for three things. I'm not sure the empty space between objects counts as nothing. I don't think the soul belongs on a list of physical objects. And I certainly don't think God is a body. None of those three, if they're there at all, look to me like they're copying anything.

You're sending me a long way round, but I'll be quick. What you're calling emptiness is one thing, and Truth is another.

Very much another. Though the word cuts both ways: what is empty is also what is pointless.35 If I've spent this long hungering after emptiness, what does that make me? Emptier than the thing I'm chasing. It's Truth I want to find.

Then you'd agree that nothing is true unless Truth makes it true?

That was shown long ago.

And do you doubt that nothing is empty except emptiness itself, or that a body isn't?

Not at all.

Then presumably you don't think Truth is a body.

Certainly not.

So what's inside a body?

I don't know, and it doesn't matter here, because you already grant that emptiness, if there is any, is emptiest exactly where there's no body.

Obviously sound.

Then why are we stalling?

Does it seem to you that Truth produced emptiness? Or that anything can be true in a place where Truth isn't?

It doesn't.

Then emptiness can't be true. What isn't empty can't give birth to what is; whatever lacks Truth plainly isn't true; and in the end we call it emptiness precisely because it is nothing. How can what is nothing be true? How can what is nothing at all be?

Let's leave emptiness to be empty.

Geometry's Figures Don't Live in Bodies ✦

(II.xviii.32)

What do you say to the rest?

What rest?

The thing you can see worrying me. Two items are left on the table: God and the soul. If either is real, it's real because Truth is in it. Nobody argues about God lasting forever. And the mind lasts forever if we can actually show that Truth, which can't be destroyed, lives there.

So here's the last question. Is a body real in its own right? Or does it only carry a kind of picture of what's real?

And here's why it matters. Bodies obviously fall apart. So if we find something inside a body that's real the way a field of knowledge is real, then logic isn't necessarily what makes things real after all, because nobody thinks a body was assembled by logic, and yet there it would be, real anyway.

But if a body turns out to be real only by copying something, and so not real outright, then nothing stops us from saying logic is Truth itself.

Then let's settle the body. Until that's done this goes nowhere.

Here's my view. A body is held together by having some shape. It wouldn't be a body without one. And if that shape were the real thing, what you'd be holding would be a mind, not a body. Disagree?

Half of it. I'll grant a body can't exist without a shape. Why having a real shape would make it a mind, I don't follow.

Have you forgotten the opening of our first book, that geometry of yours?

Good of you to remind me. It comes back at once.

Are the figures geometry proves things about ever actually found in physical objects?

Never. It's astonishing how far short they fall.

Then which of the two do you consider the true one?

Don't even ask. Who is so blind in mind that he can't see that the things geometry demonstrates dwell in that very Truth, or rather that Truth dwells in them? While embodied figures, seeming to tend toward these, possess some imitation of Truth I can't name, and are therefore false.

Now I see the whole thing you were driving at.

The Soul Is Immortal ✦

(II.xix.33)

Why keep pressing about logic? Argue all day about whether geometry's figures live inside Truth or Truth lives inside them, nobody disputes where they actually are. They're in the soul. In the understanding. Which puts Truth in the mind and settles it.

So: a field of knowledge can't be pried out of the mind holding it. And Truth can't be destroyed. Then why are we still doubting that the mind goes on? What is that, except a habit of expecting everything to die?

Or is there something else the line and the rectangle and the circle are copying, in order to be real?

There can't be. Not unless a line turns out to be something other than length with no width, or a circle something other than a curve that keeps the same distance from its center the whole way round.

Then what are we waiting for? Unless you want to tell me Truth isn't in them.

God keep me from anything that mad.

Or that knowledge isn't in the mind.

Who would say that?

Or that when the thing holding a property dies, the property carries on without it.

When would I ever believe that?

Then the only door left is the one where Truth can be destroyed. Do you want to go through it?

How could I?

Then the soul does not die. There's nowhere else to stand.

Believe your own argument now. Believe her. She is shouting that she lives in you, that she cannot be killed, that no death the body can manage will take her seat away from her.

Turn away from your shadows. Turn around and come back to yourself. Nothing about you is mortal, child, except your forgetting that you aren't.

I hear it. I'm coming back to myself. I'm beginning to remember.

But hurry with what's left. In an uneducated mind, which we've agreed we can't call mortal, how are knowledge and Truth supposed to be sitting there?

That question, explored properly, needs another volume. Meanwhile I think you should review what we've investigated. If nothing you've agreed to is still in doubt, then I consider we've accomplished a great deal, and we can turn to what remains with considerable confidence.

Real Figures and the Ones the Mind Invents ✦

(II.xx.34)

Just as you say, and I'll do as you tell me. But let me get one more thing before you close the book. Say briefly how to tell the difference between the real figure the mind grasps and the picture the mind makes up for itself, what the Greeks call a phantasm, an image thrown up by imagination.

What you're asking to see can only be seen by someone completely clear, and you aren't ready. Every circuit we've dragged ourselves through has been training for exactly that.

But I can show you quickly that the difference is enormous.

Suppose you've forgotten something, and people trying to jog your memory start offering candidates. Is it this? Is it that? You can't get at the thing you're reaching for, and yet you know, immediately and with certainty, that what they're offering isn't it.

When that happens, is that really forgetting, in every sense? Because the very thing that lets you reject the wrong answers is already a kind of remembering.

It seems so.

People in that condition don't yet perceive the Truth. But they can't be misled and deceived, and they know well enough what they're looking for.

Now suppose someone tells you that you laughed for the first time a few days after you were born. You wouldn't call him a liar. And if you trusted him you'd believe it, while remembering nothing whatsoever, because that whole stretch of your life is gone. Completely. Or do you see it differently?

I agree entirely.

So being told you laughed as an infant is nothing like groping after a name you've mislaid. The name is still in there somewhere; the infancy is simply gone. Call that second one the halfway case.

And there's a third, closer still to actually remembering. You see something and you know for certain you've seen it before. You say so out loud. But where, or how, or when, that you can't get, and you stand there working at it, trying to strike a spark.

With a person it's worse: you end up asking him outright when it was you met. And the second he tells you, the whole thing floods in at once, like a light coming on. No effort at all after that. It's simply there. Or is that unfamiliar to you?

Nothing is more familiar than that.

Buried Knowledge, and the Sphere That Can't Be Imagined ✦

(II.xx.35)

It's the same with people trained in the liberal arts. They've dug up things that were unquestionably buried inside them and recovered them by learning37, and they're still not satisfied. They don't stop until the whole face of that Truth, whose brightness already leaks through these disciplines, can be looked at uncovered.36

But out of those same disciplines, all kinds of false colors and shapes come flooding into the mind as onto a mirror, and regularly mislead the people looking, convincing them they've already found everything they were after.

Those images have to be watched for and named as the traps they are. Because they change, the way a reflection swims in a turning mirror, while the face of Truth stays one thing and never moves.

Your imagination can throw up a rectangle, and another of a different size, and set them in front of you as if you were looking at them. But the mind that actually wants the true thing turns instead, if it can, to whatever it is that lets it judge all of them to be rectangles at all.

And what if someone says the mind is only judging by what the eyes are used to seeing?

Then where could it possibly have learned that a true sphere touches a true flat surface at exactly one point?

What eye has ever seen that? What eye could? You can't even picture it.

Here's the proof. Imagine the smallest circle you can, and draw lines from its edge in to the center. Draw two of them so close together that you couldn't fit a needle's point between them, and now you can't imagine squeezing another line between those two that still reaches the center without touching one of them. Your imagination is finished; it has hit its floor.

And reason says: there are infinitely many more. In that impossibly thin gap, countless lines run to the center and touch nothing but each other's destination. And between any two of them, another whole circle can be drawn.

If imagination can't be talked into that, the eyes certainly can't.

So even though it's the eyes that load these pictures into your thinking, two things are clear: the picture is nothing like the Truth, and for as long as you're staring at the picture, you cannot see the Truth.

The Last Fear ✦

(II.xx.36)

We'll go at all this more carefully when we take up how perception works. That belongs to any real inquiry into the soul's life, and we'll argue it out as well as we can.

Because I don't think your fear is small. You're afraid that death, even if it doesn't kill the soul, might wipe out everything the soul was carrying. Including Truth, assuming you'd found any.

I can't tell you how much I dread it.

Because what would that eternal life be? Wouldn't death be better? If the soul survives the way we watch it live in a newborn, present, and holding nothing —

I won't even start on the life of the unborn. Though I don't think that's nothing either.

Take heart. God will be with us while we look for him. We can feel that already. And he has promised us something on the other side of this body. Something entirely blessed. Full of Truth, with nothing false left in it anywhere.

May it be as we hope.

Note — Here the Soliloquies stop. Augustine promised a further volume on how perception works and never wrote it, and the question he leaves open in that last exchange, whether a soul that survives can remember anything at all, never gets an answer. What answers it is a promise, not an argument.

He put down the pen and never picked this particular book back up. He would write for another forty years, the Confessions, the City of God, and a great deal else, and never quite stop asking these two questions. If the book leaves you unfinished, you are standing where it was written from.

Notes on the Text

Thirty-seven notes, keyed to the small numbers in the text. Click a number to jump down; click the arrow at the end of a note to come straight back to where you were.

These are the only words in this book that nobody in the fourth century wrote. They do three jobs. They identify the people and books Augustine mentions without explanation. He assumed his readers knew who Alypius was, and you reasonably don't. They supply context a modern reader needs and a Roman one didn't. And, most importantly, they mark the seams: wherever the main text gives Augustine something to say that the Soliloquies does not, a note here says so, states where the information actually comes from, usually the Confessions, and flags scholarly guesses as guesses rather than facts.

You can skip every one of them and lose nothing but background. Nothing in the argument depends on reading them.

1. He had been a Manichee, an adherent of a dualist religion, then widespread in North Africa, which taught that good and evil are two opposing substances locked in a real war. Everything the prayer says about evil being nothing is aimed at the position he had held for roughly nine years and had to break with. ↩

2. The scene in the garden at Milan, in Confessions VIII: a voice, a book opened at random, and the end of years of stalling. It is the most famous passage he ever wrote, and it happened weeks before this book was begun. It is not described in the Soliloquies, which nowhere mentions it. ↩

3. None of this is in the Soliloquies, which gives the name Alypius and nothing else. He and Augustine were both from Thagaste in Roman North Africa, and Alypius followed him to Carthage, to Rome, and to Milan. The details here are supplied from the Confessions to make the name mean something; the text itself assumes you already know who he is. ↩

4. Monica is his mother, who had followed him from Africa and would die the following year. Adeodatus is his son, then about fifteen, born to the partner Augustine had been made to send away; the boy would be dead within three years. The students are Licentius and Trygetius, who appear by name in the other dialogues written at this house. ↩

5. Deferring baptism was widespread in the fourth century, on the reasoning that it washed away everything committed before it and nothing after, so that receiving it early meant spending it on a life not yet finished going wrong. Constantine was baptised on his deathbed. Monica had Augustine enrolled as a catechumen in infancy and then let the matter wait. Ambrose preached against the practice, and Augustine, once a bishop himself, argued hard against it too. ↩

6. The Soliloquies names Plato and Plotinus without further comment. Plotinus (d. 270) was the founder of what is now called Neoplatonism; Augustine read him in Latin translation shortly before his conversion, and said the encounter changed what he thought God could be. The dating here is deliberately loose, the text gives none. ↩

7. Veritas and sapientia are feminine nouns in Latin, so the pronoun follows automatically. No claim about the gender of anything divine is being made, and none should be read in. ↩

8. The Academics, the later school of Plato's Academy, who argued that certainty is never available and the wise man should therefore withhold assent. Augustine had just finished writing a book against them at this same house. The Stoics, mentioned a few lines later, held the narrower view that only a perfectly wise man possesses knowledge at all. ↩

9. This paragraph is the present editor's, given in Augustine's voice. The doctrine is entirely his, and it is what the sun analogy is for. But he does not step out to summarize it here. If you want only what he wrote, skip this paragraph. ↩

10. The prayer is stitched from scripture throughout. In these lines: the bread of life and the water that ends thirst are from John's gospel; death swallowed up is from Paul, quoting Isaiah; the door that opens to knocking is from Matthew. His first readers would have heard every one. ↩

11. The translation this restatement works from renders his age as "three and thirty years." The Latin idiom behind it, in my thirty-third year, means a man who has turned thirty-two, and Augustine, born in November 354, was thirty-two through the winter at Cassiciacum. Thirty-two is used here for that reason; a critical reader comparing the two texts should expect the discrepancy and know it is deliberate. ↩

12. The Hortensius, an exhortation to philosophy, now lost apart from quotations. Augustine read it at about nineteen as a set text in rhetoric and describes it in the Confessions as the thing that redirected his life. The Soliloquies says only "a single book of Cicero's." ↩

13. A single line here, easy to pass over, on the question that would occupy him for the rest of his life and produce his fiercest controversies. His position on the will's freedom did not stay where it is in this sentence. ↩

14. The image is of a household slave who has run from his master and wants to be taken back, an ordinary and legally specific situation in the Roman world, not a metaphor his readers would have found strained. ↩

15. A proverb Augustine attributes to "certain learned men." The point is that a vice you have merely lost the opportunity to indulge can look exactly like a vice you have conquered, right up until circumstances change. ↩

16. This exchange sounds colder in English than it is. Augustine is working inside an old idea of friendship, that the best kind isn't two people enjoying each other but two people climbing the same mountain, and that what binds them is the thing they're both after. Reason is not asking him to rank his friends by usefulness. Reason is testing whether he wants anything more than wisdom, and using the people he loves most as the hardest available test. He fails parts of it. ↩

17. What exposes him is an erotic dream. The text is oblique about it, deliberately so, but the force of what follows depends on knowing that his body contradicted his afternoon's confident testimony while he slept. ↩

18. Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who wrote on medicine in the first century, some three hundred years before this conversation. Augustine is citing an old authority, not a contemporary. ↩

19. Note that Reason does not agree here. It defers. Anyone reading this as Augustine's settled teaching on suffering is reading a position the book has explicitly put on hold, and one he spent the rest of his life revising. ↩

20. The erotic language here is deliberate, and it arrives on purpose right after the passage where Augustine claimed to find sex repulsive. He is not contradicting himself. He is redirecting the same energy: the wanting doesn't get destroyed, it gets pointed somewhere it can actually be satisfied. Ancient writers moved between these registers freely, and so does the Song of Songs. Read it as a man describing the strongest thing he knows and then saying, that, but aimed at God. ↩

21. Everything that follows depends on this move, so it's worth being clear about what he's just done. He is claiming that qualities are real in their own right, that Chastity and Courage and Truth exist independently of the particular people and things that display them, and are in fact more real, since the quality outlives any individual who has it. That's Plato's doctrine of Forms. If you don't grant it, the argument for the soul's immortality doesn't get off the ground. ↩

22. It should have been harder to win. This is the weakest link in the chain, and a reader who wants to break the argument should break it here: is it actually obvious that everything real has a location? Numbers don't. Justice doesn't. Augustine agrees instantly and then spends the rest of the section building on it, and he will tell you himself, four paragraphs from now, to go back and check exactly this kind of concession. ↩

23. That conclusion is as strange as it sounds. Taken flat, it says the tree in your yard doesn't really exist. Augustine knows it's strange, which is why he ends not with a flourish but with an instruction to go back and audit the reasoning, and why Book Two opens by doing exactly that. He is not asking you to believe this yet. He is asking you to find the flaw. ↩

24. This is the problem later called idealism, whether things exist when nobody perceives them, and Augustine has walked into it about thirteen hundred years before Berkeley makes it famous. He doesn't accept the conclusion. But notice what he does instead of refuting it: he says it's absurd and offers to retract a premise. Reason then makes him name which one, and he can't. ↩

25. The crocodile isn't true. They drop the lower jaw like everything else. Augustine is repeating a stock fact that had been passed down through Herodotus and Pliny for eight centuries, and he has no reason to doubt it. Nothing in the argument depends on it. He wants an example of a lone exception to a rule, and any real one would serve. ↩

26. Quintus Roscius Gallus (d. 62 BC), the most celebrated actor of the Roman stage and a friend of Cicero's, who defended him in a surviving speech. By Augustine's time his name simply meant great actor. The praise in this line is the editor's gloss; the text assumes the reader knows him. ↩

27. A bronze heifer by the sculptor Myron (fifth century BC), so lifelike that it generated centuries of epigrams claiming that live cattle and even calves were fooled by it. The detail about the cattle comes from that later tradition rather than from Augustine. ↩

28. Daedalus built wings to escape Crete; his son Icarus flew too near the sun and fell. Roman schoolboys memorized the story as a set exercise, which is exactly the point being made. They were required to know it and forbidden to believe it. ↩

29. Corporal punishment was routine in Roman schools, and Augustine complains bitterly about it elsewhere. The beating is in the original; only the phrasing is modernized. ↩

30. That's the whole distinction the proof will run on: properties a thing can lose and survive, versus properties that are the thing. Augustine is about to argue that knowledge belongs to the mind the way heat belongs to fire. ↩

31. Hold onto this objection. It's the strongest thing anyone says in either book, Reason never fully answers it, and Augustine's eventual reply, that we're recovering what was buried in us rather than acquiring it new, is the doctrine he spends the last two sections sketching and the rest of his life reconsidering. ↩

32. Almost certainly Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who baptized Augustine at Easter 387 and whose preaching had been decisive for him. The identification is a strong scholarly inference rather than a statement in the text, which describes the man without naming him. ↩

33. Unnamed in the text and not certainly identifiable; Zenobius is the usual guess. The poem against the fear of death, if it existed, has not survived. ↩

34. From Ovid. Medea, having murdered her rivals, escapes in a chariot drawn by winged serpents, the standard example, in ancient discussions, of a thing that is not merely untrue but impossible. ↩

35. Inane in Latin means both the physical void of the atomists and what is empty in the sense of pointless or futile. The pun is in the original and does not survive translation; this sentence reconstructs it rather than translating it. ↩

36. What follows is Augustine's answer to your own objection, the one about untaught minds. His claim is that learning is not acquisition but excavation: what you take in from a teacher was already down there, and instruction only digs it up. That is Plato's doctrine of recollection, and it is the load-bearing assumption of these last two sections. It's also the one he would spend decades revising, eventually replacing the buried-memory picture with a God who illuminates the mind directly. Here, at thirty-two, he still has the shovel. ↩

37. The doctrine that learning is recovery of something already in the soul. Plato's, in the Meno and the Phaedo. Augustine holds it here and gradually abandons it, replacing the buried memory with a God who illuminates the mind directly. ↩

Appendix: For Further Thought

A companion for personal reflection or small-group discussion. One entry per section, in order. You don't need to have followed every argument to use these, start wherever the book caught you.

Book One

The Problem of Writing Any of This Down · I.i.1 §

So before Augustine argues about anything, he runs into a completely practical problem: he can't trust his own memory. And what's fascinating is that he doesn't treat that as a footnote. He treats it as the first thing worth saying. The biblical authors are working with the same assumption. Israel is constantly told to write it down, tie it on, build a pile of stones by the river, because a people who stop rehearsing what happened to them become a people it didn't happen to.

Deuteronomy 6:6–9
the commands go on the doorframes and the hands because hearts leak.
Psalm 103:2
"forget not all his benefits," which is a strange thing to have to say to yourself, and he says it anyway.
  1. What is something God has done in your life that you have genuinely forgotten, and only remembered because someone else brought it up?
  2. Augustine writes because he's sick and afraid he'll lose what he's found. What would you want written down if you knew you were losing it?
  3. Where in your life is memory doing work that a practice should be doing instead?

The Prayer · I.i.2–6 §

Here's what I love about this: Reason tells him to pray first, and to write the prayer down as the opening move, and the reason given is that having done it he'll be braver about everything after. That's not decoration. That's a claim about how thinking works. And notice the shape of the prayer. It's almost entirely address. Line after line of you are the one who, before a single request shows up.

Psalm 27:4
one thing asked, one thing sought, and everything else organized around it.
Matthew 7:7–8
asking, seeking, knocking, which is exactly the posture Augustine is in for two entire books.
  1. When you pray, how much of it is address and how much is request? What would change if you inverted the ratio?
  2. Augustine says the only thing he brings is I want to. Is that enough? Has it ever been enough for you?
  3. He asks God to make him want the right thing. What do you make of a prayer that asks for its own sincerity?

Two Things, and Nothing Else · I.ii.7 §

God and the soul. Nothing else. And then Reason immediately asks the question that undoes him: how would you know when you got there? Which is such a good question, because most of us have never once defined what we're actually asking for. We say we want to know God the way we say we want to be healthy.

Psalm 42:1–2
thirst as the governing image, and thirst is specific. You can't satisfy it with something adjacent.
Philippians 3:8
Paul doing his own version of the inventory, and reaching the same short list.
  1. If you had to reduce what you want to two things, what would they be, honestly, not aspirationally?
  2. What would it take for you to say that's enough about knowing God? Have you ever thought about it?
  3. Augustine loves his friends "in that they are human." Is there a way of loving people that goes through God rather than around him?

I Don't Even Know My Best Friend · I.iii.8 §

This is one of the most quietly devastating moments in the book. He's asked whether knowing God as well as he knows Alypius would satisfy him, and his answer is: I don't know Alypius. And then: I don't know myself either. There's a whole theology of humility sitting in that admission.

1 Corinthians 13:12
we see in a mirror dimly, and even our self-knowledge is a reflection.
Psalm 139:1–6
God's knowledge of us running ahead of our knowledge of ourselves, which Augustine would say is the only reason self-knowledge is possible at all.
  1. Who do you think you know well? What would it mean to admit you don't?
  2. Is being fully known a comfort or a threat to you? Sit with whichever answer came first.
  3. What do you actually know about yourself that isn't just a story you tell?

Saying It Is Not Knowing It · I.iv.9–10 §

Augustine admits he just prayed for a bunch of things using words he doesn't understand. He'd gathered them, stored them, and propped them up with as much faith as he could manage. And I think most of us have a whole vocabulary like that, words we can deploy fluently and couldn't cash out if pressed.

Job 42:5
I had heard of you; now my eye sees you. Two completely different verbs.
1 Corinthians 8:1–2
the warning that supposing you know something is itself the evidence you don't yet know it as you should.
  1. Which words in your faith vocabulary could you not explain to a curious ten-year-old?
  2. Is there something you believe on borrowed authority that you've never examined? Does that trouble you?
  3. What's the difference between knowing about someone and knowing them? Where's the line?

The Earth and the Sky · I.v.11 §

Reason makes a move here that's worth slowing down for. Augustine wants knowing God to be a different kind of knowing, and Reason says no, same seeing, wildly different glory. You look at the dirt and the stars with the same eyes. One of them just undoes you.

Psalm 19:1–2
the heavens telling, day pouring speech into day.
Psalm 8:3–4
the same eyes turned upward, and the smallness that arrives as wonder rather than as insult.
  1. When was the last time something in creation genuinely stopped you? What did it do to you?
  2. Do you expect knowing God to feel like a different kind of knowing? What if it doesn't?
  3. What are you certain about that gives you no joy at all? Why do you think that is?

Sound Eyes, Looking, and Seeing · I.vi.12–13 §

This is the architecture of the whole book. Three things: healthy eyes, the act of looking, and actually seeing. And faith, hope, and love map onto the healing. Faith gets you into treatment. Hope keeps you in it when it's slow. Love is why you want the light in the first place. Take away any one and the patient walks out.

1 Corinthians 13:13
the same three, in the same order, doing the same job.
Matthew 5:8
the pure in heart see God, which is Augustine's entire thesis in eight words.
  1. Which of the three is thinnest in you right now, faith, hope, or love? Be specific about how you can tell.
  2. Reason says the soul won't do the work of getting well unless she believes it will let her see. What are you not doing because you don't believe it would work?
  3. What would "clean eyes" actually mean in your ordinary week?

What Survives the Vision · I.vii.14 §

Faith and hope are temporary. That's the claim. They're for the in-between, and when you finally see, they've done their job and they go. Love doesn't go. Love gets bigger. Which reframes the whole Christian life, two of your three main instruments are scaffolding.

1 Corinthians 13:8–13
prophecy passes, knowledge passes, love never ends. Paul then says all three abide, which is worth setting against Augustine's claim rather than smoothing over.
1 John 3:2
we shall see him as he is, and be changed by the seeing.
  1. If faith and hope are scaffolding, what are you building? Do you know?
  2. How would you live differently if you really believed love is the only thing that survives?
  3. What does it mean that seeing God makes you love him more rather than finishing the wanting?

God Is the Light, Not the Thing Lit · I.viii.15 §

Okay, this one is worth the price of admission. God is not one more object the mind inspects. He's what the mind sees by. You don't look at light. You look at everything else because of it. Which means the search for God is strange in a specific way: you're looking for the thing that's making the looking possible.

Psalm 36:9
in your light we see light. The whole doctrine in one line.
John 1:9
the light that gives light to everyone.
  1. What would change about your prayer if God were less like a subject to study and more like the light you study by?
  2. Have you ever noticed God most clearly in something other than God?
  3. Is there something you've been trying to see directly that you're only ever going to see indirectly?

Are You Actually Healthy? · I.ix.16 §

Reason asks whether Augustine loves anything besides God and self-knowledge, and Augustine says, beautifully: as I feel right now, nothing; but the safer answer is I don't know. Because he's been surprised by himself before. And then he admits the three things that still get to him: losing people, pain, and death.

Psalm 139:23–24
search me, because I can't do it myself.
Jeremiah 17:9
the heart's capacity for self-misreport.
  1. What are the three things that can still genuinely destabilize you? Name them.
  2. When have you been surprised by your own reaction to something? What did it reveal?
  3. Is "I don't know" a faithful answer to a question about your own heart, or a dodge?

The Inventory: Money, Status, Sex, Food · I.x.17 §

Reason walks the list, and Augustine gives confident answers about all of it, money handled, status recent but handled, sex repulsive, food indifferent. And the book is going to take every one of those answers apart. Read this section knowing it's a setup. That's not cruelty; it's diagnosis.

Matthew 6:21
where the treasure is, the heart follows. The treasure is the diagnostic.
1 John 2:15–17
the three-fold inventory of what the world offers.
  1. Run the same list on yourself. Where are you confident? Where does the confidence feel thin?
  2. Augustine is proudest of the area where he's most wounded. Is that pattern familiar?
  3. What's something you've "dealt with" that you haven't tested recently?

The Sleeping Plague · I.xi.18–19 §

Here's the move that makes this book great. Reason doesn't ask whether Augustine has these desires. He asks whether he'd want them if they served something good. And Augustine says yes, of course, if wealth funded the community, if status persuaded people toward wisdom. Which exposes something: a desire you've merely lost the opportunity to indulge looks exactly like a desire you've conquered, right up until circumstances change.

Psalm 19:12–13
hidden faults and presumptuous sins, two different categories.
Proverbs 16:2
all a person's ways seem pure to them; something else does the weighing.
  1. What have you given up that you'd take back tomorrow if the circumstances made it defensible?
  2. Is there a good cause you've used to justify wanting something you'd otherwise question?
  3. How do you tell a dead desire from a sleeping one? Is there any way besides circumstance?

What You Actually Want Your Friends For · I.xii.20–21 §

This one stings in English. Augustine says he wants his friends alive so they can pursue wisdom with him, and would prefer solitude if they got in the way. Before you recoil, notice what Reason is doing: using the people he loves most as the hardest available test of whether he wants anything more than God. He doesn't pass it cleanly.

Matthew 10:37
loving father or mother more than me, which is the same test in Jesus's mouth.
Ecclesiastes 4:9–12
two better than one, because the goal is genuinely shared.
  1. Who are your people for? Have you ever asked that question honestly?
  2. Is there a relationship in your life that competes with God rather than pointing to him?
  3. What would it look like to love someone toward God rather than instead of him?

Wisdom Will Not Share You · I.xiii.22 §

The language goes erotic here and it's completely deliberate. Wisdom as a beloved who won't reveal herself to a divided heart. And then Augustine says the thing that saves it from possessiveness: he doesn't envy her other lovers. He goes looking for more of them.

Proverbs 8:17
Wisdom personified, loving those who love her.
Exodus 20:3–5
no other gods, and then the reason given a couple of lines later: a jealous God. Exclusive love asking for exclusive love.
  1. What does it mean that God is described as jealous? Does that word land well or badly for you?
  2. Augustine wants more people pursuing what he pursues. Is your faith like that, or more private?
  3. What are you divided between right now?

Not Everyone Climbs the Same Way · I.xiii.23 §

Reason lays out a training program for the eyes, cloth, then gold, then fire, then stars, then moon, then dawn, then the sun. And says most people need it, and that skipping it rarely ends well. That's a remarkably patient theology of growth from a man in a hurry.

Hebrews 5:12–14
milk before solid food, and the senses trained by practice.
1 Corinthians 3:1–2
Paul making the same concession to the same reality.
  1. Where are you on the ladder? Be honest rather than modest.
  2. Have you ever tried to skip a step spiritually? What happened?
  3. Who is a step or two ahead of you that you could actually learn from?

The Only Instruction There Is · I.xiv.24 §

"Let go of what your senses hand you." One instruction, and Reason says he doesn't know any others. This is the most Platonist moment in the book, and it's the one most easily bent into something Augustine didn't mean, the sentence isn't hate what you see, it's don't get stuck to it.

Colossians 3:1–3
setting the mind on things above, said to people still living an ordinary life below.
2 Corinthians 4:18
what's seen is temporary; what's unseen is eternal.
  1. What are you stuck to? Not what's sinful, what's simply holding you at eye level.
  2. Is there a difference between despising the world and not being held by it? Where's the line for you?
  3. What would it mean to enjoy something without needing it?

The Eye That Loves the Dark · I.xiv.25 §

And here's the trap. Augustine says he can't despise lesser things until he's seen the greater thing. Reason says that's the eye announcing it'll stop loving darkness once it's seen the sun, and the eye loves darkness because it's sick. You can't heal yourself into the position where healing becomes possible. Something has to come from outside.

John 3:19–21
loving darkness because of what light would show.
Ephesians 2:8–9
grace as the thing you couldn't have generated.
  1. Where are you waiting for proof before you'll take a step you already know you should take?
  2. What do you think you're healthy about that you might not be?
  3. What does it mean that the physician decides when you're ready, not you?

Breaking Down · I.xiv.26 §

He weeps. He stops promising anything. He says I won't say one word about my own health until I've actually seen that Beauty. This is the hinge of Book One, the collapse of a confident man into someone who will finally let himself be treated.

Psalm 51:17
a broken and contrite heart as the thing not despised.
2 Corinthians 12:9–10
power made perfect in weakness, which is the same discovery.
  1. When did you last stop defending yourself? What happened after?
  2. Is there something you keep promising God that you should probably stop promising?
  3. What would it mean to hand over the verdict on your own progress?

One Glimpse Before the Book Ends · I.xv.27 §

He refuses to let the book close without something. And Reason gives him Truth. You can't know God or the soul except through Truth, so Truth has to come first. Which is a claim Christians read differently than Augustine could have when he wrote it.

John 14:6
the way, the truth, and the life, as a person rather than a principle.
John 8:31–32
knowing the truth, and being set free by it.
  1. What do you do with a truth you don't like? Does it get the same treatment as one you do?
  2. Augustine won't let the conversation end without a glimpse. What are you refusing to leave without?
  3. If Truth is a person and not a proposition, what changes about how you pursue it?

True Things Die; Truth Doesn't · I.xv.28 §

The tree dies. Treeness doesn't. The chaste person dies; chastity doesn't. Augustine is reaching for something that doesn't decay when its instances do, and every one of us has felt the ache underneath that argument at a funeral.

Isaiah 40:8
grass withers, flower fades, the word stands.
Matthew 24:35
heaven and earth passing, and something not passing with them.
  1. What have you lost that you're confident wasn't finally lost?
  2. Is there something you love that you think is permanent? What makes you think so?
  3. How does the death of particular things change what you invest in?

Only the Immortal Really Is · I.xv.29 §

Truth exists. Truth isn't a body. Truth can't live in things that die. Therefore immortal things exist, and Augustine pushes it further than most of us would follow: nothing really is except what lasts. He tells you himself to go back and check it.

1 Timothy 6:16
the one who alone has immortality, which makes it a property of one thing rather than a prize handed around.
Psalm 102:25–27
earth and heavens wearing out like clothing while one thing stays the same. Augustine's test for what counts as real, arrived at independently in a psalm.
  1. What in your life would you call real by Augustine's standard? What wouldn't survive it?
  2. He instructs the reader to look for the flaw. Which step would you push on?
  3. Does it comfort or unsettle you that permanence is the test of reality?

Book Two

What I Actually Know About Myself · II.i.1 §

Reason runs a diagnostic and the results are almost comically thin. Do you know you exist? Yes. How? No idea. One thing or many? Don't know. Immortal? Don't know. But he does know he thinks, and out of that he builds a ladder: to exist, to be alive, to understand. And he admits he wants the first two mostly for the sake of the third.

Acts 17:28
in him we live and move and have our being; the same ladder from the other direction.
1 Corinthians 2:11
nobody knows a person's thoughts except that person's own spirit, which is exactly the instrument Reason is auditing here.
  1. What do you actually know about yourself with certainty? The list is shorter than you'd think.
  2. Augustine wants to live mostly in order to know. What do you want to live for? Answer before you edit it.
  3. He says an eternal life without understanding would make him weep. Do you agree?

Truth Cannot Be Killed · II.ii.2 §

The argument here loops back on itself, elegantly. If Truth were destroyed, the statement Truth has been destroyed would have to be true, and there'd be nothing left to make it true. So the destruction is unsayable. Something in reality refuses to be unsaid.

Psalm 119:89–90
a word settled and standing, faithfulness running across generations.
Hebrews 6:18
the impossibility of God lying, offered as ground for hope rather than as a technicality.
  1. What would it mean for you if truth were finally just a majority opinion? Sit in that a second.
  2. Is there something you're treating as permanent that probably isn't?
  3. Where do you go when what you thought was solid turns out not to be?

Who Exactly Is Deceived? · II.iii.3 §

The distinction here is useful in ordinary life. You are not deceived by seeing something false. You're deceived when you agree with it. The wall can look like a tree all day. The error happens when you sign for it.

James 1:14–15
the sequence from desire to consent to consequence, with the hinge in the middle.
Genesis 3:6
she saw, and she took. The gap between those two verbs holds the whole doctrine.
  1. What are you currently seeing that you haven't yet agreed with? Is that a stable place to stand?
  2. Where have you signed for something without noticing you'd signed?
  3. Is there a difference between being tempted and being deceived? Does that distinction help you?

Falsity Will Never Run Out · II.iii.4 §

Augustine says something bleak and honest: it's easier to imagine truth vanishing from the world than falsehood vanishing. He isn't being cynical. He's looking around.

Romans 1:25
exchanging the truth for a lie, described as something people do rather than something done to them.
2 Thessalonians 2:10–11
refusing to love the truth, and what follows from the refusal.
  1. Do you think falsehood is more durable than truth? What does your gut say, and does your theology agree?
  2. Where do you tolerate a small untruth because the truth would cost something?
  3. What would a world without falsehood require? Not of others, of you.

A Blade Made of Lead · II.iv.5 §

Augustine calls Reason's argument a dagger made of lead: looks like a weapon until you try to cut with it. And he's right, it proves too much. What I love is that he does this to an argument supporting a conclusion he desperately wants to be true.

Proverbs 18:17
the first to plead seems right until someone cross-examines.
1 Thessalonians 5:21
test everything and hold what's good, which assumes testing is compatible with faith.
  1. What belief do you hold with good conclusions and bad reasons? Does that matter?
  2. Have you ever refused an argument that supported your own position? What did it cost?
  3. Is it faithful or faithless to poke at something you want to be true?

No Soul, No Body · II.iv.6 §

The chain tightens fast: nothing is real unless it's what it seems, nothing seems anything except to a perceiver, only souls perceive, so bodies need souls in order to be bodies. Augustine is being carried somewhere he isn't sure he wants to go, and says so.

Genesis 2:7
dust plus breath, with the person being the combination rather than either part.
Psalm 104:29–30
creation as continuously held rather than merely launched.
  1. Does anything exist that nobody has ever perceived? What's your instinct, and why?
  2. What does it mean that God perceives what no one else does?
  3. Where are you being carried by an argument you're not sure you want to follow?

The Stones Nobody Sees · II.v.7 §

The funniest and most unsettling passage in the book. Follow the logic and there are no stones underground, locked chests contain nothing, and wood isn't wood below the surface. Augustine's response is basically: that's absurd, take back whichever step you like. And Reason makes him name which one, and he can't.

Psalm 139:7–12
darkness not dark to God, which is the theological answer to the puzzle.
Hebrews 4:13
nothing hidden from the sight of the one we answer to.
  1. Does it change anything that God sees the parts of reality nobody else does, including of you?
  2. Have you ever known a conclusion was wrong without being able to say where the argument failed? What did you do?
  3. What in your life exists only because someone is paying attention to it?

Every Definition I Try Collapses · II.v.8 §

Three attempts, three failures. Every definition of real he tries either makes reality depend on observers or leaves no room for anything false. And then this wonderful admission: he's unwilling to be taught any way except by these questions, and now he's afraid of the next one.

Proverbs 3:5–7
leaning on your own understanding, and where that runs out.
Job 38:1–4
God answering a demand for explanation with questions instead.
  1. When did a question you asked God turn around and ask you something?
  2. What are you afraid to be asked right now?
  3. Is there a definition you rely on that you've never actually tested?

Praying in the Dark · II.vi.9 §

He stops arguing and prays, and the line is I have never been this far inside the dark. Not a crisis of morals, a crisis of thinking. And he asks for a hand and a light rather than an answer. There's a whole spirituality of intellectual honesty in that.

Psalm 88
the psalm that never resolves, and is in the book anyway.
Psalm 130:1–2
out of the depths, which is a location before it's a mood.
  1. Have you ever prayed about a thinking problem rather than a moral one? What happened?
  2. What would it mean to bring God your genuine confusion rather than your tidied version of it?
  3. Where are you pretending to see more clearly than you do?

Every Fake Is a Copy of Something · II.vi.10 §

Here's the insight the rest of Book Two runs on: nothing is a fake unless it resembles something real. You can't dream about a dog and call it a dream about a man. Which means counterfeits are parasites. They have no independent existence, only borrowed.

2 Corinthians 11:14
the adversary disguised as light, which only works because light is real first.
Matthew 7:15
wolves in sheep's clothing, dangerous precisely because of the resemblance.
  1. What's a counterfeit in your life that works only because it resembles something you genuinely need?
  2. If every fake borrows from something real, what does that say about the things that tempt you?
  3. Where have you mistaken the resemblance for the thing?

Sorting the Copies · II.vi.11 §

Reason sorts resemblance into even and uneven. Twins resemble each other equally; a reflection resembles you in a way you don't resemble it. There's a direction to it. And that asymmetry matters enormously for anything made in the image of something else.

Genesis 1:26–27
image and likeness, with the direction built in.
Romans 1:22–23
exchanging glory for an image, which reverses the arrow.
  1. What does it mean to be an image of God rather than a copy of him?
  2. Where have you got the arrow backwards, treating the reflection as the original?
  3. What would it look like to resemble God more accurately this month?

The Other Four Senses Say the Same Thing · II.vi.12 §

Two lilies, honey from two hives, swan's down and goose down. Augustine can't tell them apart, and admits he keeps reaching for a distinction that isn't there. His senses report the same thing twice and have no idea they've done it.

Hebrews 5:14
powers of discernment trained by constant practice, which assumes they start untrained.
Psalm 34:8
taste and see, offered as a real invitation rather than a metaphor.
  1. What have you trained yourself to discern? What have you not?
  2. Where do your instincts report confidently and get it wrong?
  3. What would it take to develop taste for something you currently can't tell apart?

The Objection That Wrecks It · II.vii.13 §

Augustine's whole account collapses in one move. If a perfect copy would be real, then resemblance produces truth rather than falsehood, and he's had it backwards all morning. His response is my favorite line in the book: I've got nothing, and I'm embarrassed by how fast I agreed to all of it.

Hebrews 1:3
the exact imprint of God's nature. The one case where perfect resemblance produces truth rather than a fake, which is the objection Augustine has just run into.
Acts 17:11
the Bereans checking rather than accepting, and being commended for it.
  1. When were you last genuinely wrong about something you'd been confident about? How did you handle it?
  2. Is embarrassment a useful spiritual signal or just a painful one?
  3. What are you agreeing to too quickly right now?

Why This Book Is Called Soliloquies · II.vii.14 §

Augustine invents a word here, talking alone, and explains why. Question and answer is the best way to find truth, but almost nobody can stand to lose an argument, and once pride is engaged people defend instead of think. So he takes both parts himself.

Psalm 42:5
the psalmist interrogating his own soul, which is the same genre.
Psalm 77:6
remembering, meditating, and the spirit making diligent search.
  1. When did you last lose an argument gracefully? What made it possible?
  2. Try his method: ask yourself a hard question in writing and answer it honestly. What happens?
  3. Where does your pride most reliably stop you from thinking?

It's Both, So It Can't Be Either · II.viii.15 §

Augustine is stuck in a real bind, a fake is both like and unlike the real thing, and he can't work out which half earns the name. This is what honest thinking looks like from the inside. Not a tidy progression. A man saying every door I try leads back to the monsters.

Ecclesiastes 8:17
the admission that you can't find out the work under the sun, however hard you labor.
Proverbs 30:2–4
a man declaring himself too stupid to work it out, then asking a string of questions he cannot answer. Honest aporia, in the canon.
  1. What question have you circled for years without resolving? Is that failure, or faithfulness?
  2. Can you hold a genuine contradiction without forcing a resolution? What does that cost you?
  3. Where are you pretending to more clarity than you have, and who is it for?

What the False Actually Is · II.ix.16 §

The definition finally arrives in two parts: something pretending to be what it isn't, or something reaching toward being and falling short. The second is the one that stays with you. Falsehood as failed aspiration rather than active malice.

John 8:44
falsehood traced to a person and a will, which is the first kind.
Psalm 62:9
humanity itself lighter than a breath when weighed, which is nearer the second.
  1. Which kind do you deal with more, deliberate deception, or things that simply fall short of what they promised?
  2. Is there something in your life reaching toward good and not getting there? Is that a failure?
  3. How should you treat a thing that's trying to be real and can't?

Things Straining Toward Being · II.ix.17 §

Your reflection seems to want to be you. Paintings strain toward what they copy. Dreams reach hardest of all and arrive nowhere. There's an ache built into the structure of created things, everything pointing past itself at something it isn't.

Romans 8:19–22
creation groaning, straining, waiting. The same posture at cosmic scale.
Isaiah 26:17–18
writhing in labour and giving birth to wind. Straining toward being and arriving nowhere, which is Augustine's second kind of falsehood exactly.
  1. What in your life is straining toward something it can't quite reach? Is that tragic or hopeful?
  2. Have you ever mistaken a signpost for a destination? How long before you noticed?
  3. If longing is built into things, what is yours pointed at?

The Actor Who Has to Be False to Be True · II.x.18 §

Roscius has to be a fake Hecuba to be a real tragedian. A painting has to be a false horse to be a true painting. And Augustine recoils. He doesn't want to be true in one respect at the cost of being false in another. He wants something that isn't two-faced.

Matthew 6:1–6
performed righteousness, which is exactly the failure he's worried about.
2 Corinthians 6:8–10
treated as impostors and yet true, the paradox turned inside out.
  1. Where are you playing a role? Is it honest playing, or hiding?
  2. Is there a version of yourself you perform that's drifting from who you actually are?
  3. What would it mean to be undivided, the same person in every room?

Is the Study of Literature True? · II.xi.19 §

Literature deals in myths and inventions, and Augustine argues it's a true discipline anyway. It doesn't make things false; it takes charge of them and tells you what's true about them. Which is a rather good description of how to read anything, including scripture.

Philippians 4:8
whatever is true, and the instruction to actually think about it.
Proverbs 25:2
the glory of God to conceal a matter, the glory of kings to search it out.
  1. What's the difference between a story that's made up and a story that's false?
  2. How do you read fiction? Does it give you truth, and if so, how?
  3. Where has a story told you something an argument couldn't?

Daedalus Never Flew, and That's Why the Fable Is True · II.xi.20 §

Such a good inversion. The story of Daedalus is a true story precisely because the flight is false, if he'd really flown, calling it a fable would be the error. Worth sitting with if you've ever argued about whether a text has to be literal to be true.

Luke 8:4–10
parables: nothing in them happened, and everything in them is true.
2 Samuel 12:1–7
Nathan's story of the poor man's lamb. None of it happened, and it convicts a king. The fable works because it is false.
  1. Have you ever assumed a story had to have happened in order to mean something?
  2. What's the truest thing you know that you can't prove?
  3. How do you decide what kind of writing you're reading? Does it change what you ask of it?

Logic Turns Out to Be Truth Itself · II.xi.21 §

Every field of knowledge runs on defining, sorting and reasoning, so the art of reasoning underwrites all of them, and Augustine concludes it must be Truth. Whatever you make of the argument, notice the instinct: he's hunting for the one thing everything else depends on.

Colossians 1:16–17
all things holding together in one person.
John 1:1–3
the Logos: reason and word and order at once, and where Christians would say this argument was always heading.
  1. What holds your world together? Name it honestly, whatever it is.
  2. Is there a difference between believing in Reason and believing in a reasoner?
  3. Where do you look for something underneath everything else?

Two Ways of Being In Something · II.xii.22 §

The distinction: a log is in a room and could be moved. Heat is in fire and can't be. Take the heat out and you haven't cooled the fire, you've abolished it. Augustine is about to argue that knowledge is in the mind the second way, and it's worth asking what's in you that way.

John 15:4–5
abiding, where separation isn't relocation but death.
Colossians 3:3
your life hidden with Christ, which is the inseparable kind.
  1. What's in you the way heat is in fire, remove it and there's no you left?
  2. What have you treated as essential that turns out to be removable?
  3. What does it mean to abide rather than to visit?

Then the Soul Is Immortal. Except I'm Still Afraid · II.xiii.23 §

He grants the argument and stays terrified, and the image is unforgettable. Light can't contain darkness, but blow it out and the room goes dark anyway. So maybe the soul walks out of the body. Or maybe it just goes out.

Hebrews 2:14–15
people held in slavery their whole lives by the fear of death.
Psalm 23:4
walking through the valley, where the comfort is companionship rather than explanation.
  1. Are you afraid of death? Give the real answer, not the one you're supposed to give.
  2. Has an argument ever settled a fear for you? Has anything?
  3. What would actually help, proof, or presence?

The Proof, Stated Once and Straight · II.xiii.24 §

Reason lays it out kindly. What can't be pried out of a thing goes wherever that thing goes; knowledge is in the mind that way; knowledge is Truth; Truth can't be destroyed; therefore the mind endures. And then: if you want out of it, you'd have to show me which step is wrong.

1 Corinthians 15:53–55
mortality putting on immortality, and death swallowed up.
2 Timothy 1:10
life and immortality brought to light, which is a revelation claim rather than an argument.
  1. Does this argument move you? Why or why not, and is your reason intellectual, or something else?
  2. What's the difference between being convinced and being comforted?
  3. Where do you want proof and keep being handed a promise?

Two Things Still Wrong With It · II.xiv.25 §

Augustine won't take the win. First, the proof is suspiciously long for how short it turns out to be. Second, and this is the strongest objection anyone makes in either book, if knowledge is built into every mind, why do so few people have any? Reason never fully answers it.

Mark 9:24
I believe; help my unbelief. Both halves in one breath, from a man who meant both.
Psalm 73:16–17
the wearying problem, unresolved until the location changes.
  1. What's your strongest objection to something you believe? Have you ever said it out loud?
  2. Is it disloyal to keep pressing on a conclusion you want to be true?
  3. Where do you need to enter the sanctuary before the problem resolves?

We May Need Better Books Than We Have · II.xiv.26 §

Two people could help and he can't reach either. One is across town and too settled in his own certainty to notice the people still in the dark. The other is across the Alps. It's a startlingly ordinary complaint from a man mid-argument with himself: I need someone to talk to and there isn't anyone.

Proverbs 11:14
safety in an abundance of counselors.
2 Timothy 4:13
Paul near the end, asking someone to bring the books and the cloak.
  1. Who could help you with what you're working on? Have you asked?
  2. He says the settled don't always notice the unsettled. Are you settled about something in a way that's made you less useful?
  3. What book, or which person, do you need right now?

Where Is God in This? · II.xv.27 §

The complaint is raw. We didn't ask for money or status; we asked for a way through to you, so where are you? And Reason's answer isn't an explanation. It's he doesn't abandon people looking for this, so don't abandon him.

Psalm 13:1–2
how long, four times, from someone who keeps praying anyway.
Psalm 22:1–2
the abandonment psalm Jesus quotes from the cross.
  1. Have you asked God for something good and gotten silence? What did you do with that?
  2. Is it faithful to complain to God? What does the Psalter suggest?
  3. What keeps you in the conversation when nothing is coming back?

Truth Cannot Perish, Again · II.xv.28 §

He returns to the argument and it holds. Announcing truth's death is self-refuting; the announcement would have to be true. Notice the pattern. He keeps going back to the same foundation to check whether it moved.

Numbers 23:19
God not a man, that he should lie or change his mind.
Titus 1:2
hope resting on the one thing that can't be otherwise.
  1. What foundation do you keep going back to check? Should you check it more, or less?
  2. Is there something you've settled that deserves re-examination?
  3. What in your faith is genuinely unshakeable, and how would you know?

Medea's Flying Serpents · II.xv.29 §

The distinction he finally lands on: the winged serpents aren't false, because they aren't anything. The sentence is false, shaped like a true sentence and isn't one. Which is exactly how lies work. They borrow the form of truth-telling.

Ephesians 4:25
putting away falsehood and speaking truth, because of what we are to each other.
1 Corinthians 8:4
an idol has no real existence. A thing that is not false but simply nothing, which is Augustine's point about the serpents.
  1. Where do you use the form of honesty without the substance?
  2. What's the difference between a lie and a fiction? Does your speech respect it?
  3. When did someone tell you a hard truth in a way you could actually receive? What made it work?

Why "False Lead" Sounds Wrong · II.xvi.30 §

Call lead false silver and you've flattered it. Call silver false lead and you've insulted it. The direction is always upward, a counterfeit aims at something better than itself. Which makes calling something a fake a backhanded compliment to whatever it's imitating.

Isaiah 5:20
calling evil good and good evil; the disaster of getting names wrong.
Isaiah 1:22
silver become dross. The same metals, the same direction, and the insult lands the way Augustine says it does.
  1. What do you call things? Does your vocabulary honor or diminish what it names?
  2. Where have you accepted a name for yourself that doesn't fit?
  3. If counterfeits aim upward, what is the counterfeit in your life aiming at?

Is Anything True Without Imitating Anything? · II.xvii.31 §

The search for something that just is, not a copy, not derivative, not borrowed. Bodies fail the test. Emptiness fails. What's left is soul, and God. And he can't help noticing the pun: what's empty is also what's pointless, and he's spent the morning hungry for it.

Exodus 3:14
the name that is simply I AM, with nothing behind it.
Revelation 1:8
Alpha and Omega, the one who was and is and is to come.
  1. What in your life is derivative, borrowing its worth from something else?
  2. Is there anything you treat as ultimate that's actually a copy?
  3. What would it mean to build on the one thing that isn't borrowed?

Geometry's Figures Don't Live in Bodies · II.xviii.32 §

No physical circle is a real circle. Draw the best one you can and it's an approximation of something that lives only in the mind. Augustine takes that as evidence that the truest things aren't the touchable ones, the physical world is the copy, not the original.

Hebrews 8:5
a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.
Romans 1:20
invisible things understood by way of visible ones, which is the traffic Augustine says runs in both directions.
  1. Does it change anything to think of the physical world as a shadow of something more solid?
  2. What perfect thing have you only ever met in imperfect versions?
  3. Is the shadow worth loving? What's the right way to love it?

The Soul Is Immortal · II.xix.33 §

The climax, and it's a summons rather than a QED. Turn away from your shadows. Turn back to yourself. Nothing about you is mortal except your forgetting that you aren't. Whatever you make of the proof, that last line is one of the great sentences of the ancient world.

Luke 15:17
he came to himself, the exact turn Reason is describing, in a pigsty.
1 Corinthians 3:16
you are a temple, and something dwells there.
  1. What have you forgotten about yourself that's actually true?
  2. What would "coming to yourself" look like this week? Be concrete.
  3. Is there a shadow you keep turning back toward? Why that one?

Real Figures and the Ones the Mind Invents · II.xx.34 §

The passage on forgetting is unexpectedly tender. Someone offers you a name and you know instantly it's the wrong one, which means the right one is in there somewhere. Even failing to remember turns out to be a kind of remembering.

1 John 4:1
testing what's offered rather than accepting it, which requires already knowing something.
John 10:4–5
sheep who follow a known voice and will not follow a stranger's. Recognition working exactly the way Augustine describes: you reject the wrong one because the right one is already in you.
  1. What do you recognize as wrong without being able to say what's right? What does that tell you?
  2. Has something ever come flooding back the instant someone named it?
  3. What might already be in you that you haven't recovered yet?

Buried Knowledge, and the Sphere That Can't Be Imagined · II.xx.35 §

Two things here. Learning as excavation rather than acquisition, the arts dug up out of the soul. And then a thought experiment your imagination simply cannot perform: infinite lines to a center, touching nowhere else. Reason can prove it. Picture it and you'll fail.

Ecclesiastes 3:11
eternity in the heart, and the inability to see the whole.
Romans 12:2
transformed by the renewing of the mind, which assumes the mind can become more than it is.
  1. Where does your imagination fail you? Does that mean the thing isn't real?
  2. Has learning ever felt like remembering to you?
  3. What do you believe that you cannot picture?

The Last Fear · II.xx.36 §

And the book stops. Not with triumph, with Augustine's real fear said out loud. What if the soul survives and remembers nothing? What if eternal life is a newborn's blankness? Reason doesn't produce another argument. It offers a promise, and Augustine answers, may it be as we hope.

1 Corinthians 13:12
then face to face; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
Revelation 21:3–5
God with us, the tears wiped, all things made new.
  1. What's your version of Augustine's last fear, the thing arguments haven't settled?
  2. He ends on hope rather than proof. Is that a failure, or the only honest ending?
  3. The book stops mid-thought. What would you want to say next?

Reference

A Short Glossary

Six words carry more weight in this book than their modern equivalents suggest. Three of them changed meaning between Augustine's Latin and ours, and getting them wrong makes his central argument unreadable.

Discipline (Latin scientia). Any organised body of knowledge: geometry, music, medicine, the study of literature. Not laboratory science, which is fifteen centuries away. When Reason says knowledge lives in the mind the way heat lives in fire, this is the word doing the work.

Literature (Latin grammatica). The whole business of reading and interpreting texts, not the rules for commas. Its province includes myths, plays, and obvious inventions, which is why Augustine has to explain how a discipline full of made-up stories can still be true.

The art of reasoning (Augustine's phrase: the science of disputation). Logic. How to define a term, sort things into categories, and tell a good inference from a bad one. His claim that this underwrites every other field is the hinge of Book Two.

Real and fake, true and untrue. Latin uses one word, falsum, for both a thing that is not what it appears and a statement that misses the mark. English splits them. This restatement uses fake for objects, a painted horse, a face in a mirror, and untrue for statements. Reason introduces the distinction himself, once, where the argument first needs it.

Truth (capitalised). Not accuracy, and not a collection of correct statements. Augustine means the thing by which anything true is true at all, closer to a reality that things participate in than to a property they have. The argument for the soul's immortality depends entirely on taking this seriously.

Reason. Both a character in the dialogue and the name of a faculty Augustine possesses. Both senses are live at once, and at one point he says the soul's gaze is reason while Reason is the one speaking. This is not a translation slip.

Names in the Text

Everyone Augustine mentions without explaining. Each links to the passage where the name appears; the numbered notes give fuller detail.

Where to Go Next

If this book got hold of you, read the Confessions. It covers the same years from the far side, and the garden scene it describes happened weeks before the Soliloquies were begun. Book VIII is the one everybody quotes; Book X, on memory, is the one that pairs best with what you have just read.

If you want the argument done properly, Augustine returned to the immortality question almost immediately in On the Immortality of the Soul, which reads like the notes for the third part he never wrote here. It is short, dense, and unsatisfying in an interesting way.

If you want to check this restatement, the Cleveland translation is freely available online, and modern scholarly translations exist in most university libraries. Every section here carries its citation, so any passage can be found in seconds.

If you want the other Cassiciacum dialogues, three more survive from that same winter in the same house, with the same household in the room: Against the Academics, On the Happy Life, and On Order. The Soliloquies is the only one where he talks to nobody but himself.

How to Cite This

Cite the passage, not the page. Every section carries its location in the original, and those coordinates work in any edition:

Augustine, Soliloquies I.vi.12–13, in Soliloquies Restated (2026).

For the underlying translation: Augustine, The Soliloquies of St. Augustine, trans. Rose Elizabeth Cleveland (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910).

Sources and Rights

The Soliloquia was written about 386 and has been in the public domain for roughly sixteen centuries. The base translation, by Rose Elizabeth Cleveland (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910), is also in the public domain and was consulted through the Online Library of Liberty.

The restated text, the notes, the introduction, the section headings, and the appendix are new work, prepared in 2026. Share it freely.

Accessibility

This edition targets WCAG 2.1 Level AAA. Every text and background pair meets or exceeds a 7:1 contrast ratio in both light and dark themes; line spacing, paragraph spacing, and line length meet the enhanced requirements; the colour scheme can be set by the reader and is remembered; every link has an accessible name, including the symbol links; there is a skip link, a main landmark, and a visible keyboard focus state; and the page honours reduced-motion and increased-contrast preferences.

One criterion is not claimed. The reading-level requirement asks for text readable at roughly a lower-secondary level, and a fourth-century argument about the immortality of the soul will not meet it however plainly it is written. The introduction, the notes, and the appendix are offered as the supplement that criterion accepts in its place.

Colophon

Set in Fraunces for display, Newsreader for reading, and IBM Plex Sans for apparatus. The four voices in the dialogue are distinguished typographically rather than by label: Reason indented behind a rule, Augustine's replies in plain text, his narration in italic, and the editor's notes in a panel in the sans face.

Prepared from the 1910 Cleveland translation, checked section by section against the original's chapter and section divisions: fifteen chapters and twenty-nine sections in Book One, twenty chapters and thirty-six sections in Book Two.

First edition, 2026.