Continuities between the Life and Thought of Augustine

AUGUSTINE'S intellectual development was in a context rich with choice. The Mediterranean world of the fourth century must have provided as many open options to the inquiring mind as any era and arena ever. Moving freely about this world, the young Augustine exposed himself to many influences and actually sampled several positions before he finally, in his mid-thirties, settled on the particular Christian position to which he was thereafter committed. How did Augustine happen to come finally to make a particular set of affirmations ? To answer this question, the intellectual historian can trace the influence of particular people, schools, and books. But with so many potential influences available, this only pushes the question a step or two back: why should Augustine respond to these influences ? Can there have been something about the person of Augustine-with his own personal quests, yearnings, aspirations, apprehensions-which was participating in the process of screening and selectively responding to the range of intellectual positions available to the growing young man? The career of Augustine-precisely because the role of environmental influences seems indeterminate-leaves an especially large amount of room for entertaining psychological considerations as a factor in his intellectual development. Fortunately, Augustine appears to have left, in the Confessions, an unusually rich amount of autobiographical detail. Furthermore, he himself set the pattern for blending experience and thought. The contents of the Confessions range from the most abstract ideation to the most particular autobiographical recall, and no attempt is made to distinguish two realms of life and thought. The development is one. They are meant to excite mens' minds and affections toward him.' In this refusal to separate the development of a person from the development of his ideas, Augustine was being faithful to the Biblical heritage, which has since been somtimes lost, sometimes reclaimed. (And sometimes, when the religious formulations have too arbitrarily rent man asunder, the reclamation must be by a non-religious agent, such as S. Freud, whose fundamental thrust of thought in this matter was impelled by his Jewish heritage.) Fortunately, also, the kind of analysis and categories which a modern psycholugist finds himself using in such an enterprise are not foreign, either, to Augustine's own way of thinking about himself. He was far and away the best-if not the very first-psychologist in the ancient world. His observations and descriptions of human motives and emotions, his depth analyses of will and thought in their interaction, and his exploration of the inner nature of the human self-these have established one of the main traditions in European conceptions of human nature, even down