Letters 1.1–8.1

I would never dare to provoke the Academics, not even in jest (for when would the authority of such great men fail to move me?), unless I thought that they held a view far different from the one commonly believed. That is why I have imitated them, as far as I could, rather than refuted them, which I am quite unable to do. For it seems to me to have suited those times well that, if anything pure flowed from the Platonic spring, it should be led through shady and thorny thickets into the possession of very few, rather than run through open ground where, with cattle breaking in on every side, it could in no way be kept clear and pure. For what is more fitting for cattle than to think that the soul is a body? Against people of this kind I think that art and method of hiding the truth was usefully devised. But in this age, when we see no philosophers any more except, perhaps, by the cloak on their bodies (and I would hardly judge such men worthy of so venerable a name), it seems to me that people should be brought back to the hope of finding the truth, if the doctrine of the Academics, through the cleverness of its words, has frightened any of them away from grasping things; otherwise what was suited to the times for rooting out the deepest errors may now begin to be an obstacle to planting knowledge.

For in those days the zeal of the various schools burned so hot that nothing was to be feared except the approval of a falsehood. And each person, driven by those arguments from what he had believed he held firm and unshaken, searched for something else all the more steadily and cautiously, the greater the diligence in moral life was, and the more it was felt that truth lay hidden, very deep and very intricate, in the nature of things and of souls. But now there is such flight from labour and such neglect of the liberal arts that, as soon as word goes round that the sharpest philosophers held that nothing can be grasped, people dismiss their minds and cover them over for ever. For they do not dare to believe themselves more lively than those men, so as to expect to see clearly what Carneades could not find with so much zeal, talent and leisure, with such great and manifold learning, and finally with a very long life as well. And if, struggling a little against laziness, they do read the very books in which perception is, as it were, shown to be denied to human nature, they fall asleep in such torpor that not even the trumpet of heaven would wake them.

Therefore, since I value your faithful judgment of my little books very highly, and set such weight on you that neither error can befall your prudence nor pretence your friendship, I ask you rather to consider more carefully, and write back to me, whether you approve of what I thought should be believed at the end of the third book, more with suspicion, perhaps, than with certainty, yet, as I think, more usefully than incredibly. For my part, however those writings stand, I am not so much delighted, as you write, that I have defeated the Academics (for you write this perhaps more lovingly than truly), as that I have broken off from myself the most hateful tether by which, through despair of the truth, which is the food of the mind, I was held back from the breast of philosophy.

We are well agreed, I think, that all things which bodily sense touches cannot remain in the same state even for a moment of time, but slip away, flow off, and hold nothing present; that is, to speak plain Latin, they do not exist. Therefore true and divine philosophy warns us to curb and lull to sleep the love of these things, a love most pernicious and full of penalties, so that the mind with its whole self, even while it animates this body, may be borne toward and burn for those things that are always of the same kind and do not please by a borrowed beauty. Though this is so, and though the mind sees you within itself as true and simple, such as you can be loved without any anxiety, we confess nevertheless that, when you depart from us in body and are separated from us by place, we seek that company and sight of you, and long for it while we may, as brothers do. Surely, if I know you well, you love this fault in us, and though you wish every good for your dearest and most intimate friends, you are afraid to cure them of it. But if you are of so strong a mind that you can both recognize this snare and laugh at those caught in it, then you are great indeed, and different from us. For my part, as long as I long for one who is absent, I want to be longed for. Yet I keep watch as far as I can, and strive to love nothing that can be absent from me against my will. While I am about this, I remind you meanwhile, whatever you may be, that the discussion begun with you must be completed, if we have any care for ourselves. For I would never allow it to be completed with Alypius, even if he wished. But he does not wish it; for it is not like his kindness to fail to join me in trying to hold you with us by as many letters as we can, since you flee from us by some necessity or other.

Whether I should think this the result of some, so to speak, flattering speech of yours, or whether things really are so, I am uncertain. For it happened suddenly, and I have not yet considered well enough how far it should be trusted. You are waiting to hear what it is. What do you think? You have almost persuaded me, not indeed that I am happy, for that is the estate of the wise man alone, but certainly that I am, as it were, happy; as we call a man 'as it were a man' in comparison with that man whom Plato knew, or call the things we see 'as it were round' and 'as it were square', though they are far from those which the minds of a few see. For I read your letter by lamplight, after supper; bedtime was near, but not yet sleep. Indeed, lying long in bed, I thought it over and held this conversation, Augustine himself with Augustine: 'Is it not true, as Nebridius holds, that we are happy?' Certainly not; for even he does not dare to deny that we are still fools. 'What if the happy life comes even to fools?' Hardly! As though folly itself were a small misery, or there were any misery but it. 'Then how did it seem so to him? Having read those little books, did he dare to think me even wise?' The joy of an exultant man is not as rash as that, especially of a man whose weight of judgment we know well. So this is it: he wrote what he thought would be very sweet to us, because whatever we put in those books became sweet to him too; and he wrote rejoicing, and did not consider what should be entrusted to a joyful pen. What if he had read the Soliloquies? He would rejoice far more overflowingly, and yet he would find nothing greater to call me than happy. So he quickly poured out on me the highest name, and kept nothing in reserve to affirm of me when he is happier still. See what joy does!

But where is that happy life? Where? Where on earth? Oh, if only it consisted in rejecting the atoms of Epicurus! Oh, if only it consisted in knowing that there is nothing below except the world! Oh, if only it consisted in knowing that the outer parts of a sphere turn more slowly than the middle! and other such things, which we know in the same way. But as it is, how or in what sense am I happy, when I do not know why the world is as large as it is, though the principles of the figures by which it exists in no way prevent it from being larger, as much larger as anyone pleases? Or would it not be said to me, or rather would we not be compelled to admit, that bodies can be divided to infinity, so that from a fixed base, as it were, a fixed number of particles rises to a fixed quantity? Therefore, since no body is allowed to be the smallest, on what terms may we allow there to be a largest, than which there could be none larger? Unless perhaps what I once said to Alypius in great secrecy has great force: that, since intelligible number increases infinitely but does not decrease infinitely (for it may not be resolved beyond the unit), sensible number on the contrary (for what else is sensible number but the quantity of bodily things or bodies?) can decrease infinitely but cannot increase infinitely. And perhaps that is why philosophers rightly place riches in intelligible things and poverty in sensible ones. For what is more wretched than always being able to become less and less? What is richer than to grow as much as you wish, to go where you wish, to return when you wish, as far as you wish, and to love greatly that which cannot be diminished? For whoever understands those numbers loves nothing as much as the unit; and no wonder, since it is through it that the others are loved. But still, why is the world as large as it is? It could have been either larger or smaller. I do not know; it is so. And why in this place rather than that? There should be no question about that either: wherever anything was, there would be a question. The one thing that troubled me greatly was that bodies can be divided infinitely, and perhaps this has been answered by the contrary power of intelligible number.

But wait; let us see what this something is that is being suggested to my mind. Certainly the sensible world is said to be the image of some intelligible one. Now what we see in the images that mirrors give back is strange; for however huge mirrors are, they do not give back images larger than the bodies set before them, even very small ones. But in small mirrors, as in the pupils of the eyes, even if a large face is set before them, a very small image is formed in proportion to the mirror. So the images of bodies may be diminished if the mirrors are diminished, but may not be enlarged if the mirrors are enlarged. Surely something lies hidden here. But now I must sleep. For it is not by seeking that I seem happy to Nebridius, but perhaps by finding something. And what is that something? Is it that line of reasoning which I am accustomed to flatter as though it were my only one, and in which I take too much delight?

What are we made of? Of soul and body. Which of these is better? The soul, obviously. What is praised in the body? I see nothing other than beauty. What is the beauty of a body? A harmony of the parts with a certain pleasantness of colour. Is this form better where it is true or where it is false? Who would doubt that it is better where it is true? Where, then, is it true? In the soul, of course. So the soul is to be loved more than the body. But in what part of the soul is that truth? In the mind and understanding. What opposes this? The senses. So it is clear that the senses must be resisted with all the strength of the soul. What if sensible things delight too much? Let it come about that they do not delight. How does that come about? By the habit of doing without them and of desiring better things. What if the soul dies? Then truth dies, or understanding is not truth, or understanding is not in the soul, or something in which there is something immortal can die. But our Soliloquies already contain the proof that none of these can happen, and we are sufficiently persuaded of it; yet through some habit of evils we are frightened and waver. Finally, even if the soul dies, which I see can in no way happen, it has been sufficiently established in this leisure that the happy life does not lie in the joy of sensible things. Perhaps through these and similar things I seem to my Nebridius, if not happy, at least as it were happy. Let me seem so to myself as well; what do I lose by it, or why should I be sparing of a good opinion? These things I said to myself; then I prayed, as I used to, and slept.

I was pleased to write this to you. For it delights me that you thank me if I hide from you nothing that comes into my mouth, and I rejoice that I please you in this way. With whom, then, would I rather play the fool than with one whom I cannot displease? But if it is in the power of fortune that one person loves another, see how happy I am, who rejoice so much in things of chance and, I confess, wish such goods to grow abundantly for me. Yet the truly wise, who alone may rightly be called happy, wished the goods of fortune neither to be feared nor desired (cupi), or is it cupiri? You will see to that. And this falls out nicely, for I want you to make me expert in this conjugation. For when I set similar verbs beside it, I become more uncertain. For cupio goes like fugio, sapio, iacio, capio; but whether the infinitive is fugiri or fugi, sapiri or sapi, I do not know. I could look to iaci and capi, were I not afraid that someone would 'catch' me and 'throw' me where he pleased as a laughingstock, by proving that iactum and captum are one thing and fugitum, cupitum and sapitum another. And likewise I do not know whether these three should be pronounced with the next-to-last syllable long and circumflexed, or with a grave and short one. I would challenge you to a longer letter; I ask that I may read you a little longer. For I cannot say how great a pleasure it is to read you.

It is quite wonderful how beyond hope it has turned out for me that, when I looked for which of your letters remained for me to answer, I found only one that still kept me in your debt, the one in which you ask that, with all the leisure you suppose we have, and wish us to have with you or with ourselves, we tell you what progress we have made in distinguishing between sensible and intelligible nature. But I do not think it is hidden from you that, if each person becomes more deeply rooted in false opinions the more he turns them over and grows familiar with them, this happens far more easily to the mind in things that are true. Yet we progress gradually, as we do with age. For though there is a great difference between a boy and a young man, no one who was questioned every day from boyhood would ever say on a given day that he had now become a young man.

I do not want you to take this to mean that we have reached in these matters a kind of youth of the mind, with the strength of a firmer understanding. For we are boys, but, as the saying goes, perhaps pretty ones; and not badly so. For most often, when we are disturbed and filled with the cares of wounds received through the senses, that little argument so well known to you lets us breathe again: that mind and understanding are better than the eyes and this common sight. This would not be so unless the things we understand existed more truly than those we see. Please consider with me whether anything is strongly opposed to this reasoning. Refreshed by it meanwhile, when I have called on God for help and have begun to be lifted up both to him and to those things that are most truly true, I am sometimes filled with such a foretaste of abiding things that I am at times surprised that I need that reasoning in order to believe that these things exist, which are as present within us as each person is present to himself. Look back over things yourself as well (for I confess that you are more careful about this), in case I still owe you replies without knowing it. For I cannot believe that so many burdens, which I had once counted up, were laid down so suddenly, although I do not doubt that you received my letters, to which I have no replies.

Is it so, my Augustine? Do you show fortitude and endurance for the affairs of your fellow citizens, and is that longed-for rest still not given back to you? Tell me, who are these people who make such demands on so good a man? I suppose people who do not know what you love and what you desire. Have you no friend to tell them what you love? Neither Romanianus nor Lucinianus? Let them listen to me at least. I will cry out, I will testify that you love God and long to serve him and cling to him. I would like to call you to my country estate and let you rest there. For I will not be afraid of being called your seducer by your fellow citizens, whom you love too much and who love you too much.

I am very glad to keep your letters as I would my own eyes. For they are great, not in length but in content, and they contain great proofs of great things. They will speak to me of Christ, of Plato, of Plotinus. So they will be sweet to hear for their eloquence, easy to read for their brevity, and wholesome to understand for their wisdom. You will take care, then, to teach me whatever has seemed holy and good to your mind. But you will answer this letter when you have discussed something more precisely about imagination and memory. For it seems to me that, although not every act of imagination is accompanied by memory, no memory can be without imagination. But you will say: 'What about when we remember that we have understood or thought something?' Against this I answer and say that this happens because, when we understood or thought something bodily and temporal, we produced something that belongs to imagination; for either we joined words to our understanding and thoughts, and words are not without time and belong to sense or imagination, or our understanding or thought underwent something of such a kind that it could have produced a memory in the imagining soul. I have said these things without reflection and in confusion, as is my habit; you will examine them, reject what is false, and set down the truth in a letter.

Hear something else: why, I ask you, do we not say that the imagination has all its images from itself rather than from sense? For just as our intellectual soul is prompted by sense to see its intelligible objects rather than receiving anything from it, so too the imagining soul may be prompted by sense to contemplate its own images rather than taking anything in. For perhaps that is how it comes about that it can see things which sense does not see. This is a sign that it has all images in itself and from itself. On this too you will reply with what you think.

I will dispense with a preface and quickly begin what you want me to say at once, especially as I will not soon be done. It seems to you that there can be no memory without images or imaginary visions, which you chose to call by the name 'phantasies'; I think otherwise. First, then, we must see that we do not always remember things that pass away, but very often things that remain. So, though memory claims for itself a hold on past time, it is clear that it is partly of things that leave us and partly of things that are left by us. For when I remember my father, I remember something that has left me and now is not; but when I remember Carthage, something that exists and that I myself have left. In both these kinds, however, memory holds past time. For I remember both that man and that city from what I saw, not from what I see.

Here you may ask: 'What is the point of this?' especially since you notice that either of these can come into memory only through that imaginary vision. But for the time being it is enough for me to have shown in this way that one can speak of memory even of things that have not yet perished. Now pay closer attention to how this helps me. Some people cavil against that most famous discovery of Socrates, which asserts that the things we learn are not implanted in us as new but are called back into memory by recollection. They say that memory is of past things, but that the things we learn by understanding, on the authority of Plato himself, abide always and cannot perish, and therefore are not past. They do not notice that the vision is past, because we once saw these things with the mind; and since we have flowed away from them and begun to see other things in another way, we see them again by remembering, that is, through memory. Therefore, to leave other things aside, if eternity itself always abides and seeks no imaginary fictions on which to come into the mind as on vehicles, and yet it could not come unless we remembered it, there can be memory of some things without any imagination.

Now, as to your view that the soul, even without using the senses of the body, can imagine bodily things, that this is false is proved in this way. If the soul, before it uses the body to perceive bodies, can imagine those same bodies, and if (as no sane person doubts) it was in a better state before it was entangled in these deceptive senses, then the souls of sleepers are in a better state than those of the waking, and the souls of the frenzied better than those of people free of such a plague; for they are affected by the images by which they were affected before these senses, those most empty messengers. And either the sun that they see will be truer than the one seen by the sane and the waking, or false things will be better than true. If these things are absurd, as they are, that imagination, my Nebridius, is nothing other than a wound inflicted through the senses; through them there does not occur, as you write, a kind of reminding, so that such things are formed in the soul, but the very bringing in, or, to put it more exactly, the impressing, of this falsity. As for what troubles you, how it comes about that we think of faces and forms that we have never seen, it is a sharp objection. So I will do something that stretches this letter beyond its usual measure, but not in your eyes, for no page is more welcome to you than one that brings me to you more talkative.

All these images, which you, with many others, call 'phantasies', I see can be most conveniently and most truly divided into three kinds: one impressed by things perceived, another by things supposed, the third by things reasoned. Examples of the first kind are when my mind forms within itself your face, or Carthage, or our former friend Verecundus, or anything else, whether still existing or dead, which I have nevertheless seen and perceived. Under the second kind fall the things we suppose to have been so or to be so; or the things which we ourselves invent for the sake of argument and which in no way hinder the truth; or the sort of things we picture when history is read, and when we hear or compose or conjecture fables. For I picture to myself, as I please and as it occurs to my mind, the face of Aeneas, or of Medea with her winged serpents joined to the yoke, or of Chremes and some Parmeno. In this kind are also the things which either wise men, wrapping some truth in such figures, or fools, the founders of various superstitions, have put forward as true, such as the Phlegethon of Tartarus, and the five caves of the race of darkness, and the northern pole that holds up the sky, and a thousand other monsters of the poets and heretics. We also say in the course of argument, 'Suppose there are three worlds one above another, such as this one is', and 'Suppose the earth is contained in a square figure', and the like. For all these we invent and suppose as the drift of our thinking has it. As for the third kind of images, it is chiefly a matter of numbers and dimensions. This is partly in the nature of things, as when the shape of the whole world is discovered and an image follows this discovery in the mind of the one thinking; partly in the sciences, as in geometrical figures, musical rhythms, and the infinite variety of numbers. Although these, as I hold, are grasped as true, they nevertheless give rise to false imaginings which reason itself can scarcely resist; indeed, it is not easy even for the discipline of argument itself to be free of this evil, since in divisions and conclusions we imagine a kind of counters, as it were.

In this whole forest of images I believe it does not seem to you that the first kind belongs to the soul before it clings to the senses; nor need we argue about this any longer. About the other two a question could still rightly be raised, were it not obvious that the soul is less subject to falsehoods when it has not yet undergone the emptiness of sensible things and of the senses. But who would doubt that those images are far more false than these sensible things? For the things we suppose and believe or invent are entirely false in every respect, and certainly, as you see, the things we see and perceive are far truer. Now in that third kind, whatever bodily space I picture in my mind, although thought seems to have produced it by the principles of the sciences, which are least deceptive, I prove it false by those very principles, which refute it in turn. So it is that I can in no way believe that the soul, before it perceived through the body, before it was beaten by mortal and fleeting substance through the emptiest senses, lay in such a disgrace of falsehood.

Where, then, does it come from that we think of things we do not see? What do you suppose, except that there is a certain power of diminishing and increasing implanted in the soul, which it must bring with it wherever it goes? This power can be observed especially in numbers. By it, for example, the image of a crow, set as it were before the eyes, an image that is of course known by sight, can by taking away and adding certain things be brought to any image at all that has never been seen. Hence it happens that, through habit, figures of this kind rush as if of their own accord into the thoughts of minds that turn themselves about in such things. So the imagining soul may, from the things the senses brought into it, by taking away and adding, as has been said, produce things which it does not touch whole by any sense, though it had touched their parts in one thing and another. Thus we, as boys born and brought up inland, could already imagine seas after seeing water even in a small cup, while the taste of strawberries and cornel cherries in no way came into our minds before we tasted them in Italy. That is why those who have been blind from birth, when asked about light and colours, can find nothing to answer; for those who have perceived no coloured images do not experience any.

Nor should you wonder how the things that are shaped in the nature of things can be formed without the soul, which is present in all, first turning them over within itself, since it has never perceived them from outside. For not even when we form many expressions and colours in our body in indignation or joy and other such motions of the mind does our thought first conceive images of what we can do. These follow in those wonderful ways which I leave to your own thought, when hidden numbers are set at work in the soul without any image of bodily falsities. From this I would like you to understand, since you perceive that so many motions of the mind are free of all the images you are now asking about, that the soul obtains a body by some other motion than by thinking of sensible forms, which I think it can in no way experience before it uses the body and the senses. Therefore, by our friendship and by the faithfulness of divine law itself, I would earnestly warn you, my dearest and most delightful friend, to form no friendship with those shades of the underworld, and not to delay in tearing apart the friendship that has been formed. For there is no resisting the senses of the body, which is our most sacred discipline, if we caress the blows and wounds inflicted through them.

As I hurry to come to the point, I want no preface, no exordium. How does it come about, my Augustine, or what is the means used by the higher powers (by which I mean the heavenly ones), when they choose to show us dreams while we sleep? What, I say, is the means? That is, how do they do it, by what art, by what devices, by what instruments or drugs? Do they drive our mind by their own thoughts, so that we too imagine those things by thinking? Or do they offer and show us things made in their own body or in their own imagination? But if they make them in their own body, it follows that we too have other bodily eyes within us when we sleep, with which to see what they have formed in their body. But if they are not helped by their body in these things, but arrange them in their imagination and so touch our imaginations, and a vision results, which is a dream, why, I ask you, can I not compel your imagination by mine to produce the dreams which I have first formed in mine? Certainly I too have imagination, and it is able to picture what I wish, yet I produce no dream at all for you; but I see that our body itself produces dreams in us. For when it is unwell, through the bond by which it is joined to the soul, it compels us in wonderful ways to imitate that very condition through imagination. Often when we are thirsty in sleep we dream that we are drinking, and when hungry we seem to be eating, and there are many such things, which pass from the body to the soul in the imagination by a kind of exchange. Do not be surprised if, because of their obscurity and our inexperience, these things have been set out without much elegance or precision; you will work to do so as far as you can.