As I am going through my master’s thesis, four years after its completion, in order to make some minor corrections, and recalling the for me momentous, and at times almost ecstatic experience the process of composing it was, I would reiterate that some of the most striking discoveries I made when doing the research on which the chapters on St. Augustine are based, were
(1) the massive influence exerted on the future bishop by none other than Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous orator, whose lost work Hortensius St. Augustine confesses was the treatise «which first kindled in him, at the age of 19, the Love of Wisdom,» (as I put it), and which initiated the amazing spiritual journey which would transform him from one enslaved to hedonism and materialism to the devout welder of ancient Platonic philosophy and the still developing Christian doctrines, and
(2) how the crucial but now woefully neglected tenet of a suprarational human mental faculty or power may be traced across the centuries, from its appearance in Plato’s Republic as the Eye of the Soul (to omma tes psuches, he auge tes psuches), via Cicero’s references to it as the «mens acies», the edge or blade or pupil of the mind, and to St. Augustine’s attempts to reconcile his own experiences of its presence with the growing orthodox Christian emphasis on doxa or faith — attempts which can be seen in his use of the Latin equivalent of Plato’s term (oculus animae) in his Confessions, and in his move to Cicero’s preferred expression in his De Trinitate, where he also starts employing another term for the inner or third eye which would eventually become the dominant one in the Western and Christian traditions: The Heart!
Into the metaphor and symbol of this vital organ countless later thinkers poured, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, all that the ancients had associated with the Inner Eye — which, in the Indian tradition, is styled the Ajna Chakra — occasionally mixing genuine Knowledge or Wisdom with varying amounts of Ignorance in the process, until the deeper meaning of the symbol had been all but forgotten.
Although Cicero’s Hortensius is one of the many classical works that have probably been lost forever, either due to the vicissitudes of history or to a desire for extirpation, the admirably magnanimous and open-minded and Beauty-loving Aurelius preserved one of its concluding passages for posterity in the depths of his De Trinitate:
“This contemplative wisdom, which I believe is properly called wisdom as distinct from knowledge in the sacred writings; but wisdom only of man, which yet man has not except from Him, by partaking of whom a rational and intellectual mind can be made truly wise; – this contemplative wisdom, I say, it is that Cicero commends, in the end of the dialogue Hortensius, when he says:
‘While, then, we consider these things night and day, and sharpen our understanding [intellegentia], which is the eye of the mind [mens acies], taking care that it be not ever dulled, that is, while we live in philosophy; we, I say, in so doing, have great hope that, if, on the one hand, this sentiment and wisdom of ours is mortal and perishable, we shall still, when we have discharged our human offices, have a pleasant setting, and a not painful extinction, and as it were a rest from life: or if, on the other, as ancient philosophers thought, – and those, too, the greatest and far the most celebrated, – we have souls eternal and divine, then must we needs think, that the more these shall have always kept in their own proper course, i.e. in reason and in the desire of inquiry, and the less they shall have mixed and entangled themselves in the vices and errors of men, the more easy ascent and return they will have to heaven. (…)’.” (D.Tr. XIV.19.26)
Latin: «Hanc contemplatiuam sapientiam, quam proprie puto in litteris sanctis ab scientia distinctam sapientiam nuncupari dumtaxat hominis, quae quidem illi non est nisi ab illo cuius participatione uere sapiens fieri mens rationalis et intellectualis potest, Cicero commendans in fine dialogi Hortensii:
Quae nobis, inquit, dies noctesque considerantibus acuentibusque intellegentiam quae est mentis acies cauentibusque ne quando illa hebescat, id est in philosophia uiuentibus, magna spes est, aut si hoc quod sentimus et sapimus mortale et caducum est, iucundum nobis perfunctis muneribus humanis occasum neque molestam exstinctionem et quasi quietem uitae fore; aut si ut antiquis philosophis hisque maximis longeque clarissimis placuit aeternos animos ac diuinos habemus sic existimandum est, quo magis hi fuerint semper in suo cursu, id est in ratione et inuestigandi cupiditate, et quo minus se admiscuerint atque implicauerint hominum uitiis et erroribus, hoc his faciliorem ascensum et reditum in caelum fore.» (D.Tr. XIV.19.26)
Sources:
Augustine of Hippo. (1955). Confessions [e-book] (Albert C. Outler, Trans.). Dallas, TX, the United States: Southern Methodist University. Retrieved from https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf
Augustine of Hippo. (2020). On the Holy Trinity [e-book] (Arthur West Haddan, Trans., Philip Schaff, Ed., W. G. T. Shedd, Ed.). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Volume III. Grand Rapids, MI, the United States: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Retrieved from http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf103.html
(Digitized version of: Augustine of Hippo. (1887). On the Holy Trinity (Arthur West Haddan, Trans., Philip Schaff, Ed., W. G. T. Shedd, Ed.). In A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Volume III. Grand Rapids, MI, the United States: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)
Carey, W. L. (Ed.). (2020). The Latin Library: Augustine of Hippo. Retrieved from https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/august.html
This post was originally published on my profile at Academia.edu back in October 2024. It received 33 views and one like.
Edmund Schilvold: Skribent, fotograf, filosof, friluftsentusiast 