Perennial Lives | Stoics, Saints, and Sages
The Perennial Lives series explores the life and philosophy of 12 figures (one per week), from Socrates (470—399 BC) to St. Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274). To assist us in our journey, we’ll turn to resources like Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, along with more recent works like Examined Lives by James Miller, Socrates’ Children by Peter Kreeft, and Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, and many others.
Today’s meditation is Part IX of the Perennial Lives series — The Art of Living: From Socrates to Aquinas. Previously, we discussed The Art of Living: From Socrates to Aquinas (Part I), How to Live — Like Socrates (Part II), The Life and Philosophy of Confucius (Part III), The Wisdom of Jesus (Part IV), and The Teachings of the Buddha (Part V), How to Live — Like Lao Tzu (Part VI), The Way of Aristotle (Part VII), and The Life and Wisdom of Epictetus (Part VIII).
Who is St. Augustine?
“The quest for wisdom can be wayward, and a wise man cannot live by reason alone. These are two morals that one might draw from Augustine’s account of the first half of his life in his Confessions,” writes James Miller in Examined Lives. St. Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras), a remote inland town in Numidia. His father, Patricius, owned enough land to become a tax collector and town official. His mother, Monica, was a fiercely observant Catholic (and also a canonized Saint).
Miller writes,
In the story he tells in the Confessions, Augustine was forever trying to find the truth, the one and only way of life that might make a man perfectly happy. But the spiritual odyssey he recounts could have occurred only in a culture that was contentiously pluralistic—containing, as late antiquity did, a host of competing programs for securing happiness…
Augustine was a voracious reader and a prolific writer. In the years that followed his baptism in 387, he wrote many philosophical dialogues as a Catholic layman, all of them extant. First as a priest and then after he had been installed as bishop of Hippo in 396. After completing his Confessions, Augustine concentrated on writing two long treatises, one on the biblical creation story in Genesis and the other on the Trinity.
Searching for Wisdom
Augustine was nineteen years old when, in the course of this curriculum, he read a hortatory philosophical work, now lost, by Cicero, the Hortensius. Overnight, Augustine became a philosopher in the “true and ancient” sense, struggling to transform his conduct of life in accord with Cicero’s revelation: “Suddenly, all empty hope for my career lost its appeal; and I was left with an unbelievable fire in my heart, desiring the deathless qualities of Wisdom.”
Miller explains,
Inspired though he was by Cicero’s account of the quest for wisdom, Augustine bridled at the Skeptic’s willingness to settle for beliefs that were merely plausible. Yearning to find more certain sources of knowledge, the adolescent philosopher turned first to the Bible—and then to the esoteric teachings of Mani.
In 374, when Augustine, at the age of twenty, briefly returned from Carthage to Thagaste, he was a missionary of his new faith. His mother was hurt by her son’s heresy and banned him from her side until she was reassured by a vision that he would eventually be restored to the Catholic Church.
The Divine Within
In Confessions, Augustine vividly evokes the impact of reading Plotinus and recounts how he beheld God and momentarily felt as One by turning inward to contemplate the divine within.
Augustine wrote,
By the Platonic books, I was admonished to return into myself … I entered into my innermost citadel … The person who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it, knows eternity. Love knows it. Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God. To you I sigh day and night. When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being.
He revered Christ as a morally perfect man of exceptional wisdom, a paragon of Neoplatonism in practice, writes Miller, not different from Plotinus (or Socrates). “As far as man’s nature is concerned,” Augustine remarks in this work, reflecting on the dialogues he had written as a young Christian Platonist, “there is nothing better in him than mind and reason. Nevertheless, it isn’t by mind and reason that one who wants to live happily should live; in that case, he lives in accordance with man, whereas to attain happiness, one should live in accordance with God. To reach happiness, our mind should not be content with itself but subordinate itself to God.”
Final Thoughts
In his book 365 Days of Catholic Wisdom, philosopher and writer Deal Hudson explained, “St. Augustine’s journey into the Church, as told in his Confessions, is one of the most remarkable books ever written.” St. Augustine thanks God for having read, as a young man, Platonic philosophers’ ideas about the “Word” and “God” that prepared him to read the prologue to the Gospel of John.
According to Possidius,
He made no will because, as one of God’s poor, he had nothing to leave.” But he did leave “a standing order that the library of the church and all the books should be carefully preserved for posterity.
Possidius thus inherited a vast corpus of texts, much larger than that left behind by Plato or Plotinus. “No one can read what he wrote on theology without profit,” concluded Possidius, who nonetheless thought it highly unlikely that any one man could ever read everything Augustine had written.
St. Augustine teaches us how to search for wisdom — wherever it may be found. Although his mother was a devout Catholic, known today as Saint Monica, he searched for wisdom among the writings of Cicero, the Platonists, and many others. He even searched within himself and ultimately found God.
In his Confessions, Augustine observed,
Too late have I loved you. O Beauty, so ancient and so new, too late I have loved you! Behold, you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. Feel free to comment, ask questions, or make suggestions!
Truly awesome new information for me about St. Augustine and his study of Plato, Cicero, and God!