confessions and enchiridion [175]
it comes to find rest in Thee," Bk. I, Ch. I, 1. [175] Isa. 46:4. [176] Thirty years old; although the term "youth" (juventus) normally included the years twenty to forty. [177] Phantasmata, mental constructs, which may be internally coherent but correspond to no reality outside the mind. [178] Echoes here of Plato's Timaeus and Plotinus' Enneads, although with no effort to recall the sources or elaborate the ontological theory. [179] Cf. the famous "definition" of God in Anselm's ontological argument: "that being than whom no greater can be conceived." Cf. Proslogium, II-V. [180] This simile is Augustine's apparently original improvement on Plotinus' similar figure of the net in the sea; Enneads, IV, 3:9. [181] Gen. 25:21 to 33:20. [182] Cf. Job 15:26 (Old Latin version). [183] Cf. Ps. 103:9-14. [184] James 4:6. [185] Cf. John 1:14. [186] It is not altogether clear as to which "books" and which "Platonists" are here referred to. The succeeding analysis of "Platonism" does not resemble any single known text closely enough to allow for identification. The most reasonable conjecture, as most authorities agree, is that the "books" here mentioned were the Enneads of Plotinus, which Marius Victorinus (q.v. infra, Bk. VIII, Ch. II, 3-5) had translated into Latin several years before; cf. M.P. Garvey, St. Augustine: Christian or Neo-Platonist (Milwaukee, 1939). There is also a fair probability that Augustine had acquired some knowledge of the Didaskalikos of Albinus; cf. R.E. Witt, Albinus and the History of Middle Platonism (Cambridge, 1937). [187] Cf. this mixed quotation of John 1:1-10 with the Fifth Ennead and note Augustine's identification of Logos, in the Fourth Gospel, with Nous in Plotinus. [188] John 1:11, 12 [189] John 1:13. [190] John 1:14. [191] Phil. 2:6. [192] Phil. 2:7-11. [193] Rom. 5:6; 8:32. [194] Luke 10:21. [195] Cf. Matt. 11:28, 29. [196] Cf. Ps. 25:9, 18. [197] Matt. 11:29. [198] Rom. 1:21, 22. [199] Rom. 1:23. [200] An echo of Porphyry's De abstinentia ab esu animalium. [201] The allegorical interpretation of the Israelites' despoiling the Egyptians (Ex. 12:35, 36) made it refer to the liberty of Christian thinkers in appropriating whatever was good and true from the pagan philosophers of the Greco-Roman world. This was a favorite theme of Clement of Alexandria and Origen and was quite explicitly developed in Origen's Epistle to Gregory Thaumaturgus (ANF, IX, pp. 295, 296); cf. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II, 41-42. [202] Cf. Acts 17:28. [203] Cf. Rom. 1:25. [204] Cf. Ps. 39:11. [205] Some MSS. add "immo vero" ("yea, verily"), but not the best ones; cf. De Labriolle, op. cit., I, p. 162. [206] Rom. 1:20. [207] A locus classicus of the doctrine of the privative character of evil and the positive character of the good. This is a fundamental premise in Augustine's metaphysics: it reappears in Bks. XII-XIII, in the Enchiridion, and elsewhere (see note, infra, p. 343). This doctrine of the goodness of all creation is taken up into the scholastic metaphysics; cf. Confessions, Bks. XII- XIII, and Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentes, II: 45. [208] Ps. 148:7-12. [209] Ps. 148:1-5. [210] "The evil which overtakes us has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process and in the primal assertion of the desire for self-ownership" (Plotinus, Enneads, V, 1:1). [211] "We have gone weighed down from beneath; the vision is frustrated" (Enneads, VI, 9:4). [212] Rom. 1:20. [213] The Plotinian Nous. [214] This is an astonishingly candid and plain account of a Plotinian ecstasy, the pilgrimage of the soul from its absorption in things to its rapturous but momentary vision of the One; cf. especially the Sixth Ennead, 9:3-11, for very close parallels in thought and echoes of language. This is one of two ecstatic visions reported in the Confessions ; the other is, of course, the last great moment with his mother at Ostia (Bk. IX, Ch. X, 23-25). One comes before the "conversion" in the Milanese garden (Bk. VIII, Ch. XII, 28-29); the other, after. They