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By Root 2457 0

the Platonists were religious, though they remained pagan. The greatest religious rewards came from the meditation and ascent of the soul to the divine realm. But for Augustine, who had tried the religious life of the Platonists, there were yet greater rewards to be had from being a Christian. Now no longer a pagan desiring to understand what seemed like a mechanistic universe, Augustine, the Christian Platonist and churchman, affirmed that the bond of love that the intellect discerns and that carries the soul upward to God is a personal love responding to the grace of God, who is Father, Christ, and Holy Spirit. This means that the soul and the divine are not the same thing. There is a separation between the two, a natural breach that can be healed by grace and the charity of God responding to the human will.

It is a personal relationship with the divinity, a mystical bond, not just an intellectual attempt to convey one’s mind to the world soul. Augustine describes a God who became truly human and so is capable of supporting a human relationship. That relationship takes place totally on the intellectual level. Indeed, the trinitarian godhead itself, three persons in perfect intellectual love relationships with each other, gives the best example of how the soul yearns for its ascent for Augustine.

That very bond implies a separation between divinity and the human soul that needs to be overcome, not the identity of substance that Plotinus had outlined. Plotinus described a universe starting with the One which in turn is subsumed by the Divine Mind and so on outward and downward to the realm in which we live. The soul, however, is part of the same intelligible world and so is transparently part of the very center of the intellectual universe. For Neoplatonism, there was a mystical identity between the self and the universe. But for Augustine there was the separation of sin. The individual soul is essentially cut off from God and can only reach Him through an act of will. Because of this separation, the inner self, in a sense, becomes a private realm for us because it cannot be automatically subsumed within the intelligible world of the Platonic forms. So, because we are cut off from God, we become truly private human consciousnesses for the first time. At the same time, the soul becomes the place in which humans find God.

Memory played a crucial role in Plato’s proof of the soul’s immortality. With Augustine’s Confessions, personal memory is the quality that accounts for the individuality of the person:

A great power is that of memory, something awesome, my God, a deep and infinite multiplicity. And this is what the mind is, and this is what I myself am. What then am I, my God-of what nature am I? A variegated and multifaceted life, and utterly immeasurable. Behold in my memory the fields and caves and caverns innumerable, and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things…. I scamper and flit through them all, and poke this way and that as far as I am [quantum sum] and there is no end of it-so great is the power of life in a human being living mortally! (Conf. 10:26)102

The private space of the soul is made by roofing over our selves in our separation from God. But the house of the self is still furnished by memory. Augustine understood that the soul has to be a singular and newly created being for the ethical system outlined in the Bible to work fully. But at the same time Augustine used our ability to remember distant things in space and time as an example of the soul’s power and divinity. For Augustine, this private space is the place where the battle of the will begins and in which one ascends from separateness to the beatific vision, which he identifies with the Christian God. It might be too much to say that Augustine invented the interior self but he certainly perfected the notion. The concept developed continuously throughout Platonic philosophy. But, for Augustine, philosophically definable individuals truly find God, for the first time, by looking within, as opposed to looking at the design in the universe.