Truth and Selfhood in Augustine’s Thought

A Brief Study in Relation to Plotinus

[T]he soul should withdraw from everything external and revert entirely to its own inside, without any inclination to anything external. . . And when the soul has come to be with the One, and, in a way, communed with him to a sufficient degree, then it should tell others of this intimate contact. —Plotinus¹

By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With You as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel. . . I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind. . . He who knows truth knows that light. . . O eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity! You are my God, for You I sigh ‘day and night.’ —Augustine²

Augustine’s well-known argument to truth as absolute, laid out in his Soliloquia and De vera religione, has implications far more interesting concerning the nature of the self than just the repudiation of relativism. Rather than being concerned merely with “objective truth,” what the bishop of Hippo instead shows is that truth is neither a self-standing object independent of subjective apprehension, nor is it ever consigned to the limits of the subject’s representation of a reality it must always fail to grasp “in itself.” Instead, the absoluteness of truth as the coincidence of being and knowing reveals that the interior depth of the subject beholding being is in fact infinite. Let us begin by examining the relevant passage:

[T]he truth cannot pass away because not only if the entire world but even if the truth itself could pass away, it would be true that both the world and the truth had passed away. Nothing is true, however, without the truth; and so in no way does the truth pass away.³

In order to properly grasp the full implications of his argument—or better, demonstration—to Truth, one must, as Augustine did, return to the books of the Platonists and trace the steps he took, beginning with ancient categories of thought and leaving behind our own, a study which will perhaps reveal lacunae in our accustomed ways of speaking about objectivity, truth, or subjectivity. And the most fundamental law, the starting point, of all reasoning for the Platonists was the identity of thinking and being first enunciated by Parmenides (6^th-5^th c. BC).⁴ Both the necessary and the sufficient condition for anything’s existence is its being apprehensible, given to knowledge. To deny this is to extinguish the possibility of reasoning about anything whatsoever, including the denial that it is possible to reason about anything whatsoever. Either any being which is and the thought of that being are the same if truth has been achieved, or they are not, and if they are not, then one is not naming the real when one denies that reality can be spoken of as it is. To speak of an unintelligible being is nothing but a performative contradiction, for it is already to apprehend the being, in its unintelligibility, which is said to lie beyond the reach of thought and speech. To ask whether any x lies beyond this identity is already to have “grasped” x, subsumed it under the banner of reasonable affirmation, and therein affirmed the unconditioned power of judgement.⁵ There is, then, no such thing as an “unknowable,” no one thing beyond the power of judgement, and to question this is already “to show how all-inclusive being is,” as Bernard Lonergan says.⁶

We can see, then, that the reason Augustine is so adamant about this axiom throughout the Soliloquia is that its denial would always have to depend on the very claim it is attempting to deny, must always stand on that which it seeks to cut out from underneath itself in order to accomplish the latter: either there is truth or there isn’t, and if there isn’t, then there must be truth for it to be true that there is no truth. If being is not identical with intelligibility, then there is an incommensurable caesura between thought and being; if there is an incommensurable caesura between thought and being, then thought could never grasp being “as it is” and therefore could never arrive at truth about what is real. But that can’t be the case, for to deny that one can ever transgress the limits of subjective representation is already to have stepped outside the limits of subjectivity and grasped reality as it is, i.e., as intrinsically unknowable—in other words, ascertained that one can never step outside the limits of the subject. Since Truth is the identity of being and intelligibility, the very doubt of that identity would only serve to reaffirm its absoluteness, since the suspicion that being and intelligibility aren’t identical, if correct, would entail the identity of reality with the thought that being isn’t intelligible.⁷

Truth, then, is absolute, and unconditioned, and non-derivative, never depending on any limit to constitute its identity as the thing that it is. Truth itself is not one truth but prior to each truth and the totality of truths as the precondition for any one truth at all being true; as Augustine says, Truth is rather the nature that all truths have in common, which is their uniqueness as this or that true thing.⁸ Such is the transcendence of Truth, which is convertible with its immanence as that which informs every truth, grants it its determination, its being, as the one, unique truth that it is. Truth, then, is convertible with être, with to-be itself (ipsum esse, as Augustine calls God).⁹ And just as to-be itself transcends “to be a human,” “to be a shrimp,” or “to be a tree” all while being immanent as the very activity of existing in which these participate, so does Truth transcend even as it is fully present, as undifferentiated Truth itself, finitely in each truth and the totality of truths. As the identity of knowing and being, then, all truth is inherently apprehensible, which implicates the power of apprehension at the level of the first principle of all reality. So it is that Augustine calls God, who is Truth itself, the “intelligible light,” not in that God is another truth, a subject in whom truth inheres, but in that it is the “ineffable and incomprehensible light of minds”¹⁰ that is the enabling, immanent condition for any mind to grasp reality without itself being one of the things comprehended, bounded, conditioned. Since truth is to-be itself, and since to be is to be manifest, to be given to apprehension, then all existence necessarily implicates concomitantly the subjective depth of apprehension: “if something is false because it seems to be other than it is, and if it’s true because it is as it seems, then if you remove the one to whom it seems [to be true or false], there is nothing whatsoever that is neither false nor true. . . [Therefore] the true is that which is constituted in the way that it seems to the knower.”¹¹ Since for anything to be true, some judgement must be true of it, being as truth, in requiring the logical possibility of a judgement about something, establishes concomitantly in principle, ontologically, subjective reception, the dative or principle to and in which the manifestation occurs and by which judgement can be rendered.¹² Since being is nothing but intelligibility, it is nothing but givenness for apprehension, and if that is so, then the principle of conscious apprehension coincides with that of being. Thus, truth necessarily implicates as a logical precondition its being minded, and the reception of being qua manifestation implicates the category of subjective awareness, of an “I” which apprehends “this.”

Augustine has, as a consequence, arrived at an all-comprehensive account of Truth as being (être) and as activity, one which transcends the distinction between reality and non-reality as the very possibility of a judgement about either being rendered. Like “being” and “actuality,” “truth” has many uses in classical metaphysics, and as Augustine notes, the distinction between truth and falsehood must always be encompassed by a more capacious principle of Truth by which the false is truly false and the true is that which it is, just as all being and non-being, or all distinction between actuality and potency, must be encompassed by a prior principle of being (the infinitive “to be”) or actuality in virtue of which each has its character, truth, or activity as that which it is; thus, Truth transcends being and non-being as the possibility of either’s being given to discourse. Dialoguing with Augustine, Reason instructs him that if something didn’t exist at all it couldn’t even be called false, for it if it were false, it would have to be false—that is to say, it would be true that it is false, that it is not real, which would nonetheless circumscribe it as an object of thought and speech. She gives as an example Medea’s flight on a dragon-drawn golden chariot which never actually occurred, to which we may add, say, unicorns, irrational objects (gibberish, logical impossibilities like “square circles” or “married bachelors”), or perhaps the Stanley Cup aspirations of the Toronto Maple Leafs. All these, in that it can be attributed to them that they are not, the quality of not being, are not absolutely nonexistent, are subject to some judgement which can be true. For it is true that Medea never really flew, that unicorns don’t exist outside of the human imagination (though who’s to say for sure?), that the name “square circle” refers to no rational object, and so on. Insofar as there is some truth that can be predicated of them, they must exist in some measure as intelligible, as objects of reference, as thises in contraposition to thats; if I talk about my nonexistent cat, I’m not referring to my mother. Such qualified non-being that Plato speaks of in the Sophist is not unqualified nonexistence, which is not actually about anything at all. For this reason, the Eleatic Stranger gives the sophist his name on account of his rejection “that there has come to be or is such a thing as falsity. For he denied that anyone either thinks or says that which is not.”¹³ Non-being, though, or the quality of not being, is essential for discourse, since as Plato says, discourse is possible only by thinking forms, concepts, in relation to each other.¹⁴ Identity, difference, being, non-being: all these are essential for the possibility of speaking about anything and thus permeate the totality of things that are. Since to be is to be intelligible, it is to be identifiable and thus to be finite as distinguished over against what one is not, and thus to be contingent on one’s limits as determining one’s being. Therefore, not only is non-being true, but in as many instances as there are things which exist, there is non-being, for that which is simultaneously is not all the other things which are and in differentiation from which it can be thought.¹⁵

It is for this same reason that Augustine asserts God, as Truth itself, to be the cause even of matter, which is potency absent of form, that is, matter considered prior (in an ontological, not temporal, sense) to its actualization as the diversity of potential instances that the form characterizes. The “formless earth” of Genesis 1 that God made Augustine allegorically reads in a Platonic register as being “the formlessness of matter, which by your creation was made lacking in all definition.”¹⁶ Indeed, one of the primary ways in which his earlier Manicheanism differed from his subsequent Platonism was that in his former state he as yet could not give a proper account of matter because he had not “the privation of all form” in mind.¹⁷ Having been persuaded by “true reasoning,” he says to God: “It is true that you made not only whatever is created and endowed with form but also whatever is capable of being created and receiving form. From you all things have their existence.”¹⁸ That pure potency, as receptivity for form, which becomes some determinate being by its being “wedded” to form (i.e., actualized) is conditioned by God himself, who is actuality itself and so is prior to both being and non-being, true and false, actual and potential. Since God is the cause of absolutely all things, or since Truth is the cause of all that is true, and since matter is essential to everything’s being what it is, matter can be called good: “Just as we say that what is created and given form has more of goodness, so we concede that there is less good in what is created and receptive of form. Nevertheless, it is good.”¹⁹ In that matter qua pure potency has some morsel of existence, being subject to truth and subject to apprehension and discourse, it is encompassed by the activity of the Good because it tends to the reception of form, or the actualization of potential, even if, considered as pure potency, it is devoid of form.

Because matter, as pure receptivity to or potential for form is possibility, is some “this,” some determinate object of the mind (even if privative) which is intelligible as distinct from some other “that,” exists as subject to reasonable affirmation and therefore in its receptivity is determined as such by God. Since “matter” doesn’t name a “stuff” out of which shapes are made, as if like clay, but names rather the process of actualization of each form’s potential instantiations, by which all particulars come about, to say that God’s causality extends to this process is simply to say that it is absolutely unrestricted, so that God is the principle of individuation.²⁰

Obviously, then, “matter” cannot refer to an “absolute nothingness,” Augustine argues, precisely because it is potency for form and thus is not entirely bereft of activity or telos: God creates out of absolutely nothing because absolutely nothing, not any one thing, is outside him, nothing conditioning him from beyond himself out of which he creates the world and so of which he is “in need,” so to speak, to receive the limits on which he depends for his identity.²¹ In fact, Augustine explicitly rejects the Aristotelian view that matter, as formless and only capable of form, is outside God, since it would mean something could exist which God had not created.²² God, then, is

the author not only of every species [i.e., forms] of all things with which [the soul] comes into contact, either by the bodily senses or by intellectual faculties, but also of even the very capacity of taking form before any form has been taken, since the formless is defined to be that which can receive a form.²³

Thus, if Augustine calls God “form” or essentia, this should not be facilely reduced to the Aristotelian on or ousia, for Augustine’s God transcends the distinction between form and formlessness. For this reason, Augustine distinguishes between essentia and substantia, asserting that if God is a “substance,” or any one reality in which truth inheres,

then there is something in Him as in a subject, and He is no longer simple; His being, accordingly, would not be one and the same with the other qualities that are predicated of Him in respect to Himself. But it is wrong to assert that God subsists and is the subject of His own goodness […], that God Himself is not His own goodness, and that it inheres in Him as in its subject. It is, therefore, obvious that God is improperly called ‘a substance.’²⁴

Despite the unconventional terminology for a Neoplatonist, Augustine’s essentia can more properly be identified as undifferentiated esse and substantia as the form in which essentia inheres—or (in Plotinian terms), hyparxis (subsistence, être) which inheres in ousiaand is prior to the difference between ousia and to mē on (non-being), or hylē (matter). In some ways, Augustine can be seen to lay the groundwork for Aquinas’s formulation of “essence” as logically prior to both form and matter and in God convertible with ipsum esse, to-be itself—infinite, unrestricted, unconditioned being (which is not merely ousia). And as we shall see, so too does Augustine’s conception of divine knowledge anticipate that of the Angelic Doctor. But for now, we’ll concern ourselves with the immediate implications for selfhood from Augustine’s argument to Truth as the identity of to-be and to-be-apprehensible, of being as both given and received.

The Unity of Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Love

That truth is inherently apprehensible makes it the proper end for the activity of knowledge; this motion of knowledge is “love,” and what is desired by the intentioning mind as the end, the fulfillment, of its natural activity is, what Plato and Aristotle call, the Good. The Good is therefore synonymous with beauty because what is good is beautiful as that which, insofar as it provides what is “there” to be grasped by the intellect, always satisfies the demand for the most minimal apprehension. Each being, insofar as it exercises any activity as existing, must tend toward the Good as the fulfillment of its activity in virtue of the Good’s being its actualizing principle, at once the final cause of that being’s nature and for that very reason its formal cause.²⁵ But since all things aim for or desire the Good, or better, are nothing but desire for the Good, each in its own mode, that “love” or directedness which all things have for the Good simply is the Good itself, for that to which the activity is directed is necessarily that which is the very principle of the activity itself, what has prompted it to move, to be, towards actualization.²⁶ As Plotinus is right to insist, it is necessary that the motion all things have toward the Good be identical to the Good itself, since that universal character is what each and all receive from the Good—for it simply is their activity—and it therefore coincides with unity, être, manifestation, apprehensibility, and so on:

If, then, each thing produces itself by the Good, clearly it then becomes such as the Good would be towards himself primarily, by which other things, too, are being for themselves. . . For in truth the nature of the Good is wishing for himself. . ., because there was nothing else such that he could be dragged towards it. . . [Therefore] choice and willing together comprise [the Good’s] existence—he cannot be without them—then choice and willing will not be many, and willing, substantiality, and wanting must be drawn together into one.²⁷

Because God is unconditioned by anything outside himself (as every being, being finite, must be), he himself is his own being in every being that is; but the reverse is false, since each being is only a finite instance of a motion that transcends it and is present in every other instance of being, such that in each being, its tending toward or desire for the Good, is not merely limited to or identical with it. The return of all things to the Good, then, is always first and nothing other than the Good’s own odyssey from and return to itself. The Good, as all things without distinction, is itself its own love and intentionality for itself as the infinite Good, wherein it is present to itself and for that very reason to all things: “desire will have shown itself to be identical to substantiality. . . [and] it is the identical being that produces himself, and is master of himself, and did not come to be such as another wanted, but as he himself wanted.”²⁸

But in order to intend that transcendental end in virtue of which it exists, the self must in itself already possess a “pre-cognitive knowing” of that which it loves, which stirs it to be by drawing on its motion towards actuality, and this too it must have from the Good.²⁹ As Augustine observed, one can hardly will for, or love, that which one does not in some measure already know, just as the reverse is hardly possible (for knowledge must be drawn to that which it knows).³⁰ Accordingly, he identifies God himself with his own act of willing, following Plotinus, who had also named this willing the Good’s “loving himself. . . [and his] persisting activity. . . and [his] being for himself, [which,] in a way, is his self-regard.”³¹ So too, then, will Augustine say that

To know you as you are in an absolute sense is for you alone. You are immutably, you know immutably, you will immutably. Your essence knows and wills immutably. Your knowledge is and knows immutably. Your will is and knows immutably.³²

The Good’s act of self-manifestation transcends every being and the totality of beings, but none of the beings exists apart from that primordial act of self-disclosure. The Good’s “overflowing,” its unfolding of itself to itself in virtue of which each thing exists as the one thing that it is, is the Good’s being, its seeing, its willing, and its loving, not merely an accidental activity to some more original identity.³³

It is, then, a common mischaracterization that Plotinus holds the One to be “mindless” by affirming that “it does not think itself,”³⁴ which means simply that the One is not present to itself by way of noēsis—knowledge grasping sameness and difference of forms each from the other, as Intellect does. As Plotinus immediately goes on to say, the Good nonetheless possesses “a simple act of apprehension about himself.” For since “nothing else is present to him”—i.e., having nothing outside him, he is not limited by anything other than himself—“what else would this act of apprehension be except himself?”³⁵ In that “simple act of apprehension” that is its very being, the Good sees itself and sees all things at once. But its presence to itself and its presence to all things are not two different things, for God’s being is the being of all things, without distinction each from the other: while each intellect must think a complex totality of forms—thought-contents equivalent to the thinking of them—each as different from and in relation to the other, the Good instead has “entirely himself. . . like an act of contact [which] contains nothing intellectual,” or “a touching and a sort of inexpressible contact without thought.”³⁶

God, it follows, is not merely the bounded, conditioned whole of the forms in relation to each other. Any finite reality can only be desired in light of a more ultimate character in virtue of which the object desired is what it is at all, until one arrives at the unconditioned and infinite, that for the sake of which everything else was desired. Thus, for instance, one can wish to marry a woman only if one desires love itself, in virtue of which marriage is a goal deemed good to be sought by a rational nature. But since Intellect receives its conditioned being from beyond itself, the proper object of its gaze, its motion, its activity, isn’t actually being as a whole but the infinite, the Good itself; so Intellect is not truly, like the Good, “himself that which he loved.”³⁷ Thus, the motion itself never achieves a terminus, as Plotinus notes, because its object is without limit.³⁸ Since desire, or love, is infinite, and the beloved is infinite, then, Plotinus concludes (as will Augustine), the infinite Good is at once “the object of love, and love, and love of himself.”³⁹ By the principle of analogy, according to which any character common to a diversity of instances must be the immanence of a nature or principle ontologically prior, Plotinus deduces that “Intellect, that is, being, which comes about from the Good, and is, in a way, poured out, and developed from it and depends on it, gives evidence by its intelligent nature of a sort of intellect in the One,” though Plotinus is quick to clarify that this is a perfection, a gnosis above noēsis (“hypernoēsis”),⁴⁰ what we might call connaissance, or the undifferentiated apprehension of presence, beyond the, let us say, savoir, of Intellect that comprehends itself in the differentiated totality of interrelated forms that it itself is, which differentiation makes its knowledge possible, since that knowledge Intellect has of itself depends on “apprehend[ing] one thing different from another and the object of thought [i.e., being as a whole] in being thought must contain variety.”⁴¹ For it is “through the interweaving of the forms with each other [that] discourse comes to be for us,” as Plato had said.⁴² But since God is prior to the differentiation of forms one from another, unconditioned by a relation of otherness with something outside himself, which would render him finite, he cannot be circumscribed by thought, as one distinct thing set apart from another. For this reason Augustine, following his philosophical forebears, affirms that “If you comprehend it, it is not God.”⁴³ As “giving being to the order and mode of all things,” God “transcends all human thought.”⁴⁴ The unconditioned knowledge that God has of himself is, as Lonergan says, “not a synthesis of Forms but the absolute of fact,”⁴⁵ not, in Plotinus’s words, “by scientific understanding [epistēmē] nor by intellection [noēsis]. . . [but] corresponds rather to a presence which is better than scientific understanding.”⁴⁶

Not lacking anything. . ., all things that belong to him are in him, and with him. He is in every way self-discerning; his life is in himself and everything is in himself; and his grasping of himself is himself—a grasping that is as if by self-awareness in a state of eternal stability, or by an act of intellection that is different from the intellection of Intellect.⁴⁷

We are now in a better position to understand what Augustine means when he calls God the knower, the known, and the knowing, where the knowing is the loving and the known the beloved and the knower the lover. His journey to knowing and loving God that Augustine tells in the Confessions is really his discovery of his power to do so as only enfolded within God’s own love of himself as infinite Beauty. “In your gift we find our rest. There are you our joy”⁴⁸ because “you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”⁴⁹ What is the way to? “Love lifts us there, and your good Spirit exalts our humble estate.” Hence, Augustine concludes, “My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards.”⁵⁰ Love for God is only possible because God is in himself, before all else, “eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity.”⁵¹ Because God is himself the fount of all beauty and the end of all desire, God’s self-expression, the eternally spoken Word of the hidden Father, is of infinite “beauty, wherein there is at once such harmony, and prime equality, and prime similitude, in no way discordant, in no measure unequal, in no part dissimilar, but wholly answering to the identity of the one whose image it is.” God’s being, which all things participate in, is therefore a perfect self-knowledge that is

never without fruition, without love, without rejoicing. Hence that love, delight, felicity or beatitude, if any human voice can worthily say it, is called by [Hilary of Poitiers], in brief, “use,” and is in the Trinity the Holy Spirit, not begotten, but of the begetter and begotten alike the very sweetness, filling all creatures, according to their capacities, with his bountiful superabundance. . . In that Trinity is the highest origin of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and the most blessed delight.⁵²

As we saw above, God’s causality—his providence, his essence—is absolutely unrestricted, the Truth of truth and falsity, the actuality of both form and matter, the Being of being and non-being. As the very principle of individuation, then, his knowledge extends to absolutely all things.⁵³ The eternal utterance of God in which all things participate, the Word who was “in the beginning,”

is like the art of the almighty and wise God, full of all the living and unchanging ideas, which are all one in it, as it is one from the one with whom it is one. In this art, God knows all things he has made through it, and so when times come and go, nothing comes and goes from God’s knowledge. . . even changeable things have been made because they are unchangeably known by him.⁵⁴

It is indeed just because matter is essential to each thing’s being the thing that it is, as that which extends the one form into its many potential particulars, that matter is good and is conditioned by the Good; hence, God is he who grants identity and particularity to everything, its limit in virtue of which it exists and is apprehensible. To know the God by whom each thing exists is not to abstract away from particularity to a pure substance, but precisely to find God in and through the identity, the particularity, and the difference each thing has as that which it is. And so too with God’s own knowledge: it is just because God is not this one good set over against that other good but the very goodness of each good, as Augustine says, that he knows himself (i.e., his Word) in and through the particularity of everything that is simply he himself, both the existence and the apprehension of anything at all which is.⁵⁵ But God’s knowledge is not a matter of thinking each thing individually in relation to another; for since he himself is all things in simplicity, and is Beauty itself, God’s apprehension and love of himself is one of perfect simplicity, wherein all the forms are “one” in the Word, just as in God his goodness, his wisdom, and so on are equivalent to his being, in an undifferentiated manner.⁵⁶ It follows that he “does not behold individual things by thought, but embraces all that He knows in one eternal, unchangeable, and ineffable vision.”⁵⁷ But neither does this mean that all things dissolve and lose their identities in God; rather, it is just as the being of all beings that in knowing his single act of manifestation in virtue of which everything is, God knows each being that is. Rowan Williams characterizes Augustine’s thought thus: “God’s presence is an ‘infinite attention’.”⁵⁸ This is an act of love, and his life is presence to and love of himself in which, by virtue of his all-encompassing nature, he knows and loves all things. Augustine analogizes human self-apprehension to divine self-manifestation and affirms that therein we find “knowledge with love,” for since the knower present to itself

knows and loves itself, its word is joined to it with love. And since it loves knowledge and knows love, the word is in the love and the love in the word and both in the lover and the utterer.⁵⁹

It is for this reason that Augustine will, as Plotinus did, distinguish the knowledge of God from the knowledge of differentiated, intelligible reality. For verily, he calls the latter the “intellectual nature” created first of all God’s works by the Word, the “pure city” of God and the heavenly Jerusalem.⁶⁰ That “sublime created realm,”⁶¹ which is distinct from the one subject to the “successiveness of time” (i.e., sense-perceptible reality) is the world of forms, the “intelligible heaven”⁶² that is “above the visible heaven,”⁶³ the “heaven of heaven,”⁶⁴ the “realm of intellect,”⁶⁵ the “spiritual” and “[incorporeal] House of God” that “participates in” God, spending its eternity in contemplation of him.⁶⁶ For the Platonists, intelligible reality and sensible reality are not dichotomous but on a continuum from lesser to greater unification with discursive reasoning lying between the two. Thus, when Augustine affirms that “by his Word coeternal with himself God made the intelligible and sensible, or spiritual and corporeal, worlds,”⁶⁷ we should not understand this to mean that these are two separate “places,” but different modes of cognition and thus different levels of the self, since as we have seen being is nothing but intelligibility; thus Plotinus teaches that “acts of sense-perception are faint acts of intellection, whereas the acts of intellection in the intelligible world are clear acts of sense-perception.”⁶⁸ Behind Augustine’s words lies Plato’s divided line, and his God is, like the sun of the Good in the Republic and the idea of the Beautiful in the Symposium, above as cause of and thus “present in” both intellection and sensation.⁶⁹ And in that purely intelligible reality, there is immediate knowledge of reality and forms (for thinking and being are one), a noetic knowledge above that of both discursive reasoning and sense-perception:

[T]hat “heaven” [spoken of in Gen. 1:1] means the “heaven of heaven,” the intellectual, non-physical heaven where the intelligence’s knowing is a matter of simultaneity—not in part, not in an enigma, not through a mirror, but complete, in total openness, “face to face.” This knowing is not of one thing at one moment and of another thing at another moment, but is concurrent without any temporal successiveness.⁷⁰

There, in the “intellectual heaven” where there is a “total openness” of the mind to the objects of its thoughts, the ascending soul “sees” intelligible reality purely, clearer than it did through sense-perception or discursive reasoning (“one thing at one moment and another thing at another moment”), instead finding the intelligibles “face to face.” But the knowledge of God is yet something else entirely.

Memoria, the Infinite Depth of the Self

There is, I submit, something to be gleaned about Augustine’s understanding of the nature of divine knowledge from his book on memory in the Confessions. Having in book seven heeded Plotinus’s instruction to retire within one’s own interior,⁷¹ Augustine found eternal Truth by considering the possibility of anything existing as its being given to, determined by, wholly subsisting within, and actually identified with the mind. In doing so, he finds that the mind’s true end, its final cause that incites it to seek and form judgement in every moment of rational experience in which the world presents itself to the mind and the mind takes hold of the world, is its very principle which “illumines the mind” by drawing on its intentionality, enabling judgement as the identity of being and knowing, and thereby renders all things visible to—or better, in—the mind, uniting the I to itself and in that very act with all things.

Consequently, what begins as an inquiry of all the objects that can be found in the memory—coursing through physical objects, sounds, images, colours, all things attainable by sense-perception, then abstract know-hows (“intellectual skills”), immaterial notions—ends with the realization that the very power of memory itself is nothing short of an uncircumscribed interiority, never bottoming out even as Augustine continues to probe the limits of all it can contain: “I run through all these things, I fly here and there, and penetrate their working as far as I can. But I never reach the end.” In the ascent to God through memory, he is constantly surpassing himself, “passing beyond even that power of mind which is called memory” in “desiring to reach you by the way through which you can be reached, and to be bonded to you by the way in which it is possible to be bonded.”⁷² The full depth of memory is infinite; it is not merely the faculty of recollection, but the self itself, the self as infinite, self-transcending selfhood: he never arrives at a final substance that is his primordial grund, but is constantly, in his mind’s return to itself, surpassing every limited act of apprehension, every closure on its identity, everything in being, always overflowing, as it were, incapable of containing itself, and it is precisely in so doing that it attains union with God, who is self-transcending selfhood itself, immanent to himself in his very transcendence of himself in all things.⁷³

[W]e may indeed cry aloud to the living God, ‘Thy knowledge is become wonderful to me; it is sublime, and I cannot reach to it.’ For I understand from myself how wonderful and how incomprehensible Your knowledge is, by which You have made me, when I consider that I cannot even comprehend myself whom You have made; and yet in my meditation a fire flames out, so that I seek Your face evermore.⁷⁴

God will remain, for Augustine, “constant above me,” eliding the circumscription of the mind as the ascent through the mind never attains a terminus.⁷⁵ So Gregory of Nyssa, in the footsteps of Plotinus, had said: the nature of the infinite is not such as to ever be grasped.⁷⁶ There is no ultimate object or substance to attain in the ascent to the unlimited precisely because it is always exceeding all shape, all boundary, all finitude. Accordingly, of this epektasis into God’s infinitude Gregory says: “This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness.”⁷⁷ Thus the “seeing” is endless because that which it looks to in its intentionality is so. This Nicholas of Cusa will affirm a millennium forward, having adopted Augustine’s terminology about “learned ignorance” with respect to that which “surpasses all understanding.”⁷⁸

[T]he eye is there wherever love is. . . Your seeing, Lord, is your loving [and] just as your gaze looks upon me so attentively that it never turns away from me, so it is with your love. . . [Y]our love, Lord, is nothing other than you yourself. . . [And] since your seeing is your being, I am, therefore, because you regard me.⁷⁹

It is precisely because God is at once superior summo meo—utterly transcendent of everything conceivable—that he is therefore interior intimo meo—absolutely immanent as the very inward actuality of each person in virtue of which she or he is anything at all.⁸⁰ Augustine’s principle of the analogical expression in beings of God’s being that follows from this is something one finds in Plotinus too: if God were merely a being among beings, constrained to his bounds, “remaining in himself,” he could not be the principle of all things; but if he is the principle and the being of all beings (or, to use Plotinus’s preferred expression, the “power” of all things), then all beings have some proportion or analogy to God’s being as derivative of it, and consequently “everything will imitate the principle according to its capacity by tending towards eternity and goodness.”⁸¹

Thus the soul’s union with the Good is possible only in light of the Good’s more original self-regard, relation to the Good possible only by virtue of the Good’s presence to itself, through itself, and in itself in all things; he is, as Plotinus says, “altogether self-related.”⁸² But as the being of all beings, God’s presence to himself and his presence in every being are not two different things. Pseudo-Dionysius had written that the cause of all things “moves the whole and holds it together by the love of his own peculiar Beauty,”⁸³ so that “by his beautiful and good love for all things, through an overflowing [hyperbolēn] of loving goodness, becomes outside of himself. . . and is led down from his place above all and transcendent of all to dwell in all things in accordance with his ecstatic and superessential power whereby he nonetheless remains in himself.”⁸⁴ Every soul’s endless ascent to God is one expression of what is before all else God’s endless going forth from and return to himself in every soul. At that juncture where absolute being is equivalent to absolute knowing, the soul finds that its being and knowing and loving is more originally God’s own being and knowing and loving, and its own eye God’s own eye. And so Augustine prays: “May I know myself, may I know Thee.”

1. Plotinus, Enneads VI.9.7.15-25 (ed. Lloyd P. Gerson [Cambridge University Press, 2018]).

2. Augustine, Confessions 7.10.16 (trans. Henry Chadwick [Oxford University Press, 1992]).

3. Soliloquies 2.15.28; cf. also 2.2.2

4. Parmenides, frag. B3; Plato, Republic 478b; Aristotle, Metaph. IV, VII; Plotinus, V.1.8.

5. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5^th ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 295-305; Eric Perl, “Lux Mentium: Augustine’s Argument to God as Truth and Its Recent Resumptions,” International Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2024), p. 109.

6. Lonergan, Insight, p. 375; cf. pp. 377, 387-91.

7. Vittorio Hösle, Objective Idealism, Ethics, and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), pp. 36-7; Pierre Scheuer, “God,” in Daniel J. Shine, S.J., An Interior Metaphysics: The Philosophical Synthesis of Pierre Scheuer, S.J. (Weston College Press, 1966), pp. 162-4. Cf. John Rist: “[Augustine’s argument to] God as ‘Truth’ is to be understood as the guarantor both of the meaning of propositions and of the corresponding intelligibility of the world to which they refer, as well as the light by which we delight to understand its intelligible structure” (Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized [Cambridge University Press, 1994], p. 257).

8. Soliloquies 2.10.18; 2.15.29; 2.17.31.

9. Enarrationes in Psalmos 135 (134); In Evangelium Ioannis Tractatus 38.8-9.

10. Soliloquies 1.13.23.

11. Soliloquies 2.4.5-5.8.

12. Eric Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition(Brill, 2014), p. 125; idem, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (SUNY Press, 2007), p. 92; Lloyd P. Gerson, “Why the Intelligibles are not Outside the Intellect,” in John F. Finamore and Tomáš Nejeschleba (eds.), Platonism and Its Legacy (Prometheus Trust, 2019).

13. Plato, Sophist 260d.

14. Plato, Sophist 259e.

15. Plato, Sophist 257a.

16. Confessions 12.4.4.

17. Confessions 12.6.6-8.8 (“formless matter. . . you made before any day existed at all.”)

18. Confessions 12.19.28; cf. 12.22.31.

19. Confessions 12.22.31.

20. Confessions 12.15.22.

21. Confessions 7.5.7 (“He would be less than omnipotent if he could not create something good unless assisted by a matter which he had not himself created.”); 12.3.3; 12.6.6; 12.7.7 (“there was nothing apart from you out of which you could make them”); 13.33.48.

22. Confessions 12.22.31.

23. Augustine, Letter 118.3.15. From Letter 11.4, it is apparent that “species” means here “form,” the “mode of existence” for anything that is.

24. De Trinitate 7.5.10.

25. De Trinitate 11.5.8.

26. See Aristotle, Physics II.7-8; Plotinus, III.8.7.17; VI.8.7.4-5.

27. Plotinus, VI.8.13.25-55.

28. Plotinus, VI.8.15.7-11. This reasoning is the basis for Plotinus’s doctrine that the Good is itself its act of willing (VI.8.21.15-17).

29. Kevin Corrigan, “‘Solitary’ Mysticism in Plotinus, Proclus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius,” The Journal of Religion 76, no. 1 (1996), p. 42.

30. De Trinitate 8.4.6; 10.1.1-2.4; 13.4.7.

31. Confessions 7.4.6 (“For the will and power of God is God’s very self”); 12.28.38; Plotinus, VI.8.16.12-21.

32. Confessions 13.16.19.

33. De Trinitate 15.13-14; 15.17.29.

34. Plotinus VI.7.38.26. For this point in particular, as well as a general critique of approaches that conflate anthropomorphism with personality and brand Plotinus’s One as “impersonal,” see “Paul Henry, S.J. (1906-1984),” in Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Kevin Corrigan and José C. Baracat Jr., A Text Worthy of Plotinus: The Lives and Correspondence of P. Henry S.J., H.-R. Schwyzer, A.H. Armstrong, J. Trouillard and J. Igal S.J. (Leuven University Press, 2021), pp. 85-95.

35. Plotinus, VI.7.39.1-5

36. Plotinus, VI.7.39.19-21 and V.3.10.42, respectively.

37. Plotinus VI.8.16.15

38. Plotinus VI.7.32.25-31.

39. Plotinus VI.8.15.1; cf. also 5.3.16.25-33; 6.7.32.25-30; cp. De Trinitate 8.10.14. See Lloyd P. Gerson, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy(Cornell University Press, 2020), p. 188; Alexander Earl, “Lovable and Love and Love of Himself: Intimations of Trinitarian Theology in the Metaphysics of Plotinus,” International Philosophical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2020), p. 54.

40. Plotinus VI.8.16.30-35.

41. Plotinus IV.3.10.40-42.

42. Plato, Sophist 259e5-6.

43. Augustine, Sermon 67; cf. also Augustine, Octog. Tri. Quaest. xv: “whatever comprehends itself is finite as regards itself.” Augustine will, echoing Plotinus and anticipating Dionysius say that even to call God unspeakable is, incoherently, to still say something of him (De doctrina christiana 1.6.6).

44. Augustine, Letter 118.4.24

45. Lonergan, Insight, p. 390.

46. Plotinus VI.9.4.1-4.

47. Plotinus, V.4.2.15-20.

48. Confessions 13.9.10

49. Confessions 1.1

50. Confessions 13.9.10.

51. Confessions 7.10.16

52. De Trinitate 6.10.11

53. De Trinitate 15.4.6; 15.13.22.

54. De Trinitate 6.11; cf. also Confessions 8.3.6. That these ideas exist in simplicity in the Word (as Plotinus says they are in the One) can be further seen through 15.5.7.

55. De Trinitate 8.3.4-5; 15.5.7.

56. Cf. De Trinitate 8, prologue; 15.13.22.

57. De Trinitate 15.7.13. Augustine says that God’s knowledge of the Word is not a thought on the part of God and refuses a literal understanding of Scripture when it speaks of the thoughts of God, likening it to when it speaks of God being forgetful (De Trinitate 15.16.25).

58. Rowan Williams, On Augustine (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 10.

59. De Trinitate 9.15

60. Confessions 12.15.20. Cf. also 12.20.29; 13.8.7; and Soliloquies 1.6.12. The distinction Augustine makes is overlooked by Peter Brown in his evaluation of Confessions 7.9.13, where he (in my view mistakenly) judges Augustine to be there identifying the Word of the Johannine Prologue with the Plotinian Intellect (Augustine of Hippo [University of California Press, 2000], pp. 89-90).

61. Confessions 12.15.19

62. Confessions 12.21.30

63. Confessions 12.11.12

64. Confessions 12.2.2; 12.21.30

65. Confessions 12.9.9; cf. 12.15.19

66. Confessions 12.15.19; cf. also 12.9.9 as well as 3.6.10 and 12.17.26 (“the spiritual creation”).

67. Confessions 12.20.29; cf. also 12.29.40 (“the entire intelligible and physical creation”).

68. Plotinus, VI.7.7.30-33. The identity of being and intelligibility leads to the conclusion that all things have some degree of cognition, ranging from dimmer to clearer. This is why, adopting Aristotle’s hierarchy of being, Plotinus asserts that vegetative, animal, and rational each have some measure of thinking—“growth-thought” for the vegetative, “sense-thought” for the animal, discursive thought and intellection for the rational—for everything is form, and a form is simultaneously an idea and the act of ideation for that idea (III.8.8.13-17).

69. Plato, Philebus 30b.

70. Confessions 12.13.16. See Alexander J.B. Hampton, The Metaphysics of Divine Participation (Cambridge University Press, 2025), p. 18 (“Here, the heaven of heavens is immutable, and timeless, but it is not coeternal with God since it is created by God at the very inception of creation. . . The heaven of heavens contains the divine ideas in their full and unchanging realisation. They are the intelligible reality in which all creatures participate in a less than full and perfect way.”)

71. Perl, “Lux Mentium,” pp. 102, 108-9.

72. Confessions 10.17.26

73. See David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003), p. 114.

74. De Trinitate 15.7.13

75. Confessions 10.17.26

76. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses II.238

77. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses II.163.

78. Augustine, Letter 130.14.27-15.28.

79. Nicholas of Cusa, De visione dei 4.10

80. Confessions 3.6.11.

81. Plotinus, VI.4.1.33-38.

82. Plotinus, VI.8.17.25-27. Cf. Wayne Hankey’s characterization of Augustine’s thought: “The greatest possible Divine-human mutuality is necessary if no third thing can adequately connect us: God’s being is that by which we are, God’s knowing is that by which we know, and God’s love is that by which we love.” (“Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos,” Dionysius 35 [2017], p. 69).

83. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 4.7

84. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 4.13