Summary
‘At War within Oneself’ offers a hermeneutical reading of Augustine’s account of his conversion in the eighth book of his Confessions. Augustine is often said to have discovered the will or, at least, the will in conflict with itself. The author’s depiction of his conversion might be described as phenomenological and Hannah Arendt for one attempted to find the phenomenological core of Augustine’s experience of the will by separating it from its theological interpretation. ‘At War within Oneself’ argues that the attempt to do so is thwarted by what might be called the finitude of historical experience: the experience of the will cannot be divorced from its theological context, because theology, especially insofar as it informed the institutional framework of conversion, helped produce the experience of the will in conflict with itself in the first place.
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Notes
See, for example, Anthony Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, London (Duckworth), 1979, esp. pp. vii—x.
Charles Kahn, ‘Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine’. In: The Question of ‘Eclecticism’, ed. J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long, Berkeley (University of California Press), 1988, pp. 240–241. Kahn observes that Aristotle explicitly separated boulesis and hekousion on the grounds that nobody could wish what is bad whereas the akratic does what is bad voluntarily. One wonders if there would have been so much misunderstanding about the Greek conception of the will had the passage occurred in the Nicomachean Ethics, rather than the less well-known Eudemian Ethics (EE II.7.1223b29–39).
The Sickness unto Death, ed. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, Princeton, NJ (Princeton University Press), 1980, pp. 87–93.
Les confessions, ed. A. Solignac, Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 13 and 14, Bruges (Desclée de Brouwer), 1962; trans. John K. Ryan, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, New York (Doubleday), 1960. References to the Confessions will be given in the usual way: book number, chapter number, paragraph number.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, New York (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1978, Vol. 2, p. 93.
The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, Berkeley (University of California Press), 1982, p. 144.
Ibid. p. 127.
The question of invention versus discovery is posed by Maclntyre in his review of Dihle in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1986), pp. 242–45.
For a survey of the controversy surrounding the alleged fictionality of Augustine’s account of his conversion in the Confessions, see Eugene Kevane, `Philosophy, Education, and the Controversy on St. Augustine’s Conversion’. In: Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, ed. John K. Ryan, Vol. 2, 1963, pp. 61–103. It is tempting to argue for the literality of Augustine’s account on the strength of the genuineness of its phenomenological description. However, that would be to neglect the fact that there appears to be an interlude between the events described in Book Eight and the appearance of associated themes in Augustine’s writings from the same period. These were years dominated by the reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, London (Faber and Faber), 1967, p. 151. The development indicated by a comparison with the interpretation of Romans VII offered by De Musica. See William S. Babcock, ‘Augustine’s Interpretation of Romans (A. D. 394–396)’, Augustinian Studies 10 (1979), pp. 55–74.
For a description of these procedures and Augustine’s attitude toward them, see F. Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop. Church and Society at the Dawn of the Middle Ages, trans. B. Battershaw and G. R. Lamb, New York (Harper and Row), 1965, Ch. 12.
Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregy, New York (Paulist Press), 1980, p. 73: “Let each one of us note and record our actions and the stirring of our souls as though we were going to give an account to each other. And you can be sure that, being particularly ashamed to have them made known we would stop sinning and even meditating on something evil.”
Epistle to the Romans VII. 25.
Hence the importance, I suspect, of the way Augustine’s account of his conversion is artfully dominated by a number of exemplary stories of conversion that are told to him and that his own story in its turn conforms to. See Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother, Chicago (University of Chicago Press), 1991, p. 27.
What is Freedom?’, Between Past and Future, London (Faber and Faber), 1961, p. 159.
What is Freedom?’, p. 158.
Nicomachean Ethics I.13.1102b18–22.
This is not to deny the importance accords to the distinction between voluntas and potestas in other contexts. For a classic statement, see `The Spirit and the Letter’ 31, 53 in Augustine’s Later Writings, ed. John Burnaby, The Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia (The Westminster Press), 1955, p. 237.
The Life of the Mind II, pp. 84–96. Arendt here also corrects her earlier translation of nollo as “I-will-not” to “I nill” because the former might suggest an absence of will. Ibid. p. 89.
What is Freedom?’, p. 158.
Hans Jonas, ‘Philosophische Reflexion über Paulus’ Römerbrief, Kapitel 7’, in Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), 1965, p. 97; trans. H. Jonas, `Philosophical Meditation on the Seventh Chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans’, in The Future of Our Religious Past, ed. James M. Robinson, London (S.C.M. Press), 1971, pp. 339–340.
Philosophische Reflexion’, p. 98; `Philosophical Meditation’, p. 341.
Epistle to the Romans VII.19.
See Robert J. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions. The Odyssey of Soul, Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University Press), 1969, p. 99.
In The Life of the Mind Arendt emphasised the love as “the ultimate unifying will” and thus as the resolution of the will’s conflict with itself (II pp. 95 and 99–104). In so doing she is following Gilson’s lead except insofar as he does not see Augustine’s focus on love as a clerical of the importance of grace in precisely this context. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch, London (Victor Gollancz), 1961, pp. 132–142 and 159–160.
Neal W. Gilbert, `The Concept of Will in Early Latin Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1 (1963), pp. 17–35.
The City of God, trans. Henry Betterson, Harmondsworth (Penguin), 1972, XXII, 30, p. 1089.
J. Patout Burns, `The Interpretation of Romans in the Pelagian Controversy’, Augustinian Studies 10 (1979), pp. 43–54. Augustine came to the view that Paul wrote the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans as a baptised Christian. It followed that conversion did not end the will’s conflict with itself. See also John G. Prendiville, `The Development of the Idea of Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine’, Traditio XXVIII (1972), pp. 8891.
The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 85.
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Bernasconi, R. (1992). At War within Oneself: Augustine’s Phenomenology of the Will in the Confessions . In: van Tongeren, P., Sars, P., Bremmers, C., Boey, K. (eds) Eros and Eris. Phaenomenologica, vol 127. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1464-8_5
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