Take and use their gold: the adaptation of an ancient therapeutic ideal

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1.4 Augustine’s Confessions and philosophical therapy: confession as soul

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It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves.

We must endeavor with all our resources and

all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.

Cicero, (Tusculanae Disputationes 3.6).

Philosophy in the ancient world was a choice of a mode of life related to philosophical discourse as integrated theory and practice. Pierre Hadot highlights that the choice of a way of life was not only an appendix or accessory to the philosophical activity, but its beginning, related to a global vision of a certain approach to living.²³⁴ Philosophical discourse originated as a choice of an existential option, never made in isolation, but done in a philosophical school. It demanded a change of lifestyle, conversion of being, desire to be and live in a certain way as a preparation for wisdom.²³⁵ The task of philosophical schools became to justify that existential option and worldview and incorporate it into practice, a theoretical discourse integrated to an application of an ideal: philosophical discourse as an expression and the means of a type of a chosen life of perfection.²³⁶

Ancient philosophy and its major schools consented to an interrelated analogy between philosophy and the art of therapy. Orators were in the business of curing souls as words not only communicate, but impact listeners and implement change. In that regard, there was a certain type of manipulation of one’s thoughts and ideas for the good, towards an ideal of formation towards happiness and wisdom. As Martha Nussbaum argues, it was a medical perspective on philosophizing, for Hellenistic philosophy was concerned to ensure the flourishing of life by using arguments and sound reasoning.²³⁷ These arguments were mainly towards directing human affections, guiding passions, desire and its motions. As Epicureans,

234. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3. Pierre Hadot’s book shows the significant difference between what ancients considered philosophy and philosophy as we understand it today. Hadot’s perspective is of continuity between Augustine and Platonism as an overlapping of the essential parts of Platonic doctrines with the essential part of Christian Doctrines. Hadot, based on De Vera Religione, suggests that Augustine confronts Platonism and Christianity, but there is continuity as Augustine argues for the same fundamental core between both. Hadot emphasized that Christianity did what Platonism could not – to convert the masses, as in Nietzsche’s words, “Platonism to the people” (see Hadot, 251-252).

235. Ibid., 4.

236. Ibid., 3-4.

237. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practive in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton:

Printeton University Press, 1996), 14-16.

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Stoics, and Skeptics sought to relieve human suffering, they were also driven to produce diagnosis and understand the means by which these illnesses would be therapeutically treated.

Human diseases were seen as the product of false views and beliefs. The consequence is that Hellenistic philosophy produced complex understandings of health and illness that would inspire Augustine to be found, himself, among those proposing therapy, albeit not only strictly in the framework of classical philosophy, but adapting it within a relational and theological framework.

Therapeia was an ancient concern, one that occupied much space in philosophical, medical and theological endeavors. The ideas of therapy found its first developments in the fields of medical history, philosophy and theology in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the ancient world, the disciplines were already finding their specificities, such as the different approaches to therapy in medicine and philosophy. Hippocrates, who incarnated the values of what is today the medical profession, tended to highlight the somatic treatment, even though he strived for both a healthy mind and body. By an emphasis on the natural causes rather than the supernatural, Hippocrates fostered clinical observation and diagnosis, a movement that distinguished medicine as a separate discipline. Philosophers, in contrast, were skilled in the healing through beautiful words, in the art of rhetoric. Among philosophical approaches, Platonism also had keen interest in therapy. The Socratic questioning or maieutic expressed an elaborated view of philosophy as therapy based on the method of inquiring human beliefs and opinions. For Socrates, erroneous understandings of reality lead to ignorance. The philosopher is to question in order to birth life as a midwife of wisdom with the duty to bring about true knowledge.²³⁸

The Hellenistic philosophical tradition of therapy has also been stated as

“psychagogy”, a developed system of care dedicated to development in wisdom. Psychagogy was a search for knowledge and an internalized wise existence in the context of a learning and therapeutic relationship. The emphasis was not on medicine for the body, but speech and rhetoric as the main tools to foster a process towards maturity. However, speech was not enough, as the ability to persuade relied on being attentive to the illnesses, restrictions and circumstances of the recipient. Psychagogy refers to, as Paul Kolbet aptly summarizes,

philosophically articulated traditions of therapy, common in Hellenistic literature, pertaining to how a mature person leads the less mature to

238 . See Robert Earl Cushman, Therapeia: Plato’s Conception of Philosophy (New Brunswick:

Transaction Publishers), 2004.

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Search for wisdom, persuasive speech and consideration of one’s audience: by these three elements in the definition of psychagogy, it follows that Augustine’s biography and conversion placed him as a suitable rhetorician to embrace these ideals and at the same time subvert them. Augustine was well-versed in these three domains: wisdom, speech and audience responsiveness, being at the same time aware of its potentials and restrictions. His youth had been marked by a search for wisdom since reading Cicero, but he later realized the limitations to self-knowledge. Augustine had embraced a career in rhetoric and the persuasive discourse of the Manicheans, later to change his communication by speaking with God-given words. As a former teacher of rhetoric, he sought to be attentive to his students’ conditions and needs; later, he would have to reframe his sermons to reach his mostly non-educated audience in Hippo in a liturgical setting. But as an apt orator, Augustine adapted himself to different audiences and cities, such as elaborated ideas to the more educated hearers from Carthage, as many of these sermons attest. Michael Cameron discussed how Augustine’s audience, even the illiterate, participated in the psychagogical process through hearing sermons, as the Christological message worked as a spiritual exercise that stretched people’s consciousness and fostered a participation in mutual indwelling.²⁴⁰

Psychagogy was also appropriated by Hellenistic Jews and Christian apologists before Augustine, who were interested in developing an integration of the Judeo-Christian tradition with the teachings of Hellenistic philosophy. With the expansion of the Christian faith in a theologically articulated perspective about life, ancient theologians validated the philosophical ideal of therapy and appropriated it within the Christian tradition. In the interaction between the Greco-Roman heritage and the Judeo-Christian tradition, Christian philosophers accepted for themselves practices of Hellenistic philosophy and adapted it by affirming the Christian faith as the true philosophia.

239. Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of souls, 8.

240. Michael Cameron, “Totus Christus and the Psychagogy of Augustine's Sermons,” Augustinian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 69. “Augustine shaped his sermons as adapted exercitationes for the non-sophisticated Christians who made up most of his audience […] the sermon initiates a toto-christological spiritual exercise whose stretching and straining actualizes the death and resurrection of Jesus in the people’s consciousness; this staple of the Augustinian psychagogic process of pastoral care gave knowledge and increased capacity for spiritual development.”

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Out of the recent studies on the Christian adaptation of Hellenistic therapy, Paul Kolbet’s approach has been most read and reviewed. He highlights that Augustine appropriated the psychagogic tradition to Christian purposes, as he laid out a rhetoric to convey Christian truth, using methods and goals of Greek philosophical traditions.²⁴¹ Since Augustine adapted rhetorical ideals rather than rejected them,²⁴² Kolbet emphasizes how the goals of a philosophical therapy remain in Augustine’s sermons, even though they have been recontextualized and modified to fit his homilies in Christian liturgy.²⁴³ His study looked at how Augustine received the classical tradition of the cure of souls and how his attitude renovated and reframed the classic rhetorical tradition into a Christian one.

Augustine was not the first to adapt therapy principles into the Judeo-Christian tradition. Centuries before Augustine, Philo, a Hellenistic Jew, produced a synthesis between Jewish anthropology and Hellenistic therapeutic ideals. Philo and the therapists of Alexandria lived in the first century of the Christian era in a cauldron of encounter between Greek culture and Jewish tradition. Philo brought both the responsive listening of Judaism and the holistic Old Testament anthropology as elements to therapy within Hellenic culture. As Leloup suggests, Philo used an ancient holistic Hebrew approach that stands against a fragmented look at the individual and in favor of caring for the whole person.²⁴⁴ Recognizing that the task of philosophy included the fostering of therapy, he integrated the classic goals into the framework of Hellenistic Judaism, a synthesis that produced an integrated model of the unity of the person. His approach sought to care for the human person in body, soul and spirit:

ancient therapists with a holistic anthropology, seeking the care of human beings in their corporal, psychological and spiritual dimensions. Furthermore, since the shema and the call to hear the Lord are an essential part of keeping God’s law, his approach also emphasized the ability of responsive listening. Philo stands as an example of integration between Hebrew thought and Hellenistic therapeutic ideals, even though not particularly within a Christian framework.

Christian philosophers brought to Christianity practices from secular philosophy, as they adopted philosophia to designate faith as the great philosophy and the way to a wise life. In order to bridge a message born out of Judaism and originally foreign to the Greek and

241. Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of Souls, 12.

242. Ibid., 12.

243. Ibid.

244 Jean-Yves Leloup, Prendre soin de l'être: Philon et les thérapeutes d'Alexandrie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999).

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Roman mentalities, Christian apologists since second century A. D. tried to present Christianity as the supreme philosophy. Greek philosophers were conceived as having only portions of the Logos, and as Clement suggested, Christianity was the true revelation of Logos.²⁴⁵ Origen introduced his students to the wisdom books of Proverbs (ethics, initial purification), Ecclesiastes (physics, to go beyond the material) and Song of Songs (epoptics or theology, union with God)²⁴⁶, in a type of spiritual preparation for wisdom so common to the philosophical schools. The monastery became the means of preparation to join persons with a lived wisdom. Furthermore, there was the Christianization of secular themes. The spiritual exercises of the ancient philosophical schools were read as if they had been already present in Old and New Testaments.²⁴⁷

Augustine lived, however, in a Christian ecclesiastical context with diversity of opinions on how to approach Roman culture and Greek philosophy. As early as the second century, the apologists had opposing views on Christianity’s appropriation of classical antiquity. Tertullian suggested that Athens and Jerusalem were miles apart and had nothing to do with each other. Irenaeus, oppositely, used the language of Athens to reinforce the truths of Jerusalem. As a consequence, persuasive speeches and rhetorical classical strategies were also used by Christians. In the fourth century, this debate was even further deepened as Christianity became entangled with the political power of the late Roman Empire. Scholars in Augustine’s generation continued the passionate debate about the interaction between Christianity and its surrounding culture. Rufinus considered Jerome more Ciceronian than Christian due to his appreciation of classical culture; Jerome in return suggested that the flow of words and clarity of thought through which Rufinus conveyed the truths of Jerusalem would have come from Greek tradition or Cicero himself. If the purity of Christian identity was at stake in the new context, on which the great Cathedrals and political power was built over the blood of the martyr’s tombs, in North Africa these issues were ever highlighted by the Donatist controversy over the purity of the church and the desire to differentiate Christianity from its surrounding culture.

Augustine finds a way out from the polarized debate between Jerusalem and Athens through a metaphor related to the Israelite engagement in Egypt. Therefore, it could be said that he found a “local” perspective: he finds neither in Asia, nor in Europe, but in his own

245. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 239.

246. Ibid., 239-240.

247. Ibid., 248-249.

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North Africa a third way of engaging classical philosophy. It would not be Athens nor Jerusalem, but the gold out of Egypt (Conf. 7.9.15), the answer for a Christian engagement with culture:

Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils. These, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also, that is, human institutions such as are adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life, we must take and turn to a Christian use.²⁴⁸

Take their gold and turn to a Christian use: the sentence had already been used by Irenaeus and Origin; but it is through Augustine’s taking of the gold and the goal of soul therapy, one that used to be in the domain of philosophy (and the appropriation of philosophy as

“ancilla”), that their precious stones were cut and polished with Christian content and form weaving narrative, confessional language and therapy. Augustine’s Confessions can be described as a model of Christian therapeutic re-appropriation of the antiquity philosophy tradition.

As a summary, it can be stated that Augustine made use of classical therapeutic ideas within a Christian framework. In his perspective classical therapy persists as an ideal of transformation in wisdom. Even though in a different context, psychagogy is still manifested through a rhetorician/orator leading the listeners to a more mature comprehension of their illnesses, even in a different setting as a biblical expositor in homilies in the periphery of the

248. Doc. Chr, 240.

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Roman Empire. But breaking with classical pagan philosophy, Christ and not the philosophers incarnates the medicus that possesses healing knowledge. Here stands the distance between the answers of Athens and Jerusalem, the Areopagus and the Calvary, the wisdom of philosophy and the foolish-wisdom of the cross. The difference is between presumption and confession, “those who see the goal but not the way to it and the Way to our beatific homeland” (Conf. 7.20.26). Even though the ideals persist, Augustine came to believe that the response to the human predicament would not be found solely in human formation towards wisdom. God himself knows human interiority far beyond human capabilities. It is Christ, the mediator and healer, who repairs the disease of human pride by humbly becoming man and leads them towards a homeland beyond their reach.²⁴⁹