Volume 33 Number 3 Article 4

March 2005

Getting in Line: Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, and the Project of Getting in Line: Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, and the Project of

Integral Christian Scholarship Integral Christian Scholarship

Robert Sweetman

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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Sweetman, Robert (2005) "Getting in Line: Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, and the Project of Integral Christian Scholarship," Pro Rege: Vol. 33: No. 3, 26 - 36. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol33/iss3/4

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26 Pro Rege—March 2005

Christianity did not begin as the religion ofphilosophers, grammarians, experts in the lawand forensic rhetoric, i.e, as the religion of thescholastic professions in the ancientMediterranean world of the New Testament.However, early on it did attract people of thatsort. We know, for example, of some early con-verts who were interested in and gave themselvesto philosophy, or the love of wisdom. They askedquestions about the relationship between the wis-dom of their new-found faith and the schooledlove of wisdom they took with them into it. Thesecond century Christian Justin Martyr providesus an example in his Dialogue with Trypho the

Jew.1 Let us look over his shoulder.As Justin tells the story, he is walking along

one day when a man and his friends salute him.They address him as philosopher, for he isdressed as such, bearing the pallium or philoso-pher’s cloak. Justin asks the man what he wants,and the man says that a renowned Cynic hadtaught him to engage philosophers in conversa-tion at every opportunity, for, in doing so, he willeither learn something of benefit or the philoso-pher will, and, whatever the case, it will be wellfor both.

Justin next asks the man who he is, and the manidentifies himself as Trypho, a Jewish refugee. Atthis, Justin’s eyebrows rise, and he asks whyTrypho would think to benefit from a philosopherwhen he has Moses and the prophets. The ques-tion could equally be asked of Justin himself, ashe well knows, adding or perhaps substitutingJesus Christ and the Apostles.

Trypho’s answer begins by identifying com-mon ground between philosophy and the revela-tion of Moses and the prophets: “do not thephilosophers [too] speak always about God? Dothey not constantly propose questions about hisunity and providence? Is this not the task of phi-losophy, to inquire about the Divine?”2

Justin admits the common ground but theninsists that it is not neutral ground. His admissionand insistence are designed to point out that thephilosopher’s theological inquiry and theprophets’ inspired reception of divine revelationdo indeed share a common subject, the divine andits ways in the world, but that the philosopher’stheological inquiry constitutes a getting ratherthan a receiving of knowledge and that this pos-

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a lecture series for The Association of Reformed Institutions ofHigher Education (ARIHE), 2004-2005, as well as Ch. 2 in Dr. Robert Sweetman’s upcoming book,Delineations: Re-imaging the Adventure of Integral Christian Scholarship.

Getting In Line: Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, and the Project ofIntegral Christian Scholarship

by Dr. Robert Sweetman

Dr. Robert Sweetman is Professor of the History ofPhilosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies inToronto.

Pro Rege—March 2005 27

ture or attitude orients one’s whole approach tothe shared subject in ways that make a substan-tive difference. Justin gets at his point by empha-sizing the relative fallibility of the philosophers’theological inquiry. “But,” he says, “the majorityof the philosophers have simply neglected toinquire whether there is one or even several gods,and whether or not a divine providence actuallytakes care of us, as if this knowledge were unnec-essary to our happiness.”3 He goes on to list otherimportant mistakes that are made even by thosewho do deal with these issues, mistakes that cutthe ground out from under right, wrong, and thejust relations between human beings and withrespect to God.

Trypho plays out his role as straight man andasks Justin to explain where he stands on thesecentral issues. He gladly tells his story. Hebegins by praising philosophy as “one’s greatestpossession,” and as “most precious in the sight ofGod to whom it alone leads us and to whom itunites us”; as a consequence, Justin views thosewho apply themselves to philosophy as “in truth. . . holy men.”4 However, there are many schoolsof philosophy, and they bicker over how one is tolove wisdom. Justin accounts for these manyschools in a story of gigantic beginnings whittleddown to size. We who come after the larger-than-life founders mistake our giantish heroes for wis-dom herself. Hence, we parcel up their commonenterprise, preserving the founders’ opinions as ifthey were wisdom’s, full stop.

Indeed, Justin’s own biography illustrates thepoint.5 He had begun his pursuit of wisdom witha Stoic but learned nothing new about God. Hethen turned to an Aristotelian who insisted ontuition for his instruction. Justin judged thisinsistence as evidence that the Aristotelian wasnot a philosopher, for one does not sell access todivine things. Doing so is sophistry and, as such,foolishness, the very antipode of wisdom. Justinnext turned to a Pythagorean teacher whodemanded that Justin first study mathematics,geometry and astronomy. He had no stomach forsuch demanding preconditions and so turned tothe Platonists. From his Platonic teacher helearned of incorporeal things. He named theeffect of this learning in classically Platonic fash-ion: “it added wings to my mind.”6 However,only folly resulted: “I fully expected immediately

to gaze upon God, for this is the goal of Plato’sphilosophy.” 7

At this point, Justin met an old man who intro-duced him via Socratic irony to the Christian reli-gion. The old man begins by asking after the pur-pose of Justin’s earnest pursuit of wisdom. “Is itjust about lingual facility as the sophists teach,”he asks, “or is it about living well?”8 Justin’sresponse contests the disjunction: “To prove thatreason rules all and [then] to rule it and be sus-tained by it is precisely to be enabled to livewell.”9

In short, philosophy for Justin, in these, hisPlatonic days, unites all other human pursuits intoa unity and gives them value. And that meansthat philosophy produces or at least aims to pro-duce happiness, or the flourishing life—eudae-monia. Of course, he does not mean just any phi-losophy but the philosophy of Plato. And so theold man engages this Platonic way of seeing phi-losophy and its connection to happiness, and heexposes its vanity. His arguments come down tothis: Even if Platonic claims are true, what gooddoes philosophy do? How does it increase oureudaemonia?

Justin’s Christian Socrates is here exhibiting afine sense of irony and knowledge of philosophi-cal argument, for this argument is an adaptationof Aristotle’s against Plato’s account of the causalforce of the Forms. Aristotle, in Metaphysics 1.9,had granted to Forms what he called a formalcausality as the exemplars of things or sources ofwhat-things-are within our sensible world.Nevertheless, he denied that their formal causali-ty could in any way account for the movement ofbodies and, hence, account for the continuity andchange that we experience in our day-to-dayembodied living. After all, formal causes are notefficient causes, and it is efficient causes that actas movers in our world of concrete experience orperception (991a.8-33).

In this passage, Justin is forced to acknowledgeslowly but unavoidably in the course of conversa-tion that Platonic claims do not and cannotincrease our eudaemonia. This answer leavesJustin asking where he is to go in his pursuit ofwisdom if the philosophers, even the Platonicphilosophers, do not know the truth? The oldman turns him to the scriptures and the Godrevealed there as Father-Creator and Christ-Son.

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The old man admonishes him to “examine thesewritings with your philosopher’s questions andyou will learn at last the true answers to thosequestions.”10 Moreover, he insists that Justin keepat least one Platonic habit and come to his exam-ination in prayer: “beseech God to open to youthe gates of light, for no one can perceive orunderstand these truths unless he has beenenlightened by God and His Christ.”11

Here, we see already a pattern of Christianthinking about Christian scholarship that will wit-ness a dizzying number of variations throughoutsubsequent Christian experience. The deepestimpulses of scholarly inquiry find and can onlyfind their fulfillment in a lived relationship withthe Scriptures, or rather the God they reveal. AllChristian scholarship is then in some sense scrip-tural scholarship, i.e., scholarship not so muchabout the Scriptures as aligned to them. Thissense of things marks out a common groundthroughout the Christian era and among all of theacademies that Christian communities have culti-vated. Of course, common ground is not the samething as neutral ground. For what precisely con-stitutes this alignment with the Scriptures? Inparticular, what role do assumptions about lifeand knowing that come from outside of the scrip-tures play? What, for example, are we to make ofJustin’s old man’s missionary playing on platonicidentification of knowing with illumination, andof sight with Truth?12 How do we map this play-ing with Plato onto the datum of scriptural reve-lation that the Christ whom we meet in the Gospelof John is at one and the same time the Truth andthe Light?13 Where does Plato end and St. Johnbegin? Can there be no St. John without Plato?And what of Plato himself? Can there be Platowithout at least Moses and the prophets?14 Suchare the sorts of questions that have punctuatedChristian debate in and since Justin’s day.

Of course, it could be argued that Justin lets ussee a second thing as well, another through-line,it might be said, knitting the hundred or so gener-ations of Christian scholars and their scholarshiptogether. When Justin looks to scripture in orderto align his own thinking, he does so as onealready formed to a philosophical lexicon ofGreek and pagan origin. When he meetshomonyms in the Scriptures, he assumes that theyare in fact the same word. Thus he can be said at

times to have read his antecedent Greek andpagan meanings into the words of Scripture andthen to have aligned his thinking with the sense oflife, of right and wrong, of flourishing and failingthat emerged from this philosophically intinc-tured reading. The resultant pattern of eisegesis,followed by exegesis and subsequent application,marks out a leitmotif in the history of subsequentChristian scholarly endeavour.15

We next alight in Augustine’s Hippo. We do sobecause Christian scholars in the Latin tradition(i.e., Catholic and Protestant) have made much ofour Augustinian heritage, in particular his insightthat human understanding of the central mysteriesof life is built upon a foundation of belief, or whatAugustine called “thinking with assent.”16 Ourenthusiasm is unsurprising. If all understandingis predicated on belief, then an understanding ofthe world that is predicated upon Christian beliefis easily imaginable and in fact almost inevitable.The plausibility of Christian scholarship hardlynecessitates any stretching of the imagination. Ittakes its rightful place within the tournament ofideas alongside all other belief-based understand-ings of the world. And other such understandingsthere must be, for without belief, there is nounderstanding.

Augustine shares with Justin Martyr a sensethat Christian faith exists in a world that is cultur-ally older than it and hence in relation to twoantecedent sources of wisdom: Moses and theprophets on the one hand and the (pagan) philoso-phers on the other.17 In the light of Christ,Christian scholars are able to bring each of thesewisdoms to its proper fulfillment. Moses and theprophets are fulfilled in the Gospel, in the personof Christ there revealed, and in Christ’s commu-nal presence in this our aging world, the one holycatholic church. The philosophers are fulfilled,in turn, in the scriptural revelation of the absoluteorigin, end, and proper media of all things.Christianity’s antecedent wisdoms, then, aresuperceded by the faith of the Christian commu-nity and by the revelation to which the Christiancommunity extends its faith even as the God whoreveals makes that faith and community possible.That is, antecedent wisdom’s aspirations to truthand happiness are taken up in the Christian reli-gion and realized. Moreover, Augustine shareswith Justin the sense that Platonic philosophy is

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superior to that of the other schools of philoso-phy, though its claims are equally vulnerable toChristian criticism. Indeed, Augustine pens justsuch a criticism in books 8-10 of his City of God.

What Augustine adds to Justin’s enterprise is adeeper sense of what thinking in alignment withthe Scriptures amounts to. At several points in hisearly philosophical writings, he meditates on ascriptural pericope that he finds in the Old Latinversion of the Book of Isaiah: 7: 9—“Unless theywill believe, they will not understand.” In mostof these citations, he ties the relationship of beliefto understanding to that which authority enjoyswith respect to reason.18 In matters of faith, beliefand authority lay claim to a priority that is properto the Christian religion. To believe, saysAugustine, is to hold something to be true (tothink with assent), whether or not that truth canbe demonstrated argumentatively; i.e., to believeis to take something to be true on authority.Belief is a prior condition for the exercise of rea-son within the Christian religion. Subsequent useof reason leads to understanding. We Christiansproperly believe in order to understand.19

Later generations, most notably Reformedscholars, will capture this Augustinian inflectionin a pseudonymous slogan: credo ut intelligam.However, is this invocation of Augustine exhaus-tively Augustinian? Is he always thinking, whenhe invokes Isaiah 7: 9, what, for example,Reformed scholars are thinking when they intonecredo ut intelligam?

On several occasions, Augustine’s meditationon the priority of belief with respect to under-standing and of authority with respect to reason isthe first half of a conceptual diptych.20 In thesepassages, Augustine begins by coming to a firstand, I dare say, perfectly “Reformed” conclusion.But then he stops, as it were, and starts again. Hemuses that in order to hold something to be true,that is, to believe, one must already understandthe terms in which that belief is expressed. Orrather, in order for the priority of faith to be rea-sonable, there must be some reason, howeversmall, that precedes faith.21 So it is simultaneous-ly true that we must understand in order tobelieve.

In these latter passages, Augustine is simulta-neously affirming that we must believe in order tounderstand and that we must understand in order

to believe. So it appears that the widespread andapproving read of this ancient North African bish-op on belief and understanding may have been atrifle inattentive. What are we to make of himand it when we look at the entire diptych in whichIsaiah 7:9 appears?

The juxtaposition of apparently opposite claimshas a recognizable philosophical pedigree inAugustine’s world, a pedigree that makes sense inhis life as we shall see. It is a philosophical strat-egy of the Late Academy, i.e. of ancient Platonicskepticism.22 The skeptic of the Late Academycollects arguments of various kinds and logicalforces and practices endlessly employing themagainst each other. The point is not to sift à laAristotelian philosophy the things we say aboutthe world so as to be able to judge which claimsand arguments are first and most universal andhence most securely to be accounted as true.Rather, the point is to achieve a perfect cognitiveequiposition in which every claim is balancedagainst a counterclaim of the exact same logicaltexture and force, an aporia (to give it its current-ly fashionable name). The point is not to facili-tate but to impede intellectual judgment and tosuspend belief. What is to result from this cogni-tive labour is an affective state of mind, tranquil-lity, the very condition of a flourishing life undera skeptical description. So, what did Augustinethink he was doing in playing with a scripturalpericope to create an apparently skeptical aporiaor equiposition of claim and counterclaim?

Augustine was born into a North AfricanChristian community that could not imagineeither the world of day-to-day experience or theworld encountered in the scriptures in any wayother than in materialist terms.23 North AfricanChristians were not materialist in the religiouslyimpious sense of a Karl Marx. Rather, they werematerialist in a religiously pious sense that wassimilar to and undoubtedly dependent upon thereligious piety intrinsic to Stoic philosophy.24

That is, North African Catholics tended to bedrawn from the small Latin elites spread through-out the African provinces, elites whose heavilygrammatical and rhetorical education wasfocussed upon Virgil, Cicero and a narrow sup-plement of canonical texts.25 In this body ofauthoritative texts, its most philosophical pas-sages were either influenced by, or reflected the

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world that produced, Roman Stoicism. TheRoman Stoic assumed that the material cosmositself was intelligent, eternal, and hence divine. Itwas a fitting subject of human reverence andprayer, a fitting object of the human longing forrevelation. Consequently, it is perhaps not sur-prising that North African Catholics felt itunproblematic to understand the God whom theyencountered in the Scriptures in any other terms,and so they found, to us, strangely imaginativeways to express their intrinsically Christian senseof the transcendence, immanence, and omnipres-ence of the provident Creator-God.26

Augustine grew up accepting what he wouldlater view as this impoverished or carnalChristianity. Thus, when, as an adolescent, heread Cicero’s exhortation to the love of wisdom atschool and felt a strange new longing within hisbreast, he took materialistic habits of thought andimagination with him on his new quest.27 If hedid not know what wisdom was, and Cicero hadfailed to inform him, he might yet ask after itsopposite, folly. And indeed he received ananswer to this question in stories artfully told byFaustus and his intrepid band of Latin Manichees.Folly, or evil, was substantial, a tangible and pri-mary component of our every-day experience. Assuch, folly, or evil, was in principle intelligible tothe inquiring human mind. If one could but con-ceive the nature of folly-evil, one could move outtoward wisdom by a process of conceptual inver-sion. This search by inversion is what Augustinewas attempting in his nine questioning years as aManichaean “auditor.” 28

Nevertheless, his gadfly efforts to explore thelogical consequences of the stories of folly andevil to be heard among the Manichees met withFaustian resistance. Augustine became disen-chanted but continued to hang on to what he wascoming to suspect were fallacious beliefs. For,how else was he to move toward wisdom, sincehe did not know already what wisdom was? Theskeptics of the Late Academy eventually freedhim from his Manichaean beliefs, and sent himinadvertently toward the books of the Platonistsand the reality of the spiritual understood as otherthan material.29 These books and their teaching inturn opened him to the preaching of Ambrose,bishop of Milan, and his eloquent, spiritualunderstandings of the Scriptures.30 All of this

coalesced in his mind to produce a mighty conun-drum.

From the Platonists he learned of the philo-sophical power of introspection, of the greatphilosophical project captured in the Delphic slo-gan, “Know Yourself,” and its coyly hidden cod-icil, “to be divine.” He was convinced that onlyvia this inner way does one arrive at a knowledgethat is sure; only so does one access the divineand see, as it were, what lies at the origin of thethings of our experience and of what we say aboutthe world. From Ambrose he learned of the priorauthority and luminous power of the Scripturesspiritually understood. And they were external.One accessed them via an outer way—literarystudies—and a grounding authority located out-side oneself in the assembly of believers. Howwere these outer and inner sources of knowledge,these two loves of wisdom, to be understood inrelation to each other? The struggle to answerthis question constitutes the dynamic animatingmuch of Augustine’s early philosophical writing,as a look at two early treatises, the Soliloquia andthe De Magistro, make clear.

In the Soliloquia, Augustine begins by examin-ing our access to the divine within and does so viaa classically introspective and Platonic analysisof geometric figures: in relation to bodily figures,on the one hand, and in Truth, on the other.31 Hedoes so in response to a contingent conundrum oraporia. If he is to save up what he learns so as tobe able to pass it on to others, he must commit itto memory. But memory is not able to contain allthat one thinks about, and he is not strong enoughto take everything down onto papyrus and shouldnot employ a scribe, for what he is seekingdemands solitude. This personal conundrumdrives him to his knees in prayer—a prayer inwhich he explores by confessing the desires of hisheart (1.1.1). Indeed, in prayer he discovers whathe longs to know: God and himself and nothingmore (1.2.7).

However, if he is to come to know God andself, he needs to know what form such knowledgeis to take. Implicit is an adaptation of theAristotelian sense that one comes to know whatone does not know via what it is like among thethings one does know. The Aristotelian principleis then employed in a Platonic project of intro-spection. What type of internal knowing will

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knowledge of God and self be like? What isknowing God to be like among the set of know-ings I already contain in my memory? Does mymemory have a capacity for God?

The initial segment of the Soliloquia representsa meditation on the types of knowing Augustinerecognizes in his memory and their suitability asa mode of knowing God. He considers, amongother “knowings,” his knowledge of friends(1.2.7), of astronomical states of affairs (1.3.8), orof the quotidian awareness of what he had for din-ner the day before (1.3.8). Each knowing provesinsufficient to some belief that he holds aboutGod. Each is insufficient either because of a dis-proportion between God as object and the crea-turely object being considered (1.3.9), or becauseof a disproportion between the act of knowingand God as its potential object (1.6.12-13).

At one point, he comes to consider knowledgeof geometrical states of affairs (1.4.10-1.5.11). Inthe context of this inquiry, he discovers that suchknowledge is separable from corporeal things.Moreover, it is stable or immutable. So, he askshimself, is such a knowing sufficient for knowingGod? He thinks not, despite reason’s urging,32 forhe cannot believe that God is like a line or a cir-cle. On the other hand, our capacity for knowingthings eternal allows us to understand ourselvesas in some sense eternal.33 Such an understandingdoes raise the possibility that we have a(n as yetundiscovered) capacity for knowing God. Thusbolstered, he can continue the search for a know-ing fitted to the reality of God. In the course ofcontinued inquiry, Augustine makes a pregnantmove. He turns to literary science (grammatica)to see if such science also accesses the changelessdivine (2.11.19). He later expands this examina-tion to include the liberal arts as a whole(2.20.35). The assumption of literary focus is sig-nificant, for if literary science in particular andthe textually and exegetically enclosed liberal artsin general arrive at knowledge of Truth, and if thememory can contain them and the Truth theyaccess, then the aporia of external and internalwisdom can be resolved, at least in principle. Inother words, I take Augustine to be exploringwhether we contain or can come to contain thewritten revelation of God within ourselves. TheSoliloquia ends inconclusively. Platonic intro-spection and Christian thought in line with the

exterior scriptures remain in antipathetic tension.They form a stubborn aporia.

In De Magistro Augustine takes up the samegreat Platonic theme of the Meno—How do, oreven can, you learn what you do not alreadyknow? Augustine asks whether a human teacherin fact teaches. It was in and through inquiringinto the possibility of learning what one does notalready know that Plato developed his under-standing of knowing as anamnesis, or remember-ing. Augustine’s conclusions in the De Magistrohave strong family resemblances to this Platonicdoctrine. Nevertheless, he makes importantchanges. In particular, he replaces Platonicremembrance of our divine pre-existence with theregulative existence “within” of Christ our InnerLight and Teacher (11.38-14.46). Moreover, hearrives at this Christ from literary studies, i.e.,from an examination of a teacher’s words as signs(1.1-11.37).

The Soliloquia and De Magistro can be under-stood, then, to form together a chiasm or A-B/B-A pattern. The Soliloquia start by consideringand rejecting a variety of “knowings” until theyarrive at what can be called the “internal divine”of geometrical figures understood in and of them-selves rather than in terms of corporeal figuresbearing their impress. They then move to literarystudies. De Magistro starts from literary studies,or the science of signs both spoken and writtenand the things they signify, and moves to the“internal divine” of Christ the Inner Teacher. Buteven De Magistro leaves Augustine with the apo-ria brought to light in the Soliloquia. For we areleft asking the question: what is the relationshipbetween the interior Christ caught sight of inphilosophical introspection and the exteriorChrist we encounter in the scriptures?

In the Confessions, Augustine wrestles withthis aporia again along with or, better, in terms ofothers. For example, already in the first chapterof the first book Augustine moves interrogativelyfrom one conundrum to another until a circle hasbeen circumscribed. He moves from praise toknowledge or understanding and back. He movesfrom invocation and confession to believing inand back again to invocation and confession(1.1.1). Having identified confession with invo-cation, he moves on to ask where God and hisChrist are to be called into since God is ubiqui-

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tous. This question leads him to the conundrumof whether God is best understood as in the crea-ture or the creature in God (1.2.2). And this ques-tion leads in turn to a consideration of what con-taining might mean in this context: our containingGod and God’s containing us (1.3.3). Godprompts a plethora of further aporias: nevernew/never old; making all things new/workingever ancient of days, always acting/always at rest,seeking/though nothing is ever absent, loving/though never languishing, striving/though neveranxious, wrathful/but at peace, changing works/not counsel, receiving what is found/though noth-ing is lost, never penurious/though taking joy inprofit, never greedy/though demanding usury,taking on debt/though all others have only what ishis, paying debt/owing nothing (1.4.4). And themystery of a God who can only be invokedaporetically leads to questions of loving andbeing loved (1.5.5-6). How is such a God to beloved? Why should such a God demand my love?Surely only such a God can peal back the shroudsthat veil him in mystery?

The Confessions can be understood asAugustine’s search for answers to the questionsthrown upon his conscious mind by his openingprayer. Augustine answers that Christ, the Wordof God, who holds within his bosom the originalsecret of every creature, is to be found introspec-tively in the darkest recesses of our deepestselves, our memory (10.17.26). When we comeupon him, however, we find ourselves no longerexactly within but vertiginously elevated in andby light radiating from above. That is, we cometo be in and to gaze at the light of the Wordthrough a gauzy firmament marking the boundarybetween our deepest within and the divine above(13.15.16-18). And what might that mediatingboundary be? The Scriptures received in ourmemory through Christian formation—catech-esis, preaching, disciplined meditation uponscriptural phrasings (13.12.13)—constitute thatmediating boundary. In and through the internal-ized words of Scripture, we access the light of theWord above where the inspiring sun shines with-out limit. This supernal Word encountered intro-spectively is the ultimate source of all that is andis the regulator or measure of our understandingof all that is (13.16.19). Thus, the search of selffor knowledge ends up, if so blessed, in a know-

ing of God and the creation in God, but only asthat divine knowing is mediated by the Scriptureswritten on the heart.

This is Augustinian Christian scholarship, whatAugustine himself termed philosophia christiana.Again, we see Christian learning as a project ofthinking in line with the scriptures, themselvesunderstood as divine revelation. Moreover, in amuch more reflective way than we see JustinMartyr, we see Augustine importing Platonichabits of thought into this scriptural learning. Ingeneral, the process of importation is ruled to theaporia of believing and understanding that weobserved in several of Augustine’s treatments ofIsaiah 7: 9. We believe the claims of the scrip-tures in order to understand ourselves, our God,and the world of creatures implicit in understand-ing our God. However, we must first understandthe words that the Scriptures use in order to maketheir claims. And it is on this side of the aporiathat Plato, Aristotle, and the wisdom of Egypt orof the East could be of crucial, limited service.

As with Justin, we see Augustine workingwithin a hermeneutic that has been termed theeisegesis-exegesis method of reading theScriptures. Some have seen this method as con-stitutive of the Christian community’s mortallyflawed first attempts to capture the conceptualclarity of pagan philosophical modes of expres-sion and inquiry and to put them at the service ofthe Christian community in its living with theScriptures.34 The intent is clear and honourable:to think in line with the Scriptures. The result isoften far less happy. Forms of understanding areidentified with the Scriptures themselves that pro-duce discourse, making it hard, if not absolutelyimpossible, to say what one knows in one’s bonesthat a Christian must say.35

In all of this, I have yet to address the roleAugustine assigns to aporias, i.e., to equipositionsof claim and counterclaim, in his philosophiachristiana. As noted above, in the Late Academy,aporias were the conceptual means to a non-con-ceptual end, the tranquillity that resulted from thesuspension of belief. Augustine’s aporias servean analogous function.

The seat of human personhood is identified inAugustinian parlance with “mind” (mens).36

Augustine does not mean thereby our cognitivepowers, narrowly conceived. Rather, his is an

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altogether grander notion. Mind is the seat of allthose capacities we have that allow us to beagents of our actions. In Augustinian shorthand,mind is the intrinsic principle of life, our kind oflife. Mind can be thought of in its relation to ourbodily living. Then we name it soul. It can bethought of in relation to our spiritual living. Thenwe name it spirit. It can be thought of in terms ofour cognitive functions. Then we call it reason orintellect. It can be thought of in relation to ouraffective functions. Then we call it will orappetite. It can be thought of in relation to ourperceptual functions. Then we call it sense orsensuality.

When we think of mind in its depths, we thinkof memory. And when we think of mind in itsculminating height, we call the mind “heart”(cor).37 The proper act of the heart, the seamlessfusion of intellection and desire, is called love(amor), the very end of which is enjoyment(fruitio).38 We properly enjoy only God. All elsewe relate to in our search for God; all else wemerely use.39 Intellection alone cannot attain toenjoyment, nor can desire alone. Only the con-cert of intellection and desire, when directedtoward its properly divine object, achieves theenjoyment of love. So a cognitive or intellectualsearch for knowledge of self and God cannot suc-ceed. Such a search must be wedded to desire ifit is to meet the conditions of its end. In the loveof God, you could say, love, true love, onlybegins in “the failure” of intellect. This is thecontext in which aporias have a role to play.When our intellects encounter them, in allearnestness, the fires of longing are stoked. Inthose fires, affect is smelted together with anintellect that has learned to bow to its own failurewith humility and without regret. What is pro-duced is love, that cordial, you might say, that weenjoy by the grace and mercy of God.40

ConclusionFrom Justin we learn that Christians have

always understood Christian scholarship to be amatter of thinking in line with the Scriptures intheir witness to divine revelation. Augustineagrees, if in his own and far more prolix way.And from Augustine we learn two other thingsthat are equally enduring assumptions ofChristian scholars. First, Christian scholarship isnever the end; it is always but a means to non-

scholastic ends, ultimately, the love of God, i.e.,the love of God and the love of self, neighbour,and all creation as the joyfully excessive gift ofthat first love. Second, because Christian schol-arship is always a means, it is always understood,in some sense, as in the muddle of the middle; itsresults are always provisional. Scholarshipoccurs always too late to see the origin of what itwould understand, and always too early to see theimplications of the understanding it produces.This observation entails three implications. First,scholarship always emerges out of what is priorand deeper than itself. It flows from hunches,prejudices, or presuppositions; out of intuitions,circumspective conceptions, or ground-ideas; outof control beliefs, principles, or articles of faith.There are many philosophically and religiouslyloaded ways of identifying the “what” we aretalking about here. Augustine refers to this com-plex as authority (auctoritas). Second, because itis made possible by what is prior and deeper—thedistillate of one’s individual and communal livingwith the Scriptures (or rather the God revealedthere)—Christian scholarship is always willy-nilly an integral expression or better extension ofwhat one understands that distillate to be. Third,the scholarship, so produced because it is pro-duced for an end that transcends itself, is to bejudged in some measure by the outcomes it fos-ters. Such posterior judgments can be directed intwo ways. They can fall on any element intrinsicto the scholarship itself. Alternatively, scholar-ship can be directed at the prior sense of what itmeans to think in line with the Scriptures or what-ever else one thinks in line with.

My claim here is that all of what I have justbeen listing stakes out a common ground that allChristian scholars of whatever era and Christianacademy share at the level of deepest intention.We all intend our scholarship to be a seamlesspiece of our total living with the Scriptures andour total worship of the God revealed therein. Sowe are all one at the level of intention, despite ourdifferences. There are differences of import, ofcourse. There are differences of orientation andstrategy that divide persons and communitiescommitted to the project of integral Christianscholarship. In light of these differences and theirimportance, it is good to be reminded from timeto time of the astonishingly trans-temporal and

34 Pro Rege—March 2005

trans-communal oneness hidden at the level ofdeep intention. Indeed, that is a unity well worthremembering.

ENDNOTES1. An easily accessible edition of the Greek text

is to be found in the Patrologia Graeca VI:471-800. The English edition consulted herefor the purposes of providing a translation isThe Writings of Justin Martyr, trans. ThomasB. Falls, in the Fathers of the ChristianChurch Series (New York: Christian HeritageInc., 1948), 147-366. The work is dividedinto 142 chapters, the first 10 of which set thescene for the dialogue or dispute proper andcontain the biographical sketch used here.(Henceforth cited as Dialogue with Trypho,chapter #.page # from Falls’ translation.)

2. Dialogue with Trypho, 1.148.3. Ibid.4. Dialogue with Trypho, 2.149.5. Dialogue with Trypho, 2.149-151.6. Dialogue with Trypho, 2.150-151.7. Dialogue with Trypho, 2.151.8. Dialogue with Trypho, 3.152.9. Ibid.10. Dialogue with Trypho, 7.159.11. Dialogue with Trypho, 7.160.12. This is, of course, a way of speaking about

knowing and Truth that recalls Plato’s famous“Cave Analogy” from Republic VII (514a-518c).

13. See, for example, John 9: 5 (Light) and John14: 6 (Truth).

14. Justin includes a discussion of Plato’sdependence upon Moses in chapter 29 of hisExhortation to the Greeks. The Greek textcan be found in Patrologia Graeca 6. 241-312. An English version of the text can befound in Writings of Saint Justin Martyr,trans. Thomas B. Falls, The Fathers of theChurch (New York: Christian Heritage, Inc.),373-423 (Ch. 29 = 411-412).

15. One Christian philosopher of note, D.H.Th.Vollenhoven saw this pattern (which hetermed the eisegesis-exegesis method) as thevery dynamic of a fatal synthesis of Christianunderstanding with the pagan spirit ofHellenic thought which he understood to havedominated every era in the long story of

Christian scholarly culture. See,Vollenhoven’s Kort overzicht van deGeschiedenis der Wijsgegeerte voor denCursus Paedagogiek M.O.A. (Amsterdam:Uitgeverij THEJA, 1956), 23.

16. See, for example, the following passage ofAugustine’s De praedestinatione sanctorum2.5: “For who does not see, that to think isprior to the act of believing. Indeed, no onebelieves anything unless one first thinks thatit is believable . . . For to believe is nothingother than to think with assent. For not allwho think believe since there are many whothink but do not believe. Nevertheless, allwho believe think: each both thinks in believ-ing and believes in thinking.” (Quis enim nonvideat, prius esse cogitare quam credere?Nullus quippe credit aliquid, nisi prius cogi-taverit esse credendum . . . Quanquam etipsum credere, nihil aliud est, quam cumassensione cogitare. Non enim omnis quicogitat credit; cum ideo cogitent plerique, necredant; sed cogitat omnis qui credit, et cre-dendo cogitat, et cogitando credit.)

17. What follows in this paragraph was the bur-den of Augustine’s relatively early De verareligione to make plain to Augustine’s patronand fellow-traveller Romanianus. The Jewsand their Scriptures are dealt with summarilyin the context of the treatise but the pagans,and Plato in particular, receive extensivetreatment in 1.1-5.9.

18. For the theme of authority and reason, see, forexample, De vera religione 24.45. The cru-cial passage here reads, “Therefore, the med-icine of the soul that divine providence enactsout of its unspeakable favour, is beautifullyordered as to its constituent and discretestages. For it is distinguished into authorityand reason. Authority stokes up faith, and soprepares one for reason. Reason carries theperson through to understanding and knowl-edge. Nevertheless, reason is never whollyabsent from authority since one necessarilyconsiders whom one is to believe. Moreover,the highest authority belongs to a truth that isalways already known and permeating.”(Quamobrem ipsa quoque animae medicina,quae divina providential et ineffabili benefi-centia geritur, gradatim distincteque pulcher-

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rima est. Distribuitur enim in auctoritatematque rationem. Auctoritas fidem flagitat, etratione praeparat hominem. Ratio ad intellec-tum cognitionemque perducit. Quanquamneque auctoritatem ratio penitus deserit, cumconsideratur cui sit credendum; et certesumma est ipsius jam cognitae atque per-spicuae veritatis auctoritas.)

19. Augustine returns to Isaiah 7:9 time and againin the course of his writing career.Overwhelmingly he uses the verse to confirmthe point that belief is prior to understanding.The claim that belief is prior to understand-ing, in turn, is put to different uses. He usesthe claim to console fellow Christians who donot understand. Or, he will exhort them tostick with belief. He will use the same claimto mark out the future shape of his text; it willproceed from the claims of belief to an under-standing of what is believed. Or, more dark-ly, he will use the claim in polemical contextswith Manichees and Donatists, for example,to discredit understandings that diverge fromwhat he identifies as catholic. Since theheretics believe falsehoods they cannot bebelieved to understand truly; they are notcredible. Examples of this usage can befound in Enarrationes in Psalmos 8.6,Epistolae 2.7; De utilitate credendi 1.2; Delibero arbitrio 2.1.5 and 2.2.6; ContraFaustum 5.un., 12.46 and 22.53; Sermones dequibusdam lectionibus evangeliorum 39.1,41.9, 68.1, 76.1, 89.1, 90.6; De trinitate7.6.12 and 9.1.1; Tractatus in evangeliumsancti Joannis 15.24, 27.7, 29.6, 45.7, 69.2;De doctrina christiana 2.12.17.

20. Examples of the kind of double-edged use Idescribe and analyse in what follows (consti-tuting parallels to the text from De vera reli-gione cited above) are to be found inEpistolae 120.1.3; Enarrationes in Psalmos118.18.3; and De Trinitate 15.2.2.

21. Epistolae 120.1.3. “But if it is reasonable thatfaith precede a certain great reason whichcannot yet be grasped, there is no doubt that,however slight the reason which proves this,it does precede faith.” (Si igitur rationabileest ut ad magna quaedam, quae capi nondumpossunt, fides praecedat rationem, proculdubio quantulacumque ratio quae hoc per-

suadet, etiam ipsa antecedit fidem.)22. See the chapter entitled “Skeptic Purgatives:

Disturbance and Life without Belief” inMartha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire:Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1994), 280-315.

23. See the chapter “Martydom, Prophecy andContinence: Hermas to Tertullian,” in PeterBrown’s The Body and Society: Men, Womenand Sexual Renunciation in EarlyChristianity (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1988) 65-82, esp. 77 on Tertullian.

24. See A.H. Armstrong, “Gnosis and GreekPhilosophy,” in B. Aland, ed. Gnosis:Festschrift für Hans Jonas (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), 87-124,especially 94.

25. See H.I. Marrou, A History of Education inAntiquity (New York: Sheed and Ward,1956). For the North African church and edu-cation of Augustine’s day, see Peter Brown,Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1967) 19-45.

26. See Augustine’s account of one such way inhis Confessions 7.1.1-2.

27. See Confessions 3.4.7-8.28. See Confessions 3.6.10-3.10.18. For

Augustine’s confrontation with Faustus, seeConfessiones 5.3.3-5.9.17.

29. Augustine speaks of the importance of theskeptics of the Late Academy (presumably asmediated to him via Cicero’s Academica) inConfessions 5.10.19 and 5.14.25.

30. For the effect of Ambrose on Augustine, seeConfessions 5.13.23.

31. The resonance with Plato’s Meno is undeni-able, both in the Soliloquies and in the DeMagistro.

32. Augustine responds to the pressure he feelsfrom the voice of reason as follows:“Honestly, though you urge me forcefully andmove to compel my assent, still I do not dareto say that I want to know God as I knowthese things [various geometrical figures—sw.]. For not only do the things themselvesseem unlike each other, the knowing tooseems dissimilar” (1.5.11). (Quaeso te,quamvis vehementer ufgeas atque convincas,non audio tamen dicere ita me velle Deum

36 Pro Rege—March 2005

scire, ut haec scio. Non solum enim res, sedipsa scientia mihi videtur esse dissimilis.)

33. This discussion takes up most of the secondbook of the Soliloquia (2.1.1-2.23.24).

34. See the reference to Vollenhoven’s judgmentas cited in note 20, above.

35. Augustine provides a particularly poignantexample of the tension I am referring to in thefirst book of his De doctrina christiana. I amgrateful to Daniel Napier, doctoral candidatein the history of philosophy in the ICS/VrijeUniversiteit program, for this example. Afterusing neo-Platonic and eudaimonistic notionsto build up a sense of the proper mode of loveencoded within the distinction between use(uti) and enjoyment (frui), Augustine strug-gles to say that and how God loves us in thefullest and most perfect way (frui). Indeed, ascriptural pericope such as John 3: 16becomes an anxiety-producing mystery,because human beings are not properlyobjects of the fullest and most perfect love.Indeed, Augustine feels forced to explorehow we can yet be assured of God’s love forus within his chosen framework. His solutionis as ingenious as it is twisted and unlovely:God cannot be said to enjoy us, for only Godis the proper object of enjoyment. Therefore,God must use us, for God’s own sake; other-wise, as Augustine admits, “I cannot discoverhow He loves us” (1.13.34). God uses us forGod’s sake, but such use is simultaneouslyproductive of our greatest good. Thus his useis identical to enjoyment of us, for his usesimultaneously produces its end or object’ssake. Indeed, we are so accustomed to thisAugustinian ingenuity that it might not strikethe reader as odd. What Augustine is sayingis that divine use does not love us for our ownsake and nevertheless that it does; divine use-love turns out to be most profoundly enjoy-ment, i.e., for our sake. Moreover, our enjoy-ment of God, because it is at one and thesame time our ultimate end, turns out to beidentical to a use-love of God, for in lovingGod we achieve our own distinct end.However, when use and enjoyment are iden-tical, they are not distinct. Has Augustinesucceeded in understanding anything intelli-gible about divine love via his distinction?

36. See, in this regard, De trinitate 9.4.7; and9.12.18.

37. See, in this regard, the analysis of AlbertoPincherle in “‘Et inquietum est cor nostrum.’Appunti per una lezione auostiniana,”Augustinus 13 (1968): 353-368.

38. For the connection between love and enjoy-ment see Augustine’s De doctrina christiana1.4.4.

39. For the distinction between use and enjoy-ment, see De doctrina christiana 1.3.3.

40. Louis Mackey makes a very similar pointabout the “failure” of the Confessions as anintellectual inquiry and its success as a text in“From Autobiography to Theology:Augustine’s Confessions,” in Peregrinationsof the Word: Essays in Medieval Philosophy(Ann Arbor, MI: University of MichiganPress, 1997), 7-55.