THE MYSTICAL TEXT

IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME: CONFESSIONES,

IX.X.23-25
Kevin Hart

“Augustine is for me the Prince of Mystics, uniting in himself, in a

manner I do not find in any other, the two elements of mystical
experience, viz. the most penetrating intellectual vision into things
1
divine, and a love of God that was a consuming passion.” Thus
Dom Cuthbert Butler in a commanding book of 1922. Not
everyone would agree with him, and some readers of Christian
mystical literature would give the palm to John of the Cross,
Theresa of Ávila, or one of several others, Thomas Aquinas not
2
being an outrider. Dom Cuthbert’s book is entitled Western
Mysticism, though we are not to suppose a contrast with the
mysticisms of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. He is
concerned entirely with the Latin West, and the adjective in his
3
title serves to exclude Orthodoxy. Not that he proposes a

I would like to thank John F. Miller and Tony Kelly for their comments on
an earlier version of this essay. Also I should like to thank the members of
the Philosophy Colloquium at the Australian Catholic University for
inviting me to present this paper in an earlier form, and the Cistercian
Fathers of the Abbey of Notre Dame, Tarrawarra, who heard a shorter
version of the whole and engaged me in a memorable conversation about
Augustine.
1
Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine, Gregory
nd
and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life, 2 ed. (1926; New
York: Harper and Row, 1966), 20. The book was originally published in
1922 and then a section entitled “Afterthoughts” was added for the 1926
edition. It is worth noting that at first Dom Cuthbert did not think of
including Augustine in the book: “It was an afterthought to include St
Augustine,” he writes in the Preface (xi).
2
See Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3
See Butler, Western Mysticism, 88. I presume that Dom Cuthert also wishes
to exclude Eastern Catholicism from consideration.

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 GLOSSATOR 7

comprehensive survey of the mysticism of all Latin Christianity, for

by “western mysticism” he means that of “Cassian, Gregory, and
Bernard,” finding that “St Augustine’s mysticism stands somewhat
4
apart” from theirs. The Prince stands to the side of his people. Of
course, Cassian’s teaching draws deeply from Eastern Christianity,
and one might point out that the Eastern Church veers away from
5
lauding individuals and their experiences. The Orthodox would
be unlikely to use an expression such as “Prince of Mystics,” and
might also question the completeness of the “two elements.” But let
the claim stand, let the criteria not distract us, and let us focus
sharply on Augustine.
Dom Cuthbert is thinking of passages in eight texts: De animæ
quantitate (387-88), 74-75; Enarrationes in Psalmos (392-422), xli;
Confessiones (397-401), VII. xvi. 22, IX.x.23-25; De Genesi ad litteram
(401-15), xii; Contra Faustum Manicheum (404) xxii. 52-58; De
videndo Deo (Ep. 147) (413-14); De civitate Dei (413-27), xix.1, 2, 19
(413-27); and Sermones, ciii, civ (dates uncertain). Other texts could
be cited, especially with respect to one or another aspect of
contemplatio: De Ordine (386-87), II. ii. 51, De musica (387-91), VI.
xii. 36-37, De Genesi adversus Manicheos (387), I.xxv.43, and De
trinitate (399-422/26), i.17-18, 31 all come to mind. Taken together,
these texts span Augustine’s mature life as a Christian and establish
a wider range than Dom Cuthbert’s “two elements” suggests. They
pass from a delineation of the seven levels of the soul and further
gradations of rapture and vision, to testimony of direct experience
of God, to a meditation on the passage from the visible to the
invisible, to pondering the various merits of the vita activa and the
vita contemplativa, to making a case for the leisure to engage in
contemplation, to reflection on whether we shall see God with the
eyes of the flesh, and to the statement that the sole reason for
6
philosophizing is devoting oneself to the ultimate good. Yet Dom

4
See Butler, Western Mysticism, 130.
5
See Vladimir Lossky, “Theology and Mysticism in the Tradition of the
Eastern Church,” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans.
Members of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius (London: J. Clarke,
1957), 20-21.
6
See, in order, Augustine, The Greatness of the Soul, in The Greatness of the
Soul, the Teacher, trans. Joseph M. Colleran, Ancient Christian Writers
(New York: The Newman Press, 1950), 104-6, 109, along with The Literal
Meaning of Genesis in On Genesis, ed. John E. Rotelle, intro., trans. and notes
Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine I/13 (Hyde Park, NY: New

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

Cuthbert devotes sustained attention to only two passages:

Enarrationes in Psalmos, xli and Confessiones, IX.x.23-25. The former
includes a fundamental piece in the history of contemplatio, and the
latter has become a major text in the history of what we moderns
call “mysticism.”
I wish to offer a commentary on the latter text, knowing all
too well that I am far from being the first to do so: It is one of the
most celebrated yet most intensely debated short documents in the
7
history of Christianity. I begin by drawing attention to a
distinction entertained by Dom Cuthbert in his choice of texts and
his discussion of those he selects, namely that between “mystical
experience” and “contemplation.” It will send me back to some of
the other passages that he lists. Are “mystical experience” and
“contemplation” different ways of saying the same thing? Or are

City Press, 2002), 465, 470, 494, 499; Expositions of the Psalms 33-50, ed.
John E. Rotelle, trans. and notes Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint
Augustine III/16 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 240, 244;
Confessions, trans. and intro. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 170-72; Answer to Faustus a Manichean, ed. Boniface Ramsey,
intro., trans. and notes Roland Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine I/20
(Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007), 333-39 and Sermons, ed. John E.
Rotelle, trans. and notes Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine
III/4 (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1992), 76-87; “A Book on Seeing
God,” Letters 100-155, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. and notes Roland
Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine II/2 (Hyde Park, NY: New City
Press, 2003), 319-49; City of God, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1960-72), VI, trans. William Chase Greene, 107.
7
See, in particular, A. Mandouze, “’L’extaste d’Ostie’, possibilités et
limites de la méthode des parallèles textuels,” Augustinus Magister: Congrès
International Augustinien, Paris, 21-24 Septembre 1954 (Paris: Études
Augustinniennes, 1954), 67-84, and Saint Augustin: L’aventure de la raison et
de la grâce (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1968), Paul Henry, The Path to
Transcendence: From Philosophy to Mysticism in Saint Augustine, trans. and
intro. Francis F. Burch (1938; Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1981), Suzanne
Poque, “L’Expression de l’anabase plotinienne dans la prédication de saint
Augustin et ses sources,” Recherches augustiniennes, 10 (1976), 186-215,
Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to
Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ch. 7, J. J. O’Donnell, ed.,
Augustine, Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), III,
122-37, and Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint
Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2012), ch. 7.

3
 GLOSSATOR 7

they quite different things? Or is it that “mystical experience” is the

end point, for some, of “contemplation”? I leave these questions to
resonate for a while, as I do the question at the heart of the
commentaries I have mentioned: The character of the experience,
if it is one, that Augustine and his mother appear to have had. Is it
Christian, Neo-Platonic, or somehow both at once? Yet rather than
be guided by questions that come from reflections by other readers
of the text, I shall take my cues from the text itself, and seek to re-
phrase, if need be, and answer the questions in the light of what it
reveals of itself.
The piece begins, as is well known, with a reference to
Monica, Augustine’s mother. The preceding pages have recalled
her childhood, her weakness for wine, her marriage, and her
widowhood; and this evocation of her entire life is introduced by
her death (“my mother died” [IX. viii. 17]) and, within only a few
words, by an allusion to Augustine’s birth or, better, double birth
(“into the light of time. . . into the light of eternity” [IX. viii. 17])
and to what he can give birth (“whatever my soul may bring to
birth” [IX. viii. 17), which includes the Confessiones, his other
writings, and their immense heritages. Now, in the scene to which
he turns, there is just mother and son, albeit a son who has already
styled himself as a mother. Like all the Confessiones, the passage is
addressed to God, and the reader is placed in the awkward
position of overhearing someone else’s prayer. What do we hear
when we listen in to Augustine’s prayer? We pick up his testimony
of significant events in his life, and in this paragraph we apprehend
two entwined testimonies, one about his mother’s death and
another about his long desired ascent to God who, he has come to
realize, is the God of Jesus Christ:

The day was imminent when she was to depart

[erat exitura] this life (the day which you knew [tu
noveras] and we did not). It came about, as I
believe by your providence through your hidden
ways, that she and I [ego et ipsa soli] were standing
leaning out of a window overlooking a garden. It
was at the house where we were staying at Ostia
on the Tiber, where, far removed from the
crowds, after the exhaustion of a long journey, we
were recovering our strength for the voyage [ubi

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

remoti a turbis post longi itineris laborem

instaurabamus nos navigationi]. (IX. x. 23)

At least three journeys are mentioned here, with two others in play,
one of which will soon become the focus of the narrative.
Two journeys have already taken place, one is anticipated,
and another was not known at the time being recalled. God knew it
then, as Augustine freely acknowledges, and Augustine knows it
now as he dictates his story, preparing to give it his full attention.
Monica and Augustine have traveled to Ostia from Milan, where
he had been baptized, and so we are quietly reminded of an earlier
journey, Augustine’s conversion from Manichaeism to Catholicism
(which itself bespeaks a difficult journey from pride to humility).
Now mother and son are waiting in Ostia, the port of Rome,
before returning to their home in northern Africa where they
intend to work for the Church. (“We looked for a place where we
could be of most use in your service; all of us agreed on a move
back to Africa” [IX.viii.17].) That voyage across the Mediterranean
will not take place for Monica, for she will depart on another
journey, from this life to the next, and before she does so she and
her son will take another path, one that centuries later Bonaventure
8
will call itinerarium mentis in deum, the mind’s journey into God.
Augustine credits God with arranging for Monica and him to
meet alone (Chadwick does not translate soli here), apparently by
chance, in their house by a window that overlooks a garden. The
location is significant: If the window suggests light streaming in, the
garden discreetly evokes paradise. Having leisure, and being
undisturbed, they are free to talk as delicately prompted by the
connotation of window and garden, and as led by the Holy Spirit:

Alone with each other, we talked very intimately

[conloquebamur ergo soli valde dulciter]. “Forgetting
the past and reaching forward to what lies ahead”
(Phil. 3:13) [praeterita obliviscentes in ea quae ante
sunt extenti], we were searching together [inter nos]
in the presence of the truth which is you yourself.
(IX.x.23)

8
See Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in deum, trans. and intro. Philotheus
Boehner, Works of Saint Bonaventure, II (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The
Franciscan Institute, 1956).

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 GLOSSATOR 7

Again Augustine stresses that he and his mother are alone: this
time soli is translated. This is a scene of searching, though we are
not permitted to examine it closely, as we are in, say, Gregory of
Nyssa’s dialogue with his sister Macrina, On the Soul and the
9
Resurrection. There we see a Christian Platonic dialogue that recalls
10
Plato’s Phaedo. The conversation between mother and son begins
in the presence of God, now lauded as “the truth,” and who serves
in the narrative as the guarantor that they will not stray into error.
Augustine alludes to Paul’s recognition of his imperfection and his
desire to be perfect, his single-minded focus on stretching into the
future: “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are before” [τὰ μὲν ὀπίσω
ἐπιλανθανόμενος τοῖς δὲ ἔμπροσθεν ἐπεκτεινόμενος] (Phil. 3:13b).
The prize Paul seeks is “the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”
(Phil. 3:14b). We tend to associate this “reaching forth” with
Gregory of Nyssa, especially with his homilies on the Canticle, yet
11
it is also central here for Augustine. Both Monica and he have put
their pasts behind them, and strain towards what is to come: Less
the journey to Africa, and their anticipated work for the Church,
than for being eternally with God in Kingdom come. Their
intimacy is only an index of a greater closeness to come with God
and so with one another as well.
Already in their conversation they have crossed from life to
death or, better, from earthly life to eternal life. Twice born,
Augustine anticipates coming into the fullness of his second birth.
It is an active expectation, requiring intense mental concentration:

We asked what quality [qualis] of life the eternal

life of the saints [vita aeterna sanctorum] will have,
a life which “neither eye has seen nor ear heard,
nor has it entered into the heart of man” (1 Cor.
2:9). But with the mouth of the heart wide open,

9
See Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. and intro.
Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
10
Of course, Augustine also inherited from Plato in this regard. See in
particular De magister.
11
See Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. and intro.
Casimir McCambley, pref. Panagiotes Chrestou (Brookline, MA: Hellenic
College Press, 1987).

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

we drank in the waters flowing from your spring

on high, “the spring of life” (Ps. 35:10) which is
with you [sed inhiabamus ore cordis in superna
fluenta fontis tui, fontis vitae, qui est apul te].
Sprinkled with this dew to the limit of our
capacity, our minds attempted in some degree to
reflect on so great a reality [ut inde pro captu nostro
aspersi quoquo modo rem tantam cogitaremus].
(IX.x.23)

Mother and son are engaged in a conversation, one apparently

oriented by question and answer in lieu of an exchange of
opinions, about the nature of eternal life with God (and not about
the immortality of the soul such as was conducted by Gregory and
Macrina), yet as reported the discussion immediately touches a
limit. Nothing about the life of the saints in heaven has been
revealed, as Paul points out in his first letter to the Corinthians. We
do not know if the Scripture was quoted in the conversation or was
added in the report of the colloquy. (Augustine says a little later
about a related topic, “I said something like this, even if not in just
this way,” which inclines us to minimize the difference between
12
event and report.) Certainly Augustine and Monica drink the
waters of life in order to reflect on the great reality: the ut-clause
gets lost in the translation. But if Scripture is part of their
conversation, it is not rooted in it. No attention is given to what
Jesus says in the Gospels about heaven. In fact he says very little
about what the life of the saints is like; his concern is how to live
now so as to bring on the Kingdom and please God and not what
life will be like with God. Yet Augustine and his mother do not
begin by gathering what Scripture says about heaven as a place of
joy and reward (Matt. 25:13-30), a Kingdom of justice (Luke 16:19-
31), and a community without marriage (Luke 20:35). No reference
is made to Jesus’s powerful saying, “In my Father's house are many
mansions: if [it were] not [so], I would have told you. I go to
prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). Nor do they start by citing
any Scripture about the general resurrection.

12
Augustine, Confessions, IX.x.26. O’Donnell maintains that the Scriptural
quotations are “adduced as commentary ex post facto,” although he gives
no warrant for this view. See O’Donnell, Confessions, III, 124.

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 GLOSSATOR 7

Instead of beginning with revealed Scripture, or even with the

nature of sanctity, Monica and Augustine go in search of idipsum,
Itself or Selfsame, which Henry Chadwick translates a little too
boldly as “eternal being itself,” words that carry more freight than
the Latin will bear alone, as we shall see. Idipsum bears some
relation with the One of Plotinus that is beyond all categories and
consequently unable to be described. It is this general Neo-Platonic
orientation that suggests that the son takes charge of the
conversation, using Neo-Platonism as the vehicle of Christian truth,
but we are to remember how in De Ordine (386-87) Augustine
encourages Monica to take part in philosophical discussions, saying
first to her “There were plenty of philosopher-women in ancient
times, and I rather like your philosophy” and then, later, to the
reader, “no other person seemed to me fitter for true
13
philosophy.” In their conversation they become receptive to the
14
“spring of life [fons vitae]”which is with God. Here sprinkling does
not allude to the rite of asperges in which, outside Eastertide,
during the principal Sunday mass, the altar, priests and
congregation are sprinkled with holy water while part of Psalm 51
(50) is intoned (Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor). That ritual
was developed no earlier than the eighth century. Yet reciting the
psalm at the foot of the altar before mass is a tradition that
Augustine probably knew, and in his exegesis of Psalm 51 (50),
written a decade after the Confessiones, he interprets hyssop as
humility. “You will be sprinkled with hyssop, because the humility
15
of Christ will cleanse you.” There is a difference between the
human power of reasoning and the humility of Christ, and the
conversation between Augustine and Monica falls between the
Neo-Platonic and the ecclesial by virtue of Augustine’s newfound
humility and purity after his baptism. Humility and cognition are
not opposed to one another. “Sprinked with this dew . . . our minds
attempted in some degree to reflect on so great a reality [tantam
cogitaremus].”Mother and son are actively trying to understand:

13
Augustine, On Order, trans. and intro. Silvano Borruso (South Bend, IN:
St Augustine’s Press, 2007), I. xi.31, II.i.1.
14
On the spring of life, also see Augustine, “Exposition of Psalm 41,” 2, in
Expositions of the Psalms 33-50, and The Literal Meaning of Genesis,
XII.xxvi.54.
15
Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms 33-50, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. and
notes Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine III/16 (Hyde Park,
NY: New City Press, 2000), 420.

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

cogitaremus is the first-person plural imperfect active subjunctive of

cogito.
Augustine underlines that the event befalling him and his
mother is conducted by way of a conversation, one that seems to
have a teleology running through it:

The conversation led us towards the conclusion [Cumque

ad eum finem sermo perduceretur] that the pleasure of the
bodily senses, however delightful in the radiant light of
this physical world, is seen by comparison with the life of
eternity to be not even worth considering. Our minds
were lifted up [the Latin, however, is erigentes] by an
ardent affection towards eternal being itself [nos ardentiore
affectu in idipsum]. Step by step [perambulavimus gradium]
we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven
itself, where sun, moon, and stars shed light on the earth.
We ascended [ascendebamus: imperfect] even further
[adhuc: to that point] by internal reflection and dialogue
and wonder at your works [ascendebamus interius cogitando
et loquendo et mirando opera tua] (IX.x.24)

This ascent is not simply intellectual, for their minds are raised by
affection for God, here seen by way of idipsum rather than truth or
beauty. It is orderly and gradual; they rise “step by step,” and their
wonder if what they have seen in their ascent (and not, as
Chadwick’s translation suggests, at the heavenly beings, which
have been surpassed).
This is not the usual way in which contemplation takes place,
since it does not characteristically occur by way of conversation
or—as it seems in the report of the conversation—so quickly. Robert
Grosseteste tells us that mystical theology is “the most secret
talking with God,” yet here we have a conversation that is in
16
principle at least entirely public. Also we should not think of
“step by step” recapitulating the seven levels of the soul as
elaborated in De quantitate animæ, written in Rome after Monica’s

16
See Robert Grosseteste, “Commentary on De Mystica Theologia,” in
Mystical Theology: The Glosses by Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert
Grosseteste on “De Mystica Theologia,” ed., trans. and intro. James McEvoy
(Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 65.

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 GLOSSATOR 7

17
death, as well as in De vera religion and De musica. If anything, the
two already have reached stages four and five, self-purification and
possession of purity, and so begin the ascent with the sixth stage,
18
“the ardent desire to understand truth and perfection.” It seems
that the dialogue facilitates the speed of ascent, and perhaps it
indicates that neither partner dominates the colloquy. The intimacy
of mother and son, the dynamic between a modestly educated
woman of deep faith and a richly educated convert, along with the
humility of both mother and son, appear to be conducive to the
rapidity with which they climb beyond the stars.
The passage invites comparison with one in Book VII of the
Confessiones. There Augustine tells God that “you brought under my
eye some books of the Platonists [quosdam platonicorum libros],
translated from Greek into Latin” (VII.ix.13), most likely including
some writings by Porphyry, Iamblichus and a handful of Plotinus’s
19
Enneads translated into Latin by Marius Victorinus. Shortly after,
we find Augustine in Milan attempting ascents by way of Neo-
Platonic reflection, passing from the visible to the invisible:

I asked myself why I approved of the beauty of bodies,

whether celestial or terrestrial, and what justification I
had for giving an unqualified judgement on mutable
things, saying ‘This ought to be thus, and that ought not
to be thus’. In the course of this inquiry why I made such
value judgements as I was making, I found the
unchangeable and authentic eternity of truth to
transcend my mutable mind. And so step by step [atque
ita gradatim] I ascended from bodies to the soul which
perceives through the body, and from there to its inward
force, to which bodily senses report external sensations,
this being as high as the beasts go. From there I
ascended to the power of reasoning to which is to be
attributed the power of judging the deliverances of the
bodily senses. This power, which in myself I found to be

17
It is worth noting that Bonaventure comments on the seven steps in his
Itinerarium mentis in deum, intro., trans. and commentary Philotheus
Boehner, Works of Saint Bonaventure (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The
Franciscan Institute, 1956), II. 10.
18
Augustine, The Greatness of the Soul, XXXIII.lxxv.
19
See Augustine, City of God, vol. III, trans. David S. Wiesen, VIII.xii.

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

mutable, raised itself to the level of its own intelligence,

and led my thinking out of the ruts of habit. It withdrew
itself from the contradictory swarms of imaginative
fantasies, so as to discover the light by which it was
flooded [ut inveniret quo lumine aspergeretur]. At that point
it had no hesitation in declaring that the unchangeable is
preferable to the changeable, and that on this ground it
can know the unchangeable, since, unless it could
somehow know this, there would be no certainty in
preferring it to the mutable. So in the flash of a trembling
glance it attained to that which is [et pervenit ad id quod est
in ictu trepidantis aspectus]. (VII.xvi.23)

By philosophical questioning conducted in solitude Augustine

raises himself to a momentary gaze at “that which is” [id quod est].
Plainly, Plotinus’s Enneads, I.vi (“On Beauty”) is a touchstone here.
“But about the beauties beyond,” Plotinus writes, “which it is no
more the part of sense to see, but the soul sees them and speaks of
them without instruments—we must go up to them and contemplate
20
them and leave sense to stay below” (Enneads, I. vi. 4). Enneads,
V.i.4 may also be an inspiration: “If someone admires this
perceptible universe, observing its size and beauty and the order of
its everlasting course . . . let him ascend to its archetypal and truer
21
reality and there see them all intelligible and eternal in it.”
Equally likely to have had an effect on Augustine is Porphyry’s
22
advice “to fly from the body” in his letter to his wife, Marcella.
Yet, as Augustine says, “I did not possess the strength to keep
my vision fixed. My weakness reasserted itself, and I returned to
my customary condition” (VII.xvi.23). It is intellectual ascent
without the aid of divine grace to keep him safe in his weakness.
Indeed, we have been warned of this failure. With hindsight,

20
A. H. Armstrong, ed., Plotinus, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1966), vol. 1, Enneads, I.vi.4.
21
Armstrong, Plotinus, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1984), Enneads, V.i.4.
22
See Alice Zimmern, ed. and trans., Porphyry, the Philosopher, to his Wife,
Marcella, pref. Richard Garnett (London: George Redway, 1896), 10. For a
discussion of the likely influence of Porphyry on Augustine that considers
earlier arguments on the issue, see Pierre Hadot, “Citations de Porphyre à
propos d’une recente ouvrage,” Revue des Études Augustinniennes, 2 (1960),
204-44.

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 GLOSSATOR 7

Augustine found that the books of the Platonists came with a

shadow cast over them: “First you wanted to show me how you
‘resist the proud and give grace to the humble’ (I Pet. 5:5), and
with what mercy you have shown humanity the way of humility in
that your ‘Word was made flesh and dwelt among’ men (John
1:14)” (VII.ix.13). Even more to the point is the probing question
he asks of himself, “Where was the charity which builds on the
foundation of humility which is Christ Jesus?” (VII.xx.26). And,
finally, he tells God (and us) what is not in the Platonic books:
“Those pages do not contain the face of this devotion, tears of
confession, your sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a contrite and humble
spirit (Ps. 50:19), the guarantee of your Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 5:5), the
cup of our redemption” (VII.xxi.27). Despite all these caveats,
though, Augustine acknowledges that the Christian God led him to
the Platonic books: “With you as my guide . . . ,” he writes
(VII.x.16).
Similarities between the event at Milan and the description of
what happened at Ostia will be perceived, especially the use of
aspergeretur and the “trembling glance” at that which is, which will
interest us later. The ascent at Ostia, however, is fundamentally of
a different complexion than the events at Milan. It is Christian,
oriented to love of God and neighbor, life in the Kingdom, not
purely intellectual speculation. As late as De civitate Dei Augustine
tells us of the Neo-Platonists, “they have declared that the light that
illumines the intellects of men in all things that may be learned is
23
this selfsame God [ipsum Deum] by whom all things were made.”
Differences between Ostia and Milan include the fact that the
former is a conversation (and that Monica’s lifelong faith is needed
for Augustine to encounter God as life and love), the theme of the
conversation (sanctity and idipsum), and that Augustine has a
newfound humility, purity and love after baptism, that act of dying
into Christ.
If affect impels the ascent, the two participants are taken to
the highest levels by “internal reflection,” “dialogue,” and
“wonder.” The dialogue is the medium of the ascent; it triggers
internal reflection that is fuelled by wonder at creation, and its
alternation of question and answer doubtless provides the steps and
accounts for how Augustine knows of his mother’s internal
reflection. If we are reminded of the ascent evoked in the

23
Augustine, City of God, VIII.vii.

12
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

Symposium, 210a-212b and of Plotinus’s flight to the One (Enneads,

VI.ix.9), we are also checked to think that, unlike the mystical
tradition spawned by Socrates’s friend, the seer Diotima, and the
solitude of Plotinus’s ecstasy, Augustine’s model of ascent involves
two people, not just an isolated soul enraptured by God. It will
generate a tradition of dialogic mystical treatises, in which Love
and Reason (among other couples) ascend to God through
24
discussion. We may not know how this dialogue between mother
and son is conducted, but we know in advance that it will be one of
Monica’s last, and that it is pivotal for Augustine’s remaining life.
Does Monica have any inkling of her coming end, or does the
fever come quite out of the blue and carry her away without any
prior symptoms? We do not know. All that we know is that this is
one of the mother and son’s last conversations, which adds to the
pathos of the scene.
In the sentence that follows the evocation of reflection,
dialogue and wonder, the Latin is more dramatic than Chadwick’s
elegant English translation; the entry into the mind and an
immediate transcendence of human cognition is put in the one
sentence:

. . . and we entered our own minds. We moved up

beyond them [et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus
eas] so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible
abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for
food [in aeternum veritate pabulo]. There life is the wisdom
by which all creatures come into being, both things
which were and which will be. But wisdom itself is not
brought into being but is as it was and always will be.
Furthermore, in this wisdom there is no past and future,
but only being, since it is eternal. For to exist in the past
or in the future is no property of the eternal [nam fuisse et
futurum esse non est aeternum]. (IX.x.24)

Mother and son mentally climb beyond the heavens, ascend “even
further,” and so enter their own minds only to transcend them.
After so many centuries since the Confessiones was dictated this
remains an arresting sequence of thought, and its peculiarity is not

24
See, for example, A Mirror for Simple Souls, trans. Charles Crawford
(London: Gill and Macmillan, 1981).

13
 GLOSSATOR 7

softened by the young Augustine’s belief, shared with Plotinus, that

“we have God inside” and his co-ordinate injunction, “Return
25
within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.” When one goes
past the planets and the stars by way of thought one truly enters
into oneself: There is only mind that remains, it seems. But no, for
one can be raised higher than mind and attain to the divine realm.
It is as though one must find the eye of the soul in one’s mind
before one can see God. Yet none of this ascending to the heights
is attained individually; throughout, Augustine is plain that it is
achieved mutually, and in doing so he registers his distance from
Plato and Plotinus and also, unknowingly, marks a difference in
advance from Christian mystics to come. As though to underline
the difference between his experience and those of the pagan
philosophers, Augustine turns to a biblical image, the feeding of
Israel: “I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high
mountains of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good
fold, and [in] a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of
Israel” (Ezech. 34:14). Over a decade later, in 414, Augustine will
pause in a sermon to make a stylistic flourish around this verse,
“This is feeding Christ, this is feeding for Christ, this is feeding in
Christ, not feeding oneself apart from Christ” [Illoc est Christo
pascere, hoc est in Christo pascere, et cum Christo pascere, praeter
26
Christum sibi non pascere].
The eternal is not stretched across time from past to future but
is beyond all temporal determinations. Once again, Augustine
distinguishes the insight that he and his mother share from the
speculations of Greek philosophers. Christianity gives the hope of
eternal life (a quality) and not immortality (a duration), such as one
27
finds discussed so movingly in the Phaedo. God transcends his
creation, including its temporal reach. This divine transcendence
fiercely attracts mother and son:

25
Augustine, De Musica liber VI, ed. and intro. Martin Jacobson
(Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 2002), 99, and “Of True
Religion,” in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh,
The Library of Christian Classics, VI (London: SCM Press), 262. Also see
Plotinus, Enneads, I.vi.9.
26
Augustine, Sermons, II: (20-50) On the Old Testament, trans. and notes
Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle, The Works of Saint Augustine III/2
(Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1990), 46. 30.
27
See Plato, Phaedo, 69e-72d, 72e-73a, 82d-85b, 100c-104c.

14
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in

some small degree by a moment of total concentration of
the heart [attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis]. And we
sighed and left behind us “the firstfruits of the Spirit”
(Rom. 8:23) bound to that higher world, as we returned
to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has
both a beginning and an ending. But what is to be
compared with your word, Lord of our lives? It dwells in
you without growing old and gives renewal to all things.
(IX.x.24)

It will be noticed that the episode, which for ease of discussion I

have divided into two, begins with an emphasis on mind (venimus
in mentes nostras), just like the ascent we have considered in Book
VII, and yet it ends with a stress on the heart (ictu cordis). There has
been a qualitative change in orientation. The Christian God calls
forth love, not only reason. It will also be noticed how Augustine
conceives God, simply and barely as id ipsum. The man who found
himself not long before in “the region of dissimilarity [in regione
dissimilitudinis]” (VII.x.16) seeks salvation in the Selfsame. In
calling God id ipsum, nothing is predicated of him, and certainly
there is no metaphysical sense of being in play here, such as is
28
suggested by Chadwick’s translation as “eternal being itself.” The
statement is apophatic, concerned only with the deity’s nature
being eternally beyond all change, and so worlds away from the
dynamic conception of God that Aquinas will develop in concert
29
with divine immutability, namely, God as event. In Aquinas’s
words, God is ipsum esse subsistens omnibus modis indeterminatum,

28
Maria Boulding renders the expression “That Which Is,” which is
preferable to Chadwick’s translation. See Augustine, The Confessions, trans.,
intro. and notes Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle, The Works of Saint
Augustine I/1 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), 227. William Watts
is a reliable translator in this regard: he renders id ipsum as “Self-same.”
See Augustine, Confessions, Books IX-XIII, trans. William Watts (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), 49. The same is true of E. B. Pusey’s
version. See his The Confessions of S. Augustine, rev. from a former
translation, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church (Oxford: John
Henry Parker, 1838), 173.
29
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, 1a q. 9.

15
 GLOSSATOR 7

wholly undetermined self-subsistent being (in the verbal sense of

30
the word).
Not that Augustine is always shy of associating God and
being. In Confessiones VII we have already read, “And you cried
from far away: ‘Now, I am who I am’ (Exod. 3:14) [immo vero ego
sum qui sum]” (VII.x.16). A more explicit linking of idipsum and sum
qui sum may be found in Augustine’s exegesis of Psalm 121:

What is Being-Itself? That which always exists

unchangingly, which is not now one thing, now another.
What is Being-Itself, Absolute Being, the Self-Same?
That Which Is. What is That Which Is? The eternal, for
anything that is constantly changing does not truly exist,
because it does not abide—not that it is entirely
nonexistent, but it does not exist in the highest sense.
And what is That Which Is if not he who, when he
wished to give Moses his mission, said to him, I AM
WHO AM (Ex. 3:14)? What is That Which Is if not he
who, when his servant objected. So you are sending me. But
what shall I say to the sons of Israel if they challenge me. Who
sent you to us? (Ex. 3:14), refused to give himself any
other name than I AM WHO AM? He reiterated, Thus
shall you say to the children of Israel, HE WHO IS has sent me
to you (Ex. 3:14). This is Being-Iself, the Self-same: I AM
31
WHO AM. HE WHO IS has sent me to you.

Quid est idipsum? Quod semper eodem modo est; quod

non modo aliud, et modo aliud est. Quid est ergo
idipsum, nisi, quod est? Quid est quod est? Quod
aeternum est. Nam quod semper aliter atque aliter est,
non est, quia non manet: non omnino non est, sed non
summe est. Et quid est quod est, nisi ille qui quando
mittebat Moysen, dixit illi: Ego sum qui sum? Quid est
hoc, nisi ille qui cum diceret famulus ejus, Ecce mittis me:
si dixerit mihi populus, Quis te misit? quid dicam ei? nomen

30
Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, 1a, q. 11, art. 4, responsio. On Augustine’s use
of id ipsum, see Marion, In the Self’s Place, ch. 7.
31
Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, 121-150, trans. and notes Maria
Boulding, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine III/20
(Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004), 18.

16
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

suum noluit aliud dicere, quam, Ego sum qui sum; et

adjecit et ait, Dices itaque filiis Israel, Qui est, misit me ad
vos. Ecce idipsum, Ego sum qui sum, Qui est, misit me ad vos.

Here the deictic idipsum is quickly coded to what Étienne Gilson

called “the metaphysics of Exodus”: God’s self-revelation to Moses
32
of himself as unconditioned being, Qui est. Note, in particular, the
rhetorical question, Quid est ergo idipsum, nisi, quod est?, which we
may render in English as “What therefore is Itself unless I AM
WHO I AM?” And consider also his remarks on naming God in
De Trinitate VII:

. . . it is impious to say that God subsists to and underlies

his goodness, and that goodness is not his substance, or
rather his being, nor is God his goodness, but it is in him
as in an underlying subject. So it is clear that God is
improperly called substance, in order to signify being by
a more usual word. He is called being truly and properly
in such a way that perhaps only God ought to be called
being [unde manifestum est Deum abusive substantiam vocari,
ut nomine usitatiore intelligatur essentia, quod vere ac proprie
dicitur; ita ut fortasse solum Deum dici oporteat essentiam]. He
alone truly is, because he is unchanging [Est enim vere
solus, quia incommutabilis est], and he gave this as his name
to his servant Moses when he said I am who am, and, You
will say to them, He who is sent me to you (Ex. 3:14). But in
any case, whether he is called being, which he is called
properly, or substance, which he is called improperly,
either word is predicated with reference to self, not by
way of relationship with reference to something else. So
for God to be is the same as to subsist, and therefore if
the trinity is one being, it is also one substance [Sed tamen
sive essentia dicatur quod proprie dicitur, sive substantia quod
abusive; utrumque ad se dicitur, non relative ad aliquid. Unde
hoc est Deo esse quod subsistere, et ideo si una essentia Trinitas,
33
una etiam substantia].

32
See Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C.
Downes (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 51-52.
33
Augustine, The Trinity, VII. iii.10.

17
 GLOSSATOR 7

God is not a substance, since that would mean there is a difference

between his goodness and his being. No, God is an essence; and
this is to say a good deal more than that God is idipsum. The ascent
at Ostia appears not to be guided by a metaphysical notion of
being, though Augustine’s reflection on it, and his later theological
insights into the divine essence, are touched by metaphysics, even
34
if it is not the substance metaphysics of modern philosophy.
Let us return to the text under discussion. In Latin one says
ictu oculi to mean “in the blink of an eye,” and one should keep in
mind in this passage short and impulsive acts such as a stroke, blow
or thrust when thinking of how the heart reaches the divine. Both
mother and son are enabled to touch the divine, apparently as one.
Attingimus: it is the first person plural present active indicative of
attingo, from ad + tango (“touch”). Mother and son touch or reach
out to make contact with the divine. Indeed, attingo can signify
“taste” when put in the context of eating and drinking. Much of the
western tradition of “mystical experience” will follow Augustine
here, preferring the lexicon of touching and tasting to that of
seeing, even though sight is a “theoretical sense,” as Hegel says,
35
and thereby gives us access to knowledge. In contrast, touch and
taste give us experience that is pre-theoretical. Monica and
Augustine have momentarily reached outside or beyond time and
space, have touched the divine word, and now return to the time of
ordinary words, including those remembered in the Confessiones.
They do not return entirely the same, however: they are partly
bound in their higher nature to the Kingdom.
Yet the allusion to Paul’s expression “the firstfruits of the
Spirit” is not straightforward and needs to be read in the context of
Paul’s letter to the Romans:

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and

travaileth in pain together until now. And not only
[they], but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the
Spirit [ἀπαρχὴν τοῦ πνεύματος], even we ourselves groan

34
For Marion, by contrast, Augustine is not engaged in metaphysics at all;
indeed, metaphysics is a modern discourse, with an onto-theio-logical
structure as diagnosed by Martin Heidegger. See his In the Self’s Place, ch.
7.
35
See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, 38.

18
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, [to wit], the

redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but
hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why
doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not,
[then] do we with patience wait for [it]. Likewise, the
Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what
we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself
maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot
be uttered. (Rom. 8:22-26, KJV)

Even here, as Origen points out in his commentary on Romans, we

have several options to weigh. “Firstfruits of the Spirit” could mean
having the Holy Spirit, as distinct from ministering spirits, or it
could mean having the highest gifts of the Holy Spirit, or it could
36
mean Christ himself. When he comes to comment on Rom. 8:23
in his Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans Augustine will focus
on the resurrection: “For this adoption, already established for
those who have believed, was accomplished only spiritually, not
physically. For the body has not yet been remade by that heavenly
transformation, as the spirit has already been changed through the
reconciliation of faith, having turned from its errors to God.
Therefore, even those who believe still await that manifestation to
37
come at the resurrection of the body.” This gloss comes years
later than the Confessiones, to be sure, and it converges with the
eschatological emphasis of De videndo Deo. Monica and Augustine
have been adopted spiritually but not yet physically; each awaits
the resurrection from the dead, and we know, even if Augustine

36
See Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols., trans.
Thomas P. Scheck, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 104 (Washington, DC:
The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), II, 74-76. It is worth
mentioning that for Aquinas the “first fruits of the Spirit” refers to the
Apostles, because they had “the Holy Spirit before others and more
abundantly than others, just as earthly fruit which ripens earlier is richer
and more delicious,” Commentary on the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans,
trans. F. R. Larcher, ed. J. Mortensen and E. Alarcón (Lander, Wyoming:
Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), 225.
37
Paula Fredriksen Landes, ed., “Propositions from the Epistle to the
Romans,” 53, in Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the
Romans, Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Chico, CA:
Scholar’s Press, 1982).

19
 GLOSSATOR 7

and Monica in Ostia do not, that Monica has a shorter time to wait
than her son.
Mother and son stretch beyond themselves, if only for a
moment, when they touch idipsum. (Inevitably, we recall Phil. 3:13,
the tutelary spirit of the passage, while acknowledging that we pass
from ἐπέκτασις to ἔκστασις.) Stretched out beyond themselves,
separating senses and soul, as Plotinus says, they have a foretaste of
eternal life; it is a death of sorts, though one that is transitory,
before eternal life, and before any resurrection. While Augustine
evokes other moments of bliss in the Confessiones (“an extraordinary
depth of feeling marked by a strange sweetness”) he never again
speaks of such things in the first person, except, in all likelihood, to
38
reflect on this event. He may well have been recalling the event
when he defined “ecstasy” in De Genesi ad litteram, “When,
however, the attention of the mind is totally turned aside and
snatched away from the senses of the body, then you have what is
more usually called ecstasy. Then whatever bodies may be there in
front of the subject, even with his eyes wide open he simply does
39
not see them at all, or of course hear any words spoken aloud.”
Certainly the conversation seems to stop for a while—they fall silent
and then both sigh—before returning to talk, of all things, about
silence, which, because they speak in sentences, requires that they
follow a temporal structure. (Distention, the temporal stretching of
the soul, which is the contrary of ἐπέκτασις and ἔκστασις alike, will
become an important motif of Confessiones, XI.) It is the twin traits
of touching God and ecstasy that have made Confessiones, IX.x.23-
25 a primary reference point for Christian mysticism, even though
its dialogic nature makes it eccentric within that corpus.
Who or what do they touch? What is idipsum? If at first sight it
seems to be only a Latin version of the rather chilly Neo-Platonic
One, we should think twice. Like Augustine, we should read the
Psalms in the Vulgate (that is, the Iuxta Septuaginta and not the
Iuxta Hebraicum): in pace in id ipsum dormiam et requiescam [“In peace
in the self same I will sleep, and I will rest”](Ps. 4:9). It might be
said by way of objection that a biblical allusion from one of
Augustine’s favorite psalms—see Confessiones, IX.iv.8-11—could well
have been added here, as elsewhere, when composing the text,
while the experience itself could have been Neo-Platonic. This is

38
Augustine, Confessions, X. xl. 65. Also see Plotinus, Enneads, I.vi.4.
39
Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, xii.12.

20
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

possible in theory, though it is anachronistic to distinguish Neo-

Platonism and Christianity so strictly in this age. To do so would
render Gregory of Nyssa, for one, quite unintelligible. Augustine
has changed before the ascent at Ostia: He has been baptized and
approaches the ascent with newfound humility, purity and love. In
reacting to this suggestion, it will be critically observed that if
idipsum is understood to be the Christian God there is nothing said
by Augustine by way of confessing the triune nature of this God.
The experience would not be fully Christianized in its telling. We
may readily concede that there are aspects of the text that leave no
doubt about its Neo-Platonic provenance, even if one does not
agree with Paul Henry that the entire conversation is
40
“unquestionably Plotinian in mentality.” For we may reasonably
ask “Whose mentality?” Augustine’s would be only part of an
answer, since the ascent occurs by way of a conversation and may
well have been enabled by it; and while Augustine had probably
read several of the Enneads his mother had not. We do not hear the
conversation, for like Henry Mayhew’s reports of conversations in
London Labour and the London Poor (1851) we are given only a digest
of it by the author, and Monica’s voice is occluded. It is easy to
conceive her having a Christian experience brought about by piety
and next to impossible to imagine her having a Neo-Platonic
experience spurred by the desire for intellectual ascent. Yet the
experience of mother and son as related is one and the same. I
shall return to this issue in a moment; the concept of “experience”
in play here needs closer attention.
Augustine, we must remember, had sought Neo-Platonic
ascent twice or thrice by himself in Milan and had found it
frustrating because he was not converted to a better life by it. He
fell back into old habits. There is no good theological reason why

40
See Henry, The Path to Transcendence, 29. Also see Mandouze, Saint
Augustin: L’Aventure de la raison et de la grâce, 697. O’Donnell argues that the
ascent at Ostia was “not different, not uniquely better, not a denial of the
excellence of Platonic mysticism, but better,” Confessions, III, 128. I think
this judgment misses the role of Monica in the ascent and also fails to take
into account the newfound humility and love of Augustine associated with
baptism. Martha Nussbaum is closer to the mark when she stresses the
difference between the Neo-Platonic and the Christian ascents. See her
“Augustine and Dante on the Ascent of Love,” The Augustinian Tradition,
ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
61-90.

21
 GLOSSATOR 7

he cannot ascend to God by way of beauty in preference to being

or truth. Plotinus understands that they are co-ordinate, and
neither the medieval nor the modern Church would disagree with
41
him. However, it must be acknowledged that at Ostia Augustine
approaches God with affect transformed by humility, purity and
love, having been baptized into Christ, and touches him as the
unchanging Selfsame rather than as beauty or truth. Perhaps the
hope of eternal life with the unchanging Word of God gave him
the ardor that he needed and that he could not find any longer in
Enneads, I:6. So we should take care not to think of idipsum too
dryly; Augustine and Monica are concerned with the quality of life
with God, the Kingdom itself, and the ascent is cued by
Augustine’s rebirth as a Catholic and Monica’s vivid sense of a new
start for her son. At any rate, the Neo-Platonic books, it seems, do
not supply the content that Augustine needs and only provide an
intellectual impetus for ascent. They are themselves a step on the
way.
The intellectual interest of the Platonic books is testified in the
Contra Academicos (386-87) written at Cassiciacum, a text that is
closer to the date of Augustine’s conversion than the Confessiones
(397-401). In the passage of Contra Academicos that chiefly interests
me, the newly converted Augustine exhorts his benefactor
Romanianus to remember that when he left his son, Licentius, and
friends after a visit to Milan they still yearned after philosophy,
though perhaps not as enthusiastically as they might have done.
This is φιλοσοφία, of course, and not “philosophy” in the modern
sense of the word that bespeaks one or more contrasts with
“religion” or “theology.” In the ancient world φιλοσοφία and its
Latin translation philosophia was precisely the love of wisdom, and
it converged on many questions that we would now call religious.
Augustine burned for this love on reading Cicero’s now lost
42
Hortensius as he tells us in Confessiones III and VIII. When Plotinus
writes on the One he is doing φιλοσοφία, and when the young
Augustine wishes to devote himself to writing on all the artes
liberales as a Christian he proposes to spend his life engaged in
43
philosophia.

41
See Plotinus, Enneads, I.vi.6.
42
See Augustine, Confessions, III.iv.8 and VIII.vii.17.
43
See Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Mary Inez Bogan, The Fathers of
the Church, 60 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,

22
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

Let us stay with Contra Academicos for a moment longer.

Burning only with a moderate flame after Romanianus’s departure,
the young men around Augustine nonetheless continued their
studies:

But lo! when certain books full to the brim, as Celsinus

says, had wafted to us good things of Arabia, when they
had let a very few drops of most precious unguent fall
upon that meager flame, they stirred up an incredible
conflagration—incredible, Romanianus, incredible, and
perhaps beyond even what you would believe of me—
what more shall I say?—beyond even what I would
believe of myself . . . Swiftly did I begin to return entirely
to myself [Prorsus totus in me cursim redibam]. Actually, all
that I did—let me admit it—was to look back from the end
of a journey, as it were, to that religion which is
implanted in us in our childhood days and bound up in
the marrow of our bones. But she indeed was drawing
me unknowing to herself. Therefore, stumbling,
hastening, yet with hesitation I seized the Apostle Paul.
For truly, I say to myself, those men would never have
been able to do such great things, nor would they have
lived as they evidently did live, if their writings and
doctrines were opposed to this so great a good [huic tanto
bono]. I read through all of it with the greatest attention
44
and care.

So we hear of another journey, one going back in time, from

adulthood to childhood. A reading of the Neo-Platonic books leads
Augustine to the Catholicism of his childhood, but not without a
reservation. Does Christianity cohere with the insights of Plotinus
and Porphyry, which he takes to be “so great a good”? He checks
by reading Paul’s letters with care and finds that the Christians and
45
the Neo-Platonists essentially agree. In fact Christianity magnifies
the truth apparent in the Platonic books: “And then, indeed,

1968), I.v.6. Also see Augustine’s estimation of the value of the liberal arts,
On Order, II.ix.26.
44
Augustine, Against the Academics, trans. John J. O’Meara, Ancient
Christian Writers (New York: Newman Press, 1951), 69-70.
45
Cf. Augustine, Confessions, VII.ix.14.

23
 GLOSSATOR 7

whatever had been the little radiance that had surrounded the face
of philosophy before then, she now appeared so great” that it
would astonish even Romanianus’s adversary (whoever he may
46
have been) and turn him to philosophy. Accordingly, Augustine
seeks to have Romanianus study philosophy in Contra Academicos
and then, in De vera religione (390-91), urges him to become a
Christian. The persuasion was successful: He converted to the faith
in 396.
Later, in Confessiones VII.xxi.27, Augustine will rebel against
the books of the Platonists, and even later, in De civitate Dei (413-
27), he will give a more nuanced view of the Platonists who led
him to read Paul with attention. For while the Platonists hold that
there is the one true God they also mistakenly affirm that there are
47
other gods who merit worship. In the Confessiones, however, the
emphasis is on the congruence of Neo-Platonism and Catholicism
with regard to essentials: An entirely characteristic “Christian
48
Platonism” of the day. To say whether the experience at Ostia is
Neo-Platonic or Christian is to sever something that cannot be
neatly divided, although, to be sure, there are distinctions that can
and should be drawn, including that between pride and humility,
impurity and purity, as already noted more than once. One of the
most important of these distinctions turns on the very idea of
“experience” in this context. In what sense, if any, does the ascent
at Ostia result in an “experience”? It appears, as we have seen, that
it is a shared event, and no attention is given to any significant
disparity between what the mother and the son undergo. Plainly,
the encounter cannot be an empirical experience of any sort, and
Augustine is clear that he and his mother stretch out from space
and time in order to touch the deity.
As early as De Ordine Augustine had pondered the encounter
with God, though then it was in terms of vision. “Great God, how
49
will those eyes be!” he exclaims there. Vision characterizes the
ascents in Milan. Now, in Ostia, the experience is registered by
way of hearing. The soul has ears as well as eyes. We think of
Plotinus: “we must let perceptible sounds go (except in so far as we

46
Augustine, Against the Academics, II.ii.6.
47
See Augustine, City of God, VIII.xii-xiii.
48
See, for example, R. Arnou, “Platonisme des Pères,” Dictionnaire de
théologie catholique, XIII, 2258-2392.
49
Augustine, On Order, II.ii.51.

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

must listen to them) and keep the soul’s power of apprehension

50
pure and ready to hear the voices from on high.” Yet we also
think of faith, recalling Paul, “So then faith [cometh] by hearing”
(Rom. 10:17). Augustine reflects on the linguistic consequences of
this extreme situation of hearing God at Ostia in a paragraph that
is a sentence of 183 words, a tour de force of Latin prose. It begins:

Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh

has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are
quiescent, if the heavens themselves are shut out and the
very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing
itself by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and
visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language
and every sign and everything transitory is silence—for if
anyone could hear them, this is what all of them would
be saying, “We did not make ourselves, we were made
by him who abides for eternity [qui manet in aeternum]”
(Ps. 79:3, 5)—if after this declaration they were to keep
silence, having directed our ears to him that made them,
then he alone would speak not through them but
51
through himself. (IX.x.25)

Only if there is complete silence in all possible modes can one hear
God speak directly and not through creation. But what is this
divine speech?

We would hear his word [ut audiamus verbum], not

through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of
an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, not through
the obscurity of a symbolic utterance. Him who in these
things we love we would hear in person without their
mediation [ipsum sine his audiamus] (IX.x.25)

50
Armstrong, ed., Enneads, V.i.12.
51
Proper ascription of Scriptural allusions in the Confessiones is a difficult
business. Chadwick is not always in line with what scholarly
commentators (especially O’Donnell) indicate. It is important to note, for
instance, that qui manet in aeternum is a quotation of Sirach 18: 1, a key
proof text for the Creation in patristic Christianity.

25
 GLOSSATOR 7

We are told how we would not hear God’s word but not how we
would hear it, despite the profound silence that makes it possible to
hear it.
Yet Augustine has already heard this voice in his soul, in the
understanding, as he goes on to say, not mentioning any of the
senses:

This is how it was when at that moment we extended our

reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal
wisdom which abides beyond all things [sicut nunc
extendimus nos et rapida cognitatione attingimus aeternam
sapientiam super omnia manentem]. (IX.x.25)

We have passed from attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis to rapida
cognitatione attingimus, from the heart to the mind, though we
should not suppose that Augustine is claiming a theoretical
knowledge of God in the latter remark. Of course we remember
the Neo-Platonic ascent from earthly beauty to the beautiful of
book VII with its conclusion: “So in the flash of a trembling glance
it attained to that which is [et pervenit ad id quod est in ictu trepidantis
aspectus].” Yet there is no trembling in the Christian ascent, despite
the warning that rings in Christian ears, “It is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31, KJV). Needless to
say, there is no mention of hearing anything, either through the
senses or the “spiritual senses,” and in fact that would be
impossible, for Augustine has stretched beyond space and time in
order mentally to touch God. His experience of the divine is
strictly an experience without world. What could this possibly be?
We find the word experientia very rarely in Augustine, yet it
52
orders his testimony and his theology from just behind the text.
Often enough in the Confessiones he reflects on experiences he has
had (stealing pears, for example), but here in Ostia he tells us of an
experience that he cannot have in the sense of retain it on its own
terms. This is not to say that he and Monica are not active at the
critical moment: “we extended our reach,” he writes. Instead, it is
to emphasize that the experience cannot be contained in their
minds. They approach the deity in a sudden thought that takes

52
See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,
7 vols., I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio
and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 284.

26
 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

them outside space and time, yet this “flash” cannot be brought
back fully with them and cannot be put into words. (They cannot
bring themselves fully back.) To borrow a suggestive distinction
drawn by Claude Romano, it is événemential, not événementiel: it
“illuminates its own context, rather than in any way receiving its meaning
53
from it.” This context is precisely “eternal life,” the promised
54
Kingdom. Augustine reflects on his experience without
experience:

If only it could last, and other visions of a vastly inferior

kind could be withdrawn! Then this alone could ravish
and absorb and enfold in inward joys the person granted
the vision [si continuetur hoc et subtrahantur aliae visiones
longe imparis generis et haec una rapiat et absorbeat et recondat
in interiora gaudia spectatorem suum]. So too eternal life
[sempiterna vita] is of the quality of that moment of
understanding [momentum intellegentiae] after which we
sighed. Is not this the meaning of ‘Enter into the joy of
your Lord’ (Matt. 25:21)? And when is that to be? Surely
it is when ‘we all rise again, but are not all changed’ (1
Cor. 15:51). (IX.x.25)

Three things need to be heeded in these few lines. First, we need to

see that we have shifted from hearing to seeing, though remaining
“inward.” The senses of the soul allow ready passage from the one
to the other. Second, we have passed from the eternal to the
sempiternal, from aeternum to sempiterna, which perhaps may be no
more than an elegant stylistic variation, since sempiternitas means
the everlasting or eternal and need not imply temporal duration.
Yet the choice of words may also indicate an uncertainty about the
role of the resurrected flesh in eternal life with God. In their
movement from stretching to ecstasy, Augustine and Monica have
separated body and soul and, as already observed, in effect have
died without being resurrected. Their joy is “a moment of
understanding” of the quality of life the saints enjoy with God
before their resurrection in the flesh. Yet this resurrection will
come, and an unanswered question in the text is how the

53
Claude Romano, Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2009), 38.
54
See Augustine, City of God, XX.9.

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 GLOSSATOR 7

resurrected body can be eternal. Does it take up space and time?

Or is it entirely mental? Whatever Neo-Platonic dimension runs
through the ascent at Ostia for Augustine (though presumably not
for Monica), it is modified by a belief in the resurrection. Yet this
belief is not easy to align with his experience of the eternal. By the
time he was concluding De civitate Dei he maintained, as he had
done at times in earlier years, that the saints “are going to see God
in the body itself,” though exactly what this body is he cannot
55
say. The mind may be absorbed into the eternal, though a
resurrected body, it seems, may need duration of some sort. One
participates in eternal life through the Grace of God, and this need
not be in contradiction with having a physical body that needs to
experience duration. Third, it is significant that the event, being
événemential, cannot be ascribed a cause within mundane existence.
Only God can allow an ascent to him, and no amount of mental
energy or even longing for God can guarantee that one can touch
the divine.
“We asked what quality of life the eternal life of the saints will
have”: Such was the prompt for the event that has been described.
And the answer is given in the dazzling “moment of
understanding” which consists of “inward joys.” The context that is
illuminated cannot be articulated, for there has been no conversio ad
56
phantasma, as Aquinas will say centuries later. He would also say
that Augustine and Monica received the donum intellectus, the gift of
understanding, which lifts their cognitive abilities beyond their
mortal limits. They are not given new knowledge of the deity but
now they “know the same things more penetratingly and above the
57
human mode.” The “vision” has not been an experience in any
usual sense of the world; it has been an eschatological event that
has changed both mother and son, giving them pre-thetic
understanding of the quality of eternal life, and even a sense
perhaps of resurrected life. Following Jean-Luc Marion, we might
say that Augustine and Monica touched idipsum in a counter-

55
Augustine, City of God, XXII. xxix. For a survey of Augustine’s views of
the resurrected body, see Brian E. Daley’s fine article, “Resurrection,” in
Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, gen. ed., Allan D. Fitzgerald,
foreword Jaroslav Pelikan (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.,
1999), 722-23.
56
See Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1a q. 84 art. 7.
57
Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, trans. F. R.
Larcher, intro. Richard T. A. Murphy (Albany: Magi Books, 1966), 179.

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

experience, one that “resists the conditions of objectification,” for

the God they encounter is certainly no object, not a being or a
58
phenomenon. What is mentally touched abides beyond time and
space; the contact brings forth intense joy and also frustration by
dint of its brevity and the need to return to mundane life. The
Ostia “audition” is indeed saturated to the second degree, as
Marion would say: idipsum was unable to be aimed at, could not be
borne, evaded any analogy with experience, and could not be
59
looked at.
Dom Cuthbert will tell us that the event at Ostia is a “mystical
experience” par excellence. “The claim consistently and
unequivocally made by the whole line of great mystics found,
perhaps, its simplest and most arresting expression in these words
of St Augustine: ‘My mind in the flash of a trembling glance came
60
to Absolute Being — That Which Is.’” He will do so because he
speaks from a modern tradition that has come to figure religion by
way of experience and that, in the wake of several important works
61
on “mysticism,” now speaks of “mystical experience.” I am
thinking, in particular, of William James’s The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of
Religion (1908), Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911), and Rudolf
Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917). One of the reasons to study the
writings of the mystics, Dom Cuthbert says in his Prologue, is “for
62
the sake of their mysticism, itself, as a religious experience.” To
be sure, Dom Cuthbert is in some ways seeking to correct this
tradition by placing a steady emphasis on contemplation. He draws
from Auguste Saudreau and Augustin Poulin, among others, who
are concerned with interior prayer rather than experiences in a
narrow sense, and who know very well that spiritual consolations
63
are not usual features of mental prayer. As he says,

58
See Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans.
Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 215.
59
See Marion, Being Given, § 24.
60
Butler, Western Mysticism, 4.
61
See my essay, “Religious Experience and the Phenomenality of God,”
Between Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity,
ed. Lieven Boeve and Christophe Brabant (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 127-
46.
62
Butler, Western Mysticism, 3.
63
See Auguste Saudreau, The Degrees of the Spiritual Life: A Method of
Directing Souls According to their Progress in Virtue, trans. Dom Bede Camm, 2

29
 GLOSSATOR 7

“‘contemplation’ is the word that will be met with in St Augustine,

St Gregory, and St Bernard, to designate what is now commonly
called ‘the mystical experience’” (4). Yet is “mystical experience”
simply a modern translation of “contemplation,” one that leaves no
remainder? Dom Cuthbert himself gives a reason for saying no
when he writes of “experiences” that seem to take place only in the
“higher kinds of contemplation,” and of “frequent phases of prayer
64
and contemplation . . . from which such experience is absent.”
That great taxonomist of the contemplative life, Giovanni
65
Scaramelli, would agree with him. Contemplation does not
always end in mystical experience, nor does “mystical experience”
serve as a proper translation of contemplatio.
At Ostia Augustine and Monica followed Christian
contemplatio in a manner that was peculiar and was to remain so
throughout the tradition, except for treatises on mystical
experience that took the form of dialogues. Not everyone can
follow the Prince, Dom Cuthbert might say. If the son drew on
Neo-Platonism as a vehicle for the ascent, the mother almost
certainly did not, even though she is hailed as a wise woman and a
true philosopher, and yet they both touched the unsayable God of
Christianity. If we call this flash of insight an “experience,” we
must do so with many caveats; for it was a moment of
understanding, one that took place outside space and time, one
that strictly could not be objectified, and one that could not be
communicated. What struck Augustine and his mother was not a
unity with divine being but rather attaining ineffable contact with
that which is above and beyond all change. The event at Ostia
organizes the whole of the Confessiones from the vantage point of
Book IX. We fully understand the most memorable line on its first
page only when we have grasped the significance of the Christian
ascent: “our heart is restless until it rests in you” [inquietum est cor

vols. (London: R. and T. Washbourne, 1907), and The Life of Union with
God, and the Means of Attaining It According to the Great Masters of Spirituality,
trans. E. J. Strickland (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne Ltd., 1927),
esp. 12, and A. Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical
Theology, trans. Leonora L. Yorke Smith, pref. D. Considine (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1921).
64
Butler, Western Mysticism, lviii.
65
See G. B. Scaramelli, A Handbook of Mystical Theology, trans. D. H. S.
Nicholson, intro. Allan Armstrong (Berwick, Maine: Ibis Press, 2005), ch.
3, 4.

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 HART – IN PRIORA EXTENDENS ME

nostrum donec requiescat in te] (I.i.1). Peace could only be found for
Augustine after the ictu cordis at Ostia, in a journey passing from
the region of dissimilarity to the Selfsame, from the world to the
Kingdom.

Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the

University of Virginia where he also holds courtesy professorships
in the Departments of English and French. He also holds the Eric
D’Arcy Chair of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.
His most recent scholarly work is an edition of Jean-Luc Marion’s
The Essential Writings (Fordham UP), and his most recent book of
poetry is Morning Knowledge (Notre Dame UP).

31