Augustine and the Disciplines: from Cassiciacum to Confessions

Augustine and the Disciplines From Cassiciacum to Confessions edited by Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2005 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–927485–1 EAN 9780199274857 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk

acknowledgements

This volume had its origins in a conference on ‘Augustine and the Disciplines’ held at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, 9–11 November 2000. Three other presentations made during those days, by Peter Brown, Robert Markus, and James O’Donnell, have already been published together under the title of ‘The Study of Augustine, 1950–2000: Evolving Disciplinary Contexts’, in Augustinian Studies 32 (2001), 177–206. For their generous sponsorship of the original event, thanks are due to the Revd Edmund Dobbin, OSA, President, and the Revd Kail Ellis, OSA, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Villanova University. The editors are also grateful, respectively, to the British Academy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for grants in aid of research, and to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation (Université de Genève) for material and technical support during the final stages of preparation of this book. In Geneva, Marlène Jaouich made all paths smooth: our special thanks to her. The Index locorum is the work of Shelley Reid of the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia. K.P. M.V.

contents

Notes on contributors Abbreviations

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1. Introduction Ma r k Ve s s e y

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PART I Honesta studia: Classrooms without Walls 2. Disciplines of Discipleship in Late Antique Education: Augustine and Gregory Nazianzen Ne i l McLy n n 3. The Duty of a Teacher: Liminality and disciplina in Augustine’s De Ordine Cat h e r i n e Co n y b e a r e

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PART II Disciplinarum libri: The Canon in Question 67 4. Augustine’s Disciplines: Silent diutius Musae Varronis? 69 Da nuta R. Sh a n z e r 5. Divination and the Disciplines of Knowledge according to Augustine 113 Wi l l i a m E. Kl i n g s h i r n 6. The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts in Augustine’s Confessions 141 Ph i l i p Bu r to n PART III Doctrina christiana: Beyond the Disciplines 7. The Grammarian’s Spoils: De Doctrina Christiana and the Contexts of Literary Education Cat h e r i n e M. Ch i n 8. Augustine’s Critique of Dialectic: Between Ambrose and the Arians St e fa n He ß b r u¨ g g e n-Wa lt e r

165 167 184

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9. Augustine’s Hermeneutics as a Universal Discipline!? Ka r la Po l l m a n n

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Bibliography Index locorum General index

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n ot e s o n c o n t r i b uto r s

Philip Bu r to n is Senior Research Fellow in Theology, University of Birmingham, and Lecturer in Greek and Latin, University of St Andrews. Catherine M. Ch i n is Instructor in Church History, The Catholic University of America. Catherine Co n y b e a r e is Associate Professor of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, Bryn Mawr College. Stefan He ß b r u¨ g g e n-Wa lt e r is wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institut der Philosophie, Fernuniversität Hagen. William E. Kl i n g s h i r n is Professor of Greek and Latin, The Catholic University of America. Neil McLy n n is Professor in the Faculty of Law, Keio University. Karla Po l l m a n n is Professor of Classics at St Andrews University. Danuta R. Sh a n z e r is Professor of Classics and Medieval Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mark Ve s s e y is Professor of English, University of British Columbia.

a b b r e v i at i o n s

Titles of frequently cited works of Augustine C. Acad. Contra Academicos Beata Vita De Beata Vita Civ. De Civitate Dei Conf. Confessiones C. Cresc. Contra Cresconium C. Faust. Contra Faustum Manicheum Disc. Chr. De Disciplina Christiana Div. Qu. De Diversis Quaestionibus LXXXIII Doct. Chr. De Doctrina Christiana En. Ps. Enarrationes in Psalmos Ep. Epistulae Gen. adv. Man. De Genesi adversus Manicheos Imm. An. De Immortalitate Animae Lib. Arb. De Libero Arbitrio Ord. De Ordine Quant. An. De Quantitate Animae Retr. Retractationes Serm. Sermones Serm. Dom. Mont. De Sermone Domini in Monte Sol. Soliloquia Trin. De Trinitate Util. Cred. De Utilitate Credendi Ver. Rel. De Vera Religione Titles of other ancient and medieval works are given in full at their first appearance in the text or notes of a particular chapter and are thereafter abbreviated in a way that should be readily intelligible. Titles of other frequently cited works AL C. Mayer et al. (eds.), AugustinusLexikon (1986– )

Abbreviations ANRW AugSt BA CCSL CSEL GCS GL ILS JECS JRS JTS PL RE REAug RechAug SC StPatr TLL

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H. Temporini and W. Haase (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (1972– ) Augustinian Studies (1970– ) Bibliothèque Augustinienne (1936– ) Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina (1953– ) Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (1866– ) Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten (drei) Jahrhunderte (1897– ) Grammatici Latini, ed. H. Keil (1857–80) Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, ed. H. Dessau (1892–1916) Journal of Early Christian Studies (1993– ) Journal of Roman Studies (1911– ) Journal of Theological Studies, New Series (1950– ) Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (1844–64) A. Pauly, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. G. Wissowa et al. (1893– ) Revue des études augustiniennes (1955– ) Recherches augustiniennes (1958– ) Sources chrétiennes (1942– ) Studia Patristica (1957– ) Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1900– )

1 Introduction Mark Vessey

As late as the 1950s, Peter Brown recently recalled, students of the post-classical world ‘were still encouraged to sit in on that most solemn and elevating of all track events: the relay race of the formation of Western Christian civilization. In this relay race, Augustine is seen to have picked up the baton brought to him by Plotinus, all the way from Plato and the ancient sages of Greece, and to pass it on triumphantly to Boethius, and thence to Thomas Aquinas, to Saint Bonaventure and now, who knows, to an Étienne Gilson.’ Brown relates how, in the next decade, this edifying spectacle was interrupted by new styles of scholarship, more attentive to the social contexts of Augustine’s thought as well as to his personal situation as a ‘man of Late Antiquity’.1 It was not only Augustinian commentators who lost sight of the baton around this time. Other stages of the Great Western Relay were similarly affected in the 1960s, as longstanding practices of intellectual history took a turn—often but by no means always Marxian, Annaliste, or structuralist in inspiration—towards subjects and methodologies associated with the social sciences. Spiralling academic production and increasing specialization encouraged the trend towards synchronic and loosely ethnographic modes of research. Progressive politics led in the same direction. The study of ‘cultures’ in the plural replaced the doxologies of a singular

1 Introductory remarks at a conference on ‘Augustine and the Disciplines’ held at Villanova University, 9–11 November 2000, now in ‘The Study of Augustine, 1950–2000: Evolving Disciplinary Contexts’, AugSt 32 (2001), 177–206, at 183.

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(High) Culture. The epistemological challenge of so-called postmodernism, when it came, may seem in retrospect little more than the affirmation of a fait accompli. Already by the early 1970s the grand narrative of ‘Western civilization’ was dissolving into a plethora of local descriptions and micro-histories. While rarely a test bed for alternative modes of cultural-historical analysis, the period and milieux of Augustine’s life offered promising terrain for their further development. For students venturing into it in the following decades, the newly mapped and expanding ‘world of Late Antiquity’ was open to every kind of interdisciplinary inquiry, never having been claimed by any one discipline as its own. In fact, as Brown’s quietly polemical language indicates, the study of Augustine’s role in the ‘transmission’ of intellectual culture was neither concluded nor revolutionized in the 1960s, but rather overtaken by competing presentations of the man and his times. Among these, Brown’s own Augustine of Hippo: A Biography has long occupied a place of honour.2 Part of the wonder of that work, as its first readers were quick to recognize, was that it could be so truly a biography in the modern sense, so rich in contextual detail and full of psychological insight. Both as biography and as a contribution to the new historiography of the later Roman Empire, Brown’s book stood in marked contrast to another founding text of the twentieth-century science of Late Antiquity, H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, to which it was none the less heavily indebted.3 There Augustine had been held up as an ideal representative of the intellectual currents of his time and, in the best tradition of the relay-race approach to Western civilization, as party to a historic succession. Marrou aimed to plot the passage from classical intellectual culture, epitomized in the ancient ideal of a unified scheme of the liberal arts (in Greek, enkyklios paideia), to a ‘Christian culture of medieval

2 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967), reissued with two new chapters in 2000. 3 H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris, 1938), reissued with a ‘Retractatio’ in 1949.

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type’ based on the Bible. For this purpose, the central Augustinian text was the treatise De Doctrina Christiana (‘On Christian Teaching’). Brown in his 1967 biography (e.g., in the chapter ‘Doctrina Christiana’) was content to adopt Marrou’s view of Augustine’s personal intellectual culture and scientific programme, and to embed it more securely in its socio-historical context. Partly as a result of Brown’s deft assimilation of it, Marrou’s account of Augustine’s place in the history of Western theories of disciplinary knowledge has remained definitive for most Anglophone scholarship down to the present.5 Yet there are difficulties with the narrative of Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique which later adaptations, for all the refinements they have brought, have not addressed. They concern the formation of a Christian biblical culture in the late antique and early medieval West, and the long history of the liberal arts or disciplines. The basic problem is of Marrou’s own making. In the 1949 ‘Retractatio’ of his Saint Augustin he implicitly withdrew his earlier claim that study of Augustine’s work could help explain the emergence of a ‘Christian culture of medieval type’. As he now saw things, the intellectual universe of Augustine and his contemporaries—their part in 4 He completed the project with his Histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité (Paris, 1948); his later revisions, partly prompted by Brown’s work, especially The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971), can be found in Décadence romaine ou antiquité tardive? IIIe–VIe siècle (Paris, 1977). By then, the new focus on mentalités had made Marrou’s original approach to the history of culture seem outdated in France, a turn of events confirmed by the commissioning of a chapter on ‘L’antiquité tardive’ from Peter Brown for the opening volume of an Histoire de la vie privée, i, ed. Paul Veyne (Paris, 1985). For a recent mise à jour of Marrou’s project, see H. Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana: Les Mutations des savoirs (cosmographie, géographie, ethnographie, histoire) dans l’Antiquité chrétienne 30–630 après J.-C. (Paris, 2001). 5 Distinguished recent instances include R. A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 84–8; M. Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994), 178–89; F. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge, 1997), 270–7; C. Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford, 2000), ch. 2.

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the ‘civilization of the Theopolis’ as he called it in 1949— would not survive the collapse of Roman civic institutions in the West. The Christian culture of the Latin Middle Ages would therefore necessarily be of a different type. Although it could still be traced back to the fourth century, its origins lay ‘outside the cultural mainstream, in the sequestered milieux of the Desert’.6 This revision of Marrou’s thesis has consequences for any history that hews to its line. If Augustine’s work is not the harbinger of a new order of learning, any more than it is the undertaker of an old one, then we are obliged to consider afresh what its historical significance might be. What in fact was the relationship of Augustine’s to other initiatives in late antique Christian education, including those that may be supposed to have had a more immediate impact? To suspend Augustine’s status as representative of his times and ambassador to posterity is to pose the problem of establishing his relative position.7 That challenge is especially sharp with respect to a subject as open to multiple construction as ‘biblical culture’.8 Wherever they are finally located, the historical coordinates of Augustine’s biblicism will be close to those assigned to his theory (or theories) of disciplinary knowledge. A central piece of Marrou’s original argument was 6 Marrou, ‘Retractatio’, 692 n. 2, with a reference to the discussion of early monastic schools in the just published Histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité; M. Vessey, ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”: From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983)’, JECS 6 (1998), 377–411, at 383–91. 7 For a response to the implicit challenge of Marrou’s ‘Retractatio’ on this point, see R. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1991), the later chapters of which chronicle the rise in the fifth- and sixthcentury West of an ascetically conditioned ‘community of discourse . . . shaped by the scriptures’ (p. 222), in which the teachings of Augustine at first play only a modest role. 8 Augustine’s own ‘biblical culture’ has recently been the subject of several collections: A.-M. la Bonnardière (ed.), Saint Augustin et la Bible (Paris, 1986), and its transatlantic twin, P. Bright (ed.), Augustine and the Bible (Notre Dame, Ind., 1999), volumes best read in combination with others in their series; F. Van Fleteren and J. C. Schnaubelt (eds.), Augustine: Biblical Exegete (New York, 2001).

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the demonstration that Augustine’s intellectual repertoire, despite innovations that he was led to make by his Christian (and increasingly ‘scriptural’) faith, was bounded by the ordinary cycle of studies known to educated Romans of his and earlier times. This demonstration was the more confident for being based on the conviction, further justified in Marrou’s History of Education in Antiquity and elsewhere, that the unitary scheme of the liberal arts that appears in Augustine’s early philosophical dialogues and that can also, with a little ingenuity, be extracted from the latter part of Book 2 of De Doctrina Christiana, had by then already been a standard feature of Graeco-Roman higher culture for several centuries.9 Augustine’s own remarks on the subject could seem at first glance to confirm as much. In his Retractationes, the catalogue of his works that he drew up towards the end of his 9 Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 211–27. Note esp. pp. 212–13: ‘Trouvant le programme médiéval des arts libéraux déjà formé chez saint Augustin, il nous faut rechercher dans quelle mesure ce plan d’études est chez lui une innovation ou au contraire l’héritage d’une tradition antérieure . . . Le rôle qu’il assigne aux arts libéraux est chez lui un héritage de la tradition philosophique hellénistique.’ Cf. Marrou, History of Education in Antiquity (London, 1956) on the enkyklios paideia: ‘[E]ssentially, in the restricted sense in which it was used by the philosophers, it always meant the seven liberal arts which the Middle Ages were to take over from the schools of Late Antiquity. These seven liberal arts, which were finally and definit[iv]ely formulated in about the middle of the first century B.C., between the times of Dionysius Thrax and of Varro, were made up of the three literary arts, the Carolingian Trivium— grammar, rhetoric and dialectic: and the four mathematical branches of the Quadrivium—geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and theory of music— the traditional division since the time of Archytas of Tarentum, if not Pythagoras himself’ (p. 177). Marrou’s dating of the definitive form of the sevenfold scheme of the arts derives from the prolegomena to F. Marx’s edition of Celsus (Leipzig, 1915) and from F. Ritschl, ‘De M. Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, in his Opuscula Philologica, iii (Leipzig, 1877), 352–402. For the reduction of the scheme of the De Doctrina Christiana to a version of ‘le cycle normal des études qui formaient la base de la culture des lettrés de la fin de l’antiquité’ (his italics), see Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 402–7, with the revealing disclaimer: ‘Dans tout ce qui suit je résume l’enseignement du [traité] et groupe les références se rapportant au même ordre de faits sans m’astreindre à une analyse regulière du livre dont la composition est comme toujours assez complexe’ (404 n. 1).

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life, he looks back on the period of his baptism at Milan in 387. At that time, he recalls, he had entertained the idea of composing a series of ‘books of disciplines’ (‘disciplinarum libri’) in dialogue form. The overall purpose of this work would be to discover and describe a way for the mind to ascend ‘by certain steps through things material to things immaterial’.10 Of the whole imagined series, he completed one book on the art of grammar and another six on music. For the other five disciplines he meant to treat—namely (as he now listed them) dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic and philosophy—he had got no further than first drafts. Some idea of what he had in mind can be gleaned from the dialogue De Ordine, composed at the country estate of Cassiciacum outside Milan to which Augustine retired with some friends in the autumn of 386. In Book 2 of that work he presents a myth of the invention of the liberal arts by Reason, bracketed with twin references to the Roman polymath and occasional dialogue partner of Cicero, Marcus Terentius Varro.11 Since Varro is known to have written Disciplinarum Libri (now lost), it would be possible (1) to infer that his work was an important source for these ideas and thus (2) confirm that the scheme presented in De Ordine, which already corresponds closely to the medieval canon of seven liberal arts, was established by the middle of the first century b c.12 Marrou’s history of the liberal arts and the scholarly consensus that formed around it was called into question by Ilsetraut Hadot in an important 1984 study.13 She argued that the ‘medieval’ ordering of the seven liberal arts was an invention of late antique (or Middle) Platonism, which 10 Retr. 1. 6; full text and translation below 71, 141. See W. Hübner, ‘Disciplinarum libri’, AL ii. 485–7. 11 Ord. 2. 12. 35; 2. 20. 54. 12 A. Dyroff, ‘Über Form und Begriffsgehalt der augustinischen Schrift De ordine’, in M. Grabmann and J. Mausbach (eds.), Aurelius Augustinus: Festschrift der Görresgesellschaft zum 1500. Todestage des Heiligen Augustinus (Cologne, 1930), 15–62. Marrou neither formally adopts nor explicitly contests Dyroff’s hypothesis of Augustine’s reliance on Varro. 13 I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris, 1984).

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Augustine had probably found in a (lost) work of the third-century philosopher Porphyry. Nothing so systematic or conceptually coherent was likely to have been available to him in Latin texts of earlier periods; in this respect, his citations of Varro were mostly red herrings.14 Hadot also drew attention to the fact, obvious enough to any reader of De Doctrina Christiana, though somewhat obscured by the manner of Marrou’s dealing with that text, that Augustine had given up on the liberal arts as a Christian propaedeutic by the mid-390s.15 A slightly(?) later African writer, Martianus Capella, would show renewed enthusiasm for the cycle of seven sciences in his Marriage of Philology and Mercury.16 To see such a scheme entrenched in a specifically Christian programme of learning, however, one would have to wait until the mid-sixth century, when Cassiodorus, ex-minister of the Ostrogothic regime in Italy, set about reharmonizing ‘divine and human learning’ in the works of his semi-monastic retirement at Scyllacium in Calabria.17 14 For rebuttals of Marrou’s thesis on the early formation of the cycle of seven liberal arts, see ibid., esp. pp. 52–7, and of Dyroff’s argument for Varro as a source for the scheme in De Ordine, 132–6. 15 Ibid. 137: ‘Dans le domaine de l’éducation chrétienne qu’Augustin décrit dans son traité De la doctrine chrétienne, le cycle des sept sciences n’est plus retenu comme modèle . . . [S]i, auparavant, dans le traité Sur l’ordre, l’étude des sept sciences avait été subordonnée à celle de la philosophie, les études recommandées dans le traité De la doctrine chrétienne n’ont plus de valeur que dans la perspective de l’exégèse scripturaire, c’est-à-dire qu’elles ne sont autorisées que dans la mesure où elles nous aident à comprendre la Bible.’ 16 Ibid. 137–55, again rejecting Varro as a likely source. See further pp. 156–90, on ‘La Question Varronienne’, with critique of Ritschl, pp. 162–76, concluding that ‘Quoi qu’on ait pu dire et écrire des Disciplinarum libri de Varron, nous ne savons quasiment rien sur leur contenu et sur leur ordre.’ 17 Ibid. 191, and, for the hypothesis of a Greek source for Cassiodorus’ conception of the seven liberal arts, pp. 199–205, with the concession that when Cassiodorus refers to the precepts of the ‘sancti patres’ at Inst. 2. 3. 22 (ed. Mynors) he could have been thinking of Augustine’s De Ordine (p. 205). Hadot’s treatment of the Cassiodorian scheme of the arts builds on and modifies that of P. Courcelle, Late Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources, trans. H. E. Wedeck (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 339–54. Further discussion in J. W. Halporn and M. Vessey (eds.), Cassiodorus: ‘Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning’ and ‘On the Soul’ (Liverpool, 2004), 64–79.

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Scholars of Augustine have been wary of accepting all Hadot’s hypotheses, with good reason.18 As a corrective to Marrou’s rather sweeping history of the liberal arts between the Hellenistic and medieval periods, her critique none the less retains its value. For one thing, it forces us to reckon with the historical singularity of Augustine’s projected ‘disciplinarum libri’. By insisting on the representativeness of Augustine as a lettré de la décadence, Marrou risked making this enterprise appear merely a routine product of the ambient culture. It was clearly anything but that. Whatever sources may have been available to him that are lost to us, Augustine is the first person known to have essayed a largescale theory of the liberal arts that would integrate them into a Christian programme of education.19 Whether his inspiration was a fairly recent trend in Neoplatonic philosophy (as Hadot maintains), a scholastic formula already entrenched in Latin texts of the classical period (as Marrou held), or a measure of both, the result was at once something uncommon and—as it turned out—full of consequence for the later ‘tradition’. The instruments of Augustine’s intellectual culture were predominantly Latin, and it is worth underlining the fact that the subsequent vogue for the liberal arts as a system is likewise a Latin, Western phenomenon. Contrary to Marrou’s revised thesis of the insuperable rupture caused by a breakdown of Roman institutions in the West in the fifth and sixth centuries, the kind of unified theory of the liberal arts that we first see clearly outlined by Augustine was in fact to prove remarkably durable and portable. After Martianus Capella (Africa), Macrobius (an African(?) at Rome), and Claudianus Mamertus (Gaul) in the fifth century, its chief exponents are Boethius and Cassiodorus (Italy) in the sixth, and Isidore (Spain) in the seventh. By then the ‘medieval’ 18 See the excursus on ‘The Liberales Disciplinae’ in J. J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1992), ii. 269–78, doubting in particular ‘[w]hether Hadot is correct in dissociating the disciplinae entirely from the patronage of Varro’ (p. 270); M. Fussl, ‘Disciplinae liberales (I–III)’, AL ii. 472–81 (a valuable synthesis) at 473. 19 On earlier, less ambitious formulations by Clement and Origen, see Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 287–9 and 299–301 (Origenian scheme incorporated by Cassiodorus).

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canon, as we can retrospectively call it, was largely in place. Even if modern-day defenders of the classical tradition may still claim the Liberal Arts as a bequest from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome, all the evidence points to later Latin antiquity as the site of their definitive promulgation. Augustine’s role in the process deserves further scrutiny, despite his own mature judgement against the liberal arts as a template for Christian education. That seeming contradiction may indeed be the crux of the matter. For if Augustine made a point of downgrading the liberal arts in De Doctrina Christiana, with such complete success that no one could now (re)constitute anything like the plan of the medieval trivium and quadrivium from that text of his alone, was it perhaps because he had made a point of promoting the very same disciplines as the ideal trajectory of a Christian education just a few years earlier—and had since changed his mind? Public self-revision was a habit of Augustine’s long before he set about his final Retractationes. The more purposive and personal, the less straightforwardly a reflex of the collective culture, we allow the project of the Augustinian ‘disciplinarum libri’ to be, the more reason there will be for Augustine himself deliberately to overwrite it. (We can assume that copies of the early dialogues had circulated quite widely among his friends and clerical colleagues in Italy and North Africa by the mid-390s, making it impossible for him to retract them en bloc.) As a head-on confrontation with the higher educational norms of his time, De Doctrina Christiana would be an odd piece of work. On the other hand, the brilliantly original taxonomic critique of traditional ‘doctrinae’ in Book 2 makes excellent sense as the second or latest thoughts of a writer who had shown similar flair in an earlier reworking of received categories.20 We know now that Augustine’s best efforts could not prevent the assimilation of materials from or preparatory to his ‘disciplinarum libri’ into medieval corpora of the liberal arts. Such assimilation would thus occur both in 20 For an argument along these lines, see F. Van Fleteren, ‘Augustine, Neoplatonism, and the Liberal Arts’, in D. W. H. Arnold and P. Bright (eds.), De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), 14–24.

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spite and because of what he had written. This principle of double agency may be taken to apply with special force to De Doctrina Christiana, a work in which the critique of one vision of disciplinary knowledge (‘liberal’) occurs at the same time as the proclamation of another (‘biblical’). Of the chapters in the section of Marrou’s thesis entitled ‘Doctrina christiana’, that on ‘La Bible et les lettrés de la décadence’ later struck him as one of the least satisfactory in the book.21 The collective plural of the chapter title points once more to our problem. As long as Augustine is imagined as speaking for an informal committee of his contemporaries, his works must either vaguely prefigure some future ideal (the ‘biblical culture’ of the Latin Middle Ages, as Marrou supposed in 1938) or else encapsulate a lost late antique civilization (of the ‘Theopolis’, as he named it in 1949). For their historical import to be measured at all precisely, we must first stop to consider how representative in fact any of them was. Such consideration is impeded in this case by the extraordinary prestige eventually accorded De Doctrina Christiana.22 It may—indeed should—come as something of a shock, so late in scholarship, to realize how hard it still is to account for this work in terms of its sources and analogues, and hence how bizarre it is likely to have seemed to its earliest readers, or such as there were of them.23 Again, we 21 ‘Retractatio’, 646; the regrets have to do mainly with his earlier treatment of Augustine’s view of the spiritual or allegorical interpretation of Scripture. 22 See also C. Schäublin, ‘De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture?’, in Arnold and Bright (eds.), De Doctrina Christiana, 47–67, a notably clear-sighted essay. 23 On the early circulation of the text, consult M. Gorman, ‘The Diffusion of the Manuscripts of Saint Augustine’s De doctrina christiana in the Early Middle Ages’, Revue Bénédictine 95 (1985), 11–24, repr. in his The Manuscript Traditions of the Works of St Augustine (Florence, 2001), 265–78; K. B. Steinhauser, ‘Codex Leningradensis Q.v.I.3: Some Unresolved Problems’, in Arnold and Bright (eds.), De Doctrina Christiana, 33–43; J.-P. Bouhot, ‘Augustin prédicateur d’après le De Doctrina Christiana’, in G. Madec (ed.), Augustin prédicateur (395–411): Actes du colloque international de Chantilly (5–7 septembre 1996) (Paris, 1998), 49–61; I. Opelt, ‘Materialien zur Nachwirkung von Augustins Schrift De doctrina christiana’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 17 (1974),

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have no reason to think that Augustine created a new disciplinary programme (one we might now call ‘hermeneutics’) out of thin air. Indeed, it would hardly have been wise for him to do so. A newly appointed bishop could not afford to be too innovative. Even if he was bluffing a bit when he began his preface by stating matter-of-factly, ‘There are certain precepts for the treatment of the Scriptures’, it was a bluff that he would not have wished to hear called too loudly at the time. The idea of a proper, more or less rigorous method for interpreting and expounding the Bible was gaining currency. Augustine would not be the first in the field, even among Latin theologians.24 Yet, granting that, we may also allow that he would now be as inventive a theorist and advocate of biblical studies as he had once been of those called liberal.25 Research into Augustine’s intellectual debts and affinities in De Doctrina Christiana has advanced steadily in recent years.26 As evidence accumulates of his theological and other partis pris, the chances of his being taken or mistaken for a ‘typical’ well-educated Christian of his time are reduced. Tightly focused studies have made good the inevitable defects of Marrou’s pioneering study. By their 64–73. There is a helpful survey of the work’s later fortunes in the introduction to R. P. H. Green’s edition of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford, 1995), pp. ix–xxiii. 24 Apart from the ex-Donatist Tyconius, and in many ways more imposing, there was Jerome. On the possible impact of the latter’s scholarly propaganda on Augustine in the 390s, see M. Vessey, ‘Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine’s “Apologia contra Hieronymum” ’, JECS 1 (1993), 175–213. G. Strauss, Schriftgebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (Tübingen, 1959) remains fundamental. 25 K. Pollmann, Doctrina Christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana (Fribourg, 1996), with comments by C. Kannengiesser, B. Studer, and F. Van Fleteren, and a response by the author, in AugSt 29 (1998), 99–137. 26 Review of scholarship by K. Pollmann, ‘Doctrina christiana (De-)’, AL ii. 551–75. Note also B. Kursawe, Docere – Delectare – Movere: Die officia oratoris bei Augustinus in Rhetorik und Gnadenlehre (Paderborn, 2000); G. Lettieri, L’altro Agostino: Ermeneutica e retorica della grazia dalla crisi alla metamorfosi del De Doctrina Christiana (Brescia, 2001).

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very specialization, however, they have put off confronting the larger questions raised by the same scholar’s narrative history of the disciplines, his own revision of it, and the challenge offered by Hadot. Those questions may be simply stated: 1. What is the historical significance of Augustine’s ‘conversion’ from a theory of the liberal arts to a theory of biblical interpretation? 2. What prompted and facilitated his change of perspective? 3. How did it fit or clash at the time with other fashions in cultural theory and (Christian) pedagogy? 4. What were its immediate and longer-term effects? These are issues for any history of Western intellectual culture that aims to be more than commentary on a relay race of Great Thinkers. Even to begin to address them, we need to keep both aspects of the problem in view—the history of the ‘liberal arts’ and that of the ‘Bible’, or ‘biblical culture’. The subject is by nature an interdisciplinary one. Its inherent complexity invites scholarly collaboration. Such considerations have shaped the present volume on ‘Augustine and the Disciplines’. As a collection, it aims to shed new light on the first three questions listed above and thereby provide a more secure basis for future investigation of the fourth. (Only incidentally is the reception of Augustine’s disciplinary thinking treated here.) As noted in the Preface, the essays presented below (with the exception of Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter’s) were originally composed for a conference on ‘Augustine and the Disciplines’ held at Villanova University, in November 2000. As soon as that meeting got under way, it became clear that the most doubtful term in its title was the definite article. To various degrees, almost all speakers pressed for a loosening of our sense of ‘the disciplines’ spoken of in conjunction with the name of Augustine. With respect to scholarship since Marrou, two tendencies were confirmed: (1) an interest in placing Augustine’s work as unceremoniously as possible within a long history of ancient systems of the arts and their medieval–modern successors, and (2) an intuition that his texts both radically revise traditional dis-

Introduction

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ciplinary structures and participate in the formation of a Christian ‘biblical culture’. Like Marrou’s Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique,27 though without the ambition of comprehensiveness, this volume is arranged in three parts which broadly recapitulate Augustine’s personal experience from his schooldays in the 360s and 370s to the simultaneously retrospective and prospective vision of his Confessions, begun around 397 when he set aside the first draft of De Doctrina Christiana.28 Part I (‘Honesta studia: Classrooms without Walls’) contains two essays on the social, institutional, and ideological parameters of late antique higher education, as first undergone and then reconstructed by Augustine. Reading the Confessions against the equally unreliable memoirs of Gregory Nazianzen and his student fraternity in Athens, Neil McLynn makes a fresh estimate of the peculiarity of Augustine’s case. As regards what would now count as pedagogy or curriculum, the overriding impression obtained from these student reminiscences is of disorder rather than discipline. Augustine, it is argued, may have designed his ‘disciplinarum libri’ to mark ‘a decisive break with the day-to-day untidiness of the schoolroom’. A more lasting analogy between East and West is suggested by McLynn’s view of the Philocalia, the late antique collection of excerpts from the works of Origen, as a kind of club-book for serious young Christians like Gregory and Basil, containing ‘encouraging intimations of the possibility of an authentically Christian paideia’. Denied such encouragement in his late adolescence, Augustine looked elsewhere. Years would pass before he encountered a biblical pedagogy comparable with Origen’s, and many more before he himself would begin to offer a fuller treatment of issues in biblical interpretation 27 The sections of Marrou’s book are entitled ‘Vir eloquentissimus ac doctissimus’, ‘Studium sapientiae’, and ‘Doctrina christiana’. 28 The break occurs at Doct. Chr. 3. 25. 35/6; the treatise was finished thirty years later (Retr. 2. 4). On the composition dates of the Confessions, see now P.-M. Hombert, Nouvelles Recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris, 2000), 9–23, who accepts the traditional date of 397 for the inception of the work and places its completion in 403.

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than any since Book 4 of the latter’s Peri Archo¯n (‘On First Principles’). Meanwhile, in the retirement of Cassiciacum, a brilliant student again among students, he drew on resources nearer at hand: those of the Ciceronian–Platonic philosophical dialogue. In that most conventional and nostalgic of didactic genres (in the early part of Book 2 of De Ordine) Catherine Conybeare finds him devising a ‘theology’ of disciplinarity which, by undercutting the Neoplatonic distinction between the divine and the corporeal, already casts doubt on the logic of his proposed Christianization of the liberal disciplines. On this view, the abandonment of the ‘disciplinarum libri’ would reflect Augustine’s own recognition of the project’s conceptual inadequacy; his developing thought now demanded a less constraining framework. Bold ‘exercise in self-definition’ (McLynn), or obstacle to be overcome (Conybeare)? Knowing that these ‘libri’ would never exist as a finished series, we are free to see them as both. Part II (‘Disciplinarum libri: The Canon in Question’) transfers the title of Augustine’s first great ‘opus imperfectum’ to the larger array of works in which he and other Latin writers discussed or enumerated the liberal (and other) arts. The opening essay by Danuta Shanzer is the hinge of the present collection. Siding with Ritschl and Dyroff against Hadot, she considers the hypothesis of a Varronian model for the ‘medieval’ scheme of the liberal arts well founded, and supplies new reasons for regarding Augustine as a crucial witness to this line of descent. Her arguments have important consequences both for our conception of Varro’s original Disciplinarum Libri and for our history of the liberal arts in the West from the fourth century onwards. The restoration of Varro’s lost Musae—the personified arts and the work that apparently also went by that name—makes it easier to appreciate the difficulties Augustine faced in attempting to adapt these traditional figures of disciplinary thought to Christian purposes. At the same time, the newly assembled evidence of the survival of Varronian themes and motifs in Late Antiquity makes it harder to suppose that any single author of that period, even one with the powers of Martianus Capella, could ever have restructured the tradition decisively. This is not to say that all problems are solved. In modern scholarship, as in the imaginations of

Introduction

15

former ages, it seems, an air of mystery will forever surround the Muses, whether nine or seven. Why did Augustine give up on the liberal arts? Among possible ‘external’ factors, Shanzer mentions the influence of Ambrose (on which, see now the essay by HeßbrüggenWalter). ‘But above all’, she writes, ‘there was the intimidating realization that all of the Bible lay ahead of him for exegesis, and that there would never be world enough and time.’ The character here glimpsed is already that of the impatient lover of Confessions 11.2.2, the one who has left behind all arts, liberal (10. 8. 16), mechanical (10. 34. 53) and superstitious (10. 35. 56), in an urgent desire to embrace the only true Mediator between God and humankind (10. 42. 67–43. 70), Christ, the Truth who speaks in Scripture and of whom the Scripture speaks (11. 2. 4). This is the Augustine of c.396/7–400, who in the foreshortened, disciplinaryhistorical perspective of this volume is also the Augustine of the City of God (413–27), a work that disposes of the accumulated disciplinary learning (‘litterae’) of the ancient Graeco-Roman world in its first ten books without so much as listing the liberal arts, then cleaves to the uniquely authoritative text of Scripture (Civ. 11. 1). At what stage of his intellectual and public career between 386 and 396/7—that is, between the serial dialogues of Cassiciacum and the solitary double labour of De Doctrina Christiana and the Confessions—should we mark Augustine’s turn from one kind of ‘litterae’ to another? Such datings are crude approximations at best. Were we to pursue this one, however, we might profitably pause over those linked works De Vera Religione and De Utilitate Credendi, respectively the last composed before his ordination in 391 and the first completed after it (Retr. 1. 13. 14).29 29 Cf. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, ii. 278; M. Cameron, ‘The Christological Substructure of Augustine’s Figurative Exegesis’, in Bright (ed.), Augustine and the Bible, 74–103. Augustine, Retr. 1. 11, on the De Musica, last survivor of the projected ‘disciplinarum libri’, begins with an explicit disavowal of the scheme of ascent via the corporeal to the ‘invisibilia dei’, to proclaim instead the necessity of a faith in Christ, ‘qui unus mediator est dei et hominum’. On the importance of the De Vera Religione for themes later developed in the City of God, as well as for the hermeneutical concerns of De Doctrina Christiana, see G. O’Daly, Augustine’s

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William Klingshirn takes his cue from a sermon preached by Augustine in Hippo a few years later, shortly before he became bishop, in which he provides ‘a comprehensive survey of all the modes of divine communication with humankind’. The one literally textual mode mentioned is that constituted by the ‘instrument’ of the Divine Scriptures. In his next breath, the preacher refers to several procedures of divination. As this essay shows, Augustine’s views on divination are a revealing index of his changing sense of (the) discipline(s), including in due course the discipline of biblical interpretation. In effect, the pagan art of divination becomes a kind of definitive ‘anti-discipline’ for the purposes of Augustine’s theory. Thus he begins his critical review of traditional forms of learning in Book 2 of De Doctrina Christiana with an inventory of superstitious practices, among which examples from technical divination are to the fore. ‘This makes sense,’ observes Klingshirn, ‘since Book 2 is about knowledge and the interpretation of unknown signs [i.e., in Scripture], and technical divination dealt with both.’ We may wonder to what extent the semiotic slant of Augustine’s guide to the new science of Scripture was dictated by the prominence of sign theory in traditional Graeco-Roman religion. Is it possible that the science that we now call hermeneutics, and that Karla Pollmann (in her essay here) finds first theorized in De Doctrina Christiana, owes as much to the model of certain ancient mantic arts— described by Martianus Capella, evoked by Macrobius and other late antique commentators on Virgil—as it does to the liberal arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric? The example of divination introduces a series of essays on Augustine’s revision of received disciplinary structures. The last in Part II completes the review of plenary lists of liberal ‘artes’ or ‘disciplinae’30 by considering his Latin vocabulary ‘City of God’: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford, 1999), 266–70. And note also Augustine’s Ep. 21 to Bishop Valerius of Hippo, written soon after his unexpected priestly ordination, in which he pleads for leisure for biblical study, ‘ad cognoscendas divinas scripturas’. 30 For the sense of a distinction sometimes made in Latin between ‘ars’ and ‘disciplina’, the former translating the Greek techne¯, the latter episte¯me¯, see Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 193–9, with special reference to dialectic.

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for the canon, especially as presented by the Confessions. Already in Book 2 of De Doctrina Christiana the sense of a pre-ordained unity of learning (outside Scripture) is undermined by his deployment of a scheme of his own, in which some disciplines (e.g., music, astrology) are sundered from their usual congeners, while elements intrinsic to another (grammar) are distributed across different classes. Traditional structures are further weakened by Augustine’s suppression of the usual names for these disciplines, a device that must have been disconcerting for late fourth- or early fifth-century Latin readers used to the ‘Varronian’ pattern and the appearance of solidity conferred on the ensemble of the arts by their uniformly Greek titles. As if to compound that effect, Augustine next proceeded to give an account of his own education, in which the contours of disciplinary knowledge were similarly blurred. As Philip Burton demonstrates here, the idiom of intellectual activity and accomplishment found in the Confessions strongly favours Latin translations or near-equivalents of Greek loan-words. Why is that? ‘In avoiding the traditional [Greek] terminology of the arts’, Burton infers, ‘Augustine was attempting to revalorize them’ for a Latin Christian readership. This recoding, a sequel to the failed attempt to recycle the enkyklios paideia in ‘libri disciplinarum’, aims at more than just the effacement of antiquated institutions of non-Christian learning. It also promotes the idea, explicitly formulated in De Doctrina Christiana, that the useful and salutary practice of arts otherwise known as liberal is already exemplified in the sacred texts of Christianity. The less narrowly ‘technical’, more broadly evocative (or pre-disciplinary) vocabulary of the Confessions enables Augustine to conduct his discussion of Christian intellectual life in language concordant with Latin versions of Scripture. By the time he finished his Confessions, Augustine’s reflections on divine and human knowledge had reached approximately the point from which he would begin to elaborate his City of God a decade later.31 To follow his 31 Cf. M. Vessey, K. Pollmann, and A. D. Fitzgerald (eds.), History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s ‘City of God’ (Bowling Green, Oh., 1999), 9 f. (also published as AugSt 30/2 (1999), same pagination).

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course from there on, as Burton suggests, requires us to engage with themes of ‘authority’ and ‘providence’ that are vital to an understanding of his thought and its influence, but which rapidly exceed the scope of ancient and modern discourses of disciplinarity per se. Having come to a kind of limit with the Confessions, we return instead to the conjugate work De Doctrina Christiana. That is to say: we return and advance at once, since De Doctrina Christiana was itself to be completed, substantially ‘unretractated’, around the same time as the City of God, almost at the end of Augustine’s life. Part III (‘Doctrina christiana: Beyond the Disciplines’) consists of three essays which try variously to capture this sense of limits reached and passed. To the extent that they do, they may be read as symmetrical to the opening two essays with their emphasis on the shifting borderlines of Augustine’s early dialogues and confessional self-definition. Heßbrüggen-Walter’s contribution, moreover, takes us back to questions about the ‘philosophical life’ previously raised by Conybeare. Once again, strict chronology is not the goal. Augustine was fond of images of disciplinary gradation. Yet, as McLynn points out, we can rarely say exactly when he ‘graduates’. Despite differences of approach, Catherine Chin’s placing of De Doctrina Christiana in the context of grammatical education bears out McLynn’s earlier depiction of graduates of the late Roman school system as carriers of heterogeneous ‘cargoes of culture’. Awkward and reductive as it would be to construe Augustine’s treatise on biblical interpretation as an ‘ars grammatica’, the difficulty we now experience in assimilating this work to any single ancient model (see especially Pollmann’s essay) may be a sign of its special relationship to grammar, the primary discipline for all practical curricula of higher education in Augustine’s time. For it was the grammarian’s function, Chin observes, ‘to redistribute, piecemeal, the knowledge produced in other disciplines’. His classroom was the first loading port for aspiring merchantmen of Mediterranean paideia. In such important cognate texts as Macrobius’ Saturnalia and Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ‘[n]ot only is the grammarian configured, ideally, as a polymath, but grammar itself is understood to be the practice of breaking down larger fields

Introduction

19

of knowledge into “mobile” decontextualized units’. In pointing to the consonance of this habit of discursive ‘transferral’ with the famous image of the spoliation of the Egyptians (Doct. Chr. 2. 40. 60), and interpreting the latter as master trope of a discourse that produces the opposition of ‘Christian’ to ‘pagan’ culture through a process of de- and re-contextualization, Chin seeks to explain the dynamics of love (‘caritas’, but also ‘amor’) inscribed by the sign theory of De Doctrina Christiana. Augustinian ‘grammar’, on her analysis, becomes both an engine for subverting prior disciplinary formations and a self-constituting divine instrument, mediating between human readers and the object of their desire—thus homologous (if not identical?) with Scripture, and with Christ. This is a surprising—indeed barely tolerable—reading. By its own decontextualizing strategy and selective use of modern theorists, it can perhaps restore some of the shock value of Augustine’s own acts of theory. Ambrose of Milan is cited by Augustine as a great ‘despoiler’ of the Egyptians, and also as the teacher who (according to the Confessions) decisively reorientated him to the ‘auctoritas’ of Scripture.32 As Stefan HeßbrüggenWalter argues, he may also have been partly responsible for a major revision in Augustine’s thinking about dialectic. Especially when rendered by more Latinate terms (see Burton’s essay), dialectic continues to hold great sway in Augustine’s mature thought. As the science of definition and division, it may be thought to play at least as large a role as grammar in the discursive transformations projected by De Doctrina Christiana. But it is another aspect of dialectic, namely its power to generate ontological truths, that is the main focus of Heßbrüggen-Walter’s essay. Having granted dialectic such power in early works like De Ordine, Augustine had evidently changed his mind by the mid-390s. According to De Doctrina Christiana, dialectic ‘is concerned with the formal derivation of valid syllogisms, not the material truth of 32 For strong arguments against undervaluing Ambrose’s early influence on Augustine’s approach to Scripture, see now M. Dulaey, ‘L’Apprentissage de l’exégèse biblique par Augustin’, REAug 48 (2002), 267–95 and 49 (2003), 43–84.

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propositions, which in matters of the faith . . . can only be ascertained by appeal to the revealed truth of Scripture’. It seems that Augustine may have been helped to this position by arguments or gestures used by Ambrose in polemic against some of the more skilful Arian dialecticians, who allegedly sought to derive theological truths independently of divine revelation. As later for Kant, Heßbrüggen-Walter concludes, dialectic for Augustine (c.396/7) is ‘not an organon, but a canon for cognition’. The Christian’s only true organon now consisted of the texts collectively known, in Latin since Tertullian, as ‘instrumenta’ (sc., ‘vetus et novum’). Of a canon in the looser and more ambitious sense implied by our subtitle for Part II, no clear trace remains in Augustine’s later work. Dialectic, Heßbrüggen-Walter reminds us (after Augustine), was sometimes defined as a discipline ‘instrumental’ to other branches of rational inquiry, a ‘disciplina disciplinarum’ in the sense that none of them could proceed without it. It will be clear by now that the instrumentality imputed by Augustine to the activity he calls ‘tractatio scripturarum’ is of another, more transcendent order. Although itself dispensable in certain cases, as he points out in the prologue to De Doctrina Christiana and elsewhere, the ‘science’ of biblical interpretation (2. 7. 9) subserves no other intellectual discipline. In fact, no other intellectual discipline receives formal or institutional notice within the Christian, ecclesial, theological world-view of De Doctrina Christiana, whatever allowances are made for the continuing vitality of traditional, non-Christian forms of learning in a separate sphere. Would it then be wrong to speak of Augustine’s settled conviction of the late 390s as a ‘reductio omnium artium ad scientiam solam scripturarum’? What qualifications are required for such a formula to fit the case? The final essay, by Karla Pollmann, addresses these issues under the title: ‘Augustine’s Hermeneutics as a Universal Discipline!?’ As an account of De Doctrina Christiana, set against the backdrop of ancient theorizing on language, the interpretation of texts, and the relation of human to divine knowledge, with an eye to Augustine’s earlier initiatives from Cassiciacum onwards and to the related work of his Confessions, this piece

Introduction

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draws together the main threads of our collective inquiry. It could serve equally well as an alternative introduction. The combination of an exclamation mark and a question mark in Pollmann’s title should, in any case, be understood as applying to the whole of the present subject-matter. More than for any exemplarity that can be credited to it, despite whatever partial models and analogues can be suggested for it, the hermeneutic ‘discipline’ announced by Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana is perhaps most impressive in the end for its singularity—its strange, historical eventfulness. This volume will have achieved its goal if it succeeds in communicating a sense of shared surprise at so belated a (re)discovery.

pa r t i Honesta studia: Classrooms without Walls

2 Disciplines of Discipleship in Late Antique Education: Augustine and Gregory Nazianzen Neil McLynn

1. c h r i st i a n s i n t h e c la s s r o o m Cassiciacum was not Augustine’s first experiment in reconciling traditional patterns of education with Christian faith. Seventeen years earlier, at Carthage, he had tried to match his schoolbooks with the Bible, and had sought love both among his fellow students and in the city’s churches. Augustine’s student experiences have an obvious relevance to the programme of studies that he would later devise in the laboratory conditions of Cassiciacum—the two represent, indeed, the formal termini of a long, continuous engagement in (so-called) ‘honesta studia’. Moreover, Augustine’s narrative of his period at Carthage is the longest surviving account of the experience, common to well-born young men across the whole empire, of being herded through the teeming rhetorical schools.1 Yet it has remained comparatively neglected by historians.2 This is partly due, no doubt, to its deeply idiosyncratic character, as more a ‘tissue of meditative abstractions’ than a straightforward 1 ‘Per totum orbem rhetorum scholae adolescentium gregibus perstrepant’: Augustine Util. Cred. 7. 16, remarking upon the meagre results of such application. 2 B. Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 3, identifies Augustine’s ‘comments on ancient methods of instruction in literate disciplines’ as a possible approach to his theme, but declines to pursue them in any detail; I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la penseé antique (Paris, 1984), contains many valuable reflections upon the schools (pp. 215–61), but operates at a higher level of abstraction than is attempted here.

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narrative; since Henri Marrou, moreover, it has become so instinctive to measure Augustine’s educational attainments in relation to the cultural inheritance of the classical past that we easily lose sight of those less formally academic criteria that may have made Augustine the student a child of his own distinctive time and place.4 The central purpose of this essay is therefore to explore, at least in outline, Augustine’s experiences at the receiving end of late antique education, in order to obtain a clearer impression of which features might have been standard for students across the Empire, and which peculiar to Carthage or personally to Augustine; on the basis of this it will be possible to suggest some fresh perspectives upon the disciplinary programme that he conceived at Cassiciacum. The scope of the essay allows no more than a sketch of a vast subject;5 to maintain as close a focus as possible upon Augustine’s account, the approach adopted here involves a sustained comparison between his reminiscences and those of his older contemporary Gregory of Nazianzus, another Christian bishop who would review his experiences in the rhetorical schools.6 The rhetor’s classroom was anything but isolated from the city outside it.7 And Augustine himself invites us to consider his education in its broader social context, for although a whole book of his Confessions is devoted to his experiences in 3 J. J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1992), ii. 145. The point is made in reference to Conf. 3. 1. 1 but applies more widely. 4 H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th edn. (Paris, 1958). 5 Our understanding of Roman rhetorical education has recently been much enhanced by papyrological studies. T. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998), helpfully presents much material on pedagogical practice; R. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, 2001), combines the papyri with evidence from Libanius to great effect in a discussion of the rhetor’s classroom: ‘Learning to Fly: Rhetoric and Imitation’, 220–44. 6 The interpretation of Gregory Nazianzen presented here is more fully developed in work currently in progress. There is a fine account of Gregory’s Athenian experience in J. M. McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY, 2001), 47–83. 7 P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992), 43–4.

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Carthage, very little of it concerns his formal schooling. We meet him successively sizzling in the frying-pan of love (Conf. 3. 1. 1), bewitched by the illusions of the stage (3. 2. 2–4), and doing dark business in church (3. 3. 5), before we are introduced to him in the schoolroom, strutting arrogantly before his peers, the friend (at a safe distance) of the diabolical ‘eversores’ (3. 3. 6). When he reads a textbook, moreover, he does so alone (3. 4. 7); then he embarks upon a self-chosen reading programme which leads him into the hands of the Manichees (3. 5. 9–6. 10). In all this, there is no reference whatever to his teachers, who are mentioned only in the following book, in a context where Augustine has left them far behind and—aged 26—is himself a teacher of rhetoric and an aspiring author. Recalling his own literary début, he reflects on his aptitude for learning, and remembers his encounter with Aristotle’s Categories—how the Carthaginian rhetor, his master, and other learned men would puff their cheeks proudly at the name of the book, as they recalled their own struggles to understand it, even with the help of ‘most erudite masters’ and complex diagrams; yet he had mastered it by himself (4. 16. 28). The chief historical difficulty posed by this material is to establish a relationship between the different activities that Augustine describes: how the star pupil related to the eager lover, or the theatre-goer to the young father. All such reconstructions are necessarily provisional—as has been brought home vividly by the impact of a single piece of new evidence, the passage in a recently discovered sermon in which Augustine recalls how as a young student at Carthage he would attend vigils where ‘women were mixed up with the licentiousness of men’.8 Behaviour that had once, on the basis of the Confessions alone, seemed like shy gallantry in a medieval cathedral is suddenly, almost shockingly contemporary: the calculated opportunism of a sexual predator.9 8 Sermo de Oboedientia 5: F. Dolbeau, ‘Nouveaux Sermons d’Augustin pour la conversion des païens et des Donatistes (III)’, REAug 38 (1992), 50–79, at 59. 9 P. Brown, ‘A New Augustine’, New York Review of Books, 24 June 1999, modifying the presentation in Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967), 41.

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If, moreover, Augustine’s reference to how young men—‘the licentious and impudent slaves’—would gather at the church entrances to ‘begin what they would later try to complete’ is (as the parallelism with his language in the Confessions might suggest10) autobiographical, the plural raises a further disquieting possibility. This mauling of matrons seems to have been a team sport: did Augustine, one wonders, attend church with the ‘eversores’? That such shifts of perspective are even conceivable suggests the importance of relating our Augustinian evidence to other sources on late antique paideia. Hence the relevance for an understanding of the young Augustine of the account—indeed, the two overlapping accounts—provided by Gregory Nazianzus of his own encounter with secular education. Gregory arrived in Athens, by far the most celebrated educational centre of the late antique empire, a quarter-century before Augustine came to Carthage. His fullest description of his adventures there (which lasted more than a decade) is a famous section of his memorial speech for Basil, where he explains how he first met his great friend (Or. 43. 14–24).11 Young men at Athens, he explains, were as mad for sophists as in other cities they were for the circus, seizing new arrivals and initiating them into their own group (l. 15). These initiation rituals included a parade to the public bath; Gregory secured Basil an exemption from this (l. 16), and came to his rescue

10 Compare Sermo de Oboed. 5, ‘[ne] inciperent quod postea perficere molirentur’ with Conf. 3. 3. 5, ‘ausus sum . . . concupiscere et agere negotium procurandi fructus mortis’. 11 The speech is edited by J. Bernardi, Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 42–43, SC 384 (Paris, 1992). For the context see N. B. McLynn, ‘Gregory Nazianzen’s Basil: The Literary Construction of a Christian Friendship’, StPatr 37 (2001), 173–93 at 179–83. For a useful survey of the passage see J. Bernardi, ‘Un Regard sur la vie étudiante à Athènes au milieu du IVe siècle après Jésus-Christ’, Revue des Études Grecques 103 (1990), 79–94. Valuable points are made in two contributions to T. Hägg and P. Rousseau (eds.), Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000): F. W. Norris, ‘Your Honor, My Reputation: St Gregory of Nazianzus’ Funeral Oration for Basil the Great’, 140–59; D. Konstan, ‘How to Praise a Friend: St Gregory of Nazianzus’ Funeral Oration for Basil the Great’, 160–79.

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when some Armenians, members of the same diatribe, engaged the newcomer in a rhetorical duel designed to humiliate him (l. 17). The focus then softens: a mutual confession of ‘yearning’ for the philosophical life led to their becoming ‘all in all’ to one another. They were one soul in two bodies: rooming together, dining together, and spending their days together—sharing a love that transcended the transience of erotic attraction, being solidly based upon mutual aspiration for higher things (l. 19).12 The cultivation of ‘excellence’ that was their sole business is defined in religious (but not exclusively Christian) terms as the preparation for escaping from the world: which meant in practice preferring peaceable to quarrelsome companions, and the finest courses of study to the more pleasant (§20). Thus far, teachers (of whatever sort) are absent from Gregory’s account: in introducing these efforts to live out a godly life, it does not occur to him to invoke any institutional or even informal guidance. The only compasses available to himself and Basil were ‘the commandment’ (that is, the prescriptions of Scripture)13 and the standard that each set for the other, as measuring-rod and rule. Gregory thus presents us with an experiment in Christian life that is essentially home-made. This offers a point of contact not only with Augustine’s account of his own experiments at Carthage but with the formative religious experiences of other young men.14 Like Augustine in Carthage, Gregory attended church. Two roads alone were known to Basil and himself, the nobler of them leading to ‘the sacred house of ours and the teachers

12 For the erotic charge that runs through Gregory’s account, see J. Børtnes, ‘Eros Transformed: Same-Sex Love and Divine Desire’, in Hägg and Rousseau (eds.), Greek Biography and Panegyric, 180–93. 13 The same expression recurs in the speech (Or. 43. 50, 70) and elsewhere in Gregory’s writings with a large variety of biblical connotations. The generalized appeal to scriptural authority might be compared to Augustine’s requirement as a student that his preferred doctrine include the name of Christ (Conf. 3. 4. 8). 14 Our richest source on the diverse currents of late antique student religiosity comes from a later period: Zacharias Scholasticus, Vita Severi, ed. and trans. M. A. Kugener, Patrologia Orientalis 2 (Paris, 1907)).

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there’ and the other to ‘the educators outside’ (Or. 43. 21).15 Augustine too would instinctively juxtapose church and schoolroom (Conf. 3. 3. 5–6). Like Augustine, too, Gregory recognizes other possible destinations (including the theatre) but shows himself and Basil dutifully shunning all roads which did not lead to excellence. Arete¯, however, was enacted in public. Gregory remarks upon the different labels that are derived from a man’s paternity or origin, or his preferred avocations: he and Basil took pride in being—and in being called—‘Christians’. The wording makes it clear that the label was pinned upon them not by their fellow Christians in the congregation of Athens but by their (largely pagan) fellow students. They revelled in being Christians in a dangerously unchristian world. And this self-conscious flaunting of a label might remind us of the Carthaginian ‘eversores’. Gregory continues to think in terms of gangs in the following passage, where he declares that ‘the finest thing’ about their experience at Athens was the ‘brotherhood’ of young men who gathered around Basil (Or. 43. 22). Basil and Gregory became famous not only among these fellow students but also among their teachers. As in Augustine’s account, teachers are introduced here almost as an afterthought, and serve a purely ancillary function. They provide an index to Gregory’s and Basil’s fame: these teachers were as widely known as Athens itself, and the two students were as widely known as their teachers, as ‘a pair not without a name’. This latter phrase recurs also in Gregory’s other account of his schooldays, in his autobiographical poem De Vita Sua (ll. 211–64). Here too, the emphasis is upon gangs. Whereas the rest of the young bloods ‘whirled around in different brotherhoods’ (ll. 214–15), Gregory resisted their pull and instead attracted others, drawing his friends to ‘higher things’ (ll. 219–20). Here again, friendship is presented as being central: he shared with Basil ‘literary studies, lodgings, 15 McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, 62, interprets this as a reference to Gregory’s teacher Prohairesius and his ‘place in the official life of the Athenian church’: but the expression seems to distinguish between two separate bodies of teachers, sacred and secular.

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thoughts’ (ll. 226–7), but sees no need to mention his teachers until the moment of his planned departure (l. 250). The core of his Athenian experience, as reported in the poem, is the comradeship that provided the space for the cultivation of religious instincts.16 2. g e n i u s lo c i Gregory’s Athens, unlike Augustine’s Carthage, is illuminated for us from several distinct angles. An epigram reveals that his teacher was the famous Prohairesius.17 And Eunapius, another pupil of Prohairesius, has left an admiring portrait of the master; while the surviving orations of Prohairesius’ great rival Himerius (who was also claimed by a fifth-century source as Gregory’s teacher) provide a complementary perspective.18 So, for example, Eunapius’ description of the small, spartan house that Prohairesius had inherited from his teacher Iulianus, where statues of past pupils and a private auditorium of polished marble fostered a sense of almost religious intimacy and intensity, provides essential background for what otherwise seems the overblown claustrophobia of Himerius’ orations, which lavish the same sort of attentions upon newly arrived students as

16 McGuckin’s ingenious interpretation (Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, 63) of Gregory’s command at De Vita Sua 212–13 that ‘others should speak of matters there’ as a veiled allusion to baptism at Athens (and hence implying a deeper involvement in the local church than is argued here) underplays the grammatical connection with the activities described in the following lines. 17 Gregory of Nazianzus, Epit. 5. 18 Eunapius’ account of Prohairesius is well discussed by R. J. Penella, Greek Philosophers and Sophists in the Fourth Century A.D. (Leeds, 1990), 79–84. Himerius’ career has been reconstructed by T. D. Barnes, ‘Himerius and the Fourth Century’, Classical Philology 82 (1987), 206–25; we still await a fuller appreciation of his oratory. The report that Gregory and Basil were taught by Himerius as well as Prohairesius (Socrates, Hist. Eccl. 4. 26. 6) must be assessed in the light of the historian’s accompanying claim that they both subsequently also attended Libanius’ school at Antioch. See also R. Goulet, ‘Prohérésius le païen et quelques remarques sur la chronologie d’Eunape de Sardes’, Antiquité Tardive 8 (2000), 209–22.

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upon visiting proconsuls.19 When Himerius speaks as a shepherd to his flock, reminding his pupils of their responsibilities as ‘initiates’ of the Muses, he provides a glimpse of the relevance of traditional education for future bishops.20 Similarly, as a teacher, Augustine would cure Alypius of his obsession with the circus by a single well-chosen simile in class (Conf. 6. 7. 12). The vehemence with which he insists, in retrospect, that his admonition had not been a sermon suggests how unclear, in practice, the distinction may have been. The degree of pastoral involvement suggested by some of the surviving texts is striking; Himerius celebrates the birthdays of his students and hymns their weddings.21 One wonders whether Athenian teachers were party to arrangements among their students equivalent to Augustine’s semiformal relationship with his nameless concubine, or the birth of his son. Eunapius and Himerius both convey the ties between masters and pupils, where Gregory concentrates on relations between pupils; but these are both part of the same nexus. For a striking feature of Eunapius’ portrait is that he never once shows Prohairesius teaching; likewise, Himerius’ orations do not so much teach rhetoric as exhibit it. And perhaps the rhetor’s principal job was to facilitate the sort of bond that united Gregory and Basil, and to create the sort of atmosphere where (as in an Islamic madrasah22) young men felt encouraged to educate one another. In becoming a Pylades to Basil’s Orestes (Or. 43. 22), Gregory was following an established pattern. His teacher Prohairesius had 19 Eunapius, Vitae Sophistarum (hereafter VS) 483, ed. W. C. Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius: Lives of the Sophists (Cambridge, Mass., 1921), 466; Himerius, Or. 14 (Egyptian students), Or. 17 (Cypriots), Or. 18 (Cappadocians), Or. 26 (Ephesians and Mysians), Or. 27 (a student from his own city, Prusias), Or. 59–60 (Ionians), Or. 69. 8 (a Bithynian, a Galatian, and some Egyptians). 20 Himerius, Or. 69. 7–9, for the trope of initiation; Or. 54. 2, for the student body as a ‘flock’. 21 Himerius, Or. 44 (birthday); Or. 9 (an epithalamium for a recent student, Severus). 22 On peer learning in the madrasah, see D. F. Eickelman, ‘The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and its Social Reproduction’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978), 485–516. I am grateful to Peter Brown for the reference.

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pooled his possessions with his friend Hephaestion, so that like an attenuated Geryon they seemed ‘to be two men in one’; similarly, during his time at Athens Libanius had shared with Chromatius a single table, under the same roof, with the same pleasures and thoughts, and they had sharpened each other by acting as judges.23 Two features of these relationships require special emphasis. The first is that they were enacted before an audience. Gregory’s claim that he and Basil were ‘notable to our teachers and fellows, notable to all Hellas’ (Or. 43. 22) thus had a specific connotation. More particularly, his account of his intervention in the disputation between the malicious Armenians and the newly arrived Basil—participating initially to save the house’s ‘honour’, but ending up defending Basil’s—presupposes an audience of Prohairesius’ other students (43. 17). The same incident also introduces our second factor: these houses were competitive crucibles. Friendship between aspiring rhetoricians was necessarily agonistic, since their education would have required them to engage in regular duels. And in an important passage Gregory acknowledges that he and Basil were competitors: a world of tensions is implicit in his claim that they overcame the pressure of phthonos, and each took delight in the other’s victory rather than his own (Or. 43. 20).24 More typical, one suspects, was the situation described by Eunapius: the young Prohairesius ‘competed with’ his friend Hephaestion both in poverty and in logoi, but the latter eventually retired from the field, to clear the path for Prohairesius’ advancement; similarly, Chromatius faded from being Libanius’ critic to being his cheerleader.25

Eunapius, VS 487 (ed. Wright, 484–6); Libanius, Ep. 390. 5. Competitive instincts clearly died hard: note how in Or. 43. 22 Gregory begins by emphasizing Basil’s leadership of their group, including himself among those who ran on foot behind his ‘Lydian car’, then in the next sentence identifies the ‘we’ who became famous among teachers and fellow students not as the group as a whole but as Basil and himself alone, until by the end of the paragraph he has climbed aboard Basil’s chariot, as his identical twin and partner in suffering. 25 Eunapius, VS 487 (ed. Wright, 488); Libanius, Ep. 390. 6–7. 23 24

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Each rhetorical house in Athens thus offered in microcosm the competitively collaborative world of élite civic politics. What held these fragile communities together, in good classical manner, was shared hostility to other similar houses. That is to say, the student brawls for which Athens was notorious were an integral part of the training.26 For the élite being moulded at Athens needed to develop the physical self-assertion that was central to public life and a prerequisite for the effective use of fine words: one of the ways they learned to measure their worth was in confrontation with students of rival houses. Learning to be a man thus meant learning to stare down rivals in the street even when blows were threatened or given; the rhetor’s job was to impart the eloquence that would match such poise. Even those who shunned the fights and the feasts had to take sides. The professors were fully implicated. Libanius sourly noted that the Athenian schools turned out soldiers, not speakers; and Himerius is a witness for the prosecution, for he makes Homeric heroes of his battered street-fighters, rousing them with a hymn to victory.27 Iulianus’ house, where Prohairesius gave his lectures, had the feel of a fortress. We see here the consequences of an arrangement that required professors to remain rivals: they therefore needed to keep their students in a state of permanent mobilization.28 Even those who shunned the fights had to take sides. The initiation parade to the baths which Gregory describes, for example, should be understood as a means to advertise publicly each new recruit and to proclaim his allegiance. When Gregory and Basil publicly paraded to church (presumably wearing the distinctive red cloaks of students29) 26 Brawls: Eunapius, VS 483–5 (ed. Wright, 468–76); Libanius Or. 1. 19. 27 Libanius, Ep. 715; Himerius, Or. 65. 28 Gregory Nazianzen would sarcastically evoke the ‘war’ fought by a sophist of Caesarea against his rival, ‘and this in the midst of your partisans, who cheer you on’ (Ep. 192. 3). 29 Red cloaks are not specifically mentioned before the fifth century (Olympiodorus, Fr. 28: R. C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire (Leeds, 1983), ii. 192); but Gregory’s reference to students having ‘taken the gown’ (Or. 43. 17) implies that the uniform was already established.

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they were creating much the same effect—and consciously so. It is significant that Gregory recalls the road leading them to church, but not the services themselves. There was an intrinsically muscular quality to late antique paideia that we neglect at our peril. All this raises questions about Augustine’s experience at Carthage. For if the structure of education was the same, the conditions seem very different. His complaint about his own teaching situation there concerns essentially the impossibility of replicating the same mystique as was possible at Athens. ‘Scholastici’ lurch into other teachers’ classes ‘proterve’, with furious faces (Conf. 5. 8. 14): in Augustine’s experience, at least, the boundaries that at Athens made each school a quasi-religious community were not maintained. Part of the fault was perhaps Augustine’s own: in a famous anecdote, already mentioned in another context, he shows himself paying special attention to a late-comer who was not even on his roster of pupils, but who happened to be an acquaintance from his home town (6. 7. 11–12). The schools of Carthage, one suspects, were slightly too close to the students’ homes. When Alypius was in trouble, an acquaintance of a senatorial family friend, not his teacher, would vouch for him (6. 9. 15); for the latter part of his student career, Augustine had his mother living with him.30 The sheer size of the city also diminished the profile of the student population.31 When a student declaimed a piece by Libanius in the Athenian Lyceum, he was set upon by exponents of rival texts;32 at Carthage, Alypius was able to prepare his exercises in the forum, blithely oblivious to the presence of another student, who in turn was too absorbed in petty larceny to notice Alypius (6. 9. 14). We are dealing here with what might be called microclimates of paideia. The difference between Athens and 30 Eunapius, VS 483 (ed. Wright, 470) shows a sophist in a courtroom alleging concern for his ‘children’; Prohairesius, more tellingly, ordered that Eunapius be treated ‘as if he were my own son’: VS 486, cf. 493 (ed. Wright, 482, 512). P. Petit, Les Étudiants de Libanius (Paris, 1955), 138–44, shows Libanius standing in loco parentis to young students from distant provinces. 31 As Gregory remarked of Alexandria: Or. 7. 6. 32 Libanius, Or. 14. 35.

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Carthage was not merely one of size. Whereas Alypius had to share the forum of Carthage with lawyers and goldsmiths, the students of Athens had the ancient Agora and Lyceum to themselves, as their own reserved playground.33 They could therefore re-create the classical works they were studying in situ: the procession to the baths (for example) may well have led down the Panathenaic Way, past the Painted Stoa which illustrated so many of the themes of their own compositions.34 No wonder that the students of Athens thought of themselves as gods, considering those of Alexandria (as Synesius complained) mere ‘donkeys’ by comparison.35 And as Alexandria was to Athens, so perhaps was Augustine’s Carthage to Rome. In the ancient capital the Forum housed a still growing statue gallery of famous orators, and students gathered not to rehearse their own arguments but to applaud the current masters of the art.36 This makes one wonder to what extent the shadow of Rome, just out of reach, loomed

33 A. Frantz, The Athenian Agora 24: Late Antiquity A.D. 267–700 (Princeton, 1988), 12–48, discusses the physical fabric of the fourthcentury Agora, noting the failure to restore administrative buildings destroyed in the Herulian sack. Construction in the second half of the fourth century of sophists’ homes (and therefore schools) on the Areopagus (ibid. 44–8) would suggest consolidation of academic dominance of the centro storico; but see G. Fowden, Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990), 495–6, for reservations about this identification. 34 Frantz, Athenian Agora, 26–8, dates the reconstruction of the Dipylon Gate and Panathenaic Way to ‘the reign of Constantine and a little later’, just before Gregory’s arrival; the most natural route ‘through the agora’ (Or. 43. 20) would have followed this route, terminating at the Southwest Bath (lavishly refurbished in the mid-fourth century, at exactly this period: Frantz, Athenian Agora, 32–3). In later life Gregory refers instinctively (Ep. 233, 235) to Callimachus and Cynagirus, whose exploits were portrayed in the Painted Stoa; Himerius, Or. 2, describes the painting. For a fictive debate between the two heroes’ claims, see Polemon, Declam. in Callimachum, Declam. in Cynagirum. The fullest evocation of the inspiring effect of the Athenian monuments upon students is Cicero, De Finibus 5. 1–5. 35 Synesius, Ep. 54; at Ep. 136 he insists that Athens was honoured only by its bee-keepers. 36 Jerome, Comm. ad Galat. 2. 11. Augustine, Conf. 8. 2. 3 reports the statue of Marius Victorinus (cf. Jerome, Chron. s.a. 353); Eunapius, VS 492 (ed. Wright, 506–8), that of Prohairesius, who visited c.343; cf. Libanius, Ep. 278.

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over the schools of Carthage; whether the latter were selfconsciously second-rank. Augustine’s delusive dreams of better teaching conditions at Rome were fuelled, he says, by his friends (Conf. 5. 8. 14): a suggestive comment on the topics of conversation among ambitious young men in the African metropolis. It is perhaps significant, in this context, that his cue for mentioning his own teachers is his sending a copy of his own first book to Rome (4. 13. 21)—to the orator Hierius, the teacher that he had never had. 3. r e l i g i o n s o f t h e b o o k ? Mastering a syllabus seems to have been incidental to the student experiences of Gregory and Augustine, both of whom describe instead an open-ended quest for wisdom. Nor is there any reason to think that they were unusual, since Himerius and Eunapius also suggest the primacy to education of what might be called the spiritual dimension. Where Gregory emphasizes friendship, Augustine identifies books as his source of inspiration: an encounter with a school text, Cicero’s Hortensius, led to an extracurricular reading programme—first the Bible, then the books of the Manichees. Here too, however, Gregory might yet provide a point of comparison. In his account of his studies with Basil he does not, indeed, mention any shared reading. Yet one otherwise mysterious text might be associated with Gregory’s Athenian period—and if so, would provide an important parallel with Augustine’s experience. Gregory first mentions the Philocalia, an anthology of extracts from various works of Origen, a quarter-century after his return from Athens, when he presented a copy to a friend as ‘a souvenir from me, which is also of the holy Basil’ (Ep. 115). Recent work has shown just how fragile are the foundations of the traditional view, that the collection was actually compiled by Gregory and Basil.37 Gregory himself introduces the book to its 37 M. Harl, Origène: Philocalie, 1–20, Sur les Écritures, SC 302 (Paris, 1983), 19–41; É. Junod, ‘Basile de Césarée et Grégoire de Nazianze sont-ils les compilateurs de la Philocalie d’Origène? Réexamen de la lettre 115 de Grégoire’, in Mémorial Jean Gribomont (Rome, 1988), 349–60.

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recipient as ‘the Philocalia of Origen’, implying that he at least believed that Origen himself had edited the work. So, if he can offer the volume, without further explanation, as a memento not only of himself but also of Basil, this is probably because it bore physical traces—subscriptions or scholia—of their use of it.38 And once we see the two friends as users of the text (with Gregory, presumably, as its owner) rather than as its editors, far the most likely context for such joint use is during the five years they spent together in Athens.39 Their subsequent periods of collaboration were much shorter, and were devoted to projects for which the Philocalia would have offered little help; besides, Origen’s works were readily available to Basil’s circle in Cappadocia and Pontus, so Gregory had little reason to bring the compendium when he visited his friend.40 On the other hand, Gregory had arrived in Athens via the two cities between which Origen had divided his career.41 It is attractive to suppose that he acquired the volume in one of these, as a portable digest of the great master’s teachings and a useful aid to the reflections of the serious student.42 The two great themes of the work—biblical hermeneutics and the problem of free will—would be particularly relevant to aspiring Christian students; for these of course relate closely to the issues which would most disturb Augustine as

38 Cf. Palladius, Historia Lausiaca 64, reporting autograph comments by Origen; annotations in Basil’s hand were allegedly recognizable in a codex preserved in the library of Caesarea: George Syncellus, Chron., ed. B. G. Niebuhr (Bonn, 1829), 382. 39 J. N. Steenson, ‘The Date of the Philocalia’, in R. P. C. Hanson and H. Crouzel (eds.), Origeniana Tertia (Rome, 1988), 245–52, also argues for an Athenian context, but still supposes that the pair compiled the work rather than studied it. 40 Junod, ‘Basile de Césarée et Grégoire de Nazianze’, 360, offers no arguments for his assertion that Basil and Gregory used the book ‘autour des années 360’. 41 Before sailing to Athens Gregory studied rhetoric at Palestinian Caesarea (Or. 7. 6), then briefly at Alexandria (De Vita Sua 128–9). 42 McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, 60–2, emphasizes the similarities between Prohairesius and Origen, and Steenson, ‘The Date’, 248, also suggests him as a possible Origenist influence: but the fact remains that Gregory himself provides no hint of this.

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a student in Carthage. And the central chapters, providing material for replies to pagan criticism, would meanwhile have been especially useful in mid-fourth-century Athens, a place still dominated by its pagan monuments, ‘richer in wicked wealth than the rest of Greece’, where young men were easily ‘swept along by its panegyrists and patrons’ (Or. 43. 21). The Philocalia was less a textbook than a series of encouraging intimations of the possibility of an authentically Christian paideia. So one extract (Phil. 12) exhorts the reader ‘not to faint’ as he tackles the bleaker parts of Joshua; the next (Phil. 13) consists of Origen’s letter to a student named Gregory (whom Basil, one suspects, would never have recognized as his own grandmother’s teacher) which provides an explicit manifesto for the Christian student, who should ‘despoil the Egyptians’ by acquiring pagan learning as a means to Christian ends, and should meanwhile apply himself to ‘the reading of the divine scriptures’ with the serious and prayerful application that would allow, finally, ‘participation with God’. The next extract (Phil. 14) illustrates the techniques necessary by analysing the names and predicates in a passage of Genesis; then comes a ‘reply to the Greek philosophers who disparage the poverty of style of the Holy Scriptures’ (Phil. 15).44 The organization of the compendium helps give a sense of a doit-yourself religious formation, where intensive study of the Sacred Scriptures was assisted by a restricted number of well-thumbed secondary texts. Here again there are echoes of Augustine’s religious development at Carthage. He too depended upon the piecemeal collation of assorted primary and secondary sources: in his case, however, there was no Christian source to teach him (as the Philocalia taught its readers) to approach the Bible as a single musical instrument, perfect and harmonized (Phil. 6). Instead, we might see the Manichees and their books representing for him what Gregory and the Philocalia did 43 Augustine sets out his problems at Conf. 3. 7. 12. The rebarbative complexities of the biblical text are dealt with at Phil. 1–15; the problem of evil, Augustine’s particular difficulty, is treated at Phil. 26 as part of the broader subject of free will. 44 Cf. Augustine, Conf. 3. 5. 9.

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for Basil. And what mattered, ultimately, was the balance between the two parallel reading programmes. Augustine thus presents his decisive break with the Manichees as a diptych. Faustus, the most authoritative expositor of the Manichaean texts, could not answer Augustine’s questions about them; at the same time he deferred to Augustine’s literary expertise, reading with him such classical texts as he himself desired or Augustine deemed suitable (Conf. 5. 7. 12–13). 4. c a r g o e s o f c u lt u r e Departures from Athens were attended with as much ceremony as were arrivals. A fragmentary speech shows Himerius sending off a pupil with ornate instructions (reinforced by historical and mythological exempla) about the future ‘nurture of his mind’, and the maintenance of the proper interplay between character and eloquence.45 And Gregory describes vividly the day when he and Basil prepared to depart, ‘the farewell speeches, the processions, the calls to remain, the groans, the embraces, the tears’ (Or. 43. 24); it was ‘a time for embraces and sorrowful words’, as he put it elsewhere, ‘for farewell speeches and kindling of memory’ (De Vita Sua 242–4). By contrast, Augustine left school without any apparent fanfare. Indeed, we never see him leave at all. At the end of Book 3 of the Confessions Augustine is sharing a household, somewhat uneasily, with his widowed mother (Conf. 3. 11. 19): although the episode probably still belongs to the time when he was enrolled as a student at Carthage, biographers have readily transferred it to Thagaste.46 The progress from student to teacher is invisible. Augustine’s own narrative seems designed to blur the transition in fact, combining the bulk of his student career with his early years as a teacher into the ‘nine years’, from age 19 to 28, that he spent in thrall to the Manichees.47 This structure serves Himerius, Or. 10. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, ii. 198–9. 47 Conf. 3. 11. 20; 4. 1. 1; 5. 6. 10. Cf. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, ii. 297–8. 45 46

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Augustine’s artistic and apologetic purposes, but also reflects an aspect of paideia that deserves more attention than it is conventionally given. For it says something significant about late antique education that we never see Augustine ‘graduate’. The overlap in Augustine’s account between studying and teaching is not merely incidental. Book 4 of the Confessions covers his early experiences as a teacher: the incidents of the book are set during ‘those years’ when he ‘was teaching the art of rhetoric’ (Conf. 4. 4. 2); a section in the middle is located more specifically ‘at the time when I had first begun to teach in the town where I was born’ (4. 4. 7). Yet it is in this book that we have the most vivid glimpses of Augustine behaving as we might expect a student to do, competing for a crown in a literary competition (4. 2. 3–3. 5) and enjoying, in the company of friends, ‘talking and laughing together and kindly giving way to each other’s wishes, reading elegantly written books together, sharing jokes and being serious at the same time, disagreeing occasionally but without rancour’, and, like Gregory and Basil at Athens, ‘teaching one another, and learning from one another’ (4. 8. 13). Above all, during his interlude at Thagaste he found ‘a friend dear to me through the pursuits we shared’, a former schoolfriend with whom he resumed the literary pursuits of childhood (4. 4. 7). Their bond was founded upon this ‘heated enthusiasm of shared pursuits’, and Augustine lavishes upon it the clichés of student romance that Gregory had used for himself and Basil: they were Pylades and Orestes, the friend was ‘half my soul’ (4. 6. 11). This was a friendship between ‘adulescentes’, which began when Augustine was 21: about the same age, that is, as Gregory was when Basil came to Athens.48 The warmth with which Augustine describes this friendship at Thagaste throws into sharp relief the frigidity of his 48 Augustine’s friend was ‘coaevum nobis et conflorentem flore adulescentiae’ (Conf. 4. 4. 7). Gregory’s birth is most plausibly dated to c.329/330, Basil’s arrival in Athens to 349/350: see respectively P. Gallay, La Vie de saint Grégoire de Nazianze (Lyon, 1944), 25–7, and P. J. Fedwick, ‘A Chronology of the Life and Works of Basil of Caesarea’, in P. J. Fedwick (ed.), Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto, 1981), i. 3–19, at 6.

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earlier account of Carthage, where no distinct friends emerge from the lurid shadows, and even eroticism remains bleakly anonymous. But our readiness to draw biographical inferences from this—that Augustine’s initial isolation at Carthage was real, that he was an awkward provincial, out of his depth in the big city and therefore easy prey for the well-organized Manichees49—may well be misplaced. There are artistic reasons for the emphasis upon this friendship at Thagaste, which both gives significance to an otherwise potentially problematic interlude and provides a suitably heart-driven reason for the subsequent return to Carthage. And the evocation of cultivated friendship that follows, as quoted earlier, refers not to a change in circumstances but to a resumption of existing ties. The Thagaste episode thus punctuates a period that Augustine treats as a continuum. It does not imply that Augustine the student had failed to form the usual bonds. Some might indeed have endured: although the wealthy Carthaginian Nebridius is first introduced as a ‘truly good and truly chaste adulescens’ (Conf. 4. 3. 6), after Augustine’s return to the city, there is a reasonable chance that the relationship had first been forged in the classroom.50 There are similar tricks of perspective in Gregory’s account of his own youthful friendships. His three or four years at Athens before Basil’s arrival are greatly foreshortened; and only incidentally do we discover that he had made previous experiments in philia.51 Nor again is Augustine exceptional in continuing the habits of the schoolroom in later life.52 Here too there might Stock, Augustine the Reader, 43–4. The only clue here is that when introducing Alypius and Nebridius at Conf. 6. 7. 11 Augustine introduces the former as his one-time student, ‘me minor natu’, an odd choice of expression if the same applied to Nebridius. Assumptions about the relationship have been easily made: when discussing Augustine’s correspondence with Nebridius, Stock (Augustine the Reader, 128) makes the latter successively a ‘friend’, ‘protégé’, and ‘student’. 51 Gregory’s failure to claim direct knowledge of Athanasius in Or. 21 puts his move from Alexandria to Athens before the bishop’s return from exile in 346. At Alexandria he shared with Philagrius a table and ‘the delights of lovely comradeship . . . sweated labour over literature, teachers in common’: Ep. 30. 52 See in general Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 238–44. 49 50

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be a parallel in Gregory and Basil’s (ultimately abortive) plans to live together in Cappadocia as they had in Athens. Theirs was to be an ascetic, ‘philosophical’ cell rather than a Manichaean one, but would otherwise have looked little different from Augustine’s association with his friend in Thagaste. Nor would either pair have seemed eccentric. After Eunapius was suddenly recalled to Sardis by his parents from his five-year spell in Athens in order to take up, aged 18, a teaching post, he would spend the afternoons receiving instruction in higher matters from the philosopher Chrysanthius, his former teacher.53 The readiness with which habits of study were thus continued reflects, in part, the unsystematic diversity—and consequent openendedness—of the educational process itself. The schools could hardly look to a determinate end-product when their students might stay for anything between a year and a decade: a sample of some fifty-seven pupils of Libanius at Antioch shows seventeen staying only a year and eighteen for two, while nine remained with him for three years, three for four, five for five, and four for six or more.54 The vaunted uniformity of paideia was therefore inevitably a mirage, the more fragile because differences in cultural level were liable to be exposed in the ruthless zero-sum contests of public life.55 The leisure habits acquired in the schools—the shared application to texts and to literary conversation, as well as more boisterous avocations—were, in this context, of genuine social significance, as a source of much-needed coherence and an opportunity for constructive collaboration. Augustine and his Thagaste friend (who presumably had lacked the benefit of polish in the Carthaginian schools) could consort as equals over their books; Gregory did not play the Athenian demigod with his Alexandria-trained

53 Eunapius, VS 493, 502–3 (ed. Wright, 512, 552): see the useful discussion by T. M. Banchich, ‘Eunapius in Athens’, Phoenix 50 (1996), 304–11. For Chrysanthius, see Penella, Greek Philosophers, 75–8. 54 Petit, Les Étudiants de Libanius, 63–4. 55 Brown, Power and Persuasion, 39–40, offers a memorable sketch of the role of rhetorical culture in ‘the patient recreation, generation after generation, of the “collective memory” of the urban upper class’. It remains to delineate more fully the uses of this memory.

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friend Philagrius when expounding a text to him.56 Similarly, where Eunapius presents himself merely as Chrysanthius’ pupil, observers will doubtless have recognized a partnership. But what was the relationship between the unsystematic activity conducted within the schools and the formal categories represented by the disciplines? Once again, Gregory suggests an approach to such questions. In his eulogy on Basil he uses disciplinary terminology to sum up his friend’s attainments. What form of paideusis, he asks (Or. 43. 23), did Basil not traverse? It quickly emerges that he had in fact mastered eight separate disciplines; but in listing these Gregory is invoking a cultural ideal, rather than describing a syllabus. He begins by declaring Basil’s supremacy in rhetoric, grammar, and philosophy: the ordering of these subjects, which allows a sequence of progressively longer and more complex questions, most certainly does not reflect the course of Basil’s actual studies.57 Then come three matching sciences: astronomy, geometry, and the ‘relations of numbers’. Basil apparently ‘took’ as much from these as was necessary to fortify himself against the cleverness of experts, but Gregory’s prime concern is for symmetry and a neatly turned epigram: there is no need to suppose that Basil was taught these subjects specifically at Athens. The next item, moreover, puts the matter beyond reasonable doubt. Medical proficiency was thrust upon Basil by his recurrent ill health, ‘the fruit of philosophy and of zealous application’. ‘Starting from this’—his own self-inflicted needs—Basil achieved ‘possession of the art’, in a properly philosophical manner, which is to say that the skill was self-taught. Gregory introduces medicine, that is, in order to enhance his panegyric, and provide an appropriate flourish with which to

56 Greg. Naz., Ep. 34, mentioning that he had played the exegete only at Philagrius’ request, and insisting to his friend that, in another respect, ‘you had your teacher as a student’. 57 The inversion of the logical—and chronological—order of grammar and rhetoric (for which see, e.g., Augustine, Ord. 2. 12. 35–13. 38) reflects the moral problems attached to the latter: Gregory insists that Basil’s character was ‘not like the rhetors’ (Or. 43. 23).

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demonstrate Basil’s omnicompetence. And then he caps it with yet another ‘discipline’ as his climax: all Basil’s other attainments counted for little beside his paideusis in e¯thos, which made nonsense of the mythological examples of rectitude. This is not a reference to advanced studies in moral philosophy, but a conflation (the more striking for its smoothness) of specific academic disciplines with their ethical context. Paideusis was a metaphor: Basil at Athens was a ship taking on its load, and when he had as full a cargo as could be crammed into his hold, it was necessary for him to sail for home (§24). No conceptual scheme was available to allow more precise quantification of academic attainments. Much of this terminology, moreover, is recycled: for when burying his brother, Caesarius, over a decade previously, Gregory had paid similar tribute to his academic prowess (Or. 7. 6–8). Here the case is different, for Caesarius had studied at Alexandria and gone on to win renown as a doctor—and this was a period when (as an anecdote of Augustine’s confirms) a doctor’s professional authority was assured if he could claim to have been trained at Alexandria.59 But although medicine is again the capstone of the disciplines, its pre-eminence is surprisingly modest—it receives less prominence, indeed, in Caesarius’ case than in Basil’s. Like Basil, Caesarius is awarded two sets of three paideuseis, this time all scientific—having established his prowess in geometry, astronomy, and ‘the discipline that is dangerous to others’ (astrology), Gregory dares anyone to challenge his primacy in ‘numbers, calculations and divine medicine’. If medicine is then characterized more fully than the parts of arithmetic (the division here is presumably for the sake of symmetry), it still receives less space than does the conceit that spells out Caesarius’ supremacy. This itemization of specific excellences, moreover, rounds off an 58 Bernardi, Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 42–43, 176 n. 2, tries to solve the problem by supposing that Basil was taught the subject at Constantinople. 59 For Alexandrian doctors, see Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 22. 16. 18, with V. Nutton, ‘Ammianus and Alexandria’, Clio Medica 7 (1972), 165–72; Penella, Greek Philosophers, 109–17. Augustine, Civ. 22. 8, shows the authority of Alexandrian medicine in practice.

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account that had defined Caesarius’ scholarly prowess in terms of his social relations—his fidelity to teachers, his affection for his classmates, his wise choice of companions from among his fellow citizens (especially from among his fellow Nazianzenes),60 and the recognition he received from the civic leaders. Like Basil, Caesarius was a great merchantman, whose schooling consisted of the accumulation of a varied cargo. Nothing is said here to suggest that the manifest differed from Basil’s. If Gregory is silent about the literary disciplines, he does not intend to suggest that Caesarius had not studied these, but is rather presenting (somewhat awkwardly) his brother’s qualifications as complementary to his own.61 This rhetorical device reflects a real enough situation, for the two brothers had in fact returned home to Nazianzus after finishing their studies together. They were a ‘partnership’: one might envisage them (and similarly, albeit in different circumstances, Augustine and his friend at Thagaste) each acting as guarantor for the other’s attainments. There was, that is, a public aspect to privately shared absorption in ‘studia’. At Sardis, for example, Eunapius and Chrysanthius impressed their partnership in philosophy upon their fellow citizens by taking walks, absorbed in conversation, along ‘the public streets’ of the city.62 Even when Gregory announced a decisive break with secular pursuits, moreover, the habits of student associations endured. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his cautious negotiations with Basil over their project of a joint ascetic initiative—what has often been criticized as indecision or evasiveness on Gregory’s part is better understood as the continued operation, but in a less controlled environment, of 60 The same term πατρ is used twice immediately afterwards, at Or. 7. 9, specifically in reference to Nazianzus. The estate of Gregory’s friend Philagrius, who would have studied with Caesarius also (Anthologia Graeca 8. 100), may well have been in the city territory of Nazianzus. 61 Gregory mentions his own parallel pursuit of his ‘passion for rhetoric’ at Palestinian Caesarea at Or. 7. 6; he makes no reference here to his own stint in Alexandria. At Anth. Gr. 8. 91 he credits Caesarius with mastery of six disciplines, including grammar and (as the summit) ‘the might of rhetoric’. 62 Eunapius, VS 502 (ed. Wright, 550).

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the same collaborative impulses and competitive pressures that had formerly been contained within Prohairesius’ school.63 Here again, the friends’ relationship remains on display: the letters in which Gregory successively mocks and hymns the monastic ‘thinkery’ that Basil had established in Pontus are intended for wider circulation, to define the project (and Gregory’s part in it) within a peer group.64 Nor could there be more striking testimony to Gregory’s continued engagement with the world of the schools than his formal publication of these letters, along with some of Basil’s replies, over two decades later—as part of a collection compiled on behalf of a young protégé who was at the time studying with the rhetors of Caesarea.65 Augustine’s venture at Cassiciacum, too, was an assertively private withdrawal that was deliberately, in the series of pamphlets he produced there, laid open to the public gaze. And although his great project of reformatting the liberal disciplines into vehicles for managing philosophical ascent might at first seem to have as little direct relation to contemporary educational practice as Basil’s retirement to Pontus, both stand in a similar relationship to the spiritualizing, idealizing impulses behind classical education.66 For the same desire to work ‘through the corporeal to the incorporeal’ infused the intense friendships between young men that were encouraged by the schools; nor should we suppose that Gregory and Basil were the only couple at Athens (or elsewhere) to conceive their studies as a preparation for ‘escape from the world’. And Augustine’s plan to 63 In Ep. 1 Gregory cites the need to tend his parents as his excuse for not joining Basil; in Ep. 2 he offers the counter-proposal that Basil should join him at Nazianzus. For general background, see McLynn, ‘A SelfMade Holy Man: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen’, JECS 6 (1998), 463–83, at 467–8. 64 Greg. Naz., Epp. 4–6, replying serially to Basil, Ep. 14; the fact that Gregory refers directly to Basil’s letter in the first of his replies, despite having paid an extended visit to his friend in Pontus before writing it, is clear evidence that this correspondence is constructed as a dialogue for the benefit of readers. 65 For the context and organization of the letter collection, see McLynn, ‘Gregory Nazianzen’s Basil’, 183–90. 66 The point is well made, in relation to Basil, by P. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), 57–8, 70–2.

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transform the ‘disciplines’ from metaphors into a set of precisely targeted methodologies might be seen as an exercise in just such escapology. In launching his grandiose programme, he was finally announcing a decisive break with the dayto-day untidiness of the schoolroom. However, the ‘disciplinarum libri’ should no more be regarded as educational textbooks than should Gregory’s letter collection. Rather, in publicly setting himself so monumental a challenge, Augustine was arguably embarking on an exercise in selfdefinition—an exercise that can be connected with the uncertainty of his status in Milan in autumn 386, after his resignation from his rhetorical post. It does not detract from the seriousness of his project thus to interpret it as, in large part, an exhibition:67 for a central theme of this essay has been to emphasize that displays of philological prowess were very serious matters indeed. Rather, we might note how completely Augustine’s great disciplinary endeavour falls into abeyance when he leaves Milan (and the literary circles he was seeking to impress there) in 387. Only now, perhaps, when he departs for his native town and what he expects will be permanent immersion there, does Augustine ‘graduate’. 67 In this respect the alternatives offered by O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, ii. 274, are unduly restrictive: to avoid reducing Augustine to a ‘worn-out pedant exhibiting his expertise’, he makes the project ‘a serious and original contribution to philosophical literature’.

3 The Duty of a Teacher: Liminality and disciplina in Augustine’s De Ordine C at h e r i n e C o n y b e a r e

In his rural retreat in the autumn of 386, driven by ill health from his pinnacle of secular achievement, the chair of rhetoric at Milan, and waiting for baptism to Christianity, Augustine was poised— intellectually and culturally— between two very different courses of life. His writings of the period enact a complex and constantly shifting negotiation between these apparent poles, between different interpretations or aspects of the role they might play in choosing and pursuing a good life. Needless to say, the negotiation remains inconclusive: Augustine’s intellectual journey draws him swiftly away from the assumption that firm answers may ever be found in human inquiry. But the way in which it is conducted is of great interest. Augustine at Cassiciacum was self-consciously on the threshold of something new, and he set out to make that sense of liminality public with the composition of his dialogues there— for, as he explained in De Ordine, ‘quite a few people suddenly convert to a wonderfully good life, and until they draw attention to it with some more conspicuous actions, everyone believes them to be the same sort of people as they used to be’. 1 Augustine’s sense of liminality carries over into the literary production from Cassiciacum; and this has been insufficiently remarked. These are precisely the ‘more 1 ‘non pauci se subito ad bonam uitam miramque conuertunt, et donec aliquibus clarioribus factis innotescant, quales erant, esse creduntur’ (Ord. 2. 10. 29). I use the edition of W. M. Green, in CCSL 29; all translations of this and other texts, bar that in n. 12, are my own.

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conspicuous actions’ through which he announces—or begins to—that he is now a different sort of person. Why did Augustine elect—for these ‘actions’ which were personally, if not yet historically, significant—to write in the form of the philosophical dialogue? (I make the assumption here that it was indeed a matter of choice, and that these dialogues are not simply transcriptions of actual conversations.2) Though some attempts had been made to ‘Christianize’ the dialogue, the fact remains that in Latin, at any rate, it was still predominantly associated with the secular teaching which Augustine was seeking to revise.3 Not only did the dialogue form look back chronologically and intellectually to the preChristian world of Cicero, Augustine’s principal model, but Cicero himself enshrined a generic retrospection, both with his claims for his interpretation of Greek philosophy and, more immediately, with his frequent choice of participants such as Scipio or Cato—august exemplars, but deceased.4 Seen in this light, Augustine’s choice of young, living interlocutors is just as significant as the more frequently remarked inclusion of his mother.5 It brings to the fore a 2 I do not wish to rehash here the long debate about the historicity of the dialogues. Joanne McWilliam provides a welcome corrective to a rather sentimental interpretative tradition which sees Augustine as (a) transparent reporter or (b) victim of his genre, with her reading of each of the characters as of primarily symbolic significance (‘The Cassiciacum Autobiography’, StPatr 18/4 (1990), 14–43); she gives references for the ‘historicity’ debate, p. 16 nn. 5 and 6. 3 For surveys of the dialogue in the Christian tradition, see B. R. Voss, Der Dialog in der frühchristlichen Literatur, Studia et Testimonia Antiqua 9 (Munich, 1970); M. Hoffmann, Der Dialog bei den christlichen Schriftstellern der ersten vier Jahrhunderte (Berlin, 1966). 4 For a recent insistence on the importance of Cicero for these dialogues, see M. P. Foley, ‘Cicero, Augustine, and the Philosophical Roots of the Cassiciacum Dialogues’, REAug 45 (1999), 51–77; Seth Lerer is interesting on the topic in ch. 1 of Boethius and the Dialogue: Literary Method in ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ (Princeton, 1985). The testimonia for Augustine’s reading of Cicero are systematically studied in M. Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron, 2 vols. (Paris, 1958). 5 See, amid a plethora of references, E. Lamirande, ‘Quand Monique, la mère d’Augustin, prend la parole’, in A. Zumkeller (ed.), Signum Pietatis: Festgabe für Cornelius Petrus Mayer OSA (Würzburg, 1989), 3–19; R. Holte, ‘Monica, “the Philosopher”’ , Augustinus 39 (1994), 293–316, esp. 306–8.

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sense of philosophy in the making, as a living tradition subject to revision and reconsideration, rather than as something primarily concerned with translation and reinterpretation. The Cassiciacum dialogues enact a participatory, and forward-looking, pedagogical practice: this is essential to our main theme here. Equally important, the genre is one which emphasizes constantly, in conventions and content, the tension between speaking and writing. Whatever one’s position in the historicity debate, it must be conceded that Augustine is at immense pains to make it appear that the Cassiciacum dialogues actually took place. Participants wander in and out. Their reactions and facial expressions are remarked upon. They play for time, they repeat themselves, they express reluctance to participate, they even (famously) burst into song. Locations are commented on; so are breaks for meals. Above all, Augustine dwells on the recording presence of the pen (almost invariably the pen personified, not the ‘notarius’ (secretary) himself).6 We might expect this from the programmatic statement at the beginning of the Soliloquia: Ratio: Right, suppose you’ve discovered something: to what will you entrust it, so that you can move on to other things? Augustinus: To memory, I suppose. Ratio: And is memory so powerful that she can preserve everything satisfactorily, once you’ve thought it through? Augustinus: It’s difficult—or rather, impossible. Ratio: Well then, there must be writing.7 6 See, e.g., C. Acad. 1. 1. 4: ‘Adhibito itaque notario, ne aurae laborem nostrum discerperent, nihil perire permisi’ (‘Having employed a secretary, lest the breezes disperse our hard work, I allowed nothing to be lost’); compare Ord. 1. 2. 5: ‘disserebamus inter nos, quaecumque videbantur utilia adhibito sane stilo, quo cuncta exciperentur, quod videbam conducere valetudini meae’ (‘we discussed amongst ourselves whatever seemed to the purpose; obviously, a pen was employed to catch everything— I took care to hire it for my health’). The mention of the notarius in the first passage is exceptional. 7 Sol. 1. 1. 1: ‘Ratio: Ecce, fac te invenisse aliquid; cui conmendabis, ut pergas ad alia? Augustinus: Memoriae scilicet. R: Tantane illa est, ut excogitata omnia bene servet? A: Difficile est, immo non potest. R: Ergo scribendum est.’

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‘Ergo scribendum est’, Reason concludes; not ‘I, you, or we have to write’, but: ‘there must be writing’.8 This, then, is why the (apparently impersonal) writing down of the Cassiciacum dialogues is called for: to circumvent the pitiful inadequacies of memory. But, as we shall see, this utterly conventional causa scribendi is gradually interrogated and undermined as the dialogues proceed, and the liminal space between the spoken and the written word in the dialogue form contributes to the interrogation. The relationship between memory and writing proves to be crucial to Augustine’s philosophical—or should one say theological?9— revisionism. So, we have two types of liminality already in play: the biographically liminal state in which Augustine found himself at Cassiciacum and the liminality between writing and speech in the genre through which he chose to make it public. But both are merely contexts—if crucial ones—for Augustine’s repeated exploration of liminal concepts in the dialogues. Time and again, he sets up old dichotomies, only to challenge them by interrogating the space between them: it is in this shifting intermediary space that he uses concepts which begin to displace, or at least call into question, a simple binary schematic. As we shall see, this was to prove essential to his moving away from the dualisms passed down to him by both his Manichaean and his Neoplatonic intellectual inheritance. A passage from the second book of De Ordine illustrates especially richly Augustine’s internalization of these various liminalities, and I propose examining it closely. Aptly enough, it concerns the nature and status of memory, ‘memoria’—and thus the heart of the purported reason for writing down the dialogues in the first place. As the passage 8 One would normally expect an agent, expressed with a dative (pro)noun, as part of a construction like this: my slightly strained translation attempts to capture the significance of that omission. 9 Note the observation of John Rist: ‘to call Augustine a philosopher rather than a theologian is not merely to admit a distinction which he would not have accepted; it is to propose a distinction which he did not know’: Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge, 1994), 5. My argument below should demonstrate my whole-hearted agreement with this view.

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opens, Licentius is suggesting to Augustine a view of the location and qualities of ‘memoria’: ‘I think that memory lives in this subordinate part of the mind (anima). The wise mind (anima) uses it as if it were a slave, giving orders to it and imposing the confines of the law on it once it’s tame and submissive, so that while [the memory-slave] is using those senses for the things which are no longer necessary to the wise mind, only to itself, it should not dare to raise itself up or lord it over its master, nor to use the things which relate to it indiscriminately and extravagantly. It is transient things which have the power to relate to that extremely inferior part. What is memory needed for, if not for transient and—as it were—fugitive things? After all, that wise man embraces and revels in God, who is everlasting: one doesn’t hope that he exists, or fear that he doesn’t; rather, he is constantly present, by the very fact that makes him truly exist. Immovable and self-contained, he oversees the slave’s purse, as it were, such that the memory, like a frugal and punctilious servant, might use it well and keep it carefully.’ While I was pondering this opinion admiringly, I remembered that on another occasion, in his hearing, I had said a short version of that very thing. I laughed at him and said, ‘Thank that slave of yours, Licentius: if he hadn’t served you up something from his private purse, you might not have had anything to supply. If memory relates to that part which has admitted that it is ruled by a good mind as if it were a serving-wench, it is she who has just helped you—mark my words—to say this. Now, before I go back to the original schedule, don’t you think that a wise man needs memory at least for this sort of thing—that is, for honourable and necessary sorts of teaching?’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘does he need memory, when he actually keeps everything of his own present at hand? Especially in the case of the sense which relates to what is before our eyes, we don’t call memory to our aid. So since a wise man has everything in front of the inner eyes of his understanding, in other words, he contemplates God himself—with whom is everything which the understanding sees and possesses—in utter immobility: why, I repeat, does he need memory? . . .’ I said, ‘Can that wise man desert his own? When he’s driving this body, in which he keeps that servant [memory] tied down by his law, does he by some arrangement abandon the duty of bestowing favours on whoever he can, and especially that duty which is most vociferously demanded of him, of teaching wisdom itself? When he does this, he often prepares something to expound and investigate from a pre-arranged plan, which is necessarily lost

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if he doesn’t commit it to memory. So, either you’ll deny that benevolent duties are characteristic of a wise man, or you’ll acknowledge that some things belonging to the wise man are kept in his memory. Or does he perhaps entrust some necessary part of his own possessions to himself, for that servant [memory] to keep safe, not on his own account, indeed, but on that of his associates, such that [the memory-slave], as a sensible person and a product of his master’s excellent teaching, would certainly not hang on to it if [his master] hadn’t ordered [the memory] to keep it in order to lead the foolish to wisdom?’ He said, ‘I don’t think anything at all is entrusted to it [memory] by the wise man, if he really is constantly focused upon God, whether silent or speaking with others; but that well-trained slave carefully preserves what he may at intervals suggest to his master when he’s disputing and perform as his own welcome duty for that most just man, beneath whose power he realizes that he lives, and he [the memory-slave] does this not, as it were, by the use of ratio, but under the organization of that highest law and order.’ ‘I make no objection at present to your reasoning,’ I said, ‘so that we may pursue further what we’ve undertaken.’10 10 Ord. 2. 2. 6–7: ‘[Inquit Licentius:] In qua parte [animae] subiecta etiam ipsam memoriam puto habitare. Vtitur ergo hac sapiens quasi servo, ut haec ei iubeat easque iam domito atque substrato metas legis inponat, ut dum istis sensibus utitur propter illa, quae iam non sapienti sed sibi sunt necessaria, non se audeat extollere nec superbire domino nec his ipsis, quae ad se pertinent, passim atque immoderate uti. Ad illam enim vilissimam partem possunt ea pertinere, quae praetereunt. Quibus autem est memoria necessaria nisi praetereuntibus et quasi fugientibus rebus? Ille igitur sapiens amplectitur deum eoque perfruitur, qui semper manet nec expectatur, ut sit, nec metuitur, ne desit, sed eo ipso, quo vere est, semper est praesens. Curat autem immobilis et in se manens servi sui quodam modo peculium, ut eo tamquam frugi et diligens famulus bene utatur parceque custodiat. [7.] Quam sententiam eius cum admiratione considerans recordatus sum id ipsum aliquando me breviter illo audiente dixisse. Tum arridens: Gratias age, inquam, Licenti, huic servo tuo, qui tibi nisi aliquid de peculio suo ministraret, nunc fortasse quod promeres non haberes. Nam si ad eam partem memoria pertinet, quae se velut famulam bonae menti regendam concedit, ipsa nunc adiutus es, mihi crede, ut hoc diceres. Ergo antequam ad illum ordinem redeam, nonne tibi videtur vel propter talia, id est propter honestas ac necessarias disciplinas, memoria opus esse sapienti?—Quid, inquit, memoria opus est, cum omnes suas res praesentes habeat ac teneat? Non enim vel in ipso sensu ad id, quod ante oculos nostros est, in auxilium vocamus memoriam. Sapienti igitur ante illos

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Licentius begins by associating ‘memoria’ uncomplicatedly with the transient. We use it to remember fluctuating things; and it is itself unreliable, as we learnt in the passage at the beginning of the Soliloquia cited above. It belongs in a part of the ‘anima’, but a ‘vilissima pars’, an ‘extremely inferior part’—the part, precisely, that deals with the transient. Only permanent and immobile things, however, can be with God: only the higher part of the soul, not tainted by sense perception, can be called wise. This is an utterly conventional view of the role and place of ‘memoria’, which goes back at least to Plotinus (‘memory is of things that have happened and passed away’11). Behind Licentius’ interjections throughout this passage lies a figure very like Plotinus’ upward-looking, solitary sage: ‘What . . . if one does not depart at all from one’s contemplation of [the eternal] but stays in its company, wondering at its nature, and able to do so by a natural power (physis) that never fails? interiores intellectus oculos habenti omnia, id est deum ipsum fixe immobiliterque intuenti, cum quo sunt omnia, quae intellectus videt ac possidet, quid opus est quaeso memoria? . . . [Inquam:] . . . numquidnam sapiens iste suos potest deserere aut ullo pacto, cum hoc corpus agit, in quo istum famulum sua lege devinctum tenet, relinquit officium beneficia tribuendi quibus potest et maxime, quod ab eo vehementissime flagitatur, sapientiam ipsam docendi? Quod cum facit, ut congrue doceat minusque ineptus sit, praeparat saepe aliquid, quod ex dispositione eloquatur ac disputet, quod nisi memoriae commendaverit, pereat necesse est. Ergo aut officia benevolentiae negabis esse sapientis aut confiteberis res aliquas sapientis memoria custodiri. An fortasse aliquid suarum rerum non propter se quidem sed propter suos, sibi tamen necessarium commendat servandum illi famulo, ut ille tamquam sobrius et ex optima domini disciplina non quidem custodiat, nisi quod propter stultos ad sapientiam perducendos sed quod ei tamen ille custodiendum imperarit?—Nec omnino huic, inquit, commendari quicquam arbitror a sapiente, si quidem ille deo semper infixus est sive tacitus sive cum hominibus loquens; sed ille servus iam bene institutus diligenter servat, quod interdum disputanti domino suggerat et ei tamquam iustissimo gratum faciat officium suum, sub cuius se videt potestate vivere, et hoc facit non quasi ratiocinando sed summa illa lege summoque ordine praescribente.—Nihil, inquam, nunc resisto rationibus tuis, ut quod suscepimus potius peragatur.’ 11 Enneads 4. 4. 6. Klaus Winkler has traced closely the relationship between Plotinus’ thought and Augustine’s in this precise passage of Ord.: see ‘La Théorie augustinienne de la mémoire à son point de départ’, in Augustinus Magister, 3 vols. (Paris, 1955), i. 511–19.

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Surely one would be . . . oneself on the move towards eternity and never falling away from it at all, that one might be like it and eternal, contemplating eternity and the eternal by the eternal in oneself.’12 To be wise is to associate oneself with the eternal and immutable; memory must be base, for it deals with ephemera. However, Augustine manages quietly to problematize this straightforward vision—this polarization of the eternal and the mutable—by a sequence of discursive moves. The first occurs in the speech of Licentius himself, when the referent of the adjective ‘sapiens’ (‘wise’) slips back to being the (whole) wise man, not just the part of the ‘anima’ of which wisdom can be predicated (that association has been made explicit in the sentence before this extract begins). ‘After all,’ says Licentius, ‘that wise man’— ‘ ille’, not ‘illa’, ‘sapiens’— ‘ embraces and revels in God, who is everlasting.’ What are the implications of this? To parody Augustine’s own ‘ars disputandi’, is the wise man then to be identified only with the wise part of his ‘anima’? Or does he in some way contain the whole ‘anima’—the parts which deal with impermanence as well as the immobile parts? And in that case, how can he still be called wise? Plotinus dismisses this potential problem in his treatise on blessedness (Peri Eudaimonias), insisting that the true sage is completely detached from the inferior parts of his soul: only the parts which pertain to blessedness are truly his.13 But Augustine, as we shall see, is not satisfied with this separation. He sees very clearly that what sounds plausible on the metaphysical level—that the spheres of attention of the mind 12 Enn. 3. 7. 5; translation of A. H. Armstrong. The exact nature and degree of Augustine’s knowledge of Plotinus—or, for that matter, Porphyry—is not a question which I wish to address here: it is clear to me that he knew, by some route, the general tenets which I am discussing, and had engaged with them deeply. The interested reader may note the aporetic comments of Pierre Hadot in Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris, 1971), 206–10; for the conviction that Augustine had read the Enneads, see, e.g., A. Solignac, ‘Réminiscences plotiniennes et porphyriennes dans le début du de ordine de saint Augustin’, Archives de Philosophie 20 (1957), 446–65. 13 Enn. 1. 4. 4; see Winkler, ‘La Théorie augustinienne de la mémoire’, 513–14.

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should be divided—begins to unravel when confronted with embodiment. The next move in this potential unravelling is also placed in Licentius’ mouth, as he develops the image of the wise man using his memory like a slave: ‘Immovable and selfcontained, he oversees the slave’s purse, as it were, such that the memory, like a frugal and punctilious servant, might use it well and keep it carefully.’ ‘Métaphore étrange et curieuse’, observes Winkler darkly.14 ‘Peculium’, the term translated as ‘purse’, refers expressly to money or property disbursed by the head of a household (here ‘dominus’) to one of his children or slaves, to use as their own; but the privilege of controlling that property may be revoked by the ‘dominus’ at any time. The image seems apt when Licentius introduces it, not least because it formalizes his separation of the spheres of attention: the wise man remains fixed on the immutable; his slave, memory, dispenses individual memories from his own ‘peculium’, which the wise man need not have anything to do with. But in fact, this metaphor will fatally complicate Licentius’ simplistic vision. Who, after all, was responsible for establishing the ‘peculium’ in the first place? Augustine’s gentle mockery of Licentius—advising him to thank his memory-slave for helping him out—punctuates the exchange here. It serves to highlight Augustine’s own shift in attitude: from admiration to the realization that his pupil is parroting his own former teaching. His realization is articulated not just through his laughter but through a (temporary) change of the vocabulary in which the exchange is couched: where Licentius has consistently been using ‘servus’, ‘sapiens’, and ‘anima’, Augustine uses ‘famula’ (‘serving-wench’), ‘bona’, and ‘mens’. Augustine thus, within the internal logic of the dialogue, stages a debate in which he is effectively arguing with himself and his ‘Plotinian’ opinions—given fictive utterance by Licentius. It is not surprising that the ensuing debate forms the site of a crucial theoretical revision. The Augustine within the dialogue counters Licentius’ polarities with an extraordinarily significant move: the claim that the wise man needs memory ‘for honourable and 14

Winkler, ‘La Théorie augustinienne de la mémoire’, 512.

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necessary sorts of teaching’ (‘propter honestas ac necessarias disciplinas’). The association of memory and teaching had already been placed in Alypius’ mouth in Contra Academicos: ‘If I don’t forget to mention anything, I shall rejoice in my memory as well as your teaching (doctrina).’15 But here Augustine engages far more closely with the combination, and explores its implications, not for the pupil’s but for the teacher’s memory. The abstract division of the ‘anima’ with which Licentius opened has been replaced by the figure of an actual wise man who, we expect, will act in accordance with the dictates of wisdom—and it will be part of being wise to attempt to communicate his wisdom to others. It is precisely, then, the concept of ‘disciplina’ which prises open the liminal space in Licentius’ dichotomous construction, and shows how unrealistic that construction is. If the wise man has to teach, and needs memory to do so, how can we neatly divide off memory as dealing only with the transient? What does Augustine understand by ‘disciplina’ here? Pacioni, who provides a running commentary on this passage, paraphrases, ‘memory is indispensable to the wise man for learning the liberal disciplines’;16 but this surely attests to the retroactive pressure exerted by the renowned discussion of the ‘liberal disciplines’ towards the end of the second book of De Ordine (as well as an over-rigid interpretation of ‘disciplina’ as concerned only with learning). There is no suggestion here that ‘disciplina’ might contain the systematic agenda which is to be set out later: the ‘discipline(s)’ are not necessarily ‘liberal’. Augustine had supplied a simple explanation of ‘disciplina’ in the Soliloquia: ‘ “discipline” gets its name from [the process of] learning’ (‘disciplina . . . a discendo dicta est’),17 and goes on to say that ‘a discipline cannot be a discipline unless it teaches true 15 C. Acad. 2. 6. 14: ‘Si enim nihil me fugerit, gratabor cum doctrinae tuae tum etiam memoriae meae.’ 16 ‘che la memoria sia indispensabile al sapiente per apprendere le discipline liberali’: V. Pacioni, L’Unità teoretica del ‘de ordine’ di S. Agostino (Rome, 1996), 182. 17 Sol. 2. 11. 20; an identical definition in the sermon dating from c.400, De Disciplina Christiana 1 (PL 40.669–78), stemming from Varro (see Pollmann’s essay in this volume).

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18

things’ (‘ . . . nisi vera doceat’). We should note that there is, in Latin, a fundamental ambiguity in the term ‘disciplina’ (which is reflected in the English ‘discipline’, but not in the verbs ‘to teach’ or ‘to learn’19). It may denote both learning (as a fait accompli), and, by extension, the things learnt; but it may also emphasize the process by which things are learnt, and hence mean both ‘teaching’ (with the focus on the person generating the process of learning) and ‘discipline’ (with the focus on the recipient of learning, and the techniques of apprehension which she or he uses).20 Here, it is precisely the reciprocity of teaching and learning—along with the importance of its subject-matter being ‘true’—that is being captured. The point is not that the wise man should engage with the system of liberal disciplines, but that he should teach at all. This is where Augustine parts company decisively with Neoplatonic thought.21 The wise man, instead of occupying a solipsistic contemplative space, is suddenly crucially defined by his relationship with his pupils, with whom he learns through teaching. ‘Disciplina’ precisely negotiates the divide between the metaphysical and engagement with the corporeal world.22 Now, surely, we 18 ‘conlegimus disciplinam, nisi vera doceat, disciplinam esse non posse’: Sol. 2. 11. 20. 19 Other than in the archaism, now a vulgarism, ‘I’ll learn him’, meaning ‘I’ll teach him a lesson’. 20 Jean Leclercq’s entry under ‘disciplina’ in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité provides an excellent introduction to the classical background and Christian development of the term. There are two extended studies of the term in the early writings of the Church: O. Mauch, Der lateinische Begriff ‘disciplina’: Eine Wortuntersuchung (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1941); and W. Dürig, ‘Disciplina: Eine Studie zum Bedeutungsumfang des Wortes in der Sprache der Liturgie und der Väter’, Sacris Erudiri 4 (1952), 245–79. Each is generally useful, but neither deals explicitly with this passage of De Ordine. 21 See Winkler, ‘La Théorie augustinienne de la mémoire’, 517: ‘Plotin, dans sa vie personnelle, prenait au sérieux sa tâche comme maître et ses devoirs envers ceux qui avaient été recommandés à ses soins, mais dans son système le rôle des vertus sociales est loin d’être important.’ 22 Henri-Irénée Marrou makes a very similar observation of a slightly later passage in De Ordine: ‘Le passage du sens païen au sens chrétien [du mot disciplina] est bien marqué dans un texte de saint Augustin [Ord. 2. 8. 25] qui date d’une période où sa pensée était encore tout imprégnée d’une atmosphère philosophique: disciplina, c’est la sagesse envisagée non

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begin to see why Augustine has chosen for his dialogues a group of ‘young, living interlocutors’, and why he has chosen to launch his Christian career in dialogue form at all: it is by enacting the wise man’s commitment to ‘disciplina’ that he will begin publicly to move beyond Neoplatonism. Moreover, these ‘disciplinae’ are ‘honourable and necessary’ (‘honestas ac necessarias’). The adjectives are not glossed explicitly here; but the ‘honourable’ must refer both to the virtue of the wise man and to the truth (as we learnt from the Soliloquia) of what he teaches. The ‘necessary’ is rather more complicated. The word ‘necessarius’ occurs four times in this short extract, along with one instance of ‘necesse’. Each side uses it to enforce agreement by obviating debate about its associated noun or concept—by making the implicit claim that the link is natural.23 Licentius has used the word twice already, once of the (indeterminate) things which are ‘necessary’ to the memory, but not to the wise part of the mind; once, explicitly, of the ‘transient and fugitive things’ for which memory is ‘necessary’. It therefore becomes an important part of the verbal strategy for suggesting that the division between the transient and the eternal is obvious and straightforward. Here, however, Augustine challenges that division by stating that teaching is, for the wise man, ‘necessary’. The shift from mind to man (‘illa sapiens’ to ‘ille sapiens’), which has already occurred in Licentius’ speech, is essential to this move (it would be hard to claim that teaching was necessary to the wise mind alone). The adjective ‘necessarius’ is tossed in at the end of Augustine’s brief speech, with no explicit justification; but it is on this that the complication of ‘memoria’ hinges, and hence the whole challenge to the dissociation of the embodied from the divine.

seulement sous son aspect théorique, mais encore dans ses conséquences pratiques; elle implique une règle de vie’: Bulletin du Cange 9 (1934), 18; my emphasis. 23 Compare Gillian Beer’s observations on ‘naturally’: ‘Argument has already been prejudged in that word. Communality is being lined up behind the speaker’: ‘Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past’, in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke, 1997), 83.

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Licentius counters by reasserting his original position: he continues to try to dissociate ‘memoria’ from the immutable—to divorce it firmly from its liminal status and put it back in the world of fugitive things, ‘res fugientes’. Why does the wise man need memory, he asks, when he keeps ‘all his own things present to him’ (‘omnes suas res praesentes’)? Or should we translate, ‘his entire reality’—the divine things which he contemplates and which are the only things that count? Either way, Augustine calls into question the idea that this should, or could, be the wise man’s only concern—because of his obligation to teach, to relate to his fellow human beings. In the section that I have omitted, Licentius goes on to protest at some length that he himself is not wise—apparently to defy Augustine’s joking intervention and to imply that his own use of his memory’s ‘peculium’ cannot be included as an argument against him.24 But Augustine—here as in the Cassiciacum dialogues as a whole—is more concerned to include than to demarcate: he responds briskly, ‘I’m not wise either’ (‘nec me’); but returns to his insistence on the importance of ‘disciplina’. At this point, Augustine inserts a further problematizing move when he observes that the wise man’s preparations for disputation ‘are necessarily lost unless he commits them to memory’.25 Once again, ‘necesse’ signals a remarkable leap in the argument. Hitherto in the dialogues, ‘memoria’ has been related to the perceived problem of impermanence, which is ‘solved’ by writing: so with the exchange in the Soliloquia, ‘ergo scribendum est’. But here, the role which ‘memoria’ plays is precisely the opposite: it guarantees that the elements of disputation—or, for that matter, of teaching more generally—will not be lost; and hence it participates in the permanence of the divine. Perhaps this picks up Augustine’s desire, expressed earlier in De Ordine, that the boys should move ‘praeter codices’ (‘beyond books’), and

24 This is the ingenious interpretation of Winkler, ‘La Théorie augustinienne de la mémoire’. 25 ‘quod nisi memoriae commendaverit, pereat necesse est’. Note the indicative mood: there is no question of claiming (with the subjunctive) that the preparations might be lost; they will, necessarily, be so.

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‘apud sese habitare’ (‘remain self-contained’)—which is followed in the first instance by Licentius’ extravagant conversion experience, but for which we may see another, more convincing, possibility here.27 We also see, in the reinstatement of ‘memoria’, Augustine’s continued tacit insistence on the importance of situating his philosophy in embodied human experience: in actual people thinking and teaching. It is just about possible to remove the personal aspect from the statement of ‘Ratio’ in the Soliloquia, ‘ergo scribendum est’, for which we have already suggested the translation ‘there must be writing’. Writing may be displaced on to the impersonal agency of ‘the pen’, or an appeal to ‘the record’—as Augustine does repeatedly in the Cassiciacum dialogues. But how could one eliminate the personal from the parallel statement, ‘ergo reminiscendum est’? What meaning can we attach to ‘there must be remembering’, without a mind, or a person, to do it? There can be no side-stepping of personal involvement— unless we somehow separate the mind from the body, things eternal from things transient; the possibility of which is precisely the locus of the dispute between Augustine and Licentius here. Now, as if to underline that move, we revert to the vexed question of who has established, and who controls, the ‘peculium’ of Licentius’ simile. ‘Does [the wise man] perhaps entrust some necessary part of his own possessions to himself, for that servant [memory] to keep safe, 26 On ‘secum’ see J. Doignon, ‘Problèmes textuels et modèles littéraires dans le livre I du De Ordine de saint Augustin’, REAug 24 (1978), 71–86. 27 Could it be correct to read the ‘extravagant conversion experience’ as Licentius—as it were—jumping the gun and rushing into a simplistic solution? Various aspects of the account, not least its position in the logic of the dialogue, lend themselves to this interpretation; and Augustine has repeatedly portrayed himself doing the same thing in Sol., leaping to an apparently obvious conclusion and considering the matter closed—only to have the inquiry opened up for him once again in the next minute. If the Licentius of the dialogues bears any relation at all to the historical Licentius, the conversion clearly didn’t ‘take’: a full decade later, Augustine is writing to Paulinus of Nola to request his help with the incorrigibly pagan Licentius (Augustine, Ep. 27; the result is Paulinus, Ep. 8, largely a poem for Licentius).

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not on his own account, indeed, but on that of his associates, such that [the memory-slave], as a sensible person and a product of his master’s excellent teaching, would certainly not hang on to it if [his master] hadn’t ordered [the memory] to keep it in order to lead the foolish to wisdom?’28

Again, the adjective ‘necessarius’ is crucial: the contents of the ‘peculium’ are indeed necessary to the wise man— ‘ non propter se . . . sed propter suos’ (‘not on his own account but on that of his associates’): here is the tell-tale responsibility of the wise man to those around him which both Plotinus and Licentius wish to elide. The memory-slave is fully a part of the wise man, his master: the wise man controls, uses, and engages with his ‘memoria’. How is the relationship between the two—master and slave, metaphysical and corporeal, eternal and transient—configured? As ‘ex optima domini disciplina’: as the product, or by the example, of the excellent teaching of the master. It is ‘disciplina’, once again, which both complicates and bridges the liminal space between dichotomies.29 This is not quite the end of the discussion of ‘memoria’. Licentius tries one last time to salvage his simile and his separation of the divine from the corporeal. He tries once more to give an account of the actions of the memory-slave which separates the slave’s concerns utterly from those of the wise man. The wise man is ‘deo semper infixus’ (‘always focused on God’), whatever else he is (or seems to be) doing; his slave is responsible, on his own initiative, for administering the ‘peculium’, ‘not, as it were, by the use of ratio, but under the organization of that highest law and order’. Augustine responds with a self-referential shift, which alerts us to the (already striking) use of the verb ‘ratiocinando’ (‘by the use of ratio’): ‘I make no objection at present to your reasoning (rationibus tuis).’ 28 Most of the subjects in this passage are expressed simply with pronouns, which I have expanded with the words in square brackets. Though the Latin is a little convoluted, the referents of the individual pronouns are not, I think, ambiguous. 29 This also, we may note, lays the groundwork for a paradigm in which Christ’s teaching is instrumental in negotiating the divide between human and divine—and human teaching, as part of the imitatio Christi, likewise; but Augustine does not make this move here.

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Several things are going on in this invocation of ‘ratio’. Contrary to what one might expect from her relatively unproblematic appearance as interlocutor in the Soliloquia, ‘ratio’ is repeatedly under explicit or implicit interrogation in these dialogues: ‘ratio’ forms, indeed—perhaps surprisingly—another of Augustine’s ‘liminal’ concepts, though we shall not explore its role in detail here. Understandably, given its lengthy philosophical lineage, Augustine is very attached to the notion that humankind is distinguished from the beasts—and hence, more godlike—by its use of ‘ratio’, the faculty of reason. Later in De Ordine, he seems to be drawing directly on Cicero when he writes: ‘by wise men in the old days, man was defined in this manner: man is a rational, mortal animal.’30 In the lines here, however, we see how Licentius’ personification of ‘memoria’ as a slave has taken on a rather suspect life of its own, for he has to backtrack suddenly: the memory-slave gives prompts to the wise man (as if the metaphorical ‘servus’ were a literal ‘animal rationale’!)—but not, Licentius hastily adds, using reason (‘ratiocinando’—like a real person), but simply as part of the way in which things are ordered. Augustine seems to perceive—surely rightly—that both this invocation of ‘ratio’ and its summary dismissal are extremely problematic. ‘Ratio’ is traditionally what makes people more divine: why then might Licentius associate it with ‘memoria’, which (he has insisted) deals with the transient and corporeal? But what, in that case, of the implication that the divine order of things, ‘summa illa lege summoque ordine’, does not somehow include the use of reason? In his response, Augustine reminds Licentius lightly of his own power to reason, and defers further discussion. He does not press home his advantage explicitly; but the fact is that the new Augustine, the Augustine moving towards baptism and an incarnational theology, has roundly defeated the old Augustine in the person of Licentius. Licentius has been caught out by his own metaphor, and has ended by 30 Ord. 2. 11. 31: ‘ipse homo a ueteribus sapientibus ita definitus est: homo est animal rationale mortale.’ Compare Cicero, Academica 2. 7. 21: ‘si homo est, animal est mortale, rationis particeps’ (‘if he is a man, he is a mortal animal, partaking of reason’).

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implying that the divine is indeed inseparable from the embodied, the permanent from the transient, and wisdom from despised ‘memoria’ and actual human affairs. Augustine’s message of integration is crucial to his incipient understanding of the significance of Christ’s incarnation; he moves towards that message through his appreciation of the liminal space between dichotomies—an appreciation perhaps enhanced by his own biographically liminal situation, and enacted in his choice of genre in which to communicate his message. The idea that the divine and the human should—could—have nothing to do with each other, that they express mutually exclusive concepts with no space for further possibilities, was then, and remains, a tempting and in many ways comfortable option. However, if my reading of this passage of De Ordine is correct, Augustine was already, in 386, seeing that so rigid a separation of spheres ought to be impossible within Christianity, and was tentatively exploring techniques for mediating between or reframing altogether the concepts at stake. His insistence here on the importance of ‘disciplina’, of the need to communicate godlike wisdom to others, and on the reciprocities involved, is an extraordinarily significant move towards that message of integration.31 31 These ideas are developed more fully in my book, The Irrational Augustine (Oxford, forthcoming). My thinking in general on the integration of the divine with embodied experience owes most to the work of Grace Jantzen, especially Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester, 1998).

pa r t i i Disciplinarum libri: The Canon in Question

4 Augustine’s Disciplines: Silent diutius Musae Varronis? D a nuta R. S h a n z e r 1. i n t r o d u c t i o n A canon of seven liberal arts was already dominant by the time of Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville.1 Martianus Capella also consciously aimed for and achieved a heptad by deliberately omitting medicine and architecture. When and how did this canon of seven emerge? Its formation has often been ascribed to Martianus, who himself was working with a canon of nine, attributed to Varro, that included medicine and architecture in addition to the usual seven. Such were the conclusions of Ritschl’s classic treatment, in which he outlined the problem of the origin of the heptad of liberal arts and attempted to reconstruct the contents of the various ‘disciplinarum libri’, making use of many late antique sources.2 But the historical problem of the number and identity of the liberal arts pre-dates Martianus and Cassiodorus in the late fifth to sixth centuries. Augustine My gratitude to Charles Brittain and to Peter Lebrecht Schmidt for their suggestions and help. I would like to dedicate this chapter to my beloved friend and mentor and favourite Varronian, the late Harry Jocelyn, who saw it in its infantia (long ago—silent diutius!) and made it the object of his invariably incisive criticism. 1 In Book 2 of his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum Cassiodorus works with what would become the usual unproblematized medieval cycle of seven. See now J. W. Halporn and M. Vessey, Cassiodorus: ‘Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning’, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 2004), 64 f. [to be corrected in light of the present essay— Eds.]. Isidore, Origines 1. 2: ‘Disciplinae liberalium artium septem sunt . . .’ (‘The disciplines that constitute the liberal arts are seven . . .’). 2 F. Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, in his Opuscula Philologica, iii (Leipzig, 1877), 352–402, at 352–4.

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proves a crucial witness, whose own sources and contribution to the historiography of the ‘artes’ must be disentangled if we are ever to write the cultural history of the later Roman Empire and the transition to the early Middle Ages. The present essay seeks at once to clarify Augustine’s intellectual biography through source criticism and to elucidate the literary-intellectual choices confronting later Roman and early medieval encyclopaedists. This is the story of the engagement—in all senses of the word—of a great Christian thinker, Augustine, with a great pagan scholar, educator, and man of letters, Marcus Terentius Varro. Their point of intersection is the nature and teaching of the ‘disciplinae’ or liberal arts. The contested ground is not merely the canon and substance of the ‘disciplinae’, but also the literary form in which they were presented by the authors of textbooks. It is a tale of two lost works, Varro’s and Augustine’s Disciplinarum Libri, a tale of repression and suppression that ends in a surprising historical vindication of the pagan scholar. While other aspects of Augustine’s life and thought may be heavily documented, his ‘disciplinae’, unfortunately, are not. Innumerable questions surround them. Was he working from or with a canon? If so, what canon was it? We do not know for certain how many or what his ‘disciplinae’ were,3 or why astronomy was omitted from the list given in the Retractationes, although it had been included in De Ordine and De Quantitate Animae.4 The omission of any explicit allusion to arithmetic in De Ordine has likewise exercised scholars.5 Augustine’s sources remain largely obscure. Then there are the questions of intellectual biography raised by his attempt to write books on the disciplines in Milan in 387, the 3 The lack of a definite article in Latin causes difficulties, e.g., in the interpretation of ‘de aliis vero quinque’ in Retr. 1. 5. 6 below. 4 H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1949), 248–50. 5 Ibid. 192 n. 5 suggests that Augustine as a philosopher may have felt compelled to include philosophy and to telescope the arts of the quadrivium into three for a total of seven. I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris, 1984), 122, thinks that arithmetic finds an implicit place at the end of the sequence of mathematical disciplines, even though it is not mentioned here but instead at Ord. 2. 18. 47.

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omission of this project from the narrative of the Confessions,6 and its ultimate dismissal in the Retractationes in 426/7. There he writes: Per idem tempus quo Mediolani fui baptismum percepturus, etiam disciplinarum libros conatus sum scribere, interrogans eos qui mecum erant, atque ab huiusmodi studiis non abhorrebant; per corporalia cupiens ad incorporalia quibusdam quasi passibus certis vel pervenire vel ducere. Sed earum solum de grammatica librum absolvere potui, quem postea de armario nostro perdidi: et de musica sex volumina; quantum attinet ad eam partem quae rythmus vocatur. Sed eosdem sex libros iam baptizatus, iamque ex Italia regressus in Africam scripsi; inchoaveram quippe tantummodo istam apud Mediolanum disciplinam. De aliis vero quinque disciplinis illic similiter inchoatis; de dialectica, de rhetorica, de geometria, de arithmetica, de philosophia, sola principia remanserunt, quae tamen etiam ipsa perdidimus: sed haberi ab aliquibus existimo. (Retr. 1. 6) During the same time that I was at Milan intending to receive baptism, I also tried to write books about the disciplines, questioning those who were with me and who did not shudder at studies of this sort. I desired to arrive myself or to lead others through corporeal things to incorporeal things by certain definite steps, as it were. But of these disciplines, I was able to finish only the book about grammar, which I subsequently lost from my bookcase and six books about music, to the extent that it concerns the subject that is called rhythm. But I wrote these same six books when I had already been baptized and had already returned to Africa from Italy. I had only begun that discipline at Milan. But of five [or ‘the five’] other disciplines that I had similarly embarked upon there, namely dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, and philosophy, only the beginnings remain. Even these I also lost, but I believe that others have them.

Our primary evidence on this subject consists of the enumerations of the ‘disciplinae’ in De Ordine, De Quantitate Animae, and Retractationes, together with De Musica and 6 Conf. 9. 6. 14 would be the expected place. There is a dismissal of ‘omnes libri artium quas liberales vocant’ (‘all the books of the arts that they call “liberal”’ ) at Conf. 4. 17. 30 with a partial enumeration. It is interesting that music alone (which Augustine claimed only to have begun in Milan (Retr. 1. 6)) is alluded to indirectly in Conf. 9. 6. 14 and Conf. 10. 32. 49–50; in the latter two passages it is ‘saved’ as liturgical music.

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Table 4.1. Augustine’s canon of the liberal arts (period of projected ‘disciplinarum libri’) Ord. 2. 12. 36– 15. 43

Ord. 2. 4. 13– Quant. An. 5. 14 33. 72

Retr. 1. 6

grammar 2. 12. 36 dialetic 2. 13. 38 rhetoric 2. 13. 38 [missing]

grammatica dialectica rhetorica arithmetica

music 2. 14. 39

(grammar) disputationes oratio numerorum necessitates musica

geometry 2. 15. 42

geometria

astronomy 2. 15. 42 astrorum motus philosophia

(grammar) vis ratiocinandi eloquentia numerandi disciplina modulandi peritia dimetiendi subtilitates (astronomy/ astrology/ divination)

musica geometria [missing] philosophia

suggestive writings around it, such as Licentius’ hexameter poem to Augustine and the Letter to Memor of 408/9.7 Data for the earlier period, including the retrospective notice of the Retractationes, are summarized in Table 4.1 (after Marrou8). Already in the first, partial redaction of De Augustine, Ep. 101. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 189. I have taken the liberty of editing his analysis of Quant. An. 33. 72 (the third ‘gradus’). Its list is of the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ type, including more than the ‘liberal’ arts but omitting astronomy and possibly also grammar: ‘inventiones tot signorum in litteris, in verbis, in gestu, in cuiuscemodi sono’ (probably grammar); ‘vim ratiocinandi et excogitandi’ (dialectic, literally ‘the strength of reasoning and analysing’); ‘fluvios eloquentiae’ (rhetoric, ‘rivers of eloquence’); ‘carminum varietates’ (metrics, ‘different types of verse’); ‘modulandi peritiam’ (music, ‘skill in making melodies’); ‘dimetiendi subtilitatem’ (geometry, ‘subtlety in measuring’); ‘numerandi disciplinam’ (arithmetic, ‘the discipline of counting’); ‘praeteritorum ac futurorum ex praesentibus conjecturam’ (divination or possibly astrology, ‘conjecturing about the past and the future from present events’). O. Schissel von Fleschenberg, Marinos von Neapolis und die neuplatonischen Tugendgrade (Athens, 1928), 84–5, sees in the passage an originally Aristotelian tripartite division of the intellect, with the Tugendgrade starting at the fourth step. 7 8

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9

Doctrina Christiana most of the ‘disciplinae’ either carry health warnings or are said not to need teaching per se.10 But they were no doubt in trouble with Augustine well before that. Discussion must start with the second book of De Ordine and its sources. Since Ritschl’s time, and before then, Varro has been the prime putative source and the issue. After all, Augustine reproduced the title of Varro’s encyclopaedia, the Disciplinarum Libri, in his account of his own work on the disciplines in the Retractationes (above). Harald Hagendahl supported this view: ‘In all probability this work [Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri] was the basis of Augustine’s encyclopedia on the artes, although it cannot be demonstrated in detail owing to our defective knowledge of both.’11 Dyroff had interpreted matters slightly differently, but without much reducing Varro’s role. He derived De Ordine 2. 12. 35 ff. from a neo-Pythagorean source mediated by Varro: Augustine mentioned Varro twice and praised Pythagoras.12 Ritschl’s thesis, that Varro’s lost Disciplinarum Libri were the source both for Augustine’s cycle of the liberal arts and for later Latin encyclopaedists such as Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus was not seriously challenged until 1984, when Ilsetraut Hadot published her Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique. Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri and their survival were an issue again. One of the aims of Hadot’s book was to establish that the cycle of the seven liberal arts came into being, not during the fifth century a d in the Latin West, as had been supposed, by a subtraction of two ‘artes’ 9 Begun in 396, finished in 426. See Doct. Chr. 2. 29. 46 for medicine contrasted with ‘superstitio’; 2. 31. 49 for arithmetic; 2. 31. 48 ff. for dialectic; 3. 29. 40 for grammar; 4. 3. 5 for rhetoric. 10 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 136. 11 H. Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, 2 vols. (Göteborg, 1967), i. 267. Cf. ii. 590. 12 A. Dyroff, ‘Über Form und Begriffsgehalt der augustinischen Schrift De Ordine’, in M. Grabmann and J. Mausbach (eds.), Aurelius Augustinus: Festschrift der Görresgesellschaft zum 1500. Todestage des Heiligen Augustinus (Cologne, 1930), 15–62. Dyroff completely rejected a Neoplatonic source: ‘Vor vielem sicher ist, daß in De Ordine sich nicht die mindeste sichere Spur von Neuplatonismus vorfindet, obwohl genug Gelegenheit dazu war. . . . In der Trilogie von 386 knüpft er an Cicero und Varro an . . .’ (p. 47).

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from Varro’s canon of nine, but considerably earlier in Greek Neoplatonic literary circles, and that it was transmitted to the West through Augustine. She sought to undermine Varro’s importance as a source for the seven-plus-two, by demolishing the ‘thèse de Ritschl’.13 She argues (1) that Augustine did not use the Disciplinarum Libri, of whose shape and content we can in any case know little or nothing, and (2) that his descriptions of the ‘artes’ in De Ordine, because they owe much to Neoplatonism, must be derived from a source later than the mid-first century b c. Her programme has been characterized as a ‘generoso sforzo di esorcizzare l’ombra del grande erudito romano’, namely Varro.14 Before we enter into the detail of Hadot’s study, it may be helpful to outline the course that my own argument will take. We begin with a problem: the documentation of Augustine’s lost work on the liberal arts, the identification of its source(s), and the reasons behind his gradual disenchantment with the ‘disciplinae’. The traditional opinion, as we have seen, is that he worked from Varro, but this has been challenged by Hadot. The second, negative section of my essay involves detailed criticism of her position. Augustine, I shall argue, did indeed confront and use the Disciplinarum Libri. His picture of the ‘artes’ in De Ordine is Platonic (rather than necessarily Neoplatonic), and there is independent evidence to justify the ascription of such imagery to Varro. Unlike Hadot, I believe that we can know something of Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri, that a shadow outline of this work can be drawn through comparative reconstruction from later authors and the indirect tradition. In the third, more positive section of my essay I bring previously unappreciated fifth-century evidence to bear on the problem of its literary form. Finally, in a fourth section, I offer a revised narrative of Augustine’s engagement with the ‘disciplinae’ and of Varro’s role in the formation of the medieval canon. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 156 ff. U. Pizzani, ‘L’Enciclopedia agostiniana e i suoi problemi’, in Atti del Congresso internazionale su S. Agostino nel XVI centenario della conversione, Roma 15–20 settembre 1986, Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’ 24 (Rome, 1987), 331–61, at 337. 13 14

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We shall be able to confirm that the manifestly pagan form of the Disciplinarum Libri, complete with ανοδο (‘journey upwards’) and talking Muses, was ultimately unacceptable to Augustine. In De Ordine, at an early stage in his work on the ‘disciplinae’, Varro’s influence was close to the surface, absorbed, but faintly visible. By the time of De Doctrina Christiana, however, the Roman scholar and his personified ‘artes’ had become too compromised and dangerous. Some of the African bishop’s squeamishness about personifications can also be detected in the response of various late antique Gallic authors to what is almost certainly the fingerprint of the Disciplinarum Libri. But Varro was ultimately to win, for in the late fifth century Martianus Capella cheerfully— though not, as we shall see, unselfconsciously—mixed personifications, talking females, and a journey to heaven into the heady allegorical brew of De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. And it was his personified liberal arts that would fill the medieval imagination. Varro’s ghost, one might caution, should not be too lightly or prematurely laid. 2. h a d ot’s att e m pt e d r e f utat i o n o f r i t s c h l’s t h e s i s De Ordine is the linchpin of Hadot’s theory. It was written in Latin, it had an ascent motif, an apparent canon of seven, and a strong whiff of philosophy. According to her, it reflects the establishment of the Neoplatonic canon of seven ‘artes’ as propaedeutic to philosophy, and transmitted it to the West. It cannot have anything to do with a first-century-b c encyclopaedist. Hadot effectively dissects Dyroff’s argument for neoPythagoreanism,15 but her main error (an inappropriate application of Occam’s razor)16 already appears in her criticism of him: ‘Instead of assuming a mosaic of influences, we must first look for the most economical explanation.’17 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 132–5. Pizzani, ‘L’Enciclopedia agostiniana’, 341. 17 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 135: ‘Au lieu de supposer une mosaïque d’influences, il faut d’abord chercher l’explication la plus économique.’ 15 16

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For her, the source for Augustine is ‘incontestably’ Neoplatonic:18 the tenor of the passage on the ‘artes’ in Book 2 of De Ordine and the words ‘redeundum’, ‘fugiendum’, ‘progressus’, and ‘regressus’ at 2. 11. 31 all point to Porphyry’s lost De Regressu Animae.19 Granted, the flavour of Augustine’s treatment of the liberal arts in De Ordine 2. 12. 35–15. 43 is clearly philosophical and Platonic,20 what with the dominance of number, the progression from sensible to intelligible, the imagery of ascent, and many other details, such as the eye of the soul (Republic 7. 533d).21 The arts are seven, with a semi-ellipsis of arithmetic, in the order: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, geometry, astronomy. But in no case is the philosophical material linked in any organic way to the liberal

Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 132. Ibid. 103 and also 106, citing a weak parallel (not about the liberal arts) from Civ. 10. 29. Ord. 2. 11. 31: ‘Hic genere posito quod animal dictum est, videmus additas duas differentias, quibus credo admonendus erat homo, et quo sibi redeundum esset, et unde fugiendum. Nam ut progressus animae usque ad mortalia lapsus est; ita regressus esse in rationem debet.’ (‘Once a genus that is called “animal” has been established, we see that two differentiae have been added, by which I believe man was supposed to be admonished both whither he ought to return and whence he ought to flee. For just as the progression of the soul to mortal things is a slide downwards, so its return ought to be towards reason.’) 20 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 110, shows the parallels between Augustine’s section on grammar and the Philebus. 21 See in particular Ord. 2. 14. 39: ‘Hinc se illa ratio ad ipsarum rerum divinarum beatissimam contemplationem rapere voluit. Sed ne de alto caderet, quaesivit gradus, atque ipsa sibi viam per suas possessiones ordinemque molita est. Desiderabat enim pulchritudinem, quam sola et simplex posset sine istis oculis intueri; impediebatur a sensibus. Itaque in eos ipsos paululum aciem torsit, qui veritatem sese habere clamantes, festinantem ad alia pergere, importuno strepitu revocabant.’ (‘From here that Reason wished to snatch herself away towards most blessed contemplation of the divine things themselves. But lest she fall from on high, she sought steps, and she herself built a path and an order for herself through her own possessions. For she longed for the sort of beauty that by itself in its simple form can be seen without these [mortal] eyes, but she was impeded by the senses. And so she turned her gaze for a while towards those who by proclaiming that they have the truth call back with importunate noise the one who hastens to reach other things.’) 18 19

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22

arts. More importantly, there is no evidence that De Regressu contained anything about the ‘artes’ at all.23 What we have here are vignettes of the matter of the ‘disciplinae’—e.g., allusions to vowels, continuants, and stops for grammar24—with philosophizing material around them. One can mark where the liberal art starts and the philosophy begins. When one writes a narrative commentary on this passage, as Hadot does, the names of many texts and authors pepper the page: 2. 11. 30: distinguendi et conectendi potestas (‘able to distinguish and connect’): cf. Phaedrus 266b.25 2. 11. 31: homo est animal rationale mortale (‘man is a rational and mortal animal’): ‘Cette définition est en effet très ancienne, mais l’interprétation qui en est faite est essentiellement néoplatonicienne.’26 2. 11. 31: rationale vs. rationabile (‘capable of reasoning’ vs. ‘reasonable’).27 2. 12. 36: Plato, Philebus 18B6–D12.28 2. 13. 38: tripartition of dialectic: Porphyry’s Isagoge (ed. Busse, 1. 5–6), not Antiochus of Ascalon (ed. Witt, 36).29

22 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 128–9, identifies Neoplatonic material, but none of it can be traced to Neoplatonic texts that discuss the ‘artes’. Her statement that ‘tout le contexte se rapportant à la discipline grammaticale . . . selon tout vraisemblance, se fonde sur le même texte néoplatonicien que toute l’argumentation concernant le retour de l’âme dans sa patrie, effectué par des moyens intellectuels’ (p. 109 n. 33) has no basis in fact. 23 See the fragments in J. Bidez, Vie de Porphyre, le philosophe néoplatonicien (Hildesheim and New York, 1980), 27*–44*. Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae 46–7, which describes the purification of the soul, does indeed mention the place of the µαθ µατα (‘disciplines’) in the process, but only en passant. 24 Ord. 2. 12. 36. 25 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 105. 26 Ibid. 106. 27 Ibid. 107. 28 Ibid. 110, following P. Courcelle, Les Lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1948), 156; see now Pizzani, ‘L’Enciclopedia agostiniana’, 343, for Cicero, De Re Publica 3. 2. 3. 29 See Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 115–16.

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2. 14. 41: Reason wove the verbal arts with number: Proclus, In Prim. Euclid. Elem. Libr. Comm (ed. Friedlein, 24. 21–7) says that grammar and rhetoric qua sciences are founded on mathematics.30 2. 14. 39: progress away from the sensible to the intelligible: Plotinus, Enneads 1. 6; Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae 46–7.31 But none of these proposed sources is ‘hard’. Many are fuzzy, if not fuzzier (e.g., Proclus, who is much later than Augustine). Indeed, ‘sources’ is too imprecise a term in this case, where one may have to distinguish between materials that Augustine could have used directly (none extant for the matter in hand!) and ultimate sources that could be far earlier. Even if the latter are clearer, they are often so widely disseminated that pinning down a distinctive avenue of transmission is impossible. Most items Hadot cites are not clear sources, but similia. The philosophical material is largely colourless and cannot be pinned down to any one author or transmitter. Hadot has not proved her unitary source.32 The philosophizing ‘stuff’ could be Augustine’s, and the liberal arts someone else’s, or indeed various persons’. Whenever one works on Augustine’s sources, where they are extant, ‘mosaics’ and contamination are the name of the game.33 We now proceed to some of the particulars of Hadot’s case against Ritschl. a. Varro Dismissed Prematurely Let Platonists worry about the Platonic material. Our immediate concern is with Varro, whom Hadot aims to banish from De Ordine. There is a series of quick points to be made in Varro’s defence. First, his name (and it is the only author’s name in the passage other than Cicero’s34) frames the account of the ‘disciplinae’ and philosophy in Ord. 2. 12. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 117. Ibid. 118 says that it comes from De Regressu Animae. 32 Pizzani, ‘L’Enciclopedia agostiniana’, 337; J. Doignon, Dialogues philosophiques: De Ordine (= Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 4/2) (Paris, 1997), 29–30. 33 Doignon, Dialogues philosophiques: De Ordine, 30: ‘l’éclectisme d’Augustin’. 34 Ord. 2. 7. 45. 30 31

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35 and Ord. 2. 20. 54. ‘Quant aux citations de Varron, je les tiens pour occasionnelles’,36 is Hadot’s response. But why introduce names gratuitously? Second, there is a bona fide fragment of Varro’s De Grammatica at Ord. 2. 12. 37.37 Third, there is what is very probably a Varronian division of sound in Ord. 2. 14. 39, which also appears in a Varronian context in De Doctrina Christiana.38 These secure attributions by 35

35 Ord. 2. 12. 35: ‘Quibus duobus repertis nata est illa librariorum et calculonum professio velut quaedam grammaticae infantia, quam Varro litterationem vocat; Graece autem quomodo appelletur, non satis in praesentia recolo.’ (‘Once these two had been discovered, there was born that business of scribes and accountants, an infant stage of grammar as it were, that Varro called litteratio; how it is called in Greek I don’t really remember at the moment.’) Ord. 2. 20. 54: ‘Res enim multum necessaria mihi prorsus exciderat, quam in illo viro—si quid litteris memoriae mandatis credendum est; quamvis Varroni quis non credat?—mirari et paene cotidianis, ut scis, ecferre laudibus soleo . . .’ (‘A very important fact that I am wont to admire in that man [sc. Pythagoras] and to praise almost every day entirely slipped my mind—if one should believe in words entrusted to memory at all, although who would not believe Varro?’) 36 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 133. 37 ‘Poterat iam perfecta esse grammatica sed, quia ipso nomine profiteri se litteras clamat unde etiam Latine litteratura dicitur factum est, ut quidquid dignum memoria litteris mandaretur, ad eam necessario pertineret.’ (‘Grammar was already able to be perfect, but because by her very name she proclaims to profess letters—whence even in Latin she is called litteratura—it came about that whatever thing worthy of record was entrusted to writing necessarily fell under her purview.’) Cf. Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 3, para. 229, in the numbering of Kopp’s edition (hereafter ‘K’). 38 See Ord. 2. 14. 39: ‘Intellexit nihil aliud ad aurium iudicium pertinere quam sonum eumque esse triplicem, aut in voce animantis aut in eo, quod flatus in organis faceret, aut in eo, quod pulsu ederetur.’ (‘She understood that nothing other than sound pertained to the judgement of the ears and that it was threefold, consisting in the voice of a living being or in the sound that the breath makes in instruments or in the sound that is created by striking.’) Cf. Doct. Chr. 2. 17. 27: ‘Aut enim voce editur, sicuti eorum est qui faucibus sine organo canunt; aut flatu, sicut tubarum et tibiarum; aut pulsu, sicut in citharis et tympanis, et quibuslibet aliis quae percutiendo canora sunt.’ (‘For it is either produced by the voice, such as of those who sing with their throats without an instrument; or by blowing, as is the case with trumpets or pipes; or by striking, as is the case with citharae and drums, and any other instruments that are tuneful when struck.’) Here the context is clearly Varronian, though downplayed by Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 120. She does the same with the allusions to Varro at Ord. 2. 20. 54 in connection with Pythagoras (pp. 130, 133).

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name and the likely citations of Varronian material pertaining to the ‘disciplinae’ in this passage cannot be dismissed. Not one of Hadot’s Neoplatonic ‘sources’, let alone the shadowy De Regressu, can be as well authenticated or shown to be vestigially present in this way. b. Literary Frame and Colouring of Augustine’s Account of the ‘Disciplinae’ Hadot argues that the motifs of abstraction from the corporeal and the ascent have to be Neoplatonic, not Varronian. In 1991 I translated and commented on Licentius’ Carmen ad Augustinum 1–15: Arcanum Varronis iter scrutando profundi Mens hebet adversamque fugit conterrita lucem. Nec mirum; iacet omnis enim mea cura legendi Te non dante manum et consurgere sola veretur. Nam simul ut perplexa viri compendia tanti Volvere suasit amor sacrosque attingere sensus, Quis numerum dedit ille tonos mundumque Tonanti Disseruit canere et pariles agitare choreas, Implicuit varia nostrum caligine pectus Induxit animo rerum violentia nubem. Inde figurarum positas in pulvere formas Posco amens aliasque graves offendo tenebras: Ad summam astrorum causas clarosque meatus, Obscuros quorum ille situs per nubila monstrat. Sic iacui nutans . . . While investigating profound Varro’s secret path, my mind is dulled, and terrified flees the light it encounters. This is no surprise, for all my interest in the task of reading lies inert if you fail to lend me a helping hand: it is too insecure to rise on its own. For as soon as love persuades me to unroll the twisted compendia of the great man and to venture to approach their sacred significance—by which proportions he gave the tones of numbers and taught that the universe sings for the Thunderer and quickens regular dances—the strenuousness of the subjectmatter enfolds my breast in shifting darkness and has brought a cloud over my spirit. Thence in my distress I ask for forms of figures drawn in the sand, and collide with other heavy shadows—in short, the causes of the stars and their shining paths, whose invisible location he points out through the clouds. Thus I lay wavering . . .

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I concluded that it drew extensively on De Ordine and continued the dialogue, that its Varro was indeed Varro of Reate, that three mathematical ‘disciplinae’ are alluded to, and finally that the ‘arcanum Varronis iter’ was a compendium that featured at least music, geometry, and astronomy, as well as imagery of an upwards journey towards light.39 Evidence from Licentius suggests that Varro’s work on at least three mathematical ‘disciplinae’ featured a journey and an ascent. Thus, pace Hadot, not all ascents had to be Neoplatonic.40 Indeed, it is most surprising not to see Plato’s Cave from Republic 7 mentioned by her, a text that had all the requisite elements: an ascent, the terror, and bedazzlement at the light41 (compare line 2 of Licentius’ poem), a discussion of all four mathematical disciplines (and dialectic) in which their ability to turn the faculties upwards is emphasized,42 and even a journey.43 Varro would certainly have known fundamental texts of Plato.44 39 D. Shanzer, ‘Licentius’s Verse Epistle to Augustine’, REAug 37 (1991), 110–43. 40 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 118, assumes that the ‘gradus’ imagery refers to the Neoplatonic flight of Daedalus. This is simply wrong. Ascent by ‘gradus’ is not the same as flight. The same applies to Retr. 1. 5. 6: ‘quibusdam quasi passibus certis’ (‘by certain definite steps as it were’) and Ep. 101. 3: ‘quibusdam quasi gradatis itineribus’ (‘by certain, as it were, gradated progressions’). W. Hübner, ‘Die “artes liberales” im zweiten Buch von De Ordine’, in Charisteria Augustiniana Iosepho Oroz Reta dicata (Madrid, 1994), 317–44, at 323, characterizes the word ‘gradus’ as Varronian. He is, however, prepared to concede a rather mixed flight and climbing metaphor to Augustine. For subsequent development of ‘gradus’ imagery in Augustine, see Pollmann below, 225–31. 41 Rep. 516c and e. Augustine clearly had access to the idea indirectly; see Sol. 2. 25. 1. 42 Rep. 522c, 525d, 526e, 527b, 529a, 531c, 531d (for the arts’ relationship with one another); for dialectic see 532a, 533d. 43 Rep. 532e. 44 He had studied with Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens at the Academy between 84 and 82. See Cicero, Ep. ad Atticum 13. 19. 3; Academica Posteriora 1. 3. 12. Also F. Della Corte, Varrone: Il terzo gran lume romano (Genoa, 1954), 173 n. 10. W. Burkert, ‘Cicero als Platoniker und Skeptiker’, Gymnasium 72 (1972), 175–200, at 198, notes that Cicero never mentions the simile of the Cave. But there is no doubt that he had direct access to the Republic. See A. A. Long, ‘Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle’, in J. F. G. Powell (ed.), Cicero the Philosopher (Oxford, 1995), 37–61, at 43–5. Also T. B. deGraff, ‘Plato in Cicero’, Classical Philology 35 (1940), 143–55, at 146 and 150 nn. 66 and 67 for Gyges and Er.

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A work of the late fifth century, De Statu Animae of Claudianus Mamertus, likewise alludes to Varro in a context where three mathematical disciplines appear, and speaks of a progress from the visible to the invisible: Marcus Varro, sui saeculi peritissimus et teste Tullio omnium sine dubitatione doctissimus, quid in musicis, quid 〈in arithmeticis〉, quid in geometricis, quid in philosophoumenon45 libris divina quadam disputatione contendit, nisi ut a visibilibus ad invisibilia, a localibus ad inlocalia, a corporeis ad incorporea miris aeternae artis modis abstrahat animum et in corpora, hoc est in adversa sibi dilapsum sui compotem faciat?46 What does Marcus Varro, the most skilled of his age, and on Cicero’s testimony, without doubt, the most learned, seek to gain by an almost divine disputation in his musical writings, 〈his arithmetical writings〉, his geometrical ones, in the books of philosophical matters, if it not be to draw away the soul in certain wondrous ways that belong to an eternal art from the visible to the invisible, from what has place to what has no place, from the corporeal to the incorporeal and to make it master of itself, even though it has slipped into bodies, that is to say into things that are adverse to it[s nature].

It has been argued (by Bömer,47 Theiler,48 and D’Alessandro49) that this passage is a mosaic of purely Neoplatonic or Augustinian reminiscences. But again, why would Claudianus gratuitously drag in Varro in the context of the disciplines, if the name were not significant?50 The allusion

45 Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 371, hesitated to connect this with De Dialectica, and suggested De Philosophia instead. 46 Claudianus Mamertus, De Statu Animae 2. 8 (CSEL 11.130.2). 47 F. Bömer, Der lateinische Neuplatonismus und Neupythagoreismus und Claudianus Mamertus in Sprache und Philosophie (Leipzig, 1936), 158, believes that he had no access to Varro. 48 W. Theiler, ‘Porphyrios und Augustin’, in Forschungen zum Neuplatonismus (Berlin, 1966), 160–251, at 165 n. 15, warns that the influence of Varro should not be overestimated and that Claudianus is not using Varronian terminology. 49 P. D’ Alessandro, ‘Agostino, Claudiano Mamerto, Cassiodoro e i Disciplinarum libri di Varrone’, in MOUSA: Scritti in onore di Giuseppe Morelli (Bologna, 1997), 357–70, at 368. 50 Pizzani, ‘L’Enciclopedia agostiniana’, 338.

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would be pointless. As for the Varronian origin of the ascent motif: nihil obstat.51 No one, to my knowledge, has cited the next chapter (2. 9) of De Statu Animae: Aurelius Augustinus et acumine ingenii et rerum multitudine et operis mole veluti quidam Chrysippus argumentandi virtute aut Zenon sensuum subtilitate aut Varro noster voluminum magnitudine, et qui profecto talis natura adtentione disciplinis exstiterit, ut non immerito ab istis corporalibus nostri saeculi Epicureis aut Cynicis spiritalis sophista dissenserit, libro ad Hieronymum de origine animae sic pronuntiat . . .52 Aurelius Augustinus by the sharpness of his native wit, the multitude of subjects, and the bulk of his writing, like a certain Chrysippus for his strength in argument, a Zeno for the subtlety of his senses, or our Varro through the size of his œuvre, and one who indeed was such in nature, inclination, and training in the liberal arts that not without reason did he, a spiritual wise man, disagree with those corporeal Epicureans or Cynics of our age, in his book to Jerome about the origin of the soul, so pronounces . . .

Here Augustine is triply compared to a learned trio of Chrysippus, Zeno, and Varro, with respect to his ‘acumen’ and ‘virtus argumentandi’, his ‘multitudo rerum’ and ‘subtilitas’, his ‘operis moles’ and ‘voluminum magnitudo’. In the line-up of the final triad of ‘natura’, ‘adtentione’, and ‘disciplinis’, the last item, ‘disciplinae’, is appropriately associated with Varro. Would Claudianus drag in Varro as an irrelevance twice?53 We may well need to revise our customary interpretation of Sidonius’ comparison of Varro and Augustine: not the pagan antiquarian and his Christian 51 Della Corte, Varrone, 239 n. 4, goes further, comparing the passage to Retr. 1. 6 and concluding that the idea of the ascent must be Varronian. 52 CSEL 11.133.10 f. 53 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 166: ‘Nous voyons donc que le fait qu’un auteur tardif cite Varron et même une oeuvre précise de celui-ci, ne garantit d’aucune manière que l’auteur ait eu une connaissance directe de cette oeuvre.’ She then cites Fontaine on proximate and ultimate sources. She misunderstands the application of the principle. Fontaine is not saying that later writers cite authors out the blue: he is saying that someone like Macrobius will steal material on Republican Latin from Gellius and cite only the ultimate source. If a later author cites Varro, Varro is still the point. The question is how, if at all, the allusion was mediated.

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opponent of the City of God, but perhaps two encyclopaedists.54 The order of Varro’s disciplines may be unclear, and citations with precise attributions non-existent, but many more shadowy traces can be discerned by comparative reconstruction. Using this method, one can draw some conclusions not only about what the work comprised, but also about its literary shape. c. Number of Books and of ‘disciplinae’ in Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri (also known as Musae) Hadot claims that we do not know whether the nine books of Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri each contained one of the nine different disciplines.55 She fails, however, to note Ritschl’s discussion of this very question56 and the testimony of Vitruvius57 that nine disciplines were treated: ‘item Terentius Varro de novem disciplinis, unum de architectura’ (‘likewise Terentius Varro on 〈the?〉 nine disciplines, one on architecture’). With clear evidence for nine disciplines and also for nine books, the default assumption must be that one book was devoted to each discipline.58 But there may be new evidence for the distribution of the ‘disciplinae’ over nine books. To unearth it, we have to travel back in time and do some research into the conventions of titulature of ancient miscellaneous, encyclopaedic, and multi-book works, specifically those that were known as ‘Muses’. Μου˜σαι (‘Muses’) may have been the title of a work of Heraclitus.59 Unfortunately we know nothing of its format, but in the Greek world the nine books of Herodotus were 54 See Sidonius Apollinaris, Ep. 2. 9. 5: ‘Similes scientiae viri, hinc Augustinus hinc Varro lectitabantur’ (‘Men of similar knowledge, on one side Varro on the other Augustine, were read’). 55 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 157. 56 Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 356. 57 Vitruvius, De Architectura 7, praef. 14. 58 More than ‘quelque probabilité’ as Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 157, suggests. 59 See A. Ernout and L. Robin, Lucrèce: De Rerum natura, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1962), on Lucretius 1. 657, citing Plato, Sophistes 242d and Diogenes Laertius 9. 12.

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also known as ‘the Muses’. F. Oomes, however, in his TLL article on ‘musa’ drew attention to various passages in which he suggested that ‘Musae’ in Latin was the title of a miscellaneous work.61 Gellius had attested such a piece by Aurelius Opilius in Noctes Atticae 1. 25. 17 and in the preface to the same work.62 So too did Suetonius, De Grammaticis 6. 2: ‘composuitque variae eruditionis aliquot volumina, ex quibus novem unius corporis. Quae quia scriptores ac poetas sub clientela Musarum iudicaret, non absurde et fecisse et inscripsisse se ait ex numero divarum et appellatione.’ (‘And he wrote a number of books reflecting different sorts of learning, of which nine [were joined] in one volume. These, because he judged writers and poets to be part of the clientela of the Muses, quite reasonably he said that he had written and titled after the number and the names of the goddesses.’) Among the passages mentioned by Oomes was Cicero, Academica Posteriora 1. 2: ‘Silent enim diutius Musae Varronis quam solebant, nec tamen istum cessare sed celare quae scribat existimo.’ (‘The Muses of Varro are quiet for longer than they are wont, but I do not think that he has stopped, but that he is hiding what he writes.’) W. Buchwald took Oomes’ argument further and suggested that Cicero had alluded to a (then unfinished) work of Varro’s known to have been nine books long, the Disciplinarum Libri.63 They were the ‘magnum opus in manibus’, not De Lingua Latina.64 60 Lucian, Herodot. 1: αλλ αγωνιστν  Ολυµπων κα παρεχεν εαυτν α˛δων τα` στορα κα κηλ!ν του` παρ"ντα αχρι του˜ Μου´σα κληθ#ναι τα` ββλου αυτου˜, %νν&α κα αυτα` ο'σα (‘But he presented himself as a

champion of the Olympians, singing his histories and beguiling also those present with the result that his books were called the Muses, since they too were nine.’) 61 F. Oomes, ‘musa’, TLL 8. 1692. 7. 62 ‘Aurelius Opilius in primo librorum quos “Musarum” inscripsit’; Noctes Atticae, praef. 5: ‘Namque alii “Musarum” inscripserunt’. 63 W. Buchwald, ‘Musae Varronis’, Museum Helveticum 23 (1966), 215–17. 64 See Della Corte, Varrone, 263, for their dating in 47/5. The Disciplinarum Libri come after them in Jerome’s catalogue, and Della Corte dates the completion of Book 8 to 33 (presumably following Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 400, who sees Pliny, Naturalis Historia 29. 4. 65 as an allusion to Book 8) and of Book 9 possibly to somewhat later, in 31. He rightly notes that work on the Disciplinarum Libri must have been started considerably earlier.

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To the discussion he added Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.1: ‘ridet temporibus priscis Persas fluvios coluisse, memorialia ut indicant scripta . . . pro Marte Romanos hastam, Varronis ut indicant Musae.’ (‘He derides the fact that the Persians worshipped rivers in ancient times, as the written records indicate . . . and that the Romans worshipped a spear representing Mars, as the Muses of Varro indicate.’) This passage has a close parallel in the work of Clement of Alexandria, who also attributes the cult of the Mars spear to a there unspecified work of Varro.65 Buchwald’s suggestion that the Disciplinarum Libri may also have been known as the ‘Musae’ was rejected by H. Dahlmann.66 He thought that there was no evidence that the Arnobius testimonium depended on Clement, and that there was no need for the two to go back simultaneously to an authentic work of Varro’s. Both testimonia, according to him, were dependent on an anonymous intermediate source that had not specified in which work the Varronian information appeared. This origin was supposed to explain the disparity between Musae Varronis and Ουα´ρρων ( σνγγραφευ´. Hence Dahlmann concluded that the expression ‘Musae Varronis’ in the Academica was not authentic evidence for a title of a work: it merely meant ‘literarische Produktion’.67 Dahlmann’s argument is not convincing, and various points should be made in response. ‘Musae’, as ‘literary production’, is not flat or neutral, but poetic, coy, precious, or teasing. Arnobius has no such attitude to his source, nor was Varro’s work verse, as was the ‘musa Lucretia’ (note the singular of the noun and the adjective rather than the plural of the noun with a genitive) to which Arnobius once alluded.68 Had Arnobius sought to undermine Varro, he might have spoken of his ‘fabulae’. The tone of the allusion

Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 4. 46: Ουα´ρρων ( συγγραφευ´. H. Dahlmann, ‘Silent diutius Musae Varronis quam solebant’, in J. Collart (ed.), Varron: Grammaire antique et stylistique latine (Paris, 1978), 85–9. Also more recently by Hübner, ‘Die “artes liberales” im zweiten Buch von De Ordine’, 337, though he wistfully characterizes Buchwald’s suggestion as ‘verlockend’. 67 Dahlmann, ‘Silent diutius Musae Varronis quam solebant’, 86. 68 Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 3. 10, using the singular. 65 66

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is neutral, and ‘Musae’ is most probably a title. Furthermore, had Arnobius’ source not specified what work some prose citation came from, he would hardly have spontaneously attributed it to ‘Varronian Muses’. Συγγραφευ´, the term used by Clement, is the regular way of designating a fact-collector or prose-writer. It is far more probable that the source, whatever it was, attributed the quotation to the Musae Varronis, as a title, and that Clement simply dropped the title of the work altogether. Dahlmann likewise sought to dispose of the phrase ‘Musae Varronis’ in Cicero’s Academica by arguing that it referred not to the title of a work, but to Varro’s ‘literarische Schriftstellerei’.70 The word occurs in a speech of Atticus’. Dahlmann sees the tone of the passage as ‘erfüllt von Höflichkeit und Bewunderung’.71 This is possible.72 But a more probing reading might see here a double entendre, where the Muses are both Varro’s inspiration and even more aptly the patronesses of the books also known as the Musae.73 Atticus might have been making a gentle joke by personifying Varro’s learned ladies. A little later the books of Varro become hosts for Cicero.74

69 Arnobius uses ‘indicare’ both for people and for books as sources, see Adversus Nationes 6. 11: ‘memorialia ut indicant scripta’; 2. 71: ‘ut indicat supputatio’; 5. 18: ‘Sextus Clodius indicat’; 6. 22: ‘Posidippus . . . indicat’. 70 Dahlmann, ‘Silent diutius Musae Varronis quam solebant’, 88. 71 Ibid. 89. 72 Cicero regularly used ‘Musae’ in a figurative sense. See De Finibus 5. 49: ‘variis avido satiatus pectore Musis’ (‘the eager breast satiated by the Muses’—his own translation of Homer); Ep. ad Familiares 16. 10. 2 (to Tiro): ‘Tu Musis nostris para ut operas reddas’ (‘Prepare to pay attention to our Muses’). But there are also uses that stay close to personification, e.g., Fam. 1. 9. 23: ‘nam me ab orationibus diungo fere referoque ad mansuetiores Musas, quae me maxime sicut iam a prima adulescentia delectarunt’ (‘For I almost unyoke myself from speeches and take myself back to the more gentle Muses that have given me the greatest pleasure just as they already did in my first youth’). For the voice of the Muses, see Orator 62: ‘Xenophontis voce Musas quasi locutas ferunt’ (‘They say that the Muses spoke as it were in the voice of Xenophon’). 73 See Appendix below for a fuller discussion of the passage. 74 Academica Posteriora 1. 3. 9: ‘nam nos . . . tamquam hospites tui libri quasi domum reduxerunt’ (‘For your books have led us like guests back home’).

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To summarize: there are good reasons for believing that Varro wrote something whose title, official or unofficial, was Musae, in nine books, each corresponding to one of the ‘disciplinae’. The evidence for such a view has long been generally known, even if differently interpreted. Other sources may yet enable us to say more about Varro’s lost work. 3. n e w e v i d e n c e f o r va r r o’s m u s a e Sidonius Apollinaris wrote a letter in 471 to his friend Nymphidius. In it he gave a laudatory account of Claudianus Mamertus’ De Statu Animae (see above) while demanding the immediate return of his own copy from Nymphidius. He speaks of Claudianus as ‘revealing that what they call the nine Muses are disciplines not women’ (‘novem quas vocant Musas disciplinas aperiens esse, non feminas’). Namque in paginis eius vigilax lector inveniet veriora nomina Camenarum, quae propriam de se sibi pariunt nuncupationem. Illic enim et grammatica dividit et oratoria declamat et arithmetica numerat et geometria metitur et musica ponderat75 et dialectica disputat et astrologia praenoscit et architectonica struit76 et metrica modulatur. (Ep. 5.2) For in his pages the attentive reader will find the more authentic

75 ponderat makes no sense as a verb for music. It is almost certainly corrupt. If one compares a text such as the Anonymus de Constitutione Mundi (PL 90.908C): ‘Geometria est immobilis magnitudinis doctrina ponderatrix’ (‘Geometry is the subject that measures stationary mass’) or the anonymous distich (H. Walther, Alphabetisches Verzeichnis der Versanfänge mittellateinischer Dichtungen (Göttingen 1969), no. 7273): ‘Gram loquitur, Dia vera docet, Rhet verba colorat / Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra’ (‘Grammar speaks, Dialectic teaches the truth, Rhetoric colors words, Music signs, Arithmetic counts, Geometry weighs, Astronomy worships the stars’), it seems possible that a complex corruption left music with geometry’s verb. ‘Metitur’ may well be the obvious and later corrective interpolation. 76 Architecture would have been useful for Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 364. He reconstructed the presence of architecture from her deliberate exclusion by Martianus (ibid. 367) and from Vitruvius, De Architectura 7, praef. 14. This passage buttresses his analysis.

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names of the Camenae, who provide their own titles for themselves.77 For there grammar draws distinctions, oratory declaims, arithmetic counts, geometry measures, music weighs [sic], dialectic disputes, astrology foretells, architecture builds, and metrics modulates.

Care in interpretation is demanded. Someone, not Claudianus, had personified the ‘disciplinae’ as Muses—that is, women—not sober disciplines. But in Claudianus’ work are found the real disciplines, each performing the action appropriate to her sphere. This list of ‘disciplinae’ has nothing to do with the actual content of De Statu Animae.78 Its purpose is panegyric; it is an inflated way of calling Claudianus’ work learned.79 None the less, one may deduce something of Sidonius’ canon of the liberal arts from it, and it may be possible to determine whence it came. The first sentence assembles a number of key concepts: the number nine, the Muses, and a list of liberal arts, thereby proving the connection between ‘Musae’ and ‘disciplinae’. But who was the author of the false Muses? When this testimonium is combined with that of Arnobius and Cicero, an obvious answer emerges. Varro wrote something called the Musae. The Muses are usually nine, and Varro is known to have used this number.80 Sidonius provides sound evidence that in some unspecified work the ‘Musae’ were associated with the ‘disciplinae’. Since Sidonius is recalling a canon from memory, we need not be unduly bothered by the apparent 77 A. Loyen, Sidoine Apollinaire: Lettres, 3 vols. (Paris: 1960–70), ii. 175: ‘dénomination approprié à leur personnalité’. 78 Sidonius had almost certainly not even read it. See Ep. 4. 3 for his belated thanks. 79 Sidonius, when chided for not thanking Claudianus for the dedication of De Statu Animae, would eventually lay it on even thicker in Ep. 4. 3. 5. 80 See Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 3. 38: ‘Novensiles Piso deos esse credit novem in Sabinis apud Trebiam constitutos, hos Granius Musas putat consensum adcommodans Aelio, novenarium numerum tradit Varro, quod in movendis rebus potentissimus semper habeatur et maximus’. (‘Piso thinks the Novensiles are nine gods who dwell in Trebia among the Sabines, but Granius thinks them the Muses in agreement with Aelius [Stilo], and Varro ascribes the number nine, because it is always considered the greatest and most powerful in moving things.’)

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omission of Medicina and the substitution of Metrica (as distinct from Grammatica or Musica).81 a. Varro as Common Source for the Personified ‘Disciplinae’ of Martianus Capella and Fifth-Century Gallic Writers Ariston of Chios and Aristippus unflatteringly compared the arts to Penelope’s (i.e., Philosophy’s) handmaidens; subsequently Martianus Capella drew lively personifications of the liberal arts.82 Otherwise there is no literary evidence for personification of the figures. But neither the Hellenistic writers nor Martianus had nine arts; nor did they identify them with the Muses.83 So neither Ariston or Aristippus nor 81 This must be a pure slip, since metrics is never a separate liberal art, but part of grammar or of music: i.e., the cross-over point between the verbal and the mathematical ‘artes’ (as, e.g., in Augustine, Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidore). See M. Simon, ‘Zur Abhängigkeit spätrömischer Enzyklopädien der Artes liberales von Varro’s Disciplinarum libri’, Philologus 110 (1966), 88–101, at 97. 82 The ‘artes’ personified as handmaidens of Philosophy are attested for Ariston of Chios by Stobaeus 3 (ed. Hense, 246.1): (Αρστων ( Χο του`

περ τα` %γκυ´κλια µαθ µατα πονουµ&νου, αµελου˜ντα δ. φιλοσοφα, /λεγεν (µοου ε0ναι το µνηστ#ρσι τ# Πηνελ"πη ο2 αποτυγχα´νοντε %κενη περ τα` θεραπανα %γνοντο (‘Ariston of Chios said that those

who work on the liberal arts while neglecting philosophy are like the suitors of Penelope, who, failing to gain her, consorted with the maids.’) For Aristippus see Diogenes Laertius 2. 79 (students of the %γκυ´κλια παιδευ´µατα who stopped short of studying philosophy were Penelope’s suitors who won the maids, but missed the mistress), noted by F. Kühnert, Allgemeinbildung und Fachbildung in der Antike (Berlin, 1961), 6. L. M. de Rijk, ‘ “Enkyklios Paideia”: A Study of Its Original Meaning’, Vivarium 3 (1965), 24–93, at 79–81, attributes the authentic form of the mot to Bion of Borysthenes, as cited by pseudo-Plutarch, De Liberis Educandis 7D (10) (ed. Bernardakis, 15. 26–16. 4). 83 Some of Martianus’ Muses’ songs derive colouring from the ‘artes’. See 2. 118K for Urania and astronomy; 2.120K for Polymnia and music and geometry; 2. 122K for Clio and rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar; Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 146–7, for arithmetic in Erato’s song, if ‘rationibus’ means ‘calculs’. There may also be hints of a connection between the material of the ‘artes’ and ‘disciplinae’ in De Nuptiis138K, where both the arts and the disciplines collect the books that Philologia vomits up. Plutarch, Quaestiones Conviviales 746J alludes to Polyhymnia as a Muse for Geometry. As H. Kees, ‘Musai’, in RE xvi.1 (1933), 684, points out, the common pairing of Muses and arts is unknown in classical Greece. See ibid. 729–30 for a table of arts (though not liberal arts) associated with different Muses.

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De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii lies behind the allusion in Sidonius’ letter to Nymphidius. Yet Claudianus Mamertus, another Gallic writer of c.470 and the subject of Sidonius’ letter, also mentions personified ‘disciplinae’ and speaks bitterly of the reception accorded the learned ladies, in his letter to Sapaudus: Video os Romanum non modo neglegentiae, sed pudori esse Romanis, grammaticam uti quandam barbaram barbarismi et soloecismi pugno et calce propelli, dialecticen tamquam Amazonem stricto decertaturam gladio formidari, rhetoricam acsi grandem dominam in angusto non recipi, musicen vero et geometricam atque arithmeticam tres quasi furias despui, posthinc philosophiam [atque] uti quoddam ominosum bestiale numerari.84 I see that the Roman tongue is not just something to neglect for Romans, but something to be ashamed of. Grammar is being repelled, as if she were some sort of she-barbarian, by the fist and kick of barbarism and solecism; Dialectic is feared as if she were an Amazon about to fight with drawn sword; Rhetoric as if she were an over-sized mistress cannot be received in a tight space; Music, Geometry, and Arithmetic are despised as if they were three Furies; Philosophy next [and] is counted as something ominous and bestial.

The passage clearly exploits and exaggerates the personifications ironically. In Claudianus’ time the liberal arts are rejected as if they were the barbarous invaders of the author’s native Gaul. Claudianus was not working from Martianus,85 yet a number of features of Martianus’ 84 Claudianus Mamertus, Ep. ad Sapaudum (CSEL 11.204.22 f.). The text is clearly corrupt. One either excises ‘atque’ or supplies ‘astrologiam’ or ‘astronomiam’, a science that, coupled with philosophy in its natural aspect, could well have been regarded as ‘ominosum’; cf., e.g., Augustine, Ord. 2. 15. 42: ‘. . . astrologiam genuit, magnum religiosis argumentum tormentumque curiosis’ (‘. . . generated astrology, a great proof to the religious and torture to the [excessively] curious’). Charles Brittain, however, has suggested to me that ‘philosophy’ (as distinct from the propaedeutic dialectic) is correct, and that Claudianus addresses its poor reception in his own times. 85 De Nuptiis was written in Africa c.470–80. See D. Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Liber 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 1–28. It is unattested in Gaul before the time of Gregory of Tours (Decem Libri Historiarum 10. 18).

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descriptions of the ‘artes’ could seem to have been parodied by Claudianus. Dialectic, for example, says of herself: Ni Varronis mei inter Latiares glorias celebrati mihi eruditio industriaque suppeteret, possem femina Doricae nationis apud Romuleae vocis examina aut admodum rudis aut satis barbara reperiri. Quippe . . . Marci Terenti prima me in Latinam vocem pellexit industria ac fandi possibilitatem per scholas Ausonas comparavit.86 If the erudition and industry of my Varro were not available among the glories of Latium, I, a woman of the Doric nation, would be found rather uncultivated or indeed quite barbarous among the throngs of those who speak Romulus’ tongue. To be sure . . . the industry of Marcus Terentius first coaxed me to Latin speech and provided the chance to speak in the Ausonian schools.

Martianus’ work reflects a period when there was a tripartite division of Greek, Roman, and barbarian, and when an educated woman from Greece might be rejected at Rome as an undesirable alien. His Dialectic says that, although she is a Greek, had it not been for the efforts of Varro, she might have been considered a ‘barbara’ in Rome. To this we should compare Claudianus’ Dialectica, a creature of barbaric and Amazonian proportions, and his Grammatica, who is repelled as if she were a ‘barbara’ by the punch and kick of solecism. Martianus’ Rhetorica is a lofty and excessively self-confident individual, ‘quaedam sublimissimi corporis ac fiduciae grandioris’,87 who kisses people vulgarly and audibly: ‘eiusque verticem deosculata cum sonitu (nihil enim silens, ac si cuperet, faciebat), sororum se consortio societatique permiscuit’ (‘Having kissed her head with a smack for, quite intentionally, she never did anything silently, she joined the company of the sisters’).88 She thus fits Claudianus’ teasing soubriquet of ‘grandis domina’ (‘large mistress’) perfectly. Martianus’ Arithmetica, with her rapidly signing fingers and shining rays, is mistaken for a new

86 87 88

3. 335K (ed. Willis, 109. 1–6). 5. 426K (ed. Willis, 148. 12–13). 5. 565K (ed. Willis, 200. 12–14).

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89

Hydra. His Music (in jest) is a dangerous Bacchant, ready for sparagmos.90 The two Gallic writers of the later fifth century knew some source that treated ‘artes’ (nine and seven91) and included some sort of allusion to the arts as Muses (Sidonius) and arts and female personifications, big ladies and barbarians (Claudianus). Martianus has seven ‘disciplinae’, but made a deliberate departure from a canon of nine that was known to him. Martianus’ ‘disciplinae’ are portrayed as large and voluble, and occasionally comic or monstrous women; at least one was a ‘grandis domina’, and another was treated as a ‘barbara’. Dialectica refers to Varro jokingly as ‘Varro meus’ (‘my Varro’).92 Astronomy alludes to him as ‘quidam Romanorum non per omnia ignarus mei’ (‘A certain one among the Romans who is not entirely ignorant of me’).93 These similarities are unlikely to be fortuitous. None of these fifth-century authors is dependent on another: they reflect a common source. Martianus had Varro Menippeus in mind when he composed De Nuptiis.94 He also frequently alludes to Varro in the portions of the work devoted to the ‘disciplinae’.95 In the introduction to the book on Dialectic, for example, Varro is mentioned twice.96 Both Sidonius and

7. 729K (ed. Willis, 261. 15–19). The motif is Menippean. See 3. 326K (ed. Willis, 105. 12): ‘Musices impetu, cuius praevertis officium, discerperis’ (‘You will be torn to pieces by an attack from Music, whose duties you anticipate’). 91 Claudianus cites seven, not nine. This need not mean that he did not know nine ‘artes’. Ready acceptance of the humbler and more practical medicine and architecture disqualified them from this list. 92 Martianus 4. 335K (ed. Willis, 109. 1). 93 8. 817K (ed. Willis, 310. 12). As D’Alessandro, ‘Agostino, Claudiano Mamerto, Cassiodoro’, 364, rightly observes, this passage and Cassiodorus, Institutiones 2. 7. 2 guarantee the existence of a Varronian treatise on astronomy. 94 Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Liber 1, 29–44. 95 4. 335K (ed. Willis, 109. 1–4); 6. 578K (203. 18); 6. 639K (222. 5) and 6. 662K (234. 7), mediated by Pliny; 8. 817K (310. 12); 9. 928K (356. 12), through an intermediate source. 96 4. 335K (ed. Willis, 109. 1–4). 89 90

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Claudianus knew of Varro,97 and both allude to him in contexts that clearly involve the mathematical ‘disciplinae’ and philosophy.98 Even though there is some trace of a doctrine of the ‘disciplinae’ personified as Muses in Maximus of Tyre,99 his world was a Greek-speaking one, and the lost Disciplinarum Libri is the obvious candidate for the Gallic writers. While we may know nothing for certain of the literary form of the Disciplinarum Libri (the direct citations and allusions are unrevealing),100 the work of Martianus and these other late 97 For explicit allusions to Varro in Sidonius, see Carm. 2. 90; Carm. 14, praef. 2–3; Carm. 23. 151 and Ep. 2. 9. 5 to Donidius; Ep. 4. 3. 1 to Claudianus; Ep. 4. 10 to Felix (mediated by Jerome); Ep. 8. 6. 18 to Namatius. For Claudianus, see De Statu Animae 2. 9 (CSEL 11.133.12); Ep. 2 (CSEL 11.206.1). 98 De Statu Animae 2. 8 (CSEL 11.130.2), discussed at length above; ibid. 2. 9 (CSEL 11.133.12). For Sidonius, see Carm. 14, praef.: ‘Audacter affirmo, musicam et astrologiam, quae sunt infra arithmeticam consequentia membra philosophiae, nullatenus posse sine hisce nominibus indicari. Quae si quispiam ut Graeca, sicut sunt, et peregrina verba contempserit, noverit sibi aut super [semper Buecheler] eiuscemodi artis mentione supersedendum, aut nihil omnino se, aut certe non ad assem, Latiari lingua hinc posse disserere. Quod si aliquis secus atque assero, rem se habere censuerit, do quidem absens obtrectatoribus manus; sed noverint sententiam meam discrepantia sentientes sine Marco Varrone, sine Sereno, non Septimio, sed Sammonico, sine Censorino, qui de die natali volumen illustre confecit, non posse damnari.’ (‘I boldly affirm that music and astrology which are the limbs of philosophy that follow arithmetic [in importance] cannot be discussed without these names. If anyone despises them as Greek and foreign (as indeed they are), let him be aware that he must either always steer clear of the mention of that sort of art or else know that he cannot say anything at all or certainly not anything thoroughly in Latin about this. If anyone thinks that the matter is other than as I claim, I give in to these complainers, to be sure, since I’m absent; but let them know that even though they maintain a different point of view, mine cannot be condemned without [condemning] Marcus Varro, Serenus [not Septimius, but Sammonicus], and Censorinus who wrote an outstanding work on the natal day.’) 99 Maximus of Tyre 10. 9 (ed. Koniaris, 123. 7): του˜το αρα κα ο3

ποιητα τν Μνηµοσυ´νην α4νττονται Μουσ!ν µητ&ρα, Μου´σα µ.ν τα` %πιστ µα 5νοµα´ζοντε, 7γα´θεον χορν κα /ργον ∆ι", υπ Μνηµοσυ´νη δ. γεννωµ&να κα συνταττοµ&να. (‘This also the poets riddling designate as Memory, the

mother of the Muses, and they name the Muses the sciences, a most holy chorus and a work of Zeus, born and subordinated to Memory.’) 100 See Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, passim.

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Latin authors enable us to hazard some guesses about it. One could reconstruct a work in nine books, containing one discipline per book, an equation of each discipline with a Muse, and talking personifications of these figures. Varro’s longwinded learned disciplines were the Muses with which Atticus teased him. To each ‘disciplina’/‘musa’ he may likewise have been ‘Varro meus’. The passage from Sidonius cited above provides another hint, aside from the passage in the Academica of Cicero, that Varro’s work on the liberal arts in nine books may have been cited familiarly as the ‘Musae’.101 Further support may be found in Fulgentius, Mythologiae 1. 15: ‘Nos vero novem Musae doctrinae atque scientiae dicimus modos’ (‘But we say that the nine Muses are types of learning and knowledge’).102 Now Book 3 of Martianus, De Grammatica, begins with an interchange between Muse (Satura) and poet. The text of the poem is corrupt, but some sense can be elicited. At the end of Book 2 Martianus had claimed that he was about to drop the mythological dress of his ‘fabula’.103 Here, however, the Muse wants ‘amicta fictis commenta ferre’ (‘to produce arguments cloaked in literary fictions’). The poet protests that ‘artes vera fantes’ (‘arts who speak true things’) will prepare the writings of the following books. Satura jokingly insists that the Arts must be dressed for decency. The poet protests that they will do their teaching in disembodied form (‘asomato in profatu’, ‘in bodiless utterance’). The Muse insists that nothing can be made ready except by a ‘figminis figura’, a personification.104 Martianus gives in, and each of the following books sports a personified ‘disciplina’. The purpose of this poem has always been obscure, although it is clearly programmatic. It has long been suggested that Martianus deliberately confronted Varro and

101 Martianus’ encyclopaedia was referred to as the ‘Philologia’ by its own author. See M. De Nonno, ‘Un nuovo testo di Marziano Capella: la metrica’, Rivista di Filologia 118 (1990), 129–44. 102 Ed. Helm, 25. 18. 103 2. 220K (ed. Willis, 57. 24 ff.). 104 3. 221–2K (ed. Willis, 58. 11; 59. 2, 7–9, 17, 21).

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his canon of nine in Book 9, where he excludes medicine and architecture.105 If Varro’s encyclopaedia featured personified disciplines in fancy dress, then the opening of Book 3 may represent an abortive attempt to depart from Varronian practice. In the final metrum of his encyclopaedia Martianus admitted that he had mingled Muses and Gods and made the ‘disciplinae’ babble in crudely personified forms: ‘immiscuit / Musas deosque, disciplinas cyclicas / Garrire agresti cruda finxit plasmate.’106 Nothing more precise can, or should, be said now;107 but, given this new possibility of the presence of Muses and personifications in the title and, no doubt, the text of Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri, estimates of Martianus’

105 9. 891K (ed. Willis, 339. 4): ‘Sed quoniam his mortalium rerum cura terrenorumque sollertia est, nec cum aethere quidquam habent superisque confine, non incongrue si fastidio respuuntur, in senatu caelite reticebunt, ab ipsa deinceps virgine explorandae discussius.’ (‘But because they have skills pertaining to, and care for, mortal and terrestrial matters, and have nothing in common with heaven or the gods, it is not inappropriate that, if they are rejected with distaste, they fall silent in the celestial senate, but subsequently be explored in greater detail by the virgin herself.’) 106 9. 998K (ed. Willis, 385. 4). 107 There are numerous texts that could add tesserae to the mosaic: e.g., Apuleius, Florida 20 (ed. Helm, 40. 19) on the intoxicating and healing draughts from the ‘Musarum creterra’ (‘crater of the Muses’), which include ‘litteratoris rudimento’, ‘grammatica’, ‘rhetorica’, ‘poeticam commentam’, ‘geometria’, ‘musica’, ‘dialectica’, and ‘philosophia’; also Ausonius, Griphus Ternarii Numeri, ep. (ed. Green, 112. 34–9): ‘quam multa enim de ternario sciens neglexi: tempora et personas, genera et gradus, novem naturalia metra cum trimetris, totam grammaticam et musicam librosque medicinae, ter maximum Hermen et amatorem primum philosophiae Varronisque numeros, et quidquid profanum vulgus ignorat’ (‘. . . all of grammar and music and the books of medicine, thrice-great Hermes and the first lover of philosophy and the numbers of Varro . . .’). Green has no comment on the meaningfulness of the triad of ‘grammatica, musica, medicina’. It could be shorthand for the 3 × 3 liberal arts; Varro’s name and the mention of medicine point in that direction. Note that Griphus 30–3 contains an allusion to the Varronian story of the origin of the nine (versus three) Muses: ‘Et lyrici vates numero sunt Mnemonidarum / Tris solas quondam tenuit quas dextera Phoebi / Sed Citheron totiens ternas ex aere sacravit / Religione patrum, qui sex sprevisse timebant.’ (‘The lyric poets are the same in number as the daughters of Mnemosyne, which three alone the right hand of Phoebus once held, but Citheron consecrated three apiece of bronze, according to ancestral religion, for they feared to have spurned six.’)

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originality may have to be revised. In the final hymn, sung by Thalia, the lines ‘vos disciplinas omnes / ac nos sacrate Musas’ (‘consecrate all the disciplines and us too, the Muses’),109 one of the first hints that the work will deal with the ‘artes’, may be a deliberate departure from Martianus’ primary source. And, as already noted, the programmatic final metrum may contain a similar allusion. 108

b. The Place of the Practical on the Road Upwards But what of the progress from corporeal to incorporeal, the upward road that I suggested was already present in Varro and reflected both in Augustine110 and in Claudianus Mamertus? How can it be reconciled with the presence of the all-too-terrestrial medicine and architecture in Martianus? Kühnert had already raised this objection to exclude the ascent metaphor from Varro.111 Medicine was in Book 8,112 and architecture perhaps in Book 9 (as suggested by the evidence of Martianus). Be that as it may, the ‘arcanum iter’ upwards can still work. All the passages that discuss abstraction from the corporeal to the incorporeal concern the quadrivium or its parts, and these alone are mentioned in Licentius, Claudianus, and in De Ordine.113 The voyage may well have begun on earth, ascended, and

108 It would be interesting and probably worthwhile to pursue the connections between Muses and liberal arts in visual evidence as well. 109 2. 126K (ed. Willis, 40. 18–19). 110 Passim in Ord. 2. 14. 39 ff. Note Ord. 2. 20. 53: ‘cum et vitae regulas et scientiae non tam itinera quam ipsos campos ac liquida aequora . . . et breviter et ita plane significasti’ (‘Since you have briefly and so straightforwardly laid out both the rules of life and not so much roads of knowledge as the very fields and liquid seas themselves’). 111 Kühnert, Allgemeinbildung und Fachbildung in der Antike, 365. 112 Nonius Marcellus: ‘Varro disciplinarum lib. VIII’, ‘Varro disciplinae lib. VIII’—about ‘lusciosi’ and ‘portulaca’ respectively (ed. Lindsay, 135. 9–11, 551. 13). 113 Ord. 2. 14. 39: ‘Sed ne de alto caderet, quaesivit gradus atque ipsa sibi viam per suas possessiones molita est’ (‘But lest she fall from on high, she sought steps and she herself built a path through her possessions’). This initiates the mathematical disciplines. See also Augustine, Ep. 101. 3.

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then returned to earth.114 Plato’s educands had to go back down to the Cave, after all.115 Martianus’ explanation of the omission of medicine and architecture—‘quoniam his mortalium rerum cura terrenorumque sollertia est, nec cum aethere quicquam habent superisque confine’ (‘Because their care is for mortal things and their skill pertains to the earthly, nor do they have anything in common with heaven or with the gods’)—may even reflect Varro’s own strictures.116 Augustine’s canon seems to consist of just seven arts.117 But medicine and architecture are none the less present in the margins, next to one another, just before the series of seven. De Ordine 2. 11. 32, a discussion of ‘ratio’ in sight and hearing as opposed to taste, touch, and smell, mentions proportion in the prescriptions administered by the medicus (and the food seasoned by the cook!) as well as proportion in building (‘ratio’ and the architect). It is possible that these two arts, mentioned here cursorily, may be contained in the first part of Augustine’s tripartite classification in De Ordine 2. 12. 35: ‘unum est in factis ad aliquem finem relatis, alterum in dicendo [the trivium], tertium in delectando [the quadrivium]’ (‘One consists in deeds applied to some end, the other in speaking, and the third in delighting’). c. Contents, Canons, and Caveats Lists are incomplete and lists differ. Our Gallic authors diverge, each from the other and each from himself as well as from Ritschl’s reconstruction of the De Novem Disciplinis, 114 For a Muse grounded, see Martianus at 1. 28K (ed. Willis, 13. 8–10): ‘sola vero, quod vector eius cycnus impatiens oneris atque etiam subvolandi alumna stagna petierat, Thalia derelicta in ipso florentis campi ubere residebat.’ (‘Thalia alone, because the swan who was carrying her, intolerant of the burden and also of flying upwards had sought its ancestral swamp, was left alone sitting on the fertile surface of a flowering field.’) The joke is still somewhat obscure. 115 Rep. 539e–540a. 116 9. 891K (ed. Willis, 339. 4). Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 150, is engaging in special pleading when she claims that Martianus is imitating Macrobius, Saturnalia 7. 15. 14–15, not Varro, in excluding medicine and architecture. Macrobius mentions only medicine. 117 The heptad was unquestionably significant. He returned to it in Quant. An. 33. 70–6 and Doct. Chr. 2. 7. 9. See the discussion by Pollmann in this volume, 225–7.

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which, according to him, contained the trivium, the quadrivium, medicine, and architecture (see Table 4.2).118 Medicine is omitted from all passages but one. Is this an impediment to discerning a Varronian canon of nine in the background? No, for none of the passages is a formal and exclusive citation of all of the ‘artes’. Completeness was unlikely. Many students of canons and canonical lists fall victim to the fallacy of demanding a higher degree of precision or exhaustiveness from their sources than those very sources required or were intended to have.119 When one deals with sources on the ‘artes’, two crucial factors have to be taken into account. The first is the author’s purpose in listing them. Sidonius, Ep. 5. 2 is aiming at a number, nine. Claudianus does not say he is, and Claudianus is not interested in the trivium in De Statu Animae. In Ep. 5. 2 Sidonius provided a drink from a fire hydrant and was bound to get disorganized in the midst of forty-five proper names. The second factor is human error. Most people have trouble rattling off the members of any given canonical group, without some thought and either fingers or a piece of paper. I submit that both Sidonius and Claudianus were describing—in their own ways—a single unitary elephant (see J. G. Saxe, ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’). The Disciplinarum Libri120 were nine books long.121 The general content of some books was reconstructed by Ritschl, deconstructed by Hadot, and reconstructed in the present

118 The order in which these ‘artes’ appeared was reconstructed by Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 352–402. Only in the case of arithmetic (Book 5) and medicine (Book 8) can we be sure of the position of the discipline within the whole (ibid. 368). 119 This is the point made by Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 218: ‘Les discordances sont plus spécieuses que réelles. Un bon nombre s’expliquent par le caractère même des textes d’où ces listes sont tirées; c’étaient souvent des exemples jetés au hasard sous la plume, non des énumérations méthodiques et exhaustives.’ 120 Title: Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 10. 1 .6 and 18. 15. 2; Nonius Marcellus (ed. Lindsay) 135. 10 and 551. 15; Cassiodorus, Institutiones 2. 3. 2. 121 Number of books: Vitruvius, De Architectura 7, praef. 14; Cassiodorus, Institutiones 2. 3. 2; Isidore, Origines 2. 23.

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Table 4.2. The Gallic canons compared Claudianus, Stat. An. 2. 8

Sidonius, Ep. 5. 2 (not in sequence)

Claudianus, Ep. ad Sapaudum

Sidonius to Claudianus, Ep. 4. 3 (singuli artifices)

in musicis

musica

musice

cum Orpheo plectrum

〈in arithmeticis〉 arithmetica geometria

arithmetica geometrica

in philosophoumenon libris [ = dialectic?]

dialectice

dialectica

astrologia 〈astrologia〉 [?] grammatica grammatica architectonica oratoria

rhetorica

metrica [a clear error] medicina [?] in philosophoumenon libris [?]

cum Archimede radium cum Euclide mensuras Socrates, Plato, Aristotle

cum Vitruvio perpendiculum Aeschines, Demosthenes, Hortensius, etc. cum Aesculapio baculum

philosophia

essay (Table 4.3). But establishing order is difficult, because in economical ‘need to know’ citations the ‘artes’ appear as, for example, ‘Varro in geometriae volumine’,122 or ‘Varro in libro quem de astrologia conscripsit’, without indication of what book the art occupied, or even whether the work formed part of the Disciplinarum Libri. There are also potential 122

Cassiodorus, Institutiones 2. 7. 3, 4 (ed. Mynors, 155. 11, 157. 12).

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Table 4.3. Reconstructions of Varro’s disciplinae Ritschl’s Varro

grammar (358) Isidore Martianus Augustine dialectic (356) Martianus

rhetoric (357) Priscian

geometry (359) Cassiodorus Martianus

arithmetic (362–3) Incertus de grammatica Augustine Nonius Gellius Claudianus

Hadot’s Varro

Martianus’ allusions to Varro, and parallels

Shanzer’s Varro (external evidence)

(162–3) no evidence for its place in the Disciplinarum Libri

3. 229 parallels Ord. 2. 12. 35

Augustine Sidonius Claudianus Martianus

(160, 163–4, 166) no evidence for its existence in the Disciplinarum Libri

mentions Varro 4. 335 (misascribed by Della Corte (241–2) to Rhetoric)

Augustine Sidonius Claudianus Martianus

(172) no evidence for its existence in the Disciplinarum Libri

(173) mentioned by Cassiodorus, but not necessarily as part of the Disciplinarum Libri (159, 175) no trace at all anywhere

Augustine Sidonius Claudianus Martianus

mentions Varro 6. 578, 6. 639, and 6. 662 (mediated by Pliny)

Augustine Licentius Claudianus Martianus

[?] Augustine Claudianus Martianus continued

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Table 4.3. Continued Ritschl’s Varro

astronomy (361) Cassiodorus, etc.

music (361) no explicit testimonium Claudianus

Hadot’s Varro

Martianus’ allusions to Varro, and parallels

Shanzer’s Varro (external evidence)

(167) argument from Martianus is ex silentio (175) no evidence

mentions Varro 8. 817

Augustine Licentius Sidonius Martianus Cassiodorus, Inst. 2. 7. 2

(159, 175)

mentions Varro 9. 928 (mediated by an intervening source)

Licentius Claudianus Martianus

omitted (see 9. 891)

Nonius 〈Augustine〉 〈Sidonius〉

omitted (see 9. 891)

Vitruvius Martianus 〈Augustine〉 Sidonius Martianus

medicine (366–8) Martianus present and Nonius correct Pliny Isidore architecture (364–6) present and correct

problems with Roman numerals. Positivists work themselves up into a lather over what may be a false reading, a dropped or added ‘I’.123 Much of our evidence for what book a given discipline occupied is subject to that sort of corruption. We cannot afford to forget this. 123 Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 159, criticizes Ritschl (a bit unfairly) for this sort of emendation. See Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 370, for musical material ‘in tertio [sic] disciplinarum’ (‘in the third book of the disciplines’).

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Then there is the matter of order. Scholars typically make arguments of the type, ‘X can’t be following Y, because his order is different’. These are unlikely to be universally valid. Order could be varied for philosophical or literary purposes.124 Was sight a higher or lower sense than hearing?125 Should arithmetic come at the beginning (as foundation),126 the middle (sacred hebdomad),127 or the end of the quadrivium (number in abstracto)?128 Should music come first,129 or second in the quadrivium because it linked the ears and sound inherent in the appreciation of the arts of the trivium with the number underlying the quadrivium?130 Or should Music come last to sing an epithalamium?131 Or did the mind progress ‘per aspera ad astra’?132 More ‘give’ (and more room for the requirements of aesthetic and moral agendas) is required in our rules for analysis. All these factors make this sort of source criticism difficult.

Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 169, makes the point well. Augustine, Ord. 2. 14. 41 found the objects of hearing, sounds, lesser things because they were ‘sensibiles res’ that passed on as opposed to the objects that the mind sees. Authoritative sources include Aristotle, Metaphysics A1; Protrepticus Fr. 7. Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus 5. 258 made a different decision: only the horse of hearing accompanies Prudentia and Theologia into the higher regions of heaven (reflecting a Pauline hierarchy of the senses suggested by Romans 10: 17: ‘fides ex auditu’ (‘faith comes from hearing’)). 126 Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 369, incorrectly calls this a later innovation. Hübner, ‘Die “artes liberales” im zweiten Buch von De Ordine’, 341, traces its initial position back to Plato. 127 As in Book 7 of De Nuptiis. 128 As implicitly in Augustine, Ord. See 2. 15. 43: ‘in his ergo omnibus disciplinis occurrebat ei omnia numerosa’ (‘therefore in all these disciplines she encountered entirely things pertaining to number’). 129 Through its control of metrics (shared with grammar) it linked the verbal and mathematical arts. It seems to be first in Augustine, Ord. 2. 14. 39. 130 As could be the implication of Augustine, Ord. 2. 14. 39–41. Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, 369, rightly points out that its position is the most variable among the arts of the quadrivium. 131 As in Book 9 of De Nuptiis. 132 As in the conclusion of Book 2 of Cassiodorus’ Institutiones (ed. Mynors, 158. 3). 124 125

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Non enim audiendi sunt errores gentilium superstitionum, qui novem Musas Iovis et Memoriae filias esse finxerunt. Refellit eos Varro, quo nescio utrum apud eos quisquam talium rerum doctior vel curiosior esse possit. Dicit enim civitatem nescio quam, non enim nomen recolo, locasse apud tres artifices terna simulacra Musarum, quod in templo Apollinis donum poneret, ut quisquis artificum pulchriora formasset, ab illo potissimum electa emeret. Itaque contigisse ut opera sua quoque illi artifices aeque pulchra explicarent, et placuisse civitati omnes novem, atque omnes esse emptas, ut in Apollinis templo dedicarentur; quibus postea dicit Hesiodum poetam imposuisse vocabula. Non ergo Iupiter novem Musas genuit, sed tres fabri ternas creaverunt. Tres autem non propterea illa civitas locaverat, quia in somnis eas viderat, aut tot se cuiusquam illorum oculis demonstraverant; sed quia facile erat animadvertere omnem sonum, quae materies cantilenarum est, triformem esse natura. Aut enim voce editur, sicuti eorum est qui faucibus sine organo canunt; aut flatu, sicut tubarum et tibiarum; aut pulsu, sicut in citharis et tympanis, et quibuslibet aliis quae percutiendo canora sunt. Sed sive ita se habeat, quod Varro retulit, sive non ita, nos tamen non propter superstitionem profanorum debemus musicam fugere, si quid utile ad intellegendas sanctas. scripturas rapere potuerimus . . . (Doct. Chr. 2. 16. 27) We must not pay heed to the errors of the pagan superstitions that pretended that the nine Muses were the daughters of Jove and Memory. Varro refutes them, and I doubt that anyone among them could be more learned in such matters or more curious about them. He said that a certain city, whose name I do not recall, had contracted out to three craftsmen three images of the Muses apiece to dedicate in the temple of Apollo as a gift, on the understanding that whichever of the craftsmen made the more beautiful images, from him by preference it would buy the chosen artwork. And so it came about that the artisans themselves too displayed equally beautiful statues, and the city liked all nine of them, and all were bought to be dedicated in Apollo’s temple. He says that the poet Hesiod ascribed names to them. Therefore it was not Jupiter who begat the nine Muses, but three artisans created three a piece. That city did not dedicate three Muses because it had seen them in dreams or because so many had presented themselves to the sight of one of them, but because it is easy to see that all sound, which is the material of songs, is threefold in nature. Either it is produced by voices, as is the case with those who sing with their throats without an organ, or by blowing, as of trumpets or flutes, or by

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striking, as with citharae and drums, or whatever other instruments give tongue when struck. Whether this is the case, as Varro tells it, or not, we all the same should not flee music on account of the superstition of the profane, as long as we can snatch something useful for understanding sacred scripture thence . . .

In De Doctrina Christiana 2. 16. 26 Augustine saves one liberal art, music. Immediately (in the passage quoted above) he argues against the ‘errors of pagan superstition’ that consider the Muses the daughters of Jupiter and Memory. Varro, the most learned and most ‘curiosus’ in such matters, refuted them. Augustine narrates a rationalizing Varronian account of the reproduction of statues of the (originally) three Muses. Three statues were reproduced thrice and thus became nine. The Muses are three not because they appeared in dreams or in person, but because sound’s classification is tripartite: vocal, blown, or struck.133 Varro reappears at the end of the passage. In Retractationes 1. 3. 2 Augustine regretted that he had ‘attributed a great deal to the liberal arts’ and that he had said, albeit in jest, that the Muses were goddesses: Verum et in his libris displicet mihi saepe interpositum fortunae vocabulum . . . et quod multum tribui liberalibus disciplinis, quas multi sancti multum nesciunt; quidam etiam qui sciunt eas sancti non sunt; et quod Musas quasi aliquas deas quamvis iocando commemoravi. Indeed in these books too I regret that I frequently inserted the name of Fortune . . . and that I attributed a great deal to the liberal arts of which many holy people are very ignorant and even some who know them [well] are not holy and that I mentioned the Muses as if they were some sort of goddesses—even if only in jest.

The passage he was alluding to was De Ordine 2. 14. 41: Et quoniam illud quod mens videt semper est praesens et inmortale adprobatur—cuius generis numeri apparebant—sonus autem, quia sensibilis res est, praeterfluit in praeteritum tempus 133 See Ord. 2. 14. 39 for the identical triple classification of sound. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 120, notes that it appears in Doct. Chr. in ‘un contexte varronien, ce qui ne prouve pas nécessairement que ce soit Varron qui ait inventé cette division. Varron l’a probablement tirée d’une œuvre grecque.’

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inprimiturque memoriae, rationabili mendacio iam poetis favente ratione Iovis et Memoriae filias Musas esse confictum est. Unde ista disciplina sensus intellectusque particeps musicae nomen invenit. And because what the mind sees is always present and is considered immortal—numbers seemed to be of this sort—but sound, because it is a thing apprehended by the senses, flows by into time past and is imprinted on memory, by a reasonable falsehood, with reason on the side of the poets, it was pretended that the Muses were the daughters of Memory. From this that discipline, which partakes both of intellection and sense perception, found the name ‘music’.

He thus rejected his statement of 386, where he had called the falsehood ‘reasonable’ (rationabile) and consistent with ‘reason’ (ratione), by claiming to have been joking. Demythologization and demystification of the Muses show that Augustine was disquieted by them.134 In De Doctrina Christiana, I would guess, he sneakily tried to refute Varro from the latter’s own works. Varro had discussed the evolution of the canon from three to nine; yet he is cited by Augustine to prove that the Muses are three in number (not nine) and not goddesses, even though there is independent evidence that Varro assigned a ‘novenarius numerus’ or ninefold number to them.135 Augustine would never mention them by name again.136 Varro was a rationalizer, an antiquarian, a student of the gods, and a devotee of personifications. It was the form and fancy dress, not just the matter, of his Disciplinarum Libri that almost certainly disquieted Augustine. For, unlike Apollonius of Tyana,137 Augustine had little time for literary 134 Or could it be the number of occasions on which he teased Licentius about his Muses? See Ord. 1. 3. 6: ‘Nam video tibi Musam tuam lumen ad lucubrandum accendisse’ (‘For I see that your muse has lit the lamp for burning the midnight oil’); 1. 8. 24: ‘Vade ergo interim ad illas Musas’ (‘Go in the meantime to those Muses’). 135 See the text of Arnobius cited above, n. 80. 136 Confirmed by a search of the Chadwyck–Healy electronic Patrologia Latina database. 137 See the charming anecdote about Apollonius and the Mesopotamian customs-officer at Philostratus, Vita Apollonii 1. 20, where he ‘declares’ his accompanying ladies Sophrosyne, Dikaiosyne, etc. They are not slavegirls, he says, but mistresses (despoinai).

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Alexandrianism, where books and disciplines could become ladies.138 However, the Platonic upward journey through the mathematical disciplines, as outlined in the Disciplinarum Libri, was a powerful and attractive concept.139 In characteristic fashion Augustine internalized and adapted it.140 He also made use of some of Varro’s disciplinary material.141 He largely suppressed the personifications of the ‘artes’— but not entirely successfully.142 Consider the implicit personification of grammar in De Ordine 2. 12. 36: ‘Poterat iam perfecta esse grammatica sed, quia ipso nomine profiteri se litteras clamat unde etiam Latine litteratura dicitur factum est, ut quidquid dignum memoria litteris mandaretur, ad eam necessario pertineret.’143 But an even more notable personification dominates this passage of De Ordine, Ratio herself, with whom Augustine would soon converse in the Soliloquia. He ensures, however, that she is not a visible person, let alone a female one, but a disembodied voice. Even whether this is an inner or an outer voice is unclear: ‘ait mihi subito sive ego ipse, sive aliusquis 〈sive〉 extrinsecus sive intrinsecus . . .’144 (‘Some one said to me suddenly, whether I myself or someone else, be it outside or inside . . .’). In De 138 See the Callimachean ‘programmatic’ passages: (1) Aetia, prol. 11–12: ‘of two, that Mimnermus was sweet . . . the big (µεγα´λη) woman did not teach’, often thought to refer to his ‘big’ elegy, named after his mistress Nanno; (2) Fr. 398, on Antimachus’ Lyde: ‘Lyde, a fat (παχυ´) book and not clear’. 139 Hübner, ‘Die “artes liberales” im zweiten Buch von De Ordine’, 322, rightly notes that the upward journey begins with the mathematical disciplines. 140 Ord. 2. 14. 39; 2. 15. 42: ‘terram caelumque collustrans’ (‘wandering over earth and heaven’); 2. 15. 43: ‘Hic se multum erexit multumque praesumpsit’ (‘At this point she raises herself a great deal and takes much upon herself’); 2. 20. 53: ‘scientiae non tam itinera quam ipsos campos ac liquida aequora’ (‘not so much roads of knowledge as very fields and liquid seas’). 141 See Doignon, Dialogues philosophiques: De Ordine, 363–78, for a terse and recent summary. 142 See also Doct. Chr. 2. 25. 39 on statues and 3. 6. 11 on Neptune. Hübner, ‘Die “artes liberales” im zweiten Buch von De Ordine’, 312, notes that there is partial personification in Ord. that lends it ‘eine Art romanhafte Handlung’. 143 Translated above, n. 37. 144 Sol. 1. 1.

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Ordine 2. 16. 45 we can see Augustine consciously playing with the idea of the ‘corpus’ and the ‘anima’ of grammar (or Grammar): Monica grasps its soul while leaving its body to the ‘diserti’ (‘eloquent’).145 Varro must have been among the latter. In De Ordine are signs both of the present and of the future. Full assent is given to grammar and dialectic, but almost no attention is paid to rhetoric, perhaps because of the author’s own conflict about its morality and the post he had given up.146 Astrology is already designated as dangerous.147 Geometry appears in the Soliloquia.148 Grammar and dialectic are reconsidered in Soliloquia 2. 11. 19–20, but the literary duties of the grammarian have already become suspect; that trend would continue in the diatribes of Book 1 of the Confessions.149 The unquestioning acceptance in the Soliloquia that the face of ‘Veritas’ could be reached through education in the disciplines and that the disciplines could be recovered by (Platonic) reminiscence150 had to be carefully retracted in 427.151 In De Doctrina Christiana, it is true, 145 ‘Sed tu contemptis istis vel puerilibus rebus vel ad te non pertinentibus ita grammaticae paene divinam vim naturamque cognosces, ut eius animam tenuisse, corpus disertis reliquisse videaris.’ (‘But you, having rejected those things that are either childish or have nothing to do with you, will so know the almost divine power of grammar that you seem to hold its soul, while leaving its body to the eloquent.’) 146 See Conf. 9. 2. 3–4, 4. 7. It is not entirely clear whether Augustine resigned officially before the date of De Ordine (November 386). 147 Ord. 2. 15. 42. 148 Sol. 1. 9. 3; 2. 32. 8. 149 On the presentation of the ‘artes’ in Conf. see Burton’s essay below. 150 Sol. 2. 35. 1: ‘Tales sunt, qui bene disciplinis liberalibus eruditi; siquidem illas sine dubio in se oblivione obrutas errunt discendo et quodammodo refodiunt, nec tamen contenti sunt nec se tenent, donec totam faciem veritatis, cuius quidam in illis artibus splendor iam subrutilat, latissime atque plenissime intueantur.’ (‘They are like this who are well educated in the liberal arts; if they err in learning them because they are no doubt buried in oblivion inside them, and somehow dig them out, they are nonetheless not content nor do they contain themselves until they gaze most extensively and exhaustively upon the whole face of the truth, whose splendor already glows somewhat more gently in those arts.’) 151 Retr. 1. 4. 4: ‘Item quodam loco dixi, quod disciplinis liberalibus eruditi, sine dubio in se illas oblivione obrutas eruunt discendo, et quodam modo refodiunt. Sed hoc quoque improbo: credibilius est enim, propterea

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Augustine saved music, the one liberal art that he continued to pursue in Africa and returned to with longing and disquiet in the Confessions.152 But by the time of the Letter to Memor in 408/9 it too had largely fallen from favour, as had the so-called liberal arts.153 This essay has concentrated on the younger Augustine and his attitude to the disciplines, to suggest that Hadot’s dismissal of Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri as a source was premature. The tortured relationship of the bishop of Hippo to the scholar of Reate that we see in the City of God almost certainly ante-dates that work by more than twenty years. I hope to have illuminated that relationship by reading closely and to some extent between the lines. It may be possible to

vera respondere de quibusdam disciplinis, etiam imperitos earum, quando bene interrogantur, quia praesens est eis, quantum id capere possunt, lumen rationis aeternae, ubi haec immutabilia vera conspiciunt; non quia ea noverant aliquando, et obliti sunt, quod Platoni, vel talibus visum est.’ (‘Likewise I said somewhere that those learned in the liberal arts doubtless dig them up if they are buried in oblivion within them and somehow excavate them. But this too I reject, for it is more believable that even those who are unskilled in the disciplines can give correct answers about some of them when they are questioned skillfully, because the light of eternal reason is present to them to the extent that they can understand it, when they see these immutable truths. It is not the case that they knew them once and forgot them, as Plato and such people thought.’) 152 Pizzani, ‘L’Enciclopedia agostiniana’, 356, notes that De Musica is too long to form part of an encyclopaedia, but has developed a life of its own. Music had a place in Conf. 9. 6. 14–7. 15 and 10. 33. 49. 153 Ep. 101 to Memor (408/9) 1: ‘non quia nolui, sed quia non potui . . . per nostrum ministerium non litteris illis, quas variarum servi libidinum liberales vocant’ (‘Not because I was unwilling, but because I could not . . . through my offices, not those letters that the slaves of various lusts call “liberal” ’); 3: ‘Verum quia in omnibus rerum motibus quid numeri valeant facilius consideratur in vocibus, eaque consideratio quibusdam quasi gradatis itineribus nititur ad superna intima veritatis, in quibus viis ostendit se sapientia hilariter et in omni providentia occurrit amantibus’ (‘It is true that in all movements of things it will more easily be seen what power numbers have in the case of voices, and this examination strives towards the secret upper regions of truth by certain successive paths as it were; in these paths wisdom shows herself cheerfully and meets those who love her in all providence’). He sends Book 6 of De Musica, but not the first five, which he does not deem worthy of Julian.

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break up a bedevilling log-jam in Varronian source criticism by granting that lists are rarely of lapidary perfection, but have their purposes in their own contexts, that numerals can be corrupted, and that enumerative texts need not invariably fetishize their predecessors’ order and hierarchy. As for Augustine himself, it is crucial not to forget that all his writings were occasional. They respond to social forces and texts ‘out there’ in his largely lost environment. We must read between the lines and examine tergiversations and temporizings, and wonder whether his aversion to the disciplines after an initial attempt to use them as a cure for the ‘plagae opinionum’154 (‘wounds consisting of opinions’) was partly internal and whether the mathematical ones were beyond him. But there were no doubt external factors too. These may have included Ambrose155 or fundamentalist friends.156 Augustine may even have foreseen his eventual position in De Doctrina Christiana. But above all there was the intimidating realization that all the Bible lay ahead of him for exegesis, and that there would never be world enough and time. These factors can help us to understand what happened between November 386 and April of 387 to take the bloom off Augustine’s disciplines and cause him essentially to abandon the project. But ultimately his personal intellectual crises and qualms about secular learning and female personifications had little effect. Within less than 150 years a Christian Boethius would hold a prison colloquy with a superbly personified and fully visualized Philosophy.157 And the seven liberal arts, both personified and canonized, would reign throughout the Middle Ages. 154 Ord. 1. 1. 3: ‘Quod hi tantum adsequuntur, qui plagas quasdam opinionum, quae vitae cotidianae cursus infligit, aut solitudine inurunt aut liberalibus medicant disciplinis.’ (‘These alone pursue this who either impress indelibly through solitude or heal with the liberal disciplines certain wounds [consisting] of opinions that the course of daily life inflicts upon them.’) 155 For whose attitude, see P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967), 112, and the essay by Heßbrüggen-Walter in this volume. 156 Augustine may hint at the existence of this adverse body of opinion when he mentions those he did consult when working on the ‘artes’, who ‘did not shudder at these sorts of disciplines’, in Retr. 1. 5. 6. 157 Contrast Augustine’s treatment of Ratio in Sol. 1. 1.

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Appendix: Cicero and the ‘Muses’ of Varro Atticus: ‘Omitte ista quae nec percunctari nec audire sine molestia possumus, quaeso,’ inquit, ‘et quaere potius ecquid ipse novi. Silent enim diutius Musae Varronis quam solebant, nec tamen istum cessare sed celare quae scribat existimo.’ ‘Minime vero,’ inquit ille, ‘intemperantis enim arbitror esse scribere quod occultari velit; sed habeo magnum opus in manibus, quae iam pridem; ad hunc enim ipsum’ (me autem dicebat) ‘quaedam institui, quae et sunt magna sane et limantur a me politius.’ (Cicero, Academica 1. 1–2) Then Atticus said, ‘Please leave out those things that we cannot ask about or hear without annoyance and inquire rather whether there is anything new with him [sc. Varro]. For Varro’s Muses are silent for rather longer than they used to be, but I do not think that he is delaying, but hiding158 what he writes.’159 ‘Absolutely not,’ says he [sc. Varro], ‘for I consider it the act of an injudicious man to write what he might want to remain hidden. But I have a major work on my hands, 〈and have had it〉160 for some time. For I have set to work on some writings addressed to this man himself (he meant me [sc. Cicero]) that are both a major enterprise and are being filed and polished by me.’

Atticus had suggested that Cicero dedicate a work to Varro in 54 (Ep. ad Atticum 4. 16. 2). Cicero did not have an appropriate item and delayed doing so till he decided to introduce Varro into the second edition of the Academica (Att. 13. 12. 3). At that time (45 b c) Varro had already promised him the dedication of an unspecified work two years earlier.161 It is generally assumed that the work promised by Varro was Book 5 of De Lingua Latina which he did indeed eventually 158 The point is humorously picked up by Cicero at Academica 1. 3: ‘nihil enim eius modi celare possumus’ (‘For we cannot conceal anything of that sort’). 159 Or better still, given the subjunctive, ‘what sort of thing he is writing’. 160 ‘Quae’, however, is plural. 161 Cicero, Ep. ad Atticum 13. 12. 3: ‘Iam Varro mihi denuntiaverat magnam sane et gravem προσφ9νησιν. Biennium praeteriit cum ille καλλιπδη adsiduo cursu cubitum nullum processerit.’ (‘Already Varro had announced to me the dedication of a very major and serious work. Two years have gone by, but that Kallipides, though running persistently, has not progressed [even a] yard.’)

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dedicate to Cicero. It is also assumed that De Lingua Latina is the work under discussion at the opening of the Academica, the one Atticus teases Varro about.162 If, however, the badinage is only about De Lingua Latina, then there is a need to explain why he could be said to be ‘hiding’ it (‘celare’), given that Books 2–4 were out and dedicated to Publius Septimius (De Lingua Latina 5. 1).163 If two works are at issue, however, the problems are solved. Atticus teases Varro about the Musae, and Varro is depicted by Cicero as responding with the excuse that his ‘magnum opus in manibus’ (the Disciplinarum Libri) is causing the delay. 162 L. Straume-Zimmermann, F. Broemser, and O. Gigon, Marcus Tullius Cicero: Hortensius, Lucullus, Academici Libri (Darmstadt, 1990), 454–5. 163 H. Dahlmann, ‘Marcus Terentius Varro’, in RE Supplementband vi (1935), 1172–277 at 1204: ‘Daß Varro die Bücher II–IV an Septimius schon vor 47, ehe er die Absicht hatte, an Cicero ein Werk zu richten, publiziert hat, möchte ich deswegen für wahrscheinlich halten, weil er sonst der Einheitlichkeit wegen das ganze Werk unter Ciceros Namen gestellt haben würde.’

5 Divination and the Disciplines of Knowledge according to Augustine W i l l i a m E. K l i n g s h i r n

Nam si singulas disciplinas percipere magnum est, quanto maius omnis. Cicero, De Natura Deorum1

1. i n t r o d u c t i o n Shortly before his ordination as bishop, probably in 394, Augustine composed, in addition to Contra Adimantum, several popular sermons against the Manichaean Adimantus, whose Disputationes against the Law and the Prophets had recently come to his attention.2 Possidius lists five ‘tractatus’ in this series, of which three survive: Sermons 1, 50, and 12.3 The last (and probably latest) of these defends a passage from the book of Job: ‘Behold came angels into the sight of I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for a fellowship supporting the research on which this chapter is based. 1 ‘For if it is a daunting task to grasp individual disciplines, how much more so to grasp all of them!’ (1. 11). 2 Retr. 1. 22. 1. For the career and writings of Addas (Latinized as Adimantus), traditionally one of Mani’s three early disciples, see G. S. Gasparro, ‘Addas-Adimantus unus ex discipulis Manichaei: For the History of Manichaeism in the West’, in R. E. Emmerick (ed.), Studia Manichaica, iv: Internationaler Kongreβ zum Manichäismus, Berlin, 14.–18. Juli 1997, Berichte und Abhandlungen, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sonderband 4 (Berlin, 2000), 546–59. 3 Possidius iv. 29–33, ed. A. Wilmart, Miscellanea Agostininiana, ii: Studi Agostiniani (Rome, 1931), 167. On the chronology, see F. Cavallera, ‘Notes chronologiques et hagiographiques sur quelques sermons de saint Augustin’, Bulletin de Littérature Ecclésiastique 31 (1930), 21–30, at 21–3.

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God, and the devil in their midst. And God said to the devil, “Where do you come from?” And the devil replied, “Circling the whole world, I have arrived”’ (Job 1: 6).4 In this sermon, Augustine is concerned to point out how God could speak to the devil without the devil’s actually seeing him. His aim is to defend the passage from Adimantus’ charge that it contradicts the gospel saying that ‘Blessed are those who are pure of heart, for they shall see God’ (Matt. 5: 8).5 To do this, Augustine launches into what amounts to a comprehensive survey of all the modes of divine communication with humankind. Now there are many ways in which God speaks with us. At times he speaks through an instrument, as through a codex of the divine scriptures (per codicem divinarum scripturarum). He speaks through a heavenly body, as he spoke to the Magi through a star (per stellam). . . . He speaks through a lot (per sortem), just as he spoke concerning the choice of Matthias in place of Judas. He speaks through the human soul (per animam humanam), as through a prophet. He speaks through an angel (per angelum), just as we understand him to have spoken to certain patriarchs and prophets and apostles. He speaks through a creature (per . . . creaturam) endowed with speech and sound, just as we read and believe of voices produced from the heavens, although no one is visible to the eye. Finally God speaks directly to a person, not externally through the ears or eyes, but internally in the soul, and not in one way only, but in dreams (in somnis) . . . or with a person’s spirit lifted up (spiritu hominis assumpto), which the Greeks call ecstasis, . . . or in the mind itself (in ipsa mente), when each person understands his majesty and his will.6

4 Serm. 12. 1: ‘Ecce venerunt angeli in conspectum dei, et diabolus in medio eorum. Et deus ait diabolo: Unde venis? Qui respondens dixit: Circumiens totum orbem adveni.’ 5 Ibid.: ‘Beati qui puro sunt corde, quia ipsi deum videbunt’ (CCSL 41. 165). 6 Serm. 12. 4: ‘Multi autem modi sunt, quibus nobiscum loquitur deus. Loquitur aliquando per aliquod instrumentum, sicut per codicem divinarum scripturarum. Loquitur per aliquod elementum mundi, sicut per stellam magis locutus est. . . . Loquitur per sortem, sicut de Mathia in locum Iudae ordinando, locutus est. Loquitur per animam humanam, sicut per prophetam. Loquitur per angelum, sicut patriarcharum et prophetarum et apostolorum quibusdam locutum esse accipimus. Loquitur per aliquam vocalem sonantemque creaturam, sicut de caelo

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This list is consistent with Augustine’s keen and tolerant interest in divination in the period between his conversion and the writing of the Confessions. In addition to the expected forms of divine communication (angels and prophets), it also mentions several kinds that can clearly be categorized as divinatory (although Augustine would never have used the word).7 These include divination by lot, by the stars, by ecstasies and dreams, and by the direct mental transfer that he believed could occur in certain cases. Augustine included these types of divination because, like many other Christians, he believed that under the right conditions they could legitimately convey God’s knowledge. Other types, such as those involving animal sacrifice or the consultation of demons, he deliberately left off the list, for the same reasons that he gave in Confessions 4. 2. 3 for refusing to employ a haruspex. It is notable that, along with objectionable kinds of divination, Augustine also omitted diviners from his catalogue. Not that such figures are entirely absent from his early writings: half a book of the Contra Academicos is taken up with his description of the ‘hariolus’ Albicerius; astrologers are featured in the Confessions; and various kinds of diviners are attacked in the sermons. But, unlike divination, which could in certain forms and under certain circumstances channel God’s knowledge, diviners, Augustine believed, had no access of their own to offer. In the worst cases, for instance the haruspex in the Confessions, that was because they performed sacrifices or trafficked with demons. But even if diviners supplied harmless knowledge, Augustine believed it was either of a trivial kind, like Albicerius’, or, if more significant, the result of a divinely inspired conjuction

voces factas, cum oculis nullus videretur, legimus et tenemus. Ipsi denique homini, non extrinsecus per aures eius aut oculos, sed intus in animo non uno modo deus loquitur, sed aut in somnis . . . aut spiritu hominis assumpto, quam graeci extasin vocant, . . . aut in ipsa mente, cum quisque maiestatem vel voluntatem intellegit’ (CCSL 41.167–8). For the date, see P.-P. Verbraken, Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de Saint Augustin, Instrumenta Patristica 12 (The Hague, 1976), 55. 7 See the article of J. den Boeft in AL ii. 518–19, s.v. ‘Divinatio’.

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between the diviner’s chance words and thoughts already in the inquirer’s mind (Conf. 4. 3. 5). Such for instance was his explanation in Confessions 7. 6. 9 of the apparent accuracy of some astrologers’ predictions.8 The connection between Augustine’s opinion of diviners and his understanding of the disciplines lies just below the surface of this reasoning. For the kind of diviner against whom Augustine’s polemic was directed was the diviner who operated, according to Cicero’s (and ultimately Plato’s) distinction, by skill (‘ars’) rather than inspiration (‘natura’).9 By ceaselessly attacking such figures in his sermons and other writings, Augustine aligned himself with existing Christian teaching, philosophical opinion, and imperial legislation. But, more significantly for our purposes, he also implicitly rejected a long Roman tradition of treating skilled diviners as possessors of a ‘disciplina’, an organized system of interpreting signs and obtaining knowledge that was not innate or inspired, but could be learned and applied. Why Augustine did this is, in retrospect, not particularly puzzling. First, in the ‘economy of knowledge’ in which divination operated, too much emphasis on technical systems of interpretation threatened to place skill before virtue. Already evident in Plato’s hostility to artificial divination, this view repeatedly resurfaces in the Platonic tradition. Another problem for Augustine and other Platonists was that technical divination, whether it emphasized skill or virtue, seemed to overvalue human agency and thus leave no room for divine autonomy or, in Christian terms, grace. A third problem was that the successful workings of divination were widely attributed to daimones, whom Christians condemned as demons. But Augustine’s mature views on these matters, as expressed most fully in City of God, took a long time to develop. And in the fifteen years from conversion

8 See further W. E. Klingshirn, ‘The Figure of Albicerius the Diviner in Augustine’s Contra Academicos’, StPatr 38 (2001), 219–23. 9 Plato, Phaedrus 244C–E; Cicero, De Divinatione 1. 6. 12. See, in general, A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’Antiquité, i (Paris, 1879), 29–91.

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to the Confessions, his changing treatment of the disciplines can be used as a lens through which to view his continuing fascination with divination. It is especially interesting to observe Augustine using techniques from the disciplines he accepted, particularly grammatical learning and the dialectical arts of division and classification, against the disciplines he rejected.10 2. d i v i nat i o n a s a d i s c i p l i n e For almost half a millennium before Augustine, the overwhelmingly positive connotations of the word ‘disciplina’ had appealed to Romans who wished to portray artificial divination as a respectable science. Its core meanings— ‘learning’ and ‘what or how a learner has learned’ (clearly displayed in the unsyncopated form ‘discipulina’11)— associated it not only with teaching (‘doctrina’), knowledge (‘scientia’), and skilled practice (‘ars’), but also with severity, manners, moral formation, and good order.12 Used of the philosophical schools and of training in grammar, music, and other skills, the word brought to mind the social recognition and organization of the higher arts, and even more reassuringly the stabilizing, traditional authority of a teacher, without whom no one could apprehend a discipline.13 It was, accordingly, for Cicero the right word to describe not only

10 On the grammarian as ‘a man of distinctions’, see R. A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 19. 11 e.g., in the entry for ‘Tages’ in Festus, De Verborum Significatu: ‘Tages nomine, geni filius, nepos Iovis, puer dicitur discipulinam haruspicii dedisse duodecim populis Etruriae.’ 12 The fundamental studies of the word are by A. Gudeman, TLL v. 1 (1915), cols. 1316–26, s.v. ‘disciplina’, and O. Mauch, Der lateinische Begriff Disciplina: Eine Wortuntersuchung (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1941). See also H.-I. Marrou, ‘ “Doctrina” et “Disciplina” dans la langue des Pères de l’Église’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 9 (1934), 5–25, at 10–12. See also, in this volume, the definition offered by Catherine Conybeare, above 59. 13 Augustine, Util. Cred. 17. 35: ‘et si unaquaeque disciplina, quamquam vilis et facilis, ut percipi possit, doctorem aut magistrum requirit’ (CSEL 25[1].46).

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haruspicy, suitably denominated the ‘Etrusca disciplina’,15 but also augury, its Roman counterpart.16 Cicero declined to pay exactly the same compliment to astrology, but in the first book of De Divinatione, expressing views favourable to divination, he did call it, synonymously, an ‘ars’ and a ‘scientia’ (1. 1. 2).17 Later in the same book he associated astrologers with haruspices, to whom he explicitly assigned a ‘disciplina’ (1. 19. 36). Further, in a letter of 46 b c, he associated astrologers with augurs, likewise credited in the text with a ‘disciplina’.18 But Cicero went no further. He did list ‘astrologia’ along with the liberal arts of music, geometry, grammar, and rhetoric in De Oratore (1. 42. 187), but by this he meant what we would call astronomy.19 Varro did the same in his De Astrologia,20 possibly one of the nine books of his Disciplinae.21 After Cicero and Varro, ‘disciplina’ became a standard Latin term for the teaching of the divinatory sciences.22 This usage reached its high point in fourth-century pagan circles. As before, ‘disciplina’ continued to be used of individual 14 ‘haruspicum disciplina’, ‘haruspicinae disciplina’: De Divinatione 1. 2. 3, 41. 91; 2. 23. 50; see also 2. 12. 28, 38. 80. 15 C. O. Thulin, RE vi. 1 (1907), cols. 725–30, s.v. ‘Etrusca disciplina’. 16 ‘Atqui et nostrorum augurum et Etruscorum disciplinam . . . res ipsa probavit’: De Natura Deorum 2. 10. See also De Divinatione 1. 17. 33, 47. 105; 2. 35. 74; De Legibus 2. 8. 20, 13. 32–3; De Natura Deorum 2. 9. 17 On the related meanings of ‘disciplina’, ‘ars’, and ‘scientia’, see G. Schrimpf, ‘Disciplina’, in Joachim Ritter (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ii (Basel and Stuttgart, 1972), cols. 256–9. 18 Fam. 6. 6. 7 (= 234. 7, ed. Shackleton-Bailey). 19 For the difference, see Cicero, De Divinatione 2. 42. 88, and more generally, W. Hübner, Die Begriffe ‘Astrologie’ und ‘Astronomie’ in der Antike, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1989, no. 7 (Stuttgart, 1990). 20 Cassiodorus, Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum 2. 7. 2. 21 F. Ritschl, ‘De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius’, in his Opuscula Philologica, iii (Leipzig, 1877), 361; I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris, 1984), 175. See now the essay by Shanzer above, esp. 93. 22 For haruspicy, see Thulin, RE vi. 1, col. 725; for augury, see J. Linderski, ‘The Augural Law’, ANRW 16.3 (1986), 2146–312, at 2237–40; and for astrology, see Vitruvius, De Architectura 1. 1. 16; 9. 2. 1, 6. 2; Apuleius, De Dogmate Platonis 1. 3.

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forms of divination: augury, haruspicy, and, at least once, astrology.25 But the term also began to be used of divinatory systems in general. In his description of the state of learning in contemporary Alexandria, for instance, Ammianus Marcellinus lists among ‘the masters of the disciplines’ (‘disciplinarum magistri’) those skilled in geometry, music, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as those who possess the knowledge (‘scientia’) that ‘shows the ways of the fates’ (22. 16. 17). In a digression on the Persian magi, he tells us that in addition to what they learned from Zoroaster, they handed on to their offspring the ‘disciplines of predicting the future’ (‘disciplinis praesentiendi futura’, 23. 6. 33). In his account of the treasonous divination session performed by the diviners Patricius and Hilarius, he represents Hilarius as saying that the ring they used for the ceremony was ‘consecrated by secret disciplines’ (‘anulum . . . mysticis disciplinis initiatum’), that is by learned divinatory rituals (29. 1. 31). Finally, in the long analysis of divination that justifies Julian’s skill in it, Ammianus explains that humans receive the ‘gifts of divining’ (‘munera divinandi’) from what they obtain ‘through the various disciplines’ (‘per disciplinas varias’, 21. 1.8). It was therefore fitting for a philosopher like Julian, ‘both learned and zealous for all knowledge’ (‘erudito et studioso cognitionum omnium’, 21. 1. 7), to possess significant divinatory abilities. Such all-encompassing knowledge, potent both in divination and in philosophical wisdom, had become a commonplace by the fourth century. Consider Servius’ explanation of the phrase ‘hominum divumque interpres’, used of the Etruscan diviner Asilas in Aeneid 10. 175: 23 e.g., in commentaries on the Aeneid by Servius (5. 530) and Servius Danielis (2. 692–3; 3. 60, 90, 359; 4. 453, 462; 5. 530). See also Macrobius, Sat. 1. 24: ‘Apud poetam nostrum, inquit, tantam scientiam iuris auguralis invenio, ut, si aliarum disciplinarum doctrina destitueretur, haec illum vel sola professio sublimaret’ (“In our poet”, he said, “I find so great a knowledge of the augural law that if the teaching of the other disciplines were left behind, the profession of this knowledge, even by itself, would ennoble him”). 24 Servius on Aen. 1. 733; 4. 166; Servius Danielis on Aen. 1. 2, 422; Ammianus Marcellinus 21. 1. 10. 25 Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis 2. 30. 14. See also Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 1. 5: ‘at Chaldaeorum ex reconditis disciplinis’.

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An interpres is an intermediary (medium). For the interpreter (interpretator) both of the gods and of the humans to whom he indicates divine thoughts (divinas mentes) is called an interpres. What Nigidius Figulus says must also be noted, that these arts (artes) are so interconnected that one cannot exist without another. For this reason Virgil assigns the knowledge (scientia) of all the arts of divining (omnium divinandi artium) to those whom he wishes to prove perfect.26

The perfect diviner of this ideal was like the diviner described in a horoscope by Firmicus Maternus: ‘knowing much and inquiring thoroughly into the secrets of all the disciplines’ (‘multa sciens et omnium disciplinarum secreta perquirens’).27 For many, Virgil himself was the supreme example of such comprehensive disciplinary knowledge.28 Macrobius, for instance, describes him in the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio as ‘lacking in no discipline’ (‘nullius disciplinae expers’, 1. 6. 44) and ‘most skilled in all the disciplines’ (‘disciplinarum omnium peritissimus’, 1. 15. 12).29 It is thus with the highest praise for Vettius Agorius Praetextatus that Aconia Fabia Paulina is presented on their joint epitaph as saying, ‘Releasing me pure and chaste from the fate of death by the good of your disciplinae, husband, you lead me into temples and dedicate your servant to the gods.’30 The most systematic association between the liberal and the divinatory disciplines can be found in the Marriage 26 ‘ “Interpres” medium est: nam et deorum interpretator, et hominum, quibus divinas indicat mentes, interpres vocatur. Et notandum quod ait Nigidius Figulus, has artes ita inter sese esse coniunctas, ut alterum sine altero esse non possit: unde his quos perfectos vult probare Vergilius, omnium divinandi artium praestat scientiam’: G. Thilo and H. Hagen (eds.), Servii Grammatici qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, ii (Leipzig, 1883), 408. 27 Mathesis 5. 1. 16; cf. 5. 1. 17: ‘multarum artium ac disciplinarum scius’. 28 J. den Boeft, ‘Nullius Disciplinae Expers: Virgil’s Authority in (Late) Antiquity’, in L. V. Rutgers et al. (eds.), The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World (Leuven, 1998), 175–86. 29 Similar language is found in Servius Danielis: ‘omnium disciplinarum scientiam’ (on Aen. 1. 305) and ‘disciplinis omnibus eruditam’ (on Aen. 8. 314). 30 ‘Tu me, marite, disciplinarum bono / puram ac pudicam sorte mortis eximens / in templa ducis ac famulam divis dicas’ (ILS 1259. 22–4).

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of Philology and Mercury of Martianus Capella. Here the liberal disciplines, allegorized as maidens raised in Mercury’s household (1. 36K), are balanced by the seven mantic disciplines, allegorized as maidens reared by Philology’s mother Phronesis (9. 892K). Unlike the maidens representing the liberal disciplines, the virgins raised by Phronesis are never subjected to a full examination. Thus we learn the specialties of only four of them (9. 894–6K); the other three are a mysterious trinity.32 Genethliace represents Astrology; Symbolice is concerned with the interpretation of omens and portents; Oeonistice stands for augury through birds; and the last sister interprets Jupiter’s lightning through haruspicy.33 Since the interpretation of omens and portents in Roman religion was the usual province of haruspices (although other kinds of diviners could also be employed), the four divinatory specialties named here are in fact equivalent to the same three we have seen characterized elsewhere as ‘disciplinae’. Compared with the liberal disciplines, all seven mantic disciplines are said to be endowed with an equal or greater erudition (9. 892K). This consists of a knowledge of divine secrets (‘superum . . . pectorum arcana’) and of interpretations of the hidden divine will (‘voluntatis abditae interpretamenta’, 9. 893K). They alone are said to be able to mediate between humans and gods (‘nam inter divina

31 On the work and its late fifth-century date, see D. Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Liber 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 1–28. Paragraph numbers below are from the edition of Kopp. 32 In his commentary on Martianus Capella, Remigius of Auxerre states that Augustine names all seven mantic disciplines: ‘Augustinus in libro De Civitate Dei earum nomina dicit’: C. E. Lutz (ed.), Remigii Autissiodorensis Commentum in Martianum Capellam, Libri III–IX (Leiden, 1965), 298. I am not aware of any single passage in which Augustine does this, although he does list many types of divination at various points, including astrology (Civ. 5. 7) and augury, haruspicy, inspired prophecy, and dreams (Civ. 8. 16). 33 For these identifications, see L. Cristante, Martiani Capellae De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Liber IX (Padua, 1987), 196–202, and L. Lenaz, Martiani Capellae De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Liber Secundus (Padua, 1975), 110–11.

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humanaque discidia solae semper interiunxere colloquia’, 9. 893K), and when shamefully expelled from the earth (‘terris indecenter expulsas’, 9. 898K)—a telling indication of Martianus’ late date34—they will be fittingly received in the stars. Raised by Phronesis in the same household as Philology and constituting a part of her dowry, they can therefore be understood in the allegory to have played a significant formative role in her education. Accordingly, the Muses Terpsichore and Euterpe praise Philology for her knowledge of the arts of divination (2. 124–5K). Already in the fourth century, the full conjunction of disciplinary and divinatory knowledge that Martianus Capella was later to bestow upon Philology was crystallized into the set phrase ‘scientiae disciplinis’ (‘by the disciplines of knowledge’). Arnobius of Sicca, writing before 310, provides our earliest example. Addressing pagans who claim to possess ‘sapientia’ and ‘intelligentia’, he demands to know from where they have received so much wisdom (‘tantum sapientiae’) or mental perception (‘acuminis et vivacitatis tantum’), or from what disciplines of knowledge (‘scientiae disciplinis’) they have obtained so much understanding (‘tantum cordis’) or derived so much divination (‘divinationis tantum’).35 Beneath Arnobius’ sarcasm, we glimpse the pagan claim that the ‘disciplines of knowledge’ were the source of understanding and divination. A more direct example comes from the introduction to Book 5 of Firmicus Maternus’ Mathesis, datable to the 330s. Addressing his dedicatee Mavortius, the astrologer promises that a capable mind prepared by the reading of the four previous books and illuminated by the stars ‘will arrive at the divine secrets of this knowledge (divina istius scientiae secreta) and, initiated in all the disciplines of this knowledge (initiatum omnibus istius scientiae disciplinis), will receive the whole order of

Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary, 21. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 2. 6: ‘Unde quaeso est vobis tantum sapientiae traditum, unde acuminis et vivacitatis tantum vel ex quibus scientiae disciplinis tantum cordis adsumere, divinationis tantum potuistis haurire?’ On this sense of ‘cor’, see also Adv. Nat. 2. 12: ‘ac dum vestris fiditis cordibus et quod typhus est sapientiam vocatis.’ 34 35

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divine interpretation (totum ordinem divinae interpretationis)’. The result will be the ability ‘both to discover and explain human fates, (fata hominum et invenire pariter et explicare)’.36 Christians who used the phrase ‘scientiae disciplinis’ avoided its divinatory connotations by distinguishing the knowledge produced by the disciplines from true wisdom. Commenting on the proverb ‘Dilige sapientiam et disciplinam’ (Prov. 1: 2), Ambrose of Milan wrote that ‘wisdom is what flows from understanding, and discipline is moulded into a certain natural shape by the virtues and strengthened as a mental condition by the disciplines of knowledge’.37 The biographers of Caesarius of Arles sharpened this distinction in the mid-sixth century when they described a futile attempt by the grammarian and rhetor Julianus Pomerius to polish their hero’s ‘monastic simplicity’ (‘monasterialis . . . simplicitas’) by the ‘disciplines of secular knowledge’ (‘saecularis scientiae disciplinis’).38 Another Christian approach was to emphasize the distinction between secular knowledge and true wisdom by using the phrase ‘sapientiae disciplinis’ (‘by the disciplines of wisdom’).39 36 Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis 5, praef. 1: ‘Si itaque capax ingenium et flagrantis animi desiderio commotum praecedentes hauserit libros et sit oportuna stellarum radiatione conceptum, ad divina istius scientiae secreta perveniet, et, initiatum omnibus istius scientiae disciplinis, totum ordinem divinae interpretationis accipiet, ut possit fata hominum et invenire pariter et explicare.’ 37 Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum xii, Ps. 43: 2: ‘Sapientia est quae sensu scaturit, disciplina in habitudinem quandam naturae coalita forma virtutum et mentis confirmata sententia scientiae disciplinis’ (CSEL 64. 260). 38 Vita Caesarii 1. 9, ed. G. Morin, Sancti Caesarii Episcopi Arelatensis Opera Omnia nunc primum in unum collecta, ii (Maredsous, 1942), 300. For the deliberate use here of ‘secular’ in place of ‘liberal’, see Augustine, Civ. 6. 2 (CCSL 47.167): ‘ut in omni eruditione, quam nos saecularem, illi autem liberalem vocant.’ The credentials of Julianus Pomerius are given in his entry in Kaster’s prosopography of grammatici (Guardians of Language, 342–3, no. 124). 39 The phrase is a favourite of Ambrose’s. See his De Isaac vel Anima 1. 2: ‘et hauriret purae sapientiae disciplinas’; 3. 9: ‘et interioris sapientiae disciplinas’ (CSEL 32[1].642, 648); De Iacob et Vita Beata 1. 1. 4: ‘et sapientiae instrueret disciplinis’; 1. 5. 17: ‘sapientiae disciplinis’ (CSEL 32[2].6, 15); De Ioseph 13. 75: ‘sapientiae multiplicis disciplinas’

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Augustine did not use these phrases himself, but he repeatedly problematized the assumptions that stood behind them. What were the disciplines that gave access to knowledge or wisdom? Could they teach something that was not good or true? What precisely did they teach? And, in the matter of divination, why could they not transmit the truest and most secret knowledge of all—the knowledge of past, present, and future—that is, God’s knowledge? 3. d i v i nat i o n i n t h e c a s s i c i a c u m d i a lo g u e s In Augustine’s early writings, the liberal disciplines themselves and people well educated in them seem capable of almost anything.40 There cannot be a bad discipline,41 disciplines cannot teach what is false,42 and whatever can be known is known through a discipline.43 This high valuation of the disciplines set strict criteria for inclusion, which the liberal disciplines could meet and other disciplines could not. Broader criteria might have included other disciplines. Apuleius’ criteria were so broad that even robbers could have a ‘disciplina’ (Metamorphoses 4. 9, 18)—a standard no less telling for all its irony. Magic was a discipline for him too (Met. 2. 20; 3. 18), and sometimes a very wicked one (Met. 3. 16: ‘maleficae disciplinae perinfames sumus’; (CSEL 32[2].117); Explanatio Psalmorum xii, Ps. 36: 64: ‘quae in nullo discrepauit a sapientiae disciplinis’ (CSEL 64.123). See also Jerome, Ep. 99. 2: ‘et de intimis sapientiae disciplinis’; Ep. 100. 10: ‘et sapientiae disciplinis suas animas dedicarunt’ (CSEL 55.212, 222); and Rufinus’ translation of Origen, In Leviticum Homiliae, hom. 9. 2: ‘si qui mentem suam adornaverit sapientiae disciplinis’ (SC 287.80). 40 Ord. 1. 8. 24: ‘nam eruditio disciplinarum liberalium modesta sane atque succincta et alacriores et perseverantiores et comtiores exhibet amatores amplectendae veritati, ut ardentius appetant et constantius insequantur et inhaereant postremo dulcius, quae vocatur, Licenti, beata vita’ ‘For instruction in the liberal disciplines—measured, of course, and kept concise—makes those who love to embrace truth more eager, persistent, and elegant, so that they seek more passionately, pursue more steadfastly, and in the end cling more delightfully to what is called, Licentius, the happy life’. 41 Lib. Arb. 1. 1. 2 (CCSL 29.212). 42 Sol. 2. 11. 20–1 (CSEL 89.71–4). 43 Imm. An. 1. 1 (CSEL 89.102).

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Met. 9. 29: ‘armis facinerosae disciplinae suae’). For Firmicus Maternus (after his conversion), pagan signs and symbols were the devil’s ‘disciplina’ (De Errore Profanarum Religionum 18. 1: ‘quae illis in istorum sacrilegiorum coetibus diaboli tradidit disciplina’). By valorizing the disciplines as he did, Augustine gave up the opportunity to depict artificial divination as a wicked or diabolic discipline. But he also gained the ability to recast divination as an ‘anti-discipline’ that could then be contrasted with real disciplines like grammar and music. The story of the diviner Albicerius fills precisely this role in Book 1 of Contra Academicos.44 All the interlocutors in the dialogue agree that his knowledge, such as it was, had nothing to do with intellectual training. Completely lacking grammatical schooling (‘qui grammatici scholam vix transiens vidisset aliquando’, 1. 6. 18) and living the kind of sensual and depraved life that only someone with no humane ‘scientia’ could lead (‘quae si Albicerius ille didicisset, numquam . . . tam luxuriose deformiterque vixisset’), Albicerius possessed none of the most honorable disciplines (‘honestissimas disciplinas’, 20). His ability to recite lines of poetry from other people’s minds was something that even the most uneducated (‘imperitissimis’) could manage—with the help of demons (‘ab huius aeris animalibus quibusdam vilissimis, quos daemonas vocant’, 20). For he could neither teach the metres themselves (‘ipsa metra’) nor make up his own verses (‘versus proprios’, 21). Albicerius’ low intellectual profile and the demonic inspiration that stood in the place of real learning thus allow Augustine, in the character of Flaccianus, to recommend the disciplines over demonic divination: For that most learned man (vir ille doctissimus) used to ask those who admired such things whether Albicerius could teach grammar or music or geometry. But who could know him and not admit that he was entirely unskilled (imperitissimum) in all of these matters? For this reason he used to mightily urge that those who had learned 44 On the subject of Albicerius’ appearance in Book 1, I have benefited from conversations with Karin Schlapbach and from her recently published commentary, Augustin: Contra Academicos (vel De Academicis) Buch 1, Patristische Texte und Studien 58 (Berlin and New York, 2003).

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such things (qui talia didicissent) not hesitate to prefer their own souls to that divination (illi divinationi) and take care to instruct and advise their own mind in those disciplines in which it was possible to leap across and fly over the airy nature of invisible spirits. (1. 7. 21)

Standing behind this contest between demonic divination and the soul’s own learning is a complicated Neoplatonic debate over the proper means to ascend to God: more specifically, by what combination of virtue, knowledge, ritual, and skill this might be accomplished.45 In such a context, if one had to make a choice, an emphasis on the disciplines preferred virtue and knowledge, an emphasis on divination, ritual and skill. The case of Albicerius makes Augustine’s choice clear from the beginning, and prepares the way for the treatment of the disciplines not only in the remaining two books of Contra Academicos, but also, more prominently, in De Ordine. In this dialogue, divination is repeatedly presented as the wrong means for acquiring knowledge. As an anti-discipline, it serves to underscore the point that the divinely ordered universe is best understood by the orderly acquisition of the liberal disciplines. So, early in Book 1, Licentius jokingly asks why, if superstitious people (‘superstitiosi’) can take auguries from mice (‘de muribus augurari’), he cannot interpret Augustine’s intervention as an oracular voice (1. 3. 9, with 1. 5. 14), something that would be consistent with the whole scheme of divine order. Mice were considered sacred to Apollo,46 and these musings accordingly elicited from Augustine the Virgilian tag ‘Sic Pater ille deus faciat, sic altus Apollo!’,47 suitably Christianized by the change of the genitive plural ‘deum’ (‘of the gods’) to ‘deus’ (Aen. 10. 875: ‘Sic pater ille deum faciat, sic altus Apollo’). This reference 45 The subject is vast. A good starting-point is P. Athanassiadi, ‘Dreams, Theurgy and Freelance Divination: The Testimony of Iamblichus’, JRS 83 (1993), 115–30. 46 M. Tulli Ciceronis De Divinatione, ed. A. S. Pease, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 6 (1920), 438; repr. Darmstadt (1963), 276. 47 I take this reading from J. Doignon, ‘Problèmes textuels et modèles littéraires dans le livre I du De ordine de saint Augustin’, REAug 24 (1978), 71–86, at 79–82.

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to Apollo prompts Augustine to recall Aeneid 3. 88–9 (‘Quem sequimur? Quove ire iubes? Ubi ponere sedes? / Da, pater, augurium, atque animis illabere nostris’), which he then Christianizes by transferring Apollo’s divinatory powers to God the Father, ‘who now sends an augurium and slips into our minds’. The ‘vates’ of truth, Augustine concludes, are not those inspired by Apollo, but those who can be wise (‘sapientes’, 1. 4. 10). Artificial divination (in the form of augury by mice) is rejected, while natural divination is shown to be none other than the wise person’s search for truth. Licentius extends this line of reasoning by (naïvely) wondering what would have happened if some great ‘vates’ or astrologer (‘Chaldeus’) had predicted the subject of the dialogue long before its committal to writing. He is uncertain whether any diviner has actually done so, either on his own or in response to an inquirer (‘a consultore coactus’48), but supposes that if a chain of unknown causes actually links one event to the next, then, theoretically at least, this hidden order could be uncovered. Along with the events themselves, so too could the words that describe them in a book be predicted beforehand (1. 5. 14). Whatever the merits of the argument, it is immediately shut down by Augustine’s observation that his young interlocutor does not realize how much has been said against divination (‘contra divinationem’) and by what sorts of men (1. 6. 15). Again, though not as bluntly as in Contra Academicos, the skills of diviners are shown to be relevant to the problem at hand, but at the same time to be inappropriate for investigating it. In Book 2, as Augustine approaches his description of the liberal disciplines, which belong to the category of learning by reason, he pauses briefly at the category of learning by authority, which can be human or divine. Here he draws renewed attention to the shortcomings of divination. Divine authority is more secure than human authority, but students should beware of what masquerades as divine authority. In anti-demonic language strongly reminiscent of Contra Academicos, Augustine warns inquirers against ‘the wondrous 48 The phrase recalls C. Acad. 1. 7. 21: ‘vel coactus a quopiam consultorum’. The similarity is noted by Schlapbach, Augustin: Contra Academicos, 186.

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deception of airy creatures’ (‘aeriorum animalium mira fallacia’), who deceive curious, acquisitive, and fearful souls ‘through certain divinations and not a few interpretations of matters pertaining to the bodily senses’ (‘per rerum ad istos sensus corporis pertinentium quasdam divinationes nonnullasque sententias’, 2. 9. 27). The message is clear. Not only does demonic divination have nothing to do with the reason from which the disciplines issue; it also has nothing to do with authority, either divine or human. In the framework of learning Augustine sets up in De Ordine, divination has no place. When we arrive at the description of astronomy (‘astrologia’) in the list of the liberal disciplines, no question of divination arises. Augustine merely nods at the discipline’s ambiguity, ‘a great proof for the pious, and a torment for the curious’ (‘magnum religiosis argumentum tormentumque curiosis’, 2. 15. 42). 4. d i v i nat i o n a n d s u pe r st i t i o n i n d e d o c t r i na c h r i st i a na In the aftermath of the Cassiciacum dialogues, Augustine retreated from his earlier valuation of the liberal disciplines, eventually admitting that he had attached too much weight to them (‘et quod multum tribui liberalibus disciplinis’, Retr. 1. 3. 2). By the time he had completed the second book of De Doctrina Christiana, he no longer argued that the liberal disciplines were the key to all wisdom: at best, they could serve as useful tools for interpreting the unknown signs of Scripture. The narrower function Augustine now assigned to the liberal disciplines also had the effect of further hardening their division from other disciplines of knowledge. Thus, in the synopsis of pagan learning that occupies the second half of Book 2, the liberal disciplines belong to the category of divinely instituted ‘doctrinae’, whereas divination is placed in the category of human institutions. The liberal disciplines are further distinguished from divination by the fact that they stand at the top of their genus (because they pertain to reason rather than the bodily senses), whereas in its genus divination stands at the bottom, since it is a form, indeed the very paradigm, of ‘superstition’. To appreciate the full complexity of this categoriza-

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tion, we need to examine the role that divination plays as an anti-discipline in Book 2 of De Doctrina Christiana. Book 2 is centrally about the knowledge (‘scientia’) needed by the interpreter of Scripture, which Augustine uses a semiotic framework to discuss.49 The book focuses mostly on unknown signs, leaving the subject of ambiguous signs for Book 3. It deals with both literal and metaphorical signs, and with the knowledge of ‘languages’ (2. 11. 16, 16. 23) and ‘things’ (2. 13. 20, 16. 23–4) needed to understand these. But while a knowledge of languages and things sufficed for many problems in Scripture, Augustine also thought that interpreters needed an understanding of the larger frameworks of meaning in which signs made sense. Such a ‘knowledge of signs’ (2. 13. 20), however, was dangerous, both intrinsically, because of its tendency to generate excessive pride (2. 13. 20, 38. 57, 42. 63), and extrinsically, because of its connections to pagan learning. At least in part, Augustine’s classification of the forms of knowledge was intended to protect his readers from these dangers. He prefaces his formal classification with a preliminary discussion of mathematics (2. 16. 25) and music (2. 16. 26), disciplines closely related to one another.50 Their function here is to establish the absence of ‘superstition’ as the first condition of legitimacy for all human learning: ‘Indeed, we find both number and music mentioned with respect in several places in the holy scriptures. But we must not listen to the fictions of pagan superstition, which have represented the nine Muses as the daughters of Jupiter and Memory’ (2. 16. 26–17.27).51 The question of how many Muses there were and who their parents were combines number and 49 On its structure, see G. A. Press, ‘The Content and Argument of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana’, Augustiniana 31 (1981), 165–82, at 173–7, and K. Pollmann, Doctrina Christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1996), esp. 147–55. 50 Doct. Chr. 4. 20. 41: ‘illa musica disciplina, ubi numerus iste plenissime discitur’. 51 Trans. R. P. H. Green, Augustine: De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford, 1995). On the contrast between the treatment of the Muses here and in Ord. 2. 14. 41, see S. MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), 63–4, and above, 105–9.

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music into a single problem, which Augustine attempts to solve—inconclusively, as it turns out—by an amusing story from Varro. ‘But whether Varro’s story is true or not,’ he continues, ‘we should not avoid music because of the associated pagan superstitions if there is a possibility of gleaning from it something of value for understanding holy scripture’ (2. 18. 28, trans. Green). After these programmatic comments, Augustine embarks on a more systematic treatment of the problem, based on a distinction between the ‘doctrinae’ that humans establish themselves and those that they take notice of, whether already enacted under divine administration or divinely inscribed in nature (2. 19. 29).52 In both genera, Augustine takes pains to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of learning based on the absence or presence of superstition. And although he occasionally refers to other forms of superstition, such as the ‘magicae artes’ that he knew almost exclusively from literature (‘quae quidem commemorare potius quam docere assolent poetae’, 2. 20. 30) and the incantations, symbols, amulets, and other remedies used by folk healers (2. 20. 30, 23. 36, 29. 45), most of his examples come from divination, and specifically technical divination. This makes sense, since Book 2 is about knowledge and the interpretation of unknown signs, and technical divination dealt with both,53 though illegitimately, as Augustine had come to believe. The first genus concerns humanly devised forms of learning. Augustine begins with its lower, superstitious branch (2. 20. 30–24. 37). Both pulled by his theory of signs and pushed by his need to reject divination as a discipline, Augustine defines superstition as a pact of signification made between humans and demons. The practical effect of this definition is to radically alter the field of signs inter52 On the underlying distinction between nomos and physis that this represents, see C. Schäublin, ‘De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture?’, in D. W. H. Arnold and P. Bright (eds.), De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (Notre Dame, Ind., and London, 1995), 47–67, at 50–8. 53 H. R. Seeliger, ‘Aberglaube, Wissenschaft und die Rolle der historica narratio in Augustins Doctrina Christiana’, Wissenschaft und Weisheit 43 (1980), 148–155, at 151.

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preted by diviners. Instead of dealing with signs inscribed in nature by divine providence, as theories favourable to technical divination envisioned,54 Augustine’s diviners deal with signs sent by fallen angels, whose fugitive meanings are based only on convention. Divinatory knowledge thus emerges as an anti-type of disciplinary knowledge, since it deals not with what God has established in creation but merely with what humans and demons with the same intentions have agreed upon.55 While it was not necessarily false (2. 23. 35), such knowledge was deceptive, illusory, and of course very dangerous (2. 23. 36). In this section Augustine concentrates on only three kinds of technical diviners: augurs, haruspices, and astrologers.56 As we have seen, these were the only kinds of diviners considered in the Latin tradition to practice a discipline. Other types attacked by Augustine elsewhere, such as lot diviners or dream-interpreters, were not thought by anyone to be so endowed, and so are of no concern to him here. The discussion is carefully arranged to give prominence to astrology, Augustine’s favourite divinatory science. After a brief mention of haruspices, augurs, healing practices, and other superstitions (2. 20. 30), astrologers are attacked by traditional arguments in a single continuous section (2. 21. 31–22. 34). This is followed by a more general discussion of demonic involvement in divinatory signs (2. 23. 35–24. 37), in which further references are made to haruspices (by the portents they explained, 2. 23. 36) and augurs (2. 24. 37). Augustine’s main interest in this section lies in explaining how superstitious and especially divinatory knowledge rests on human and demonic conventions and intentions, and not in directly contrasting this knowledge with disciplinary knowledge. Indeed, he only once explicitly compares any of the superstitious ‘doctrinae’ to any of the disciplines. ‘To this category (ad hoc genus) also belong all the amulets and 54 Cicero, De Divinatione 1. 52. 118: ‘sed ita a principio inchoatum esse mundum ut certis rebus certa signa praecurrerent’. 55 On the role of intentionality, see R. A. Markus, ‘Augustine on Magic: A Neglected Semiotic Theory’, in his Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool, 1996), 135–9. 56 Only the biblical examples he cites (2. 23. 35) belong to the category of natural divination.

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remedies that the discipline of physicians (medicorum . . . disciplina) likewise condemns’ (2. 20. 30). It is only later in the book that the full meaning of this statement emerges, in a passage contrasting the ‘natural’ power of true medicine with the ‘conventional’ power of superstitious healing (2. 29. 45). At this point, ‘the discipline of physicians’ may be taken to stand for all the true disciplines, which are found in what God, not humans, have established, and which must therefore be opposed to superstitious knowledge. Following his discussion of the superstitious branch of humanly established learning, Augustine moved to its higher, non-superstitious branch (2. 25. 38–26. 40), which by definition included no divination. Its first subdivision (‘superflua luxuriosaque’) consists mainly of the arts, like dancing, painting, and literature, that represent something else, whose signification is based on convention (2. 25. 38). Its second subdivision (‘commoda . . . et necessaria’) contains the social and economic conventions on which civilized life depends (2. 25. 39–40) and also human sign systems like writing, language, and shorthand symbols (2. 26. 40). As a means of representing rational thought, these sign systems make a smooth transition to the second genus, which consists of divinely established ‘doctrinae’. This genus is divided into two branches, the lower pertaining to the bodily senses (2. 27. 41–30. 47), the higher to rational thought (2. 31. 48–38. 56). In his discussion of the bodily senses, Augustine returns to the question of superstition. He draws explicit contrasts between ‘doctrinae’ in this category and superstitions that he had identified earlier in the book. Following the order of those superstitions, his comparisons served three purposes. The most immediate was to differentiate learning based on the senses from any kind of superstition, which always threatened when bodies were involved. This differentiation served in the second place to define legitimate ‘doctrinae’ more exactly by comparing them with illegitimate ‘doctrinae’. The third purpose was to displace divination from the category it would otherwise have occupied. This is illustrated in Martianus Capella, where the mantic disciplines are associated with Philology, who represents human learning, and the liberal arts with Mercury, who represents divine reason. As Ilsetraut Hadot explains, while

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the liberal arts ‘exist independently of human realities, in the very realm of Ideas’, the mantic arts, although sacred, ‘are closely tied to the human condition and its needs’.57 Augustine begins his comparisons with history. As a narrative of what has been done under God’s order and administration, history is located in the genus of divinely instituted ‘doctrinae’ (2. 28. 44). To explain this counterintuitive categorization, Augustine differentiates between the narration of ‘what has been done’ (‘facta’) and the narration of ‘what must be done’ (‘facienda’). In keeping with his purposes, he cites divination as an example of the latter. ‘History narrates what has been done in a faithful and useful way, whereas the books of haruspices and similar writings set out to teach things that must be done or observed, with the audacity of a counselor and not the reliability of a witness.’58 The link between ‘the books of haruspices and similar writings’ mentioned here and ‘the books of haruspices and augurs’ mentioned earlier (2. 20. 30) is unmistakable, and serves to introduce a train of similar comparisons. In the next passage, Augustine commends a knowledge of natural history, but warns readers against putting it to superstitious uses (2. 29. 45). He again points back to an earlier passage, in this case on superstitious ‘remedia’ (2. 20. 30). ‘For we have separately treated that category too, already distinguished from this legitimate and unrestricted kind’ (‘nam et illud genus iam distinctum ab hoc licito et libero separavimus’). Links between the two sections include the mention of incantations, magical symbols, and amulets, and the contrast, here made explicit, between natural and conventional healing. Knowledge of the stars comes next (2. 29. 46). In this section, again deploying highly traditional arguments,59 57 ‘La loi des nombres et de leurs rapports mutuels, qui forme la base des sept disciplines cycliques, existe indépendamment des réalités humaines, au niveau même des Idées. Par contre, les arts mantiques et la théurgie sont des arts sacrés, il est vrai, mais liés étroitement à la condition et aux besoins humains’: Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie, 151. 58 ‘Historia facta narrat fideliter atque utiliter, libri autem haruspicum et quaeque similes literrae facienda vel observanda intendunt docere, monitoris audacia, non indicis fide’ (2. 28. 44, trans. adapted from Green). 59 e.g., Cicero, De Divinatione 2. 42. 88 ff.

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Augustine differentiates the predictions of astronomers from those of astrologers. Both use their knowledge of signs to reason from the known to the unknown, but astronomers focus their predictions on the stars themselves, in contrast to astrologers, who try to draw conclusions about human deeds and outcomes (‘in nostra facta et eventa’, 2. 29. 46). The passage contains obvious echoes of Augustine’s earlier description of astrologers, whose attempts to predict ‘both our actions and the outcomes of those actions’ (‘vel actiones nostras vel actionum eventa’, 2. 21. 32) lead them into superstitious error (2. 22. 33). Such comparisons between the predictions made by diviners and those made by other skilled professionals are often found in discussions of divination. In addition to helping to distinguish between astronomers and astrologers, they also help to assign ‘the other arts’ to their proper category (2. 30. 47). In this subdivision, Augustine gathers together the arts of manufacture (construction, carpentry, pottery making), service (medicine, agriculture, sailing), and action (dancing, running, wrestling). Some of these arts have been mentioned in other categories: dancing was classified as a superfluous human institution at 2. 25. 38, and medicine and agriculture were said to be liable to superstitious use at 2. 29. 45. What links all these arts here, says Augustine, is that their practitioners use past experiences to make conjectures about future ones (‘harum ergo cunctarum artium de praeteritis experimenta faciunt etiam futura conici’, 2. 30. 47). At first, this seems like an odd point to find in common among such diverse arts. But the divinatory context explains it. For the three arts of service mentioned by Augustine—medicine, agriculture, and sailing—are among those whose predictions were traditionally contrasted with divinatory predictions. As Cicero’s brother explains in De Divinatione: ‘There are many things foreseen by physicians, ship captains, and also by farmers, but I do not call the predictions of any of them divination.’60 60 Cicero, De Divinatione 1. 50. 112: ‘Multa medici, multa gubernatores, agricolae etiam multa praesentiunt, sed nullam eorum divinationem voco’ (trans. adapted from W. A. Falconer (Loeb Classical Library, 1923)). For further references, see Pease (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis De Divinatione, ad loc.

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Having argued and re-argued the inferior status of technical divination, Augustine moves to the only category in which he believed the true disciplines could be found, those divinely instituted ‘doctrinae’ that pertain to reason (2. 31. 48–38. 56). Like the higher branch of humanly instituted ‘doctrinae’, this branch also makes no mention of divination. Rather, it discusses the two parts of dialectic, disputation and logic (2. 31. 48–35. 53), rhetoric (2. 36. 54–37. 55), and mathematics (2. 38. 56). Mentioned together prominently at the beginning of the section (2. 31. 48) and in the first summary that follows (2. 39. 58–9), only ‘disputatio’ and ‘numerus’ are termed disciplines, but they may be taken to stand for others. ‘Disputatio’ certainly stands for the other disciplines of language, and ‘numerus’ for the mathematical disciplines, or at least music. Astronomy is mentioned in this category, but only in a reprise of divine institutions pertaining to the senses (2. 32. 50); geometry is not mentioned. Bracketed by renewed admonitions to avoid pride (2. 38. 57, 42. 63), two summaries close the book. These take the form of a package of advice for young people and an allegorical explanation of the spoils of Egypt. Although superstition is mentioned, no hint of divination occurs here. 5. t e c h n i c a l a n d nat u r a l d i v i nat i o n in the confessions In Book 2 of De Doctrina Christiana Augustine attempted to demonstrate both the (diminished) value of the disciplines for acquiring knowledge and their superiority over technical divination. He decisively followed through on these efforts in the Confessions, where the kind of knowledge that he represents himself as most earnestly seeking is supplied neither by the disciplines, which play only a minor role, nor by technical divination, which he rejects in the form of astrology, but by God’s mysterious providence. This is channelled through significant persons, books, events, and two forms of natural divination: his mother’s dreams and his own biblical lot divination. To illustrate how small a role the liberal disciplines play in Augustine’s search for knowledge in the Confessions, we need only examine the three occurrences of ‘disciplina’ in the

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work. In each case, the word is associated with a failure to achieve true knowledge. In Book 1, Augustine complains that people are more offended by the mispronunciation of the word for person ‘contra disciplinam grammaticam’ than by hatred of an actual person (1. 18. 29). And in Book 5, Faustus the Manichaean, reputedly endowed, like some Neoplatonic sage, with the mastery of all knowledge (‘honestarum omnium doctrinarum peritissimus et apprime disciplinis liberalibus eruditus’, 5. 3. 3), disappointingly turns out to be unqualified in any of the liberal disciplines except grammar (‘hominem expertem liberalium disciplinarum nisi grammaticae’, 5. 6. 11). Of course, Augustine’s high expectations of Faustus’ learning, as judged by the standards of his own education, do concede some value to the liberal disciplines, as do other episodes in the work. But technical divination holds no similar place in the Confessions. This is demonstrated above all by the example of astrology, to which Augustine ultimately assigned no standing even as an ‘ars’, let alone as a ‘disciplina’. This realization was brought home to him by the arguments and experiences of well-educated men: the proconsul Vindicianus (‘vir sagax medicinae artis peritissimus’, 4. 3. 5) and the aristocrats Nebridius (4. 3. 6)61 and Firminus (‘liberaliter institutus et excultus eloquio’, 7. 6. 8–10). As a result, Augustine concluded that the true predictions made by astrologers are produced not by art but by chance (‘non arte . . . sed sorte’); likewise, their false predictions come about not from lack of skill (‘artis inperitia’) but from random error (‘sortis mendacio’, 7. 6. 9). The same logic applied of course to predictions made by lot, particularly to lots drawn from inspired books, as Vindicianus pointed out (4. 3. 5). The pagan definition he gives of ‘sors’ as ‘a power . . . everywhere diffused in the nature of things’ (‘vim sortis . . . in rerum natura usquequaque diffusam’) was easily transformed by Augustine into a definition of divine grace (7. 6. 10).62 This move allowed Augustine to portray the central divinatory event in the For his education, see Kaster, Guardians of Language, 314–15. B. Bruning, ‘De l’astrologie à la grâce’, in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T. J. Van Bavel, ii (Leuven, 1990), 575–643. 61 62

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Confessions, his consultation of a codex of Paul’s Letters, as a form not of divination by art, but of divination by nature. The third important form of divination in the Confessions, Monica’s dreams, already belonged to this category, and so Augustine could portray both his own and Monica’s divinatory experiences as effusions of divine revelation rather than technical divinatory consultations. Thus is natural divination shown to be consistent with God’s providence and Augustine’s search for knowledge. Ultimately, of course, Augustine and Monica move beyond even this. In their Neoplatonic ascent (9. 10. 24) and subsequent reflection on it (9. 10. 25), their souls rise not only above the stars and hence above astrology,63 but also beyond bibliomancy and oneiromancy. If all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and every sign and everything transitory is silent . . . then he alone would speak not through them but through himself. We would hear his word (verbum eius), not through the tongue of the flesh (per linguam carnis), nor through the voice of an angel (per vocem angeli), nor through the sound of thunder (per sonitum nubis), nor through the obscurity of a simile (per aenigma similitudinis). Him who is in these things we love we would hear himself without them. (9. 10. 25)64

Carried by this experience beyond their previous modes of natural divination—Monica beyond her ‘dreams and visions’ and Augustine beyond ‘all language and every sign’—mother and son move for an instant not simply beyond the need for divination, but more profoundly beyond the need for any kind of mediation. In the world which Augustine created for his readers in the Confessions, this was as far as one could get from the ‘disciplines of knowledge’. Of course, outside his world the same kind of ascent was promised to readers of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and other Neoplatonists by those very disciplines. In this respect, it is worth noting that Augustine only uses the word ‘disciplina’ in connection with any kind

63 L. C. Ferrari, ‘Augustine and Astrology’, Laval Théologique et Philosophique 33 (1977), 241–51, at 242. 64 Translation adapted from H. Chadwick, Saint Augustine: Confessions (Oxford, 1991).

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of divination in three passages from Book 10 of the City of God, where it is theurgy that earns the distinction (‘apparere theurgian esse . . . disciplinam’, 10. 9; ‘per nescio quam theurgicam disciplinam’, 10. 10; ‘theurgica disciplina’, 10. 27). But by the time he wrote about theurgy in the City of God, it was safe for Augustine to apply the theurgists’ own word to their practice, for he stood on the far side of a shift in his thinking about divination, which we can clearly see in Book 10 of the Confessions. There, in a preview of his later arguments against theurgy, he dismissed the claims of practitioners whose reliance on their own ‘doctrina’ and on tactical alliances with demons left them unable to return to God (10. 42. 67). They needed a mediator, he said, but their mediator was false. As both divine and human, only Christ could truly serve this purpose (68). By this move, Augustine not only attacked theurgy and Neoplatonism; he also permanently reconfigured for himself the problem of human access to divine knowledge, and thus the problem of divination and the disciplines of knowledge. For if it was in Christ that ‘all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden’ (‘in quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae absconditi’, Col. 2: 3), as he wrote at Confessions 10. 43. 70, then it was only through Christ that these treasures would be accessible to humankind. Thus, Augustine’s concept of ‘the centrality . . . of Christ as mediator of wisdom’, which began to emerge in his thinking in the mid-390s, marked an important break not only in his thinking about wisdom, knowledge, philosophy, and Christianity, as Carol Harrison has recently argued,65 but also in his thinking about divination and the disciplines of knowledge. Indeed, as we can see in retrospect, it was an emphasis on Christ’s role as mediator that made biblical learning, biblical disciplines, and biblical divination so appealing to Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana 2 and Confessions 8. Although such an emphasis is not entirely absent from earlier writings (e.g., C. Acad. 2. 1. 1), its still predominantly Platonic deployment there allowed him to

65 C. Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford, 2000), 36–8, quotation at 37.

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take a more traditional approach to problems of divination and the disciplines in the later 380s and early 390s.66 But these two stages of Augustine’s early thought are also linked by another theme, operating in both periods, which Christ’s mediation only throws into greater prominence. This is the enormous gap between God and man that calls for divination (and mediation) in the first place. To discuss it briefly, and so to conclude, it will be instructive to examine Augustine’s correction of a passage in De Immortalitate Animae in which he had stated that there was no knowledge that was not contained in a discipline (‘Omne autem quod scit animus, in sese habet; nec ullam rem scientia complectitur, nisi quae ad aliquam pertineat disciplinam’, 1. 1). He had been thinking only of human souls, he conceded in his retractatio: ‘it did not occur to me that God does not learn disciplines, and yet he possesses a knowledge of all things that also includes a foreknowledge of future things’ (‘nec venit in mentem Deum non discere disciplinas et habere omnium rerum scientiam in qua etiam praescientia est futurorum’, Retr. 1. 5. 2). God in fact was the only being whose knowledge (and foreknowledge) was not learned. Some of that knowledge he widely shared, according to De Doctrina Christiana, by means of his creation itself and the divinely instituted ‘doctrinae’ and ‘disciplinae’ that humans investigated, discovered, and in one way or another learned (2. 27. 41). But foreknowledge or, to put it more broadly, divinatory knowledge, God kept more carefully guarded. As essentially secret knowledge, it belonged to God’s hidden providence, and like God’s power constituted one of the great asymmetries separating the Creator from his creation. It might be snatched away prematurely by demons,67 opaquely hinted at in the Holy Scriptures, or openly conveyed to humans by special modes of communication, but it could never be entrusted to any professional class of diviners or system of interpretation. Augustine makes this point in many ways throughout his early writings, not least remarkably by scrupulously avoiding any association 66 For another assessment of the changing balance in Augustine’s thought, see the discussion by Conybeare above. 67 Tertullian, Apologeticum 22. 9 (CCSL 1.129).

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between divination and the disciplines. By such consistent effort, made possible by his own disciplined grammatical and dialectical training, he aimed to maintain the proper boundaries, in power and knowledge, between heaven and earth. As we can see in the sermon with which we began (Serm. 12. 12, CCSL 41.174), these were boundaries that Augustine believed could only be transgressed by Christ, the ‘power and wisdom of God’ (1 Cor. 1: 24), a mediation that guaranteed their perdurance to the end of time.

6 The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts in Augustine’s Confessions Ph i l i p Bu r to n

Following his conversion back to Christianity in the spring of 386, Augustine embarked on a project to produce handbooks of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, and philosophy— a version of what is known to us as the ‘canon’ of an education in the liberal arts. 1 We know this because he tells us so in the first book of his Retractationes (1. 6): Per idem tempus quo Mediolani fui, baptismum percepturus, etiam disciplinarum libros conatus sum scribere, interrogans eos qui mecum erant atque ab huiusmodi studiis non abhorrebant, per corporalia cupiens ad incorporalia quibusdam quasi passibus certis vel pervenire vel ducere. Sed earum solum de grammatica librum absolvere potui, quem postea de armario nostro perdidi, et de musica sex volumina, quantum attinet ad eam partem quae rhythmus vocatur. Sed eosdem sex libros iam baptizatus, iamque ex Italia regressus in Africam scripsi; inchoaveram quippe tantummodo istam apud Mediolanum disciplinam. De aliis vero quinque disciplinis illic similiter inchoatis, de dialectica, de rhetorica, de geometria, de arithmetica, de philosophia, sola principia remanserunt. Quae tamen etiam ipsa perdidimus; sed haberi ab aliquibus existimo. Throughout that time, when I was at Milan waiting to receive baptism, I tried also to compose books on the arts. I questioned My particular thanks to Gillian Clark and Bob Coleman for their encouragement and helpful comments. 1 The larger question of the origins of the ‘canon’ will not be considered here. It is not entirely clear that Augustine even knew of a canon, though it seems a reasonable assumption. See the Introduction and Shanzer’s essay in this volume.

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those of my companions who were not averse to such studies, in my desire to arrive or to lead others by certain steps through things material to things immaterial. But of these arts I was able to complete only my book on grammar, which later I lost from my bookcase, and six books on music, touching the part known as ‘rhythm’. But these six books I wrote after my baptism and my return from Italy to Africa; at Milan I had only begun that art. Of the other five arts I had likewise begun there—dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, and philosophy—only the beginnings have remained, and even these I have lost, though I think some people have them.

It has often been remarked that Augustine’s interest in the liberal arts suggests a distinctly ‘intellectual’ understanding of Christianity. Certainly he had been influenced to part from the Manichees by his discovery of incompatibilities between their cosmology and the laws of mathematics and geometry. His other early post-conversion works, such as the Soliloquia and De Magistro, are philosophical dialogues in form. The very verb he uses in this passage to describe his technique, ‘interrogare’, has a long history as a technical term of rhetoric and dialectic.2 Augustine is clearly optimistic about the possibility of taking the traditional view of the arts as a pathway from the physical to the incorporeal world and combining it within his own Christian Platonism. Around 391 work on the project was abandoned. Augustine did not simply lose interest in Christian applications of the arts, as can be seen from De Doctrina Christiana, begun around 395–7. None the less, his later writings do betray an increasing pessimism about the possibility, or desirability, of a Christianization of the traditional curriculum. I suggest that we can see the beginnings of this pessimism if we look at the vocabulary which Augustine uses to describe the arts in another work, closely contemporary with De Doctrina 2 For its use as a general term for dialectical reasoning, see, e.g., Cicero, De Fato 28: ‘sic . . . interrogant: si fatum tibi est ex hoc morbo convalescere, sive tu medicum adhibueris sive non adhibueris, convalesces’ (TLL vii(1). 2272.71 ff.), and for the specific sense ‘questioning requiring yes-or-no answer’, TLL vii(1). 2266.28 ff. Augustine is aware of both senses: Doct. Chr. 4. 10. 25: ‘in collocutionibus [i.e., philosophical dialogues] est cuique interrogandi potestas’; ibid. 3. 3. 6: ‘ad percontationem multa responderi possunt, ad interrogationem vero aut non aut etiam’.

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3

Christiana, namely the Confessions. In doing so, we shall also have occasion to note some ways in which he combines classical ‘disciplina’ with his own practice of biblical interpretation.4 The Greek terminology we have seen Augustine using in the Retractationes goes back at least to the first century before the Christian era. ‘I shall do my best,’ says Cicero in the Academica, ‘to speak Latin—except in the case of words such as “philosophy” or “rhetoric” or “physics” or “dialectic”, which along with many others custom now uses as if they were Latin words.’5 Again in De Finibus he writes that ‘we follow the example of our ancestors in using “philosophy”, along with “rhetoric”, “dialectic”, “grammar”, “geometry”, and “music”, even though they could be expressed in Latin, as being our own’.6 The one notable absentee from this list, ‘arithmetica’, makes its first appearance in Vitruvius, and is common from the first century a d onwards; the Elder Pliny, for instance, describes the sculptor Pamphilus as ‘learned in all subjects, especially arithmetic and geometry’.7 By Late Antiquity, this Greek terminology was clearly the norm. Martianus Capella uses a scheme based on ‘grammatica, dialectica, rhetorica, geometria, astronomia, arithmetica, harmonia’;

3 The terminology of De Doctrina Christiana will be mentioned marginally for purposes of comparison. The range of disciplines covered in this work is wider than that of the Confessions, and the intended audience may be more specialized. This question would deserve analysis of its own, the results of which may differ from those offered here. 4 As background, note especially H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th edn. (Paris, 1958), 561–83, who first discusses the technical senses of ‘scientia’ and ‘sapientia’, then surveys the evidence relating to Augustine’s manuals on different ‘artes’. 5 Cicero, Academica 1. 7. 25: ‘nisi in huiuscemodi verbis, ut philosophiam aut rhetoricam aut physicam aut dialecticam appellem, quibus ut aliis multis consuetudo iam utitur pro latinis’. 6 Cicero, De Finibus 3. 2. 5: ‘Quamquam ea verba quibus instituto veterum utimur pro latinis, ut ipsa philosophia, ut rhetorica, dialectica, grammatica, geometria, musica, quamquam latine ea dici poterant, tamen quoniam usu percepta sunt, nostra ducamus.’ 7 Pliny, Historia Naturalis 35. 76: ‘omnibus litteris eruditus, praecipue arithmetica et geometria’.

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Cassiodorus has ‘musica’ for ‘harmonia’, but is otherwise the same.8 What were the alternatives? It is a commonplace of loanword studies that when a technical vocabulary is borrowed by one language from another, there is usually a period of experimentation, during which various translations are tried out; usually, the loan-words emerge as winners.9 But the picture is not always so simple. Where the loan-words triumph, they often retain a foreign flavour—as for instance with ‘philosophia’ and ‘rhetorica’, marked out as foreign by phonology, orthography, and general cultural association. As for the translations, where these were already current in the language, they may retain a flavour of the word they were used to translate. Where they were novel coinages, the mere fact that we often know them only from citations by later authors proves that they did not vanish entirely. One very important stylistic consequence follows from this. All stylistics rests on the twin notions of substitutability and markedness.10 The principle of substitutability assumes that it is possible to say fundamentally the same thing in more than one way. At the lexical level, this substitutability is what we call synonymy. The very concept of synonymy is a major stumbling-block for many semanticists. But if we are to find examples of it anywhere, surely it is in cases of technical translation, where we know that one word is used precisely to stand in for another one. The principle of markedness assumes that where two words or constructions 8 For further detail and references, see Shanzer’s essay in this volume, esp. 98–102. 9 For this phenomenon in the fields of philosophy and rhetoric, see R. G. G. Coleman, ‘The Formation of Specialized Vocabularies in Philosophy, Grammar, and Rhetoric: Winners and Losers’, in M. Lavency and D. Longrée (eds.), Actes du Ve Colloque de Linguistique latine (Louvain, 1989), 77–89; for medicine, D. R. Langslow, Medical Latin in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2000), 127–30, with caveats and qualifications; for biblical translation, P. Burton, The Old Latin Gospels: A Study of their Texts and Language (Oxford, 2000), 147–8. 10 In this paragraph I draw upon terminology and approaches familiar from linguistics. For definitions and examples, see D. Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1991), 211–12, 340–1); J. Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge, 1968), 427–8, 451.

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may be substituted for each other, the less common of the two is more marked, and so more interesting from a stylistic point of view. Marked terms may contrast with unmarked ones either by dialect (‘faucet’ versus ‘tap’), sociolectally (‘napkin’ versus ‘serviette’), or chronologically (‘recordplayer’ versus ‘gramophone’). In each pair, both terms have the same referend, but one of the two terms would strike many English-speakers as unusual or forced. It is the interplay between marked and unmarked terms in the Confessions which concerns us now. We shall first consider ‘grammar’ and ‘rhetoric’. Throughout the Confessions Augustine is ambivalent about human language. The initial acquisition of language he enjoys, but it leaves him deeper in what he calls ‘the stormy fellowship of human life’ (1. 8. 13). And grammar as it is taught in schools merely reinforces this obsession with human values rather than divine ones: ‘How carefully,’ he exclaims, ‘the children of men observe the rules governing letters and syllables that they have received from previous speakers, while ignoring the eternal rules that lead to everlasting salvation, which they have received from you!’ (1. 18. 29). At the heart of his critique is the Platonic belief that the conventional educational system is a fraud. Teachers and parents are ‘grammarmongers and their customers’ (‘venditores grammaticae vel emptores’, 1. 13. 23; cf. 4. 2. 2: ‘docebam . . . rhetoricam, et . . . loquacitatem . . . vendebam’), but in fact knowledge cannot be imparted. Moreover, the ‘artes’ of grammar and rhetoric are in any case concerned with fictions and plausibilities rather than with truth; the better educated your grammarian, the more likely he is to know that Aeneas did not, in fact, come to Carthage (1. 13. 22). grammar The usual word for grammar in the Confessions is ‘grammatica’, and usually it has bad connotations.11 It is Greek 11 For a less rhetorical presentation of Augustine’s views on grammar, see Doct. Chr. 3. 29–40. There he declares that it is not his intention to teach the various literary tropes, in case he gives the impression of teaching the ‘ars grammatica’; useful as they are for the understanding of Scripture, they are also familiar to those with no formal training in grammar.

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‘grammatica’ that Augustine is forced against his will to study, and ‘grammatica’ which teaches men to believe that a dropped aitch is worse than a miscarriage of justice.12 Faustus the Manichee knows only ‘grammatica’ of all the liberal arts—and has only an average knowledge of that.13 What were the alternatives here? From an early date, the loan-word ‘grammatica’ had been used alongside ‘litterae’, itself a translation of τα` γρα´µµατα (an etymology known to Augustine), as well as ‘cognitio litterarum’ and similar periphrases. Cicero himself, although he allowed ‘grammatica’ honorary Latin citizenship, preferred these expressions. And Augustine too uses them in the Confessions, alongside ‘grammatica’. So, for instance, where he criticizes ‘grammatica’ for being concerned with merely human traditions, he goes on to observe that the zealous prosecutor’s awareness that he is doing to others what he would not have done to himself is as sharply engraved in his being as his knowledge of ‘letters’ (‘non est interior litterarum scientia quam scripta conscientia’, 1. 18. 29). Elsewhere, ‘litterae’ in their broader sense may be good or bad: the Scriptures are ‘sacrae litterae’ (12. 31. 42), but literalism is characteristic of Manichee exegetics; Augustine is freed only through Ambrose’s reiteration of the principle that ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3: 6, quoted at 6. 4. 6). The term ‘litterae’, then, is not the positive counterpart of an intrinsically negative ‘grammatica’; in itself neutral, it may be used in favourable or unfavourable contexts. A basic knowledge of literacy is necessary, but not sufficient, for a true reading of the Scriptures.14 12 See Conf. 1. 18. 29 ff., where ‘grammatica’ consorts with other such shady terms as ‘syllaba’, ‘soloecismus’, and ‘barbarismus’; it is ironic that the parameters of good Latin can be defined only by using Greek words. For constellation of Greek words, compare Conf. 3. 3. 6, where ‘schola rhetoris’ is followed up with ‘typhus’, ‘diabolicus’, and ‘daemonium’. 13 Conf. 5. 6. 11: ‘expertus sum hominem expertem liberalium disciplinarum nisi grammaticae atque eius ipsius usitato modo’. 14 This would seem to imply that the Christian exegete needed at least some basic, conventional education. Note that in Doct. Chr. praef. 4 Augustine side-steps even that minimal requirement, with his story of the barbarian Christian slave who learnt his letters after a three-day prayer session; the absence of any human agency (‘nullo docente homine’) is

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Similarly ambivalent is Augustine’s other word for grammar: namely, ‘litteratura’. This term, as Augustine knew, went back at least to Varro, but was already obsolete in Seneca’s day.15 Yet he uses it three times in the Confessions, twice in connection with another archaic translation, ‘oratoria’ for ‘rhetorica’. Again, this translation has a good republican pedigree—one thinks of Cicero’s dialogue, the Partitiones Oratoriae—but again, this time thanks to Quintilian, we know that it was obsolete by the first century a d.16 stressed. It has to be borne in mind, however, that Augustine sees this example as an exception. 15 Augustine, Ord. 2. 12. 35: ‘Quibus [sc. litteris et numeris] duobus repertis nata est illa librariorum et calculonum professio, quaedam grammaticae infantia, quam Varro litterationem vocat’ (‘When these two arts [i.e. literacy and numeracy] had been discovered, there came into being the profession of the book-man and the bean-counter; this was, so to speak, the infancy of the art of grammar, which Varro calls litteratio’); Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Mercuriae et Philologiae 3. 229 (ed. Kopp): Γραµµατικ dicor in Graecia, quod γραµµ linea et γρα´µµατα litterae nuncupentur . . . hincque mihi Romulus Litteraturae nomen ascripsit, quamvis infantem Litterationem voluerit nuncupare, sicut apud Graecos Γραµµατιστικ primitus vocitabar’ (‘Grammatike¯ am I called in Greece, as a pen-stroke is called gramme¯ and letters are called grammata . . . for this reason Romulus gave me the name of Litteratura, though in my infancy he chose to call me Litteratio, just as I was originally called grammatistike¯ among the Greeks’). The distinction between ‘litteratio’ (basic literacy) and ‘litteratura’ (literary studies) has been painstakingly reconstructed by R. Kaster, C. Suetonius Tranquillus: De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (Oxford, 1995), 86–93. For ‘litteratura’ in both senses, and its obsolescence, see Seneca, Ep. 88. 20: ‘prima illa, ut antiqui vocabant, litteratura, per quam pueris elementa traduntur’ (‘the earliest litteratura (as the ancients called it), the one through which children are taught their letters’). 16 Compare Cicero’s use of the phrase ‘facultas oratoria’ at De Inventione 1. 6–7; De Oratore 1. 245. For the formation, we might compare Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, clearly a parody of a technical handbook: M. Janka, Ovid ‘Ars Amatoria’, Buch 2: Kommentar (Heidelberg, 1997), 31–4. For the obsolescence of the term, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2. 14. 1–4: ‘Rhetoricen in latinum transferentes tum oratoriam, tum oratricem nominaverunt . . . et haec interpretatio non minus dura est quam illa Plauti essentia atque queentia’ (‘Latin translators sometimes called rhetoric oratoria, sometimes oratrix . . . a translation no less harsh than those famous words of Plautus’, essentia and queentia’). Quintilian’s own title (if manuscripts are to be trusted) is, of course, evidence of the currency of the adjective.

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The three passages repay attention. The first is Augustine’s description of his days at sixth-form college in Madaura, where he had gone ‘for the sake of acquiring literary and oratorical expertise’ (‘litteraturae atque oratoriae percipiendiae gratia’, 2. 3. 5). It is hard to know what, if anything, to read into this, though one is tempted to think that Augustine is using the archaic expression to describe the provincial schooling available in Madaura in the 360s.17 His second use is ambivalent rather than neutral: Simplicianus tells Augustine how Marius Victorinus had taken the emperor Julian’s prohibition of Christians teaching ‘litteratura’ and ‘oratoria’ as the cue for his professional retirement (8. 5. 10). Here Augustine’s attitude is more complex. Victorinus’ decision would be one of the factors influencing Augustine’s own retirement, but Augustine does not approve of Julian’s edict; elsewhere he equates it with persecution.18 His focus in this passage is not on the evils of the conventional educational system, but on the uses to which it may be put. More clearly positive is the third instance of ‘litteratura’, in a key passage for our present study. In Book 10 of the Confessions, Augustine discusses the arts, not as they are taught in school, but in a more Platonic sense, as things accessible only to the intellect: ‘as for the nature of grammar and the art of dialectic (nam quid sit litteratura, quid peritia disputandi), how many categories there are . . . [A]ll these things are in my memory, without my having kept an image and left the reality outside’ (10. 9. 16). Grammar in this more positive sense may fairly be described as ‘litteratura’. In the same passage Augustine refers also to rhetoric, to which we now turn. 17 Madaura, a centre of Romanization in North Africa in the second century a d, seems to have undergone something of a renovation programme around and shortly after Augustine’s time there. C. Lepelley, Les Cités de l’Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979–81), ii. 128–33, lists a series of public works on buildings ‘incuria paene ad interitum redactae’ (‘all but reduced to destruction through neglect’) or ‘tot retro annis ruinarum labe deformes’ (‘besmirched with the stain of delapidation going back over many years’). 18 Civ. 18. 52: ‘an ipse non est ecclesiam persecutus, qui christianos liberales litteras docere vetuit?’ (‘What of him who forbade Christians to teach the liberal arts? Did he not persecute the Church?’).

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r h e to r i c The Confessions contain seven instances of ‘rhetorica’, all referring to Augustine’s pre-conversion career. The one example we have encountered (4. 2. 2) speaks for all: ‘Throughout those years I taught the art of rhetoric (artem rhetoricam), and taught the knack of domineering speech, being myself dominated by my own cupidity.’19 But in the key catalogue of the arts as they exist in the memory, Augustine again avoids this term, asking instead how it is that we remember rhetoric (‘numquid sicut meminimus eloquentiam?’, 10. 21. 30). There is every reason to think that he is here using the word ‘eloquentia’ in its technical sense, which goes back at least to Cicero, is solidly attested in Quintilian,20 and most memorably of all appears in Eumolpus’ introduction of himself in Petronius’ Satyricon: ‘Where is dialectic? Where astronomy? Where the welltended path of philosophy? Who has ever gone to a temple to perform his vow, having attained unto rhetoric?’ (‘ubi est 19 Note the description of rhetoric as an ‘art’, found also at 5. 12. 22; in Doct. Chr. 4. 60 Augustine explicitly endorses Cicero’s view that eloquence is not so much invented as discovered. Three of the other seven instances of ‘rhetorica’ co-occur with ‘profiteri’ or ‘professio’, to be contrasted with the ‘confessio’ of the Christian Augustine. Note also how his own enterprise in Doct. Chr. is carefully paraphrased as a ‘means of presentation’ (‘modus proferendi’, 1. 1. 1 and elsewhere), even though the closeness to rhetoric is obvious already from 2. 37. 55: ‘sed haec pars [i.e. rhetorica or eloquentia] discitur, magis ut proferamus ea quae intellecta sunt’. 20 Cicero does draw a loose distinction between untutored eloquence and rhetoric proper. See, e.g., De Inventione 1. 5: ‘Civilis quaedam ratio est, quae multis et magnis rebus constat. Eius quaedam magna et ampla pars est artificiosa eloquentia, quam rhetoricam vocant’ (‘Political science consists of many important things. An important and noble part of it is eloquence refined by art, or “rhetoric”, as it is called’), or De Oratore 1. 167: ‘non defuit . . . patronis . . . eloquentia neque dicendi ratio, sed iuris civilis scientia’ (‘Those lawyers lacked neither eloquence nor a scientific approach to speaking, but rather a knowledge of law’). Quintilian, however, uses ‘eloquentia’ as a straightforward translation: Institutio Oratoria 2. 16. 2: ‘Sequitur quaestio, an utilis rhetorice. Nam quidam vehementer in eam invehi solent . . .: eloquentiam esse, quae poenis eripiat scelestos’ (‘The question follows, whether rhetoric is a good thing. Some people habitually criticize it harshly, saying that it is eloquence which rescues the wicked from their punishment’).

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dialectica? ubi astronomia? ubi sapientiae cultissima via? quis umquam venit in templum et votum fecit, si ad eloquentiam pervenisset?’, 88). Elsewhere in the Confessions, Augustine’s use of the term ‘eloquentia’ is similar to his use of ‘litterae’ for ‘grammatica’. It is found both in pejorative contexts, as when he studies ‘with criminal intent’ the classics of rhetoric (‘libri eloquentiae’) at Carthage (3. 4. 7), but also in reference to the Scriptures: Moses is notable for his ‘facultas eloquendi’ (12. 26. 36), but never for his ‘facultas rhetorica’. The ‘loq’- root appears also in another key passage of the Confessions. Having described his university education in Book 3, Augustine sums it up by telling God he was taught nothing: ‘Whatever I learnt of the arts of speech and logic, or of the measurement of figures or music or mathematics (de arte loquendi et disserendi . . . de dimensionibus figurarum et musicis et de numeris), I learnt with no great difficulty—and not through any human tradition. You know, O Lord my God, that my ready understanding and critical acumen also are your gifts’ (4. 16. 30). We should note in passing that this summary, like the Platonic catalogue of the arts as they truly are in Book 10, is couched almost completely in Latin terms. Only ‘musica’ is given a Greek name, on this its one appearance in the Confessions.21 (We shall return below to another use, or abuse, of the ‘loq’- root.) The other possible Latin translation of ‘rhetorica’ to be considered here is ‘facundia’. This is not a canonical translation in the way that ‘eloquentia’ is, but there is some evidence that in earlier Latin it could bear this sense. Sallust uses it of the primitive rhetorical skills of the

21 In De Musica Augustine repeatedly uses the phrase ‘peritia’ or ‘ars (bene) modulandi’, also found in Cassiodorus’ Institutiones; the first attestation of this formula is in the third-century grammarian Censorinus (10. 3). The phrase is not used in the Confessions, though it is notable that Augustine favours church music only if it is done ‘cum convenientissima modulatione’ (Conf. 10. 33. 50). We should, therefore, be prepared to hear echoes of music in all ‘mod’- words in the Confessions: ‘modus’, ‘moderari’, ‘omnimodus’, ‘multimodus’, and so on. And as Klingshirn notes above, 129, we should remember that music is an arithmetical discipline, and so falls under the broader rubric of ‘numerus’.

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22

second-century tribune Memmius, and Ovid of the Scythians’ first faltering steps on the road to eloquence.23 The Sallustian tag is recycled by Augustine in reference to his dedication of De Pulchro et Apto to Hierius, famous for his ‘Graeca facundia’ (4. 14. 21); it is used also in the description of his early trips to hear Ambrose preaching in the basilica at Milan, where he is interested only in the style of Ambrose’s preaching, not its content (‘quasi explorans eius facundiam’, 5. 23. 13). Again, it is difficult to generalize on the basis of two examples. It appears, however, that this is an old-fashioned translation, not common in classical Latin, and that Augustine reserves it for rather unfavourable contexts; he is clearly critical of his pre-conversion preoccupation with rhetoric. dialectic We have seen how Augustine’s attitude to the ‘artes’ undergoes a major change between his conversion and the later decades of his life. Nowhere is this more visible than in his use of the term ‘dialectica’.24 In his first post-conversion work, the Contra Academicos of 386, he observes that ‘by adding dialectic, which is either the essence or the sine qua non of philosophy, Plato is said to have perfected that art’ (‘Plato . . . subiungens . . . dialecticam, quae aut ipsa esset aut sine qua sapientia omnino esse non posset, perfectam dicitur composuisse philosophiae disciplinam’, 3. 18. 37). By

22 Sallust, Iugurtha 30. 4: ‘quoniam ea tempestate Romae Memmi facundia clara pollensque fuit’ (‘since at that time Memmius’ speech-craft was famous and prepollent at Rome’). 23 Ovid, Tristia 2. 273: ‘discitur innocuas ut agat facundia causas’ (‘Men study speech-craft, to defend the just’). 24 On matters relating to dialectic in Late Antiquity, including Manichee disputations, Christian deployment of the practice, and ultimately the growing preference for authority based on hierarchy, tradition, assent to formulas, and unanimous or at least univocal acclamation, see R. Lim, Public Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995). An additional perspective is provided by Heßbrüggen-Walter in this volume.

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the last decade of his life, he is not so charitable:25 the first disciples, he writes in the City of God, ‘were uneducated, not versed in grammar, not armed with dialectic, not puffed up with rhetoric’ (‘impolitos, non peritos grammatica, non armatos dialectica, non rhetorica inflatos’, 22. 5)—three Greek words together. His works against Julian of Eclanum, also from his last decade, are full of sneers at Julian’s pretensions as a ‘dialecticus’: where, he asks at one point, is Julian’s vaunted grasp of Aristotle and the other tricks of the dialectical trade (‘ubi est acumen tuum, quo tibi videris categorias Aristotelis assecutus, et aliam dialecticae artis astutiam’, Contra Iulianum 3. 2. 7)? But more than half of the 120 or so examples of ‘dialectica’ in Augustine’s writings appear in a very different work—the polemic Against Cresconius the Donatist Grammarian, written in 405–6, and so chronologically quite close to the Confessions. Cresconius had accused Augustine of being a ‘dialecticus’. Augustine, however, is unrepentant; dialectic, he says, is ‘nothing other than the art of disputation’. A ‘dialecticus’ is merely what in Latin is called a ‘disputator’, and, he says, ‘to criticize under a Greek name what you have no choice but to praise under a Latin name is nothing other than to impose upon the uneducated, and to insult the educated’ (‘Improbrare ergo in vocabulo graeco, quod approbare cogeris in latino, quid est aliud quam indoctis praetentare fallaciam, doctis facere iniuriam?’, 1. 14. 17). For good measure, Augustine adds that the question-and-answer sessions we find Jesus practising in the Gospels were themselves an example of ‘dialectica’. A shrewd point. But Augustine’s rather shrill defence of ‘dialectica’ may lead us to suspect that Cresconius had touched a sore point. Augustine had, in fact, hardly used the word ‘dialectica’ in his published works in the twenty years since Contra Academicos. Certainly he does not use it in the Confessions, but he has a range of alternatives. One of his alternatives, ‘peritia 25 The turning-point can be clearly observed at Doct. Chr. 2. 31. 48– 35. 53, where he cautions against an unbridled use of the ‘disciplina disputationis’, also called ‘scientia definiendi, dividendi atque partiendi’ or ‘regulae conexionum’; see also Pollmann below, 221.

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disputandi’, we have encountered already in his catalogues of the arts as they exist in the mind (10. 9. 16, 4. 16. 30). The translation is canonical; Cicero in the Orator links the ‘disputandi ratio’ with ‘praecepta disserendi’ as Latin versions of ; διαλεκτικ 26 Here, as in other cases, preference for Latin words has the important consequence of enabling Augustine to link the ‘artes’ to specific biblical passages, where the same words are used in a non-technical sense. The supreme dialectician, for him, is God; it is God who teaches us, by forcing us to confront the inconsistencies and false values in purely human conventions. The link is provided by Isaiah 1: 18, cited at Conf. 13. 19. 24: ‘venite, disputemus, dicit dominus.’ ‘Come let us reckon up [or do dialectic], says the Lord’—a passage to which we shall return later. Another important verb is ‘sermocinari’;27 not, perhaps, so familiar a rendering of διαλ&γοµαι as ‘disputare’ or ‘disserere’, but a rendering none the less. Both the Auctor ad Herennium and Quintilian use the term ‘sermocinatio’ to refer to the rhetorical figure known as δια´λογο, in which individuals referred to in a speech are made to converse in language appropriate to their character,28 and ‘sermo’ or ‘sermocinatio’ can also be used of philosophical dialogue, whether Xenophontic, Platonic, or Ciceronian.29 Indeed it is

26 Cicero, Orator 32. 113–14: ‘disputandi ratio et loquendi dialecticum sit . . . ipse Aristoteles tradidit praecepta plurima disserendi, et postea qui dialectici dicuntur spinosiora multa pepererunt’ (‘The scientific approach to argument and speech [is] dialectic . . . Aristotle himself left many teachings on the art of debate, and the later “dialecticians” produced many teachings more thorny still’). 27 See also Conybeare in this volume, 50–1. 28 Rhetorica ad Herennium 4. 52. 65: ‘Sermocinatio est cum alicui personae sermo attribuitur et is exponitur cum ratione dignitatis’ (‘Sermocinatio is when a speech is ascribed to a character and is set forth in a way proportionate to their status’); Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9. 2. 31: ‘sermones hominum assimulatos dicere διαλ"γου malunt, quod latinorum quidam dixerunt sermocinationem’ (‘Fictional speeches by individuals are called “dialogues”; some Latin-speakers have called this phenomenon sermocinatio’). 29 Cicero, De Officiis 1. 37. 134–5: ‘Sit ergo hic sermo, in quo Socratici maxime excellunt, levis minimeque pertinax; insit in eo lepos . . . habentur autem plerumque sermones aut de domesticis negotiis aut de re publica

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easy to see how ‘sermocinari’, a middle verb with a similar basic meaning to διαλ&γοµαι, could easily take on the sense ‘to engage in dialectic’. Augustine himself is aware of this possibility. Cresconius the Donatist grammarian is pummelled mercilessly: if, Augustine asks, ‘neither our Lord nor his interlocutors conducted dialectic in the course of their “sermocinatio”, then what in your opinion is dialectic?’30 Of the five instances of ‘sermocinari’ in the Confessions, all can, at a push, be classed under the heading of ‘dialectic’ or ‘intellectual discourse’. On one occasion, Augustine fuses the double sense of ‘sermo’ as a rendering both of ; (µιλα, ‘homily’ or ‘sermon’ in the English sense, and of δια´λογο: Monica goes to church to hear not the preacher, but ‘you, [O God], in your homilies’ (‘te [Deus] in tuis sermonibus’, 5. 9. 17). I would suggest that the notion of ‘dialectic’ is strongly present at this point. Monica has often been viewed as a classic instance of the untaught sage, and indeed Augustine refers to God teaching her in the ‘inner schola’ or

aut de artium studiis atque doctrina’ (‘The sort of conversation in which the Socratics excel should be light and not too single-minded; it should have a humorous element . . . these conversations are usually about either household management or politics or the pursuit and study of the arts’); De Amicitia 1. 24. 38: ‘[Scaevola] exposuit nobis sermonem Laelii de amicitia . . . eius disputationis sententias memoriae mandavi . . . ut tamquam a praesentibus haberi sermo videretur’ (‘[Scaevola] recounted to us the conversation on friendship which Laelius held . . . I learnt by heart many of phrases from that discussion . . . so that the conversation should seem to be conducted by parties actually present’); Horace, Odes 3. 21. 9–10: ‘non ille, quamquam Socraticis madet / sermonibus, te neglegit horridus’ (‘Drenched as he is in Socratic dialogues, he’s not wild and woolly; he won’t overlook you’). 30 C. Cresc. 1. 19. 23: ‘video quid fortasse dicturus sis, nec illos [sc. captiosi interrogatores domini] nec illum in ea sermocinatione dialectice egisse. Si ergo nec illi qui captiose atque invidiose sermocinantur, nec illi qui tales eorum responsione convincunt, dialectice agunt, dic nobis tandem quid sit dialectica?’ (‘I think perhaps I see what you’re going to say, that neither [Jesus] himself nor those [who tried to catch him out with questions] practised dialectic in the course of their conversation. If, then, dialectic is practised neither by those who conduct conversations out of envy and a desire to catch people out, nor by those who refute such people with an answer, don’t keep us in suspense—what is dialectic?’).

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lecture-theatre of her heart. At two other points in the later books of the Confessions, he uses ‘sermocinari’ again to refer to God as supreme dialectician, calling on those who can to ‘listen to [God’s] inner dialectic’ (‘audiat te intus sermocinantem qui potest’, 11. 9. 11), and beseeching God to ‘console me, and reason with me’ (‘tu me alloquere, tu mihi sermocinare’, 12. 10. 10). For reasons that will become clearer in a moment, this special use of philosophical language in the later books is entirely appropriate. geometry We have already noted the appearance of geometry as ‘dimensio figurarum’ in the list of the ‘artes’ as they really are, given in Book 4. In the catalogue of the arts in Book 10 we find a similar translation, ‘dimensionum rationes’ (10. 12. 19). Various other phrases also occur, referring to the measurement of shapes, of the earth, or of the cosmos more generally. Thus we find ‘dimensiones figurarum’ (4. 19. 30), and references to ‘measuring the distances between the stars and seeking the fulcra of the earth’ (‘neque . . . siderum intervalla dimetimur vel terrae libramenta quaerimus’, 10. 16. 24). The one expression we never find is ‘geometria’ itself—even though it is one of Cicero’s honorary Latin words. Augustine’s alternatives are, in fact, reminiscent of some of the expressions Cicero himself tried and dropped.31 But again, his translations both play up the radical sense of the words and allow him to link the arts to the Scriptures: God, the Great Geometer, has ‘arranged all things in measure and number and weight’, and the humblest believer

31 Cicero, Disputationes Tusculanae 1. 5: ‘at nos metiendi ratiocinandique utilitate huius artis [sc. geometriae] terminavimus modum’ (‘We have restricted the boundaries of this art to the practical purpose of measuring and calculating’); De Senectute 49. 6: ‘mori videbamus in studio dimetiendi paene caeli atque terrae C. Galum’ (‘We watched as Gaius Galus died in the pursuit of measuring all but heaven and earth’). Cf. Horace, Odes 1. 28. 1–2: ‘te maris et terrae numeroque carentis harenae / mensorem cohibent, Archyta’ (‘You, Archytas, measurer of the sea and the land and the countless sand . . . are circumscribed within a little dust; what slight reward!’).

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has a truer grasp of the source of geometry than the finest infidel professional.32 arithmetic Turning to mathematics, we may not be surprised to find that the word ‘arithmetica’, like ‘geometria’, is entirely avoided in the Confessions, even though it had been current in educated Latin for centuries. Instead, Augustine uses ‘numerus’.33 This is the regular translation in Republican Latin—Cicero uses it twice in the context of Platonic philosophy34—and, like ‘disputare’, it enables Augustine to link the liberal arts to the Scriptures. The Confessions famously open with a reference to ‘numerus’, cited from Psalm 147: 5: ‘Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde. Magna virtus tua, et sapientiae tuae non est numerus.’ Likewise, many of the forty instances of ‘numerus’ and ‘numerare’ in the Confessions appear in biblical citations. So, for instance, Augustine can invoke Matthew 10: 20, ‘to you the hairs of our head are numbered’ (‘tu vero, cui numerati sunt capilli nostri’, 1. 12. 19), or the statement that Christ was ‘numbered among us’ (‘et numeratus est inter nos’, 5. 3. 5, 32 Conf. 5. 4. 7, citing Wisdom 11: 21: ‘fidelis homo . . . dubitare stultum est quin utique melior sit quam mensor caeli et numerator siderum et pensor elementorum et neglegens tui, qui omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti’ (‘It is foolish to doubt that the believer is better off than the measurer of the sky and the counter of the stars and the weigher of the elements who has no regard for you, who have arranged everything according to measure and number and weight’). 33 Compare Doct. Chr. 2. 38. 56, where Augustine uses ‘numeri disciplina’ (as elsewhere just ‘numerus’ or ‘numeri’) of the unchanging laws of mathematics, with relevance also for geometry and music, but distinguished from the arbitrary ‘numerus’ of metre. 34 Cicero, De Re Publica 1. 10. 16: ‘cuius [sc. Platonis] in libris multis locis ita loquitur Socrates, ut etiam cum de moribus, de virtutibus, denique de re publica disputet, numeros tamen et geometriam et harmoniam studeat Pythagorae more coniungere’ (‘There are many passages in [Plato’s] works where Socrates speaks in such a way that even when discussing ethics, moral qualities, or politics, he betrays a desire to link them to mathematics and geometry and harmony, Pythagoras-style’); cf. De Finibus 5. 29. 87: ‘cur Plato Aegyptum peragravit ut a sacerdotibus barbaris numeros et caelestia acciperet’ (‘why Plato scoured Egypt to learn mathematics and astronomy from the barbarian priests’).

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citing Isaiah 53: 12, Mark 15: 28)—this last in a passage concerned explicitly with the relationship between mathematics and theology. By choosing ‘numeri’ rather than ‘arithmetica’, Augustine is able to portray God as the Great Mathematician. ph i lo s o ph y Augustine famously encounters philosophy at the age of 18, through reading Cicero’s lost protreptic Hortensius. Wisdom is with God; and the Hortensius teaches him that ‘the love of wisdom has a Greek noun: philosophy’ (‘amor autem sapientiae nomen graecum habet philosophiam’, 3. 4. 7–8). It would be easy to say that ‘amor sapientiae’ is Augustine’s, or Cicero’s, gloss on ‘philosophia’. But Augustine does not present us with the Greek term, then with a Latin equivalent, or vice versa. Rather, ‘philosophia’ is presented as simply the ‘Greek noun’ to describe the love of wisdom, in the same way that ‘amor sapientiae’ is the corresponding Latin noun phrase. True philosophy, he suggests, is above and beyond linguistic particularism.35 It is true that this initial, positive evaluation is swiftly followed by a health warning, from the Apostle Paul: ‘See that none deceive you through philosophy and empty distraction, according to human tradition, according to the elements of this world’ (3. 4. 8, citing Col. 2: 8). But the reference here is to ‘bad’ philosophy, seen as characterized by atheist materialism and an obsession with intellectual pedigrees. This sort of philosophy is always ‘philosophia’, its practitioners ‘philosophi’. The Latin terms are generally reserved for ‘good’ philosophy. In his catalogue of the arts in the memory in Book 10, Augustine talks of philosophy—that is, in this case, ethics—in purely descriptive terms. He speaks of the 35 Once again, we find a more dispassionate treatment of this discipline in Doct. Chr. (2. 40. 60). The nuances of his introductory phrase ‘philosophi autem qui vocantur’ (‘those who are called philosophers’) are hard to read. Like the use of quotation marks in English, the expression ‘qui vocantur’ might imply a rejection of the claim of (all) philosophers to be friends of the truth; but such expressions are often used with Greek words, even familiar ones, with little more implication than the practice of putting (say) German loan-words in italics.

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‘affectiones’ or ‘perturbationes animi’, but uses nothing that we can call even a semi-technical translation of φιλοσοφα. Elsewhere, Augustine typically uses some locution involving ‘sapientia’. For the verb, he avoids the pejorative ‘philosophari’ in favour of the more positive calques ‘sapientiam colere’ (6. 12. 20) or ‘diligere’ (3. 4. 8), or simply ‘sapere’. For the noun, we find ‘studium sapientiae’ (4. 14. 21), or just plain ‘sapientia’. ‘Sapientia’ is, once again, a familiar rendering of ‘philosophia’ from Republican times onward. But, as in the other cases already observed, Augustine blends this traditional discourse of intellectual activity with his new biblical wisdom. Sixteen of the sixty instances of ‘sapientia’ in the Confessions appear in biblical citations, beginning with the prominent citation of Psalm 147: ‘sapientiae tuae non est numerus’ (1. 1. 1). ‘Sapientia’ is the quality par excellence of God; quoting Paul again, Augustine even identifies it with Christ: ‘The Only-Begotten himself has become our wisdom and righteousness’ (‘ipse autem unigenitus factus est nobis sapientia et iustitia’, 5. 3. 5, citing 1 Cor. 1: 24, 30). And Augustine concludes his exegesis of the creation story with the statement that God, the Supreme Philosopher, teaches us all these meanings through a process of dialectic (‘haec nobis disputas, sapientissime deus noster’, 13. 18. 23). Having examined Augustine’s practice for each of the ‘artes’, we should now inquire into the principles lying behind it. It is true that Latin writers often intersperse Greek and Latin technical vocabulary, especially in lists;36 but that does not seem to be an adequate explanation here. Why are established words so regularly reserved for pejorative contexts, or else ignored altogether? It is true that Latin writers frequently use clusters of Greek terms in order to distance themselves from their subject-matter. But Augustine himself explicitly warns Cresconius against criticizing in Greek what he approves in Latin, and in fact a high 36 Compare, for instance, Petronius’ catalogue of ‘dialectica, astronomia, sapientia, eloquentia’ (Satyricon 88, quoted above) with Quintilian’s juxtaposition of ‘grammatice, musice, philosophia [praecepta sapientiae]’ with ‘ratio siderum’ and ‘eloquentia’ (Inst. Or. 1. 4. 4–5).

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percentage of the Greek words in the Confessions are there precisely because of their occurrence in biblical Latin. We may grant that, up to a point, Greek words are used by Augustine to indicate disapproval. But that principle by itself will not account for the distribution of liberal-arts terms that we find in the Confessions. The clue to Augustine’s usage is surely the wider semantic resonance of his translations. Our original concept of substitutability may be stretched to breaking-point here. Perhaps we should think of Greek words as having not a defined set of familiar Latin translations, but a penumbra of various translations. The extent of this penumbra is necessarily uncertain, and it may be worth while considering some borderline examples. Take ‘loquacitas’. We have seen this word juxtaposed to ‘rhetorica’ (‘docebam in illis annis rhetoricam, et victoriosam loquacitatem victus cupidine vendebam’, 4. 2. 2). Augustine uses it also when speaking of his retirement from teaching rhetoric or as a decision to ‘withdraw the service of my tongue from the speech-market’ (‘subtrahere ministerium linguae meae nundinis loquacitatis’, 9. 2. 2), shortly afterwards expressed as ‘gaining release from the rhetorical profession’ (‘[solvi] a professione rhetorica’, 9. 4. 7). These juxtapositions in themselves suggest an equivalence between the terms. Underlying them there may be an extension of the analogical principle by which many Latin translations are formed: