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resurrected self
[ 71 ]
wholeheartedly. I was at odds with myself, and fragmenting myself. This disintegra-
tion was occurring without my consent, but what it indicated was not the presence in
me of a mind belonging to some alien nature, [but conflict in my own mind].
23
“If we were to take the number of conflicting urges to signify the number of
natures present in us,” Augustine observed, “we should have to assume that there
are not two, but many” and that the conflicts among them are not just between
good and evil but between good and good and between evil and evil. He wrote
that “when the joys of eternity call us from above and pleasure in temporal pros-
perity holds us fast below, our one soul, in no state to embrace either with its entire
will, . . . is torn apart in its distress.”
24
In these remarks Augustine declares a unity
of soul, where late-twentieth-century theorists would see a fragmented self.
To find out about the human mind, Augustine urged, “Do not go outward,
return to yourself. Truth dwells within.”
25
By first going inward, he said, we are
led not outward, but upward. By going inward, the first truth that one discovers
is one’s own existence. The second is that the knowing of this truth does not
depend upon the body but on direct self-awareness. Reflecting on this reveals
something about our nature: since we know ourselves directly and do not know
ourselves as any sort of material object, we are not a material object. In the sev-
enteenth century, Descartes would
build on this argument to develop an extreme
form of substance dualism—between a thinking, unextended “spiritual” sub-
stance and an unthinking, extended, material substance—and declare that the
self is essentially a thinking, unextended substance.
Augustine did not go that far. Yet, as a substance dualist, he was among the
first to become self-conscious about a problem that would persist in the tradition
of Christian dualism at least until the end of the eighteenth century: how to
explain the relation of the soul substance to the body. Plato had maintained, in
effect, that the soul is related to the body like a pilot to his ship. Augustine’s view,
in contrast, was that soul and body together form an intimate unit: “A soul in
possession of a body does not constitute two persons, but one man.”
A man is not a body alone, nor a soul alone, but a being composed of both. . . . [The
soul is] not the whole man, but the better part of man, the body not the whole, but
the inferior part of man. . . . When both are joined, they receive the name of man. . .
[However,] even while a man is alive, and body and soul are united, [Scripture] calls
each of them singly by the name, man, speaking of the soul as the inward man, and
of the body as the outward man, as if there were two men, though both together are
indeed but one.
26
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