On Order

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.22 · 1.23–2.6 · 2.7–2.23 · 2.24–2.44 · 2.45–2.54

1. 1.1Augustine introduces to Zenobius the problem of order: how God can govern the world when so much perversity fills human affairs, a problem that tempts men to deny either providence or God's goodness.
2. 1.2Augustine argues that the ordered structure of even the smallest creatures shows divine governance, and that those who see disorder in the world are like a man who sees only one tile of a mosaic.
3. 1.3Augustine traces the error to man's ignorance of himself, and argues that the mind must withdraw from the many things of sense to its center, as all points of a circle are measured from its one center.
4. 1.4Augustine assures Zenobius that through liberal learning he will come to understand how all things form one ordered whole while sin is still to be avoided, and commends the books to him.
5. 1.5Augustine recounts how ill health led him to Verecundus's country house at Cassiciacum, where he held recorded discussions with Alypius, Navigius, Licentius, and Trygetius.
6. 1.6Augustine tells how, lying awake one night, he noticed the irregular sound of the water channel by the baths and found that Licentius and Trygetius were also awake.
7. 1.7Licentius explains the irregular sound by leaves alternately clogging and releasing the channel, and Augustine accepts the explanation as probable.
8. 1.8Licentius declares that nothing happens outside order, and Augustine, delighted, challenges him to defend the claim and urges him away from his poem on Pyramus and Thisbe.
9. 1.9Licentius, quoting Terence, takes Augustine's rebuke as a sign to turn to philosophy and undertakes to defend the claim that nothing happens outside order.
10. 1.10Licentius rejoices that he is no longer an Academic and senses something divine, and Augustine, quoting Vergil, prays that God, who is truth itself rather than the oracular Apollo, will lead them.
11. 1.11Licentius argues that the fall of the leaves, like everything else, had causes, many hidden from the senses, and that nothing happens without a cause.
12. 1.12Augustine asks what purpose barren trees serve, Trygetius lists their uses, and Licentius insists that the question is rather how anything could happen without a cause.
13. 1.13Licentius protests at having to teach Augustine, who replies that he too is a beginner in philosophy and that the leaves themselves resisting the stream remind men of order.
14. 1.14Licentius exclaims that God orders all things, since even the leaves, the mouse, and their own waking were necessary links in the chain that produced their conversation and the book that records it.
15. 1.15Licentius argues that order is neither good nor evil and that nothing, not even error, is contrary to it, since everything has causes within order.
16. 1.16As Augustine rejoices at Licentius's turn to philosophy, Licentius exclaims that both good and evil are within order.
17. 1.17Trygetius objects that if evils are within order and order comes from God and is loved by him, then evils come from God and God loves them.
18. 1.18Licentius replies that God does not love evils, and that this very non-loving is part of order, so that evils, though not loved, belong to an order whose beauty arises from contraries as a speech is adorned by antitheses.
19. 1.19Licentius argues that God is just in giving each his due, which requires a distinction of good and evil deserts, so that everything is included in order.
20. 1.20Augustine promises to argue against Licentius by daylight, both to test him and for Zenobius, who had often pressed him on the order of things and to whom this conversation is owed.
21. 1.21Licentius declares that philosophy is more beautiful than the loves of poetry and gives thanks to Christ.
22. 1.22At daybreak Licentius sings the psalm verse "God of hosts, turn us," which Monica had rebuked him for singing in the latrine the evening before.
23. 1.23Augustine interprets Licentius's psalm as a prayer to be turned from the filth and darkness of the body and error toward the face of God, which is truth.
24. 1.24Augustine sends Licentius back to his poetry as a modest training for the happy life, urging him to end his Pyramus and Thisbe with a curse on lust and praise of pure love joined to the intellect through philosophy.
25. 1.25On the way to the baths the friends watch a cockfight and see in it, even in the defeated bird, the order and beauty of reason governing all things.
26. 1.26The cockfight prompts reflection on law, rule, and measure everywhere in nature, and the friends then write up the night's discussion.
27. 1.27Augustine opens the next day's discussion with a short praise of order as that which, if held to in life, leads to God, and prepares to oppose Licentius.
28. 1.28Pressed for a definition, Licentius defines order as that through which all things that God has established are done.
29. 1.29Licentius argues that Christ, sent by the Father, shows that God too acts by order; Trygetius stumbles in calling only the Father God properly and is corrected, and Augustine tearfully rebukes the young men for their rivalry and vanity.
30. 1.30Augustine reproves the young men's love of empty praise, Licentius begs that the episode be deleted, and Trygetius proposes that it stand as their punishment.
31. 1.31When Monica asks whether women appear in such discussions, Augustine defends her presence, noting that learned books include humble philosophers and that women philosophized among the ancients.
32. 1.32Augustine explains to Monica that philosophy is the love of wisdom, that Scripture condemns only the philosophy of this world, as Christ's kingdom is not of this world, and that her freedom from fear of death makes him glad to be her pupil.
33. 1.33Monica protests Augustine's praise, the first book ends for lack of tablets and for Augustine's health, and Licentius remarks on the hidden divine order that brings them these lessons.
34. 2.1Opening the second book, Augustine tells how Alypius returned and how Monica, whose fitness for philosophy he had seen in the birthday discussion, joined them in the meadow.
35. 2.2Licentius qualifies his definition: where all is good, as with God, there is supreme equality and no need of order, but order governs good and evil together.
36. 2.3Augustine presses Licentius on the claim that what is with God is unmoved, and Licentius struggles to hold both that nothing is without God and that moving things are not with God.
37. 2.4Augustine proposes that whatever understands God is with God, and Licentius specifies that what is with God is what the wise man knows, though not his clothes and furniture.
38. 2.5Trygetius argues that sense perception is not knowledge, which belongs to the intellect alone, and Licentius concludes that the wise man himself, who understands himself, is with God, apart from the part of him that uses the senses.
39. 2.6Licentius describes the wise man's purified soul clinging to God, served by a lower part that uses the senses and memory, which the wise man rules as a master rules a slave.
40. 2.7Licentius argues that the wise man, gazing on God, needs no memory, which belongs to the servant part of the soul; Augustine objects that teaching requires memory, and the question is deferred.
41. 2.8Augustine objects that if what the wise man understands is with God, folly, which he must understand to avoid, would be with God; Alypius answers that one who understands folly in order to avoid it is not yet wise.
42. 2.9Augustine replies that a wise man who taught about folly without understanding it would speak foolishly, so the difficulty remains, and Alypius yields the point to him.
43. 2.10Trygetius suggests that folly cannot be understood, and Augustine supports him: as the eye cannot see darkness, the mind cannot understand folly, its darkness, but can avoid it by grieving that it understands other things less.
44. 2.11Asked whether a fool's actions are ordered, Trygetius answers that the life of fools, though disordered in itself, is placed by providence within the order of the whole.
45. 2.12Augustine illustrates how evils find a place in the order of the whole with the executioner in a well-ordered city, prostitutes in society, the unseemly members of the body, and the defeated cock.
46. 2.13Augustine adds that faults of language, low style, and even fallacies have their proper place and value when governed by order.
47. 2.14Augustine says that order rules in music, geometry, astronomy, and number, and that moderate study of these disciplines leads to the highest measure, from which the apparent injustices of human life no longer trouble the mind.
48. 2.15Augustine advises that the apparent disorder of human life can be understood only through the liberal disciplines, and that those unable to study should rely on faith, by which God, through the mysteries, saves those who believe.
49. 2.16Augustine sets out the two ways of reason and authority, and says that true philosophy teaches the one almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the humility of God's taking a human body for our salvation.
50. 2.17Augustine notes that questions about the soul require a great order of learning, warns against rushing into them, and calls Licentius back to the discussion of the wise man's unmoved mind.
51. 2.18Augustine asks how the wise man's mind can remain unmoved while his body moves, and when the call to lunch comes he jokes that going from one place to another is just what being moved is.
52. 2.19Defining motion as passing from place to place, Augustine suggests that since God is everywhere the wise man can move and still always be with God; Licentius holds that only the body moves, not the wise mind.
53. 2.20Licentius argues that the wicked are neither with God, since they do not possess or enjoy him, nor without God, since God holds them.
54. 2.21Augustine raises the question whether God does what is done badly, and tells the distracted Licentius to read what Trygetius had already answered.
55. 2.22Augustine asks whether God was just before evil existed; Monica sees the difficulty, and Trygetius answers that God was always just, as Cicero's virtues existed before Catiline gave them occasion to act.
56. 2.23Augustine shows that if evil arose before order or by order, either something happens outside order or God is the author of evil; Monica answers that evil did not arise by God's order but that his justice brought it into the order it deserved.
57. 2.24Augustine urges the friends to follow the proper order of learning, as a teacher must teach letters before syllables, and says a lofty discipline can show that even perverse things are within divine order.
58. 2.25Augustine sets out the moral rule of life for young students of wisdom: abstinence from pleasures and ambition, moderation in anger and punishment, the golden rule, friendship, and the worship of God in faith, hope, and love.
59. 2.26Augustine explains that authority comes first in time and reason first in reality: authority opens the door to learning, and reason then leads the few to know the intellect and the first principle of all things, while those who live well by authority alone will be freed after death.
60. 2.27Augustine distinguishes divine authority, which surpasses human power in signs and in Christ shows its power, mercy, and nature, from the deceptions of demons and from fallible human authority.
61. 2.28Alypius admires the rule of life but doubts it can be lived without divine help, and Augustine answers that it comes from the books of great men and that Alypius already lives it.
62. 2.29Augustine argues that there are more good men than Alypius thinks, since virtue is hidden in the mind and conversions are often unnoticed, and that divine help reaches all peoples widely.
63. 2.30Augustine defines reason as the movement of the mind able to distinguish and connect what is learned, and notes that few can use it to understand God or the soul.
64. 2.31Augustine reflects on the definition of man as a rational mortal animal and distinguishes the rational, what uses reason, from the reasonable, what is made or said by reason.
65. 2.32Augustine notes that we speak of reason in what is seen and heard, but of smells and tastes only when they serve some purpose arranged by reason.
66. 2.33Augustine concludes that in the pleasures of sight and hearing, what belongs to reason is measure and proportion, called beauty in what is seen and sweetness in what is heard.
67. 2.34Augustine illustrates the role of measure in architecture, poetry, and dance, distinguishing the pleasure of the senses from the meaning grasped by the mind through the senses.
68. 2.35Augustine distinguishes three domains of the reasonable, in action, teaching, and delight, and describes how reason, for the sake of human fellowship, invented words, letters, and numbers, the beginnings of grammar.
69. 2.36Augustine describes reason's development of grammar: the classes of letters, syllables, the eight parts of speech, and the quantities of syllables.
70. 2.37Augustine notes that grammar came to include history, much of which is laborious trivia, such as the flight of Daedalus or the name of Euryalus's mother.
71. 2.38Augustine describes how reason, after grammar, produced dialectic, the discipline of disciplines that teaches how to teach and learn, and rhetoric, which moves those who cannot be taught by truth alone.
72. 2.39Reason, seeking to rise to divine contemplation by steps, turns to the senses, beginning with hearing, and distinguishes three kinds of sound: voice, wind instruments, and struck instruments.
73. 2.40Reason discovers meter and rhythm from the measures of syllables, names verse from its turning back, and so gives rise to poets, whom it allows reasonable fictions under the judgment of grammarians.
74. 2.41In music reason finds that eternal numbers rule, and explains the fable of the Muses as daughters of Jupiter and Memory, since sound passes and is kept by memory.
75. 2.42Turning to sight, reason finds that visible shapes fall far short of those the mind contains and founds geometry, and from the ordered movements of the heavens produces astronomy.
76. 2.43Reason finds number in all the disciplines, most truly in the measures grasped by the mind, dares to prove the soul immortal, and suspects that it is itself the number by which all things are numbered, though false images make it elusive like Proteus.
77. 2.44Augustine says that one who reduces the disciplines to one simple truth may seek divine things, but one ignorant of basic metaphysical notions will err greatly even about his own soul, let alone God, who is better known by not knowing.
78. 2.45Augustine assures Monica that the few essential things needed from the disciplines will be easy for her, even though she lacks polished speech, and that she will grasp the soul of grammar and leave its body to the eloquent.
79. 2.46Augustine advises Monica to keep the faith she received in the sacraments and lists the hard questions about God, evil, and creation, including the Manichaean view that evil harmed God and that the soul is of God's substance, which should be approached only through the order of learning.
80. 2.47Augustine says that one must know dialectic and number, or at least what the one is, before inquiring into these questions; philosophy then studies the soul and God, leading to knowledge of the two worlds and of the Father of all, known only by knowing how he is not known.
81. 2.48The soul, studying itself, finds that reason in distinguishing and connecting always seeks the one, and that unity constitutes stones, trees, animals, friendships, cities, armies, and love.
82. 2.49The soul reflects that man surpasses birds and beasts not by making well-measured things, which they also do by nature, but by knowing the numbers involved.
83. 2.50The soul reasons that rational truths such as numerical ratios are eternal while the world changes, so that it should flee from the mortal to the immortal and bring its own life into harmony as it brings verse and music.
84. 2.51Augustine describes the soul's vision of God, the source and Father of truth and the beauty by which all else is beautiful, which frees it from trouble over the apparent disorders of life, seen as parts of a harmonious whole.
85. 2.52Augustine urges good morals as the condition of being heard by God, asks Monica to pray for them, crediting her prayers with his love of truth, and praises Alypius.
86. 2.53Alypius compares Augustine's teaching to the venerable discipline of Pythagoras, which he says Augustine has laid open before them.
87. 2.54Augustine adds Varro's report that Pythagoras taught the art of governing the state only to his most perfect pupils, applies Vergil's image of the rock unmoved by the sea to the wise man, and the dialogue ends.