Soliloquies

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.9 · 1.10–2.2 · 2.3–2.10 · 2.11–2.19 · 2.20

1. 1.1Reason urges Augustine to write down what he finds, and he opens with a long prayer to God as the source of truth, wisdom, life and happiness, asking to be healed and to return to him.
2. 1.2Augustine says he desires to know only God and the soul, and Reason presses him on what knowledge of God would satisfy him and on what he loves in his friends.
3. 1.3Reason and Augustine distinguish knowing by the senses from knowing by the intellect, using the examples of his friend Alypius, his dinner, and the course of the moon.
4. 1.4Reason uses the geometer's line and sphere to show that very different things can be known with equal certainty, and asks whether Augustine would be content to know God in that way.
5. 1.5Augustine protests that knowing God must differ from knowing geometry, and Reason answers that the certainty can be the same though the objects and the joy differ, as with seeing earth and sky.
6. 1.6Reason compares knowing God to the sun lighting what the eye sees, and explains that the soul needs healthy eyes, looking and seeing, and that faith, hope and love are required for its healing.
7. 1.7Reason explains that once the soul sees God, faith and hope are no longer needed and only love remains, though in this life all three are still required.
8. 1.8Reason teaches that as the sun is, shines and illuminates, so God is, is understood, and makes other things understood, and Augustine accepts this as probable.
9. 1.9Reason tests whether Augustine is healthy enough to see God, and he admits he is still moved by fear of losing friends, of pain, and of death.
10. 1.10Augustine tells Reason that he no longer desires riches or honors, has resolved not to marry, and seeks food and bodily comforts only as health requires.
11. 1.11Reason asks whether Augustine would still want wealth, honor, or a wealthy wife if they served the pursuit of wisdom, and Augustine answers that he would accept them only as means, not desire them for themselves.
12. 1.12Augustine admits that he wants his friends and his own life only for the sake of finding wisdom, and that he fears bodily pain because it hinders the search, citing Cornelius Celsus on the supreme good and evil.
13. 1.13Reason describes wisdom as a beloved to be loved for herself alone, and explains that minds must be trained by stages to bear her light, as weak eyes are led from dim objects to the sun.
14. 1.14Reason tells Augustine that he will see God when nothing earthly delights him, reminds him how a night's thoughts of a woman's caresses showed that he is not yet healed, and Augustine, weeping, commits himself to God's care.
15. 1.15Reason begins to show that truth outlasts all true things that perish, so that truth must dwell in what is immortal, and urges Augustine to entrust himself wholly to God.
16. 2.1Opening the second book with a short prayer, Augustine says that he knows he thinks but not whether he is immortal, and that he wants to live forever in order to know.
17. 2.2Reason argues that truth cannot perish, since even its perishing would be true.
18. 2.3Reason argues that falsity exists only in sense, that sense requires a living soul, and that since falsity will always exist the soul must always live, and Augustine asks to go more slowly.
19. 2.4Augustine objects that the argument proves only that some soul always exists, not that each soul is immortal, and Reason goes on to argue that bodies cannot exist without a soul to perceive them.
20. 2.5Reason shows that defining the true as what appears to a knower leads to absurd conclusions, while defining it as what is leaves nothing false, and Augustine is left without an answer.
21. 2.6After Augustine prays for light, Reason shows from sight, hearing and the other senses that what we call false is always something that resembles the true.
22. 2.7Reason shows that likeness can make things true as well as false, and explains that he calls the work Soliloquies because Augustine questions and answers himself, which spares the shame of being refuted.
23. 2.8Augustine is perplexed that falsity seems to arise from both likeness and unlikeness, and finds every definition of the true leading back into difficulties.
24. 2.9Reason distinguishes what is false by intent to deceive or by invention from what is false because it tends to be something it is not, such as reflections, pictures, and dreams.
25. 2.10Reason observes that actors, pictures, and reflections are true in one respect only by being false in another, and Augustine replies that he seeks a truth that is not two-faced in this way.
26. 2.11Reason argues that grammar and every discipline are true because they are disciplines, formed by the definitions and divisions of the art of disputation, so that truth is true through itself.
27. 2.12Reason and Augustine agree that what is inseparably in a subject, as a discipline is in the mind, cannot remain if the subject ceases to exist.
28. 2.13Reason concludes that, since truth always remains and discipline, which is truth, is inseparably in the mind, the mind must be immortal, while Augustine voices his fear that the soul may be extinguished like a light.
29. 2.14Augustine raises two doubts about the proof, the long way it took and how a discipline can be in untaught minds, and wishes for help from two men whose writings might settle the question.
30. 2.15Reason restates the proof that truth cannot perish, then shows that something is called false only when it imitates the true, as a false statement imitates true ones or lead imitates silver.
31. 2.16Reason and Augustine note that lead may be called false silver but not silver false lead, and touch on men who wear women's dress before returning to the point that the false always imitates the true.
32. 2.17Reason argues that the void cannot be true, since it is nothing and truth cannot produce it, and Augustine agrees to set it aside.
33. 2.18Reason shows that bodies are only imitations of truth, since the figures in bodies fall short of the true figures of geometry, which dwell in truth itself.
34. 2.19Reason concludes that since the true figures of geometry, and so truth, are in the mind as in a subject, the soul is immortal, and defers the question of the untaught mind to another book.
35. 2.20Reason explains the difference between true figures known by the intelligence and the images formed by thought, using the kinds of forgetting and remembering, and closes by promising that God will grant a blessed life full of truth after this body.