Saint Augustine of Hippo lived a life in tension. Tossed about by the caprices of circumstance, wracked with intellectual doubt and inward temptation, his soul was in a constant state of movement, even after becoming Christian. This tension was multifaceted and complex, manifesting itself in myriad ways.

Early in his life, Augustine experienced intellectual dissonance between the depravity of the culture that surrounded him and the various philosophical outlooks available to him. This may have been partly due to the upheavals of his age. The 4th and 5th centuries A.D. in North Africa were a time of great social disruption, a time of transition in public philosophy, religion, and politics. Paganism, Stoicism, Christianity, and Donatism all vied for dominance in the popular consciousness during this age of late-Roman decay.¹ Accordingly, Augustine’s life was marked by restless intellectual and spiritual searching, with dalliances in Neoplatonic philosophy and Manichaeism. This search ended only with his choice to join the Church in 378.

There was also a tension present in Augustine’s endless engagements with heresies, critics, and pastoral cares that marked his later life as Bishop of Hippo. Augustine was reluctant to take the post from the first, a reticence that turned out to be well-placed for a man who yearned for a life of contemplation.² Once installed in office, a seemingly endless litany of problems found their way to his desk, from the petty disputes among parishioners to the need to address the various heresies that rose up in the African Church of Augustine’s time.³ Augustine often commented on his desire for a life of intellectual engagement with a small circle of like-minded believers. He even remarks at one point in the Confessions that a desire for monastic life was beckoning him from the depths of his consciousness.⁴ Yet he persevered to the end, remaining in his post until his death in 430. ­

This tension manifested itself in more inward ways as well. Starting with his early engagement with philosophy, Augustine continually vacillated between the extremes of sensual indulgence and ascetic contemplation of the good. As he considered converting to Christianity, his highbrow intellectualism often conflicted with the conversion stories he heard about people of humbler ilk. On one occasion he exclaims, “What is wrong with us?…Uneducated people are rising up and capturing heaven, and we with our high culture without any heart-see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood.”⁵ These tendencies continued into Augustine’s mature life as attested by the prayerful consideration of inner temptations found in Book X of the Confessions.

How was Augustine able to navigate through all these years of intellectual indecisiveness, work stressors, and temptation? While a full exploration of this theme in Augustine’s life would merit a book-length study, it may be possible to isolate and analyze one key episode in Augustine’s life in order to respond to this question. Augustine’s rejection of Manichaeism may be one such experience.

Peter Brown argues that it was Augustine’s view on the tensile nature of the philosophical life that drove him away from Manichaeism:

…[For Augustine], ‘Wisdom’ was the fruit of a prolonged intellectual discipline and of personal growth. Compared with this ideal, it became clear to Augustine as he grew older, that the Manichees were merely presenting him with a Gnosis in its crudest form: he had run up against an esoteric and exotic ‘secret’ revelation, that claimed to bypass the exigencies and excitements of a classical philosopher’s quest for truth.⁶

To Augustine, these “exigencies of a quest for truth” are a hallmark of our sublunar life. It is as if he knew from a young age that accepting the difficulties of a life in tension constituted an important step in the journey toward truth.

Eric Voegelin’s understanding of the structure of consciousness may be instructive here. According to Voegelin, consciousness can be conceptualized as an act of questioning: “in the act of questioning, man’s experience of his tensions toward the divine ground breaks forth in word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer.”⁷ Augustine’s rejection of Manichaeism may be read as an experience of this principle: in bypassing the tensile structure of existence, Gnostic conceptions of man’s relation with ultimate reality cannot provide a philosophical basis for the tensile existence in which Augustine found himself.

Structures of Consciousness

In November 1978, Voegelin delivered a lecture in which he laid out his understanding of the “structures of consciousness” as they relate to one’s grasp of reality. While the lecture is a more general attack on the “-isms” meant to describe ideological, reductionist notions of reality that arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, the attack could just as easily apply to the Manichaeism that Augustine rejected upon his conversion in 378 A.D.

The key question for Voegelin here is whether reality as an object of intentionality (in the Husserlian sense) can be said to be conscious: “Can we say that reality is conscious? or that reality knows? or is the subject of knowledge?”¹⁰ The question is similar to one that still dominates philosophy of mind practitioners: can our notion of the reality that contains our consciousness become an object of knowledge? In Voegelin’s words, “There is a reality in which consciousness occurs; reality, the object of intentional consciousness, is now becoming the subject, of which consciousness, as one of its events, has to be predicated.”¹¹ That is to say, Voegelin needs to create a new term to denote this structure which “does not gloss over” this double structure of consciousness.”¹²

Voegelin dubs this double structure “luminosity:” “We have consciousness, first, in its intentionality and then as an event of luminosity in reality.”¹³ It might be thought of as a conceptual mirror: consciousness holds up a mirror to itself to picture itself and the reality that contains it. Truth, according to Voegelin is “… reality becoming luminous for its structure… So truth does not refer only to a reality outside of man and confronting man, but also to the process of reality in which man himself becomes an event, the event of the carrier of consciousness.”¹⁴ Consciousness can never be reified, but can become luminous in structure and process.

On the other hand, whenever an ideology does not reflect this structure, it becomes an “…’eristic’ construction….” Any philosophical system based on this notion is dubbed a “fantasy.” Hegelian dialectic is one example of a “glossing over” of this problem.¹⁴

Voegelin goes on to explain that man is necessarily limited in his capacity for apprehending the constituent elements of this structure. Every human being is aware of some truth beyond being (epekeina), a transcendent reality of which we are somehow aware even though it cannot be grasped in any positive sense. According to Voegelin, if we were capable of grasping it, there would be no reason for us to pursue the truth any further. To possess this type of truth would be the end of what Aristotle called kinesis or “movement” which characterizes all becoming. The end of this search is the end of history, the end of movement, the end of time.

Our constant searching, the pull toward higher levels of truth (aporein) despite our uncertainty as to their nature or mode of existence is a constant in human history, an experiential theme integral to all human experience. The epekeina is what Voegelin calls the “divine ground,” or God. There is another “pole” of the structure, man himself: “the other end of the tension is ‘man’; and there is a movement and countermovement. And, we might say, the area of that movement [and countermovement], that is what Plato and Aristotle would call the psyche.”¹⁵ Thus, the movement within this structure is constitutive of our experience of being. We experience kinesis between the two poles, both of which are beyond our horizon but are able to move us nonetheless.

Further, this ground and our search for it are what constitute reason or nous:

Now this whole process of searching for the ‘ground’ of one’s existence—the ignorance of the ground, then the awareness that one is searching for it, that one is moved in the search by the ground itself (in the kinesis)—that is what Plato and Aristotle have ultimately called the nous. So when we speak of nous as “reason” we should be aware that reason is not a world-immanent operation or faculty but always the consciousness of the in-between, of ignorance with a horizon that always has to be transgressed in order to find more beyond.¹⁶

To hypostatize this “beyond,” as it were, is to misunderstand the metaxy, to mischaracterize an essential element of man’s existential reality. Similarly, in agreement with Kierkegaard’s notion of man as the “synthesis of infinite and finite,”¹⁷ Voegelin asserts that to hypostatize man in his immanent being is to fundamentally misunderstand one of his constitutive elements: “One cannot, therefore, hypostatize [ . . . ] the ground, as the divinity, into a god about whom we know something, short of that tension; and [one] cannot hypostatize man into an immanent entity, short of that tension in which man experiences himself as man in the tension—that is, his existential reality.”¹⁸

Thus, the full, ultimately ungraspable, reality of the concept of man himself is as much a mystery as the divine ground. Movement (kinesis)  between the two poles of the structure can be conceptualized as the psyche of Plato and Aristotle. It is where we find ourselves existentially, the metaxy or “in between.” Whenever we attempt to hypostatize one of the two poles, we lose the “…luminous reality of the psyche… and one gets into empty speculation…”¹⁹ It is out of this hypostatization of the psyche that gnosis can arise.

Voegelin on Gnosis

Voegelin treats the Gnostic phenomenon at length in the fourth volume of Order and History. In the introduction to the work, he identifies the seeds of Gnosticism in the Gospel of John, in Jesus’s prayer just before entering into his Passion: “And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”²⁰ Contained within this utterance is the Beginning and the Beyond of Christian myth; its cosmology and its eschatology.

The problem here, according to Voegelin, is an opening for flawed interpretation that overemphasizes the eschatological aspects of Christian doctrine at the expense of the cosmogonic. Normally, bringing the Beyond into consciousness immediately opens the psyche to questions about the Beginning. But the Gnostic speculator alienates him- or herself from questions of the Beginning:

The intensely experienced presence of the Beyond brings the problem of the Beginning to intense attention. When the formerly unknown god of the Beyond reveals himself as the goal of the eschatological movement in the soul, the existence of the cosmos becomes an ever more disturbing mystery. Why should a cosmos exist at all, if man can do no better than live in it as if he were not of it, in order to make his escape from the prison through death?²¹

In other words, the danger of non-participation through a bankrupt sense of the Beyond’s participation in the cosmos can lead to a denial of the role of man’s participation in this reality. A proper relation to the cosmos is replaced by an inordinate preoccupation with the Beyond: “the flooding of consciousness with the Beyond induce[s] the imagery of nonparticipation, to the extreme of abolishing human existence altogether.”²²

The problem of right orientation toward the ground in immanent reality is the key problem here. In Gnostic speculation, the Beyond is connected to Beginning through man’s consciousness. The tension of lived mystery between the Beyond and the Beginning are abolished: “the divine mystery can turn into a human absurdity, if the consciousness of the movement toward the Beyond is torn out of the context of reality in which it arises and made the autonomous basis for human action that will abolish the mystery.”²³

It is important to note here the expansion of the metaxy to include a new realm of mystery. In the same way one might reify God or man, hypostatizing the Beginning removes a healthy sense of the tension of being out of consciousness. Properly speaking, the Beginning can only be accessed through mediated experience, rather than through knowledge of the psychodrama, as Voegelin terms this type of hypostasis. In this sense, consciousness loses its luminosity because the reality which contains it is improperly hypostatized and thus becomes an object for itself rather than the luminous structure it was before.

Gnostic speculations lead to a misunderstanding of the fundamental mysteries that drive the existential tensions of life. These misunderstandings lead to deformations that manifest themselves in what Glenn Hughes calls the “stop history” movements like Communism, modern enlightened progressivism, as well as under the guise of religious movements like Christian fundamentalism. In Hughes’s words: “These answers and assurances address and calm our anxiety about the mysteries of human origin and destiny, of suffering and iniquity—but at the cost…of an irrational and immoral refusal to acknowledge certain basic facts of existence, including both our duty to the world and the limitations of human knowing.”²⁴ In light of all these possible deformations, how can one properly approach the problems posed by life in the metaxy?

Man as Questioner

In “The Gospel and Culture” Voegelin lays out his view of how man must orient himself to the metaxy in order to prevent the “luminous search” from turning into a dogmatic and soul-deadening charade. The tension, or “existential unrest” of the metaxy becomes the baseline condition that draws man into the event of questioning as a mode of existence. In this process, “Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other; the search moves in the metaxy…in the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine; the question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a question that may reach the true answer or miss it.”²⁵

In refusing to become the questioner, in freezing the movement of the metaxy, man “deforms his humanity,” making it impossible to understand or respond to answers silently conveyed to him from beyond. Indeed, when the tension of the metaxy is alleviated, whether it be due to a Gnostic religious outlook, or scientistic marginalization of any sense of the transcendent, man loses his ability to ask questions of being. This is clearly not ideal because the posing of the question constitutes the movement of the metaxy. The event of the question is the essential movement that makes us human “From the experience of this movement, from the anxiety of losing the right direction in this In-Between of darkness and light, arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life. But it does arise only because life is experienced as man’s participation in a movement with a direction to be found or missed.”²⁶

Therefore, any ideological system or worldview which distorts one’s possibility for experiencing the tension of existence or prevents man from questioning being is a distortion of his humanity. Again, this can be in the form of religious dogmatism, positivist philosophy, or a reductive scientistic materialism. Voegelin points out that existence is not a propositional fact, and can never be conceived as a fact because if existence were solely factual, “the question of existence could not even arise.”²⁷ It is essential that the structure of man’s consciousness allow for the movement of this tension within his horizon of experience, in order to foster those aspects of his being that cannot be contained in the finite. To prohibit the question is, in a sense, to deny a person his or her humanity. Manichaeism is the archetypal example of a Weltanschauung which commits this error.

Manichaeism

The Manichaean faith originated with the teachings of a Persian mystic named Mani, born in Babylonia around 216 A.D. to Persian parents. His teachings amounted to a core of Gnostic doctrines dressed in a synthetic mix of most likely combining elements of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. The syncretistic elements of the doctrine allowed it to spread through areas where Christianity had already taken root, including North Africa. The doctrine was compatible enough with Christianity to allow members of the Catholic Church to adopt it while in some cases even maintaining outward membership of the Church. Indeed, Augustine memorably argued with the Manichee Faustus over who more properly ought to be called Christian.²⁸

Mani’s teachings started with a dualistic cosmology that envisioned a realm of two principles existing before the creation of the world, one good, one evil. In this cosmology, hyle, or matter, has an “active spiritual nature” that is, the principle of evil at work in the world around us. It is not the passive material of Aristotle’s hyle, rather, it is the “…’evil lust,’ and its powers are symbolized in the ‘dark consuming fire.'”²⁹ The two realms are eternally coexistent, with no beginning. The good principle wishes to exist for itself, separate from the evil principle. The ideal state is the one we find at the beginning: separation of the evil and the good in perfect equilibrium.

This state of affairs leaves the evil realm to its own devices until its internecine warfare causes it to break out of its realm and violently attack the light. In this way, the dark and the light become mixed and the universe is created. This mixture of two principles becomes the fundamental doctrine of dualistic Manichaeism.³⁰

In the battle against evil light is passive; it cannot even fight, much less win, the war. It is for this reason that Primal Man was created: to fight the war against evil on behalf of the good and to reestablish equilibrium between the two principles. Indeed, in some sects, “Man” is actually deified as the highest godhead.³¹ Yet the evil principle swallows Primal Man, paving the way for the second creation. In this second creation, several spirits are created that liberate Primal Man from the darkness (evil principle). But Primal Man leaves his soul behind in the darkness, and this is the moment at which the cosmos is created. The cosmos is conceived as the mixture of the evil principle (hyle or matter) and the soul of Primal Man.³² Man’s redemptive acts in spatio-temporal reality collect tiny fragments of God and free them from the hyle in order to return the world to its primal state, wherein the good and the evil principle are again separated and in equilibrium.³³

Augustine Discovers Luminosity: Book VIII

At first glance, the doctrines of Manichaeism seem perfectly suited for someone like Augustine, whose life was so characterized by tensions between inward and outward antitheses.³⁴ The interplay between good and evil, and especially the dominance of evil desires within the will, seem to reflect Augustine’s experience. One could easily imagine that the evil desires that Augustine finds within his will, which simultaneously exist with a desire to contemplate God, might be nicely explained by the Gnostic account. Why, then, did he reject this philosophy?

An application of Voegelin’s analysis of the structures of consciousness may be of use in answering this question. Two sections of the Confessions in particular seem to reflect key elements of Voegelin’s theory: Augustine’s conversion in Book VIII and his exploration of consciousness and temptation in Book X.

Beginning with Book VIII, we find Augustine seeking out the advice of a priest in Milan, Simplicianus, on how he can overcome the final barriers to his conversion. The bishop relates a story about the conversion of Victorinus, a Roman public intellectual. Augustine is inspired by the story: he finds himself feeling “…ardent to follow [Victorinus’s] example.” However, he is held back by a division within his will: “…my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration.”³⁵ Tensions continue to mount as Augustine chances to hear another story of decisive conversion, this time during a meeting with a recent convert named Ponticianus, an official from the Roman government. In this story, two of Ponticianus’s colleagues from the imperial administration decide in a single day to quit their careers and join a monastery.³⁶

After hearing this second story, all the intellectual, volitional, and emotional stresses regarding his decision to convert come to a head. In a state of great agitation, he turns on his friend Alypius and exclaims: “What is wrong with us?…Uneducated people are rising up and capturing heaven, and we with our high culture without any heart-see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood… Do we feel no shame at making not even an attempt to follow?”³⁷

At this point Augustine embarks on an extended meditation concerning the will in order to better understand his hesitation on the conversion question. He begins with a meditation on why the body obeys his desire to make a simple gesture, yet he cannot will himself to follow God. He concludes that there are, in fact, two opposed wills working against each other which is the origin of this tension:

For it is the will that commands the will to exist, and it commands not another will but itself. So the will that commands is incomplete, and therefore what it commands does not happen…We are dealing with a morbid condition of the mind which, when it is lifted up by the truth, does not unreservedly rise to it but is weighed down by habit.³⁸

Yet these two wills are both wrapped up in the same identity: “the self which willed to serve was identical with the self which was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling.” Augustine attributes this other will to sin: “it was ‘not I’ that brought this about ‘but sin which dwelt in me,’ sin resulting from the punishment of a more freely chosen sin, because I was a son of Adam.”³⁹

Book VIII ends with the famous tolle lege episode in which Providence finally provides Augustine the grace to overcome this duality of will and commit to following the Lord. Augustine summarizes what had plagued him all along: “The nub of the problem was to reject my own will and to desire yours. But where through so many years was my freedom of will?”⁴⁰

These episodes demonstrate the movements within the metaxy. Augustine experiences tension between his desire for propositional answers to the questions of existence and their ultimate incomprehensibility. As any person does, he desires prescriptive knowledge (gnosis) of reality, but there is cognitive dissonance between the intellectual reification of these forces within him and his actual experience of the necessity of grace. He cannot maintain both the Gnostic certainty of Manichaeism and his personal experience of this tension.

It is clear that only by divine grace can Augustine accept Christianity. This is highlighted by the literary tone of the tolle lege episode as Augustine describes it. Indeed, he almost seems like a passive participant in the providential event. In a the crucial moment of high dramatic tension, he is beckoned by someone (God? an angel? a person who just happened to be singing the crucial exhortation at the crucial moment?) to pick up the scriptures and read the first verse that he sees, which tells him to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.”⁴¹ Given these experiences, how can Augustine possibly put his faith in a passive God who so desperately needs man to help restore him to his natural state? The only way for Augustine to overcome the vagaries of his dual will and make sense of the process is to conceptualize God as the all-powerful bestower of graces.

As we have seen, the Manichees taught that after one awakes himself from the slumber of life consumed by the evil principle, the observance of religious rites will help man release God from hyle: “If he knows how to observe the rituals, he will awaken: the fragment of the luminous mind in him will return to its full purity; and the ‘foreign’ nature of good that resides, temporarily, in his body will disengage itself from all dangers….”⁴² There is a determinism here that, in Voegelin’s terms, hypostatizes both man and God in a way that cannot explain Augustine’s experience on its own terms. As Peter Brown explains, “The complexities of doubt, of ignorance, deep-rooted tensions within the citadel of the will itself are deliberately ignored in Manichaeism.”⁴³ The tensions of Augustine’s experience are thus necessary for his renunciation of Manichaeism and his acceptance of Christianity.

Most importantly, the episodes related in Book VIII can be read as Augustine’s discovery of the structure of luminosity. The moment of grace is, on this reading, the moment at which man’s reality becomes luminous to itself. The gift of grace, given by the loving and giving God, becomes a way to understand the double construction of luminosity. For the God who gives abundantly is a consciousness within (but not contained by) the reality surveyed by the person. Only a god conceived as having consciousness could ever lovingly providing humanity with the grace required for salvation.

Augustine the Questioner: Book X

In Book X of the Confessions, Augustine turns to exploring the question of who God is via an examination of himself. It is through these explorations that Augustine demonstrates another of Voegelin’s notions of consciousness: man as questioner, a contemplator.

At the beginning of the book, Augustine turns to a philosophical examination of the question, “when I love you [God], what do I love?”⁴⁴ He decides to try understanding God by examining himself. As mentioned above, this is the crucial philosophical insight that allows Augustine to bring to bear both of the poles in the Voegelinian metaxy, viz., the transcendent ground and man. As we have seen, the movement between these two poles constitute the structural tension of existence. But the ultimately aporetic nature of Book X illustrates how the act of questioning is a necessary element of the movement of the psyche within the structure of the metaxy.

Augustine decides that an examination of memory will be the best way to explore the mystery, or “burden” that he is to himself.⁴⁵ As Henry Chadwick points out, in the present context we must not consider memory simply as the mental capacity to recall events, facts, or objects. Instead, we must think of memory here in a broader sense, as in Plato’s Meno, where the doctrine of anamnesis (learning through remembering from a prior existence of the soul) is developed. In this sense, one might conceive of the memory as the storehouse of all ideas which a person can possibly access through various modes of remembering, learning (which is envisaged in this conceptualization as a guided remembering), or reasoning.

Augustine begins by wondering how concepts or ideas enter memory: “For when I learnt them, I did not believe what someone else was telling me, but within myself I recognized them and assented to their truth.” Thus, true concepts are “already in the memory.”⁴⁶ Hence, the process of learning is a bringing-to-attention of the scattered truths already held within memory. This conceptualization points to the key presupposition at work in Augustine’s approach to finding God, viz., that if anything we can know is in memory, we should be able to find God there as well. However, Augustine concludes that it is ultimately a futile effort because the mystery of the memory seems as inscrutable as the mystery of God. Again, we see parallels with Voegelin: the mystery of the poles of the metaxy.

However, if God cannot be accessed in the vast reserves of truth waiting to be recovered from the memory where else can one possibly find him? Augustine ultimately must admit that while it is true that, in some sense, God is in the memory, he is also to be found elsewhere: “Where then did I find you so that I could learn of you if not in the fact that you transcend me? There is no place, whether we go backwards or forwards; there can be no question of place. O truth, everywhere you preside over all who ask counsel of you.”⁴⁷

It is here that Augustine transitions to the tensions inherent to the moral life, for this “counsel of truth” can also be found in God’s commandments regarding the moral actions of the believer. Even though he has been given the gift of grace which allows him to “rest in [God],” his fallenness continues to present a challenge to him.⁴⁸ How can Augustine understand these lingering temptations? Shouldn’t his faith long ago have cleansed him of these tendencies? He considers lust and gluttony, sins from undue desire of beautiful objects or music, and sins of undue curiosity, among others. All of God’s commandments regarding these sins and our efforts to overcome the relevant temptations help us to know Him better.

Ultimately, Augustine realizes that even in enumerating these ways in which we can find God through fidelity to his commandments his own vanity has crept into his motives: “But as I did this, the ego, that is the power by which I was doing it, was not you.”⁴⁹ Ultimately, God is the abiding light that allows one to explore these matters, the end goal of all intellectual seeking for the truth. God is the lamp that lights the various paths to his truth. No one method or path can hypostatize God within propositional knowledge. At best, one can ask questions and be open to the answers that the drama of being returns.

What can this mean in practice? In order to get a sense of who Voegelin’s “man the questioner” is, or what his practice looks like, one would do well to put into practice Augustine’s methods in Book X. As we have seen, the book is a litany of questions, explorations, realizations, dead ends, and alternate approaches to the question of who God is. Yet there are no final answers here. Augustine truly appreciates the tension of existence: “In adversities I desire prosperity, in prosperous times I fear adversities. Between these two is there a middle ground where human life is not a trial?”⁵⁰

The ultimate conclusion for Augustine is to invoke the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the only way that he can rest within this anxiety: “See, Lord, ‘I cast my anxiety on you that I may live,’ and ‘I will consider the wonders from your law.’ You know my inexperience and my weakness.”⁵¹ But the anxiety remains; Augustine is unable to fully adhere to God’s truth: “When I shall have adhered to you with the whole of myself, I shall never have pain and toil, and my entire life will be full of you. You lift up the person whom you fill. But for the present, because I am not full of you, I am a burden to myself.”⁵²

As pointed out by Voegelin and demonstrated here by Augustine, the timeless immutability of God contrasted with our mutable, fallen state of being requires that we continually ask new questions of Him and continually work to attune ourselves to the “answers” we receive. As we have seen, these answers do not come in the form of concrete propositions. In the end, they are the responses to the tension of existence. If this response amounts to a Gnostic formulation of positive propositional truths, appropriating immanence or propositional certainty in mystery or tension, we deform our own humanity. It is only through an open and loving participation in the mysteries of being that we are able to find a response.

Personal Limits

To be sure, there are limits to the structural parallels identified here between Voegelin’s analysis of consciousness and Augustine’s project in the Confessions. Personalist thinkers like Martin Buber would highlight the interpersonal aspects of Augustine’s methodology: it is only through the I-Thou relationship that we can enter into true communion with reality.⁵³ Similarly, David Walsh’s critique of the limits of Voegelin’s theory of consciousness continues to develop.⁵⁴ He explores a person-centered approach to his critique of modernity using some of the concepts pioneered by Voegelin.⁵⁵ According to this analysis, Augustine enters into a relationship with the personal God by engaging him in a prayerful conversation.

Indeed, Voegelin’s theory of consciousness, like any theoretical explanation, cannot provide the complete picture. Structural analysis applied to experience is, in a way, an acknowledgement of the value of Walsh’s critique of Voegelin. By applying this type of analysis to the inward life of persons who, like Augustine, share such experiences through art, the centrality of the person is acknowledged.

Notes

1. Brown, Peter. 2000. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 15.

2. Chadwick, Henry. 2009. Augustine of Hippo: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.

3. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 189.

4. St. Augustine. 1991. Confessions. trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 220.

5. St. Augustine, 146

6. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 49.

7. Voegelin, Eric. 2017. “The Gospel and Culture.” In The Eric Voegelin Reader, ed. Charles R Embry and Glenn Hughes, 245-286. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 249.

8. Voegelin, Eric. 2004. “Structures of Consciousness.” In The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939-1985, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss, 351-383. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 356.

9. Voegelin, Eric. 2017. “The Gospel and Culture.” In The Eric Voegelin Reader, ed. Charles R Embry and Glenn Hughes, 245-286. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 248.

10. Voegelin, “Structures of Consciousness,” 355.

11. Voegelin, 355.

12. Voegelin, 356.

13. Voegelin, 356.

14. Voegelin, 357.

15. Voegelin, 363.

16. Voegelin, 362-3.

17. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. trans. Howard V Hong and Edna H Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 13.

18. Voegelin, “Structures of Consciousness,” 363.
19. Voegelin, 363.

20. Jn 17:5, NKJV.

21. Voegelin, Eric. 1974. The Ecumenic Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 64.

22. Voegelin, 299.

23. Voegelin, 65.

24. Hughes, Glenn. 2003. Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 91.

25. Voegelin, Eric. 2017. “The Gospel and Culture.” In The Eric Voegelin Reader, ed. Charles R Embry and Glenn Hughes, 245-286. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 249.

26. Voegelin, 251.

27. Voegelin, 251.

28. St. Augustine, n.d. “Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, Books 1-15.” EWTN. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/reply-to-faustus-the-manichaean-books-115-11753, I.3.

29. Jonas, Hans. 2001. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 211.

30. Jonas, 214.

31. Jonas, 217.

32. Jonas, 222.

33. Chadwick, Augustine of Hippo: A Life, 13.

34. St. Augustine, Confessions, 64.

35. St. Augustine, 140.

36. St. Augustine, 142.

37. St. Augustine, 146.

38. St. Augustine, 148.

39. St. Augustine, 148.
40. St. Augustine, 152.

41. Rom. 13:13-14, NKJV

42. Chavannes, Édouard, and Pierre Pelliot. 1911. “Un Traité Manichèen Retrouvé en Chine: Traduit et Annoté.” Journal Asiatique 499-617, 611, author’s translation.

43. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 49.

44. St. Augustine, Confessions, 183.

45. St. Augustine, 185.

46. St. Augustine, 189.

47. St. Augustine, 201.

48. St. Augustine, 3.

49. St. Augustine, 217-218.

50. St. Augustine, 202.

51. St. Augustine, 220.

52. St. Augustine, 202.

53. Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

54. David Walsh. 2016. Politics of the Person as Politics of Being. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

55. McGuire, Steven F. 2010. “Eric Voegelin and David Walsh on Modernity and the Search for Order.” Perspectives on Political Science39 (3): 135.

Works Cited:

Brown, Peter. 2000. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Chadwick, Henry. 2009. Augustine of Hippo: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chavannes, Édouard, and Pierre Pelliot. 1911. “Un Traité Manichèen Retrouvé en Chine: Traduit et Annoté.” Journal Asiatique 499-617.

Hughes, Glenn. 2003. Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Jonas, Hans. 2001. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Translated by Howard V Hong and Edna H Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

McGuire, Steven F. 2010. “Eric Voegelin and David Walsh on Modernity and the Search for Order.” Perspectives on Political Science 39 (3): 134–39. doi:10.1080/10457097.2010.489470.

St. Augustine. 1991. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. n.d. “Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, Books 1-15.” EWTN. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/reply-to-faustus-the-manichaean-books-115-11753.

Voegelin, Eric. 2004. “Structures of Consciousness.” In The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939-1985, edited by William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss, 351-383. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

—. 1974. The Ecumenic Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Voegelin, Eric. 2017. “The Gospel and Culture.” In The Eric Voegelin Reader, edited by Charles R Embry and Glenn Hughes, 245-286. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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