The challenge to Cicero is even couched in Ciceronian language: te te consulo, Marce Tulli. . . (c. Acad.3.16.35). Will a young man who espouses Academic doctrines use them to justify adultery with another’s wife? He can simply plead that he hasn’t assented to the deed as true—it is merely probable. Augustine may well have had in mind the passage of Ter- ence’s Eunuchus which he uses in the Confessiones, in which a young man is inspired by Jove’s antics to justify his own adultery; there is a verbal echo from the same play a few lines later.24 But it is more signiWcant
that, in the scenario of the dialogue, Augustine’s main interlocutors are two young men for whose spiritual development he has begun to hold
24 conf.1.16.26, citing Ter. Eun. 583–91; the ‘verbal echo’ in c. Acad. 3.16.35 is liquet deierare,
himself responsible. He continues: ‘we are dealing with the character and life of young men: that’s the life for which those writings of yours [Cicero’s] are wholly preoccupied with preparing and instructing them’ (de adulescentium moribus uitaque tractamus, cui educandae atque instituendae omnes illae litterae tuae uigilauerunt: c. Acad. 3.16.35). If the adulterous young man could Wnd Cicero to defend him, perhaps Cicero would argue that he merely seemed to himself to have done the deed. The husband—foolish man (homo fatuus)—may litigate anyway. Cicero him- self is brought on as an actor: ‘let him lay aside the mask of the patron and put on that of the consoling philosopher’ ( ponet . . . personam patroni et philosophi consolatoris suscipiet). And so on.
Sed uos me iocari arbitramini—‘but you think that I am joking’, says Augustine. (How comprehensive is ‘you’ here?) He uses the favourite Ciceronian device of praeteritio:
I am silent about murder, parricide, sacrilege, absolutely all the shameful sins which can happen or be planned, which are defended in few words and (which is worse) before the wisest of judges: I didn’t consent to them, and therefore I did no wrong; but how could I not be doing what seemed probable? taceo de homicidiis parricidiis sacrilegiis omnibusque omnino quaeWeri aut cogitari possuntXagitiis ac facinoribus, quae paucis uerbis et, quod est grauius, apud sapientissimos iudices defenduntur: nihil consensi et ideo non erraui; quomodo autem non facerem quod probabile uisum est? (c. Acad.3.16.36)
As with his parable of the travellers, Augustine dwells on the ethical consequences of the Academic withholding of assent. The savage sequitur to ‘but you think that I am joking’ leaves his readers in no doubt that he is propelled by his rage and sorrow.
Suddenly, we see how it has helped Augustine’s argument in this dialogue to keep the dramatic conceit so very much alive. When he elicits an emotional response from his readers, it is not merely a bid for verisimilitude; it is a crucial argumentative stance. The introduction of the various interlocutors gives context to the prosopopoeia when Cicero is brought on to answer the charges against him; the emotions of the audience (within and, by implication, outside the text) open up a space for their engagement with the issues at hand. And when the leisurely, joking fac¸ade is dropped to reveal the deep ethical concerns beneath, the eVect is more striking because the previous scene-setting has been so convincing.
It is immaterial, for Augustine’s purposes, that this is a parody of Cicero’s actual intellectual position. What matters is that he has thought
through the moral consequences of the Academic position taken ad absurdum; he has portrayed his interlocutors testing its appeal; and he has Wnally dismissed it on grounds which have nothing to do with the internal logic of the arguments. As we remarked earlier, he tipped his hand half-way through the dialogue: he couldn’t even have embarked upon the conversation if he had not already made up his mind about the possibility of attaining truth. So we can conclude that the success of this dialogue—and this may, indeed, be argued of the others at Cassicia- cum—is due not so much to its intellectual trajectory as to its portrayal of process;25to the subtler messages delivered by who is included and
how they are depicted as acting and reacting. The emotional responses, especially, prepare the ground for a type of argumentation that leaves more to the human actors, and more space for what cannot be con- trolled. The value attached to uncertainty is nicely summed up in a remark which Augustine makes to Trygetius in De Ordine: ‘I don’t understand how you can say these things if you haven’t seen them, and I don’t understand how you could have seen them; therefore I suspect that they are both true and profound’ (nam ea dicitis, quae nec quomodo dicantur non uisa nec quomodo ea uideatis intellego; ita ea et uera et alta esse suspicor: ord.2.4.12). Being alert to uncertainty in its turn leaves space— eventually—for God.
If this thoroughgoing ‘staging’ of the dialogues is such an eVective way of leaving space for God, why, we may ask, does Augustine write no more fully-realized pieces like this after Cassiciacum? To be sure, he continues for a while to write in dialogic form, but in a more schematic mode, and within a couple of years, he has abandoned formal dialogues altogether.26
First, Augustine gets less and less diYdent about ‘leaving space for God’. We observed that clearly one of his reasons for choosing the genre of the philosophical dialogue for his literary productions at Cassiciacum was to avoid frightening his patrons. ( Those patrons may have consisted only of Romanianus and Verecundus at this stage; if Augustine hoped to extend the group, caution would be all the more desirable.) This was the way in which a promising young man ought to celebrate his otium liberale. The spiritual material takes one almost by surprise; it is inserted suddenly, and under-justiWed—think of the
25 Which of course takes us back to Hadot, Exercices spirituels (Ch.1, n. 25).
26 For a more generous view of Augustine’s commitment to the dialogue form, see Therese
sudden appeal to the ‘authority of Christ’ at the end of De Academicis, which seems to have made Hermogenianus so uncomfortable.27And
many of the undercurrents which I have traced as signiWcant—particu- larly theXexibility aVorded by the choice and depiction of the partici- pants—only gradually emerge as such. But as time goes on, Augustine no longer needs the obliquity and misdirection that the staging tech- nique aVords him. He can aVord to be more straightforward about his themes. And we should remember, as his commentators so often have not, what a cumbersome construction this staged realism is. The mo- ments of laughter, shrugging, bickering are Xeeting; these exchanges could not possibly have been set down in real time. The verisimilitude on which the intellectual developments of these dialogues rely, and which contributes so substantially to their charm, depends on the slow accretion of ‘documentary detail’. Only when we read dialogues without that accretion of detail—or, still more, the purported notes for dia- logues, like the De Dialectica—do we realize how bald their composition would be without it, and how time-consuming its insertion must have been. At Cassiciacum, the staging of the dialogues becomes a delightful way to symbolize the leisurely pace of the time, as well as subtly hedging Augustine’s intellectual bets. We shall see in the ensuing chapters how far theXexibility aVorded by this staging can take its impresario. Early in De Academicis, Augustine lines up the participants in the debate. Navigius, it seems, is so far on Licentius’ ‘side’,
. . . and I look forward greatly to seeing what sort of supporters of your opinions you can be. For it is an important subject, most worthy of careful discussion.—If it’s an important subject, said Licentius, it needs important men (si res magna est . . . magnos uiros desiderat).—Don’t look for people whom it would be diYcult toWnd anywhere, I said, especially in this villa; instead, explain why that [account] was proposed by you (not rashly, I think) and on what rationale it might seem good to you. For when the most important subjects (maximae res) are inquired into by insigniWcant people, they generally make the people important too.
. . . magnopere specto quales sententiarum uestrarum patroni esse possitis. res enim magna est et diligenti discussione dignissima.—si res magna est, ait Licentius, magnos uiros desiderat.—noli quaerere, inquam, praesertim in hac uilla, quod ubiuis gentium reperire diYcile est, et potius explica, cur id quod abs te non temere, ut opinor, prolatum est et qua tibi ratione uideatur. nam et maximae res cum a paruis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent eYcere. (c. Acad. 1.2.6)
27 We can counterpose Alypius’ reported reluctance (conf.9.4.7) that Christ be mentioned at
This, then, is the Wrst broadside to Cicero, delivered just lines after Trygetius has quoted the Wrst lines of the Hortensius, beati certe esse uolumus, we certainly wish to be blessed. Augustine makes a point of proclaiming that he is departing from Ciceronian practice: the partici- pants in his dialogues are ‘insigniWcant people’. But they are illuminated by their subject matter. This is the possibility that he is opening up in these dialogues: he is holding out greatness to those who would nor- mally be passed over, for they can attain it through treating of great things. This he accomplishes above all, as we shall see in Part Two, through the persona of his mother.
This passage also makes clear, however, the renegotiation of the past which is crucial to Augustine’s project—not just in his contravention of Cicero, excellent representativeWgure though he might be, but in more general ways. It is no coincidence that Licentius has just invoked the presence of maiores nostri—which may be construed as ‘our ancestors’ but also, of course, ‘greater men than we’. Augustine needs toWnd a way of shaking oV the reverence for his intellectual maiores which so far in his career has served him so well; he accomplishes it in theWrst instance from within the parameters that they have set, by stretching the generic boundaries as far as possible. In every way, he slyly subverts the conventions. The participants are humble, and all too human. The artiWce of the product is highlighted by the emphasis on how—and whether—it is recorded. The conventions of staging are used to direct attention to the importance of non-verbal responses, and to begin to break away from the primacy of conventional reasoning. Then Augus- tine completes the manoeuvre by claiming that the players are lent glory by their subject matter.
Notwithstanding the nostalgic choice of genre, these dialogues are tantalizingly experimental. They commemorate in text an extraordinary process of searching; the emphasis on the human limitations of the participants makes the dialogues feel convincingly provisional. So con- vincing is their ‘staging’ that it is hard not to use words like ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ when writing about them. But in fact, as I have shown, they hover on the boundaries between truth and Wction. And on those boundaries a new set of possibilities is revealed. The trajectory at Cassiciacum consists of Augustine’s creative exploration of those possibilities.