What is the "self" according to Augustine in Confessions?

A striking thing about Augustine's Confessions is how relevant it is to many aspects of modern or contemporary thought, and the view of the self is one of these.

One current theoretical and research perspective on personal identity is known as "narrative identity," which Adams & McLean define as

a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose.

The narrative identity begins to be formed in childhood, where it is deeply impacted by the parents, and grows from there:

Researchers have tracked the development of narrative identity from its origins in conversations between parents and their young children to the articulation of sophisticated meaning-making strategies in the personal stories told in adolescence and the emerging adulthood years. (Adams & McLean)

Crucial to this development is the memory:

Narrative identity consists of a dual memory system that generates autobiographical memories, some of which, because of their relevance to long-term goals and enduring conflicts, evolve into self-defining memories. (Singer, et al.)

These descriptions could have been written specifically about Augustine's Confessions. Beginning from his relationship to God In Book I, chapter 1, he quickly wanders into reflections about himself and God that lead to paradox, confusion (chapters 2–4), and even a sort of crisis of self-identity (chapter 5). He seeks an answer to these difficulties about who God is and who he is not in abstract philosophy but in his own life story, beginning from his own birth and concluding with the death of his mother, with whom he shares a profound moment of contemplation that seems to take them into eternity (Book IX, chapter 10).

When he does turn from autobiographical narrative to more discursive philosophical reflection, he begins with the faculty of memory, which, he concludes, is the faculty of the mind that creates his very self:

Great indeed is the power of the memory...and this thing is the mind, and this thing is I myself. (Book X, chapter 17)

Already the fourth-century A.D., Augustine understood and saw the self in terms of what twentieth-century psychology calls "narrative identity."

What is the "self" according to Augustine in Confessions?

What is interesting about this text is the way in which Augustine's narrative about his own life and journey towards his religious belief becomes a reflection on self and what it means to be human. Augustine has been noted by critics as creating in this text a new conception of the human self that is coupled with his spiritual development. This development of self is achieved through self-presentation and then self-realisation. He uses his own self as a character who gradually comes to demonstrate these two aspects on his journey towards an understanding of self that is centred around his religious beliefs. One of the most imporatnt quotes in this novel reflects on what Augustine believed to be the crux of the self, or of the identity of humans:

Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.

In Augustine's version of the self, it is only possible to understand who a person is when they have understood how they stand in relation to God, and this is a central aspect of the self that Augustine espouses in this text. Augustine tells a story with himself as the central character, and as a result his struggles between the body and the soul as he seeks happiness assume a bigger importance as a kind of metaphor for the self, which, in Augustine's opinon, can only be truly discovered through a recognition of God's love and man's response to that love.

What is the "self" according to Augustine in Confessions?

Augustine believed that the self existed in two parts: the body and the soul. The body existed physically in the world and was subject to physical needs and desires. The soul, on the other hand, was the seat of consciousness and connected to God. The soul could be purified by turning towards God, and, in so doing, it could assert its rightful role as master of the body.

More specifically, Augustine saw the human mind as a kind of crude copy of the Trinity. Augustine thought that the three-part nature of God shaped human cognition. For instance, one part of this triad would be objects external to the self; a second part would be the mental process of recognizing the object; the third would be the volition or intentionality that causes this recognition.

Man's self awareness of his own cognitive abilities is vital to Augustine's theory of the self. It is because the self has a "memory of itself"—or, in other words, is aware of its own existence apart from the body and other subjects—that it qualifies, in Augustine's view, as an "image of God." The mind must "remember" itself, or shake off its connection to the physical world, to reestablish its vital connection to God.

What is the "self" according to Augustine in Confessions?

Whereas modern-day secular conceptions of the self omit all mention of man's relationship to God, for religious thinkers such as Augustine, it was impossible to conceive of the self in any meaningful sense without taking the Almighty into consideration.

Simply put, Augustine believes that the self as we understand it cannot exist without the right relationship having been established between God and man. In practical terms, this means responding to God's grace, which, as always, is freely given.

In his natural state, man allows his ego to get the better of him. He leads a life of dissipation and self-indulgence in which the things of this world take priority over the worship of God and the cultivation of deep inner spirituality. Augustine knows whereof he speaks, for this is exactly the kind of lifestyle that he himself led prior to his conversion to Christianity.

So long as we remain in this natural state, our hearts will continue to be restless. However, if we respond to God's grace and turn our hearts towards him and away from the things of this world, then we will, at long last, find rest. In doing so, we will have achieved true self-fulfillment by establishing the right relationship with God.

What is the "self" according to Augustine in Confessions?

St. Augustine has some very interesting ideas on the sense of self, the mind, and the idea of intelligence, primarily as a result of his time period and theological background. Given that Augustine lived in the fifth century CE, he was not privy to the understanding of the psyche and mind that came many centuries afterwards. He relied wholly on logic and his belief in God to form a philosophy of self and the mind.

He made an argument in response to the problem of other minds, which asks how can we know that others have minds (since we can only see their behavior), questioning the idea of “others” as intellectual beings. He posited the argument of other minds from analogy, which reasons that we can interpret others' mentality through analogy and thus have to assume that they are intelligent.

In terms of human perception and the mind of each person, Augustine believed that God played an intimate and constant role in how we perceive the world, much in contrast to later ideas by the likes of Descartes, who believed that God gave reason and let the mind follow the patterns set before it to make decisions and interpret the world. Augustine believed that God had a hand in everything we experience as well as in how we interpret it—a very strict view of predestination and God’s control over the world.

How does St. Augustine describe the self in Confessions?

For Augustine, the self only has meaning in relation to God. Individuals can forge an identity of sorts apart from God, as Augustine himself did in his younger days, but it's not a self in the true sense of the word. In our estrangement from God we remain restless, never fully sure of who and what we are. It is only once we open our hearts and accept God into our lives that we can finally get in touch with our true selves:

Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.

On this reading, a self is not an isolated unit, separate and apart from everything else. It is only a self insofar as it stands in an appropriate relation to God. According to Augustine, it was God who created the self. If we choose, then, to separate ourselves from the Almighty, we will become estranged from our Creator and lose touch with what makes each and every one of us unique.