In many ways, Augustine sets himself in the Platonist ascent tradition. Repeatedly, he uses the metaphor of ascent to speak of the Christian development of love and desire. He sometimes enumerates the stages of this ascent in a manner that shows the influence of the Platonist texts that moved him. Repeatedly, too, he speaks of the disdain for earthly love that is so much stressed by Plato as a product of ascent. And he seems to endorse the central structural principle used by Plato to explain how love can move upward: the fundamental kinship of all fine things. In two early works, however,^[6] Augustine goes beyond these general Platonist commitments – which persist in some form throughout his career. Here he embraces a more thoroughgoing Platonism, defending the life of contemplative self-sufficiency as a valuable and available Christian ideal.

The complex philosophical dialogue De Quantitate Animae ends with an account of the ascent of the soul from vegetative and sensory life to contemplative perfection. The ascent has seven stages (7off.). The soul progresses to each new stage by freeing itself from impediments to contemplation. Intellect and will are the propelling forces in its movement. The first three stages bring the human being to ordinary adulthood. On top of the nutritive and vegetative life with which he is born, he quickly develops the use of his perceptual faculties and, later, the arts and abilities of reason. Only at stage four does he begin to reject any of the influences and activities of earlier stages. Here, Augustine says, is where true goodness begins (73). In stages four, five, and six, the soul gradually detaches itself from the influences of the body and the senses. From the painful struggle against worldly distraction that characterizes stage four,^[7] it moves, by intellectual effort and strength of will, to the purity of stage five, as the soul “holds itself most joyfully in itself” (74). At this point the soul has a conception of its own power; at this point, then, it can turn itself outward, in stage six, to contemplation of truth (75). It now may advance, in stage seven, to the perfection of contemplation.

As the soul advances, its confidence grows, soon excluding all anxiety and uncertainty. At stage four the soul still feels some fear of death, though a fear tempered by the thought of divine Providence. By stage five, however, the soul advances toward contemplation “with a huge and unbelievable confidence.”^[8] In stage six, the soul’s desire for truth is described as “most perfect,” “best,” “most correct” (75). Nowhere after the conflict of stage four is there any serious opposition to the movement of the rational will, which has now been “freed,” “purified,” “cured.” Indeed, by stage six we are told that intellect itself has “purified itself and freed itself from all desire and corruption of mortal things” (75).^[9] At the last stage the ascent is completed in the perfection of philosophical self-sufficiency, a state which, Augustine assures us, has been attained by outstanding people in this life:

We have now arrived at the vision and contemplation of truth, which is the seventh and final step. Nor is it a step any longer, but a kind of stopping place to which these steps lead up. What its joys are, what the full enjoyment of the highest and true good is like, what serenity and eternity is in the air -how can I describe all this? It has been described by certain great and incomparable souls, insofar as they thought it ought to be described, souls whom we believe to have seen these things, and to be seeing them still. (76)

In De Genesi contra Manichaeos, Augustine depicts a similar process of ascent. The soul travels, again, through seven stages. The stages are now mapped onto the seven days of the Creation, a procedure that produces some changes in their order and content. The nature of the final stage, however, emerges with particular clarity. After six “days” of action and motion, there is a stopping place, a “day” of rest. Purified from all sin and bodily distraction, “having spiritual fruits, that is, good reflections (cogitationes) by virtue of the stability of his mind,” the human being can now have a rest and a peace that are truly comparable to God’s peace: the peace of perfection, null disturbance, and clear sight: “After the very good works of these (so to speak) six days, let the human being hope for perpetual rest, and let him understand what it means to say, ‘On the seventh day God rested from all his works’ “ (I.25).

In these two passages, Augustine takes over all of the essentials of the Platonist ascent tradition, with minor modifications, as a description of an available and good Christian life. As soon as the person weans himself from the influence of the temporal and the sensible, he achieves a remarkable independence. Intellect propels itself continuously upward, interested only in its own self-sufficient activity. It generates its own motion, waiting for nothing, receptive to nothing. (Even the receptivity of faith, not mentioned at all in De quantitate, figures in De Genesi only as the early precondition for the beginning of intellectual activity, in stage one. Once intellect takes over, it no longer plays a role.) Because of this extraordinary freedom from circumstance, the soul’s aim is completely fulfilled. Ascent and motion cease in consequence. The seventh step is no step at all, but the quiet dwelling place (mansio) at the top of the steps. The seventh “day” is no “day” of action at all, but a “day of rest,” in which the soul exists outside of change. Breathing the air of eternity, the previously aspiring human being knows what it means to say that God rested from his labors. And, as the Platonic ascent would have it, he is godlike in his rest, he takes the place of God in God’s own story.

IV. INCOMPLETENESS AND THE UNCERTAINTY OF GRACE