Augustine and the Renaissance Self

William Bouwsma points out in his book on the “waning of the Renaissance” that the Renaissance challenged what he calls the “traditional conception of the self,” in which reason sits at the top of a hierarchy of discrete faculties, including will, passions, and body. The challenge to this conception during the later Renaissance was part of a “return to biblical roots,” and particularly a return to the rhetorically-oriented theology of Augustine:

“For Augustine and his Renaissance followers, the crucial areas of human being were the affections and the will, both seen as dependent not on reason but on the quality of the heart. This facet in the thought of the many-sided Augustine was especially prominent in his Confessions, a work not highly valued before the Renaissance. This aspect of Augustinianism contributed to the disintegration of hierarchical conceptions in all domains of thought, to the high regard for rhetoric in the Renaissance, to a growing biblicism that shaped both Protestant and Catholic Reformations, to an emphasis on time, change, and history, and to a growing concern with action and social responsibility, not always highly esteemed in traditional culture.” Bouwsma compares the influence of Augustine in the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century to the influence of Aristotle in the high middle ages.

Under the influence of Augustine, the Renaissance developed a conception of the self that doubted “the value and power of reason” and blurred “the boundaries between the several supposedly distinguishable faculties arranged in order below it.” The result was a view of the self “as a mysterious and undifferentiated unity, its quality a reflection of another faculty previously little recognized, ‘the heart.’” Harvey’s claims about the circulation of the blood, Bouwsma suggests, “reflected a deeper cultural shift,” as thinkers came to think of the etymological connection of core/ cor as something more than fortuitous.

At the same time, Renaissance writers struggled to find ways to talk about the unity of the body and soul. Montaigne said, “The body has a great part in our being, it holds a high rank in it. Those who want to split up our two principal parts and sequester them from each other are wrong. On the contrary we must couple and join them together again. We must order the soul not to draw aside and entertain itself apart, not to scorn and abandon the body (nor can it do so except by some counterfeit monkey trick), but to rally to the body, embrace it, cherish it, assist it, control it, advise it, set is right and bring it back when it goes astray; in short to marry it and be a husband to it, so that their actions may not appear different and contrary, but harmonious and uniform.”

Renaissance writers also often emphasized the temporality of the self. Montaigne spoke not of “being” but of “passing,” and claimed that human beings are “all patchwork, so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment plays its own game. And there is as much between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

Human nature was elusive and slippery, not fixed, and the mind was seen as constantly in motion: “A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive. Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity.” More orthodox writers expressed something of the same dynamism. Pascal claimed that “Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.” For both Hooker and the Puritans, this ceaseless activity was oriented to a transcendent goal. As Hooker wrote, humans seek what they do not know, but desire “doth so incite [us] that all other knowne delightes and pleasures are layd aside . . . . so that nature even in this life doth plainly claime and call for a more divine perfection.”