Augustine Misunderstood

Was Augustine, as Charles Taylor and others have said, the inventor of Western interiority? Perhaps, but only because Augustine was misread.

Matthew Maguire offers this summary of the the effects of Arnauld d’Andilly’s 1649 French translation of Augustine’s Confessions:

“Although d’Andilly faithfully renders memory’s opening unto the infinite – and thus its power remaining beyond human comprehension – his translation reveals a persistent tendency to endow memory and nature with a comprehensible order and to make memory a more purely interior space, without the excessive measure of relationality and analogy expressed by Augustine’s original text . . . .

“As Nicholas Paige has observed, d’Andilly also renders the ‘inner man’ of Pauline and with some adjustments, Augustinian thought into something very different. For d’Andilly, the ‘inner man,’ which in Paul and Augustine had been sufficiently close an analogue to the outer man to be endowed with senses, is not an interior space in comprehensive contrast to rather than corresponding to an exterior. Thus d’Andilly translates Augustine’s description of loving God from the ‘inner man, where that light shines into my soul, which no place can receive’ as something quite different. The inner man is now ‘the bottom of my heart, in this part of myself that is completely interior and completely invisible.’ In both Augustine’s original and d’Andilly’s translation, there is a mystery of the self manifest in its relation to God; however in d’Andilly, that mystery does not suffuse an integrated, whole inner being with a spiritual light, but appears in a recessive interior of the self, a ‘part’ of the self bound not by analogy to the body and its perceptions of the world but identified by their absence.”