Augustine of Hippo occupies a remarkably contested position in the depth-psychology corpus. He appears simultaneously as a primary source — through the Confessions and The City of God — and as a psychological specimen subjected to retrospective analysis. Von Franz reads Augustine through Jungian typology, identifying in his conversion narrative a sacrifice of the superior function, a mother-complex blocking eros, and a dream of Monica that anticipates analytical concepts of the compensatory unconscious. Sorabji's philosophically rigorous treatment positions Augustine as the pivotal architect of a voluntarist anthropology in tension with Stoic apatheia, tracing how his peculiar account of lust, involuntary movement, and original sin both appropriates and distorts his ancient sources. Dihle, meanwhile, argues that Augustine's doctrine of will constitutes a genuine conceptual rupture with Greek intellectualism, making possible a new theological anthropology irreducible to ontology. Alexander deploys Augustine's pre-conversion life as a case study in dislocation-driven addiction, drawing structural parallels to Bill Wilson's conversion. Auerbach situates Augustine as uniquely outside the stylistic conventions of late antiquity: a writer who renders interiority as living dramatic struggle. Running beneath all these encounters is a shared recognition that Augustine's introspective turn — his insistence that truth dwells in the inner person — made the Western psychological tradition possible.
In the library
25 passages
St. Augustine's doctrine of grace, very much like his Trinitarian theology, can only be properly understood on the basis of the fundamental belief that the direct relation between God and the human soul is prior to and independent of any objectively existing order of being
Dihle argues that Augustine's concept of will represents a genuine epistemic break with Greek ontological intellectualism, grounding anthropology in a direct soul-God relation rather than in participation in a hierarchy of being.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982thesis
St. Augustine would have been led in his doctrine of grace and election to the Gnostic concept of φύσει σῴζεσθαι, salvation because of privileged nature, if he had not found a new point of reference in the notion of will.
Dihle demonstrates that Augustine's novel concept of will was theologically indispensable, preventing his soteriology from collapsing into Gnostic naturalism while simultaneously distinguishing him from Pelagius's residual Greek intellectualism.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982thesis
Augustine's case against lust centred on the idea of the will. I believe Julian won the philosophical argument and showed that Augustine's objections failed. But he lost the political battle.
Sorabji contends that Augustine's theologically influential account of lust as involuntary insubordination to the will was philosophically untenable, defeated in argument by Julian of Eclanum yet victorious through institutional authority.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
According to Jung, a conversion to Christianity — on the part of those few exceptional individuals who genuinely strove to follow Christ's example — consisted in the sacrifice of the superior function. Jung illustrates this with the examples of Tertullian and Origen and mentions that Augustine was similar to the latter.
Von Franz, drawing on Jung, reads Augustine's conversion as a psychological drama of sacrificing the superior intellectual function, with his conversion blocked by an unresolved mother-complex that bound his feeling life.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, 1998thesis
Augustine uses here and in many other places the word inordinata, to say that lust is something unruly. The power of music over lust is another manifestation of the failure of the will to command it.
Sorabji analyzes Augustine's category of inordinata concupiscentia as a recurring diagnostic tool by which he subordinates sexual desire to voluntarist critique, extending the argument to the involuntary power of music over passion.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
This is the crucial characteristic which sets Augustine wholly outside the style of his age, so far as it is known to me: he feels and directly presents human life, and it lives before our eyes.
Auerbach identifies Augustine as a literary revolutionary whose direct, dramatic representation of interior human struggle stands entirely apart from the static, rhetorical conventions of late antique prose.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
Monica, the mother, had the following dream which Augustine reports in his Confessions: She saw herself standing on a wooden rule and a youth all radiant coming to her cheerful and smiling upon her, whereas she was grieving and heavy with her grief.
Von Franz uses Monica's compensatory dream, recorded in Augustine's Confessions, as clinical evidence for the unconscious's capacity to anticipate psychic resolution before conscious conversion is achieved.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, 1998supporting
I am inclined to say that Julian won the philosophical, but Augustine the political, battle. A factor in that victory, I think, must have been the immense skill with which Augustine invoked the authority of other Fathers of the Church.
Sorabji assesses the Pelagian controversy's outcome as a triumph of rhetorical-ecclesiastical authority over philosophical argument, explaining Augustine's doctrinal dominance through political rather than logical superiority.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
The similarity between this paragraph and St Augustine's earlier quoted description of his own conversion is striking, particularly the vision of an indescribable white light. Bill W. never drank again.
Alexander draws a structural parallel between Augustine's conversion experience and Bill Wilson's founding vision, using the resemblance to argue that the twelve-step model of addiction recovery is historically rooted in Augustinian spiritual transformation.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
In an early work Augustine, like the Stoics and Clement, distinguishes taking pity on people from feeling pity (misericordia from miseria) ... But in his Retractations he denies there are any such wise men. He had in the meantime become a defender of metriopatheia.
Sorabji traces Augustine's development from early Stoic-aligned apatheia toward a mature defence of moderated emotion, marking a decisive turn in Latin Christian psychology's attitude toward the passions.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
more than any other earthly pleasure, sexual intercourse draws the mind from contemplation of God to which it should be devoted without interruption.
Alexander summarises Augustine's theological rationale for treating sexual lust as the paradigmatic post-lapsarian sin, interpreting it as the psychological mechanism by which attention is diverted from divine contemplation to embodied pleasure.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Augustine himself says: 'Go not outside, return into yourself; truth dwells in the inner man. And if you find that you are by nature changeable, transcend yourself.'
Jung cites Augustine's De vera religione to ground the depth-psychological imperative of interiority within a patristic authority, linking the Augustinian inward turn to the concept of the imago Dei or Self.
Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
Memory, cognition, and will, the functions of the soul, are individually attributed to the hypostases of the Trinity.
Dihle explicates Augustine's Trinitarian psychology, in which the triad of memory, intellect, and will images the threefold divine nature, distinguishing his approach from Victorinus's purely ontological interpretation.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
In City of God 14. 19 the failure to distinguish first movements from emotions enables him to treat... mere pre-passion.
Sorabji diagnoses a specific conceptual error in Augustine's engagement with Stoic psychology: his conflation of first involuntary movements with full emotional responses, which distorts his critique of Stoic apatheia and reinforces his voluntarist account of sin.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
He distinguishes between full participation in the life of the Christian community, which is a holy duty, from an inner life of extreme piety in which no pleasure is allowed unless it comes from God. St Augustine separated the divine from the social, whereas psychosocial integration marries them.
Alexander identifies a structural tension in Augustine's theology between communal and interior religious life, using this distinction to critique Augustinian spirituality from the standpoint of psychosocial integration theory.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
That lust (carnalis concupiscentia), whose movement attains the final pleasure which delights you so much, never arose in paradise except when it was necessary for procreating upon the approval (nutus) of the will.
Sorabji presents Augustine's hypothetical account of pre-lapsarian sexuality as wholly obedient to the will, which serves as the positive counterpart to his fallen diagnosis of lust as intrinsically insubordinate.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
The opening of the Confessions establishes the restlessness of the human heart as Augustine's foundational anthropological datum, a formulation that the depth-psychology corpus repeatedly invokes as the prototype of psychological longing and conversion.
Thus with the baggage of this present world was I held down pleasantly, as in sleep: and the thoughts wherein I meditated on Thee were like the efforts of such as would awake, who yet overcome with a heavy drowsiness, are again drenched therein.
Augustine's account of pre-conversion lethargy furnishes Alexander and von Franz with a phenomenology of addiction and psychological resistance structurally analogous to what depth psychology terms unconscious captivity.
Chapter 9 explained why the word 'addiction' can be used to describe St Augustine's lifestyle before his conversion, although he did not use the Latin word 'addictionem' to describe himself.
Alexander explicitly justifies the retrospective application of the category of addiction to Augustine's pre-conversion life, anchoring the dislocation theory of addiction in an historically canonical spiritual biography.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
The three powers of my soul are my memory, my understanding, and my will. These three powers are 'the likeness to the Blessed Trinity in my soul' because 'in my one soul are three powers.'
Hillman invokes the catechetical Augustinian triad of memory, understanding, and will — reflecting the Trinity — as the doctrinal infrastructure underlying both Western soul-theory and the archetypal psychology of memoria.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Jung, in Symbols of Transformation, said that these 'apparently infantile reminiscences' are in reality 'archaic thought forms which naturally emerge more clearly in childhood.' Here Jung clearly implies the Platonic view that in childhood the soul is immersed in memoria.
Hillman situates the Augustinian concept of memoria within a genealogy running from Plato through Jung, arguing that the primary psychological stratum is archaic and symbolic, not developmental and personal.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
In Confessions 10. 30 Augustine acknowledges that he still has sexual dreams, and he implies that in them he sometimes gives consent (adsensus, consentire, consensio).
Sorabji reads Augustine's confessional account of nocturnal sexual dreams as evidence that the problem of involuntary desire extends even into sleep, deepening the voluntarist paradox at the heart of his doctrine of concupiscence.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
If both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding... the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future.
Auerbach articulates the figural or typological mode of historical interpretation associated with Augustine's exegetical tradition, in which temporal events are vertically anchored to divine providence rather than horizontally to causal sequence.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
Only then, thirty years after writing the book, did she add the passages about natality. The original German text of Liebesbegriff contains nothing of this, nor any reference to the statement from The City of God she would later associate with the idea.
The passage documents Hannah Arendt's retrospective revision of her Augustinian thesis on love, noting that her concept of natality was a later addition not fully compatible with her original reading of Augustine's Liebesbegriff.
Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
Augustine's City of God is a holy mystery. It is an ideal Christian community in which truly faithful Christians dwell with the angels and Jesus Himself while they are on earth, although it is immaterial and has no specific location.
Alexander summarises Peter Brown's reading of The City of God as an otherworldly-in-the-world community, contextualising his critique of Augustinian social theology within the broader dislocation theory of addiction.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008aside