The question of Augustine’s position concerning the origin of the soul emerged out of the larger historical study of Augustine’s relation to Neoplatonism and particularly out of the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with source criticism, Quellenforschung.¹ Between the publications of the studies of G. Bossier and A. von Harnack² at the end of the nineteenth century and those of P. Courcelle and C. Boyer in the middle of the twentieth century, the question of Augustine’s conversion, whether and to what degree was it to Neoplatonism or to Christianity, took center place among students and scholars of Augustine. Augustine’s earliest texts from...

At the heart of Robert O’Connell’s theses concerning the Plotinian influence upon Augustine and upon his doctrine of the human person in particular stands this criticism: the Plotinian doctrine that O’Connell found in Augustine—“a disincarnate view of man as soul in quest of vision,” fallen from the unity of a common enjoyment of the vision of God into a private, individuated life with the body—cannot ultimately ground or be reconciled with the Christian understanding of man as an incarnate member of a divinely established human society, whether of this world or of that to come.¹ In other words,...

Augustine’s language and imagery suggest the Plotinian doctrine of the fall of soul; doubtless Augustine relies heavily upon the metaphor of fall and return. And O’Connell has demonstrated the Plotinian origins of much of Augustine’s imagery and descriptions of the soul’s fall. Nevertheless, Augustine’s descriptions themselves leave it unclear whether he took the fall of the soul in any fuller sense than as metaphor.

There remain, however, stronger indications than Augustine’s imagery that O’Connell found to substantiate the hypothesis that Augustine did in fact adopt the Plotinian doctrine quite literally. Each of the elements of Plotinus’s doctrine of soul, what...

I have endeavored to present in the previous two chapters the first two of three theses fundamental to O’Connell’s contribution to Augustinian studies: first, that the young Augustine held a recognizably Plotinian doctrine of the preexistence and fall of the soul, and secondly that Augustine understood that fall in ontological terms. The form of O’Connell’s arguments for these theses has been criticized for being too often indirect and assumptive,¹ and the same can be said of my presentation of those arguments. But there is a sense in which the approach must be indirect, because the origin of the soul was...

It is worth noting that O’Connell gives the first chapter of The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine’s Later Works to an examination of the third book of the De libero arbitrio. The De libero arbitrio was finished by 395, preceding by as much as nine years the Confessions, which occupied the forefront of O’Connell’s study of Augustine’s early thought. O’Connell, however, had good reason to begin with the De libero arbitrio. Not only does the text betray Augustine’s preference for the fallen soul theory, but Augustine’s explanation that sin in its proper sense must be voluntary¹—thus entailing...

The impetus that led the young Augustine to take seriously the idea of the soul’s preexistence and fall into bodily life differed entirely from that of Plotinus. Thus the fall of soul as a part of the metaphysics and worldview of Plotinus and Augustine functions differently within their respective systems of thought; the concept solves or accounts for different problems. For Plotinus the fall of soul provides the efficient cause of the coming-to-be of the lower world, both in terms of its essence and existence; it serves a cosmogonic function. “Descent” or “fall” on every level of being, from the...

The question until now in scholarly debate concerning the origin of the soul in the Confessions has without exception centered upon whether or not a Plotinian doctrine of the soul’s fall stands behind the text. As such, interest in the Confessions centered upon mining for passages that would unearth Augustine’s underlying belief in the fall of soul.¹ And as I have tried to show, a “Plotinian doctrine of the ‘fall of soul’” meant more precisely an ontological conception of the fall. Scholars looked to prove or disprove the claim that Augustine held a “Plotinian”—that is, an ontological and cosmogonic—...

The center of Augustine’s thought, O’Connell would emphasize in one of his last publications, was the anthropological idea that man is essentially a soul, fallen into the present bodily and punitive condition.¹ From the beginning of his writings through the very end, accordingly, Augustine tended to think of man in these terms; each of the other areas of Augustine’s thought can be seen to radiate outward from this center. In other words, O’Connell concluded, the idea of the soul as fallen into bodily life was not merely one of several theological positions or ideas for Augustine but rather functioned as...

Until rejecting the ontological dimension of the soul’s fall, Augustine relied upon the supposition of the soul’s preexistence and fall as one of two distinct arguments or grounds for explaining the present penal state in which we find ourselves. Separately from the fallen soul theory, from his initial reading of St. Paul,¹ Augustine will also describe our state as inherited or as derived in some way from Adam. These two approaches to the justification of the doctrine of original sin and guilt—one a philosophical explanation, the other biblical—are not integrated into a single or larger systematic vision.

The...