Philosophers · 哲學家 · The Medieval World
Augustine 奧古斯丁 · Aurelius Augustinus
A teacher of rhetoric who turned philosophy inward, and who wrote the first autobiography in order to understand his own will.
一位修辭學教師；他把哲學轉向內在，並且為了理解自己的意志，寫下了第一部自傳。
- Born 出生
- November 13, 354, Thagaste (now Souk Ahras, Algeria)
- Died 去世
- August 28, 430, Hippo Regius, during the Vandal siege
- Parents 父母
- Patricius, a pagan town councilor; Monica, a Christian
- Professions 職業
- Teacher of rhetoric; from 395, bishop of Hippo
- Main works 主要著作
- Confessions (c. 397–400); On the Trinity; The City of God (413–426)
- Wrote in 寫作語言
- Latin, about five million words of which survive
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all. 每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
Life · 生平
A life in three scenes 三幕人生
A clever boy from a small town 小鎮上的聰明男孩
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a market town in the hills of what is now eastern Algeria, then a prosperous province of the Roman Empire. His father, Patricius, was a minor official who scraped together the money to educate a gifted son. His mother, Monica, was a devout Christian who wanted the son to be one too, and followed him across the Mediterranean to see it done. He was sent to study rhetoric at Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa, where, he says, “a cauldron of unholy loves” sang about his ears. He took a mistress, whose name he never tells us, lived with her faithfully for some fifteen years, and had a son by her.
奧古斯丁 354 年生於塔加斯特，一個位於今天阿爾及利亞東部山區的市集小鎮，當時是羅馬帝國一個富庶的行省。父親帕特里修斯是個小官員，勉強湊出錢來栽培這個有天分的兒子。母親莫尼加是虔誠的基督徒，希望兒子也成為基督徒，並且跟著他渡過地中海，要親眼看到這件事成真。他被送到迦太基——羅馬非洲的大城——學修辭學；他說，在那裡「一口不潔之愛的大鍋」在他耳邊沸騰作響。他有了一位情婦，卻從沒告訴我們她的名字；他忠實地跟她同居了大約十五年，並且跟她生了一個兒子。
At nineteen he read a dialogue of Cicero, now lost, that exhorted the reader to philosophy, and it changed his ambitions. For nine years he followed the Manichees, who taught that the world is a battleground between a good power and an evil one, a doctrine that explained why he did what he disapproved of. He became a teacher of rhetoric at Carthage, then at Rome, and in 384 won the public chair of rhetoric at Milan, the seat of the emperor’s court. He was thirty and had reached the top of his profession.
十九歲那年，他讀了西塞羅的一篇對話錄（現已失傳），那篇對話錄勸人從事哲學，從此改變了他的志向。有九年之久，他追隨摩尼教徒；他們教導世界是善的力量與惡的力量之間的戰場，這套學說解釋了他為什麼會去做自己並不贊同的事。他先在迦太基、後來在羅馬當修辭學教師；384 年，他取得了米蘭的公立修辭學教席，那是皇帝宮廷的所在地。當時他三十歲，已經爬到了這一行的頂端。
The garden in Milan 米蘭的花園
In Milan two things undid his certainties. He heard the bishop, Ambrose, interpret the scriptures in a way an educated man could respect, and he read the Platonist philosophers, who convinced him that reality is not all bodily and that evil is not a substance but a lack. He was persuaded, and he could not act. For months he wanted to change his life and found that he did not want it enough. “Give me chastity and continency,” he had once prayed, “only not yet.” The crisis came in a garden in the summer of 386. Weeping under a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice from a neighboring house chanting “Take up and read.” He opened a book of Paul’s letters at random, read a single verse, and the struggle was over.
在米蘭，有兩件事瓦解了他原有的種種確信。他聽到主教安波羅修用一種受過教育的人也能尊重的方式詮釋經文；他也讀了柏拉圖學派哲學家的著作，他們讓他相信，實在並不全是物體性的，而惡不是一種實體，是一種缺乏。他被說服了，卻無法行動。一連好幾個月，他想改變自己的生活，卻發現自己想得不夠。他曾經這樣禱告過：「求你賜我貞潔與節制，只是先不要現在。」危機在 386 年夏天的一座花園裡到來。他在一棵無花果樹下哭泣，聽到鄰家傳來一個孩子的聲音，反覆唱著「拿起來讀」。他隨手翻開一本保羅書信，讀了一節，掙扎就結束了。
He resigned his chair, was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387, and set out for Africa. Monica died on the journey, at the port of Ostia, after a conversation with her son that he records as the happiest hour of his life. Back home he meant to live quietly with a few friends. In 391, visiting the port city of Hippo, he was seized by the congregation and ordained a priest against his will, and four years later he was its bishop.
他辭去教席，387 年復活節由安波羅修為他施洗，然後啟程回非洲。莫尼加在途中、在奧斯提亞港去世；去世前她跟兒子有過一次談話，他把那次談話記為自己一生中最幸福的時刻。回到家鄉，他本來打算跟幾個朋友安靜度日。391 年，他造訪港口城市希波時，被當地會眾硬拉住，違背他的意願按立為神父；四年後，他成了那裡的主教。
Bishop in a falling empire 傾頹帝國裡的主教
For thirty-five years he preached, judged disputes, answered letters from all over the Roman world, and wrote constantly. The Confessions dates from the first years of his episcopate. In 410 an army of Goths sacked Rome, and pagans blamed the disaster on the abandonment of the old gods. Augustine’s reply, The City of God, took thirteen years to write. It argues that no earthly state can be the object of a person’s final loyalty, and it shaped European political thought for a millennium. He died on August 28, 430, in his seventy-sixth year, while an army of Vandals was besieging Hippo. The city fell soon afterward. His library, by good fortune, survived.
有三十五年之久，他講道、裁決糾紛、回覆來自羅馬世界各地的信件，並且不停地寫作。《懺悔錄》寫於他擔任主教的最初幾年。410 年，一支哥德人的軍隊洗劫了羅馬，異教徒把這場災難歸咎於拋棄了舊日的眾神。奧古斯丁的回應是《上帝之城》，花了十三年才寫成。它論證：沒有任何地上的國家，可以成為一個人最終效忠的對象；這本書塑造了此後一千年的歐洲政治思想。430 年 8 月 28 日，他在七十六歲那年去世，當時一支汪達爾人的軍隊正在圍攻希波。不久之後城就陷落了。幸運的是，他的藏書保存了下來。
- 354Born at Thagaste生於塔加斯特
- 373Reads Cicero; joins the Manichees讀西塞羅；加入摩尼教
- 384Professor of rhetoric at Milan任米蘭修辭學教授
- 386The garden花園裡的轉變
- 395Bishop of Hippo任希波主教
- c. 397Confessions《懺悔錄》
- 430Dies at Hippo卒於希波
The central idea · 核心觀念
The divided will 分裂的意志
Greek philosophy had on the whole agreed with Socrates that to know the good is to do it, and that wrongdoing is a kind of ignorance. Augustine’s own experience told him otherwise. In the garden he knew perfectly well what he ought to do, and wanted to do it, and did not. He describes the puzzle with a rhetorician’s precision: “The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is resisted.” I tell my hand to move and it moves. I tell my will to will, and it only half obeys. His explanation is that the will is divided against itself, pulled one way by long habit and another by what it now sees to be better. Knowledge by itself does not move us. What moves us is what we love.
希臘哲學大體上同意蘇格拉底：知道善就會行善，作惡是一種無知。奧古斯丁自己的經驗告訴他並非如此。在那座花園裡，他清清楚楚知道自己該做什麼，也想去做，卻沒有做。他用修辭學家的精確描述了這個難題：「心靈命令身體，身體立刻服從；心靈命令它自己，卻遭到抗拒。」我叫我的手動，它就動。我叫我的意志去意願，它只服從一半。他的解釋是：意志自己跟自己分裂了，一邊被長久的習慣拉著，另一邊被它現在看出來更好的東西拉著。知識本身並不推動我們。推動我們的，是我們所愛的東西。
From this came a new way of doing philosophy. If the important facts are inside, in memory, desire, and will, then the philosopher’s method is to look inward and describe honestly what is found. The Confessions does this at length, examining an infant’s jealousy, a boy’s theft of pears he did not even want, a grown man’s grief. Its first paragraph states the theory that the rest illustrates: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” Human desire, he holds, has no finite object that can satisfy it, and a life is made orderly or disorderly by the order of its loves. The same inward turn produced his analysis of time, and an argument against skepticism that Descartes would repeat twelve centuries later: if I am mistaken, I exist.
由此產生了一種做哲學的新方式。如果重要的事實都在裡面——在記憶、欲望與意志裡——那麼哲學家的方法就是往內看，並且誠實地描述所見。《懺悔錄》詳盡地這樣做了：它檢視嬰兒的嫉妒、一個男孩偷他根本不想要的梨子、一個成年人的悲傷。它的第一段就陳述了全書其餘部分要說明的那個理論：「你為你自己造了我們，我們的心若不安息在你裡面，就不得安寧。」他主張，人的欲望沒有任何有限的對象可以滿足它；而一個人的生活有序或失序，取決於他所愛之物的次序。同一個向內的轉向，產生了他對時間的分析，也產生了一個反駁懷疑論的論證，笛卡兒在十二個世紀之後會再說一次：如果我弄錯了，我就存在。
Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.你為你自己造了我們，我們的心若不安息在你裡面，就不得安寧。
The first paragraph of the book, and the thesis of the whole. 全書的第一段，也是整本書的論旨。
The strongest objection · 最強的反駁
Can we be blamed for what we cannot help? 不由自主的事，可以怪我們嗎？
As a young bishop Augustine wrote a book defending free will. Evil, he argued, comes from the misuse of a freedom that God rightly gave. As he grew older, his reflection on his own conversion led him to a darker view. The will, damaged since the first human sin, cannot turn itself toward the good. It must be turned by grace, which God gives to some and not to others, for reasons we cannot see. The British monk Pelagius was appalled. If people cannot avoid sin without a help that is not in their power to obtain, he asked, how can they justly be blamed, and what becomes of moral effort? A command that cannot be obeyed is not a just command.
奧古斯丁年輕當主教的時候，寫過一本為自由意志辯護的書。他論證說，惡來自對自由的誤用，而那份自由是上帝正當地賜予的。隨著年歲增長，他對自己皈依經驗的反省，把他帶到一個更陰暗的看法。意志自從人類的第一次犯罪就受了損，無法自己轉向善。它必須被恩典轉過去；而恩典，上帝給了某些人、沒給另一些人，理由我們看不見。不列顛的修士伯拉糾對此大為震驚。他問：如果人沒有一種「不在自己能力範圍內取得」的幫助，就無法避免犯罪，那麼責備他們怎麼能算公正？道德上的努力又成了什麼？一條無法被遵守的命令，不是公正的命令。
Augustine won the argument in the councils of the Church and never gave a reply that satisfied his critics. The difficulty is the one met in the lesson on free will, in a theological form: responsibility seems to require that we could have done otherwise, and his account of grace seems to deny it. A second charge concerns his conduct as bishop. Confronted by a rival church in Africa, he came to defend the use of imperial force to compel its members to conform, and his arguments were quoted by persecutors for centuries afterward.
奧古斯丁在教會的會議上贏了這場爭論，卻始終沒有給出一個讓批評者滿意的回答。這個困難，就是在「自由意志」那一課遇到的那一個，只是換成了神學的形式：責任似乎要求我們「本來可以有別的做法」，而他對恩典的說明似乎否定了這一點。第二項指控針對的是他擔任主教時的作為。面對非洲的一個敵對教派，他後來為動用帝國的武力、強迫其成員歸順辯護；此後好幾個世紀，他的論證都被迫害者拿來引用。
How we know · 史料
A book addressed to someone else 一本寫給別人的書
The Confessions is not addressed to its reader. From the first line to the last it speaks to God, and we overhear. That shapes what it can tell us. The author selects the episodes that show a pattern of wandering and return, and he passes quickly over much that a biographer would want, including his years as a teacher and the name of the woman he lived with. He also wrote it a decade after the events, as a bishop with opponents to answer. None of this makes it unreliable in the ordinary sense. It makes it an argument in the form of a life. The word confessio in his Latin means praise and acknowledgment as much as admission of fault, and the last four of its thirteen books are philosophy and scriptural commentary, on memory, time, and creation.
《懺悔錄》不是寫給讀者的。從第一行到最後一行，它都在對上帝說話，而我們是在旁邊聽到的。這決定了它能告訴我們什麼。作者挑選的是那些顯示出「迷途與歸返」這個樣式的片段；傳記作者會想知道的許多事，他都匆匆帶過，包括他當教師的那些年，以及與他同居的那位女子的名字。而且他是在事隔十年之後寫的，當時他是一位有對手要回應的主教。這一切並不使它在通常的意義上不可靠。這使它成為一個以「一生」為形式的論證。在他的拉丁文裡，confessio 這個詞的意思既是讚美與承認，也是認錯；而全書十三卷的最後四卷，是談記憶、時間與創造的哲學與經文註解。
Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學
Augustine and the Buddha 奧古斯丁與佛陀
The restless heart of the Confessions and the Buddha’s first two truths describe the same condition. Human beings want, obtain, and want again, and no finite thing ends the wanting. Augustine examined this with a closeness that no Western writer before him had attempted, and a Buddhist reader will recognize his account of how habit hardens into a chain. “The mind commands itself, and is resisted” is a fair description of what anyone finds on first trying to meditate.
《懺悔錄》裡那顆不安的心，跟佛陀的前兩聖諦描述的是同一種狀態。人想要、得到、又再想要，而沒有任何有限的東西能終止這份「想要」。奧古斯丁對此檢視之細密，是他之前的西方作者不曾嘗試過的；佛教的讀者會認出他對「習慣如何硬化成鎖鍊」的描述。「心靈命令它自己，卻遭到抗拒」，相當貼切地描述了任何人第一次嘗試禪修時發現的事。
The two then go in opposite directions. Augustine concludes that desire has been aimed at the wrong objects, and that it will rest when it is aimed at the one object that is infinite. On his view the remedy for craving is a greater love. The Buddha concludes that craving itself is the cause of the trouble, whatever its object, and that it can cease. Augustine also holds that the will cannot heal itself and must be healed from outside. Early Buddhism teaches the opposite: “you yourselves must make the effort; the Buddhas only point the way” (Dhammapada 276). Yet the Buddhist world contains a tradition that sounds remarkably like him. Pure Land teachers such as Shinran held that in a degenerate age no one can reach awakening by self-power, and that one must rely wholly on the other-power of Amitābha’s vow. The quarrel between Augustine and Pelagius was fought out again, on other ground, between the Pure Land schools and their critics (Dharma and the West, D23).
接下來，兩人往相反的方向走。奧古斯丁的結論是：欲望一直瞄準了錯誤的對象；等它瞄準那唯一無限的對象，它就會安息。照他的看法，對治渴求的藥是一份更大的愛。佛陀的結論是：不管對象是什麼，渴愛本身就是問題的原因，而它是可以止息的。奧古斯丁還主張，意志無法醫治自己，必須從外面被醫治。早期佛教教的正好相反：「你們自己應當努力；如來只是指路的人」（《法句經》276）。然而佛教世界裡有一個傳統，聽起來跟他驚人地相像。親鸞這樣的淨土祖師主張，在末法時代沒有人能靠自力達到覺悟，必須完全仰賴阿彌陀佛本願的他力。奧古斯丁與伯拉糾之間的爭論，在另一片土地上，在淨土宗與批評它的人之間又打了一次（佛法與西方哲學 D23）。
Terms of art · 哲學術語
Words that come with him 跟著他一起來的詞
L. voluntas
The power of choosing and loving, which Augustine made central to the account of human action.
選擇與愛的能力；奧古斯丁把它放在說明人類行為的核心位置。
L. gratia ‘favor, free gift’
Divine help that is not earned, without which, on Augustine’s later view, the will cannot turn to the good.
不是掙來的神的幫助；依奧古斯丁晚期的看法，沒有它，意志就無法轉向善。
L. privatio ‘a taking away’
His account of evil: it is the absence of a good that ought to be present, with no being of its own.
他對惡的說明：惡是本該存在的善的缺席，它自己沒有存有。
L. interior ‘inner’
The turn toward the inner life as the place where truth is to be sought.
轉向內在生活，把它當作尋求真理的所在。
The doctrine that human nature has been damaged since the first sin and inclines toward wrong.
主張人性自第一次犯罪以來就受了損，並且傾向於惡。
from the prophet Mani (216–c. 274)
A religion teaching that the world is the scene of a struggle between two equal powers, light and darkness.
一種宗教，教導世界是光明與黑暗兩股對等力量爭鬥的場所。
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. What did Augustine’s experience in the garden lead him to deny?
2. What does he mean by the “restless heart”?
3. What was Pelagius’s objection?
Go further · 延伸
Where he appears 他出現在哪幾課
- Augustine, Confessions, translated by E. B. Pusey ↗Books I–IX are the life; Book VIII is the garden; Books X and XI are memory and time. 卷一到九是生平；卷八是花園；卷十與十一談記憶與時間。
- Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967; revised 2000)One of the great biographies of the twentieth century. 二十世紀最出色的傳記之一。
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Augustine of Hippo” ↗