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KNOWLEDGE geometry is in fact recalling our buried memories of what we have always known Early in life Augustine was tempted by this explanation (cf Ep 2), but in his mature writings he cools to the idea that the soul pre-existed the formation of the body Even if there were such a previous life, he argues in On the Trinity, it would not explain the learning of geometry, because we can hardly suppose that every one of us was a geometer in a previous life We ought rather to believe that the nature of the intellectual mind was so formed that by means of a unique kind of incorporeal light it sees the intelligible realities to which, in the natural order, it is subordinate—just as the eye of the Xesh sees the things that surround it in this corporeal light (DT 12 15 24) What Augustine here calls ‘intelligible realities’ he elsewhere calls ‘incorporeal and eternal reasons’ They are unchangeable, and are therefore superior to the human mind; and yet they are in some way linked to the mind, because otherwise it would not be able to employ them as standards to judge of bodily things (DT 12 2) We employ them in this way when, for example, we decide that a particular cartwheel is not a perfect circle, or if we apply Pythagoras’ theorem when measuring a Weld But it is not only arithmetical and geometrical standards that we apply in this way: there are also intellectual canons of beauty Augustine recalled a particular traceried arch he had seen in Carthage His judgement that this was aesthetically pleasing was, he tells us, based on a form of eternal truth that he perceived through the eye of the rational mind (DT 11) Augustine’s ‘intelligible realities’ are clearly very close to Plato’s Ideas In rejecting the account of the Meno, Augustine is disagreeing not about the existence of eternal standards, but about the nature of human access to them Following the lead of Neoplatonic thinkers such as Plotinus,1 he locates the Ideas in the divine mind Augustine’s Christianization of Plato is most explicit in the treatise De Ideis, which is the forty-sixth question in his Eighty-Three DiVerent Questions He oVers three Latin words for Ideas: ‘formae’, ‘species’, and ‘rationes’ The Ideas cannot be thought to exist anywhere but in the mind of the creator If creation was a work of intelligence, it must have been in accord with eternal reasons But it is blasphemous to think that God, in creating the world in accordance with Ideas, looked up to anything outside himself See vol i, p 313 158
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