The Soliloquies

Augustine invented the Latin soliloquia for a kind of writing he had no name for: speech a person holds with himself. The book is a dialogue with only one other character, his own Reason, which questions him and refuses to let an answer stand. He explains the coinage in the text, since no existing word named a conversation carried on entirely within a single mind.

Two things, and he refuses to widen the aim: God and the soul. Reason presses him from there toward two conclusions he cannot yet secure, that truth exists and cannot perish, and that the soul which grasps such truth is itself immortal. The narrowness is deliberate; Augustine treats these as the only questions whose answers his salvation and his understanding actually turn on.

It was written alongside Augustine's reply to the Academic sceptics and aims at the same target, the claim that certainty is beyond us. By showing that truth exists and cannot perish, Augustine means to secure a fixed point the sceptic cannot dissolve, and to bind the soul's own permanence to it. The two works together mark his early conviction that the mind can reach something it cannot be argued out of.

Augustine broke it off with its central question, the soul's immortality, still unsettled, and returned to that question separately in a short treatise, On the Immortality of the Soul. The dialogue thus ends without reaching the second of the two conclusions it was driving toward. Its incompleteness is characteristic of these early experimental works, written in the months between his conversion and his baptism.

It is the most inward of the philosophical dialogues he wrote at Cassiciacum, the country retreat he withdrew to in the winter of 386 before taking orders. It precedes the Confessions by a decade and shows the young convert reasoning his way toward God rather than narrating his return to him. Five centuries later King Alfred had it turned into Old English, an early sign of its reach.