that intelligible light and having been illuminated perceives those reasons not through corporeal eyes but through that ruling part of itself by which it excels-that is through its intellect-and becomes most blessed in the vision of them.24

Augustine's theology is marked by the relentless quest to know God and the soul. And, while these two are distinct, they are not separate. The presence of God is uniquely experienced in the rational soul. Caritas is the manner in which the pure soul fuses itself to God. While the rationes aeternae of all existents are logically prior to their finite iteration, the rational creature is unique in his ability to contemplate this relation. For Cicero and Plotinus, as well as for the Latin Middle Platonists on which Augustine drew, the locus of kinship between the divine and human spirit is the divine ideas.25 The origin and nature of the soul is "contained" in these divine ideas. However, the divine ideas are not to be sought in some far off, transcendent "place"; rather, they are discovered in the depths of the human soul, because nothing is more proximate to God than the soul, which shares in God's own intelligible light. It is in contemplation of the divine ideas in the superior parts of the soul that the soul can come to share once again in this divine life. Platonic interiority (masterfully adopted and transposed in the Christian cadence of the Confessions) assumes a bond (sungeneia) between God and the human soul. The truism of Platonic spirituality, that the depths of interiority is also the site of the highest transcendence, equally holds true for Augustine.26 It is in seeing God's own ideas and participating in his light that the rational soul understands and is illumined. By turning within itself the soul comes to the visio beatissima of the divine ideas.27

24 Augustine, De ideis 2: "Sed anima rationalis inter eas res, quae sunt a Deo conditae, omnia superat et Deo proxima est, quando pura est; eique in quantum caritate cohaeserit, in tantum ab eo lumine illo intellegibili perfusa quodammodo et illustrata cernit non per corporeos oculos, sed per ipsius sui principale quo excellit, id est, per intellegentiam suam, istas rationes, quarum visione fit beatissima."25 Of course, this idea is hardly antithetical to Christian convictions. Paul could affirm with the Stoic poet, Aratos, "Του γάρ καί γένος έσμέν” (Acts 17:28).26 Cf. Confessions 3.6.11: "Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo" ("But you were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me").27 See Pépin, 111: "In the eyes of Cicero-very probably a practitioner of the Middle Platonic ideology taken from Antiochus of Ascalon-conceiving the ideas as the thoughts of God does not exclude interiorizing them. In other words, when he wrote in the Orator that Phidias reproduced in his art an interior model, he clearly signifies that Phidias participated in the divine intelligence. It is also very probable

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The Rationes Seminales in Augustine's Theology of Creation

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