About this Book

The Confessions, Proslogion, and Consolation of Philosophy, likethe Divine Comedy, all enact Platonist ascents. Each has a pilgrimfigure, guided dialogically on a journey of understanding. Each rises toprogressively higher levels of understanding and culminates in asupreme intellectual vision. The higher levels contain and surpassearlier understandings and thereby reconfigure them, but implicitly, forthe questing pilgrim rarely stops to reflect on the stages of his ascent.Augustine's conclusions about time in book 11, for example, embracememory as time past, but he does not reconsider his account ofmemory in book 10 from this new perspective. He left these for hisreader's meditation, as a spiritual exercise. In this way, a Platonistascent generates implied meditative meanings, which scholars haveexplored only in part.