Sarah Stewart-Kroeker - A Journey for the Feet: Augustine's Incarnational Appropriation of Plotinus

The image of the journey to God as the voyage to the homeland is one that Augustine uses over and over again throughout his life and work.  Augustine appropriates this image from Plotinus’s “On Beauty,” but he modifies it in several striking ways. For Plotinus, the voyage to the Fatherland is a path of interior flight, guided by an inner vision of Being; it is a withdrawal into the self, a movement beyond the material world, to a blissful vision of the One.  It is solitary, interior, and involves a casting off of the material world.  For Augustine, the voyage may be solitary but is more often communal, it is interior but must be enacted in the world, and it anticipates the afterlife but is firmly grounded in earthly existence. For Augustine, the voyage is an arduous pilgrimage undertaken by the embodied believer following the God-made-flesh.

     Augustine’s modifications to the Plotinian image reveal the crucial theological juncture at which Augustine departs from the Neo-Platonic philosophical tradition in favor of the Christian moral life, which for Augustine is founded on the Incarnation. Whereas for Plotinus the voyage to the homeland is “not a journey for the feet,” (Enneads I.6) I will argue that for Augustine the journey is precisely one for the feet.  This contrast is indicative of Augustine’s emphasis on the Christian life as a pilgrimage along the road paved by Christ and the implications of the Incarnation on both theological and moral levels.  The voyage to the homeland and corresponding pilgrimage motifs form a central metaphor for Augustine’s Christology (which in turn founds his vision of the ethical life). This metaphor provides a key to Augustine’s incarnational Christology, a Christology that highlights Christ as the Way and the Goal: the Mediator between God and humanity.  The Word-made-flesh enables all who believe (and not merely those few clear-eyed intellectuals) to walk home together along the road paved by his human-divine feet.  For Augustine this journey involves the imitation of Christ in humility and submission, the ordering of love in the conformation to the true image of God (Christ), and the formation of a community of pilgrims, the city of God, whose head is Christ.  In this paper I will undertake a careful reading of Augustine’s appropriation of the Plotinian image and propose that his modifications to it indicate the Christological framework for his pilgrimage ethics.