The Seven Levels of the Soul

The maps in this series have come from sixteenth-century Spain, twelfth-century Persia, medieval India, fifth-century Sri Lanka and the Buddha’s own teaching. The map in this essay is older than all but the last of them, and it comes from a man who was, at the time he drew it, a new Christian in his early thirties, still close to the philosophy that had brought him to faith. It is short, a few pages at the end of a dialogue. But it is a map of the whole human soul, from the life it shares with plants to the vision of God, and it shaped how the Christian West thought about the inner ascent for a thousand years.

How great is the soul?§

The dialogue begins with a strange-sounding question. Evodius wants to know how large the soul is. If it is in the body, does it have the body’s size? Does it grow as the body grows? Much of the conversation is spent showing that the question is wrongly put. The soul, Augustine argues, is not extended in space at all. It does not grow as the child grows, any more than wisdom grows by getting taller; and the mind can hold in thought things far larger than the body, which it could not do if it were the size of the body (Hippo 1950, chs. 5–14).

So when we ask how great the soul is, Augustine concludes, we must mean not how big but how powerful: what it can do. And to answer that he turns, at the end of the dialogue, to a list. The soul’s greatness is shown in seven levels of its activity, rising from the lowest to the highest (Hippo 1950, 33.70–76).

Augustine makes the argument with geometry, in a long passage that may surprise readers who know him only as a theologian. He asks Evodius to consider a line, which has length but no breadth, and a point, which has no parts at all; and he shows that the point, which has no size, is in a sense the most powerful of the figures, since every line and shape is generated from it and depends on it. None of these figures can be seen with the eyes. The lines we draw are only images of them; the mind sees the line itself. And what sees the incorporeal cannot itself be a body. The soul’s greatness, like the point’s, is a greatness without extension.

He adds examples from ordinary experience. The eye’s pupil is tiny, yet through it the soul sees half the sky. Memory holds cities, mountains and seas, none of which could fit inside the head. A body grows by adding parts; the soul grows by learning, which adds nothing to its size. The dialogue is an early statement of a conviction that would run through all of Augustine’s work: that the soul is a reality of a different order from the body, and that it is known not by looking outward but by turning inward to its own activity.

The seven levels§

The first level: life§

At the first level the soul gives life to the body. It holds the body together, nourishes it, makes it grow and reproduce, maintains its form and proportion. This, Augustine says, the human soul shares with plants: whatever lives, lives because something animates it. It is the most ordinary of the soul’s powers, and the most easily forgotten, but Augustine insists that it is already a sign of the soul’s greatness. A body without a soul is a corpse.

The second level: sensation§

At the second level the soul senses. It sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches; it seeks what is pleasant and avoids what harms; it remembers what it has sensed, and is drawn by habit; it reproduces and cares for its young. This, Augustine says, the human soul shares with the animals.

The third level: art§

At the third level the soul does what only human beings do. Augustine’s description is a celebration of human culture: memory that holds countless things, not by habit but by attention; the arts and crafts; the cultivation of fields and the building of cities; the invention of signs, letters and words; languages and books; poetry, music, drama; the ordering of states and armies; reasoning and invention of every kind. All this is the soul’s greatness at the third level. And yet, he adds, it is shared by the wise and the foolish, the good and the wicked. Culture is great, but it is not yet goodness.

The fourth level: virtue§

At the fourth level goodness begins. The soul, seeing that it is greater than the body and than everything bodily, begins to prefer itself and its true good to the pleasures of the body and the world. It begins to purify itself. This is a stage of struggle. The soul has to fight against the habits of the levels below; it is afraid of death; it trusts in God’s help and justice, but it is not yet at peace. Augustine says that this purification is a great labour, and that the soul at this level is still anxious, because it is still striving.

The fifth level: tranquillity§

At the fifth level the struggle is over. The soul, purified, holds itself in a joy and confidence that nothing can shake. It has no more fear for itself. It knows how great it is, and it goes on with an immense and incredible trust towards God, that is, towards the contemplation of truth. Augustine calls this level tranquillity.

The sixth level: approach§

At the sixth level the soul directs its gaze towards God. Augustine calls it ingressio, the approach or entry. The soul has made its eye healthy and clean in the levels before, and now turns it towards the light. This, he says, is different from purifying the eye: one may clean the eye and still not look, or look with an eye too weak to bear the light. At the sixth level the soul, purified and at peace, looks.

The seventh level: contemplation§

At the seventh level the soul contemplates truth. Augustine says that this is not a step but a dwelling place, mansio, to which the steps lead. He refuses to describe it in detail. Great and incomparable souls, he says, have spoken of it, and he believes them. In this vision the soul sees how true are the things it was commanded to believe, and how it was nourished by the faith of the Church; it sees that death, which it so feared, is a flight from the body, and that the resurrection of the body is to be believed. And the joys of contemplating truth are such that, compared with them, the levels below are as nothing.

Of, through, about, towards, in§

Having described the levels, Augustine gives them two further sets of names, and they are the clearest key to his map (Hippo 1950, 35.79). The first set says where the soul’s activity is directed. At the first level it acts of the body; at the second, through the body; at the third, about the body; at the fourth, towards itself; at the fifth, in itself; at the sixth, towards God; at the seventh, in God.

The pattern is striking. The first three levels are turned outward, to the body and the world. The fourth and fifth turn inward, to the soul itself. The sixth and seventh turn upward, to God. Augustine’s ascent is an inward movement that becomes an upward one: the soul must first come home to itself before it can rise above itself. He would later put it in a single sentence in a book on true religion: do not go outside; return into yourself; truth dwells in the inner self; and if you find your own nature changeable, go beyond yourself as well.

The second set of names is about beauty. At each level the soul acts beautifully: beautifully of another, at the first; beautifully through another, at the second; beautifully about another, at the third; beautifully towards the beautiful, at the fourth; beautifully in the beautiful, at the fifth; beautifully towards beauty itself, at the sixth; beautifully in the presence of beauty, at the seventh. The ascent of the soul is also an ascent of love, drawn upward by a beauty that is finally God.

Plato, baptized§

Readers of the earlier essays in this Library will recognize the shape. It is the ascent of Plato’s Symposium, in which the lover rises from the beauty of one body to the beauty of souls, of laws, of knowledge, and at last to beauty itself. It is the ascent of Plotinus, who taught that the soul must withdraw into itself and be made beautiful in order to see the Beautiful. Augustine had read the Platonists in Latin translation in Milan, and he says in the Confessions that they showed him where to look, though not how to get there.

The Confessions describes two such ascents. In the seventh book, before his conversion, Augustine rises step by step from bodies to the soul that senses through the body, to its inner sense, to the power of reasoning, and to the unchangeable truth above it, and for a moment reaches that which is, before falling back (Hippo 1838, VII.17). In the ninth book, at Ostia with his mother, he rises with her in conversation through all bodily things and the heavens themselves, into their own minds and beyond them, until they touch eternal Wisdom for an instant with the whole force of the heart, and then return to the sound of their own voices (Hippo 1838, IX.10).

The seven levels are the theory of which these are the experience. The Ostia vision passes through exactly the movement the dialogue maps: from the bodily, through the soul’s own inwardness, to God. And what Augustine adds to Plato and Plotinus is in the levels themselves. Virtue is not only an intellectual purification; it is a struggle with fear, carried by trust in God. Tranquillity is not self-sufficiency but confidence in God’s help. And the seventh level is reached by grace and faith as well as by understanding: the soul sees there how true were the things it had believed.

A map the West inherited§

Augustine’s seven levels were not the only sevenfold ascent he described. In another work, On Christian Teaching, he traced seven steps to wisdom, from the fear of God through piety, knowledge, fortitude, counsel and purity of heart to wisdom itself, matching the seven gifts of the Spirit in Isaiah. Seven, for Augustine as for the whole Christian tradition, was the number of completeness, the days of creation and the rest that ends them.

The seven steps make an instructive comparison with the seven levels. They begin, as the levels do not, with the fear of God, which turns the soul to think of its death and its sin. Piety makes it gentle and teachable before the scriptures. Knowledge, the third step, shows it that the whole law is to love God and neighbour, and that it is far from this, and so it mourns. Fortitude is a hunger and thirst for justice that carries it away from the love of passing things. Counsel turns it to mercy, to the love of the neighbour and even of enemies, and by this it is purified. Purity of heart is the sixth step: the eye of the heart is cleansed, so that it can see God as far as God can be seen in this life. And wisdom is the seventh, in peace. The levels were drawn by a philosopher; the steps by a pastor. But at the sixth stage both say the same thing. The eye must be clean before it can look.

Through these texts, and above all through the Confessions, the pattern of an ascent from the outer to the inner to the higher became the frame of Western mystical theology. Bonaventure would write of a journey of the mind into God through traces, images and the light above the mind. Teresa read the Confessions and wept at the scene of Augustine’s conversion, and her castle, with its movement from the outer courts to the centre where God dwells, is in many ways a later and more personal drawing of the same map.

What this map teaches§

Augustine’s levels make three contributions to this series that no other map makes as clearly.

First, the map starts lower than any other. It begins not with prayer, longing, disillusion or ethics, but with life itself, and with sensation and culture. The ascent does not despise these. They are already the soul’s greatness. The point is not to leave them behind as worthless but to see that they are not the whole of what the soul is, and that its powers point beyond them.

Second, the map gives the clearest statement of a pattern hidden in the others: outward, inward, upward. Teresa’s soul moves from the outer courts inward to a centre that is God. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha turns from the world to the Self. Buddhaghosa’s meditator turns from the world to the mind, and from the mind to what is beyond conditioning. Augustine names the turn and its sequence: of, through and about the body; towards and in the self; towards and in God.

Third, the map distinguishes cleansing the eye from looking. It is one of Augustine’s most useful insights, and it applies to every tradition. Much of the path, in every map, is purification: of conduct, of mind, of desire. But purification is not yet vision, and a purified soul can still fail to turn towards the light. The sixth level, the turning of the gaze, is a distinct act, and perhaps the one that most needs grace.

And like the other maps, Augustine’s ends in a dwelling, not a step, and declines to describe it. The great souls have spoken of it, he says, and he believes them.

The final essay in this series sets the six maps side by side and asks the question they have raised throughout: are these maps of one country, drawn by different travellers, or of different countries altogether?