How Meditations on First Philosophy drew on Confessions
A documented line of influence: René Descartes demonstrably engaged Augustine of Hippo’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo · c. 398
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes · 1641
EnlightenmentRelevance
7/10
On Meditations on First Philosophy’s page
- "I am thinking, therefore I exist" has a forebear in Augustine — Descartes himself went to the library to check, and confirmed Augustine used the same move to ground the certainty of existence
- The Meditations' inward retreat from the senses toward a self-certain mind reworks the introspective ascent Augustine performs in the Confessions
- Read Augustine first and Descartes's radical-seeming method reveals its lineage: the soul turning on itself to find the one thing it can't doubt
On Confessions’s page
- Augustine's inward turn — distrust the senses, find certainty in the self — becomes Descartes's whole method twelve centuries later
- Descartes knew the debt: in a 1640 letter he reports going to the town library to read Augustine, confirming that Augustine, too, used "if I am mistaken, I exist" to prove the certainty of one's own existence
- The cogito has an ancestor here — and so does the Meditations' proof of God from the idea of perfection, which recasts Augustine's ascent into a tool for modern certainty