AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT: FROM TIME TO ETERNITY

by Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle

toto ictu cordis

Confessiones

The transcendence of time to touch eternity “with a whole heartbeat” was a unique
achievement. With cultured ingenuity Augustine invented the method in conversation
with his mother, Monica, as they awaited voyage home to North Africa from Ostia.
His Confessions records how, leaning on the windowsill of their apartment, overlook­
ing its enclosed garden, they meditated from the ground up. They wondered “what the
future eternal life of the saints might be?” Their mental progress from the sensory per­
ception of earthbound bodies, to the heavens above with their luminous orbs, to their
own enlightened minds, to the mystery above all creation was a classical philosophical
procedure with broad application.1 Its climax in eternity has been declared a “vision,”
a “revelation,” an “ecstasy” inspired by Plotinus, the major Platonist philosopher. The
editor of Plotinus determined this source, and with few quibbles the interpretation pre­
vails. Augustine’s Latin diction in his Confessions has been matched to Greek terms in
Plotinus’s Enneads, and toto ictu cordis pronounced “mystical contact.”2
Yet, this spiritual speculation seems detached from Roman reality. Augustine never
studied philosophy formally, and his personal reading was hindered by his loss of
Greek.3 He mentions in his Confessions reading “certain books of the Platonists trans­
lated from the Greek tongue into Latin.” He thus only sampled Plotinus—and not in
his notoriously idiosyncratic Greek but in a Latin translation by Marius Victorinus.4
Since that translation is not extant, a comparison of their diction is impossible.
Augustine alludes in his Confessions to a single passage about Plotinus’s method of
attaining divine intellection. Plotinus pondered crossing the material sea of disorder to

1 Augustine, Confessiones 9.10.23-24. For the critical edition, see Confessionum libri XIII, ed. Lucas
Verheijen (Turnhout 1981). Critical editions of some of Augustine’s other works are in the Brepols Corpus
christianorum series latina (CCSL). See also De musica liber VI, ed. Martin Jacobsson (Stockholm 2002).
For Augustine’s other texts, see Patrologia latina (PL) 32-47, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris 1800-1875). Transla­
tions of Augustine are mine.
2 Paul Henry, Plotin et l ’Occident: Firmicus Maternus, Mari-us Victorinus, s. Augustin, et Macrobe
(Louvain 1934) 78-96; idem, La vision d ’Ostie: sa place dans la vie et l ’oeuvre de s. Augustin (Paris 1938);
André Mandouze, “L’extase d’Ostie: Possibilités et limites de la méthode des parallèles textuels,” Au­
gustinus Magister, 3 vols. (Paris 1954) 1.67-84. For the Plotinian program, see recently Phillip Cary,
Augustine’s Invention o f the Inner Self: The Legacy o f a Christian Platonist (Oxford 2000); Roland J.
Teske, “The Heaven of Heavens and the Unity of St. Augustine’s Confessiones,” American Catholic Phi­
losophical Quarterly 74 (2000) 29-45.
3 For Augustine on Greek, see Pierre Courcelle, Later Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources, trans.
Harry E. Wedeck (Cambridge, MA 1969) 163-164, 207; Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Clas­
sics, 2 vols. in 1 (Göteborg and Stockholm 1967) 585-586.
4 Augustine, Confessiones 8.2.3. By the principle of the harder reading, Plotinici, which appears in some
manuscripts, is generally accepted over Platoni. See Henry, Plotin et l ’Occident (n. 2 above) 79-82. For the
intermediary of the Platonist manuscripts, see John M. Rist, “A Man of Monstrous Vanity,” Journal o f
Theological Studies 42 (1991) 138-143.
20 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

the celestial port of intellection: “But how shall we find the way? What method can we
devise ... what then is our way of escape, and how are we to find it? ... How shall we
travel to it, where is our way of escape?”5 Augustine’s browse of Plotinus encouraged
him to imitate this philosophical meditation. He relates how his reasoning progressed
gradually “from bodily matters” to the sentient soul, to its reason, to its judgment, to
its intelligence, to “that which is.” He approached this ontological destination in ictu
trepidantis aspectus, “in a blink of blurry sight.” The frailty of his soul rebuffed its
contemplation, but he learned that God existed, eternal, self-same, and the source of
all existence. Yet, Augustine identifies this supreme being not as Platonist but biblical
by citing the voice to Moses from the burning bush, “I am who I am.” Augustine af­
firms that he heard this “in the heart.”6
Although this feeble intellection encouraged Augustine to philosophize, it does not
justify the Platonist program imposed on his maturer meditation at Ostia. He com­
posed a medley of intellectual traditions. The climax of the meditation at Ostia signifi­
cantly stroked eternity toto ictu cordis, “with a whole heartbeat.” The means of “a
blink of blurry sight” and “a whole heartbeat” differ, from the exemplary visual meta­
phor for contemplation to the basic tactile experience of animals.7 Augustine’s diction
does not shift from the intellectual to the affective, however, as modern sensibility
about “heart” might suppose. His meditation at Ostia is rational, however impelled
“with a burning desire,” which also resided in the heart. With his conversion to Ca­
tholicism, Augustine realizes that Platonism did not offer the sure and salvific method
to traverse time to eternity. Reading scripture, he exclaims, “I could discern and dis­
tinguish what a difference there is between presumption and confession, between see­
ing where to go but not seeing how, and the Way leading to the beatific fatherland,
which is not so much to be perceived as inhabited.” Without Christ the savior as that
Way, he confesses that, inflated with specious wisdom, he would have perished in
Platonism. His faith in the Word made flesh acknowledges “the whole man in Christ,
not merely the body of a man, or the spirit with a body but without a mind, but the
very man.”8 Augustine must now believe that the eternity into which Christ rose from
the dead embraces humans who are not Platonist disembodied souls but Christian
souls expecting at the last judgment their resurrected bodies. He seeks to reason anew
from the bodily to the unbodily to God without sloughing his body but by transporting
it there mentally. Such argumentation from the design of the human body to its provi­
dent creator was also a classical topic.9
Plotinus had reflected on the soul’s return to its origin: “How shall we travel to it?

5 Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.8; trans., A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA 1966-1988) 1.255, 257. See
also Enneads 1.3.1.
6 Augustine, Confessiones 7.17.23, 7.10.16, 7.17.23; cf. ictu oculi 7.1.1 and De trinitate (CCSL 50)
14.19.25, citing 1 Cor. 15.52 on the resurrection of the body; Confessiones 8.1.1, 7.10.1, citing Ex. 3.14. For
Augustine on the extromissive theory of vision, see De musica 6.8.21. Note that ictus, “blow,” is a tactile
and associatively auditory term, not a visual one. Even in combination with vision. ictus is not visual, a
“twinkle,” but tactile, a “blink,” denoting the percussion of the eyelids. For more on the philology of ictus,
see below.
7 For the sense of touch, see for example Aristotle, De anima 435a-b.
8 Augustine, Confessiones 9.10.24, 7.19.25, 7.20.26.
9 For example, Cicero, De natura deorum 2.54-58; Galen, De usu partium 17.1, ed. Georg Helmreich, 2
vols. (Leipzig 1907-1909) 2.448-449.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 21

where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us
everywhere in this world, from one country to another.”10 Augustine echoed this belief
initially: “Not by the feet or strolls through sites is the departure or return to Thee.”
On the threshold of his conversion under the fig tree, he reaffirmed that entering into a
covenant with God is “not by the feet,” like his student Alypius trailing him into that
garden “footstep by footstep.” But Augustine’s initial vehicle of reason becomes there
his new vehicle of will. With belief in God as the creator of everything as very good—
bodies and not only souls,11 Augustine revises the Platonist overstepping of the body.
Relevant to his meditation at Ostia is a text by Marius Victorinus, Ars grammatica.
Augustine had blazed from below with infernal fires of lust until reading philosophy
kindled him from above to burn for wisdom. But hearing the story of Victorinus’s
conversion from pagan rhetor to Christian apologist inflamed him to a greater imita­
tion. Victorinus merely asked to “go” (eamus) to the church for baptism; Augustine
alight prayed to “run” (curramus) to God. But how to run there, if not with his feet?
With grammatical feet. As Victorinus’s Ars and the genre of grammars taught, a clas­
sical “foot” (pes ) is the elementary metrical measure.12 Grammar was Augustine’s
formative education in provincial North Africa. He detested Greek grammar and lit­
erature as a bitter, foreign taste in his mouth and only relearned it in old age. But he
was flogged by his masters toward learning Latin grammar and so he became “a
promising lad.” His knowledge of grammar was advanced in the rhetoric schools,
where he excelled. From school, an accomplished Augustine taught in his home town,
Thagaste, then at Carthage and Rome, until he was finally appointed professor of
rhetoric for Milan. He also earned a living as a grammarian until “too much grammati­
cal work” caused him difficulty in breathing and forced his resignation as civic
rhetor.13 By the time of the meditation at Ostia, he has reexamined his own two feet in
their metrical demonstrations to his students. With the grammatical metaphor of “feet”
he invents footfalls from time to eternity: down-up, down-up, down-up. Augustine
tapping his toes, stepping his soles from here to eternity may cut a strange figure, but
this is the historical Augustine: halfway down to earth.
The famous meditation at Ostia was not an ecstasy but an exercise. Augustine
composed it liberally from three disciplines—meter, music, and medicine—for a new
theological purpose. Beyond its commonplace ascent from the bodily to the unbodily,
the meditation was only superficially Platonist. It was not a shared repetition of his
attempt to spy with the soul’s eye the illuminating light above it. The meditation at
Ostia diverges radically from Platonism in inception, method, and conclusion. Its
stated premise is biblical. “‘Oblivious to the past, extended toward those things that
were ahead [Phil. 3.13],’ we sought between us in the presence of the present truth,
which Thou art, what the future eternal life of the saints might be ‘that neither eye has
seen, nor ear heard, nor has it ascended into the human heart [1 Cor. 2.9].’” The hearts

10 Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.8; trans. 1.257.

11 Augustine, Confessiones 1.18.28, 8.8.19, cf. 9.6.14, 7.12.18, 7.3.4.
12 Augustine, Confessiones 2.1.1, 3.4.7-8, 8.4.9, 8.5.10. Marius Victorinus, Ars grammatica 1, in Gram­
matici latini, ed. Heinrich Keil, 8 vols. (Hildesheim 1961) 6.43-50. Augustine, Confessiones 8.4.9.
22 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

of Augustine and Monica will ascend together to hear it. The motive for this endeavor
is their commitment to the resurrection of the body. That Christian doctrine is distinct
from the Platonist doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which is neither scriptural
nor creedal. Plotinus would refute belief in a resurrected body as an erroneous subor­
dination of metaphysics to psychology. Indeed, he was probably contemptuous of
Christianity. Both Plato and Plotinus differ from Christians in their opinion that hu­
mans are not defined by their bodies but have a superior nonbodily reality and des-
tiny.14 The social circumstance of the meditation at Ostia also contradicts Plotinus’s
anti-social conclusion that godlike humans “escape in solitude to the solitary.”15 Al­
though Augustine states that he and Monica were “alone,” of course they were to­
gether. That society of son and mother prefigured the communion of the saints they
together sought. Their unified achievement was emphatic in the singularity of
Augustine’s phrase “with a whole heartbeat,” as their two hearts beat as if one. Nor
were they silently thinking but noisily talking, an activity that is not contemplative and
intellectual but discursive and rational. Moreover, theirs was familiar conversation
(sermo), not even the stately rhetoric (oratio) by which Augustine’s secular profession
had promoted the Roman Empire. Their method of reasoning from time to eternity
“with a whole heartbeat” was decisively un-Platonist. It owed to a major theoretical
division in classical medicine between the brain or the heart as the seat of conscious­
ness. This vital topic of the organ of the soul was common knowledge, as in Cicero’s
deliberation over the identification of the soul with the heart.16 Among the cardiocen-
trists were the Sicilian school, the author of the Hippocratic De corde, Diocles and
Praxagoras of the Pneumatic school as influenced by Stoic philosophy, and Aristotle.17
In Roman medicine Galen rehearsed their views in his contrary arguments, based on
experiment, for the location of reason in the brain.18 Pliny’s Historia naturalis
popularized the heart as “the dwelling-place of the mind (ibi mens habitat).”19 The
first Christian Latin author, Tertullian, illustrated the extension of cardiocentrism to
religion. Conflating medicine and scripture, he located the hegemonikon, the authori­
tative part of the soul, in the heart. A Stoic term, hegemonikon was avoided by Plo­
tinus but accepted by Augustine.20
Heart (kardia) is not a Platonic or Platonist concept for rationality or intellection.1345678920

13 Augustine, Confessiones 1.12.19-1.19.30, 2.3.5, 3.4.7, 4.2.2-3, 4.4.7, 5.7.13, 5.8.14-15, 5.12.22­
13.23, 6.7.13. For Greek grammaticus as Latin litterarius, see De musica 2.1.1. Confessiones 9.2.4, 9.4.7,
9.5.13.
14 For body, see also Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London 1994) 204, 203; idem, “Introduction,” The
Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Gerson (Cambridge 1996) 7.
15 Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.11; trans. 7.345.
16 Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes 1.9.18-20; cf. 1.27.47, 1.29.70.
17 C. R. S. Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine: From Alcmaeon to
Galen (Oxford 1973) 7, 14, 19, 34, 35, 38, 99, 104-105, 113-114, 121, 167-168, 236.
18 Teun Tieleman, Galen and Chrysippus on the Soul: Argument and Refutation in the "De placitis ”
Books II-III (Leiden 1996) xiii, 39-44, 47-55, 80-81.
19 Pliny, Historia naturalis 11.70.181; trans. H. Rackham et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA 1958-1962)
3.547
20 Tertullian, De anima 15.1—4, ed. J. H. Waszink (Amsterdam 1947); and Waszink, ed. 221. Augustine,
De anima et eius origine (PL 44) 4.5.6. For hegemonikon in medicine, see Galen, De locis affectibus 3.7, De
usu partium 17.1, in Opera, ed. Karl Gottlob Kuhn, 22 vols. in 20 (Leipzig 1821-1823) 8.166-167; 2.448;
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 23

Plato distributed the soul among the three venters: head, thorax, abdomen. He allowed
that the gods placed the mortal part of the soul in the “breast,” or “thorax,” and further
located the spirited part of this mortal soul “midway between the midriff and the
neck.” But he did not specify the “heart,” although later writers inferred it. “Heart”
occurs only once in Plato’s writings, in the Timaeus, which defines it physically as
“the knot of the veins and the fountain of the blood which races through all the limbs.”
The heart is positioned to check passion by obedience to reason; but the heart itself is
not rational. The Timaeus in Latin translation was the only work of Plato’s that
Augustine read, yet its partial renditions by Calcidius and Cicero ended well before
these statements. What Augustine did read identified not the heart but the head as “the
most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in it,” “the dwelling-place of the most
sacred and divine part of us.” This head is the citadel of reason.21
Plotinus’s unitive doctrine was the attainment of the One, or the Good, by the in­
tellect, not the attainment of eternity by the heart. In his Enneads the heart is merely
an example of Plato’s attribution of the passionate spirit to a bodily organ in a par­
ticular state. Plotinus reports Plato on the residence of desire “in the region of the liver
and the spirited part” and he expresses uncertainty about the location of different parts
of the soul in different parts of the body. Plotinus thinks the unity of the soul is proved
by its presence as a whole and in every bodily part, not scattered about. Nevertheless,
he considers that the heart can be “the appropriate dwelling place for the seething of
the spirited part” because in the heart the rarified blood necessary to the spirited soul is
refined. Thus, “It is not absurd to say that the trace of soul which is expressed in pas­
sion is in the region of the heart; for this is not to say that the soul is there, but the
starting point of the blood which has this qualification.”22 If Augustine read these
comments, they afforded him only a trace, not a residence, of the soul in the heart.
This vestige was not the superior rational part of the soul but an inferior passionate
part, which was unable to attain intellection and indeed rebelled against it.
The Platonist program imposed on Augustine’s meditation at Ostia has skipped his
heartbeat. It is time, then, to read Augustine’s pulse, for it alone will accurately regis­
ter his heartbeat. Augustine is the saint with heart; the God of his Confessions, “the
God of my heart.”23 His principal iconographical attribute is the heart: flaming,
pierced with an arrow, or held in his hand, while in other art he gestures suggestively
toward his breast. Heart is more prominent for Augustine than the pen and book or
miter and staff of his literary and episcopal vocations.24 Yet, investigation of
Augustine’s “heart” dismisses the cardiac organ to insist that “the most frequent and

animae regalia, Caelius Aurelianus, Celeres passiones 1.8.53-56, in Akute Kronkheiten, Buch I—III;
Chronische Krankheiten, Buch I—V, ed. Gerhard Bendz, 2 vols. (Berlin 1990-1903) 1.54.
21 Plato, Timaeus 69e-70d, cf. 65d; 44d, 45a; The Dialogues o f Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 2 vols.
(New York 1937) 2.48, 25, 26. Cf. silva for hyle in Augustine, Confessiones 2.1.1 with Calcidius’s Timaeus
123. For Cicero’s translation, see Augustine, De civitate Dei (CCSL 47-48) 13.16.1.
22 Plotinus, Enneads 1.1.8, 3.2, 3.8.8, 6.7.41; 4.4.28; 4.3.19, trans. 4.95; 4.9.1; 4.3.23, trans. 4.109;
4.4.28, trans. 4.219. See also Teun Tieleman, “Plotinus on the Seat of the Soul: Reverberations of Galen and
Alexander in Enn. IV, 3 [27], 23,” Phronesis 43 (1998) 306-325.
23 Augustine, Confessiones 2.3.5, 4.2.3, 6.1.1, 9.13.35; cf. Ps. 72.26.
24 Louis Réau, Iconographie de l ’art chrétien, vol. 3: Iconographie des saints (Paris 1938) 150-151;
Antonio Iturbe, “Iconografia de san Augustin: Atributos y temas o titulos iconograficos: Sus origenes lite-
rarias: Ciclos principales,” Iconografia augustiniana, ed. Rafael Lazcano (Rome 2001) 34-37.
24 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

important usage of ‘cor’ is a metaphor in the strict sense.” Augustine’s “heart” desig­
nates the activity of “the interior man,” with spiritual power for moral decision that
defines his value. His “heart” is “exclusive spiritualism” and “spiritual exclusivity.”
Inquiry into the meaning and value of the body for Augustine studies body as a con­
cept, not an organism. Without medical research, it reflects theologically on the
Christian doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection. The marginal scholarship
on medicine in Augustine’s writings treats piety and pathology. Augustine’s devotion
to the Christ the humble physician is topical, while his medical terminology is apolo­
getic, reporting miraculous cures as proofs of divine power versus human therapy. A
quantitative statistical analysis of Augustine’s counted medical terms allots percent­
ages for literal and metaphorical usages. And, although his philology for anal fistula is
thoroughly examined, cardiac cor has been ignored.25 This consensus is that
Augustine’s “heart” is a philosophical vessel, not a medical organ.
It is both: fundamentally medical, attributively philosophical. Further, his “God of
my heart” misappropriates the primary anthropological concept of the Hebrew Scrip­
ture (leb, lebab), which refers neither to medicine nor philosophy but law.26 Augustine
identifies “my heart, where I am whatever I am” as the “mind” and “intellect.” He
means that the cardiac organ, in distinction to the brain, is the rational seat. He ac­
knowledges the essential medical division of opinion between the heart and the brain
in his treatise on the soul and its origin. There he wonders “from what part the he­
gemonikon rules, whether from the heart or from the brain,” or whether their functions
are distributed between movement and sensation. His reflection is unscientific but
philosophical. Augustine raises medical issues to ask why the soul that operates the
body does not know what it does or how it does it. If the operations of the body are
unknown, he reasons that it should not be surprising if the origin of the soul, whether
from divine inbreathing or Adamic descent, is unknown.27
Knowledge of bodily operations, Augustine continues, belongs to the anatomical
or empirical art of medicine, which few acquire. Many strive to learn it but cannot
because they are slow to learn from others what they do with themselves. “But this is
an ultimate question,” he poses, “why is it necessary for me to know by art whence I
begin when I wiggle a finger, whether from the heart or from the brain, whether from

25 Edgardo de la Peza, El significado de “cor" en san Augustin (Paris 1962) 87-88. See also Anton
Maxsein, “Philosophia cordis": Das Wesen der Personalität bei Augustinus (Salzburg 1966); Shinro Kato,
“Cor, praecordia, viscera: Remarques sur quelques expressions psychosomatiques des Confessions
d’Augustin,” Saint Augustin, ed. Patric Ranson (n. p. 1988) 321-322; Margaret Ruth Miles, Augustine on
the Body (Missoula 1979); Jean Courtès, “Saint Augustin et la médecine,” Augustinus Magister (n. 2 above)
1.43-51; Gustave Bardy, “Saint Augustin et les médecins,” L ’année theologique augustiniana 13 (1953)
327-346; Rudolph Arbesmann, “Christ, the medicus humilis,” Augustinus Magister (n. 2 above) 2.623-629;
Jean-Paul Rassinier, “Le vocabulaire médical de saint Augustin: Approche quantitative et qualitative,” Le
latin médical: La constitution d ’un langage scientifique, ed. Guy Sabbah (Saint-Étienne 1991) 379-395;
idem, “Miracles et pathologie dans l’oeuvre de saint Augustin,” Le corps et ses énigmes au Moyen Age, ed.
Bernard Ribémont (Caen 1993) 133-155.
26 See Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “The Law of the Heart: The Death of a Fool (1 Samuel 25)” Journal o f
Biblical Literature 120 (2001) 401^27; “In the Heart of the Sea: Fathoming the Exodus,” Journal o f Near
Eastern Studies 63 (2004) 17-27; “Broken Hearts: The Violation of Biblical Law,” Journal o f the American
Academy o f Religion 73 (2005) 731-757.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 25

both, whether from neither? Why must I necessarily expect some other person to teach
me whence I do what I do with me?” Although humans think in the heart, and what
they think no one else knows, yet they do not know in what part of the body they think
unless they learn it from a doctor, who does not know what they are thinking.
Augustine does not crudely assume that the command to love God “from the whole
heart” refers to the bit of flesh beneath the ribs. “But the power that thinks is deserv­
ingly called by this name [“heart”], because motion is ceaseless in the heart, whence
the pulse of the veins diffuses itself, so that we do not rest from thinking and mulling
over.” Yet, although we can count our fingers with our eyes shut, “our innermost soul
that vivifies and animates it we do not know—neither do physicians know it, not em­
piricists, or anatomists, or dogmatists, or methodists.”2728
The history of medicine has been compared to the stage in Augustine’s meditation
at Ostia that considered the celestial orbs suspended above the city. “The historical
record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constella­
tions. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.”29 Cardiology was not a bright
constellation. Not until William Harvey’s De motu cordis et sanguinis in 1628 was the
heart’s function published as the circulation of the blood. By its muscular contraction
and dilation the heart pumps blood from the arteries to the veins in a continuous bod­
ily circuit. Contraction causes the heartbeat, which is sensible in the arterial pulse.
This physiology exploded conjectures since antiquity by establishing the empirical
foundation for medical science.30 The heartbeat was an ancient sensation, associated
since Egyptian physicians with the arterial pulse. But explanations varied unscientifi­
cally: from the penetration of the heart by cold phlegm that coated the veins so they
leaped up, to the vaporization of digested food that swelled against the heart’s walls.
Ignorance was principally owed to lack of physiological knowledge from human dis­
section because of taboo of violating bodies, even corpses.31
Augustine recoiled conventionally at the rare report of vivisection as cruel and in­
humane. But he also conceded it a method toward baring hidden facts to ascertain the
nature of the body and how to cure disease.32 Augustine’s medical knowledge was
basic, if Latinate. He knew the principal texts, which were not by physicians but ency­
clopedists exemplifying Roman self-reliance, Pliny’s Historia naturalis and Celsus’s
De medicina. Other sources were philosophical treatises, especially Cicero’s, that dis­
cussed medicine. Christian apologists frequently compared ecclesiastical troubles,

27 Augustine, Confessiones 4.13.20, 6.3.3, 10.3.4; De anima et eius origine 4.5.6. See also its statement
that the coursing veins supply the entire body, its questions about how many kinds of veins there are, and
the use of the veins not for blood but air called “arteries.”
28 De anima et eius origine 4.6.7. Cf. Confessiones 3.8.15, 12.25.35. Deut. 6.5; Matt. 22.37-38// (and
parallel texts). For the heartbeat and venous pulsation, cf. Aristotle, De respiratione 480a; for the medical
schools, Celsus, De medicina prooem.
29 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History o f Humanity from Antiquity to the
Present (New York 1997) 13.
30 William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628; facsimile
repr. Birmingham, AL 1978) 1-72.
31 André Cournard, “Air and Blood,” Circulation o f the Blood: Men and Ideas, ed. Alfred P. Fishman
and Dickinson W. Richards (New York 1964) 8; Harris, Heart and Vascular System (n. 17 above) 42-43,
136, 163-165, 184, 185, 226, 317, viii.
32 Augustine, De anima et eius origine 4.2.3; De civitate Dei 22.14.
26 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

from misbehavior to heresy, to physical illnesses and they prescribed remedies for
pastoral application as if they were physicians.33 The only certain guide to Augustine’s
medical knowledge is his language and argumentation, the grammar and rhetoric he
practiced professionally. His literature does not trumpet his cardiology. His masterful
style conceals the labor of his art, so that his knowledge is only discernible by a close
reading of his texts.
Augustine’s Confessions graphically depicts his exterior physique as a manifesta­
tion of his interior turpitude. God wrests him from hiding behind his own back “to my
face, so that I might see how ugly I am, how deformed and dirty.” In the meditation at
Ostia he probes his insides. Augustine’s sodden heart has accumulated the fluids of
concupiscence: his infantile wails for breast milk, his puerile tears over dead Dido and
under the rod, his pubescent bubbling semen—all fluids, sucking him into a passionate
whirlpool and flushing him onto the turbulent sea of alienation from God, the abyss.
Then, the good and merciful Lord, “regarding the profundity of my death, with thy
right hand drained (exhauriens) from the bottom of my heart an abyss of corruption.”
This divine drainage was like a feat of civil engineering, the Roman genius, for ex­
haurire means the mechanical drawing and emptying out of fluids from ditches and
sewers. Notably it denotes the pumping out of bilge-water from ships. The symbolism
accords with Augustine’s motif of voyage and it signifies his heart as the vessel for the
journey. Later in life Augustine will disclose the heart itself as a deep abyss with
waves breaking over it, so that only by clinging to the plank of Christ’s cross can he
traverse its sea.34 But for now he is confident that his watertight heart can carry him
heavenward.
From the base of Augustine’s heart divine providence drains “corruption,” not usu­
ally a medical term, although fluids could be drained surgically from the body.35
Corruption was usually moral spoilage, such as bribery. Augustine implicates his rhe­
torical employment as “vendor of verbs” for collusion in civic immorality, for corrup­
tio also means the dregs of society. Only his closest friends share his secret in a com­
mon heartfelt experience. “Thou had pierced our heart with the arrow of thy charity,
and we carried thy words transfixed in our innards.” Stories of Christians converted
from death to life collected in the bosom of their thought where they “scorched and
consumed our severe torpor (urebant et absumebant gravem torporem).” This gravis
torpor is numbness, a deprivation or deficiency of sensation or movement. It denotes
medically their extreme coldness. Their burning (urere) is a term for cauterization: the
traditional draining instrument was a heated iron. Augustine writes how Christian ex­
emplars “kindled us from above strongly (valide) on fire, so that every gust from a
cunning tongue of contradiction could not extinguish it but only inflame it more

33 For Christian apologetics, see Bernard Lançon, “Magna theriaca: La médecine dans la pensée des let-
très chrétiens de l’Antiquité tardive (Ive-Vie siècles)” Tradición e innovación de la medicina latina de la
Antigüedad y de la alta Edad Media, ed. Manuel Enrique Vazquez Bujan (Santiago de Compostela 1994)
331-341.
34 Augustine, Confessiones 8.7.16, 1.6.7-8, 1.13.21, 2.2.2, cf. 8.6.15, 9.1.1; Enarrationes in psalmos
(CCSL 38-40) 41.13-16; cf. Confessiones 1.16.25.
35 Celsus, De medicina 7.2.1. For medical terms as political metaphors, see Rodolfo Funari,
“L’immagine della tabes come metafora di corruzione nel linguaggio morale di Sallustio e della prosa
latina,” Athenaeum 85 (1997) 208, 210. Cf. tabes in Augustine, Confessiones 3.2.4.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 27

keenly.” This superior kindling was validus, meaning good sound health and strong
efficacious medicine.36 The providential resuscitation of Augustine’s heart by desicca­
tion and inflammation prefigures the resurrection of the body in eternity that will ab­
sorb him with Monica in the meditation at Ostia. The divine drainage of Augustine’s
heart dries it out so that it might be lit among the saints for its proper physiological
function: to burn.
The burning heart was the medical commonplace: hearts burned, or died. The error
was popularized by the Hippocratic De corde and it persisted like a light in a gourd
with Galen, the most eminent physician of the Roman Empire. From the evidence of
tactile sensation, corpses were cold. They were believed devoid of the innate vital heat
contained in the heart, which sustained the body. Aristotle ventured cardiac compari­
sons to flame with a systematic philosophical importance. The heart was like a hearth
that possessed the “kindling fire” of an organism. As the common organ of sensation,
to which disparate sensations traveled through the connate pneuma, or warm air piping
through the body’s arteries and veins, the heart unified them and set aglow the sensi­
tive and nutritive soul. All of the soul’s functions, except nous, depended on the heart.
Aristotle literally “focused” the operations of the heart’s innate vital heat for the gen­
eration, organization, and function of living substances.37 Augustine thus implies that,
before the divine drainage of corruption from the hold of his heart, he was virtually
dead. He was not medically dead, however, because, as Galen explained, “if a heart is
comparatively cold by nature, its mixture will still be hotter than that of the hottest
brain.” Cardiac heat significantly determined “the volume of breath, the speed and
frequency of the pulse.” Cold hearts had smaller pulses, with moral consequences.
“With a cold and moist heart the pulses are soft, and the character timid and fearful,
lacking in courage.”38
Pulse lore is the medical subject essential to Augustine’s stroking eternity “with a
whole heartbeat.” Although arterial pulsation was early observed, it lacked classical
theory and clinical practice. Traditionally the pulse was not normal but pathological.
Galen canonized this belief for Roman medicine by relating pulsation only to un­
healthy parts. The pulse refreshed the heart’s innate heat and nourished the psychic
pneuma and it distributed these by the arteries throughout the body. Galen identified
four types of pulse—by size, speed, strength, and rhythm—caused by the active dis­
tention and passive contraction of the heart and arteries. This error reversed the physi­

36 Augustine, Confessiones 9.2-3, the source for the iconography of his pierced heart. For an early
example, see the base of the crucifix by Guarantino (d. 1338), Padua, Chiesa degli eremitani, in Jeanne
Courcelle and Pierre Courcelle, Iconographie de saint Augustin, 4 vols. (Paris 1965-1980) pl. XLVI5, 1.51;
Celsus, De medicina 2.8.37-39. For the humoral diagnosis of coldness, see Galen, Ars medendi 8; ed. Kuhn,
1.329. For cauterization, see Ralph Jackson, Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (London 1988) 23;
cf. Augustine on healing with glowing coals, Confessiones 6.7.12.
37 Harris, Heart and Vascular System (n. 17 above) 14; Armelle Debru, Le corps respirant: La pensée
physiologique chez Galien (Leiden 1996) 139-144, 143-144; Gad Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory o f Mate­
rial Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul (Oxford 1995) 19-35, 130-134, 182. For the heart as the
coordinating center or principle of the soul’s powers, see also Philip J. van der Eijk, “Aristotle’s Psycho­
physiological Account of the Soul-Body Relationship,” Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians
on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Englightenment, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter (Oxford
2000)68-69.
38 Galen, Ars medendi 11, 10; ed. Kuhn, 1.336, 333; Galen: Selected Works, trans. P. N. Singer (Oxford
1997) 359, 358.
28 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

ology because, as Harvey would correct it, active contraction causes pulsation. Galen
did further the subject by recommending that the physician “train both his intellectual
faculties and his sense of touch, in order that he may be able to recognize pulses in
practice, not just to distinguish them in theory.” His introductory treatise detailed
types of pulse as varying with emotions and affected by pain. But it was another phy­
sician’s popular theory, which Galen reported,39 that Augustine adapted to pulse eter­
nity with his own heartbeat.
Herophilus, an Alexandrian physician who under Ptolemaic patronage dissected
and probably vivisected humans, correctly derived arterial pulsation from the heart.
Although he did not anticipate Harvey’s discovery of the heart as the circulatory or­
gan, he was the first to realize the clinical significance of the pulse for diagnosis and
prognosis. Herophilus differentiated and classified pulses with a science well in ad­
vance of classical medicine. He analyzed the patterns of arterial pulsation as temporal
rhythms analogous to musical and metrical rhythms. Rhythm was “a motion which has
a defined regulation in time.” Herophilus compared the reversed medical dilation
(systole) and contraction (diastole) of arterial pulsation with the temporal length of
notes in their musical upbeat (arsis) and downbeat (thesis). The analogy may be in­
debted to the primary source for ancient Greek music, perhaps a reproduction of Py­
thagoras’s lost teaching, Aristoxenus’s theory of metrical feet as short and long sylla­
bles.40 Melody required rhythm, with a notational system, not as a simple succession
of notes but as a regular arrangement with repetition. Marching and dancing to music
required upbeat and downbeat as signals for raising and lowering the feet and hands.
As one theorist elucidated, “What do we mean by ‘arsis’? When our foot is in the air,
when we are about to take a step. And by ‘thesis’? When it is on the ground.”41 As the
grammarian Victorinus explained, “Arsis and thesis, as the Greeks say, that is sublatio
and positio, signify the movement of the foot.” Pliny testified to the Roman practice of
“foot-beats of persons keeping time with the chanting of a choral song.”42 In verse
familiar to Augustine from school Vergil’s Aeneas observes some of the blessed souls
in the underworld “beat the choral dances with their feet (pedibus plaudunt cho­
reas).”43 The Greek terms survive in modern musicology, transferred from the move­
ment of the limbs to the conductor’s baton.
Herophilus applied the concept of rhythm as perceptible temporal units to the clas­
sification of pulses. He identified four types of pulse, corresponding to the grammati-394012

39 Galen, De pulsibus ad tirones 12, ed. Kuhn, 8.473-492; trans. Singer 337. Debru, Corps respirant (n.
37 above) 127; Leonard G. Wilson, “Eristratus, Galen, and the pneuma,” Bulletin o f the History o f Medicine
33 (1959) 305; Harris, Heart and Vascular System (n. 17 above) 185-186, 189-190. For Galen on Hero­
philus on the pulse, see Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art o f Medicine in Early Alexandria: Edition,
Translation, and Essays (Cambridge 1989) 322-359.
40 James Longrigg, “Anatomy in Alexandria in the Third Century B.C.,” The British Journal for the His­
tory o f Science 21 (1988) 469-470; von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 276-279; Harris, Heart and Vas­
cular System (n. 17 above) 187-189.
41 Lionel Pearson, ed., Aristoxenus, Elementa rhythmica: The Fragment o f Book II and the Additional
Evidence for Aristoxenean Rhythmic Theory (Oxford 1990) xxvii-xxviii, xxii-xxiv, xxix; citing Baccheius,
Isagogue 98. Augustine knew of Aristoxenus as a musician and philosopher from Cicero, Tusculanae dis­
putationes 1.10.20; and he knew the Christian apologetic against his disbelief in the existence of the soul
from Lactantius, De opificio Dei 16.
42 Marius Victorinus, Ars grammatica 1, ed. Keil 40. Pliny, Historia naturalis 2.96.209; trans. 2.341.
43 Virgil, Aeneid 6.644.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 29

cal metric system: pyrrhic, trochee, spondee, and iamb. The standard was the minimal
perceptible temporal beat, in which expansion and contraction were equal. That
matched an infant’s arterial pulsation. From this basis he determined four stages of
development, or ages, in the equal or unequal lengths of arterial expansion and con­
traction. As the body aged toward full growth, it experienced an increase in the ratio in
its pulse. Its dilation became proportionately more extended than its contraction. Thus,
infancy was metrically pyrrhic (u u ), youth trochaic (—u), the prime of life spondaic
(-------), and old age iambic (u —). Herophilus was renowned for taking the pulse of
his patients with a clepsydra, or portable water clock, which he calibrated to their
physical ages. He calculated the frequency of beats and the quantification of intervals
between them. Four primary differences were recorded: in size, speed, strength, and
rhythm 44
Herophilus’s idea of how the arteries make music became the model for pulse lore.
Although his cardiovascular writings are not extant, his theory was publicized in a
variety of sources and it extensively influenced classical and medieval writing on both
medicine and music.45 When Abraham Cowley poetized William Harvey’s medical
discovery, he still wrote how “the untaught Heart began to beat/The tunefull March to
vital Heat.”46 Modern musicology, up-to-date online, maintains Herophilus’s
identification of musical beat with medical pulsation. A musical beat is defined as “the
basic pulse underlying mensural music, that is, the temporal unit of a composition.”47
Pliny’s Historia naturalis reported on “Herophilus, who divided pulsation into rhyth­
mic feet for the various periods (gradus) of life.” Pliny praised his science of the arte­
rial pulse. “With remarkable scientific skill it has been reduced by that high priest of
medicine, Herophilus, to definite rhythms and metrical rules throughout the periods of
life—steady, or hurried or slow.” Alluding to the neglected relation of arterial pulsa­
tion to the heartbeat in the Hippocratic tradition, Pliny championed Herophilus’s dis­
covery. “This sign has been neglected because of its excessive subtlety, but yet really
it supplies a rule for the guidance of life by observation of the pulse-beat (ictus), rapid
or languid.”48
This ictus informs Augustine’s method to eternity as he imitates Pliny’s phrase ictu
pulsus with ictu cordis. In his Confessions he augments the agents of his personal ac­
tion with the adjective totus. The exact parallels in the ablative case are toto animo,
“with a whole mind,” and toto affectu, “with total affection.” Examples of full agency
in the nominative case are tota voluntas, “complete will,” and tota spes, “full hope.”
The inspiration for this augmented agency is the biblical verse Augustine has already
cited and will again cite. This is the perfect law: “‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God

44 von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 276-279, 281; Harris, Heart and Vascular System (n. 17 above)
187-189; von Staden, Herophilus 282-283, 286. For clepsydra, see Augustine, Confe;ssiones 11.2.2.
45 von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 288, 279. For the texts on vascular physiology, see 322-365.
Note that systole and diastole were reversed historically before Harvey.
46 Abraham Cowley, “Ode upon Dr. Harvey,” cited in Geoffrey Keynes, The Life o f William Harvey
(Oxford 1966) 428.
47 “Beat,” The New Grove Dictionary o f Music Online, L. Macy, ed. (accessed 28/06/2006)
<http//www.grovemusic.com>. Italics mine.
48 Pliny, Historia naturalis 29.4.5, 11.89.219; trans. 8.185; 3.571. See also von Staden, Herophilus (n.
39 above) 87-88.
30 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

with the whole heart, with the whole soul, with the whole mind (ex toto corde ex tota
anima ex tota mente).” (Deut. 6.5; Matt. 22.37).49
From Tertullian’s apologetics Augustine knew that Herophilus was not a cardio-
centrist, for he located the soul at the base of the brain.50 Yet, another informant for
Herophilus’s concept of pulsation was probably Augustine’s friendly advisor the phy­
sician Vindicianus. His Confessions calls him “a sharp old man, exceptionally skilled
and renowned in the art of medicine.” They met in Carthage, when as proconsul Vin-
dicianus crowned him winner of a poetry contest. It is plausible that Augustine’s po­
etic recital led the rhetor and the physician to a discussion of the popular comparison
of metrical beats with medical pulses. Augustine writes how he became “quite
friendly” with Vindicianus, attracted by his unaffected conversation and the liveliness
of his weighty and agreeable judgments. Augustine admits his rejection of Vindi-
cianus’s “kind and fatherly” advice, from personal experience, about abandoning the
vanity and deceit of astrology for the value and truth of medicine. Only Christ,
Augustine confesses, could cure his sick proud head of its chancy stargazing. Never­
theless, Augustine hung on Vindicianus’s every word, “constant and fixed” on his
conversation, and he quotes his advice from memory. Augustine became sufficiently
knowledgeable about his medical practice as “a great physician of our times” to phi­
losophize from it. Vindicianus’s change of prescriptions for the same patient at differ­
ent ages is Augustine’s model for the validity of accommodating what is right to
changing circumstances.51 Vindicianus wrote Epitome, which is Augustine’s source
for the cardiac “ears”; Epistula ad Pentadium, which abbreviated humoral theory and
applied it to the pulse; Gynaecia; and attributed to him is De natura generis humani52
He reported Herophilus on the diagnostic dissection of human cadavers and on the
origin of semen in blood, subjects Augustine repeated.53
Augustine’s confidence in pulsation as a method to the knowledge of God contra­
dicts the classical tradition of the pulse as abnormal, pathological. As Pliny stated the

49 Augustine, Confessiones 7.3.4, 12.11.12, 8.10.24, 10.29.40, 3.8.15, 12.25.35.

50 Tertullian, De anima 5.4, cf. 10.4, 25.5. See also Heinrich von Staden, “Body, Soul, and Nerves:
Epicurus, Herophilus, Eristratus, the Stoics, and Galen,” Psyche and Soma (n. 37 above) 87-88.
51 Augustine, Confessiones 4.2.3, 4.3.4, 4.3.6, 7.6.8; Epistulae 138.3. For distinguished medical histori­
ans who accept Vindicianus as Augustine’s “friend,” see Vivian Nutton, “Un homme perdu et un objet
rétrouve chez Vindicianus,” Latin médical (n. 25 above) 153-154; von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above)
571. For physicians as friends, see Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and the Making o f Roman Women: Gen­
der, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford 2000) 67-68.
52 Vindicianus, Opera, in Priscianus “Euporiston”: Accedunt Vindiciani Afri quae feruntur reliquiae,
ed. Valentin Rose (Leipzig 1894) 426-492; “De natura generis humani,” ed. Manuel E. Vazquez, “Vindi-
ciano y el tratado De natura generis humani,” Dynamis: Acta hispanica ad medicinae scientiarumque his­
toriam illustrandam 2 (1982) 25-56. Gynaecia would suggest that Vindicianus is the more plausible source
for Augustine’s anecdote about conception than the contention of Courcelle, Later Latin Writers (n. 2
above) 195-196, that Augustine read Soranus in the Greek. For Vindicianus’s Liber opthalmicus, see von
Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 571. For excerpts of Vindicianus’s work in other medical texts, see Klaus­
Dietrich Fischer, “Kidney Trouble in Vindicianus,” “Vir bonus discendi peritus”: Studies in Celebration o f
Otto Skutsch ’s Eightieth Birthday, ed. Nicholas Horsfall (London 1988) 24-26. For recent study of Vindi-
cianus’s medicine, see Louise Cilliers, “Vindicianus’ Gynaecia and Theories on Generation and Embryol­
ogy from the Babylonians up to Graeco-Roman Times,” Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and
Graeco-Roman Medicine, ed. H. G. J. Horstmanshoff and M. Stol with C. R. van Tilburg (Leiden 2004)
343-368.
53 von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 143, 167, 292-295, 302. Augustine, De anima et eius origine
4.2.3, 4.5.6; De civitate Dei 22.14.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 31

common belief, “The pulse of the arteries being particularly evident at the extremity of
the limbs is usually a sign of diseases.”54 Augustine considered health the supreme
quiet of the body and like the Sabbath rest. The resurrection of the body would restore
it to its pristine stability in its own certain time and order. Reflecting on resurrection,
he thought that the body’s beauty would be more apparent if the rhythms of the meas­
ures interconnecting its parts were known. While the bodily surface could be investi­
gated, its hidden depths, the tangle of veins and nerves and the secrets of the vital or­
gans, were remote from observation, so that not even anatomists could discover them.
The rhythms called harmonia, which accord the outer and inner organs, lay beyond
discovery, beyond even daring to seek them. Yet, if they were known, the beauty of
the bodily design, even of the ugly entrails, would delight.55 This harmony is the hy­
pothesis of his meditation at Ostia: the concept that medical pulsation coincides with
musical and metrical measures, so that his heart can beat to the eternal Word through
which all temporal bodies were created.
Augustine’s Confessions “pulses” (pulso) with beats that pulsate the sense of hear­
ing to touch the thoughtful mind to motivate it. Roman education in “heartless doc­
trines” is “a hellish river that pulses on its stony bed, resounding” with the boasts of
grammar and rhetoric. The carnal concupiscence it taught through obscene literature
pulses a groaning Augustine, who in hindsight admits that God would have granted
him continence if with an inner groan he had pulsed His ears. By pulsing Augustine
proposes questions of belief. This is pulsation in the sense of knocking on doors pul­
sare ostia. Quintilian wrote of students of rhetoric knocking from door to door (pul­
sanda ostiatim) to discover whether certain “places,” or topics, met the requirements
for demonstrating an argument. Augustine’s knocks are rhetorical signs about pulsare
Ostia, which meditation progresses from bodily to unbodily rhythms to beat to the
creative Word. Augustine counsels against hesitation to pulse/knock for the full truth
to be disclosed. He begs God through his Word not to shut the hidden realities against
those who pulse/knock, for he seeks the interior of God’s speech to open to him puls-
ing/knocking. It is the Lord himself who arouses him to pulse/knock and who opens to
him when he pulses/knocks. In a stunning innovation to the traditional names of God,
Augustine declares him a “pulser,” “the pulser of my ears, the enlightener of my
heart.” Amid daily preoccupations, his poor heart “pulses to the words of Thy holy
scriptures.” Beyond its words is the Word through whom God created everything by
speaking wonderfully. This manifest wisdom pulses Augustine’s heart. It beats his
heart with its word but without wounding it. Augustine’s Confessions concludes on
this very beat: “From Thee it must be begged, in Thee it must be sought, to Thee it
must be pulsed; thus, thus, it will be received, thus discovered, thus opened.”56
Herophilus’s medical rhythm applied to one contiguous pulsation of contraction

54 Pliny, Historia naturalis 11.89.219; trans. 3.571.

55 Augustine, De musica 6.14.45, 6.5.13-14; De civitate Dei 22.14. Cf. Aristoxenus on harmonia in
Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 7.13.
56 Augustine, Confessiones 8.8.19, 1.16.26, 11.3.5, 10.34.51, cf. 6.8.14, 6.11.20, 6.4.5, 6.11.18, 11.2.3­
4, 12.12.15, 10.31.46, 12.1.1, 11.9.11, 10.6.8, 11.9.11, 13.38.53; cf. Matt. 7.7-8 (Vulg.); Quintilian, Institu­
tio oratoria 5.10.122. See also Cicero, De divinatione 2.67.137; Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae 9.13.1.
32 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

and dilation without pause, not to the pattern of successive beats.57 What Herophilus
miscalls “rhythm” (rythmos) is classically meter (metron). Augustine thought that the
heart beat and the veins pulsed involuntarily and continually. For that rhythm, he
would apply his superior grammatical knowledge. As he instructed, the single foot is
the basic unit of meter, which is then composed sequentially into rhythm.58 The classi­
cal Latin verse Augustine formally studied and professionally taught derived from the
quantitative meters of Greek verse that Herophilus adapted for pulse lore. This metri-
fication determined the long and short syllables of verse not by spoken accent but by
an arbitrary system. The system artificially assigned metrical values to the combina­
tions of vowels and consonants in words. All diphthongs were long by nature, while
single vowels could be long or short. Position could alter the quantity of short vowels,
when immediately followed by two or more consonants—with exceptions, in which a
vowel could remain short if the two consonants combined a mute and a liquid sound.
Also, there was the law by which certain long syllables were shortened, in comedy for
example. More rules governed elision and hiatus. Since, by its quantitatively long
syllables and its strong word accents, Latin differed linguistically from Greek, the
system was only adopted in Roman culture with difficulty. Word-accent persisted and,
with the waning of the classical period, it replaced quantity as the rhythmic base. In
Latin accentual scansion an accented syllable was “long,” an unaccented syllable,
“short.” Of the classical meters, only the iambic (u —) and even more so the trochaic
(—u ) were readily adaptable to accentual scansion.59 Augustine transfers Herophi-
lus’s pulsation from classical Greek quantitative meter to late Roman accentual meter,
or word-stress. The trochee is exemplary, the very beat that Augustine and Monica tap
at the climax of their meditation.
Although Augustine’s Confessions is not verse but prose, in classical Latin it had
been fashionable to ape Ciceronian quantitative verse meter in the endings of prose
sentences. By Augustine’s era the affectation had much declined, although his con­
temporaries Ambrose and Jerome occasionally combined quantitative meter with word
accent. There is no trace of this fashion in his Confessions. Its absence has been attrib­
uted to an imitation of scriptural style, which, even in Latin translation, lacked classi­
cal prose rhythms.60 But Augustine’s omission of quantitative meter reflects its decline
in common usage and his personal loathing of its artificial techniques. In grammar
school the metrical beats were literally beaten into his flesh—vapulabam ... vapula­
bam, “whap, whap”—and he howls in his Confessions at the memory of the fear, pain,
and shame he suffered under his teachers’ rulers. He complains that mispronunciation
against the rules of grammar was judged worse than a sin. He blames metrical intri­
cacy as “the technique by which I grayed.” As a grammarian, it became his sorry task
to teach it to new boys in the daunting terminology of the ancient metricians. As he
owns, “The knowledge of long and short syllables belongs to grammar” and is set in

57 Harris, Heart and Vascular System (n. 17 above) 189; von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 276-277.
58 Augustine, De anima et eius origine 4.5.6; De musica 3.1.2, 3.2.4.
59 D. S. Raven, Latin Metre: An Introduction (London 1965) 17, 22-28, 31-32, 36, 38-39, 42.
60 Steven M. Oberhelman, Rhetoric and Homiletics in Fourth-Century Christian Latin: Prose Rhythm,
Oratorical Style, and Preaching in the Works of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine (Atlanta 1991) 5, 8, 90,
117-118.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 33

authority. His examples are the difference between placing the acute accent in pone
the verb and pone the adverb, or a syllable made by position: two consonants t and n
making the preceding vowel long. Augustine rues his observance of the conventional
agreement of letters and syllables while neglecting the eternal covenant of everlasting
salvation.61
Augustine’s De grammatica, part of a projected encyclopedia, is lost; but its De
musica displays his erudition of musical rhythm parallel to grammatical quantity. This
neglected dialogue treated long before his Confessions the definition of music; metric
syllables and feet; rhythm, meter, and verse; and most importantly the advancement to
God by rhythm (numerus). It established his conviction that rhythm could be argued
from its meters to infinity. As an orator, Augustine was attuned to music, whose
rhythm was believed manifest most powerfully in eloquence. The difference between
musical and grammatical rhythms, he explained, is that in quantitative grammatical
meter syllables are long or short by ancient custom, thus subject to alteration. Musical
rhythms, however, are unchangeable and eternal and equal. Augustine’s objective in
De musica was contemplation, in the Pythagorean tradition. He determined “how from
the bodily and spiritual but changeable facts of rhythms to arrive at unchangeable
rhythms, which presently are in themselves unchangeable in truth; and thus to the in­
visible things of God, through those things that are made, so that intellectual truths
may be perceived.” This intention previewed the meditation at Ostia to attain the un­
bodily from the bodily.62 In his Confessions he will reason by the accentual meter of
toto ictu cordis from time to eternity.
After tarrying academically with the rhythms of temporal durations, Augustine de­
sired to snatch those readers divinely endowed with good wit away from the carnal
reasoning of grammar to God. Of necessity, he wrote, he had so far traveled in the
company of grammarians and poets. With wings nurtured in the nest of Christian faith,
he now aspired to fly above them, to escape the toil and dust of childish, grammatical
paths toward the fatherland. This meditative flight from number to infinity incorpo­
rated the sense of ictus as the “stroke” of a bird’s wing, which in natural history
“beats” or “pulses” (pulset ictu). In De musica he aspired to be a bird, as he flapped
his arms to beat out meters into rhythms that would transport him from those numbers
to infinity. Escaping the nets of triviality, avian Augustine soared “from the bodily to
the unbodily” to pronounce Deus creator omnium. This opening phrase of Ambrose’s
vesper hymn in its sung verse involved all rhythms, he explained. Through its sound it

61 Augustine, Confessiones 1.9.14-15, 1.12.19, 1.14.23, 1.17.27, 1.19.30, 1.18.29, 3.7.14; Augustine, De
musica 3.3.5, 4.2.3; Confessiones 1.18.29.
62 Augustine, Retractationes (CCSL 57) 1.11. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 4.4.13. Augustine, De
musica 3.3.5, 6.12.34, 6.12.36. For rhythm as numerus, see also Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 4.4.45. For
the Pythagorean tradition, see Augustine’s contemporary Aristides Quintilianus, De musica 2.2, 3.24-25,
ed. R. P. Winnington-Ingram (Leipzig 1963); trans. Thomas J. Mathiesen, On Music: In Three Books (New
Haven 1985) 56-57. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 1.3.1, for musicians as nervously excited by sounds to appreciate
beauty but unable to attain absolute beauty except by philosophical abstraction from sound; see also 1.6.1, 3.
Augustine, Retractationes 1.11. The study of De musica that purports to coordinate it with his other writings
ignores the meditation at Ostia. Adalbert Keller, Aurelius Augustinus und die Musik: Untersuchungen zu
“De musica” im Kontext seines Schriftums (Würzburg 1993).
34 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

was attractive to the ears, through its truth to the soul.63

Augustine relates in his Confessions how hymns entered his ears and penetrated his
heart to burn there. He repeatedly quotes from Deus creator omnium, with its promise
of limbs relaxed from labor. As he teaches the hymn metrically, “This verse of eight
syllables alternates between short and long syllables: therefore, the four brief ones—
first, third, fifth, and seventh—are simple with regard to the four long ones—second,
fourth, sixth, eighth. These separate syllables have double the time with regard to
those separate syllables. I pronounce them and I announce them, and it is so, insofar as
it is sensed by manifest sense.” Augustine ponders how he sensibly measures a long
syllable as twice the length of a short one. How can this be, since the sound of the first
syllable disappears once the second syllable is emitted? And can the present long one
be measured before it ends, since its ending is the absence of sound?64
The meditation at Ostia reasons from such soundings by coordinating the temporal
beats of meter, music, and medicine to tap eternity. Beyond an apprehension of the
rhythms the soul receives directly from the body, it taps those rhythms the supreme
God imprints directly on the body. “Even the body is a creature of God,” Augustine
avers in De musica, and its rhythms are “by the fabrication of divine providence, since
they are in their kind beautiful.” As temporal, they are beautiful but not beatifying,
however; so that, in his typical distinction between use and enjoyment, they should not
be embraced but used well. Augustine enjoins his readers not to love such carnal
pleasures, which touch the body externally, but rather to secure their joy by possessing
God within, where everything loved is certain and unchangeable. In time humans acti­
vate temporal rhythms in bodily movements like walking and singing; in eternity hu­
mans will more keenly perceive these rhythms undisturbed.65
Roman readers of Augustine’s Confessions would not have missed the beat on how
he touched eternity toto ictu cordis. Whether they scanned it silently or spoke it aloud,
they would have sensed a heartbeat in its rhythm. Their cue to listen to this extraordi­
nary and emphatic phrase metrically is the word ictus itself, the technical term for a
metrical “beat.” Augustine deliberately employs a rhetorical device, onomatopoeia, to
signify his meaning—“heartbeat”—by mimicking the rhythmic sound of a beating
heart. This onomatopoeia is unusually metrical, rather than phonic. Like the other
word-stresses of his prose, the phrase scans accentually, not quantitatively. According
to the rules of accentuation, in two-syllabic words the stress (long) falls on the first
syllable. Augustine’s method toto ictu cordis is a triple trochee (—u): stress-unstress,
stress-unstress, stress-unstress. He discusses trochaic, or choraic, meter in De musica
as feet joined in the ratio of one to two. “Beautiful things please by rhythm,” he ar­
gues, because they manifest equality. The special beauty of the trochee consists in its
equal division of its larger part by its smaller part into two parts of the same size.
Augustine illustrates the trochee significantly by twenty variations on veritas, “truth,”

63 Augustine, De musica 6.1.1, 6.2.2, 6.8.23, 6.17.57; Pliny, Historia naturalis 10.54.112; Augustine, De
musica 6.2.2, 6.9.23. See also Early Latin Hymns: With Introduction and Notes, ed. Arthur S. Walpole
(Cambridge 1922) 16-27, 46-49.
64 Augustine, Confessiones 9.6.14, 9.7.15-16, 9.12.32, 4.10.15, 10.34.52, 11.27.35; cf. 2.6.12, 5.5.9,
6.6.5.
65 Augustine, De musica 6.4.7, 6.14.46, 6.14.48, 6.24.49.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 35

such as Veritas vocatur ars Dei supremi, “Truth is called the art of the supreme God.”
Augustine declares trochaic meter “the best” of all meters. Thus, his appropriation of
the trochee to touch eternity is perfect. Augustine and Monica at Ostia consider eter­
nity precisely “in the present truth, which Thou art,” that is, with the exemplary
“truth” of a trochee.66 The trochaic stress-unstress of toto ictu cordis simultaneously
sounds the beat-rest of the heart in expansion and contraction. In Herophilus’s medi­
cal-musical-metrical scheme a trochaic heartbeat corresponded to the pulse of a youth,
Augustine’s age.67 If Augustine intended a personal allusion, he would have confessed
the immaturity of his achievement. His introductory word, modice, “slightly,” admits
this.
Augustine’s method toto ictu cordis has historically been misconstrued. The favor­
ite mistranslation is ecclesiastical, dating to the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement,
“with the whole effort of our heart.” Variants on this “effort” are “thrust,” “outreach-
ing,” “strength,” “force,” and “leap.” A related translation is “by a moment of total
concentration of the heart.” The revisory translation “with a full heartbeat” is echoed
in the newest version, “for the space of a whole heartbeat.” But a beat is a temporal,
not spatial, measurement; and the heart is its agent. An accurate translation would be
“with a full, or whole, heartbeat.”68 An ictus is primarily a “blow,” such as a gladiato­
rial jab. The metaphorical translations have softened or deflected the blow, as if
Augustine’s meditation were taking a stab at God. His Confessions does employ ictus
to describe how the divine physician “with a single slash (ictu) of his medical instru­
ment” lopped off Monica’s putrefaction.69 But Augustine’s diction for his method
from time to eternity is technical, a metrical beat or stress. As a grammarian and rheto­
rician, Augustine practiced ictus professionally. The term ictus as “stress” occurs in
Terentianus Afer’s handbooks, which he frequently consulted on meter. Marius Vic-
torinus, the translator of Plotinus but more relevantly the author of Ars grammatica,
defined the human voice by ictus. “The voice is air perceptible by the sound of a beat
(iictus).” Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria compared rhetorical attack and rebuttal to the
“blow” (ictus) of swordplay, fighting, and gladiatorial parry. Aphorisms and epigrams

66 Augustine, De musica 6.13.38, 6.26.56, 6.10.25, 4.5.6. For trochee, 2.8.15, 2.10.18, 2.14.26, 3.4.9,
3.6.14, 3.7.15, 3.8.18, 5.4.5. Confessiones 9.10.23. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.4.136, on preference
for the iamb for producing harshness because its beat (quasi pulsum) is more frequent and because it rises
with each foot, climbing and swelling from short to long. By implication, the trochee (choree), which drops
from long to short —u , is because of its less frequent beat suited for smoothness. Trochaic usage thus coin­
cides with Augustine’s confidence in the ease of reasoning smoothly from bodily beats to eternal rhythms.
67 Augustine, Confessiones 7.1.1. See Brent D. Shaw, “The Family in Late Antiquity: The Experience of
Augustine,” Past and Present 115 (1987) 3-51. As for Monica’s age, Roman medicine marginalized
women, whether well or ill, by likening them to dependent male children or vulnerable male aged. Heinrich
von Staden, “Apud nos foediora verba: Celsus’ Reluctant Construction of the Female Body,” Latin médical
(n. 25 above) 277-278.
68 The “Confessions” o f S. Augustin, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oxford 1876) 174. Copied by J. G. Pilkington
(Grand Rapids 1956) 137, and (New York, 1948) 141; F. J. Sheed (London 1944) 158; Albert C. Outler
(Philadelphia 1955) 193; Hal M. Helms (n.p. 1986) 178. Variants by Vernon J. Bourke (New York 1953)
252; E. M. Blaiklock (London 1983) 228; R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth 1961) 197; Tobie Matthew
and Roger Huddleston (London 1954) 250; Maria Boulding (New York 1977) 188 and (Hyde Park, NY
2000) 228; Henry Chadwick (Oxford 1992) 171. Revisions by Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Divine Domestic­
ity: From Augustine o f Thagaste to Teresa o f Avila (Leiden 1997) 55; The Confessions, trans. Philip Burton
(New York 2001) 204.
69 Augustine, Confessiones 9.9.18.
36 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

also delivered a “blow” (ictus).70 The association between ictus as a blow and a sound
was explicated in natural history by the reverberation of falling stars on clouds, by
thunder and lightning, and by the repercussion of an echo on bees.71 A blow (ictus)
sounded; thus ictus designated sounds. With this conflated impact of sound
Augustine’s Confessions tells of his shouting heart hitting his phantasms with a
blow.72
In prosody an ictus, also percussio, was a sounding “beat.” An intensity in the cu­
mulative rhythm of Latin verse marked the strong part by a vocal intensification or
demonstrated it with blow by the hand or foot.73 Quintilian’s manual, in distinguishing
rhythm from meter, explained ictus thus: “rhythm, where we measure time units both
mentally and by the beat (ictu) of foot or finger, mark the intervals by signs, and esti­
mate the number of shorts that the space will hold.” He also compared the study of
oratory with the medical power of taking the pulse, a talent a physician could not
communicate to pupils.74 But instruction in rhythm was prominent in Roman North
Africa,75 and Augustine learned in school the physical exercise of tapping out the
times. As his Confessions relates his practice, “I recited verse sing-song and I was not
allowed to place the foot (ponere pedem) wherever I liked, but some in one place in
the meter and some in another, hither and thither; and I was not allowed to place the
same foot in one verse differently in all places.”76 As a grammarian, he performed this
skill, teaching his own students to scan classical Latin literature for correct delivery.
Augustine compares syllables to understand the numerical relations of metrical feet
and he explains the complex but concordant sets of sounds as a “foot.” He considers
feet in their affinity and treats their composition, sequence, and versification.
Augustine invests confidence in them, “for nothing is more certain than numbers or
more ordered than the recollection and arrangement of feet.” By these musical feet
Augustine progresses numerically to infinity in De musica. Their grammatical coun­
terpart in metrical feet are the steps Augustine takes from time to eternity in the medi­
tation at Ostia. His Confessions relates how his physical feet were once ensnared in
traps of error and sin, and how he roped in others. He knew the convention of feet as a
measure of a person’s height and how bodily parts were congruent like a shoe fitting a
foot. But seeking deeper truth, “I fixed my feet on the step (gradus) on which as a boy
I was positioned by my parents.” From that church he learned that persons were cre­
ated in the divine image “from head to foot.” And he learned from its gospel about the70123456

70 Terentius Afer, De litteris and De metris, in Grammatici latini 6.328, 329, 332, 333, 366, 391. For
Augustine’s use, see Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics (n. 3 above) 474-476, 675. Marius Vic-
torinus, Ars grammatica 1, p. 4; cf. Plato, Timaeus 67b. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.1.20, 4.2.26,
5.13.54, 12.10.48.
71 Pliny, Historia naturalis 2.43.112, 2.55.142, 11.21.65.
72 Augustine, Confessiones 7.1.1.
73 Jesus Luque Moreno, Arsis, thesis, ictus: Las marcas del ritmo en la mùsica y en las métricas anti­
guas (Granada 1994) 52-59; Raven, Latin Metre (n. 59 above) 153.
74 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.4.51; The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cam­
bridge, MA 2001) 4.189. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 7.10.10.
75 Oberhelman, Rhetoric and Homiletics (n. 60 above) 7.
76 Augustine, De musica 4.1.1; Confessiones 3.7.14. For chanting in school, see Thomas Habinek, The
World o f Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order (Baltimore 2005) 79-82; Stanley F. Bonner,
Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1977)
166, 322.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 37

Word made flesh, abject before human “feet.” This truth exceeded the Platonist books,
which alluded to the Word but not to its enfleshment, he confessed. By faith, scripture
became a lamp to his “feet” so that he could follow the Lord with “well-sounding
feet.”77
Scripture’s psalms, which Augustine “burned to recite” and does so 696 times in
his Confessions, teach him the song of ascents, or “steps,” to God. “We ascend the
ascents in the heart and we sing the song of the steps. By your fire, by your good fire
we are kindled and we go.”78 As his homily explicates, “We do not seek ascents with
our bodily feet but as it is written in another psalm, ‘Ascents in his heart he disposed’
[Ps. 83.6, Vulg.] ... Where? That is: ‘in the heart.’” The divine destination is incom­
prehensible and ineffable. Since it cannot arise in the heart (1 Cor. 2.9), let the heart
rise to it, Augustine urges. The heart’s destination is the paradigmatic Logos of the
Johannine prologue, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1.1). Augustine reviews
the same consideration that prefaces his meditation with Monica at Ostia: that the
eternity of the saints has never arisen in the human heart. Before this moment the only
thought that arose in Augustine’s heart was a written plea that his friends beg God for
his relief from an excruciating toothache that has rendered him speechless. Its instant
cure by divine power foretells the restoration to bodily health the resurrected saints
will enjoy in eternity. Although he states that eternity cannot be reached by bodily
feet, he reasons that it can be reached by the extension of physical feet to metrical feet.
Augustine confesses the Word as the Way through whom everything created was
numbered: the things that are numbered, the persons who enumerate them, the sensa­
tion by which they discern what they number, and the mind by which they number.
Although this divine Wisdom is not number, for human salvation it became flesh and
at birth was enumerated in Caesar’s census. Augustine thus discovers, pace Plotinus,
that the way to the fatherland is indeed by the feet. These “feet” (pedes) are “numbers”
(numeri), the rhythms of grammar and music that lead to the Word who is coinciden­
tally the Way. This belief explains why Augustine and Monica at Ostia “walked
through step by step (perambulauimus gradatim)” the bodily realities from time to
eternity.79 The placement of their ascending feet in the heart associates metrical and
musical rhythms with medical pulsations. Augustine’s use of Herophilus’s idea is pat­
ent.
Augustine writes in De musica of measurement with audible beats or claps, which
he names in two parts levatio and positio, “since the hand is raised and lowered.”
These opposing motions divide the parts of the metrical foot, which Augustine scru­
pulously details in 568 types. Little wonder that he offers for the Bacchius meter------
u: Laborat magister docens tardos, “The master toils teaching the slow.” Augustine
commands, “Incline, therefore, your ear to the sound and keep your eyes on the tap­

77 Augustine, De musica 2.3.3, 3.7.16; Confessiones 4.6.11, 10.34.52, 11.26.33, 6.12.21, 4.16.28,
4.13.20, 6.11.18, 7.18.24, 7.9.13-14, 13.14.15, cf. 10.34.52, 11.26.33.
78 Augustine, Confessiones 9.4.8, 13.9.10.
79 Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos 119.1; Confessiones 9.4.12. Cf. the comparison of a throbbing ab­
scess, the probable cause of Augustine’s infection, with cardiac pulsation in Aristotle, De respiratione 479b.
For the remission of chronic toothache, see Aurelianus, Acutae passiones 2.4.76, ed. Bendz 1.590.
Augustine, Confessiones 5.3.5; cf. Luke 2.1; Confessiones 9.10.24.
38 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

ping, for the work of the tapping hand is not to be heard but seen. And pay sharp at­
tention to how much time lapses in raising it, how much in lowering it.” Timing mat­
ters. “Everything is measured by a part of time, something precedes, something fol­
lows, something begins, something ends.” The temporal percussion of meter is “not by
the voice but by the tap.”80
Augustine wonders whether sound exists without a listener striking the air by some
“bodily pulsation.” He reflects, “If you touch a sentient part of the body with a finger,
as often as you like that rhythm is felt by touch, and, while it senses, the sensor does
not lack it.” Augustine counts five types of rhythms by which body and soul cooper­
ate. The prevailing bodily rhythms are judicial, the operations that create walking with
equal steps, moving the jaws equally to eat and drink, scratching equally in rows with
the fingernails, and beating equally with intervals of blows. Augustine believes God
the author of all this convenience and concord. The grammarian’s tapping out of the
beats of meters and rhythms with his fingers and feet is a judicial rhythm of the body
that has its ultimate source in God. Thus, Augustine can name God his “pulser.”81
Metrical and musical tapping of the fingers and stepping with the feet coincided with
medical pulsation. In medicine an ictus was a sounding beat of the pulse, as in Pliny’s
account of Herophilus’s pulse lore. The arterial pulse is not only palpable at the wrists,
where it is commonly taken, but at other bodily points, such as the neck and the groin.
Phenomenal pulsations are also felt in the toe, the finger, and the fingernail’s capillary
bed.82 If grammarians tapped with their fingers on their wrists, they explicated the
physiological association. In sum, a technical ictus is mensural, a happening ictu tem­
poris, “in a moment of time.”83
In successive moments of time Augustine and Monica converse through creatures
toward the transcendence of time, creatures, and conversation. They intend toward
eternity, “where life is wisdom, through which all those things are made, and those
that have been, and those that will be; and it itself is not made, but is thus as it has
been, and thus as it always will be. But indeed, better said, past and future being are
not in it but it is alone, since it is eternal, for to have been and to will be is not eter­
nal.” So, then, what did Augustine and Monica experience at this climax, “while we
were speaking and breathing it”? They scanned it, they sounded it out, they tapped it
with their fingertips. What did they scan, sound, and tap? The paradigm of speech, the
eternal Word, the absolute trochee, through whom every creature they had just dis­
cussed was created: Verbum —u . As Augustine explicates, this is “he himself who
speaks alone not through them but through himself, so that we might hear his word
(verbum), not through the tongue of the flesh nor through the voice of an angel nor
through a thunderclap nor through the enigma of a simile, but he himself, whom we
love in these things, he himself whom we might hear without these things, just as now
we stretched ourselves and with swift thinking we touched the eternal wisdom abiding
above everything.” As the Johannine prologue proclaims, “In the beginning was the

80 Augustine, De musica 1.13.27; 2.10.18, with the terms at 3.4.7, 4.8.9, 4.11.13; 5.2.2, and plaudere for
beating the meter 3.7.16, 4.11.12; 4.11.12, 4.12.15, 4.13.16, 4.17.37, 4.9.10, 2.13.24, 5.3.3, 4.1.1.
81 Augustine, De musica 6.2.2, 6.5.16, 6.8.24, 6.8.20; Confessiones 10.31.46.
82 Michael F. O’Rourke et al., The Arterial Pulse (Philadelphia 1992) 15.
83 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.3.40, 10.4.2, 11.2.5.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 39

Word, and the Word was with God ... All things were made through him, and without
him was not anything made that was made. In him was life ...” (John 1.1, 3-4). This
was Augustine’s first citation upon reading the Platonist books—“not in these exact
words,” he acknowledges, but insinuating the same concept by many varied argu­
ments.84 However, at Ostia he did not arrive at the Word by Platonist method but by
his own reasoning, literally lent a hand by Herophilus’s pulse lore. Verbum matches
the metrical, musical, medical pattern of a trochee: stress-unstress, downbeat-upbeat,
beat-rest. Augustine conceives Verbum mentally—in the heart—in conversation with
his mother, who conceived him bodily in the womb. This is the eternal paradigm of
their temporal speech, which they measure with their unified heartbeats. Implicit in
this achievement is Augustine’s understanding of language, with its characteristically
Stoic distinction between the exterior (verbum vocis) and the interior (verbum mentis)
word.85
It was infelicitous diction, however, because Latin verbum gravely mistranslates
the Greek Logos of the Johannine prologue to which Augustine refers. The oldest, the
customary, and a correct translation was sermo,86 informal discourse, exactly what
Augustine calls his conversation with his mother at Ostia, sermo. Augustine knew two
Christian traditions for translating that paradigmatic Logos, sermo and verbum*1 His
preference for verbum accords with his rejection of his rhetorical career as a “salesman
of words (verborum)” for religious dedication to preaching the Word (Verbum).88 It
allows him to identify this singular Word with the only-begotten Son, incarnated—as
the Platonist books never allowed—as Jesus, the Christ. For Augustine, the traditional
sermo, composed of many words, compromised Christ’s unicity.89
Before Augustine and Monica can scan, sound, and tap Verbum, however, they
need to hear it spoken in God’s scriptural words. This listening is the function of the
heart’s auricles, or “ears.” Augustine’s Confessions introduces them aggressively.
“Behold the ears of my heart before thee, O Lord; open them and say to my soul ‘I am
thy salvation.’” He complains of “bodily figments roaring at the ears of my heart,” as
he strains to hear instead “the interior melody.” Augustine begs his soul not to deafen
the ears of his heart, because of its uproarious vanity, but to hear the very Word
shouting for his return to rest in him. It is the Lord, who is truth, who moves the ear of
Augustine’s heart to His mouth. The confessing heart inclines to God’s ears and vice
versa. God speaks in a strong voice in Augustine’s inner ear about the divine eternity845679

84 Augustine, Confessiones 9.10.24, 9.10.25, 7.9.13, cf. 8.1.1.

85 The documentation of Augustine’s semiotics as Stoic is extensive. For an orientation, see Marcia Col-
ish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden 1985) 2.142-238, esp.
181-198. For bibliography, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Petrarch’s Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy
(Berkeley and Los Angeles 1991) 161 n. 15; corroborated more recently by R. A. Markus, Signs and
Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool 1996) 94-95; John M. Rist, Augustine: An­
cient Thought Baptized (Cambridge 1994) 28-29.
86 Cyprian, Adversus Iudeos ad Quirinum 2.6, 2.3; Tertullian, Adversus Praxean 5.3; De oratione 1.1;
Hilary, De trinitate 2; Lactantius, De christianae religionis institutio 4.8, 9; Prudentius, “Hymnus ante som­
nium”; Ambrose, Hexameron 4; Gregory of Elvira, De fide orthodoxa contra Arianos 2. See Marjorie
O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto 1977) 5-35.
87 Augustine, In Ioannis evangelium tractatus (CCSL 36) 118; Confessiones 9.10.24.
88 Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric o f Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston 1961) 49.
89 Boyle, Erasmus on Language (n. 86 above) 28-29.
40 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

and the human expectation of that future. While the external ears hear syllables from
the prudent mind, the internal ears are positioned to hear the eternal Word.90
Augustine knew the theological notion of humans as doubles, outer and inner be­
ings, who had duplicate sets of ears that should hear God externally and internally. But
this was Tertullian’s heresy, whose crass materialism of the soul as body he rejected.91
Although in the lexicon auriculae are “earlobes,” as the diminutive of aures, “ears,”
auriculae also distinguished the inner from the outer ear. Natural history located an
earache in the inner ear and also noted water leaking into it. Augustine paralleled this
sense of auriculae as the “inner ears” with the pupils and the nostrils.92 In a cardiac
context, however, Augustine’s auriculae has been misstated as “symbolic.”93 It is
medical, with “auricles” still in usage. Besides denoting the organ for hearing, ana­
tomical aures were the two small lobes misdescribed in classical medicine as attach­
ments to the cardiac atria. Since the Hippocratic De corde these ears were like bellows
drawing in matter and blowing it into the cardiac chambers. Galen’s reversal of systole
and diastole misdescribed that at cardiac dilation these ears tense and contract like
membranes. From the impetus of the powerful attraction of the heart, the auricles pro­
pelled air through the adjacent “mouths” of the vessels into the cavities. Alternately a
sinewy and soft buffer, the auricles also protected against the accidental rupture of the
heart in its full force of attraction. Although Galen considered their purpose divinely
designed, he dismissed their name as metaphorical. “The auricles have been named
not for any usefulness or action, but on account of a slight resemblance, because they
lie on either side of the heart just as the ears of an animal lie on either side of its
head.”94
Augustine acquired his understanding of the cardiac “ears” from his friend the phy­
sician Vindicianus. In his Epitome Vindicianus ascribes to Diocles a cardiocentric
medicine, which located the seat of consciousness not generally in the heart but pre­
cisely in its “ears.” As Vindicianus philosophizes this physiology of the cordis aures,
the heart has “two ears where the human mind and spirit dwells. Whatever judgment
we have comes through those ears of the heart, from which all thought arises and is
aroused by all excitements.”95 This belief explains Augustine’s retirement into his

90 Augustine, Confessiones 1.5.5, 4.15.27, 4.11.16, 4.5.10, 2.3.5, 10.35.57, 3.11.19, cf. 10.3.4, 12.11.11,
12.11.12, 12.15.18, 11.6.8.
91 Tertullian, De anima 9.8; Augustine, De genesi ad litteram (PL 34) 10.25.41-42; De anima et eius
origine 2.5.9.
92 Seneca, Naturales quaestiones 6.32; Pliny, Naturalis historia 30.8.24, 28.17.60. See also Alf Önnes-
fors, “Marcellus, De medicamentis: Latin de science, de superstition, d’humanité,” Latin médical (n. 25
above) 397-405. Augustine, De civitate Dei 11.27.56.
93 Jacques André, Le vocabulaire latin de l ’anatomie (Paris 1991) 126.
94 Galen, De usu partium 6.14-15; ed. Helmreich 1.353; Galen on the Usefulness o f Parts o f the Body,
trans. Margaret Talmadge May, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY 1968) 1.318. See also Debru, Corps respirant (n. 37
above) 115-116.
95 Vindicianus, Epitome 18; ed. Rose 474. Cf. the medieval derivation ascribed to him, De natura
generis humani 9, ed. Rose 49. A further supposed report of Diocles adds that the heart is ever alert “be­
cause it also has ears for listening.” Although this was ascribed to Vindicianus as Fragmentum Bruxellense
44, in Die Fragmente der sikelischen Ärtze Akron, Philiston, und die Diokles von Karystos, ed. Max
Wellman (Berlin 1901) 234, its authorship and source are now questioned. For the Anonymous Bruxellen-
sis, see Philip J. van der Eijk, Diocles o f Carystus: A Collection o f the Fragments with Translation and
Commentary, 2 vols. (Leiden 2000-2001) 2.79-81. He dates the text as “probably fifth century C.E.” but
derived from earlier doxographical texts. Thus, even if not composed by Vindicianus, it evidences the idea
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 41

heart as a cubiculum, or “bedchamber,” “in the interior of my house, in our bedcham­

ber, my heart.” He plays on the medical appropriation of atrium, the principal room of
a traditional Italic house, for the cardiac atria, or “chambers,” the term still used in
modern anatomy. Since in Roman architecture an atrium was roofless, exposed to
sunlight, it was an attractive philosophical model for the mind illuminated from above.
Augustine thus names God “the illuminator of my heart.” Architecturally the bed­
chamber was juxtaposed with the public rooms, especially the atrium, where general
callers clustered. The bedchamber was private quarters, for retirement and sleep, and
for reception of close friends and confidential business. In Roman domestic housing,
which was arranged for social prestige through intercourse and visibility, this increase
in privacy meant higher privilege. Augustine’s retirement to the bedchamber of his
heart means listening with his cardiac ears to the divine colloquy. He confesses God as
“the pulser of my ears.” Through those receptacles, the cardiac auricles, God speaks
truthfully “in the heart.” This intimate chamber is where “on my bed” Augustine “with
uplifted heart” sings love songs to God.96 He will later preach his experience, articulat­
ing Roman public and private space, on how a Christian should “think about God as
present to himself, not in public only but even at home, not at home only but also in
the bedchamber, at night, on his bed, in his heart.” As he will affirm, “We are all hear­
ers [of the Word] within, in the heart, in the mind.. .”97
After lightly tapping Verbum in the meditation at Ostia, Augustine and Monica re­
turn to the noise of their mouths, where a word (verbum) begins and ends. They won­
der how a word might resemble the Word, the Lord, who endures without such aging.
Augustine imagines a person hushing creation to silence (sileat, sileant) six times, so
that in this dead silence might be heard Him who made creation. “He alone speaks not
through these creatures but through himself, so that we hear his word not through the
fleshly tongue, nor through an angelic voice, nor through a thunderclap, nor through
the obscurity of similitude, but himself whom in these things we love, himself without
these things we hear, just as now we extended ourselves and with swift thought we
touched the eternal wisdom abiding above everything.”98 Although Augustine’s ana­
phora of six silencings has been heard as an echo of Plotinus’s triple “quiet,”99 stylisti­
cally it imitates the exemplary Latin anaphora, Cicero’s six nihils.100 Augustine’s
meaning also differs substantially from Plotinus’s celestial quietude, into which the
soul flows to immortality. Augustine’s silence marks the Sabbath, in which seventh
day rested the eternal Word through which everything was created (Gen. 2.2-3). This

of the hearing heart in Augustine’s time. For Diocles in Vindicianus, see also Ludwig Edelstein, Ancient
Medicine: Selected Papers o f Ludwig Edelstein, ed. Owsei Temkin and C. Lilian Temkin (Baltimore 1967)
147-148; Longrigg, “Anatomy in Alexandria” (n. 40 above) 171; von Staden, Herophilus (n. 39 above) 172.
96 Augustine, Confessiones 8.8.19, 10.31.46, 12.16.23. For the bedchamber, see Andrew Wallace-Ha-
drill, “The Social Structure of the Roman House,” Publications o f the British School at Rome 56 (1988) 55­
57, 85; Yvon Thébert, “Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa,” A History o f Private Life,
5 vols. (Cambridge, MA 1987-1991) 1.361, 378-379.
97 Augustine, Sermones (PL 38-39) 352.3.9, 179.7.7.
98 Augustine, Confessiones 9.10.25. See also Contra epistolam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti (PL
42) 41.47; Sermones 52.5.15; Enarrationes in psalmos 37.28.
99 For comparison with Plotinus’s Enneads 5.1.2, cf. 6.3.27, see Henry, Vision d ’Ostie (n. 2 above) 19.
100 Cicero, In Catalinam 1.1. For this text as the exemplary anaphora, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria
9.3.30.
42 MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE

is the end for which he yearned at the beginning of his Confessions'. “Thou has made
us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” Silence is a rest,
“an interval of time,” like the period he endured with his pupils before his retirement
from the grammatical task of marking beats. Silence is also the vocal pause for breath
necessary to grammatical rhythm and its oratorical delivery. As he reflects on vocali­
zation, “The syllables sounded and passed, the second after the first, the third after the
second, and then in order, until the final one after the others, and silence after the fi­
nal.” Augustine’s silence designates this particular silence, a technical “rest.” In De
musica he employed sileo and silentium for the “method” of a musical “rest,” or
“stop.” Musical rest corresponds to metrical rest in verse. In Augustine’s method of
tapping eternity “with a whole heartbeat” the ensuing silences also correspond to the
cardiac rests between contraction and dilation, which the physician Galen counted. As
Augustine writes, the silent mind produces temporal rhythms similar to those vocal­
ized. He considers whether “the soul makes these rhythms that we find in the pulse of
the veins” and he decides “certainly they are done by a reciprocal breath.”101
Thus, Augustine and Monica begin their meditation at Ostia with an inhalation (in­
hiamus) and end it with an exhalation (suspiramus). They had learned to “inhale” and
“exhale” God by singing hymns as a pastime, when they were sequestered together in
Ambrose’s basilica during the imperial persecution. Now they gape, slackening their
jaws and opening their mouths wide to inhale air for the principal functions of respira­
tion, which were refreshment and nourishment of the heart. Classical physiology erred
that the heart was the principal organ of respiration, whose heat the lungs merely
cooled as dual fans. The cardiac “ears” attracted this cooling air to the heart’s “mouth”
to stabilize in equilibrium its innate heat. The drawing of a deep breath thus assured
Augustine and Monica that the heart would function at maximum capacity and secu­
rity. Air was also believed alimentary, and the heart was an organ of nutrition.
Augustine’s allusion for inhio as drawing nourishment is to the legend of Romulus
and Remus sucking (inhio) the teats of the she-wolf at the foundation of Rome, as
“citizens of the earthly city.” Augustine and Monica at Ostia, port of entry for food
shipments from the provinces, suck the breasts of Christ the nursing mother on the
threshold of the heavenly city. As he confesses, the Word made flesh is milk for hu­
man consumption. At his mother’s breast his heart had drunk in the name of that sav­
ior, as she sang in his ears divine words.102
By tapping the beat of Verbum, Augustine philosophizes Herophilus’s pulse lore of

101 Augustine, Confessiones 1.1.1, 9.2.4, 11.6.8; De musica 3.7.16, 3.8.17, 3.8.18, 6.3.4. For oratorical
pauses, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 4.4.18. For cardiac “quiets,” see Galen, De pulsuum differentiis,
ed. Kuhn 8.908. For musical rests, see also Marcia Colish, “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence Revisited,”
Augustinian Studies 9 (1978) 20-24; and further on silence, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Augustine in the
Garden of Zeus: Lust, Love, and Language,” Harvard Theological Review 83 (1990) 135-138.
102 Augustine, Confessiones 9.10.24, 9.17.15-16, 7.18.24, 3.4.8, 2.3.7. See also Enarrationes in psalmos
30(2/1).9, 33(1).6; 109.12; 119.2, 54.24, 67.22, 120.12, 130.9-14. For air penetrating the body, see
Augustine, De musica 6.5.15; for respiratory air as food, De anima et eius origine 3.4.4. For classical respi­
ration, see Debru, Corps respirant (n. 37 above) 100, 117, 126-127, 168-169, 232-233, 145-148; Donald
F. Proctor, “Ancient Medicine and the Mystery of Breathing,” in A History o f Breathing Physiology, ed.
idem (New York 1995) 3-16. For Romulus and Remus, see Statius, Thebais 1.626; Cicero, In Catalinam
3.8.19; Augustine, De civitate Dei 18.21, 15.5. For port of entry, see Russell Meiggs, Roman Ostia, 2nd ed.
(Oxford 1973) 54-62.
AUGUSTINE’S HEARTBEAT 43

the heart making metrical music. Augustine in De musica thought “no doubt the vari­
ous pulses of the veins and the intervals of breathing are made through the harmony of
bodies.” Classical harmony, from bodily to cosmic rhythms, to their creative impulse,
is Augustine’s premise in his Confessions for reasoning to God “the pulser” of the ears
of his heart. In continuity with the meditation at Ostia, it then philosophizes about
time, which measures the beats of the steps to eternity. Later in De civitate Dei he will
extol the body’s “rhythmic congruence of all parts, which accords with itself with
beautiful equality.” In eternity “all the limbs and innards of the incorruptible body,
which now we see distributed to various uses of necessity, since then there will be no
necessity but full, certain, secure, eternal happiness, perform with the praises of God.
The now latent rhythms of bodily harmony will emerge, arranged through the whole
body, inside and outside.”103 In 1616 when Harvey, the great cardiologist, will prepare
to dissect a cadaver for the College of Physicians, London, he will invoke Augustine
on the natural design of the body for beauty “because longings here are attained by
resurrection.”104 As for Augustine post-mortem, his attribute the heart is owed to a
medieval legend. At the moment of his death his guardian angel ripped out his heart.
But in the tenth century Sigisbert of London begged it back from God and displayed it
in a glass reliquary. The moment the congregation in the church began to sing the
hymn “Te Deum laudamus,” Augustine’s heart beat.105 In a historiographical upset, it
was medieval legend, not modern philosophy, that understood what made Augustine’s
pulse quicken and his heart beat.
95 Normandy Boulevard
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4L 3K4

103 Augustine, De musica 6.3.4; Confessiones 11; De civitate Dei 22.30.

104 William Harvey, The Anatomical Lectures o f William Harvey: “Prelectiones anatomie universalis
“De musculis,” ed. Gweneth Whitteridge (Edinburgh 1964) 14. Although this offers as Harvey’s source
Augustine, Sermones 243, it seems farfetched that he would have read these sermons. That particular ser­
mon repeats themes of Augustine’s much more popular and accessible De civitate Dei 22.14, which is also
closer to Harvey’s paraphrase. For a contemporary work addressed to the College of Physicians, London
that cites De civitate Dei, see Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse o f a Disease Called the Suffocation o f the
Mother (London 1603) 12r.
105 Iturbe, “Iconografia de san Augustin” (n. 24 above) 34—35.