When a student first desires to study the thought of St. Augustine, it’s only natural to begin with either his Confessions or The City of God. That being said, expert scholars of Augustine naturally hope that the student with sufficient time will not stop at those volumes, as there are several lesser known works that are worthy of close and sustained investigation. Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues undoubtedly fall into this category. These dialogues were the first works written by Augustine following his conversion to Christianity, and they offer a remarkable engagement with key questions raised by classical philosophy. Anyone desiring a comprehensive grasp of Augustine’s Christian philosophy must take the time to wade through these books.

Michael P. Foley, then, has provided a great gift to Augustinian studies by producing a fresh and elegant translation of these somewhat neglected dialogues. As Foley notes in the Preface, his translation “aspires to be as literal as is reasonable” (ix). In his estimation, a slavishly literal translation is not only impossible (the Latin of Augustine’s time had fewer than sixteen thousand words while contemporary English has thirty times that number) but also cumbersome. As Foley goes on to explain, “Augustine chose words not only for their meaning, but for their resonance; unfortunately, any mellifluence or connotations that go with that resonance are compromised in translation” (ibid.). Thus, Foley “allow[s] the goal of a literal translation to be trumped by the canons of good prosody,” but when he does “depart significantly from the literal sense of the text,” he acknowledges this in his notes so that “the reader may retain some access to the original wording” (x). Alongside these notes, Foley also provides a Translation Key that gives further background to variants and that unpacks the rationale for specific translational decisions. Equally helpful is his commentary on the text, which provides indispensable context for understanding the arguments that comprise the dialogues. In short, the reader is not left to slog her way alone through a difficult and ancient text. Rather, there is a whole set of tools here to ease one into an in-depth study of this part of Augustine’s corpus. In the estimation of this reviewer, Foley’s careful guidance is the next best thing to learning Latin and enrolling in a graduate-level seminar on these works.

Turning to the dialogues themselves, it’s astounding how relevant Augustine’s concerns are to contemporary philosophical discussions, particularly in the realm of epistemology. In the first dialogue, for instance, Augustine confronts head-on the challenges raised by Academic skepticism, including the suggestion that “in a world where knowledge of the highest things is fraught with uncertainty … a healthy agnosticism is the only reasonable position to maintain” (Foley’s paraphrase; 4). Augustine’s central purpose is to remove the despair of finding truth so as to guide the reader along the path to reaching warranted assent. As a trained Newmanist, this reviewer could not help but notice the overlap between what Augustine tackles in these dialogues and John Henry Newman’s discourse in his justifiably renowned Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Both thinkers view “skepticism’s denial of the possibility of ascertaining truth … [as] a threat rather than an aid to the philosophical life” (9). “Life is for action,” as Newman liked to remind his readers, and knowledge sufficient for action can only be attained by adopting a fundamental stance of trust rather than doubt.
In his Grammar of Assent, Newman memorably remarked:

One hears in this quotation an echo of Augustine’s counsel in his Cassiciacum Dialogues. Cartesian-style skepticism may lead the philosopher to believe that he is building from a bedrock of certitude, but skepticism consistently maintained will ultimately lead to an infinite regress of doubt from which the thinking subject can never escape. As one surveys the contemporary philosophical landscape, it’s clear that the style of skepticism combatted by both Augustine and Newman has not disappeared from the scene. On a popular level, one can see a manifestation of it in the hard-nosed utilitarianism of the new atheists—who are confident in some of their ethical pronouncements, but nonetheless despair of attaining to what classical philosophy identified as the highest truths. If for no other reason than exposing the pretensions of such an outlook, Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues are worth studying. Michael Foley has made this task far less painful than it otherwise might be by providing a superb translation with a remarkable set of study tools to aid in understanding the text.