“Am I Immortal?”. Augustine’s responses in the early dialogues

Abstract

In our article we follow Augustine’s arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul, linked to the experience of Cassiciacus; methodologically, we focus the unity of discourse on the question in the first person (“Am I immortal?”) and on the Neoplatonic line of reflection. There we recognize three instances: esse cum Deo or the soul that lives by faith, non esse sine Deo or the soul that seeks wisdom without having found faith, and regressus in rationem or turn of the soul that takes up the fact of faith by the rational way. Despite the difficulty of the solutions, proportional to the size of the problem, and the predominance of the aporetic argument, the author confirms the need for an absolute starting point in reasoning. This conclusion will be the basis for the treatment of the problem in later works, providing the key to the first person in the question of immortality.