Toward Augustine’s Letters as an album

Right now I am exploring Augustines letters as well as different approaches to translations. The end goal is a planned EP containung 5 songs covering the first 4 letters written during Augustine’s short retreat at his friends home in the countryside. Why 5 songs for 4 letters? Because I can’t count of course! No really actually letter 3 is significantly larger and I want to give more space to it.

My source for the letters is Migne’s Patrologia Latina Volume 33.

Here is a handy link to that source: https://la.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Patrologia_Latina/33

One you are at that page navigate to the first link

Epistolae (Augustinus Hipponensis), J. P. Migne; PL 33, 0061-1094

From here select

Epistles 1-15

This will take you to the text of the letters.

One thing that is helpful is that if your using Google Chrome to access that link, Chrome will automatically attempt to translate the letters for you. This makes it immediately easy to begin to read the letter. This said however the translation is quite literal and stiff and not as readable as it could be. I think this may stem, from its programming to translate things literally.

This is where ChatGPT can come in handy to provide a better translation. I aimed for a approach that was similar to the New Living Translation of the bible to make the text quite readible.

In case you’re not familiar with the New Living Translation, it is a translation of the bible that is very readable aiming for a reading level of about 6th grade. This is not to be confused with the Living Bible which is more of a thought for thought translation. The NLT is generally a word for simple word translation.

The prompt for the AI is something like

Keep Augustine’s meaning intact, but speak it in today’s language — clear, rhythmic, vivid, with imagery alive and paragraphs digestible. Accuracy first, but always through the lens of readability and impact.

Below is a translation of Letter 1. It relates to the first dialogue Against the Skeptics. I also have a audio version for easy listening I made using a tool called ElevenLabs.

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Augustine to Hermogenianus

I would never dare to attack the Academics—not even in jest. The authority of such great men is weighty, and I wouldn’t disregard them unless I believed their real opinion was quite different from what most people assume. That’s why I tried to follow their example rather than fight them—because honestly, I’m not able to refute them. 

It seemed fitting for the times that, if anything pure flowed from Plato’s fountain, it should be hidden away in shady, thorny places, where only a few people could drink. If it flowed out in the open, the great crowd would rush in and muddy it, so that nothing pure could remain. And really, what belief is more “fitting” for the masses than to think the soul is nothing but a body? Against that kind of thinking, I believe God wisely raised up the Academic approach. 

But things are different in our own day. We hardly see any true philosophers—only people dressed in the philosopher’s cloak, and I don’t think they deserve so great a title. So now it seems necessary to bring people back into the hope of finding truth. If the Academics’ clever words once scared some people away from seeking understanding, I want to call them back. Otherwise, a strategy that was once helpful for uprooting deep errors could now end up blocking the growth of knowledge. 

Back then, the rivalry between different schools of thought was so passionate that the only danger was people accepting something false as true. When someone was shaken from what he thought was unshakably certain, he would only search harder and more carefully for what was real. People were more earnest in their morals, and truth was sensed as lying hidden in the deepest layers of reality and of the soul. 

But now things are different. People avoid hard work and neglect the pursuit of learning. So when they hear that even the sharpest philosophers concluded that nothing can be fully known, they just give up—closing their minds forever. The more energetic ones don’t dare to think they could succeed where Carneades himself failed, even though he devoted incredible energy, talent, study, and even a long life to the pursuit. And if anyone does resist laziness enough to read those same books, which seem to prove that human understanding is impossible, they fall asleep in such a stupor that not even the trumpet of heaven could wake them. 

That’s why I value your honest judgment of my little books so highly. I trust your wisdom and friendship so much that I know neither error nor flattery will find a place in your reply. So I ask you especially to consider carefully, and write back to me: do you approve of what I suggested near the end of the third book? Perhaps I phrased it more as a suspicion than a certainty, but I believed it was more useful to accept than to dismiss as unbelievable. 

Whatever the case, what pleases me is not so much that I “defeated the Academics” (as you kindly say—though I think more out of affection than accuracy), but that I broke free from that hateful chain: the despair of truth. That despair had been holding me back from the rich nourishment of philosophy, and from the truth itself, which is the food of the soul.

Thanks!

-Kyle